Publishers Weekly reviews THE HUM AND THE SHIVER

In its review, Publishers Weekly calls my upcoming novel The Hum and the Shiver a "masterpiece of world-building." Hell, I'll take that.

Review: Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine

Bruce Springsteen says his classic song "Born to Run" is about people looking for "connection." The great crime novelist Andrew Vachss fills his stories with people forming "families of choice" to retain their humanity against the brutal outside world. And in the same vein, the heart of Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti shows how the bonds of family can form between and among people who otherwise have nothing in common.

If you have to give it a genre, I suppose Mechanique counts as steampunk. Or fantasy. Some aspects verge on science fiction. But it plays with these conventions as much as it does with narrative form. It's not set in the past, like steampunk, and it's not about technology, like science fiction. Its landscape is post-apocalyptic, but with no set time frame (or even confirmation that it's actually set on Earth). And there is a sense of magic to what happens, but it's so grounded, so organic and mundane, that it's as far from the standard tropes as you can get. None of this really matters, though, because ultimately it's about people-building, not world-building.

Via a fractured narrative point of view, we learn that the circus, led by the enigmatic woman known only as Boss, features performers that are part metal, with hollow copper bones to make their feats that much more astounding. One even features the enormous metal wings shown on the cover, but he's dead when the story begins. Which doesn't mean he doesn't figure in things, because Valentine jumps back and forth, changing point of view and time frame whenever it suits her. The story is most often told by Little George, a boy of indeterminate age who works as Boss' go-fer. Through him we learn the complexities of the Tresaulti personalities, and a bit about how some of them came to join the circus. It's a real tribute to Valentine's skill that this is never confusing or disorienting.

If there's a criticism to be made, it's that the plot takes so long to get going, it almost seems like an intrusion. For its first half Mechanique is a brilliant high wire act of a mood piece; the events of the second half jar only because of their relative normality. But that's minor, and ultimately the second half wouldn't work without the emotional investment of the first.

I've known Genevieve for several years now, mostly as a delightful raconteur at conventions and a deliciously snarky columnist. I'd read some of her short fiction, but nothing prepared me for this, not even hearing her read the first few chapters at last year's World Fantasy Convention. She's created a unique world here, and made a brilliant debut as a novelist.

Come back Wednesday for an interview with Genevieve Valentine.

Mamet's Theatre: an extended whine

Recently I had the unmitigated pleasure of discovering Beginnings, playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote's memoir of his years as a young man in the theater. It started me on a little run of books about American theatrical thought, such as an immense collection of Lee Strasberg lectures, and made me eager to see a live theatrical performance, something I haven't done in a while. Then I came across David Mamet's recent book Theatre. I may never go see a play again.

Mamet, like Foote, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Glengarry Glen Ross) and a successful screenwriter (The Untouchables, Hoffa). But there the similarities end. Beginnings was a warm, kind tale of people devoted to their art; Theatre, supposedly the culmination of Mamet's forty years in the trade, feels like the extended whine of an entitled old man who thinks that not enough people listen to him. In it, Mamet comes across as a combination of South Park's Eric Cartman and Patrick Swayze's "My way or the highway" speech from Road House.

I've never been a theatrical person, so my first-hand knowledge is limited. Still, the contempt Mamet shows for anyone who thinks differently than he does shoots way beyond arrogance into a kind of pathological egotism that must originate from some childhood humiliation. It's not just, "This is my way, and it works for me," it's "This is my way, and it's the only way that works, so shut the fuck up and listen."

Here's is a typical passage:

"But there is no inner life of the character, as there is no character. The character is only a few words of speech delineated on the page, and that's all there is--and the Method's concern with the character differs not at all from the daydreams of a twelve-year-old girl, e.g., 'I wonder what Rhett Butler would do if he lived now?'"

As a writer, I can understand the wariness with which he approaches those involved in producing his plays (actors, directors, designers, etc.). I sometimes feel the same way about editors, marketing departments, and so forth. The difference is, I recognize the value of their jobs. Mamet never does. For him theater begins and ends with the play's text; directors are next to useless, and I suspect if he could get rid of actors somehow, he would. He certainly doesn't want their input: "The actor's true talent and job is...to stand still and say the words--in order to accomplish something like the purpose indicated by the author."

And the fear behind this minimizing of actors? Rejection. "The persistence of an interest in the inner life of the character is a form of deconstructionism, which is to say a rejection of the text." His text.

The pragmatist in me wants to agree with many of his tenets, but they come laced with such vitriol that I instinctively side with those he chastises. Even a bully who's right is still a bully. The contempt laced through Theatre must come from a place of supreme, intractable unhappiness that no amount of success will ever ameliorate. I feel sorry for the guy, because I doubt he's ever enjoyed any of his success the way Horton Foote clearly did (and God only knows what Mamet thinks of Foote). Still, none of this is surprising for a man bitter and misanthropic enough to write Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna.

In the commentary for the Hoffa DVD, director Danny DeVito relates the following joke (paraphrased by me):

An English professor comes out of a Broadway show and is approached by a bum asking for change. The professor haughtily says, "'Neither a borrower nor a lender be.' William Shakespeare." The bum replies, "Yeah? 'Fuck you.' David Mamet."

Yep. Fuck you, indeed. That's the core statement at the heart of Mamet's theatre, and Mamet's Theatre.

Survival of the Dead and how to keep a series interesting

Some background on me and George Romero's zombies:

I saw Night of the Living Dead one Saturday afternoon when I was in high school. The Memphis TV station, apparently thinking it was some innocuous old B&W horror movie, did not edit it. Forget the graphic intestine-eating: I'd never before seen a movie where the hero died such a pointless death. Later, when I got to college, I discovered there was a small community of people who'd watched that exact same broadcast and been similarly marked by it.

I saw Dawn of the Dead at the Cabana Theater in Jackson, TN. When the famous shotgun-to-the-head effect came up, a woman in a nurse's uniform got up and proclaimed to her date, "I see this shit in the ER all day, I ain't paying to see it now!" She stomped out. Her date stayed.

I saw Day of the Dead on videotape, alone in my college apartment. When the heroes were herded into the zombie enclosure, I had to stand up and pace around my chair for the remainder of the film. That's one way I handle suspense when I'm alone.

I saw Land of the Dead at a packed preview showing in Madison, WI. Cheers greeted Tom Savini's momentary cameo. Bigger cheers greeted the zombie biting out a girl's navel ring.

I saw Diary of the Dead at the late Westgate Art Cinema in Madison, with six other patrons (which explains why it's "late," I suppose). I stayed all the way through the credits to see if there was a stinger. There wasn't.

And now, Survival of the Dead, on blu ray in my living room, once again all alone.

You can find synopses of the film online, so I won't bore you with one here. What I will say is that Romero once again subverts expectations by giving us a zombie movie that's almost a western, with wide-screen photography, galloping horses and lots of gunplay. It's also the first true sequel in his series, featuring a character introduced in Diary of the Dead. At the same time you get the expected tropes: an isolated setting (in this case an island), survivors enmeshed in petty squabbles while missing the big picture, plenty of gore (most of it CG enhanced to the point of [deliberate] ridiculousness), and zombies doing things they've never done before.

Is this as good as Dawn of the Dead? No. You don't hit that sort of pinnacle more than once. John Ford made a lot of westerns, many of them great, but he only made one The Searchers. At the same time, it's impressive how Romero, working in such a narrowly defined form, continues to find new ways to present his zombies. A lot of web critics dismiss his newer films as lacking the chops of his earlier work, but that's missing the point.

After you revolutionize the genre with your first two horror films, it's impossible to keep repeating the trick. The fact that Romero doesn't simply rehash the same old thing is both admirable and exciting. As a novelist who writes a series, I see this as an example of how to do it right: name another series where the individual films are so hugely different from each other,and yet (to me at least) still give the people what they want.

Sailing through Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes

After my recent dire experience with The Island, Peter Benchley's 1979 pirate adventure (see my post here), I was leery of another "best-selling" author tackling the same subject. I was doubly leery when that author was the late Michael Crichton, a writer whose brilliant and innovative ideas are invariably balanced by a nonexistent sense of pacing, characterization and style.

