The Memory Remains

Posted on May 17, 2012 at 2:43 pm by richard cosgrove

There’s nothing more effective at driving home the reality of your own mortality as when one of your childhood heroes shuffles off their mortal coil.

Death, of course, is the only thing (along with taxes if Benjamin Franklin is to be believed) in this world that is certain, and it affects us as a species on an ongoing, daily basis. Think about the world as a whole and just while you’re reading this sentence people are dropping like flies all over the globe.

I digress. In my adult life there have been frequent occasions where people in the public eye have died, and every time it serves to trigger memories of how their particular lives, whether musicians or writers or actors or whatever their talent may have been, had impacted mine.

The earliest death of somebody who I really admired camed back in 1996 when Cliff Burton died on a lonely stretch of European road, ending the classic Metallica lineup in the process. Since then I’ve tipped a hat to the likes of Freddy Mercury, Stuart Adamson (Big Country’s tormented but genius singer/songwriter), Randy Savage (one of the great wrestlers), John Peel and Justin ‘Pepsi’ Tate (bassist with Welsh rockers Tigertailz and a huge influence on my own playing).

Each of them, and the many, many more that I could mention, triggered memories on hearing of their deaths, and will be forever linked, in my mind, with these very particular recollections.

So, why this somewhat morbid topic for a blog? Well, it happened again last week. Another of the people who were unwittingly instrument in building my memories has passed on, the incomparable Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch of the Beastie Boys.

Adam Yauch

Though the Beasties have been a constant in my life ever since crashing onto the scene in 1986 with their Licensed To Ill album and their tabloid baiting live shows with half naked women dancing in cages and giant inflatable penises, the one overriding memory I have of them is when their first single, She’s On It, was played at Nottingham’s Rock City, the mecca of all things, well, rock back in the mid 80s.

At the time it was something of a novelty for a club to have a video screen, and Rock City was somewhat groundbreaking because it showed up to half a dozen – yep, count ‘em – videos on a white screen that was barely bigger than the average plasma TV that sits in your living room today.

She’s On It, which featured Ad Rock and his compadres Mike ‘Mike D’ Diamond and Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horowitz, was a simple affair, consisting of the boys wandering down a beach and a woman in blood red high heels, but because it was the first time we’d ever seen anything like this in a club it seared itself into our consciousness and has remained there ever since.

The passing of MCA has effectively, like Cliff Burton before him, ended the classic Beasties era, and so I’m not only bidding Adam Yauch goodbye, but the Beastie Boys as well. I do so with a smile, however, as they brought me and millions of others around the world a lot of pleasure, and so I raise a Budweiser and with a hearty cry of “Kick it!” drink to MCA and to the Beasties.

The Beasties and Mixmaster Mike

Twitt
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Writer’s Avalanche

Posted on May 11, 2012 at 4:03 pm by richard cosgrove

Writer’s block. It’s a well known and well documented condition that afflicts all of us scribbly types at some point or another, but having finished a project a couple of weeks ago and yet to start a new one, I find that I’m suffering from something that’s almost the polar opposite, but which is proving just as crippling.

I’m not sure if there’s a name for it, but one that springs to mind is Writer’s Avalanche. I’m not suffering from a shortage of ideas or projects, but rather from an overwhelming barrage of them, but the problem is that I don’t know which of them to start, as most of them will require a good commitment of time and effort (not a problem once I get going) and I want to make sure I pick the right one.

As a result for the last two weeks I’ve written virtually nothing, in fact this blog represents the most words that I’ve strung together in over a fortnight.

My goal, then, is to face this avalanche over the weekend, and make a commitment to one of these ideas, at which point I can launch into it with gusto and hopefully have the foundations of whichever one I choose firmly laid by this time next week.

Wish me luck, and pass me the skis…..

Buried under an avalanche of ideas (not me, by the way!)

Twitt
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You Leave Me Hanging On

Posted on May 3, 2012 at 9:20 am by richard cosgrove

My fellow Shadowlocked writer and one of the most knowledgeable Dr Who scribes that the world has ever known, John Bensalhia has just produced a brilliant article on the many types of Who cliffhangers that have appeared over the years (read this superb article here), and it got me thinking that the cliffhanger has become something of a dying art.

I remember as a child, and then a young man, tuning into Dr Who every week for the twenty-odd minutes of story before invariably being left with a teasing cliffhanger to tempt me back the following week. It worked, too, even through the McCoy years (which I have to say were particularly painful to watch at times).

