What: The Living Dead 2 editor John Joseph Adams will present a panel of zombie experts featuring Living Dead 2 contributors Bob Fingerman, David Barr Kirtley, and others! (Full panel participant list forthcoming.) The panel will cover a range of topics, from the appeal of zombies, to debating the best weapons for fighting off the undead–something no zombie fan will want to miss!
(This is the same bookstore where I did the Halloween reading last year. Photos.)
Here are some photos from my Halloween night appearance at McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan, where I was joined by Kenneth C. Davis (Sigmund Freud below), author of Don’t Know Much About History, who gave a short talk on the origins of Halloween. Other costumes pictured include Humbert Humbert & Lolita and Sylvia Plath & her oven. Thanks to The Desk Set for snapping these pictures.
Last night I went to this fun Post-Apocalyptic Teen Fiction Panel, featuring Scott Westerfeld, Carrie Ryan, James Dashner, and Michael Grant. The venue, Barnes & Noble at 86th & Lexington, was perfectly appropriate, as it’s laid out like a bomb shelter — seriously, you walk through the front door and immediately descend an escalator into a multi-level underground complex. They showed two really good book trailers (especially compared to most book trailers, which are usually pretty lame). The one for James Dashner’s The Maze Runner doesn’t seem to be online, but here’s the one for Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth, about a girl born generations after a zombie apocalypse:
I’ll be appearing at: The Science Fiction Society of Northern New Jersey presents Face the Fiction: Zombie Encounter & Film Festival, featuring the premiere of Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated, a re-creation of George Romero’s 1968 classic, now with each scene rendered by a different animator in their own unique visual style. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with me, Kim Paffenroth, Jonathan Maberry, Peter Gutierrez, and John Joseph Adams.
Last night I headed out to The Diamond bar in Brooklyn for an evening of penis-themed entertainment featuring David Farley, author of An Irreverent Curiosity, and Tony Perrottet, author of Napoleon’s Privates.
In An Irreverent Curiosity, journalist David Farley spends a year living in the bizarre Italian castle-town of Calcata trying to discover whatever became of the town’s claim to fame, a reliquary containing Jesus’ foreskin, which went missing in 1986. Saints were the rock stars of the medieval world, and for a time every church was required to possess a relic, which created a massive opportunity for scam artists. The transparent fraudulence of so many relics undermined the Church’s credibility and helped lead to the Reformation. (John Calvin quipped that there were enough pieces of the True Cross floating around Europe to build a ship.) Since doctrine held that Jesus had ascended bodily, the only part of him that might conceivably be hanging around on earth was his foreskin, which eventually turned up — supposedly given to Charlemagne in Jerusalem by an angel — and was recognized by the Pope as authentic. The Church even granted a plenary indulgence (remission of sins) to any pilgrims who would come and worship the Holy Foreskin. During the sacking of Rome the foreskin was carried off by a French knight, who was later captured in Calcata and who stashed the reliquary under some manure in his cave-cell. Centuries later the relic was rediscovered, and the people of Calcata began holding an annual procession with the foreskin as the main attraction. Later the Church became intensely embarrassed about the whole business. The people of Calcata were very attached to their yearly parade, so the Church allowed the practice to continue, but only under the condition that nobody displayed the foreskin at any other time and that nobody talked about the foreskin at all, under threat of excommunication.
I haven’t read the other book, Napoleon’s Privates, but the author talked about it a bit. Apparently Napoleon was extremely obnoxious to his surgeon, so when Napoleon died the surgeon got back at him by cutting off his private parts during the autopsy. Napoleon’s penis bounced around to different countries before finally ending up with a collector in New Jersey, where Tony Perrottet found it and surreptitiously made a replica, which he displayed last night. Another interesting fact he mentioned was that Napoleon was not in fact short. Napoleon’s height (5’6”) was pretty much average for his day. The idea that Napoleon was a shrimp seems to have been an invention of British propagandists.
