Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 257

Year in Review: 2015

‘Tis the season for lists, yes? And mine at this time of year, they’re always skewed by my terrible recall—the books and films &etc that just happened always seem to get higher billing. Still, in an effort to be even-handed, I did scroll back a few places, just to refresh, refresh (that’s a story joke) (which is hilarious), and here’s where I land, more or less. This time with pictures, and, yes, this time including books by friends, because, I mean, a lot of them write some pretty excellent stuff: Solid Novels               I put Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts up backwards because this blurb-set will, on the trade paperback, get way eclipsed by a certain Stephen King blurb, I suspect. And, Dare Me: this was my third read of it, I think? And it still hits me just right. Was it on my list last year too? (nope; no excuse) And, Skullcrack City, man. Here‘s my original write-up. And, Joshua Gaylord’s When We Were Animals. I’m working on a theory that he wrote this book especially for me. That there’s a way to decode the dedication such that it actually says for Stephen, who needs this story. One of the most intense werewolf stories I’ve read. Which is maybe saying something, since there aren’t really any werewolves in it. I never would have stumbled onto this one if not for Paul Tremblay, either (he also turned me on to Murcheston: the Wolf’s Tale, which I verymuch like, now). Which is to say:  . . . → → →

Advance Mongrels

Know that STP line, “what’s real and what’s for sale?” Mongrels is now both: [ click to pre-order ]

End of the Road

This would have been cool for the short-film day we had in Werewolf Class this fall. It’s pretty cool just watching it alone at home on your laptop too, though. One of the more excellent Little Red looks I’ve yet seen: End Of The Road_TEASER from Unmanned Media on Vimeo.

The Final Girls

It’s a good time to be a slasher. Nearly twenty years ago, Scream revitalized the genre, kicked off a series of clones and also-rans—some of them quite excellent—that finally landed us at Leslie Vernon, at Tucker and Dale, at Cabin in the Woods, at You’re Next and It Follows, even accomplishing the unheard-of feat of crossing over into television land: Harper’s Island was the first, but now we’ve got Scream and Scream Queens. Everybody who says the slasher’s run its course, that it’s too tired a genre, that it’s played all the tricks it can play? They’re snuffed before the first reel’s done, and probably off-screen, as their complains and obections and doomsaying hardly even matters anymore. The slasher boom of the eighties might have died under the weight of its own success, but the slasher never stays down for long. Case in point: The Final Girls. If you watch that list above, the movement or development of the slasher for the last decade or so would seem to have been from ‘self-aware’ to ‘stripped down,’ yes? From glib self-referentialism back to the basics. But there’s been an alternate vein the slasher’s been tapping the whole while, and that’s exactly where The Final Girls (note the very cool plural) situates itself—right alongside Detention and Stage Fright and The Killage, but with a healthy dose of that good old Final Destination dynamic we know and love, and, yes, that necessary self-referential fun. Specifically . . . do you know John Scalzi’s Redshirts? This is that, pretty much.  . . . → → →

Letter to a Just Starting-Out Indian Writer, and Maybe to Myself

I read this first at Isleta Casino in Albequerque. No just randomly, mongst the slots, but for a keynote-thing. Why I wrote a commencement address for that, no idea. But, Jon Davis asked me to read it for his MFA students at IAIA—click around, there’s also a chapter of Mongrels out-loud, first-time ever, and likely the only time I’ll read that chapter in front of people—said he’d post it for all, and he wasn’t lying: SGJ-LetterF-2015 from IAIA – Low Rez MFA on Vimeo.

Trucks I’ve Had

I wish I’d taken more pictures. A part of my heart is still with each of these trucks. I remember dragging a chain out of the bed and leaving a big gouge on the bed rail of one. I remember loading a piano into one of the tall ones, in the sun, when I wasn’t sure I had gas money to get home. I remember a dog I picked up one day to get it a little farther down the road, and how it kept biting me and biting me. I remember pulling over in the ditch to write. I remember working through the night, trying to get them running again. I remember watching fireworks from the bed of the blue one with my wife, then, when the radio came on with its song to match the explosions, two-stepping out through the grass with her. I remember my daughter putting a tarp in the bed of the yellow one and then filling it with water, for all the kids on the block to have a swimming pool. And I wish I had pictures of each one of these. But you never think to get a camera out, do you? At least I never did. So, some of these are my trucks, and some are kind of stock photos—stuff I searched up. And, this is a pretty selfish post, finally; all I really want is to be able to come here, click through all these trucks every now and again. As more pics surface of the  . . . → → →

Elvis Room on screen

In post-production right now. I got to swing out to Hollywood for a bit of the shooting, too. So cool to watch it all coming together.

Jeremy Robert Johnson & Skullcrack City

Because I kind of insist on assigning amazing stuff for my grad workshops, I of course assigned Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Skullcrack City (my original write-up here). It was dug by all. Here’s JRJ’s answers to the questions we crowd-sourced: —To start with the ending: Is this bleak or is it hopeful? Are they (that is, ‘we’) winning? What others ending were under consideration, if any, or did you have this as your get-to point the whole time? This was always my ending, for years, and I earnestly believed that it would be hopeful and beautiful and offer a respite from all the craziness which came before it. Then I started writing it and suddenly realized the true implications of that path for humanity and I got really creeped out. I think the ambiguity there fluctuates in direct response to the reader’s level of misanthropy. So, yes: humanity “survives” the Vakhtang scourge and the known universe isn’t sucked over into an even-more-terrible realm, but now there’s this sort of shape-shifting-nanovirus/grey flood-collective consciousness thing floating from world to world, and despite its gathered wisdom it is still asserting its right to exist by consuming or altering that which comes before it. So if you like the idea of some vestige of humanity extending into infinity throughout time and space: Hopeful. But if you think about what might happen to the worlds this thing encounters: Creepy. (Side note: Part of the reason this ending always existed was that I wanted to pay homage to the transmissions in Carpenter’s  . . . → → →

Mongrels

“Set in the deep South, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, and surprisingly funny novel that follows an unnamed narrator as he comes of age under the care of his aunt and uncle — who are werewolves. They are a family living on the fringe, struggling to survive in a society that shuns them: living in cars or trailers, moving every couple of months, eating from garbage cans, taking whatever work they can scrounge. Mongrels takes us on a compelling and fascinating journey into this dark and shadowy world, moving fluidly through time to create an unforgettable portrait of a boy trying to understand his place in the world and in his close-knit family of outcasts. Never has the werewolf been so funny, so bloody, so raw and so real. Jones delivers a smart and innovative novel with heart.” [ William Morrow catalogue copy ]   links: sample of what would become Mongrels  |  the story of  Mongrels   general (SGJ) werewolfery: “Wolf Island“ “The Boy Who Cried About Wolves“ “Old Meat“ “Deviants“ Wer write-up Werewolf class The Promise of Werewolves (really about writing Growing Up Dead in Texas) The Last Werewolf write-up Teen Wolf (Mtv one) write-up werewolf happiness:

The Little Werewolf Novel that Could

Until World War Z, I’d been hearing that same thing about the zombie. And I guess it was kind of true. A lot of fun had been had, no doubt—the bulk of it on film and in the short story—but nobody’d Tolkien’d out the zombie landscape with a story that really sang. Not until Max Brooks applied his bloody pen. However, this guy above and the public at large saying this about werewolves, it’s always kind of especially hurt. Not because they were wrong, but because, for more years than I think I really have to my name, I’ve been thinking about werewolves. In 1999 or 2000, trying to correct the fact that werewolves didn’t have their Dracula yet, and knowing full well what hubris is—but what other place is there to work from?—I wrote my first werewolf novel, Anubis, My Father, which, on reworking, became Bloodlines. However, in spite of the fact that I built it on the excellent scaffolding of The Galactic Pot-Healer, I kind of missed the mark, so didn’t even send this one out. Because the werewolf mattered too much to me. Nothing less than my absolute best would do. So for the next dozen-plus years, I didn’t try my hand at a werewolf novel. Not because I wasn’t itching to every week, but because I was scared—scared I was going to mess it up again, that I was going to do it wrong again. I had some werewolf short-stuff come out, but werewolves never tore through the endpapers of any of my novels—not until 2013, anyway, when,  . . . → → →