Happy Holidays?

Best card ever from my brother Dan, his wife Beth, and baby-to-be:

Booklist review of PHANTOM

Been a reviewy kind of week.  I’m coming up on a two week break from school and plan a bunch of less spamy blog posts soon.  I promise.

“With the glut of vampire novels and slasher flicks currently saturating the horror genre, it’s easy to overlook the still healthy demand for loftier ways of scaring people. While its intended audience may be small for now, this slender volume of highbrow horror stories offers superlative craftsmanship without sacrificing the indispensable chills. The assembled authors, whose publishing credits range from Fantasy Magazine to the New England Quarterly, have in common twisted imaginations and respect for literary distinction. In Steve Eller’s “The End of Everything,” a killer is astounded and relieved to discover that the post-apocalyptic zombies roaming the streets aren’t the least interested in feasting on him. Two teenaged kidnappers in Stephen Graham Jones’ “The Ones Who Got Away” get more than they bargained for when they realize their intended victim is the child of a machete-wielding judge. More than a few tales here stop abruptly in unsatisfying endings, but one can’t fault their creators’ abilities to startle the reader with unusual premises and unsettling imagery..”—Booklist (December 15, 2009)

Phantom edited by Paul Tremblay and Sean Wallace is available in bookstores. [Amazon, Powells]

Advent Book Blog and Nick Kaufmann recommend The Little Sleep

The post title kind of says it all, don’t it?

Tremblay’s masterful debut novel is feast of language and imagery.

Publisher’s Weekly review of No Sleep till Wonderland, plus a random math fact

Solid! And Derivative of Hitchcock is the name of my new band.

No Sleep Till Wonderland Paul Tremblay. Holt, $14 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8850-2

While somewhat derivative of Hitchcock, Tremblay’s second novel featuring South Boston PI Mark Genevich improves enough on the first, The Little Sleep (2009), to suggest that the unusual hero—a narcoleptic sleuth subject to unpredictable blackouts—can sustain a series. Genevich is scraping the bottom of the barrel after one of his frequent screwups leads to his following the wrong woman on what should have been a straightforward investigation of marital infidelity, a goof that leads his client, an investment company CEO, to consider suing him. Genevich gets another opportunity from a fellow member of the group therapy sessions his mother forces him to attend, who asks him to protect a female bartender from a stalker. That assignment winds up placing Genevich on the police radar as an arson suspect. The plot twists satisfy more than surprise, but the clever writing will keep readers turning the pages. (Feb.)

Speaking of derivatives…the first derivative of sinx is cosx, the second derivative is -sinx, the third derivative is -cosx, and the fourth derivative is sinx.  Get it!

House of Windows and Pariah

While school’s in session for a few more weeks, my blog posts will consist of exciting book musings.  Exciting!  Musings!

First up, John Langan’s excellent first novel, House of Windows.  The novel centers around Veronica (young, beautiful grad student) and Roger (65 yr old divorcee, well-established and respected Dickens scholar/professor, who’s son Ted had joined the Army and is killed in Afghanistan) and their complex relationship/marriage, the relationships they have/had with their parents, and ultimately the relationships they have with themselves as well.  Langan isn’t interested in heroes, and Roger and Veronica are painfully human, and he has the courage in a first novel to devote a lot of time to developing them, big fat warts and all.  It more than pays off when the strange occurrences at the Belvedere house begin to take place.   Langan offers no easy answers or explanations to the happenings, which give the proceedings the weight of reality even as reality breaks down for his characters.  And within these shifting threads of the narrative, character motivation, and even of the physical house itself, the idea of story (and how we’re defined by story) is everywhere.

“Dickens tries to come to terms with his childhood traumas, his adult ambivalences, by writing about them over and over.  Hawthorne tries to clarify his Puritan legacy to himself in story after story.  Whenever something happens to you–something too much–you create a story to deal with it, to define if not contain it.”

Dave Zeltserman’s Pariah takes noir for a ride with one of the more despicable characters this side of  Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman (from American Psycho).  Kyle Nevin is let out of prison after a 9 year stint for a foiled bank robbery, with now on-the-lam Southie crime boss Red Mahoney as the guy who ratted Kyle out.  Kyle isn’t exactly into reform or starting a new life.  He wants revenge, and anyone in his way doesn’t stay in his way for long.  Like Bateman, Kyle as a violent sociopath, a force of nature  (one from which we can’t look away), albeit a cultivated one.  He’s a wonderfully unreliable narrator, even pseudo-confessing to inaccuracies (or him replacing actual events with some over-the-top American male, consumer obsessed type fantasies) to an unnamed “editor.”  Yeah, an editor, as in Kyle is ready and willing and even able (despite a horribly botched kidnapping attempt) to cash in on his celebrity.

