David Dubrow

Author

Putting the Fantasy into Horror

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I love the kind of horror that takes you behind the veil, to where monsters actually come from. Most horror involves the monster coming here to wreak havoc: the disruptor. The rustler of jimmies. It’s used so frequently because it works.

But what about the places from which monsters are birthed? What about Hell, or just Hell’s outskirts? The other planes of existence? What might they look like?

In The Blessed Man and the Witch, I took the reader to what occultists call The Lower Planes, and what one character referred to as “Hell’s suburbs”. As a long-time fan of fantasy literature, I wanted to create a fantasy world no one would live in, but was nevertheless important on a fundamental level: one of the building blocks of a universe that has Heaven, Hell, and magic. In Kabbalism, there’s a kind of map of the celestial realms called The Tree of Life, and it looks a little bit like a ladder reaching toward Heaven. It also has a flip-side reaching down to Hell, and these lower planes are called the Qlippoth. The following excerpt describes part of a journey into the Qlippoth, where a group of modern occultists using astral projection undertake a quest to save imprisoned Watcher angels (also called Grigori).

—

“You dither and hesitate, always,” Gilhedu said with some asperity. “Rouse yourself and act.”

Screw you, sister, Siobhan told her silently, walked away, and aimed her astral body up, into the tear.

Unexpectedly, there was no sensation of crossing a barrier: no tingling across her body or feeling of resistance. One moment she was here, and the next she was there.

She stood shin-deep in a vast expanse of snow, marred by jagged chunks of ice scattered across the plain as far as the eye could see. The sky had taken on a mottled gray-brown color, and in place of the sun hung a dirty smear of dull crimson, as though a gigantic thumb had spread a clot of blood across the heavens. She felt cold, but not terribly so. Not as cold as it should have been. I guess that’s a benefit of being here astrally—

Oh, my God.

Two gigantic towers of glass and steel and concrete loomed above, reaching thousands of feet into the gloomy sky. Both were frozen in the act of breaking in half, the tops slanting at 66 degree angles. The broken ends did not fall, but at the points of fracture enormous plumes of blood and paper spewed, staining the snow crimson.

Most of the magicians had gathered in a rough oval, staring at the halved towers. Siobhan trudged through the snow to join them. Is this a metaphorical representation of the 9/11 attacks, or something else? Is this where it happened spiritually, somehow? Do we have to go into that?

“So, where do we go next?” a man in middle age asked. The mark he bore was Zegrahem’s, and he wore all black, sporting silver rings on every finger.

Hovering just above the snow, Azazel shrugged her thin shoulders. “Dunno. Nobody knew what to expect once we opened the door. The Watchers couldn’t get real specific.”

As she looked for Gilhedu in the crowd, Siobhan noticed that the silver cords once connecting the magicians to their physical bodies had vanished, including her own. I hope we can find a way to get back, because I don’t see a doorway on this side. Where did she—ah. Gilhedu stood apart from the others, gazing across the frozen snowscape. What’s she up to?

“We should probably go to the towers,” Armaros suggested.

A skinny, redheaded woman floating near Ezeqeel shook her head. “We should scout the area first. We can still fly here, so it shouldn’t take too long.”

“Zhehaja, why else’ve these towers been put here? I bet that’s the blood of the angels spurting out right now,” said a huge, hulking man with a mohawk and rings piercing his eyebrows, nose, and lips.

“I can read names too, Berezadel,” Zhehaja said, smirking. “And I—” A look of horror crossed her face and she screamed, falling to the snowy ground. Thrashing, shrieking, and convulsing, she arched her back as her abdomen burst open and loops of intestine sprang out, spraying blood and viscera across the snow. The nearest magicians shouted in alarm and backed away in a broad circle. Flailing, feet drumming on the ground, she uttered a final scream and launched into the sky as if pulled on a string, disappearing in seconds.

Wiping his face and looking at his bloodstained hands, Berezadel said, “Holy fuck, what just happened?”

“I have seen this before,” Gilhedu replied, approaching the crowd of horrified magicians. “Her physical shell was murdered by a servant of Hell. She is no more, body or soul.”

Armaros asked, “Why would that happen to her? Why would she be, um, murdered by a servant of Hell?”

