Sometimes I envy cartoonists.

Cartoonists can make an important point in such a succinct and effective fashion. For example:

Always say What?

I don't know why The Horror Zine's Jeani Rector loves my short story "Always Say Treat" so much but with the impending arrival of their latest anthology, she will have published it three times.

"The Horror Zine: The Early Years" collects the "finest selections" from the four anthologies they have published so far and one of those included the short story mentioned above. It's a Halloween-themed, dystopian tale of a time when trick or treating youngsters have become so feared and so unstoppable that everyone spends Halloween locked inside, hoping they haven't been chosen to be this year's trick.

While my personal favorite story of the three I've had published with the Horror Zine is "Flame101" I consider "Always Say Treat" the first time I truly honed my ability to balance creepiness with social commentary. Or maybe it's just a really effective poop-inducing scare-a-thon. Regardless, I am honored to appear in an anthology that includes such luminaries as  Ramsey Campbell (who once compared this particular short story to something Bradbury might have written!) Bentley Little and Joe R. Lansdale.

I'll provide further info as details are provided to me~

Finding Myself in Too Many Places...

I'd never heard of the site "Booklikes," but I happened to find it and there I was in all my mock glory along with several books I have stories in as well as my second novel "Kaiju." My first novel, "Dreamers at Infinity's Core," isn't on the site for some odd reason, but I still feel well-represented on this professionally designed website.

Click here to see it what I'm talking about.

I just wish they hadn't included that damn Russian bride book by that OTHER Christopher Nadeau~

THE UPTIGHT BRITISH PRINCIPAL'S COMMENTS REGARDING POPULAR YOUNG ADULT NOVELS AREN'T ENTIRELY WRONG

Many of my Facebook friends and presumably many more in the so-called "genre community" have their knickers in a twist over the severely judgmental words of a severely uptight principal in the UK.

Graham Whiting, Principal at the Acorn School, posted a blog condemning such works as "Harry Potter," "The Hunger Games" and even Tolkien's seminal "Lord of the Rings" as mind-ruining garbage. It's all in defense of the wonderful children, of course, as he writes what I can only hope is a sentence laced with intentional irony, "Children are innocent and pure at the same time, and don’t need to be mistreated by cramming their imagination that lies deep within them, with inappropriate things."

Whiting defines "inappropriate things" as " mystical and frightening texts" that apparently are embodied by these popular series. One wonders what age group he means. According to their website, "The Acorn School is an independent, co-educational school which provides an invigorating, quality education for pupils from 7 to 18 years of age." Does Whiting believe teens are also too delicate and underprepared for these stories or is he specifically referring to single digit age children?

The principal appears to be espousing the by now tiresome assertion that there is no beauty in darkness and only positivity is worthwhile for the development of young minds. Okay, fine, but then he proceeds to advocate classic authors who wrote some of the most disturbing stories in English-speaking history. For every light-hearted Shakespearean romp, there's a horrible, violent tragedy.  Yet somehow Whiting finds the works of these more revered authors to be the opposite of, "un-sensitive books for young children!" (Exclamation point his)

Whiting sums up his point of view rather well with the following paragraph:

"I stand for the old-fashioned values of traditional literature, classical poetry, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Dickens, Shakespearean plays, and the great writers who will still be read in future years by those children whose parents adopt a protective attitude towards ensuring that dark, demonic literature, carefully sprinkled with ideas of magic, of control and of ghostly and frightening stories that will cause the children who read them to seek for ever more sensational things to add to those they have already been exposed to."

One gets the impression Mr. Whiting is speaking from the perspective of a devout Christian. He is well within his rights to do so, as is he in declaring his disregard for fantastic literature aimed at young adult readers. By "fantastic" of course I mean "fantasy-oriented," not "super cool" the way people often use the word. However, while he does indeed make minor reference to a religious objection with veiled comments about the "devil in the text," he goes so much farther by literally blaming childhood mental illness on these types of stories:

"Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Terry Pratchett, to mention only a few of the modern world’s ‘must-haves’, contain deeply insensitive and addictive material which I am certain encourages difficult behaviour in children; yet they can be bought without a special licence, and can damage the sensitive subconscious brains of young children, many of whom may be added to the current statistics of mentally ill young children."

Wow! It's "Seduction of the Innocent" all over again.

To be blunt, Whiting comes off like an elitist, clueless individual with far too much time spent in an academic enclave where he has formed ideas about reality rather than experiencing it. He also unapologetically advocates for the stories he grew up reading and admits that by the age of thirty he felt as if he'd read all the books he needed to read in order to become a well-rounded individual. So, add pompous and self-important to any assessment of this gentleman. But as some readers of Ayn Rand have practically said in response to comments regarding their heroine as a person, sure she was an awful human being but was she wrong?

Well, she was but Whiting is a less definite matter. Yes he is ludicrously overblown in his conclusions but I cannot deny the kernels of truth contained within them. I have watched what Harry Potter fandom has done to a generation of impressionable young people and I must concede his point on an albeit lower level.

Since the Nineties, it does seem as if the generations most heavily influenced by whatever Young Adult Novel of the Moment is on their list of expected pop culture obsessions have become infantilized. Many of them refuse to read anything that is even remotely challenging and gods forbid they're asked to read mainstream fiction! Keep in mind this is coming from an author of fantasy, horror and science fiction. I'm not some sequestered, arrogant establishment tool. I'm a sympathetic fellow fan who still sees the validity in an otherwise melodramatic screed.

I work for two libraries in two very different communities, yet the majority of teen and JFic books I see going out and coming in are fantasy based. And while I vehemently disagree with Whiting that kids shouldn't be reading these things, there is definitely an over-abundance of them. Perhaps it's a backhanded way of getting kids to read in an increasingly digital world, and that's certainly a noble undertaking, but there is something to be said for experiencing a more tangible reality in print form. These are, after all, growing, questioning minds seeking meaning and answers in a confusing world. We're already seeing what safe places are doing to them, so is it necessarily a positive to provide them with fantasy world into which they can escape, complete with costume and insider jargon?

Where Whiting goes wrong in his reasoning is his enthusiastic willingness to condemn all forms of fantasy and tales of magic as detrimental to the minds of children. That's patently absurd. His obvious disdain for anything he didn't read by the time he was thirty, apparently a milestone age in his life, is laughable. And the outdated mentality that reading material he doesn't approve of contributes to mental illness is so far beyond reason as to be something that might have originated in one of those novels he looks down upon from his lofty perch.

If anything causes the brain damage he believes is caused by Harry Potter and other like stories, it's close-minded literary bigotry. It's already claimed one victim~



Sources:
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-jc-harry-potter-brain-damage-20160509-snap-story.html
http://www.theacornschool.com/news/the-imagination-of-the-child/

Opening Paragraph/Excerpt of a New Story

I don't post these often but since the opening sentence was actually spoken by my wife, thereby sparking off a torrent of ideas and images, I thought I'd share:

Nobody really thinks about what Forever means until it’s handed to them on an ice cold plate.  Until then, it’s merely an abstract concept, a lovely three-syllable word that fills the space between song lyrics and sounds like the ultimate commitment to love and togetherness.  But Forever has a much darker side, one that takes away those we love and keeps them away no matter how much we miss them or what we’re willing to do to bring them back.  And there’s a secret about Forever, one only a few of us know and even fewer of us share: Forever comes to a stop.

 

 

Good bad or indifferent, feel free to share your opinions!

(Name-calling, unless it's really funny, will not be permitted)

Not the Movies You Remember.

With the constant barrage of blockbuster films assaulting our senses these days, I have been thinking back to another blockbuster-filled decade and wondering how many of these current films will stand the test of time as poorly as so many of those. Will people still use words such as “awesome” to describe “Iron Man” or the “Lord of the Rings” films in ten or fifteen years? Here are ten films people considered to be pretty damn incredible at the time that have not aged well at all:

 

The Fugitive- When news of this Harrison Ford starring remake of the classic TV series dropped, I’ll admit to reacting bitterly. After all, I’d already started work on a script with Dennis Quaid in mind (A Harrison Ford type to my way of thinking) and it was a far more grounded treatment than what we got. At the time, the film seemed exciting and riveting, but age has revealed it to be overblown and suffering from a ludicrous third act reveal.

Speed- Okay, I hated this one from the outset, but even I thought it had some production level merits. Not anymore. It was yet another overwrought descent into laughable mediocrity, featuring Dennis Hopper is an embarrassingly awful scenery chewing performance and more clichéd dialogue on that stupid bus than one would find in a screenwriting class.

