Stephen Romano’s Kingdom: Aliens On Ice and Escape from New York on my Underwear

Stephen Romano |

Sep 14, 2015

Today my new novel METRO hits the street.

It’s full of murder, mayhem and torture.

And the best part: It’s just 2 dollars.

(Costs more to ride the bus where I come from.)

So you’re a fan of hard-boiled violence, high-strung suspense and things that go BOOM in the night, click the links in this posting and get yourself a copy. This is an EBOOK EXCLUSIVE, only from my fine pals at Simon and Schuster, the people behind my last novel “Resurrection Express.” Those of you who may have enjoyed the adventures of Elroy Coffin will like my new one, too, but I’ve scythed a somewhat different path this time—a path much closer to home. METRO isn’t an action thriller with a macho-zen hero who escapes by the skin of his teeth in every scene. I love stuff like that, obviously. It speaks to the kid in me who still loves trashy paperbacks and gaudy exploitation cinema, and it’s damn fun to write. But this time out, I’m servicing those obsessions in far more direct and less traditional ways. It’s a sort of geek-noir approach that I hope will make you think a little.

Snake Don't Care

METRO is the story of three wild young people who have been living together in a crazy bohemian crashpad in South Austin for five years. If you know anything about South Austin, you know that’s where a lot of the crazy happens. We have passionate writers, painters, musicians, and whacked-out filmmakers, all of them struggling with every last raging ounce of raging artistic genius they possess to record their own “Exile on Main Street” or make the next El Mariachi.

It’s a counter culture attenuated to every frequency you can imagine—and, yes, there are plenty of horror nerds here. One particularly lunatic group called Old Murder House Theatre once put on a live version of James Cameron’s Aliens on an ice hockey rink, complete with musical numbers, cardboard props and Xenomorphs on skates. No kidding. It was called (wait for it) Aliens On Ice. (They also did live versions of Die Hard and Robocop, but I digress.) Yeah, this is pretty amazing town. My novel suggests that the counterculture scene here may be so weird and incongruous that it would be the perfect place to hide some very bad people. And some of them may be gunning for you. You’ll meet some scary guys, including a psychotic surgeon with a monstrous face, who preaches the word of “love and freedom” as he chops his victims apart on a bloody operating table, deep in the heart of a perverted human trafficking cartel known as The Monster Squad. And just when you think he’s gone too far? Well, it only gets worse.

I promise you, people, METRO will get under your skin.

And it ends in a place you will never expect.

But, of course . . . it all begins in The Kingdom, the colorful house of artsy mayhem where our heroes reside, and which becomes the scene of a very bloody massacre, kicking off a night of escalating horror. The Kingdom, as many of you already know, was once a real place. I’ve been sharing it with you for a few weeks now. As we celebrate the publication of METRO, here are a few more images, along with a few more words.

The Kingdom isn’t just one place. It represents many places, and many forms of the same religion. Those of you whose minds were blown at a young age by the weird and way-out and who were brought forward through years of worship at the alter of Zombies, Aliens, Snake Plissken and all the other cool stuff that made you kind of a nerdy outcast THEN, but makes you one of the really super awesome people NOW—well, all of us are special and pedigreed in a way that is difficult to express in words. It goes beyond words. Or even images. It starts with a passion, triggered in youth, and develops through a lifetime of deep, meaningful understanding. Some of us become artists and poets. Some of us become filmmakers and writers. Other people act out Aliens live on a hockey rink. Because this is why we were put here on this earth. If we don’t feed the beast, we go mad.

There are now and have been hundreds of houses and compounds like The Kingdom, all over the world, with walls at least as wild and colorful as ours were. Some of those walls will never be documented. Others were really famous for a brief time, like The Werepad or even The Vortex Room, those awesome California-based commune/nightclub hybrids that played host to film screenings, art exhibits and live music, celebrating all forms of psychotronic expression. Even The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema empire, based out of Austin and now host to the amazing FANTASIC FEST—the biggest international genre film festival in the world—was once a very small community-based movie theater, with just 300 seats. And it was our home away from home.

These places were special because they were ours.

There are a lot of reasons why these people end up worshiping at these particular altars. It’s all very personal and deeply seated in the hearts of each individual. But here’s the thing: I never believe a single besotted soul when they try to explain themselves. It is my belief that past a certain age, there is no real is no “justification” for why anybody does what they do. By then, it just is. We just are.

In the end, this is what defines the entire world.

Zombies in a shopping mall are just happy to be there, you know?

See this? It’s a pair of underwear customized by my father in 1981. That was the year Escape From New York first came out in movie theaters, of course. Which makes this pair of underwear more than 30 years old. I was eleven then. And Snake Plissken was my spirit animal. He still is. I still have that ragged old piece of cloth, even now. It’s under a glass frame in my new house, right beside all the other artifacts I have in glass frames. It’s my museum. My religion. Should I have to explain that to anybody?

And so that’s where METRO is coming from, at least partially.

Why are we obsessed with these things, where does it start, when will it stop, and should there ever be a reason to stop?

There is a section in the book that deals with why one particular character is so well-versed in all his particular arcane nerdy obsessions—and it’s a very unique explanation, very specific to this story. But it’s also a story of all of us. And not just the Escape From New York underwear crowd. Think it over. Be damn proud of your religion. It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters.