Animal Planet Hero Award

Animal Planet is currently running an awards program, with 2 categories: Hero of the Year and Cat Hero of the Year. Both awards are for the person(s) who have done the most for animals and/or cats.

I'm here to ask people to vote for Tigers For Tomorrow founder Susan McCauley. In 1999, Susan founded Tigers for Tomorrow (TFT), a non-profit, protective facility for captive-bred tigers, lions, and other big cats, as well as other exotic animals. Susan works closely with local, state, and federal authorities to rescue and rehabilitate large carnivores and other exotic animals. TFT also runs a public awareness campaign to educate people on the plight of these beautiful and endangered animals. Since moving TFT from Florida to Alabama in 2006, she has taken in more than 40 large carnivores, including tigers, lions, cougars, and leopards, as well as wolves, camels, and other exotics. Many of her charges have been rescued from roadside zoos and private owners, where they had been victims of abuse, mistreatment, and poor healthcare. Others have come from humane societies or been purchased from zoos or circuses that had no need for them. All of the animals at TFT live in larger than average enclosures, and receive regular exercise and state-of-the-art healthcare. TFT relies on donations, public and private tours, and funding from grants. Despite the harsh economic conditions going on, and their rural location, Susan and her volunteers continue to personally clear more land, build enclosures, and take in more animals. It is because of this dedication to the health and welfare of big cats and other exotics, and her dedication to educating people on the conservation of wild big cats, that I believe Susan McCauley deserves either the Hero of the Year or the Cat Hero award.

If you think that what we do here at Tigers for Tomorrow - rescuing big cats and other exotics in order to provide them with a safe, healthy environment for the rest of their lives, plus educating the public on the plight of tigers and other big cats in the wild and in captivity, then please visit the Animal Planet site and nominate us. The publicity and monetary prize would go a long way towards helping TFT accomplish its goals.

Find out more here:  http://animal.discovery.com/sweepstakes/hero/2008/entryform.html

7:06 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Summer Music

Well, summer's almost here, and I've been thinking about how it's funny the way certain songs or bands are associated with the summer season. Everyone has their own, whether it's because they first heard the song in the summer, or because the music just has that 'feeling' to it. And I'm not talking about the obvious - let's face it, no one hears the Beach Boys and thinks about going snowmobiling. But some bands/songs are just indelibly linked to the hot weather in our shared conscious.

For instance, Springsteen, Van Halen, and Aerosmith. You hear these way more often in the summer than in the winter.

So, with that in mind, here are my favorite summer bands (in no particular order):

Sprinsteen
Van Halen
Go-Gos
Iron Maiden
Huey Lewis
Queensryche
Blue Oyster Cult
Dire Straits
The Wallflowers
Counting Crows
Bob Marley
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Shaw/Blades
Poison
Aldo Nova
Neil Young

There are plenty of others, but this is a good start.

Now, what are your favorites?

12:41 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Creepy Death on a Highway

For an excerpt from my new short story, "The Toll," and a cool video trailer, check out:

http://www.wrongworld.com/shop/cart.php?target=book&galley_id=331

The story: Traveling the back roads of rural Utah, a surgeon and his wife take an unmapped detour in search of help for a creature they accidentally struck on the highway.

It's a real Twilight Zone-type of tale, with drama, twists, and...monsters!

"The Toll" will appear in CHOICES—The Fork in the Road for release on DVD-Video and PDF April 10, 2008.

4:44 AM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Don’t believe the hype, reading is good!
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

Ruminations on Horror Writing, Movies, and the Promotion of Illiteracy

By JG Faherty

I recently caught I Am Legend. By now most of you know the plot: Will Smith is the last man in Manhattan, and has to fight hordes of zombie/vampire creatures in order to stay alive and continue his dual searches for a cure and for other survivors. The special effects were pretty good. The monsters weren't too over-the-top. All-in-all, much better than the average Lou Diamond Phillips Sci-Fi Channel movie.

But driving home, I started thinking about the state of horror today. The theater was jam-packed. In fact, any time I go to a horror film, there's usually a good crowd.

So why isn't horror fiction selling better?

A few weeks ago I visited the local Barnes & Noble. Horror was represented by the usual subjects: King, Koontz, Straub, Rice. Some John Saul moldy oldies. Some Chris Golden. A few anthologies, of which the only recent ones were Borderlands 5 and books of local ghost stories (including one with a story by yours truly!). A Repairman Jack Novel. A couple of vanity press authors.

That was it.

"How could this be?" I asked myself. Horror seems so popular right now. Everyone I know loves a scary movie.

Why aren't they reading the books?

Cue the 'Aha!' light bulb over my head.

People today are being trained not to read.