Berezadel moved away from the bloody, churned snow where Zhehaja used to be and said, “Who gives a fuck? Let’s just find the Grigori and free ‘em before we go out like she did!” He lifted himself off the ground and flew toward the towers.

“The Pit always seeks to annihilate all magick that does not spring from suffering and despair,” Gilhedu told Armaros. “Its servants cannot work miracles that invoke the name of God or His angels.”

—

Not everyone succeeds, and success isn’t what you think it’s going to be in the end. To get the full story, check out The Blessed Man and the Witch.

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That Time I Became a Real-Life Hollywood Villain

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I want to tell you about the time that Hollywood deliberately targeted a small private business with one of the worst “based on a true story” movies ever made. The business was named Paladin Press.

Founded in 1970 by Peder Lund, a former Special Forces A-Team leader in Vietnam, Paladin Press published instructional books and videos on military science, police science, martial arts, combat shooting, grappling, medieval armor reproduction, self-defense, knife fighting, survival skills, and like subjects. For its entire run, Paladin lived on the bleeding edge of First Amendment issues, owing to the controversial nature of the material it published. This included manuals on bomb disposal, firearm manufacture, and texts like Kill Without Joy, Homemade C-4, and Birth Certificate Fraud. Despite its sometimes objectionable publications, Paladin was always scrupulous in following the law. In the year 2000, when it became illegal to print, sell, and distribute books in America that described the creation of weapons of mass destruction, Paladin complied.

I know this because I worked for Paladin Press for twelve years.

In 1983 (before my time), Paladin published a book called Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors. It was initially pitched as a novel, but as Paladin didn’t publish fiction, the author reworked it into a how-to manual. The author, a female real estate agent writing under the pseudonym Rex Feral, researched Hit Man by watching crime thrillers, police procedurals, and gangster movies. The book did okay for Paladin, just enough to keep it in print, but it wasn’t a best-seller until around ten years later, when Paladin got sued for publishing it in a case that irreparably harmed the First Amendment.

In 1993, a record producer named Lawrence Horn hired James Perry to kill Horn’s ex-wife and disabled son so he could inherit the money from a trust fund set up for the child. Perry did the job as ordered, and at no extra charge he also murdered Horn’s son’s nurse. When the police caught him, they found evidence that Perry had ordered a copy of Hit Man.

A slip-and-fall lawyer convinced the remaining family to sue Paladin Press for publishing Hit Man, claiming that Paladin aided and abetted the murderer, and that Paladin intended for people to use the information in the book to murder people. This resulted in a multi-year court battle known as the Hit Man Case, with judgments and appeals, and in 1999, Paladin’s insurance company settled with the family for several million dollars, over Paladin’s protestations. As much as he hated enriching lawyers, publisher Peder Lund would have fought this case for decades if he had to, but the insurance company did a cost/benefit analysis on First Amendment rights and decided that free speech wasn’t worth paying for. Per the settlement, Paladin agreed to stop publishing Hit Man and destroyed the remaining copies of the book. Case closed.

Sort of.

The self-proclaimed First Amendment scholar Rod Smolla, who represented the plaintiffs in the Hit Man Case, tried to enrich himself further by writing the book Deliberate Intent: A Lawyer Tells the True Story of Murder by the Book. It didn’t make anyone’s best-seller list, but Hollywood got hold of it, and Fox produced a TV movie based on the Hit Man Case titled, predictably, Deliberate Intent.

Deliberate Intent was an extremely silly production, starring Ron Rifkin and Timothy Hutton as the good guys fighting for justice, and Kenneth Welsh as the evil, wealthy Peder Lund, who profits off of murdering children. There were many risible and overwrought aspects to the entire film, but the stupidest part was a brief scene where a butler brings Peder a telephone on a silver platter while Peder shot clay pigeons on a palatial estate. Peder didn’t have a butler. Peder made his money honestly, and while well-off, was not a rich billionaire profiting off of dead children. Simplistic, dimwitted Hollywood had to deflect from Smolla pissing all over First Amendment rights, so they went to class warfare instead. It’s what they do.

