Category: SGJ

Pirate Radio

A few years ago one of my publishers was cool enough to send me up some forever elevator in New York to get a full day of some much-needed media training. Just in case. It was excellent, too; got to watch myself on a big screen over and over and over, and have every stupid thing I kept doing pointed out, the idea being of course that once I’d said, Yeah, that’s pretty ridiculous, obviously, c’mon, that maybe it’d click that I should stop doing that. I’…

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In my movie, should anybody ever let me make one:

  • if anybody’s carrying a bag of groceries, it won’t have French bread in it
  • nobody will flick playing cards into and around a trashcan or hat
  • if the characters need to hack into somebody’s computer, the password will be unguessable
  • if there’s some big and final showdown on a boat, then it won’t be finally decided with a flare gun
  • if somebody cuts their wrists in the bathtub, there won’t be a lit candle there
  • if there’s a detective of a
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What to do just right before you turn 35 :

  • First, and this is important, get Vince Liaguno, the guy who knows slashers so well that he managed to somehow trap one on the page in The Literary Six, to have written just a supercool Demon Theory review over at Unspeakable Horror, then, moments after that,
  • find out that Ellen Datlow, she who more than anybody else is probably responsible for you being a writer — her OMNI fiction being your first experience with fiction that was doing something, that was more than just wo
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The other (first) Stephen Jones

Looks like Amazon has me having a hand in a couple of books I only wish I’d had a hand in:

[ apologies for the ‘see more’ junk on those images — no time right now to dig for clean images ]

Don’t guess I’ll be getting any checks for them, though. Anyway, just to clarify, this Stephen Jones, he’s pretty much an institution in the horror world, not just some hunger artist like me, trying to see over the fence. Really, he’s the reason I u…

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You might be a novelist if . . .


. . . you could never*say :

  • No, please, no — my book would make a terrible movie.
  • Actually, I never thought about if this book would outlive me or not.
  • Well, I mean, that book’s obviously better than mine. That’s the only reason it’s on the best seller list.
  • Of course I would only ever talk bad about a book I’ve read.
  • Man, if the reader doesn’t get it, that’s just all my fault.
  • Really, I think my publisher may have even spent too much on mar
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What I wrote after (finally) reading Ben Marcus’s piece in Harper’s on Jonathan Franzen and experimental fiction

[ the title and the whole piece here may not make much sense–it may not anyway–without cueing into TheValve.org, which, it looks like, may have the original Marcus article in PDF ]

Just what is experimental fiction, then?

The easiest definition for experimental or innovative or non-conventional fiction is fiction that, both at armslength and upon closer inspection, doesn’t look or read at all like standard, mainstream, commercial fiction. A more

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Cinesthasia

So a while back a friend i was borrowing DVDs from asked what horror he might need to have a somewhat complete collection. I told him I’d pen him a list sooner or later. Only just now remembering this. And, yeah, two disclaimers before I even start here: 1) I’m surely forgetting as many as I’m remembering, and 2) my tastes of course kind of dictate what I remember, what I don’t. And I love slashers. Too, I started out trying to have just ten movies per decade…

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The Gospel According to Demon Theory

The best place to hide from an axe-weilding maniac is with your back pressed up against a wooden door you’re pretty sure is both solid and impenetrable. This is because that maniac who’s after you, his first strike with the axe will nearly always be from two to six inches from the left side of your face, thus allowing you both to know exactly where she or he is, and thus escape into the next room, and getting the maniac’s axe caught in the door long enough for you to make that esca…

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Ludovico Treatment, Demon Theory style

Been trying to figure out what scenes/images from horror movies have become so indelibly imprinted on pop-culture that even people who don’t watch horror kind of have to know them, or at least of them. Which is to say I can’t just pick the coolest or best horror clips–the ones that imprinted me once upon a time. I mean, that’d be Freddy’s long arms from A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, kid-Jason at the end of FRIDAY THE 13th, Gage cutting grandpa’…

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A Sense of an Ending in THE DESCENT

First, as this is just all about the end of THE DESCENT, then, yep, it’s just chock full of spoilers. So stop here if:

  • you’ve not seen it
  • you’re going to see it
  • and you don’t like to know how a thing’s going to end

Not meaning to say THE DESCENT has a gimmick-ending or anything — we don’t change perspective and slowly become aware that these are just action figures in a toy bin. But the two endings it does have, in being at odds with each oth…

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