Roland Emmerich has destroyed the world so many times by now that it’s become blasé.

In Independence Day (1996), the writer/director had aliens raze the world’s major cities. In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), he flooded then froze the northern hemisphere. (By those standards, Emmerich’s destruction of New York City in Godzilla (1998) seems like such small potatoes.)

In his latest big-screen apocalyptic spectacle, 2012, Emmerich breaks apart the earth’s crust, rending the very continents themselves. But while Emmerich offers plenty of eye candy, his movie lacks any real “wow” moments. The end of the world never looked so cartoonish. Full Story »

Geoffrey Becker’s short stories in Black Elvis have a tendency to leave me scratching my head—but that’s just the point. Becker’s characters are frequently left scratching their heads, too.

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Black Elvis collects a dozen of Becker’s stories into a collection that could best be described as a handbook for people trying to find themselves. It’s no “How-To” guide, though; consider it more of a “misery loves company” companion because Becker’s characters find themselves as lost at the end of each story as they were at the beginning.

In the title story, for instance, a blues guitarist who goes by the stage name “Black Elvis” suddenly finds himself supplanted at the local club’s open mic night. Full Story »

Fifty-seven steps above me, behind twelve great pillars, President Lincoln sits impassively, looking out from his memorial chamber toward the Washington Monument, illuminated against the dark backdrop of night like a needle pointing heavenward. The very top tip blinks red to ward off airplanes and, perhaps, low-flying angels.

In the reflecting pool, the monument points directly at me.

I look back at Lincoln. For the moment, he has company enough—busloads of school kids and vanloads of families. A gaggle of middle-schoolers in red sweatshirts that say “Redwood City, California” race past me, the adults looking every bit as anxious to get up the stairs as the kids.

Instead of following them, I peel away toward the south, toward the Korean War Memorial, just a few hundred yards away. Full Story »

I can almost hear Thomas Jefferson calling from across the tidal basin, from across the centuries: “What about me? What about me?”

I hardly give the Jefferson Memorial a second glance. I see it, like a glowing turtle that has crawled onto the bank, on the far side of the basin. Beneath the memorial’s domed ceiling—modeled after the ceiling of Jefferson’s home, Monticello—Jefferson calls, “What about me?”

It reminds me of that great little scene from “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” from season three of The Simpsons. After seeking advice and inspiration from Abraham Lincoln, who’s inundated with advice-seekers, Lisa seeks out Jefferson for advice instead. The place is deserted. “No one ever comes to see me,” a bitter Jefferson laments. “I don’t blame them. I never did anything important. Just the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, the dumbwaiter….”

Lisa, her patience already frayed, leaves him. “Wait!” Jefferson calls. “Please don’t go. I get so lonely….”

The scene always delights me—in part because of what may be an irrational grudge I hold toward Jefferson. Full Story »

The crickets and katydids still trade chirps between the trees and the bushes that line the Potomac River’s great tidal basin. As I walk along the basin toward the FDR Memorial, the insect song see-saws back and forth—but then it’s drowned out completely by the rumble of a low-flying jet making its descent toward Ronald Reagan International Airport on the far side of the river.

It’s 7:00 p.m. The last trickle of the evening commute has drained from the capital, and the busloads of school groups haven’t yet arrived from dinner. It’s the perfect time to visit. It’s me and the insects and perhaps ten other visitors. Three Muslim women walk past me, their heads covered with scarves so brightly colored I can see them in the dark.

And there’s the president—a bronze, life-sized statue of FDR in a wheelchair that sits near the entrance to the memorial. Writer Christopher Buckley once said the statue looked “exactly like James Joyce on the toilet,” an image I can now never shake from my mind. What a way to dethrone one of the Twentieth Century’s towering figures. Full Story »

Anyone who’s seen Guillermo del Toro’s recent movies—Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies (and a two-part The Hobbit on the way)—probably expect anything spawned by that mind to be boldly imaginative. Del Toro takes risks and he paints large while paying attention to the most meticulous details.

So when del Toro teamed up with Chuck Hogan to write a vampire trilogy, fans understandably expected something crazy, crazy, crazy good.

With the first part of that trilogy, The Strain, fans do indeed get something good—but it lacks the crazy, crazy, crazy.

Full Story »

Zombie: Don’t worry. Only people with brains
get eaten. You’re safe.

They aren’t sexy. They aren’t romantic. They aren’t tragically doomed.

In fact, they’re ravenous, violent, and virtually unstoppable. They ooze all sorts of bodily fluids. And they want to eat your brains.

So how come zombies are getting such mainstream media treatment?

As a culture, we love and loath things that go bump in the night. We have to have boogeymen, for all sorts of reasons. Because they touch deep psychological fears in profound ways, our boogeymen serve as a kind of moral check on behavior that laws and rules just sometimes can’t. At the other end of the spectrum, we seem to have a lot of fun being scared. Boogeymen do that for us, too. Full Story »

Got zombies on the brain? Well, it’s better than having them eat your brain, so that’s a plus.

Zombies are a hot pop-cultural property these days. Woody Harrelson’s buddy movie Zombieland has been eating up theaters. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies brought Jane Austen back from the dead to become one of the year’s publishing phenoms. Marvel Comics is now on their umpteeth iteration of a Marvel Zombies franchise that, pardon the pun, doesn’t want to die.

While zombies don’t have the long literary tradition of, say, vampires, there’s been plenty of recent zombie-lit out there to feed your brain. Here are a few recent favorites: Full Story »

October 30 is Frankenstein Friday.

Like a lot of kids, I could not get enough of monster movies. On Saturday afternoons, I would hunker down on my living room couch to watch Creature Double-Feature on our small black-and-white TV.

I loved Godzilla, Gorgo, the giant ants of Them!, War of the Worlds, and those delightful shock-fests from England’s Hammer Studios with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

But none were better than Universal’s classics: The Creature from the Black Lagoon; Bela Lugosi as Dracula; Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man; and of course, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Watching Colin Clive scream, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” remains one of the most thrilling moments of movie magic ever filmed.

Those movies were so creepy because, unlike today’s horror films, they left almost everything to my imagination—and my imagination can be a whole lot scarier than anything Hollywood can dish out. It’s no wonder audiences back then found those classic monster movies shocking and truly scary.

But the beauty of a story like Frankenstein is that it succeeds on so many levels. Full Story »

‘Tis the season for ghosts and goblins and jack-o-lanterns, trick-or-treaters, and all the candy corn you can eat.

But for my family, the Halloween season holds a special “tradition of terror”—The Glowing Orange Pumpkin of Doom.

The Glowing Orange Pumpkin of Doom usually first appears in late September, in someone’s front yard. Soon, as if on the ends of an ever-growing invisible pumpkin vine, he starts popping up in yards and on front porches all over town. Full Story »

If you’ve been attacked by a werewolf and have survived, then you need a copy of Ritch Duncan and Bob Powers’ new book The Werewolf’s Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten.

While lycanthropy is inconvenient at best and terribly dangerous at worst, Duncan and Powers contend that it’s something a person can successfully manage. Through proper precautions and care—including cages, restraining systems, and livestock—a lycanthrope can live a full, rich, successful life. Otherwise, without the advice offered in the manual, a lyc is doomed to be an object of scorn, attracting mobs of angry, pitchfork- and torch-wielding villagers.

The Werewolf’s Guide works as a humor piece because Duncan and Powers play it straight, with casual matter-of-factness: werewolves are real. Full Story »

As a lifelong comic book reader, I was curious to stumble across Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics at the bookstore one day. That was perhaps a year ago, but I never got around to reading it. Written as a comic book itself, I figured it wouldn’t take me too long to plow through it once I finally picked it up.

Well, confined to bed for a few days, trying to avoid anything that would tax my foggy and phlegm-filled head, I decided to tackle McCloud’s book.

Bad choice and good choice.

Bad choice because it looked deceptively light, but in fact, the book is a pretty heavy-duty, sophisticated look at comic book theory. Yeah, that’s right: “comic book theory.” Full Story »

It’s been nearly ten years since a radioactive spider crept into the offices of Marvel Comics and bit everyone. Or maybe it was the burst of a gamma bomb. Or a shower of cosmic rays.

Marvel Comics EIC Joe Quesada
(photo courtesy Marvel Comics)

At the time, puny Marvel was trying to steady its wobbly legs after a rough period of bankruptcy in the late nineties. Then, suddenly, the company found itself endowed with fantastic new super powers: It could seemingly make money at will.

Impressed by Marvel’s astonishing turnaround over the last ten years, Disney announced a month and a half ago that it was snatching up the comic book company for $4 billion.

But the secret origin of Marvel’s amazing success isn’t such a secret, says Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada.

In fact, it’s written on every page. Full Story »

Yeah, there’s a book called Zombie Haiku, and it’s exactly what you think it is—and I bought it anyway.

