Thomas Pluck's Blog, page 16
August 1, 2016
Bouchercon 2016! moderating Leather & Lace
Are you attending Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans? I’ve been going for five years now, and it keeps getting better. It’s a crime and mystery fiction convention for the fans, and the volunteers who run it do a fantastic job. Judy Bobalik and Jon Jordan handled the immense task of setting up panels for over 700 registered writers and this year I’m moderating one, and speaking at another.
I’ll be moderating Leather & Lace: Hardboiled vs. Cozy, which has writers who do both or skirt the middle. Linda Rodriguez, Chris Knopf, Linda Joffe Hull, Clea Simon, and Dave Putnam will be answering my questions and yours. I’m writing a “cozy” now–at least a less gritty and more humorous novel–and those familiar with Jay Desmarteaux, Denny the Dent, and Blade of Dishonor know I also write hardboiled. This one will be great fun. It’s on Friday at 11:00am.
Zoe Sharp is moderating The Boxer panel, which is about writing violence. Having trained in America and Japan and gotten my butt whupped by Keigo Kunihara in the sparring ring (he fought in UFC55) I know why they chose me for that one. But there’s a lot more to writing violence. I’m looking forward to this one. This is also Friday, 3:30pm.
Here’s the card for Leather & Lace:
Tagged: Bouchercon, Cozies, Hardboiled, Linda Rodriguez, Mixed Martial Arts
July 31, 2016
the awesomeness of Stranger Things – and recommended reading
dunt dunna dunt dunt … my WinonaI loved the NetFlix original series Stranger Things. It’s only 8 episodes long, but never feels rushed. The Duffer Brothers did a great job, giving us characters we care about and a monster that truly terrified me. It’s set in the early ’80s and begins with four young kids playing a Dungeons & Dragons game. After the game ends one never makes it home. The cast is excellent, the police are not jerks or incompetent, and even the bullies have depth. It’s not perfect but it’s very close. And it doesn’t have a smarmy facade of nostalgia, the early ’80s were good and bad. A little anachronistic in behavior, but that’s expected.
I recently read a list of “you might like…” books and wasn’t satisfied. It had the usual literary-friendly pre-genre picks like Arthur Machen and some other great books like Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, but … they really aren’t anything like the show. Stranger Things owes a lot to the following sources: Firestarter by Stephen King, also It and Carrie and its clone The Fury, and Stand by Me. The works of H.P. Lovecraft. Poltergeist, Akira, and the video game Silent Hill. There are nods to Aliens and the nerdy kids who all ring perfectly true reference things they love like The Hobbit and the Star Wars movies. And their favorite teacher is a clueless science nerd, who shows his date The Thing on VHS.
Here are some books I’ve read that reminded me of Stranger Things in a good way:
Summer of Night by Dan Simmons. There are scenes in this novel that still haunt me. It’s similar to It, but so much more concise and darker. Four young kids growing up in a town haunted by the evil of its past, which they must confront to save their lives.
Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale. Not quite as perfect as his masterpiece The Bottoms, but when a local girl goes missing, her oddball friends go on a Huck Finn-like adventure to find her, while avoiding the evil Skunk who haunts the swamps of the Sabine River. The Bottoms has young Harry witnessing a murder and trying to save a black friend from being lynched for it, and is possibly Lansdale’s best.
In the Woods, by Tana French. The first one by the master crime writer is darker and more haunting. Before Rob Ryan was police, as a young boy he was found tied to a tree in the woods near an ancient altar. The other two boys were never found. Now the land is about to be razed for developments and he goes seeking answers, as he remembers nothing of that night.
The stories of Laird Barron. The Children of Old Leech are even worse than the otherworldly Thing in Stranger Things and they also love to hide in the boles of trees. Start with The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All.
The Loney, by Andrew Michael Hurley. Another creepy childhood tale of a family’s yearly visit to an old Christian shrine in the hopes of healing their learning disabled youngest boy. The miracle occurs, but the source is something far more sinister.
My own short novella The Summer of Blind Joe Death is a weird tale set in ’20s Appalachia, where two young boys face the greatest evil there is.
And if you want to read a Megan Abbott novel about a missing child that will haunt you, it’s The End of Everything you want. One of my favorites.
Have you watched the series? What did you think? And what books or series would you recommend, to those who loved it?
