So there I was, taking a break from putting the final polish on a new short story, and I sat down with Jeffrey Ford’s The Drowned Life. Even though I was already familiar with many of these stories, having experienced a number of them during their original publications thanks to many perspicacious editors, and had even heard him read some of them aloud, including the collection’s title story at last year’s Readercon, as I read them straight through it was like a receiving a blow with a 2 × 4 to the back of the skull.

The highlights for me were “The Night Whiskey,” in which a cloistered town’s strange fruit causes visions in some, while at the same time creating a need for others to pluck the wandering dreamers from the tree tops, and “Present From the Past,” in which the removal of a dead oak from the backyard brings a family together and reveals a forgotten treasure, and “The Bedroom Light,” in which what remains unsaid is far more important than what is said, and …

In fact, why am I bothering to pluck out individual titles and call them highlights? They’re all highlights. In fact, The Drowned Life is the best book I’ve read all year. (more…)

The focus of this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is its annual “The Lives They Lived” feature, which memorializes many of those we’ve lost this year, including George Carlin, Will Elder, Joan Winston, and others.

My favorite component of the issue turned out not to be the words, but rather a single photograph, taken in 1939 of pals Al Jaffee and Will Elder as they yukked it up in their high school cafeteria:

It’s easy to see why they were destined to become part of the “usual gang of idiots” behind Mad magazine. I’d have killed to have lunch with those two guys. They’d have had me snorting milk out my nose in seconds! (more…)

An inordinate amount of attention is suddenly being paid to the Scarecrow stories I wrote for Marvel back in the ’70s, especially considering the lack of attention that was paid to them at the time. The recent reprintings of the tales in the Legion of Monsters hardcover and the Essential Marvel Horror volume two trade paperback has caused a flurry of blogging about those ancient stories lately, such as the comment from Greg Hatcher over at Comic Book Resources this week that “there are moments of real potential in Scott Edelman’s work on the Scarecrow.”

Whether there was or not, that potential remained unfulfilled, as I only ever got to script two issues about the character. But since people are talking about the Scarecrow again, it seems a good time to share some never-before-reprinted art which appeared in Marvel’s UK titles when the stories were reprinted there.

First up, three covers of the weekly black-and-white book The Super-Heroes from the mid-’70s:

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I’m about halfway through the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, and that is where I think I’m going to have to stop. It isn’t that Lovecraft doesn’t have fascinating things to say. It’s more that at times the things he has to say are … well … too fascinating.

Sometimes I find his sentiments interesting in terms of the way they differ from my own, as in this letter from August 12, 1928, in which he states:

I prefer non-committal, non-sensational titles as a general rule; especially when the stories are themselves subtle & elusive in their weirdness.

Not me! I prefer more ornate titles, both in my own writing (the titles of mine I like the best are always more complex, as with “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” and “10 Things I’ve Learned About Writing”) and in that of others (as with Samuel R. Delany’s “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” and Harlan Ellison’s “The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”).

I also break with Lovecraft’s comments from August 20, 1928:

I note that you prefer the dialogue form as a medium of expression—a circumstance which perhaps indicates that you are a playwright at heart. I myself am the exact opposite. My purpose in writing a tale is to delineate a certain visual picture or crystallise a certain atmospheric effect—in which human beings are only incidental “properties”.

While it’s interesting to see Lovecraft make his methods concrete in that way—since the allure of his stories has always been the language and the atmosphere, rather than any of the people—in my own work, it is the people and characters who come first. (more…)

I like Christmas. I really do.

I love going out at night and driving around looking at lights, I lust after fruitcake, and I can’t watch It’s a Wonderful Life without sobbing like a baby.

So why is it that as I searched for Christmas imagery to illustrate the day, the only pieces of art which spoke to me show poor Santa either threatened …

… or dead? (more…)

Even though I wouldn’t have gotten along with H.P. Lovecraft on a personal level—his feelings about racial purity and his fear of non-Aryan immigrants have creeped me out ever since I read the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft in the ’70s—as I move deeper into the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, I find more and more points on which we agree, at least as far as writing is concerned.

Here he is on May 16, 1927, addressing the choices we all have to make to put food on our tables and keep roofs over our heads:

An author really ought to be financially independent, so that he need neither cater to the commercial field in his writing, nor expend his time & energy on other pursuits. However, of the two evils, catering & outside work, the latter is by far the lesser evil. That at least does not impair the artistic sincerity of the small amount of writing one does do. I have more respect for an honest plumber or truck-driver who writes to please himself in his spare time, than for a literary hack who extinguishes his own personality in a service acquiescence to the puerile & artificial demands of an ignorant herd.

We’re in agreement there. One reason I’ve always held day jobs was to prevent economic issues from influencing my artistic decisions. (more…)

On Friday, after having read a particularly entertaining entry in The Book of Lists: Horror, edited by Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley, I asked the question, “Who the Heck is Warren Martense?”

I believed that Warren Martense had to be a pseudonym, and so I e-mailed Del, who e-mailed Scott, who contacted the writer of the list which had piqued my interest, and the big brains conferred to decide whether the secret could be revealed, and lo, the curtains opened …

Well … better make that, the curtains parted slightly.

For though I haven’t yet learned the true identity of the writers (yes, writers) who came up with “Ten Things H.P. Lovecraft Never Asked for in a Bar,” I now know this much, that Warren Martense is “the Lovecraft-inspired pseudonym of two UK writers.”

And now you know, too.

I began reading the first volume of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth last night. The relationship between the two began in 1926 when Derleth wrote a letter to Lovecraft asking for help in tracking down a couple of short stories by M.P. Shiel, and blossomed into a correspondence that continued on a weekly basis through 1937.

David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi have edited the hundreds of letters into a fascinating two-volume set from Hippocampus Press. I read the five-volume Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft thirty years ago, but as those books contained letters to multiple correspondents, I don’t remember the reading experience as having had as intimate a feeling as this.

I’m also finding that these these letters will appeal to more than just those with either a scholarly or fanboy interest in Lovecraft. The editors’ helpful footnotes make sure that no prior knowledge of either Lovecraft or Derleth is necessary. I think any writer, whatever his or her level of familiarity with these men, will find something of interest here relating to the creative process, dealing with rejection, the nature of fantasy, and more. (more…)

According to Carleen Brice over at The Washington Post, December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give It to Somebody Not Black Month.

An interesting article, and an intriguing promotional strategy, which Brice describes as “this guerrilla marketing effort—although sort of a stunt.”

Unfortunately, the online commenting got ugly. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Over at The New York Times, Grant Barrett, the head of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, has anointed “The Buzzwords of 2008.” To make it even more interesting, artist Jessica Hische has whipped up some intriguing typographical treatments of the chosen phrases.

Here’s one you may recall, spawned by a particularly idiotic moment in one of the year’s biggest blockbusters.