Mental Illness in Horror: My Friend Dahmer & Suicide Club

Previously: Blumhouse's Halloween.

I love Horror, but too much of it views mental illness as a bottomless well of origin stories for killers. It's disappointing that Horror still views "crazy" as a synonym "villain" when we live in a world where so many people with mental illness are abused, evicted, and killed.

Today I want to look at two very powerful films that have different angles on mental illness. The first actually asks us to sympathize with the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer.

My Friend Dahmer (2017)

This is almost the prologue to a Horror movie. Based on the comic of the same name, My Friend Dahmer is about the years of Jeffrey Dahmer’s life right before he became a serial killer. It’s seldom merely morbid, offering a profoundly human vision of a confused, neuroatypical young man who had a brief chance to change. It focuses on the group of prankster friends Dahmer fell in with, jocular but not cruel.

At the start of the movie, Dahmer collects road kill and other dead animals in his shack, where he dissects them and reduces them to bones. It looks like he’s on the path to becoming a serial killer already, although he hasn’t made the typical jump to harming animals yet. But his father discovers the shack and demolishes it. Dahmer is infuriated, but his father sits him down and says he sees himself in the boy. There’s deep irony in this heart-to-heart chat about the importance of making friends and not isolating yourself, because his father thinks he’s just on the road to being an unhappy middle-aged man like himself.

That irony is lost on Dahmer, who then tries to fit in with the goofballs he knows at school, creating an incredibly unlikely friendship that sublimates his darker impulses. He’s willing to embarrass himself publicly in ways the other boys aren’t. That makes him a legend to them, and gives him an outlet he needs as the rest of his life starts to fall apart.

Bathroom Monologue: What If Captain America Isn't Alone?

It wasn’t just Captain America who joined Hydra. Was it weird to you that in seventy years of continuity, Cap never mentioned his fascist leanings, and always stopped Hydra from taking over the world?

Then it’s going to be super-weird when Sam Wilson and Sharon Carter join Hydra, too, plus three quarters of the Fantastic Four. Ben Grimm brings an iPod Shuffle and plays smooth jazz just a little too loud during roll call.

The thing is, having all these new recruits doesn’t make Hydra more effective. In fact the number of missions per fiscal quarter drops. Every time they take a vote to raid some young democracy, the measure is voted down in favor of getting drunk and ordering Five Guys. The TEAM HYDRA Facebook Wall is quickly covered in Bernie Sanders quotes and funny cat memes.

Kryptonite or Bad Writing: What's Superman's Real Weakness?

The more I hear people wishing Batman would take down Superman, the more I believe it comes from a greater hatred of power than of its abuse. The current popular iterations of Batman are of a tyrant building his kingdom, an autocrat ruling Gotham with an iron fist, an angry billionaire of unchecked privilege and brutality. Somehow Superman is the one labeled overpowered and unrelatable.

People keep saying he's invincible and therefore a bad character. But Superman's weakness isn't just Kryptonite. In the biggest comic event of all time, the mofo was straight-up beaten to death in a fist fight.


His weaknesses include magic, mind-control, various diseases, other Kryptonians, and the bajillion other aliens that are just as powerful, or more powerful, but are dicks about it. He's vulnerable to super-sharp weapons, the light of a red sun, pretty much every energy weapon I've ever seen. He can be out-smarted, caught by Green Lantern rings, or Black Lantern rings. And there are always nuclear weapons. If he has a greatest weakness, it's probably the emergencies of normal people who he constantly puts his own life on hold to assist. That's why I like him better than Batman. Increasingly, Batman is a fantasy of punishing someone, where Superman is a fantasy of helping someone.

Your Daredevil Fanfic Minute

Foggy: No no no no no.

Matt: What's the matter, Foggy?

Foggy: I just realized this guy is going to kill one of us and you're the main character.

Matt: You're the plucky comic relief.

Foggy: In a Marvel thing.

Matt: They wouldn't.

Foggy: MATT HE LOOKS LIKE JOSS WHEDON

"The Terrible" is live at Daily Science Fiction

My superhero short "The Terrible" is now up and free to read at Daily Science Fiction! It follows The Terrible, the self-proclaimed greatest villain in America's greatest city, as he thinks to finally kill off his heroine. Tonight is not going as he intended. It springs from the relationship I wish more heroes and villains had. No spoilers.

I want to thank Max Cantor, Tam MacNeil, and Cassie Nichols for beta reading this thing, and convincing me that while demented, it was a good kind of demented. Also to Sunil Patel, whose Twitter goading got me to keep the heroine's name. It is my favorite superhero name I've ever invented.

In other news, I'm packing up for my last convention trip of the year, to the annual World Fantasy Conference in Saratoga Springs, NY. Last year's was one of my all-time favorite cons, and this year I'm doing a panel! Drop by at 4:00 PM on Thursday, when I'll be part of Monsters as Devourers, discussing the psychological roots of why we tell so many stories about zombies and werewolves coming after us. It should be a blast.

Civil War Draft: How the Sides of Captain America: Civil War Were Decided

Tony: My movie came first so I get to draft first.

Cap: Is that how this works?

Tony: Vision is essentially my operating system plus Ultron's ultimate body. So, gimme.

Cap: It's on already? Uh, alright, alright. You have a guy who can fly. I want a guy who can fly. I need somebody I can trust. He's the highlight of that Ant-Man movie. Falcon.

Tony: Hell. Take Ant-Man, too.

Cap: I don't know...

Falcon: What? No, take both of us.

Cap: Do I have to?

Ant-Man: I don't know why anybody wants me either. Is Carol Danvers in these movies yet?

Falcon: You guys know this is a war, right? Civil War?

A Daredevil Wishlist

A wonderful thing happened while watching Daredevil. Stuck in bed with bronchitis, too wiped to even sit up and read (my poor copy of Grace of Kings...), the show was exactly what I needed. There's so much worthwhile about it that I actively hoped certain characters from the comics wouldn't show up, and certain stories wouldn't play out, because of how cracking they would be as the focus of later seasons.

And lo, Netflix's Daredevil restrained itself. The season is about the feud of Murdoch and Wilson Fisk, The Lawyer Vs. The Mobster, with a few side characters fleshed out. Mostly side-characters are introduced with unlimited potential: the best buddy Foggy Nelson, Karen Page with a checkered past, the Night Nurse willing to treat heroes without exposing their identities. It's a great season of television as well as a cracking origin story, and at the end I had a wishlist of things for future seasons.

We'll get to that wishlist in a paragraph, but be forewarned: we're about to spoil the crap out of the show. If you like superheroes, you ought to give Daredevil a shot. The list of what could be coming will be waiting when you're ready. But if you're caught up, or if you don't care about spoilers*, let's dig in.

An Open Letter to Wolverine and Archie (RIP)

Dear Wolverine and Archie,

I was in elementary school when they killed Superman. It was big and dramatic; my mother ordered my brother and I separate copies of the black-bagged issue without even asking us because it seemed so culturally important. Being a villain-kid, I was just happy to see such an annoying icon scrubbed, but I was interested. The cafeteria buzzed with speculation about how it happened. It was a pop culture event.

It's been a stupid twenty-two years since then. The decreasing relevance of superhero comics has led the industry to many stunts, including killing characters whenever they get desperate for attention. I'm afraid you two are the most recent victims, and I sincerely apologize to you both that you had to share an announcement month. Archie, you're not even a superhero. You both worked hard enough to deserve better P.R. You're both iconic in such different ways that you getting stunt-murdered at the same time makes it all feel like… well, stunts.

And your announcements came only weeks after Marvel announced the who-dunnit murder of The Watcher. Oh, for a meta-comic about The Watcher observing this desperate trend.

Even as a villain kid, you were my hero, Wolverine. I was a runt like you. This is a perplexing week, as I should be upset that you're going to die, and yet, I'm not. If anything, I'm upset that I'm not upset. The problem is that you'll be back, probably in the next two years. Why, just last week Marvel resurrected Spider-Man after a year of being dead. He's alive again in time to make his own movie premiere.

Not only did Superman come back, but his killer, Doomsday? He's been killed and resurrected at least three times. In the last few years they've killed and resurrected Batman, the female Robin, Captain America, Nightcrawler, Superboy, Wasp, and Thor. Every dead Flash has come back. Marvel and D.C. brought back the perennial tragic sidekicks Bucky and Jason Todd almost in parallel, to identical drama with their mentors and antihero lives.

D.C. pulled "Blackest Night," a Green Lantern story that brought back every dead character in their universe, and boldly ended it with the characters surmising the dead could never return again and death was now permanent. A year later, D.C. rebooted its universe and brought back a bunch of those same dead characters.

Remember when Marvel killed Ultimate Spider-Man, a Spider-Man from another universe, and tried to convince the public they'd killed the one they actually knew about? Just to get on CNN? Later they killed the real one, but as you both know, he's back.
 

This has devalued death, which ought to be the greatest stakes in all the combat-based stories superhero comics keep telling. Archie, you've never been about fighting, so it's not fair that you're been sucked into this, but you have. I honestly wonder if you'll return, too, the next time your publisher needs attention.

And Wolverine? Death may be the rest you deserve, but it won't be permanent. In the last ten years Marvel has already killed and resurrected your nemeses, Sabretooth, Gorgon and Cyber. When Psylocke died, you yourself visited a friend in NYC for a method of bringing her back. That guy can probably hook you up if you want it.

You both have no control over your mortality, just like me. But if you could write for your own comics, don't you think the interesting story at this point would be about a universe where death isn't permanent and what it does to people's psyches? If C-list heroes routinely rise from the grave, does the public no longer fear death? How does religion change? What happens to the blood feuds between heroes and villains when bloodshed doesn't end anything?

There are stories there. There's an upheaval of the way I live, and the way you both will probably be living again in a few years.

I'm sorry that I'm not sorry you died. You deserved better.

Best,

John Wiswell

Kicking off #BestReads2013

You're cordially invited to share your favorite books of the year. Not what was published during the year, but you got to for the first time. The blog hop is a few weeks away, giving everyone time to check their lists twice.

Best Reads 2013 launches on Saturday, December 28th, the weekend after Christmas. Up until then, anyone on Twitter is invited to an open chat about their favorite books of the year using the hashtag #bestreads2013. If you’ve got a blog or Tumblr, you can post a list of your favorite books there, only make sure to come back and link it here by the 30th so I can include you in the master list. For those without Twitter or blogs, you're still welcome to discuss your favorites in the Comments section. Everyone is welcome, readers and authors alike.

So think on it. What are your favorite books that you read this year? Not what was written or published in 2012, but that you personally read and loved for the first time. Fiction, non-fiction, prose, poetry and sequential art are all welcome. I guarantee you at least one comic book will show up on my list. It's Middle Grade, too. My list will be between 5-15 books long, with 1-2 paragraphs for each entry on what I got out of them. You can handle the number and format as you like.

Feel free to launch questions below. We'll field them together.

The 4 Ways Marvel Really Got Thor Wrong

Recently, Marvel Comics released their second movie about Thor. It’s part of their Avengers franchise of movies, which show very little scholarship about mythology. Many of us wonder if Marvel cares about anything more than making lots of money by way of vapid movies that are a lot of fun to watch. In doing so, they've utterly ruined the character forever. This must be remedied. Here are their four greatest transgressions.

Why would they do this to him?

1. Thor Speaks English At All
Some critics have pointed out that, historically, Marvel made Thor speak in a bad impression of Shakespearean English. A Norse god wouldn’t sound like Shakespeare. But this ignores the real contention: a Norse god wouldn’t be speaking English at all. He should be bantering in a dialect of Old Norse that’s unrecognizable even to modern Scandinavians. It would seriously help the authenticity of Marvel films if everything Thor said was utterly incomprehensible to any typical American moviegoer.

They didn't have contact lenses, either.

2. The Race Card
Some people have complained that Heimdall is blackwashed in the Thor movies, played by Idris Elba. Idris Elba is blacker than the average American imagines the average Icelander is. The average American doesn’t know much about how many ethnicities spread across Europe by the 13th century, and the average theologian has barely cracked why gods do anything, much less why they pick a specific skin tone or bone structure. However, Idris Elba has an amazing gravitas that we can all agree every god should have. Because Idris Elba is only one actor, most of the gods in the Thor movies don’t have this gravitas. Marvel screwed this up big time by not cloning Idris Elba.

No one asks if Tom Hiddleston is the right race to play a trickster god.

3. Thor Coexists With The Hulk
Look, it’s not that hard. The pre-Christian Nords didn’t know about radiation. There is nothing in their lore or cycles that references gamma waves or their implausible relationship to human emotion. The Incredible Hulk is simply irreconcilable with any of Thor’s mythology. Any modern science has no place in a shared universe with Thor, even science as miraculously bad as what supports the Hulk’s existence.

Yup. Pride, Instagram and Haar.

