"The horror, the horror..."

 "The recently published horror novel Night Film by Marisha Pessl has this to say about being scared: 'Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are.'
     This is exactly why I write horror. Fear is crucial to my life. It always has been. My list of fears is long and legendary: leeches, ghosts, the Apocalypse, Skeksis, aliens, the coyotes I see skulking down my street at night, swimming in the ocean, a killer hiding in my backseat, basements, cougars, clowns, zombies, abandoned houses, swimming in a quarry, rat hordes, heights, getting lost in a cave like Tom Sawyer, being buried alive, rustling cornfields, pets that come back to life, buckets of pig's blood, reading "The Shining" with a flashlight at three in the morning in the dark in a dead silent house...
     My fear has helped me learn what I'm made of. It has shown me what I am. My list of scary books is not comprehensive, and leaves off some greats like The Road, Perfume, House of Leaves, and several Stephen King titles. But most of the books I mention I first read as an adolescent, and they still haunt me today. Which means something."
— April Genevieve Tucholke, Huffington Post

Find out what's on that list here…

Se a post about Marisha Pessl's latest book Night Film here...

"Because your beauty seduced you, and made of you a prankster. Because the prankster always goes too far, that is the essence of prank." — Joyce Carol Oates

Peter Manso's
Brando: The Biography (1994)

Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.

Because you made of our adoration, mockery.
Because you were the predator male, without remorse.

Because you were the greatest of our actors, and you threw away greatness like trash.
Because you could not take seriously what others took as their lives.
Because in this you made mockery of our lives […]
— Joyce Carol Oates, Port

Read all of "To Brando in Hell" here…

"The phrase 'beyond words' does not roll lightly from the lips of Joyce Carol Oates. In fact, it lands on the table between us like a brick.
     This is not because the expression, which the 74-year-old author has just used to describe the experience of coming to terms with her late husband Raymond Smith’s sudden death in 2008, is insincere. It’s because if anyone knows about words, if anyone has generated an incredible number of them, it’s the wraithlike woman who now sits in front of me, solemnly sipping from a large cup of herbal tea.
     Oates is the legendarily prolific author of more than 50 books of fiction, non-fiction and now memoir. For her to describe anything as beyond words is, well, beyond comprehension."
— Jeff Pevere, The Star
Read more…

Buy Manso's Brando and all of Joyce Carol Oates' books here...