I ask you to consider the fact that we live in a web of mystery, and have simply gotten so used to the fact that we have crossed out the word and replaced it with one we like better, that one being reality. Where do we come from? Where were we before we were here?…
Tag: Books
My Own Personal Tesseract: Reflections on ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
Although my work as an author has been overwhelmingly centered in realms of darkness and horror, as cross-fertilized by my deep and personal focus on matters of religion, philosophy, and psychology, I have also been a lifelong lover of fantasy and science fiction. So perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the foundational books…
Books, solitude, and finding your own reality amid a cultural cacophony
From a lecture titled “Solitude and Leadership,” which William Deresiewicz delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009: Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Hereâs the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself…
“The book is elegiac. Books, I think, are dead.”
Here’s an excerpt worth pondering from a brief email interview with humorist, critic, and author Joe Queenan at The New York Times‘ ArtBeat blog, occasioned by the publication of Queenan’s new memoir One for the Books, about his lifetime of passionate engagement with books and “his own eccentric reading style.” Q. One of your bookâs…
The Next Big Thing: TO ROUSE LEVIATHAN
“The Next Big Thing” is a meme that asks authors to answer ten questions about their next project, after which they tag five additional authors to do the same a week later. Last week I was tagged in this regard by my friends, fellow authors, and fellow Teeming Brain writers Stuart Young and T. E….
Teeming Brain contributor Stuart Young’s SPARE PARTS reissued as ebook
Spare Parts, the 2003 debut collection of short horror fiction by Teem member Stuart Young, has just been reissued in a new ebook edition by Stumar Press. Note the chorus of praise below from various fellow authors in the field. Note especially the final blurb, from a source that will be familiar to Teeming Brain…
Positive reviews of AT FEAR’S ALTAR by Teeming Brain contributor Richard Gavin
Teeming Brain columnist Richard Gavin (Echoes from Hades) recently received two excellent reviews for his new book At Fear’s Altar (Hippocampus Press, 2012). At Speculative Fiction Junkie, reviewer Ben writes, At Fearâs Altar is an impressive collection, as impressive as what Iâve come to expect from Mr. Gavin. While it does not contain as many…
Forthcoming horror books from Teem members T.E. Grau and Stuart Young
Teeming Brain contributors T.E. Grau and Stuart Young have just shared some information about their new publications in the pipeline. Both were tagged in the “Next Big Thing” meme, which is currently winding its way through the ‘Net-connected authorial community, and which asks authors to answer ten questions about their forthcoming works. Participants are also…
Recommended Reading 33
Recommendations this week, spanning a vastly broad variety of trends, issues, ideas, people, and subjects, include: the pressure on American policymakers to adapt to increasingly wild weather; Daniel Pinchbeck’s analysis of the wild weather and other aspects of our current ecological crisis as a collective planetary-spiritual experience of initiation into higher levels of consciousness; an…
To Suffer This World or Illuminate Another? On the Meanings and Uses of Horror
In his interesting book-length meditation, Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King posited the following theory regarding the intrinsic and perennial appeal of Horror: Why do you want to make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in the world? The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope…