In his essay “Francis Bacon’s Studio” (32:4), M.G. Stephens describes the astounding disorder in which the great modern painter worked, and which actually facilitated his creativity. Stephens writes of the studio, preserved as an installation at Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, in Dublin, “The studio may be the closest you will ever get to seeing inside the mind of the creative imagination — the imagination inchoate, without the trappings of form and function. The unfocused imagination is like an engine off the rails; it is a maelstrom.”

You can read the essay here: http://www.missourireview.com/content/dynamic/from_archives_detail.php?mt_metatext_id=93

Thanks,

The Management

It’s that time of the year again—AWP season. When next Wednesday rolls around multitudes of writers, readers, editors, students, professors will flock to Washington D. C. and pack the Marriot to the brim for a few days. I think back to my first AWP three years ago, and it is clear to me that I was utterly unprepared. This is likely still the case, and I am far from a veteran, but I think my proximity to that first overwhelming experience might help me provide some advice for first-timers, and maybe I can even provide more experienced conference-goers a few useful tips.

First, register ahead of time. It will save you some money and long lines. Once you have your tres fashionable AWP tote, dig into your massive schedule of events. Now, prepare for disappointment. It isn’t that the folks at AWP put together a lackluster schedule—just the opposite. You’ll undoubtedly thumb through the first day of panels and readings only to discover that your esteemed former mentor who you haven’t seen in years, favorite poet/personal muse, and closest friend desperately in need of your presence in the crowd for moral support will all be speaking at 9:00 in far apart corners of the hotel. You will miss things that days before you would have sworn were impossible to pass up. At first missing these events will seem blasphemous, but by the end of the weekend you’ll be skipping them for a catnap.  There is a lot to see and do.  So see what you can, and save the rest for the AWP’s to come.

One other tip regarding daytime events: go to readings.  They are nice break from the panels whether you are hearing Sharon Olds or the latest batch of MFA candidates from (fill in the blank) University.  It’s nice to hear some of the product that is being discussed in such detail throughout the conference.

On the rare hours where there are no panels or readings that pique your interest, you’ll likely head down to the Bookfair. Prepare yourself.  If you are charismatic, self-assured, and a natural but gentle self-marketer, enjoy yourself.  If however, you react as I did (and, okay I admit, still do), you walk swiftly down the aisles, eyes straight ahead and slightly down—using only peripheral vision to take in the stalls and their wares.  It takes me as many as three laps of the various halls before I feel confident enough for interaction.

Of course, the experience does not need to be this traumatic.  One thing that I have found helpful is having a home base.  If you are at all associated with a journal, press, or program, volunteer to help out at their booth.  It seems significantly easier to have people come to you than to approach a booth.  And, once you’ve done it, you realize that the people at the booth are hoping for people to come talk to them.  A shocking notion, I know.  When you do head up to booths—talk.  Maybe you can get a free copy of a journal, or a discounted contest entry, or just a better idea of what it is they do.  Try to avoid awkward jokes about the recent rejection you’ve received.  It seemed funny at the time, but I now realize that they hear that joke about a dozen times a day.  I promise to stop using it this year.

Above all else, don’t forget the SWAG (or stuff we all get!).  The tote will come in handy here.  If mine isn’t full of magnets, pens, coasters, bookmarks, and all other manner of bauble, I’ve had an unsuccessful weekend.

Once the day of panels is over, you’ll have your pick of a number of hosted nighttime readings and parties to attend.  Do attend them.  There is no better opportunity to bump into and socialize with “favorite poet/personal muse” or “National Book Award winner.”  Plus, most of these events are a decidedly good time.  My advice for these parties, avoid the subject of writing and writers when you can.  With this crowd, the subject will inevitably and constantly pop-up, and after a long day of sitting on and listening to panels, it can be nice to come up for air.  You will know you are doing this right when you find yourself discussing recent events on The Jersey Shore with some esteemed literary figure whose three latest novels are on your bookshelf.

“I agree,” said literary figure might reply, “Snooki’s recent antics at Club Karma were tragically Falstaffian.”

Another popular nighttime event is the AWP dance party, hosted in the host-hotel.  This year, a fifty-dollar donation is required to attend the open bar event on Friday and Saturday night.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether the price is worth the chance to “Electric Slide” or “Cupid Shuffle” along with your fellow literati.  The scene seems to invite a David Attenborough voice-over narration on the “joyous and instinctive dance of these typically bashful creatures.”  Did you read that with a British accent?

Even if this has been completely unhelpful and you still find yourself being snowed under, remember, you are surrounded by people who love to read and write as much as you do.  It’s a truly comforting thought.

Mike Petrik is a PhD candidate in fiction at the University of Missouri and a Fiction Intern at the Missouri Review.

Issue 33.4 (Winter 2010): Blindsided

Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking describes the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of cardiac arrest in their apartment in 2003.  Some time before her husband’s death, her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, had been hospitalized for a mysterious case of pneumonia that had developed into septic shock.  Quintana was unconscious at the time of her father’s death and later, just before the publication of her mother’s book, died of pancreatitis.  With her usual close observation and detachment, Didion examines the bizarre states of mind that accompany life’s shocks, including behaviors that amount to temporary delusion and even insanity: speaking to people who aren’t there, the powerful emotional need to keep certain possessions and the magical thinking which assumes that performing particular actions can change reality. Didion gives unashamed and potent examples of how the most rational person can be made irrational when they are blindsided by such calamity.

Because much of the literature about this subject is by nature corrective—offering solutions easy answers and descriptions of “stages”—it is oddly refreshing and useful to see an author describe and fully recognize the derangement of grief and trauma. At least someone who is suffering such agony knows she isn’t the only crazy person out there.

In this issue, our authors face everything from a terminally sick child to being uprooted and living in an alien environment to abandonment by a spouse.  Dan Stolar’s story “Emma Won’t Get Better” describes how the unexpected tragedy of a child’s illness can undermine even a stable and happy family.  Jennie Lin’s “In the Quiet” is the tale of a girl who has been sent to live in China with an uncle who are farmers.  Her cousin ignores her, the uncle and aunt leave her untended most of the time while they work in the fields, and the grandmother is senile.  It is a story of being exiled in a place that seems almost in a different century, where nothing looks right or familiar. Karl Taro Greenfeld’s story “Even the Gargoyle is Frightened” is a first-person fictional narrative from the point of view of a young Japanese naval officer with high connections who has been assigned to do increasingly irrelevant work on an aircraft carrier, including investigating the murder of a pilot who failed in his assignment to fulfill a suicide mission.  This leads the young officer to even darker discoveries in the demented world of total war.

In Carol Ghiglieri’s ironically light-toned “Fergus,” her protagonist, Jackie, seems to be undergoing a terrible time, at least on the surface.  Her husband precipitously gave up his dental practice and disappeared on an extended sailing voyage.  Jackie adopts a dog that is anything but a perfect companion, yet she finds herself able to cope surprisingly well, particularly when you-know-who comes slinking back in the door.  Adam Krause’s wonderful “Gandhi is Dead” is another first-person story with a tone of muted irony. Protagonist Sampuran runs a slum tourism business in New Delhi, exploiting both altruistic tourists who want to help in the developing world and the people of the slums, from whom he receives large kickbacks.  Yet he defends himself as someone who at least has some positive influence, providing infrastructure and facilities that improves lives in the neighborhood.

Danielle Ofri’s essay “Unstrung” describes her experience as an ER doctor dealing with a patient who has apparently experienced a psychotic break.  The woman is a middle-aged Polish janitor who has up to now led a seemingly normal life.  In the ER she violently resists all drugs to sedate her and continues to fight and scream and threaten the doctors and nurses trying to administer her tests.   It is a story about puzzling through a diagnosis made all the more difficult by sheer physical desperation and about how the mind can suddenly snap without warning or apparent reason.  In his essay “I’m OK, You’re OK,” Danielle Mueller recalls hitchhiking as a young man to Alaska, under the illusion that he is going to make a small fortune during the fishing season.  He is picked up en route by a man who works as a clown at children’s parties, and while the young Mueller is seemingly oblivious to it, the reader senses the ominousness of the situation.  It’s an essay both about the blessing of youthful naïveté and, paradoxically, the potential danger of it, as a seemingly harmless person may out of the blue become something else.

