The nineteenth entry in the Bury Me… series features US-based Stephen Graham Jones, author of Demon Theory among others, and by day Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“Just realizing that this is a completely different question than What book have you reread the most, or even What book is your favorite book, though I kept trying to read it that way. Since you asked, I’ve generated lists and lists, and consulted old lists, and it’s too painful to select just one, but at the same time I keep wanting to allow myself to cheat, just string ten or twenty together here, the same way you wallpaper your room with band posters when you’re fourteen, in hopes somebody’ll walk in, see how obviously cool you must be.
Or, really, I kind of gave up on an answer, was ducking the reminder I’d set to do this. But then, yesterday, I was writing the notes for this story collection I have coming out, and it hit me, or, I discovered it on the page, which is pretty much where I discover everything: It. Stephen King’s It.
That story’s still running in my head, is probably the most permanent piece of fiction I’ve ever read. The most influential, anyway, the one I’m just now seeing that I’ve always been trying to rewrite without getting caught. Because, even just looking at it on my shelf, that’s enough for me to see some chrome eyeballs rolling my way, sure, but the real magic of that story’s those kids, their dynamic, how they’re growing up together. With It, you get the horror but you also get the, I don’t know, the distinct sense of what it means to be human, and to keep trying to be human, even when the world’s failing all around you. A completely magical book for me, and I so appreciate the way it splits into all these distinct storylines but then comes back together. I mean, reading it, just remembering it, I know it’d be dangerous to be in that story, and it’s likely stupid to secretly want to be, but, just for the chance of gambling everything on that bike ride at the end, the chance of gambling and winning, it’s got to be worth it, yeah? My heart’s pounding, even, writing this. Just thinking about that story again, about It.
I’m going to have to read it again now, soon. Need to get back to Derry for about a thousand pages.”
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About Stephen Graham Jones:
Stephen Graham Jones has seven books out so far, two of them horror – Demon Theory and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti (the second a Shirley Jackson Award finalist) – and has two more horror novels on the horizon: The Ones That Almost Got Away, a collection of horror stories out with Prime Books in October, and It Came from Del Rio (Trapdoor Books), Book 1 of the Bunnyhead Chronicles.
Jones has been an NEA fellow, a Texas Writers League fellow, has won the Texas Insititute of Letters Fiction Award and the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award, and, in spite of all that Texas stuff, he now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, assigning Jack Ketchum to his students every chance he gets. His next two courses are The Slasher and The Zombie.
Visit Stephen’s website at http://www.demontheory.net/
July 19th, 2010
Bury Me‘s eighteenth instalment focuses upon the UK’s Gary Fry, whose short stories have graced my shelves since I encountered Both And way back in 2003′s seminal Gathering The Bones anthology…
“…E Mortius Revoco, a Guide to DIY Practical Resurrections.
Only kidding.
In fact, that’s a hard question, but put a gun to my head (and let’s face it, such an act would bring the grave a tad closer) and I’d have to say Money by Martin Amis. I love it. One of those books you can read from start to end with undiminished pleasure, or simply dip into and revisit certain seminal passages. The prose is wonderful, the jokes as dark and funny as they come, and the whole thing is frequently profound, provocative and stimulating. Amis is my generation’s big UK voice. Nuff said, sir.
Here’s a short extract to illustrate only some of the foregoing eulogising:
In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop you ashes or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown sky line carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hours, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF–BOOZE–NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.
What I love here, as in the great majority of Amis’s work, is the brilliance of the ideas, their phrasing, the way he alludes to great literature by way of tawdry modern life (“God’s green snot”). He has made the hideous beautiful – quite an achievement. If great writers hold up a mirror to their times, what is Amis giving us? In Money, it’s the way that the whole of social life has been commodified and subjugated to the rigors of capitalism. John Self is a void, a man who moves from one effortless addiction to the next. When he goes to watch an opera, he interprets the story according to a soap opera or a tabloid headline story. He’s drunk most of the time, but those blank-outs serve another purpose. Amis also offers us a meta-reflective rumination on the nature of novel writing. Characters disappear for great patches of all novels – Self simply blacks out: a nicely judged metaphor what happens when the reader ‘isn’t looking’. But Amis goes further, and later in the book we get a character called Martin Amis who’s deliberately manipulating his central character much in the way that ‘Godlike’ authors do: a smart touch. There are other things going on in this novel which beggar belief. The complexity masquerades as endless vitriolic and painful comedy. It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever read. And if Self achieves a little pathos and independence towards the end of the book, what are we to make of this? Is he redeemable? Are our times? Are we?
