Leave it to Steve

• Stephen King speaks the truth about Stephanie Meyer in USA Weekend.

..."I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me," King explains. "People always say to me, 'Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?' And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, 'This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.' I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. ... The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good."

The state of the short story

• Stephen King proclaims the short story alive and well in The New York Times.

Could have done without the bloodstained graphic -- what, exactly does that have to do with anything, except to serve as an unnecessary reminder that King has written scary books? Still a good read, as always.

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.

And yet. I read plenty of great stories this year. There isn’t a single one in this book that didn’t delight me, that didn’t make me want to crow, “Oh, man, you gotta read this!” I think of such disparate stories as Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” John Barth’s “Toga Party” and “Wake,” by Beverly Jensen, now deceased, and I think — marvel, really — they paid me to read these! Are you kiddin’ me???

Talent can’t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. If these stories have anything in common, it’s that sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out amazement. I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive — like “Sans Farine,” by Jim Shepard — I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a pear.”

Thrills and chills -- in monthly doses

• Stephen King's new novella will be serialized in Esquire.

I love the strange irony of this, considering King's first story sales as a writer were to other, less well-regarded "men's magazines." This, of course, isn't his first shot at serial storytelling -- there was the The Green Mile, which read awfully well as a serial, despite its wanderings into gloppy sentimentality in the last section and its perpetuation of the odious Magic Black Man cliche. There was also "The Plant," which was published in installments on his official website (and, as far as I know, has yet to appear in a print collection).

According to Esquire, "The Gingerbread Girl" tells "the story of Emily, who flees to the secluded Vermillion Key off of Florida's coast after the death of her infant child. Her new neighbor also enjoys the privacy of the key, but the women he brings with him never return home. Emily's curiosity leads her right into the hands of the madman, but it's her legs that are her only hope for survival."

Reactions to real horror

Various writers chime in on the Virginia Tech shootings.

• Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post:

First is the peculiar nature of the gun violence. Cho, it seems, wasn't a sniper, a marksman. He wasn't shooting carefully, at a distance. He wasn't, one can assume, aiming. He was shooting very much like Chow in the Woo pictures, with a gun in each hand, as witnesses state, up close, very fast. Woo saw gunfights in musical terms: His primary conceit was the shootout as dance number, with great attention paid to choreography, the movement of both actors within the frame. He loved to send his shooters flying through the air in surprising ways, far more poetically than in any real-life scenario. He frequently diverted to slow motion and he specialized in shooting not merely to kill, but to riddle -- his shooters often blast their opponents five and six times. Perhaps all that was at play in Cho's mind as well.

• A. O. Scott in The New York Times:

From this near-certainty Mr. Hunter makes a short trip to the assertion that during his rampage Mr. Cho “was shooting a John Woo movie in his head.” Evidence for this speculation is found in Mr. Woo’s fondness for two-fisted gunmanship, which Mr. Hunter credits him with introducing into movies, and also in a scene from “The Killer” that Mr. Hunter finds “strikingly similar to what must have happened Monday.”

It is hard to say what all this proves, other than that Mr. Hunter has no peer when it comes to wielding the conditional tense on deadline. He does not suggest that Mr. Woo is to blame for Mr. Cho’s actions. But his article does conjure a story line — the loner in his room watching ultraviolent movies on DVD, gathering inspiration for his own real-life action movie — that has unmistakable and familiar implications. Like guns, it seems, certain movies in the wrong hands can pose a threat to public safety.

This may be true, but only to the extent that a disturbed mind is apt to seek external confirmation of its own disturbance. It seems somewhat fair to conclude that Mr. Hunter, in linking Mr. Cho’s rampage to Mr. Woo’s films, was simply trying to make a guess as to the features of the killer’s mental world.

• Finally, Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly:

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

When hack novelists strike

• Clive Cussler's iron-fisted grip on the film of Sahara is dissected in the Los Angeles Times.

