Robert Jackson Bennett's Blog, page 11

Guilded Earlobe review

The Guilded Earlobe gives The Troupe an A!

Quick Thoughts: The Troupe is one of the very few fantasies that I was completely enthralled with from the mysterious beginnings to its bittersweet end. It reminded me that there is magic still in this world, whether it’s in a song, or the touch of a loved one and most importantly within the pages of a well told story. You needn’t be a fan of Fantasy to find the joy and the magic in this wonderful world that Robert Jackson Bennett has created.

This reminds me… I really do need to make a summary of all the “Best of 2012 Lists” THE TROUPE made…

On the present tense

AMERICAN ELSEWHERE marks a lot of changes for me as a writer. It’s contemporary, it’s strongly science fiction, it has more characters than any of my novels, and it’s much longer than the others, too.

However, the biggest change is probably that the book utilizes the omniscient present tense. This might not sound huge to some of you – but it really is.

It has passages like:

Mr. Trimley is old and alone, but he has his diversions. Specifically, his model trains, which occupy nearly every waking moment of his life and most of the eighteen-hundred square feet of his adobe home. His trains are his hobby, he tells himself, just a hobby, yet sometimes he wonders if it is all right for a hobby to grow so extensive that he throws out his bed, stove, tables, chairs, all in the cause of allowing more room for his many trains.

No, he thinks. That’s silly. He is an old man, and old men are allowed their eccentricities.

He has somewhere in the range of nine-hundred and fifty model trains, all running on electrical tracks from four feet long to four hundred feet long… and perhaps longer. Mr. Trimley knows that it is a good thing to be a man, just a simple old man living in his simple house, but he does not feel it is wrong to help things a little, all in the name of his trains, of course. After all, if he can alter things to make his trains more impressive, then he should, correct?

Yes. Of course. And Mr. Trimley can alter quite a bit.

Some of his trains, when they enter a little plastic tunnel or trundle under a miniature wooden bridge, take a very, very long time to come out on the other side. The most extreme example is the Northern Line, who only comes back to his house every three days or so, usually at around 9 in the morning. And when it returns, the Northern Line is frequently bedecked with snow, and reeking of sulfur.

Mr. Trimley has laid a lot of track for his trains. It’s just that some of the tracks go places outside of his home, or to places invisible to the naked eye. But that’s just a detail, really – after all, this is just his quaint hobby, isn’t it?

So this format marks a pretty big break from my usual stuff.

However: for some people, the present tense is like nails on a blackboard. It’s borderline unreadable, in fact. The mere subject of the present tense is somewhat akin to abortion: wildly polarizing, with staunch supporters and fierce critics.

So why did I choose to write this book in the present tense?

MY PAST WITH THE PRESENT TENSE

The first book I ever read in the present tense, I think, was THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION, by Michael Chabon. And it was difficult, at first: I recall flipping to the end of the book to see if it actually stayed in the present tense for the whole story.

But eventually, it really, really started to work. It somehow made the prose effervescent, sparkling, vibrant; the book seemed to vibrate and thrum with energy. This was, however, way before I ever really started writing, and it never occurred to me to try writing that way.

But a huge influence on THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION is – I’m pretty sure – is David Simons’s HOMICIDE: A YEAR ON THE KILLING STREETS, a nonfiction book written by Simon after spending four years working with the detectives of the Baltimore homicide department.

This book is phenomenal. It is brilliant. It is alive and stark and ringing. An excerpt can be found here, and I highly recommend you read it.

This book is nonfiction, and could even be considered a work of journalism – I am fairly sure Simon considers it to be. So it, like many journalistic pieces or profiles, is written in the present tense. And it works in a way that the past tense simply couldn’t: there’s an immediacy to it, pulsing with the feeling that this is real, this is happening, this is still happening somewhere.

That was the book the got me started thinking about how this could work in my own stuff. It was about five years ago.

I read some really Big Gun Writers who also used present tense some – David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and so on. But it wasn’t until I read David Mitchell’s THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET that I realized how the present tense could be used in such a beautiful manner.

This book is a gem, a marvelous gem that uses the present tense to capture characters and express thoughts and feelings in a way that I had never seen before. It was like taking a wonderful drug that made reality feel so much more… well, present. And I wanted to try it.

