I posted this a few years ago when I first saw the movie. I have rewatched it more than once over the years, and after watching a couple of slightly below-average to average offerings recently (a movie called TAU and the third movie in the NOW YOU SEE ME franchise (NOW YOU SEE ME, NOW YOU DON’T) along with READY OR NOT (the first, not the sequel) and the short Punisher one-off on Disney+, I felt like I needed to watch something that I knew would be a five-star viewing experience for me. And I wasn’t in the mood for INFINITY WAR/ENDGAME (too long, although having just seen the Punisher and DareDevil Born Again Season 2 and anticipating the two big offerings later in the year from Marvel), so I settled on one of my go-to’s: LA LA LAND.

This is a repost of my thoughts when I first watched it. I do not have much new to add. But so few people look at my blog that odds are this will seem fresh to anyone checking it out. Any new comments I have are in parentheses and italics.

If you don’t know, the movie is about two young dreamers, an actress (Stone) and a jazz musician (Gosling) chasing those dreams and finding each other, supporting each other, and falling in love.  It was the ending that really made what would have been a good film into a great one, in my opinion.

Don’t read on if you don’t want some things about the movie spoiled for you.

*

*

*

Okay, that’s enough space. So, the ending…

As a viewer, you go through the entire film watching the relationship of Emma Stone’s Mia and
Ryan Gosling’s Seb (short for Sebastian) build up from their awkward first encounters, to their
budding romance, and finally to Seb’s missteps (betrayal seems like too strong a word) as they both chase their dreams. They have their inevitable breakup, and then Seb gets a call from a woman looking to audition Mia for a starring role in a big motion picture which will be filmed in Paris. He has to find Mia, who has returned to her parents’ home, and he must try to convince her to go for it. (Seb basically recalls something she said on their first meeting, when she is telling him about her love of movies and acting. It’s kind of an offhand comment, but he remembers. This says something about Seb, but the movie doesn’t harp on it. They just leave it there for the viewer to notice.) She does, and does well, and then the film cuts to five years in the future.

We see Mia basically becoming the huge star, going to the coffee shop where she used to work, very much like what happened at the beginning when she was the barista and a star orders from her. From there, she goes home, where waits the baby and her husband. She looks pretty happy. She has it all, a family and her dream career.

But wait! The husband isn’t Seb. It’s someone else!

So she and the husband are going out and leaving the baby with a nanny, and they get off the
expressway and end up wandering into a jazz club.

The logo at the door, the name of the club, is SEB’S. It’s the very logo that Mia designed over five years ago. Mia and her husband enter and find a table to watch the talented combo play some old-school jazz. After the song concludes, the owner of the club comes onstage, and to no one’s surprise, it’s her old love, Seb. He sees her—and they lock eyes right before he sits down at the piano. He plays the opening notes of the song that’s run through the entire soundtrack: “Mia and Sebastian’s Theme.” It’s a pretty song, with some intricate piano runs and a haunting melody, and it takes Mia back.

And we see in her mind that she’s back in the club where she first encountered Seb. She wandered in after an unfulfilling party, and she hears him play this song. Right after the song finishes, the manager fires Seb for not playing the Christmas music he’s been hired to play. She goes to compliment him and…

Back then, in real life, he rudely bumped into her as he stormed past and out of the club.

This time, however, he passionately embraces her and kisses her in this fantasy, and their life together—a life that did not come to pass—plays out in her mind. Mia watches them go through their life together, hit their milestones, but there are two distinct changes: One, Seb turns down John Legend’s character for a job in his powerhouse band, and two, Seb is there, front row, at a packed house for Mia’s one woman play that she’s produced and starred in. (The first time, the house wasn’t packed — there were only a couple of people in it.)

She nails the audition, and the baby is still there (but now it’s a little boy!), but now Seb is the husband and father, and they’re leaving for a night out, and they end up in the jazz club, but it isn’t “Seb’s” any more. They’re audience members watching the band. And then it fades back to reality, and we’re back to Seb playing the final notes of the theme, and Mia is still sitting next to her husband (played by Tom Everett Scott — hey, she ended up with Skitch, the drummer for the Wonders and an aspiring jazz player
in the movie THAT THING YOU DO).

They get up to leave, and there’s a sadness about it, but then she looks back and her eyes meet
with Seb’s eyes, and they smile, a knowing smile, and it’s over.

So what happened?

I read some comments that suggested that in Mia’s daydream, Seb was the one who made all the sacrifices. He doesn’t join up with the powerhouse band that has a big hit and is doing huge
venues and pays well. He doesn’t end up with his jazz club. He just follows Mia on her career
path.

I read another comment that suggested that during the movie, Mia was always the one supporting Seb. She watched him perform multiple times during the film, and he never saw her, even at the play that he missed because of a photo session for the band.

But why is Seb in this band that clearly isn’t the kind of music that he loves? There was a phone
call early in the movie where Mia is talking to her mother about Seb and describing his job
prospects, and Seb hears it and I think he gets the idea that Mia wants him to do something like
this band, to be very successful.

