NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS - First blurb

It's not out until October, but No Doors, No Windows scored its first blurb today, and it's a doozy:

"NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS draws us into a fearsome, doom-haunted world that closes down like a trap. A knockout book!"

--Peter Straub

To say that I've been a huge fan of Straub's for twenty years is to badly understate the case. Let's just say that I spent years trying to unlearn his monumental influence on my work. Getting a blurb from him is like sitting in with Pharoah Sanders on a late-night set in a dark jazz club. What else can I say?

Color me ecstatic.

Torpor and Lassitude on a Saturday Afternoon

Some of us have to go in to work tonight.

And some of us are cats.

Philly Book Festival

What do you do after you work the midnight shift till 7 AM, sleep for three hours and wake up with one eye glued shut? Well, if it's 70 degrees and sunny with moderate winds, you pack up the kids and head off to where the wild things are -- i.e,, the Philadelphia Book Festival.

We got to Philly around lunchtime and wandered around the Free Library. After grabbing some sushi at Whole Foods, we returned to the Children's Department where I ran into Susan Orlean, who was there to read from her new children's book Lazy Little Loafers.

Here's Susan and me just seconds before the small atomic bomb exploding between our faces vaporized the entire festival:


At Susan's reading, I also met up with Rob Swartwood , and he loaned me a copy of Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which I can't wait to dig into. I also scored some paperback goodness off the used book stores outdoor tables, bringing the day's haul up to a not-so-even five.

Let's take a look, shall we?



Along with Everything Ravaged, you've got Donald Westlake's God Save the Mark, Charlie Huston's Six Bad Things and a Thomas Ligotti collection The Nightmare Factory, which I've never heard of before, but just happens to be the title of my favorite iPod playlist.

All this and no parking ticket. Can you beat that?

Back from the Dead, Again

So the question is, where does this guy go?

My blog postings have dropped dramatically in the last couple months. It's not that there isn't anything happening...quite the opposite, really. I look back at the months where I was posting ten, fifteen, even twenty entries, Mr. Happy Blogger Man, while my actual writing output more or less flatlined.

I've been working hard on the new novel that I started over two years ago, and have repeatedly set aside for more pressing (ie, bill-paying) projects...and I'm about to put it aside again. And this is okay. In the past I've been paranoid about setting these things to the side for fear of losing momentum, and while this is a legitimate concern, I'm not as worked up about it as I used to be. My change of philosophy is partly due to necessity -- you can't sign a book-contract with a deadline and ignore the thing to keep tinkering with your own little toy truck. But also, I've discovered, throughout the long pre-publication road for No Doors, No Windows, that some extra time, space and daylight can actually be beneficial for a work in progress. There was a time not so long ago when I thought that a book had to be written at roughly the same breakneck pace that you hoped it would be read, but I'm not sure that nostrum holds true for everything. In fact, I'm pretty sure it doesn't. So I'm letting the novel breathe for a couple months and taking a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. It'll be warming up soon and I'll be retreating to the basement office, seeking out cool shadows where the dark things dwell.

Meanwhile, the best way to keep current with me is on Facebook. If you haven't already joined me there, think about, maybe, huh?

Vachss Populi

I don't know how you feel about Andrew Vachss -- up till the other day, I couldn't remember how I felt about him. It had been a long time since I'd read a Vachss novel (I think it was probably Blue Belle, back in, oh, 1988?) and I remembered enjoying it, although the ironclad ubertough first-person voice of Vachss' narrator Burke was sometimes so hardcore that the sophisticated seventeen-year-old headed-off-to-college smartass that I was back then probably found it a little over-the-top at the time. (I try not to have many regrets, but I do wish I could have gotten out of my way a little more often back then and allowed myself to enjoy the things I actually liked.)

Anyhow, I came back to Vachss the other day, just in time for what appears to be the final Burke novel, Another Life, and it's just as galvanizing as I remember, and totally up-all-night absorbing. The plot, such as it is, revolves around the abducted infant son of an unimaginably wealthy Saudi prince, and the length that various shadowy pseudo-government types will go to to get the child back, all of which pivots, naturally, on Burke and his underworld-wired, super lethal "family of choice." Burke's contacts will give him whatever he wants or needs if he helps them get the kid back.

So much for the plot. But the real reason to read Vachss is for the prose. Here are two examples, drawn from the same page:

"Max can feather-brush a nerve juncture and put you down, temporary or permanent. His target's vulnerabilities stand out for him like candle points in a crypt."

And this almost surreal description, just a couple paragraphs down:

"Frightening Wesley wasn't possible. The human-skinned demons who assembled him from spare parts of terror-traumatized babies left fear out of their creation. They ended up with a thing fueled by a chemical coldness not found in nature."

This is showboating, but it's showboating of the very first water. Vachss's Burke knows much more than he lets on, and he knows how to let the details seep through stealthily as well. Like here, on the very next page, with this description of the Saudi prince, a man whose wealth and power literally knows no bounds:

"The Sheikh had never developed liar's skills. He had no reason to learn them, and no one to practice them on. Why lie when anything you say becomes the truth?"

And listen to the way Vachss, in a single sentence, zooms down with the rack-focus precision of a pinhole camera in the hands of meth-demented Orson Welles:

"The Mole reconfigured the torn-out pay phone in the South Bronx as Clarence lounged against the metal pole, one hand inside his dull-khaki coat."

Reading those lines last night, I felt the same high-voltage spinal charge I experienced (but couldn't quite permit myself to enjoy) as a high school senior. Like the very best of his breed, Vachss writes like a demonic auctioneer of souls with a brown recluse spider coiled up inside his mouth. I just joined the International Thriller Writers, and registered for ThrillerFest in July in New York City, but the fact is that I don't read as many thrillers as I'd like. But Vachss is something else again. He's a rat-starved reticulated python that goes wherever his appetites take him, a code-blue trauma patient whose Type AB negative worldview just happens to fit in the "crime and thriller" section of the bookstore shelf. Like George V. Higgins and other stylists whose obsessions led them into the American criminal demimonde (a term that the ever pretentious seventeen-year-old me no doubt would have adored), Vachss can sometimes get lost in his own thorny prose, but more often than not, its just so damn much fun to hang out with him that you just don't care.

Of course I want to know how (and even if) Burke and his people get the Sheikh's baby boy back. But that's not really the point. The point is the Voice, and in the case of Another Life, the Voice hauls the freight.