Monsieur Crankypants' Home for Wayward Readers

The Night Shade Debacle in links

2013-04-04T20:50:00Z

I've decided to attempt to keep a running list of the more insightful and informative stories in response to Night Shade's attempts to sell off their assets and pay off their debts. If anyone has further posts to link to, please feel free to put them in the comments.

PW's report on Night Shade's proposed sale of assets.

Jeremy Lassen's Open Letter in Locus Online.

Michael Stackpole's analysis of the terms of the deal, and why he won't be signing.

Justin Landon of Staffer's Book Review offers some perspective on how Night Shade went awry.

I'm very interested to see what happens here, as I am friends with a number of Night Shade authors, and I want them done right by. So far from my reading (both in these links and in various Facebook discussions), this deal doesn't seem to be in their best interests.

Update #1:

A copy of the letter sent to Night Shade Books' authors.

Analysis of the letter, deal, and everything else from a literary agent.

Update #2:

Response from Night Shade authors Phil and Kaja Foglio.

Response from Night Shade author Kameron Hurley.

Update #3:

Skyhorse and Start (who are attempting to acquire Night Shade's assets) give their side.

Literary agent Andrew Zack on the deal.

Readercon 23 Schedule

2012-06-26T12:58:12Z

In just a couple of weeks, Readercon will be here again. The guests of honor are Peter Straub and Caitlin R. Kiernan, with Shirley Jackson as posthumous GoH. You can check out the whole schedule, see a list of program participants, and read more about the event at http://readercon.org I'm very pleased to be on a number of interesting panels with folks better known and smarter than I am, Here's my schedule of events:

Friday July 13

12:00 PM RI At School with Peter Straub. Andy Duncan, Jack Haringa, Nicholas Kaufmann (leader), Caitlín R. Kiernan, John Langan, Paul Tremblay. For the generation of horror writers who came of age in the seventies and eighties, the fiction of Peter Straub has exerted a profound gravitational pull. Glen Hirshberg has spoken of the importance of If You Could See Me Now to his development as a writer of ghost stories. Lee Thomas has acknowledged the influence of Ghost Story on his novel The Dust of Wonderland. Kelly Link has noted the significance of Shadowland to her stories. Laird Barron has written the afterword to the recent Centipede Press edition of Koko, in which he details that novel's importance to his work. This panel will bring together several writers who have benefited from the example of Straub's fiction to discuss some of the ways in which his work contributed to theirs.

Proposed by Nicholas Kaufmann.

1:00 PM G Through a Glass, Dystopianly. Leah Bobet, Gwendolyn Clare, Jack Haringa (leader), Alaya Dawn Johnson, Shira Lipkin. Millions of words have been written on the current dystopian trend in young adult literature; the consensus seems to be that dystopias are a reflection of the state of being a modern teenager, feeling trapped and uncertain of who you are. Fair enough. But given that the teen years are often when people first become engaged with wider world concerns—and given that these books are written by adults aware of those concerns—perhaps there are also particular anxieties about the current state of society and the world feeding the popularity of books like Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games or Ali Condie'sMatched. The Hunger Games, for example, can be read as commentary on the issues surrounding the Occupy protests, with those in power controlling resources as a way of maintaining order at the cost of tremendous collateral damage to the innocent. Is this a useful way of reading these stories? Are there similar issues we can discern in other recent young adult fictions? And what issues might we expect to see reflected in future YA works?

Saturday July 14

10:00 AM F Horror and the Social Compact. Jack Haringa (leader), Ken Houghton, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Stephen Graham Jones, Kit Reed. In Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and Octavia Butler's Bloodchild, the social compact incorporates the horrific, declaring it necessary for survival. In novels about war and the aftermath of disaster, the destruction of the social compact leaves a vacuum that is filled by the horrific. In Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, horror comes in part from the protagonist's efforts to maintain a social compact that is no longer in effect. What makes the constructed relationship between the individual and society so unsettling, whether it's functioning, changing, or absent?

3:00 PM F Horizontal Genre Transfer. John Clute, Jack Haringa, James Patrick Kelly (leader), Bradford Morrow, Veronica Schanoes, Peter Straub. In a 2011 article in The Atlantic, Joe Fassler wrote, "The trappings of genre fiction—monsters, masked marvels, gizmos, and gumshoes—are no longer quarantined to the bookstore aisles reserved for popular fiction. Horror, mystery and science-fiction books have spread their genetic code to a foreign habitat: the literature section." So-called literary writers such as Michael Chabon and Aimee Bender freely incorporate fantastical tropes into their stories, and literary magazines feature special issues on the fantastic, such as Peter Straub's Conjunctions 39. Do literary and genre fiction benefit from this hybridization, or do they begin to lose the distinctive qualities that their audiences are looking for? Is this just literary writers trying not to be boring?

