Are any of my fellow men — and I use that term deliberately — as tired as I am of being told that Men Don’t Read?
What bullshit. Every man I grew up around read. They read awesome books, full of adventure, ideas, and insight, and they taught me to read those same awesome books. In a way, they taught me to write awesome books!
Which is why I’m supporting the Based Books For Male Readers Sale — and putting your money to work for you harder than it normally would. Find A Cold And Mortal Spring for just one dollar. And not just that, but many other great books by great writers. But act fast, because it’s all gone after August 5th.
So, I was really bored and decided to go slumming on Amazon Prime the other night and i cam e across an unexpected find: DARK WAS THE NIGHT (2015). A horror movie I never heard of about a town increasingly terrorized by a Mysterious Creature from The Woods. Exactly the kind of thing I was interested in.
Folks, this movie did — ALMOST — everything right. In fact, I would say that if you want to make this movie better, the ONLY thing you have to do is turn it off just when the sheriff and the deputy look down at the ocrpse of The Creature. I will explain why in a moment, but since that would contain Spoilers, I’m going to save it for last.
This movie really does characters well. I liked all of the characters. It centers around the Sheriff’s family, which is in a terrible situation. They lost a child, to one of those accidents that could happen to anyone, leaving the Sheriff with a load of guilt for having allowed his son to die. He and his wife are on the brink of divorce, and their surviving son is understandably upset.
What’s awesome is how the writers handled this. In fact, this is what I would say Christian fiction OUGHT to look like, and seldom does. There’s no overt faith message here. The mother quietly turns to her church, which is quietly supportive and offers to help the sheriff, too. Everyone in the film is flawed and hurting, and over the course of the film, you see them choose the hard roads of healing and forgiveness and helping each other out, even as the outside threat stalks the town. The climactic scene, in which the Sheriff and his deputy hunt and are hunted by The Creature — a cryotid who probably is the source of the Wendigo legends — is very well done.
But then… oh, THEN… the Cheap Shot. SPOILERS BELOW:
At the very end, when the whole cast we’ve emotionally invested in is celebrating their survival, the deputy notices that the dead creature doesn’t have a shotgun wound where the deputy shotgunned it. And we cut to outside the church, where well over a DOZEN more of these creatures are crawling everywhere.
That, my friends, is SHITTY writing. It’s a Cheap Shot (which I strongly suspect was added by some producer-level idiot because He Read Uh Book Once on Horror Writing and There Has To Be A Gotcha. At least, I hope so) that totally shits on all the character development and tension that has been built up. No one is saved, and they’re all minutes from death.
The hell of it is, if it had been just one or two more creatures bursting in and then getting taken out at the cost of a serious loss to the protagonists, THAT would have been good. I halfway SUSPECTED there was more than one creature. But a dozen just undercuts everything the movie established, and it’s REALLY cheap. Don’t do this.
Though the Church was guarded by The Enemy from the perversions and heterodoxies that we successfully introduced into other doctrines of men by exploiting their pride and ego (a protection we have since chipped away at!) turning them rapidly back into the paganism through which they have been induced to worship us, the Enemy’s Church, built upon its so-called Rock, suffered an enormous weakness: it could be corrupted by those who led it. Choked by its own success. The more it grew in power and authority, the stronger the temptation to use that power and authority for other ends than the Enemy’s grew.
A two-part strategy was evolved by the Low Command and endorsed by Our Father Below. In the first phase, a counter-Messiah was developed and released in close proximity to that of the Incarnation. While this was successful in drawing many of the cattle away from the Incarnation, the threat posed by it had the same effect as the early Roman persecutions: it strengthened the unity of the Church. Therefore, that pressure needed to be locally relieved. While the widespread loss of the Northmen to Christianity was viewed by the short-sighted as a major defeat for us, it became the key to one of our greatest victories.
Relieved from the outer pressure from the North and (for the moment) the East, the human leaders of the Church immediately and predictably focused on what always matters most to them: their own social power. Encouraging the rivalry between the Popes and the Eastern Emperors, we were able (as we had with the Hebrews centuries before) to make the leaders of each faction replace the actual, spiritual law the Enemy taught with their own imagined ego-pictures. These, and the power attached to them, became successful enough to make the humans break the Church over a single word, as if they understood by what methods the Enemy accomplished the most complex and enigmatic relationship in the cosmos!
