S.G. Browne

After the World Horror Convention, since I was in Europe for the first time in eight years, I decided to take the train over to Paris and spend five days enjoying the City of Lights.

I didn’t have more than a rudimentary use of French. Bon jour, au revoir, merci, sil vous plait, etc. So I checked out some CDs from my library to try to learn a little more conversational French. In theory, I knew what I was doing, and felt confident I could handle basic conversations. But when faced with actually answering questions or trying to remember what I was supposed to say, well, let’s just say I did a top notch job of butchering the language.

Still, even when you can’t speak the language, it’s pretty easy to have a great time in Paris even when it’s cold and wet and the lines for the museums and Notre Dame are two hours deep with tourists on Spring Break.

Rather than waiting in line, you can can discover places that everyone else missed. Like the Jardin des Halles in Chatelet-Les Halles, by the St. Eustache Church. Or Les Viaduc des Arts in the Bastille, an old elevated railway viaduct turned into a garden promenade above exhibition spaces that are home to craftsmen’s workshops and galleries. Or the streets that wind behind the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur in Montmartre and through the Latin Quarter behind the Pantheon.

I did manage to see the Catacombs, the Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise (found Oscar Wilde, but Jim Morrison apparently wanted to be left alone), the Musee Rodin, The Louvre, and wandered past and under the Arch de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, but avoided the lines that would suck up my afternoon.

All in all, a great way to end my trip to Europe.

Some random thoughts on Paris:

While there are dogs, you don’t see a lot of dangling tongues and excited faces. Most of the dogs wear serious expressions, like they’re all business. But then, so do their owners. None of the humans seemed particularly happy to be out walking their dogs. I only saw one owner who actually interacted with her dog, a Bull Terrier, with affection.

A friend suggested the Canal St. Martin was a good place to take a walk, touting the cute boutiques and numerous patisseries. Personally, the area was a little more crack whore than I expected. The boutiques were selling T-shirts that said My Parents Got High at Canal St. Martin and all I Got Was This Stupid T-shirt and you could buy dime bags from the crystal meth junkie twitching under his umbrella stand, with his serious dog at his feet.

I also ate at Chartier, an inexpensive restaurant at the edge of the Opera district. Chartier is touted as serving inexpensive quality food in a very Parisian experience that is well worth the visit. What the travel guides don’t tell you is that you sit elbow to elbow cafeteria style with everyone else and that if you don’t eat steak, you’re only non-meat option is some kind of unidentifiable fish croquette with a sauce that tastes better when you eat it with your rice pilaf.

Adieu, Paris!

The 2010 World Horror Convention took place this year for the first time outside of North America at the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton, England – a seaside city on the south coast an hour from London.

The Royal Albion was like a maze, with twisting hallways that made it easy to get lost until you figured out where you were going. And at night, when they closed all of the dual swinging hallway fire doors, I had to make my way through half a dozen of them on a circuitous route from the elevator to my room that made me feel like I was in the opening credits for Get Smart.

Before attending the World Horror Convention, I was booked both for a panel (about zombies, go figure) and for a reading. Bill Breedlove, co-founder of Dark Arts Books, was slated to read after me and contacted me to see if I was interested in doing a collaborative story to read just for the convention. I’d never collaborated before, and had only met Bill briefly last June, but it sounded like fun. So we came up with a fun piece about air raid sirens and vultures and werewolves that I’m hoping we’ll have video of at some point.

While the reading itself was definitely worth the price of admission, having the opportunity to work with Bill and to get to know him was priceless. Even if he doesn’t believe me.

The panel (attended by myself, Weston Ochse, Scott Edelman, and Michael Marshall Smith) was supposed to be a discussion about Zombies vs. Vampires, or Are Zombies the New Vampires, but it ended up being a panel about zombies, with nary a mention of vampires. Though we all agreed that neither vampires nor zombies should ever, EVER, sparkle.

