I published only one story in 2024, “The True Story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree,” which appeared in R&R, the new literary journal from Relegation Books. One isn’t a lot of stories! But it was a good one, so it counts double, maybe even triple or 10-20x? That’s what I’m telling myself. This was the third in a series of stories I’ve written about famous people and their weird relationships with trees, which began with “James K. Polk” in 2012 (later included in Tales of Falling and Flying), and then continued on with “Joan of Arc” in 2019 (one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written). Maybe there will be more? I hope so, but who can tell? It’s not like I’m in charge around here. Many thanks to editor Joey Grantham for his help on the story and for publishing it and teaming it with the perfect Brad Holland painting. I love what Joey’s doing over at R&R and I hope they are rewarding him handsomely.

I did four public readings in 2024: First, out in Baltimore at the Hidden Palace reading series, which was maybe my favorite reading I’ve ever done? I got to stay in a fancy hotel and drink fancy drinks in a loud, cramped, dimly lit bar and eat 700 lbs of delicious french fries at 3 in the morning and hang out with Danielle Evans and Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, two of my favorite short story writers in America. Then, back in Los Angeles, I did a reading at the Hannah Hoffman Gallery, in concert with an exhibition related to Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, alongside my old student Emily Hunt Kivel, whose first novel, Dwelling, is coming in August from Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. I also got to see some old friends from Dennis Etchison’s writing classes back in the day. (They were both wearing octopus t-shirts, and I was reading a story about a squid—Lovecraftians!) The third reading I did was at a Los Angeles Review of Books event at Permanent Records Roadhouse in Cypress Park and it was great fun, maybe because I got a suspiciously large number of free drink tickets and didn’t eat anything. I did meet some long-time fans who said really nice things to me (I gotta come up with some better things to say to people who say nice things to me, sorry about that), and got to hang out with my grilled cheese lunch buddy Zoe Ruiz (currently available for all your coaching and editing needs). Then in November I went up to Cal State East Bay for their Distinguished Visiting Writers Series and finally got to go to the Winchester Mystery House, which I’d been wanting to see for 30+ years and turned out to be way, way weirder and more disorienting & disturbing than I’d expected.

The coolest thing that happened in 2024 (to me, anyway) was that my album came out! I say “my,” though really it’s my friend’s album—composer Nathan Hudson—and I had almost nothing to do with it. But my name is on it, so I’m happy to take credit! It’s an album containing four pieces of contemporary classical chamber music, each composed by Nathan, and based (some more loosely than others) on one of my stories (“The Duck,” “The Well,” “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun,” and “God“). It was funded via KickStarter (thanks everybody!), recorded earlier in the year, and released by Neuma Records in October. It’s called Music for Falling and Flying, and you can listen to and/or (preferably!) buy it on Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, at the Neuma Records website, or wherever else you do those kinds of things. I have to say, it’s really good! The recording of “God,” especially, I just love.

What else do I have to report? A couple of my stories popped up on the Selected Shorts Podcast again: “Dandelions” (read by Wyatt Cenac on Episode #50: Best Laid Plans), “The Frog and the Bird” (read by Mike Doyle on Episode #38: Taking Flight with Amy Tan), and “Death and the Lady” (read by Denis O’Hare on Episode #22: Reality Checks). I answered some Chaos Questions for Sheldon Lee Compton over at Hobart, was interviewed on Robert Swartwood Live, got a nice mention in the LA Times in an article by Jim Ruland about Short Story Month, got to choose 3 books for the Juror’s Prize at the 18th Annual National Indie Excellence Book Awards, and contributed a little blurb about my favorite short story collection I read this year to Aaron Burch’s new journal Short Story, Long.

Mostly what I did in 2024 was walk around. Starting back in April, I walked 5-6 miles every day (and sometimes 10-12). I resolved to walk down every street within a reasonable distance of my house and, while my definition of “reasonable” expanded a lot as the months went by, eventually, I have to say, I think maybe I did it? I walked all around Echo Park, Elysian Heights (and Valley), Silver Lake, Los Feliz, Westlake, Victor Heights, Chinatown, DTLA, all around Elysian Park and the Dodger Stadium area, over into Lincoln Park, Koreatown, etc. It was a lot of walking (and still is!). I lost 30 pounds and saw some cool buildings and got to know the city’s Little Free Library system like the back of my hand and learned a lot about the history of Los Angeles and Los Angeles architecture and ate a ton of donuts, bagels, and clif bars. I also wore out a bunch of shoes, had to buy a smaller belt, and got very interested in sun hats and sunblock.

