Movie Review: GHOST SQUAD

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GHOST SQUAD is not a breathtaking work of staggering genius, nor does it appear to be designed to be. It is, however, a fairly fun romp and taste of the supernatural perfect for young kids (or older ones) who aren’t ready to go full-steam ahead in this genre. The scares are gentle, for lack of a better term, with just enough thrill to keep kids engaged.

The film follows young friends off to spend the night in a haunted house after a dare by their local bully. That’s standard old-school fare, but the film gives it a nice update. This is not IT nor STRANGER THINGS, but the performances are admirable on the part of all the kids involved.

There is what feels like a rather forced subplot and theme about dads and sons, but a surprisingly gruff showing by SNL alum Kevin Nealon actually sells the idea pretty well — again, for the primary audience. The script is not shabby at all, though the pacing is off; not slow, but off. The performances keep the film going even though the central storyline takes a bit to find its feet.

Overall, GHOST SQUAD is genuine and heartfelt and even pulls off a pretty cute ending that hits the right note for any fretful parents.

GHOST SQUAD is not recommended for adults, and nor are they its intended audience. It’s a polished version of the Goosebumps TV show from days of yore, and a less scary version of the modern, updated films with Jack Black. If your kids aren’t ready for that film, GHOST SQUAD is a perfect place to start.

#HoldOnToTheLight – 2018

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THE BAD PLACE

It is the end of September. I just now realized it is Thursday, not Friday.

I am in my office. I am in my bad place. My office is not a bad place; I bring my bad place with me, like a guilty photo ragged at the edges and stuffed unseen in my wallet. Everywhere I go.

My bad place is not tangible. It is not a room or a spot or an area. It’s a place in my head and I could feel it coming on this morning. It is a cross between a slow, oozing wound and a brittle snap. I could feel it coming. I didn’t know what to do. Now it’s here. Or maybe I’m there. Whichever. It doesn’t matter. The bad place is back.

As I sit here, literally and truly, with no exaggeration, I want to scream. I want to scream awful things. Horrible things. Wicked things. So the world will know how bad I am and why I should be killed.

I want to punch myself in the stomach. The thighs. The face. Like I have done so many times before.

I want to break everything in my house. Feel each bit of crockery shatter and send tremors up my legs that rattle my ribs together like windchimes.

The destruction feels good. The sound of shit breaking feels good. Punching myself feels good. Screaming awful screams feels good. This is the bad place. I don’t know why I am here or what to do about it.

Right now I am sitting and writing. I have to remind myself to breath because there is very little breathing in the bad place. I have not broken anything. I have not screamed. I have not hurt myself.

But one.

Little.

Thing.

Will do it. Will TRIGGER it.

Maybe it’s banging my pinky against a door frame. Maybe it’s misspelling a word in this article over and over and over and over and over and christ jesus fuck you in the face who the fuck ever let me near a keyboard you useless piece of shit die.

That’s all I can hear. That’s the echo of the bad place.

An hour ago I was doing “jazz hands” for children and their moms in a place that is nearly a second home. I teach children how to read! I should be proud of this. It should make me happy.

They don’t see the drive home. They don’t see the breaking and the screaming and the punching. They don’t see the visceral hate I see in the mirror. The face that says You must not just be destroyed, you must be torn apart.

This is the bad place.

What went wrong this time? What was today’s “trigger?”

There is no trigger. There is just this. This is its face. I listened to encouraging words on the way to my job. I tried to breathe on the way home. I put on a good show and got great feedback. I also got a rejection on a query letter, but that ain’t shit, that’s the business.

There is no trigger. There is just this. It just comes when it wants to.

My wife and children are healthy and safe. I have a home. My dog is loyal to a fault. My friends and family love me.

It’s never enough to stop the bad place.

There is no trigger. There is just this.

I should probably cry. That would probably help. But I don’t. I won’t. I won’t, I refuse, and I’ve been told this is bad for me. It is. I agree. So instead I come here, to the bad place, and try not to break, to scream, or to punch.

I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know how to come up for air.

There is just this. The visceral need to destroy and be destroyed.

All I can do . . . all I can ever do . . .

Is wait.

Wait just one more minute.

Wait one more minute.

Don’t give up for one more minute.

Don’t give in for one more minute.

Just stay safe for one more minute.

As of this moment—let me get a calculator—I have been here for more than 23,126,400 minutes. I just need to hang on for one more of those.

They start to add up, don’t they? A minute here, another minute there. One after another.

Pretty soon you have a life.

A life where not every minute must be spent counting the minutes, but one in which some are lost to the bad place, yes. I can’t have those minutes back. But there are so many other minutes…minutes with my wife. Minutes with my children. Minutes with my friends. Minutes with my art. Minutes for ice cream and coffee and pizza and walks around the park. My minutes. My good minutes. There are so many good minutes to be had, and so much potential in each one.

So yeah. The bad ones suck. But not every minute is bad and there’s only one way to find out: Stay here.

I am still here.

I am still safe.

I have made it one more minute.

Too many of us have not.

So today, I promise—I will wait just one more minute.

Now promise me: You will wait just one more minute. That’s not so much. Breathe with me. Even in the bad place, breathe. For one more minute.