On the basis of this book in particular, Amis has been described as a misogynist, but nothing – in my view – could be further from the truth. Selina Street manipulates Self, for sure, though it’s he who holds all the money and that’s what she’s after. And of course it’s another female character, Martina Twain, who attempts to reform Self, even though, when left in her flat a while, he spends rather less time reading the copy of Animal Farm she’s lent him than he does seeking out choice bits of photography over which he can masturbate. But come on, that’s all true – it’s so true. And that’s the bottom line for me: Amis tells it the way it is for men in these not-so-long-departed modern times.
Maybe he’s therefore a geezers’ author. I’m not entirely sure. All I do know is that his fictional worlds resonate with me. The headiness of the language is intoxicating. He does what V S Pritchett insisted all writers should do: give voice to all the wonderful thoughts inside even the most base of people. And boy is Self base. But…maybe we all are. Maybe Amis is reminding us of that, and perhaps he uses his divine gift for prose as a way of smuggling these truths through the ever-so-refined filter of ‘good taste’. In short, he challenges what literature is supposed to deal with, the higher aspirations and concerns of humanity. Well, what can I say to support that? Something in the style of the superb Money, maybe: okay, here goes – Bach, Galileo, Shakespeare, Churchill, Keats, Constable, Brunel, to name but a few – they all surely enjoyed a handjob now and again.”
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About Gary Fry:
Gary Fry lives in Dracula’s Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying when he was thinking about that character. Gary has a PhD in psychology, though his first love is literature. To date he’s had four short story collections and over 60 tales published. His first novel – a frightening haunted house piece called The House of Canted Steps – will be published in 2010 by PS Publishing. He also has a disturbing novella – the colourfully entitled ‘The Invisible Architect of Psychopathy – out from Pendragon Press in 2010: this accompanies a fine piece by Simon Maginn in a book called Feral Companions.
More news and views on Gary’s new website at: http://www.gary-fry.com/
July 12th, 2010
Many of you will be familiar with our guest today, Johnny Mains. His mission to resurrect The Pan Book of Horror Stories has made him an instant legend in the horror community. As I said to him in a recent Facebook exchange, he is at the forefront of Horror Reanimation.
I invited Johnny to join us here in the Hell-realms of Horror Reanimated where we could interrogate him properly – a chat on Facebook never quite satisfies, does it? At least down here, where the walls drip pus-thick sulphur and our interrogation equipment never fails, we could get to know each other…more intimately. He could barely wait to get his genitals through our mini-guillotine!
Unfortunately, Johnny pressed the wrong button in the lift (B is for Blowtorch not Basement!) and got a bit of a roasting.
Joseph D’Lacey: Hi, Johnny. Thanks for riding the elevator down to Satan’s crypt – where the resident bloggers are enslaved for all eternity. You’re looking a little crispy but I’m sure we can soon excise the excess dermis. Anyway, we’re delighted to have you here – Mathew’s been blunting his razors in anticipation.
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July 6th, 2010
The seventeenth entry in the Bury Me With… series; Paul Kane, one of the nicest men in genre fiction I’ve met, offers up his choice of entombed reading matter.
“My choice for this shouldn’t come as much of a shock, bearing in mind myself and my better half Marie have just co-edited an anthology based on it which came out from Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster) last September. Yes, of course it’s The Hellbound Heart by my favourite author, none other than Clive Barker (we just removed the definite article and added an ‘s’ at the end – Hellbound Hearts – clever, eh?). The other small-ish clue was that I also wrote a book focussing on the film series this novella spawned, The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy. Obsessed? Me? Naw. It’s just that The Hellbound Heart, which was originally published back in 1986, contains the seeds for such a rich and never-ending mythology, that the short book itself is a springboard for many other tales; or at least it was in my imagination. After reading it for the first time, and later watching the movie based on it, I found myself asking questions like: who are the Cenobites, really? What are their day-to-day lives like? (I know, I’m a weirdo, right?) How many other people have they visited after various puzzles have been solved?
