Girl in a Cage

Undead Oozing Corpses For the Soul

We had a couple of deaths in the extended family last week, and I don't think it's coincidental that I've gone on another horror kick. (True confession time--while my son was in the funeral home bathroom, I scraped at the door, chanting, "braiiiinss. Braiiinns!" He was more annoyed and embarrassed than scared, which is a testament to both the high quality of his judgment and the low quality of my zombie imitation.)

I mean, yeah, okay, I've been on kind of a lifelong horror kick, but sometimes it gets more intense than others. Right now is a particularly intense time--I'm reading Christopher Moore's You Suck, which doesn't really count, but sort of does since it's about vampires. I'm also reading the Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics, which contains many twisted and demented horror comics from the 50's onward. I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this, but it is kind of funny that we created the most horrific weapon of mass destruction ever, and then they thought it was the horror comics that were messing everyone up. I've also been listening to stockpiled episodes of Rue Morgue Radio--I can go months without listening to this, and recently I've been listening all the time.

I've written before about horror and how I think it helps us deal with the genuine horror of mortality, but I've realized for me, it's something different: it's strangely comforting.

I think this has to do with the fact that my dad was into horror movies (why? He died before I could really ask him. But could it be because of the death of his older brother when he was young? I do think that the people most into horror movies (and comics, and stuff) are the people who've been the closest to real horror.). He had this big coffee table book that I used to peruse endlessly, looking at pictures of Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney Jr. (neither, sadly, walkin' with the queen nor doin' the werewolves of London) and all kinds of guys in rubber masks and suits pretending to be scary. So in some weird and probably twisted way, gore and horror reminds me of a rather idyllic point in my childhood, i.e., the point before my dad died.

One of my fondest memories is of my dad waking me at what seemed, at the time, to be the middle of the night. I couldn't have been older than 8 or 9. "Wake up!" he said. "King Kong is on TV!" (This, remember, was before the VCR, a sepia-toned, grainy time when a midnight showing of King Kong might be your only chance to see it for years).

Anyway, I'll emerge eventually--right now I'll just keep watching Tales From the Crypt on Chiller and anxiously awaiting the new Lordi CD.

Quick Hits

I downloaded the audio version of Joe Hill's "Best New Horror" to listen to in the car while I was driving home from dropping my daughter off at camp. It scared the crap out of me! Being alone in the car is kind of scary even in broad daylight. "Best New Horror" is the story of a guy who edits an anthology called Best New Horror, and how he gets sucked into some genuine horror. Normally I find this kinda postmodern metawriting annoying, but this one totally worked for me on both levels--it's a legitimately horrifying story, and it's also a pretty neat explanation of why those of us who love horror love it despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the stuff out there is undreadable (or unwatchable or unlistenable) crap. It's in his anthology 20th Century Ghosts. Read it.

Here's what bugs me about audiobooks. The voice acting. I mean, if a man is reading the story, I'd rather just have him read a female voice straight up rather than doing that breathy, annoying pseudo-female voice that all these guys do when they are reading a female character. Still, it was a good way to pass the time.

Just finished reading "How Soccer Explains the World" by, um, aw hell, Foer is the guy's last name, but he's not that Foer. Anyway, it's really readable and fun and is packed with tons of interesting information.

As much as I complained about watching kids' soccer all the time, I think it may have turned me into a soccer fan. I find myself watching international matches just for kicks. (That Russia-Sweden game was something else!) Someone asked me the score of a game and I actually said "one-nil". Fortunately there was no time-traveling past version of myself in the room when I said that, or else I might have had my ass kicked by that version of myself. (I'd like to see him try it!)

If you're in Anaheim this weekend at the ALA conference, please talk up my book How Ya Like Me Now and tell everybody how you can't wait for my fall YA release, Forever Changes, which is, I think, the best book I've ever written. When I re-read it, I don't find anything that makes me cringe, whereas I do in pretty much everything else I've ever written. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I find stuff I love in all the books as well, and far more good stuff than bad, but there's always that sentence where I go, "ugh. I hate that.") I guess I feel like a lot of what I've wanted to say about life and death is contained in this book. Well, sort of. I mean, Donorboy and Long Way Back are both about how you live when someone crucial to your life dies, and Forever Changes is about how you live when you know that you're going to die. I know praise from myself isn't all that convincing, but I'm really really proud of this book. And, of course, I think that every high school should have at least ten copies on the shelves. And it should win lots of awards.

Speaking of awards, the awesome, discerning, not to mention incredibly attractive people at VOYA are giving How Ya Like Me Now their Top Shelf Fiction award on Sunday. I will not be there to accept on behalf of the book, but it's nice to know something I wrote is up there between the Patron and the Glenlivet.

God bless the inventor of the sundress.

My SSIGWJLAH wife bought me an awesome graphic novel for Father's Day, which I just finished: The Walking Dead part 1: Days Gone Bye. It was cool as hell. I'm definitely getting volume 2.

I'm listening to Pandora radio all the time while I correct papers and the like. It is awesome.

I've also been having fun lately at wordle.net. If you too are a kind of word geek, you'll probably dig it too.

