Robert Jackson Bennett's Blog, page 15
June 8, 2012
The Company Man Review – Bookworm Blues
Sara over at Bookworm Blues has written up a lovely review for The Company Man. I’ll go ahead and be vain and highlight some pieces that made me smile:
People can’t pin him down, and I think that must drive some readers insane. Is he horror? Is he mystery? Noir? Fantasy? Gritty? Who knows. Bennett, like [K.J.] Parker, boldly does his own thing and blazes his own trail. I find that admirable, but some readers find it frustrating. Bennett isn’t really fantasy, but he’s not really anything else, either. He’s whatever he wants to be and I love that. I love his brazen ability to write powerful books without trying to box himself into any typical genre boxes.
June 7, 2012
June 6, 2012
Nicholas Kaufmann review
Nicholas Kaufmann is an accomplished writer and wise man, and here he writes about how he quite liked The Company Man:
Longtime readers of my blog may remember how I raved about Robert Jackson Bennett’s first novel Mr. Shivers. If that novel, which went on to win the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, marked the debut of a promising new author, his second novel, The Company Man, fulfills that promise handily. After it won a special citation from the Philip K. Dick Award, not to mention the Best Paperback Original Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, to call Bennett a writer to watch is to already be behind the curve.
And I am grateful for it.
June 5, 2012
On Graceland, and responsibility
There’s a really great essay on the controversy over Paul Simon’s Graceland over here at the AV Club. My brother loved Graceland back in college, so I’m familiar with (and like) the music, but I’d never heard much about the controversy itself. Probably because by the time I was old enough to get it, apartheid had – probably regrettably – faded into the back of the national consciousness.
But the controversy itself brings up a good point: how much social and political responsibility does an artist have in creating art? I think the kneejerk reaction people assume is, well, plenty: artists, being creators of work that theoretically should enrich our lives and catalyze thought, should be thoughtful humanitarians in everything they create. It’s just assumed that artists, seekers of beauty and truth, would have to seek them compassionately and thoughtfully, making sure everyone is part of the conversation, that no aspect of human life is unexamined.
Except when the artist is told that in order to so, he or she has to compromise their work. This happens all the time, really – someone says your work should be saying or advocating This Thing, when in fact This Thing wasn’t on your mind at all, and it wasn’t on the agenda of what you wanted to accomplish with the work.
Now, the issue for me with Simon, then, isn’t that he didn’t credit or pay his artists enough – because I feel sure that he should have – but whether or not, because he used South African folk artists and violated an international humanitarian initiative in the process, shouldn’t his album been about apartheid?
And that’s the sticking point. It’s likely Simon didn’t start his album because he found a political stance he wanted to make: rather, I think he heard some cool sounds this country was using, and he didn’t see anything wrong with mixing those sounds into his own work for his own purposes. Should he have credited the creators of those sounds more? Hell yes. Should he have changed what he was trying to do because of the history and background of the place they came from? I’m not so sure.
There are times when I genuinely think art is superfluous, temporary, and superficial. Art frequently fails to move far beyond mere entertainment, and those that try for depth often go ignored. In such a case, I’d much rather try and produce real, progressive change than make entertainment, or a piece of work that will be massively ignored by the public and critical establishment.
But at the same time, I know that feeling where I’m convinced that This Idea Will Work And Is Worth Doing, where it’s not just something I want to try but something I have to try. It’s like tunnel vision: it doesn’t matter what’s outside the tunnel. There is this thing that can be done, and you are compelled to do it, to shrug off what everyone thinks of you, to spit in the faces of everyone who says you just can’t do that, and try for something new, something ingenious, something you’re sure will work.
So on the one hand, I don’t get what he did. It was a couple of pieces of nice music: matched up against the suffering and death of a whole country, it amounts to shit. It might have been better to try and educate people about what was happening, and try to help. (The cynic in me, of course, would refer to Papa Vonnegut, who said: “During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.” So if you’re convinced of the awesome power of art, think again.)
On the other hand, I understand what he did. He saw something new, something he wanted to try, something that had the potential to be beautiful. That justifies itself, usually.
June 1, 2012
The Lion and the Aardvark
The cover for The Lion and the Aardvark, a book of modern fables in which a very short fable of mine is included, can be found here. I’ll also put it below because what the hell. It’s due for a release in Christmas. It’s a really cool idea, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the other contributions!
May 15, 2012
HWA Bram Stoker Award™ 2012 Reading List
THE TROUPE is on the HWA Bram Stoker Award™ 2012 Reading List!
Which means:
These works are all new horror published during the year that our members feel worthy of recommending for Bram Stoker Award consideration. They are not ‘Bram Stoker Award nominees’, nor are they part of any ballot process at this stage, but it is likely they represent some of the best new horror fiction., poetry and non-fiction published during the year.
May 11, 2012
Novella Cover
Just got this from the folks at Subterranean Press… it’s the cover of the edition that contains my novella, To Be Read Upon Your Waking! And it looks like they chose my story for the cover art.
The story follows an errant scion to an aristocratic English family who buys the ruins of an old chapel in Post-WWII France in attempt to play archaeologist. But though he believes the chapel is the first Christian site in France, he slowly begins to suspect that it’s quite a bit older than Christianity… and perhaps older than human civilization.
Should be fun!
May 10, 2012
Daniel Pinkwater’s Lizard Music
Over a Pornokitsch, I’ve written a fun little guest blog post about one of my favorite children’s books of all time, Daniel Pinkwater’s Lizard Music:
It’s this marvelous capacity to suggest logic within illogic that makes Lizard Music – and most of Pinkwater’s books – really fly. The set up is incredibly fascinating: it suggests there’s a secret message hinting a vast conspiracy within the mundane world – and note that Victor only finds this on his first experiment in adulthood: if he hadn’t been living independently, he’d never have found this mad truth. It’s the wild excursion into adult life that lets Victor see what strange things might be happening in the backstages of reality.
May 8, 2012
Fantasy Literature interview
There’s a fun interview with me up over at Fantasy Literature:
The plot of The Troupe is pretty linear, but there is a lot of strangeness in the world, and those strangenesses intersect and interface. How do you keep it straight?
RJB: I’ve no idea. A lot of writing is subconscious, and stories have a beat and a rhythm to them. So at certain points, I’d think to myself, “There’s a callback coming soon, but I don’t know what it’s calling back to,” and then it’s like you remember something you’ve forgotten, and think, “Oh, of course,” but you never really knew it in the first place.
There’s a line from a book about how we’ve already lived the future, we’re just remembering it as we go along. That’s what writing is like.
