Sponsored by

Home| Prose| Pictures| Contact me| Friends Links| Journal| Bibliography| Influences | What I Read

Book Reviews:

This is a kind of what-am-I-reading-now page.  Because of my daily writing, my job, and the various and sundry things that take up my time each day, I only manage an average of 65-70 books a year, while my wife, Kim, puts away about 125 or more a year.
For about four years now, I've been keeping a reading journal, and have found it to be very valuable to me as writer, mostly because it keeps me from falling into the 'genre trap' when choosing my reading material.
As I finish my readings, I will post them here, sometimes along with a review of what value I found within their pages.

11/26/04
'The Dark Fantastic: The Authorized Biography of Clive Barker' by Douglas Winter
     This books is so full of revelations for any writer that has ever felt as if he or she was unable to break past the barrier between what is inside and what finally ends up on the page for the world to see.  It is nice to know that even 'big names' like Barker have seen the dark side of the coin of creation as well.
    But the best part of this excellent, intelligently-written biography is Winter's astute observations about the state of modern horror as an art form, something still shunned, but seeking a higher literary ground by the likes of Barker, King, and Rice, and a handful of others.  I was especially thoughtful about his late 80s report card of how the publishing business changed the world of literature in general, and how many authors seeking the success of repetition, allowed themselves to whored out by New York publishers row to fill shelves, instead of writing honest, thought provoking literature.  Not the case with Barker, although he seemed immune to this tragedy.
     But Winter and Barker do not let the writers off the hook either.  They tell it as it is.  And while I don't want to sound pompous in my agreement with their dire critique of modern horror writing, someone had to finally say it.  In a world where big publishers still treat a money making genre as poorly behaved step children, only pulled out when the 'Cold Mountain's of the world start slipping in sales, it is nice to know that someone is telling the truth.
     Thank God for dedicated visionaries like Barker, and for observers like Winter.

11/28/04
'KoKo' by Peter Straub
     This is one of those books that I have been trying to read for the last ten years or so.  At least half a dozen times I have managed to start it, get to about the midpoint of the novel, and then lose focus, go to something else for a few years and then come back to it again.  Of course, I then had to start all over again.  So to finally have finished entails with it a sense of real accomplishment.  But I wish I had stuck with 'KoKo' all those years ago, because now I would have been able to to move on to his other 'Tim Underhill' novels before now (something I plan to do this evening, starting with 'Mystery').
     What Straub does in this novel is nothing short of genius.  He tells the story of what war and life horrors can do to a person's psyche.  And what becomes ultimately the unanswerable question: is KoKo wrong in his sense of self-righteous vengeance against those who he feels have betrayed him?
     As you read this excellent book, you get the sense that these are real people, with real problems, and not some cardboard cutouts that seem to plague modern fiction.  I mean, there was a certain part of the book that, if I had been able to speak with Mike Poole, I would have called him right up and told him not to let his bitchy wife treat him so badly, that it was not his fault that their kid had died.
     Don't worry, this is not a spoiler for those of you have not read it yet; you get that information in the first few dozen pages or so.
     One other thing that Straub invariably does in his story telling, something that I think of as his own unique gift, is that he has a firm foundation of other literature (including children's books, as it turns out), and he always leaves these interesting clues inside his characters' dialogues and thoughts about how books can, and do, effect us daily.  There are few books ingested by the human brain, that are then melded by our personal emotions that these words evoke within us, that leave us without some residue of their wonder behind.  Straub knows this is so, that these great string of words, that we sometimes take for granted, do leave behind a sort of pollen that will bear fruit later, even if we are unconscious of their gestation.
     But the one thing that I find most wondrous about his literature is his love for jazz.  Straub is one of my favorites, if only for that reason.  Besides the fact that he is a fucking genius with a turn of phrase and character-story building.  If you're a budding writer, you couldn't learn this craft from a much better source.

12/10/04
'Battle Royale' by Koushun Takami
    Let me start by saying this, having been a writer for several years now, and knowing how little time I have in any given day, I have become very selective about what I will spend my truncated time upon for the printed word.  For instance, I do not read Louis La'Mour any longer; not because he isn't a fine writer, but because I feel I have learned just about everything I can from his work.  So I don't actually read for entertainment any longer.  I read to learn my craft- one way or the other
    So that having been said, I don't really like to borrow other people's books to read. I have so damned many on my own shelves that I have yet to delve into that it seems wasteful to do so.  But when I was handed this novel by a friend at work, I couldn't say no.  After all, he had been kind enough to follow my suggestions about reading Neil Gaiman's entire works.
    I started 'Battle Royale' with some misgivings; but like so many things in life, I now find that I am glad that I guilted myself into reading it.
    The novel is big, at over 600 pages, and has so many characters that one can get lost in them.  But Takami plays it smart: he concentrates on a few of these characters and places them in archetypical roles that we are all familiar with.  Amazingly, the novel doesn't feel cluttered or silly.  Because let's face it, when your book is about a bunch of junior high school students placed on a deserted island by the government to fight it out until there is only one student left alive, it could have been silly indeed.  I was worried that it would turn out to be like so many action novels, one big video game on the page, with no pathos and characterization.  I was wrong.
    When you get a hold of this one, and I highly recommend seeking it out, let me know what you thought of that despicable bastard Kazuo.  He was like the fucking Terminator, man.  Nothing could kill him.
    The action sequences were great, if a bit stiffly written.  Where the novel mainly falls apart is the translation.  It is obviously translated by someone who isn't really well versed in English idiom or grammar rules.  There are passages that had me rolling with laughter, just simply because they sounded so phony and ridiculous.  But most people probably are a bit more forgiving in that area than I.
    And let me add this: 'Battle Royale' is not all action.  There are some wonderful parts about the loss of innocence, the horrors of a fascist government (particularly resounding with our situation in this country right now, I think), the mindlessness of blind loyalty- both good and bad- and an equally adept examination of the nature of fear and paranoia.
    And, yes, some times the good guys do die.
    'Battle Royale'.  Read it.  Love it.  And know that at any given time, in any country, it might just fucking happen.  After all, that's entertainment, right?

12/17/04
'Out of the Silent Planet' by C. S. Lewis
     For me, one of the biggest problems with reading fantasy and/or science fiction literature is the fact that they can lose themselves in the personal ethics of the writer.  This is especially true in the ranks of science fiction, where most writers may have a heightened sense of the potential of mankind in the face of the larger than life canvas of the universe, but miss the mark when it comes to finding the spiritual ethic in their characters.  Fantasy writers tend to go the other way, and lose themselves in the smaller canvas of the world which they have created from scratch for their particular dec-ology (as has become fashionable these days to write), and wallow in their self-created gods and goddesses, beings so outside the realm of man's understanding that these deities might as well be aliens themselves.
    C. S. Lewis has hit the mark in 'Out of the Silent Planet'.  Of course, it might have helped that this is an author known for his intense Christian beliefs, as evidenced to anyone who has ever read his excellent 'Screwtape Letters' and the 'Narnia' series.
    The story is sometimes science fiction and sometimes fantasy, and is simple enough.  Ransom is a disillusioned loner intelligentsia on a walking holiday through the backways of early 20th century England, who is kidnapped by a duo of rather unsavory men.  The unfeeling physicist and the greedy young gadfly treat him like an animal as they travel through space to a mysterious planet where he's to be offered as a sacrifice to an alien master.  He escapes and finds himself in this new and hostile environment without food, weapons, or any hope for escape back to Earth.
    And this all sounds rather prosaic to this point, and most authors would have gone off on tangents of adventures and senseless violence to cover the fact that their character is plastic and useless.  But Lewis does something different here.  He allows Ransom to act as a normal man might in this fantastical situation, as he goes a bit mad with fear, reacting sometimes irrationally because of it.  Along the way he finds that he has nothing to fear but his own madness.
    The aliens (some of the most humane that I've ever read in the pre-Star Wars world of science fiction) that inhabit the planet- later revealed to be Mars- are gentle, industrious, and live within a somewhat socialist society, each race doing what it is best at and letting the others do what they do best.  The intense sense of spiritualism and Christian ethics come in the shape of formless overseers, and the seemingly invisible spirits of the dead that inhabit the world along with the living, that teach Ransom not to fear, and to expect more of the seen universe, that death is not the end.
    This is a trilogy, and not a large one either.  I look forward to reading the second book next.  I hope Lewis keeps this spiritual ethic in evidence in the next two books.

