Posts Tagged ‘authors’

Review: We Need to Do Something (2021 film)

Posted: September 27, 2021 in Review, Scary Stuff
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Read the book by Max Booth III last month. Finally got to see the movie, the screenplay of which was penned by Booth as well and which was directed by Sean King O’Grady, this evening. Let’s get reviewing.

As I said, We Need to Do Something is based on the novel by Max Booth III and follows Melissa and her family as they pile into the master bathroom during a violent storm (no basement). However, they soon find themselves trapped in that bathroom with no way to get out, and it’s unlikely anyone’s coming for them. Hunger, fear and their own dysfunction soon lead to tension, terror and their own personal ride to Hell.

Okay, first off, the bathroom in the movie is both bigger and tackier than the one I had in my head. Seriously, there’s plenty of space, but has that bathroom not been remodeled since the 1970s?

Enough silliness. Onto the actual review.

The film was made during the height of the pandemic and O’Grady said that the movie and current events sort of mirrored and mimicked each other. And you can see it in the film: all four of the main cast are trapped inside a small space due to events in the outside world and can’t leave. They grate on each other rather quickly and events make things worse and worse. Add in some crazy, ambiguous happenings to heighten the atmosphere and the situation further deteriorating, and it makes for a great analogue to the pandemic.

Not only that, but the ambiguity in the novel is translated very well into the film. It’s more heavily implied that what’s happening outside the bathroom (which we never see) might actually be real rather than a side effect of cabin fever or anything. But it’s still quite mysterious and leaves you with just as many questions as the novel did.

Finally, the cast does a great job as their characters. As Melissa, Sierra McCormick is brimming with hurt and pathos, while Vinessa Shaw (Allison in Hocus Pocus, if you can believe it) does a great job as the mother tired of living a friction-filled marriage. And while Pat Healy’s take on dad Robert is written the tiniest bit more sympathetic than in the book, he still comes across as a mega asshole you love to hate.

Oh, and guess what? Ozzy Osbourne is apparently in the film. I’ll let you guess which character he is.

On the downside, the flashbacks with Melissa and her girlfriend Amy do feel kind of lacking without a lot of the context the novel gave them. While the score reminds me of the best of Colin Stetson’s work, it does have a few moments where it doesn’t work too well with what’s occurring in the movie. And in certain moments, the snake does look laughably fake.

But all in all, this is a great translation of the novel to the screen. On a scale of 1 to 5, I give We Need to Do Something a 4.5 out of 5. If you can’t make it to a theater playing it, you can find it on YouTube, Apple TV and Amazon, among other sites, so go give it a watch. You’ll be reminded that, as bad as your pandemic experience with your family has been these 19 months, at least you weren’t trapped like these guys!

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. Tomorrow I get to work on new stories, but right now, I’m going to hit the proverbial hay. Until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares!

Double Publishing Acceptance!!!

Posted: September 26, 2021 in Journalism, Living and Life, Progress Report, short story, Writing
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You know, I meant to get this out earlier, but a lot has happened today. My apologies on that.

So, as you can tell from the above title, I had two acceptances for publication! And get this, the confirmation emails came this morning after I woke up! How about that? Nice thing to wake up to, all told. And it gave me something to tell people when I was out seeing people I hadn’t seen in a while earlier today.

Anyway, the first acceptance is from House of Stitched magazine, the same magazine that published my article on the character trope of the broken child (links below). It’s another article with them, but this time it’s a review of Stephen King’s first Richard Bachman novel, Rage. Yeah, it’s an old novel, but it’s out of print nowadays and as far as I’m aware, no one from the millennial generation, my generation, has ever written a review of it. Thus I read the book and wrote one. I’m interested to hear what people think of my thoughts of the one book King let fall out of print.

The second acceptance is from the Dublin Creative Writers Cooperative. No, not Dublin, Ireland, though that would be cool. Dublin, Ohio (you may recognize it as having been mentioned in my novel Rose). Anyway, last year I co-wrote a short story with my fellow author and Member of the Tribe Richard Gerlach called “The Hanukkah Massacre.” The story follows a pair of feuding Jewish families whose rivalry suddenly escalates one Hanukkah. The anthology we wrote it for originally passed on it, but we kept looking, and now it’s being published in the anthology Dead of Winter from the Dublin Creative Writers Cooperative. We’re both very excited for everyone to read the story.

