Thursday, May 26, 2016

Literateur: MORE Short Attention Span Reviews

I have no attention span but still manage to read books. So you can read books, too! I believe in you!
Bluescreen by Dan Wells

This one could've gone either way. I LOVE Dan Wells for his John Cleaver books- the ones he's written and the ones he has yet to write. His supernatural/psychological thriller The Hollow City was also killer. But I did not at all care for his Partials trilogy. That one started strong and just petered out. It had the misfortune of coming out in a time where us humans are already completely burned out on futuristic YA dystopia fiction. Especially in trilogy form.

So how's Bluescreen, his first cyberpunk book? Not good. It's a pale shadow of the 80's cyberpunk books it's riffing on, plus it's aimed squarely at teens. The dialogue and writing left me totally cold. A few cool moments here and there, but weak overall. This is allegedly the first book in a series. Dan Wells just left my "must-read" list.

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

The author of Eat, Pray, Love riffs on creativity and overcoming fear and anxiety. Like a short book-length pep talk to get you to open up and tell the story you want to tell. Funny and uplifting, even if it goes a little wonky with her New Age notions about ideas being literally alive.

I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich

Not a zombie love story. Actually a 1940's crime novel. A well-told tale of mistaken identity and a woman in trouble during the Great Depression. The writing is smooth and the emotional intensity is high, but I didn't really care for it. The ending is a bit klunky, too. But this was an important influence on crime fiction and film noir, so it's worth a look for historical value.

Honky-Tonk Samurai by Joe R. Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale is a genre-hopping powerhouse of story. Mystery, western, horror, bizarro, thriller, fantasy, retro-pulp, you name it. This one is the latest in his long-running Hap & Leonard series. The pair of lovable job-hopping, conflict-prone Texan losers- one a straight white dude and one a gay Black dude- find themselves up against an organized crime ring and chaos ensues. After almost three decades of writing these characters, Lansdale STILL isn't phoning it in. It's hilarious and entertaining and disturbing, often at the same time. Bonus- they just recently adapted these characters to TV.
Nanny Ogg's Cookbook by Terry Pratchett

This is a cookbook by one of the witches in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. But it's more than that- it's also an advice and etiquette guide to help you be a proper lady or gentleman in the Discworld. Some of the recipes are tedious, but the laughs-per-page rate is just as high here as in any of Terry Pratchett's narrative books. Lots of fun for Pratchett fans.

A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft by S.T. Joshi

Joshi gives a nice overview of all things Lovecraft. Lots of interesting tidbits about Lovecraft's sheltered life and personal and artistic development. He also puts every one of the author's stories in context, artistically and personally. Joshi is also a SNOB! He's super-snooty and dismissive of any work that riffs on Lovecraft and he nitpicks the flaws in almost all of the author's work. Don't get me wrong- Lovecraft is a flawed human being and a flawed writer. But Joshi takes the guy a bit too seriously and frequently sucks the fun out of his work.

Nightmare Alley by William Gresham

Not a horror story about an alley. Actually a 1940's crime novel. Surprisingly brutal and hard-edged for its time, this unflinching look at carny life still packs a punch today. The bits about geeks and the botched back-alley abortion are skin-crawling. Also interesting- its structure is based on tarot cards. If you want to dive into the dark underbelly of carnival life in the 40's, this Alley's for you!

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I tried. Twice. I hit a wall after 100 pages both times, just couldn't get any farther into it. I love me some Dickens- Tale of Two CitiesGreat ExpectationsOliver TwistChristmas Carol, even Hard Times. But I just could not with this book. The characters suck and not one note rings true. And this is one of his really popular and famous ones, it's not like I'm trashing The Old Curiosity Shop here (which also kind of sucked, but at least it was short!). So I apologize. But no.
Don't Try This At Home by Various Authors

An anti-greatest hits collection by some of the world's greatest chefs and some other people who I presume also cook food. The premise: each writer describes their most disastrous kitchen experience. Some of them are funnier than others, but this is a great peek behind the scenes at the vital, tense, foul-mouthed heart of the restaurant business.

