I just saw the terrible news that highly-respected fantasy author Robert Holdstock has died from E. coli, at just 61 years old.

For a few days now I’ve been meaning to post something about the new documentary Food Inc., which relates in sickening detail how hazardous our food has become. The film profiles a young mother whose toddler was killed by eating an E. coli-contaminated hamburger. This woman subsequently became a consumer protection advocate and has struggled for years to enact common-sense legislation that would restore to the FDA the power to shut down facilities that repeatedly produce deadly food. According to the film, the agro-business industry is so massively rich and powerful that they can stifle any regulation, sue anyone who says anything the industry doesn’t like (even Oprah Winfrey, who lost a million dollars in legal fees defending herself against them), and is even agitating for laws banning journalists from taking pictures of modern factory farms — and it’s easy to understand why, when you watch some of the revolting footage in this movie.

Now that is a cool-looking jetpack:

To learn more, read up on inventor Yves Rossy.

So I just popped into Borders bookstore in Palo Alto for the first time since March and this is what I saw. Wow, the zombie virus is spreading exponentially.

Congrats to my buddy Doug Cohen on his recent promotion to Editor of Realms of Fantasy magazine. Shawna McCarthy will be staying on as Fiction Editor, but Doug will be handling most other duties, including the slush reader, art director, and managing editor roles.

Doug Cohen in his new, more powerful form

The new issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show is out and the cover features just a drop-dead gorgeous illustration by Howard Lyon for Mary Robinette Kowal‘s story “Body Language.” Check it out:

There’s now a (not at all embellished) graphic novel adaptation of the Zombie Encounter panel I moderated back in October for the Science Fiction Society of Northern New Jersey. Thanks to Mike Schneider (lead creator on Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated) and Dorian Bachman for putting this together.

Anyone know of any contests/opportunities for young, aspiring manga artists? I just got this email from someone who came across my Teen Writers site:

Hi Dave,

I have a 13-year-old daughter who has always been a talented artist. She goes through phases of interest and works on perfecting different styles of art.

This year she has been working on something called Manga (sp?). Her pictures are very sci-fi looking combined with the manga style of characters. This weekend she brought me a script she has been writing for her comic she is developing and it blew me away. I have never been interested in this kind of writing or art, but I loved the story! I didn’t even know she could write like that!

Can you tell me if there is any kind of art/writing contest for this style of work? I have always been supportive, but more hands off than anything when it comes to her art and other interests, but this needs to be shared with others who love this kind of stuff. I have no idea which way to point her.

Thanks for any advice you can give!

Edited 12/20/11: Unfortunately this episode is no longer online.

Speaking of The Twilight Zone, I just noticed that my favorite episode of The Outer Limits from the ’90s is now online. (With ads, unfortunately.) It’s called “Quality of Mercy,” and stars Robert Patrick (Terminator 2, The X-Files) as a captured star pilot who shares a cell with a female cadet who’s being subjected to genetic experiments that are slowly transforming her into one of the hideous aliens that Earth is at war with.

This was the first episode of The Outer Limits I ever saw, and it blew me away, so much so that for the next year or so I tried to catch the show whenever I could, which wasn’t easy because it was on at some ridiculous time — I think Sunday nights at 1 a.m. This was while I was in college, and I didn’t have a TV, so I’d be sitting there in the lounge at 1 a.m. watching TV and sometimes someone would walk by and look in on me and just be like, “What the hell are you doing?” And I’d be like, “It’s The Outer Limits, man! It’s awesome.” Unfortunately, aside from this one episode, none of the others I saw were really all that good.

Anyone seen The Box? It’s the new film from Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko). I’m trying to decide whether to go see it, and the reviews are pretty mixed.

It’s an adaptation of one of my all-time favorite TV episodes, “Button, Button,” part of the ’80s Twilight Zone revival that I used to watch all the time as a kid. The premise is that a mysterious man appears at the door of a married couple in financial difficulty and offers them a box with a button on it. If they press the button, they get a huge sum of money and a total stranger — they don’t know who — dies. It’s one of the best pure “idea” stories I’ve ever seen, and the ending is perfect.

