Some chills and a thrill

Halloween is nearly here. Tell my next-door neighbours - they've had plaster pumpkins and a big witch's-hat display on their porch for weeks. If you get yourself all worked up that early, I think the actual day loses its spooky shine. Premature horripilation, Dr Freud would've called it. But if you're not sick of ghosts and goblins yet, here are some suggestions for an enjoyable shudder:

The image above is from "Wrong Turning", a comic strip in the Creepy style that I wrote for Martin McKenna after a fog-shrouded week at Shute Gatehouse. You can read the story here for free, but if you want to see the works of real genius that inspired it, Steve Ditko's collected Creepy and Eerie strips are here.

If that lights your turnip lantern, the comics connection gives me a segue to "A Dying Trade", a story I originally cooked up for a ghost-written Clive Barker book that didn't happen. I tried turning it into a comic with the help of Russ Nicholson, but that didn't get off the ground either. But eventually Dermot Bolton produced it as a short movie directed by Dan Turner, and you can watch that here.

Talking of movies, The Book of Life is out now and has to be worth a watch, because if two Mexican maestros like Guillermo del Toro and Jorge Gutierrez don't know their Day of the Dead, who does? As del Toro says:

“[What is it with Mexicans and death?] Ultimately you walk life side-by-side with death, and the Day of the Dead, curiously enough, is about life. It’s an impulse that’s intrinsic to the Mexican character. And when people ask me, what is so Mexican about your films, I say me. Because I’m not a guy that hides the monster: I show it to you with the absolute conviction that it exists. And that’s the way I think we view death. We don’t view it as the end of end all. You say 'carpe diem' in Dead Poets Society; we have that in a much more tequila-infused, mariachi-soundtrack kind of way.”

That whole vibe of wild partying and the flowering of life in death resonates with me, maybe because I got married in Mexico (just after the Day of the Dead, in fact). I like the fabulist notion of death teeming with all these passions and possibilities, which probably accounts for me being such a big fan of Tim Schafer's adventure game Grim Fandango. Boy, I wish somebody would turn that into a movie. Or a kids' TV show. Or a comic or a series of novels. (Well, maybe somebody did the last of those, kind of, only without Manny Calavera's decent-little-guy charm.)

The thing about Halloween is the fairground fun side of it. It's the ghost train version of scariness, a chill to enjoy by the fireside on a dark and stormy night. That's why I love John Whitbourn's classic series Binscombe Tales - not exclusively horror stories as such, but all of them open a window on an unsettling world of weird. They've been anthologized more widely, and won more awards, than any eerie English yarns this side of Algernon Blackwood, and the main reason for that is the storytelling warmth that accompanies the grave-deep chill and feverish fizz of Mr Whitbourn's imagination.

A more serious take on a tale of dread is to be found in Frankenstein, which (I'm sure you know) I turned into an interactive novel a couple of years back. There's no comfort to be found there, no cosy shiver before bedtime. This isn't the Universal horror movie version to be taken with popcorn and a pinch of salt, it's Mary Shelley's bleakly brilliant work of SF - only with more humour and characterization and fewer descriptions of mountain walks and river journeys. Oh, and I added a solution to the knotty problem of how the monster got the corpse of Frankenstein's murdered friend to Ireland, which otherwise makes no plot sense whatsoever. (Sorry, Mrs Shelley.) Read Dr Dale Townshend discussing the story with me here, or go and grab a copy (for iOS or Android) here.

More exploration of nightmarish unease was supposed to happen in Wrong, the online magazine I launched with Peter Richardson. Unfortunately the creators involved were all too busy trying to make a crust to throw in their time for free - myself included. But I still stand by our manifesto:

The most unsettling fears are the ones you can’t quite put your finger on. It needn't be anything as cosy as werewolves or vampires; nothing so comfortingly concrete as a madman with a knife. The supernatural, when it appears, can be a catalyst evoking the real horror that comes from within. ...Dreams are also a kind of truth, and bad things are more sinister when they happen to the blameless. Not everything is always explained and neatly tied up. There are often loose ends that will leave you uneasy. Rod Serling would be at home here. 

To round off, let's go back to Mexico. As well as getting hitched, I was there researching Maya mythology for my gamebook Necklace of Skulls. Eldritch encounters abound with skeletal noblemen who invite you to join them for a chat, threshold guardians on the way into Xibalba, disembodied heads, and the like. You can buy that in its new Fabled Lands Publishing edition, and if you get the paperback then the Kindle version is free, but I recommend waiting a week or two for Cubus Games's all-new app version. The full gleeful ghoulishness of the Day of the Dead has rarely been so vibrantly evoked as by Xavier Mula's artwork.

And a little snippet of a whiff of a hint of news: we may have a new publisher for Mirabilis. It's no secret that our partnership with Print Media Publishing turned out a big disappointment for all involved. Book One got out to reviewers (and got some very gratifying write-ups; here and here and here, for instance) but only half a dozen copies got into bookshops, and those I had to deliver myself! Book Two simply never arrived in Britain - apparently the lorry carrying the stock went missing somewhere in Germany, and I may have one of only two copies in existence.

But now we're on the verge of signing with a big-name comics publisher (no, not Marvel) and I'm hoping that will be the catalyst for getting our story out to all the people who I'm sure would love to read Jack and Estelle's adventures if only they knew about them. 2015 is looking good!

Dead or just resting?

LucasArts' Grim Fandango was a computer game by the legendary Tim Schafer that drew its inspiration from el Dia de los Muertos - the Mexican version of Halloween.

The setting is El Marrow, the city where the souls of the recently dead arrive to begin their journey to the afterlife. The land of the dead is depicted as sleepy and full of secrets. It has a sultry, dreamlike quality and yet things happen there.

By contrast, just over that border from which no traveller returns, the land of living is composed of brashly hued snapshots, styled on the 1950s work of Pop Artists like Richard Hamilton. It's a garish, glossy world which is full of bustling action, the sound and fury of life which strikes us as superficial now that we’ve strolled through El Marrow and had a glimpse of eternity.

Day of the Dead imagery juxtaposes life and death. In an inspired inversion, characters in the Grim Fandango world are despatched with guns that sprout flowers through their skulls and ribcages. The effect is beautiful and eerie, and at the same time more effectively shocking than the desensitizing carnage found in (yawn) so many videogames.

Because the plot involves mystery and danger, and the hero never knows who he can trust, Grim Fandango's film noir styling works perfectly. The guides of the dead are depicted like private eyes (though they are in fact travel agents) and their offices are located in an art deco building typical of the 1930s. Except that there's a subtle twist. Where art deco drew from ancient Egyptian design, the Grim Fandango version uses a restyled art deco substituting motifs from the Pre-Columbian civilizations.

Grim Fandango is far and away the most original game setting ever devised. It stands a million miles above the tedious floodwaters of super-soldiers, zombies, cloned hitmen, big guns, and monsters that always look exactly like Alien. Unlike just about every other videogame in existence, this actually would make a first-rate movie, TV series or graphic novel. Or all three.

So why have you never heard of it? Because it was an adventure game, in the days that adventure gaming meant stuff like tying a coat-hanger to a balloon to hook a message off a tree. And no, I don’t know why anybody ever thought that was fun either. It was like watching an animated movie where somebody keeps hitting pause and making you solve a Sudoku before you can see another few minutes.

But I’m thinking that old-style adventure gaming might turn out, with a very slight spin, to be just what those families around the entertainment hearth are looking for. Suppose that our hero (the very likeable Manny Calavera) wasn’t a damnable brainless puppet that you had to steer around while cursing at his inability to line up with objects. Suppose that he turned and asked you what he should do. Maybe all you have to do is give him the hint by pointing to something, so he's more like a character you can have a pretend relationship with. Suppose that, if you couldn’t be bothered to work it out, you could just give up and he’d figure it out for himself.

Or you could even say you don’t want to play it as a game, you just want to sit back and let Manny solve his own problems. Then it could be an animated movie that would be a darn sight more inventive than Shrek.

Just using the art, writing and audio assets that are already there, Grim Fandango could be turned into a graphic novel and an iPhone comic with just a few weeks’ work. Ay, caramba! I’d do it myself – right now, for nothing, out of sheer love of Tim Schafer’s brilliant creation. Hear that, LucasArts? Please do something with this great, great property! Make lots of money using the material you already have! Trust me on this. You don’t want to leave Manny in limbo.