S.G. Browne

Following up on my blog post for The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, below is my list of The Best Books You’ve Never Read. Admittedly, you might have read one of them. Maybe even two. But I’m guessing no one else has read all five of them. Or even three. Prove me wrong. And feel free to share your own gems.

Kockroach, Tyler Knox
Taking Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and flipping it upside down, this story about a cockroach who wakes up one morning to discover he’s a man in 1950s New York has everything you want in a noir novel – organized crime, a love triangle, and an inhuman antihero with a relentless survival instinct. Good fun.

The Little Sleep, Paul Tremblay
Another noir novel, this one takes its title from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and features a South Boston P.I. who nods off at the wrong times and suffers from hallucinations. Blackmail, corrupt politicians, and a narcoleptic detective. What more do you want? (If you like this one, check out the sequel, No Sleep Till Wonderland.)

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
The not-so-heartwarming story of a family of carnival freaks. Art and Lily Binewski, the owners of a traveling carnival, decide to breed their own freak show by using experimental drugs to create genetically altered children. Dark, twisted, beautiful, and bizarre, this novel about a singularly dysfunctional family will stay with you long after you’ve finished.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
The most likely book of the bunch to have been read, and the only New York Times bestseller on the list, STIFF is a wonderfully informative and delightfully humorous look into what happens to the human body when nature and medical science take over. Roach knows how to make non-fiction entertaining. (This book was an invaluable inspiration in the writing of my novel Breathers.)

Vamped, David Sosnowski
Martin, a suicidal vampire, living off blood derived from stem cells since humans are nearly extinct, finds salvation in the form of a six-year-old human girl who escaped from a preserve. Initially intending to snack on her, Martin instead finds himself growing fond of her company and becomes an unlikely guardian. An original vampire tale written with warmth and humor.

I realize whenever anyone makes a Best Something List, it’s somewhat skewed by the personal tastes and opinions of the person making the list. But since I have impeccable taste and my opinions are the only ones that matter, then we’re all in agreement.

Below are my Top Five Films You’ve Never Seen. Why just five? Because one, I realize you have other things to do other than read this blog post. And two, I’m lazy.

In no order that matters :

Monsters (2010)
This thoughtful science fiction film set half a dozen years after a NASA space probe crashed to Earth with alien life samples takes place in a quarantined infected zone that straddles the U.S.-Mexican border. You don’t see much of the monsters who inhabit the quarantined area, but that’s not the point of the film. Just watch it. You’ll thank me. (Worldwide box office: $4.2 million).

Gentlemen Broncos (2009)
A comedy film from the writer and director of Napoleon Dynamite, this story follows the plight of an aspiring fantasy writer whose novel gets plagiarized by his idol. The scenes from his novel “Yeast Lords,” which are enacted with Sam Rockwell as the main protagonist, are ridiculously sublime. ($118,000)

Intacto (2001)
A Spanish psychological thriller about an underground luck trade where the main characters steal luck from others and engage in games of life or death chance with one another to determine who walks away with all of the luck. This film gave me the idea that would become my next novel, Lucky Bastard. ($307,000)

CQ (2002)
Set in late 1960s Paris, this film-within-a-film homage to European spy/sci-fi spoofs stars Jeremy Davies as a young film editor thrust into the director’s chair of the sci-fi adventure Dragonfly, where his infatuation with the film’s sexy star starts to affect his ability to separate fantasy from reality. ($414,000)

Hamlet 2 (2008)
Steve Coogan plays a failed actor turned high school drama teacher who tries to save his job and the drama program by writing and staging a controversial musical sequel to Hamlet that includes time travel, child abuse, and a toe-tapping number called “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.” A fun and irreverent riff on the inspirational teacher film. ($4.9 million)

Okay. That’s my list of the Best Films You’ve Never Seen. Or maybe you have seen them but you disagree. Or maybe you have your own films you’d like to share. Be my guest. We’re all friends here.

On Friday, I’ll share my list of the Best Books You’ve Never Read.

To celebrate Halloween, I thought I’d throw out my Top 10 Favorite Spookiest/Scariest Films of all time. You’ll notice that the majority of the films listed were released in 1980 or earlier. I guess I just don’t scare as easily as I did when I was younger. Either that or they don’t know how to make scary films like they used to.

In no particular order…

Halloween (1978)
I watched this one at home alone on cable when I was fourteen-years-old and I stayed up until three in the morning pressed up against the wall in the corner of my bed with my baseball bat, watching my bedroom door. Not my finest hour.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)
This film is the reason I had nightmares about zombies growing up. The opening sequence is as creepy and terrifying as it gets. I still think it holds up after more than forty years. They’re coming to get you, Barbara.

The Exorcist (1973)
I haven’t watched this film in thirty years because it freaked me out so much the first time I saw it. Don’t ask me to watch it again.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Yes, the girl gets kind of annoying (who yells out “hello” when you hear something making noises in the woods out in the dark?), but you never see what’s chasing them and when it comes to doing scary right, I’m a firm believer that less is more.

The Haunting (1963)
The book by Shirley Jackson is better, but this one is the classic haunted house film. A little dated, but still creepy and spooky. In the night. In the dark.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Just. Plain. Scary.

