Tag: Chicago

Squeeze Play

Romance and sports don’t mix. That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. It’s one of those weird rules, hidden and unarticulated, that seem to underly any given genre. It’s a tenet that gets passed down to new writers, not as gospel so much as in the form of a mild […]

Red Eye

15 hours on the road and I was my own red-eye on I-94’s corridor of stripclubs, fireworks and roadkill, racing past dead deer in Michigan, then Gary, Indiana’s steel mills and through Chicagoland, the Sears Tower in the distance waiting for its evil eye, till the highway gave […]

A Perfect Frame

Early in Eddie Campbell’s painterly “picture novel,” The Black Diamond Detective Agency, the main character, Jackie Hardin, says, “We thought we had all the time in the world…. Tomorrow can take it all away” (7).  And with the implied death of a young daughter and a bucolic description […]

Fred Saberhagen, RIP

City on Fire and Days of Atonement author Walter Jon Williams has a eulogy up at his blog for Fred Saberhagen, who died a little over a week ago. Williams writes about Saberhagen’s unacknowledged influence on fantasy, science fiction and horror. And he tells a couple of nice […]

In the Sewer with the Alligators

I’m tired of the two-camera, hour-long drama. I’m tired of the Oscar-oriented mainstream film. I’m tired of “literary fiction,” you know, respectable middlebrow art. I don’t enjoy everyday reality heightened with swelling strings. I’m tired of realism’s conventions; so I’ve been turning to comics, pulp fiction, cartoons and […]