As everyone already knows, a new Snakes on a Plane teaser trailer has hit the internet. I’m still excited about the film, but the teaser trailer left me a little cold. With all its quick cuts, sloppy pacing and weak score it felt more like a gangly teen fumbling open a bra than the second coming of cool. And if you’re introducing Samuel L. Jackson as the most dangerous mother fucker on the plane, show a close-up of his snarling, bleeding face, or a shot of him punching a snake, not a long shot of him walking through a door and giving a guy a high-five. That shit’s whiter than me.

In other Snakes on a Plane news, upon the advice of Snakes on a Blog I took a peek in my local bookstore to see if they had mistakenly placed the novelization on the shelf prematurely. They had. I am now the proud owner of the Snakes on a Plane novelization. For a sneak peek at the first exciting paragraph, click the link above.

In 2003, Dylan Finkle read portions of a horror story he had written entitled “Costume Party” in front of fellow students in his English class. Later that day, a teacher took a closer look at the story just before Dylan began reading some more aloud during lunch. She contacted the principal of the school, and Dylan was suspended for six weeks. Dylan’s attorney has attempted to appeal the case numerous times, and plans to again after their most recent defeat. So, what was in the story?

According to court documents, Finkle was 11 when he wrote the multi-chapter story titled “Costume Party,” modeled after the horror flick “Halloween,” in which he named characters after some of his friends and classmates. The story, which was part of a journal that one of Finkle�s teachers had assigned as a class project, chronicled the killing spree of a character named “Dylan” who was out for revenge after being bullied by kids at school.

In the story, Finkle graphically described the murders (many involving a knife or ax) of “mean kids,” some of which occurred while a character was making out topless on a table or engaged in sex.

I can understand the teachers being concerned, but was it necessary to suspend the kid for six weeks? After all, not only was this a class project, but it was deemed appropriate enough to read in the classroom before the incident, which may have given Dylan the false assumption that this was material condoned by the administration as a whole.

For a more detailed and accurate account of the case, please refer to this article which first appeared in the New York Times.

I read a lot of Stephen King when I was younger, but like Bradbury before him, somehow I fell out of the habit. I recently read Cell and am now in the middle of Salem’s Lot, which I have never read before. The difference between the two novels is astounding, if not a little sad.

One person who has taken his appreciation of King to a higher level is Rocky Woods, the fan who compiled The Complete Guide to the Works of Stephen King. His next book will be about King’s little-seen non-fiction pieces, about 600 in total scattered across various publications over his lifetime.

The one part of the article that threw me came near the end, when the topic of horror came up.

But there are also people in the horror community who look at a successful author, not just King but maybe someone like Clive Barker, some of these guys, as a bit of an insult to the genre somehow.

[They question] why is it that he’s successful and the horror genre isn’t more broadly successful out there in the community, and that’s because King isn’t a horror writer.

I’m not going to go off on this topic again, but it does sadden me that there are so many people out there, people who probably should know better, who insist that superior works of genre fiction don’t reside within that genre at all.