But I still haven’t answered the real question – what does the present tense do that made it good for this book?

THE BENEFITS OF THE PRESENT TENSE

All art is artifice. It is manipulation, deceit, machinations piles upon machinations. This is what art is.

However, all of these devices, while having great effect upon the audience, also act as an obstacle between the audience and the writer. Think of a stage play: in between the writer and the audience is the director, the actors, the set directors, the customers, and so on not to mention all the physical objects, like the stage and staging itself.

This is not necessarily a bad thing: it’s just how art works.

The past tense actually separates the audience from what’s happening in the work they’re reading by making it so that the story has already happened. While you might not think about it, the past tense actually sets works in the past – there is a division of time between the audience and the work, in the same manner that there is a division in time between me and World War II. If I read about World War II, I am not experiencing World War II, I am merely hearing about it. I will never experience World War II: I will only have someone tell me what it was like.

The present tense, to a certain extent, bypasses this division, or it simulates the feeling of bypassing it: you are witnessing something happening right now. Everything is immediate.

I said before that my son has a PICC line, at the moment – a catheter that is inserted into his vein to feed antibiotics directly to his heart. This is much more powerful than orally taking drugs, because that means you have to swallow them, digest them, etcetera, for the drug to take effect.

The present tense is kind of like that. It bypasses the fixed, static feeling of an event that has already happened, being told from a fixed narrator’s voice, and instead feeds you an experience that is currently ongoing.

When I first started thinking about AMERICAN ELSEWHERE, I remembered how New Mexico had felt while I was there: it was a total sensory overload. The air felt electric. It was some of the most beautiful country I’d ever seen, and, as Douglas Adams put it, if you don’t go there, then you are stupid, stupid, stupid.

I wanted to capture that feeling. And the more I thought about it, the more the present tense seemed like the best way to do that. It’d funnel all that exuberant, sensory vibrancy right into everyone’s heads.

Or it should. But it wouldn’t work for everyone.

WHY PEOPLE HATE THE PRESENT TENSE

This is tough for me to say. I didn’t like it initially, as I said – but I adapted to it.

But I think the issue might be that the present tense is delivering information in a completely new format. It’s a different form of narrative entirely: to some, it isn’t even a narrative at all, since a narrative is often relating something that’s already happened. So the present tense fails in a lot of ways for people: not only is it unconventional, it doesn’t do anything that most stories do.

At least, this is what I think it to be – I am, naturally, open to comments and thoughts on this.

But the real question is…

IS HAVING AN ISSUE WITH THE PRESENT TENSE A LEGITIMATE CRITIQUE OF THE WORK

Eh. I kind of waffle on this.

On the one hand, art is subjective. Nothing is illegitimate: your feelings are never invalid, because your feelings are your feelings.

But, some critiques are more valid than another: “I found these characters unbelievable and insufferable,” is a more valid critique than “I didn’t like this book because it was depressing,” or, “I didn’t like these characters because they were Japanese,” or, worse, “This book had gay people in it, GROSS.”

One is a comment about the work; another is the reader’s opinion being forced onto the work. Fantasy readers know these sorts of critiques well: “I won’t read a book with silly magic in it,” is something we’ve all heard before.

Do issues with the present tense align with these sorts of critiques? Not necessarily. Like I said, it’s receiving information in a completely different format, and saying that, “The way the book delivered information didn’t work for me,” is naturally a really valid opinion to have.

It’s a bit like the shakycam issue: movies that use handheld cameras that shake, usually in an attempt to give the scenes a sense of violent urgency. However, it doesn’t always work: for some people, it makes them want to vomit. And it can be used just to cover up a low budget by obscuring much of the actual action.

Another example would be footnotes: some people DESPISE books with footnotes, because they feel they distract from the action of the novel. But another viewpoint would be that they connect the reader more directly to the narrator, because it’s the narrator actually stepping away from the work and talking to you.

In all, I think it’s a bit like a doctor prescribing drugs (you can tell what’s been on my mind recently): some people respond to the drugs, some people don’t. Is it the doctor’s fault? Is it the patient’s? Not really. Some people respond to certain things, and some people don’t.

