Nick Mamatas (famously called "a true Chaotic Neutral" by fellow writer Catherynne Valente) is a crafty writer, in every sense of the word. He leads wNick Mamatas (famously called "a true Chaotic Neutral" by fellow writer Catherynne Valente) is a crafty writer, in every sense of the word. He leads writing workshops, he writes in a lit style (I am again using that word in multiple senses), you always sense he's writing a bit tongue-in-cheek and low-key making fun of readers who don't quite Get It.
I didn't quite get this one. The Second Shooter is a strange book, set in Mamatas's stomping grounds of the East Bay. Mike Karras is a "journalist" working for a shoestring publisher, investigating the phenomenon of second shooters after mass shooting events. After every incident - an assassination, a school shooting, a shopping mall terrorist attack - there are reports of a second shooter, someone the police never caught. Karras thinks there is something to this, and he's writing a book about it.
Following leads fed to him by shooting survivors, by a crazy talk radio host, by "fans" and fellow conspiracy theorists, chased by feds and drones, Karras spends some time living rough in Oakland, California, pursuing leads from a nice Ethiopian Christian girl who survived a shooting at her church, who seems both fond and contemptuous of him, while trying to uncover... the Truth.
I really was not sure where the story was going or what it was even about. Mamatas inserts sly observations throughout, poking at the obsessions of paranoid right wingers and sanctimonious leftists, but I remained unsure what the point was. Is it about America's gun culture? About conspiracy theories? About the psychology of mass shooters? About social media derangement? About people trying to make sense of the senseless? At times the story had a bit of Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea Illuminati vibe.
The ending is where it gets really strange and earns the "sci-fi" label, but I cannot say I was left satisfied, or any less perplexed.
The Second Shooter is a departure from Mamatas's previous books; he usually dabbles in Lovecraftian horror, and I have to admit I preferred them. This one was just kind of weird, and seemed more like something born in a brainstorming session, perhaps inspired by some of the weird Japanese SF that he edits at Haikasoru, that never quite cohered....more
This is a short, bloody ride, and while it might not have reached Cormac McCarthy levels of literary awesomeness, it certainly rivaled a McCarthy noveThis is a short, bloody ride, and while it might not have reached Cormac McCarthy levels of literary awesomeness, it certainly rivaled a McCarthy novel in violence.
Bull Mountain takes place in the present day, but it skips back and forth in time to tell the story of three generations of Burroughs � violent hillbilly outlaws who've owned Bull Mountain and the surrounding counties for generations. We first meet Cooper Burroughs in 1950, arguing with his brother during a hunting trip in the woods. They are taking Cooper's young son Gareth out for his first kill, but the brothers Burroughs are having a dispute. Cooper's brother wants to sell their valuable land and get the family out of the moonshine business to go legit. He is pragmatic, businesslike, farseeing. And he's already made the deal. Except he doesn't emerge from the woods alive.
Growing up with a father like that, Gareth, predictably, turns into a violent son-of-a-bitch who takes over from his daddy when Cooper starts losing his mind, demented by age, alcohol, and guilt. But in flashbacks going back and forth from his childhood to shortly before the story of Bull Mountain actually begins, we see the hints of soft-heartedness in Gareth, the boy he once was and the better man he could have become.
But he didn't. Instead, he turns into a violent alcoholic wife-beater who sits at the top of Bull Mountain like the Godfather of Appalachia, expanding the family's business into drugs, arms, and even trafficking, as he forms relations with a Florida biker gang.
Gareth has three sons. One's already come to a violent end. One is his heir, Hayford, who has taken over as the criminal overlord of north Georgia. And one is Clayton - the "good" Burroughs, who refused to join the family enterprise and instead became a sheriff, where he tries to keep law and order in his little town while ignoring his older brother up on the mountain. Until a federal agent comes to him with an offer he can't refuse.
Bull Mountain is a story of family, crime, and double-crosses. It skips generations and shifts between characters, giving us a look at all the Burroughs clan, their wives and hookups, their sordid, troubled history, and the bikers and arms dealers they run with. Of course the offer that the feds bring Clayton isn't quite what it seems, and the climax is the bloodbath we've been expecting all along.
This was thoroughly enjoyable, fast-paced, and surprisingly not a lot of wasted exposition despite covering three generations before the events of the main story....more
I never read White Fang as a kid, but I would have liked it. While Jack London wasn't writing primarily for children, it's very much a Boy's AdventureI never read White Fang as a kid, but I would have liked it. While Jack London wasn't writing primarily for children, it's very much a Boy's Adventure sort of novel, especially nowadays, when Alaska is no longer quite the unimaginable alien wilderness it was in London's day, and wolves are mostly consigned to lurking at the borders of civilization, and regarded more with pity (when not being exterminated) than fear. So the story of this half-dog, half-wolf who started out as an Indian sled dog and winds up the happy housepet of a judge in California reads as a quaint adventure from a bygone time.
White Fang tells the story of a wolf-dog born wild but eventually captured by an Alaskan Indian tribe and made to lead a sled. White Fang is the fiercest and most savage of his pack, and learns to fight and survive with greater cunning and skill than any of his kind. London imparts a great deal of willfulness and reasoning to White Fang that is probably more than could actually be attributed to a canine, but it reads almost believably, as if you're getting into the actual mind of this fierce, intelligent, savage creature who isn't quite a person and not quite fully sapient, but still has a definite personality and memories and motivations.
In many ways, White Fang is a Conan-like hero. He's a singular specimen of his kind, raised on hardship and brutality, genetically gifted, destined to become the most fearsome warrior in the land. He defeats dogs and wolves alike. He spends some time forced to become a fighting dog, at the hands of a particularly brutal white man, before he is taken by another white man who manages to earn his trust and loyalty and eventually (and improbably) bend him to domesticated life in sunny California.
White Fang's adventures are high-spirited and often bloody, but even when White Fang is being a real son-of-a-bitch, you're always rooting for the dog....more
Cormac McCarthy's prose is like black coffee - you can appreciate when it's well-made, but it doesn't always go down smoothly and you might wish thereCormac McCarthy's prose is like black coffee - you can appreciate when it's well-made, but it doesn't always go down smoothly and you might wish there was something to sweeten it. This is the fifth McCarthy novel I've read. I've loved two, hated one, and been lukewarm about Suttree and now this one.
All the Pretty Horses is a coming-of-age story about a young man of sixteen whose mother decides to sell the ranch he wanted to make his livelihood. With no further attachment to his parents, he rides off to the Mexican badlands. It's the 1940s, and the era of cowboys riding off on horses is coming to an end, but John Grady Cole still manages to get into enough trouble for a Western epic. He and his friend Lacy become unwilling companions of an ill-fated youngster who seems born under a bad moon. They become horse wranglers, Cole falls in love (of course) with a beautiful Senorita who is (of course) the daughter of his rich employer, and this (of course) brings him only trouble. He spend a while with Lacy rotting in a Mexican jail, having to fight for their lives every night, but once he gets out, like any young man in love, he's not going to let a little thing like a rich landowner who can sic the Mexican police on him get in the way of true love. But the girl's formidable grandmother ultimately proves to be the insurmountable obstacle.
As a coming-of-age story and a romance, there is not much original in this tale, just like McCarthy's other novels (especially The Road, the one I hated) have not really involved much in the way of novel plotting. Rather, it's the style of his writing and his storytelling - plain, linear, masculine, sometimes a bit overwrought. All the Pretty Horses was one of the novels attacked in the Atlantic's infamous , indicting the pretentiousness of American literary prose like this:
While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned.
Or this:
He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold ... Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal ... Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing.
Okay, that is some pretty hefty artisanal prosing. At times it could get a bit much, but it really is poetic once you sink into the rhythm of McCarthy's storytelling.
And after too much YA fiction in recent years, I particularly appreciated a sixteen-year-old (!) who was not a freakin' child. John Grady Cole may be young, dumb, and full of cum, but he's also a young man dealing with men's business, the way sixteen-year-olds used to have to do.
That said, this cup of black coffee was a little bit bitter and a little bit stale. The long, long disquisition by the elderly Mexican grand dame about why Cole had to stay away from her granddaughter because of her entire history since childhood and all her scheming to give her granddaughter the life she couldn't have, which turns into a mini lecture on Mexican and Anglo culture and the nature of fate, was just too much. It still boiled down to "Stay away from my granddaughter, gringo!" And paragraphs like those above did sometimes drop like pompous prose-bombs.
I was lukewarm on this book, and not sure if I will read the rest of the Border Trilogy, but I cain't quit McCarthy....more
Chandler is a smooth writer who still delivers prose that lesser writers can't match seven decades later. Sure, Philip Marlow's cases all begin to runChandler is a smooth writer who still delivers prose that lesser writers can't match seven decades later. Sure, Philip Marlow's cases all begin to run together... a dame, a tough guy, some mobsters, some crooked cops, a couple of murders that don't quite add up until Marlow begins poking around and finding angles on the angles... Yet Chandler always makes the plot wrap up neatly in the end. Usually Marlow gets roughed up a few times, some gorgeous dolls throw themselves at him, and for one reason or another he is unable or unwilling to take advantage, then he gets roughed up by the cops, then he gets taken somewhere for a private, ominous conversation with the local kingpin, and eventually the original murder turns out to be some tawdry affair of the heart, or jealousy. Dames are always dangerous in Chandler's world, cops are rarely to be trusted, and a PI who's a stand-up guy shouldn't expect to get thanked for his troubles.
If you haven't read any Chandler, you really should. I liked The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, but now I've really come to love his writing, even though I couldn't tell you which of his books is my favorite....more
This is possibly the most depressing book I've ever read.
It's not grimdark, it's not maudlin or sentimental, it's not a hopeless tale of a broken lifeThis is possibly the most depressing book I've ever read.
It's not grimdark, it's not maudlin or sentimental, it's not a hopeless tale of a broken life. It's the biography of a young farmboy who goes off to college to learn agricultural science, falls in love with English literature, and spends the rest of his life as an English professor. And through bad luck, principled refusal, and a certain amount of passivity, enters into a loveless embittered marriage, watches his career stagnate, his daughter become estranged, and everything he ever loved fall away like browning leaves. Except his love of literature, which never leaves him and is often his sole consolation across the long years.
In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.
The author, a former English professor, sets his novel in a university much like the one where he taught, though he assures his former colleagues in the foreword that it is entirely fictional. His familiarity with the ins and outs of university life and the vicious nature of academia (as the old saying goes, the fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small) bring Stoner to life in hushed academic vivacity.
"It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that's just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn't give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive - because we have to."
William Stoner, a tall, lanky young man, has the beginnings of a promising career when he sets out on his academic path. The publication of his first book heralds what the rest of his life will be like - it is received as a "competent" work by reviewers. It would be easy to say that Stoner is a tale of frustrated mediocrity, except that Stoner the man is vividly self-aware, aware even that he has the potential for something more that he will never quite achieve.
First it's his wife, Edith, a pale, tall, awkward girl from an affluent family, whom Stoner woos and wins because she can't seem to think of a good reason to say no. And from the moment of their wedding night, it's a disaster, his marriage to this spiritless, unhappy woman who will first be swallowed in depression and then wage subversive war against her husband, seeing that he has no peace or solitude at home, no comfort at her side, no hope of moving on to a better opportunity, and worst of all, when she sees that their daughter takes after her father with quiet, devoted seriousness, goes about driving a wedge between them and in the process destroys her daughter's spirit as well.
At work, in one of the few moments when Stoner stands his ground, against an unqualified, farcically unprepared graduate student pushed forward for a doctorate by one of his colleagues, this turns into the defining millstone of his career, because it makes his colleague, who will soon thereafter become the department chair, a bitter enemy. And so Stoner will spend the next twenty years with a superior who despises him and sees to it that nothing good ever comes his way.
When Stoner finds love at last, in the arms of a brilliant young graduate student, I was prepared to groan and roll my eyes. So cliched, the middle-aged college professor being rejuvenated by the healing power of fresh poontang. Really, John Williams, did you have to do a Philip Roth? But Stoner's love affair with Katherine is rendered so poignantly, so touchingly, both of them fully aware of what they're doing, and so inevitably doomed to end like every other happiness in Stoner's life, that it made me feel sorry for him, made his love real and bittersweet and tragic.
In the end, William Stoner stands tall and alone, stooped by years and adversity, but never quite defeated. He has stood on his principles and suffered for them. He has had the chance to take the easy way out more than once, and never has, never abandoned his responsibilities or his promises, no matter how much they cost him. He is a man alone and apart.
Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that...
He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. "Katherine."
And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?
What did you expect? he asked himself.
This book hit me... at a certain time in my life. I'd be lying if I said I don't see a little bit of Stoner in me. Hopefully my life has not been such an abject lack of success. Hopefully there are still futures ahead that I can venture into and achieve some of what I started out meaning to do. But if Stoner is in fact reminiscent of all those other books I have sometimes wryly tagged as "dude lit" about dissatisfied middle aged white guys discovering their lives aren't all they cracked up to be, unlike those it doesn't offer apologies, excuses, or solace. It's a book that illustrates that everyone is deserving of sympathy; everyone can be related to as a human being whose life has tasted too much disappointment. And yet in the end Stoner isn't a failure, he isn't a loser, he isn't even miserable. The book his colleagues buy for the university library in honor of him - that is his memorial, the only thing to remember him by when he's gone, a rare book with an inscription, occasionally perused by some graduate student - may not be much of a mark to leave behind, but how much more of a mark do any of us get to make?...more
This claustrophobic thriller about paranoia and conspiracies is set on an island prison-mental institution in the 1950s. Teddy Daniels is a U.S. marshThis claustrophobic thriller about paranoia and conspiracies is set on an island prison-mental institution in the 1950s. Teddy Daniels is a U.S. marshal sent to investigate the escape of a patient at Ashecliffe Hospital, arriving with a brand-new partner just as a hurricane is approaching the island. Teddy and his partner Chuck are supposed to find the escapee and determine how she escaped - fairly routine.
Pretty soon, the story starts fraying around the edges. The doctors and the warden are as untrustworthy as the inmates. The prisoners claim they are being experimented on. And Teddy starts hearing whispers from his dead wife.
The point at which Teddy starts hearing voices and we learn that he has his own reasons for coming to Shutter Island is when this thriller takes a departure from what was previously a straightforward plot. And as the story becomes more and more improbable, involving Nazi doctors, Soviet brainwashing, lobotomies and drug experiments and every single person possibly not being who they seem to be, the reader will obviously begin to suspect that it's Teddy who's insane.
Dennis Lehane makes this claustrophobic book of paranoia-fuel work, despite increasingly incredible plot twists, by putting the reader in the mind of someone who has either uncovered a horrible, crazy-making conspiracy or is in fact crazy, or maybe both, and then keeping you guessing just as Teddy himself does. Of course a crazy person will claim to be sane, as Teddy recognizes. And of course a secret project to perform experiments on mental patients would be covered up by making anyone who tries to expose it look... well, crazy.
Aided by the atmospheric description of the island and its hospital, enhanced by a timely hurricane, Shutter Island has its eerie moments and is solidly entertaining. I won't tell you at what point I made up my mind about what was really going on, but while I can't say I found the ending surprising, it wasn't completely predictable either....more
This collection had three tales: The Telltale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Black Cat.
If you are unfamiliar with these classics, you should This collection had three tales: The Telltale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Black Cat.
If you are unfamiliar with these classics, you should really read them. They are old-school horror, served chilled.
They're all creepy as hell - Poe depicted narrators going completely mad better than just about anyone else, including florid ol' Lovecraft. This would be fine listening on a dark Halloween night....more
If at first you don't succeed, get rid of the bitch and move on to the next sister.
A Kiss Before Dying is a taut little thriller about a sociopath whoIf at first you don't succeed, get rid of the bitch and move on to the next sister.
A Kiss Before Dying is a taut little thriller about a sociopath who conceives an ingenuous plan to seduce the daughter of a wealthy copper baron. Except she goes and gets pregnant before his plan can come to fruition. Since Daddy is the moralistic disinheriting type, he figures a kid before they are properly married and he's had time to work his charms and soften the old man up will just ruin everything. When he can't persuade her to get rid of it, he's left with only one option - a well-planned murder in which he manages to make it look like a suicide, and then avoid any connection between him and the dead girl.
Which allows him to move on to daughter #2.
But daughter #2 proves a little too intuitive � she starts putting clues together and realizing her sister didn't commit suicide, and wants to find out who murdered her. She figures everything out just a little too late.
And our boy, as long on audacity as he is short on scruples, decides third time's the charm: the rich industrialist had three daughters, and after all that research he did to seduce the first two, he knows the oldest sister pretty well...
As improbable as this story may sound, I couldn't really spot any plot holes. Sure, our protagonist needed a bit of luck here and there, but nothing so overwhelmingly coincidental as to be completely implausible. He's just a meticulous, cold-blooded schemer with a knack for manipulation.
A lot of people want books with "relatable" protagonists. Well, the protagonist of this book is a murderous, gold-digging sociopath. You want him to trip up and get caught, and you want his victims to get away, and at the same time, the exciting part is finding out how he's going to get away with it.
