If you read my biography, you know that I've been writing a good deal of non-fiction over the years. Here's a sample of my favorite essays, reviews and pieces on writing. For the complete list with links to those on-line, check out my Writing Credits

• Everything you wanted to know about the "Brilliant Career" of Ursula K. Le Guin appeared at Salon.com in 1/2001.
• My complete interview with satirist James Morrow is available for the first time on this site. Much shorter versions have appeared in both print and on-line during the past two years, but here's the complete, unedited version. Morrow is erudite and fascinating - get the whole story.
• Who was Hypatia? A pagan martyr? The last light of reason before the Dark Ages descended on Europe? A brilliant mathematician murdered because she was a woman in a man's role? It depends on who you ask... Get the answer at Bygone Days.
• Go to Strange Horizons and read my most recent review "Blast Off with John Varley's Red Thunder" a rolickng good tale in the style of Heinlein's juveniles. What's to prevent four teens from building a spaceship and taking off for Mars? Men-in-Black? A sleazy PI? Wittern permission from their parents?
• "Gladiator vs. Gibbon: The Facts Behind the Fiction." (2001) Gladiator was a blockbuster movie, but was it real? Of course not! Well...mostly. Read my essay to see how much fact the producers managed to let slip in among the fiction. A shorter version also appeared at iUniverse 8/2000.
• "Painfreak" - Read my book review published in Deathrealm, 1996 and see what else Gerard Houarner is up to at his site.
• "Night Shapes" - William Nolan, author of Logan's Run, put out a signed numbered collection of horror stories. Read my book review published in Deathrealm, in 1996.
• "The King is Dead" - Elvis has been sighted in an amazing array of well-written horror, fantasy and mystery stories. Read all about it in my book review published in Deathrealm, in 1995.
• "Year's Best Fantasy & Horror" - Nancy Kress, Neil Gaiman and Jack Ketchum are just a few of the red hot authors represented in this collection. See what I have to say about them in my book review published in Deathrealm, in 1995.

FAITH L. JUSTICE: You've been called "one of the great modern satirists" and claim Twain, Vonnegut, and Heller among your literary influences. How did you wind up writing in the SF/fantasy genre vs. mainstream fiction?

JAMES MORROW: As early as my first novel, The Wine of Violence, I was producing fiction that obviously partook as much of satire and allegory as of "SF/Fantasy." But the events in Wine occurred on another planet, and the people got there in spaceships, and so we all looked at each other -- my agent, my editor, and me -- and we said, "It probably makes sense to market this as science fiction, but let's hope we can somehow reach a cross-over audience."

That was two decades ago. Twenty years later, we're all still looking at each other and saying, "It probably makes sense to market this as science fiction, but let's hope we can somehow reach a cross-over audience."

I'm not a fatalist. I don't like Original Sin scenarios. But it's possible that, in defining myself as an SF author right at the beginning, I have irretrievably exiled myself from the Garden of Mainstream Acceptance.

If I had it to do over, however, I suspect I'd choose to lapse from grace once again. Now, sure, I'd love to have the large audience enjoyed by Twain and Heller. (Though I would not want to acquire that audience at the price of Twain and Heller's present ontological status.) Naturally I would like to connect with Vonnegut's vast readership. But it's important to remember this: there's no obscurity like publishing a mainstream novel that goes nowhere. Heller was the first to admit that, for every Catch-22, fifty equally worthy mainstream novels fall by the wayside. (I was privileged to have Heller for a teacher when I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and I always admired his self-deprecating demeanor.) Whereas the SF community has a way of continually giving an author a new lease on life. At the moment, for example, I'm almost completely in print, in trade paperbacks labeled "science fiction/fiction," whatever that means.

I hate marketing categories. They have nothing to do with the art of fiction, and everything to do with the non-art of shelving books. How ironic that the most commercial Hollywood director enjoys greater freedom from labels than does the most artistically ambitious SF author. When you go to the multiplex cinema, there's none of the presumptuous geography that governs a book store or a library -- you don't find a special screen for SF films, another dedicated to mysteries, another for serious drama, and so on. The boundaries are porous.

I shall always feel enormously indebted to the SF world. It's given me an audience, critical acclaim, half a living wage, and more than my share of awards. And here's the most powerful argument of all: by working in relative obscurity, addressing myself to the freewheeling, low-pressure science fiction community, I think I've probably done better work -- more biting, more audacious, more honest -- than if I'd quickly become a high-profile writer. And in my haltingly idealistic fashion, I shall always insist that the work, not the royalty check, is what counts most.

Now, if the mainstream wants to discover me at this point in my career, that would be perfectly all right with me. I could use the money.

Your stories are always fantastical yet grounded in the real world. What kind of research do you do to keep the "science" in science fiction?

Even since This Is the Way the World Ends, I've attempted to work simultaneously in two very different -- perhaps even incompatible -- idioms: the utterly fanciful and the utterly mundane. I'm intrigued by the artistic possibilities that unfold in that kind of literary no-man's-land. One finds a similar landscape in Kafka's stories, though without the strain of scientific rationality that runs through my work.

World Ends turns on a wholly supernatural premise -- a temporary reprieve for the "unadmitted" victims of human extinction -- but the disaster itself is treated realistically. I read dozens of books on the effects of nuclear blasts (short-term and long-term), the perverse logic of so-called "strategic doctrine," and the Nuremberg precedent whereby the "unadmitted" put their murderers on trial. The situation is impossible, but the suffering is real.

Only Begotten Daughter features the same strategy: an absurdist premise counterpoised against lots of research into Atlantic City, Christian theology, the scientific worldview, and all the other components of my heroine's mental and physical universe. With Towing Jehovah, I found out as much as I could about supertankers and oil spills, the better to lend an air of spurious credibility to the conceit of a flesh-and-blood Corpus Dei. For Blameless in Abaddon, I obviously spent a lot of time investigating the field of theodicy, so that the courtroom scenes would feel plausible even though the defendant happens to be God.

The argument I make to myself goes something like this: if I do enough research, augmenting the premise of the moment with lots of gritty particulars, then at a certain point I will start to believe that premise, no matter how ridiculous. And if I believe it, then maybe the reader will believe it as well.

I've always admired your quirky complicated characters -- people just on the edge of mainstream, neighbors with a twist. You did it again in *The Eternal Footman* with Nora Burkhart, the ex-English teacher and flower-delivery person, and Gerard Korty the reclusive "modern Michelangelo." Where did they come from?

This issue of characterization dovetails neatly into the research question you asked earlier. It's the other side of the coin: how might a writer invest his characters with enough humanity that we care about them even if they're living through impossible events?

A common criticism of SF is that it settles for far too simplistic an understanding of the human psyche. In the words of Thomas Disch, the genre lacks "a decent sense of despair." It's a fair complaint, I feel. There's certainly no evidence that, as our species becomes increasingly dependent on technology and our world becomes increasingly science-fictional, we're losing our psychological complexity. Indeed, most people would argue that inner turmoil and ineffable existential dread have *increased* in the post-industrial age.

Nobody in a feudal fantasy like The Lord of the Rings or Dune experiences anxiety attacks of unknown origin. Nobody has to cope with migraines or hemorrhoids or suicidal depression. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe that kind of realism would destroy the very conventions that permit such novels to delight us. But I do worry when an author places a caste system at the center of a novel and then fails to ask searching questions about it. To make any sense of the Dune books, you have assume that the average Sardaukar storm-trooper or Bene Gesserit witch has nothing that we would call an inner life. That's not a leap I enjoy making.

Having said all this, let me hasten to confess that I've always found characterization to be the hardest aspect of novel-writing. I conceive of my stories in terms of themes and situations first, human psychology second. If I were completely honest, I'd have to admit that the main reason I give my characters vivid occupations -- Murray Katz processing snapshots, George Paxton carving tombstones, Nora Burkhart delivering flowers, Gerard Korty sculpting the Divine Comedy -- is that it simplifies the characterization problem. This strategy affords me lots of "objective correlatives" for my character's mental states, including their self-doubts and neuroses. That's better than the stupid conceit of a worry-free Sardaukar, but it's certainly not the highest variety of psychological fiction. I'm not Dostoyevsky.

What does your typical creative day look like?

The alarm clock rings. Kathy and Jim send Pooka the Border collie to wake up Christopher, the eleven-year-old (my son, Kathy's stepson). Kathy makes Chris's breakfast. Jim takes Amtrak the Doberman for a walk, a process that usually yields at least two good ideas -- a line of dialogue, a juicy metaphor, a structural tactic -- for that day's scene.

Chris eats breakfast while reading the funnies. Jim, Kathy, Chris, and Pooka walk a quarter-mile to the bus stop. (For reasons not worth explaining, the best way for my son to get to school is on a public bus.) While Kathy and Chris ride downtown together, Jim heads for home with Pooka. He typically gets two or three more good ideas along the way.

The rest of the day is a dance among competing obligations. Jim tries to get a load of dishes washed ... to have at least one nourishing conversation with Kathy ... and to jog twice around the block. But mostly he writes and writes and writes. It's an addiction.

I sometimes worry that, if the Prince of Darkness came to me and said, "Just sign here, and I'll give you unlimited writing time for the rest of your life," I would start looking around for a pen. That would be wrong on many levels, of course. My family needs me, and vice-versa. Besides, I've *already* got a better schedule -- more opportunity to practice my craft -- than 95% of the authors on this planet.

This situation could change overnight, of course, but right now I'm still in a position to write thematically ambitious books that take two or three years between conception and publication. I'm very lucky.

You've described Towing Jehovah as a fantastical Lord Jim and Blameless in Abaddon as a retelling of the Book of Job. What are the literary roots of The Eternal Footman?

Its primary touchstone is The Epic of Gilgamesh. I'm not very subtle about this ancestry. My heroine spends part of the novel traveling with a theatre company that's producing a more-or-less faithful adaptation of Gilgamesh in a succession of southern towns.

We hear a lot these days, especially from academic precincts, about the deterministic nature of human language and culture. There is no such thing as a universal human spirit, the postmodern intellectuals argue. All realities -- moral, epistemological, psychological -- are ultimately "local," conditioned by immediate social and linguistic norms. Even science, the postmoderns say, can be profitable scrutinized through this radically relativistic lens.

And yet here's Gilgamesh, the world's oldest surviving epic, speaking to us with poignancy and immediacy about the bedrock tragedy of the human condition. The theme is the inescapability of death, and the poem tells us how utterly human it is to wish that things were otherwise. If Gilgamesh is essentially "local," then I say the hell with it.

