Publication Day

Make It Stop in West Hollywood, USC, and the world

Make It Stop is officially out in the world!

Yesterday I celebrated by putting in a few hours of work on a client project, driving up to LA, and having an early dinner at Dinah’s (if you know, you know). Last night I attended a gathering held in honor of Terese Svoboda and myself in Mar Vista and made some new friends and reconnected with some old ones (Hi Nathan!). It seems like yesterday when I was up in Victoria BC visiting Terese on her houseboat, talking about our books and learning about orcas, yet here we are.

(Speaking of orcas, there was no Orca Alert last week due to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which I’ll get to in a minute. Orca Alert is a weekly round-up of links from the world of art, culture, and science and is available for paid subscribers to Message from the World. Shout out to all my supporters!

Terese has written a superb novel called Dog on Fire that’s a sneaky whodunnit / Midwestern noir that explores the aftermath of a sibling’s mysterious death. As she explained last night it’s not a mystery but has a mystery in it and it’s not a ghost story but features a ghost. It explores the ways grief filters through our lives in unpredictable ways like water after a hard rain. Sometimes it quietly seeps into the earth, sometimes it goes all over the place and makes a mess of things. Terese and I will be reading together at Book Soup tonight. We will try not to make a mess of things but no promises…

Here’s a list of all the events I’ve got planned in April and May. Please note times and dates may have changed from previous posting.

Wednesday April 26
Book Soup in West Hollywood at 7pm with Terese Svoboda. (Tonight!)

Tuesday May 2
Stories Books & Café in LA at 7pm with JD O’Brien, Francesca Lia Block, Dan Ozzi, and Chris L. Terry.

Wednesday May 3 
Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ at 7pm with JD O’Brien.

Thursday May 4
Wooden Tooth Records in downtown Tucson, AZ at 5:30pm with JD O’Brien

Friday May 5
Bright Side Books in Flagstaff, AZ at 4pm with JD O’Brien. Book signing with festivities to follow at Uptown Pubhouse at 5pm.

Sunday May 7 
2060 Logan Ave in Barrio Logan in San Diego, CA from 10am to 3pm with JD O’Brien. Book signing and hangout at my studio above Valazoz Art / Strange Daze Books.

Thursday May 11
Black Saddle Bikes in Madison, WI at 7pm

Friday Mat 12
SubText Books in St. Paul, MN at 7pm with Emma Johnson

Saturday May 13
Exile in Bookville, Chicago IL at 7pm with Joe Meno & Amelia Dellos

Monday May 15
Lion’s Tooth in Milwaukee, WI at 6pm

Wednesday May 17
Small’s Bar in Detroit, MI at 5pm with Aaron Burch

Thursday May 18
Two Dollar Radio HQ in Columbus, OH at 5pm with Aaron Burch & David E. Yee

Friday May 19
Dear Mom in Indianapolis, IN at 7pm with Aaron Burch, Sam Berman & Natalie Lima

Sunday May 21
Cleveland, OH at Blue Arrow Records at 4pm with Aaron Burch, Jen Larson & Annie Zaleski

More Make It Stop News

If you missed it, Make It Stop received a gobsmackingly great review in the LA Times last week.

When you send your work out into the world, you do so with the knowledge that no one is obligated to read it much less respond to it. If people don’t like it, that’s the way it goes, and if they do, same deal. That said, this review feels especially good.  

There were so many times when I thought the smart thing to do would be to put the novel in a drawer and forget about it. I’ve written several books that will never see the light of day. Sometimes it’s a failure to execute. Sometimes the idea isn’t very good. Sometimes it’s a matter of taking on a project that’s too ambitious. There’s no shame in pulling the plug on a novel that isn’t coming together. Every published writer I know has at least one book in the drawer, if not more.

But Make It Stop was different. I felt like I had a good idea, maybe even a great idea, and I was determined to get it right. I’ll have more to say about the steps I took to make it better down the road, but right now I’m glad that I stuck with it. That sounds a little self-serving but I don’t mean it to be because I received a ton of advice and encouragement from friends who read the manuscript, my agent and his team, and the editors at Rare Bird. I’m grateful to so many people who helped me.