What the movie didn’t describe was how James Perry committed these murders using tactics and information readily available elsewhere (including the movie Godfather 2); Hit Man was itself a laughable sort of text that included such sage advice as not eating out of your victim’s refrigerator and wearing gloves if you pee in your victim’s bathroom. The movie didn’t describe the recusal-worthy bias of the appeals judge who overturned the original verdict for the defendant: the judge’s own father had been murdered, and he showed himself throughout the case to be a less than fair arbiter. Most tellingly, the movie didn’t show any real agonizing over the First Amendment breach this case caused, because according to left-wing Hollywood there are villains, who are rich, and heroes, who are poor, and when there’s hay to be made, your so-called free speech rights belong in the trash. Peder Lund was the ultimate villain: a wealthy, gun-owning, white Vietnam veteran who didn’t immediately roll over when sued by a minority family and their slip-and-fall lawyer.

As a movie title, Deliberate Intent cuts two ways. The plaintiffs felt (but couldn’t prove) that Paladin Press deliberately intended for the material in its books to be used. The other way is how Hollywood deliberately intended to put me and my colleagues out of a job with their unbelievably stupid and slanted movie. They really did try to destroy a small private business by name. They picked us to be the villains. I became a real-life villain in a Hollywood story.

It didn’t work, but it showed what a complete joke Hollywood is, particularly when it comes to serious issues. Paladin continued to publish instructional books and videos for another seventeen years until Peder Lund’s passing in 2017.

The movie didn’t become a big thing at Paladin. We watched it, we pointed out how dumb it was, and we went on. Because it involved real people, some of whom were dead, we didn’t joke about it, either. We published books that people wanted to read, and at no point did we encourage anyone to use the information inside for any reason at any time. Peder hated that the insurance company settled the case, and as someone who didn’t watch movies, Deliberate Intent didn’t faze him. We knew what the case was really about and took it as a learning experience: sometimes the bad guys win.

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Paladin Stories: Combat Knife Throwing

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One of the most memorable shoots that I directed as Video Production Manager of Paladin Press was on combat knife throwing. Paladin was a small publisher and we did books and low-budget, high-quality instructional videos; my job consisted of everything from contract negotiation to directing, producing, shooting, editing, and marketing. I kept busy.

I was the only full-time employee in Paladin’s video department at that time, but in a small business everyone wears many hats. For this shoot I took someone from Marketing to do second camera and someone from the print-on-demand shop to help with miscellaneous production tasks. Usually I only had the Marketing rep, but Paladin’s owner/publisher, Peder Lund, wanted me to show the print-on-demand guy the video ropes. We referred to him as FNG until a new FNG came along, as you do.

This shoot took place in late spring on the author’s family property in semi-rural Tennessee. Beautiful country. Hot and humid as all get-out, particularly for us Colorado boys who loved the dry air. Yes, we did make the occasional Deliverance joke, up until we tried to find the turnoff to the author’s place and, after driving up and down country roads for half an hour, had to stop at a ramshackle convenience store to ask for directions. As it turned out, the entrance to his property was a slightly wider gap between two trees that we’d driven past a bunch of times, so we turned the minivan around (Marketing guy hated that I always rented us a minivan, but it was cheap and it fit all the production equipment) and eased our way deeper into the woods.

The enclosing trees spread out a quarter mile down the road to a clearing that provided a breathtaking view; I did the best I could to capture it on video. On a typical shoot, the day we fly in we drop off our personal luggage at the hotel, go meet the author, and plan the next day’s work. The author (Ralph Thorn), however, had different plans: unlike us, he was not an early bird, and wanted to do some shooting in the late afternoon/early evening sun. So we got to work.

As I set up angles to give us good, glare-free shots of both Ralph and the target (a log), I asked, somewhat facetiously, “So, is there any, uh, local flora or fauna we need to be aware of out here?”

“Not much,” Ralph replied. “Just poison ivy. I’m immune to it, though.”

“Ah,” I said. “Is there…any nearby?”

Ralph pointed with his chin at the Marketing guy, who was adjusting focus. “He’s standing in some there.”

The Marketing guy, who wore shorts all the time, quickly stepped out of the patch and we re-set his camera elsewhere.