Demolition Man- What once seemed like a refreshingly humorous take on a tired genre now feels forced, loud and severely compromised. Stallone’s fish out of water is fine but Snipes’ overacting is painful to watch.

Forrest Gump- I’m pretty sure this movie makes everybody’s list of overrated schlock. What a cloying piece of sentimental rubbish. Hanks has never been worse and neither has Zemeckis.

Titanic- Bill Paxton once referred to this movie as a 3-hour “romance novel crap-a-thon” in an SNL skit. Whether he meant it or not, he was right. Frankly, at the risk of offending idiots, they’re the only ones who could possibly still think this historical bastardization that was obviously filmed on a soundstage was anything other than James Cameron’s massive ego run amok.

The Matrix- Oh, look. It’s Keanu Reeves again. Never mind the fact that he seems to have just recently learned to act. Nobody could have changed my opinion of this pretentious, over-the-top pile of drek.

Jurassic Park- I never understand what thrilled people about this lackluster, phoned-in excuse to introduce people to the next generation of CGI. The story was dull, the action was stagey, the acting was better than the material and the dinosaurs failed to impress. Looking at it now, the skeletal plot and dull resolution remind us that it really was an excuse to practice using new technology. Boys and their toys…

The Silence of the Lambs- If ever one needs an example of bad melodramatic Nineties acting and “Face/Off” isn’t available, look no further than this overrated glorification of serial killers. Anthony Hopkins, an actor I’ve always found rather iffy, chews scenery so hard I’m surprised he still has his teeth. Taking a character another actor infused with a quiet, subtle dread and turning it into a farcical mockery must be a talent. The less said about an apparently half-asleep Jodie Foster the better.

Braveheart- Mel Gibson is a very good director, despite his personal problems, but this is not the movie to showcase his talent. While his acting in the film is quite good (everyone’s is) the visuals are so textbook symbolic and silly the movie suffers from an overabundance of self-indulgence. If not for the admittedly kick-ass battle sequences, this woefully inaccurate portrayal with its cartoonishly evil English and virtuous Scots would be a complete waste.

Men in Black- Here’s an idea: Let’s take something people have been reporting seeing for decades in the most negative manner possible, and turn them into a pale reflection of the Ghostbusters.  Let’s make the aliens wacky and almost harmless and throw a bunch of one-liners at everybody. Oh, and let’s make sure the movie is plotless. The only saving grace for this movie is that by the third installment, all involved had apparently learned how to make an actual movie with a plot.

 

 

 

They Get Me in the UK, Man.

This hefty anthology, originally published in 2013, features one of my most intensely personal short stories called "In Green, Remembered." I usually pay an inordinate amount of attention to the American Amazon site when I apparently should be paying more attention to the UK version! British readers tend to have a firmer grasp on what I'm doing, as the below pull quote should indicate:

 "In Green Remembered", by Christopher Nadeau, is an unusual tale, evocative of memory and loss.

An Open Letter to Marvel That They Will Never Read

Dear Marvel,

 

This letter is more specifically aimed at your aptly named “Cinematic Universe” but it’s also to the overall Marvel Comics Corporation. And while I’m sure you couldn’t give a possum’s furry ass what I think of you, especially considering the enormous success you’ve achieved over the past eight years, I’m gonna share it with you anyway.

As a young boy, I read your comics all the time. I read DC, too, but yours contained an immediacy and a relatability I was drawn to on several levels. Spiderman’s youthful vulnerability, the Hulk’s doomed nobility, and of course Captain America’s struggle with never quite fitting in. Then there was the original X-Men team I was fortunate to read in reprinted form, a true metaphor for being born different and singled out because of it. Discriminated against mutants was a perfect source of relatability for this biracial young’n. The stories in these books were almost as compelling as the artwork.

As I entered my teen years, however, something changed my perspective.  A chance encounter at a comic convention, to be precise.  Conventions were different back then.  Smaller, more intimate, filled with genuine fans.  Not the pop culture ludicrousness that exists now. 

At the time, the biggest thing going in comics was your original “Secret Wars” mini-series, the epic clash between all of Marvel’s heroes and villains for the amusement of an omnipotent being known as the Beyonder. As I picked up a copy from a dealer’s table, he asked me if I liked the series. I shrugged and told him I did and he nodded. He then asked me the question I’d never asked myself: “Have you noticed how everything they claim is going to change is changed back one or two issues later?”

