Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 265

Joyland

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First, to get the associations out of the way: the two movies this title kickstarts in my head are Strangeland and Adventureland. Anybody else the same? And that’s not bad. Anything that brings Dee Snyder to mind is a good thing, I say. But, of those two, Joyland‘s a lot closer in content to Adventureland. Except, where Adventureland was all nostalgic for the eighties (and expressing that through music that wasn’t my eighties), Stephen King’s Joyland is set in — I’m guessing here, as the first thing I did when I finished with my copy was loan it out — 1973. And, to get something else out of the way: yes, when I was asked what book I’d like to be buried with, it was It — could there be any other? — but, too, when people ask what my favorite King novel is, it’s always Lisey’s Story. So, this was of course cool: Anyway, to finally talk Joyland: needless to say, it’s solid. The last decade or so, King’s been writing with a sureness that never quite leans over into that kind of authority that a lot of writers assume late in their career. Which, I mean, no, nobody’s had a career like him, so comparisons are tricky, but still: Updike, say. He was king of The New Yorker set, yes? And you could tell by the way he wrote that he knew that. I never feel that same sense of presumption, reading Stephen King. Or listening to him speak, either. It’s not just nice,  . . . → → →

The Car What Evil Drives: N0S4A2

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The real test of a novel for me is if it sparks ideas. If it makes me stop reading, flip to the back of the book, and crib down what I think is a completely bulletproof, never-before-thought-of idea. Joe Hill’s N0S4A2 does that. I just got my copy back — loaned out the night of the reading at Tattered Cover in Denver — and, sure enough, in back and at all angles and in a hand I can hardly read are all these sure-thing best-seller pitches and immortal phrases and overheard-at-the-foodcourt loglines. Also, associated with the page-numbers of N0S4A2 are plenty of stars and checkmarks, for stuff I want to go back to, steal. The week I read this, a student turned in a paper on a clutch of books I’d assigned. A paper on Hill’s books. And the title of that, it was “Things I Want to Steal from Joe Hill.” It was pretty detailed list, too. I’ve added to it, of course. Anyway, this late in the game, everybody’s already read N0S4A2, so the premise is no secret: there’s these shortcuts through reality, and they exact a terrible price. And it’s especially cool for Boulder and Denver people to read, as a lot of the book happens here in our back yard. But what I want to call your attention to, it’s two things Hill does . . . or, not ‘does,’ more like ‘exhibits’: N0S4A2 has an ethical core. And that’s not at all like a novel having an agenda. And this  . . . → → →

Cabin in the Woods intro/extro

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[ this is the script of the pre- and post-words I gave for a charity event Cabin-screening Friday night, down in Manitou Springs ]   wolf kisses and bear traps The slasher. We can all make a list of our ten favorite, yes? Which of course we consider the ten best. So . . . that list starts where? Psycho, Peeping Tom? Bay of Blood? Maybe, maybe not. Definitely Black Christmas in seventy-four, anyway. And let’s not forget Texas Chain Saw Massacre from that same year, which gave us a mask, that all-important signature weapon. And you can’t ignore Jaws, either. Which, no, didn’t involve masks or signature weapons, unless teeth can count, but there was plenty of stalking the nearly naked, there was plenty of blood, plenty of looking through the killer’s eyes, and, for about the first time, plenty of what would become so important exactly four years later: theme music. A lot of people say seventy-eight’s the real birth of the slasher, anyway. And maybe they’re right. That’s when it got codified, anyway. Which is to say that’s when John Carpenter gathered together and pioneered a set of suspense techniques and narrative developments and character types that, with people trying to clone Halloween’s success, got turned into conventions, into, as Randy would say in Scream nearly twenty years later, a list of rules, a formula. And that’s a formula we’ve all benefited from, isn’t it? Plug a killer into a group of licentious teens, and wait for the least licentious of them to not just  . . . → → →

The Word for Childhood is Ocean

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One cool place to read the second-to-last chapter of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane is bleeding out at a donation place. A blood donation place. And, best place to read the last chapter, at least in Boulder, Colorado? Sitting in the bright bright sun in front of TimeWarp Comics. Also cool about this big little novel is that, in a very cool way, it feels like he’s been going toward it for a while now. I mean—my American Gods is packed away for the summer, so I can’t cite this or even use the right names (anybody?), but remember that chapter where Shadow stays the night with those two or three sisters, and one of them’s the moon? More than anything, The Ocean at the End of the Lane reminded me of that. But it also brought me back to that issue of Sandman, about how all the cats are trying to dream themselves back to being in charge of things. Or . . . isn’t there also a Sandman issue where people keep letting lost in the dreamspace of a desert, and a kitten saves one of them? That kitten is in Ocean, here. And wonderfully so. And, while this novel is for adults, still, it’s somehow also a sister book to Coraline. Not just because it’s Gaiman, either. It’s more like the same well’s getting tapped. Of mystery, of — of myth? It’s that fairy tale kind of tone that Gaiman does maybe better than anybody, right now.  . . . → → →

US News, WWZ, and Me

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Just talking World War Z. Which, I mean, I was doing that anyway, so, you know, it all worked out: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2...

World War Z

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The first thing to get out of the way when talking the World War Z movie is the obvious thing: it’s not the novel. Whereas with Hunger Games, say, sure, there’s a lot in the novel that doesn’t end up on screen, and a lot of what does is different, but still, condense the Hunger Games novel and the Hunger Games movie to a one-sentence synopsis, and you’ve got the same thing, don’t you? Not so with World War Z, unless the way you distill the two versions is “There’s zombies. And that sucks.” And, with a novel as popular as World War Z, of course there’s going to be legions hordes of fans of the 2006 novel who reject the movie just on principle—“it’s unfilmable”—or maybe because accepting the movie would be a betrayal of the novel. The trick with the World War Z movie, though, it’s that, since the novel and the adaptation have so little to do with each other, maybe a zombie fan’s heart can be big enough for both. Which isn’t to say that I think the novel is remotely filmable, don’t get me wrong. I’m not even sure a limited miniseries could get all of that novel on-screen. And, even with an HBO miniseries, still, a lot of the changes that have been made to the novel to let it live at the cineplex, they’d still have to happen. Just because what Max Brooks gave us, it’s a big sprawling, episodic, multi-vocal piece of Stud Terkel-ish journalism, just, instead  . . . → → →

Big Fight in Smallville

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Back when, the Pa Kent-Superboy dynamic made a certain kind of wholesome sense, didn’t it? Behind the eventual Superman’s heroism there was always this one old Kansas farmer’s values, really saving the world. There was something kind of safe and comforting about that. And, it’s not so much in opposition to the idea of an ‘alien’ being Earth’s savior as it is a championing of good parenting, sacrifice, trust—all that stuff that needs no argument. However, Man of Steel, it’s a decidedly post-Dexter story, isn’t it? Or, we can’t watch it without thinking how Dexter’s father trained him to be a sort of complicated hero, anyway. At least I couldn’t. It didn’t make push me away from this Superman any, though, no worries. Really, just kind of made me like Dexter more. Which isn’t to say that you can still say “Phantom Zone” and not get a knee-jerk Danny Phantom out of me. To say nothing of the “Genesis Chamber”; I half-expected  Khan to come striding out of it. But of course by then I’d already seen Kal-el’s John Carter/Spider-Man learn-your-powers montage—and appreciated it—and right when the movie started I felt like I was reliving James Thaddeus Kirk’s JJ Abrams (re-)birth, so, you know: no harm, no foul. We live in a cineplex where the pop-culture snowball is monstrous, and we’re all rolling in it. Happily rolling. What actually interests me about this Man of Steel, though, it’s this positioning of the superhero way out on the fringes of society, instead of the banner around  . . . → → →

Dan Brown’s Inferno

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The Matrix Syndrome. I propose that as both the name for Dan Brown’s next Robert Langdon thriller and as the condition he now writes under. Or with. Or is expressing symptoms of. Not that it’s hurting his sales or his celebrity, of course. Or, as many would have it, his infamy. Remember how the first Matrix so wowed us to such a degree that the second and third paled in comparison? That’s how it is for Brown now, I think: everything he does falls under the long shadow of (the success of) The Da Vinci Code, which, much like Foucault’s Pendulum, trod and retrod that fun old Holy Blood, Holy Grail territory. However, unlike the Eco, Dan Brown’s novel was actually engaging. And it took over the world every bit as much as Harry Potter, as Fifty Shades. Maybe even more, in that it became a point for people to argue, and take ideological sides over. And that it was built like a hybrid of a crossword and chutes & ladders definitely didn’t hurt, as that allowed it to showcase the frenetic pacing Brown does as well anybody, and had already been doing for a few books. All his work, it’s got that same pacing, those same sudden reversals, the betrayals, the twists and turns and little hidden lectures, the showing-off of obscure, kind of intrinsically cool facts, but none of those other books have sparked our imagination as much as Da Vinci Code, right? Neither did Matrix 2 or 3 reel in the same  . . . → → →

Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth

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It’s becoming real. August. More soon.

The Demon Theory Project

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Man, check this out: My students’ most recent project suite on @stephengjones72‘s fantastic novel, Demon Theory: gbdh.sadiron.com/demon-theory-p… — Chuck Rybak (@ChuckRybak) April 23, 2013