Shelfari

An Interview with Best-selling Fantasy Author R.A. Salvatore: Finding the Personal in the Epic, the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

By Jeff VanderMeer

On the occasion of the recent publication of R.A. Salvatore's latest novel, Omnivoracious invited Jeremy L. C. Jones to share his thoughts about the book"”and to interview the author. Jones, an expert on Salvatore's fiction, is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. Along with Jeff VanderMeer, he co-directs Shared Worlds, a SF/Fantasy creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers partially funded by an Amazon.com grant.

Even though Neverwinter by R. A. Salvatore falls late in his heroic fantasy Forgotten Realms series about the dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden, it is an ideal place to start reading"”or re-reading"”Salvatore's fiction. Neverwinter finds the veteran fantasist pushing himself (and his characters) harder than ever before"”asking bigger questions, meeting bigger challenges, and conquering bigger personal demons.

Though known for writing vivid combat scenes, Salvatore is very much a character writer. His Forgotten Realms novels are "buddy fantasy" in the mode of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories and heroic fantasy in the mode David Gemmell's Legend. Iconic characters like Drizzt Do'Urden, Bruenor Battlehammer, Wulfgar, Regis, and Cattie-brie are, as Salvatore says, "friends to walk down the road of adventure beside."

With Neverwinter, Salvatore shows us what happens when Drizzt has lost everyone he cares about and must walk alone. Faster, harder, and more frantic than previous books, Neverwinter is nostalgic and a little wistful. It is, perhaps, Salvatore's most mature Forgotten Realms novel yet.

Jeremy L.C. Jones for Amazon.com: What's the Neverwinter series about? There's a pretty important murder, some massive catastrophe, and plenty of action, but what's it really about?

R. A. Salvatore: This series is about Drizzt coming out of his comfort zone and being put in a situation with an alluring, deadly, and dangerous companion [Dahlia Sin'felle]. I look at it as if your best friend in high school is falling in love with someone you know is bad news. Will your friend help elevate that person or will that person drag your friend down into the gutter? That's the big question of this series.

Amazon.com:Neverwinter, the novel, opens with Dahlia watching Drizzt practicing his sword routines.

R. A. Salvatore: Watching an artist perform his or her art is probably the truest way to get a measure of the artist. Watching a fighter going through his practice moves, watching a baseball player taking batting practice, watching a pitcher throwing off the mound, you are watching that person perfect his or her muscle memory. And muscle memory is everything in sports and in combat. Also, watching an artist practice is beautiful.

Amazon.com: The Drizzt books seem to be increasingly personal.

R. A. Salvatore: I think that is my own maturity starting to show. Being a writer means walking naked down a beach. It means putting yourself out there and letting it fly. It means being honest with the story. There's no place to hide when you're a writer. And if you're hiding, you're failing. I don't think I was hiding in the earlier Drizzt books. I think Homeland is as good as I've ever done. It's just that after 23 years, the only way to explore these characters is to go deeper. I have to look deeper into his heart and soul and challenge him harder on those parts of his character that his is confident with. To shake him.

To do that, I had to separate Drizzt from people who would reinforce what we already know about him. Surround him with people who were not of like mind in order to put pressure on him emotionally. To try to break him.

Amazon.com: Does what Drizzt is going through mirror your creative or professional situation?

R. A. Salvatore: In a way. As long as you don't extrapolate from that what I am going through in my personal life. My life has never been more stable. I've taken control of my writing; it no longer controls me schedule-wise. I'm in an incredibly stable and happy marriage. I've got a grandson who is the best thing ever. I'm in the best place I've ever been, which makes it even harder to flip it around on Drizzt. But I do wonder what my life would be like if I was jarred out of my current, stable situation.

Amazon.com: In reading The Collected Stories, I was struck with how I can read any Drizzt story or book, in any order, and not be confused.

R. A. Salvatore: Here's the trick to that for me: I know who the characters are. The characters are fully formed in my mind, so I tell a standalone book about the characters. There is no meta-story that guides the Drizzt books. I know exactly who these characters are. I throw a new adventure, a new challenge"”emotional, physical, societal challenge"”at them.

By the way, a really weird thing happened to me as I put The Collected Stories together. As I re-read each short story it put me exactly back into the time and place I was at emotionally when I wrote it"”when I had my back surgery, when I was losing my brother. I think of The Collected Stories as "snapshots in time."

The Collected Stories also led to a huge epiphany for me. For the first time, it came to me that writing isn't what I do, it's who I am. And what I'm really doing here is throwing challenges at these characters in order to get the characters to answer the questions that I have about myself in my own life.

Amazon.com: The Drizzt books also have become increasingly epic. Have you gone so deeply into the characters that you've found the epic in the individual human heart?

R. A. Salvatore: The Companions of the Hall are people that most people would love to be walking down the road beside. I've created friends. And you care about your friends.

Amazon.com: After all these years, do you still believe that "the hero is the one with the biggest heart, not the biggest sword"?

R. A. Salvatore: Of course! Absolutely. I've never wavered on that. I find my heroes in the everyday person who is vulnerable but will stand up anyway. Everybody has within them a compass that tells them right from wrong. The person who tries to make things a little better for those around him or her"¦that person is the hero, whether running a cat shelter or running into a burning building to help someone get out. The hero tries to alleviate the suffering in the world. The hero does what's right even when it's not popular.

Amazon.com: Why explore the great human questions and heroism in a fantastical milieu? I mean, you're finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and you're setting it"”

R. A. Salvatore: "”in the extraordinary. There're two things I really like about fantasy. I believe greatly in science, but it is fun to think that there are things that science can't explain. That's the entire basis of faith, right? I am able to keep a spiritual life and a secular life side-by-side, believing in what science tells me without it diminishing my hopes for the universe.

In a fantasy world, you have magic. Magic can't be explained by science within the context of that world. I think most people find that comforting. I do. I love watching those shows about UFOs and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster and all these other weird creatures. Do I believe any of that? No. Do I want to believe it? Of course! Who doesn't? It's cool. Fun. Exciting. It's mystical on all kinds of levels. Fantasy gives you that, too.

The other thing fantasy gives you is the ability for one person to make a huge, profound, black-and-white, in-your-face difference in the world. Now, you can do that in realistic novels"”you can do that in real life"”but it's a lot muddier, a lot harder in a world of seven billion people.

[Regardless of milieu], the job of the writer is not to give you answers, but to get you to ask the questions of yourself. I don't have the answers for you. Only you have the answers for you.

Amazon.com: You are known for writing great fight scenes that actually mean something. What does violence in a novel do for the story?

R. A. Salvatore: In a crisis, we reveal ourselves more fully than in a comfortable setting sipping tea. I was a bouncer in a nightclub. Other bouncers would be the biggest, toughest, strongest people you ever saw and after one night we'd know they weren't going to work out because they didn't act appropriately in a crisis. Either they went over the top and hurt somebody or they froze. I'm sure that people in the military, cops, firemen, emergency techs are all nodding right now because they know exactly what I'm saying. When something really bad happens, you shut down your human doubts and do what needs to be done to fix the situation. Or you don't. In other words, crisis is the easiest way to reveal character.

Amazon.com: Any parting words?

R. A. Salvatore: A few years ago my wife said on her birthday that every year she was going to try something new that scared her. I think that's a great way to look at life. I'm in my fifties now and I'm not giving up. I'm not saying, "Okay, it's time to go lie down." I'm not dead yet, right?

Keep looking for new things. Keep looking at the sunrise and appreciating it. Looking at the sunset and appreciating it. You've got to. Or what's the freaking point, right? I like there being a point. Life is what you make of it. And I'm not ready to stop making of it.

Already Gone: A Q&A with Suspense Writer John Rector

By Editor

John Rector, the best-selling author of The Grove and The Cold Kiss (optioned for a feature film), has a new thriller out today: Already Gone. In this pulse-racer of a book, writing teacher Jake Reese is attacked in a parking lot one night by two men who cut off his ring finger. Bewildered by the incident, Jake tries chalking it up to bad luck"”until his wife disappears, and he realizes that his dark past has finally come to track him down.

Amazon:Already Gone opens with an dramatic attack that eventually drives a wedge between Jake and his wife. Then you pull back and carefully build an emotional situation between these newlyweds. Was opening with that kind of contrast always your plan?

John Rector: The contrast wasn't as much a plan as a necessity. Already Gone takes off at full speed, so I had to introduce the reader to the characters right away. The trick was building the characters as the story developed, so the reader wouldn't get bored and close the book. Writing action and plot twists isn't the hard part"”the hard part is creating characters the reader will care about. To do that, I had to show who they were before the main conflict tore through their lives and changed everything.

A: Are you ever surprised by how your writing unfolds?

JR: Yes, I'm often surprised by how things unfold as I'm writing. I usually have an idea where things are heading, but in each book, there has come a point where the different elements all come together in an unexpected way and form a bigger picture. That revelation is one of my favorite things about writing.