THE PRESENT TENSE IN THE FUTURE

When I first started writing CITY OF STAIRS, I tried writing in the past tense. But it just didn’t work – it felt stuffy and stale, like I was sitting in a chair reading you the story. And I didn’t want to do that – I wanted to put you in the story, directly.

If I’m telling you a story, then that means that I own the story: to continue the metaphor, I’m keeping it in my lap, in my hands, and giving it to you piece by piece. The story is all filtered through the narrator’s voice.

But I want to put you in the story, to immerse you in it, for it to feel as alive and exuberant as it feels for me. So, for CITY OF STAIRS, I opted to use the present tense there, too.

Will I write in the present tense for the future? Probably not. As you might know, I like to mix it up a lot. I really want to write an epistolary novel or a transcript novel in the future; and, of course, the present tense wouldn’t work there. So it really does depend.

How our holidays went

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We had an interesting Christmas this year.

THE SHORT STORY

On Tuesday, 12/18, our not-quite two year old son started limping. We assumed he’d simply twisted his ankle, or bruised his heel.

On Thursday night, 12/20, he woke up several times in the night saying “Ow!” and grabbing his right foot. This was when we decided to check it out and see what was up.

As it turns out, in the ages from about 2-5, infants are susceptible to joint infections, especially in the hips, knees, and ankles. The way they get infected, usually, is the child has an upper respiratory infection, then bruises or injures something in the joint.

This is what had happened with our son. We were in the hospital from 12/21 to 12/25 – Christmas Day, of course. Once he started receiving treatment – copious amounts of antibiotics, delivered via IV, he started recovering almost immediately. He’ll be receiving antibiotics here, at home, through a PICC line until the 4th, but he seems damn chipper now.

However, the stay in the hospital, and the bad timing of it, has enlightened me to a lot of things I never knew before. I will review these things for your edification, and mine – I have not, unlike my parents or a lot of people, ever had to care for someone at a hospital. It was, shall we say, eye-opening.

First off,

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON AT A HOSPITAL

And not just diagnostically. You have about twenty or thirty people dealing with you, the patient, every day and night, and they all just hop on shift and they have no idea who you are or what’s going on.

We went to the orthopedist, who made a quick (and, as it turns out, accurate) diagnosis, and arranged for us to stay at the hospital, but the pediatricians and internal med folks obviously hadn’t heard shit about this and had no fucking clue who we were or why we were in the hospital.

Then the pediatricians (after DAYS OF WAITING) arranged for us to have an MRI, and the MRI people and anesthesiologists had no idea why we were there – they just knew he had to get an MRI, and we had to tell them which leg was the problem, and what the suspected cause was. (They actually had to change the MRI considerably because they didn’t know they’d be taking pictures of his foot.)

Then because the MRI wasn’t conclusive, we had to get Infectious Diseases in (who chose to wear, as you would expect, a mask and gloves), and she openly thought the diagnosis was crazypants. She was wrong, and quickly realized it, but when she first walked in we had to review the story for what seemed like the 50 millionth time.

This doesn’t take into account all the nurses and all the sort-of-random doctors who just happened to swing by, for whom we had to recount everything all over again. Same goes for all the other little shit – blood drawings, etc.

Secondly, we learned

NO ONE AT THE HOSPITAL GIVES A SHIT ABOUT YOU UNTIL YOU HAVE A DOG IN THE FIGHT

We arrived on Friday at around 4 PM, and got a room, presumably to get an MRI. We’d rushed hugely specifically to try and get the MRI done on Friday.

We didn’t see the doctor until 6:30 PM. They were completely perplexed, and even a little mistrustful, about why we were there.

I asked them when we’d know if we were getting the MRI. The response, from the senior doctor, was “in the next few hours.”

I do not know if she knew at that time that the anesthesiologist had gone home at 4:30 PM. But I do think she was chiefly thinking about getting the fuck out of there so she could get home for the holidays.

It wasn’t until late Saturday that we actually got the MRI – because we weren’t a priority patient, all the other emergencies took precedence over us. But we had to nag and nag and nag and nag until finally one set of doctors took up our case and actually coordinated everything that needed to happen (which was a lot).

Which is the next lesson:

IF YOU WANT SOMETHING DONE IN THE HOSPITAL, EITHER BE DYING OR BE A HUGE BITCH

Seriously. It took us 36 hours to get something done, and when it did happen it was because a few of us had said “fuck” a whole lot or asked a zillion questions.

But part of the wait was because…

MODERN MEDICINE IS ABOUT KNOWING PROGRESSIVELY LESS AMOUNTS OF NOTHING

Even though the immediate diagnosis was the correct one, it was never certain. The X rays showed nothing bad. The MRI showed inflammation of the joint, and water behind the heel -but not enough water for a biopsy/aspiration. The bloodwork wasn’t hugely conclusive. Eventually they went with a broad spectrum of antibiotics, which worked.

This sounds short and sweet, but it took THREE AND A HALF DAYS OF WAITING 24 HOURS TO GET THERE. And it was NEVER a case of “This is 100% what this is?” You want to know something? You got to do a test. Scheduling the test is work. Getting the test done is work. Reading the results is work. Figuring out what to do is work. It’s all work, work, work, which for the patients means waiting, waiting, waiting.

Sometimes the doctors would call us down from waiting for our son to come back solely to wait in a second, closer-by room, with no windows or amusement, for about two hours.

In other words,

BESIDES BITCHING, PATIENTS AT THE HOSPITAL WILL MOSTLY BE WAITING

So bring your iPad.

Some other lessons:

IF YOU HAVE TO TAKE YOUR CHILD TO THE HOSPITAL, PRAY THEY’RE TOO YOUNG TO REMEMBER

Holding my child down while the nurses tried to re-insert an IV, him screaming “LET ME GO!” (something I didn’t know he could say), my wife trying to distract him, all while blood poured out of his hand… That pretty much sucked.

STAYS AT THE HOSPITAL WILL RUIN YOUR DIET

Burgers, pizza, Schlotzky’s, and my wife’s folks brought Christmas Dinner on Christmas Eve. It was a rich diet. My toilets need to have their own charity. But it reminds me that…

WE HAVE SOME AWESOME PEOPLE IN OUR LIVES

We were almost never alone. Family, friends, everyone was there, and my folks came up on Christmas Day to see him. My wife’s parents were there every day. And this was important because…

STAYING AT THE HOPSITAL WITH AN INFANT IS LIKE BEING ON A NEVERENDING PLANE RIDE WITH AN INFANT

He can’t use his arm, because he has an IV. (See the GIANT ASS SHIELD ARM they had to make for him below.) He can’t walk, because his ankle is septic. And he can’t leave the room, either because of the IV or because every other child is wildly contagious. So no arms, no legs, no leaving.

Entertaining the baby got tough. Having folks there was important.

CHRISTMAS AT THE HOSPITAL ISN’T AS DEPRESSING AS YOU’D THINK

Mostly because you aren’t aware of time passing. Is it 10 AM? 3 PM? You never know. Days lose meaning. But…

CHRISTMAS AT THE HOSPITAL MEANS A FUCKING SHITLOAD OF TOYS

EVERY person who saw him gave him a toy. We were DROWNING in stuffed animals, which is ironic because my son doesn’t give six hot wet shits about stuffed animals. (He’s all about trains.) Santa even came with stretchers stacked with toys (kind of morbid, in my opinion), and he didn’t want to have one fucking thing to do with him. It was insane.

Someone even gave me a four-foot stuffed dog, which you don’t give to people in a small house. Jesus.

(It was also extremely generous. However, for us, being middle-class parents whose kid gets the shit spoiled out of him by everyone, we knew we didn’t need this. It made me kind of wish everyone had taken their 17.50 they paid for whichever stuffed bear and given it to a charity to help the families that were there but couldn’t afford it.)

Which reminds me that…

TEXAS MIGHT THINK IT’S CAUCASIAN BUT ITS HOSPITALS DISAGREE

The patients, staff, and doctors, were almost overwhelmingly nonwhite. I would say that most of the patients in the ER – which was always stuffed to bursting – were Latino. And most of them were at the ER because they couldn’t afford non-emergency care, as the ER HAS to take you. It was pretty troubling, on Christmas.

SCHEDULE TIME AFTER THE HOSPITAL TO BE SICK

Because you will be. We all have a wildly contagious cold virus called RSV.

