My Top Five List of Non-Vampire Fiction

There have been better weeks over here at The Sanguine Diary. We had an escaped cat who has― Thank God ―safely returned. As I write this, I am home sick from work. And I’ve had a serious case of writer’s block for about a month now.

But the show must go on. Very soon, I will have another story published. The good people at Dark Moon Books are including my story, “The Restless Warrior”, in the upcoming issue of their monthly Horror e-Magazine, Dark Eclipse.

As always, my story “Survivor’s Guilt” is still available from the kind souls at Wicked East Press.

And since man can’t live on fangs and frilly capes alone, here is a Top-Five List of Non-Vampire Fiction:

5. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections: Okay, so pretentious jerks name drop him at parties, he snubbed Oprah, and there are loud rumbles that he’s overrated. So, yeah, there’s some backlash against Jonathan Franzen. But he’s still good, really good. He has an incredible gift for description and surprising, incisive turns of phrase. He also wrings gripping drama from the mundane motions of life, which in other hands could easily sputter like a tempest in a tea kettle. When I try to describe The Corrections to people, I am surprised by how little justice I am able to do it. This is because it is not about just one thing. A single family ties the plot together, but Franzen explores each character’s lives with exhaustive detail. But to me, an aspiring writer, the most amazing thing about Franzen is the way he inverts a cardinal rule of the craft: show, don’t tell. Franzen “tells” practically every part of his stories with dense exposition and I can’t imagine him doing it any other way.

4. Stephen King, All-Around Awesome Guy: Technically, including Stephen King overlaps with the first list I published here, because of Salem’s Lot and his other vampire works. But his vampire stuff has not effected me as much as other things he’s done, on and off the page. My favorite King novel has to be Under the Dome, with 11/22/63 running a close second. The man was born with a talent for storytelling, and he has refined that gift beautifully over the past few decades. He is also, by all accounts, a remarkable human being. As told in On Writing, he is a recovering alcoholic and addict. He’s a devoted husband, loving father, and humble social commentator. He’s also funny in an unpretentious, self-effacing way. Oh yeah, and he’s also one of the most successful authors in history. The very existence of Stephen King inspires me as a writer.

3. Harry Turtledove, Great War, American Empire, and Settling Accounts series: Ten books in row is a lot of reading, and Turtledove’s sprawling alternate history of two world wars involving the Union and Confederacy are worth every word. At root, Turtledove is a historian and he thinks like one, weaving complex social and political corollaries into multiple personal narratives. You have to put up with some awkward scenarios, like Confederate slaves arguing about Marx in thick dialect (think: “Dey’s ain’t no such thing as no ghosts! Da histo’cal dialectic says so!”) But Turtledove successfully transplants the convulsions of Europe in the first half of the 20th century onto a divided America. Southern apologists may chafe at the fact that the Confederacy becomes a dictatorship led by a vulgar populist, but Turtledove is too nuanced to be strident and his portrayal of good and evil is too muddy to be polemic.If you don’t want to do all ten books, decide which period of history interests you most and go from there. Great War deals with World War I, American Empire is about the interwar period, and Settling Accounts is about World War II. My own writing deals with a lot of historical settings and these books are Alternate History 101.  

2. Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files series: A friend in my writers’ group once complimented the way I described a character’s hair. My reply: “I nicked it from Jim Butcher.” While I do not directly steal phrases from other authors, I am heavily influenced by Jim Butcher’s precise, colorful, and often witty method of physical description. Not to mention that in Harry Dresden, Butcher has drawn a character so well-defined that he is at once familiar and surprising. Dresden is a wizard detective, and the laws of the magic he wields are as consistent as his cautiously optimistic view of human nature. Butcher’s blend of noir and urban fantasy is as dark as it is funny, and has taught me a lot about what makes for a good story.

1. Philip Caputo, Indian Country: Early on, I decided I wanted to write about a vampire who must deal with the trauma of her human past, and a friend’s sister, who works with veterans, recommended I read this novel. As it turns out, Indian Country is one of the best things I have ever read. Caputo deftly weaves back and forth in time to describe a Vietnam veteran’s struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the costs his trauma lays upon his family. Christian Starkmann’s internal torments, and the unhealed wounds that drive them, are vividly rendered, as are the efforts of his wife June, who tries to understand her husband’s illness while maintaining her own sanity. Both characters make difficult choices that some may find less-than-ideal― Caputo is not one for storybook endings― but the reader feels so close to them that their actions make perfect sense. Indian Country is also beautifully written. His characters' inner worlds teem with as much life as the novel's setting of Michigan's wild Upper Penninsula. I have made two false starts on a novel that is directly inspired by this work, and without it, one of my best stories, “Survivor’s Guilt”, would not have been possible.