I stood there, mouth agape, book forgotten, staring at this seemingly wise comic sage.  What did he mean? Wasn’t that how comic book storytelling worked? Why was he making me think that was a bad thing?

Then he dropped the bomb: “Have you heard what DC’s doing?”

DC? I read their stuff, too. I loved the Justice League of America and Teen Titans. But Marvel was the king, right? That’s where all the cool stuff happened, like “Secret Wars.” Who was this guy?

Then he told me about DC’s plans to completely revamp its stagnating universe with a mini-series called “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” We didn’t have the term “Spoilers” back then but he dropped some on me anyway, including the fact that Supergirl was going to die.

“Die?” I said.

“And stay dead,” he said.

Whoa! As far as I knew, only one superhero had stayed dead and that was your Captain Marvel, who’d died of cancer a few years prior in a highly regarded graphic novel. But Mar-vell was never an A-List character like Supergirl or the next person he told me was going to die.

“The Flash???”

My head spun with the possibilities of a comic book universe where heroes could die for good and multiple Earths could be permanently wiped out of existence. I had to see this! It wasn’t that I wasn’t going to still “Make Mine Marvel” but this sounded incredible.

The next few years saw a radical change in my tastes. “Crisis” was everything that convention guy said it would be and, sadly, so was “Secret Wars.” One felt like a revolution while the other felt like a total waste of time, money and talent.

Not much has changed since then. Your books slowly became unreadable until, by the late Nineties, I wasn’t reading any of them anymore. Until I stopped buying comics altogether, DC and a handful of Image titles got my money. You see, I fell out of love with you because you no longer felt genuine. Different names assumed different mantles but you always churned out that same regrettable paint-by-numbers pointlessness that caused me to stop reading back then.

Fast forward a few years and suddenly there are Marvel movies coming out which, until recently, reminded me of the comics I obsessed over when I was a kid. But now they’re starting to look more like the comics I stopped reading and that’s a hard thing to admit. Lately, as a friend remarked, my Marvel apathy is well-documented. I just can’t seem to work up the same excitement for your films and I think it’s because the convention guy’s comments have once again run true. As much as you try and convince us that big changes are in the wind, it looks like the same old bait and switch to me.

So, Marvel. Although I want to fall in love with you all over again, and while I certainly don’t blame you for doing what millions of others love, I don’t know that I can ever feel that way a third time.

Readers who like me can't be wrong.

While Googling myself (it sounds much dirtier than it is, senior citizens) I came across this website that I'd never heard of before selling my novel, "Kaiju." And while that in itself wasn't a surprise, the fact that the book has an average of a 5-star rating certainly was a pleasant one!

Some of the English on this site indicates it's foreign, so I'm wondering if some of the readers are, too. I would love that.

 

Plot:

Walter Henderson didn't think things could get much worse He has a job he hates, a marriage that seems to be going nowhere except toward parenthood and a military past that haunts him to this day Not to mention an inappropriate workplace attraction Then someone nukes the city of Tokyo and the world is thrown into chaos For on the other side of the world, a man named Walter Henderson didn't think things could get much worse He has a job he hates, a marriage that seems to be going nowhere except toward parenthood and a military past that haunts him to this day Not to mention an inappropriate workplace attraction Then someone nukes the city of Tokyo and the world is thrown into chaos For on the other side of the world, a man named Tanaka single handedly fights a battle against an overwhelming, ancient force capable of harnessing humanity into a source of power that can literally rip open the Veil between worlds But Tanaka has grown old and cannot do it alone This follows a powerful man s quest for the next great ally in his cause, a quest that takes Tanaka from Japan to the Middle East to France and, finally, to a troubled man named Walter Henderson whose newly emerging powers just might engulf him before he can be of use

From the "Crap You Just Can't Make Up" Files.

Children of the 1970's and 80s should remember Hanna-Barbera's "The Wacky Races" featuring Mutley and a host of other bizarre characters from that company's second-tier. I never though this obscure gem would be the thing that signaled how far into absolute ridiculousness pop culture had descended. But it is! Behold below DC Comics' Mad-Max-style reimagining of "The Wacky Races!"

If you lean toward the screen, you can actually hear the end of civilization approaching~

"The Good Fight" Available on Kindle for Only $2.99!

The Embry Press anthology featuring my short story "The Hero Disease" and other quality stories is only $2.99 through Kindle. One reader referred to my story as, " An insightful look at the superhero in all of us."