The Eternal Footman also owes a debt to Camus's The Plague and to Peter Barnes's marvelous play about the Black Death, Red Noses. As I've commented elsewhere, it's possible to map the whole Godhead Trilogy onto the Divine Comedy. Towing Jehovah corresponds to the Purgatorio -- the characters are trapped in a gray domain defined by their moral limitations. Blameless in Abaddon is the Inferno in a different key. ("Abaddon" is a Hebrew word that can be translated as "hell.") And Footman, with its glimpses of a post-theistic utopia, might be regarded as a kind of Paradiso. But this is all rather cerebral. Let's drop it and go on to the next question.

You've lamented that, unlike nineteenth-century writers, modern novels deal primarily with "quotidian life and its discontents." What are the grand questions you wrestle with in this trilogy, and did you come up with any answers?

This is a great question, Faith, but I could spend the rest of the week trying to answer it!

Let me attempt an end run around the problem . Let me talk briefly about the gap between the cosmic riddles I thought I'd be confronting in the Godhead Trilogy and the riddles I really did confront.

Before I actually wrote Towing Jehovah, I'd assumed it would be a satire on the common notion that, when a society loses faith in God, it ceases to be moral. But eventually I took the theme much more seriously, and I ended up giving theism its due. Once the crew of the Carpco Valparaiso discovers that nobody is peering down from Heaven, they lose their moral compass: murders and orgies start becoming the norm.

But only temporarily. By the end of act two, the Kantian categorical imperative has taken hold, and the crew starts behaving decently again. So a novel that began life as a kind of science-fictional joke -- what if God died? -- ended up addressing other sorts of questions. How do we account for ethical behavior? What might a non-theistic morality look like? Do we behave decently merely because we fear divine retribution, or are we a better species than that?

I went into Blameless in Abaddon knowing that the plot would revolve around God's long overdue trial for crimes against humanity. But until I began investigating theodicy in depth, I had no idea that the case for the defense could be so rich and complex. Christian theologians have been explaining God's ostensible complicity in human suffering for nearly 2,000 years, and they've accomplished a lot -- so much, in fact, that I decided to have the World Court judges return a "not guilty" verdict. And here I thought a single case of childhood cancer would make the prosecution's case!

But there's a problem, of course. Because after you've hammered together your beautiful little theodicy -- whether you're Saint Augustine or C. S. Lewis -- you're still stuck with that suffering child. So while the World Court was ultimately willing to let God off the hook, you can be sure that James Morrow was not.

On the drawing board, The Eternal Footman was supposed to address the following theme: "No matter what the clerics tell us, death means nothing but oblivion, and it's also the primary source from which the world's religions draw their energy." But during the composition process, I realized that death is a more ambiguous phenomenon than my original notes allowed. I still have no use for it in my personal life, but I can see how -- from the broadest evolutionary and historical perspective -- the case for death's necessity is probably even better than the case for God's goodness.

As for the notion that death-denial lies at the heart of most religions, I have one of the characters in Footman say this very explicitly. But I'm no longer prepared to reduce religion to that formula. Like Towing Jehovah, The Eternal Footman got me speculating about the genesis of ethical behavior, and I concluded that religiously-rooted narratives like the Good Samaritan certainly have their part to play.

In The Eternal Footman you propose two alternative utopias: Deus Absconditus and Holistica. Which one would you want to live in and why?

The great challenge I faced in writing *The Eternal Footman* was to move beyond my usual anti-religious satire and offer a few glimpses of a world that has somehow evolved beyond God. This is Deus Absconditus. It's not Utopia, but it is a "land of the grown-ups."

Readers who examine my hostility to organized churches closely will notice the gravamen of my indictment centers on the idea that religion infantilizes us. In the West, this infantilization process is displayed in much of our religious rhetoric. God is a "father." Jesus wants us to approach him as "children." Many Christians fancy themselves "born again." (Let's remember, to be "born" means to enter a state of infancy, not a state of enlightenment.)

Anybody familiar with my oeuvre knows that I think children are absolutely marvelous beings. But they are not adults. They aren't obligated to shoulder the same moral responsibilities as grown-ups. When Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham tells you how the world works, listen very closely. You will hear a child talking.

Holistica is presented as a kind of New Age alternative to Deus Absconditus, and I think it's essentially a nightmare. At its worst, the New Age mentality is even worse than the organized-church mentality. It doesn't just invite us to be children. It invites us to abandon rationality altogether. It asks us to be chipmunks.

In The Eternal Footman, one of your protagonists, Nora Burkhart, suffers a terrible punishment for "loving her child too much." Earlier in the story she makes a choice which she thinks will save her son, but knows it means the death of many others. Since God is dead, who punishes her?

Nora's situation constitutes the most tragic and ambiguous trap I've ever set for a protagonist. She's not fundamentally a victim: indeed, she's the savior of civilization. But she's still trapped.

When one of my death avatars, Quincy the fetch, tells Nora that she loved her child too much, he's not necessarily speaking the truth. A few pages later, Nora's rescuer tells her, "Death is a lousy philosopher." But I wanted to raise the bedeviling and maddening idea that, in our determination to do right by our loved ones, we may do other people harm.

