I ran across this review of Logorrhea from a newspaper in Baton Rouge, and thought I'd excerpt the bit about my story:
Alex Irvine's "Semaphore," is more of a conventional story with hints at the supernatural. In Irvine's tale, a Jewish boy in New Jersey whose brother is killed in World War II takes up spelling to deal with his loss. "At breakfast I started spelling words out loud. My sisters got into it. They collected newspapers and hit me with whatever they could find, and then it turned into a game they played among themselves. Each of them focused on words that began with the same letter as their first names: Miriam, Eva, Ruth, Deborah. After a month of this, I was convinced that I knew every word in the language that began with those four letters. Mnemonic, elegiac, rotisserie, diverticulitis. Malevolent, esoterica, rubicon, demesne."
The boy suffers visitations from his brother's ghost who gives him cryptic messages that the boy can't unravel until he has a sudden epiphany that is as good as any you're likely to find in a short story. Even in a book with stories made of words and about words, Irvine's story stands out. This is a story that a logophile — a lover of words — will cherish.
A couple of short story sales to note, both in the UK (they'll be my first magazine appearances there): "Black Lagoon," a noirish Detroit story to Crimewave, and "Shad's Mess," a comic SF novelette to Postscripts.
There's new Supernatural-related interview up here.
Also, things are brewing again on the Marvel front...
1 comment:
"People can write about whatever they want to write about. That doesn't mean that other people are obligated to encourage them or give them a platform."
You said this. And, well, I'll back you up on that. Becasue your right. I mean I'm not into censoring people, but you know, you don't have to read every damn thing that somebody rights. Granted, a guy might be a good writer but come on, with a title like that, well, the book better be really good or else he's just selling a title. I hate gimmicks. But I don't want to jump the gun becasue I have read some of his work, but I mean, really, you know? a title like that? Come on! You know he wants to piss some people off. He's the antagonist of his own novel. I mean now that I think of it.
Somebody said to me once, a friend's father, it was after we just got done running a five mile race. I beat him up the hill. It was the last stretch of the race. I remember running with him and he told me to go on the hell ahead if I could. I felt bad. I can be such a pussy sometimes. But he said people have to have thick skin so shit just rolls right off of you. I didn't know what he was talking about. I was such an idiot then. But later on I came to understand.
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