Stuff I've Been Reading: April

The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
The Guards, Ken Bruen
The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
This Is Water, David Foster Wallace
Bossypants, Tina Fey
Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher
Odd Thomas, Dean Koontz
Darkness Under The Sun, Dean Koontz
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, Frank Baum

The Wise Man’s Fear Rothfuss’s second book in The Kingkiller Chronicles. As it took him about five years to write and has only chuckled merrily when pressed about when we might see the third, I can only expect the phrase frothing demand to take on new and painful meaning.

Once again it’s tough to exactly express just what made these books so damn appealing. “They’re about this guy name Kvothe. He’s kind of egotistical and is always starting shit. He goes to medival Hogwarts, learns Sexcromancy, and occasionally just completely loses his shit. Not a whole lot happens and by the time you finish the thousand page second book you’re more or less where the first book ended, which itself was not overstuffed with narrative events. It’s awesome!”

But here’s the thing. It is awesome. It is in fact really really awesome, my favorite fantasy novel since Roland and his Ka Tet found their doom, easily. It’s just tough to verbalize why. Of course the answer is in the text itself. It’s the story, it’s the telling. Rothfuss is one of those rare writers like Gaiman who truly knows the value of stories, and thus knows the value of the one he tells. Watching Rothfuss tell the story is literally magic. That he does not get very far in it is not the point.

That said if Rothfuss finishes the story in one book. I will eat it. Page by page, with my shoe as garnish.

By no stretch of the imagination could you call me a jingoist. I’m not one to go around waving the flag chanting “USA USA USA” like an extra in Rocky IV. Like the man said, I’m no fortunate son.

Yet at the risk of alienating my European Readers there is one area where I truly do believe America to be manifestly better. If it is snobbishness to be honest then so be it. I believe in the immutable superiority of American Crime. Y’all do not have crime the way we have crime. Here I’ll just pass the mike to Mr. Hicks…



I will admit that this prejudice extends to American Crime Fiction. If I want to know who stole the third Viscount’s cookies, I’ll give Father Brown a ring. If I wish to know who took Charles Withington’s necklace, intended for his lady most faire, Ms. Marple will be first on my list. If I’d like to read intermably paced meditations on the midlife crisises of Swedish Journalists, with the single laziest answer to a locked room mystery I’ve ever read I’ll be sure to get out my Oujia board and talk turkey with Stiegg Larson.

But I don’t usually want that…

What I want is Mike Hammer prowling the streets with blood on his first and a smile on his face. I want Patrick Kenzie facing the darkness within and out. I want Ellroy’s crew of sociopath doing the unmentionable to the unthinkable. I want Easy Rawlins turning over the rock of American history to reveal the worms beneath it. I want Carl Hiassen in Looney Tunes gone beserk, spreading perverse acts of ghastly mayhem across the Florida coast. I want the urban tragedies of George Pelecanos and Richard Price. I want Phillip Marlowe as Dante in the concentric circles of LA. I want The Continental Op. I want the lean, crazed shark efficency of Richard Stark. The single minded cruelty of Patricia Highsmith. In the words of Frank Miller I want Blood For Blood and by the gallons of it. USA! USA! USA!

I say this dear reader not just so I come off as an ugly American to my readers from other countries (that ship has sailed). But just so I can underline the fact that when I say that Ken Bruen’s The Guards is my favorite crime novel I’ve read in the last couple of years you’ll know I mean it.

You’ve seen dysfunctional detectives before. They’re practically their own subgenre but I can more or less guarantee that you’ve never met a character as gloriously dysfunctional as Jack Taylor. An alcholic, and not the functional kind, rarely are we faced with a detective who must constantly check to see if he has pissed himself. Taylor is given to waking up not knowing where he’s been for the past three days. Watching this character put on his pants and make a cup of tea is an ordeal. Watching him try to solve a mystery involving some very dangerous people is like watching a blind man stumble into traffic.

His story is told with a devastating combination of laugh out loud prose, a firm sense of place and character and a coal black heart. The Killing Of Tinkers sits next to me like a live grenade I can’t wait.

(Postscript one: Many thanks to the wonderful Leopard13 for recommending The Guards. I owe you one.

Postscript two: Truth in criticism, one other exception to my Eurocrime rule would be David Peace. Who frankly kind of scares the shit out of me.)

The celebrity tell all is somewhere below adaptations of The Ghost Recon videogames and the collected works of David Icke on the literary respectability meter.

So saying that Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking is a cut above the usual may not be saying much. Yet it remains that Wishful Drinking is a passably funny, breezy book. I only hated myself for reading it afterwards.

Feeling more like the script for a one woman show rather than a traditional memoir. Wishful Drinking doesn’t so much go through Fisher’s career as it does systematically drag every skeleton she has out of the closet, of which there are not a few. It’s fun for a while and then just gets a bit exhausting (even at a relatively slim length barely eighty pages depending what printing your looking at). But the fact remains that any book which contains an anecdote in which Cary Grant lectures the heroine on the dangers of LSD not once but twice, is not entirely a waste of time.

