The Power of Words

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“When considering the power of words, remember that wars have begun with words, marriages have been wrecked by hateful words, and the cemeteries in the nation are filled with individuals whose lives were taken prematurely by a bullet, shot from the hand of an angry person whose argument with their victim sent them over the edge and cost two lives: the future of the victim and the future of the manslayer who now serves life behind bars. Words birth ideas, images, and imaginations. Words live on beyond our brief earthly time span and will be repeated both to our delight and our dismay. Think before speaking, and remember that what has been said can never be recalled from the atmosphere.”

~ ~ ~ From Opening the Gates of Heaven by Perry Stone.

by allen0997

Legends: Paranormal Pursuits 2016

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(My short story “When He Saw They Were Dead” is in this just- released anthology available from Amazon.)

From Grey Wolfe Publishing
Legends: Paranormal Pursuits 2016

Some of the most entertaining works of fiction are those very strange stories… those oddities that aren’t easily explained by what common sense teaches, and what scientists know about nature and the world. You know the ones we have in mind… angels, demons, hauntings, UFO sightings and abductions, monsters, ghosts, spirits… those experiences that depart from what is usual or normal, especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature. This special 2016 edition of Legends will introduce you to a collection of scary, odd, ethereal, transcendent, and unearthly accounts. Some of the stories, poems and anecdotal narratives contained within these pages may delight or bewilder the reader. Others may cause trepidation or produce an unnerving influence. Whatever the effect, we are certain that these Legends are some you’ll not soon forget.

426 pages. Available for $25 from Amazon at this link:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1628281715/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

by allen0997

Hacksaw Ridge ~ A Capsule Movie Review

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Hacksaw Ridge ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

I’d rather have Mel Gibson behind the camera where I don’t have to see him. His latest directorial effort is Hacksaw Ridge, a gripping World War II story with a conscientious objector from Virginia as its central character. When Desmond Doss sees that his country is in trouble, he can’t sit out the war and do nothing. He wants to enlist, but there’s just one thing: he’s a Seventh Day Adventist with very strong principles against carrying a weapon. He enlists, anyway, though, and soon finds himself in unexpected trouble in the military. His officers and fellow soldiers can’t and won’t understand his religious principles. How can he be such a fool as to believe he can go to war without killing the enemy or at least defending himself with a gun? He is harassed, beaten, called a coward, and yelled at (I would crumple under the yelling and name-calling) and finally given an easy way out, but he is not to be deterred. He wants to serve and he believes the best way for him to do it is as a combat medic. He will be the one to put people back together, he says, while everybody else is taking people apart.

He is about to be court-martialed for his refusal to pick up a weapon, but his drunken father, a World War I veteran, produces proof from somebody he knew back in the day that shows his son’s religious convictions are protected by the good old Constitution of the United States. (We can’t let politicians shred it!) He goes to war with his division and soon finds himself fighting the battle of Okinawa. Okinawa is of strategic importance to the U.S. war effort. If it can be breached, the next step is Japan.

The fighting on Okinawa is as close to hell as anybody has ever seen. (Bloody and graphic battle sequences, showing mutilations and head wounds.) Casualties are heavy on both sides. As a medic, Desmond Doss displays bravery beyond what anybody might have ever imagined. He selflessly rescues about seventy-five of his fellow soldiers from the battlefield under heavy fire from the Japanese. He manages to get each injured man down a cliff, using a butterfly knot that he learned in basic training. The man who was labeled a coward for his refusal to pick up a gun becomes an unexpected hero.

Actor Andrew Garfield (memorable in The Social Network and Never Let Me Go) plays real-life Desmond Doss with sweetness and sincerity. He goes to war armed only with a small Bible his girlfriend (later his wife) gives him with her picture in it. As modest and quiet-spoken as he is, he is never willing to compromise his principles under pressure that would make most of us buckle. We need more people like him.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Tonight When the Moon is Full

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The Wolf Man (1941)

Lawrence Talbot is tormented. He bears the mark of the beast. He is a lycanthrope. When the moon is full, he turns into the Wolf Man, unable to control his urge to kill. Can his new love interest from the village help him? What about the old gypsy woman, Maleva? Does she have any magic spells or incantations that can release him from his horrible condition?

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by allen0997

This House is Haunted ~ A Capsule Book Review

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This House is Haunted ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

This House is Haunted by John Boyne is a gothic ghost story set in Norfolk, England, in 1867. Eliza Caine is a plain, twenty-one-year-old teacher at a girls’ school in London. When she and her father, her only living relative, go to hear Charles Dickens do a reading from his work on a cold, rainy night, her father, already ill, catches a chill and dies. Now alone in the world, Eliza applies for, and gets, the position of governess to the Westerley family at Gaudlin Hall in Norfolk, England. (She doesn’t know the family’s name until later.) From the beginning, she knows almost nothing about the job; how many children there are or what the family is like. Her feeling of mystery only intensifies when she arrives at the crumbling old family mansion to begin her duties anew and finds nobody there except the two children, Isabella and Eustace. Isabella is older and seems to know things that nobody else knows; Eustace, at eight, is sweet and innocent.

