I have been a professional writer since 1977.

 

My influences include H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and William Faulkner.

 

If you'd like to read one of my Light's End horror, sf, fantasy, or mainstream short stories, let me know at miklvance at yahoo dot com.*

 

I was first published at the age of eleven and became a professional freelance writer in 1977. My work has appeared in dozens of magazines including Starlog, Warped,, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Comics Buyers Guide, Dreams and Visions, and Jack and Jill. I have been a syndicated columnist and cartoonist in over 500 newspapers.

 

My history book, Forbidden Adventures: The History of the American Comics Group, has been called a "benchmark in comics history". It was recently reprinted in #61 & 62 of Alter Ego.

 

I ghosted an internationally syndicated comic strip, and wrote my own strip for five years, Holiday Out, that was reprinted as a comic book. I also wrote Straw Men, Angel of Death, The Adventures of Captain Nemo, Holiday Out and Bloodtide. I am listed in the Who's Who of American Comic Books and Comic Book Superstars.

 

My short stories set in Light's End, Maine, have been published in more than two dozen magazines and have been recorded by legendary actor William (Murder She Wrote) Windom. They are mostly horror stories. They have now been released as a trilogy of novels from Airship 27 and Cornerstone Book Publishers. The titles are: Weird Horror Tales, Weird Horror Tales: The Feasting, and Weird Horror Tales: Light's End. Look around; they are easy to find to purchase.

 

With novelists Mel Odom and R.A. Jones, I co-wrote Global Star, a tabloid in a world where werewolves and babies born with bowling balls in their stomachs are reality. This has recently been published by the Pro Se Press.

 

I co-wrote the suspense/thriller novel The Equation with R. A. Jones.

 

My novel, TheThief of Two Worlds, is a Christian SF trip back into time to Angkor Wat!

 

Young Nemo and the Black Knights is an action-adventure novel with the spice of steam-punk.

 

My weekly comics review column, Suspended Animation, was continuously published since 1989 in fanzines until 2009 in newspapers and websites. It had a readership of about 2,170,000.

 

In addition, I worked in newspapers for twenty-two years as an editor, writer and advertising manager, creating three successful newspaper magazines.

 

Here's a list of publications that have carried my work: Nominated For ‘04 SLF Fountain Award: Best Short Story

Creator of the Oklahoma Cartoonists Museum

06’ Diamond Distributors Top Ten Comics Publication: #2

 

National Magazines in Bold; Novels in Italic

 

*Starlog *Jack and Jill *The Oklahoman *OK Magazine*The Blotter *Good Old Days *Holiday Out (syndicated comic strip ’82-‘86, 5 years, 40 publications, 356 adventure strips, 519 funny animal for a total of 865 strips)) *Alley Oop (syndicated comic strip/500 newspapers)*Comics Buyers Guide *Applause (editor/ writer; weekly entertainment magazine, 120 issues) *Fantasy Review*Grafiske Dromme (Denmark) *Census Takings *Cryptoc/Wildcat (editor, publisher, writer) *Warped Magazine *TimePassager *Holiday Out (comic book, 3 issues) *The Film Collector *Bloodtide (comic book)*Poto *Fandom Zone *Extra (editor, writer; Okla. history magazine, 4 issues) * Comico Primer *Tribble Talk *Media Sight *Weekly Central Express *Gnomes & Poems *Scavenger’s Newsletter *Dreamline *Complete Holiday Out (Grafiske Dromme-Denmark; Blue Moon Comics) *Professor’s Story Book *LexFanzine *Fangraphix (NOW Comics) *Wiggansnatch *Self Publisher *Comic Creations *Spartan Shout *The Originals *Forbidden Adventures (text-book)*Low Orbit *Comics Scene *Comics Interview *Radio Free Thulcandra *Space and Time *Okla. Advertiser (publisher, editor, writer, 20 plus issues) *Voices *The Final Draft *The Horrow Show (Spring ‘88)*Read Me *Safe Comix *Ocean Comics *Mangazine *Straw Men (graphic novel, 8 issues) *Suspended Animation (700,000 readers, syndicated weekly review column, 18 plus years; ongoing) *City Beat *New Orleans Magazine (editor, writer; 12 issues) *Family Entertainment (creator, writer; newspaper entertainment section) *Commander Battle and the Atomic Sub (introduction) *The Extra magazine (writer; 52 plus issues) *Angel of Death (comic book; 4 issues) *Black and White (comic book)*Blue Moon Super Heroes (comic book) *Vault of Shadows (comic book)*Star Trek: The Next Generation magazine *The Equation (novel) *Lenten Daily Devotionals (1994, 1996) * The Adventures of Captain Nemo (comic book) *Dreams and Visions *Baby Boomers magazine *Vantage *Infinity Press (ten short stories)*Home Team News (quarterly newsletter; editor, writer, designer) *The Chronicles of Oklahoma*Maelstrom Spectulative Fiction * Parsec *Comic Fan *Whispers From the Shattered Forum *On Spec *Gnome *Gateway SF *Light’s End Short Stories (25 written, 24 published, 20 recorded by actor William Windom) *Lovecraft’s Weird Mysteries *Skysongs 1 & 2 *Stillwater’s Journal *Maelstrom One *Vicious Shivers *Nocturne *Lighthouse IV, V, VI *Apocris (Vance paperback) *A Tangled Script *Lunar Harvest*Dark Corridor*Weird Horror Tales*Weird Horror Tales: The Feasting *Weird Horror Tales: Light's End *Global Star *The Equation *The Thief of Two Worlds *Young Nemo and the Black Knights