I once saw George Romero relate a great Stephen King anecdote. Romero was talking about how whenever someone went up to King and complained how whichever movie ruined his book, King would point to the bookshelf and go, "No, they didn't. The book's right there." I kept thinking about this the entire time I was reading this article. I find it ironic that Cussler, whose junk-food pulp-adventure novels have long wallowed in blatant racism and sexism, considers the many screenwriters who tried to turn a turd into a diamond as "hacks."

As a best-selling author, Cussler was used to getting his way. "Traditionally, all my editors have suggested changes and I have only followed them 20%," he said in a deposition.

Cussler's approval rights troubled the movie's creative personnel, who were unaccustomed to catering to the whims of a novelist.

Studio officials at Paramount, the distributor of "Sahara," resisted Cussler's active participation in the script, according to Karen Baldwin, who served as executive vice president of creative affairs for Anschutz's film company.

"Paramount has always been cagey in that respect — urging us to keep you out of the loop and lie when necessary," Baldwin wrote Cussler in July 2003. "Essentially, Paramount feels … the author should not have much input when it comes to script."

In all, Anschutz's firm spent about $4 million on writers, many of whom produced scripts that Cussler deemed inferior. In one memo, the author wrote that the money producers have "thrown down the sewer with hack writers is a crime."

It's the typical Hollywood bullshit -- throw money at it, that will always work, right? -- but it's still incredible to read. Aspiring screenwriters, take note...

Writers as characters

• The Onion A.V. Club selects 6 Memorable Books About Writers Writing.

The winners: Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, The Poet by Michael Connelly, Misery by Stephen King, Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. A fun selection, and much preferable on the whole to Dave White's rather pedestrian "Writers on film" article at MSNBC.

Boo!

• Terrence Rafferty surveys some recent horror novels at the New York Times.

I've always been amused by the constant, unending dismissal of the horror genre by mainstream literary critics. You could just about do a book on the subject; hell, it took nearly a century for H. P. Lovecraft to get the credit he deserved, but that's the way these things work most of the time. Rafferty is then, of course, obligated to get his apology out of the way in the first paragraph of his piece, but once that's done, he gets into some interesting waters:

The ability to embody your fears and anxieties and revulsions metaphorically may or may not give you pleasure or contribute in any measurable way to your mental health, but it's a perfectly legitimate function of the working brain: one of those operations that help you maintain the appropriate respect for the power and weird beauty of unreason, its relentless prankishness, its capacity to prick us with sudden joys and sudden dreads. Horror fiction, even at its direst, frequently betrays an unexpectedly giddy quality, a sense of heedless, headlong freedom that's the proper effect of a good metaphor, building and rolling and breaking like a wave of the sea.

As with all genre fiction, horror writers work too much and too fast, too often rely on serviceable but weary conventions to get themselves through a rough patch of plot and are generally rather too quick to sacrifice aesthetic unity to speed and raw shock. But the reckless grip-it-and-rip-it approach to storytelling is less damaging to this genre than it is to, say, detective fiction, because the feeling of being at least a little out of control is basic to the experience of horror. What's terrifying in a story by Stephen King or Peter Straub is, finally, nothing less than the sensation of pure helplessness, of confronting something that cannot be conquered — or regulated, or even understood — by reason alone. At its worst, horror is just a scary, kind of exhausting amusement park ride. But at its best, it can produce effects close to Rimbaud's ideal: the derangement of all the senses. If that's your thing.

I always responded to the metaphorical side of top-notch horror lit; the sense that the worst nightmares were all around you, in the everyday world. Gore and bloodshed weren't really the attraction; I grew up in farm country and saw more than enough carnage to numb me to its fictional counterpart. Few, if any, horror books/movies ever really frightened me; suspenseful they could be, yes, but not necessarily terrifying in the sense that I had to go to sleep with the nightlight on and the closet door flung wide open.

