I try to keep my e-book naysaying to a minimum. Really, I do. It's not becoming. And the future seems to be as utterly inevitable as ever, so why bother? I'll tell you why. With the passing away of the book, we're losing far more than most people appreciate. This is fast becoming a relevant argument, believe it or not, as opposed to the game of nostalgia versus progress that many e-book fanatics like to paint it as.

Here's the real scoop, people. We're giving up freedom of choice and competition on an unprecedented scale (Um, from whom do you have to buy all your Kindle content?). We're forsaking the value of spontaneous discovery (When's the last time you found a digital file lying on the bench at the bus stop?). We're profoundly changing our notions of permanence and ownership (Will you leave behind a book collection for kith and kin to wallow in after you die, or will your Amazon account simply close? Will you really experience the same sense of gratitude at being lent an e-book for two weeks as you would at being handed a beloved paperback? If you're young enough, will you ever know the difference?). And last but not least, from the perspective of this struggling fiction writer we all seem to be joyously signing on to a paradigm shift in the way books are marketed (Here I'm referring to the tried and true practice of exposing the cover of the book you're reading when in public. A writer can't buy that kind of publicity, even in the age of social networking).

You can read elsewhere in this blog about the more pointed reasons I have for opposing the sheep-like rush toward e-books if you're so inclined. Trust me, I have a laundry list of them, though I do of course admit there are some obvious gains for the visually impaired. But here's the gist of today's little rant: it puts writers like me in a bit of a tight spot. On the one hand we want to embrace anything that might put our stories and names before the eyes of more readers, but at the same time, we expect our fair share of the pie. If we as readers don't demand certain standards from the publishing world, the very word publishing will cease to have any meaning at all. When everyone on the planet can zap their drivel to an e-reader, much will have been lost irretrievably. And we're very nearly there.

Funny, I suppose, that I should be typing this blog entry into a computer and self-publishing it electronically. Is this hypocritcal, or at least contradictary? I don't think so. Blogs are a product of the info revolution, after all. Books, magazines, and newspapers are not. We're turning those time-tested formats into something new. That's one of the reasons I try to resist the occasional temptation to put poetry or fiction on this site. I have too much respect for published poets and writers to willfully diminish the value of their craft by giving samples of my work away for free. Then again, I could use the exposure, so I do succumb once in a while. In fact, a forthcoming blog post will serve as an interesting case in point. Besides, blogging is good practice. Keeps the fingers moving, the mind-current flowing, the opinion mill grinding away. It's also a great way for fiction writers to dip into the sea of nonfiction from time to time.

As is always the case here at the Prison, you have the final say on these matters. Don't take that responsibility lightly. The world is watching.

I might have died happily ambivalent about Mel Gibson if it weren't for the stink that's been made over the recordings of his abusive profanities toward his girlfriend. It's one of those things that's hard to justify, but the controversy got me wanting to see some of Gibson's work that had been eluding me over the years, or maybe return to a handful of old favorites. You'd think this might have manifested itself as a desire to watch him act in some of his more outlandish roles, to see if I could glimpse a hint of the man Gibson would eventually reveal himself to be. Not so. I immediately turned to his directorial output. Man, am I glad I did. Besides being more entertaining, the films he's directed do at least as much to reveal Gibson's inner workings as the movies he merely acted in ever did.

I started off with the jackpot, too: Apocalypto. Now this is a movie. I sat down with this thing at ten o'clock one Sunday night, thinking maybe I'd watch a half hour of it and finish up another day. No such luck. I don't think I paused the film once as it whiplashed me from its opening credits to its gripping conclusion. It wasn't until I subsequently watched The Passion of the Christ that I realized what it is that makes Gibson, the director, so appealing to me. He's not afraid to let the camera tell the story. If that means holding a shot for more than ten seconds, so be it. Crane shots? No problem. Slow pans? You got it. Over-cranked scenes? Perhaps just a few. Whatever it takes, in other words, to let the story unfurl. The camera in both of these films has an almost preternatural tendency to anticipate our curiousity, and preemptively satisfy it. What's more, Gibson has a clear understanding of genre, dipping with confidence into horror territory for his supernatural torture-porn rendition of Christ's last moments on Earth and shamelessly ladeling up the melodrama for his take on the Mayans. He knows what buttons to push and when.

