David Dubrow

Author

Appalling Stories 2 Excerpt: Deprogram

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For the Appalling Stories series, entertainment is paramount. Yes, we intend to push back against left-wing agitprop infesting genre fiction, but if it’s a boring story, or, worse yet, right-wing agitprop masquerading as genre fiction, it wouldn’t fit. For my story Deprogram in Appalling Stories 2, I wanted to extend the craziness of multiple genders and the criminalizing of traditional morals to the next level, positing a future that hinted of Dystopia without bludgeoning the reader with details. Here’s an excerpt:

—

After a final glance at the security monitor, Grayson got up from his desk, left his office, and waited in the reception area for his new clients. They hadn’t signed the contract, but he knew with perfect certitude that by the end of the meeting they would leave his office scared, hopeful, and lighter by $250,000. They always did.

Smoothing his necktie, Grayson played his favorite pre-meeting game: which spouse would open the door first? Definitely Evelyn. Pat was still transitioning, and the male-to-female types tended to go overboard with the wilting flower routine until they worked out the hormonal quirks and relational friction. If he was wrong, he’d do leg day twice this week. If he was right, he’d treat himself to an extra shot of—

The door opened and Evelyn walked in, followed by her wife. Both medium-sized, average-looking types; the security monitor’s shitty resolution hadn’t picked up the lipstick on Pat’s teeth or Evelyn’s puffy eyes.

“Good morning,” Grayson said with a relieved smile, keeping his hands where they could see them. “I checked each of your ProReg profiles ten minutes ago. I take it you both still prefer to be referred to as Ms. for the purposes of this meeting? I apologize if I’ve made an offensive assumption.”

Evelyn smiled and nodded. “Yes, that’s right. But please, call me Evelyn.”

“Of course,” Grayson said. “Pleased to meet you.” He turned to Pat, eyebrows lifted in polite expectation.

“Ms. Papasian-Smith,” Pat said. She clutched her Nouveau Spade purse in a tight grip, but he noticed that her right hand twitched on meeting him: suppressing the handshake habit she’d acquired in decades of being—no, living as a man.

Keeping his expression bland, Grayson bobbed his head. “A pleasure. Please, call me Grayson or Mr. Dahab. Or even ‘hey, you’; whatever suits.” He didn’t wait to see their reaction to the weak joke as he led the way to his office. “Please have a seat. Would either of you like coffee or water?”

Nodding at their demurrals, he seated himself behind the desk and steepled his fingers. “We need to get something out of the way: there won’t be any monitors or recordings during this meeting, due to the…sensitive nature of what we’re about to discuss. With that in mind, I understand that you’re putting yourselves in some danger by consenting to being alone with me. I was born and continue to identify as male and cis, as you’ve no doubt seen from my ProReg profile. If that makes you feel unsafe, we can stop the meeting right now and you’re free to leave with no hard feelings. Is that all right?”

Evelyn looked at Pat, who made a show of thinking about it before nodding. “Yes. That’ll be fine.”

“Good,” Grayson said, folding his hands. “I got the broa—er, the less-detailed story in your email. Can you tell me a little more so we can decide what our next steps might be?”

As Evelyn opened her mouth to speak, Pat leaned forward and barked, “What’s your success rate? How can we be sure we’ll…I mean, our daughter, she…” Her mouth pursed into a glistening red asshole shape, and as she reached into her purse for a Kleenex, sobbing, Evelyn grimaced and patted at her shoulder.

Grayson turned, opened the mini-fridge, and pulled out a bottle of water, which he placed on the desk within both women’s reach. “I understand how difficult this can be,” he said, once Pat’s storm of crying had blown over. “However, I should probably warn you that what you—what we’re dealing with is extremely dangerous. These terrorists…these…cultists, they’ve mastered the art of brainwashing. I can’t deprogram someone with a snap of my fingers. It’s a long and difficult process, and at the end, sometimes I don’t succeed.”

Evelyn’s head snapped up. “What happens then?”

“I call the police, who’ll take her away.”

“Oh, Gaia,” Pat sobbed, and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.

Blinking, Evelyn said, “But we wouldn’t tell—“

“I can’t take that chance,” Grayson said, lifting his hand. “If your daughter’s really caught up in this, and from what you told me in the email I’m sure she is, then she’s joined an organization that bombs hospitals, shoots schools, and burns down shopping malls. The WLA makes the freedom fighter 9/11 terrorists look like Outdoor Scouts selling cookies. We could all be sent away for the rest of our lives if we’re caught aiding and abetting even one of these WLA types. Or worse.” He tapped his index finger against his forehead.