A: You are a prize-winning short-story writer as well as a best-selling novelist. How is writing a story different than writing a novel?

JR: Anyone who has tried both can tell you that writing short fiction is a different skill set. When you're working on a short story, every single line you write has to either develop character or advance the plot. If a line doesn't add something essential, it should be cut. With novels, you have a little more room to play. It becomes more about the scene than the individual lines, but the goal is the same.

A: Do you still write short fiction?

JR: For the past several years, my focus has been on novels, so I haven't written short fiction in quite a while. I've received emails from a number of readers asking about my old stories, so I recently decided to put a few together and released a small collection. It's called The Walls Around Us, and it's a snapshot of what I was working on when I started writing fiction. Short stories were my way of learning how to create a scene, build tension, and develop characters. I had a great time writing them, but my true love is the novel.

A: I've heard that you don't consider yourself a mystery/thriller writer, but Already Gone is a thrilling, mysterious read. How would you describe your writing, and what kinds of readers do you think will love this book?

JR: I consider myself a suspense writer. Some of what I write falls into the mystery/thriller genre, but I've also written horror stories, noir stories, and even science fiction. The only constant element in everything I've written is suspense. Anyone who likes fast-paced, dark novels with a lot of danger and plot twists should like my books.

A: What are you reading now?

JR:The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis and The Outlaw Album by Daniel Woodrell.

A: What do you like to read over and over again?

JR: There are a few books I always seem to revisit: The Notebook by Agota Kristof, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver, Night Shift by Stephen King, Big Bad Love by Larry Brown, Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski, and A Farewell to Arms by Earnest Hemingway are the first ones that come to my mind. I go back to these books because the writing in them is so clear and vivid and beautiful, which to me is the best kind of writing"”also the hardest. Whenever I'm struggling, it's nice to be able to grab one of these books, flip it open, and see how it should be done.

Media Monday - The LA Times takes the lead

By Chris Schluep

Starting off with the Los Angeles Times today. Call it West Coast bias, but I thought they had the most interesting selection of book reviews this weekend.

 

Los Angeles times

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  David L. Ulin, perhaps my favorite book critic, writes a review of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. He suggests that readers try to read the 926 novel in as close to one sitting as possible. This may sound silly (and impossible), but Ulin insists that "there's something about the book that requires the deep immersion, the otherworldly sense of connection/disconnection, that only an extended plunge allows." He continues that the book draws readers "into a landscape where the boundary between reality and imagination has been rendered moot." So what's the plot? you ask.You can read the full review here. But suffice it to say that "this is a major development in Murakami's writing."

  
  

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  Carolyn Kellogg writes a review about A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown, in which Julia Scheeres, who chronicled her own experience as a troubled teen sent to a tropical religious camp in the best-selling Jesus Land, uses published reports and recently released FBI files to protray the members of the Jonestown massacre "as victims, not fools." In Kellogg's words, "It's hard to imagine how people might be so browbeaten, afraid and misled that they would bring about their own deaths "” but Scheeres has made that terrifying story believable and human."

  
  

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  The Cat's Table debuted at #1 on the Los Angeles Times list. Reviewer Nick Owchar writes that "Ondaatje is a quiet writer," explaining that the primary characters in the book "experience their own moments of quiet revelation" while aboard a ship heading from Ceylon to England. "While the more privileged passengers use binoculars to sightsee from the rails, the boys "” and readers "” are more intent upon all those things going on in secret aboard the ship. Ondaatje teaches us that the most marvelous sights are those most often overlooked. It's a lesson that turns this supple story, like the meals at the cat's table, into a feast."

  
  

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  Lastly, a fine new book has come out called The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales. It is a unique book, a sort of sequel to The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which was published twenty five years ago. Author Chris Van Allsburg does the drawing, while a host of contributors, from Stephen King to Sherman Alexie to Susan Lorie Park (collectively, the fourteen authors have won five Newberys, three National Book Awards, two Caldecotts, one Printz, and one Pulitzer) write short stories about his artwork, which balances somewhere between childlike wonder and adult intrigue. There's even an Introduction by Lemony Snicket.

  
  

 

New York Times

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  Reviewer Jennifer Schuessler asks about Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, "Do dogs deserve biographies? In Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, Susan Orlean answers that question resoundingly in the affirmative, while also asking a harder one: Can a dog deserve an Oscar?

