Last night started with me experiencing the chills, not out of fright, but due to my stupid cold/flu/germs from outer space/whatever it is. That didn’t last, though, as by midway through the night I was hot and sweaty instead. Oh, and my nose was so stuffed up I couldn’t breathe. Or sleep. Not sleeping when sick is not a good way to speed recovery.
I managed to catch an hour or so of uninterrupted sleep around 7 a.m. when I finally dozed off, likely from exhaustion. When I awoke I discovered that I’d been breathing through my mouth (the only handy breathing orifice), said mouth was parched and my lips were almost chapped from. They still feel funny this evening.
I went to ye local drug store and got a not-over-the-counter decongestant. While it hasn’t completely unplugged my sinuses, it’s partially done so and more importantly, they are staying partially unplugged when I lay down, meaning I should be able to sleep tonight without being a mouth breather and get actual rest.
To balance this positive news, I am now coughing and sneezing a lot more.
I am not a fan of this head cold. No sir, not a fan at all.
This head cold I’m currently fighting is like what you get if you crossed a head cold with Africanized bees. I’m tired, I’m achy, my sinuses are so plugged up it’s like my nose went on vacation. If I get a little cold (ho ho) I start shivering as if I’m standing starkers on an ice floe.
And today it feels like it’s moving into my chest, so coughing and wheezing are what I can likely look forward to for the rest of the week.
I don’t like this. Please send a healthy body for me to occupy ASAP.
The alternate title for this collection of short stories could be Old, Dead or Dying.
That said, Bazaar of Bad Dreams is not quite as grim as you’d expect for a bunch of tales that largely center around death in its various forms, both real and unreal. As King gets older it’s clear his mind is turning more and more to the twin topics of old age and death and he presents visions of each that are at times hopeful and, unsurprisingly at others, horrifying.
I had read a number of these stories before as many appeared previously in magazines or other formats (like the formerly Kindle-exclusive “Ur”, which I ironically read on a Kobo ereader) but King explains that many have been revised or polished further. Writers love tinkering with their stories.
There are no duds here, though if pressed I’d say the two poems are the weakest points of the collection. King writes poetry the way I do, less as poetry and more as differently-formatted prose. There’s no real meter or rhythm to be found, no clever or trenchant word choices, just old-fashioned stories told through a framework of structured prose. But even the poems have their merits.
Highlights for me include “Mile 81”, featuring yet another of King’s sinister car-like things. It’s a good ol’ goofy horror romp. “Ur” marries modern tech (the ereader, which may already be going the way of the CD if the big publishers have their way) to the classic “try to stop terrible future event” trope and does so in fine style.
“Bad Little Kid” has the feel of a dark Twilight Zone episode–one rated M for language. The titular bad little kid has an enthusiastically vulgar vocabulary.
In the intro to “Blockade Billy” King implores the reader to have a look, even though it’s a story about baseball, noting that it’s still a King story. King’s absolute love of the game gives the tale a richly authentic feel as he carefully builds on the “all is not what it seems” of the title character.
A lot of these stories don’t score high on originality but King’s typically deft hand with characterization propels them past such trivial concerns. He even has a few good endings (not a giant spider in sight).
There is a pleasing variety of styles here, ranging from the light “Drunken Fireworks” to the melancholy “Summer Thunder” and with a number of stories drawing specific inspiration from other authors. For fans of King, this collection is a no-brainer. For someone looking for stories that tackle the subjects of aging, loss and death, both with and without supernatural elements, Bazaar of Bad Dreams is still a very good choice.
Today I had my left foot examined by a certified pedorthist. I got an official report and am heading back on January 21 to get an orthotic device that I will use in my walking-around shoes and running shoes. This is basically a fancy insole specifically molded to the shape of my foot and designed to minimize pain in the gimpy parts of my foot.
Here are the highlights (?) of my assessment:
Postural Observations Bilateral: Medium MLA, Hindfoot Valgus
Balance weak when single leg stance bilaterally
[Insert joke about Hindfoot Valgus being my new punk band name here]
The second line about balance is a polite way of saying I really suck at standing on one leg. My sense of balance is not weak, it’s silly and nearly non-existent. I could be on a tightrope a meter wide and still find a way to fall off. I don’t know why this is, but it’s been this way as long as I can remember.