23,126,401

23,126,402

23,126,403

One more minute.

About the campaign:

 

#HoldOnToTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by genre authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Hope for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, go to http://www.HoldOnToTheLight.com and join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WeHoldOnToTheLight

We All Have an Origin Story

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My wife and I were driving home from seeing a superhero movie one night and talking about it as normal people do after a movie. I believe it was a sequel; possibly Spider-Man 3 or something like that. I mentioned that I really tend to prefer the first films in a series, not just because they are any better necessarily, but because I really love origin stories.

“That makes sense,” Joy said. “Since that’s what you write.”

And I thought–but had the common sense not to say–“Oh, no no no, sweetie love. No no no, I write contemporary young adult fiction, not superhero stories.”

What I said was, “Huh?” (Which I say a lot.)

She answered, “Well, what is being a teenager if not your origin story?”

BAM! She was absolutely right. All young adult (YA) and middle-grade (MG) fiction is, essentially, origin stories. We may not see where these characters end up as adults, but we see who they are in the process of becoming, and that process, universal certainly to Western civilization over the past 100 years or so, but possibly the world throughout, is the story we’re telling.

I’m fairly sure I’ve changed a lot since I was a teenager. At least, I hope so! But boiled down, how different am I really? How have my core beliefs and attitudes changed since then? What matters to me, what I care about, who I am attracted to romantically and otherwise? I mean, cripes, my best friends from high school are my best friends today. A lot of them still live within driving distance.

Why YA?

I don’t know why exactly I am attracted to these origin stories; maybe it’s because only recently have I become as … alive as I was back then, and so revisiting that deep well of nostalgia is somehow cathartic. Maybe there’s an ethos in being a teenager that appeals to me. (Probably that’s it.) Or maybe it’s just that things of the Adult World bore me silly. Dance clubs and alcohol and mortgages and credit cards and keeping up with the Whomevers and watching reality TV…yawn. My family is about as middle class and nuclear as they come (few and far between these days, I know), yet we don’t strive for the things others in our demographic seem to.

Or maybe I just haven’t accepted that I’m forty-something goddamn years old yet. A distinct possibility. But the best part of being older is you (usually) have money to buy all the crap you couldn’t when you were 14, so that’s a plus.

Part of my attraction to YA too I think is, frankly, the brutality of it. Not that this necessarily goes away as people age, but most of us become at least somewhat socially aware as we get older and stop making assholes of ourselves. (Some, not all!) But kids don’t have those filters in place yet, I think, as a whole. Shit just comes out of their mouths before they can stop to think about the ramifications of it, and while sometimes that’s straight up funny, other times–a lot of times–it is devastating. Even … fatal, I am sorry to say. So there is always drama to be teased out and studied, like I did with Random, a book inspired by very true and very awful circumstances. Being a teen is far too often a real-life Hunger Games.

On the flip side, though–the good side, the great side–I think it’s the bigness of everything at that age that I keep wanting to write about. Everything is new when you hit junior high and high school. You’ve learned so much about the world and yet know so little. My dad once said something like, “Tom, I’m sixty-five years old, and am just now realizing that I don’t know shit.” Teenagers, happily for us writers, don’t labor under this problem, as they have the solutions for everything. I know I did. I probably still do, actually, which is why I write YA…?

This is one reason I get so bent out of shape when teens are dismissed. Come on, man, it was mostly teens and very young adults who saved the fucking planet in the 1940s. They know the score. They have the passion to get things done, and I for one say let ’em. It’s not like adults have a great track record with human rights, amen?

But Why Else?

Maybe, too, it’s my theatre background, which is dependent on dialogue to function. I feel like my teenage years were filled with nothing but dialogue. Phone calls and hanging out, all the time. All night, all day. We didn’t have money or much else, and we were lucky if someone had a car. Three bucks, a Super Big Gulp, and a pack of smokes, we were good to go. I know this is an ancient and largely romanticized picture to paint, but it’s true. I’d say, on average, I spent five afternoons and/or evenings with one or more of my friends, away from school. After school, at night, on the weekend, whatever, we were together. For about a year, maybe two, my buddy Damon would come pick me up in his old blue Chevy pick up at least once a week, and we’d drive to some random location, pop in some Skoal, and talk for two hours or more on whatever-the-fuck.

So talking, dialogue, is very much a part of our teen lives, and since dialogue is what I was trained in, so to speak, maybe it’s only natural that I gravitated to YA.

Or maybe it’s simply that the first full-length novel I really completed was written at age 19, about 19-year-olds. That’s outer limit for YA these days, yes, but certainly its topics, tone, and ideas were squarely in the YA genre. (This book later became Zero.)

This Is Why:

My latest book, Mercy Rule, is definitely a YA novel, but the thing about that genre and most of the books in it — particularly the realistic contemporary stuff — is that it speaks not just to teens, but to a large swath of adults who remember those years vividly but who made it out the other side. Mercy Rule is a tough book, I’m not gonna lie, and it’s definitely an origin story for several of its characters. But it’s also about the origin stories that never got to be told to completion. (You’ll understand when you read it.) And to me, the most important part of all this is that someone who needs to read it gets ahold of it and says, “Yeah, this guy gets me.” It’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever been paid with my novels. I need these readers to Stay Here and help get the rest of the world out of the goddamn dark ages.