But! Moving on. Let’s go to the year’s bookshelf!

I read 156 books in 2024, unless my records are wrong (my records are never wrong). Some of my favorites were Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek (a slim, sad, beautifully mysterious & haunting book that I instantly reread and promptly gifted to a bunch of people), Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s by Marianne Meaker (not a great book, but I always like learning more about Patricia Highsmith (and imagining her fidgeting threateningly with her switchblade), and enjoyed the portrayal of a relationship where the two people involved clearly just don’t understand each other at all), Dayswork by Chris Bachelder & Jennifer Habel (a Reader’s Block-like literary portrait of Herman Melville, crossed with a texting-based pandemic novel, which sounds awful but was brain-ticklingly lively and fun), Fever House by Keith Rosson (I’ve been a Keith Rosson fan for years, and this one exceeded not just my expectations but my hopes—surreal, fast-moving, emotionally harrowing, funny, illuminating, and scary as hell), Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (probably my favorite book of the year; a buddy drama about two down-on-their-luck friends inexplicably driven to stage Euripides in a POW camp in ancient Syracuse), The Ice Cream Man & Other Stories by Sam Pink (I still don’t get why Sam Pink isn’t famous, he should totally be famous (little plug for his Rontel here, one of the 4-5 funniest things I’ve ever read)), The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs (explained a lot of things about The KLF that I hadn’t even noticed I didn’t understand before, and also somehow made me feel like a super genius, which I enjoyed), My Father, the Pornographer by Chris Offutt (when I was 15 I was obsessed with Chris Offutt’s dad Andrew J. Offutt’s fantasy novels and Thieves’ World stories and always wondered why he didn’t write more—well, turns out he was busy with other things! And also with being a total maniac??), Puttering About in a Small Land by Philip K. Dick (has my vote for best title of all time (except maybe for The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (and/or The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea))), Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car by Jordan Bolton (a collection of beautiful & piercingly sad comics by this guy I follow on Instagram), Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson (which she wrote to draw attention to the injustices perpetrated against Native Americans in this country, but which ended up instead helping to create the Southern California tourism industry, as readers went west on the new railroad hoping to see the (completely imaginary) home of the beautiful (and completely imaginary) Ramona from the book), and You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue (which I read the same week as I saw Longlegs—I hadn’t expected them to dovetail so perfectly).

As a result of Dayswork, I read three books by Melville: Billy Budd (a reread (though I still can’t say I get the appeal)), The Confidence-Man (mysterious and fun at first, but episodic and gets old fast), and Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (which is fantastic, a wonderfully fun book full of remarkable scenes and sentences; made me want to run off to an island paradise full of charming & hilarious cannibals and row my girlfriend around a lake in a canoe). I also read three books by James Welch: The Death of Jim Loney, Winter in the Blood, and Fools Crow (all excellent), two by Somerset Maugham: The Magician and The Moon and Sixpence (The Moon and Sixpence on the recommendation of Stephen King (more about him later)), two by Tobias Wolff (In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World (good, but neither as good as The Night in Question)), two by Sara Gran (The Book of the Most Precious Substance and Saturn’s Return to New York (and liked them both, though Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead and the audiobook-only Marigold are still my favorites)), two by Steven Millhauser (Disruptions and Dangerous Laughter), two by Octavia Butler: The Parable of the Sower and Dawn, three by Barbara Comyns: Our Spoons Came from Woolworth’s, The Vet’s Daughter, and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (still processing, but I liked the first two of these a lot), and three more of Iain Banks’ Culture novels: Matter, The Hydrogen Sonata, and Consider Phlebas (Consider Phlebas was the best).

