The symmetry of the three stars I’m giving The Three is unintentional. If Goodreads supported half stars it would be 3.5. I quite enjoyed this tale of potential apocalypse but a few issues keep me from giving it a slightly higher rating. That shouldn’t discourage anyone from reading it if they find the premise interesting and enjoy the epistolary format.
The Three chronicles how three children survive three separate plane crashes, all on the same day, leading to speculation ranging from “it’s just a coincidence” to aliens to how the children are the four horsemen of the apocalypse and are ushering in the end times. It is the last theory that takes hold most firmly, particularly in the U.S. and especially among Christian evangelicals and their right wing political allies.
The book uses the epistolary format, framing it largely as an account written by an American journalist (From Crash to Conspiracy) who includes news reports, interviews, chat logs, flight recording transcripts and more to piece together the aftermath of the crashes, the fate of the child survivors and the rapidly deteriorating political landscape as people get swept up in Rapture fever.
Apart from a few lapses where author Sarah Lotz has Americans using British slang, the various reports, interviews and chats are handled quite well, with characters emerging naturally through their own words. The narrative builds slowly as each chapter adds more pieces to the puzzle, though some may be frustrated by the ambiguous ending. I discovered afterward that Lotz has a book out that is apparently the follow-up to The Three, which may partly explain why things aren’t neatly wrapped-up by the end, though to give Lotz credit, the ambiguity feels more like a deliberate stylistic choice–and one that I feel works.
Having said that, I miss the art of telling a story in a single book. Sometimes I just want a good tale, not thousands of pages of world building spread across multiple volumes. Oh well, The Three still works well as a standalone novel, letting the reader decide on their own terrible-things-will-almost certainly-be happening ending.
While I found the characterizations compelling and convincing, the rapidly-shifting geopolitical environment never struck me as particularly credible. The idea that the U.S. could so quickly change into what amounts to a fundamentalist theocracy simply because of the improbability of three plane crashes on the same day with a single child surviving each doesn’t feel plausible. Perhaps even more ludicrous is the idea that China, Japan and the Koreas would form an alliance.
These events are important to underpinning the overall story and in the end never struck me as even being that necessary.
Still, the accounts of those around the survivors are vivid, funny and often harrowing. This book may forever convince anyone feeling a little down to stay far away from spooky Japanese forests.
Recommended. Unless you’re looking for something to read while passing through an airport.
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.
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.
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.
One of the benefits of this kooky ebook thing is how it’s made it easier than ever for new authors to get their work out before the public. What was once a terrifying trip on roads filled with insane drivers, followed by navigating the madding crowds at the mall before arriving at your favorite bookstore outlet to look for and purchase a new book–hopefully they had it in stock if you didn’t call ahead–is now just a couple of clicks on a website. You can do the entire thing with one hand, even, like so many other fun activities.
The ease of getting books out there and the much more variable pricing–many new authors opt to discount their books well below what typical bestsellers go for as enticement–means the reader has a greater selection of choices than ever before.
All of this can be summed up as: sometimes I see a book by an author I’m unfamiliar with and the price is low enough that I am fine with taking the risk that the book will be a stinker.
The good news is that the eminently affordable The Gate at Lake Drive is not a stinker. The less-than-good-news is that author Shaun Meeks would have benefited from a sharper editor and another pass to strengthen recurring problems with the writing, primarily the use of unnecessary modifiers that serve to sap the strength from the prose. Told in the first person by monster hunter Dillon, the writing is often weakened by unneeded verbiage. I’m not saying adverbs are a prime evil as Stephen King would have you think, nor do I believe that every story needs to be written with a Hemingway-level obsession with being lean to the point of minimalist, but The Gate at Lake Drive is filled with equivocation, describing things as slightly this or somewhat that, giving the prose a mushy feel. Sometimes it’s better to just be direct and not worry that your writing will come off as spartan.
The Gate at Lake Drive is set to be the first of a series of books featuring monster hunter Dillon, who brands himself as a monster detective. His rationale is presented thusly: “And calling myself a monster detective beats the hell out of monster exterminator or buster or whatever else you want to call it. A detective seems slightly more serious in my opinion.” But he then adds “I called my site Monster Dick, knowing that eventually people will run a search on it and then BOOM, there I am in front of you.” The contradiction here–wanting to appear “serious” then using the terrible pun of “monster dick” to lure in potential customers (do people seeking large male members online often have monster problems?) feels less like a character quirk and more something the author thought was funny and simply determined to make work.
