The Ghost of Tom Will Always Tell You

Write about the moment after which everything was different. Whether the reveal is good news or bad. A lottery ticket or a car accident. Tom said good fiction begins at those moments where you have to reevaluate everything, recalibrate and make a course correction for your entire life going forward. These past few months have been loaded with such moments.

Where to begin?

Why Is It That You Can Sing Songs You Haven’t Heard in Years

But you can’t quote a single line from a novel you read yesterday? And, yes, I feel you. Talking about writing gets boring. Talking about writing isn’t actually writing, but it’s worth stepping back a little and looking at what we tend to do by intuition.

For years I’ve been obsessed with short-term seemingly spontaneous events. What people might now call “Pop-Up” events. My interest started with the Cacophony Society and how entire cities — Burning Man — could spring into existence overnight. It’s this fascination that led me to dream up Fight Clubs and Party Crashing, and I was a decade deep into these themes before a friend put me onto Victor Turner and his anthropological work around liminal and liminoid events. In the case of Fight Clubs and Party Crashing, both are liminoid events because they can occur at any time, but they still have the general “communitas” of liminal events, the acceptance that all people present are of equal status.

Much of success comes from sniffing out what was popular in the past but has not yet seen a resurgence. In the 90s David Foster Wallace wanted to write work that hearkened back to the rich, dense novels of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis and John Barth. In the Minimalism dirty realistic world of Raymond Carver, Wallace’s work grabbed people’s attention. It struck readers as fresh, compared to the pared down work then on the shelves.

With much less intention, I almost by accident found success by stuffing Fight Club with rhetorical devices. As beautifully unpacked in the Mark Forsyth book Elements of Eloquence, shown above, rhetorical tricks work best in speeches… song lyrics… plays… jokes… sermons. In short, in forms that are meant to be read aloud. Or sung. That’s why you can recall those songs from long, long ago. All the rhetorical qualities built into them — cadence, alliteration, rhythm, paradox — make them so quotable.

“Scarlett O’Hara wasn’t beautiful, but men seldom noticed…” thus begins the massively selling novel Gone With the Wind — with a paradox.

“The things you own end up owning you,” is an example of Chiasmus, or a neatly symmetrical sentence. As is “If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot of stuff you don’t.” Those sticky sentences that double back on themselves are “flowers of rhetoric” as Forsyth puts it.

The Forsyth book unpacks almost forty tricks of rhetoric, even citing Fight Club. And finding his book is like discovering Victor Turner: At last I know what I’ve always intuitively sought to create. Again, rhetoric works at its sticky best when it’s used aloud. Just think of all of those Oscar Wilde quotes made famous by actors speaking them on stage. That’s why I’ll always push you to include a least one “soap box” scene wherein a character can pontificate and you can blast out ideas and rhetoric. So Big Voice or speeches — the equivalent of voiceover in a film — seems like the best place to showcase rhetoric.

Another trick that Forsyth unpacks is “Catachresis,” in effect using a bit of intuitive gibberish that can be understood by context. His first example is from Hamlet, “I will speak daggers to her, but use none.” He also cites the first line from the Roxette song, “Lay a whisper on my pillow.” To that I’d add the song lyric “the shadow of your smile.” Each acts like a zen koan to engage and disable the reasoning mind and thus hypnotically induce the reader into the dream of the story. The reader is tipped slightly off balance.

Gordon Lish might call Catachresis “Burnt Tongue” because it serves the same function: again, to give the reader the sense of learning to read for the first time, thus increasing the reader’s participation. Writing Invisible Monsters I’d had the narrator say, “I’d pay snakes to bite her.” It’s absurd, but a week later Tom Spanbauer told me he’d already heard people using the phrase at a party… in Seattle. Workshop students had used the saying, and it had caught on. Isn’t that what all writers want? To shape the culture?

So, look up The Elements of Eloquence and check out a good interview with the author, Here. If David Foster Wallace can relaunch the thick post-modern novel, maybe Fight Club and Mark Forsyth can launch a wave of work written in the rhetorical “flowers of eloquence.”

On Another Topic

My thanks to everyone who attended the two showings of Fight Club at the Bagdad Theater, April 22nd and 23rd. This from the organizer:

I wanted to send a note to genuinely thank you so much for bringing us two sold-out nights of FIGHT CLUB. I’ve heard only great things from our audience and we raised $11,000 for the Film District! We are so happy with how it all turned out.

That’s another $11,000 toward renovating the century-old Hollywood Theater.

A Lesson in Heroism

In 1991 I went to dinner with several people, most of them wealthy, most of them strangers to me. One, a man named Oliver, was the regional book rep for the publisher W.W. Norton — the house that would publish Fight Club five years later. That night, however, I kept my writing a secret. I was unpublished and saw no signs I’d ever be. The sales rep, Oliver, held forth about some upcoming novel, a crime against humanity, he called the book. A heinous story, the book should never have gotten a contract according to Oliver, and he cursed Vintage for bringing it to market. The good news, Oliver assured us, was that he’d convinced all of his bookselling accounts not to order the novel. He told us that all the booksellers had agreed to kill the novel in its cradle by ignoring it, not ordering it, not selling it. The book would simply disappear. Poof!

I know it was 1991 because the novel was American Psycho. Oliver was beloved by many, including by fellow W.W. Norton author Diana Abu- Jaber, and he has since died. The novel he worked so very, very hard to kill, has not.

Fast forward to 2005 or thereabouts. I’d been asked to read at the KGB Bar in Manhattan, where a twiggy, stylish, older woman introduced herself. Kit Reed was the creator of trans-genre fiction, a writer on a par with Ursula LeGuin. Reed wrote brilliant speculative novels and short stories, some of which would eventually include me as a character, my name misspelled comically in each iteration.

Over beers, Reed told me how she’d been one of the three judges who’d eventually given Fight Club the 1997 Oregon Book Award for best novel. Now called the Ken Kesey Award, Reed described the backstage battle she’d had to wage on my behalf. The other two judges had agreed that Fight Club was the strongest book nominated that year, but they refused to give it the award on the grounds that it might offend… someone. Reed persevered, threatening to report the situation to the media if the judges or the sponsors denied me the award.

