Bleak. Unremitting. Is to the road trip book what THE HILLS HAVE EYES was to the family vacation movie. And as far as post-apocalyptic stuff goes, Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD makes you see what a happy fantasy A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ was, how tame DR. BLOODMONEY was. That that road in THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER was gold brick.
Anyway, though this is a non-review like all the others, still, some steering if you’ll take it: read THE ROAD in five hours or less, all in one sit…
everyone dreams the dream
but we are it
It’s like a word problem: If two ribbons, one gold one green, approach each other at a rate of eight pages at a time in a three hundred and sixty page book, will they ever meet? Because of course one-eighty isn’t a multiple of eight — you’re either four short or four over. Which kind of make…
Showed up at the wrong bookstore Halloween night to do a DEMON THEORY signing — kind of 
awkward when you’re wearing a Jason mask, carrying a big fake knife — but finally found the right one, had a blast (notice all the LISEY’S STORYs behind me there, yeah?). Rented FEAST that night as well, though of course had to watch HALLOWEEN instead, just because I’m sentimental, and half-trying to study it, I suppose, to see where there’s room for Ro…
Man, if everybody doesn’t have a list, right? I’d guess, if I took the time to look, somebody’s already got one like this, I mean: things they’re tired enough of in horror to make a public plea that those things stop, lest the whole genre cave in or something. Or, really, those things we get tired of in our chosen reading areas (assuming we use the marketing terms [Western, Horror, Romance, Thriller, Mystery, Erotica, Historical, ‘Literary,&…
For a long time now I’ve gone to bed early
For a long time now I’ve been writing “title shot” in the back of every book I read, along with a/the page number. Most, anyway. All it means is that this (page) is the first time the title of the book appears in the book itself. Just something I’ve been tracking for years and years, with the idea of going back someday, synthesing all the ratios (“if a title’s to appear in a book, it’s usual…
Just a couple of quick links:
- Wooden Spoon’s posted a cool Demon Theory review
- In anticipation & celebration of Halloween, that fifth page of the Demon Theory quiz-thing‘s been very updated
- I just last night rung that 100-page bell on the novel I started a few days ago, which has a title still probably too tentative to say, as it might lock me into it or something. Anyway, about it: the rule this time around’s that nobody can kill anybody, and there can be
Just thinking about what I said in that last post, about how I don’t do reviews because I’m pretty sure I’d set my standards impossibly high, just so I could shoot down every book in my path. That may be a little too broad a statement, though — I don’t mean to suggest that all reviews that burn a book are similarly motivated. Granted, some reviewers just have bad attitudes (Tobias Wolff, of course, in “Bullet to the Brain,” shoots one of them …
Well, I mean, yeah, because he’s got titles like THE LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE and PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING. These are what originally got me peeling his books up from the shelves back whenever ago. Years already, I guess. Too, though, I’ve yet to read a CMoore book that hasn’t made me smile, and then impressed me too, somehow. Like this, from A DIRTY JOB, which I just finished ten minutes ago:
- “Oh, goddamn,” said Minty Fresh (damn on the dow
JUKED #4 (print) is out. Just showed up in my mailbox today. Very pretty. In there with a couple of people I know, even: Alan Rossi and Patrick Whitfill.
The story is that “Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth”-one. A story about a man and his mouse. Which, that’s not figurative language there, though I guess when you get right down to it, that mouse isn’t your standard ordinary everyday boring mouse. Who’d want to write about that?
Click the image to t…
…Editor Y:
In today’s trend-oriented publishing climate, you need to either be the celebrity-of-the-moment or you need to have a bulletproof plan to plug into what’s hot, what’s guaranteed, what there’s already an audience for. And, sir/madam/etc., that you don’t already know my name from the tabloids should suggest that, while not infamous for killing or raping or stalking somebody, which is pretty much the standard for literary poten
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