Over at the Horror Drive-In, reviewer Mark Sieber writes:

“The first thing I want to point out is how well written The Hunger of Empty Vessels is. The language is rich and each sentence is a beautiful construction. Clearly Scott Edelman is a solid professional.”

Though the horror turned out to be a little too vague for him, he still went on to write that “I urge readers to give The Hunger of Empty Vessels a chance.” What more can I ask for?

Meanwhile, Don D’Ammassa calls The Hunger of Empty Vessels “another nice chapbook from Bad Moon” and deems my tale to be “nicely done.”

If you’d like to discover the reason for these kind words, copies are still available over at the Bad Moon Books site.

Yesterday’s Washington Post included the following correction on page 2:

The Second Reading column in the March 6 Style section mistakenly said writer James Salter is dead.

I hope that I will be around to see the same sort of thing written about me someday!

A review by John Seavey over at fraggmented takes a look at the Scarecrow stories I wrote for Marvel Comics more than three decades ago and finds them wanting.

Luckily, Seavey is so hilarious in his description of the plot that I couldn’t help but laugh.

Besides—when I wrote those comics, I was just a tadpole. He’s probably right about everything!

Here’s my favorite part of his review:

And finally we get “The Scarecrow.” No, no, not that Scarecrow. No, not that Scarecrow either. This is an entirely different Scarecrow, who is … um … he lives in a painting, and there’s this cult that hates him, or maybe he hates them, and he’s getting revenge on them for, um … something, but they want the painting, and there’s a demon, and this guy keeps vanishing, and he’s got the power to … do stuff, I guess, and … it’s all actually more than a little confusing.

There’s more, which you can find here.

Whether he loved them or hated them is almost beside the point. The fact that anyone is still bothering to think about these at all so many years later is flattering enough!

I have been deemed “deep, disturbing, and emotionally draining.”

Well … not me personally. Rather, it’s my about-to-be-published novella The Hunger of Empty Vessels which has been judged so, in its first review.

The reviewer also states that “Edelman really knows how to pack a knockout into a literary jab.”

If you’d like to find out why, The Hunger of Empty Vessels is available for sale over at the Bad Moon Books site.

Do you remember where you were over the 1972 Memorial Day weekend? I do!

I spent every hour I could at Manhattan’s McAlpin Hotel attending the 1972 EC Fan Addict convention. I paid my $7.50 entry fee and got to hang out with the madmen (and one crazy lady) behind one of the most amazing comic-book companies ever.

And I have the button to prove it!

Those of you who couldn’t make it to New York back then are able to catch up with a report in the pages of the September 1972 issue of Graphic Story World magazine, one of the high-end fanzines of the day. (And if that cover boy below puts you in mind of Watchmen‘s Nite Owl, well, that’s not him. It’s just … The Owl, a character created by Jerry De Fuccio and Mart Bailey for a potential newspaper strip in the mid-’60s.) (more…)

It’s true! Paul Levitz has left the building. Why, I read it only yesterday.

At least … it seems like yesterday …

Actually, though, he announced his retirement in the 100th issue of his fanzine, The Comic Reader. The Comic Reader started out called On the Drawing Board, which, at the time I started subscribing as soon as I read a mention of it in a DC comic, was being edited by Mark Hanerfeld. But Paul took over in October 1971, and by this issue two years later, dated August-September 1973, he was ready to call it a day.

Here’s the cover of his farewell issue:

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Over at Fantasy Book Critic, Liviu C. Suciu reviewed the entire contents of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, edited by George Mann.

Why do I care?

Because my short story, “Glitch,” earned 4 1/2 stars … which as far as I can tell, was on a scale of 1 through 5. (If I’m misinterpreting things, and it was instead on a scale of 1 through 100, please … keep that to yourself.)

Here’s what Suciu had to say:

Prim S-Tr resists the attempts of her bonded partner X-ta to have “animal-like” human intimacy. Then things go out of control… Interesting, funny and dark at the same time. The style was a bit flat but otherwise very good.

The anthology will officially go on sale tomorrow.

The February 2009 issue of The Believer features an article on the early novels of Thornton Wilder, books written before he wrote the plays for which he is now mostly remembered, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.

“A Partisan of Eternity,” by Christopher R. Beha, details how the contemporary critics of those first three novels slammed Wilder for ignoring what they considered to be the fundamental issues of his age. The following intriguing quote doesn’t specifically touch on that main thrust, but rather on Wilder’s thoughts when creating a story:

“It seems to me that my books are about: what is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources that one has to oppose it,” he wrote not long before the crash, in a letter included in the new and generous Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. “In other words: when a human being is made to bear more than [a] human can bear—what then?”

This makes a good companion to the other question I’ve ben advised a writer should ask when deciding whether he or she has chosen the proper protagonist for a story—

Who hurts?

Yesterday was an extremely social day, beginning when Irene and I headed over to Maryland for dim sum at New Fortune Chinese Restaurant with Karen Newton, Charlie Newton, and Risa Stewart. Poor Sandy Stewart was stuck home sick—which meant that he ended up with leftovers. He also missed much electronics neepery, because Karen showed off her Kindle and I did the same with my new iPhone.

Since I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I could trust any of my lunch mates, I used my newly downloaded Battlestar Galactica Cylon Detector iPhone app on each of them. Luckily, I discovered that I was surrounded by nothing more than humans.

Then, after an afternoon spent with family, Irene and I took our palates to a different country when we joined a second set of friends for Greek food at the Mykonos Grill. While I enjoyed the meal, the acoustics were such that we could barely hear each other over the din of the other diners, so we headed over to the nearby Borders Books at the White Flint Mall to continue our conversation.

While browsing there, I discovered that a letter of mine had been printed in the latest issue of The Believer, a fun magazine from the good folks over at McSweeney’s. Think of it as a hip New Yorker.

My letter was in response to the article “The Henry Ford of Literature,” by Rolf Potts, which was about Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and his 1920s’ publishing company which managed to put more than 300 million copies of inexpensive “Little Blue Books” into circulation. Serendipitously, I’d discovered from my reading of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth at about the same time that the article hit newsstands that H.P. Lovecraft had been a fan of those pamphlets, and dropped the editors a note to pass on to the author, which they decided to publish.

It’s always feels good to be tapped into the zeitgeist …

After much prodding and even a little bit of dithering, I have finally opened a Facebook account, and just spent the evening friending Facebook friends.

Now riddle me this—

What should I be doing over there that’s any different from what I’ve been doing over here for the past year and a half?