Teenagers are superheros, if we let them. Superman was not born Superman; he was Clark Kent long before he put on the cape. He’s a hero not for his powers, but for the way his family raised him to care about others. He could have just as easily been found by Lex Luthor’s family. “Kansas farm boy makes good” isn’t much of an origin story, but it turned out one hell of a super man.

I hope I do the same.

 

It’s About A Girl

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I’d been wanting to start a novel with the line “It’s about a girl” for a long time. With manicpixiedreamgirl, I could cross that off my list. Because as a teen . . . man, everything was about a girl.

Turns out, this is the most autobiographical of my novels so far. Which is to say, like, five percent autobiographical. It is not a true story in the sense of it being nonfiction. Party and Zero were maybe two or three percent “true,” in terms of things that happened to me personally. But with manicpixiedreamgirl, I went a lot farther (further? Gah, who can keep those straight?) into my high school experience than in my previous novels.

Let’s call it “emotionally autobiographical.”

So, yes, it’s about a girl. I mean, what else is high school supposed to be about if not young/first/thrilling/doomed love?

There are two parts to this novel. There’s the semi-nostalgic, somewhat-regretful, true-ish part, where I got to relive those formative years and inspirations all over again, and that was fun. It stung a little, too, when I took the time to realize that, yeah, I was pretty much an idiot on my best days, and far worse on my worst days.

Still—we had a good time, and everyone pretty much turned out okay. Which is not the same as saying, “No one got hurt.”

Then there’s the grown-up, now-I’m-a-dad, author part. That’s the part that I want people to really take home with this novel. It’s the part that’s not so much about the protagonist, Tyler, but about his “dream girl,” Becky.

There are a lot of Beckys out there.

Guys and girls both who are willing to do pretty much anything to make the pain stop for a minute, or feel like someone at least knows they exist.

If you’ve read Party, you might think of Becky Webb as who Beckett Montgomery could have become had not things gone differently that night in Santa Barbara. Like so many of us, Becky is lost and abandoned and shattered. When we reach that point, no matter what our age, we often start doing things to ourselves not easily taken back or undone.

I’ve been there. Maybe you have, too. If you know what I’m talking about, then let me tell you this, too: Don’t give up. It gets better.

I hope you enjoy the story for the story itself. I hope you laugh at Tyler (and at me) for being such a doofblatt most of the time. (His heart’s in the right place, I think, but he’s also, you know…a boy, so.) I hope that, if you haven’t already, you find your own dreamgirl/dreamboy someday, like I have.

And I really hope that, on those days you feel like these characters, you’ll at the very least remember you’re not alone. ’Kay? Cool.

Take care.

For Teachers, As The Holidays Come To A Close

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THE THIN CHALK LINE

Remember chalk? It was once used by teachers to illustrate things on a blackboard. Some older classrooms still have them, including on the main campus of ASU. I wonder if some teachers still prefer them. Me, I’m equally maladapted for handwriting no matter what the surface or medium.

So let’s imagine an old chalkboard in a class room. One piece of old yellow chalk. Draw a line horizontally across this chalkboard with that piece of chalk. Got it in your head? Cool. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

Over the past seven years, I’ve had the privilege and honor of going to schools where students of various ages — junior high to college — were in attendance to hear me talk about my novels. Here’s a sample of some of the things I’ve heard in that time:

English Teacher at a North Phoenix, upper-middle to upper-class district: “We know that if we built dormitories on this campus, we’d have students begging to be let into them. They’d rather live on campus 24/7 than go back to their homes and deal with the devastation there.”

Same teacher: “I’ve had kids ask if they could sleep overnight on my patio rather than go home. I have kids who come to school not know where they are going to sleep that night.”

Teacher, middle-class district: “You’ll have a lot of kids here after school because they don’t want to go home. They don’t have air conditioning.” (In August, in Phoenix.)

Student: “When did you know you wanted to be a writer…and what did your family think?”

Student: “I wanted to direct a play, but my dad said no.”

Student: “I gave my mom a story I wrote. She read it and told me it sucked.”

I’ve got more. If you’re a teacher, you do too.

In eighth grade (at a private Christian school, mind you) I got my first cigarettes and my first joints. By freshman year, I was getting high as often as possible with people I thought were my friends because they laughed at me when I was high. I also joined the drama department that year. I was a pain in the ass to my drama teacher, Mrs. Ann Tully, who, by the way, will always be “Mrs. Tully” or just “Tully” no matter how old I get. Never “Ann.” And Mrs. Goldsen will always be “Goldie.” Period.

Our drama department put on two full length productions each year. Tully directed the first one, Goldie the second. Tully cast me in the first play that year, and the seniors were all beside themselves, saying, “Freshman don’t get cast in the plays!” I didn’t know that. Nor did I care. I had pot to smoke. But hey, the rehearsals were fun…

Toward the end of the year, I showed up to a speech and drama department meeting high as a kite. I have no idea what I said or did, but I know I laughed a lot. Loudly. Afterward, Tully pulled me aside and said, “I know you won’t remember any of this, but…”  And I don’t know what she said after that, so I guess she was right.

The next day, she showed up at my speech class, pulled me out, escorted me into a little windowless room down the hall, sat me down, shut the door, and sat across from me, so close our knees were practically touching. I looked at her feet the entire time. I know she said some things like “wasting your potential” and “have so much to offer” and “smarter than this” and so on. But what really stuck out was this:

“And if you ever, ever, step foot in this department for a class, a meeting, a rehearsal, anything, in that condition again, you will be out. No plays, no speech tournaments, no classes, no student assistant, nothing. Ever again. Am I clear?”

And I whispered, “Yes.”

It was the second to last time I ever got high, and the last time was terrible. Looking back at the direction I was heading, I have no doubt that had Tully not cast me in her show, and had she not had that little sit-down, there’s no telling where I would have ended up. Certainly not in a place where I’d have nine hardcover novels out at bookstores everywhere. (Years later, when Party came out, Goldie wrote to me and said, “See? I told you to do something with your writing!”)

Senior year, I went into their office, just a few days before graduation. Goldie was somewhere else, but Tully was there. By that point, I had become the department club president, won every possible acting award they had, become a speech team Letterman, ranked high in state speech competitions, attended three out-of-state actor training sessions with Tully at the Utah Shakespeare Festival…I was a drama department lifer. And I told Tully, “Thank you. Thanks for putting up with me, thanks for everything you taught me, thanks for being there.”

Mrs. Tully laughed.

“Don’t thank me,” she said.  “Thank Mrs. Goldsen!”

I said, “I’m going to…she’s just not here right now…”

Tully said, “No no, you don’t understand.  You really need to thank Mrs. Goldsen, because she’s the one who convinced me to cast you in that first play.”

I sat down. Hard. “What?”

Tully nodded.  “You remember the kind of kid you were when you showed up here? There’s no way in hell I was going to put you in one of my shows. Mrs. Goldsen argued with me for more than hour, trying to convince me that you were worth it. The only reason I cast you was because she is my best friend. So thank her for all this. She’s the one who made it happen.”

Remember our chalk board, the one with the horizontal yellow chalk line?

That’s you.

You are the thin chalk line that separates kids like me from what they’re becoming to what they can be.  Junior high and high school teachers in particular are, in my opinion, the last line of defense for our nation’s children. After that, there’s no net, no safeties.

The friends I made in the drama department were also useless little hoods when they arrived. We had a guy with a criminal record for grand theft auto (one of my best friends). A struggling and recovering alcoholic at 16 (another best friend of mine). Too many more to mention. But you know where we are now? One became a combat medic with three combat tours on his sleeve.  Another became an English teacher. One founded a film festival, another joined him not long after.  All of us, at some point, worked together at a theatre company I started in my backyard.

On April 27, 2010, I got to hold my first-ever official book launch at a little indie book shop in Tempe, Arizona, called Changing Hands. We had about 100 people show up, which is incredible. And sitting together in the second row on my right were Tully and Goldie. They have never missed a book launch since then.

When I was 15, I wrote a play, and asked Tully if I could direct it for our annual showcase of one acts. She said I could do it.

She did not say that she “gave me permission.”  Listen closely to the difference: “I give you permission.”  vs. “Yes, you can do it.”  You. Can. Do this.  Fifteen years old.

Teenagers want you to teach them. They want to be driven.  They want to be pushed to excel.

Tully and Goldie expected and got excellence. They gave us authority and responsibility, and demanded not perfection, but our very best effort. And they got it. Every time. They were the thin chalk line.  And so are you.

You have kids in your class and school who aren’t sleeping at home tonight. I met one kid who joined the Marines because the risks of being sent to Afghanistan were better than being at home for one more year. I watched a counselor explain to a teenage girl how her parents’ joint custody of her was going to affect her college plans.

I know you are overworked. Underpaid. That the entire system is broken from the ground up. That our libraries are disappearing, along with our librarians, and good teachers are punished while bad teachers are rewarded. I know. And it’s not fair.

But we need you to hang in there. Don’t give up. You got into this gig, I hope, because you love teaching and you love students. Don’t stop. Fight back. You are all that remains between a generation of hopeless children and a generation that can take us beyond the moon. Raise your voices, be heard. Because in a few years, it’ll be my kids in your classroom. (I’ll do my part. Parents? Will you join me?)

There’s an old ’80s movie called Teachers, starring Nick Nolte and Judd Hirsch, and I hope some of you are old enough to even know who those actors are. The premise of the movie is that a former student is suing the school because he graduated without the ability to read. And I know there are schools in your city who are forcing you to give a kid who doesn’t turn in an assignment 50% instead of zero, and I know how absurd that is. I know middle schools are shoving poorly educated students right through the grade levels, and threatening teachers who don’t think a zero student should move up a grade. I know.

At the end of the film, a kid has pulled a false fire alarm, and the entire school empties out. In the movie, Judd Hirsch plays an administrator to Nick Nolte’s civics teacher. Hirsch has been beaten down by the system. In a tired voice, standing in the parking lot, he tells Nolte, “Half those kids aren’t even coming back after the fire alarm.”

And Nolte says, “But half will. I think they’re worth it. I’m a teacher.”

