David Soul R.I.P.

David Soul, R.I.P.
1943 - 2024

David Soul passed away on January 4 at age 80.

He was a seventies pop culture icon, surfacing first in the TV show Starsky and Hutch. I was a fan of the show, and its at-times wild storylines (which arguably reached an apogee with the 'light bulb killer' episode from November, 1976).

In 1976, Soul released an LP, titled David Soul, that had the hit song 'Don't Give Up On Us Baby'. I remember how that song dominated the FM top 40 playlist in the Spring of 1977, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in April of that year.

A followup single, and another good track, was 'Silver Lady'.

For fans of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, Soul perhaps is best remembered for his lead role in the 1979 television production of Stephen King's Salem's Lot.

Salem's Lot was not the best film or television incarnation of that novel, but given the constraints of network TV at that time, it was a significant acknowledgement that there was an audience for horror content among American viewers. This was some 31 years before the debut of The Walking Dead, mind you. Soul's performance was a decent one despite the at-times awkward plotting, and to this day I retain a fondness for the quirkiness of 'Salem's Lot.

1979 also saw David Soul immortalized in the pages of the Warren magazine Eerie. He was the lead character in 'Gotterdammerung', a Budd Lewis sci-fi story published, in issue 100, about a post-apocalyptic, near-future Earth. 

Soul's character, 'Juda', specialized in taking out cannibal zombies with a scoped laser gun - ! How fuckin' cool is that ?!

Rest in Peace, David Soul !

Penthouse January 1973

Penthouse magazine

January 1973

Time once again to dip into our archive of back issues of Penthouse magazine. Why not showcase the January, 1973 issue, and see what Bob Guccione has for us ?

Back then (January 13, 1973), the number one single in the land was 'You're So Vain', by Carly Simon.

An eclectic array of albums are featured in the magazine's 'Disc Discussion' column.

Back in '73, an electronic calculator was a precision instrument with an accordingly high price tag. And instead of Alexa and amazon Echo, you had 'video voice'.

The Pet of the Month is an amazing young woman named Maggi Burton, from Australia. Guccione photographed her portfolio, and he knew what he was doing.

There is a feature article, by Donn Pearce, on country music performer Merle Haggard, who at the time was riding high on the success of the 1969 song 'Okie from Muskogee'. Pearce's article is an unflattering, even depressing, look at how it was for a singer and his entourage to travel through the north-central USA in the early 1970s, staying in budget motels, and doing shows at middle-of-nowhere venues like Goose Lake, Michigan, and Ponderosa Park, Ohio. 

As Pearce tells it, Haggard and his band (the 'Strangers') spend their road trip stalled in various motels due to poor weather. They pass the time having perfunctory assignations with various groupies, ladies who sport bell-bottomed jeans and dyed-blonde hair.

The January issue takes a skeptical view of two personalities who were immensely popular in the early 1970s: David Reuben, the psychiatrist whose book 'Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)' was a monster best-seller, and psychologist Arthur Janov, whose 'primal scream' therapy was very trendy among celebrities.

We've got a cartoon.........

.........and a feature on the 1983 R-rated softcore film 'Cheerleaders'.

We'll close with a second portfolio, this one involving an athletic young woman named Susan Backlinie, of Washington, DC. Susan gets gets in very close proximity to a real, live, lion. Ahh, workplace safety standards were a little looser, back in 1983.........

Dice Men

'Dice Men'
The Origin Story of Games Workshop

by Ian Livingstone with Steve Jackson

Unbound (UK), 2022

Anyone with familiarity with Anglophone science fiction and fantasy media is aware of Games Workshop, a UK firm with a juggernaut presence in the world not only of tabletop gaming, but video gaming, too. Games Workshop also ran / runs  the Black Library and Solaris book publishing imprints.

What I didn't know is that Games Workshop began back in 1975 as the brainchild of three Manchester residents and grammar school chums who met, and discovered a mutual liking for board games: Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson (not to be confused with the Steve Jackson from Austin, Texas) and John Peake.

'Dice Men' is a memoir, authored by Livingstone with contributions from Jackson and other Games Workshop employees and gaming world luminaries, of the founding of the company, all the way up to 1991.

Although priced at barely $20 at amazon, at 297 pages in length this is a formidable book, measuring 8 1/5 x 12 inches, with study hardbound covers and high-quality, thick paper stock.

Livingstone is a capable writer and he tells the story of Games Workshop's early days in a conversational, flowing style that touches the right notes of nostalgia without lapsing into sentimentality.

The book is copiously illustrated with scans and photographs of vintage periodicals such as the Owl and Weasel newsletter, which morphed into White Dwarf in 1977. There are photos of gaming conventions and personalities from the early era, as well as portraits - if you could call them that - of the large library of RPG figurines the company produced in the 1970s and 1980s. 

