A page turned Thursday night, though probably not as big and heavy a one as the bookseller would have you believe.
“We’re on the computer!” Bill Maher told his L.A. studio audience and anyone else who was logged on to the homepage of Amazon.com.
The comedian touted Amazon as “the first major Internet site to launch an episodic series.” Fishbowl With Bill Maher, which began at 11 p.m. Thursday and is available at this very second at www.amazon.com/gp/movie-player-dashboard/permalink/39:31/104-3877406-928
The Blog
Media
Re: Amazon Fishbowl
January 29, 2015
Just found this image on Getty Images from the Amazon Fishbowl episode…
…and this 6 June 2006 article from Philly.com:
7120, puts Maher in the talk-show host seat, interviewing folks whose stuff you can buy on Amazon. A new episode is scheduled every Thursday for the next few weeks.
Minor Internet sites have been running episodic series for quite a while. Of course, I’m a TV critic, and I don’t know a whole lot about them, but I do like one called Rocketboom.com, which features a pretty woman named Amanda Congdon doing a cockamamie “news” show, heavy on computer content.
She auctioned off the show’s first commercial time on eBay a while back (I think she got $40,000, which isn’t chicken feed, though it’s probably about 30 seconds of Amazon revenue), and you can watch her daily performance, which is called a “vlog,” on TV if you have TiVo.
I can’t, because I can’t figure out how to work it all. And that was part of the problem with Maher’s show Thursday night, too. It would just stop and start, and the little virtual gadget that was supposed to control it didn’t have any skip or rewind buttons, which I can work on my TiVo, so how new and revolutionary is that?
What is revolutionary, of course, are the commercial geegaws associated with Fishbowl, which appears on a little screen that’s made to look like a TV, maybe 5 by 6 inches, in the middle of your larger computer screen, leaving room for such Amazon messages as “The Husband (Hardcover) by Dean Koontz. Go to this product detail page.”
Full article @ Philly.com.
The Real Town of Silent Hill
January 19, 2015
It’s called Centralia, Pennsylvania, and while not what inspired the games it is the place that inspired the setting for the films and they share quite a few similarities.
Centralia is a near-ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 10 as of 2010, as a result of the Centralia mine fire burning beneath the town since 1962. All properties in the town were claimed under eminent domain by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1992 (and all buildings condemned), and Centralia’s ZIP code revoked by the Postal Service. State and local officials reached an agreement with the remaining residents allowing them to live out their lives there, after which the rights of their properties will be taken…
Centralia has been used as a model for many different ghost towns and physical manifestations of Hell. Examples include Dean Koontz’s Strange Highways and David Wellington’s Vampire Zero, and, as stated, the film adaptation of Silent Hill.
Read the full article @ MoviePilot.com
HP Lovecraft: Horrible man, great writer, now collected in annotated edition
January 19, 2015
The-New-Annotated-H.-P.-LovecraftHe wrote like nobody before him, and no one since. Stephen King called him “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” He was HP Lovecraft, whose works are now collected and curated by scholar Leslie Klinger in “The New Annotated HP Lovecraft,” with an introduction by Alan Moore.
“He was very much a stylist, a craftsman, and I think writers like Neil Gaiman, Robert Bloch, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz — they all absorbed that and realized that’s how you write scary stuff,” says Klinger. “You don’t start with something that has blood and gore. You write an atmosphere. You build it up.”
While he was alive, Lovecraft was unknown and made very little money from his writing. He had a few stories published before he died at the age of 46, but not much else. “He had only a single book published in his lifetime,” says Klinger. “He was clearly a commercial failure and sort of the quintessential starving artist.”
Now, Lovecraft is regarded as one of the most important horror writers of the twentieth century. Authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King and Dean Koontz name him as an influence. But there’s a side to Lovecraft that’s hard for fans to ignore: he was a horrible bigot.
Read the full article @ SCPR.org
Dean reviewed in Castle Rock
January 19, 2015
By my count, Dean has had books of his reviewed in a total of six issues of Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter. Recently I picked up four of those issues which has me missing just one at this point.
