Weird Tales: Paul Tremblay on Books Worth Seeking Out

Writer: Paul TremblayWeird Tales Story: Figure 5 (with M. Thomas in Issue #347, Nov/Dec 2007)Writer Bio: Paul G. Tremblay is the author of the short fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and novella City Pier: Above and Below. His first novel, The Little Sleep is due to be published by Henry Holt in early '09. He has edited at Chizine, Fantasy Magazine, and is the co-editor of the Fantasy and Bandersnatch anthologies. He's tall and has no uvula.***I'm sure you all have bags full of money and gift certificates to spend post-holiday, so here's a couple of authors that generally aren't on the radar of the speculative genre reader, but should be.I first heard of Lucy Corin via Nick Mamatas. Nick was on a book tour and shared a reading with Corin. Lucky for me!Corin's first novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls tells its complex story through myths, history, psychoanalysis, and the narrative of an early-teen girl living in Florida. Adam Walsh, Ted Bundy, and the god Osiris among the stories that make recurring appearances, illustrating humanity's violent history; a history told through dismemberments and beheadings with our society continually reinforcing and determining and commodifying gender and the roles of victim and killer. An atmosphere of menace permeates the book and it's an atmosphere that the young narrator dares to explore and live within, gleefully defying it as often as she is repulsed."Sometimes people say you can look at ten different photos of Bundy and he'll look different in each one. Sometimes people say they can see it in his eyes. I can look through any stack of photos, through any school yearbook or any issue of the paper. I can see it in the eyes of anyone I look at."Corin's new short story collection, (which has a cover-blurb from Kelly Link) is as fresh and noteworthy. The title story features a woman, bound and hanging in her front doorway interacting with neighborhood kids, soldiers, and her husband. "Airplane" is terrifying in its mundane account of the minutes before and after an accident. Corin is expert at taking simple, every day events, breaking them down, and exposing the otherness or oddity of it all. In Corin's stories, these moments of discovery are never comfortable, but always challenging and compelling.Like You'd Understand, Anyway is Jim Shepard's new short fiction collection. It's a standout, a national book award finalist, and while he's not marketed as such, he writes damn dark stuff. A handful of his excellent stories are even, *gulp*, horror stories!"The Zero Meter Diving Team" details the institutional missteps leading to the horror of the Chernobyl accident through the eyes and deeds of a local family of engineers. "Ancestral Legacies" has Nepal and yetis. "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" transposes a couple's disintegrating relationship with 2000 foot tsunamis in Alaska. "Sans Farine" features a guillotine operator as protagonist during the Terror in revolutionary France. Each story is as well researched as it is well written; his frail and often times doomed characters speak give the stories a weighty sense of humanity, of hope and loss.His previous collection, Love and Hydrogren is as remarkable, with stories featuring the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Megalodon, and Mars Attacks! trading cards. Two novels of note include his short, gut-punch PROJECT X, which details the events leading up to a school shooting from the POV of the young, damaged shooter. There's also his novel Nosferatu, a fictional biography of F. W. Murnau, the troubled genius, one of the founding fathers of cinema. Told through a variety of styles and viewpoints, Shepard successfully presents the then revolutionary ideas of the time period as still being fresh and vital, and gives us an unflinching look into the life of Murnau, the inner and personal tragedies of a man who so desperately wanted to be an artist."I talked of the vampire's parasitism-you must die if I am to live. I talked of the loathsomeness and the dread of his allure. I talked of how the terrible inhumanness of him, the nightmarish repulsiveness, should move easily among the bourgeois naturalism of the costumes and acting styles of the rest of the cast-how everyone must see him as in some ways not out of the ordinary....Filmmaking offers shelter for a failure to live. The essence it transfers to the medium is stolen from life. Without my notebooks I'm ignorant, an absent curator for myself."