David Dubrow

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Book Review Resurrection: Sweet Tooth

October 24, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Some time ago I wrote a review of R.M. Huffman’s Sweet Tooth series for the now-defunct horror website The Slaughtered Bird. As Halloween is coming up, and the stories are too good to miss for this time of year, I am republishing this review here.

—

R.M. Huffman deftly straddles the line of horror and humor in his Sweet Tooth series of short stories about Dr. Pierce, a vampire psychiatrist who faces challenges both medical and supernatural in his practice. Huffman is himself a practicing physician, and his knowledge of the human body’s foibles adds credibility to Pierce’s internal dialogue and actions. While clever and lighthearted, the Sweet Tooth stories tackle heavier issues at times, with varying results.

The title story, Sweet Tooth, introduces us to Pierce in a very droll fashion: he’s crept into a local hospital on Halloween night to feed on the glucose-laden blood of diabetic patients. It’s how he gets his sugar rush, you see. Pierce is himself a throwback to the vampires of Stoker’s tale: he doesn’t cast a reflection, can’t stand crosses, is repulsed by garlic. No sparkling here.

The scope widens a bit with Lord of the Pies, where Pierce has to contend with a most unusual antagonist brought into his clinic for psychiatric care. Here we learn that Pierce is far from the only supernatural creature in the world, and that even vampire doctors have to work on Thanksgiving.

In A Very Christmas Sweet Tooth, Pierce shows us the vague beginnings of a conscience; or, perhaps, just a desire to see a case through to the bitter end.

The Heartstaker story brings us to Valentine’s Day, when even vampires and werewolves get lonely. Can a cold-blooded, undead immortal like Pierce fall in love?

With Easter comes the story Raise the Dad, which finds Pierce hiding in his crypt: “Imagine how you might feel about Halloween if the decorations and costumes were real. Crosses. So many crosses.” Even in seclusion there’s no rest for the wicked, and Pierce has an unwelcome visitor that unearths not just the unquiet dead, but unresolved personal issues as well.

The anthology ends with Rebirthday Boy, where we find Pierce celebrating both Independence Day and his (fake) birthday: you have to maintain a façade of mortality when you deal with humans, after all. This neatly wraps up the various story threads from the previous Sweet Tooth tales and sets up for a new chapter in Pierce’s (un)life.

In Sweet Tooth Omnibus, we get a year in the life of a vampire who’s anything but an ordinary bloodsucker. Amoral, anti-heroic, and yet a physician who helps both the living and undead. A fun anthology told in a unique voice: definitely worth a midnight read.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: book review, Halloween, huffman, sweet tooth, the slaughtered bird, vampire

Interview With R.M. Huffman

January 27, 2016 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

I very much enjoyed R.M. Huffman’s novel Leviathan: Book One of the Antediluvian Legacy, and it was an honor to have the opportunity to ask Dr. Huffman some questions about his life, his work, and his faith, all of which figure prominently in his writing.

You’re a practicing physician, writer, illustrator, husband, and father of four small children. How do you find time to create?

I started writing the book that became Leviathan when I was an intern. Every few days I’d be post-call, which means I’d have most of the day off after spending the night at the hospital, and – this is the key part – I can’t take naps. I’ve just never been able to do it. Writing turned out to be a relaxing sort of thing I could do while resting on the couch, sometimes with a baby sleeping on me, and at some point during my residency I had done enough of it that I had an entire manuscript. These days, the writing is a bit lower on the priority list and gets done a couple hundred words at a time, early in the morning or late at night or if I have a long break between cases. It’s slow going, but it goes, and I’ve written 75K+ words in the sequel (and about 10K in book 3). The cliched-but-true moral of this story: if I can do this, anybody can.

RMHuffmanYou’ve mentioned C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as influences on your world-building. Who are some of your other favorite fantasy authors?

My favorite current (urban) fantasy series is The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. His world-building is top-notch, and he’s kept it consistently entertaining for fourteen or fifteen books now. Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories probably have the most “pre-flood world” flavor of any well-known fantasy setting, but my favorite character of his is Solomon Kane, whose somber, no-nonsense Puritanical attitude and wandering monster-killing ways probably seeped into Noah’s characterization, especially in book 2.

