Coming in 2008

This year was a particularly busy one for me, but it was positively drowsy compared to what I've got lined up for next year. Keep in mind that none of the following is written in stone, though I have included tentative dates to the best of my understanding.

Two-Car Funeral (hardboiled): Shorty had a plan. Jimmy had a habit. All that stood between them and the heist of a lifetime was an underground Nevada gun cult led by the charismatic Reverend John Sandman, sitting on a cool eight million in donations from their devoted flock. Getting in was one thing: getting out might just fuck them silly. (August 19th, Charming Cutthroat Press, Kalamazoo, MI)

Tree Lot (original screenplay): In this soon-to-be classic holiday heart-warmer, a college kid with a gambling problem returns home for the holidays to help his wacky family selling Christmas trees. When mob-funded terrorists come into his colorful neighborhood with guns blazing, looking for money stolen from a crooked all-cop poker game, our hero and his family find themselves in the crossfire. (Feb., Ankle Productions)

What the Hell Are Those? (Health): A pop-up guidebook for adolescents on the magical changes their bodies undergo during puberty and beyond. (Sneaky Uncle Press, May 2nd)

Mendacity (SF): Set in a world where chemical weapons have rendered everyone incapable of telling the truth, hard-as-nails investigator and human lie-detector sexpot Mendacity Jones runs a business tracking down missing persons among a landscape where everybody is constantly talking shit, all the time. (July 28th, Gadfly Media)

The 1001 Tales of Dr. Chicken-Sauce (children’s book): A compendium of the beloved Dr. Chicken-Sauce bedtime stories, including “The Machine that Stopped the World,” “Ape-Face Hotrod” and “Bubblegum Killed the Dinosaurs.” (Hey Mister Publications, November)

On His President’s Secret Business (treatment for motion picture): P.T. Barnum and Harriet Tubman are dispatched on a top-secret White House mission to retrieve a missing rocket in the midst of Civil War-era Atlanta, and retrieve its payload, a rare precious stone whose prismatic qualities may alter the flow of time itself. (Rights currently available)

“Your mother doesn’t work here,” sign written on paper napkin, taped over coffee maker in employee break room. (December 3rd-22nd)

Tuesdays with Joey (memoir): An emotionally wrenching story of how I went back to poison one of my beloved professors and spend the last few hours of their lives recording their thoughts and heartfelt pleas for medical assistance. (San Fernando, CA: Lacrimose Sons Inc)

There’s a Fucker Born Every Minute (self-help): A highly opinionated view of the entire human race, by one of its most provocative commentators, me, with lots of helpful tips along the way on how the world could be a better place. (pub date unknown)

Why do we write?

I’m reading Peter Straub’s novel Mr. X right now, as I go about the business of starting my own new novel. Like almost all Straub’s work, Mr. X is a long and voluble book, rich with secondary characters and back story and smaller tales that eddy within the larger current of the story. Straub’s performance is complex and risky, and I find his work—in combination with old interviews I’ve found online where he talks about the origin of different projects—to be a tremendous confidence booster as I go about my own work.

For me the process of starting a new book is a lot like exploring an old dark house full of intriguing but very dangerous possibilities. I go inside when I can no longer resist, when my curiosity about what’s inside overcomes my apprehension of floors that might collapse under my weight, blind hallways that lead nowhere, wiring that might electrocute me if I get too close. Or I might just lose all momentum, which is its own kind of trap. Particularly when I get home at night and it’s late and my energy level is at its lowest point. With my current book, a non-paranormal novel, I’ve been teetering perilously close to giving up completely.

But I hear music in Straub’s work, and the measured encouraging voice of a friend. He conveys a commitment to the craft that almost feels involuntary, and that inspires me, even when I’m tired and not in the mood to put words on the screen. On one occasion he talks about the origin of The Hellfire Club, how he spent over a year on a book trying to make it work before discovering the character whose personality holds the key to the story. That sense of mission, combined with the sheer originality of the language and the story’s breadth of scope, drives me back to my computer night after night. Even if I’m only able to commit an hour to the book, a page or two, it satisfies that part of me that allows me to go on with whatever’s left of the evening.

In one interview Straub describes a late ‘50s performance by Billie Holiday on CBS’s The Sound of Jazz. When I watch Billie Holiday’s reaction to Lester Young’s saxophone solo, I do get a sense of how the two parts of the writer’s mind may work, under certain circumstances, and the satisfaction emanating from that relationship.


