Category: Books

Books, Crime, Crime, Horror, TV

King of Ashes Review: S.A. Cosby Sets Family and Loyalty on Fire

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I’ve been a fan of S.A. Cosby since I read All the Sinners Bleed a few years ago and gobbled down all of his work. He’s a unique writer with such a distinctive voice, and through the holds list at my library, I was finally able to get my hands on his latest, King of Ashes, which was published a year ago. I think that in itself is a testament to his popularity. His latest novel is about the downfall of a Southern family after their father, owner and founder of the family business Carruthers Crematorium, is left in a coma after his car is hit by a train.

cover of S.A. Cosby's King of Ashes

The whole accident stinks of a setup, since his car was rammed onto the train tracks by a mysterious truck, and Roman Carruthers, the oldest son, is called back to his humble beginnings in Jefferson Run, Virginia. Roman escaped the little hamlet that’s now ridden with gang violence and is currently a rich money manager catering to celebrities and the elite of Atlanta. Besides Roman, there is his middle sister Neveah, who’s now the heart and soul of the family business, albeit reluctantly, and his younger brother Dante, who still lives at home, in a bedroom decorated in posters of rappers and superheroes.

Their father’s coma is just the latest family crisis; the family’s been marked by tragedy since the disappearance and probable death of their mother when they were kids. Roman was just sixteen and on the precipice of losing his virginity when his mother’s car was found on those same train tracks where his dad’s accident took place.

The recent trauma stirs up echoes from their past, and Neveah gets her hands on her mother’s old case files from the police, determined to find out what happened. The rumor in town is that Roman’s father, Keith, killed his wife after discovering that she was cheating on him with the crematorium assistant, and then he burned her remains in one of the business’s ovens so there was no evidence of the crime.

All three of the Carruthers siblings struggle to reconcile with the past while dealing with the family patriarch in a vegetative state, unlikely to ever wake up and function again. At the same time, a very different kind of family exists in Jefferson Run—gangs—and Roman learns that his brother Dante, the ne’er-do-well, has crossed the most fearsome gang in Jefferson Run and they’ve put out a hit on Dante. The Black Baron Boys are led by twin brothers Torrent and Tranquil, who are known for their cruelty. Dante tells Roman about a man who crossed the brothers, then was killed and had his guts turned to food, which was delivered to his baby mama by a driver pretending to be from DoorDash. She ended up eating the food, only to find out she’d scarfed her lover.

Roman now knows who’s responsible for his father’s accident, and he loves his family fiercely and will do anything to protect those who are left. This particular novel hit me really hard since I’m dealing with the downfall of my father, similar to Keith Carruthers lying in a vegetative state. My dad has Alzheimer’s and has been slowly going downhill since about 2018, but now the disease has accelerated and finally got to the point where my mother can’t take care of him. He had to go into a nursing home a month and a half ago, something we tried to prevent for as long as possible, and the guilt is shattering. The details Cosby puts into his novel about the Carruthers dealing with their dying father’s health insurance and eventually moving him into a nursing home are a salve on my soul, making me feel a little bit less alone:

“Are the doctors giving up on him? Is that it? Are you giving up on him?” Roman asked.

“I’m not giving up, I’m thinking of myself, for once. It’s been over a month. His insurance is about to run out. The doctors don’t think he’s going to come out of it. I can’t work myself into an early grave to keep paying for these hospital bills.”

“I can give you money,” Roman said.

“Rome, I love you, but I don’t think I want the money that you’re making nowadays. This is the right thing to do. For him and for us. Are you gonna take him home? Wipe his ass? Change his feeding tube? Because that’s what’s in his future. I’m not trying to be gross, I’m trying to be real,” Neveah said.

“I’ll do anything for him. I’ll move goddamn heaven and earth for him. But that’s not the problem here. We’re a family. When it comes to Pop, we should all talk about this. He … deserves better,” Roman said.

Reading can be therapy, and I definitely felt that with this novel. Cosby knows what he’s writing about since he had to drop out of college in order to move home and take care of his sick mother, according to the Los Angeles Times. He said, “I was also a primary caregiver for my mother.”

S.A. Cosby with a notebook
S.A. Cosby at home with a notebook. Looking at the notebook, I think it might be a Moleskine—a favorite of many writers. Photo by: Sean Pressley for Garden&Gun

Roman wonders about what his dad’s legacy will be and wrestles with ideas of mortality and how he, too, will be perceived in the future. How do you deal with a family secret? Compartmentalize, I guess. That secret is stuck in a special box that doesn’t get paraded around much, but all the Carruthers siblings carry the scars. Neveah dates a married man who treats her like shit, as if she believes this is what she deserves in the world. Roman has a sexual kink, and when tension builds up in him before an important meeting, he hires a professional to get the beating he needs for release. Dante struggles with drugs and alcohol, though he has a silver tongue when it comes to the ladies.

This mortal coil—what’s it all for? So much repetition—bad decisions repeated again and again. On the one hand, we have the Carruthers family who started out hardscrabble until their father got the loan for the crematorium, which became their livelihood, launching them out of poverty. Their father worked there around the clock with his wife assisting once she finished her shifts at the hospital. He was so single-minded that he neglected his wife so she sought affection with others. We see that same determination in Roman—again to make money, just like his father, though he’s traded corpses for shell companies. Then we have the gang family also blinded by greed, adopting young boys to carry out all their evil deeds and ruling by fear.

The ending is bleak, but it feels true and is so Southern gothic, reminding me of Faulkner. 

I’m not sure how long I’ll have to wait for the next S.A. Cosby book, but I think I’ll be somewhat satiated since Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company with Netflix has developed  Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed into a nine-episode series that’s rumored to premiere later in 2026 or early 2027. (Please let it be 2026!) 

Book cover of 'All the Sinners Bleed' by S.A. Cosby featuring a large orange moon framed by dark tree branches against a blue background.
Astrology, Books, Crime, Horror

Joyce Carol Oates Astrology: A Dark, Unsettling Literary Birth Chart (Part 1)

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Part 1 of a 4-part series on the astrology of Joyce Carol Oates

A portrait of Joyce Carol Oates with a thoughtful expression, featuring the text 'The Astrology of Joyce Carol Oates Part I' alongside various astrological symbols in the background.

In college I had a subscription to the New Yorker because I’d learned in various workshops and the lit I consumed that this was where great writing could be found. I’d read the short stories that appeared in each issue, studying them and often wondering, What makes this great? Most of the stories left me strangely cold. I couldn’t connect with them and thought maybe I didn’t have enough life experience yet. Maybe I had to live in New York to understand.

But then I stumbled across Joyce Carol Oates’s “Zombie” in the magazine. Just the title alone was enough to make me read it, and I was transported by the short, clipped sentences of a serial killer who yearned for a companion and decided to make one. I could feel his pining and how desperately the narrator was misunderstood, even though he committed horrible crimes. I’ve always been attracted to the darker things in life, and this story (loosely based on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer) made me actually feel and believe I understood such motivations. What witchery! I was in love.

Immediately, I went to the library and found the Oates section, where there were so many works, she had her own shelf. I read the inner flaps of each novel and collection of short stories, deciding what I would read first, and picked out Foxfire, a story about a girl gang. What a perfect first Oates novel for me. As an English major at the University of Iowa, most of my time was spent reading and discussing white male authors, so I was ecstatic to find a woman writer with dark, gritty work mining all that disturbing territory that I loved. And she had so many books—I would never run out, I thought.

Since that time more than thirty years ago, Joyce Carol Oates’s works have been a backbeat to my life and a huge influence on my own writing. From the horrific food porn of Wonderland to her fictionalized odyssey of Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, I’ve been reading her work, noticing themes about American life that Oates comes back to again and again. Right now, I’m preparing to reread Joyce Carol Oates’s canon, starting from her very first collection of short stories By the North Gate to her most recent novel Fox. I’ve also been looking at her astrological chart, studying it like I once did the New Yorker, trying to figure out what makes her such a talented writer and how she’s sustained such a long career. Here’s a look at her chart, and in the first part of this series, I’m going to be focusing on the first quadrant.

Astrological birth chart of Joyce Carol Oates, showing planetary positions, aspects, and signs, with details on Sun sign as Gemini and Ascendant as Aquarius.

Her ascendant is at 28 degrees of Aquarius, which is potent; there are thirty degrees in a sign and with Oates’s near the end, she’s able to harness all the power of it and act with a sense of urgency. Aquarians view the world through a humanitarian lens and are known for being curious about the people around them and how they can become their best selves, making a better society. Often, a rising Aquarius comes off as cold, withdrawn, and emotionally distant to others; they’re the intellectuals of the zodiac and live in their heads, taking apart anything they encounter, trying to see what makes it tick. And they can be shy.

The first house of the zodiac, the ascendent, shows us how Joyce Carol Oates approaches life, and it is first as an intellectual. She stands on the sidelines, taking everything in, and she does have that Aquarian trait of shyness. She went to Syracuse University on a scholarship and was so shy she couldn’t even read her stories aloud during her writing workshop; her teacher had to read her stories to the class. Oates graduated in 1960 as valedictorian of her class and was horrified to learn that she was expected to give a speech in front of hundreds of people. The only way she might escape this was if the graduation ceremony was rained out, which had never happened before. Oates did the work and wrote a speech, revising it many times, but she kept saying over and over again, “I don’t want to give a speech. I don’t want to give a speech.” The day of the graduation was sunny as people gathered at Archibald Stadium, but soon heavy, gray rain clouds began rolling in and a steady drizzle started as the ceremony began. The drizzle turned to sheeting rain, and at first people cracked open their umbrellas on the bleachers, but eventually parents started fleeing, and the chancellor interrupted his own speech to say, “You’re all graduated.”

The first house is also associated with one’s style, and Aquarians are known for their eclectic choices. They like bright, saturated colors, different textures, and shapes, and you can see that sense of style in how Joyce Carol Oates presents herself to the world. She loves big statement necklaces and earrings, scarves, and hats–her fingers always adorned by a couple of rings.

A collage of images featuring a woman with distinctive features, showcasing various outfits and poses in different settings.

Her first house spans three zodiacal signs–Aquarius, Pisces, and Aries–a phenomenon known as intercepted signs, which is an indicator of a person having a karmic lesson that still needs to be learned. Pisces is the intercepted sign in her first house and is known for its artistry and psychic abilities. Some say that an intercepted sign indicates the person having a difficult time expressing those qualities, but Oates has two planets in her first house, making it quite dynamic.

She has Jupiter in her intercepted sign of Pisces, where the planet is in its domicile, meaning this is one of two placements where Jupiter shines and does its job to the best of its abilities. Jupiter is a benevolent planet known for luck and expanding everything it touches, and of course, we can’t talk about Joyce Carol Oates without discussing her tremendous output. She’s even been cruelly mocked for this ability, as in James Wolcott’s infamous essay “Stop Me Before I Write Again: Six Hundred More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates,” which appeared in a 1982 issue of Harper’s magazine. But this expansive and abundant scope of how she makes sense of the world is a part of her identity–she was born to be a writer and to write a lot.

In her first house, she also has Saturn in Aries, where the planet is in its fall and struggles to function. Saturn is considered a malefic planet and is the exact opposite of Jupiter. It’s about time, structure, discipline, coldness, and contraction, but the zodiacal sign of Aries is impatient and hot, so Saturn doesn’t do well there. It’s an awkward fit, and regarding her writing, Oates can struggle to turn off the faucet. But I can also see Saturn and Jupiter combining here, with Saturn giving form and discipline to her boundless imagination. Oates identifies as a formalist where she’s most concerned with the structure of literature, the building blocks of sentences, words, and punctuation, and Saturn is all about structure.

She has Uranus in her second house, and because Oates is a rising Aquarius, that makes Uranus her chart’s ruler. Uranus is the planet of sudden surprises and innovation, and the second house is all about values and personal finances. Uranus is also associated with new technology and the internet, and Oates has quickly adopted those innovations that give form to writing. About a decade ago, she joined Twitter and has since then delivered some of the sickest burns. My recent favorite is the takedown she did on Elon Musk who bought Twitter and renamed it X:

A tweet by Joyce Carol Oates reflecting on a wealthy man's lack of appreciation for common experiences and emotions, highlighting the contrast between wealth and cultural engagement.

She’s also been an early adopter of Substack, an online platform where writers can share their work through subscriptions and make money off their words. Her second house starts in Aries, all about energy and initiating things, but it ends in Taurus, which is associated with nature and agrarian culture, definitely one of Oates’s values. She likes going out daily for walks, runs, and bicycle rides in nature, and this is where she likes to work out ideas for her stories. She also grew up on a farm and acknowledges her childhood in Lockport, New York, as an integral part of her writing: “I am drawn to write about rural and small-town upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer’s recurring dreams are likely to be set in childhood places. Our oldest memories are the most deeply imprinted in our brains—the first to be absorbed into our physical being, in neurons; the last to be lost, as consciousness fades to black.”

Taurus extends into the third house of her astrological chart, which rules siblings, communications, and short trips. That makes sense to me as Oates uses nature and setting as a conduit for her stories, and the third house ends in Gemini, which rules communications and duality since it is quite literally the sign of the twins. Oates’s sister Lynn Ann was born on her eighteenth birthday, and Joyce was allowed to name the new baby, which she took very seriously. Lynn was autistic and nonverbal, and Joyce’s mother took care of her youngest child at home until Lynn was fifteen and physically attacked her mother, injuring her. They then had to institutionalize her for their own safety. Joyce and Lynn Ann shared an uncanny physical appearance and could have been twins, identical, born eighteen years apart. But where Joyce had been gifted with language, Lynn was nonverbal and existed in a physical world ruled by sensations.

Art, Books, Horror, Personal

Artus Scheiner: Is It in the Blood?

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We were living in Germany, and my dad got a slim box in the mail. The kind that usually indicated a book. He said we were going to look at something very special once we got home. Me and my sister sat at the dining room table with Mom and Dad while our younger sister and brother played; they were too young to understand the importance of this book. My dad flipped through the pages very carefully with amazement. We had a family coat of arms, and there was text going into the symbology, though there wasn’t too much actual writing in the book. There were lions on the crest, which represented courage. But even at twelve, I knew that. I didn’t need a book to point it out. I really didn’t feel a connection to the book on the Scheiners. It seemed vague and not quite right. This was pre-Internet, and I think my grandmother may have ordered this for my dad.

So I forgot all about that Scheiner book with its coat of arms with lions that looked like a cartoon, not real at all. How could anybody carve that onto a shield? Instead my interests were more taken by visits to the Landstuhl Post newsstand and the few racks that were stacked with real comics. I’d also read the cartoons in the daily Stars and Stripes that my dad brought home from Ramstein every day, but what me and my sister really enjoyed were long-form comics. It started with juvenile Archies, which were few and far between because my family couldn’t really afford these extras.

But one day we discovered a treasure trove of comics in the dumpster outside of our building. They had been thrown out by the Covingtons who lived above us. A couple of teenagers in the family were the source of the comics, and I figured Mrs. Covington must have stumbled on them and made her kids get rid of them. She was super-religious and had been spotted in the woods outside our housing complex cutting switches from the trees to beat her kids with.

For sure, Alan Moore’s and Stephen Bissette’s Swamp Thing would be against her religion. I remember being terrified while reading the eco-horror title when a boy’s parents release the Monkey King after playing with a ouija board. With both excitement and dread, I watched that black-and-white monkey as it started feeding on the blood of children. I didn’t know comics could do that, and it was transcendent for me. We’ve always been artists in our family, and with horror comics paving the way, along with a deep love of Grimm’s fairy tales, some seriously demented and wonderful creatures sprung up. We’d always had a taste for the dark, the gothic, and that was reflected in my family’s artwork.

So imagine my surprise when I stumbled onto work by Artus Scheiner, a bohemian artist from Prague, who specialized in cartoons and illustrations made in gauche, my paint medium of choice in college because of the bright colors. I clicked a link that Guillermo del Toro put up on his Twitter account and was stunned to find artwork that looked so similar to what me and the rest of my family produced.