Gait Assessment Bilateral: Time Of Heel Lift Early
Mtt arch collapse / splay
The first line was interesting to me. When I first gave serious thought to running back in 2009 my reading on the subject left me with the impression that heel injuries were common and and that a good stance would greatly reduce or eliminate the chance of injury. And in over 3,000 km of running I have never hurt my heel. Unfortunately this may have lead to me indirectly causing other problems. When I am striding–walking or running–I lift off my heel early, which tends to result in landing on the front of my foot harder than I might otherwise. You can probably guess which part of my left foot hurts.
Significant Clinical Observations:
Mr. James [I always feel weird when people call me Mr. James, partly because it makes me think of my dad and partly because it sounds like I’m being addressed a a teacher] presents with pain under left metatarsal heads. He has medium arch height, limited ankle dorsiflexion, dropped metatarsal heads with callousing bilaterally [interpretation: I have ugly feet. I was also asked if I had some sort of fungal infection because my toenail are like ten little mini horror shows]. He has limited ankle dorsiflexion leading to early heel rise and more pressure at forefoot during gait. Orthotics recommended to aid in shock absorption and take pressure off metatarsal heads. Footwear with good cushioning and forefoot rocker recommended as well as home footwear. Calf stretches regularly strongly recommended in treatment plan as well [this was a big thing; basically I’m as flexible as a board and need to change that].
I went home with a pair of sandals designed to cushion the proper parts of my feet. I’m to wear them around home, which is something that makes me feel old man-ish but if they work, it beats not old man-ish with an aching foot. I was also persuaded to get a new pair of running shoes with the aforementioned forefoot rocker, specifically the Hoka Speedgoat trail runners. Yes, the name is absurd. Will I get the urge to chew on tin cans as I run? Perhaps. It features “Balanced Meta-Rocker Geometry” and this particular feature is startlingly noticeable when you walk around in the shoes. I’m curious to see how they feel when running. They look like this:
The testing/assessment took about an hour and consisted of me walking/running on a treadmill and having my feet poked, prodded and stretched to see where it hurt, as well as the standing-on-one-leg thing. Fortunately the balancing part was not critical. The biggest takeaway as far as what I can do, apart from getting the orthotic, is to stretch multiple times every day and especially before running. Ironically, I used to stretch before running but after hurting an Achilles tendon back in 2012 I became concerned (paranoid?) that the stretching was increasing the chance of me injuring myself by overdoing it. The pedorthist (a nice woman named Lynne) told me this would be pretty much impossible to do without engaging in a level of excessive stretching idiocy that a rational human would not be capable of. This mostly reassured me.
I may try the goat shoes as soon as tomorrow.
To paraphrase the first Star Trek movie, The Foot Adventure is Just Beginning…
Here’s a few story ideas off the top of my head. The intention is for these to be more useful than funny, unlike my writing prompts. I’m going to try using one of them if it speaks to me. You know, like, “GET OFF YOUR LAZY BUTT AND WRITE ME INSTEAD OF LOAFING AROUND AND DREAMING OF DONUTS!” And yes, in my mind the story prompt would yell at me like a bad stage actor.
Ideas:
the initial stage of the afterlife of someone (with possible non-stupid twist)
the world changes in subtle but disturbing ways for someone
strange messages start appearing on a phone or tablet
a giant alien mothership arrives and then nothing ever happens
two words: ghost jogger
and a few more that I will add later because it’s late, I’m tired and falling asleep
I find I write best on this blog when I tackle a topic early in the day or evening. If I wait until mid-evening, say, I’m already shutting off my brain for the night and planning non-thinking activities like sleep* or watching amusing/strange cat videos. But it is difficult for me to jump in early because when I get home from work I am almost always mentally tired (I work in technical support). I usually have dinner shortly after getting home and after that there is a small window between brain-still-active and brain-go-nap where I can start writing with some energy and enthusiasm but more often than not I find my brain simply doesn’t want to participate.