And yet, his 2009 novel Pirate Latitudes surprised me, much as his 1976 novel, Eaters of the Dead. This new book was discovered as a completed manuscript among his computer files after his death, and it has the feel of a pet project. As such, perhaps he paid more attention to crafting a plot that pays off, rather than a series of incidents that simply stop when the book runs out of pages (i.e., Jurassic Park). Whatever the reason, both Latitudes and Eaters avoid the pitfalls of Crichton's books set in the contemporary world.

Charles Hunter is a privateer in Jamaica's Port Royal, attacking Spanish ships under the protection of the British governor. When he gets word of a Spanish galleon anchored in an impregnable harbor, he hatches a plan to steal it, and its considerable treasure.

And that's really it. There's not a lot of digression, just a straightforward plot with lots of action and damn near every pirate cliche you could want. There are hurricanes, attacks by giant squid, sword fights and cannon broadsides. Hunter is as smooth with the ladies as he is with the waves. Each member of his crew has a specialty, and they all manage to save the day at least once. The villains are suitably rogueish (all could be played by Basil Rathbone), and only the sex and violence make it an adult book. It's Pirates of the Caribbean for grownups.

Crichton (or his staff) did their research as well, because there are plenty of obscure historical details worked into the story, mostly legitimately. But even at that, there's something thin about it, a sense that it's more a film treatment than an actual novel. We learn only enough about the characters to justify their actions, and although the settings are vivid, they still don't feel like places real people live. Still, perhaps that's enough. No one should expect depth from the guy who wrote The Lost World.

Here's the British book trailer (much cooler than the US one):

No treasure in The Island

I started reading Peter Benchley's 1979 novel The Island sitting in a waiting room, for lack of anything better to read. And the sucker hooked me.

For those who don't know, the late author was the son of Nathaniel Benchley and the grandson of Robert Benchley, both literary figures of high reknown. He was also the author of Jaws, the novel that was the Twilight of the early Seventies.

Jaws the book is nowhere near as exciting as the classic film adapted from it: it's a potboiler, filled with contemptible characters that even the author doesn't seem to like very much. But it sold like gangbusters, and set Benchley on an unsuccessful quest to replicate its success with a series of water-based thrillers (The Deep, Beast and White Shark, one of the worst books by a so-called "major" author I've ever had the misfortune to read).

The Island was his second novel after Jaws (following the sunken-treasure tale The Deep) and centers on magazine writer Blair Maynard (a typical name for a Benchley hero; the main character of The Deep was named "Romer Treece," Beast's hero was "Whip Dalton," and so forth). Maynard and his twelve-year-old son, Justin, head into the Caribbean to investigate ship disappearances, but what should have been a father-son lark turns unbelievably grim. They run afoul of an isolated population of inbred descendants of 17th-century pirates who co-opt Justin into their ranks and plan a grisly end for Maynard when he's no longer useful. These are not the rollicking buccaneers of Errol Flynn and Jonny Depp, but disgusting, bloodthirsty killers with appalling levels of hygiene.

The first third of the novel is a crackling good mystery-adventure with a surprisingly realistic father/son relationship. It was this aspect that caught my eye and kept me reading. Maynard wants to be a good dad, and tries very hard to stay connected to Justin despite being divorced from the boy's diffident mother. He's conscious of his status as a role model, and even if he never quite lives up to it, he sincerely tries. And Justin is depicted as a normal kid, neither precocious nor infuriatingly dense.

Unfortunately, once the Maynard lads are captured by the pirates, the novel's considerable momentum slows to a crawl. Justin vanishes from the story for long stretches, and we spend our time with Maynard senior and the pirate woman who wants him to impregnate her (yep, you read that right). And here's a tip to you would-be adventure writers out there: if you want to keep your readers on your hero's side, don't have the villains give him an enema. In graphic detail. Really. For any reason. If your plot demands it, then you should seriously re-evaluate. Sometimes your fetishes should stay private.

Eventually Maynard realizes that Justin likes the bloodthirsty pirate life, and so the battle becomes one for the boy's soul. I won't give away the ending--hell, if you slog through the last third of the book, you deserve the suspense--but its impact is considerably lessened because we don't see Justin's gradual transformation from comic-reading 'tween to Blackbeard-in-waiting. I don't know what Benchley was after, exactly, but what promised to be a neat modern twist on Treasure Island becomes instead one more sad artifact on the trail of a writer trying to reclaim the buried treasure of his debut novel.

Review: a vampire suffragette in Alaya Johnson's Moonshine

I first heard about Moonshine when I was on a 2009 convention panel with its author, Alaya Johnson. The central conceit--in 1920s New York, a woman battles for the rights of vampires much as other suffragettes stood up for women and immigrants--fascinated me. My own vampire novels, Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood, also draw parallels between the racial and gender tensions of the 70s and the identity crises faced by my vampires.

According to Johnson, Moonshine was originally titled Vampire Suffragette, which is a much more accurate, if unwieldy, title. Zephyr Hollis is a Montana girl trained to kill vampires (and various additional creatures grouped under the name "Others") who has a change of heart and begins fighting for their right to co-exist with humans. A genie named Amir wants her help in tracking down the mysterious vampire gangster Rinaldo, who is flooding the city with Faust, a blood-based drink that leaves vampires addicted and vulnerable to the sun.

The book works because of the narrator's delightful, spunky voice. Zephyr is a compelling character, and her drive to help others (and Others) is blessedly devoid of self-pity or martyrdom. She stays true to her principles no matter what. Whether teaching a night class for vampire immigrants, helping the father of a part-fairy child get the illegal surgery his offspring needs, or defending an injured vampire from an angry mob, Zephyr demonstrates remarkable courage and resourcefulness. Some of her language seems disconcertingly modern, though (her use of "fuck," for example, or the word "clone"; at one point she threatens to kill "all your sorry asses" and says an opponent "face-planted into the cold rock").

The one big disappointment for me--and it's a matter of my own expectations rather than a failure by the author--is the overall lightness of tone. After talking with Ms. Johnson, I expected something darker and heavier. The dreariness of Zephyr's existence and the inherent hopelessness of her cause(s) are glossed over by clever banter and rollicking action scenes (since she's been raised to be a slayer--here called Defenders--there's a lot of swordplay). Zephyr's voice never allows the true despair of the ones she tries to help to come through, and thus her nobility seems somehow...shallow. She remains outside the true tragedies around her. Further, romance is a big element of the story, and while I have nothing against that (and it's handled well here), it again works at cross-purposes to the depth I expected. A male hero can have a cause so important it makes romance incidental; why not a female hero?

But this is judging the book against standards it never tries to meet in the first place. Moonlight is a fun read, with an engaging heroine and a world rich enough to sustain several subsequent adventures. If those adventures grow darker, make the parallel between immigrant and Other more tied to reality, and break down the barriers between Zephyr and her charges, then so much the better. But at least next time, I'll have a better idea of what I'm getting.

Moonshine will be released May 11, 2010.

Review: Albert Pyun's Bulletface

One of the first interviews I did for this blog was with cult director Albert Pyun about his upcoming film Road to Hell (you can read it here).

Now he's released Bulletface, part of the grand tradition of films created in a ridiculously short period of time, in this case five and a half days (twice as long as Corman's original Little Shop of Horrors, for a frame of reference). Written by Randall Fontana, it's a revenge tale of a corrupt DEA agent (Victoria Maurette) furloughed from a hellish Mexican prison to take down her old crew before they unleash a new, lethal street drug, and in the process avenge her brother's death. Low budget, digitally shot, it embraces its status rather than trying to deny it, and finds its power in its least likely places.



Dara Maren (Maurette), the "Bulletface" of the title after she's scarred, is a deceptively quiet creature, small and chain-smoking, perpetually greasy even when dressed up for a rave. You'd be quiet, too, if you'd endured what Dara has: gang rapes by both men and women in prison, brutal and bloody encounters that are definitely not titillating. Yet she retains her own brutality and willingness to kill, letting it out when provoked.

Maurette's performance is a gem of understatement in a role that could easily swing into parody, and that's the biggest surprise here: what works best are not the action scenes, but the quiet ones between Dara and the other characters. Maurette finds the reality in Dara's damaged psyche: her eyes dart, she fidgets, and the way she slaps away an intended tender touch has the vivid truth of an abuse victim.

