pornokitsch

Gothic Evening x S.D. Crockett

We're delighted to announce that S.D. Crockett, author of the extraordinary debut, After the Snow, will be attending the upcoming Gothic Evening. Ms. Crockett's highly-acclaimed young adult adventure showcases some of the classic Gothic themes of place, identity, darkness and connection - but incorporated into the ultra-contemporary theme of the post-Apocalyptic landscape.

Ms. Crockett joins Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee,  Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Marcus Hearn, Suzanne McLeod, John Kaiine, Emma Vieceli, James Pearson and Jonathan Rigby as one of the evening's darkly delicious buffet of featured guests. The event takes place on 8 March (6 pm - 8 pm) at Blackwell's Charing Cross.

More information about the evening can be found on The Kitschies site, as well as a long list of contemporary and classic Gothic titles. RSVPs are welcome but not mandatory. You can keep track of the event on Facebook and Lanyrd.

SFX Weekender 3: The Morning After

You guys! You guys! We went to Wales! For a convention! It was very cold! There were transportation foul-ups and weather-related foul-ups and frozen grass and authors everywhere and BRIAN BLESSED and pouring rain and icicles hanging off the tips of our noses and Craig Charles and NO LEEKS, like seriously, Wales; what the hell? And we had lunch in Oxford and breakfast at a Little Chef, which was described to this expat as being "the British Denny's" and EVERYTHING WAS AWESOME.

Are you ready?

Let's do this thing.

The 2011 Kitschies, presented by The Kraken Rum

We're proud to announce that the winners of the 2011 Kitschies, presented by The Kraken Rum, are:

The Inky Tentacle for Cover Art: The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan, designed by Peter Mendelsund (Canongate)

The Golden Tentacle for Debut: God's War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)

The Red Tentacle for Novel: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd (Walker)

The judges' discretionary award, The Black Tentacle, was given to publisher SelfMadeHero.

Congratulations to all the winners and finalists. Thank you to everyone who came (or tried to come) to the awards ceremony. We appreciate everyone's support very, very much and look forward to a tentacular 2012 with you.

(Editors' note: We're still in Prestatyn and off the Internet. We'll be back with more chatter on Sunday.)

The Kitschies: A Gothic Evening at Blackwell's

Thursday, 8 March, The Kitschies are proud to host an evening of dark entertainments at Blackwell's Charing Cross. Following on from the success of the Steampunk evening, we'll be delving into the forgotten lore of another popular genre: The Gothic.

The Gothic is a tricky one. Originating in the 18th century as a cleverly conceived revival of the medieval romance, its modern thematic legacy includes horror, romance and fantasy, while the aesthetics of the movement have expanded even further afield.

Appropriately, our guests for the Gothic evening come from a wide variety of disciplines and traditions. We're exceedingly pleased to have in attendance:

Christopher Fowler
Marcus Hearn
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
John Kaiine
Tanith Lee
Suzanne McLeod
James Pearson
Jonathan Rigby
Emma Vieceli

If you're interested in learning more about our guests - and the Gothic in general - we've assembled a (not-so-brief) reading list. This is intended to be a broad survey with a special emphasis on the work of our guests. If you have a favourite book with a Gothic influence, please share by letting us know in the comments.

We'll be opening the evening with a short talk then we'll encourage everyone to chat, browse and ogle as they see fit. This is a wonderfully sprawling topic and there's a lot to discuss. Plus, The Kraken Rum will be providing tasty samples of their appropriately dark beverage.

From late February, a host of guests will be taking over on Charing Cross Read - the official blog of Blackwell's Charing Cross - keep your eyes peeled. 

Facebook RSVPs are welcomed but not mandatory. They do, however, let us plan how much rum to bring along. More details can be found here.

The SFX Weekender 3

The Weekender is drawing nigh, and Pornokitsch is here to help!

We've journeyed down to Rye the last two years, but the Weekender is being held at a new location this year - Prestatyn, in Wales! Here are some exciting Prestatyn facts you may wow your roommates with:

• Prestatyn has been inhabited since prehistoric times. The Romans liked it, too; there's evidence that a Roman fort stood on the road from Chester to Caernarfon.
• Prestatyn's name is a Welsh corruption of an English corruption of the Anglo-Saxon words preosta (priest) and tun (farm). Priestfarm! 
• Prestatyn was just a teeny fishing hamlet until the nineteenth century, when the Victorians got into sea-bathing and ran a railroad out to it. Apparently the Prestatyn beaches are very nice (in the summer)!
• Prestatyn was bombed during WWII - but not by the Germans! It was one of the few locations in the UK to be hit by the Italian Air Force!
• Philip Larkin once write a poem about Prestatyn! Gold star for anyone who memorizes at least a stanza before the Weekender.
• A bog mummy, known as "Prestatyn Child," was found in 1984, apparently nearby!

More tips, tricks, recaps & musings below...

The Kitschies: Guess the Winners, Win a Tentacle!