This concerns me because I think I have some talent when it comes to writing and could improve on it with practice. As Stephen King put it:
While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
I am competent for the most part, even if I often feel I get it right through dumb luck or some other process I can’t fully explain or even understand, but I realize that the hard work and dedication King speaks of are lacking. It’s easier to slouch back in my chair and passively let myself be entertained until it’s time for bed and then to dream I’m playing with Fleetwood Mac (see below).
I’ve read a few books on writing over the years, some of them focusing on the nuts and bolts of the craft, others more inspirational. King’s own book “On Writing” has left me fired up each time I’ve read it but the fire burns fast and hot and before long it’s embers and then ash. I need to find a way to keep the fire stoked.
And there is no book or magic trick or sure-fire technique for this. It’s just dedication and hard work. I need to find that within me or just move on to other hobbies, like This Couch is Very Comfortable or Tonight I’m Going to…Nah, This Couch is Too Comfortable.
I made the first step last August when I promised myself to write every day. With only a few exceptions due to unusual circumstances I’ve stuck to that and it has helped to instill some of the discipline I need. But it’s only a first step. The next step is to turn this discipline toward my fiction writing, which has been largely moribund for the past half year, a few days during NaNoWriMo excepted.
I’ll try this week and report the grisly details here. It may be fun. It may even be better than a comfortable couch.
* I recently had a dream where I was playing guitar with Fleetwood Mac. They had another guest performer on stage and he announced the next song would be “The Baboons” or something like that. I was concerned because I was not aware of any such Fleetwood Mac song. When the band started in I quickly recognized it as one of their familiar hits and jumped in, at which point the strap on my guitar broke. I awoke before finding out if I dropped the guitar on the stage, produced an unholy shriek of feedback and had Lindsey Buckingham exclaim, “I love it! Keep it!” because remember this is the man who wrote “Tusk.”
Hey, I thought, I already posted an amusing cat video yesterday and I can’t do it two days in a row. It would be like giving up on writing altogether, however adorable the resultant video might be. And it’s too early in the new year to give up on writing. That got me thinking…new year…writing…hey, why not a bunch of dumb writing prompts using a holiday theme? And here they are, in chronological order:
New Year’s: Baby New Year and Father Time meet up as they often do in the funny papers. In 1,000 words or less, write about their debate over the mistakes of the past and the futility of the future. Since Baby New Year is a baby he just poops his diaper and cries a lot.
Valentine’s Day: Write a story from the perspective of Cupid, except this year Cupid decides to shoot people with arrows that don’t make them fall in love with each other, instead the arrows just injure and kill. Why has Cupid become so hurtful? Has he become jaded and cynical over the commercialization of Valentine’s Day? Is he trying to re-enact the St. Valentine’s Day massacre? Is he cranky after attempting to have a conversation with Baby New Year? Follow your heart, in 500 words or less.
Easter: It’s the fight of the century! In one corner, the Easter Bunny, in the other corner, Jesus Christ. Write a light-hearted romp that pits these two lovable characters against each other. Who will be King of Easter? Only your muse knows!
Arbor Day: If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Bonus: include a drawing of the tree.
Mother’s Day: On The Police’s 1983 album, Synchronicity, there is a song called “Mother.” It is the worst song ever in the history of everything. Rewrite this song so your mother would not immediately disown you if you presented it to her.
Father’s Day: Write a dirty limerick for your father. If you hate your father (perhaps he really likes that Police song) write a clean limerick instead. If your father is dead or missing, you may roll the dice again.
Halloween: Write a short story based on one of the following entertainment-themed scary ideas:
Seinfeld never gets canceled
Pink Floyd reunites to record “The Wall II” with special guests One Direction and Meatloaf
Aliens arrive and use advanced DRM to make all of your media inaccessible, then leave the planet, laughing as they go
Thanksgiving: Write a touching drama from the perspective of the turkey about to be eaten. Use the following words in your story: gobble, thwack, cry and delicious.
Christmas: Jolly Old St. Nick turns out to be an alcoholic and he’s on another bender with the holiday just around the corner. Write a story about how Christmas is saved by people realizing it’s not about the accumulation of material gifts, it’s about the birth of Christ. Just kidding. Write about the desperate attempts by the elves to sober up Santa and get him onto the sleigh without killing anyone. If kids don’t get their presents there’s going to be heck to pay! Bonus: Include Frosty the Snowman as a supporting character/comic relief.