REC (2007)
This one delivers the scares almost from the start and once it gets going, it doesn’t let up. More intense than moody, but heavy on the creep factor.

The Shining (1980)
Admittedly, I find the book far superior, but on its own this is arguably the best haunted house film, scare for scare.

Psycho (1960)
Hitchcock set the standard with this one. Everything that followed pales in comparison. Anthony Hopkins creeps me out to this day.

The Ring (2002)
I admit, I have a thing for Naomi Watts, which is probably why I liked this one more than the original Japanese version. And I will NEVER watch an unmarked video tape in a cabin. NEVER.

Okay, that’s my Top 10 List of creepy movies that scared the hell out of me. What are some of yours?

When I chose the name for my second novel, Fated, I didn’t consider whether other novels had been published under the same name or what the content of those novels might be. It was, I felt, simply the best name for my novel.

However, a search on Amazon reveals that quite a few other novels have been published under that same title. And every single one of them is a paranormal romance novel.

There’s Fated – A Doomsday Brethren Novella by Shayla Black (a paranormal romance)

And Fated (The Eternals) by Carolyn McCray (touted in the book’s description as the #1 historical and fantasy romance)

Then there’s Fated: The Cascadia Wolves Series by Lauren Dane (apparently a hot, sexy paranormal romance)

There’s also Fated (The Bloodstone Saga) by Courtney Cole (the second novel in her paranormal YA series)

And finally Fated by Rebecca Zanetti (another paranormal romance, this one with vampires)

Now, I don’t consider MY Fated to be fantasy romance, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, or any of their relatives. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but as far as I’m concerned, I’ve written a dark comedy and social satire with a romantic storyline. However, I realize everyone has their own opinions and perspectives, and that’s fine. And considering the company I’m keeping, apparently my title lends itself to hot, sexy, paranormal romance.

I’m thinking I needed more beefcake on my cover.

I don’t normally blog about films or books that I don’t enjoy because I know what it’s like to hear bad reviews. But if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s stupid movie people. So I felt like I had to speak up.

Now I realize that in some films people do stupid things because they’re stupid. That’s just the human condition. We do stupid things. We cheat on our spouses. We drink too much at parties. We believe politicians actually care about doing what’s best for the country rather than what’s best for their political party.

So I’m fine when people do stupid things in movies because that’s what reasonable humans do. But there’s a difference between doing something stupid in a movie and being a stupid movie person. A stupid movie person does something unreasonable that no one with any intelligence or common sense would do.

In the supernatural horror film Insidious, there’s a moment early on when the married couple, Josh and Renai Lambert, are talking in bed late at night while their son, Dalton, sleeps in an unexplained coma in one of the bedrooms. His brother, Foster,  doesn’t want to sleep in the same room as Dalton anymore because, as he explains to his mom, it creeps him out when Dalton gets up in the middle of the night and walks around.

(The fact that his mother doesn’t follow this up with something like: WHAT? HOW COULD THAT BE POSSIBLE? or YOU MUST BE IMAGINING THINGS bothers me, but that’s another issue.)

So while their infant daughter and sons are sleeping, one naturally and one not so much, there comes a knock on the front door downstairs. Once. Twice. Three times. Josh goes downstairs in his pajamas to investigate and turns on the outside light, which flickers and goes out. Unable to see who is outside, and hearing no response from whoever knocked on the door when he calls out to them, he does what any sensible husband and father of three would do: he opens the door.

But wait, it gets worse.

Josh checks the front porch, then closes the door, chains it, and turns on the house alarm. Moments later, when the couple’s infant daughter starts crying, Rose gets out of bed and goes in to check on her, only to start screaming when she sees a man behind her daughter’s crib. Josh runs upstairs to see what’s wrong, Rose insists that she saw someone standing in the room even though no one’s there. Then the house alarm goes off.

Good stuff. Except for the fact that these are stupid movie people. Or at least Josh is.

After telling Rose to take their daughter and son and go into Dalton’s room and lock the door, he goes downstairs to find the front door wide open and the chain dangling on the doorjamb.

Yes, this is a movie, but if this is real life, if this is you or me or Rain Man, we turn around and run back up the stairs into the bedroom and call 911 on the cell phone. Or we take our family and get the hell out of the house. Instead, Josh walks downstairs, closes the front door, then proceeds to search the downstairs with a fireplace poker or some kind of weapon, leaving his wife and children unattended and vulnerable upstairs.

While the film does a good job of building up the suspense, I didn’t care about Josh anymore because he was too stupid to deserve to survive the rest of the film. It didn’t help that the next day no one talks about the incident. No one calls the police. And then Josh stays at work/school grading papers late into the evening, leaving his wife and children at home alone after a traumatic evening. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. I smell a divorce. The incident felt like something that needed to be addressed but instead the main characters just ignored it. To me that’s either bad writing, bad editing, or both.

In The Big Lebowski The Dude abides, but when it comes to stupid movie people, I am most definitely not The Dude. Not if you want me to care about the characters.

And I won’t even mention the fact that the demon looks like a Cirque du Soleil reject.

Oh wait, I just did.