 12/22/04
‘Mystery’ by Peter Straub
     Straub does some extraordinary things with the detective conventions in this excellent novel.  As the title of the novel purports, this is a good old-fashioned mystery. At least on the surface it is.  But what the novel does beyond the sometimes-formula setup for a good mystery is to make it as believable as life.  The protagonist, Tom Pasmore, is one of the better characters in modern fiction that I can remember reading.  He is brilliant to the point of displaying a preternatural ability in putting clues together.  But, thankfully, Straub doesn’t ruin the fun of the book by making it a breakdown of how the human mind works to solve the mystery either.  He lets us all be in awe of the young Tom and his older mentor von Hileitz, as they weave their way through the social classes on a small Caribbean island, and a playground for the ultra rich in an American resort, to finally tie up all of the story’s loose ends- of which there are many.
      The great characters abound, the situation is almost too real, and the prose is up to Straub’s usual astounding writing.  This guy could teach quite a few modern best-selling authors a thing or two about the art of editing what you write.  Not a word is wasted by this genius.  Every character and every scene leads in logical conclusion to the next, as much as it doesn’t sometimes appear to be doing so.
     It is interesting that he chose to write this particular novel during the horror market bust of the late 80s and early 90s.  Maybe he saw the writing on the wall, so to speak.  Or maybe he just got tired of writing about ghostly happenings in modern gothic mansions.  In any case, he shows off his extensive knowledge of the history of the detective genre in these pages, with its many references to literary detective heroes of the past.  One of the best things about Straub is that he never just writes a book or a story.  He gives you the chance to discover a rich literary past with him, if you are so inclined.  Luckily, I had already read many of the works and authors mentioned in ‘Mystery’, so I had a good idea of how he puzzled the pieces together to form one of the tightest mysteries ever written.

12/31/04
'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickins
     To review such a book would be absolute impertinence on my part.  Instead, I would rather tell all just how much I enjoyed reading this book for the first time.  I am glad that I waited until I had some years under my belt before really giving this one a shot.  A younger man might not have been able to grasp some of the subtler tones of desire and longing with which Dickins imbues his work.  There was a sense of humor that I don't remember from the first time that I attempted to read this great work of fiction.  Of course, that was when I was about 20 years old, I think.  The book meant nothing to me then.  But after having been jilted a few times myself, 'Great Expectations' was able to strike a deeper sense of pathos with me than I thought it would.  I was enthralled by Dickins timelessness of character and language.
     But, again, my praise of his durable classic is a little like Salieri's recognition of Mozart's greatness.

01/05/05
'Abarat--Part One' by Clive Barker
     What an imagination!
     There is something that hints at instant classic in these pages.  But they are still typical Barker in the best sort of way.  I could see his love of Barrie's classic tale, 'Peter Pan', shades of Carroll's 'Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis' 'Narnia' series, and also Baum's 'The Wizard of Oz'.  But don't get me wrong, even though this is the first part of the two part tale of Ms. Quakenbush's adventures in the Abarat, it is adult fiction we're talking here.  Teens will get a sense of wonder from it, especially is they have enjoyed things like the 'Narnia' series and such.  However, I think it is the art that demands your awe.  Barker has been a very busy man from the looks of the artwork.  And what a joy it was to match up the seemingly bizarre and disparate pictures with the tale as one went along, although I do not mean that in any puerile sense.  This is the real thing.  Classic.
     And the folks at Disney seem to agree, since they have purchased the rights to this work and supposedly are building an entire amusement park based on Barker's two part tale of magic and darkness.
     That sounds great to me.  Just don't get me on the tea-cup ride...

01/07/05
'Ragtime' by E. L. Doctorow
     When I first started reading 'Ragtime', I admit that Doctorow's unconventional approach to writing this sort of still life of early 20th century American history kind of left me feeling lost.  That sense only lasted the first few pages.  Once I had accepted the namelessness of the main characters for the most part, then I was steeped in an unpleasant telling of the 'forgotten' history of immigrants, and their struggle just to be able to stay in the 'Home of the Free and the Brave', without being ejected for whatever peevish reason petty immigration officers could conceive.  I felt my sense of injustice rise during certain passages, and I wanted to believe that because this was a work of fiction, that surely the details had been embellished and exaggerated for maximum dramatic punch.  But having read some, what I consider more truthful history books since my federally funded brainwashing in grade and high schools, I know that the misery that these poor people endured was merely a smidgen of the useless reality that real immigrants had to live with all their lives.
     But this isn't just a tale of misery in America, circa 1901 to 1915; this is also a story of love and hope.  Mostly, it is a story of white people who are forced to face their eventual integration with people who are not rich and white.  This is a story of industrialization and its dehumanizing effects, of old money aristocracy, of white politicians and black outlaws, of Houdini, Ford, Emma Goldman, and other historical personalities in our great country that might not have meant to shape us, but did so by being who they were. 
     In my opinion, Doctorow has done something here that should be remembered: he told a terrible truth about big city politics, small minded men and women, and hopelessness.  I wish that I had had this book as a sort of history book in high school.  It might have been easier to swallow than the bullshit my teachers had to teach us.

01/08/05
'A Room With A View' by E. M. Forster
    There’s something about the way Forster writes a story.  On the face, each always seems like such a simplistic thing: dealing with family struggles, class prejudices, etc., etc., and so English in its style, that sometimes one forgets to be befuddled by it.  The man knew how to use the language and dialogue.  His characters behave primly, and are, for the most part, very opposed to social change and class deconstruction.  But there is something absolutely romantic in “A Room With A View” that makes me forget that I am not, and never have been, English in this respect.  I found myself getting wonderfully lost in his descriptions of Italy’s small tourista towns, a time that has passed for all of us.  There are scenes that he has written that leap from the page and into your head like magical incantations.  I was blown away by this story of a young woman’s yearning to be free, to be loved for herself, and he desires to find herself to be loved by our young hero.  To tell more would destroy the experience for a future reader.

01/10/05
'House of Blood' by Bryan Smith
    I’ve got to say some positive things about Smith’s “House of Blood”.  First, he can turn a phrase, his dialogues scenes weren’t as washed out as most modern horror novels, and I did want to see what happened next.  These are all great things, things that any middling author wants very much to pull off for a debut mass-market novel.
    But where Smith fails is his consistent need to describe all the silly sexual exploits of his major characters.  I did not find any of these wasteful scenes of use to the story as a whole, and they seemed as thrown in as any arbitrary scenes in any modern fiction book.  I think if he decides to try hard to make every scene count, Smith might be a hell of a writer.  This wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever read from Leisure, but not as bad as “Brass” by Robert J. Conley, or any number of their releases these days.
    The story is simple enough.  Bickering young asshole characters take a wrong turn on a back road, find death and a creepy old house, full of perverts and demons, apparently…I’m still not sure if they were real humans or not.  One character, named Dream, is the anti-demon somehow, and for some unknown reason.  See, it all gets a little ambiguous at times as to what exactly the motivations are.
    In any case, I would probably give the guy another shot, if the next one doesn’t sound like he is cribbing from every slasher film in the 80s.

01/11/05
'O’ Pioneers' by Willa Cather
   This is one of those tough reads that I love to get into as a writer and as a reader.  It's told in spastic scenes that sometimes move as slowly and sensually as the wild winds that blow through Kansas, and others that scream through the characters like fire on the plains.  There is real backbreaking existential horror in this one because of the terrible struggles that the characters must go through to make it work on their farm, in the middle of nowhere.  But there is a half-buried sense of romance here as well, one that draws you in like the warm sun above the still plains.
    What I love about it most is that, as a writer, I learned a lot from her sparse use of description.  Not to say that Cather doesn’t use the language beautifully; but she uses when it is absolutely necessary.  Some of her passages, especially at the end, when I found myself very teary eyed, and feeling like hell for these imagined people, are so wonderfully written that I was in awe of this woman.
    There is nothing so liberating as seeing someone finally take the chance to be free from all earthly, social constraints.

01/19/05
'Arundel' by Kenneth Roberts
    This makes the sixth book I have read by this extraordinary, but, alas, and sadly, forgotten, Maine historical fiction author.  Roberts’ favorite subject is evoked here for the first time: the early Colonial period in America, and the struggles that our ancestors had to face from the wild and Indians and the English and French.  “Arundel”, like all of his novels, are gritty and brutal to read.  His descriptions of physical deprivation- hunger and cold and thirst and physical injury- are hard to read sometimes because they are so real feeling from his deft touch with emotion and words.
    And like all his other novels that I’ve read, I was not disappointed.  I found myself egging on my fictional countrymen, despising them and loving them, as they made their way with Benedict Arnold, a much maligned man as Roberts and history has re-taught us, as he leads them across some of the most unforgiving wilderness ever put to paper by an author so that they can take Quebec from the English.  Enemies hide behind every tree and every face.  Love and war, romance and adventure, these are things that one may count on with this Pulitzer award winning author.

01/25/05
‘The Big Sky’ by A. B. Guthrie Jr.
     Okay.  I admit it.  The short span of American history that encompasses the time of the mountain men is one of pet historical subjects, along with the first transcontinental railroad and the American Revolution.  For me, there is something lost to the modern man when stacked against such immediate backgrounds of danger and adventure.
     In the introduction of this American classic adventure of mountain men, Boone Caudhill is referred to as truly epitomizing the American spirit of exploration.  We follow him through almost three decades of his life, from young man to his early thirties, while Guthrie paints a picture of a young America, one full of adventure and riches in beaver fur and buffalo, and swarming with the many tribes of the original people.  It is a sometimes-brutal depiction of the wildness of people and animals, of death and survival under impossible conditions.
     Boone Caudhill isn’t a man one can love, or even at times understand, for he is so full of independence that he sometimes makes decisions based on pure desire to stay away from people, and in doing so, also lets his emotions pull the trigger too often.  But I think Guthrie presents Boone Caudhill as something more than the epitome of the American spirit; he becomes the mindless rage of a country being slowly subjugated by more than an adventurous desire to see what lies over the next hill beyond the sunset; he is the disappearing Indians, murdered for land; he is the beaver, killed for their fur until fashion dictates their lives be spared; and he is the buffalo, killed at whim, to the point of almost extinction in the blink of a historical eye.  In the end, Boone Caudhill becomes the voice of the wild and of a vanishing way of life.  He cannot live in harmony with his fellowman.  He despises society and runs to the mountains to escape this growing monster of struggling towns and farms, and in the end, offered a chance to become a part of that society again, runs away once more, giving the book a somewhat forlorn finality, despite the ambiguous end-scene.

02/06/05
‘The Wolves of the Calla: The Dark Tower IV’ by Stephen King
     Having read the first three novels in this, perhaps his most ambitious work, and most certainly with the largest cult following, I felt that I had seen many of his scenes before.  And I have: in the classic ‘Western’ films of Leone, Kurisawa, and Sturges.  There was the hint of “The Seven Samarai”, and it’s Americanized version, “The Magnificent Seven”, and certainly there was the breath of Leone’s and Eastwood’s Blondie in Roland, sometimes known as the Man With No Name.  But what he did was to place this in a could-be world in the near future of earth…or is it earth at all.  That is the intriguing thing King does in this series.  By drawing on his many great works, he makes the world seem as familiar as the world he gave us in “The Stand” and “The Regulators”, and others.  He helpfully lists all of the previous books that have been tied into this imaginary world at some point along his career.  I wonder how he will handle this in the future if he continues to keep writing?  I can’t imagine that having ended the series that somewhere along the way he won’t think of a great concept that will fit perfectly into this world of Roland and his pals.
      My wife has already finished the last two books, “The Song of Susannah” and “The Dark Tower”.  She’s been a huge fan of this series, and King in general, since she was a young woman.  She isn’t particularly happy with the end of this great work of horror and fantasy literature.  I already know how it ends, yet I will finish the books, because I can see the sense in how he ended it- don’t worry; no spoilers here.
      King has been pumping out books for decades now, books that a lesser talent would never have been able to conceive, let alone write.  We have been using him to vicariously live out our societal fears.  Can anyone else see that this might be a difficult job to keep up forever?
      I applaud King for the story telling genius he displayed in “The Wolves of the Calla”.  He certainly left me wanting to get to the next one.  And I think it’s a great time to be alive, witness to this moment in literature when the artist becomes the work of art.
     I tip my hat, doo-ya, to the gunfighters.

02/06/05
‘Mystery Walk’ by Robert R. McCammon
     Re-reading any McCammon work is for me a little like reliving my young adulthood.  I discovered McCammon when I was seventeen and fresh out of high school.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life at that point.  The only thing I knew was that I really loved horror books and movies; that I wanted desperately to be a superhero like Spiderman or Batman; and that I had some talent at telling a story.  As some of you might remember the late 80s brought about a flood in the market of McCammon books; seemingly he had been writing for years before he’d been able to get anything published and so he had a bunch of books that hadn’t been printed yet.  His publisher decided to get them on the racks rather quickly.  I remember being able to buy “Stinger”, “Bethany’s Sin”, and “Swan Song” all at once in the local Winn Dixie (this is a huge chain of supermarkets in the South in case some of you are wondering what the hell is a Winn Dixie).  Now these books weren’t the first horror novels I had ever read- that dubious honor goes to Laymon’s “The Cellar”, and arguably, Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”- but McCammon’s books were the first cross genre works I had read.  And they allowed me to see that this was what real writing was about, letting the story go where it needed to tell itself, breaking down all expectations for the conventions set by the horror minded.
     "Mystery Walk” is one of those kinds of books, slipping dark with the light, letting the reader feel the angst of the cursed and the blessed.  It is a simple story of a young boy to man who has a gift for speaking with the dead.  His mother and father have their own grim history, and it sets the boy on a path his mother, and grandmother, call the ‘mystery walk’.  It is a finely told story, paced quickly, but allowing for those Mccammon moments when he can even make the monster seem empathetic.
     I do think that it was a bit of hard sell to make the two young men brothers in the end.  I did when I was twenty something, reading it for the first time, and I feel the same now that I’m thirty-five.  But this second reading gave a great opportunity to see more than I saw the first time in this book.  Life experience gave me a different eye for it after all of these years.  McCammon’s indisputable talent shines through all those intervening years, however, and it reminded me why this man was one of those who was able to show me the way back then, able to point true for what a life purpose really is.
     In subsequent years, despite the sad fact that he let the New York bastards beat him down, made him submit and stop writing professionally, I go back to him sometimes to feel that sense of purpose anew.  He does not fail me and neither do his books.

02/18/05
‘America: A Narrative History volume II’ by George Tindall Brown
     For years I have had the first of this two-volume set, which goes only up to the end of the Civil War, and had been looking for the second volume all that time.  I read and re-read the first one because I gave such a sense of real historical drama to our early history in America, and I expected nothing less from the second volume.  I wasn’t disappointed.  This one goes up to Reagan’s second term in office and the end of the Cold War.  Brown tells it like it is, and doesn’t try to be politic about how the facts make some of our anointed personas in this country look.  And, boy, do some of them come of looking like assholes.  All I can say is I am glad that I was too young to know how badly Nixon fucked us over and treated the American people like idiots.  I am glad that I was too young to realize what a lying manipulative jerk Reagan was.  For the most part the book deals with years that I have never seen, but have been living with the consequences of throughout my life, as well as my parents and possibly their parents before them.  Was FDR a good man or bad?  Was Johnson using the public to further his own ends?
     The second volume was bogged down, through no fault of the author, as he was only reporting the facts, in documents and laws and bylaws, and pure pettiness on the part of our supposed leaders.  There were so many instances of lying and corruption that even this straight ahead report of the facts had to be leavened with a tongue-in-cheek response at times.  I can see from this book that our leaders have slowly compromised us until we have lost any power we once might have had as a people- if we ever truly had that power.
     I was saddened and appalled by our recent history as reported in this book.  And it left me wondering how later generations will see us in our present crisis.

02/21/05
‘Playmates’ by Robert B. Parker
      To say that this guy is one of the reasons I write is an understatement.  Until I picked up his old novels, I thought there was no better crime novelist in the world than good old John D. MacDonald (by the way I still think he is awful great).  I spent about a whole summer picking up every one of his old Spenser novels in any used bookstore I could find in my hometown.  The good thing about Parker is that lost of people read his stuff, but for some reason rarely feel the need to hold on to them forever, like I do.  So I was able to find them all in short order.  They are a treasure of dialogue and characterization.  Each is a small sweet bon-bon of perfection.  Parker never wastes a word, a comma, or your time.  He has such great interplay between Spenser and Hawk- Spenser and anyone in his novels- that you feel as if you really know this guy.  I’ve been a fan for years, and have just gotten my wife interested in the series.  We now have everyone of them, and we’ve been able to discuss what Parker does with his books that makes us love them so.  That is a gift in itself, that ability to converse with my wife about books we both love.
     “Playmates” is no exception.  When Spenser takes on a mob, a corrupt school faculty, and even the boogeyman of illiteracy in college sports, he does what he does best: fix the problem.  There is a kind of Zen coolness about Spenser that attracts readers I think.  And if you are at least half way literate, there are so many little moments of pure joy to expect in one of Parker’s novels that you can’t wait to get to the next.  But I think the most important thing he does with this series of novels is that he makes Spenser a role model for modern maleness, something we need these days.

02/23/05
‘Stardust’ by Robert B. Parker
     Yes, I went to the next right away and fell right into it.  I had to stop myself from going on the next one from here, because I have a book I am trying to write and one I am trying to edit as well, so this was quite the distraction for me.  So, I made myself stop here.
     “Stardust” drags the stolid and inscrutable Spenser into the grimy world of Hollywood when he agrees to safeguard a young actress from a mysterious stalker.  When her stunt double is murdered things become even more serious.
     Parker never fails to deliver the goods, man.

03/05
I did not completely read one damn book the whole month...

04/17/05
'Faces of Fear' by Douglas Winter
    I was lucky enough to find a copy of this excellent book at the latest World Horror Convention in New York City.  It's been out of print for quite a few years, and I've never seen one up close.  It is one of those legendary books for writers who love the macabre, mainly because of Winter's usual astute pin point accuracy when it comes to interviewing writers.  No exception, this book.  Even though quite a bit of the information contained within is outdated by the new standards of publishing, and especially after the downfall of the popularity of horror in the 90s, I still found kernels of truth and redemption in its pages.  The interviews, for the most part, were great.  I especially enjoyed Blatty's; since having read 'Legion' and 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, he's become somewhat of a benchmark for my own style.  Some of the interviews left me dumbfounded as to how the hell their books had ever found print.  Should V.C. Andrews, sounding as flaky as a box of cornflakes, have been included?  Not really, but I can see how at the time Winter had to stretch a point to include her, since there were no popular female horror authors when the book first hit the shelves.  Now, of course, there are numerous examples of popular female horror writers from which to choose, and I hope one day he'll revamp the thing and get some updated interviews.
    On the whole, it left me feeling nostalgic for the by-gone days of horror past.  When King was king, and Barker was still a fresh new commodity.  Nowadays I don't see horror with the same rose-colored glasses as I once did.  Thanks to Winter's clear moment in time slap in the face that many of his books have been for me.  What I thought of as fantastic history of the genre, he shows, even in this book, as points along a curve destined to occur and finally to fall from grace in the publishing world.
    If one is lucky enough to find this book, get it and read it.  You won't be disappointed, especially if you are a writer as well.  In its pages you will read of the pitfalls and dangers of success in the bastard genre games.  But, most importantly, it will give you a sense of the awesome power of these folks' words, and how they help change the world for the better, even if for a too-short time.

04/21/05
'Dance of the Dwarfs' by Geoffrey Household
    I have heard many things about this novel over the years, as one normally does when one is always reading about writers and their influences, and I was curious why its impact had been felt by such writers as David Morell and so on.  Several times over the years I had meant to find a copy of it and finally read it, but something always seemed to come up to take its place in my TBR pile.  But after speaking with Morell himself at the last WHC, I was determined to do so.
    Household is one of those fringe names, a man who wrote in the early spy thriller vein with some success.  His style is definitely of that genre, but also, like Morell's own writing, steeped in the classics of literature.  One can see how Morell developed his own style from reading Household's novels.  Many of them sound like something Morell has written in contemporary settings.
    This novel worked for me on several levels, but mostly as a strangely exotic horror story.  If one is knows the South American legend of the Chupacabra this monster will sound familiar.  Household does such a great job building the story into a tense and action packed ride...and he does it in first person., something that I have always found difficult to do for a story of this nature.  His characters, for being excerpts in a journal, feel alive on the page, and even though he at times falls into the British prose lag, he still manages to make them romantic and funny and sad and loving.
    The main character is a botanist, sent to the South American jungle to study the plant life and to monitor its growth patterns, to try and make the jungle behave the way the government needs it to to keep its people fed.  What he finds is a mysterious creature that may be an anthropological throwback, or something much more dangerous.  The natives fear the dark and stay away from a certain part of the forest at all costs.  In his boredom, like many a person had done, he picks at this mystery like a scab, until he looses the hidden purulence beneath.  Once the monsters become unafraid, they become dangerous.  And make no mistake as you read this excellent story: it is a tale of monsters, both natural and unnatural.

04/25/05
'Grave Men' by Tom Piccirilli
    I don't read a lot of westerns anymore.  Like many genres, the style and stories get old pretty quickly.  But what Piccirilli does with the western is what he has done with all genres: he changes it to suit his style and need.
    'Grave Men' is like reading a 'Hap and Leonard' Lansdale novel, only with rolling sagebrush and six guns ablazin', and like most westerns, its quick paced, short, and full of great one liners from the main characters, heroes and villains alike.  I found myself hating that the thing was so short.  I wanted all those background stories which he alludes to for introduction to new characters.  I wanted to know their whole history.  That's the kind of book this is: it leaves you wanting more.  The crazy quilt of personalities that people this book feel as strange as a Lynch film, and yet as familiar as a La'mour tale.  If he keeps this series going, I know there will be some great things ahead for them all.  Insanity and villainy go hand-and-hand, and not always the bad guys either.  The author truly digs deep into the psyches of his characters and explores failed lives and black hate.  There is a sequel called 'Coffin Blues' which is in my TBR pile right now.  I can't wait to see what he does with the characters.    
    Two things can be said of Piccirilli: he is never boring and he has a strangle hold on the genres, squeezing hard to make them submit to his twists and turns.  And he gets better with every book, no matter the genre he decides to plant his current project within.

04/29/05
'Psycho' by Robert Bloch
    Bloch has been dead and gone now for some time.  Sadly, I was never able to meet him face to face, although I feel as if I have through reading is many now classic novels.  I saw 'Psycho' the movie when I was a young kid, about twelve or so, on a late night horror show.  It scared the bejesus out of me then.  Mainly because it was done so cleverly, building to the two moments that define the horror genre to a certain extent, the shower scene and when the mummified Mommy is found in the fruit cellar.
    But I had never read the book.
    A crime, really, as I think this should be required reading for any would-be writer.  It is the epitome of pacing and suspense in the old form, without the extraneous and tiresome gross-out factor that many newer thrillers pile on to keep the pages turning.  Bloch's story is followed by Hitchcock almost word for word, scene for scene. 
    Bloch does some great writing here, pulling the reader into Norman Bates terrible world of guilt and pent up lusts.  He is a murderer, and we learn that slowly throughout the novel, but we do still feel a certain kind of pity for him.  After all, is it really his fault?  Mother made him insecure and unwisely taught him that lust for the the flesh was to be reviled as impure and hateful.
    Everyone knows the classic setup of the tale by now, so I won't rehash it here.  But I do recommend it you are an aspiring writer this is one you must read, if for no other reason than to learn the ideal model of classic suspense building.
    And if you are a lucky reader who has never cracked the spine on this one, do so as soon as possible.  It is a great classic read of dark thoughts and darker deeds.

