Kirkman Talks Season Two

Here's a pretty nifty interview with Robert Kirkman, in which he reveals that Hershel's farm will come into play. The Rick/Shane drama will also continue. My suspicion is that they will make it last until mid-season, by which point Carl will have gotten in some gun practice and, well, y'know...

Pray To Stay Updated

Thanks to those of you who picked up the Kindle edition of PRAY TO STAY DEAD. With an e-book, it's sometimes hard to tell just how large is the book that you're buying, which can make pulling the trigger on a purchase difficult.

PRAY TO STAY DEAD is approximately 110k words long, and the print edition will clock in at nearly 350 pages.

THE WALKING DEAD at my front door

I shouldn't have watched THE WALKING DEAD the first time around. AMC sent me a screener of the first two episodes, and that was cool--I got to see those episodes several weeks in advance, the only drawback being the picture quality: it was terrible. Just a pixelated, non-anamorphic mess that looked really bad on my 50" plasma screen. Image quality on my Standard Definition satellite service is worse, and the remaining episodes gave me the impression that THE WALKING DEAD just didn't look very good, a fact that detracted from my enjoyment of the show.

Today I received the WALKING DEAD Blu-Ray press kit. It arrived in a bloody-footprint-stamped envelope that must have alarmed my mail carrier, and contained a nifty full-color folder containing character sheets and some nice shots of KNB's excellent make-up work. I haven't had time to sit down and watch the entire show in HD, but the little that I did watch this evening was an eye-opener.

THE WALKING DEAD's 16mm photography is beautiful. Lush and sharp, with a subtle, organic grain--not some post faux digital grain. This isn't the show I watched late last year, and I kinda wish I had waited. Unless I get an HD service before Season Two, I just may wait for DVD...

In addition to the complete series, the DVD (available in both Standard Definition and HD on March 8th), contains an assortment of extras:

• Featurettes:
  • The Making of THE WALKING DEAD
  • Inside THE WALKING DEAD: Episode 1-6
  • A Sneak Peek with Robert Kirkman
  • Behind The Scenes Zombie Make-Up Tips
  • Convention Panel With Producers
  • THE WALKING DEAD Trailer
  • 
    
• Extra Footage:
  • Zombie School
  • Bicycle Girl
  • On Set With Robert Kirkman
  • Hanging With Steven Yeun
  • Inside Dale's RV
  • On Set With Andrew Lincoln

I'd seen many of these online, but they're worth checking out--the "Bicycle Girl" clip is fun, and the Make-Up Tips segment shows you how a pro does it with a limited Halloween budget.

PRINT IS DEAD is alive

We started this blog a few years back, when we decided to launch our own zombie imprint. As you can see, we haven't touched it in a while.

It was a long time coming, but the zombie imprint is here...




We're pleased to announce that the first novel from Print Is Dead, our new zombie line, is now available through Kindle. The trade paperback will be available for order wherever books are sold within two weeks.


ABOUT THE BOOK

1974.

The Summer of Love is a fading memory, the Cold War rages on, Richard M. Nixon is barely holding onto the Presidency, and the dead are returning to life.

Five friends on their way to a week at Lake Tahoe, a Vietnam veteran in Sacramento trying to get home to his daughter in New Mexico, an older couple idling in a dusty shop in the hills, and a dangerous man who has spent twenty years preparing his strange family for the end of the world...

As civilization collapses, these scattered survivors cross paths, and the hungry dead are the least of the horrors unleashed.

Those who die will walk. Those who live will hope for a quick death, and they will...

PRAY TO STAY DEAD.


PRAISE

"A brutally entertaining collision of zombie thriller and grindhouse action. Not for the faint of heart!"

Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Patient Zero


"This guy Mason James Cole knocked me back on my heels. I've read a lot of zombie books over the last few years, and frankly, I thought I had seen it all. It seemed like nothing could shock me anymore. But Pray to Stay Dead delivered on all fronts. It's got all the raw emotional violence and brutal gore one would expect from a zombie book, but those things are only the surface of this tale. Underneath, Pray to Stay Dead possesses an elegantly simple style of storytelling that I haven't found since my first encounter with Jack Ketchum. Mason James Cole is that good. Read Pray to Stay Dead, and then pray this guy writes more soon, because he's the real deal."