9:00 PM ME Teaching and Doing. Michael Cisco, Jack Haringa, John Kessel (leader), Veronica Schanoes, Gregory Wilson. How does teaching fantasy fiction improve the writing of it, and vice versa? Does academic study of fantasy and science fiction hinder one's ability to write it? What is the responsibility of academics in the fantasy and science fiction field who also write: are they obligated to cheerlead canonical works within the genre, given the relatively low regard in which fantasy and science fiction is held in some academic circles, or ignore underappreciated but valuable works in favor of those more mainstream (and perhaps more accessible) books which might attract more general interest?

Proposed by Gregory A. Wilson.

Naming the Animals

2012-04-29T20:46:17Z

Anthony Hecht

Naming the Animals

Having commanded Adam to bestow
Names upon all the creatures, God withdrew
To empyrean palaces of blue
That warm and windless morning long ago,
And seemed to take no notice of the vexed
Look on the young man's face as he took thought
Of all the miracles the Lord had wrought,
Now to be labelled, dubbed, yclept, indexed.

Before an addled mind and puddled brow,
The feathered nation and the finny prey
Passed by; there went biped and quadruped.
Adam looked forth with bottomless dismay
Into the tragic eyes of his first cow,
And shyly ventured, "Thou shalt be called 'Fred.'"

Professor Stanley Sultan introduced me to this poem in the first class I took at the graduate level. It remains one of favorites, and it can be hard to find. I think it ought to be anthologized as often as his better-known "The Dover Bitch."

My Boskone Schedule

2012-02-17T11:04:35Z

Once again I'll be participating in programming at Boskone, the venerable Boston science fiction convention now in its 49th year. It' held at the Westin Waterfront, next to the Boston Convention Center, and runs from February 17th (today!) to the 19th. Here's what I'll be on:

Friday, 6pm, Griffin: SF/F/H in the Classroom

Kids today don't have to hide their SF book in class. It is their class. How are science fiction, fantasy, and horror taught in a typical course today? What do the teachers know that we fans don't, or vice versa? What works work best in the classroom? Does studying the stuff in school recruit lifelong speculative fiction readers, or drive them away in droves?

B.A. Chepaitis, F. Brett Cox (M), Jack M. Haringa, Kenneth Schneyer

Friday, 10pm, Harbor II: The Influence of Lovecraft on Horror Today

In his thesis Lovecraft's Progeny, horror scholar John Langan considers how Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, and other writers were influenced by the weirdest New Englander of all, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). OK, we'll bite. How did the long-dead creator of the Cthulhu cult insinuate his unspeakably squamous sensibility into the unresisting intellects of these and other scribes and screenwriters? How can you tell?

Theodora Goss, Jack M. Haringa (M), John Langan, Darrell Schweitzer, David Wellington

Saturday, 3pm, Harbor II: Trends in Young Adult Literature

Has the paranormal gotten to the end of the line? Where is YA fiction going to now that Twilight and Harry Potter have wound down?

Jordan Hamessley, Jack M. Haringa, Susan MacDonald, Darlene Marshall (M)

Saturday, 10pm, Harbor I: The Horrified Gaze: What Horror Stories Do To Us

We read horror fiction and watch horror flicks and TV just for fun. However, is anything else going on? If witnessing a frightening real-world event can cause actual psychological trauma, what about seeing it on the page or screen? Can a scary story really mess us up--but in a good way?

Don D'Ammassa, Jordan Hamessley, Jack M. Haringa, David Wellington (M), Brianna Spacekat Wu

I think imago1 was scheduled to be on that last panel with me, but he's got to stay home to take care of his dog. We'll miss you this weekend, Laird!

My Favorite Reads of 2011

2011-12-31T16:17:04Z

I read 56 books in 2011: 33 novels and novellas, thirteen graphic novels, six short story collections, five works of non-fiction, and one anthology. While many are of recent vintage, only about a dozen of them were published in 2011, so the following list of favorites reflects what stuck with me as the books I'd most recommend of those read over the year, regardless of publication date.

1. The End of Everything (2011) by Megan Abbott: probably my favorite novel of the year, and definitely my favorite new book on the list. Abbott is best known for her neo-noir work, but this lyrical, suspenseful story of a girl's disappearance, narrated by her best friend and neighbor, defies categorization. The prose is stunning and in places reminiscent of Bradbury, while the exploration of the adolescent mind and the secrets of suburbia is authentic and illuminating. I can't recommend this one enough.

2. A Handbook of American Prayer (2006) by Lucius Shepard runs neck and neck with the Abbott book for my favorite novel read in 2011. Shepard can always be relied upon to deliver beautifully written and compelling work, but Handbook is extraordinary, an indictment of religious fervor and the self-delusions it encourages as well as an examination of American greed and celebrity culture. It's also violent, sexy, and very darkly funny by turns (and sometimes simultaneously). A new edition of the novel is on the horizon, but the original paperback is currently available as a bargain book.

3. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005) by Umberto Eco is a love letter to books (and comics) from the highest brow to the most common. Eco explores the definitions of identity, the uses of memory, the power of relationships, and idea of beauty in this story of an amnesiac's attempt to regain his sense of self through revisiting what he has read, heard, and seen in his formative years. The book is beautifully constructed with full color reproductions of pages and covers from Yambo's reading, images of toys and collectors' items, and collages built from the narrator's encounters with images and objects from his past. Eco's novel is slow and deliberate and sad, and it's worth your time.

4. Every Shallow Cut (2011) by Tom Piccirilli: a novella with all the punch and despair of James M. Cain and all the violent immediacy of Chuck Palahniuk. Spare, raw, insightful, and heartbreaking, this little book reveals a man unravelling in the face of a cruelly indifferent and increasingly chaotic America--something that should speak to a wide audience. Tom Piccirilli has long been a fine stylist working in the mystery, suspense, and horror genres, and this book should bring him not just more accolades but more readers.

5. In the Mean Time (2010) by Paul Tremblay is the author's third collection of short stories and for my money his best. The tales collected here deal with apocalypses personal and global, all of them defined by Tremblay's penchant for the surreal and the ambiguous. Those looking for traditional stories with all the ends tied up neatly should look elsewhere; these pieces are meant to make you think, and stories like "The Teacher" and "We Will Never Live in the Castle" will haunt you for weeks after you put the book down.

6. Picking the Bones (2011) by Brian Hodge: my second short story collection on the list, entirely different in tone, style, and substance from Paul Tremblay's book but equally effective in disturbing the reader. Hodge is a seasoned pro in the horror genre, but his work draws from many categories. Favorite stories in this collection include "The Firebrand Symphony," "Hate the Sinner, Love the Sin," and "A Good Dead Man Is Hard to Find." Like Piccirilli, Hodge should be better known to a wide audience, and I hope a bigger publisher picks this up for a trade edition.

7. All-Star Superman (2009) by Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly finally offers a new Superman story (and a new representation of Superman and Clark Kent) that I find engaging as opposed to boring. At the same time, they manage to draw from decades of continuity to involve secondary and tertiary characters in new and interesting ways. After reading the execrable All-Star Batman and Robin by Frank Miller, Morrison and Quietly's version of Supes renewed my faith in auteur reinventions of iconic characters.

8. The Woman (2011) by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee: written at the same time as the screenplay for the film of the same title, this novel offers further insight into the characters emotions and motivations than the movie while losing none of the visceral impact. The book is an extension of the stories told in Ketchum's first novel Off Season and its sequel Offspring, though the opening for such a sequel was provided for more in the film version of that second book. Ketchum continues to explore the depths to which humans can sink and also the ways in which they can rise to survive their fellow men. This novel also stares down the ugly barrel of American misogyny and all its painful outcomes.

9. I Am Not a Serial Killer and Mr. Monster (both 2010) by Dan Wells are the first two books in the John Wayne Cleaver series. The third book, I Don't Want to Kill You, came out in 2011. The novels straddle the line between adult and young adult fiction; the narrator is fifteen year old John Wayne Cleaver, who recognizes that he has the potential to become a serial killer and suffers from "conduct disorder"--the diagnosis psychologists give to adolescent sociopaths. But before you dismiss these books as Dexter-lite, note that John and the serial killers by whom he is fascinated aren't the worst horrors here; there is another level of evil at work in the city of Clayton. Wells, like Abbott above, authentically captures much of the adolescent experience in his narrator's voice, intensifying that age's natural feelings of isolation through the device of the serial killer psychopathology.

10. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008) by David Hadju told me things I didn't already know about the history of comics, the people who created them, and the causes and impact of the attacks on the form in the '40s and '50s. Hadju connects personal reminiscences with hard facts and trial transcripts, building not just a traditional history of the art form and not just a procedural about the scare but a very human story about the importance of comics, their power, influence, and foibles.

There are many other terrific books worth mentioning from this year's list--I guess I'm getting better at picking what I read, or at maybe I just got lucky. The whole list can be accessed here, in alphabetical order.

Pepparkokar Cookies

2011-12-24T18:34:01Z

Here's the recipe I've been using for Pepparkokar cookies (Swedish gingerbread) for the last few years. It's not the same one I made with my grandmother when I was a kid; that particular recipe is lost to the ages, I'm afraid. This one is good, though.

INGREDIENTS

2/3 cup packed brown sugar

2/3 cup molasses

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

3/4 tablespoon baking soda

2/3 cup butter

1 egg

3 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

DIRECTIONS

Place butter in a large, heatproof bowl. In a medium saucepan, heat brown sugar, molasses and spices just to boiling point. Add baking soda and stir in. (Note: the mixture will expand to a foamy consistency very quickly; be ready to move fast.) Pour this mixture over the butter and stir until it melts.

Beat egg and mix in; add flour, a cup at a time, and blend thoroughly. Turn out onto a lightly floured board and knead 1-2 minutes. Wrap in waxed paper and chill until firm (about an hour).

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (170 degrees C).

