Four guys in one car and three girls in another head out to a cabin in the Norwegian alps. The forth girl, Sara (Ann Dahl Torp), dating the token cutie (Vegar Hoel), has gone on ahead, and, unbeknownst to her friends has met a grizzly end. The gang settle into the cabin—cue snow-fights, beer-guzzling, and a truly disgusting sex-in-the- shitter scene—to wait for Sara to join them. One dark and stormy night, a grizzled hiker calls by and tells them a tale of Nazi torture and pillaging in years gone by. Although played for laughs, the subtext for this scene, like that of the entire movie, is the brutal German occupation of Norway and the country’s spirited resistance.

Heil to the yeah. The undead platoons close in on the cabin, picking off the students by one in a frenzy of flying limbs, buried war chests, and dead-cherry snow. Did I mention bowel? Lots of bowel. The action scenes are tight and the Nazi Zombies are fully sick in their SS drag. Upside-down teeth, Francis Bacon eyes, green skin. The kids are good too, more realistic than your average Hollywood fare. Chubby, boring, and inarticulate. One’s allergic to blood, another has a thing for erotic asphyxiation. Your typical med students. But in their own way perhaps more interesting than the interchangeable paper dolls we’ve come to expect in US B-ville fare. So, you know, we almost care when they get bit.

Yeah, you can drive a Panzer division through some of the plot holes, but the Colonel Klink Zombi (Orjan Gamst) is a trip, and some of the shots are superb. A hoard of trench-coated undead push through the surface of the snow like crocuses in the devil’s garden. Spring-time for Hitler? Some memories will never die.

LitReactor previews Ten Obvious Truths about Fiction, an essay on craft by the category-defying Stephen Graham Jones.

Really, any scene that’s only getting across what’s happening on the surface of that scene—two guys loading boxes into a truck, say—then that scene’s dead. Instead, let those two men load boxes, but only one of them knows the other’s tranquilized pet is in one of the boxes. It changes everything, for the better.

Annie Murphy Paul at The New York Times finds fiction readers have better brains.

A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television.

But even more interestingly, or obviously, this article offers a scientific explanation for why we sometimes remember fictional characters as real. To our brains, they are.

There is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

Back to LitReactor, and Zanesville author Kris Saknussemm joins an illustrious line-up of instructors for a workshop starting in April. Saknussemm, fresh from his Reverend America Tour tackles place, a subject dear to the heart of this oft-displaced writer. Tell him I sent you.

Over at The Cult, Chuck Palahniuk is offloading the faux Yin Yang table from The Fight Club to raise money for a Portland Dog shelter. If you live in Portland, he’ll even come over and help you assemble it, so get out your Allenkeys, people.

And finally Ian McEwan at The Guardian draws parallels between science and literature over issues of originality, not nearly so much an anachronism in this digital age as you’d think.

[Darwin’s] reluctance to upset his wife Emma’s religious devotion, or to contradict the theological certainties of his scientific colleagues, or to find himself in the unlikely role of iconoclast, a radical dissenter in Victorian society, all were swept aside for fear of another man taking possession of and getting credit for the ideas he believed to be his.

Rear view mirrors of the mind.

I think about the instability of polarities, how to be at our most human and alive is paradoxically to resemble an exquisite corpse. Remade at every turn, scarred and burned, and fuck you very much, here I am.

read more, here.

What’s interesting among other things is that the electric rifles used in Twenty Thousand Leagues… were later (1969) revisited by Thomas Cover when he invented the TASER, which is an acronym for Thomas A Swift’s Electric Rifle. Tom Swift (Swift by name and nature!)being the teenage hero of the juvenile scifi book series launched by Victor Appleton (a pseudonym) in 1910, and obviously referencing Verne.

I think, in fact, that the question is who am I now? I think that’s important. I knew who I was once but then it was like, gone. Someone dies or your family changes in some way, or you undertake a major move, or you finish or start something. It changes who you are. It really does, fundamentally. I mean I think that. I think that there is no essential you. I think you are who you are now. I need to think that because sometimes I want to be better, or different, and I like to think I can change. Having children fundamentally changed me. I was a lonely, nerdish, party girl, and having kids made me into a she-wolf. Who am I now that they are out in the world? Who am I now that I am a displaced nerdish writer? I’d like to be a she-wolf about my words, too. But I mean, that doesn’t describe me, really. My sister had therapy to deal with dying. She had cancer and took counseling to deal with it. She called me on the way home from work to see how my first session in therapy went. She said,

‘Don’t worry, if it doesn’t tell you EVERYTHING. If it only tells you one thing, or maybe two, then it’s worth it. It told me how to deal with death,’ she said.

This was the first time she’s actually expressed this. My sister is no longer dying. But for many years she held death within her as a cold kernel of possibility that set her apart from the rest of the world. It was who she was. It’s been ten years and she’s dealt with it. Now she’s a counselor in disadvantaged schools. That’s who she is now. She is the kind of person who will say on the phone to her sister, Therapy helped me deal with dying.

I read an article about a soldier from San Diego who was badly burnt in Afghanistan when his Humvee drove over a buried mine. It ignited the fuel tank and killed his team leader. Specialist Joey Paulk regained consciousness twenty feet from the vehicle engulfed in flames. On the day that he finally confronted his reflection in the mirror, he didn’t recognize himself.

‘His swollen lower lip hung below his gums. His left lower eyelid drooped hound dog-like, revealing a scarlet crescent of raw tissue. His nostrils were squeezed shut, his chin had virtually disappeared and the top half of one ear was gone. Skin grafts crisscrossed his face like lines on a map, and silver medicine coated his scars, making him look like something out of a Terminator film.’

‘This is who I am now,’ he said.

What? Who? The Terminator? ‘Like something out of a Terminator film’? What does that mean? There is no Joey Paulk that exists somewhere outside of those injuries. He’s not the same person any more. He has to learn how to be who he is now. I found his story inspiring, desperate, anguishing. All those meaningless words. I worked for a while as movie reviewer. The catch phrase among us, was, ‘What’s another word for ‘good’?’ What’s another word for ‘Terminator?’ If he can do it, I must. We think death is the ultimate journey from which there is no return, and maybe it is, maybe it’s the blockbuster. But life is the limited season miniseries. We leave bits of ourselves behind. We pick up new bits. It’s confusing. Shakespeare was right. We strut and fret. Shakespeare hid behind his work. That was probably a good call.

No. Give me Mary Tyler Moore any day. Saw the last show in the series last night on cable. Wow. I don’t think any of us realize just how radical this chick, this show was in its day. Compare Mary’s take on marriage to the reactionary right as espoused by Michele Bachmann.

And now it’s raining all the time. The air is cold but humid. I want to wash my hair every day. I felt like a slug at yoga. The animals are going nuts.

Because, you know, it’s not always easy to say which is which—the good self and the bad. Which the harbinger and which the savior?

Pulp never lies.

Anyway, the story is set just outside my home town, a place I’ve renamed Union Falls in previous work, near Moonshine Falls, NY. My friends and I used to hang out at the falls when we were kids. Ride our bikes there and splash in the gullies, wear bright clothing so the poachers’ rifles wouldn’t get us. It was remote and wild and scary as hell. Those were good summers. We’d head out after breakfast and come home for dinner, maybe. Maybe call from a friend’s place where we’d stopped for a plate of whatever their mom had going. Or maybe just grill us some cheese and take it upstairs to where someone’s big brother would be watching TV and sucking on a joint next to the open window. And always the lake.

In my dreams I’m always on Route 90 heading toward that place and the lake is to my left, so I’m heading north, and I always wake up just before I get there.