Why do we write? To find out what happens next. If you think about the writer’s performance as a dialogue with himself, creating an itch and then scratching it, this call-and-response technique can potentially sustain the entire weight and ligature of the whole book, long or short. To be successful, the writing, then, has to be doubly good—it has to engage the writer enough to compel him forward through the process, and answer the questions it asks along the way in a satisfactory manner. Done right, all the pleasure, the joy of writing comes off of this dialogue like steam off a hotplate.

Top Ten Holiday Movies of All Time

The best holiday films are inevitably about alienation. With that in mind, the Scary Parent offers this list, the top ten holiday movies:

1) The Ice Harvest: Richard Russo co-adapted the script from Scott Phillips bleak-as-January-ice Kansas noir that's woozy with booze and bad choices. Nobody gets what they want in the end except the viewer.

2) Bad Santa: A no-brainer, and perhaps the best of the lot, because in the blackest of moments it somehow manages to pull out a punch-drunk happy ending. The Rio Bravo of Christmas movies, it manages to do almost everything right. A rewrite by the Coen Brothers and Harvey Weinstein's decision to bring in Todd (Old School) Phillips for post-production reshoots send it right over the top.

3) The Long Kiss Goodnight: Shane Black loves Christmas almost as much as he loves Borscht Belt humor, snappy dialogue and gunplay and we're all richer for it. The most Christmasy of his bloody holiday trilogy (see the below two films). Tbe original script features a scene of a dead Santa and reindeer propelled through the air by force of explosion -- unproduced but undeniably brilliant.

4) Lethal Weapon: Oh, it's a Christmas film all right. And it plays just as well today as it did 20 years ago. Which brings us to...

5) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Robert Downey Jr. makes this thing walk and talk from start to finish. If this movie doesn't make you want to take a trip to LA for Christmas, your eggnog's not strong enough. The holiday party scenes at the beginning glitter like the tree did when you were seven years old.

6) Die Hard/Die Hard 2: Sure, John McTiernan's original kicks the sequel's ass. But try walking through an airport listening to Christmas carols and not feeling a little bit like you-know-who. Go ahead, I'll wait.

7) A Charlie Brown Christmas: Rick Moody for kids. Maybe the bleakest of the bunch, and a miracle that it even exists in the first place, twenty-three minutes of unremitting and absolutely accurate holiday desolation set against minimalist backgrounds and accompanied by a brilliant jazz score. For those who weren't naturally depressed around the holidays, a fine starter kit.

8) The Star Wars Holiday Special: The notorious banned-by-Lucas TV special featuring a blearily coked up Carrie Fisher and Wookie Christmas carols. What's better, the fact that you can only buy it on bootleg DVDs, or that somebody actually thought this was a good idea to begin with? Discuss.

9)Black Christmas: Robert Clark's '74 original, sick, quick and dirty. Ignore the remake. There might be better Christmas horror movies out there (Silent Night Deadly Night had a better add campaign and a pool table sex scene) but this one set the standard.

10) Tales from the Darkside - "Seasons of Belief": E.G. Marshall tells his kids about a supposedly make believe creature called the Grither, which is supposed to get closer every time its unholy name is spoken. Marshall goes on to play a song about it to the tune of "O Come, All Ye Faithful"..."I am the Gri-ther, you cannot escape me...." Then the Grither breaks into the house and devours them all. Perfection.

The Cemetery Dance Interview

Remember the interview with me that I was talking about the other week, the one in that legendary horror mag? Here it is.

I've been reading Cemetery Dance since it came out and getting interviewed there is a Christmas present come early. What's that dripping out of that stocking?

"And this time, we didn't forget the gravy."

Because everybody needs to watch this around the holidays...

G'byeSpace

I nuked my MySpace page last night.

It's hard to explain exactly why I felt compelled to do it, except that I had the nagging suspicion I was making money for somebody everytime I signed on. There's a reason why it's free, folks. So, I ain't gonna work on Tom's farm no more.

Plus, the spam was freakin' killing me.

And I was being cyber stalked.

To my 713 friends, I'm sorry I didn't say goodbye personally. To the dozen or so that might actually notice, this is the new place. So stop by sometime.