 

*Weird Horror Tales Reviews

 

Vance offers up thirteen tales of Lovecraftian horror with a deft sense of suspense and heart-pumping terror. His grasp of terror is second to none, and delivers nightmarish scenes with incredible, horrific feelings. Ron Fortier

 

“I'm a-skeered just lookin' at that!! Woooooooooooooo” Van Allen Plexico.

 

“Scary!” Guglie

 

“Nice, spooky cover.” Bobby Nash

 

“That cover is to die for (from?)! This looks to be a great anthology and a great start to this year's wave of Airship titles. A must have!” Andrew Salmon

 

“You said the magic word, Ron..."Lovecraft". It is now on my wish list to buy.” Mike Schau

 

“Oooh, that IS a scary cover! It would even make a good sword-and-sorcery type cover.” Duane Spurlock

  

I did get a chance to read "Picked Clean". As you requested, I am going to be completely honest!

 

So far as the story goes -- I especially liked the pressurized atmospheric effect that you describe during the two men's encounter with Caleb's island environment. This was very effective. Caleb is a very unnerving character, desperate and deformed, with strange agendas. Ezekiel is brutal and greedy, and operates in a very clearly defined manner with no ambiguity, a nice offset to Caleb. Hiram seems like he's been dragged along for the ride, and provides the necessary sympathetic character, and the hint of a continuation of the story with his survival.

 

The suspense built up by the end, when Hiram enters the cave chamber, is palpable, and the dread approaching is wonderfully crafted, especially as the ultimate denouement doesn't occur until after Hiram's fate is settled for the reader. Meanwhile, the reader sits, their mind imagining what the horror could have been.

 

The giant maggot kind of threw me. It seemed like ... well, the spider leg reference was disorienting, and the biological method necessary to encourage Caleb to create a maggot monster offspring baffled me, and distracted me from how well the suspense had been built up to that point, until I had reread the story a couple of times and regained that sense of dread prior to the monster's reveal. I think I had been expecting something oceanic, since it lived in a sea well -- that might part of it. So for me, the suspension of disbelief got thrown at this point because of the extremism of the monster, which was a pity after the build-up of historic mood and setting.

 

But overall, I enjoyed the story! While I was out at lunch, it occurred to me that in a pulp-story sense, the creature was perfect for that genre -- over the top and hideous, an amalgamation of evil and man's warping influence.

Michelle Souliere

  

Mark Orr

Michael Vance has produced a terrific cycle of tales, inspired by but not slavishly imitative of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. He seems to draw from some of the same tainted wells that Lovecraft did, and from those drilled after Lovecraft passed on, but has assembled those traditions in a new and deliciously creepy way. Frissons abound in his tales of Light's End. Highly recommended.

