Author: SGJ

click the banner to go to the site. right-click the banner to steal it. all looking very cool, very likely.

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Reading now:

Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf. Will this werewolf be the only one to know regret? I’m only about a third through, but that’s a third in hardly any hours, so I’ll know soon. Anyway, completely digging it. Because, you know, it’s about werewolves, but also because it’s written so, so well. And, I mean, werewolves are fast, are perfect hunters—why wouldn’t they also be able to just reel off perfect lines page after page, right?

Also jammed through Donald Ray Pollock…

hey, first little bit of my 2014 novel Not For Nothing (Dzanc) is up over at the excellent Dirty Noir. Not For Nothing‘s second-person, small-town detective, and, for the first time, it’s set in the town I mostly grew up in: Stanton, Texas. Was so cool going there again in fiction, on the page. Can’t wait for everybody to see the rest of this one, but, for now, click here to go there.

 

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Here’s a bit of writing you don’t see much of anymore:

Stonehill was not in a quarrelsome mood that morning, indeed he was not snorting or blowing at all but rather in a sad, baffled state like that of some elderly lunatics I have known. Let me say quickly that the man was not crazy. My comparison is not a kind one and I would not use it except to emphasize his changed manner.

Okay, first, “Elderly Lunatics I Have Known” would be a great title for just about anything. A poetry book on equi…

Some of you’ll remember a bit ago, before the hack, the crash, the switch to another host, I posted a cool excerpt by Pablo D’Stair (which the hack/crash ate, refused to spit back up, and I couldn’t figure how to get a remade version back in-line with the rest, which sucks, but that’s not why I’m here, now, talking about Pablo).  Or some of you may have the installment of Predicate we did together, and which I’m still tangled up in in my head, in the best way. Or you may remember just a c…

At least at Amazon, . There’s a synopsis on the listing, or, here at DemonTheory, or, I could just tell you that it’s about a unicorn who finds a flower under a rainbow and falls in love with a pirate centaur who’s only interested in her for how well she sings, and he of course quits his high-seas life and they have a baby seahorse together that also has wings and can fly but, as bad luck would have it, is only interested in mermaids, who are all betrothed to various r…

that makes it sound like I’m doing a response to King’s On Writing, yeah? Nope. Only response that book needs is, you know, writing. Anyway, this a series where different writers talk about what ‘reading’ is, or means, or does. And this is my paragraph.…

The Fast Red Road—A Plainsong is a gleeful, two-fisted plundering of the myth and pop- culture surrounding the American Indian. It is a novel fueled on pot fumes and blues, a surreal pseudo-Western, in which imitation is the sincerest form of subversion. Indians, cowboys, and outlaws are as changeable as their outfits; horses are traded for Trans-Ams, and men are as likely to strike poses from Gunsmoke as they are from Custer’s last stand. Pidgin, the half-blood pr…

I mean, Pablo D’Stair’s a-reading it, and writing about it for Sri Lanka, here.…

It’s probably just me, but I had the hardest time getting into Amelia Beamer’s The Loving Dead. As for why I picked it up in the first place? Aside from that it was definitely ‘zombie?’ AT WHC2011, John Skipp (on an excellent zombie panel) said it was the only zombie fiction he’d read recently that was legitimately bringing something new. So, I went home ready to buy it, but then of course already had it—I’d plucked it from a shelf going solely on the Christopher Moore blurb, which i…