I picked up Odd Thomas when I heard it described and recognized a few parallels between it and something I was working on. Since inadvertently copying Dean Koontz is grounds of Artistic Seppuku I thought I’d better confirm the similarities myself. Thankfully they were few and very surface. Unfortunately Dean Koontz is still Dean Koontz.

I didn’t really have any animosity towards Koontz. No more than any other career airport writer. I read quite a few of his books in Jr. High and High School and have fond memories of Watchers, The Door To December, and Fear Nothing as being fairly snappy pulp fiction. I grew tired of him when I realized that he was intent on shoehorning the same plot twist (“It’s the supernatural. No it’s not.”) into as many books as humanly possible. But like I said no real malice…

Until I read from The Corner Of His Eye, which depending on the day you ask me, is the worst book I’ve ever read.

The experience of reading from The Corner Of His Eye isn’t so much like reading a book as it is being caught in the stirrup of a bolting frothing horse for the time it takes someone to read a seven hundred page novel while shouting at you about Murder and Quantum Mechanics. It soured me to Koontz rather definitely and I haven’t read one of his books since.

Odd Thomas isn’t as bad, though it is singularly loopy. Koontz’s prose swings back and forth between quirky and demented like he’s a sociopathic Diablo Cody and if he wants to stop the narrative so Thomas can go off on a long tangent about whatever bothered Koontz today when he read the morning paper, then you had better believe he is going to do it. That things get overdone go without saying. Odd Thomas was at the end of the day, decidedly not for me.

That said, Odd himself is an appealing character, and I can understand why the series has struck a cord with so many people. I’m not going to go out of my way to continue the Odd Thomas series, but if circumstances put the next book in my hand my reaction would be something less than out and out horror.

Ironically, fate ended up putting a second Koontz story in my hand this month after a pause of ten years or so. Darkness Under The Sun is actually a very effective novella about an encounter with evil and its aftermath. It’s a prequel to Koontz’s last novel, What The Night Knows, which is supposed to be a career best for Koontz and I have to admit Darkness Under The Sun made me grudgingly curious to read it. Though I think I can stand to wait for paperback.

I read Wallace’s The Pale King and reread This Is Water in preperation. You can read my reflections on both here.

…

After an offhand comment in Johnathan Franzen’s New Yorker Obituary, about The Screwtape Letters being Wallace’s favorite book, I revisited that volume. My admiration for The Letters has only grown. It’s so deceptively small. But then again so is an icepick in your brainstem.

The completeness of vision in the scant novella is what is truly staggering. Such a thorough view it has on sins and counter sins that at times it feels as though Lewis has been given an objective place to view earthly life from outside of eternity. The mortal plane becomes as perilous as trying to walk across soaped ballbearings. There is not a more thorough compendium of human frailty I know of.

Yet as anyone who has read it knows Screwtape, is not some solemn hectoring tract. It is at times devastatingly funny and contains in its final pages some of the most powerful transcendental writings that I know of. It’s a work of satire, in which we are the targets and the best thing to be said about it is that it is easy to believe as the product of an inhuman mind.

It may truly be Lewis’s masterpiece.

(I supplemented the reading with Andy Serkis’s reading of The Screwtape Letters. As you might expect Serkis giving voice to all of inequity is awesome (He’s basically the new Tim Curry isn’t he?) Yet there is a serious qualm as the production is sponsored by Focus On The Family, an organization which is at best deeply problematic. Frankly I’m a little bit baffled at what an actor of Serkis’s stature is doing associating himself with the organization. But I suppose if I can gain wisdom from reading a correspondence between two demons, I can accept an excellent reading from a dubious sponser.)

It should surprise no one that Tina Fey’s memoir is such a literate deeply funny work. But that still sells it short. Like Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Bossypants doesn’t just embody the form at its best, it actually elevates it as well.

Like Zombie Space Ship Wasteland, Bossypants is half traditional memoir half free form sketch comedy, and Fey excels at both.

As telling the jokes would be spoiling them (OK just one. I have sincere admiration and envy for the sentence in which Fey describes herself as crying “Like a three year old who just wants to bring her toy cash register into the bathtub.”)I will only note that Fey is remarkably adapt at handling each element of the book. It contains devastatingly funny passages, wistful sharply drawn sketches from her past and trenchant commentary on gender and society all without one of the elements ever overwhelming the other.

It’s a fantastic balancing act in a fantastic book. Fey remains in print as in life, deeply impressive.

Written in Baum's unmistakable prose, as declaritive and matter of fact as a Kansas prairie. The Wizard Of Oz remains a remarkably strange book.