Evelyn covered her mouth and looked away.

Voice soft, he added, “But Ms. Papasian-Smith asked a good question. My deprogramming success rate. It currently stands at ninety percent. Nine out of every ten kids. That’s good odds. And I can guarantee that there’s nothing I won’t do to save your daughter from these monsters.”

Glancing at her wife, who shredded a damp tissue and stared into her lap, Evelyn said, “Okay. What do you need to know?”

—

For the rest of Deprogram, as well as several other short stories on subjects ranging from satire to science fiction, check out Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice.

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Battlestar Galactica 1978: An Overview

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“There are those who believe that life here began out there: far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive…somewhere beyond the heavens.”

I was only in single digits when it was first broadcast, but I’ll never forget watching the original Battlestar Galactica television series. Most science fiction programs like Star Trek, The Invaders, and even My Favorite Martian were relegated to UHF back then. A high-budget network television show with dogfighting spaceships, scary robots, and aliens was special. Even the comic books were cool. We all wanted to be like Starbuck or Apollo. Adama was the wise grandfather we wish we had. And who didn’t want to pilot a Colonial Viper?

As I watch it today, Battlestar Galactica‘s flaws become more evident. It could be that it’s a different viewing experience when you’re not seated six inches from a wood-framed color TV, wide-eyed and absorbing uncounted roentgens of radiation. Or maybe it’s got real problems. Nevertheless, it’s still an entertaining program, and worth talking about. We can discuss the 2003 remake at a later time. I’ve got all the DVDs.

The most striking thing about the show when you first watch it is the music. Both sad and stirring, it fits perfectly within the theme of embattled humanity fleeing for its life across the blackness of space. It conveys both loss and dignity, grief and unbowed heads.

Casting and performances were uneven, but hit the mark where it counted. Lorne Greene inhabited Adama, and to those of us who never watched Greene in Bonanza (why would you when Star Trek reruns were on), he nevertheless became a favorite actor. A great leader of men. His rich, deep voice conveyed both wisdom and authority, and he was very rarely wrong about anything. You’d follow Adama to the end of the universe if he asked, and would be honored by the request every centon. Dirk Benedict as Starbuck was the perfect lovable rogue: smoked cigars, drank, played cards, joked, womanized, feared commitment but possessed fierce loyalty, always with an eye for the main chance. You rooted for him, or for Richard Hatch as Apollo, the strait-laced fighter pilot who always did the right thing, and did it by the book. The other characters were, for the most part, interchangeable except for Herbert Jefferson Jr as Boomer and John Colicos as the evil Count Baltar. No one else stood out.

The child character Boxey was a problem. His pet robot dog Muffit was a problem. Even as a small boy I hated them. Perhaps I was born a cynic, but back then I knew they’d only been put into the show to cater to young people like me. Perhaps if Muffit wasn’t so obviously a performer in a robot dog suit or if Boxey hadn’t been so irritating they might have been better received. As it was, they were an unwelcome distraction that took you out of the show.

There’s a fundamental decency to the characters, themes, and storytelling that’s completely absent from today’s television fare. The people of the 12 Colonies believed in God. They prayed to Him, these ancient, starfaring people who had a different Bible, a different set of legends and heroes. They had marriage and codes of honor and were appalled at the necessity, when all else failed, of putting their women on the front lines of combat in Colonial Vipers. The miniseries’s pilot, Saga of a Star World, reflects late 1970’s Cold War concerns, with the Cylons filling in for the Soviets as a dreadful, implacable enemy. This Cold War comparison becomes even more stark when Sire Uri, a leader among the surviving humans, suggests that they should dispose of all of their weapons to show the Cylons that humans are no longer a threat. The Cylons would presumably call off the war and sue for peace: a perfect metaphor for the demand for nuclear disarmament in the face of Soviet aggression. We know how that ended up in the real world, and the people of Battlestar Galactica were at least as wise as us in refusing Sire Uri’s suggestion.

The special effects were good for the time. A common complaint was the frequent reuse of certain special effects shots: dogfights, ships exploding, Vipers leaving the flight bay, etc. I already mentioned the unfortunate Muffit. Still, they don’t get in the way of the plot. The Cylons were creepy, with their absurdly shiny bodies and that red, endlessly scanning eye. Despite the uniformity of their electronic voices, they’re not emotionless robots: they experience anger, concern, and fear. Some even carry swords. There’s a Cylon culture buried somewhere deep in their reptilian past, but we don’t see much of it. Lucifer, Count Baltar’s erstwhile dogsbody, has a disquietingly effete, refined voice, but his sparkling robot head is too small for his body and he’s difficult to be afraid of. All in all, Battlestar Galactica‘s illusion is imperfect, but functional.

Unfortunately, the show had problems throughout its run, with high budgets, terrible mid-season episodes, and dwindling viewership. It didn’t last past a single season. Galactica 1980 failed to recapture the magic and didn’t last long, either.

Nevertheless, it still holds up. If barely.

“Fleeing from the Cylon tyranny, the last Battlestar, the Galactica, leads a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest: a shining planet known as Earth.”

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Three Things to Watch at Thanksgivingtime

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All sports except for boxing and MMA bore the living tits off of me, so football is never my choice for screen entertainment during Thanksgivingtime. No, Thanksgivingtime isn’t a word like Christmastime is, but it should be. Yes. Anyhoo, if you’re looking to watch something during Thanksgivingtime, here are a few recommendations.

The Endless: An indie film of no fixed genre, The Endless tells the story of Aaron and Justin, two men who claim to have escaped a UFO-style cult ten years ago, and are having trouble adjusting to today’s world. When they get a package from the cult they left, they return to the compound to see how things have fared over the last decade. What’s great about good indie films like The Endless is that they’re imaginative in a way that corporate-produced Hollywood genre movies can’t quite match, with rare exceptions. You’ll find a lot of sticks-with-you visuals and terrific bits of storytelling in The Endless, and the mistakes it makes don’t distract from the overall quality of the production. There’s weird stuff, there’s funny stuff, there’s even some family stuff, and it works, for the most part. Trust me. I’m not wrong about a lot.

American Vandal: If you’ve seen multi-episode true crime shows like Making a Murderer or The Keepers, you have to watch American Vandal. It’s a pitch-perfect parody of true crime programs, from the close-up profile interviews and hours of B-roll to the multiple plot lines and red herrings. The first season deals with the investigation of a prank in which someone spray-painted penises on the teachers’ cars in a local high school’s parking lot, so you know where the humor is going. It’s both an eerily realistic dissection of the high school ecosystem and a deconstruction of the true crime genre. Season two addresses a different crime, this one committed by someone called The Turd Burglar. Social media and its attendant dangers/pitfalls get skewered here, with both hilarious and disgusting results. Both seasons are engrossing and incredibly well made.

First Reformed: Horribly flawed but impossible to look away from, First Reformed is a Paul Schrader movie that focuses on Ethan Hawke as Reverend Toller, the priest of a small church known more for its history than its holiness. Toller is a man with a haunted past and a terribly grim present, and he’s too conflicted to like but too human to hate. Everything’s bleak and stark and cold and meticulously placed, making it a visual masterpiece that you have to watch in awe. The performances couldn’t be better, adding to the film’s visual perfection. And yet the story’s muddled, the plot’s unclear, and the message is hackneyed. It tackles the issue of faith imperfectly at best, and misses the mark on deeper themes. What bothered me most was the ending, summed up by the director himself: “I don’t know what the ending is.” I’m not a movie director, but I am a fiction writer and an adult, and I say that that’s unfair to the audience. If we trust you with our time and attention, you owe us a proper story. I’m not saying that every ending has to be cut-and-dried, but if you don’t know how it ends and you made it, you’re betraying our trust. Don’t do that. I’ve written my share of open-ended endings, but I always knew how they do and should end. You may feel differently. Watch the movie and let me know what you think.

Happy Thanksgiving! And start using the term Thanksgivingtime so I don’t look like too much of a ding-dong.

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New Story Published: Dear Dad

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My short story Dear Dad was published in Issue 2 of the literary magazine Cinder Quarterly, and you can get it here on Amazon. It’s arguably my strangest work yet, and serves as a prequel to the story The Bitterness of Honey in the anthology Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice. Don’t let the weirdness turn you off; it’s a solid, fun piece of work that stands on its own. Let me prove it with this excerpt:

Dear Dad:

That’s how you’re supposed to start a letter, right? With “dear.” Even though we haven’t been dear to each other since you kicked me out of the house. No, I’m not writing to rehash the same old shit, so you can keep reading. I know you thought you had good reasons for throwing me out. You and Mom. Maybe I’d’ve done the same thing in your position. I don’t know. I mean, I doubt it, because who puts his only son out on the street for flunking out of college? Other than you. Anyway, lately I’ve been doing some real thinking about this, and I get it now. You were testing me. Putting ice down the garbage disposal to sharpen the blades.

