Breaking the Code

The Da Vinci Code was on a cable movie channel the other night, so I recorded it to watch again at my leisure. I saw it in theaters when it came out, and I was confounded as to how the filmmakers could break such a filmable novel. Say what you will about the book, it’s got thriller written all over it. I watched the first eighty minutes last night, up until the point they arrive in London, and I realized that they broke it in a number of ways. First off, Tom Hanks isn’t Robert Langdon. I don’t know who is, but it ain’t him. He’s too dry and stiff. Langdon’s smart, but he’s also adventurous, whereas Hanks seems completely out of his depth. This is a man who, after all, has already had the Angels and Demons experience as part of his backstory, so he should be a little more hip to things. Secondly, I think they went too C.S.I. cinematically. By that I mean they spent way too much time explaining stuff. There’s a certain amount of exposition necessary to set up the context, but I don’t think it was necessary to go inside the little code cylinder, for example, to show how it works at the same time as a character is explaining how it works. This isn’t a forensics movie—it’s a thriller, something I think the filmmakers forgot. I love Audrey Tatou and Ian McKellan is brilliant, but the energetic pace of the book got lost in all the trappings. I hope they do a better job of Angels and Demons, which is a better novel in any case.

The first review of Gratia Placenti appears in Dark Scribe magazine, and it’s a doozy. Many anthology reviews give each story a sentence or two at best, but this one dedicates a lot of virtual ink to each tale. Here’s what Michele Lee said about my story:

Bev Vincent’s “Popup Killer” starts with a scene familiar to many a Web surfer. When protagonist Nate gets an annoying popup ad that refuses to go away, he follows the link to Truist.corp, where the enigmatic Al asks him for a name of someone in his life whose removal would make Nate’s life better. Scoffing in disbelief, Nate clicks off. But Al’s words linger, and Nate eventually revisits the site and gives up a name. The next day, like dark magic, an annoying co-worker named Ted never existed, and only Nate and Al seem to remember the name at all. Al insists that Nate should give him more names, citing three to five as the average number of names that the people Al helps surrender to him. But Nate’s life is not enriched by the erasing of these bothersome forces in his life, and he soon learns the expansive affects of Al’s strange ability to eliminate lives. “Popup Killer” is instantly familiar to the modern Internet user, and it ventures into a cavernous electronic world rich in raw genre material yet to be fully mined by writers of dark fiction. With “Popup Killer”, Vincent brings a well-written, cautionary tale to the star power of Gratia Placenti’s pages.

Gratia Placenti would make a great stocking stuffer for all the horror fans on your Christmas list! It’s available directly from Apex Publications here.

I resubmitted a story on Sunday to keep my idle log clear. This one was going to the UK, so it’ll be out for a while, especially given the holiday mail crunch. I spent some time editing the story in progress this morning, and sent it to my first reader for feedback. It’s a little grittier than my stories tend to be. Also my first exploration of a currently popular horror trope, though I approach it from a different direction.

Season 3 of LOST is available on DVD today. Wal-Mart is the only place offering the bonus disc normally available at Best Buy, I hear. The behind-the-scenes stuff I’ve read about sounds interesting. I’m looking forward to revisiting the episodes in preparation for the launch of the new season in a couple of months.