David Dubrow

Author

American Horror Story Season Two: Impressions

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Over the course of the last few weeks, I watched the second season of American Horror Story after having been assured by its fans that it was better than the first season, which featured Dylan McDermott crying and masturbating in the early episodes and was generally mediocre.

Unfortunately, I found the second season about as mediocre for similar reasons.

The writers did absolutely nothing to make you care about any of the characters, including Kit Walker, arguably the only “good guy” in the show.  None of them were likable.  You have to like the characters to care about what happens to them, and in horror, very bad things are supposed to happen to them.  One gets possessed by the Devil, one gets raped, many get killed horribly, etc, and it wasn’t the least bit affecting.  The reporter character was simply venal and without charm; sister Jude lacked pathos despite piddling late-season efforts to achieve it; and Bloody Face, once unmasked, lacked menace.

It was a mishmash of horror themes that lacked a single unifying thread.  Alien abductions, demonic possession, Nazi experiments, and serial killers: all thrown against the wall, and none of them stuck.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what the Devil thinks about Gray aliens kidnapping people and experimenting on them?  You won’t find it here.  Despite that the story took place, for the most part, in an asylum, they barely touched on an extremely important theme: perception vs reality.  Crazy people and people on drugs often perceive reality as different from what it actually is.  That idea could have been used to show insanity.  It didn’t.  There was very little madness in the madhouse.

The show suffered from some very clumsy storytelling elements that should have been taken out.  When the reporter character escapes from Bloody Face, she just happens to get into a car with a crazy, suicidal man?  Really?  That was the best way the writers could think of to bring her back to the asylum?  Didn’t make sense.  The subplot with Ian McShane was entertaining, but only because Ian McShane was in it.  Certain characters just dropped off the face of the show for long periods without rhyme or reason.  Story arcs ended abruptly.  We don’t get closure in real life, so we want it in our fiction.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get that here.

The ending was banal and without surprise or tension.  While it was nice to see Dylan McDermott with his clothes on, his character lacked menace, and it was obvious what would happen to him in the end.  The alien kids end up becoming a lawyer and a doctor, respectively. The Nazi self-immolates.  Kit gets beamed up.  By then, I didn’t care.

The show did have one bright spot: the Angel of Death.  She was awesome.  I loved every scene with her in it, even though she was underutilized as a character.

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Breadhead Friday: Dutch Oven Experiments

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I hauled our cast iron dutch oven out of storage, cleaned and re-seasoned it, and got it ready for some bread baking.  Baking bread in a dutch oven is simple: you preheat the dutch oven in your regular oven, put the dough in there, cover it, and bake it.  For the last few minutes of baking you take off the lid to help color the crust.  A simple Google search on dutch oven bread recipes presented variations on this one by Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery, so I gave it a try.

The crust was nice, the crumb was nice, but there was a certain flavor to it I didn’t care for, probably having to do with the overnight fermentation on the counter.  So I adapted a more tried-and-true lean bread recipe, using a cold rise in the fridge, and had much better results.

Okay, great.  What now?

My first experiment was with bacon bread.  Same lean dough recipe, perhaps a little wetter than usual, with pieces of cooked bacon added to the mixing process.  It turned out really well.  There was a faint smoky flavor throughout the loaf, and the little bacon bits added texture.  Any concerns about the salt content of the bacon affecting the yeast were unfounded: it rose just fine in the fridge.  I used the leftover dough to make pizza, which was really quite good.

Bacon dough, pre-rise

Bacon dough, after 3 days in the fridge

The baked bacon bread
Bacon bread crumb

Bacon dough pizza with chicken parm and pepperoni

Where else do we go with this?

As I leafed through a Zingerman’s catalog, I saw their mail-order breads and found my answer: Parmesan pepper bread.  If the salty bacon didn’t mess up the rise, surely a salty cheese like Parmesan wouldn’t, either.  Right?