They are.

And so are you.

Thank you for all you do.

Why is writing endings so difficult?

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Endings are tough on writers and readers alike. For authors of course it’s hard to know if we’ve nailed an ending; and for readers, we can all name at least a few endings that left us a little cold. (I can name one right now that I think I shouted, “WHAT?!” and then shook my head for the last page or two. No, I will not name it here. Ask me at Ace or Phoenix ComiCon.)

On the other hand, we’ve all read endings that really soared too; that left us weeping sadly (not me!!!) or weeping joyfully (also not me!!!). But as an author, how do you take a reader there?

I’ll go into more detail on this in a new project I’m working on, but for today, let’s stick with the following:

1. The protagonist needs to change. This is all but an absolute requirement, and I’d say it’s pretty much a requirement of all genre fiction. It needn’t be the basis of the novel, but do give us some sense that the hero is not who she was at the beginning.

2. The ending needs to be in context of the storyworld. I talk a bit about this in my new book How To Write Your Novel By Watching Movies First, which you should totally get right now, but the short of it is this: If you’ve presented us with a novel set in the real world, then there better not be any aliens showing up at the end (unless that was the inevitable thing we knew about at the start). You opened your book with several promises: this is the genre, this/these are the hero/es, here’s the story problem. Deviating from any of these at the end is not going to endear you to readers.

This brings us to twists and surprise endings, but we’ll come back to those another time. Right now, just know that you’ve established a premise in the novel’s opening pages; the ending should be the payoff.

3. Word choice and cadence or rhythm matter. Remember how Morgan Freeman said, “I hope,” at the end of The Shawshank Redemption movie? It’s the same last words of the novella. Now imagine him saying, “I have hope.”

Ehhh . . . it lacks somehow, doesn’t it? I think it’s because “I hope” is active; it has momentum and breathes on its one. “I have hope,” while not a bad sentence and is still true in the context of the story, sounds like something possessed; something inanimate like a pencil or a phone. “I hope” has a different cadence than “I have hope,” and is by far the stronger choice. So sound out those last few sentences, and make sure you’re writing and punctuating them the way you hear them out loud.

4. What have you liked about other novels? Think of the top three or more books that left you a little breathless or somehow emotional, and study how that author did it. You can’t (usually) rip off an exact ending of course, but ask yourself why a particular ending had the impact on you that it did. Then go back and compare those notes to your novel. You might discover something.

Good luck sticking the landing on those endings! It can be challenge, but it’s a good feeling when you know you’ve got something. Keep writing!

(And if you liked this post, please share it; if you want to learn more, drop me a line!)

 

Questions about RANDOM taken from German students 2 years ago.

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Top questions asked by students while in Germany. Enjoy!

You are a male author, so why did you choose to write the story from a female point of view?

Excellent question. First let me point out that writing from a female perspective is not new for me; I did it in Party, Zero, Shackled, Hellworld, and Violent Ends as well. My adult horror novella Those We Bury Back is not, nor is manicpixiedreamgirl; Sex, Death, God; or Sick. So I’m just about 50/50 in terms of which gender I choose to write from.

I’m going to use a broad generalization here, so please don’t flip out on me: Broadly speaking, boys tend to be physically aggressive in their bullying behavior, and girls tend to be verbal. This makes sense because, broadly speaking, girls have a better vocabulary and speak more frequently than boys do. That’s not a values judgement in either direction, it’s just an American cultural phenomenon. Since the plot of the novel was primarily about words and how they are used to hurt people, it seemed to make more sense to have a female playing the role of the bully (or villain, which Tori is).

Interestingly, in the first draft, the Tori character was male and the Andy character female. So the story did not start out the way it ended up. That happens a lot!

Right away, Andy asks Tori if she believes in God, and Tori says no. Do you believe in God?

Yes, someone actually asked me this. First time ever.

While I don’t think anyone truly cares–except maybe my mother-in-law, oh snap!–I’ll tell you the same thing I told him: That I do not know if God exists, that no one knows for certain whether God exists, but that I hope–deeply, truly hope to the core of my being–that God does exist in some way. I really do hope so.

I stopped there because otherwise we would have been there all night listening to me go on and on about matter spiritual, scientific, and religious. I’ll save it for a nonfiction book. But I am so proud of that kid for having the courage to ask the question!

Who is your favorite character in the novel?

I get asked variations on this question a lot, and I always qualify it by saying, “This is my answer today. Ask me tomorrow, it might be different.” Today, my answer is Andy. He holds all the cards, he has all the inside information, and he has reason enough to really attack Tori, but he doesn’t. I admire that about him. I also enjoyed writing him because, unlike in real life, since he knows the entire story and is leading the conversation, he can say clever or funny things that I could never have come up with on the spur of the moment. He has an agenda, so he gets to choose his words more carefully than we usually get to.

Would you have been friends with Tori in high school?

Probably not. She’s an athlete and I . . . wasn’t. We just would not have run in the same circles. I very well might have been friends with Kevin, though, or Jack. In fact, Jack and I would have had a lot in common. The cystic acne part of his story is something I know a lot about!

Do you like Tori?

