Jason Henderson, Writer Guy

Remembering Sylvia Faust

2012-01-23T09:14:00.002-06:00

Oh. My. Gosh.
Over at Comics Bulletin, Daniel Elkin spends a whole column reminiscing about Sylvia Faust, the "magical romantic comedy" I wrote and Greg Scott drew for Image Comics. It was about a magic-using girl who joins the staff of a crazy 24-hour movie house patterned after a certain indy theater in Austin.

After issue two, I'm sure I'll want to introduce this comic to my parents. Maybe after issue three we'll talk about moving in together. After issue four I'll find myself lingering in front of jewelry store windows eying rings I can't possibly afford. After issue five . . . Oh . . .With these long range romantic plans dancing in my head, I set upon myself the task of trying to track down every issue I could find ofSylvia Faust.To my initial horror, I found out that Sylvia Faust was only planned to be a four-issue mini-series through Image. To further rip my heart out, though, only two issues came out! Nobody on the internet seems to know what happened to the series. It's like the last two issues were kidnapped by some mysterious malevolent but maladroit mustachioed menace and taken to some terrible titanic tower in an alternate alien dimension. Sylvia Faust is in peril! A hero must be summoned to take on the quest of saving it and journey through terrible trials and tribulations! Who will rise to the occasion?

We did two issues, and then schedules got the best of the team and we never completed the series. This has always made me sad. Check out Daniel's column if you'd like a taste of the "practical magic" world of Sylvia Faust.

Alternate & Deleted Scenes from Alex Van Helsing

2012-01-20T14:20:00.001-06:00

Here's a little experiment in e-distribution and I'm not sure I've ever seen a writer do this before. I've just uploaded a collection of "extras" for the first two Alex Van Helsing books, sort of the kind of thing you'd find on an Alex Van Helsing "Director's Cut" DVD. I've made it a 99 cent e-book.

I put this little collection together because often when I speak at schools, I mention to students who have read the Alex Van Helsing books (the first two, anyway; Book 3: The Triumph of Death won’t be out until Summer 2012) just how much gets changed in the writing.

So here for fans who have read the first book (or even the first two!) is a collection of deleted and alternate scenes. This isn’t a complete collection—really, books genuinely aren’t written but re-written—but it’s a nice sampler of scenes that almost made it, and in many cases would have made for a different book.

What you’ll see here are subplots, alternate deaths, and grotty details that didn’t make it to the end. Plus some whiteboard work with Alex’s “Scooby Gang” that was cut for time.

I hope you enjoy it!

So piracy doesn't matter, right? Prove it.

2012-01-19T18:47:00.000-06:00

Matthew Yglesias' article at Slate-- about how even a good anti-piracy bill would be fruitless because piracy doesn't matter-- compels me to re-run this piece:

Piracy pays for itself. Isn't that the argument? So you could prove it, right? Over at Stacey Jay's blog, I joined a conversation a week or so ago about e-book piracy. Pretty soon the argument came down to two sides:

Those who thought pirated e-books hurt the sales of the author's books and cut down revenue
Those who predicted that pirated e-books would actually act as advertisements and would lead to a revenue lift. (Also known as "can I show you this musing from Neil Gaiman again?") It doesn't matter to these people, by the way, whether I agree. They want free books without going to a library or borrowing one, but they're compelled for some reason to want me to feel better about it.

This second point is a popular point; the people who make it are arguing that piracy is like libraries; where a person gets a taste for an author and then will buy later. My position was that libraries work that way because they're still very limited; with a pirated book, you can have a copy and so can everyone else. I might be incentivized to read more of the author, but there's no incentive to go buy a book.
One poster on the blog raised the phenomenon of suggested donations, but a suggested donation system is a scenario where the author makes the book free and asks for a donation. That's a floating discount, not piracy.

All of which brings me to this: prove it. I'm a businessman, so I'm easy to talk to about these things. Show me a business case. The poster at Stacey Jay's blog answered this request with:
OK GO, Family Guy, Justin Bieber, South Park. Schmoyo (the autotune the news guys) I could cherry pick examples of people made wealthy and famous by internet file sharing all day, but then so could someone arguing the counterpoint. There are plenty of examples of both, so to say that all piracy is bad and all piracy is done with rosy hearted intentions is intellectually disingenuous.

Are there plenty? All of that paragraph is interesting but it's anecdotal, and also it's not about books. Here's what I want-- pick a case of e-book piracy and send me a spreadsheet that shows that the piracy grew revenue. Pick something major and pirated, like Mockingjay, but to do this you're going to need real numbers. I want to see a success in the field. Since piracy has been going on for awhile, the example showing the value of piracy should be out there. Stacey Jay says that low sales due to piracy actually killed a book for her, so I guess that's not the example we're looking for. To win this, you need a case where piracy helps. Pro-piracy proponents insist that this will be readily available.

Key to the business case will, I suppose, be the percentage of readers downloading a pirated copy and deciding to purchase a book. What would that percentage be that would purchase the actual downloaded pirated book? Probably less than 1%, but we might also have a line for the percentage who downloaded a pirated copy and then decided to purchase another book by the same author. What percentage would that be? I'm guessing-- rather liberally-- maybe as high as 1.5%, but bring me the proof to show me different. In theory, if 1.5% of 100,000 people who stole a book buy a second book because of this for $10, that's $15K for the vendor, which (assuming she has two books with a total costs of $150K, a completely made-up number intended to bring in salaries, etc.) means a negative NPV for our piracy program so far. Your piracy program so far is $135K in the hole, so if it were up to me, I'd cancel the piracy initiative and go back to selling books without the benefit of piracy.

But wait, you say. $150K as a cost for two books was way too expensive. You should be able to publish a book online for practically free. Okay, make it free. So now I spent nothing and made 15K, but I can do better in the current environment where I have a time-limited government-issued monopoly on my work. At 15K, I go back to slinging hash, and the only people who can afford to create work will be the very wealthy. So long, democratization of thought.

But if my data is wrong, bring me the right data. The way people talk this scenario up, there should be plenty of data showing the value of promoting piracy. Because this might sound anecdotal and swell to you, but I actually pay bills through the benefit of copyright. It works for me. It's a system that works well, that allowed Stephen King to end his own poverty by selling Carrie.

If someone can show me a two-year business case with a positive net present value for piracy, I'll send them an Alex Van Helsing ARC (reader copy.) It won't even be pirated.

Busy working on proposals...

2012-01-19T13:13:00.001-06:00

...but I will be back soon!

The Terminator (1984): The CES 2012 Episode of the Castle Dracula Podcast

2012-01-06T07:17:00.001-06:00

In just a few days I'll be attending CES 2012, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, so our in honor of consumer tech at its finest the Castle Dracula Podcast discusses THE TERMINATOR (1984.)

Along the way we discuss whether Arnold could have made a good Mr. Freeze, and all sorts of time paradoxes, such as why in the world a man would be super-enthused to keep giving his friend a picture of his mom-- that will mean his death!

If you haven't seen the original in a long time, this is a fun episode to listen to.

The Terminator: a cyborg assassin played by future California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who goes back in time from the year 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, played by Linda Hamilton. Michael Biehn plays Kyle Reese, a soldier from the future sent back in time to protect Sarah.

Hear the new episode of the Castle Dracula Podcast:

The Hammer Vault-- a MUST for Hammer fans

2012-01-02T08:49:00.001-06:00

I just got my hands on The Hammer Vault. But first I have to ask:
Are you a Hammer fan? The funny thing is I find that generally if you understand the question, the answer is yes. Every week or so I post something about Hammer horror, and responses are divided between people saying I love Hammer! and What is Hammer?
Here's what I wrote in another blog entry:

In Horror, there's one world that holds together like that: a landscape slightly European and slightly British, slightly historical and modern, adaptable to many plots and characters and yet always recognizable. In Horror, there is the Hammerscape.
What is the Hammerscape? You have to see it to truly get it, but it is a cohesive horror universe reflected in curiously stagy and yet convincing sets, oddly lurid and sumptuous and yet stunningly classy colors (Ah, burgundy! Burgundy everywhere!), and not a single element that doesn't fit into the Hammer Ideal.
...
What made these films special? The conventional article on Hammer will suggest that the trick was to make Dracula and Frankenstein more "modern." They used color, after all. They explored sexual themes. All of this is true; it's a first-glance thesis that misses a lot. Hammer was not more "modern" than Universal- in fact, Hammer was quite the opposite. Hammer used modern tools to throw its films body and soul into a crushing and complicated love affair with antiquity. Universal's Frankenstein and Dracula came from a time when science had conquered the world and could conquer monsters, too. Hammer came from a time when we'd grown out of that ideal and found ourselves fearing the unseen once again.

So what am I going on about Hammer about this week? Oh, something outstanding: Marcus Hearn's THE HAMMER VAULT, a new book that collects all sorts of items-- lobby cards, memos, screenplay pages, magazine covers, publicity guidebooks, newspaper articles, and more-- related to every Hammer movie release from 1954's Quatermass Xperiment to next year's new Hammer release The Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe.

This is a very cool book for any horror fan because the articles and copy provide new information, covering the strategies for each of the films, internal politics and squabbles between creatives and censorship boards, and more. It's definitely a book I'll be pulling down to flip through over and over again.

Highly recommended for all Gothic horror fans and Hammer fans.

(Review copy received from Titan Books.)

Sherlock Holmes on Screen-- a New Guide to the Film History of Our Favorite Detective

2011-12-30T10:54:00.001-06:00

I love Sherlock Holmes, but I'm not a Sherlock Holmes completist in the way that I am of, say, James Bond or Dracula. (And there's a geek continuum: I'm constantly reminded that there are many fans of those that are far to the left and right of me.) I do have a favorite Holmes-- Ian Richardson, largely because his BBC films were the ones I grew up on, whereas I largely missed the Jeremy Brett version that began the following year. The great thing about true geeks is we have geeky opinions; I remember a megafan of the Doors who could talk for days about what was wrong with the Oliver Stone movie, just as I could about Coppola's Dracula. Even when we're doing it we see the conundrum: we are spending more time on these works than the people who love them do. Sherlock Holmes has such fans.

So I love, love, love books like SHERLOCK HOLMES ON SCREEN, a guide to Sherlock Holmes adaptations of TV and movies written by Alan Barnes, who is a prize geek, opinionated and fussy and possessing a kind of love for even those works he hates. From the first Sherlock Holmes adaptation (1900's one-minute silent Sherlock Holmes Baffled) to the current dueling detectives of the BBC series Sherlock and the Guy Ritchie movie series, and everything in between.
You can spend hours reading this book. I had no idea that Peter Cushing starred as Sherlock Holmes on TV in the sixties, for instance. You can start to line up your own Sherlock viewing party.
I totally recommend Sherlock Holmes on Screen.

(Note-- I received this book for review from the great folks at Titan Books. Thanks fellas!)

Word Processing: The Barbarian Savior!

2011-12-29T11:45:00.000-06:00

The Slate Culture Gabfest this week spends some time talking about the history of writing on word processors (like Word, or like the blogger web tool I'm typing in right now), and the whole conversation (with helpful links on the Slate page) is well worth checking out.
What really captured my imagination was the lengthy discussion the podcast members had on the actual process of writing. How did anyone ever write a whole book longhand? Does writing with a word processor help you cut corners?

The Brother WP-75, which I drove carts. pushed wheelchairs and wrangled
unaccompanied minors all summer to buy.

I've straddled the line. In early high school I wrote papers and stories longhand. When I was in high school I had a home computer to write papers on, and by the time I got to college I had actually worked all summer to save up for a Brother WP 75 word processor, which for the young was basically a printer with a keyboard and a single piece of software for writing documents. It was essentially a smart typewriter. I wrote my first book on a Mac, and my next several books on PCs using Word Perfect.
At the time there was a lot of talk about what word processing would do to writing. A lot of this talk came in the form of sour admonishments from other writers, so you heard all the same hand-wringing, but the biggest fear was this:
Writing on a word processor would make writers lazy, because a good writer types his pages, and then re-types them from the top, changing them along the way. Over and over again. And we like it. Word processing seduces you into sticking with something close to your first draft because it already looks pretty. There's a little bit of truth to this-- a first draft of anything really does look decent even if it reads terribly-- but it turns out for most of us that in fact we toss entire paragraphs all the time. Basically if you're a conscientious editor you'll be one whether you're typing, handwriting or using a computer.
And yet, and yet: I remember once I had to re-type about 40,000 words of a book I'd printed but could not retrieve the data from, and I really did enjoy re-drafting the sentences from the top as I went. But I wouldn't do it on purpose.
There was another fear, more obliquely spoken: that using a word processor, because it produced what to the naked eye appeared to be an acceptable manuscript, would allow too many unqualified people into the field of writing.
To this: first, f*** off, snobs. But second, reality tells us differently anyway; editors are pretty good at tossing bad writing after reading a single page. Heck, they toss almost all writing that way.
Check out the Slate Podcast and links!

RARE EXPORTS, A CHRISTMAS TALE episode

2011-12-29T08:55:00.001-06:00

Our Holiday celebration continues with a brand new Castle Dracula Podcast: a discussion of RARE EXPORTS, A CHRISTMAS TALE.

I LOVED this movie.

(2010) Unusual Christmas story set in the frozen beauty of Finland, where local reindeer herders race against the clock to capture an ancient evil: Santa Claus. Single father Rauno (Jorma Tommila) and his young son, Pietari (Onni Tommila), are caught up in the chaos as international scientists dig for artifacts. What they find endangers the entire village.

Hear the new episode of the Castle Dracula Podcast:

Flesh and Blood (Monsterverse) by Bob Tinnell and Neil Vokes review

2011-12-19T14:53:00.000-06:00

In 2004, VAN HELSING absolutely broke my heart. (You can hear a podcast review of that one from the Castle Dracula Podcast here.) Here was a big-budget Universal release of a monster mash the likes of which hadn't been seen since the 40s: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, all combatted by Van Helsing, the great vampire hunter of Dracula. The cast was the kind of thing that seemed to guarantee big box office, with Hugh Jackman-- freaking Wolverine-- and Kate Beckinsale in the leads. And... no. Word got out fast that the movie managed to be both over-complicated and simplistic, over-long and dull.

And worst of all, from my perspective: the movie had no heart. It had no idea why it was there. A story's got to have a reason to exist for people to want to see it. Star Trek is about wonder. Mission Impossible is about overcoming long odds with ridiculously detailed planning and teamwork. What was Van Helsing about? Not being scared, surely. So... wonder? What? To be able to answer the querstion, you'd have to have some awareness of the source material and be able to tell someone what made you fall in love with it and want to write about it. Another way to ask a creator "What is it about?" is: "Why did you want to write this?"

FLESH AND BLOOD is a new graphic novel (actually part 1 in a series) from writer Robert Tinnel and artist Neil Vokes that does what Van Helsing should have done: it shares its creator's love for an alternate world where Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man all co-exist. It's a world they're in love with so much that every page is crammed with details that fans will recognize. Of course, where VAN HELSING was a missed opportunity for its creators to share the wonder of Universal Horror, FLESH AND BLOOD shares the wonder of a different universe, just through the veil from Universal: Hammer Horror.

If there were a perfect Hammer Movie that captured the look, feel, the horror and urgent eroticism of the strange universe that tied all the Hammer gothic horrors together, FLESH AND BLOOD may be as close to it as you will ever see.

The time is the mid-nineteenth century, when the seductive, deadly vampire named Carmilla has been put to death by a team of vampire hunters led by General Spiesldorf, who lost his daughter to Carmilla. The death of Carmilla sets off a chain reaction among humans and vampires alike. Carmilla's sister Ezebet goes to none other than Dracula, Lord of all Vampires, to solicit his aid in destroying the hunters. The hunters enlist the machiavellian Baron Frankenstein, here the spitting image of Peter Cushing, in developing an anti-vampire biological weapon. We meet a young Van Helsing, who like the young Lord Godalming in Dracula is the lover of a vampire, wounded to the quick and bound to learn the "rough work ahead" needed to rid the world of vampirism.

Bob Tinnell, the author, clearly knows his stuff-- he writes a sweeping story that's not only aware of his source material (Hammer movies) but even the source material of the source material. Vokes has a fantastic style for this work, too-- his art is expressive rather than realistic, so that vampires and men leap and swoop in perfect fantasy. His art perfectly with the world of Hammer, which was always a little dreamy and symbolic. I've been a huge Vokes fan ever since Blood of Dracula, a series I picked up in 1988, making him an even bigger Dracula geek than I am.

But even if you're not a Hammer Horror geek, any vampire and monster fan should read this. The Hammer world is just the palette Tinnell and Vokes use to paint a vivid dream of a world of monsters and men.

For those counting at home, by the way, Peter Cushing played General Spielsdorf, Van Helsing, and Baron Frankenstein in the movies. If this had been a movie made in the 70s, the trailer would have looked like a Blake Edwards comedy: "Starring... Peter Cushing! And Peter Cushing! And Peter Cushing!" In the comic, they do not look alike, which is just as well. Cushing's face is reserved for the Baron, and that seems fitting; it was Cushing's greatest role.

The book is brought to you by Kerry Gammill's Monsterverse line, which has been doing simply fantastic horror-geek work. Outstanding.

Gremlins: The Bad Chimney Episode

2011-12-14T09:08:00.003-06:00

It's Christmas time, and that means strange green creatures swarming your tiny American town. Yes! The Gremlins episode is up!

Listen in and welcome to the second episode of the Castle Dracula Podcast Holiday Season.

In this episode we discuss Gremlins:

Gremlins (1984)-- a film about a young man who receives a strange creature—called a Mogwai—as a pet, which then spawns other creatures who transform into small, destructive, evil monsters. It all takes place in a lovely little town at Christmastime, and it’s chock-full of references to classic movies and even folklore, as you might expect from a film produced (as it is) by Steven Spielberg.

Hear the new episode of the Castle Dracula Podcast:

Alex Van Helsing 3 Revisions and Style Sheet

2011-12-07T09:55:00.001-06:00

So this week I'm doing another rough of edits on Alex Van Helsing: The Triumph of Death, which comes out in Summer 2012.

At this point the kinds of changes I'm making are in a Word document with "tracked changes" from the editor and copyeditor. There are countless tiny choices and changes, and we leave comments for one another in the margins. Is this kind of vampire capitalized? Can we get a different word here to avoid an echo from a paragraph above, or was that on purpose?

One of my favorite aspects of this is a Style Sheet that HarperCollins provides, which is like a field guide to the world of Alex Van Helsing. Not only does it include a synopsis of each of the books, but it has a nifty Alex Van Helsing Glossary:

Neat, huh?

The Monster Squad: The Thumbs Up From Limbo Episode is up!

2011-12-05T10:40:00.001-06:00

Listen in and welcome to the Castle Dracula Podcast Holiday Season.

In this episode we discuss The Monster Squad:

Somewhere in the 80s, a ragtag band of lovable loser kids must save the world from the machinations of Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Wolf Man and the Creature. Definitely a movie for the young and monster fans who are young at heart.

Hear us:

or here:

New episode is up! Here us discuss Daughters of Darkness!

2011-11-23T08:29:00.001-06:00

Daughters of Darkness: The Sexy Belgian Vampire Episode is up! Listen in and Happy Thanksgiving from the Castle Dracula Podcast!

Hear us:

or here:

Join the Castle Dracula Podcast TUESDAY 10:30ET for DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971), the Sexy Belgian Vampire Episode

2011-11-18T10:25:00.001-06:00

Join the Castle Dracula Podcast TUESDAY 10:30ET for DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971), the Sexy Belgian Vampire EpisodeCastle Dracula Podcast Returns Tuesday Night (11/22) at 10:30ET with one of the sexiest vampire classics ever: DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS.
And this time I've put up a link so you can watch the movie beforehand.

Daughters of Darkness (1971) is one of the greats in vampire cinema-- a pair of newlyweds check into a gloomy seaside resort and ignite a friendship with a mysterious, elegant woman named after the "Blood Countess" Elisabeth Bathory, and her quiet secretary. But soon Elisabeth has designs on both of the newlyweds, and the young couple are drawn into a web of seduction, murder and immortality. It is all style and blood. Outstanding euro-horror, though definitely NSFW. That's why this won't be posted on the Alex Van Helsing page.

Here's what Camille Paglia said about Daughters of Darkness:

"A classy genre of vampire film follows a style I call psychological high Gothic. It begins in Coleridge's medieval Christabel and its descendants, Poe's Ligeia and James's The Turn of the Screw. A good example is Daughters of Darkness, starring Delphine Seyrig as an elegant lesbian vampire. High gothic is abstract and ceremonious. Evil has become world-weary, hierarchical glamour. There is no bestiality. The theme is eroticized western power, the burden of history."^[1]

We'll do our review and discussion LIVE on Tuesday night at 10:30ET -- join us if you like-- and after that you can hear it:

But this time we have a special treat-- you can watch the movie in advance at Google Video-- right here!

An Alex Van Helsing Christmas Promotion: Order Both Books and Get a TOP SECRET Preview of Book 3

2011-11-17T21:18:00.001-06:00

Just this week I got a letter from a student in Denver who published a review of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead in the Denver Post. I was so thankful (and impressed-- I wasn't publishing reviews in the paper in middle school!) that I sent her a bookmark. It was wrapped in scratch paper that just happened to be a page from an editing draft of Alex Van Helsing #3: The Triumph of Death. The student wrote back that she loved the sneak preview as much as the bookmark.

And that got me thinking.

It's Thanksgiving. It's Christmas shopping time. So here's my commitment to you.

Want to get the action-and-vampire-loving reader in your life a great set gift? Know a boy or girl who loves spies, motorcycles, helicopters, and monsters, not necessarily in that order?

Order them the first two books in the Alex Van Helsing series.

Anyone who orders or purchases Alex Van Helsing: Vampire Rising and Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead together between now and December 25, 2011 will get an email with an exclusive sneak peek at July 2012's Alex Van Helsing: The Triumph of Death.

I'll give you access to a whole scene, not available anywhere else until well into next year.

Here's how:
Who: You.
When: now until 12:01 December 26, 2012
What: Order or purchase, online or off, both Alex Van Helsing: Vampire Rising and Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead.

How:

Email me proof at jasonhendersontx@gmail.com .
Use the Subject Line: TOP SECRET PROMOTION
What's proof? Forward me a receipt (be sure to clip out anything you don't want to share) or if you have a paper receipt, just take a phone pic of it and send it.
I'll email you back your top secret preview of Book 3, Alex Van Helsing: The Triumph of Death. This is material that no one outside of my house and my publisher has seen. I leave it to YOU to guard it with your life.

If you or anyone you know would have their world turned upside down by our favorite motorcycle-riding, WaveRunner-stealing, vampire-killing high school superspy, then now is your chance for a completely rare gift.

Pass it on.

Listen to Castle Dracula Podcast now on Stitcher!

2011-11-10T15:05:00.001-06:00

This is very exciting news. I've actually been a fan of Stitcher, the best podcast-listening mobile app I've discovered yet, for some time. I've gotten to the point where I'm as likely to listen to my podcasts via Stitcher as often if not more often than I do via iTunes. So I totally recommend it. But now CASTLE DRACULA PODCAST has been added to Stitcher. You can listen to the latest episode plus past episodes.
Look for a new episode very soon!

How do you get Stitcher? Go to your mobile app store, or go to Stitcher and click the Download tool.

Our show is now on Stitcher!

Listen to us on your iPhone, Android Phone, BlackBerry and WebOS phones..
Stitcher is Smart Radio for Your phone. Find it in your app store or at stitcher.com

Stitcher SmartRadio- The Smarter Way to listen to radio.

Will be back soon!

2011-11-08T12:58:00.003-06:00

Just working on some proposals and haven't been able to post. Looking forward to returning soon!

Halloween on 6th Street

2011-10-26T19:02:00.001-05:00

Halloween Time turns me back to a favorite documentary you HAVE to check out if you're a nut for the holiday.
I previewed a brand new documentary making the festival circuit right now called Halloween on 6th Street, now on Hulu in its entirety.

I cannot say enough about this doc, which its running time introduces us to the amazing phenomenon of Halloween in Austin, Texas, where historic 6th Street fills with equal parts exhibitionists, costuming genius and gawkers. The focus of the documentary, from producer Michelle Canning, is on Bud Hasert, a triathlete whose late Summer is usually taken over by planning his Halloween costume. And when I say costume, I mean production: Hasert plans and builds gigantic costumes with transforming parts, like his Headless Horseman costume featuring a horse. He even recruits extras, and builds costumes for them. All the way through we follow his remarkably patient fiance, who is planning a marathon and a wedding, and hoping Bud will make it to at least one of these. Along the way we meet local designers, producers and inventers, all of whom turn out in a big way for Halloween.

Amazing work. I hope you can catch it soon.

Remembering the Great Pumpkin

2011-10-25T18:43:00.000-05:00

(Note-- we're reviewing The Great Pumpkin at the Castle Dracula Podcast Wednesday at 10:30ET, so I'm reprinting this review to get in the mood. Enjoy!)

My daughters and I watched IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN tonight. The Charlie Brown DVDs are a big hit with them, so we are careful not to break them out until the right month, so they retain their specialness. We can watch each over and over again, but only in October, or November, or December. The arrival of GREAT PUMPKIN announces the arrival of a bevy of holiday specials that have drilled their way into my mind. Lately I've enjoyed returning to these things with fresh eyes.

GREAT PUMPKIN in particular resonates with me, particularly because of the strangely chilling fantasy Snoopy the dog has about the most vile and butcherous war of the last century.

The center of GREAT PUMPKIN is Linus, whom we recall as the voice of reason in the 1965 CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS. There, while Charlie Brown obsessed about the growing commercialization of Christmas, Linus was the even-handed guy who said, 'Charlie Brown, you're the only guy I know who can take a nice holiday like Christmas and make it a problem." And at the end, it is Linus who steps to Brown's rescue, tapping the microphone and simply reciting the Christmas story. That's 1965.

Now, in GREAT PUMPKIN, it's a year later and we find Linus in the thrall of complete religious fervor of his own device, as the boy proselytizes to the gang about the impending arrival of a giant pumpkin-being who favors the children with the "sincerest" pumpkin patch with a visit and gifts. The gang thinks he's a loon, the girl who loves him loses a whole evening coming to the same conclusion, and in the end Linus shivers in the cold until being rescued by his hateful but ultimately caring sister Lucy.

What is this supposed to mean? If CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS was about keeping the true spirit of Christmas (while enjoying the benefits of a commercialized holiday), what is GREAT PUMPKIN about? It seems to be a satire on fringe religion ("we're separated by denominational differences," Linus insists when Charlie Brown professes faith in Santa Claus.) But it's kind of sad that Linus, the voice of wisdom in the Christmas special, is so misguided here. We close out the special with Linus raving-- RAVING-- that this time something went wrong, but next year his pumpkin patch will be sincere enough to merit the arrival of the Great Pumpkin. In this he sounds like one of those cultists who keeps moving back the end of the world.

Meanwhile, I don't think when I watched this as a child that I realized that these children are all just little adults. There are no parents in sight, and they get around about as well as college students. Better: in the beginning, Lucy and Linus pick a pumpkin and carve it with a butcher knife in the span of about forty-five seconds. They throw a killer party whose only non-child visitor is a beagle that fantasizes about war and mayhem, and swims in punch.

I still love Snoopy's fantasy of the Red Baron, the moment I waited for every year, the dark water-color world made ominous by the high hat and woodwinds of Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack. Snoopy creeps through bombed-out France, and all the images of the Great War-- barbed wire, cratered earth, ruined shelters, blackened skies, bullet-riddled fuselages, churning black smoke-- all become playthings, and beautiful and chilling ones. Barbed wire is stuff that you and I don't blink at, but there's a generation-- some of whom still breathe-- that grow nauseated at the sight of it. Barbed wire was the patchy stitching that only festered and worsened the wounds of World War I. But there it is, amid the ruined houses of Snoopy's imagination, and suddenly I realize Disney could have made a park called Somme Land, named after the famous battle that spat out men like pumpkin seeds.

Halloween Man Vs. Invisible Man Conclusion!

2011-10-24T14:18:00.000-05:00

Over at HalloweenMan.com, Drew Edwards completes the four-part monster bash between Halloween Man, the zombie with a heart of gold and a Reed-Richards-smart girlfriend faces off against HG Wells' most evil creation, The Invisible Man.
I've really been enjoying this story because it's played like a monster procedural. We began in Part 1 with Halloween Man investigating a series of attacks in the leather district of Halloween Man's home, Solar City. Soon it became clear that "The Terror" was obsessed with the clientele of the leather bars and could attack them with near-impunity because the police had no interest in patrolling the district.
That left Solomon (Halloween Man) to pick up the search, one outsider looking after a community of outsiders. But it turned out that The Terror was actually none other than the insane Griffin, the sadistic, brilliant scientist who created a formula to turn himself invisible, and that has now rendered him impotent and insane.

The cover of Halloween Man vs. Invisible Man #4/4

This four-part story has been illustrated by Sergio Calvet, who I think brings just the right quirky, even cartoonish tone to the book. His is one of my favorite interpretations of Halloween Man yet, handling horror, violence and tenderness equally well.
This is great stuff. Halloween Man continues to be a favorite independent comic of mine and one of the few that I think holds up next to any new comic on the stands this week. Definitely check it out if you haven't had a taste.Check it out!

Trick r' Treat (2007) - Listen Now!

2011-10-18T08:25:00.002-05:00

Anna Paquin in Trick r' Treat

Grab some popcorn, grab your partner, and listen up! We're all about Halloween this month at the Castle Dracula Podcast, so be sure and listen to our latest episode, where Jason, Drew, Tony and Julia discuss TRICK R' TREAT, an absolutely gorgeous horror anthology currently on Netflix streaming. Listen to the show here-- or subscribe at iTunes!

Title: TRICK 'R TREAT (2007 Anthology) Dracula Podcast (Horror & More)

Time: 10/17/2011 10:30 PM EDT
Episode Notes: A look at this 2007 horror movie in the fine tradition of horror anthologies going all the way back to Tales from the Crypt, but with a loopy Pulp Fiction-like timeline.

The Lost, Creepy, Wonderful Chills of Halloween Horror

2011-10-07T14:28:00.002-05:00

When I was a kid I had a record called HALLOWEEN HORRORS. This was a Halloween party record that I listened to over, and over, and over again. Really only Side A mattered.

The original Halloween Horror record cover.

Side B was sound effects. If you wanted to make a creepy recording, Side B had it all: whistling wind, ghosts, chains, clopping horses, thumping hearts...

Side A? That was a story-- fourteen minutes long, a story about a young man (played by Michael Bell) who drives down south to visit a mansion he's suddenly inherited. Like any of us, he tells himself ghost stories to pass the time and then walks into a haunted mansion. This thing is tight as a drum, one chill after another. When the ghost wanders by singing, My baby? Have you seen my baby? you will get chills.

But this record came out in 1978, so it's nowhere to be found. Long out of print-- the last CD press of it was done in 1990. But get this: you can hear the story here.

And then, after you've heard that, check out the below-- a near-perfect imitation of the story, re-recorded by a fan and animated to video game footage. Now that's dedication.

Halloween Horror is lost, but it's back there.

NOSFERATU (1979)- Listen Now!

2011-10-03T10:01:00.000-05:00

You can now hear the Castle Dracula Podcast discuss NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE, the vampire classic starring Klaus Kinksi. You can listen here or subscribe at iTunes for free.

Thank you Mission High!

2011-09-29T23:31:00.003-05:00

Today I had a fantastic day visiting Mission High School in Mission, Texas. Besides presenting all day to over 1400 students, talking about writing in general and Alex Van Helsing in particular, I also had the pleasure of judging a Bookmark contest. Students designed bookmarks about Alex Van Helsing-- with the top three winners receiving books. Take a look at just a few, including the winning three:

The top three were:
1st Place: Jocelyn Lopez, with her manga versions of the characters
2nd Place: Haily Hernandez, with her wonderful cartoon about the breadth of vampire books
3rd Place: Samantha Garcia, with her cool Alex Van Helsing character.
It was actually painful judging these because there were so many really cool ones.Thanks Mission High, especially librarians Lydia Perez and Margie Longoria!

Tomorrow I'll be visiting Region 1 ESC (Educational Service Center) in Texas, talking with lots of librarians. Then a book festival in Harlingen on Saturday. I'm being hosted this weekend by Overlooked Books, who arrange a lot of author visits to ESCs and schools.

Hear us Discuss The Haunting!

2011-09-26T09:08:00.000-05:00

The Gang of Four in The Haunting.

You can now listen to the Castle Dracula Podcast discussion of The Haunting (1963), one of the finest horror movies of all time. Listen here:And don't forget you can subscribe at iTunes.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

2011-09-24T12:01:00.001-05:00

Note: The Podcast Returns this week with a discussion of The Haunting (1963) Sunday at 10:30 ET/9:30CT.

Book Tour Update:
This Friday I visited the ESC 20 Library Roundup in San Antonio and had the opportunity to moderate a panel on YA with Mark Gregory Mitchell, Jessica Lee Anderson, Jennnifer Ziegler, PJ Hoover, Jo Whittemore, and Jenny Moss. We talked about why we write YA and got into a really fun discussion of how closely we work with publishers and editors to sculpt the work-- I talked about removing whole subplots from Alex Van Helsing. The whole thing was sponsored by Overlooked Books, a book distributor that organizes a lot of events I attend.

The Haunting of Hill House

On the way down and up I finished listening to Shirley Jackson's fine book The Haunting of Hill House. Which one is this one? The Haunting of Hill House came out in 1959 and is the reigning King (queen?) of haunted house stories. But you might recall that recently I read Richard Matheson's Hell House, so here it would be helpful to give a brief primer to help you keep all these alliterative haunted titles straight.

The Haunting of Hill House (1959), by Shirley Jackson. A professor who wants to study the supernatural gathers a small group of guests to record their experiences in a haunted house in order to prove the existence of the supernatural. All the scares are psychological and suggestive-- touches in the dark, pounding on walls-- but this horror of the mind is a wonderful read.

Movies: The Haunting (1963), a masterpiece by Robert Wise, and The Haunting (1999), which most people don't prefer (I don't either.)

Hell House (1971), by Richard Matheson, writing an homage to The Haunting of Hill House. Same plot as the Haunting of Hill House, except here the more modern writer Matheson makes the whole affair a very modern "expedition" into the house, where every member of the team is a professional ghost hunter or spiritualist of sorts. Where Jackson's book is all subtle horror and sublimated desire, this book is out there with gory and garish sex and violence. But Matheson is a beautiful writer as well, so this is still a fine gothic.

Movies: The Legend of Hell House (1973), starring Roddy McDowall

I've already written about The Legend of Hell House here-- I love that book and movie! Go check it out! It's so strange to think that Matheson's book, which is a pretty hard-edged update (and just eleven years later) of Jackson is almost forgotten now, its movie subsumed with the wave brought on by The Exorcist, which came out at the same time.

But The Haunting of Hill House. Man, what a fantastic book. The book is told almost entirely from the perspective of Eleanor, Nell, a girl (woman, actually, Nell is 32 but feels always like a girl) whose home life is so unhappy that being invited on an expedition into a haunted house brings her the first peace and happiness she's felt in years. The book is really an exploration of Nell, who has sacrificed her youth serving her ailing mother and now yearns for an identity. She veers constantly into fantasy, throws herself into an instant friendship with the strong and confident Theodora (Theo), whose lesbianism is made clear but never named. (And also never comdemned, unlike in Wise's movie where an unhinged Nell insults Theo by calling her "unnatural.")

Nell seems to be trying on different identities that range from fantasy to reality-- will she live in a cottage with Theo and spend their days antiquing, will she chase the callow owner of the house, who she realizes is basically uninteresting, will she stay forever at Hill House?

As the book continued I yearned for Nell to find happiness, to grow up instantly and be able to distinguish fantasy from reality. She finds so much joy imagining her expedition as a family that the inevitable break-up is heartbreaking.

In The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson shows us how to write a book that reflects the soft, undulating waves of a person's mind, and shows us the torrent underneath. It's a fine book to read and learn from.

Jody Hedlund on Missing Your Own Writing Faults

2011-09-20T14:51:00.001-05:00

Check out Jody Hedlund's post today on something that I think haunts all writers: the ability to miss your own mistakes, faults and tendencies.

Instead, most of us polish up our work until we think it shines with brilliant glory. We labour over it and try to get every word perfect. Sure, our fingers might tremble with anxiety when we finally hit send, but let’s admit it: we usually think our work is pretty darn good. Otherwise we probably wouldn’t put it out there.

Yet . . . the large majority of manuscripts that agents and editors see just aren’t ready for publication. And in the contest I recently judged, most of the entries weren’t ready for publication either. They had potential but still needed more time and growth.

Why do we struggle to know our skill levels? When we’re just beginning, why do we often think we’re better than we really are? Why are most of us blind to our own faults?

Be sure and chime in at her blog if you have some ideas beyond those that Jody lays out.

For my part I think the biggest blinder to faults in my own writing is wilful disbelief. I know what line is supposed to sound like! See, the alliteration is cool if you read it like this! As if I could go to everyone's house and read them the sections they might need help with.

The thing that I have to remember as a novelist is that my prose is not a script that I will read on the radio. It's a script that the reader needs to be able to perform in their own heads, and if the direction ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage.
It turns out I can deny that over and over, I can be blind to it, but it matters. You don't just have to read your work aloud-- or at least aloud in your head-- you need to forget how it goes and then read it aloud.

Great post.

Return of the Living Dead- Listen to the Discussion!

2011-09-18T23:16:00.001-05:00

Hey gang! The Castle Dracula Podcast is back-- listen below or in the margin to hear us discuss the 1985 movie RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Added bonus: for the first time ever, a cast member WALKS OUT!

Questions? Requests? Don't forget to join us at the Facebook Page!

Alex Van Helsing Background: "The Transfer" by Algernon Blackwood, 1912

2011-09-14T12:07:00.004-05:00

This morning I was thinking about classic stories (later this week I really want to talk about Benson's chilling The Room in the Tower,) but I wanted to share a fascinating story that vampire fans might not have come across.

The story is called THE TRANSFER by the mysterious, mystical Algernon Blackwood, and at its heart is the psychic vampire known as Mr. Frene:

For this Mr. Frene was a man who drooped alone, but grew vital in a crowd-- because he used their vitality. He was a supreme, unconscious artist in the science of taking the fruits of others' work and living--for his own advantage. He vampired, unknowingly no doubt, every one with whom he came in contact; left them exhausted, tired, listless. Others fed him, so that while in a full room he shone, alone by himself and with no life to draw upon he languished and declined. In the man's immediate neighborhood you felt his presence draining you; he took your ideas, your strength, your very words, and later used them for his own benefit and aggrandizement. Not evilly, of course; the man was good enough; but you felt that he was dangerous owing to the facile way he absorbed into himself all loose vitality that was to be had. His eyes and voice and presence devitalized you. Life, it seemed, not highly organized enough to resist, must shrink from his too near approach and hide away for fear of being appropriated, for fear, that is, of--death.

...

So this was how I saw him--a great human sponge, crammed and soaked with the life, or proceeds of life, absorbed from others--stolen. My idea of a human vampire was satisfied. He went about carrying these accumulations of the life of others. In this sense his "life" was not really his own. For the same reason, I think, it was not so fully under his control as he imagined.

Frene is a man who destroys your vitality by being in your presence, and he plays a key role in the book Voice of the Undead.

Give the Transfer a read online-- or look for it in the collection The Vampire Archives.

Kristi Bernard on Voice of the Undead: Excellent!

2011-09-12T09:50:00.000-05:00

Awesome new review of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead! Check out Kristi Bernard's blog for her review:

ith the help of Sangster, his mentor and the Polidoruim, Alex must stop Ultravox, a leader of the Scholomance with a deadly viral voice....
This novel is the second installment of a series written by Jason Henderson. This is an excellent book for all teens but especially boys. It has monsters and excitement to keep them turning the pages and wanting more. If you missed Vampire Rising, you can still follow along with Voice of the Undead, each book can stand all on its own.

Check out the rest!

Listen to our DRACULA (Chris Lee) Discussion! (SPOILERS)

2011-08-31T09:28:00.000-05:00

Our new CASTLE DRACULA PODCAST episode is up! This week: DRACULA starring Christopher Lee, AKA Horror of Dracula!

You can also listen right here:

Description: We talk DRACULA AKA HORROR OF DRACULA, the Hammer vampire film starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Hosted by the creators of the Alex Van Helsing book series (Jason Henderson), indy comic Halloween Man (Drew Edwards), and manga Psy-comm (Tony Salvaggio), and attorney Julia Guzman.

Next Podcast: DRACULA starring Christopher Lee!

2011-08-28T11:38:00.002-05:00

Don't miss our CASTLE DRACULA PODCAST discussion Tuesday Night at 10:30ET/9:30CT of DRACULA AKA HORROR OF DRACULA, starring Christopher Lee.

Read Jason's review of HORROR OF DRACULA.

Listen to the Fright Night 2011 Discussion (SPOILERS!)

2011-08-25T09:48:00.000-05:00

The FRIGHT NIGHT 2011 episode of the Castle Dracula Podcast is up-- you can listen here or right here:

This week we discuss the 2011 "Fright Night" starring Colin Farrell and David Tennant with an amazing Buffy-like script from Marti Noxon. Plus, endorsements, and embarrassing convention-related revelations from Julia.

Also, check out our new Castle Dracula Podcast Blog!

Goodbye, Mr. Sangster

2011-08-22T12:15:00.001-05:00

Jimmy Sangster, screenwriter of HORROR OF DRACULA (as it was known in the US) and CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN-- not to mention all the other films he was involved in-- has passed away.

Peter Cushing as Van Helsing in Horror of Dracula,
written by Jimmy Sangster

The world of cinematic horror fiction lost a true great yesterday: the wonderfully prolific Jimmy Sangster passed away at the age of 83. The man's name might not ring any immediate bells, but any true horror fan (especially a British one) could tell you he was the go-to screenwriter for a large portion of the very best Hammer Films. (Hammer Films being a production company that churned out lots of horror films in the 1950s and '60s.) When Hammer opted to resurrect old Universal favorites like Dracula and Frankenstein, Mr. Sangster was the man behind the typewriter. His 1958 double feature of Horror of Dracula and The Revenge of Frankenstein would be the envy of any horror screenwriter, but Jimmy Sangster just kept on banging 'em out.

Goodbye and thank you, Mr. Sangster.

Girls in the Stacks: Voice of the Undead

2011-08-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

Another neat review, this one from Girls in the Stacks reviewer Nancy Tuuling!

my take: Alex Van Helsing returns with a book full of action, villianous vampires, and budding teen romance! We enjoyed the first book in this series (see Vampire Rising review here) and I enjoyed this second book even more.

Nancy even keys in on my New Wave obsession, which creeps into the book:

I have to mention one of my favorite lines – when Alex asks “Who is Ultravox?”, Sangster said, “Well, for one thing it’s the name of a New Wave band.” “What’s New Wave?” Ahhh, Sangster – your young padawan needs some musical instruction. That, or vampires need to find names that don’t make the adults reading hum “Vienna” in their heads. Oh, wait, isn’t that the girl’s name with the green scarf? Hmmmm… Oh, Jason, you punny man.

Yes. Yes it is, Nancy... and here's my favorite Ultravox song (but not the only one that influenced Voice of the Undead) "Vienna."

Associated Press/ABC News on Alex Van Helsing: "Tapping Into the Market of Books for YA Boys"

2011-08-18T10:14:00.000-05:00

A great notice on Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead turned up from the Associated Press on ABC's website:

In "Voice of the Undead," Alex attends school during the day and spends his nights searching Lake Geneva for the magic-protected Scholomance, an ancient vampire school. During one of these missions, he burns down Glenarvon Academy, which is forced to relocate to an all-girls academy down the road.

Summer Moore, AP

Meanwhile, the Polidorium want Alex to track down a vampire named Ultravox.

The Alex Van Helsing series is tapping into the market of books for young adult boys, and does so successfully. The novels are engaging and suspenseful, without relying on a central love story.

Check out the rest! And thank you so much AP writer Summer Moore!

Listen to the Dracula's Daughter Podcast!

2011-08-10T08:22:00.000-05:00

The new episode of the Castle Dracula Podcast is up. This time our topic is DRACULA'S DAUGHTER, the 1936 vampire thriller starring Gloria Holden. Listen here and join us each week!

And don't forget to Friend the show and leave us notes and questions on Facebook!

Check out a trailer for DRACULA'S DAUGHTER:

@Bibliojunkies: 4.5 Stars to Voice of the Undead

2011-08-09T21:13:00.002-05:00

Awesome Bibliojunkies review of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead from blogger Shel:

My love of the Alex Van Helsing books is pretty well documented and that love continues. This book is fast-paced and fun. I enjoy the way the author illustrates Alex’s thought process when facing stressful situations. I also enjoy that while Alex is extraordinary in many ways, we also see how in many ways, Alex is a typical 14 year old. It was reminiscent of reading The Hardy Boys, except with vampires and cooler gadgets! All in all, I say 4.5 stars and I cannot wait for Alex No. 3! I also cannot wait until my 4 year old nephew is old enough to read Alex. Please tell me it is coming soon!

Read the rest!

Thanks Shel! First off, Alex Van Helsing: The Triumph of Death is coming next Summer. I've even got a draft finished already.

But thank you for kindly comparing Alex Van Helsing to the Hardy Boys-- that's absolutely my goal, to create a new boys' adventure series that can last a long time and mean something important to new readers. Thanks for making my day!

Ms. Yingling loves Voice of the Undead:"textbook example of how to write for the Adrenaline rush"

2011-08-05T14:21:00.000-05:00

The fantastic Ms. Yingling blog weighs in on Voice of the Undead:

I liked Vampire Rising so much that I nominated it for the Cybils Awards.The second book is a textbook example of how to write for the Adrenaline rush: Alex is chased by two cars, has blood sucking leeches thrown at him by Elle, is attacked by the leeches again in his dorm room, and then the dorm catches on fire. That's just the first two chapters! The boys from Glenarvon have to move in with the girls at LaLaurie school until repairs are made.

Check out the rest-- but warning: SPOILERS!

Thanks Ms. Yingling!

Castle Dracula Podcast on THE LOST BOYS-- Listen here.

2011-08-03T11:04:00.001-05:00

Our Lost Boys Episode is up-- listen in here!

This is our fifth episode of the podcast and I'm really enjoying it. I think the guys are beginning to get a good rhythm going, and we're actually having people show up in the chat room to throw questions at us.

Meanwhile, Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead came out last week and we continue to get good reviews. I'll post some more soon!

Join us to talk LOST BOYS on the Castle Dracula Podcast

2011-08-02T10:48:00.001-05:00

Tonight, 10:30ET/9:30CT. Go hear to listen in live, join the chat and ask questions!

Episode Notes: CRY LITTLE SISTER! A look at one of the most important vampire movies of the last forty years, THE LOST BOYS, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Patric. Hosted by the creators of the Alex Van Helsing book series (Jason Henderson), indy comic Halloween Man (Drew Edwards), and manga Psy-comm (Tony Salvaggio), and attorney Julia Guzman. We'll cap it off with a look at vampires and pop culture, and of course Q&A from the audience!

I freaking love this movie so I can't wait to get into it. To get you in the mood, here's an original trailer and a cool video:

SciFiChick review: Alex Van Helsing series "completely engaging, exceptional"

2011-07-29T09:04:00.001-05:00

SciFiChick turns in a new review of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead and loves it!

As the complex story unfolds, the intensity increases. Fast-paced and action-packed, this sequel is completely engaging. There are plenty of surprises and twists leading to a climactic and dramatic ending. A few mysteries still linger that will leave readers wanting more. Full of mystery, adventure, and teenage angst, this fantasy series for young adults is exceptional.

Thank you, SciFiChick!

Castle Dracula Podcast on Interview with the Vampire!

2011-07-27T21:49:00.000-05:00

Check out our latest podcast episode: INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE!

A look at INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Hosted by the creators of the Alex Van Helsing book series (Jason Henderson) with panelists Julia Guzman, travel writer and attorney, Barb Lien-Cooper, creator of the online comic GUN STREET GIRL and adapter of many manga and manhwa titles published by Tokyopop and Viz Media, and Dr. Park Cooper, co-creator of the graphic novel HALF DEAD and editor-in-chief of comic-book publisher Septagon Studios. We'll cap it off with endorsements and of course Q&A from the audience!

Don't forget to check out the podcast at iTunes and subscribe!

Meanwhile, tune in next Tuesday for the next episode...

MTV Geek on Alex Van Helsing (with Excerpt!)

2011-07-26T23:31:00.001-05:00

MTV Geek, MTV's website on books, comics, movies and the like, has a post up with an exclusive preview of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead.
Go check it out!

Release day for Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead (and some new reviews)

2011-07-26T08:03:00.000-05:00

Some new reviews for Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead this morning, on the very day that the book is available everywhere.

Mundie Moms turned in a review of Vampire Rising, which comes out in paperback today:

I really enjoyed this book. It was an engaging, fun, quick read. There's humor, classical references, down to earth and enjoyable characters and of course some great vampire hunting, butt kicking scenes. Now I can see why Alex Van Helsing made the Texas Lone Star List. I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, Voice of the Undead. This is a clean cut book I'd recommend to older middle grade and YA readers.

Collected Miscellany has a review of Voice of the Undead:

Ultravox was a nice villain and the concept added a thread that could pull both the action of the school(s) and the larger vampire versus human battle. The continuing battle with Elle and the development of the Merrill brothers added a nice touch as well – some tension and an extra burst of action.
Looks like this is turning into a nice series for those looking for action adventure with a vampire twist.

The Brain Lair says:

Voice of the Undead is a fast-paced, action-packed caper. Alex is in and out of trouble faster than you can say Vampire Rising. ... Alex is too busy surviving to reflect on anything, but the mishaps keep the story moving forward.

Finally! The book is here! I want to hear what you think.

Shock Value (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 1)

2011-07-25T09:23:00.001-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool (often vampire) things. Today:
SHOCK VALUE by Jason Zinoman

Shock Value is a deeply researched and thoughtfully told analysis of New Horror, the modern-set, often more unsettling horror movies that came around in the 70s and continue more or less to today.
I had some real doubts about reading this outstanding book from Penguin Press. I'm a fan of horror of the gothic era-- Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, Hammer and Corman. For me the end of the Gothics signaled by the thunderclap of The Exorcist is a sort of sad time, although I appreciate the modern scares of the New Horror era. I mean, The Exorcist is a masterpiece, and I'm a huge fan of a few modern horrors such as The Changeling.

I'd read a series of essays by Jason Zinoman in Slate where he staked out several positions I loved (such as "the less explained about horror, the better") and at least one position I wasn't on board with, that horror has a purpose, and the purpose is to unsettle the audience. That means constantly upping the stakes, because the audience can't remain unsettled long-- so that whereas audiences in the 70s were disturbed by Regan spitting up pea soup, by the 2000s we really need to see someone's eye gouged out with a blowtorch. I'm not really there because I kind of think there's room for both the unsettling and the curiously settling kinds of horror. I'm not convinced that one is superior to the other.

The book makes no such claim-- Zinoman painstakingly traces the rebellious roots of Wes Craven, Dan O'Bannon, William Friedkin, Peter Blatty, and more as they launch modern classics like Last House on the Left, Alien, and The Exorcist. And it all begins with a look at Vincent Price, hamming it up on the Mike Douglas show, musing about what is horror.

Great stuff. I really admire this book and recommend it.

Listen now to the Kung Fu & Vampires Episode! (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 5)

2011-07-20T11:09:00.002-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool (often vampire) things. Today:
Kung Fu and Vampires: The Caste Dracula Podcast brought to you by alexvanhelsing.com

The podcast team recorded our new episode last night and had a great time. You can listen now to our discussion of kung-fu, vampires, and the movie that brought them together.

Description: A look at the one the most awesome and awesomely off vampire movies ever, the kung-fu vampire extravaganza LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES starring Peter Cushing. Hosted by the creators of the Alex Van Helsing book series (Jason Henderson), indy comic Halloween Man (Drew Edwards), and manga Psy-comm (Tony Salvaggio), and token female attorney Julia Guzman. We'll cap it off with a look at kung fu, vampires, and of course Q&A from the audience!

Here you go:

Or you can find the Castle Dracula Podcast at Talkshoe.
Or on iTunes.

Meanwhile, here's a trailer for Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.

SIX DAYS! Pre-Order! (And tune in tonight!) (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 6)

2011-07-19T11:08:00.003-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool (often vampire) things. Today:

Tune in tonight to the Castle Dracula Podcast! And by "Tune In," of course I mean click that link and you can either dial in or listen on computer. Tonight the topic is kung-fu vampires.

Description: A look at the one the most awesome and awesomely off vampire movies ever, the kung-fu vampire extravaganza LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES starring Peter Cushing. Hosted by the creators of the Alex Van Helsing book series (Jason Henderson), indy comic Halloween Man (Drew Edwards), and manga Psy-comm (Tony Salvaggio), and token female attorney Julia Guzman. We'll cap it off with a look at kung fu, vampires, and of course Q&A from the audience!

Meanwhile: holy mackerel. Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead comes out in SIX DAYS! It's been a long road since the first book came out last year-- I've talked to literally thousands of readers and even got to be the only Texan on the Texas Lone Star List. Now, book two is finally coming out. I want to do more of these-- and I want this book to blow the first one out of the water.

So: MY REQUEST FOR YOU.

If you like Alex Van Helsing, pre-order. Pre-orders are everything. If you haven't, pre-order the book by clicking the Amazon link to the left.
Want more to do? Read a Preview of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead at HarperTeen!
While you're there, put the Read Inside widget you see below on your site by going to the preview page and clicking "Put this book on your site" in the upper right to grab the code for the widget. Then you can just paste it into your blog.
Finally, thank you to all the readers who have written in! I've had a blast hearing from all of you.

So! Go read, and then pre-order. Voice of the Undead comes out on July 26 and I for one can't stand the suspense.

Ebook Pricing Has Nothing to Do with Physical Book Pricing

2011-07-15T09:38:00.004-05:00

I was on twitter and someone brought up a logical question that people have asked often:
How can it be that a book has a cheaper physical price at a store than when I buy it on Kindle?
A few supporting points I hear:
Paper costs more than air, so the paper price should be higher.
Restated as a cry from the heart: On general principle there should never be a book that costs more on paper.

Unfortunately, sometimes the things we think are just common sense in fact aren't true. The prices of ebooks and paper books have nothing to do with one another.

Let's completely set aside, by the way, the cost of network bandwidth and content management. We'll pretend a world where ebook and paper book costs of delivery are equal.

The price of ebooks depends on a lot of things, such as the price suggested by the retailer, the actual price paid by the retailer to the publisher, and any standard price the retailer pays. There are lots and lots of details in here, but basically the thing to know is that ebooks are a product like downloadable games that have a price. The price could vary widely from day to day and hour to hour, though as a matter of policy these prices generally are stable.
The price of paper books depends on a lot of things, such as such as the price suggested by the retailer, the actual price paid by the retailer to the publisher, and any standard price the retailer pays. There are lots and lots of details in here, but basically the thing to know is that paper books are a product like slacks that have a price. The price could vary widely from day to day and hour to hour, though as a matter of policy these prices generally are stable.

You know what these two don't have anything to do with? One another. Sams sells paper books. On Tuesday they might decide, "It's back to school time! Today, paper books will be the thing that brings people in the door. Let's make all paper books half off. We'll lose money on the paper books, but we'll make money on pencils and pens." And Voila, a $15 book is $7. The Ebook on Amazon is still $9.99. Let the cry of the heart begin. They don't have anything to do with one another. They are products, with prices. They have no more relation to one another than their relation to the price of a soft drink featuring a character from a movie based on the book.

But you know, they could have something to do with one another by choice. In theory a retailer could set up a spider that says, if there's a cheaper price in hardback out there, we will undercut it on the ebook version. But that would still be a marketing choice by the retailer. And anyway, why? They are different products. Tomorrow Sams' sale will end; the paper book will go back up.

I might be in an airport and can't find SOLOMON KANE, but can buy it for $9.99 on my Kindle. My price choices here are $0 for zero books or $9.99 for one ebook. The fact that Solomon Kane is $5 at a store down the street from the airport is completely meaningless in this instance.

I might be in the airport and find Under The Dome marked down to $8 on paper, while the ebook remains $11.77. But the paper book weighs approximately 900 pounds while the ebook weighs nothing. At this point, the ebook is worth the extra money, if we're comparing. I'm paying for a value.

Ebook prices and paper book prices: They don't have anything to do with one another.

Read the First Chapters of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead Online! (Countdown Minus 11)

2011-07-14T11:22:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool (often vampire) things. Today:
Read a Preview of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead at HarperTeen!
It all starts with a motorcycle chase that leads to an all-boys' school having to merge with an all-girls' school.

I usually write books in isolation a good year and a half before they come out. Between that and the street date, I might edit some here and there at the editor's behest, but there comes a point still many, many months from the book's release when it is done, completely done and locked, and all I can do is wait. Because I want people to read! I have students who write me and say, hey! Finished book 1-- where's book 2! And it's not out there.

