The Many Days of Horror - The Hive

Tim Curran may not be overly familiar to you, but that's mostly because he's been circulating in the small press and online fiction resources for most of his career, and it's a damn shame because his writing is bar none some of the goriest, moodiest and most evocative out there. I previously reviewed his work in Zombie Pulp, and it's time to talk about The Hive. This review focuses on the Kindle ebook edition, which includes a lot of additional material omitted from the print copy I read many years go.

We'll get the preamble out of the way: it's well written, its well-researched (as far as I know, not being an Antarctic researcher....worked for me!) and it's a direct sequel to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. No small feat making a sequel to Lovecraft's greatest novella, but Curran does so, not only evoking the memory of the original but also drawing inspiration from a host of modern resources, not the least of which is Carpenter's The Thing. Don't worry, though; the derivations from The Thing are principally a matter of mood and suspense, along with a healthy dose of "last-name-itis" amongst the crew of Kharkov Station deep in Antarctica near the Medusa Ice Shelf. Sure....a shoggoth bears more than a passing resemblance to something Thing-like, but the shoggoths in Curran's version of the mythos are really damned freaky.

Curran's tale weaves between a myriad variety of characters stuck in Antarctica when one researcher and his crew stumble across evidence of subterranean ruins beneath the glacial ice, as well as actual mummified bodies of decidedly alien beings (the old ones, sometimes known as elder things to CoC fans). As things rapidly begin to unravel we are treated to a vast number of hideous and sometimes subtle ways that discovering these ruins and bodies can affect humanity, as the scientists come to grips with the chilling truth about what they are witnessing, and what it means for the ancient history of mankind and possibly all life on Earth. Meanwhile other scientists drilling down to a frozen lake beneath the glacial ice uncover evidence of live, active old ones...and a scientist who's discovered too much encountered a diary of an expedition that preceded even the mysterious lost expedition of the original novel, which serves as a lengthy interlude not in the original book.

The pacing is great, events exciting and believable, the cast of characters thick and filled with those both memorable, deceitful and otherwise problematic, the sorts of personalities that you don't want to be around when you begin to awaken the hive consciousness of alien beings who might have created humanity and all other entities as a byproduct of some other greater experiment.

If you like good horror, and especially if you like good mythos fiction that stands on its own merits, then you need to read The Hive. I'll be hitting the sequel soon!

A+++

The Many Days of Horror! - Return of the living Dead (NSFW)

There are a few movies you can date yourself with in the world of geekdom. If you're a zombie fan for example, you can easily point to a few specific films as the source of one's obsession for the cinematically undead....plenty of older zombie fans can call out the original Night of the Living Dead, sure...but you know you're a product of the 80's if Return of the Living Dead is the one which stands out as your de facto zombie flick! Bonus points if you not only know who Linnea Quigley is but dreamed of meeting her at a convention. Triple points if you still dream of meeting her. She's the reason this blog gets an NSFW by the way. I could have left out pics of her but it felt s bit disingenuous.

It seems silly to me to review this amazing movie, since it's hard to imagine anyone who's a zombie fan who hasn't seen it, but I'll be honest: I have live humans at my game table, most of whom were born after this movie was released in 1985, who have either never seen it or never heard of it. Those people also liked the Evil Dead remake. So yes, it's time for some geek-vangelism!

Return of the Living Dead presented itself as a campy quasi-sequel to Night of the Living Dead, even encompassing a backstory that filled in the "real story" of what might have happened a decade and a half back, and how that story....told almost as if the guys working in the Medical Supply Warehouse were joshing the new kid....ultimately leads to the outbreak of an entirely new zombie uprising.

RotLD introduced a thick campiness to the film as many did in the 80's, and like a much smaller handful it pulled it off extremely well. The humor is black and infectious, and even the zombies get in on it. The film had a number of notable tropes and bits worth noting, as follows:

1. The Tar Man Zombie. He's still an amazing special effect, one you do not forget, and his FX still surpass most contemporary zombie films in terms of gory nastiness.

2. Smart Zombies. The zombies in RotLD are cunning, keep their wits about them even when their brains are rotting, and while they might be a product of chemical contamination their tenacious supernatural vileness is present throughout the film. These zombies feel their bodies rotting away and the only relief they get is to devour the living. Especially brains. And they will do anything they can to get those brains.

3. 80's Fashion at it's Worst! RotLD dates itself with almost delightful glee in the realm of 80's punk and pop...and while it was probably unintentional, I still recall in the 80's being mildly peturbed at how outrageous everyone looked. Keep in mind, I grew up in rural Arizona, so yeah:

4. The Medical Supply Warehouse. Name three places you can set a zombie uprising. Graveyard? Check. Mortuary? check. Medical Supply Warehouse? Check and give yourself a golden genius star. Hanging cadavers...spliced dog schemata (or whatever it's called) all coming back to hideous unlife....protagonists who understand little things like embalming and rigor mortis? And a script which deploys the use of both? Excellent!

5. The Nuclear Option. I'm pretty sure RotLD was the first one to exercise this option directly against zombies.

6. Zombie Linnea. The reason I rank this blog NSFW but arguably its hard to make anything safe when we're talking about one of the great scream queens of the 80's! Linnea plays a punk rock chick who has a fear of being ravished by evil old men. She gets eaten by zombies again, who are scrupulously efficient at not marring her physical form so she can parade around nude for most of the film.

In short: best zombie movie ever, especially if you're a child of the 80's. Watch it, love it, and realize that long before all the zombie movies of the last decade, for a very long time this was one of a handful of true greats!

A+++