Paul Tremblay's Blog, page 10
August 17, 2012
Shirley Jackson, an appreciation
I wrote this for this summer’s Readercon souvenir program. Shirley Jackson was the memorial guest of honor for the convention.
I have to admit that I’m intimidated by the prospect of writing about Shirley Jackson and what her work means to our speculative fiction community and 20th century literature in general. Having had the honor of spending the past five years working with the Shirley Jackson Awards, I’ve heard heartfelt and erudite speeches from Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, and Victor LaValle detailing Jackson’s legacy and enduring influence. I’ve listened to and read scores of acceptance speeches from award winners and nominees who expressed their deep and abiding love of Shirley Jackson’s work. I’m not quite sure what it is, exactly, that I can add beyond a humbled what they said!
I’m equally intimidated by the prospect of writing about what Shirley Jackson means to me. Perhaps it would be best to simply walk up to you, interrupt whatever it was you were doing, and press into your hands one of her books or a hastily photocopied short story from my dog-eared The Lottery and Other Stories. My eyes would be those of a zealot, one whose enthusiasm is infectious but more than a little frightening. I might be smiling, but the smile might be twitching. Then, I’d say breathlessly, though not wholly unconcerned about what her work might do to you, “Here. You must read this.”
*
I sat in my middle school’s library, listening to my sixth grade teacher reading what is one of the most famous short stories written in the English language: “The Lottery.” I remember Mr. Hughes pausing dramatically and shifting his position on a skeleton-thin stool; his thick, black moustache curled above a top lip gone missing. Mr. Hughes looked up from the book and down at us criss-cross applesauce sixth- graders sitting on the floor. Some of us were nervously giggling or pulling at the frays of the day-glo orange library carpet, but we were all listening. Mr. Hughes didn’t read the last line. He delivered it like a stage actor: “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”
*
I took out an old copy of The Haunting of Hill House from the high school library and never brought it back. It’s the only book I’ve ever stolen. I rationalized the theft by telling myself that my fellow students hadn’t taken it out enough, that they didn’t deserve it, that they wouldn’t get it. I am still in possession of the book. Would it be too obvious to say the book is still in possession of me? It’s a reprint of the 1959 paperback. The cellophane library dust jacket protects the weakening, brightly colored cover, “holding darkness within.”
*
In the introduction to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of The Haunting of Hill House, Laura Miller argues that the novel is less a traditional gothic ghost story and is instead a psychological ghost story. I like the idea of psychological ghosts and their inherent ambiguity, of being haunted from within by the question of identity, of who are we really?, and where the true horror comes from, according to Miller, “the dissolving boundary… the one between the mind and the exterior world.”
In the novel, Dr. Montague, the proposed scientific investigator of supernatural events, and three others are to stay at Hill House for a summer. One of the invited guests, Eleanor Vance, agrees to stay at the house partly because she dreams of escaping her rural, secluded life, one in which she is forced to care for her invalid mother. The house sublimates Eleanor’s dreams and fears. Eleanor is as affected by Hill House as Hill House is affected by her. The genius of the novel is in how it so neatly traps the desperate Eleanor and we the readers within those dissolving boundaries.
*
I don’t like to brag or anything, but a few years ago I digitally pressed We Have Always Lived in the Castle into Shirley Jackson Awards winner Kevin Wilson’s hands. He won the award for his collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. In his most recent novel, the New York Times bestselling The Family Fang, the avant garde performers of the family Fang gave themselves a most interesting werewolf back-story. Kevin said in an email about Jackson’s novel: “I think about it all the time. I’m kind of in love with Merricat. If we ever have a girl, we will name her Merricat.”
*
Merricat is the ultimate unreliable narrator of Jackson’s masterpiece, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And, all right, I’m kind of in love with Merricat, too. She wishes that she was born a werewolf and she likes Amanita Phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. So what if most of her family is dead and that she may or may not have put the arsenic in the sugar bowl. The Blackwoods had liked to eat blackberries with sugar sprinkled on top, apparently. Merricat’s older sister Constance (who was arrested for the poisoning but acquitted) didn’t use the sugar, and her Uncle Julian survived the poisoning. The three remaining Blackwoods live ostracized from the rest of the village. There isn’t a page that doesn’t ooze with Merricat’s playful strangeness, intelligence, and menace, particularly when cousin Charles shows up to woo Constance, and to woo away the family cash the sisters keep locked in a safe. Merricat isn’t a fan of Charles. When her attempts at using magic to send Charles packing aren’t successful she pragmatically sets fire to the family home. In the most terrifying scene in the book, and one that echoes the finale of “The Lottery,” the local villagers arrive to help put out the fire, but once it’s out they set to destroying the house by throwing rocks while they cruelly taunt the sisters with a childhood rhyme. Here, there’s no crutch of tradition to explain away the villagers’ easy, ingrained, and all-too-real hatred for the two women who have managed to live wholly independent of them. Merricat and Constance manage to survive the near physical assault and the almost total destruction of their family home, and they reclaim their castle. I like to think they still live there now.
I wrote a story called “We Will Never Live in the Castle,” where I attempted to channel some of what Merricat has with my own unreliable, verbose, oddly charming, and quite possibly sociopathic narrator. The dude has an abiding love of death-cup mushrooms, of course. I’ve never had so much fun writing a post-apocalyptic story about a teen holed up in an amusement park, scheming to take Cinderella’s Castle by force.
*
JoAnn Cox (the tireless Shirley Jackson Awards administrator and member of the Board of Directors) put a copy of The Sundial into my big, greedy hands. It’s a beautiful 1958 paperback that smells like a 1958 paperback should. The Sundial is totally messed up: a novel of manners that Austen (without zombies) would’ve approved of, however, the aristocratic Halloran family believes the world is going to end on August 30th, and only people within the Halloran family homestead will survive the apocalypse and be reborn to paradise. With deceptively simple language grounded in the everyday minutia of familiar surroundings (a house, a family, a social gathering, a village) Jackson manages to make the ridiculous turn to the sublime. The Sundial is both hysterically funny and eerily foreboding often within the same sentence. Mrs. Halloran, the controlling, contemptuous, and caustic matriarch is the star of the novel. Her wit, cruelty, and vulnerability make her one of Jackson’s most memorable characters. I know Mrs. Halloran certainly convinced me of the need to be suitably dressed for the apocalypse.
*
Earlier, when I was pressing a short story into your hands, it was “The Intoxicated.” It’s the story that I find myself returning to more than any other piece of Jackson’s work. In six pages this story could serve as both an introduction to and a summary of the brilliant oeuvre of Shirley Jackson.
An unnamed attendee of a swanky suburban party, winds his way to the kitchen in an attempt to clear his head as he is quite drunk. In the kitchen he finds the seventeen-year-old daughter of the hosts sitting at the kitchen table. He says, by way of introduction: “You the daughter?” Which isn’t an introduction, really, but comes off as dismissive. To him, she is “baggy and ill-formed” but at the same time he describes her as “young and fresh,” a brief but creepy sexualizing of the girl who is almost twenty years younger than him. It’s something that he’ll continue to do throughout the story, particularly when she challenges him and his perceptions.
They make small talk about the lovely party and she makes him a cup of coffee. His attitude toward the girl remains deeply condescending as he only drinks the coffee so that she might feel like she helped him in some small way. After more small talk about her homework, she says to him, flatly, “I suppose you like parties.” The partygoer grows more irritated that he has to suffer through not only this conversation, but her very presence, particularly when she reveals that she’s writing a paper on the future of the world, and that she’s of the opinion that the world doesn’t have much of one. He again is arrogantly dismissive of her, saying, “It’s really a frightening time when a girl sixteen has to think of things like that.”
She says, “I’m seventeen…There’s a terrible difference.”
He denigrates her by sexualizing her according to traditional gender stereotypes. Growing louder, he insists that girls in his day, “thought of nothing but cocktails and necking,” and that her morbid fascination with the end of the world is, “a stage you go through, like being boy-crazy.”
She simply explains that if people of his generation had been more scared of the future when they were young, then, “we wouldn’t be so badly off today.” She details the breakdown of society with churches going first, buildings crumbling into the water. She wonders aloud if the end might happen in Latin class, while reading Caesar.
The partygoer continues to berate her, telling her to forget this end of the world stuff and to, “Buy yourself a movie magazine and settle down.”
In response, she simply tells him that she can get all the magazines she wants when the subways crash and go to ruin, when the big department stores are smashed, when, “The office buildings will be just piles of broken stones.”
The back and forth between the girl and the partygoer increases in tempo and dichotomy, the disturbing images of what might be (or what will be, eventually) against the everyday horribleness of this sexist, older man makes for compelling social satire along with an underlying current of dread.
In the penultimate scene, she says, “We’ll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there’ll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.” In the story, it’s a simple quip that so perfectly describes and skewers suburbia. Read in the totality of Jackson’s career, it foreshadows the blurring of the boundaries of self, houses, community, and society in The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
The pathetic partygoer’s response is as base as a schoolyard taunt: “Maybe there’ll be a law to keep all seventeen-year-old girls in school learning sense.”
