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,

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.

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.

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!).

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.

John Joseph Adams is announcing that he’ll be editing a new online science fiction magazine called Lightspeed.

The short story “After the Age of Giant Sundials” by recent Alpha grad Haris is today’s #1 Sci-Fi/Fantasy article over on Teen Ink. Congrats!

The Dell Magazines Award has a slick new website. Check it out.

Locus is reporting the thrilling news that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean flick will officially be an adaptation of the Tim Powers novel On Stranger Tides.

So they sat me down in a room. They had these two people dressed in their military Sea Org uniforms, and they had a man and a woman, and the man was somebody I had previously met in Scientology, so I kind of had a buddy-buddy relationship with him, and then the woman was, you know, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and she was flirting with me and telling me how great it would be if we could be in the Sea Org together, and she was like from Louisiana, she had this really charming Southern accent, and they’re working me. There would be times when she would get up and leave and I’d be alone with the guy, and I’d be bonding with him, and then he’d leave and she’d come back. This went on for five hours, and I now know that the woman had been at the Long Island center where I’d worked previously, and so certainly would have had access to my auditing files. Because when I was talking to them I was amazed at how much these people seemed to know about me, it was like they could see right into my soul, you know? They say the files are confidential, but obviously they’re not. So they’re like pushing my buttons and getting me to be upset, and I’d be crying, and then they would calm me down, and then get me to cry again, calm me down. This is torture, this is psychological torture, for five hours they’re doing this, and now I’m like an emotional wreck, my head is spinning, and then they say, because, you know, I didn’t want to drop out of school, so they say, “Look, suppose you stay in school, and you have a good education, and you get a good job, in fifty years you’re going to be dead, what’s the point? But if you join us, you’ll live forever.”

Here’s a fascinating lecture by Yale professor Donald Kagan on the organization of Spartan society. This is a culture that really upends a lot of our notions about human nature and propriety.

The Candy Man Can: Or Why John Joseph Adams is Genre Fiction’s Willy Wonka. Barnes & Noble.com’s Paul Goat Allen calls John Joseph Adams “the reigning king of the anthology world.” He adds, “Every anthology this guy is associated with seems to turn to gold: and by gold I mean jaw-droppingly brilliant anthologies with no weak links that I’ll not only read again and again but treasure until the day I die.” Wastelands is “arguably my favorite anthology of all time,” The Living Dead is “the best collection of zombie fiction stories ever collected,” and By Blood We Live is “another masterful – dare I say perfect – anthology.”

I’ve blogged before about how text to speech software is the greatest new tool for writers since the invention of the word processor. This software makes it vastly easier to catch typos, and you can sit back and close your eyes and listen to your story being read aloud, which greatly aids in polishing. But nobody I talk to seems to know about or use it, even people who have Macs, which have text to speech capability built right in. So I’m going to show you how to use it. It’s really easy. Give it a try. Seriously.

First click on the Apple icon and select “System Preferences”:

Next select the Speech icon:

Select “Text to Speech” and make sure you choose the Alex voice, which sounds much better than the others:

Select “Set Key” and pick a key combo for reading text aloud. I use Control + S:

Now just highlight any text in any program or document (emails, your story) and hit Control + S (or whatever). Your computer will start reading. Hit Control + S (or whatever) again to make it stop.

And that’s all there is to it.