The Only Good Musical is About Actual Musicians

Although music forms a huge part of many of my novels, I don’t, as a rule, like traditional musicals. People bursting into song, unless it’s played for laughs (as in Cannibal: the Musical, an early film by South Park’s creators), overwhelms my suspension of disbelief. Even something as monumentally clever as Little Shop of Horrors stops dead (and never recovers) … Read More

The origin of character names: Eddie LaCrosse

One of the most common questions I get from fantasy fans is, “Why is your hero named ‘Eddie’?” Naming characters, especially the main characters of continuing series, is an art far more than a science. For example, one of my favorite characters, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, has a first name, but in the 40 books Parker wrote (and who knows … Read More

Review: Road to Hell

There are a lot of film parodies, but not so many films that function as commentaries. Offhand, the best known example might be The Freshman, in which Marlon Brando both spoofs his Godfather persona and simultaneously creates a new, ironic character. Road to Hell, the new film by Albert Pyun, is a commentary film, in a sense. Michael Pare plays Cody, … Read More

The dignity of the faux dead

This is an addendum to my earlier post on P.F. Kluge’s novel Eddie and the Cruisers. And I swear it’s true. In the late 1980s I worked in Florence, Alabama for the Olan Mills Portrait Studio chain. The studio manager was a woman then in her mid-forties, and one night just after closing our conversation turned to how much I … Read More

The soul of rock and roll: Eddie & the Cruisers, the novel

There haven’t been very many good novels about popular music. It could be due to the inherent contradictory nature of writing in concrete terms about something so ephemeral, even when the writers are also musicians. Music is such an individual experience that it can be daunting to find the absolutes in it. I know, because I’ve tried: my novel The … Read More