Stephen Graham Jones's Blog, page 274

Some catch-up updates

which I'd posted individually, but they all died in the hack. So, to list: short-piece "Bone Choir" up at Rotten Leaves. Coachella interview's live "Blue Velvet Monster: on David Foster Wallace" is up at The Cult "What You Can Remember," an essay, is included in Llano Estacado: Island in the Sky. It Came from Del Rio is a Colorado Book Award Finalist I'm included/interviewed at ReadHorror I'm somewhat on LinkedIn now

Stoker Ceremony

will be streamed this Saturday night, here. I would say you'll maybe see me on-stage, but, yeah. it'll be one of the other nominees, I suspect. I'll try to do a good Faith Hill close-up/reaction thing, though. also, I bought a tuxedo jacket the other day at Goodwill. now just to figure how to make it work with my White's Boots.

A Dog-like Individual: on Teen Wolf

Adolescence and lycanthropy are the chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. All this strange body hair, an insatiable appetite, late hours,  sleeping at all the wrong times, nights you can't really remember, can only piece together flashes of. A pretty sincere distrust of what are seeming to be your instincts, and everybody looking at you like they know, so that you feel pressured to only hang out with your pack, with who you can trust, those who share your affliction. Uncontrollable drooling. Your body's asserting itself, reminding you that you're an animal. So, the same way that we tell ourselves ourselves zombie stories to deal with the looming specter of our own mortality, we've been telling ourselves werewolf stories to try to navigate our own various liminal states. Werewolf stories poke and prod at the boundaries of what it means to be human, what it means to change, and, after the crib, where we change the most, that's high school, isn't it? It's where we figure out who we are, who we don't want to be. So, yeah, the hook of 1957's I Was a Teenage Werewolf — a redundant title, yes? — was that this Michael Landon kid's going all Lon Chaney in the halls, but, unlike The Wolf Man (1941), he's using lycanthropy to navigate his social space, a dynamic that really came into its own with 1985's Teen Wolf update, where Michael J. Fox can, with his newfound wolf powers, suddenly slam the basketball, win the game, become the hero  . . . → → →

The Night They Missed the Horror Show

I don't care who you are, you only get a couple of drop-dead gorgeous stories, no matter how long you write. A couple, maybe three, that just sing, that last, that are permanent, that are indelible. Even Flannery O'Connor, even Tobias Wolff, even Stephen King. The rest can be beautiful and chiseled and have impact, do everything right, and you've got to keep trying to do it again, just one more time, trade whatever parts of yourself you need to get the words down right, but still — it's like you're a kid down at the diamond, at the plate, and just once over the course of that whole magic summer you really come up under that ball, send it out past where anybody else has, and you kind of just look at the bat afterwards. At your hands. One of the ones Joe R. Lansdale's hit deep into legend is "The Night They Missed the Horror Show." I didn't read it when it won its Stoker in 1988 — I was sixteen, though, and it would have changed me, would have had me right in its sights — don't think I found it until about a decade later, even, probably in one of its many reprints. Then, coming back from WHC2011 a couple of weeks ago, going cover-to-cover with their stand-out souvenir book (check Tom Piccirilli's Brian Keene write-up, for one, or the Joe Hill), I lucked onto "The Night They Missed the Horror Show" again, with its dedication to Lew Shiner, as a  . . . → → →

the new site here

So, post-hack, lost a few posts, all the comments, and have yet to get everything tailored exactly as I want it, but demontheory.net's more or less functional again, even if the images &etc in some of the links aren't going to work anymore. And the menus and boxes will continue to change, as I figure [...]

This Just In

"Novelist Hit by Electric Car, Claims 'He Never Heard it Coming,' Swears Revenge"

Course Objective

For ten Wednesdays the subject will be fiction. Mostly yours. With our class meetings going all afternoon, too, it's not unlikely for you to be bringing a story to workshop each week. No essays or memoir or journalism either, please. Just lies, told in a fashion so compelling that we impart reality to them, that [...]

Things Movies Have Been Based On

"Based on a melody once whistled by Garth Marenghi." Another movie A book A true story Real events An amusement park ride A video game A television show A toy A real idea A comic book A comic strip A song

Seven Spanish Angels

seven spanish angels Life isn't easy in El Paso, Texas. Neither is death. Caught between them is crime-scene tech in-training Marta Villarreal, trying to work a case that may very well be her last. And she's having to work it without her assigned homicide escort, who's also kind of her boyfriend, and would look a [...]

faq

Jones: PEN OR PENCIL? SGJ: I can't really handle how loud pencils are. Jones: HOW FAST CAN YOU TYPE? SGJ: Can't quite hit the 220wpm Philip K Dick was supposed to. But I plan on living longer, too. Jones: WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE X-FILES EPISODE? SGJ: "Jose Chung's Little Green Men" Jones: WHY WRITE? SGJ: Because [...]