I particularly enjoyed Livingstone's account of a summer, 1976 trip that he, Jackson, and some friends and fellow employees made to the U.S. They drove across the country to California, taking in the sights, and then turned around for a rendezvous with Gary Gygax and TSR at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in August. It was a road trip inspired, according to Livingstone, by the Kerouac novel 'On the Road'.

As someone who was 16 years old in 1976, I found this part of the book to be a powerful shot of nostalgia, and an interesting look at America as it was in the mid-1970s. It brought me new appreciation for that time, and that place. 

One aspect of the company history that the book tends to be rather self-effacing about, is the fact that Livingstone and Jackson, while bereft of MBA degrees (or much in the way of formal training and experience in business, period), took their creation from very humble beginnings into a very successful corporation. This is particularly true when the book recounts the Workshop's interactions with TSR, who made overtures towards buying the company. There were times when much money was dangled in the faces of the Games Workshop executives, but they decided not to cash in, and instead focused on the long term success of their company. 

This was no small achievement in the era before venture capitalism and investment firms. One only has to think of how TSR overextended itself, and experienced financial problems, in the mid-1980s, and sowed the seeds of later bankruptcy, to realize that the tabletop gaming industry could be a fragile enterprise. It was Jackson's habitual caution in making business decisions that helped keep Games Workshop not only solvent, but prosperous. 

The book recounts the rise, and tremendous success, in the early 1980s of the 'Fighting Fantasy' line of books designed to introduce younger people to the world of RPGs. The books met with some condemnation from religious activists with the UK's 'Evangelical Alliance', who warned that the material would promote Satanic practices (!).

Livingstone's history of his personal involvement in Games Workshop ends on something of a melancholy note, as 1986 saw he and Jackson ceding greater control of the day-to-day running of the company to others. In 1991, Workshop executives and part-owners Bryan Ansell, Tom Kirby, and Keith Pinfold became convinced that the future of Games Workshop lay with selling the company to the private equity firm ECI Partners. Livingstone and Jackson were less than enthused about the idea, but as minority shareholders they eventually capitulated to the pressure from the other owners, and sold their shares and completed the buyout. 

That decision ended their involvement with the company they had created back in 1975 in a flat on the top floor of a house on Bolingbroke Road in West London. In fairness to Ansell, Kirby, and Pinfold, the acquisition by ECI gave Games Workshop the capital it needed to become its present-day £3 billion firm, and for their part, Livingstone and Jackson went on to fame and prosperity in the world of computer and video gaming. 

Who will want a copy of 'Dice Men' ? Needless to say, UK fans of tabletop and RPG games will want their copy. But I also think it's a useful addition to observations of popular culture in the UK and the USA during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a good overview of how one can go from a startup company manned by a handful of people in a tiny office, to a resounding corporate success. In other words, it shows the best side of the economic enterprise we know as Capitalism !

At the Library Sale, Christmas 2023

At the Library Sale

Christmas, 2023

I spend Christmas in my hometown in Upstate New York. One of the libraries there has a used book sale timed to coincide with the holidays. So a week ago I stopped in at the library sale, sweating in my overcoat as I crouched and squatted to peer at the shelves, and discovered that someone named 'R. M. Keating' (or someone who knows that person) had donated a collection of Paperbacks from Hell............!

There are some true gems and obscurities here. I mean, I don't think that Will Errickson, over at the 'Too Much Horror Fiction' blog, has some of these on his shelves........?!

I've never heard of 'The Beast'.........nor 'Night of the Wolf'.

Nothing wrong with a vintage Graham Masterton title.......with a stepback cover, of course ! 

According to Errickson, 'Manitou' is '...tasteless and outrageous fun.' Can't go wrong with that endorsement..........!

I'm not all that sure about the Dennis Etchison novel 'Shadow Man', but Errickson judged his short story collection, 'Cutting Edge', as worthwhile.

Errickson regarded Alan Ryan's 'Dead White' as a competent, if not particularly memorable, novel.

'The Dogs' is a novelty......not sure if it will rise to the heights of 'Hell Hound' / 'Baxter' and 'Manstopper'.

Errickson says that 'The Totem' is a 'gripping read', which makes me glad I picked the book up.

Regarding the 1979 anthology 'Shadows 2', Errickson is decidedly lukewarm: mostly filler and mostly too tame and polite to offer any real horror. I can't say I'm surprised, as Charles L. Grant's approach to editing horror fiction was not exactly dynamic and transgressive. And in '79, Splatterpunk was still some years away.

And so, as 2024 arrives, I have a  stack of reading material awaiting me. Some promising titles, some not so promising. But the message is the same: you never know what you might find at the Library Sale........... 

White Christmas by America

'White Christmas' by America
from the album 'Holiday Harmony' (2002)

So, as I was driving around I heard this song on one of the Sirius XM channels. It's 'White Christmas' by the group America. I'd never heard it before. It sounds like 'Tin Man', crossed with 'White Christmas'. Who did this ?! Was this song some obscurity from the 1970s ?! 

It turns out it's from a 2002 vinyl LP, called 'Holiday Harmony', produced by Andrew Gold (of 'Lonely Boy' fame) and released by Rhino Records. A CD was issued in 2010, and nowadays there is a digital download available, too.

Along with some standards, the album features some original compositions from Gerry Beckley and Dewey Bunnell, as well as Bunnell and Andrew Gold.

I think 'White Christmas' is the best track, and overall, 'Holiday Harmony' is a pretty decent album. Most of the songs have the slightly overproduced, smooth rock sound that America exemplified / exemplifies. I have to say that I'd rather listen to 'Holiday Harmony', that any Christmas song by Mariah Carey............

Book Review: The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror

Book Review: 'The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror' edited by Stephen Jones

 4 / 5 Stars

'The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror' is a thick brick of a book at 524 pages, published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., in 2021.

Britisher Stephen Jones is of course the world's foremost editor of horror fiction, with over 140 books to his credit.

In his Introduction to the anthology, Jones states that folk horror is '....basically the horrific side of folklore'. As well, folk horror is horror that usually is set in rural environs. I note that in 1993, DAW Books issued an anthology, edited (inevitably) by Martin Greenberg, titled 'Urban Horrors', so it would seem appropriate that attention be given to horror placed in pastoral places.

The contents of 'Folk Horror' range from old favorites (so to speak) from 19th-century authors, to stories from 20th and 21st-century authors, including many younger authors whose works were issued well after the Horror Boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Most of the entries appear to have been newly written for this anthology.

Rather than give capsule summaries of each of the 19 novelettes and stories in 'Folk Horror', I'll simply provide an overview that, hopefully, will give readers an idea of what to expect from the book. 

I will say that in general, the treatments of horror depicted in this collection have a subdued, opaque quality; splatterpunks probably will be disappointed with 'Folk Horror'.

The anthology leads off with Arthur Machen's 1899 novelette 'The White People', about a young English girl whose governess introduces her to pagan practices. The novelette is essentially one lengthy travelogue, rendered in Little Girl-ish, through a fairyland that doesn't contain the expected rainbows and unicorns (and perhaps is better for it). 

Traditional favorites from M. R. James ('Wailing Well') and Algernon Blackwood ('Ancient Lights') give readers new to the genre a grounding in the folk horror ethos. H. P. Lovecraft's vintage story 'The Hound' also somehow finds its way into this company.

The book's other novelette comes from Kim Newman, who first wrote it for a 2005 Science Fiction Book Club anthology, 'The Fair Folk'. 

'The Gypsies in the Wood' features Charles Beauregard, from Newman's 1992 novel 'Anno Dracula', as the lead character. 'Gypsies' deals with malevolent fairies, coming forth to infest a kind of Steampunk Disneyland operating in  Regent's Park. 'Gypsies' is one of the better entries in the anthology. 

Aficionados of horror fiction will find a well-known piece among the entries in 'Folk Horror': 'Sticks', by Karl Edward Wagner, the classic tale of Lovecraftian goings-on in the woodlands of upstate New York. 

I was surprised to see Dennis Etchison's 'The Dark Country' in this anthology. In my opinion Etchison's story fails to qualify as folk horror, or even as a horror story at all. If there is such a category as 'Mexican Noir', then 'Dark Country' belongs there.

Strange, unsettling places in rural England are the focus of well-composed stories from Alison Littlewood ('Jenny Greenteeth'), Mike Chinn ('All I Ever See'), David Sutton ('St. Ambrews Well'), Jan Edwards ('The Devil's Piss Pot'), Storm Constantine ('Wyfa Medj'), and Reggie Oliver ('Porson's Piece').

Ramsey Campbell presents a tale set in rural England. 'The Fourth Call' is about a village tradition that is perilous to ignore. It's a newer story, and thus, for Campbell, a better one: the horror content is more reified than Campbell was wont to do in his older tales.

Supernatural forces loose in the wild are treated in Maura McHugh's 'Gravedirt Mouth', Steve Rasnic Tem's 'Gavin's Field', and Simon Strantzas's 'The King of Stones' (which has the most graphic horror of all the anthology's contributions and, as a result, is memorable).

Folk horror outside Anglophone countries is featured in 'The Offering' by Michael Marshall Smith (you'll think twice about renting an Air BnB in Denmark, especially with a snotnosed teen in your entourage). Christopher Fowler's 'The Mistake at the Monsoon Palace' deals with an Ugly American who finds redemption in rural India; it's more a fantasy tale than a horror tale. 

I finished 'The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror' with a willingness to assign it a Four Star Rating. Every reader will of course have his or her opinion on what stories should, or should not, be included, but I think the only real dud entry is Etchison's. Replacing it with something from Robert Holdstock (such as 'Scarrowfell') would, I think, propel 'Folk Horror' into Five-Star territory. But read it for yourself and see what you think............