Roll out dough in parts, keeping unused portion chilled until ready, on lightly floured board to 1/8-inch thickness and cut into desired shapes.

Place on greased or non-stick cookie sheets and bake for 8-10 minutes.

Decorate while warm with colored sugar, piped icing, raisins, or whatever you like.

God Jul!

More on Laird Barron's Secret Life

2011-03-18T17:22:59Z

Our festival of Laird got a write-up from Rose Fox at Publishers Weekly Online! Check it out here (it includes a few excerpts, including one from my story): http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1074

It looks like there were 14 entries in total. Check them all out if you have a chance. It's hard for me to pick a favorite, and they range from funny to scary, played for camp or played straight, plausible to absurd. It was great fun. Also, I've edited mine for typos, which it was riddled with. It may have a few more still, but I got some of the ones that were keeping me awake at night.

The Secret Life of Laird Barron

2011-03-16T15:52:13Z

That World, and the Fireworks

They threw him off the mail boat around noon.

He’d slipped aboard at Kona in the pre-dawn murk, crawled under a tarp near the bow, and used his rucksack for a pillow. The bags of mail smelled better than the trawler he’d worked from Honolulu and the tar-coated telephone poles he’d loaded on the tramp from San Fran. Sleep came quick, and so did the hands that yanked him out of darkness.

He was glad he’d slid an arm through the strap of his sack so it dropped with him into the water. The men on the boat had swung reasonably close to the rocky South Point, and he didn’t have too far to swim. The current was with him though the tide was going out. It pushed him west of Naalehu, their next stop, and he made for a cinder cone that dominated the shore each time a swell brought it into view.

Barron was a good swimmer and the water was warm. Still, he kept his strokes shallow to avoid the rip and ended tired and on his back on coarse sand. The cinder cone rose around him. The earth shook or he shook, he couldn’t tell which, but the sun was hot. He heard voices.

He rolled over to see a couple, younger than he and pretty, hopping down the cliff from boulder to pumice. They had backpacks and camera bags and brought with them, too, the scent of sunscreen when the wind whirled around the sandy cove. He noticed the sand then, too, and knew just where he was. It was dark green and up close looked like millions of tiny gems, which it was.

He stood up and felt another tremor. The tourists sat on a rock and took out their cameras, oohing and jabbering, then clicking away. Barron picked up his rucksack meaning to stagger out of the way of their lenses, but they called out to him.

“Excuse? Excuse me?” The young man’s teeth were very white against his tan.

Barron looked up. There was nowhere else to look because there was no one else he could be talking to.

“Would you mind taking a picture? Of us on the sand? My wife and me?”

“Sure.” What else could he say.

They moved closer to the water and Barron moved up the beach until their trajectories intersected. They were sleek, and under the coconut oil smelled of money. The camera they handed him would have paid the rent on his apartment for three months.

The ground shook a little as Barron waived them back toward the sea and the wife joked, “Pele must be angry.”

He took a couple pictures, tempted at first to cut their heads out of frame or lose focus because of the woman’s crack. But he shot them straight then moved to hand the camera back.

“One more? In the water?”

“OK.”

The man stepped into the foam and lifted his wife in his arms. She giggled and wrapped her arms around his neck. Barron looked down at the camera for a different setting. When he looked up, half of the couple was gone.

Not the wife. And not the husband. The top half.

Their legs and pelvises bubbled a little blood, but it didn’t really start to pour out until they toppled into the waves. Out in the water something, maybe a few things, was moving. He couldn’t get a clear look at it. If he moved his head there was a shape in the corner of his eye, but it was a different shape each time he swung his vision across the cove. But the water was moving in a way that made it clear there were more forces than waves at work on it.

He ran. What else was there to do but run. Behind him was the sound of a long and heavy dragging on the sand, but he wasn’t going to look.

He jumped the first boulder, then the second, and then he was scrabbling with hands and knees up the cliff face. The pumice tore at his skin and the blood made the climbing harder. His rucksack banged at his back, the camera at his hip. Why did he still have the camera. He wasn’t going to stop to take it off his shoulder.

A hot wind chased him up the side of the cinder cone. He didn’t know if it was natural, but he knew it smelled wrong. It could have been the trade winds or the breath of whatever dragged itself across the beach. He knew it was behind him and that was enough.

At the top he wanted to rest but the ground shook again and he could smell burning and something else, something rotten, and the wind spun dust into his eye and he heard a sound like the inhalation of the very sea itself. His senses wanted to shut down, to deny these things, but he wouldn’t let them. He did not want to hear what voice or roar or cry would follow that great gulping of atmosphere nor to see what could make such a sound. But he had to hear and see if he wanted to live.

Ahead on a trail no more than two dirt ruts sat a Jeep, clean if a little dusty, top open. He knew it would not have the keys in it. The keys were in a backpack at the bottom of the cliff, or they were in a pocket on a pair of legs in the surf. He didn’t need keys.