Well, you can imagine how excited I am to enter the world of Braveheart, which is next on the list. My expectations are high, I'll admit. Here I'll have the best of both worlds: Gibson in his screaming, face-painted glory, and Gibson behind the lens. Too often the move from acting to directing is a mistake. Maybe that's why I hadn't seen any of these Gibson-directed movies at the height of their popularity. But you know what? The good ones shouldn't have to be seen on opening weekend. They should still speak to us ten or twenty years down the road. Of course there's something to be said for experiencing a great picture in a theater, but you can't win 'em all.

Anyway, the two best films I've seen in a good long while are Gibson's Apocalypto and David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether they're signs that the art of fiction filmmaking still has a pulse in its decimated veins, or if they merely represent a postmortem twitch. Hey, I never said I have all the answers.

In my view, the tale of terror is better suited to short- than long-form fiction, so you'll see a preponderance of scary stories on this list. Enjoy!

• "In the Hills, the Cities"—I'm not sure that I can think of a more satisfying ending to a story than what we have here. I've read the story a number of times, and it's one of my absolute favorites among Clive Barker's infamous Books of Blood. Part of me longs to be swept up into Popolac and carried off into the sunset, a piece of something deadly and implacable.


• "The Rats in the Walls"—This is Lovecraft at his best. The winding introduction to this chilling tale is almost Jamesean in its refusal to reveal more than a trickle of story amid the density of atmosphere and background information. I'm glad not all stories are written this way, but I'm also glad that this one was.


• "Yellachile's Cage"—Robert McCammon is so good it makes sick. I wish he published more short fiction, but I have no complaints about his fine novels, either. One thing's for certain: I can't wait for the forthcoming collection of Michael Gallatin shorts he recently promised on his website. "Yellachile's Cage" is from his only extant collection of short fiction, Blue World. The book as a whole is one of the most audacious collections of horror stories I've ever had the pleasure of reading, and none of the stories between its covers if more daring than "Yellachile's Cage." Reading this story for the first time was seminal for me. If this could appear in a horror collection, surely anything under the sun was possible.


• "The Death of a Traveling Salesman"—If you were to hang me, naked and smeared with garbage, above a nest of starving rats and tell me the only way out was to name my single all-time favorite short story, this might well be answer you'd hear. You can pretty much close your eyes and point at random to the table of contents when it comes to Eudora Welty. If she knew how to write a bad story, she took the secret to her grave. Still, there's something special about "The Death of a Traveling Salesman." All the frailty of being human seems to be wrapped up in this little tale of a man at the end of his life.


• "The Black Cat"—"The Rats in the Walls" is good and scary, don't get me wrong, but "The Black Cat" occupies the number one slot for short-form terror in my book. Poe was a better writer than Lovecraft anyway, and here's the proof. Poe probably wrote several of the scariest short stories ever penned, to be honest, but "The Black Cat" revels in its subject matter in a way that foreshadows an approach favored to this day by many dabblers in horror fiction.


• "A Good Man is Hard to Find"—As with Eudora Welty, it's hard to go wrong with Flannery O'Connor, but I've always kind of considered this to be her horror story, so I'm especially fond of it. Discovering "A Good Man is Hard to Find" was all the proof I needed that literary didn't have to be synonymous with boring.


• "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas"—Allegory, when handled poorly, is an insult to a reader's intelligence. When handled adroitly, it sometimes results in gems like this feather in Ursula K. LeGuin's cap.


• "The Monkey's Paw"—What needs to be said about W. W. Jacobs's famous tale of terror? It's an absolutely foundational work of short fiction.


