They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Michael Libling, whose debut novel, Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels, comes out on July 29th in Canada and August 13th in the US, from ChiZine Publications!
What does Michael love when he’s not writing about collective amnesia in Trenton, Ontario? Spoiler alert: Michael has a lot of favorites, so many it’s hard to narrow them down. Prepare yourself for a blast from the past, with a few recent favorites sprinkled in. You’ll meet a comic book hero who could’ve taken out Thanos with a single boop, a whole bunch of classic films, a radio play that you should listen to before bed so you won’t sleep at night, a variety of classic and recent reads with a surprise genre thrown in, and a spec fic medium no one talks about enough. You know you’re interested: read on to learn more!
Choosing a favorite anything has never been easy for me, outside of black licorice, rhubarb pie, and an abiding love for the late, lamented Montreal Expos. Call it a short attention span, chronic fickleness, or whatever you’d like, but, for the most part, I am no sooner captivated by one distraction than I find myself moving on and enamored of the next. Sooner or later, even the unforgettable becomes forgettable. The exceptions are my early favorites — books, movies, and the like that linger at the forefront of memory, long after so many other entries have come and gone. Fact is, the era in which I first encountered most of the selections that follow is the same era in which so much of my writing is rooted, not the least of which is my novel, Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels.
This exercise begins in the small town of Trenton, Ontario and the cubbyhole of a restaurant my parents ran there. I’d help my parents out to the extent I was allowed, working the cash or restocking the cigarettes and chocolate bars. But the best part of the job was the downtime. To keep me occupied, and despite my mother’s disapproval, my dad would give me change and send me up the street to Kirby’s Drugs to buy comic books and magazines. I’d return with two or three or five in hand, find a corner in the diner, and hunker down to read and re-read. To this day, I associate the aroma of fresh-perked coffee and the sizzle of bacon with reading.
My Favorite Comic Book
My tastes ran the gamut: MAD and Sick. Ed Roth’s CARtoons. Classics Illustrated, especially the Jules Verne and H.G. Wells editions. Harvey’s goody-two-shoes line-up of Richie Rich, Casper, Little Lotta, and Little Dot. And, of course, DC’s Batman, Superman, Blackhawk, and anything else they hammered out.
Marvel wasn’t a big player yet and, while this could well be heresy on my part, that first issue of The Fantastic Four in 1961 did not impress. I was given a copy as a freebie at Geoff Uttley’s twelfth birthday and I thought the artwork sucked compared to DC. In fact, I left the comic behind at the party, which summarizes the poor judgement, taste, and sorry nature of my misspent youth, if not the better part of my adult years, as well. Last I heard, near-mint copies of FF #1 have sold in the $300,000 range. Aargghhhhhh.
So what was my favorite comic book? Chances are, you’ve never heard of it. It was Forbidden Worlds and the Herbie Popnecker issues and, later, Herbie’s own self-titled book, starting with the cover banner that heralded his arrival: Make Way for the Fat Fury.
Oh, man, that kid was a freak and I loved him for it. Herbie was fat. I was fat. Herbie wore glasses. I wore glasses. Herbie liked lollipops. I liked lollipops. At long last, a super-hero not all that remote from my own existence.
Where Herbie and I parted ways was in the super power department. He could walk on air and breathe underwater. He knew how to time-travel. He could eat in his sleep. He could talk to animals. He was invulnerable, without the mind-numbing worry of green or red kryptonite. And, best of all, women were unaccountably attracted to him. I did not want to look like Herbie, exactly, but I sure wanted to be more like him. The only super-power I had was the ability to make bullies laugh, which came in handy more often than you might think, though hardly up to Herbie’s standards.
If you’ve never read a Herbie comic, you owe it to yourself to dig out a copy. Created and written by Shane O’Shea (Richard E. Hughes, born Leo Rosenbaum), with art by Ogden Whitney, the storylines and comic panels are fun and funny, more typical of MAD in its heyday than your average comic book. I only wish Herbie had been picked up by Marvel at some point. As a member of The Avengers, he would have outshone them all. One bop of Herbie’s lollipop and Thanos would have been a goner from the get-go.