But the horror genre is one that not only embraces the dark side of humanity, but runs towards it, to learn more. Of all the writers I can think of with an esteemed literary pedigree, only Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind as an example of a writer who's taken horror conventions/tropes and bent them to her will, and not gotten blackballed as a genre hack in the process. (I'm waiting for someone to correct me here...) Horror, to me, is an immensely fertile ground for metaphor and drama, a genre you can really put to interesting use if you're so inclined, and Rafferty's piece is a very welcome exploration of its possibilities.

So anyhow... go say hi to Damien today.

What kind of crap are you reading this summer?

It must be the temperature; the higher it goes, the lower the standards sink. Like such a fuddy-duddy I sound, but still... how it is that summertime came to equal dumb, weightless entertainment has always mystified me. Yeah, I like to see girls in bikinis and shit blowing up just as much as the next guy. That's me, down there in the middle of the theatre, hooting at car chases and leering at Keira Knightley, mainlining Skittles and soda like heroin. (Oh, and in case you haven't heard: Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane.)

Still, when it comes to the reading, my habits tend to be inversely proportional to the rest of the world's. (I save the silly crap for the wintertime, when I'm so brain-fried by cabin fever that even a Clive Cussler potboiler could seem stunningly profound.) Last summer was the one I picked to dive into Swann's Way and War and Peace; the summer before, it was Heller's Something Happened and Barth's Coming Soon. I don't know what it will be this summer, but impossible behemoths like Gravity's Rainbow and Life and Fate are keening their siren song. (But please, friends and relations, if you catch me with schnozz a-buried in something gloriously disreputable like Carl Hiassen or Joe R. Lansdale, just pretend I'm mastur-- er, masochistic -- and look away.)

So over at Slate, currently in the midst of a welcome celebration of pulp fiction, authors chime in: Scott Turow is diving into Greg Iles, Michael Connelly and Ridley Pearson; Thomas Mallon is rolling around in Kenneth Anger; Rick Moody is soaking up a Motley Crue tell-all. There are snooty exceptions, of course. Michael Chabon claims that he doesn't "change what I read when I go to the beach or on a vacation. I just read more." Joyce Carol Oates and George Saunders politely refuse to answer the question, with Saunders' explanation being a particular standout (in that unmistakable Saunders fashion):

For my money, the best beach read is How To Get Sand Out of Your Private Areas, by Hitch C. Groyan. Ha ha! No seriously. The best beach book is I Floated Nearby, Full of Envy by Moby Dick. It's the heartbreaking, true-life story of a whale who longs to come up on the beach and befriend the wealthy, joyful people he sees there but can't, because he has no legs and is totally naked. Also, he is a little sensitive about his last name. In the sad conclusion, this cranky guy named Ahab kills "Moby" to make him into lantern oil, only to find that lanterns are no longer used. Then—I haven't read it in awhile—I think Ahab gets so depressed about the lantern thing that he cuts off his own leg, and then this crocodile keeps chasing him around, and the crocodile learns to fly and decides never to grow up, and asks the audience if they believe in fairies, and then gets arrested for using language insulting to gay people. It's sad, but it's also depressing, and really makes you think while totally bringing you down and making you want to have about six more drinks and go for a swim.

Not to be outdone, USA Today asks the same question of writers including Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Wally Lamb and E. Lynn Harris. Always the straight shooter, King, when asked about his summer selections, cuts to the chase:

Why these authors? "Because they're good!"

From the page to the screen

• The Guardian picks the 50 best film adaptations of books.

Another list to nitpick, this time slightly less so. There's a definite British slant to the selections (The Day of the Triffids?), but it's a pretty good collection nonetheless:

1984
Alice in Wonderland
American Psycho
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Brighton Rock
Catch-22
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
A Clockwork Orange
Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
The Day of the Triffids
Devil in a Blue Dress
Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
Doctor Zhivago
Empire of the Sun
The English Patient
Fight Club
The French Lieutenant's Woman
Get Shorty
The Godfather
Goldfinger
Goodfellas
Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Jaws
The Jungle Book
A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
LA Confidential
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
The Maltese Falcon
Oliver Twist
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Orlando
The Outsiders
Pride and Prejudice
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Railway Children
Rebecca
The Remains of the Day
Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List)
Sin City
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Talented Mr Ripley
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
To Kill a Mockingbird
Trainspotting
The Vanishing
Watership Down

