Paul Tremblay's Blog, page 15
March 9, 2011
Karen Joy Fowler's WHAT I DIDN'T SEE and Mat Johnson's PYM
I've been on one of those reading streaks where it seems like every book I pick up is flat out amazing. Lucky me!
Karen Joy Fowler's WHAT I DIDN'T SEE is a fantastic, genre-bending short story collection from Small Beer Press. The first story "The Pelican Bar" (winner of last year's Shirley Jackson Awards for best short story) is a punch to the gut. A bratty teen is taken away to a far away island for re-education (I almos typed, re-Neducation, a reference to a SIMPONS treehouse of horror episode, but I stopped, because it would've shown how sad I am with always refering to the Simpsons…). It's one of the most disturbing stories I've read in a long time. Other favorites include "Always," the first person account of a woman who joined a cult with a leader who promises everlasting life; "Booth's Ghost," one of two stories that feature John Wilkes Booth; "King Rat," a breif but harrowing story about a missng boy and the bus ride his father takes to look for him; and the stunning title piece, "What I Didn't See," which is a story about the first European woman to see a gorilla in the wild and what she wasn't allowed to see. Fowler's characters are vivid, the fantasical elements (when used) are subtle, used in a way to heighten the tension and the story's core of realism as well. I'm very impressed, and wish I was good enough to write more than a few of these stories.
Mat Johnson's novel PYM is a revelation. Chris Jaynes is a professor of African American studies at a small white college, but is denied tenure because he won't be the token black on the Diversity Committe and he wants to teach Edgar Allen Poe in an attempt to find the root of Whiteness. He finds a slave narrative that seems to prove Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a fictionalized account of true events. Jaynes then takes a small, all African American crew down to Antartica to search for the lost island of Tsalal (a lost island of black people desrcibed by Poe in PYM). They get waylaid by Poe's white Yeti-monsters instead! Part biting social and racial commentary, part satire/comedy, part adventure/horror story, part academic treatise, PYM is an utterly original novel. One so original, it shows there might just be some hope for big publishing. PYM is brilliant, brazen, fearless, angry, funny, weird, and totally unlike anything else you've read.
February 25, 2011
Tom Piccirilli's EVERY SHALLOW CUT
Tom refers to his mesmerizing new book, Every Shallow Cut, as a "noirella" (a noir novella). It is a shame that more publishers (or more mainstream publishers) don't publish novellas. When done correctly, they pack quite a punch. Tom takes full advantage of the form here, as ESC is meant to be experienced in a one-to-two hour sitting. It's no accident, I think, that the length-of-read is essentially movie-length. We're so used to our entertainment being chunked out to us in that format, part of the appeal is that we're going through that similar temporal motion. Hell, sit with this book with a bag of popcorn and enjoy the downward spiral. Only, like great films that do achieve art, the ideas, themes, and emotions in Every Shallow Cut linger well beyond the two-hours spent.
The unnamed narrator is a struggling mid-list writer whose life, marriage, and career are going down the tubes and fast. He makes a trek from Denver to NYC, and to his estranged brother's house (and agent's office), with only his dog Churchill in tow. At times, the novella reads, almost uncomfortably so, as a type of metafiction, as if Tom is telling us way too much about himself. But then again; that's the point. Whereas most stories about writers come off as preachy, self-absorbed, and myopic, ESC's narrator is all of us. Almost beyond empathy and pathos, he is our collected fears, anxieties, and broken dreams. It's those detailed broken dreams the narrator clings to that simultaneously makes him heroic and pathetic; it makes him us.
Every Shallow Cut is a wow read, folks.
February 21, 2011
Creatures! TOC announced
John Langan and I are very excited to announce the Table of Contents for Creatures! Thirty Years of Monster Stories. 26 tales in all, 150,000 words of monster fiction.
IT CAME AND WE KNEW IT
"Godzilla's Twelve-Step Program," Joe R. Lansdale
"The Creature from the Black Lagoon," Jim Shepard
"After Moreau," Jeffrey Ford
"Among Their Bright Eyes," Alaya Dawn Johnson
"Under Cover of Night," Christopher Golden
"The Kraken," Mike Kelly
"Underneath Me, Steady Air," Carrie Laben
IT CAME WE COULD NOT STOP IT
"Rawhead Rex," Clive Barker
"Wishbones," Cherie Priest
"The Hollow Man," Norm Partridge
"Not from Around Here," David J. Schow
"The Ropy Thing," Al Sarrantonio
"The Third Bear," Jeff Vandermeer
IT CAME FOR US
"Monster," Kelly Link
"Keep Calm and Carillon," Genevieve Valentine
"The Deep End," Robert R. McCammon
"The Serpent and the Hatchet Gang," F. Brett Cox
"Blood Makes Noise," Gemma Files
"The Machine Is Perfect, the Engineer Is Nobody," Brett Alexander Savory
"Proboscis," Laird Barron
IT CAME FROM US
"Familiar," China Miéville
"Replacements," Lisa Tuttle
"Little Monsters," Stephen Graham Jones
"The Changeling," Sarah Langan
"The Monsters of Heaven," Nathan Ballingrud
"Absolute Zero," Nadia Bulkin
February 15, 2011
My Boskone Schedule
It'll be a busy weekend at Boskone (this weekend!). Bunch of panels. And I eat brains, apparently.