I tried to find more information on him, and the things I uncovered gave me shivers down my back because of the similarities I found. Artus started off as a financial clerk in Prague, but he had an interest in drawing and art from a young age. After he started having success publishing his illustrations in important magazines of the time, like Lustige Blätter, he quit and worked full-time as an artist. He participated in the café culture of Prague, where intellectuals, artists, and writers gathered, and frequented Café Arco, which was visited by other famous luminaries such as Franz Kafka and Max Brod. There he met Milena Jesenska who he asked to work as a model for some of his fairy-tale illustrations. She didn’t mind modeling nude, but she was kind of grossed out by his studio.

Artus and his older brother Josef Scheiner, who was a politician, were part of an association called Sokol, which believed in gymnastic training and cultural development for its members. Josef loved puppet theater and would stage productions for children and guests in his study from 1895 to 1907. The puppet theater was a family affair with puppets being created partly by the brothers’ mother and some by Josef’s wife, Karla Scheinerová. Artus helped by creating scenery and backgrounds for the stage. And Josef would write the scripts, some based on old fairy tales. This reminds me of work my sister has done designing marionettes and selling them on her Etsy shop. Teen Vogue contacted her once, and she lent the magazine one of her puppets as a prop for a photo shoot.

Artus is identified as an artist of the Secessionist movement, which puzzled me. But reading more about it, I found it was part of a reaction to classical art of the time, and there were many bases for the movement: Prague, Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. I knew it as art from the Weimar Republic, and some of the artists associated with this movement are Otto Dix, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and George Grosz—only some of my favorite artists. While staying in Berlin, those were the artists I sought out at smaller galleries and museums, skipping all the classical art.

One of my favorite images by Artus is an illustration for the story “The Wooden Baby” from Tales from Bohemia. For the longest time, I thought it was a picture of a giant frog wolfing down a person, but no, it’s a wooden baby with a voracious appetite who keeps eating everybody he encounters while singing rhymes: “I’ve gobbled and gobbled/All that I can;/A jugful of milk/And food from the pan./A whole loaf of bread/And, all this is true—/My mum and my dad/And a dairymaid, too!/I’ve eaten a peasant/And all of his hay,/Pigs, swineherd and shepherd/And sheep, in a day./But as I’m still hungry…/I’ll eat you, if I may!”

The similarities between that and some of my stories are eerie, and now as I work on my kids’ book The Rats of New York with illustrations done by my sister, looking at her artwork and one by Artus for the book The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, they almost appear as if they came from the same studio. In my eyes, at least.

I am actively trying to acquire some of Artus’s work now through a Czech auction house called Sypka, but so far I haven’t been lucky with any of my bids. I think I need to make a visit to Prague the next time a lot is selling. I want to see one of these artworks in person and really study it.

Books, Horror

Creepy Cats in Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street

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Creepy Cats in Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street

Since Tor announced its new imprint dedicated to horror Nightfire in 2019, I’ve been anxiously awaiting its first books, wondering what to expect. It’s been a long time coming, but reading one of their first offerings, Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street, has been a highlight of my horror year so far, and I’m looking forward to reading more books from the line. I especially like the feminist bent that Ward’s storytelling takes and her knowledge of what makes horror appealing to a female audience. “There’s a tricksy sense of empowerment, particularly from the ghost story,” she’s told The Guardian. I don’t know any woman who hasn’t felt a bit like a ghost in a meeting, so you can see the appeal. And just being a woman has an element of body horror to it. Childbirth? That’s some horror right there.”

Ward uses multiple points of view to tell a murky, layered story that takes place on the East Coast in a small town near a destination lake and a gothic forest as bleak as any to be found in fairy tales. There’s Ted, a damaged man with questionable tastes in food, who’s become the scourge of his neighborhood after being accused in a child’s disappearance years ago. He has a young daughter Lauren who he sees part-time, and the teenager appears to have some developmental issues. Ted lives on Needless Street, and soon a new neighbor moves in next to him, spying on him and tracking his whereabouts. This is Dee, older sister of Lulu, who was one of the missing girls at the lake years ago. Dee’s determined to find out what happened to her sister years ago no matter what, and her journeys have led her to Needless Street. There are a few appearances from the Bug Man, what Ted calls his shifty psychiatrist who likes to talk about his magnum opus that he plans on publishing soon. And then there’s my personal favorite character, Olivia the cat who describes the many different types of naps she takes and has a faith in God that would rival a human’s. She also harbors a feral huntress side to her that she calls Nighttime, who only comes out when she’s truly hungry or angry.

Ted has set up barricades around his house with teeny-tiny peepholes to protect himself and his property from all the people who want to do him harm, and Olivia watches out of them during certain times of the day when she spies a stray tabby who she loves with all her heart. For me, these are the most heartbreaking moments of the story.

“Her scent precedes her, falls through the air like honey dripping onto toast. She comes around the corner with her graceful stride. How can I describe her? She’s striped like a little dusty tiger. Her yellow eyes are the same color as ripe gold apple skin, or pee. They’re beautiful, is what I mean. She is beautiful. She stops and stretches, this way and that, extends her long black claws. She blinks as snowflakes come to rest on her nose. She has something silver sticking out of her mouth, a tail, maybe. A small fish like a sardine or an anchovy.”