Raw loaf in the hot dutch oven – note the pepper

Parmesan pepper boule

The crumb shot

It came out perfectly.  There’s a great, rich taste of Parmesan cheese, mixed with a pleasant, lingering heat from about two teaspoons of black pepper.  As before, I’d done nothing different in the mixing and kneading process: I just added the extra ingredients in the beginning.

No eggs, milk, or butter needed: just a straight flour-water-yeast-salt dough, plus the flavoring of your choice.

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Dreadedin Chronicles Is Published!

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I’m pleased to announce that my new novella, Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City has just been published and is available as an e-book on Amazon.com.

It’s a novella aimed at a Young Adult (YA) audience, written in cooperation with the Dunedin Public Library.  The story takes place in and around the city of Dunedin (pronounced “dun-EE-din”), Florida.  Most of the novel’s supporting characters are based on local teen volunteers.

A limited edition print run will make the book available for borrowing from the Dunedin Public Library in November 2014.

The book blurb states:

Paige Ashton is an ordinary teenager just trying to get through high school. Friendless, she’s socially invisible until bizarre occurrences put her in the spotlight. When disaster strikes on Halloween, why is everyone looking for her? 

College freshman Ryan Kincaid is living a lie: he pretends to go to class but hangs out and drinks with his friends instead. He’s never had to work for anything in his life, so how is he going to save his family from a fate worse than death? 

Soon, they’ll have to face cannibal zombies, a horrible sleeping sickness, and an ancient evil hundreds of millions of years old, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. 

Happy Halloween!

The text includes some Lovecraftian themes, including research using forbidden tomes like the Pnakotic Manuscripts, inhuman civilizations that existed millions of years before our own, and terms like “cyclopean.”  At 99 cents, it’s practically a steal!

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Book Review: The Blue Tent Sky

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I can’t remember where I found the link to Brian Aitken’s Indiegogo site, but I do recall that once I read it, I had to contribute.  His story required it.

The book blurb says, “In 2010 Brian Aitken was sentenced to seven years in prison for possessing firearms he legally owned. He lost everything, including custody of his son, for a crime he did not commit. After spending four months behind bars, Governor Chris Christie demanded his release. This is his story.”

For anyone interested in personal freedom, firearms laws, individual rights, or an inside look at an extremely arbitrary and capricious legal system, this book is a must-read.  The early part of Brian’s story is immediately recognizable: an acrimonious divorce followed by parental alienation, but it soon spirals into a horribly Kafkaesque nightmare culminating in a seven-year prison sentence for the crime of moving one’s lawfully-owned firearms from one residence to another.

While gripping, the book isn’t without its flaws.  Some grammatical mistakes, odd phrasing, and disjointed story-telling occasionally mar the narrative; it needed one last pass with an editor before it went to print.  In addition, there’s a ham-handed marketing effort to make Brian’s story a left vs. right issue, which doesn’t fit.  The American left doesn’t like guns and wants to outlaw private ownership of them, yes, but this case was about the typical unthinking gun-grabbing that’s part and parcel of northeastern liberalism, not a true political effort.  An overzealous prosecutor and disgustingly biased judge wanted to make an example of Brian not because he was a conservative, but because he dared to own guns in their state.

Brian had been gored by two bulls: America’s awful family court system (which treats all fathers like disposable potential abusers) and New Jersey’s contradictory, even senseless firearms laws.  I can’t imagine how terrible it must be to have one’s own son ripped away like Brian’s, but to be sentenced to prison on top of that for not having done anything illegal is unthinkable.  Despite this, Brian treated the subject matter with admirable grace.

The story hits its nadir with Brian’s chilling account of county jail, followed by prison.  As appalling as the experience was, the injustice of it made it even worse, no doubt, and I needed a Silkwood shower after reading it.

Whether or not you can ever see yourself in Brian’s shoes, what happened to him was a terrible injustice.  Buy his book.  Read it.  And stay out of New Jersey if you legally own a firearm.

