Book Reviews

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I've read a little about Haunted and not sure it's my thing but might check it out at some point. Maybe not, though, if you hated it that much. There's too much good stuff to get to.

Sometimes I'll break up huge novels with short stories here and there, and in doing so came across the Palahniuk story "Zombies."

I thought this one was brilliant, so good that it pushed me to read Survivor before returning to the novel I was already in the middle of. It's about an epidemic of youths using defibrillators on themselves to escape societal pressures, is about a 15 minute read and is available free online at the below (it seems the name changed from "Zombie" to "Zombies" somewhere between original publication and the collection I was reading). If you ever feel you may give the author another chance I'd suggest this one. If you don't like it then that would be it, that's my big gun.

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/news/zombi...huck-palahniuk

[Theli]

I've only read one Palahniuk novel, Haunted, and I just did not like it. Pretty much turned me away from his work for good. Just came across as short-sighted, vitriolic, pompous and poorly written. The attempts at social commentary were laughably shallow, ignorant and judgmental.

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Survivor – Chuck Palahniuk

Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
To be or not to be.
Every time you don’t throw yourself down the stairs, that’s a choice. Every time you don’t crash your car, you reenlist.

In his 30’s Tender Brandon is one of the last known survivors of a religious cult that terminated in mass suicide a decade earlier. The number of members who lived through the ordeal is dwindling due to a deeply ingrained sense that members need to kill themselves when the timing is right. And someone may be stalking the remaining few to speed things along. The books opens with Tender alone on a commercial aircraft, explaining his life story to the black box before the plane runs out of fuel and nosedives.

We learn Tender was a born and bred slave to menial labor and sent out into the world, as are most all of his brothers and sisters, as nearly unpaid experts in things like gardening, cleaning and cooking. While balancing his life of labor and meetings with his social worker Tender meets the girl, Fertility, who sees the future and meddles with his life. When the media learns the number of survivors is narrowing to just him they turn everything into a ticket-selling feeding frenzy.

The story is irreverent and contemptuous, a vicious social satire framed with religion, and everything is crackpot. Shots are taken at numerous aspects of the modern consumerist lifestyle and none of them are off the mark. Of course, this perspective on modern life was already laser-sighted and brutalized with his first novel, Fight Club, but that doesn’t make anything here less true. It’s about a modern human organism so socially dumbed-down, so beholden to celebrity lifestyles and reality television that the last thing we want to do is make our own decisions when others can make them for us. Our lives have been taken over to the extent we’re not really alive, we’re just inevitable statistics on actuarial tables waiting to be realized, moved from the red column to the black. Marketing taking priority over substance is the key to Survivor.

Let’s look at Amazon’s rating system for an ironic example:

This book rates as 4.5 stars, as does Fight Club, but they are not equal. Survivor is good. It’s very good, but Amazon’s system, where every positive experience needs to rate a 4 or a 5, doesn’t allow for real distinctions. If a more realistic, less sensational rating system were adopted we could actually trust ratings. I know it wouldn’t sell as many books, at least at first, because books wouldn’t be artificially boosted at a glance, but we also wouldn’t have to wade through so much to get at the good stuff. It’s just possible the number of serious readers would increase.

If John Doe gets turned on to reading after a friend’s great book recommendation, then starts out on his own journey only to repeatedly encounter mediocre books all rated by the masses as averaging between 4 and 5 stars, how soon until he gives up and goes back to television and everyone loses? This book’s a perfect example. It’s good, and you can’t go wrong reading it. But if you only have the time left in your life to read one more book with a philosophical bent it shouldn’t be this one. Go for Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Or Voltaire’s Candide. Or King’s The Stand. Or Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Or Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales. Or Fight Club, or this or that; there’s a big list that I know of and a much bigger one that I don't. But with Amazon you couldn’t tell because everything that's good has a 4.5 star rating and looks like it's a masterpiece. They’re the de facto leader yet they’re confusing things for people who want to learn and not just follow a train of lemmings right off the Stupid-Cliff. It’s not about truth, it’s about selling stuff. And that’s exactly the type of thing Survivor is skewering.

Fantastic social commentary resides within these pages but keeping it from the top echelons is its uneven transitions between the sometimes sly but usually biting implications of modern society and occasional stale passages of exposition—it just bogs down a little here and there. But when it on, it’s on.

Survivor is a well-recommended read that you probably won’t want to have missed it when it’s all said and done. Fight Club is a similar but superior novel so go for that one first, and if you liked it chances are you will this one as well.

“You can tell people the truth, but they’ll never believe you until the event. Until it’s too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.”

3+ stars

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Darker Places - Richard Matheson

"You're improving on evolution then."
"Let's just say cooperating with it."

In his introduction Mr. Matheson makes it clear these were predominately earlier stories and that he tried over his career to maintain his distance from the horror and dread contained here. He never wanted these published, considering them too dark and having mostly forgotten about writing them, but relented for a 2004 Gauntlet edition.

“Revolution” – A very young boy is at the butcher’s with his mother and their pet dog Muggins when the boy questions the butcher about meat. He begins to understand meat comes from creatures that have been alive and enters into hysterics for Muggins’ life, thinking the dog will become food next, and his horror spreads to his family.

The Puppy – One of two novellas, Sara is desperately trying to care for her young boy Davie and one night is startled to find a puppy in her apartment, one she is afraid might hurt her delicate son. She decides to get rid of it, a task more difficult that it might seem.

“Little Girl Knocking On My Door” – The crowning achievement here, a mother remembers when a disturbing child showed up at her door, asking the somehow chilling question, “please ma’am, may I play with your little girl?”

Cassidy’s Shoes – The second novella, a virtuoso lead in a troupe of dancers expires after a period of spiraling down into madness and while management figuratively scrambles to fill his shoes a cast member literally does so.

“The Hill” – A man is on his way to the post office when interrupted by another man who needs his help in keeping a lookout for a third party who will be along shortly. One of my favorites.

“Intergalactic Report” – This one's written as a kind of alien, computerized document concerning investigation of a slaughter that occurred at a temple containing The Ultimate Truth. Another of my favorites here, and basically just a single page.

Creature – A screenplay based on a John Saul novel that never made it into production (he explains why in his introduction to the script), this is the story of bio-engineering in a small town that’s working on producing the next wave of human evolution, and is producing a current wave of super-athletes. But the price associated this kind of advancement is high.

Creature makes up the bulk of the collection, about half of the book, and throughout the read conjures up images of 70’s style cutting-edge technology. This could just be me, though. It’s the first script I’ve ever read and I liked it but felt most of the other stories here edged it out.

Overall this is definitely dark stuff, and from a master storyteller like Mr. Matheson you can’t go wrong here if you like horror.

4 stars

*Since this edition stands alone, I’ve never seen any of these stories elsewhere, I’ve got to point out there are a couple of typos in “Little Girl Knocking On My Door” (bands for hands and cheat for chest) that are enough to interrupt the flow, and another minor one a few pages later. Also the page numbers in the TOC don’t actually match the page numbers of the stories, becoming progressively more inaccurate—by the time you hit the introduction for Creature there’s a 12 page difference. Not the end of the world but unfortunate in an expensive book.

My copy, ordered from Gauntlet, did not come with the script page signed by Matheson as did the other lettered copies of Darker Places. I asked Barry about this and he sent the following as a replacement. It is a digital copy of a handwritten, signed document, but Mr. Hoffman assured me this (copy) was in fact the exact, original document he received from Mr. Matheson via FedEx when putting together the book in 2003 prior to its publication as the backstory to “Creature.”