If there’s anything philosophical or theological you’d like readers to take away from Leviathan, what would it be?

That the plain text of Genesis 2 through 6 is completely fascinating and deserving of more interest and study than it gets now, which is virtually nil. Also, half-angel giants riding dinosaurs is almost certainly a thing that really happened.

How far do you plan to take The Antediluvian Legacy series? To the building of the Ark?  The Flood and beyond? 

The series is planned to be a trilogy, and book 3 will include the building of the ark, the flood, and the immediate aftermath. The last third or so of the book will be the “Noah’s ark” narrative that’s familiar to most people, but hopefully with an emotional and historical context that will make it more harrowing and compelling than the typical smiling, white-bearded-man-with-happy-giraffes Sunday School version of the story.

You’ve made many of the Naphil characters in Leviathan decent, moral people, but the Lord sends the Flood, in part, to clear the world of Nephilim.  How can the modern reader square God’s erasing of the Nephilim from the Earth with the idea that the Nephilim are not responsible for their parentage?  Doesn’t that seem unjust?

The Nephilim are described as “heroes of old, men of renown,” so I felt like it was reasonable, at least initially, to depict them as such. Now, because of the worldwide judgment of the flood, we know that they eventually become irredeemably evil, but so did everyone else. I get into this in the books, but I do think that there were probably a great many pre-flood folks, Nephilim included, who clung faithfully to a God-fearing morality and were killed for it, much like Christians under Nero or Jews in the Holocaust or [pick another of many awful examples throughout history]. Anyway, I don’t believe that the Nephilim were necessarily condemned by their parentage (at least, the text of Genesis doesn’t state such a thing). It does seem that a driving motivation for Joshua-era Israel’s mandate to destroy the inhabitants of the promised land could have been that many of them were of the “…and also afterwards” Nephilim ilk (Rephaim, Emim, Zamzummin, Anakim – see Deuteronomy chapter 2), but Leviathaneven then, cultural depravity was likely the main (or only) factor. However it ultimately went down, I know that 1) God is perfectly just, 2) Genesis 6 gives very little specific information about either the Nephilim or the global depravity that demanded that a just God destroy the earth, which means that 3) despite any semblance of unfairness, if we had complete information about the societal milieu and individual behaviors of the antediluvian world immediately preceding the flood, we would have no doubt that destroying the world was a just God’s only option. In fact, that’s going to be the challenge in the third book: how does one depict a world that becomes so bad that the reader feels a sense of massive relief and cathartic satisfaction when the flood judgment finally does come? Hint: it’ll be a bit worse than “Noah’s neighbors make fun of him while he’s building the ark.”

Many people consider Creationism to be anti-science.  How do you reconcile being a practicing anesthesiologist and a Creationist?

This deserves a 10,000 word answer that encompasses epistemology, the original text of Genesis, the nature of “macro-” versus “micro-” evolution, and the history of scientific philosophy beginning with James Hutton and uniformitarianism, but I’ll just hit the high points. An “evolutionary biologist” is a scientist in the sense that someone fluent in Orcish or Klingon is a philologist, and the works of Richard Dawkins are comparable to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. It’s worth noting the difference between empirical science (experimental, measurable, repeatable, responsible for antibiotics and airplanes) and historical science (data is interpreted within an axiomatic paradigm). Whether one is a creationist or a Darwinist depends not on evidence, but interpretation of the evidence, which becomes a philosophical matter, not a scientific one. As a Christian, my axiom is “the Bible is authoritative in every respect,” and its explanatory power as relates to everything from natural history to human behavior is immensely satisfactory. As far as Biblical creation being an idea that’s “anti-science,” the following people would disagree: Newton, Kepler, Mendel, Pasteur, Pascal, Cuvier, Faraday, Kelvin, Boyle, Linnaeus, and Francis Bacon, who came up with the concept of the modern scientific method in the first place. Anesthesiology is a pragmatic medical specialty (for example, do you know how modern volatile anesthetic gas works? Neither does anybody else, but it does! Hooray for the Manhattan project, where its chemistry was developed!) and not particularly beholden to belief about origins, but as a physician, I’ll say this: the idea that the self-replicating, self-healing, autoregulating, sentient machine that is the human body is a product of chance mutations of a spontaneously-arising functional DNA/protein interface is scientific nonsense. Mutations cause trisomies and cancer, and the number of known mutations that have been found to be both beneficial to survival and additive to a genome is exactly zero. A Creator with intelligence beyond our capacity to comprehend is the only reasonable conclusion; in fact, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, strongly rejected belief in God but had such a problem with the materialistic origin of life that he ended up espousing panspermia, the idea that life on earth was seeded by aliens.

So, that was only like a 5,000 word answer. Even shorter: it isn’t hard, and those people are silly.

What were the hardest parts of the novel to write?  The easiest?

Hardest: romantic stuff. Easiest: violent encounters between prehistoric beasts and people with cool weapons.

Tell us about your Sweet Tooth series.  Are you more comfortable writing that sort of lighthearted humor than the serious material in Leviathan?Sweettooth

Sweet Tooth originated from the (hilarious!) idea that the glucose-laden blood of an uncontrolled diabetic would be like candy to a vampire. I wrote the story, I was highly entertained by doing so, and I did five more with the same character. They’re sort of urban fantasy/horror with, yes, lighthearted humor, each one with a different holiday theme. I did find them easier to write, actually. With these, I didn’t have to worry about anachronisms or avoiding modern idioms or creating a fantasy setting, and with a protagonist who’s a sarcastic vampire doctor and myself being two out of three of those, I pretty much just used my own voice. I’m biased, of course, but I have to say, I think most people would like them and find them to be subversively clever.

When Noah speaks, do you imagine him having the voice of John Huston in The Bible: In the Beginning… or Russell Crowe in Noah? 

Great question. I’m honestly not sure, but I figure I’ll find out when Mel Gibson, bringing his Braveheart/Passion of the Christ/Apocalypto directorial sensibilities and playing the part of Methuselah, casts the Antediluvian Legacy movies (filmed back-to-back-to-back, of course).

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: antediluvian, fantasy, horror, huffman, interview, leviathan, noah, sweet tooth, vampire

Here's a clip from a recent Tucker Carlson Tonight episode that features Kelly McCann. During my time at Paladin Press, I produced several instructional videos with Kelly on subjects like knife fighting, combat shooting, and unarmed self-defense.

Sports Illustrated is following the current tradition of discarding the customer base they have in favor of chasing the customer base they want. That this is a strategy that has always resulted in significant loss of revenue is not a factor in the decision-making process. They're signaling virtue, not seeking more money.

A review of this touching and thought-provoking movie is coming soon.

Rest in peace, René Auberjonois. I remember you from Benson as a kid. As an adult, I remember you as Janos Audron in the Legacy of Kain video game series. You made every role you were in a classic.

Elf on a Shelf Follies, Part 2:
8-year-old: I wrote the elf a note! I hope he writes back.
Me: What did you write?
8yo: I asked if he has any friends.
Me: What if he says it's none of your business?
8yo: *eyes grow dark and glittering* Then I'll...touch him.
Me: Ah. Mutually assured destruction, then.

Elf on a Shelf Follies, Part 1: My 8-year-old got an Elf on the Shelf the other day. The book it came with tells a story in doggerel about this elf's purpose, which is to spy on the kid and report his doings to Santa Claus, who would then determine if the kid is worthy for Christmas presents this year. The book also said for the kid not to touch him, or the magic would fade, and for the family to give the elf a name. I wanted to name him Stasi. I was outvoted.

Actor Billy Dee Williams calls himself a man or a woman, depending on whim; his character Lando Calrissian is "pansexual," and his writer implies that he'd become intimate with anyone or anything, including, one presumes, a dog, a toaster, or a baby. J.J. Abrams is very concerned about LGBTQ representation in the Star Wars universe. This is Hollywood. This is Star Wars. This is what's important to the people in charge of your cinematic entertainment. Are you not entertained?