Saint Odd commercial
January 17, 2015
Dean Koontz on MSNBC's Morning Joe
January 16, 2015
Well, not really… But one of his books was… In the background…
It always frustrated my father when I would watch a news interview and identify the books behind someone. This is the title in question. Here’s the book in question.
Author Dean Koontz on "Odd" finale, fame and dark childhood
January 14, 2015
Koontz is one of the best selling authors of all time. He just released “Saint Odd,” the final book in one of this most popular series. Koontz speaks with Ben Tracy about his unusual life experiences.
Originally broadcast at 8:40am on 14 January 2015.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/author-dean-koontz-on-odd-finale-fame-and-dark-childhood/
Gugu Mbatha-Raw: Everything you need to know about the Bafta Rising Star nominee
January 9, 2015
What will you recognise her from?
Horror and supernatural fans will most likely recognise Gugu from the criminally underrated Odd Thomas, a movie based on the novel of the same name by Dean Koontz, which also starred Star Trek’s Anton Yelchin and the always-brilliant Willem Dafoe.
The movie wasn’t widely released in the UK, but was shown at London-based film festival FrightFest and can be found on Netflix for your streaming pleasure.
Outside of that, you may recognise her from period drama Belle, where she plays a mixed-race daughter of a Navy Admiral, raised by her aristocratic uncle in the 18th Century, and romantic drama Beyond the Lights where she portrayed a pop star called Noni who falls for young cop Kaz.
She will be featuring in The Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending later this year.
Red the full article @ Metro.co.uk.
16mm Demon Seed trailer
January 4, 2015
Here’s another recent find: a 16mm print of the trailer for Demon Seed. (No, I don’t have anything to play it on…)
Kątem oka
January 4, 2015
Here’s a Polish edition cover for you. The title translates to “peripheral vision.” Leave a comment if you want to guess which book this is a translation of. (Source review.)
5 Films in 2014 You Should Have Seen But Probably Haven't
December 31, 2014
Odd Thomas:
Based on the novel by Dean Koontz, ‘Odd Thomas’ bypassed cinemas and went straight to DVD after being held back from release for over a year due to legal wranglings. Anton Yelchin plays the title character whose name is indeed Odd Thomas, a young man who can see dead people as well as beings he refers to as ‘Bodachs’, strange entities who appear when something catastrophic is about to happen. Sticking fairly closely to the novel the film is quirkily funny, spooky, surprising, and by the film’s end really quite heart wrenching. ‘GI Joe’ director Stephen Sommers works with a lower budget here but this is one of his better films. I hope more adaptations are made from the ‘Odd Thomas’ series of books, but its DVD only release may have squashed that, and if you see a Bodach hanging around around Hollywood then that is probably true.
Read the full list @ Moviepilot.
No, there is not a film version of Santa's Twin
December 5, 2014
According to this article, ‘“Santa’s Twin,” based on the children’s book by Dean Koontz, will be the featured film’ at an event tomorrow morning at the Sternberg Museum in Hays, KS tomorrow.
The existance of such a film was news to me so I contacted the group hosting the presentation and it was news to them too. They’re doing a Santa’s Twin story-time, not showing a film version.
You won’t find it on a map: 11 fictional places that have appeared in multiple works
December 4, 2014
4. Santa Mira, California
Alien imposters. Invisible men. Malevolent mask-makers. The sleepy California community of Santa Mira has played host to all these horrors, and several others, since director Don Siegal and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring first introduced it in 1956’s sci-fi classic Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Modeled after the very real Mill Valley, California—where Jack Finney actually set his 1955 book The Body Snatchers, the film’s source material—Santa Mira is the platonic ideal of safe, clean, small-town America. That makes it, in turn, the perfect ground zero for a supernatural conspiracy, as the friendly facade provides an ideal smokescreen for insidious activities. No wonder other writers and filmmakers have appropriated the fictional locale; it’s appeared, or at least been mentioned, in no less than nine other sci-fi properties, many featuring “replaced” humans—the phantoms of Dean Koontz’s Phantoms, the robot henchmen of Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, the DNAliens of Ben 10: Alien Force. It’s a town fit only for pod people, or maybe for those willing to risk life, limb, and identity for a little breezy West Coast weather.