Tagged: Andrew Michael Hurley, Dan Simmons, Dungeons and Dragons, Horror, Joe Lansdale, Laird Barron, Megan Abbott, Stephen King, Stranger Things, Tana French
July 28, 2016
July 4, 2016
June 21, 2016
Blood on the Bayou
I’m thrilled, twitterpated, and titillated to announce that my Jay Desmarteaux story “Gumbo Weather” will appear in the 2016 Bouchercon anthology edited by Greg Herren, Blood on the Bayou.
Jay’s debut novel comes out next year from Down & Out Books, an action-packed crime thriller called Bad Boy Boogie. You can get a taste of Desmarteaux in this anthology, along with stories by David Morrell, Alison Gaylin, Terrie Moran, Gary Phillips, B.V. Lawson and Eric Beetner, among others. You can read the full press release here.
Signed copies of the book will be available at the convention, and you can get unsigned copies wherever books are sold. I’ll post an update when it’s available for pre-order.
Tagged: Anthologies, Bouchercon, Louisiana
June 20, 2016
Noir at the Bar Queens 6/26
Join me this Sunday with a murder of crime writers, including Lawrence Block and Jill, his daughter–very much a chip off the old one–plus Sarah Weinman, Jason Starr, Jen Conley, Scott Adlerberg, Rob Hart, Alex Segura, Lyndsay Faye, Angel Colón, William Boyle and Erik Arneson. Guaranteed to be a ripping good time…
Tagged: Noir at the Bar
June 9, 2016
Cruising with Elvis in Bigfoot’s UFO
While Portland Maine is soon following its othercoastly sister into hipster hell, it still has cool people and weirdness to enjoy. This Memorial Day weekend, the Firecracker and I hopped in the Honda and drove to Bernieland to hit Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and the beer mecca of Waterbury, where we sampled Heady Topper and Sip o’ Sunshine and many great beers by 14th Star, Hillstead Farms, and many others. Then we shot over to the FunSpot arcade in the wilds of New Hampshire (our adventure is regaled here) before entering America’s frostbitten toe of weirdness and meth, aka Maine.
We stopped at Sebago Brewing and Maine Beer Co., the latter an old fave and the former a new one. The WhistlePunk from Sebago is a great IPA, and MBC always brews interesting things. We skipped Allagash this time around because our local pub (the Cloverleaf Tavern of Caldwell NJ) just had a tap takeover. But we’ve been there before. It was raining and cold when we arrived, and all the clothing stores were tourist traps or yuppie scumpits ($200 for a vinyl raincoat?) so I my only choice was to stop in the Belgian beer bar Novares Res, where I knew they sold hoodies emblazoned with hooded monks and beer barrels. I nabbed a snazzy sweatshirt and was thus well clothed for the chill.
There’s much to do in Portland but we got food out of the way first, with a lobster roll for Firecracker and a roll stuffed with whole belly fried clams for me. That evening we met a lovely couple from … where we’d just left, Laconia NH, who gave us a bug-eyed stare, like we were following them. (“You went to the FunSpot?” It has a reputation…) A lovely evening was had, I had a great smoke beer from Germany, we regaled each other with tales. Antonio told us of growing up in the Philippines, and they laughed at our rutted road adventure when the GPS tried to kill us.
But hey, you’re saying, what about Bigfoot?
What about him?
I like Bigfoot.
I know he doesn’t exist, but I like him anyway. Part of me wants them to exist, and another part wants us to never know definitively if they exist or not. This is because I was around seven years old when I first heard the word sasquatch, and I want that mystery to always remain. (Probably saw Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot)
So I’m glad my visit to the International Museum of Cryptozoology in Portland Maine left me utterly sure in my belief that bigfoot will never be discovered, no matter how many okapis, coelocanths and giant squids we find.
A lot of tourists are disappointed by this museum, but it’s not a sideshow. Go to Ripley’s Believe it or Not if you want that stuff. This museum is about cryptozoology, the study of undiscovered critters, and ones that may be extinct, or not, like the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. It’s a marsupial predator:
Much of the museum is pop culture memorabilia, and our love of these creatures. And that’s just fine. There’s a bunch about the Mothman and UFO sightings. (Though if you’re into the Mothman, you really should visit the Mothman Museum, which I did).
They have a few Fiji Mermaids, the product of creative taxidermy. It was interesting to see them up close. One of my favorites was my friend Kim Parkhurst‘s sculpture of a tatzelwurm, a two-legged lizard whose gaze caused death, if you believe the medieval hype.
