WAR ON HORROR: THREE NEW NOVELS ON VAMPIRES AND DEMONS
Source: Elizabeth Hand at washingtonpost.com
World leaders: Forget the tedium of politics. If you want to boost your approval ratings, grab an ax and attack some hellish demons.
Seth Grahame-Smith helped create the current vogue for supernatural alternate histories with his surprise bestseller, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” Everything you need to know about his sophomore effort is summed up in its title, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (Grand Central, $21.99). That really is all you need to know. The novel itself is so torpid that one imagines the undead snoring in their coffins rather than rousing themselves to do battle with the man from Springfield. Eleven-year-old Abe, devastated by his mother’s death at the fangs of a vampire in the backwoods, vows to avenge her: “I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America.” That message is repeated two pages later: “My life shall have but one purpose. That purpose is to kill as many vampires as I can. This journal shall be where I write about killing vampires.” And yes, indeed, many, many vampires are killed in the telling of this tale, usually with an ax and a well-gnawed cliche. Not even national politics can keep Abe from thwacking at his enemies, just as no amount of hugger-mugger about vampires and evil plantation owners can energize Grahame-Smith’s sluggish account of the “central struggle of [Abe’s] life. A struggle that eventually spilled onto the battlefields of the Civil War.”
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‘EAGLE EYE’ WRITER TO ADAPT HIMSELF SOME FANTASY
Source: Latinoreview.com
And so, the quest to find the next cinematic successor to “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” continues!
Travis Adam Wright has been hired to adapt “Here, There Be Dragons” and “The Search for the Red Dragon,” the first two books in James A. Owen’s popular young-adult fantasy series “The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica.”
So far, “Geographica,” which Owen also illustrates, includes four novels revolving around a secret book that contains the unpublished maps and journals of history’s most famous author-adventurers. Included as protagonists are a young J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, future giants of the fantasy-adventure genre whose famous works are imagined by Owen to have been inspired by these fictional adventures.
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DEAD SPACE BOOK BEING WRITTEN BY HORROR NOVELIST/MORMAN
Source: gamepro.com
The Dead Space universe is hitting the printed page, as Dead Space: Martyr–the very first novel from the sci-fi franchise–is currently being penned with a July 2010 release planned.
When does a video game become a bona fide franchise? Some say it’s the first time a developer’s asked whether a sequel is being planned. Others think that it’s when you find that first callback in the second game. One true benchmark of a game maturing into a series is when it makes the leap into the literary world. From that perspective, Dead Space will experience its evolution in July, when the franchise’s first novel, Dead Space: Martyr, is released for $15.
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What do you think of the idea of ‘Dead Space’ becoming a novel? It’s … quite a bold move. Everyone was quite surprised at Pirates of the Carribean becoming a movie, based on a ride, and now video games are becoming books? Could be interesting. What do you think about “Here, there be dragons’ becoming a movie?
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