This was quite something to hear from a stranger in a bar in New York. Of course Reed won out. Until that moment I’d held that storytelling was a meritocracy: The best books got the awards and backing. The consolation is that it only takes one champion to help a book break out. In many ways it was Joan Didion who rescued American Psycho, and it was unquestionably Kit Reed who came to my rescue.

Kit Reed’s birthday is June 7th, she would be 94 years old. Alive or dead, she has my eternal gratitude.

Which Brings Us to House Call #19

Walk the Night is the first chunk of something amazing by Bernadette Francis. We’ve spent a week debating the objects — a cake, a cat, cocaine — and Bernadette has been a peach about feedback. Sex and transgressions abound, and something else that brings it to magic. Please give Walk the Night a read, and leave your praise and feedback. As writers, we live for that shit.

Which Brings Us to

I hate to close on a sad note, but Cheryl Strayed’s husband died yesterday. Brian Lindstrom elected to travel to Switzerland and end his life following his diagnosis with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a progressive neurological disorder. The Portland writing community has been following his tragic story since Strayed announced her husband’s intentions this past Monday. The plan was to die peacefully in a forest surrounded by nature and family.

Cheryl was a member of our writers group while finishing her memoir, Wild, and graciously mentions both me and Suzy Vitello as well as Chelsea Cain in the acknowledgements. Among Brian’s early work as a filmmaker was a biography about legendary Portland poet Walt Curtis. The first time I met Brian — at a Chelsea Cain party — he told a hilarious story about that documentary. The filmmaker needed someone to splash naked into a freezing cold river, and Brian took a bullet for the team. If I’m not mistaken, Salmon Poet is the documentary. Walt was a renown lech, and Brian had his work cut out for him. Ah, back before everything, when we were so young and reckless.

Let’s all our thoughts and prayers go out to Cheryl tonight. Now and for always, write about the moment after which everything was different.

A Favorite Example of Big Voice

To distinguish Big Voice from Little Voice (which is also called Recording Angel), Big Voice allows you to rise above the action and make big philosophical statements. From the novel and film Heartburn…

“… And then the dream dies. And the dream breaks into a million tiny little pieces; which leaves you with a choice: You can either stick with it — which is unbearable — or you can just go off and dream another dream.”

Note: This scene from Heartburn is the “murder” portion of the classic martyr/murder/witness formula. It’s the most clever interpretation of the “murder” that I’m aware of.

Every story is an experiment. Every story is a dream. Yes, this is a new dog. No, she does not have a name yet.

In San Diego: Me lunching with a group that includes Dr. Bill Nericcio and his students

And at the Castle Ivar in the Hollywood Hills

In the Ivar Castle, Chelsea Cain Gave Everyone Differently Colored Painters Tape

And asked us to create messages on the walls. Can you recognize where my message comes from? Yes, that suit of armor stood in a niche in my bedroom.

Weird, yes, but not as unsettling as the Museum of Death. I killed an afternoon there; which seemed fitting because in next year’s book I set a scene there. The place seems to ramble on forever, including gallery after gallery about snipers, serial killers, car wrecks, suicides, capital punishment, cannibals, NAZI atrocities, taxidermied house pets, the works. Not the place to microdose — which I did not. Numerous screens play high-def videos of autopsies, and a surprising number of families with young kids wander the rooms, slack-jawed. The overall impression is of vastness and sadness and sex.

At one point Chelsea sent workshoppers to find the last apartment occupied by the writer Nathanael West, and they happened across the current occupant putting out the garbage. The man gave them a tour of a small, unremarkable studio apartment. A shock when you consider how large West’s work continues to loom in the culture.

Likewise, in the Museum of Death, Jay Sebring… who’d always seemed so stylish and dashing… photographed at the Tate murders, his corpse looked like a small boy wearing 60s Mod clothes, trussed in ropes and splashed with blood. The truth of everything seems so much smaller in real life.

They Say “Not Open to the Public”

But the sponsor said we should push the limits.

For Years The Joke Was…

That Fran Lebowitz was the writer who went from ready-to-wear to Haute Couture. Meaning she started her career with funny, snarky magazine essays, then published two collections of said essays — Metropolitan Life and Social Studies — then became so famous as a wit and raconteur that she became the perennial party guest of the rich and famous. Lebowitz practically lived on David Geffen’s private jet where she kept everyone laughing with her sardonic take on everything. For decades, she made a life by telling what the British call “stories you dine out on.” The writers equivalent of the pop artists hired by oligarchs to jazz up the party.

Now thanks to the Netflix series, Pretend It’s a City, she’s being rediscovered by a new generation. Call her racist. Call her transphobic. Call her antisemitic. She can be all of these by turns. Here, what’s important is that you call “dibs” first in the Comments to get the above book — a very classy British edition.

Which Brings Us to This Week’s House Call

My congratulations to Matt Smythe for the beginning of what’s bound to be a meticulously written thriller. And romance. A romantic thriller, peopled by characters with the scariest motives. Read his sample, Red Flags, Here.

Matt has been a peach about tossing ideas back and forth. Matching wits has been a joy all week. I won’t spoil anything by summing it up here, but please pay Matt and Red Flags a visit and offer up some praise and feedback.

Thank you, Matt, for being so excited about the process. You brought a lot of fun to my life, especially on Friday while I was stuck at the tire place getting a flat tire fixed.

If you’d like to submit a writing sample for a House Call, please post a link Here.

The First Week of May

I’ll be co-teaching with Chelsea Cain in a rented castle where she’s organized several retreats in the past. By coincidence the place is mentioned in today’s New York Post.

Called “Castle Ivar,” it looks like the evil step-sister to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle.

What You See Above

Is a small glass sphere cast with a hologram or a cavity in the shape of a skull inside it. Years back I asked people to hide these in the woods and fields on my property, with the idea of strangers finding them in some distant future. The glass makes them impervious to snow and rain, and they can sink into moss or mud and stay hidden forever.

The joy for me comes from the idea of what strangers will make of each sphere when they find it. What story will they invent to explain it? What powers will they attribute to it? Someday each sphere will surface in the roots around a tree, or at the burrow of a mole, and the person who finds it will wonder over it.

