David Dubrow

Author

Leviathan by R.M. Huffman

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In July of 2014, I read and reviewed R.M. Huffman’s novel Antediluvian.  At the time, this is what I said of it:

“It’s a fascinating story about the world-that-was described so sparingly in the Book of Genesis, where morning mists covered the Earth in lieu of rain, Watcher angels gave into lust to lay with human women, and dragon-like sauropods were used as beasts of burden.”

I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Huffman has re-released this extraordinary fantasy novel with publisher Lampion Press under the title Leviathan: Book One of the Antediluvian Legacy.  In addition to illustrations of some of the characters, places, and beasts in the novel, this new edition includes:

  1. A genealogy of both Biblical and Huffman’s characters.
  2. A bestiary that tells you the difference between a creodont and an indrik.
  3. A preview of Fallen: Book Two of the Antediluvian Legacy.

What makes Leviathan stand out, in part, is how lived-in Huffman made the setting, the theology.  When one farmer says to another, “Toil, plants of the field, sweat of our faces…we’ll be well aware of the ground’s curse for certain,” it makes sense: they’re the Biblical Adam’s heirs, just a few generations from the Fall, and they know it. They live it every day.

This is reinforced by the fallen Watcher angel Azazyel saying, much later, “We watched as Adam was made, and then we watched him ruin everything.  And now, Samyaza is paying the price for Adam’s loosing of death into the world.”  Despite the fantasy theme, we know these characters from Bible study.

Huffman’s description of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals used as beasts of burden maintain the Biblical-historical theme, as does the Edenites being vegetarians (a tradition ended after the Flood when God says in Genesis 9:2-3, “The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.”)

Some of my favorite parts of Leviathan were the references to other places, adding to the richness of the world. Kenan, a former adventurer, says to Noah, “I slew the high priests of the Om-Ctherra snake cult, along with its monstrous ‘deity.’ I fought a warlord-sorcerer, possessed by one of Satan’s princes, with the Nomads of Nod.”  Kenan becomes Howard’s Conan, or even Moorcock’s Corum Jhaelen Irsei.

If you want adventure in a fully-realized fantasy world that’s both familiar and mysterious, you’ve got to get Leviathan. And then tell Dr. Huffman to finish up Fallen already!

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Two-Minute Movie Review: Pay the Ghost

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I’m a Nicolas Cage fan, no two ways about it. I know that if I’m watching a movie with Nic Cage in it, I’ll be at least mildly entertained. Consistency is a quality to be prized, depending on context; obviously, some things are consistently awful, like mayonnaise and root canals. Nic Cage is not like mayonnaise and root canals.

Pay the Ghost is a fun movie, imaginative and disturbing.  It was based off of a novella by Tim Lebbon, whom I’ve never read before but deserves great respect for being a successful writer. The film has one great strength that makes it worth watching and one titanic weakness that almost made me turn it off. I’m glad I didn’t.

The strength is in the portrayal of how Mike (Nic Cage) and Kristen’s (Sarah Wayne Callies) son Charlie goes missing.  You know what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t lessen the tension in the lead-up, the panic in the event, and the grief afterward.  As a parent, it becomes very easy to identify with the loss of a child: every missing or kidnapped child becomes your own, if only for a moment.  That part was very well done.  Callies always seems to take thankless, unlikable roles, like the doctor in Prison Break and Lori in The Walking Dead: it’s not her performance that makes you dislike her, but the writing. This unlikability carries over in Pay the Ghost, where her character Kristen immediately blames Mike for losing the boy, and even later, in the aftermath, continues to hold him responsible.

And this is where the weakness comes in: a year later, after they’ve separated, both Mike and Kristen get intimations that Charlie is asking for their help, reaching out to them from some other place.  Later, when Kristen approaches Mike with news of her occult visitations with Charlie, Mike immediately and pathetically accepts her as if nothing had happened in the intervening year. No acknowledgment of Kristen’s venomous words or behavior, and most importantly, no apology from Kristen. It threw me off, made me like both Mike and the movie a bit less.

The addition of a sexy German folklore professor played by Veronica Ferres and harried cop played by Lyriq Bent didn’t do a lot for the film’s plot or interest: both could have been fleshed out a little more.  Stephen McHattie had a great little cameo as a blind homeless man (a sentence that both amuses and depresses in equal measure).

Overall, though, I enjoyed the movie and recommend it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

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The Nephilim and the False Prophet

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The second book in my Armageddon trilogy, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, is live in the Amazon bookstore!

From the blurb:

Fueled by brutal, random violence and a worldwide leprosy epidemic, the Earth descends into chaos. Preparing for Armageddon, Hell plans an atrocity called The Slaughter of the Innocents while Heaven’s scattered agents fight a cold war against superstar evangelist Kyle Loubet, who they believe is the False Prophet foretold in the Bible. 

