New York Comic Con

I'm going to be haunting the Javits Center next weekend. On Saturday afternoon I plan on checking in at the Del Rey booth, maybe meeting some Star Wars and horror fans and walking around with my kids.

On Sunday, one of our favorite children's authors, Mo Willems, creator of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and the Elephant and Piggy books, is going to be there . I really want to come up to him and yell, "Lunchtime!"

Updike's Space Oddity

I met John Updike at a signing at Borders back in the late '90s. He was a consummate gentlemen who handled the crowd effortlessly, signing books for the long line of people who came out to see him. The guy in front of me wanted him to inscribe the words, "To Bill, Get down with your bad self, John Updike," and Updike happily obliged.

Being the semiliterate genre hound that I am, it only makes sense that Toward the End of Time is the only John Updike novel I've read from beginning to end. Roundly considered a lesser work at best, TTEOT is set in the future, dismissed by critics as a science fiction oddity, and one of my favorite reading experiences of the '90s. I love Updike's take on the future war between UPS and FedEx, the little electronic creatures that plug themselves into electrical outlets, and the description of the main character's somewhat pathological loneliness. Writing about it here makes me want to take it down and read it again. And, perhaps ideally, I remember how reading it made me want to write.

Fangoria? Fangoria!

If you live anywhere in America's northeast, you probably woke up this morning to something that looks like the last thirty minutes of The Shining. Personally, I spent the morning in snow-covered NYC, slogging like Shackleton across midtown Manhattan, from the Random House offices up to 80th and Broadway to pick up a dozen bagels at H&H Bagels, the best in the world. As the weather worsened, and my socks went from damp to soaked, I remembered that I'm supposed to be working the midnight shift at the hospital tonight, and had to regretably cancel a visit with my agent and catch a train back.

Anyhow, arriving home in Hershey to my own polar outpost, I discovered that Deathtroopers has been popping up all over the place, from this cool writeup at Slashfilm, to this one at Fangoria. Check 'em out if you dare!

Update: Deathtroopers also gets this awesome writeup on Joblo.com, one of my all-time favorite sites!

Deathtroopers!

Keith, my former Random House editor and current West Coast superstar, clued me into this red-hot news freshly posted over at Star Wars. I actually hadn't seen it yet -- but I'm stoopid with happiness about it right now!

What's not to love?

Dead Snow is a Norwegian horror movie about Nazi zombies attacking a group of skiers. As a fan of 1977's classic Shock Waves -- which still sets the bar for the subgenre of undead Nazi super-soldiers -- I already thought this new flick sounded pretty awesome. Then I saw the above poster art, and I realized why Dead Snow is premiering at Sundance: it's got that subtle understated humanist charm of a real indie classic.

And oh yeah...I can't wait to see it.

Take Cover!

Mark, my editor at Random House, just sent me this awesome PDF for the cover art of No Doors, No Windows, due out in November.

Getting cover art is gobsmackingly awesome. It's like Christmas for the author. And I think the art department did an especially awesome job on this one. Can I use the word "awesome" one more time?

Hope you like it as much as I do...

My First Star Wars Interview

Jay Tomio over at BookSpot Central just ran a new interview with me about Deathtroopers, my upcoming Star Wars horror novel. Kudos to Jay for the terrific questions -- and for accommodating my paranoia about letting any specific plot details slip about Deathtroopers.

Which is all the more difficult for me, as my wife will attest, because I'm terrible about keeping secrets...