If you read today’s Buzz, you saw but a small portion of my exclusive interview with Anita Blake scribe Laurell K. Hamilton. This is the interview in its entirety.

Matt Knicl: Who do you feel is your target audience?

Laurell K Hamilton: I don’t really target an audience. I write and if I’m enjoying it and having fun then I hope that the reader will enjoy it and have fun. In all honesty, when the sexual content was lower the demographics were 11 to 60 plus, women as well as men. I think the comic book has brought a lot of men in, but we’re seeing more men in line.

Matt: Some fans feel you put parts of your personal life into your books. Do you feel this is true or not?

Laurell: No. I put very little of my personal life on the page.

Matt: How much of the negative and positive fan feedback do you allow to influence your writing?

Laurell: I’m going to quote Thornton Wilder at you. He said criticism, negative or positive, should never end up on the written page. The people who love you can’t take too seriously because then you think you’re wonderful, and nobody’s that wonderful. And the people that hate you – that’s not true either because they hate you. They don’t know you. They hate you because of words on paper. I actually don’t read any critique or criticism; I don’t read any of it. If it’s negative, you sit there and feel bad and if it’s positive you don’t feel like you can live up to it. So either way it messes with your head. As a working writer, you just can’t afford to get caught up in it.

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Lazy Narnia

People tend to compare the book to its movie adaption, so when coming out of theaters the first thing spoken is the comment about how the movie fared compared to the book. My friends, and other professional critics, have pointed out that the movie was very different from the book. For some, this is a point of weakness, but for me, that’s actually a strength.

The Narnia books are children’s books, and this is due to the immature use of fantasy characters and the allegorical nature of the text. J.R.R. Tolkein was a friend of C.S. Lewis, but he hated Narnia because it was a patchwork quilt of fantasy cliché for some reason - werewolves and minotaurs and fauns and centaurs and talking animals live in a 100 Acre Woods type forest with little sense of practicality and a functioning secondary world. The big secret is that the books are all Christian allegory, which isn’t a bad thing, but direct allegory is a thing of Aesop and Kipling, not more complicated fantasy like Tolkien or Neil Gaiman.

I’ve read all the Narnia books several times, but lucky for me that was awhile ago. I don’t really remember Prince Caspian exactly, so when I saw the film I wasn’t putting both side by side to see which was “better.” But, I found the film to be a great movie because it not only adapted the book to a post-LotR mainstream audience, but it was able to add depth to the secondary world that the book lacked. I mean that the movie had hundreds of people shown in some scenes whereas the book would list the exact number of characters present, which would usually be about ten to fifteen characters (which makes you wonder how a sparsely populated world was supposed to operate, which was one of Tolkien’s beefs with the books, as LotR went to great lengths to make Middle Earth a realistic place with towns and commerce and economy). The action scenes were unique and made up for the lack of action during the mandatory allegorical dialog downtime in the beginning. I actually found the movie’s violence adding to the credibility of the world.

I’m sure they will do more movies, though which books I’m not sure (probably Dawntreader, Magician’s Nephew and Last Battle), and I welcome them, even though I may have been hesitant to begin with, because in the end Dinsey could have done much worse.

Hey kids! Sorry for not updating for a few days - the Convention was amazing! There was so much to see, so much to do - everything vaguely nerd was there - from Japanese designer toys to trading card games to comics. Walking around, there was so much going on you actually forget to eat and drink. You bump into famous people and realize they are human beings, or hear them speak and become more convinced they are a literary god. I’m still absorbing the events, but I’ll share with you some of the cool news I picked up. Read the rest of this entry »

After researching supernatural romance detective novels for my column in The Buzz, I decided to give some of the books I haven’t yet read a try. So far I had only read all the Anita Blake books.

Rachel Morgan is a different sort of detective. Granted, it’s in the same vein as Anita Blake, and there are some similarities, and as far as the book’s gimmick goes, the differences of this world are more interesting. Instead of having characters operate in the back alleys of our world, the world of The Hollows series is an alternate history where bioengineering accidentally wiped out many humans. With so many mortals missing, the once hidden races, like vampires and leprechauns, now stood out. So instead of an all out war, every species integrated into human society. Of course, not without obstacles. Read the rest of this entry »

4 out of 4 stars

The Spiderwick Chronicles is Nickelodeon’s second film venture in recent years adapting a children’s series into a movie. A Series of Unfortunate Events was a great movie, unlike Spiderwick, which was purely adequate.

