There’s more to redesigning a newspaper than earning the wrath of your coworkers
This is the Sunday, Feb. 7, 1988 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News featuring the new name and new look. Image by Del Stone Jr.
Our newspaper, the Daily News, has embarked on an ambitious redesign project which I am overseeing, and this has given me the opportunity to investigate many important design questions, foremost among them the question of how much am I going to be paid extra for doing this.
The staff and I have become like brothers and sisters during this project, and though my sisters and I fought to near-death until we were older and wiser and could hire trained killers to manage our inter-family relationships, I have nothing but optimism for the redesign’s eventual success, though I may be witnessing that happy event from the great newsroom in the sky.
If I were to offer a single piece of advice to an editor contemplating a redesign, it would be to lie down and take several pills until the feeling passes or you die. But newspapers must change if they are to survive, which what the last Neanderthal man said as the tool-making Cro-Magnon man sedated him with a large clubbing tool. So to avoid the tar pits I have blundered into, you should consider the following:
WHAT GOES THERE? The most difficult aspect of a redesign involves choosing an identity for your newspaper. Presumably, your newspaper’s identity should be derived from your community’s identity, unless your community consists of a penal colony, an industry that has been rendered obsolete by talking Japanese toy robots and a rehabilitation clinic for serial ax murderers. In that case you should put a large brown bag over your community and kidnap subscribers from other communities.
If felony is not an option and your community has no identifiable identity, it would be best if you published your newspaper under what is known as an Assumed Identity, which will then impart an Assumed Identity to your community so that nobody will know who anybody else really is, and your community will probably be crossed off the map, as if it were participating in a federal witness protection program.
WHAT’S IT GOING TO LOOK LIKE? Will your newspaper be gray and drab and remind the reader that he really should get going and have that will made out? Or will ti feature high-candlepower, dazzling color photographs, eye-popping graphics and multi-chromatic bar treatments, so that when the reader opens the page he is charred by third-degree powder burns?
Decisions, decisions. You can save yourself some trouble if you take this precaution: If the redesign looks bad, stick to your guns, at least for the first 10 minutes, then blame it on someone else such as the Advertising Department or the community. You can even blame it on the federal witness protection program. At any rate, it certainly wasn’t YOUR fault.
PRODUCING MOCKUPS: A number of pitfalls await the designer at this stage of the project.
1. You will be tempted to use may different typefaces so that your pages resemble ransom notes. Do not do this. Stick to only several hundred typefaces, and carefully regulate their usage, as in, “Helvetica may only be used when the Pope canonizes another street dweller” or, “Perpetua is reserved for stories about hang glider pilots who find religion in the clouds, not to mention birds of prey.”
2. You will be tempted to box as many stories and photographs as you can, which will look as if a spider’s web has been sucked into the press. It’s much easier if you use fewer rules but compensate by increasing the thickness of the rule. For example: DON’T use 400 one-point rules on a page. Instead, use a single 400-point rule.
3. Many, many years ago, as far back as the early ’80s even, it was decided that tint blocks could break up a gray page with the really novel approach of putting even more gray on the page. Now that pages resemble aerial photographs of Nebraska farmland, you may be tempted to refine the process by screening only selected passages of stories, as if your page had passed through the hands of Israeli censors.
I suggest you screen the entire page.
GETTING READY FOR THE REDESIGN: Eventually, you will actually have to do something to bring the redesign closer to reality, such as talking about having a negative of something made. This will require expertise in negotiating with the cameraroom, which means you should spend few hours each week at a pistol range before you actually go into the cameraroom to negotiate.
This is how the conversation might go if you are unprepared:
You: Excuse me, sir, but could you please make a negative of this? I know it’s an imposition and I promise to make it up to you somehow, though I can’t say when because little Billy needs an operation to remove my wife’s pacemaker from his stomach, which he accidentally swallowed when he was giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to his older sister after she tried to hock the pacemaker to a neighborhood crack dealer and the FBI raided the place and she put it in her mouth to hide the evidence and then fainted because she’s hypoglycemic, and the only reason little Billy was there to save her was because she was supposed to be babysitting him since my wife is in the hospital having her intestines scraped.
Camerarooom dweller: Die and go to hell.
You: Yes sir, and thank you sir. You’ve been more than generous with your time.
But with adequate preparation, you can have the cameraroom eating out of your hands.
You: Hands up against the wall. Spread ’em! Make a negative of this and don’t give me any backtalk or I’ll blow your brains out all over the mounting plate with this .357 Magnum.
Cameraroom dweller: YES SIR! You’re a rough and tough newspaper designer, and I’m going to do exactly what you say right now! And how else may I serve you, Master?
CHANGE, CHANGE AND MORE CHANGE: At some point during the redesign process, probably between the “Developing of High Concepts” stage and the “Just Chewing the Fat about It” stage, keener minds will begin to suspect that a redesign might alter the newspaper’s appearance.
This must be avoided at all costs. Nobody must know anything – not even you. Otherwise, you will seriously reduce the level of confusion when the redesign debuts.
WHEN THE REDESIGN DEBUTS: You will know if the redesign is a success if you walk into the newsroom and are greeted with thunderous applause and the publisher hands you a check for $20 skillion dollars, in which case you should thank your producer, your director and all the little people who helped you.
But just to be on the safe side, have a Lear jet standing by with the engines running.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Image courtesy of Concorede Pictures.
“Chopping Mall” stars Kelli Maroney as Alison Parks, Tony O’Dell as Ferdy Meisel, Russell Todd as Rick Stanton, Karrie Emerson as Linda Stanton, Barbara Crampton as Suzie Linn, and Nick Segal as Greg Williams. Directed by Jim Wynorski. Rated R with a 1-hour, 17-minute run time. See it on Amazon Prime and Tubi.
Del’s take
“Chopping Mall” is a product of the incomparable Roger Corman, king of the independent, low-budget exploitation film.
Corman began his career in the mid-1950s making science fiction/horror movies (“The Beast with a Million Eyes”) and Westerns (“Five Guns West”), and became known as the “King of the Drive-In.” He continued in the 1960s with a series of opulent gothic horror movies based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe (“The Pit and the Pendulum”) and worked with stars such as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Ray Miland and Peter Lorre.
Eventually Corman established his own studio, New World Pictures. He is credited with starting the careers of numerous A-list actors and directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorcese, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron and Jonathan Demme, to name a few.