  
  

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  Alan Hollinghurst has a new novel. Of it, the Times says, "Hollinghurst's fine new book, The Stranger's Child "” the closest thing he has written to an old-fashioned chronicle novel "” contains a whole hidden literary curriculum, out of which he has fashioned something fresh and vital."

  
  

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  And Garrison Keillor introduces Harry Belafonte's My Song with a compelling blowfish of a sentence that's trying to disguise itself as a whole paragraph: "Here is a gorgeous account of the large life of a Harlem boy, son of a Jamaican cleaning lady, Melvine Love, and a ship's cook, Harold Bellan­fanti, who endured the grind of poverty under the watchful eye of his proud mother and waited for his chances, prepared to be lucky, and made himself into the international calypso star and popular folk singer, huge in Las Vegas, also Europe, and a mainstay of the civil rights movement of the '60s, a confidant of Dr. King's, who lived for years in a U-shaped 21-room apartment on West End Avenue, but never forgot what he ran so hard to escape from, the four or five families squeezed into a few rooms, the smell of Caribbean food cooking, the shared bathroom, his father drunk, yelling, blood on his hands, beating his mother, and 'a terrible claustrophobic closet of fear.'"

  
  

 

Slate

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  The very talented Lionel Shriver, author of the Amazon favorite (and disturbing) We Need to Talk about Kevin, has written an essay in defense of unlikable characters.

  
  

 

Paris Review

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  In the Paris Review Staff Picks section, two books stood out. The first was chosen by staff member Deirdre Foley-Mendelson, who wrote of The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition, "I was curiously entranced and chilled by the newly discovered photographs of Scott's expedition to the South Pole. They're bleak, beautiful, and suffused with doom.

  
  

  And Sadie Stein says of Amor Towles's Rules of Civility, "I've been enjoying Amor Towles's Depression-era Rules of Civility with delight; it's a good read in every sense."

  
  

   

  
  

 

The Guardian

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  In a story entitled "The Hobbit as JRR Tolkien imagined it," the Guardian informs us that "when The Hobbit was first published almost 75 years ago, JRR Tolkien provided a set of wonderful illustrations." You can see the pictures here.

  
  

 

Daily Beast

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  The Daily Beast informs us: "If book sales determined who won the GOP primary, then Ron Paul would be wiping the floor. Jason Pinter breaks down the numbers and what they reveal about the candidates"”and why Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, and other pundits always do best."

  
  

 

New York Review of Books

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  The New York Review of Books is running an interview with Saul Bellow that took place in 1988. It is entitled "A Jewish Writer in America," and begins "So, in my first consciousness, I was, among other things, a Jew, the child of Jewish immigrants. At home our parents spoke Russian to each other, we children spoke Yiddish with them, and we spoke English with one another."

  
  

 

Abe Books

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  Want to know some fun facts about Dickens?

  
  

 

Publishers Weekly

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  This is a nice piece about a dastardly word.

  
  

 

Jacket Copy

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  You can read here about Michelle Obama's upcoming book American Grown.

  
  

 

A.V. Club

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  The Onion's A.V. Club offers Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance"

  
  

 

Brain Pickings

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  Five unsung heroes who shaped modern life.

  
  

 

The New Yorker

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  And finally, Susan Orlean gets the last word in her essay on wild animals.

  
  

John Grant: Affirming Science with the Smart, Darkly Humorous "Denying Science"

By Jeff VanderMeer

For the past few years, John Grant has been intrepidly documenting instances of bogus, corrupted, and discarded science. Now he's back with perhaps the best of the lot: Denying Science. As topical and as cutting as past volumes have been, Denying Science gets to the heart of the problem in today's world"”and does so with fascinating, brilliantly written accounts that may curl your toes but also contain elements of humor and absurdity. In doing so, he tackles such question as "Is global warming just scaremongering?", "Is evolution 'just a theory'", and "Is autism caused by vaccinations?" Grant provides compelling evidence that the answers in all three cases is a resounding "no."

But his larger point in these instances and more is to comment on the role of popular media in presenting the interpretation of scientific data as having equally compelling and factual "sides", blurring the lines between critical thinking/scientific literacy and approaches more common to presenting opposing political pundits on morning talk shows.

The title comes from Grant's position that "Large sections of the supposedly sophisticated populations in the developed nations are in an active state of denial. Not only do they deny scientific evidence but they also call into question the very competence of science as a descriptor of reality. In short, they deny reality."

