A. Michael Schwarz's Blog

I’m obsessed with this. I tried not to be, I really did, but I can’t help myself, I love monsters. I love monsters so much that I am blogging about them. I love monsters so much that I don’t even care if I don’t have any friends because of it. 

I don’t care what they look like, either, so long as they’re monstrous. But that’s the beauty about monsters: they can be whatever you want them to be. Pretty, ugly, hairy. All of the above. But before anyone can undertake a sensible conversation about monsters we have to define what a monster is. And for that Wikipedia does a good job: 

A monster is a type of fictional creature found in horror, fantasy, science fiction, folklore, mythology and religion. Monsters are very often depicted as dangerous and aggressive, with a strange or grotesque appearance that causes terror and fear, often in humans. Monsters usually resemble bizarre, deformed, otherworldly and/or mutated animals or entirely unique creatures of varying sizes, but may also take a human form, such as mutants, ghosts, spirits, zombies, or cannibals, among other things. They may or may not have supernatural powers, but are usually capable of killing or causing some form of destruction, threatening the social or moral order of the human world in the process.

So basically, anything. That’s all right by me. I like all of them but I have to say I have some favorites. Today I wanna talk about monsters that (or who, I guess) save the world. I think those are kind of rare. I mean okay the Hulk, right. But before the tesseract and all that, he was just plain old Dr. Banner getting pissed off and turning into Lou Ferrigno and throwing people through windows. Then long after that he was part of the dream team that saved the world. But I don’t know, the Hulk sort of bores me. 

Now one of my favorites didn’t so much save the world as he saved a girl (one time anyway). The beautiful and incomparable Esmerelda. Yep everybody’s favorite monster Quasimodo. I mean his name is monstrous, or at least unusually strange. He’s sad and lonely but super strong. In fact his strength comes from his monstrousness even though I’m gonna say it probably wouldn’t really work that way. Anyhow, the thing about Quasimodo is he was so ugly it was shocking just to look at him and of course he goes after the hottest gypsy girl around. It is revealed in the story that his terrible monstrousness is tempered by his kind heart. 

Beauty and Beast plays on the same point. The beast must be transformed by the beautiful woman and it turns out he’s a pretty nice guy after all. He’s mean and surly in the actual story and not nearly as cuddly as he is in the Disney version, BTW. 

Now if we can switch over to another beloved monstrosity for a moment and take a peek at one of my be(a)sties we shall see something entirely different at work in The Wretch. Commonly known as Frankenstein. Here the monster is tempered by his love for a woman. In fact, he never even gets a woman. Dr. Frankenstein says he’ll make him one, at threat of death to his family, but he never comes through because he can’t bring himself to compound his crime of making this monster in the first place. So, yeah, there never was a bride of Frankenstein, in the book anyway. The civilizing influence for this monster is philosophy. That’s the transformative elixir. Naturally, it doesn’t solve all of his monster issues, like how terrible a thing he is, but it does make him quite intelligent and very intuitive. You could talk for hours with Frank over a pint or two and still not get bored with the conversation. He might strangle you at the end of it, but it would be a solid night out for sure. 

In my book The Demon of Montreal a monster is made by a demon and yes that monster saves the world. It saves the world without the world ever knowing it and naturally, it’s a pretty thankless job. For the monster and the demon. I was accused of being too dark in that book but really it can’t be dark enough. 

This theme is then repeated in another book of mine The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Zombie Hunter and that’s a pretty good time too. Especially, when you consider that Mr. Hyde really does such an excellent job at killing zombies. I mean, if you’ve never seen it or heard tell of it, you really ought to. 

The post Monsters That Save The World appeared first on Science Fiction and Horror.

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This is a huge issue. The answer to this seems rather elusive.

I’m going to say what is scary are things that are both real and unreal; there and not there. And then I’m just going to distill it down into: things that are ambivalent.

Let’s see if we can’t break this down a little:

Always the dark is scary and aliens are pretty darn scary. If you don’t think so, just see how you feel the next time you are going into a dark place you have never been before. The thing about it is that darkness covers up what may or may not be there.

Bad smells are scary because we don’t know if we are in danger or not. Go into a pitch black dark room that stinks like sulfur and you will (or should) get plenty scared.

Alien things are scary because we don’t know where they came from and it is a connection to something unknown and possibly dangerous. Alien beings are scary because of their inhumanity. Though, most of us have never actually seen aliens, which, I dare say, makes them scarier.

Ghosts are scary because ghosts are either real or so possible they might as well be real, but also they are not there, or not wholly there, as in not in a solid body. Once I bought this book. It was about the size of the Encarta with the same size font and it was chockablock full of “real” ghost stories. I had this idea that I would read a little every night before bedtime. Three days later, I wasn’t reading from that book anymore. I was so spooked after a few of those when I was lying there in the dark, I could not sleep, or stay entirely sane.

What is scary? I think the idea of things is far more scary than the thing itself. The tension really holds up when you think someone or something is there, but can’t see them, which goes back to the “both there and not there” proposition. Then again, that is a form of darkness isn’t it? You can’t see…the monster. It’s also a kind of ghost: not there, but there. Real and not real. Interesting to think that maybe things that we can’t decide on are scary. That would include “fear of the unknown.”

