Category: bookish

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 …

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 be…

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 te…

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 …

I really really want to review it, but . . . anybody noticed that I only tend to do write-ups for books that are either problematic (or offensive to my delicate sensibilities) or that I can use a step to get up on my soapbox? And King’s 11/22/63, it’s just a solid, well-told, strongly-written book. And, if we’re to believe the sign-off at the end, a book written in, what, six weeks? I mean, I’m usually not intimidated by how fast somebody else can kick a boo…

Of all the novels and stories I’ve written, only two of them really stand out as an experience. Not at all saying the rest were a chore or a race or a slog or forgettable, any of that. Every novel you write, it’s different, and wonderful, and terrible, and worth it. But the title story from Bleed Into Me, say: one morning I woke with a fever, was standing at the medicine cabinet about to dose myself with all the usual experiments, when I remembered a fight my cousin Stacy had got in once. …

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 s…

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 for

A while back I was part of the cattle call for what became this article, and just found myself looking this email up as a student was coming to my office to talk about ghosts. So I figured it’d be good if I could see again what I think about them (I know nothing until I write it down, and then, because it’s written down, I don’t need to try to remember it). Anyway, couple of friends — Laird Barron, Paul Tremblay — got in the article, so all’s good an…

Finished CJ Box’s very Hillerman-ey Back of Beyond. Like everything else of his so far, I really dug it, though this one’s a lot more straight-ahead thriller than mystery, which is where he usually writes. I’d say it’s a (Crais) Hostage, just rural instead of urban. Just as well-paced, though, and very well-written this time, too. Glad he’s branching out from the Joe Pickett stuff more and more. I mean, I love Joe, but like Box says at his read…