Stuff I've Been Reading January

Patton Oswalt’s stand up comedy is more literary then most actual literature, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that he makes the transfer to book form exceedingly, if unevenly, well. If Reading Dennis Leary and Lewis Black makes you feel like you’re catching half the act, than Zombie Spaceship Wasteland manages to capture ever ounce of the idiosyncratic view, eye for damning detail, hilarious allusions, and 180 degree point of view shifts that make Oswalt’s comedy so bracing.

From wistful vignettes about growing up, to comics about Vampires (“You’ve seen things!?!” an irate bloodsucker asks another Vampire a few hundred years his junior, “Like what? The first VCR? The Finale of Friends?”) To a satire of the modern Hollywood “romantic comedy” so angry that I’m shocked my hands didn’t blister. If Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland has a flaw it’s that it seems the work of a man worried that he will never write another book again and thus must get everything he has wanted to do in now NOW NOW NOW!!!

But if it lacks the unity of his stand up albums, and if the 26 dollar price tag is just a little too much for a hundred fifty page book for me to give it an unqualified recommend, more then makes up for its brevity with it’s searing brilliance. Patton Oswalt is one of the funniest people on the planet and it’s nice to know he can be so in any medium.

Bill R of the indispensable The Kind Of Face You Hate noted this in his review of True Grit…

"...and it's unusual to me that anyone would bother to point out that the dialogue in True Grit is largely the work of Portis and not think to also mention that his words are pretty much the perfect marriage with the Coens' sensibility. Several times already they've seemed to make films that are simply adaptation of Portis novels that Portis never wrote. The very act of adapting Portis is already a Coenesque thing to do."

And judging by passages like this in Dog Of The South-

"One of his favorite ploys was to take a seat at the bar and repeat overheard fatuous remarks in a quacking voice like Donald Duck. Or he would spit BB’s at people. He could fire BB’s from between his teeth at high velocity and he would sit there and sting the tender chins and noses of the drinkers with these little bullets until he was discovered and, as was usually the consequence, knocked cold as a wedge."

I'd say that's fairly close to the mark.

The Dog Of The South is a book that leaves one grasping for antecedents. It’s like Cormac McCarthey was employed to write a Three Stooges episode, or if Kurt Vonnegut decided to try his hand at hard boiled fiction, or as if Sam Pechinpah abruptly decided to make Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia slapstick.

The story follows Ray Midge, whose wife has just run off with her ex husband and his credit cards, car and boyhood shotgun. Midge tracks them south of the border to, to… well he’s not right sure. It’s easy of course, to imagine what someone else would do in this situation. Pulp Fiction is simply swimming with angry men chasing after the no good heel who ran off with their wife, and the no good dame herself. But Ray Midge is a simpler more confused sort and when he catches up with his wife and husband… Well suffice to say that that Portis is more interested in texture and character and hardly a paragraph goes by that doesn’t have some wonderful vagary of character, detail or language.

Suffice to say, I have a feeling I will soon become very sorry that there are only five Charles Portis novels.

Carl Hiassen chronicles his return to golf. I have to admit that I was expecting a little more Hiassen and a little less golf. His trademark wit and outraged social conscience do drop by to say hello from time to time. But they can’t stay long. All in all there are enough funny lines and moments of trademark Hiassen temper to make me glad I spent the dollar at the garage sale where I picked this up. But I’m afraid I can’t give it a sturdier recommendation ten that. Don’t read unless the prospect of page upon page about bitching about Handicaps causes you to rub your hands together in anticipation.

To say that the Vampire genre is a bit overrun at the moment is an exercise in understatement. So it’s nice to have a reminder like Matt Haig’s modest novel The Radleys that there is still plenty of juice left in the old archetype yet.

The Radleys are a family of Vampires crouched in Suburban Northern England. They’re “abstainers” basically vampire dry drunks and they seem to have an epic bender waiting in their future. Haig wrings an unseemly amount of tension out of waiting for that Bender to finally come. The vampire as addiction metaphor has been done before, but it has seldom been done so well. Haig paints both the desperation of abstaining and the exhilaration of the effects of feeding so well, that it seems like almost a matter of course that The Radley’s will give in. Not an if, but a when.

The fact that the promised Bender never exactly materializes seems to be because Haig likes his characters so much. (Though as a rule his younger characters are much more interesting then their elder counterparts, who are a little anemic. The Radley Father in particular seems more a placeholder then character.) This is in itself an admirable quality. But it indicatives of the problem it has on the whole.

Haig has mentioned that The Radley’s was written originally as a screenplay and it shows. And its lineage is obvious. For all the good and bad that implies. There’s crisp pacing, but plenty of predictable McKee story beats as well, not to mention plenty of “Gotcha” moments most likely written with the thought “This will look bloody brilliant in the trailers!”

The screenplay nature of the film crops up more problematically in its clumsyish exposition lots of lines like “Of course not Helen. You can’t bloodmind Vampires!” (Yes of course Helen why it sounds almost like this was some sort of important information I had to deliver for the sake of the plot.)

