Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 264

Not for Nothing

The Town is Stanton, Texas, population 3,000. Your name is Nicholas Bruiseman, and you’re a disgraced homicide detective so down on your luck you’ve been forced to take a job as the live-in security guard for the town’s lone storage facility. At last, you can finally get on with the business of drinking yourself to a better state of mind, except the ghosts of childhood keep rising all around you. You might have been done with Stanton once upon a time, but Stanton’s hardly done with you. This is your new life—starting over with nothing in the town you grew up in, and trying to survive a case where there’s one dead body and an old high school yearbook full of suspects. Let the class reunion begin, and if you can get paid this time, even better. After all, you’re not doing this for nothing… Amazon

Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly

written with Paul Tremblay “And now the boy’s lost in the brightness somehow. The whole tree shakes. He’s up in the thickest part of the tree. I step back, looking up, and I keep going until I back into the kiddie pool, which takes me out behind my knees. My soccer calves are no help and I splash down butt-first into the water. No one is watching me, so no one laughs or asks if I’m okay. I’m not okay. There, he’s at the top. Definitely. Am I the only one who can—? The light branches bend under his weight, and then he just leaps forward, into the air, into nothing. There are screams all around, but he doesn’t fall, doesn’t plummet, doesn’t make a body imprint on the lawn like some cartoon character. He just hangs in the air like he’s getting his grip. And then he rises. The sun is behind him so he’s a shadow. He moves his arms and legs, but I can’t tell if it’s gaining him any sort of direction. He drifts away, up and to the left, and somersaults in the air a few times. Everyone is out in the yard. The kids laugh and wave. The adults grab and claw at each other, terrified. They try to herd the children away. And the kids, they only start crying because they want to watch. They want to see that other boy, that older one, the one floating away like a lost balloon.”

Floating Boy Meets the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly

written with Paul Tremblay “And now the boy’s lost in the brightness somehow. The whole tree shakes. He’s up in the thickest part of the tree. I step back, looking up, and I keep going until I back into the kiddie pool, which takes me out behind my knees. My soccer calves are no help and I splash down butt-first into the water. No one is watching me, so no one laughs or asks if I’m okay. I’m not okay. There, he’s at the top. Definitely. Am I the only one who can—? The light branches bend under his weight, and then he just leaps forward, into the air, into nothing. There are screams all around, but he doesn’t fall, doesn’t plummet, doesn’t make a body imprint on the lawn like some cartoon character. He just hangs in the air like he’s getting his grip. And then he rises. The sun is behind him so he’s a shadow. He moves his arms and legs, but I can’t tell if it’s gaining him any sort of direction. He drifts away, up and to the left, and somersaults in the air a few times. Everyone is out in the yard. The kids laugh and wave. The adults grab and claw at each other, terrified. They try to herd the children away. And the kids, they only start crying because they want to watch. They want to see that other boy, that older one, the one floating away like a lost balloon.”

Jamie Lee Curtis

Thanks to Jesse Lawrence for the heads-up on The Final Girls. Excited. ABC gave us HARPER’S ISLAND, yes? One of the best miniseries ever. And, this premise of a final girl support group is something I’ve been playing with for a while myself. So, this’ll either make it obsolete—which is great, I should have been faster—or it’ll show me what not to do (not hoping for this outcome at all). Anyway, looks like good people all around. Excited. Also, for those who missed it: The Last Final Girl (not my novel, but a write-up on Danielle Harris).

Demon Theory: the comic book

Kind of an update: we’ve got the first issue down, and temp-lettered. No colors or inks yet. Just starting to hit up publishers a little about it. There’s been one page of it posted at HorrorNews, and here’s a screengrab of another:

You’re Definitely Next

Once upon a time, a little movie called Scream asked What if the victims in the slasher knew the formula of the movie they were in? It started a revolution, a renaissance, one that finally made room for a Leslie Vernon to look at things from the slasher’s point-of-view, one that left room for Tucker & Dale to see what happens if the bad guys were the victims this time around. One that opened the door for Cabin in the Woods, which posed the question What if all these cliché conventions are part of something real, something vital for us all? Horror reshapes itself with questions, I’m saying. It’s always turning back on itself, trying to poke holes in the givens, see what its own gory insides might look like. Which brings us to You’re Next. A bit ago, I was saying The Conjuring was far and away the best wide-release horror of the year so far. And I feel like I was right, for then. This is a month later, though. And, while I don’t want to dethrone The Conjuring — still excellent, a clean span above the rest — man, You’re Next. Slashers are what I live for. Especially ones that are smart, that cut the genre off at the knees only to graft its stumps to stilts. The question You’re Next is doing that with is something a lot like: What if Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street had been her third-act self from the opening frames on? It changes everything. So much for  . . . → → →

Scared Straight: The Conjuring

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I keep thinking about these two kids who left the theater early. Say, ten minutes shy of the end, right when things were at their goriest, most sacrilegious frenzy. I mean, first and of course, eight- and ten-year-old girls shouldn’t be seeing The Conjuring. Boys either. I’m not even sure I was old enough to see The Conjuring, really. But I did stick it out all the same, and, because I stayed, I was processed through the horror. I saw the daylight at the end of the tunnel, and I moved toward it. Not those two girls. When their parent or sister or whoever it was finally got responsible and shepherded them out, it was only after they’d had all these images grafted onto their psyches forever. For them, now, this family’s still in that haunted house, the evil’s still out there, the nightmare’s never over. So, parents: if you take your kids to a horror movie for some insane reason, please, don’t wimp out three quarters of the way through? I don’t think that promotes restful sleep. Anyway, yes, The Conjuring. Yes yes yes The Conjuring.  It’s cool to watch the pendulum swing in horror, isn’t it? Last year’s breakout horror was Cabin in the Woods, which was crazy and fun and smart and aware of itself—it was every bit Scream’s inheritor, and put the slasher on everybody’s map again. This year, however, we’ve got The Conjuring dark-horsing The Lone Ranger, of all things. And, The Conjuring, while it definitely shares some stuff with  . . . → → →

The Folly of the World

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The Folly of the World is about the most hilarious book I’ve read. If not ever, then, I don’t know, at least since my last Christopher Moore, maybe. Folly is . . . it’s got a mouth like Deadwood, a plot like a Coen Brothers movie, and it looks for all the world to me like Hagar the Horrible. Better, even, it’s set in fifteenth-century Holland. Which, trust me, before reading this, I thought that was all . . . I don’t know what I thought it was, really. Just some place I’d never thought about. But now it’s as real to me as any place I’ve been. And maybe even better. As gritty and exotic and rollicking as Folly is, though, really, it’s the writing that hooks you. Bullington’s prose. No, his precision. I read this on Kindle, and, being a perpetual gunjumper, I always swipe to the next page a few words too early. Like, those words still register, but they don’t go through my brain, so much, if that makes any sense. Anyway, with Folly, I kept doing that, of course, but then I kept paging back. Just to luxuriate in the word-choice, in the on-the-noseness of this or that verb, and: the vocabulary. Bullington is never showing off with it, but—how in the world does he know all these maritime terms? Is ‘maritime’ even the right word for a drowned city? And do you know what baby eels are called? It’s in Folly of the World. And so much more. You know  . . . → → →

Flushboy

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Over the course of one shift working the window of his father’s drive-through urinal, our sixteen-year-old Flushboy will have to not only juggle gallons of warm pee and deal with the worst flood ever (it’s not water), but he’ll also have to fend off the urine mafia, solve the citywide mystery of Chickenstein, and win his girlfriend back. Flushboy is hilarious and sad and insanely good. And it’s a love story too. Only Stephen Graham Jones could have written this, so read it, and make sure you spring the extra dough for the lap protector. – Paul Tremblay Stephen Graham Jones takes that old question, “What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?” and makes it worse yet. By turns hiliarious and heartbreaking, you’ll never piss again without thinking of this book It’s brilliant. – Monica Drake Flushboy is to coming-of-age novels as toilet paper is to wiping: both are essential. Stephen Graham Jones proves in efficient, beautiful detail that no matter what the setting, a boy accepting his parents’ humanity can be earth-shattering. If that doesn’t entice you, then I offer one word: Chickenstein — Lindsay Hunter Only a writer of Stephen Graham Jones’ serious talent could take a scenario that could be a George Saunder outtake — teenage boy works at his urine-obsessed father’s drive-through bathroom facility — and turn it into this touching, funny, uplifting coming of age story — Dave Housley Get: Amazon | B&N | Powell’s | Tatterred Cover | Boulder Book Store

The Least of My Scars

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Coming in November You haven’t heard of William Colton Hughes. Or, if you have, then you’re not telling anybody. Not telling them anything, ever. The best serial killer? He’s not the one on the news, in the textbooks. He’s the one out there still punching his card, and a few other people’s too. This is William Colton Hughes, a nightmare not only come to life, but waiting in his apartment for you to knock on his door. And you will, it’s only a matter of when. But what would a person— if he even counts as a person — like William Colton Hughes do if his fantasy life, this heaven he lives in, where his victims are delivered to his door every few days, what does he do when he’s suddenly alone, no visitors, nobody to talk to but himself? Has his benefactor, his employer, abandoned him? Is this a message, and, if so, how to read it? Has his benefactor been his prison warden all along? His apartment complex a hospital? Is he going to have to go back to heaving dark plastic bags into dumpsters when nobody’s looking, and finally winding up on the news one bad day? Or is he going to start harvesting from within the building. A bad idea, he knows, but whatever gets you through the night, right? Nevermind that somebody out there on the street, a Dashboard Mary, is onto him, is taunting him, but wants more than just to parade him through the media. Who is she to  . . . → → →