It seems they’re both doing stuff for the other one. (On this watch, I wonder about this observation. What was Mia doing for Seb? How was she supporting his dreams? Sure she sees him play, but, well…so what? That just seems to be them dating.) Miscommunication? Maybe. But throughout the movie, they’re both chasing dreams. Seb’s dream of owning his own jazz club where he does things his way seems to be a longshot without the band that he’s part of. Mia’s acting career seems to be a longshot if she doesn’t do her dream project of the play. It’s Seb’s one “selfish” act of not attending the play because of a photo shoot that he’s forced into that pushes them apart, and maybe makes them realize just how important their own dreams are to themselves. (And was it really selfish? Or was he simply making the responsible choice? The one that he’s contractually obligated to do? He says earlier that he wishes she would have said something BEFORE he signed on the dotted line… Still, I tried to tell Seb through the TV screen to just say no and go support Mia. Does he underestimate the importance of the night to her? I cannot see how he could. So maybe it is a poor choice…but a selfish one? Still not sure about that.)

In the end, their smiles say that they both recognize what they’ve done for each other…helped each other to achieve their dreams, but at the expense of the dream of having each other. And maybe they could have had each other also, but that would have come at the expense of either Seb’s or Mia’s dream. (I wondered when watching this scene: would EITHER of them have it any other way, really? Would Mia trade her husband and daughter for Seb and a son? Would Seb trade his club and his dream for the life that Mia imagines? I think it’s left unanswered. But it is a great question!)

Are they happy with this? I think the smile they share at the end shows that they’ve at least
accepted it. (This goes back to the comment above—would they want that other life, if it was a possibility?) In an interview about the ending, Emma Stone said, “”I don’t know that they
necessarily couldn’t have ended up together. I think these two characters help inspire each
other’s dreams and the way that that unfolds means that they can’t end up together but that their love isn’t any less important. I was talking to somebody the other night and he said that ‘What I really love about this story is that in the end, even though she’s happily married and has a baby, that this movie celebrates those loves that came before and that they’re just as important as the love you have now.’ It’s about how important each person is in your journey in wherever you’re going.”

So they know that without each other, they would never have achieved their goals, and they’re
better for having known each other and having loved each other.

It’s a deep ending that provoked a lot of thought in me.

I’d love to hear comments about the movie in the comments to this post (assuming anyone reads this).

/end spoiler

As I said at the beginning, I really think this was a great film that will stand the test of time and
will be enjoyable to watch years down the road…and will probably inspire a few people to follow
their own dreams.

Addendum: I have been thinking about this film’s place in my “all-time” list. My 5-star watches are different from what I consider to be the “best” or what would be ranked as 1 through 10 on such a list. Movies like Mission Impossible, Infinity War, Back To The Future, and Pixar films like Soul and Up all get five stars, and every time I rewatch those movies, I am left with the conviction that they earn that rating. But not all of those movies would be in the running for my personal “best” movie, or would earn a position on my personal top five or top ten.

LA LA LAND would definitely make my top ten list. It probably would make my top five list, and it might just be in the running for the number ONE spot on that list. Some of the other contenders would include (for me) the Lord of the Rings trilogy taken as a whole, and THE TWO TOWERS, taken as an individual movie. I love that movie. Also, I’d have to have THE STING, ANNIE HALL, CASABLANCA, and possibly WAKE UP DEAD MAN (a Knives Out story). UP and COCO probably make the list, and so does IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. All these movies have resonated incredibly in my brain. In my view, LA LA LAND is right up there with those films.

Now, I’m not a film historian. I just like what I like. Same with books. I like a lot of books that no one will ever consider to be “classics,” and some that ARE considered to be “classics” don’t make my list. People see great things in certain works that I just can’t get to. The problems are mine, probably.

I’ve read a bunch of Letterboxd reviews, some saying that this is one of the best movies of all time (which as you can probably tell, I more or less agree with) and some saying it is utter trash. I don’t know. Some of those “bad” reviews complain about things that I found to be completely untrue, like underdeveloped, flat characters. Bad singing (ok, I accept that about the leads in this movie. John Legend is the only one of the true leads who has a real voice). Music that doesn’t work.

To me, a story guy, a musician, a (bad) singer, I find all of those either untrue or irrelevant. These are supposed to be “normal” people. They aren’t Broadway stars. They aren’t international pop stars. (Well, John Legend actually IS.) The very average (perhaps that’s charitable in Gosling’s case) singing voices of the leads are perhaps part of the point. They are just PEOPLE. Their talents are specific, as are most people. We can’t all be geniuses or phenomenons at everything. Seb is an amazing jazz keyboardist. Mia is an amazing actor and storyteller. The fact that they aren’t amazing at everything else serves to highlight those talents. It’s kind of genius when you think about it.

I also read one review that stated that the two (Stone and Gosling) have no chemistry. I was like, WHAT!?!?!? They have off-the-charts chemistry with each other. They seem SO natural. What is this reviewer looking for? If these two have no chemistry, then just who DOES?!?

I could go on and on. But I think I’ve made my point. There are myriad reasons that I feel this movie belongs in my personal pantheon of great films, and I’ve highlighted a few in this commentary and review.

So go give it a watch, whether it be via streaming, rental, or purchase. Or if you’re lucky, maybe you can catch it in a theater on some revival run, if they ever do that. Or at one of the showings where they have a live symphony doing the score. See if you agree. But if you don’t, do me a favor. Keep it to yourself! 🙂

Jump to Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

As you can tell by reading this series of posts/articles, I may or may not have given a lot of thought to post-apocalyptic scenarios. I think the authors I’ve referenced in these articles have pretty much touched every base there is to touch with respect to the variety of ways our world could end. Are there issues that we haven’t thought of? Probably. I can think of a few examples off the top of my head of real life giving us new material for our consideration and analysis, which writers then wrote about.

Remember December 31, 1999? Everyone was wondering what might happen when the computer clock clicked over to 2000? Most everything was in a 6-digit date format. What would happen to all of our systems when that year went to double-zero? Would everything shut off? Reset? Would we lose the records of everyone’s wealth? 

Movies and books were written about this in advance of the date. But no more, because fortunately, nothing much happened. Whether this was because we switched to an eight digit format for dates, using the full number for the year (like, this year is 2025, so the date is 03/20/2025, the first day of spring), or was it simply because the computers didn’t care what the date was as much as we thought they might? I don’t really know. 

Remember 2012? Some people (not me) were worried that the world would end that year, because the Mayan calendar ended that year. Whitley Streiber notably wrote a book called 2012 about a potential apocalypse, which I read, but which I can barely recall anything about besides the title. Nothing prevented an apocalypse at the time, because there was nothing apocalyptic about the date. It was just a number!

Perhaps we face some more serious issues today. We have a climate crisis approaching, whether natural or helped along by human civilization. So we are trying to find alternative energy sources. We have them, but we don’t know if they are feasible in the short or long run. What if we begin using one extensively, but there are unforeseen consequences to wind, or solar, or hydroelectric? What about nuclear solutions? Fusion is still not commercially useful to us, but we continue to research it. What if, when we finally make it work, its use has unforeseen consequences?

So which of these scenarios seems most likely? Duh…zombies!  

Just kidding. If we’re simply talking about what’s most likely to happen, it’s a pandemic. We just had one. Instead of making our response teams more robust and implementing a more efficient early warning system, we did the opposite. That can’t lead to anything good. But a pandemic in reality is not going to be 99% fatal. Even if it’s more serious than COVID, it isn’t going to kill off humanity, at least not if it’s a naturally occurring bug. 

I think we can rule out aliens, because, unless they (or we) find a way to circumvent the known laws of physics, our civilization will die out long before they ever find us, or travel this far. And while I think climate and weather are going to change our lives, not to mention our economies, all over the world, I don’t think we will see a mass extinction event from it. Humans will still be around when it’s all said and done.

No, what I think is the most likely scenario is that a comet or asteroid hits the planet, causing it to become inhospitable to any kind of life, especially human life. A dinosaur killer, to be clear. It’s happened before. It’s going to happen again. It’s more a question of when than if. And who knows? Maybe we will have the ability by then to simply swat the object away like it was an unwelcome insect attacking our planet.

So, the books I am writing right now—two are different takes on the disease apocalypse. I think I talked about all of my PA fiction in earlier posts. I don’t want to rehash it in this post, just to point out that I have about a hundred thousand words done on the one where only adults are killed and kids are spared. It still feels far from done, but I keep plugging. Another is where a shadowy group of people, including government folks, moguls/oligarchs, and other rich people, decide to kill off the world. I was inspired for this one by Hugh Howey’s WOOL series, but after a brief email exchange with Mr. Howey, I realized that my ideas wouldn’t work in his world (it started out as an attempt to write something in the Silo world, since Mr. Howey had generously allowed others to write in his sandbox, so to speak), so I changed it to something else. Then I realized that a third pandemic-inspired story I’d started but which was languishing could fit as part of this tale, so I worked it in. I believe this one is already over a hundred thousand words. 

And the last one I talked about in the dinosaur killer post, because my idea is that the moon’s orbit destabilizes and it comes crashing into the Earth. I’ve finished two books, each about fifty thousand words, and I actually started a third book (because trilogies work well in PA fiction, I’m told)

I stay up at night sometimes thinking about stuff like this—not because I’m particularly worried about it, but because if I come up with something new, different, interesting, or some combination of those three, I want to write it. Be assured that if I come up with the next original post-apocalyptic scenario, you will find me talking about the stories I write about it on the pages of this blog or wherever I’m promoting my work.

I don’t have that new idea yet, but if you don’t want to miss it when it comes to me, keep checking back hereabouts! Thanks for reading, if you’ve made it this far!

Jump to Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

I’ve so far avoided the big one: War. We have lived with the idea that we are in possession of weapons that could make the planet uninhabitable for virtually (but not quite) all forms of life, and plenty of stories have been written about such an apocalypse, including Aden Cabro with his Island Survival series and Boyd Craven, with his long The World Burns series and plenty of others. Of course, the seminal post-nuclear war stories are ones like Neville Shute’s ON THE BEACH and David Brin’s THE POSTMAN, both set after a nuclear apocalypse.

There are two types of nuclear devastation. In Shute’s novel, it is the devastation from the nuclear bombs themselves, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, multiplied by a hundred. In Brin’s story it may involve some bombs as it is definitely post-war, but a lot of the problems are created by the destroyed electronics because of the nuclear EMP that knocks out technology. Craven and many other PA writers use EMPs to destroy tech in their stories, which can (and often does) lead to a story set in the sub-sub-genre of “prepper” fiction. 

One of my favorite EMP stories is William Forstchen’s ONE SECOND AFTER, in which a college history professor (who happens to be retired military) is thrust into a leadership position in his small North Carolina mountain town. The story focuses on the people and how they live, how they defend themselves, and how they move past the apocalyptic event—a classic post-apocalyptic story. (I also loved PILLAR IN THE SKY, a book by Forstchen about a space elevator.) Like the Niven and Pournelle book, this one has a bit of everything in it. 

War might not be nuclear, however, and actor/director Levar Burton wrote his debut novel AFTERMATH about a post-civil/race war America also dealing with devastation brought on by a killer earthquake at the New Madrid Fault in the middle of the country. It highlighted the aftereffects of a destructive war made worse by natural disaster, including financial collapse and civil unrest brought on by the assassination of the first African-American president days after his election in 2012. (He missed the mark on that—Obama was elected in 2008 and survived two terms as a popular president, generally.) This scenario seems more likely today than most of the others, at least in the United States. But that’s a political discussion for another time (or never, at least at this blog). 

Nuclear holocaust, EMP, or a different kind of war? Dan Simmons, in his book FLASHBACK, describes a United States where left-wing policies have left us vulnerable to an economic war of some kind. As it’s been a while since I have read it, and I don’t generally agree with Simmons’s politics, I don’t recall exactly what happened—just that the United States are a shell of their former self, with Japan (or is it China?) calling the economic shots. In Simmons’s view, the policies are enough to create a dystopia where the drug called “Flashback” is used to relive happier times. It’s not survivalist or apocalyptic in nature, but it is definitely a future created by a different kind of war entirely.

I’m sure I’m missing some sorts of war that would cause an apocalypse, and thus lead to a post-apocalyptic world. When I was a kid, I wrote a story about me and my friends fighting off a Russian (?) army after they invaded and conquered the United States. A bunch of junior high kids fighting a fully trained army, and winning? I know, totally unrealistic—but totally fun for me at that age. Could that happen? It seems unlikely that another country would be able to invade and hold a country like the United States—one that is not only the strongest militarily, but also protected by allies on the north and south and oceans on the east and west. It would take a Manchurian Candidate of some sort to create the conditions where such a thing could happen. Life imitates art? Probably not, but who knows?

In the final post of this series, I’ll have a few final thoughts, and maybe give some insights into the PA fiction I’ve written (and am writing) and which I hope to publish some day.

Jump to Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

We see that there is often overlap between the sub-sub-genres—after all, how many different ways are there to kill off very high percentages of humans? Seems like it’s either supernatural, infectious, or environmental so far. But there is another way to kill off large numbers of humans, and that is with something not alien, not sentient, but extraterrestrial—I’m talking about a dinosaur-killer type of event. An asteroid or a comet on a collision course with our planet would do the trick, ending massive amounts of human lives immediately and probably killing off a large percentage of the rest of humanity in its aftermath.

One can have all sorts of fun with this sort of story. After all, different types of catastrophic events would result from the extraterrestrial objects impacted on the planet. In the oceans—we would get tidal waves and tsunamis. On land—probably earthquakes and large amounts of debris into the atmosphere. Can you imagine the fun one might have researching what might happen depending on where the singular huge body impacted? Size would matter, too. A writer could research the heck out of that and find out how much energy would be transferred and how that transfer would impact our planet’s environment—or one could simply wing it, starting with the idea that all the theoretical knowledge in the world won’t be one hundred percent accurate and what actually happens will be what happens, not what we think will happen.

There are plenty of examples of this type of story, but my favorite book by a longshot is one by Larry Niven and Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I’m talking about LUCIFER’S HAMMER. This book has it all. It’s written from a hard SF writer’s angle, with everything checking out according to the best knowledge of the day. It’s a classic survival story. It goes into details about “prepping” for doomsday when a television producer and director takes the warning from a wealthy amateur astronomer seriously and decides to prepare for it, figuring he can always use the information he gathers while gathering supplies for a project in the future (considering his prepping to be research). It has politics and intrigue and weaves everything together for an incredibly satisfying (to me) result. 

Niven and Pournelle also took a stab at the alien apocalypse sub-sub-genre with their novel FOOTFALL, but while I found it enjoyable, it didn’t stick with me or inspire rereads over the years like LUCIFER’S HAMMER did. FOOTFALL combined two things—the aliens, instead of using disease, are throwing large rocky projectiles at the planet, demanding total surrender or death. It has a veritable cast of hundreds, and while it’s been a long time since I’ve read it, it was the first thing like it that I’d ever read.

After reading Bryan W. Smith’s LAST DAY, a book about the leadup to an apocalyptic event (an impending asteroid impact on the Earth) where the primary focus is on the horrors that humans, unshackled from the rule of law and unworried about the future consequences of their actions, are capable of, I wrote my own pair of short novels, which are tentatively titled LUNACY: MOONSTRIKE and LUNACY: AFTERMATH, which describe the events that occur in a small town in Indiana after the knowledge that the Moon’s orbit has become unstable and it is on a path that will have it colliding with the Earth becomes public. I tried to explore some of the things that Smith explored, as one storyline focuses on an evil man indulging his dark desires now that consequences are off the table. But other storylines explore what a governmental response to the impending event might be and how regular folks might survive it. I have to admit, it was a lot of fun to write, and I look forward to publishing it myself someday. I am considering combining those two stories into one larger book with maybe 2 parts—books 1 and 2, perhaps.