Well, guess what? It worked. You and your MAGA hat-wearing buddies bitch and moan all the time about millennials being weak, entitled, and lazy. Not me. Not anymore. Your snowflake millennial son’s responsible for the end of the whole world. How’s that for accomplishment, you asshole?

Sorry. It just slipped out. Amazing how the same cycles of behavior repeat themselves over and over. You harangue me, I call you names, you tell me to get out, I leave. I guess that’s why they’re called cycles of behavior instead of lines of behavior.

I won’t bother going over the old stuff, before I moved out of state. I’ve been Facebook-stalking Mom’s account, so I know that my “friends” were keeping tabs on me, telling her (and you) what I’ve been doing. I can’t let you know where I am now for reasons that’ll become clear soon, but I can say that I moved to Madison, Wisconsin a year and a half ago. Yes, the liberal paradise, where everyone drives a Prius and has tattoos and calls each other “zhe” and “xher.” Or, at least, that’s how you see it. You’d be surprised at how strait-laced it actually is, especially for a college town.

And now, you better be sitting down for this: I was working for…Greenpeace.

Ha! I’ll bet your face went all white. I wasn’t blocking Japanese ships from harpooning whales or anything like that. I was a canvasser. I walked around the suburbs with a clipboard and a partner and a credit card reader, asking for donations from decent people to keep not-decent people like you from fucking up the one planet we have to live on. As it turns out this was not only a gigantic waste of time, but actually contributed to the end of civilization, but I didn’t know that then. Unlike you, I was trying to make a difference, not a profit.

It’s a tasty blend of science fiction, horror, and environmentalism wrapped in a page-turning narrative crust, and you can get it, plus several other stories from some truly talented writers, for less than $2.00!

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A Tale of Three Movies

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The best things come in threes. Everyone knows that.

—

Alien: Covenant is both a prequel and a sequel. It’s a sequel to the execrable film Prometheus, which was the best screenwriting example ever seen where the plot only moves forward only because every character makes a series of unbelievably stupid decisions. It’s also a prequel, because it continues the story of how the alien from the eponymous Alien science fiction movie franchise got its genetic start.

Despite this, it’s an entertaining movie, the greater son of a lesser father. Michael Fassbender puts in his usual terrific performance, investing the dual roles of androids named David and Walter with both credibility and pathos. Billy Crudup as the unready, less-than-assertive captain of the deep-space colonization vehicle Covenant makes you believe beyond a shadow of doubt that his character couldn’t do a whole lot right if his and his crew’s lives depended on it, which is a more difficult role than you might think. Everyone else fills their trope-positions admirably, so not much else to say there.

The mythology behind the story and the character motivations all made a certain amount of tragic, disturbing sense, and the mysteries that the captain and his crew seek to unravel are compelling; you want to see what happens next and what’s going to happen afterward. There are some dumb parts, but not many. You like science fiction? You like the Alien franchise? You like blood and monsters? Take a look at Alien: Covenant.

 

I saw a lot of online praise for Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage as a man who gets revenge on the religious cult that murdered his wife. While the film was, for the most part, a fun watch, I’m surprised at how many plaudits it got. The story’s as pedestrian as they come; in fact, I can’t believe it hasn’t been protested out of circulation for use of the “they killed my wife so I’m going to kill them” trope. Most movie reviewers are male feminists (heh): aren’t they horribly offended by this movie? Where’s the woke backlash?

Much has been made of Cage’s excellent portrayal of Red, the protagonist, which is also strange: Nicolas Cage is great in every movie he’s in. Sure, he’s been in some terrible movies, but they’re not terrible because of him. He elevates them to watchable status simply because of his performance. Who’s more entertaining on screen than Nic Cage? Nobody. He’s both character actor and leading man in one package.

If you plan to watch Mandy I hope you like magenta, because you’ll be seeing quite a lot of it. It’s the director’s favorite filter. The film starts off extremely slowly, so much so that my wife fell asleep during the first forty minutes in and had to be nudged awake to see Cage get strung up with barbed wire. At that point it moves briskly enough, but I kept waiting for it to get to the really good part.