• "And of Gideon"—This post-nuclear story by the always masterful Mort Castle is simply one of the greatest tales of madness I've ever read. The poetry of it will absolutely lay you out.


• "The Open Window"—Clever, clever stuff. But what else would you expect from Saki? This is one of those stories I immediately wished I'd written after reading it. I'll bet it has that effect on a lot of people.


• "Parson's Pleasure"—Roald Dahl was the master of a certain kind of sardonic fiction, and I don't think there's a better example of his powers than "Parson's Pleasure." What a sick bastard.


• "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"—What could be cozier than one of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories? Sure, Conan Doyle was happy to cover familar terrain over and over again, but when the terrain is delightful, why step off the path?


• "The Gift of the Magi"—I wouldn't have to go with one particular story in the case of O. Henry. They're all pretty similarly satsifying, with the expected twist at the end. Although "The Gift of the Magi" is the most obvious example of his work, it remains that way for a reason. "The Ransom of Red Chief" is another one I remember liking a lot. Many of his titles have vanished into the fog of memory, I'm afraid.


• "The Graveyard Ghoul"—There's a certain kind of tale that just seems to chisel us one layer closer to the ultimate definition of a short story. This creepy mystery from Edward D. Koch is such a tale.


• "The Yellow Wallpaper"—Here's the kind of story that makes some people feel the need to justify their admiration for it. Why? Easy: it's a psychological horror story, and we all know that no self-respecting reader of literature could be drawn to such a thing. Hence all the this-ing and that-ing that's been written about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic over the years. It's in good company, though: Beowulf (a monster story), Hamlet (a ghost story), A Christmas Carol (a supernatural tale of terror if ever there was one), just about anything by Poe ...


• "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"—If you haven't read this story, you're missing out on one of the most powerful short stories out there. I can get my fill of Hemmingway, but this is him with all chambers loaded.


• "Rain"—W. Somerset Maugham's little story is so filled with atmosphere and tension, it's just about impossible not to love.


• "The Sheriff's Children"—I haven't read all of Charles W. Chesnutt's short fiction, but of the stories I have read, this one struck me as being among the most poignant in terms of its direct handling of racism, not unlike his novel, The Marrow of Tradition.


• "The Test"—Pretty much anything you pick up by Richard Matheson is going to be clever, efficient, true, and absorbing. "The Test" is also deeply moving.


• "The Howling Man"—This story inspired me to turn my own novelette, The Wintrose Chronicles, into something of an expansion of Charles Beaumont's idea. It was also made into one of the most memorable episodes of the orginal Twilight Zone series.


• "Sonny's Blues"—Yes, it was forced upon me as an undergrad. Thank god. It might have taken me years to discover James Baldwin otherwise.

Obviously, these lists aren't exhaustive, and of course there's no poetry. No movies, plays, or comics, either. There is, however, always tomorrow. Maybe I'll take up some of the slack at that time. Until then, go out and love the world. It needs your attention almost as much as I do.

I'm not sure if this puts me in a minority, but I love short stories and novels equally. I always have. As a writer, this has meant that I've been in no great hurry to publish a novel. My short fiction has been appearing pretty regularly for the last few years, and that's been almost as rewarding as writing the stories was in the first place. Now I'm trying to sell the manuscript for a collection of short stories. Seeing that get published would be a swell thing indeed. Then we'll see about novels. I've got one just about ready to go. It needs a spit polish here and there yet, but it's shaping up to be a proud ship. I've got about four ideas on deck behind that as well. But I have a hell of time sitting down to write without hammering out a short story. They're so damn much fun.

Still, there's something incomplete about a short fiction writer who never gets around to publishing a novel, or a novelist who never publishes any short fiction. The two forms are different but related, after all. In fact, they're probably much more similar than many would have us think. Sure, writing one novel is more work than writing one short story, but writing 300 pages' worth of short fiction is every damn bit as tough as writing 300 pages' worth of novel—all things being equal. Of course a mediocre novelist can turn out cookie-cutter titles with little effort compared to what goes into a truly literary body of short work. And likewise a hack short story writer can clog the arteries of the small presses with publication credits that don't amount to much more than a hillock of beans.

Because it's been a while since I've treated you good people to a proper list, below are some of the novels that have had the biggest impact on me over the years (better make this a two-parter and save the short stories for next time). And just to make this more fun, I won't duplicate any authors—at least not within the same list—and I'll explain briefly why each work is meaningful to me.

Let's begin:

• David Copperfield—Hard not to include A Christmas Carol on one of these lists, but that marvellous tale lives in the borderlands between novels and short stories, and I really don't want to extend this exercise to novellas and such or we'll be here all day. David Copperfield, on the other hand, is pure, unadulterated novel. And oh, what a novel. I envy anyone coming at the surging power of this narrative for the first time. And if you're already a believer, you might be interested to know that there's actually a fantastic film adaptation of Dickens's masterpiece. No, I'm not talking about an interminable BBC rendering, but a real and proper film. It's running time is only a little over two hours, yet it delivers an admirable dose of the story's heart in that brief time. This is a shocking fact until you consider that it was directed by none other than George Cukor. Who else could have pulled off such a feat? Cukor's David Copperfield, Disney's meticulous Great Expections, and Scrooge (starring Albert Finney) remain my favorite filmed versions of Dickens's work (though with the Carol you really need to take bits and pieces from about three or four different film versions to assemble an ideal mind's-eye production of the story). There, I think we've wandered far enough off topic for the time being. And this is only the first entry!


• Imajica—I've loved every novel Clive Barker has written, including Coldheart Canyon (which could have just as well been called The Devil's Country, as far as I'm concerned) and Mister B. Gone, but like many of his ardent fans, I have an especially strong attachment to Imajica. It's the novel that blew the lid off my kettle of understanding when it comes to the elasticity of genres. Go ahead, look me in the eye and tell me what genre this sprawling epic belongs to. Did about four or five categories flit through your head before you realized none of them fits? That's Clive, gods bless him. If you really can't live without labels, let's call Imajica a literary novel, in the truest sense of that overused term.


• Pet Sematary—This is simply one of the best supernatural horror novels of all time. Why? Because of the humanity at its core and the essence of its dread. Structurally it's little more than an expansion of "The Monkey's Paw," but Stephen King's telling takes us deeper and darker than W. W. Jacobs could have dreamed.


• Always Coming Home—Ursula LeGuin's writing always has a strange, ethereal quality to it, but Always Coming Home is downright staggering in its weirdness. At times it's more like immersing yourself in an ethnography than a work of fiction, and that was obviously the intent. To this day I'm not entirely sure what I think of Always Coming Home as a novel, but it's a book I dip back into from time to time. I even have a cassette tape of the Songs of the Kesh, which I listen to occasionally as well. It's a frank and beautiful world LeGuin has created, and the scope of the book just about knocked me out of my boots when I first read it in high school. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what fiction was capable of achieving until I read Always Coming Home.


• Stinger—Here's a great example of how tricky genre labels can be. Ironically, it's also a great example of how useful they sometimes are. Many would call Stinger a science fiction novel, only because it features a couple of aliens. However, I'd argue that it's one of the purest horror novels ever written. What Robert McCammon accomplishes so deftly in this novel is to bring together disparate—often antagonistic—characters; to trap them Under a Dome ... er, I mean, a pyramidal force field; and to present them with a common enemy to defeat. Quarrels must be sidelined, grudges put aside, if the town of Inferno, Texas, is to have a prayer of avoiding decimation. That's a tasty recipe for horror fiction if you ask me.


• Adam Bede—I've never read a Victorian novel I didn't love. Still, some of them have a little something extra special between their covers. I know this one does. It possesses all the rustic charm of a Little House on the Prairie episode and is shot through with a streak of literary insight that only George Eliot could have brought to the party. I enjoyed it so much I wrote a solo guitar piece based on it (see my Music page if you're so inclined).


• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—I know, I know. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered the better book, but here's where it all begins.


• Crime and Punishment—This one shouldn't require a lot of defending. It demands a lot from its readers, especially in translation, but it pays high dividends. I can't imagine any fan of horror literature not being drawn into this novel completely. But be warned, it's an oppressive, and depressive, journey that you have to be ready to surrender yourself to. There's no gas let out of this balloon until you've turned the last page.


• Oblomov— Before I read it, Goncharov's novel was described to me as the story of a man who goes to sleep. This sounded bizarrely intriguing to me, so I ran out to the nearest bookstore and found a copy. I was surprised to see that it was a lengthy novel. (Surely the story of a man who goes to sleep could be told in under 500 pages.) All I can say is that I was hooked from the start. And I have to admit, I've come up with no better summation of the book's plot than what initially piqued my curiosity.


• Jane Eyre— Another classic with a touch of horror in its bloodstream. Not a bad love story, either.


• Wuthering Heights—I didn't quite get it the first time I read Emily Brontë's novel, so I went back to it very soon after and read it again. I was blown away. The language and complexity of relationships in the book are much more difficult than what you're confronted with in most 19th century British novels, including Jane Eyre. It's a freak of a novel, really.


• Frankenstein—I'll never understand Stephen King's claim that Dracula is a better written novel than Frankenstein. He's been right about so much, after all. But from the sentence level to the sweep of its themes, Mary Shelley's novel boils with good prose, it seems to me. I came across King's opinion in an introduction he wrote for an omnibus edition containing Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. I find myself going back to my paperback copy of that book from time to time, just to be sure I haven't been misreading the King's intended meaning. Nope, his point is very clear, unless there was a ghastly typo.


• The Magus—I actually think The French Lieutenant's Woman is a better novel, but The Magus was my introduction to John Fowles, and I would recommend it as the starting point for anyone coming to his work for the first time. Horror fans, of course, will want to turn next to The Collector. Fowles cared as deeply for the poetry of his words as for the scope of his vision.


• Dracula—When I first tackled this monster I was too young to grasp its language or appreciate its subtlety. Years passed before I gave it another shot. It's not without its flaws, but it's also not without its elegance. Too many vampires have risen from the grave since Bram Stoker wrote his masterpiece, making it hard to judge his novel strictly on its own merits. In fact, it's possible that better vampire novels have been written since, by the likes of Matheson, King, and McCammon. Stoker wasn't the first to write about undead bloodsuckers, but he certainly raised the bar. Reading Dracula while I had a newborn baby in the house was an experience I'll never forget. That combination of boundless joy and unrelenting dread was almost unbearable. For that I thank Mr. Stoker.


• Tom Jones—Here can be found many of the same characteristics that have made Charles Dickens so loved and lauded across time and oceans. The humor is more ribald, the sentences more ponderous, but the tightness of plot and richness of character are nothing short of pre-Dickensian. What a joy.


• The Hobbit—The books that followed were deeper and more complicated, but The Hobbit is a tighter story with a more consistent voice.


• Robinson Crusoe—I'm happy to let this one stand for the host of adventure stories it has inspired.


• What Dreams May Come—How does one pick a favorite Richard Matheson novel? It's impossible. But there is something especially moving about this one.


• Song of Kali—A slender enough volume, but beware the secrets within. I picked this up when I was in the mood for something strikingly literary. I was not disappointed by Dan Simmons's Hindu version of The Exorcist.


• The Son of Rosemary—This one's easy. Reading it reminded me never to let a favorite writer rest on his laurels. He is always capable of putting out a turkey.


• Psycho—The book has received too much bad press, mostly because of the understandable temptation to compare it to Hitchcock's film.


