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. …
and, it’s from me: “State,” over at the new Quarterly West.…
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…
and, nothing against Oklahoma, either. I watched Saving Grace, I mean, and I’ve read some good books and stories out of there — however, when I wrote ATBS, I remember very specifically driving everybody way around Oklahoma. Just because I knew that if I let anybody set tire there, that the story was going to be forever getting up to Kansas like ATBS needed.
None of which is what I’m about to link, here. What I’m linking is my invective against “OK…
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
I know — best journal title ever, right? My “Neither Heads Nor Tails” is up there now.
Also, thanks to a heads-up from Gordon Highland, I just clicked through all the story links over to the right, here. Turns out a few of them were dead:
- “The Complete Absence of Cats is Another Definition for Silence,” from Literal Latte (though I think I ran it through BOMB or somewhere as well — some B-place, anyway).
- the title story from Bleed Into Me, th
Man, went into Drive fully prepared for Steve McQueen to be powershifting through the city, fully psyched for that chase scene from Ronin to get dilated out to ninety minutes, was ready for some Gone in 60 Seconds (the remake) fun, so long as it didn’t get as goofy as The Fast and the Furious(es) or xXx. To Drive’s credit, too, it never even approaches that level of stunt-ridiculousness. But still, it’s called “Drive,” right? An imperative sentence, not just a description. I mea…
first is a bookstore window here in Boulder (Innisfree), second a friend shot to me from Virginia, I think.…