angels

Leviathan by R.M. Huffman

January 20, 2016 by David Dubrow 1 Comment

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:

A genealogy of both Biblical and Huffman’s characters.
A bestiary that tells you the difference between a creodont and an indrik.
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!

The Nephilim and the False Prophet

January 12, 2016 by David Dubrow 1 Comment

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!

The Prophecy’s Angels as Immature, Brutal Childen

March 25, 2015 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy is an extraordinary, imaginative film that shows angels in a much different light from the celestial beings humanized by television shows like Touched by an Angel and articles in Reader’s Digest. Widen’s angels are brutal, savage, animalistic. Rather than create an angel mythology out of whole cloth, Widen mined the Bible for angelic references to show us that angels are, in their hearts, killers.

This central theme is stated quite clearly when Thomas Daggett, the protagonist, says, “Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?”

Physically, Widen’s angels display birdlike behavior, given that their true forms are winged, eyeless humanoids. They perch like raptors, a bizarre affectation that works very well in the film. Uziel, Gabriel’s lieutenant, scents for the angel Simon like an animal would, and their subsequent fight is extremely brutal, without human finesse or mercy. After stabbing Simon, Uziel literally digs into the wound, trying to pull out his heart.

Uziel’s autopsy scene further shows how separate the angels are from humans, from the lack of growth rings on their bones to the bizarre makeup of their blood (chemicals usually only found in an aborted fetus). Hermaphroditic, lacking eyes, they’re just different.

Later, we see the Archangel Gabriel literally tasting the shed blood on the wardrobe after Uziel and Simon’s fight, able from this to determine that it came from Simon. Not even a higher order of angel like Gabriel is exempt from this kind of base animalism. They’re not beautiful, celestial messengers of God, but are, in Daggett’s terms, “creatures.”

In addition to their bestial nature, the angels in The Prophecy are bizarrely childlike in both temper and behavior. The entire conceit of the film, that certain angels became jealous of humans for being created with souls and acquiring God’s chief affection, is essentially a gigantic, millennia-long temper tantrum. A war, with casualties and spiritual consequences that affect the spiritual future of the human race, based entirely on envy.

This is shown most clearly in Gabriel, arguably one of Christopher Walken’s greatest roles. He contemptuously refers to humans by the juvenile term “talking monkeys,” but can’t even drive a car, showing an immature helplessness. During his confrontation with Simon, Simon tells him, “Sometimes you just have to do what you’re told,” which is very reminiscent of a parent scolding a child. When Simon won’t tell Gabriel where he’d hidden Hawthorne’s soul even after being tortured, Gabriel stamps his foot and shouts in a childish fit of pique: a mini-tantrum.

Perhaps the best indication that the angels are emotional children, bereft of a father as a result of their ruinous war in Heaven, is when Gabriel tries to entice Thomas to fight alongside him: “Nobody tells you when to go to bed. You eat all the ice cream you want. You get to kill all day, all night, just like an angel!” Gabriel’s speaking ironically about the bed time and ice cream, but the language he uses still evokes images of childlike freedom. Despite his contempt for humans, he is himself beneath them in maturity and ethics.

And what of God in this war-torn universe? The only time we hear of Him is when Daggett asks Gabriel, “If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly, why don’t you just ask Him? Why don’t you just ask God?”

Gabriel’s answer is poignant, and in many painful ways puts him on the same level as us: “Because He doesn’t talk to me anymore.”

Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale

December 19, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

My hybrid Christmas/Hanukkah story Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale, was published by Liberty Island!

It’s got comedy, pathos, excitement, and the most incisive social commentary you’ll ever see outside of a gas station water cooler conversation. If you’ve ever been interested in what Judah Maccabee really thinks about the holiday season, then this is the story for you.

There’s a little bit of rough language, some implied intimacy, adult situations, mild violence, and angels. Which reindeer takes a bullet? What does Heaven’s VFW post look like? Where do cat souls come from? These questions and more are answered in Get the Greek, free to read on Liberty Island!

Horror’s Shifting Moral Center

December 10, 2014 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

A casual observer of supernatural themes in movies, television, and literature could easily conclude that angels are simply enhanced humans with wings, and vampires are merely enhanced (if anemic) humans with fangs. They’re superheroes.

The reasons for this are simple, but unfortunate: these characters are not part of a universe where there’s a God who intervenes in human events. Going there in a narrative sense is icky. It gets into religion, and who wants to get involved in that? Too often religion is equated with judgment (as though using one’s intellect and ethics to determine what’s proper from what isn’t is a bad thing), and we can’t have judgment in our fiction. We can’t have a supreme moral arbiter, especially when that hot angel over there is about to knock boots with the wisecracking-but-gold-hearted cambion detective protagonist. It spoils the fantasy.

One of my most favorite parts of F. Paul Wilson’s novel The Keep was when the scholar character talks with the vampire Molasar and learns that the crosses embedded into the eponymous keep are part of what is imprisoning him. The cross is indeed a symbol of power and that, as a Jew, the scholar has had it all wrong: Jesus Christ was the Messiah. He found this to be deeply disturbing news, as would any Jewish person (including myself). Later on, we learn that it’s not a cross, but the figure of a sword hilt, but the crisis was still very poignant and meaningful.

Today’s vampires aren’t forced back by crosses and holy water; to have that, you’d have to include the whole raft of Judeo-Christian mythology. Because we’ve lost our sense of proportion, it would be considered proselytizing, and that’s just evil. It wasn’t long ago that Fright Night came out, and with it a vampire that suffered injury from symbols of holiness (the way vampires used to). Before that, we had The Exorcist, where Catholic priests were the good guys who used the power of God to exorcize a demon. Try to find a sympathetic portrayal of a priest in mainstream television, literature, or cinema these days, where it’s still considered brave to create a priest character who molests children or does something equally horrible.

In Supernatural, mumbled pseudo-Latin and nonsense-inscribed pentagrams are sufficient to exorcize or trap most demons, and the angels, as charming as some can be, are no different morally than the inhabitants of the infernal realms. What’s interesting in the Supernatural universe is that demonic possession can be cured through the use of sanctified blood, and holy water burns the possessed. In an early scene in the episode Soul Survivor, we even see a Catholic priest, rosary and all, blessing bags of blood at a blood bank. Where did he get the power to sanctify the blood? It’s never explored. They have to gloss over it. If angels can’t bless things, how can priests do it? Got me. Ask the writers.

Modern media’s deliberate avoidance, if not outright shunning of Judeo-Christian ethics as expressed in the Bible has altered the landscape of horror, shifting its moral center to nihilism. Torture porn like the Hostel series, ultra-violent mumblegore like You’re Next, dystopian zombie melodramas like The Walking Dead, and any of the ghost stories produced in the last fifteen years prove this out. Ethics are derived from expediency, with no ultimate moral arbiter.

Horror’s big enough to contain all these things and still scare you, and you don’t need the God of the Bible to tell you right from wrong. Nevertheless, what we’re seeing is the horror genre reflecting today’s cultural norms in ways that, it can be argued, dilute its unique power. If vampires, angels, and demons are just more powerful humans, why not make them aliens instead? Or X-Men?

American Horror Story Season Two: Impressions

October 27, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

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.