The other actors contribute the same understated seriousness. Lydia Castro, as a heart-of-gold prostitute neighbor, finds a core of strength and depth in that cliche'd character. Morgan Weisser and Scott Paulin, as Dara's onetime friends, convey both real affection and the coldness of killers. Most interesting is Jenny Dare Paulin as Dara's former girlfriend; she and Maurette create a convincing edgy chemistry. Steven Bauer (Scarface, Thief of Hearts) is the name actor on hand, and he's adequate; it's easy to see how he'd feel unmotivated to try very hard, but as a result he's blown away by the other performers.

Fontana's script hits some disturbingly gratutious notes that Pyun's execution manages to almost redeem. For example, every woman who crosses Dara's path makes a play for her, a male-centric view of lesbian relationships, to say the least. Diminutive Dara also physically overpowers professional criminals double her size, often incapacitating them with one blow. But where Bulletface really suffers is in the editing: freeze-frames, color bleeds and split-screens take you out of the reality the actors and director create, and the constant bombardment of names and places, rather than clarifying things, just makes you feel the need to take notes.

If you can get past that, there's a lot that's good in Bulletface. This is exploitation, certainly, but it's made with care, heart and a serious effort to do good work. Pyun gets performances far above the call of duty from his cast, and Victoria Maurette takes fearless risks to bring Dara to twitchy life.

The soul of rock and roll: Eddie & the Cruisers, the novel

There haven't been very many good novels about popular music. It could be due to the inherent contradictory nature of writing in concrete terms about something so ephemeral, even when the writers are also musicians. Music is such an individual experience that it can be daunting to find the absolutes in it. I know, because I've tried: my novel The Hum and the Shiver, coming from Tor in 2011, is about music, among other things.

(An example of how to do it badly is Mark Childress' 1990 novel, Tender. He takes the life of Elvis, changes all the names [i.e, Leroy Kirby] and pretends it's a novel. There are no insights, just a xerox of a famous life transcribed as fiction. His descriptions of rock and roll are as banal as Dick Clark's American Bandstand introductions. For the best Elvis novel I've read, try Stark Raving Elvis by William McCranor Henderson.)

P.F. Kluge got it right in his 1980 novel Eddie and the Cruisers. Yes, it's the source for the 1983 film, but forget that for a moment. What Kluge does is something harder, and deeper, than the film's mere missing-album mystery. Kluge shows us the limits of the music, and how real talent sees it and pushes past it. He demonstrates where Leaves of Grass and "Hound Dog" coincide.

Frank Ridgeway is a high school teacher blindsided by his past: a song he wrote twenty years earlier, for his band Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers, suddenly becomes popular again. People come out of the woodwork seeking information on the band, its mysterious leader Eddie, and the secret tapes he made deep in the woods with unknown musicians just before his death. Frank reconnects with his old bandmates and pieces together the mystery, all the while being trailed by someone willing to kill for those tapes.

***SPOILER ALERT***

In the movie the missing tapes are the first concept album, predating the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. In Kluge's novel, it's much more complex. Eddie and the band play an Apollo-ish theater, and while they don't bomb, they also don't really connect with the black audience. This drives Eddie to find a way to cross that color line, which he does by summoning all the biggest stars of the time (by implication Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding and so forth) to a quonset hit deep in the Jersey woods. Each is known only as "Mr. White" or "Mr. Black," and they make music as anonymous equals, with no thought of race. Then Eddie dies, and the tapes vanish.

There are two main stylistic differences between the movie and the book. First, the book plays for real stakes, life and death. People die for these tapes, and Frank's life is in genuine danger. The second is the true affection for rock and roll, for how it makes the people who hear it and play it feel. Consider this moment, in which Eddie's elderly mother talks about her son:

"So many nights, he'd sit up in the dark, listening to that radio. His father said he was like a spy, receiving secret messages." (p. 121 in the hardcover edition)

Or this, when the nearly-forty Frank Ridgeway describes digging out his old record collection:

"Those cheap little discs, scratched and dirty, with my initials on the label, sitting in the attic...they were alive!" (p. 126)

Or this, Ridgeway describing a particular Cruiser performance:

"We played for two hours, no breaks, no patter, no tuning or stalling, Eddie rushing from one song to another, and the way he pounced on the songs, the way he explored, prolonged, teased, reprised, exhausted them, you had to think--and I later confirmed this with some other people--that he was fucking the songs." (p. 150)

Or this, Eddie's former girl Joanne at the prospect that he isn't dead after all:

Every time she said his name, it came a little easier. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie, like a refrain in a song. My boyfriend's back and there's gonna be trouble. Hey, bird dog, get away from my quail. You really got a hold on me. Some hold it was. (p. 216)

There are lots of other examples, because Kluge gets one thing exactly right: music, real music, matters. It's the context for our emotions, for feelings that can't be expressed any other way. That's as true for the audience as the performers.