Psycho II by Robert Bloch

The most fun thing about this book is its origin story. The author- who wrote the original Psycho- found out Hollywood was making a Psycho sequel. So he wrote this book to deliberately annoy the studio. It's about Norman Bates killing a nun and using her clothes to escape his asylum and then travel to Hollywood to kill the people making a movie about him.

Fun enough premise. But the book lost me right off the bat. First, Bates' escape is totally glossed over. And then he violates the corpse of his first new victim. Peace out. Well-written, but it feels like Bloch was being deliberately ugly to punish anyone who came to the book expecting it to be a novelization of the movie Psycho II.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Hilton 

A cool behind-the-scenes look at how a handful of jokers came up with a website that we all use to complain and snark on. The interpersonal drama is compelling and it's neat to see their mistakes and how they bounced back and modified their approach constantly.

The Shift by Theresa Brown

An inside look at the life of a hospital nurse. Dry-witted and informative, this puts you in her shoes and gives you a newfound respect for the work and the people who work in the industry.
You're Never Weird On the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day

This is a delightful tale of the making of a geek girl. Her home-schooled childhood and quirky parents are a lot of fun and her insights into gaming- pros and cons- are superb. She's funny throughout, with witty asides and great self-deprecating humor.

Possessions by James A. Moore

Shockingly bad considering how much I've enjoyed Moore's other books, Deeper and Fireworks. Just a turgid mess of a supernatural tale with lousy characters and one non-starter of a scene after another.

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

Even tougher to understand than the author's other recent hit, The Big Short. But equally rewarding- and disturbing- once you figure it out. Short version: Wall Street douchebags use software to rig stock trades and a group of heroes catches and busts them. A great cast of characters permeates this caper, though it ends on a sad note with a feeling that evil always finds a way to get one over on the system.

The Terror by Dan Simmons 

A great 19th century historical fiction epic. Not a horror story. The title is "Terror" because that's the name of the ship that got caught in the Arctic. This is the tale of the crew that got stranded in the ice and gradually succumbed to exposure, starvation, madness, and a giant mutant polar bear. The amount of research Simmons must have conducted is staggering. But at times one wishes he would have been more concise and more entertaining. 800 pages is a long slog for such a simple story.
Professor in a Cage by Jonathan Gottschall

A professor takes up cage fighting so he can do an elegant job telling us all about it in this here book. Ironically, his descriptions of his fights are the least interesting parts. (I don't really care about martial arts, so they disengaged me.) The author is at his strongest when he makes connections to violence throughout history and what drives it. Lots of great thoughts about organized sports, too.

Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon

I dig McCammon's horror novels and thrillers and fantasies, but I wasn't feeling this coming-of-age story at all. Some great prose and lines in here, but the overall effect is a pedantic and preachy one. It's so weighed down with all the works of art it's homaging and referencing, it never really comes to life as its own thing.

The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick

This is a misfire. ("Japed" means "joked," by the way.) There's just not much to it. In the future, an overly moralistic government bans all fun, so a prominent government employee gets fed up and chops the head off a statue. That's the "man" and that's his "jape." People argue about how fun is cool and how oppression is bad. And not much happens. This is an early Dick work, so he hadn't yet started jamming every paragraph full of wild ideas yet. Or maybe he wasn't on methamphetamines yet. I don't endorse drug abuse, but Dick wrote his best stuff under the influence. I'm a huge fan of the guy, but I'd say skip this one. No jape.

Tarr, by Wyndham Lewis

Hard to describe. Basically- two guys wander around Paris and get into shenanigans. It's a novel about nothing. A literary Seinfeld, beating Jerry to the punch by decades. First written in 1909, it's notable for rambling about sex and phalluses in the first chapter. Wasting no time getting to the stuff that'll make the reader with refined sensibilities blush. The writing style is bizarre and one-of-a-kind. It has sentences like this: "I don't believe he was in love with anybody, I think that it was however a sex-tumult of course." I guess its claim to fame is that it's got some literary flair, but was never embraced by Academia and thus isn't as renowned as other Modernist books of the time. So if any of this sounds cool to you, enjoy this sex-tumult of a book.
Truth in Comedy by Charna Halpern

The is the bible of improv comedy. And it's a pleasantly short bible- all killer and no filler! The principles of Second City- the foundation of all comedy as we know it- are explained clearly and humorously. If you ever wanted to know how comedians forge their craft, or if you want to learn how to be more clever and creative, this book provides some great guidelines.

