New chapter for Agent Shield and Spaceman

The next chapter for "Agent Shield and Spaceman" is available. Marcus and Spaceman interview Dr. Duchampski about the contents of the Anti-Cerebrist vials and learn about one of the most fearsome of all cryptozoological creatures - the Burmese Tiger Snake.

In other news, Gwendolyn Kiste published an interview with me on her blog yesterday. I have tremendous respect for Gwendolyn's talents as a writer and fan of weird fiction and enjoyed her questions greatly. Check it out if you get a chance and while you're there read some of her work and the other interviews she's posted. Great stuff!

On more of a personal note, I have finally finished the door to my chicken coop. In terms of tool-use, I rank somewhere between an Australopithecus and H. Habilis, but by repeatedly banging heavy objects into slats of wood, this crude contraption some how resulted. Plans to open my own boutique catering to aficionados of crappy post-apocalyptic carpentry are in the works.

To mix things up a little, I'm currently reading one of those "Noir (fill in the blank city)" anthologies. In this case, all of the stories involve Chicago - great stuff. I'm not sure if I'm ever going to get to the Noir Helsinki collection but I am hoping they eventually get to Rochester or Syracuse.

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Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...

Ancient Logic

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