Now, with this pun being so prominent, I expected the story to be presented in a light, funny manner. And it is, sort of. The tone is light, with Dillon making regular sarcastic asides, but the humor never feels fully committed to. And that may be my biggest issue with the book. On the one hand, Dillon is a veritable dervish with his daggers and magical demon-fighting equipment, slicing and dicing and dispatching monsters with ease, yet he is also a paunchy virgin who somehow attracts a burlesque performer and instantly they fall for each other because who knows why? All of this is great material for an absurd, over-the-top story, but it never really takes off and the main reason is the way the character of Dillon tells the story. He is a cipher (there’s a twist) but also kind of bland. Meeks doesn’t exploit the the conflict between his bad ass monster-fighting and his allegedly awkward way around women. Instead, there’s an instant romance, sex (mercifully not described) and none of it connects because there’s no work done to connect it. It just happens.
A stronger editor would have helped, too. As someone who regularly bumbles through his own rewrites and misses things that are glaringly obvious, I can appreciate the fresh eyes of a skilled editor to see things an author doesn’t. There are numerous typos and other errors, problems with continuity–Dillon dons gloves at the beginning of one scene then mysteriously doesn’t have them on later in the same scene–that should have been caught and corrected.
The Gate at Lake Drive has the ingredients to be a fun romp but the different pieces never fit together as well as they should. The romance is the very definition of tacked-on. It almost feels like an entire subplot is missing. It’s obvious Meeks enjoys the character of Dillon, though, and with a stronger editor, I’m certain his next entry in the series will be an improvement.
Idiot America is a book filled with little that will surprise anyone who has been watching the devolution of U.S. politics, debate and public thought over the last forty (or more) years.
Pierce uses a series of events–the war in Iraq, the Terry Schiavo life-support battle, efforts to give “intelligent design” (creationism) equal footing in public schools–and couples them with observations and actions regarding the necessity of intelligent government and an informed, educated populace from the founders of America to paint a bleak picture of the current state for what passes for discussion (he argues there is little to no actual debate) in the current U.S. landscape. It is a relentlessly bleak picture, punctuated by the occasional triumph that shines like a diamond in a bin of coal.
Pierce presents his premise as such: intellect and expertise have somehow become regarded as undesirable qualities, things to be mistrusted or rejected outright. It is more important to have a president you’re comfortable having a beer with than one who can make nuance, evidence-based decisions on matters of foreign and domestic policy. The soundbite is better than the essay, hair is more important than the brain that resides beneath it.
Pierce argues that the gut (or Gut, as he calls it) has come to dominate thinking, with emotion displacing rationality and logic, where cranks who once had an audience no larger than the people passing by listening to them exhort their conspiracy theories on a street corner now have the wide reach of cable television and the instant access of the Internet to project their lunacy. At times caustically funny and by turns surprisingly lyrical, painting scenes with the care of a novelist, Pierce offers example after example of how idiocy has become ascendant.
As I read the book I found myself alternating between a sense of frustration and outright anger. The length to which people–who should be intelligent adults–fully and completely reject intelligent thought for ridiculous, easily-debunked hokum, is at times astonishing. If some fabrication is repeated often enough, Pierce says, it takes on the patina of truth. If enough people believe and believe fervently enough, it becomes indisputable fact. Actual facts no longer have any effect on these believers. People simply stop listening. There is no debate, there is no reaching out, there are only sides yelling at each other over who is right.
This is a depressing but important book. As I said at the beginning, there are no real surprises here, but Pierce catalogs the problems and hammers his points home. Given the circus that is the current group running for the Republican nomination for president, and given the wholesale manufacture of fiction in the guise of endless reality TV shows, it’s hard to believe that the situation is improving, but perhaps we can draw some hope that it can hardly get worse.
In 1983, twelve years after The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty wrote Legion, a sequel of sorts that switches focus away from Regan MacNeil to the rumpled, philosophical and schmaltz-loving police detective William Kinderman as he investigates a series of gruesome murders in Georgetown. The novel presents the possibility that the supposedly deceased serial killer known as The Gemini Killer (modeled after the real-life Zodiac killer) has somehow started murdering again. As Kinderman investigates he begins to see signs that tie the new killings to the events surrounding the exorcism of Regan more than a decade earlier.
Kinderman is a character Blatty obviously loves writing about and it shows throughout Legion. The detective goes from long ruminations on the nature of evil to complaining about a live carp his mother-in-law is keeping in his bathtub (she likes her fish fresh). As the body count rises and Kinderman heads into the psych ward of a hospital looking for leads, things turn increasingly dark before coming to a head when it seems no one is truly safe from the killer or killers. Blatty has characters fighting to determine what is real and what isn’t as the demonic influence strengthens. Although I never found the novel especially scary, it is unnerving and the suspense toward the end is well-executed (pardon the pun). The prose often has a lyrical, dream-like quality to it, most obviously when Kinderman or others muse about life, the universe and other suitably cosmic topics.