Corman produced “Chopping Mall,” along with his wife, Julie. It was shot mostly at the Sherman Oaks Galleria mall in Los Angeles in 20 days, with two days of studio filming. The film is described as a parable of Reaganesque consumption and has become a bit of a cult hit over the years.
The plot is fairly straightforward: A group of teenagers holds an after-hours drinking and sex party at a furniture store in a shopping mall on the same night a trio of security robots goes online for the first time. Unfortunately for the teenagers, a lightning strike damages the robots’ programming and they embark on a killing spree. Armed with tranquilizing darts, tasers and directed-energy weapons, the robots are more than a match for a group of oversexed teens … or are they?
Originally marketed as “Killbots,” (a superior title in my opinion) “Chopping Mall” was filmed at the same location as “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” But trust me, it bears little resemblance to that classic coming-of-age movie. “Chopping Mall” is mostly a bloody excess of exploding heads, lots of jiggling breasts, tacky ’80s-esque music, some seriously terrible dialogue (which was mostly ad-libbed from what I understand) and crappy special effects – heck, they even poached the ray gun sound effects from the George Pal version of “War of the Worlds.”
But as an artifact of the ’80s, “Chopping Mall” is a fascinating time capsule. As I watched the movie I made a list of some of the uniquely ’80s features: big hair, designer jeans, pay phones, landlines, popped collars, circular glasses frames, pastels, Better Cheddar, CRTs, gun stores in a mall, cigarette machines (a pack of smokes cost $1.25), suspenders, button-down shirts, wooden skateboards, handheld calculators the size of mobile phones, khakis with pleats and shoulder boards.
Wow, those were the days. Not.
Look, “Chopping Mall” isn’t high art. It’s a low-budget exploitation film, squarely within the Roger Corman mode of a moviemaking. As silly entertainment it’s just fine. I can think of worse ways to waste an hour and 17 minutes of my life. Go into it with low expectations and you won’t be disappointed. Just be prepared for some serious gore.
I give “Chopping Mall” a grade of B. Anything higher would dishonor its low-budget aspirations. But I’m guessing Mladen will gush – it’s right up his alley. So expect multiple A’s, maybe even with a bullet. Or an exploding head.
Mladen’s take
Yeah, I was hyped when Del used the phrase “jiggling breasts” in his review. All of a sudden, I was looking forward to watching “Chopping Mall.” But trouble soon arrived. The problem? The bared breasts were front-loaded. So, the remaining four-fifths of the movie was barely tolerable to me. No more nudity, just hokey – even for a Corman film – analog-ish visual effects and blood splatter. Let’s face it, despite years of writing movie reviews with Del as my antagonist, he still has no ability to distinguish between cartoonish depiction of slit throats or exploding heads and realistic, honest-to-goodness, stomach-churning graphic violence.
Where to begin evaluating “Chopping Mall?” How about the old saying, “lightning never strikes twice in the same place?” Why? Because in “Chopping Mall” lightning struck THREE times in the same place to send the trio of Bobcat tractor-like killerbots on a hunting spree. Sheesh. From there, the movie gets better in the sense that it gets worse.
We start with four heterosexual couples and then there were three and then there were two and then one. I concede, the couples countdown was a tidy way to knock off the subadults portrayed in the film. The systematic, one-couple-slaughtered-at-a-time pace of the movie generated anticipation. “Ah,” I’d say to myself, “she bought it because she was unable to use a Molotov cocktail correctly. Burning to death sucks. How will her boyfriend meet the Grim Reaper?” Wait a few minutes and, pow, a killerbot grabs the boyfriend and drops him from the mall’s third floor. Thud, and we’re shown a pool of diluted ketchup pooling around the boyfriend’s cracked skull.
For Christ’s sake, the movie didn’t even have a decent soundtrack and it was made in the decade, 1980s, that generated some of the best songs ever. Yes, Corman’s studio did things on the cheap but, come on, why not drop a bit of change for the right to use Blondie’s “Rapture?”
Why the f— Del thought I’d like this movie, I have no idea. Maybe he thought I’d like it because it has gained somewhat of a cult following over the years. Maybe he just wanted to insult my taste in movies. No matter, “Chopping Mall” deserves no better than a C-. But, I don’t want to discourage filmgoers from watching other “Gore”man flicks. There are a lot of them. Del, here are a few that I watched and enjoyed: “The Wasp Woman,” “Carnosaur,” “Death Race 2000” and its sequel, “Death Race 2050,” and let’s not ignore “Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda.”
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.
The sadists I work with on the wired desk have a game they play from June 1 to Nov. 30.
They know I am fascinated by hurricanes. They see my tracking charts featuring the scribbled admonition that he who steals this chart will die of earworms.
Worst of all, they know I am always anxious to study the satellite photographs.
We receive three satellite photographs each day. The first is transmitted at about 4 a.m., the second at 4 p.m. and the last at 9:30 p.m. Each has its own idiosyncrasies. The morning photo has poor resolution. The afternoon photo is usually sharp, and more closely represents the extent of the cloud cover. This is the photo we publish in the newspaper. The night photo exaggerates the cloud cover, but it can give you an idea of trends in a storm’s movement.
At any rate, I want to see them all. Enter the sadists.
My desk used to be next to the Laserphoto receiver and I could quickly intercept any photographs entering its collection tray. But now my desk is located across the room. Now I must rely on the good graces of the wire desk to supply me with satellite photos.
Ha ha ha ha ha, boy am I a schmuck. Relying on the good graces of the wire desk is like hiring a 40-foot python to babysit small children.
The game goes like this:
1. I am sitting across the room, minding my own business, when suddenly I hear the telltale click of a Laserphoto being cut and fed into the collection tray. All eyes on the wire desk also turn to the Laserphoto machine, as if were a slot machine that had just rung up four cherries.
2. Somebody on the wire desk leaps up and snares the photo.
3. A triumphant “AH HA!” rings across the newsroom.
4. The satellite photo is held so that everybody on the wire desk may see it, but not I.
5. Suddenly, everybody on the wire desk becomes an expert at interpreting satellite photography. “Looks like a suspicious cloud mass in the Caribbean,” they shout in delight. “Yes sir, I see evidence of a circulation in that cloud mass,” or, “Are those spiral bands beginning to form in that Atlantic disturbance?”