In his interview with Polly Rosenwaike, writer Michael Byers talks about his recent novel Percival’s Planet.  Byers is a former Missouri Review Editors’ Prize winner, whom we are happy to have published four times over the years.  His story collection The Coast of Good Intentions was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and both it and his first novel, Long for this World, were New York Times Notable Books.  His new novel is set during the Depression and moves between the tales of Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas kid who became famous for his discovery of Pluto, and the Harvard astronomers who preceded him at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, as well as a couple of connecting stories, including one occurring at an archaeological dig for dinosaur bones.  As in his other writing, Byers in his new novel makes intimate and interesting observations about human creativity, obsessive pursuit and selflessness, as well as about some of our less attractive traits.

Tarfia Faizullah’s poems are profoundly visceral, with their central image being the body and its response to different scenarios.  “Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh” is an elegy to her grandmother as well as a narrative about the sudden death of a young boy.  Its final line is a central theme in all of her work: “There are so many bodies inside this clumsy one.”  Faizullah evokes the disorienting transitions between countries, languages, and between the past and the present.   Many of Brian Brodeur’s poems are also narratives of extremity.  The widower in “He Asks the New Owner to Look After his Trees” is still in shock after losing his wife and is embarrassed that people will think he is “tapped.”  Another of them is a brutal narrative recalling the rape of a Tutsi woman, about how she cannot convince her rescuers of the violence she has lived through; “Kandahar” is an elegy for a returning soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder who tries to come to terms with the loss of a brother. Maria Hummel’s group of poems concern a son who is “beautiful and ill.”  They are frank looks at the vulnerability and pain that are involved in parenthood.

SM

Speer Morgan is the editor of The Missouri Review.

Recovery

Walking along my front porch, I rub my swollen

     belly like I did, years ago, when I was expecting

a miracle. I am empty now, gutted

     like the old farmhouse across the street,

every room pared down to the frame’s

     bare bones. Even the floors have been removed.

All I want is a day when pain

     breaks. I’ve had so many surgeries—

adhesions excised like splinters,

     four rundown organs

pulled out like windows and walls.

     Here in mid-life, I’m nothing but pure

ruin. And part of me would like to give up,

     dissolve into dust like my neighbor’s brick.

But in the ash trees that line our road,

     in flawless iambs, the sparrows chant

preserve, preserve, preserve, preserve.

     And I step into our yard where bees,

persistent as repeated pleas,

     poise themselves before the roses,

then bury their faces in the velvet

     breasts, suckling sugar, tasting

grace as insistent as the tune they hum.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

During my long and complicated recuperation from open surgery last spring, my neighbors across the street were remodeling their farmhouse, a homestead that’s been in their family for many generations. As I followed doctors’ orders and “moved around,” hobbling along my front porch and sidewalk, I watched the builder working on the house and caught the poem’s insistent “germ.”  I tried resisting it: I thought it was too obvious a metaphor, too easy. (Besides, I thought, surely other women have already written about hysterectomies!) Yet, this neighbor’s brother-in-law, who’s another neighbor of mine  (this is rural, southwest Ohio where farm families live along the same tract of land they own), shared with me the tremendous cost of saving the home, a cost the owners could easily have avoided by simply razing the house and starting fresh. After all, even the fireplace’s brick had ground down to dust. I was that house; we all, at some point, become that house. The poem, like prayer, helped me endure pain and uncertainty as it spilled over into gratitude for those who choose preservation as a way of life, gratitude for such grace.

From earth, each star

is a likeness of the other, which is why divination

is impossible — the constellations are not Braille, but piercings,

wounds in the neck of a bull.

Perhaps the sky is a matador’s scarlet.

Or, no — perhaps the sky is the stadium in which we sit, watching

the bull, the banderilleros stabbing his neck, the way he falters,

throws his head wildly, his yellow eyes trying to focus

on the source of pain–

The men are drinking from leather flasks of wine and the women

avert their eyes, or a few young men avert their eyes

and some young women lean toward the scene so far forward it seems

they’ll fall out of the sky

toward the earth again, where their bodies will be trampled

or swell with children. The mothers fret at this,

their fingers drawing near the frayed ends of their daughters’ hair

as if their children were fabrics they could weave

without touching. Everyone is yelling kill the bull,

except those who murmur I want to die

into their palms, into the palms of their neighbors

who turn back to their wine, or stand and begin to weep.