I enjoy the movie version of Eddie and the Cruisers, particularly its soundtrack, but the book is a whole other level of accomplishment. If you love rock and roll, if you understand why Elvis was the King, Springsteen is the Boss, Dylan is the Jester and know the smell of teen spirit, then you'll love this book. It's available here.

So what music novels get it right for you?

Reviewing According to Crow at Guys Lit Wire

Over at Guys Lit Wire, a blog that reviews books for teenage boys, I discuss Ekaterina Sedia's debut novel, According to Crow. If you've read her two later books, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone, then you'll want to check out her first one. If you have yet to discover the extraordinary Ms. Sedia, then let this be your introduction.

Finding A Bomb Built in Hell

I've just finished reading the bookends of one of my favorite series, the "Burke" novels by Andrew Vachss. After 18 books in 23 years, he completed it with the release of Another Life in 2008. Meanwhile, his website has the free PDF of his first, unpublished novel, a sort of prelude to the Burke series titled, A Bomb Built in Hell.

To call Bomb "disturbing" is an understatement. Written in 1973, it deals with Wesley, a supporting character in the Burke series, one who's so scary even mentioning his name terrifies people. He's an amoral hit man who finally decides to start killing the people he feels most deserve it. But his judgment, needless to say, is a bit twisted.

What skews it, as in all Vachss' novels, is his tormented childhood at the hands of the government. Abandoned at age four, he's raised by the state and becomes a petty teen criminal. In the first few pages he refers to reform institutions as "upstate sodomy schools," and thinks no more of going to jail than a normal person would going to Wal-Mart. He's desensitized, an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

His prison mentor Carmine does just that, teaching him the prison ropes and preparing him for life outside as a hit man. When Wesley is released, he sets about avenging Carmine on the mobsters who let him rot in prison. But when that's accomplished, he decides to seek a more personal revenge, not against individuals but against an entire class of people. I won't give it away here, but what Vachss wrote about in 1973 came to pass in an almost identical event in 1999.

There are a lot of parallels with the later Burke series, the first of which (Flood) did not appear in print for another thirteen years. Where Wesley has Carmine, Burke has the Prof; Wesley's driver and mechanic "Pet" Petraglia parallels with The Mole, Burke's mechanical and electronic expert. Wesley even has a dog who guards his home, just as Burke has Pansy the mastiff.

In the author's notes on his website, Vachss says publishers repeatedly told him, "the book was also 'too' hard-boiled, 'too' extreme, 'too' spare and violent. I heard endlessly about how an anti-hero was acceptable, but Wesley was just 'too' much."

And maybe, dare I say it, they were right about that last bit. Burke narrates his own stories; while the other characters see only his carefully-chosen front, we are privy to his thoughts, feelings and motives. Bomb is written in third person, so that the reader sees Wesley the same way the other characters do. There's very little sympathy for him, ultimately, especially as he closes in on his greatest hit at the climax. In fact, if Bomb were written and published today, the outcry would probably be massive; Vachss might even disappear at the hands of Homeland Security for advocating (and describing in detail how to accomplish) such extreme acts.

But despite being a period piece in a sense, "Bomb" still resonates with the thing that makes all Vachss' books so powerful: the sense that there's reality in the details, no matter how outlandish the characters or plot might seem. Vachss' has spent his life in the trenches, and if he says this is how something should be done, I wouldn't doubt him.

Andrew Vachss is on the short list of heroes I never want to actually meet, along with people like Bruce Springsteen. If I caught any of them on a bad day, and they were rude or cross with me, then I would lose great swaths of my life tied inexorably to their work. I need Vachss to stay on his pedestal, with his eyepatch and dog, glaring from his one eye. Part of it is because I suspect he'd have nothing but contempt for someone like me, who's never really been exposed to the brutality of life and whose ideas of good and evil would likely strike him as impossibly naive; I'm also pretty sure he could kill me with only his thumbs.