Miss Caine discovers, to her horror, that she is just the most recent in a string of governesses. Only the governess right before her got away. All the others died mysterious deaths. Is she going to be next? As if several dead governesses before her isn’t bad enough, she soon feels a mysteriously malevolent and unseen force in the house that wants to get rid of her, to kill her if necessary. Slowly and bit by bit she learns the secret of Gaudlin Hall and the mysterious Westerley family for whom she works. Why doesn’t she just leave and go back to her old teaching job in London? She has grown attached to Isabella and Eustace, especially Eustace, and doesn’t want to leave them alone in the house. And she isn’t thinking only of the children, but also of herself; she is beginning to feel a growing romantic attachment to Mr. Raisin, the Westerley family lawyer, even though he is in his late thirties and already has a wife.

This House is Haunted seeks to emulate the Victorian writing style of Charles Dickens, but in its tone is more like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. A young, plain woman, educated and alone in the world, strikes out on her own to take a job in an unknown place far away from what she knows and there encounters mystery and unexpected romance. Unlike the works of Charles Dickens, though, or Charlotte Bronte, This House is Haunted is quick, breezy, light-weight reading. There’s nothing too surprising here. The horror is very mild, unlike the recent trend in movies and books of horrific, shocking, grisly horror.  The story is so familiar that it almost seems clichéd but is still thoughtful, entertaining, and well worth the time and effort to read it.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

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Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Mad scientist Dr. Heinrich Frankenstein is long dead but his son, Wolf Frankenstein, lives, and he is also a doctor. When Wolf returns to his ancestral home with his American wife and son, he finds out just how unpopular his father is because of the unholy experiments he conducted in his laboratory but, more specifically, for the terrifying, ten-foot-tall, killing-machine monster he made out of the body parts of cadavers. The villagers believe the monster was destroyed but Dr. Wolf Frankenstein learns, soon after his arrival at Castle Frankenstein, that the monster lives and is being nursed and tended to by none other than hunchbacked, broken-necked Ygor. The monster and Ygor are close friends and, in fact, have no other friends besides each other. When Wolf sees that the monster is ailing, he has no other choice as a doctor and nascent mad scientist but to try and make him well again, which might not be easy considering his super-human biological makeup. The villagers, who don’t like anybody by the name of Frankenstein anyway, begin to suspect that something nefarious is underway at Castle Frankenstein, especially when Ygor begins sending the monster out to kill certain of the villagers who served on the jury that condemned him to be hanged years earlier. Vengeance is mine, sayeth Ygor.  

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by allen0997

Jane Hudson ~ Hag Cinema

If Jane catches you making a phone call, she'll kick you right in the middle of your daily duties.
If Jane catches you making a phone call, she’ll kick you right in the middle of your daily duties.

 

"I still have what it takes to be a big, big star!"
“I still have what it takes to be a big, big star!”

 

"Of course, I forget how truly creepy I've become until I see myself in a full-length mirror."
“Of course, I forget how truly creepy I’ve become until I see myself in a full-length mirror.”
by allen0997

The House of Frankenstein (1944)

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The House of Frankenstein (1944)

Dr. Niemann, mad scientist and protégé of Dr. Frankenstein, along with his hunchback assistant named Daniel, has been in prison for fifteen years for transplanting a human brain into a dog’s skull. A fortuitous storm/earthquake knocks down the prison walls, allowing Dr. Niemann and Daniel to escape. They find themselves in a traveling chamber of horrors that has, among other exhibits, the skeleton of Count Dracula. When Dr. Niemann removes the stake from the skeletal chest of Dracula (the stake that killed him), Dracula materializes into the blood-sucking vampire he once was, allowing him to have a brief infatuation with a young married matron in the neighborhood. Leaving the traveling chamber of horrors, Dr. Niemann and Daniel make their way to the castle of the late Dr. Frankenstein. The castle, you will recall, was dynamited by the villagers and then flooded, so it’s just a ruin. Dr. Niemann discovers, in the ice beneath the castle, the intact bodies of Lawrence Talbot, who becomes the Wolf Man during a full moon, and Frankenstein’s monster. He begins working to restore the monster, Dr. Frankenstein’s greatest achievement, to the fully functioning killing machine he once was. Lawrence Talbot, for his part, entreats Dr. Niemann to give him a new brain so he will be relieved forever of the curse of being the Wolf Man. Of course, none of this works out the way it’s supposed to.  

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by allen0997