05/01/05
'The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing a Novel' by Thomas Monteleone
    I have read quite a number of books by authors whom purport to be the guiding light when it comes to pulling back the mysterious veil of being a real writer.  Some of my favorites over the years have been 'Zen and the Art of Writing' by Ray Bradbury, 'On Writing' by Stephen King, 'The Right to Write' by Julia Cameron, and now I would have to say that this is one to be added to that list.
    Monteleone does an amazing thing here.  He truly breaks the whole damn process down to a simple step by step guide to doing it in the real world...and he does so realistically.  He doesn't try to sugarcoat the bitter pill of reality, but he does make it funny.  His first requirement is one that a lot of wannabes always fail at: you have to actually write!  He doesn't hold with the classic 'writer's block' excuses either.  You either write or you do not.  Simple and to the point.  Once he has ascertained that you do, or want to, write, he then gives you a step by step guide to getting better faster.  I wish this book had been around when I first started getting serious about writing; it might have saved me a lot of years of struggling through the 'dos and dont's' of the process.  It will be an invaluable help for those beyond.
    But here's another great thing he does for the novice: he brings you through the process that follows having written the novel.  So now you got it written, what's next?  And he tells you what to be careful of and how to avoid the serious career pitfalls that he and his peers have fallen.  There are some good interviews in the back of the book as well, one great one with Straub, another with Blatty.
    Not only did I enjoy reading C.I.G. to Writing A Novel, but he taught me some things about editing as well, something that most new authors don't realize is the most important part of writing.  In my experience, I have found that once the person has gotten past the talking about writing thing, to actually having written a novel, there then comes the emotionally excruciating process of having to break it all down and put it back together again.  It is an ordeal, and Monteleone tells you it is.  But he also helps you get past the hurdles of trying to do too much at one time, and how to do it piecemeal, so that the goals always feel obtainable.
    Wanna write?  Get this book.  I guarantee you will not regret having it as a reference in the future.  For what he says within is timeless and will always be applicable to the process, if not the industry.

05/05/05
'Desolation' by Tim Lebbon
    I have steadily become a big fan of this guy's writing.  In my opinion, he's a new voice that grows more confident and mature with every new book he hits us with.
    'Desolation' is like a David Lynch film, weird and convoluted and nightmarish.  And I loved it.  In fact, I think this may be one of the most original horror novels I've ever read.
    It's the strange story of a young man named Cain, who's been recently released from an apparent insane asylum.  We join him  as he moves to a seedy side of town, into an apartment complex, which is peopled by some rather unusual inhabitants.  Sister Mary is a flying succubus-nun, George is a metamorphing beast that eats living flesh, and there's a woman who may or may not be many faces in one.  Much of the story feels like a nightmare through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic, as he meets and is disturbed by these strange new people.  Is he insane...or is this the real thing?  Cain finds a truth that is madness itself, thanks to Lebbon's wonderfully articulate style of characterization.   
    I don't want to spoil the novel for those of you who haven't yet read it, so let me just finish by saying that it has one of the most unusual endings in modern horror, something even M. Night Shamaleya might not have seen coming.

05/14/05
‘Family Inheritance’ by Deborah LeBlanc
    The great story that this debut novel provides doesn’t always hit the mark with some people.  Luckily, for LeBlanc, she has such a vivid eye for detail and characterization that this does transcend the usual pointless misfires that most debut horror novels give we readers.
    Jessie, just promoted at a large company, finds that her brother has unaccountably gone mad.  She and her best friend dash off to their home state of Louisiana to rescue him, finding along the way that there is a heck of a lot more to his seeming insanity.  By the end of the book, we’ve met some great characters and one can’t help but pull for Jessie and her brother, as they combat an ancient evil.  To give more details might ruin it, so I’ll stop there.  But do yourself a favor and read this book.  You’ll have a good time learning and reading.
     LeBlanc does her research for this story, bringing to it a gritty edge of reality about madness in Southern families, a sort of ‘family inheritance’ that one rarely discusses in polite company if you’re from the South.  But more importantly, LeBlanc handles the background scenes with the alluring melancholy of someone who distinctly misses their lost childhood.
     And best of all, this is not a one hit wonder: for she has a second d novel coming soon, ‘Grave Intent’.  I have a copy now and am reading it.  The two books are as different as night and day story wise, but you can feel her confidence kick in with this second novel.  I’m not sure if I would say she has a definite vision of the genre in mind yet, but she could conceivably become a big, big name in the next couple of years if she hits the conventions and signings to garner the genre audience.
     I will be reviewing that novel at a later date. 

05/19/05
‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ by J.K. Rowling
     First of all let me say that it took me years to make myself sit and start reading these books.  Mostly, that was due to the fact that I worked in a Barnes and Noble when they first hit the scene and everyone was talking about them.  Having to hear about how great something is everyday tends to sully you on the idea of partaking of that greatness.  Working in a bookstore makes one cynical, especially when people go on and on about new books.  Some of that can be blamed on an unconscious elitist attitude that is almost impossible to escape if you work in a bookstore; you become convinced that yours is the only valid litmus test of great reading.
    So after years of hearing about them, I finally decided to give them a try a couple of years ago, starting from the first book- by the way, you must do so to properly read this series of books, for each one is a graduated year for Harry as he makes his precarious way through magic academy.
    This is the third book in the, supposedly, six or seven book series, and I haven’t yet regretted being sucked into reading them.  Rowling has a wonderful sense of fun about the stories, and has allowed each year to become more emotionally complicated for Harry, and of course, for the reader as well.  This one has some disturbing moments, the stuff that nightmares are made of.  But she handles them with a certain sense of playfulness that doesn’t intend to psychically damage the young reader.  In fact, I think the adult audience may find some of the scenes more disturbing than the kids because of their (hopefully) matured emotional state.
    There’s death and darkness within these pages, and she is slowly bringing us to what I guess might be a pretty grim conclusion in the sixth (or seventh) and final installment in Harry’s ongoing adventures.  I look forward to finishing the series, and counting myself lucky that I finally pulled my head out of my ass to do read them.

05/25/05
‘The Cabinet of Curiosities’ by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
    This is the kind of great reading that teaches and entertains.  I find myself envious of these guys’ power to tell a great story, and in such adroit detail.  The things I learned about museum history, and so many other subjects that I lost count of them, is amazing.
    The story is creepy as all hell, and the characters dig inside, as they are thrust into the dark mystery of the past to solve a heinous crime.  As they get closer to discovering the truth of the past, a new series of copycat crimes begins in the Big Apple, which they must solve before one of their own becomes the next terrible victim of the killer known as ‘The Surgeon’.
    Preston’s and Child’s ultimate take on that legendary detective, Sherlock Holmes, is Agent Pendergast, a sometimes F.B.I. agent who we last saw in ‘Reliquary’ (the sequel to yet another exciting novel called ‘Relic’), who now comes onto the scene to solve this ancient mystery of a recently discovered sepulcher of ruined bodies from the early 1900s.  He is all knowing, yet cocky enough to get caught, and every armchair detective’s hero.  This guy knows trivial facts about everything and everybody.  He’s got what seems like unlimited resources, both mentally and monetarily.
    Can anyone be this good?
    Who cares?
    I feel very much the same way about Pendergast as I do about Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt, and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Hawk characters: he is a rogue heroic archetype in a diminishing contemporary mindlessness that seems to be sucking the lifeblood from our country.  He’s inventive, brave, and just crazy enough to try anything once to figure out a problem.  However, unlike Pitt or Spenser, Pendergast uses his head more than his gun or fists.  He’s a thinking man’s hero.  Kind of like MacGuyver, only not so silly.
    This may truly be one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years.  In fact, I read it straight through, never even once going to any other book during the process, something that I hardly ever do these days.  I was never bored by the story or the history of the story.  We have all of Preston’s and Child’s books on the shelf, and I can’t wait to dig into them now.

