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Cover Reveal: Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of)

11/9/2013

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That’s right, the time has come! Today’s the day I get to show you all what my baby’s going to be wearing when it hits shelves on May 6th. I’m giving away an Amazon giftcard at the bottom of this post to celebrate, but first, without further ado, here it is:
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*hold for applause*  

Well, what do you think?  

What do I think, you ask? Well, as I’ve complained many times before, I’m no sophisticated connoisseur of the visual arts, and I’ll admit the whole concept of my own book actually having a cover still has my head embarrassingly light and spinny, but I think…  

It’s got zombies! It’s bloody, beaten up, and optimistically hand-cobbled-together! I think it promises exactly the sort of scary-sweet-funny YA Horror-Comedy adventure that’s going to be inside, which is exactly what a cover should do. Oh, and it’s not a picture of a girl with one eye obscured, so there’s that.  

Okay, if you’re anything like me, the whole point of a book cover is getting to flip it over, so in case you haven’t heard me yammer on enough about the book itself yet, here’s the blurb:  

About Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of)

The world is Cassie Fremont’s playground. Her face is on the cover of every newspaper, she has no homework, no curfew, and no credit limit, and she spends her days traveling the country with her closest friends, including a boy who’d do the chicken dance with death just to make her laugh. Life would be almost perfect, if those newspaper headlines weren’t about her bludgeoning her crush to death with a paintball gun, if she didn’t have to fight ravenous walking corpses every time she steps outside, and if there weren’t one friend still missing, trapped somewhere in the distant, practically impassable wreckage of Manhattan.

Still, Cassie’s an optimist. She’ll take hysterical laughter over hysterical tears, fighting a corpse over being one, and she won’t leave a friend stranded when she can simply take her road trip to impossible new places, even if getting there means admitting to that boy that she thinks she might love him as more than her own private jester.
Have I got you excited?  

Keep an eye on that clock on the side of my site. Only 177 more days until release day. And guess what?
You can now pre-order it here!
Sorry it’s only paperback so far. It will be available as an ebook too.  

Now, who’s ready to win free stuff? Thanks in advance for every like, follow, tweet, and especially to-read. They mean a lot.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
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Twenty Things Matt Carter and F.J.R. Titchenell Learned This Halloween

11/3/2013

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If you’ve been anywhere near either of our blogs within the past month and a half or so, you’re aware that Halloween is what we, Matt Carter and F.J.R. Titchenell, look forward to all year. We were engaged and married in consecutive Octobers, we’re year-round horror geeks, and during this season brimming with opportunities to share our macabre passion, we pull out all the stops to celebrate.

But Halloween aficionados though we are, there’s always something left to surprise us. Together, we’ve compiled a list of twenty things we learned this Halloween, for your reference and enjoyment.
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: Bonus tip: Don’t turn your head to the side for a zombie photo booth, it can’t read your face.
1. Do your research! Always check reviews for events to see if they're worth attending or fit your personal style. If an event is new, proceed with caution and consider attending *after* opening weekend, lest you attend the opening weekend for an event that's... less than great. (Having attended the disastrous opening weekend of The Purge: Fear the Night, this is not a lesson we will soon forget.)

2. Stretch! Some of these Halloween events are a lot more physically demanding than you'd think. Delusion: Masque of Mortality and the Queen Mary's Dark Harbor events had us sore for days afterwards after what we went through. Totally worth it, though.

3. If you're going to pay for a VIP experience, for the love of god don't lose your VIP guide! We went a little all out for Fi's birthday this year and did the VIP experience at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights. Part of it involves a guided backlot tour, before being led into a couple of mazes. Well, half of our group apparently missed our guide and abandoned us, which meant by the end of the night our tour group had a mortality rate somewhere along the lines of an early Friday the 13th film.

4. Why let the scare actors have all the fun? One of my proudest moments this season happened at Halloween Horror Nights. Fi was off getting a drink in the VIP lounge, leaving me standing by a window. I saw the scare zone outside full of clowns chasing people down, including one twenty-something blonde girl who was cowering right by my window. Sensing an opportunity, I put my face right up against the glass and tried to look empty. She looked up, she saw me, she screamed. Life is good.

5. Front of the Line Passes are (almost) always worth the investment. The bigger events get packed, leading to lines in excess of two or three hours for some mazes. If you want to see everything, the only way you can do this is by getting front of the line upgrades. At Halloween Horror Nights and Dark Harbor this was worth the investment, however at Knott’s Scary Farm, where Front of the Line effectively meant doubling your ticket price, we decided to take our chances. Considering that this got us on 7 out of the 10 mazes (one of which we went through twice, because it was really awesome) and the train ride, I think it was a gamble worth taking. (Also, avoid the train ride on Halloween at Knott's. Boring.)
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Yeah, these events can get packed.
6. For the most entertaining experience, try to position yourself around a group of teenage girls. They scream loud and up the fun. Bonus points if you can do this without looking like a creep! We sat near a group of teenage girls with hair-trigger scream responses during the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride, and came off better for it I think. I mean, our ears bled for a few days and my shins were bruised all to hell when one of them kept instinctively kicking me, but it was worth it.

7. As a female attendee, if a Halloween haunt isn’t scary enough, you can go for bonus points by burying your face in a guy’s jacket. This is the universal signal for every monster in range to pay you special attention. Better yet, if possible (as it is at the Haunted Hayride), lie back into his lap. Done right, this serves the double purpose of marking you as a target and heightening the sense of physical vulnerability. What passes for a cheap startle when you’re upright or curled into a ball can be downright terrifying when you’re off balance with your neck and other soft bits facing up. It’s a silly biological response, but it works.
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8. Don't discount local haunts! Local haunted houses may not have the budget or skill of professional haunts, but can still have their charms, and can have surprising quality. South Pasadena's Theatre of Terror event this year looked cheap and cheesy on paper, but in practice was comparable with anything we experienced at Knott's Scary Farm.

9. Startle responses are surprisingly easy to reprogram. While we were unable to restrain all expletives when the scares were good, even when sincerely trying, a combination of dares, jokes, creative friends, and the presence of small children had us blurting out everything from “Hello sailor!” to “Go, Diego, Go!” in a few moments of terror.

10. The insides of abandoned, reportedly haunted ships can get really dark! At the Queen Mary's Dark Harbor Halloween event, three of the six mazes take place within the bowels of the ship itself. Two of them, Hellfire and Submerged, have long stretches that take place in near pitch-darkness. While most on-land mazes you'll find have some ambient light sneaking in, here you could not see your hand in front of your face much of the time. The monsters seemed to quite enjoy this, as in one dark corridor, one snuck up to within six inches of my face and screamed at the top of his lungs. I fell back, on my ass, and since Fiona was holding my hand hard, she went down with me.
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11. Fear of limited visibility need not involve darkness. One of the five mini-mazes that made up the “freak show” at the Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor had nothing in it but lights and fog too thick to see your hand in front of your face. It was one of the more memorable moments of a wonderful and terrifying night.

12. Mechanical bulls (and mechanical monsters alike, as the one at Dark Harbor was called) spin really, really fast. This elicited a different kind of scream from the rest of the event.

13. When falling off a mechanical monster try falling off to the side. Falling off to the front can end badly. Almost one week later, my back is still killing me.
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This didn’t end well.
14. Impressive things are possible when adrenaline, alcohol, and good old competitive stubbornness all gang up against the pain response and other self-preservation mechanisms. The duration of the subsequent soreness correlates directly with the impressiveness of the thing. Yes, this relates again to our performances on the mechanical monster. While Matt took the challenge sober, the combination of the other two factors was still enough to require muscle healing for several days.
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I did not know this guy was behind me. I soon found out.
15. It’s simply not practical to find official non-clubbing Halloween events that welcome both costumes and childless adults, let alone costumes on childless adults. Okay, we knew this one already, but it took a while to come to terms with. Thankfully, the fortunate timing of Comikaze Expo here in LA does welcome this very necessary combination and saves us the trouble of stealing other people’s children to trick-or-treat with.
 
16. White tights are also surprisingly difficult to find. You’d think they’d be in every clothing and shoe store, if only for ballerinas, but you’d be wrong. I had to get them at a costume store to feel secure in my Harley Quinn mini-dress. (Before anyone conjures any unseemly images, this is a Fi tip).
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17. Pumpkins should not be left in the trunk of a car longer than necessary. No, we don’t have a picture of the moldy explosion that taught us this lesson. Just don’t do it.

