Paul Tremblay's Blog, page 27

Happy Holidays from Dan and the Golden Scarab

Season's Greetings from your insect overlord!

I be highbrow horror, it's true.

I made a discovery recently.  I was looking into the mirror and saw something.  That something was my brow.  I think it's a little higher, now.  I'm not talking about my hairline (though if I was talking about my hairline, I'd be freaking out, because, if I'm allowed a shred of vanity, or anti-vanity, I'd be the ugliest bald man alive, I need my hair, oh please, I need it).  I pulled out a handy-dandy tape measurer and discovered, yes, my brow is indeed high.  A highbrow, as it...

Attack of the 90s music!

With the end of the 2000-2009 decade, it of course makes sense to suddenly dip into the indie tunes of the 90s, right? I can't full explain the wave of nostalgia on my part, though I suspect I do this (this being in a hurry to look back) at the end of every year.

Or I could blame Jawbox.  They just released a remixed For Your Own Special Sweetheart.  Looking forward to hearing what they do on the remix.  The vocals level on the original certainly needed improvement.  Watch the Jimmy Fallon...

Top tenish reads of 2009

In no particular order…

1) Masterpiece Comics by R. Sikoryak: In a year where the brain dead PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES mashup sold oodles and publishers sold their souls to crap out the next zombie/monster/classic mashup (okay, I'm speaking in hyperbole…publishers have no souls), R. Sikoryak's insanely funny, smart, and deep (yes, deep!) collection of comic/classic mashups is the kind of book that be reread and you'd still not catch all the brilliant metaphors and links to themes of...

Happy Holidays?

Best card ever from my brother Dan, his wife Beth, and baby-to-be:

Booklist review of PHANTOM

Been a reviewy kind of week.  I'm coming up on a two week break from school and plan a bunch of less spamy blog posts soon.  I promise.

"With the glut of vampire novels and slasher flicks currently saturating the horror genre, it's easy to overlook the still healthy demand for loftier ways of scaring people. While its intended audience may be small for now, this slender volume of highbrow horror stories offers superlative craftsmanship without sacrificing the indispensable chills. The...

Advent Book Blog and Nick Kaufmann recommend The Little Sleep

The post title kind of says it all, don't it?

Tremblay's masterful debut novel is feast of language and imagery.

Publisher's Weekly review of No Sleep till Wonderland, plus a random math fact

Solid! And Derivative of Hitchcock is the name of my new band.

No Sleep Till Wonderland Paul Tremblay. Holt, $14 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8850-2

While somewhat derivative of Hitchcock, Tremblay's second novel featuring South Boston PI Mark Genevich improves enough on the first, The Little Sleep (2009), to suggest that the unusual hero—a narcoleptic sleuth subject to unpredictable blackouts—can sustain a series. Genevich is scraping the bottom of the barrel after one of his frequent...

House of Windows and Pariah

While school's in session for a few more weeks, my blog posts will consist of exciting book musings.  Exciting!  Musings!

First up, John Langan's excellent first novel, House of Windows.  The novel centers around Veronica (young, beautiful grad student) and Roger (65 yr old divorcee, well-established and respected Dickens scholar/professor, who's son Ted had joined the Army and is killed in Afghanistan) and their complex relationship/marriage, the relationships they have/had with their...

Chew and Lovecraft Unbound

Chew Volume One: Tasters Choice (John Layman and Rob Guillory) collects the comic's issues 1-5.  Tony Chu is a cibopathic detective, which means that he gets psychic vibes from whatever he eats (except for beets…blucky, beets).  Yes, Tony eats horrible things and the gross out get played, but not overplayed and used in step with the plot, which delights in going all over the place.  Really fun and clever stuff that manages to be funny, brutal, and yeah, suspenseful at times too.  Looking...