Troll Repellent

Urrgh. Urrgh. Never want to blog again. I've had one troll for several years without realizing it, and the other troll has just been given a cease-and-desist order. Troll #1 just found out what happens when you snoop around in the life of someone you've denied visitation of their child to for eight years. (My novel 'Blood of Eden' was sitting there waiting in the earth like a land mine for that precise day. ) FAIL.

Troll #2 likes to tape-record everything like Tricky Dick and then claim that the Constitution protects this as a right somewhere. Last I heard, Jefferson didn't write the Declaration by dictaphone. The necessary and proper clause of the Constitution guarantees to the states all powers not specifically addressed. In the state of Oregon, recording without consent is legal only if you are an officer of the court recording a conversation you are not involved in, where one of the parties consents. 

This psycho does it with EVERYBODY, and has proven in that and so many other ways to be twice as crazy as the people he was 'writing' about in his little crime novel he's sat on for thirty years while he fires editors one after the other. (I say'writing' advisedly. He couldn't write a men's room wall. ) FAIL.

I always find the fun ones. Someone find me that baseball bat.

On the bright side,  I will be rolling up my sleeves and pitching in at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.  We've got some heavy hitters rolling in from the nearly nameless nightmare countries toward the top of the world, folks. 

Mike Mignola (just saw 'Hellboy II' at the Bagdad last weekend and my head's still ringing.) 

Laird Barron (whose story 'The Imago Sequence' is tied for first place in my own mind with Jeff VanderMeer's 'The Cage' as the finest horror story I've read in twenty years.) 

Richard Lupoff (One of the most twisted alternate-history minds New England has ever produced, whose psychedelic interpretation of Lovecraft's works is rivaled only by the late Robert Anton Wilson.)

Brian Lumley (the man who invented the word 'Necroscope', a true class act who wrote me my first, and best ever, rejection letter when I was all of eight years old)

Stanley Sargent (Wait... who the fuck... How did he get in this blog? SECURITY!?!??!!)

All these folks, and many more, will be in attendance. On Saturday night, as it stands now, I am introducing 'The Blair Witch Project' with a very short thumbnail sketch of its connections to the Lovecraftian genre. (You'd be surprised... especially at the Karl Edward Wagner story "Sticks"...) 

Sunday night, I get to read a Lovecraft-inspired short called 'The Cat Inside' that I wrote about some of my favorite Lovecraftian unknowns: alcoholism, the incomprehensible feline species, alienation and possession. I will keep this one short, but plan on blogging from the event as things unfold. Crack KUFO suicide squad Cort & Fatboy may be on hand for carnage control as well. 

On October 18, I will be reading a story that only Mike "Gutterball" Gardner at  Burnside Represent has had the balls to publish. "Leaning Toward This Machine" examines the curious lull in Charles Bukowski's life-cycle as a writer after he first moved to Los Angeles.

Genius is a funny, fluid thing. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Bukowski had his finger on something. I pointed that finger east instead of West, to New York instead of Los Angeles. Toward a group of hard-drinking, chain-smoking fiends where he would have fit right in: Gernsback's wriggling bastard brood of Post-WWII science fiction writers. 

Sure, Buk would have balked at first, but stories like his "The Devil Was Hot" are entirely speculative in nature. Just get him drunk enough first, and...

And America looks passing strange. Scratch Pdx have invited me to read this one again, which I haven't since the old Diet Soap reads at the former Red & Black Cafe. 

Must go get back to work. I thought being entirely freelance would be nothing but an endless sea of B-movies and bong hits. Very sadly mistaken there, but I still wouldn't trade it. Stay Tuned...

Pseudopod 106

Pseudopod 106
"Jihad Over Innsmouth"

Woot!

Just went freelance as an editor two nights ago.

"Best part about it is... I DON'T HAVE A BOSS."

---Bill Hicks, 'Relentless'

Oddlands: You Filthy, Filthy People...

...for publishing my Trent Zelazny tribute, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee", here

Trent's story "The Day The Leash Gave Way" is a ground-breaking exercise in splatterpunk, psychological fiction and just plain Lansdale-esque fun. It made me cringe. I had to write one like that, just to see if I could stand in the shadow of this warm-hearted human being and cold-blooded horrormeister who does his Dad proud.

The actual transsexual featured in this story is much more willing than his fictional counterpart. S/he does what s/he likes. S/he and the 'fiancee' are both happy with the arrangement, just...

Damn. Dayom. That's all I have to say about the things that go on in my neighborhood. It's like Patrick McCabe and H.P. Lovecraft wrote Felony Flats when they were bored one day and called Irvine Welsh in to put on a rubber gimp suit and fetch them nitrous and cocktails. I don't make the news, kids. I just report it.

The title, of course, came from Ani diFranco and her great line:"My country 'tis of thee to take swings at each other on national TV..." I used to live for watching 'Jerry Springer' when I was a Fire Guard at the Grove Hotel, simply because it was the most entertaining thing that happened all day if Dog Lady up on 3 didn't start throwing a wingding and there were no fights to break up.

When I read of Mr. Springer's political history, some truly nasty possibilities for alt-hist began to suggest themselves. Add in Ani, the tranny and Trent. Stir.

Anyway, yeah, this one came from a dark place, and there are plenty more on the way like it. Aeon#16 features another Grove tale, the shuddery little 'Rejection Letter', a tribute to an editor further back in the canon than either Zelazny, and his postulated take on the world around us now.

Must go grab a couple episodes of 'Dr. Who' for fuel. I have another long night of writing ahead of me, and a long day of weirder things ahead. Stay Tuned, True Believers. I have not yet begun to distribute filth like MCTOT en masse... (Fiendish cackle, fades out to John Waters organ music...)