Heroes

You ever have a hero? One you could rely on deep into the grave? In the last ten years or so, the term ‘hero’ has been taken away from people we idolise and handed back to people who do things like spread themselves across live grenades so as a bus load of school kids don’t have early funerals… and rightly so, but for the purposes of this piece, I’m rolling with the former because choosing something else doesn’t come close for me.

I’ve had a few and as the years have gone by, they’ve never let me down. Some are so obvious, they’re hardly worth mentioning if you know me. Paul Stanley from Kiss and Alice Cooper are the big guns. Their philosophy is not so different despite their (seeming) rivalry.

There’s also been a few that were a sign of the times - that I picked up and put down as I needed them - which might actually be the whole point of even having a hero.

I was obsessive about Bjorn Borg for a while simply because he was the ‘whole game’. I’m not sure what I got out of it but there it is. Boris Karloff was another… again, because when it came to monster movies, he was also ‘the whole game’. Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart - the whole game. There are a few others like this. Short life-spans with no other purpose but to dam the river when needed

But when it comes to books, it’s not so simple for me. Neil Gaiman came close, not least because I once picked up The Doll’s House Sandman graphic novel on a whim one Saturday afternoon back in something like ‘90/’91 (whenever it came out) when I was headed to a weekend-long party and was early for the train. (Of note here is that the money I spent on the book was supposed be money set aside for booze… go figure).

It had all the makings of the kind of party everybody talked about for years but I wouldn’t know. I spent the entire two days with my head in that book, drinking tea and eating whatever food my then (very understanding) girlfriend chose to put in front of me. Having presumably finished the book, I vaguely recall something about being chased by a horse in the dark and going home alone (natch). It was a long time ago but Gaiman has been pretty consistent and I’m still with him… but so is the rest of the world and that makes him a lot less attractive these days as a name to bandy about. These days I’m more likely to waft Michael Chabon’s name in front of your face as a name of somebody you should be reading. Mr Gaiman needs no more assistance from me at the moment.

Stephen King came close to a lifelong thing but wobbled too much and got replaced by Clive Barker… who also wobbled, but when I went back to King he was still too unstable for me. I keep up with them both still but it’s probably unreasonable to expect either to still be on their respective mountain tops, standing on one leg and juggling a very singular crown - particularly when John Connolly came along and whitewashed both of them for me.

Anyway, as the years have trickled by, those I didn’t recognise as heroes for the longest time have risen to the surface. Most of them were dead by the time I figured this out which gives it a certain kind of closure. It’s unlikely that they will become zeroes anymore - the work is complete. Raymond Carver, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Orwell and Dylan Thomas have weathered that storm with a certain grace I can only dream of but then, there’s this man:

One of the really big deals for me out in the world is J.D. Salinger. Aside from his books being some kind of misinterpreted influential template for my own work, I liked the way he went to his grave with two fingers in the air over never having his books made into films and how digital books could kiss his ass. It’s not how he wanted things to be and credit where it’s due, his estate continued to pipe cement into that wall since he died.

Until a year or so back:

His son, Matt, the very man who been mixing that cement since 2010, was interviewed by the New York Times and the article brought up some important things - namely, this:

‘…during a trip to China earlier this year, he realized that many young people overseas read exclusively on phones and digital devices, and that e-books were the only way to get his father’s writing in front of them.’

and from the horses mouth:

“He wouldn’t want people to not be able to read his stuff.”

And while we can sit here all day and argue that both Catcher In The Rye(55 million copies in 30 languages!) and Franny and Zooey are both still widely available in paperback (show me a bookshop without either and I’ll show you a bookshop without clue), the world has changed - and continues to change - bringing into sharp perspective my own observation that a book isn’t a book unless it’s actually being read. If somebody is not devouring the story, it’s just some paper with some thicker paper on the outside that lives on a shelf to show other people what sort of person you’d like them to think you are.

It brings up all kinds of horrible questions I never want to have to answer about what constitutes as ‘reading’.

But in the end, he’s right and if that’s the opinion of the last bastion of something I hold so dear, I need to swallow a plateful of humble pie topped with pride and also get to work on making things available digitally. It’s not so long ago that I seem to recall saying “Once you can read a book on your phone, the game will be over” and I would have been at least partially right.

