bookish

  Southern Gods A lot of novels out there, they play with the tentacley, the eldritch, the elder, but this one . . . I don’t know. It kind of does it, first, in a way that doesn’t seem like ‘play’ at all, but more important, it does it in a way that kind of […]

Layli Longsoldier, killing it on the page. This is exactly how art can work. I would say how poetry can work, but, really, this feels bigger than just one form, one medium. As the poem talks about. Click here to go there, and then never leave, except to spread this poem more and farther: My

Last three I read over the last . . . ten, twelve days? Something like that. I know, I know: how have I ever called myself a horror writer without having this one on my mental bookshelf? No excuse. It’s good, too. Most interesting, maybe, is the way Bloch starts so many of the chapters

Meant to write this last weekend, when these were actually the last three books I’d read, but . . . I don’t exactly recall: something went on to keep me from doing that. However, I already can’t remember whatever book I read this week, so, kind of technically, these are still the last three books

Thinking I might need to do one of these soon. Or, I’m thinking of trying out an undergrad senior seminar on Alan Moore’s work, then—different semester (as I’m a sane human)—something like this course. How do I know when it’s getting to be time to try this kind of stuff? Because the books start lining

Read this—lived in this—two or so weeks ago, but haven’t had a spare minute at the keyboard until now, just because of what Bob Seger calls deadlines and commitments. But it’s been cycling through my brainpan this whole time. Jeremy Robert Johnson’s last book, the collection We Live Inside You, has some pretty persistent parasites popping

I wonder what it’s like to read this if you’re not, say, exactly forty-two. Being forty-two, however (just like Ernest Cline), this was perfect. It rewards all the obscure trivia I prize, makes being into X set of movies and Y set of comics cool. And, it even goes what’s Z for me: videogames, which

The Folly of the World is about the most hilarious book I’ve read. If not ever, then, I don’t know, at least since my last Christopher Moore, maybe. Folly is . . . it’s got a mouth like Deadwood, a plot like a Coen Brothers movie, and it looks for all the world to me

First, to get the associations out of the way: the two movies this title kickstarts in my head are Strangeland and Adventureland. Anybody else the same? And that’s not bad. Anything that brings Dee Snyder to mind is a good thing, I say. But, of those two, Joyland‘s a lot closer in content to Adventureland.

The real test of a novel for me is if it sparks ideas. If it makes me stop reading, flip to the back of the book, and crib down what I think is a completely bulletproof, never-before-thought-of idea. Joe Hill’s N0S4A2 does that. I just got my copy back — loaned out the night of

One cool place to read the second-to-last chapter of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane is bleeding out at a donation place. A blood donation place. And, best place to read the last chapter, at least in Boulder, Colorado? Sitting in the bright bright sun in front of TimeWarp Comics. Also

The Matrix Syndrome. I propose that as both the name for Dan Brown’s next Robert Langdon thriller and as the condition he now writes under. Or with. Or is expressing symptoms of. Not that it’s hurting his sales or his celebrity, of course. Or, as many would have it, his infamy. Remember how the first

I knew from the first time I saw the title of this book that I was going to have to consume it, and then I lucked onto an ARC, meaning all I had to do was steal some time from myself. Which, I can be particularly unwatchful when the reading’s good enough. And, here, it

Just went to the most excellent lecture-discussion led by David Ulin, with Matthew Zapruder and Rob Roberge and Elizabeth Crane Brandt and Mark Haskell Smith and Tod Godberg chiming in—more people as well, but, you know, you lose track. Not of the talk, though. It was about John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, and the kind-of

I’ve hit both Laird Barron’s collections, of course — if you’re going to play in the horror fields, his bloody square of grass goes for an acre or two — and, in the way of disclosure, he was kind enough to pen the intro for my first horror collection, and I know and respect him

Way the Baptists saw it, that dunk in the river made it sure you was going to heaven, even if before or later you knew a cow in the biblical sense and set fire to a crib with the baby in it — Lansdale, this book When I’m pushing Joe R. Lansdale’s The Bottoms on somebody, I’ll

Don’t get me wrong, I love Demon Theory, I’m forever lost in it. But still, I always wondered what a novel written with that kind of syntax might look like if somebody took out the footnotes. And then what if they also took out the screenplay language stuff? What would be left? Just straight-up story?

Thinking a lot about haunted houses this semester — overseeing an ind study on them, just wrote a long old haunted house short story, and here we are coming on to Halloween — and, specifically, of course, about the idea of Dr. Sleep, and how if anybody can pull it off,  yeah, it’d be him.

by Noel Carroll — and I have no clue how to make his umlat. And, only took me this long to read it (it’s cited everywhere, is maybe the only of its kind) is because it was lodged in my head as being written by Noel Coward. Which never made sense. But, finally dug it

Finished CJ Box’s very Hillerman-ey Back of Beyond. Like everything else of his so far, I really dug it, though this one’s a lot more straight-ahead thriller than mystery, which is where he usually writes. I’d say it’s a (Crais) Hostage, just rural instead of urban. Just as well-paced, though, and very well-written this time, too.