4. Thor Wasn’t a Comic Book Character
Our primary sources for the Norse gods are the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Gesta Danorum. While some of the manuscripts in the Prose Edda were illuminated with beautiful imagery, the stories of Thor were never relayed in screen-printed sequential art. Frankly, everything Jack Kirby ever drew looked entirely inaccurate to visual stylings of the 13th century Scandinavians. Worse: they didn’t have movies. Making the things into movies is fundamentally inaccurate. If Marvel had any cultural sensitivity, they would force audiences at all their premieres to starve around camp fires in the middle of a blizzard and have Stan Lee recount the tales orally. He’d probably do it. He loves cameos.

This is actually 100% historically accurate.

It's my hope that by starting a dialogue about Marvel's failure to accurately capture their source material, that we will bring about change. By forcing blockbuster movies to be entirely accurate to someone else's vision, and by stripping anything that anyone was having fun with, we will create films that no one wants to see. And once no one will go see them, no one will ever complain about them again.

The future is in your hands, True Believers.

BM: Who would win: Superman or Batman?

If the writer likes Batman more: Batman wins.

If the writer likes Superman more: it's a tie or they're distracted and work together against a common third opponent. Superman fans are less awful.

If it's a fight to the death: neither of them kill people. Superman eventually wins by having a longer lifespan. Alternatively, Batman wins because Superman's died before and thus he outlived him.

If it's a race for who gets to the kitchen first: Superman, as he is much faster.

If it's a race for who gets to the kitchen first and Batman gets prep time: Batman builds the kitchen, starts in the kitchen, and wins.

If it's a race around the planet: Batman uses his superpower of money to hire The Flash, and wins.

If it's a competition of tragic origins: Batman's parents are dead, while Superman's planet is dead and in most versions so is his earth-dad. Superman wins, but since Batman is taking this worse, lets Batman think he wins.

If it's mortal combat and Batman has a kryptonite ring: Superman smothers him in lead at speeds faster than his eyes can follow.

If it's mortal combat and Batman has a kryptonite ring and infinite prep time: Superman likely also had such prep time and probably does okay with his laser eyes and ability to fight from space.

If it's mortal combat and Batman has a kryptonite ring and infinite prep time and Superman was screwing around for that infinity: the writer likes Batman.

If Batman has a really cool mech he suspiciously never uses for all the other cases it'd be useful: Superman probably rips it apart and leaves him alive.

If Batman needs to establish a mythos: Superman takes a dive in front of a cameraman.

If Superman needs to establish a mythos: he does something else impressive and lets Bruce abuse some children or whatever he does with his time.

If they're on hallucinogenics, brainwashed, in an alternate universe, and think each other are figments and villains and whatever other nonsense your message board requires to justify two non-lethal characters murdering people they love and respect: Superman throws the earth into the sun, are you happy now?

Why I tried writing a Wonder Woman movie no one will make.

TV series cancelled because a DC main character smiled.

So yesterday I posted the synopsis for a Wonder Woman movie that I tried to write in thirty minutes. It's rough as heck, but seemed worth trying when many people have spent years on adapting the character to film and came out of it saying she's an impossible character. At Comic-Con last weekend they announced a Flash and a Batman/Superman movie, and Twitter rightly got upset about the lack of such a famous character getting her screen time.

I wasn't offended until the old arguments that she's uninteresting or not fit for motion pictures resurfaced. These arguments are nonsense, and given that she is the most iconic female superhero, and the current glut of superhero movies are already decidedly light on ladies, it reads gross.

First and foremost: there is an excellent Wonder Woman movie. It's animated, free to stream if you have Amazon Prime and cheap on DVD, and could be remade live action shot-for-shot into a splendid blockbuster. And it'd be an empowering, fun action flick that happened to star an iconic woman. Please don't tell me that's the reason why you can't make it.

Second and possibly foremoster: Wonder Woman is a sexy warrior from a familiar but different culture who engages critically with ours and gets to fight anything from the Grecko-Roman bestiary or pantheon you want. She has a history of punching Nazis, robots, aliens and dragons - the untouchable holy quartet of ass-kicking. From a writing and promotional perspective, there is no reason she's not a franchise. Probably a really explodey dumb one that grosses embarrassingly well.

And my synopsis was for that kind of blockbuster. It's honestly not the Wonder Woman I'd like to make, rather the kind that seems like every producer deems unfeasible, a message I deem harmful.

If Smallville adapts the costume well as a gag,
then costume design isn't a valid excuse anymore.