NOTE: This review contains spoilers. If you are spoiler-averse, skip this review. If you want a short take, here it is: there are better post-apocalypse books out there.
I bought the paperback of Swan Song when it first came out in 1987 after reading and enjoying McCammon’s science fiction/horror romp Stinger. For some reason I never got around to reading Swan Song, but nearly three decades later I finally got the ebook and jumped in. Unlike 1987 I did so with more trepidation, as I’d recently read McCammon’s short story collection Blue World, which I found rather uneven.
Swan Song is like a cartoon version of a post-apocalypse world. Or maybe it’s more a fantasy dreamed up by a high school kid extended to epic length. Either way, the book has most of the right ingredients but doesn’t know how to combine them effectively.
Set in the present day (at the time the mid-80s), Swan Song begins with political tensions ramping up and then someone–it’s purposely obfuscated who–starts launching nuclear attacks, and before you can say drop, roll and cover, the entire world has been blasted by nukes and the survivors are faced with years of nuclear winter.
As with most epic tales, the story chronicles different groups of survivors who ultimately converge and confront each other, to determine if good or evil will triumph. The characters range from pro wrestlers to ex-military, to religious fanatics and ex-military haunted by the ghosts of war. So far so good, yes?
Yes, more or less. The first part of the story chronicles the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks, with survivors scrabbling through destroyed cities, collapsed shelters and hellish landscapes filled with destruction and littered with corpses. This is all in service of laying the groundwork for the rest of the story, which jumps ahead seven years and picks up on all the characters’ lives as they slowly begin to converge for the final battle.
But before that seven year jump happens, the reader is tipped off to the sledgehammer subtlety to come. As the missiles fly at the novel’s beginning, the president is on a plane flying high above the nukes. As he tries to activate launch codes from a briefcase, the fiery apocalypse below spits up a bus filled with corpses that disables the plane and causes it to crash. This is Emmerich-level disaster here, presented straight-faced and without irony. The president later shows up as a crazy hermit who wants to destroy the world.
The premise of Swan Song is broadly similar to The Stand, perhaps the best-known post-apocalypse novel, and while there are similarities–a devastated world, supernatural elements, the meeting of good and evil to determine the future of the world–King focuses on the struggle to rebuild civilization while McCammon depicts a world where people turn savage and fight relentlessly and without remorse. Swan Song is filled with long, vividly-detailed battle scenes. There are a lot of really nasty people here–usually also insane because that’s what nukes do to you, I guess–and it’s all relentlessly grim.
I’m not saying this is a bad approach. In fact, it could have been compelling, but the problem is McCammon’s writing is so clunky. I keep trying to think of a better way to describe it, but that’s the word I keep coming back to. A lot of the prose here is fine, if unremarkable. McCammon keeps things moving, even if the story feels too long, but so much of the execution comes off as, well, clunky.
Here’s an example featuring the ex-military man, Colonel James Macklin, as he heads back into his Airstream trailer, which serves as the command post for the budding army he’s assembling:
He turned back toward the trailer. Sheila Fontana was standing in the doorway, and suddenly Macklin realized that all this excitement had given him an erection. It was a good erection, too. It promised to stay around awhile. He walked up the carved staircase with its banister of demon faces, entered the trailer and shut the door.
This is just bad. No one should ever use the phrase “it was a good erection” outside a clinical test report or soft porn. Mercifully, McCammon declines to depict the actual sex acts. The banister of demon faces is made by a crazy person, by the way. Did I mention there are a lot of crazy people in Swan Song?
Oh, and the military force that Macklin is assembling is called the Army of Excellence. Yes. Maybe Army of Total Awesomeness was already taken.
The titular character of Swan, who has the ability to rekindle life in plants and trees, rejects the advances of a potential paramour:
All she could think to say was, “Don’t bother me again!” Instantly she felt a pang of pain that sliced her open from head to toe.
That is one serious pang of pain. Fortunately, she magically stitches back together so the story can continue.