Chapter titles include "Unless We Think, We Aren't," "Puffing the Product," No Safe Classroom?," "Eugenically Speaking," and "Global Weirding." Grant is invested in showing how many issues are clouded by various panics, urban legends, and a general climate of misinformation. He also examines how special interests, from agribusiness to pharmaceutical companies to creationists, actively work to distort or suppress scientific findings.

It may seem odd, but Denying Science is nimble, clever, and darkly funny. Grant is an excellent writer and knows both how to present information in an entertaining way and how to underscore a particularly important point.

Chances are, no matter what your political persuasion, you'll find something that challenges your beliefs, but hopefully you'll also agree with one of Grant's main thoughts running throughout the series, as expressed in an interview I conducted with the author in 2008: "We all suffer whenever someone indulges in the wholesale falsification or suppression of knowledge."

"Steve Jobs"

By Chris Schluep

It is difficult to read the opening pages of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs without feeling melancholic. Jobs retired at the end of August and died about six weeks later. Now, less than three weeks after his death, you can open the book that bears his name and read about is youth, his promise, and his relentless press to succeed.

How the book came to be is practically lore already: Walter Isaacson, who has written about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, was asked by Jobs in 2004 to take a walk in Aspen so that they could talk. During the walk Jobs asked him to write his biography, but Isaacson declined. By 2009, aware that Jobs was suffering from the cancer that would eventually take his life, he finally accepted.

The initial sense of sadness in starting the book is soon replaced by something else, which is the intensity of the read"”mirroring the intensity of Jobs's focus and vision for his products"”and the end result is something that is satisfying, complete, and gives insight into a man whose contradictions were in many ways his greatest strength.

Despite an embargo, much has already been written about the book. Yes, there are surprises and fascinating disclosures in Steve Jobs. And the book paints a clear-eyed picture of the man. Some might argue that the biggest star (or at least the most sympathetic protagonist) is each and every product that Steve Jobs worked on in his brilliant career. But Jobs was so closely linked to his products that it's almost impossible not to think of the Mac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, or iPad without picturing in your mind the already iconic photo of Steve Jobs that graces the book's cover.

What's also clear is that-- even if he was tempted to take all the credit for himself-- Steve Jobs knew to surround himself with talented people.

That instinct started early when Jobs, still in high school, struck up a friendship with Steve Wozniak, who was five years his elder. In the words of Isaacson, "It may have been the most significant meeting in a Silicon Valley garage since Hewlett and Packard's thirty two years earlier." The two shared a love for electronics, pranks, and Bob Dylan, and it is obvoius that, though "Woz" knew more about electronics than Jobs ever would, you would have never heard of Woz if it hadn't been for Jobs's marketing savvy and plain guts and brashness. The same can be said for most people who worked with Jobs. He was obsessed with surrounding himself with great people, even if we read that he was often abusive to them, and he pushed, prodded, motivated, and manipulated those people to get what he needed out of them. His unique gifts were his vision, focus, and passionate dedication to quality. But he couldn't execute all by himself.

So we learn that Jobs was both an inspiration and a terror to the people he worked with. He was abrasive and not a very good manager. In fact, you could argue that he was a bad one. Eventually he was even kicked out of his own company. But that setback only seemed to spur Jobs forward, as he sold his Apple stock and used the money to start Next computers (which failed) and to buy Pixar (which was wildly successful and turned him from a millionaire to a billionaire). And, of course, there's the fact that Apple eventually hired him back.

Jobs was a man of wild contradictions, all of which he seemed to spin into strengths. One major contradiction was the fact that he was the head of a Fortune 500 company who also embraced the counterculture. Jobs spends the first quarter of the book walking around barefoot, eating strange diets, and not showering (the attention to diet continues throughout the book). He goes to India, studies Buddhism, and at the same time builds a successful computer company and becomes a twenty-something millionaire. He aspires to the Mother Jones motto, "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish," and yet the force of his personality (something that those who worked for him called his "reality distortion field") is almost impossible to fathom even as we read about it. And he's all around us. Apple is second only to Exxon Mobile in terms of company value. There's a very good chance you're using one of his devices at this very moment.

So what was his secret?

-- He was intensely focused. When Jobs embraced an idea, he did so with an almost shocking intensity and dedicaton.

-- He valued Intuition. When Jobs went to India as a young man, he marked how rational thought was a learned Western process, noting how people in the Indian countryside successfully exercised the power of intuition over rational thought on a regular basis. A strong belief in his own intuition would serve him well over time.

-- He loved design. Jobs purposely positioned himself at the intersection of technology and design. He studied fonts, took design cues from a Cuisinart, and embraced the simplicity and intuitiveness of Buddhism and the look of Bauhaus. He also observed that most tech companies "just didn't get it."

--He thought big. Jobs worked on principles that ruled his practices"”simplicity, intuitiveness, beauty, and grace for the mass market. But he had an even bigger goal, which was to "make a dent in the universe."

--He was a survivor. How many people get kicked out of their company, only to be brought back and given the opportunity to take it from the brink of bankruptcy to being perhaps the top company in the world? Answer: one.

--He was a control freak. There are good and bad sides to this quality. One positive is that the same control issues that kept Jobs from licensing software out to external companies (thus, shrinking his potential market when he first launched Apple computers) eventually made it possible for him to integrate all his hardware and software into one product (hello, iPhone!).

--Steve Jobs was a salesman. His ability to believe what he was saying, even if that belief required a certain amount of reality distortion, was essential to his success.

--He was an idealist. When it came to products, Jobs wanted to be "insanely great." When it came to people and relationships, maybe not so much.

It may be splitting hairs, but Steve Jobs was not Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin. Still, he did manage to become insanely great in what he accomplished, and he does have analogs in history. Reading Steve Jobs, it's almost impossible not to wonder what it would have been like to get the same kind of access into the minds of those analogs. What would Gutenberg have told us about his real motivations? What dark shadows drove Edison or Ford?

We will never have a view into those minds like Walter Isaacson has given us here. And it never could have happened without Jobs's cooperation. What we get in the end is a great book about a great and flawed man. Steve Jobs may sell more copies than any other book this year, and if it does, it will have earned that distinction. This is a wonderful book.

Halloween Special: How to Scare your Reader (Tricks from the Movies)

By Susan J. Morris

In honor of Halloween, I'd like to focus on what writers can take away from Halloween's most sacred and time-honored tradition: the horror movie. I know, I know: books and movies are natural enemies. Books have long-lasting, deep affairs with their readers, and movies have quick, memorable flings. Books resent the popularity of movies, and movies are turned off by book's need for commitment. But that doesn't mean there aren't a few tricks books can learn from movies"”after all, there's a reason they're so popular!"”and movies have always had particularly effective scare tactics.

Even if you're not writing a horror story, knowing how to scare your reader is an important skill to have. We like our villains frightening, our monsters terrifying, and our unknown horrors to reduce us to a quivering goo. Otherwise, we can't appreciate the heroism of your hero"”or their abject fear"”when they face whatever horrors you have in store for them. Being able to effectively communicate how scary something is for your hero is key to reader immersion and empathy.

So what makes things scary? Sure shock, gore, and the exploitation of common phobias have something going for them, but to make something really scary? That's the art of the psychological thriller. It's also the easiest to translate to a book. There are two basic principles of scaring your reader that we can learn from the movies: the power of everyday objects to evoke horror, and the implications of a single, perfect detail.

Everyday Horror

You are at your most vulnerable with those you trust. You let your guard down. You begin to relax. So something that makes you question the things you took for granted as safe is naturally terrifying. Doctors should heal you. Showers cleanse and refresh you. Wooden blocks are for children to play with. Cheese graters are for cooking. After you read a scene from a book that twists something you trust, you will never look at those objects quite the same way again. And it's that ability of the everyday turned horrific to haunt you that makes them so powerful.

Everyday Objects"”Pan's Labyrinth as one scene that everyone remembers as "The Bottle Scene." Most people thing of knives and guns as violent, but taking something like a bottle, and killing someone with it"”with all the time that takes"”makes it a memorable moment of horror. No matter how many babies that character kissed, old ladies he helped across the street, or kittens he saved, that character was a monster from there on out.

Everyday Places"”In the shower you are about as vulnerable as you can get. Naked, alone, eyes closed, curtained off in a small room with only one exit and no room to maneuver, all sounds masked by running water"¦ Psycho's bathroom scene is so intense that my leisurely shower routine was converted to a quick 5-minute affair, with my escape route planned.

Everyday Experiences"”Most Americans watch TV everyday"”and The Ring (Ringu) takes that everyday relaxing habit and turns it into an instrument of terror. A Nightmare on Elm Street goes one step further and turns sleep, which is both necessary and relaxing, and in which you are completely helpless, against you. But my most scaring case of this actually does come from a book: Jurassic Park, the book not the movie, has a scene in the beginning where small dinosaurs sneak in a window and eat a kid's face off. I slept with my lights on for weeks after reading that. Did I mention I was just a kid at the time?

Everyday People"”The most common trope of horror movies, and still one of the most effective, is the use of everyday, seemingly innocent people as a means of horror. From The Omen's corruption of children to The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers's corruption of your friends and family"”taking those we love and trust and turning them against us is both simple and effective.

The Devil's in the Details

Cutting off someone's head is scary. Pulling off someone's fingernails is scarier. Finding a fingernail imbedded in the arm of your chair while you're home skipping class, trying to get your groove on with your boyfriend, is scariest. Every scene in your book was chosen because it helps tell the story your are trying to tell"”and every detail in every scene should be chosen for the same reason. Choosing and using details effectively is key to writing frightening fiction.

The Right Detail: The slow-pan, the focus on just the splatter of blood on the wall"”movies tell whole stories with just one detail by choosing what to show, and what to leave to the reader's imagination. Books have that same opportunity. Hemmingway's famous six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." is haunting because of what it leaves unsaid. Those six words present a question and a mystery with terrible implications. In Audition, when the police find a dismembered body and find three extra fingers, an extra ear, and an extra tongue, it becomes a lot more horrific than if they'd just shown a lot of bodies.

Pavlovian Details: Choosing an everyday detail"”like the cell phone jingles in Suicide Club"”to presage the first occurrence of horror"”like a mass of school kids jumping in front of a train--and then repeating that same detail again when the horror is about to happen again creates a Pavlovian association of that detail with the horror. Every time you hear that peppy cell phone jingle coming from more than one phone in Suicide Club, dread begins to build, and you get ready to cover your eyes.

Incongruous Details: Madsen's dancing and singing to "Stuck in the Middle with You" while he happily tortures a cop in Reservoir Dogs is more disturbing because of the unexpectedly cheery tone of his dancing and singing. It would not be as disturbing if he seemed to want something the cop could give, or if he acted like a normal bad guy, and was serious. Because this means that this previously normal enough criminal has become someone we can't bargain with, predict, or identify before the horror begins.

Flash Fiction Practice:

Describe a chair. Describe it in such a way as to make it the scariest thing ever. Remember, there's a fine line between Chairs That Eat People and a chair that tells a horrific story.

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Not Drinking With Man Booker Prize Winner Anne Enright

By Neal Thompson

People will say of the Irish, "Now that's someone I'd like to share a pint with." But I have to admit, drinking beer with Irish author Anne Enright crossed my mind more than once during Amazon's recent pint-free chat with her. Anne was funny and charming and real. Someone you'd want to spend time with. Over a pint. Or two.

We talked about her new book, The Forgotten Waltz. This was days before the Man Booker Prize was to be announced (it went to Julian Barnes, for The Sense of An Ending). So we had to ask Anne about winning the prestigious Booker Prize in 2007, for The Gathering, and what it meant to her. "It made me a bit grumpy, actually," she said.

"Because it was a full-time job winning the Booker. I mean, it was very hard work, and I'm a conscientious sort of chick, and I was doing the job of winning the Booker... But, as it is, I already have two full-time jobs. I have kids, and I have books to write. So it kept me from the desk. I was very happy to meet readers. That was an extremely nurturing experience. But I really, really wanted to get back to work."

Watch this space for our full interview. Meanwhile, here's a preview: Anne reading a selection from The Forgotten Waltz, including a stumble and a curse or two...

 

Craig Thompson signs my copy of Haibibi

By Chris Schluep

Craig Thompson, creator of Blankets and the extraordinary Haibibi, stopped by our offices a while back. I was lucky enough to get a copy of Haibibi signed by him, which I belatedly thought to catch on video. Please excuse the shoddy camera work. I thought this was kind of cool and worth sharing. (As well as autographing, he drew the face on the title page-- it's amazing to see how a true artist's hand moves when it's at work. Almost like it's its own entity.)

 

Helen Oyeyemi's New Novel Mr. Fox": Unruly Disguises, Amiable Silliness, and a Love Story

By Jeff VanderMeer

Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox is one of the more delightful, and delightfully complex, selections on Amazon's
"http://www.amazon.com/Best-Books-of-the-Month/b/ref=bhp_bb0309A_botm5_A?ie=UTF8&node=390919011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=browse&pf_rd_r=1F5TTT01DM5R43YJG8M6&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1321415182&pf_rd_i=283155/ref=blogs_omni_link">October Best Books of the Month. It's the fourth novel for Oyeyemi, who

was born in Nigeria and raised in London, and it's garnered a great deal of praise from national media, including NPR and the Boston Globe.

