Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 258

Endless Janes: Ex Machina

Have we come a long way, baby? I don’t know. I’m not going to pretend to have a line on the first AI done in film or novel or story—and, after Ex Machina, no way am I going to profile myself Feed-style by entering this into a search engine—but, working from my limited set, I can see us starting in the general area of Hal 9000, a male AI, coming up from ‘him’ to the also-male computer in War Games, and, after that, AI goes largely female. Yes, no? I mean, Jane from the Ender books is the obvious female AI (or, that’s the voice she uses for Ender), but three decades later we’re still at Samantha in Her, and between them there’s everything from Cherry 2000 to whatever AI that is that Clive Cussler’s Juan Cabrillo salvages (in . . . was it The Jungle?). Or, just look at the first three Terminators, how they process from a male terminator to a ‘scary’ female one. That seems to track, in miniature, how our stories have dealt with AI and gender. But why? What does it say about us that this is the story we seem to prefer? Is it the ‘incorporate’ woman who’s somehow actually . . .  non-threatening? compelling? (which seems a poor way of incorporating a woman into the storyline. related: if fantasy-tech is the only way to incorporate women into a story, that might be an alarm right there, then could be something’s wrong right there) Or is that males aren’t to be trusted with all this  . . . → → →

The Shining in Emoji

From forever ago, yes. But I’m just now stumbling onto it. And, is ’emoji’ the right word? Like, what are those little character-based happy faces people put in their texts? It’s all confusing to me. But this isn’t: The Shining, without words. Pretty cool. Wondering if I should learn whatever this language is (he said between telling kids to get off his lawn, yes), use it to diagnose slow points etc in whatever novel I’m writing. Like, if the skulls aren’t sprinkled evenly throughout, then I’m messing up . . .

The Slasher in the Machine

The analogue to ‘found footage’ in fiction would be the shoebox novel: somebody drags a box out from under the bed, there’s all these clippings, let’s lay them out one after the other and thread a narrative through them. Which is to say, as Man Bites Dog and The Blair Witch Project and the rest established in no uncertain terms, these stories are artifacts. But when Chronicle uses what would seem to be that technique—for long sequences, we’re only looking through a (telekinetically levitating) videocamera—it’s a lot less about “Hey, look, I found this old videotape, let’s plug it in, see what’s on it” and more about our point-of-view being locked in that camera (which no way can survive the crazy events), as a way not so much to document the moment as to limit our frame, ratchet the tension even higher. Yes? I haven’t done all my reading on found-footage, and would imagine there’s a large grey area between “is” and “isn’t”—and who cares about angels on a pinhead anyway—but I do know that, say, Paranormal Activity is found-footage, while stuff like Silent House, which tricks us into thinking this is found footage when really it’s just a sustained scare technique, probably doesn’t count. All of which leaves me at Unfriended, which is kind of wrapping Smiley and The Den into one extended, claustrophobic, bloody rollercoaster ride of a Skype session. But, whereas The Den was definitely recording these video chats, and I suspect Smiley was as well, Unfriended is straight streaming . . . and  . . . → → →

Skullcrack City

Read this—lived in this—two or so weeks ago, but haven’t had a spare minute at the keyboard until now, just because of what Bob Seger calls deadlines and commitments. But it’s been cycling through my brainpan this whole time. Jeremy Robert Johnson’s last book, the collection We Live Inside You, has some pretty persistent parasites popping up and burrowing in through the stories. I kind of fear Skullcrack City may be just such a parasite—a story you think you’re done with. But it’s not done with you. And, no, no worries: whereas a lot of writers who are known for their proficiency with and in the short story tend to produce first novels that are really just five or six long stories braided together like we’re stupid enough not to notice, Skullcrack City is a novel all on its own: crystal clear plot, a tension that ratchets up with each surprise development yet never quite steps over into absurdity, and, most important, a single character on a quest, a dude with all these insane obstacles, both internal and external, a single character with—get this—a love interest, of all things. And a mom. And a turtle. And a job he hates. And a bad history with drugs. But that’s just the long way of saying it’s a novel. Where Skullcrack City absolutely excelerates (my word) past most everything else on the shelf, it’s the pairing of two things that rarely appear between the same covers: a headlong, nearly frenetic narrative velocity and language so precise you want to  . . . → → →

