WARNING: LONG NEWSLETTER BELOW!
New comics,
2019 recommendations,
Year end round-up.
Read at your own pace.
What's So Funny?!?
I'm mostly known for writing horror, but as a reader, crime fiction is really my bag, and has been since the beginning.
When I was just a tween, I had a deal with my parents. Bedtime was 9PM... but I could stay up an extra hour as long as I was reading in bed. That was how I wound up a Sherlock Holmes junkie. It took exactly an hour to read one of the short stories and four to finish off a novel. In all, I needed just 72 days to read the entire Sherlock Holmes library.
I never missed an episode of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes adaptations, which were remarkable for a number of reasons, but especially this: the show was careful to visually recreate the Sidney Paget illustrations, which ran alongside the original Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand magazine. I roamed the wildlands of Sherlockania, always hungry for more. I inhaled Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes-Dracula File and fell in love with Nicholas Meyer'sThe Seven-Percent Solution. I had a deerstalker cap I wore in private and I dreamt of being invited to join The Baker Street Irregulars, a private club formed in the 1930s for hardcore Doyle fanboys and fangirls. Supposedly they had less than 500 members and met in London inside a library hidden behind a bookcase-disguised-as-a-door.
Holmes led me to my broad, lifelong affection for crime fiction. I liked Agatha Christie's elegant fair play puzzle stories just as much as I enjoyed Lawrence Block's boozy, blood-in-your-teeth tales of street crime. Inevitably it seeped into my work. Even in my stories of ghosts and devils, I've always felt a compulsion to play with misdirection and to hide clues.
Which brings me around to Syd "Shit-Talk" Homes, the star of a new five-issue comic series I wrote for IDW, illustrated by Martin Simmonds, who has an eye for filthy beauty and the despair hiding behind a smile. Our hero's last name, of course, is a nod to the guy who got me interested in these stories in the first place. But so is the first name, which is a shout-out to Sidney Paget, who was Conan Doyle's Martin Simmonds. We only know what Sherlock Holmes looks like because Sidney Paget showed us.
Dying is Easy is my own attempt to write a crime story that fuses traditional mystery plotting (the Agatha Christie strain) with the sunstroke fever-heat of American street crime (the Lawrence Block thread). Our lead -- I won't quite call him a hero -- is an ex-homicide detective, who left the force under an ethical cloud, and decided to take a stab at a career in stand-up. But the joke's on him when a dead body turns up in an alley and a witness says Syd himself confessed to the murder.
I talked about the comic a whole bunch more with Collider and SyFy... and Bloody Disgusting has already jumped out with a lovely first review. Dying is Easy can be found in your local comic shop as of today. My thanks to you if you're able to check it out. I hope you like it.
The Wrap on 2019
I had a pretty satisfying year as a hunter-gatherer foraging in the pop cultural underbrush. I didn't find much to thrill me as a moviegoer (maybe I picked the wrong pictures?) but I heard enough great music and read enough great books to more than balance it out. And it was an unbeeeeeeeelivably great year for TV. If you're looking for last minute Christmas gifts, or just something to enjoy over the holidays, I've got a few last minute suggestions for you.
The great stuff only:
The World That We Knew - Alice Hoffman
novel • 2019
I was looking for something that captured the gentle magic of Close Encounters of the Third Kind but also the relentless pace of Raiders of the Lost Ark... and this book fell into my lap to scratch the itch. The World is the story of a teenage girl fleeing Nazi Berlin with the help of an implacable, unstoppable golem. Do I really have to say more?
"Let's Rock" - The Black Keys
LP • 2019
From the serpentine come-on of "Lo/Hi" to the dirty crunch of "Eagle Birds" this is rock the way I want it. Not one skippable track on the whole platter. The Black Keys are putting together a Zeppelin-esque body of work, building their grubby legend one essential album at a time.
Fleabag, Season 2
BBC/Amazon • 2019
Great high-end TV programs are often compared to novels, but Fleabag is one of the few cases where it's deserved. It's not as good as you've heard -- it's better. Fleabag faces her own self-hatred and damaging compulsions with an effervescent wit and curiosity that made me want to cheer. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is one of the finest comic writers of her generation; it seems criminally unfair that she should also be one of her generation's finest actresses.
Chernobyl
HBO • 2019
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth," says atomic scientist Valery Legasov, about midway through this tale of obliterating horror. "Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
Which is when we realize Chernobyl isn't just about a terrifying thing that happened... it's as much about what might yet happen, a warning that any society that chooses ideology over fact is at risk of disaster.
A Little Hatred - Joe Abercrombie
novel • 2019
A Little Hatred shows Joe Abercrombie pushing his world of magic and massacre into a sooty industrial age, an era in which the clean savagery of barbarism is being replaced by the more heartless cruelties of capitalism. There's a riot in the middle of this book, viewed through a shifting kaleidoscope of perspectives, that might be the single most remarkable scene I encountered all year. I love these flawed, compromised, courageous, sex-hungry characters. Can't wait for the next.
Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo
novel • 2019
In Ninth House, Yale's many secret clubs are revealed as private cabals for rich, entitled sorcerers. Someone has to police these overpowered churls, with their trust funds and their reality-trashing spells. Enter Galaxy "Alex" Stern -- lone survivor of an inexplicable slaughter, recovering drug addict, and a woman cursed to see ghosts -- who is offered a full scholarship, on the condition that she'll keep the brats in line. Bardugo's novel deals in unforgettable characters, unrelenting suspense, and dizzying ideas from the first page to the last.
Catastrophe, Season 4
Channel 4/Amazon • (2019)
Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney's raunchy sex comedy about trying to stay married was over way too soon... but they saved the best for last, and gave Carrie Fisher a laugh-till-you-cry send-off.
Money Heist aka La Casa de Papel, Season 3
Antena 3/Netflix • 2019
I hated the idea of Money Heist returning for a third season... because the first two seasons taken together were the perfect crime show, and you don't mess with perfection.
Only it turns out they had plenty more in the tank, and season three was as outrageous, intense, sexy, and ingenious as the first two. This show stole my heart. Bring on the fourth season already.
The Library Book - Susan Orlean
Non-Fiction/True Crime • 2018
This little book is so full. It's at once a gripping look at the arson that gutted the Los Angeles Public Library, a larger history of libraries and library fires, an ode to the lovely obsessives to be found among the world's librarians, and a forensic consideration of compulsive fire-setters The first thing I did after finishing this book was make sure my library card was current.
Mindhunters, Season 2
Netflix • 2019
There are programs I love, and then there are programs that have an almost trance-like power over me, and Mindhunters falls into the latter category. In the second season, the show wrestles with child killers, the nature of sexual obsession, and the fine line between the potentially helpful techniques of psychological profiling and the society-poisoning effects of racial profiling. The moment a new season of Mindhunters drops, I say goodbye to my weekend. I can usually spread a good show out over a couple weeks in the name of delayed gratification, but this is the one I always have to binge.
Honorable Mentions:
I don't feel like it's fair to include family books in my list of favorite reads -- I have an obvious bias. But The Institute was the most exciting, just-can't-stop thriller I read all year, so there.
I saw Elton John and the Rolling Stones in 2019. That's two big daydreams achieved. Write 'em off as nostalgia acts if you want, but the Stones rocked harder, with more passion, and more skill, than almost any of the much younger bands I've been to see in the last decade, while Elton John's show was a landslide of masterfully performed hits and joyous connection with his audience.
The award for Best Audition to Play Indiana Jones goes to Chris Pratt in Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom. As with the first Jurassic World picture, I skipped this one in the theaters because the reviews were so scaldingly bad. And as with the first Jurassic World picture, I shouldn't have listened to 'em. This thing is a ten-car pile up of beautifully executed action sequences, Spielberg shout-outs, witty dialogue, and immediately loveable characters. What's wrong with that?
The most disturbing villain I saw all year was Homelander from Season One of The Boys on Amazon. He's a vision of unstoppable and unaccountable American power, and instantly the scariest baddie since Hannibal Lector. Yeah, I said that.
I am all admiration for writer-director Jon Faverau, who cracked the Star Wars problem with The Mandalorian. The very first Star Wars flick triumphed by recycling Kurosawa samurai riffs as science-fiction; Mandalorian does the same by reinventing Lone Wolf and Cub. The only reason Mando isn't on my best of the year list is because the first season is still in play, and I want to take it in as a whole.
And if you don't want to sleep this evening, go check out "Good Night, Malaysian three-seven-zero," the year's most wrenching work of long-form journalism. Sarah Weinman's "Before and After the Jogger" is right there alongside it... a crucial but painful look at the victims of a serial rapist who ran unchecked when the New York cops decided to lock up five innocent kids for the brutal assault on a Central Park jogger in 1989.
On the professional level, I've never had a year like this one. AMC aired the first season of NOS4A2, starring Ashleigh Cummings, Zachery Quinto, and Jahkara Smith, and it was so much fun... and a hit too! I've read the scripts for the next season and can't wait till it arrives on your TV. Guys, season two runs so hard.
I also had the chance to watch the entire first season of Locke & Key, which will land on Netflix in February of next year. I'm just giddy for people to get a face full of it. It's shamelessly Netflixy, by which I mean, chemically designed to be binged in an entire weekend, with no slowing down. The idea that I've got two shows firing at once is both sublime and kind of unbelievable.
I had a book of stories out, my first collection of shorts since 20th Century Ghosts in 2005. Full Throttle hit the New York Times Bestseller list, and was then listed as a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. I couldn't be more grateful. Thanks to everyone who went out and picked the thing up.
One of the stories was made into a film (!)... a harrowing, hayseed Inception, gory, beautifully shot, and full of mind-fuckery. Another story was made into an episode of Shudder's Creepshow, directed by one of my lifelong heroes, Tom Savini.
In 2019, I also had a chance to come back to comics, the form I love best, and tell some new scary stories, beginning with Basketful of Heads for my imprint with D.C., Hill House Comics. Hill House isn't just publishing my stuff. We're also proud to present some of the scariest stories dreamt up by some of the best writers and artists in the genre... starting with The Dollhouse Family by Mike Carey, Peter Gross and Vince Locke. The first issue arrived to ecstatic reviews and the second issue is out today. Get a load of this cover!
If that doesn't unsettle the hell out of you, you've got more intestinal fortitude than me!
More Hill House is on the way before the year is done: the third issue of Basketful of Heads hits on December 18th, and is joined by the inaugural chapter of The Low, Low Woods, a beautifully demented shocker from Carmen Maria Machado and Dani.
My wife and I took a real honest-to-God vacation (like, we didn't work or anything -- no, seriously, that's pretty hard for both of us) and it was five days of peace and sun and reading and happiness. Over the course of the last 12 months we read half a dozen books aloud to one another, cooked together, and tramped all over London, New York, New Hampshire, L.A., and Portland, OR. We spent a lot of time in bookstores and we solved over a 100 New York Times crossword puzzles in a row. She tried to persuade me that marmite is tasty, I tried to convince her running from zombies can be fun, and neither of us succeeded. I am so lucky to be married to this woman.
Oh, and at the age of 47, I received an unlikely invitation to join The Baker Street Irregulars.
I'd say more, but I have to go up in the attic and try and find my deerstalker cap.
Here's wishing you love, happiness, and good books in 2020. See you when we turn the page.