Paul Auster at Book Expo America

Paul Auster was at the book conference today, signing his newest novel, Sunset Park (which you should buy, and read). The line was surprisingly short -- I couldn't decide whether I was going to spend my entire 30-minute lunch break waiting to talk to him or just skip it and regret it for the rest of my life. Fortuitously, no choice needed to be made. He was perched on a high stool, looking particularly civil and caffeinated, in dark glasses, slicked-back hair, and every bit as rompy as one of his characters.

I asked if he was overloaded with books or if I could give him a copy of my book Candy in Action, which Soft Skull had just passed off to me. He said a pretty clear "overloaded," until his (handler? agent? mysterious female companion?) smiled graciously and said "I'll make sure he actually reads it" and slipped it from my hands. Then we talked about the comic he'd written that I'd read to my daughter the other day -- he cackled when he heard that. "She didn't get it at all, did she," he cackled. I said she understood it pretty well, but she was still checking for an invisible man behind her.

He said he didn't like the illustrations; I thought they were good, but strange, like smelling one thing and tasting another. Then he moved on. But it was pretty cool.

A minute later on the other side of the expo center, I ran into the Jewish Book Council crew. I was still bubbly about my new Auster book. Carolyn hooked into my arm: "Take us there," she commanded. I did. I stayed low because I'd had my moment and didn't want to spoil it, but I saw he still had my book sitting there. Naomi managed to snap a picture of Mr. Auster and my book, and there it sits above us in this post. If *ahem* when somebody makes it into a movie, I sincerely hope they cast Paul Auster as the shady character who gives Candy her missions. And that they pay him a million dollars to do it. I mean, it probably won't be as good as Smoke, but it will be a whole other kind of good. Unless they get Tom Waits to record the music too. Then it might be.

My new favorite photo ever from the Jewish Book Council blog, courtesy of Naomi and co. Thank you thank you.

The Poison Eaters by Holly Black

I wasn't going to blog about this for another few months, since it's not going on sale until February, but Holly Black's new book The Poison Eaters has had me on the edge of my chair since the subway ride to work 3 hours ago, and it keeps pulsing in my head like a vein about to aneurysm -- it's that mercilessly good. The first story, "The Coldest Girl in Coldtowm," is kind of about vampires, but they're more like zombies. They're bloodthirsty, teeth-baring, flesh-chomping...which is actually what vampires used to be like, back in the Old World.

I almost always hate short stories. Short stories that are plot-based ignore the main character. Short stories that are character-based are almost exclusively the domain of characters stumbling around in search of a plot. Here, character and plot are suffused, and there's a hyperactive emotional terseness that creeps up on you and freezes you in place. This happens the exact moment that we learn the truth about vampirism in this world -- it's transmitted by blood, but it doesn't take hold of its victim until she tastes blood herself:

It took eighty-eight days for the venom to sweat out a person's pores. She only had thirty-seven to go. Thirty-seven days to stay so drunk that she could ignore the buzz in her head that made her want to bite, rend, devour.

Aaah. In the first three pages, our perception of the main character switches from a slut to lovesick to cold, calculating, a kind of teen goth-girl Artful Dodger in fishnets. And that's just the setup. The execution is...well, an execution.

Can I tell you how much I can't wait to finish the rest of this book?

There. I just did. February be damned.

Sherman Alexie on Kindle: "I want to hit her."

Sherman Alexie, one of my favorite writers, refuses to let his books be released in digital form because the e-book devices are so expensive. I don't agree with him about refusing to publish -- dammit, if someone wants to read my book, I'm gonna let them -- but I totally feel him:

Inevitably there was a backlash. At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”

(it's in the New York Times, via Eliyahu Enriquez

Gentlemen, by Michael Northrop, will scare your underpants off.

Best morning subway ride EVER. Last night, I finished (yes! finally! finished! for real, this time!) my screenplay, and I didn't have anything to do on the subway. So I read Michael Northrop's Gentlemen, which tied for my #1 score at Book Expo this year with the advance copy of Poppy Z. Brite's gay New Orleans food couture mystery. So good that I wrote an Amazon review. Yes, I couldn't help myself.

Small-Town Horror Meets Classic American Fiction

The thing that dawned on me, reading this novel, is how little a percentage of horror books actually involve capital-H Horror. Stephen King isn't about googly-eyed monsters and crazed psychos -- or, at least, he isn't about that so much as he's about the most basic human reactions. Fear. Anxiety. Loss. Regret. That's what separates, say, "The Catcher in the Rye" from "The Road" -- in other words, a really well-done non-horror story from a really good horror story.

And there's a lot of Stephen King in Michael Northrop's book. Actually, it reminded me more of Michael ("The Hours") Cunningham. For much of the book, the main plot moves slowly, but interesting, well-developed and well-savored. Almost every page there's a side story that made me want to tell the person next to me about what I was reading -- like how Tommy threw a desk across the room in order to distract a girl he liked, or the summer of the two Jennys. And Micheal's language (the narrator -- whose name was misspelled on his birth certificate, not the author) is so graceful that when he suddenly becomes "typical guy"-ish and talks about throwing a punch at his teacher, you're blown away. Not because it's out of character, but because it makes him so multi-dimensional and real.

Then, of course, there's the scary stuff. And Michael (the author) seems to know his way around both scary stuff and the more Gothic parts of small-town America: the secrets people keep and the way that dark seems to swallow up the country after twilight. As the novel moves on, the simple question of whether or not their teacher has a dead body no longer feels like the point of the book -- it's more about Micheal, his friends, his town, and the darkness that's inside him.