One of my favorite things I did this year was sign up for a class on Philip K. Dick over at Morbid Anatomy, taught by my friend, PKD scholar David Gill (who wrote the introduction to (PKD’s third wife) Anne Dick’s indispensable bio The Search for Philip K. Dick). I’ve known David for years, ever since 2005 or so, when I used to run the Philip K. Dick fanpage over on MySpace (the good ol’ days), and it was nice to see him in action in a classroom (zoom room). The class was fantastic: 16 weeks, two 3-hour lectures per week… we went through PKD’s whole life and discussed all his literary phases and books; every other class we had a visiting scholar or someone from PKD’s life (friends, girlfriends, roommates, mentees, etc.) come to speak. I learned more about PKD and PKD-related weirdness than I would’ve thought possible, and finally got around to reading a few of the (very few) books of his I still hadn’t read, including The Crack in Space (pretty good), Dr. Futurity (blecch), and The Cosmic Puppets (great images but a bit lifeless), plus his first book, the non-science fictional Gather Yourselves Together (which was incredibly strange—long and rambly and full of awful people behaving in incomprehensible ways—but somehow in a good way??), and the above-mentioned Puttering About in a Small Land (which I really loved: as off-putting as all the characters are, and as little as I understand what the whole thing’s about, it’s idiosyncratic and alive and feels like the one book that maybe gets closest to making me understand who PKD was internally on a day-to-day basis (and also it has a great cover (on top of a great title))). I also reread Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, three of my all-time favorites of his—and hey, what do you know, they hold up! My favorite thing about the class was finally coming to understand how the two strands of PKD’s writing life (science fiction and literary fiction) finally came together around 1960 when (in hopes of finally making enough money to maintain his new wife in the style she was accustomed) he gave up his (failing) straight-world literary fiction aspirations, started jamming the “unhappy couples” of his literary novels into his (previously lone-man) SF books, upped his benzedrine intake about 1000%, and got really into Episcopalianism. All my favorite books of his come from that period; too bad the stress of it all brought everything crashing down. Still, he came through it okay! Well, eventually… more or less… for a while.

Anyway! Some other books I enjoyed this year: Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, The Ugliest House in the World by Peter Ho Davies, A Different Darkness by Luigi Musolino (especially the first story, “Lactic Acid,” which reminded me of the short film “The Black Tower” which I saw a few months before and really loved), William Vollman’s Europe Central (though it would’ve been better as a short story), The Known World by Edward P. Jones, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Houellebecq’s Annihilation (though I don’t remember a single thing about it), The Knockout Artist by Harry Crews (Harry Crews is the best), Bukowski’s Hollywood (I also walked over to see Bukowski’s old apartment in Hollywood, it looked about as depressing as you’d imagine), Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (“Hell-Heaven” was probably the best short story I read in 2024, but this collection as a whole mostly just made me really sick of hearing about rich people, I couldn’t even finish it), Steve Anwyll’s Welfare: A Novel (troublingly vivid and unforgettable), Roger Zelazny’s first collection The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (one of the worst titles of all time, but the stories are solid; he’s sort of a hipper, more poetic Ray Bradbury), Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas, Experimental Film by Gemma Files (one of the best “cursed movie” books I’ve read), Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, David Ulin’s Thirteen Question Method (always nice to read a book by someone who loves film noir as much as I do), Steven Dunn’s Potted Meat, David Gates’ Jernigan (They don’t really make books like this anymore… which, hey, is maybe for the best), Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, Matthew Bartlett’s Gateways to Abomination, The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (really loved the psychedelic scope of this), Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner (which was infinitely more interesting than Peter Ackroyd’s Chaucer (Brief Lives), which I also read), Jan Fosse’s A Shining (actually I didn’t like this very much, but I did keep thinking about it afterward), Richard Mirabella’s Brother and Sister Enter the Forest, Fleur Jaggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, Randall Kenan’s Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Kaveh Ackbar’s Martyr!, Christina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, Scott Wolven’s Controlled Burn, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, and All Fours by Miranda July (which I fully expected to hate, and did! Until somewhere along the way I found myself admiring how totally mainstream and commercial-minded it was beneath the grating superficial wackiness… a neat trick). I also read Sjowall & Wahloo’s Cop Killer and The Terrorists, thereby finally finishing their 10-book Martin Beck series after many years of reading. Might begin again from the start.

Some classics I finally got around to in 2024: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (good book, though it made me feel bad for Uncle Tom, who’s a pretty decent guy in the book), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (which weirdly lacks the famous story-defining climax I remember from all the movies where he swings in on the rope and saves her (instead, she just… dies?? wtf)), The Phantom of the Opera (I love the physical world of this story more than maybe any other (an island in the middle of a secret, subterranean lake buried beneath a haunted opera house!!?? incredible stuff) but the story itself is a real snooze, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (almost terrifyingly energetic (also, I love the cover of the Penguin Classics edition)), Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (one of those “Don’t Do Heroin” books, but a good one (I shall continue to not do heroin)), Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (great ending involving Stonehenge), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (loved this; a real world so messed up it reads like science fiction), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (started out as one of the best books I ever read and then kinda spiraled out of control, but still, had me cheering and texting everyone excitedly for a while), and Dickens’ Hard Times (short, bleak, humorless; easily the worst Dickens I’ve ever read). I also read Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (in which the narrator withholds a lot of information from the reader, not sure exactly why but it was interesting), Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (now I get why people don’t talk much about Anne), and reread Wuthering Heights (that book is intense! the very definition of bad vibes). It was my intention to read (or reread) all the Bronte books, but… I failed. I admit it, the Brontes defeated me.

Some other rereads: The Burnt Orange Heresy by Charles Willeford (the older I get the more I love Willeford), The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons (this was my 4th or 5th time through, and I still find it riveting, unsettling, and often shocking), The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (still don’t enjoy being lectured for 300 pages, and will never understand why everyone always talks about this instead of The Lathe of Heaven, which is one of the best science fiction books of all time), The Collected Works Vol. 1 by Scott McClanahan (I wish Scott McClanahan published a book every week; I’d never read anything else), and The Shining by Stephen King (tbh, I liked this one more when I was 15, but I still love the idea of a telepathic kid trapped between his incredibly unhappy parents who never talk about what’s actually on their minds).

Speaking of Stephen King, I also read 35 other books by him this year. I’ve been reading Stephen King my whole life and am perpetually “almost caught up” but then I turn around and he’s written a whole raft of new ones. So this year I decided to actually REALLY catch up. Some of my favorites from those 35 I’d never read before: Blaze, The Colorado Kid (which is a real anomaly amongst his work, almost an experimental novel, quite refreshing though it definitely leaves you hanging at the end), the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, Billy Summers, and, maybe most of all, Holly (which is super fun and creepy, I could feel myself grinning like a madman the whole way through). Didn’t care much for the tomes: Under the Dome, 11/22/63, Lisey’s Story, Bag of Bones, Tommyknockers, Dreamcatcher, etc., though they all had their moments and sequences (yes, even Dreamcatcher) and it was cool to read them all so close together as to get to see and appreciate King’s moves and the way his brain works. I was impressed to find that he has written excellent books in every decade of his career; I expected to see a sharp falling off recently but that wasn’t borne out; if anything, I like his more recent books (esp Holly and the Bill Hodges trilogy) more than those from the late 90s and 00s. Weirdly, I didn’t much care for the short story collections (although Night Shift is by far my favorite King book (well, it’s neck and neck between that and The Long Walk)). Not that the stories were bad, they always just felt a little… like glancing blows. (Which is not true of the stories in Night Shift, I hasten to add! “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” for instance, gets me every time.) That said, the one about the stationary bicycle really captured my imagination, so much so in fact that I went out and bought a stationary bicycle (didn’t make the connection at the time, but I see it now). So far I haven’t stationarily biked into any other realms of existence, but here’s hoping. The only King books I didn’t cross off the list were the Dark Tower novels, which I’m leaving for another time. I tried! But I just can’t make it through the second one.

The worst book I read this year was… well, maybe I won’t go there. I will say that I have no idea how that book Orbital won the Booker Prize. But then again, I never understand how any of the books that win the Booker Prize win the Booker Prize. Or any of the other big prizes, for that matter. The book world is a strange and mysterious place. Sometimes I think everyone’s just messing with me.

But anyway! Happy 2025 everybody! Go read Glorious Exploits.

Oh! Last thing—horror movies! It wasn’t a very good year for horror movies (IMO), but I did enjoy I Saw the TV Glow, Oddity, Red Rooms, Strange Darling, Longlegs, and You’ll Never Find Me. I also enjoyed parts of Cuckoo (especially the biking scene (what is it with me and biking scenes?)) and Exhuma, and Alien Romulus was fun if completely pointless and forgettable. Full disclosure, I still haven’t seen Nosferatu or The Devil’s Bath (or Terrifier 3, for that matter).

And finally, here’s my favorite photo I took in 2024. In November, I was finally lured back to the world of live music for the first time since 2019; I went to see my friend’s band, MyVeronica, at the Echo. They have a song inspired by my story “The Duck,” and they played it! Sometimes life is pretty cool.