I won't give away the emotional climax of Footman -- I won't say exactly how Nora is punished -- but her downfall presumably traces to what, throughout the novel, I call God's "death throes." Yes, the Supreme Being is "dead," but his dark side still sends out reverberations, most conspicuously the fetches. Only after the last fetch vanishes do we truly enter the "post-theistic age."

You've said that satire is the child of anger and comedy. In your writings on western religion, where does your anger come from? Your comedic touch?

As I mentioned in my recent Paradoxa interview with Samuel R. Delany, people are sometimes surprised to learn that my childhood contacts with religion were undramatic. My readers assume that, given the vehemence with which I question Christianity's legitimacy, I must be working through some terrible, quasi-repressed trauma. They think I was hit with a ruler by a nun, or I had to empty a Lutheran minister's bedpan -- something like that.

My religious upbringing was actually quite tepid and generic -- a white Presbyterian Church in the Philadelphia suburbs. My skepticism comes primarily from reading the world's great disbelievers -- Voltaire, Twain, Ibsen, Camus, and so on -- and realizing that their anguish and their disaffection felt honest to me in a way that the theistic worldview never did. To use my earlier terminology, Voltaire and Camus seemed to be among the real grown-ups on the planet.

Let me hasten to add that, while my skepticism is essentially intellectual, that doesn't mean it's passionless. Quite the contrary. For me, thinking and feeling are inextricably intermixed.

To quote from the aforementioned Samuel R. Delany interview: "I guess I'm writing for readers who, whether they're believers or not, are viscerally disturbed, on a almost daily basis, by Christianity's claim to occupy some moral and epistemological high ground. My imagined audience includes people who've noticed that you can't depend on religion to get us thinking intelligently about war, peace, ethics, eros, gender, nature, intolerance, or human origins - au contraire, religion often gets us thinking about these problems in vacuous and ugly ways - and this state of affairs shakes them to the core. It drives them crazy. It makes them want to scream."

The comedy in my fiction, I feel, functions as a kind of Trojan horse. It lets me smuggle all sorts of grand opinions into each story without seeming too pretentious.

Woody Allen does it better than I do. He has a gift for condensing a devastating -- yet at the same time rather subtle -- critique of the theistic worldview into a single line. In Love and Death, Allen raises the possibility that God is "evil," then quickly adds that he's probably just an "underachiever" instead. In Deconstructing Harry, the protagonist tells his sister, "Given a choice between the Pope and air conditioning, I'll take air conditioning."

You call yourself a "scientific humanist." What does that mean?

I like that term -- I first heard it in connection with Jacob Bronowski -- because there's something slightly paradoxical and ambiguous about it. And I think that worthy fiction always partakes of paradox and ambiguity.

C.P. Snow's famous dichotomy between "the two cultures," scientists versus humanists, goes back to 1962, and I think it's still very much with us. If anything, the schism has gotten worse in recent years. Snow was concerned about the failure of academic humanists to comprehend the insights of science. Today we have hundreds of postmodern academics who are actually *proud* of their failure to comprehend the insights of science -- a pride in which they are so noisy and articulate and persuasive that they make someone like me feel slightly ashamed to be caught using a phrase like "the insights of science."

The wonderful hoax that Alan Sokal perpetrated six years ago in the pages of Social Text" -- feeding the postmodernists' catechism back to them in a form that so flattering that they didn't recognize it as a parody -- points up the essential bankruptcy of the contemporary "science studies" movement. When Swift published "A Modest Proposal," most educated people understood that he was being satiric. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries" and the faculty of Duke University, the wellspring of Social Text.

Bronowski liked to point out that science is "a very human activity." I think he meant that it's a mistake to regard science as a sterile, passionless, bureaucratic pursuit, destined to turn us into numbers. But the postmoderns have distorted Bronowski's idea -- as they have distorted similar ideas drawn from Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper -- beyond recognition, turning science into a mere "metaphor" or "narrative." Bronowski was inviting humanists to join in the great post-Enlightenment conversation about the limitations and misuses of scientific knowledge. And the humanists, to their eternal shame, responded by declaring that the Enlightenment was dead.

The success of the Sokal hoax makes me especially sad because we *do* need a serious critique of science in this culture. The apologists for the technocratic machine must be countered and contradicted. But this will never happen by filtering science through the bizarre epistemologies of French intellectuals. Jacques Derrida didn't discover the threat to the ozone layer. Scientists did. (Their names, for the record, were F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California.)

Your writing has been called everything from "irreverent" to "blasphemous." How would you characterize your writing and, given Salman Rushdie's fate, does this vehemence affect your writing or personal behavior?

Obviously a whole book could be written about the Rushdie affair and the differences between Western and Islamic perceptions of fiction and its power over reality. (In fact, whole books have been written about these matters.) On the whole, I don't imagine myself becoming the next Rushdie -- I don't fear reprisals from Christian militants. At this point in history, theological satire in the West flies well below the radar of the religious right. There's no need for me to put a barbed-wire fence around my house.

Occasionally, a born-again Christian with a powerful search engine will blunder into my website. The poor fellow has typed in "Jesus," and suddenly he's confronted with reviews of Only Begotten Daughter. Usually he'll leave me a message -- disapproving, but hardly menacing. It goes something like this: "Well, Jim, I can see by this website that you're very concerned with religious matters. Did you know that Jesus Christ is very concerned about your concern with religious matters? I suggest you let him into your heart, preferably before sundown, lest you roast in Hell. Have a nice day."