My Favorite Movie
Another perk of my parents’ restaurant was its location next door to the movie theater. I got into the Odeon for free, with Saturday matinees my mainstay.
Where other towns and cities had declared traditional Saturday matinees passé, the cinematic funfest survived in Trenton into the early ’60s. The format usually included a comedy short, a Pathé newsreel, cartoons, an episode of a serial, and two features. We never knew what we were going to get from week to week, something fresh out of Hollywood or oldies from the ’30s and ’40s. Frankly, most of us couldn’t tell the difference.
It’s how I got to see the oeuvres of Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges, and Abbott & Costello on the big screen. Likewise such animated classics as Farmer Alfalfa, Merrie Melodies, and Popeye (before Bluto became Brutus). This was also how I got to experience the cliffhangers, serials such as The Phantom Empire, Buck Rogers, King of the Rocket Men, and Zombies of the Stratosphere. (The only thing I never quite grasped about these science fiction sagas was how once the heroes came down to earth, disembarked their otherworldly rockets or stripped off their jetpacks, they inevitably drove around in clunky old Fords and Chevys.)
As mentioned above, my friends and I were never entirely sure if the movie we were watching was old or new. When rumor circulated that both Oliver Hardy and Lou Costello were dead, we were more confused than convinced. After all, we’d just seen their latest movies and, in the weeks to come, we were sure to see their next latest movies.
B-westerns figured prominently among the features, with Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers leading the herd. And while I was not immune to hero worship, I often scoffed to friends about the sameness of the plots. Ranchers’ daughters. Evil land barons. Corrupt sheriffs. Cattle rustlers. C’mon, already! It was why, more than anything, I looked forward to the SF, horror, and fantasy features. Memorable scenes abound.
The Time Machine (1960). When an Eloi brings Rod Taylor into a abandoned library and the first book he touches turns to dust in his hands, followed by an entire shelf of books.
Forbidden Planet (1956). When Leslie Nielsen is smooching with Anne Francis and her pet tiger pounces, only to be vaporized by Leslie’s ray gun.
Mr. Sardonicus (1961). That grin. That grin. My nightmares. My nightmares.
Hercules (1958). When Steve Reeves (Herc!) is challenged to take part in a discus-throwing contest and quickly whips his competition by tossing the saucer into deep space, the accompanying sound effects familiar to anyone who’d seen Earth Versus The Flying Saucers.
The Day of the Triffids (1962). When Howard Keel awakens in a hospital, peels the bandages from his eyes, and wanders the hallways amid inexplicable chaos, as yet unaware the rest of mankind has gone blind and man-eating plants are on the march.
Horrors of the Black Museum (1959). The opening scene, when the woman receives a package at her door, discovers binoculars inside, rushes happily to a window to try them out, and two spikes shoot into her eyes. (I have carefully examined all binoculars before using ever since.)
Gorgo (1961). The ending, when … Nope. I’ll stay quiet on this one, in the event you’ve never seen it. But oh how I loved that final twist! Think Godzilla with a heart.
But my favorite from the era will always be The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). We’d seen the trailers. We knew some of what was coming. But when that big pinky-orange Cyclops made his entrance, running from the cave on his hooves and chasing Sinbad and his crew down the beach, it was like nothing this jaded audience of matinee veterans had ever seen. We went from collective hush to vocal gasp to jittery applause and cheers, with flattened popcorn boxes flying in celebration of the miracle on screen. And the excitement never let up, not even during the mushy moments between Sinbad (Kerwin Matthews) and the Princess (Kathryn Grant). There was just too much going on …
The death-dealing, two-headed Roc. Sinbad’s swordfight with a skeleton. The Cyclops’s return and his battle with the dragon. It was a movie we relived and re-enacted for weeks following, and if anything measured a movie’s greatness, it was longevity on the playground.