Man, what a year it’s been. I still can’t believe how many of my stories and articles have been accepted for publication. And there’s always a chance that more stories will get accepted.

It’s funny, but just the other day, I decided to make my writing goal for the rest of the year to ensure I get a few more acceptances before 2022. And now I have two. That was fast! I didn’t even have time to agonize how close the end of the year was coming and how little progress I’d made! I’m sure the brooding would have been epic.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’m probably going to watch and review a horror movie soon, so keep an eye out for it. And, of course, I’ll be working on new stories and letting you know if there are any pieces of big news to share. Or random thoughts. Plenty of that, too.

Until next time, my Followers of Fear, good night and pleasant nightmares!

House of Stitched magazine: Blurb.com , Amazon

Having Fun with these Crazy Characters

Posted: September 19, 2021 in Reflections, Writing
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So, for the past several days, I’ve been working on the outline for Crawler, the mummy novel I’ll write after my upcoming vacation. And it’s coming along very well. I think I could be done with the outline by the middle of the week. That being said, more fun than writing this outline (and believe me, it is fun), is the characters themselves.

Some of my favorite Stephen King novels are those that have, along with a kick-ass premise, a really memorable cast of characters. IT has the Losers Club, as well as bullies, a mother with Munchausen’s by proxy, a budding serial killer teen, plenty more nasty parents and a few horrible lovers, and so many more. Salem’s Lot has Ben Mears, his girlfriend Susan, the professor, the priest, the teen boy with a fondness for horror, the real estate agent, Susan’s controlling mother, Susan’s asshole ex-boyfriend that her mother loves for some reason, the teen mom who takes her rage out on her baby, her lousy husband, the woman having an affair, her husband and her lover, the hunchbacked man and so many more. Not to mention the vampire Barlow and his familiar Richard Straker.

And I could write a whole blog post about the characters of Needful Things, one of my favorite King novels ever. There’s Leland Gaunt himself, as well as Sheriff Pangborn, his girlfriend Polly Chalmers, the town drunk, the crazy first selectman, the preteen boy obsessed with baseball and his speech therapy teacher, his mom and her best friend who think they’re having affairs with Elvis, Ace Merrill, Polly’s housekeeper Nettie, local angry bitch Wilma Jerzyck (what else would you call her?), the various members of the Catholic and Baptist churches who hate each other’s guts, etc. They’re all part of the fun that make this and the previous two novels, which wouldn’t be as impactful without them.

And I’m willing to bet that for King, a lot of the fun he had writing those novels probably came from these characters. Maybe even moreso than the stories themselves, let alone the horrors within.

By the by, I’m pretty sure Salem’s Lot will be especially influential on Crawler. I’ll have to work hard not to let that influence make the novel read like a King ripoff or pastiche.

Anyway, as you can probably guess, I’m having a ball with this outline, and a lot of the fun comes from the characters. Remember my blog post about wanting to include Jewish characters? Well, I made my leads Jewish. And while I didn’t need to, it actually adds an interesting dimension to the struggle of the novel. After all, they’re facing an Egyptian-style mummy. Play the Prince of Egypt soundtrack! Plus, they each have aspects to them that people will like or identify with.

It’ll probably help that I modeled their appearances after Rei Hino/Sailor Mars from Sailor Moon and Dean Winchester from Supernatural (if there’s a movie version someday, can we get Jensen Ackles as the male lead?).

I would love to have a novel with a cast compared favorably to either of these novels.

I’ve also been able to add a bunch of characters that I think will be fun to write. For instance, there’s my antagonist, whom I think people are going to find terrifying and yet relatable. There’s also a troublesome mother who thinks she’s entitled to things when she’s not; a police dispatcher with a very big secret; a drug dealer; a preteen with a heart of gold who ends up caught up in the meshuggas around town; a true crime blogger who’s kind of awful; and more. They’re going to be great to write.

Of course, there’s a good chance I could screw it up by not writing them well enough before they reach their final fates, whatever that might be. Still, I gotta try. And I’m sure if I focus on making these characters memorable and somewhat likable while also making sure they play the parts needed for the novel…maybe the cast will turn out as well as the casts of the above novels. Or close enough to it. Balancing acts in writing like this are often a matter of practice, trial and error.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. I look forward to giving you further updates on this novel and the other projects I’ll be working on in the near future. Until next time, my Followers of Fear, good night, pleasant nightmares, and it’s 42 days till Halloween. Have you decided on your costume yet? I have. It’s going to be a killer.

#FirstLineFriday: Triple Publication Edition!!!

Posted: September 10, 2021 in Novelette, short story, Writing
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I can’t believe it’s been nearly a year since I did one of these! No kidding, the last one was December 4th, 2020. What a gap. Thanks to my friend and fellow writer Iseult Murphy for reminding me this is a thing and to do it again.

So, if you’re unfamiliar with #FirstLineFriday, this was a meme I used to do quite often as a way to get people’s opinions of opening lines for stories (opening lines can be the hardest part of writing fiction sometimes). Here are the rules I usually went with:

  1. Create a post on your blog called #FirstLineFriday, hashtag and all.
  2. Explain the rules like I’m doing now.
  3. Post the first line or two of a potential story, a story-in-progress, or a completed/published story.
  4. Ask your readers for feedback and try to get them to try #FirstLineFriday themselves on their blogs. Tagging is encouraged but not necessary.

This time, however, I’m doing it with a twist. I’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of publications recently, including two novelettes and a novel. So, I’m going to give you the first three openings of each of these works! Triple Publication Edition! Woo-hoo!

First, we have “Cressida,” my mermaid horror story, which was released in Into the Deep, from Jazz House Publications. I’m really proud of this story and think it’s some of my best work. And my dad, who just read it recently, agrees. Enjoy:

Mark Honig drove the rental car towards his uncle’s beach home. On the driver’s side was a great cliff face dappled with green moss, while on the other side the ocean lapped against the cliff face dappled with barnacles and mollusks.

“Cressida,” Into the Deep, July 2021.

It’s a quiet opening, but at least it paints an image in your head. Enough to make you keep reading and get to the good stuff, I hope.

Our next story is “Blood and Paper Skin,” which is being serialized in Issues 8-10 of The Dark Sire. The story is about a bunch of teens that end up trapped in a jail-like room in someone’s basement for a dark purpose. I’m looking forward to how people react to the conclusion. For now, though, here’s the opening:

Grey held onto the side of Mark’s Chevy Tahoe for dear life, cursing his supposed best friend for making him endure the chilly winds whipping around the car. How the hell did I end up in this situation? he wondered for the millionth time.

“Blood and Paper Skin,” The Dark Sire Issue 8, July 31, 2021.

A guy hanging onto the side of a car. What a way to open a story. I had fun with that. And guess what? It was inspired by something I saw last year on my birthday.

And last but definitely not least, the opening of my novel The Pure World Comes. This was published on the Readict app, run by VitaleTek Inc. The novel follows a maid in Victorian England who goes to work for a mad scientist. It’s my love letter to Victorian England and to Gothic literature.

A stream of shit and piss fell from the second floor of the Avondale house to the street below, where it mixed with the piss, shit and mud that already littered the avenue. From the second-floor window of Mr. Avondale’s dressing room, Shirley Dobbins put down the chamber pot belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Avondale and picked up the one belonging to their daughter, Miss Lucinda.

The Pure World Comes Ch. 1, August 2021

How many novels start with piss and shit? I don’t know, but this one does! And it sums up Victorian living in many ways.

But what do you think of these openings? Did anything catch your eyes and make you want to read more? Let me know in the comments below. And if you want to read the rest of the stories, I’ll leave the links for them below.

And as for who should do this next, I’m going to tag Priscilla Bettis, Allen Huntsman, and Brian B Baker. You don’t have to, but it would tickle me if you did. And I hope you’ll tag back here if you do the challenge.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. It’s past midnight, so I’ll see all your comments in the morning. Until next time (which should be soon, believe it or not), pleasant nightmares!

The Pure World Comes: Readict app (free with ads)

The Dark Sire Issue 8: Amazon

Into the Deep: Paperback, Ebook

Trunk Novels: Sadly, They’re Necessary for our Growth

Posted: August 30, 2021 in Novel, Reflections, Writing
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Have you ever written part of or an entire novel, and then nothing has happened to it? Maybe you edited the hell out of it and tried to find a publisher. Maybe you got some feedback from a beta reader that made you hesitate to put it out in the world. Or maybe you realized that, as much as you loved it and as much work as you put into it, it’s not very good and you’re better off moving on. So this project you’ve worked months or even years on gets put away, stored in a box or on a shelf or in a file drive to gather dust and likely never see the light of day.