Believe it or not, I sometimes wonder if my relentless railing against Christianity doesn't go too far. At a certain point, obviously, any sort of blasphemy can become hurtful, irrelevant, or puerile. But I keep coming back to this question: who struck first, the satirist or the sacristan? And the answer is clearly, the latter.

We must be angry about Christianity's historical complicity in war, slavery, anti-Semitism, and the subjugation of women. God knows, that's not all we should be angry about. Secular belief systems also have much to answer for -- maybe they even have more to answer for. I don't know. But it's my particular job to keep shouting, "Look where the theistic-salvationist worldview leads us if we're not careful!"

Did you ever write a line that you're especially proud of -- that is, a line in which you managed to capture your worldview in epigrammatic fashion?

Yes. Ready? Here goes. In Towing Jehovah, my heroine says to a friend of hers, "That maxim, 'There are no atheists in foxholes,' it's not an argument against atheism - it's an argument against foxholes."

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For the record, I love history and I love to read historical fiction because most of it accurately portrays the facts. I'm also a fan of historical Hollywood epics, eagerly scanning the American Movie Classics listings for my favorites. But I don't hold Hollywood to the higher standards of written fiction. Movie producers are first and foremost entertainers who want to earn a profit from their product. Part of the entertainment for me is seeing what they get right and what they get wrong. So when a blockbuster like Gladiator hits the big screen, I eagerly plunk down my money, buy popcorn, cheer the good guys, and boo the bad. As I suspected, Gladiator was fun, but none of its twelve Oscar nominations were for historical accuracy. When I got home from the theater, I pulled out my Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and checked the facts. Here's what I found:

Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) was a philosopher king as portrayed in the movie and was considered the last of the "five good emperors." For four reigns the Roman Emperors had followed a pattern of identifying a mature able man and appointing him the successor by "adoption." Marcus Aurelius broke that pattern in favor of his unstable son and set the Empire on a disastrous course. Contrary to the movie, which portrayed the son as a rejected applicant for the throne, Marcus Aurelius doted on Commodus, gave him the best tutors and raised him to be his successor. He made him co-ruler in 177. I'm sure, like most fathers who want to leave the family business to their son, he over-looked the rashness of the boy.

The movie also claimed Commodus murdered his father and subverted his plan to revert the Empire to the golden days of the Roman Republic under the stewardship of the virtuous General Maximus. Marcus Aurelius had no intention of changing the course of the Empire and when he died in 180 (probably of plague), the senate and army enthusiastically acclaimed Commodus as emperor. At least the movie got the truth of the classic relationship - powerful demanding father vs. weakling needy son.

Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) was eighteen when he assumed the diadem and, in typical teenage fashion, rejected everything his father stood for. The movie actually cleaned up some of his monstrousness - Gibbon dates the Decline from Commodus' reign. Among his many excesses he renamed Rome "Colony of Commodus," renamed the months of the year after his titles, kept hundreds of women and boys for his sexual pleasure, and executed wealthy men to confiscate their property. He particularly targeted anyone connected with the earlier five reigns either by blood or association, thus eliminating any potential rivals. After thirteen years, his domestics became so afraid of his excesses, his favorite concubine poisoned him and a wrestler strangled him in his weakened condition.

The movie particularly glossed over Commodus' own gladiatorial skills. Early in his reign he styled himself after Hercules, grew a beard, and added the club and lion skin as symbols of his sovereignty. He personally slaughtered hundreds of animals in the public arena - while being suitably protected, of course. Later he took on the persona of Paulus, a celebrated gladiator who fought in the Secutor style with helmet, buckler and sword. Commodus fought in the arena seven hundred and thirty-five times and demanded a stipend from the common fund for gladiators so huge it became another tax on the Roman people. Showing some of this would have made the climatic scene of Commodus fighting Maximus much more pertinent - not to mention interesting - but then they might have had to shorten the love story.

The movie did capture Lucilla's (Connie Nielson) ambition, but missed on her motive. There is no evidence Lucilla wanted power for anything other than power's sake. Commodus' sister was married to her father's adopted brother and co-emperor Lucius Verus and got a taste for ruling during that eight-year period. When Verus died, she married an elderly man named Pompeianus, but soon got bored with private life. Lucilla plotted against her brother; was caught, sentenced to exile on the island of Capraea in 182, and murdered on her brother's order in 183. Commodus ruled for another ten years after her death. What the movie did get right is the hairstyle. Based on coins from the period, Lucilla did wear her hair in relatively simple styles, pulled into braided buns at the nape of her neck. Who knows about the funky cosmetic dots connecting her eyebrows?

Which brings us to the titular gladiator. In the movie, Maximus (Russell Crowe), the honorable general-turned-slave-turned-gladiator, avenges the murder of his family by killing Commodus in gladiatorial combat. Maximus did not exist and, as we already found out, Commodus reigned long and unhappily. Commodus did execute two well-regarded brothers named Maximus and Condianus who served as Roman Consuls in 151, but there is no record of a General Maximus from Spain.

An ex-soldier named Maternus might have inspired part of the story. He gathered bands of deserters, broke open prisons, and incited slaves to revolt. He forged these dregs into an army, which terrorized the rich cities of Gaul and Spain, then split up his men and sent them in disguise over the Alps to Rome. Maternus planned to murder Commodus and take over the throne during the tumultuous festival honoring Cybele. He was betrayed and executed.