Friday 7pm The Zombie Phenom — Is It Staggering Yet?
Alan F. Beck
Suzy McKee Charnas
John Langan
Faye Ringel
Paul G. Tremblay
It seems like zombies are everywhere lately: books, movie, TV,
marches, meetups … Does this phenomenon show any signs of
weakening or, you know, dying down? What would it take to kill this
zombie thing dead?
Friday 11pm Almost Midnight Zombies — "The Walking Dead" Show
Ginjer Buchanan
John Langan (M)
Paul G. Tremblay
Saturday 2pm My Favorite Mysteries
Dana Cameron
John R. Douglas
Toni L. P. Kelner
Resa Nelson
Darrell Schweitzer
Paul G. Tremblay (M)
What kinds of crossover qualities make so many SF/F/H fans also like
a good mystery story?
Saturday 3pm The Divide Between Mysteries and Fantasy-Horror
Ellen Asher
Christopher Golden
Joe Hill
Toni L. P. Kelner (M)
Paul G. Tremblay
Saturday 4pm Kaffeeklatsch
Laird Barron
Sarah Langan
Paul G. Tremblay
Saturday 5pm Up with Monsters!
Laird Barron
Suzy McKee Charnas
Joe Hill
Paul G. Tremblay (M)
What we need are more stories with monsters other than vampires and
zombies. Let's talk tall tales featuring leviathans, mummies,
chupacabras, kapres, killer bees, ghosts, shoggoths, golems,
hellhounds, and other denizens that lurk further off the beaten
path. Plus it would help if some of them were also on the pretty or
sexy side.
Sunday 2pm A Good Death
Jeffrey A. Carver (M)
James D. Macdonald
Paul G. Tremblay
Death is "the last enemy", feared by all. Yet Tolkien's immortal
elves call it "the One's gift to Man". Whether a sad ending or a
glad ending, let's remember the most heartbreaking, surprising,
realistic, satisfying, or otherwise memorable death scenes in SF/F/H
books and movies.
February 3, 2011
Um, snow, plus new(ish) reads from Zeltserman and Egan
As I'm sure you've heard, we've been having a spot of weather in the north americas. The roof of my niece's elementary school collapsed. And my entombed mailbox:
Luckily, despite snowpocalypes and such, there's still books!
Dave Zeltserman's newest (yes, the prolific bastard puts out like three a year) is OUTSOURCED. It's a crime/heist novel about Dan, a laid off software engineer. At 48 years old, his re-hire prospects are grim, and he's slowly losing his sight (retinitis pigmentosa) to boot. Creeping ever closer to defaulting on his mortgage, and desperate to provide for his family, he schemes to rob a bank, or more specifically, to rob the safety deposit boxes that belong to a reputed Russian mobster. Dan gets a bunch of his has-been friends in on the clumsy yet clever caper, and stuff goes way wrong, quickly.
OUTSOURCED is brilliantly paced and reminiscent of A SIMPLE PLAN with the supposed non-criminals slowly descending into desperation and violence, and Zeltserman gives the characters (Dan, in particularly) a kind of heartbreaking vulnerability as well. Another great crime novel from Zeltserman.
If we're all still around and reading books 20-30 years from now, I can totally envision the next generation of crime/noir readers–the ones discovering and raving about Chandler and Hammet–finding all of Zelterman's books too, and greedily inhaling them.
Jennifer Egan's A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD is one of the best novels published in 2010. A sprawling epic about seemingly small lives, and all packed in to 288 pages. The novel opens with a music producer who's dying inside because the music he's producing now more than kinda sucks. His assistant Sasha, is a mysterious closet-cleptomanic, and the novel quickly then spins into other interconnected characters, their past lives (including the Bay Area punk scene, and an African safari), and their future lives (Sasha's daughter's power point about their lives is as heartbreaking as it is breathtakingly genius). Clever but never winky. Many critics have talked about the chances she took by playing with narrative structure and viewpoints almost in a chapter-by-chapter basis. It all works and the result is an emotionally dizzying and authentic novel. Time is a goon….
January 24, 2011
My guest blog spot at Joel Arnold's livejournal
Joel Arnold kindly offered me a chance to take over his livejournal for a day. So, it'll be like you're reading my blog, but you'll be somewhere else, too!
"Flailin' for Distance" is the title of the post. Go read it HERE.