Today, finally, you can go to HarperTeen and read the first bunch of chapters of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead. It takes you through a LOT, including the catastrophe that causes Alex's boys' school to have to merge with the all-girl school across the lake.

So! Go read, and then pre-order. Voice of the Undead comes out on July 26 and I for one can't stand the suspense.

Listen to Fright Night: Episode 2 of the Castle Dracula Podcast (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 12)

2011-07-13T07:58:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool (often vampire) things. Today:
Episode 2 of the Castle Dracula Podcast: FRIGHT NIGHT!
You can stream the podcast right here:

FRIGHT NIGHT (1985) - Castle Dracula Podcast Episode 2

ReleasedJul 13, 2011

A look at the vampire/comedy/horror classic Fright Night while we anticipate the release of the Colin Farrell remake. Hosted by the creators of the Alex Van Helsing book series (Jason Henderson), indy comic Halloween Man (Drew Edwards), and manga Psy-comm (Tony Salvaggio), and token female attorney Julia Guzman. Spoilers!
The really exciting thing is the panel had an audience this week listening live. Join in next Tuesday, when we'll be talking about THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES.

Also you can visit the Podcast on iTunes and subscribe (be sure to leave comments!) or visit us at the Talkshoe home page.

Thanks for listening, leave comments, and let us know what topics YOU would like to be covered!

Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League Script by @erniecline (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 14)

2011-07-11T07:49:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool (often vampire) things. Today:

Ernie Cline's Script for Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League.

I recently watched BUCKAROO BANZAI on DVD, and you know, it has everything that makes me want to be a writer-- at any moment you look at the film, you feel as though you're seeing a far smaller fraction of the movie's reality than a normal movie would suggest. With most movies, one gets the sense that the characters hardly existed before the film and will probably sputter away shortly afterwards. BUCKAROO goes on and on, and encourages you to believe the well is deep, deep. And it should have been deeper-- after the outstanding curtain call at the end (seen below), the credits promised a return: "Against the World Crime League."

And at least some of the world waited.

Writing possibly the single most storied spec script ever written-- Sci-Fi World Magazine even ran an article about it-- Ernest Cline of the soon-to-be megahit Ready Player One created "BBAWCL" as a fan-fueled lark. At Cline's blog, the writer explains:

It was the BB sequel I’d always wanted to see, and I knew that other die-hard Banzai fans would probably get a kick out of it. So I posted the script online, where it quickly spread to the far reaches of the Internet. In the months that followed, I received literally hundreds of emails from other Banzai fans writing to tell me how much they enjoyed the script. This was incredibly gratifying, and something I never expected when I was writing it.

Amazing, really. Go to Cline's blog to check out the script and download it, and don't forget to pre-order Ready Player One, which is just fantastic.

The wonderful Buckaroo Banzai curtain call:

Slate's How to Fix Horror Series (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 15)

2011-07-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Slate Magazine's Series on "How to Fix Horror" by Jason Zinoman

This past week, Jason Zinoman, author of the new look at modern horror films Shock Value, has turned in a thoughtful series of essays called "How to Fix Horror." I've enjoyed reading them for the most part because they're erudite and well-argued, and I recommend them. Having said that I have a lot of disagreements with Zinoman because he strikes me as a kind of purist against other purists, which is silly when we're talking about pop culture.

Here's Zinoman:

Horror can certainly be discreet and cerebral and deeply moral. But it's more at home being impolite and gross and borderline unethical. We needn't be embarrassed if we prefer the movies that favor splatter over politics or poetry. What matters—what keeps us coming back for more—is fear, a pleasure as old as the game of peek-a-boo. Maybe we like horror movies of questionable taste because we get a perverse thrill out of something debased. Maybe it's just because we are so addicted to goose bumps that we'll see anything to get that feeling again. Straining to be respectable not only misjudges the nature of the genre; it robs us of one of the most potent scares you can have at the theater: the horror of realizing you love horror.

Well, I don't know, I think "more at home being impolite and gross and borderline unethical" might be a judgment call. I'm not crazy about these pronouncements where something is "supposed" to be anything. What is horror supposed to be? Do we really have to get uppity about this?

Linoman is definitely a worshipper at the cult of King, and I respect that-- he quotes from Danse Macabre. But Linoman and King part ways in that Linoman can't stand indoor bullstuff. The kind of horror I prefer tends to be either supremely eerie (Dont Look Now) or sublimely cheesy (Blood of Dracula)-- two kinds of horror Zinoman seems to define right out of worthy consideration. These are good essays, but the lean way hard in the direction of a respect for what Bruce Wright's Nightwalkers calls "terror" (movies about primal fear of bodily harm) and turns its nose up at what Wright calls "horror" (movies about the sinking awareness of the great abyss beyond.) That's just another nomenclature, of course. I can't wait to read Linoman's book, though, because I expect it to be very good at covering what it covers.

Halloween Man: No Safe Word

2011-07-09T10:53:00.000-05:00

Heads up! There's a brand new Halloween Man story by Drew Edwards called NO SAFE WORD, you can read it online, and it is fantastic. (Note: Drew Edwards is a panelist of the Castle Dracula Podcast, so tune in Tuesday night at 10:30ET if you want to hear me, him and the rest of the gang talk about Fright Night!)

Castle Dracula Podcast-- look for us online!

What's Halloween Man? As I wrote before:

Drew Edwards' Halloween Man is an independent comic that is as pure of heart as it is clever. Here is a story that unabashedly calls on the spirit of horror-- classic horror, modern horror, B-movie and forgotten horror, all of it-- to endow a hero to fight the powers of darkness in much the way that horror empowers its own enthusiasts to face the darkness in our own lives. I've been reading the comic for years, on and off, and I can't think of another story that comes closer to the feeling Ray Bradbury summoned in The Halloween Tree: a joyous celebration of Halloween.
...Halloween Man himself is a flesh-lusting zombie, the revived writer Solomon Hitch, killed by a vampire and brought back to life by a John Constantine-like necromancer called Morlack.

In the past, Halloween Man stories have tended to be very compressed, like old-school Avengers stories or the one-shot Tales of the Unexpected comics of my youth. But No Safe Word is a quantum leap forward for Drew Edwards-- it's the first part of a two-parter in which Solomon is investigating a killer who stalks the leather bars of Solar City. While that makes this story the first slightly not-safe-for-work Halloween Man story (only barely-- there's subject matter but no nudity here), it allows Edwards to draw parallels between Solomon, the outcast zombie feared by both mortals and monsters, and the citizens of the BDSM world who feel ostracized and ignored. It makes the heart swell to see Solomon decide to investigate the killings there when no one else will.

I love the fully-realized gonzo world of Halloween Man. I can't wait to go back!

And it's a two-parter, so go check it out, and then come around next month!

CONTEST: Become an Anti-Vampire Spy and Win a copy of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead!

2011-07-07T08:47:00.002-05:00

Awesome book blog iLive, iLaugh, iLove Books are running a very cool contest where EVERYONE wins a bookmark for entering, plus we'll be giving away an ARC (advanced reader copy) of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead.

Read the details here!

We have a contest! The goal? Become an ANTI-VAMPIRE SPY and you'll win an ARC of Voice of the Undead! And even better: anybody that enters this contest will receive something!

What's an ARC? An ARC is an Advanced Review Copy. It's the version of the book that newspapers and bookstores get. Jason is going to award one to one reader who can send in the best image of themselves as an Anti-Vampire Spy. A member of the vampire-terrorist-hunting Polidorium, like Alex -- in the cover above-- or like his sister Ronnie here:

Ronnie Van Helsing, Anti-Vampire Spy, from Sword of Dracula.

But wait, you might be asking-- how do I do this?
Any way you want.
It could be a photograph of you, dressed as a spy, in a spy pose. (What's a spy pose? This is a spy pose: )

Basically, look cool.

So yes, you could, if you thought it somehow conveyed anti-vampire spy, dress up like the Michelin Man and front as only that rubberized, all-weather demon can.

Or it could be a drawing. Or a video. It could be a collage as long as it someone represents you-- as a spy-- wanting to kill some vampires.

Rules:
Very few. Keep it clean, and anything you enter has to be something you don't mind being posting.

EVERYONE WHO SENDS IN AN ARTISTIC RENDITION will get a SIGNED ALEX VAN HELSING BOOKMARK. And one of you, randomly chosen, gets an ARC of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead.

Show us your spy stuff!

How to Enter:
-Email any entries to jasonhendersontx@gmail.com
-Subject Line: Be a Spy Contest

-Include your name, shipping information, and attach your picture, video, or whatever your entry is.
-Deadline: Between Now and July 26, the day Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead is released!

Examiner 4-Star Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead Review (Countdown Minus 18)

2011-07-07T08:34:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Examiner gives Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead 4 Stars

Caitlin Stanford, in an Examiner review that's been a zillion times from the India Times to the Chicago Hello, weighs in on Voice of the Undead:

Caitlin Stanford
Alex Van Helsing, 14-year-old Polidorium agent-in-training and descendent of Abraham Van Helsing of Dracula, returns in Jason Henderson’s new book, Voice of the Undead.

Suspicious things are afoot at Glenarvon Academy in Geneva, and as usual, Alex Van Helsing is in the thick of them. Continually harassed by the vampire Elle, a name readers will recognize from the first book, Alex gets into deeper trouble when a new villain, Ultravox, arrives at the Scholomance.
...
Voice of the Undead has a few new characters for the readers to love, including Ultravox, as well as old friends like Sid, Paul, Minhi, and Mr. Sangster. There are also still plenty of cool techno-gadgets and weapons to go around, not to mention motorcycles, WaveRunners, yachts, and, of course, wooden stakes.

Alex’s character continues to grow in Voice of the Undead, and soon he is learning more and more about himself and his family. He’s still very relatable and very funny, and fans will enjoy learning more about him.

Continue reading on Examiner.com: Review of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead - Dallas young adult literature |

Thanks Caitlin!

LA Teen Festival Interview (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 19)

2011-07-06T11:55:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

LA Teen Festival Magazine Interview on Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead

LA Teen Festival is an online teen magazine with a mainstream focus, so it's really exciting to have some exposure in a non-book-related mag. Check out the interview here!

LA Teen Festival (Selena Gomez cover)

Jason Henderson Interview, page 1

Duke Nukem: Glorious Bastard: So Much Fun It Should Be Illegal

2011-07-05T22:18:00.000-05:00

I just read Duke Nukem: Glorious Bastard from IDW, written by Tom Waltz of the recent comic adaptation of Silent Hill. There, Waltz captured the nerve-jangling spookiness of Silent Hill while adding new layers to the story. Here he does the same for Duke in that the story he gives us is exactly in line with the game (Duke Nukem 3D and especially the new Duke Nukem Forever)-- meaning it is unabashedly aggressive, violent, corny, hypersexual and insensitive. I mean, it's kind of amazing.

Who is Duke Nukem? As written by Waltz, and I think he's got it right, Duke is an oversexed, roided-out megastar modern gunslinger whose many product endorsements have earned him a rock star mansion and all the weapons he can handle. In Glorious Bastard, Duke is recruited by an old woman to return (via time travel) to World War II, where Duke can help stave off a world-threatening alien/Nazi alliance.

Does Duke make crass comments about women? Does he make Snake Plissken look like Cary Grant? Actually, I would kill for a Duke/Snake team-up.

I've read a lot of Waltz's work so I know whereof he writes-- he has completely mind-melded with Duke here, giving us a comic that captures the exact feel of the source material. It's really fun, and I can't wait to read the whole story.

1897 Reviews of Bram Stoker's Dracula (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 23)

2011-07-02T11:00:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

Contemporary reviews of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
This is fantastic reading-- a collection of reviews of Dracula from the period of the books' release.

Here, then, is the Daily Mail:

By ten o’clock the story had so fastened itself upon our attention that we could not pause even to light our pipe. At midnight the narrative had fairly got upon our nerves; a creepy terror had seized upon us, and when at length, in the early hours of the morning, we went upstairs to bed it was with the anticipation of nightmare. We listened anxiously for the sound of bats’ wings against the window; we even felt at our throat in dread least an actual vampire should have left there the two ghastly punctures which in Mr Stoker’s book attested to the hellish operations of Dracula.

Here, from the Spectator:

Mr. Bram Stoker gives us the impression — we may be doing him an injustice — of having deliberately laid himself out in Dracula to eclipse all previous efforts in the domain of the horrible, — to “go one better” than Wilkie Collins (whose method of narration he has closely followed), Sheridan Le Fanu, and all the other professors of the flesh-creeping school.

Great reading for any Dracula fanatic, check them out here.

CONTEST: Become an Anti-Vampire Spy and Win an Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead ARC (Countdown Minus 24)

2011-07-01T09:26:00.004-05:00

UPDATE:
This contest is now being hosted by one of my favorite bloggers, iLive, iLaugh, iLove Books.

You'll still send entries to me, but you can read blogger Lucia's excellent post over there.

I want to see you all looking like spies!

-----------------

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

CONTEST ANNOUNCEMENT!
Become an Anti-Vampire Spy Win an Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead ARC!

What's an ARC? An ARC is an Advanced Review Copy. It's the version of the book that newspapers and bookstores get. I want to award one to one reader who can send in the best image of themselves as an Anti-Vampire Spy. A member of the vampire-terrorist-hunting Polidorium, like Alex -- in the cover above-- or like his sister Ronnie here:

Ronnie Van Helsing, Anti-Vampire Spy, from Sword of Dracula.

But wait, I hear you asking-- how do I do this?
Any way you want.
It could be a photograph of you, dressed as a spy, in a spy pose. (What's a spy pose? This is a spy pose:)

So yes, you could, if you thought it somehow conveyed anti-vampire spy, dress up like the Michelin Man and front as only that rubberized, all-weather demon can.

Or it could be a drawing. Or a video. It could be a collage as long as it someone represents you-- as a spy-- wanting to kill some vampires.

Rules:
Very few. Keep it clean, and anything you enter has to be something you don't mind me posting.

EVERYONE WHO SENDS IN AN ARTISTIC RENDITION will get a SIGNED ALEX VAN HELSING BOOKMARK. And one of you, randomly chosen, gets an ARC of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead.

Show me your spy stuff!

How to Enter:
Email any entries to jasonhendersontx@gmail.com
Subject Line: Be a Spy Contest
Deadline: Between Now and July 26, the day Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead is released!

