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|  2008 Golden Globe Nominations | | | |
| They're back!
The After Dark guys have hit the theaters with eight gruesome films that you have a whole week to watch this time. We've already seen them all (yes, we sat through ALL of them this time) and have reviews-to-peruse!
Comment and read our reviews here!
This year brings us a monster movies, cannibalism, ghost stories and (of course) psycho killers by the bushel.
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| Loaded Questions: "The Wich's Trinity" author Erika Mailman | | | |
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Loaded Questions with Kelly Hewitt
A harrowing treat for Halloween...
The Witch's Trinity
by Erika Mailman
The Witch's Trinity is the story of a real horror come true. After as small medieval German town experiences a famine an unknown friar appears with a book, Malleus Maleficarum, which he uses to convince the towns residents that a real witch is among them. The friar is soon aided by a woman eager to dispose of an unwanted mother-in-law. The cast out grandmother Güde begins to fear for her life when the famine doesn't end and the town is turned upside down. Resident's clamor to find the source of their trouble as the town turns on itself and no one is safe. Erika Mailman has written a difficult novel, showing the reader what really happens self-preservation becomes the rule and death by fire is believed to be the only way to end the madness. Mailman's scenes of chaos and impending death are vivid and filled with characters confused, betrayed, dedicated, and deadly.
Kelly: The friar in your book who comes to save the town brings with him the Malleus Maleficarum. This isn't a book that I am very familiar with. Is it a fictional creation that you have used for your novel or does the Malleus Maleficarum really exist?
Erika: Sadly, the Malleus Maleficarum really does exist. It was written in 1486 by two German inquisitors blessed by the pope in their witchhunting duties. The book provides guidelines for how to locate witches, what to ask them, when to use torture, etc. Five hundred years later, you can still order a copy of this book! Its pseudo-legal language leaves your jaw hanging open at times in disbelief. Reading it is ultimately depressing. I highlighted my copy every time a quote left me enraged or sad… the whole thing is basically yellow now! My editor at Crown, Allison McCabe, had the idea of including a quote from this book at the beginning of each chapter of The Witch’s Trinity. I think that goes a long way to underscore the idea that although my novel is fiction, it could really be any woman’s story from that time. At my website I am working on having quotations from the Malleus Maleficarum constantly rotating on my home page. A typical one is this, which conveys both the assured tone and the shocking ludicrousness: “Although the devil can work without a witch, he yet very much prefers to work with one.”
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| Loaded Questions: "Look Me in the Eye" author John Robison | | | |
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In Look Me in the Eye John Elder Robison offers another look at the childhood of he and his brother Augusten Burroughs. The author discusses his struggles to be "normal" and his eventual diagnosis of Asperger's disorder. Robison details the birth of his brother, the beginning of his family's interactions with Doctor Finch and his family, who later came to be a major force in Augusten Burroughs' life and a significant part of his memoir Running with Scissors.
Robison has written a thoughtful book full of stories from his sometimes difficult childhood. He writes about the beginning of his mother's madness and the gradual increase of his father's alcoholic tendencies. One cannot help but feel for Robison, a big brother who loved his younger brother but yearned for freedom. Robison details his young adulthood and all of the chaos that ensued and into his adulthood in which the skills that have made him so different make him successful.
Kelly: Were you happy to have been largely left out of Running with Scissors? What was your initial reaction to the book?
John: I wasn't happy or sad. I was not there at the times my brother wrote about, and I had no place in those particular stories. My initial reaction was of sadness and then anger as I remembered how bad our childhood really was.
Then, when people started to read it, I got worried. Every time a friend said, "I'm gonna read your brother's book!" I thought, they'll never speak to me again when they read that!
But the reverse happened. The warm and supportive response of readers to RWS is really what gave me courage to tell my own story, which had been a shameful secret in my mind for so long.
Kelly: There are quite a few fun and light-hearted chapters in this book. But there are certainly darker stories of alcohol, mental illness, and abuse. Did those chapters take longer to write? Did you find writing them to be therapeutic?
John: I found the dark chapters troubling to write, and I did not reread them again. They did not take any longer to write. The process in general could be described as therapeutic but I think that would refer to the whole writing effort, not just to the writing of dark material.
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| Loaded Questions: "When We Were Bad" author, Charlotte Mendelson | | | |
| Loaded Questions with Kelly Hewitt
CHARLOTTE MENDELSON
author of Love in Idleness,
Daughters of Jerusalem, & When We Were Bad
When We Were Bad, Charlotte Mendelson's third novel, is the story of a particularly badly behaved British Jewish family called the Rubins. The Rubins are lead by the family Matriarch Claudia, a rabbi, who has worked to mold her husband, Norman, and children into the perfect family. But some things aren't meant to be. Just before Claudia's inspirational memoir, a handbook to families of the new millennium, is about to be published the family's faults start appearing left and right. Mendelson's book is a funny family saga about a clan to clean to be true.
Kelly Hewitt: Okay, the book is hilarious. Each of the characters has a secret, a fault, and they all make some pretty terrible decisions. The Rubin family has it all. Leo, the eldest runs away from his bride at the alter, Francis, the next in line admits that she has little or no maternal feelings and is unhappy in her marriage, the youngest Emily is dating a man that turns out to be a woman. Mom, Claudia, and dad, Norman, are holding secrets of their own.What I want to know is which character you think you identify with the most?
Charlotte Mendelson: They all contain a little bit of me, but's usually very subtle; I've never been a Rabbi, or a runaway mother, or a naughty younger sybling. However,
Norman is definitely my inner grumpy old man.
Kelly: You have said that the worlds of American Jews and British Jews are quite unalike. What kind of differences can readers pick up on by reading your novel about a famous but faltering British Jewish family?