It didn’t. Still, it was decent, and I liked it. There’s enough blood and guts and dumb violence to get your motor running, if that’s indeed the thing that turns the ignition for you. And some funny parts. And a lot of weirdness.

The Cheddar Goblins commercial wasn’t as incredibly amazing as touted, but it was funny enough and did what it was supposed to do, more or less.

 

Over three years ago I reviewed Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which purported to tell the story of the Biblical Noah. It was not a good movie, nor was it consistent with Biblical tradition. But I did kind of like it because it was a fun, if stupid way to spend some time.

Aronofsky’s second Biblical movie, Mother!, is a horrible, unwatchable mess from beginning to end, the kind of film that should end Aronofsky’s career the way Heaven’s Gate did to Michael Cimino. But because we live in a time where virtue-signaling and pleasing the right critics is far more important than decent filmmaking or entertaining an audience, we’ll no doubt be treated to yet another Aronofsky movie in the future. Maybe it’ll be better than Mother!.

It would have to be.

The movie metaphorically retells the Bible in around 120 minutes, though the runtime feels more like 120 days. It stars Javier Bardem, one of the few anti-Semites that Hollywood hasn’t run out of town yet, and Jennifer Lawrence, who thinks that hurricanes are the planet’s way of punishing people for voting for Trump. Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are also in it, which is a shame because they’re both great to watch, but wasted in this bilge. Lawrence spends the entire film sporting the same bovine, open-mouthed mien that’s intended to express everything from shock to horror to sadness to joy, depending on the stimulus. She’s the titular Mother: Mother Earth. Bardem is supposed to be God. I’m sure he thinks he’s apt enough to play the role.

The exclamation point at the end of the title represents the chaos of the last quarter of the film. Just so you know.

Reasonable people often disagree about Biblical exegesis, but this is an interpretation of the Bible as told by the wokest Environmental Science associate professor who ever shared a spliff in the quad. It’s really not at all worth watching, not even as a curiosity.

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Book Review: Earth Abides

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I still read books, even if I no longer review them for the now-defunct site The Slaughtered Bird. A recent read was George R. Stewart’s novel Earth Abides. Written in 1949, it describes a post-apocalyptic scenario in which graduate student Isherwood Williams (Ish) is bitten by a rattlesnake near a remote cabin, falls ill, and recovers to find that the world’s population has been all but eliminated by a plague of some sort.

Ish wanders the country to see the devastation, then returns home and meets a few other survivors, who become neighbors. It isn’t long before he starts a family, and events proceed from there.

Post-apocalyptic fiction has changed dramatically since Earth Abides; in today’s tales, the focus is generally on survival in the face of outside threats: looters, aliens, zombies, etc. Once immediate survival concerns are addressed, the characters typically attempt to rebuild civilization as it once was, with electricity, running water, a government, etc.

Not so here. Earth Abides is terribly bleak. The survivors become scavengers feeding off the corpse of the industrialized society they squat upon. No one is capable of building anything lasting, or even thinking far enough in the future to identify something as important as alternative water sources. As the protagonist, Ish suffers from a terrible lack of leadership qualities, a problem he recognizes in himself and simply cannot seem to alter in any way. He’s the de facto leader of his tiny community only because there’s no one else with the intelligence, gumption, or inclination to take charge.

The issue of intelligence being an innate, immutable thing is a major theme of the novel: you’re either born smart or you’re born stupid. Ish, being a graduate student, is apparently the smartest person alive, and everyone else is, quite literally, too dumb to learn anything except the most basic survival skills. He even judges his own children to be mentally deficient; all except one, his favorite: a boy named Joey. What makes this interesting is that Ish sees himself as highly intelligent, but is also aware that he lacks the knowledge that would enable him to rebuild civilization himself. He can’t build a house, repair a car, fix the plumbing, or cut out an appendix. What he can do is philosophize and feel superior to the other survivors. In this, I can’t help but think that the author is either satirizing his own academic colleagues as worthless elitists, or putting himself wholly into the character of Ish and exposing his own elitism. Ish knows everything except what he needs to know, and that presents a problem for himself and his Tribe.

Today’s sensitive readers may flap their hands at the author’s treatment of black people in the novel, despite that Ish marries one and the black people, as negatively as they’re portrayed, at least can farm and take care of animals and do all the things necessary to build a proper community. I’d rather live with them.

Earth Abides shows a decidedly pessimistic post-WWII view of humanity, society, and culture, and while it’s not as unrelievedly dark and distressing as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it’s got more than its fair share of hopelessness.

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