John Joseph Adams - Editor & Anthologist

Tangent Online Closing Up Shop For Good…Unless You Want to Keep It Going

Dave Truesdale has announced that Tangent Online will be closing up shop for good on March 1, 2009, unless someone wants to take it over. Anyone want to take over the reins?

New Living Dead Reviews

A couple new reviews of The Living Dead:

SFF World: “To call this volume anything other than must have would be selling it short, the stories range a great number of years and capture many unique voices on one of the seminal images and iconic characters of Horror fiction and is something I know I’ll be pulling down every Halloween. This impressive, massive anthology would make a great gift to give by the light of the Jack o’ Lantern.”

SF Signal: “The zombie anthology for the new millennium.”

Fairfield Weekly: “A comprehensive collection on the subject and a joyful celebration of all things flesh-eating and re-animated.”

Starred Review in Library Journal for The Living Dead

One of publishing’s top trade journals, Library Journal, has reviewed The Living Dead, giving it a starred review, which indicates a book of exceptional merit: “Editor Adams does a remarkable job of collecting a sampling of variations on this theme. … Highly recommended for all horror fiction collections.

Also, the Sacramento Book Review reviews The Living Dead: “A collection of short zombie stories from some of the greatest horror writers of all time.” [PDF]

As does Realms of Fantasy: “It’s hard to find fault in almost five hundred pages of zombie stories.” [not online]

New Reviews of Wastelands & The Living Dead

The Short Review on Wastelands: “This could have been dreary. … [But] there’s nothing dreary in this book. The stories here are real, juicy, solid stories instead of morality lessons in disguise, and not two of them are alike.”

SF Scope covers the Oct. 7 “Readings of The Living Dead” event presented by the New York Review of Science Fiction reading series: “At a time when the scariest stories are found on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and on the very evening of a Presidential debate (on top of which, I’d just been to the dentist and told that I need a root canal), zombies have a lot of fierce (dare I say stiff—get it? "Stiff", dead body?) competition to terrify us, but Kirtley and Langan successfully managed to affect us, haunt us, creep us out, disgust us, and even raise the odd hollow chuckle.”

Mania.com also reviews The Living Dead, giving it an “A” grade and calling it “One of the best zombie anthologies published in recent years.”

5 Takes on The Living Dead

There are a couple new reviews of The Living Dead to share:

USA Today’s Pop Candy blog: “a cool new anthology.”

BookLoons: “A fascinating collection which proves to the reader that no zombie story is the same and shows what amazing settings and situations authors can create to involve zombies.”

Subterranean Online: “The Living Dead features some great seminal tales [and] several lesser-known stories that definitely deserve more attention.”

Bookgasm: “Contains its fair share of pleasant surprises. … Filled with tales that take the zombie in wildly different directions.”

Textual Frigate blog: “There was a lot of variety in this book. … There really is something here for any type of zombie fan.”

SF Revu Reviews Seeds of Change

SF Revu has a nice review of Seeds of Change: “These are not your usual short stories — each one is a true gem. If you haven’t already found this book on the shelves, go look for it now. It will supply hours of absorbing reading and lots of food for thought.”

Also, the Minimal to the Max blog says: “Seeds of Change exceeded my expectations. I found it to be quite an engaging read, and … I think the majority of it will appeal to readers everywhere.”

The Living Dead–Starred Review in PW

Publishers Weekly reviews The Living Dead: (Starred Review) "Recently prolific anthologist Adams (Seeds of Change) delivers a superb reprint anthology that runs the gamut of zombie stories. There’s plenty of gore, highlighted by Stephen King’s ‘Home Delivery’ and David Schow’s classic ‘Blossom.’ Less traditional but equally satisfying are Lisa Morton’s ‘Sparks Fly Upward,’ which analyzes abortion politics in a zombified world, and Douglas Winter’s literary pastiche ‘Less than Zombie.’ Also outstanding, Kelly Link’s ‘Some Zombie Contingency Plans’ and Hannah Wolf Bowen’s ‘Everything Is Better with Zombies’ take similar themes in wildly different directions. Neil Gaiman’s impeccably crafted ‘Bitter Grounds’ offers a change of pace with traditional Caribbean zombies. The sole original contribution, John Langan’s ‘How the Day Runs Down,’ is a darkly amusing twist on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. There’s some great storytelling for zombie fans as well as newcomers."

