The Return of the Cover Dilemma

 Since people weren't necessarily impressed with the cover concept that I had come up with for the forthcoming THEY CAME FROM BEYOND PULP,  I decided to give it a total overhaul to see if I could make it work better for people. The result is on the right and I actually prefer the original that I had, so I don't think that I'll be using this one.

Since I wasn't happy with the one that I had, I went back to the drawing board and came up with the new concept that you can see below. Since the stories in the collection are meant to be based around murder and crime and punishment and various dark-themed things like that, the blood motif has to stay and I really liked the bright yellow background for making a bold statement. It certainly catches the attention.

The question is whether it does enough to make people want to read the blurb and decide whether or not they want to read the book. That is, after all the main purpose of the cover.

The stories are finished, the beta readers are working on cleaning up the text of all the errors that I failed to spot and hopefully I'll be able to release it soon.

If I can get the cover right.

There are times when not being able to afford to hire people to do this stuff is a real pain.

Anyway, the images are here. Give me some hints on whether it's a complete failure on my Goodreads thread.

The good news is that I have so many story ideas rattling around inside my head that I don't think I'll be running out of projects any time soon. Of course, they'll need covers too!

JOSS WHEDON - Geek King Of The Universe by Amy Pascale

 

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Joss Whedon and will watch anything that he is involved in (even if that is AGENTS OF SHIELD), but before you start worrying, this is not another long-winded speech about my love for the Geek King of the Universe that is Joss Whedon. Someone else has already got there.

Sort of.

For those who don't know Joss Whedon is a writer of TV shows, films and comic books. Up until recently, his work was known to a smallish audience who made up for their lack of huge numbers with passion.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL and FIREFLY are considered (by their fans at least) as some of the finest science fiction and fantasy shows ever put on television. They never broke into the mainstream, though, and DOLLHOUSE barely made a dent on the popular culture.

Marvel's AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, however, really put the man on the map by becoming one of the biggest moneymaking movies of all time. Taking time off to relax from making that blockbuster, he made a film version of Shakespeare's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING in his house!

As a lover of all the above shows/films it was no hardship to read this biography. Amy Pascale's chronological retelling is carried out in a clean and clear style that never puts the writing ahead of the story that it is telling. The author certainly knows her subject, with input from Whedon's family, friends and co-workers on almost all subjects, whether it is his work, his Shakespeare readings with friends, his support of the writers' union or his rocky relationships with various TV companies and movie producers. Whilst his private life is kept private (he's married, he has children, that's about all you're getting), his professional life is laid bare and whilst his early life might not raise too much interest, the moment that we get into the stuff we really want to know about, the book becomes unputdownable.

If there is a negative to be found then it is that a book about a man who is described by almost everyone as the wittiest man they have ever met could have done with a bit more itself.

If you're interested in Joss Whedon's work, then this biography gives a great insight into his history and his methods.

It's available now.

THE ZOMBIE FILM from White Zombie to World War Z by Alain Silver & James Ursini

Now that the whole sparkly-vampires-make-good-boyfriends farrago is come to an end and the werewolves-also-make good-boyfriends phase never managed to get off the ground, attention has turned to the zombie as the paranormal boogeyman of choice. Zombies have often featured in low-budget movies, but now the budgets aren't always so low and screens both large and small are awash with the shambling dead.

To cover this increasingly huge genre of work comes this large format book that starts with the generally accepted first zombie movie, White Zombie (having already covered the myth and written words history of the undead) and takes the reader through all the various iterations of the zombie whether it be George A Romero's shambling metaphors for modern society, Stephen King's reanimated pets in a sematary, raging speedsters appearing 28 Days Later or (oh the horror, the horror) zombie strippers.

The early parts of the book are the more interesting as the formative years are covered with appearances by masters of horror Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in films that set the earlier, voodoo-linked stories. That moves on nicely into the George A Romero period of increasing gore and social commentary. When it moves into the more modern era, it becomes less sure of itself, often becoming overwhelmed by the sheer amount of output that there is to cover and becoming often a list of films and what happens in them rather than analysis into the thematic and historical contexts. Of course, that might just be because there are no themes being examined any longer. The writing style is generally clean and accessible and entertaining, certainly in the book's earlier sections.

It is surprising, however, that THE WALKING DEAD television series gets so little coverage, considering how influential it has been in the genre.

There is a huge filmography at the end so that you can make sure that you have caught up with all of the more obscure offerings that the genre has and the book also has interviews with zombie filmmakers and contributors that vary from the interesting to the intrusive. For sheer coverage, the book also cannot be faulted as it covers the most obvious entries in the genre to some of the less obvious. It's concentration on the contribution made by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend is refreshingly insightful.

The content of the written words might be variable, but there is no faulting the visuals. The books comes stuffed full of lobby cards, stills and images of corpses in various stages of decay. As you can see from the cover image, this is probably not a book to leave where your four year old can get their hands on it and give themselves nightmares.