6. They sneak peeks at me and titter like schoolgirls. They want me to get p and come over there and try to beg for the photo, but I know they’d pass it from person to person in a perverse game of keep-away, so I refuse to act like I’m interested.
7. They raise the stakes by saying in loud voices, “Uh oh, this looks like a Category 5 storm to me. I don’t think we better let Del see this. I think we should tear this up and burn it. Del wouldn’t be interested, anyway.”
8. The final act in the game involves my capitulation, where I must prostrate myself and shout, “Come on you slimes, gimme that satellite photo. PLEEEZE?” This always is greeted with malicious merriment, especially if I have to get down on my knees and grovel.
Now isn’t that sick?
This column was published in the Playground Daily News sometime in the 1980s, possibly 1986, and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Image courtesy of De Paolis In.Co.R. Studio.
“The House by the Cemetery” Starring Catriona MacColl, Paola Malco and Ania Pieroni. Directed by Lucio Fulci. 86 minutes. Not rated.
Del’s take
“The House by the Cemetery” is a film only a horror purist could love, and love it they do, in gushing online paeans that celebrate its blood-drenched genius. Written by legendary screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti and directed by the Godfather of Gore, Lucio Fulci, “House” is itself a paean to violence, splashing its audience with viscera, maggots, and other gory tropes of Italian horror cinema.
It is part of Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy, which also includes “City of the Living Dead” and “The Beyond” – entries in a catalog of horror movies, spaghetti westerns and comedies that make up the erstwhile communist agitator’s body of work. Fulci passed away in 1996 due to complications from diabetes after suffering a life nearly as tragic as his horror films, but he has developed a cult following over the years and many of his fans rate “The House by the Cemetery” one of his best works.
The story is about a young academic, Dr. Norman Boyle, who brings his wife and son to a small, rural town so that he may resume the work of a colleague, identified only as Dr. Petersen. Petersen was researching the notorious Dr. Freudstein, a 19th century medical practitioner who allegedly conducted forbidden experiments resulting in disfigurement, death and, shall we say, supernatural complications. During his investigation, Petersen inexplicably loses his mind, kills his girlfriend and hangs himself from the rafters of the town library. Now Dr. Boyle has arrived to finish Petersen’s work. He has even moved his family into the house that was previously occupied by Dr. Freudstein.
The Boyles are joined by Ann, ostensibly a babysitter for young Bob, the Boyles’ blindingly blonde-haired son. But she may be in league with the supernatural forces that rule the Freudstein house. Bob’s mother, Lucy, seems to sense something is off about Ann. In fact, she knows something is off about the entire house but she soldiers on, the loving if weary spouse of an obsessed academic.
The Boyles’ presence rekindles the ghostly inhabitant of Freudstein House and all manner of jump scares, sudden spooks and not-so-ethereal attacks commence, culminating in an inevitable showdown between man and boogeyman.
The film was released in 1980, which dates it. More substantially – and jarringly – its Italian roots, and its Italian horror sensibility, establish a distance between movie and audience that “House by the Cemetery” may not be able to overcome in the United States. Its case is not helped by the oceans of blood and horrifically graphic violence that, even by today’s standards, will present a challenge to weak-stomached audience members. It could have been worse. According to lore, Fulci was mandated to slay at least some of his darlings to keep the movie at an R rating in the U.S.
More puzzling are the weird lapses in cognition experienced by the characters. For instance, in one scene a woman is brutally (and bloodily) murdered. Her body is dragged across the kitchen and down into the cellar, leaving a blood trail wide as an interstate highway. The next morning Ann, the suspicious au pair, sets about cleaning up the mess (without inquiring as to its cause, which to my mind casts her in league with the devil). Lucy walks into the kitchen, sees Ann down on the floor with her bucket and scrub brush, and asks her what she is doing. Ann says, “I made coffee,” and that answer seems satisfactory to Lucy, who turns and heads toward the stove. Blood trail? What blood trail? The movie is rife with such oversights.
Replete with overly dramatic acting, a musical score that will strike Americans as intrusively silly, and inexplicable gaps in storytelling, “House by the Cemetery” falls more into grindhouse mockery than art house storytelling.
For those reasons I won’t recommend it. I watched out of a sense of duty to Fulci and Sacchetti, but in retrospect, “House by the Cemetery” wasn’t very good.
If you are a horror purist or a collector of oddball cinema, you might enjoy the movie. Otherwise, try something a bit more modern, and a lot more consistent with reality.
“House by the Cemetery” is available on Shudder.
I rate it a D+.
Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
Image courtesy of Karolina Grabowska of Pexels by way of a Creative Commons license. https://www.pexels.com/@karolina-grabowska/
To watch Mom iron is to watch a carpenter join pieces of wood into something that ill be handed down, parent to child, for generations. It is watching an artist imbue blank canvas with timelessness. It is watching a craftsman at her trade, doing a thing I will never be able to do.
It is almost seeing art done.
She shoulders me aside – amused by my fumbled attempt to press a pair of pants – and takes the iron in hand. Suddenly it is endowed with power, supernatural, no longer inanimate but a living thing. She wields it as if it weighed nothing. She never hesitates.
The pants are splayed on the ironing board, impossible wrinkles over every square inch. They couldn’t be straightened. The thought of even trying leaves me giddy.
Mom sets to work.
“It’s important that you stretch the pants over the board,” she says, her voice stretched too, as she pulls the pants over the board’s tapered snout and spreads them flat. She sprays starch over them, then presses with the iron. It plows into the wrinkles, smoothing them. Steam rises from the fabric as the iron is drawn back, and a hot, electric smell fills the kitchen.
She gets to the pocket and pulls the pants away from the board, grabs the pocket the way one would handle an unruly child, and spreads it flat. “Always iron the pockets before you iron the outside. If you don’t, you’ll leave an imprint of the pocket on the outside.”
I wonder why I never noticed imprints of pockets on my bachelor friends’ pants. Do they know?
She shows me how it happens and, just as she explained, the imprint is there. She irons the pockets steaming flat, then flips the pants over and irons the outside. No imprint. Maybe I would’ve discovered that for myself. Maybe not.
Then she starts on the legs. She holds the pants vertically, matches the seams at the bottom. “Line these up as closely as possible,” says she, eyeballing her work as if she were about to cleave a gemstone. “They have to be matched just right or the crease won’t come out the way it’s supposed to.” I believe her. But I don’t see how she’ll manage it.
