Best Sex Scene from a '70s Novel

From All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, by John Farris (1977):

"So I dreamed again but not dementedly, this time from the center of my groin, the pleasure being deep and all the more enjoyed for its casual wickedness. Nhora swayed in the tree house of my manly trunk, eyes like caged death-birds brightly tuning, her hair let down to drape my thighs, navel coming unraveled as it gave suck, viny limbs arustle and wrapping me to the bed. Cunning nails traced all the long bones, studied the smoky running of my veins, hands cold but neat oval nails colder still and whitening out in my brain like fish gleam in heavy ice, like stopped comets. Splitting then at her demand, first with difficulty like a virgin rosebud then a ripe splashed apricot yielding up all fruit, blood, plasm, marrow to fill the dark and quiver everywhere around us, a dense cold cloud in which our collective breath burned like radium."

Today's Author Photo

Jack, my five-year-old, took this picture of me yesterday. I like it because you can tell I'm actually happy as opposed to grinning blankly like a monkey full of lithium. Unfortunately I've never learned how to fake a convincing smile.

Generally I'm better off doing something like this.

Dead to Rights

I just found out from Keith, my editor at Ballantine, that Tantor Media is going to produce the audio version of Eat the Dark. This is just so freakin' cool. Tantor did an incredible job with Chasing the Dead, Renee Raudman's performance was outright terrifying, and I'm sure this means all kinds of good things for Eat the Dark when the audio comes out in October.

Keith also told me that the Japanese rights have sold to Chasing the Dead to Shueisha Publishing. One look at their website should let you know how excited I am that they're the ones introducing Japan to my twisted view of the world.

Waiting in the Wings

The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece today that Elliott Chaze's legendary Fawcett Gold Medal noir masterpiece Black Wings Has My Angel is being adapted for the movies by Barry Gifford. This is pants-pissingly exciting news. Black Wings is one of my favorite novels ever -- it turned me on to Chaze and his other work, including the terrific Wettermark -- and it was Gifford's article about Chaze in the Oxford American that got me hooked on noir in the first place.

Though I wasn't smart enough to save that issue of the American, I remember Gifford's Chaze as being a fascinating guy. Intelligent, ailing, alienated and brilliant, he seemed steeped in his own dark vision of the world. I remember Gifford writing how, at one point in the interview, Chaze pulled a pistol and wondered aloud why he hadn't already used it on himself.

As a sidebar: although it's not mentioned in the article, this is actually the second time Black Wings has been adapted. Jean-Pierre Mocky produced a by all accounts downright bizarre French version a few years ago that I've never seen.

Meanwhile, yes, I'm also working on a novel called The Black Wing, which doesn't have anything to do with armored car heists, femme fatales or lonely, alienated criminals. People do, however, die horribly in it.

Film rights are available.

Robot Boy

For my 100th post, I'm doing something special. Actually, I was going to do it anyway. I just noticed that this was my 100th post.

Meet Robot Boy.

Robot Boy is a new comic book that I'm writing and drawing while I try to figure out my next novel. It's a combination of my son's recent fall, where he lost three teeth and broke part of the adjoining bony plate, and the fact that my wife was about to throw out a stack of old construction paper. I decided to turn the whole thing into a comic book. It's about a boy (for some reason my three-year-old daughter named him "Panna") on vacation with his parents in Salamanca, Spain, (I had the photo reference) who falls on his face and breaks part of it off, revealing that underneath, he's actually a robot. Makes perfect sense, right?

Anyway, here's some pencil roughs.


I've only done about two and a half pages of it--it's tough work writing and drawing a comic book when you don't have any talent--but I've just reached the moment of revelation.

Basically the story from here is that Panna will go on the run, using a code on the inside of his broken face to track down who really made him. His parents can't find him. Who created him? Why is his name Panna? What's that smudge on the top of the page? Banana pudding?

I intend to keep putting up pages of the comic book as I generate them. If you want to ignore this whole thing, I'll understand.

Endsville Eddie

Whenever I tell people that I'm a parent of two kids, have a full-time job and write novels, I get the same question: "What do you do with all your free time?" Well, folks, that's where my friend Endsville Eddie comes in.

Eddie is part of a recent re-introduction of Weird-Ohs, a collection of uber-cool model cars that originally appeared in the '60s. Now they're back on the shelves of Wal-Mart, complete with the original Bill Campbell box artwork. And fortunately, they're just simple enough to put together and paint that even an inexperienced whelp such as myself can do it.

In all honesty, Endsville Eddie is part of a continuing attempt on my part to outline the rewrite of The Black Wing. Because I'm one of those people who will readily throw himself into some creative endeavor even if I'm not remotely prepared, the past week has been filled with little distractions that I've given my conscious mind so that my unconscious can do whatever it has to, to make The Black Wing work. I'm not remotely out of the woods with it yet, so there may be many more Weird-Ohs yet to come.

Stoned Again

I've been reading Robert Stone's novels since I first found a mass market edition of Dog Soldiers at a library book sale in high school. Its beautifully disturbing jungle cover, with its surreal naked soldier and flying syringes, is a Seventies artifact as vital as any Stones album or Saigon Zippo. In any case, it was striking enough that I've held onto it, unlike a lot of the books from that day and age, which were lost in the back-and-forth cross-country experiences of my twenties.

And I'm glad I did. Dog Soldiers is a stunning novel, glittering with scrupulously described Nixon-era paranoia, and Stone's writing is as dazzling as ever. Last week I read his most recent, Bay of Souls, and that inspired me to pick up the only remaining work of his that I've never read, the estimable Damascus Gate.

Gate is a whole new order of magnitude, even for Stone. Although I'm less than fifty pages into it, I already have that feeling you get when you're reading truly great writing -- the sense of, Why on earth did I wait this long to read this? What else was I wasting my time on that was important, that I delayed this pleasure? Stone is so good that you almost can't bear to read anything else while you're reading him; I put down three other novels after Bay of Souls, spoiled by the depth of character, the dialogue and Stone's easy, seemingly effortless command of language and ideas. Stone is a writer's writer in the best and most useful sense of the word: not only is his work inspiring, but on a word by word, it practically commands you to be the best you can be.

Rewrite Ahoy

I spent an hour on the phone with Keith, my editor, this morning, discussing the fate of The Black Wing, the manuscript I sent him last month. It appears I'm going to be doing some outlining. And rethinking. And rewriting.

Of course, what everybody wants to hear from their editor when they submit a new manuscript is, "It's brilliant, I love it." And that was Keith's reaction to the first fifty pages. Based on this, and the pitch I'd given him over lunch last October, he was prepared for greatness, and boy, those first fifty pages delivered like a mother.

Unfortunately, the manuscript is three hundred and forty pages long.

The upside is that Keith happens to be an extremely good at what he does. And what he does is trust his instincts, and articulate, with coherence and diplomacy (but without mercy) where and how the story fails to deliver on its promise. My own emotional waveform throughout the conversation went something like this:

First ten minutes: Depression. Thinly veiled urge to kill self with fork through eye. Lame attempts to keep up spirits inspired by realization that in a hundred years none of this will matter.

Next twenty minutes: Deep and confusing child-of-divorced-parents attempts to Make Everything All Right by either jettisoning project entirely for something new, or somehow salvaging current project.

Next twenty minutes: First faint sense of scales tipping in favor of rewrite, or at least re-outlining.

Final ten minutes: Tentative glimmer of hope for future of project.

So yes, tomorrow, I go back to the outline process. I do it armed with the knowledge that my man in New York will be ready to make The Black Wing all it can be...

And with those first fifty pages.