Also, the blog Dusk Before Dawn reviews The Living Dead, providing capsule reviews for each story. The reviewer’s favorites were: Ghost Dance by Sherman Alexie, The Third Dead Body by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Malthusian’s Zombie by Jeffrey Ford, Home Delivery by Stephen King, Deadman’s Road by Joe R. Lansdale, and The Song the Zombie Sang by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg.

Review: Dark Verses & Light by Tom Disch

As I mentioned in my previous post, in college I wrote an essay about Tom Disch’s poetry collection, Dark Verses & Light. Here it is:

***

Thomas Disch’s Dark Verses & Light is a diverse assortment of poetry, including traditional verse, a verse play, and the poems of a fictional poet. Disch includes everything from a verse play with a talking corpse exploring the properties of particle physics to a deceptively simple poem pondering which tie to wear. Reading this collection is an emotional roller coaster, and the poet’s voice ranges from innocence to cynicism.

Section one contains only one poem, “The Snake in the Manger: A Christmas Legend” and the verse play “The Eightfold Way: A Masque in Five Tableaux.” In this section, you will find experiments in meter and rhyme, and the occasional turn of phrase so clever it makes the poem worth reading all by itself. In “The Eightfold Way” a man reincarnated as a woman dances with his former male self and explores the nature of DNA:

Thymine, my other self! Mythical twin,

Twining with me in serpentine helices,

Mirror reversing right and left,

Machine of perpetual emotion,

Loom on which the shuttles of my soul

Flash to and fro, genetic spinning jenny,

Sin with me, spin with me

Deoxyribonucleically.
 

Another example of Disch’s playful use of language can be seen in the following excerpt from the same verse play:

What care I where I am

While I am with you? Were you of uracil,

Still would I love you, still would my oxygen

Lock to your phosphorus. Across the Aegean

And up through the Bosporus, my galley should sail,

Like a new Cleopatra’s.
 

In this startlingly bizarre verse play, you will also find a corpse and a mechanical mouse conversing, talking electrons, and an impression of Robin Leach doing “Death-styles of the Rich and Famous.” The play ends and finishes its explanation of physics with a game of cosmic “three-shell monte.”

Section two begins with a powerful short poem, “Back Here,” which tells us that one can never go home. However, perhaps the strongest piece of this section, “Why This Tie, Why That,” portrays both the innocence and cynicism of Disch’s poetry. This is a poem exploring the reasons for wearing a tie. The poem hits hard by lulling the reader with the mundaneness of the subject matter (”Because it was foremost on the rack”). Then we’re slapped with emotion by a line like “Because I’m blue.” The reader is then left with a mixed feeling of hope and sadness when the poem ends with the last and perhaps most telling reason of all:

Because this is exactly who I am, 

could be, might wish to be, 

today, this afternoon, or some day soon.
 

Perhaps the most interesting portion of this collection is brought to us in section three, by the fictional former filmmaker and world’s worst beat poet, Joycelin Shrager. Disch gives us a detailed short history of Joycelin’s life, then leaves us to wander through her poetry, which ranges from the humorous (”i am just a plain poet”) to the obsessive (”when i am sick science fiction”). Included in all “Shrager’s” poems are her idiosyncrasies, including but not limited to her total lack of capitalization and punctuation, her constant misspelling of poem as pome, her overuse of ampersands, and her refusal to title her poems. “Shrager’s” unusual personality comes through in each “pome,” but perhaps most clearly in “if you know what i mean,” which is dedicated “to john ashbery with love from joycelin.” This poem in a way responds to a line from “i am just a plain poet” in which “Shrager” quips:

you can’t expect them to like

a subtle poet like john ashbery

(who i have to confess doesn’t make

a scrap of sense to me)
 

In “if you know what i mean,” “Shrager” explains how her teacher “andy lowe explained” ashbery’s poems and ordered his class “go thou & do likewise.” The rest of the poem then goes on to explain to the reader how “Shrager” cannot understand the method of Ashbery’s madness.