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[Brian861]

Thanks Brian. We're agreed, this is a really special story. It's startling how fast things change and it's Mr. King's ability to bend reality that makes it so much easier to gain perspective. I loved this book as a whole but especially feel that impossible connection he forges with readers in the first half (first 100,000 words!) is just pure magic.

You're most welcome, Andrew. Agreed!

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Thanks Brian. We're agreed, this is a really special story. It's startling how fast things change and it's Mr. King's ability to bend reality that makes it so much easier to gain perspective. I loved this book as a whole but especially feel that impossible connection he forges with readers in the first half (first 100,000 words!) is just pure magic.

[Brian861]

Excellent review, Andrew of one of my favorite stories and one I revisit every couple of years or so. I'd love to see a reboot of the film as well; if done correctly of course. I think it's a timeless tale of a boy's love for his machine (his freedom), his best friend, his girl, and how quickly those priorities can get screwed up. With a little help of outside forces in the world of SK. Right, wrong, or indifferent; I cheer inside each time Arnie's bullies get their due.....

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Christine – Stephen King

“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.”

Somehow managing to go 33 years since its publication without reading Christine, approaching the halfway point, having covered some of the most brilliantly written, intimate material I’ve seen from Mr. King, I knew a big part of me was in there with Arnie. Probably a bunch of us can relate to parents who seemed to care only about what they cared about, not so much what their kid cared about, because if they in their wisdom didn’t already care about something or disagreed with it then that something must be no good—get rid of it.

Young Arnold Cunningham is riding shotgun with his buddy Dennis when they pass a rotting heap of a Plymouth Fury junked on the side of the road displaying a reluctant For Sale sign. Arnie is instantly smitten and buys the car, costs be damned, and begins an impossible restoration process. He can taste potential freedom for the first time in his familial-dominated life and pours his heart and soul into the idea of Christine, his new love, setting him free.

His parents immediately cannot stand the car or how it represents Arnie pulling away from them. His one friend and his eventual girlfriend see a dangerously close relationship developing between Arnie and his car and begin speaking out against Christine. This serves to strengthen the bizarre relationship, and Christine’s malevolent spirit begins challenging Arnie’s enemies and those rivaling for his affection as people around him present their ultimatums. And it gets ugly.

The book is eerie in its ability to summon up sentiment from our teens. How about you parents out there? Have you created any Arnold Cunninghams, pushed them into corners? Because Christine only gained her real power over Arnie when he had nowhere else to turn, when he had her or had nothing, at least in his mind.

Yes, this is the horrific story of evil manifested and attached to a car, as everyone knows, but it didn’t have to go down this way. Because more than the story of the murderous spirit in Christine this is the story of the importance of listening to those we care about instead of just pretending to listen, for those times when real guidance or empathy is necessary. And what can go wrong when we’ve misjudged. God help the parents. And God help the kids when the parents are mistaken.

“The terrible feeling, the terrible image persisted: that the first time he had talked to Arnie Cunningham, he had been talking to a drowning man, and the second time he had talked to him, the drowning had happened—and he was talking to a corpse.”

4+ stars

christine PS.jpg

*This review was written about a week ago when the book was finished but I decided not to post it, mostly because it was hot and angry. I’ve toned it down and posted it now because it was an honest reaction to a fantastic novel. One day I'd like to have a limited copy of the PS (pictured) or Grant edition.

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“Throttle” – Stephen King, Joe Hill

A father, his headstrong son, his old war buddy from Vietnam and seven other road brothers of The Tribe (Live on the Road, Die on the Road) get mixed up in a deal that goes bad. Very bad. While discussing the matter in a restaurant parking lot they become aware of a nearby trucker who promptly leaves the family of bikers only to terrorize them when they move out. As all synopsis state the tale is homage to Richard Matheson’s “Duel” where an unstoppable king of the road must be stopped, originally appearing in the tribute anthology He Is Legend.

This one reads like lightning as you might expect from collaboration between these two. Even the conversation leading to initial action is fast and brutal and you learn a bit of character backstory on the road. Once it really gets going there’s no stopping the momentum.