Material Love

I love my new bag. I know, I know, I ignore the teachings of KRS-One at my own peril, but I love my new bag.

You can get your own here.

It's really boss, and it keeps all my stuff bone dry even in the driving rain. Plus, on my bike with my 76% recycled bag on my bike, I can whiz past those smug Prius owners with a big, self-satisfied grin on my face!

Of Teen Pregnancies and Horseshit

I'm a little late getting to this story, and I suppose this isn't really in the pop culture milieu, but I have some thoughts to share about the alleged Gloucester Teen Pregnancy Pact.

I speak with no specific knowledge of anyone involved, but as soon as I heard about it, I smelled horseshit. It does not surprise me that said horseshit originated with the high school principal. School administrators need to be somewhat full of shit to do their jobs correctly. They are constantly trying to please teachers, parents, and the central office, and often these three constituencies don't have the same interests, so the principal has to be good at telling each what they want to hear. A really good high school principal will have each of the interested parties firmly believing that he or she is completely on their side, even when their interests conflict with the interests of the other two.

It's a tough job and a tough balancing act. So the Mayor of Gloucester is saying there was no pact among teenage girls to get pregnant, and the principal has backed off the pact theory, which suggests to me that he made this up out of whole cloth in order to please the reporter from Time magazine. And let's face it, it does make a better, and more titillating story than, "our city is geographically isolated and economically depressed, and our young women don't see a lot of options for themselves," which is probably a lot closer to the truth but doesn't make nearly as good of a story as "out of control, sex-crazed teens plotting to get knocked up."

In any case, 17 girls got pregnant at that high school, and everybody's got their own favorite villains: The films of Judd Apatow! The Catholic Church! The School's Day Care Center! The School's failure to provide contraception! I don't think anybody gets pregnant because they saw Knocked Up, and I don't know off the top of my head if predominantly Catholic areas have a higher rate of teen pregnancy than others, and I'm not going to be convinced till I see the data. The idea that teens, rarely adept at long-term thinking, would plan to get pregnant because the school has a daycare center is just idiotic. And yeah, I do think school health centers should provide contraception, but if you're not willing to walk into CVS and lay down ten bucks for a box of condoms, I think it's probably unlikely you'll seek them out from the school nurse either.

In the end, I think it just comes down to economics. And everybody loves a story that allows them to get on their high horse about how other people should live.

Please, Please, Help Correct This Injustice

So PETA has announced their "Sexiest Vegetarians Alive".

I guess given our relative levels of celebrity, not to mention ripped-ness, it's no surprise that Anthony Keidis beat me in the male category. I can live with that.

What I'm having a hard time with is that I didn't even make the short list. I mean, okay, maybe I'm no Michael Franti, but for God's sake, are you telling me I'm no sexier than Leonard Nimoy? Steve Jobs? Don Imus? The guy looks like a reanimated corpse!

Sure, sure, I'm not exactly a celebrity, but come on, Jonathan Safran Foer is on the list! Like you'd know him if you tripped over him in the street!

I'm biking to work, I've rejoined the gym, and I haven't eaten meat since 1990. PETA members--help correct this injustice! Get me on the 2009 list! This may not have always been true, but I've gotta be sexier than Alec Baldwin at this point!

We Beat L.A.

Working in downtown Boston as I do, I saw the streets filled with Celtics fans streaming toward the victory parade this morning. I didn't go to the parade because the whole experience doesn't really appeal, but I really like the way that, at least for a couple of days, everybody seems to be friends here in Boston. Though we'll be back to cutting each other off in traffic and flipping each other the bird probably as early as this afternoon, at least for a day and a half, there's been a real feeling of bonhomie in the city. And yes, I did construct that sentence just so I'd have an excuse to say "bonhomie."

And here's another plus--the Celts have been so bad for so long prior to this year that you just haven't seen many people wearing their gear. So it's been red white and blue for the Sox and the Patriots, which is fine, but I'm delighted that green is now going to be part of our municipal color palette. It just helps mix things up a little around here.

And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I've just had the first ever use of the phrase "municipal color palette".

Clobberin' Time

I attempt to be a good person and not assume that people conform to demeaning stereotypes. I try to keep an open mind.

And yet, there is a certain amount of truth to the idea that the kind of people who work in hobby stores tend to be the kind of people who love their hobby and hate their customers. The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy and Jack Black's character in High Fidelity are perhaps the archetype of this stereotype (is that possible? Can you be two kinds of type?), but if you've ever ventured into a sports store or a knitting store, you've met these kind of people too.

And yet there is the occasional kind and helpful clerk at any of these stores--they're not all obese misanthropes.

Indeed, so it is at my regular comic book store, where the clerks do conform to some stereotypes (a certain level of geekiness, a few extra pounds) and shatter others (one of them is female, and all have been kind and helpful to me and my children whenever we've gone in there.) (And yeah, I have a regular comic book store, as well as a spouse and a life, so I suppose I'm shattering some stereotypes myself.)

