SQUAD THIRTEEN – It’s official

THEY WERE DESIGNATED SQUAD THIRTEEN.  Unstoppable, uncontrollable killers, walking nightmares. To be contained and deployed for the worst emergencies, hellmouths, vampiric infestations, zombie outbreaks, alien incursions. When it’s mad, bad and out of control, when the situation is hopeless and everything has gone to hell, they send in Squad Thirteen.

When Squad Thirteen shows up, there will be no survivors. The good, the bad, the heroes and the monsters, the ones who fight, the ones who run, the ones who hide, the guilty and the innocent… It doesn’t matter.

Everyone dies.

WHO ARE SQUAD THIRTEEN?

SQUAD THIRTEEN – The story of unkillable, unstoppable slashers drafted by the military, assembled into a unit, evil wielded as a weapon against other evils. A book about walking nightmares existing only to destroy everything and everyone in their path.  But can evil really be controlled?  Perhaps the solution is worse than the problems?

The General – The Commander of Squad Thirteen, a no-nonsense military man, charged with directing unstoppable evil.

The Lieutenant – The final girl, desperately holding onto the fragments of her humanity. Where she goes, the Squad follows. Nominally, she’s assigned to lead monsters, but the only thing to do with faceless killing machines is get out of their way.

Jackson – a hulking unstoppable monstrosity behind a battered plastic face plate. He carries and uses all sorts of tools. But he’s at his worst when wielding with a machete. Jackson is unstoppable destruction.

Michaels – tall, relentless, ruthless, Michaels wears a white corpse mask. He never speaks, he never laughs, he never feels pain or fear. All he does is kill, without pity or emotion, and move on to the next victim.

Sawyer – wearing the tanned skins of his victims, dressed in motley, his weapon is a chainsaw. Sawyer is almost childlike, he likes to dance, he likes to show off. Sawyer likes to spend time with his victims, no matter how much they beg for death.

Vernon – slim, graceful, tricks and traps, don’t go into a house where Vernon has been. Vernon enjoys his work. You won’t.

Dapper – small, slender, dressed in a white suit, with a red devil mask, he dances and kills with a small knife. He can peel a human being like an apple, and in less time.

Pigman – A hulking hillbilly, wearing a hollowed out rotting pig’s head, carrying a rusty scythe. He’s a walking slaughterhouse, and he enjoys his work.

Shroud – dressed in flowing black robes, wearing a cattle skull for a headpiece, it hides in shadows. By the time you see it, it’s too late.

The Kid – Looking like a twelve year old, his mask is hand knit balaclava, he has a beach towel worn as a cape. He’s like an innocent boy playing hero. But when he laughs, people die.

Fetish – wearing a gas mask, a skinny, bony body covered head to toe in black latex, Fetish’s weapon is a gauntlet of chains and razor blades. Pain and pleasure are the same to him, but not to his victims.

Hood – Wearing casual clothes, wears a burlap sack with a single hole in it, covering a head that never seems to be the same shape. Whatever is under the Hood’s sack and clothes, it might have been human once. It isn’t now.

Scarecrow – wearing rags, a painted cloth for a face, leaving straw wherever he goes, and using a pair of rusty sickles to dismember. Scarecrow likes to wait, still and inanimate, until his victims come close enough.

And more…

WHERE DID THIS IDEA COME FROM?

From Slasher movies, obviously. It’s actually fairly simple, all these slasher movie villains, the idea of a team up of some kind just presents itself.

But let’s take a moment out to examine the overlooked and mostly disrespected genre of the Slasher.  The first one wasn’t the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), but a Canadian offering, Black Christmas (1973) featuring Keir Dullea (the Starlost guy).

The basic idea was a mysterious, perhaps unstoppable killer, slowly hunting down a series of victims.

It took time for the genre to evolve. Black Christmas contains only the bare bones. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre introduced Leatherface, but he’s only a relatively secondary character, in the baroque madhouse world inspired by the real life Ed Gein.

Halloween (1978) introduced Michael Myers, but even John Carpenter didn’t see Myers and his mask as iconic, after reappearing in a sequel, Myers was abandoned and Halloween III took off in a different direction and failed disastrously. They had to bring Myers back, building his legend with each film.

Friday the 13th (1980) didn’t even feature Jason Voorhees. The villain is his mother. Jason only shows up in a cameo at the end as a deformed boy in the lake. He doesn’t appear as the killer until the next movie, and he doesn’t acquire his iconic hockey mask until the third movie. It’s not until the fifth movie that he becomes the unstoppable zombie we all know and love.

