Tag: noir

Craftwork Episode 19: Ghost Stories, Market Pressures, & Tapping into the Subconscious w/ Naben Ruthnum

Listen to Craftwork Episode 19: Ghost Stories, Market Pressures, & Tapping into the Subconscious w/ Naben Ruthnum.

In this interview, we chat with Naben Ruthnum about character development, avoiding TV-brained writing, making sense of first-reader notes, and so much more.

Naben Ruthnum is a Toronto-based writer of fiction, cultural criticism, film and TV. His novel A Hero of Our Time was released by Penguin Random House and was optioned for development by The Littlefield Company. His books include the YA novel The Grimmer, the World Fantasy Award-nominated horror novella Helpmeet and two thrillers penned as Nathan Ripley, both of which have been optioned for development and were published internationally. He has written for Canadian television series including Murdoch Mysteries and Cardinal. As a feature screenwriter, he’s collaborated with Kris Bertin for feature and TV projects in development at Oddfellows, BoulderLight Pictures, Automatik, Skybound, and Blink49. Kris and Naben’s script Road Test made the 2024 Black List.

Books mentioned in this episode:

  • A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
  • The Sorceress in Stained Glass & Other Ghost Stories – Richard Dalby, ed.
  • The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
  • The Black Dahlia; Killer on the Road; L.A. Confidential; My Dark Places – James Ellroy 
  • Black Flame – Gretchen Felker-Martin
  • The James Bond series – Ian Fleming
  • The Collector; The Magus – John Fowles
  • The Green Carnation – Robert Hichens
  • The Americans; The Tragic Muse; The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
  • Supernatural Horror in Literature – H. P. Lovecraft
  • The Beckoning Fair One – Oliver Onions
  • A Fatal Inversion; Master of the Moor – Ruth Rendell
  • Flicker – Theodore Roszak
  • The Tempest – William Shakespeare
  • Ghost Story; If You Could See Me Now; In the Night Room; Koko; The Throat – Peter Straub
  • The Secret History – Donna Tartt
  • A Dark-Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs – Barbara Vine
  • The October Film Haunt – Michael Wehunt
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Craftwork S1E2: Agency, Microtensions, & Mythic Resonance w/ Randy Nikkel Schroeder

In this interview, Randy Nikkel Schroeder talks about noir, character possession, Biblical frisson, and so much more. Listen here.

Randy Nikkel Schroeder is the author of Arctic Smoke (NeWest), Crooked Timber: Seven Suburban Faerie Tales (Green Magpie), and over fifty published short stories. In his spare time, he is professor of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University.

Books mentioned in this episode:

  • Queenpin; The Turnout; You Will Know Me – Megan Abbott
  • Poetics – Aristotle
  • Book of Greek Myths – Ingri d’Aulaire & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
  • Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – Jessica Brody
  • Dave Robicheaux novels – James Lee Burke
  • The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know – Shawn Coyne
  • Neuromancer – William Gibson
  • Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
  • Red Dragon – Thomas Harris
  • Winter’s Tale – Mark Helprin
  • The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
  • Rose Madder – Stephen King
  • Mystic River – Dennis Lehane
  • The Magician’s Nephew – C. S. Lewis
  • Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen – Robert McKee
  • Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different – Chuck Palahniuk
  • Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
  • Old Testament – Various authors

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“Numbness and Arousal in the Post-Postmodern Apocalypse of Too Old to Die Young” (Vague Visages)

“Bound up in taboo fetishism and constantly oscillating commitments between the base and the transcendent, and between comedy and horror (much like Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return), Too Old to Die Young uses its genre-codified landscape of moral corruption as an allegorical mirror for America’s crumbling civilization, and as a space for a far-reaching aesthetic study of eroticism and violence in art. Putting itself in conversation with the cinematic genre signifiers most loudly established by Alfred Hitchcock’s oneiric, perverse California masterpiece Vertigo (1958), Too Old to Die Young constantly scrutinizes the wavering spaces where the tawdry mingles with the sublime, where sexual (re)productivity entangles with morbidity and destruction.”

Read the full essay in Vague Visages.

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Mike Thorn Interviews Niall Howell, Author of Only Pretty Damned

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Niall and I first met as undergrads at Mount Royal University. From what I remember, we first connected through our mutual love of film, either through a course or a club of some kind. It wasn’t long before I learned that Niall was also a fiction writer, and we started exchanging excerpts from our works-in-progress. Niall’s rare, formidable talent was immediately evident to me—I saw in all his work a unique sense of humour and a mastery of pacing, plot and voice. After reading his phenomenal debut novel Only Pretty Damned (available now through NeWest Press), I reached out asking if he’d like to do a Q&A. He kindly agreed, and the dialogue below is the result of our email exchanges.

Read the full interview on Kendall Reviews.

 

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