If you have one of these novels, you have a “trunk novel.”

What are trunk novels, you may be asking? Well, trunk novels are as I said above: novels that were put away because, for one reason or another, they weren’t suitable to be released or marketed. Prior to computer storage, you might literally put them in a trunk so nobody ever saw them but you. Hence the name.

At least, I think that’s how it got its name. Tracking down the origin of the term was kind of impossible.

In any case, it happens more than we like to admit. We write a story and no matter how hard we try, it doesn’t get past the first draft or never leaves our computers. We may have thought it was the next big thing, or something that could have been published and been a small success, or at least could have gotten a publisher or agent interested. But in the end, it just doesn’t cut the mustard in one way or another, so it gets stowed away somewhere. You may say you’ll work on it again someday, but rarely does that happen.

And it happens to all of us. Really. Even Stephen King has them. He wrote four novels before Carrie was published. Only one of the previous three, Rage, was ever published (and King kind of regrets that). I did a poll in one or two horror writing groups I belong to, and all of the people who answered have trunk novels somewhere in their pasts.

I have several from my younger years, finished and unfinished, that are trunk novels. And one of the novels I wrote in college, Laura Horn, which I am still really proud of, is pretty much a trunk novel now. Why? Several reasons, but the fact that some of the events in the book resemble events that occurred in recent years might have something to do with it. Putting the book out given what’s happened in the last five years just feels wrong.

And I guess you could consider the Reborn City books trunk novels, even though I previously self-published them before taking them out of circulation.

And you know what? That’s alright. Yeah, our feelings towards our trunk novels may sometimes be complex. And we may regret at times that the stories never saw the light of day. But they are still important milestones in our career. They are the results learning to become writers, to learn what works in writing fiction and in learning the discipline of writing. They are the foundation of becoming us. Of becoming the authors we were meant to be.

So, as much as it sucks when a novel goes into the trunk, don’t regret it or feel too bad. It’s just another foundation stone in what is becoming your career.

Do you think I should get one of these and put literal manuscripts inside?

All that being said, I hope none of my completed, as of yet unpublished novels go into the trunk. I’m still shopping around River of Wrath with the hopes of finding a publisher for it, and I plan to work on Toyland again someday soon in the hopes of shopping that around too. What will happen to them? I honestly don’t know. But if they do end up in the trunk? Well, at least I had a hell of a time working on them and honing my skills with them.

Do you have any trunk novels? Would you mind talking about them with me? How do you feel about them? Let’s discuss.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I still have time left in the evening and I have only one story left in the collection I’ve been editing, so I’m going to get to work on that. Afterwards, I have a couple more short stories to edit (including one with dragon bats in it), and then…well, I’m not sure. A couple of new short stories? Perhaps a new novel? I’ve certainly been itching to get into something longer. And now that The Pure World Comes is out (check it out on the Readict app), I think I can afford to put together another sixty thousand-plus word story of terror and woe. We’ll see what happens.

Until next time, my Followers of Fear, good night, pleasant nightmares and–OH NO! MY TRUNK NOVELS, AS WELL AS MY TRUNK NOVELLAS, TRUNK NOVELETTES, AND TRUNK SHORT STORIES, HAVE BEEN COMBINED TO FORM A GIANT MONSTER MADE OF PAPER! Excuse me while I get the boom stick and fight it off. Ta ta!

Conversations with Maxwell I. Gold

Posted: August 19, 2021 in Author Interciew, Poetry, Scary Stuff, Writing
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Maxwell I. Gold, author of Oblivion in Flux.

After so many years of writing and networking, I’ve had the pleasure of making many friends who also enjoy a good scary story. Recently, one of those friends had a collection of prose poetry, Oblivion in Flux, released, and I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with him. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to Rami Ungar the Writer my fellow HWA Ohio member and creator of the Cyber Gods, Maxwell I. Gold!

Rami Ungar: Welcome to the show, Max. Tell us about yourself and your career as a writer.

Maxwell I. Gold: I’ve always had a passion for storytelling and believe it or not, poetry was not my first love. Growing up I read mostly literary fiction and fantasy (Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, Victor Hugo) and was only exposed to weird horror and cosmic fiction much later in my post-graduate years. I didn’t begin my career, not my favorite term, as an author until 2017 when I had my first prose poem Ad’Naigon published in Spectral Realms from Hippocampus Press. Since then, I’ve published over 100 poems and short stories in both print and online formats.