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July 5th, 2010
Bury Me With‘s sixteenth entry features the choice of UK writer and editor James Cooper…
“If ever there was a more fitting book to be buried with than Clive Barker’s Books Of Blood, I can’t for the life of me imagine what it might be. I’m one of the lucky few to own a copy of the definitive Stealth Press hardback editions containing all six volumes in one glorious package. I cherish it beyond measure. It’s protected by a Mylar plastic cover and weighs 4½ pounds – the equivalent of about five pints of beer (and, yes, merely in the interests of research, I have checked). Suffice to say, it is not a book to be read in bed. Again, I’ve tested this so you don’t have to and can report that my feeble triceps, accustomed to lifting only one beer at a time, were unable to support the book for more than a few minutes. Pathetic, I know, but true…
Still, it is a book that elevates the spirit each time I hold it in my hands. It reminds me of something hot and primal, beyond the simple act of reading, as though merely to own such a thing has the capacity to quicken the blood. These stories, all thirty-one of them, possess the unique quality of every great story: when you read them for the first time, they feel fresh. Unlike anything you’ve ever read before. It doesn’t matter if you first read them back in 1984, or if you’re reading them for the first time now, these tales retain a pulse of such startling originality, such raw, elemental power, they become the yardstick against which one instinctively measures everything else, from Bradbury to King, and all the pretenders that nestle in between.
Why are the Books of Blood so good? Because they complement each other so beautifully. Because they enrich the soul of the reader. Because every brutal stroke of Barker’s pen reveals something new. Because at the heart of every story lies the truth.
Don’t take my word for it; go and read them for yourself. Or re-read them. I defy you not to be mesmerised by the sheer variety of the tales, the humanity (and inhumanity) of the characters, the dark poetry embedded in Barker’s prose.
Ah! To be buried with the Books of Blood. How sweet eternity…”
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About James Cooper:
James Cooper’s latest collection of stories, The Beautiful Red, is available from Amazon or direct from the publisher, Atomic Fez. He is the author of the novel The Midway (Crowsing Books) and is the editor of the anthology Dark Doorways (The Prufrock Press). A collection of interviews with some of the leading lights in dark fiction, In Conversation: A Writer’s Perspective, was published by the British Fantasy Society in September 2009.
June 28th, 2010
The fifteenth entry in the Bury Me With… series features a genre author who has utilised the power of the internet with his free series fiction, garnering word-of-mouth recommendations like no other: David Wellington came to prominence with his Monster Island zombie series. He’s thought long and hard about his choice…
“The answer to that question really depends on the context.
Assuming that I am cremated, as I would prefer, I wouldn’t like to take any books with me at all. I’m not in favor of burning books under any circumstances. Not even Twilight.
If I were to be buried in a traditional pine coffin, a circumstance which presumably would only happen if I died anonymously in some foreign land, perhaps a tropical country where bodies are required by law to be buried as quickly as possible, well. It’s unlikely that the kindly folks who bury unknown bodies would waste any more money on buying books for the anonymous deceased. If they did, I hope that some cosmic twist of fate would make sure it was one of my own books that I was buried with. Hopefully – and here we’re getting into the realm of extremely unlikely events – they would also seal the book in some kind of plastic that would last a very long time. The whole point of these improbabilities is that when my bones are eventually uncovered by some future society, the highly advanced energy beings who dig me up will either a) realize that these are the bones of a long forgotten but underrated author from another era, or b) be so confused that I will become one of those unsolved mysteries of history that bother people so much.
In the far more likely, if less sanguine prospect that I was somehow buried alive – that is, if I was to fall victim to some sort of deep, coma-like sleep but a (highly incompetent) doctor mistakenly diagnosed me as, in fact, dead, and the coroner, all the morgue assistants, funeral home director (too cheap to embalm my “corpse”), and family all failed to correct the mistake – then I would like to be buried with a blank book for use when I wake up inside my coffin. Given the conditions that I never obtained in life, i.e., peace and quiet, plenty of free time, and no high speed internet access, I believe I could finally write my masterpiece. Hopefully I would finish it before I asphyxiated. Alternatively, if all of the above happened but – cruel fate – I was accidentally buried, alive, with a blank book but no pen or pencil to write with, I would at least be able to appreciate the terrible morbid irony of the situation.”
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About David Wellington:
David Wellington is the author of seven novels. His zombie novels Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet (Thunder’s Mouth Press) form a complete trilogy. He has also written a series of vampire novels including (so far) Thirteen Bullets, Ninety-Nine Coffins, Vampire Zero and Twenty-Three Hours, and in October of 2009 began his new Werewolf series, starting with Frostbite (all with Three Rivers Press).
In 2004 he began serializing his horror fiction online, posting short chapters of a novel three times a week on a friend’s blog. Response to the project was so great that in 2004 Thunder’s Mouth Press approached Mr. Wellington about publishing Monster Island as a print book. His novels have been featured in Rue Morgue, Fangoria, and the New York Times.