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos by Various Authors

This is another one of those Lovecraft-inspired collections that's more enjoyable than actual Lovecraft collections. (In case we haven't discussed Lovecraft- he's great, he's groundbreaking, he's amazing...except when he's not. When he's good, he's GREAT. When he's not, he's very much not.) I back almost every story in this collection, all delightfully creepy. Also well worth a look and in the same vein: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and The New Lovecraft Circle.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

Details the origins of bundling mortgages together into securities and selling those to customers, thus making it the unintentional origin story for the 2008 housing market crisis. A warts-and-all look at the bond market and the horrible behavior among the white men in suspenders that ruled the floors there in the heady mid-80's. The author's constant sense of irony and whimsy makes his insider perspective more goofy than biting.

Gormenghast Trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone) by Mervyn Peake

I got this because it was referenced on the cover of an Elric collection. I can see its influence, but it's pretty dry. A Chosen One is born in a fallen kingdom, he realizes his fallen kingdom sucks, so he leaves and wanders around. That's the whole trilogy in one sentence. The decadent lyrical epic fantasy stylings were probably pretty amazing when it was written in the 40's, but it hasn't aged well. The language is arcane and off-putting. Stuff like "Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia." It's Gormen-ghastly!
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

An absorbing look into the human mind and how we make decisions and how we change our behaviors. Even offers a step-by-step methodology for reprogramming our brains. That's a generous thing for a book to do.

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

An improvement on Fellowship because stuff actually happens in here. But it's told in a bungled, fragmented way. Action/ fight sequences are delivered in a dry after-the-fact way that dulls any impact. Gollum's great, though.

(UPDATE: I listened to Return of the King, as well. The multiple endings work better in the book than the movie, especially with the Scouring of the Shire. But the final battle was better in the movie.)

Mr. X by Peter Straub

This one's a puzzler. I'm a Straub fan. Shadowlands was pure gold, a near-perfect horror-fantasy. Ghost Story was so intense and creepy, I dropped it halfway through because I was getting too uneasy. And A Dark Matter was a great mind-bender. But this one, I dunno. Mr. X is the tale of a guy who believes the works of H.P. Lovecraft are real and has some other mental health issues, too. Also there's a young man trying to figure out his family history. (Family history work is good, so good for him!) But instead of building to a horrific or striking conclusion, events and characters just kind of tapdance around each other and then it just ends. Most of it's unclear, but some of it you can infer. It's not much fun. It's not scary. It's just not very interesting despite having a lot of interesting stuff happen in it.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

I don't really care about baseball- I go to games mostly to hang out, eat junk, and goof off- so most of this book bored me. The story itself- statistics trumping tradition- is fascinating, but the movie adaptation hits all the main points and does a nice job turning it into a more compelling narrative. The book goes all over the place. This is rare: I'd recommend a movie version over the book it adapts.

Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow

This is a collection of interviews conducted by funny person Judd Apatow. Makes for a kaleidoscopic view into the creative mind and what makes someone funny and how funny people see the world.
City by Clifford Simak

I owe this book a huge debt. (See here for the reason.) But it's also a wild ride by any standard as we see centuries pass with dogs growing sentient and inheriting the Earth while humans grow increasingly isolated, abandoning cities due to cheap and easy personal atomic-powered helicopters. Humans grow so isolated- living far from each other out in the country- that their hearts fail them and they give up on human society. And eventually voluntarily mutate themselves so they can survive life on Jupiter and then move there. Makes sense.

