E.E. Knight: Desparkler of Vampires

E.E. Knight has a great hometown write-up (In the photo, Knight is the one on the right.) If you aren't into his spectacular Vampire Earth series, then you should at least check out his Age of Fire books.

After all, there are only two kinds of people on this planet: Vampire People and Dragon People - you must be one of them.*

Anyhoodle, Knight's vampires are of the decidedly Lovecraftian sort - otherworldly, grotesque, uncaring. Not an ascot to be found among them.

"Beneath the heavy robes of bullet-resistant material the Kurians wear is a bony, angular physique of wiry muscle. Their knees and elbows can bend either way in an unsettling manner. Aside from the grotesqueness of its motions, this allows the Reaper to coil its entire body for a leap, climb rapidly, and change position in a hand-to-hand fight with terrifying speed. Their bones are not white, but rather a dull black, as are their pointed seizing teeth within their snake-hinged jaws. Their blood turns into a thick, tarry substance when exposed to air, so they rarely bleed to death.

...they use their long, flexible, beaked tongues to stab into the prey, using their teeth to fix on the victim as a lamprey does while they pierce poor wretch's heart with their stabbing lingular syringe...They are hard to kill, vulnerable only to massed firearms, burning, or decapitation....

Only a fool takes on a Reaper alone at night."

Entirely unrelated (unless they are a front for a vampire hunting operation): have you ever wondered what the most beautiful website in the solar system for a Ukrainian Orthodox Church might look like?

Me too. (The photo gallery alone is worth the price of admission.)

*I'm both. This places me in the unique class of "First to Die" during the Vampire/Dragon apocalypse.

Which Zombie Will You Be? [Personality Test]

Every zombie movie has a set number of zombie types - a horde, a random guy, the first one to get shot.

But these zombies were once people, you know, with lives and dreams and ambitions.

Like you.

Which one will you be? Take the quiz and find out.

The History Channel Trick

In an age that unworships at the non-altar of the relative experience, I recommend co-opting a trick perfected by the History Channel, both for some of their more standard history programs and their whack-a-doo pseudohistory programs, such as the "prophecies" of mystics, or the alien origins of the pyramids, or alien ghost autopsies, or whatever.

It is five magic words:

"There are those who say..."

Throw these in any time you would like to make an outrageous claim without any footing. It will sound authoritative and mildly suggestive that those who disagree will find themselves in an impossible situation.

F is for Fire that Burns Down the Whole Town*

I climbed a high tower, looked over the land, and saw water where there should be no water, fire where there should be no fire, and a moon turned to blood.

Somehow, St. John on Patmos doesn't seem so delirious to me.

I'm going to admit something: I get a kick out of the apocalypse. Pure entertainment. That's not to say that I don't take the writings of John seriously. I do.

But man oh man does the book of Revelation inspire some cool stuff: big godzilla monsters coming out of oceans to join forces with, then fight and torture a beast-riding queen of religion and whoring, hailstorms of superbug disease cupcakes, trumpets rolling out the best of Count Basie in a syncopated rythym to beat the devil.

I'm translating loosely, but still. Hellhorses, 200 million man armies at war, blood to the bridles, falling stars, thirsty dragons.

Yum. But you've got to remember that I'm the sort of troll who gets a kick out of cleaning out hog lots and dining on chilli dog spaghetti burittos.

I'm thick in the skull, so I can only afford to spend most of my time just bowing my neck and pushing forward in the Word, and trying hard not to fight against the scarylove Ru'ach of Jesus. I've got to leave the real End of Days to brighter minds than mine.

But I do have fun looking in on the apocalyptic expressions of others:

Apocalypse Soon
Berean Call
The always hilarious* Rapture Ready (I hope those manuals never come in handy for me.)
The God Still Loves Us forums... where being crazy and wrong never felt so good and friendly.

Oh, there are a jillion of them out there. There is plenty of pop-apocalypse, both Christian and non, that borders on (or even bathes in) the asinine. For example, I'm pretty certain that, despite the contemporary protests to the contrary, neither Ronald Wilson Reagan (good ol' 666) nor Barack Hussein Obama fit the profile of the Antichrist as described in the bible.

But the links above are reasoned and worked at. Even if they don't get everything right (because, after all, who does?) they do a good job of citing actual sources and doing their level best to comprehend something as wild and incomprehensible as the End of Days.

*Thanks, Plankton. I feel tingly inside too.

**to those, like me, who find Johnny Cash/Shel Silverstein meditations on death to be a hoot.

Life Before "Life After People"

I beat the History Channel to the punch, but only after they beat me to it first. Or vice versa.

Let me explain:

The History Channel will be airing a speculative documentary called "Life After People." It attempts to look at our cultural artifacts in a setting in which human life has abandoned or been stricken from, creation. Cherynobyl provides a case study.

The book I'm working on is a speculative story that attempts to look at our cultural artifacts before an apocalyptic* disaster. So, yeah, my book is sort of the spiritual pre-quel in fiction to Life After People. The other thing is that, in my book, the cataclysm isn't something currently popular, like nukes or disease or fire or demons or angels or spaceships. It is a relatively subtle, fundamental change to our social infrastructure.

So yeah, the book isn't published yet, isn't finished, even, and may end up in print ten years after Life After People airs, but, see, it comes first!

*I hate this term as it is used today. An "apocalypse" is NOT a widespread or total disaster that devastates a population. An "apocalypse" is something wonderful, like an unveiling at an art show.