Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 269

Machine Readable, and other news

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a podcast interview from MileHiCon 2011′ up at Machine Readable. was fun; I'm always kind of awed, talking to DJs who know what they're doing, who can keep a conversation going, who have done actual research beforehand, all that. or, to say better: I'm the most useless keep-aliver of a conversation ever (unless we're talking specific years of trucks, or violence I've seen done to animals, or books of any kind, or horror movies), so, hanging out with people who have made an art of it, man. also, though days if not weeks late, there's tight review of Warmed & Bound over at The Rumpus. and, last week my story "The Silent Game" posted over at the so, so, so cooly designed Plots With Guns, my ten recs for Halloween posted at Slushpile, The Denver Post ran an article on zombies that I'm in, Clarkesworld let me participate in a group discussion on The Weird (and a first line of mine's in this), and I participated in a reading at the LoDo Tattered Cover here in Denver (such a cool venue). all of which I should have posted last week (or was it the week before?), but, man: been editing and proofing and going over and over (wonderfully — this is the best kind of work) a novel I have hitting in June. Which I still can't announce. But soon, soon. Rocking cover, rocking publisher, great editor. It's a perfect storm of goodness. And also the best thing I've ever lucked into writing. coming up  . . . → → →

Happy Halloweening

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or, 'Five Horror (Movie) Anthologies,' but that doesn't look so cool as a title. nor does 'Five Horror-Antho Movies.' really, I couldn't find anything properly cool. and I'm far from the first dude to make a list like this — though I might be the first to limit it to just five? — and mine's not nearly so wonderful and exhaustive as some, but still and anyway, here's five I happen to especially dig: Screamtime The "Dream House" one if one of the better haunted house stories I've yet to luck onto. Terror Tract John Ritter. Three horror stories. Can't miss. Creepshow "Father's Day" is mandatory viewing in all circles I travel in. Trilogy of Terror Very Matheson. And all good horror comes in trilogies, as we all know. Trick 'r Treat Long-delayed, then DVD only, but at last, it's ours forevermore. Very slick.

My Intro for the Killage

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All the Beautiful Sinners, Eight Years Later

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Of all the novels and stories I've written, only two of them really stand out as an experience. Not at all saying the rest were a chore or a race or a slog or forgettable, any of that. Every novel you write, it's different, and wonderful, and terrible, and worth it. But the title story from Bleed Into Me, say: one morning I woke with a fever, was standing at the medicine cabinet about to dose myself with all the usual experiments, when I remembered a fight my cousin Stacy had got in once. This legendary kind of thing. And then it matched up in my head with the way monkeys hug your neck, and I knew right then I could either take some pills, zone out for the afternoon, or keep the fever, try to get this story on the page. All the Beautiful Sinners is the other time that happened. A four month fever—though don't quote me on that. Honestly, I suspect it was more like two, but who knows, it could have been six, I suppose. This was all the way back in 2002, yeah? By ATBS, I'd written, I think, five novels: The Fast Red Road; Demon Theory; Bloodlines; Tar, Baby; and No Rest for the Wicked. And this screenplay with Steve Perry and an El Camino, Stay (Perry's a character, not co-writer. same for the El Camino). So, by this time the intimidating thing about novels, it wasn't whether I could cross three or four hundred pages. It was whether  . . . → → →

Some non-horror

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and, it's from me: "State," over at the new Quarterly West.

Shining

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Thinking a lot about haunted houses this semester — overseeing an ind study on them, just wrote a long old haunted house short story, and here we are coming on to Halloween — and, specifically, of course, about the idea of Dr. Sleep, and how if anybody can pull it off,  yeah, it'd be him. But, still, I've never quite been able to figure out the precise magic King was tapping into with The Shining. I mean, sure, it seems modeled on Shirley Jackson's stuff, no doubt, it's finally a very conventional telling of a haunted house story, has all the elements we need and are used to, all that. But what elevates it past most of the rest? And then I hit this: And, first, I wish I could edit like that, that I could see alt_stories buried in the obvious, but, too, when crazydude Jack's bouncing that ball up against that wall in that grand big room of the Overlook, my heart kind of swept up and I maybe got it, a little: this is the basic post-apocalyptic dream, isn't it? This is Will Smith in I Am Legend, slamming through the streets of Manhattan in whatever car he wants. This is those two guys in that Gary Larson panel, out fishing, seeing the mushroom clouds in the distance, one of them saying to the other that what this means is screw the limits, right? The Torrances getting to camp out in the Overlook, have the run of that whole magical place for  . . . → → →

This is Not Oklahoma

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and, nothing against Oklahoma, either. I watched Saving Grace, I mean, and I've read some good books and stories out of there — however, when I wrote ATBS, I remember very specifically driving everybody way around Oklahoma. Just because I knew that if I let anybody set tire there, that the story was going to be forever getting up to Kansas like ATBS needed. None of which is what I'm about to link, here. What I'm linking is my invective against "OK." At the spanky new LitReactor. Click here. Though, people who have been through my classroom, you of course already know that you don't get credit for your whole assignment or submission (or life) if you ever utter "OK" or "O.K." on the page. It's a word. You spell it with four letters. It's not that complicated. I never thought I'd be a crusader, really. But then I never thought people would resist doing what's obviously right and proper. Maybe this'll convert a human or two, though. Or make somebody reconsider how they've been living up until now. And what a charade it's possibly been. And how there's an authentic life just on the other side of those four letters.

The Philosophy of Horror

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by Noel Carroll — and I have no clue how to make his umlat. And, only took me this long to read it (it's cited everywhere, is maybe the only of its kind) is because it was lodged in my head as being written by Noel Coward. Which never made sense. But, finally dug it up, peeled through it, and it's solid. My favorite: The majority of horror stories are, to a significant extent, representations of processes of discovery, as well as often occasions for hypothesis formation on the part of the audience, and, as such, these stories engage us in the drama of proof. My boldface, yeah. But, for years now I've been casting around, trying to figure out why my novels tend to be shaped like they are. I always wanted to call them 'epistemic'-something or another, but nothing would ever stick (and who am I to call my own stuff anything, yeah; this was all just in my head, though, if that helps). But it's so often about one dude (or dudette) encountering something 'off,' then following that off-ness into layers of lies surrounding something awful they finally have to face. What that is, though, it's Carroll's "drama of proof." That's exactly what and why I write, I think, and . . . horror. I used to always think I wrote it because I loved it, and of course I want to write what I like to read. Made sense. And's maybe not wrong. But, too, as Carroll describes the narrative shapes  . . . → → →

Bacon Review

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I know — best journal title ever, right? My "Neither Heads Nor Tails" is up there now. Also, thanks to a heads-up from Gordon Highland, I just clicked through all the story links over to the right, here. Turns out a few of them were dead: "The Complete Absence of Cats is Another Definition for Silence," from Literal Latte (though I think I ran it through BOMB or somewhere as well — some B-place, anyway). the title story from Bleed Into Me, that I wrote one afternoon with a big fever. Anyway, this was just a PDF sneak from UNP, so I should have put it in a timer or something. It was built to go away. "Cops and Robbers," from Anthony Neil Smith's issue of Mississippi Review (or, one of his issues — he did a few, right?). I suspect that when they rebuilt, this fell off and away, never to return. My 'racetrack' definition from Barry Lopez's Home Ground book (I think I have twenty-one defs in there, all told). And, that Shadowbox link, with thirteen or so stories, I didn't even click on it. Every time I ever have, I get permanently lost. Kind of the drawback of designing with flash, I guess. Anyway, one of those stories is the one now at Bacon Review "So Perfect," the Tammy and Brianne/tick-poison story that's in The Ones That Got Away? It originally showed up in Grok. But that was then, this is now . . . Anyway, if anybody knows the obscure locations  . . . → → →

Chizine on Del Rio

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Had somehow missed this. very cool review at Chizine, from/by Chris Hallock.