My second or third year teaching, somebody caught me in a hallway, asked me my thoughts on how detective fiction’s put together. And, listening to myself answer—of course I’d been reading noir and p.i. and crime and thriller forever—I realized that I only knew detective fiction as a reader, not a writer. And I say […]
Okay, I need to be writing chapters of a novel, but, to keep my brain from melting, I slip out from time to time for a movie. And I got zero time or fingerstrength for rigging a proper review together, but, man, I did dig this one. Also, the world may be lucky that Jim
1.) There’s about fifty jokes to make with that title. None of which will be made in this list. 2.) Put The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity in a jar, let Carrie (also 1974 . . .) shake it while Samara watches, and you’ve pretty much got The Quiet Ones. 3.) There was me
Got pages of mostly illegible notes re: Under the Skin, but not much time to collate. Rather, like Snowman and the Bandit, I got a long way to go and a short time to get there. So, some quick bulletpoint responses, anyway: 1) We all want to be David Bowie, of course. Or, we all
Man, the links and updates get away from me. I can usually remember to stuff them to the right, here, under Interviews/Stories/Off-Site, but I don’t always remember to put them here. So, doing it now, here. What I can recall from the last two weeks or so (will try to make all the images links):
We need a new designation: there’s movies about the apocalypse, and all our valiant efforts to stop it from happening, from Armageddon to The Hunt for Red October, and then there’s the post-apocalyptic stories, from Mad Max to The Book of Eli and way beyond. There’s stories that are kind of both, too, like Twelve
Ten Bulletpoints re: Oculus 1) This is probably from The Exorcist, but where I remember it from is Hysterical: one priest telling another not to listen, that the devil will lie to you. But then one of the Hudson brother’s pants are actually at his ankles. It wasn’t a lie, surprise. If you could turn that
I wrote Not for Nothing right on the heels of a second read of Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. And that read was because the movie showed up on some ninety-nine cent shelf, to remind me, to impress me, to lure me. And I’ve been telling anybody who asked that that was probably right around 2006
I’m pretty sure the first rashomon I ever saw, at least the first where the on-the-fly construction of the story really set me back on my heels, was this one: After that I was hooked. Completely. Forever. Happily. Now I keep a running list of rashomon stuff, which I’ll annotate below some. But it also
Back in the late nineties, I’d see Stephen Dixon stories all over and flip back to his author bio at the end of the journal or whatever not because I didn’t already know it, but for the rush: it always said he had some three hundred stories published. I had maybe six at the time?
I can’t remember if I wrote The Gospel of Z right before or right after The Least of My Scars. They were right next to each other, anyway. Oh, yeah: I wrote the first draft of Z before Scars, then the next draft after Scars. I’m pretty sure. And, it wasn’t the first zombie thing
Update, Steve. Got to remember, got to remember: City of the Dead is easily the best haunted house I’ve ever been to. I learned both NOT to get lost in the backtunnels visitors aren’t supposed to stumble into, and also to NOT let my wallet chain get caught on the wall when Leatherface is chasing
I forget if I’ve properly updated or not, but: Demon Theory, the comic book. We’ve got pencils and temp-lettering in the can, are playing with cover stuff now (I’ve got a fake-o logo/title somewhere, but, it’s somewhere not on this particular computer), as you can see below. As for its eventual realness, as in buyableness:
If only anybody were ever smart enough to call a lawyer and an English major before they made their three wishes, right? You’ve got to the get the wording just, just right, with all these exclusionary clauses, with all this over-specific verbiage to indicate exactly what you’re asking for. And bring an artist in as
Thanks to Jesse Lawrence for the heads-up on The Final Girls. Excited. ABC gave us HARPER’S ISLAND, yes? One of the best miniseries ever. And, this premise of a final girl support group is something I’ve been playing with for a while myself. So, this’ll either make it obsolete—which is great, I should have been
Kind of an update: we’ve got the first issue down, and temp-lettered. No colors or inks yet. Just starting to hit up publishers a little about it. There’s been one page of it posted at HorrorNews, and here’s a screengrab of another:
Once upon a time, a little movie called Scream asked What if the victims in the slasher knew the formula of the movie they were in? It started a revolution, a renaissance, one that finally made room for a Leslie Vernon to look at things from the slasher’s point-of-view, one that left room for Tucker
I keep thinking about these two kids who left the theater early. Say, ten minutes shy of the end, right when things were at their goriest, most sacrilegious frenzy. I mean, first and of course, eight- and ten-year-old girls shouldn’t be seeing The Conjuring. Boys either. I’m not even sure I was old enough to
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
[ this is the script of the pre- and post-words I gave for a charity event Cabin-screening Friday night, down in Manitou Springs ] wolf kisses and bear traps The slasher. We can all make a list of our ten favorite, yes? Which of course we consider the ten best. So . . . that list starts
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
Just talking World War Z. Which, I mean, I was doing that anyway, so, you know, it all worked out: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/06/27/how-world-war-z-stands-up-to-the-zombie-film-genre
