Monday, February 10, 2025

The 40 But 10: Mark Rayner

 



I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!


Today we are joined by human-shaped, monkey-loving, robot-fighting, pirate- hearted, storytelling junkie, Mark Rayner is an award- winning author of satire and speculative fiction. He writes in the genres of science fiction, humorous SF and dark comedy. He also dips his toe in the occasional bit of dramatic prose and experimental/literary fiction. When not working on the next novel, he pens short stories, squibs and other drivel. (Some pure, and some quite tainted with meaning.) He's the co-host of Re-Creative, a podcast about how creative people were inspired by other works of art. Mark does all these things while being Canadian and owning cats.

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What’s the single best line you’ve ever read?

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”

~Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

 

What is your favorite book from childhood?

One of my first memories is of reading my favorite book, Look Out for Pirates! aloud, to my brother, Mike. He was barely a toddler. Whenever I leaned over the crib to show him the picture that went with the prose I was so enthusiastically reciting, he’d grab the book at try to throw it away. (Very pirate-like behavior, so I approved.)

A few years later, when all my classmates were explaining they wanted to be astronauts, or nurses, or firefighters, I explained it was the pirates life for me. I was devasted when I learned that being a pirate was not a viable career goal. (I mean, unless you want to manage a hedge fund.)

 

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Telekinesis, 100%!

It gets you flying, assuming you can lift yourself. You don’t have superstrength, but you don’t need to get close to anything. You can protect yourself with force fields. Hell, you could theoretically manipulate atoms and create things with the power of your mind.

Plus, you never have to get off the couch when you can’t find the remote!

Am I jazzed about this superpower? Hell yeah. I’m in the process of writing two trilogies in which this is the killer app.

 

Summarize your book using only gifs or emojis.

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What’s the one book someone else wrote that you wish you had written?

Serious answer for this one: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It’s about Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan about all the marvelous cities in the Khan’s empire, but so much more. It’s a prose poem, a paean to the limitless nature of human creativity. Don’t look to it for plot or character development, but in terms of style and imagination it’s not to be missed. And it inspired one of the short stories in my new collection, The Gates of Polished Horn, “This Ambiguous Miracle.”

 

What are some of your favorite books and/or authors?

Some of my favourite authors include Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Chuck Palahniuk, Tom Robbins, George Orwell, Robertson Davies, Julian Barnes, George Saunders, Milan Kundera, William Gibson, Douglas Adams, Christopher Moore, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard & Italo Calvino.

 

If you could spend the day with another author, who would you choose and why?

Assuming we can go back in time? Kurt Vonnegut. He’s my literary hero, and I consider one of America’s all-time great satirists. Vonnegut has a beautiful way of casting the folly of human nature into disrepute at the same time as having great sympathy, and even love, for his characters. Plus, he was funny as hell and apparently a great conversationalist when he was in the mood.

 

Which literary invention do you wish was real and why?

I guess I stole my own thunder on this one – a time machine, clearly. Though you have to be careful when you’re time travelling, as people will learn from the first story in my new collection, “Socratic Insanity.” The framework for this story is that time travellers who go back to, oh, let’s say kill Hitler before he does all his damage, believe they have succeeded. But when they come back, they have not – you can’t change what has already happened, or if you do, you create an alternate reality. But you can’t travel to an alternate reality. Their subjective reality – I killed Hitler – just doesn’t match the objective reality. So my time travellers go insane. But not if they’re careful and don’t try to change anything. Having drinks with Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t count.

 

What do you do when you’re not writing?

I teach at Western University, at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS). I’m very lucky to have a job that feeds my writing, while much of my marketing activities as a writer help me in the classroom. My teaching focuses on web design, information architecture, visual communication and social media. I teach in the undergrad program, called Media and Communication, plus in our two professional graduate programs, the Library and Information Science program, and in the Master of Media in Journalism and Communication program.

When I’m not teaching, I like to enjoy workouts, reading, video games, movies and playing guitar. And my two cats, Max and Milo, keep me busy too!

 

Why do you write?

For the money, of course. Bwahahah!

Sorry. It’s just that this is a deep and difficult question. Why am I trying to answer it? I guess I like a challenge. I mean, writing is one of the all-time great artistic challenges. The rejection isn’t as intense as it is with acting, but it’s up there. Yet having the ability to bring people, ideas, worlds … whole universes into existence is just such a cool thing.

