My love for comics is due in large part to a bunk-bed in my family’s summer cabin.  When my uncles were kids, they stashed 1960s Mad magazines between the bed frame and wall, and I fumbled upon them one night as I kicked off the covers in the summer heat.  The gags and parodies were great, if not a bit over my head, but I remember reading the letter columns in every issue.  Not only did the readers have a sense of humor, but so did the editors of Mad in their responses.

EC Comics published Mad Magazine as well as classic Horror and Suspense titles like Tales from the Crypt and Two-Fisted Tales, but in the 1950s, EC was nearly run out of business by the Comics Authority Code [for more details, see David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague. –ed.] and forced to halt production on all publications save Mad.

Yet, horror comics would not bump gently into the night, and in the 1960s, Creepy magazine crept from the grave of EC Comics.  Given that they published in black & white and in an oversized format, Creepy did not have to conform to the Comics Authority Code.  The publication gave artists like Al Williamson, Alex Toth, Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, and fantasy art legend Frank Frazetta an outlet for their fang-toothed imaginations.  By skirting the rules, Creepy could pick up where Tales from the Crypt left off, employing a mascot named Uncle Creepy as their substitute Crypt Keeper.  Stories usually involved werewolves, vampires, and zombies and typically relied on twist endings, revealing the monster to be the very character the reader least expected (i.e. the narrator or narrator’s wife/boss/best friend/butler, etc.).

Just in time for Halloween, Dark Horse Comics has collected the first five issues in Creepy Archives Vol. 1, and the storytelling is still infectious.  As I flipped through the huge pages, there were reprints of not only classic ads from the magazine (“Human skeleton…$1 [plus twenty-five cents shipping]”) but also letter columns for each issue.  Sample exchange between fans and Uncle Creepy:

“No offense, but didn’t you kind of goof up in issue #4…?  Doctor Habeas said that monsters have eternal life.  Well, the way I hear it, the werewolf can be killed with a silver bullet and the vampire with a stake….” --Mike Terry, Aurora, MS

“Face it—He was a lousy doctor!” --Uncle Creepy

“[In issue #4]…When the townspeople burned up the mad doctor’s castle, how come the werewolf died when he can only be killed by something made of silver?” --Kerry Hotchkiss, St. Ann, MS

“Face it—he was a lousy werewolf!” --Uncle Creepy

Creepy Volume 1 also contains an adoring letter from one “Bernie A. Wrightson,” who would later go on to be the celebrated Horror comics illustrator (see his pen and ink artwork in the recently reprinted Frankenstein) and Stephen King’s artistic choice for The Dark Tower V .

Creepy Volumes 2 and 3 are forthcoming and will hopefully continue their faithful reproductions of the magazine in its entirety, because, thanks to shrinking page counts and the advent of email, exchanges like this are a rarity in today's comics.  Luckily, I know the perfect bunk-bed where I can stash my copies of Creepy.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday - as a kid for candy and costumes, as an adult for, well - for the exact same reasons.  The only major difference in my celebration now and then is the ridiculous number of horror movies I watch throughout the month of October (and the adult beverages I might consume, but that's another story).  I'm going to write about some of my favorites a little later this month.

There aren't a ton of horror fans here at Amazon Movies & TV (to these misguided haters I say - have you ever seen Dead Alive? Lord of the King's Peter Jackson and one of the BEST MOVIES EVER). So, there's only a handful of us who'll be writing and getting excited about all the bloody, gory, terrifying greatness that you should be marathoning this month (and getting for crazy cheap over at our Halloween Store).  Because our numbers are semi-limited, we've solicited the Horror experts over at Bloody-Disgusting.com to share lists of their hands down favorite horror flicks.  They'll be posting each Friday this month, so if you love horror or find yourself intrigued but aren't sure where to jump in, make sure to check back each Friday in November, including the last one - Halloween! 

And hey, while you're here - what are you going to watch to celebrate this year? 

--Kira

This month, David Wellington's third vampire novel, Vampire Zero, will be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. In this installment, reluctant vampire hunter Laura Caxton is faced with the unenviable task of hunting down her former mentor: U.S. Marshall Jameson Arkeley, now a bloodsucker himself. If you've read the first two volumes, 13 Bullets and 99 Coffins, you know how ruthless Arkeley was when he was living and breathing. Now that he's undead, Caxton is going to have her hands full if she wants to stop him from fathering a new generation of vampires.

I recently asked Wellington for ten reasons why readers should pick up Vampire Zero...

1. You will not be able to put this book down. You'll be unable to bear not knowing what happens next.

2. It's a great standalone novel, and a good introduction to a continuing series, though--

3. Anyone who enjoyed 99 Coffins NEEDS to read this book, because the ending of 99 Coffins is played out here in graphic detail.

4. The main character, Laura Caxton, isn't a helpless damsel in distress, nor is she some inhuman killing machine. She's not some gorgeous but dumb ingenue in deepest darkest Louisiana. She's not an immortal vampire who nobody understands. She's a woman doing a job she didn't want but she has no choice. She's in way over her head, but she doesn't panic. She does the best she can to stop the horror, and then some. But is that going to be enough?

5. The vampires are scary! They don't want to read poetry to you. They don't want to call on you sometime if that's convenient. They want to rip your head off and suck blood out of your stump. You have never seen vampires like this before, I promise. These vampires are scarier.

6. The action! This isn't the kind of book where deeply conflicted monsters lie around on fainting couches talking for fifty pages about how desperately alone and forsaken they are. The cops in this book have a plan. They're out there every night trying to make it happen. And the vampires are always one step ahead of them. When they meet--it's fireworks, every time.

7. The research!  This is a work of fiction. Vampires aren't real. But the world they inhabit is as exhaustively realistic as the author could make it--every street is a real street, every gun is a real gun, every location is a place you can find on a map--and go to in real life. The realism grounds the story and keeps it from getting too over-the-top into fantasy land. And it makes the vampires that much scarier.

8. The drama! Laura Caxton learned everything she ever knew about vampires from her old mentor, Jameson Arkeley. Now he's a vampire, and she has to bring him in. She's learned her lessons well--but what if there are some secrets he didn't have time to teach her? What if he knows something, something that could get her killed, and he didn't share?

9. The mystery! Why would a vampire hunt down the members of his own family? What is his secret plan? There's only one way to find out.

10. The twist ending! See, Laura Caxton has gone a little too far this time, and--but no. I won't spoil it for you. You have to read this book to believe what happens at the end. I promise only that it's a surprise!

Yes!  Moonlight is going to be on DVD after all, and you can pre-order it now!  For all you fans who watched the vampire series starring Alex O'Loughlin and have been waiting patiently (or not so patiently) to own it on DVD, January 20, 2009 is your day.  And for those of you who have participated in our First To Know system, this is a big win.  We told Warner Home Video about how many of you had signed up to be notified about DVD release.  We told them about your customer reviews and discussion boards.  We told them that you want Moonlight on DVD!  And now it's finally coming.  Of course, the next question is: what about Blu-ray?  No news yet, but just like before, you can sign up to be notified and we'll pass that on too!  --David

Bring Down the Sun by Judith Tarr is an intriguing historical fantasy about Alexander the Great's mother. This is stylized melodrama at its best. The novel is often sensual and erotic, but not in an embarrassing way--in part because Tarr's style is somewhat stripped down and tight and also because Tarr doesn't wink at the reader during those scenes. Somehow, also, Tarr manages to effectively convey the historical setting without long pages of description. I interviewed Tarr via email to find out more about the underpinnings of the novel and her approach to historical fantasy...

Amazon.com: Can you tell Amazon readers where you are as you’re answering these questions?
Judith Tarr: I'm sitting in the living room of my house outside of Tucson, Arizona, looking out at the horse barn and the hot and cold running Lipizzans.

Amazon.com: What is your background? Have you always been a writer? What other jobs have you held? Judith Tarr: I started off with ambitions to go into academia to help support my writing habit--Tolkien was my inspiration. However in the middle of the PhD program in Medieval Studies at Yale, I sold six fantasy novels in one swell swoop. I handed in the dissertation and the proofs of book 6 on the same day. I've done a fair bit of teaching--taught high-school Latin for a couple of years, and taught Latin and novel writing at Wesleyan in Connecticut. Otherwise I've been a full-time writer pretty much from the beginning.