The legs are twisted beyond hope. She lays them on the board, lifts the top leg and lets it dangle over the front; she sets upon the bottom leg. Starch and steam. She moves the iron at impossible angles, finds all the lines, smoothes them under heat and pressure into a flat plane. Up the leg, over the seam and down the other side. The pants are beginning to look like pants, the improbably magically becoming possible.
She pulls the dangled leg, lays it flat against the other, then goes to work on it, too, with baffling certainty, pushing the iron over the cloth, making it presentable. She puts a crease in this leg, and it is a match with the other.
The whole business is flipped over and she starts from the opposite side, doing away with the last bit of disorder. Then she peels the pants from the board, holds them up for final inspection, slides the legs carefully through a hanger and hands them to me.
“That’s how you iron a pair of pants.”
I hang them in the closet, careful that they don’t touch the other clothes there. I’m not sure I want to put them on. They look too nice to wear.
I’ll never get the hang of it.
Mom has left the ironing board in the kitchen, and I, the understudy to some Florentine realist, am only too happy to do the easy part, to put away the artist’s easel.
This column was originally published in the Playground Daily News in the early 1980s and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, Ello and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Image by Flickr user Greg Virtucio by way of a Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/gregvirtucio/
I opened into my personal computer file the other day and there, at the top of the list, was a short story with a message especially for me written above it. The message read: “Good news, Del.” A little farther down was written: “Del, I just knew this would make your day.” Tom Conner, our state editor, had left it for me.
The story was about the Cuban Death’s Head Cockroach. To quote The Associated Press: “The Cuban Death’s Head Cockroach, a three-inch, thumb-sized monster, has migrated from its native Caribbean to South Florida.”
That’s just great.
The story went on to say most of the 2,000 species of roaches already live in Florida, but the new roach claims all prizes for size.
Wonderful news. Clint Eastwood couldn’t have done as much to make my day.
You are reading the words of an adult male who is mortally terrified of cockroaches. I will let snakes crawl up the sleeves of my short, pick up insects of all description, touch assorted creatures slimy and horrible, but I cannot stand the thought of a roach coming near me, the thought of breathing the same air as a “three-inch, thumb-sized monster.” The minute bug experts begin describing new cockroaches with hyphenated words, you may look for me booking it to the next county.
Del turned on the light and something moved.
I have heard horror stories about cockroaches, and I have my own to tell, but none has ever involved a “three-inch monster,” though I would say some looked a strapping 6 feet in the paralyzingly dispassionate aspect of midnight.
Consider:
– A roach somehow gained entry to a sealed envelope and was mailed from Washington, D.C. to somewhere like Nebraska; I am certain the person who opened the letter must have had all of his suspicions about bureaucracy forever confirmed.
Mom vs. the snake around her neck.
– I once covered a town commission meeting that I thought would never end – until a giant Cro-Magnon roach scurried across the wall behind the commissioners. The place emptied in about 30 seconds. And I was the first one out.
– I was at a party when a palmetto bug – not a roach but about as close a relative to a roach as, say, a rat is to a squirrel – crawled across the ceiling above the food table. Our considerate hostess swatted it and that was that, until the next day when she informed me she had found a leg the size of a well-fed mastodon’s in the French onion dip. Had I eaten any of that?
Wild Kingdom at the golf course.
– Once, as I stepped into our outdoor utility room, a roach dropped from the ceiling, slipped down the sleeve of my tank top, crawled across my ribcage and, unbeknownst of me, dropped out of my shirt and vanished to parts unknown. When they found me, I had eaten myself into a coma.
– I was riding in a car when the driver suddenly shrieked and nearly ran us through a telephone pole. A roach, she screamed, had crawled across her foot. Then I screamed. One would have thought a swarm of killer bees had moved into the glove compartment, we were out of that car so fast.
– My premier roach story involves former Daily News reporter Steve Chew. One unforgettable Sunday night, Chew found a very large, very dead cockroach on the floor in our backshop. He appropriated said cockroach and hid it beneath my keychain in a way that I could not see it. As we got ready to leave, I reached across my desk and picked up the keychain. Perversely, the roach’s rigor-mortic leg hooked on my thumb. I raised my hand and the nightmarish thing dangled from it, penduluming back and forth, a torment to me even in death. A bolt of pure fright shot up my spine and I threw down the keys, strangling on a scream I couldn’t get to come out. Chew was paralyzed with laughter.
“Three-inch monsters” invading South Florida, eh. Something tells me my days in this state are numbered.
This column was originally published in the Playground Daily News in 1983 (est.) and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
“Phase IV” Starring Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, Lynne Frederick, Lots of Ants and others. Directed by Saul Bass. 84 minutes. Rated PG. Hulu, Prime.
Mladen’s take
“Phase IV,” lovingly built in 1974 with an admirable effort at incorporating animated and computer graphics to enhance the film, is sci-fi at its finest – provocative and enthralling.
Remember, we’re talking about 1974 here. 1974 was 47 years ago. 1974 was the year of another Republican dickhead president’s impeachment (Nixon). Hell, I was but a sprite in 1974.
Del always bellyaches about my inadequate summaries of film plots, so I’ll give it a better shot this go-around. The problem? A completely thorough plot summary gives away the story, which, I assume, makes a movie less fun to watch.
The “Phase IV” plot: Mankind drops to the bottom of the food chain. Sufficient summary, Del? No? OK.
A burst of celestial energy, detected early and highly anticipated by scientists because of what it could do to life on Earth, passes through our planet without causing obvious change or damage. One lone entomologist, however, notices something odd unfolding in Arizona post-energy wave. Ants of different species are no longer feuding, are systematically cooperating to extinguish their predators, and appear to be gathering at pow-wows to talk strategy. The ant tribes build a half-dozen cooling towers for their massive collective nest. No big deal, right? Some regular ants (and termites) have built elevated structures to help condition the air flowing through their underground homes for tens of thousands of years, probably longer. But, the Arizona ant colony chimneys are symmetrical and constructed at right angles. They’re topped with triangular slits inside squares that face in exactly the same direction and tilt upward and back slightly. The chimneys are symbolic structures, too, maybe even a form of religious worship. The entomologist (Davenport as Dr. Ernest D. Hubbs) concludes the energy burst has rendered the ants intelligent. Trouble is on the way unless the “natural order” is restored, he advises a panel. The panel authorizes construction of a research facility smack dab in the middle of the territory of the sectarian smart ants. Hubbs recruits Lesko (Murphy) to staff the laboratory. Lesko is a numbers theorist and cryptographer with expertise in deciphering languages. There’s a third person in the story, Lynne Frederick as teenager Kendra, but she’s used to help the movie along to reach Phase IV of the Ant plan for humanity. In short, Hubbs and Lesko end up fighting the six-legged version of Star Trek’s Borg. Very, very neat.
“Phase IV” is remarkable for its capture of real ants performing ant-like duties in organized, methodical, and adaptable fashion. The humans and the smart ants duel, each species countering the other’s moves of conquest and domination. Wait until you see how the ants flush the scientists and the girl from their geodesic dome laboratory. Hell, Lesko even devises a way to communicate with the ant queen controlling the millions (billions?) of worker ants working to control the humans. She’s in no mood to negotiate a settlement or foster inter-species compromise. That’s very human-like. No?
“Phase IV” is an unambiguous A. You need to watch this blast from the past, something Del has come around to calling a “stream gem.”
Del’s take
I’ve seen bits and pieces of “Phase IV” over the years but never the entire movie until Mladen got a bee in his bonnet and suggested we review a film about super-smart ants.
I could tell it was a ’70s-vintage flick because of the Lazenby Computer Smooth font used in some of the typography. It seems every movie, book or magazine that sought to appear “modern” in the 1970s used Lazenby Computer Smooth. Now, of course, it makes me think “old.”
But that’s OK because “Phase IV” is a darned good little movie, much better than what the movie reviewers like Mladen – oops, that just slipped out – said about it. (Remember how the movie reviewers trashed “The Terminator”? Yeah. Those guys. Can’t believe a word they say.)
Mladen finally, after much ridiculing from yours truly, provided a decent plot summary, so I can get right into the critique itself.
You can’t judge “Phase IV” by today’s production standards. The music is contrived and hokey (though “modern” for its day), the characters behave in ways that would earn them a social media drubbing (Dr. Hubbs smokes!) and the special effects resemble those you and I would create if somebody handed us an 8mm movie camera and told us to revise “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”
My big gripe with “Phase IV” is that the characters seem incidental to the plot. Hubbs is a throwback to the misguided scientist who seemed to occupy every big bug movie produced in the 1950s, while his dashing sidekick – in this case Murphy’s James R. Lesko – seems more interested in 16-year-old Kendra Eldridge (Lynne Frederick) than solving the mystery of the ants, creepy even for that era. Everyone else was cannon fodder so by the end I didn’t care as much about their fates as I should have.
But the ideas! Spectacular and original barely describe them. Director Bass doesn’t limit his ants’ intelligence to mere acts of malice but has them building oddly designed towers, drilling symmetrical holes in animal flesh and using unconventional warfare to flush out their human antagonists from their protective geodesic dome. The towers alone are worth the watch, standing creepily over the desert like mysterious Easter Island statuary, festooned with alien glyphs and designed with an architecture that weirdly, at least to me, suggested a non-human intelligence.
The inventiveness of the ant intelligence is under-appreciated by movie fans not including the cult worshippers “Phase IV” has amassed over the years, and it is one of those movies you should not only watch but add to your collection, along with “Day of the Triffids,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (original) and “Forbidden Planet,” to name a few.
I was surprised to learn the movie was not shot in Arizona but Kenya, and that it was a box office flop, which sealed Bass’s fate as a director. That’s too bad because “Phase IV” is a classic science fiction film and a wonderful cautionary tale about mankind’s hubris.
I give it an A despite its flaws.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
This photo, taken Dec. 10, 1967, shows the path of a tornado through the Belaire Subdivision of Fort Walton Beach. Our house is at the bottom, slightly left of center.
I wrote this essay on March 25, 1972, which would have made me 16 years old at the time.
TORNADO!
We, being myself, my parents, my younger sister and at the time, my older sister, live in the town of Fort Walton. Fort Walton is a bustling community of about 20,000 people on Florida’s northwest Gulf Coast. Like most other communities of this day, it is threatened by the incessant pincers of commercialism, but of course, that has nothing to do with my story. Although I was only 12 at the time, I remember that morning more vividly than any other day of my life.
On December 10, 1967, at exactly 3:00 AM, I was awakened by the sound of thunder. There was a terrific thunderstorm in progress, one of the most severe I had ever experienced. There had been tornado warnings issued for our county along with several others the night before, bat at the moment, this did not even enter my mind. The lightning was incredible, it was flashing almost continuously and the thunder never halted in roaring. I lay there for 5 minutes listening to the din, when I decided to make a game of it. Using a scale between 1 and 10, I would rate each flash of lightning according to it’s intensity. If an extremely bright flash occurred, I would give it a rating of 7 or 8, and if a dim flash occurred, I would rate 2 or 3. I played this game for 10 minutes, until to my disappointment, the lightning mysteriously ended. The time was 3:15 AM. I lay back, bored once again, and listened to the steady drum of rain upon the roof. Occasionally, one enterprising raindrop would strike one of the pipes that jutted from the roof, sending a tiny “clang” down into the house. I had, by that time, decided to go back to sleep, when something terrible happened.
There was a stupendous flash of light, almost brighter than description. It would compare with confining a person to a pitch black room then suddenly setting a flashbulb off in their eyes. The light was bluer than it was white, and at first, I had thought lightning had struck the house, or either a tree out in the yard. I prepared myself for the thunder that would follow a flash of that proximity, but I was not prepared for what did follow.
A tremendous roar filled the air. Immediately I caught the sound of glass breaking and wood splintering. I kept asking myself what was happening, and I could not believe that this was our house I was hearing destroyed. By now I knew this was not thunder, and could not figure out what was happening. I sat up in bed and turned my head just in time to see a section of glass strike the wall and shatter into a thousand pieces. The terrible roar continued, nearly drowning out the rest of the sounds. The house shook as if some giant hand had grabbed it and was trying to empty it of it’s contents. Even though the curtains were drawn, my room was as bright as day. I have heard that tornadoes are often accompanied by spectacular displays of lighting; this one certainly was. This whole conglomeration of smashing, tearing and roaring took place over a period of about 15 seconds, and I still had not figured out what was going on.
Finally, the sounds grew fainter, then ceased. It grew quiet as death. The next thing I heard was the sound of my mother walking down the hall from her room, assuring me that everything was alright and not to be afraid. Personally, I am certain that she was much more afraid than I, for she would always tell us of her nightmares concerning tornadoes, she has had them years before this happened. I told her that I was alright and asked what had happened. Her reply was that a “little windstorm” had occurred, and it was then that it finally dawned upon me that we had just experienced a tornado. My father was checking on my sisters. After he had done that he retrieved the gas lantern from the utility room, while my mother and older sister started cleaning up the mess. I was not allowed to get out of bed because of the glass on the floor, and I was unable to see because of the lack of light. The lantern was with mother in my sister’s room, and my father had our only flashlight with him in the living room while he covered broken windows with cardboard.
Naturally, a child’s curiosity is the strongest, and after a minor search I discovered a section of one of my old toys that had a flashing light; as good as I could come up with in that situation. The light would stay lit for 2 seconds, then would flash off for 2 seconds, then flash on for 2 seconds. This proved to be aggravating and revealed little. After much persuasion, I managed to wheedle my parents into letting me look around. I went into the living room and stared in amazement at the damage. Almost every window in the system of small rectangular windows that made sort of a picture window were broken out. They had been covered by pieces of plywood and cardboard. Small pine branches, slivers of wood, boards and glass dotted the floor. We found one spear of wood, a wedge shaped piece about a foot long, that gone through the front window, struck the T.V. taking a gouge out of it, then had struck the dining room table and skidded across the surface leaving scratch marks on it, then had struck the dining room window and partially gone through it.
I then visited my sister’s room and saw about the same thing, broke glass, tree branches, and wood. According to my older sister, Sandy, she had been awake when the storm had struck, and looked up just in time to see the windows bulge to an amazing degree, then break.
My parents had both been awake when the storm struck. My mother jumped from her bed and tried to open the door to my sister’s room, but she couldn’t budge it, while my father tried to close one of the open bedroom windows.
After everything had been attended to inside, my father started investigating the damage outside. We had just bought a brand new boat, an aluminum 14 footer, the very day before the storm struck. According to my father who came in about 10 minutes later, it was in our neighbor’s yard against a tree. While outside he had gotten into a comical conversation with that neighbor. It ended with the neighbor saying, “Would you mind getting your boat out of my yard?”
We sat and talked of the storm among ourselves for awhile, in the meantime 2 more of our neighbors came over, each giving his own account of what had happened, and a fireman knocked on the door to see if any of us were injured. After a few more minutes of talk we went to bed. It was 4:00 AM.
Sleep was impossible. It had begun to rain again, though very lightly. During the times of 4:30 and 5:00 AM I heard another rise in the wind and thought we were due for a second performance. It continued to rise but then dropped off. Another peculiar thing happened during this time. I heard a sound similar to chimes ringing in the wind. It sounded as if small pieces of glass were falling to earth. Both my mother and I heard this sound, as we have finally come to the conclusion that it was glass returning to earth, glass that had been sucked up by the storm.
At 6:00 AM we could remain in bed no longer. I remember rising out of bed and dressing myself. This reminded me of Christmas, the contemplating of what was to be seen from those remaining windows like a child will sit and wonder what lies in those gaily decorated packages under the tree. I looked first from my bed room window. There was a large triangular section of a roof that had been stabbed into the yard off to the left. Other than minor debris I could see nothing else from this vantage point. Looking out my sister’s window that faced our next door neighbor, I could see one downed scrub oak tree. The view from my parent’s room offered the best perspective of all. From it I could see twisted trees and sections of homes from who knows where, garbage and objects from patio. But the amazing sight was the house without a roof. We had not known the extent of the damage inflicted upon the area, and we were simply amazed that this had occurred.
As soon as my father had dressed, he, my younger sister and I piled into our 1966 Fairlane, and after dodging downed powerlines we managed to get out of the stricken area and to a gas station to buy fuel for our portable heater, stove and lantern. On the way back to the house we were halted by a National Guardsman. Even after my father explained to him that we lived in the area and had to get back to our house, he still refused to let us pass. Fortunately I knew of a side road we could take, and minutes later we were home, with nothing short of a flat tire.
My mother cooked breakfast, then we all went out to inspect the damage and to proceed with the inevitable cleaning up job.
Some of the tricks the tornado pulled were really amazing and quite frightening. The boat had been latched to it’s trailer and the trailer had been chained to an 18 or more inch thick pine tree with a chain built to resist 700 lbs of pull. Of course, the boat as you know was in our neighbor’s back yard, but the amazing thing was that the chain holding the trailer ahd been snapped and the trailer was lying in the same place, upside down with at least 50 feet of telephone wire wrapped around it! We had 2 garbage sitting beside each other before the storm, but after, one had been carried off, but not before it’s contents had been emptied over the yard. A short needled pine at least 2 feet thick and been twisted 3 times at the base of the trunk and it now lay upon our roof.
These are just a few of the tricks this monster pulled on Fort Walton. A compact car was found in a tree, a man, bed and all was carried into the middle of a 4 lane highway.
Some of the grimmer aspects of the storm was the 3 year old child killed by flying debris, the scores that were injured and hundreds made homeless. The funnel touched down in a major residential area, crossed a small bayou and smashed into another residential area, then after destroying a few businesses and a major discount store of the Gibson chain, it lifted into the clouds. Debris was found more than 20 miles away.
All in all, it was the worst disaster to ever befall Fort Walton. Over 5 million dollars in damage was done, and the city was declared a disaster area by Governor Kirk.
I know that I will never forget it; the story will be told by myself and members of my family for ages to come.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Note: I wrote the following piece when I was 16 years old.
It is an everyday Saturday morning. You have just finished drinking your coffee and reading the paper, and you are now watching a television program for a few minutes before you plan your day’s activities.
Suddenly, your program is interrupted and you see the letters EBS flash onto the television screen. Your first thought is that this is another test of the Emergency Broadcast System. A frantic announcer’s voice appears and says, “This is not a test, I repeat, this is not a test. Northern based radar stations have detected the launching of hundreds of missiles, the estimated time for their arrival is 30 minutes. I repeat, you have 30 minutes to reach safety. …”
Immediately you panic. You circle the room, terrified, completely ignorant as to what to do. You begin to calm yourself so that you can think straight. Your first decision is to reach a bomb shelter, but you have no idea as to where the nearest one is. You center your attention once again to the announcer. He seems to have calmed somewhat also, because he is now busily rattling off street names and the appropriate shelter for these streets.