Here's an example: A while back I attended my niece's birthday party. While we were there, two sets of parents were complaining about how their kids had to read a book (yes, a whole book) over the summer, and then be prepared to take a quiz on it when school started. They were able to choose from among more than 30 titles, some currently popular with the YA crowd. One boy had finished his, enjoyed it, and was reading another. The other three budding scholars hadn't even selected a book yet.

Those three were laughing at the first boy for wasting his summer. Bad enough, right? But the parents agreed with them, going on about how summer is supposed to be a time for kids to have fun, not learn.

Huh?

The lesson to the children? Reading sucks. But movies are fun. Momma and Poppa Einstein had a whole stack of them for their kids to watch. Video games, too. When I tried to voice my opinion on the benefits of reading vs. video games, it was hinted none-too-subtly that I should keep quiet because A) I'm one of those weirdos who likes to read, and B) I don't have children.

I spent the rest of the evening gazing off into space, wishing the a plague on all those who treat books like kryptonite.

These parents who complain that it takes their kids three or four hours a day to complete their homework - leaving no time for play - are the same people who have trouble putting together a grammatically correct paragraph or helping their children do 'new math.' One father even wanted to write a letter to the school.

He didn't. Because he doesn't know how to use MS Word.

He's really good at Grand Theft Auto III, though.

Another example can be found right in the school systems. In speaking to my nephews, and my friends' children, I've learned it's a common practice for teachers today to show movies in class a couple of times a month. Fun movies, like Spy Kids or Daddy Day Care. And, they don't even have to write a report on it afterwards! I'm talking middle school here, not first grade.

So, how can this trend towards promoted illiteracy be reversed? Writers and fans of horror need to take a stand against this problem. We don't necessarily realize it, but we represent a powerful force. All kids like scary stories - mysteries, wizards, aliens, monsters, ghosts, you name it. But most parents aren't aware of what's going on in horror literature. A few years ago, Buffy and Angel were all the rage on TV. But how many parents bought those tie-in books for their kids?

Back when I was a kid, I got into sci-fi by reading the tie-ins to Star Trek. No reason this same method wouldn't work for today's kids. Find a movie or tv show they like, buy them books based on the series. Your kid likes vampires? Go onto the Amazon or Barnes & Noble websites, and search for the Young Adult titles in those sections. Fans of the O.C. might want to read  Generation Dead by Dan Waters. High School with Zombies - what kid wouldn't like that?

Deborah LeBlanc has a great literacy push going on her website, including a contest with a $5,000 prize. All you have to do is read two books. Dave Simms, a local English teacher, has had horror authors come into his class and speak to the students, and he uses horror books as required reading. I've been loaning my old books to my nephew. When I'm around my friends' children, I make it a point to have a book in my pocket, or to talk about a new book I read. And I always mention when a movie is based on a novel.

Without the advertising bucks of the publishers behind this movement, it's a hard hill to climb. But we've got that marvelous Internet at our disposal. And our big mouths. If we all do our part to promote the fun and thrills you can get from reading a really good book, we can make a difference.

So let's put those thinking caps on.  Hey, we're supposed to be smart, aren't we?

After all, we enjoy reading books.

6:23 AM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Rob Zombie’s Halloween

There's a lot of controversy surrounding this movie; traditionalists feel it doesn't compare to the original, that it takes away the mystery surrounding Michael Myers' origins and eliminates the supernatural aspects of Myers.

Don't believe it.

I grew up watching the original Halloween movies, and I am here to say that Zombie has delivered a movie that is not only worthy of the Halloween name, but kicks the original in the ass and sends it packing like an annoying little brother.

Zombie's Halloween provides a great backstory that really lets you understand why Myers has such a yen for ending people's lives in violent fashion. Zombie does a great job in making us feel for the young Myers as a real person who's life is so crappy he has to make some radical changes. With the world we live in today, you can almost believe something like this could happen in any town across the nation.

After his bloody escape from the mental institution (and watching him mature from a creepy kid in a mask to a creepy adult in a mask is just great!), he's actually only interested in reuniting with the last surviving member of his family, but he's the victim of his own violent needs.

The movie has some typically violent deaths, but it's nowhere near as violent or over-the-top gory as the Saw or Tourista movies. And there is more suspense than in the typical slasher films - enough so that my wife jumped a couple of times while we watched it.

And the movie's ending sets things up nicely for the eventual sequel, which would also serve to morph Myers into a supernatural force who can return from the dead.

All in all, I would have to rate it as the best horror movie of the year.

Plus, the music kicks ass! Lots of classic metal.

Go see it. You won't regret it.

7:41 AM - 6 Comments - 1 Kudos - Add Comment

Meet JG Faherty
Category: Writing and Poetry

Who am I?

