Tyler Miller's Blog: The Black Cat Moan, page 4

The Collected Stories of Stephen King: A Speculative Table of Contents

It is a sad truism that while many mainstream literary short story writerseventually publish a Collected or Best Of anthology, very few popular genre writers do the same.In this way, we end up withThe Collected Stories of Flanery O’ConnorandThe Complete Stories of Jorge Luis Borges–both excellent–but sadly no such compilation from a writer like Stephen King.

Indeed,many popular genre writers don’t write short stories, or write very few. Michael Crichton wrote only one that I’m aware of. John...

Wolfman’s Got Nards! The Decline of Boy Movies

“I never had any friends later on like I did when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” — The Body, by Stephen King

When I was a boy, there existed a particular breed of movie within the genre of coming of age stories. For lack of a better term, I’ll call it the Boy Movie, by which I mean that it dealt exclusively with boys rather than girls, and while it was certainly about dawning maturity it was never about sex. The boys were always pre-adolescent. Boys, not young men.

The prototypical Boy Mo...

All Aboard! The Girl on the Train and Crime Fiction on the Coach

No crimes take place aboard a train in Paula Hawkins’ smash bestsellerThe Girl on the Train, unless you consider excessive drinking a crime (oddly enough, in many states in America, it would be, but I’ve got no clue about England, where the novel takes place). Even so, the locomotive plays a central role in the novel, both in its plot and its structure.

Hawkins’ anti-hero, Rachel, takes the same train in and out of London each day, travelling past the neighborhood in which she used to live, i...

A Forgotten Masterpiece: Terry Davis’s “Vision Quest”

I recently finished for the second time Terry Davis’s short but stunning coming-of-age novelVision Quest, originally published in 1979 and thankfully still in print today. Simple, elegant, laced with sly humor and unpretentious wisdom, I can think of few novels quite like it.

Which is a bit of a surprise, really. If it were published now,Vision Questwould undoubtedly be printed as a YA novel. It is told in the first person by high-school senior Louden Swain. It addresses drinking, sex, gradua...

The Man in the High Castle and Alternate Histories

In the 20th (and now the 21st) century, alternate history stories were a big hit. If considered a genre in its own right, there is actually a good deal of diversity within the field. But the most popular subsection of this peculiar fiction is surely the What If Germany Won World War II scenario.

This was the premise for Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novelThe Man in the High Castle, in which the Nazis and the Japanese win the war, invade America, and divide the US between them. Japan receives the Paci...

The Joy of a Book Club for 2

Two years ago, after my mom read The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe, like many inspired Americans, we set out to form a tiny book club of two. We established only two rules: we would alternate book selections, and if one of us truly hated a book, we could say so and we would put the work aside and choose another (a circumstance that has not yet come to pass).

Book clubs are common in America, which is rather ironic. Like the overabundance of gyms in a land of the obese, thousands...

Star Wars, Jurassic World and Borrowed Nostalgia

This has been, more than any year in recent memory, the year of Nostalgia. Yes, with a capital N. Given the enormous success Nostalgia has had this year, it deserves a little added respect.

Steven Spielberg cashed in the Nostalgia chip this year, producing the record-breaking Jurassic World in a move that at first looked a bit hammy and then suddenly seemed like utter freakin genius (from a monetary standpoint, though sadly not an artistic one). The fact that the movie sucked hippo weenies on...

The Underrated Masterpiece: Stephen King’s “From a Buick 8”

Not that all of the horrors went unglimpsed. In the end, they glimpsed plenty.

Any writer with a career as long and varied as Stephen King’s is going to have at least a couple novels that get overlooked. Some deservedly so. Others, however, get lost in the shuffle and never get a chance to shine.

From a Buick 8is a slender novel, especially by King’s standards. Published in 2002, it got sandwiched between two brick-thick epics (DreamcatcherandBlack House) and the final three novels of theDark...

Murder by the Book: The Many Covers of Agatha Christie

I’ve been an Agatha Christie fan since I was a young boy. One of the primary reasons I was drawn to Christie’s novels was for the fantastic cover art, which easily snagsthe eye and fires up the imagination.

In recent years, as part of our Book Club of Two, my mom and I have been reading the Hercule Poirot novels in order, and in doing so I’ve found myself awash in all those murderous old covers once again. And it occurs to me that, if I had to lay down my money, I’d say no other author has b...

Kaplow! Landing Punches in American Writing

Watching the movieCreed–the latest installment in theRockyfranchise–turned out better than I anticipated. Sylvester Stallone’s ongoing exploration of Philadelphia’s favorite son is a pretty uneven affair, going rather downhill after the first installment. Still, it has its fair share of excellent moments, andCreedis easily the best of the bunch since the 1976 Best Picture winner.

Seeing the movie put me in the mind of other excellent boxing stories, both on the page and the silver screen. And...