More problematic is that while Haig’s novel is devastatingly effective in the micro, the everyday drudgery of ignoring the one thing you know will make you happy day in and day out, his macro world filled with unconvincing bureaucracy on both the human and vampire side is much less so. Most of this is once again toes into another sin of the screenplay father, that of “Thou shalt set up for thy sequel.”

This is one of those uncomfortable reviews to write where I can only promise that I enjoyed the book much more then it sounds like I have. The Radleys has its flaws no doubt. But it is a well written genre novel that the author plainly cared about. Which as any genre fan knows is a reward unto itself.

Review Pending.

To call Population 1280 darkly funny seems almost willfully misleading. Pitch Black doesn’t so much describe its tone as shrug meekly in its direction. Bulworth is darkly funny. Population 1280 leaps into a stygian blackness of sadistic violence, racism, incest, idiocy and other assorted unsavory acts and laughs as it drowns. I’m fairly certain reading it has made me a worse person.

Like something that Mark Twain would write if he was psychotic, or something idly dreamed up by a corn pone Marquis De Sade. Population 1280 employs the greatest unreliable narrator of all time as he goes about his business as The Sheriff of Pottsville, the forty seventh largest county in the state!

At first he seems like your average noir hero beset by circumstances on all sides. But very soon it is revealed that he has a skill for discord and temptation that is Mephistophelian. Soon things get dark enough to make Thompson’s own The Killer Inside Me look like The Sound Of Music.

It would be unfair to give away just where Pop. 1280 goes. Suffice to say, that if you think you’ve found the bottom you’ve got a long long way to go.

Death Wish by Christopher Sorrentino is the second entry in Soft Skull Presses’s admirable Deep Focus series.

As you might have guessed from the title this time the slumming novelist in question is tackling Death Wish. As with Lethem’s entry, one does occasionally have to strap on hip waders to get through the bullshit. Take this jem…

“… a highly selective outrage that isolates the film from its antecedents, there by isolating it from film itself the better to isolate it on extra cinematic grounds (an act, really, of criminal misfeasance)"

I know how to extract meaning from a sentence like that, but I kind of wish I didn’t.

Sorrentino’s style is digressive, contrarian and tangential and sometimes (Oh joy) it’s all three at once. At one point I had to flip back to the beginning of a chapter just to make sure it wasn’t entitled “Woody Allen: Why I Hate Him” (Answer: He puts references to books in his films! Amirite?)

But in all fairness, Sorrentino’s hit to miss ratio isn’t bad. He finds plenty interesting to say about Winner’s framing, and the problems inherent in the film’s narrative structure. But I wouldn’t go out of my way. Deep Focus’s mission is a noble one and thus I will continue to support it. I can only hope that one day they produce a book worthy of it.

The Long Walk, is a brutally effective work by a young Stephen King (Writing as Richard Bachman). The premise is simple; a group of a hundred boys get together and start to walk. Whenever one of them slows below the designated speed limit, they are shot.

It’s brutally effective as a premise, and it bludgeon all the dime store Freudianism (Bachman always was a bit more self conscience then King) and other flaws that the book has. The most devious thing about the book is the way that King sneakily suggests that not much has changed in this new America where the game is held. It’s one thing to read about this sort of thing in a dystopian hellscape, ala Susan Collins, and quite another to read about it in an America where King suggests that shit has gone on more or less as usual when ruled under a military junta.

There’s still mom and pop stores, work in the textile mills, and drive ins. It’s just that every year a hundred boys are killed.

“But let us have no antiquarianism about Dickens, for Dickens is not an antiquity. Dickens looks not backward, but forward; he might look at our modern mobs with satire or with fury, but he would love to look at them. He might lash our democracy, but it would be because like a democrat, he asked much from it. We will not have all his books bound up under the title of “The Old Curiousity Shop.” Rather we will have them all bound up under the title, Great Expectations.”

-GK Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles-

One can never underestimate the life in Dickens. As Chesterton suggests to approach him as some kind of antiquity is to do so at one’s own peril.

Dickens is of course still a writer whose vividness is staggering. And there are passages here, describing the useless upper classes that will make anyone want to dust off the ole guillotine, juxtaposed with his depictions of poverty and not want to dust off the ole guillotine.

Which is rather the point. As Orwell noted in his intriguing but somewhat wrong headed essay on Dickens, the great tension that powers A Tale Of Two Cities is that Dickens hardly seems sure whether he is more horrified by the behavior of the aristocracy or the mob in revenge. The fact that Dicken’s is so perpetually appalled through out the writing of Tale makes it one of his greatest work, there is simply no place for the middle class sleepiness that makes its way into some of his other work.

And yet people always are trying to make Dickens an anachronism. Pointing to his coincidences, his didactic style, and his social conscience.

