David Barr Kirtley

Science fiction author and podcaster

Mailbag: I Am 8-Bit Sequel, Naming Kids Anakin

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Mailbag time. In this post I mentioned the book I Am 8-Bit: Art Inspired by Classic Videogames of the ’80s. The author of that book, Jon M. Gibson, writes:

Hey David. Glad you dig the book! We’re putting out an even bigger volume early next year, so stay tuned! Lots of great art that you haven’t seen yet!

Cool. So if you’re one of the folks here (and there were quite a few) who expressed an interest in I Am 8-Bit, keep an eye out for the follow-up as well.

In response to my recent post about naming children after fictional characters, writer buddy Mike Canfield writes:

I don’t know about books, but I was on a bus a few years ago and witnessed parents trying to get the attention of their toddler son “Anakin.” Well, it’s better than “Boba,” I guess.

Yeah, or Dooku. Nobody should be named Dooku … not even Dooku.

Although Tobias S. Buckell brings up an interesting point:

But isn’t naming a kid Anakin much like naming a kid Adolf? I mean, strictly speaking?

I don’t know. What do people think? Is there something a little off about naming your kid Anakin, considering that his namesake, Anakin Skywalker, went on to become Darth Vader, a character who deployed WMD and wiped out an entire planet’s worth of innocent civilians?

Dead But Dreaming Anthology Reprinted by Miskatonic River Press

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My first-ever anthology appearance was “The Disciple,” which was published in Dead But Dreaming, a book of Cthulhu Mythos fiction from DarkTales Publications. The book received a great response from readers. For example, Matthew T. Carpenter, who has reviewed 100+ Mythos books on Amazon.com, calls Dead But Dreaming “The absolute finest Lovecraftian collection of new fiction in more than a decade.” (He was also nice enough to mention my story as one of his favorites: “The best of these stories were excellent reads: ‘Bangkok Rules,’ in which a hitman finds he didn’t really want to know too much about his employer; ‘Why We Do It’ shows us life as a cultist; ‘The Disciple,’ about learning how to contact ancient evil entities in a university seminar setting; ‘Fire Breathing,’ about how callously victims are selected and how little anyone cares; ‘The Other Names,’ about learning to read by picking up the wrong book; and best of all is a vision of the end of the world in ‘Final Draft.’ It’s not that the rest of the stories were low quality. I just singled out the ones I liked best for special mention. I really do wish we could see more anthologies like this. A belated bravo to all who were involved.”)

Unfortunately, very few people ever got to actually see the anthology, because the publisher went out of business the same week that the book was released, and only 75 copies were printed. How hard is it to get a hold of one? Well, a few used copies are available on Amazon, but they’re a little pricey:


Fortunately, Dead But Dreaming is now being re-released by a new publisher, Miskatonic River Press, so hopefully the book will get a bit more exposure this time around. The book is apparently at the printer as we speak, and there’s a page up for the new edition at Amazon. And this time they even listed me as one of the authors:


That’s the first time I’ve been listed like that as an author at Amazon.com. It’s a small thing, but in the publishing world you have to take what you can get. I also like how they put that (Author) next to my name. So next time I wonder, “Am I really an author?” I can just go and check on Amazon.com. “Oh, yup. I am. Says so right there.”

For more on the anthology — including the complete table on contents — see my page for “The Disciple.” (That page also includes the illustration for my story that was done by Allen Koszowski for Weird Tales, and a link to the Pseudopod horror podcast audio production of the story.)

Naming Children After Literary Characters

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I like this staff recommendation card for Roger Zelazny’s The Great Book of Amber from Kepler’s bookstore in Palo Alto:

Roger Zelazny's The Great Book of Amber at Kepler's Bookstore in Palo Alto

And okay, yeah, I’ve considered it too.

I remember one time I actually came across an Amber internet message board where several teenagers had posted and said that their parents had named them after Amber characters. And of course there are a number of kids named after George R. R. Martin characters. I wonder how often this sort of thing happens, and what books have inspired the most kids’ names. It seems like the ultimate compliment for an author to receive — far more so than any award or review or whatever.

The Verdant Passage by Troy Denning

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I just came across this in the bookstore. Wizards of the Coast has repackaged Troy Denning’s novel The Verdant Passage in a really nice-looking trade paperback edition:

The Verdant Passage by Troy Denning

The book is set in the Dark Sun game world (which Denning co-developed). This is the campaign setting I was most into when I played Dungeons & Dragons back in middle school. It’s basically Lord of the Rings meets Mad Max (most vegetation has been wiped out by life-devouring magic, gladiatorial combat is big, and the hobbits are all feral cannibals). The world is absolutely brutal. All player characters were supposed to start out at level 3 just to give them a fighting chance, and even so you were supposed to roll up three or four characters per player because it was just assumed that the characters wouldn’t be lasting long.