Writing is an act of empathy. The best stories are ones that move us and that requires the author has compassion for their characters. Even the baddies.

And I’ve always been a storyteller, since I first started reading Look Out for Pirates! to my brother. It’s a compulsion. An intellectually and emotionally rewarding compulsion. It can be painful too, but I’ve never really seriously considered NOT writing. It’s too much at the core of who I am.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



What happens when you’re face-to-face with a truth that shakes you? 

Do you accept it, or pretend it was never there?

Award-winning author Mark A. Rayner smudges the lines between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative in this collection of stories that examines this question—what Homer called passing through The Gates of Polished Horn.

We discover the cruelty of creating synthetic consciousness. A woman is worried that her husband is having an affair but discovers it's much, much worse. A time traveler uncovers a reality-bending fact while observing the death of Socrates. Waldo, of Where's Waldo fame, has an existential crisis. A traveling salesperson is killed on the highway, and this is just the start of his journey through the gates.

Infused with comic insight and tragic vision, this collection invites readers into new realities that touch on our shared humanity.

“Mark A. Rayner’s formidable storytelling is on full display in this thoughtful and diverse collection. He’s a fine and creative writer whose characters and storylines are quirky, inventive, and often very funny.  Bravo!”
~Terry Fallis, author of The Best Laid Plans & two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour

Get your copy here!  or

Enter the book giveaway here (ends Feb 28th)


Sunday, February 2, 2025

What I Read in January

 I know everyone says this but I wholeheartedly agree... why does January always feel like the month that's never going to end?! It's funny, because the last few months of the year fly by at lightening speed, here and gone before you can even acknowledge them, and then January comes in and it's like that houseguest who doesn't get the hint and never wants to leave. 

And of course, this past month was one of my worst reading months in a long time! Not the way I had hoped to kick off the new year. I read a total of 6 books, but I also have to cut myself some slack because my publicity workload picked up again and as my client workload increases, my free time for reading always decreases.

Plus, we all know it's not HOW MUCH you read, but WHAT you read that really matters so let's take a look and see if I made smart choices with the books I chose to spend my time with....



My Husband by Maud Ventura

Good lord this book.

It was cute at first. The whole woman married 15 years and still obsessing over her husband thing was a little relatable. Like, look how handsome he is. And I can't believe I haven't lost an ounce of love for this man, honestly I think I love him more today than I did when we first got married. So adorable it kind of makes you want to vomit.

But then you read a little more and you realize, ok, yup, sooooo this lady is clearly a little unhinged and is convincing herself of all this horrible shit she's made up in her head about how she thinks her husband doesn't love her as much as she loves him and she's tracking all the things she believes is proof of this in her little journals and she's comparing their relationship to all the crap she reads online and in magazines and she's faking being perfect to make sure he doesn't try to leave her and now I'm thinking to myself why I am still reading this? I should totally put it down. I don't think I can read an entire book of this crap. And then she just starts losing her shit completely, like going full out nutter.

And so now I'm reading it just to see where it's going to go because it's gotta go SOMEwhere right? And then whoa... that ending?! Ok book. You redeemed yourself.

You're a fucked up little thing for sure.




Grasshands by Kyle Winkler

Oh hell no. Do not recommend. This was not good despite the fact that it sounded right up my alley. Librarians identify a strange moss growing on the books in their basement and when people eat it, they have immediate knowledge of the information contained within. But the moss, that nefarious weird ass moss, is working its evil magic on them when they do. There's a big bad moss monster called Grasshands and these little tippy tap tickling spiders that crawl into your mouth and kind of... I don't know... hibernate in there and attack you when provoked. Sounds interesting, right?

The writing was really rough. It's trippy and weird but not in a good way. I wanted to DNF it a couple times but I bought it at full paperback price so I was determined to get my money's worth. It was so not worth the money or the time.

I know it's early in the year still but I'm pretty sure this will end up on my worst-of list for 2025. Sigh.





The Country Will Bring Us No Peace by Matthieu Simard

This is one that #bookstagrammademedoit got right!

"Peace is a momentary void between two conflicts."

Throwing all the stars at this grief fueled novella in which a couple buys a house in the country in an attempt to start over and move beyond their haunted past. Only, their new small town is not so welcoming and the townsfolk appear to be fighting a history that won't release them from its clutches either.

