NOTE: This is the latest in an occasional series about notable figures from my home region. These are, for the most part, personal reminiscences and opinions; where available, I’ll include links so interested readers can find out more. While Memphis has its own vibrant literary history, rural west Tennessee suffers from a dearth of serious writers. The swamps, fields and … Read More
What’s in a Name? Well…
A lot of times, my novels will be catch-alls for everything I find interesting about a particular topic. Burn Me Deadly, for example, deals with dragons, and Blood Groove with both vampires and 1970s culture. Usually by the time I finish, I’ve burned out my intense interest in a sort of positive exorcism that gets the obsession out of me … Read More
“Don’t you think I’m taking this really well?”
Recently filmmaker Lexi Alexander tweeted: “The ‘nagging wife of cop who‘s trying to catch serial killer’ trope has to die. Look…there’s no woman who prefers a serial killer roaming around if it means a few hours more with the husband. Doesn’t happen. Male fantasy.” I first encountered this trope at age 14, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Roy … Read More
Chatting at the Bottom of the Lake
Steven Stack is an internationally-produced playwright for teens and middle-schoolers, and a full-time acting teacher for kids. He’s also one of my best friends, and he’s just published his first novel, The Bottom of the Lake. Here we discuss the fairly unique project of turning a play into a novel. Me: You’ve written many plays, so why did you decide … Read More
The Unexpected Return of Dakota North, part 2
In an earlier post, I talked about the Marvel comic Dakota North, which ran for five issues in the mid-80s and is now the subject of a brand new collection, Dakota North: Design for Dying. Now Dakota’s creator and writer, Martha Thomases, has been kind enough to talk to me a bit about Dakota’s origins. You wrote about the fashion … Read More
The Unexpected Return of Dakota North, part 1
Addendum: R.I.P. Stan Lee. The mid-1980s, when I was a serious comic book fan, was a great time for taking risks: it gave us Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and Miracleman; Neil Gaiman’s Sandman; Frank Miller’s Daredevil and The Dark Knight Returns; and significant runs in all the major series, many of which have turned up as the plots of … Read More
The Vampires Want to Wear My Mud Shoes
One of my personal traditions is that, every October, I re-read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s such a rich novel that I usually find at least one detail I’d never noticed before. This year, though, in addition to reading the actual novel, I’ve been reading a children’s version to my daughter (after all, what else can follow Frankenstein?). It’s easy to … Read More
Revisiting Night Streets, Part 3
You can read part 1 of this series here, and part 2 here. I’m old enough to remember when comics were considered strictly for kids. The very term “comic book” implies the immaturity and humor of the earliest examples. Comic strips in the newspapers were even grouped together on what was called the “funny pages.” The idea that one day comics would … Read More
Revisiting Night Streets, Part 2
Previously in Part 1, I wrote about the eighties comic Night Streets, which ended at issue #5, promising a storyline conclusion in issue #6, which never appeared. The unresolved cliffhanger is a special kind of torture. If you’ve ever gotten emotionally invested in a story—whether a movie, TV, comic, or novel—the idea that there will never be a resolution can … Read More
Revisiting Night Streets, Part 1
With every bit of information and history seemingly at our fingertips, it can be hard to recall that once, finding out things was much harder. Occasionally, though, you run across a topic that hasn’t been done to death on the web, and for which there’s virtually no information. Then you have to roll up your sleeves and start digging. So … Read More