The movie's most grievous historical fault is in leading us to believe that after Commodus' death, Rome passed into the hands of wise Lucilla and the honorable senator Gracchus (Derek Jacobi) who would restore the luster of the Roman Republic. All is well and American moviegoers have their semi-happy ending. It didn't happen. After Commodus' murder, his Praetorian Guard handpicked an elderly man of impeccable reputation named Pertinax as emperor and very soon resented their haste.

The new emperor reversed Commodus' largess toward the Guards as well as recalling many of the former emperor's exiles and restoring confiscated property to rightful families. After only eighty-six days, the Praetorians assassinated the virtuous Pertinax and put the imperial throne up for sale to the highest bidder. Thus ended the golden era of the Antonines. Over the next ninety years the Roman Empire was plagued with thirty-six emperors, many lasting less than a year.

For a movie with a more realistic ending, but just as fantastic a narrative, check out AMC for Fall of the Roman Empire, a 1964 blockbuster starring Alec Guiness as the saintly Marcus Aurelius, Christopher Plummer as a suitably deranged Commodus, Sophia Loren as a luscious Lucilla, and Stephen Boyd as a virtuous general named Livius. Like many, I enjoyed Gladiator for its flash and drama, but whether it's on the big screen or the little one, take the history like your popcorn - with a grain salt.

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"Sex, love, death, they are all the same. Pain, pleasure, what is the difference?" states one of Houarner's characters. In this book, love and death dance a horrific tango while pain and pleasure take turns cutting in. This veteran small press author succeeds in pulling you into his depraved world of erotic horror and holding you hostage. Houarner exposes our hidden psychic pools of slimy exudate and shines light into the cobwebby corners of our souls. You shiver helplessly as you recognize yourself -- if ever so faintly -- in the dark distorted mirror of his stories.

Houarner draws you in through vivid, disturbing detail and carefully thought out characters. The cycle of sex/love/death /pain/pleasure is played out in many relationships: husband/wife, father/daughter, brother/sister. He toys with his characters in a cat and mouse game. We hope for them to escape and slowly realize they never will -- and most wouldn't want to. Houarner's stories have the impact of a highway pileup where you slowly drive by, ogle the body parts and mutter "there but for the grace of God..."

If you don't believe in God and need to fill some hollow space at your core, maybe you should visit "Painfreak," the Flying Dutchman-like club that appears suddenly in disreputable parts of cities in several of these stories. In the title story a young man stalks his estranged wife to the club where they met. He confronts the question: Why do we love? The answer is played out in the twisted deeds of a hell that owes more to Hieronymous Bosch than to Dante.

Houarner grounds his stories in realism and peoples them with characters we might think of as marginal to society -- like Cynthia, a young sex slave in "Safe Word." I've seen her on the subway doing her solo dance with a pole. I've found Bricht, the homeless man in "The Night Pain," crumpled in doorways. He's an ex-mental patient who can only feel by naming his pain and carving it on the people whose lives he desperately wants to share. Kurt, a young "exotic dancer" entertained at a few of my friends' over-40 parties. That was before he ran afoul of Talia in a story aptly titled "Tongue."

Ordinary people get caught in this surreal world as well. Gene in "Painted Faces" is a nice suburban husband (with only a few kinks) who loved his serial killer father. Unfortunately for him, the inclination to mayhem skipped a generation. Eliot is a drab young man in a drab job in "Hot Thing." He is driven to casual murder in order to acquire the power to make himself desirable. "Trail of Pain and Letters" is a bizarre story told in written instructions to an office worker as he becomes ever more ensnared in humiliation and death.

My favorites of the book are a trilogy of stories about an assassin named Max and his adopted twin nieces Kueur and Alioune -- a most peculiar pair whose tastes in love/death run parallel to their adopted uncles'. In "The Beast That Was Max" we learn how Max found the girls in the woods outside Paris and provided for them at private schools. The girls redeem Max through his love for them and help him slay the Beast Within.

In "Angel of Death," Max desperately searches Painfreak for the twins whom he believes have been kidnapped. He has to resurrect the Beast in order to save himself from the spirits of his own victims. "Demons of Blood and Passion" caps the cycle. Max becomes almost recognizably human in his attempt to save the twins from their demon father. Houarner's art is such that you really like these characters and root for their survival.

This is a disturbing and unforgettable set of stories sold as a signed and numbered limited edition (500). Tom Piccirilli wrote a personal introduction and Debbie Tomassetti produced the cover art. Painfreak is not for the squeamish. Enter at your own peril. But if you just happen to meet Gerard Daniel Houarner there, don't run away screaming -- he's really a nice guy. It's only the Beast Within that makes him write these stories.

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Nolan, a veteran author with roots in the Midwest and Hollywood, provides a wide sampling of his skill in these twenty-four horror stories. Most dwell on themes of domestic violence and serial murder - usually as a result of child abuse. Transcending those themes is the feeling that this is a book of experiments. Experiments in voice, point of view and subject - most of which succeed.

Nolan has been publishing for over thirty years in the science fiction and horror fields. He has honed his craft to a fine edge. The beauty of his spare prose and deft style kept me turning the pages even when a story "failed." An "Introduction" by Peter Straub and "Afterword" by Robert Bloch put this book in the context of Nolan's career and his career in the context of time and the evolution of the genre. Both provide valuable insights and enhance the book.