06/02/05
'Metamorphoses' by Ovid
   When one thinks on the 'splatter-punk' controversy that was such a big deal in the 80s, one can easily forget that these bloodied and visceral writers didn't hold a candle to Ovid.
    This series of loosely connected tales of bodily change draw from the ancient Greek and Roman myths of gods and man, of animal and plant.  The introduction claims there are more than 116 of these stories, told in a style of storytellers passing on their own stories to a make believe audience, but I think there were a hell of a lot more of them than that.  I don't think the small stories between the larger stories were being counted.  In any case, you have tales of dismemberment, of mothers killing their children, then feeding them their fathers as vengeance.  There are stories of man changed to birds, waterfalls, various plants and flowers, changed to monsters and the opposite sex.  There are tales of madness and depravity, of incestual love, homosexual love, of sanity against the odds.  And Ovid relates all of these things with a blow by blow lust for bloody detail that would make even John Skipp pause and grimace in distaste.
    One such tale is of the small battle between a group of drunken heroes and some randy Centaurs, in which Ovid gives us the detailed deaths of all the participants, including a disgusting death by spear to the lungs, a skull crushing blow by tree trunk (the Centaurs are absurdly huge and strong, and they want to mate with human women), and stomach roiling limb dismemberment.
    And this is just one such story within.
    For all of you horror completist, I challenge you to peruse this book without feeling a little nauseated somewhere along the way.  There are several different translations on the market these days, and you can probably download it for free on any major library site online, so do yourself the favor and read something disgustingly visceral and educational all at once.  Then when anyone says that horror is a bunch of blood and guts trash, you can tell all about a little book called 'Metamorphoses', by a little old writer named Ovid, and watch their eyes go wide with uneducated shock.

06/11/05
'Don Quixote (Man of La Mancha) by Miguel De Cervantes Saaverda
    Okay, okay, okay...so it took me almost a whole fucking year to finally read this book.  It's HUGE, man.  My paperback copy translation weighs in at about a pound, and is over 1000 pages long.
    And that isn't even including the 50 page introduction.
    So why did it take so long?
    It wasn't that the book was boring.  No way.  Because our knight errant and his sidekick, Sancho Panza, have one crazy adventure after another.
    It was more that it was like eating a rich chocolate confection: one does not gobble that sort of sweet down like a glutton; instead, one nibbles and savors, all the while rolling one's eyes in bliss.
    'Don Quixote' is a book (and character) that you hear quoted and talked about more than one think, but how many folks actually do themselves the favor of sitting down and enjoying it first hand?  Personally, I don't know a single person that has read it besides myself.  And, yet, people are always making reference to the knight whom tilts windmills.
    Don Quixote is an old man who's gone insane.  But it's a mostly harmless insanity, brought about by a pure boredom with his declining life.  He wants to live his final days in adventures, like the knights he's read of all his life.  During his many adventures, he meets society head on, not giving a fig for their sense of proprieties or their staid social rules.  His squire, Panza, who can quote a proverb at the drop of a hat, knows he's probably insane, but his own selfish desires for riches, promised by this armored madman with a lance, outweigh his good judgment in matters.
    Along the way, the reader learns a good deal about the nature of purposeful insanity, and while you may laugh at Quixote's ridiculous speeches and his blundering attempts at jousting with imaginary giants and dragons, you will learn something about your desire for adventures.
    After all, what is the act of reading really, other than an attempt to escape the humdrum world we live in?  Why watch movies other than for something to fall into for a couple of hours?  Don Quixote just carries his desires that final step and tries to live them out.
    When you try to read this, take your time, and enjoy the beautiful language of a poet turned author, and savor the hilarious and poignant moments of a man trying to escape his mundane existence.  But, please, don't try to fight a windmill.  As you'll see within these pages, they always win.

06/15/05
'War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells
    At the time of this writing, it is less than a week before 'Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds' begins.  I have seen a few of the commercials and it looks strikingly similar to what I've just read by the master of the horror/sci-fi story, Mr. Wells.  There are the red weeds, the towering despotic tri-tentacled metallic creatures that whip up humans for nourishment, and there is...Tom Cruise?
    Okay.  So Spielberg has obviously taken some liberties with the classic story.  And as he nearly always does, I'm sure he will make it uniquely his own.
    But let's talk about the book, because it is truly horrific in its own way.  There are several scenes in which we see what we already know in this day and age: that the human creature is its own worst enemy.  What makes it really nightmarish, however, is that the aliens just don't stop for anything.  They hit us like...well, like a bunch of hard core, fundamentalist terrorists, bent on the destruction of our way of life.
    After crash landing on earth in a fiery blaze, it doesn't take long for the humans to see that they are now the beasts, and more than a few times Wells makes it a point to compare us to the beasts that we have become.  He also includes some scenes, tastefully written, in deference to the staid English sensibilities, of violence so horrific that he stops short of telling it all.    
    The language is, of course, dated, but this excellent quick book is still one of the granddaddies of the genre.  It is horror; make no mistake about that.
    I can guarantee that this book will be around a lot longer than Mr. Spielberg's vision of it.

06/24/05
'Treasure Island' by Robert Louis Stevenson
    To say that this is one of my all time favorite stories is an understatement.  When I was a wee lad of five, my great grandmother taught me to read on my own.  'The Hobbit' and 'Treasure Island' are the two that I remember most from that especially formative time in my life.
    Who can resist the timeless story of Jim Hawkins, a young brave boy, and the sly Long John Silver, the peg legged pirate?  Who can forget that classic tune the pirates sing:  Yo, ho, ho...and a bottle of rum?
    This is what adventure is meant to be: dangerous and fun, dark and moral.
    I've read this gem more than twenty times in my life, and I never grow bored with it.  I can almost smell the sea and feel the roll of the ship under my feet, every time I read it.  I grew up in pirate country, where the original Blackbeard, Captian Edward Treche, once harbored off of the coast of Florida.  All my life I heard the legends surrounding the buried treasure he left behind.  There are ghostly tales of rotting wooden chest, chained to oaks in the swamps, that are gone when folks come back to retrieve the treasure therein.  I wanted so much to be on board The Hispaniola when I was a boy, just like Jim Hawkins that I used to traipse through those same swamps looking for the treasure.  Not to steal it, but to somehow summon Blackbeard forth to make him let me be his first mate.
    Of course, after having read several histories on real life pirates like Treach, I'm damned glad that never happened.
    If you've never read this classic, do yourself the favor of partaking of Mr. Stevenson's reliable tale of pirates and gold.

06/26/05
'Past Time' by Robert B. Parker
    Following the history of  Spenser and Hawk is always fun, and for me a hell of a learning experience.  Parker has such a sharp wit, and his carefully crafted sentences leap from the page with their verve.  I never fail to find some nugget of writing wisdom within his pages.  Not to mention, I love these characters.  If there was ever a mentor for me, it is Spenser.  He's been a personal inspiration for years, and Parker has been a writing inspiration.
    This novel reads like a tough guy version of Turgenov's 'Fathers and Sons', always circling the issues that men and their male children have to face: responsibility in the face of failure, and learning to let go of old ways, trade them in for what makes you happy.  We see that lose is not always a bad thing, and can help a person grow from it.  We also meet Pearl, Spenser's new dog, in this one. 
    Spenser is up against some tough Mafia men this time, and has to learn how to let go of things that he cannot fix for his surrogate son, Paul, a recurring character, and find some way of teaching his old enemy that he cannot make decisions for his own son, a failed crime boss.
    Reading Spenser novels is my one guilty pleasure.  All else is set aside while I burn through one after another, and I have to stop myself from going on the next one.  But... 