These days, though, everything seems to be wrapped up in convenient 44 minute episodes, whether new Doctor Who or any of my other favourite shows like Dexter, or The Walking Dead or going back further, Buffy and The X-Files. True, there are ongoing story arcs, but rarely is there a moment of genuine peril or revelation that drops the jaw and raises the pulse in anticipation of the next episode.

There’s nothing wrong with this ‘new’ style of storytelling, of course, but until I read John’s article I hadn’t realised quite how much I’d missed a good cliffhanger, and I’ll tell you another thing………..

(not really......)

Twitt
Posted in Dr Who, Memory Lane, Shadowlocked, TV | 1 Comment

“I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe”

Posted on April 26, 2012 at 4:31 pm by richard cosgrove

I’ve been a huge horror film fan pretty much all my life, having been introduced to the genre by way of Carrie (after persuading my parents to let me watch it because that nice man from Grease was in it – I speak, of course, of John Travolta), and have rarely shied away from checking any movie out due to its content, but for the last year or so I’ve been sitting firmly (and slightly painfully – those pickets are sharp!) on the fence regarding one particular flick.

The movie in question is A Serbian Film.

A Serbian Film - promotional poster

Described by Mark Kermode as a “nasty piece of exploitation trash in the mold of Jörg Buttgereit and Ruggero Deodato”, there’s a part of me that thinks, having seen and not been disturbed by Buttgereit’s Der Todesking and his pair of Nekromantic flicks, or Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (though the genuine footage of animal cruelty did repulse me), that nothing in A Serbian Film will be any worse, and that it’ll be another case of a film’s reputation being greater than its impact.

The reason I hesitate, though, is that I have it on good authority from a couple of friends and fellow gorehounds that A Serbian Film is, indeed, a disturbing flick, to the point where one of them has strongly recommeded that I don’t watch it and that if he could unwatch it, he would.

And this is the rub, so to speak. Once we’ve seen something we can’t scrub it from our minds. As a curious young man I saw several things, mostly it has to be said old newsreel footage of genuine unpleasantness (I won’t go into details), that I will never forget and will never cleanse my mind of. Nothing that has changed my life, or left any psychological or emotional damage, but still…..things I’d rather have left unseen.

The reason that A Serbian Film has reared its bloody head in my consciousness again is that I read today that, finally, a completely uncut version is about to be released (the currently available UK cut is missing just over four minutes of footage), but as much as a small part of my brain is itching to see what all the fuss is about, the lessons that I’ve learned about seeing things that I’d then rather not have remain, and so for the forseeable future I think the fence sitting will continue.

Twitt
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Starstruck On Set

Posted on April 19, 2012 at 11:22 am by richard cosgrove

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet a number of what the media would describe as ‘famous’ people – actors, directors, musicians, writers – but I’ve never been starstruck, figuring that these are just people like me who happen to do interesting jobs. Happily, on the whole they’ve turned out to be good people who I’ve enjoyed being around and who I like to think have found my lack of deification refreshing. (There are, of course, those who positively demand being worshipped, but these tend not to be the kind of people that I would have any interest in meeting anyway, so to our mutual benefit rarely the twain shall meet.)

However, when it comes to film sets and props I do tend to get a little overawed, pleasantly so I might add, and I experienced this in a major way last week when we went to Leavesden, just outside Watford, to visit the Making Of Harry Potter exhibition.

Housed in two giant soundstages, I was like a child as we wandered around Diagon Alley or peered into Dumbledore’s office, stopping to stare at props and locations while my brain stage whispered at me ‘this is not a recreation, this IS where there actually filmed the movie’.

This was none more apparent, much to my wife’s amusement, at the start of the experience when we found ourselves standing in the Great Hall. Roughly every ninety seconds I would turn to her, a look of starstruck wonder on my face as I proclaimed ‘Snape stood HERE’ or ‘this is the ACTUAL set’, emphasing the point to her as if I was the only one who was taking in the full magnitude of ACTUALLY STANDING IN THE GREAT HALL!!

The Great Hall.........thh ACTUAL GREAT HALL, I tells ya!!

I’m in the process of writing up the experience at length for Shadowlocked, and will post a link in due course, but for film fans and particularly Potter fans, a visit to the Making Of Harry Potter tour is absolutely essential.

Twitt
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The Long Autumn

Posted on April 9, 2012 at 10:25 am by richard cosgrove

Every now and again you reach a point in life where cycles come to an end, where things that seemed to have had an indefinite potential reach a conclusion, and where there is no longer any looking forward with anticipation but only looking backwards with fond memories.

