Continued from page 18
human-made gypsum carving? I’m sure that
most folks were still thrilled to have seen it.
Again, I digress). For Enya, I chose Ken
Grimwood’s brilliant what-if parable Replay,
and for Trent Reznor and also The 1975’s
Matthew Healy, I chose Cormac McCarthy’s
brutal Blood Meridian, with passages so ornately
constructed you find yourself rereading
• COOL WEREWOLF HOWLERS: The
Nightwalker by Thomas Tessier; Kirsten Bakis’
Lives of the Monster Dogs, and Sharp Teeth,
penned in inventive free verse by Toby Barlow.
KILLER PULP NOVELS: Jim Thompson’s
definitive **The Killer Inside Me (and pretty
much anything else by him, as well); Richard
Neely’s Shattered; David Goodis’ Shoot the
Piano Player, and Leigh Brackett’s **The Tiger
Billy Corgan
them five minutes later. Nothing against The
Road and No Country For Old Men, of course.
Robert Plant also received two French surrealist
classics, Huysmans’ La Bas and A Rebours,
and when I bumped into him a year later at
L.A. club The Viper Room, and he said he really
loved them. John Doe from X adored
Natsuo Kirino’s revenge thriller Out so much;
he passed it on to Exene Cervenka, who forwarded
it to the rest of the band. A perfect trajectory
of aesthetic appreciation, I thought. Yet
I certainly don’t mean to make these exchanges
sound commonplace — I always saw them as
an extraordinary privilege, and never once
took them for granted. They were just part of
my punching the clock every day as a rock
journalist that genuinely cared about his job.
Ergo, here a few other selections I’ve passed on
that have withstood the test of time.
• GREAT ONE-MAN-AGAINST-THE-
WORLD YARNS: Run by Douglas Winter;
Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact; and David
Morrell’s Desperate Measures (and First Blood,
too).
06•2020
Among Us, and anything in the cutting-edge
Black Lizard press series.
• GREAT HORROR OBSCURITIES: Keith
Roberts creepy The Furies, where giant wasps
— not a coronavirus — enslave humanity;
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber; Clive
Barker’s original six-volume Books of Blood; Ray
Garton’s Live Girls (lizard vampires — who
knew?); Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and
collected short stories; Algernon Blackwood’s
Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories; and —
to this day — any anthology of H.P. Lovecraft’s
work.
• OTHERS TOO UNIQUE TO CLASSIFY:
Henri Guiggonat’s Daemon of Lithuania (About
a cat that sits. Around. The house); Geek Love,a
compelling story of circus freaks by the late
Katherine Dunn; Tim Powers’ time-warped
Anubis Gates and The Stress of Her Regard (Lord
Byron and Percy Shelley battle very real succubi);
Christopher Fowler’s Roofworld and Neil
Gaiman’s Neverwhere, both imagining sinister
parallel London universes; Stephen Gregory’s
demon-bird parable The Cormorant; Sue
Townsend’s hilarious Adrian Mole series, commencing
when he’s 13 and 3/4 years old; and
Gothic artist Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey trilogy,
including The Doubtful Guest and The
Gashlycrumb Tinies alphabet of moribund children:
“M is for Maud, who was swept out to
sea / N is for Neville, who died of ennui.” An
affliction you are guaranteed to avoid by disappearing
into any of the above mentioned literary
escapes. Trust me — I’ve spent my career
giddily compiling this stuff. And naturally,
there’s probably a lot that I’m forgetting. And
lately, I can’t get enough of mortician Caitlin
Doughty’s campy cadaverous essays, like “Will
My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions From
Tiny Mortals About Death” (the answer is yes,
but they prefer fleshier tidbits like your lips or
eyelids first).
What does all of this signify? Fuck if I
know. But — as Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores
Abernathy android character put it in this season’s
Westworld finale, “Some people choose to
see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I
choose to see the beauty.” And I think it’s made
me a better, more inspired writer. Billy Corgan
— right after an interview with some other
antagonistic journalist had ended — phrased it
this way: “The reason that you’ll always get the
real story and guys like him won’t is, you don’t
step to me with your hands behind your back,
holding some malicious weapon — you walk
up with your palms outstretched and open,
always holding a gift, with no hidden agenda.
So I can finally relax and answer some serious
questions.” Probably the nicest thing anyone’s
ever said to me.
Tom Lanham
For We're the safety postponing of our our customers April shows and in vendors Countryside and to IL stay and Milwaukee within the WI guidlines becausethe
Governor of COVID-19 has stay-at-home outlined for Phase orders 3 and reopening the safety of of Illinois, our customers we're postponing and vendors. our
June shows in Countryside and Milwaukee.
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