​I recently watched a movie called Black Mountain Side directed by Nick Szostakiwskyj. It was released in January of 2016 in the USA. The description of the movie is what pulled me in to begin with, stating that a group of archaeologists find a structure buried in the ground in Northern Canada that is over ten thousand years old. As they continue to unearth the structure, their communications equipment fail and they find themselves stranded and begin to lose their sanity—very Lovecraftian from the description.
 
The movie was actually pretty interesting from the Lovecraftian standpoint. They bring in an expert who helps them try to identify the culture that built the structure and offer other tidbits of information. As they continue, workers begin to disappear, seeming to walk off the dig site into the Canadian wilderness, which given the location and the time of year basically equates to death sentence. 

​I’ll get into some spoilers later in this, but overall, I really enjoyed the slow pacing and build-up of tension as the team starts to lose their shit. Some of them start seeing and hearing things, while others become violent. For me, the story goes off the rails and loses steam with the ending which wasn’t a complete bummer, but it wasn’t the satisfying end I was hoping for. The acting is a sub-par in some spots, but nothing you wouldn’t expect from this kind of movie. Another thing that was kind of a letdown was the fact that the movie never shows you any of the artifacts they talk about. While not a necessary thing for storytelling, it felt somewhat lazy and probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to manufacture artifacts to show what they were referencing.
 
Overall, it was entertaining and played on some great horror tropes such as isolation, not really explaining or showing things that didn’t need to be shown, and leaving a lot to interpretation. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s hard these days to nail a perfect movie. I’d recommend it to fans of Lovecraftian horror. It felt like a nod to The Thing. I’d give it three out of five cephalopod bacteria.
 
Keep reading for a spoiler review.

The archeological team finds some symbols and artifacts that point out some sort of deer god that was worshiped by the culture that created the structure. There are also markers around the area that were placed later in the timeline by another (different) indigenous group of peoples. I had the sense that the markers were there to keep people away from the site because it was obvious that people who went near started going nuts. The team surmised that it was some sort of bacteria because one of the first people to lose their shit becomes ill, and starts throwing up some black liquid. They end up having to sever the person’s arm because there’s something moving around underneath the skin. After some tests run by the doctor on site, he determined that the bacteria was causing the cells to reform into tiny cephalopod-like creatures (octopus-squid things). This felt very out of place because there is never another connection to squids or octopi ever again in the movie. It almost felt like was force-feeding some Cthulhu-esque mythos into the movie. Plus, the big baddie manifests as an upright deer that talks to the archeologists, urging them to kill one another for various reasons. So I failed to see how the cephalopod angle was relevant or necessary in the movie. On top of that, no one else ever progresses that far into the disease (in that no one ever shows signs of having things move under their skin). In that aspect the story felt a little jumbled. On a different note, I don’t think they were just going crazy, because they all had visions of the same creature. While it’s possible to have a shared hallucination, I don’t think that was the direction the movie was going. 

​I found the deer god interesting on one hand, because it was a departure from what you would expect a malevolent being to manifest as. I mean, how scary is a deer? On the other hand, I never got a sense of what the deer god wanted. Was its motive just to sow chaos? It had the archaeologists at each other’s throats with deception, manipulation and dark little nudges when it was necessary. It was also obvious that the creature was trapped to the structure, because otherwise it would have left a long time ago. However, at one point the deer god asks one of the people, “what makes you think I’m trapped here?” or something similar.
 
Near the end, there are two team members left. One of them is injured via gunshot wound to the guts. He stays behind while the uninjured team-mate makes a run for it hoping to make it to a nearby reservation (a long shot for sure, but they had run out of options). The guy who stays behind gets it in his head to blow up the structure in the hopes that it will destroy the creature. This idea kind of comes out of left field and didn’t make a ton of sense to me.
 
The other guy ends up stepping on a bear trap on his way to the reservation. End of movie. It didn’t answer any questions, which is okay, but it didn’t even put us on the path to make our own inference as to what happened after the structure was destroyed. There just wasn’t enough throughout the film to give me any idea of what that would do, or if the creature wanted him to destroy it, or not. So in that aspect, the movie failed in my mind. But the build-up to that point was fun, reminding me of The Thing as I mentioned before. Worth a watch from a Redbox or if it comes to Netflix if this type of movie is your thing.

If you find yourself out in the wilds trying to survive and you just can't seem to find any water, worry not! You can use a transpiration bag with little effort on your part. Now I know you packed clear plastic bags in your in your survival/bug-out kit because I mentioned their use in an earlier blog post. Grab one of those divine chalices and find a plant (the larger the better, because they will have the most water. Do NOT use this method on poisonous plants...just don't...I think it will cause you to lose your mind, shit your pants, and possibly die, only to be reborn as some ungodly creature that scours the night preying on unsuspecting humans. But in all seriousness, don't use this on toxic or poisonous plants. If you're unsure, then move along until you are sure).

Once you've selected the plant that gets to endow it's life-giving liquid unto you, then wrap that bag around the greens, at least 3/4 of the way into the bag. Tie the top end off with some cord real tight so it won't fall. You'll also want to use a small rock to keep the corner low so the moisture will collect. Then you wait and let the sun do it's work. The plant inside will go through its magical process and within a few hours, SHAZAM! you've got water. The amount of water you collect will depend on a lot of factors like sun, cloud cover, type and size of plant, etc...but it should produce enough to keep you alive.

