Come visit us @ Coast City Comicon!

This weekend we're taking part in our first convention, the Coast City Comicon (tickets are available at the door). It's being held here in Portland at the Eastland Park Hotel on Saturday and Sunday, and it should be a blast! We will have local guest authors at our table, and loads of the tasty new Philip K. Dick books on sale. Huzzah!

Our main author guest is Michael Connor, who just wrapped up his art exhibit Fuzzy Allotropes 2 here at the shop. He will be at our table throughout the weekend (when he isn't heading panel discussions at the SPACE Gallery!). Our other author is Mark LaFlamme, Lewiston native, crime beat writer for the Lewiston Sun Journal, and a terrific horror author. Mark is being held hostage by alpacas so he will only be able to visit on Sunday afternoon, starting at 2:00. I recently reviewed his short story collection Box of Lies: http://greenhandbooks.blogspot.com/2011/10/review-mark-laflammes-box-of-lies.html

Here is the schedule of events for the convention as it stands now:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11TH
8:00pm-1:00am Convention kickoff! Nerd Rave @ SPACE Gallery with DJ Pony Farm and Waranimal, plus Heloise and the Savoir Faire, plus a costume contest w/crazy prizes!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12TH
10:00-6:00 Vendor and artist tables open @ Eastland Hotel
10:00-4:00 Super Mario 3 Tournament in Dealer Room @ Eastland Hotel:
A timed, score based, big screen Super Mario 3 Tournament! Crazy prizes from Coast City Comics for winners! No Powerglove required.
10:00-6:00 Wet Paint Project demonstration @ Eastland Hotel
Guest artist Chris Dingwell will be demonstrating the dynamic painting techniques that allowed him to produce such masterworks as seen in his new book, Inside Out, copies of which will be available. Dingwell will be joined throughout the weekend by special guests who will throw their painting techniques into the mix. Prepare to be amazed.
12:00-1:30 Self Publishing 101 @ SPACE Gallery with special guests:
-- Comic artist & writer Ben Bishop (Nathan the Caveman & Lost Trail)
-- Comic artist and writer Michael Connor (Coelacanthus comic zine)
1:30-3:00 Breaking into Comics panel @ SPACE Gallery with special guests:
-- Comic artist & colorist Ray Dillon (DC’s Brightest Day & IDW’s Servant of the Bones)
-- Comic artist & creator/editor Renae De Liz (IDW’s Servant of the Bones, Womanthology, IDW’s The Last Unicorn)
-- Andy Schmidt (former Senior Editor @ IDW Comics, former Editor at Marvel Comics, founder of Comics Experience career school)
-- Comic artist, writer & editor Mort Todd (former Cracked Magazine editor-in-chief, owner of Comicfix)
--& other special guests TBA!
3:30-5:30 Deadly Spawn screening (78 min) @ SPACE Gallery, followed by Q&A w/director Ted Bohus.
4:00-6:00 Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Tournament in Dealer Room @ Eastland Hotel
6:00-9:00 Dinner break!
9:00pm Doors open for Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts screening @ SPACE Gallery
9:00-11:00 Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts – East Coast premiere screening
For the first time, see Warren Ellis’s work and life as seen by himself and others in this sharp new documentary by the team that brought you the critically acclaimed film Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods. This premiere screening is timed to coincide with the film’s West Coast weekend premiere at the Napa Valley Film Festival!
9:00-12:30 Doors open for Comiccon Rock & Roll After Party (21+) @ Empire. Hear the fantastic Flipsides with the Heeby Jeebies, and added attractive attraction the Whistlebait Burlesque troupe at Empire Dine and Dance, 575 Congress (corner of Forest and Congress). $5 cover or FREE w/your comicon badge!

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13TH
10:00-6:00 Vendor and artist tables open @ Eastland Hotel
10:00-6:00 Super Mario 3 Tournament continues in Dealer Room @ Eastland Hotel
10:00-6:00 Wet Paint Project demonstration @ Eastland Hotel
Guest artist Chris Dingwell will be demonstrating the dynamic painting techniques that allowed him to produce such masterworks as seen in his new book, Inside Out, copies of which will be available. Dingwell will be joined throughout the weekend by special guests who will throw their painting techniques into the mix. Prepare to be amazed.
12:00-1:30 Cryptozoology in Comics discussion panel @ SPACE Gallery with special guests:
-– Perhapanauts comic artist Craig Rousseau and writer Todd Dezago
-- Loren Coleman, director of the International Museum of Cryptozoology
1:30-3:00 Philip K. Dick panel discussion @ SPACE Gallery w/giveaways from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s new edition of author Philip K. Dick’s books, including copies of Exegesis!
Special guests:
-- Author Alex Irvine (Marvel’s Hellstorm: Son of Satan, The Narrows, A Scattering of Jades)
-- Zack Handlen of the Onion AV Club
-- Sam Pfeifle of the Portland Phoenix
3:00-4:30 Guerilla Film-Making discussion panel @ SPACE Gallery with special guests:
-- Ted Bohus, director of Deadly Spawn
-- Rob Fitz, director of God of Vampires
-- Barry Dodd, director of Ragged Isle
-- Shawn French, director of Wrong House
-- Shoggoth Assembly members
4:30-7:00 God of Vampires screening (106 min) @ SPACE Gallery,
Followed by Q&A w/director Rob Fitz.
7:00-8:30 Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods screening @ SPACE Gallery. This critically acclaimed documentary about the life and work of comic writer Grant Morrison is crafted to feel in part much like one of his stories, and was produced in close collaboration with the author himself.