  

By Frank Creed

 

After King and Poe, Lovecraft is widely acknowledged as one of the top three horror writers to impact American horror. Lovecraft's horror world even has its own name: the Cthulhu (Kuh-Thoo-Loo) Mythos. Fans of Howard Phillip Lovecraft's style, rejoice--there is an author you simply must meet. Algernon Blackwood and August Derleth have a stylistic contemporary in Michael Vance, a professional writer of non-fiction for over thirty years, who has mastered the short story form.

 

The award-winning Vance does not write in the Cthulhu Mythos itself, but his Lovecraftian style features patiently built suspense rich in setting and character, usually with short vivid climaxes and resolutions. Properly written, the effect puts a reader into the story, with page flipping curiosity.

 

Vance paints portraits of fated personalities in an eerie little town on Maine's northern Atlantic coast. Light's End can also be found on brink of madness. Deep spiritual influences and events, guilty evils, and ancient lore are scrimshawed into memorable tales centered on the moral implications and consequences of personal actions.

 

Vance's voice is distinct from Lovecraft's on several points. Horrors of the dark human heart, rather than horrific alien mysteries, are the center of each work. Readers are snatched from madness' edge by an overall Christian worldview, which gives horror, and moral choices, context.

 

Weird Horror Tales' thirteen short stories, and a few non-short story treats, showcase a Lovecraftian sins-of-the-fathers theme. The collection is what's known as a braided novel. The tales, all in and around Light's End, are set chronologically from the early twentieth century, to present day and near future. Common threads of symbol and prophecy progress through the stories. Any of the stories could be enjoyed individually, but read sequentially, there's a bigger tale.

 

Vance's fiction does not cower from language and subjects that most Christian publishers avoid. Vance uses dark imagery and language in a tasteful and literary sense. Pre-teens would see examples of good literature, but graphic content is appropriate for high school and older maturity levels

 

Sadly, Vance's literary level may be too high. I fear readers won't like Random Pairings: a literary dialog, boldly written without quotation marks, with one of the most dramatic endings in the braided novel.

 

Overall, Weird Horror Tales is a must-read for genre fans, especially those who of the Christian worldview. Note that one tale, The Lighter Side, should be saved for a reader's zany reading mood. When you want something fun, the humor in this piece rivals Douglas Adams and Stephen Leon Rice.

  

Light's End: The Feasting

by Michael Vance

reviewed by Tim Walters

 

Once again we venture to the small town of Light’s End, Maine, courtesy of author Michael Vance. Light's End: The Feasting is his second chapbook collection of stories, poems, comic strips and photographs set in or inspired by his fictional New England town. Vance has

created a fascinating and detailed background "universe" for his Light’s End series.

 

"Billie Hell" is a harrowing tale set in the sordid Light’s End district dubbed "The Alley", an underbelly of rough-and-tumble dance halls and bars, circa 1914. Bishop’s Alley is teaming with drunkards, drug addicts and prostitutes and, of course, is secretly frequented by some of Light’s End’s most prominent and respectable citizens. From this squalid and decadent scenery emerges the tale’s aptly-named title character, Billie Hell. A highly effective story, and one of the more unsettling chapters in the Light’s End oeuvre.

 

"Unhinged" features Schlomo Nantier and Charlie Azreal, two boys growing up in the Light’s End of the 1920s and 1930s. There are comic strips and pulp magazines (Weird Tales, The Shadow, Doc Savage) and movie matinees, but it’s far from an idyllic portrait of childhood friendship in a small town. Issues of race, class and religion are woven throughout this poignant coming of age saga. The timeline extends into the 1940s with Schlomo Nantier shipping out to fight the war in the Pacific, then returning home to Light’s End. This tale offers a vision of small town America that, beneath the surface, is much darker than the wholesome Norman Rockwell images often associated with the era.

 

"Half Nelson" is the story of beleaguered professional wrestler Brett Nelson, who once upon a time stood proudly center ring as the unbeatable "El Diablo". It’s a tale of betrayal and deceit, of lost love and lost opportunity, and of broken promises and broken dreams. The cheering crowds have long since faded for the once mighty El Diablo. What remains is a mortal man with a haunted past, a bleak future and a present mired in despair. An interesting story with some

surprising plot twists and turns, right up to the last line.

