The Dark Country by Dennis Etchison, containing the following stories: "It Only Comes Out at Night", "Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly", "The Walking Man", "We Have All Been Here Before", "Daughter of the Golden West", "The Pitch", "You Can Go Now", "Today's Special", "The Machine Demands a Sacrifice", "Calling All Monsters", "The Dead Line", "The Late Shift", "The Nighthawk", "It Will Be Here Soon", "Deathtracks", and "The Dark Country." (1972-1982; Collected 1982): It took nearly 20 years of being published before Dennis Etchison got his first collection of short stories. It's a dandy, collecting the best of his work from the 1970's and early 1980's.
Etchison's idiosyncratic style and subject matter are in full view here, from the near-future horrors of the "Transplant trilogy" ("The Machine Demands a Sacrifice", "Calling All Monsters", "The Dead Line"), in which the demand for organ donors has ventured into Pythonesque territory, to The Hardy Boys Goe To Hell weirdness of "Daughter of the Golden West."
The award-winning title novella is perhaps the weirdest story here, a subtle horror story about a bad Mexican vacation in which the horrors never completely manifest themselves. It's like a vignette from Apocalypse Now by way of Spring Break. There's also blatant, bloody revenge fantasy suggestive of EC horror comics in "The Pitch" and "Today's Special" and "We Have All Been Here Before."
Two of Etchison's major tropes -- Southern California and "the road" -- appear again and again here, sometimes in concert (the Los Angeles area has a lot of cars and a lot of drivers, after all). Everyone seems to be in transit; everyone is the target of sinister but often undefined horrors that can come from anywhere, anytime. The seemingly ordinary -- late-night convenience-store clerks, highway rest stops, tow trucks, even television laugh tracks -- shimmer with hidden menace, sometimes fatally revealed. Some things come out of the dark; some things hunt in the sun. Highly recommended.
Iron Sky: written by Johanna Sinisalo, Jarmo Puskala, Michael Kalesniko, and Timo Vuorensola; directed by Timo Vuorensola; starring Julia Dietze (Renate Richter), Christopher Kirby (James Washington), Gotz Otto (Klaus Adler), Peta Sergeant (Vivian Wagner), and Stephanie Paul (President Sarah Palin) (2012): Partially crowd-funded, Iron Sky turns out to be an unexpected oddity -- a film about Nazis on the Moon in 2018 that's a political and social satire, not (as many of the previews suggested) a straight-up homage to 1950's science-fiction movies.
It's 2018. In an attempt to bolster her re-election chances -- and raise her popularity with African-American voters -- a thinly veiled President Sarah Palin has launched a cynical two-man mission to "the dark side of the Moon" (which in actuality would be the far side of the Moon: the Moon's dark side changes with its rotational relationship to the Sun, as does Earth's) with one of the astronauts being an African-American male model named James Washington (to further hammer things home, the slogan for this lunar mission is 'Black to the Moon? Yes she can!').
Upon landing, the mission swiftly runs into Nazis who've been hiding on the Moon since the fall of the Third Reich. This is actually based on one of those weird theories one sees on the History Channel sometimes, in which the Nazis had UFOs and escaped Earth in 1945. It's history, man! Aliens!
All Hell gradually breaks loose, though not in the ways one might expect. Washington meets and saves the life of a fetching female Moon Nazi, teacher Renate Richter, who has no idea what the Third Reich was really like (one of the funnier, smarter bits involves the edited, ten-minute-long Moon Nazi version of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and the reaction of both Richter and Washington to seeing the full version in a revival cinema on Earth). However, Palin and her modelling-agency campaign advisor soon find Moon Nazis to be useful, especially as Nazi rhetoric and Republican rhetoric are strikingly similar...
This isn't a subtle satire, though at points it would actually be funnier if certain things were made clearer, earlier (the male model joke takes forever to unpack itself). The visual effects are striking and historically plausible -- I quite like the space zeppelins, and it's a matter of historical record that liberated-and-freed-from-fear-of-prosecution Nazi rocket scientist Werner Von Braun initially wanted to put something the size of a battleship in orbit once he was put in charge of portions of the American space program (!!!!!!!!!!!).
And there are some killer jokes and homages to Dr. Strangelove, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the music of Richard Wagner, and a very funny bit involving the surprising origins of the Earth space defense fleet that takes on the Nazi invasion at the end of the film. And Julia Dietze, as Renate Richter, is hellacute. Recommended.