This book is dated now � it was written in 1954 and it's set in the early fifties, so the campus life described, and the so-visible class distinctions are not the same now, but that just makes this suspenseful novel a period piece as well. In fact, some of the period details are what made it interesting. For example, there is surprisingly little moralizing about the proposed abortion � she doesn't want to do it, but it seems more for emotional reasons than any real ethical or religious qualms. And it struck me that in some ways, the "boy from the wrong side of the tracks" was a thing that would be even harder to envision today � nowadays, we like to pretend that American society is less class-stratified, but that's because the rich are increasingly distant and out of sight. Working class people just don't socialize, at all, with the very wealthy, which makes it easier for us to pretend that there is no such thing as class.
Ira Levin also wrote other thrillers, like Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, and with this pacey, suspenseful novel, it's easy to see how readily his stories became a part of pop culture. Definitely worth reading, and motivated me to read more by him someday....more
Did you know that Jack London wrote a post-apocalyptic novel? I didn't!
"The Scarlet Death broke out in San Francisco. The first death came on a Monday
Did you know that Jack London wrote a post-apocalyptic novel? I didn't!
"The Scarlet Death broke out in San Francisco. The first death came on a Monday morning. By Thursday they were dying like flies in Oakland and San Francisco. They died everywhere—in their beds, at their work, walking along the street. It was on Tuesday that I saw my first death—Miss Collbran, one of my students, sitting right there before my eyes, in my lecture-room. I noticed her face while I was talking. It had suddenly turned scarlet. I ceased speaking and could only look at her, for the first fear of the plague was already on all of us and we knew that it had come. The young women screamed and ran out of the room. So did the young men run out, all but two. Miss Collbran's convulsions were very mild and lasted less than a minute. One of the young men fetched her a glass of water. She drank only a little of it, and cried out: "'My feet! All sensation has left them.' "After a minute she said, 'I have no feet. I am unaware that I have any feet. And my knees are cold. I can scarcely feel that I have knees.'
I was expecting a nifty adventure in the tradition of H.G. Wells or Edgar Rice Burroughs after reading The Call of the Wild, but The Scarlet Plague, written in 1912, seems to be from a later stage in Jack London's career when, according to Wikipedia, he was often just churning out stories to pay for upgrades on his ranch. It rather shows - that dialog, above, is hardly realistic, and London's imagined plague, striking in 2013, shows little imagination, and his futuristic world even less.
This wasn't a bad story, it just wasn't particularly exciting or original, and I doubt it was very original even in 1912. There isn't much tension, because it's all narrated by an old man, once a Professor of English Literature at UC Berkeley, telling his savage grandchildren how the plague came over 60 years earlier. His incurious grandsons rudely complain and call him names whenever he uses words they're not familiar with.
It is an interesting early entry in the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, and while I could compare it to any number of later global plague novels, if I had to guess which modern author was most heavily influenced by it, I'd say Cormac McCarthy, with his surprisingly similar (and equally tedious) novel The Road, which like The Scarlet Plague shows little concern about the science of the disease that ended civilization or the details of the world, but is centered on one survivor trying to keep the fire alive. The fact that both novels end on the California coast also seems an interesting coincidence.
That said, you might want to read this for historical reasons if you are into post-apocalyptic novels, but I don't think it was one of London's best....more
Wow! I don't know if I've ever actually read a Jack London story before. I suppose I must have in elementary school. But The Call of the Wild, a shortWow! I don't know if I've ever actually read a Jack London story before. I suppose I must have in elementary school. But The Call of the Wild, a short novel of 84 pages, is really an excellent adventure - simple, straightforward, but with crisp prose, rousing adventure, and who doesn't love a dog story? And no sentimental tail-wagging doggie here, but a metaphor for the ancient struggle between civilization and nature, the blessings and disadvantages of giving up our ancestral survival instincts and attunement to the natural world for the comforts of hearthfires and permanent shelter.
Buck, our furry protagonist, is half-Saint Bernard, half-German Shepard. He starts life as the lazy pet of a wealthy California judge, but during the Klondike gold rush of 1897, big dogs like Buck are in high demand as sled dogs, so he is kidnapped and sold up the coast to begin a new life. He soon learns the way of fang and club, as this formerly gentle giant proves to be a sort of Conan among canines. Not just in brute strength and capacity for violence, but also in cunning.
He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused. As the days went by, other dogs came, in crates and at the ends of ropes, some docilely, and some raging and roaring as he had come; and, one and all, he watched them pass under the dominion of the man in the red sweater. Again and again, as he looked at each brutal performance, the lesson was driven home to Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated. Of this last Buck was never guilty, though he did see beaten dogs that fawned upon the man, and wagged their tails, and licked his hand. Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for mastery.
Jack London made Buck a compelling protagonist � while the dogs are anthropomorphized just a little, depicted as having greater understanding and self-awareness than real dogs probably do, they do not speak, or behave in any other way unrealistically. (Well, towards the end, Buck becomes something of a super-dog, capable of heroic feats like pulling a thousand-pound sled and defeating black bears, wolverines, Indian tribes, and wolf packs by himself. But let's give Jack London some artistic license.) Buck's gradual awakening to his true primitive nature evolves from his understanding of men with clubs, to his fatal duel with a rival huskie, to his penultimate stage of life, at last, with a man he truly loves, and then his final trek into the wilderness.
This is a very masculine, adventuresome book and I can see why it's popular with kids, especially boys. Jack London clearly idealized the wilderness and the life of a primitive, though it may have contributed to his own early demise. In reality, of course, the life of a dog turned loose in the wild is likely to be brutal and short, but you can read The Call of the Wild and imagine Buck running free in the Alaskan Yukon, howling with his wolf-brothers.
It's a great little story, not all that deep, but it does resonate with clear and powerful themes, and Jack London's prose goes down surprisingly well....more
This fourteen-year-old book was "discovered" by Neil Gaiman, and thanks to his project of putting underread books on Audible, it has become available This fourteen-year-old book was "discovered" by Neil Gaiman, and thanks to his project of putting underread books on Audible, it has become available to a wider audience, which is how I came across it.
A minotaur - not just a minotaur, but The Minotaur - is now working as a line cook at a steakhouse in the South. What is this nonsense? Is it some deeply metaphorical new take on the Theseus myth - Ovid by way of Faulkner? Is it Southern magical realism? Is it literary bizarro fiction?
Maybe it's a little of all those things, but mostly it's a story about the human heart (even if that heart is half bull's) and loneliness. The yearning for human contact. The way small moments can register large for the poor and working class who have little in the way of luxury, recreational time, wide circles of associates, and opportunities to go on fun-filled vacations. They live in trailer parks, they work paycheck to paycheck, they make bad choices in life and love, often because their menu of choices is pretty damn limited, and so a little thing like a hand placed over yours can take on Homeric significance, and an investment in a corn dog trailer can represent the sailing of the Argo.
Okay, I am probably stretching my metaphors a little too far there.
The Minotaur (he has no other name, though his friends and coworkers call him "M") has wandered the Earth for five thousand years. This isn't your typical fantasy story about an immortal, mythological being, though - he's simply existed, in all that time, and acquired no great wealth or power or mad skills. If he's met any famous people since Theseus, it's not mentioned. And the "magical realism" is in the way his existence is simply accepted. People react to his bull-headed appearance, but only the way they might react to any unusual, freakish person - no one ever says "Oh my God, that guy has a bull's head!" or "Whoa, it's a minotaur!" They just tell him to watch the horns (after five thousand years he still seems to have trouble maneuvering around spaces built for human heads) or, if they are of a mean and taunting disposition, moo at him while he's on a miniature golf date.
So, this story is about a minotaur (The Minotaur) who's settled, for the moment, in the South, living in a trailer park and working at a steakhouse. He is handy with engines and knives. And he's lonely. He's had lovers before, and he remembers, very dimly, the days when he dined once every seven years on virgin youths. But that ancient, immortal capacity for rage and evil is like an old Greek ruin, still visible, maybe possible to excavate if an archeologist were so inclined, but to all appearances it is a dead and ancient thing seen now only in outline.
The architecture of the Minotaur’s heart is ancient. Rough hewn and many chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps � the blood it has pumped for five thousand years, the blood it will pump for the rest of his life � is nearly human blood. It carries with it, through his monster’s veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur’s world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.
The Minotaur has a bit of a crush on a waitress named Kelly. He wants a relationship, obviously, but does not know how to initiate one. (After five thousand years, this bull still has got no Game.) But things do indeed proceed towards the inevitable- well, you know you were wondering this, right? Is minotaur sex bestiality? It's actually, while certainly not the tenderest part of the book (in fact, things don't really go well), neither gratuitous nor lurid.
It remains hard to describe this book, because it really is just a bit of close-up human drama, with a main character you will find it easy to root for, so earnest and ancient and sad is he. Who'd have thought someone could write a Southern literary novel about a minotaur who just needs a hug? So read this for the excellent writing and the characterization (and I should note that part of the characterization is of the food the minotaur prepares and serves � seriously, you will be able to smell the onions and have a hankering for a nice juicy steak, which is kind of ironic considering who/what the protagonist is...). But be aware there isn't a big plot here � it's a slow story about a guy with horns. Don't expect Heracles to show up for a climactic wrestling match. You might spot a few other mythological figures here and there (blink and you'll miss them), but this is not an adult Percy Jackson novel.
I also have to say that having listened to this as an audiobook, I never thought you could put so much expressiveness into a grunt � grunts making up about 90% of the Minotaur's dialog. 4 stars for the story, but 5 stars for the narration � I suspect you might actually be missing out if you read it in print....more
It took me forever to finish this book. Actually, it's one of my few remaining books on CD, so after it was sitting on my desk for over two years (halIt took me forever to finish this book. Actually, it's one of my few remaining books on CD, so after it was sitting on my desk for over two years (half-listened) I finally got around to playing it in my car (which is just old enough to still have a CD player - funny to think that soon those will be like cassette players).
When the Killing's Done is a story about environmental activists and hipsters and scientists that plays out in California, specifically around the Channel Islands. The plot mostly revolves around a rich businessman who's taken up radical activism on behalf of animal rights, which manifests as protesting and obstructing efforts to kill rats and feral pigs and other invasive species that biologists are trying to eliminate from the islands. He's actually an egomaniac asshole, however, as demonstrated on his one and only date with the protagonist of the story, in which he proves to be a hot-tempered jackass of the first order. So it's no surprise when he takes his crusade against her animal control efforts personally and the naive college kids who follow him on his misbegotten quest fare poorly.
This is a very literary novel, however, so the prose is layered thickly and artistically over a fairly mundane story about critters and marine biology and California wildlife. There is some personal drama, as we get family histories of several of the characters, all illustrated in depth but none of them actually that interesting.
T.C. Boyle is apparently a popular author with certain types of literary aficionados, but while this story was somewhat interesting, it didn't really engage me (as evidenced by the fact that it took me a couple of years to get around to finishing it). Boyle does do an excellent job of describing Anacapa Island, and fleshing out all his flawed people who animate the drama and conflict over how to deal with creatures great and small who might or might not belong on it. Not sure I would read another one of his novels if I were looking for a page-turner, though....more
I like me some gritty Southern fiction now and then, and Ron Rash delivers, though he's not quite Daniel Woodrell or William Faulkner, at least not yeI like me some gritty Southern fiction now and then, and Ron Rash delivers, though he's not quite Daniel Woodrell or William Faulkner, at least not yet. But this collection of sixteen short stories was very listenable, very varied and flavorful, and while not quite popping 5-star greatness for me, it satisfied my yearning so I will definitely check out more by him.
All set in the Appalachians, these are stories are about hard, surviving mountain people. They range from a post-Civil War story about a preacher called upon to make a gruesome sacrifice to heal his still-divided community, to modern times, with promising college-bound young teenagers unable to escape the gravity of poverty and meth, or a scarred former schoolteacher who finds solace only on the night shift at a radio station.
There is retribution, not always entirely deserved, such as for the pompous Englishman who comes to America to study the locals � "He was no university don muttering Gradgrindian facts facts facts in a lecture hall’s chalky air, but a man venturing among the new world’s Calibans." And for the title character of The Trustee, a Depression-era convict who figures he can charm a young bride into helping him escape.
In very few of these stories do things end well. Not all of them even have much of an ending. But this is a nice bit of recrafted Appalachian lore, both modern and period....more
Not having read any Franzen before, I knew him only because of his infamous Oprah snub, which gave me the impression that he's one of those very self-Not having read any Franzen before, I knew him only because of his infamous Oprah snub, which gave me the impression that he's one of those very self-important dude-lit authors who knows he's writing Serious Literature. For dudes.
Freedom is a well-written and interesting book, convincing me that yeah, the dude can write, and he's no hack. He covers a certain modern milieu and a range of characters in 21st century America, all believable, complex, and highlighting the pathos, comedy, and absurdity in our modern world.
That said, Franzen reminds me of Haruki Murakami, who has a minimum number of penis scenes per book, and this book almost lost me with the scatological phone sex and then more lavishly described scatology with the same character having to "pass" his engagement ring and then retrieve it from the contents thus passed.
I mean, if I read another Franzen book and there is poop in it, I'm going to be convinced he has a fetish.
The real strength of Freedom, however, is Walter and Patty Berglund, two painfully earnest, painfully described affluent SWPL liberals living the American dream with two painfully earnest children. Walter works as an environmental lawyer, and we learn he is on a path to damnation as he gets in bed with a coal mining company to save a tiny patch of forest as a bird preserve, but of course this involves actually selling out all his supposed principles. Intertwined with this are the flirtations of his sexy twenty-something assistant, so yeah, you got it, Franzen is indeed following the dude-lit mold: aging middle-ager at the height of his career but missing a little something-something in the marital bed discovers the magical revitalizing power of a hot younger chick.
Or not. In fairness, Walter really tries to resist Lalitha's (oh you so clever Franzen) advances, because he's a faithful married man.
In fact, Walter's painful devotion to his wife, Patty, a woman who married beta-male Walter because she really wanted his alpha-male best friend, rock star Richard Katz, is the key to the eventual unraveling of everything. When Walter discovers the truth by discovering Patty's unfortunate autobiographical therapeutic journal, he completely comes apart, and while I did not like Walter (or Patty, or really, any character in this book except maybe Lalitha), I winced with him and felt his pain � Franzen makes his unmanning as the scales fall from his eyes visceral. All his life he's been Captain Nice Guy, doing and saying all the right things, and now he's exposed to the bitter Red Pill truth: nice guys finish last, and chicks really do dig jerks.
Which might be a reason why you might not like this novel, because as brilliant and subtle and satirical and knife-twisting as it is, Franzen, with all his liberal sensibilities (which he's not afraid to puncture viciously and repeatedly when they are echoed by his characters) sure doesn't let any of the women come off looking particularly good. Lalitha is sweet and smart and dedicated, but she subsumes all that with her desire to jump her older married boss, like a sort of Indian-American Monica Lewinsky. Patty is, when not cheating on her husband, a self-absorbed politically vapid liberal. She does, like Walter, get a completely rounded personal history (including an episode of date rape in college that forever mars her relationship with her parents), but despite her genuine remorse, it's hard to feel sorry for the emasculating bitch. Of course it's hard to feel sorry for Walter, too � any woman you have to pursue that desperately and from whom you demand that much reassurance is clearly not into you, so he should have known what he was signing up for when he married her.
Then there is Walter's son Joey whose girlfriend basically hitches her entire life to Joey's star (Oh captain her captain) and follows him wherever he may lead. Even though Joey is in many ways as big a schmuck as his dad, his eye-rolling Millenial condescensions notwithstanding.
This book is about a family unraveling, but it's clearly metaphorical for the unraveling of the privileged American Whole Foods generation. There are many levels on which I could analyze this book more deeply, because I'm sure it rewards a deeper reading, but I enjoyed it (and hated parts of it) because Franzen has a Dickens-like talent for telling social fables with memorable characters. However, he also has a Murakami/Roth/Bellow-like talent for writing about dicks, metaphorical and literal, so if you are not inclined to enjoy the preoccupations of entitled dudes with penises and poop, Freedom may not be to your taste.
A definite 4-star read because it's a complex narrative where everything fits together and the words are pretty. Franzen has the gift, even if I still believe (perhaps unjustly, but now weighted by words of his I've actually read) that he's probably kind of a jerk....more
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was famous as a 19th century feminist author, and apparently she's taught in a lot of feminist/women's studies courses. I wasCharlotte Perkins Gilman was famous as a 19th century feminist author, and apparently she's taught in a lot of feminist/women's studies courses. I was vaguely interested in her most famous story, The Yellow Wallpaper, so when this collection was an Audible deal of the day, I went ahead and downloaded it.
I'm glad I did. I'll get to the title story in a minute, but I found the other short stories - which were all about a woman being presented with a choice (usually in the form of a man) very readable. Clearly there is a feminist undertone to each story, though bear in the mind this is 19th century "First Wave" feminism, so it remains largely a given that even a spirited, talented, independent-minded woman is still going to marry eventually. But Gilman was first and foremost writing short stories meant to have a beginning, middle, and end, and does not beat her readers over the head with any "message." In that respect, these stories were quite enjoyable, some of them having an O. Henry twist. I particularly liked the one about a moralistic, wealthy old spinster aunt who promises her two nephews $50 (a small fortune, especially to children) if they forego butter for an entire year, believing butter is bad for children and too "rich." They do, and when the year is up, the old bitch gives them their $50 in the form of membership pledges in a missionary society. The reader seethes with anger along with the boys at the injustice of it, but Gilman delivers a satisfying coda to the story.