RU: For many readers, prose poetry is something they’ve never heard of before. The name itself sounds kinda contradictory. Can you tell us a bit about what prose poetry is and some famous examples?

MIG: Prose poetry is not a new art form, I’m merely another creator who’s attempting to shed some light on this exquisite act of poeticism. A lot of confusion that arises when reading prose poetry is people tend think there must be a narrative, and there certainly can be, but it’s not a requirement. For me, when I am writing a new piece sometimes, I imagine brief snippets of a memory possibly forgotten, or a broken dream. All jagged pieces of something bigger that connect in a mad Escherian jigsaw puzzle.

A few famous and favroite examples of mine are Clark Ashton Smith’s Memnon’s of the Night and Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat.

RU: Look those up if you’re curious, folks. Now tell us how Oblivion in Flux came to be.

MIG: There’s no fluid answer to this question as it arose out of a few serendipitious conversations with editors, and I wanted to have a collection of prose poems that painted a broad picture of the vivid world where the Cyber Gods dwelled.

RU: Great segue, actually. What are the Cyber Gods you feature in your work and how do you come up with them? And is there any influence from the Cthulhu Mythos?

MIG: Strangely enough, this has been a continuously evolving question and that was purposeful. The Cyber Gods began as a thought experiment, like something meant to be beyond the scope of human reason still borne of our own confused, deranged, and quietly destructive philosophies. Something worse than any Elder God or Old One. I was not directly influenced by Lovecraft’s pantheon of gods as much as I was by this concept of cosmic nihilism, that no matter the value placed on a thing or a valued system of things we’re still like mites scrambling to justify meaning in a world we’ve either doomed to oblivion or worse.

As for the Cyber Gods themselves, they aren’t esoteric as much as they are conceptual. This doesn’t mean they aren’t personified in my stories or poems. For example, Hazthrog is a cosmic virus, but appears in one story as a literal ball of sludge that consumes the planet. Ad’Naigon, the first Cyber God, exists 14 billion light-years away at the edge of known space as a yellow neutron star. This is because at the time I created the character the farthest humans could see towards the edge of known space was 14 billion light-years.  

RU: What is it about prose poetry and dark fiction that draws you to them?

MIG: As I mentioned previously, I enjoy creating terrifying moments sometimes more than writing longer pieces of fiction.

Oblivion in Flux by Maxwell I. Gold

RU: What are you working on now? Any projects in the near future you can tell us about?

MIG: I’m currently working on a collaborative book of poetry with Bram Stoker nominated author Angela Yuriko Smith, titled Mobius Lyrics. I’m also working on a novella titled The Unspeakable: A Cyberland Tale.

RU: Cool! What are you doing when not writing?

MIG: Watching too many shows on Netflix or reading or playing the piano.

RU: I know two out of three of those way too well. What is some good advice you would give to another writer, regardless of experience or background?

MIG: Never stop writing. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s true, persistence pays off in the end.  Always write when you can, and always try something new when you can.

RU: Final question: if you were stuck on a desert island for a while and could only bring three books with you for the duration of your stay there, which would you pick?

MIG: Craig L. Sidney’s Sea Swallow Me, John Langan’s The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, and Matt Cardin’s To Rouse Leviathan.

RU: Thanks for joining us, Max. It’s been a blast!

If you enjoyed this interview, you can find Maxwell I. Gold on his website, The Wells of the Weird, as well on Instagram as @CyberGodWrites, and on his Amazon Author Page. And of course, make sure to read Oblivion in Flux if you’re a fan of dark poetry like what Max writes! You can find it here.

You can find more conversations with my fellow authors on my Interviews Page here.

And finally, if you’re an author with something coming out soon and want to talk about it, hit me up at ramiungar@ramiungarthewriter.com. If I’m not too busy, we might be able to make some magic happen.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’m sure I’ll have more to talk about soon. Until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares!

Updates on 2021 Events

Posted: August 17, 2021 in Living and Life
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There’s a phrase about opportunity and knocking on doors, but I can’t think of what the exact phrase is. Oh well.