Legion manages to retain many of the same strengths The Exorcist had while standing apart as something more than just a sequel. If you’ve read The Exorcist and enjoyed the character of Kinderman, Legion is easy to recommend.
I’m actually having a difficult time articulating my opinion of Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. On the positive side, David Wong (aka Jason Pargin) continues his breezy, effortlessly sarcastic way of writing that for me is the equivalent of a belly rub for a dog. Okay, that analogy was a little labored. Let me try again. I like the way Wong writes. His characters are smart and funny, the situations he puts them in are equally silly and dangerous and somehow all the gonzo stuff he throws together manages to work.
In this novel he shifts to third person to tell the story of Zoey Ashe, a young woman in the near(ish) future who inherits the estate of a father she never saw or liked much, along with technology that can turn an ordinary person into an unstoppable force of destruction (ie. a supervillain). The setting is a designed city in the Utah desert called Tabula Ra$a, a largely lawless place peopled by dozens of millionaires and those who work for, prey on and gawk at them.
So far, so zany. My first stumbling block is Zoey. She’s presented as tough and independent, but also makes some very (unbelievably) stupid decisions, usually in service to moving the plot forward. I really dislike characters doing things solely to keep the plot rolling. King was right–story is good, plot is bad. Wong does this a number of times throughout, using coincidences, slip-ups and kooky hijinks to make sure the plot continues from A to B to C.
On the other hand, the novel is less about the clever machinations of the characters and more reveling in the excesses of this future world that takes the smartphone/always-connected thing to its ludicrous conclusion, where everyone has a video camera, a live feed and the insatiable need to draw an audience, whether through quirky or homicidal means.
Tone is another issue here. As the title promises, there is violence aplenty and much of it is graphic. While many of the characters are cartoonish, some are genuinely repugnant in their actions (even as they are simultaneously ridiculous in presentation). The main villain, Molech, is a self-obsessed diva who brutalizes Zoey repeatedly, all of it depicted in vivid detail. It feels a bit at odds with the sillier parts of the story, but maybe it’s just edgy and I have insufficient hipness left to appreciate it, given that I am mere years away from wearing suspenders and inexplicably hiking my pants up to my nipples (which is to say, getting older). None of this was enough to keep me from wanting to see how it all turned out, but it did lessen the experience a bit. Maybe I just don’t like reading (in detail) about terrible physical violence being inflicted on people.
The big finale also felt a bit thrown together and was anti-climactic, but wasn’t actually bad. I mean, we’re talking barely registering on the It-o-meter for bad endings. Still, it could have been better.
If you liked Wong’s two previous novels, you’ll almost certainly like Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. In the end it’s a goofy, gory, gross ride whose strengths overcome its weaknesses. It’s not as good as This Book is Full of Spiders but it’s still a fun read, with more than a few laughs tucked in among the copious flying bullets, severed heads and talking toilets.
I don’t read a lot of fantasy because I prefer my absurd story scenarios to be horror-flavored but The Library at Mount Char had been recommended and has surfaced on a few “Best of 2015” lists so I figured, what the heck, it’s not like it was going to be elves and dwarves arguing with each other.
Instead, The Library at Mount Char tells the story of how an ancient uber-being who may or may not be human has fended off his enemies for thousands of years (maybe longer) while maintaining The Library, a collection of books, scrolls and bric a brac that essentially allows him to rule and shape our universe. He is aided by twelves children he kidnaps at the beginning of the story, using them as apprentices, with each studying a different discipline. One of them is Carolyn, the protagonist, and the story that unfolds deals mainly with her plotting to usurp her “Father” and also how she learns to become human again, sort of, after turning into an emotionless monster for several decades due to aforementioned plotting.
There’s always a goofy plumber/thief named Steve she conscripts for various tasks and an ex-military man named Earwin who is pretty much your typical possibly-crazy-but-smart ex-military guy.
Several times when explaining the various impossible things happening, Carolyn tells Steve “It’s not magic” but it’s magic. Some lip service is paid to “seventh dimensions” and such but if you’re expecting plausible, scientific explanations for everything, you won’t find them here–nor should you, despite the overall realistic tone the story takes.
What you will find is a generally light, sometimes funny and often gruesome tale of long-brewing revenge, world-destroying (rather than building) wrapped up in a modern fantasy shell with a little life lesson tucked in at the end.