- Joe McKinney, author of Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mason James Cole is the pseudonym of an apparently mild-mannered conservative type who doesn’t want his family and friends to know he writes stuff like this. His boring but lucrative job keeps him on the road five months out of the year, and that’s when he watches scary movies, reads scary books, and writes scary stories. He smiles and nods through church every Sunday and secretly votes Green. He lives in Farmington, Utah.


ABOUT PRINT IS DEAD

PRINT IS DEAD is a new line of top-quality zombie novels brought to you by the critically acclaimed indie publisher, Creeping Hemlock
Press. Each title is available in both paperback and e-book format.

www.printisdead.com

"These guys know more about the undead than I do... and that's saying something, because I've been hanging out with zombies for as long as I can remember."

-- George A. Romero

Thirst

Decades of fancifully lousy representations have given me cause to be trepidatious when walking into a vampire movie. Thirst by Park Chan-Wook was no exception. My husband and I had a double date with a comedy rapper and a Russian-born psych student (not relevant to the review; just had to put that out there) and we all arrived early to guarantee good seats. Everyone else's expectations were high, which meant I was nervous. I love Park's work. But vampires?

As put off as I am by traditional vampires, I'm even more apprehensive of "reimaginings" of the vampire mythos. (Y'all know that of which I speak. coughglittercough) I thought maybe we'd be treated to a depiction of Korea's historical equivalent of the European vampire, but was pleasantly surprised to learn that Thirst's vampires are about as conventionally western as they come: night-dwelling, super-strong, immortal, black-bedecked bloodsuckers, obsessed with Christian images and superstitions and the struggle between good and evil. It's interesting to see this faithful representation of western myth cast through the lens of an Asian culture. It strikes me that Europe's vampire, the evil spirit of the dead that comes by night to feast upon the blood of the living, turning to ash at the touch of sunlight, fits in perfectly with the majority of Asian lores, which are saturated with malicious revenants bound by quirky, complex rules. Our Draculas and Nosferatus would fit in perfectly over there.

As I expected from Park, every shot is crafted conscientiously and individually, paying attention to the entire toolbox available to cinematographers but somehow never feeling overly artsy or conspicuous, always in service of telling the story rather than distracting the audience with flashy visuals. American directors ought to be ashamed of themselves; with a few remarkable exceptions, cinematography has become a sleepy game of Follow the Leader, made up of cut corners and obvious answers intended to keep the production short and cheap. And when it's not that, when it's designed to impress, the poor audience is bludgeoned with sweeping (typically artificial) vistas, junky color correction and hamfisted, "Look how dramatic" shots. Park allows his environments to be natural and his scope is mostly kept to the characters' awarenesses. The shot style often reflects their emotions.

Park's paramount Vengeance trilogy (full disclosure: I've only seen two of them) thrives on black and bitter peripeteias that make you cry "Mercy!" The same notes are struck in Thirst, though lightly, and the supernatural subject matter in combination with a heightened dark comedy angle make the whole experience less realist and, thus, far less harrowing than those films. Still, the story twists in a dozen little directions from act to act, so the predictability factor is zero.

It's probably fair to say that my favorite things about Thirst are the non-vampire things. (And that's a lot; the story is largely about humanity and its motions.) I am not converted, I still expect vampire movies to suck, but I have had a bit of a revelation. Between this and Let the Right One In, I see that even subgenres I've written off as foolishly gothic can come calling in the form of a movie I love, provided the right director is molding it.

I have learned to trust Park absolutely. He has my blessing to adapt for screen stories that I would otherwise have nothing but disdain for, and I'll be first in line. Perhaps he could try a sports legend biopic next. I'll place myself in his fatherly care.

I have a new euphemism for suicide

"Putting up Halloween Decorations"

Pepper's Ghost

Fun video explanation of the Pepper's Ghost trick at Disney's Haunted Mansion.