Saturday, March 22, 2014

Writing the Werewolf Apocalypse

The book is finally available from Severed Press, with an awesome cover by Alan M. Clark. In the foreword, I explained why I wrote the book; the novel is essentially a love letter to Takashi Miike and Meiko Kaiji, both legends in Japanese cinema.

CLICK HERE TO BUY THIS THING 

For me to say the book is violent and original is a bit pretentious. I will say I used a different approach when writing the book, and did whatever I could to capture a sort of Japanese aesthetic to the prose. The book is a big one (over three hundred pages), but there aren’t many large paragraphs. Sometimes, there is beauty in “simplicity”; so I didn’t write the thing like it was a Haiku, but I wanted readers to infer and “feel”; telling readers much of anything would have ruined the cultural context. 

Are there werewolves in the book? Yes. A lot of them. 

Meiko Kaji in Lady Snowblood
I didn’t create a “dream cast” for this book on the blog because a lot of the actors would be Japanese, and not many folks know about the actors who I’d want in the movie. I’m also biased; I think even the “cheesy” Japanese films, or even the horror films, take their approach to acting and presentation far more seriously than most American film studios. An American film studio couldn’t make this into a movie. No way. Not even Tom Cruise. 

I won’t apologize for how “weird” the book might seem. I won’t apologize for anything in this book. It shifts between stories, jumps around, and entire chapters are presented differently. It’s exploitative, ridiculous, and very, very, Japanese. 

With werewolves, of course. Many of them. Many, many werewolves

Takashi Miike's remake of Hara-Kiri. A movie that is kind of "normal" for him, although depressing as hell.


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