New England has a fairly reputable stable of writers and in recent years, a few of them have risen out of the Seacoast community of Exeter, New Hampshire. Among them, Dan Brown. Maybe you’re familiar. He’s the one who wrote that massively popular book about Leonardo Da Vinci, his secret codes and all this overt hatred for Jesus and assassin priests who whip themselves. Good stuff. At the center of this Exeter literary culture is the Water Street Bookstore, an independently owned outlet that manages to survive in the face of big box bookstores well within driving distance of it’s sparsely (by comparison) stocked shelves. What makes Water Street such a survivor, though, is its ties to the writing community and these little Author gigs that they book. The aformentioned Dan Brown used to sign all of the copies of his books at Water Street, thereby giving readers some incentive to buck 35% off the cover price on new releases.
I didn’t know this until recently but horror writer, Joe Hill is also a resident of this town, as well and is something of a regular over there. As I mentioned a couple posts back, Joe was doing a signing at the Bookstore last night and it turned into something else. I wasn’t sure what sort of writer he was since my experience ends with Locke & Key. Nise read Heart Shaped Box and tells me that it’s pretty good and we were both big-ass fans of Locke & Key so it seemed only natural to get out of the house and check it out.
Joe was awesome. A plus all the way. What was supposed to be an autograph sesh turned into a reading of a short story that I believe was called Staircases, to be featured in the upcoming collection, Stories, edited by another one of our favorites, Neil Gaiman. The theme was to write something original that has the vibe of a folk tale and Joe’s took on this Italian folk flavor about a guy who kills an arab (having nothing to do with Albert Camus) and then hides out in the depths of this staircase at the center of some local legends having to do with the devil. It was pretty good and I can’t wait to read the completed short.
He then jumped into a little Q&A which was centered around Locke & Key and made a great case for graphic novels as a legitimate literary devide, citing some of the masters, even going so far to compare Alan Moore to Nabokov, James Joyce and Charles Dickens. Through this I found out that the regular monthly series of Locke & Key has been pushed back to January when it will become a regular monthly series and these first six succesful issues were, in fact, testing the waters for a longer narrative. Good stuff. Joe also went over the established news that the Neil Jordan script for Heart Shaped Box has been turned out and no one really knows where it’s at and that Locke & Key is being developed for television, but that seems to be harder to do than producing a single movie.
Joe definitely falls into my winners pile for genre personalities doing the meet and greet thing. I’ve gone on at length about how some of these people don’t know how to conduct themselves when they interact with fans and making small talk with them while they sign your shit is always a little awkward, but Joe knows how to play the game and he seems to actually enjoy meeting the people who read his stuff. He signed the first issue of the comic for me and then made out Nise’s hardcover of 20th Century Ghosts to our daughter, Delilah, complete with a drawing of a ghost. To wrap up the encounter, he recommended that Nise read Y The Last Man, which I still need to finish.
I’d bet that if we had more time, he would have told her to read Fables, too. If you’re reading this, top shelf reading, Joe. Huge thanks for showing up. Book signings and readings are not something we typically take in. We’ll be down there for your next.