It’s ironic that the slashers themselves were almost secondary characters in their original movies. They only emerged over time, moving to the foreground, becoming the iconic monsters of 80s and 90s.

Equally, no one person, or one movie really created the slasher genre.  The key elements evolved bit by bit.  The tropes came together almost gradually, building up, merging, coalescing, adapting from one movie to the next.

A lot of these movies were cheap and thrown together. There’s nothing wrong with that, people have to learn somewhere. If you wanted to make a movie, you didn’t have much money or experience, well, Mission Impossible was out of the question. But you might be able to pull off a slasher and find a willing audience to actually make some money, particularly as the elements of the genre congealed and became established.

We started with the ‘Ten Little Indians’ murder plotline, to get people together to be killed, you needed an isolated location. Then simple killings were boring, so you had to jolt the audience. Someone had to survive to the end, so you evolved the final girl. The killer had to be mysterious so you evolved all sorts of tricks, the killers POV shots, and eventually the idea of the killer being masked and literally faceless.

This in turn added to the genre, ineptitude gave us people doing stupid things, running into traps and dead ends, splitting up to go looking, sneaking off to have sex.  Formula meant we had to have young people, they had to be isolated and vulnerable. So they went to camp, or parties, had sleepovers, went on road trips, got lost, took dares to go into haunted houses or forbidden buildings. It was all mechanics.

But it also gave us killers that were seemingly unstoppable, that through the magic of bad writing and bad editing, seemed to appear in two places at once, or kept coming back to life.

Bit by bit, a classic movie monster emerged – The Slasher – hulking, indestructible, seemingly unstoppable. They could soak up horrible injuries and somehow keep on coming, and even when you thought they were dead, they’d just come back anyway, somehow. The Slasher worked with knives, machetes, drills and saws, the point was that their murders were up close and personal (and messy). In tune with their low end weapons, they dressed casually, in overalls or labourers clothing. They wore signature masks, becoming both faceless and monstrous. They didn’t talk, there was no witty repartee, they just stalked and killed.

At least, right up until the final girl, when they became stumblebums and finally got put down. Or were unmasked and revealed to be whiny crybabies. But up to those moments, they were terrifying.

And yes, these movies were often brutal, illogical and stupid. But you know what? Their audience loved them. The teenagers of the 80s and 90s ate these movies up like popcorn, even though they and their friends were typically the victims.

That’s kind of a paradox – teens loving movies where they were the victims – but not as much as you might think. Being a teenager in that era was stressful. In the Slasher movies, kids are always killed for being horny, for wanting or actually having sex. That might seem puritanical, but actually, it reflected the lives of the audience. They were hormonal, thinking of sex constantly, wanting it, dreaming of it, seeking it out. But at the same time, this sex they so desperately craved came with those scary downsides – pregnancy, STD’s, even how and where to do it.  No one really expected to be impaled by Jason Voorhees in the middle of the act, but getting caught in the act by your parents arriving home early was a real possibility, and most teens in that situation, would have preferred being killed by Jason.

As stupid and brain damaged as these movies were, they actually did speak to their audience. They spoke to an audience of young people whose lives were in transition, who were caught on the cusp of adulthood, still safe, still happy, with their families and friends, but also outgrowing it, wanting desperately to move on, but deeply unsure of what the future held or whether they were ready for it.  If young people were the victims, it was because young people felt like victims, they felt vulnerable and insecure, and that’s what projected on the screen. There was always the survivors to reassure the audience that as bad as it got, with smarts and luck, perserverance and being quick on their feet, they could survive an overwhelming menace.

No longer children, not yet adults, the saw themselves and their friends in these movies, and the Slasher, with his working class stylings, his facelessness and his relentlessness, represented a world that they weren’t sure how to face. A world and a future that was terrifying.

But  as bad as it got, alone in the dark, when the chips were down, and we were on our own facing life without friends or family to rescue us, the final girls showed us that we could make it.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK?

Because it’s fun. Because it’s wicked, unapologetic fun. Because it offers thrills and chills, and the deliciousness of scares and dares, as we watch monsters go up against other monsters.

Because it’s chock full of crazy, crunchy slasher goodness. We have Colombian drug lords, giant centipedes from another dimension, killer hippos, wendigos, Lovecraftian abominations, pagan gods, creeps, critters and nightmares…and you can’t even be sure which ones are the good guys.

It’s got shivers and chills, and awful foreboding. It’s got the delicious delight of every slasher movie you ever saw, crossed over, tossed into a blender, amped up to eleven and shot out of a cannon. And after that, it gets crazy.

