Less Than Pulp, Issue 39

…and we're back.

I finished my story before my deadline, but the deadline was extended anyway. Not that I'm complaining! Now I can take some extra time to get the story into even better shape. I still can't say much, but to tease you a bit, I'll reveal its title: I'm calling it “Dracula and the Devil Walk into a Bar.”

I'm a big fan of classic horror characters, and this probably won't be my only time playing with similar, public domain monsters. They really have become modern day demigods with their own mythos ripe for exploitation and reinterpretation.

My first exposure to Dracula was in the 1931 Bela Lugosi movie put out by Universal. I reckon a lot of people came by him the same way. That flick, and the whole lot of Universal monster movies, were probably my first brushes with the concept of aesthetics. Was your movie in black-and-white? Did it have crumbling Gothic structures and desolate, Old-World landscapes? Were there monsters? If your movie could answer yes to those questions, then it checked all of my boxes. Story was secondary—though these movies were pretty well-written—I wanted style. And that’s not to say I wanted (or want) style and no substance. It takes a style of considerable substance to transport a viewer from the comfort of their living room into the textured space of your film (or book or song, etc.). A distinct and memorable style is why I’ll sometimes give a pass to a piece with clunky pacing or stock characters.

This mindset may have started with Dracula (1931).

I stumbled my way through the novel when I was nine or ten. Most of it went over my head, understandably, but I picked up on a good deal of the surface text. Guy goes to meet with vampire; vampire goes to England and targets various women; guy and other guys kill the vampire. The version of the novel I had was the tie-in edition for the Frances Ford Coppola movie that came out in the early 1990s. It had the movie poster as a cover.

I wasn’t allowed to see that movie until later when it was shown on network television with all the naughty bits censored, but I did get to see a few of the Christopher Lee vehicles and the 1979 version. Mom was adamant that I see the Lee films—I don’t think she remembered how sexual they were. Even as a youngster, I knew I was watching something grown-up. While none of those movies had any nudity that I can remember, I do recall seeing a lot of cleavage, and those bites on the neck sure looked a lot like kisses to my young eyes.

At some point, my parents bought me this crazy cool book that was all about vampires in movies. It had write-ups of Nosferatu, every Dracula adaptation up that point, and a few other movies, as well as posters and stills. I remember wanting to see every movie mentioned in that book. Had I made an actual list or kept the book, I’m sure I would learn that I still haven’t seen half of them. A lot of them weren’t so easy to find back then, and as I got older, other interests replaced fanged fiends of the night. When I did encounter vampires in later works, be they Anne Rice’s Louis and Lestat, the crew of wandering bloodsuckers from Near Dark, or the vampire next door from Fright Night, a lot of the older works seemed tame and less interesting.

I took another crack at reading Dracula this past summer while traveling to Pennsylvania. I still need to finish it. Maybe I will pick it back up when I'm on the road again. It's a good vacation book. And isn’t that interesting? “Dracula and the Devil Walk into a Bar” is a road trip horror story.

I've always enjoyed vampires, especially seeing creators put their own spins on the mythic figures. Some other vampires I've enjoyed were the heavily folkloric creatures from Jonathan Maberry's Pine Deep trilogy, the movie Stakeland, Judith Sonnet’s Blood Suck, the Subspecies movies from Full Moon Features, and L.A. Banks’ Vampire Huntress Legend series of books.

Would you live forever if it meant drinking blood? Lots of vampire stories explore this question. Some also ask whether one would even want to live forever. My story is, admittedly, not that deep, and that's okay. Sometimes, it's good to just have fun.

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It has been a few wild weeks. Two weeks ago, Jean and our oldest were in Jamaica while I hung at home with our youngest. They got back on the weekend, but then she had to go to Seattle for work, so I had to parent solo a second week in a row. Thankfully, my dad was here to help. I also had friends in the neighborhood willing to take my oldest to school in the morning so I wouldn’t have to drag the two-year-old out of her crib. Never wake a sleeping baby—I’m pretty sure that’s a universal truth. If it’s not in every book of the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Mahabharata, and every other sacred text ever committed to print, carved into tablets, or passed down through oral tradition, it absolutely should be! Because of my kind neighbors, I wasn’t forced to break this sacred commandment. All is well with my soul.

While he was here, Dad had a series of epic pillow fights with my oldest, but more importantly, he wound up showing the kiddo how to ride a bike. I know how to ride a bike and have attempted to pass down this knowledge to my son, but even with training wheels, we couldn’t seem to make it work. Leave it to my dad to make the lesson finally stick. My son rode his bike today (Sunday) at the park without any help, save for his training wheels, which I’m sure he’ll shed eventually. Dad also got to spend some time with the youngest. Mostly, he got up with her in the morning so I could catch a few extra winks, but he also got to play and read with her too.

Having him around makes me want to get stuff done. In addition to freelancing (Q3 is here!), I did a decent amount of writing, edited the podcast, and took no naps in the afternoon. He also helped me fix our patio door, which was sagging and scraping against the floor but now gives us no trouble. He’s gone back to California now, but hopefully, I can keep the momentum going.

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I’m currently reading Bryan Smith’s Dead End House on Kindle, listening to Edward Lee’s Creekers on Audible, and slowly but surely reading Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear (which I got from my local library, along with Dead on the Bones by Joe R. Lansdale).

So far, Dead End House is classic Bryan Smith. It’s his newest release, and it might be his most fun to date. And that’s saying something! His work almost always gives me a feeling similar to how I felt while sitting in my room alone as a teenager and watching 80s horror movies on DVD. The icing on the cake, for me, is that his books tend to take things farther than a lot of those movies did in terms of graphic content. In a lot of ways, they’re how I envisioned films like Friday the 13th and Fright Night before I actually sat down to watch them. He’s a super fun writer, and I saw on Facebook that Dead End House is his fortieth book. Wild! That leaves a lot to choose from if you haven’t read him yet.

Creekers is one of those seminal splatterpunk titles that I missed in my initial explorations of the subgenre. I can see why it’s so well-regarded. I’m about halfway through the audiobook. I’ve laughed, cringed, and sometimes simply nodded at the craftsmanship on display. Ed Lee is not for everyone. The depravity in his work and the sheer skill with which it’s depicted has yet to be outdone. It’s big on ick, but if you don’t mind getting exposed to that sort of thing, you’ll simply find excellent writing.

I’m making my way through Clan a little at a time. It’s a brick, and I’ll have to check it out from the library more than once if I aim to finish it, but it’s nice reading something so outside my usual fare.

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In this week’s episode of Make Your Own Damn Podcast, Jeff and I sat down to talk about one of the most creative movies in recent years. Dave Made a Maze examines creativity itself while crafting something truly unique. Plus, it's got a wrestler in it, so I got to do a fun sidebar on Lucha Underground. We're switching to a biweekly recording schedule for the foreseeable future, but we still plan to post weekly content of some kind. You can hear our episode on Dave Made a Maze right here.

I’m also working on the first essay for our Patreon. That should be up later this month. In the meantime, you can check out bonus episodes on there for just a buck a month.

Lastly, thank you so much to everyone who reads this newsletter every week. I know we all have things going on, so it’s humbling that anyone would take time out of their day to read something I wrote. If you want to support this newsletter beyond simply reading it, you can perform the Like-Share-Subscribe ritual, which has become like the modern equivalent of saying “abracadabra,” meaning if you do it, I’ll pull a rabbit out of a hat, and hopefully, that rabbit will grant me three wishes. You can also pick up one of my books. My most recent is Snow Angels, which is bringing in some nice reviews already.

Until next time, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.