The bull staggers and we swarm into the arena

to drive steel points trussed with ribbon

into his crest, his throat, his knees — until the matador

drops his sword, sprawls in the dust. Night shifts around us,

mud-dark and furious — clouds like white foam in the mouth

of the sky, and we stare a long while

at the scene we rendered, trying to recall

how we arrived. Slowly, the curved horn of the moon

rises. Lament settles in the stadium tiers.

Some in the crowd begin to chant there is no balm

to assuage the mark of the body.

Others sing there is no star that leads us away from ourselves.



Author’s Note:

When writing, I always begin with the constraint of a big idea — then stray. So my poems are deviant. Three published here (‘Corrida de Toros,’ ‘Fig’ and ‘I Want You Dangerously’) are included in the collection that will debut this winter, my intent for which was to examine the trope of the fruit in Western literature — its literal forms, mythos and psychosexual connotations. That’s what I meant to write. You see here how the poems got pushy, and I ended up with a bullfight, a war in Tibet and a hurricane. The other three (‘After the Twentieth Century,’ ‘Lacan at the Carousel’ and ‘Revolution’) are part of a new poetry collection I’m working on — an assay of the theoretical and social evolution of psychology. That’s the big idea, anyway, though I’ll likely compose the poems through digression.

1) You work as a project manager for New York State.  Do you ever find yourself bringing experiences from your daily job into your writing?
For the most part, no.  Work is work and fiction is fiction and never the twain shall meet.  Well, never say never.  I did write one story called “Building 8″ the protagonist of which is a career bureaucrat, and which takes place in the infamously “sick” title building, a building based, incidentally, on a real state office building here in Albany.  The story is a wonderful, laugh-out-loud-funny parody of bureaucracy, but unfortunately I’m the only one it seems to make laugh out loud.  It remains, as of this date, unpublished, though full of hope.

2) What have you been reading/spending your time with most lately?
My full-time job, which, as the term “full-time” might imply, occupies at least part of my time.  When I’m not there, or writing or sleeping, I’m often reading historical novels.  I try to read what I’m writing.  For the last decade or so, when I was writing short stories exclusively, I was reading nothing but short stories.  I seldom read collections (Alice Munro and George Saunders being the glorious exceptions); on the theory that if you want to write your best you should read the best, I read the prize anthologies for the most part – O. Henry, Pushcart and Best American Short Stories.  As a matter of fact, I collect the latter as a hobby; I probably have 75% of all the volumes published since they were inaugurated in 1915, and I’m hoping they’ll rub off.  With hard work and perseverance I hope to someday be included in Good American Short Stories, then work my way up to Better American Short Stories.  I think Best is probably too much to hope for at my age.

3) You’ve just published your first collection of stories, Hart’s Grove. What did you find to be the most exciting part of the process?
Without question, the most exciting part is the launching of the book after all the hum-drum hard work and tedium is done.  Any writer who says otherwise is either lying or a fool.  Of course, I suppose he or she could be both, a lying fool.  Or a foolish liar.  At any rate, after years of laboring in rejection and obscurity, never sure if your little collection of letters and syllables will ever see the light of day, the bright sunshine of the limelight is pretty irresistible, not to mention metaphorically mixed.  I could get used to champagne, adoration, and applause if I weren’t so humble.

4) What are you working on now?

I’m writing a historical novel right now.  The protagonist is a young doctor in the year 1857 in, of all places, Hart’s Grove, Pennsylvania.  It’s based on one of my Hart’s Grove stories (which is not included in the collection) and I’ve written over 200 pages.  Some wonderful writing there, if I do say so myself, chock full of terrific characters, snappy dialog, beautiful settings.  But, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m probably going to need a plot as well, so it could be a while yet.

Andrea Waterfield is a summer intern with The Missouri Review.

Paige Burnham, intern: 19th-Century Time Travel

I love time travel stories where the main character travels in time from the modern day back to the 1800s. I think I like it so much because then the 1800s are described through the narrator’s eyes, in a way that we would see it. Little things that the people of the 1800s take for granted are noticed, both good and bad, like the toilet situation or the fancy plates and silverware. It at once idealizes the 1800s, but also makes me appreciate living in the modern world. I’ll read anything that has time travel to the 1800s, no matter how “low brow” it is, and I’ll probably love it, especially if there’s some romance. I’m a sucker for a boy in pantaloons.