To date when we’ve discussed “vertical” in a story we’ve focused on emotion — the emotional build that accompanies the horizontal plot. But sometimes the vertical is a deeper meaning the reader is meant to discover much later. As a child I enjoyed The Martian Chronicles, but as an adult I appreciate how the stories about the conquest of Mars are actually stories about the conquest of the Americas, and about the subsequent messy imperialism that followed. It’s a very grown-up political book in the guise of pulp sci-fi. Likewise, I enjoyed Fran Lebowitz’s essay Notes on Trick, but I adore it now that I see it was lampooning Susan Sontag’s landmark essay Notes on Camp. The backstory or hidden meaning explodes like time-delayed ecstasy, and sometimes that’s the vertical. Especially for you, the writer.

Here I’ll summon the Ghost of Tom Spanbauer… For people new to his workshop, Tom would ask them to write about something they could barely recall. Each writer might begin with a single detail: a taste, a color… but once it was written down, that detail prompted a new, heretofore forgotten detail. Within a week, the writer had usually unearthed an entire memory that had once seemed lost forever. Thus in Tom’s program of “Dangerous Writing” we weren’t told to spill out some known pain, as in intentional memoir writing. Tom coached us to begin with one small something we found enticing — but didn’t know why we found it so enticing.

Case in point, forty years ago I began to write a story called Trained Birds Change Your Oil, about a Jiffy Lube-type business where normally flying, singing, bright-plummaged birds were instead slaving away to do car maintenance. The story spun round and round in my head for a week or more, until I hit on the line “All summer I wanted someone to ask me what happened to my face. ‘Birds,’ I wanted to tell them, ‘Birds ate my face.’” A classic Gordon Lish “Line of Flight” sentence, it turned into the book Invisible Monsters.

Still, I’d no idea what the story meant. It was a lark — no pun intended — and it was fun enough to keep me exploring it until I had a book. Not until a decade later, once the book was published and I was touring to promote it, did I realize the horrible truth I’d put down on paper by accident.1

You see, Tom’s trick: Write about the glittering something that entices you… leads you past you own self defenses, and allows you to unpack a truth you’d never in your rational mind touch. For years I wrote to Ira Levin, asking, “Is your book Rosemary’s Baby actually about the German drug Thalidomide, and how thousands of young mothers blindly trusted the medical establishment and swallowed Thalidomide and unfortunately gave birth to infants with limb defects — defects, frankly, very much like the clawed hands and feet of the “devil’s child” birthed by Rosemary Woodhouse?”

Of course Levin said I was full of shit. He’d delivered his social comment, his Martian Chronicles, and gotten it under the radar. Readers reacted in horror, but never realized why they’d been so unnerved by a melodramatic story about would-be Satan worshipers. The “vertical” was never really on the page, it was in the culture.

That is the kind of Dangerous Writing that would make Tom Spanbauer proud. It’s not just about sneakily revealing the truth about one person — the writer. It’s about tricking an entire society into confronting a flaw so tragic that no one wants to look in that direction.

Which Brings Us To

This week’s House Call is The Wrong Cantina by Tony Mills. It’s a good story, with some flare-ups of excellent language; however, when I started to press Tony for more detail he responded, in effect, “It’s not that deep. It’s just pulp.”

I don’t buy that. I can accept that Ira Levin didn’t want to rewrite The Midwich Cuckoos, but something was baiting him in that direction, and eventually he unconsciously gave vent to the collective, unexpressed horror of Thalidomide. For Tony Mills to write this and post it… I don’t accept that the story is a bit of fluff fobbed off for no good reason.

If Tony will forgive me, and I’ve been mulling this over all week, the vertical is some angle on the story that the author has yet to recognize.

And how do we recognize such things? We return to them. We find the one germ of something that lures us onward. The story might not be about parrots doing lube jobs, but that’s something that will leads us to something that will lead us to something that will leads us to a huge, unexpressed, to-date unseen truth. A truth possibly about everyone.

For now, please consider that what you write is never just “pulp” unless you’re so spooked by it that you can’t explore it further. Please give The Wrong Cantina a read, and give Tony some decent feedback. But please be aware that nothing is ever really “pulp.” Even the most ludicrous ideas occur to us for a reason. Whether or not you pursue them is up to you.

Where some ideas go is a place you’ve been avoiding your entire life.

After all that, if you’ve got a writing sample and would risk a House Call, please post the link Here

And Thank You to Tony!

Thank You, Scott

Here’s a rare video clip that demonstrates my ideal in Recording Angel and dialog. Note how we watch the action take place (in recording angel aka Little Voice), and WE must decipher its meaning. The motion carries its own authority = we’ll watch clearly depicted action = the action need not be explained. To repeat, action carries its own authority.

A hint? The moment you use a “thought” verb you’re explaining. For instance, “Det. John Doe guessed that the refrigerator door had been repaired.” Or, “Det. Frank noted how the photo of the window showed a bullet hole.” Thought verbs = explaining. Please give your reader a chance to assemble the puzzle.

As for dialog, note how it does not further plot in the clip. The dialog only expresses emotion and acts as a “beat” to express some completed thought. The repeated word “fuck” becomes like the rhythm in a song. Again, the dialog does not explain the action, nor does it further the plot by explaining the gradual reveal. The viewer is allowed to follow this pantomime and enjoy the discovery process as the characters perform it.

Can you imagine the choreography that went into creating this scene? Can you imagine how much weaker it would’ve been if the characters had explained their actions in dialog?

Let this be a golden example of what the Ghost of Tom wants from you.

More Money to Restore the PDX Hollywood Theater

On April 22nd the new 4K version of Fight Club will be released nationwide for one night. In Portland, OR it will be shown at the Bagdad Theater, with all profits going to the restoration of the nearby Hollywood Theater, a big grassroots projects floated by film buffs with youthful enthusiasm.

The planned showing sold out quickly, so the Bagdad is adding at least one extra screening. I’ll be there to answer questions, and comics legend Matt Fraction will run the whole show.

If you didn’t get tickets but would like first shot at seats for an additional showing… please call this number 503.281.1142 to get on the waiting list. Call between eight in the AM and five in the PM, Pacific Time. The Hollywood Theater will likely add a link to their website, but for now call 503.281.1142 to get on the list.

Brazil has Given Me My First 3D Cover!

Sure, Haunted glowed in the dark, but this new Portuguese edition of Fight Club is a beautiful hardcover AND when you shift the book, the cover changes to the title stitched in flesh! Pics don’t do it justice, but it works!

