Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 271

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.

The Wheelman Cometh

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Man, went into Drive fully prepared for Steve McQueen to be powershifting through the city, fully psyched for that chase scene from Ronin to get dilated out to ninety minutes, was ready for some Gone in 60 Seconds (the remake) fun, so long as it didn't get as goofy as The Fast and the Furious(es) or xXx. To Drive's credit, too, it never even approaches that level of stunt-ridiculousness. But still, it's called "Drive," right? An imperative sentence, not just a description. I mean, Drive Angry, say—in that, Nicholas Cage really does drive angry, doesn't he? And in Crash, there's a crash. And, yes, in Drive, there is some cool driving, but it's not the centerpiece, it isn't what the story's shaping itself around. As it should be. No, what Drive is arranging itself around is Ryan Gosling's nameless character, a carburetor priest of a stuntman who moonlights as getaway driver for whoever's got the money, and, though the movie opens with his voice, it's minutes before we hear it again. So, yeah, that's some easy to remember dialogue, I guess—at least to this non-actor that's what it seems like—but, too, that's not to say Gosling's not communicating the whole time, with grins, lookaways, his toothpick, his posture, all of it. It's that kind of meaningful silence you always get from the gunfighter who just wondered into town, is now having to set things right. Which is pretty much the case here (thumbnail: this driver's got a crush on his neighbor, signs onto a bad  . . . → → →

Pics from the wild

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first is a bookstore window here in Boulder (Innisfree), second a friend shot to me from Virginia, I think.

Ones That Got Away: e-vailable

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at Amazon, B&N, maybe other places I don't know to look.