Zombies have overridden some nameless city, and a hapless poet falls victim to the plague. As he transforms into the undead, the poet recounts his experience using haiku, three-line poems with five, seven, and five syllables:

Blood is really warm.
It’s like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.

When dealing with zombies, one has to suspend disbelief to begin with, but Zombie Haiku takes that suspension to a whole new level. The basic conceit of the book—that a rampaging zombie can somehow write haiku as he’s rampaging—is a tough conceit to accept, even for readers eager and willing to embrace the humor the book offers.

But once a reader gets past that, the book is loads of fun. Full Story »

Steve Alten is waiting for some big news. In Alten’s case, “big” involves a seventy-six-foot-long man-eater that lives in the world’s deepest oceans and has been trying, for twelve years, to rise out of the depths and into cineplexes.

Alten is the author of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, arguably one of the best summer potboilers in the last decade and a half. In the book, a team of deep-sea explorers accidentally bring to the surface a Carcharodon megalodon—a species of giant prehistoric shark thought to have died out about 50,000 years ago.

“I have been enthralled with this entire species,” Alten said in a phone interview from his South Florida home.

In Alten’s world, as the prehistoric seas cooled, the giant sharks gradually retreated to the deepest parts of the ocean, where geothermal vents kept the water much warmer than the water at the surface. A layer of near-freezing deep-sea water just above the geothermal zone kept the sharks from surfacing.

When in came out in 1997, Meg rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list. The Los Angles Times called it “Jurassic Shark!” A Time magazine cover story touted it as a “cool summer read.” Disney’s Hollywood Pictures optioned the movie rights. Three sequels hit bookshelves in the twelve years since, including the most recent, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium, this past summer.

But moviegoers are still waiting for their first Meg sighting. Full Story »

It’s one of those days of American history that lives in infamy: April 20, 1999, the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, killing twelve students and a teacher, and inuring twenty-four others, before turning their guns on themselves.

Say “Columbine” today, and nearly anyone can tell you what it means. But as journalist Dave Cullen says in his new book on the tragedy, the real story of Columbine is only now starting to become clear. Media sensationalism, police cover-ups, scapegoating, and mythmaking have all distorted the story. Cullen’s Columbine, then, represents an important historical and journalistic effort to shed light on what really happened. Full Story »

“Take a walk with me,” I said.

My students, some twenty-one freshmen, followed me into the hallway. “We’re going to take a walk around the building,” I told them. “I want you to just notice things.”

With my cowboy boots clicking on the tile floors, I moseyed down the hall with the pack of students behind me.

Some of them chit-chatted with each other. Almost all of them wondered what the heck we were doing: If this class was Composition and Critical Thinking, why were we going for a stroll? Full Story »

“The culture wars are over,” says journalist Charles Pierce, “and the idiots have won.”

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

Full Story »

Meld the slipperiness of memory with the manic power of pop culture and you’ll get an idea of the lens Rebecca Brown uses to look at the world these days.

Brown’s newest book, American Romances, a collection of eight essays, mixes and matches in surprising ways: Oreo cookies and Gertrude Stein. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Beach Boy Brian Wilson. The Invisible Woman, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, and the God Squad. They’re all in there—along with a lot of Brown herself.

“I’m trying to understand my individual life in the context of other things,” she explains in a phone interview from her Seattle-area home. “Clearly, some of the pieces are very personal. The autobiographical stuff is really autobiographical.”

Brown, who’s taught writing for twenty years, is best known for her novels: The Haunted House, The Last Time I Saw You, The Gifts of the Body, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary—eleven in all. Her 2003 book Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, a powerful retelling of her mother’s battle with terminal cancer, provided her the opportunity to explore memoir.

But nothing quite compares to the essay style Brown creates in American Romances. Full Story »

In his most recent collection of poems, Sestets, Charles Wright manages to capture more in six lines than most poets say in volumes.

The volume’s sixty-six poems, six lines each, read like dazzling meditations (believe me, if any poet is capable of such an oxymoron, it’s Wright). The six-line format gives each poem a haiku-like feel, although Wright doesn’t conform to the haiku meter. That sort of constraint would take away from Wright’s rustic charm—which comes across like a contemplative gentleman farmer sitting on the wide, wooden porch of his mountaintop home, looking out across uncut fields of hay toward the sunset at the far side of a valley. He takes a pipe from his mouth, and in a quiet, even voice, delivers a poem.

“There’s no way to describe how the light splays after the storm, under the clouds/Still piled like Armageddon/Back to the west, the northwest, intent on incursion,” he says in “Outscape.” Full Story »