06/27/05
'Double Deuce' by Robert B. Parker
    Okay, so I got caught up in another one by this guy.
    This time Spenser and Hawk must go into a ghetto swarming with violent gangs and drugs, to find the killer of a fourteen year old girl and her three month old baby, proving again that evil and good are not always so black and white.  Much to Spenser's dismay, he finds himself in situations that he has no control over, and must stick by his friend Hawk, even though he is highly dubious of this bad guy's motives.
    I'm not sure how this would read to someone who has actually grown up in a ghetto and been faced with terrible futility of such a life.  I guess for the sheltered white folk that read his stuff it probably sounds right anyway.  I'll sure give him a hell of an 'A' for effort in any case.  It's an exciting read, full of death and danger, and of course, Pearl.
    Spenser's biggest danger is that Susan convinces him to move in with her.  Can such an autonomous person survive living with someone he loves?  Read the book and see.  You might be surprised at the answer.

07/04/05
'A Winter Haunting' by Dan Simmons
    I knew it had to happen sooner or later: Simmons wrote his male-menopause book.
    No...no...that's not saying it was bad- because if was quite good, actually.  But it was definitely his menopause book.  The story is about an aging college professor (actually Dale Stewart from Simmons' greatest horror novel, 'Summer of Night') who must confront his past ghosts and his present failures.  He goes home to die after losing his family due to his own extramarital screwing around, and finds his life turned upside down.  The title is a play on his other novel, 'summer' for their childhood, 'winter' for their elder years, and plays quite well with the classical acceptance of the male-menopause novel, turning it into a rip-roaring ghost story, in the Henry James vein.  After all, it's not the ghost that informs us in all great ghost tales; it is the haunted that tells all. 
    And once again it's not just the story itself that compelled me to keep going.  Simmons has a firm grounding in the classics of literature.  In this case, I'm talking about his use of Henry James' 'The Ambassadors' as part of the structure of the tale.  He references James' excellent work several times throughout 'A Winter Haunting', and draws forth an added layer with them.
   Recommended for readers of ghostly literature.

07/19/05
'Hyperion' by Dan Simmons
   This is the first book in his sprawling epic tale of a far-flung universe (so far far-flung, in fact, that sometimes the whole reads as a fantasy novel set in the future) and the wars and politics and terrors and fantastic wonders that this universe has to offer.
   I love this book.  I love the whole series, in fact.  And I cannot recommend this series loudly enough to all who have never read it.
   What I love the most about this first book is the structure, copied from 'The Canterbury Tales'.  It is the separate stories told by the men and woman traveling to a planet to basically sacrifice themselves to a being known as 'The Shrike', a mysterious creature that kills with a supernatural celerity and goriness that most times only appear in horror novels.  Which is another aspect of this fine series: just when you think it's all space battles and laser guns, Simmons turns it around into a horrific depiction of love and death.  It is a tale firmly grounded in the classics, as are all of his works.  Just in this first book alone we see references not only to 'The Canterbury Tales', but to the great poet Lord Byron, Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' and others.  Again, these references add an extra layer or two to the complex story of sacrifice and love.

07/23/05
'A Choir of Ill Children' by Tom Piccirilli
   To say that Tom is one of the greatest new writers of neo-Southern Gothic is an understatement.  In a way, he has almost reinvented the sub-sub-genre with first this book, and now with 'November Mourns', his second attempt at the style.  The great thing about his writing is that he knows how to mix the genre conventions to come up with something all his own.  There is no simplistic story here.  It's complexly structured for all of the simplistic sentence structure- I think an intentional thing on his part, since I have read some of his other works and have seen the difference.
   Within these pages one may find all of the great things about Faulkner, Williams, and Tod Browning.  There are no boundaries that Tom will not cross to gain your sympathy for his sad characters, no depravity, nor forlorn moment of realization.  It is required reading for anyone interested in how to build atmosphere and mood.
   Unfortunately, to tell much about the story is to give away much of it.  Best to read it and try to convince yourself it's all make believe.

07/30/05
'The Invisible Man' by H. G. Wells
   After all of these years, it is a great feeling to come back to one of my favorite books.  Wells had my love from the first few pages of 'The Island of Dr. Moreau', and it has been a love affair for the continuance of my life.  There was always something deeper than the story with Wells writing, I think.  I know it has always affected me from an early age, when I built sympathy for Jack, the inventor of the secret formula that has made him invisible to the world.  And it is this newfound power that finally does drive him insane.  If no one sees you, how can you effect your world?  And if given the chance, who would could keep the awesome power from eating away their morals?
   Even as dated as it may read to some, the notion is still a chilling one, and he has some wonderful observations on the essence of power and avarice.  For those who have never read the book, this is not like the great James Whale adaptation.  There is no love story, for one, and there are many instances where your sympathies will lie solely with Jack and his struggle for power enough to come back to the real world.

08/08/05
'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' by J. K. Rowling
   What a great read!  I know a lot of people were put off with the sheer bulk of the novel, but I think It was important bulk, which was taken up in the next novel.  There was a lot of background needed for this one, and that takes room to do it.
   Aside from that, this was one of the best of the series so far.  Much darker than the others in tone and mood.  This is not your kid's Harry Potter.  There is death in this one, real death that no magic can dispel.
   The Goblet of Fire is the cup used to pick the participants of a great contest between other schools of magic and Hogwarts.  Against the rules, Harry is picked to be a contestant, and things get rougher from there.    

08/21/05
'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' by J. K. Rowling
   This one takes a natural lead in from the last novel, bringing us into his next year at Hogwarts, and introducing some very adult themes to the series.  Again, this is not your kid's Harry Potter, and should not be handed to those who are easily affected by dark mood and atmosphere.  This is a book that begins to delineate the struggle between good and evil that is tearing apart Hogwarts, and Harry and his friends.  It is more complex than the last book, and promises some creepy things for the next one.
   The Order of the Phoenix are the good guys...or are they?
   You'll have to read to find out.
   Let me just say this: I think this may be the next generation's 'Chronicles of Narnia'.

08/23/05
'Where Angels Fear to Tread' by E. M. Forster
   This is a story of accepted social perimeters, of unthinkable breeches of conduct, and finally of redemption by the helping hand of love.
   When their widowed sister-in-law travels to Italy with a young companion and finds love with a socially depressed Italian fish monger, the family goes into an uproar.  The machinations used by the grandmother and daughter against the poor woman and her eventually widowed Italian husband are terrible, but almost justifiable given the poor environment in which the child must be raised far away from England and a proper English family.
   This one is hard to review without giving away too much of the ending.  Let me just say that I found myself in tears toward the end, and smiling at the final two pages of forgiveness and redemption.
   As you can see from my previous reviews of his work, Forster has become one of those wonderful, rarest of things: a find in my later years.  I am slowly reading his few books, coveting them for later on.  Fact is, I only have a couple left...damn it.

08/25/05
'Aspects of the Novel' by E. M. Forster
   This is one of his few non-fiction writings, a collection of essays given at King's College in his later years, about the way a novel is broken down from a reading and writing point of view.  I found it to be heavily laden with references to plenty of authors I've read, including Dickens, James, Wharton, and Austen.  He makes some very good points about the way each writes, and how the structure can be effected by sentences and paragraphs, and the small details they entail.  But I think what I found most enlightening about the aspects he touches on are his thoughts on place and time for the tale, in which he compares Scott and Cooper and DeFoe, the holy trinity of historical adventure writers as far as I'm concerned.  He brings to my attention some aspects of their writing I had never seen before.  Across the years, this great writer, this great teacher of minds, taught me something valuable about others.
   Although I love his writing, I don't recommend this to the novice reader.  Some of it can get a little tedious unless you've read a great deal of the one hundred and something books he references.
   By the way, he does argue at the beginning of the book that he would not be talking about Russian literature at all.  He made a good point that Russian lit tends to be far outside the usual spectrum of writing, steeped in philosophy and pathos as it is, it wasn't an easy task to forsake them; but I could see his point.

