FCUK THE MAINSTREAM

just learned a filmmaker/critic/writer friend of mine was involved in editing a book that's been published! it's an anthology done in tribute to director lucio fulci & looks pretty cool, so thought i'd share.

Beyond the Book of Eibon

And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored…

SHIPPING IN FEBRUARY!!!

Includes book, pins, stickers and bookmark


A haunted priest confronts an apocalypse of his sins ...

The last days of a doomed conquistador …

An impossible realm of painted nightmares ...

These are but glimpses into the world of Beyond the Book of Eibon, a literary tribute to the mind-boggling terrors and bizarre atmospheres of the maestro of Italian horror film Lucio Fulci with a bounty of original short fiction. Taking inspiration from the horrors and atmospheres of Fulci’s works, fifteen established and up-and-coming weird fiction authors including Adam Cesare (Clown in a Cornfield), Gemma Files (Experimental Film), Christopher Slatsky (The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature), and Matt Serafini (Rites of Extinction) have put together their own spine-tingling stories taking cues from all sides of Fulci’s career, from his infamous cosmic-splatter films to his outré exercises in dark fantasy and gothic westerns. Additionally, the book will contain a forward by Kier-La Janisse, whose landmark House of Psychotic Women helped redefine the critical approach to exploitation films in the 2010s.

Titled after Lucio Fulci’s cursed Book of Eibon, itself a reference to Clark Ashton Smith’s tome of the same name, Beyond the Book of Eibon combines the gothic, the weird, and the gory in a carefully curated anthology that should please everyone from die-hard Fulci fanatics to devotees of all stripes of weird fiction.

So it's ok to judge this book by its cover then. I find it strange that for all the weird movies I've seen, I've only ever seen a couple of Fulci's. Actually, who am I kidding, I usually only stumble upon anything by accident. Sounds like a fun read.

yeah, that's what happen with non mainstream hollywood guys. unless you're into them, most work will just fly by you without notice.

yeah, the cover is rad af

tbh i'm not as into fulci as my friend is. i like some of his visuals, but as per most italian b-movies, the plots are nonsensical. my personal fave of the handful i've seen is don't torture a duckling. the beyond is good spooky fun (unless u hate eye horror, in which case stay away f fulci altogther) & zombi 2 famously has a zombie fight a shark:


all the same, i'm rly happy to see he's got a project like this out & want to support him. it's got a few popular horror authors included, & he & his co-editor also have stories featured. i've already ordered my copy.

Eye horror

finally got my copy! +some xtras

Have you read it yet? What's it like?

working my way thru slowly. very nice presentation/layout, some good gory bits, tho some stories r only tributes to fulci if u squint. noticing the editing is a teensy bit rough in some spots, but the writing is generally above avg tho i can always find things to nitpick.

one thing i hate abt modern short stories in general is they're less complete stories in the beginning-middle-ending sense than they r vignettes or snapshots of an idea. to be expected given the market, i guess, but not how i prefer to do it.

The eye of writer/editor. I think I've had a less critical eye since I stopped doing that stuff. Now everything is cake or vinegar. I also don't like that about modern short stories. I want a whole story, damn it. I don't want to be served just the sauce.

"cake or vinegar" i think i'll yoink that

i feel like heavily stylized slice of life short stories work. slice of life doesn't necessarily need a full 100+ pages of fleshing out characters and the writing style is what's most attractive, so no hard feelings about those

hmm, could u give maybe an example or two? stylized writing can definitely be interesting in its own right, tho too many ppl fail at making it compelling vs esoteric/boring af. my complaint is also more to do w/ what i see as a glut of 'bite-sized' story writing in modern fiction, like zines, which seem to me to be more abt getting a bit of spare change & putting up-&-comers' names out there for awards consideration or to buff up portfolios for publishers.

not from the top of my head, unless i start translating and it's really hard to translate styles and not losing meaning it'd probably feel too absurdist/surreal or esoteric i mean, short stories from kafka work even translated because they feel like mind to paper reflections, so there's that...fiction is trickier.
i did a lot of mind to paper short stories but i'm into dada and german expressionism so it doesn't go anywhere and only has meaning if you give it.

i agree with your complaint, they're very much used for a quick way to get something in return without having to put work into it. the concept can be good, but needs exploring and not just throwing vague ideas into paper that not even the author understands, therefore not working if thought is put into it.

agreed, kafka is a good example of surrealistic slice-of-life. magical realism touches on this a lot, too, as does stream-of-consciousness which is what i interpret when u say mind to paper. i took what u said before in another direction, i.e. linguistic stylism like t.s. eliot, visual poetry, second-person narration, etc., which is much rarer. dada is also interesting, tho much more subjective as u say. all of these r worthwhile artistic experiments.

what can i say, i'm a sucker for artistic puzzles my stuff all reads like rumblings from an hallucinating addict because i find the "normal" writing style boring and bland for short stories

it definitely takes skill to portray mundane or universal experiences in a refreshing/compelling way. there r many forms this can take, be it playing w the written word itself, w convention or reader expectation, or w the way the writer conveys sensory reality. done right, even a trip to get the morning paper can be imbued w suspense, humor, terror, or a poignant appreciation of human life.

ofc escapism is fun, but in addition to my issue w abrupt contemporary fiction, i am also frustrated that the represented external world takes so much precedence over the internal, which to me is almost the entire point of writing. i want insight into a character's viewpoint, thoughts, feelings, i want them to color their world not just exist in it. this is why my opinion abt fight or action scenes is generally pretty low. too often it's written cinematically, that is to say visually, which doesn't come to life on the pg like it would a movie screen. the best writers who employ them know it's abt pacing & visceral physical & emotional input f ur characters.

that's why i rarely wrote outside 1st person. even when i did, the narrator was more of a character instead of an exposition machine in the way things are portrayed, if that makes sense.

1st person is probs my preference as well. i very much enjoy finding out the idiosyncrasies of this new individual i 'am' when i'm writing. i'll admit, this is likely also bc writing 3rd person is a bit more challenging for me bc like everyone else nowadays my brain is trained to think so visually in terms of storytelling & i hate having to prioritize scenery details. i can appreciate the wisdom of letting readers fill those in themselves, but especially w speculative writing the urge to elaborate is very strong.