Hal Johnson's Blog, page 13

A garland of quotations CIII

Perhaps your local library has my books?

Amongst all the Engines of Dissention, there hath been none more powerful in all Times, than the fixing Names upon one another of Contumely and Reproach, and the reason is plain, in respect of the People, who tho’ generally they are uncapable of making a Syllogism or forming an Argument, yet they can pronounce a word; and that serveth their turn to throw it with their dull malice at the Head of those they do not like; such things ever begin in Jest, and en...

Blvd. of Blood

Continued from here. Table of contents here.

(The story so far: Colin Lang recruits hapless Bernie Feldstein to help him in something violent and evil, if as yet undefined, on Blande Boulevard. Meanwhile, Alan Jancewicz just lives with his parents and looks at cars; we won’t have to worry about him for a while.)

6.

John Oberman was some five years older than Bernie or Alan; he’d gone to the same high school, but had never heard about their fight. He’d never met either of them until that night in Oc...

Impossible Histories Errata

The book in question, currently 34% off

Will it last? No one tells me anything

The fact checkers at Macmillan did a great job catching me out, but sometimes I outfoxed them and slipped an error into my book Impossible Histories. I realized (eventually) that I should keep some kind of publicly available list of these triumphs over mere fact, which some people call errors. Feel free to send me additional examples (but be nice!). Links to the index and bibliography, both of which you can print out an...

Truly Wordless Comic Panels

Perhaps your local library has my books?

Hal Johnson Books is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

George Tuska!

A garland of quotations CII

Does anyone care about my Year in Books?

New systems, I fear, in states, are always dangerous, if not wicked.
•Fanny Burney, letter to Mrs Locke (1792).

As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier. The revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape.
•Franz Kafka to Gustav Janouch (ca. 1921).

By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often and as much and in as many ways...

Blvd. of Blood

(This is the first installment; you have missed nothing)

Other books I have written

Book I: The Pawns Assemble1.

Twenty years passed after his last arrest before Colin Lang began to think about killing someone.

In adolescence, Colin had been a little wild—just the usual high-spirits of any high school boy, really: underage beer parties and vandalism. An older kid in shop class taught Colin how to hotwire a car, and he went joyriding in his neighbors’ vehicles once or twice. Mostly, though it was bee...

Truly Wordless Comic Panels

Try a new book for the new year!

Hal Johnson Books is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

George Tuska!

A garland of quotations CI

Try a book that won't make you stupider!

Toys are—chords; we walk on the chords: by means of the chords we enter: into the mysterious rooms of meaning.
•Andrei Bely, Kotik Letaev (1916).

Saussure’s bête noir was the arbitrary (nature of the sign).
•Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (1975).

The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.
•William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

We cannot learn the message of a symbol with a merely passive and receptive mind, because it is of the genius...

Blvd. of Blood: Table of Contents

Chapter

Colin Lang

Bernie Feldstein

Alan Jancewicz

Colin Lang

Bernie Feldstein

(The original post)

Unless someone talks me out of it in the immediate future, starting next week I will begin serializing a complete novel, Blvd. of Blood. This is a straight-up thriller, with no postmodern jibber-jabber added—an edge-of-the-seat tale of a man planning a mass shooting and the cop who seeks to stop him. I should warn you that the book involves salty language and either a little or a lot of violence—depending...

Starting next week: Blvd. of Blood

Unless someone talks me out of it in the immediate future, starting next week I will begin serializing a complete novel, Blvd. of Blood. This is a straight-up thriller, with no postmodern jibber-jabber added—an edge-of-the-seat tale of a man planning a mass shooting and the cop who seeks to stop him. I should warn you that the book involves salty language and either a little or a lot of violence—depending on the plot’s outcome.

Please tell your thriller-loving friends about this new project—I am ...