Nell McCabe, graduate assistant: New England

Even before I moved from Western Massachusetts to Columbia, Missouri, novels and stories set in New England have always spoken to me in a way that others don’t. I love books and writers who can capture something about what it means to live in the Northeast: in a small Maine town (Empire Falls and The Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo), the streets of Dorchester (Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane), or even a dystopian futuristic New England town (The Handmaid’s Tale by Marget Atwood). It’s hard to say for sure what draws me to this setting, but I suspect that the familiarity it offers and the glimmer of recognition when a character acts or speaks in a particularly New England way has something to do with it.

Kate McIntyre, contest coordinator: Oxford

What I can’t resist (I don’t try very hard) is anything set at that ancient seat of learning, Oxford.   You’re guaranteed a comedic don. Turn riverward, and you’ll spy punters. Look up and admire the spires. The cast of characters will be highly educated, to the point of great social strangeness. You’ll find that they are all affiliated with colleges whose names sound strange and deeply, deliciously English: Balliol, Brasenose, Keble.

My favorite novel set at Oxford is Max Beerbohm’s nastily charming Zuleika Dobson, in which a beautiful young woman convinces hoards of Oxford undergraduates to kill themselves. The river proves handy. Oxford is also a frequent setting for murder. In a handful of golden age mystery novels, it functions as a sort of extra large country house, enclosing both murderers and suspects in its gates. (Are there, in fact, gates? I’ve never seen it in person.) Mystery-wise, The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin and Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers are stand-outs.

Marc McKee, poetry editor: New York City

I have never been to New York City.  This is a sad fact made ridiculous by the lineage I claim as a poet: the New York School (especially Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara), Federico Garcia Lorca (especially The Poet in New York) and Walt Whitman.  I’m drawn to urban settings generally, the way the edges and glass and roil of humanity interject themselves on the consciousness of the poet, virtually guaranteeing that the poet has to share the page with the world we’ve made, but I’m incredibly susceptible to New York City.  It looms and it looms, its shadows are serious.  Give me a lunch poem like “A Step Away from Them,” and even the grit of NYC shines.  Of course it’s also the province of fiction writers; certain moments of Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude actually let me believe I grew up in Brooklyn at the same time as hip hop, instead of a small town in Texas during the ascendancy of Garth Brooks.  And speaking of hip hop, some of my favorite emcees make their home there or the home of their music, Mos Def and Aesop Rock and many, many others.  I suspect that one day I will go to New York City, but this does not worry me.  Of all the settings in all the poems and books and songs I feel like have a chance of living up to their poetic and/or fictional hype, I feel like New York has the best chance of exceeding my expectations.  It is always on my horizon.

Owen Neace, intern: Texas and the American South

Two settings that I can’t seem to pass up are Texas and the American South, for the following reasons: I love the beauty and sparseness of Texas, specifically how it can be both breathtaking and inhospitable at the same time. But I also love its history: how it was almost its own country, how it kind of is now, all the bloodshed that occurred, all the wars, all the literature that’s been written about. And finally I find its people infinitely interesting. To put it simply, we absolutely do not care about national perception or potential criticism, and whether you agree with our politics and lifestyle or not, that’s admirable, and rare. And to top it off, those politics and lifestyle are extremely unique: we tote guns like God told us the apocalypse is tomorrow, we’re unflinchingly “conservative” on some things, and ridiculously “liberal” on others. I quote these because being from Texas makes you appreciate just how relative these terms are. Also, to harken back to a Texas saying, “In life, there’s only God and football, and not necessary in that order.” This sounds like a joke, but it’s really not.

And regarding the South, there’s a lot of commonalites with Texas. In addition to its physical beauty and literature, I guess the main infactuation I have with it is its grotesquery. Also, and this is probably the main catalyst for most Southern literature, there’s the slave history. I simply cannot resist reading about this, and how the South almost unknowingly destroyed America and recreated the backwards classicism of medieval Europe, AND how now, it’s such a thriving economic region. I find the whole history of it really enthralling.

Michael Nye, managing editor: European Summers Abroad

This is easy: the college student’s summer abroad in Europe.

Let me clarify now: these stories are not good.  I’ve written them.  I’ve written about my summer abroad, in both essays and in “fiction.”  I’ve read thousands of these stories, both in writing workshops as an undergraduate and a graduate.  I’ve also read these stories as an editor of literary magazines, at Natural Bridge, at River Styx, and here at The Missouri Review.  They are always the same story.  They all essential go like this:

A boy/girl who is misunderstood/heartbroken/naïve goes abroad one summer to England/Spain/France to find his-herself/seek adventure and ends up either lamenting his/her soulmate who abandoned him/her back in the States or ends up meeting his/her soulmate who is a super-awesome European who is just so ethereal.  Invariably, they spend a lot of time in the story walking around and in pubs and endlessly namedropping avenues, museums, and famous restaurants.

So why do I fall for these stories?  Why do I go ahead and read all thirty five pages of these stories (and these stories are always twice as long as they should be, even if they were wholly original, which, again, they are not) when I know exactly what is going to happen?

Because I’m an optimist.  Because these stories are honest and heartfelt.  They may be melodramatic and clichéd, but the authors don’t know that yet (they will; the authors of these stories are almost always twenty three years old).  They capture setting and it infuses the characters with energy.  Because there is tragedy—these stories are never funny—and there is something verging on adulthood for the characters, and for the writer, the sense that the world is bigger than he/she yet realizes.  You know that you are reading work by someone who is going to write for the rest of his/her life no matter what, and there is something captivating about being the audience for this awareness, this hopeful claim on the world.  One day, the writer of the My Crazy Summer Abroad will look back on the story and cringe.

And yet, these stories always take the reader to the streets of Barcelona, the café of Paris, the ruins of Italy, and stay in those places, live in those places, refuse to abandon the sense of location (does anyone read Eudora Welty’s “Place in Fiction” anymore?) and the way place shapes us characters in fiction is often, sadly, forgotten.  The writing in these passages may not be good for the story, but the writer, always, clearly, is at his/her best in these moments.  And I’ll take those moments.  You never know what will come next from this writer: the next story might be the one that makes The Leap.

Dan Stahl, office assistant: Hollywood

How to explain my preoccupation with Hollywood? As a city, Los Angeles ought to appall anyone who has outgrown Disneyland, but perhaps the very qualities that make L.A. preposterous in real life make it compelling in art. “City” may be a misnomer — the place feels more like a metropolitan movie set, with its insistent sunshine and vacant sidewalks. (Most Angelinos learn how to drive before they learn how to walk.) This public artificiality and impersonality have resulted in what I consider some of the most engrossing and, ironically, affecting films over the past several years: Crash, Mulholland Drive, L.A. Confidential. The books that fostered my initial interest in Hollywood — Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan — exhibit, like the movies above, a morbid fascination with their setting. I guess I could risk further embarrassment by addressing music, but who still remembers Hole?

Sarah Strong, intern: Victorian England

I find the energy and vitality of the Victorian era compelling, with its frantic tensions between different social groups and within those groups. I’m drawn to stories with a lot of power play in them, and I associate that kind of socio-political grappling with Victorian England. Rapid pacing and scientific/technological progress set against the extreme conservatism of Victorian middle class mores has come to define the era for me. It’s an age of transition, of looking backward and forward at the same time, and it is exciting on many levels. Throw in the Victorian obsession with the occult, and you have a natural setting for the supernatural to merge with the scientific, amping up the tension with a note of the inexplicable. Books (and movies, for that matter) drawing on this era are irresistible to me, whether they are young adult literature—Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, for instance—or thick tomes of fiction like Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. And of course, there are the contemporaries.

Nathan Zaring, intern: The Gothic

I’m a sucker for dark settings.  If there are castles, curses, or strange creatures, I’ll probably read it, no matter how bad it is.  But that isn’t to say that I forgive all stories as long as they have those elements.  I actually feel that I’m harsher on those types of stories (as I’ve read so many).  It’s a strange paradox.  But, truthfully, it’s that way for me in more than just setting.  I’ll read a much lower grade of science fiction or fantasy story simply because it is sci-fi or fantasy, while I’ll pretty much only stick to what I feel is upper-quality fiction in most other genres.

So, dear Internet Reader, what settings captivate you?