8:30-10:30 Coast City Comicon wrap-up party (21+ only) @ Geno’s Rock Club: The Geek Chorus presents that awful Captain America movie from the 70s

Game Geeks will be running Heroclix Superman Sealed Drafts all weekend, for $24 (clix included), as well as Magic The Gathering: Standard Constructed Draft tournaments. Check in at their table for more details, or you can also call their shop before the con at (207)767-1101.

LOCATION INFO
Main Convention Floor:
The Eastland Park Hotel is at 157 High Street, near the major intersection of High, Congress, and Free Streets, where the Portland Museum of Art is located. Opened as a grand establishment in 1927, the hotel has maintained itself over the decades as one of Portland's most prominent hotels. The convention is being held in one of the large event halls at the hotel. If you reserve rooms at the Eastland, make sure to mention you are attending the convention for a discount. http://www.eastlandparkhotel.com/

Discussion Panels and Film Screenings:
The SPACE Gallery is at 538 Congress Street, about a block and a half from the Eastland Hotel, where the convention floor is. This venue is small and heavily involved with the very young and vibrant local arts scene, as it is located in the same block as both the Maine College of Art, the Artist Studios Building, and the Institute of Contemporary Art. http://www.space538.org/

For a Google map which shows the distance between the two locations, which will allow you to get driving directions to either spot:
http://g.co/maps/v66qn

REVIEW: Mark LaFlamme's Box of Lies

This review is really, really late in coming, because I wanted to do it up right, and I didn’t want to skimp on it. Chances are you wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t told you, because chances are you haven’t heard of the book, Box of Lies, even though it’s been out a full year as I write this. You may not have even heard of the author, Mark LaFlamme, unless you live in the Lewiston-Auburn area. Why this is, I can’t explain. LaFlamme has been steadily writing and releasing excellent horror and weird fiction books since 2005, and each one has had a slightly different but equally captivating overall character. I’ve liked and admired every single one of his books I’ve read, and that’s most of them. Why one of the big publishers hasn’t picked up his contract is beyond me.

LaFlamme was born in Waterville, Maine, and continues to live here with the rest of us loonies. Clearly this has affected his brain, and has fertilized his imagination to an ungodly level. As if that wasn’t enough, for the last 17 years or so he has been writing the Lewiston Daily Sun’s crime beat, and has been the author of their “Street Talk” column for many years. The influence of this journalistic work on his fiction is a straightforward approach that takes the reader on roads that would never have been taken otherwise (one hopes).

I know in the past I’ve compared some of his storytelling skills to Stephen King’s, but truly his voice is his very own, and a strong one at that. Unmistakable and somehow honest even though what he tells us word by word is a string of lies. That, I suspect, is because he knows the truth, intimately. Working the crime beat in Lewiston, Maine, is a hard way to learn about reality, yet that is what he does, every day, every late night shift. Yet somehow within him a spark of light still lives – though perhaps that light simply serves to throw darker shadows as he speaks in these stories.

Page by page in Box of Lies, LaFlamme giveth and he taketh away. Is what we imagine real? Is that which we think real imagined instead? In "Table for One," LaFlamme turns the fancies of the paranoid mind of the restaurant diner into solid worse-than-you-could-imagine reality. In "Pepper," a visiting alien finds out what makes Earthmen tick. In "The Bender Argument," LaFlamme gives us a scenario that posits what you might get if you like philosophy a little TOO much, a story which would make one hell of a nightmare movie, a perfect Twilight Zone episode, and would make Philip K. Dick himself proud.

Those of us who spend time musing about the unknown histories of our local street people may notice that LaFlamme has the talent to transmute these blanks into new stories, such as Elsy in "Find a Penny," wherein we find out what happens when you can’t tell a bad penny from a good one until its spell is woven in intractable time. Others of us who wonder what happens in communities after the press is done reporting on the latest icy winter sport fatalities will find out perhaps more than we wanted to know in "Bone Lake," where the search goes on for the dead that have left land for the cold dark waters.

The 28 stories in Box of Lies vary in size from 5 pages to 31 pages in length, which gives a wonderfully varied pace to the collection, and subject matter ranges from the graphically horrific to the futuristically normal, which reminds me of some of my favorite horror/weird fiction authors’ collections, like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. But when I asked him if he prefers writing scifi or horror, LaFlamme answered, “I'm constantly telling people that I don't write either. I don't set out to write horror or science fiction. It's just that my characters tend to do things that are: A) horrifying, or B) in defiance of known physical laws. I like to think of myself as a perfectly normal writer whose characters misbehave. I even tried to write a romance once. The heroine ended up dead, hacked into a dozen pieces and shipped to Venus. Not really. But that sounds pretty good. I might write that one.”