But they don’t mention how elegant his use of coincidence can be (such as the graverobbing vignette that at first seems a blush of Dickensian color ends up being crucial to the plot). Compared to the clumsy foreshadowing of modern authors Dickens is downright subtle. As for his social conscience, if his social conscience seems astounding now it is only because the very act of having a social conscience is seen as a gauche one today.

One place in Tales where Dicken’s does seem a wee bit creaky is in the characterization of Sydney Carton. Who we are supposed to consider, more or less the worst man in the world, both by his own admission and Dicken’s scolding narration, when the worst we seem him do is go on a bender. The way Dicken’s writes of him you would think he was drowning puppies.

I say this not out of some kind of superiority to Victorian primness, I simply note the fact that watching Carlton find the strength in himself to overcome his weaker nature to perform his heroic act would have been even more moving if there had been more evidence of weaker nature then hearsay.

Still it does nothing to take away from the splendor of the act itself, and the beauty of those final lines.

Stuff I've Been Reading: December

Crazy the latest from William Peter Blatty is a slim, well meaning, allegorical novella. It is perhaps the most personal thing Blatty has written. It’s the kind of book that has a lot of problems but is also the sort of book that makes you want to make allowances.

Crazy follows the nineteen thirties boyhood, and in more scattershot fashion the adulthood of Joey El Bueno (Look no one has ever accused Blatty of being a subtle writer… ever). El Bueno’s life is marked at certain times by the appearance of Jane, a girl with mystical powers who pushes the reticent Bueno towards a spiritual awakening.

The sheer personalness of the book is both it’s central charm and its Achilles Heel. On one hand the writing calling Blatty’s old stomping grounds to life is vivid and heartfelt. On the other hand, the book is unfortunately a comedy (Blatty’s original genre before his talents in horror came about) and the humor of it ranges from bafflingly unparsable to bafflingly scatological.

Still for all of its odd stylistic tics and bludgeoning over writing; I find it difficult to dislike a book as open hearted and sweet natured as this. The fact that it contains the most unexpected tribute to Vonnegut I’ve encountered is a nice bonus. I firmly like Crazy. Like a wheezy old great uncle invited to a holiday supper, the fact that it is strange and occasionally incomprehensible only adds to one’s affection.

Review pending.

I’m of two minds about Deep Focus's initial volume. On one hand, I love the idea and have already purchased the next volume in the series. And I also have to hand it to Jonathan Lethem for engaging a work most would rank beneath him, as well as engaging it for such a small press.

The problem is that Lethem is all too eager to accept such praise. Throughout the book all but waves his arms to show he’s not taking it THAT seriously, like a hipster who drags everyone to a Journey concert then rolls his eyes and “pffts” through it to make sure we know he’s not actually enjoying it.

It’s not entirely Lethem’s fault, it’s just that his particular brand of PoMo academic horseshit happens to be the brand of academia horseshit I have the least amount of tolerance for.

Anyway, the monograph is about 2/3rds astute criticism and about 1/3^rd aforementioned academia horseshit. If that’s an acceptable ratio to you, and lord knows you can do a lot worse, then by all means pick up They Live.

This is kind of ridiculous. I consider myself a pretty big Dennis Leary fan, but a book of Tweets? It’s not that they’re not occasionally funny, it’s just that had anyone other then Leary himself written this, Leary would have devoted a chapter to ripping them a new asshole in “Why We Suck 2: The Suckening.”

If you’re going to make your reputation as a world class bullshit calling raconteur, you’d better make sure to keep yourself beyond reproach.

: Inspeaking of cash ins from people who should really no better… It’s not that I’m Dreaming Of A Black Christmas was bad exactly. It certainly has it’s share of funny moments and it sees Black in an unusually introspective mood, which is interesting. On the whole thing though it seems kind of toothless. Like Me Of Little Faith, it demonstrates all too well that Print is not Black’s friend. Apoplectic doesn’t really translate, and the fact that the whole thing ends with a breathless tribute to Kid Rock is as confusing as it is depressing.

I have to hand it to Connolly, I think his prose is pretty flat, his moral dilemmas watered down Lehane and his characters not as interesting as everyone else seems to find them, but the man can plot.

Twice in two books, I’ve found myself completely waylayed by two nasty plot twists buried with all the precision of landmines. I pride myself for having a nose for these things and both times it crept up right past my defenses. So yeah, I might not have loved The Lincoln Lawyer and might have found sections of it bordering on tone deaf. But truth in criticism, I intend to keep reading Connolly, because even though I find him mediocre in some regards, he remains one of the few genre authors genuinely able to surprise me.

Larry McMurtry concludes his trilogy of odd dispassionate memoirs. And it ends up being the most readable of the three.

It would be inaccurate to say that the purposeful aloof detachment that made McMurtry’s previous two memoirs so unenjoyable is gone. But it no longer seems out of place. As it is McMurty’s professed disinterest in the place that has allowed him to operate successfully in Hollywood. Amused by his changing fortunes rather then broken by them.

