Chad Eagleton's Blog, page 33

Tobacco-Stained Sky Review

There’s a nice review of The Tobacco-Stained Sky just posted here:

A Stevens Update

I’ve gotten a few messages, so here’s a pic to show that work does continue on my Shane Stevens biography. It’s simply that right now, nothing is going according to schedule.

Awful Moment of Awareness

MethotrexateYour spouse is ill. A couple of weeks after she’s been on serious meds that keep her nauseous and on an old person’s sleep schedule, there’s this moment. It comes around 8:15 or so when you look over and see that she’s asleep already, again. That’s when you realize that you feel a little lonely and maybe being able to finally watch that crime film or the first season of the British horror series or that depressing sci-fi film from the 70s  isn’t as much fun as you thought it...

Pugs Don't Chew

Killer, The PugLast Saturday, I was in the kitchen doing the dishes. The lovely wife was on the couch, trying to deal with her nausea from an upped methotrexate dose, and our pug was chewing a bone. I finished the first sinkful and had started scrubbing the pans when my wife called my name and yelled that the dog was choking.
I came in expecting him to just barf it up and figured I’d snatch the soggy bit away before he tried to eat it, again. This happens all the time--he’s a pug and they don’...

Blood on the Milky Way

Ever since I saw Mad Max on Channel 4 when I was in elementary school, I’ve had a weakness for the post-apocalyptic genre. I remember, it aired on a Friday, so my mother actually let me stay up late and watch the whole thing. Even edited for television and badly-dubbed, after that first chase scene, I was hooked on the series and the genre (I’m even looking forward to Mad Max 4: Fury Road with Tom Hardy).
I suppose, then, it’s rather fitting that my first published post-apocalyptic story...

Blade of Dishonor

Then
You are 12 years old.

It’s your dad’s weekend. He buys a large meat pizza and a six pack of root beer, the kind that comes in those bottles that make it look like real beer. You convince him to rent a VHS tape from the grocery store. He lets you pick and you chose a direct-to-video Golan-Globus ninja flick.

It’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.

Before your father returns it, you watch it 32 ½ times: reading the credits, memorizing dialogue, and mastering when to hit pause for the best loo...

The Anarchist Has Left The Building

On Saturday, July 27, 2013, after I finished proofing the print copy of Hoods, Hot Rods, and Hellcats, I sent the small list of corrections to Brian Roe. I was floored the next day when I got on Facebook and saw that Mick Farren was dead. He had been performing at the Borderline Club in London the day before, as part of the Atomic Sunshine Festival, when he collapsed on stage.

I don’t really know what to say, except that he was one of my idols, he was a fellow Gene Vincent fan, he was kind en...

The Same Little Tune

A passage from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, Volume #1: Say You Want A Revolution, has been stuck in my head for the last couple of days:

"Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of the oceans and the turning of the stars. 

Whole universes fit in there!  

But what do we chose to keep in this miraculous little cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. ...

A Secret Passion For Mercy

“There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns— different states, if possible—and write each other letters once a year.”
The Blue Hammer, Ross MacDonald

Yesterday on the way home from yet another doctor’s appointment for the lovely wife, WTTS played Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” For a moment, it hit me kind of hard because it’s one of those songs and lately, in the midst of so much turmoil, I’ve been terrible at being present—my thoughts sometimes get awa...

On This Day

I’ve always much preferred Dashiell Hammett over Raymond Chandler. The preference comes down to a lot of different things and not just that I think Hammett was the better writer. There's a fundamental difference between the two that I think James Ellroy explained best:

“Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be—gallant and with a lively satirist's wit. Hammett wrote the man he feared he might be—tenuous and skeptical in all human dealings, corruptible and addicted to violent intrigue.”

But today i...