And talking lions. And deer. And zombies. And people who love baking brownies.
The general inhumanity of the children (who are in their thirties for most of the story) means you won’t particularly identify with or feel empathy for them, but Steve the plumber serves as a reference point to the reader, a likable doofus who gets in way over his head.
I liked The Library at Mount Char overall, though at times I felt author Scott Hawkins might have committed more fully to a specific tone, as the story swings a bit uneasily at times from Very Serious High Stakes Stuff to irreverence and silliness. But that’s more a personal preference on my part more than it is a significant failing of the book.
As I mentioned up top, I don’t read a lot of fantasy so I have no idea how The Library at Mount Char compares to similar work. It’s a well-written and tightly-plotted novel, though, and taken on its own, I enjoyed the journey of Steve and Carolyn through the woods and bombs and gunfire and weird other dimensional places.
With a few weeks to go before I dive into my seventh National Novel Writing Month competition, I cast about for an inspirational book to read, to get me pumped up while I flail about for an idea for my novel. Getting pumped up reduces the chance of injury when flailing about, you see.
This is the third time I’ve read On Writing and perhaps surprisingly–given how often King’s books come out in revised editions–the text remains unchanged from the book’s original publication in 2000. This is not a complaint, mind you, as my five-star rating will attest.
What is it about On Writing that makes it work so well? Is it the best book to cover the nuts and bolts of writing? No. Is it the best autobiography of a writer? No. Is the best book to offer inspiration and advice to new writers? No.
But what it does so well is cover everything King sets out to tackle, which is all of the above. King fuses together a solid how-to book on writing with solid (if common sense) advice and tosses in a dramatic curriculum vitae in which the author’s life at one point actually hangs by a thread. More than anything, King has written an entertaining volume that appeals far beyond his usual horror milieu.
If you want his tips in super-condensed form, here they are (remember, this time I took notes):
– read a lot (he claims he is a slow reader and reads 70-90 books a year)
– write a lot (he writes 2,000 words seven days a week but suggests 1,000 words six days a week)
– don’t watch a lot of TV
– passive voice is the worst thing ever
– adverbs come a close second
– cut out unnecessary words (King is admittedly not so great on this score)
– story is important, plot not so much
– write what you know but do so as broadly and inclusively as possible
– research when needed but remember where backstory goes (in the back)
– write what interests you, not what you think will sell or what you think people want
– write two drafts and a polish (the polish may be a third draft)
– take 2-3 days off writing when done with the first draft
– don’t revisit your writing until at least six weeks later
– don’t have others critique or offer feedback on your work until after the second draft (it’s not ready till then)
Don’t let my list dissuade you from reading On Writing, though. As I said above, this is pretty common sense advice, but King makes the list entertaining as hell, maybe even a little magical.
– a lot of it took place in or around snowy woods
– they made a big budget movie of it
– something something shit weasels
– it is regarded as perhaps not Stephen King’s finest hour
Having now read the book I can confirm all four of the above are accurate. That said, lesser King is never truly awful and the ending of Dreamcatcher is still a lot better than It or a half dozen of his other novels.
If you’ve never read the book, imagine Alien taking place on Earth but with way more farting. We’re talking apocalyptic levels of farting here, all in the name (and really ripe stench) of otherworldly being proliferation.
Four high school buddies, along with one of King’s favorite archetypes, the magical mentally challenged man, form a kind of psychic bond and then find themselves in the middle of what turns out to be a clumsy alien invasion. They puzzle and struggle and flee and fight as the military moves in to seal off an area of Maine known as the Jefferson Tract. Said military is led by a man named Kurtz. Here King eats his cake and has it, too, directly drawing comparisons to Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, playing the “Is he crazy or just acting crazy?” card before making it clear that this Kurtz is pretty much like the other one.
This was the first book King wrote after being hit and nearly killed by a van in 1999 and he transposes the physical anguish of his injuries and subsequent recovery onto one of the main characters here. As an application of writing what you know, the pain and suffering is understandably authentic. The characters are vivid and colorful, as one expects in a King novel, but the story suffers from horror elements that are more cartoonish than chilling (the aforementioned shit weasels, alien thingies that explode from people’s butts after a gestation period, preceded by bouts of extreme flatulence) and science fiction aspects that teeter on the line between deliberately hokey and plausible. It’s an odd combination that is carried along primarily by King’s strengths with character.
I would probably say this one is a safe pass for people not set on being King completists. It’s not outright bad but is brought down by the uneven tone and sillier elements. If you want to read King, there are a lot of other books of his to recommend over Dreamcatcher.
The Three by Sarah Lotz
