I am pleased to announce that the anthology All That Weird Jazz, published by the fine guys at Pro Se Productions, is available in both paperback and ebook, and it’s a collection of hits, featuring nine stories by Kimberly Richardson, MA Monnin, Ernest Russell, EW Farnsworth, James Hopwood, McCallum J. Morgan, Mark Barnard, and Sharae Allen. And one by me.
As a long time fan of jazz music, it was a pleasure and a privilege being part of this team, and I hope you guys will enjoy this fine selection of weird fiction.
According to an old saying among Chinese grave robbers, “The living light the candle and the ghosts blow it out”. That’s my story and I’m sticking it… or rather, that’s Chinese fantasy author Zhang Muye’s story, and by sticking to it, his first novel in the Candle in the Tomb series got six million online readers, and when it later was printed, it sold half a million copies. More volumes followed, then an online videogame, and it was quite obvious that the movie people would come along soon afterwards. Films were made, and then TV adaptations.
And last night, as I was once again dealing with my insomnia, I went through the first five episodes of 2016 the web-series that was based on Zhang Muye’s novels. The 35-minutes episodes can be found on Youtube, with handy English subtitles.
I mentioned Brotherhood of the Wolf in yesterday’s post, and then realized that apparently I never wrote about that movie, that I saw in 2001 in a movie theatre in Turin together with my brother. We went to the first show in the afternoon, packing chips and some lemonade, and we had a lot of fun. Twenty years on, a director’s cut has been published, and so I went and checked it out again. So, let’s see what this is all about.
And for starters, a bit of history – between 1764 and 1767, in the province of Gévaudan (South-Central France) an animal later identified as a wolf, or a dog, or a wolf-dog hybrid, went on a rampage, attacking an estimate (based on a 1987 study) 210 people, killing 113 and injuring 49 more. Based on the documents, 98 of the victims were partly eaten. Envoys from the King of France killed a wolf in 1765, and the case was considered closed – but the killings actually kept happening for two more years. Many considered the Beast to be some kind of werewolf, and indeed some pointed out in the chronicles of the time that the killings stopped after the Beast was shot with silver bullets. The movie is thus based on a true story, and gets most of its historical references right, and offers an alternative interpretation of the historical events.
In these confused times, a lot of friends of mine have found a way to relieve part of the pressure by, as they say, “exorcising” the fear of the pandemic by a steady diet of post-apocalyptic fiction – zombie movies, TV series about viruses and the collapse of civilization, novels and comics about crumbling cities and lone survivors. And it’s all good and fine, if that works for them – it just does not work for me. And I am keeping myself up with old pulp adventures, sword & sorcery and space operas, and classic swashbucklers.
And last night I was checking out what’s new on DriveThruRPGs and I found a massive discount on a game I know and I’ve wanted to play forever. A complete game for 5 bucks? A game with musketeers fighting werewolves on its cover? Come on, are you kidding me?
Apparently, Coronavirus took away from us Juan Giménez, of Metabarons and Metal Hurlant fame. Another small piece of my youth that slips away. He will be missed.
Sometimes it’s good to have friends in Australia – here I am, sitting in the middle of nowhere while my country and much of the rest of the world is in lockdown, and yet I was able to pass an evening with the always delectable Hon. Phryne Fisher. And it was – interesting.
For the uninitiated, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears is the first feature film based on the mystery novels by Kerry Greenwood and the TV series that was made based on Underwood characters. The general premise: the last survivor of an aristocratic British family mostly killed off in the Great War, Australia-born adventuress Phryne Fisher becomes extravagantly wealthy and decides to set up a detective agency in Melbourne. What comes afterwards is simply delightful.
I have talked in the past about how, to Italian kids of my generation, Arsène Lupin, the character created at the turn of the last century by Maurice Leblanc, was a timely and much welcome introduction to tongue-in-cheek adventure and good-natured rule-breaking, jazz, sophistication and beautiful women, thanks to a wonderful TV series featuring the excellent Georges Descrières in the role of the gentleman thief. Indeed, Descrières as Lupin and Patrick Macnee as John Steed have a lot to answer about how I turned out as a person.
Later came the Lupin books, often in strange translations and abridged editions to make them suitable for young readers, and later still the movies, but everything started with the TV series. Re-watched today, the series is slow-paced and suffers from an almost theatrical construction of certain scenes, and yet the acting, the production values and the locations (episodes were shot all over Europe) are worth alone the price of admission.
Karavansara 