 

Other stories in the collection include "Under Wraps", "Face Off" and the epistolary "Schlomo’s Letters". There is a comic strip version of "In the Out Door", various poems and photographs, and even a couple of maps of downtown Light’s End. At 72 pages Light’s End: The Feasting is a chapbook well worth the purchase price.

 

An audio version of Light’s End also remains available on CD and cassette, featuring famed actor William Windom reading a number of tales. Information on ordering the Light’s End series can be found at www.starland.com/sus/

  

From the blog, It’s Dark in the Dark

 

Although I’ve been spending almost all of my time feverishly slaving over my exciting TOP SECRET project, I’ve had some moments here and there to read. It helps me keep my mind off my poor broken heart. It’s also a good thing because I do book reviews on this site.

 

In the lifetime of a monster, you end up seeing many things. You see the seasons change. Years come and go. Continents sink into the ocean. You make new friends and you lose others. For example, one of my biggest disappointments in life was arriving too late save the Wicked Witch of the West from that Dorothy and her little dog.

 

When I’m reading a book or watching a movie, like any good student of the arts I look for a scene, paragraph or sentence that really encapsulates what the book (or movie) is about. A good example of this is the scene in The Conformist where the protagonist, Marcello, stands and watches everyone else dance. Every once in a great long while, the key sentence of a book is the very first. In Weird Horror Tales, you have only to wait until sentence four:

 

“If the issue of human and god is always a monster, was Caleb Elliot that child?”

 

I had to read that sentence several times to make sense of it, and I think that it encapsulates the following pages very well.

 

The book follows a town in Maine and the happenings there, along with one or two of the families in the town. The town is blessed with a sort of secret society which resembles a satanic cult. The town, the families, and the secret society show up in most of the thirteen tales in the book.

 

Many of the stories in this book resemble a Twilight Zone episode, or the plot from horror comics like Eerie and Tales from the Crypt from the 1950s and ’60s. You have a story about a corrupt politician who makes an ill-advised trip back to the scene of a crime he inflicted on an entire town. There is a tale of a man who kills his own brother and pays the inevitable grisly price for it. In another, two men play a psychological game of chess, both knowing that one has come to murder the other.

 

Although the plots are imaginative, the characters are two-dimensional and unlikeable. At times, the writing makes the proceedings vague and hard to follow. The author tries to set mood with vocabulary to ill effect (the word “soughing” is not creepy.)

 

If you really love Eerie or Tales from the Crypt or really loved the Twilight Zone to the point where you would enjoy reading short stories in that style, then Weird Horror Tales might be for you, if you can overlook some of the warts I list above.

 

Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5 (for Wishful Thinking)

Suspense Factor: 1 out of 5

Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5 (yes you read that right: Zero!)

Funny and/or Strange Factor: 1 out of 5

 

Final result: The book aspires to be “Thirteen Harrowing Stories of Horror and Suspense in the Lovecraft Tradition!” but what it ends up being is a text version of horror comics like Eerie and Tales from the Crypt from the 1950s and ’60s. The publisher should really leave Lovecraft out of this. If you’re going to invoke the name of H.P. Lovecraft on the cover of your book, you better make sure you can back it up.

 

Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews. Hopefully next time I review a nice juicy horror novel with loads of Weird Erotic Tension. I’m working on it! See you next time!

 

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Review: Weird Horror Tales by Michael Vance

Reviewed by Michelle Souliere

 

Weird Horror Tales, despite its generalized title, collects 13 tales very specifically centered around the fictitious town of “Light’s End” in Maine. While varying in their historic timeframe and even at times in their style, they are all crafted in the weird tales tradition. A great find for fans of this field of fiction!

 

Unlike many writers who claim to be inspired by Lovecraft, Vance is not afraid to produce stories using an efficient and sparse storytelling technique, which suffers nothing from omission, and lends itself to the very Lovecraftian theme of cosmic horror that rears its indescribable head throughout. The reader is more likely to encounter a poetry-like flow of Bradburyesque proportion than the purple prose of Lovecraft’s fantasy pieces, especially in such stories as “Wishful Thinking.”