And so, the other day, I found myself in a different, and rather glorious comic book store in a different part of town. It was expansive rather than cramped, and the boy and I strolled the aisles for quite a long time taking in the huge selection of trade paperbacks, manga (which I still don't really get), and regular ol' comic books before one of us got sick of it and demanded to leave. The boy posed a question to the clerk, and he replied in a kind and knowledgeable fashion, and I thought, well, this is a heck of a place.

But then, as we're leaving, the boy grabs a couple of the free postcards sitting out for anyone to take on the counter. And the guy wigs out because one of the cards was a pass to a screening of The Love Guru and he thought we'd taken two, when in fact we hadn't. This when the cards are sitting on the counter and, by the way, we'd just dropped a substantial hunk of change in his store.

"That guy's a freak," the boy said as we exited the store. It was a perfectly-timed maneuver where he was speaking loud enough that the guy could hear him, but not so loud that it looked like he wanted him to hear. Also the door was still wide open and closed right after the word "freak" escaped the boy's lips.

Normally I would upbraid the boy for his rudeness, but, in this case, all I could do was nod in assent. We kept walking, never to return.

Walkin' On a Sidewalk Hotter Than a Match Head

Well, I am working through the summer for the first time in 15 years, having moved from public school teaching to full time writing and now into teaching in a nonprofit.

It's definitely an adjustment, but I'm really appreciating summer in the city despite the fact that my days are not as crammed with leisure as I might otherwise like. (Especially given the fact that my SSIGWJLAH wife and awesome kids gave me a bunch of great books yesterday for Father's Day that I would quite enjoy curling up with right now. Or after I beat the last boss on House of the Dead 3. I've thought for a while that Tedious Boss Battle might be a good name for something--maybe my next novel. In my admittedly limited video game experience, boss battles are always tedious.)

Anyway, here are some good things about summer in Boston.

1.) The students are gone! Gone, I say! Yes, we love the money they bring into our local economy, and yes, they are the leaders of the future, but, as a group, college students are very very annoying. I say this as a former college student now ashamed of how very annoying I was at the time. People of Philadelphia! I apologize for having been annoying, lo these many years ago. Please know that I am reaping the karmic whirlwind by living in Boston. (Though, to be honest, I'm usually in bed before the Children of the Night even hit the town. But still.)

2.) Everybody else leaves for the weekend. People go down to the Cape or wherever they go, leaving the restaurants open for easy access, the streets devoid of traffic--basically it turns the city into a fun, nonthreatening version of the beginning of 28 Days Later or I am Legend. You can do anything on summer weekends with no waiting! Sweet!

3.)Youth soccer is over. Ahhhhhhhhh....

Injustice

Well, here in the Parkside section of Jamaica Plain (Schooly D wrote a song about us back in the day: PSK), we're feeling like Byata got robbed on the finale of Miss Rap Supreme.

I suppose it's possible that Rece Steele brought the dopest rhyme ever to the finale, but it was pretty impossible to tell because the whole freaking thing was bleeped out on VH1. (We suspect it had something to do with sex because she grabbed her crotch a lot, but that really could have been aggressive crotch-grabbing too.) But really, while Rece had an undeniable stage presence, I didn't find her rhymes all that remarkable, and I suspect that nonstop rage on the stage might get old after a while.

Oh well, despite Serch's continued insistence that it wasn't a game, it actually was a game. A game with a big prize, but a game nonetheless. Still, I thought they did a good job of reimagining the competition from The White Rapper show (and whatever happened to Shamrock? Anyone? Anyone?), and I do hope Ego Trip makes another rap competition reality show. But geez, I hope the right one wins next time. Serch--call me! I'm happy to be a non-celebrity judge! Tell everybody I'm the other guy from 3rd bass! Nobody will ever kinow!

Previews of Coming Attractions

Mark your calendars, people-- September 2 is the date my next YA novel, Forever Changes comes out. It's a novel about life, death, and math, and it might be the best thing I ever wrote. I know, I know, I've said that before, but really-- this book kicks butt. It's published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux and will hopefully be in bookstores everywhere, but, as I said, not until the early fall.

Which gives you plenty of time to save up for the following Halpin releases:

I Can See Clearly Now, a novel for adults coming from Villard Books in March 2009. What happens when a bunch of young, naive, and horny songwriters come together in 1972 under the questionable leadership of a washed-up folksinger to create educational cartoons for children? Read and find out!

Shutout, a novel for young adults coming from FSG sometime in 2009. Amanda and Lena have played soccer together for 6 years, but now they're in high school and Lena made varsity as a 9th grader and is hanging out with older girls and dating older boys. Can their friendship survive? And if Amanda's not Lena's best friend and the best goalie in town, then who is she? And what is her dad's unconventional insomnia cure? Read and find out!

The Half Life of Planets, a novel for young adults co-written with Emily Franklin and published by Hyperion, also, I think, in 2009. The kids at school call Liana a slut. They call Hank much worse, but really he's just a kid with Aspergers who's really into music. Can these two find love? We can only hope so!

Check out what I'm reading at www.goodreads.com, and be my friend on facebook or myspace.

Finally, my friend Deb is once again doing the 3 day walk to benefit the Komen Foundation-- you know, breast cancer research and treatment. Click here and pledge lots of cash for this most worthy and still sadly urgent cause.