When I was in sixth grade, the homeroom bookshelf had plenty of awful paperbacks full of ghost stories and what-ifs and old legends, which I absorbed like a sponge. A favorite was this story of cowboys gunning down a pterodactyl in the American desert:
And they give plenty of time to my home state’s favorite cryptid, the Jersey Devil (which if you dig deep enough, was a political prank by a young Ben Franklin about the Leeds family, and we’ve been “seeing” this horse-faced bat-winged cloven hoofed critter ever since).
I’m a skeptic at heart, but I have a lively imagination, and I like to hope we haven’t ravaged the Earth so terribly that there aren’t undiscovered charismatic megafauna like the hairy hominid we call sasquatch hiding from us in the depths of the forest and jungle. I’d love for a small population of thylacine to have survived. My friend Gerry’s daughter Alibeth would be delighted, she’s a thylacine fan. We took her to see the titanosaur at the Natural History Museum in NYC a while back, and we were both saddened to learn that their thylacine exhibit had moved on.
There are still wonders out there, even if there’s no sasquatch. We can preserve them and ourselves if we stop acting like science is a matter of opinion. But expecting people to believe scientists over political hucksters? I’d sooner believe in Bigfoot.
(P.S.: I totally stole the title from this Adrenaline O.D. album)
Tagged: Beer, Bigfoot, Jersey Devil, Maine
May 31, 2016
Button mashing at the FunSpot
That’s not as dirty as it sounds.
The FunSpot bills itself as the world’s largest arcade, and was featured in the arcade game documentary The King of Kong. I’ve wanted to visit for years, but it’s just far enough into New Hampshire that a day trip makes for an unpleasant eleven hour round trip. To put it less diplomatically, it’s in the ass end of nowhere. BFE. East Ja-bip.
Hell, even the lovely couple we met at Novares Res beer bar in Portland a day later, who live nearby in Meredith, looked at us like we’d just said we liked to eat live snakes when we said that we’d spent the day there. They were trying to escape.
While were there, our GPS tried to kill us by sending us up a one-lane gravel road (no problem, all wheel drive, and I’ve driven all over Scotland) and then up a rutted mountain death hole with a cheeky sign warning that the road “is not maintained by the state or the town.” It looked like someone had attacked it with a steam shovel. I gingerly made a K turn in the pitch black with three foot drop-offs on either side–thankfully there was a bulge in the road a few yards back that I turned into–and we drove all the way back into town before asking a local how to get there without taking “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut.” (that’s a wonderful Stephen King story that I mentioned last week. You haven’t read it yet?)
We also watched one of the adolescent menfolk try to woo a woman working at a drive-thru grill by smoking out his F-150’s tires until her parking lot resembled a haunted house production at your local high school (overzealous use of dry ice machine).
We were in the boonies, and mind you, we’d just driven through Louisiana bayou country a few months back and saw nothing like this. Must be something in the mountain air…
The FunSpot is next to a mini-golf course and a water park and has a bowling alley and skee-ball lanes, so it is a lot like Lucky Leo’s and other Jersey Shore arcades where you need something to do when it rains. We bought a bucket of tokens and Firecracker went off to ply her skills at Skee while I hunted every arcade game cabinet I’d played as a child in the ’80s and had never been able to find again.
Oddly, there was no Donkey Kong. There was a sign mentioning the high scoreage, but they don’t play up their fame in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, probably because the film pokes fun at arcade game junkies, especially Billy Mitchell, the mulleted, black jeaned maestro of the joystick:
My friend Milky wanted me to look for Mitchell’s toadie Brian Kuhn, but he was nowhere to be found. He had better things to do. And so did I, like playing RADICAL RADIAL!!! This terrible game was one of the few they had at Chestnut Grove lodge and resort, where we went for summer vacation a few times as a kid. My mom had to get away, and here she could sit by the pool or the lake while we cavorted with counselors and fished for monster bass stocked in the lake and flirted with the other hormone-crazed teens. And when it rained, we played Radical Radial, Night Driver, Joust, and Gyruss (3 warps to Uranus! bwahahaha).
No one had ever heard of Radical Radial, and I’ve only seen it again here. It could even be the same cabinet:
You play this tire who jumps around avoiding road obstacles and shooting lasers, as only the raddest of radials can do.