—The Last House on Needless Street

The Last House on Needless Street is quite unlike any horror novel I’ve read before. The story’s dreamy but also terrifying. I love the homage paid to a person’s pets; no matter how creepy their personality might be, they too love someone or something. Also, the shifting setting kept me feeling off-kilter and claustrophobic. A large part of the story is spent inside that house on Needless Street with three floors. There’s an attic at the top, which all occupants of the house avoid, except Nighttime, because of the creepy green children who live there. There’s an ever-watchful portrait of Ted’s mother, a former nurse, and his father, a drunk who abandoned the family years ago. And next to that portrait stands a set of Russian dolls that keep reappearing in different configurations as the story progresses. This claustrophobia appears to be a desired effect, though, as Ward classifies this novel compared to others she’s written: “Needless Street, I think, was more about containment.”

Art, Books, drama, Personal, Uncategorized

A Bloody Julius Caesar Stirs Up a Hornet’s Nest

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I took my Girls Write Now mentee Laura to go see Julius Caesar last Friday at Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park. We had been planning it for a while and postponed to later in the week so we had nicer weather. I’m glad I charged and packed my computer because we really wanted to tape our exit interview we had planned now that she’s graduating and going on to college in the fall. I had come up with ten questions for Laura, and she ad-libbed questions for me. I was surprised that it lasted longer than an hour, but we had some meaty questions, like “What do you think is going to happen politically in the next five years?” and “What’s going to happen to art in the current political climate?” We were both optimistic about the future and had no idea how portentous our questions and ideas were.

We took turns going to the restroom while the other saved our spot in line, and then right before they started handing out tickets, I went to the snack bar area and got us two hot dogs. The line started moving, and after the first glut of tickets was gone, Laura and I were at the head of the line with just one woman in front of us. A man came by and handed the woman his extra ticket after his friend was a no show, so then Laura and I were at the head of the line. The second round of tickets came by, and the Shakespeare in the Park employee sorted them into singles and pairs and gave us our tickets. We were so surprised to find ourselves in the front row almost center stage—the best tickets in the house. Laura was exuberant, hopping up and down. “I’ve never been in the front row anywhere!”

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The play was tremendous. Whenever I read Julius Caesar while editing our Grade 10 textbooks at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, I enjoyed it, but when I saw it performed at BAM (the first time I’d ever seen it live), I didn’t really like it. Might have been the nosebleed seats we had—the absolute last row in the theater. This Julius Caesar, though, was fabulous. When we sat down, I saw people miling about onstage, looking at scaffolding, like what we have in New York when buildings are undergoing construction. Some had programs in their hands, and they were putting Post-it notes on the scaffolding, similar to what happened in Union Square station after Trump was elected and everybody was so upset. There was a wall that became an entire passageway, where everybody started writing Post-it notes about how upset they were about the election and it became a thing.

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I thought the people were actual audience members, so I told Laura, “Go on up there, hon, and write something. Put your wish down.” Laura said, “No, I don’t think I should,” and usually she’s so bold. Thank God she didn’t. They were frigging actors, and later, they played the part of the disgruntled public.

It was a clever staging. It’s set in modern times, and Caesar is portrayed as a Trumpian character; Calpurnia as Melania, with an Eastern European accent; and Marc Antony was portrayed as a woman with a “Go USA!” attitude, leggings, and an Aw, shucks! Midwestern accent. I’m guessing she’s supposed to correlate to Mike Pence. It worked really well and was riveting for the first three acts, but the play kind of lost momentum in the last two acts. I still loved it. How they handled the crowd scenes was brilliant and unexpected, and Laura and I craned our heads, trying to catch the rabble-rousers who sprang up in the audience. It felt so interactive, like the demonstrations going on now during this presidency. Some people walked out—about four that I could see—and I remember thinking it was because of the controversial staging decisions or maybe because of the chairs. They are pretty uncomfortable. Then I saw the headlines the next day.

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We still don’t have an answer in this play about what is going to happen to us, much like in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, but it gives us plenty to think about. We just have to be aware and flexible, roll with the punches, and never give up hope. I think of that old saying, “May you live in interesting times.” I do. I most definitely do. And I’m grateful for Shakespeare in the Park.

Books, Horror, Uncategorized

Oops! Joyce Carol Oates Does It Again with DIS MEM BER

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I finished DIS MEM BER by Joyce Carol Oates, and for me, it’s kind of meh compared to some of her other works. I prefer the short-story collection HEAT, where the females are allowed to be mean and fierce. The female protagonists in this collection seem limp and boxed in, which maybe is the point—that the stories show how girls and women are forced into these positions by society. But I want heroes, dammit.

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There are two stories about widows, which speak to Oates’s own experience, I think, after unexpectedly losing her first husband. And I’m glad to have a few short stories on the subject because I haven’t encountered many. In “Great Blue Heron,” a brother-in-law pressures a widow to sell the lakefront home she’s always lived in and “invest” in some technology that he deems worthy. The other widow story was the reason why I wanted to read this collection (“The Crawl Space”), since it won a Stoker Award this year. It’s a creepy, claustrophobic story about a widow missing the house she once lived in with her husband and feeling like she’s neglected his memory—eventually when she visits, she’s trapped with his possessions . It reminded me of “Hansel and Gretel” when the witch is pushed into the oven.