18. It’s just about impossible to find carveable white pumpkins. While we’ve seen lots of pictures of round white pumpkins, the white pumpkins sold in the stores near us were all of a squat, flat variety so dense they require a hatchet to open. Literally, we used an actual hatchet.
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There. Much better.
19. Once open, these white pumpkins look, smell, and taste curiously like cantaloupes.

20. Be fearless. You get a better experience from these events the more you throw yourself into one. If they ask for volunteers, volunteer away! If you see something scary, scream your head off! The monsters will appreciate your enthusiasm and your delicious, delicious screams. Of course, there is such a thing as being too enthusiastic. Please do not hurt the monsters. They work very hard, and do not care for the abuse, and you don't want to take the chance that this is the one time that a guy actually dressed like a deranged lunatic will snap and decide to remove your skin with a cheese grater.
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Celebrating The Walking Dead Season Premier -- With Chocolate!

10/13/2013

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What day is today? That's right, tonight is the season premier of The Walking Dead!

Matt and I will be observing the occasion with chocolate lava cake served in these lovely skull cupcake molds, a dish Matt has christened a Rotten Headshot.

For the life of me, I can't find where Matt got these molds for me, but I can share the recipe I'll be using for the cake (adapted from one in the Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook)!

1/4 cup butter or margarine
1/4 cup semisweet chocolate
6 tablespoons egg white (or 1 egg and 1 yolk)
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 tablespoon flour
Whipped cream and cherries to garnish

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Grease your 2 skull ramekins (level of imagination necessary to make them skulls will vary).

Melt butter and chocolate in the microwave in a glass or ceramic bowl, heating in short intervals and stirring frequently.

Gently whisk in the sugar, egg, vanilla, and flour. Spoon into ramekins.

Bake for 9-10 minutes, until edges are set but center is still soft.

Decorate with whipped cream and plenty of cherry head wounds.

Happy headshots to all!

What are you doing to celebrate The Walking Dead's return? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my geeky musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Book Review: The New Hunger

6/30/2013

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Topping off zombie month with another book review!

Book Review:

The New Hunger

By Isaac Marion

Zola Books, 2013

B+

Note: The New Hunger is a prequel to Warm Bodies. You can read my review of Warm Bodies here.

The Basics:

The world is still in the process of falling apart. Our zombie hero, R, is freshly reanimated and searching for even the vaguest understanding of what he is. Julie Grigio is twelve years old, searching with her parents for any form of civilization. Nora Greene is sixteen and alone with her seven-year-old brother, searching for anything at all. And they’re all searching in the same direction.

The Downside:

Prequel-itis. I’m a defender of prequels in general. I find that knowing how they have to end gives them a powerful weaving-together quality more often than it spoils them, but in this one, the inevitability of who will live and where they’ll end up is particularly limiting, especially for R. With Warm Bodies relying on the premise that he’s dead at the beginning in almost every sense, going through some of the motions of life but with their meaning absent, he doesn’t have a whole lot of room for progress before he gets there. Julie, on the other hand, clearly has a past, but none of it is in this book, other than the part about being a tired but optimistic twelve-year-old who’s seen too much death. The founding of the stadium city, the romance with Perry, and the worst of the Grigio family’s breakdown all take place between the two books. The interactions between separate groups of main characters are kept to a minimum, just enough to hold the book together, but they still slightly undercut the impact of their formal first meetings in Warm Bodies.  

The Upside:

Nora’s share of the story (the biggest blank the book has to work with) is sweet, funny, and heartbreaking. Her relationship with her brother and their one-day-at-a-time quest to stay alive makes it impossible not to want to stop and give them both big hugs every few pages. What Warm Bodies lacked as a monster story, being told entirely from a zombie’s perspective, The New Hunger helps make up for from Nora’s. There are no vast hordes of zombies, but the Boneys and their pure evil group intelligence are chilling enough in tiny numbers. And of course, being Isaac Marion, the imagery and the prose itself are gorgeous, poignant, and razor-sharp all the way through. If you’re a fan of Warm Bodies, this is an extra taste of the universe and its style that’s certainly worth taking.

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Fi's Five Favorite Zombie Moments #1: "Another one for the Fire" (Night of the Living Dead)

6/26/2013

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(Click the links for Zombie Moment #2, #3, #4, and #5)

For another zombie moment this week, check out Matt's top zombie moment here.