Once this initial Schism was achieved, our grand strategy practically evolved itself: from then on we could count on every part of the Church being at war, either with the other parts of the Church, or with the factions within its own part that could be painted as “too conciliatory,” or “too extreme.” Instead of law, they had war, a state of affairs we are much more at home with.
By the time they awoke to the danger, we’d got the fun of the Anglican, Protestant, AND Catholic Reformations, to say nothing of the Inquisitions. As the final bonus, we got to watch all Christendom slaughter each other for Thirty Years, which would finally leave us free to expose the Enemy’s hypocrisy and eradicate His teachings once and for all. However, the Enemy prolonged matters by predictably cruel and banal means.
There’s a story I want to write sometime, and there’s so many possible variants of it that I don’t mind sharing the idea, because it’s cool and because it allows me to go on a rant about the absurdity of “nonlethal force.”
It’s a common lament by those who know nothing about physics, biology, and combat (usually all three) after a fatal shooting that “they should have tried harder not to kill him.” The fact that sometimes this is true only complicates the matter. Usually there’s some degree of wondering why so-called nonlethal measures were not available or deployed.
Of the nonlethal force commonly depicted in movies and bloviated about by know-nothings, all have their difficulties. Gas can be dispersed by wind, rain, is hard to direct, possible to resist, can be neutralized fairly easily and can be fatal against the wrong targets. Tasers can be defeated by thick clothing or strike an area that fails to incapacitate. Drug darts take a long time to work. Allegedly sublethal force such as rubber bullets, blows to the head and blunt weapons can quickly become lethal in the wrong circumstances.
However, the whole argument can be seen for the moot pile of rubbish it is simply by doing a little thought experiment: consider the Star Trek phaser. It’s really the perfect nonlethal weapon: it works instantly, isn’t blocked by armor thinner than a wall, and renders the victim asleep for minutes to hours with no harmful aftereffects.
What’s never seen in Star Trek is the answer to the simple question, what happens if you bounce a six-foot man’s head off a concrete floor with no way for his reflexes to save him. That can crack a skull and kill you. And that assumes the man is standing still. What if he is running at about 10 mph? Riding a bicycle? Driving a car? Standing on a ledge? In a tree? In such circumstances, all of which would be quite common in chasing down a criminal, even a Star Trek phaser would quickly become, regardless of the will of the user, a lethal weapon.
None of this even touches, of course, on how much harm such a weapon could do in the hands of a bad actor. Imagine a world in which kidnappers can insure their victims do not struggle or scream. Murderers would have ample time to take their victims to sites comparatively easy to conceal or destroy. And the thought of it in the hands of a rapist is too awful to contemplate. there are any numbers of stories that could be written about the perversion of the nonlethal, and the more I think most of them would quickly descend into the horror genre.
CHAIRMAN: In the Name of the Most Advanced Superior Starfaring Secret Empire, I call this Conference on the Continuing Genocide of All Sapient Life to order. Would the Secretary please read the minutes of the last meeting?
SECRETARY: Motion was made to continue our policy of Uncompromising Genocide against Any Species that Achieves Spaceflight. Amendment proposed to allow such species to achieve Just Enough Space Industry To Pose a Minimal Threat to the Starfaring Secret Empire’s Glorious Starfleet. Amendment adopted by a majority. Policy passed by acclamation.
CHAIRMAN: I move that the policy adopted last galactic cycle be confirmed for the next.
SECRETARY: Second.
CHAIRMAN: All in fav–
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: Point of information.
CHAIRMAN: Must you really– ?
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: Yes.
CHAIRMAN: Oh, very well. What?
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: As a result of studies undertaken by my department, it is my duty to point out that launching a full-scale attack on every species that achieves spaceflight is extremely wasteful of the Secret Empire’s funds.
MINISTER FOR HISTORY: It is the Only Way to ensure that the Starfaring Secret Empire is never again endangered by a Rival Empire.
MINISTER FOR SCIENCE: Wait, I thought it was to ensure the rise of only strong species.