Early Influences: Clive Barker

Back in college I went through a brief, misguided period where I thought I wanted to be a journalist. I published a short series of book reviews and author interviews in the Michigan Daily. Mainly it gave me an excuse to talk to some of my favorite writers, including Clive Barker, who was cool enough to spend an autumn evening in 1991 talking to a college kid when he was in town on tour for Imajica.

Sixteen years later, Imajica remains one my favorite books ever. Reading this interview over now, I think I did a pretty good job staying out of Barker's way and letting him talk, and I like some of the small details of it -- the fact that his signing was at a bookstore called the Little Professor Bookshop, for example, still makes me smile. And I think what he told me that night about the power of imagination and uncertainty makes as much sense now as they did back in the memorable evening in 1991.

Clive Barker and I are in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn, talking about sex, death and Imajica. It’s after ten o’clock and Barker’s had a long day of travel and book-signing, but as the coffee arrives and the conversation progresses, he begins to speak emphatically about his new novel.

The enthusiasm is well-warranted. Imajica is the biggest, most ambitious fantasy novel yet from Barker, whose previous work includes the multi-volume Books of Blood, the novels Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show, and the films Hellraiser and Nightbreed. A person best by Barker’s own estimation, Imajica juggles half a dozen main characters and as many different worlds, alternating between sweeping imaginary vistas and the subtle workings of individual souls.

In other words, you’ve come a long way from splatterpunk, baby.

But Barker’s revolutionary instinct was never completely satisfied with traditional horror fiction. “I’m not leaving the paraphernalia (of horror) behind,” he says, “I’ve just simply added hugely to the amount of paraphernalia that I will play with…In my little box of demons and malignancies I had five percent of the props that I wanted to play with. And now, in floating into new dimensions, new cultures, new philosophies, new dramas, new sexualities, I feel like I’ve gained another forty-five percent of them.”

Barker said that the final 50 percent of his “props” have yet to be assembled. Most likely, they’ll emerge from some of his diverse works-in-progress—the second and third Books of the Art, which follow Great and Secret Show, or the children’s book he’s just finished. More movies, television and comic books are in the works as well, and Barker is unashamedly thrilled with the proliferation of the Clive Barker industry. Earlier, at a signing at the Little Professor Bookstore, fans showed up with Barker’s Tapping the Vein comic, Weaveworld posters, Great and Secret Show T-shirts (reading, “It’s about sex, Hollywood and Armageddon, not necessarily in that order”) and record albums. It’s all part of a mission for Barker, a mission to revolutionize fantasy literature and to remythologize our thoughts about ourselves.

According to Barker, he is regenerating this genre because we can’t rely on the old myths anymore. For example, he says, even J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, “arguably the greatest fantasy masterpiece of the century,” borrows its structure from Norse myth, “the structures of a culture that no longer believes in those structures anyway.”

“So what you’re saying is, ‘OK, my underlying myth structure is one which I, the writer, probably don’t believe in anyway,’” he continues. “It’s a conveniently romantic notion of the world. It’s a world, for instance, which is untroubled by the problem of the female. It is a world which is untouched by sexuality. How convenient all of this is!”

What Barker offers instead is a symphony of confused voices, characters whose own souls don’t fit so easily into traditional categories of good or evil, masculine or feminine, sane or mad. “I think (that confusion) is me,” he says. “That’s the voice of the author saying, ‘I’m fucking confused, I don’t know.’ It’s real difficult to make up your mind from moment to moment in the book, and I love that ambiguity. I love that paradox. I love uncertainty, because it’s there anyway, and if you don’t love it it’ll just bite you in the ass. So, you may as well celebrate the fact that the world is in flux, and your feelings are in flux, and you as an individual are constantly changing and transforming.

“I want to make books that allow the reader to celebrate that in themselves by showing the heroic and powerful and magical potential for those qualities. So that the reader says, ‘I see characters going through their lives and changing and confronting these ambiguities and actually being stronger for it, rather than being stronger because they realize what evil was,’ which doesn’t pertain to the real world.”

Listening to Barker, though, one begins to question his notion of the real world. He confesses that his work is real to him. At the signings people asked curiously if he believes what he writes, and his answer, immediately, was yes. “I feel as though what I’m doing a lot of the time is almost journalistic,” he says. “I feel as though I’m making an account of something which is going on anyway, at least in my head, but possibly elsewhere. I absolutely believe what I write. It is the truth of my life, and everything else seems wan, more like gossamer, by comparison with these things.”