Apprehension is scary. That moves it over into the “going to happen, not going to happen” category. I grew up in the 80’s and while that wasn’t the most war torn time to grow up, in fact, most of it was peaceful, we had the last vestige of the cold war. I remember being terrified of the atom bomb. And I really was scared of Russians invading, like I would just be going along, doing my thing, and bam, a Russian would appear in the backyard out by the clothesline or something. That was fear of many things: aliens, alien things, apprehension, and ghosts (in this case, we can say phantoms.)

So, we can boil it down to a list of things that are all there and not there; seen and not seen; real and not real; going to happen, not going to happen:

Darkness

Aliens

Alien things: objects, powers, energies

Bad smells

Invisible things: radiation, ghosts, entities, devils, insanity

Really small things like diseases.

Interesting to note that serial killers are sort of insane aliens; we know they have human bodies, but we suspect they are not the same kind of beings as we are and so we see them, but we don’t see them.

How about when we talk about dreams? they happened, but they didn’t. That can get pretty freaky.

God, now I’m starting to think there’s a lot of scary stuff out there. Or is there?

 

 

 

Sometimes I can’t take it. You know what I mean? You just need one piece of specific information to do one thing and all you can find are posts that tell you to review all options and make the best choice, or some such wording, and all you can say is: just tell me what the best choice is!

Here is how to do it:

Go to facebook ads manager page: just google facebook ads manager.

Select Create Ad; it should then load your content. If that doesn’t happen then you probably have to create a facebook page, like an author page in order to get an account.

Select campaign objective: choose Send people to your website. Hit Continue.

Choose an audience: put in All English if that’s your language and select a daily budget, start with the minimum of 5 per day.

Scroll to where you see “INCLUDE people who match at least ONE of the following” and go to the field where it says “demographics.” Then choose all the things that relate to your book, like Anne Rice, Horror fiction, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Stephen King Fans, etc. It’s okay to be broad on the meter up top. Hit continue.

Now you’re on the format page, do a single image. At this point if you haven’t designed your ad, go do so. In photo shop make a new file. Set it at 1200 pixels wide and 627 pixels tall. Stick your book cover on there and then some come-on buttons that you think will make people buy or look or read.

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If you don’t know photo shop you have to learn it. Best way to learn it is to trick someone into sending you an original photo shop file (a book cover) which you can then open in photo shop and see how it was put together.

Then you enter data into the other fields and what not. If you want to link to Amazon: go to your book page on Amazon and copy the url link and then go to Bitly.com and shorten and customize the link. Like this: http://bit.ly/JACKS_DISEASE (or whatever your book title is, obviously.)

And that’s it. Wait for approval from facebook droids.

 

There is a lot to be said for horror. As a genre it is one of the only ones that allows you to explore so many diverse concepts. The supernatural is a built in trope, and that leads you into all kinds of fantasy and science fiction. In the old days, they used to think they wouldn’t be able to sell straight sf flicks, so they made sf horror and gave us Alien, The Thing, Predator, The Fly (albeit that was a remake, but a damn good one.) Horror is also a unique genre in that cheap B renditions seem to be preferred. Horror, for many is a starting ground. I was speaking with a friend a few years ago and she had mention writing one of the Halloween books and, with bright eyes and a big wide smile, she said, “Yeah, you only get killed if you have sex.”

I hadn’t really twigged on the moral lessons inherent in horror before that, but sure enough in all those 80’s slasher flicks, teenage sex is resoundingly frowned upon.

My love affair with horror began when I was a child, a scared child. I remember being so paranoid about Jason coming to get me that I once, after school in the latchkey-kid hours before my dad came home, left my house putting my stuffed animal in charge and equipping him with a pet rock that he was instructed to throw at Jason should that SOB’s hockey mask wearing face show up, looking for me.

My brother was an ardent hockey player.

So, superstition played a big part in my romance with horror. Little did I know just how thoroughly horror would claim me. I once made a cheap high school movie about a guy who was claimed by the darkness, and who resisted it, until the end when he embraced it. I guess I was portraying myself.

To me horror is multifaceted. I most enjoy a good Gothic romance set against the backdrop of impending doom, or a well crafted ghost story with lots of atmospheric gloom and apprehension. Blood n’ guts or splatterpunk is one kind of horror, which, when you want it all in your face–a sort of social rebellion–works wonders.

I often hear people say that there is enough horror in the modern world or that they have enough horror in their life so they don’t want to read about it. I understand this, but at the same time, feel it’s terribly misguided, since horror, just like other fiction, is escapism. But it is escapism which seeks to show us how to survive the worst thing. Once you survive the worst thing, let’s just say death, the other problems in life seem rather small by comparison. So it is with horror.

I don’t discount the horror of the modern world, we are, after all, now more than ever, surrounded by it, but my point is that horror as a genre is seeking to help us deal with it. Whether it is effective or not, is up to the reader or viewer and his or her personal experience to decide.

The gross out is one kind of horror, and does work, but is easily overdone.

Horror also seems to like to be dressed up in its Sunday best with lush purple style prose, much like a aged vampire will want to wear a fine suit when he goes out to kill. Horror, has many lessons to teach, but also wants you to learn them on your own, so horror likes to tell us the cautionary tale where the inventor is killed by his or her creation, or the how the best laid, but ill conceived, plans can and do backfire, often in the most terrible of ways.

Horror wants to lure us into its embrace and then scare the shit out of us. You know, that’s not unlike some people I know.

 

 

Bear with me, this process is touchy, but you should be able to find what you need i.e. Hidden Episode No. 2

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