THE TROUPE is on the HWA Bram Stoker Award™ 2012 Reading List!
Which means:
These works are all new horror published during the year that our members feel worthy of recommending for Bram Stoker Award consideration. They are not ‘Bram Stoker Award nominees’, nor are they part of any ballot process at this stage, but it is likely they represent some of the best new horror fiction., poetry and non-fiction published during the year.
Just got this from the folks at Subterranean Press… it’s the cover of the edition that contains my novella, To Be Read Upon Your Waking! And it looks like they chose my story for the cover art.
The story follows an errant scion to an aristocratic English family who buys the ruins of an old chapel in Post-WWII France in attempt to play archaeologist. But though he believes the chapel is the first Christian site in France, he slowly begins to suspect that it’s quite a bit older than Christianity… and perhaps older than human civilization.
Should be fun! It’ll be available in June/July.
Over a Pornokitsch, I’ve written a fun little guest blog post about one of my favorite children’s books of all time, Daniel Pinkwater’s Lizard Music:
It’s this marvelous capacity to suggest logic within illogic that makes Lizard Music – and most of Pinkwater’s books – really fly. The set up is incredibly fascinating: it suggests there’s a secret message hinting a vast conspiracy within the mundane world – and note that Victor only finds this on his first experiment in adulthood: if he hadn’t been living independently, he’d never have found this mad truth. It’s the wild excursion into adult life that lets Victor see what strange things might be happening in the backstages of reality.
There’s a fun interview with me up over at Fantasy Literature:
The plot of The Troupe is pretty linear, but there is a lot of strangeness in the world, and those strangenesses intersect and interface. How do you keep it straight?
RJB: I’ve no idea. A lot of writing is subconscious, and stories have a beat and a rhythm to them. So at certain points, I’d think to myself, “There’s a callback coming soon, but I don’t know what it’s calling back to,” and then it’s like you remember something you’ve forgotten, and think, “Oh, of course,” but you never really knew it in the first place.
There’s a line from a book about how we’ve already lived the future, we’re just remembering it as we go along. That’s what writing is like.
Here’s a fun interview I did with CultureMap Austin. It was live, which is a rare thing for me to do, so a lot of what I said was off the cuff. Like:
The tall, quiet 27-year-old, who just won a 2012 Edgar Award for his second novel The Company Man, spent much of his childhood in Katy, Texas, performing on the viola before an audience. Bennett claims that he, like a lot of kids who perform at an early age, was intolerably arrogant. Speaking to CultureMap about his latest novel, a coming-of-age tale called The Troupe, he deadpans, “Part of the fun of writing [the teenage protagonist] was getting to punch 16-year-old me in the face.”
The Troupe gets a very enthusiastic review over at Lynn’s Book Blog:
This book is without a doubt, not a shadow of it, brilliant. It is going on the list. If this book isn’t on best of year lists for many, many people, come the end of 2012 then all I can say is that (a) what is wrong with everyone! or (b) we must have had some damn fine books for the rest of the year. This read is intriguing, it’s compelling and I will just say, by way of warning, don’t pick this up unless you can put your life on hold and dedicate a few days to it whilst ignoring all your friends, family, work, dogs, social life, etc, etc. You get the picture.
Which happifies me quite extensively.
In other me-me-me news, Justin Landon has recommended The Troupe if you’re the sort of person who liked American Gods, and of course you are, don’t be a dummy.
While George has almost nothing in common with Gaiman’s Shadow, there are many similarities between Silenius and Mr. Wednesday. A withholding of knowledge and a larger understanding of the workings of the world, create a mystery that enfolds the entire narrative, unraveling a page at a time. In both novels there exists a palpable alternate reality beyond the pale of the average human experience. They are also steeped in myth, more obviously in American Gods, but also in The Troupe, with appearances by elemental forces, fairies, and primordial chaos. Beyond the superficial similarities, there’s a very Gaiman tone — dark tones and moments of tenderness all the more poignant for there scarcity.
I’m kind of tired of talking about myself so here’s a picture of a duck!