So, I recently found out I’m going to be a guest author at the Licking County Local Author Festival in October. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Licking County is one county over from Franklin County, where I live and work. It’s a decent drive, but nothing too strenuous. Anyway, I heard about the festival a while back and signed up. Today, I found out I’m going to be among the authors there. And I hear they may have a special section just for those Halloween-loving, terror-propagating writers such as myself.

Plus food stalls (yum!).

Anyway, if you want to stop by, it’s Saturday, October 16th, 2021 from 10:30 AM – 2 PM at the Downtown Library at 101 West Main Street in Newark, Ohio. I hope you’ll stop by.

And as you already know, we’re just over three weeks away from the Indie Author Book Expo in Aurora, Illinois. That’ll be on September 11th from 10 AM – 3 PM at the Prisco Community Center in Aurora, about an hour west of Chicago. I look forward to driving out there and seeing you there.

Heck, I hope to see you at both events. Authors from all over the place and a variety of backgrounds will be at the book expo and the author festival. We’ll all be meeting readers, helping you find your next great read, and maybe making friendships and connections to last a lifetime along the way. So please, come on out!

And if you can’t make it out but still want to support me, you can always find my stories online (the stories of the other authors are another matter entirely). I’ll provide links below. And if you decide to read one of my stories, please let me know what you think. Positive or negative, I love reader feedback, and it helps me in the long run. Not just by giving me encouragement to write, but by letting other readers know whether they should check out the stories as well.

What will you choose, I wonder? A quick tale about King Arthur or a recluse forced out of his home in a hurricane? The story of a young woman turned into a human/plant hybrid (and that’s just the start of her problems)? A collection of creepy tales that has been scaring audiences for over eight years? Or the tale of a serial killer hunting members of New York’s most powerful mafia family? Whatever you pick, I hope you like it!

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’m off to get shit done. Until next time, good night, pleasant nightmares, and only 75 days till Halloween! Are you excited? Because I am.

The Quiet Game: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Smashwords, and Kobo.

Rose: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada, Audible

Snake: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Smashwords, and Kobo

Agoraphobia: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada

Mother of the King: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada

Review: “Audition” by Ryu Murakami

Posted: August 12, 2021 in Novel, Review, Scary Stuff
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I did say in my last post that I was going to try to get my thoughts out on this novel soon. As it happens, I ended up finishing it before bed, and now’s the first time I’ve had the opportunity to write out my thoughts.

The basis for the famous 1999 horror film from Takashi Miike, Audition follows Aoyoma, a father and widower who is ready to date and love again. However, he’s no idea where to start looking for a potential new wife. Luckily for him, his best friend has an idea: they’ll hold auditions for a movie they never intend to make, and Aoyama can pick a girl from any of the applicants. Through this crazy plan, Aoyama meets Yamazaki Asami, a former ballerina who is as mysterious as she is beautiful. And she’s quite beautiful. Problem is, there’s a bit of a dark side to her, and Aoyama is going to discover it pretty quickly. With disastrous consequences.

I may have gone into this one with too-high expectations. I know J-Horror can be hit or miss with me sometimes, but I’ve heard nothing but praise for the movie, so the book had to be good. Right? RIGHT?!

Sadly, I was wrong. As it turned out, this book felt kind of amateurish. The language is elegant and well-written, and the scenario presented within isn’t implausible. And Aoyama’s progression from a salaryman with a somewhat sexist/voyeuristic view of women to a very besotted man with a very narrow view of a particular woman is well written. However, the storyline is basic and nothing special, and there isn’t enough to Aoyama for us to really root for him. I would call it a slow-burn, but there has to be some tension to really make it worth that slow pace. It just comes off as slow and kinda boring.

And Asami’s reasons for becoming the villain that she is feels like it might have been written by a high schooler whose only knowledge of psychology comes from watching Criminal Minds reruns. Not to mention kind of ableist (though that might just be my interpretation).

All told, I’m assigning Audition by Ryu Murakami a 1.3 out of 5. One critic likened it to an early draft or treatment for the movie, and I kind of have to agree with that assessment. It’s the bare bones of what could have been a good, suspenseful story about a man’s love with a twisted femme fatale. As it is, though, it’s at best something to compare to the movie and maybe write an academic paper about.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I have one more review coming up, this one for a movie (not the Audition movie, though I will try to get my hands on that). And if anything else comes up, exciting news or weird musings, I’ll let you know.

Until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares!