Barron hit the side of the Jeep with his hands splayed, the only way to stop after his full-tilt sprint from the cliff’s edge. He pulled his knife from his rucksack, dropped it in the foot well, took it up again. The column was tough to crack, but he’d learned more than how to load telephone poles on the San Fran waterfront. He was losing time, he wasn’t that good with wires, but if he could get the car started it would be better than running.

It was. Over the roar of the motor he made out the cracking of rocks, as if some terrible pressure were squeezing the very heart of the shoreline. He spun the Jeep around and accelerated up the trail, ignoring all but the worst dips and stones. He heard the ground scrape the undercarriage over and over as he clung to the wheel to keep from being launched out of the seat. He crossed pasture empty of all livestock, then on to a black sand road. As he crested a rise he saw macadam ahead that lead to an intersection with a highway. He cut wide and right but there was nothing coming, nothing on the road at all. But not nothing.

The sun was gone. Ash floated across his vision and at first he thought he was passing out. But flakes landed on his arm, his lap, and he turned to see fire on the hillside to his left. To his right was the ocean, coming into view as the highway swung southeast. There were great ripples in the water, counter-current oddities. Queer motions shook the sea and temblors shook the land. He was on the Belt Road, the road that would take him up to the volcano, and the volcano was erupting. Had people already evacuated? If they hadn’t, they should, and not just because of the lava. At least the lava was something you could believe in, something you could see and understand and name. It was the unnamed thing that scared him more.

Flaming cinders passed overhead. In front of him was a sign for a village, Kapaahuu, just off the highway. The road ahead was burning and he braked and turned right. Fingers of lava coursed over the fields and into the little town. Vents had ruptured in the hillside, bringing the spouts of fire and rock and ash closer to the sea.

Barron slammed to a stop at a filling station whose office had been abandoned not long ago, maybe just after the mail boat had passed by. The door hung open and he ran in, turned on the pumps. In the garage he found two flares, a Zippo, a tow cable. He wished they’d left the tow truck, too. He took the flares. Outside he laid the pump handles on the ground and jammed broken pieces of asphalt under their triggers. Gasoline spewed across the pavement and into the grass.

He roared out of the lot looking for roads and trails that would get him closer to the water. His knife rattled on the floor. He picked it up and had another thought. Just north of him a village blazed and smoked under the onslaught of the lava and spumes leapt from vents no more than a mile away. The Jeep skidded across a sandy patch between dirt roads and came to rest against a guardrail. On the other side was a blowhole where the sea roared in to hollow the land. This was a place where the land fought back.

Barron moved to the passenger seat and leaned over the edge. He could stretch his hand over the rail from here. The knife was sharp though not too clean but he drew it across his palm anyway. Blood pooled in his cupped hand and he squeezed it onto the wet rocks at the edge of the blowhole. A plume of salt spray drove some of it back at him. The sea surged toward the pumice outcropping, driven faster than the tide. He squeezed his hand again and heard or felt or smelled, he would never be able to say which, a response from below that drove him scrambling back to the wheel and racing uphill. In the rearview mirror he saw the guardrail crumple along a thirty-foot length.

He followed his own tracks back to the village, drove until he could smell gasoline. Each glance back showed the hill caving, bending, reduced to rubble. His hand hurt and he held it to the slipstream whenever he could afford to take it off the wheel.

The first flare went wide, lighting some grass that just smoldered as it rolled into a sandy rut. He kept driving but slower now despite the scent that flowed at his back and vied with the gasoline to make him dizzy.

Barron steered the Jeep straight across the blacktop of the filling station, gas spraying from his rear tires. He was afraid to light the flare until he got across, afraid too to wait. When his wheels struck the road he ignited the flare and threw it straight back and accelerated again.

The flame unfolded behind him like a liquid rose in bloom, petal after petal of red and orange and yellow, each edged with black, blossoming it seemed endlessly against the ash sky. Hot winds carried cinders and coals over the town, and from the heart of the flame something dark and salted and deep at the last exhaled.

For more stories about Laird Barron, check out a list at jplangan 's livejournal.

Rock and Shock Recap

2009-10-18T23:31:57Z

Another Rock and Shock has passed, and this was certainly my best one for sales yet. I moved both hardcover and paperback copies of Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, multiple issues of Dead Reckonings, and my lone copy of Writers Workshop of Horror.

I manned the New England Horror Writers' table on and off all three days, alongside comics creators T.J. May and Bob Heske, and fellow fiction writers Paul Tremblay, Paul McMahon, Seamus Cooper (whose novel, The Mall of Cthulhu, sold well and is available from Night Shade Books and fine bookstores everywhere), LL Soares, Jennifer Palmatier, Morven Westfield, and many more. The booth was right next to artist Ken Kelly--painter of iconic album covers such as Destroyer and Love Gun from KISS and loads of great Conan and comics arts--and behind us through the curtain was the celebrity room where Jack Ketchum had his own booth next to Malcolm McDowell and Tiffany Shepis.

