H.P. not only nurtured Leiber’s writing aspirations, but, according to Leiber “Lovecraft was the chiefest (sic) influence on my literary development after Shakespeare.”

Literary critics of the genre go farther, calling Lieber an” apprentice to H.P. Lovecraft.”

Okay, I inferred I wasn’t going to do it, but here’s a quick plot synopsis:  The novel opens with our hero, Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz, landing in the spaceship Tsiolkovsky in what  he believes to be Canada, but turns out to be near Dallas, Texas.

The orbital democratic societies Circumluna and the Bubbles Congeries of which La Cruz is a marginal citizen, have long been isolated from Earth since nuclear war devastated the planet.

La Cruz, is a “thin,” a biological mutation to zero-gravity environments. So thin is La Cruz that he’s nearly a walking skeleton, being able to tolerate Earth’s gravity only with a powered titanium exoskeleton. But the Texans he meets are just as freakish. Through the use of hormones, they have an obtained average height of about eight feet, the same as La Cruz. (Everything bigger in Texas.) Through use of other hormones they have bred a Mexican underclass who are only about four feet tall.

The Texas political system is also freakish, seeming to rely more on assassination than the electoral process, sort of like a third world banana republic with really tall bananas.

The novel is a fast-paced, ever-escalating sci-fi opera.  But the thing about Leiber is that he manages to rise above the melodramatic cliché, just as his mentor Lovecraft did.

Much has been written about both, and their similarities and differences. One of the most astute things I’ve read, though, is a exegesis in Fritz Leiber: critical essays  by Benjamin Szumskyj.  Actually, it’s a collection of essays, and in one by Henrik Harksen, I found the author making the distinction between a “Chuthulu mythos” story and a “Lovecraftian story.”

The first is a matter of name dropping at best and out-and-out pastiche at worse. Leiber does none of these, not committing the soul-sucking sin of writing about Chuthulu like creatures, but he does create the Lovecraftian moods of dread and dark atmosphere. To quote Lovecraft, the weird tale must have an “atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.” (An aside: I was reminded by the current GOP primary debates by this statement.)

What’s remarkable about Spectre is Haunting Texas, is that Leiber manages to do this while creating a air of high, absurd comedy, seasoned with wacko politics that could only be grown in our fine state of super-inflated egos and hang-them-all; let God-sort-it-out justice.

But the backstory is even better, in my opinion. Leiber had made his reputation as a highly original sci-fi writer of literary merit a decade earlier. Then his wife died, and Lieber, the story goes, starts a drunken, potted wake that by some accounts lasts nearly ten years. He does little writing during this time, doing little more than get stoned. As he came out of this mournful blur, needing money, the result was Spectre.

A caveat: I haven’t been able to verify this story, to learn with certainty that it is one based on actual fact, but I love it, and therefore feel the unspeakable compulsion to share it with you here. To me, it seems just like something that the son of a Shakespearean actor, a correspondent with H.P. Lovecraft, and a student of Carl Jung might do. Therefore, I dub it a “True Story,” for it is definitely faithful to the mythos of Fritz Leiber.

The evil nihilist blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) makes a killing off the pandemic.

Best line of the movie: “Blogging isn’t writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.” Point taken, but I’ll trudge on anyway.

That line was the high point of the movie, in my opinion, unless you enjoy seeing your a few of favorite actress vomit and die (Winslet, Paltrow) and die. As some one who hates faux science in movies, it was faithful, as far as I can tell, to epidemiology and how vaccines are developed.  Perhaps because it was so faithful to science, it had the tone and entertainment value of a Discovery Channel documentary. I guess there’s just no pleasing me.

I believe there was a strong anti-meat message to the film, hence the pun on the word ‘meating’ in the title. (As people can be infected others coughing and even by touch, ‘meetings,’ public events and person contact are discouraged.)  Okay, it’s a terrible pun, but the ‘meat-eating is death’ message was pretty strong to me.

The pathogen (spoiler alert) was a mishmash of viral genes from bat and hog with some poultry thrown in for good measure. Again, this is science-based, though I haven’t heard of any bat genes in flu viruses before, but the many scenes of meat markets and kitchens seem to last a little longer than needed to set this fact. So I did a little research. Who was vegan or vegetarian among the cast?

On the left, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) dies within the first few minutes of the film. The culprit? Some sweet-and-sour infected pork. Was this irony or a message? The real, live Gwyneth is vegan.

• Gwyneth Paltrow is a well known vegan.
• Kate Winslet is vegetarian; that’s for sure, though I don’t know what flavor.
• Warren Fishburne is a non-dairy vegetarian.
• Jude Law was a vegetarian but supposedly gave it up.
• Matt Damon is a vegan.
• I couldn’t find any info on Director Steven Soderbergh’s diet.
• The info on writer Scott Burns is a bit vague too; though he is lactose intolerant, he’s also famous for the “Got Milk?” slogan.

I’ll update this post if I learn more.

The Brits will have to rely cricket bats and frisbied Sade vinyl albums. The Germans on their ingenuity and inventiveness and respect for order. But here in the states, we’ll have our rugged, go-it-alone individualism – and our .38 and .357 revolvers, .380 and 9mm semiautomatics, our 12 gauge shotguns and .357 revolvers. Not mention our muskets and practically every other personal firearm every manufactured and then some. (See Time Magazines article “Most Wanted Guns.)

The FBI estimates there are more than 200 million personally owned firearms in the U.S. That’s not counting those owned by the military, law enforcement agencies and those in held in museums. If you count those, then there’s probably one personal firearm for every man, woman and child in the country.

That’s a bullet in the brain several times over for every U.S. zombie even during the more advanced stages of the plague. So why does it go so badly so quickly. To be fair, it goes badly elsewhere too, but why here?

That’s the question I kept asking myself while watching Rammbock: Berlin Undead. (I was also wondering why Germans seem to make terrible zombie movies.)

Latest reincarnation of the cover for Awakening of an Alien God, which I hope to make available before the end of 2011.

As a nearly shameless post, ere’s an excerpt from a rough draft of the third of my triology, Awakening of an Alien God, where Uncle Robert, one of the main characters, waxes on about the issue in more erudite terms than I ever could. He calls it “epistemological solipsism,” but as I inferred, my fictional characters are often wiser, more educated than I am.  

When Bryan shook his head, Uncle Robert said, “Shit, I miss Wikipedia at a time like this. But I’ll try to explain. Methodological solipsism is the line of logic Decartes struggled with. It’s also the skepticism that the Wachowski brothers toyed with in the Matrix.
“Are we getting off track?” Laura said.
“No. Well, maybe we’re on a side rail, but we’ll get there eventually,” Uncle Robert said. “Anyway, what Descartes asked, as a kind of exercise, and the Wachowski brothers posited, is that there’s no way of being sure of objective reality. We could all just be brains in vats, being fed false info via some evil demon into thinking we have ‘real’ experiences.
“Epistemological solipsists are on the fence. You can only believe you’re your senses tell you, but it could be that there’s an external world, or that only the Self exists, but it’s impossible to say with any certainty which is true.
“Metaphysical solipsism says that the Self — your Self in this case — is the only existing reality. All other realities, including the external world and other persons, are representations of that self, and have no independent existence. I call this metaphysical narcissism, a lot of other brains in vats might argue with this term, but fuck them. ”
“Hah, Bryan, ” Laura said, and tugged the old man’s beard. “That’s how I know this isn’t just my dream when my dear Uncle surprises me with asinine jokes. I could never make this stuff up.”

But the disturbing (I still have to cringe and turn my head aside)  images of a young woman mutilating herself, aside, what I find most absorbing about this movie is the philosophical tone.

Most zombie movies have a nihilistic mood, or at least soon adopt one. By nihilistic, I mean that to survive, the protagonists must choose reject most commonly religious and moral principles — respect for the dead, sense of altruism — or they end up as zombies themselves. This is made easier by the de-humization of the zombies, which,  to give the survivors credit, is not a hard leap to make.

First there is that sense of meaninglessness as Julie, not yet a zombie, is killed in a stupid teenage motorcycle accident. But her boyfriend, his judgement addled by mind-blowing sex, has a solution. His father, a general’s solution, that is: Trioxin, a chemical designed to fight the war on marijuana that turns out to be to be a zombie-maker. (If there is irony here, I can’t remember where I put it.) Curt, the boyfriend doses her corpse with Trioxin, and wonders-of- wonders, she reanimates. Julie seems normal at first, with just a trickle of blood crisscrossing her pancake gothish makeup, but  the urge to eat brains, including the boyfriend she actually loves, keeps building. This is where the existentialism comes in. Given the choice, Julie decides she would rather be dead that a flesh-eating zombie, but no bullet in the brain kills Trioxin zombies. Suicide, jumping off a bridge into a concrete culvert doesn’t do the trick either. And Curt is no help; the love-craze boyfriend keeps propping her up. As the movie progresses, Julie discovers pain and mutilation will momentarily take her zombie mind off the terrible hunger. So to save Curt — and by implication her own soul — Julie resorts to more and more extreme acts of self-mutilation.