There is a biggie that I haven’t mentioned, but I will get to it in my next post…how’s that for building anticipation?

Jump to Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

While zombie stories are most definitely a (very popular) sub-genre unto themselves, another supernatural type of apocalypse is described in Iain Rob Wright’s Hell On Earth books that begin with THE GATES (I think currently there are six of them). Perhaps this series better embodies the supernaturally-caused apocalypse better that even zombie fiction. In Wright’s series, the apocalypse is caused by someone somehow opening the titular gates and releasing an apocalypse of biblical proportions upon humanity. This series comes complete with the religioius overtones one might expect from such a calamity!

Yet another supernaturally charged apocalypse is described in Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series, where a decent percentage of humanity just disappears because of the Rapture as they interpreted from Revelation in the Bible. The “righteous” are taken up to heaven, leaving the rest of us behind to deal with the aftermath society suffers in those good folks’ absence. Regardless of one’s beliefs, I have to admit that the first few of these were pretty fun, and were made into a movie starring Kirk Cameron (which I probably will never watch).

We can’t really discuss a post-apocalyptic world without at least touching on the events of Marvel’s INFINITY WAR and ENDGAME movies, where a big purple alien acquires magic stones and a bunch of heroes from around the galaxy fight to keep him from doing what he is trying to do with them—cause half of all life to disappear, just sort of cease to exist. Kind of like the Rapture, now that I think of it, except that these folks didn’t go to their just reward in Heaven, they simply vanished. The world is changed dramatically by the disappearance of all these people, of course, and as we probably all know by now, our heroes spend the second movie doing everything they can to bring them all back, which causes its own issues. Marvel tries to “science-speak” some explanation for the event, but really, it’s a supernatural cause.

Marvel’s Infinity Saga kind of crosses over into the next type of apocalypse, and that would be a disaster caused by aliens! Seems like this would be an obvious subject of an apocalyptic and/or post-apocalyptic novel. Yes, it’s unlikely—but that doesn’t stop it from being fun!

BATTLEFIELD: EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard might be a slog to read, but it was definitely a defining example of the alien apocalypse. I’d define this type of story to be something to do with aliens acting to destroy humanity, maybe because they want our planet. There have been plenty of books and movies about this, notably INDEPENDENCE DAY, where Aliens attack and humans have to band together from the far reaches of a decimated (not literally) United States to attempt to defeat them. Currently I’m reading Rod Little’s Sons Of Neptune series, where human-like aliens have decided that they need the Earth for themselves, and they want to keep all the infrastructure that humans have already built. To accomplish this, they’ve done a bit of genetic manipulation, turning humans (and dogs) into reptilian predatory creatures. It’s an interesting concept, enough so that I’m reading on beyond the first book in the series.

Perhaps my favorite in this genre is Edward W. Robertson’s Breakers series. I thought it was going to be a run-of-the-mill apocalyptic pandemic series, but then aliens popped up—aliens who introduced the organisms responsible for killing most of humanity (except, of course, for the ones who somehow are immune). When you think about it, the idea that this sort of disease has extraterrestrial origin makes a lot of sense. Like I said earlier, viruses of earthly origin usually would not be so lethal. Viruses (and other parasitic microorganisms) evolutionarily are designed to survive, and killing their hosts is not an effective way to continue their existence. Whereas, an engineered pathogen would not necessarily have evolved to survive. The combination makes a great deal of sense.

In my next post, I’m going to get to another of my favorite post-apocalyptic settings, and one of my favorite apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic books—that would be an impact from an extraterrestrial object like the dinosaur-killer. You’ll have to wait for it, though. Maybe tomorrow!

Read Part One Here:

Read Part Two Here:

So we move to the sub-sub-genre that perhaps can most easily blend the post-apocalyptic subgenre with the horror genre—the zombie apocalypse! Judging by the number of books written about the battles between undead zombies and the remaining humans, it is one of the most popular sub-genres. I have to admit, for a long time the idea of zombies didn’t interest me. My first experience with the sub-genre was probably seeing the black and white version of Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD—approximately a hundred times! So many times that I was kind of bored with it. I’m afraid that the experience of seeing that film a lot on television, with commercials, probably jaded me to the entire sub-genre.

Even though I was never the biggest fan of this sub-sub-genre, I later found out that zombies can be pure fun! The dead coming to life, or some facsimile of that event, can straddle the line between, and blend together, the horror and PA genres. I think the first stuff I read was indie fiction from Amanda Hocking (remember her?), and I liked it. It was kinda epic, written over more than one book—like so much PA fiction is. Others took that formula and followed it. Scott Nicholson’s name comes to mind. Piperbrook, Clausen and Evans wrote epic zombie apocalypse series. Honestly there are too many to mention. A lot of early indie fiction writers latched onto the sub-sub-genre to write in.

Probably because it sold.

