Our state troopers have been in the news recently for being a bit overzealous (kicking people's heads in, ramming them with cars - the usual Sweeney stuff). Not to be outdone, our local police have now hit the headlines. From today's Post & Courier:

Arm of law might reach sand castles
IOP considering fines if structures not toppled
By Jessica Johnson

ISLE OF PALMS — Building in the sand is free, but beach lovers who leave their castles behind could soon pay the price.

Under a new proposal, beachcombers could get a $128 to $500 ticket for not flattening sand castles and not filling in holes when they're through. City leaders intend to discuss the proposal more in the next month.

Todd Brower, a vacationer from North Carolina who sculpted a mound of sand with a spade on Friday, found the proposal ludicrous.

"I'd laugh at them," Brower said. "I've never heard of such a thing.

"If I was fined for leaving a hole, I would never come back," he said. "I'd just go to Sullivan's Island."

Palan Lussier, a part-time resident of Ohio who read about the city's potential law, found it equally ridiculous.

"You've got to be kidding me," she said as her children rolled in a hole nearby.

"Someone has too much time on their hands," Lussier's husband Steve said. "Police have got better things to do than sand castle enforcement."

Police and Mayor Mike Sottile said enforcement would be nearly impossible. They would have to watch the creation from start to finish and then catch its sculptors as they walk away.

Isle of Palms City Councilman Ryan Buckhannon, who sits on the public safety committee that formulated the law's first draft, said the provision is part of a bigger proposal aimed at stopping droves of tourists from leaving items and large holes behind.

"It's a disposable world now," he said.

Tourists often abandon their tents, coolers and surfboards for others to enjoy. The proposed law would require people to pick up after themselves and knock over sand castles before leaving the area.

Buckhannon said the holes are the real problem. A police officer recently fell into a hole and twisted an ankle. Councilman Michael Loftus said he knows of others who have done the same while walking the beach at night.

For the Lussiers, falling into a pit is a risk worth taking if it means saving sand castles.
"That's what flashlights are for," Steve Lussier said.

Over on neighboring Sullivan's Island, Town Administrator Andy Benke said the council may re- establish a citizens beach committee that might address similar issues in the near future.

Farther down the coast, Folly Beach regulates dogs and vendors on its beach, but sand castles? Never, Zoning Administrator Aaron Pope said. Folly also is one of the few beaches where drinking alcohol is allowed, Pope said.

My cat Tips has switched from her usual routine of howling at 2 a.m. - now she howls at 5 a.m., giving us an early wake up call (hey, I'm a writer, I don't do mornings).

Apparently, the 13-year-old Tips isn't a banshee in disguise. Her uncannily human-sounding wails are attributed to failing kidneys, making her thirsty in the middle of the night (or just before dawn).

Of course, she can't just go to her dish and drink. She wakes up the whole household instead. Maybe she's complaining about the switch from Wiskas to vet-recommended dry food. I'm too tired to tell.

Just back from a short trip to Florida, where I had the pleasure of paying $3.79 for a gallon of gas. Not bad compared to the UK, where petrol is so expensive that it's sold by the liter to sweeten the blow of buying it (present cost: about ten bucks a gallon. Brits don't get out much). Over here though, the Shell station I gassed up at was commiting daylight robbery.

Back in Charleston, SC (with a more palatable $3.13 a gallon rate) my vacation mood has been shattered by the heap of tax forms waiting for me on my desk. After almost half a decade of placating the IRS, you'd think I'd be able to fill the forms in quickly. But there are always complicated, confusing little bits in my 1040 that make the act more like trudging through mud with an axe in my head.

Zombies may be cold in the grave, but they’re hot in today’s popular culture. From video games like Dead Rising to books like Max Brooks’ World War Z, it seems that any product featuring zombies sells better than warm brains at an undead cookout.

A quick glance at the racks in Captain Lou’s Comics gives an indication of the way zombies have conquered comic books. The Walking Dead is generally accepted as the best of the current onslaught, drawn in black and white to match its stark storyline. Over 50+ issues, writer Robert Kirkman has developed a world where flesh-eating zombies already have the upper hand and only a few fucked-up humans survive to bite each other’s heads off.

Aside from the gore and the taut storytelling, the comic’s succeeded because the characters seem real. They make believable decisions, even in the face of something as unbelievable as an undead epidemic.

Senseless slaughter. Bullet-to-the-head executions. Hordes of bad guys bent on our destruction – or assimilation. Are these evils really so unbelievable or are they a fact of life? Part of the monsters’ popularity comes from their power to reflect contemporary culture and the way we view the world. In the ‘60s, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead took some of its gruesome, apocalyptic inspiration from televised images of the Vietnam War; while they’re holed up in an isolated house, the heroes of the film watch their society disintegrate via a TV set.

Decades earlier, director James Whale undoubtedly derived some of Frankenstein’s dark humor and stitched-together visuals from his personal experiences of scarred soldiers from WWI. More recently, Joe Dante used Homecoming, a segment of Showtime’s Masters of Horror, to dramatize “this elephant in the room, this Iraq war.” Set during an election year, dead veterans of the War on Terror drag their khaki-clad asses out of the graves to the polls, voting out a president who sold them a war on the basis of "horseshit and elbow grease."

The same atmosphere of doom, gloom and rising from the tomb that informs blatantly political films like Homecoming and Romero’s Land of the Dead is present in most of the recent batch of pessimistic zombie flicks. But more than anything else, there’s the sense that our technologically obsessed, fast-moving world is crying out of for savage shambling ghouls to remind us what’s really important in life: the freedom to live, breathe and get some goddamned personal space.

