Benjamin Whitmer's Blog, page 15

09/18/2012 French Pike release and press roundup.

Pike is now available in France, thanks to Éditions Gallmeister, and the reviews so far have been very kind. As follows:

09/17/12 evene.fr
09/17/12 k-libre
09/15/12 Unwalkers
09/14/12 Encore et toujours du noir!
09/13/12 actu-du-noir. Blog de JM Laherrère
09/13/12 Le blog de Jeanne Desaubry
09/13/12 La Cause Littéraire
09/13/12 lesartsausoleil
Semptember 2012 Le Matricule Des Anges
09/13/12 Livres Hebdo
09/11/12 danactu-résistance
09/06/12 L’Express
09/02/12 La Marseillaise
08/26/12 L’Union
08/22/12  Les Inrockuptibles

k-libre was also kind enough to request an interview. Of course, I can’t read a word of it, but as of yet nobody’s sent me any hate mail.

It’s not you, it’s me

So I’m kind of dying of internet overload. And as you may have noticed I haven’t been posting much here. The thing is, I’ve been blogging a very long time, and I’m pretty much bored with it. Especially since there doesn’t seem to be any way to get off of Facebook in this day and age, and it does everything blogging does. (And it’s set to public, so you can follow my line of shit there without joining up or anything.) In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m killing Twitter, too. And probably everything else I can think that I’ve joined up with over the years.

I will be keeping this as my web page, however. So if you want reviews, book announcements, and etc., here’s your place. Otherwise, I’ll see you around.

My favorite short story collection of 2012

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I’m busier’n hell, but I wanted to make sure you knew to pick up F*ckload of Shorts by Jedidiah Ayres. So get to it.

Here’s my official blurb: “A F*ckload of Shorts is my favorite short story collection of 2012. Jedidiah Ayres may have his feet in the shitter, but his eyes are on the stars.”

Bullettime

I’ve been out of the crime fiction feedback loop of late, mostly due to moving my household into the suburbs. The move’s something I’m incredibly ambivalent about, of course, but I’ve get the same tired excuse as everybody else: no money for private schools and I’d like my kids to be able to play outside without worrying about the drug-addled and bone-headed antics of some of our neighbors. (On the bright side, my children know exactly what a SWAT team looks like, and to never open the door for the police.)

That said, I’ve been dipping in from time to time, and lucked on a Brian Lindenmuth interview with Nick Mamatas that included this:

Those at the bottom of a power structure, or those that have no power, may reach for the one thing that they think will give them power, a gun. Is this a peculiarly American trait?

Oh, I don’t think so. What might be peculiar to the US is the combination of guns and individualism. Certainly oppressed communities all over the world rally around the gun (and the car bomb, and the RPG-launcher, and the mass strike) when agitating to separate from the larger nation of which they find themselves a part, and almost every culture has some version of running amok, but it’s the combination of extreme individualism and relatively easy access to firearms that causes problems in the US. Instead of joining a group and engaging in politicized violence, individuals engage in seemingly arbitrary gun violence. Other countries certainly have individualized rampage stabbings, bombings, or even the use of trucks against random pedestrians, so I don’t think the gun itself is a cause. It certainly seems to help increase bodycounts.

Having said all that, it doesn’t seem like most rampage shooters really are at the bottom of the power structure—most seem to have been right in the lower-middle of the power structure. Their rage and anxiety are often born of the idea that they deserve even better. Their expectations and material conditions don’t match up.

Back in the early 1990s, some Maoist-influenced anarchists in Manhattan’s East Village floated the only semi-comical slogan “ARM THE HOMELESS” via stencil graffiti. Nothing ever came of it though, and now the place is utterly littered with fancy shoe stores and Starbucks. Had there been a real craving for power, or revenge against the world, on the part of the people at the bottom of the heap, perhaps there would still be an affordable, if bullet-marked, neighborhood in New York today.

To my mind, that’s a pretty amazingly perceptive answer. It rejects the usual tropes about American gun ownership and forces the conversation into the actual power firearms represent. As I’ve said about ten thousand times, I’m not pro-gun because I’m scared some drug addict might kick in my door, I’m pro-gun because I’m not for taking any tool off the table when it comes to those “at the bottom of the heap” making a bid for real power — whether it be blacks resisting lynching, the American Indian Movement fighting back against FBI sponsored terror, or Appalachian folks running mining interests off their land.

Guns can be pretty effective tools against power, and the right to bear them has to be maintained for that reason. Is there a cost? Of course. It’s not a great a cost as the anti-gun folks are always hyperventilating about, but there is a cost. But it’s a necessary cost.

And then there’s this:

Dave’s final act is one of free will. Where he stops being buffeted around by exterior forces and takes charge. Is that one of the things that you hope readers will take away from Bullettime, that there is always a choice?

I hope that people read my work and find themselves developing a taste for greater freedom than they have now. Sometimes, I do that by portraying a setting or character with highly constrained freedoms, or by someone who achieves some greater freedom. With Bullettime I hope there’s a bit of both.