It seems that, unlike the WGA's recent "101 Best," they're judging the merits of the screenplay adaptations before the film itself, which is a tricky tightrope to walk; some books flat-out resist a filmed adaptation at every turn, where others are practically tailor-made for the screen. Some others I'd nominate:

Dolores Claiborne, scripted by Tony Gilroy and directed by Taylor Hackford, always gets my nomination for the most underappreciated Stephen King adaptation, second only to Rob Reiner and William Goldman's take on Misery. (I've never been a fan of either the film of The Shawshank Redemption or the original novella; it's King at his more preachy and ickily sentimental.) Dolores Claiborne is a book-length monologue by the title character; Gilroy restructed the story somewhat and despite a jarring, tacked-on courtroom finale, it's consistently gripping. Hackford's stylish take on the flashback sequences is amazing.

Waterland, adapted by Peter Prince from the novel by Graham Swift, is particuarly good, once you get past the Americanized plot elements that are rather obviously grafted on. Like Dolores Claiborne above, the story incorporates many flashback sequences that somehow maintain the heft and magic-realism weight of the novel. [It just so happens that the film is playing tonight -- 4/20 -- on the Independent Film Channel at 9:15pm. Unfortunately, the print IFC is using is panned-and-scanned; Stephen Gyllenhaal's filming of it takes every advantage of the Panavision widescreen process and can only be truly appreciated in that format. Image Entertainment will be releasing the film on DVD next month.]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, from the novel by Milan Kundera, tends to split people straight down the middle. Most people I know who've read the novel hate the movie, and vice versa. I like them both very much, but they are, by neccessity, very different beasts; the film is fairly linear, whereas the novel is decidedly not so. Philip Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carriere did the adaptation, and Kaufman directed.

The Woman in the Dunes, adapted by Kobo Abe from his novel, and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Abe is an acquired taste, but if your taste happens to run towards unsettling, threateningly erotic surrealism, then he's your man. This is the kind of adaptation you watch and, if you're familiar with both, you think, "It couldn't have been done any other way." It helps, of course, that Abe did the adaptation himself, but Teshigahara deserves a lot of credit for crisply visualizing Abe's strange, almost otherworldly textures and shadings. [Abe and Teshigahara collaborated twice more, on adaptations of Abe's novels The Face of Another (1966) and The Ruined Map (1968), both of which have yet to be released on video in America.]

Deliverance, scripted by James Dickey from his novel, and directed by John Boorman. This is the movie that's essentially responsible for every redneck-psychopath stereotype in every movie made since; apparently, there are many people in the world who truly believe there are toothless, shotgun-toting rapists behind every tree in the American South. Get past that, and you're left with truly one of the best movies ever made, one in which Dickey's poetic examination of masculinity versus nature is preserved with tremendous clarity and resonance.

There are plenty of other great adaptations that didn't make the cut -- The Last Picture Show, Wonder Boys, In the Bedroom, The Manchurian Candidate, The Pledge and especially A Simple Plan are others that come to mind -- but these are some I think are particularly worth singling out.

It's a guy thing

• The Guardian explores "the books that move men."

And the winner is... Albert Camus' The Stranger. (Apparently, across the pond it's known as The Outsider... po-tay-to, po-tah-to.)

Yeah... check. That one's been an all-time favorite ever since I read it in English class in 11th grade. But the Big 3, the books that really reshaped my conception of writing, were Richard Adams' Watership Down, George Orwell's 1984 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Orwell, of course, gets the mention in the Guardian piece, but then again, he's a homegrown hero over there.

