The Mumpsimus

original image by Joseph Maclise In the Weird Fiction Review conversation I had with Eric Schaller , Eric asked me to talk a bit about designing the cover of Blood: Stories , and in my recent WROTE Podcast conversation , I mentioned an alternate version of the cover that starred Ronald Reagan (this was, in fact, the cover that my publisher originally thought we should use, until she couldn't get the image we ended up using out of her mind). I thought it might be fun to share some of the mock-ups I did that we didn't use — the covers that might have been...

Will Lasky at The House Next Door suggests that The Fall is destined to be a cult classic, and that seems right to me. It's a movie that causes viewers to split quite strongly, some feeling the film is visionary and powerful, others finding it pretentious and boring. Inevitably, as we try to tell people what we thought of the movie and what the experience of watching it is like, we compare it to other films -- The Princess Bride comes up a lot, but I think that's a bit misleading, and likely to cause dissatisfaction in a viewer who watches The Fall expecting the other film's whimsy. A closer approximation would be Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , a movie that is as full of stories-within-stories as Princess Bride and The Fall , and also shares The Fall's darker view of human motivations, attention to imagery, and sometimes messy (some might even say flabby ) narrative structure. The other particularly valid comparison, I think, is to th...