​To collect the water you can open up the corner with the rock and drain it into a container. You might want to filter it because sometimes there can be debris or "other" things in there (free protein if you aren't opposed to eating creepy crawlies). You can also place a tube in the bag and use it as a straw if that's your thing. Anyway, that's a quick tip for survival. Make sure you put some clear plastic bags in your survival gear and you can get some water.

​I picked up a copy of Apparition by Michaelbrent Collings at the last Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium a couple of months ago. For those of you who don’t know Michaelbrent, he’s billed as a Bestselling author and does quite well in the market. I’ve seen a lot of his work at the local conventions, as well as online, and finally decided to pick something up. The back cover blurb caught my eye and intrigued me:

Every year, thousands of children are killed... by their own parents.
Now, Shane Wills is about to discover why. About to discover an evil that has existed since the beginning of time.
An evil that invades loving parents and turns them into something else. An evil that feeds on the blood and despair of dying children.
An evil that most people will never know, because they cannot perceive the APPARITION.

To top that, his father was at the booth helping sell the books and he told me something along the lines of, that’s the only book of my son’s that I can’t read. It’s too disturbing. Whether true or not, it was a great marketing technique.

The story begins with the protagonist waking up in the middle of the night to his wife trying to kill their daughter with a knife. It quickly spirals into a tale of ghosts, unearthly entities, and constant thoughts of filicide that the protagonist can’t shake.

The story itself is a fast-paced, cinematic read that would make a great horror flick. In fact, many times while I was reading it, it felt as if I were watching movie. On that same note, sometimes I felt like the scares were there for no apparent reason other than to be creepy (#notreallyaproblemnowisit?). I loved the little snippets before each chapter and overall I found the content to be somewhat disturbing. Whether that was due to the fact that I have kids and the thought of killing my own children is horrible, I’m not sure.
​
Overall the book is a fun read with some great twists and turns throughout the narrative. I loved the ending and the final confrontation. If you haven’t read Michaelbrent Collings, then this is a great book to start with. Fans of horror, both books and movie alike, should find this read entertaining.

If you follow my Facebook, then you already know the news: Dark Fantasy Press, the publisher that picked up my Dark Tyrant Series, of which Consequence was the first book, has gone out of business. That means they gave me back my rights to the series. For a short time, I didn't know what to do, but I reached out, and was able to strike a deal with Griffin Publishers, the publishing company behind the Utah Horror Writers anthologies, Old Scratch and Owl Hoots, and It Came From the Great Salt Lake.

Consequence will be re-released through Griffin in a few months. If you've already bought the book, don't worry, the only thing that will have changed is some minor typographical errors, and it will have some kick ass new cover art (to be revealed soon). Shortly after that, the second book, Canyon Shadows will be released. I'm already working on the third in the series, Alpha Protocol, and I hope to have it finished by the end of the year. I'd love to have it done sooner, but life gets in the way.

If you don't know about the Dark Tyrant Series let me tell you a bit about it. The series is dark urban fantasy/horror that takes place in Utah. Each book follows a different set of protagonists as they cross paths with the Dark Tyrant and his minions. The Dark Tyrant crashed into the Earth as it was first created, and was locked away deep underground in a prison by the combined forces of the Infernal Legion and the Celestial Armies. As the years passed, the Dark Tyrant regained his strength, slowly corrupting everything around it until it could find a proper host and free itself from its prison. The books themselves can stand alone and you can read the first three in any order. Some of the characters and locations will hop through each book, but it's not necessary to read them in any particular order. The fourth and final book will bring all the main characters together for a final showdown.

Consequence is about a man who is hunting elk in the Utah wilderness with his friends when the demonic apocalypse kicks off. A supernatural storm tears across landscape awakening all sorts of nightmares, as well as latent magical powers in the protagonist. He races to get home to his family, willing to sacrifice everything to make it there on time. The second book, Canyon Shadows is about a Sheriff in a small Utah town and an antiques collector who find more than they were looking for in some ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. The events in Canyon Shadows lead up to the supernatural storm featured in Consequence. Alpha Protocol, the third book, is about a specialized team of soldiers, called an Alpha Team who's sole purpose in life is to respond to supernatural, cataclysmic events. They are dispatched to Salt Lake City to investigate the damage which occurred in Consequence and neutralize the threat before an Omega Team is dispatched to clean up. The Omega Team believes in nothing more than a scorched earth policy to fix problems of that magnitude. The Alpha Team races against the clock and the awakened, nightmarish creatures to get the job done in time.

As I mentioned before, the series is a dark urban fantasy because there is magic of all kinds, monsters, and the main characters can hold their own; however, it's also horror because of the mood, tension and sense of dread throughout the books. I like to think of the series as a really dark Jim Butcher or Simon R. Green mixed with Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft and a smidgen of Dungeons and Dragons. Shake them all up and add my own special ingredient and you get the Dark Tyrant Series. I grew up reading a lot of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. As I got older I transitioned to horror and urban fantasy, so it's no surprise that my own books would have all those elements. Keep an eye on this blog and my Facebook page for more information.