It’s one of those Sundays where you sort of feel like putting on some old vinyl and hanging out in the attic and sweating through the small, important, uncanny details of a given re-write. The type of day where you contemplate some strong ice tea with plenty of leaves and lemon but no sugar.  A sort of Sunday where even a hot sun comes off a little wan and a velvet pillow dreamily drowsy and dark.

So on a bit of a whim I thought I’d put up this review I wrote a few years ago of a book called Songs They Never Play on the Radio, by James Young. The book is about singer/songwriter/model Nico of Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol fame. It may seem a bit unusual for a blog mostly about horror writing. But I find it drifts along the edge of the aesthetic spectrum in that, first, it tells a shadowy and desperate story in a tone that horror writers may find useful, and second, that it had me thinking of the empty and strange years I spent living in various empty and strange corners of Brooklyn. It’s also a review that got a fair number of useful votes on Amazon. And so without further review, throw on a good album and perhaps enjoy some of these thoughts on a Sunday afternoon:

I can’t remember where I first read a few excerpts from this book, but I remember being pretty irate I didn’t have the full text in front of me at the time. Years later, after bad breakups, fires, towers falling down around me, I finally stumbled across Songs They Never Play on the Radio again, devoured it like a starved cannibal on the tundra. This book is so much wider in its scope than the blurbs on the back make it out to be, primarily in its oblique commentaries on European political history, and the valuation of Art.

The book is a biographical snippet of singer/songwriter Nico’s last years and tours. At the beginning she is living inManchester,England, addicted to heroin and passing her days getting high and drowsing in the shadows. A vaguely ambitious and obscure producer named Dr. Demetrius lines up a tour for her and pulls together a band to back her up. James Young, the author, is the keyboard player for this band.

The ensuing narrative is what they call in MFA programs “creative non-fiction.” (Yes, MFA programs ARE annoying, but sometimes pull-out the useful term or two). Anyway, it reads like a novel, imitates actual events, and doesn’t change the names like in a roman-a-clef. Fortunately, Young lets his camera jump cut from scene to scene, across time, countries and continents, to land right where the action demands. We get portraits of the band–Echo, a mixture of sullen, backsliding pater familia and post-punk rock bassist… oh, and throw in junkie to boot. We get a variety of drummers–from an industrial junk-percussion virtuoso to a totem-wearing pretty-boy tabla diva to a hair-metal sorta-be. We get a lead guitarist desperate to meet Bob Dylan. We get so many mini-music pros, the portrait of the desperation of professional pop music and the love of heroin might fool the reader into thinking it’s the subject of the book.

But the real subject is the struggle for recognition and accomplishment of pop artist Nico, and what that means for all struggling artists, especially those who deal with all things truly dark. Nico just happens to write deeply shadowed, literary-style poetry for lyrics, whether she or anyone else likes it or not. The poems themselves, from You Forgot To Answer to Nibelungenland to Frozen Warnings to Mutterlein (to name a few), are not just personal blues songs (though some do deal with relationships). They are elegies for the German tragedy of World War II, and the tragic side of the long and rich history of the country in general. Throughout the book exists a painful irony where Nico honestly responds to questions aboutBerlin’s pre- and post- war culture, questions put forth by interviewers who really don’t care at all about the tragedy of racism and war and the hangover it left on the consciousness of a country and continent. Subtler still we get vestiges in the persona of Nico herself, of these old, Central-European cultural mores (and her own quandaries over its single-mindedness). We also get Nico’s passing comments on Hassidic Jews and gypsies and thoughts that members the Velvet Underground were hostile due to her Germanness (though the author ascribes it to the possibility of being upstaged).

James Young handles his insights with a tenderness I rarely witness when it comes to themes of prejudice, loss and cultural kinetics. Throughout the band’s world travels, the reader gets the sense that stereotypes like American battle-cry egotism,Pacific rimcommercialism, Eastern European old-style communism are animals born from group mentality, group forces much more easily decried than deleted. No character or ideology is oversimplified here. I am reminded of an old episode of Maury Povich where he tries to get a neo-nazi to get over his prejudice and shake his hand. Not a bad thing, but come on, let’s talk about why so many rural American kids are entranced by that crap in the first place. Instead, Mr. Young addresses the depression, the lack of options and the insanity of the materially and emotionally impoverished.

Personal emptiness, economic emptiness and artistic emptiness run parallel throughout the narrative. There is a scene where a female Japanese fan offers John Cale a rare bottle of sake as a gift. Well, by then it’s later in the 1980’s, Cale has gone from beer swilling, snow snorting studio genius to clean living performing genius. He turns her down. Young gives what’s due with Cale, always underscoring his musical talent. But he also uses him as a somewhat abstracted symbol for a cultural shift in the music business (and perhaps international business in general). In the narrative, his figure symbolizes 1960’s psychedelic, imagination-oriented, hedonism-rich art product, where one must at least pretend the artwork comes first and commerciality second, that then shifts to the mall-shopping fine threads wearing 1980’s rich intellectual for whom the cash is not shameful in the least. (Ironically, with the advent of You Tube and so many free venues for every variety of artistic output, we may be entering a strange amalgam of the two eras–the complete shamelessness of wanting to make money with art, but such an abundance of supply that nobody cares to pay for it).

In the center stands Nico, her art and her lament (addiction is a by-product). No one really buys or plays her songs. The penny-pinching carnival goes on. At one point, late in the book, after enduring many painful episodes and adventures, Allen Ginsburg appears as a not-quite Deus ex Machina. Young and Nico accompany him to a poetry reading inManchester. He heroically recites detailed images of gay sex to a horrified conservative crowd. It is one of the story’s happier occasions. Nico seems in good spirits. We get the sense that any latent cultural cruelties on anybody’s part were being rubbed out by a non-contrived shared interest in poetry and music. It recalls a time when both artists were looking forward with their art and perhaps hoping, consciously or not, to use it as building block for the improvement of late Twentieth-Century culture and life. At the end of the chapter, however, Nico ominously comments that Ginsburg did not take off his clothes as he used to…

…so I’ve listed some scenes in this review, but have not revealed even 1% of the beauty of this book. Buy and read it. If it is a grave marker of a bygone era, I hope its stone fist points to a coming love of insight and imagination in humanity’s cultural and artistic output. It rescues Nico’s true beauty and function, an imperfect elegy writer, a singer for her native culture’s, as well as pop culture’s, death dirge and chance at rebirth. And to the dude who commented on another review here on Amazon.com and claimed Young is “milking” Nico’s memory for even more money: Dude, whose clean cash pays your bills?

Photo Credit: NASA/SDO, AIA Licensing link here.

So Venus passed in front of the sun. It made me recall what might be one of my favorite Stephen King stories of all time titled I Am The Doorway.  A tale a touch Lovecraftian yet with King’s sense of realism in the prose. It also featured the planet Venus (though it wasn’t quite in the foreground in the story, it cast an ominous shadow over the entire narrative). I read this when I was about nine years old (way too young for it), got pretty freaked out and have been re-reading it now and again ever since.

This also got me thinking that though Mars seems to figure more frequently in science-fiction, horror and fantasy, I personally have always had an interest in the planet that travels between the Earth and the sun. For one thing, Earth and Venus are about the same size, which makes the second planet kind of a warped twin of the third. Something about that and the fact that it is overheated and hell-like serves to feed the dark side of imagination. And if it’s named after a love goddess, that only adds to its sadistic allure.

So I wonder if anyone else has any recommendations on good Venus stories? Has there been an anthology of Venus stories? Would be interested in people’s thoughts.

On another note, something else I should mention is that soon this blog will be featuring some guest bloggers: Armand Rosamilia, writer and editor for Rymfire Books which just published my novella Slash of Crimson will be making a guest appearance, as will Dan O’Brien, author, editor and radio host. Updates soon on when these events will be happening.

Here is a link to the paperback version on Amazon:

Slash of Crimson (Paperback)

Thanks and enjoy!

Here is a link to the Kindle version now available on Amazon.com (click image below):

Great deal at $2.99, and even if you don’t have an e-reader, it can be downloaded on a laptop or read online.