What’s important is that I have THREE copies to give away. Please have a mailing address within the United States, and if you’re one of the first three to dibs in the Comments, I’ll send you a copy. In the future, you must demand your publisher give you a 3D cover. Don’t take No for an answer. The result is beautiful.

This Week’s House Call Has Been a Blast

End of the Vine is a strong, captivating beginning to something that’s bound to be great. The author, Nivethine Mahendran, has been a joy to explore ideas with. This might not be your writing sample, but we learn from one another, so give it a read and post your feedback, please. Often it’s easier to learn from other people’s work because we’re too attached to our own.

For almost a year I’ve been in communication with the David Perell show, How I Write. On occasion I enjoy the show, but I find that too much talking ABOUT writing grosses me out. Very few guests can really unpack how fiction gets its effects, and I’ve been determined to not commit to the show until I have something worth filling the time. Again, the armchair experience of talking ABOUT writing isn’t the same as applying ideas and technique to a piece of writing.

To date, this is my favorite episode of the David Perell program. Song writing is all about rhetoric, and my best writing is based on song writing. I wasn’t surprised to see Fight Club mentioned in Mark Forsyth’s book The Elements of Eloquence.

While the House Calls take some effort to consume — you have to read the work and Comments, you don’t just hit Play on YouTube — you’ll learn more from seeing the application of solid ideas. Some Tom’s ideas. Some from Lish. From Amy Hempel and Mark Richard. Even if you don’t have a light bulb A-Ha! moment, these ideas will linger in your memory until the exact moment you find yourself stuck. In fact you might be stuck right now, and my dialog with Nivethine might help break you loose.

So, please make the extra effort, read End of the Vine and take part in the dialog. My extra thanks to Nivethine Mahendran for being so enthusiastic and open to ideas. Ours has been a fun week’s work.

Every story is an experiment.

Life Imitating Art?

Yeah, Well, Everything Old is New Again

As Always, What Do They Do With the Money?

We really need a book where people get rich and then spend the money on something worth reading about…

Still in my Bulking Phase, I read King Leopold’s Ghost in which the monarch of Belgium enslaves half the African continent in harvesting rubber. Leopold profits enormously, and the book describes in vague terms how he spends the money building extra palaces and monuments. In this week’s book, Empty Mansions, I read how William Andrews Clark, born a Pennsylvania farm boy, goes on to develop copper and silver mines in Montana and New Mexico. W.A. Clark founds the city of Las Vegas — thus Clark County in Nevada is named for him. He’s elected to a short career as a Senator and dies in 1925. He builds a lot of houses…

…Just as King Leopold built palaces and Hearst built San Simeon and Sarah Winchester built her “mystery” house in San Jose. The impulse to translate wealth into art and architecture makes sense on a couple levels: It keeps the rich person in conversation with creative minds. In a way this impulse seems like that of men who earn a fortune and start a podcast so they can stay in dialog with a wide selection of creatives. It’s like founding a salon: exciting and social and exhausting.

Also, Nora Ephron wrote that her marriage thrived as long as she and her husband were building or renovating something. This “nesting” pitted them against contractors and problems, and kept them united… at least until the house was finished. Cheating and divorce followed. Think of the archetype: The Overlook Hotel is only finished for a couple years before the builder’s son dies and the project falls to ruin. In The Haunting of Hill House the house is barely glimpsed by its new mistress before she dies in a carriage accident.

In short, the building part is fun: Building the fortune, building the monument.1 What follows is death. Which brings us to Empty Mansions. The Fifth Avenue mansion on the book’s cover stood for only sixteen years, less time than it took to plan and build its 121 rooms. Most of the fortune piled up by W.A. Clark ends up with his youngest child, Huguette, who… spends that money as a recluse — wait for it — building and furnishing doll houses. Like her father, she corresponds endlessly with artists and craftsmen, designing and revising the houses for her collection of hundreds of antique dolls.2 Yes, a bit like Hugh Crain’s daughter, Abigail, who grows old sleeping in her own childhood nursery and eventually dies.

Huguette Clark, however, lives building and discarding her dollhouses until the age of 104. Making this — a New York Times #1 bestseller — the sort of book that should come equipped with a cyanide capsule around page 250. So, please, somebody write a book, please, where getting the money is interesting, please, and where what the money is spent on is even MORE interesting.3

The creative process, the discourse, the back-and-forth reasoning, is the joyous process. The community part. The active part. The Building Part. The result is death, unless it can drive readers into community, as the Tolkien books do. This was the favorite proof cited by Shirley Brice Heath, the anthropologist who explains that books become lasting classics only when they do bring together communities of readers.

Which Brings Us to Hayden Thorner

This past week has been a treat. Hayden’s story, All Growed Up, has been a joy to read and discuss. Hayden demonstrates the perfect spirit of creative exploration, the truly fun part of putting together a book or story. If you’ve not already read the Mark Richard story This is Us, Excellent doing so will give you a leg up on what Hayden is doing here. Please give All Growed Up a read and let’s see your feedback.

As always, please link to your own writing samples Here. My thanks to Hayden, and I’ll be in contact with the next House Call writer soon.

Introduction to a Unicorn!

It’s always a joy to celebrate when a writer does the impossible: Not just getting a book written, but growing a readership, winning awards and getting published. As proof that the dream is still possible, here’s Eric Larocca, who’s novel, Wretch, launches today. A couple days ago I asked him:

Getting published much less making a career as a writer might seem impossible today. How did you do it, and what would be your pep talk to aspiring writers?

Eric explains:

I always viewed the art of writing (showing up at my desk, sitting down, and putting in the hard work) as a full-time job even when I was working a day job or attending school. I was always very dedicated when it came to deadlines and meeting certain expectations. Moreover, I reflect on my early years as an aspiring writer and realize I adopted this sense of delusion—this unflinching idea that I would be a successful author regardless of the number of rejection letters I received or the doors that closed in my face. I’d argue that much of writing is rooted in discipline, but also a sense of confidence and hopefulness. We create art because we desperately want to share our stories, our vision with others. Being a writer is certainly not for the fainthearted. It can be such a distressing, demoralizing industry. However, it can also be inspiring and tremendously rewarding. For anyone reading this who is struggling to get your work out there and break through, please do not give up. I know it’s so cliché, but you only need one “yes” in the world of publishing. You only need one editor to believe in you and your work to get through the door. For now, focus on creating art that is unique to you, that would be difficult for any other writer to replicate. One of my professors in undergrad told me “true talent always ends up being noticed eventually.” Do the work, remain hopeful, and be persistent.

The Tour for Wretch Will Include:

3/24/26 - Trident Booksellers with Chris Golden (Boston, MA)

3/25/26 - The Twisted Spine with Grady Hendrix (Brooklyn, NY)

3/26/26 - Thrillerdelphia with Chuck Wendig (Philadelphia, PA)

Please check the links for exact locations and times.

More Q & A With Eric

Me: Your previous hit, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, was a novella at 120 pages. Do you support the idea that younger readers prefer novellas and short stories over novel-length prose?

Eric: I think short stories and novellas are attractive and compelling for readers of all ages! There’s nothing more pleasing and totally immersive than a one-sitting read. I feel horror works especially well when you’re absorbed by the atmosphere and setting without taking routine breaks throughout your reading experience. I think it was Richard Matheson who once said that “true dread/unequivocal horror is very difficult to sustain for 300 or 400 pages.” I agree with that somewhat. I think it’s very challenging to sustain dread for the entirety of a full-length novel. Of course, it’s not impossible. Many authors are very competent at crafting terror and intrigue for many pages. I think of Joe Hill, Josh Malerman, and Chuck Wendig to name a few. However, there’s something very appealing about the immersive experience of a short story or novella that takes about an hour to read. You’re engrossed in the world of the narrative and (hopefully) invested in the characters’ plight.

Me: On the “This is Horror” podcast you state your preference for short fiction. Will you give us your top five short horror stories?

Eric: Yes, absolutely! Here are my favorites:

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (One of the most disturbing, hopeless stories I’ve ever read. I reread it often.)

“Mourning” by Maria Fernanda Ampuero (From her collection, Cockfight. This story is utterly sickening and yet so tender, so sensitively told.)

“A Collapse of Horses” by Brian Evenson (From his collection of the same title. Evenson excels at creating a suffocating sense of paranoia and dread. This is one of my favorite stories in his repertoire.)

“Where Are You, Dear Heart?” by Mariana Enriquez (From her collection, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. A dark, unnerving tale of obsession that chills me each time I read it.)

“Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament” by Clive Barker (From his collection, Books of Blood. Visceral and gorgeously written.)

Me: On “The Writers Chair” podcast you describe your preference for human monsters doing the worst things possible to other humans. That said, who’s your favorite serial killer? And you may interpret “favorite” any way you’d like.

Eric: I’ve always been fascinated by the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, especially since Joyce Carol Oates wrote a phenomenal (and profoundly disturbing) novel titled Zombie that was somewhat inspired by him. I appreciate any narrative that focuses on queer men or women behaving obscenely.

Now For Your Test

Eric asks:

What is the title and author of the 1992 Locus Award-winning debut novel about a pair of misfits who experiment on a mysterious black hole they uncover in their apartment building's storage room?

Please post your response in the Comments below. I’ll tag the first correct one and arrange to send you the book.

A postscript from Eric: “Also, I have a Substack I'm trying to launch. I'd be so grateful if you included a link to it: https://substack.com/@ericlarocca?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page ”

Done & done. Congratulations.

Like the Passenger Pigeon Once Blotted Out the Sun…

My office walls were once lined with steely eyed Jackalope heads. Since January 24th, we’ve been spouting Baby Talk. So much Baby Talk. But today only two prizes remain to be awarded. Let me remind you, Baby Talk isn’t the only game in town; your forte might be legalese or pidgin or faux-Lovecraft (which would make a worthy contest…). The point is to “try on” a style or voice that might be in keeping with your story — or be completely at odds with the topic — but in some strange way, put the story over.

Gimmick-y, yes, but so is everything in the canon. Do you think Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked himself, Why so stylized and back-asswards? Is that really necessary? Fuck no, he just smoked his opium and made literary history:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

As Oscar Wilde spouted:

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”

What matters is commitment to… and successful selling of the “pose.” As in song lyrics, what matters is successful distortion. And Mia Maeve finally got it right! Shorter is better! Don’t exhaust your reader, and this reads like a baby leprechaun got beat senseless with a shillelagh. AND with a touch of the Pirate Tongue. Nicely done!

Celtic Cure by Mia Maeve

Unwewcome guest! Ah fed ye vewvain an’ foxgwove miwk wi’ yer suppa evewy nite. Ye wouwdnae weave. Fwung ye up the hazel twee in the wildest wintew gale—by God, ye were aye there come mownin’, face doon on the gwavel. Tied ye tae the bed—an’ stiww ye wouwdnae go. Aye, they sed the hoose were cuwsed—biwt on a faiwy moond. Ah didnae bewieve it, no tiww ye stopped speakin’—stopped smiwin’. Nuffin’ but scweamin’, battawin’ yer heid aff the wa’w. Taen, ma wee ‘un, swapped—wi’ YOO, ye unbidden guest! Bwing the hot shovew—wight the fiwe, aye! We’ww see ye off noo! Be gone wi’ ye, ye demon baiwn, ye devil’s changewin’. Out wi’ ye—OUT!

The remaining Jackalope head goes to Andrew Rutledge for what I assume is a cocaine/heroin-related tragedy. Witnessed by a baby? Reading this is like reading Jabberwocky for the first time. Annoying, perhaps, but this is how you reinvent the language and get copyright!!

An aside, in 1980 at the age of eighteen I worked as a messenger alongside a guy named David from South Africa who told me that the secret to Jabberwocky was that Lewis Carroll thought the Scottish accent was rubbish, and he’d meant to write a poem that sounded like Irvine Welsh on acid. This is CLOSE, but David would tell this man, “Keep Rolllling your R’s! RRRrreally, rrrroll them!” And it’s not pronounced “WAY-bah” it’s pronounced “WAH-bay” according to David, who would now be about seventy years old. Anyway, here’s Andrew:

Pic-a-boo by Andrew Rutledge

Dada sneak ma eyes and dada went buh-bye, poof! Dada says’d pic-a-boo and dada face come back. Yay baby! One day dada says’d pic-a-boo and dada face stays poof and mama cries. New dada sneaks ma eyes and mama laugh. New dada says’d pic-a-boo and stays poof. Mama sads again. New new dada sneaks my eyes, sniffs sniffs bum bum powder. Mama sniffs too. New new dada says pic-a-boo and both they faces stays poof.

Andrew, with a name like Andrew Rutledge you need to be rolling your R’s more. Wear a kilt. Really lean into the bit.

You know the drill. Please contact The Cult and let me know how you’d like the books inscribed and where to send them. The Jackalopes they are no more, at last.

My Photo Does the Painting No Justice

It really is superb. Worked into the image are the words “Egg Forever.” It will always hold a place of pride wherever we live, probably alongside the watercolor Kerri sent me of Egg in 2021(?). And the exquisite drawing by Cheap & Crass.

If you want to explore “Vertical” in a story, an animal is almost always pure Vertical, i.e. emotion. “It made the children laugh and play to see a lamb in school.” A pet makes even the worst psychopath seem relatable. Whether it’s true or not, we want to believe the story of the Turin horse. We might not care about callow Holly Golightly, but we can’t look away when the cat is lost. And while Lt. Ellen Ripley is no Audrey Hepburn, she’s still saving the cat.

Also note, in every Amy Hempel story the animal creates the verticality. The gorilla expresses the emotion the narrator cannot. Or the dog does, or the cat.

When you meet someone who’s carrying flowers or a baby, or walking a puppy, you’re hooked by emotion. When the mouse dies in Of Mice and Men or The Green Mile, it’s pure vertical.

Here’s the New Place to Post Links for a Possible House Call

As before:

• Do not offer up your solid-gold story idea. At most offer up a scene or chapter or passage, but never risk putting up something worth stealing.

• Make sure the link works. If I hit a firewall, that’s where I stop.

• Make the writing sample as clean and clear as anything you’d send an editor. I’m not here to correct spelling errors, nor do I want to showcase something that might embarrass you.

• You might use AI, but how’s that going to help you learn or experiment? Or even have fun? To date, I’ve never seen anything written by AI that’s been well plotted — or even slightly plotted. If it smells like AI, I’m going to look for a different sample.

• If your sample looks good I’ll contact you in private, at your site, and we’ll discuss what works well and what could work better.

• When looking for a sample I’ll consider how often each writer has offered feedback on earlier House Calls. There’s nothing more tedious than a writer who only shows up to workshop when he/she has work to share.

• Any questions? Ask me in the Comments, please.

A Big Added Bonus This Week

The author Eric Larocca made horror history with a short novel called Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, and his newest novel goes on sale Tuesday, March 24th. On that day I’ll post a Q & A with Eric, and Eric will return the favor by asking YOU a question. A horror-based question, that is. The first person to answer the question — again, horror related — correctly, will win a copy of the book and a letter from the author.

The new novel is Wretch, and Brian Evenson calls it, “… a chiaroscuro masterpiece that captures the nature of what it means to be longingly, abjectly human.”

For now, post your samples for a possible House Call. Come Tuesday, be ready to put on your thinking caps and win a book.

Revisiting Sous-Conversation

Don’t get me wrong, a good strong “Horizontal” is crucial in a story. For instance, things need to happen, people to take action, conditions to change. But eventually the reader will demand an emotional “Vertical” to the story. From Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

Yeah, no. We want emotional progress. Insight must happen. Objects must be introduced, accrue meaning, morph in meaning, and be resolved. Which brings us to this week’s House Call. The story is Haley’s 24 Hours, which rolls along with the energy of the best Irvine Welsh fiction. The characters take relentless action, making poor choices at every step. The Horizontal is flawless. The circular structure works. The voice works. Everything escalates to chaos. Thank you and Bravo to Haley.

However, the ghost of Tom Spanbauer still haunts me, and Tom’s ghost asks, “Why do these characters take so many drugs?” Tom would look across the workshop table and clear his throat and adjust his eyeglasses and ask, “Haley, what’s the sous-conversation?” Meaning, what’s the undercurrent that’s not being said?

It can be an undercurrent specific to the characters: Some unexpressed emotion they must keep suppressed by using drugs, or some trauma they likewise can’t face.

But on a big, deep, cultural level the sous-conversation can be something enormous, something the entire culture is afraid to recognize… like the ghost of Thalidomide that haunted the book and film Rosemary’s Baby. Perhaps the author Ira Levin wasn’t even aware of this undercurrent. Thalidomide had been introduced as a treatment for morning sickness in 1957. If taken during a specific window of a pregnancy it lead to birth defects — similar to the defects we eventually see on Rosemary Woodhouse’s newborn. In real life, tens of thousands of infants were affected, but the overall culture had to keep a brave face and soldier on. Thalidomide was still available in many countries, with better guidelines for usage. This left — unexpressed — all the rage and grief the world felt. Vulnerable women had blindly trusted their doctors, and there was no universal way to vent and exhaust that rage. Like Rosemary Woodhouse, each mother had to accept her child despite how it differed from her expectations.

Yes, there is the moment of shrieking horror and denial and thoughts of murder/suicide. In the book Rosemary considers grabbing the baby and leaping from the window. But acceptance and peace eventually prevail. Rosemary embraces what is.

It’s the sous-conversation of Thalidomide and anger at technology that made the story a landmark in the culture. Otherwise, it would’ve simply been a drive-in theater flick like It’s Alive or The Brood. Odds are that Levin didn’t realize his subtext until he’d finished at least one draft. After that, it was too late to change course, he’d get slaughtered if the world caught him writing a horror novel about Thalidomide. Readers and movie goers had their emotional reaction, but they never realized why the story had hit so hard, and Levin wasn’t about to tell them.

This week, let’s give Haley’s story 24 Hours a good read. Read it several times, and chime in with your feedback in the Comments. Let Tom’s ghost keep asking, “What’s the subtext here? What’s the sous-conversation?”

If You Don’t Have a Copy of Jesus’ Son…

Here’s your chance for a freebie. Be the first in the Comments, and I’ll send you the above copy.

If you’ve got a copy, please let someone else claim this one, okay?

Gooner, gooneral, fap, no-fap, faptronaut, coomer…

If you want to grab the reader’s attention and show emotion – or disassociation – in a memorable way, consider that self-pleasure can cover a wide spectrum. It’s powerfully engaging. Sad or hilarious, this might be the perfect physical “business” to add to that scene you’re writing that’s become too talky or too thought-heavy.

Note how the Roth sequence runs on and on – and people think edging is a new invention. While the Stephen King sequence is about cars and boys but plays very coy with the actual orgasm – this from the writer who unpacked a whole menstrual period in the girls shower! Also look at the High Language used in the Kennedy Toole sample vs. the innocent language used in the Walker one.

As always, pretentious High Language used to depict a low subject creates humor. Simple language can leave room for wonder and awe.

It’s amazing how much emotion the physical climax can convey.

From The Color Purple by Alice Walker, 1982

Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button that gits real hot when you do you know what with somebody. It gits hotter and hotter and then it melt. That the good part. But the other parts good too, she say…

…I say. Where’s the button?

Right up near the top, she say. The part that stick out a little.

I look at her and touch it with my finger. A little shiver go through me. Nothing much. But just enough to tell me this is the right button to mash. Maybe.

She say, While you’re looking, look at your titties too. I haul up my dress and look at my titties. Think bout my babies sucking them. Remember the little shiver I felt then too. Sometimes a big shiver. Best part about having the babies was feeding ‘em.

…But when I hear them together all I can do is pull the quilt over my head and finger my little button and titties and cry.

From People Like Us by Dominick Dunne, 1988

Hubie started to drift off to sleep.

When he awoke he looked out the window at the skyline of lower New York, watching a barge go slowly by. On the bed he saw the shopping bag from Wilton House that his mother had left earlier. Unable to sleep again, he took out the magazines and the new book on the Princesses of Monaco, about whom he had no interest. Inside, at the bottom of the bag, he saw a dark brown plastic container. He reached in and took it out. Inside there were fifty Seconal pills.

Hubie reached down and undid the drawstring of his pajamas. For a while his hand rested on his stomach. Then he allowed his fingers to slide down between his legs, resting in his pubic hair. He moved his fingers around, massaging himself lightly. When his penis was semierect, he made a fist around it and pounded himself. For the two minutes and thirty-four seconds that it took to complete the act of masturbation, Hubie Altemus forgot that he was going to die at twenty-seven.

From Carrie by Stephen King, 1974

Billy had not been her first lover, but he was the first she could not dance and dandle at her whim. Before him her boys had been clever marionettes with clear, pimple-free faces and parents with connections and country-club memberships. They drove their own VWs or Javelins or Dodge Chargers. They went to UMass or Boston College. They wore fraternity windbreakers in the fall and muscle-shirts with bright stripes in the summer. They smoked marijuana a great deal and talked about the funny things that happened to them when they were wrecked. They began by treating her with patronizing good fellowship (all high school girls, no matter how good-looking, were Bush League) and always ended up trotting after her with panting, doglike lust. If they trotted long enough and spent enough in the process, she usually let them go to bed with her. Quite often she lay passively beneath them, not helping or hindering, until it was over. Later, she achieved her own solitary climax while viewing the incident as a single closed loop of memory.

From A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, 1980

Bouncing up and down on his side vigorously, Ignatius sensed a belch rising in his throat, but when he expectantly opened his mouth he emitted only a small burp. Still, the bouncing had some physiological effect. Ignatius touched the small erection that was pointing downward into the sheet, held it, and lay still trying to decide what to do. In this position, with the red flannel nightshirt around his chest and his massive stomach sagging into the mattress, he thought somewhat sadly that after eighteen years with his hobby it had become merely a mechanical physical act stripped of the flights of fancy and invention that he had once been able to bring to it. At one time he had almost developed it into an art form, practicing the hobby with the skill and fervor of an artist and philosopher, a scholar and gentleman. There were still hidden in his room several accessories which he had once used, a rubber glove, a piece of fabric from a silk umbrella, a jar of Noxema. Putting them away again after it was all over had eventually grown too depressing.

Ignatius manipulated and concentrated. At last a vision appeared, the familiar figure of the large and devoted collie that had been his pet when he was in high school. “Woof!” Ignatius almost heard Rex say once again. “Woof! Woof! Arf!” Rex looked so lifelike. One ear drooped. He panted…

From Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, 1967

Then came adolescence – half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth – though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil. Through a world of matted handkerchiefs and crumpled Kleenex and stained pajamas, I moved my raw and swollen penis, perpetually in dread that my loathsomeness would be discovered by someone stealing upon me just as I was in the frenzy of dropping my load… I once cored an apple, saw to my astonishment (and with the aid of my obsession) what it looked like, and ran off into the woods to fall upon the orifice of the fruit, pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually between the legs of that mythical being who always called me Big Boy when she pleaded for what no girl in all recorded history had ever had. “Oh shove it in me, Big Boy,” cried the cored apple that I banged silly on that picnic…

Clorox??

How would your character describe the act? Even if the scene never goes into your book/story, it’s worth writing. Write a version to express grief, then write a draft to get laughs. Unpack, unpack, unpack.

Next week I’ll revisit the Baby Talk entries and award the final two Jackalope heads. To date the biggest obstacle to winning has been… length. With language this dense, don’t exhaust your reader by taking too long to make your point.

Post new entries or revise your current ones Here. I’ll be in touch with the editor of Smokelong Quarterly to see if they’ll accept a few pieces. Who knows, we might get our own Baby Talk issue. No promises. Just get in your last, best shots this week.

First a Story

When the publisher, St. Martin’s, went to launch Doug Coupland’s Generation X, they pissed off millions. For weeks up to the book’s pub date St. Martin’s faxed a page-sized, bold, black “X” to every fax machine in North America. Unexplained. It created such a panic in 1991: these ominous black Xs rolling out of every office fax machine. Was it political? What did it mean? Soon the book dropped. Mystery solved. But it was exactly this brand of fax abuse that got fax abuse made illegal.

The moral? Publicity is anything you can do before it’s outlawed.

Which Brings Us to the Boarding House Story

Still in my bulking phase, here. Flirting with ideas for short stories. Testing those ideas on friends. Analyzing old books I still love: What about them keeps me coming back?

Scratch any book I love, and most likely you’ll find it’s a “boarding house story.” By that, I mean a group of characters compelled by poverty or a shortage of housing to share a living space. Such is the soul of Minimalism: a limited cast billeted together in a cramped setting. Their energy building upon one another’s dramas. But the chief charm of boardinghouse stories – as far as I’m concerned – is that they’re populated by either very young people, or very old ones, or a mixture of both.

