Living Dangerously: Steve Rasnic Tem Fandangos!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His fiction and non-fiction has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the 21st Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. A writer of more than 26 books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war. Weston likes to be called a chaotic good paladin and challenges anyone to disagree. After all, no one can really stand a goody two-shoes lawful good character. They can be so annoying. It's so much more fun to be chaotic, even when you're striving to save the world. You can argue with him about this and other things online at Living Dangerously or on Facebook at Badasswriter. All content of this blog is copywrited by Weston Ochse.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Steve Rasnic Tem Fandangos!

To have Steve Tem give me this blurb means the world to me. I could go on and on about how good he is and how much a master of the form he is, but in this case Wilipedia got it right, so I'll quote from them:

"Steve Rasnic Tem's short fiction has been compared to the work of Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, Ray Bradbury, and Raymond Carver, but to quote Joe R. Lansdale: 'Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.' His 200 plus published pieces have garnered him a British Fantasy Award, World Fantasy and a nomination for the Bram Stoker Awards."

"MULTIPLEX FANDANGO is a remarkable collection of stories. I read a huge amount of short fiction, and a lot of great stories, but it's rare that I come across a collection so cohesive, whose obsessions mirror and build in combination such that by the end we have this haunting vision of our cultural iconography at the beginning of a new century. This is aggressive work, boldly creating new metaphors and language out of its violent juxtapositions of the imagery from our recent cinematic past. Using such unique settings as a reproduction of the Last Supper painted on the bottom of a pool, a repurposed Disney World of the future, a hundred foot statue of a fisherman astride a giant shrimp, and a melting Hiroshima, and populating the stories with characters with names like Hemingway, Homer, and Cary Grant, Ochse explores the difficulties involved in finding your identity when it lies buried beneath layers of cultural scrim and Hollywood dream. The metaphor of the multiplex is an apt one: these concepts are movie large, if only the right eccentric, talented auteur could be found to film them." Steve Rasnic Tem

If you haven't had the chance to read his work, or Melanie's for that matter, take a dive into their fiction. Reading it I get the same raw summer awe that I do when I read Bradbury for the first time, but often with the serrated edge of Aimee Bender in Faces or Flammable Skirt.

Thank You Steve!