But she’s not a moral-robot — a zombie thinker if you will — for she allows herself to eat the bad guys, which in this movie flickers back and forth from the clueless Machiavellian soldiers to a clueless Machiavellian Latino street gang. (In this early 1990s West Coast production it’s hard to distinguish between the professional loot-for-hire and the amateurs, between the U.S military and an organized gang of thugs.)

Plot twists and turns follow, including cadres of conflict within the military research group, will to power, etc. But what sets this movie apart, IMO, is Julie’s continual existential struggle. The other recently zombified seem to have no problems taking a bite out of friends and fellow gang members. It’s only Julie-zombie who fights the urge to munch brains. It’s not said, but inferred: It’s the love she has for Curt that helps her remain human — more or less human — and raises her beyond mere automaton.

You know it’s all going to end badly — and it does, as do most zombie movies — but in the end, Curt must make his own hard choices, to help Julie-consciousness/pain be erased for ever.  Life is a sum of all your choices,” as Albert Camus wrote.

Her old bedroom was smaller than Marguerite remembered it, the door from the hallway so narrow that she had problems wedging her wings through it. Entering the adjoining bathroom was a even tighter squeeze. She had to duck her head and slither through the door sideways and still her wings caught. Finally she tore off a piece of the molding and punched out the adjoining two-by-fours. The  rest of the doorframe sagged and ceiling joists creaked alarmingly, but the remains of the wall held.

Inside the bathroom, her Zoloft prescription was in the medicine cabinet, just where she left it so many months ago after merging with the archangel Azazel.

The fact that she could remember such details was testimony of the evaporation of the insanity that had nearly completely clouded her mind after her transformation. Not only could she now remember specific details of her life as a human, those memories now seemed more complete, sharply enhanced with smells, sights and sounds, than when she had been human. She could remember her childhood, moments in the crib, the smell and taste of her mother’s nipple. And John, the feeling of falling in love — and of falling out of love with him — were both as powerful as the moment they had happened.

So what was she doing here with the bottle of Zoloft in her hand? The answer came slowly to her that as her mental facilities had returned so had the malaise of the spirit that had tortured her before her transformation.

It had seemed such a grand deal, one though by no means made in heaven, but promising salvation nonetheless. Azazel got oblivion, if not the ending he craved. (She could sense his presence there in the back of her mind, but it was as if he were sleeping.) She was spared what seemed inevitable as a woman of flesh and blood. The decay of flesh and mind that she had then thought was the cause of her unbearable sadness. Now she was beyond all the weaknesses of flesh; she didn’t even need to eat. The cravings had disappeared. She was beautiful, almost horribly so, and she feared next to nothing. But the horrible feeling of emptiness had returned.

I tried to find a nostalgia quote that was linked to old age, but I stumbled across this one by Lou and was happy to have (sort of) a reason to use it.

Why nostalgia for a zombie novel that is more than 50 years old?  Why did I take time off reading D.H.’s The Rainbow, to read an apocalyptic horror novel? Good questions all, for which I have good answers — I think.

First, a book such has The Rainbow deserves to be read in two or three consecutive sittings as it’s about learning the inner desires of characters and how one life flows into another. Not that I am Legend doesn’t have inner dialogue. In fact, it’s more about the protagonist’s thoughts about loneliness, despair and lost love than it is about zombies. The zombies are termed “vampires” in the novel, but they have a lot more in common with zombies. They stumble; they’re mentally impaired and were made undead by a bacillus rather than by supernatural means. But let’s not split – rather spill — body fluids. Whatever they’re called, the creatures in I am Legend serve more as the backdrop for the novel than the main plot line. They are “the situation,” if you will, not the reason entendre of the story.  The main theme of Matheson’s novel is survival, of social isolation, and of, as I inferred above, extreme alienation. He is completely dispossessed. Even his dog dies.

First, though, if you’ve seen the Will Smith movie by the same name, forget it. Though supposedly based on Matheson’s novel, it is about as much like it as a Big Mac and fries is like a dinner in a four-star restaurant. All the elements may be the same: meat, potatoes, a few vegetables, even some sort of special sauce, but the resemblance stops there.  Both will fill you up, of course, but one will merely sate, the other leave you with a feeling you’ve done something good and memorable for yourself; a moveable feast, if you will

This allusion to Hemingway may offend some, but I actually think stylistically that Matheson is the better prose stylist. Like Hemingway, his word choices are economical. He trims away the fat, and like drunken Papa, he doesn’t care much for lyrical prose. (What a departure both writers are from D.H. Lawrence!)  But Matheson does have these little moments as a writer when he inserts a short insight into his narrative that is more like buried treasure; almost poetry.

BTW, there have been two other movie adaptations of this novel. The 1971 film, The Omega Man,  with Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe and Rosalind Cash, was even less faithful to the novel than the Will Smith movie. The infected are purely zombies, but zombies who got a particularly nasty variety of fundamentalism along with their photosensitivity and flaking skin. You do get to see some brief nudity of Rosalind Cash – a real treat for twenty-something me when I first saw it. And the movie broached the inter-racial sex boundary of the early 70s, as I recall, when Charlie and Rosalind get it on.  But the movie doesn’t hold up, and if you enjoyed Matheson’s novel, you feel rather cuckolded. Hollywood cheated again. Hollywood is a whore. What else is new? However, Charlie and Rosalind do get it on, inter-racial sex, which was a sort of courageous thing to do on film in the early 1970s. So Hollywood, in typical cliche fashion, is sometimes the whore with the heart of gold.

By far the movie most loyal to the 1951 novel is the 1964 film, The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price playing the part of Robert Neville, a.k.a. the last man, a.k.a, legend to the vampires. Though I thought the  B&W movie very good — which was filmed in Rome, Italy — Matheson, who wrote much of the screen play, did not. He was evidently so embarrassed that he had his credits listed under an alias. You’ll find him listed in the movie credits as Logan Swanson. Hmm… I wonder how Richard, a.k.a, Logan, would have done it differently?

Enough digression. Back to the novel and my allusion to zombie nostalgia. Why did I read this novel that is primarily about a man cut off from all he loved and all that loved him?  Not to whine, but I suppose I was drawn to the novel because that’s the way I was feeling last night.  D.H.’s book is largely about family, love and connections, of which I have little to none these days. For some reason, reading the protagonist’s (Robert Neville) continuing angst, his near failing in to alcoholism, his return to sanity or something like it, and then his contentment with what he calls his solitary bachelorhood, was a kind of therapy. No matter that the novel ends in another personal tragedy for Neville. (It’s hard to do a spoiler on the book when Will, Vincent and Charlie all die at the end of their respective movies.) Despite all that, I came away from the novel feeling a bit more connected to people and the world at large.  It’s not if I not nearly as alone as Robert Neville. My lovers have all walked out the door, some to go back to their husbands, others for greener, younger haunts. My children are long gone and far away, and most the people I deal with day-to-day seem to be in some sort of consumer trance, buying what they can’t afford, moaning over their huge debt loads,  and still shopping like automatons anyway. But I’m good with all that, and I don’t need a drink to deal with the stillness of my own thoughts.  Now, perhaps, I can deal with the extended lyrical love poem that is The Rainbow without feeling depressed. Thanks, Richard.

The title of the panel could have well as been “Forgotten and Undiscovered Gems” for many of the books were well received decades ago but seem to have been forgotten by younger (under 30-35) readers. There was also some discussion as to the sad state of the NY publishing industry which has become, like Hollywood, afraid to take a chance on experimental fiction. That explains why we get so much crap Vampire Romance novels. The publishing industry has become conservative and hide-bound.

Anywhere, here’s a partial list. Feel free to comment or email me if you have additions:

Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant

Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle

The Goat Without Horns by Thomas Burnett Swann

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

The Queen’s Gambit: A Novel by Walter Tevis

Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

Wizard of the Pigeonsby Megan Lindholm

Cosmic Banditos by A. C. Weisbecker

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick (and practically anything written else by him)

KW Jeter was a protégé of PK Dicks; many of his books, but particularly Dr. Adder, Morlock Night, were both recommended by the panel.

A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn

The Last Starship from Earth by John Boyd

Sex and the High Command by John Boyd

anything Michael Bishop wrote

Nortstrilia by Cordwainer Smith

Lifekeeper by Mike McQuay.

Memories by Mike McQuay

…..well, there was a tiny one, but it looks like a blemish above Tara’s left eyebrow. Damn, if I can figure out a zombie tie-in to this. Let’s see, vanity? No, zombies are anything but vain. Something about the zombie-like impulse to get tats today. No, that’s an ungainly metaphoric stretch. If I’d been thinking ahead, I guess I should have had a zombie version of Tara (Buddhist goddess of enlightenment) done instead of a 1950′s pinup version.

Robert B.