It's bleak and beautiful and eerily atmospheric. It's full of lies and secrets, disappointments and hostilities. It's about the things that keep people together while also actively pulling them apart. And it's surprisingly kind of ballsy, hiding the end in its beginning.

This book haunted me as I read it. I can only imagine what it will do to me now that it's over.

Grief fiction is definitely becoming a favorite genre of mine.




Father Gaetano's Puppet Catechism by Mike Mignola

There are few things that scare the beejezus out of me but puppets, especially marionettes, are creepy as fuck and make my skin crawl something fierce so tucking them into a horror novel... oh lordy! But I really like Bad Hand Books so I took the plunge.

And I'm glad I did because I really, really enjoyed it!

Father Gaetano's Puppet Catechism starts off slow and atmospheric. It's set in a church rectory in a small town in Sicily that's been ravaged by war. A group of orphaned children were taken in by the nuns of the church and then suffered the unexpected loss of their priest. So in comes Father Gaetano. A young man of the cloth who agrees to take on the temporary work of teaching the children the Catechism. Many of their hearts have been hardened by the brutal loss of their parents at such a young age and they actively challenge the young priest, questioning God and his allowance of such horrible events. Gaetano realized he has his work cut out for him but it's while he befriends the shy nine year old Sabastiano that he learns of an abandoned puppet theatre in the basement of the rectory. The puppets, he hopes, will help him teach his bible lessons and reconnect the children to God in a fun and interactive way.

But the puppets... well... they have other ideas.

I'm sure you can guess where things go from here. A heavy wooden box long hidden in the basement. Stuffed full of handcrafted creepy ass dolls. Just waiting for someone to come along and release them? It's all fun and games until the sun goes down and the strings come loose.

It's a quick, engrossing read that's really well written. It's dark and chilling and sure, there's a lot of set up and exploration into the church and the nuns and Father Gaetano before the good stuff really starts to kick in but there's enough build up and tension working its way through the storyline that I was ok with the whole thing. Oh, and... I'm only just now learning that the author is the dude behind Hellboy.




Julia by Sandra Newman

Sandra Newman's Country of Ice Cream Star is one of my all time favorite books. Nothing she's written since has come close in my opinion but I'm always excited when I see a new book from her. And somehow this one passed under my radar for a while. I was browsing our new B&N in the science fiction section and nearly whooped when I saw it sitting there.

Julia is a feminist retelling of Orwell's classic novel told through the lens of... well... Julia, where Winston is almost relegated to a full fledged background character, and I have to admit... I wasn't really the biggest fan of 1984. I read it more than 20 years ago and gave it a low rating but didn't write a review for it and god help me if I can remember what I didn't like about it or the specifics outside of the obvious - big brother is always watching and privacy is a thing of the past and people will get tortured and killed for getting caught just thinking anti-BB thoughts - ... but honestly, I quite enjoyed this modernized version.

I see a lot of people bashing it and finding fault with it but I thought it was creative as hell and kind of fun too. I mean, I just admitted that I had mostly forgotten what was in the original and 100% can't remember how it ended so ... what am I really comparing it to, you know? For me, it's totally it's own thing!

You should give it a shot. Maybe you can help remind me of the ways in which it deviated from Winston's POV.




When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy

The deeper into the book I got, the more certain I was that this was going to be a 5 star read for me but the ending messed with the pace of the book and felt a little too rushed. I was one hundred percent strapped in and hanging on for dear life until those final pages. Did Cassidy always know that was how it would end, or did he sit there after the big boss fight and wonder "what now"? You know that meme /tik tok thing that's been going around where the person's looking at things and deciding "hmm, no... eh... oh hehehe yeaaah", saying yes to the worst possible choice. I dunno, I kinda felt like that's what he did there at the end.

Don't let my reaction to those final pages scare you aware though. The book as a whole was pretty bad ass. You think it's going to be your typical scary werewolf story but it's so much more than that while also not that at all. It's about jerk fathers and lonely kids and making bad choices and living with their consequences. It's part Twilight Zone, part survival horror, and a whole lot of omg I can't stop turning the pages to see what's going to happen next.

I love what Cassidy's been doing and how he kind of reinvents himself with every book he writes. Can't wait to see what's next.