The next two days didn’t go as smoothly as we’d like because it was so damned hot and Ralph needed a bunch of breaks to rest. I didn’t blame him. It’s difficult enough throwing knives for hours at a time. Imagine having to teach knife-throwing on video and throw and actually get good hits on target in the hot sun.

One time during a break, while we stood under a tree with our cameras, eating Clif bars for lunch while Ralph went inside to take a cold shower and ice his shoulder, FNG said, “Who’s that?”

A little girl in a dress, maybe nine or ten, stood in a nearby meadow, watching us with eyes that wouldn’t look out of place in a Keane painting. She was very pretty, but her appearance felt strange, like she was a ghost, and when I lifted a hand to wave, she turned and ran across the meadow and disappeared behind a shed. Later on, Ralph told us she was probably one of his nieces.

Probably.

Ralph’s knife-throwing style was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The vast majority of throwers fling the knife so that it spins in the air, and you have to accurately gauge distance to hit point-first consistently. Am I close enough for a half-spin throw, or do I try for a full-spin? That’s why it’s such a difficult thing to master, and nearly impossible to do in the chaotic circumstances of an actual fight. Despite cinematic representations of knife throwing, there are no credible real-world accounts of someone being killed in a fight with a thrown knife.

Ralph, however, taught a method of knife throwing that didn’t rely on spins and fine distance calculation: you release it in such a way as to make it sail into the target point first without spinning it. I don’t know if he developed this method himself or learned it elsewhere, but he was not only very skilled, he could teach that skill with some detail.

Over a year later, while shooting a video with some high-speed combat shooting instructors who worked in security management, one man told me that he loved Ralph’s video and had learned how to throw knives from it. So we weren’t peddling bullshit. Still, when we did knife-throwing on lunch breaks at the office, we went with the half-to-full spin technique. Easier to do with minimal practice.

We spent the last shooting day with Ralph doing extra knife-throwing shots, still photos, the introduction, the conclusion, and a bunch of voice-overs. Ralph loosened up a bit at the end; we’re easy to work with, but sometimes it takes a while to fully break the ice. At the end of the conclusion, while we were setting up for the final outdoor shot, he did an Elvis impression that was absolutely hysterical. I got some of it on video, but I can’t remember if I put it on the DVD as an Easter egg or not. It seemed so out of character, but it wasn’t; he was just glad the shoot was almost over. Us, too. A typical shoot day had us working from early morning until evening, then a break for dinner, then sitting and watching footage half the night in the hotel room to make sure we didn’t miss anything or if the equipment crapped out without us knowing. Shoot days were always grueling: during them you have to be 100% on your game for 100% of the time. The author can screw up: no problem. But the crew can’t.

Even though I bitched about it, I miss it, a little.

I looked for it at home, but I think Combat Knife Throwing: The Video is one of those few I didn’t get a copy of, which is a shame.

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HiT Piece: The Pitch

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I wrote a flash fiction piece for Hollywood in Toto just in time for Ramadan:

“You’ve got five minutes to wow me,” Ms. Biedermeyer said, leaning forward with her elbows on the glass table and her fingers steepled in front of her mouth. “Shoot.”

Trying to ignore the sweat prickling across his lower back, Bobby said, “Thank you, Ms. Biedermeyer. I’ve been a big fan of your work since the early 2000’s, and—”

“Time’s a-wasting.” Ms. Biedermeyer tapped the jeweled crystal of her David Yurman classic. “I got a lunch with DuVernay in ten minutes. Chop chop.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Bobby shuffled his papers, cleared his throat, and said, “The show I have in mind is similar to Roy O’Donohue, but it turns the genre conventions on its head, and—”

“Why do we want to have two of the same show on TV?”

“No no no,” he said. “This is different. You see, we start out with a traditional Muslim family instead of a semi-Catholic one.”

Ms. Biedermeyer returned her French tips to their steeple. “And?”

And you’ll have to click through to read the rest!

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HiT Piece: Gregory Widen

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In my first solo piece for the indispensable culture website Hollywood in Toto, I talk about one of my favorite screenwriters:

Sometimes you find yourself a fan of somebody’s work without knowing it.

