The latest series in the X-Files began last weekend. Was it any good? Let me start by explaining…
A few years ago in Melbourne I managed to do some unsupervised shopping (X-Files folks, bear with me here). By “unsupervised”, I mean without my wife. When it comes to clothing I tend to buy shit that’s useful for standing around barbecues and drinking beer. My wife prefers that I buy shirts that offer some kind of… visual improvement.
Anyway, I stumbled across a specialty tee-shirt shop. Three shirts for fifty bucks – bargain. But after a while I discovered it wasn’t easy to choose three designs I liked. There was lots of stuff about Justin Beiber, “I ♥NY” and obscure American basketball teams, but eventually I selected three relatively innocuous designs including one that said, “It Was All A Dream”. (Sound familiar…?)
Months later a mate of mine pointed at my tee-shirt and said, “Bobby Ewing”.
I’m like, “Who?”
“Bobby Ewing, in Dallas.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” (I was never a Dallas fan).
To briefly explain for some younger readers, Dallas was pretty much the first, enormously successful US mega-soap opera and Bobby Ewing was a hugely popular character who the producers killed off at the end of a series. The viewer backlash was unprecedented – especially for before the days of the internet – until the producers were forced to somehow resurrect Bobby and bring him back to life and into the show. How did they do it?
By beginning the next series with the revelation, “It was all a dream…”
Just like the beginning of The X-Files Series 11. What a crock of complete shit. And that’s coming from a number 1, card-carrying, tattooed (not really) X-Files nutjob fan.
At the end of Series 10 we were all going to die. Everyone was going to die. Mulder had the shit beaten out of him, Scully’s plastic surgery was peeling off, the whole world had a deadly virus… then, to top things off, Mulder and Scully apparently get sucked into a UFO. Mulder must have been happy as a pig in poo to be finally vindicated and Scully… well, she’s not going to talk her way out of this one, right? That was THE END. In fact, even the usual, “The Truth Is Out There” graphic was replaced with, “This Is The End”. No more X-Files, although I suspected that Mulder and Scully’s younger dopplegangers, Einstein and Miller, hinted at some kind of future reboot.
The new Series 11 starts, and what do we get? Apparently it was all a dream in Scully’s head and the storyline’s been booted backwards about five episodes. We’re back into the confusing, tired, incomprehensible conspiracy theory of some vague, secret government agenda about alien DNA, chain-smoking and – for fuck’s sake to make things worse – a fake moon landing. What a pain in the arse – and I’m not talking about any alien anal probing here.
I really enjoyed the “normal” X-Files when they’re chasing flesh-eating monsters, homicidal poltergeists and demons in bad, latex body-suits. And I loved the occasional funny episode where they took the piss out of themselves. If Series 11 is just going to be some garbled, over-complicated unravelling of the big “conspiracy”, it’s going to suck. Because the writers have already written themselves into a corner. I don’t care. I reckon the majority of X-Files fans don’t care. We just want more Loch Ness monsters, creepy shit hiding in the walls and light switches that never work when you need them.
But hey, hopefully I’m wrong – and I’ll be watching it regardless with my tinfoil beanie on and wooden vampire stake close to hand.
If you’re interested in zombie stuff, coming back from the Dead, ghosts, ghouls and shit that goes bump in the night, you might like to try my horror stories. The link to the first in a series (so far) of six is below. They’re all available in audiobooks too.
Back to Horror Writing.
This has been bugging at me for a long time. With eBooks and self-publishing there is a renewed demand for shorter books and what we used to call “short stories”, and this has given new life to my old passion – writing horror. I’ve decided to regularly publish new “short” horror stories – each one will take around an hour or so to read. It’s actually great fun writing this kind of thing, because you can concentrate on the horror, scary bits and hopefully frighten the behooters out of the reader, without labouring away at a full novel that takes perhaps years to write.
To kick things off I’ve split my collection of “Ghost Tales, Four Stories of the Dead Among Us” into four separate books and given the series its own branding and “look” calling each a “Horror Story” with a subtitle and volume number. Each one will be a stand-alone horror story (or perhaps two, if the one tale is too short) and don’t need to be read in any order. These first four are quite long compared to my basic idea of publishing something new every two-three weeks. In fact I have a new one, called “The Hangman’s Ghost” already written and it should be available within a week following a final edit and cover design.
And, even better, I get to compose a new tune for each horror title – an outlet for my music with direction, rather than doodling with song ideas on rainy days. Awesome.
It isn’t the end of my Lukas Boston mysteries. far from it – again, a new as-yet unnamed novel is finished and going through the last edits and cover creation. Mind you, I want to tweak the Lukas Boston series a little… give them a similar branding appearance to the Horror Story covers and remove the “Book 1, Book2…” references, because they really don’t need to be read in any sequence.
So, you’ll see a couple of new books here very soon. Let me know what you think.
Happy reading, Graeme Hague.
One of the good things about being a long-established author these days is that several manuscripts that in the past never saw the book store bookshelves can be self-published instead. We’ve all got ’em. Plenty of manuscripts – not just mine – are rejected by publishers, because they don’t fit a certain criteria or their “list”. It’s not about whether the book is good enough or not.
I always had a lot of faith in The Mirror Of Madness and it bugged me no one saw its potential. So I’m really glad of the opportunity to publish it for myself. Of course, it needed a good editing spit-and-polish, then I had to design the cover. This is the end result. I’m calling it a paranormal fantasy, but it’s also all about modern witchcraft.
Here’s the Amazon US link http://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Madness-Story-Modern-Witchcraft-ebook/dp/B00QVFWNM6/ref=asap_B0058SQWQ0?ie=UTF8
Mark at Momentum sent this screen grab of my books’ Halloween promotion being featured on iBooks. Brilliant! Fantastic to be on the iBooks headline flappy-turn-over thing on the main page. It’s going to be really interesting to see what sort of results this kind of promotion achieves. Not sure just how long the special 99 cent pricing will stay available (normally they’re $4.99) so if you’re interested, get in now. It’s not just iBooks by the way. Amazon and other online book stores are running the promotion, too.
Huge thanks to the crew at Momentum for putting this together.
This cover is great although it kind of represents only half the story, which begins with a bunch of witchcraft and sorcery from centuries ago. Then the narrative shifts to the modern day, super-computers and a sort Ghost In The Machine theme. Oh, and there’s a haunted German U-Boat from World War 1 – a part of the novel that’s based on a true story. You can find out more on my The Devil’s Numbers page here.
I’ve added two more of my And In The Morning soundtrack songs to Soundcloud. One is the first of two “overtures” for the novel which originally once meant to be a kind of ambient music accompaniment for reading the book, but it turned out more like a progressive rock opus. Feel free to do other stuff as you listen – it’s fourteen minutes long! The second song (three of nine have been posted so far) is Lost and Alone, which Ellen Dixon sang for me. Check out the awesome job she did with absolutely no rehearsal or idea what I was going to ask her to do! The best way to find the songs is through the And In The Morning setlist here https://soundcloud.com/graeme-hague/sets
Here’s the new Momentum cover for Voices of Evil. The general storyline is about a man who is haunted by ghosts of Gallipoli soldiers, so you can see how Momentum have layered in images from the trenches and the sniper’s crosshairs on the skull. Awesome!