A Far Out Fantastic Site

Sinister Creature Con is a biannual horror convention in Sacramento, California that caters to movie make-up artists. However, as with the show that occurred during the weekend of June 15th at the Scottish Rite Center, horror authors do show up as venders to present their work. Other items related to horror fiction are also featured, such as board games based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

The Horror Authors
The horror fiction authors at June’s Sinister Creature Con included Nicholas Grabowsky, Derek Muk and Nicolas Walls. There may have been others, but I only had time to talk with those three. Grabowsky’s table consisted of both his own and other horror fiction writers’ works, many of which he has published through his Black Bed Sheet Books publishing house which is headquartered in nearby Antelope. One of his books is his 1989 novel, The Rag Man, which he said he is doing a re-write of for a new edition that he’s collaborating on with another author.

Black Bed Sheet is also t…

It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! IWSG is a monthly blog hop that occurs every first Wednesday of the month where we writers talk about the challenges in writing and how to resolve them.
A couple weeks ago, I was talking to author Derek Muk at Sinister Creature Con, a horror convention in Sacramento California. I told him I was a self-published author. He asked me if I thought self-publishing still gets looked down on compared to traditional publishing. I thought for a moment. Then I said that it does but less so than when it first came onto the internet scene in the 1990s. In a way, like many of the authors themselves who have gone that route, self-publishing is making its break!
I told Muk that self-published books are still not taken seriously by the majority of critics and avid readers since most of the works on the New York Timesbest sellers’ list come from traditional publishers such as Random House and DAW. But self-published books are getting m…

It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature.


‘I Am Legend’, The Book
Set in a near post-apocalyptic future, Matheson’s novel is about Robert Neville who thinks he may be the last person alive on the planet after a deadly plague …

Well it’s already the first week of the month and so that means it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Group (IWSG) post! IWSG is a monthly blog hop that occurs every first Wednesday of the month where we writers talk about the challenges in writing and how to resolve them. Each month the blog hop offers an optional question for us to answer, in which I have opted to answer this month’s. The question is “Of all the genres you read and write, which is your favorite to write in and why?” My answer: horror and sci fi. As for the why:I’ve been a longtime lover of the unknown which science fiction and horror expresses.
Horror and sci fi appealed to me most ever since I was a kid, almost since I learned to walk! I guess you can say I got into those genres because several members of my family were sci fi and/or horror fans, especially on my mom’s side (though my mom herself wasn’t a fan) but my dad also watched a lot of the two genres. I got hooked to sci fi early with television series s…

Most Saturday afternoons I’m usually recording my expenses in the cheque transaction booklet and cleaning house so that later in the day I can work on what I enjoy most: writing. But this Saturday I ditched the usual routine and took a bus out to the second annual Sacramento Zine Fest held held at the Verge Center for the Arts in downtown. My first experience with zines was when I picked up a couple free science fiction fanzines at my first full sci fi/fantasy convention, BayCon in San Jose, several years ago. Soon, I came across one called The National Fantasy Fan and purchased a membership that gave me as many as six issues a year. I even wrote a review of a Larry Niven book for one. That was one of my first published works. Ever since then, I’ve always been interested in the zine scene. Many famous speculative fiction writers started off writing for fantasy and science fiction fanzines--Harlan Ellison and William Gibson to name two. 


So what is a zine? Simply put, it was the thing…

Well, it’s been more than six months since the last Book-To-Movie article. So I’m glad to present another, finally, after all this time. I’m planning to have a Book-To-Movie here at the Fantastic Site on the third Saturday of each month and so am planning to make it a regularly occurring series. In this series, I review, or in some cases preview, book to movie adaptations. In each installment, I discuss the book and the movie that’s based on it, showing how faithful the latter is to the former. Because this is a science fiction/fantasy blog, most of the book to movie adaptations will be sci fi, horror, or some other type of fantasy. 
This time, I’m reviewing William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s 1967 novel Logan’s Run and the movie adaptation that released in 1976. As with most book to movie adaptations, Logan’s Run the film lacks the details of the novel and so scenes are either condensed or cut entirely. However, the style of filming makes up for these omitted details.


Synopsis …