I feel for her. I wish other people would, too. She’s very young and very inexperienced, and makes bad choices like all of us do when we’re that age. But she has potential, and the people who love her see that in her. I think she will make better choices after the story ends, and will learn from her bad ones, and will make a positive difference in the world as she gets older. It sometimes feels like a few readers have never committed a “sin of commission or omission” in their lives, the way they talk about her. That hurts, I’ll be honest.

Why not show the trial itself?

There’s a reason the book ends the way it does. It’s because I am not and never was interested in the legal aspects of Tori’s case; I was interested in the social and personal aspects, namely: How does a person who has done what Tori has done justify it? How can a person convince herself she need not take any responsibility for what has happened? The result of asking that question was Random, which is why the protagonist is also the villain.

Sometimes I regret that choice because apparently, for some people, there needed to be a big-ass red warning label on the cover.

 

ICYMI, here’s a short video of one of my readings at the English Theater in Berlin. It was such a cool night!

 

 

 

 

Oh, the horror: Stephen King’s THE MIST; WORLD WAR Z; and more

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In honor of the release of HELLWORLD, here’s a quick look at some of my favorite horror out there. Enjoy! (p.s. Yeah, there are some affiliate links scattered about in here. That’s because you have got to read these books.)

The Mist by Stephen King

No discussion of Stephen King’s The Mist would be complete without an aside about the differences between the novella and the movie. I’ve waffled on this one, to some degree. I love the ending to the novel. It’s a theme King has used before, most notably in Shawshank, and it’s the one I most often write about myself.

The 2007 Frank Darabont movie took the original theme and, in my humble opinion, decimated it. Just spread ‘em and took one giant enormous crap on the whole thing, and I was just as pissed when I first saw it as I sound right here. Unforfuckinggiveable. And then I read the King said he wished he’d thought of it! GAHHHHH! Steve, you’re killing me, here!

…Okay. Then I took some time away and gave the movie another look. And I still prefer the novella. But…now I can sort of see where the theme is actually intact, and that Darabont just got there in a different way. I don’t like that way, but I will grant it some grace (because, you know, Stephen King loses sleep over what I think) because Darabont does make the point a bit more…forcefully…than King did.

Having said all that, the movie is otherwise pretty damn faithful, and I appreciate that. But as always, the book is better. Especially when narrated by the spectacular Frank Muller. Any time you can hear a King book narrated by Muller, do it. The man was magical, and taken far too early. (God rest ye, Mr. Muller, and thank you.)

The Mist has influenced a whole, whole lot of my writing–Hellworld is no exception. I have always had a soft spot for stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. The movie and novel Fortress by Gabrielle Lord comes to mind, that one about a group of Australian children kidnapped by four men for ransom…and what the kids do after being pushed to the edge. (That should probably be its own post. Also I’ve learned some things about the author’s politics that sort of sour me on the story, but if you can put that aside, Fortress is still amazing.)

This whole idea of “Everything was fine, and then out of nowhere, monsters!” is attractive to me for some reason. I guess because it’s real life writ large: everything was fine, and then out of nowhere, cancer/car accident/she cheated on me/whatever. We all know, and horror writers prey on this fact, that monsters do exist. They just sometimes look like parents, spouses, pastors, children, or the IRS.

One thing I love about The Mist so much is that it reads as though King was sitting there for a handful of days, pounding out the words, asking himself, “I wonder what happens next?” and having no idea until he wrote it. It doesn’t read like a well-planned story; it reads like the diary we will come to realize it is at story’s end. It reads like King put himself in that situation, and just kept asking himself what he’d do if in it.

That’s a very fun way to write.

The Mummy, The Will, and the Crypt by John Bellairs

Before there was such a thing as a Young Adult section in the bookstore, there was Juvenile Fiction, and there was Adult Fiction. That’s it. You had your Judy Blume, and you had your Stephen King, and never the two shall meet. Then you had your awkwardly juvenile like the inimitable Robert Cormier—awkward, because while his characters were teens, his themes and often plots were not. But there was no YA, so he got shelved in Juvenile.

Back in those heady days before Goosebumps—which we will return to in a future blog—if you wanted horror, real supernatural shit, there was one place to go: John Bellairs.

Bellairs (who, I am sad to report, passed away in 1991) was introduced to me via his first juvenile novel, The House With A Clock In Its Walls. Pretty good stuff; atmospheric and very literary (in retrospect. Back then, “literary” just meant “how books were written.” We didn’t have quite the breadth of Voice that readers today enjoy). I enjoyed and have read all of Bellairs’ work multiple times, but when it comes to the creep factor, none of them touches The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt.

I read Mummy at an age when I should not have been watching slasher movies, but did it anyway. By B-horror film standards—think Basket Case, or Tourist Trap—Bellairs’ work was tame; it was for children, after all, and this is in a time before Hunger Games and its explicit violence toward children ever would have made it to an agent’s desk. By today’s standards, Bellairs is working with his hands tied: he needs to be legitimately frightening but not bloody, gory, or even necessarily violent.