The Wonder Woman movie I'd rather make is of a superhero who bridged to our culture in World War II against the worst of all possible enemies, then grew up with us for decades, with the moral decay of wars in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq, who is a crucible for our shortcomings and an agent against them. If it's too much like the Superman I'd write, well, tough. We deserve heroes we can’t relate to when we suck.

Also, the superhero movie I really want to make is actually Daredevil & She-Hulk: Attorneys at Law, but that's another story and another company.

There's a Wired column I won't waste your clicks linking to that asserts a Wonder Woman movie has to be uncomfortably feminist and bondage-themed. That's needless clickbait writing, something encroaching more and more of Wired. The truth is that a WW film can be about uncomfortable feminist issues and bondage, or about other facets of her character. The bondage baggage, in particular, is something I couldn't think to incorporate in my half hour and probably wouldn't in my final draft. It ain't essential, but it's out there and a valid interpretation.

My guess is that the real pitfalls of a Wonder Woman movie aren't that no one has an idea. As many annoying things as Joss Whedon has said about the character, he had a decent idea before Warner Bros shot him down. It's more likely money-backers who don't believe in female leads, testy focus groups, the decreasingly tenable profits blockbusters must bring in turning studios even more conservative. It's enough to make you wonder what we'd get if copyright laws were different and anyone could make a movie about her.

Enough to make you wonder. Get it?

Wonder Woman Movie Outline - Written in 30 minutes.

Yesterday: I ran my mouth about people saying there can't be a good Wonder Woman movie. They've taken years to produce nothing. I have myself half an hour to write how one might go and had to stop when the alarm clock rang.

Today: I'm sharing what I wrote, no editing, exposing my typos, my stream of consciousness, and some hackneyed writing. At worst, I'm showing the earliest thing in any of my creative processes I've ever put out there. I'm a little scared.

Tomorrow: I'm going to unpack my reasons for trying this, the offense of being told there's no chance of a good Wonder Woman movie when they're trying to reboot Green Lantern and Flash, and perhaps field some comments/hatemail.

We start with two points of view. Our first is Steve Trevor, grounding us in the present United States, post-Man of Steel. Our government is paranoid about what else is out there. The Fortress of Solitude was just hiding in ice? So drones and stealth pilots are sweeping as much space as possible. Trevor is piloting the most advanced human machine out there scanning for suspicious signs and jaw-jacking with friend Hal Jordan.

Our second (and main) point of view is through the island of Themyscira, removed from modern culture. Their sky shimmers with the magical barriers that keep the world ignorant to their presence; the Amazons have been hiding for a long time, and there's mention that they've refused reconciliation even with the king of Atlantis. Something awful and unspoken once happened here, but Queen Hippolyta has decreed silence and progress. She sometimes watches the modern world through a pool, ala the original Clash of the Titans, but forbids others to view of it. The Amazons do not speak of the prison of Hades that exists beneath their palace. The Amazons want to be alone, all except one. Guess who.

Bathroom Monologue: Superman has no weaknesses except…

…Kryptonite.
…magic.

…red suns, and apparently any freaking red lamp put together by a two-bit prodigy.
…the umpteen other Last Kryptonians Alive.

…the hundreds of other characters, non-Kryptonian and still depicted as equal or greater in strength.

…mind control.

…nanobots and other pesky SciFi infections.

…blackmail.

…declining ad rates. He is a newsman, after all.

…really, really sharp things, of which the DC Universe has a questionable abundance.

…the villain-of-the-week who beats him up to seem formidable when facing other heroes.

…constantly being outsmarted despite spending all his time thinking about crisis management.
…bad writing.

Bathroom Monologue: Edgiest Hero

No scarred personality. He’ll be fighting for truth and justice simply because it’s the right thing to do. It’ll be about civic responsibility at titanic scales. I’m thinking we bring him from the Midwest, the Heartland, and give him a lot of that boyscout virtue we’re afraid NRA-types are losing. Guns will be both useless against him and deplored by him.

In fact, he’ll deplore all violence. When he has to hit you, you’ll go through a wall, and he’ll be somber, even saddened that he’s had to strike. He thinks you should have been better, and he’s an example of your failure to be better.

That’s the thing: rather than being broken, his presence will show how everyone else is broken. The corruption of businessmen, the cynicism of reporters, the implicit cruelty of military – he’ll force you to change. He’s the one who doesn’t change just because the world’s hard.

