Category Archives: Books

Veteran Writers in Oceanside

Books,

I’ll be taking part in the inaugural showcase of So Say We All’s Veteran Writers Program, featuring men and women across several generations of military service detailing the poignant, surprising, and darkly funny struggles, missteps, and unforeseen pitfalls that come with transitioning from military to civilian life. 

This event will be held on December 6, 2014 from 6pm to 8pm at the Oceanside Library 330 N. Coast Highway in Oceanside, CA. I’ll do a multi-media presentation of a salty story form my past and sign books after the show. 

Horror Business

Books

You know Ryan Bradford as the editor of Black Candies and from his hilarious San Diego CityBeat columns. He has a novel coming out early next year called Horror Business and he’s been asking people for their favorite scenes from scary movies. I came clean and confessed to my ridiculously unreasonable reaction to Salem’s Lot, a made-for-TV movie adapted from a Stephen Kind novel. (The photo above holds the clue to what freaked me out when I was 11 years old.)

In the movie, a young boy named Ralphie Glick goes missing. His family thinks he’s been abducted but the audience knows the truth: he’s been turned into a vampire. His brother Danny finds this out the hard way when Ralphie turns up one night, tapping on his bedroom window. Somehow Danny doesn’t notice that Ralphie isfucking floating in the air and opens the window for him.

Now it’s on and these creepy Glick Brothers are tapping on windows all over town and going on a blood-sucking rampage. Danny sets his sights on his friend, Mark Petrie, a horror movie buff with a Luke Skywalker haircut. Mark knows his monster movies and he repels Danny with a cross. You can watch the scene here.

Ryan also says some very kind words about “Brains for Bengo,” one of the spookiest stories in my collection Big Lonesome. 

Ottessa Moshfegh in BOMB

Books

Fascinating interview with Ottessa Moshfegh about her process in BOMB Magazine 

When I read a novel, I want my sense of self to disappear. Take Bukowski’s Womenfor example. I don’t feel that he’s trying to impress me, and I feel I can adopt Chinaski’s psychology, digest it, and still be surprised and excited by it. The questions it raises for me, at least the last time I read it, aren’t questions about craft or authorship. I’m not wondering how Bukowski wrote the book. As soon as I start wondering about that, the book is dead.

I’m really looking forward to reading her novella McGlue, to be published later this month by FENCE Books. 

Books

For its 48th installment, The Floating Library embarks on a journey back in time — several journeys actually — to the deaths of every signer of The Declaration of Independence in Damien Ober’s debut novel: 

It seems that a swift and terrible plague known as “The Death” is sweeping through the colonies and killing two out of every three people. Though no one knows for certain how the disease is spreading, the doctors racing from signer to signer to stop the devastation suspect the Internet is to blame. Yes, thatInternet.

The easiest way to pigeonhole Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America is to call it a work of counterfactual fiction—a story that takes the facts as we know them (the names of the signers) and mixes up a few things (Internet plague). In other words, Ober has written a “What if?” story for the ages.