News from the North

I have an article about a maternity hospital in Haiti in the May issue of The Walrus , and a little essay about writing graphic novels up on the The Guardian 's books blog. I actually sent The Guardian this version first, which if you ask me was far more interesting and appropriate, but it got bounced for failure to comply with their house style rules, alas: Panel One Young Jon – chubby, bespectacled, geeky – stands in front of a rack of comic books, totally engrossed in an issue of The Uncanny X-Men. Batman, Spiderman and Superman stare out at us from the rack behind him. Caption Twenty years ago, this was what comics meant to me: melodramatic tales of implausibly proportioned superheroes. Jon This is awesome! Caption Not that there's anything wrong with that. Panel Two The same layout as Panel One. Present-day Jon – tall, strong, devastatingly handsome – stands in a modern bookstore, in front of a rack labelled "Graphic Novels", reading Louis Riel . Among t...

And for those of you who have been living in a cave - or, if there's anything to the horror-audience stereotype, perhaps those of you not living in caves - my old friend Sarah Langan (we've known each other since our teens, lo these many strange aeons ago) last week won a thoroughly deserved Bram Stoker Award for the best horror novel of 2007, The Missing . While it's technically a sequel to her stunning debut The Keeper , which was a nominee last year - and, frankly, should have won - you really don't need to read Keeper first. But that's a moot point as you should rush out and read both right now.