Email Author Mark Holcomb

2003 Stories by Mark Holcomb

• Public Spaces

  published December 30, 2003

  One of New York's more enduring illusions is that its physical quarters are universally accessible. But while there are acres of parklands and... More >>

• Philip K. Paycheck

  published December 23, 2003

  The law of diminishing returns appears to have caught up with Hollywood's Philip K. Dick infatuation. The man was a literary workhorse, so it's... More >>

• Girl Afraid

  published December 2, 2003

  What goes around, comes around—and around and around, as an inexhaustible supply of slasher-movie retreads and pulp-fiction resurrections... More >>

• Rio Bravo

  published October 7, 2003

  Hollywood lore is brimming with anguished accounts of botched literary adaptations: for-hire hacks with little understanding of the source... More >>

• Fall Books

  published September 9, 2003

  When Gregory Maguire says of his latest novel that "the story is made up, as modernity is (as Picasso told us), of fragments and... More >>

• Write What You Know

  published September 2, 2003

  Books about writers and editors, like movies about filmmakers, have a built-in mystique that masks a multitude of sins—or so their authors... More >>

• That '80s Show: Two Horror Franchises Go Straight to Hell

  published August 12, 2003

  Presumably, the value of combining two lightweight horror franchises lies in the ability to thrill and frighten without taxing the gray matter.... More >>

• Going Stag

  published August 5, 2003

  The term pulp, once used to describe the low-grade newsprint on which certain turn-of-the-century magazines printed low-rent fiction, has... More >>

• The World in His Arms

  published June 17, 2003

  Gregory Peck, who died at age 87 on Thursday, June 12, was one of Hollywood's most iconographic leading men. It was commonplace to associate the... More >>

• The Strokes

  published April 29, 2003

  Not feeling guilty enough? If the recent War to End All Gas Hikes didn't elicit your shame and anxiety, historian Thomas W. Laqueur would like you... More >>

• Caught In The Act

  published April 22, 2003

  Somewhere in the premise of John Whitesell's Malibu's Most Wanted—rich, pampered white kid adopts black ghetto persona as a way of... More >>

• Amazing Stories

  published April 8, 2003

  Save for a few moldering back issues gathering dust in rural barbershops or drawing preposterous bids on eBay, pulp- and popular-fiction magazines... More >>

• Somewhere in Africa

  published April 8, 2003

  With attempts at cross-cultural understanding in short supply, Anthology's weeklong selection of films from cinematically underrepresented... More >>

• The Carson Show

  published January 21, 2003

  It may be no coincidence that so many "reality" shows—from Survivor to its reprehensible kiddy knockoff Endurance—use... More >>

• All This Useful Beauty

  published January 14, 2003

  Our auteur-obsessed movie culture ensures that film technicians rarely get the credit they deserve. Conrad L. Hall, who died of cancer in Los... More >>

• Monsters' Pall

  published January 7, 2003

  The latest entry in a prolific Japanese video, manga, television, and movie series involving "patlabor" (short for "patrol labor") police robots,... More >>

• Bargains in Blood

  published January 7, 2003

  Last year was unusually bountiful for home-video completists, even if several of the most historically significant titles that made it to disc... More >>