What's it about? Many intricate, tangled-together things. As Amazon's Heather Delieepan wrote, "[The novel] uses a series of interconnected vignettes

to capture the love triangle between wry, self-absorbed writer St. John Fox, his wife, Daphne, and his imagined muse, Mary Foxe. As his muse Mary takes

form on the page, St. John struggles to maintain his already tenuous marriage. Through different time periods and characters, he writes and rewrites

Mary Foxe as an embodiment of unrequited love"¦Through them all is the shared and often feverish complexity that comes with sustained relationships"¦.With

clever, tender, and often poignant prose, she captures the magic and heartbreak of the love story."

The novel mixes folktales and a certain meta-element, but those elements are really just a jumping off point for the novel's main conflict. As

Oyeyemi replied when I asked her about the idea of focus in the novel, "Yes, there're lots of disguises going on, appearances and disappearances and

reappearances; I took care not to abandon my interest in the central dispute between Mary and Mr. Fox"”the one about love and stories; Mary's very

serious about both, and Mr. Fox claims not to be serious about either. With a few of the stories I had to rewrite bits over and over until I felt both

sides had been addressed."

The very nature of Mr. Fox seems to indicate a continual process of discovery on the writer's part. When asked what surprised her the most while

working on the novel, Oyeyemi told me "Its unruliness, the way all the story's influences met and mixed together so that (to me) the book has an amiable

silliness to it rather than an anguished, conflicted personality. There are the fairy tale variants, the essays on fairy tales, the despairing gaiety I

get from reading Dorothy Parker, the maniacal logic of certain

Witold Gombrowicz stories, then Kharms...that nervous, inscrutable http://www.amazon.com/Daniil-Kharms/e/B001HOMAQA/ref=blogs_omni_link">Kharms,

some candidness that I wish was like Barbara Comyns' but is

probably just my own, plus wholesome Mills and Boon romances from the 1930s, and some fiddling about with the trope of the femme fatale, some Bronte

stuff... technically Mr. Fox ought to be unreadable."

And yet, it is instead much more than the sum of its parts, and for Oyeyemi "the only novel I've written that I'm still able to look at post-

publication without groaning overmuch. I only wish my mind didn't show through quite so much in this one. On the other hand, when I'm much older I'll be

able to look back and say "huh...so that was my idea of romance"”"

One of the best of the next generation of writers working in the interstices of realism and the fantastical, Oyeyemi seems set to keep delivering up

thought-provoking, emotive, and unclassifiable fiction for a long time to come. Indeed, she is already working on the next novel, which she says is

"completely different" from Mr. Fox.

Chip Kidd to Pen Original Batman Graphic Novel

By Alex Carr

Dream jobs do come true. At New York Comic Con last weekend, DC announced that award-winning author, book jacket designer, and unabashed Batman fan Chip Kidd would wirte an original Batman graphic novel. Previously, Kidd showed off his personal collection of Batman memorabilia in Batman: Collected and he recently chronicled long unsung Batman-manga comics and Japanese Batman toys in Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan. This is in addition to having a hand in the design of numerous high profile comics projects like Final Crisis, Watching the Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Rough Justice: the DC Comics Sketches of Alex Ross, Absolute All-Star Superman, and many more.

With a wink to such comics ties, Kidd revealed in an interview with Comic Book Resources that the title of his graphic novel will be Batman: Death by Design, and that he will be collaborating with artist Dave Taylor.

"I actually came up with the title first. I thought, 'If it's me and you know who I am and what I do, then I'm going to come at this whole thing from a design standpoint.' I've said for many years that Batman himself and especially the way he's evolved is brilliant design. It's problem solving. And we get into that in the story. Beyond that, it became about me going 'What if?' What do I want that I haven't seen? And really, the overall Art Direction for the book is 'What if Fritz Land made a Batman movie in the late 1930s and had a huge budget? Go!' There's the visual platform."

While he's written stories for comics before in Bizarro Comics and a strip in Mythology, this marks Kidd's first full-scale comics work. Early word from DC is that the publication date is June 2012, but a detail page doesn't even exist yet. If readers are looking for a taste of the designer's prose, Kidd wrote The Cheese Monkeys, a novel about--you guessed it!--graphic design students, and its sequel, The Learners. Both are witty, involving works and signal a high standard for this Batman project.

For much more on Death by Design, be sure to read the full interview at CBR.

--Alex