Boys Reading YA and the Violence-in-YA Flap: Related, but not the way you think

2011-06-30T11:06:00.000-05:00

Mike Mullin, author of the upcoming Ashfall, turns in a new post called Why Don't More Boys Read YA? Mike has lots of compelling thoughts and even draws on tweets from last nights #YaLitChat twitter discussion on this topic. You should read the post because it's very skillful at hashing through this topic.
I've actually puzzled over this question a lot recently, about why boys read less YA than girls. There are a whole jumble of reasons and it's easy to get wrapped around the axle. We could talk about:

Boys read less to begin with as the school years wear on, for reasons having a lot to do with conformity
The vicious circle wherein more books appealing to girls are published because that's where the market is-- see Mary Kole's amazing post on this. ("We filled our [boy book] slot," reports one publisher.)
Covers, see above regarding appealing to girls

But there's something else I wanted to mention. At the same time we're having this discussion, we also had the amazing flap around WSJ writer Meghan Cox Gurdon's column on violence in YA. A nice summary of the flap is here from Ashley Perez.

I found myself curiously disconnected from this discussion. Generally I tended to think Gurdon's column was a polemic, a screed, in a business daily. She objected to violence in YA novels. The response, I would think, would be a few more screeds in argument. It's rhetoric. In fact, though, the YA community went absolutely bonkers over this column. They went bonkers, I think, because they felt it very personally. Here's a wonderful Laurie Halse Anderson response quoted in the Perez column:

They are afraid of their inability to talk to their kids about the scary, awful, real-world stuff that is out there. And they know, deep-down, that even if their own children are blessed with violence- and trauma-free childhoods and adolescences, their kids will daily come in contact with other kids who aren’t that lucky. So they know they·should be talking about this stuff, but they don’t know where to start. And when their kid starts reading books about subjects that make Mom and Dad uncomfortable, the reaction is to get rid of the book, instead of summoning the courage and faith to have conversations that make them uneasy.

For me: Yes. Got it. Catharsis, growth, healing. Communication. Down with all that.
But.
You know something? That's not the kind of YA I write, and it's not the kind I would read. You know the kind I write? I write YA where a good guy named Alex Van Helsing constantly gets into and out of scrapes. He stands up for his friends and fights to survive in very James Bond-like adventures. Generally these are not books where we are exploring childhood trauma. These are books to escape your trauma.
And I think there has to be both kinds of books, and I'm going out on a limb when I say I think boys might be more inclined towards one than the other. I turned to heroic books as a boy to show me how to be confident and crafty (though I never had to steal a Wave Runner to break onto a yacht, like Alex Van Helsing does in Voice of the Undead. See what I did there? That is a plug.)
Ah! I hear you say. But we have those books! We have gross-out books for boys! Yes. There are lots of humorous gross-out books. But you know, man cannot live by fart jokes alone. There has to be a higher brow for boys available.
Recently I told someone, I just can't bear to read a book where two people do nothing but remember their past and wonder whether or not they should get a divorce. Now, if they do all that while trying to stop someone from blowing up the Smithsonian, I'm there.
All I'm saying is that I think the Gurdon flap and the why-don't-boys-read flap are related, though not in the obvious way. It's not that boys would agree with Gurdon and object to all the violence. I think it's the flap that's related-- in all the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth over Gurdon, everyone seemed to demand that YA confront us with the selves we are running from in order to survive.
That's a kind of introspection that boys might need in doses, but do not crave in hardback.

Castle Dracula Podcast Now on iTunes! (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 25)

2011-06-30T09:37:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

The Castle Dracula Podcast is Now Available on iTunes! Our first episode, a discussion of Stephen Sommer's Van Helsing, has been added, and our next Episode, Fright Night, should go up the week after July 4th. Give us a listen and let me know what you think, and if there are any topics you'd like discussed!

NEW Castle Dracula Podcast-- Episode 1: Van Helsing (2004) (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 26)

2011-06-29T11:00:00.040-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

Announcing the Castle Dracula Podcast
Episode 1: Van Helsing (2004)

For months I've been listening to favorite movie-related podcasts like Now Playing, and it finally came to this: the Castle Dracula Podcast, a podcast panel show on vampires, vampire movies, and anything cool in the horror genre. And this week, we kick it off with a look at the 2004 movie Van Helsing. The show is hosted by me and with the amazing insights of Drew Edwards, creator of Halloween Man, Tony Salvaggio, columnist and creator of the manga Psy-Comm and Humanoids Clockwerx, and our always faithful/rueful attorney and friend Julia Guzman.

Soon you'll be able to subscribe to the Castle Dracula Podcast on iTunes, but you can hear Episode 1 here:
Castle Dracula Podcast: Episode 1: Van Helsing

Enjoy and leave us a note, comment, or question on the Alex Van Helsing Facebook Page!

Booklist loves Voice of the Undead (Countdown to Voice of the Undead Minus 27)

2011-06-28T10:23:00.003-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

BOOKLIST, the review magazine of the American Library Association, has reviewed Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead!

The review, from Daniel Kraus, is behind the subscription wall, but here's a snippet:

Anyone who thought Alex Van Helsing’s adventures were finished with Vampire Rising (2010) doesn’t know much about bloodsuckers... An opening motorcycle chase leads to monstrous worms, which lead to the fiery destruction of Alex’s school, which leads to meeting a mysterious new girl, Vienna.

I cannot express how excited I am-- just 27 days and Alex returns, and we're starting to get professional reviews. (There's another MAJOR one coming in a few days and I can't wait to share it with you.)

The Art of Hammer: Gothic Vampire Posters from the 50s through the 70s (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 28)

2011-06-27T15:38:00.001-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
I recently got The Art of Hammer, a very recent poster book this Christmas that is ideal for any classic horror fan. You've heard me expound on the unique look and feel of Hammer Films before-- I first wrote on this over thirteen years ago-- but here's the short version:
From the 1950s through the end of the 1970s, horror films entered what is now called the Gothic period, defined by a heavy reliance on supernatural rather than science-fiction-influenced themes, and period rather than contemporary settings. The champion of all Gothic horror was Hammer, a British studio that used many of the same cast, crew, and most especially production designers through their horror films. The result is a very recognizable series of films-- you can sit down to watch Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein, which came out in '57 and '58, and then watch The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil, which both came out in the early 70s, and you get the sense that these films are all part of a series and indeed seem to exist in the same world. People have called that world the Hammerscape, recognizable for its color and strange, sort-of-Euro and sort-of-British sets, trees and castle grounds.

These are the movies I play in the background while I'm working. So I was stunned by this book, which is over-sized and reprints posters from around the world advertising Hammer horror. One thing that's new for me here is that it gives me the chance to see the same film promoted in different ways. For instance, here's the first poster for The Vampire Lovers (see my review here)-- the poster is lurid and green (and by the way, isn't it odd to look at this and think, no-one's done a poster for a movie like this in thirty years?)

Whereas here is the American version, done in the style of drive-in movie posters (and in great drive-in fashion, suggests a totally different movie, though I'm sure this one, with its army of vampire women and Roman slaves, would be great too.)

That's just one example. There are alternate poster takes for Countess Dracula, Hands of the Ripper, four different takes on Dracula AD 1972, and on and on. Very cool.

Paranormal Pop Culture Interview (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 30)

2011-06-25T09:15:00.001-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Interview at Paranormal Pop Culture!

Head over to read about Alex Van Helsing, vampires, and what kind of music I listen to when I write!

We are now THIRTY DAYS from the release!

RIP Gene Colan, Best Dracula Artist of All Time

2011-06-24T06:58:00.000-05:00

Gene Colan, American artist, has died. I discovered Gene Colan in a grocery store in Oklahoma. Not the kind of grocery store we have today, the kind that takes up multiple city blocks, but the old kind, with linoleum and a small magazine rack.

I discovered Gene Colan and his unique vision, those pencils like no-one else's. Colan re-imagined comic book art as something visceral and alive. His pencils were the medium and the message, so much so that eventually no-one dared ink over him.

Where did your fandom come from? For me, it came from this Colan piece-- Tomb of Dracula Magazine #6, cover date August 1980.

I'm sure I had seen Dracula before-- I was 9 years old-- but this was a riveting rendition of the Count, drawn in black and white by Gene Colan in a script by Jim Shooter.

This Dracula that Colan drew was not the Lugosi Dracula who in 1980 still showed up everywhere on Halloween masks. But this comic-- with its cruel, princely Dracula-- captured my imagination instantly. In the main story inside, Dracula travels across the ocean to be with a Southern Belle he has become obsessed with, and for her hand, offers his military savvy to the Confederacy. (Isn't that great? Dracula in the American Civil War!) And that's not all-- there's a backup story starring Lilith, Marvel's daughter of Dracula, and a feature about vampires from around the world.

I mean, look:

This was the last issue of the magazine. The heydey of black-and-white mags was passing. I had not read the long Tomb of Dracula comic series, and I wouldn't be getting any more of the old Marvel Mags for many years. But the stories here were the beginning of my long obsession with the many facets of Stoker's long-enduring character. It was also the beginning of my appreciation of Gene Colan, who would later be my favorite Batman artist of the 1980s, drawing Doug Moench's street-wise, serious stories.

By the way-- it's easy now. You don't have to go to the grocery store, and anyway, grocery stores don't carry comics anymore. If you want to read *all* the issues of the Tomb of Dracula Magazine series, they're reprinted in an Omnibus version (Essential Tomb of Dracula Vol. 4) that-- since it's black and white-- exactly captures the original.

Authors as Isolated Crazy People (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 33)

2011-06-22T11:09:00.003-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Sometimes Authors are Crazy
Skyla Dawn Cameron, who blogs from the perspective of both a writer and an editor, tweeted yesterday that she was amazed that writers can do profoundly stupid things, such as (this happened yesterday) pasting a query letter into the comments section of an editor's blog. She linked to a post she wrote a few months ago urging writers to avoid what she called "Only Author Syndrome." She's not alone-- if you traverse the blogs of editors and agents you'll find a lot of frustrated venting. Some of it, like Cameron's, tries to get an instructive point across with humor, while many (I won't link here, mainly because I don't feel like looking them up) tend towards a kind of in-the-know derision: let me read to you from the idiotic query I got today. How I suffer to read such things. Sharing them with you on my blog is the very savior of my sanity.
But what are we talking about? Cameron does a good job of listing a few examples:
I once received the same inquiry from the same author six times in the span of twelve hours.

I've been bombarded with the same email several times in one day from the same people for something "urgent" that is, in no way, urgent...and wouldn't be urgent* for another four months, if that.

I've had people go through multiple rounds of editing and proofing screaming after the book is released because they've decided to change something in the book and want it re-edited and re-released. Right. Now.

I was asked once a week (and sometimes twice) for a month and a half by a slush author if we had decided on her book yet.

So, let me say from the first that I'm not guilty of these things, at least not in the last fifteen years or so; I don't remember much about the first couple of books. So when I take a blog post to explain what's going on, I'm trying to carve out a space for compassion for writers I regard as-- I don't know, siblings, if not spiritual children. I want to explain to the editors and agents why writers are so crazy-making. Here are a few thoughts; there may be more.

Writers are like temporarily insane boyfriends/ girlfriends. Remember how in college you'd have a friend who would be completely, utterly normal, but then after a break-up or something, they were still normal, except that somehow regarding this particular person they were crazy? They'd start showing up at such-and-such a bar because that was the bar their ex would go to, so maybe they could run into them, and they'd maybe stand outside the bar and wait or wander by the ex's workplace? Stalkery, right? Yes. And yet, I have watched the greatest minds of my generation slip into stalkerdom, and then back out again after the fever passes. And afterwards you could ask: Janet! What for you hang around Brad's workplace until 1 in the morning? She'd have no idea. A year later she would say, I remember being compelled to. I remember it made so much sense, and now I have no memory of why. This is the stalker scenario, and editors see it when they get the behavior that seems kind of creepy-- the weird friendly phone calls, the query put in the blog comment box, or God forbid showing up at the editor's office.

It's all about putting yourself in the other person's place. The writer thinks they're being a go-getter, taking charge of their own destiny. The editor doesn't know the writer from Adam and doesn't know if they're dangerous, so they react (reasonably) with icky suspicion.

Writers: to avoid this stuff, you have to look at everything you do and ask, "how will the editor as a person see this?" Editors, just so you know, they mean well.

Here's another one:

Only Author Syndrome Proper. This is what Cameron really gets bugged about and with good reason. These behaviors involve writers haranguing PR for more resources, bugging editors for a better deadline, a better cover, another re-write, etc. By "only author syndrome," Cameron is saying that these writers are acting like they're not used to having to share resources (editors). There's something to this, but it's uglier and sadder, really.

Cameron points out that writers need to realize that the editors are way overworked. They don't have time to deal with every writer demanding special attention. I think she's right that no writer has an idea of how busy an editor is. But here's where the editor and the writer are both getting screwed by circumstance.
Every piece of advice a new writer gets today says that the writer needs to be prepared to take the shepherding of their work into their own hands. Publishers often complain that writers don't take enough responsibility for their own marketing. Unfortunately, though, as marketing tasks shift to the writer as a member of the marketing team, no infrastructure to support this new integration has taken place. The writer is expected now to do PR and marketing and advertising, but you know what that makes this? A job. And on my other job in marketing, I actually do call my co-workers constantly: what were our sales today? Did Janet get that editorial turned in? Has someone answered that question? Can we have a quick call at two to go over the stuff for next week? That's what professional work is like. It's not surprising to me that writers treat books like work. They want answers yesterday because they have been given new responsibilities.

And yet. And yet. It's not working. Editors feel attacked and the writers feel like however much work they do, they can't win.

A lot of this would be solved, I believe, with the institution of some practices from the software industry: regular meetings on every project with all timelines shared with the author. Lots of answers simply written down and shared to the author. Maybe even an online project management system so that, instead of calling the editor, the author could see: ah, that manuscript was entered into the system on Date A, and is still waiting to be read. There is no news here. DO NOT CALL. Editors are suffering because they drew the short end of the stick. They are the front line, and also, they still have to be editors.

There's one more phenomenon I wanted to mention that was first observed by Greg Scott, a friend of mine who draws for a living:
In Your Head Syndrome.
"The thing to know," Greg said, "is that artists spend all day alone in their studios and much of that time they're engaged in long conversations in their heads with people they intend to talk to later. They've been hashing and rehashing this stuff all day. By the time they talk to you, they feel like they've already had this conversation-- why aren't you caught up? You spend all day in your head. It makes you crazy."

It does; it makes you crazy. I know it makes no sense, but that writer is basically dying to know if you've thought about her proposal, and it's making her crazy. I truly regret that she's gone nuts, but if you sat her down (and who has the time?) she would get it. She needs to figure that out for herself.