You listen, and soon he announces your street along with a few neighboring streets and gives the location of their bomb shelter. You are thankful you live in a large city where adequate protection may be found. After hearing the location of your shelter, you hurriedly change your clothes, then go outside, unlatch the garage door and drive to the location.
You are greeted by a locked door. A few others are pounding piteously on it, trying to gain entrance. The shelter has been filled to capacity in minutes. You are sick to your stomach. You shake uncontrollably, and curse yourself for not preparing for this day.
A policeman advises you to go home and construct a makeshift shelter in your basement, if you have one, using heavy furniture for the shelter’s walls. Your hope in renewed.
You return to your car to only discover it has been completely encompassed by other automobiles, making it impossible to move. Forgetting about it, you begin to run home, making it in 3 minutes. You now have 20 minutes left to prepare for the attack.
You stagger into your living room, exhausted from the run, and descend into the basement to inspect the area you have in mind for the makeshift shelter.
A 6 foot long section of concrete, about 5 feet high, protrudes from the wall. It had been constructed for some unknown purpose by the previous owner of the house. You decide to use it plus your couch, two bookshelves and a chester drawers for the remaining walls.
You manage to drag the bulky couch down the stairs and arrange it to your liking, but in the process, you break off one of the legs. The remaining pieces of furniture are easier to carry down. For the roof, you use the only thing possible, a big square slab of plywood. After the shelter has been completed, you turn to gathering supplies.
To your dismay you discover there are no large containers in our house to store water in. You do manage to find a quart container that once held bleach, but the mainstay of your water supply containers are glass jars that you have been cleaned and saved for a recycling project you were part of. There are only 9 of these, and you hare forced to empty a few more jars of food that would normally require refrigeration. After you have gathered your water and hauled it to the shelter, you begin gathering food. You pick out several canned items from the shelf, along with a few containers of milk that will have to be drunk quickly lest they sour, and a few eating utensils. After this has been taken care of, you begin to gather clothes, blankets, and a first aid kit that you have previously bought for your car in case of an accident but had failed to put in the trunk.
You glance at your watch and see that you have 10 minutes left. You get one more jar of water and a few more items to eat. You are terrified, but you feel more secure.
You bend to your knees and pray to God, asking him for his help in your survival. Your prayer is interrupted by a bright flash. It is blinding, even in the center of your home where the light of day rarely falls. You dash down the stairway and enclose yourself in the shelter. Seconds later, there is a terrific thud and a wave of heat. A glass window, the only one in the basement, smashes, showering pieces on the plywood roof. Other windows break. The ground heaves as in an earthquake, causing slight structural damage to your home. It is lucky for you that you live on the outskirts of the city or the damage might have been greater. The foundation of the house shudders and several pipes are ruptured. You sit in pure terror, your heart thudding as never before. The situation you are now in has provided many an author the subject for books, and you did not even enjoy reading them, much less taking part in them. The air becomes incredibly stuffy, and one of your precious jars of water has been broken by the shock wave of the explosion.
You lay there, cramped, hot, damp from the water, you feel sick. It is pitch dark, preventing you from even making out the outline of the walls that surround you. Sleep comes hard. You wake up several times during the night. Once you hear someone prowling about the house and you wish you had a gun. Later that night you wake up and have to use the bathroom. Before the explosion occurred you had arranged a garbage can for a makeshift toilet, and even had a supply of plastic bags to store the waste in. After you finish you tightly bundle the bag with a wire twist, then you remove a drawer from the chester drawer and drop the bag in the can, then, you put the lid on and return the drawer to it’s berth. A highly efficient operation, you think, and commend yourself for your ingenuity. You again sleep till you are unable to any longer. You smell the faint odor of gas and hope that the leak does not poison you. You drink a jar of your water and open a can of mixed vegetables. You then drink the entire quart of milk that you brought along. Your legs ache, and you frequently have to rub cramps out of them. The air is constantly stuffy; you never seem to be able to get enough oxygen. As the day progresses, you become more and more bored. At first, you listen to the sounds of the outside world. Occasionally you hear the sounds of people talking, and once you hear the sounds of a savage fight between two dogs. But other than that, there is complete silence.
You eat, drink, and sit. You become so bored that you frequently daydream and resort to reading the labels on the cans. During the day, a slight amount of light managed to filter it’s way into the shelter, but as it progressed, this decreased in intensity, then disappeared.
You go through the same cycle you did the night before until the next day when the light entered the shelter. You begin exploring the perimeter of your shelter trying to discover something previously unknown. To your surprise and pleasure, you discover a book in one of the drawers. There is not enough light to read by, so you search through your belongings and produce a candle and a book of matches. You set up the candle so that it will not topple, then, taking a match from the book, you light it. There is a “puff” and your enclosure is engulfed in flame for a second. Your hair, eyelashes, nostrils and other portions of your body are burned. Thankfully the shelter did not, but you are flabbergasted by what happened. You wince in pain as you apply a sav from the first aid kit to the worst areas. You later deduce that the gases from the broken pipeline had been trapped in the shelter. You try piteously to read the book, but it is to much of a strain. Feeling sorry for yourself, you burst into tears. After a period of crying, you feel better and sleep.
You wake the next day with a fever. Later in the day you become sick to your stomach, but fight off the urge to vomit. During the night mosquitoes have completely riddled your arms and legs, but you are too sick to care. You do not eat anything that day, and you drink little. The next day you feel better, but because you did not get a tight lid for your garbage can toilet, a terrible stench has resulted. You decide that day you will come out of your shelter. You have been crammed into a tiny area for days, sick, thirsty, cramped, and near death from sheer boredom. You did not know it at the time but you had a mild case of radiation sickness. You eat, use the bathroom, and remove one of the drawers so you may have light to read your book by. When it gets dark, you drink the last container of water, and are able to finally get a decent night of sleep. The next morning you awaken to find yourself totally soaked, and a thin layer of water covering the floor. Somewhere, a water pipe had broken and water was draining into the basement. You rise and unbarricade yourself. It feels wonderful to stretch your weary self. A bright beam of sunshine streaks through the broken window, displaying the cracked woodwork above your head.
You ascend the stairs and explore the house. The water is coming from the kitchen. A broken pipe juts through the floor amid broken glass. In fact, every window in your house is broken. The house across the street has completely burned to the ground. Down the street you can see a camp with many tents and a Red Cross truck parked nearby.