The highlight of my weekend, however, was spending about 15-20 minutes talking about Into the Night with John Landis. It's one of his own favorites, but virtually no one brings it up at conventions to him. I know the film inside and out, since I wore my VHS tape of it out back in high school (and not just for Michelle Pfeiffer's only nude scene, either). I had a much shorter chat with McDowell about his playing Reggie Wanker in Get Crazy (another high school fave) and Jimmy Porter in the BBC production of Look Back in Anger (sadly, neither of them are available on DVD).

And speaking of DVDs, I did end up buying a few from a table that had used discs for $5 a pop. Here's the lineup:

The Burrowers (directed by JT Petty, and starring William Mapother and Clancy Brown)

One Eyed Monster, a horror comedy featuring Amber Benson and...Ron Jeremy!?

Rampo Noir (out of print in the US already), an anthology film from Japan adapting four stories by Edogawa Rampo

Dorm, the much-touted Thai horror film

Gemini, a film from Shinya Tsukamoto of Tetuso: Iron Man fame

Kirei, another Japanese horror film that just looks deeply disturbing

Arang, a South Korean supernatural/procedural

The horror! Good fun overall, though I'm thoroughly exhausted.

Update for Stalkers: Rock and Shock

2009-10-15T21:34:48Z

If any of you are in the Worcester area this weekend, stop in at Rock and Shock, a festival of horror films and heavy metal. The horror movie- and book-related events are held at the DCU Center, and the music is at The Palladium (formerly E.M. Loew's). There's a pretty impressive guest list this year, including Malcolm McDowell, John Landis, Doug Jones, and Margot Kidder, as well as a ton of cult/horror figures like Sid Haig, P.J. Soles, Bill Mosely, Kane Hodder, and the like. Check the guest page at the website for a full list.

I'll be manning the New England Horror Writers' table alongside folks like Paul Tremblay, Brendan Halpin, Don D'Ammassa, Kurt Newton, and many more. Also at the table will be some pretty snazzy comics writers and illustrators like Tom Moran and Bob Heske.

The con's major author guest is Jack Ketchum, who will be selling and signing all weekend. He's also doing a guest lecture spot for my Gothic Literature course, but you can't come to that. You can, however, pick up Offspring, based on Ketchum's novel of the same name, which came out just last week. That makes the fourth film adaptation from Ketchum's novels. The trailer is creepy as hell, and I'm looking forward to seeing the full film.

We'll all have books for sale--I've got copies of Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Writers Workshop of Horror, and Dead Reckonings, and there may even be a couple stray copies of Jack Haringa Must Die hiding in the wings.

Dead Air is Live

2009-10-08T14:44:40Z

nick_kaufmann 's State of the Genre column from Fear Zone has gone through some changes, including in name and in venue. He can now be found writing the Dead Air column at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. The first column is up now, and Nick spent some time asking me questions like I know something. Apparently I went on at such length that he's getting two articles out of it! The first one is live at IROSF under the excellent title "At the Mountains of Misperception."

Check it out!

Clarifying Social Media

2009-10-07T10:19:01Z

This is brilliant:

Crisp Fall Morning

2009-09-26T14:35:30Z

There's a lovely bite in the air this morning, and since we went apple picking last week, we decided to make apple crisp. I love the weather that a New England autumn brings, and the apples only get better as the season progresses.

Apple Crisp Recipe

6 lbs. crisp, ripe apples (Empire, Cortland, and Cornell top my list for crisp), peeled and sliced
1 cup raisins
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup water
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly butter or oil a 9" X 13" X 2"pan (if non-stick, don't butter)

In a small sauce pan mix maple syrup, water, and raisins. Bring to a gentle boil, then simmer until softened. Drain.

Place peeled, sliced apples in a large mixing bowl. Mix in drained raisins.

In a small bowl, combine sugar, flour, and spices. Sprinkle over apple-raisin mix and stir gently but thoroughly until fruit is covered. Place in baking pan and pat down firmly.

Topping:

1+1/2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, cut into chunks
1 cup rolled oats (quick cooking, not instant)
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. nutmeg

With a pastry blender or hands, mix together topping ingredients in a medium bowl. Be sure to break up the butter in the mix until the topping becomes a crumbly pie crust consistency. Cover apples with mixture and pat down lightly.

Bake 1 hour, until top is light brown and firm. (Baking time depends on apples.) Serve warm, topped with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

Makes 8-10 large servings.

THAT Argument

2009-09-24T10:20:32Z

After a fairly substantial absence from the Shocklines message board, I got sucked into a conversation regarding sexism in horror and making reference to an article on that British Fantasy Society collection of interviews that contains no conversations with women. You'd think I'd know better by now than to argue on the internet--and really, what am I doing on that message board anyway?--but there it is. I'm most impressed (and by impressed I mean mildly horrified) by the intellectual and rhetorical contortions made in the process of constructing straw man arguments that are expected, miraculously, to address the actual points made. For those who don't want to fish, here's what I said:

Heavy sexism--if not misogyny--is at the heart of the slasher genre and half of the books published during the horror boom. It can trace its roots right back to the early Gothics, with essentially helpless women in peril suffering all sorts of horrors for no other reason than that they're easy targets in the eyes of the authors.