Section four opens with a return to Disch’s own poetry, and a disconcerting one at that. “Selected Quirks” explores “whether the moral status of mankind has undergone an improvement in our times.” It does so by citing twelve cases of aberrant behavior. “Case One had masturbated all his life…. / Case Ten had incest twice with Case Eleven.” Disch then ends on a somber and disturbing note, “But worse than these was Twelve, who would not choose.” Disch’s cynicism is most readily apparent in his “Poem from the Pen.” This is a poem about a normal everyday man who

could have been a boxing pro

but drugs & liquor laid [him] low.
 

He “killed a man” and now he’s in prison “For forty years.” The poem ends with one of Disch’s best stanzas, which contains both a clever turn of phrase and seamless rhymes:

They say you shouldn’t bear a grudge

But if I could I’d kill my judge

And hang the jury who hung me

Oh how I long for liberty
 

Overall, this collection will make the reader smile, frown, and shake his head in consternation. It is a complex lot, not easily categorized or referenced. Critic Thomas Fleming has characterized Disch’s poetry as “quirky, unpredictable, and irreverent with a satire that is savage in its restraint.” That is a beginning to classifying Disch’s work, but Disch himself would likely resist these and all other labels. In any case, Dark Verses & Light is too diverse a collection to pass up, whether it can be fit neatly into a category or not.

Doomsday: Don’t Go See It Even if It’s the Last Movie on Earth

As the editor of a post-apocalyptic anthology and someone who is generally considered to be something of an expert on the subject, I feel it is my duty to provide this public service announcement in regard to the recently released film Doomsday. It is, quite simply, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a quick synopsis, in case you’re not familiar with it already: There’s a massive plague in England, which is contained by sealing off Scotland along Hadrian’s Wall. Thirty years later, the virus starts showing up in the rest of England, so a team is sent into the quarantine zone to search for a cure among the survivors.

Okay, but here’s the thing. Almost nothing that happens in the movie makes sense. None of the SF elements are thought out at all. There’s tons of cliches such as the idiotic post-apocalyptic biker punk society that arises inside the quarantine zone, who for some reason turn to cannibalism even though there are, inexplicably, so many cows wandering around that when the "outside" team enters the quarantine zone they run them over with their tanks. It’s like director Neil Marshall surveyed all of post-apocalyptic fiction and film, took all of the worst elements from each of them and threw them into this movie.

It’s just absolutely abysmal. You just might find yourself wishing the end of the world would come just so you wouldn’t have to sit through another second of this pathetic excuse for a movie.

Trust me: Don’t waste your money. Hell, don’t even go if you get in for free–life’s too short.

SF Signal on Wastelands: "More entertaining than the average ‘Best of’ annual anthology."

John over at the great SF Signal blog posted a glowing (four-out-of-five stars) review of Wastelands. Here’s a snippet:

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse offers a great selection of end-of-the-world stories proving that stories in a single setting (or a single subgenre of science fiction) need not be similar. While the prevailing theme, as would be expected, is one of hope, the stories are presented with unique focus and voice. But the mood is as dark as it should be with such serious subject matter. With rare exception (Neal Barrett, Jr.’s comical "Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus") these stories are gloomy indeed. But isn’t that the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction after all?

John Joseph Adams has culled a great selection of stories here dating back to 1973, with more than half of those written in the last seven years. [...] In then end, Wastelands proved to be more entertaining than the average yearly "Best of".
 

One of the thing I like so much about SF Signal’s reviews is the fact that when they cover an anthology, they review each and every story. That’s the case here as well–John provides mini-reviews of each tale, along with a star-rating for each. So go check out the full review, and add SF Signal to your RSS feed-reader.