You find the gas valve and shut it off, take a drink of water that remains in the pipes, then change your filthy clothes, and leave your house to see what has become of the world.
This has been a story of what could happen to anyone in a time of nuclear war. The person in the story was extremely lucky in surviving.
What did he (or she) do wrong?
The first thing was that she panicked. No mater how hard it may seem, you must stay calm in a situation like this. One cannot think clearly if in a panic.
The worst thing she did was not planning ahead. She did not know where the bomb shelter was among a multitude of other things. You should know the location of the nearest bomb shelter to your home. In the story, when she did discover the shelter’s whereabouts, she took no supplies with her, and she drove to it. Bomb shelters are limited in the amounts and types of supplies they can carry. You should take clothing and any other materials needed for your family. You should not drive unless you can park somewhere out of the way. The roads should be left open for emergency and military vehicles.
If you do not think you could reach a public shelter, construct one of your own in your basement or back yard. A temporary shelter can be constructed out of heavy furniture such as the one in the story. It would be best to take advantage of any shielding you can possibly find. If you happen to have a piece of furniture in your temporary shelter with drawers in them fill them with sand. Be sure that your shelter is well ventilated.
You should have several plastic gallon containers handy for the storage of water.
You should also have food that can be kept over long periods of time without spoiling. Items such as clothes, blankets, utensils and medical supplies are also very important. You should make sure your utilities are shut off (gas and water), because like in the story, a pipe could be broken and you could be poisoned or catch some diseases from water that has flooded your shelter.
A makeshift toilet can be made from a garbage can. Small portable toilets can be bought, the garbage can is used for disposal. Make sure the lid fits tight or you could wind up like the person in the story. You should also carry some type of insect spray.
There are hundreds of other suggestions I could give you, but probably the most important is to acquire a Civil Defense manual. In this book, everything you would like and need to know is covered and written simple enough for nearly anyone to understand.
It could, some day, save not only your, but your family’s life.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
“Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” Starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, James Earl Jones and Slim Pickens. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. 93 minutes. Rated “approved.”
Mladen’s take
Ever have one of these days?
You can’t find the car keys until you’re already late for work. Then, the starter clicks a couple of times before cranking the engine. Finally on the road, you get a flat tire. While you’re changing the flat, the vehicle slips off the jack and crushes your foot. In the ER, you get a doctor who has prescribed himself a few too many medications and he mucks repairing your foot. An infection comes along while you’re recovering from the faulty service. Antibiotics fail and the only way to contain the infection is by amputating your leg. The intern performing the amputation sneezes during the procedure, severing your femoral artery. You die.
The simile illustrates, roughly, what happens in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
I watched the 1964 movie a couple of weeks ago. It’s clear that “Dr. Strangelove” is entirely relevant today. In short, Kubrick imagines thermonuclear Armageddon unfolding as a series of seemingly absurd, unlikely events stacking atop each other until the only people left alive are the ones who made the all-destructive atomic war possible.
The idea in “Strangelove” that mistakes, be they failures of thought or products of psychosis would lead to the planet’s fiery, H-bomb-induced demise could have come from today’s headlines. A USAF bomber was flown from North Dakota to Louisiana in August 2007 with six nuclear warhead-tipped cruise missiles hanging from a rack. No one at the wing, including the flight crew, knew the nukes were aboard the bomber until it arrived at Barksdale Air Force Base. A year earlier, American supply troops sent ICBM nose cone fuzes to Taiwan thinking they were helicopter parts.
Attention to details, particularly the movie’s calm demeanor as the B-52 crew receives the order to nuke an adversary and the meticulous, as-a-matter-of-fact way it arms a warhead, left me feeling that war was largely a bureaucratic affair uprooted from consequences. Following procedures, rather than questioning them, drove humanity over the edge in “Strangelove.”
To me, “Strangelove” offers sardonic relief best captured in the military motto – “Peace is our profession” – that frequently appears in the movie. I know nuclear holocaust is on the way. You know nuclear holocaust is on the way. Kubrick and “Strangelove” allow me to laugh at the prospect.
Del‘s take
At the risk of dating myself I remember the Cuban missile crisis, backyard bomb shelters and drills where we kids would be hustled into an interior room at the school to ride out the onslaught of inbound ICBMs.
It was not funny.
But that was life in the early ‘60s and oddly my recollection of those events seems framed in a black-and-white panorama of worry and fear, much like “Dr. Strangelove,” which deploys its dark humor to accentuate the absurdity of mutually assured destruction.
For those of you who missed this cinematic classic, here’s the plot: An Air Force general becomes convinced the communists are subverting America through fluoridated water. He dispatches a wing of nuclear-armed B-52s to destroy the Soviet Union. The Strategic Air Command is made aware of the situation and huddles with the president in the “War Room” to devise a strategy for recalling the bombers. The Russian ambassador is brought in and reveals the existence of a “doomsday device,” a network of cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs that will spread lethal radiation across the world if Russia is nuked. The bombers are recalled, but one, damaged by an anti-aircraft missile, continues on its mission. …
“Strangelove” provides a canvas for stunning performances by George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens and most notably Peter Sellers of “Pink Panther” fame, who plays three roles, that of R.A.F. Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound Nazi scientist who wages a minute-by-minute battle with his black-gloved hand for control of his loyalties – to his new American friends or his old friends at the Reichstag.
But “Strangelove’s” best performance comes from the screenplay, written by director Stanley Kubrick, which skewers all the institutions Americans relied on to guide them through the Cold War: the military, the government, and what most people would call common sense. As the B-52s streak toward the Soviet Union, Scott’s Gen. Buck Turgidson argues for an all-out attack – and why not? “We could catch them with their pants down!” Turgidson enthuses.
“Strangelove” is so steeped in historical context that nobody under the age 45 is likely to grasp its sophistication and nuance – a skill of perception sadly lacking in contemporary audiences. Yet “Strangelove” is one of the 20th century’s greatest films, serving up a damning indictment of bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex and a simple-minded us-or-them worldview that cannot exist in today’s interconnected global village.
“Gentlemen!” President Muffley shouts as Turgidson and Russian ambassador Alexi de Sadesky grapple over a secret camera. “You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
As John McCain might say, “That, my friends, is ‘Dr. Strangelove. ’ ”
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical editor. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
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