We’ll run counter to the leather aesthetic. He loves capes, and spandex, and underwear on the outside of his pants. A brightly colored costume, a garish logo, something that looks gaudy in daylight. If professional wrestlers actually fought crime. Put him in a line-up of body armor and black trench coats, and he’ll be the one everyone remembers. He’ll be different from every other hero.

He’ll be super, man.

#NaNoReMo Megapost

National Novel Reading Month begins February 1st. The rules are simple:

1. Find a classic novel you've never read, preferably one you've been meaning to read for a long time.

2. "Classic" is up to your definition. If you feel Beloved is a Modern Classic, you read it.

3. Between February 1st and 28th, read the book.

4. Join in on Twitter, blogs and Facebook to discuss your journey through the classic. You're even welcome to come back discuss the books in comments threads on this post.

I've chosen Middlemarch, a social commentary on 1800's England by Mary Anne Evans, under the pen name George Eliot. I've wanted to read it ever since missing registration for a class on it in college. Les Miserables came close, but my copy is 1,400 pages, and that's simply too long for me to be sure I'll finish in a month with beta reading, more medical tests, and at least two big road trips. Middlemarch's 1,000 pages as far as I'm willing to push it. It's technically eight books in one - a collected serial. Fortunately, Catherine Russel is picking up my slack, having chosen Les Mis for her own #NaNoReMo!

If you've picked your book, please mention it in the comments here and I'll add you to the post. I'm going to link any blog or Twitter accounts so people can check out reading progress. Feel free to blog across the month as you get insights into your book, or tear through it and move on to still more classics.

#NaNoReMo Readers List
1. Catherine Russell: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
2. Danielle la Paglia: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
3. Tony Noland: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
4. John Wiswell: George Eliot's Middlemarch
5. Andy Hollandbeck: T.H. White's Once and Future King
6. John Gray: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
7. T.S. Bazelli: Toni Morrison's Beloved8. Eric Krause: Edgar Rice Burroughs's Princess of Mars
9. Beverly Fox: Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby 
10. Paul Philips: BOTH Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man
11. Janet Lingel Aldrich: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
12. Katherine Nabity: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
13.  Ross Dillon: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
14. Maria Kelly: Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles 
15. Katherine Hajer: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
16. Helen Howell: Bram Stroker's Dracula
17. Icy Sedgwick: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
18. Susan Cross: Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice
19. Cindy Vaskova: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

20.Rachel Frink: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

21. April L. Hamilton: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Bathroom Monologue: Heat of This Sun

Clark always insisted he was an alien. As young as three years of age he would lead friends on play dates into his barn where he alleged his parents had buried the ship on which he’d reached earth. They never found it, and he never manifested the alien powers he claimed he was supposed to get from sunlight. All it did was earn him the nickname “Unvampire.”

At five years of age, Clark began convincing girls on the playground to let him save them. It was his duty as a more evolved alien god-man. They would pretend to be trapped on top of the jungle gym, or that the slide was on fire, and he would run across the yard to pretend his incredible hearing was picking up their distress. How the fires were slain by him blowing on them was chalked up to imagination.

How the house fire began is still a matter of contention in the county. Clark was nearly burned alive trying to pull his mother from beneath a collapsed beam. The local paper has a heart-wrenching photo of the child kicking a firefighter for pulling him outside and, to quote, “stopping me from saving them.”

The tragedy begat several years of transitive living, with foster parents who all had praise for the boy’s intelligence and drive, but all reported he was simply too outgoing to fit in. He wanted to captain sports teams, be head chef at dinner, and yelled over every argument. His second foster father was an engineer, and tells the story of how the boy redirected sunlight through his glasses into a heat ray unlike anything he’d ever seen. The experiment conveniently destroyed the glasses and half their garage, and was largely thought of as apocryphal until his teens.

At age thirteen he lived at a shared home in a particularly nasty part of Chicago. It was almost as soon as Clark moved in that a series of grisly murders began along the waterfront, each a helpless young man or woman. The sites and times were spaced so that no one was able to create a narrow field of subjects. Not until Clark. With amateur blogging and diligent photo evidence of what was available to the public, he was able to lead the police to the murderer within only two weeks. It was a disturbed homeless man, whom psychiatrists later testified didn’t even know he’d done any of it. He’d squatted only a few blocks from Clark’s shared home.

