Fans always say that the book was better than the movie, and authors always says the movie fails to capture the spirit of the book. But what do you say when the book is admittedly written as a movie in book form? And by someone who used to write for a movie magazine? Such is the case with writer Andy McDemott, the author of the “Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase” novels, the newest of which is The Revelation Code (paperback, digital).
Tag: Interviews
One day, someone will write a tell-all book about what it’s like being a video game journalist. But today is not that day. Which is good because I’ve been writing about games for more than twenty years and I’m getting bored just thinking about it.
Instead, today is the day you get to read about what it’s been like for video game journalist Russ Pitts to write his second memoir, Sex, Drugs, And Cartoon Violence: My Decade As A Video Game Journalist (paperback, digital). The follow-up to last year’s Eagle Semen: The Story Of TechTV Employee Number One, the book chronicles Pitts’ ten year stint at Polygon (where he was one of the Founding Editors and their former Features Editor) and The Escapist (where he held multiple titles including Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Director), as well as his time contributing to IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, and other gaming outlets.
In numerology — which Wikipedia defines as “any belief in the divine, mystical relationship between a number ad one or more coinciding events” — the number 4 is supposed to reflect stability. Well, someone might want to tell that to writer Christopher L Bennett, the author of Star Trek Enterprise Rise Of The Federation Live By The Code (paperback, digital). Because while it’s the fourth book in his Rise Of The Federation series, and is set four years after The Federation was founded, an event depicted in the last episode of the fourth and final season of the TV show Star Trek: Enterprise, in talking about Bennett about Live By The Code, I don’t get the sense that he was going for stability.
Unlike science fiction, pulpy crime novels usually shy away from social or political issues. They don’t often work as allegories for something else. But with Stand Your Ground (paperback, digital), writer Raeder Lomax has written a pulpy crime novel that doesn’t shy away from…okay, maybe not taking a political stance, but it certainly doesn’t shy away from one of our more controversial gun laws. Though in talking to Lomax about the book, and the prequel he’s already got in the works, it’s clear that his kind of pulp was probably always going to get political.
Vintage Interview: Marilyn Manson from 1996
In my career, I’ve interviewed a lot of interesting musicians and actors. But since many of the magazines and websites that originally published those stories aren’t around anymore, I’ve decided to pull some of the more interesting interviews out of my archive.
The following interview with Marilyn Manson took place in August of 1996 at a house he had rented in New Orleans while recording Antichrist Superstar. Parts of the interview were used in a piece about him I wrote for the music magazine huH.
While everyone knows the story of how Bruce Wayne became Batman, not everyone knows the real-life story of how the character has morphed over the years into the one we see today in movies, video games, and comic books. But in new book, The Caped Crusade: Batman And The Rise Of Nerd Culture (hardcover, digital), writer Glen Weldon doesn’t just explores the character’s durability and mutability, he also widens his scope to examine what Batman’s durability and mutability says about our modern culture.
In speculative fiction, one of the “What If?” questions that gets asked the most is “What if [War X] went on longer than it really did?” But in his novel The Ratten Expedition (hardcover, paperback, digital), writer David A Hornung doesn’t show us what The Civil War would be like if it lasted six years longer than it really did, but what life is like ten years after that longer war concluded.
I’m not sure where I got it from, but sitting on a shelf in my office is an adorable plastic toy of the dark lord Cthulhu. It’s even called “My Little Cthulhu,” and comes with two screaming people who kind of look like those Playmobil figures. The point being that Satanism, the dark arts, and the occult have become so commonplace in our society, in our pop culture, that they’ve sometimes, well, adorable. And if you don’t believe me, there’s a reality show called The Osbournes you might want to check out.
So how did we get to this point? It’s something writer George Case explores the origins of in Here’s To My Sweet Satan: How The Occult Haunted Music, Movies, And Pop Culture 1966-1980 (hardcover, digital). Though in talking to Case about his book, it’s clear he doesn’t see the influence of Satanism, the dark arts, and the occult on our pop culture as being all that evil.
It’s easy to think that the age of physical media is coming to an end. And for some things, it clearly is. But it seems the death of paper books may have been greatly exaggerated. Case in point: Matt Forbeck’s Halo New Blood. Though it was originally released digitally last year, the sci-fi novel — about a character from the video games Halo 3: ODST and Halo 5: Guardians — is now being released in paperback…by popular demand.
For those who missed it when it was 1s and 0s instead of paper and ink, I spoke to Forbeck about what the book is about and how it connects to the aforementioned games.