Tag Archives: horror

Structure: China Mountain Zhang

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , ,

The first time I realized I was reading a mosaic novel, I had deliberately sought it out. It took a few trades in the online book networks to find it, but finally I held a battered copy of China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh in my hands. I had no idea what I was getting into but by the end I still had no idea what I had really read. It was good. If I were to recommend it today, I would say: it was very good.


The premise of the novel supposes that China is the ruling superpower on Earth and takes a wide ranging look at how this affects Chinese citizens, Chinese Americans, space colonists, naive young people, and people who think they are too old to be naive.


A mosaic novel treats each chapter as a short story in the same world. I believe I have seen the term “loosely connected” somewhere in relation to this form, though I cannot remember where. McHugh uses the form to give us a different perspective on the world so that we sample coming of age and Outer Limit-like episodes set within the same confines. However, all characters interact with each other and each others’ consequences until what we really have is a journey of self-knowledge and acceptance.

Anything more is a spoiler, so go hunt down your own copy.


Mosaic novels exist onscreen in a very popular format if one is a horror addict like myself. The horror anthologies, of the eighties and nineties, usually use the smaller films within to affect the larger framing device characters so that the true horror is one that the audience sees coming (as is true in all good horror – we call this feeling dread).


I chose to do a mosaic novel for the 100 Day Project because I thought a. It will be really fun and b. It will be challenging and c. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Talking to Yourself: Mo Haydr

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , , , ,

I first stumbled on Mo Haydr’s works when I was a poor, broke grad student haunting the local library in Leeds. My favorite sections were horror and crime, and Haydr’s work settled comfortably in both. One of the first books I read was Pig Island which made me, as a reader, pretty mad. I could respect what she was saying with the plot, but I could also respect that I had checked out a library book and could just shove it back in the return bin without remorse.


Years later, I read Wolf. It took the underlying young woman protagonist arc that was first mapped in Pig Island and said, well, yes, but what if the other characters did something a little differently? It was a good book on its own, but a fantastic counterpart to Pig Island. Even if I weren’t already a fan, as a writer I could really get behind the conversation taking place between the two works.


How freeing! To be able to have both timelines, the present and of course, the darkest timeline. Or perhaps, in creating a response timeline you may find you were already in the darkest timeline. In writing complete worlds, we aren’t bound to characters talking to each other. The entire structure of our universes unfold in new and different ways with a single, “But what if I did it a little differently this time.” Perhaps you learn that you have grown optimistic in aging or perhaps the person you become takes the patina of age as whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses might be.


You can’t respond to yourself unless you’ve said something in the first place.