I won’t have much to say about either Hobgoblin, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman’s upcoming magicians-and-con-men-fight-the-Nazis project for HBO, or Salman Rushdie’s even vaguer-sounding pilot for Showtime until I know more about either one. But I’m glad we’re at a point where television is as desirable a high art form for internationally-regarded authors to pursue as novels or film.

I think the big question is how all three authors will pull off not just plot, which they’re all good at, but dialogue. I think Chabon and Rushdie have a similar tendency towards the grand, the too-perfectly witty, and I’m not always sure how that translates. Authors like Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos have a smaller aperture than Chabon and Rushdie, who see the potential for magic and miracle everywhere. But they also have a finer sense of how humans really do talk to each other, not simply how they would in a world where everyone was preternaturally clever.

Oh, come on, are we really so small-town America that it’s not cool for kids to “run around with cameras and monster makeup”?

Even Gary Hobson had more edge than that. And dude, free childcare.

Funnily enough, I think the whole thing that this movie is selling is the thing that makes me unsure I want to see it yet: the lack of information about the monster. I tend to think audiences are increasingly smart and conceptual and want not to be scared by the thing under the bed but to see it, and understand it. I don’t really trust J.J. Abrams to come up with something that will be satisfying at the big reveal, but I trust Guillermo Del Toro, and Neill Blomkamp, and Justin Cronin to come up with monsters that will sustain me for a whole movie rather than having to jump out of my closet and scare me.

I think this piece in The Atlantic about how love happens in New York and wholesale destruction in Los Angeles is quite good except for one thing: it totally ignores the fact that in a post-9/11 world, you just can’t destroy New York. Okay, a Cloverfield monster can wreak havoc on New York, but in a shaky, hand-held camera kind of way that doesn’t produce the indelible, lovely shots of destruction pornography that are the staples of so many of our action movies. If you want slow-motioned explosions taking out major buildings and to linger on the anatomy of their demise, you just can’t do it in New York in any way that might recall 9/11. It doesn’t make strategic sense that aliens would invade on the West Coast, or that a preliminary strike force would land there, or whatever. But if they’re going to make landfall somewhere, Los Angeles is what’s available and reasonably important that we don’t mind seeing destroyed, and if it’s happening everywhere, Los Angeles is where we’re willing to watch it go down.