Solving the gruesome killing spree launched him into a sort of regional celebrity. He was consulted on further cases, though solved none, and charities soon raised the funds to send him to the college he deserved. He had a plethora of glowing references and was admitted at the age of 16 to MIT.

Clark had the knack for engineering and immediately bonded with other top students and professors in key programs. He claimed he’d always loved rockets, and dedicated his post-graduate work in alternative fuels to a roommate, who died tragically from taking the wrong prescriptions. Clark revealed staggering breakthroughs in fuels only a month later, and patented enough that he was able to fund vast improvements in Chicago’s slums. To both orphans and astronauts, he was heralded as a hero. In retrospect, it seems bizarre they let him go up in that shuttle. It was all about stardom and reigniting the American passion for space.

There are doubts. While the alternative fuels initially tested producing no carbon emissions, the temperature of the planet has raised dramatically in the last three years during their adoption. Scientists still struggle to explain the cause. It would be too ironic if he had to wait for Clark to return and fix it for us. He’s already done so much, and we don’t even know what he’s up there looking for.

#NaNoReMo: National Novel Reading Month

February will be National Novel Reading Month. It’s a simple idea. We’ve all got at least one classic book we think we ought to read and have put off too long. Last year people flocked around the hashtag as they put away classics; I finally read Jane Austen, and am hoping for better results this year. I have six titles in mind, and the literary guilt may actually be killing me.

Check your shelf. Check your conscience. Isn’t there something long removed from the Bestseller’s List you think you ought to read? Be it for craft, for history, or some gap in your personal English canon. #NaNoReMo is about catching up with the classics.

One thing that bothers me about National Novel Writing Month is it isn’t located in a country. “National” is a poor word choice for a program that’s clearly international. Yet it’s popular, so #NaNoReMo will double the dubiousness. Not only can you read it in any nation of your choice, but your classic doesn’t have to be a novel. Want to brush up on Virgil or Ovid? Go for it. The rule is to read a classic.

We’re using a personal sliding scale for "classics." Some people don’t think Jules Verne is a classic author. I don’t like to talk to those people, but they exist, and so they can read someone else. But if you do think he’s a classic writer who deserves your time, then it’s your choice.

It begins on February 1^st. We’ll be on the honor system; nobody cheat and start reading now. In advance you’re welcome to hop onto blogs and Twitter to chat about your potential choices. Our hashtag is #NaNoReMo. Then join us throughout February as we discuss our progress through our chosen classics. If it works the cross-pollination of encouragement will increase our reading lists as well as encourage us to finish reading great works.

I’m actually asking for advice on my choices. Each is too big to expect to read together.

• George Elliot’s Middlemarch
• Alex Haley’s Roots
• Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables
• Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
• Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities
• And the book that lost to Austen last year: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

I’ve wanted to read them all for years, and have owned a copy of Roots since 2007. Wolfe and Bulgakov seem the most likely to entertain, while Les Mis has the greatest mystique with all its hype and plethora of adaptations. I can’t mention the book on Twitter without someone gushing. And I’ve never read Hugo, never read Elliot, never read Haley, and was only ever exposed to Dickens’s Christmas Carol. It’s a lot of literary guilt.

Is there one of the above you’d most like to subject me to, or read me digest? I know how much people enjoyed watching me squirm over how insufferable Pride and Prejudice was last year.

Bathroom Monologue: Costume App

It's a unique app that has only ever been downloaded to only one cell phone in the United States. It can send out a pulse across every available frequency and networking, activating other phones, televisions, car alarms, and anything with a computer in it. The curious thing? It's designed to activate only those devices in one direction from the user's cell phone, as though he or she needs a distraction. Why is a short story.

Why the app is called "Phone Booth" is a longer story.

Bathroom Monologue: What ‘Earth’ Means Abroad, OR, Monologue for Sinestro

“I’m not going to earth myself. I will deal with the real threats to my fledgling corps of fear. I only had to meet you to know – you, granted the greatest weapon in the universe, went home and barely made fourth-from-the-top of your League. Does this say that earth is home to unbeatable wonder women and supermen? No. The ring operates based on the capacity of its user, and you, the best of earth, can barely make it into fame for yourself. Earth possesses scarcely the intelligence to reach the stars, and no will to do anything with it. So I will not be assaulting earth. It will be the rookies of my corps that guts your backwater insult of a planet. Earth is what I feed to my young. Goodbye, Hal Jordan.”