 

His characters are normal, desperate, deranged, owners of strange agendas, people who want basic and harmless lives, and people who want to cause harm to enrich their lives. The settings are reflective of the strange arrangement of the townspeople’s history and continued existence. They live in the shadow of “the Great Secret Hidden Openly.” The length and breadth of the human betrayal taking place in Light’s End is brought into sharp focus when the reader is reminded of the simple, honest need for a good life, even as communicated via the otherworldly narrative in the award-nominated* story “The Lighter Side.”

 

Humor, the likes of which fans of Tales from the Crypt will appreciate, creeps in from time to time. There is something rottenly appealing in the idea of the faux lighthouse restaurant in “Knock-Off,” with ever-popular tourist-attracting features such as the “irritating moaning of ‘the alien dead, giddy with hunger’, that incessantly gibbered from hidden speakers in the floor,” décor inscribed with “symbols and mermaids with needle teeth,” and “wallpaper that illogically seemed to creep across the wall.”

 

The wonderful thing about independent publication, and the use of short stories, is the freedom that both give an author to pursue a variety of storytelling techniques, while the collected format allows a common ground for tales to form from. In more ways than one, this collection reminds me of Bradbury. Vance seems to feel a similar need to tie together the ingredients of tragedy and transcendence, and a brave daring to try new storytelling techniques and voices pulled from the fringe of the genre. I can only imagine what will happen if he finds a really keen editor with the ability to help him shape this series into the crescendo it could become (this is the first of 3 planned volumes).

 

"Weird Horror Tales” really winds up working as the title for this collection, and Vance’s years of writing experience show in his Jack-of-all-trades approach to fantastic fiction. Take a solid, squirming bedrock of horror, throw in some satellites of sci-fi, a generous helping of Twilight Zone plot twists, lace it with the eldritch horror of H. P. Lovecraft’s favorite poisons, and you have yourself a hefty volume of entertaining and engaging stories which will surprise you with its variety, and reward you with each re-reading.

 

While I may not be completely sold on Maine as the setting for this series, I understand the effort given to make these stories come alive in a Maine that Vance has never seen, and I more than understand his love for the weird tale, and the honor given Maine by choosing it as the place for these stories, outside of their Midwestern author’s experience of his home state of Oklahoma. Maine is an “other” place. These stories certainly are alive in their other place, a place with a unique kind of strangeness that I think Lovecraft would have been well pleased to see spawned from his legacy.

 

I would really like Michael Vance to visit Maine as he completes work on the next collection in the planned trilogy of Light’s End anthologies. But then again – maybe if he came here he’d be too charmed to write more Maine-based horror! Perhaps we should simply invite him to come during February to prevent such a tragedy.

 

* “The Lighter Side” was nominated for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award for Best Short Story in 2004.

-- -- --

  

In preface to this section, let me just say that I realize how difficult it is for an author to research a location he is unfamiliar with. Vance says he does “a lot of research to get my setting right.” This is obvious in his use of a wide range of specific details used in his world building, both in his attempts to reference Maine, and in his use of the Oklahoma town he grew up in to form the structural matrix of the concocted Maine town of Light’s End.

 

Perhaps in his copious note-taking, certain cultural elements have been misattributed to Maine when they really belong to other New England locales. Perhaps all of New England seems like a single collection of places to folks from the Midwest. At any rate, there are too many small moments when questions arise, speaking as a Maine reader, when Vance includes specific place-related details in the tales. Plus the feel is just a bit off.

 

It was always the little things that cocked my eyebrow, like a Providence, RI, reporter and radio commentator showing up to interview a Maine senator during a fishing trip in his hometown locale, away from his usual Washington, D.C., setting, instead of the much-more-likely Boston press, or the fact that Vance set the stories in Maine to honor Lovecraft, who, (although a professed fan of the state), had little to do with Maine beyond a few sightseeing trips and the use of its wily and weird backwoods as way-stations in a couple of his stories. Lovecraft is much more thoroughly identified with Rhode Island, where his final resting place is marked with a stone that bears the legend, “I am Providence.” Heck, I wish Lovecraft was Maine’s. At any rate, Light’s End is Maine’s now!