There’s a nice review for Mr. Shivers over at Shock Totem:
I will say that this is one of the strongest debuts I have read in some time. Bennett’s prose and use of language is fantastic. Poetic and downright lyrical, at times. I loved the details regarding the etiquette of hobo society and the starving beast that was America in the thirties. I was riveted the entire time, could not read fast enough, which is something I don’t often get to say.
The climax, while somewhat expected, was deftly handled and a good fit for the story. I suspect if Steinbeck had penned The Stand, it would have shared the same gritty feel as this novel. No higher praise than simply declaring Mr. Shivers a wonderful read.
If you are curious, yes, I still find it weird to read reviews of old work. It’s nice, but weird – it’s a dislocated feeling. (At the same time, I do wonder how much my blog readers need to see these things – the older the work, I assume, the less interest those already familiar with me will have in hearing thoughts on it. Would this be correct?)
Am doing things right now. Lots of things. Will tell you about things when things can be told about.
In the meantime, this is a great little essay about how sometimes self-interest and the public good dovetail, and when that happens you should put your shoulder to it and push as hard as you can:
Some have (on the listserv I belong to) argued that increasing literacy is social policy and not the province of business. I would argue (and I did) that in publishing in particular, you don’t have to separate the two. Our business is predicated on education – if fewer people are educated, then the market shrinks by definition. The more people who can read, the more books will be sold. Ignoring that, or saying that it’s not a concern of the business, is short-sighted. And we’re in this for the long game.
I’ve made a guest post about special needs in speculative fiction over at Bookworm Blues. After a while I decided it’s not about special needs, but really just needs. If that makes any sense.
Last Monday, at around 11 PM, we finally published the extremely silly non-book advertisement “A Sexual Experience,” something my friends and I have had in the works for about two months now. I wrote the script, Galen Dara made the wonderful cover, my wife made the prop book when my arts and crafts skills continued to fail to exist, my friend Jake Sam did the filming and the amazing editing job, Josh Brewster did the lighting, and my friend Jameson bought roses in the middle of the day, did legwork and handiwork, and cooked sausages. It was fun to film, and I am, bizarrely, quite proud of it.
Then it went and got retweeted by Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, Warren Ellis, and others, and it went from 75 views in one day to 1,300. It hasn’t hit those numbers since, but it’s been getting a nice turnover.
Then I went off to New York for the Edgars. Wednesday I had lunch with the great Nick Kaufmann, whose brilliant idea for an Existentialist Choose Your Own Adventure book must happen or I will HAUNT HIM. Then Thursday I had lunch with my editor, Tom Bouman, my publicist, Ellen Wright, and Rose Fox from PW. It was a great chat, and I’m looking forward to going back again some day.
Then I got glammed up for the Edgars. I aired out my tuxedo, which I hadn’t worn since I was 18, and my wife and I headed downstairs.
And this happened.
This is a photo of me failing to make a good speech because I did not expect to win because it was enough that the MWA made the gesture of nominating what I thought to be a silly little sci fi novel. I thought I’d show up, wear nice clothes, get fed, clap for some extremely famous people, and go home. I had a bunch of speeches in my head – about four – and they all seemed like they’d be easy to make, provided I did not win. But then I did, and they all suddenly seemed very hard. I failed to thank anyone specifically, since names suddenly seemed very very hard, so I just said THANK YOU very loud and sort of wobbled off the stage.
So this is a photo of me later still not believing this happened.
I met a lot of folks I never would have expected to – Michael Dirda, Martha Grimes, and I saw Maureen Johnson and Sarah Weinman from afar – and then I happened to see a tweet from Neil Gaiman about how he was putting on his tails, and upon seeing him and walking up to him in the lobby before the awards, he looked at me and said, “Hello, I retweeted you, didn’t it?”
So it comes full circle.
We had a very nice, normal conversation. Later, at the after-awards reception, I hoped to get a photo with him holding a sign saying SORRY LEE because I lost my mom’s anniversary edition of Good Omens and she’s still pretty mad about that. But unfortunately I missed him, but I think my mom is pretty happy anyways.