This new edition of the novel uses the same cover art (by Brom, whose spectacular artwork was always key to defining the look of the world), but with the addition of that gigantic black number 1. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had this thing involving book series with numbers on them — those damned numbers practically compel me to collect the whole set, and that they put the number in gigantic typeface on the cover … I mean, that’s just not fair. It took an enormous act of will to return this book to the shelf.

It did remind me, though, of an incident I’d completely forgotten about. I read The Verdant Passage during a day that I stayed home sick from school. I spent the whole day reading, and as is wont to happen when you spend hour after hour reading a book, the book started to seem more and more real and reality receded further and further into the background. This effect was amplified by the fact that I was running a tremendous fever, and by mid-afternoon I had become positively delirious. In the story, the band of heroes — which includes a gladiator — discover that the vile sorcerer-king intends to sacrifice everyone in the arena as part of an evil magical ritual. I remember crawling out of bed toward the door, but being too weak to keep going, and I lay there on the floor with my forehead pressed into the carpet, with sweat just pouring off me, and I was somehow convinced that I was both myself and the gladiator character, and that if I didn’t manage to drag myself off the floor and out the door and go save the world, then everyone was going to die.

Eventually, of course, my fever came down, and I realized that I am not in fact a totally badass gladiator warrior. (Wait. Or am I? Actually, I guess I kind of am. But I digress…) It was actually a pretty cool experience, and sort of made me wish that I could read books while delirious more often.

I Am 8-Bit by Jon M. Gibson

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Holy crap, what a find! While browsing through the Art section of the bookstore last night I came across (and instantly acquired) I Am 8-Bit: Art Inspired by Classic Videogames of the ’80s by Jon M. Gibson (and featuring a foreword by Chuck Klosterman).

I am 8 bit by jon m gibson

This book combines some of my greatest loves (pop surrealist art, ’80s pop culture, and videogames), so I probably would’ve bought it even if most of the art was only so-so, but actually the artwork is spectacular, and I like just about everything in here. Sorry art critics, but my favorite art tends to be quirky, representational, and narrative, and this stuff fits the bill perfectly. In Amanda Visell‘s Level 1016, Frogger hopelessly contemplates an endless landscape of criss-crossing traffic-heavy highways. Ryan Bubnis‘s Mourning the Loss of the Princess depicts Link with vacant eyes, rotten teeth, and threadbare clothing. The artist explains, “I was never skilled enough to beat Gannon and save Princess Zelda … So I thought it would be funny and interesting to revisit Link years after his defeat and see how he was coping.” In Martin Cendreda‘s Luigi Bros., Lugi stares dejectedly at an arcade machine and laments, “How come it’s never called ‘Luigi Bros’ …” In Greg “Craola” Simkin‘s Pac-Man in Hospice, a decrepit Pac-Man sits in a rocking chair and is fed an IV drip of pac pellets while characters from other videogames of the era cavort about him. And finally, in Jason Sho Green‘s Putting the Super in Mario, Mario faces a bed upon which the princess is splayed, naked and seductive, and an uncertain Mario checks the cheat sheet he’s written on his palm, which reads “up up down down left right B A start.”

Free Fiction from Alpha Workshop Writers

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Fellow Alpha staffer Karina Sumner-Smith‘s story “The Voices of the Snakes” is now available as a free audio program over at Podcastle. The story, told from the point of view of Medusa as she converses with her head of snakes, is beautifully written and evocative.

  “Hello poison, hello grave-specter, hello nightmare,” the little green grass snake called, his tiny voice high and all his sibilants hissed. He flicked his tongue and uncurled his sleepy coils. “Hello dung heap, hello monstrosity, hello ruin.”

This podcast appeared last week over at Fantasy magazine, and while I was over there I noticed that another Alpha person, workshop alum Jeanette Westwood, also has a story up, “The Banyan Tree,” which I remember reading at Alpha.

Social Bonding Through Horror

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Last night I swung by Borders in downtown Palo Alto, and of course I checked out how they were doing in terms of stocking books that include me. (One copy of the Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008 trade paperback, three copies of the mass market paperback, and a princely five copies of The Living Dead.) While I was there in the horror anthologies section, a father and his son — who looked about twelve — appeared. The dad was introducing his son to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. The son took down a volume and said, “Does this have that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ story?” and the dad said, “Yeah, so either get that one or ‘At the Mountains of Madness.'” The son said, “What’s that about?” and the dad said, “Well, it’s about these … mountains … of madness.” (I guess it’s been a while since he read it.) Anyway, it always warms my heart to see a father and son bonding over unnameable eldritch terrors.