Read the full article @ A.V. Club.
Have you seen the Innocence paperback commercial?
December 4, 2014
We hold each other hostage…
December 4, 2014
Publisher Interview: Richard Chizmar
November 29, 2014
The Black Cat Horror Blog sits down with the owner/founder of Cemetery Dance Publications, Richard Chizmar. Cemetery Dance Publications is a two-time World Fantasy Award winner, a four-time International Horror Critics Guild Award winner, and has been awarded/nominated for just about every other thing in existence when it comes to publishing. Do yourself a favor and, after the interview, sign-up for their magazine subscription–you won’t regret it!
TBC: It’s December 1988, and Cemetery Dance issue # 1 just hit the stands. Did you ever think Cemetery Dance would become what is it today? Or that you’d get to work with the top talent in horror–King, Koontz, Little, Ketchum, Matheson, etc.
Richard: Well, I knew I wanted to, and I knew I was willing to do whatever work was necessary to make it happen…but did I absolutely know it? Nope. But I definitely dreamed it and chased it with everything I had.
TBC: Which authors/books inspired your love for the horror genre?
Richard: Stephen King’s novella “The Monkey” is what made me want to be a writer. That led to all his novels. Also, the early Koontz paperbacks from Berkley. Before that, I read the usual horror comics. Loved THE TWILIGHT ZONE and any scary movie I could find on television. But Stephen King was definitely to blame for all this.
Read the full interview @ The Black Cat Horror Blog.
Dean Koontz: Semi-libertarian
November 29, 2014
Mega-bestselling author Dean Koontz declines to call himself a libertarian. But Publishers Weekly chastised him for allowing his “libertarian views” to seep into his novels; Koontz complains that all politicians “get corrupted by power;” and he admits to being at least “semi-libertarian” on most issues.
But let’s take Koontz at his word; he’s just a semi-libertarian — albeit one who trumpets his distrust of government, power and politicians at almost every opportunity. Some examples:
• In an online chat on CNN.com (September 10, 2001), Koontz said, “Any time I’m looking for a good psychopath [as a character for a novel], I first check out the current crop of Congressmen and see what they are up to.”
• In The Dean Koontz Companion (Headline Book Publishing, 1994), Koontz said, “It had become apparent to me that the worst enemy of the working man and woman is the state, and that the average person is safest in a country that struggles to limit the size of the state.”
Read the full article @ TheAdvocates.org.
Dean Koontz's 'Innocence" and Pheromones of Love and War
November 29, 2014
Pity Addison, the protagonist of Dean Koontz’s novel Innocence: Anyone who catches a glimpse of his face attacks him. He doesn’t understand why: There’s nothing unusual about his features, and he isn’t looking for a fight. By all accounts, he’s an everyday person who through no fault of his own, has become an enemy of humankind. The danger forces him to seek shelter beneath the city streets. There, in the darkness of the sewers, he meets a man who may be able to help him.
Addison’s condition is eventually explained, and chances are that very few readers will have guessed what it is before the big reveal. The answer changes the way Addison sees the world forever. Some of Koontz’s fans may experience revelations of their own.
The animal kingdom provides plenty of examples of seemingly inexplicable and unprovoked behavior caused by factors invisible to the human eye. None of this has anything to do with what’s causing people to attack Addison, by the way, so don’t worry about spoilers!
Read the full article @ Suvudu.
Epic as always
November 28, 2014
Odd Thomas from Korea
November 24, 2014
I don’t go out of my way to purchase non-English editions but I’ve been known to pick up some used books and the current title from a country I’m visiting. However I recently saw the cover artwork for the Korean editions of the Odd Thomas books and I couldn’t resist. So, with the help of a librarian with a friend in South Korea, and then that friend’s co-worker, these beauties arrived today. (Click for large versions.)
