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Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).

Help Me Raise Money For Suicide Awareness & Get Free Stuff!

That's me and Mike to the left, circa 1999. Mike was one of my first friends I ever had, very much raised as a brother to me. He lost his life to suicide nearly five years ago now, and while you learn to deal with loss as time goes on, it never really goes away — you're left with questions and loss and one big hole that will never ever get refilled. That's part of the reason that I'm so sensitive and vocal about mental health (aside from own struggles); because I know what that suffering is like on all sides, and I don't think anyone else should ever have to experience those things.

I had other friends who'd lost loved ones to suicide, but Mike's death was really the first time I was forced to deal with losing someone so directly close to me, and especially in such a way. Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with loss, I've gotten my fair of share of practice in these last five years, and Mike's wasn't the only one of those that could have (maybe, possibly) been helped, or stopped.

I could go on and on about this, but since suicide has recently been in the public eye, I've decided to do something different. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention hosts walkathon fundraisers every year to raise money for research, education, and outreach programs about suicide. The Out of Darkness walk (as it's called) in my hometown is not just for Mike, but it is taking place right around the anniversary of his passing. I want to raise some money for the walk, in the hope that even though its too late to save my friends, it might make a difference in someone else's life, so that they don't have to suffer the same.

So here's the deal: I've put together a sweet little package of music and eBooks, all various things that I've created, and they can all be yours with a donation of any amount to the Hamden, CT Out of Darkness Walk for the American Foundation for Society Prevention (Go Team Mikey).

All you have to do is click here to make your donation, and the download should start right away! (It's a pretty hefty ZIP file, because all the music is uncompressed)

Thanks in advance for your support. It means more to people than you realize, and I hope you enjoy your little rewards. Here's what you'll get:

eBooks:

  • Fixing a Hole, a one-act play about two friends and a hole at the end of the world. Mike lived for theatre, and shortly his death, I wrote this as a kind of elegy to him, and a reflection on our relationship.
  • EndProgram.txt, a darkly comedic (or maybe just sad) short story about the death of a robot. Originally written and conceived in the 5th week of the Clarion Writer's Workshop under the guidance of Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler. 

Music:

  • If You Really Want To Hear About It, the unreleased EP from my college band the Roland High Life. Six tracks, plus two bonus b-sides. Track 2, "Your Last Fall" was written before Mike's passing...but listening to it now, it feels frighteningly prescient.
  • Three new cover songs recorded especially for this occasion:
    • "The 59 Sound" by the Gaslight Anthem, changed to "The 69 Sound" in honor of the recording of Mike's beloved "Let It Be";
    • "I Was Meant For The Stage" by The Decemberists, one of Mike's favorite bands, this song could just have easily been written from his point of view, especially given how he had committed his life to theatre. At the reception following his funeral, some of Mike's friends played a haunting video of him singing this song at karaoke (my parents actually thought it was a song he had written). Recording this was the first time I've listened to this song since then;
    • and "You Were Cool" by the Mountain Goats, an unreleased track, with a few lyrical changes, as John's protagonist lives in his version of the song (also Mike wasn't really known for wearing high heels back in high school, although I did think about changing it to something like "stalking down the concrete hallways / in your tight jeans / back in high school," but then I didn't). Still, the lyrics remind me a lot of Mike growing up, and what I wish I could say to him now.


If you have any trouble with your download, please let me know.

Legal stuff: all content made available in this offer is available free and will not used for personal profit or gain. All files, content, intellectual property, etc. is the legal property and copyright of Thom Dunn and is made available through a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike4.0 International license, with the following exceptions: 

  • "The 59 Sound" is copyright 2008 Brian Fallon / The Gaslight Anthem
  • "I Was Meant For The Stage" is copyright 2003 Colin Meloy / The Decemberists
  • "You Were Cool" is copyright John Darnielle / Mountain Goats

Review: TRANSHUMAN by Jonathan Hickman

In Transhuman, writer Jonathan Hickman uses JM Ringuet's gorgeous artwork to tell an original story about the rise of Transhumanism as a corporate pissing match, and it embodies everything that is wrong with Hickman as a writer.