The characters live precarious lives, always scrambling to find love, money, jobs, health insurance, while warding off parents and family that would pull them back into a stale orbit back at some childhood home.

From More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, 1980

Mary Ann was not moving back to Cleveland. She was not running home to Mommy and Daddy. She knew that much, anyway. For all her trials, she loved it here in San Francisco, and she loved her makeshift family at Mrs. Madrigal’s comfy apartment house on Barbary Lane…

This was home now – this crumbling, ivy-entwined relic called 28 Barbary Lane – and the only parental figure in Mary Ann’s day-to-day existence was Anna Madrigal, a landlady whose fey charm and eccentric ways were legendary on Russian Hill.

The characters balance and flail through one of the most free, however dangerous, periods in modern life.

From Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia, 1991

When I was young, I thought teenage boys were the most awkward, miserable, antsy, bratty, scuzzy, snickering creatures on God’s green earth. Now at midlife and, as it were, hors de combat, I see them quite differently. Watching them rampage on the street or at a shopping mall, I find them extraordinarily moving, for they represent the masculine principle struggling to free itself from woman’s cosmic dominance.

Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones (at maximum strength at this time), run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.1

Whether the book is Generation X or Tales of the City, the characters stumble from romance to romance, mishap to adventure. The shared roof makes them an ersatz family. At this stage in life, anything could happen. In Jesus’ Son the characters are reduced to living in the roach-infested Rebel Motel, where the maids spit chewing tobacco in the shower stalls. In Generation X, the three main characters share a similar low-rent motel.

From Generation X by Douglas Coupland, 1991

Hell is the town of West Palm Springs Village – a bleached and defoliated Flintstones cartoon of a failed housing development from the 1950s. The town lies on a chokingly hot hill a few miles up the valley, and it overlooks the shimmering aluminum necklace of Interstate 10, whose double strands stretch from San Bernadino in the west, out to Blythe and Phoenix in the east…

… a modern ruin and almost deserted save for a few hearty souls in Airstream trailers and mobile homes, who give us a cautious eye… the mood is vaguely reminiscent of a Vietnam War movie set.

The boarding house story takes place in a liminal no-place between childhood and adulthood. This is where characters tread water before they have resources or networking contacts, an education, a skill, or any real plan. Here is where characters can make real mistakes — they have so little to lose.

From Clown Girl by Monica Drake, 2006

Baloneyville Co op it said, on a wooden sign above Herman’s front door. My room was the mudroom, off the kitchen in back. I opened the back door, heard a screech. The first thing I saw was the muscled, nearly naked body of Herman’s new girlfriend – Natalia, Nadia or Italia, whatever her name was. She was doubled over and laughing, knees pressed together, ready to piss her miniskirt…

…The clown money was my ticket out of Herman’s house and down to San Francisco, to Rex. I’d leave Baloneytown in the dust. Maybe I’d go to Clown College, too. Then I’d sleep in the master bedroom, not in the mudroom, right? Ta da!

In the boarding house story, the young and old are thrown together. Anna Madrigal, the landlady in Armistead Maupin’s books is Frl. Schroeder from 1930’s Germany is Madame Sapphia Spanella in Truman Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. All boarding house stories.

From The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, 1935

From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy, balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.

…All day long (Frl. Schroeder) goes padding about the large dingy flat. Shapeless but alert, she waddles from room to room, in carpet slippers and a flowered dressing-gown pinned ingeniously together, so not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her lodgers…

Long ago, before the War and the Inflation, she used to be comparatively well off. She went to the Baltic for her summer holidays and kept a maid to do the housework. For the last thirty years she has lived here and taken in lodgers. She started doing it because she liked to have company…

And now Frl. Schroeder has not even a room of her own. She has to sleep in the living-room, behind a screen, on a small sofa with broken springs…

She is fond of pointing out to me the various marks and stains left by lodgers who have inhabited this room:…

Given Our Current Housing Crisis

Given our current housing crisis, I’m surprised some writer hasn’t reinvented the boarding house. I know I tried in 1988, when my 20-something friends pitched me on the idea of buying a derelict four-story candy factory. They proposed that we’d each partition off half of a floor, giving everyone at least 5000 square feet of raw concrete space. A loft! The plan broke every housing and fire code, but we were desperate. We’d be living as gritty outlaws, and if crimes began to occur we’d have to deal with the criminals by ourselves. As a gothic situation, an urban gothic, it had all the earmarks of Delicatessen or Home Bodies. Even so, we were desperate for stable housing. When the (very) shaky real estate deal fell through, I wrote it into a failed novel, If You Lived Here, You’d be Home Already.

And when that novel failed, it wrote the situation into another novel. Yeah, a boarding house story.

From Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, 1996

The shingles on the roof blister, buckle, curl, and the rain comes through and collects on top of the ceiling plaster and drips down through the light fixtures… The house that Tyler rents, it has three stories and a basement. We carry around candles. It has pantries and screened sleeping porches and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing. There are bay windows with window seats in the parlor… the house is waiting for something, a zoning change or a will to come out of probate, and then it will be torn down.

One poverty-row, run-down building is pretty much another. In our current world, so much like Isherwood’s Berlin, where inflation is high and housing is scarce, it puzzles me that we aren’t reinventing the boarding house novel. Retired people are squeezed by loneliness and the rising cost of living. As are younger people.

Whatever writer can create a new model for low-cost communal living… and people it with appealing, relatable characters (old, young, or both)… that writer will shape a generation.

If you’ve not got a copy, the above Generation X, 30^th Anniversary Edition is up for grabs. Whoever hits me up first in the Comments below gets the book. I’ll ship it to anyone in the United States – and for now, England.2

Another House Call Soon

Most of the weird photos for the captioning contests came from this secondhand store, The Village Merchant. While I riffled the bins of photographs, my dog would run around the place off leash. She loved shopping there.

The ARCs for Silent Nightmares are Out

Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) are how publishers approach corporate book sellers and tastemakers. The dirty secret is that the very limited number of ARCs cost oodles more to publish than the actual book itself. Limited number = higher cost per. If you ever find yourself with an ARC, treat it with respect and it will be worth so much more than a first edition.

At least six of your fellow subscribers are on the roster. In the next anthology, Michael and I are planning to include at least six new names.

The publication date for Silent Nightmares is Sept. 29th, 2026. It’s positioned for the Christmas season. My congratulations to everyone who’s debuting here.