Letter To A Child Whose First Book was GUSTAV GLOOM

Posted on May 4th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

Tags: Gustav Gloom, Mark Twain, Sherlock Holmes, The Princess Bride, The Three Musketeers, Tom Sawyer, writing | Category Books, Gustav Gloom, Writing

Story Excerpt: “The Old Horror Writer”

Posted on May 1st, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

Available at Nightmare Magazine starting May 4, “The Old Horror Writer,” a masochistic portrait of how I might very well end up.

Excerpt:

“He’s an old man now, twenty years removed from his last novel and ten from his last short story; he’s no longer a member of HWA or of SFWA, and the agency that used to handle his interests now has him in their estate file, sending out occasional contracts and two-digit checks whenever some foreign-language magazine situated in one of the new country deigns to ask permission for, let alone, compensate, a reprint. Out of curiosity I made myself a voice on the phone and had to stay on the line with them for ten minutes before the receptionist was able to connect me with the member of the agency who knew who he was.  The address they had was a post office box, and they hadn’t mailed anything there for three years. I linger in the post office lobby for a few days waiting to see if he ever shows up, but he never does; I suspect he’s paid for years in advance and forgotten that the address even exists.

“Fortunately I have other methods, and I soon appear in front of his home, which is not so much a home as the place where he wound up. It’s a decaying little house in a decaying little neighborhood, a place of boarded-up windows and rusting automobiles, with a front walk stained by brown patches left by years of fallen leaves that were allowed to rot wherever they landed. The sky is gray, the air oppressive, in the way it’s pretty much been everywhere, the last couple of decades. Before I get to the door I hear the TV playing something with a theremin score, and wonder whether it’s Forbidden Planet or one of its many imitators, before I knock and hear the old man grunt as he gets up from his chair…”

Tags: horror, Story Excerpts, writing | Category Books, Excerpts, Horror, Writing

The Last Stand of The Original Nick Fury

Posted on April 30th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

Look. If you’re not a particular comic book fan, I’m going to cut through the initial confusion in record time, giving you the bottom line without miring down in endless recapping of storylines that are better on the printed page.

In the comic book world, there are two separate characters named Nick Fury.

They have a lot in common. Both are tough, pragmatic military men who have lost an eye in combat. Both are Colonels. Both frequently wield authority far greater than you would normally expect from a Colonel.

One is a white dude who fought in World War Two but is still active well into the new century, requiring some retroactive plotting to explain why he never gets any older. You don’t need to know the details. He is a cigar smoker who talks, for the most part, like a blue-collar guy.

The other is a black dude who by his own admission was still a kid during Vietnam. He looks uncannily like Samuel L. Jackson and did before there were any Marvel movies for Samuel L. Jackson to play him in. He doesn’t seem to be much into cigars. He talks like an educated man, as played by Samuel L. Jackson.

They are not two different characters; they are different versions of the same character, created at different times, who for reasons too long and tiresome to go into now, except to say that they involve parallel universes, now occupy the same space.

For a time, there was a competition over which character would predominate; the white guy had the history, but the black guy had an international prominence worth billions. Ultimately, it seems like the black guy won out. If you pick up a Marvel Comic today in search of a guy named Nick Fury, he’s the one you’ll find.  Which is fine. In some ways, he’s a superior character.

The white Nick Fury? Was definitely taken out of commission, a couple of years ago, in a storyline so gaga that, again, I’m not going to attempt to recap it here. “Gaga” doesn’t do it justice. Maybe I’ll tell you in the thread. But not here. He deserved better.

And he got better, in a 12-issue series I just read in trade paperback.

FURY, by Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov, quickly reminds us that the man seems to be immune to the ravages of age, but after that leaves the realm of fantasy behind. It opens in the modern day, with Fury drinking in a hotel room, sometimes in the company of hookers, as he dictates the memoirs that detail his involvement in fifty years of disastrous foreign policy, from French Indochina to the Bay of Pigs to CIA drug smuggling and beyond. It’s all shades of gray, this account, with not all the enemies on foreign soil; and it details how Fury was wrist-deep in blood, for all of it, while the people who cared about him aged and were destroyed by disenchantment. Of particular note is the arc of a formidable woman who, aside from war, may have been the love of this Fury’s life. It’s so dark it’s ultraviolet.

Folks, I have long maintained that this team’s work on the MAX version of The Punisher was some of the darkest, smartest crime fiction of our time. Even with that frequently gamey creation, the Punisher, at the center of it.

Here, he gives us a version of Nick Fury that is even better – and that is even relevant to the world we’re now stuck with.

This may be the last stand of the original Nick Fury. I honestly hope so. To go from here from another wise-cracking battle among superheroes would be a serious comedown.

Tags: comic books, Garth Ennis, Nick Fury, Samuel L. Jackson, The Punisher | Category Comics, Commentary, Writing