The most successful experiment in this collection is "The Cure." Nolan does a delightful job of building the complex character of a serial killer in a first person diary. The dichotomy of this man's self-perception as essentially moral, clashes with his matter-of-fact descriptions of the murders. He searches for a "cure" for the compulsion to strangle people and finds it in a most surprising place. This story is fun.

His other serial killer stories varied in quality. "Him, Her, Them" a story of two serial killers who meet and date has a delightful twist ending. "A Final Stone" expands on the Jack the Ripper story. Nolan builds suspense and a terror as "Jack" strikes in the small Arizona town where the original London Bridge was relocated. "The Visit," an extended experiment in story telling by dialog, tried for a twist ending but fell flat. "The Francis File" is also flawed. It builds a picture of a serial killer as a victim - of child abuse, peers, societal rejection. The final occult victimization didn't work for me.

The other theme of domestic violence is reflected in a series of abusive father/daughter relationships. "Babe's Laughter" is a short but shocking tale exploring a woman's disintegration after the death of her father releases her from the need to be perfect. "My Name Is Dolly" is a chilling first person account of a child and her abusive adoptive father. Nolan excels in first person. We don't know if the narration is real or delusional brought on by the abuse suffered by the characters. "An Act of Violence" continues the form in a series of fan letters to an unresponsive author - or are they?

Some less successful entries in this category include "On Harper's Road," a competent story about a woman who travels to her past to confront her parents. It suffers from a predictable Twilight Zone plot. "Trust Not A Man" explores the same territory as "Babe's Laughter" but is flawed by an ending right out of "The Little Shop of Horrors." "Boyfriend," an experiment in poor typing seemed just plain silly.

Nolan's few stories tackling classic horror themes offer some comic relief. "Getting Dead" is a funny story about a vampire desperately trying to end his existence. He finds a California man who promises to fulfill his wish. He should have heeded the Chinese proverb "Be careful what you wish for..." "From A Narrow House" is a fun romp by a zombie who is still in love with his murdering wife. Maybe true love can conquer all.

Other random highlights of the collection include "The Party," an alcoholic's hell of endless schmucks, weirdoes and watered booze. It was chosen by Newsweek as one of the seven most effective horror stories of the century. "The Halloween Man" is a psychological horror story about a bright imaginative child who gives into her fears - or does she? "Special Treat" is about a lonely man, his divorced sister and talking cats. It has another twist ending that works.

Not all of Nolan's experiments work. There is a fair sprinkling of predictable stories that fall into the categories of "Don't go into the castle!" and "he was dead after all." But there are more hits than misses in this volume. Nolan's style is clean, his characters are vivid and complex, and his voice is one of experience.

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The King is Dead - Tales of Elvis Postmortem

Edited by Paul M. Sammon
Reviewed by Faith L. Justice

A Delta Book, Published by Dell Publishing, 1994

Elvis Presley has been sighted...in an amazing array of well-written horror, fantasy and mystery stories. We find Elvis as ghost, vampire and zombie; elf, troll and avenging angel; mummy killer, main course and most horrible of all...Elvis as opera singer.

Sammon, who edited Splatterpunks in 1990, delivers an Elvis overindulgence of 25 fiction stories and six non-fiction pieces in 381 pages. Fans will find familiar people and tragic details throughout the fiction. There are also literate non-fiction discussions of his life and legend and its impact on the music of his time and ours.

Sammon has assembled an impressive list of authors that spans mainstream and genre fiction - Joyce Carol Oates, Harlan Ellison, Lawrence Block, Clive Barker and Roger Ebert among many well-known names. Newcomers Stephen Manzi, Kevin Andrew Murphy and Robert Zasuly weigh in with compelling stories.

Like Elvis's famous peanut butter and banana sandwiches fried in butter, this book needs to be taken in small bites. Some details get worn with the retelling, though the writers do a wonderful job of providing variation on the theme. My recommendation is to jump in. If a story doesn't hold your interest, move on. The next one will.

It starts strong with Zasuly's "Burnin' Luv" about a two-bit hustler who picks up a zombie Elvis and tries to hold him together with duct tape long enough to make it to Geraldo. His portrayal of Elvis leaking 3-day-old jelly donuts is a fitting metaphor for a decaying career.

For the more ghoulish, there is "Love Me Tenderized or You Ain't Nothing But a Hot Dog" by Nancy Holder. She takes us to "Taste of Fame (West)" where a couple of rockers turn a record producer's wife into corpus dilecti and the producer into sushi. After all, any self-respecting cannibal knows that meat as old as Elvis's suffers from freezer burn.

For readers with a tender heart, Manzi sets his sweet but twisted love story "The King and I" in the family mortuary that handled Elvis's body. He provides a creepy insight into body preparation as well as a sensitive look at a bereaved fan. Linda Sue, who always "did the best mouths" acquires some memories and more tangible souvenirs of her fantasy love that carry her through her mundane and sometimes brutal life.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll are frequent themes. Karl Edward Wagner provides us with "Deep in the Depth of the Acme Warehouse" a funny story featuring his reoccurring character Kane, a lesbian rocker and an Elvis dildo. Warning - sexual content may offend some readers and will surely tickle others.