With Mummy, he succeeds spectacularly. The plot revolves around young Johnny, who becomes obsessed with finding a lost will of a powerful cereal magnate. There’s a reward for whoever finds it, and Johnny needs the money to pay for an operation for his grandmother. Pretty straightforward. But Bellairs populates his novels with quirky but utterly believable characters: Johnny, a bespectacled little nerd who—and this is brilliant, I think—manages to catch a cold before breaking and entering into the estate of the deceased businessman. It’s a small detail, but Bellairs takes that common experience and lets it work into Johnny’s climactic break-in. Think about it: When you have a bad cold, do you feel like getting off the couch, much less travelling halfway across your home state, at night, in the winter, alone, to break into an abandoned mansion?

Then there’s the Professor. One of the greats in literature, if you ask me; the Professor is an old man, seventies or so, who is as cranky as he is loyal. Bellairs breathes great life into this old guy, and builds a Miyagi-Daniel relationship between he and Johnny long before Karate Kid came on the scene. He also introduces Fergie, a gangly nerd who becomes Johnny’s first real friend; great comic relief and a stalwart ally in Johnny’s insane scheme.

Now what about the horror? Suffice it to say Bellair’s description of a walking, undead mummy influenced Hellworld to the point of outright homage. The book has a nasty witch, an eerie ghost, and the aforementioned mummy.

Bellairs excels in two particular areas: believable characters and authentic, gripping settings. Most, if not all, of his novels all occur in the Eastern U.S. near or during the Second World War; no cell phones, kids! Hell, sometimes not even a landline, depending on the location. But this isn’t just a gimmick, and it is not romanticized. Johnny’s dad in Mummy is a pilot, and all he or we know is that he was recently shot down over the Pacific, and no one seems to know if he’s alive or dead. With that palpable dread setting the scene, Bellairs goes on to give us chilling atmospheric details that captures things like what it might feel like to really, truly see a ghost come floating out of a window in the dead of night.

Grown-ups could read Mummy in an afternoon; it’s about the length of a Judy Blume YA. I think if you’ll give this Bellairs novel a shot, you’ll soon want the others, too.

(One note of caution, though: Because Bellairs passed away at a relatively young age, he left incomplete manuscripts behind, which were summarily finished and released by his publisher. I don’t recommend these; they are too plainly not the real Bellairs. I appreciate the attempt to honor his memory, but those novels fall short in my opinion.)

World War Z by Max Brooks

There are only a handful of books I really, truly, deeply wish I had written. Books that literally make me angry that I did not write them. One of them is World War Z.

I’ve met Max Brooks twice—and  was smart enough to get a picture the second time—and I’ll never forget the look on his face when I told him I thought Z was one of the most intelligent novels I’d ever read. “Wow, really?” he said, or something like it. “Thanks!”

It’s true. The conceit of Z is simple: Instead of being about a zombie apocalypse, it’s in the aftermath…and humanity won. We did it. Brooks has written a horror novel that, no matter how you cut it, is one of optimism and faith. I mean, what an idiot, right? How the hell do you begin a novel by essentially stating, “The good guys win in the end”?

That’s exactly what he does, and that’s exactly why it works. The novel is told as a series of interviews of survivors, people who are now a part of rebuilding civilized society (no Governors or Negans here, thank you). The “interviews” are as authentic as any you’d read about Germany, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. They are full of blood and viscera, terror and fear, as told by those who went through it, losing all they had in the process, barely escaping with their lives.

And in doing so, Brooks is able to insert gentle social commentary along the way. My favorite: Floridians building boats in near-hopeless attempts to sail to Cuba, where they hope to find work as maids and house cleaners. BOOM!  That is awesome.

World War Z cannot be replicated. The movie, without the book, would have been an entertaining little zombie flick; that they did not do exactly what Brooks did with the book is unforgivable. Imagine any number of Hollywood heavyweights—many of whom narrate the audiobook, beautifully—doing Band-of-Brothers-esque interview sequences about the zombie war. Just think about it. Can you see it? Ugh! I hope Brooks is allowed to do something like this in the future.

Anyway. There’s enough gore to keep the horror kids pleased, and zombie fans sated. But World War Z is really a book for just about any reader who enjoys strong, well-written fiction. Again, Brooks’ fundamental optimism about humanity is unrelenting, and that sets it apart from any other horror novel out there. Give it a shot, if you haven’t. Or at try the audio, which is abridged (sadly), but still excellent.

Nice to have met you, Mr. Brooks. Thank you!

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Horror: One for the Road, by Stephen King

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“It was quarter past ten and Herb Tooklander was thinking of closing for the night when the man in the fancy overcoat and the white, staring face burst into Tookey’s Bar, which lies in the northern part of Falmouth.” ~ Stephen King, “One For The Road,” from the collection Night Shift.

One of my all-time favorite short stories ever. I’m a fan of the entire canon of ‘Salem’s Lot, which includes this short story, the short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” and of course the novel ‘Salem’s Lot. All are worth a read.

But Road really sticks with me, decades after the first time I read it.  Why?