We found a strong sense of nostalgia among male readers as they looked back to their formative years; many had tended to lose interest in fiction in favour of non-fiction on entering into adulthood. One consequence of this was that several men admitted that they were reluctant to reread a book which had been almost painfully important to them at puberty. "I'm afraid I might find it mawkish now", "It might not live up to my memories", "It might read as dated now" became familiar responses.

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

I admit, I haven't reread any of the above books in many, many years, but not necessarily because I'm afraid of finding them to be lacking; it's just that there are too damn many other books I haven't read yet.

As for authors who've become mentors by proxy, well, I've read just about everything Stephen King has ever written, but I wouldn't necessarily consider him to be a guiding light. (Despite the fact that many of his books feature as a central character a screwed-up writer type.) I have, though, discovered authors and gone through phases where I read everything by them I could get my hands on; writers including (but not limited to) Richard Russo, Arthur Koestler, Don DeLillo, John Barth and T. C. Boyle have always left me hungry for more.

Lawsuits, interviews and another publication's demise

• A Turkish judge has dropped charges against novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Pamuk caused a ruckus a while back by classifying the wholesale slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, as well as of Kurds in the 1980s, as genocide, an opinion that the Turkish public was apparently not ready to accept. The charge against Pamuk was that he “insulted Turkish identity.” It’s a good thing the judge found a handy legal loophole to use as an escape chute; it saved the government from having to address the fact that they’re trying to suppress alternative viewpoints.

• Donald Trump is suing New York Times business reporter Timothy O’Brien.

O’Brien, as well as Time Warner Book Group and Warner Books, have the lawyer-hounds at their heels because O’Brien’s new book, TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald, quotes anonymous sources that allege Trump isn’t nearly as wealthy as he says he is. I got five bucks saying they’ll call each other names and point fingers and eventually settle out of court for some absurd undisclosed amount.

• Video: Bill Maher interviews Stephen King at Amazon.com.

For a strange new experience, watch Bill Maher interview Stephen King via Amazon’s new online video program, Amazon Fishbowl (a.k.a., “All We Really Want Is To Be The Home Shopping Network”). The interview starts out with the usual softball questions, but quickly gets interesting once Maher brings up James Frey and lets King, a former user/abuser himself, express his total lack of surprise that a drug addict might make a few things up. It’s too bad they both look like corporate shills in the process.

• Charles McGrath details the closing of The New Leader in the New York Times.

Another one bites the dust:

Over the years The New Leader attracted a band of loyal contributors who amounted to a not-so-short list of everyone who was anyone in liberal intellectual circles: George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Willy Brandt, Albert Murray, Hubert H. Humphrey, Theodore Draper, Bayard Rustin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George F. Kennan, Murray Kempton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Ralph Ellison, Hans J. Morgenthau, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to name just a few. All of them wrote for nothing, or in recent years for what Mr. Kolatch calls a "tangible token" of $100 or so. The sociologist Daniel Bell, whose connection to the magazine is perhaps the longest of anyone's, dating back to when he was a student at City College in the late 30's, said recently, "When you think about it, it's remarkable that The New Leader was able to sustain itself for so long."

Collaborations, kiss-offs and sad farewells

• John Mellencamp and Stephen King are collaborating on a musical.

King’s always been a fiend for rock music -- he played for years in a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, members of which included Ridley Pearson, Amy Tan and Dave Barry (and may still, for all I know) -- and in his liner notes for W.G. Walden’s soundtrack to the miniseries of The Stand, he professed a love for “blue jeans music,” a blue-collar, working-class, grassroots sound. I wouldn’t have thought of Mellencamp first -- Springsteen, maybe -- but the results should be pretty interesting.

• Text-messaging ushers in a new way to communicate.

In my junior high days, it was a hastily-scribbled note that you handed the girl before running off to shop class. Now your cell phone beeps and you learn you’re newly single. Until cell phones come with standard QWERTY keyboards (and some of them already do), writing text-messages is always going to be a pain in the ass. I don’t necessarily think that tapping out a 160-character text message automatically makes you an “emotional cripple;” it’s just a means to an end. But I’ve always been skeptical of instant messaging -- it’s a shortcut, no more or less, an easy alternative to an application of thought and effort -- and until the next slick new toy comes along, people will hide behind it as long as they can.