The Faster, Redder Road

From UNM: This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream. The Faster Redder Road features excerpts from Jones’s novels—including The Last Final Girl, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Not for Nothing, and The Gospel of Z—and short stories, some never before published in book form. Examining Jones’s contributions to American literature as well as noir, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s introduction puts Jones on the literary map. From me: In 1995, I think it was, I was living in Apple Creek apartments in Denton, Texas with my new wife. I was in the PhD5 program at UNT, studying with William J. Cobb, a program I’d abandon momentarily for FSU. But, for the moment I was there, taking a critical theory course from a Dr. Preston (brilliant, wonderful dude; I still come back nearly daily to what-all he taught me), I was given permission to write a story instead of a paper. So of course I jumped on that, especially since it was my idea, my bargain, “I’m not a critic,” all that. Only guideline for the story was it had to engage or be in dialogue with some article or book we’d been reading for class. The story I kicked up—actually I kicked two up, both of which got published—was to be my first-ever publication in a national rag, “Paleogenesis, 1970.” That “1970” was how I completely disguised myself, as I’m born in 72. Nobody could ever see through a scrim like that, could they? The  . . . → → →

Bueno

It’s what the new theme’s called. It’s made for showcasing cars—photographs, at least—has a cool built-in slider I can use if I set a featured image with each post. but, the drawback is that it then plants that featured image large-size at the top of every post. So, I fiddled with this, fiddled with that, re-learned CSS and had the usual fun parsing PHP, and this is what we got for now. what’s cool is that—I don’t think I have a screenshot (I didn’t know what one was in 2005)—these are the same colors of my first-ever website, that some Velvet droogs (Nick and Dan and, I think, Drew) built for me ten years ago. anyway, the new theme required going into each individual book page and tweaking it some. really, I should just standardize them—come up with a template, then plug variables in. maybe someday. for now they’re just generally similar, but still kind of hodgepodge. rebuilt the anthos page too, so it wouldn’t be scrolling forever down. as for the why of the change: I updated that monochrome theme I was using, seeing if it was mobile-compatible yet, and, not only was it not, but it wasn’t . . . I don’t know, HTML5-compliant, friendly with this version of Safari—something: the page was all fried. so I had to jump ship, find something else. which leaves us here, with a finally mobile-friendly kind of site. hopefully the designers keep it updated, or I’ll be jumping to a new theme in a year or  . . . → → →

Ready Player One

I wonder what it’s like to read this if you’re not, say, exactly forty-two. Being forty-two, however (just like Ernest Cline), this was perfect. It rewards all the obscure trivia I prize, makes being into X set of movies and Y set of comics cool. And, it even goes what’s Z for me: videogames, which I don’t know as well as Ready Player One does. I mean, yeah, I haunted the arcades in the eighties like the rest of the world, knew Galaga (I’m even in a recent Galaga book) and Pac-Man and Joust and the rest, but I was never really a contender. My quarters always just lasted for a few minutes, never an afternoon. The arcade wasn’t the destination, for me, it was just the place you cruised between cruising all the other places. And, these text-based videogames Ernest Cline talks about—I mean, I’d seen a computer in junior high, I think, but never actually confronted one until a guy in my dorm had one in 1990. And it just sat there on a shelf, with its cassette-tape memory. Still, the nostalgia Ready Player One summons up, it’s not nothing. Thomas Pynchon says we always have a certain fondness for the decade we were born in, right? I amend that to ‘the decade we came of age in.’ For me that was the eighties. It was every single movie and television show this novel dips into, and from—including Schoolhouse Rock. And Def Leppard’s even here, so, nothing to complain about, right? Well, almost  . . . → → →</a