This doesn’t happen with books. An author’s name is on every page, so you know if you’re a fan or not. It’s happening less and less with television shows: if Dick Wolf’s name is on something, you know it’ll involve cops, robbers, and lawyers. If Shonda Rhimes’s name is on it, it’ll start out okay and then devolve into an unwatchable stew of intersectional feminism. With movies, we generally tend to know the greats, alive or dead: Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick. But what about those lesser-known screenwriters or directors, the ones who create some of your favorite movies, but don’t get as much notoriety?

Gregory Widen is a perfect example. He wrote Highlander and Backdraft, and wrote/directed The Prophecy. Now I’ll bet you’ve heard of him.

Head out to Hollywood in Toto to read the whole thing!

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That Hideous Aztec

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My favorite books are ones I can reread and find something different to enjoy each time, with a few exceptions. I can’t reread John Fowles’s The Magus, for example, because it would be impossible to recreate the feeling of utter shock at the last quarter of the book, the sheer page-turning power of it. If you’ve read it you’ll know what I mean. Others, I can and have, several times: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is a classic, as is his Narcissus and Goldmund. Anything from Jonathan Carroll. Much of H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre.

One notable book I read in my twenties and had trouble with decades later was Clive Barker’s Imajica, for reasons I described here.

I have a confession to make, however, and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I must. I’d read C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia many times, and claimed I read and enjoyed his Space Trilogy, but the latter isn’t entirely true. While I read book one of the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, and read the second book, Perelandra, I’d had to skim through large parts of the latter because they bored me. As for the third book, That Hideous Strength, I had never made it past the first chapter.

Until now.

It’s such a different story from the first two novels, taking place entirely on Earth instead of Mars or Venus, that I couldn’t get into it. Less adventure, more talking. No alien life. Why bother?

It’s a terrible mistake. That Hideous Strength is the best novel of the trilogy. While Out of the Silent Planet takes place on an un-fallen world, and Perelandra describes the protagonist’s attempt to keep a new world from falling like ours has, this third novel grounds everything right here, delving into the terrible consequences of our world having fallen from grace, and how despite that, we, as flawed, desperate creatures, can do great, even holy things. We’ve fallen, yes, but redemption is available.

It deals with a number of themes: love and marriage, the mistake of equating science with progress, journalistic manipulation, the ethics of today versus yesterday’s, and many others. While it starts very slowly, it grips you hard, if you’re accessible to it, and does not let you go. Some sections are deeply disquieting, filling you with real horror, and others describe sweeping, magical experiences from within. Despite that it’s decades old, That Hideous Strength is relevant today:

When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.

It’s as accurate a description of the chattering class versus the working class as you’ll ever read.

So the novel hadn’t changed. I did.

Contrast that to Gary Jennings’s novel Aztec. This remains one of my all-time favorite novels, and it kindled a lifelong interest in both pre-Columbian history and historical fiction. A gripping account of the Aztec empire at its height…and how it falls at the hands of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés (with the help of neighboring Mesoamerican civilizations). It’s a book I’ve read many times and continue to marvel at.

But I no longer mourn for what was lost when the Aztecs fell. While the Spanish were greatly evil in their massacre and plunder of the Aztec civilization, the Aztecs were themselves monstrous, engaging in human sacrifice, cannibalism, torture, and casual murder. The protagonist, Mixtli, is a clever man, a funny man, but not at all a good man, and he does things that are oftentimes horrific and disgusting. It’s easy to excuse him when reading his first-person account: after all, he’s a different man living at a different time in a different culture. But even if we’re invited to sympathize, we don’t have to approve. We can understand and still be disgusted. As I am now, reading it again.

The novel hadn’t changed. I did.

Despite that, Aztec was a significant influence on my story Beneath the Ziggurat, and drawing from Mesoamerican culture/myth is something I’m comfortable with.

Tastes change as we get older, and I’m further into middle age than I like to think about. Is this the maturing process, or does one’s brain alter? Does liking one thing over the other suggest maturity, personal advancement, or simply a lateral change in taste? Since becoming a fiction writer I read differently from the way I used to: I dissect, I analyze, I learn more. I’ve become an active reader.

I heartily recommend both books, for entirely different reasons.

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