Take a look at Night of the Living Dead and its many (mostly Italian) imitators. A small group of people are stuck in the middle of nowhere with little chance of rescue. Slowly, an increasing number of stumbling, starving, groaning, faintly recognizable bodies bust into the house, forcing them back further and further from the front door until they’re stuck in a little corner (or the cellar, or the attic), trapped in surroundings that are usually familiar and comfortable. It’s like your extended family coming to visit for Thanksgiving, giving you no peace and eating you out of house and home. Except this time, you’re the turkey.

In an overpopulated world, peace will become increasingly hard to come by. So it’s no surprise that our crowded planet is welcoming the zombie mythos. Even the Marvel superheroes have got in on the act, winning their comic book publishers a notable share of the macabre profits. In the alternate dimension of Earth-2149, Spiderman, Captain America and their pals have all been infected with an alien virus that transforms them into the Marvel Zombies, superheroes who’d rather eat your liver than save the day. In the hands of writer Robert Kirkman (again), even our coziest childhood idols pose a threat to our survival.

Not all of Marvel’s reanimated corpses are as greedy for flesh. In 1973, the company sought to expand its range of black and white horror magazines to cash in on the then-present craze for movie monsters. In an early example of modern narrative retrofitting, the developers of Tales of the Zombie took a short 1950s strip by Stan Lee and added a top and tail, expanding the character of Simon Garth. Garth was a greedy, selfish workaholic; not typical star material for a comic book.






To make things even tougher for the writers, after his murder and rebirth Garth could feel nothing and cared about nothing. Why would he? He was dead. But the voodoo-charged adventures of Garth, told from the tenacious monster’s point of view, were strangely captivating and Garth has been revived for a new miniseries this year.

It will be interesting to see how Garth, who owed more to the revenging cadavers of EC Comics than today’s brand of body biters, will be reevaluated and made relevant for current readers. Zombies as a concept have been around for a long time – they’re in the millennia-old Epic of Gilgamesh – but it wasn’t until Romero decided to give his corpses a craving for flesh and the ability to expand their numbers through their bites that we got the creatures that we know and love to blow the heads off of today.

Perhaps it’s their zen qualities that we admire so much. Zombies don’t have to control themselves or be civilized. They give in to their base urges: hunt, feed, lurk. Peter Dendle is associate professor of English at Penn State Mont Alto, and he’s made it his mission in life to know all about zombies and their social context. He thinks that their contagious nature is their real hook. They herald an apocalypse where we must struggle to survive, paranoid that the next person round the corner could give us a hickie we’ll never recover from.

Whatever the reason for our zombie obsession, there’s no question that the genre taps into our fears that the world will end, or that we’ll lose the people and things around us that we love. That’s a frightening enough concept to keep us coming back again and again to read more books and watch more movies where the dead refuse to rest in peace.


This love letter to walking corpses first appeared in the Charleston City Paper.

I’ll be signing copies of my latest novel Undead on Arrival at Books-a-Million West Ashley today (March 15th) from noon to 3 p.m.

Books-a-Million doesn’t publicize its events, unless the author’s megafamous. I even had to make my own poster for them. So I’d appreciate any support you can give. Nip in and say hello on your way to the mall.

Books-a-Million is at 832 Orleans Rd., just off Sam Rittenberg Blvd in Charleston, SC. For further information, call the manager’s spendthrift ass on (843) 556-9232.

The author and a zombie friend at an Undead on Arrival signing.

Aw, now this is a pity. From the City Paper's A&E Blog:

Venue News: Buxton’s East Bay Theatre shuttered

The former site of ghost storytelling, the Magnolia Singers, and many Piccolo Spoleto concerts, Buxton’s East Bay Theatre, a tiny nook seating about 70 at the most, closed in December.

Owner Julian T. Buxton III told me the reason was financial. He couldn’t meet the cost of a lease held by the Southeastern Management Group. The theater was built in 2005 using 40 seats from the old Garden Theatre on King Street (currently occupied by an Urban Outfitters).

The seats have now been sold to a “guy living on Edisto,” Buxton told me, “for his own private theater.” Chad Yonce, of Southeastern Management Group, told me the space is being turned into — what else? — condos.

“I’m sad to see it go,” Buxton said.

In its inaugural year, I co-directed a play at the theatre called Christmas in Charlestowne, and visited it last year to discuss a multimedia ghost production.

I've also attended Piccolo shows there like Hobo: The Musical and Paul Thomas: Late Bloomer, where the performers made great use of the modest space.

I also filmed Pirates! The Revenge of Colonel Rhett at the East bay Theatre. This inventive show is making a welcome return at the Charleston Convention Center.

Like Buxton, I'm sad to see it closed. It's yet another example of the arts being squuezed out of downtown Charleston by rising rent costs. For shame!

Band of Trojan Horses

If you've read and enjoyed any of David Gemmell's previous books, you'll be familiar with their weird place names and deceptively simple prose. You'll also recall the wonderfully flawed characters. But whether you've read a Gemmell book before or not, Troy: Fall of Kings is likely to draw you in like the best of gift horses.

I recommend that you read the two prequels first, though - Gemmell comes up with a clever explanation for the Trojan Horse, but doesn't waste any time describing his conceit to newcomers. A "story so far" introduction or a few brief expository lines would have been very helpful this go-round. But stick with it and the book will reward you as a classic page-turner.

You can read my full review of Fall of Kings on the Charleston Post & Courier website.