"Elviscera" by Wayne Allen Sallee, of small press fame, is a disturbing piece. A gaggle of Gothic teens establish an Elvis sacrifice cult hoping to make the world better through murder. I tended to give youngsters wearing black a wide berth after reading this one. In New York that means staying in my apartment.

There are psychological horror stories as well. Joyce Carol Oates's "Elvis is Dead: Why Are You Still Alive?" is about nightmares and madness. David Morrell's "Presley 45" deals with obsession and madness. Both hinge on male mid-life crises.

One of my favorite stories is "Bubba Ho-Tep" by Joe R. Lansdale. This rib tickler is set in an East Texas nursing home and features an elderly Elvis (or is he an Elvis impersonator?) and a black man who claims he is JFK. Together they battle old age, disbelieving nurses and a soul-sucking mummy who escaped from a traveling museum exhibit. Mark Nelson provides original East Texas hieroglyphics.

This is a satisfying volume for Elvis fans and non-fans alike. Because it defies categorization, you might have trouble finding it. I looked in genre anthologies, mainstream fiction and biographies before I finally found it in "Rock and Roll." It's worth the hunt.

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The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror

Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling
Reviewed by Faith L. Justice

St. Marten's Press, 1995

This Eighth Annual Collection published by St. Marten's Press is not a light volume in any sense of the word with a relentlessly dark tone, heavyweight authors and hefty 525 pages of fiction. The editors intend this series to present "the best fantasy fiction published each year in all its rich diversity of form." Fantasy is "any fiction and poetry rooted in the fecund soil of myth, magic and dream." All the recognized fantasy forms are present in their darker, more horrific manifestations. I found few comedic or upbeat touches to give relief from the drumbeat of quiet despair, terror and madness.

The book starts with comprehensive surveys of the fantasy and horror fields in print, media and comics. This additional material makes the volume a wonderful reference. Windling and Datlow do a Herculean job of reviewing the small and mainstream press, releases from the publishing houses in a multitude of categories, conventions, award ceremonies and music.

Edward Bryant gives a literate review of horror, fantasy and science fiction in the media, however, video releases are conspicuous for their absence. Will Shetterly and Emma Bull survey "Comics 1994," introducing the novice reader to a wide range of graphic publications. James Frenkle writes the 1994 "Obituaries" acknowledging the contributions of authors, publishers and actors to the genre. Seventeen pages of "Honorable Mentions" finish the book.

In any tome titled "Best of..." it's difficult to identify the best of the best. Almost all of the entries deserve their designation, so I will cover the ones that caught my fancy. As an inveterate folk tale collector I look for imaginative treatment of the classics. This volume does not disappoint. Nancy Kress leads off with "Words Like Pale Stones," a lyrical retelling of Rumplestiltskin. I've always thought Rumplestiltskin got a raw deal and wondered how any relationship built on greed could result in a happy ending. Kress puts all that to right. Neil Gaiman tackles Snow White from the stepmother's point of view in "Snow, Glass, Apples." This eerie tale casts Snow White as a vampire and her Prince Charming as a necrophiliac. Native American folklore is represented by Charles de Lint's "Coyote Stories," a wonderful representation of Coyote as metaphor for the modern Native American experience.

Representing magical realism is Margarita Engles's wonderful tale of a servant who saves the sanity of a household during the chaos of a revolution in "Buenaventura and the Fifteen Sisters." Two of the more fun stories in this volume are Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil" and B. Brandon Barker's "Superman Diary." Baker does a hilarious send up of minor academics studying obscure topics in his mildly horrific tale about potatoes. Barker gives us an insight into the split personality of Superman/Clark Kent.

There are ghost, vampire and werewolf stories all told with a marvelous twist. "Young Woman in a Garden" by Delia Sherman is a lushly painted portrait of a young researcher and her ghostly encounter with a love triangle involving a minor Impressionist. Stephen King's "The Man in the Black Suit" is a chilling tale of a young boy's escape from the devil. "Chandira" by Brian Mooney puts a new spin on the Frankenstein story set in colonial India.

Nearly a third of the entries are dark fantasy or psychological horror. Three stories dealing with families are especially fine. "The Box" by Jack Ketchum is a haunting tale told by a father whose children and wife gradually succumb to self-starvation after a chance encounter with a stranger on a commuter train. "The Sisterhood of the Night" by Steven Millhauser deals with a community's panic when its daughters join a cult. Kevin Roice's "Is That Them?" is a poignant story of abuse told from the child's point of view. Another stand out is "Blue Motel" by Ian McDonald. Look for your favorite characters and scenes from Hitchcock's movies. "Hitch" even makes a cameo appearance.

The tales dealing with alternate histories/futures are the most disappointing. "Aweary of the Sun" by Gregory Feeley is set in Shakespeare's time, the main point of which seems to be to show off the author's research. Nicholas Royle's "The Big Game" mirrors the violent future of A Clockwork Orange but with none of its believability.

The few poems in this volume are buried by the sheer weight of the short stories. Likewise, the single non-fiction piece "In The Tradition..." by Michael Swanwick would be better off in the forward section. In spite of these small flaws, the editors do a commendable job of packing 47 stories, five poems and over 100 pages of non-fiction between the hardback covers. It deserves to be on the bookshelves of discriminating readers and aspiring writers. But be warned - you might have to use a magnifying glass to comfortably read the small type.

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