Anyway, I write this not to excuse bad author behavior, but to attempt an honest answer as to why writers do inexplicable and obviously stupid things.

Legend of Hell House (Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 34)

2011-06-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973)
Seen on: Netflix Streaming

Here is an outstanding haunted house film about what the characters call "the Mount Everest of Haunted Houses." It's not outstanding in context or for its time, but simply outstanding, and based on an outstanding book.

I hadn't seen Legend of Hell House since I was in college, where as an RA I showed it in a double feature with The Haunting at Halloween time. In the film, a quartet of people who truck in investigating the supernatural-- a stalwart scientist and his wife/assistant, a young, attractive spiritualist medium, and Roddy McDowall as a withdrawn psychic-- accept a one-week assignment to determine whether the haunting of Belasco Mansion, or Hell House, is actually haunted. Hint: yes.

I just read the source novel last week-- Richard Matheson's Hell House, and this is that rare case where the movie changes a little and produces some different feeling, but all in all creates a complementary set. The book takes place in Maine and the characters are all Americans, and the story is darker, more graphically violent and erotic. The movie, by contrast, owes even more to Robert Wise's The Haunting than the book owed to that movie's Shirley Jackson source: The Legend of Hell House is thick with fog and atmosphere, though when the action comes, it's plenty scary.

Here's a funny fact: I've read comments from people on the Internet who insist that they remember seeing what Pamela Franklin sees when she opens her eyes in the trailer. As far as I can tell from the research, this memory is false. This was always a movie that left the worst horrors to your imagination. But people's memories, like their angry spirits, can play tricks.

Check out the trailer.

LOST BOYS: THE THIRST: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 37

2011-06-17T23:08:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
LOST BOYS: THE THIRST

Understand: when the original THE LOST BOYS arrived in 1987, the vampire was mostly dead. The Gothic vampire resurgence that had begun in 1958 with Christopher Lee's Dracula had fallen apart some fifteen years earlier, wrecked on the shores of the fierce post-modern double blow of THE OMEN and THE EXORCIST. Hammer stuck around for a few years, but the vampire of old in his period costumes was well and truly staked.
Oh, there were vampires in the lean years that followed-- 1979 saw two of them; Werner Herzog's insane remake of NOSFERATU and Chris Langella's sexy-- and still Gothic-- Universal DRACULA, a filming of the Hamilton Deane stage play. There was also David Bowie, vamping and preening with Catherine Deneuve in the Cinemaxy 1981 THE HUNGER, a fine enough film. But even as Anne Rice was bringing back vampires in a big way on paper, the vampire world was drifting on the big screen.
In 1987, all of that changed. THE LOST BOYS (and yes, NEAR DARK, and right, I skipped COUNT YORGA, twice, but let's not make this a white paper, okay?) breathed new life into the genre. Keifer Sutherland's vampire lead David was a New Romantic vampire, very 80s, haunting a beautifully-realized California boardwalk and seducing young men and women alike with a crew of flying vampires who feasted on sun-bathing patrons and surf nazis. After 1987, vampires were back.
As I write this, that was twenty-four years ago. I mention all of this because LOST BOYS: THE THIRST, which you can catch on Netflix streaming as I did or pick up at Itunes or rent on Youtube (or heck, get a DVD, a format that did not exist in 1987 and will not exist much longer) stands at the other end of a long tunnel back to that period in the 1980s. Unlike the THE TRIBE, first Lost Boys sequel, THE THIRST has an idea about where vampire movies have gone. It's a direct-to-video sequel, yes, but that means the makers have some room to play and experiment. What I loved about is that it takes time to comment on a whole world of vampire tropes that simply did not exist when Joel Schumacher filmed the original, such as: sexy vampire raves, raves themselves, designer drugs, paranormal vampire novels, familiarity with X-Files-ish alien invasion scenarios, vlogs, ebay and the slow disintegration of the direct-market comic book industry, Lara Croft, and more. Oh, this is a B movie, with a lush Capetown, South Africa standing in for the West Coast. But I'd much rather watch a B picture like THE THIRST that knows something about vampire films-- that has some real heart pumping under the deliberately cheesy dialogue-- than sit through self-important and ultimately empty AAA stuff like Coppola's dull BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA or Wes Craven's wasted DRACULA 2000.
So what have we got here? In LOST BOYS: THE THIRST, Corey Feldman, doing his best Snake Plissken impression, returns as burnt-out vampire hunter Edgar Frog, accepting a job to look for the teen brother of a famous vampire romance novelist. The brother has been kidnapped by X, a rave DJ who has a plan to turn thousands of teens into vampires. Not a bad plan, since in today's universe, many of them want to be vampires anyway.
The movie plays games with people's expectations of vampires, with Feldman arguing with the sexy novelist about how she's "making people think vampires are sexy." But of course they are-- Feldman is a zealot who refuses to see it. And besides, it's his universe, where in the end, the vampires deserve to be killed. The movie follows all the rules set up for the Lost Boys universe previously-- here, a vampire who creates a bunch of vampires remains tied to them, and when he dies, those who have not completely "turned" have a chance at humanity again.
I love how this movie moves like lightning while remaining totally aware that Edgar Frog is a character who was absurd in 1987 and has grown middle-aged and absurd and still fighting what he regards as the good fight. Edgar cracks wise and the movie knows he's got a screw loose, but the man is sincere about head vampires and the havoc they wreak. I also love a late call-out to Matheson's I AM LEGEND, proving that these guys who have known how that movie should have been made.
We get vampire wire-flying and vampire sword fights and lots of awesome street-level vampire weaponry. Lots and lots of exploding vampires, who either burst like brilliant starshells or splat like blood-filled balloons. (I'll admit I have never glommed onto when they do one versus the other. Maybe it's random. Who cares?) It's as though Edgar Frog has been set loose in the Twilight universe and promptly started trying to blow everyone up.

The movie makes a genuine attempt at both telling a drive-in-level followable story while filling it with winking one-liners and vampire pop culture references. I really enjoyed THE THIRST for what it is: a great time kicking vampire butt and reminding us that there was a time when vampires were the bad guys.

Pacer Review: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 39

2011-06-16T09:00:00.001-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Newcastle Pacer Reviews Alex Van Helsing Series
Check it out-- Darla Welchel took the time to review the first two books in the Alex Van Helsing series, including the upcoming Voice of the Undead:

Henderson's follow-up novel to Vampire Rising, Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead, due to be released July 26, 2011, takes our young hero into greater dangers as his work with the secret society of vampire hunters continues.

The book begins with a nail-biting motorcycle chase and of course, more vampires. Van Helsing soon uncovers a plot to turn Glenarvon's sister school and its students into mindless killing machines. And he also realizes that one mad vamp chick has a personal vendetta against him.

Armed with an arsenal of cool toys that would have James Bond envious, Alex takes on the bad guys and gals with fangs and attempts to save the world once again, this time, from a truly vile vamp called Ultravox.

Written with young readers in mind, the Alex Van Helsing series is written with more action and less clever dialogue, but still the story held my attention. The hero will appeal to young boys, so if you have one who is a reluctant reader, these books might just be the ticket to draw him into the world of literature.

Although the target audience is young males, I believe girls will enjoy the tough vamp-kicking girls in the books as well. Plus there is just enough budding teen romance to entice young girls - nothing as steamy as Twilight.

Check out the rest here!

BRAND NEW ALEX VAN HELSING TRAILER! Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 41

2011-06-14T08:16:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

CHECK OUT THE BRAND NEW ALEX VAN HELSING: VOICE OF THE UNDEAD TRAILER.

I'm really happy with how this trailer came out because I like that it gives you a quick idea that this is a series about vampires + spies. All in 30 seconds! The trailer-- everything here is animated-- was created by Jake Maymar of New York, voice by Voice Talent Now.
Pass it along!

Casting the Alex Van Helsing Movie: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 42

2011-06-13T08:39:00.001-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Casting the Alex Van Helsing Movie
No, there isn't an actual movie. (Not that I know of.) But the cool folks over at the blog My Book, the Movie asked me to do a post on how I'd cast an Alex Van Helsing film if given a shot. It's a fun question because in real life I have a suspicion that the author is the last person anyone asks.

Sangster? That’s easy. Mr. Sangster, Alex’s insanely fit, machine-gun-wielding, enigmatic literature teacher, is patterned after Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 2. In fact, the first time we learn Sangster’s secret, it’s in a scene where Sangster rides the Triumph that Cruise rode in MI:2. So, over a decade after MI:2, Cruise is still your go-to guy for Mr. Sangster.

Check out the rest.

Blood of Dracula: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 44

2011-06-11T16:43:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
BLOOD OF DRACULA (1957)
After a decent writing session I kicked back and watched the glorious 1957 "Girls Gone Vampiric" movie Blood of Dracula AKA Blood of the Demon AKA Blood is My Heritage.

Mind you, this is not a Dracula movie and it probably would have done better had it gone out under a name similar to the earlier works of the same crew, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and I Was a Teenage Werewolf. But who cares? Halfway through this movie, when a Fabian-like "bad" boy interrupts a girls'-school pajama party to croon a mildly rock & roll number ("Puppy Love," but not the one you know) I turned to my wife and said, "this is officially the best 1950s girls' school vampire movie ever."

The plot? Teen Nancy is a girl with some behavioral issues and a nasty dislike for her new step-mom, so in true 1950s movie fashion, Nancy's Dad ships her off to the Sherwood School for girls, led by the well-meaning and long-suffering Mrs. Thorndyke.

No sooner does Nancy arrive at Sherwood but she is harassed and then recruited by the girl gang called "The Birds of Paradise," who are monstrous, monstrous girls engaged in such well-known gang activities as flirting, having sleepovers and going on scavenger hunts. Also, the gang leadership demands they clean up after themselves and is a respected teacher's assistant. Somewhere these rebels have missed the concept, but luckily Nancy is a genuine rebel with genuinely anti-social tendencies, so naturally Nancy is soon under the close study of Mrs. Branding, a psychiatrist who has some kind of theory about unleashing our inner demons, or something. Did I mention that Nancy becomes a vampire?

This movie is fantastic. Yes, it's full of leaden performances, a plot that makes no sense, and stupendously stupid dialogue. But I couldn't take my eyes off of it-- it's easy to make fun of movies like this, but it's impossible to make them boring.

Vampire Lovers: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 45

2011-06-10T09:00:00.002-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Ingrid Pitt in Vampire Lovers

I caught The Vampire Lovers on a big screen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and I realized that the DVD era has brought a few curses along with its blessings. Of the good, thanks to DVD and VHS before it, we are able to see an old film whenever we want. I have The Vampire Lovers on DVD myself, in fact. And most of the times I've watched a movie and studied it, I've watched a home video version. But I realized while watching the movie in a theater that theaters give us the gift of focus. In a theater, we delegate to a third party the authority to tell us to shut up and listen, to sit quietly in the dark. I'm used to this for brand new movies, but I have to search for it for older titles.

I tend to watch movies as thought I'm studying a problem, letting the movie play while I thumb through four or five different books on movies, and tabbing over to look up various details. (With this movie, it's, Who's that playing the innkeeper? Is that castle set the backlot at Elstree or Bray Studio? Wait, this would be 1970, so it has to be Elstree, so when did that transition happen again?) When you watch an older title in a theater you get the chance to think of it by itself.

The Vampire Lovers is a Hammer Studios adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla. Carmilla was probably the first vampire story I ever read, a languid, erotic and romantic story of a vampire woman who comes into the life of a young noble girl and nearly destroys her. It's an extremely important story.
Everyone always remembers that Carmilla was a lesbian but they rarely seem to remember what an exciting b**** Carmilla is in Le Fanu's story. She whines petulantly when she doesn't get her way, smugly insults peasants and comes on a little strong with everyone. She's dashing and brash. She's a con artist, too, running a regularly-repeating long con where the mark is always a pretty and naive noble girl and prize given up is the mark's life.
Carmilla came out in 1872, fifty-three years after Polidori's The Vampyre but certainly in that tradition of dastardly and erotically powerful noble vampires. The date also puts Carmilla twenty-five years before Stoker's Dracula, which would revisit several of these themes, though with nowhere near Le Fanu's gift for prose:
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever". ("Carmilla", Chapter 4).
I loved Le Fanu's use of time in his story, note how he mentions the "hour of apathy;" in fact Carmilla is full of ennui, of slow walks and lounging, waiting for something to happen. Punctuated with vampirism and violence.
The Vampire Lovers attempts to take Carmilla and tell it as a Hammer movie, and why not-- the Hammerscape, a strange Euro-Britain of rolling fog and gorgeous castle sets, is on full display here. In fact, I'm not sure it's ever looked better, because The Vampire Lovers manages to display in one movie every graveyard, haunted wood, foggy court, broken down castle, and musty crypt ever built for other Hammer movies, with a few more new ones thrown in.
The movie, like all Hammer Films, operates within a rigid fictional class system where everyone's behavior is pre-determined. Carmilla's scam works this way: her mother/aunt/older companion drops her off at a nobleman's castle, protesting that she must hurry to an emergency meeting elsewhere; could the master of the house allow Carmilla (called whatever she's called) to stay with your daughter? Because they are of the same class, the imposition is acceded to inside a cloud of understandings and gentleman's agreements.
We see the scam play out twice in The Vampire Lovers, once with Laura (the first girl here, the Final Girl in the original novella) and then with Emma, who becomes the Final Girl.

There are problems everywhere-- it's troubling that we conflate Carmilla's lesbianism with her villainy, because she is a villain, she lies and she kills with no remorse. And Ingrid Pitt, who is an enchanting actress, is still a very strange choice for Carmilla because she's about fifteen years too old. Maybe the problem is that it's hard to find a 19-year-old who can play a centuries-old noblewoman. Also, the movie seems to suggest that Carmilla is changing the rules and has special feelings for Emma-- which would add a special crime-drama tragedy to the piece if it were explored more. And of course the movie is mannered, as all Hammer's are, with language as formal as its attire. The acting is mannered, too-- all of these actors could probably appear very normal in another film, but on these sets they are stagy and expressive. Watching Hammer, you are watching a universe that plays by its own rules.
The Vampire Lovers comes very close to capturing the ennui, romanticism and action of Le Fanu's story, and at the same time is a fine example of Hammer Horror. If you can'tcatch it on the big screen, you can now watch it on Netflix Streaming-- and put away the books.