The Eremites walk the Earth: black magicians kept alive through unholy relics. Terrible visions assail the world’s remaining psychics, promising an eternal night of blood and fire and endless agony. Caught in the middle, Hector, Ozzie, and Siobhan face terrible dangers from all sides. Now free from their infernal prison, what are the Watcher angels planning? With only days before the Apocalypse, can humanity be saved?

This edition includes a synopsis of the first book in the trilogy, The Blessed Man and the Witch; a list of characters; and a glossary of terms.

$2.99 or free to read through Kindle Unlimited. Get your copy now!

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The Algorithms, the Minefield

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The algorithms, the algorithms, the damned algorithms.

Facebook and Twitter choose what we see and what we show according to the algorithms, social media’s God (or Devil), of sorts. We can blame all sorts of things on the algorithms: our lack of reach, the things we miss, the ads we see and the ones we block.  The friends you used to see on your wall three times daily have dropped off social media…or have they? No. Facebook’s just not showing them to you anymore (or, more to the point, Facebook’s algorithms aren’t). The same cat videos and memes are there, but now you just have to go hunting for them on individual pages.

Oh, but the irritating stuff is there, too.  The Darth Trump video she Liked; the Bernie Sanders student loan debt thread he commented on; the Stephen King meme she retweeted that called everyone not an unreconstructed 1970’s hippie a fascist. That stuff’s front and center. Can’t miss that.

It’s a terrible thing to serve such an arbitrary and capricious deity as the social media algorithm, especially when its Creators are such flawed figures. I know: I saw The Social Network.

When you’re treating social media as a potential sales outlet, you subject yourself to a terrible set of self-imposed strictures that can’t help but conflict. Say you’re a writer, like me, and you use Facebook not just to connect with friends and relatives, but find new readers and network with other writers. It is a social network, after all.  When you’re starting out, the rule is: don’t alienate half the world with your horrible political/religious/economic opinions (and they are horrible, all of them, every single one).  Keep it light.  Stay professional.  Be yourself, but don’t be too much of yourself, because you’ll piss someone off. Maybe you’ll make someone important angry.  Is it worth the price of a book (or an online friendship) to dash off that paragraph about how evil Hillary Clinton is?  They’re watching you, you know. They’ll see and get mad.  So how much tongue-biting are you going to do?  You want to be you, but you have to hide certain things, which isn’t you.

No, it doesn’t matter that you see what they Like and it makes you mad but you let it go.  Your forbearance means nothing.  You see them, but more importantly, they see you. They can piss you off all day long, but don’t piss them off. Only their views are legitimate.

A conundrum, isn’t it?

No.

Because it’s all bullshit.  You’re not going to ruin your writing career, nascent or otherwise, through social media, especially Facebook.  The people who will get mad at you for your appalling opinions on issues that have nothing to do with your writing are entirely without value as individuals or contacts.  Their conditional professionalism can only damage you.  Nobody gets rich selling books on Facebook or Twitter.  Nobody.  (At least, nobody who wasn’t rich to begin with.) If you can’t strike it rich there, then you can’t get bankrupted there, either. Social media is a tool among many.  Obviously, it’s stupid to go out to deliberately make enemies, but living on eggshells will kill you.

Anyone who’ll construct a negative opinion of you because you Like Rush Limbaugh (or Rachel Maddow) on social media is a waste of time.  They won’t buy from you and they won’t sell for you. Ditch them and move on.

The only caveat is that shoehorning your disgusting political views into your fiction at the expense of plot and characterization dooms you to deserved failure, as my Breitbart piece suggests.

So don’t worry about the algorithms. They’re there to upset you, but they won’t kill you.  Most of the time.

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Sicario: A Brief Review

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I can’t remember when I saw the trailer for Sicario, but it definitely made me want to see the movie. The medieval brutality of Mexican drug gangs is particularly disturbing. Stories of Vlad Tepes and Tomás de Torquemada are horrific, but let’s face it: they happened centuries ago and the violence is dimmed over time. When it happens today, it’s somehow uniquely horrible (even though it’s not unique).

Unfortunately, this movie didn’t live up to the hype in any way, and I can’t recommend it as worth your time or money.

My main criticism of the film is in its protagonist (a role that inexplicably shifts to a different character in the last several minutes of the film, putting its lack of narrative focus on full display), played by Emily Blunt.  I have no problem with Emily Blunt as an actress, but as the leader of a tactical team doing drug interdiction for the FBI, she lacked a great deal to be desired. Everybody wants strong, confident women roles in movies, but nobody wants to acknowledge the gigantic suspension of disbelief that’s required to maintain the polite fiction that a fit 5’7″, 100 lb woman can be at least as physically competent as a fit, 6’1″, 210 lb man.  It’s ludicrous and did the film no favors.