In other Make It Stop news, I put together a list of Essential Punk Reads for Bookshop and appeared on the Emo Brown Podcast. The last time I was on Emo Brown we recorded it in a tiny little closet in the basement of a brewery. Now Emo Brown has a full-on multi-camera studio and the podcast is a party! It’s not like any podcast I’ve been on before. (I come in at the second half at 1:09)

Lastly, if you’ve already picked up a copy of Make It Stop—thank you—please consider leaving a review at Amazon or Goodreads or wherever.  

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

I had a blast at the annual LA Times Festival of Books and tried to cram as much as possible into two days. I attended panels featuring David Ulin, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh, saw James Ellroy in conversation with Michael Connelly, had a book signing at the Rare Bird booth and went to a small book party at North Figueroa Bookshop in Highland Park—and that was just Saturday!

On Sunday it was more of the same with a panel featuring Alex Espinosa, Saeed Jones, and Matthew Zapruder, whose book The Story of a Poem I’m absolutely loving. I sat on a panel with Tracy Brown, Sammy Harkham, Sarah Priscus & Antoine Wilson and hugged and said hello to what felt like hundreds of people.

Somehow I missed Adam Sternbergh with whom I spoke for this LA Times profile about his new book The Eden Test. I loved talking with Adam and our conversation was all over the place.

As usual, I’m going to share a few excerpts from our conversation that didn’t make it into the piece. The Eden Test deals with two people in an isolated cabin in the woods. We discussed the pandemic’s role in the shaping of the novel, which led to a broader conversation about horror movies and it’s implications.

JR: I wonder if like the resurgence of horror movies has something to do with the fact that we all kind of lived through one—or at least many of us did.

AS: Yeah, for sure. I think that's definitely true. I think there were many times when I was working on this book when I felt that. I like horror movies—in theory. I’m a scaredy cat. I don't really enjoy the sensation of being scared as a form of entertainment. So I don't go out of my way to watch a lot of horror movies. If there's a movie that people are really going on about or that's getting great reviews, I will definitely seek them out. I watched Midsommar. I thought that movie was great. But It's against my essential nature to sit down and watch something that I know is gonna make me feel scared. And yet there were definitely moments when I was working on the book, I was like, “Am I writing a horror novel?” Is that what I'm doing? Because I'm like the last person that I would expect to do that. And yet it had so many trappings of a classic horror situation, right? It's like two people there in a cabin. Things start to go wrong. They're finding weird things. There's weird noises outside… I was like, “This isn’t an odd Raymond Chandler novel anymore. This is like a slasher film.”

JR: Interesting! (I didn’t really say that. I’m just breaking up the text a little.)

AS: I think it's because it was in the air. It's interesting to me how many really great, twisted horror films have come out in the last few years have found an audience. There's a logistical reason for that. During COVID it was much easier to make a movie about four people trapped in a cabin then to make a movie about Roman gladiators in the arena, right? But also they’re touching a very raw nerve that I think is still exposed from the experience of the pandemic and being torn away from each other in a way that had never happened in my lifetime. And also this feeling of fear that, if you're lucky, you've never felt before, a fear about your future. I know that it's a fear that people all over the world feel all the time. An interesting lesson to me about the pandemic was how insulated some of us are from that fear and what it feels like when you actually have to face it.

When I asked Adam about his theater background, specifically about his training and interest in improve, he made some really interesting connections:

AS: There's a really straight line between comedy and thrillers, and comedy and horror, with Jordan Peele being the best example of it. Both of them are about building tension. It's just in comedy you release the tension, you have a punch line, right? In horror, you don't release the tension. Or you wait to release the tension. Watching Get Out, I think what's so interesting about that movie is if you just skew it 15 degrees it’s a comedy sketch except it has a different resolution. It's a very similar idea. It's like a fish out of water premise. A person is put into a certain situation and then the pressure is turned up. Crime fiction, in a lot of ways, is the same thing. It's about creating tension, ratcheting up the tension, and then having some kind of cathartic resolution. It's just usually in crime fiction the resolution isn't funny.

Proof of concept:

Thanks for reading and see you next week!