Fugitive Tendencies
5/27/2006 @ 1:37 pm Comments OffCraig Clevenger has a near pathological soft spot for people who disappear. Scroll through his protagonists, and witness. Damaged junkie savant John Dolan Vincent erases and reboots his identity every eighteen months to stay clear of the system, to avoid materializing on any legal or medical database. Heartsick meth alchemist Eric Ashworth splashes down through the atmosphere of his own consciousness on page one, his memory wiped by a self-administered overdose of a drug designed by his own hand and most of his surface skin scorched off by an inferno of his own making. The ghost voice narrating Clevenger’s as yet blooming third novel, meanwhile, suffers a slow irreversible fade from the physical plane, recounting in mild tone but excruciating detail the symptoms of a genetically transferred syndrome featuring a progressive irreversible molecular decay that does not kill him but leaves him invisible to others. Like the kid with a magnifying glass crouched over a flat rock with the sun to his back, Clevenger is fascinated with his characters, and loves them on some primordial level, but he isn’t afraid to burn them. Sometimes, though, I wonder if Clevenger is pulling a John Dolan of his own, a self-inflicted fade…
For the unabridged version of Fugitive Tendencies, check out the new back pages of the paperback edition of The Contortionist’s Handbook (Harper’s UK, 2006).
godspeed,
-wcb
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Enter Sandman
11/14/2005 @ 4:24 pm Comments OffThe writers and artists of comic books may live in the dead zone between novels and film, borrowing narrative technique from the one and visual vocabulary from the other- but that dead zone is defined by King, who gave Johnny Smith the power to see the past and future, and to step into alternate realities. The pages and panels of a comic book allow for infinite variations of composition and dramatic sequence, giving comic writers and artists the power to routinely rewrite storytelling physics, to not only stop time, but to treat time as a liquid and spin ripples in it. To make our eyes track from right to left and left to right at once, to read along verticals and diagonals- dreamweaving stunts that filmmakers and novelists rarely attempt and less often pull off. The most accomplished writers and artists in the narrative dead zone cause us to reconsider how we tell stories, how we hear and see our dreams. Some of these guys, who spin new myths for a living and walk in the long shadows cast by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, have become myths themselves. Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, J. O’ Barr, and Neil Gaiman, among others, dragged the comic industry from its death bed in the 1980’s and ’90s and laid the groundwork for the Hollywood behemoth that comics, for good or ill, have become since…
interview with Neil Gaiman now live at The Cult.
go.
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Deception of the Thrush
9/15/2005 @ 5:53 pm Comments OffJude opened her hand and the panic of blind horses seized her. The washcloth was marked with a bloody knot of red in the shape of a gouged eye. She sat naked on the edge of the bathtub and tried not to hyperventilate, she pushed from her head the idea that her blood on a white washcloth was the single source of primary color in a strange bathroom yawning black and white around her. She stared at the locked door across from her and counted to ten, and when the panic of horses was gone she took stock of her situation. She was seventeen and it was a school night. Her left arm was so bruised it looked like it belonged to someone else, the bruise running so deep she was sure she could smell it, as if the blood pooling in there had gone bad. Her legs were cold to the touch, her thighs rippled with goose bumps, and when she pulled her hands from her knees they left marks slow to fade. She wondered if it were true that fingerprints could be dusted from human skin, and made a mental note to look that up. She had locked herself in this bathroom two minutes ago, not counting a few too rapid heartbeats, and by her estimation she could safely remain another four minutes more. Any longer and he might get suspicious and come to the door to ask in a soft threatening voice if she were all right, and she couldnt bear that. She needed to exit the bathroom without prompting. Already it had taken her twenty-two seconds to pee, another thirty-six seconds to run water over the washcloth and bathe herself as instructed, and it sickened her to realize she had been staring at the knot of blood for nearly a minute…
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