Years later I read a Richard Matheson collection and came across the short story that inspired the episode, and was very excited … until I got to the end. The ending of the short story is completely different and it’s HORRIBLE — a totally lame cop-out of the worst kind. I just assumed that Matheson had had a brilliant premise for a story but hadn’t been able to come up with a good ending, and that example has always stood for me as a warning against plucking an idea before it’s ripe. Since Matheson has done so much work in Hollywood, I figured he likely wrote the Twilight Zone episode, and, having had a decade to mull it over, had finally come up with the right ending for his story.

So I was just reading about “Button, Button” on Wikipedia, which states that Matheson actually prefers his original ending, and was so upset by the change that he had his name taken off the episode. Wow. I just don’t get that at all. Incidentally, this is the second example I’ve seen of a filmed version greatly improving on Matheson’s original. The film version of Stir of Echoes is a dramatic improvement over the novel. The novel is kind of a mess structurally, and whoever wrote the screenplay did a very clever job of drawing connections between the different events of the story so that they actually tie together. Incidentally, Stir of Echoes is a pretty good movie, and worth watching. It came out around the same time as the very similar and much better known The Sixth Sense, and got completely buried, which is too bad.

And if you don’t know, Richard Matheson also wrote the brilliant, must-read novels I Am Legend (which has most emphatically not been improved on by the filmed versions) and The Shrinking Man. Both are extremely powerful evocations of loss and loneliness in a hostile, strangely-altered world.

A loyal reader informs me that the terrifying short story I described in my last post was “The Patchwork Monkey” by Beverly Butler, which appeared in the picture book horror anthology Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures, illustrated by Rod Ruth (introduction by Andre Norton!).

Apparently I’m not the only one scarred by this story. Among the Amazon reviews, one person says, “I first read this story when I was in 4th grade, and it scared me so bad that I still remember it to this day, and I am 34 now,” and another says, “I read ‘The Patchwork Monkey’ when I was 7, and slept with my parents for a month. It scared me so bad that my mom had the librarian get rid of the book.”

It looks like there was also a recent film adaptation of the story.

Harry Markov over at Temple Library Reviews asks a bunch of writers about what monsters scared us as kids. Here’s my answer:

When I was a kid I read a picture book of scary stories. I wish I remembered what it was called. The first story was about a boy who gets a stuffed monkey toy, a sort of ragged old hand-me-down, and someone has sewn needles into its paws to make claws, which cut the kid before he notices them. He starts having nightmares about the monkey, and by the end of the story the nightmares have become reality and he’s trapped, and the monkey has become gigantic and is looming over him — this was one of the illustrations. That story scared the crap out of me. So much so that I returned the book to the library without reading any of the other stories. So much so that I basically didn’t go near the horror genre for years afterward. I was too scared to read Stephen King, too scared to watch Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street, so I missed a lot of the standard stuff that kids of my generation would probably name. I used to have to cover my eyes during the librarian ghost scene in Ghostbusters, and for a long time James Cameron’s Aliens was probably the scariest movie I’d watched. Then one night I was sitting in front of the TV, and somehow started watching this movie called Killer Clowns from Outer Space, about alien clowns who land in a UFO/circus tent, and start abducting people and cocooning them in cotton candy, and then the clowns use curly straws to suck out their victims’ blood. The only way to kill them is to shoot them in their big red noses. It sounds like a comedy, and if I watched it today I’d probably see it as a comedy, but I don’t think any movie has ever unnerved me as much as that one did. There’s just something really freaky about clowns. Clowns, dolls, puppets, anything like that. (There was a great episode of the Tales from the Crypt TV show that featured a puppet who avenges himself on his owner’s scheming wife.) A piece of fiction that really did it for me was George R. R. Martin’s “Sandkings.” I read that in an airport while waiting for a delayed flight to board, and the story transported me completely, and by the time I finished it my adrenaline was racing and I looked around, startled to be back in the airport. You know something is good when it can scare you even in a crowded airport at noon.

I’ll be reading my fiction on Saturday as part of the Halloween Party at the McNally Jackson Bookstore in SoHo.

I recorded an audio version of my short story “Red Road,” which appeared last year in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.

“Red Road” MP3 [34:48]