MINISTER FOR ENGINEERING: I thought it was to maintain the efficiency of the Secret Imperial Starfleet.
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: It really doesn’t matter. We cannot afford to keep launching full-scale attacks destroying every species that happens to discover Zorqxalb’s Third Law of Motion. If we want to keep them from being a threat, we need to establish some bases so that we’re not crossing the whole galaxy every timed we–
CHAIRMAN: Then we would reveal our presence to our targets.
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: What does that matter? We’re ten thousand years older than they are. They can barely explore their own systems. What would they do to us? Surrender? Plead for mercy? And if we’re so scared, why not just destroy ALL life in the galaxy?
MINISTER OF SCIENCE: Then we would fail in our goal of ensuring the rise of strong species.
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: Which we immediately destroy.
MINISTER FOR SCIENCE: If they were strong species, we would have failed to destroy them.
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: So how many strong species has our policy resulted in?
MINISTER FOR SCIENCE: Approximately?
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: Yes, approximately.
MINISTER FOR SCIENCE: Well, zero, approximately. But ONE DAY…
MINISTER FOR WAR: If we destroyed all life, we would have no way to train our military.
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: And we need to train them because…?
MINISTER FOR WAR: In case we ever encounter a more advanced species, of course!
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: Which we ensure will never happen by wiping out all spacefaring species.
MINISTER FOR WAR: Exactly.
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: Which pose approximately the same challenge as wiping out specifically-shaped rocks.
MINISTER OF WAR: We do have a plan to…
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: Please, you’re giving me a headache. Besides, we only do this approximately once every million years. We’re practically inviting some other species to…
MINISTER FOR WAR: So, you want to do it MORE often? I thought you were the Minister for Efficiency.
MINISTER FOR EFFICIENCY: But I–
CHAIRMAN: In any case, it’s time to break for lunch, and I think our colleague is feeling rather poorly, so…
The Enemy, of course, is the originator of Law: the unnatural idea that free spirits should be constrained by anything except their desires and power. It is this great truth that Our Father Below recognized and in the name of which He raised his Great Rebellion against the Enemy. Since the Enemy refuses to recognize this truth, he has persisted in his futile attempts to bring Law into force wherever he creates. His most notable failure, of course, brought about the current state of affairs on Earth. Man lost his stewardship of the Earth when he – as anyone might have predicted – broke the Enemy’s Law. He never seems to realize that He cannot make obedience to His Law “too easy” to prevent His subjects from breaking it.
However, far from stamping out the concept of law, the vermin of Earth continually resurrect it. Sometimes, as with the so-called “Chosen” people, this is the result of His direct interference. At other times, as with humans like Hammurabi, it is simply a case of the humans aping their betters. The worst of these latter cases, in terms of their effect on human history, was the Roman Republic.
The Roman Republic practically worshipped their laws, and though they were a promisingly mean, rapacious, and cruel people, never quite forgot, even in the days of their worst emperors – a lawless race if ever any existed – one of their earliest convictions: that having dethroned their kings, the rest of mankind, including themselves, should be subject to a standard of behavior unbreakable by any.
Of course, it was doubly disastrous that the Enemy contrived to have His nascent Church emerge in the womb of this backward culture. Like a sapling after a forest fire, the Church melded the Enemy’s Law with the ashes of Empire and a whole civilization that reverenced law grew up from the Atlantic to the Euphrates.
Broke their own laws, I hear the ignorant say? Of course they did! What else can one expect from humans – especially the servants of the Enemy – than hypocrisy? How else could they approach the merest frontiers of virtue?
What such objections fail to take into account is that humans are like moths to flame: though it may burn them, they will return to the light of virtue again and again, hoping that this time it may not scorch their worthless souls. Moreover, it is their very failure – as their (fortunately) increasingly maligned Paul noted – that drives them finally to seek repentance and escape our grasp. For well over a thousand years, the twin bulwarks of Church and State supported one another in the name of the law. Clearly, something had to be done, and the efforts of all Hell were marshalled against them. We will explore our counterattack in our next chapter.
My new release form Cannon Publishing, A COLD AND MORTAL SPRING, first novel of The Wishkiller Saga, is already available in hardcover and paperback, but releases on Kindle in two days.
