Just my thoughts on this lifelong favourite.

Written by L Andrew Cooper and published by Blackwyrm Publishing, Burning Middle Ground is a supernatural cum horror cum occult novel. Featuring a religious zealot that will make you think immediately of that Westboro bunch, the book disturbs as much as it scares.

The book’s prologue deals with the murder/suicide of and entire family sans one, Brian. After the events on this tragic and horrible day, Brian doesn’t speak for an entire year. When he is released out into the community and he decides to move into his old house, feelings are mixed in the tiny burg.

The story is about small town USA and it’s a town split by two very different Christian factors. Investigative internet reporter Ronald Glassner goes to the small town of Kenning, Georgia to cover Brian’s return and besides fall for one of the local sheriff’s deputies, he gets caught up in a battle of wills between two churches. One of which is practising a religion older than Christianity and it’s very powerful.

Once Ronald arrives in the small town, strange things begin to happen. Animals run wild, impossible events become common place and people are acting very weird.

All the characters in Cooper’s book are likeable. I felt like I could identify with each and every one and they did a brilliant job of not just representing the denizens of the southern hemisphere of America, but they also had enough quirks and foibles to seem real.

Ronald has the acerbic wit and a sort of radar that helps him to sense when things are not right. He also tends to joke too much when he is stressed. As the third person narrator of the story he is charming, funny, scared and sensible.

The books main “bogey-man” Deacon Jake Warren is an outsider who has made Kenning his home and base of operation. He soon enlists the aid of Reverend Michael Cox a local “fire and brimstone, eye for an eye” man of the cloth. Soon Cox’s wife and the local sheriff are part of his plans for Kenning as well.

In the opposite camp you have Jeanne Harper who runs a church that practices a more peaceful and loving religion she counts, among her flock, Brian and his girl friend Melanie and a small handful of locals who don’t like what Rev Cox preaches. Especially as it was one of his sermons that appeared to have set off the stream of events at the beginning of the book.

With imagery that would not look out of place in a Stephen King or Peter Straub book, Cooper has created a world that, despite its nightmarish aspect, is very cinematic and easy to picture in your mind as you encounter it. I became quite attached to all the main characters and as they struggle to the conclusion of this story, I felt bad when bad things happened to them.

This is obviously the beginning of what promises to be a brilliant series and I cannot wait to see what Mr Cooper has in store for the survivors of Kenning.

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh Seven Psychopaths has a pretty hefty cast list; a wandering storyline and has six, not seven psycho’s in it. I only mention it because a third of the way through the film, it is somewhat obliquely mentioned.

The Cast:

Like I said the cast list is pretty damned impressive. And while I am not a huge Colin Farrell fan, I did enjoy his performance in this film.

Now, about the plot and the storyline; It is, at best, a little eclectic and esoteric. It follows the everyday interactions between Colin Farrell’s character who writes for a living. Marty’s best friend is Billy (Rockwell) who is a psychopath who kidnaps dogs to sell back to their owners with the aid of Hans (Walken).

Throughout the film there is a red hooded person who is “capping” mid level mafioso thugs and leaving a jack of cards on the bodies to show that they’ve been assassinated by the jack; presumably this “calling card” is sending some type of message.

Meanwhile back at the ranch,  Marty is struggling to write his latest screenplay about, seven psychopaths. But Marty doesn’t want this to be a standard blood, guts and gore shoot-em-up, he wants all his psycho’s to be pacifists.

Woody Harrelson plays Charlie another psychopath who is a mafia kingpin and who just happens to be devoted to his shitzu, Bonnie. Of course Billy kidnaps Bonnie and the whole film’s violence level increases.

I can’t really reveal any more or I’ll be seriously spoiling a lot of the film. But I can honestly say that after watching it, I felt ambiguous about it. I couldn’t decide whether I liked it or not.

The film looks good. It amuses in parts and disturbs in others, but in neither instance does the film overwhelm or overly impress. My two favourite characters were Hans and Marty (which says a lot as I don’t really care for Farrell as I said before) but Rockwell as Billy did entertain…a little; which also says something as I adore Rockwell in almost everything I see him in.

I believe that this is one that I may have to watch a couple of times to see if I missed something. Because at the end of the film I was left feeling like I had missed something.

Either that, or, they left something out.

A 3 out of 5 stars just for the cast alone…and for the flare gun.

Author of

What Once Was Flesh

From the Anthology Collection

of

Michael West’s Vampires Don’t Sparkle

Guest Post

The Genesis of “What Once Was Flesh”

“Where do you get your ideas?” is the most common question writers are asked. (Followed closely by “Do you know Stephen King/Stephenie Myer/J.K. Rowling?” and “How much do you pay to get your books published?”) Sometimes it’s a question we can’t answer because we simply don’t know. Some ideas just pop into our heads fully realized, and all we have to do is sit down and write. (Too bad that doesn’t happen more often!) But sometimes we know exactly where and how a story idea is born, and that’s the case with my contribution to Vampires Don’t Sparkle, “What Once Was Flesh.”

I started writing seriously – meaning with the intent to publish and make a career out of it – in my late teens. I read Writer’s Digest religiously, along with tons of How-To books. One of the bits of advice that I encountered over and over was that writers should always carry a notebook with them to jot down ideas. I tried. I bought a pocket-sized notebook and carried it around with me, but I never seemed to write much in it, and half the time I’d forget to bring it with me, or I’d lose it and have to buy another one. Eventually I gave up. But now, in my late forties, I’ve finally found a way to make note-taking work for me. The notepad function on my phone is the perfect solution. I already carry my phone with me wherever I go, and I don’t need to worry about finding a pen to write with. Best of all, since I can email my notes to myself, I don’t ever have to worry about losing them. So now, whenever an idea occurs to me, I pull out my phone and type it into my notepad. Better yet, I can record weird and interesting things that I see on a daily basis, usually people, objects, or events that I might easily forget encountering if I didn’t write them down. For example, here’s one entry: “Guy with dirty old book bag with stick figure drawn on it with a word balloon saying hell is other people.” It’s an odd detail I noticed in a coffee shop one day, and if I hadn’t written it down, I’m sure it would’ve slipped my mind within minutes. What, if anything, I’ll ever do with this detail, I can’t tell you. But it’s there in my notepad if I ever need it.

So when it came time for me to write a story for Vampires Don’t Sparkle, I did several things. One was, of course, think deeply on the guidelines. The thrust of the anthology was to present stories about evil vampires, to reclaim the mantle of monster for the poor bloodsuckers after they’d been Twilighted into eternal brooding adolescents. That was cool. I’d grown up reading books and watching movies in which vampires were scary feral predators only masquerading as humans, demonic things that used human form solely as camouflage in order to better stalk their prey. But they weren’t just interested in obtaining food or preserving their own undead existences: they wanted to spread their unholy contagion, in the process damning as many innocent souls as possible.

So once I had a handle on the anthology’s theme, I knew I needed to avoid any ideas that other contributors might use in their stories. (This is always the tough part of writing for themed anthologies – you have to try to ensure that your idea stands out from, but yet complements, a bunch of stories you haven’t read.) One of the best ways to write original fiction is to avoid riffing on stories, movies, or TV shows you’re familiar with – and all too common failing for all of us, if we’re not careful – and instead draw on your unique experience. So what did I do? Grab my phone and start scrolling through my notes, of course!

I often go to coffee shops to write (in fact, I’m typing this in one right now). I need a certain amount of noise and activity around me to concentrate, and I’m not tempted to procrastinate since there’s nothing else to do with drink coffee and write. One day as I was walking into a Barnes and Noble, intending to write in the café, I noticed an EMS vehicle parked in the lot. It said Community EMS on the side, there were two men sitting up front, and the engine was running. The vehicle looked a bit old, and it struck me odd that it didn’t seem affiliated with a particular town or city. “Community” seemed so generic. And I wondered what they were doing just hanging out in a bookstore parking lot, engine running. I figured maybe they were taking a break for lunch or something, and it was a bit cold out, so maybe they were running the engine to stay warm. I thought no more about it, went inside, and wrote for several hours. And when I came outside to head to my car, there was the EMS vehicle, sitting in the same spot, same two men sitting in front, engine still running. Hours later.