Based on the book series of the same name by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi (a Magic: The Gathering card artist), we see twins Jared and Simon (Freddy Highmore), their older sister Mallory and recently divorced mother (Mary-Louise Parker of Weeds) moving into an old, abandoned house. It doesn’t take long for Jared to discover his great uncle Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around Us. Read the rest of this entry »

Bored of the Rings

Okay, before I begin, let me preface this by saying I’m not against Tolkien’s epic fantasy. However, there are things about it that need addressing. I’m not attacking his writing style or even the story, rather how Tolkien chose to present them. If you like Lord of the Rings, that’s great, but I’m going to voice a different opinion, which is my own and shouldn’t influence your liking of the book. This is aimed more towards people who haven’t yet read Tolkien.

Let me first say that Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy, or even a quadrilogy. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings as one book, but the publisher broke it into three separate novels. It might be more pertinent to say that Lord of the Rings is then two novels in four volumes - this includes The Hobbit (which is essential to LotR - Fellowship of the Rings references events and characters from The Hobbit to the point of annoyance throughout). But this is still inaccurate as The Silmarillion, the history of Middle Earth, reveals important plot points about LotR, like that Sauron is a demon and Gandalf is basically an angel. This means to read LotR, you need to read five volumes of text. Throw in the Lost Tales and Tolkien’s other Middle Earth writings, and you have a ten volume monster on your hands. Read the rest of this entry »

Greeting programs!

If you’ve been in the Illini Union Bookstore (not to be confused with the Illinois University Bookstore) this past week, you may have seen a book display of spring leisure titles picked by staff members. I’ve got my own little section! No, 70% of these aren’t comics, but they are good, fun reads. Some are light-hearted, but some will f^$% you up.

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Sister Act 3: This Time The Act Is For Real

Archaia Studios Press continues to release diverse titles. A recent series, The Sisterhood, focuses on an order of nuns whose job is to protect mankind by trapping demons in their body. Written by Christopher Golden (Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire) and Thomas Sniegoski (Owlboy), this is an action-packed mystery story filled with Christian mythology.

I spoke with both authors about the series. Read the rest of this entry »

I Got 99 Problems But A Vamp Ain’t One

I’m a fan of vampires in all their forms; from the B-movie clichés of Buffy to the oversexed “Jean Claudes” of Laurell K. Hamilton. I’ve taken a class of the history of vampires and have dozens of books and comics featuring these undead fiends.

But what irks me is that when I ask many people about vampires - those who claim to be fans of the genre - have not even read Dracula. They’ve seen Interview with a Vampire and maybe read I Am Legend. Big whoop, I say. Vampires are part of a larger tradition than any one author and their legacy is rooted in the myths of Eastern Europe - myths of horrible, homicidal beasts that lurked in the night.

Author David Wellington gets that. I interviewed Mr. Wellington regarding his new novel, 99 Coffins, a novel that gets back to roots of vampire fiction. Read the rest of this entry »

Cut It Out

I’m a comic book guy, so why am I giving my two bits about a movie? Well, many people know that Sweeney Todd the movie is based on the Stephen Sondheim Sweeny Todd musical from the late 70s and 80s. What fewer know is the musical was based on an obscure 1840 penny dreadful titled The String of Pearls.

Wikipedia attributes the creation of Sweeney Todd to Thomas Peckett Prest, a hack writer that plagiarized the works of Charles Dickens among writing other penny dreadfuls. The original String of Pearls was published by Edward Lloyd, a man constantly on the run for plagiarism and other illegal enterprises. When Lloyd published a book, according to Dick Collins in his introduction to the Wordsworth Edition, he would buy a story cheap from the original writer and then have his hacks, Prest and J.M. Rymer (supposed creator of Varney the Vampire) creatively edit the work so they could pass it off as their work. Read the rest of this entry »