Christopher Buehlman was born in Tampa, Fla. After earning his bachelor's degree in French from Florida State University, he established his versatility as a poet, playwright, performer and comedian. On the Renaissance Festival circuit, he took on all comers as the verbal mercenary Christophe the Insultor. He is the winner of the 2007 Bridport Prize in poetry and his web site provides a generous sample of his work prior to the publication of Those Across the River (Ace, September 6, 2011). He lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., with his wife, actress Geneva Rae, and their rescued dog, Duck.
On your nightstand now:
The Plague by Albert Camus.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Plague by Albert Camus. (kidding). The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein. I remember being particularly charmed by Bilbo Baggins, suffering from a cold, telling well-wishers "Thag you very buch."
Your top five authors:
Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shirley Jackson, Anthony Burgess, Neil Gaiman. Stephen King if I get a sixth, but I don't think even he would want me to bump any of the others. Except maybe Neil Gaiman.
Pretty meat and potatoes list, I know. I just saw Jesse Ball, a startlingly good poet and author of The Curfew, give a reading in Milwaukee, and he listed Julius Caesar and Basho. I want to be that guy when I grow up.
Book you've faked reading:
The Scarlet Letter. Christ, I couldn't. I would have almost rather done 11th grade again, even if it meant listening to another year of Ms. Vernotzy telling us that we'd get a C on any piece of writing wherein a sentence began with "There," or making us read an article about how Joan Baez was a superior artist to the Rolling Stones, even though her bias was 10 years stale, as my generation was already on The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees. It must be bewildering trying to keep up with teenage trends when you're nearing retirement.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. I'm glad she wrote that delightfully nuanced, fascinating postwar ghost story, if only because I was getting tired of hearing myself say that nobody was writing literary horror anymore. Sarah Waters is.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Any tattoo magazine with an attractive tattooed woman on the front, i.e., any tattoo magazine.
Book that changed your life:
Had to be The Shining. A teacher in middle school used to tell us ghost stories on Fridays if we had behaved to his satisfaction during the week; his favorites were Stephen King vignettes, which he watered down enough to avoid litigation. I already had a skew toward the dark, both in humor and in what I liked to watch on TV or read. Now that I had been indirectly exposed to this King person and his stalking hedge animals and revenant bullies, I wanted to go to the source and read him for myself. I picked up my first copy of The Shining at the neighborhood TG&Y when I was 10 or 11--I remember the cover was silver and had a faceless boy on the front. I say "my first copy" because that one got confiscated and I had to get another one on the sly. I lost the original because I was simple enough to ask my father, retired navy man Joe Buehlman, what a "prick" was. He never told me the definition, but he might have been tempted to say "Why, son, whoever sold you that book is a prick."
Favorite line from a book:
"...my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water...." --Lolita.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I was on a trans-Atlantic flight to accept the Bridport Prize in England, and I never sleep well on planes (6'2", all legs), so I just dove in and didn't come out until we touched down; I was halfway through it. It rained like a bastard the whole time I was in Bridport--my plans to explore the Jurassic coast on foot metamorphosed into afternoons at the pub, book in hand, ale on table--not a horrible way to pass rainy afternoons. Curiously, the irony of going to England to read a book called American Gods only just occurred to me, right about when I typed the word "ale.'"