Don't get me wrong, Hickman is incredibly creative and kind of a mad genius — he's just a terrible storyteller. I've come to accept this fact. Transhuman is told as a "documentary" about the rise of the 3 largest Transhumanist corporations, which I guess is a clever conceit, except (1) why make a fictional documentary as a graphic novel? Why not, ya know, write a screenplay? and (2) the nature of those 60 Minutes-style factual reporting documentary is, by nature, a summary, and therefore not a story. The story is told through interviews with a narrator and the people involved in the story, but they are literally just TELLING the reader what happened. It's almost remarkable that a graphic novel — a medium which is visual by nature — could rely so much on telling and not showing, and therefore breaks one of the cardinal rules of fiction writing.

Sure, there are some interesting characters, and probably some cool dramatic, personal moments between them — namely, the divorced couple who end up working together on the Transhumanist project despite their mutual hatred for one another, who ultimately backstab each other again — but frankly, it's not very interesting to just see someone tell you that. It doesn't matter how witty or clever the commentary and writing is, I want to see it happen, I want to witness their interpersonal relations. If this were a real-life documentary from 50 years from now, and it aired on 60 Minutes or whatever, it would probably be great, because investigative journalism can get away with digging deep and just reciting facts (although I'd argue that most award-winning works of investigative journalism still manage to find a compelling human angle, something for the audience to emotionally engage with that makes them follow the story through to the end). In Transhuman, we just get a bunch of talking heads telling us what already happened, and a narrator / director to steer us away from any unreliable sources. There is literally nothing compelling or human to pull you through the story. There's a clever (albeit overwhelmingly cynical) twist at the end, which I guess is fun. But you can't build a story off a twist.

When Hickman first broke out onto the comics scene, I thought he was fantastic, but the truth is, he's good at creating the ILLUSION of good story telling. Everything he writes is done in summary, with a few cool moments in between to make it feel human. A friend of mine summed it up well as citing the difference between The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion — one is a story about characters that we care about, the other is a play-by-play history book, and Hickman writes the latter. I think Hickman would be better off as an idea man, leaving other people to actually execute these epic stories of his. Because the worlds he creates are always unique and fascinating, full of complex politics and otherworldly visions. But saying "HERE'S THIS CRAZY WORLD I CREATED AND THERE ARE THESE GUYS AND THEN THESE TWO FOUGHT AND THEN THIS GUY BETRAYED THIS GIRL AND THEN THIS PERSON WON, THE END" is really not a fun story to read.

I mean, okay, this was a fun moment. But not worth the wait.

I mean, okay, this was a fun moment. But not worth the wait.

"The Girl With All The Gifts": A YA Zombie Book That Will Actually Make You Cry

I read the first 30 pages of The Girl With All The Gifts on the train ride into work one rainy morning, and I'm pretty sure I got choked at least three times in that opening section of the book. Who the hell gets emotional over precocious 10-year-old zombies?

The Girl With All the Gifts is a new novel by M.R. "Totally Not Mike Carey" Carey. I've been a fan of M.R.'s alter ego for a while now, ever since his run on X-Men: Legacy and, more recently, his crazy Harry Potter metafiction series The Unwritten, so even if The Girl With All The Gifts wasn't one of the most-hyped genre books of the year, I would have still been pretty excited about it. However, it was heavily hyped, which made me that much more anxious to get my hands on an ARC — and I can happily say that it was worth every bit of the buzz.

The simplest way to describe The Girl With All The Gifts is as a young adult zombie novel, but even given my personal penchant for clunky noun-y elevator pitches, that description doesn't do the book justice. The story focuses on an eerily precocious young girl named Melanie, who lives in a cellblock with twenty other children like her, where they go to school and learn and then get forced back into their cells by soldiers. Once a week, the children are given a chemical shower and a meal of grubs. The kids seem a little weird, sure, but they're all remarkably articulate, if a little bit naïve and — oh yeah, they sometimes crave human flesh, like the other mindless "hungries" that have obliterated the British landscape.

Here's a trailer for the book:

The majority of the book focuses on the relationship between Melanie and her favorite teacher, Ms. Justineau, on whom she has one of those weird psuedo-crushes that plenty of ten-year-olds have but especially those who are already emotionally stunted by, erm, crazy fungal parasites. That's another thing — this psuedoscience surrounding the zombie outbreak in this book is some of the most well-researched and believable science I've ever read in a zombie story (not to mention, viscerally grotesque in way too many ways). If you want some spoilers, it's a very slight extrapolation from this very real bit of scientific horror.

The real strengths of the book lie in its characters, as well as M.R. Carey's delicate prose. Sure, there are a few places where I would have liked a bit more vivid descriptions than "bland army cellblock" and "post-apocalyptic countryside," but Carey is able to capture so much emotion in his stark and simple sentences. The relationships are complex, but they're rendered in such a way that they are easy to understand and empathize with. And honestly, the young-adult-as-intelligent-zombie metaphor is a particularly powerful one — the adults simultaneously underestimate her and also think she's dangerous, while she has trouble grasping the true complexities of the world around her. Young adult stories are often about coming into one's own and discovering one's true identity, and in the case of Melanie, that couldn't be more literal. She thinks, therefore she is, but she continues to struggle with understanding what that means for the other people around her — both human and hungry alike. The rest of the cast stray into two-dimensional territory — the gruff soldier, the alcoholic Irish rookie (oof), the viciously determined scientist, and the mothering, emotional researcher — but in the end, you can't help but feel for them and root for their journeys, as well as Melanie's (and, like all good drama, those journeys don't always work in harmony together...).

If you like zombie stories, or young adult stories, or post-apocalyptic stories, or teacher-student relationship stories, I absolutely cannot recommend this book more highly. So check it out — I swear, it doesn't bite...

Oh Yes, DO Let's Ban Yet Another Book That Tries To Teach Kids About The Overreaches Of Authority

Because banning books has always ended well, and has never been held up as an eternal symbol of a corrupt society...

Yes, after approving Cory Doctorow's Little Brother for the "One School / One Book" reading program, a principal in Pensacola, Florida (where else?) has decided to ban the book from classrooms, because it encourages students to question authority and engage in hacker culture. Are you kidding me?

Cory himself explains it perfectly over at BoingBoing: "I don't think this is a problem because my book is the greatest novel ever written and the kids will all miss out by not reading it, but because I think that the role of an educator is to encourage critical thinking and debate, and that this is a totally inappropriate way to address 'controversial' material in schools."

I mean, I'm 28 now, and I still think this is a valid message.

I mean, I'm 28 now, and I still think this is a valid message.

Little Brother is an absolutely exhilarating young adult novel about teens fighting back against Big Brother. Most of us read 1984 in school (and other dystopian classic, such as Brave New World), but Little Brother arms readers with the necessary knowledge to fight back. Big Brother is watching you, all right — but who's keeping tabs on Big Brother? The book is set vaguely now-ish, and even reading it as an adult, it was both educational, and horrifying. I'm glad I read it after the Boston Marathon Bombings, or else I would have been even more freaked out during that situation, rather than being oblivious to the other real-life horrors of what was going on (the basic plot of the novel follows a teen named Marcus Yallow who skips school to go LARPing, which puts him in the wrong place during a terrorist attack and leads him into the torturous hands of the Department of Homeland Security). It's one of those books that I find myself recommending to absolutely everyone I meet, but especially to middle- and high school students. 

Fortunately, when not writing fantastic science fiction books, Cory Doctorow is also an advocate for Internet freedoms and basic Civil Rights (plus a fantastic writing mentor). His publisher, Tor Books (to whom I also contribute, via Tor.com), has agreed to send 200 free paperback copies of the novel to students at Booker T. Washington High School. And on top of that, you can download Little Brother for free in a variety of different formats directly from Cory's website, where he offers all of his books for download under Creative Commons licensing (the idea being that people will download the book for free, like I did, then tell someone about it, like I just did, which then leads to someone buying it. And it works). Even the National Coalition Against Censorship has gotten involved, writing a good ol' fashioned "strongly worded letter" to the educational administration in Pensacola.

So download Little Brother (it's free! You have literally no excuse!), give it to your friends and younger cousins and siblings. Because a society that still bans books is not a good place to live.

You Had Me at "Slutty Teenage Vampire Hobo Junkies"

Or, I suppose more accurately, I was had at "four hour bus ride to New York City what should I read to pass the time ooh this looks interesting and I bet I can devour it in one sitting." And that's how I came to read The Orange Eats Creeps, the debut novel by Grave Krilanovich, which is less Twilight and more Requiem for a Dream; less sparkly vampires, more meth addiction.

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A Retrospective Look at Jane Austen's Brain-eating Habits

Can you believe it's been 5 years since the release of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies?  And just over 200 from the release of the original novel? Well, to celebrate, the folks at Quirk Books (who published ...and Zombies and its followups, as well as many other fine collections of pulped trees) asked me to do some digging and explore the past, present, and future of their massive mashup mega-hit -- where it started, how it worked, and what it did for the company over the last 5 years. The short answer is that it basically launched their entire fiction line, which is now tremendously successful -- and also served as an accidental omen to our current pop-culture status of zombie overload (seriously! They beat the trend! But barely). For the long answer? Check out my 3-piece retrospective on Pride & Prejudice & Zombies on the Quirk website.

REVIEW: Polarity by Max Bemis and Jorge Coelho

Polarity

As much as I enjoy Say Anything (the band fronted by writer Max Bemis), I was hesitant to pick up this comic because, well, the premise sounds exactly like the pseudo-autobiographical premise of their first album "...Is A Real Boy," which kindofsortamaybe chronicled Bemis's descent into super-powered bi-polar disorder -- except that, while recording said album, Max Bemis was actually diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and locked himself up for a while. But, the book was on sale for $4 on ComiXology, so I figured hey, why not.

While I tend to be the kind of person who connects with comic books more the writing than the art (although I do love a good collaboration), I'd first look to say that the artwork on this book is PHENOMENAL. It's slightly cartoonish, but not a childish way, and accurately portrays hyperviolence, superhero action, internal mindscape struggles, and hipster culture. As for the story itself, it didn't shy away from the fact that it was a slight variation on the story that Bemis has told several times already. The basic premise is that Tim is an artist and self-loathing hipster who suffers from bi-polar disorder, and after he's institutionalized and begins taking pills, he can't create his art. So he goes off his medication, and soon discovers that his untreated condition literally gives him superpowers. But maybe he's too dangerous, and maybe there's a Shadowy Government Organization trying to create an army of Bi-Polar Super Soldiers? Meanwhile, his art is getting better, and he meets a girl.

Overall, it's a pretty enjoyable story, and while applying science fictional concepts to mental illness is nothing new, I actually think that Bemis does it in a pretty fresh way -- by essentially saying that yes, mental illness IS a superpower, but the same way that traditional superheroes suffer from their extra-human abilities, maybe it's still better if you take your pills and try to function like a normal person. That being said, I'm not sure how this book would read to someone who was unfamiliar with "hipster" culture. The main character spends a lot of the book criticizing everyone around him for being hypocrites and poseurs, and ultimately realizes that he's just the same as the rest of them. If you're familiar with Say Anything's music, Tim's rants are all basically pulled straight out of the song "Admit it!" As far as cultural critique is concerned, it is an interesting analysis of hipsterdom that I mostly agree with, even if it is a bit misanthropic (which works well in a loud rock song, but feels different as internal monologue).

That being said, I wonder how someone who was outside of or unfamiliar with "hipster culture" would feel about this book. It's very insular, and some might even say that hipsters criticizing hipsters for being hipsters is THE most hipster thing possible, and while the story does acknowledge that irony (while also criticizing irony as the cheapest form of hipster self-defense), it never quite transcends it. I suspect that if you weren't already aware of and/or immersed in that post-art-school-Williamsburg-landscape, you'd think, "Okay, so these are a bunch of Urban Outfitters asshole who are too cool for Urban Outfitters and this main character is kind of an unlikeable dick who judges everyone around him for being fake judgmental assholes -- why should I care?" And if that's you, I might suggest that you're better served by listening to "Woe" and "Admit it!" by Say Anything, which pretty much sum up the book.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


REVIEW: The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty

This was enjoyable, but it took me longer to get through than it should have, because I didn't care enough. It's a fun concept, I like the world, but I wish it had either been funnier, or darker (for example, and this is a slight spoiler: if you have a co-worker who's a succubus and feeds on sexual energy, and he tries to seduce your character at a nightclub because he's hungry, and you DON'T find a way to make that a metaphor either for date rape, or a regrettable but consensual one night stand with a co-worker? C'mon! It's right there!). Instead, it was kind of a mediocre middle ground between monsters and tourism that was certainly fun, but nothing remarkable. I loved the idea of Public Works, and the zombies, and some of the characters were still fun (despite the fact that I have literally no idea what the protagonist looked like). By the time the epic ending came around, which I guess was kind of cool, I was more interested in finishing the book than I was in what actually happened to any of the characters (spoilers: they all live happily ever after. lame).

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

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