And speaking of The Living Dead, last week’s New York Review of Science Fiction reading series with me and John Langan went swimmingly. The event was scheduled against the second presidential debate, so I was a little worried that that would affect the turnout, but in fact quite a lively crowd showed up. (One attendee suggested that, given a choice between zombie horror and presidential politics, the audience had gone with the less-scary alternative.)

Before I read my story “The Skull-Faced Boy,” I told an anecdote that went something like this: “I’d never really written any horror before, but back around the time I graduated from college my life had become so miserable that horror was the only way I could express all my angsty angst. I’m happy to get a chance to read this story tonight to a live audience because this sort of reminds me of going on camping trips as a kid and telling ghost stories around the campfire. In fact, I went on a family camping trip shortly after writing this story, and so I actually did once read this story around a campfire. One of the people along on that trip was one of my dad’s colleagues, who went on to become the first and only female tenured physics faculty member at Stanford. She’s not a big horror fan, and I think the story really freaked her out. It’s been years now, but every time I see her she still mentions how scared she was by my story about the vampires, and I have to tell her, ‘Actually, it was zombies … geez, I thought you were supposed to be smart.'”

John Langan also posted about the evening (he notes some interesting points of congruence between his story and mine), and so did Jordache, who reports of the story I read, “The story follows a young sentient zombie during a zombie invasion and what happens to him when he gets in contact with his still-human family. I really enjoyed the story and was moved by it. I wasn’t expecting to be moved by zombie stories … I expected a lot of gore. It says a lot about the quality of the stories in this collection.” I also met for the first time the writers Carrie Laben, Rhodi Hawk, and M. M. De Voe, as well as Hippocampus Press editor Derrick Hussey (who you can see in this clip from The Ali G Show). (Also present, apparently, was David Wellington, author of the Monster Island zombie series, though I never really got a chance to say hi.)

John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley on Hour of the Wolf

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This morning I appeared alongside John Joseph Adams on Jim Freund’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on WBAI 99.FM in New York to discuss John’s recent anthologies The Living Dead and Seeds of Change. I also gave a reading of my story “The Skull-Faced Boy.”

John Joseph Adams   David Barr Kirtley

Below are some of the highlights from the show, including — right near the beginning — me coming one consonant away from getting myself into trouble with the FCC when I begin to discuss Catherine Cheek’s story “She’s Taking Her Tits to the Grave.”

Part 1 – Discussion
Humorous zombies?, Joe Hill, Owen’s King’s Who Can Save Us Now?, Seeds of Change, The Living Dead cover art

Part 2 – Reading
“The Skull-Faced Boy” by David Barr Kirtley, read by the author

Part 3 – Callers
Andy Duncan, Zora Neale Hurston, George Romero, From Dusk Til Dawn, Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead

My Political Cartoons from College

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Someone recently requested that I post some of the political cartoons I did when I was an undergrad, so while I’ve got the scanner out anyway, I decided that I would. (The strip pissed off enough people that I didn’t really want my name on it, but the editors insisted I be given credit, so we went with my initials, hence the “by D.K.” thing. Also, I redacted the names because I’m a nice guy.)

During hockey games against arch-rival school Bowdoin, it was a tradition for students to hurl objects onto the ice — objects such as oranges, tennis balls, and in one legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) case a decapitated cow’s head from a local slaughterhouse. Security became really tight for these games, and here we have a student who’s been caught trying to sneak in a few oranges under his coat:


I still remember walking into my first hockey game, which was like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. Everyone in the audience was screaming, gesticulating, and massively intoxicated. The alcohol-laden exhalations were so thick in the air that they practically knocked you over. Students were leaning over the boards, yelling and gesturing and throwing stuff at the opposing players. One guy behind me yelled, “Hey goalie! I’m in your head! I’m in your head, man!” continuously for over two hours. There was much taunting, threats, and speculation about the sexual proclivities of both the players and their mothers. I was in awe of this. It was a spectator sport that was actually fun, since I’ve always enjoyed shouting at people a lot more than watching sports. Sadly, with school admissions getting tougher each year, the students became more and more studious and less and less wild, and by my senior year the hockey games had become sedate affairs, with students sitting politely with their hands folded in their laps. I tried to rally the troops, to bring back the grand old days, by doing all the trash-talking myself — one lone obscene voice piercing the night’s complacency, and I got thrown out. It was the end of an era.

This next comic involves a political scandal at the school. As I recall, it came out that one of the student body presidents had been in his office late into the night making phone calls to everyone he knew on planet earth, with all the charges going to the student body. This was in the wake of the Clinton impeachment (which seemed absurd even at the time and seems infinitely more so now that we’ve had a president who seems determined to do six impeachable things before breakfast each morning). Anyway, that’s why the two things are tied together here:


This next comic appeared in the winter of ’99 and played on the then-current fear of calamity caused by the Y2K bug. (“Jan Plan” was a special one-month, one-class January semester.)


And finally, here’s one involving the dean of students, whom we hated because of an incident in which he chewed us out over a party we’d had. The background for this strip: A TV had gone missing from a dorm lounge, and the dean suspected that a particular group of students had moved the TV into their private suite, so over break — while the students were away — he instructed security to search the suite. This search was a violation of school policy, which required that room searches be done only after the students had been informed and with them present.


I was really proud of how this one turned out. The first stormtrooper I tried to draw, on the left, looks a little screwy, but I really nailed it with the stormtrooper on the right. Unfortunately, the editors cropped the image in such a way that they cut out half my good stormtrooper, but whatever. We were sure that the dean was going to flip when he saw this cartoon, and that we’d be visiting him again real soon, but actually he loved the strip, and I heard that afterward he got a Darth Vader statuette or something that he kept on his desk. You can never tell with some people.

Sketches for My Short Story “The Skull-Faced Boy”

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I thought I’d post some of the doodles I’ve done for my short story “The Skull-Faced Boy.” I used to (and may again someday) do “concept art” to help me think through a story. Back in the summer of 2000, I wanted to write a zombie story, but I didn’t have any ideas. So I started just sketching zombies, such as this:

The skull-faced boy by David Barr Kirtley has appeared on the pseudopod podcast and in the anthology the living dead

I liked how that one came out — with the pieces of skull showing through his face — so the next zombie I drew had even more of just a skull for a face. For whatever reason, I imagined this next zombie as wearing a military uniform and leading an army:
The skull-faced boy by David Barr Kirtley has appeared on the pseudopod podcast and in the anthology the living dead

That drawing inspired me to dream up a whole sequence of events to explain who this character was and why he had an army. A few days later, I knew what the story’s climax would be, and drew it. If you haven’t read the story, this next picture is a monumental spoiler, so I’m going to put it behind a link:
 
“The Skull-Faced Boy” Image #3 SPOILER
 

When “The Skull-Faced Boy” went up on Pseudopod, at least one listener complained that it wasn’t plausible for a skull-faced boy without lips to be able to enunciate clearly, and that this totally ruined the story. (Though apparently the part about everyone on earth simultaneously rising from the dead wasn’t a problem.) Since then, I’ve spent hours trying to see how well I can talk with my lips pulled back, and I seem to be able to manage pretty well, in fact. (I’m reluctant to actually carve off my face in order to do a really meaningful experiment on this, but if someone else wants to give it a go, let me know your results.) And anyway, I went back and checked the story, and it never actually says that the skull-faced boy is missing his lips. The only parts of his facial anatomy that are specifically identified as being missing are his nose and cheeks, so maybe he’s still got enough flesh around the mouth not to suffer any kind of embarrassing speech impediment, which I’d imagine could be really socially debilitating for a living corpse who’s missing most of his face. Anyway, if you’re one of those people who just couldn’t get over how a guy without lips could talk (do the creators of He-Man get these complaints?), I drew this last sketch of the skull-faced boy with lips, so you can picture this while you’re reading or listening to the story, and hopefully that’ll set your mind at ease.

The skull-faced boy by David Barr Kirtley has appeared on the pseudopod podcast and in the anthology The Living Dead

Palo Alto: Pluto’s Restaurant and Maggie Taylor Exhibition

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Here’s a shot of a restaurant in Palo Alto called Pluto’s. Strangely, I feel right at home in this place. Can’t really put my finger on why…

The wall of Plutos restaurant in Palo Alto

I also stopped by a gallery that’s showing work by Maggie Taylor, whose gorgeous and surreal Victorian-themed art combines photography with computer effects. (Reminds me a bit of Magritte and a bit of Alex Gross.) Many of the pieces can be seen on her website or on the gallery’s site. Here’s the cover of one of her books:

The cover of the book Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Maggie Taylor

The Living Dead Anthology Appearances; Neil Gaiman at Columbia University

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I’ll be coming back to New York at the end of the week and staying for two weeks, and I’ll be doing some promotional stuff for the zombie anthology The Living Dead. On October 4th I’ll be appearing alongside John Joseph Adams to discuss the anthology on Jim Freund’s Hour of the Wolf radio show, and then on October 7th I’ll be appearing alongside John Joseph Adams and John Langan at the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series, where I’ll be reading my offbeat zombie horror story “The Skull-Faced Boy.”

I’m also hoping to make it to see Neil Gaiman at Columbia University next Tuesday, so if anyone thinks they might attend, let me know and I’ll keep an eye out for you: 

Neil Gaiman reads The Graveyard Book at Columbia University

Filed Under: nyc

Wil Wheaton Comments on My Blog

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Holy shit, no way! I just got a comment on my blog from Wil Wheaton! In response to this post. (And if you don’t know who Wil Wheaton is, here are some basic facts about him.)

Wil Wheaton (and I emphasize Wil Wheaton, man) writes:

I will admit that I have a google news alert set up to let me know when someone mentions me in their blog, so that’s why I’m here.

My copy of The Living Dead arrived earlier this week, and I spent much of yesterday morning reading it.

Because I’d read this post before the book arrived, yours was the first story I turned to. Not that my opinion means much, but I really liked it. It’s damn hard to do anything original in the zombie genre, but you pulled it off, man.

I look forward to reading more of your work!

Wow, thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed the story, and thanks for stopping by!

(And if you’re just tuning in, the story he’s talking about is “The Skull-Faced Boy.”)

The Living Dead Anthology “In Contention” for New York Times Best Seller List

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In response to my last post about the anthology The Living Dead, epic_socks writes:

What a coincidence–I just bought the book last night. Your story was kind of completely awesome. I haven’t gotten very far in, but the first few were really good as well. And now I have to go find the other zombie anthologies recommended in the preface.

Thanks, epic_socks! I’m glad you enjoyed my story, and thanks for buying the book. And speaking of that, I just saw this post by Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books:

So, I just found out that the Night Shade title The Living Dead made the NY Times best seller REPORTING “In Contention” list.

It doesn’t mean the book made the list (regular or extended), but what it probably means is that it shifted enough copies at the distributors and wholesalers that it was one of the top books in its category (trade paperback adult fiction), and is thus considered “In Contention,” and retailers are asked to enter the number of copies sold. Without this prompting, a book only gets counted if it is a “write-in” title, and books that are write-ins almost never make the list.

A rough estimate shows that just under 100 books get pre-listed in this category each week.

I’ll find out on Tuesday if we made the extended list. But still, it’s kind of cool. For the last couple years, one of our company goals has been to crack the NY Times Extended list. This is a nice first step.

Oh, and if you were planning on buying The Living Dead, or get copies for people as a gift, if you were to all run out and buy it this week, that might help us for next week. If everybody who reads this message buys 2 copies, and posts this message to their blog, we’ll be on! :)

The Agony Column Interviews Jeremy Lassen about The Living Dead

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The cover of the anthology The Living Dead, edited by John Joseph Adams    Here’s an interesting interview about the anthology The Living Dead (which contains my story “The Skull-Faced Boy”) and about some of the political subtext of zombie fiction. The interviewer is Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column and the interviewee is Jeremy Lassen of Night Shade Books.

A sample:

Rick Kleffel: I’m going to read Clive Barker’s comment on zombies from The Book of the Dead, the introduction. He says: “Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door … with their faces falling off. And you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but there they are, after all, eating the cat! And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.” Now, I think this is a really interesting comment on some of the political nature of zombies, because we have seen that as a nation we’ve kind of been acting in a mindless fashion, and I think the resurgence of interest in horror fiction is somewhat a result, at least to my mind, of our current economic crisis.

Jeremy Lassen: Well, that’s definitely the case. There’s always been a tie between horror and politics. There’s an old saw that says that horror fiction is always popular when Republicans are in office, and that sort of has proven to be true, continuously. I guess you could add the corollary that the economy always ends up in the tank when Republicans are in office, and so thereby makes the economy-and-horror connection. But that’s interesting, casting this as “the liberal nightmare.” Because that is sort of the case: The fear of the masses who vote against their own self-interest.

Roger Barr

My grandfather Roger Barr passed away early this morning at the age of 98. He was my mom’s father, and was my last surviving grandparent. He was being cared for by my uncle Steve (his son) and aunt Denice — both medical professionals — and was still sharp and good-humored in his final days. Yesterday […]

David Barr Kirtley

David Barr Kirtley is the host of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, for which he’s interviewed over four hundred guests, including George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, Simon Pegg, Margaret Atwood, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Ursula K. Le Guin. His short fiction appears in the book Save Me Plz and Other Stories.