I don’t care who you are, you only get a couple of drop-dead gorgeous stories, no matter how long you write. A couple, maybe three, that just sing, that last, that are permanent, that are indelible. Even Flannery O’Connor, even Tobias Wolff, even Stephen King. The rest can be beautiful and chiseled and have impact,
My review’s up over at, you guessed it, The Cult. And it’s not really a review, either. Jumping off point? Also, I need a cool header like this, below; I’d silkscreen it on a t-shirt, wear it around. You maybe think I’m lying here, too.
If only I had a cooler voice, but still, the story’s excellent: Paul Tremblay’s “We Will Never Live in the Castle,” as read by yours sometimes truly. From his new In the Mean Time collection, which I much recommend.
Last summer — months after everybody else then as well — I finally hit LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, and was so completely impressed. To say it better: I was so impressed that the movie adaptation seemed pale to me, incomplete, boring. Which isn’t at all to say it wasn’t a wonderful film (I dig
Or, “What I did with my yesterday,” yeah. Book: PARKER: THE HUNTER. Pretty fun; very straightforward, and cool art. Though, the night before I was up until two or three in the morning, unable to look away from the second volume of SCALPED, “Casino Boogie.” I’ve always thought that SANDMAN or Y THE LAST MAN
not based on a true story So I read more fiction than non-fiction. It’s a moral failing, I know: I prefer the make-believe. Too, though, I mean I write fiction. Makes sense to read it, yeah? Where else am I going to learn technique, cue into little narrative shuffles this or that writer pulled off,
In Five Words or Less: Boring title, good movie. In More than Five Words, with / without spoilers: In 1998, Sam Raimi adapted Scott Smith’s debut sensation A Simple Plan (1993) for us, and, though a lot of the narrator’s nuances were lost in the compression, still, Smith had written a strong enough dramatic spine
Accidentally cribbed a little list down last night, of books I’d somehow, embarassingly, to my own detriment, not got around to reading in 2008. No excuses, really. I mean, as usual, I read just a whole tower of novels, but I couldn’t even start to say how many or what they were. Had never considered
Doing a reading today, a Dead Authors thing, where we all take turns reading stuff from writers who died this year. I’ve got David Foster Wallace, and’ll of course be doing the aloud thing to some Infinite Jest. Too, it was cool: I wrote a friend, asked him what I should read, and one of
I’d guess we’ve all got holes in our reading. Which I’m likely saying just to make myself feel better, yeah. Anyway, Faulkner, say. I’ve read maybe five of his novels? But I don’t feel bad about that either, because I was pretty bored about two novels in. And Hemingway, man. Only made it through two
The only connection there being that I’m writing about both of them now: hit RANT the other day, and, like SNUFF, I really dug it. I’m liking the direction he’s going lately. Anyway, I guess that’s the complete text of my review there, ‘I dug it,’ but, specifically, and all spoilerly, so watch out, he
If only I could. But this would definitely be in there, right along with the TOTALL RECALL/2001 saga: “The ‘Road to Perdition’ novelization was a nightmare, frankly,” Collins says. “I went after it for obvious reasons — I didn’t want a ‘Perdition’ novel written by someone else out there. I proceeded to write the best
Well, ‘new,’ I don’t know — I’m just seeing them anyway. And one I’ve been waiting for, I don’t know, feels like ever, but a few months anyway:
Really, just two passages I’ve stumbled onto these last couple of days. The first is from Eric Miles Williamson, a guy I really respect because he can seriously write. On the editorial board of some mystery-press a couple of years ago, I read a book of his in manuscript which I still think of just
Man, except for re-hitting ReAnimator the other day — and maybe even including it — Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon is far and away the best horror I’ve seen all year. Best I’ve seen since Feast, really.* And Feast is that holy kind of good for me. The only time I plan
As part of my quest to not write any reviews, either book or movie, I submit this by way just of suggestion: William J. Cobb‘s Goodnight, Texas (Unbridled Books, who, going by this, man, they produce some seriously clean books. And pretty too. If I’m not mistaken, they even commissioned the painting for the cover
“In a great turnaround, upstart Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, billed as something of an homage to The Omega Man‘s Charlton Heston, whom McCarthy once did stunt-work for, but owing more probably to Walter Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, managed to steal the 2007 Pulitzer for fiction from — “ Okay, sorry. Just figured
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr: no more. Gone. Maybe like Billy Pilgrim, though, he’s just rollercoasting back and forth through it all now. Laughing. Hope so, anyway.
Which, I’m finding, aren’t at all the same as my five favorite books. Ridiculous, yes? Wish I had some fix for that, or at least an explanation, or suspicion. I mean, it’s kind of presupposing some major disconnect between intensity and . . . I don’t know: appreciation? Revisitability? Not some Pirsig-ish ‘quality,’ I don’t
Man, turns out Only Revolutions, at 360 pages, was an easy read, yeah? I mean, as compared to three million pages. But it is Richard Grossman, so maybe three million pages is just the right amount [ see below ]. As some of y’all know, I’m always pushing that seventy-page sentence fragment from his The
[ the title and the whole piece here may not make much sense–it may not anyway–without cueing into TheValve.org, which, it looks like, may have the original Marcus article in PDF ] Just what is experimental fiction, then? The easiest definition for experimental or innovative or non-conventional fiction is fiction that, both at armslength and
I first read Pynchon when I was twenty-two, I think, between a B.A. and an M.A. The only reason I read him, too, was because I’d hit up a professor I trusted for a list of books I’d need to have read if I didn’t want to get laughed out of grad school. She of
Looks like, in pre-celebration for TURISTAS1, Demon Theory pulled two reviews this week: & [ click em to hit the rvws ] Cool places each, though the reviews are kind of opposites of each other. Anyway, it’s none other than Mike Bracken on the Toxic Universe one. Which, I mean — for my first novel,
and his freezer’s now spilling over with elk. which is to say dancing days are here again, all that. and, because all this can’t seem to organize itself any other way, a list: That 32 Poems (Fall/Winter 4.2) with my story “Lunch” is out and about now. Just had “The Sadness of Two People Meeting
Bleak. Unremitting. Is to the road trip book what THE HILLS HAVE EYES was to the family vacation movie. And as far as post-apocalyptic stuff goes, Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD makes you see what a happy fantasy A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ was, how tame DR. BLOODMONEY was. That that road in THE PARABLE OF THE
everyone dreams the dream but we are it It’s like a word problem: If two ribbons, one gold one green, approach each other at a rate of eight pages at a time in a three hundred and sixty page book, will they ever meet? Because of course one-eighty isn’t a multiple of eight — you’re
Just thinking about what I said in that last post, about how I don’t do reviews because I’m pretty sure I’d set my standards impossibly high, just so I could shoot down every book in my path. That may be a little too broad a statement, though — I don’t mean to suggest that all
Well, I mean, yeah, because he’s got titles like THE LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE and PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING. These are what originally got me peeling his books up from the shelves back whenever ago. Years already, I guess. Too, though, I’ve yet to read a CMoore book that hasn’t made me smile, and then impressed
Just finished Charles McCarry’s OLD BOYS, which, like the rest of the Paul Christopher series, just absolutely blew me away. The guy’s not just a good storyteller, he hammers his prose, too. Usually you get one or the other. A sample line: She had the wary unwavering eyes of a woman who knew how attractive
never at a loss for stuff to read. if I could just shoehorn one more syllable in there, it’d scan pretty cool, I think. what little I know or can take a stab at talking lines. anyway, yesterday afternoon’s library haul (this doesn’t count the ninety-plus I already have checked out, on my shelf, which
