One of the things you do as you get older is peek backwards at the things you held dear when you were a kid. Sometimes the old favorite is found wanting, and occasionally, it holds up. And when you are really lucky, you learn something. Something you missed back a long time ago….
It surprises people sometimes when I tell them I was a “reluctant reader”. That’s teacher talk for a kid who hates reading. This surprises them because I am an author and a teacher. They just assume that I was one of the wonder kids who got everything quick on the first try. How far from the truth…
And a good example of this is the books I chose to read, before I loved reading. You’d have to know what I was like to really understand. I was obstinate. If you told me I had to read a certain book I would do anything but. (I even had that problem in University when profs would assign Jane Austin or Leonard Cohen. I never read them. Instead, I was pilfering the good stuff out of the U of A library, like a complete set of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd & Grey Mouser or Oliver Onion’s Widdershin. Good thing I learned how to write essays without reading the books. Profs as a general rule like to have their own pet theories regurgitated ad nauseum.)
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 2: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.