Author: SGJ

Got pages of mostly illegible notes re: Under the Skin, but not much time to collate. Rather, like Snowman and the Bandit, I got a long way to go and a short time to get there. So, some quick bulletpoint responses, anyway:

1) We all want to be David Bowie, of course. Or, we all want Walter Tevis to have written us, anyway. And, no, sadly, regrettably, unforgivably, I haven’t read the novel Under the Skin is working from. But what I imagine is some amalgamation of Henry: Portrai…

Clickable on Amazon, readable at Tor.com.

It’s a story of how anthropologists might handle the apocalypse, how academics deal with zombies. Pretty short, and a pretty cool cover.

Thanks to Ellen Datlow both for selecting it and then for editing it into a better form of itself.

Links: Locus  |  BookPlank  |  MyLifeinFiction  |…

Man, the links and updates get away from me. I can usually remember to stuff them to the right, here, under Interviews/Stories/Off-Site, but I don’t always remember to put them here. So, doing it now, here. What I can recall from the last two weeks or so (will try to make all the images links):

 …

We need a new designation: there’s movies about the apocalypse, and all our valiant efforts to stop it from happening, from Armageddon to The Hunt for Red October, and then there’s the post-apocalyptic stories, from Mad Max to The Book of Eli and way beyond. There’s stories that are kind of both, too, like Twelve Monkeys and Terminator, where the apocalypse has ‘already’ happened but can still be undone. Adding time-travel to the mix kind of escapes these movies from the usual …

Ten Bulletpoints re: Oculus

1) This is probably from The Exorcist, but where I remember it from is Hysterical: one priest telling another not to listen, that the devil will lie to you. But then one of the Hudson brother’s pants are actually at his ankles. It wasn’t a lie, surprise. If you could turn that into a feature-length movie—and you can—then you’ve got Oculus, pretty much.

2) Horror lately is really getting good at making its ghost-women kind of legi…

• Introduction: Joe R. Lansdale
• Thirteen (out loud)
• Brush dogs (out loud)
• Welcome to the Reptile House
• This is Love
• The Spindly Man
• The Black Sleeve of Destiny
• The Spider Box
• Snow Monsters
• Doc’s Story
• The Dead Are Not
• Xebico
• Second Chances
• After the People Lights Have Gone Off
• Uncle
• Solve for X

Audiobook: Audible

links: Revolt Daily  |  Pantheon  |  HorrorNews  |  MonkeyBicycle  |  HellNotes  |  HorrorTalk&nb

I wrote Not for Nothing right on the heels of a second read of Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. And that read was because the movie showed up on some ninety-nine cent shelf, to remind me, to impress me, to lure me. And I’ve been telling anybody who asked that that was probably right around 2006 — I was pretty sure Not for Nothing was the last novel I wrote before Flushboy, in 2007. Just looked at the timestamps on the old files, though, and:

And that’s kind of foreve…

I’m pretty sure the first rashomon I ever saw, at least the first where the on-the-fly construction of the story really set me back on my heels, was this one:

After that I was hooked. Completely. Forever. Happily. Now I keep a running list of rashomon stuff, which I’ll annotate below some. But it also strikes me that every single first-person story is basically being told as ‘counter’ to the version that ‘really’ happened. Yes? Or under…

Back in the late nineties, I’d see Stephen Dixon stories all over and flip back to his author bio at the end of the journal or whatever not because I didn’t already know it, but for the rush: it always said he had some three hundred stories published. I had maybe six at the time? Three hundred was an amazing, impossible, never-get-there kind of number. And I’m not there yet. This isn’t that post. Though I did just total up my stories from print- and e-mags a…

Exactly fifty stories, none longer than a thousand words, a couple just a sentence or two.

Here‘s where I was getting them all in order.

Here’s some few links:

SpringGun  |  SPD  |  LitReactor  |  Do Some Damage

If we had to choose one writer to rebuild American literature after the apocalypse, the smart money would be on Stephen Graham Jones, who is in the process of reinventing literally every genre from the ground up. In States of Grace he offers up lean, deftly c