She calmly points out that there will be no more schools so that the same mistakes won’t be repeated. Defeated, the partygoer stumbles away from the kitchen, lamely offering to help her with her Latin. The girl giggles and then utters the funniest and creepiest line of the story. “I still do my homework every night.”
*
I’m no longer the little boy sitting on the floor listening to Mr. Hughes read “The Lottery.” All those years ago the story was a straightforward, jarring fable about the perils of mindless tradition and mob-mentality, with its deliciously gruesome twist ending. As an adult, however, I’m as disturbed by the cycle of perpetual violence in that small village as I’m unsettled by all the blurry possibilities in the final line uttered by the doomed Mrs. Hutchinson: Is she just the victim of blind chance? Did she believe the lottery was fixed so that her name would come up? Did she believe the lottery was to be fixed for someone else so her name being pulled is a horrible mistake? Is she talking about the entire lottery, or the social system and its inherent injustices, or existence itself being unfair?
As a writer, I humbly aspire to blur those Jacksonesque boundaries between humor and horror; social satire and realism; reality, identity, and the self to ultimately reveal the happy and ugly truths of the world, and reveal them in such a way that you might be left smirking while utterly unnerved at the same time. And I humbly aspire to address the ultimate questions of art and literature–What am I going to do now? How do I live through this? How does anyone live through this?–which are so expertly and memorably explored in a Shirley Jackson story.
A Shirley Jackson story is where a house, a family, a village, or even six simple words can mean everything.
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.”
August 16, 2012
Review of Evenson’s IMMOBILITY at LARB
I wrote a review of Brian Evenson‘s IMMOBILITY for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and it’s live today. Call me the critic. But for today only.
August 15, 2012
Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye lives! Plus guest-blog post, LA Times, and freebies at Litreactor.
Timing is everything, right? Well, I don’t have any.
In the midst of moving out of my house of 13 years, my novel SWALLOWING A DONKEY’S EYE was released yesterday. Now that I’ve unpacked my computer, I can participate in the promo fun.
In the mean time, go and consume! Buy here!
Some of the goings on and release bacchanalia:
–CZP started a website for the novel. The site has book excerpts (including an entire chapter), artwork, news, a discount offer, and there’ll be some original content in the coming days/weeks as well.
–Litreactor is giving away two copies. You just have to jump through a few interpretive hoops to possibly win one. Check it out!
–David Ulin of the LA Times is going on vacation and he gave a brief list of books that he’s taking with him. Yup, one of the books has a donkey on the cover. See?
–Jonathan Wilhoit kindly gave me some blog-space over at his I Read a Book Once for an essay explaining (somewhat) the connections between legumes, music, and satire to my novel and its title. GO HERE.
August 7, 2012
Book Trailer for Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye
Shipping now from amazon. In stores August 15th!
July 11, 2012
My Readercon schedule
I’m really looking forward to stalking seeing all my talented friends at Readercon this weekend. Special bonus of my family spending most of the con weekend in the hotel with me too. I hope they don’t mind my coming back to the room after a late night of literary discussion!
To the schedule!
Friday July 13
11:30 AM VT Reading. Paul Tremblay. Paul Tremblay reads from his upcoming novel Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye.
12:00 PM RI At School with Peter Straub. Andy Duncan, Jack Haringa, Nicholas Kaufmann (leader), Caitlín R. Kiernan, John Langan, Paul Tremblay. For the generation of horror writers who came of age in the seventies and eighties, the fiction of Peter Straub has exerted a profound gravitational pull. Glen Hirshberg has spoken of the importance of If You Could See Me Now to his development as a writer of ghost stories. Lee Thomas has acknowledged the influence of Ghost Story on his novel The Dust of Wonderland. Kelly Link has noted the significance of Shadowland to her stories. Laird Barron has written the afterword to the recent Centipede Press edition of Koko, in which he details that novel’s importance to his work. This panel will bring together several writers who have benefited from the example of Straub’s fiction to discuss some of the ways in which his work contributed to theirs.
Proposed by Nicholas Kaufmann.
Saturday July 14
11:00 AM NH Group Reading: ChiZine Publications. Gemma Files, Nicholas Kaufmann, Nick Mamatas, Yves Meynard, Paul Tremblay. Authors published by ChiZine Publications read from their works.