Zombie PA fiction can pull in some of the tropes of other sub-genres of PA fiction, especially the infectious disease apocalypse. M.P. McDonald does a pretty cool job pulling together the tropes from the apocalyptic pandemic and the zombie sub-genres with her Sympatico Syndrome books. People are behaving like zombies but it is due to a virus, and as usual for me, the really interesting parts are reading about how her characters deal with the aftermath.  There are plenty of others, also. One of the first I read in this sub-genre was Bobby Adair’s Slow Burn series, and in it, people were infected. Except some of the infected did not become zombies—not exactly, at least. They were the titular “Slow Burns,” humans who retained their humanity while having some of the physical manifestations of the zombies of this story’s world, including an elevated normal body temperature. (I flew through the Slow Burns, but finally petered out somewhere around eight or nine books into the series.)

It can also be supernatural, or of an unexplained origin. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the seminal George Romero film, has the dead crawling out of graves and arising from the newly-dead. It was implied that the cause of these zombies was some sort of radiation from a space probe returning from Venus, but I certainly never got that from that first classic film. Being the first of its kind to have any sort of mass awareness, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD gave us the model for the zombie apocalypse for many years.

Other supernatural causes include voodooism and old curses. THE MUMMY’s titular character is sort of a zombie, I think, although the story is more a horror story and less an apocalyptic tale. I can’t some up with an example, but reanimated corpses can feature in some voodoo mythology.

WORLD WAR Z, both a novel by Max  Brooks and a movie starring Brad Pitt, is another of the most popular of a crowded sub-sub-genre. Though I didn’t get it from the movie (and haven’t read the book), apparently the back story cause is a virus. Same with the extremely popular TV series THE WALKING DEAD and all of its spinoffs—viruses cause the zombie apocalypse. In FALLOUT, there are zombies, seemingly created by the radiation from the world-ending nuclear apocalypse. (There is a lot going on in FALLOUT, besides zombies!)

One Reddit poster summed up possible causes as follows: “Bio-Engineering, Space Rabies, Alien Parasite, Black Magic Voodoo, etc etc.” And I think that pretty much follows along with everything I’ve talked about above (and below).

Even YA fiction gets into the act! One of my favorites was Howard Odentz’s DEAD (A LOT) series, where the zombies are created by a parasite and have some unique characteristics (I won’t spoil it for potential readers). This one inspired me to write a bit of fan-fiction set in Odentz’s world (but in a different part of the country), and I had a blast writing it! I tried my hand at one where my main character was a zombie, with his own mind trapped somewhere within the zombie urges, but it didn’t go anywhere. (WARM BODIES, a movie starring Nicholas Hoult, did a fun light treatment of the subject with a safe resolution of the problem of the zombie-human relationship!)

While zombies are super popular, and seem to be a common apocalypse and post-apocalyptic setting, we still have more to explore—in my next post!

(Read Part 1 here.)

In the last entry, I talked about pandemics and diseases of a scale so large that there are few people left. We saw the reality of a pandemic in 2020, and while it was horrifying and life-changing, it certainly was not on the scale of the fictional pandemics from King, McCammon, et al. And perhaps that PA cause is a bit overdone? I hope not, because I’m writing two of them.

Fortunately for the PA fiction afficionado, there are many other ways for the world to end. Another issue we are dealing with in our real life is climate change, the resistance to believe it is happening and even if it is, that humans can do anything about it or have any responsibility for it. So this makes it a fertile ground for fictional treatments.

Environmental disasters are one of the larger categories of PA fiction today. One of the earlier ones I’m aware of (and I’m probably missing a lot of them) was shown in the film THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know what happens, don’t read on.

The environmental disaster in that movie is rapid climate change, a topic that is controversial in the political and social (if not within the science) communities. It’s this denial that makes it such a potent source of material for PA fiction writers. When the movie was made, we were used to hearing the terminology “global warming” instead of “rapid climate change” so this movie definitely gave viewers something else to look at. In the movie, instead of the Earth warming up, it freezes. Their premise is fun but does not hold much water scientifically, I’m told. Still, some of the ideas behind it are valid. What we were calling “global warming” did not mean that the entire planet experiences endless summers. It’s an unfortunate term because small increases in global temperatures lead to changes in ocean currents, in salt concentration of the oceans, in changes in weather patterns that can lead to extreme conditions. Is it happening? I’ll leave that to individuals, but I choose to believe the scientists, because I like to think I am a scientist, in a way. 

Kelly L. Greene has written several different PA series, most dealing with (from what I’ve read so far) environmental disasters which kill off significant numbers of our population. She has flooding, extreme weather, and a host of other situations leading to these events. What I like about Greene’s stories is that she focuses on the humans left behind. Really, does it even matter what the reasons are? Not so much to the survivors. They still behave like humans behave—good, bad, and indifferent.  

Stephen Baxter wrote a series about people leaving the planet to look for a new home for humanity due to extreme environmental changes. ARK is about the journey through space, and it is science fiction at its finest. FLOOD is about what happens here on Mother Earth, and while it has the rigors of SF, it has the trappings of good old PA fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his 40-50-60 DAYS series of books, also tackles environmental disasters with a SF writer’s rigor and discipline as to what is possible and what isn’t. 