Lost Sequel to Universal Dracula REVEALED: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 46

2011-06-09T09:00:00.020-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
The Lost Sequel to Universal's Dracula

In a glass case on a shelf nearby sits a document I don't own but hold for the Polidori Society-- the document was procured by a member of the Society at auction.

The booklet is unassuming-- 9 typewritten pages with slightly thicker reddish pages forming a cover, the whole booklet staple-bound by hand. It was written in 1939.

It is a treatment for a sequel to Universal's 1931 Dracula-- a sequel never to be made. That's a picture of it to the left.

The treatment, titled "A Sequel to Dracula," is by none other than Manly P. Hall, famed lecturer on the occult, the kind of detail that sounds made up, but isn't. Even better: apparently Hall was a pal of Bela Lugosi, and the pair sat down together to pitch a sequel to Dracula that would actually, you know, have Dracula in it. (Dracula had died at the end of the 1931, Lugosi Dracula, so the next Universal sequel starred Gloria Holden was the 1936 Dracula's Daughter.) If Hall was typing these pages-- and it's odd to see the old-fashioned key marks-- in '39, he would have been hoping for a 1940 or 1941 Dracula sequel.

Just think of it: Lugosi, not the drug-addled, doddering Lugosi of the 50's, but the lithe, talented Lugosi whose most powerful performance-- Igor in Son of Frankenstein -- had been completed just the year before and released in January of 1939. Next to him Manly Hall, who ten years before had released a book called The Secret Teachings of All Ages, sitting down to pound out a movie that would get Lugosi back in the cape. Not inconceivable-- the monster mash-up Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man wouldn't come until 1943, signaling the beginning of the end of the Universal monster era.

Again, this treatment was never produced. I'm not even aware that Hall's agent got the treatment to Universal, and we can't ask him, because Manly Hall died in 1990.

But the story rocks. It's not much more expensive on the page than the 1931 film, but it feels more grand: instead of the drawing rooms and the castle in the first film, Hall's story moves between an ornate mansion in Buenos Aires and Dracula's massive Yacht, the Nemesis III. In brief, the story tells how Dracula outsmarted Van Helsing and survived the attack at the end of the first movie, then bided his time till age ended Van Helsing's life-- and now he has come for Mina, now in her 70s, who has crossed oceans to escape him. He offers her new life, but ends up locked in vampiric combat with a vampirized Mina for the love of a younger victim.

In Argentina, no less. Boy, what I wouldn't give to see a computer-generated Lugosi do this movie...

COOL, no?

Slaughter of the Vampires: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 47

2011-06-08T09:00:00.004-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Slaughter of the Vampires, AKA La Strage Dei Vampiri (1962)
There are very few phrases that will bring me running like Italian Gothic. When I was a kid I came across movies like Castle of Blood and was entranced by these black-and-white stories of witches and vampires. True to the form, Slaughter of the Vampires is a dreamy, elegant vampire movie resplendent with dark castle walks and stilted, overly formal language. The movie tells the story of a young nobleman whose wife is quickly seduced and lost to a mysterious stranger, the vampire played by German actor Dieter Eppler.

Movies like this are so simple and sincere as to almost work as fables; they are the vampire story distilled to its essence-- the vampire here seduces the gorgeous Graziella Granata with moonlit poetry: I am from the past, he says. And I carry with me the present and the future. He promises that he sees more in Graziella than she sees in herself, and only he can bring the beauty he sees to life. But of course the transformation he promises is in fact a degraded and dark one.

You don't watch movies like Slaughter of the Vampires the way you watch, say, Blade. When I first encountered Classic Gothic horrors, I felt as though the dubbing were not dubbing but some strange language from another world, a world more real because of its falsehood. I still feel that way. Classic Gothic has to spin itself out and cast its spell.

I caught this movie just this week on Netflix Streaming.

Here's a trailer that uses the garish alternate title CURSE OF THE BLOOD GHOULS.

4-Star Review of Voice of the Undead: Countdown Minus 48

2011-06-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
I Live, I Laugh, I Love Books reviewed Voice of the Undead!
Okay, can I just say that the first reviews you get of a new book, especially before it comes out, are terrifying. After all, the book is going from zero reviews to now one, now two-- so think of the weight of a bad review that represents 50% of the available reviews. But anyway, Lucia of Houston (Clear Lake, one of my own high schools!) actually liked Voice of the Undead, and I was thrilled to see how much:

Once again, Jason Henderson does not disappoint with this clean young adult adventure fit for paranormal fans of any age. This title was even better than the first, with an even scarier villain and much higher stakes. New characters are introduced, and several play bigger roles in this one. There's a bigger mystery element in Voice of the Undead, and some characters take a turn for the evil as time goes on.... It was exciting, and I couldn't stop reading until the very last page.

You can read Lucia's fantastic review for which I'm so grateful-- and yes, relieved-- here.

Thanks Lucia!

Lake Geneva as Byron Knew It: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 49

2011-06-06T17:28:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
The New York Times looks at Lake Geneva as Lord Byron knew it.

The Villa Diodati, where John Polidori was inspired to write The Vampyre.

The Alex Van Helsing series takes place on and around Lake Geneva because of the importance of the place to vampire literature. It was here that in 1816, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, the soon-to-be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Claire Godwin and Dr. John Polidori gathered and told ghost stories. Understand that this was June, but not a June we'd recognize. A volcanic eruption in Asia had cast an ashy pall over Europe and plunged Switzerland into a soggy, cold mess.

Writer Tom Perrottet paints a splendid picture as he explores the Villa Diodati (Byron's rented villa, where the action climax of Vampire Rising takes place) and remembers the Haunted Summer:

The gate was open, so I blithely strolled into the estate intending to knock on the door. As I drew near, I could easily imagine the bohemians of 1816 gathering by candlelight in the upstairs dining room to debate and carouse. Byron’s initial resistance to resuming his affair with the dark-eyed Claire did not last long. (“I never loved her nor pretended to love her,” he later wrote, “but a man is a man — & if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours — there is but one way.”) Sexual tensions festered as Dr. Polidori fell in love with Mary, and wild rumors began to spread among English visitors to Geneva. Curiosity seekers passed by in boats to peer at the women’s underwear on the washing lines — evidence, it was believed, that the Villa Diodati was a virtual bordello. Others would stop Byron on his evening rides to accuse him of corrupting the local girls and youth. The whole Swiss setup, one British newspaper reported back in London, was a sordid “league of incest.”

Wonderful article; read the rest here.

You can't get vampire literature without the Villa Diodati. Without the Haunted Summer and the rift that formed between Lord Byron and his physician you would have no The Vampyre, which created the first modern vampire. Without The Vampyre, there would be no Dracula.

Of course, these people are all characters in the background of Alex Van Helsing-- sometimes not even the background. I've made a conscious decision to have no flashbacks or scenes set in the past, so what we learn we learn from what the characters tell us. But in the world of the series, Byron is still around, and very much a threat-- and so is Claire. Polidori? The one who died of a drug overdose, a pathetic wretch to the end? Maybe not so much. pathetic, wretched, or dead when everybody thinks.

Note-- I've posted reviews of one movie about the Haunted Summer starring Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley here: Rowing with the Wind.

Samson Versus the Vampire Women: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 51

2011-06-04T09:20:00.002-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today: Samson Versus the Vampire Women

This is wonderful-- a ten-minute montage of the best gags from the MST3K version of Samson Versus the Vampire Women.

For the uninitiated:

Samson was the American name for El Santo, the Mexican Superhero/Wrestler of comics, books and movies
Samson Versus the Vampire Women is a movie I have in both English and Spanish-- I still have a fondness for the awful American dubs of these movies, which were all produced by American shlockmeister K. Gordon Murray. These Murray dubs used to show up a lot on basic cable midnight movie shows. Hey, I feel a debt towards Murray-- without him I never would have discovered foreign horror in the first place.

Enjoy!

Johnny Depp Revives Dark Shadows: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 52

2011-06-03T07:42:00.000-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

Johnny Depp in Dark Shadows. I've written before how much I've recently come to love Dark Shadows:

Dark Shadows concerns a lot of things, because it's a soap opera, but chiefly it concerns vampire Barnabas Collins, who has returned to the stately Collinwood in coastal Maine, where he plots to find his lost love and control the people around him. On Netflix streaming, you can literally watch this series the way it was first intended, one episode after the other. Of course that would take years.

In the early 70s Dan Curtis produced two movies in the universe of Dark Shadows and I recommend both of them. But now we're starting to get more details about an event that has Dark Shadows fans in a tizzy-- Tim Burton directing a new Dark Shadows with Johnny Depp as Barnabas. "What I’d like to do," says Depp,"is maybe stretch [Barnabas] out a bit — in the extreme. Just ever-so-slightly take him a little further, beyond what may be considered… corny.”

I'm not sure what that means. But I know this will be good. And if it's not you've got years and years of the original to watch.

Check out the article at EW.

What is Jason Henderson Reading?: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 53

2011-06-02T08:17:00.002-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:

What is Jason Henderson Reading?
I was asked to contribute to a blog run by a group called Campaign for the American Reader on what I tend to read, filtered through what I happened to be reading at the moment. I loved this assignment because I got a chance to talk about how important reading is to me-- and moreover, how much I've come to believe that you can do yourself a disservice by reading too much depressing material without letting up.

For several years nonfiction dominated my reading list until it began to overwhelm me; I was reading a lot of cynical war histories and after a while it was seeping into my everyday thoughts: everything in life was a cluster**** like the wars I was spending all my time reading about. This brings up another important point: no reader gets out of a book completely untouched; you will be affected by what you read. This means you should think carefully before spending time with a work. I still read some depressing nonfic, but I try to mix it up a little more.

Check it out for my thoughts on the Annotated Dracula, Danny Peary Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, and how much everyone is going to love Ernie Cline's Ready Player One.

Go to Writer's Read: Jason Henderson.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Trailer (Clean): Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 54

2011-06-01T09:49:00.002-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
The trailer for David Fincher's English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Of course my blog usually concerns itself with horror, and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a noir thriller that verges into horror while remaining an almost crystal-pure modernization of an Agatha Christie-style mystery. Just look at this trailer. Cannot. Wait.

Original Vs. New Fright Night Trailers: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 55

2011-05-31T08:49:00.001-05:00

With Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today:
Fright Night.

The original 1985 Fright Night was a loving ode to vampire films, about a boy who teams up with a washed up horror host (played by Roddy McDowall) to face a vampire who has moved in next door. There are so many layers of vampire geekdom here, starting with the basic plot lifting a key element of Dracula-- the new neighbor is a vampire. In the original, the vampire was Chris Sarandon-- this Summer we see it all again with Colin Farrell. Here are trailers for both. The remake of Fright Night opens in August.

Original Fright Night Trailer

Fright Night Remake Trailer

World War II Vampires, #happymemorialday , Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 56

2011-05-30T09:14:00.002-05:00

With Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today: The Keep.
Looking for a vampire movie that will keep you in the Memorial Day spirit? How about a movie where Nazis are stupid enough to open an ancient vampire's tomb, and he proceeds to make mincemeat of

them. Also Scott Glenn plays a fearless demon hunter. This movie is utterly forgotten-- and utterly cool-- and you can see it now on Netflix streaming.

Here's a trailer-- Happy Memorial Day!

Lair of the White Worm: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 57

2011-05-29T09:09:00.002-05:00

With Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down 60 cool vampire things. Today: Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm.

White Worm is probably the best-known story by Stoker not to have "Dracula" in the title, and the movie by Ken Russell starring Hugh Grant is an 80s vampire classic. Check it out!

Horror Hotty Veronica Carlson (#peopleiveseenlive) : Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 58

2011-05-28T09:42:00.002-05:00

With Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead coming out on July 26, I'm counting down sixty cool vampire things, one per day. Today's cool vampire thing: swinging 60's scream queen Veronica Carlson.
Several years ago I had the chance to chair a panel featuring actresses who had starred in vampire films in the 60s.

On the panel was Veronica Carlson, a statuesque and stunning actress who was the perfect plainspoken, witty foil for the more baroque Ingrid Pitt. Carlson was in a number of Hammer films, including Horror of Frankenstein, which I regard as an unsung masterpiece, but none was better than Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. That movie had it all: Christopher Lee as Dracula, an amazing series of rooftop sets, and of course, Hammer Glamour.

Here then is a video tribute to the lovely Veronica Carlson, cool vampire thing of the day.

For the Blood is the Life: Voice of the Undead Countdown Minus 59

2011-05-27T09:16:00.002-05:00

With 59 days until the release of Alex Van Helsing: Voice of the Undead, I am counting down 59 cool vampire-related things. So keep coming back!

The Alex Van Helsing series exists in a world where high-tech spies must contend with vampires from classic literature, including Dracula as a key work, but also digging deep into lesser known stories. These old stories are my companions as I write and they've been with me since I was a child.

Today's cool thing is a favorite classic story (and a video with the same name): For the Blood is the Life by F. Marion Crawford, one of my favorite classic vampire tales.

For the Blood is the Life tells in just a few pages a romantic story of an old castle, stolen treasure, and a murdered innocent gypsy girl who becomes a vampire. There's a really nice image that sticks with me today of the ghost of the vampire, visible upon the grave and reaching out for victims, but unable to rise. You can read the story here. You can also find it in many collections, including one bearing the title of the story

When the moon rose high that night the shadow of that Thing was not alone down there upon the mound.

Calabria, Italy, where For the Blood is the Life takes place.

Happy Birthday Peter Cushing: VOICE OF THE UNDEAD Countdown Minus 60

2011-05-26T12:34:00.001-05:00

Holy Mackerel! We are now just sixty days from the July 26 hardback release of Voice of the Undead, the second book in the Alex Van Helsing series. So to that end I am going to be counting down sixty cool vampire things, one cool vampire item per day until D-Day.

Today is very special, though. It's the birthday of Peter Cushing, who played the best Van Helsing ever, in a series of films for Hammer Studios in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Oh, sure, Abraham Van Helsing in Stoker's Dracula was an elderly (if vigorous) oddball with a strange German accent. But in my mind, it's Peter Cushing who really captures the character who looms in the background of my own imagination. Peter Cushing's Van Helsing was driven, serious, athletic and had a commando-like ability to instantly spring into action, no matter the personal danger.

Here's a favorite moment that gives you some idea of what I mean-- Van Helsing taking the matter of purifying a fresh vampire bite in his own hands by hanging onto a heavy chain and applying a hot iron to his own neck. You do not mess with Peter Cushing.

Tune in tomorrow for VOICE OF THE UNDEAD Countdown Minus 59!