It's my half-baked reponse to Nathan Ballingrud's thoughtful response to Lucius Shepard's question, which demanded, um, responses. Lucius said, "I rarely write about stuff that's going on in my head at the time–it seems to take around ten years for life to manifest in stories and my protagonists are often a decade younger than I. There are exceptions provoked by extreme emotion, but this is the general rule. What's your lag time…or do you have one?"
January 20, 2011
SF Signal: Be my victim: Paul Tremblay on the State of the Short Story
Author and all around good egg Lee Thomas has a regular column called Be My Victim over at SF Signal. This time around we discussed the short story as a format and how our instant gratification culture may or may not be affecting the form.
Make with the clicky for the full piece:
"The big question is who does the short story–as a form–appeal to? Who reads them? Besides us, right? And by us I mean writers. There's compelling evidence to suggest that the short story is where today's writers do their training or their apprenticeship. The speculative fiction community has a vibrant short fiction readership so it seems, but how much of that readership is of other writers or trying-to-be writers? When I was slush reading for Chizine and Fantasy Magazine , I can't tell you how many cover letters I got that mentioned "graduate of Clarion pick-a-direction" and other workshops. Hell, even this math-teaching-schmoe taught a workshop at Emerson College (it was a lot of fun, I must say). I don't have an MFA, but it seems like many of those writers are learning how to write primarily in the form of short fiction. Interesting article on slate.com about how MFA programs use short fiction."
January 17, 2011
A collection of first-rate collections
Over the last few weeks I've been fortunate to read three outstanding short story collections (one from '09, the others from '10); each of them weird, dark, horrific, and beautiful. Each with their own voice and distinct feel.
Tina May Hall's The Physics of Imaginary Objects
Winner of the Drue Heinze Literature Prize, Tina's 15 stories (including one novella) challenge narrative form/style as it plays with dreamlike perceptions and observations. Gorgeous imagery and unsettling weirdness abounds. My favorites include "How to Remember a Bird," about a town with a bottomless hole that opens up, and the stunning novella "All the Day's Sad Stories," which is told in a long series of vignettes, and is about a young couple trying to have a baby, trying to save or understand their own relationship, and everything else, really.
Matt Bell's How They Were Found
This collection is one of 2010′s favorite discoveries for me. One of the best collections of dark/horror fiction as well. In his best stories, Matt's unsettling premises with their unreliable narrator's build to climaxes that are as devastating as they are oddly personal. Must reads include "The Receiving Tower," a story about an army isolated by snow and ice, its members slowly losing their memories, and "Dredge," which is about an unforgettably tormented man named Punter, who finds a drowned girl in a pond, takes her home and keeps her in the freezer, and decides to find who killed her.
Highly stylized (both in terms of prose and it's packaging: the paper the book is printed on is ash grey, as if printed on the only paper left after the end of everything) and unrelenting, the world ends over and over again. Houses and towns drown in mud, people simply disappear, a desperate story told through an insurance claim form, in Scorch Atlas the end is bizarre, horrific, never-ending, and you can't take your eyes off it. "In the Year of Cyst & Tremor" and "Water Damaged Photos of Our Home Before I Left It" are exceptional on their own and within the greater landscape of the book.
As someone who loves the short story (and dabbles in the form every so often), it's encouraging to see such original work being done. The best books of 2010, without a doubt, came from the ranks of short story collections.
January 11, 2011
The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ulin
David L. Ulin is an editor and book critic for the Los Angeles Times.
The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time is an engaging, contemplative, and effective long-form essay; state-of-the-union on reading: how we read, why we read, and why we should continue to read. Ulin shifts seamlessly from personal experience and anecdotes to the larger technological, social, and even political issues of concern and how they relate to reading.
There are sections of this book that feel a bit eerie in the shadow of the massacre in Arizona and our newly heightened discussion of the tenor and lack of depth of political discourse in the US.
"At the heart of the crisis is not just the evaporation of what we once referred to as shared assumptions, but even more, a dysfunction of language, a failure of the tools of rhetoric and logic on which consensus relies."
Ulin connects a decline in cultural literacy with the decline in discord, in even our ability to empathize.
"Stories, after all–whether aesthetic or political–require sustained concentration; we need to approach them as one side of a conversation in which we also play a part. If we don't, we end up susceptible to manipulation, emotional or otherwise."
The latter half of the book discusses both the technological distractions of social media and the various e-reader gadgets. I connected with how Ulin initially defines reading and how it works and what it does on a personal level ("we are given a template that we must remake as our own" and reading, ultimately as "a way for us to understand ourselves."), before expanding into the bigger picture. And that bigger picture is muddy. Various studies show new technologies are not only changing with how we interact with each other and the outside world, but they're actually changing the pathways in our brains, changing how we physically think. Still, there are clear instances where new technologies can potentially enhance the reading experience as well.
Ulin smartly does not paint technology as an evil boogeyman. And he doesn't offer any prescriptive advice or simple, avuncular solutions. Instead, like the act of reading itself, we're urged to do our own deep thinking.