Fools' Gold by Gilliam Tett

Another behind-the-scenes look at the making of the 2008 financial collapse, detailing the invention of CDOs and how they evolved. This one's a more forgiving look at the players on Wall Street, showing that they were human beings who made mistakes and not devious and nefarious monsters bent on breaking the world.

Shakespeare Saved My Life by Laura Bates

An English teacher details her experiences teaching Shakespeare to prisoners. It focuses on one hard-case prisoner who proves to be the most responsive to her methods. Inspiring and uplifting.


-Phony McFakename

* * *

Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Monday, May 23, 2016

Literateur: "Fireman" is Hot! Hot! Hot!

I love Joe Hill. Yes, he's Stephen King's kid, but he's a fantastic writer on his own merits. And he's gotten better with each book- 20th Century Ghosts, Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2. So obviously I'm stoked about his new one. (What madman wouldn't be?)
Problem: it's an apocalyptic plague novel. And that genre is far beyond played out.

It's a GOOD apocalyptic plague novel, though! Original touch: it's a plague of spontaneous combustion. It makes people unpredictably smoke for a while, and then catch fire and sometimes explode. Resulting in some great nightmarish scenes and imagery.

And it's tremendously well-written. Hill excels at poetic imagery and clever descriptions and observations.

But truth be told, the main characters didn't catch my interest at all. We don't get to know them before the plague hits and then they're in constant distress and arguing for the first 50 pages and the book just lost me.

I kept going for a while after that, but it never recaptured my attention. The title character was just kind of an annoying fire-throwing superhero. The pregnancy melodrama fell flat. Lots of people screaming and cussing non-stop at each other. LOUD NOISES. And the Cremation Crew would have been more shocking if the jarringly horrifying Torchwood: Miracle Day hadn't nailed that brutal concept.

It says at the end that Hill started writing this book in 2010. If Hill had cranked it out faster, he might have hit the genre before it was overrun by Divergent Hungry Zombie Strains of apocalypse in movies, books, and TV.

As is- meh. And it's really surprising that he didn't nail the characters, because that's usually his strength. In all his other books, you really love the characters and hope they're gonna be okay.

It's getting great reviews, though. So maybe you'll like it. And I take no joy in reporting that it did nothing for me. Just a heads-up: modulate your expectations, because this one is getting an awful lot of hype.


-Phony McFakename

* * *

Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Strange Interlude: "Used Zombies" Writing Journal

I'm about to publish my third book, Generic Romance.

So this is a good time to tell you about my book I'm revising right now, Used Zombies.

What the heck, let's look at the writing process.

I've written ten books so far and have outlined dozens more and the process for each one has been different. I don't believe there's a right or wrong way to do it. But this is the way Used Zombies happened.

One fine Saturday, I was sitting in the gym lobby, cooling off after a workout. And I thought about a literary genre I'd heard about a few years ago, "zombie erotica."

(Now before you stop reading, I'm gonna reassure you right now that this story does not end with me writing a "zombie erotica" book.)

I looked into it and there's a built-in audience for this zombie sexytime genre. Which is sad. But I realized it would be funny to play with expectations and troll folks.

So a title popped in my head: PG Zombie Erotica.

I raced over to the public computer that the gym provides and sat down, opened up Internet Explorer (the only browser on their desktop), logged into the Google, and opened a new Google document. And I typed a bunch of nonsense about everyone but one guy in a town dropping dead, the one guy resurrecting them all, and using his zombies to make a zombie movie.

This nonsense formed the foundation of the story's world. And I kept most of it.

I was in the middle of writing two other books, so I set it aside, stewed over the milieu, and thought about where the people and the zombies would go from there. I realized with a title like PG Zombie Erotica, it needed to have some zombie romance. (TAME romance.) So I threw a light love angle in there.

I came up with a story for the human and the main zombie that spanned decades and was an epic saga of life and love and death. From multiple perspectives, with thoughts about business and slavery.

And it was only 4,000 words long.

I write short books, but not THAT short. (I'm writing for the short-attention-span crowd, so I keep my books between 20,000-30,000 words. I recently learned that technically makes them "novellas"- works that are 17,500-40,000 words long.) So it needed more material.