Hello, my name is JG Faherty. Welcome to my blog. In case you don't know me, I write horror and dark fiction. I do other things as well, in order to actually make money, but this is what I do if you get my drift.

If you write horror and dark fiction, everyone asks you where you get your ideas from. The sarcastic answer I'd like to give is 'From my imagination, butthead. Maybe you should try using yours.' However, those types of comments earn me painful blows to the shin from my wife's shoes, so I tell people about my misspent youth instead, how I grew up watching horror movies, building monster models, and reading scary stories.

One of my earliest memories is of going to the drive-in theater with my parents to see a double feature. Planet of the Apes was the first movie, and Night of the Living Dead was the second. That would have been in 1973, making me...12 at the time. I'd previously seen all sorts of monster movies (Them! was my favorite), not to mention a million showings of Godzilla vs. anybody, but Night of the Living Dead was my first real gore-fest.
I was hooked!
My parents didn't make it through the whole movie, but later that year I found it on television. After that, I couldn't get enough dismemberments, disembowelments, and exploding skulls.

So I guess all you armchair psychologists can blame my parents.
Personally, I thank them!



Graveyards, Ghosts, and Twisted Teens

I grew up in a small town 35 miles north of Manhattan. I still live there, and it's the setting for many of my stories, along with upstate New York, and the rural south. The county I live in is full of history. Revolutionary War battle grounds, two-hundred year-old gravesites, ghosts, haunted roads, and tales of monsters in the woods - a great place to grow up.


Once I was old enough to take off for the day on my bike with my friends, I was able to explore all these things and more. We often played hide and seek in the graveyards at night (the same graveyards that years later became THE place to park, drink, and bring dates), and in fact it was a rite of passage in our neighborhood to be pushed into a sunken grave or locked in a mausoleum. There probably wasn't a kid on my street who didn't have some kind of strange encounter, including myself. (You can read one of mine, "The Phantom Milkman," in 'Haunted Encounters: Departed Family & Friends' {Atriad Press}, available from this site. The rest I'm saving for future stories.)


In high school and college, armed with my driver's license and a few dollars, some of these past times were replaced by 'adult' activities - booze, beer, and bimbos. But even then it wasn't unusual for us to keep a dead cat as a pet (until a schoolmate stole it), sneak into a satanic ritual in upstate New York, charge money to let people watch my African Puff Adders eat their weekly meal (this involved having small mice bitten by large, venomous snakes), or even just having a beer at midnight in old cemetery while "Funeral for a Friend" played on the stereo.


And of course, there were the books and movies.


The Golden Age of Horror

Ahh, the eighties! Forget punk rock, Duran Duran, and The Breakfast Club. The eighties were the best years, in my humble opinion, for horror. It seemed like every week I'd go to the bookstore and pick up another paperback about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, or demons. Were a lot of them dogs, barely worth a place in the basket next to the toilet? You bet!
But a lot of them were hidden treasures, and launched many a career still going strong today.I remember purchasing books and short stories by Tom Monteleone, Ramsey Campbell, Charles L. Grant, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Karl Edward Wagner, Richard Laymon, Dennis Etchison, Manly Wade Wellman, and so many others.
It was the heyday for King and Koontz, when you'd wait for months for that new novel to come out. Peter Straub, too, although unlike the other two he's still going strong these days. One of the scariest nights I ever had was sitting in my apartment in 1983 reading Pet Cemetery. I started it at 2 in the afternoon, and at midnight I was so involved I forgot I was supposed to meet friends out at a local bar. When I reached the part where Dr. Creed makes his first trip through the deadfall trees, I was so creeped out I had to put the friggin' book down and get a soda!

Today, horror is different. There're many more authors, and many more places to find short stories, great magazines like Cemetery Dance. Online bookstores like Shocklines, and specialty presses like Borderlands Press. But it's grown very hard to pick up really good material. I go back and read my old copies of "Year's Best Horror," or similar anthologies, and I can expect to enjoy half the stories. Today? I'm lucky if one of them is worth reading twice. The same goes for books.
Give me a solid beginning, middle, and end. Vampire, ghost, alien, lunatic killer, monster from the deep - I don't care. A classic plot is okay, if the writing's good. Just don't make me read 400 pages only to find there's no ending. Leave the art house writing to some other genre, not horror.
As a reader, I enjoy 'classic' horror, as opposed to vague, twisting tales that go nowhere. So it only makes sense that my writing follows suit. I'm not here to impress you with how many words I know, or how far I can stretch a boring plot line. I just want you to get that jiggly feeling in your spine or your gut. I want to disgust you, unnerve you, freak you out. Make you laugh, make you cry. And maybe even scare you.

1:37 PM - 7 Comments - 5 Kudos - Add Comment