A blogger over at Creature Cast went through the zombie anthology The Living Dead and reviewed every story, including the only one that really mattered (right?) …

Mine.

Of “Almost The Last Story By Almost The Last Man” (which was a finalist for HWA’s Stoker Award last year), he wrote:

Oh, man. I never really expected to discover anyone new, and I never really expected to adore a writer whose previous work was published by Eden Studios All Flesh Must Be Eaten zombie RPG anthologies, but this was one of the big pleasures of this collection. A multi-layered tale of a writer desperately telling stories in the middle of Romero’s apocalypse, the narrator succeeds in drawing us into his desperation. It covers every type of story you could imagine Romero devotees telling and does an amazing job engaging us with the narrator as he goes to his doom.

‘Tis a good thing to be adored!

The Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review features “The Lover,” a melancholy story by Damon Galgut about a young man traveling across the African continent. You can read the first few pages of the piece here.

I’d never read anything by Galgut before, even though he’s a critically acclaimed writer who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Award. Accidental finds like these are one of the best reasons for reading magazines—I get exposed to writers whom I might never have made the effort to track down on my own.

“The Lover” was an interesting story of accidental meetings and missed opportunities. What moved me the most was its penultimate paragraph:

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them know who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Whether it touched me more now than it might have at some other time due to recent events in my life I can’t say. I only know that this aside on the ephemeral nature of our passage through the world spoke to me now.

My father, Barnet “Barney” Edelman, seen with me below in our last picture together, passed away one week ago today.

He had been ailing for quite a while from a variety of illnesses, including congestive heart failure, but what finally took him from us was either polymyositis or dermatomyositis. Though his agonizing symptoms seemed consistent with one or both of those, his doctors were never really sure, as he was not responding to any medications. As his body withered, his many physicians were puzzled, and wished they had a Gregory House on staff to solve the medical mystery. (more…)

The Horror Writers Association has just announced its 2008 Preliminary Stoker Ballot. I’ll skip listing the entire ballot, so that LJ doesn’t get clogged with dozens of us posting the same thing. Instead, I’ll just point out a category near and dear to my heart.

Look closely, and you’ll see why:

SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT IN SHORT FICTION

“The Last Word” by Maria Alexander (Sins of the Sirens)

“Mama Strangelove’s Remedies for Afterlife Disorders, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mother Death” by C. Dean Andersson (Brutarian)

“Consumed” by Michael Louis Calvillo (Horror Library Volume 3)

“Petrified” by Scott Edelman (Desolate Souls)

“Mechanix” by Christopher Fulbright (Bound for Evil)

“The Lost” by Sarah Langan (Cemetery Dance Publications)

“The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” by Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt (Chizine)

“The Haven” by John Palisano (Horror Library Vol. 3)

“Turtle” by Lee Thomas (Doorways)

“The Blog at the End of the World” by Paul Tremblay (Chizine)

“Those Eyes” by Mark W. Worthen (Thinner Than Mist)

Good luck to all the nominees—and may the best stories make it to the final ballot!

If there are any HWA members out there who haven’t yet had a chance to read “Petrified,” please drop me a line and I’ll get one into your hands before the mailing of the ballots.

And as you can see, in this picture Bob forwarded to me last week, he has the nerve to laugh about it!

I don’t care if the guy is a Grand Master—isn’t it time he had his license revoked?

And just to show that my memory isn’t what it once was, I had thought this accident had taken place at a publisher party at the 2001 Philadelphia Worldcon, but Bob assures me that he had instead mowed me down a year later at a party held at San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation during the 2002 Worldcon.

My first Worldcon was 1974, so they’re all starting to blend together, folks.

Reading of the death of French pastry genius Gaston Lenôtre in the pages of The New York Times brought me immediately back to mid-’70s Manhattan, when I first met the woman who was to become my wife and love was in bloom. I need no madeleine to bring back my past; give me an inspired Lenôtre creation any day.

The obituary refers to Chateau France, an 80-seat restaurant and pâtisserie, which he opened on East 59th Street in April 1974, the same month Irene began work at Marvel Comics, and two months before my start date. I don’t remember ever eating in the restaurant, but the pâtisserie, which in my memory was simply called Lenôtre’s, was immediately next to the restaurant, and once Irene and I discovered each other it became somewhat of a hangout for us.

I can close my eyes and remember specific pastries, Irene and I holding hands across the table as we ate. There was a swan encased in spun-sugar. A large orange filled with cream. Irene and I would walk there during our lunch hours, or after work, and enjoy Lenôtre’s amazing confections, and our budding relationship. Lenôtre was a culinary god, and his pastries were so sensual that eating them was almost a form of foreplay.

Lenôtre apprentice Michel Richards is quoted as saying about the restaurant, “It closed a year later. Americans weren’t ready for his pastries.” Irene and I surely were. You may remember what music was playing when you fell in love. I remember what I was eating. And often, what I was eating was the brainchild of Gaston Lenôtre.

Continued Richard, “When you’ve been at Lenôtre, it’s like a drug. You’ve been injected with his recipes that you have to carry your whole life.”

I have. I do. And almost 35 years later, I’m still high.

Roger Langridge‘s tribute to the King is the coolest thing I’ve seen all week. But then, since I recognized every reference, I guess I’m the target audience.

Langridge, the creator of Fred the Clown, apparently drew this for a convention program book, and according to his blog will be auctioning off the original for charity.

Steven Soderbergh is interviewed in the February 2009 issue of Esquire on his upcoming two-part, four-and-a-half hour biographical film Che, which stars Benicio Del Toro.

In the interview, the director talks about how much he admires Che Guevara’s work ethic, though not necessarily his politics, how the man “spent every waking hour trying to shape the world in a certain way,” and that “he just felt like there wasn’t enough time to do all the things that needed to be done.”

Which led the interviewer to ask:

ESQ: Sounds like you.

SS: Yeah, except what I do isn’t important. That’s the only difference.

ESQ: Don’t you think art makes the world a better place?

SS: What tragedy has it kept from happening? Tell that to the 13-year-old girl from Somalia who got stoned to death last week after being raped by three men and then convicted of adultery, buried up to her head, and stoned in front of a crowd of 1,000 people. If the collected works of Shakespeare can’t keep that from happening, then what is it worth? Honestly?

I’d already heard of that incident, but reading about it late last night in that context with that contrast took my breath away.

Too depressed to read any further, I just went to bed.

It seems that I made a mistake last month when I offered copies of my short story, “Petrified,” which appeared in Desolate Souls, the World Horror Convention souvenir program book last year, to active HWA members only.

Though voting is limited to active members, all members of the Horror Writers Association, and not just actives, may recommend a work.

With only a week to go until recs close for this year’s preliminary ballot, this is a reminder that you can either go to the rec list and click on the link to download a copy of “Petrified,” or else drop me an e-mail and I’ll send it to you as an attachment via return e-mail.

If you’d prefer, and if there’s enough time, I’ll even get a uniformed government employee to deliver it to you. Yes, I have that power.

You know where to reach me.

One of the problems with censorship is that what we can imagine is usually far worse than what’s actually being censored, something which I realized while reading the next graphic novel to be bowdlerized by at patron at my local library. I already told you about what he or she did to Wonder Woman. What was done to the Justice Society of America is even more amusing.

The latest collection to get the Wite-Out treatment is JSA: The Liberty Files, which is a bit ironic, don’t you think? A book with the word “liberty” in the title being censored?

As before, the book is filled with numerous instances of what I assume to be words such as “hell” or “damn” or “Christ” being obscured. But what this censor doesn’t seem to realize is what happens in the mind of a reader when facing such blanks, or as in the case of the page on display, replacements, such as the kind encountered when watching movies which, as the euphemism goes, have been edited for television.

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