Paul Tremblay's Blog, page 6
December 22, 2014
Excerpt from a new short story, “________”, up at Stone Skin Press
Letters to Lovecraft is a new anthology edited by the fabulous Jesse Bullington. I have a story in it. And check it out, the story has like the sickest title ever.
“______”
The publisher is posting excerpts from the stories online, one a day. Today is my day. Go check it out, and then go buy the anthology.
November 23, 2014
Monster weekend reads: The Boy Who Killed Demons and The Wake
The Boy Who Killed Demons, by Dave Zeltserman:
Full disclosure, Dave is a friend and with his Kung Fu he could do serious damage of to all of us put together…
Dave writes these modern pulps with attitude and jet propulsion, and has this new-school-old-school nasty streak that–forget getting under your skin–gets under your fingernails. BOY is no different. It’s an epistolary novel from the POV of Henry, a fifteen-year-old who discovers one day that he can see demons hiding among us. Or maybe he’s just a teen having a psychotic break. Like in Dave’s masterpiece The Caretaker of Lorne Field, Dave slowly builds a case for both supernatural and psychological explanations throughout the novel. His brilliant twist here is how closely Henry’s story is a nightmarish, twisted, even satirized homage/version of Peter Parker/Spider-man’s origin story. Instead of the aw shucks Peter, though, we get teens who are as dark and dangerous as the whole wide world, and none of us are ever safe with Dave.
The Wake, by Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy.
A limited series comic, The Wake is one of the best comics I’ve read in the last few years. (While I don’t read as many comics as supergeeks the erudite Jack Haringa and John Langan, I have read my share, and just trust me here with The Wake, all right?)
Split into two parts, five chapters each, the first part mostly (like mostly dead) takes place in the present tense where a group of scientists head to a secret government drilling rig in the arctic. Something’s wrong, and that something is monstrous mermaids? Mermaids, really? Yes. And trust me, they’re awesome. The book bounces around through different epochs and the second part takes place hundreds of years for now, and I really don’t want to detail the plot because it’s only a ten comic series, and I don’t want to make a mess of it (too late). Suffice to say, the writing is sharp, and the artwork, man, the artwork, from panel one, you get a sense of epic and scope and size, and I found myself pouring through the larger splash pages just taking in all of the details. A huge story with guts, ambition, and pulls themes and ideas from so many places (including Quatermass and the Pit, one of my favorite Hammer films). And there are big scary monsters to boot.
November 10, 2014
November 3, 2014
Sneak peek at interior design of A HEAD FULL OF GHOSTS and my new author pic.
The title of the post kind of says it all, yeah? Fine, be that way.
Anyway, here are some pictures of the first-look pages I got. Not sure why the pictures came out so dark but they did. At the bottom is my mug. Photo taken by Michael Lajoie and shot at my sister’s house. Her house served as a partial inspiration to the book.
October 28, 2014
Horror: the musical. Sort of.
Here’s a not-exhaustive list of songs that are creepy or have creepy videos and songs. In no particular order…
1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Heads Will Roll.” Okay, so maybe there’s an order. Such a great video. Starts off fun, clever, and it achieves a vibe of true weird and discomfort that should make most mainstream Hollywood horror movies jealous.
2. Protomarytr, “Come and See.” Great song. Horrific video.
3. Murder by Death, “White Noise.” Subtle beauty and creeps here, both sonically and visually.
4. Daughters “The Theatre Goer.” Insane band. Creepy song.
5. The Alarm “The Stand.” Come on, gotta have a song inspired by King’s THE STAND. Well, I say we gotta, anyway.
6. Metallica “All Nightmare Long.” Okay, certainly not the best song on this list, but a Cthulhu-y video for ya.
7. The Drones “Shark Fin Blues.” If Jaws had an Aussie noise-folk counterpart, this is it.
8. Clutch “Texan Book of the Dead.” An American 70’s horror movie put to music.
9. Interpol “Evil.” Great song. Creepy mannequin/doll singing is creepy.
10. Tomahawk “Sweet Smell of Success.” Couldn’t chosen any number of Mike Patton bands/projects, but you get this atmosphere heavy tune.
11. Tom Waits “Murder in the Red Barn.” Title and artist sort of say it all, me thinks.
12. Metz, “Rats.” Rats are creepy. Ask Ben.
13. Shellac “The End of Radio” Apocalypse now.
September 21, 2014
After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones
*For note of disclosure, see below.
Stephen’s latest book, After the People Lights Have Gone Off, is a short story collection published by the new and impressive Dark House Press**. What I admire most about Stephen’s work is how fearlessly he approaches and employs possibility. It’s one thing to come up with the concept, the what-if, but Stephen pokes, prods, and expands his possibilities until you-the-reader arrive at this strange place that is simultaneously shocking and familiar. His fiction doesn’t shy away from the difficult implications and questions, nor does he shy away from the horror of inevitability.
The fifteen stories work individually and as a collective reading experience. You experience Stephen’s stories.
To some of the stories themselves:
“Thirteen” is local legend and hell in a movie theater and hell in a high school relationship. “Brushdogs” is a dread-filled hallucinogenic account of a father and son out hunting that I think could/should be read as a companion piece to “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit” (appeared in The Ones That Got Away). “The Spindly Man” is clever and fun in its group story setting (and its reference to Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suit”) until it’s not so fun. “This is Love” made me hurt. I wish I wrote story with the title “The Spider Box.” “Snow Monsters” puts a spin on the bargain-story and this one made me hurt even worse. The title story “After All the People Lights Have Gone Off” is a tour de force ghost story with some images that genuinely left me shuddering in a heap. A heap, I say.
So, yeah, just go buy his book already.
*Stephen is a friend of mine. He does not resemble Frankenstein. We co-wrote a book together (available in Canada now, coming out soon in the USA). Like me he is tall and he hates pickles. It’s the pickles-hate that most threatens my objectivity. But! But! Stephen was a writer that I admired and was jealous of before I met him. I started haunting his email inbox after I read his genius DEMON THEORY. *)
**Dark House Press has also published the anthology The New Black edited by Richard Thomas and the very cool novel Echo Lake by Letitia Trent. Both books are more than worth your time.
September 9, 2014
FLOATING BOY in The Globe and Mail
July 6, 2014
The Children of Old Leech lives
The Children of Old Leech (Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele, editors) is an anthology of stories inspired by Laird Barron‘s fictional universe. It’s available now in hardcover, and I just got my copy. It’s a beautifully designed book and I’m so very impressed with Lockhart’s WORD HORDE press.
See the pretty picture:
I’ve already read a handful of stories and they’re excellent thus far. I’m humbled and happy to be included as one of the kids who get to play in Laird’s sandbox. I’m the tall one.
My story (“Notes for ‘The Barn in the Wild”) is a found notebook kind of story. While the story appears in the anthology (with footnotes standing in for marginalia the lost notebook), first 100 folks who pre-ordered of the book (all sold out, sorry) Word Horde included a chapbook of my story actually written out by hand in a notebook. Check out the interior cover and first page:
Those are my chicken scratches. I wrote out the story longhand into a notebook, scanned the pages, and Word Horde turned the scans back into a 100 print run chapbook of creepy found notebooks. So cool and fun!
You can read more about the book and how they put together the chapbook at Marty Halpern‘s blog.
July 3, 2014
Has it been that long since I last updated this stupid blog? Yes, yes it has.
Yikes! Well, I’ve been busy. And lazy. Lazy busy. I suspect in the fall when things start to ramp up for Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly and A Head Full of Ghosts, I’ll be peeking my head in here much more often.
In the mean time, here’s a scattershot update of sorts.
–Floating Boy is now out in Canada! If you live in the US, do you need a better reason to cross the border? Or you can wait until October, if you wish.
–CZP is having a .99 cent ebook sale on backlist titles through July 4th. So get your e-copies of In the Meantime and Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye cheap!
–Short stories! My story “Notes from ‘The Barn in the Wild’” is now available in the The Children of Old Leech anthology. Just announced, my story “The Large Man” will be appearing in Streets of Shadows, out later this fall. Other short stories sold to anthologies that I can’t quite name yet include “The Dead Boy,” “______”, and “The Ice Tower.”
–Readercon is July 10-13. My schedule:
Friday, July 12
2:30 PM ENV Reading: Paul Tremblay. Paul Tremblay reads selections from the upcoming, co-written YA novel, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly.
5:00 PM ENL The Satirist’s Progress. Marc Abrahams, F. Brett Cox, Alex Jablokow, James Morrow (leader), Paul Tremblay. In an interview at Clarkesworld Magazine, Nick Mamatas said, “Speculative fiction has become much less about transparent allegories or satires and such, and much more about itself,” while also asserting that “Even if it’s only a minor current within speculative fiction, satire will always have a place in it, because exaggeration is crucial to satire. You cannot satirize the here and now simply through reproduction of it via bourgeois realism.” In response, Paul Tremblay offered examples of three picaresque novels “devoid of speculative fiction elements” that he considered satirical: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine, and Home Land by Sam Lipsyte. To what extent has the core of genre SF moved away from satire? And is satire possible within pure realism?
Sunday July 13
11:00 AM F The Shirley Jackson Awards. Chesya Burke, F. Brett Cox, Jack Haringa, John Langan, Sarah Langan, Kit Reed, Paul Tremblay. 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 2013 in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.
–What else? Oh, here’s picture of my freaky thumb celebrating the completion of some edits on the new novel.
April 9, 2014
Pre-order The Children of Old Leech, and get a chapbook of my story
So, if you pre-order The Children of Old Leech, you’ll also get an exclusive chapbook of my story “Notes for The Barn in the Wild.”
The story is a found-notebook story. The chapbook will be comprised of scans of the actual notebook pages I wrote longhand. There are fun sketches and chicken-scratched notes in the margins all of which help tell the story of a journalist investigating a disappearance and the odd history of a barn in the middle of nowhere (Labrador).
A digital version of the story will be included in the anthology, but only in the limited/exclusive chapbook will you get the recreation of the actual hand-written notebook. You want the chapbook, you know you do….