I thought about various zombie and horror comedy ideas I've had over the years and brained up some new ones. I'm all about just throwing the ideas out there, devil may care, everything must go, I'll come up with new ones later.

So I contemplated the Book of Exodus- like I do- and figured it would be fun to do a zombie variation on it. The second part of my book thus started as a direct rewrite of Exodus. With zombies. Then I changed it all around. And wrote an epic allegory about obedience and why bad things happen to good people and why God asks his people to do things that sometimes don't make sense and how things sometimes just don't make sense.

And that brought the word count up to 8,000 words.

I slammed myself across the walls and yanked all my hair out. Writing this book was literally harder than giving birth. LITERALLY. LITERALLY. LITERALLY. (Not really. It's opposite day today.)

Then I thought about this script I wrote years ago with some assistance from my BFF (who was my co-worker at the time) about a zombie outbreak in an office building. It had some ideas that were still original in the year 2016. But even so- it needed an extra twist. And hoo boy, did I throw an extra twist in there. It's a plot device I've never seen and I've seen EVERYTHING zombie-related.

And then I realized how it needed to end. And I did another profound, thoughtful take on religious ambiguity,  life, the universe, and everything.

And that brought the word count up to 13,000 words.

I threw up my hands and wrote something else.

After finishing something else- a book on Eric Roberts- I sat back down with Used Zombies and realized it was actually kind of unique and maybe special. It had enough story and ideas for a 10-book series crammed into a very small space, structured as a trilogy of interconnected stories. But it was scatterbrained. I wanted it to be a novel, but I wrote it like a short story collection.

Trying to puzzle it out, I ran the problem by some writer friends, one of whom suggested throwing J.J. Abrams-esque "mystery boxes" in there to keep the momentum strong between stories and make them flow better. (I'm currently working on that.)

But the overarching problem is that the narrative voice is unclear. Who's telling this story, and why?

While mulling this over, I picked up Clifford Simak's City, a 50's sf book I've been meaning to get around to for a long while. This bizarre tale of mankind's evolution into Jupiter-dwelling aliens and dogs evolving to inherit the Earth was fascinating. But I also realized it had the same basic story and structure as Used Zombies- only with dogs in place of zombies. And I took note of how Simak held the story together- with a super-evolved dog acting as the narrator explaining and tying the stories together.

Eureka! My solution: One of the zombies that inherit the Earth is the one compiling the stories in Used Zombies. He's basically Moroni, if you get that reference. And he has a wry sense of humor and he's connected to all the stories, which end up being sort of a work of family history for him.

Adding the narration- plus adding a bit more character development- FINALLY brought the book up to publishable length.

But it still didn't work!

The book opened with the basic material I sat down and slammed out as PG Zombie Erotica- a title I'd long since abandoned in favor of Used Zombies- and it just wasn't very compelling as an introduction to the world. It dragged.

I puzzled it over by night as I continued to write a book about an evil gym by day. And then had another "Eureka!" moment.

I restructured the trilogy.

The middle part- the zombie riff on the Book of Exodus- is now the opening. And the origin story/ background on the world is now in the middle. Because once you've read the zombie religion stuff- which is pretty solid- you'll actually CARE about the background material.

And that's where it stands now. Still being tweaked and modified, but mostly done.

Part of me wishes I was a better writer. I don't quite have the tools yet to convey the emotion in certain long-spanning sections. But it all works well enough.

And I hope you enjoy it when I finally get around to publishing it! (I may have one...or two...or three more books out before this one hits.)

This is not how I write books, but it's how I wrote this one. Your mileage, it may vary.


-Phony McFakename

* * *

Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

The Best Words: May 2016

This is a very special episode of The Best Words. Every quote here is by Robert Benchley, an awesome and funny writer I recently discovered thanks to this review.

(If you also want to see what I think was funny on Twitter this past month, here's the link.)