While Weston, Scott, and I tended to be more in the camp of zombies branching out to discover their inner undead soul and tell a joke or two, Michael wanted his zombies slow and relentless, like a cancer that continues to spread and keeps eating away. Fast, funny, or sentient zombies weren’t what he wanted in the living dead. By the end of the panel, however, Michael had begun to have second thoughts and actually ended up walking away with a copy of Breathers. So hopefully that’s one more convert.

The rest of Thursday, which lasted until 2am, consisted mainly of conversation and beer, more of the former than the latter, with Bill Breedlove, Bev Vincent, Michael Knost (Stoker winner for Non-Fiction), and numerous wonderful Brits and Yanks in the hotel lounge.

The rest of the weekend went something like this:

A fantastic vegetarian lunch at Food for Friends with Martel Sardina; a panel and a reading here and there; a couple pints of Guinness (which is really more of a meal in a glass than a beer) and more conversation with Rocky Wood, Simon Clark, and others; a rocking party on the St. Pete Pier hosted by Heather Graham; dancing to 80s music spun by Bill Breedlove until 2am with Michael Knost, Karen Yoder, Suzanne Nash, Debbie Kuhn, Angel McCoy, and everyone else at the launch party for Dark Arts Books; hanging out with Paul Wilson, Weston Ochse, Stephen Woodworth and Kelly Dunn; and meeting Neil Gaiman after the Stoker Awards. That was definitely an unexpected highlight.

As for the Stokers, I was relaxed about my nomination the entire weekend and didn’t feel any anxiety until about an hour before the banquet, when the sense of calm I’d been feeling revealed itself for the facade it truly was. All during the banquet I could hardly eat and wished they would just get it over with. It didn’t help matters that the award for First Novel was the next to the last one given out. And I had to pee. But while I didn’t end up taking home the Stoker, I still had a fabulous weekend. The well-earned honor for Outstanding First Novel went to Hank Schwaeble for his debut Damnable.

That’s about it. Or at least all I can remember and fit into a reasonable blog entry. While I’m sure I left out something and someone relevant, I can say without a doubt that this was the most enjoyable convention I’ve attended. Thanks to everyone who made it so.

Okay, back from being more or less disconnected for 12 days. Which, I have to admit, was refreshingly freeing. However, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to share in the moment during my trip to London and Paris and the World Horror Convention, but circumstances dictated otherwise. So here’s my travel blog in flashback form, starting with my first leg in London…

Since most, if not all, of the time you spend at a World Horror Convention is in the hotel attending panels, readings or (truth be told) in the bar, I opted to take advantage of a little time in London before heading down to Brighton, England, to attend the annual World Horror Convention and Bram Stoker Awards banquet, both held outside of North America for the first time.

And yes, that was all one sentence.

While there’s not a whole lot of London you can see in just 1 ½ days, I did manage to get in a lot of walking through neighborhoods and past a lot of the iconic sights. Westminster Abbey, Parliament, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace, Covent Garden, Soho, and of course, the Tower of London.

One of the things I enjoy most when I visit another city is just walking around. Taking in the sights and sounds of someplace foreign. Appreciating the architecture. Listening to the language. And since I only had the 1 ½ days, I didn’t want to spend all of it inside. So I chose only a couple of attractions to visit: The Tower of London and the Van Gogh exhibit, The Real Van Gogh, at the Royal Academy of Art.

The Tower of London was a no-brainer. I haven’t been to London since 1997 and the Tower, along with the Jack the Ripper tour, were my favorite memories. So I paid my £17, walked through the Bloody Tower and along the walls, listened to the Beefeater tell his story of Guy Fawkes being drawn and quartered (which includes being disemboweled and having your intestines set on fire while you’re still conscious), and imagined what it must have been like to live under the 39 year reign of Henry VIII. Hopefully, I wouldn’t have been Guy Fawkes. Or Anne Boleyn. For any number of reasons.