Just two odd notes. The first is that McMurtry wrote fairly warmly (or at least as warmly as McMurtry seems capbable of) about Peter Bogdanovich in his first two volumes, yet here turns on him and gets pretty nasty. It’s just so blatant it can’t help but make one a bit curious.

The other strange thing is that the book is filled with as many typos and misprints as I have ever seen from a book from a major publisher. I’m no great shakes as catching these myself, as readers of this blog are probably far too aware, but I counted an easy dozen. The sloppiness is puzzling, but some part of me thinks it might just be personal. After all these books have been nothing if not a valentine to book trading, and an old hound like McMurtry knows that nothing drives up the price of an edition like some choice misprints.

I think he might just be crazy enough to have offered it up as some kind of gift.

So many reviews have dedicated themselves to writing about how BIG AND IMPORTANT Freedom is, that I feel as though there’s a risk of driving people off. But don’t let the reputation (or for that matter the Oprah sticker) drive you off.

Here’s the secret, Freedom isn’t just BIG AND IMPORTANT. It’s awful good as well. A razor sharp character study, that knows as all great novels do that what is said about a person in the singular reverberates into humanity in general. Johnathon Franzen is one of America’s finest authors and he’s never written better. It’s stripped down, setting aside the showoffy tendencies that cropped up in his early masterpiece The Corrections. And while in that novel it seemed as though Franzen had to keep reminding himself not to hate to his characters, he has the opposite problem here. Freedom is more despairing and sad in the macro, but hopeful in the micro. The promise of reconciliation seems not merely possible, but inevitable.

Like the albums of Arcade Fire, Freedom is a work of equal parts anxiety and exhilaration. More then anything the sound of an author realizing just how good he really is. I’m kind of in awe of it.

I checked this out, thinking that it was a “Best Of” collection, and while there is a small selection of comics in the back, the book is for the most part a history of the comic and all the unlikely things that have spun off of it..

And if the book has an air of a victory lap. Well who’s to say that the boys don’t deserve it? Penny Arcade is one of those blessed institutions that prove that just because you’re popular doesn’t mean you have to be bad. They are the living proof of FX Feeney’s “Uncommon Denominator”

Yeah once again, this thing is endorsed. Heartily.

Stuff I've Been Reading October

“Tessa’s feet were screaming in her fasionable boots.”

This sentence, dropped in the middle of a chase scene involving dozens of vicious automatons, apropos to nothing, should let you know all you need to about Cassandra Claire’s immense deficiency as a writer.

In my line of work it behooves me to keep abreast of at least a few YA titles. So when I came across Clockwork Angel, I realized “Hey I like both Victorian London and Eternal Battles against the Darkness! How bad can this be?” Hoo boy.

The blending of Victorian and Occult fiction is a natural one. Both depend upon the thrill of the hidden society concealed within the world. Wheels within wheels powered by arcane codes of conduct.

Anyway the story is the usual mumbo jumbo of a young girl caught in between the forces of darkness represented by blah blah blah. The point is she soon ends up predictably caught between two life support systems for abs and we go on from there.

All the usual flaws are here, characters who range from vapid to merely dim. A plot we’re several steps ahead of at all times. Writing that’s declaritive and dull (It doesn’t help that Claire makes the decision to start each chapter with some of the finest lines of Victorian verse. Reminding our poor brains what good writing does look like) and Banter that is jarringly contemporary.

But here’s the real bad news. There are scenes here, isolated though they may be. That actually suggest Claire could become a good writer. A scene where our young heroine stumbles into an abattoir where the corpses of the innocent are being fused with machines, are written with a vividness that suggests a dark and fertile imagination that Meyer’s and most of her ilk never had.

Should Claire ever shrug off her bad habits it’s possible she could become a hell of a writer.

As she has already been amply rewarded for those bad habits, that seems rather unlikely.






I have begun a delightfully unexpected late in life love affair with Ray Bradbury.

When I was the age when most discover Bradbury his indirect florid prose frustrated me. And to a certain extent, say in something like "Jack In The Box", it still does. But setting aside his stylistic ticks Bradbury is one of those treasured authors who marches in no one’s territory but his own.

Most of the stories in October Country aren’t quite horror, fantasy or sci fi, though some like The Small Assassin would fit quite comfortably. Most just hum along on a kind of all American wrongness. A feeling like you’re conversing with Will Rogers after ingesting a few tabs of acid.

The Halloween Tree exists on the same inimitable plane. It’s hard to imagine a children’s book with scenes as intense as the children’s encounters with Samhain and it’s grisly aftermath being released today. At least not without the school board getting buried in letters. But The Halloween Tree maintains a feeling of good natured malice, if not comprehensibility.




Yeah I’m pretty sure I dug this one.




Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk finds David Sedaris in an unusually vindictive mood. Though there are few writers better at ripping apart people behaving badly, Sedaris more vicious tendencies are usually countermanded by his inherent amusement and affection for people.

