Oct 28, 2011 4
James Franco’s Butt, other things
In a naked appeal for my dollars, Flaunt Magazine has covered their latest issue with James Franco’s butt1:
I just returned from Kansas City. It was a work detour that came out of nowhere. I’m eager to write again. I didn’t have any time to write while I was there. We checked out the wonderful vegan options in town, and bounced around bookstores and comic book stores. I brought home a stack of new books. At one of the comic shops, writer Jason Aaron was just standing around, hanging out. He writes one of my favorite comics, Scalped.
Tuesday night, the waitress at Waldo Pizza recommended the most wonderful double-IPA but now I’ve forgotten what it was called. Waldo Pizza has a vegan menu and incredibly nice, awesome waitstaff.
We got muffins and scones and coffee at Mud Pie, a vegan coffeehouse. We ate Chinese food at The Blue Koi, a restaurant staffed by cute Kansas City hipsters.
St. Louis has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to feeding vegans.
While I was in Kansas City, I read a novella by Robert McCammon, The Room at the Bottom of the Stairs. It’s collected in a soon-to-be-released collection, The Hunter from the Woods from Subterranean Press.
The Room at the Bottom of the Stairs tells the story of Michael Gallatin, a British spy who’s tasked with infiltrating Berlin during World War II in order to distract Franziska Luxe, a German journalist, from her mission of exposing traitors within the Third Reich. Gallatin finds himself drawn to Luxe despite her role as a Nazi, and soon the two are caught up in a whirlwind romance. The book deals with the moral and emotional complexity of a damaged man who finds himself enraptured by an (un)questionably evil woman.
I came to McCammon’s work via another book, The Five, but I found that book to be hard to penetrate. While reading about McCammon, and reading his blog (I virtually always research writers and read interviews with them as I read their books.
The Room… caught me off guard. McCammon’s an incredibly talented writer, and the story of Gallatin and Luxe broke my heart; it’s erotic, exciting, and fraught with danger. McCammon beautifully twists between scenes of subterfuge, action, sex and romance in a way that made me care deeply for the characters, and made me want to strive to be a better writer. His language is clear and simple but manages to evoke a dramatic range of emotions and sensations and he presents a poetic view of Berlin as a war-torn city filled with debutantes who will continue the party at any cost. It’s in this backdrop that Gallatin and Luxe can continue their charade as though nothing is wrong between them, between their respective countries and ideologies.
The twist (not a plot twist, or a spoiler) is that Gallatin is a werewolf. He’s the star of McCammon’s earlier novel, The Wolf’s Hour.
That McCammon pulls all of this off in a story about a werewolf fighting Nazis is nothing short of astounding. Even if nothing interests you less than the topic of a werewolf fighting Nazis, I urge you to check it out.
The novella is available as a free download directly from Subterranean Press (scroll down to the bottom of the book description.)
The above illustrations are by Vincent Chong.
1: Noting of course that this may not, in fact, be Franco’s butt. Flaunt and Franco could very well be pulling one over on us all.
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