I reached such a point yesterday when I finished Autumm: Aftermath by David Moody, the fifth and final book in his series about the end of the world as we know it and the resulting life among the walking dead that the handful of survivors are forced to adapt to.

I first came across Autumn and David Moody a decade ago when by chance I came across the free download of the first Autumn novel and, being a big fan of all things horror and particularly undead, I decided to give it a go, figuring I had nothing to lose except the few hours it would take to read it. I was, to put it mildly, pleasantly surprised.

Though the whole zombie genre even back then was as packed as the Monroeville Mall’s parking lot, Moody managed to take the regular conventions and give them a little tweak, to the point where the novel wasn’t really about the zombies at all, but rather about the ordinary people that suddenly found themselves in a very select group – the still breathing – and how they coped (or in some cases, didn’t).

David Moody's Autumn

What really set Autumn aside, though, was the additional material that Moody was writing to further flesh out his post apocalyptic vision. Taking the novel, and at the time its recently released sequel Autumn: The City, as the skeleton of the series, if you’ll forgive me the analogy, Moody also present a series of short stories he called ‘Echoes’ which gave further depth to some of the characters in the books, and also showed the horrifying events from the perspective of others, some of which eventually went on to appear in the five core titles.

These short stories were eventually published in the collection Autumn: The Human Condition (now out of print and highly collectable), and the series spawned three further novels, Autumn: Purification, Autumn: Disintegration and the just published (in America, and later in the year for UK readers) Autumn: Aftermath which brings the series to a satisfying conclusion, but one that for me is bittersweet because I know there are no plans for any further Autumn novels, and in my humble opinion, nor should there be.

So, as I turned the final few pages of Aftermath yesterday afternoon, there was a sense of satisfaction that this series I’d invested in (in many ways, but most significantly in an emotional fashion) was finally at an end, but also a feeling of loss, as I knew that in a sense I was saying farewell to these characters that had become part of my life for the last decade, and that even though I have no doubt I’ll revisit the series again in the future, it’ll be with a sense of fond remembrance, much like flicking through an old photograph album of family and friends who are no longer with us.

(check out David Moody’s website by clicking here)

Twitt
Posted in Autumn, Books, David Moody, Horror, Recommended, zombies | Leave a comment

In Print, No One Can Hear You Scream

Posted on March 31, 2012 at 6:18 pm by richard cosgrove

While working on a Prometheus/Alien article for Shadowlocked recently (coming soon!) I found my mind drifting back to my youth in the mist shrouded days before DVD and even VHS tapes were widely available, and in particular to the film novelisation of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece. Written by Allen Dean Foster, one of the most prolific of the novelisation writers, it was one of the first of these kind of books that I ever read, thanks largely to my good friend Nick’s father being something of a bibliophile, and introduced me to the universe of the xenomorph long before I saw the actual film.

As a boy on the cusp of my teenage years I was already a huge fan of scary movies, having seen Carrie on television a few years previously and subsequently devouring all the books, comics and old Hammer and Universal movies that were shown in Saturday afternoon matinees as was humanly possible, these novelisations were a vital link to the films that I was aware of thanks to television spots and print ads but that I was far too young to see at the cinema. Through them I could vicariously experience and enjoy movies like Alien, Outland (which turned out to be terrible but the trailer was great) and John Carpenter’s The Thing, all of which Foster wrote, and other more obscure fare like Inseminoid (by Larry Miller), The Howling (by Dean Koontz under the pseudonym Owen West) and Dead And Buried (by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro).

Alien novelisation by Allen Dean Foster

My little trip down memory lane also made me realise that while I don’t tend to read novelisations of movies these days, though they are still produced in their droves, I have developed a tendency to want to read the source novel for an adaptation before I see the film. In the last few years I’ve been inspired by glowing film reviews to devour books like Shutter Island (by Dennis Lehane), The Lovely Bones (by Alice Sebold), Let The Right One In (by John Ajvide Lindqvist), The Road (by Cormac McCarthy) and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy before taking in their cinematic counterparts, and while there are of course the inevitable disappointments when certain scenes and/or characters are changed in or missing from the celluloid versions, I’d much rather discover these tales through the medium of print before the magic of movies. But that’s just me.

With all the commotion about The Hunger Games at the moment, I’m again going to defer seeing the flick and catch up on the source novel (and indeed trilogy) by Suzanne Collins, and instead revisit its spiritual successor, director Kinji Fukasaku’s classic Battle Royale (which ironically is also based on a source novel, by Koshun Takami, that I haven’t read, but which in my defense didn’t receive an English translation until three years after I’d seen the 2000 movie).