****Spoiler Alert****

If there’s anyone out there reading this list of great zombie moments who doesn’t already know, Night of the Living Dead is the first of George A. Romero’s Living Dead movies and the first zombie movie. Period.

As a movie, I can’t claim it’s one of my favorites. It’s not one I can call near-perfect, and it’s certainly not one I can watch over and over.

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Mostly because of this bitch.
But I’m naturally grateful to it for creating the subgenre I love, and I respect it as an independent horror movie that did bold, revolutionary things, including but not limited to creating the classic zombie.

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Most of Night of the Living Dead is a pretty basic zombie movie, or rather, the basic zombie movie, since it’s the one all others jump off from. A motley group of survivors take shelter in a farm house, struggle to keep the zombies out, fight amongst themselves, and are whittled down by a combination of pettiness, sentiment, stupidity, and bad luck. A radio broadcast informs them that destroying the zombies’ brains will stop them and that extermination teams are on their way to resolve the disaster by doing just that to every zombie they can find.

Our hero, Ben, does his best to keep everyone safe until that can happen, but the aforementioned whittling forces are just too strong, and by the end of the night, the series of mishaps has left him completely alone.

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Ben does manage to survive until morning, when he finally hears the shots and shouts of one of the cleanup teams headed his way. He goes to the window, and…

Gets mistaken for a zombie. The movie ends with the cleanup guy’s line, “That’s another one for the fire.” And that’s it.

The first zombie movie, released in 1968, when every Hollywood movie still had to end with an uplifting monologue about the American spirit, instead went to an even darker, bleaker place than most horror movies will go today. There was no way it could not be number 1.

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Movie Review: World War Z

6/23/2013

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Movie Review:

World War Z

2013

B-

Yes, as I've said many times, I’m a fan of the book. You can read my review of it here.

The Basics:

There are zombies. Brad Pitt must fight zombies.

The Downside:

First, let’s get this part out of the way: this is not an adaptation of the book World War Z. Any fan should have started working on coming to terms with that when the first trailer full of running zombies was released, but just in case there were any lingering hopes, consider that fact confirmed.

They are both called World War Z, they both involve zombies, and the movie has one brief cameo appearance by a character from the book and a few near-subliminal references. The connection firmly ends there. Even tiny details that might accidentally coincide with the book if left unchecked are made as different as they could possibly be, the American military’s nickname for the zombies, for example (“Zack” in the book, “Zeke” in the movie).

Now to do what I’ve been psyching up for since those first trailers: put the book aside and focus on the movie as an independent entity.

It’s a zombie action movie. It’s a zombie action movie about a troubled but utterly perfect hero who spends most of his time rescuing helpless women and children, being tragically disappointed by all the drastically less perfect people who try to help him or require his help, worrying about his family (which adds nothing to the plot other than his worry and a laughable number of “oh no, the child has wandered off again!” moments), and generally being troubled but utterly perfect.

Even the global scope that should make this one unique among zombie movies is forgotten about two thirds of the way in, when it morphs into a typical lock-in zombie story in a research facility.

The Upside:

The fact that our troubled but utterly perfect hero does all this with Brad Pitt-grade charisma manages to keep him from being completely intolerable, as does the fact that one of the women he saves (an Israeli soldier whose bitten hand he chops off) turns out to be about as cool as anyone other than Brad Pitt is apparently allowed to be in this movie, not that that’s saying much.

Most of the other characters, while annoyingly helpless next to our perfect hero, are refreshingly decent for inhabitants of a zombie-infested world. This one isn’t a story about humanity’s internal breakdown, for a change, and as a result, it has some genuinely sweet moments.

The zombies themselves account for a large percentage of the points I’d give this movie. They’re quite terrifying (in their own right, not as an interpretation of the book’s zombies, of course). The images of them swarming and pouncing in the large-scale scenes and twitching and snapping in the small-scale ones are distinctive and effective.

The transition from a global movie to a lock-in makes both styles feel underutilized, but both are done well in what screen time they get, and both are able to maintain adequate tension and fun for an overall enjoyable summer blockbuster experience.

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Fi's Five Favorite Zombie Moments #2: "Bloody Mary" (Shaun of the Dead)

6/18/2013

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(Click the links for Zombie Moment #1, #3, #4, and #5)

For another zombie moment this week, check out Matt’s #2 zombie moment here.