They also had the most disturbing arcade game of all time, Chiller, where you shoot at victims in a torture chamber to unlock treasures. No, I’m not kidding:
They also had a sit-down version of the vector Star Wars game which I played until I destroyed the Death Star, a bunch of weird ripoffs of other popular games, and some fun ones I remembered, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Elevator Action, Tutankhamen, Congo Bongo, Dragon’s Lair, the awful Cliff Hanger which took Hayao Miayazaki’s delightful Castle of Cagliostro animated film and cut it into a terrible game, Joust 2, and a game I’m actually pretty good at, Road Blasters:
They didn’t have Tempest, my favorite of the oldies, as it was in for repair. No Donkey Kong, either. I’m not sure I’d recommend a long pilgrimage here but if you’re ever in the area, lost on Dana Hill road by Squam Lake (where On Golden Pond was filmed) and it’s too rainy to go trout fishing, go get a fistful of tokens and recall your misspent youth at the FunSpot.
Tagged: King of Kong, Milky, Video Games
May 26, 2016
Eat my favorite shorts
I am officially old enough to goggle at how shocking it was to hear Bart Simpson exclaim “Eat My Shorts!” and how popular that silly catchphrase was.
But I’m here to talk about another kind of shorts, short stories. Oh no, not another post about “the power” of the short story! You either enjoy reading short story collections or you don’t, I’m not here to change your mind. But when master anthologist Ellen Datlow shared a link to Terry Bisson’s classic short tale “They’re Made Out of Meat,” my morning commute was occupied with picking some of my favorite short stories. Not “the best” ones, I’ll leave that to the academics. Here are some that have stuck with me over the years.
Of course, “They’re Made Out of Meat,” by Terry Bisson. It’s a masterful piece of flash fiction consisting entirely of dialogue, a form that usually leaves me cold. (If you love them, befriend Roddy Doyle on Facebook; he shares many, and his are uncommonly good, as one would expect from a fine writer). This story is available in his collection Bears Discover Fire.
“The Gentle Way,” by Lawrence Block. A not-so simple revenge story from a master of the short form (he’s got quite a talent for novels, as well). This one’s my favorite, so much that I riffed on it in “The Big Snip,” when LB asked me to contribute a story for Dark City Lights. You can read this in his collection Enough Rope. It’s a brick of a book collecting decades of great stories.
“The Redfield Girls,” by Laird Barron. His collection The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All is crammed with great horror stories. Some are much more dreadful and terrifying than this one, but none so chilling.
“Run Kiss Daddy” by Joyce Carol Oates. This is in New Jersey Noir and involves a grisly discovery and a new father’s response to it. It reminds me of how easily we can dupe ourselves into committing terrible things.
“Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut” by Stephen King. Who doesn’t like a shortcut? One of King’s best, the eponymous driver loves finding a new shortcut… but when they become shorter than as the crow flies, the disturbing backdrop of what makes our world comes to light. In Skeleton Crew, which was my introduction to King.
“A Small Good Thing” by Raymond Carver. I just really like bread. And also stories that show us being terrible and self-absorbed, but with a chance for redemption. It’s available in his collection Cathedral and Short Cuts, where I first read it
“This is Not for You,” by Gemma Files. Unapologetic and dark as all hell.
What are some of your favorites? Tell me in the comments.
Today’s best reading from the interwebs:
Missing hiker found dead two years after she disappeared had kept a journal of her final days. If you’re an avid hiker or a fan of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon this will resonate. Firecracker will never let me hike the Appalachian trail again…
We may need to expand our definition of “human” as finds in Neanderthal caverns dated 176,000 years ago depict a much richer life than we ever imagined from our hirsute prognathous cousins. A Shocking Find In a Neanderthal Cave In France
If you haven’t discovered the imaginary world of Scarfolk, a dystopian English city trapped in the ’70s, this is a good place to start: Discovering Scarfolk
For writers:
33 No-Fee Writing Contests, a Publishing…and Other Forms of Insanity.
19 Markets that pay $500 or more per story. SF and horror are the only remaining genres where writing short stories can make you a living. Maybe Lit. This and the Neanderthal story come via Gemma Files,
May 13, 2016
Forsooth, saying sleuth!
Art Taylor rounded up the anthologists nominated for the Anthony Award this year over at SleuthSayers, and invited us to briefly chat about editing anthologies and what we think makes a great story.
Hop on over to SleuthSayers to hear what Todd Robinson, Chris Irvin, Kenneth Wishnia, Art Taylor, and I had to say.
Tagged: Anthologies, Protectors Anthology
Thomas Pluck's Blog
- Thomas Pluck's profile
- 122 followers