So about this guy. Robert Benchley was a humor writer from the 1910s to 1945. He wrote a ton of articles and books and movies. I just looked up the list and I've only seen two (The Gay Divorcee and Foreign Correspondent). I guess he wrote a lot of duds?

His son ended up being Peter Benchley, author of Jaws. So indirectly, you can thank this guy for Jaws. (Even though the book sucked in comparison to the Spielberg adaptation- it wastes like 100 pages on a clunky adultery subplot.)

The Benchley books I've read- so far!- include From Bed to Worse, Love Conquers All, Pluck and Luck, and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, or David Copperfield. Gems, all of them.

He specializes in whimsical, satirical observational humor. But every once in a while he'll drop a subtly brutal tirade on war, racism, and even a concise little anecdote that argues America is a failed experiment. Please note that Benchley's bitingly sarcastic take on racism- "Darkwater" in Love Conquers All- was published in 1922. Progressive thought on race relations was hardly the norm at the time.

"Instead of taking over a protectorate of Armenia we might better take over a protectorate of the State of Georgia, which yearly leads the proud list of lynchers."

Boom.

He was a master of the pithy epigram as well as a sustained comic anecdote. Some of his funniest work isn't cited here, because the effect doesn't work in excerpts. Just believe me, all his stuff is worth reading.

Enjoy!

* * *

“A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.”

“Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.”

“Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.”

“Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.”

“Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony.”

“Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.”

“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

“The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.”

“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.”

“I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.”

“After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.”

“Goethe was in delicate health and had seriously contemplated suicide. At least, that was what he said. More likely he was just fooling, as there is no record that he ever succeeded.”

“We all, like a lot of poor saps, believed that the molecule was the smallest division into which you could divide matter. Then someone came along and proved that the molecule itself could be divided into something called atoms. Well, the relief we felt at this announcement! Everyone went out and got drunk.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, If things keep on as they are, if Shakespeare began to lose his hold on people. I give him ten centuries more at the outside.”

“Every year a lot of judges get together and decide on the best novels and plays of the season. Nobody asks them to. They just do it to be funny.”

“Let’s have an end of all this shilly-shallying. I killed Rasputin.”

“Croquet has one big advantage over most other games in that it can be played nowhere except on a croquet-field...This lends an aristocratic air to the sport, and also makes it easily avoided.”

“There has already been enough advice written for hostesses and guests so that there should be no danger of toppling over forward into the wrong sop or getting into arguments as to which elbow belongs on which arm. The etiquette books have taken care of all that.”

“I am a strict taskmaster for myself, and I expect others to be equally strict in their attention to duty. (There will be a short wait until the laughter of my employers and friends has died down.)”

“If the movement toward a uniform national divorce law is to gain any headway it is necessary for everyone to know just what the quickest ways of getting a divorce are at present- and then discard them. The final plan must be as unsatisfactory as possible, in order that there shall be fewer divorces and more axe-murders.”

“In the hurly-burly of modern life I sometimes wonder if enough attention is paid to the old-fashioned rites of demonology.”

“Someone has just estimated that the velocity of the wind on some of the stars is 140,000 miles an hour. That’s too fast for wind to blow.”

“One of the myriad traits that distinguishes me from the nation’s Great Men is my inability to finish a detective story. I can get right up to the last ten pages, but there galloping indifference sets in and I go out to the ice-box...when the detective explains just why he came to the conclusion that Scarboro did it I suddenly realize that I don’t even know what the characters’ names are, and that, furthermore, I don’t particularly care...But, so long as I get a certain amount of simple-minded enjoyment out of the first chapters, when the murder is committed, and can follow along with my forefinger over the more exciting developments of the plot, what difference does it make who really committed the crime? If I don’t care, who does? It’s my book, and I may do with it as I like.”

“I kept a diary from 1904 to 1921, more out of nervousness than anything else, and I give you my word a less important record has ever been compiled. It would seem impossible to write over six thousand pages, covering some of the world’s most momentous years, and still not have a single one worth reading, and yet I accomplished this herculean task...No one else is ever going to get a look at these diaries so long as I have a bullet in my rifle.”

