It’s a good time to be a slasher. Nearly twenty years ago, Scream revitalized the genre, kicked off a series of clones and also-rans—some of them quite excellent—that finally landed us at Leslie Vernon, at Tucker and Dale, at Cabin in the Woods, at You’re Next and It Follows, even accomplishing the unheard-of feat of crossing over into television land: Harper’s Island was the first, but now we’ve got Scream and Scream Queens.
Everybody who says the …
I read this first at Isleta Casino in Albequerque. Not just randomly, mongst the slots, but for a keynote-thing. Why I wrote a commencement address for that, no idea. Then Jon Davis (there at Isleta) asked me to read it for his MFA students at IAIA (click around, there’s also a chapter of Mongrels out-loud, first-time ever, and likely the only time I’ll read that chapter in front of people), said he’d post it for all, and he wasn’t lying:
I wish I’d taken more pictures. A part of my heart is still with each of these trucks. I remember dragging a chain out of the bed and leaving a big gouge on the bed rail of one. I remember loading a piano into one of the tall ones, in the sun, when I wasn’t sure I had gas money to get home. I remember a dog I picked up one day to get it a little farther down the road, and how it kept biting me and biting me. I remember pulling over in the ditch to write. I remember working through the ni…
In post-production right now. I got to swing out to Hollywood for a bit of the shooting, too. So cool to watch it all coming together.
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Because I kind of insist on assigning amazing stuff for my grad workshops, I of course assigned Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Skullcrack City (my original write-up here). It was dug by all. Here’s JRJ’s answers to the questions we crowd-sourced:
—To start with the ending: Is this bleak or is it hopeful? Are they (that is, ‘we’) winning? What others ending were under consideration, if any, or did you have this as your get-to point the whole time?
This was always my …
Set in the deep South, Mongrels is a deeply moving, sometimes grisly, and surprisingly funny novel that follows an unnamed narrator as he comes of age under the care of his aunt and uncle — who are werewolves. They are a family living on the fringe, struggling to survive in a society that shuns them: living in cars or trailers, moving every couple of months, eating from garbage cans, taking whatever work they can scrounge. Mongrels takes us on a compelling and fasci
Until World War Z, I’d been hearing that same thing about the zombie. And I guess it was kind of true. A lot of fun had been had, no doubt—the bulk of it on film and in the short story—but nobody’d Tolkien’d out the zombie landscape with a story that really sang. Not until Max Brooks applied his bloody pen.
However, this guy above and the public at large saying this about werewolves, it’s always kind of especially hurt. Not because they were wrong, but b…
Have we come a long way, baby? I don’t know. I’m not going to pretend to have a line on the first AI done in film or novel or story—and, after Ex Machina, no way am I going to profile myself Feed-style by entering this into a search engine—but, working from my limited set, I can see us starting in the general area of Hal 9000, a male AI, coming up from ‘him’ to the also-male computer in War Games, and, after that, AI goes largely female. Yes, no?
I mean, Jane fr…
From forever ago, yes. But I’m just now stumbling onto it. And, is ’emoji’ the right word? Like, what are those little character-based happy faces people put in their texts? It’s all confusing to me. But this isn’t: The Shining, without words. Pretty cool. Wondering if I should learn whatever this language is (he said between telling kids to get off his lawn, yes), use it to diagnose slow points etc in whatever novel I’m writing. Like, i…
The analogue to ‘found footage’ in fiction would be the shoebox novel: somebody drags a box out from under the bed, there’s all these clippings, let’s lay them out one after the other and thread a narrative through them. Which is to say, as Man Bites Dog and The Blair Witch Project and the rest established in no uncertain terms, these stories are artifacts. But when Chronicle uses what would seem to be that technique—for long sequences, we’re …
is the NYT bestselling author of 30 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More