Bava Bio Book of the Year?

It's too soon to say -- since it's just off to the printer this past week -- but I daresay I've not been this eager to hold a book in my hands since the announcement of Joe Kubert returning to Tor (via the Epic series), or Ray Harryhausen's first book coming out back in the 1970s.

The image Tim and Donna built this cover around is burned into my braincells, searing seven-year-old Bissette's young Catholic mind as no other movie image had or would for years.

It's hard to communicate today how potent a film like Black Sunday was in the early '60s, just after the modern horror film was born (via Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom) but before it had become the mirror of that decade that the genre became (via George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Michael Reeves's The Witchfinder General aka The Conqueror Worm). Mario Bava's black-and-white phantasmagoria spoke louder and clearer to me of matters of the soul, good and evil, and the power of light over darkness than any of the "religious" films I'd been subjected to at that tender age (at that time, Charlton Heston epics like Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments were required viewing, even at age five and six).

More on Bava, and Tim's new book, in coming posts...

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I've just completed two new interviews with Bryan Talbot -- another for PaneltoPanel.net, and one for this blog -- which will be online soon. More info, and the Myrant interview, soon!

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Gotta run, be back later today...