Month: March 2011
from the back of the book :
These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out. A boy’s summer romance doesn’t end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who’s exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn’t be possible, but now he can’t stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn…
1) Characters are most interesting when they lie. It’s when they’re the most naked, the most vulnerable, the most perplexing — the most like us. Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn’t thrown out of balance, and so there’s no need for a ‘rest of the story’ to balance it back.
2) If you keep having to dip into the story’s past to explain the present, then there’s a good chance your real story…
Sucker Punch has problems, yes. Usually, though, you can squint just right, only watch the parts of the movie that the trailer sold you on, and you’re good. Not this time. Which, this is a hyperkinetic, Scott Pilgrim-kind of fantasy fight movie involving steam-powered zombies, with some pretty cool updates of standard songs going on in the background (and foreground), such that the whole thing feels like an Evanescence video, I guess. Any one of which should be enough …
So one time I’m on the phone with the bank, talking to a robot about money, when I hit the wrong key, somehow ended up with Laird Barron on the other end, and I could tell from the way he was talking that his mouth was just real close to the phone, close enough I had to hold my phone out, look at it. But then I listened. He was already talking, he might have even been mostly asleep, and his voice, something about it, it kind of unmoored me, made me not so much suspicious that he was calling from …
that I’m proud and lucky and honored to be in: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, ed. Paula Guran.…
is the NYT bestselling author of 30 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More