Looks like, in pre-celebration for TURISTAS1, Demon Theory pulled two reviews this week:
&
Cool places each, though the reviews are kind of opposites of each other.
Anyway, it’s none other than Mike Bracken on the Toxic Universe one. Which, I mean — for my first novel, I remember telling somebody that it would only be complete when I knew that Gerald Vizenor had read it. And then, bam, it was suddenly complete before it was even published: FC2 had somehow got Vizenor to blurb it. About the coolest thing in the world. Anyway, having Bracken talk about Demon Theory, it’s the same. Now just need Kevin Williamson to chime in.
Too, of course, these reviews (and the rest that I know about) are all linked up here. And the trade paperback’ll be hitting in April here, and it’s looking to be different in kind of an important way (other than fixing the Anne/Nancy Wilson mis-speak and the unforgivable Van Halen debacle, which I’m eternally in apology for, and suspect that Dante, with all his foresight, designed some place specifically for people who make those kinds of mistakes).
Other than all that, two more reviews in waiting somewhere, I think. I’ll link them when I get linked myself. Also, looks like I’ll be doing some guest-blogging and podcasting in early January.
And, as for what I’m wanting for Christmas, aside from the usual, knives and boots, just the other usual, t-shirts:
Too, now that 2006 is even closer to being over, it’s getting safer and safer for me to say that FEAST was the movie of the year. Only runner-up, still, might be LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. And, I mean, yeah, I’m still all doe-eyed for DEJA VU (oka2 ‘the movie with the worst trailers ever’), but it’s time-travel too, which I’m just eternally a fool for, and can’t be trusted to speak objectively about. But, man, unobjectively, DEJA VU, it doesn’t just rock, it rawks.
As for best novel of the year, man, yeah: it’s been a good year, right? Anyway, not that I read “all the right books“3 or anything, but my vote’d be Stephen King’s LISEY’S STORY. It seriously, really impressed me. And, that it is actually on that list I just linked, that’s good, though I am still pretty fond of the idea of King out there at the edge of things, his shadow just falling ominously over the whole literary landscape. But I don’t guess there’s any real fear of him going legitimate, either. Or, really, screw legitimacy. Give him every book award out there. I don’t think it’s going to make him write boring New Yorker stories. Which is to say also that I’m really expecting that BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES he’s editing to shake things up some4, the way, say, Erdrich’s did back forever go.
Anyway, not just real sure how much I’ll be in here this next month — writing another biggish thing, suddenly and accidentally (zombies again, always) — but I think that’s what I said last time, before I was posting a couple of monologues a day.
Off to the happiness of TURISTAS now, in T-minus fourteen hours . . .
©Stephen Graham Jones, 2006
1 which I know everybody’s calling “HOSTEL in South America” or whatever, but I’d suggest that Scott Smith’s THE RUINS is in there as well.
2 “otherwise known as”
3 it is in fact perfectly possible that these are the quotation marks of jealousy
4 a thing, yeah, I also kind of expected from Chabon’s. But I’m guessing (hoping) it wasn’t all his fault, either: he probably did pick the best twenty from the hundred and twenty he was given. And my expectations of course get in the way — what I was looking for was some more “Thrilling Tales,” I suppose . . . However, in his BASS, there was at least more blood than usual, I think, which I’m thankful for. More piano-related stuff too, however. Maybe there’s a balance there I’m not yet aware of?