Serial Interview: Christopher Golden

Summertime and the livin' is easy . . . or at least it's warm. It's also Monday, which means I get to bug interview Chris some more . . .

What do you love about summer?

The best thing about summer, by far, is that I don't have to get
up
early to get my kids to school. I love that it gets dark so late that
when
I quit work I still have hours of sunshine left. Summer evenings are
some
of the greatest hours we're ever given. I love ice cream, a good
summer
blockbuster, driving in the car with the windows down and music
blasting,
and the ocean (not the beach so much, but one pretty much goes with the

other).

What do you dislike about summer?

Perfect timing for this question. We're having a heat wave in
Boston,
four or five days straight of mid-90s and high humidity, and my
air-conditioning is not working. If I didn't have to work, I'd be at
the
beach, with a cool breeze and the Maine water to chill me. I can't
abide
sweltering weather, but fortunately, weeks like this are rare. What I
really hate, even more than that, are mosquitoes. They were bad enough

before they could kill you. :)

Any summer blockbusters you plan on seeing in the
theatre?

Most of them, probably. IRON MAN was one of the greatest summer
movies
I've seen in a long time. INDIANA JONES was a lot of fun. People who
compared it to Raiders of the Lost Ark are doing themselves a
disservice,
preventing themselves from having a good time. The other two weren't
nearly
as good as the original either. You can't recapture something so
perfect.
My whole family enjoyed KUNG FU PANDA. "There's no charge for
awesomeness."
We'll be lining up for THE INCREDIBLE HULK this weekend, not to mention

HELLBOY II next month. This is an excellent summer for movies.

When you think of the summers you spent as a kid, what
comes to mind?

Freedom, of course. We spent a ton of time at friends' houses, or

walking in the woods, building tree forts. It was the late 1970s, and
though horrible things happened to children then, people didn't know
about
it the way we do now, and didn't talk about it when they did. Child
abduction and that sort of thing seems far more common now, but maybe
that's
an illusion, I don't know. All I do know is that we were NEVER home.
We
rode our bikes, had adventures in the woods, found gullies that seemed
otherworldly to us, stole bags full of corn from a local cornfield and
cooked it up at home. And we walked. Boy, did we walk. The movie
theatre
was six miles away, and by 7th or 8th grade, we would walk there and
back if
we couldn't get a ride. We walked to McDonald's, or to get pizza, or
wherever we felt like going. We roamed. Honestly, it was glorious.

Make sure to come back to Bildungsroman next Monday for another installment of our serial interview!

In the meantime, check out the previous portions -
Part 1 |
Part 2 |
Part 3 |
Part 4 |
Part 5
- and browse through the other Golden-related posts here. Also swing by the brand-spankin' new Poison Ink mini-site.