News Bites: It’s Close to Midnight and Something Evil Lurks in the Dark…
- Seventy-eight Northwestern University students broke the world record for number of people to perform the “Thriller” dance the other day. It was an effort aligned with the NU Dance Marathon.
Oh, what’s that? You want to see video of it? Please, by all means take a gander. There’s something incredibly spooky and fun about how quickly these kids shift from “Happy Dancers Hanging About a Gymnasium” to “Dancing, Evil Corpses.” [Found at Chicagoist]
- The Independent has an article up about how 2007 is going to be a hot and “reanimated” year for horror literature. From the piece:
According to Nielsen BookScan, which compiles the nation’s book charts, sales of titles classified as horror and ghost stories almost doubled to just over £7m by value in 2006 from £3.8m in 2005. The number of copies sold increased from 566,000 in 2005 to almost one million (892,000) over the same period. Though old-school writers including Herbert, Dean Koontz and Shaun Hutson continue to dominate, new names are emerging, though not all are classified as horror.
Publishers remain nervous about the genre after the bubble burst at the end of the 1980s, and most prefer to leave the word off the spine. Instead, novels filled with vampires, werewolves, ghouls and ghosties have been reclassified as dark fantasies, supernatural suspense or even, if they look likely to hit the hip lit market, general fiction.
I’ve noticed at the day job there’s been an increase in horror(ish) books by people whose names don’t start with a K or H. And it always gets me double excited in hopes I’ll find some new great writers, as the fresh wave of people like Max Brooks, David Wellington, Cherie Priest, A. Lee Martinez, and others have made me mighty happy. [Link via Kevin “I Can See Forever” Melrose]
- J.K. over at Blog@Newsarama points us to the first in Marvel’s line of Marvel Zombies related toys: Spider-Man with a removable leg. Insert standard Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference here about how his leg’s off.
- Finally, Hannibal Rising comes out in theaters today, providing us all with our fix of what appears to be, juding by the trailers, the story of a snot-nosed kid who likes to eat faces. Okay, okay, I’m sure it has more to offer than that (Like Dominic West, who I just watched in the fantastic Richard III the other day). But if you’re in Chicago and looking for something to view this weekend, my pick would have to be Fulltime Killer showing at the Siskel Film Center tomorrow evening at six. They’re showing a whole mess of modern Hong Kong goodness this month (including Breaking News, which I just enjoyed the other week), so get on down there if that’s what your boat floats upon. Mine sure does.
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You’re reading “News Bites: It’s Close to Midnight and Something Evil Lurks in the Dark…,” an entry by Rick Geerling
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- 2.9.07 / 12pm
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