Sure, Ray Harryhausen’s effects might not stand up to the CGI of today. And I’ve seen a countless number of movies and special effects since. But never once in the intervening years has any movie come close to replicating the magic and excitement to the extent I experienced in that packed movie house on that Saturday afternoon Sinbad sailed onto the screen. That time. That place. Oh, yeah, that movie. Definitely. Without a doubt.
My Favorite Golden Age Radio Episode
Back in the early ’70s, I lived in Vancouver, supporting myself by writing a weekly trivia quiz for the Vancouver Sun and cutting carpets in the warehouse of Canada’s largest department store chain, the now defunct Eaton’s. In order to get to the warehouse for my 7:00 a.m. start, I’d have to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to catch the bus in time.
Most evenings, I’d lull myself to sleep listening to late-night replays of old radio shows on CKNW. Hosted by the late (and wonderful) Jack Cullen, the show took to the air just after 11:00 p.m. and I’d doze off to the likes of Jack Benny, The Great Gildersleeve, The Whistler, and Melody Ranch. Rarely did I manage to get through an entire episode of anything without drifting off. Until the night Jack aired The House in Cypress Canyon, an episode of Suspense.
To this day, no horror novel or horror movie has come anywhere close to terrifying me in the way that old radio show managed. It crept into my ears and into my brain and left me tossing and turning the whole night through. I went to work the next day exhausted and shaken, and unable to get the story out of my head. I finally understood why radio was called “theater of the mind.”
At its deceptive core, The House in Cypress Canyon (1946) is about a real estate agent who, while checking out a house in a new development, discovers a manuscript in a shoebox. The contents so disturb him, he brings the manuscript to a detective to review. The episode stars an admirably intense Robert Taylor, Cathy Lewis, Hans Conried, and Howard Duff. I won’t say more for fear of spoilers, but I will leave you with this bad advice: listen to The House in Cypress Canyon late at night, when you are alone, and the lights are off. And, next morning, be sure to let me know how well you slept.
My Favorite Book
This is the toughest “favorite” to narrow down. Although the stories I write are mostly speculative, my reading habits are broad and eclectic, covering both fiction and non-fiction. It is also important to note that my approach to reading has never been what anyone might call academic.
The first two science fiction books I read were Find the Feathered Serpent by Evan Hunter and Danger: Dinosaurs! by Richard Marsten, both of whom I later learned were one and the same person. (Born Salvatore Lombino, he later changed his name to Evan Hunter. His most famous pen name was Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct series.)
Serpent and Dinosaurs! were part of the Winston Science Fiction series and I borrowed them from my elementary school’s library, which amounted to four or five bookshelves along a single wall of my sixth grade classroom. Both novels were also time-travel stories, the theme so revelatory, I would repeatedly return to it.
Favorites of the sub-genre include Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line, David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself, Jack Finney’s seminal Time and Again, and Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic. More recent additions are If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock, All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai, and Last Year by Robert Charles Wilson — all fun and memorable reads.
Kurt Vonnegut was also an early influence, starting with The Sirens of Titan and continuing through Player Piano, Breakfast of Champions, and the much-loved Slaughterhouse Five. Others that have stayed with me include Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series (before it ran out of steam), Clifford Simak’s City, George Orwell’s 1984, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. Then, too, for a shattering, no-holds-barred look at the life of an SF writer with literary ambitions, there is nothing quite like Barry Malzberg’s Herovit’s World. Dark, funny, gut-wrenching, and intentionally controversial, it is a must-read for every reader and writer of genre fiction. Love it or hate it, you will not forget it. (But then that’s what Malzberg’s writing inevitably does. It forces readers to choose sides.)
Horror novels are another matter. Yes, there are many I have liked a lot. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby gave me a good case of the creeps. And the more recent Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts and Ian Rogers’s Every House is Haunted delivered a niggling sense of dread. The horror that has always affected me most, however, is the real life variety.
My favorite horror stories are the non-fiction ones, which, oddly, also make them my least favorite. The evil here is all too real, people! And, accordingly, these are the most chilling books I recall reading:
Truman Capote’s depiction of the Clutter family murders in In Cold Blood.
Bugliosi and Gentry’s chronicle of the Manson killings in Helter Skelter.
And Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, the story of the architects behind Chicago’s World Columbian Exhibition in 1893 and how H.H. Holmes used it to his homicidal advantage.
Now comes my grand and shamefaced admission. The novels at the top of my all-time favorites list are westerns. There, I’ve said it, out loud and in public. WESTERNS!
- The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt.
- All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.
Yup, Lonesome Dove! A novel that took a dozen tries before I was able to get into it. But then there was no going back.
The characters. Augustus. Call. Lorena. McMurtry makes you feel for every one, minor or major, good, bad, and in-between.
The narrative. The sweep and detail of the intertwining storylines. No sooner are you gripped by one person’s tale than McMurtry disrupts the flow by switching to another and, before you know it, he’s hooked you yet again.
And unlike the B-western movies I mentioned earlier, there’s an unpredictability to the whole that does nothing to reassure the reader. Every character’s fate is up in the air every mile and page of the way, with no expectation of a happy ending for any or all. Lonesome Dove is everything a great read should be. Although clearly a dereliction of duty on my part, allow me to defer to the back cover of the 1985 paperback edition. Lonesome Dove is “a love story, an adventure, an epic of the frontier … the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness of America.” Nope. Not word of a lie. Indeed, Lonesome Dove is that rare epic that fully embraces and delivers on the claim.
Bonus: A Favorite “Speculative” Pop Song
Pop songs appear to be the an overlooked category when it comes to choosing spec fiction favorites. Again, I forgo the contemporary in favor of the songs that fascinated me as kid — the 45-rpm singles and LPs the pop music stations played and my sisters bought at the record shop. Here, for better or worse, is my Top 10 countdown to the best SF, horror, and fantasy songs of the ’50s and ’60s, without including David Bowie’s Space Oddity, only because it would blow everything else off the turntable. (Besides Space Oddity came out in 1969 which almost counts as 1970, right?)
10. “Love Potion No. 9,” The Clovers, 1959
9. “Mr. Spaceman,” The Byrds, 1966
8. “I’m the Wolfman,” Round Robin, 1965
7. “2000 Light Years from Home,” The Rolling Stones, 1967
6. “Haunted House,” Jumpin’ Gene Simmons, 1964
5. “Little Blue Man,” Betty Johnson, 1958
4. “The Purple People Eater,” Sheb Wooley, 1958
3. “Ghost Riders (In the Sky),” Frankie Laine, 1963
2. “I Put a Spell on You,” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1956
1. “Laurie (Strange Things Happen),” Dickey Lee, 1965
Ah, yes, “Laurie.” A teenage ghoulie hit and ghost story rolled into one. And as cornball as the song and as hackneyed as the ending might now be, Dickey Lee delivers with heart and chills and angst in a tight three minutes.
Okay, I’ve rambled on long enough. There you have my favorite things — at this brief moment in time, anyhow. Agree or disagree, no problem. All I ask is that you try not to think too ill of me.
Michael Libling is a World Fantasy Award-nominated author whose short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, SciFiction, Amazing Stories, OnSpec, and such anthologies as Gordon Van Gelder’s Welcome to Dystopia and Ellen Datlow’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. His debut novel, Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels, published by ChiZine, is a coming-of-age mystery and fantasy noir inspired by true events. Michael is the father of three daughters and lives in Montreal, Quebec with his wife, Pat, and a dog named Piper. He claims to be one of only seven North American authors who does not own a cat.
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Author Photo by Matthew Cope
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I am definitely going to look for the house in cypress canyon. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing I like.
I guarantee, listen alone with the lights turned down low and you will be wonderfully creeped out.
I’d definitely check out the Herbie comics just from “one bop from the lollipop!” That would be a hilarious spin-off, Herbie vs. Thanos! Take it away, fan artists!! All that aside, I’m all for fat superheroes. We need someone to look up to, too.
Herbie was like no other comic, before or since. It was crazy and fun.
A very entertaining read, especially the film section and I liked the surprise inclusion of Westerns. First time I’ve read this blog but five minutes enjoyably spent!
Thank you! Really glad you enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun to write.