That’s an equally great answer, because, well, freedom. And as soon as I get an address, I’ll be having a copy of Bullettime shipped my way.

From the publisher:

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David Holbrook exists everywhere and nowhere.

David Holbrook is a scrawny kid, the victim of bullies, and the neglected son of insane parents.

David Holbrook is the Kallis Episkipos, a vicious murderer turned imprisoned leader of a death cult dedicated to Eris, the Hellenic goddess of discord.

David Holbrook never killed anyone, and lives a lonely and luckless existence with his aging mother in a tumbledown New Jersey town.

Caught between finger and trigger, David is given three chances to decide his fate as he is compelled to live and relive all his potential existences, guided only by the dark wisdom found in a bottle of cough syrup.

From the author of the instant cult classic Move Under Ground comes a fantasy of blood, lust, destiny, school shootings, and the chance to change your future.

Last Call for the Living

I’ve been moving, so my brain’s running on fumes. For instance, I finished Last Call for the Living by Peter Farris not too long ago, and thought for sure I’d posted something about it. Which, as it turns out, I didn’t.

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This from the IndieBound description:

For bank teller Charlie Colquitt, it was just another Saturday. For Hobe Hicklin, an ex-con with nothing to lose, it was just another score. For Hobe’s drug-addled, sex-crazed girlfriend, it was just more lust, violence, and drugs. But in this gripping narrative, nothing is as it seems.

Hicklin’s first mistake was double-crossing his partners in the Aryan Brotherhood. His second mistake was taking a hostage. But he and Charlie can only hide out for so long in the mountains of north Georgia before the sins of Hicklin’s past catch up to them.

Hot on Hicklin’s trail are a pair of ruthless Brotherhood soldiers, ready to burn a path of murder and mayhem to get their revenge. GBI Special Agent Sallie Crews and Sheriff Tommy Lang catch the case, themselves no strangers to the evil men are capable of. Soon Crews is making some dangerous connections while for the hard-drinking, despondent Lang, rescuing Charlie Colquitt might be the key to personal salvation.

Prodigious talent Peter Farris has written a backwoods fairy tale of fate and flight that is also a dark, modern thriller. Like the bastard child of Stephen Hunter’s Dirty White Boys and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Last Call for the Living is a smashing debut from a writer whose unique and disturbing vision of the world cannot be ignored.

My take?

Easy.

It’s a great book, a hell of a book, the kind of book that’ll make you rip your face off if you’re not careful. And that’s not hyperbole, there were a couple of scenes in there where I noticed I’d moved from stroking my jawline in a sensitive, contemplative manner to all but peeling the skin off.

So read it.

I’m going wheelgun

My 15-year anniversary present from my wife.

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She’s ordered. Pictures as soon as she gets here.

Update: All right, I’m cheating. One picture from Combat Handguns.

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Good morning from Schopenhauer

Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don’t believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

It’s a man’s world, we just die in it

Christ Faust had a wonderful piece on women in crime fiction here that I’ve been meaning to post about for a long while. The whole thing’s great, but this caught my eye in particular.

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Women certainly have protective instincts, but the female urge to protect and avenge is usually more maternal than sexual. A murder victim seems helpless and childlike, qualities that have little power to arouse standard female desire. On the other hand, I don’t write about “standard” females. Since I love a challenge, I decided to see whether I could find a way to reconfigure the Jasmine Fiore story. I started sketching out the bare bones of a narrative about a sexy male victim and an obsessed female investigator.

The cop is the first one on the scene, and she can’t get the images of the violated body out of her mind. She finds herself spending way too much time in the young man’s apartment, going through his things and consumed by every little detail of his short life. She finds nude photos, even an explicit video of the young man and his new wife. The video features scenes of bondage and submission, which the cop finds especially arousing. The images of his bound body in the video become tangled in her mind with those of his corpse. Driven by guilt and shame, she works night and day on the case, determined to find his missing, possibly murderous wife and bring her to justice. To punish the killer, punishing herself by proxy.

But would anybody buy that book? Would you?

The rest.

I’d buy the hell out of that book. I’d take notes on that book. In fact, that sounds like one of the greatest books ever written, so I say all of us start begging Ms. Faust to write the damn thing right now.

What I’m doing tonight

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And you won’t beat that. At the Hi-Dive, 9 o’clock, if you’re in Denver.

Lost Coast

M.A. Littler is raising funds for his newest film on Indiegogo. I’m a big fan of Littler’s films, and if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you’ve seen me raving about The Folksinger and The Kingdom of Survival.

Meaning, if you’ve got the money, you should give. (And in giving, receive, because you can get all kinds of good stuff back.)

Here’s the teaser.

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Also this, from Littler, on the Indiegogo page: “I’m interested in people who dance to their own beat, prototypes who fix their radio with a blow torch.”