My novel Wolf Time, so long out of print, is now available as an e-book! Kindle version available here.
All posts by Lars Walker
‘Death’s Doors’ reviewed at ‘I Saw Lightning Fall’
Our friend Loren Eaton, at I Saw Lightning Fall,reviews Death’s Doors:
Imagine a blender. Chuck in Atwood’s aforementioned novel, Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and Walker’s own West Oversea. Add a generous pinch of profanity, a scoop of Christian church history, and several comment sections plucked at random from various Huffington Post articles. Now pulse for two or three seconds. Voila! That’s Death’s Doors. Yes, it’s just as lumpy as it sounds. But it’s also works.
No, the Vikings weren’t gender-neutral
Had to post about this, before there’s further confusion.
This article from Tor. com has been making the rounds.
Researchers at the University of Western Australia decided to revamp the way they studied Viking remains. Previously, researchers had misidentified skeletons as male simply because they were buried with their swords and shields. (Female remains were identified by their oval brooches, and not much else.) By studying osteological signs of gender within the bones themselves, researchers discovered that approximately half of the remains were actually female warriors, given a proper burial with their weapons
It didn’t take long for a rebuttal to come from what looks like a somewhat more credible source, Stuff You Missed in History.
But, this paper essentially uses the presence of six female migrants and seven male as evidence that women and children most likely accompanied the Norse armies with the intent of settling the land once it was conquered, rather than migrating in a second wave once the fighting was over. It is, sadly, not at all about female Viking warriors, and not some Earth-shattering evidence that Norse armies were evenly split among women and men.
They’ll still have to prove to me that there were any female Viking warriors at all, but the point is made. The Tor article drew unwarranted and exaggerated conclusions from a study that examined a mere 13 graves.
Hey, Tor Books rejected my novel Wolf Time (soon to be re-released in e-book form) with disparaging comments, about 30 years ago. That should tell you all you need to know about them.
Rite of fall
It just occurred to me that Autumn/Fall is the only season with two names. Perhaps because it’s so depressing they figured they’d divide it up into two bundles to make it easier to carry.
Oh yes, buy my book: Death’s Doors.
So. Fall. This means that my blog posting, never regular even during summer break, will diminish materially. It’s back-to-school time. I’m in my second year of graduate school already. How time does fly!
No it doesn’t. I feel like I’ve been at this for a decade, and have about 30 years left to go.
I had a gratifying moment on Saturday. It’s my ancient custom to go out for lunch somewhere on Saturday noon, and then go to the local Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar.
As I approached the window, the manager said, “I always like to see you coming. You remind me of better times.” Continue reading Rite of fall
Who is my neighbor? A terrorist, apparently.
Little did I know, when I moved to Robbinsdale, Minnesota, that I was relocating to a seedbed of treason. But so it appears. Not one but two jihadist casualties overseas have been identified as former students at Robbinsdale Cooper High School. And it gets closer than that, as I’ll explain.
First, a little orientation. Robbinsdale Cooper High School is not in fact located in Robbinsdale. The historical reasons are convoluted (I don’t actually know them), but enough to say that the school district includes several inner ring suburbs. In any case, it’s close to me.
More than that, early reports (the information seems to have been redacted now; perhaps it was in error) stated that the latest casualty, Douglas McAuthor (sic) McCain, dead in Syria, lived on Oregon Avenue in New Hope.
Before I bought my house, I lived in an apartment building on Oregon Avenue in New Hope. New Hope isn’t that big. Oregon Avenue isn’t that long. We were neighbors. I very likely rubbed shoulders with him at some point.
Even so, I find it hard to generate a lot of sympathy for the young man. He was born in America, and New Hope isn’t a ghetto. He had ample opportunities to respond to the gospel. Instead he joined a death cult to murder infidels and rape women.
Still, after some consideration, I can think of a couple reasons to pity him. Continue reading Who is my neighbor? A terrorist, apparently.
‘Russian Roulette’ and ‘Mr. Swirlee,’ by Mike Faricy
I’m inclined to support my local mystery writers, as you know, so when I got a Kindle deal on one of Mike Faricy’s Dev Haskell mysteries, I thought I’d try it out. Glad I did. These are not highbrow mysteries, nor are they world-weary meditations on existential dilemmas. They’re just fun private eye stories that poke gentle fun at the form. I liked them.
Dev Haskell is a private eye in St. Paul. He has no office, but does a marginal business out of a string of scruffy bars. At the beginning of Russian Roulette he’s approached in one of those bars by a drop dead gorgeous woman with an accent (she says it’s French and he goes along with it) who asks him to look for her missing sister. Thinking more with a lower organ than with his higher functions, he follows her into a plot involving prostitution and sex trafficking.
The big joke in Russian Roulette is the way Dev overworks the traditional private eye pastime of getting injured and not letting it stop him. Not only does he suffer the liturgical beatings and a bullet wound that any literary private eye expects, but he also gets poisoned and car bombed. It stretches credibility that he’s able to function at all, let alone defend himself, by the end of the story, but that’s all part of the joke. Continue reading ‘Russian Roulette’ and ‘Mr. Swirlee,’ by Mike Faricy
‘Death’s Doors’: a snippet and an apologia
CHAPTER I
The Lifestyle Services case worker seemed friendly and genuinely interested in him. Tom Galloway wasn’t entirely pleased about that. The case workers he’d dealt with in the Twin Cities had all seemed overworked and time-pinched. The desks in their cubicles had been piled with file folders and official bulletins, and they themselves had exhaled an institutional miasma that seemed to say, “Don’t show me any red flags and we won’t ask too many questions.”
But Megan Siegenthaler seemed to have all the time in the world, and was cordially curious about everything having to do with Tom and his family. Her small office had been painted a cheery mint green, and a tasteful landscape print hung on one wall. No family pictures though. He supposed those might be stressful for some of the case subjects. Or just as likely she had no family.
She herself was a honey-haired woman who must have been very attractive once and was still comfortably good-looking. Her green eyes were especially remarkable. She smoked a long thin cigarette, as was her right in all places except for hospital ICUs ever since the passage of the Smokers’ Re-enfranchisement Act. She’d offered Tom a breathing device, in accordance with the provisions of the Act, but he’d turned it down. Tobacco smoke had never bothered him much.
“I suppose it’s pretty dull here in Epsom compared to life in the Cities,” she said.
“I like it dull,” said Tom.
“Does Christine like it dull too?”
Tom adjusted his mouth in something like a smile. “No. She’d like to move back.”
“What do you think about that?”
“I don’t care what she’d like. I’m trying to keep her alive.”
Megan picked up the Galloway file and flipped through it. She had very long fingernails, enameled in red. Tom had always wondered why anyone who had to work with paper or keyboards would bother with such a self-inflicted handicap. “I think we ought to talk about this,” she said. “Your last case worker made a note about your attitude. You realize that, in the long run, you can’t keep your daughter alive, don’t you?”
Tom kicked himself in a mental shin. He should have learned to keep his mouth shut by now. He didn’t want to have this discussion again.
“I know what the law says,” he grunted.
“Then you know that if Christine decides to end her life, you have no legal power to stop her. The Constitution’s on her side. If she complains to us that you’re interfering, she can be taken from you and escorted to the Happy Endings Clinic by a Lifestyle Services worker. The law is very explicit.”
That’s just a snippet from Death’s Doors, my newly released e-book (by the way, Orie says it’s non-DRM, which means you can convert it to your e-reader’s format using the Calibre utility, even if you don’t have a Kindle). I thought I’d just take a few moments to talk about this book, and what I think it means (I could, of course, be wrong). Continue reading ‘Death’s Doors’: a snippet and an apologia
Death’s Doors
Dateline: Minneapolis
My new novel, Death’s Doors, is now available for download for Amazon Kindle.
In the near future, suicide is a constitutional right. Tom Galloway is an ordinary single father, just trying to keep his rebellious and depressed daughter from going to the Happy Endings Clinic.
The last thing he needs is a ninth-century Viking time traveler dropping into his life.
But Tom is about to embark on the adventure of his life. One that will change the world.
If you look closely…
…you can see Phil Wade in the background.
Have a good weekend.
Death’s Doors, Snippet 1
(As best I can figure out, we’re close to releasing my next novel, Death’s Doors. To whet your appetite, here’s a snippet. lw)
PROLOGUE
We have no use for barns anymore, but are ashamed to tear them down. So the lofted sheds stand here and there across the land on derelict farmsteads, redundant, their backs swayed like old horses’.
The woman tossed her cigarette away. It arced like comet spit in the dark. She went into the ruined barn through a dutch door, pulling open first the upper panel, then the lower. The granulated hinges screamed and the bottom scraped an arc in the earth. She was afraid the noise would wake the baby she cradled in her left arm, but it did not. Such a good baby.
The law said she could be rid of a baby up to the age of eight weeks. She would never have let this one go except for something like this – something terribly, cosmically important.
Her flashlight showed her a low-ceilinged side-shed with animal stalls along its inside wall, its dividers and wooden posts scaly with brown flakes of ancient, petrified manure.
The old woman she’d come to see sat so still that she overshot her with the flashlight beam and had to back it up. Once fixed by the beam, the old woman smiled – a smile of radiant beauty that brought to mind a Renaissance Madonna gone wrinkled and white-haired.
“You – you’re the one I was to meet?” the younger woman asked. Continue reading Death’s Doors, Snippet 1