09/01/05
'The Sheltering Sky' by Peter Bowles
   The story of a married couple fleeing from their own ennui across the great deserts of Africa and the Middle East, it is hard reading some times, but I did finally get to a point in the novel that I understood the complexity of the relationship between the husband and wife.  There is a lot of beautiful writing in this, Bowles most famous novel of post WW II expatriate Americans, but there is also a lot of horrible events that sway your sympathies from the husband to the wife and from her back to him again, in a tangle of emotions.  That is some powerful writing, in my opinion.
   Bowles captures the mood of self loathing and the local disdain for the rich blaise American travelers of the period.  He also gets a grimy sense of sand in your shoes and the flies in your face and the stink of the dead lying in the streets of the poorer cities that no one sees on the main routes.  This is the kind of book that can get a little stylistic for me at times, but still a fine read, once you get past all the style, if you know what I mean.  If you don't then read it and see what I mean.
   For those of you old enough to remember the old Police song, 'Tea in the Sahara', this is the book that Sting got the idea of the song from.

09/02/05
'Zen and the Art of Writing' by Ray Bradbury
    Simply a classic of writing tomes.  There is no way to describe the sense of freedom I got from this book when I first read it in my early twenties.  This was during a period where I was still struggling to come to terms with the idea of the years of labor I had to look forward to to get anywhere with my writing.  This was during those terrible years of self doubt and fear of the years ahead of me.  Bradbury quieted those fears with a few simple pages of his easy going attitude about the craft of writing.  He showed me a better way of dealing with those doubts and a way of digging into the mythology of my own childhood for stories not yet told.  He taught me a valuable lesson about voice and style.
   And here's the cool thing: he taught all that again this time around.
   For those who are interested in taking up the craft of writing, this is the book to read first. before you steep yourself in all of those binding rules of the profession, and maybe lose some of the fun spontaneity of it.  Much recommended to all.

09/04/05
'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' by C. S. Lewis
   To say that the Chronicles of Narnia were some of the most formative books of my youth would be an understatement.  They're up there with 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' by Tolkien and all of those damned Moorcock books about pale skinned elves and swords (hehehe).  I truly love coming back to this novel time and time again, and I think it is one of the classic of any genre.  Any reader of any age should pick it up and read about the struggle between good and evil, as Aslan and the Witch build their armies for the great war to come.  Yes, it is heavily Western Christian, rife with the ethical and religious views of that school of thought, but beyond that it is a great story about children coming of age and learning compassion and honor among the fantastical setting that is Narnia.
   When I was young, I wanted so much to go to Narnia and explore that I would read the series over and over again in the hopes that I would so memorize the details that Lewis gave me that it would finally propel into the magical world.
   That never happened, of course, but now there is a huge blockbuster movie coming that should make me feel as if I could go there.  And, you know, even at thirty-six, I still wouldn't mind too terribly going to Narnia to explore.

09/10/05
'The Age of Innocence' by Edith Wharton
   Archer Newland may be one of the most fully realized male characters ever written by a woman.  Before anyone thinks that I am being sexist in this comment, let me explain that I have had some difficulty in making a fully realized female character of my own, so I know what I'm talking about.  For a woman to write about the secret joys and desires of a male is not that easy to do- not convincingly, and not anything beyond the facile sexual urges that plague we men.  But what she does is incredible.  She gets inside Archer's head and heart and makes us understand his need for love.  He truly loves his cousin by marriage, and despite all of ploys and counterploys, it is the woman who puts to death his almost realized plans.
   Another of those great reads that I can't tell too much or else I'll blow the plot for any planning to read it.  All I can say is that Wharton's voice is strong and true in these pages and she gives us a final view of the last death throes of the New York society at the turn of the century.  This is society at its worst.

09/17/05
'An American Horror Story' by James Newman
   I am one of the lucky few who's been given the chance to read this novella, for which his newest novel to soon be released by Leisure is based.
   James' use of small details about his characters motivations, their dislikes and prejudices, gives this story a round sense of real life drama.  It's about a man (a horror novelist, of course) who finds a young girl's raped and mutilated body in his neighborhood while walking his dog.  His neighbors become sure that he's the killer and begin to hound him, throwing stones at his house, tearing down his mailbox, and finally assaulting his home en masse, like something out of 'The Night of the Living Dead'.
   This man's voice has grown by leaps and bounds since his first novel, 'Midnight Rain'.  I know for a fact he has added quite a bit more backstory for the eventual release of the Leisure entitled 'Animosity'.  I can't wait to see the changes this novella goes through before it hits the shelves.

09/17/05
'The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini' by Benvenuto Cellini
   This is one of the classics of autobiographies, written by one of histories great artists.  Like most autobiographies he paints himself as the martyr in many of the situations, and at times he admits that his temper and greed caused his downfall before some of the great men of his time.  It's adventurous and bleak, and at times light hearted and full of savvy.  I found it hard going for months to get through it, mostly because I couldn't find much sympathy for someone who admitted his stupidity in his financial and personal dealings and didn't seem to learn anything from his dumb moves.  He writes about his years as a soldier, artist, politician, and rake as blithely as he writes about his murders and political ploys to have others torn down for his own advancement.  Keeping in mind this is the Europe of 14th century, I still found his devilish take on tossing aside his female conquests a little distastetful.

10/02/05
'Faust: Part One' by Goethe
   A classic for certain of the ancient story of a man who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge outside the sphere of mortal man.  I'm glad I read the 40 pages of introductory notes to this smallish play, or else I might have been a puzzled about some of the ancient cultural and literary references.  According to the notes, this part one took almost thirty years for Goethe to complete, incredible when you think about it.  That was over half of life devoted to writing and re-writing this small play, and then working on part two later, adding bits and pieces here and there to tie the two together.
   There are sections within that will undoubtedly seem very familiar to those of you who've read Clive Barker's 'Damnation Game' since that's what he based his first novel upon.

10/05/05
'Great Train Robberies of the West' by Eugene B. Block
   A book I read primarily for research for a western novel I intend to finish by next year, I found plenty of great little anecdotal tales for my work.  This is a small book, but chock full of history of train barons, robbers, and the lawmen who gave chase for the sake of money and fame.  I highly recommend this to anyone who is lucky enough to find a copy.  It was simply written with a lot of back history to catch up the reader on the critical events of the day that drove the lawful citizen to become lawless.

11/05/05
'Imagica' by Clive Barker
    What can a writer say about a book that changed his young life?  Taken at face value, I think even Barker would say that “Imagica” was somewhat of a riff on subjects that he'd already examined in “The Great and Secret Show” and “Weaveworld”, most prominently the notion of secret worlds within worlds.  But I think what made “Imagica” greater than these pre-examined themes of hidden lives and magic was the inevitably tragic romance between Gentle and Pie O’ Pah.  Primarily, this is a book about union and disunion, about men and women and their powers for creation and destruction.  It's a book about the redemptive power of love and dissolutionary power of jealousy.  It is a story of all the kinds of love we know: paternal, maternal, romantic, filial, familial, heterosexual, homosexual, asexual and self love.  It is a book of the secret shape of the universe, the erroneous finality of death, and the face of God finally revealed as a mean spirited frosaker of the truth and life.
   Finally, I think this may be Barker's best, and final, word on the state of his own beliefs and loves.
   I know it has been a book that has enriched me through the years, as some claim about the Holy Bible or the Koran.  It has given me direction emotively and professionally, and is highly recommended by this writer for those who want not only a grand book of fantasy and love, but a book that may instruct and edify at the same time.

11/15/05
'Captain Blood' Raphael Sabotini
   Hands down, my favorite Errol Flynn movie, I have tried for a long time to find it in paperback.  I finally did.  And let me say: what a read!  Sabotini had a way of capturing the unwilling pirate's emotions and disdain for authority.  the movie hardly covers all of the themes that he found in this work.  The biggest was the fact that as a pirate, Blood finds himself surrounded by the aristocracy who turn out to be more piratical than he ever could be.  Sabotini was at one time the man in Hollywood when it came to adventure, having penned 'Scaramouche', 'The Black Swan', and 'The Sea Hawk'.  This is classic adventure literature of the highest order and anyone interested in pirates should give it a read.