The funniest thing on the internet today is the number of people angry over an exercise bike commercial. Public outrage is always funny. Always.

One of the biggest mistakes the United States has ever made since WWII was recruiting for clandestine and federal law enforcement organizations at Ivy League schools. The best talent pools were/are available from local law enforcement and military veterans, with their maturity and, most importantly, field experience. We've been reaping the costs of these terrible decisions for decades, culminating in a hopelessly politicized, sub-competent FBI and CIA.

I love Christmastime, despite being Jewish. The lights, the presents, the spirit of generosity. I do feel left out, however; my neighbors have nice Christmas lights, inflatable Santas, animatronic reindeer that crop the grass, and illuminated Nativity scenes. As Hanukkah isn't a big holiday for Jews, we just don't have those kinds of decorations. However, if someone crafts an inflatable scene of a Jewish guerrilla warrior caving in a Syrian Greek's head with a hammer, I'll buy it and put it in the front yard.

Watching Fauda seasons 1 and 2 again in preparation for season 3 to be broadcast, one hopes, in early 2020. Here's my back-of-the-matchbook review of season 2.

Every day I try to be grateful for what I have, even in the face of the petty frustrations and troubles that pockmark a day spent outside of one's living room, binge-watching Netflix. We live lives of ease in 21st century America, making it enormously difficult to do anything but take one's countless blessings for granted. Holidays like the just-passed Thanksgiving are helpful reminders. There's a reason why people call the attitude of a thankful heart practicing gratitude, not just feeling grateful. You have to practice it. You have to remind yourself of what you have. It's the work of a lifetime.

Held Back: A Recent Conversation.
8-year-old: Oh, and Jamie was there, too. He was in my first grade class two years ago.
Me: Wasn't he held back a year?
8yo: Yeah. It's because he kept going to the bathroom with the door open.
Me: No way!
8yo: And girls saw.
Me: That's not right. They're not going to hold a kid back a whole year over that.
8yo: Well, that's what he told me.
Me: Sounds fishy.
8yo: I believe him.
~fin~

It's right and good to push a raft of politically correct social justice policies on everything else under the sun, but when social justice invades Hollywood, that's just a bridge too far, says Terry Gilliam. Sorry, Terry: you helped make this sandwich. EAT IT.

Well, it makes me feel gross to be coerced into participating in a mentally ill person's sexual hang-ups without my consent, so I guess everyone's unhappy.

Let's hear it for adults taking time out of their day to help kids play team sports! Or...or not, as is the case here. I'd be pretty embarrassed if I was one of the parents, but there may be more to this story than we can see in this video.

They'll be doing Drag Queen Story Hour hosted by Desmond is Amazing in your local Chick-fil-A by 2025 at the latest.

Episode 45 of the Red Pilled America podcast is a disturbing look into a court case that raises the question: can you really tell if someone is lying?

Rob Henderson's piece on luxury beliefs will have you nodding your head over and over again...unless you subscribe to these luxury beliefs, in which case you'll get mad.

I'm late to the #FartGate controversy, as I no longer use social media, but it's a truism that when you have one asshole talking to another, you're going to get fart noises.

I've made the Saturday bread from Flour Water Salt Yeast so often that I've memorized the recipe. It never disappoints. Never. The same recipe works well for pizza, too.

Robert Lopez tells a disquieting story that suggests that there are no safe spaces for literature among the left or right.

The best part of the "Mon Laferte exposing herself story" is the wide variety of digital pasties that online outfits provide her. Flowers, dots, digital artifacts and, in creepy fashion, pure erasure.

Liberty doesn't mean the freedom to do anything you want. The true definition of liberty is the ability to choose the good. Anything less is libertinism.

“I was confused at first and then I started to doubt whether or not I should be offended.” No no, be offended. At everything.

Andrei Serban quits a tenured professorship at Columbia University because the college began to resemble the Communist country he fled from. Everything that's good and decent will be forced out in favor of woke box-checking. Are you not entertained?

Boris Zelkin elucidates a concern and proffers a solution to a problem that almost all parents of young children will have to face.

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