One last example, which is something that regularly pulled me out of the story. Analogies are dangerous things. I try to avoid them because they are almost always terrible and best used if played for laughs.
For a few seconds bullets had been whizzing past as thick as flies at a garbage men’s convention.
This is terrible writing. It doesn’t even make sense as an analogy. In a way I can’t really blame McCammon. An editor should have cut this. Given the length of the book, maybe the editor didn’t cut anything.
Another big issue with the story is the depiction of the big bad guy, given various names and identities throughout, such as Friend. Yes, when asked his name in one of the final scenes, he says, “You can call me Friend” and that is literally how he is referred to for the rest of the book by the author. Friend. Friend is not very friendly, and has a few spooky tricks up his sleeve. He can change his appearance, moulding his face to look like others, or sometimes he just gets all silly and puts on a face full of mouths if the mood strikes him. He also changes the colour of his eyes a lot, for no apparent reason. Maybe it’s a nervous tic. He sends out fly-like things from his mouth that act as drones, allowing him to spy on others. He can make his hands catch on fire.
With this bag of tricks he should be fairly intimidating, but his character comes off as flat and without menace, even as he goes about doing Bad Guy things. Why? Because McCammon, perhaps in trying to be coy and not come right out and say he’s THE DEVIL, instead creates a character who acts like a temperamental teen, who wants to bring about the end of humanity, but never offers a compelling reason for this (other than his juvenile cries of “It’s my party!”) and at the end of the story he just kind of goes away. Maybe there was going to be a sequel? Maybe something did get cut? He’s a one-dimensional villain who doesn’t really do anything. It’s actually kind of baffling. Maybe McCammon was saying the real bad guys are us. His depiction of most humans post-apocalypse is not exactly flattering, after all.
I wanted to like Swan Song, but the writing and many of the characterizations left me underwhelmed. I’d rate this one as a major disappointment.
Hey, there’s a new Star Wars movie out. You may have heard about it, possibly.
Released twelve days ago, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has already made over $600 million domestically. Even taking into account ticket price inflation, that’s an impressive figure. Ten years after Lucas wrapped up his prequel trilogy with Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, there’s apparently quite an appetite for more Star Wars movies.
I’m not going to ramble on since the Internet is already stuffed to the gills with reviews of the movie, but I will offer a few of my own thoughts.
I saw the original Star Wars when I was 12 years old. It was magical and awesome. I’d never seen a movie like it before. When Return of the Jedi came out in 1983 I paid to see it four times, something I’d never done before and have never done again since. I loved Star Wars and its flaws and imperfections didn’t bother me in the slightest, even as I acknowledged them.
When Lucas decided to make Episodes I-III I was excited. I’d have preferred Episodes VII-IX since we already knew Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, but still, new Star Wars!
As it turned out, whatever Lucas captured for the original three movies largely eluded him for the prequels, which were flat, poorly-directed, bloated with overly busy effects, featured embarrassing fan service and had one of the worst movie romances ever.
The biggest criticism I might level at The Force Awakens is that it largely uses the template of the first movie, swapping in new characters for the same general roles. But this is a minor nit, because it is done well and serves as a way to relaunch the movie series, not just for people who didn’t grow up with the original trilogy, but especially for those who did.
I suspected J.J. Abrams would be a better fit for Star Wars than Star Trek and he is. Reining in his excesses, he ably directs a cast that is diverse, smart and appealing. The script is rather sharp for a Star Wars film. The whole thing moves relentlessly, but finds the right places to breathe before picking up the action again. The fan service is tolerable–in stark contrast to what Abrams did in Star Trek–and Harrison Ford, who plays a surprisingly large part in the film, perfectly recaptures the character of Han Solo. And BB-8 is adorable.
Really, the major achievement here–apart from the stellar work done by the young cast that will carry the series forward–is that this feels like a Star Wars film in a way the prequels never really did. It’s ironic that it took people other than Lucas to rediscover and recapture what made the original trilogy work so well.
Now I just have to wait impatiently for Episode VIII.
I read most of Lovecraft’s fiction back when I was a teen, initially drawn to his work not by his reputation or fame but by the lurid Michael Whelan cover art found on the 1981 paperback editions published by Del Rey. The art is fantastically creepy, even if it doesn’t particularly relate to Lovecraft’s stories. You can see the two pieces (chopped up to span seven paperbacks) at Whelan’s site here and here.