There will always be those who love a physical book, how it feels in their hands, what it means to them and how they remember where they bought it from. Those are my kind of people but I’m damn sure that whole Gaiman episode I described above would never have happened if I had downloaded The Doll’s House to a portable reading device. Things change and time moves with it eventually crushing everything in its path that doesn’t want to ‘flow’.

It’s sad, but I guess it’s not sad at all if you’re under thirty. If you’re under thirty, it’s just the way things are and the way they’ve always been.

Out there in the world somewhere, there are most likely people for whom eight track was the Bees Knees too.

Time, huh. Can’t live with it…

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Footnote: Salinger also had a good line in quotes, so here’s a few of my favourites - all of which sound a lot like things that come out of my own mouth…

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to

There are still a few men who love desperately

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good anymore

OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF

Sometimes, things can pass you by for no reason at all. This album - Dregen - is five years old (maybe more) and I didn’t know it had even come out but this weekend, I found it and made everything right in the world again. If you’ve ever surveyed the landscape and considered rock n roll as you once loved it to be dead and buried… dream on sucker. What a great record this is for all the right reasons and somehow, digging it out of the earth with my bare hands has made it even better.

Meanwhile, I went wandering in search of wholesome brain food and Daisy Jones and The Six might be a very decent meal. I haven’t started this yet but everything is pointing towards it being a class act for all the right reasons and if my memory serves me well, it’s also heading for Netflix as a series sometime soon. I’m hoping it will shape up to be one of those books I’ll finish and wish I had written:

We appear to be in a great place for books at the moment. Despite - or in spite - of the world proclaiming print is dead, I swear I am finding more things to read than ever… or maybe I’m just open to different kinds of things, but I don’t think so. I’m treading the same path I have always trodden really. For instance, I picked up Gwendy’s Button Box - a novella by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar - and umm… sat until it was finished (bar a couple of breaks for coffee).

King has seriously come back to the table recently. This is a great read and - with a nod to the post I made a couple of posts ago about the Pushkin Vertigo novellas - I’m seeing an awful lot to love about the novella these days. So much so, that as a writer, I’m thinking the format might suit me more than anything else. There’s something immensely satisfying about them that I can really relate too. Stairway to Heaven is a fantastic (perhaps the greatest) piece of music to get involved in but sometimes you simply need that four minutes of Back in Black to plug your spirit into the mains of the universe.

The days are gone when I had the capacity for huge novels like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (maybe not forever but certainly for the foreseeable). Not that I don’t have the attention span for such things - rather that I have other things to do. At least I think that’s the reason.

Maybe I just like reading novellas and that’s reason enough.

Sion Smith: King of the Novella. It has a ring I could get used to… and more importantly, a shape to it that suits my brain.

Now and again, I dig some poetry too. Not every day like some people do, but occasionally my heart demands it. This is pretty cool if you like such things:

Oh… I forgot about this - mostly because I bought it, tossed it in the car and haven’t actually been out in the car since:

Never really paid a lot of attention to John Cooper Clarke’s work but I went into HMV to see why some Canadian thought it still had legs as a brand and for a fiver, I figured I’d give it a whirl. It’s the kind of thing I usually look at and think “I could do that” and then don’t do because when you really listen, find it’s harder to get right than you ever thought it could be.

But hey… the thought is there.

I have a dog to walk and work to do and so should you.

Later Gators…

Origin Of The Species

I happened upon a radio show today that had Brian Eno on talking about his life - or as much as you can in half an hour. There's a point at which he's talking about the first Roxy Music album and how they had been playing and rehearsing those songs every day for two years before they even hit the studio. I like that story because it goes some way to illustrating exactly why that first Roxy Music album stands up today.

There's an earlier part too in which he talks about the first time he ever saw a painting by Mondrian and decided, immediately, that he too - and very adamantly - wanted to do that for the rest of his life. 

"That's a good subject for a ploughing up of the field at the back of the head" I thought - so I fired up the hot water machine, made some coffee, sat and ploughed. 

Was there somebody out there that made me want to be a writer? There is, but being young, I decided that wanting to be Alice Cooper or Paul Stanley was far more exciting and that took up a lot of time - it's a big chunk of my life to navigate around but I made it.

Books were my constant companion long before music came down the mountain and avalanched me but somewhere out there is the one person that planted this damn seed in my soul - because after all... even when I was in a band, I was writing.

There's plenty of books I could name from when I was in single figures that I still think are fantastic works of literature, but will probably never be named as such. Emil and the Detectives is one. Black Hearts In Battersea is another - both are pretty well known even now. Then there was a book called Terry on the Fence that only a select few seem to recall and that was a great introduction to how realism worked on my psyche. 

At first, I thought the answer to this question was Stephen King. He took me to some dark places that I felt very much at home in after all. Then I thought harder and wondered if it were Peter Benchley because aside from Jaws, he also wrote The Island and The Deep (both of which are probably better books than Jaws) and definitely fired up my longing to live by the sea. Higher than both of these people on the list is Ed McBain. His 87th Precinct police series is the best the world has ever seen but I don't think he was the seed planter either.

I must hand the award I just made up to Stanley Morgan who wrote a series of books about a regular guy called Russ Tobin who was content to wander the world and see what adventures might come his way. They were loaded with humour, high on the sexual content (or at least a 'rom-com' version of it) but mostly they were about friendship and saying 'yes' to every opportunity that might come your way to see what might happen because the worst that can happen is that you'll find yourself back in your rented room in Liverpool selling sewing machines.

Man, we got a kick out of those books from the age of about 13 until we were 20 something, hunted down the missing books from the series in mouldy used bookshops the length and breadth of the country, hid them from our parents, loaned them to other people to enjoy (but always asked for them back) and revelled in the excitement that we had found magic nobody else had yet discovered. They are also the only books I have ever read more than once. I learned a lot from Russ Tobin.

Reading back over that, I would be more than happy with that as a legacy. Those are good things for people to say about you decades after your work has gone out of print don't you think?

Do what makes you happy. That's the lesson I ploughed up today.

Pretty Things

Isn't this just the best quote ever:

"I knew that Jaws couldn’t possibly be successful. It was a first novel, and nobody reads first novels. It was a first novel about a fish, so who cares?”

Peter Benchley

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This is neat:

Regardless of what people may say about him out there, Stephen King is an icon for a reason. 

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So... Sunday morning came around and we decided it was time to paint the lounge. A few hours later, the first coat was done and because we had taken all the pictures down and pretty much moved everything into another room to work with a blank canvas, we were left with a choice Put all the things we had just taken down back where they had come from or take the opportunity to replace them with something new... or at least different - and while I was looking for different, I found these: 

And then I found these:

All of which are just killer.... aside from the fact that a) they are all sold out and b) I need a set of five things to fill the holes in this way. The Agatha Christie ones would have been perfect but alas... the search continues. I mention it here because the Black Dragon Press store has many, many similar wonders if you like this sort of thing.

If it were up to me, I would unfurl the tube I have sitting in a corner with things like this inside...

...but you know how the compromise thing goes.

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And now I need to actually do some work. No. I really do...

The World Is Not Enough

Now here's somewhere a man could kick back and chew over his place in the world and more than likely come to the conclusion that his place in the world was not worth chewing over. 

If he was smart, he would figure out those mountains had been around long before he was even a starseed and will be there for many moons after too. Even those rocks sitting beneath the surface of the water have a longer lifespan than he does and in all likelihood, probably provide a far more useful purpose in the world than he does too. 

But that's not a good reason to not even try.

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Still jet-lagged to hell and back here. More time in the air than on the ground in a short four day period is not good for your equilibrium. I wrote a little - not as much as I would like, but enough. I did The Bad Thing and watched an airplane movie which knocked on to another and then another. Worth talking about are 500 Days Of Summer and Our Kind Of Traitor - both are good investments of your (wasted) time. 

I'm not going to tell anything about my trip here. It will make a good extra chapter for the Cities of the Dead collection - it was also the first time I have ever got in an uber car. It's very much the same as being in a regular cab in that you sit in the back while somebody drives you, but the reality is, it's more like being driven somewhere by a friend of a friend in a nice car that somebody gives a damn about. I can see why it works and how it is absolutely the death of the taxi as we know it. Then again, all it takes is one singular uber-murder scandal and the whole world will come crashing down around its ankles. 

I wonder if cab drivers moonlight as uber-drivers during their time off.