Twitt
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Das Titanic

Posted on March 23, 2012 at 11:43 pm by richard cosgrove

Being a writer, there’s a part of my brain that is always switched on to the possibility of an article arising from pretty much anything I see or read, but every now and again something crops up that makes me think “I have to write about this!”

Such an occurence happened a couple of weeks ago when I came across a programme about a film version of the Titanic tragedy that I’d never even heard of. As someone with a pretty major interest in all things Titanic this surprised me, but not half as much as the story behind what has become known as the Nazi Titanic.

Commissioned by none other than Joseph Goebbels, the film itself is quite remarkable as an early example of cutting edge (for the time) special effects and as a historic piece of Nazi propaganda, but the story behind the movie is even more intriguing, and horrific, than the tragedy itself.

As a result I’ve penned a piece for Shadowlocked, and which you can read in full by clicking here or on the picture below. Enjoy….


The Lost Titanic (aka Nazi Titanic)

Twitt
Posted in Movies, Recommended, Reviews, Shadowlocked, Titanic | Leave a comment

Zombie Boot Camp

Posted on March 16, 2012 at 11:23 am by richard cosgrove

One of my best friends got married last weekend, and in time honoured tradition, a couple of weeks prior to that eighteen men (myself included) found themselves embarking on his stag weekend in the fine county of Worcester. In addition to the usual stag activities (which as a man I am sworn not to disclose just in case any of the fairer sex are reading this!) the best man had arranged for us to be put through Zombie Boot Camp.

Being a huge fan of anything involving shambling hordes of catatonic things (with the exception of Christmas shopping excursions) I was particularly excited about this, expecting it to be a glorified version of paintballing, but nothing could have prepared us for the full on, very physical experience that awaited us.

Being a writer, the first thing I wanted to do after surviving this truly awesome day (after, of course, celebrating our victory over the undead with drinking and dancing in Worcester’s finest – or so we were reliably informed by a couple of the locals – night club) was to rattle off an account of the day, and this has now been published on Shadowlocked and can be found by clicking on the picture below.

The full gory story of my brush with the end of the world is in the article, but I have to admit that before going through Zombie Boot Camp I thought that I was reasonable ready for the undead apocalypse, but having been run ragged, drilled in weapons and tactics and beaten, punched and kicked by hordes of the recently reanimated, I can honestly say I’m not so sure any more, but I am willing to go through it all again but not, perhaps, until I’m a little fitter than I am now.

Twitt
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World War…..V?

Posted on February 24, 2012 at 3:32 pm by richard cosgrove

I like zombie novels. Actually, that’s not strictly true, I absolutely love zombie novels, and along with David Moody and his Autumn series (check ‘em out here) there’s one man who has done more to resurrect the genre than any other, and that man is Max Brooks.

When World War Z first came out back in 2006 I devoured it like a ravenous Fulci creature and it remains one of my favourite books, of any genre, due to its original take on the whole phenomenon.

Since its release it has spawned a graphic novel (Recorded Attacks), an audio book and an upcoming film starring no less than Brad Pitt, and now, finally, Brooks has taken a leaf out of Moody’s book (who has written dozens of additional stories in the Autumn universe that do not feature in the four, soon to be five, core novels, and then given them away for free on his website as a thank you to loyal readers) and has served up four more tales from the Zombie War in his new short story collection, Closure, Limited.

Though a very slim volume, containing just four stories, there is one in particular, The Extinction Parade, that is worth the price of admission alone. I’m wary of spoiling anything for potential readers, and even the title of this entry may be giving too much away, but the idea behind this story (the ‘twist’ of which is actually given away very early on in the piece) is a well executed examination of how human beings are not the only species that the zombie virus has had a devasting impact on, and delivers an emotional kick that resonates long after the reader finishes the story.

The real genius of this story, though, is that because World War Z is written in such a way that you find yourself accepting without question that the dead actually can/did come back to life, the fact that this short tale is set in the same universe means that you have to also accept certain other facts and realities as presented in this story

I’m looking forward to whatever Max Brooks comes up with next, though I have a feeling that in World War Z he may have already written his masterpiece, but for the time being Closure Limited is a welcome return to the War.

Closure, Limited by Max Brooks

Twitt
Posted in Autumn, Books, David Moody, Horror, Max Brooks, Recommended, Reviews, World War Z | Leave a comment