I've moved my blog to the official Matthew Warner website.  Please click here to read my continued ramblings!

So, in the course of my work for Deena Warner Design LLC, I'm wading more and more into the world of search engine optimization and widgets such as RSS feeds.  This has led me to widgetize the homepage of my own website a little bit more.  Now I'm wondering if I should dump this Myspace blog in favor of something contained just on the website--or if anyone will even care.  What's your opinion?

I'm also gearing up to be a dad later this summer.  Be Prepared, a how-to guide for new fathers as well as an homage to the Boy Scouts, is a wonderfully funny and informative book.  Not a touchy-feely bone in it; just straightforward, straight-talking information for macho dads.

The book for this year's NEA Big Read is The Maltese Falcon, written by Dashiell Hammett in the 1920s.  The local Augusta County Library in Fishersville, VA, has folks giving daily readings from the book, and I'll be reading/performing chapter 16 on March 23 at noon.

So guess it's about time I read the book, huh?

I finished it yesterday while lying on the couch, trying not to die from a head cold.  And I must say that, while it was entertaining, I found it challenging on several levels, and not necessarily in a good way.  There was, of course, the immense cultural baggage that accompanies a seminal book like this--all the decades of film and TV adaptations, the way it really established hard-boiled noir mystery fiction, as far as I know--so it was impossible to read the book and not think I was watching a black-and-white movie from the '40s starring Humphrey Bogart.  After awhile, I stopped trying.  But that wasn't Dashiell Hammett's fault.

What was Dashiell Hammett's "fault," if any fault is to be assigned, is that he constructed a thoroughly dislikable character in Samuel Spade.  Up to the very last page, I found nothing redeeming about him.  Spade's actions and words, quite consistently, showed that he valued one thing and one thing only: money.  He wasn't motivated by respect for the law, nor love, nor loyalty.  At the end, he did say something about feeling obligated to investigate the murder of his partner, whom he didn't like, just because he'd been his partner, but if that was the case, then it didn't really come out in the story until that point.

I guess what I'm getting at is that one of the gold standards in judging the power of any story is whether the characters have been changed by the story.  It's a simple matter of character arc: was Samuel Spade a different person at the end than he was at the beginning?  Because let's face it: if a character isn't changed by the story, then this must not have been a particularly significant episode of the character's life, so we as the readers have no particular reason for reading the story.  And on that criterion, I have to say about Samuel Spade that I'm not sure if he changed, and probably not.  In the last chapter, Brigid O'Shaughnessy challenges Spade with a question: Do you love me?  "Maybe I do," he answers.  "What of it?"  He goes on to say that he won't "play the sap for you" and makes it clear that he's perfectly willing to sell her out to the cops because he doesn't want to go down for her crimes.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about all the character arc that I can detect.  Spade might love her, he might not, but that doesn't change who he is.  He's looking out for number one.  Oh, and that other woman whom he's been sleeping with, the wife of his dead partner?  For God's sake, Effie, keep her out of my office.  Not now.

All that being said, perhaps The Maltese Falcon was a success for the very reasons I've cited above.  It certainly got me thinking.  It certainly elicited an emotional reaction in me, and, to the author's credit, the emotional reaction had more to do with the story and characters than it did with how he writes.  (It's not often that we encounter a novel written entirely in the third-person objective viewpoint, in which we never get inside of character's thoughts and have to figure it all out for ourselves, kind of like watching a movie or a play.)  And in the final judgment, that's really the most important thing about a book: did it reach the reader in some way?  Did it affect the reader on some level?  Did it entertain him, piss him off, or change the reader in any way? 

In answer to that, the best I can say is to parrot Spade.  Maybe it did.

"Selections from the Field Guide to Creepy Art," my article about the creepy children's artwork in my local newspaper, is online at Horror World this month for your reading pleasure:

http://horrorworld.org/columns.htm

Enjoy!

The fine folks over at Dark Scribe Magazine have nominated Horror Isn't a 4-Letter Word for a 2008 Black Quill Award for non-fiction.

This award depends on votes from the public, so I'd appreciate your vote.  Please click here, and thanks!

Just a cautionary tale in the era of corporate bailouts that are going to add $1 trillion to our debt next year:

A song from Schoolhouse Rock

Some belated Halloween goodies for you!

*  My November column at Horror World, "The Great, the Good, and the Ugly: Who's Driving this Horse, Anyway?"

* Two flash-fiction stories at MicroHorror: "Four Four Nine" and "Starting to Like It"

* Rue Morgue's interview of me in their October issue (reposted with permission).

Enjoy!

"Under the Bridge Downtown," my short-story collaboration with Gary A. Braunbeck, will appear in the new Horror Library anthology coming from Cutting Block Press.

Variant Frequencies is now running a podcast recording of me reading the story, which you can hear at this link.

Here's the TOC.  I'm especially pleased to share a book with Bentley Little:

Lávese las Manos - R.J Cavender & Boyd E. Harris
Them - Sunil Sadanand
Ashes of the Dead - Kurt Dinan
The Orange Mammoth - Matthew Lee Bain
The River Child - R. Michael Burns
The Station - Bentley Little
Short Stacked - Rodney J. Smith
After - Kealan Patrick Burke
Consumed - Michael Louis Calvillo
Under the Bridge Downtown - Gary A. Braunbeck & Matthew Warner
Being Supreme - Mark Justice
Clover - Gina Ranalli
Guarded - Michael A. Arnzen
The Review - Rick Moore
Teeth - A.C. Wise
When the Skies Toss Down Rain Heavy - Eric Grizzle
Obsidian Sea - Kurt Kirchmeier
Masks and Shadows - Cullen Bunn
Extra Innings - John Peters
The Living World - C. Michael Cook
Fish Bait - John Everson
Toll - Blu Gilliand
The Steel Church - Charles Colyott
The Apocalypse Ain't So Bad - Jeff Strand
The Rhythm Method - Mikal Trimm
Her Dead Oceans - Lorne Dixon
Golden Eyes - Lisa Morton
The Haven - John Palisano
The Birdie - Stephen Couch
Blink the Blood Away - R.M. Ridley

And finally, here's the cover:

It was a blast to be involved with my first theatrical production since the seventh grade, when I assayed the role of Phillip Bax as Bazzard in Drood. This Tony Award-winning musical by Rupert Holmes adapts Charles Dickens's unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood—and because it was unfinished (Dickens died while writing it), the audience gets to vote on the ending. By the last day of the run, I was circulating campaign flyers (pictured) among the audience to ensure I was voted the murderer. It didn't work, but I was voted the detective on two of the nights.

You can learn more about the show at the promotional website Deena and I built at this link.  Deena also painted all the sets and handled sound effects.