As my friends and family will tell you, I don’t always have the best of taste.
When it comes to literature, I love J.R.R. Tolkien, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft…and R.A. Salvatore, Stephen King, and even Edward Lee (do not Google unless you have a strong stomach). At the theatre, I love a well-done Shakespearean, but I also loved a staged reading of H.P. Lovecraft stories, a musical comedy about the Hopkinsville Goblin Incident, and a little independent comedy about beer and zombies called Brew of the Dead. And its sequel. Movies? The Lord of the Rings and The Maltese Falcon share space on my shelves with The Return of the Living Dead, the entirety of both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series, and of course, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse. Visual arts? I acknowledge the greatness of the Old Masters, but I can’t help but prefer Joseph Michael Linsner and Michael Whelan. As for music…heh. I guess this is where my taste is entirely lowbrow. Loud and bombastic, Epic Rock and Country – Garth Brooks and Bonnie Tyler, Journey and Meat Loaf, and every note that Jim Steinman ever wrote.
What I’m leading up to with all this is that my Novels and Novellas page and my Short Stories page are where I put the things that I take seriously: horror and fantasy where I try to tell some sort of truth, to make myself heard, to build something with the art and craft of writing.
But I also need to feed the other urge. That’s what the Grindhouse Page (coming soon to this very theatre!) is for.
The Grindhouse page will be the uncensored version, the back room of the video store, the grindhouse theatre on 42nd street in the depths of the Seventies getting ready to start its midnight show, the director’s cut where all of the scenes that were cut to keep the rating at R instead of NC-17 are put back in. It will be where I have fun with boobs and blood, all the graphic and gratuitous sex and violence that would be a distraction in the serious stuff. There will be sleaze and slashers and even outright erotica.
Coming soon to this very theatre…