books

WE ALL DIE IN THE END by Elizabeth Merry – A Review

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Merry’s is some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. Like Faulkner, she creates a fictional world unto its own, Faulkner’s set as a struggling Mississippi town, Merry’s as a struggling seaside town in Ireland…

A Turn From the Worst

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So, I was thick into the development of the follow-up novel to THE GOOD KILL (any guesses what follow-up title will be?) when of a sudden it seemed like End Times had finally started to throw down with the Covid-19 pandemic and cult daddy trump’s horrific death-inducing response to it.

With the Killian Lebon storyline as dark and violent as it is, and with all the research into the real-life examples of darkness and violence it takes to bring it out fictionally, I just thought it best for my mental stability to shelve all the pretend mayhem for a while seeing how there was far too much of it going on within our apocalyptic twilight zone of a reality.

But of course I could not not write so I immediately began looking internally for a story that would be able to transport me away to a better place.

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In Appreciation of a Photograph

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Except for THE GOOD KILL, of which I contracted out to Extended Imagery, for better or worse, you decide, I’ve created all my book covers, including the one for my latest novella RAINY SEASON.

It’s a fun process creating book covers, one that allows me to escape the writing process tedium for a while and become creative through other mediums. I like to create the cover early on in the story development process so I can refer to it for inspiration similar to the way I refer to the logline.

The covers I created are mostly designed around photographs I took, except for HOW NOT TO DIE, which you’ll see if you look closely, is designed around a photograph of me in a hospital bed flashing my middle finger in defiance as I’m being treated for heart failure, which was the result of a freak side effect of the chemo drug I was taking at the time (I was speedily switched to a different drug which has yet to cause my heart to fail, fingers crossed), and except for HERCULES GONE MAD, which is designed from a drawing of mine.

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An Expression of Love

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Don’t worry, my relentless efforts to completely overpower you politically is nothing more than a love-like expression… 😘 The actual exercise of physical violence substitutes for the psychological relations between two minds, which is of the essence of political power, the physical relation between two bodies.” He wrote that “all foreign policy is the struggle for … Read more

Straight On Through*

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You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless -there is only one thing to do with a novel [or anything important**] and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing. Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1929 letter from France, courtesy the New … Read more

The Bogart Advantage

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It’s a close call but this might be one of those rare instances where the movie outperforms the book. The flick does have an unfair advantage though with Bogart as the lead… For a crash course on a category that can be hard to pin down, Nicholas Ray’s psychologically complex “In a Lonely Place” has … Read more

Starbucks and Mocha

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The New York Times’ recent piece Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed is actually a quite serious look at human nature, racism, the environment… but here is a fun selection from it that belies its erudition: Melville had read Jeremiah Reynolds’s violent account of a sperm whale “white as wool,” named — … Read more