Shaun of the Dead is an English horror-comedy, and as anyone familiar with my upcoming zombie horror-comedy novel (or my anglophilic upbringing) can probably guess, it’s a favorite of mine.

In this scene, our hero, Shaun, and his roommate, Ed, are still unaware that they’re in a zombie movie. Ed glances outside and sees what he thinks is just a very drunk human being stumbling around the yard, and the two of them go out to ask her to leave. Well, Shaun asks her to leave. Ed is playing with an old film-winding camera and keeps snapping pictures of them.

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According to her obscured tag, her name is Mary.
Mary attacks and tries to eat them, as zombies do, and after a few more moments of attempted polite reasoning, Shaun is forced to push her off of him hard enough to make her fall backward onto an exposed pipe, which impales her through the middle.

Shaun and Ed stare in horror for a moment at what they think they’ve done, before they finally see their first evidence of the fact that something has gone very, very wrong in their world.

Mary plants her feet and hands and lifts herself off the pipe as if it’s a minor inconvenience, then continues stumbling toward them with a perfectly circular hole through her stomach, a truly awesome zombie image which, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, doesn’t seem to have been captured anywhere online.

Luckily, though, that’s not even the best part. What’s Ed’s reaction to witnessing his first ever zombie moment?

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A blank stare and dead silence, broken by that special, distinct sound of winding film in the camera for another shot.

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Book Review: World War Z

6/15/2013

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World War Z
By Max Brooks

Crown, 2006

A+

This one’s been a favorite of mine since around the time it was released, long before I started blogging, and it’s one of those very weighty masterworks that’s always felt too big to revisit and dissect with the necessary care and reverence, but it seems only right to record and post a full review before the movie is released and changes the world’s perspective on the book forever.

The Basics:

World War Z is, as the cover announces, a historical account of a world-wide zombie war, compiled after the fact. It is told in a series of varied first person accounts, with an introduction and occasional prompts by the researcher, detailing everything from patient zero to the following reconstruction.

The Downside:

By the nature of the format, if you’re looking for a tight, linear storyline with a protagonist to bond with and root for, this isn’t it. Few interviewees come up more than once, and after his passionate introduction, the researcher keeps a deliberate, professionally discreet distance. Nothing is safe to become attached to.

The Upside:

Somehow, attachment still manages to be inevitable. The characters are memorable even for their solitary chapters in the spotlight, and even without the continuation of individual characters’ stories to anticipate, the arc of humanity’s survival and the pure quality of the vignettes keep the pages turning.

 All the advantages of the format are used to full effect. The story is every bit as global as it should be, the voices are incredibly diverse and distinct, and the research and analysis put into the zombie war scenario are absolutely breathtaking. The whole work is played absolutely straight as a history book, all the way down to the in-universe review blurbs on the back, and the writing carries all the weight and authority such a book would have in reality.

It’s a zombie book that takes itself more seriously than any other and manages to live up to its own lofty standard, one of the few books about which I’ll say, without a single snide qualifier, “There’s nothing else like it.”

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Fi's Five Favorite Zombie Moments #3: "The Future of the Human Spirit" (World War Z)

6/11/2013

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(Click the links for Zombie Moment #1, #2, #4, and #5)

For a second zombie moment for this week, check out Matt's list of zombie moments here.

I had a hard time picking one moment out of World War Z, because it’s made of big moments. Each single-chapter vignette could be called a great moment in zombie fiction, but most of them felt just a little bit too big, too complicated and shrouded in research and analysis, to stand alone in a list of pieces small and simple enough for the word “moment.” This one, I think, is self-explanatory enough.

By this point in the book, the worst of the zombie war is over. Humanity is devastated but has pulled itself back together and gotten organized enough to start focusing on eradicating the zombies and reclaiming the planet rather than simply surviving another day. Of course, the best and worst thing about zombies is that they’ll keep on attacking no matter what the odds are, so the easiest and safest way to root them out of an infested area is to stand in an open space nearby and make a lot of noise.

