L. Andrew Cooper's Horrific Scribblings

The converse is not true, but all monsters are hybrids, or at least John Locke thought so, and although I’d like to believe the human imagination isn’t limited in the way he says it is, I can’t think of a counter-example, and I’ve looked at thousands of variations on monsters and their subtypes around the world.

So last weekend, at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta, BlackWyrm Publishing and I introduced to the world our latest monster!

Go to Amazon to get the marvelous back-cover blurb that co-editor Pamela Turner crafted, but the monstrous gist is that it’s a book about film infecting the world with dark realities, so while we’ve got comedy, western, sci-fi, and, yes, horror, the bottom line is that it’s dark and smart and full of fresh voices and some amazing pros. Hal Bodner! James Chambers! James Dorr! JG Faherty! Amy Grech! Jude-Marie Green! Karen Head! Lots of other great people–accomplished poets, storytellers, and filmmakers as well–and I am honored to be in their company and to have had an opportunity to work with their words, to arrange them so that they can have conversations you can now overhear.

New from BlackWyrm Publishing

To round out this post, here’s my intro to the volume:

“The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified, as it were.”
—André Bazin, What is Cinema?

“The cinema combines, perhaps more perfectly than any other medium, two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and death and the other with the mechanical animation of the inanimate… the answer to the question ‘what is cinema?’ should also be death 24 times a second.”
—Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second

These two quotations—from two of the most important thinkers about the cinema since mad scientists pieced it together from other art-forms in the late nineteenth century—tell us that even in the silent era that so few horror fans pay due, people saw a close connection between reels of film and the realities of horror and death. Our mission as editors was to find stories that offered dark, diverse perspectives on how far that connection between reel and real might go, and we wanted diversity in both the types of films people wrote about and in the writing itself. Rose Streif attends to the silent era’s neglect by horror’s mainstream in “Caligarisme,” and in addition to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919/1920), my own movie-obsessed madman narrator in “Leer Reel” riffs on many a silent: he jumps in time but has 1928 as home base. Arguably the first horror film, “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,” made by Thomas Edison’s studio the year regarded as cinema’s beginning, 1895, is just a few short seconds of a woman guillotined. The other contender for first horror film, Georges Méliès’s 1896 “Mansion of the Devil” (or “House of the Devil” if you want Ti West continuity) focuses on magical apparitions. People understood at the outset that just as the photographed, moving image made an action immortal, the immortality was “change mummified,” the immortality of the undead, and, as our debut poet Caroline Shriner-Wunn writes in “Confessions of a Woman of a Certain Age,” “The Mummy,” and some others we’ve scattered in between, the undeadness of the film real is not likely to be your sparkling friend. Think about a movie from 1900. Every frame that shows you a person is showing you a corpse. That person is dead. Chances are, if you’re my age, that person’s corpse looks younger than you do. And it’s smiling. Film, on average, advances at 24 images, or frames, per second. Those corpses are smiling at you 24 times per second. Cheeky bastards.

We selected stories that are dark (that was the point), so though we’ve got laughs and action and western and sci-fi and twisted relationships and WTFs, along with some light as well as extreme horror, expect chills, smart ones, as a thread. Our featured story, Hal Bodner’s “Whatever Happened to Peggy… Who?,” is fast, fun, and creepy on its own, but it pays double if you know mid-20th century American and British horror movies, quintuple if you’ve not only seen but really know Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), with bonuses if you know The Bad Seed (1956) or a lot of what Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were up to around then. Likewise, Jude-Marie Green’s “Queen of the Death Scenes” harkens to an age of screen queens that is behind us. Pamela Turner’s “Rival” riffs on 40s and 50s film noir with a twist; James Dorr’s title “Marcie and Her Sisters” points toward prime late 70s and 80s Woody Allen, but this editor’s opinion is that, intentionally or not, he manages in Jane Austen comic-horror adaptation territory better than many recent adapters have in several media. Sean Eads also takes us toward more contemporary territory with “The Dreamist,” on the Inception (2010) side of the postmodern mind-game.

Wait! Stop worrying! This ain’t a history book.

We offer you three sections, mostly short stories, with short poems providing different sorts of pleasure scattered in each of the three. Many selections could appear in more than one section,so we placed based on where we thought they leaned.