That aside, what made things worse was that she was a complete incompetent in addition to being a moral coward.  At no point did she make a decision during the film’s events that redounded positively to her character. When she wasn’t whining about not knowing what was going on, she was defying orders, pulling guns on her colleagues, and getting herself in more trouble than she could handle on her own.  Not since Inspector Clouseau has a law enforcement officer been so bumblingly portrayed, though at least Peter Sellers was hysterically funny and managed to solve the case on his own.  As a cipher, lacking personality or judgment, she failed to give the viewer the chance to identify with her even a little bit.

Josh Brolin and his flip-flops wasn’t as charming as he was supposed to be.  Daniel Kaluuya had a horribly thankless role as the gay black friend/colleague who probably wasn’t gay.  And Benicio Del Toro was tragically wasted, relegated to occasional grunting and mumbling (which isn’t unusual, but in this role, he did even fewer grunts and mumbles than normal).

The scenes with the corrupt cop did nothing to advance story or tension, and should have been left for a future Director’s Cut.

I know everybody works very hard in the movie business, and I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews, but I was not only disappointed in this film, but cheated out of a not-inconsiderable amount of money to see it. Avoid at all costs.

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He Knows You Know

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You’ve got this social media thing all figured out. You’re smart about it. You choose your friends carefully, you like the right things they do online (not everything, because you don’t want to be That Guy, do you, the obvious ass-kisser?). You’re cool. You’re building that all-important network.

(Oh, don’t get me started on that network thing, either. I mean, who gives a damn how many writer friends you have, especially if they’re all unknowns like you? Do you want to have lots of writer friends or lots of reader fans?  Fans are where the money’s at. If all you hang out with is writers, how do you break out?  What about all the writers recommending each others’ books, isn’t that a gigantic circle jerk? On the other hand, you have to start somewhere, right? But is this the best place to get started? And what about those fans, the ones who all the writers are friends with on social media? They like all the right things, too, and get free books out of it. Lots of free books. So yeah, that’s your network.)


You’re so smart, right?  There was that one time working in retail and you caught that girl shoplifting years and years ago and when you caught her she said, “You think you smart, but you ain’t,” and it was funny at the time and it’s become a thing you still laugh at now, decades later, but it’s not so funny the more you think about it because it raises the all-important question, the question on everybody’s mind every day: What did I miss?

Thing is, you see what the others are doing on social media and you don’t want to duplicate their mistakes, so you do different things, but they see you, too, and that’s something you really need to install into your personal hard drive: they see you, too. They do.  Just as you’re watching them, they’re watching you, and they see what you do and what you don’t and what you Share and Favorite and Like and Retweet and WooWoo and whatever else is out there.

It’s a two-way street, all this stuff, this interacting with other frustrating humans, whether it’s on social media or in meatspace, and you know that if you stroke you should get strokes back, and when you do it’s great and when you don’t it’s not so great and nobody strokes you the way they should for the things you do. People like what they like and not what you think they should like, and it’s funny when you think of writers like A. A. Milne, who hated that his most successful writing was the Winnie the Pooh material, but Jesus Christ, man, at least he got successful, and success in anything honorable isn’t to be despised and beggars can’t be choosers.  If that’s a frustrating roadblock in the path to success, you’d take it in a heartbeat.

The thing you can’t forget is that your writer buddies know what you Like, but most importantly, they know what you don’t Like.  They know when you’ve put them on the Pay No Mind List, even when you don’t announce it.  Oh, you’ve got your reasons for not sharing their stuff, and they’re good ones and not about jealousy (oh, there’s so much jealousy), but about character: this one called you and your buddies fascists; that one called everyone who thinks like you a bigot (which means that he called you a bigot, let’s be honest); the one over there’s an ass-kisser who never reciprocates your strokes anyway so she’s no loss except that you did spend some time boosting her books and giving her asked-for feedback some time ago and it’d only be fair to get a stroke in return.

So while you’re watching them, they’re watching you, and the bitchy, passive-aggressive nature of social media reinforces hostilities even as it bolsters friendships. And those red flags, the ones you ignored because you wanted to make friends with everybody? They’re still there, and there’re reasons why they’re there, and those reasons never vanish: you just ignore them.

Just remember what limited good social media really does, and whatever happens, no matter what, cross your heart and hope to die, remember that they see you too. You know them, and they know you.

(Title taken from Marillion’s song of the same name.)

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