In 1990, I was an undergraduate freshman archeology major sneaking over to the English building and unearthing an amazing repository of books I'd never even suspected. By 1998, I'd have my Ph.D.
You always want to read something that everybody says has gone too far, don't you? That's supposed to not just be charting our decline, but embodying it?
Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.
The slasher film is such a neat, self-contained genre.
Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface's mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early '90s.
When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.
In the 40 years since 'The Amityville Horror', dramatizations of those supposedly-real events have gotten loose enough - special-effects laden enough, star-power re-packaged enough - that the audience no longer trusts the dramatization's loyalty to the core story.
Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real.
The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.
I would highly, highly recommend seeing 'Paranormal Activity' with a friend or, better yet, a group.
The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.
You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.
The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it.
In 1984, when 'Nightmare on Elm Street' came out, not only was I twelve and couldn't get into an R movie, but I lived twenty miles from a theater. So my first experience of it was on VHS.
With the Romero zombie, you usually did not have a reason for the infection, the plague, the virus, whatever it's called.
With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
In the fast zombie stories, it's not our humanity that is at stake anymore. It's our survival.
We tell ourselves zombie stories to remind us we shouldn't live beyond the natural boundaries of life - or seek a third stage of life in this world.
Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