So that’s exactly what all the different extermination teams do, all over the world, in their own ways, and it turns into a celebration of humanity’s return as much as a weapon. In the British Isles, they use bagpipes. China uses bugles, South Africa uses Zulu war chants, and the Americans get to live the dream of actually blasting heavy metal while firing at walking corpses.
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I couldn't find an adequate picture of people living that dream, so here's one of them doing the exact opposite.
Other than its simplicity, there is one (very timely) reason this moment was the one that made the list. It’s the only part of World War Z that ever made me think, even for a moment, “This should be a movie!”

Like many fans of the book, the only screen adaptation I ever eagerly envisioned for it was an R-rated HBO-style miniseries imitating a History Channel-style documentary, and I still hope such a thing may yet exist someday far down the line.

This chapter, though, has that cinematic, everything coming together, final-confrontation-musical-montage feel that takes me back to some of my favorite Broadway-inspired movies.

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I'm a woman of eclectic tastes.
That’s really remarkable, when you think about it. In the midst of a zombie novel so dense and intrinsically stylized that I’d dare to call it cinematically untranslatable, there’s a chapter that manages to capture a global zombie-killing musical montage that should only be possible to render in clips of images and sound, on the page.

A contender for a zombie-loving bookworm’s favorite moment? Yes. Definitely.

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Event Review: The Great Horror Campout

6/10/2013

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Event Review:

The Great Horror Campout

B-

The Basics:

An overnight interactive horror experience featuring a scavenger hunt, several different theme zones and small horror mazes, dinner and breakfast, tent hopping monsters, and frequent kidnappings.

The Upside:

The actors were enthusiastic and professional, there were some intricate sets, and the costumes were fantastic. The whole concept of an overnight horror camping experience is unexplored territory, and the competitive angle of the scavenger hunt and the constant presence of the monsters in every part of the event make for a very different psychological experience from the typical Halloween haunt. And, of course, being in June, it caters to Halloween-all-year types like Matt and me and avoids a lot of potential weather problems.

There were some great moments that had the feel of a living videogame. One maze required sneaking past a pack of Chupacabras by freezing whenever they turned to look (I was seen once, bagged, and dropped in another part of the maze for my group to find). Matt jumped into a windowless van that was roaming the campsite promising free candy, had the door slammed behind him, and escaped a few laps of the tents later with a Werther’s Original and a missing child poster, two prizes that really, really should have had a higher point value. While trying to rescue him, I avoided being thrown in the trunk of a car by a clown for the sole reason that the trunk was full at the time. Those were some very notable highlights, as well as some sentences one never expects to type.

The Downside:

The planning level of the event and the newness of the concept allowed for some pretty major logistical issues. The idea of combining a scavenger hunt with Halloween mazes sounds awesome in principle, but in practice, having large groups of people scouring every set and crawlspace of a maze instead of running from the monsters only causes massive congestion and a pervasive feeling of paranoid boredom, appropriate for standing in line for a maze, not for being inside one.

For every game moment that worked well, there were several that didn’t. The scavenger hunt items were rarely restocked, and it would have been impossible to be among the first to reach everything with all the traffic flow problems, so it became clear very early, even to those with excessive competitive spirit, like Matt and me, that the game was effectively unwinnable, taking a lot of the fun out of the levels. There’s a lot less satisfaction in reaching into the goopy chest of a fresh Bigfoot kill knowing that all the precious ribs will already gone.

One area required guests to smear their skin with blood to mask their scent in order to get close enough to a bug’s nest to reach in to find a grub. The more blood, the better the chance of a find, we were told. The woman in line in front of us jumped in the blood vat and soaked herself, to no avail. Zombie dancers in another area asked for volunteers to be locked in coffins, one of the scariest-looking challenges, but in spite of what the clue promised, there was nothing to be gained or solved or accomplished. People just ended up having to buy their way back out with items they’d already found.

There were some random announcements where people got pulled out of mazes (without any interesting theatrical fanfare) for pointless wristband color changes. The event really ran out of steam at 2, when the hunt ended,  and the task of surviving until morning through the monster visits (which also sounded awesome on paper) became more of an obligation than a challenge, with nothing left to look forwa.

Then there were the more mundane issues like the tents being quite small for four people (and misnumbered at the beginning of the night), and the authentic special appearance by the LAPD at around 3am due to the easily anticipated noise complaints from the houses across the street from the very urban campground location.

It was a fun, memorable time overall, and I’m glad to have gone and proud to support innovative horror thinking, but without some major refinements, I probably wouldn’t pay another $150 a head to go again.

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