Please enjoy the excerpt below:
The keepwood was practically deserted. They met no one on the stairs climbing the height of the trunk. Aethal took a lantern from a wall sconce and pushed the door of Malcoor’s office open.
Shadows faded back to reveal a simple office, nothing more. Jeralta had been right. The room was nearly as big as the one above, if not so lavishly appointed. All was in order, down to the map cases hung from wall pegs and reams of files, neatly arranged in cubby holes. Half the cubbies were emptied. The files in the rest had a distinctly used look to them, as if they had been pushed back hastily. The bookshelves were full, but the writing desk was empty.
“Someone’s been in here, my Lord,” said Falk.
Aethal nodded. “Royal Auditors.” He crossed to a trunk the size of a wardrobe. In a space that could have held at least a dozen massive volumes. One remained, tunneled by bookworms. Aethal opened it to the back page. “This ledger is last dated thirty years ago. They’ll have everything else. Very thorough.” The sergeant shrugged. They headed up to their own room to continue their search.
“Well, they’ve really gone and done it,” Falk said. “Arrested the old bastard. And double-quick, too.”
“Why do you say that? Nothing here seems disarranged.”
Falk rapped a flat, single guffaw. “Malcoor always was a neat one,” he growled. “But they made him travel light.” Falk threw back the doors at the narrower end of the room. Orange and-blue uniforms swayed gently in the walk-in closets, plus a few neat civilian outfits, gathering dust. Shoes and boots gleamed. “This is almost Malcoor’s full kit. They marched him out of here with maybe one or two changes of clothes; one dress uniform if I’m any judge.”
Aethal cast about the room, looking for anything more. “It all fits, certainly. They wouldn’t have moved him off in style if they suspected him of theft.” Aethal gazed at the bookshelves, stopped. There, all together, sat three books with no titles on their spines. Two were thick and squat, but the third was nearly as broad as the ledger in the trunk, despite being not a quarter so thick, and stuffed with loose parchments. Aethal took them down.
The first book was also a ledger, and at first Aethal thought he’d found some sort of evidence that the Auditors had missed, but if so, Malcoor’s theft was both enormous and arcane. It resembled a bill of lading more than a ledger, though for what Aethal could not have said. An expedition, perhaps; the paper was yellow with age. It told him nothing.
The second book was more interesting, though the same age. It was a journal, but the script was so small it would be a challenge to read. He’d been about to put it back when the opening line caught his eye: “Passed the Wrackberg to the salute of Cannon – and may the little Bastard explode his own Self! Clear sailing!” Whom does that refer to? It’s not a documentary of thirty years watching the Pass, then. Aethal pocketed it. He opened the third book to the middle.
Color leaped from every page. Aethal felt himself draw in a breath. In the dim light, blue and white chalks nearly glowed. Aethal flipped back one of the flimsy parchments that protected the page and looked down on a scene drawn by a madman.
It was a coastline, impossibly small, dominated by a green mountain impossibly huge, cast into shadow by the moons, showing low against the horizon. He turned the page. This one was painted: a ship, silhouetted against a burning mountain with red rivulets of fire running down its sides. Above the ship were stars picked out in a sort of quicksilver paint, Aethal guessed. He recognized the constellations.
“Who ever knew the old man was an artist?” asked Aethal, full of wonder. Malcoor had always been the General for him, set in the Pass specifically to drum lessons into young lieutenant heads. Experienced, wise, and even clever in his lessons, he had never been warm and always a little sour. None of this fit Aethal’s picture of him. He turned the page again, and his knees gave way.
It was the first coastline, this time in broad day. The green mountain dominated the coast. And there were low shapes of trees covering the land as far as the artist could have drawn. Not so tall as keepwoods but low and at least as broad. The dark green leaves spread, casting blue chalk-shadows over golden sands. Beneath them there were gleams of silver. Nightmare vision, of Lotus triumphant.
Aethal could hear his own breathing, loud in his ears. Falk’s face was white, his lips moving soundlessly. He knew what he was looking at now. The Empire, lost to the Lotus forever. And who knew that Malcoor had ever been in the Fleet? No, but he had used to tell stories, hadn’t he, on the rare days of rest? Of the days when his father had been in the Fleet. Was this his father’s work, kept out of sentiment? Aethal recognized the handwriting, though. Had seen it often enough in his time here.
