The Mumpsimus

When God commanded this hand to write In the studious hours of deep midnight He told me the writing I wrote should prove The Bane of all that on Earth I lovd —William Blake, "The Grey Monk" Over the last month or two, I've started and stopped reading dozens of books, many of them clearly quite good, even excellent, but none of them able to hold my interest in amidst busy days of work, life, etc. And then I found myself reading a lot of Clive Barker for the first time in many years. (I don't seem to be alone — see this excellent Weird Studies podcast episode from last last month with Conner Habib discussing The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser .) Barker's short stories and novels have captured my reading with their wild commitment to imagination and their seriousness of intent within popular forms. Sacrament is both a summation of the first 15 years or so of Barker's concerns and a departure from the overtly horrific and then phantasmagoric work. Some supernatu...

Today (May 2, 2023) is the official release date for The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories . Mostly, that just means it's now available from the online booksellers — it's been available from the publisher for a month and has been making its way into independent bookstores for a week or so. International distribution will be a little longer. Ebook, too.  But still, we need one day to say, "The book is published!" — and today is that day. I have some interviews in the pipeline (keep your eyes on Lit Hub and Cemetery Dance ) as well as a Largehearted Boy playlist. Also, I will be doing an event at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on May 26 with a couple friends (details TBA). I'll put some notes about the book below, but like a public radio or tv broadcaster, I must pause here to say that if you appreciate the book and/or me, the best thing you can do other than buying a copy is to rate it and leave a review on sites like Amazon and Goodreads . Like so much else i...

I do not think of myself as a sadistic person. I have been, at heart, a pacifist from my teenage years. I was a strict vegetarian for 13 years because I did not want to benefit from the suffering of animals, and even now, an omnivore, I only occasionally eat meat. I have spent a lot of my professional academic career working against the cruelty that often pops up in education. I believe that anger is a poison and kindness is the only sure guide to ethical behavior. And yet ... I love it when readers of my stories tell me they were disturbed, unsettled, uncertain, discombobulated — and I especially love it when they say, "Your writing gave me nightmares." For instance, a friend who picked up an advance copy of my new story collection at the AWP Conference texted me: Reader, I love this reaction. Like laughter at comedy or arousal at pornography, a nightmare is an involuntary response. In their own ways, such responses are the ultimate praise for the work because they do not...

If I were preparing to teach a course in fiction writing (something I haven’t done for a few years now), I would be tempted to assign Joan Samson’s 1975 novel The Auctioneer , because it is both not a bad book and also a book with some specific flaws that prevent it from being a great book. These are the most instructive texts. I started reading The Auctioneer with great hopes. For one thing, it is set in central New Hampshire, where I live, a place often ignored by fiction writers. (You might be surprised how few notable works of fiction are set in rural New Hampshire, a place that has attracted plenty of writers to visit or live, but fewer to write about.) It has the reputation of being a lost classic, a book that got good reviews in hardcover, sold about a million copies in paperback, got optioned by Hollywood, and then disappeared, probably because its writer died tragically young of brain cancer, and so a promising career became a single pretty good book. In recent years, it has...

At the end of an interesting episode of the Hermitix podcast, Jesuit priest and professor of theology Ryan Duns says that he has been thinking about how to write his next book, one built partly from his course at Marquette University on “Evil, Horror, and Theology”, and that he has struggled with a focus for it as well as a title. His original idea for a title was The Dark Transcendent: The Metaphysics and Theology of Horror , but because that makes the topic so large, he is now inclined to call the book Horror: A Theology . I would eagerly read a book with that title, especially one written by someone with as deep an understanding of theology as Duns, because most of what I’ve read on the topic of how horror intersects with theology feels superficial or reductive. Yet horror is the mode of storytelling most reliant on systems of belief and unbelief, both as subject of its stories and as tool for its effects — thus horror is the mode most inclined to exploration of how belief matter...