My best-of 2014 list

Four or five days late, but, you know, I was finishing a novel. So. Three of my best reads from 2014 weren’t actually 2014 books, as it turned out: John Scalzi’s Redshirts, Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder, and Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. But, from 2014, it’s got to be Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land, Matt Kindt’s continuing MIND MGMT, Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, and Jeff Strand’s Wolf Hunt. I wish I could erase all of these from my mind and then sit down, read them all over again. And, I wish I could track and remember short stories, and I’m sure I could somehow search them up through my inbox—I’m always forwarding them around, assigning them—but, man, this might be more task than I’m up to. Two I remember very distinctly are Junot Diaz’s “Miss Lora” from the 2013 BASS and Peter Watt’s “The Things.” But neither are 2014, alas. Oh, I know: two This is Horror chapbooks, each of which blew me away, only one of which is available yet—Ray Cluley’s “Water for Drowning” and Nathan Ballingrud’s “Visible Filth.” Both are ridiculously good. Like, I just want to stop writing because of both of these stories, because how can I ever match up? As for best 2014 short films—I was in Texas while Mile High Horror Film Fest was going on this year, so didn’t participate in the selectioning process. But I did recently get to see Robin Schdmidt’s “Dog,” which is flat out amazing. Every love story is brutal, man. There’s so little dialogue  . . . → → →</a

SDF

Those are the three letters I’ve been tagging onto the end of each writing session since forever. Everybody do this? I can’t not do it. Just a way a laying claim to the blank page, like. Same way you leave your jacket on the seat in the theater, saying you’ll be right back, that this stands for you, that you’re not leaving, you’re going to finish this thing. However, after a while I did learn to teach each of my Pages or Words or WordPerfects or whatever to ‘learn’ this spelling—to please not put a squiggly line under it. As for why those three letters, it’s just that that’s where the fingers of my left hand sit, and kind of like when a pianist (or, anybody, I guess) does that ‘trill’ down the keys, where they just swipe left to write, hitting them all? That’s what starting at the left is for me: it suggests that things are about to rise, and quickly, loudly. And, though I’m all the way against ritualizing writing, still, guess I’ve fallen into it some as well, in that, if I accidentally tag an ‘sdfs” at the front of the chapter, to erase the next day, replace with ‘real’ story, well, I have to go back, kill that extra ‘s.’ Not just because spellcheck doesn’t know the plural form, but because I try to be a decent person, and, while decent people CAN ‘sdf’ to their heart’s content, ‘sdfs’ or anything further down the qwerty, that’s dangerous territory. For me  . . . → → →</a

The Town that Dreaded Sundown

Is a serial- or spree-killer who wears a mask and kills ‘misbehaving’ teens a slasher? If not, then what of Ghostface and fifty other killers, right? But, the slashers we know and love, they usually have a signature weapon, don’t they? Michael’s got his knife, Jason’s got his machete, Leatherface rips that chainsaw to life every chance he gets. But there’s weapons of opportunity, too. Jason’s hardly above getting the job done with a speargun, and Freddy, while he actually wears his signature weapon, as often as not his victims die in ‘dreamy’ ways (barbells, television set, etc). Which is to say, this killer in the new The Town that Dreaded Sundown, he doesn’t limit himself just to that boring old knife. No, this guy, he even goes so far as to break Batman’s cardinal rule: guns. Which his why I’m asking about serial killers vs. slashers, trying to tease apart which is what: shooting lovers parked in their cars out in the woods is a bad story we know from headlines, right? And aren’t slashers a lot more made-up? However, blurring this line, does that up the scare? Does it bring the slasher home to our world, a little? Maybe, yeah. To back up for a moment, though, the original The Town that Dreaded Sundown hit in 1976. A couple of years after Black Christmas but a couple before Halloween codified things up such that the formula could be replicated all through the eighties. And it seriously had one of the all-time best slasher titles ever. Its main  . . . → → →</a