THE ZOMBIE FILM from White Zombie to World War Z might not be the ultimate guide to the zombie genre, but it will certainly fill the hole whilst we wait for that that one to come along.

Cover for short story collection

Of late, inspiration has been coming to me in the shape of short stories. Despite the fact that my previous collection of short stories (Sharing A Fence With The Twilight Zone) is about the least popular of everything that I've put out there, I go where the inspiration takes me.

These stories, though, are not made of the same humour for which I am best known (where I am known at all). These have a tendency to darker visions, resolutely earthbound and rooted in more recognisable landscapes. Having said that, many of them do have a supernatural edge to them.

Anyway, pulpy stories deserve, call out for even, a pulpy cover and this is the one that I've come up with. It echoes the old battered book cover motif I used for Penny Kilkenny Saves The Day, but I hope conveys the fun that I've had writing the stories so far.

There aren't enough of those to justify the whole book just yet, but if they keep coming with the regularity that they have been then it won't be too long.

STEPHEN KING FILMS FAQ by Scott Von Doviak

Stephen King is one of the great storytellers of our age, hell of any age if it comes to that. It is therefore a strange thing that movie and TV adaptations of his books more often than not fall well short of, well, not sucking.

This book is a comprehensive look at all things screen when it comes to taking the printed words and, more often than not, ignoring the hell out of them. Every production you can think of (and a whole bunch you couldn't and will wish you hadn't found out about) can be found inside the covers here.

First of all, let's deal with the title. STEPHEN KING FILMS FAQ suggests a certain format, but it's not like that at all. There are no list of questions being answered, frequently asked or otherwise. And then there is the matter of the subtitle 'All that's left to know about the king of horror on film'. Well, that forgets about the whole chunks devoted to videotape productions and I'm curious to know what it means by 'all that's left to know'. All that's left to know after what?

Let's deal with the good stuff first. Scott Van Doviak knows his Stephen King adaptations. What it may lack in surgical detail it makes up for in the sheer breadth of its scope. Whilst books could be written (and have been) about the troubled making of Kubrick's THE SHINING, it gets a single chapter before we head on to the next one. There is so much ground to cover that we don't get to dig too deeply at any point.

Von Doviak's tone is light and pleasant and the book itself is a very easy read, almost a page turner. It's very easy to settle down to a quick sample and find that three or four chapters have gone past. The layout is clear, going through celluloid examples chronologically before then moving onto the televisual delights on offer. It starts to run out of steam toward the end, however, but that's because we're on to the odds and sods such as THE SIMPSONS pastiches and films inspired by Stephen King.

Curiously, Von Doviak doesn't really seem to like many of the films and shows on offer. He certainly spends more time waxing rhapsodic about what's wrong with each of them than what's great. Then again, we all do that.

Despite the fact that it's 'all that's left to know', I doubt that there is that much in there that the King devotee didn't already know. The more obscure outings might be useful for the King completist, however. For the person just getting into the visualisation of Stephen King's books, however, there is a wealth of stuff to choose from. Is THE STAND miniseries as good as the book? How did THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION move from a short story to a long masterpiece? Is the Stephen King scripted THE SHINING better than the Kubrick version?

It's all here.

As someone who's liked and hated his fair share of King's books and films, but is far from being an expert, I found this an enjoyable, easy read, though I was possibly not all that more well-informed at the end of it.

SPENSER GOES NORTH is released on Amazon Kindle

Yes, the last post showed two covers that were hugely different from this one, but the other concepts just didn't work out and so here is the latest book with an entirely different set of clothes, finally set loose on an unsuspecting world.

Or Amazon Kindle at least.

The obligatory blurb goes like this:

'Wardington-Smythe is Britain's greatest hero; gentleman adventurer, master marksman, expert fencer and all-round doer of derring. He is exactly the kind of man you want on the job when the Imperial Commonwealth faces its greatest peril.

It's a shame that he's fictional.

The task of saving the Commonwealth falls instead to Wardington-Smyth's creator, a novelist for whom adventure is changing his supplier of bacon.

Aided only by a street urchin of dubious morality, Spenser Warwick must solve the mystery of scented letters, vanishing airships and abducted ladies whilst not getting drugged in public conveniences. At least not again.

Adventure is certainly not how he imagined it.'


It's a standalone novel, but then again so was The Man From U.N.D.EA.D. and look what happened there.

UK link:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spenser-Goes-North-Darren-Humphries-ebook/dp/B00K3KH7YY/ref=cm_cmu_up_thanks_hdr
US link:  http://www.amazon.com/Spenser-Goes-North-Darren-Humphries-ebook/dp/B00K3KH7YY/

SPENSER GOES NORTH cover design

SPENSER GOES NORTH is the new book that should be coming out on a kindle near you in the next couple of months. There are just some last editing, formatting and design decisions to take into consideration. Like the cover. Here are the two concepts that I have at the moment. I'm not exactly sure which of them I like the most at the moment, so please leave a comment here or on my goodreads thread . Which do you like best, or maybe you don't like either.