Four out of five stars.

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Breadhead Friday: Pizzas I Have Known

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It’s been another extremely busy week.  Here are the highlights:

  • The novella is finished editing and has gone on to formatting.  Once again, I’ve used Mark Coker’s Smashwords Style Guide, which is an excellent resource on formatting documents into ebooks.  It’s a somewhat lengthy process, but the results are worth it.
  • I trained myself to use GIMP to create a cover for the novella.  GIMP is powerful, easy to use, and free.  Luckily, I have some experience using Photoshop, so GIMP wasn’t terribly difficult to learn.  The cover photo was taken by me at 4:30 AM in downtown Dunedin.
  • Everyone says that unless you’re a graphic artist, you shouldn’t do your own book covers.  That’s mostly true. However, I have done professional graphic art and have experience designing both book and video covers.  The cover for Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City is good and captures the feel and look of what I’d imagined.
  • I changed the look of this blog.
  • I practiced baking bread in a dutch oven.  The results have been good, but I want them to be great, so I continue to work at it.
With all that in mind, here are some pizzas I have made over the last few months.  This does not represent all of the pizzas; only the ones I remembered to take photos of.
Turkey pepperoni and chicken parm pizza

Turkey pepperoni, grilled chicken, and bacon

Turkey pepperoni, chicken parm, and bacon

Turkey pepperoni and bacon

Sloppy joe pizza

A few notes:

  • Obviously, my family is keeping the turkey pepperoni industry afloat.  It’s a heavy task, but someone has to do it.
  • A chicken and bacon pizza is about as good as it gets, especially if it’s chicken parm.  
  • For the sloppy joe pizza, things went in a different but delicious direction: I added some leftover sloppy joes I’d made to the sauce, which gave it some extra protein and diced peppers.  The crust is also different: I used leftover lean dough from a dutch oven boule I’d made earlier in the week.  It’s an experiment that’s well worth repeating.
  • And just so we don’t seem like pigs here, a green salad always precedes pizza,  I call it a “kitchen sink” salad because I add diced apples, strawberries, blueberries, jicama, and papaya to the typical greens, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, peapods, etc.  It’s become such a habit that our three-year-old naturally expects a salad before pizza. Go figure.
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Fred Zombies and Dreadedin Zombies

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A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to work with firearms expert Phil Motzer on a number of instructional videos, including Combat Handgun, arguably the best primer on using a semi-automatic pistol for personal defense available.

Not long after our professional relationship ended, his wife asked if I might participate in the first Fredericksburg Zombie Walk, a charity event.  I was unable to attend, but I did send a number of autographed copies of The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse.  I’ve done so for every Fredericksburg Zombie Walk since.

This year’s Fredericksburg Zombie Walk will be held on Saturday November 1, 2014 at Hurkamp Park, 500 William Street, Fredericksburg VA 22401, from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm.  Please bring a non-perishable food item, cleaning supplies, or a charitable donation.  There’ll be prizes and contests and all sorts of fun.

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The title of my YA Lovecraftian Halloween novel will be Dreadedin Chronicles: The Nameless City.  Electronic copies will be available before Halloween, and physical copies some time in early 2015.  Here is the blurb:

Paige Ashton is an ordinary teenager, just trying to get through high school. Friendless, she’s socially invisible until bizarre occurrences put her in the spotlight. When disaster strikes on Halloween, why is everyone looking for her?

College freshman Ryan Kincaid is living a lie: he pretends to go to class but hangs out and drinks with his friends instead. He’s never had to work for anything in his life, so how is he going to save his family from a fate worse than death?

Soon, they’ll have to face cannibal zombies, a horrible sleeping sickness, and an ancient evil hundreds of millions of years old, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

Happy Halloween!

The story will take place in a fictionalized version of the town of Dunedin, Florida, and most of the supporting characters have been taken from local teen volunteers who filled out a questionnaire provided by the Dunedin Public Library.  
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