The Kitschies will be announced this Friday, 3 February at the SFX Weekender. We're on at 7 pm in the Screening Room. No additional ticket is required - the joy of the tentacles comes as part of the convention package. Hope to see you there!

Now it is time to put your guessing hat on and guess the winners! We've got a special hand-crafted mini-Tentacle trophy for whomever gets it right.

If you need to brush up on your options, you can find our reviews for all fifteen finalists linked from the Red, Golden and Inky Tentacle pages.

[Editors' note: If it helps, we don't even know yet!] 

Guess away!

Golden Tentacle Finalist: The Samaritan by Fred Venturini

Horror isn't about fear of death, not really. Horror is about something more primal, more basic: fear. The best horror novels (and the worst, and a lot in between) are steaming with fear: fear of death, yes, but also fear of pain, fear of anger. Of rejection. Incompetence. Meaninglessness. Vulnerability.  Sex. Society. Identity.

Fear of one's self.

Is it any wonder that so many horror novels feature teen-aged or college-aged protagonists, characters who are of an age when those concerns are totally consuming?

Fred Venturini's The Samaritan begins where a lot of horror begins: middle school. Thirteen-year-old Dale finds himself at the mercy of a group of really awful, but attractive, girls; going along with whatever humiliation they're inflicting on him is terrible, yes. But it also makes him the center of their attention, however briefly, and (being a horny 13-year-old boy), that's exactly where he wants to be - again, however briefly.

[A few unavoidable spoilers from here - sorry! To be safe, skip the next few paragraphs.]

The experiment yields unexpected results when Dale winds up making friends with a guy called Mack, an all-around awesome, athletic, funny, boys-want-to-be-him girls-want-to-do-him type, who tries to teach Dale about self-respect. Their friendship continues through high school, though Dale's self-hatred never quite allows him to buy what Mack is trying to sell him. A series of testosterone-fueled run-ins with a violent senior (high school senior, not senior citizen) named Clint leads to tragedy, when Clint rapes the girl Dale's in love with and murders her and four other students. He also gives Mack a career-ending wound and shoots Dale through the hand. And possibly the head.

The day Dale removes his bandages, he finds he's wholly healed - everything that had been shot off has regrown.

Inky Tentacle Finalist: A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd
Illustrated by Jim Kay
Walker Books 

Although the entire book is a work of art, it's the cover - that hulking, not-quite-human thing striding over the moonlit landscape, across the furrows and toward an isolated farmhouse - that says everything you need to know about A Monster Calls. It's a horror story, of a sort; an invasion, an assault upon the safe places and the quiet moments; monstrous in its pitiless and inexorable progress. The viewer cannot help but be overwhelmed by that invasion, overtaken by that image. It's gorgeous, horrible, and utterly haunting. [Anne]

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From 16 January to 3 February, members of The Kitschies' judging panel will be discussing all of the 2011 finalists. Each review only reflects the view of that judge, and should not be taken as representative of the panel's collective opinion or final selection.

You can find the complete list of Inky Tentacle finalists on The Kitschies' site. Please join in the discussion below and on our Facebook page.

Red Tentacle Finalist: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

The best advice I ever got about photography was that you shouldn't ever try to photograph the thing itself: the fireworks, the touchdown, the sunset. Instead, turn around and take your pictures of the way the world looks when it's looking at those fireworks, that sunset. Try to capture the way a crowd responds to something, or the way the colors of that sunset bleed across the horizon. The way to access a moment is to try to capture its effects.

A decade after the events of 9/11, it's almost easy to talk about terrorism: suicide bombers and the war on terror and Homeland Security and full-body airport scans. But the thing itself, the event, hasn't lessened in impact; it's no easier to watch footage of the Twin Towers falling now than it was to see it live on television, more than ten years ago. And so, with Osama, Lavie Tidhar isn't writing about the moments of horror that make up the connect-the-dots of modern terrorism. He's writing about their reflections.

Golden Tentacle Finalist: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children might be the most structurally interesting (peculiar, even) of all the books on the Golden Tentacle shortlist. Superficially, it is an extremely traditional young adult fantasy. But the author, Ransom Riggs, uses elements beyond the text to build additional layers of meaning. As a story, Miss Peregrine is enjoyable, as a book, it is distinctive.

Jacob is a your typically normal boy. He plods drearily through his middle American suburban life, going through the paces until he starts his job at the family business (an ubiquitous drug store chain). His father adds a touch of a Burtonesque – a constantly-scheming failed naturalist, Jacob’s dad sublimates his own familial pressure by taking endless notes on birds.

The real loon, however, is Jacob’s grandfather, Abe. Abe is filled with crazy old stories, the memories of which dot through Jacob’s youth. Stories of monsters and magic, escape and mayhem, nightmare and fantasy and wonder. Like a young Fred Savage, Jacob loves the stories but, as he grows up, learns that the “mature” thing to do is reject them.