A couple of months ago I had this whole rodent thing going on. Well, I ended up writing this crazed and ponderous analysis of The Great Mouse Detective and The Secret of NIMH and sending it off to Fantasy Magazine.

Enjoy!

If you have time tomorrow and six bucks you should go. No joke. I went tonight because, well, tomorrow I plan on sitting in the closet smoking slices of black cake and eating buttered toast.

Granted, most of the stuff was expensive (like signed first editions of William Lindsey Gresham's Nightmare Alley for $500 bucks expensive) but there were some bargains to be found. I picked up a collection of William S. Burrough's essays, Robert Bloch's Strange Aeons, and James M. Cain's The Enchanted Isle all for $25. I also picked up a book on Black Magic by Idries Shah, which ... ummmm... yeah ... who knew Ramen noodles could taste so good!

But the real reason to go is to see some of these books. First editions of the Oz books, Raggedy Ann and Andy, Stevenson's Treasure Island with NC Wyeth illustrations, zoological prints, maps, a Sears Roebuck travel guide to Russia circa 1875 (and actually quite cheap at $125), Jiu-Jitsu manuals from the 1920s (also cheap), something titled Private Life in the Middle Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt, and porn, old freakie-freakster porn -- Tijuana Bibles, histories of erotic postcards, and plenty of copies of that Ziegfield Jazz-age Beauties book. You know, the one with all those naked pictures in it.

You ever wonder what happened to those folks in those 50s beatnik nudie films (and don't tell me you haven't) -- come on down to the book fair and meet them. Almost every one of the dealers looks like the old couple from Rosemary's Baby.

And the people wondering around. I swear at least eight of them were Peter Bogdanovich.

Info here.

I for one welcome our new alien overlords.

I went out for lunch yesterday and came back with a large skull that tested the (thus far) good-natured tolerance of my new coworkers. It's a sculpted replica from a Phorusrhacos, a five-foot-tall mid-Miocene flightless raptor (skkyechan, are they technically raptors?) from Patagonia. When I saw it in the window I thought it might have been from an argentavis and initially had this falsely confirmed, but all that really mattered was that it's a giant carnivorous bird skull and I had to have it.

It came from The Bone Room, which is dangerously close to my new office and therefore at high risk of taking all of my moneys. The shopkeeper said she could get me a confuciusornis by special order. And they have tons of bugs. And a bumper sticker reading "Australopithecus ends in 'US'!"



Flighted ancestor or not, it's probably the closest I'm going to get to a gryphon anatomical reference without commissioning something unnatural. There don't seem to be commonly available casts of argentavis parts, but if there were, they'd probably look more vulture-like than I'd like anyway. (But they'd be damn cool.)

The store likely exists because of our proximity to Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology and associated research departments, so the fact that I was asked "what do you study?" was perfectly reasonable. But apparently I had the wrong answer, because I was asked twice by the same person in the course of my information gathering on how accurate this stuff was and, uh, whether I could get a confuciusornis. And this after I'd explained that I work up the street at a game design company. I even said "video game design", which probably still didn't compute. Yes, sorry, I am a non-scholar, a dirty impostor, in your shop and asking entirely nerdy questions about your bones. But she did sell me the skull anyway. And then asked what I studied again.

The appropriate response, which (in my exuberance over the phorusrhacos) I missed, was: I'm a game designer. I study everything.

On this day in the year 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition for confirming such blasphemous concepts as a heliocentric solar system and an infinite universe. Supposedly, the blessed fathers sealed his mouth by piercing his tongue and lips with a padlock "lest he speak his heresies unto the masses".

Galileo was tried in 1633 for the same heresy (heliocentrism), recanted, and got to live out the rest of his days under house arrest. In 1992, Pope John Paul II admitted that these trials could have been handled better.

I know for me it’s often like squeezing blood from a stone. And the debate over whether to outline or not is one of those classic, eternally ongoing discussions like “less filling” versus “tastes great.”

But for neat answers to the question of “how do you devise your plots,” check out this new post on the Odyssey Workshop Blog. It includes not only my answer but also those from Lane Robbins, author of the novel Maledicte, Rita Oakes, who has a story forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Matthew Rotundo, who won Writers of the Future last year, and other Odyssey grads. Interesting answers, all, even though their processes are all very different.

I’m having one of those afternoons where everything I’m made of seems to come apart and lie there spread out on the carpet for me to rummage through like plastic pieces from three dozen different building block sets I’ve been accumulating since I was three. And the turning world rolls a sunbeam across the whole angular mess and up the wall and then gone, and I sit here trying to get back to what I was doing—writing, trying to get the legos back up into their towers and buttresses and balustrades—but all I can do is keep pulling them down, turning them over, thinking This is what I am.