Sometimes it’s fun to approach things with SF writers’ discipline—it’s like a thought experiment that can be cautionary about our outlook on our real life.  But sometimes it’s fun to throw science to the wind and just tell the story you want to tell. I believe that SF writers are, by their very nature, philosophers of a sort. They are taking real-world facts and extrapolating them forward to explore possible futures. They often have an agenda beyond just telling a story, and I think that can be extremely interesting to consider one set of possible consequences to how we choose to deal with today’s issues.

Can PA fiction deal with things like this? Absolutely, as shown by Baxter and Robinson. But does it have to, in order to be entertaining? I don’t think so. Facts sometimes get in the way of a fun story. Stories, by their nature, are “lies” in that the events described are fictional! I think most good stories use these falsehoods to tell a story that illustrates a larger (or sometimes not so large) point that the author is trying to make. Not to mention that often, we do not understand the world around us, nor do we understand everything that occurs in that world. Some things are false—until they are true! (Hard SF is not really like this, but even there, writers use tropes like FTL travel, which is pretty accepted to be impossible in any scenario…impossible, until it’s NOT!)

The comment I’d leave one with is that we can entertain and make people think without being strictly factual and within the realm of possibility. Maybe that means that we leave the SF genre, or at least the hard SF sub-genre) and move into those genres that aren’t as rigorous on those points. Maybe we move a bit into…

Horror?

Our next sub-sub-genre will come as no surprise to horror writers. But I’ll argue that it is every bit as post-apocalyptic as disease and environmental disaster apocalypses. Of course I’m talking about the zombie apocalypse!

To be continued…

For the first time in 6 years, I have a new release!

LAST ONE LEFT is a follow-up to my longish (37000 words) novella ODD MAN OUT. It picks up a few months after the events of that book. Paul and Amy are planning their wedding. And Roger is still on the run. But he’s coming back, and vengeance is on the table this time.

I’m proud of this book; it’s a short (a bit less than 30000 words) but action filled book that completes the story that began in ODD MAN OUT. And it’s available in both paper and ebook form. $10.95 for the paperback, $2.99 for the ebook.

I hope, if you’re reading this, that you’ll give it a try!

LAST ONE LEFT paperback

LAST ONE LEFT ebook

ODD MAN OUT paperback

ODD MAN OUT ebook

*****

Upon finishing Ben Farthing’s I FOUND A LOST HALLWAY IN A DYING MALL, I flipped it over to read the back of the book.  There, on the back cover, was this quote from horror author Jonathan Butcher:  “The eeriest liminal setting and an array of heartfelt themes bubbling beneath the surface.”

I fully agree on the heartfelt themes.  I’m sort of where Farthing’s main character is in her life right now.  Kids are grown and moved out, and while there aren’t any grandkids for us yet, I get the emotions that go with the transition. You go from being needed to maybe not really being needed so much, and maybe you begin to feel like an afterthought. You start to look for niches you can fit into in their busy lives and trying to balance between trying to naturally insert yourself into those niches and trying to force your way in. Ben addresses this in a remarkable way in this book, I feel. 

But that’s not where I was going with this blog post.  Because there is also a second quote on the back cover, from horror author Debra Castaneda, and it goes like this: “A landscape of liminal horrors.”  

Note the overlap there? “Liminal.” Honestly, I didn’t know what the word meant. So I looked it up and here’s the definition.  Liminal means “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” Okay, that’s a start.  Moving on, liminal horror like Farthing’s and maybe others uses these spaces in a frightening way, such as by making them empty, stretching on forever, or being places where people are not meant to linger.

Now I’m getting somewhere. I think I’m beginning to understand why it unsettles me. Empty, stretching on forever, places where people (like me) aren’t meant to be. That resonates. 

See, as a youngster, my parents decided to teach me a lesson in Marshall Field’s store in Chicago.  Our trips to the store were rare treats, and their toy section was like nothing I’d ever seen!  I guess I was wandering off all the time, and they finally decided to just let me go. They were right around the corner, but when I realized I was “lost”, I bolted.  The other way.  Fast, crying and screaming. (I was fast when I was a kid.) I was grabbed by a store employee and taken to some kind of a control center where they kept me and called the “little lost boy” alert and my parents came and got me. 

I still remember this as an adult. Not specifics, but I remember that control room. I remember the panic. I remember running and crying. I thought I was never going to get home again! It was terrifying! I would wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares about this growing up. I would sit up in bed in the middle of the night, terrified that I might have never been found — that I might have been lost forever in that huge liminal space that was Marshall Field’s flagship department store! 

Ben Farthing taps into this fear in an incredibly personal manner in all three of his books. In his I FOUND A CIRCUS TENT IN MY BACK YARD, the protagonist unwillingly enters a large colorful tent that they find in the woods behind his home with his four-year-old son, and discovers that the interior is impossibly large, going on and on with no exit in sight.  In his I FOUND PUPPETS LIVING IN MY APARTMENT WALLS, the protagonist discovers a hidden space behind the drywall of the bedroom, and when he and his cousin explore it, they find that it consistently descends into the bowels of the earth, much further down than is possible. 