I picked up this particular collection because it assembles all of Lovecraft’s stories in chronological order, allowing the reader to experience both the growing skill of Lovecraft as a writer and the expansion and iteration of his favorite themes, settings and tentacles. The included illustrations are merely serviceable but given the price of the volume, that’s a non-issue.
I read the collection over the course of many months, usually taking in a story or two between novels. Not to get all up in the puns, but this is probably the sanest way to read his work. Lovecraft wrote some frightful horror but most of it is delivered in the form of dense, baroque prose that feels as antiquarian as the tombs and ruins his narrators stumble upon. His characters are also strangely mute, with little in the way of spoken dialogue–but this turns out to be a good thing, because as elaborate as Lovecraft’s phrasing could get, he had an undeniable style and facility with language that was completely absent when he presented characters talking to each other. No actual person would ever speak the way a Lovecraft character does. It’s like watching an early rehearsal of a high school play in 1915. A bad high school play.
But if you tackle his body of work with some restraint there are some great stories in here, and any horror buff would be remiss in not sampling at least the better-known works, ranging from the mythos-establishing “The Call of Cthulhu” to the short novel “At the Mountains of Madness,” which eschews most of Lovecraft’s excessive flourishes and in turn stands as one of his most chilling stories, as an expedition explores and uncovers the horrors found in ancient cyclopean ruins deep in the Antarctic.
Lovecraft is at his best when he paints surreal landscapes, often literal dream worlds that his protagonists wander through, sometimes emerging mad, sometimes not emerging at all. Conversely, he is at his worst when his racism and classism comes through, with villains typically described as “swarthy,” “thick-lipped” or otherwise not white and more specifically, not English. You could argue that he lived in a less-enlightened time but that’s really no excuse.
And don’t ask about the cat*.
Still, his influence and unique voice make him one of the essential horror authors and this collection allows one to experience his growth, if not as a person, then as a storyteller.
* the cat in his 1924 story “The Rats in the Walls” is named Nigger Man, after a cat Lovecraft himself owned
Although Hell House may take its inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, mainly in the broad premise of a group of people investigating a haunted house, it departs from the relatively mild chills of Jackson’s tale and goes straight for the throat–and every other body part. The ghosts in Hell House are nasty things that mean to injure and even kill those daring to solve the home’s decades-old mysteries.
Matheson, perhaps best-known for his contributions to the original Twilight Zone TV series (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” among others) has written a ghost story that leaves the reader wondering who is right–Florence Tanner, a medium brought to the house with three others to help uncover and perhaps banish whatever malefic force dwells within–or Lionel Barrett, a physicist who theorizes that ghostly doings are nothing more than residual energy that can be neutralized by a “reversor,” a large contraption covered with dials, buttons, switches and filled with vacuum tubes. You know, like a typical computer from 1970 (when the story takes place).
Tanner and Barret are joined by Barrett’s wife, Edith, and another medium, Ben Fischer, who as a teenager had been part of a disastrous attempt to clean the house in 1940, an attempt that left everyone but Fischer dead.
Promised loads of money by the house’s current owner if they can wrap up their investigation of life after death in a week, the foursome quickly discovers that the house is primed for a party in which everyone is invited…to die! Exploiting personal weaknesses of the four, the house’s spirits move quickly and violently to divide and conquer.
Matheson does a terrific job balancing tensions both between the four and between the sides of spiritualism and science. Also to his credit, there are no eyeball-rolling moments where characters do stupid things in order to advance the plot. There is a battle here between the living and the not-so-living and Matheson lets it play out in as believable a manner as you are likely to get in a story about a haunted house.
For a novel published in 1971, Hell House is surprisingly timeless. Apart from the above-mentioned “reversor” it could be updated to the present day without any substantial change, a testament to Matheson’s straightforward, character-driven approach. If you want a ghost story that is more than people wandering around the dark and hearing a few odd noises (ie. every limp ghost-hunting show ever), Hell House’s bricked-over windows, profane chapel and steam(ed to death) room will serve you well.
