Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

Commonwealth (novel by Ann Patchett , published in 2016)   Ann Pratchett has a warning to the world, “I'm the old author who is saying, ‘I'm going to sell you out and take your story.’"   Those of us that have ambitions as writers read more than the average person because beyond the obvious pleasure of reading, which drove us to write in the first place, we also read to learn the how-to. We generally read a large variety of books, because if we focused only on authors who attack the same themes we tackle, we do nothing but ape our processors, we can’t see the power of language beyond its most familiar application, we bring nothing new in, we become mere “borrowers” and as Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”   But fully drinking the richness of our literature can be intimidating because many of our predecessors and our contemporaries, are also our betters. I am prone to be jealous of these betters and so far, this decade, no o...

    “The Wolf Man” (1941)   THE "WOLF" THAT LARY FIGHTS WITH WAS LON CHANEY JR.'S OWN DOG. GERMAN SHEPARD MOOSE.   LATER WOLFMAN FILMS ADDED THE DETAIL OF THE WOLFMAN BEING IMMORTAL, AGAIN ,AN INVENTION OF HOLLYWOOD, AND BASICALLY AN EXCUSE TO KEEP BRINGING THE FAN LOVED CHARACTER BACK FOR SEQUEL AFTER SEQUEL   Bravo’s “100 Scariest Movie Moments” #62 “The Wolf Man,” shares a distinction with the “Mummy” (1932) that separates them from the other towering greats of the Golden Age of Universal Monsters ("Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1923), “Phantom of the Opera” (1925), “Dracula” (1931), “Frankenstein” (1931), etc.) in that they did not claim to be based on a classic of literature, but it alleged it was rooted in traditional folklore. Well...yes and no. The most important werewolf novel ever written was 1933's “The Werewolf of Paris” by Guy Endore. At the time, he was a scenarioist for Universal Pictures and the studio twice drew from it, though without credit and to...