'Seventies Research for October Dark

October Dark, and its secret history of the fantastic film, benefited from my packrat's collection of 1970's-era film books and magazines, from Starlog to Cinefantastique to Fantastic Films to Mediascene Previews. This first example comes from a fat hardback published in 1977, Horror, SciFi and Fantasy Films of the Fifties. I found it not in the bookstore (in that era, B.Dalton or Waldens in downtown Seattle) but in Golden Age Collectibles.

These next few come from Wizards of Wonder: The Special Effects Magicians, a magazine-book hybrid, from the same folks who published Film Magic, edited by the late, great Don Dohler, the original publisher of Cinemagic magazine. I purchased it at Golden Age in Seattle's Pike Place Market, circa 1979.

Still there, though not quite as magical (focusing mostly on comics), Golden Age Collectibles was Mecca for fantastic film lovers, a warren of waterfront rooms and glass cases packed with movie magazines, scripts, lobby cards, novelizations, Super 8 film digests -- you name it.

Wizards of Wonder wasn't the greatest book about special effects artists, but it was remarkable for its encylopedic small-press enthusiasm for folks like Willis O'Brien, Marcel Delgado, Douglas Trumbull, Jim Danforth, and the great David Allen.

This last example I pilfered from a low, dusty shelf in the Seattle Public Library. I quote it in my novel.

October Dark Goes To Press

From acclaimed author David Herter, a new novel in the tradition of Ray Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and Tim Powers's LAST CALL

Halloween, 1931. The metropolis of Grenton. On the ruined canals, a clock tolls midnight. Willis H. O'Brien, the father of stop motion animation, seeks the base elements of a new animation. And Henri Mordaunt, the undying Phantasmagoria magician, will soon provide them. An uncanny bargain is struck, leading to betrayal and dire retribution, and an act of cinematic alchemy that echoes down the history of fantastic film.

Halloween, 1977. For thirteen-year-old Will and his best friend Jim — amateur animators and Famous Monsters of Filmland fanatics — summer darkens into mysterious autumn, with a black balloon prowling the skies of their suburban neighborhood, and supernatural images haunting the frames of their latest 8mm epic, heralding doom. Everything leads to the edge of Grenton’s ruined canals, and the faded cinema palace where Star Wars has been showing non-stop since late May, a gateway into the mysteries of Grenton’s past, and to a secret history playing out on either side of the silver screen.

Library Journal
STARRED REVIEW: "This book has a distinctive premise. So-called movie magic is real, the special effects masters are its practitioners, and it’s the only thing protecting the world from unspeakable evil. Filled with nostalgia triggers for baby boomers and Gen Xers alike, with an original story and the liberally dropped names of a pantheon of horror moviemakers, October Dark is a delight. Consider recommending it to mature YA readers as well.


Booklist
"Herter excels at creating a truly spooky, Halloween-worthy atmosphere that Bradbury fans, among others, will relish."


Somebody Dies
"Ambitious in scope and execution, October Dark is a love letter to Bradbury, Star Wars, Halloween, and the special effects masters of the cinema, most prominently Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien."

From Jeffrey Ford's introduction:

"October Dark is brilliant for so many reasons. It' a very personal authorial vision; an immersion in the world of 1977 boyhood. It's the portrait of an artist, a budding film animator and story teller. The historical research here concerning Willis O'Brien and Huygens and the early processes of animation is incredible. There is so much more to the story — arcane knowledge, conspiracy, a lurid automaton, a secret device, other centuries, monsters. Herter, like the stop-motion magicians of history, has brought a monster of imagination to life. Enter this dark carnival and see for yourself."
— Jeffrey Ford

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF DAVID HERTER:

“Distinctive and imaginative, a debut of immense promise.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Ceres Storm

“A marvelous fantasy.”
—SF Weekly on Evening's Empire

“Through voyages on haunted spaceships, encounters with sentient plagues and descents into ancient tombs. . . bemused readers will sympathize with naïve Daric as one enigmatic incident follows another, characters shift from flesh to hologram to crystal to mechanical insect, and reality encompasses dream worlds, shared hallucinations and miniature cities. The book's a grand exercise in weirdness, cloaked in a coming of age story. It's a unique reading experience.”
—Starlog on Ceres Storm

“Herter’s blending of contemporary fantasy and the Verne opera-in-progress is seamless and intense. . . an exquisite, subtle performance.”
— Booklist on Evening’s Empire

“Evening’s Empire is a literary fantasy novel of grace and quiet strength, with echoes of Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Carroll, and even a little of H.P. Lovecraft.”
— Elliott Bay Booknotes on Evening’s Empire

"This epic unfolds in a seductive faerie tongue as we follow the perilous transformation of Daric from an adolescent boy into a primal galactic force. We flee with him along elusive coordinates as he deals with constructs that aid or hinder him, and one chromatic scene follows another as he escapes creatures who would bind him to their own uses. And so we move to a shattering climax. A beautiful read.”
— Charles Harness on Ceres Storm

“Ceres Storm is sublime, and though the language is sparse, it is rich and poetic, swinging easily between dreamlike perceptions and hard-edged reason. This astonishing debut leaves me hungry for more.”
— Elliott Bay Booknotes on Ceres Storm

“Just as there are touches of D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel in Herter’s depiction through his beloved Janacek of the warp and weave of civilization under stress, so there are suggestions of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” in the way he spells his great composer into tranced rapport with whatever breathes there and does not wish to be taken into music.”
— John Clute on On the Overgrown Path

“The Luminous Depths has a richness of prose and a density of allusion and ideas reminiscent of authors like Aldiss and Wolfe — and, incidentally, it is a page-turning cracker of a horror story. Outside his homeland, Karel Capek may be remembered primarily through his legacy of the term “Robot”. It is Herter’s achievement in this novella to lead us through the narrow window of that single chthonic word to a rich evocation of a fragile, doomed period of Central European history.”
— Stephen Baxter on The Luminous Depths

"David Herter’s trilogy, to which One Who Disappeared provides a spectacular and moving conclusion, does not fall; on the contrary, it remains perfectly suspended, sturdy and elegant—and by virtue of its topography, it does not, like more myopic literary projects, taper off into soothing closure, but opens wide to an even vaster and more glorious universe of possibility. . ."
— Brian Stableford on One Who Disappeared

Beer, Booklist, Espresso Book Machine, Beer

An eventful day, today. (Yesterday, rather). I received Chris Nurse's final October Dark cover from Paul at Earthling. It's stupendous and strange. And October Dark is now ready to be sent to press.

Here's the punch line of my recent Booklist review:

"Herter excels at creating a truly spooky, Halloween-worthy atmosphere that Bradbury fans, among others, will relish."
-- Booklist Reviews

According to Paul, the book should hit the stores in four to six weeks. And to whet your appetite, I'll be posting a excerpt very soon. . .

Also today I had a few beers with Vlad Verano, the excellent artist and bookseller and, now, book maker. Vlad works at Third Place Books here in Seattle (or Lake Forest Park, to be exact), and he's been sheparding their purchase/implementation and development of an Espresso Book Machine. A few weeks ago he made a book for me in front of my wondering eyes in the space of, oh, twelve minutes. Tonight, we discussed all things publishing, and he also sketched out (literally, with a pencil) ideas for an illustration for my upcoming October Dark excerpt. Here's an earlier sketch he made, inspired by the opening scene (and eerily close to what I'd imagined).

For a closer look at the Espresso Book Machine and its Lord and Keeper in the hip Seattle newspaper The Stranger, click here.

From the introduction by Jeffrey Ford

"October Dark is brilliant for so many reasons. In it I see the synthesis of the techniques and styles of Herter's other fiction joined with what seems a very personal authorial vision; an immersion in the world of 1977 boyhood. It's the portrait of an artist, a budding film animator and story teller. And in addition to the wonderfully rendered scenes of that time and place — Star Wars and weed and eight tracks — the reader sees the young artist's pursuits as part of an historical tradition of magicians who create life with light and shadow, from [astronomer Christiaan] Huygens to Ray Harryhausen and beyond.

The historical research here concerning Willis O'Brien and Huygens and the early processes of animation is incredible. Herter relays all this so naturally and convincingly that even the times when he veers away from real history for the sake of plot, those manufactured places, people, and events are indistinguishable in the power of their presence from the authentic. As a writer, I'd often find myself going to the internet to find out if what I'd just read really happened in history. There were times when I was sure these instances must be imaginative and they weren't and times I was sure they were real, but not so. For me as a reader, in the long run, it didn't matter which they were because the story so thoroughly had me convinced of its own fictional authenticity. These connections form secret catacombs of thought that run through the interior of the story, making for a reading experience that continues when the book is closed.

There's a scene in which Will and Jim (two characters you will meet in the story) play hooky from school in order to go see Star Wars on opening day. They miss the bus, so they go to Jim's older brother's place to see if they can get him to take them. He does, joined by his girl friend. The resultant journey is so well rendered with dialogue and description, revealing the characters and capturing the time period (I remember 1977), I felt like I was in the car with them and the scene was actually a memory of mine.

There is so much more to the story — arcane knowledge, conspiracy, a lurid automaton, a secret device, other centuries, monsters. Herter, like the stop-motion magicians of history, has brought a monster of imagination to life. Enter this dark carnival and see for yourself."

— adapted from the introduction by World Fantasy, Hugo, Nebula and Edgar-nominated author Jeffrey Ford

Prepared Insects

Willis O'Brien's European Shadow -- not content to animate apes and dinosaurs -- was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1882-1965). Where O'Brien built his pathos from latex and aluminum dural, Starewicz turned to the natural world; more specifically, to the dead natural world. Instead of machine-shopped armatures, Starewicz favored what he called prepared insects (spiders, beetles, flies, augmented with clasps and wires which would amaze a clockmaker) as well as the infrequent prepared animal. His short films are hauntingly dark, humorous, with a heady Slavic bite. Curiously, Willis O'Brien's father was an entymologist. And it's interesting to note, these two masters of animation-in-depth came up with their startling, ground-breaking processes due to the simple urge to see a boxing match; Willis O'Brien's happened to take the form of two heavyweights; Starewicz's, two stag beetles.