• The West Virginia miners left goodbye notes to their loved ones.

Tom Toler identified the body of his youngest brother. And then he was handed a message from the dead man. In wobbly printing, written in ink on the back of an insurance application, 51-year-old miner Martin Toler Jr. said goodbye. For now. "(I'll) see them on the other side," the note said. "It wasn't bad. I just went to sleep. I love you."

Everyone hail to the pumpkin song

I love Halloween.

David J. Skal’s illuminating book The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror is a must-read. Skal takes the genre seriously, and does an exemplary job of examining the social and historical contexts from which great horror and science-fiction tales emerge. The umbrella term “speculative fiction” has long allowed for much political and social commentary, disguised as simple monster films; it’s often a great way for storytellers to make points without having to get all obvious about it. Authors like Anne Rice and Stephen King get their discussion time, with a particularly interesting section on how Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” series dealt metaphorically with the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s. And it’s always fun to read about the controversies, too, from fun bits on the original screen adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein to a recounting of a 90s-era editorial in the New York Times that objected to the look of the Crypt Keeper, the “host” of HBO’s short-lived Tales from the Crypt series, because its emaciated resemblance was too reminiscent of starving Iraqi children(!). Skal’s work is well-researched and refreshingly nonjudgmental, and it’s a fun, juicy read to boot; also recommended as a companion read is his Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween.

Stephen King’s digressive Danse Macabre came along at a time when, if his On Writing is to be believed, his own bad habits were getting really out of control. Like any prolific author, King has had his peaks and valleys, and Danse Macabre, a book-length essay on the horror genre whose approach predated the aforementioned The Monster Show, was written just as his fictional work took a decade-long spiral into excess. Still, as a funhouse tour through King’s influences, likes and dislikes, it’s engaging and unpretentious, and he helpfully shines a spotlight on many lesser-known and/or forgotten genre works that helped shape his tastes. There’s a helpfully idiot-proof checklist of horror/sci-fi books and films, which makes for a great video-store decision-maker. And then, of course, there are the classic King white-knucklers: The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Pet Sematary and Misery, all terrific pieces of storytelling.

Gaslight is the online archive of a discussion group, hosted through Mount Royal College, “which reviews one story a week from the genres of mystery, adventure and The Weird, written between 1800 and 1919.” There’s a ton of great stuff available on the site, all public domain; old-school ghost stories from Oscar Wilde, Louisa May Alcott, William Makepeace Thackeray, Kate Chopin and Joseph Conrad reside alongside the usual suspects (H. G. Wells, O. Henry, Arthur Conan Doyle). There’s also a great selection of stories from Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek-born, British-educated journalist who began his career in Cincinnati in the 1870s. Later in life he became a legal citizen of Japan, and his collection of supernatural Japanese folk tales, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things became the basis of a remarkable 1965 film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Also sprinkled throughout are a number of excellent nonfiction pieces, including a particularly interesting essay by H. P. Lovecraft called “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”

Another good resource for horror texts online can be found in the horror section of short stories at east of the web.

The standbys:
- The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
- The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
- The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs
- Famous Modern Ghost Stories, edited by Dorothy Scarborough (1921)

Great scary tunes:
- Krzysztof Penderecki: Anaklasis, Threnody, etc.
- John Zorn: Magick and Rituals
- Michael Nyman & Damon Albarn: Ravenous
- Bernard Herrmann: Psycho

Great scary flicks:
- Ginger Snaps
- Diabolique
- Carnival of Souls
- Suspiria

Call it "visual literature"

I’ll admit it -- I’m one of those narrow-minded snob assholes whose brain shuts off when a comic book crosses my vision. You know the cliché, the ones where all the men look like Schwarzenegger and all the women look like no woman ever looked. I’ve never cared much for superhero comics; in my brief comics phase when I was a kid, I leaned more towards the old E.C. horror books published by William Gaines, like Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt.