He admits that the act of writing something of Imajica’s scope drains him completely. “Everything else is my life is irrelevant,” he says. But another life opens within the realm of the work itself. “I invariably sit at my desk with tears pouring down my face when a character dies,” he admits. “When a character makes a joke, I think it’s hysterically funny. And I won’t tell you about the physical response to the sex scenes. But it’s all happening in front of me.”

What Barker really sees in front of him when sits down to write, however, is for his eyes only. Nobody—publishers, lovers or friends—have more than the vaguest of ideas until the day the novel is complete. Barker writes everything out longhand, a sort of merger of writing and drawing which he says is vital to a complete rendering of his imagined worlds. Talking about work-in-progress has exactly the opposite effect.

“I don’t like to start talking about something that isn’t done,” he says. “After sixteen months on Imajica, all my publishers knew was a two-minute verbal summary that I gave them at a convention which describes probably the first thirty pages of the book. ‘It’s about a forger, and he’s in love with this woman, and the woman left him, and the husband calls him up and says, I’ve set a murderer on her trail, and the murder is quite a strange guy.’ And that was it. I said, ‘It’ll be a very long book, it’ll be a fantasy, it will be very sexual, and that what it will be, guys. And after sixteen months and fourteen hundred pages, here it is, hope you like it. It’s the baby, let’s hope it hasn’t got two heads.’”

But doesn’t he ever long for feedback before the book is done?

“It’s part of the creative process for me, that you don’t use up creative energy talking about the project,” Barker explains. “There’s a saying among poets, that there’s two kinds of poems. One is the kind that poets talk about in bars, the other is kind that poets write. And I can believe that—there’s something poets boast about, and then there’s the kind that you sit down on a Monday morning in front of a blank piece of paper and you actually produce.” His voice becomes very serious, almost reverent. “I don’t talk about the poem in the bar. I don’t talk about it at all.”

A few minutes in his company, however, convinces me that he’s not shy about his identity as a public figure. At one point in the book-signing, he spotted a Stephen King bookmark, and suggested a Clive Barker bookmark to the Harper-Collins publishing representative hovering over his shoulder. “We could just have a picture of my erection,” he grins. “Of course we’d have to enlarge it quite a bit.”

The Little Professor people smiled nervously. There were children present. “How would they know it was yours?”

“Oh, I’m known around the world,” Barker said, then laughed again.

The paradox of this man who loves paradoxes is a contradiction between Clive Barker the secretive, almost monastic writer, and Barker the compulsive communicator, agitating, smiling, shaking hands and signing everything put in front of him.

“You know,” he says, reflecting, “there’s a book about me coming out next week called Shadows of Eden, which is biography, plus bibliography…I went through the book and I thought, all the real important details of my life are actually in the novels. Every single obsession, all my taboo stuff, all the private preoccupations, all the fears, all the hopes, are there. Maybe they’re encoded, maybe they’re presented as allegories, but they’re there. And the rest of it is just husks. But, we live in a world that thinks about people in terms of numbers, that thinks of authors in terms of thirty million copies sold. Simple, trite ways to classify people.”

Why is he so careful, so protective, of that imaginative, creative process? “I think the imagination is the only truth,” Barker says. “And every other experience, the pain one suffers, the people one loses, the people one gains, the loves one has, are folded into the texture of your imagination, and reconfigured, and transfigured, and made over as metaphor, in order to achieve, hopefully, some universality, so that it doesn’t become some trite listing of events. When you write, you hope that fantasy will make the material sing, and make people say, this is happening in my souls, too. This is happening in my spirit, too.”

He takes a deep breath, and laughs tiredly.

“And each book you fail, and you go on to the next one.”

Is it snowing in Tulsa?

Because it is here.

And I'll be finding out first-hand about Oklahoma winters when I fly out to Tulsa next month to talk to the Tulsa Ink Slingers Writers Group, January 5th. If you're in the area and want to come by, make sure to get all the information here. For more information and to RSVP, follow the link under the "appearances" list on the right.

Oh yeah, and I finished the revisions on The Black Wing this morning and sent it off to New York.