S.G. Browne

I enjoy stories with characters who aren’t clean-cut, perfect heroes. Who have flaws and secrets and skeletons in their closets. Who struggle with their inner demons. It makes them more believable. More three dimensional.

The same goes for my movies. Which is why I thought L.A. Confidential should have won the Best Picture Oscar in 1997 instead of Titanic. The richness of the story aside, I thought the characters resonated with more truth.

I mention L.A. Confidential because that film is what ultimately led me to read The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy. Both The Big Nowhere and L.A. Confidential make up the second and third entries in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, which also includes the bookend novels The Black Dahlia (which I’ve read) and White Jazz. I’m only halfway through the four but eagerly anticipating the third.

The Big Nowhere takes place in 1950, just a year or so before the events that occur in L.A. Confidential, and, like The Black Dahlia, the novel starts off with a gruesome murder. Eventually, the murder becomes plural and dovetails with several other story lines dealing with police corruption, Hollywood politics, and the Los Angeles mob.

Ellroy’s prose hits you like a prize fighter, never pulling any punches and taking you all twelve rounds. The book is dark and gritty and paints a picture of 1950 Los Angeles that is both believable and far from flattering.

The narrative is told in alternating chapters by the three main characters – Detective Danny Upshaw, Lieutenant Mal Considine, and Buzz Meeks -who are as flawed and as tragic as any heroes you’ve ever met. Sometimes you wonder if you should be rooting for them. But in the end, you realize you don’t really have any choice.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the chance to experience having other people tell me what my books mean. What someone else got out of them. How strangers interpreted them. It’s an odd thing, having people who had nothing to do with the creation of your book tell you and others what it is you’re trying to say with your writing. Sometimes it’s so far off base that you wonder if the person took crystal meth before reading the book.

Like the person who thought Breathers was an allegory for the Holocaust.

Initially, this disparity was something I had trouble adjusting to, even when someone made me out to look smarter or more insightful than I actually am. After all, I’m the one who wrote the book, so I’m the only one who knows the truth of the words I’ve written. Of what I intended to accomplish.

But at some point around the time when Fated came out last November, I began to realize that the truth of creation is no more valid than the truth of interpretation. How one person reacts to a book or a story is true for them. It’s a reflection of how the book speaks, or doesn’t speak, to their sensibilities. Of how it makes them feel. So how one person interprets the words and ideas I’ve strung together is absolutely correct.

It’s just different than my interpretation.

Art in all of its forms is subjective, be it a novel, a movie, an album, or a painting. As a fan of writing, film, music, and fine art, I understand that my opinion is just that. An opinion. I understand that there is no objectivity in art. That art exists for us to experience and that each individual experience is shaped by personal preferences and viewpoints. There is no definitive quality that makes one piece of art better than another. It’s all subjective. As someone once told me, once you start to qualify art, it ceases to become art.

Just because I think Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown is one of the best albums of the past decade doesn’t make it true.

Just because I think Being John Malkovich was the most original film of 1999 doesn’t mean it deserved to have won any awards.

But sometimes it’s difficult to be on the other side of the process, to be the creator rather than the consumer, and maintain that point of view. To understand that when you let your creations out into the world, they no longer belong to just you. They belong to everyone who experiences them.

However, when someone—a reviewer or a teacher or some self-proclaimed literati—claims to know what the author intended, whether it’s a novel written by me or by someone else, that’s where I think they’ve developed an over-inflated sense of themselves. You can’t possibly know what the author intended unless you spoke with the author about his or her intentions. You can guess. You can theorize. You can view the books through your own personal lens and offer your own personal insights. But you can’t know what the author was thinking. It’s all just a matter of opinion. A matter of interpretation.

And in spite of the fact that I might not agree with them, all of those opinions and interpretations are true.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting excerpts from each of my four short stories included in the recently released Dark Arts Books collection, Swallowed by the Cracks, which is available for order through the Dark Arts website.

Below is an excerpt from the opening of “Dr. Lullaby,” a short story that takes place in Manhattan and is the concept upon which I’ve based one of my future novels.

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DR. LULLABY

People still get confused about my name.

I suppose I shouldn’t take it personally. After all, it’s not like I’ve ever done any interviews or tried to set the matter straight. I’m not even the one who came up with the moniker. I think The New York Post was the first to print it. That was my first big headline. The one that turned me into a local celebrity. Though celebrity isn’t really the right word, since no one knows for sure who I am. Who any of us are.

Still, you’d think that after all of the press surrounding the events that have transpired over the past few months, people would understand what it is I do. But from what I hear on the street and on talk radio, a lot of people still think I’m some kind of serenading physician or an academic pedophile.

I’m thinking I need to hire a good publicist.

Before I go any further, I should probably explain a few things. So let me start at the beginning. Or maybe we should start in the middle. Isn’t that where stories are supposed to start? In the middle? Not with the hero graduating from college and getting a job working for an advertising agency in Manhattan, then getting downsized and blowing through his severance and savings in less than a year and trying to figure out how he’s going to earn a living.

You don’t start with all of that expository crap.
The wistful reverie.
The character building.

It’s not: Lights. Camera. Backstory.

What you start with is action.

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“Dr. Lullaby” can be read in its entirety in Swallowed by the Cracks.

It’s not often I read a book that gets five stars out of me, but such is the case with this fantastic novel about the importance of words by Markus Zusak.

Although technically a YA novel, written for children ages 12 and up, The Book Thief resonates on so many levels that it should be enjoyed by adults of all ages.

The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl living with her foster parents in a small town in 1939 Nazi Germany. More accurately, the story is told by Death, who has a rather empathetic view of the human race and who is understandably overworked during this period in history. Yet he finds himself inevitably drawn into the lives of those who inhabit Liesel’s world.

As are we.

I’m not going to tell you the synopsis of the novel. You can read the synopsis on Wikipedia or Amazon.  What I will tell you is that the novel is dark and touching, filled with both dread and hope. It’s filled with characters who remain long after the last page has been turned. And it’s filled with prose that is lyrical and eloquent, with fabulous imagery that you want to breath in and savor.

Breath collapses. Words lean. Sentences fumble.

It’s the type of book that reminds you of the beauty of words. The power of words. And that, in essence, is what The Book Thief is about. The power of words to transform the world, both for good and for bad.

Someone once asked me what book would I recommend to everyone. I used to have an answer. That answer has changed. That book is now The Book Thief.

As I mentioned in last Friday’s blog post, I’m going to have four (mostly) never-before-published short stories appearing in the collection Swallowed By The Cracks, which will debut at the World Horror Convention in Austin, TX,  at the end of this month. I say “mostly” never-before-published because one of the stories, “Lower Slaughter,” appeared in Issue #30 of Outer Darkness in 2005.

But the other three are new.  And one of them, “Dr. Lullaby,” is a bit of a sneak peak at one of the novels I’m currently working on.

In any case, the collection, which also includes stories from Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, and Michael Marshall Smith, is available for Pre-Order now at the Dark Arts Books bookstore.  And if you’re so inclined, you can check out the official announcement of Swallowed By The Cracks.