“So you will see that it is the little things that count in successful police evasion, and the sooner our criminals realize this the fewer humiliating arrests there will be.”

“A great many people have asked me ‘How did you learn to play tennis?’ (Maybe it was ‘Why don’t you learn to play tennis?’ I don’t pay strict attention to everything that people ask me.)”

“I offer the fruit of my experience in the form of suggestions and reminiscences which may tend to clarify the situation, or, in case there is no situation which needs clarifying, to make one.”

“I am no man to make light of chess and its adherents, although they might very well make light of me. In fact, they have.”

“Just why beards and bigamy seem to have gone hand in hand through the ages is a matter for the professional humorists to determine. We certainly haven’t got time to do it here.”

“Perhaps some of our little readers remember what the major premise of this article was. If so, will they please communicate with the writer.”

“I can’t quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who, like [my wife], believe it to be the solution of most of this world’s problems. The man’s dread is probably that of making himself appear a pest or ridiculously uninformed. The woman’s insistence is based probably on experience which has taught her that any one, no matter who, knows more about things in general than her husband.”

“There are several ways in which to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory. In our home we have hit upon the most unsatisfactory of all- the budget. If any worse system is known, I hope that my readers will write in and tell about it. Send communications to the Editor of the Worse-than-Budget Department.”

“A manufacturer can’t tell whether he has turned out an obscene play or a work of art...A good way to judge in advance about the intrinsic art of a sex play is to see whether the characters have a good time at it or not. If they get fun out of the thing, then it’s a harmful play. If they hate it, it’s a work of art.”

“During the early years of our political history the Republican Party was the Democratic Party, or, if you choose, the Democratic Party was the Republican Party. This led naturally to a lot of confusion, especially in the Democratic Party getting the Republican Party’s mail; so it was decided to call the Republicans ‘Democrats’ and be done with it.”

“Frankly, I am not much of a fight fan. I always get sorry for the one who is getting socked. On the other hand, if no one is getting socked, I am bored and start screaming for blood. There is no such thing as pleasing me at a fight.”

“It will be seen that in all these folk-songs the picaresque element is almost entirely lacking: that is, there is very little- perhaps I mean ‘picturesque’ instead of ‘picaresque.’ In all these songs the picturesque element is lacking.”

“Either somebody has rubbed candy over each key while I have been dozing here or the typewriter itself has a strain of maple in it and is giving off sap. I have never run across anything like it in all my experience with typewriters. The ‘j’ key looks so sticky that I am actually afraid to touch it. Ugh!”

“He polished his adjectives with meticulous and loving care.”

“There has got to be a drastic deflation in style among football-reporters, otherwise the sports-writers are going to find themselves swirling through space on comets, with bulging eyes and throbbing temples, trying to find newer adn moer ecstatic ways of saying, ‘Yale and Harvard played football yesterday.’”

“One of the big questions which is agitating society today is why I don’t go out to more parties...The real reason is that society has turned intellectual on me. You can’t go out any more to parties without being asked questions on matters of general information. Immediately the supper dishes are cleared away someone comes out with a list of questions concerning famous characters in history or literature, and there’s your evening- just sunk.”

“Of course, Plato only wrote only what he had learned from Socrates, and Socrates, like the wise old owl that he was, never signed his name to anything. So that left Plato holding the bag for an unworkable political theory which has been carried down to the present day.”

― Robert Benchley


-Compiled by Phony McFakename

* * *

Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Comical Books: Neil Gaiman's "Black Orchid"

I'm a bad Neil Gaiman fan.

I like everything he's done EXCEPT Sandman and American Gods. And those are the two that you're supposed to like no matter who you are. Even non-fans of Neil Himself usually respect those two.

But I can't do it. They're layered and clever, yes. But they're also rambling nonsense chock full of random, inane characters. Some people like it. I do not. It's almost like different people enjoy different things for different reasons.

Gaiman wrote a lot of comics and books and short stories and I have an affinity for nearly all of them that don't bear the title Sandman or American Gods. Your mileage may vary with each, but they all have memorable and resonant scenes and lines.