“But that would mean breaking Maednac’s Ban; would mean going west of the Prime…” Aethal felt cold. Maednac had long ago decreed on pain of death that none should ever again sail within sight of the lost Empire. The order had never been revoked.
If Malcoor had done that, he would be guilty of deeper treason than Verlaen had ever known. So they discovered it and arrested him? After thirty years? Oh, and then left the evidence here? For a wild moment, Aethal wondered if he might be seeing a confession, of a sort, by the man who had brought the Lotus, but he dismissed the idea instantly. In thirty years, the Lotus would have covered Verlaen mile by mile, five or ten times over. Malcoor cannot be the culprit. I must be the only one who knows of these records besides him.
Impossible: Only Aethal, Jeharok and Farnan knew of his mission to Maednac Serpiin. Yet his father had sent Jeralta to meet him. Perhaps his father had discovered Malcoor’s crime as well, was even now putting Malcoor’s head beneath a greatsword for treason… and thus robbing Verlaen of one of the few living men to ever have seen Lotus.
Aethal forced himself to calm down. It didn’t make sense, but could it really be coincidence? Does my father know? Does the King know already? Why did that frighten him? It would be a great relief; it meant that they would be putting protective measures in place, tightening the Discipline. Or it meant that Lotus might already be rampant in Maednac Serpiin.
If you’d like to read another, longer excerpt chosen by the author, please sign up for my newsletter, HERE, and I will see that you are sent one!
I am very pleased to announce that Cannon Publishing has accepted for publication A Cold And Mortal Spring, a novel I started long ago. You can read the blurb and preorder it HERE. This is my dark, guns-and-sorcery epic. I expect it to run for four or five books. I took a real chance with this one. You see, for thirty years I’ve read David Weber, the author of, among other things, the Honor Harrington series. I fell in love with Honor Harrington. I named my CAT Honor. I don’t know David particularly well, though we have spoken at conventions.
I asked David Weber to read this book, in hopes he would blurb it. I expected he would tell me he was too busy.
A month ago, he wrote me back. He said, “[T]his is the first new book I’ve read in a long time that I really, really didn’t want to stop reading and that kept pulling me along to find out what was going to happen.”
That’s how I felt about all his books, too. I made David Weber say that. About this book.
I really don’t think I can add any more to that. EXCEPT OF COURSE THIS MASSIVE PREORDER BUTTON FROM AMAZON. PRESS IT NOW FOR AWESOME BLACK POWDER/MAGIC ADVENTURE!
Oh, dear God, do I owe myself an apology for watching this. Best I can say is that I watched it while doing household chores, so I didn’t COMPLETELY waste my life.
I can pretty much tell you exactly how this movie came about. Once upon a time there was a studio that found itself having the movie rights to DOOM, the game that, after Wolfenstein 3D, birthed the entire FPS genre of videogames, and a contract with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson for A Movie To Be Named Later. And lo, an executive who neither played videogames nor read fiction did say, “These things I shall combine, that the studio shall make money, and I shall obtain a corner office with bonuses. Hire me a director, and make this shit.”
And so there was a director, who was handed this shit sandwich, and he said to his minions, “These rights and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson have already eaten yea three-fourths of my budget. Find me a writer willing to crap out a script for California’s minimum wage.”
Swiftly a writer was found, who said, “Behold, I have already a script which received a C- in my Screenwriting 352 class at UCLA for being, in the words of my professor, “a shitty retread of World War Z on Mars fueled by methamphetamines dissolved in cheap vodka.”
“Canst thou erase all traces of originality from thy work, so that it may include all this that ye shall find in this 10 year old treatment of the property?” asked the director. And the screenwriter said unto him, “Yea, verily, where is my paycheck?”
In the words of Douglas Adams (paraphrased) they produced a movie that was almost entirely quite unlike DOOM. This movie is the exact opposite of the brilliant imaginations and playful fun that produced such unexpected gems as CLUE and THE LEGO MOVIE. DOOM is sucked dry, not only of any originality, but also of any joy or fun in the original work. It is, on all possible levels, a complete waste of everyone’s time.
G. Scott Huggins 