As soon as I got into my car, I recorded the incident on my phone.

I decided it would make a good basis to start with for my vampire story. For one thing, I was almost guaranteed no one else would write about something similar. I was the only person who saw the vehicle and thought it was strange. (Side note: this is how to “write what you know” when writing horror/science fiction/fantasy, etc. You don’t literally write about your experience; you use your experience as a starting point, as a seed from which to grow a story.)  And it struck me that posing as an EMT would be an excellent way for vampires to find prey. Since there were two men in the vehicle in real life, I decided to put two men in the vehicle in my story. And since the anthology was about evil vampires, I wondered why truly evil entities would choose to work together instead of working alone. After that, all I had to do was start writing.

So, if you’ve got a smart phone, think about using the notepad function to record your ideas and especially your observations. But be warned: if you see an EMS vehicle sitting in a parking lot, engine running, don’t walk up to it and knock on the window. You might not like what’s sitting on the other side.

Michael West Editor of Vampires Don’t Sparkle.

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Cover of When a Stranger Calls

I remember seeing the original of this film, the 1979 one with Carol Kane as part of one of those Drive-in Special features where you got three films for the price of one. Not too different from the $1.00 a car night where no matter how many hot and sweaty bodies you crammed in the car, it only cost a buck.

I say not too different because the concept was the same, you got two films that were kind of crap and one  ”big” feature. If memory serves me correctly, the 1979 When a Stranger Calls was not the main feature, something else was and it wasn’t as good as the Carol Kane film, which scared the crap out of everyone in the car.

The whole premise came about because of an urban legend. I still remember it making the rounds ages before the film came out. It was, funnily enough a girl who was about 3 to 4 years younger than me (who had an embarrassing crush on me, if I’d only known how she was going to be when she grew up, I wouldn’t have been so embarrassed…I know, shallow; uh-huh) who was going to be doing her first professional baby sitting job.

We’d just finished messing around (With a Ouija board! Get your mind out of the  gutter!) when she relayed to me in a kind of breathless yet horrified way the story as she’d heard it.

“This girl? Well, she goes to baby sit these twin boys…or girls…I don’t remember which and she starts getting phone calls. Which she isn’t supposed to get cos she’s meant to be babysitting, right? So this guy keeps asking her if she’s checked the kids. So she keeps checking on them and when she gets tired of this whole rigamarole, she calls the cops. They then put a tracer on her phone and then they call her and say get out of the house! He’s upstairs!”

Incredibly, everyone believed this particular boogeyman story, as folks were just getting into having separate phone lines put in for their kids to have their own phones, so it sort of made sense. Of course it was easier in the days before the internet to spread those kind of urban myths because it was a lot harder to check up.

Presumably the film makers who decided to make the remake thought, quite rightly, that cell phones (or mobiles over  here) could facilitate the plot just as well.

Unfortunately the film moves at a snails pace and no one ever explained to the director that suspense that drags on too long becomes tedious and then boring. The addition of loveable Clark Gregg (aka Agent Coulson from S.H.I.E.L.D.) in a minute part as the babysitter’s pop, could not save this yawn fest from dragging on and on and on and on….

Camilla Belle is too stunningly attractive to be a real teenage babysitter in the real world and although her performance convinced me that she was about to have a major league panic attack or heart attack, the films agonisingly slow, almost backward, pace wouldn’t let me care.

So, as this is on Netflix right now (in the Uk anyway) and  if you’re having trouble sleeping, pop this puppy on and you’ll doze right off.

A 2 out of 5 stars only because. dammit, Belle is gorgeous and hey, it’s got Agent Coulson in it.

Phil Coulson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Related articles

• When the Stranger Calls (chealy1910.wordpress.com)
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• What is an Urban Legend? (myths.answers.com)

Yet another senior military member who heads up a sex abuse prevention program is accused of sexual abuse in Fort Hood, Texas.