He apparently feels no such need when faced with animal characters, and most of his stories quickly fall into levels of bad behavior and misanthropy which are Ellisian. Things pick up a little at the end, when Sedaris lets up on his targets just a little. And his prose is witty and graceful as ever. But it can’t help but all feel more then a little pointless.

I was lucky enough to attend a reading of Sedaris earlier in the week, where he read a few stories. And as expected they worked much better (though unexpectedly, despite what his persona may have you believe Sedaris is borderline gregarious in person. He also drew an owl in my copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day. I have no idea of its meaning and it haunts me) Sedaris reading of his own material has always been as much a key to his success as his prose itself, if not more so. And Squirrel is no exception, in this regard. But perhaps it is an exception as it is the first of his works that cannot stand without it.



Bill Bryson an author of boundless curiosity, humane temperment, lucid civilized prose and a lacerating dry wit is one of the most purely pleasurable authors I know of. A Walk In The Woods is of course, no exception, and arguably his masterwork.

The saga of Bryson’s attempt to walk The Appalachian Trail, A Walk In The Woods is hilarious and unsentimental, and yet full of wonder. Accompanied by his obese fouled tempered Sancho Panza, Katz Bryson chronicles his attempt to hike the AT, intercutting it with musings on the trails history, the disastrous ecological state of America, bemused vignettes on the short comings of other hikers, a fear of bears to rival Stephen Colbert's and whatever else enters his mind.

It’s a worthwhile trip as it always is with Bryson, even if he grows a little defensive at the end. But for anyone who has yet to walk with him, this makes for a perfect introduction.




But in all these tales the dog is the innocent shoot star/
We all wish upon/
Until It burns up, aging fast and disappearing/
Beyond our jagged horizen

I already covered these in my five horror books column. I’ll just note that beyond all it’s affectation Sharp Teeth is a truly human horror story. And even if the master plot never really holds together as much as it seems it is going to, watching it get there is still a thing of beauty.

John Dies At The End is a tough book to review. Since so much of it’s pleasures come from it’s unpredictability. It’s rare when one of its 375 pages does not contain a turn on a dime plot twist, hilarious joke, or truly horrifying concept.

I regret even to inform you that there is a cock punching demon named Shitload (One of the books cleverest jokes. Think about it for a second.) Feeling vaguely like I’m robbing you of something. So if talking about what I like about the book spoils it, and talking about my very minor quibbles, like the fact that it’s really more of two or three novellas stitched together then a cohesive novel, make me feel grinch like, what does that leave me with to talk about?

Well how about this. Buy it! Buy it Now!



I’ll admit I did not have high hopes for American Vampire. I have an aversion to co-authored work And it seemed at first glance to be yet another toss off in a year of toss offs for King. Which he’s used to clear the pipes after Under The Dome.

So it as suprising and thoroughly gratifying to learn that I had thoroughly underestimated American Vampire.

It’s a stylish, funny, badass, dark, substantial, and yes scary reworking of the vampire mythos.

King sums the mission statement up perfectly in his introduction.

“Here’s what Vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and only work at Night, lovelorn southern gentlemen, anorexic teenage girls, and boy toys with dewy eyes.

What should they be?

Killers. Stone Killers who never get enough of that tasty type A.

At the heart of American Vampire lies a surpringly potent metaphor. The title is not accidental. The story follows as the increasingly decrepit and outmoded European Vampires fall in the wake of WWI as the titular American Vampire Skinner Sweet (Who puts the anti in hero then goes ahead and throws away the hero part) rises. His vitality inextricable from his viciousness.

If there is a flaw in the book its that the parellel stories really are parellel stories. Never quite meeting despite the final stinger.

They’re both fine they just plain don’t touch on each other. In the intro King writes that he requested to write Skinner’s origin. And given how the book is structured it’s hard to believe that Scott Synder wouldn’t have waited to reveal Skinner’s origins for a later issue, or perhaps even a miniseries. And for those annoyed by them, be aware that King’s idiosyncrasies as a writer are in full affect. Only King would introduce his full formed Vampire lead by having him burst out of his watery grave, like a pissed off jack in the box with the line “HELLO MOTHER FUCKER GOT ANY CANDY?”

Still I found American Vampire the perfect way to wrap up the holiday season.

5 Horror Great Horror Reads Not Written By Stephen King

Despite The Vitagraph American’s rather strong warning against list based posts. I’ve decided to brave the wrath of Cole and give a quick list of five horror books that October is the perfect time for. Now I’m off to take a shower…. AAAAHHHH!!!!



“So,” I thought, reading the back of the book I’d picked up from a random table of Halloween picks at the bookstore “A story about a lovelorn dog catcher who falls in love with female werewolf about to break from her pack. There’s another novel I’ll read when they invent the eight day week.”

And I ALMOST put it down, but cracked it open, hoping perhaps to find some chuckle worthy sub Stephanie Meyer’s writing within, despite the Nick Hornby blurb on the front.