Which brings us to Black Orchid, one of his earliest comics.

This is pre-Sandman stuff here. You can feel his exuberance as he plays with structure and words and gets his visual story flowing in ways that comics just never attempted before.

You've never heard of Black Orchid? Me neither. But with Gaiman at the wheel, it doesn't matter. His DC comics have a way of throwing old obscure characters and even popular characters like Batman into his stories and making it feel natural and effortless. It never feels like a stunt, it's more like a special effect when comic celebrities make cameos in his work. Oddly, it would work just as fine without a comic superstar appearance.

It also has this scene, which was jaw-droppingly revolutionary when it was published in 1990:
(Deconstructive ironic humor, as well as blowing a main character's brains out in the first few pages, is pretty much mandatory in contemporary comics.)

I didn't understand what was going on through most of this thing. But that's okay. You can enjoy a story even if it doesn't always make sense.

Other fun note- it ominously repeats the phrase "Winter is coming" at the beginning and end. Six years before Game of Thrones was published. I don't think Gaiman's upset at Martin, though.

And Dave McKean's art is always great to look at. (McKean is known for Arkham Asylum, the Sandman covers. etc.) You can stare at almost any individual panel from the work and marvel and wonder at how long it took him to create. The level of photorealistic detail is superb. No computer-generated artwork here!
So if you like odd, unpredictable comics, this one and Gaiman's other early works (Violent Cases, Mr. Punch, etc) are well worth a look.

I realize I'm probably wrong when I say this, but they're all more interesting than Sandman, which had its moments but was a real drag to read all the way through. If Sandman had been a single-volume work like most of Gaiman's other comics, I'd probably like it a lot more.


-Phony McFakename
* * *

Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Literateur: "Heaven Makers" is for Real

(WARNING! This review contains spoilers for Stephen King's Under the Dome and Joe R. Lansdale's The Drive-In. Go read those books now and then come back so I don't ruin their endings for you!)

As you long-time readers know, I like Frank Herbert because he wrote Dune. I like his weird books that no one's ever heard of, too. I reviewed two of them here.

And this is another book of his that you and I never heard of!
This is another book of Herbert's that I grabbed at our beloved twice-yearly library book sale. I had no idea what it was about, just thought the title was cool and the cover illustration was fun. (That's right- I judged a book by a cover. No regrets. I'm a bad boy.)

Even though it was written decades before Under the Dome or The Drive-In, The Heaven Makers starts where those books end.

Allow me to ruin the ending for both those books now! They're very different stories, but they're both about a group of people confined in an isolated location. Both books detail their adventures in trying to survive and figure out who/what's causing their isolation. And the answer:
Yep, aliens.

Heaven Makers reveals right off the bat that aliens are watching and manipulating events on Earth. Now they're not supposed to be manipulating us, but...well, they're bored.

These aliens are lost souls. Immortal, existential creatures watching us for the entertainment value we provide. Our lives, loves, deaths, triumphs, and losses are all just a show for them. The aliens want to feel something after existing for so long and doing everything everywhere. And thus the randomness of our lives on Earth is the only thing left that interests them.

Until one day, that stops being enough. And some rogue aliens begin to intervene directly in Earth affairs and even interact- and possibly mate?- with Earthlings.

This is a big no-no and causes much dissension in the alien ranks.

There's a nice showdown at the end where the immortal aliens come face-to-face with the concept of mortality for the first time. Good philosophical dialogue, always a strength of Herbert's.

Now this book's biggest weakness is the human characters. They're annoying and overly melodramatic and not very well-drawn. They're treated like pieces on a chessboard by the aliens, but Herbert isn't treating them much better as their author and creator.

But if you liked Under the Dome or The Drive-In and always wanted to get to explore the motivations of the meddlesome aliens in those stories better, this is a great read for you. Herbert takes on the Big Questions of life and storytelling and God-like responsibility with ease, getting you in and out of his world in under 200 pages.


-Phony McFakename

* * *

Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.