Part 1 is “Decaying Celluloid,” and selections here either center on specific films or specific genres. In addition to the stories by Bodner, Turner, Dorr, and Streif, you’ll find Shriner-Wunn’s “Last Show at Hobb’s End” especially meaningful if you’ve seen John Carpenter’s Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness (1994). Prepare yourself for a story that matches the inversion in the title of Jason S. Walters’s swan song to the classic Western “Low Midnight” (which makes me want to discuss post-Kurosawa samurai films with him… Walters understands bleak but doesn’t present it like Sam Peckinpah or even Sergio Leone). The section concludes with our featured poem, the inimitable Karen Head’s “Amnesia,” a layered reflection on watching/living David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001).

Part 2, “Framing You,” transitions from Head’s poem and focuses on how audiences—the “real” world—might get caught up, often in ways far more literal than most people would think possible, in media. Thinking about Amy Grech’s “Dead Eye” still gives me  hills; all I’ll say in an intro is that she derives horrific concepts from the multiple meanings of “frame” and “shot.” Shriner-Wunn’s brief contributions here focus on spectacle, particularly the spectacle of the mutilated woman and what its cultural appeal seems to say (if you don’t know about it, read the poem once before you web search the real Black Dahlia case). Jay Seate and Mike Watt take us into fictional film production worlds, where films have very different ways of absorbing their makers. Sean Taylor’s “And So She Asked Again,” has maestro Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and its legendary star Barbara Steele as major references, but it’s about obsession with the power of film more generally… and what it could deliver. Likewise, master storyteller J.G. Faherty concludes the section with a tale about a man who finds immense, horrific power in a camera.

The book concludes with Pt. 3, “Pathological Projections,” the smallest and likely weirdest group, as their uniting feature is that they take a (usually kind of abstract) aspect of the medium of film itself and expand it into a (generally fairly messed up) story. Russ Bickerstaff kicks it off with ruminations on the 24-per-second concept in the dark sci-fi “24 per second: Persistence of Fission.” James Chambers suggests the medium may be the monster in “The Monster with My Fist for Its Head,” and in “Queen of the Death Scenes,” Jude-Marie Green finds that manipulating the medium’s immortal qualities could have unwanted side effects Shriner-Wunn’s “The Mummy” recalls Bazin but again goes fuller monster; “Cigarette Burns” by Jay Wilburn finds a perspective on the horror of being in the movies that nothing else I’ve read captures in the same way. My own story… well… it’s last. You get your money’s worth without it. You don’t have to read it. Perhaps you shouldn’t. The narrator is looking at you while you read.

—L. Andrew Cooper
April, 2015

BlackWyrm Publishing (click and scroll down the alphabetic list to find my novel Burning the Middle Ground) is a noble but small press, a minority entity that offers innovative fiction not overtly calculated to match pre-sold subjects with large, predictable demographics.

Examples of the overtly-calculated appear in paranormal teen thrillers, which use vampires and other love-softened supernaturals (pre-sold subjects) to titillate literate adolescents (a large, predictable demographic). Or, perhaps more controversially, consider the “literary” novel, which uses trendy topics from history and the news (pre-sold) to assuage the liberal guilt and class insecurity of bourgeois New Yorkers and New Yorker readers (a large, predictable demographic). Anything that cannot be made recognizable as pre-sold and pre-matched, however erroneously, with the often demographic-defying mass American readership is unlikely to appear under imprints of the “Big Six” publishers that sell more than 50% of what Americans read.

At this point I could make this blog quite interesting by claiming that the 50%+ figure, lower than many people suspicious of Big Media might expect (maybe I should do more homework about the source?), justifies one of these assertions:

1. Print fiction is a dead art form!

2. Under the laws of capitalism, free thought is illegal!

3. Corporate hegemony and global capitalism dictate our lives by limiting our representations of ways to live!

All of these claims are tempting, and when I’m in a bad mood, I’m inclined to believe them, but I have been unable to convince myself of their extremes’ veracity. If I believed such critiques, would I really bother with print fiction or, for that matter, thought? On the contrary, I believe all fiction is necessarily formulaic, and I actually like for my demographic to be served with mass market goodies. I therefore see the situation as bad news / good news.

The bad news is that we’re not likely to see very much innovative work coming directly from the bestseller-mills. “Literary” fiction, like “genre” fiction, relies on narrative and market formulas, but the literary distinguishes itself from the (other) genres by hiding its formulaic buttresses. These buttresses generally involve narratives about underprivileged people who have experiences that ultimately affirm the lives of the privileged by revealing the importance of Understanding. They sometimes involve privileged people confronting the malaise of their own incapacity to achieve Understanding. The former approach tends to engage with identity politics; the latter tends to engage with quasi-experimental form, existential angst wearing postmodern shawls. Hybrids welcome.

The good news is that fiction doesn’t have to be innovative to be enjoyable.

The better news is that the independents publishing the less-than-50% of novels are putting out a huge amount of material, a gush of books in which any droplet is unlikely to be a standout but could be, especially if it moistens appetites, perhaps some of those in the more-than-50% sector who deign to splash through them like the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita.

Image borrowed from an Italian site about Fellini

Now then, I’m thinking about all of this stuff because I want to be realistic about the prospects for my novel Burning the Middle Ground, which will rely not on the +50%’s market muscle but on people like YOU if it’s to reach all the people who might find it vastly entertaining and thought-provoking. In other words, I am at the mercy of viral flows and appetites–word of mouth, word of Facebook, word of Twitter, word of words.

And now my thinking flows into other media.

David Bowie was, according to some, the first publicly traded individual. We could, at one point, buy stock in the man’s as-yet-unspecified artistic productivity and then share in the profits of such activity. But anyone who stakes her or his life on the buying power of the public, particularly if the stakes involve something as personal as art, is, in a sense, publicly traded. The artist’s fortunes wax and wane according to the investments of distributors and consumers. Bowie knew this truism and made his market activity a profound metaphoric reflection on a much broader phenomenon.

As a novelist and film critic working outside mainstream channels, I have small, ambivalent hopes of gaining anything like the profile of a David Bowie. I am, nevertheless, interested in what having that kind of market power could enable me to do, not just for me (narrow narcissism gets boring rather quickly) but for others I happen to like.

The fantasy of market power fills my head today because, in my class on the American Horror Film Since 1960, I hosted a Skype session with film director Mike Lombardo of Reel Splatter Productions. I have seen a great many short horror films in my time, and I have talked with several filmmakers who share Mike’s ambition. Mike, however, is the first person I’ve met in a purely-business fashion who has convinced me, however unintentionally, that he has a shot at becoming a true celebrity in my chosen field. I picked up his first collection of shorts, Suburban Holocaust, at Louisville’s Fright Nights Film Festival in July 2012. I’ll admit that I was shopping for someone to become a part of my teaching agenda, but only Mike got a follow-up email. While some of the other films I saw were competent, Mike’s had something different–self-awareness without cliched mise-en-abyme, humor that accentuates horror (and vice versa), and writing that makes characters seem more like the students I work with every day than flat Hollywood stereotypes. The work is allegorical but avoids the pitfall of taking itself too seriously; it is disgusting but avoids the error of assuming that extreme gore alone can carry a horror film to success.

In short, Mike Lombardo’s Reel Splatter is where I hope the horror genre is going. What a thing to stumble upon while casually shopping a crowded festival!

In an email to Mike after the Skype, I paid an awkward, self-indulgent compliment to the tune of, “Hey, if anybody ever asks me who I’d like to direct the film version of Burning the Middle Ground, I’d put your name right at the top of the list!” This awkwardness involves layers of fantasy–the fantasy of having the power to sell my novel’s film rights wrapped around the fantasy of also having the power to lure a director who writes his own good stuff into working with mine–but I think, perhaps, these layers reveal what is most attractive about working in the less-than-50% indie zone. Just as small presses offer an alternative mode of publishing, and indie cinema offers an alternative outlet for film art, the indie world offers an alternative fantasy of power and fame.

Sure, I dream about my books reaching an audience wide enough to support me in a luxurious lifestyle, but at least a little more realistically, I dream about my work reaching a substantial audience that trusts me enough to take my advice about other art to consider.

If I had such an audience, I’d say to them–“Hey, look at Mike Lombardo!” I can’t judge my own artistic potential, but I have judged his, and I think it’s considerable. However, I know that the majority of people who have such considerable potential do not get a “breakout” moment to achieve stardom. If whatever capital I get from my own endeavors allows me to give a bump to an artist like Mike who deserves a breakout as much or more than anyone I’ve met, I’d feel enormous satisfaction in the accomplishment.

I really don’t think I have such capital yet, but just in case, do have a look at Mike’s work: http://www.reelsplatter.com/store.html.