Monthly Archives: April 2012

Authors put the bite on vampires and their ways
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We’ve all heard enough about vampires recently.

Everyone knows they look like frumpy old ladies, overjoyed that an aging population means they fit in nowadays. Or that they keep humans penned up as food, and having sex with a human is tantamount to bestiality. Or that when a vampire slayer starts killing them off, they go right to the police.

Wait, this isn’t sounding too much like Twilight or True Blood — but they’re some of the ideas introduced in the new Canadian anthology Evolve, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick.

The Montreal-based Kilpatrick is no stranger to the genre, having written numerous dark fantasy and horror novels herself. She previously edited the erotic vampire collection Love Bites, and co-edited Edge’s horror anthology Tesseracts 13.

Tesseracts 13 was the first horror title published by Edge, a predominantly sci-fi and fantasy publisher in Calgary. The success of that book prompted this new all-vampire anthology.
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She did it — now she needs to hang on
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Well, many of us predicted it: Rachel Deering managed to get to $20,000 in pledges for her Kickstarter campaign to fund the remaining five issues of her “lesbian werewolf epic,” Anathema.  A huge and hearty congratulations to her.

Now comes the hard part.  I don’t mean the writing, lettering and publishing, which Rachel will undertake (though the publishing duties have now been picked up by Comix Tribe — a huge coup for Rachel).  No, the challenge now is to ensure the total stays above that mark until the campaign closes on April 30. If any pledges are reduced, bringing the total below $20,000, none of the money is collected.

That’s already happened once — for a very understandable reason. One prospective donor who had pledged $1,000 reduced it to $45 upon learning he would soon have a baby to support. Great news for the donor, on which Rachel and other pledgers offered congratulations; but a snag in the fundraising all the same.
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Werewolf Wednesday: Underworld
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Underworld (2003 film)

I had no idea when I first wrote about Underworld during a stint as movie reviewer for Uptown Magazine that the movie would spawn a four-movie franchise, the latest of which, Underworld: Awakening, hit theatres in March this year.

I’m afraid I never got past the sequel.  This first instalment had its moments (few and far between) but the second, despite Derek Jacobi doing his best Hunt For Red October riff as a sub captain hunting paranormals (if you’re saying “huh?” I say: exactly), was a hot mess.  And that’s kind of unfair to words denoting temperature and chaos.
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