First off, let’s start with King’s economy. If you’ve taken any of my classes or read any of my writing on writing, I talk about economy quite a bit. It’s not a word often attributed to King’s doorstoppers, but bear with me on this:

Notice how economically he starts the story: Never mind the “white, staring face” for the moment. The man, Lumley, didn’t just walk in, or amble, or prance – he burst in. It’s a small but important word. With one simple, relatively innocuous word, the night is off to an interesting start. Then our narrator, Booth, specifies the man is wearing a “fancy overcoat.” Booth doesn’t notice that he uses this phrase. Why? Because if you regularly wear a fancy overcoat, you don’t point out other people wearing them, which reveals something (or implies it) about Booth: he’s not a man who wears fancy overcoats, and probably has some ideas about people who do. So this one moment is the moment everything changes; there’s a hint of tension socially as well as physically (using the words “fancy” and “burst.”)

And not one word about vampires in that opening sentence. In fact, we won’t hear it until about halfway through the story. That’s economy. And I bet you anything King did not slave over those opening words. (Statistically, at that point in time, he may well have been high or hammered or both at the time, but hey.)

I also love the slow burn. I’m a fan of slow burns, provided the pacing is good — the two are not synonymous. Booth/King drops in phrases like these early on without elucidating:

~ “The lot. Oh my god.”

~ “I’ve got my bible on the shelf. You still wear yor Pope’s medal?”

~ “Everyone in town has something. Crucifix, St. Christopher’s medal…something.”

Long before Booth says anything about “vampires,” we’re sucked in. (HA! Sucked in! Get it? Sorry.) Phrases like these three trip our internal sensors. What’s “the lot?” Why are you talking about Bibles at a bar? Why does everyone in town have a crucifix? Without saying much, Booth/King has told us a lot, and we have to keep reading to find out more. What is not said is as frightening as what is not seen. Booth/King keeps the reader at arm’s length even though it’s first person; he forces us to take the role of Lumley because he won’t give us any details right away. The narrator isn’t unreliable — he just doesn’t say much, in a sense. Although Booth is telling us a story, he also keeps his own counsel about it. We won’t get anything from him until he’s good and ready to say it.

Then there’s setting. On its surface, the setting is trite: it’s a dark and stormy night, for heaven’s sake! But it works here, and it wouldn’t work any other way. It’s cold dread on a cold night. In the snow, we see a slumped form slithering away from the Jeep; a little girl standing on top of the snow instead of sinking into it doesn’t work without . . . well, snow. Lumley’s family must rely on his car heater to stay alive, so there is ample tension and motivation for him to ask these two old locals for help. The dark and stormy night works on a number of plot levels (and King never says “dark and stormy night,” people.)

“One for the Road” partially inspired Hellworld, by the way. The question, as they usually are, was simple: Could a ‘Salem’s Lot-type of place exist today? It was easy to create and maintain such a hamlet in the late ’70s when the story came out; that was before iPhones and Google Earth. Sure, there are places like the forest we see in movies like The Blair Witch Project, but seriously, how hard do you have to try to get eaten by vampires these days? Pretty hard, I think. Not that a cell phone can save you from hungry nosferatu, but are there any surprises out there in the world for us anymore? I’m not sure. So I set out to see if I could find that place. Find it I did: Desert caves. Nothing good happens in there, friends.

“One for the Road” can be found in King’s collection Night Shift, and is also a not-too-bad little short film available on IMDB.com. Check it out!

Liked SICK? Read THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

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BEST BOOKS BLOG #1

The Girl With All The Gifts

I’ll be posting 10 or so new blogs about books and media that are somehow related to HELLWORLD (which you can pre-order now!). Up first, a wonderfully written novel that should please fans of my novel SICK.

 

Melanie gets strapped to a wheelchair every day in order to go to school with several other young people. They exist in an apocalyptic world where most of humanity has died off…or rather, “died” with air quotes because a lot of folks infected by the disease that wiped humanity out are out there, and they’re hungry. What Melanie doesn’t understand at first is that she and her classmates are being used—that is, dissected—in order to try and find a cure or a way to stop the progression of the disease.

So yes, technically THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is a “zombie” novel. But it’s really so much more, and so much better, than that.

Written by M.R. Carey and now a major motion picture with Glenn Close, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS succeeds on its surface as a horror novel, full of dread, panic, and just enough gore for the gorehounds to enjoy. If that’s all a reader wants to take from it, so be it, but they’d be missing a whole lot.

Carey (https://twitter.com/michaelcarey191) excels at writing three-dimensional characters, people so real you’re sure you know them, and all the more infuriating (in a good way) when they behave as real people actually do (especially real people under mortal stress). If you are a writer in need of a crash course in plotting, this would be great book to study: the main characters are under constant threat, which keeps the energy and pacing high even though Carey’s writing is blocky (big chunky paragraphs rather than the short, zippy grafs I like to use myself). Something else that sets this novel apart from other genre novels: There is no predicting the outcome.

Fans of any genre tend to know where things are going. It doesn’t stop us from reading more in that genre, of course. In fact, there’s a certain comfort to the predictability. Not so with THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS. I can’t recall the last time I read a novel where I thought, with virtually every turn of the page, “What in the hell is going to happen to these people??” That’s not an easy feat, but Carey does it wonderfully.

I took notes in the margins of this novel to refer to later. I’ll leave with my one-word summary, scrawled in black ink at the bottom of the last page:

Wow.

Highly recommended for you fans of SICK! For you writers, head over to hellworld.co for short post on using this novel as a reference!