Officially, I'm going to write some short stories for October. These will be along the lines of the thriller/horror stuff I did last year. Expect (or hope for) them on Fridays, starting next week. The thought is I'll tell some more stories about Cartersville and Lee County, where there's a monster at the lake, an evil preacher looking to kick start the apocalypse and you really shouldn't piss of Nan at the Tastee Freeze.
In the meantime, here's another book I read.
The Magicians: Lev Grossman -I think I heard about this one through The Onion AV Club. It might have been through Boing-Boing, but the premise sounded cool -- a sort of Harry Potter meets Brett Easton Ellis's "Rules Of Attraction."
And you know, it almost worked.
The gist is a kid named Quentin gets accepted into "Magic College" --which is very secretive, to the point of virtually no one knowing it exists and nobody applies. Anyway, following along similar lines as the Harry Potter books, he has a few adventures along the way, deals with relationship problems and tries to come to grips with his powers while building up to a huge showdown with evil forces. What's lacking really is a sense of wonder and Rowling's sense of humor.
Magic is just something they do besides drugs, booze and casual sex. It's cool, but so the fuck what?
It's a dense, but intelligent, read. The novel is divided into sub-books, but really, it feels like the author intended for the story to be larger, like maybe he really wanted to chase J.K. Rowling down the rabbit hole and come up with four or five books in a high-end fantasy series for the twenty, thirty and forty-somethings who read Harry Potter, but was told by his publisher, "No, you get one. If they like it, then we can do a sequel, maybe."
I'd have like to have seen what he might have done if he'd been given a little more room to grow.
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4 comments:
methinks you need an artist and to start doing these shorts as sequential art (comic books). cause that would rock.
It's funny. I've got a story thread dealing with the preacher and the boy, but it's hard to work out because it would take place over the course of several decades --beginning around 1971 or 1972, when Randal is 10 to the present, which is an interesting sort of jump, given that some of the characters aren't aging for a variety of reasons.
I'm not sure how to do what you say, but illustrations could be cool
its a good time to be and indy comic author.
I guess I need to find an artist...
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