Review: “We Need To Do Something” by Max Booth III

Posted: August 11, 2021 in Novel, Review, Scary Stuff
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I’ve seen Max Booth’s tweets on Twitter a bit, but this was the first time I’ve read one of his works. I was spurred to do so by the trailer for the upcoming film adaptation, which looks terrifying (click this link to watch it). I had an audio book credit and the novel looked short enough, so I downloaded it and got to listening.

We Need To Do Something follows Melissa, a teenage girl who gets home from a friend’s as a massive storm hits the area and tornado sirens wail. As her family hides in the parents’ bathroom (no basement in the house), a tree falls in front of the door, trapping them inside. As Melissa, her little brother Bobby, her mother Diane and her father Robert, struggle with time, hunger, and their own dysfunction, they’ll also go on the ride from Hell. Possibly in more ways than one.

This novel is predicated on the concept “Hell is other people” and I love it!

What I really was blown away by is that everything takes place in the bathroom. Even flashbacks take place in the bathroom, presented as dreams or as hallucinations rather than as full flashbacks. This really gives you the sense of isolation and claustrophobia the characters are feeling. And this space acts like a pressure cooker, forcing them to confront their problems, themselves and each other. It is intense, and the confusion Booth weaves into the narrative only makes it worse. Are they really experiencing all of this? Is part of it something supernatural, or is there an element of shared delusion? You’ll read till the end asking those very same questions.

It doesn’t help that when the outside world does make an appearance, it’s only to make things crazier. Truth be told, you could learn a lot about writing tension from this novel.

As for the characters, you get to know them quite intimately. You also come to like them quite a bit–well, most of them. Robert, Melissa’s father, is an alcoholic with serious anger and toxic masculinity issues, and does not see the irony in calling his daughter a “snowflake” at one point. You love to dislike this guy from early on. But the others, you do start to feel sympathy for the others. None of them are perfect–Melissa has her own anger, Diane has been suffering for years and probably wishes her life was closer to a fifties sitcom than what it really is, and Bobby exists to annoy his sister and make fart and pee jokes–but you do grow to like them. And Melissa especially has more to her than what you meet in the first few pages, which at first glance is a typical phone-obsessed teen who’s annoyed with her folks.

The one downside is that there’s a lot of ambiguity and not everything you’d think would be clarified is. Now, for me that doesn’t really take away from the novel, but for others it’s going to be frustrating.

Altogether, We Need to Do Something by Max Booth III is a terrifying rollercoaster of a novel. On a scale of 1 to 5, I’m giving it a 4.5. Grab a copy, use the toilet real quick (not during a storm, though), and get settled in. You’re going to want to read this one.

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’m hoping to get you my thoughts of Audition by Ryu Murakami by the end of the week. And when the movie for this novel comes out, I’ll probably review that too. And I’ll likely have more to say in the near future. Point is, there will be more from me soon.

In the meantime, however, I’ve got work tomorrow, so I’m getting ready for bed. Good night, sleep tight, and pleasant nightmares!

IABE Aurora: One Month Away!!!

Posted: August 11, 2021 in Living and Life, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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Where is the year going? We’re nearly midway through August! I swear, God was feeling bad that 2020 played on 0.5x speed, so He put this year on 1.5x speed!

Oh well. As you are no doubt aware, I was supposed to be at an event in Chicago back in June, but COVID-19 messed with things and we had to relocate to September.* I’m happy to announce that, in one month, Indie Author Book Expo Aurora, or IABE Aurora, will be happening!

As the above graphic states (and yes, I’m aware Illinois has three L’s. What about it?), IABE Aurora will be held at the Prisco Community Center in Aurora, Illinois on September 11th from 10 AM – 3 PM. In addition to myself, there will be a bunch of other authors there as well, telling all sorts of other stories and selling all sorts of cool wares! And I think there may be food stalls, though I wouldn’t swear to that.

Anyway, if you can make it, please do so. It’s a great opportunity to support lesser-known and indie authors. And events like this have all sorts of hidden surprises, so it’s definitely worth checking out. You can find out more at IABE’s website here.

Well, that’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. I’ll be in touch again soon, if things progress as planned. Until next time, good night, pleasant nightmares, and what’s that crawling up your leg?

*And please, so that nobody else gets sick and no more dates get changed, GET VACCINATED IF YOU’RE ABLE TO, AND WEAR A DAMN MASK!

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