But do I love his work. The thing that draws me to it is, in fact, the same thing that attracts me to David Lynch's films. Lynch mixes the cruelest, most sadistic brutality with the tenderest, almost unbearably sweet love stories. I suspect that Lynch goes to the former extreme so that he can indulge the latter with a clear artistic conscience. I don't know if Vachss' motives are similar, but the effect is identical. The time spent touring humanity's cesspools is redeemed by moments like the frank but touching love scenes in Blue Belle.

As a novelist, I write stories and try to imbue them with elements of real life. Vachss, it seems, takes real life and uses it to tell stories. I don't believe one is neccesarily any better than the other, but the weight of real life is hard to argue with. And when that real life is as grim, gritty and traumatic as A Bomb Built in Hell, it's also hard to ignore.

New interview, new review

Jeff Cunningham interviews me at his blog, and there's a perceptive review of The Sword-Edged Blonde over at Perrynomasia. Check 'em out!

Guest blogging at Guys Lit Wire

This month at Guys Lit Wire, I review In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick's book about the Essex, sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. Sound familiar? Herman Melville read about it, too.

First review in on Blood Groove

The first pre-publication review of Blood Groove has hit the Net.

Read Patricia Altner's comments here; she calls it, "an intoxicating brew of mystery, humor, and horror."

New review of The Sword-Edged Blonde

Tia over at Fantasy Debut gives The Sword-Edged Blonde a perceptive evaluation. In part she says:

"Eddie runs into his old friend, whose wife is in considerable trouble. The reunion scene between the two friends was great, and reminded me why I enjoy reading novels by authors who have at least reached the age 35 or so. No way a twentysomething author would have thought of that."

The white crow: Tim Hall's Half Empty

The rules say that a "self-published" book equals...well, crap. These are the books that, for whatever reason, couldn't make it past the "gatekeepers" of publishing (agents, editors, etc.). Sure, there are books that began as self-published works and went on to be best-sellers (The Celestine Prophecy, for example, or Eragon), but the conventional wisdom is that if you have to pay to publish it yourself, it must be...well, crap.

Before you jump to the defense of the downtrodden self-published author, peruse the catalogs of iUniverse and XLibris. You'll find that in this case, the maxim is mostly true. Gatekeepers weed out the books that come with recommendations like, "My mother thinks it's great," "My children used to love it when I'd tell them stories," or the dreaded, "Everyone tells me my life would make a great book." Without these gatekeepers, readers would be buried under egregiously bad grammar, Wagnerian spelling errors, derivative characters and recycled plots.

But wait.

They say that in order to disprove the statement, "All crows are black," you need only produce one white crow. And I believe I have found that white crow of self-publishing: a genuinely good, well-written, powerful and original self-published novel.



Half Empty by Tim Hall tells the story of Dennis, a New York slacker who, thirty days into new sobriety, tries to sort through his past and find direction; his choices are represented by the two women in his life.

Well-traveled territory, to be sure, but author Hall doesn't make this a trite or even predicatable story. Dennis is a rich character, well-defined and contradictory, whose emotions (whether noble or base) are clear and understandable. He lives in a particular, detailed environment and has the troubled minutiae of life common to us all. The two women are certainly not virgin/whore caricatures, but individuals with unique strengths and believable flaws. More importantly, Hall doesn't take any of the easy narrative turns: we never learn exactly why Dennis sobered up, nor is his sobriety under constant, melodramatic threat. In other words, this is a well-written, gripping contemporary novel that could easily be from a major publishing house, certainly the equal of something like Bright Lights, Big City (a dated reference, I know, but hopefully a clear one).

So why isn't it from a major publisher?

I've asked Tim Hall that question, and a few more. Watch for that interview coming soon.

Possibly the best review I'll ever get

A special belated shout-out to gladiolii, whose blog post discussing my novel The Sword-Edged Blonde contains what may be the best review I'll ever get:

"The main character is cooler than I'd have expected, for an old guy."

Thanks, Kit, and I hope you like the next one as much.