Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 31

More Call of Cthulhu by John Coulthart

More of John Coulthart’s lovely and chilling Rapidograph work in his adaptation of “Call of Cthulhu”.

I had the good fortune of interviewing Mr. Coulthart for Robot 6 a few years ago and I’m always happy to link to that. Give it a read.

The Call of Cthulhu by John Coulthart

A little of John Coulthart’s adaptation of “Call of Cthulhu”

The Starry Wisdom – two of however many

THE STARRY WISDOM contains contributions from several comics folk, most notably among them the two shimmering lights in the firmament of the magickal side of comics creation: Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Unsurprisingly, the two represent polar opposites of magick as much as they did with their work in comics; Moore favoring the esoteric and Morrison going exoteric (which is my linguistic approximation of Morrison’s freer school of thought.) Moore’s “The Courtyard” would go on to a three-issue adaptation in comics form and then spin off NEONOMICON which I rapidly lost patience with. Morrison played with Lovecraftian tropes in his comics work for most of his career. Moore did some, mostly in the bounds of his SWAMP THING run, though mining that vein pretty hard in the later LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN work.

But then the book also contains contributions by JG Ballard and WS Burroughs and Michael Gira. Oh and Rick Grimes, long before zombies ruled the pop culture earth.

The Starry Wisdom – one of several

Art by Peter Smith, with design by John Balance

Happy Halloween. We’re going to try a new thing here, where I post stuff on my actual weblog and use Tumblr in a different way. Won’t bore you with reasons why.

The above images are from an anthology called THE STARRY WISDOM, published by Creation Books in 1994 (at least the second edition, which was expanded.) It’s a tribute to HP Lovecraft, but I suspect the contents of it would largely appall Lovecraft himself, or at least the persona that he projected in his fiction and what bit of his correspondence I’ve read. This is more like HPL crashing headlong into (primarily UK-based) esoteric subculture.

I’ve given the Intrapanel treatment to a chunk of the book, primarily the contributions of John Coulthart, who did a comics adaptation of “The Call of Cthulhu” which nails the spirit of the original in a way that few HPL adaptations have or will.

Print book updates

Okay, so what’s happened so far?

Last week, BLUE HIGWAY got released by the Createspace store. It’s also on Amazon, but honestly, buy it from Createspace, since I see a bigger slice out of that.

https://www.createspace.com/4460732

 

While you weren’t looking, I went ahead and did POD versions of both TUG ON THE RIBBON (featuring all seven of my horror/sci-fi short stories) and RAGNAROK SUMMER (a somewhat twisted take on Norse mythology after an aborted Ragnarok.) Links follow.

https://www.createspace.com/4494415 – RAGNAROK SUMMER

https://www.createspace.com/4494199 - TUG ON THE RIBBON

 

I’ll still be appearing at Convolution 2013 in Emeryville at the end of next week and into the weekend (might not be there on 11/1, but who knows). Still thinking about LOSCON at the end of November. Would like to make it, but that’s a tough time of year.

Lexicon for the future

Capital traps

Debt wizard

Capitalmancer

Post-inauthentic

Guilt quilt

Para-paradise

Nopocalypse

I may talk about one or more of these later on. Nopocalypse is the most likely for a first candidate. It’s a word we could use, don’t you think?

BLUE HIGHWAY and other updates

BLUE HIGHWAY is done and off to Createspace for your POD enjoyment.

If you’re interested, click on this link and head on over.

Here’s the back cover copy:

After the Great Big Zero,

After the United States went untied,

Life went on.

Jake Culver is a driver, a fixer and an enigma. Out in the no man’s land of desert California, people don’t often ask what you did before or how you got there. But now someone is, and he doesn’t have the luxury of refusing an answer.

Against his better judgement, he agrees to return to his old haunts in the manufactured para-paradise of Orange County. The Orange Trust runs it like a company town, which would be fine if Jake and the man at the top didn’t share the baddest of blood. Jake’s got a few days to find out who’s not only stealing from the hotbed of high-tech, but trying to get the biggest criminal organizations in the county to pick a very public war with one another.

From the cracked asphalt and no rules motorized combat beyond the reach of authority to the regulated cool of the icehouse and back again, Jake and his friend Tommy ‘Thin’ Manh dig through the above-ground and underground of a near-future California. The pursuit leads them both through the abandoned subway tunnels run by the electrified Mozarts and the subtle digitality of the Weave, to the neon playground of Fascination Street, finally leading Jake back to the one thing that he could never outrun.

BLUE HIGHWAY is 336 pages of nopocalypse science fiction for $15.99. I will probably have copies for sale at Convolution in Emeryville in November. But if you hit Createspace now, you’re guaranteed a copy.

There may or may not be an ebook release. My experience there has been pretty sour, to be bluntly honest. That’s shortcomings on my end, I’m sure, particularly in the self-promotion side of things. All that said, a Kindle release comes in the Createspace package, but that may wait for a little while. Or a long while.

But please, check out the book. I’ll be posting some lengthier excerpts here and I’ve been doing the same at my Tumblr blog (which is much more active than this one.)

You can read that at http://highway62.tumblr.com and I hope you check it out.

Convolution 2013

In addition to folks like Brian and Wendy Froud and Richard and Wendy Pini and Richard Kadrey, the fine folks over at Convolution SF have extended an invitation for yours truly to appear as a guest of the show and do some panels/programming.

I’ll try not to mess it up too badly, but I’m kinda weirded out by the process.

Anyways, a chance for you to stop by and say “hi” and check out the goings-on if you’re in San Francisco the first weekend of November.

Here’s the Convolution 2013 site.

More updates as they happen.

Strangeways update of a sort

Hey folks, you might’ve seen a solicitation from Image for a book called STRANGEWAYS. That is not my book. I’ve already talked to them. I’ll let you all know when there’s official news.

Work continues on THE LAND WILL KNOW, but it’s slow, primarily because I can only pay artists like a small indie publisher which means that work that pays better and has tighter deadlines goes to the top of the pile. Still shooting for a release early next year.

Con/temporary

So I’m wrangling with the first of my own projects (as opposed to the day job projects, which I don’t choose, but are chosen for me) that’s set in contemporary America. Los Angeles in particular. And you wouldn’t think it, but there’s a lot of weird obstacles when you’re doing that, that I haven’t had to deal with, set in fantastic or futuristic settings, as I’d done previously.

I guess the big issue is that this project is really about contemporary society, through the lens of some distinctly genre stuff that’s going on. But when I start lining up the events/things/places/people that really resonate with people right now, I’m reminded of that first five or ten minutes of IRON MAN where Tony Stark makes jokes about MAXIM models and MySpace pages and all those things just stick out to me. That’s to me, mind you. I guess that my kids hear those names as just another old joke like the ones in THE SIMPSONS that I throw out asides about, something to explain why that reference is funny. Was kinda hoping that it wouldn’t turn into that in just six years after I’d finished whatever this actually became. Even worse is the fact that this is something that’s been chewing on my brains for several years now.

A long enough time to see the window of opportunity for the genre label for this thing (yes, zombies) open and close. Granted, it’s not actually zombies, but you could see ‘em from there, at least in the first book. Then there’s the whole issue of zombies having become a cultural thing that everyone and their sister won’t shut up about now. Kinda feel like I need to acknowledge that reality, but man, there’s nothing worse than bringing up another cultural product as a reference point in the middle of your own work. The comparison becomes inevitable and toxic, so I’ll have to figure out some sleight of hand for that one.