Wouldn’t you know it? Right after finishing DYING MALL (which I purchased directly from the author at the Books and Brews event in Evanston, Illinois in early August), Amazon for some reason showed me an anthology of short stories called simple LIMINAL. The fifteen stories deal with some interesting candidates for liminal spaces, including a greenhouse (yeah, I get this one — I remember going into greenhouses as a kid and just being amazed by the way they just seemed to keep going and going), an office building, suburbs, a beach, a hatchery, a waiting room, a prison, a “float barn” (whatever that is), a playground, a library, a nightclub, an “Isomart,” a school, a mall and a rest stop bathroom. I’ve read the first two, and they are suitably disturbing.

My own idea is maybe a parking lot. Something like those huge lots at Disney or Universal, where they just seem to go on and on and on and on. So large that you have to take trams to reach the furthest edges…if you even can.  I think I’m going to try a short story set in a parking lot.  A hospital or a medical office might make a good setting also. 

Back to Farthing’s stories, and the stories in the anthology — is escape from this sort of liminal space even possible?  Will our friends find their way out? How will it affect them?  Those questions are terrifying to me.  Honestly, these may be the first books that have ever really made me uncomfortable, and now I understand why. (I couldn’t put my finger on it when reading the book itself.) The idea of impossible spaces is simply disturbing to me.  Because of my childhood experience? Probably. But even quite literally 6 decades later, I am still frightened by the idea.

(This article may contain spoilers for TWISTED by Jonathan Kellerman. Or maybe not. In any case, if you plan on reading the book, read on at your own risk. Or skip.)

I finished a book by Jonathan Kellerman called TWISTED last night. Kellerman is, of course, best known for his Alex Delaware series. (I’d love to see Delaware on the big or small screen!) This one, however, is NOT a Delaware novel; instead, it features Petra Connor.

Petra Connor was, if I recall correctly, first introduced in a Delaware novel, but soon merited a book of her own. (I could research it and find out what the title was, exactly, but it’s not really important to this article, and I’m kind of lazy, so I’ll leave it there. Plus my internet is down as I write this, so we’ll just move on.) Kellerman writes crime thrillers in his clipped urgent style, always from the perspective of the detectives. He’s one of my favorites.

So. Onto the book. In this story, Petra is dealing with a lot of stuff. She has a boyfriend who was a cop but is now working with some sort of anti-terrorist unit in Tel Aviv. (The book was written in 2004, so remember that the story is informed by the events of that time, not ours.) Petra catches a case where some kids were gunned down in what appears to be a random gangland shooting after a concert. As they work the case, they find that all victims are identified except for one.

Petra is also assigned to ‘babysit’ a doctoral candidate named Isaac Gomez, who is a young genius, aged 22, already accepted into medical school but is deferring in order to earn a Ph.D. degree. His thesis is something to do with crime statistics, and in his research at the department, he has stumbled across some unsolved cold cases that seem to be related by an odd fact: they all occurred on June 28th. He brings this to Petra and she writes it off initially as insignificant. But as Isaac continues to look at the details of the cases, other patterns, including the wounds themselves, emerge, and Isaac convinces Petra that they have a serial killer on their hands.

So both investigations proceed, one official with departmental sanctions, and the other unofficial, off the books, because no one would think much of it. Petra can’t tell her higher-ups because they wouldn’t allow her to spend time on it, and also because her captain dislikes her intensely.

Okay, so how is this horror? Or maybe the question should be, is it horror at all?

Up until now, what I’ve written is just an extended blurb. A summary that doesn’t give away too much. It’s the setup of the book. Now I have to get into the spoilers. So don’t read on if you don’t want to know more.

I say it is, of course. There’s a serial killer. He’s bashing his victims’ skulls in. There doesn’t appear to be a pattern, except for the date and the weapon used. No connections between any of the victims. That’s a classic serial killer horror story.

Later young Isaac, with the help of a librarian who he gets interested in the case (among other things), finds a copy of a rare old antiquarian journal, handwritten many years before by a serial killer, describing his career meticulously, prior to being caught. It contains graphic descriptions and sketches of the victims whose lives this killer, whose name is Otto Retzik, claimed.

Retzik was born on July 28th. His first killing was on his birthday. And this information will help them solve the case.

As I read the book, I thought, what’s the difference between this story and something like HOLLY by Stephen King? My answer is, not much. What’s the difference between this and something like SILENCE OF THE LAMBS by Thomas Harris? Again, not much. Kellerman’s style is more clipped, more thriller than horror. But in all of these, the point of view characters are the detectives and the detective surrogates. Holly Gibney and Clarice Starling have a lot in common with Petra Connor, and maybe even more in common with Isaac Gomez, who isn’t the main character, but becomes a point of view character many times throughout the book.

How does it differ from my own books? RECIPROCAL EVIL is about a supernatural serial killer, Theodore Tremaine, who kills in order to be rewarded by his evil Masters. And the point of view character, Chris Jones, is a victim in the sense that all of Tremaine’s victims seem to surround Jones and have some connection to the young student. Chris has to investigate and figure things out as the story progresses. Maybe he’s the surrogate detective in this one?

I consider RECIPROCAL EVIL to be pure serial killer horror, with elements of a crime thriller. But is it different than TWISTED in kind, or simply in degree?

I don’t know for sure what other opinions would state, but my own is that TWISTED, by Jonathan Kellerman, is absolutely a horror novel, in the same way that SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, HOLLY, and my own RECIPROCAL EVIL are horror novels.

Thanks for reading. If you have an opinion on this, I’d love to hear it in the comments!