The forward-march of the comics world is kind of old news at this point; both mainstream and literary authors have been taking tricks from them for years. Stephen King’s E. C. tributes include his graphic novels Cycle of the Werewolf and Creepshow (both with art by Berni Wrightston). Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves resembles a scrapbook, from which an engagingly fractured narrative emerges. And Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close plays similar games with typography, photos and a flip-book effect at the book’s close that serves as its final, haunting image. Comics may not be revolutionary in and of themselves, but their influence on other literary forms is, at this point, undeniable.

These days, write-ups in The New York Times Magazine give them a patina of respectability, which demands that the label be “graphic novel” or “comix;” whatever it takes to separate the healthy main course from the junk food. That comic-book-based film franchises like Spider-Man and X-Men are far better than most typical Hollywood tentpoles has everything to do with the fact that each has a tremendous well of source material to draw from, however pulpy. And it’s ironic, albeit unsurprising, that the films of two of the comics world’s more venerated “literary” works -- Alan Moore’s From Hell and John Wagner’s A History of Violence -- eventually reached the screen with their storylines severely truncated and/or reworked, and in each case for the worse; each film did away with practically everything about the source novel that was interesting in the first place. When businessmen and focus groups call the shots, expect only tits, gore and explosions for your dollar. (Unless that’s the book’s raison d’etre; ergo, Sin City.)

I bring up the film adaptations only because comic books and graphic novels owe much to the movies, and vice versa; both are a mash-up of literary and visual storytelling. Whereas mainstream popular filmmaking has essentially flatlined (and will continue to devolve as long as the corporate-controlled studio system remains in place), graphic novels are taking major strides in innovative directions, if only because, for the moment, it seems like the inmates are running the asylum.

If there’s an enfant terrible of the current comix scene, it’s probably Chris Ware, for better or for worse. His Quimby the Mouse, for example, is an enormous coffee-table-sized book with so much visual and literary content jammed into 56 pages you reel from sensory overload the second you open it. In his Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, panels crawl backwards, forwards, upside-down and in circles on the page, making finding the next frame just as much of a challenge as deciphering its storyline. All of this show-off technique, however, only serves the narrative, and it’s a doozy: an exquisitely sad evocation of loneliness and familial history so wrenching that at times it’s hard to keep turning the pages. Ware’s bratty, to be sure, and his reach sometimes exceeds his grasp, but at least he’s reaching to begin with.

Not all of them are impenetrable, however. Craig Thompson’s Blankets tells a very simple first-love story, between cloistered young teenagers who meet at Bible camp, with great dexterity and emotional resonance. Thompson’s wintry landscapes are evocatively rendered, and his artistic flights of fancy are mostly earned; they crescendo in an extraordinary frame where a car containing one of the young lovers drives out of the other’s life -- and off the edge of the earth. His earlier book Goodbye, Chunky Rice tells a similarly poignant tale, albeit in a more oblique fashion (here’s the moment to apply that first-book curve).

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and its sequel have gotten a lot of press, as has Art Spiegelman, who arguably created the long-form literary graphic novel with his Maus series and, more recently, put out an amazing oversized collection called In the Shadow of No Towers, featuring his unforgettable post-9/11 New Yorker cover painting. And Alex Robinson has carved a Nick Hornby-esque niche out for himself with his books Box Office Poison and Tricked. The field of literary comics has also been helped tremendously by publishers like Atlanta-based Top Shelf Productions, who have created a kind of safe haven for up-and-coming artists to thrive; they currently boast Thompson, Robinson, Moore, Eddie Campbell, Ed Brubaker and James Kochalka among their stable.

Oh, just try one.

Knocking on the fourth wall (quietly, so no one hears)

Notes on modernism

People are drawn to art because it provides something calming, taming. Regardless of how your emotions are flamed, you still give yourselves over to the experience. You surrender something of yourself to the whim of the storyteller and his lyre; passivity is what you give in exchange for transcendence. It’s a tonic; like any other, you can get drunk on it, addicted to it.