As a Mainer, his stories are often set here in the Pine Tree State, but as he succinctly explains, “The slithering freak plants in Vegetation are no more creepy because they are set in Homefield, Maine. I could have set that book in Dork, Utah and the substance of the tale wouldn't have changed a bit.” Yet somehow his home state creeps its way into the tales, for whatever reason. It may have something to do with the long winters, which form the impetus for him to create: “I absolutely hate winter. It's cold. It's dark and it seems endless. I can't ride my motorcycle much and there's no point in going to the beach at all. Maine winters are harsh and long. With all that time spent indoors, it's easy to become introspective and gloomy. Which I do. If I didn't have fictional worlds to turn to, I'd probably go into my basement and never come out.” (Maybe that’s another story for you to write, Mark!)

Like me, he has pondered why Maine does seem to stand out from other settings. “There IS something about Maine. It's rugged. It feels isolated from the rest of the world. The people here have their own way of doing things. I think that gets overplayed in Hollywood sometimes, but there's no doubt that living here is conducive to creativity. And perhaps lunacy.”

Some folks who read LaFlamme’s work in the Lewiston Sun Journal develop the idea that he’s from away, but that may be due to the fact that he, like many Mainers, has felt the need to roam. “I spent some time in the south - Charlotte, NC and Newport News, Virginia, specifically - but didn't last long down there. Like so many others, I came back. It was almost a subconscious decision, some homing mechanism I don't fully understand. Someday, I'd like to move out to California or Arizona. Could I stay out there? Remains to be seen. In the meantime, I'm here in Maine, my roots getting thicker by the hour.”

Since I couldn’t figure myself out why none of the big publishers has picked LaFlamme up yet, I asked him directly. He said he hadn’t initially planned to stick with his independent publisher, Booklocker, beyond his first book The Pink Room, but “six years and four novels later, I have no plans to go anywhere else. Why would I? Right now, I have final say on things like title, cover and layout. Once my novel gets through tweaking, editing and design, it gets to the market fairly quickly. It's out there getting read and making money instead of sitting on some big publisher's slush pile along with five hundred others. It's the golden age of indie publishing, although too few people know that right now.” For LaFlamme, going indie has allowed him to focus his time on book writing instead of spending futile hours trying to craft proposals to big publishers and agents, a gamble which doesn’t often pay off in the floodtide of material coming through their office doors each day.

LaFlamme made an observation on the newly rejuventated state of independent publishing in a growing electronic book market: “A lot of authors are turning down respectable offers from traditional publishers these days because they like the freedom and earning potential of the indie way. And yet, a lot of people still believe that authors are self-published because they have no other choice. There's still that stigma, but I suspect it won't last forever. With more and more indie authors out there, chances are good that your next favorite book will be written by one of us. Hopefully by me personally. There are plenty of authors doing extremely well just by selling their books on Kindle. Look up Amanda Hocking, Joe Konrath or John Locke to find out just how well.”

In September 2011 he released his newest book, Delirium Tremens, which lands solidly in the horror genre. This latest accomplishment from LaFlamme leads readers into the terror-laden life of alcoholic Stephen Boone, soon to die if he doesn’t cease his liquor habit. Problem is, if he stops drinking, all the dead people that visit him when he’s sober will come back. A Catch-22 erupts when spirits of a mother and daughter involve him in the details of their murder, and there is no going back. You can find this book on Amazon in either print or electronic versions, along with his prior volumes, such as Box of Lies, Dirt, and The Pink Room. You might even find copies of a few of his titles at your local independent bookshop, such as Portland's Green Hand Bookshop. You never know!

Philip K. Dick book release!

In a rare foray into the world of new book selling, I am happy to announce that, as of today, the Green Hand has in stock the 8 newly released titles from the Philip K. Dick catalogue that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is printing. The cover design is simple and sharp, I'm really enjoying the aesthetic they landed on for the series. For those of you tired of piecing together a mix-matched collection, here is a chance to pick up freshly minted copies in this swanky but affordable softcover edition! Come on in and check them out!

The titles I now have in stock are (as shown, L to R, top row then bottom):
The Simulacra
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Lies, Inc.
The Divine Invasion
Valis
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
A Scanner Darkly
Now Wait for Last Year

Sacred & Profane 2011

FYI folks, no advance sales of tickets this year for the Sacred & Profane festival!! Buy 'em Saturday at the Casco Bay Lines terminal when embarking for Peaks on the 2:15 ferry, or get 'em @ the Peaks Island dock when the ferry lands @ 2:35pm.

Poetry as an object

There is something about a book that is pure poetry in and of itself, in physical form. Of course, often there is wonderful poetry within as well, such as this great little piece from a 1936 edition of Rachel Field's Fear Is The Thorn:

Black Alder Berry

Under mid-winter skies I stood
Before red berries by a wood.
With these two eyes I saw them plain
Strung on bare twigs like scarlet rain.
There in that withered, frosty field
My throat went dry, my senses reeled,
And who I was and why I came
I could not say. My very name
Was lost to me -- I only knew
Color that breaks the heart in two.