Some of the stories are really just simple romances, though with a slightly feminist spin, but all of them showed that Gilman was a master of characterization and not bad as a prose stylist either.
Now, The Yellow Wallpaper is famous because it represents an early feminist look at the treatment of women and mental health. The main character is a wife suffering in the aftermath of some sort of nervous breakdown and made to stay in an upstairs room decorated with a hideous yellow wallpaper that she abhors. She wants to leave, she wants to do something, she craves mental stimulation, but her kind but egostistical and patronizing physician husband refuses to let her go anywhere or lift a finger. And so he accomplishes exactly the opposite of his intent as she slowly goes mad.
This has obvious significance as an indictment of how women with mental health issues were treated, how their concerns were not taken seriously, and how they could be reduced to powerless chattel even by the most well-meaning husband. However, as a horror fan, I submit that this story can be read completely differently...
... as a tale of Lovecraftian horror! A trapped woman slowly discovers the secret of the things that live in the in-between spaces accessible from our reality through unearthly patterns in a hideous yellow wallpaper. In the climax, her husband discovers her after she has gone insane from exposure to secrets man was not meant to know.
Seriously, read it that way and it totally works.
Anyway, I quite liked these stories, even the ones that were very short and had not much in the way of conclusion....more
Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, is a shiftless, bullying, vulgar young man who begins the book tormenting his poor mother, goes to a bilBigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, is a shiftless, bullying, vulgar young man who begins the book tormenting his poor mother, goes to a billiards club to plan a robbery with his equally ne'er-do-well friends, then he and one of his friends goes to a movie theater to masturbate in the seats.
He ends the book accused of the capital rape and murder of a white girl, whom he did murder (but did not in fact rape), but by his own words to his lawyer, makes clear that raping her was something he might have done, if the circumstances had been only slightly different.
In other words, Bigger Thomas is the Big Scary Negro personified, a nightmare manifestation of white America's racial fears. And that was Richard Wright's point. He wasn't trying to make Bigger Thomas sympathetic as an individual. He was, as he explains in my edition's afterword ("How 'Bigger' was Born") trying to show how American society creates Biggers.
Written in 1940, Native Son describes a pre-Civil Rights Act America in which segregation was still the law of the land and political correctness had not yet banished "boy" and "nigger" from polite discourse. So on the surface one might think that Native Son is nearly as dated as, say, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
But Wright (the grandson of slaves) was not addressing anything as simple as segregation or racial epithets. In the interior monologues of his protagonist, he spells out the alienation and hostility of men like Bigger, and comparisons with today's society, with a prison-industrial complex that exists largely to incarcerate black men, are hard to avoid.
Richard Wright was apparently a novelist of the naturalist school, and his writing has been criticized for its lack of imagery or style and a tendency towards polemics. There are a lot of monologues and speeches in Native Son, particularly in the closing arguments of Bigger's trial, which take up most of the second half of the book. Bigger's defense attorney, Max, a Jewish communist (as the prosecutor points out repeatedly), eloquently and at length presents what is essentially a "society made him do it" argument.
"Let me, Your Honor, explain further the meaning of Bigger Thomas' life. In him and men like him is what was in our forefathers when they first came to these strange shores hundreds of years ago. We were lucky. They are not. We found a land whose tasks called forth the deepest and best we had; and we built a nation, mighty and feared. We poured and are still pouring our soul into it. But we have told them: 'This is a white man's country!' They are yet looking for a land whose tasks can call forth their deepest and best."
To which the prosecutor responds with a brief, vitriolic "protect your daughters from scary niggers" speech.
"Every white man in America ought to swoon with joy for the opportunity to crush with his heel the woolly head of this black lizard, to keep him from scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death!"
There can be little doubt who's going to win over the jury.
Despite its thickness and its soapboxing, I did not find Native Son at all boring, and it was powerful because when Wright describes Bigger's alternating feelings of shame, alienation, reflexive hostility, crushed capacity to dream, and inability to express any of this even to the most helpful of white men, it all rang plausibly to me. Bigger Thomas's murder of Mary Dalton is a horrible tragedy. She was innocent, he is guilty, and yet even the situation that led to her death is a multilayered disaster of racial fear and guilt and misunderstanding.
I had not previously read any of the works of Richard Wright, one of the most prominent African-American writers of the 20th century. His biography is interesting to say the least, as he mingled with a Who's Who of the early 20th century cultural scene - W.E.B. Dubois, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Langston Hughes, John Houseman, Orson Welles, Frederic Werthham, etc. He was a member of the Communist Party, but became disenchanted and broke with them not long after Native Son was published.
I don't know if this is the definitive book about the Black Experience. Apparently many of Wright's critics think he did a rough cut of ground covered better by Ralph Ellison and others, and the communist influences are, while not completely intrusive, noticeable. Native Son reminded me most strongly of the social novels of Upton Sinclair, who likewise could tell a good story even while being completely unsubtle about his cause. But whereas Sinclair was a muckraker and a rabble-rouser, Wright, I think, saw himself as trying to sound an alarm bell. An alarm bell that still may not have been heard....more
Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon is a classic novel of post-nuclear war survival. Set in Fort Repose, Florida, a tiny town that is missed by the nuclear missPat Frank's Alas, Babylon is a classic novel of post-nuclear war survival. Set in Fort Repose, Florida, a tiny town that is missed by the nuclear missiles that level all major cities in the U.S., it is less Cold War science fiction than a survivalist epic.
The author of One Second After acknowledged this book as one of his inspirations, and the two books are very similar in many ways. Both feature the residents of a small Southern town forming a survivalist community in the wake of the collapse of the U.S. government and technological civilization. In Alas, Babylon, it is a nuclear war between the US and the USSR, the ominous and inevitable build-up to war taking up the first half of the book, as only a few people realize just what is unfolding before them on the news.
As in One Second After, Alas, Babylon features an All-American protagonist stepping up to take charge because no one else will, while he tries to manage his small family (in this case, the family of his brother, an Air Force officer who knew what was going down and sent them to relative safety ahead of time). There are food shortages, the necessity of modern people figuring out how to survive without modern technology, the return of the barter economy, as well as bandits and highwaymen. As a survivalist epic, it's not as grim as it could have been, but it's another one of those books that might make you think about stocking up on bullets and beans, just in case.
For a book written in 1959, Alas, Babylon holds up surprisingly well, largely because as with all stories about a total collapse of civilization, once the grid goes down and there is no more government, it doesn't matter whether it was 1959 or 1980 or 2014, everything is going to look like the 19th century pretty quickly. The USSR is no longer, but Russia still has missiles pointed at us; nuclear war may no longer be as likely as it once seemed, but it's hardly a threat that's vanished. The black characters, despite living in Florida in 1959, are treated better by the author than in some more recent post-apocalyptic novels I could name.
This was a good read for anyone who's a fan of survivalist novels and stories about what a community would do after the end of the world. Very slightly dated, but the writing style and the challenges facing the characters will mostly keep you from noticing....more
I have noticed lately that reading and reviewing has become a "hobby" in itself, and I often am already thinking aboutGood golly, Ms. Oates can write!
I have noticed lately that reading and reviewing has become a "hobby" in itself, and I often am already thinking about what I'm going to say about a book even before I finish it. And somehow, this has trended me away from reading short stories, since it's harder to review a collection of short stories than a novel. Well, also because I guess I just generally prefer novels over short stories. But there is so much short fiction out there of excellent quality, even if the market for it (particularly in my favorite genres of SF&F) has largely dried up as far as being something that serious pro authors can support themselves on.
Joyce Carol Oates has written novels, but I understand she's more widely regarded for her short-form fiction, and after reading this volume, I can see why. She really excels in spinning out a story with characters who show their scars, and all the more ghastly wounds squirming under their skins. These are ordinary people, not psychopaths or ninjas or geniuses or heroes, just schoolteachers, single mothers, doctors, widows, publishers, all living ordinary lives until something dark casts its shadow over them.
I picked up The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares because I expected horror stories, and I was in a Halloweeny mood. Well, these really aren't "horror" stories per se. None of them involve anything supernatural at all � no monsters, no Stephen Kingish frights, not even so much as a plain old ghost. And for the most part, the stories aren't particularly bloody either, though there is some violence and death in a few of them.
But they're all about people listening to the worser angels of their nature, succumbing to fear or vanity or envy or ego, and suffering for it. There are no happy endings, and a lot of ambiguous "But what happens next?" endings. Yet even the stories without resolution end when they should. Does the doctor get away with it? Does the jerk survive? Did the girl do it? Remember the best stories you read when you were a kid, where the author didn't answer those questions, so the teacher would make you write essays about what you think happened? (Yeah, way to ruin a great short story, teacher!) These are a lot like that.
The title story (the one that interested me initially, because I thought it would be, you know, a supernatural horror story), The Corn Maiden, is about a twelve-year-old girl named Jude who abducts a classmate of hers, a sweet, slightly slow, beautiful little girl with cornsilk hair named Marissa. Jude has gotten it into her head that she's going to sacrifice Marissa following an old Indian ritual she read about. Jude is cunning, charismatic, and disturbed, so she manages to talk a couple of her friends into being her accomplices. She lives in a large mansion with only her old, semi-invalid grandmother, so she is able to drug Marissa to keep her compliant, and then tells her that there was a nuclear war and they are the only survivors. Meanwhile, the hunt has begun for the missing girl, and Jude points the finger at a teacher she resents for having rebuffed her tween crush.
Jude is a very, very sick puppy, but the story is all the more believable because while Jude is clever and devious, she's still just a child, not a criminal mastermind, so of course things start to go wrong. And this story, the longest one in the book (really a novella), kept me up late because I had to get to the ending. That right there convinced me Joyce Carol Oates has some chops and I need to read more of her.
None of the other stories were disappointing. There are two about twins (a "good" twin and a "bad" twin), and one about a long-lost stepdaughter looking up her stepfather to catch up on old times (the reunion does not go well). There's a little girl who hates her baby sister (sibling rivalry turned sour seems to be a recurring theme), a wealthy widow who reaches out in loneliness in a very misguided attempt at playing Benevolent Rich Lady, and finally, a doctor who makes a living giving face lifts to rich ladies, until he allows one of his battier clients to bribe him into her.
This is an excellent collection of short stories. Despite the title and the blood-spattered cover, the nightmares are all of a very human kind, so don't read this expecting ghouls and ghosts and vampires, or serial killers, elaborate deathtraps, clever murders, and the like. But several of the stories probably will make you go "Oh shit, don't go there!"...more
This is one of those anti-war classics that emerged from the Great War, with boys marching off singing patriotic songs about whipping the Huns, and diThis is one of those anti-war classics that emerged from the Great War, with boys marching off singing patriotic songs about whipping the Huns, and discovering war as it was to be fought in the 20th century: trenches, machine guns, grenades, endless shelling, poison gas.
It was probably very powerful in its day. It still is a powerful and harrowing description of war, but the narrative is a sadly familiar one. If you want to read another story about how horrible war is, this is another story about how horrible war is.
One Man's Initiation has the anti-war message of All Quiet on the Western Front and the starry-eyed socialist idealism of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Ending with a bunch of soldiers slinging philosophy and revolution in an atmosphere of alcohol and mortar shells, you can see how anything that might shake up the present world order must have appealed to them under the circumstances. Unfortunately, we also know how it turned out.
As a story, it's average, half-fiction, half autobiographical soapbox. I listened to it because it was an Audible freebie. Not a complete waste of time, but I find Upton Sinclair a much more compelling writer in this space than John Dos Passos....more
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