I Am Your Horror Hard-On, Fanboy!

Vance O'Rourke's Custom Painted Shoes


Admittedly, I haven't been much of a "shoe guy" most of my life. A way of living that belies both my status as a queer fella (apparently) and the fact that I've been a professional pedestrian for nearly a decade now. You'd think that someone who uses their feet to get everywhere would be either more concerned with their dainty pair o'puffs' level of comfort, or I'd pay more attention to their style. No and no. It's been Chuck Martins high-tops, standard black for several years now and hell if I don't wear them right down to their cheaply produced rubber soled nub. Nonetheless, my husband Daniel (who most definitely is a shoe guy) has made some headway on me of late, his enthusiam for footgear having become slightly infectious. But thankfully not to endemic (at $60 a pop, he'd own 40 pairs if he could and we'd quite literally be the old maids that lived in their shoes).Now thanks to him, not only do I own a pair of Chuck Martin hightops (alas, the standard black, they just go with everything) but I also own a pair of Chuck Martin hightops of the hot pink variety (still trying to get under my overly conservative mother's skin after all these years, I know I know). Oh, and a pair of DC slipons that have seen better days at this point. Okay three. I've become quite the conniseur right (okay, maybe not yet). Anyway, amidst this burgeoning desire to possess nifty little sneakers to bulwark my size ten-and-a-halfs, I came across Vance O'Rourke's custom shoe work.



Looks like it's time to hide my wallet under lock and key somewhere (not to mention keep my husband in the dark). A dedicated painter, Mr. O'Rourke has parlayed his talent into both the medium of tattooing and custom painting shoes and by the looks of the examples provided us, they're both pretty phenomenal. Though honestly, I won't even let the daydream of having my own personal ideas serviced onto a pair of his Vans enter my mind lest it be all I daydream about (hmmm, a Lamberto Bava's Demons collage complete with Geretta Geretta snarling forth from my big toe... Shit! Fuck!). As it is, the work that Vance O'Rourke has already accomplished is drool worthy (and yes, I need a bucket secured snuggly beneath my chin for the duration of writing this piece). At either rate, if I ever could afford a pair of his shoes (I'm not certain of their price, but a new pair of sneakers is not in the budget right now regardless), I don't know whether I would sport them out in public, or gift them to our mannequin that stands sentinel over our game room for longivity and safe keeping where I would no doubt stare at them for hours on end. They're that cool.



For those of you interetsed in purchasing Vance O'Rourke's work, or having a pair of your own customly designed shoes created, you may do so by visting his site here.

I Am Your Horror Hard-On, Fanboy!

In The Mouth Of Madness - Sutter Cane Collection

Back in 1995 John Carpenter released his love letter to all things H.P. Lovecraft in the form of In The Mouth Of Madness. The film wasn't very well received at the time. Critics hated it and the fans stayed away in droves (I wasn't one of them). By the time it had been in theaters for a month, it had only managed to rake in a disappointing $8,671,748. Still, it has enjoyed a relatively healthy afterlife on the home video market and finally, after all these years, found itself an appreciative audience. I'll be honest, the film is full of glaring flaws and missed opportunities but yet has enough merit to make it worth any horror fan's time. There are moments (sporadic though they might be) wherein the film comes to magnificent, creepy, atmospheric life.


Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow) is the world's best-selling author of the macabre whose newest novel is literally driving readers insane. When he inexplicably vanishes, his publisher (Charlton Heston) sends special investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) to track him down. Drawn to the town of Hobb's End, which only exists in Cane's books, Trent crosses the barrier between fact and fiction and enters a terrifying world from which there is no escape.



For years after viewing the film I was taken with the notion of how gosh-darn-cool it would have been if there existed some sort of media tie-in coinciding with the film's release wherein a published version of one of Sutter Cane's novels made it on to bookshelves. The film didn't help out my nerdy salivation at the idea by presenting within it's plot, delicious morsels of information about what some of those novels would have contained. That and those lurid book covers just fueled the fire.


Flashing forward to the present, talk about a geek-gasm! It came to my attention recently that these nonexistent Sutter Cane "novels", authentic props from John Carpenter's In The Mouth Of Madness, had been up for auction on eBay last year. Of course they're not real despite how convincing they look. Indeed, I imagine that if you were to crack the spine they would be full of blank, white pages but who cares, right? You'd be holding them in your hands, and as every good fanboy knows how to do, you could pretend. You could imagine.


According to the listing on eBay, all six books, which comprise the bibliography of Sutter Cane (save for the film's titular novel, In The Mouth Of Madness, which wasn't offered as part of the collection) were signed by special effects wizard Robert Kurtzman with a letter of authenticity written for us skeptical folks. Unfortunately, as much as it was a fanboy delusion on my part that these novels should one day exist (with text on the pages from beginning to end) so too is the dream that I could ever hope to own even the dummy copies. At the time, the seller's Buy It Now asking price was $2,499. I'm sure that if I had just picked up an extra job or three...


In the end, I'm not privy to knowing what they ultimately sold for (sorry) but I am certain beyond a doubt, that somewhere out there, there is a very pleased Carpenter fan gazing appreciatively at his or her bookshelf.

"Lived any good books lately?"