The BFS anthology is an example of passive sexism. I don't imagine the editor actively set out to exclude women, but considering the importance of women to the genre, especially in the 20th Century, it looks like a pretty gross omission to me. And it's not as if the interviews focused solely on the "old guard" in this volume--there are plenty of newer, small-press-exclusive, male writers in the mix. If the goal was to give a cross-section of some of the best writers in horror across a range of decades, it certainly should have included authors like Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough (who won an award from the BFS this year), Joyce Carol Oates, and Lisa Tuttle. And the list is easy to expand. The omission of women entirely is glaring.

And in reply to someone asking why I continue to support the horror genre if its so sexist (which of course isn't what I claimed):

I support those writers who don't rely on the cheap attack at the cliche "weak" woman, and I don't support slashers and torture porn, and I think over half of the books published during the horror boom were pretty crap, which is a major reason why the boom went bust. [And yes, the polysyndeton is intentional.]

The fact that good, non-sexist, non-misogynist, non-cliche horror continues to get published is what makes me keep reading in the genre. Why should the existence of SOME bad books in a field prevent me from reading ALL books in the field?

The final post (as of now) in the thread is the work of the most talented contortionist:

"Frankly, I'm a lot more annoyed by mediocrity than by what some would decry as "sexism" in horror (as well as in any other form of art or entertainment, for that matter).

"And if by attempting to enforce or cater to an "anti-sexist" attitude you end up producing mediocre results-- say, by replacing a "weak" (read: credibly terrified and distressed) female main character, as featured in the original Night of the Living Dead, with a "strong" one (ie, a cartoonish Buffy/Ripley imitation), as in the mediocre and pointless 1990 remake; or by following a safe cliched formula whereby everybody dies horribly except the timid young girl who miraculously (and probably ridiculously) overcomes the horror in the movie's final moments; or by rejecting top-quality work in favor of lesser in order to make for a more pleasing "gender balance" in your table of contents--then it's a stupid, counterproductive move, regardless of how politically correct it might be."

I suppose someone should point out that the BFS has actually admitted the problem with the book and used the word sexism in said apology.

And then there's Saten

2009-09-22T21:22:32Z

Forgot that it is also my old pal Brian Keene's birthday today. Go visit his official website to find out what's new with him. He did just return from Las Vegas, where he was a guest of honor at KillerCon.

And for the record, Brian was the first author to kill me off in a novel (and in a short story, come to think of it). So Jack Haringa Must Die is really all his fault. But then, what isn't Brian Keene's fault?

We Call Upon the Author

2009-09-22T10:38:31Z

...to have a happy 52nd birthday! Nick Cave was born this day in 1957.

And while I haven't read it yet, he has a new novel out called The Death of Bunny Munro , the American cover for which is much less interesting than the Australian and UK covers.

But if the book is half as good as ...And the Ass Saw the Angel (which sadly seems to be out of print), it will be magnificent.

So here's one of my favorite Nick Cave videos (with Kylie Minogue), which you can listen to as you open a new tab and shop for Nick Cave stuff (the Amazon page for Bunny has a video interview with NC):

The Decline of Readership

2009-09-21T10:09:31Z

"The danger for all novels and novelists, he said, is that there may be no audience left as time passes.

"'I don't think there's a decline of the novel so much as the decline of the readership,' Mr. Roth said, mounting what he admitted was a favorite hobbyhorse. 'There's been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That's inescapable. We can't fail to see it. It's also inescapable, given the pressures in the society. That's a tragedy. By readers, I don't mean people who pick up a book, once in a while. By readers, I mean people who when they are at work during the day think that after dinner tonight and after the kids are in bed, I'm going to read for two hours. That's what I mean. No. 2, these people do it three or four nights a week for two and half, three hours, and while they do it they don't watch television or answer the phone.'

"'So if that's what readers are, how many of them are there? We are down to a gulag archipelago of readers. Of the sort of readers I've described, there are 176 of them in Nashville, 432 in Atlanta, 4,011 in Chicago, 3,017 in Los Angeles and 7,000 in New York. It adds up to 60,000 people. I assure you there are no more. We would be foolish to add a zero. Maybe there are 120,000. But that's it, and that is bizarre.'

"Whether it is a matter of television, mass culture or shifts in the way people work and live, Mr. Roth said, 'There is a change in the mental landscape having to do with concentration,' and that is what's responsible for the declining readership.'

"'For me, concentration is a pleasure, but it's no longer thought of that way by most people,' he said.

"The number of serious readers may halve every decade, Mr. Roth said, leading to the obvious. And yet, he said, he writes every day at his home in northwestern Connecticut, believing in the existence of the serious reader.