IT’S A MIRACLE MY WIFE SURVIVED

She’s a confirmed germophobe. Seeing me walk across the hospital floor barefooted gave her conniption fits. At that point, I didn’t give a shit, we’d just been marinating in it nonstop.

But the real thing I learned is…

MY SON IS A TOTAL TROOPER

Here is on Saturday, still in pain and before his MRI.

Tor.com – Reviewer’s picks of 2012

 

The Troupe has made the Tor.com list of reviewer’s picks of 2012!  SFF World reviewer Rob Bedford said of it:

On every level, this novel blew me away. Vaudeville, traveling artists, hints of Paradise Lost; this one had it all. Elements of the novel reminded me of the film Gangs of New York while other elements reminded me of King’s Dark Tower saga with other resonances to Neil Gaiman’s fiction.

You can read Rob’s original review here.

 

Only the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy review

Bryce Lee over at Only the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy has given THE TROUPE a lovely review.

Bennett not only writes about magic, but his writing itself is imbued with magic and a bit of humor and even a little darkness. To be mentioned in the same breathe as Neil Gaiman would be no stretch of the imagination. The Troupe may just be the best book of 2012.

Go check it out!

Writing under the influence

One of the most fun things about writing is finding out how things work, and being surprised when you’re wrong. This is true both on the writing end of things – actually making the story – and the reading side of things, when people read the story you made.

I am still getting surprised. This isn’t going to be a rant – I promise you that – but more like recording my own reactions when I see how people react to what I’m doing.

THE PHENOMENON

The weirdest thing about writing, so far, is having someone else tell me what I was trying to do in a thing I did.

This can be weirdly specific – I have not ever had anyone tell me, “Your book is clearly an exploration of how Wisconsin lesbians are contributing to the organic food boom,”  but, at this point, it wouldn’t surprise me.

One thing that’s quite amusing is when someone tells me what was influencing my work, assuming they know what I read and what I like.

And it’s really, really, really amusing when someone tells me what is an obvious, huge, heavy influence on my work – and I’ve never even heard of the thing they’re saying has influenced me.

This happens a lot more than you would expect. My influences, I’ve always felt, are pretty obvious, and when someone asks me if XXXX was an influence, I’m always happy to say so, because neither writers nor novels come from nowhere. But there’s always a rather thunderstruck moment when someone – in a tweet, review, blog post, or direct email to me – says, “Well, the novel is heavily influenced by _____,” and I have to google _____ to find out what _____ even is.

This is amusing to me.

What’s less amusing is when someone suggests there’s an influence that is so incredibly heavy upon my work that it borders upon plagiarism.

Though it’s darkly amusing when I’ve never even heard of the thing they’re suggesting I’ve borrowed from.

THE CONUNDRUM

This has happened a couple of times. I’ve been told that MR. SHIVERS and THE TROUPE – in very separate instances – very closely mimic certain works. The works they’re saying the books mimic vary tremendously, and each time that this has happened, I’m more or less completely unfamiliar with the work my work supposedly mimics.

Here’s an example:

I’ve been told that both those books heavily borrow from the HBO series Carnivale.

Here’s the fun thing:

I have seen about ten minutes of Carnivale in my life. I can remember the instance clearly: I was in a hotel (I have never had HBO), I turned on the TV, immediately tuned it to HBO (because that’s what people who don’t have HBO do in hotel rooms), and watched about five minutes of Carnivale, because that’s what was on. I recall something about two men being in a diner, and a storm being outside. Then when I realized that on another channel Hook was showing, I immediately tuned it to that channel, because ROOF EE OOOOO. (This is why I remember watching Carnivale – it was the first time I was actually disappointed in the movie Hook. But that’s another story, probably a much more controversial one.)

So, unless that scene in the diner was so loaded with subtext and suggestion that it somehow downloaded all 2 years of the show into my brain, I don’t think I, personally,can claim that Carnivale is a big influence on me, because that would be a lie, and any fans of Carnivale might be disappointed to pick up my stuff expecting the same.

Do I work in the same vein as Carnivale? Probably.

Is it possible to have two, three, or maybe even four works about magic and mystery set deep in past Americana, in circulation among the innumerable outlets of screen, print and music, all saying different things? I would like to say probably.

Here’s the thing, though:

I recall reading once in a music essay that there is no show on earth that owes as much to Tom Waits as Carnivale. (Googling has not turned up the article – but I will keep looking.) Tom Waits, as I hope you know, has thoroughly explored the magical/seedy side of early 20th Century Americana through a variety of music types for nearly 40 years. This essay suggested that, as perhaps the single greatest articulator of weird, alley-performance Americana, Tom Waits and Carnivale were inextricably linked: what Tom Waits created, Carnivale used.

I love Tom Waits. Tom Waits has been a huge influence on me. Part of why I write is to explore worlds he created, or suggested – part of why I write is because I want to make my own worlds, just as he did.

Am I saying that I bypassed Carnivale, and went straight to the source? Am I saying that Carnivale stole from Tom Waits?

No. That would be stupid. That’s not how influence works.

HOW I THINK INFLUENCE WORKS

The issue is that, when someone encounters something done really, really well for the first time, they assume that this exact instance is the first time it has ever been done well, ever, period.

This is rarely true. For example, in regards to stories about the performance culture – these have been around since the performance culture existed. The “youth runs away to join a troupe of traveling players” is a trope that is positively medieval, or older.

Nothing is new. Ideas circulate. And they do not do so logically: you cannot trace an influence like tracing a bloodline on a family tree. Ideas travel through osmosis. They’re like a gas, swelling to fill their container. There is oh so very rarely an idea or an aesthetic that is wholly and completely new at the moment it is conceived. You don’t have an influence injected directly into your brain: you have to marinate in it for a long, long while.

If there is any newness to art of any kind, it is when an old idea is filtered through a lens that is wholly unique: the artist. No one is quite like anyone else – right? – so no one will do the same thing in the exact same manner.

Ideas are old: all people are new.

But, this doesn’t address the rather huge and mildly dispiriting elephant in the room:

THE HUGE, HUGE, ECHOING GAP BETWEEN THE WRITER AND THE READER

Readers like to believe that when they’re reading a book, they’re stepping inside the mind of a writer. Some people even grow to believe that the writer is someone they know, and trust: after all, you are spending three, four, maybe even ten hours with someone, discussing very intimate, beautiful, terrible things.

But you do not know your writers. Because the reading experience is about 70% the reader, and 30% the work. Good writers know that – they know that the reader will be doing most of the heavy lifting, and the smartest thing to do is to give them the tools, the suggestions, the implications to make the story start, and then get the fuck out of the way.

(If you are curious why all writers feel like frauds – and almost all of them do – it’s that they all know that, deep down, it’s the reader doing everything. Writers can see the strings on the puppets – to them, the show they put on is paltry garbage. And when audience members approach, describing the show as if it was some miraculous revelation, the writer cannot help but feel a deep and terrible shame.)

So, go back and take a look at my formula – 70% the reader, and 30% the work.

You will note that the writer is not a part of this, at all.

I am not with you when you read. The voice you hear is your own. I am giving you a frame: you are the one imbuing it with beauty.

So, I have my own influences, certainly – but so do you have yours.

BUT WHAT HAS REALLY, REALLY INFLUENCED ME

Lots of things.

Lots and lots and lots of things. Book things as well as life things. Mostly life things, possibly. Thus, things I can’t quite explain.

But there are writers that I am specifically keeping in mind when I write my books. These are writers I aspire to, that I wish to learn from.

(Many times, I try to aspire to be like them several years after I read their stories. In these instances, I aspire to be like my idea of them, and my idea of their works, rather than the real things – because I cannot remember them. This is, usually, a good thing.)

So, do you want a list? Do you want a list of the writers I went into a book trying to be like?

Of course you do. This is the internet age: all things that cannot be listified are deemed worthless.

So, without further ado, here are the writers I had in mind when I wrote each and every one of my books:

MR. SHIVERS – Cormac McCarthy
THE COMPANY MAN – John le Carré, Raymond Chandler, David Simon (as in, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which is a really phenomenal book)
THE TROUPE – Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, P.L. Travers
AMERICAN ELSEWHERE – David Lynch, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury
CITY OF STAIRS – David Mitchell, John le Carré

I will assume that clears everything up, answers all questions, clarifies the inscrutable, and casts light into the many dingy corners of my mind.

That was easy. Right?

Publishers Weekly starred review – American Elsewhere

There seems to be a burst of activity recently! I received word over the weekend that American Elsewhere has gotten a very positive, starred review from Publishers Weekly:

Bennett (The Troupe) gives the idealized image of the American dream a pan-dimensional twist with this alien invasion tale, part Bradbury and part L’Engle with a dash of Edward Scissorhands. Mona Bright, a former cop with a tragic past, inherits her long-dead mother’s house in Wink, N. Mex., a picture-perfect hamlet built as a support community for a government lab conducting experiments in quantum physics. As Mona pieces together a history that bears no resemblance to the childhood she remembers, Bennett’s epic narrative unveils a chronicle of dysfunction masked by Wink’s mechanical obsession with normalcy. The quibbling, displaced characters are vile and sympathetic by turns, and always startlingly American. Through sharp empathetic detail, the horrific becomes both achingly poignant and comic; a wholesome diner where no one can ever order just one piece of pie shares space with a harsh alien landscape where a quivering blue imp cowers in terror while pleading for his life. Readers will be captivated from start to finish. (Feb.)

Which has left me terribly happy.

City of Stairs

I’ve been hinting at something biggish for some time now, and I guess I can finally come clean about what we’ve all had cooking. Crown of Random House will be publishing my fifth novel, City of Stairs.

Crown Nabs Bennett’s ‘City of Stairs’

Robert Jackson Bennett sold his fifth novel, City of Stairs, to Julian Pavia at Crown. Cameron McClure at Donald Maass Literary handled the sale for Bennett, whose third book, The Troupe, was just featured in the SF/Fantasy/Horror category among PW’s Best Books of 2012. The new book, which will be a trade paperback original on the Broadway list, also marks a house shift for Bennett, who was at Hachette’s Orbit imprint. (Bennett’s fourth book from Orbit, American Elsewhere, is coming out in February.) Stairs, as McClure described it, is “a second-world story of spies, subterfuge, and statesmanship set in a nation of dead gods.”

I’m about 1/3 of the way done with it, I think – you can never really tell at this point. It’s like guessing when a relationship will end. But, this is my first second-story world, one that’s inspired by many real-world things, but is more or less made up entirely by me.

I said once I’d never set anything in a second-story world, chiefly because I always felt those sorts of things were kind of, well, a big pain in the ass. As it turns out, I’m having a tremendous amount of fun.

The book is partially a spy story, set in a world where gods once existed, but were murdered in what essentially amounts to a global coup. But the farther I get into it, the more I realize that this is a book about history, and how it’s present with us, influencing what we do, and yet it’s also inaccessible and remote – not unlike a god, in a way.

I am very much looking forward to the future.

Mention in Guardian article

Mr. Shivers is mentioned favorably in this article on the Guardian by Stuart Kelly, where he asks why horror remains the black sheep of the genre triumvirate – whereas Fantasy and Sci-Fi try new and more complicated things, Horror is content to, I don’t know, cut people up and stuff.

However, Mr. Shivers is cited as a “worthy attempt” to up the game. This is a nice thing to hear.

To me, genre is really mostly a matter of discussion – genres are, in a way, conversations about similar ideas, using similar methods. Genres study common things and share ideas among themselves. The works talk to one another, across the years. They inform one another. They gossip.

If this theory has any merit to it at all, then I’m not convinced Mr. Shivers is part of the Horror dialogue. I went into it without Horror – any kind of Horror – on my mind at all. And though I, like dozens of people, grew up reading Stephen King, I never had him on my mind when I wrote it. If I’m trying to mimic anyone in that book, it’s Cormac McCarthy (whom Michael Chabon has argued is a horror writer – but that’s another thing altogether).

So while it’s nice to hear that some feel the book is trying to advance the Horror discussion, it’s also a bit amusing for me, since I never intended for it to do any such thing.

I could be quite wrong, however – no one has less authority on what a book is and isn’t than the person who wrote it. Writing exists between the writer and the work – but reading exists between the work and the reader.

I’ll be very curious to see how future readers see the book.

Change

Probably not the kind we were thinking of. But the kind that we’re seeing. (From the creator of “The Wire” and “Treme.”)