Red Shoes Go Rogue! Read All About It in Rouge by Mona Awad

Red Shoes Go Rogue! Read All About It in Rouge by Mona Awad

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Rouge by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster, August 1, 2024). Cover uncredited

Red footwear is a powerful metaphor in folklore and fantasy. Dorothy clicked her red slippers to go home. (Yeah, I know, the slippers were silver in the Baum book, and only became red as a better fit with new Technicolor filming, but stay with me here.)

Let’s go back to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Red Shoes in which Karen is given a pair of red shoes as (it turns out) an inappropriate confirmation present; the shoes stay stuck to her feet and force her to dance incessantly to the point where the only remedy is to cut off her feet.  The story forms the basis of the British film, also called The Red Shoes, in which a ballerina dancing in red shoes commits suicide. The film inspired the Kate Bush song (you guessed it) The Red Shoes.

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The Weyland-Yutaniverse, Part I

The Weyland-Yutaniverse, Part I

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In celebration of the recent streaming series Alien: Earth (whether you enjoyed it or not), I have created a new list of films that most certainly exist in the Weyland-Yutani universe, and if not certainly, then enjoy an unbelievably tenuous link to it.

This will be an ordered list of sixteen films, four a week, in reverse order, and is guaranteed to enrage you. The Alien and Predator films, and all those in between, are beloved by some, held sacred by a few, and the subjects of intense debate. My opinions will most certainly not align with yours, but I hope to keep you guessing as to my top four!

This list is as complete as I could make it, as I’m only including films I have seen, and I am sure there are one or two other movies out there that have a sneaky W-Y easter-egg buried in the background. Also note the absence of 2022’s Prey, which is indeed a Predator flick (and would have ranked very high on my list), but Weyland-Yutani didn’t exist in its time period, so I’m not including it. Are these rules flawed? Probably. I’m making them up as I go along.

I am limiting this list to sixteen films. There are plenty of TV shows that have snuck in a Weyland-Yutani reference; Firefly, Angel (essentially anything created by Joss Whedon), the V remake, even Dr. Who, and of course the recent show, Alien: Earth. I won’t be discussing any of these, but for the record I really enjoyed Alien: Earth, so there.

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Tor Doubles #26: John Varley’s Press Enter and Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station

Tor Doubles #26: John Varley’s Press Enter and Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station

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Cover for Fugue State by Wayne Barlowe
Cover for The Death of Doctor Island by Ron Walotsky

Tor Double #26, originally published in October 1990, contains the fifth and final story by Robert Silverberg. It also contains the second of three stories by John Varley.

Hawksbill Station was originally published in Galaxy in August, 1967. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Set in the Cambrian period, before land animals or plants have evolved, it focuses on the titular prison, sent back in time from the twenty-first century to house political dissidents.

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Masters of Horror: The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale

Masters of Horror: The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale

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The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale (Tachyon Publications, October 7, 2025). Cover artist uncredited

Lansdale is the well known, prolific author both of mysteries (Hap and Leonard series) and of famous horror stories, which made him the recipient of multiple Bram Stoker awards.

The present collection does not include new stories but assembles a bunch of his best horror tales, making the book a real treat for horror fan. His narrative output is so huge that even a confirmed horror lover like myself has found here a few tales I was not familiar with.

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The Sword & Planet of Edmond Hamilton, Part II

The Sword & Planet of Edmond Hamilton, Part II

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The Star Kings by Edmond Hamilton (Paperback Library, November 1970). Cover artist unknown

See Part I of The Sword & Planet of Edmond Hamilton here.

Edmond Hamilton’s Kaldar tales seem very much an homage to ERB’s Barsoom stories. An Earthman adventurer named Stuart Merrick is sent to Kaldar by a group of scientists. He finds himself a princess to love and becomes that world’s greatest warrior, and at the end of the first tale is drawn back toEearth by those same scientists. When asked what he found, he says, “My world.”

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We Are Not Commodities (Modern Marketing Scares Me)

We Are Not Commodities (Modern Marketing Scares Me)

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An old woman standing in an empty dorm points a shotgun at the viewer. On the wall behind her is scrawled the words “We are not things”
A still from Mad Max: Fury Road

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

You’ll have to excuse me as I’m currently on holidays, and the absence of the routine of heading into the office daily has thrown off my brain a little. Today, I wanted to muse about something quite personal to me. I had, for  quite a while, taken myself off most social media — I was still on Facebook a very little, and continued to watch YouTube videos — but the rest of them were used only to post a link to my blog post (such as BlueSky), or not at all (TikTok, looking at you). But I have since returned, albeit slowly and distantly.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray asks, ‘Do Lost Raymond Chandler Stories Exist?’

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Will Murray asks, ‘Do Lost Raymond Chandler Stories Exist?’