“Heartbreak” really hit me with younger sister, Steff, who’s terribly jealous of her older sister, Caitlin, and the attention she gets from her slightly older stepcousin Hunt. It ended completely different from how I pictured it. There’s gunplay going on in the story, and Chekhov has said if a gun’s introduced, it has to be used. I still wasn’t ready for the massive guilt, which I think is the right reaction to an “accidental” shooting. We need more stories showing the consequences.

“The Drowned Girl” seems to be a take on the real-life Elisa Lam story, where a young woman drowned in a hotel’s rooftop water tank (the Cecil Hotel) and contaminated the water supply. For more than a week, guests complained about the foul water, and then a security guard went to the top and found the bloated, dead body of the girl. Cops say she had a psychotic break (Lam was bipolar) and killed herself by accident, but there are suspicious things in the case: She was naked, the top to the tank was put back in place (too heavy to do one’s self), and the rape kit was never processed. Anyway, Joyce Carol Oates sets the story in a college town, where the woman is named Miri Kim, and she’s already died, but another student becomes obsessed with the case and water and pipes. It kind of reminded me of the protagonist who goes a little crazy in Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAYS.

Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates at the 2013 LA Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California campus on Saturday April 21, 2013, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Katy Winn/Invision/AP)

Books

Agatha Christie Battles the Copyeditor

by horrorfeminista2 Comments on Agatha Christie Battles the Copyeditor

I make my living as a copyeditor, always following different clients’ style sheets, and I find it strange where people decide to draw the line: no commas after hey when used as a greeting, healthcare as one word, and the weirdest, Jay-Z turning to Jay Z. He was done with hyphens.

I’m reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography right now, and even the grande dame of mysteries had to duke it out with a publishing house’s copyeditor when she published her first mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

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Her first publisher, The Bodley Head, decided that cocoa should be spelled coco. Christie wrote:

For some strange reason, the house spelling of cocoa—meaning by that a cup of cocoa—was coco, which, as Euclid would have said, is absurd. I was sternly opposed by Miss Howse, the dragon presiding over all spelling in The Bodley Head books. Cocoa, she said, in their publications, was always spelt coco—it was the proper spelling and was a rule of the firm. I produced tins of cocoa and even dictionaries—they had no impression on her. Coco was the proper spelling, she said. It was not until many years later, when I was talking to Allen Lane, John Lane’s nephew, and begetter of Penguin Books, that I said, “You know I had terrible fights with Miss Howse over the spelling of cocoa.”

He grinned. “I know, we had great trouble with her as she got older. She got very opinionated about certain things. She argued with authors and would never give way.”

Innumerable people wrote to me and said, “I can’t understand, Agatha, why you spelled cocoa ‘coco’ in your book. Of course you were never a good speller.” Most unfair. I was not a good speller, but at any rate I could spell cocoa the proper way. What I was, though, was a weak character. it was my first book—and I thought they must know better than I did.

Agatha Christie is my new hero.

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Books, Horror

Anne Rice Reinvents Vampires After Tragedy

by horrorfeminista10 Comments on Anne Rice Reinvents Vampires After Tragedy

Anne Rice was born in New Orleans as Howard Allen O’Brien (the Howard came from her father), but she spontaneously renamed herself Anne when a nun asked her name at school. Her father worked all over the United States for the postal service, and Rice did not meet him until she was four years old. Her mother was an alcoholic who died of complications from the disease when Rice was fifteen. “’It was from alcoholism,” says Rice. “As a matter of fact, I think she swallowed her tongue.”

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Rice always felt odd and like she didn’t belong at school and blamed that on the secret life she had to live as a child. “I never felt at home with other kids,” she says. “I felt like at any time I could make mistakes and be exposed as weird. I guess my mother’s drinking marked me out in my own eyes—the fact that it was a huge secret, and I couldn’t tell anyone, and you never knew how she’d be when you got home.”

Rice used writing as a form of therapy after she lost her daughter Michelle to leukemia when she was only five. “It was a nightmare,” says Rice, and she and her husband turned to alcohol to cope with the loss. “I was nothing and nobody. I had no prestige. I wasn’t a mother. I was a bad wife—I never cleaned house. I was no good at anything.”

During that dark time, Rice revisited an old story she had written about a vampire named Louis from the eighteenth century who was now living in New Orleans. Something about the character and setting clicked into place for her. “Suddenly, when I was in the skin of Louis, when I was in this cartoon character—he really was a cartoon vampire with a cape and black clothes and bare white skin—when I slipped into this seemingly unreal thing and looked through his eyes, I could make my whole world real,” says Rice. “He was able to say, ‘Let me tell you about New Orleans, this was our world,’ and I could write about all the beauty. Even the most fictional stuff in there was somehow out of my real world. It fell into place and was coherent.”

This story turned into her best-selling first novel Interview with the Vampire. Rice says about the experience, “I didn’t know it at the time, but it was all about my daughter, the loss of her and the need to go on living when faith is shattered. The lights do come back on, no matter how dark it seems, and I’m sensitive now, more than ever, to the beauty of the world—and more resigned to living with cosmic uncertainty.”

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But in order to do that, first Rice had to kill off her darling. Claudia, a child vampire and stand-in for Michelle, had a different ending in Rice’s first draft. But her editor at Knopf pushed for a stronger ending, and Rice realized while revising “that Claudia had really been meant to die at the end of Interview the way Michelle had died.”

When she cheated on Claudia’s death originally, Rice says she started having a nervous breakdown and her mind knew that wasn’t the correct ending. She says, “I almost died myself and went kind of crazy. I saw germs on everything and washed my hands fifty times and really cracked up. If somebody is meant to die and you don’t do it, you’re really risking your well-being at the end of the book.”

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Two years after Interview with the Vampire was published, Rice gave birth to her son, Christopher, and she and her husband stopped drinking entirely. Instead, she focused on her writing career.

 

Rice has no definite writing process. She prefers now to write in the late morning, but when she penned Interview with the Vampire, she wrote at night—sometimes not starting until 1:00 a.m. “I have never had any one hard and fast method. No storyboard, no. But I do think a lot before ‘plunging,’ and do work out a crude road map of sorts, but I revise constantly, moving back and forth in the growing draft as I work, and sometimes throw out great chunks of material and start over when I feel I should,” says Rice. “But I have written whole books with no real plan—just a concept or a character—at the beginning. There’s just no hard and fast rule at all. Whatever works, whatever causes the prose to flow, the characters to begin talking and walking, whatever makes a world slowly form all around the characters.”

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Rice does like to work in pink-and-blue flannel nightgowns—what she considers her work clothes—and has a closet full of them because “they shrink and get rough after you wash them a few times.”

 

“I think what’s important is that you write what’s really, really intense and what gives you the greatest thrill,” says Rice. “All I know is that the supernatural gives me that intensity whether I’m reading it or writing it. I just find it the most powerful means that I have for writing about real life.”

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Using vampires, Rice feels she was able to explore more what it means to be human. “Here you have a monster with a soul that’s immortal, yet in a biological body. It’s a metaphor for us, as it’s very difficult to realize that we are going to die, and day to day we have to think and move as though we are immortal,” says Rice. “A vampire like Lestat in Interview…is perfect for that because he transcends time—yet he can be destroyed, go mad and suffer; it’s intensely about the human dilemma.”

 

Lestat, the bad boy vampire character who defies the rules of the vampire community, may be Rice’s most beloved character, and she does have a soft spot for her creation. “I loved being Lestat more than anything in the world,” she says.

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Sources:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/anne-rice-the-interview-with-the-vampire-novelist-on-her-daughters-death-living-through-her-own-9829902.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/garden/the-coffin-was-too-confining.html

http://www.examiner.com/article/anne-rice-on-the-writing-process

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/14/magazine/novels-you-can-sink-your-teeth-into

Books, Horror

Alexandra Sokoloff Goes from Hauntings to Serial Killers

by horrorfeministaLeave a Comment on Alexandra Sokoloff Goes from Hauntings to Serial Killers

Originally Alexandra Sokoloff considered herself a drama kid and threw herself into acting. She started doing theater in sixth grade and majored in it at college, the University of California, Berkeley. But when Sokoloff wrote a one-act play, she loved the feeling of control that writing gave her, and from there, she went into writing screenplays after teaching herself the business by working as a reader for a studio.

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“It didn’t take me that long to get established. My first screenplay won a UCLA Diane Thomas Award and was optioned. My second screenplay, cowritten with David Arata, sold to Twentieth Century Fox in a bidding war, and I’ve been lucky enough never to have a day job since,” says Sokoloff.

 

Sokoloff was able to make a living with her screenwriting for ten years, but she found it frustrating when others were telling her how the story should go. “Hollywood is a seductive place to work. But it’s a sad fact that screenwriters have less and less creative power in an increasingly corporate industry,” says Sokoloff. “When it’s all about box office, and corporate executives are making story decisions, what you get is what we’ve been seeing on the big screen for years now—a mind-numbing parade of sequels and remakes. And that was really what drove me to start writing novels.”

 

Sokoloff’s first horror novel The Harrowing was originally a screenplay, but when deals feel apart, the author ended up buying the rights back and rewriting the story as a novel. “I wanted to take a bunch of misfit, troubled college kids and put them into a situation similar to Shirley Jackson’s great The Haunting of Hill House, and play with the idea that the emotional dynamic between them attracts an equally troubled spirit—or that the whole thing is just psychological or a prank that gets out of hand and builds its own momentum,” says Sokoloff.

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Writing a novel was so satisfying that Sokoloff went that direction with her work. “Although it’s sometimes sheer agony, writing a novel is about seven billion times more satisfying than writing a script, for the simple reason that when you finish a novel, it’s a complete work,” she says. “When you finish a script, it’s just the beginning of a process that may never amount to anything except a paycheck. For me, there’s no comparison.”

 

The writer has always been attracted to the darker elements of life and had some of her own harrowing real-life experiences as well. She says, “I was always attracted to ghost stories—my dad used to tell them around the campfire and he loved horror and suspense—books, movies, plays, anything. I developed a taste for being scared senseless. But also from the time I was a very young child I was very sensitive to the fact that there’s a lot of weirdness out there, and a lot of danger from unstable people.”

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“My family did quite a bit of traveling, so along with all the good stuff—great art, ancient cultures, different mores and political beliefs—I was exposed to disturbing images and situations: poverty, desperation, oppression, madness. Also, I was almost abducted as a child, so I was aware that there are people out there who have something terribly wrong with them, who actively want to hurt and destroy,” says Sokoloff.

 

Lately, Sokoloff has been writing a series about an FBI agent who’s after the rarest creature of all—a female serial killer. Sokoloff says, “I’ve been studying serial killers for years. Years ago, when I was a screenwriter writing crime thrillers, I tracked down the FBI’s textbook on sexual homicide before it was ever available to the public. I attend Citizens Police Academies and other law enforcement and forensics workshops whenever I get the chance. If I know there’s a behavioral profiler at a writing convention, I stalk that person so I can pick his or her brain about serial killers.”

