It’s Halloween eve, folks, and we’re ready to get creepy and eat some candy! This week’s roundup highlights what we love so much about Halloween: the combination of scary and sweet, of “misery and magic” (quoth Morgantown Magazine, below). We’ll start off with this bit of photographic sweetness from the Boston Book Festival, where our own Matthew Neill Null sat on a panel with superstars Megan Mayhew Bergman and Matt Bell.
Things heat up with some love for Honey from the Lion, first from this Atlanta Journal-Constitution review. “Null commands the language of a bygone place and time in prose as eloquent and precise as poetry,” it says, and also: “Mistaken identities, espionage, double-crosses, police corruption, gilded-era fat cats scheming from afar, hatchet men penetrating the union ranks like ninjas—it’s all here in a tightly plotted story that often reads like a thriller.” Poetry and pacing! That’s quite a combo, no?
Matt and the book also got some hometown love in the October issue of Morgantown Magazine: “Matt’s characters are the men and women who live close to the bone—the sawyers, peddlers, and laborers whose muscle and spirit both built the state and irrevocably transformed it. And his language, though image-rich and arresting on its own, doesn’t shy away from describing the misery and magic of the setting in equal measure.” We just love that description.
A delightful piece of news: contributor Aimee Nezhukumatathil has been named poetry editor of Orion. Congrats, Aimee! But don’t get too comfy: The Toronto Observer asks, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” in this awesome review of contributor Benjamin Percy’s novel The Dead Lands, a new post-apocalyptic thriller inspired by the Lewis and Clark saga.
We were so happy to see the first three suggestions on the Master’s Review‘s fall reading list are novels from Ecotone contributors—Matthew Neill Null alongside Lauren Groff and Claire Vaye Watkins! Scary! Awesome!
As we’re putting together our Sound issue of Ecotone, it was pretty fun to find this piece in Guernica about Lou Reed, from contributor Peter Trachtenberg, which gets the combination of melody and madness just right. “The best songs were like doors opening into a party, one that was glamorous but also terrible, heartless.”
We hope your Halloween festivities are filled with all the wholesomeness and wickedness, debauchery and deliciousness you can stomach.