Pariah is at turns brutal, violent, and a funny, scathing satire of our celebrity obsessed consumer culture and publishing industry.   Really couldn’t put the book down, I poured through it in one day.

Chew and Lovecraft Unbound

Chew Volume One: Tasters Choice (John Layman and Rob Guillory) collects the comic’s issues 1-5.  Tony Chu is a cibopathic detective, which means that he gets psychic vibes from whatever he eats (except for beets…blucky, beets).  Yes, Tony eats horrible things and the gross out get played, but not overplayed and used in step with the plot, which delights in going all over the place.  Really fun and clever stuff that manages to be funny, brutal, and yeah, suspenseful at times too.  Looking forward to the next cycle of CHEW comics.

Lovecraft Unbound edited by Ellen Datlow is an excellent original anthology of stories inspired by (not necessarily set in) Lovecraft’s mythos.  I’ve read H. P., of course, but never really enjoyed him, to be honest.  I can appreciate the themes and the abounding cosmic horror, but man, I just can’t get past his writing style (me being a style monkey and all).  However, I have found that I rather enjoy other people doing Lovecraftian fiction.  Standouts from the antho include “The Office of Doom” by Richard Bowes (and everything I’ve read from Richard recently has totally kicked my ass) featuring great, witty, and weird first person account of NYC University librarian.  “Cold Water Survival” by Holly Phillips is about an expedition on a floating/crumbling iceberg, “Machines of Concrete Light and Dark” by Michael Cisco with the cosmic horror being supplied by a machine running on collective consciousness (or unconsciousness), “Leng” by Marc Laidlaw with fungal gods in Tibet.  The stories from Brian Evenson, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Laird Barron, and Nick Mamatas were excellent as well.  A very impressive original fiction anthology.

Literary Horror: Dude you made that up (introduction from Phantom)

(the brief essay that serves as the intro to Phantom):

Literary Horror: Dude you made that up

The following is a brief (and clearly informal!) e-mail exchange with a colleague–who primarily writes and reads works of fantasy–concerning PHANTOM and horror in general:

Colleague: A horror anthology sounds interesting. I’m a person who loves/hates horror. I can’t read or watch movies without gettng the heebie-jeebies. Yet, I still do it (on rare occasion).

Me: I’m a big time scaredy cat. So my tastes tend to be particular; “literary horror” if there’s such a thing.

Colleague: “Literary Horror” . . . Dude, you made that up! But I think you mean something more psychological than gross out/painful being the result. Or do I have that wrong? I don’t like horror for the sake of having lots of death. I like some deeper reason (more than he was crazy).

All right, so horror has its baggage: the seemingly unending stream of exploitative Hollywood slasher and torture movies, the stuff of pubescent revenge and misogynistic fantasies, or the retread plot of some unspeakable horror visits the nice white suburban neighborhood and the ‘other’ must be defeated; and most recently,the seemingly unending horde of Internet champions, websites with names like StabbyStabStab.com that feature unreadable stories and slime-lined banner-ads to their vanity published books,their authors boasting of being the next Stephen King or being too brutal-for-your-grandma. As frustrating as it is, no other genre seems to be as defi ned or recognized by the works that fail as art.

Yeah, there’s baggage with both words (literary and horror), and yeah, there’s a lot of bad horror but, Dude, I did not make up “literary horror.” I swear. It lives! Within the last half-century practitioners of literary horror include Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner (tell me “A Rose for Emily” is not a horror story, go ahead, I dare you!), Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Stewart O’Nan, Chuck Palahniuk, and Kelly Link just to name a few.

Many a more qualified writer has attempted an in-depth definition of the genre, but here’s an incredibly brief and awkward attempt at defining literary horror (I could be rightly accused of simply describing horror that I like . . . but since you’re reading this, you’re stuck with it.) by what it achieves: The literary horror story aims to do more than shock, titilate, scare, or affect the reader. While affect is a clear and important (possibly defining) element of horror fiction, there needs to be more. In using the elements of literary fiction–style, theme, setting, character–the literary horror story goes beyond the scare, beyond the revealing of some terrible truth (personal or social or universal) and asks the truly terrifying questions: What’s next? What decisions are you going to make? Does it matter the consequences? Do you know the consequences? How are you going to live through this? How does anyone live through this? Stories where the shock or the grand revealings or implications aren’t the point, but a part of the exploration of how people react to the everyday horrors of existence, how they might answer How does anyone live through this?