Sunday July 15
11:00 AM G The Shirley Jackson Awards. Nathan Ballingrud, Matthew Cheney, Michael Cisco, F. Brett Cox, Ellen Datlow, Sarah Hyman DeWitt, Elizabeth Hand, Jack Haringa, Caitlín R. Kiernan (leader), John Langan, Sarah Langan, Kelly Link, Kit Reed, Peter Straub (moderator), Paul Tremblay, Genevieve Valentine, Jeff VanderMeer, Gary K. Wolfe. In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, the Shirley Jackson Awards have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. Jackson (1916–1965) wrote classic novels such as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. The awards given in her name have been voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors, for the best work published in the calendar year of 2011 in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author
July 10, 2012
The Harlequin and the Train now available as an ebook
Formerly only available as a limited edition from Necropolitan Press, The Harlequin and the Train is now a $2.99 ebook. Available at amazon now, and soon to be in Nook and Apple’s iTunes as well. The ebook version is gussied up with hyperlinks. They’re fun and informative!
Summary!
Rudy has only been on the job as a train engineer for a few months. While at the helm of a commuter train headed to Boston, Massachusetts, it hits a harlequin clown, and in the chaotic aftermath, he witnesses the horrific and inexplicable actions of a group of people who were seemingly laying in wait for the accident. There are other accidents and as the group infiltrates his life (present and past), and as random global acts of violence and suffering seem to be connected, what Rudy believes about others and himself will be forever warped as he makes his final choice.
Blurbs!
“Tremblay is an expert when it comes to piercing the veil of prosaic suburban life to reveal its dark heart. Cryptic, elliptical, and profoundly eerie, The Harlequin & the Train unfolds inexorably as a nightmare.”—Laird Barron, author of The Croning and Occultation
“Highlight this in yellow: With The Harlequin and the Train, Paul G. Tremblay manages to make the reader complicit in the narrator’s decisions. He pulls you down with him, giving you that uncomfortable feeling in your gut when being dragged to something you don’t want to see. Through clean, simple language coupled with bizarre and unsettling events, you are brought directly to that place you would never want to be. But it’s okay, it’s alright, everything will be fine: Just keep telling yourself that you’re not Rudy. Could never be Rudy. The Harlequin and the Train further cements Tremblay’s reputation of being one of the finest writers of weird fiction—hell, any form of fiction—working in the field today.”–Brett Savory, author of In and Down
“Don’t let the title fool you. This story’s about neither clowns nor trains. Instead, it shows us what terrible thing germinates in each of our hearts. And how it can grow into something beautiful, if we let it.”–Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory and Growing Up Dead in Texas
“Call it a novella if you want, but this fast little book engages you at a deeper level than most of the doorstop novels out there. It’s one of those rare instances where the writing and the story have synched up perfectly. What I’m saying is that I wish I would have written this book. As is, I’ll have to just be satisfied with having name small here, like this:”–Stephen Graham Jones (so nice, he blurbed it twice!)
“With The Harlequin and The Train, Tremblay cements his reputation as one of the finest craftsmen of dark fiction working today. The story is emotionally complex and stylistically innovative in its exploration of fate and the cruelty of chance. Ambitious and exciting, The Harlequin and The Train is a remarkable achievement.” Lee Thomas, author of The German and The Dust of Wonderland
“With THE HARLEQUIN AND THE TRAIN, Paul Tremblay accomplishes what veteran authors of the new genre still strive toward: the perfect balance between smart, innovative plot, and true characters who break your heart. I loved it.”—Sarah Langan, author of The Keeper and The Missing
June 30, 2012
Last day for limited DONKEY pre-orders!
The trade paperback will be out in late August, but for the big spenders, CZP is only taking limited hardcover orders for one more day!
May 16, 2012
The Horror, The Horror: Writing Horror Fiction with Substance workshop at Litreactor
Workshop!
Brett Cox, John Langan, Sarah Langan, and I are running a horror writing workshop at Litreactor. We’re donating our proceeds to help support our beloved Shirley Jackson Awards.
Spread the word and/or take the class. I’ll be fun. I promise.
Class starts June 4th. Workshop details are here.
April 27, 2012
Fungi!
FUNGI! is to be published by the Innsmouth Free Press, and edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey. I got me a mushroomy story in it and so do a lot of other cool writers.
Fungi cover by Oliver Wetter
Ann K. Schwader, “Cordyceps zombii” (poem)
A.C. Wise, “Where Dead Men Go to Dream”
Andrew Penn Romine, “Last Bloom on the Sage”
Camille Alexa, “His Sweet Truffle of a Girl”
Chadwick Ginther, “First They Came for the Pigs”
Daniel Mills, “Dust From a Dark Flower”
Ian Rogers, “Out of the Blue”
Jane Hertenstein, “Wild Mushrooms”
Jeff Vandermeer, “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose”
John Langan, “Hyphae”
Julio Toro San Martin, “A Monster In The Midst”
Kris Reisz, “The Pilgrims of Parthen”
Laird Barron, “Gamma”
Lavie Tidhar, “The White Hands”
Lisa M. Bradley, “The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster Under Glass”
Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington, “Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus”
Nick Mamatas, “The Shaft Through The Middle of It All”
Paul Tremblay, “Our Stories Will Live Forever”
Polenth Blake, “Letters to a Fungus”
Richard Gavin, “Goatsbride” Simon Strantzas, “Go Home Again”
Steve Berman, “Kum, Raúl (The Unknown Terror) – b. 1925, d. 1957”
W.H. Pugmire, “Midnight Mushrumps”
Three extra stories included in the hardcover edition are:
E. Catherine Tobler, “New Feet Within My Garden Go”
J.T. Glover, “The Flaming Exodus of the Greifswald Grimoire”
Claude Lalumière, “Big Guy and Little Guy’s Survivalist Adventure”
April 23, 2012
2011 Shirley Jackson Awards nominees announced
Congratulations to the nominees of the 2011 Shirley Jackson Awards. A thousand thank yous to the jurors–Laird Barron, Matthew Cheney, Maura McHugh, Kaaron Warren, Gary K. Wolfe–who put in untold hours of reading and considering of the fine works of 2011.
(check this link to a Pinterest board with nominee book covers)
Boston, MA (April 2012) — In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards, Inc. has been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.
The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.
The nominees for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Awards are:
NOVEL
The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday)
The Dracula Papers, Reggie Oliver (Chômu Press)
The Great Lover, Michael Cisco (Chômu Press)
Knock Knock, S. P. Miskowski (Omnium Gatherum Media)
The Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan (Canongate Books, Ltd.)
Witches on the Road Tonight, Sheri Holman (Grove Press)
NOVELLA
“And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living,” Deborah Biancotti (Ishtar, Gilgamesh Press)
“A Child’s Problem,” Reggie Oliver (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
“Displacement,” Michael Marano (Stories from the Plague Years, Cemetery Dance Publications)
The Men Upstairs, Tim Waggoner (Delirium Books)
“Near Zennor,” Elizabeth Hand (A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books)
“Rose Street Attractors,” Lucius Shepard (Ghosts by Gaslight, Harper Voyager)
NOVELETTE
“The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” Peter Straub (Conjunctions 56)
“Ditch Witch,” Lucius Shepard (Supernatural Noir, Dark Horse)
“The Last Triangle,” Jeffrey Ford (Supernatural Noir, Dark Horse)
“Omphalos,” Livia Llewellyn (Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, Lethe Press)
“The Summer People,” Kelly Link (Tin House 49/Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, Candlewick Press)
SHORT FICTION
“Absolute Zero,” Nadia Bulkin (Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, Prime Books)
“The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece,” M. Rickert (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sept/Oct, 2011)
“Hair,” Joan Aiken (The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories, Small Beer Press/ The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July/Aug, 2011)
“Max,” Jason Ockert (The Iowa Review 41/1)
“Sunbleached,” Nathan Ballingrud (Teeth, HarperCollins)
“Things to Know About Being Dead,” Genevieve Valentine (Teeth, HarperCollins)
SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION
After the Apocalypse: Stories, Maureen F. McHugh (Small Beer Press)
The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious Press)
Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, Livia Llewellyn (Lethe Press)
The Janus Tree, Glen Hirshberg (Subterranean Press)
Red Gloves, Christopher Fowler (PS Publishing)
What Wolves Know, Kit Reed (PS Publishing)
EDITED ANTHOLOGY
Blood and Other Cravings, edited by Ellen Datlow (Tor)
A Book of Horrors, edited by Stephen Jones (Jo Fletcher Books)
Ghosts by Gaslight, edited by Jack Dann and Nick Gevers (Harper Voyager)
Supernatural Noir, edited by Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse)
Teeth, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (HarperCollins)
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Harper Voyager)
Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.” Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work.
The 2011 Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, July 15th at Readercon 23, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Shirley Jackson is the Memorial Guest of Honor. Readercon 23 Guests of Honor, Peter Straub and Caitlin R. Kiernan, will act as hosts.
