What made you want to help start the New York Asian Film Festival?
I used to go to the Music Palace down in Chinatown to see double features when I was in university and fell in love with Hong Kong movies there. Around 1999, the owners put it on the market and some other folks who also loved the place reached out and we all met and tried to see if we could get some cultural agency to buy the building, but no luck. We realized that plenty of people would keep showing the latest Wong Kar-wai and Zhag Yimou movie but who’d show the comedies and romances and action movies we loved. So we all put our money in a pot and started showing them ourselves.
Who is your favorite writer?
It changes constantly, but every book I write has a writer who functions as its spirit animal. For my latest book, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, that was Shirley Jackson. I spent the entire time I wrote it re-reading her books and short stories, including her two memoirs about raising kids, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, which are really underrated.
What do you prefer to write: novels, non-fiction, or screenplays?
They’re all hard for me. Novels are deeply immersive and I have to write three books and throw them out for every one book I publish. Non-fiction is back-breakingly labor-intensive because every word has to be true. And screenplays are so stripped down and concise that every sentence requires pages of work to get there. So I hate them all.
What current writing projects are you working on?
I’m revising a screenplay for a crime film set in the South and another one about a mediumship investigation, writing a non-fiction book about martial arts movies coming to America in the Seventies and doing revisions on my next novel, which will be out in 2021.
Who or what are your biggest influences in terms of your writing?
I aspire to get my writing boiled down to the lean, deceptively simple style of someone like Elmore Leonard or George V. Higgins. I fail on a regular basis.
Is there an overall theme to your writing?
I don’t write according to a theme, but it’s more that there are a lot of stories I want to tell. If I started today, it would take me about a decade to get them all down on paper and published.
In your novel, We Sold Our Souls, is Black Iron Mountain a metaphor for anything?
Black Iron Mountain is the prison that we’re all trapped in, the one where only money has value, messiness is discouraged, kindness is mistaken for weakness. Philip K. Dick wrote about a similar construct he called The Black Iron Prison, and Grant Morrison talked about something equivalent to his Anti-Life Equation. I feel like it’s a piece of mental architecture that appears from time to time in fiction almost like a kind of Flying Dutchman. The worst thing about Black Iron Mountain is that while we’re the prisoners we’re also our own jailers.
Is there any subject that is off-limits for you as a writer?
Not that I can think of offhand.
Why did you choose heavy metal to be at the front and center of your novel We Sold Our Souls?
I wanted to write about a musical genre that no one thought was cool, and no one thinks metal is cool. If you say you like metal people make a lot of unflattering assumptions about you and your life. There’s no other style of music that gets that reaction, as far as I can tell. Hip hop comes close, but at least people who listen to it are cool. There’s nothing cool about metal. That’s why I love it. And it helps that metalheads are some of the kindest, sweetest people on the planet.
If Hollywood was making a film adaptation of We Sold Our Souls, and the director asked you to cast the role of Kris Pulaski, who would you choose?
God Save the Queen is a bit of a mishmash of different genres. It’s part alternate history where during the reign of Queen Victoria, she and other aristocrats are plagued with some taking the form of vampires, others werewolves, and others goblins. It’s part fantasy with some shades of romance, although that’s a small part of the novel, with a bit of a steampunk feel to it. Queen Victoria is still alive, and there are divisions between the aristocrats and the humans with half-bloods (half human and half other) somewhere in between.
The protagonist, Xandra Vardan, is part of the Royal Guard, an elite fighting squad of half-bloods whose job it is to defend the aristocrats from humans who might wish them harm. The plot thickens when Xandra’s sister goes missing and is declared to be dead, although she’s not dead, causing Xandra to investigate. In the process, she discovers a conspiracy that she’s at the center of.
By and large, I liked this novel. I like the writing style. Although I generally liked the characterization, if you’ve read any modern urban fantasy, there is a lot of cliché to Xandra and Vex, her alpha werewolf love interest. The biggest shortcoming of this novel is that these two characters, the badass female protagonist, and her bad boy non-human lover, have been done to death and there is no new ground here. The plot was sound, and I enjoyed the steampunk-ish feel to it where there is some technology in this world but not to our levels of technology. Overall, I would give this novel a thumbs up and will be reading the second novel in the series.
I really enjoyed the first novel in the Immortal Empire Series, but I felt the second novel in the series fell off the mark and didn’t live up to my expectations. For starters, the setup is almost exactly the same as the first novel. One of Xandra’s siblings goes missing and she has to go find them. This time, it’s her brother, Val. She is still involved in a relationship with her werewolf boyfriend, a relationship that is so typical in this genre of the novel. The storyline is very similar to the first novel as well with the exception that Xandra now knows she’s a goblin instead of the mystery in the first novel where she was finding it out. The novel ends very abruptly with no resolution to the storyline except for the missing sibling.
I don’t want to be overly negative since there were elements of the novel that I enjoyed. The writing, for the most part, was strong. The characters were generally well done with a couple of exceptions. The plot moved along and set up for the final novel in the series. Overall, it wasn’t a bad read. It just seemed to be a repeat of the first novel, and no new ground was broken here. It did not deter me from wanting to read the finale and completing the series, which I will be doing soon.
We Sold Our Souls is a fascinating and unique novel. I truly never have read anything quite like it. My interest in the novel is heightened by me being a life long heavy metal fan. I don’t know if I would have liked this nearly as much if the focus of the novel was, say country instead of metal. That said, I think this novel worked in many different ways, and would still be a great read even if you had no interest in heavy metal.
For starters, the writing is really strong. The voice is loud and clear. The grammar, flow, and pace are all tight. I liked the way the author broke into the action with radio and television interviews or news reports to fill in the details. The characterization was also strong. Chris comes out loud and clear, as do some of the side characters. Even the villains in the story to a certain level are sympathetic and are not just evil for the sake of being evil. It’s easy to sympathize with a musician who will sell their soul not just for fame and fortune but to be legendary, for their music to live on long after they are gone. There is a lot that I liked about this novel, and my complaints are only minor. This is a horror novel well worth reading.
Demons for me is a tale of two books. Apparently, it started off as a novella, and later became a novel, when a second, longer part was added to it. The first part of demons was great. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It had an interesting concept, a kind of light, understated tone to it, a well-developed plot, and a decent conclusion. The characters were just so-so, but there was a lot to like about it. I wished that was all I had read because the following, longer part did not come close to delivering.
All of the charm and wit the novella had, the extended novel was lacking. The story was incoherent and nonsensical. The author wanted the reader to believe that through some sort of control of the media, that people did not believe that the demon invasion happened, despite the fact that thousands upon thousands of people died, it had dominated every facet of the world when it happened, every single human being alive witnessed it, the president of the United States was killed by a demon, and the vice president was running the country through a bunker. Am I missing something? In the novella, demons were bad and they overran the planet. Now, the author decided to use the ridiculously overused trope that it was the evil industrial corporations that were responsible for summoning these demons. Writers have a habit of using the evil, industrial corporation as the villain like a crutch. It’s old and tired. And for some reason it would be desirable for these folks to have demons destroy the planet and have it become some sort of dystopian world. Yeah, that’s exactly what a corporate industrialist would want. None of it made sense, including the part where they take away a child so they could replace him with a member of the circle. It was a big mess. I would recommend reading the first part and stopping there.