And of course, anyone who takes the time to give it a (good) review has my undying gratitude!

Thanks and enjoy,

–Carl

So today’s the day, Rymfire is releasing Slash of Crimson. I will post links to booksellers as they become available; it may not be up on Amazon.com until tomorrow. Also, the book will be available in ebook format first and the paperback release possibly a week away yet. For folks who’d rather wait for the paperback, that’s all good; I invite anyone to try out the ebook format on Amazon, however, as it will cost significantly less.

Here’s what some advance readers had to say about it:

“Slash of Crimson brims with a sensual grittiness that is every bit as hypnotic and captivating as its mysterious heroine. Fans of Joe Hill or Neil Gaiman will appreciate Moore’s keen knack for description and atmosphere that all comes together in a contemporary gothic tale that sinks in its claws on the very first page and doesn’t let go even after its thrilling conclusion.” — Allison M. Dickson, author of Dust

“Slash of Crimson is a fun read with a climax that caught me totally off guard. Carl Moore has crafted a must for anyone who cares about reading good books or just reading…period.” —Brent Abell, author of In Memoriam (forthcoming)

Again, I’ll be posting links to booksellers as they come in. For now enjoy a look at the official cover, and thanks in advance to all readers:

A nice article on the origins of Atlantis from the BBC website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/atlantis_01.shtml

This myth has been on my mind during these days leading up to the release of Slash of Crimson, as it figures largely in the storyline. Though there have been wide ranging theories as to origins of Plato’s sunken city, I think its location probably does match a geographical source from the classical or pre-classical Mediterranean. Discovering a story’s origins, however, often raises more questions than it answers.

We are conditioned by themes in popular literature to feel like we already know to some extent what kind of character a vampire has, a werewolf has, etcetera. We need these themes to stay somewhat true even to enjoy it when we add a twist to them. And so in this regard, when it comes to Atlantis, what we’re usually handed is an ancient civilization inhabited by advanced beings that encountered tragedy for unspecified reasons.

But I wonder sometimes what motivations might lie beneath this story structure. I wonder what an Atlantean would have to say about Plato’s tale, and whether what he thinks important would be the same as what she thinks important. Perhaps an Atlantean would have other priorities entirely. Perhaps she would ask something very different of someone she loves, for example, than a human would, and perhaps growing to understand what that love truly meant would lead to places uncharted indeed.

In an age where technology is splicing itself faster than a mad scientist’s Petri-dish full of mutant mitoticidal bunny rabbit cells, I sometimes forget about a device that existed long before blackberries, iPads and Skype. That is, the telephone.

During the weeks Armand (Writer/Editor with Rymfire) and I were sending drafts of Slash of Crimson back and forth, the emails started to get a little backed up. I kept sending him versions with names something like, Slash.of.Crimson.REAL.FINAL.VERSION.I.MEAN.IT.THIS.TIME.WITH.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.doc

As a result, we had to work out version control. We also had to discuss the final touches on the cover. And of course, the release date. This was going to take a lot of time through email, and increase traffic even more.

That’s when Armand came up with a radical proposal: “How about you call me?”

Carl: “Okay, no problem, let’s see, why don’t you email your phone number…”

Omitted: “…to my Gmail account which will automatically forward to my Blackberry (well, it’s not really a Blackberry, it’s a Nokia E71x that looked almost as cool as a Blackberry about eight years ago, but hey who’s counting…). Anyway it’ll come in as a text message and I can just save your number from there.”

Armand: “Sure.”

But of course when would the call happen? Because after all, one of the great advantages of texting and email, of beaming photos back and forth and posting things on social networking sites, is the time lag. You can respond when you have time to respond and get more done overall. Most of the time this works perfectly for us as we are pretty busy with full time writing schedules and other responsibilities. But finally we settled on our first phone call attempt:

Thursday night, 9:00 p.m.:

Carl’s email at 11:30 p.m.: “Crap, I’m really sorry, I fell asleep putting the kids to bed and forgot to ask Sarah to wake me up.”

Armand’s email: “No worries, how about next Friday?”

The Next Friday:

Armand’s email: “NOT TONIGHT—family duties, try next week.”

Carl’s email: “No problem.”

Omitted: “…I mean, it works out anyway because I had like three shots of bourbon and some hot wings and can’t talk. No, not a scheduling issue. I mean I can’t talk.

The Next Sunday:

Armand’s email: “I called this afternoon.”

Carl’s email: “So did I.”

Omitted: Guys, phone calls have to happen simultaneously.

Next Thursday:

Carl’s email at 11:30: “Crap, um, I fell asleep putting the kids to bed again, crap, damn, sorry…”

Armand’s email: “Oh, yeah, um, I was asleep too, but I woke up from about 9:00 to 9:05.”

Carl’s email: “Okay, we’re going to make this happen tomorrow morning.”

Friday morning:

I began to realize that the phone call had to be made a true priority. All kidding aside, the reality is that I function under a set of priorities similar to those listed in Stephen King’s On Writing. Namely, that the most important thing about the craft of writing is to write every day, rain or shine. Nor does it matter if it’s a holiday or day-job day, sleep-deprivation day (or night), or a kids or housework day. All must be worked around. This is the way forward in developing one’s craft as a novelist. This is the way to become a better storyteller. The advice in that book, which is generally echoed by other professional novelists, proves true in a lasting sense.

Where that particular book is less useful, however, is in pointers in more recent forms of networking and conducting business. In a time when Internet and Ebooks are alive and getting stronger, we can’t ignore this side of writing. And though I would still never sacrifice the daily work on the craft, this other realm must also be developed.

And so that Friday morning I delayed the camping trip departure, delayed the bill paying, delayed even getting dressed. And though I didn’t cut out the writing session altogether, I did put aside some time at the end and made sure the phone call was finally on time!  An hour later Armand and I had our details worked out.

Thus, Slash of Crimson’s release date:  June 1, 2012!

Upon returning from a recent trip to the woods I found myself thinking about the true meaning of ‘wilderness’. As a writer, I’ve noticed most of my stories take place in either remote rural landscapes or deep in the inner city. This reflects my own biography, having spent most of my adult life living in large cities and most of my youth living in back-woods Maine. Of course, Stephen King has written quite a lot about Maine, and many diverse aspects of it. Yet I would venture to say, even as a fan of his writing, that in most cases, the way he engages Maine and Mainers could be characterized as ‘Small Town’ Maine. I think he has always done this exceptionally well, and growing up in Bangor during his time of coming to prominence as a novelist would be an interesting post in itself.

However, I’ve always felt like there was something else going on in my relationship with the locale where I grew up. I’m not talking so much about the small towns, but rather the remote lakes, streams and forests where my father spent as much time as he could, and where consequently, I spent a large amount of time during my formative years.

These places had a character that wasn’t quite so state-specific. Rather, I felt a sense of losing touch with mapped geography altogether and travelling back to something primordial. Being at the winter lake and listening to the ice bend and crack through the night, being at the summer lake and hearing the coyotes wailing far off in the hills had a limitless, impersonal kind of power. When we were in these places, we did not have running water or electricity, and often ate food that was hunted, gathered or caught. As a child this breadth of land and closeness of life and death had a profound impact on my mind. We were not church-going people and the old man rarely talked about impractical things. To the extent I heard anything close to spiritual, it centered on what animals had to do to survive. However, I would stop short of saying that nature itself was ‘spiritual’; instead I would substitute ‘nature’ with ‘wilderness’. I would consider wilderness a place where independence and survival constituted what was most important, and the landscape something to be tampered with only to the extent minimally required to facilitate survival’s priorities. True, animals and human beings living in these settings sometimes worked in groups, but there was a distinct sense of independence and thrift when it came to relationships that was nothing like what one experiences in day to day life in more civilized places.

Jump cut to my move to big cities—I have lived mostly in two large cities: Pusan, South Korea, and New York, New York, and for now will focus on New York.

When I began living in Brooklyn, I felt a stir very similar to what I felt when I would go to the remotest parts of Maine. Maybe that sounds crazy, because Brooklyn is so densely populated. But it did feel somehow familiar. Perhaps one factor might have been that the neighborhoods where I could afford to live were mostly impoverished, particularly when I first moved to the city in the late 1990’s. The doorways were thick with graffiti, the lots slithering with weeds and the carcasses of old cars. Most of us are familiar with scenes like these because many American cities have their own versions of them. But what took me aback about New York was the sheer size of it. Its immensity made it feel like an urban tundra—a place uncharted and not subject to the rules and regulations common to smaller cities, towns and suburbs.

And so wilderness began to take on a new meaning for me, something that consisted of what Maine and New York had in common—the sense of mystery, the sense of lawlessness and the sense of freedom. Whether urban or rural, these landscapes possessed a certain rugged power that could enliven narrative, particularly when dealing with subjects frightening or taboo. And though the setting alone would never be the whole of a story, venturing into lands ripe for exploration increased the chance for a thrilling discovery.

Note: due to the nature of some of the early versions of the cover image contained in this post, reader discretion is advised.

Slash of Crimson’s publication date nears. The cover is finished. But getting to this point was a more involved process than I expected.

When Rymfire first accepted the manuscript, I wondered what their method was for acquiring cover art. Being a small press, they often worked with both new writers and new artists. It became quickly clear to me that it could be a fair amount of work to find the right fit for any given project. I asked editor Armand Rosamilia if he would be open to my getting involved in the selection process. He said he was so long as the work was high quality and matched Rymfire’s brand.

And so the search began—I turned first to a New York artist who had given me a business card on the subway. It showed a painting of a subway car, mostly blacks and grays, with tentacles slithering out of its windows. They were poised to seize an unsuspecting elementary school student and drag the body into the one spot of color, the creature’s red mouth. The sinister threat combined with a macabre sense of humor attracted me and I contacted him. He was interested, however, he had already moved from one tier of the art world to the next, going from home studio to Brooklyn gallery shows. His price had therefore increased to something that, if it couldn’t buy you an Andy Warhol print, it would at least qualify as a decent down payment on one.

Next I tried an old friend from Portland, the city where the novella takes place. He was willing to do it and sent me an amazing painting. However, though a beautiful work in its own right, it was very abstract and wasn’t quite the hard rock style that matched Rymfire’s brand, publishers of books like Heavy Metal Horror and Extreme Undead.

And so I was beginning to feel like Goldilocks (albeit a black bearded manson-jesusish sort of Goldilocks). Nothing was quite right. I began to brood and stew around the house, until I finally went to an artist who happened to be quite close by—my wife Sarah—and asked if she would be interested in working up an image herself.

Now someone might wonder why I didn’t go to Sarah in the first place. Wouldn’t that be convenient, an artist in the family who would always be willing to co-create? Except that Sarah and I had never worked together on anything. Indeed, though not expressly stated, we tended keep our art very separate during our lives together. While we had definitely shared our work with each other from the time we met, and generally liked each other’s work, giving each other room to do our own work was a boundary we didn’t want to blur.

Sarah’s artistic background consisted of art school in Virgina and then Queens College in New York City. She had already lived in New York as an artist for over ten years when we first met. While her themes did at times include the macabre, her work usually employed video as its media and focused on gallery-oriented post-modernism. I guess the analogy in writing would be what’s popularly considered the distinction between ‘genre fiction’ and ‘literary fiction’.

On the other hand, I knew she knew how to draw, and so figured why not just hit her up and see if she’d make an exception to our usual practice:

“Honey, I was wondering if you could draw a creepy naked woman who just crawled out of the ocean for my book cover?”

“I suppose I could take a shot.”

“That’d be great, remember it’s a horror/dark sci-fi novel, so think along the lines of The Exorcist meets Aliens.”

“Um, what?”

“Right, maybe think along the lines of something like Japanese cartoons.”

“You mean the porno ones?”

“Kinda.”

“All right, I’ll take a shot.”

Now aside from the thematic considerations we have our all encompassing and most profoundly important consideration, that is, the schedule of our family life. Many writers have talked about this, from Virginia Woolf to Stephen King. I don’t want to do that entire essay here, but suffice it to say that what we normally do is take turns doing activities with the kids so that the other person can have some personal time. This of course has to be done outside of a full time work schedule, and with the added consideration that one of our daughters is not yet in school and still requires constant care.

Therefore the fair division of time and tasks is critical to harmonious domestic life. Again without going to far into these issues, most of the time I try very hard to make a full contribution and not do my personal work at the expense of my family. How successful I am is not for me to say, though I haven’t been thrown out yet. What changed, however, when the cover art came into play, was that I would simply have to give up some of my writing time to give Sarah time to work on the cover. I would also have to take the kids more often to give her extra time on top of that to work on it. And I did this as well as I could, and out of all the factors of ‘what it is like to work with a spouse on an art project’, I would say that in our case, this is the most important. Working with my spouse on an art project consists mostly of pushing swings, doing dishes, driving kids around and helping them when they don’t quite make it to the bathroom in time…

But even with those obstacles accounted for, there were still important aesthetic considerations. What kind of image would she use? We started by reading some passages from the book. She agreed the inciting incident, the opening scene where the kayaker is rescued by the woman who emerges from the waves, was what she wanted to draw.

She went with a good mix of eeriness and allure and thus her first rendering looked like this:

Of course I liked it, but also knew, as confirmed by editor Armand, that bare nipples could be objectionable on a lot of the websites where the book would be for sale. Neither I nor Armand had anything against nipples personally, but we knew it just wasn’t conventional in genre fiction to put them on a book cover.

Me: “I’m sorry, I think we’re going to have to cover the nipples.”

Sarah: “What’s wrong with nipples?”

Me: “They’re naked. I mean it has nudity, so mainstream booksellers won’t show the image on their websites.”

Sarah: “But I thought you guys were bad-ass heavy metal dudes.”

Me: “Um, maybe, but the booksellers are pretty important.”

Sarah: “You know, in art school there were naked people all over the place, it was no big deal.”

Me: “I know, but genre fiction usually goes with the scantily clad and well-armed.”

Sarah: “Like guns?”

Me: “Yeah, like guns, like guns okay, nipples not okay. I actually like guns and nipples, but that’s just how it goes…”

Sarah: “Okay, I’ll cover the nipples.”

Thus the next version:

“What do you think?”

“I love it but there’s still half a nipple.”

“You can barely see it.”

“Right, we have to just not have the nipples, like even though the novella itself is rated R, the cover just has to be PG-13.”

“You know, in Europe they had bare breasts all over the magazines, everybody seemed okay with that. And when I was taking figure drawing I discovered porno mags had some of the best photos of the human body. I often used to sketch from those, like the big butt ones were the best for that.”

“Yeah, I guess this gal’s not even fully human, more on the skeletony side…”

“Yeah, I think Grandma’s Hollywood actress mags have better models for that. But I’ll have to go with a composite, photos and a live model.”

“As long as you like the image in the end. My suggestions are just suggestions. I want this to be a work of art you would stand behind.”

“Of course. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.”

There ensued more discussion, mostly about color and light, but as much as I tried to lay my back-seat-driving sort of opinions on her work, we deferred to her sense in the end, since she is experienced and I trusted it would come out best that way.

And thus, the final version:

Now, in what manner Rymfire will design the final cover is yet to be determined. As stated by the editor, there are considerations to publishing standards for the layout of the text and the title, etc. There will be some cropping and sizing involved and possible touch up in Photoshop.

In the end however, I am truly indebted to Sarah for coming up with such a gorgeous cover that captures the spirit of the novella. Perhaps it may even inspire someone to buy a paperback version of the book and acquire something that is interesting to look at, as well as interesting to read.

Has anybody else ever worked with his or her spouse on a project? I’d be curious to hear how it went!

–C.R.M.

In anticipation of the release of the Slash of Crimson, I will be writing a post about what it was like to work with my wife on the book’s cover art. Rymfire recently approved the image, and so that post on our collaboration and the evolution of the image will go up by the end of the week.

For anyone who has not read the original post on Slash of Crimson’s publication announcement it can be found here:

https://carlrmoore.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/slash-of-crimson-debut-novella/

Thanks and check in when the post goes up!

–C.R.M.