Of Worms and Demons

 

Mysteries of the Worm: The Cthulhu Mythos Stories of Robert Bloch: edited by Lin Carter: (1935-1958; collected 1982): The first mass-market collection of all of legendary Robert 'Psycho' Bloch's Cthulhu Mythos stories from the early 1930's to the late 1950's. 

Like most writers writing in the Lovecraft vein, Bloch starts as a pastiche artist. Of course, Bloch knew and corresponded with HPL and engaged in a friendly game of killing each other's proxies off in stories (Bloch killing an HPL stand-in in "The Shambler from the Stars" and HPL reciprocating by killing 'Robert Black' in "The Haunter of the Dark.") 

Real-world poignance slips in as Bloch stops writing Lovecraftian fiction for a decade after HPL's death. When Bloch returns, he's much more assured and no longer writing pastiches in the last four stories in the collection. The best from this later quartet is "Notebook Found in a Deserted House" (1951), which is sort of like Huckleberry Finn vs. Cthulhu, if you can dig it. The collection takes its title from Bloch's most famous addition to the fictional books of the Cthulhu Universe, De Vermis Mysteriis. Highly recommended.

The Hollow Ones [The Blackwood Tapes Volume 1) (2020) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: As with del Toro and Hogan's previous collaboration, The Strain trilogy, The Hollow Ones seems to have an eye to becoming a TV series if it isn't in pre-production already. It's an enjoyable, fast read in the Supernatural Detective genre, pitting a young FBI agent and a mysterious British gentleman against supernatural shenanigans in and around the New York area. Recommended.

George Romero's Land of the Dead (2005)

George Romero's Land of the Dead (2005): written and directed by George Romero; starring Simon Baker (Riley Denbo), John Leguizamo (Cholo DeMora), Dennis Hopper (Kaufman), Asia Argento (Slack), Robert Joy (Charlie), Eugene Clark (Big Daddy) and Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy): 

George Romero's fourth Dead movie gave him a mostly name cast and a decent budget; Romero's own quirky muse caused him to use these things on what wasn't a horror movie at all, or at least not the horror movie the studio thought it would be getting. But George Romero's movies were always about more than just flesh-eating thrills.

Land of the Dead is part-satire, part-social commentary. The zombies aren't really the villains any more: indeed, they don't seem to have any interest in hunting humans until the humans piss them off. And piss them off, they do. 

I don't know that the movie benefited from having known actors in some of the roles, though I am sure that this was necessary to secure funding. Dennis Hopper just seems miscast as a scheming businessman, but Leguizamo, Baker, and Asia Argento are all fine. But the real hero is the massive zombie gas-station owner dubbed Big Daddy. He's the Robinson Crusoe of zombies.

Essential viewing, in part because it now looks like an allegory for America Now. Hint: most of us are the increasingly intelligent zombies, while Donald Trump is played by Dennis Hopper. Fittingly for today's horrorshow world, the leader of the sympathetic zombies is a working-class African-American. Highly recommended.