Steampunk Poe!

The annual Bellingham Steampunk Festival is coming up and as always, there are author appearances. This year one of the authors who'll be there is Lindsay Shopfer. I don't know his work, but when I Googled around, I found THIS collection, Merely This, which looks like all kinds of fun. (They had me at "clockwork raven.") I look forward to reading his work.

I like the playful thing the book designer did with Edgar Allan Poe's name. I also like the play of purple against the black and white. Not crazy about the way the title and subtitle are laid in. 

A is for Alcott, Louisa May

Like so many other girls in America, I devoured Little Women when I was a kid, and then went on to read the whole series, Little Men, Jo's Boys, and all the rest. I loved those books. But when an unknown book  by Louisa May Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase, surfaced in 1995, I found it almost unreadable. It's basically a supernatural thriller but for me it wasn't particularly thrilling. What I did discover, though, was that Alcott wrote a lot more than just books about families. Who knew she was a secret thriller writer? (You can find a collection of her thrillers in Behind a Mask.)

Look at this portrait of Alcott. She has the same haunted eyes as Edgar Allan Poe. What if she'd only written supernatural tales? What classic would she have left behind in that genre?

Poe man of the 80s

This is why I love Facebook. You can see silliness  like this photo of Edgar Allan Poe photoshopped to look  like a sleazy bad guy on Magnum PI.  Not sure where it originated.
And speaking of Poe (a belated happy birthday to the dark bard), his poetry is going to be an integral part of The Following, the Kevin Williamson-created television show starring Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy.

Bacon plays an FBI agent and Purefoy plays a literature professor specializing in romantic poetry whose real passion is murder. The series premieres on Fox this coming Monday and I cannot wait. There's an "Inside The Following" featurette up on IMDB, with images of crazy cultists in Poe masks killing people in honor of their idol, the charismatic killer played by Purefoy.

I (Heart) Short Stories

I came across this great quote by Isaac Asimove,"If knowledge creates problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them." and found myself thinking about his wonderful short story Nightfall.

And then I started thinking about the short stories that have stuck with me since I first read them. Yes, yes, yes, Jack London's To Build a Fire is a fantastic story, and so is Stephen Crane's Open Boat but the stories that really made an impression never made it into my English books--with one exception.

I was going to make a list of my five favorite short stories and then I realized, I had to make it a top 10 list. So here they are in no particular order:

Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. I know what you're thinking, how can I pick just one? But I recently saw Jeffrey Combs' awesome one-man Poe show Nevermore where he recited this one and it's still so potent.

Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.--I'm also fan of his Pretty Maggie Money-Eyes with its stinger of a last line.

Nightfall I once wrote Asimov a fan letter, one of the few I've written, and he was gracious enough to respond to me. His guides to Shakespeare and the Bible are outstanding works of scholarship and well worth owning in the days before the Internet.

Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Written in 1948, the story goes that she wrote it because she needed money to fix her refrigerator. Her novel has one of the most chilling last lines of any ghost story I ever read.

Saki's The Open Window also has a great last line and a twist. He wrote a ton of great short stories, but this one is probably his most famous.

Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God. Just an awesome story and so incredibly simple. I love the collision of mysticism and technology.

Ray Bradbury's The Small Assassin is a dark, dark story of the kind you might find in a Stephen King anthology. (I love a lot of King's stories, and also many written by his son Joe Hill, but I read King as an adult. The stories here are the ones that shaped me as a writer because they just haunted me.)

Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game which has been used as a basic plot in a bazillion movies including the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Hard Target directed by John Woo.

Frank R. Stockton's The Lady or the Tiger is another favorite. I don't remember ever reading anything else he wrote but like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, maybe one thing is all you need.

And finally, W. W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw.. This story was written in the 19th century and they'll still be reading it 500 years from now. Stephen King used it as the basis of his novel Pet Sematary and if you haven't read that, you should.

If I could go to 11 like the amps in Spinal Tap I would add one more, D.H. Lawrence's The Rocking Horse Winner. And then there are all those wonderful Roald Dahl stories. I skipped right past Willy Wonka and James and the Giant Peach and went right to his stories in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

What are the stories that shaped your life and your writing? I'd really like to know so I can go read them.