Vlad Verano's Cool Cover

Here's the near-final cover art for One Who Disappeared, due in August from PS Publishing. Thanks, Vlad!

Great News All Over the Place

This week I turned in my 175,000 word manuscript for October Dark to Paul Miller at Earthling Publications. My shoulders feel a bit lighter. There's more work to do, but for the most part, the huge, huge project is over, and I'm very happy with it. I'd like to thank Christopher Paul Carey for helping me wrangle the first half of the manuscript into presentable form. And I'd also like to give a shout-out about his cool new compilation of the late Philip Jose Farmer's Venus on the Half Shell and others.

These last few months, with the huge workload on OD, I'd pretty much abandoned this blog. As we move closer to the publication of One Who Disappeared (scheduled in August) and October Dark (Halloween), I'll try to amp up the posts.

Very soon, Vlad Verano and are getting together to look over his (no doubt fantastic) cover art for OWD. I can't wait to see it.

More good news: This week Jeffrey Ford agreed to write the introduction to October Dark. I've been a fan since The Physiognomy, and I lately admired The Shadow Year, which pulls off what I've attempted with my 175,000 words in about a third of the space -- and in first person. (I wrote a draft of October Dark in first person, and found it deviously difficult when you're writing semi-autobiographically).

Even more good news: Last week I received word that Brian Stableford (!) has agreed to write the introduction to One Who Disappeared. I've been a fan of his since the Hooded Swan series (the Chris Foss paintings remain indelible in my psyche).

Universal Robots

Vlad V drew my attention to the play Universal Robots, a reworking of Čapek's RUR. I just now saw a link at Locus Online. Check it out. There's also a review of the play here. Sounds cool, and strangely in league with my novel The Luminous Depths. Too bad I'm on the opposite coast. (I wonder if they pronounce "robot" in the true Czech manner, ROW-but)?

An email from Ray Bradbury. . .

Some may wonder about this blog's new title (formerly Crazed Feuilliton). I changed it in anticipation of my new novel, which (as you can read in posts below) is partly a fantasia on Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Those familiar with SWTWC may recognize A Manual of the Air Kingdoms as one of the books Mr. Halloway finds in the Green Town library.

". . . to twelve stood a copy of Dr. Faustus, at two lay an Occult Iconography; at six, under Mr. Halloway's trailed fingers now, a history of circuses, carnivals, shadow shows, puppet menageries inhabited by mountebanks, minstrels, stilt-walking sorcerers and their fantoccini. More: A Manual of the Air Kingdoms (Things That Fly Down History). At nine sharp: By Demons Posessed, lying atop Egyptian Philtres. . . "
pg 196 Knopf 1983

As for my novel. . .

Last month, I decided to seek out Mr. Bradbury, and solicit his response to my writing a novel inspired by SWTWC which I was calling dark carnivals. Thanks to Pete Crowther my publisher at PS (and his good advice) I obtained the email address of Alexandra Bradbury, Ray's daughter (with whom Pete's working to produce a lovely series of special editions). I crafted a brief letter that sought to describe the plot of dark carnivals, as well outline my earlier projects. I appended a string of positive reviews, from Kirkus to Starlog. I sent if off.

A few days later I received a reply; not from Alexandra but from Mr. Bradbury himself. The gist: he thanked me for telling him about the project, and his only request concerned the title; would it be possible to change it, since readers might confuse dark carnivals with his book Dark Carnival? I responded: Of course! And so dark carnivals is no more.

Now the manuscript is living under a series of assumed names, one of which, I hope, will stick.
Among the latest:

October Dark

Shadowshows

The Autumn Dark

In other news, I'll soon be turning the One Who Disappeared manuscript over to Robert Wexler for typesetting. Vlad Verano and I met for coffee last night and mulled over ideas for his cover art. His reaction to the book was extremely positive. OWD is scheduled for August, and the novel formerly known as dark carnivals, for Halloween.

A recent letter

Dear Mr. Herter,

A few weeks ago, I chanced across a review of The Luminous Depths on the internet. Intrigued, I ordered the book through Abe.books, along with On The Overgrown Path. I have now read both books (twice) and cannot resist writing to tell you how greatly they intrigued and moved me. Partly, my strong response is probably due to the protagonists, Leos Janacek and Karel Capek. I have loved Janacek’s orchestral and piano music since I played some of the latter when I was a kid. And I remain a great fan of Capek’s War With The Newts, of which I have a battered, aged paperback edition I bought long ago and have re-read a few times. But mostly, your novellas captivate for the best of reasons: the stories they tell and the prose with which those stories are told.

Both books have about them an aura of mystery, the sublime (in the sense of awe), and the uncanny quite unlike anything I can remember reading. You manage to vividly, memorably evoke places and times quite unfamiliar, even before elements of the fantastic enter the scene. I regularly found myself re-reading long passages simply to savor the images they evoked and the prose itself.
. . .
I read in the review that you are seeking an American publisher for these books. I greatly hope you succeed. I can’t imagine these books not finding a receptive, reasonably broad audience here --- perhaps at least or more-so among non-genre readers than among genre readers.
. . .

In any case, thank you so much for these marvelous works. I am eagerly looking forward to the third of these works, One Who Disappeared, and to whatever else you write in the future.

Michael
Michael A. Morrison
Dept. Physics & AstronomyUniversity of Oklahoma


I'd like to thank Dr.Morrison.

Prepared Insects

Willis O'Brien's European Shadow -- not content to animate apes and dinosaurs -- was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1882-1965). Where O'Brien built his pathos from latex and aluminum dural, Starewicz turned to the natural world; more specifically, to the dead natural world. Instead of machine-shopped armatures, Starewicz favored what he called prepared insects (spiders, beetles, flies, augmented with clasps and wires which would amaze a clockmaker) as well as the infrequent prepared animal. His short films are hauntingly dark, humorous, with a heady Slavic bite. Curiously, Willis O'Brien's father was an entymologist. And it's interesting to note, these two masters of animation-in-depth came up with their startling, ground-breaking processes due to the simple urge to see a boxing match; Willis O'Brien's happened to take the form of two heavyweights; Starewicz's, two stag beetles.

Pioneer of Animation-in-Depth

Willis H. O'Brien (b. 1886 d. 1962) ran away from home starting at the age of 10, and spent his early life jumping from one job to another -- a rodeo rider, chicken farmer, factory worker, fur trapper, field guide and hostler, bartender, professional boxer, draftsman, freight train brakeman, surveyor, political cartoonist -- most before the age of 21. On a whim one afternoon, while modeling clay figures of prize fighters, he conceived of bringing them to life via the film camera. He called his method Animation-in-Depth; we know it as stop-motion animation. O'Brien was soon under the auspices of Edison's studios in the Bronx (where he received the nickname Obie, which stuck forevermore), and then on to newly-founded Hollywood. Footage from his breakthrough project, The Lost World, was presented by Harry Houdini to the New York Press as actual footage shot in the wild. It fooled them completely -- so unexpected was this new art form. By 1933, Obie was world-famous for bringing King Kong to life.

O'Brien was a brilliant technician, an artist, a wizard, a somber man; his later life had its share of tragedy, the contours of which, happily for me, accommodate those of my novel, a secret history of the fantastic film culminating in the summer and autumn of 1977.