The true horrors of the inimitable Steve Rasnic Tem’s “The Cabinet Child” are the decisions Alma and her husband make, independently of each other, while under the duress of an all-too-familiar loneliness.

Steve Eller’s “The End of Everything” and Carrie Laben’s “Invasive Species” present recognizable but fresh apocalyptic scenarios, making their settings painfully personal via the desperate actions of their flawed and fragile characters.

In the break-neck paced “The Ones Who Got Away,” Stephen Graham Jones tells us right up front that something bad is going to happen, and makes us live through the hours of decisions and consequences (both intended and unintended) leading up to the inevitable.

Michael Cisco’s wonderfully unreliable narrator in “Mr. Wosslynne” spins a dizzying Aickman-like fever dream that blurs reality and identity. Similar in its unreality, Becca De La Rosa’s story pieces the bits of Kate’s life together creating ghosts and houses, and nothing is safe.

From paranoid gold prospectors to lonely curators, Satan worshiping Long Island teens, metaphysics-obsessed television reporters, and to Peter and Olivia and their devastating final choices detailed in the last pages of this anthology, the fourteen stories of PHANTOM present their horrors diff erently, but they all ask: How does anyone live through this?

Phantom: Now available!

Phantom, the anthology of literary horror is finally available at amazon and Barnes and Nobles and the like.

Blurbs:

Ghosts, disaffected wives, deserted towns, obsessive journalists and children who never existed haunt the pages of this stunning, elegant and frightful anthology of “literary horror” assembled by Stoker nominee Tremblay and World Fantasy Award–winning Wallace (Bandersnatch)… deliciously creepy book of horrors that prove all the more terrifying for their everyday nature.”–Publisher’s Weekly

“Tremblay and Wallace have put together an oustanding anthology that truly examines the dark corners of the human experience and asks, ‘What’s next?’ Haunting, provocative and immensely enjoyable.”–Brian Keene

“Literary Horror is by definition personal horror.  As the introduction points out, it asks the question, ‘How does anyone live through this?’  Phantom attempts to answer in a kaleidoscope of ways, blending stylistic experimentation and surreal subject matter with solid storytelling by established authors and newcomers alike.”–Poppy Z. Brite

“A mosaic replete with frightful and hypnogogic imagery.  Phantom is the physical artifact of the weird and horrific dreams of fourteen febrile visions aligned in cryptic symmetry.”–Laird Barron

TOC:

Introduction (Literary Horror: Dude you made that up!), Paul Tremblay

The Cabinet Child, by Steve Rasnic Tem

The End of Everything, by Steve Eller

A Ghost, A House, by Becca De La Rossa

The Ones Who Got Away, by Stephen Graham Jones

After Images, by Karen Heuler

The Ladder of St. Augustine, by Seth Lindberg

What President Polk Said, by Vylar Kaftan

Kinder, by Steve Berman

Set Down This, by Lavie Tidhar

A Stain on the Stone, by Nick Mamatas

Mr. Wosslynne, by Michael Cisco

Jonquils Bloom, by Geoffrey H. Goodwin

Invasive Species, by Carrie Laben

She Hears Music Up Above, by F. Brett Cox

 

There wasn’t a second spitter at Borders

But there was a second videographer: Steve “the crotchety old fan” Davidson also videotaped the readings.

Relive the magic from a different angle here.

Videos from the Borders Reading

Friday night at Borders couldn’t have gone better.  John and the Borders staff were extremely gracious hosts.  It was a lot of fun sharing the stage with David and Jeff.  The crowd was rowdy, too.  I said rowdy! Big thanks to everyone, and especially to JoAnn Cox for taping the event.

Jeff’s intro for the evening:

Me reading (in two parts):

More vids from the evening:

David Anthony Durham reads from his The Other Lands

Footage of Jeff Vandermeer’s lost reading (only 3 minutes, then my camera crapped out).

David, Jeff, and I hung around for 30 minutes of Q&A:

Part1

Part 2

Part 3