stephen graham jones stuff

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 Matrix so wowed us to such a degree that the second and third paled in comparison? That’s how it is for Brown now, I think: everything he does falls under the long shadow of (the success of) The Da Vinci Code, which, much like Foucault’s Pendulum, trod and retrod that fun old Holy Blood, Holy Grail territory. However, unlike the Eco, Dan Brown’s novel was actually engaging. And it took over the world every bit as much as Harry Potter, as Fifty Shades. Maybe even more, in that it became a point for people to argue, and take ideological sides over. And that it was built like a hybrid of a crossword and chutes & ladders definitely didn’t hurt, as that allowed it to showcase the frenetic pacing Brown does as well anybody, and had already been doing for a few books. All his work, it’s got that same pacing, those same sudden reversals, the betrayals, the twists and turns and little hidden lectures, the showing-off of obscure, kind of intrinsically cool facts, but none of those other books have sparked our imagination as much as Da Vinci Code, right? Neither did Matrix 2 or 3 reel in the same  . . . → → →

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 is, it was, it would be again. And, like me, I’d guess a lot of you are getting Amazon emails with Lydia Netzer’s Shine Shine Shine at the top of their lists. Deservedly so. There’s a wit here, a lightness of touch, and a continual mulling-over of story that’s compelling. And, rather than excising all my favorite passages, let me just show you how many of those favorite passages there are: That many stars, for me, it’s very unusual. Usually my endpaper notes are littered with question marks and ellipses (these being the ellipses of dissatisfaction . . .) and just plain old X’s. Here, it’s like I’m trying to draw the night sky Sunny’s looking up into, trying to find her Maxon: it’s all stars. Too, the good books, you learn from them, don’t you? You see the tricks going on and you try to steal them. And there’s a lot of stuff here to steal. Not just the way Lydia can flip a line the instant it starts to get sentimental, either. More the way she’s keeping the whole scope of the story in mind, with each scene. It’s good stuff, I’m saying. Also, the good books, you  . . . → → →

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 follow-up/undercut The Lifespan of a Fact, neither of which I’ve hit (so lost in Song of Ice and Fire). But I’m going to now. And, to ramp right off of the actual discussion into where and how it hit me: that other post, where I was talking about why I wrote Growing Up Dead in Texas? None of those were lies. But I realized, during this panel, that that wasn’t quite complete, either. To back up, I’ve had a lot of students and various unsorted people kind of shuffle up to me, and lead in their question or request or whatever with some version of “I know you hate non-fiction, but . . . ” Which is fair. I mean, I wouldn’t say I hate non-fiction, but it’s not what I do, and, starting about ten years ago, I got all highly sensitized to and more than slightly defensive about how non-fiction was encroaching on fiction. But, at the same time, I’ve read some really good non-fiction, and know there’s some great stuff out there waiting to change my life, and, yeah, I’m finally coming around to agree with David Ulin, that calling one thing ‘fiction’ and another ‘non-fiction’ is  . . . → → →

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 as a quality human besides, so of course I was going to hit The Croning, first chance I got. As for that first chance, though, it got lost in the void, evidently; not even a month before the book hit, one of my other publishers finally forwarded a longago request from Nightshade, to look at The Croning early. At which point it was already printed, ready to ship. So there was all that instant regret, the raging at the gods, I could have hit it then, wouldn’t have had to wait, but, still and all, that wait, it was so worth it. And, as a gauge: the book I read immediately before The Croning was the first in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Which, Charles McCarry’s Paul Christopher series aside — and maybe not aside — is looking to be my favorite series ever in the history of anything, also counting the future. Reading Martin, I don’t want to do anything else. Like eat, or move. Just Kindle me another, please, and it better get here in thirty seconds or less or I’m buying it again, and again. So, yeah, book 2 of that, it’s  . . . → → →

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 usually tell them that it’s in the same vein as To Kill a Mockingbird, kind of. Except it’s exciting, and has blood, and scary stuff. And those people, they usually come back and tell me, yep, that’s about the sum of it. And: where can I read the rest? Which means they’re ready for A Fine Dark Line, Sunset & Sawdust, that line of books — they evoke the region better than anybody else writing, and they’re also snapshots of a particular time, but they’re never that kind of nostalgic that whitewashes the era or gets all syrupy with sentimentality. And, though Lansdale does tend to stick to the East Texas he knows, that’s not at all to limit him to being a ‘regional’ writer. Even (just) a ‘Texas’ or ‘southern’ writer. No, the issues he’s dealing with, always, they’re big, they’re human, they concern us all. What he’s always dealing with is how to be a good person in this world. And, sure, there’s blood, there’s killing — the imagery in Leather Maiden‘s far from pretty — but there’s always a kind of ethical boundary in his work, too. It doesn’t make you feel safe — that would be an insult (to Lansdale)  . . . → → →

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? Zombie Bake-Off, pretty much. To back up again, though: the big hurdle for me and graduate school, at the MA level anyway, it was that I had this big prejudice against dialogue. I felt certain you could tell and novel and tell it wonderfully by simply paraphrasing all the dialogue. Yet there are conventions, there are norms, there was, evidently, stuff to be hammered sidewise into my head, whether I wanted it to be there or not. And, no, Lord of the Barnyard hadn’t been published at the time. Had it have been, I’d have held it up as my standard, my proof, my defense: 402 beautiful pages, and never a quoted line of dialogue (no unquoted, either—all paraphrased, indirect). But, as things went, I reluctantly started letting my characters actually speak on the page. Complete revolution for me. Then, a year or two later, I even started using actual real quotation marks. I was a complete sell-out of/to the person I’d been trying to be. But that’s growing up, too, I kind of suspect. If you don’t have any regret, any secret fondness for the way things might have been, maybe even should have been, then you’re still lucky enough to  . . . → → →

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. But, still, I’ve never quite been able to figure out the precise magic King was tapping into with The Shining. I mean, sure, it seems modeled on Shirley Jackson’s stuff, no doubt, it’s finally a very conventional telling of a haunted house story, has all the elements we need and are used to, all that. But what elevates it past most of the rest? And then I hit this: And, first, I wish I could edit like that, that I could see alt_stories buried in the obvious, but, too, when crazydude Jack’s bouncing that ball up against that wall in that grand big room of the Overlook, my heart kind of swept up and I maybe got it, a little: this is the basic post-apocalyptic dream, isn’t it? This is Will Smith in I Am Legend, slamming through the streets of Manhattan in whatever car he wants. This is those two guys in that Gary Larson panel, out fishing, seeing the mushroom clouds in the distance, one of them saying to the other that what this means is screw the limits, right? The Torrances getting to camp out in the Overlook, have the run of that whole magical place for  . . . → → →

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 up, peeled through it, and it’s solid. My favorite: The majority of horror stories are, to a significant extent, representations of processes of discovery, as well as often occasions for hypothesis formation on the part of the audience, and, as such, these stories engage us in the drama of proof. My boldface, yeah. But, for years now I’ve been casting around, trying to figure out why my novels tend to be shaped like they are. I always wanted to call them ‘epistemic’-something or another, but nothing would ever stick (and who am I to call my own stuff anything, yeah; this was all just in my head, though, if that helps). But it’s so often about one dude (or dudette) encountering something ‘off,’ then following that off-ness into layers of lies surrounding something awful they finally have to face. What that is, though, it’s Carroll’s “drama of proof.” That’s exactly what and why I write, I think, and . . . horror. I used to always think I wrote it because I loved it, and of course I want to write what I like to read. Made sense. And’s maybe not wrong. But, too, as Carroll describes the narrative shapes  . . . → → →