Poet Eric Weinstein writes about things he wished he had always known. One point opposes originality as often defined: "All writing is collage. The more and wider ranging influences you have, the more connections and juxtapositions you can create in your own work."

Darwin Garrison of Darwin's Evolutions reviews Troll Valley.

The bright lights of Hollywood Boulevard took on a shimmering radiance, neon burning in the coolness of dusk, the hard, unpleasant edges of an ugly one-industry town blurred into blemish-free beauty. Like an aging screen queen with a great makeup artist, a gauze-draped key light, and a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, Hollywood didn't look half bad.

Continuing my random-order reading of the novels in Max Allan Collins's Nate Heller historical mystery series, I came to Angel in Black, his treatment of the Black Dahlia murder.

1947 finds Nate Heller newly married and honeymooning in Los Angeles. He's riding along with a newspaper reporter when they follow a police radio call and become the first two people (after the murderer) to see the naked, bisected female corpse that will soon become a national sensation.

Heller, a former cop and well-known private eye, is invited by the chief investigator to help out. He agrees, for reasons he keeps secret. Read the rest of this entry . . .

I have a new article up at The American Spectator Online today. It's a review of the Netflix comedy series, "Lilyhammer."

Not recommended for those with delicate sensibilities.

1. John takes a gorgeous photo of a sunset over the Pacific ocean and pays $6,612 for it.

2. An app for iPad of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is barely more than an ebook of the same. ... “[t]o have turned a profit so quickly, however, may say as much about The Waste Land app’s production budget as its undisclosed sales figures.”

3. Dining After 'Downton Abbey': Why British Food Was So Bad For So Long

4. More Republicans (8x more) than Democrats are impressed (or positively influenced) when a political candidate expresses his religious convictions. (via Trevin Wax)

5. Venerable literary magazine, The Paris Review, is on Pinterest. In other news, Google has announced an official retroactive alliance with the once-and-future Soviet Union.

When I was a boy, every school child knew about this, but I suspect they don't teach it in schools anymore. In honor of Presidents Day, a snippet from Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years:

Having learned to read Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on. Dennis [Hanks], years later, tried to remember his cousin's reading habits. “I never seen Abe after he was twelve 'at he didn't have a book some'ers 'round. He'd put a book inside his shirt an' fill his pants pockets with corn dodgers, an' go off to plow or hoe. When noon come he'd set down under a tree, an' read an' eat. In the house at night, he'd tilt a cheer by the chimbly, an' set on his backbone an' read. I've seen a feller come in an' look at him, Abe not knowin' anybody was round, an' sneak out agin like a cat, an' say, 'Well, I'll be darned.' It didn't seem natural, nohow, to see a feller read like that. Aunt Sairy's never let the children pester him. She always said Abe was goin' to be a great man some day. An' she wasn't goin' to have him hendered.”

They heard Abe saying, “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll git me a book I ain't read.”

I have thought of myself as a citizen of the Internet, but yesterday I took a step deeper into the swamp of Netdom. I made a video response to a You Tube video. I've been watching the online morning show, Good Mythical Morning, by the singing comedians Rhett and Link. Last Friday, they asked what the best board game ever is according to their fans, and I recorded for them my story of playing a few minutes of Backwords with a some friends in college. Backwords is not the best board game ever by far, but I thought my story would add to the conversation.

See my response here, and if you want to watch the original video, go here.

I have to give T. L. Hines a lot of credit. In Faces in the Fire he has, first of all, broken with standard Christian genre fiction in making his message implicit, not explicit. You'll search in vain here for a conversion moment or an explanation of the way of salvation.

Secondly, he's messed with the form. It's not that nobody has ever written a story out of sequence before, it's just that Christian novelists, in general, don't have the confidence to do something so experimental. Faces in the Fire begins with Chapter 34, and proceeds to tell the major characters' stories out of sequence, showing us the consequences before we see the causes. He does this pretty well, with the result that the reading experience closely approximates the mystery that is all of our lives.

Also, it's the rare Christian novel that features a hit man, an e-mail spammer, and a drug addicted tattoo artist as sympathetic main characters.

We're talking grace here, not works.

The story begins with Kurt Marlowe, a metal sculptor and sometime over the road trucker, who hears ghostly voices (he calls them “spooks”) in the used clothing he buys at estate sales. He does not respond to the voices, but uses their messages as inspiration for his art. Then one day he picks up a pair of shoes that put a picture in his mind more compelling than any he's seen before. It's an image so compelling it scares him. So he tries to throw the shoes away. But they keep coming back to him.

He meets a woman in a truck stop, who gives him a ten digit number written on a napkin, in a plastic bag. Then the story switches to her background, and passes from her to yet another character...

It all comes together pretty neatly in the end. The plot strains a bit at points, I think, but that's almost inevitable in a tightly woven story of this kind. All in all, a very good read.

Recommended, with cautions for adult subject matter.

If this were The Thinklings site, this would be filed under Awesomeness and This is Freakin Bizarre. Uber-kudos to Black Sheep Films for their skills in putting together this amusement park footage.

If you're a faithful Barnes & Noble customer, and have been waiting for Troll Valley to appear on their site, I have wonderful news for you. B&N is now carrying the e-book for the Nook.

Alas, we haven't been able to include the cover art with this file. So here's a nice big version, which you can save to your favorite device and have for your very own:



Tell your friends. Tell your acquaintances. Tell your co-workers and courteous, trained service providers.

I haven't gotten a new review in a couple days. Feeling a little antsy.

Impressionist Jim Meskimen performs Clarence's speech from William Shakespeare's Richard III using the voices of George Clooney, George W. Bush, Woody Allen, Jimmy Stewart, Boris Karloff, Morgan Freeman, and many, many other public figures. I love it. I'm sure the Bard would love it too.

Like the rest of the country, I'd seen in the papers that Huey had, on the floor of the Senate, accused FDR of aiding and abetting a murder plot against him; something about conspirators meeting at some hotel somewhere. But I'd really merely read the headlines, skimmed the stories. Nobody was taking it very seriously. After all, Huey made a habit out of such accusations. He was a wolf who kept crying little boy.

I'm delighted to have rediscovered Max Allan Collins's Nate Heller novels. They're textured and well-written, and something like George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels in providing entertaining, excellently researched history lessons. I knew almost nothing about the death of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long before I read Blood and Thunder, but now I do.

The novel starts in 1935. Chicago private eye Nathan Heller has been persuaded by Senator Long (who met him on an earlier visit to the windy city) to become one of his bodyguards. After a visit to the Oklahoma State Fair they return to Louisiana, and Nate is introduced to the continual circus that is Huey Long's presidential campaign. Formerly a supporter of the New Deal, Long has broken with Roosevelt, and dreams of taking his populist wealth redistribution campaign to a national stage. He entertains visitors and reporters in his hotel suite dressed in green silk pajamas. He writes music. He parties hard. He has connections with organized crime. Heller has about had his fill of it all (in spite of an enjoyable affair with one of Long's ex-mistresses) when Long is shot to death. According to eyewitness reports he was killed by an angry dentist who was then riddled with bullets by Long's furious bodyguards (Nate is off on an errand at that moment). Nate goes home. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Dan Rosenblum writes about author Jennifer Egan's talk on technology, life, and reading:

But Egan said she wasn’t afraid for the future of the novel because of the form’s genesis as a “crazy grab bag” had left it with the ability to assimilate many different forms.

“Really, almost everything that’s been done since was done in Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy. So I find that very heartening, too. Just remember this was invented as a flexible, strong and swaggering form that could do all kinds of things that other forms couldn’t do,” Egan said.

The remarkable growth on Christianity in Africa "has been tainted by an American-style prosperity emphasis that focuses on health and wealth at the expense of sin, redemption, and repentance." Nigerian Femi Adeleye is fighting back in his book, Preachers of a Different Gospel: A Pilgrim’s Reflections on Contemporary Trends in Christianity, drawing clear distinctions between biblical gospel with the message of self-satisfaction.

Ooh! Ooh!

After more than a decade without a new Whit Stillman film, his new one, "Damsels in Distress," is coming:



The trailer doesn't say when it's being released, but Movie Insider says April. I want very much to see this movie. It looks great.

I explain my passion for Stillman's work here.

Tip: First Things.

A photo of the oldest recorded supernova

For something a little more romantic for Valentine's Day, a panorama of the U.S. East Coast. I can almost hear Louis Armstrong singing now.

It was a great misfortune (but not a forced error) that the movie The Beaver came out just when pretty much everybody in the country was mad at its star, Mel Gibson. Alas, Mel's particular form of weirdness doesn't fall within the bounds of Acceptable Deviancy under Hollywood rules, so not many people saw it. But you can get it on DVD, which I did this weekend, and I found it well worth viewing.

The story is of Walter Black (Gibson), the president of a once-dynamic toy company now drifting aimlessly, due to Walter's chronic depression. Walter inherited the company from his father who (we are informed almost parenthetically) himself fell into depression and committed suicide. Walter has a loving, frustrated wife, Meredith (Jodie Foster), an adoring young son, and an older son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), who hates him out of fear that he himself will end up as his grandfather did, and as his father seems likely to.

When Meredith finally kicks Walter out of the house for the sake of the children's safety, he (in a remarkable scene of black comedy) attempts unsuccessfully to commit suicide. It's in this awful moment that The Beaver, a discarded puppet he found in a dumpster, starts “talking” to him. (It's always very clear that Walter is saying the words, but the personality differences are great enough that the Beaver takes on a weird reality of his own.) The Beaver tells him he's come to save his life, and under his inspiration Walter revitalizes his company with new ideas, and reconnects with his youngest son and his wife (though she's very skeptical). Son Porter alone refuses to play along, seeing in the Beaver the flowering of the insanity that scares him. (There's also a very nice subplot about Porter courting a girl at school, trying to find his own way to be a man while terrified of himself.) Read the rest of this entry . . .

Today we have two blog reviews of Troll Valley.

First, from Will Duquette at The View From the Foothills:

They always tell aspiring writers that they should write what they know. As commonly understood, I think this is hogwash—a writer needs to be able to go beyond his personal experience to date. But there’s no denying that when it’s done well, the personal touch can bring an immediacy and a concreteness to a work. And that’s precisely what Lars has done here.

Then, from Loren Eaton, at I Saw Lightning Fall:

For the record, I hold little in common with the characters of Troll Valley. I'm not of Norwegian descent, I'm not Lutheran, and the closest I've come to even setting foot in Minnesota is a trip to friend's wedding in Wisconsin. But I still found them engaging. Walker understands that literature is supposed about the stuff of universal human experience, and he uses his characters' specific situations to touch on it. Alienation and belonging, love and lust, faith and doubt -- all make appearances.

Thanks to both.

I think the general consensus is that, of all Dennis Lehane's Patrick Kenzie/Angela Genarro private eye novels, the most perfect, memorable, and troubling was Gone, Baby Gone, which was also turned into a very good movie that not enough people saw. In that story, the detectives, who were also lovers, nearly split up for good over the decision of what to do about a little girl kidnapped from a neglectful home. The conclusion of the book was heartbreaking and a real moral puzzler.

After more than a decade, author Lehane has picked up the story again in Moonlight Mile. Much has changed for the Boston investigators. Patrick, having barely survived a gunshot wound, has turned to less dangerous forms of detective work, doing contract jobs for a large firm. Angela is working on a graduate degree. They have a four-year-old daughter who is the light of their lives. Money's tight, but if they can hold out until Angela finishes school, life ought to be good.

And then the past shows up. The aunt of Amanda McCready, the little girl kidnapped in Gone, Baby, Gone, who originally hired Patrick and Angela, approaches Patrick. Amanda, now sixteen years old, has disappeared again, she says. She fears it has something to do with the girl's stepfather, an ex-convict and drug dealer with a record of sexual abuse.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Dr. Gene Edward Veith, author of God At Work and other highly regarded Christian books, reviews Troll Valley here.

I think I'll just start my review by saying that T. L. Hines's The Unseen is one of the most impressive thrillers I've read in some time—not just among Christian books, but among thrillers in general. I liked Hines' first novel, Waking Lazarus, quite a lot. I was less impressed with The Dead Whisper On, his second. But this book—in my opinion—knocks it out of the park. It works on many levels, not only as a straight thriller, but as a cultural metaphor.

Lucas, the hero, is not strictly a part of the normal world. He makes a little money doing temporary, menial jobs, but he doesn't need much money, because he's essentially homeless. He moves from place to place in Washington, DC—abandoned buildings, service tunnels, even the sewer. He lives to watch other people, from hiding places he sets up behind walls and ceilings, “between the seams of society.” He's not a voyeur in the ordinary sense. He doesn't spy on women in dressing rooms, for instance. He watches people in public places, or at work. He imagines what their lives are like. It's the only thing that makes him feel good, that calms the incessant buzzing he hears in his brain.

But one day he meets another man who's a watcher like him. Through that man he learns of a whole organization of “creepers,” people who install cameras and make secret videos of people in their homes. They film acts of domestic violence and murder plots, but they refuse to do anything about them.

Lucas does something about them. Only the results aren't what he expects, and the more he learns the stranger the mysteries grow, until he finds himself pursuing—and fleeing from—spies and counterspies and mysterious scientists who may hold the secret to his own forgotten past.

Aside from the originality of the concept, I liked the way Hines progressively amped up the tension (some of the action is kind of hackneyed, but it's effective) and managed to make sympathetic a character who could have been pretty repellant. And Lucas's watching obsession obviously mirrors various pathologies in modern society, from which (I suspect) few of us are entirely free. (Porn, anyone? Reality TV?) I suppose most readers won't identify with Lucas as strongly as I did, but I think most will identify to some degree or another.

Highly recommended for older teens and adults. Well done.

Kevin Long, who is the author of The Undead At War is the same person as the Republibot 3.0 who wrote Ice Cream and Venom, which I reviewed a while back (I note that he's come out of the closet on that authorship now). I thought his work showed a lot of promise then, and I'm happy to report that he's only gotten better as a writer.

Although there are some stand-alone stories in the collection, the bulk of the stories fall into two sequences—the Undead stories (which, in spite of expectations, are not about zombies or vampires), and the Redneck Universe stories, which culminate in the last part of the book, a novella called “Home Again.”

The Undead stories are actually concerned with the question of medical life extension. What if we could preserve the brains of people whose bodies have died, hook them up to a virtual reality scenario, and put their brain power to work? Plenty of moral ambiguities are explored, and the texture of the narrative is enriched by the fact that the narrator, one of the Undead himself, is not a particularly admirable man, and has every reason to wish to postpone his absolute death.

The Redneck Universe stories have a Heinleinian flavor, and concern a mass exodus from earth by a large number of people who form colonies—entirely without the support of any terrestrial government—on distant planets. The essential theme of all these stories is the alienation experienced by people trying to find a way to be human in environments no human has ever known before. The narrator of “Home Again,” the bittersweet novella at the end of the book, is further torn when, on returning to earth, he finds himself (because of the effects of relativity) subjectively only a few years older than when he left, but faced with a world where everything has experienced decades of change. Christians are likely to have trouble with the one religious scene in this story, and also with its conclusion, which is nevertheless dramatically justified.

If you're a science fiction fan, especially one with libertarian views, I think you'll probably like The Undead At War. Cautions for language and adult situations.

I am reliably informed that Troll Valley is now available in (for?) the iBooks app. As I understand it, I don't need to provide any kind of a link, just inform you that this is so. The world of iStuff is a mystery to me.

Also, someone pointed me to this link, which takes you to a full-length image of the Bayeux Tapestry. You can scroll it from one end to the other. It's rather impressive, seen front to back. Like the mother of all comic books.

Author and editor Nick Harrison asks if a book can be published, and if published, can it sell if it has a sad ending. "I like a sad ending that offers hope, but I think those of us who feel that way are in the minority," he says. "A sad ending in a book for our market has an uphill struggle..."

Full disclosure: Darwin Garrison is a friend of mine. But even adjusting for my prejudice, I think Cry Unto Heaven is a good, satisfying story.

In a sort of post-apocalyptic world (a very special kind of post-apocalyptic world) a young girl named Renn, scavenging for food, is rescued from a rapist by a man named Zeke who reminds her of an angel. He has seemingly supernatural powers, and he's on a mission to answer prayers, and to frustrate the plans of his own brother, who has committed great crimes and wants to commit worse.

Cry Unto Heaven is a quick read, with good characters, a tight narrative, and theological resonance (no preaching). I enjoyed it a lot, and it'll only cost you a buck. Recommended.

Author Alex Preston picks ten believers from literary novels. He observes, "Quiet, placid faith fails to stir us. It's the dark night of the soul that we want in our fiction, the adolescent torment of Salinger's Franny or the guilt-ravaged Bendrix coming reluctantly to God in The End of the Affair." (via Books, Inq. and Dave Lull)

A friend gave me a copy of The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt, in order to reduce my appalling ignorance of some of the classics in my own genre. Having read it, I can see why it's a (kind of a) classic, but also, I think, why it will probably never have a passionate following.

Fletcher Pratt, a prolific author who worked in many genres, as well as nonfiction, in the early part of the 20th Century, was a very fine author. The single thing that impressed me most about The Well of the Unicorn was the fact that he uses antique diction, but unlike most authors he actually uses it well. He very clearly understands the old words and idioms he employs, giving the whole story a flavor of authenticity.

On the other hand, that same diction can be an obstacle to the reader. I have a pretty extensive vocabulary, and I still found the prose a bit of a slog. Read the rest of this entry . . .

I finished Troll Valley last night, and like many of you, loved it. His characters have authentic voices and raise questions that are not clearly answered. His main character, Christian Anderson, follows a story arc somewhat similar to the priest of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, being a sympathetic boy who grows into a despicable coward and returns to being sympathetic again. It's a beautiful, challenging picture of divine grace (not like the one to the right here).

One of the pastors in Troll Valley reminds me of a preacher I know through family ties. He knows the Bible well and yet is so wrong on select issues that you wish you could push him to become either a wholly sound pastor or a ridiculous fanatic. You might trust him more if he was less complicated, but such complications make the story so good.

One brief scene from the book may illustrate this point. Christian slips into the underworld or faerie land a few times. You might even say the whole story is about how faerie land is breaking in on Chris' life. One time, he sees a giant hammering away on the manacles tying him to the ground. He's crying because he can't get free, but when Chris asks him about it, he says he chained himself down so that he wouldn't attack the beautiful children who were playing nearby. Now in his chains, he wrestles to get free and attack them. That complex conflict of the heart and will may be the key to Troll Valley. Christian and other characters are limited in ways that keep them healthy to a degree and restrained. They don't know how to assert their desires in positive ways and chafe at their restrictions until they can no longer stand it. If and when they break free, they make a terrible mess of themselves. Can they handle the self-determination they seek? Some of the restrictions which bind them are not sound ones, which makes the binding worse, and that is one of the major themes that makes this novel wonderful. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Photo credit: Shin.

Over at PJ Media, where all the cool kids hang out, Kathy Shaidle rattled a few nacelles the other day by posting a piece called “Five Reasons Star Wars Actually Sucks.” Although the article was primarily an attack (not entirely unfair, either) on Star Wars fandom, she painted with a wide enough brush to step on a lot of general science fiction fans' toes.

Successful, mature men do not play computer games, attend “cons,” and get excited about overrated science fiction movies from the 1970s.

Come on, all the conservative boys who’ve read this far:

Do you imagine Victor Davis Hanson is some kind of font of boring zombie lore?

Do you think Mark Steyn wastes his spare time playing World of Warcraft? (Trick question. Mark Steyn doesn’t have any spare time.)

No, these men have careers and families, here on planet earth.

So today Bryan Preston took up the gauntlet at The PJ Tatler, with a piece called “Why Star Wars and Sci-Fi Actually Don't Suck.”

But here’s a little known fact about Star Wars: More than just being a series of two very good films, a pair of decent films and a pair of bad films, it bequeathed a whole industry. I’m not talking about the parallel marketing of the toys, many of which I used to own and now wish I still did because they would be worth a pile of money. I’m talking about Photoshop, and the broader digital imaging industry.

But here's where it gets exciting and relevant and important. He goes on to say,

Now, if you hate sci-fi it follows that you’ll probably hate both of Lucas’ most successful franchises, but that doesn’t make them bad films and it doesn’t make sci-fi a bad genre. There’s a tendency around to try to force others to stop liking things that we don’t like. Well, I love sci-fi. When I’m not reading up on politics, I’m probably reading either legitimate history or sci-fi/fantasy. Good sci-fi, like good video games, gets your mind going. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Jack McDevitt and Lars Walker. (Emphasis mine. lw) Both are fine writers with interesting minds who can create a universe and invest that universe with life. I don’t just read sci-fi/fantasy for the escape. I read it because, right now, it’s where the intellectual action is in fiction.

Thanks for the plug, Bryan.

Author Gabe Lyons talks about his son, age 11, who has Down's.

Cade’s life, and those like his, offers an alternative view of the good life.

These individuals alter career paths and require families to work together.
They invite each of us to engage, instead of simply walking by.
They love unconditionally, asking little in return beyond a simple acknowledgement.
They celebrate the little things in life, and displace the stress that bogs most of us down.
They seem to understand what true life is about, more than many of us.
They offer us the opportunity to truly value all people as created equal.

(via Andy Crouch)