“It’s not human, and it’s got an axe!”  That’s probably the greatest tagline ever.  Just makes you want to go out and rent it, it’s so intriguing and rife with possibilities.  That’s what I’m going for, that insane, wild, reckless journey into chaos.

Look – this is not literature. I’m going to be honest.  I’m not writing this because I have an important statement about the human condition. Your teachers won’t give this as assigned reading in schools. I don’t have an important lesson I want to teach. I refuse to have a message.  I don’t want to change your life. I’m not angling for the Nobel Prize in literature here.

This is just going to be evil fun, with no apologies. The World can still benefit from a few guilty pleasures done right.

Fair Warning:  This book will not make you a better person. It will not cure cancer, balance the budget, mow your lawn, pet your dog, or teach your cat to speak French.

This book might possibly ruin your sleep or make you question your faith in humanity. Don’t give this book to children or be caught with it in a secret military facility. It might make people look at you weird.

But  you will enjoy it.

WHO AM I TO WRITE THIS BOOK?

D.G. Valdron, at your service.  Writer, raconteur, horror maven, and general weird guy.  I’ve written over twenty books and had numerous short story publications in magazines, exploring grimdark fantasy, bizarre alternate history, funny fantasy, horror, science fiction and everything else in between.

I grew up working at a Drive-In Theatre. I started out picking up the yard, but did security, installed and fixed speakers, ran projectors, worked in the ticket office and canteen and manhandled those old 34 reel cans.

I was raised on a solid diet of B-movies, Cult classics, junk cinema and low grade horror.  Throw in a steady stream of sci fi and cult television, from Monty Python to Star Trek, and a voracious  habit of reading science fiction, fantasy and horror…  and frankly, I’m amazed that I turned out as well as I did.

MY PREVIOUS BOOK

STARLOST UNAUTHORIZED AND THE QUEST FOR CANADIAN IDENTITY – A serious nonfiction work exploring the 1973 Canadian Television series created and later denounced by Harlan Ellison.

How did it turn out?  Well, I got great review in the prestigious Ottawa Review of Books, Amazing Stories Magazine, and the Toronto Star.

Here’s what some fans had to say:

“An important and well-researched work on a unique expression of Canadian cultural history.”

“This is a terrific book on a much-maligned or otherwise-unremembered science fiction TV show from 1973… Valdron’s sympathetic viewpoint towards STARLOST is perfect: it lets us see the hurdles the show’s producers had to jump, in order to produce any kind of show at all; he gives us explanations for the show’s flaws, but never doles out fannish excuses…. And it’s such a good hearted and thoughtful work as well (and funny, and approachable, too).

“Valdron has combined years of research and interviews along with episode synopsis and reviews into a single volume that doesn’t just chart the creation of the short lived series, but goes into how the socio-political landscape here in Canada at the time influenced the show in very profound ways.”

So, I’ve gone from Starlost Unauthorized to Squad Thirteen. Kind of like stepping off a cliff, ain’t it.  But I like to live a little, spread my wings, live dangerously.

Previous works include…

Giant Monsters Sing Sad Songs, There Are no Doors in Dark Places and What Devours Also Hungers – three collections fo horror stories

Drunk Slutty Elf and Drunk Slutty Elf and Zombies, two collections of funny fantasy.

The Mermaid’s Tale, a grimdark fantasy murder mystery

Axis of Andes and New World War, a blazing alternate history about WWII in South America.

Bear Cavalry, Dawn of Cthulhu and Fall of Atlantis, excursions into alternate histories.

The Pirate Histories of Doctor Who, exploring unseen corners of the Whoniverse – fan films, stage plays, authorized and unauthorized audio and animation, and the intersections fo fandom, culture, technology and creativity.

Currently, I am at large, not institutionalized, and have successfully evaded pursuit by international law enforcement.  Scientists around the world are working at breakneck pace for a vaccine against me, but currently, there is no cure or even an effective treatment.

So guaranteed, I am the guy to write this book.

WHO IS NYM

NYM PRODUCTIONS is well known locally for his unconventional and styliized takes on pop culture and exotic themes, including horror, fantasy and science fiction.

NYM PRODUCTIONS writes, draws and produces the “Outright Horror” series.

https://outrighthorror.weebly.com/

FOSSIL COVE PUBLISHING

Although I’ve been published or had contracts with Five Rivers Publishing, At Bay Press and Renaissance Press, my main publisher is Fossil Cove Publishing, a small press out of my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Dating to 2016, Fossil Cove has also published other authors, notably Eve St. Albert, Scott Ellis and R.J. Hore.

They will be publishing Squad Thirteen. Unless, there’s a bigger, better offer from a bigger publisher.