Charlotte: What I've found so interesting abou the publication of When We Were Bad is how both British and American audiences respond in such similar ways. For non-Jews, I'm lifting a veil on a little known and even less well-understood world and Jews -- Jews everywhere - seem to think that they know the family I'm describing! For American readers the most obvious difference is, I think, how shocking unconfident many British Jews are about their place in British society. They're a self-conscious, rather nervous and hidden minority, which can make for some fantastic drama...
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| Hey, everybody!
We've been working on upgrading the web server (double the speed, the RAM, 4x the hard-drive space, etc.) but some recent virus attacks have convinced us that sooner is better than later as far as getting everything going.
What that means is that we'll be transitioning to the new server over the next week or so, and may experience some occasional outages in web, chat and mail services. Nothing should go out for more than an hour or so (and nothing like the recent outages we've had which were virus related), so be sure to check back often if you have trouble reaching us.
The upgrade should also allow us to enjoy some new and interesting site features, so stay tuned!
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| Loaded Questions: "The Beastiary" author, Nicholas Christopher | | | |
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Loaded Questions with Kelly Hewitt
NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER
author of A Trip to the Stars, The Soloist,
Frankling Flyer, Veronica & The Bestiary.
The Bestiary, Nicholas Christopher's fifth novel, is a book about Xeno Atlas, a young man raised by his grandmother in the wake of his mother's death during birth. Atlas' father is shipman with a murky and often absent influence on the child's life. Xeno, who reports always feeling a close connection to animals first fostered by his grandmother, sets out on a world-wide adventure to find missing texts with mythical creatures. The book is magical, filled with characters you can't help but find sympathy for and mysteries you can't wait to be solved.
Kelly Hewitt: As a reader I really connected with Xeno, the central character of the book, and I think it had to do with the way write his internal monologue. Xeno's is stark, brief, but unbelievably honest. You writing style is rich and yet brief as well. Would you say that you and the character are as similar as you might seem?
Nicholas Christopher: As it is with any novel, I had to connect with Xeno myself before his story could be told. I inhabited him, and he me, for the five years it took me to write this book. If I were to look, I might logically see some part of myself in many of my characters. ButI am not Xeno. I bear some slight similarities to him. My parents did live in the Bronx when I was born (in a Manhattan hospital), and I grew up in and around the city and later attended Harvard. I had a grandmother who raised me for a while who put great stock in her dreams and told me fairy tales and legends, some from books, and some (the most striking ones), I am convinced, she made up herself. The sights, sounds, smells of New York from the 1950s and 60s are all vivid to me still, and were constantly in my mind as I wrote this novel.
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| Loaded Questions: David Blixt, author of The Master of Verona | | | |
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 The Master of Verona is a fascinating new historical fiction that combines Shakespearian characters, real historical personages, and Blixt's own vivid characters.
Kelly Hewitt: What do you say to readers who may feel daunted by the detailed list of historical Italian characters, Shakespeare's characters, and your own? What advice do you have about tackling the large number of characters?
David Blixt: My advice, honestly, is to just ignore the Dramatis Personae entirely – that’s what I usually do. It’s a tool for those who like it, and a requirement from my editor. But to me, the leads of a story always introduce themselves. There are one or two characters that the narrative follows, whose experience is our own. Then there are the people they interact with most. If I’ve done my job right, by page 50 the reader should be feeling comfortable in the world, and by page 100 most the main players will be clear. One or two more can be introduced after that – a third of STAR WARS has passed before we meet Han and Chewie – but not too many really vital characters. So, no need to be daunted. You only need to keep track of six or seven characters, the rest come and go as needed, and context will make their roles clear. The Dramatis Personae is a tool – and a conceit, as if you were reading a play. Oddly, I don’t feel the same way about maps. I like maps in books, and refer to them now and again, just to get my bearings.
Kelly: One of the things I find most interesting is the mesh of characters that you write into the book. Were there any characters that you tried fitting into the book but just couldn't pull off?
David: Yes, absolutely. In streamlining the story (it was once a third longer), I took out a few references to Shakespeare characters that were clever and slyly written, but useless. Based on the text, the Duke from Measure for Measure is somehow related to Cangrande, and I had this whole scene discussing him and his eccentricities. It didn’t add anything to the story I was telling, so it’s gone. As is a scene with Shylock and one with Lucentio. All those characters will step onto the stage in later books – Shylock and Lucentio soon, the Duke much later on – but when they do it will be to move the story along, not as an attempt at cleverness. But most of the characters that were cut were minor – Cangrande’s cook and butler had a long scene, one of Antonia’s copyists had a scene. These were slice-of-life bits, humorous but forgettable. They were a look at the leads from other eyes—but Point-Of-View was something my agent, the marvelous Michael Denneny, hammered me over, and he was right. The story is the experience of Pietro Alagheiri, Dante’s son. We may wander from time to time, just to be present at action he doesn’t witness. But it’s best to let the story tell itself through him.
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| Best-selling Books become Big Budget Movies | | | |
| Loaded Questions: "Nefertiti" author Michelle Moran | | | |
|   Kelly Hewitt: I have to say first and foremost that I really enjoyed this book. It has some really great surprises and very rich characters.Michelle Moran: Thank you. History has been very generous with its supply of unique characters- I merely tried to depict them as vividly as possible.Kelly: What kind of knowledge did you have about Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the rest of the characters in your book before you began writing?Michelle: Well, the novel writing process for me normally involves at least a year of reading and digging before I first put pen to paper. My trips to Egypt had also given me a pretty solid feel for the landscape and much of the archaeology. I make sure to have the plot and characterization laid out in some detail before I start to write...
Read the Entire Interview Now | |
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