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.
– Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep
(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Will Murray makes a return to A (Black) Gat in the Hand. Last month, Strand Magazine (who I wrote DVD reviews for in a prior century) published a lost Raymond Chandler story. Which got Will to thinking…

The recent discovery of a previously unknown and unpublished short story by Raymond Chandler reminded me of a question that’s lingered in my mind for a very long time.

How did Chandler in the early years the Depression support himself and his wife writing for Black Mask and other titles when he only sold a two or three stories a year?

Black Mask was then paying only a penny or a penny and a half a word for fiction to any but their top writers. Chandler was writing stories that were roughly 12 to 18,000 words long. He received $180.00 for his first sale, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.“ Even considering what a penny could buy in 1933, when a loaf of sliced bread cost 3 cents, Chandler wouldn’t have been able to survive solely writing for Black Mask.

It wasn’t until 1935 that he broke into Munsey’s Detective Fiction Weekly, which probably paid him two cents a word, and possibly more. A considerable raise, but still far short of what was required for subsistence living. And he only sold one story to DFW, “Noon Street Nemesis.“

Since Chandler had been a well-paid oil company executive until he lost his job in 1932, conceivably his savings carried him for some period. But according to Chandler biographer Tom Hiney, by the time he started working on “Blackmailers,“ Chandler’s savings had been all but exhausted. The story took him five months to write. Add another month or so until he received the acceptance check. So that’s $30.00 a month for six months toil, paid at the end of the six-month period. At his old executive position, Chandler’s salary had approached $10,000 a year.

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The Battleborn Interviews: the Final Chapter!

The Battleborn Interviews: the Final Chapter!

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Having returned the Eye of Rhynn and the Hand of Kwll to their rightful (quite frightening) owners, Sean CW Korsgaard and I sat down to conclude our Sword & Sorcery chat, and to focus once more on his upcoming magazine Battleborn. Thanks to a successful Indiegogo campaign, Issues One and Two are now fully funded, both digital and print.

Read Part One of the interview here, and Part Two here.

Battleborn is positioning itself as a sword & sorcery outlet. Speaking both as editor and fan, how is that different from epic or high fantasy? What elements or touches make a story S&S?

What makes the sword-and-sorcery subgenre are a combination of five factors. First up, the Protagonist. Unlike, for example, epic fantasy, which have large casts or changing points of view, a work of S&S typically follows a single protagonist, or the odd duo. I say protagonist instead of hero for a reason –– many of these characters are rogues, mercenaries, rebels, savages, and scoundrels, if not antiheroes or outright villainous. They are often underdogs or outsiders, and often on the road or far from home, akin to lone gunslingers of American westerns and the wandering samurai of Japanese folklore.

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Foreign Bodies, Part III

Foreign Bodies, Part III

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Sick Nurses (Sahamongkol Film International, June 14, 2007)

A new, twenty-film watch-a-thon, this time looking at horror films from around the world. The rules are the same — they must be films I haven’t seen before, and they must be free to stream.

With a bit of luck, this new watch project will feature a lot more quality films as I unearth horror from around the globe. With that said…

Sick Nurses – Thailand – (2007)

Hey there, you. Fancy watching a film about six sexy nurses who sell body parts on the side getting offed by a vengeful ghost? Would you like your story with a side of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff, in an unspecified setting save a remarkably under-populated hospital? Would you like this tale to be at once hilarious and downright ghastly, with lashings of gore and death by handbag?

How about some frenetic filmmaking with surreal set-pieces, bizarre lighting, and a scary, long-haired spirit who looks like she’s doing a Vogue spread?

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Tor Doubles #25: Gene Wolfe’s The Death of Doctor Island and John M. Ford’s Fugue State

Tor Doubles #25: Gene Wolfe’s The Death of Doctor Island and John M. Ford’s Fugue State

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Cover for Fugue State by Wayne Barlowe
Cover for The Death of Doctor Island by Ron Walotsky

Tor Double #25 was originally published in September 1990 and collects Gene Wolfe’s The Death of Doctor Island and an expanded version of John M. Ford’s Fugue State. Both stories have settings which question the nature of reality, although in very different ways.

The Death of Doctor Island was originally published in Universe 3, edited by Terry Carr and published by Random House in October, 1973. It was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, winning the latter. It also won the Locus poll.

Wolfe’s story focuses on Nicholas de Vore, who rescues himself from a sandy pit to discover he is living on a nearly deserted island. He eventually learns that there are two other people living on the island, Ignacio, an older man who attacks Nick upon first meeting him, and Diana Phillips, a young woman who provides him with advice and assistance in surviving on the island. The most important “person” he meets, however, is the disembodied voice of “Doctor Island,” who is Nicky’s primary source of communication on the island.

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