I’ve recommended Brian Chippendale’s astounding, eyeball-gouging graphic novel If ‘N Oof at the Emerging Writers Network blog as part of their 2010 Holiday Shopping Guide.

Sound advice for almost anyone.

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

Excerpted from this piece on The Pale King from The New Yorker

Writing a review of Brian Chippendale’s If ‘N Oof for the Dzanc Holiday Guide…

I’m psyched to read with Andrew Zornoza at Ada Books in Providence this Saturday at 6pm.  Andrew’s book, Where I Stay, is desolate and affecting in all the right ways.  Absolute worst case scenario for this reading: Your ex shows up and buys a copy of The Help but you get over it and have a good time anyway.

“Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.  With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear.” – H.P. Lovecraft, from Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927)