Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 261

After the People Lights Have Gone Off

Fifteen horror stories. Dark House Press. More info &etc as it becomes realer and realer. Until then: “If I’ve read better horror writers than Jones, I’ve forgotten them. He’s at the apex of his game. After the People Lights Have Gone Off is the kind of collection that lodges in your brain like a malignant grain of an evil dream. And it’s just going to be there, forever.” —Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All     Pub date: October 2014

Not for Nothing: the Dirt

I wrote Not for Nothing right on the heels of a second read of Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. And that read was because the movie showed up on some ninety-nine cent shelf, to remind me, to impress me, to lure me. And I’ve been telling anybody who asked that that was probably right around 2006 — I was pretty sure Not for Nothing was the last novel I wrote before Flushboy, in 2007. Just looked at the timestamps on the old files, though, and: And that’s kind of forever ago. Specifically, going by that date, it’s right about here, when I was carrying Spillane around in my pocket all the time: And, when I wrote it, I was pretty sure I was the first to pull off this second-person PI shuffle. But ‘first’ only matters if you say it out loud, right? Robert Coover beat me to the punch with his Noir in 2010, which broke my heart in all the usual ways. But, really, of course there’d been second-person PI stuff before that, in the choose-your-own-adventures mines. So we both got beat, I figure (but I got beat a lot worse). As for why Coover did it, I can’t say. As for why I did it, I half-suspect I cribbed the trick from those occasional drops into the rhetorical second-person you get in the old stuff, the Spillane and Marlowe and Chandler; when those narrators want to get really gritty but are trying to hide it so as to be not quite so abrasive, they can  . . . → → →

The Rashomon Effect

I’m pretty sure the first rashomon I ever saw, at least the first where the on-the-fly construction of the story really set me back on my heels, was this one: After that I was hooked. Completely. Forever. Happily. Now I keep a running list of rashomon stuff, which I’ll annotate below some. But it also strikes me that every single first-person story is basically being told as ‘counter’ to the version that ‘really’ happened. Yes? Or undercutting it, embellishing it, fleshing it out—taking whatever rhetorical strategy is necessary for our estimation of this narrator to be ‘good’ rather than ‘bad.’ I mean, in the stories that are obviously rashomon, each character’s version of events is that wonderful kind of selecting an offense that anticipates the defense, yes? From Nick Carroway to Patrick Bateman, there’s not a single narrator we can trust. And that indeterminacy, that’s where fiction lives. Without it the process of creating a narrative is really just stacking bulletpoints one after the next. Without self-aggrandizing selection, we’re left with the illusion of non-fiction. Which can be fun in itself—those are fertile grounds to lie in, if you can adopt the right ‘journalistic’ pose, and keep from grinning too obviously, and if you don’t get seduced by research or correspondence to facts or, though I hesitate, “truth”—but what I’m talking about here is conflict. That’s what’s at the heart of every rashomon. As readers, we know almost immediately that all of these versions can’t be the way it really went down. They’re not just  . . . → → →

Reeling in the Years

Back in the late nineties, I’d see Stephen Dixon stories all over and flip back to his author bio at the end of the journal or whatever not because I didn’t already know it, but for the rush: it always said he had some three hundred stories published. I had maybe six at the time? Three hundred was an amazing, impossible, never-get-there kind of number. And I’m not there yet. This isn’t that post. Though I did just total up my stories from print- and e-mags and anthologies and best-of-the-years and textbooks, meaning there’s some doubling, even some tripling, and maybe a ‘forthcoming’ or three sneaked in (I did manage not to count novel chapters that ran in different places, anyway), but still, sitting at 201, looks like. Since my first publication in Black Warrior Review back in 1996 (well, ‘first’ would be this little mag MindPurge, then there was North Texas Review. But BWR was the first I got a check for. And checks matter). Still chasing Dixon, though. And, as anybody who’s ever requested a bio from me knows, that’s the thing I suck at the most. I’d far rather just write another story. Or make up a bio. Just because I can’t keep track. But, near as I can tell, here’s the count as of early March, 2014: fifteen novels (just counting ATBS once, though it’s now two way-separate novels, and including Not for Nothing, already on some shelves), five collections, one e-novella that’s soon to be print, and another novella going  . . . → → →

States of Grace

Exactly fifty stories, none longer than a thousand words, a couple just a sentence or two. Pre-order   If we had to choose one writer to rebuild American literature after the apocalypse, the smart money would be on Stephen Graham Jones, who is in the process of reinventing literally every genre from the ground up. In States of Grace he offers up lean, deftly composed short-shorts that seem effortless but get a surprising amount done considering their style—like a deadly gang of smurfs.  – Brian Evenson    

Z Lives

I can’t remember if I wrote The Gospel of Z right before or right after The Least of My Scars. They were right next to each other, anyway. Oh, yeah: I wrote the first draft of Z before Scars, then the next draft after Scars. I’m pretty sure. And, it wasn’t the first zombie thing I’d written. My first zombie novel was It Came from Del Rio. Which I’m thinking was 05, maybe? -ish? I know I did Zombie Bake-Off in 07, anyway. And, coming into both of them, I knew nothing about zombies. I mean, I’d seen the zombie movies, of course, and read some of the stories, but I hadn’t thought about the zombie in any real way. This is probably why Dodd in Del Rio has a bunny head, and keeps a journal. And why the zombies in Zombie Bake-Off are molting into stage after stage: I was making it all up as I went. It was the same with The Gospel of Z. With that first draft, anyway. Which was huge-long and twice and three different kinds of unwieldy. I’d given myself no page-cap, so just kept throwing down word-as-patches, as you do, and the story kept going and going and going. What I was doing, I realize now, was world-building: going down each blind alley of this post-apocalypse, then backing my way out, looking to map the next portion of the terrain. That doesn’t make for a tight, compelling story, though. Obviously. The people I gave that draft to either  . . . → → →

The Elvis Room

a novella What if you weren’t looking for evidence of the supernatural, but found it all the same? A true research scientist can either hide that evidence or tell the world. Either way it’s going to haunt you. Either way your life is never going to be same. Find out what’s always on the other side of the door. It’s the Elvis Room. first word  

Sterling City

a novella A moon explodes and a marriage dies. An impossible creature rises from the tall grass, watches a farmer’s circle system crawl across the field like a giant insect. That farmer watches back. His wife’s footprints are there in the dirt. The fire in the sky leaves his shadow crisp and deep. This is Texas without the cowboy hat. This is Texas with a soft rain of cosmic debris sifting down over it. This is a dark, dangerous thing hiding in the cellar, but this is also a girl threading her bangs out of her face and smiling with her eyes at a boy. This is that impossible creature, love. This is Sterling City.   Amazon

There Comes a Rider

saw this at BizarroCon this weekend. it’s one of one. the rest coming soon.

All the links fit to link

Update, Steve. Got to remember, got to remember: City of the Dead is easily the best haunted house I’ve ever been to. I learned both NOT to get lost in the backtunnels visitors aren’t supposed to stumble into, and also to NOT let my wallet chain get caught on the wall when Leatherface is chasing me hit two movie premieres recently: Monkey’s Paw in LA and Winter in the Blood in Austin I was on HuffPost Live, talking “Terrifying Television.” was fun. crazy to think there’s still Werthams out there, trying to bring the horror down: and, Mixer asked me to give my top five horror novels, stories, and movies. it’s in here, now, alongside Brian Evenson’s list, which I’m anxious to see: my story “Thirteen” from Paula Guran’s Halloween got a nice mention in AICN my story “Welcome to the Reptile” house is in the charity anthology Blood Type:   my story “Old Meat” got the musical accompaniment treatment by Matthew Treon, at Gutfish Radio: and, just now I was on KMSU radio, talking slashers. Soon to be archived, I’m sure, at which point this image will become a link: I’ve got an interview spread across Jeff Vandermeer’s too-cool Wonderbook: I was lucky enough to make this excellent book: and, finally, this is what I looked like for class for Halloween: