How Do You Write Like AA Gill?

He might be one of the best writers I’ve ever read. Pyrotechnics? Nah. Fuck that. It’s complete control. He’s composing symphonies tracing thoughts so delicately then dropping scorn like timpanis. I don’t know if it’s classical or if it’s punk rock, cause it’s so intelligent, so free-ranging; then so bitingly fierce, so jack-knife savage. Wit! Wildean wit! Armed like a sniper to pick off his subjects, illuminating the familiar making them new and strange; delineating the weird so you’ll never see it short of his way again. Is it simply the exaggeration that makes his criticism so scouring? And if so, why do all his observations sound like their right on the money? Gill’s giant brain’s brings a storm of knowledge to his subjects, and this depth of analysis and allusion makes you as a reader feel worldly, and complicit in his conspiracy. So funny, so poignant, so mean, did I mention he’s Scottish? A.A. Gill might be my new hero.

My Dark Places

Weekend away, visiting the nation’s capital, or more strictly speaking, its suburbs.  Kanata, which from the passenger seat appears to be an accretion of business parks and corporate headquarters, was a  5 hour drive so plenty of time to be catching up on some reading. Managed to polish off two books on the way, both of which freaked me out. The first was The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, a book about small town cop with a ‘sickness’ that is just starting to resurface.  Thompson makes a point of not steering clear of the violence perpetrated by his protagonist; but then what is told comes with such subtle turns of phrase, such intelligence that sometimes you have to  slow down and read a sentence again just to really believe what you think just happened, did. It also rides on such terrible insight into the killer; who gains the same enjoyment out of needling someone with clichés in conversation as he does actually knocking people around.  Dobb’s reactions to his own shocking violence, can seem wildly inappropriate to the situation, but perfectly fit to the mind of this sociopath. It’s these moments that show the power of the first person narration, to place the reader in an alien situation, a skin that’s not their own. Anyway, I devoured it.

The second book was one recommended to me by Mark Askwith, after I told him I was trying to crack the structure of short horror fiction. Twentieth Century Ghosts by Joe Hill is a book of contemporary short stories, throwing the gauntlet down to be a successor of literary/horror cross over fiction, in the vein of Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker and more recently Kelly Link. Much to learn here along the lines of how to screw a tight story together; how to bring out the gore; how to up the spook factor; what human dramas to tap to make something that has a pulse (hint—your own!). Self-consciously written in parts, grotesquely detailed in others, particularly in the lead story “Best New Horror”, the anthology seemed to take a genuine delight in all the different contradictory aspects of horror: its trashiness, its literary aspirations, and the freedom given when writing in that space in between. Made me wonder what his comic books Locke & Key are like too.

All of this is to say, I’ve got some new stuff I’ve been working on too. I’d heard about Thompson’s book for a while but picked it up because I’ve been experimenting with that mode for a comics short story. It’s called The Push and it’s being drawn right now by Eric Kim for an upcoming Popgun anthology.  It’s shorter, more suspense than horror, but should push you off in a dark place when it comes to its stop. More to post on it soon.  I’m liking it, but wow, wish I could say it went as far as The Killer Inside Me; that sucker goes to the end of the line.

Whazamo!

Department of Things I’ve been doing lately:

Not a lot to knock out here other than that.  This is a big deal! Weekly videos! Bloggers! Profiles! Polls! Contests?!? All under the Vepo label.  Now how about that?

Meanwhile, Freelance Blues remains on hiatus.  But the new pages are coming in and I have to tell you they are sweet.  Hopefully we’ll be opening shop up again in early June.  Things’ll get ugly. Guaranteed.