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Posted on 11.11.09 by Wolven @ 9:50 pm
Comments on this: 9 so far. Add your own.  The second stop on the road of my Not-A-Top-5 for Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Novelists That Use Dreams to Crack Your Head Open In All the Right Ways... Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a sprawling, convoluted tale of a found manuscript which recounts the exegesis of: a non-existent film and family; a conspiratorial friendship; a young man's inability to deal with death, intimacy, and hereditary madness; the mutable nature of communication in the shared soul that a home creates; and a house which is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. All of these things are the same thing, and they overlap and intertwine in a tragic, hopeful arc that runs from Virginia to Hollywood, from the Arctic sea to the Mediterranean, and through the minds and lives of three men who may all be the same man, or the man for whom whichever of them is "Real" is searching. It's the faulty recall and outright lies of Danielewski's characters and his ability to craft the world around his people in such a way as they are not infallible, but imminently flawed, which, when coupled with the interwoven themes, places, and states of mind mentioned above, make this entire work an exercise in parsing the memory of dreaming. Each footnote is a step on a giant spiral staircase of the unconscious, and each chapter a landing, and whether you're going up or down, you find yourself pulled not only into the lives of these people, but into the spaces between them. You find yourself in that hearty darkened hollow in the centre of each of them that keeps them apart, keeps them from seeing each other, and which, ultimately, is the only thing that can help them put themselves back together. Categorized as: Books
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Posted on 11.05.09 by Wolven @ 12:54 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Our first stop on the road of my Not-A-Top-5 for Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Novelists That Use Dreams to Crack Your Head Open In All the Right Ways... Caitlín R. Kiernan's story world has a thread in it which could be said to "start" with Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time. Threshold itself is precisely about the sheer horror and terror of learning that there is more to the world around you than you ever suspected, that there are lasting consequences to every action you take, and that theme continues through every story set in that world. Each of the stories thereafter puts the reader into the mind of any of the vast number of broken and slightly deranged personalities to be found in... well... Reality, really. Each of her characters has distinct histories, flaws, needs, drives, fears, outright phobias and aversions, all of which bring them to full, nuanced life, making them a part of the fabric of the world. Even her "villains" have complex motivations. And they all dream. Categorized as: Books
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Posted on 10.26.09 by Wolven @ 11:44 pm
Comments on this: 2 so far. Add your own.  Wolven here again. I'm back from the wilds of a future time where the southeast portion of the United States is the desert it only pretends to be in our present autumn months, and the cities of Atlanta, Charlotte, and Birmingham have the beaches they've always wanted. From the considerable effort I was having to exert to follow the rule "never read your own press," I gather that people had… Feelings, one way or another, about my premier piece, here on Need Coffee. And that's good, because we're going again, and this time I want to talk to you about something you dang kids don't talk nearly enough about these days: Novels. Now don't get me wrong, we talk about Fiction all the time here. We talk about Important fiction all the time, too. Comics, music, movies; all of these are deeply important. But, just for a little while, let's talk about some books, and let's talk about the writers of those books. Categorized as: Books
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Posted on 10.16.09 by Widge @ 6:04 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own. For today's kickoff, a bit of what I did while in Baltimore for the Poe Bicentennial as part of my 32 Days of Halloween special trip. Here's a walkthrough of the Poe House there in Baltimore, which was open for a viewing of Poe's "body" on October 7th ahead of the funeral that took place the Sunday following. I give a brief...well, brief...on what you're about to see. There's some annotations and such in the video to help explain what the heck is going on. Enjoy. Direct link for the feedreaders. For still shots of some of the items inside as well as some exterior shots of the Poe House, check out this gallery on our Facebook page. And, you know, become a fan while you're there. It's painless. Honest. For the official site of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, who runs The Poe House, you can find them here. Categorized as: Books
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 Wolven, while he works in his monstrous lab concocting his follow-up to his Magic in Comics post, offered up this archival interview he conducted with author Hal Duncan on September 14, 2006. Hal Duncan is the author of Vellum and Ink, both discussed below, and also Escape From Hell!, which came out last year. Wolven: 1) For the record, what is your name? HD: Hal Duncan. W: 2) Many would say that "modern magical practice," as spoken of by people like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Phil Hine, and those others counting themselves as "modern magicians," rests in an idea of the manipulation of language as a way to manipulate concepts and thereby dictate perception and interaction with the world. HD: a) I think it would have to. I'm an atheist, nihilist, existentialist, materialist, when it comes down to it, albeit with an idiosyncratic view on materialism which doesn't preclude the irrational, the indefinite and the downright chaotic, so any theory of magic that requires a spiritual / material distinction, that posits it as an appeal to supernatural entities or incorporeal agents active in a "higher" realm, doesn't hold water for me. If magic were to exist, to me it would have to be a natural phenomenon. Categorized as: Books
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