• Barry Lyndon—As painstaking as Stanley Kubrick's adaptation is, even that great film can only hint at the sarcastic zest of Thackeray's novel.


• Intensity—Still the best Koontz novel I've read. Also probably the scariest book—by anyone—that I've read. This book is the personification of plot being driven by character. Its masterful use of POV shifts to maximize suspense is also remarkable. My story, "Zombie Killer," was a conscious attempt to take a stab at the way Koontz handled POV in Intensity.


• New Grub Street—This masterly novel by George Gissing might just be the most modern 19th century novel I've read (William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance rivals it from this side of the Pond). Every page sizzles with emotional realism.


• The Damnation of Theron Ware—What a great illustration of how some of us really are our own worst enemies. Harold Frederic's book gets more embarrassing with each page, yet I challenge you to shift your gaze from the train wreck that is Theron Ware's descent into self-humiliation. You just can't wait to see if there's a bottom to his cluelessness.

There, that should tide you over until I get around to posting the list of short stories. It'll be worth the wait, I promise. Hurry back!

"Ground zero mosque touches off right-wing panic"

What better place to start than with that charmingly slanted headline from a recent Salon story. I consider myself to be pretty far left on the political spectrum, but I'm also extremely distrustful of organized religion, especially when it gets too big for its britches. I respect and admire many works of art, literature, and music that would not have come into the world, or would have taken a very different form, had it not been for the religions that informed them, but the amount of power wielded by religious entities in today's society is way out of line. (In defense of Gabriel Winant's article, his closing paragraph makes a very good point about the importance of tolerance, but often the time for tolerance is after a healthy debate; more on that below.)

Let's take a look at just a couple of reasons why the proposed thirteen-story mosque/Islamic cultural center in New York City is a horrible idea.

First and foremost, it's beyond disrespectful. Three thousand innocent people died within spitting distance of the proposed location, at the hands of Muslim extremists. Does this really need to be explained? We're willing to kill and be killed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, ostensibly for reasons at least remotely linked to terrorism. Yet we can't speak out—unless we've succumbed to a right-wing panic—in opposition to the building of an enormous mosque and cultural center in the vicinity of Ground Zero (so close, in fact, that the building currently occupying the space was damaged by airplane debris on Sept. 11, 2001, according to the caption in the Salon article)? Now, I don't mean to suggest the mosque would necessarily become a magnet for extremist activity, but the symbolism is grotesque. Again, for me this is nothing more or less than a matter of respect, of doing the right thing.

Another concern that comes into play here is the potential for violent retaliation. I certainly don't advocate such measures—before, during, or after the erection of the mosque. If it gets built, it gets built, and the people who use it should expect to enjoy the same freedom of religion we all do in this country. But I'm not so naive as to think that everyone else will see things so kindheartedly (do check out some of the shamelessly vitriolic quotes from the far (gone) right in the Salon piece). Maybe that kind of fear isn't a good reason not to build something, but it is a consideration. To build this mosque is to take a stand. Well, people, you've got to learn to pick your battles in this life. We don't even have a 9/11 memorial in place and these folks want to put up a super-mosque? Give me a break. And if you buy the bullshit excuse that this is an opportunity to build bridges of peace and blah, blah, blah, I've got an ice palace in hell with your name on it, frankly. This is religion thumbing its nose at freedom, and I'm sure that somewhere at the bottom of it there's a huge cache of money at stake, probably right next to the vault of hypocrisy. After all, religion never seems to show up without a thirst for the former and a ready supply of the latter. Besides, Muslims have had every opportunity to speak out against the most extreme elements in their religion. Too few have chosen to do so, as far as I can tell. Why should we believe congregants at this mosque will be any different?

In closing, since I have no artistic skill, I would simply ask that you use your imagination to insert a cartoon image of Mohammed here, and just to show that I'm even-handed, he might as well be making out with Jesus. Over and out.