But my favorite part of my stay was the two hours I spent at the Royal Academy of Art wandering through seven rooms filled with the art and personal letters of Vincent Van Gogh. While the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam is still the best place to enjoy his 10-year career as an artist, this exhibit portrayed a side of Van Gogh most people never get to see. Displayed alongside pieces of art I’d never seen were corresponding letters to his brother Theo, Paul Gauguin, and several other artists and friends. It’s amazing enough to think he decided to become an artist at 27 and was self taught and produced such an incredible and extensive body of work in just 10 years, but the exhibit showed through his letters how eloquent and poetic and thoughtful Van Gogh was about his craft.

Although Van Gogh’s letters were written in Dutch and French, the exhibit had a reading room with computer that allowed you to read his letters in any language. I didn’t have time to read them all, so I read the last one, written five days before he killed himself. The actual letter, written to his brother, was in the last room, along with a first draft of the same letter never mailed, which was found, blood stained, in his coat pocket after he shot himself.

Seeing the blood stains on the letter and listening to his final written words read on the audio tour, surrounded by some of the pieces he painted during his final year, was extraordinarily moving and the highlight of my brief stay in London.

(Next, the World Horror Convention in Brighton)

With a couple of airplane flights and several hours waiting in the airport and time spent relaxing in a hammock beneath palm trees or on the beach or at the hotel pool, I had plenty of time to read over the past couple of weeks. Of course, I also spent some of that time doing nothing but existing in a Zen like tranquility, but I did manage to get through most of three books, all of them markedly different. Although I’m still working on Book #3, I thought I’d share what I’ve read and a few thoughts.

Pressure by Jeff Strand

I picked up this book last June at the HWA Stoker Award’s weekend in Los Angeles during a mass book signing, having met Jeff previously at the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City. Admittedly, I was dubious about whether or not I would enjoy it, as it wasn’t what I was in the mood for, but I soon found myself caught up in the tension and frustration of a prep school friendship that turns terrifyingly bad and haunts the main character into college and beyond. Jeff manages to create an empathy for the main character and a growing frustration and terror at his helplessness as the story spans across several time frames. A good, pressure-packed thriller that doesn’t hold anything back.

The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay

I wanted to read this novel because it was one of the other three nominees for this year’s HWA Bram Stoker Awards for Best First Novel. I was further intrigued when I came across his second novel, No Sleep Till Wonderland, and read the back cover copy. It’s a darkly comic detective novel in the spirit of Raymond Chandler about a narcoleptic detective who struggles with sleep, hallucinations, and his relationship with his landlord mother. Although I wasn’t as emotionally invested in the main character as I would like to have been, I found the writing style and the humor engaging and entertaining. I had a hard time putting it down and looked forward to picking it back up.

City of Thieves by Paul Benioff

This novel by the author of The 25th Hour (I saw the film starring Edward Norton but never read the book) was recommended to me by Bill, one of the staff at my local Books Inc. I intend on going back to the store and thanking Bill for the recommendation, as this was one of my favorite reads of the past year. I finished it on the flight back to San Francisco and couldn’t put it down. It’s one of those books that makes you appreciate the joy of the written word and how much of a pleasure it is when you come across an author who can string together words to create a memorable, affecting story.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This is just my opinion, so if you pick up one of these books and don’t enjoy it, don’t blame me. But if you do pick up one of these, let me know what you think.

Until next time…

I’ll be at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Pittsburgh South this weekend, September 18-20, for the Horror Realm Convention.

Although I’ll be hanging out and available most of the weekend, I do have a couple of scheduled signings and readings:

On Friday, from 6-7PM, I’ll be doing a sit and sign in the Dealer’s Room with Jonathan Mayberry, author of Patient Zero and Zombie CSU.  If you’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan, he’s a great guy.

On Saturday, I’ll be doing a reading followed by a Q&A from 11:30AM-12:30PM, followed by a solo sit and sign in the Dealer’s Room from 12:30-1:30PM.

So if you’re in the area, come on by. There’s lots of zombie goodness to be had.