Tag: novels

“Gil’s All Fright Diner” To Be Animated By DreamWorks

According to this little Variety snippet, DreamWorks Animation is producing an adaptation of A. Lee Martinez’s novel Gil’s All Fright Diner. If you haven’t heard of the book (I hadn’t, but then, there’s a lot I don’t hear about), here’s what you need to know:

Something Evil (that’s with a capital E) is stalking Gil’s All Night Diner in Martinez’s terrific debut, a comic horror-fantasy novel. Heading the delightfully eccentric cast are buddies Earl (aka the Earl of Vampires) and Duke (aka the Duke of Werewolves), who are looking for a place to eat as they drive through Rockwood, a small desert community besieged by cosmically weird stuff. Soon after stopping at Gil’s Diner, the pair help Loretta, the formidable owner-operator, fend off a zombie attack. Determined to do the right thing, the two supernatural misfits take on further challenges, such as trying to prevent Tammy (aka Mistress Lilith, Queen of the Night) and her loyal but dumb boyfriend, Chad, from ending the world.

The screenplay is being adapted by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris (who also wrote Kung Fu Panda for DreamWorks) and the film will be directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (it’s been 11 years– I think we can forgive him for Wild Wild West now). With the right character design and an adherence to what sounds like a dark Douglas Adams style of humour, this could be pretty good. Have any of you read the book? What’d you think?

Jan. 21st 2010

The Last Werewolves of October

Champions Online - Blood Moon werewolfHere’s an assortment of items that have hit my inbox over the course of October, but that I’ve been too busy or distracted to post.

  • The Yorkshire Post has an interview with Jenny Agutter, who played nurse Alex Price in An American Werewolf in London. She discusses her role in AWIL and talks about how the audience reacted to the initial screening of the film.
  • The Grosse Pointe Farms Department of Public Works in Michigan is home to a boulder that bears the footprint of Le Loup Garou, the werewolf of Grosse Pointe. Hooray for urban legends!
  • Here’s a printable 3D werewolf paper craft, in case you’re locked in a room with a colour printer and 15 minutes to kill. I may have crafted one of these for my office desk.
  • pjstar.com has an interview with Professor Leslie Sconduto, author of “Metamorphoses of the Werewolf: A Literary Study from Antiquity through the Renaissance”. Choice quote: “There’s a werewolf for everyone. Each to its own. One to suit each taste.”
  • Champions Online is running a game event called “Blood Moon“, wherein the game’s world is overrun with werewolves, vampires and other monstrous creatures. Players can battle (and become) these monsters, and of course there’s a number of werewolf-related items to be had. There’s a free trial available for anyone who wants to try the game out, but it expires at 10 AM Pacific on November 2nd. That’s in, like, 10 hours. Hurry! HURRY!
  • The BSC Beat has an interview with Mark Chadbourn, author of the recently-released Hellboy novel Hellboy: The Ice Wolves. You can read a preview of The Ice Wolves at the Dark Horse web site.
  • Scribblenauts is an interesting game that’s just come out for the Nintendo DS. The idea is to solve puzzles by typing in the name of virtually any object you can think of that might help. That object then appears in the game and does its thing, whether it’s a ball, a chainsaw or a platypus. You can probably guess where I’m going with this… yes, you can summon werewolves. Here’s a Youtube video of two garlic and stake-infused werewolves scaring a vampire to death. I want this game just so I can do that, over and over.
  • Cinematical explains why it’s worth it to replace your DVD copy of An American Werewolf in London with the recently released Full Moon Edition on Blu-ray. Apparently the new bonus content alone is worth the cost! I wish I had a Blu-ray player.
  • I also wish I had an Xbox 360. The LIVE Marketplace has got werewolf costumes for your Xbox 360 Avatar.

Many thanks to people who submitted these items!

Nov. 2nd 2009

Ultra Super Lycanthropic Travesty II: Werewolf Book Covers of Stupid X: The Reckoning

The art of making a good werewolf book cover must be tough shit. For reasons that modern Roukasian science has yet to discover, most monster-fans shun lycanthropes in favor of books featuring thin pale guys who sip blood, sparkle, and languish in a dark existential tardzone. Of course, this may prompt me to smoothly remove my box-frame emo glasses as I lounge in my Panera booth-seat and say something like: “Well then what, dear reader, constitutes a monster to begin with? Perhaps his multifacetedness is all too eager to transgress our subjective demarcations of criticism and culture?”

While that’s a legitimate question, fuck it for now. There are tons, tons of werewolf book covers out there that suck royal truckloads of ass, and I have some ideas why. Perhaps it’s because the awesomeness of snarly animal-humans is just too hard for people to capture. Perhaps it’s because the human mind, when it gets its hands on the demonic cauldron of Photoshop, goes 100% more bat-shit crazy than it already is. Perhaps because, dear reader, a populace that exalts its own divorce from Thoreauvian nature will, by implication, fail to capture the energy of predation, especially if it fails to even remember that the Grande Columbian Dark-Roast Almond Latte always comes with soy, not SKIM milk.

Anyway, here are some more shitty werewolf book covers. A while ago, Werewolf News ran a feature of mine called “The Top Five Worst Werewolf Book Covers Ever,” and now I’m back to do it again.
(more…)

Jul. 17th 2009

Eva Gordon’s Werewolf Fiction

Author Eva Gordon sent in this note late last week:

I’m an author of fantasy/paranormal novels. My debut novel The Stone of The Tenth Realm‘s main male character is a Scottish Werewolf, Logan MacLeod, and he has to kick ass to set things right.

I was checking out Eva’s site, and noticed that she has a background in biology, environmental science and anatomy/physiology, and she’s also worked at a wolf sanctuary. This range of knowledge and experience could make for some extremely detailed and interesting werewolves, and I asked her how she applied this knowledge to her writing. She replies:

…my background in the biological sciences has certainly influenced my writings. I’ve read a few paranormal novels about wolves and I often cringe because some wolf biology and behaviors are off. I’m more lax with lycan characters because they are the author’s own creative invention. In my just released novel, my werewolf was cursed, but when he joins a pack of real wolves he behaves as they do. In my current work in process, The Wolf Maiden Chronicles my lycans are genetic and I even drew out a pedigree and punnet square (biology 101) before writing the first one, Werewolf Sanctuary, which is under consideration with a publisher at this moment.

It’s always a pleasure to see writers approaching the subject of werewolves with care and interest, particularly when they’ve got real-world knowledge to help shape the characters. You can find Eva’s first published novel, The Stone of The Tenth Realm, on Amazon.

Sep. 18th 2008

Werewolf Month at MonsterLibrarian.com

July is Werewolf Month at MonsterLibrarian.com. Werewolf Month– I like the sound of that! (more…)

Jul. 3rd 2008

Tor Posthumously Publishes Slain Officer’s Werewolf Novel

Quite a few news sites are talking about today’s publication of The Wolfman, a werewolf novel penned by a New York City volunteer police officer who was killed in the line of duty. (more…)

May. 13th 2008

Slow. Slow!

Werewolf news has been slow these days. It’s kind of hard to believe, with the X-Files: I Want To Believe & The Wolf Man on the way, Welcome To Hoxford coming out in August, and a spate of werewolf novels hitting the market. (more…)

Apr. 23rd 2008