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I picked up a couple of magazines at the airport too. One of them was the latest edition of Wired. Somewhere in there is an article about a company that hosts residential courses for kids who want to be You-Tubers when they grow up. It really is a thing. It says that five years ago, kids mostly wanted to be app developers but now they want to be You-Tubers making money for simply being themselves. 

Meanwhile, I mailed my friend Wayne Simmons a pic of his book on a Waterstones shelf yesterday - a pic from the period in which he wrote (and made his name with) horror. On one side of his book was Pride, Prejudice and Zombies and on the other side, a classic edition of Frankenstein. In that 'horror' section, there was a whole collection of Stephen King books but hardly anything else to speak of. No Ramsey Campbell, no Clive Barker and no James Herbert. 

Maybe horror fiction is resting. Maybe it's waiting for somebody to come out and lay waste to the world. Maybe Stephen King must die for people to pay attention again... but it didn't make any difference when James Herbert did, so that's a very poor answer to the problem.

Or maybe, horror authors need to become You-Tubers to regain their mojo, though I can't think of anything more boring to watch than a video of somebody staring out of the window before occasionally tapping some keys.

If you took a poll in an average school, I wonder how many kids would say they wanted to be a writer these days and how many of them would say they wanted to be a horror author - and just who would they want to be like? Who are their role models? I wonder exactly how many schools you would have to visit before you found a kid who wanted to be a horror author and said as much without being prompted from a list of previously arranged choices. 

Note to self: never buy Wired again. Wired is Cosmopolitan for the Samsung generation. It suggests the new world is built on algorithms and there is nothing we can do about it. It hosts adverts for apps that will close your blinds for you when you're not at home. It promotes great design discussed over many pages for items such as football boots and lamps.

It tells me the world is more connected than ever but does not even begin to explain why everybody feels so fucking alone.

Welcome to the true face of horror in 2016 in which horror writers now freelance for tech mags.

OTHER PEOPLE SUNDAY (1)

Looks like it's Other People Sunday. I'll probably forget next Sunday but it seems like a good day to blog about all the things I've seen this week, that I've taken notice of. First up is the soon to be released (September 8th, so not that soon) illustrated edition of Joyland from Hard Case Crime. Joyland is likely the best thing Stephen King has written in twenty years. I loved every moment of it, so much so that I took some time out to review it here.

Any book cover illustrated by Glen Orbik is a good book cover but this one captures the entire Joyland world in a pretty little snow-globe all of its own. All of which leaves me with just one unanswered question...

Where are the Hard Case posters? 

•••

Talking of posters, back in this neck of the woods, one of my favourite artists - Richey Beckett - has just released this fine looking piece in his store (from David Robert Mitchell’s new horror movie IT FOLLOWS):

There's another variant of the poster that looks like this:

Maybe that will match your curtains better. Regardless of your taste in decor - go buy something from him. I'm actually running out of room around here but hey, you can always make room for valuable additions to your life, can't you.

•••

Blast From The Past this week comes in the form of something I had forgotten all about. So much so, that the book I meant to buy a very long time ago has since been updated. Take a look at this:

If ever there was a subject matter that sat close to my heart, it's this. 

Men dressed in fur and looking peculiar in a field for no apparent reason other than to disturb passers-by? 

Maybe. Maybe not.

These images are from a book called Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage by an insanely talented photographer who goes by the name of Charles Ferger (because that's his name). There are more from the series on his webpage for the book here.

I would like to interview this man. Sooner rather than later.

•••

On the record deck this week has been Goon from Tobias Jesso Jr. If you think all the creative male singer/songwriters died somewhere back in 1975, stick your nose in and see what you think. 

One man and a piano shouldn't be allowed out into the world unaccompanied. I like it. A lot. There's some fine songs lurking here... and if you do like what you hear, there's a tour on the road right now with some UK dates in the bag.

•••

On the reading front, I'm on a go slow due to writing but still enjoying ploughing my way through Knausgård (if your still unsure about him, there's a great piece in the New York Times which should help you make up your mind one way or another) and somewhere along the way, I picked up a copy of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons which despite a royally mixed bag on the review front, is suiting me just fine.

•••

And here's a playlist if you're a user of rdio.com - because I felt like it.

Le Fin.