So when someone taps on the fourth wall -- that no-fly-zone where artists aren’t supposed to travel -- it’s no surprise when the alarm is sounded. The furor isn’t over content but the delivery of it. Modernism in art has become the equivalent of getting handed a grenade, inside of which are the keys to the kingdom. Yeah, you can get ‘em out, but why the hell would you want to?

The basic disconnect is between writing and storytelling. We grow up with stories ringing in our ears, the lessons of Aesop and Grimm and the Bible attempting to shape our lives and experiences with morality and sense and decency. Storytelling is another name for the great tradition of oral histories, the passing-down of intricate, interconnected tales via the music of words and the quicksand of memory. But the vessel that brings us these stories is never questioned; what matters is only what they say, and not how they say it.

Then along come these upstarts. Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne, all the way down the line to Joyce, Faulkner, Pynchon and Barth. Whatever the purpose, one thing is clear: the story and characters may or may not be there, but the writer sure is, and he's the real star of the show. Other writers might chafe at this, but the best way to go about it is to write what you know, and whom else do you know better but yourself? Sometimes writers will go all the way and make themselves major characters in their own stories. Barth did it with Coming Soon!!!; Roth did it with Operation Shylock; even Stephen King does it in the later installments of his Dark Tower series. Is it experimental playfulness or just egomaniacal pretension? Well, it's probably a bit of both. Once you master the training bike, it's only a matter of time before you're trying to pop a wheelie.

A writer ultimately answers to no one but himself, and those that realize that they don’t sit down to write like Dan Brown or Tom Clancy but to get at something else altogether drive themselves crazy (and everyone else around them). The path to progress is strewn with the bodies of a bunch of writers who’d have done a lot better putting pencil to paper instead of their own throats. Stories are complete, tangible. They begin and end. They’re stepping stones -- they’re terrestrial. Storytellers build them for us. Ideas, however, aren’t so compliant. They're pliant, liquid, untouchable. If they’re your stock in trade, you’ll probably end up in a rubber room, because they're also like cockroaches -- they’re impossible to kill, and they breed quickly. You go crazy just trying to keep up.

Modernism is exhausting, to be sure. Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel is an enormous, bratty, tiresome novel that revels deliciously in the fact that it has no real story to tell, and has only the ammunition of outrage to offer. Reading it in one sitting is much like having teeth pulled. Yet you step away from it and are able to see its inventiveness of structure, playfulness of language, and sheer narrative bravado that you can’t believe it isn’t required reading in first grade. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is basically one long joke on the reader, and as such, it’s a howl, just as experimental and wildly imaginative as Gargantua, but Sterne is just as exasperating at times as Rabelais, and not quite as willing to shock and provoke. Yet the book's exuberance is infectious and, like the madman that banged his head against the wall because it felt so good when he stopped, you can’t put it down for very long.

And the whole modernist bent -- a form that flouts form -- sticks around, and always finds places to take root. Animators at Warner Brothers took many cues from surrealist and Dadaist art of the time period and filled the classic Looney Tunes cartoon shorts with stylistic and narrative devices that never let the viewer forget they were watching a cartoon. Monty Python’s entire reputation is built on their willingness to peel back the curtains, point and laugh. And writers themselves are always doing the same, even though many profess to abhor revealing the tricks of the trade. So many writers have written about writing over the years -- introductions, forewords, afterwords, notes to the reader, essays, whole books -- that it’s almost become de rigueur to put out the obligatory nonfiction collection of essays on the craft at some point. So much for the magician and his secrets.

If anything, modernism reveals our inmost secrets and most embarrassing frailties, which is why it’s never received with adulation. It’s annoying to keep having the rug yanked out from under you. Your ass starts to hurt after a while. But that’s the thing about pain -- it lets you know the engine's still working, that you still can feel.