So I’ve been reading Little, Big. Probably not the safest thing to be doing in this kind of mood.

Some books are so good they drive me back to the blank page with sticks and lashes, shouting, “You can do this, you have to do this, do it!” Other books, better books even than that, make me stare at the page and feel the world rusting, shouting, “You’ll never do that.” This afternoon, Little, Big seems to have made its way into a third, still more rarefied and elite subcategory, whose members, if I really wanted to depress myself, I could probably count on two hands: books that are a distillation of existence—of everybody’s existence, but of mine in particular—books that maybe happen to come at the right time and be about exactly the thing that occupies me at that moment in my life, or else maybe they’re always like that for everybody, because they are what life is about. Books that seem to know me better than I do.

“Kill the fatted calf,” Momdy said, the only one there to whom the phrase would have occurred. “And fricassee it.”

Every few pages, something like this leaps right up off the page and stabs me with a white-hot knitting needle. Then there’s a lull, a chance for me to catch my breath and quiet my bawling. Then it happens again.

They stared at each other wildly, all questions, no answers; and at the same moment saw that. Smoky clapped his hand to his brow. “But how could you have thought I… that I… I mean wasn’t it obvious I didn’t know…”

“Well, I wondered,” Auberon said. “I thought maybe you were pretending. But I couldn’t be sure. How could I be sure? I couldn’t take a chance.”

“Then why didn’t you…”

“Don’t say it,” Auberon said. “Don’t say, Why didn’t you ask. Just don’t.”

“Oh, God,” Smoky said, laughing. “Oh, dear.”

Auberon sat back on the floor, shaking his head. “All that work,” he said. “All that effort.”

This stuff is taken out of context, obviously, which probably deprives it of the power to do whatever it’s doing to me. Consider yourself lucky. But I suppose the force of the impact comes from that it’s archetypal and it’s real at once. It’s saying something universal, using ancient forms, but doing it simply and intimately, without barely even having to draw on the ancient or the universal at all, because it’s been building up a mountainous reserve of all it could ever need for the past four hundred pages.

This is why novels win over short stories in the end. On most any other day, I never would admit that. There are many, many short stories I’ve read that fit into tier one and tier two: they drive me to write, they drive me away from writing, they drive me back. But in tier three—I don’t want to have to count what’s there on my two hands, and I hate to admit it—but none of them are short stories.

I guess I just thought I’d gotten past the point where this kind of thing could bite me. Thought I’d taken enough classes in psychoanalytic theory and read more than enough fantasy and metaphysics and aged enough to make me immune.

Not so.

Drink deep from the skull of your enemies.

The second installment of my essay "War of Horror: The Horror of War" is now up at Fearzone-

http://www.fearzone.com/blog/other-name

This time, I am not competing with the lovely Eliza Dushku for your attention, so you can read about the nightmare of the Eastern Front without any pretty distractions.

Please leave comments so Greg keeps the column running. Next month, I look at horror in the comic book world. And, no, I will not be fawning over the Sandman (despite being, in my humble estimation, the best work Neil Gaiman has yet done).

JSR

Coming home on the subway, one of those new E trains that I swear are smaller than the old ones, and folks are crowded all around when this couple boards, and first they are talking about some gizmo called a BoomPod that you can hook up to your couch so it shakes when you’re watching movies. Then from the BoomPod it branches out to movies and from there things got hazy because the guy kept chattering.

The guy wouldn’t stop. He talked about how the moon landings were faked and Area 51 was real because Independence Day said so and extraterrestrials helped build the Pyramids and transporters a la Star Trek are right around the corner and the military has a spray that can let you walk through walls. He saw it all on the computer, or on the Discovery Channel, or heard it from a friend. The woman chimed in, saying how you never knew when something like I Am Legend might occur. At one point the conversation/monologue swung around to the Masons, and the guy said his pastor told him not to get involved with them, because they’re not quite Christian.

The whole thing had a weird/surreal quality to it, and the guy reminded me of my great-uncle, my grandmother's youngest brother, who had stacks and stacks of 1970s pseudo-science paperbacks all over his house. The stuff nearly covered the floor of his guest-room and was piled on top of the cabinets along with sleazy “suspense” novels. And he believed all this junk. Space aliens, telekinesis, witchcraft, and fairies. It entirely shaped his worldview.

And I wondered, "Shit. How many people like this are there in the world?"