Despite honoring the framework of an outstanding story, the collaboration of extremely gifted authors and a killer pace, this one doesn’t quite go where it needs to go for 5 stars but comes close on speed alone. It’s riveting but doesn’t match the desperate tension of its predecessor even if its stakes are higher.

“Throttle” is about 14,000 words to the 10,000 of “Duel” and is over well before you know it.

“You couldn’t drive a man’s family to earth and expect to live.”

4 stars

*Image is in the Kindle edition but looks taken from the comic adaptation (Nelson Daniel)
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The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury

“Amoebas cannot sin because they reproduce by fission. They do not covet wives or murder each other. Add sex to amoebas, add arms and legs, and you would have murder and adultery.”

Today it came to my attention I’ve approached Ray Bradbury like an idiot, which doesn’t surprise me because it’s from that same direction I’ve approached all kinds of things. Most of my experience with the celebrated author has come from more modern anthologies often using tales that don’t properly represent him. Cheaper tales, maybe. I allowed those stories to form an initial opinion of the writer as well as dictate the urgency for his main works to be read. That was a mistake, and I understand I’m possibly the last person on these boards to have read this.

The Martian Chronicles consists of a series of short stories stitched together to form a cohesive whole, which I’d heard is ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ and I agree. The version of the book I read is the updated one, changing dates to be more futuristic for the modern reader and removing the tale “Way in the Middle of the Air” for PC sensibilities (don’t get me started) which I tracked down and placed back into its proper order after “Musicians.” In 1997 when this tale was removed from the collection and all story dates were moved out 31 additional years two other shorts were added in, “The Fire Balloons” and “The Wilderness.” All are considered here.

At the beginning mankind has perfected rocketry and launched a series of expeditions to Mars, which is a surprise to the Martians because their scientists had always told them that the atmosphere on Earth was too oxygen-rich to support life.

The first couple of humans meet opposition all too familiar to us today. The next aren’t believed to be Earthlings and try to prove themselves to the inhabitants. The third has humanity revealing some of the weaknesses that caused people to want to abandon Earth in the first place. Martian and man meet at the same time while thousands of years apart. Inhabitants realize colonization is inevitable and retreat. Man exerts his will on the planet, removing signs of previous ownership. These are some of the stories, and familiar characters weave in and out throughout the book.

Overall it’s a kind of Wild West on Mars as people on Earth rush to escape war, poverty and oppression and take their chances on new lives. But man will be man, and most of the heavier thinkers among the early pioneers know that it’s only a matter of time, maybe 100 years, before all earthly problems have migrated to the new world.

And that’s what happens. And that’s the point. We can’t escape ourselves, ever, and while man is capable of breeding individuals with the drive to change, to do good works, eventually the sheer weight, volume and volume of humans drowns out sense. No one has yet solved this problem on our world today, and Mr. Bradbury knew this and wrote about it. This book is an examination of those foibles, the issues that keep us from being better than we are even when we give it everything we’ve got. But there’s hope. Every time one of us does something good, something that makes the world just a little bit better there’s a little bit more hope, and I guess that sounds cheesy but it’s still about the most important thing we can do. Will it help? Will we survive? We can hope.

I don’t normally post these but here are my ratings for the individual stories. Without adding them up to ‘more than the sum of its parts’ and viewing as a novel this would still be the highest rated collection I’ve ever read:

Rocket Summer - 2
Ylla - 4- (3+)
The Summer Night - 4-
The Earth Man - 5
The Taxpayer - 3+
The Third Expedition - 5
...and the Moon Be Still As Bright - 5-
The Settlers - 4-
The Green Morning - 4-
The Locusts - 3
Night Metting - 5
The Shore - 4
The Fire Balloons (added) - 4-
Interim - 3
The Musicians - 4-
Way in the Middle of the Air - (removed) - 3+
The Wilderness (added) - 4
The Naming of Names - 5-
Usher II - 4+
The Old Ones - 3 (n/a?)
The Martian - 4 (4+)
The Luggage Store - 4+
The Off Season - 4
The Watchers - 4+
The Silent Towns - 5
The Long Years - 5- (4+)
There Will Come Soft Rains - 5-
The Million-Year Picnic - 5

I don’t really know what else to say. It’s a beautiful collection of stories and a beautiful snapshot of the human race. And it’s not a picture of us caught in amber from the time when it was originally published in 1951, this is a modern picture of us that still dates all the way back to when we first picked up clubs. We sometimes have the intelligence, the wisdom and the empathy to overcome as individuals, just not the inclination as a whole. Mr. Bradbury’s examination of these issues is art in its highest form.

“We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.”
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“Who are we, anyway? The majority? Is that the answer? The majority is always holy, is it not? Always, always; just never wrong for one little insignificant tiny moment, is it?”
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“If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.”

5 stars


This one’s for you, sir. Sorry I'm late.

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The Man Who Made Models – R.A. Lafferty (vol. 1)

“A German of the last century stated that the generally bad design of eyes offered irrefutable evidence that God was a bungler.”

Most of the gut-bustingly funny quotes I could list here are more so if you have the context from the previous sentence or two, with that context built upon the previous paragraph or two, and all of a sudden you really need the whole 15 minute story if you want to be rolling on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. And I kid you not, with some of these stories you will curl up into a ball, stomach muscles finding the humor even if your mind is still catching up (though you may not necessarily be on the floor).

This first book in a planned series of twelve volumes covering Mr. Raphael Aloysius Lafferty’s entire career in short stories consists of 17 tales. My understanding is these stories are out of print with Centipede now bringing them all back and some basic searches seem to bear that out. But that’s the only thing that makes them obscure. Some of the greatest writers of our time look to this man as an idol of imagination. The volume’s introduction by Michael Swanwick is informative, touching, and a bit of hero-worship. I’ve read the introduction to volume 2 by Harlan Ellison and much of the same applies. This quiet, unassuming, deeply religious man from Tulsa, Oklahoma was a giant to some of the greatest writers of our age like Ellison, Gaiman and Wolfe.

“Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space, he filled it with his imagination.”

We open with a man who carves intricate models of humans and the subjects always disappear as the models are finished. But when the human subjects reappear, the models are gone. A policeman trying to stop a gargantuan theft attempts to pin the crime on the sculptor and has his own way of manipulating carvings. Near the close is a tale of a man looking for an $85,000 loan and ending up in front of a street-peddler who claims to clear profits of a nickel on a good week, but the potential borrower witnesses the peddler make a loan of 2.5 million to a well-known businessman while deciding if he wants to accept his own loan with its accompanying catch. And in between is a series of stories that fall into the category of “I’ve never read anything like it.”

It’s not horror unless you count a man fighting to be the ultimate hunter while being ripped apart. It’s not sci-fi unless you count a man building his own living mice out of plasma. It’s not fantasy unless you count a man casting spells of perception on land to make it nearly invisible so he can avoid paying taxes. And it’s not absurd. Not unless you count a state-of-the-art communications device with serious issues communicating. It’s a highly concentrated dose of allegorical and deep but whimsical storytelling.

I’ve seen a few photos of the man, read a bit about him from a couple of introductions and have started to form a working knowledge through the stories themselves, all of which have led me to a mental image of R.A. Lafferty in action—it’s something akin to Tom Bombadil.

If anyone here is unfamiliar with Mr. Lafferty but your interest is piqued you may want to click the following link, scroll down a bit and open "Narrow Valley" which will take around 15 minutes to read.

http://www.ralafferty.org/works/coll...nline-stories/

“And I will tell you something else if you will promise not to tell the monkeys.”

4 stars

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This Year’s Class Picture – Dan Simmons

“Mr. Geiss grunted, pulled the new boy to his feet with the wire noose, opened the door with one hand, and shoved him in ahead of her with the pole. There would be just enough time for cleanup before the first bell rang.”

I don’t much care for the zombie sub-genre. Zombie stories remind me too much of walking down the street, looking out the window, working in an office or, God forbid, going to the mall, all of which indicate the world ended a long time ago and we’re just waiting around for everyone to realize it’s already over.

That being said, Dan Simmons’ This Year’s Class Picture is one of the best stories I’ve read, even though it contains zombies.

Ms. Geiss, possibly the last living teacher on the planet, is clinging to her past life as a tough-as-nails but dedicated teacher. Though her students are zombies she keeps bringing them into the classroom to learn despite their mindless actions and constant attempts to devour her. During the times the students are in her class they are under her protection and she’ll do whatever she can to keep them focused and incentivized to learn, including actions she would have found revolting when the world was alive.

The heart of this story is a teacher’s determination to break through to her students, to show them they matter, to demonstrate they can be better than they are if they apply themselves. This isn’t about zombie students, it’s about the best teachers struggling all over the world today and it’s a work of art--very highly recommended.

“There would be only the dead eyes, the slack faces, the open mouths, the aimless, mindless stirrings, and the soft stench of rank flesh. It was not too dissimilar from her years of teaching live children.”

5 stars

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Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman

“This is reality. Get used to it. It’s all there is.”

This man has no right to write like this. I understand there’s a craft perfected with hard work, but it just seems so easy; it must be so easy. Beneath even a small section of a seemingly whimsical tale is (always) something profound. And it’s not even hidden, it's just a single layer down. But while philosophy is ever-present it serves the story, and you can be deeply moved, grinning ear-to-ear and fighting back tears all at the same time. On first sitting down and beginning I smiled once, opened it up to broad grin within a couple of pages, and was laughing out loud by page 9 and this kept up throughout the book.

Richard Mayhew is relatively happy with his normal life and rushing to dinner with his fiancé when an injured girl appears before him on the sidewalk. His fiancé Jessica, already running late for the dinner with her rich, important boss, implores Richard to leave the poor homeless girl alone, at most call someone else for help, but Richard refuses and because the girl is adamant at avoiding a hospital Richard takes her home with him then and there to tend her wounds and talk sense into her for proper care tomorrow.

The girl is much better the following day but a couple of bruisers show up looking for her and Richard stands in their way. His fiancé leaves him, his friends desert him, he loses his job and nobody in the world can even see him properly anymore, and he follows the girl, Door, to the hidden underground of London where the story begins.

What follows is a grand adventure for a mythic key in an impossible land of magic with Richard so far out of his element he spends most of the story astonished. It’s troubling, it’s funny, it’s moving and most important it’s true. As you approach the story’s end you’ll find yourself exerting your own will, making sure the author has written want you want, what you need to happen, and if he didn’t write it that way, well then he must go back in time this very instant, write it, publish it in the past and make sure it’s all wrapped up and ready so when you read the next few paragraphs it’s been properly fixed. Except it doesn’t need to be fixed.

It’s amazing, it’s not to be missed, and it’s just not fair to other writers having to contend. The perfect modern fairytale.

“I’d watch out for doors if I were you.”

5 stars

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[bugen]

You're most welcome Sock Monkey. It's tough but really something special. I'd heard about this for a while myself before picking it up. Theli I think it was a comment you made a while back that helped tip the scale - thank you!

The text is especially dense toward the beginning which makes the book seem like a mountain. I recall somewhere within the first 100 pages flipping back and forth following footnotes around, frustrated because I didn't seem to be making the forward progress I'm used to when reading. But the payoff is so much more gratifying when you've worked for it like that.

[Theli]

House of Leaves is a demanding read, but is also a very rewarding read. One of my all time favourite novels.