"'It's what I have instead of religion," he said. "Some people believe in God, and I believe in the reader. But I don't want my faith tested too strongly.'"

--Philip Roth interviewed in The Times. In 1993.

Drop by and read an interview!

2009-09-20T20:24:59Z

Happy birthday to charlesatan (Charles Tan)! His tireless compilations of great articles, interviews, and blog posts about reading and writing specfic are a highlight to my every perusal of my friends' list. And his interviews with the Shirley Jackson Award nominees shouldn't be missed.

Standing in a Jungle

2009-09-13T16:54:00Z

Does anyone else out there remember the great Boston band Cliffs of Dooneen? Lucius Shepard's recent post about bands that should have made it big got me rooting around on YouTube, but I could only find one video from the group, and it's not by any stretch my favorite song. I guess "Carol" got some decent radio play even outside the Boston area, but their whole first album, The Dog Went East & God Went West, kicks all kinds of ass. I saw them three or four times around the city before they split up.

Any other Cliffs fans out there?

Jerk or Justified?

2009-09-11T00:33:40Z

I'm mostly on Josh Olson's side after reading this article from the Village Voice Online, though what's supposed to be snappy, hip rhetoric at the start I found mostly a turn off in the way I found almost all the dialogue in Superbad a turn off. Still, the guy's not dumb, and he makes a number of good points in the progress of his argument. One favorite bit:

"It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

"(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)"

Whatcha readin'...for?

2009-08-23T16:15:22Z

Forced to read! Oh, the agony.

My so-called summer vacation is at an end, as we start pre-sessional meetings tomorrow morning. I've been teaching in our new program for international students for the past two weeks already, though, and much of my summer has been consumed with preparatory work for this year's classes. In addition to my staple AP class, I'm teaching three new elective courses this year--of my design, so it's all my fault--which means reading or re-reading a pile of books I haven't taught before. Here's a list of books I'm leading students through that are fresh to the curriculum:

Summer Reading

lost boy, lost girl by Peter Straub
Duma Key by Stephen King

The Gothic Strain (elective course)

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell

Death and the City (elective course on detective fiction and urban studies)

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes
The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction, ed. Deane Mansfield-Kelley and Lois A. Marchino

Central and South Asian Literature

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Poems of Rumi
The Prose Ramayana
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction, ed. Denys Johnson-Davies

AP Literature

Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter

I haven't finished reading this list, but I've made a significant dent in it. I try to stay at least a trimester ahead of my prepping duties, though I've jumped around a bit to gie my reading some variety. The chair of our department is a real task master, though, so I've been forced--forced, I tell you--to read my widdle eyes out.

Additionally, I've read several books for review in the next issue of Dead Reckonings (also available at the Horror Mall), including Peter Straub's The Skylark (from Subterranean Press) and the sold-out novella A Special Place: The Heart of A Dark Matter (Borderlands Press). I'll be interested to read the heavily edited A Dark Matter, the mass-market version of The Skylark due from Doubleday in February of 2010. Then there was Bad Things by Michael Marshall, which--despite the marketing--is a real, live supernatural horror novel, and John Langan's debut novel, The House of Windows, which fences its yard in the best traditions of haunted house books but grows something strange, original, and contemporary in its gardens (there's a tortured metaphor for you).

And if you don't get the reference in the title of this entry, it's from a bit by the great comedian Bill Hicks. Here's a clip of the performance:

I've never felt this way...

2009-08-14T19:24:55Z

...about a man before. But Hal Duncan's incredible response to John C. Wright's awful bigotry made me a little weak in the knees. Well done, Mr. Duncan.

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2009/08/open-letter-to-john-c-wright.html

The Road Through the Wall

2009-08-10T11:17:50Z

Last month at Readercon I picked up a copy of The Road Through the Wall, a Shirley Jackson book of which I had never heard. It turns out this is her 1948 first novel, re-released in paperback in 1976 to capitalize on the success of "The Lottery" and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by giving it a cover with creepy children illustrations and copy claiming it "a macabre masterpiece." It's a slim novel of 220 pages in reasonably-sized type, and I'm looking forward to it. However, the descriptions I've read online make it clear that the back cover copy calling the book "Shirley Jackson's unforgettable novel of mounting terror and shattering revelation" may be more than a tad misleading.

Can't find a cover scan for the paperback, or I'd show it to you.

I always thought Hangsaman (which I also haven't read) was her first novel. Has anyone out there read this one? What did you think?

Also, Googling the book brought me to a review that "previously appeared in the Bonner County Bee..." and other places, which contains a good example of the dangling participle. I'll have to remember to use this in class: "Despite being a first novel, Jackson has made an artful statement out of her grim teen years."

Sometimes Math

2009-07-31T15:23:55Z

can in fact be used for accurate literary analysis.

There's actually some sort of rule or law or fallacy about this, but I can't remember the name. It has to do with "alien" or fantasy names for rabbits. Can anyone remind me?

My Geek Cup, It Overfloweth

2009-07-31T15:16:36Z