Amazon.com: Your novel combines a historical (Greek/Macedonian) setting with a fantastical element, and yet doesn’t get bogged down in endless description. Is this a skill that comes naturally to you? How hard is it to get the “mix” right?
Judith Tarr: Oh, good question. The short answer is, I like writing spare--less is more--so if I can get a lot across in a few words, I'm there. Mixing historical and fantasy is more of a lifestyle choice. My personal rule is, if people of the time believed in it, it's real. I'll write accordingly. I think the academic background (aka combat training in research methods) helps quite a bit, but there's a substantial amount of seat of the pants to it, too. Probably the most important influence was the indomitable Betty Nye Quinn in the Classics Department at Mount Holyoke, who taught all her students to look at a historical era as it saw itself. We were trained to set aside our modern viewpoint and examine our assumptions, and to get inside the heads of the authors we read. Later on at Cambridge under Prof. Crook, I did a Tripos section on historiography that revisited this: we read Latin and Greek historians not only for what they had to say about the periods they wrote about, but for what their histories said about their own periods. While we did that, we are also encouraged to consider our own biases and the biases of our own era, and to take those into account when evaluating the works we read. If you're living inside the period, I think you describe less and feel more. Then there's the element of skill: what Harry Turtledove refers to as "knowing 500 details and mentioning five--and they have to be the right five." The more you know, the more likely you are to know which details to include. That takes practice, but it also takes something I call "period sense"--an in-depth sense of how people thought and felt and acted. Of course there's also the accessibility problem. Most historical and fantasy bestsellers have little or none. They write about modern Americans in fancy dress. This is successful because it speaks directly to the attitudes of the readers. They're not specialists; they don't know if it's wrong. They do know if the story works, and if there are characters they can identify with. For the writer who has more of a sense of period, there's a challenge to present period attitudes while also making them credible to the contemporary reader. I had my first exposure to this with my second novel, when my editor said, "No one will ever buy your medieval monk not getting it on with the sexy girl who's following him around." In fact, in period, he would have made a huge martyrdom out of it and never so much as touched her--but in order to sell the book, I had to compromise. I tried to do it believably in context, but I never was totally happy with that. Since then of course I've learned to cope better, and to find ways to juggle modern and historical without completely losing the latter. The "five salient details" rule is one of the ways.

Amazon.com: What drew you to this historical period?
Judith Tarr: Mary Renault. Love her Alexander books. Always wanted to play my own riff on the character and the period, and so I've been fortunate to do--in Lord of the Two Lands and Queen of the Amazons as well as Bring Down the Sun, but also, more obliquely, in the six books of the Avaryan high-fantasy series.

Amazon.com: How much is there in the historical record about Alexander’s mother?
Judith Tarr: Not a whole lot that isn't directly related to her son. Her early life is mostly hearsay and contradictory rumor. If it's not connected to a male in her life, it's not there.

Amazon.com: What part of the novel do you most enjoy in re-reading it?
Judith Tarr: I don't reread them for years after I send in the proofs, if ever. I'm kind of like an alligator that way. I take care of them until they hatch; after that they're on their own. I've moved on to the next clutch. With this one, I'm kind of partial to the maze spell. That was fun to do, and evil of me, too, to trap [SPOILER REDACTED] in it. Bringing down the mountain--good fun there, as well.

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Judith Tarr: This week I'm revising a novel about magical horses for middle-grade readers (ages 8-12), for Tor. Total change of pace: it's contemporary, it's for kids, and it's set in Arizona. I'm enjoying it tremendously. It's like becoming a new writer all over again.

As those who were kind enough to watch my video from the Stargate Continuum red carpet already know, I'm the single coolest, most naturally-gifted celebrity interviewer the world has ever known. (Haha--sarcasm!)

Below, you can hear me titter incessantly in the background as I try to professionally interview the guys from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (This is a hilarious show, BTW.) And ask Jensen Ackles from Supernatural the de rigueur question about Dean's (his character's) beloved Impala/his trip to Hell and back.  Again, a huge thanks the folks who were hapless enough to stumble in front of my camera--especially Rob McElhenney (Mac from It's Always Sunny)--for not being too cool to have his picture taken with the world's foremost entertainment journalist. --Leah

(PS: New seasons of both Supernatural and Always Sunny are pre-order-able now. Just saying.)

Shared Worlds student Katherine Buchanan admonishing me to read Stephanie Meyer at a Breaking Dawn book release party; Will Hindmarch talking to the students about world-building from a game development point of view.

Nothing could've better served as a grand finale to the Shared Worlds teen writing camp at Wofford College in South Carolina than taking the students to one of the recent Stephanie Meyer book release parties. These are kids, you have to understand, who read constantly, who have to be told to put away their books to pay attention in class, and who when asked what activities they'd like to do outside of class pretty uniformly replied, "take us anywhere we can buy more books." Talk about omnivoracious!

Shared Worlds ran from July 20 to August 2 and started off with a week of world-building, in which the students split into groups to create distinctive SF-fantasy worlds. Then, in the second week, they wrote short stories and novel excerpts set in those worlds. In addition to Wofford College teachers and other personnel, I was there as the writer-in-residence and assistant director. Other writers came in to conduct guest lectures and workshops, including Tobias Buckell, Ekaterina Sedia, and Will Hindmarch. Buckell is known for writing Caribbean-influenced SF, Sedia has a Russian background and is a strong advocate for diversity, while Hindmarch has swiftly shot to the top of the gaming ranks on the strength of his work for White Wolf, among others.

 
Clarke Richard and Rena Smith, Amy Lin and Jana Wilson posing with the famous alien baby during a break from writing.

Shared Worlds founder and director Jeremy Jones is a strong proponent of giving teens a chance to work together and individually. "The original vision at the heart of Shared Worlds has always been the desire to provide a place where oddball kids (like me) could get together and play with ideas. Please note that when I say 'oddball,' I mean it as a compliment. I'm talking about the sorts of kids who like to read, who are into art, who'd rather spend their free time writing stories. When I taught in a high school, I noticed that these kids tended to be isolated, marginalized, and often lonely. What they value---books, ideas, learning, creativity--aren't exactly what most school cultures value as 'cool.'"

I was also struck by the diversity on display. Of the nineteen students, the majority were girls, many were African American, and some came from as far away as Japan. Support for the camp also came from a variety of sources, including io9, Tor Books, Prime Books, and SF Signal, which ran two "MindMeld" pieces asking authors about world-building. The students really seemed to appreciate this support, as it added to the overall sense of community. The literal "shared worlds" aspect of the writing camp also provided a wider context. To me, these teens weren't just creating fantastical settings--they were part of a teen think tank, and part of the challenge was coming up with solutions to creative issues or questions. Solving those kinds of challenges will help them later on no matter what career they choose as adults.

Wofford College also did a great job of providing the tools, on-campus support, and constructive environment for these students to flourish and have fun even as they took on a lot of hard work.

The details for next year's camp should be available in a few months, with the possibility of three separate creative tracks in the second week: fiction writing, game development, and visual arts. I'm already looking forward to it, and I think a lot of teens will, too. (For more on Shared Worlds, check out these videos and my personal blog entry, too.)

Set on the imaginary island of Altania, the enchanting The Magicians and Mrs. Quent evokes memories of other pseudo-Victorian-Edwardian fantasies, but the writing and execution are vastly superior to most of the others I’ve read. Ivy, the eldest of the three Harrowell daughters, takes a position a governess to the wards Mrs. Quent, a compellingly odd character. The house she inhabits, Heathcrest Hall is suitably stark and strange. The pleasure in watching Ivy navigate through multiple mysteries, including the madness of her father (for which she hopes to find a cure), provides much of the narrative drive here. Eldyn Garritt, scion of a bankrupt trading company, also figures into the mix. While I preferred the sections from Ivy’s point-of-view, readers should also find Eldyn an interesting character. As their two stories come together, along with the discovery of secret societies (who, exactly, are those shadowy men in the black hats?) and much else that will delight readers, the novel really comes into its own. The discussions of and uses of magic may be familiar from other books, but somehow Galen Beckett reconfigures what could be stereotypical into an exciting and clever romp.

In this