“Well huh, that’s funny it’s not a novel at all. It’s apparently a 300 page epic poem… Well that was unexpected. Just a few stanzas…” But by then I was as helpless as one of the pack’s victim’s once they have their jaws on their throat.

I can pretty much guarantee that Sharp Teeth is unlike just about anything you’ve ever read. Unless of course you regularly read books composed long form free verse poetry about weredogs that are one part gang warfare epic, one part enticing mystery, one part surprisingly effective soap opera, one part surprisingly(er) effective love story, and one part seriously balls out brutal horror story.

Didn’t think so.

If you’re looking for a quick bloody read this October, I don’t believe you can do better.



As has been stated rather conclusively, I am more or less totally in the tank for Joe Hill. The question then is what to recommend. The moving combination of The Haunting and The Royal Tenenbaums that makes Locke And Key one of the best things going on in comics right now? What about the darkly funny Horns. Or 20th Century Ghosts, which showcases the full range of Hill’s talent from the Juggernaut “Best New Horror” to the wistful “Pop Art” and the disturbing Lynchian “Masks” Not to mention the titular story one of the most loving tributes to cinema I’ve ever seen in print.

But there’s still no better place to start from then Heart Shaped Box. Which as balls out a ghost story as has ever been written.

Hill’s dark fertile imagination gives Box it’s haunting power. But it is the unexpected story of a man coming late in life to his better nature, that gives it its heft.

Read one Hill and I can guarantee you’ll be hooked for life.



Walking Dead is of course the graphic novel zombie epic soon to be transformed into a TV series on AMC.







In the word’s of Henry Jones Senior, Most zombie movies “leave just when they were getting interesting.” With the last vestiges of human civilization overrun by the zombie hordes.

Walking Dead uses that as it’s starting point. And explores how society rebuilds itself. Or doesn’t. The zombies, which are basically ringers anyway, aren't nearly as scary as the answer's Kirkman comes up with. But the real subversive thing about Kirkman's work isn't the fact that he shows humans doing horrible things in the wake of societal breakdown, it's the fact that he posits that societal breakdown itself as a boon.

The world being overrun with zombie hordes portrayed almost as a Thoreau like awakening of the human spirit rather then a tragedy. The Walking Dead is at its core a story of the anesthetic wearing off.




Before Seth Grahmn Smith kick started the most annoying meme of all time with the still funny despite its predecessors, Pride Prejudice and Zombies and then proved he was more then a one gimmick man with Doris Kearnes Goodwin (That still blows my mind) approved Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer, he penned this little ditty. Which provides advice for surviving everything from encountering Satan (hard) to surviving a night of babysitting (harder).

Fleet and “Laugh out loud so hard you disturb the strangers on the bus” funny Smith’s book is a thorough deconstruction of horror tropes with a thorough understanding and an even thorougher affection for the genre. This belongs on the shelf of every horror aficionado in the country.

…



If I had to encapsulate it in an annoying horror blurb (which I am) I’d say it’s like Shaun Of The Dead, if our heroes were trapped not in a Romero film but in a Raimi one.

I would go on. But why should I when "Dave Wong" himself does such a better job telling you why you should buy his book.

Every once in a while you run into a porn video or website that you can't, in good conscience, recommend to your friends because it's simply too erotic. The actress's boobs were too perfect, the scenario too plausible, your erection too firm--almost to the level of exquisite pain.

This is the situation I find myself in with the horrortacular, John Dies at the End. A friend will say, "Hey, David, I see you have a copy of John Dies at the End. I like horror, and it's getting awesome reviews. Should I run down to Borders and... Jesus, what is that in your pants?"

What am I to say? Sure, my friend likes horror, but he "likes" beer, too. That doesn't mean he would enjoy being trapped inside a half million-gallon vat at the Anheuser-Busch brewery, forced to drink his way out or die trying. And he would like it even less if, instead of beer, the vat was full of horror.

John Dies at the End is like that, it's the porno you hesitate to recommend. My answer to such friends is always the same: "Are you sure you know what you're getting into? Because imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet. Only instead of food, it's crack cocaine. And instead of crack cocaine, it's horror. And the object in my pants? It is but my erection--an erection I've had ever since I purchased my copy of John Dies at the End... THREE WEEKS AGO. So sure, go right ahead and buy a copy if you dare. Just know that you won't be able to give out any hugs to family members at Thanksgiving."

And if that wasn’t enough. Here's some text from the actual book…

We kicked through the slithering things and stomped up after the dog, just as the stairwell door banged shut on its own. I reached for the knob.

At the same moment it began to melt and transform, turning pink and finally taking the shape of a flaccid penis. It flopped softly against the door, like a man was cramming it through the knob hole from the other side.

I turned back to John and said, "That door cannot be opened."

I believe the word you're looking for is "Add To Cart"