 

In her studies, Sokoloff was puzzled to learn that there has never really been a female serial killer and decided she wanted to tackle the subject. “Here’s what’s really interesting. Arguably, there’s never been any such thing as a female serial killer in real life. The women that the media holds up as serial killers actually operate from a completely different psychology from the men who commit what the FBI calls ‘sexual homicide,’” says Sokoloff.

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“Even Aileen Wuornos, infamous in the media as ‘America’s First Female Serial Killer,’ wasn’t a serial killer in the sense that male killers like Bundy, Gacy, and Kemper were. The profilers I’ve interviewed call Wuornos a spree killer with a vigilante motivation. So what’s that about? Why do men do it and women don’t? Women rarely kill, compared to men—but when it happens, what does make a woman kill?”

 

It’s questions like these that make Sokoloff a writer. She says, “For better or worse, my core theme as a writer is, ‘What can good people do about the evil in the world?’”

 

Sokoloff is sick of seeing women portrayed as prey and rape victims in literature and film. At a recent writers conference, she says, “Prominently displayed in the book tent was a new crime fiction release that featured a crucified woman on the cover. I’m writing these books because I’ve had enough of violence against women in fiction and film.”

 

In her own novels, Sokoloff says, “I do not depict rape or torture on the page. I can assure you, no one gets crucified. I think real-life crime is horrific enough without rubbing a reader’s face in it or adding absurd embellishments (my personal literary pet peeve is the serial killer with an artistic streak or poetic bent).”

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Sources:

http://axsokoloff.blogspot.com/

http://www.thebigthrill.org/2015/06/cold-moon-by-alexandra-sokoloff/

http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/39-FE5-AlexandraSokoloff.html

Books, Horror

Amanda Hocking Self-Publishes Vampire Series and Gets a Book Deal

by horrorfeministaLeave a Comment on Amanda Hocking Self-Publishes Vampire Series and Gets a Book Deal

Amanda Hocking became the self-publishing wunderkind after her vampire and troll series took off, prompting a Big Five publisher to snap up her work, something happening more and more often with indie authors. She was born in Austin, Minnesota, which has the distinction of being the birthplace of SPAM, the chopped meat in a can. For as long as she can remember, Hocking has been telling stories. “My mom has a tape from when I was, like, two years old, talking with my grandma, telling her a story that’s really elaborate about werewolves and wolves,” she says.

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Hocking had a stack of novels she had been working on, and in her twenties she started sending them out to agents (more than fifty), but all she got back were form rejection letters. She studied different genres and decided to try her hand at paranormal romance, writing a novel in fifteen days. Then instead of sending the manuscript out to agents, she self-published. At first, sales were slow—a book or two a day—but then things really picked up. She was getting requests to do interviews with bloggers and had positive reviews of her work. Soon “I sold, like, six thousand books that month or something,” says Hocking. “It was a pretty dramatic jump.”

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Hocking decided to go the self-publishing route because she wasn’t getting anywhere submitting to agents. “I once heard the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I’d heard that some authors were self-publishing and finding a decent readership, so I thought, Why not? I knew I needed to try something different, so I did,” says Hocking.

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Hocking’s writing process is intense, and she’s published seventeen books since she started making her work public in 2010. She says, “When I get an idea, I think about it for a few weeks, and then I outline. Once I have an outline ready, I sit down at the computer and write. Sometimes, I’ll write for eight to twelve hours a night. When I’m writing, I usually shut myself off from the world for a few weeks and just write. Then I’m done and I come back to real life.”

Her advice to writers who’d like to follow in her footsteps is to keep working on new ideas, like Andy Warhol recommended years ago—always go on to your next work. “Don’t get married to your first book or idea. Write your first book, put it in a drawer, and then write your second. It seems to me that a lot of writers get hung up on their first idea, their first book, but here’s the truth: Almost universally speaking, the first book you write will be terrible,” says Hocking.

“I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, but I would say that rarely is the first published work by an author the first thing they wrote. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love your first book or take pride in it or work hard on it—because you really should. It just means you shouldn’t get hooked on that one thing. Write another book and another. Then go back and look at your first book and see how you feel about it. But whether you love it or hate it, just keep writing and reading.”

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Hocking would like to do more horror writing. She says, “I’ve played around with horror, which I think is a sister genre to fantasy. I love writing about monsters and villains and otherworldly creatures.”

After doing so many book series, Hocking is working on a stand-alone novel that will be coming out in 2016, as well as a few projects she calls “duologies.” Hocking describes her upcoming work Freeks as “a YA paranormal romance novel set in the 1980s that follows a traveling sideshow. I pitched it as Pretty in Pink meets The Lost Boys (minus the vampires) meets Carnivale.”

Hocking’s duology will be about teenage Valkyries. She says, “I knew that I wanted to do something with it and the idea just kept nagging me. It’s just such a cool idea, of women deciding who lived during battle.”

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Sources:

http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1004.Amanda_Hocking

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/08/144804084/a-self-published-authors-2-million-cinderella-story

http://happyeverafter.usatoday.com/2015/01/07/amanda-hocking-interview-frostfire/

http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/951669/author-amanda-hocking-talks-switched

Hocking inks 6-figure deal for 3 new books