June 21st, 2010
I first discovered today’s featured artist when I stumbled across his blog. I’d been Googling my short story ‘The Food of Love’ to see if its ghost remained online. Instead, I found Nick’s site and his detailed explanation of an illustration titled ‘Brainburgers’. Nick had been commissioned to provide art for my story in an anthology now titled Darc Karnivale. His image of zombies queuing for ‘Brainburgers’ in a fast food joint appears in the book, as do many other fine examples of Nick’s work.
As you’ll glean from his frank responses to our questions, Nick has survived a lot to get where he is today.
Joseph D’Lacey: Welcome to Horror Reanimated, Nick. I’m glad you could make it all the way out to our quaint little corner of Hell.
Nick Rose: Joseph, I am very honoured. You know you’re Madison’s and my favourite writer, and you’re a wonderful man on top of that. Illustrating “The Food of Love” was probably my favourite assignment to date. And guess what? – This time next month everyone will be able to have a print or T-shirt with “Brainburgers” on it. And don’t worry, brother, if we sell a good many of these, we’ll send some money your way! After all, you gave me the idea…
Actually, this will be the very first time that fans and friends can buy prints of Nick Rose art. I really hope that I get the chance to work on more of your stories in the future.
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June 17th, 2010
The fourteenth entry in the Bury Me With… series features a relative newcomer to the writing scene, R.B. Russell. However those not yet familiar with his quiet unease might well recognise him due to his sterling work co-running the Tartarus Press.
“I’d like to take my old battered Corgi paperback The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen. (I would probably have taken the Collected Aickman if Simon hadn’t beaten me to it!)
Machen’s The Hill of Dreams was given to me to read at a time when I was immersed in Camus, Hesse and Sartre, and I read it as an existentialist novel; the story of an artistic outsider who has problems coming to grips with the world around him. What astounded me, though, and set it apart from the other authors I’d been reading, was the great beauty of the language. I found the novel hard-going that first time, but each re-reading has been a joy.
From The Hill of Dreams I went on to Machen’s Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, which baffled me completely. Why would an existentialist write horror stories? Machen, though, doesn’t really fit into any categories. His work suggests that there is more to the world around us than we may ordinarily perceive, and sometimes this revelation offers us great beauty, at other times great horror. An apparently banal marriage may conceal a wonderful, mystical love (A Fragment of Life), or the depths of evil (The Inmost Light). The Hill of Dreams, though, is Machen’s masterpiece, from the resonant opening through to the profound, echoing last line.”
About R.B. Russell:
R.B. Russell is the author of the short story collection Putting the Pieces in Place and the novella, Bloody Baudelaire (both Ex Occidente, 2009). His second collection, Literary Remains (PS Publishing, 2010) is recently published. Russell‘s stories have appeared in The Best Horror of the Year, Supernatural Tales, Postscripts and The Black Book of Horror. He runs the Tartarus Press with his partner, Rosalie Parker.
June 14th, 2010
The thirteenth entry in the Bury Me With… series. This week, Matt Cardin, in my humble opinion a uniquely philosophical voice in horror and weird fiction…
“The book I would like to be buried with is the unabridged facsimile edition of the late British philosopher Douglas Harding‘s frighteningly outsized and terrifyingly brilliant über-tome The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth – which I haven’t read in its entirety and almost certainly never will.
Let me explain.
The idea of a book that you’d like to be buried with differs significantly from the familiar challenge of choosing your “desert island book,” the single book that you’d like to have with you if ever you find yourself stranded on a desert island. The proper choice for that challenge is a book that you wouldn’t mind reading over and over again, one that you’d be perfectly happy to have as your sole and perpetual literary companion, so dearly do you love it and so inexhaustible do you finds its contents. (more…)
June 7th, 2010
Oh, joy!
Tonight, after months of scheming and dirty deals, I have finally snared the slippery and elusive Jasper Bark, author of Dawn Over Doomsday and Way of the Barefoot Zombie. We tracked him down using private detectives, crooked coppers and undercover prostitutes. After a failed blackmail attempt, we kidnapped his children. He said we could keep them. In the end, we had to resort to a large transfer of funds into his numbered Swiss account. There’s nothing we won’t do for you, the horror-lover, here at Horror Reanimated.
Okay, that’s a complete lie. We should have strapped Jasper into the ‘interview chair’ several months ago but I forgot.
Still, he’s comfortable now. Ears pinned to the backboard with carpet tacks, hands nailed to the armrests with a staple-gun. We removed his foreskin and eyelids – purely for reasons of hygiene, you understand; the filth of the dungeon just doesn’t enter the bloodstream properly if we don’t take certain precautions. Septicaemia should be setting in about now…
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June 4th, 2010
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About Stephen Graham Jones:
