77 Shadow Street, by Dean Koontz

One thing that can be said for Dean Koontz is that he likes to mix it up. His characters may tend to look similar (as what author’s don’t?), but he likes to experiment with his stories. 77 Shadow Street, I think, is unusual among his books in featuring quite a large cast of characters and constantly jumping the point of view from one to another. I wish I could say I thought the experiment was a great success, but I wouldn’t call it a total failure either.

77 Shadow Street is the address of an exclusive residential apartment building, something like the Dakota in Manhattan, home to a number of wealthy and/or famous people. They include a drunken ex-senator, a stock broker with military experience, a single mother who writes hit country songs, a female novelist raising an autistic daughter, a retired lawyer, a working hit man, a famous geneticist, and others. When they first begin to notice strange phenomena in their building—lights, vibrations, and strangers appearing and disappearing in antique clothing—they aren’t alarmed at first. Until the whole building is transported into a future time where the world is depopulated and strange life forms stalk the hallways, intent on turning them all into something other than human. Continue reading 77 Shadow Street, by Dean Koontz

Reformation Day, 2012

Personal note: I told you a while back that the Viking Age Club and Society of the Sons of Norway, my reenactment group, was being considered as the subject of a reality TV show. We got the final word today that the production company has not been able to find a buyer for the project. So that’s that.

I told another member a while back that my feelings on the whole thing were mixed. For my own sake, I’d like it to happen so I’d get exposure for my novels. But for the sake of the young people in our group (and we have a fair number now), I hoped it wouldn’t happen. Because fame in your youth is one of the worst disasters that can happen to you.

All for the best, then.

Today is Reformation Day, so as the Lutheran caucus of this blog, I think I ought to say something about it.

I direct you to this post at Anthony Sacramone’s Strange Herring blog, if you have a taste for tall grass theology. Anthony is underappreciated as a theologian, and I think he nails the point of the discussion.

In overview:

It starts with a link to a post from Russell Saltzman, a Lutheran pastor, over at First Things. He considers a recent article by Carl Braaten, a noted theologian of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Braaten sees no reason why Lutherans should not be allowed to commune in Roman Catholic churches, giving a long list of things that Lutherans and Catholics now agree on. Saltzman, taking exception, points out that women’s ordination is a serious and sufficient disagreement.

Then, in the comments, a Catholic priest points out further, more fundamental differences in how Lutherans and Catholics understand the very nature of the church.

Finally, Anthony himself notes that all this still misses the point. He expounds a number of differences from the Lutheran point of view. Especially in terms of the doctrine of justification.

I agree with him entirely.

But what amazes me is that, as a conservative Lutheran, I even agree with the Catholic priest far more than with the ELCA theologian. I far prefer an honorable opponent to a shifty ally.

I think Luther would have agreed.

Many Literary Critics Are Vampires

Columnist Ruth Dudley Edwards joined a panel discussion on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and was reminded what she hates about the fruitcakes who populate many humanities departments. “Now, it’s not that I don’t know that the wilder fringes of academia are populated by the ignorant, mad or just silly: indeed several of my crime novels are savage about the lunacies of humanities departments. But every time I revisit that world it’s the sheer stupidity and tunnel vision that gets me cross.” (via Books, Inq.)

Netflix review: “The Last Detective”

One of our commenters, a while back, mentioned The Last Detective, a British semi-comic TV series starring Peter Davison, whom many readers will remember from All Creatures Great and Small, and as the first youthful Doctor Who. (Personally I liked him best as Mr. Campion, but that series didn’t last long.) Our commenter found the show depressing. I can understand this. However, I stayed with it and found things to like as well, though I can’t say I loved it all in all. The program is based on a series of detective novels by Leslie Thomas.

Detective Constable “Dangerous” Davies (his first name is never divulged) works out of a police station in Willesden, a North London suburb. His nickname is one of those antonymic male jokes, as in “Little John.” He is a laughingstock in the force. His superior, Inspector Aspinall, explains in the first episode that Davies is “the last detective” he will ever send on an important job. Apparently he testified against some other officer in an unspecified matter, and has been reduced in rank.

His personal life, which takes up a lot of screen time, is also a mess. He’s separated from his wife Julie, whom he adores, and lives in rental lodgings with an eccentric landlady in the first season. He spends most of his free time with his Irish friend Mod, who flits from job to job to unemployment, and reads a lot, generally coming to all the wrong conclusions.

Dangerous Davies is intended, it appears, to be a counterpoint to all those suave, omnicompetent TV detectives we see in other series. Davies has a life more like yours and mine, and the writers spare him none of those little indignities so richly distributed by life. Each episode opens with a short vignette in which he tries to do his job in a decent way, and gets rewarded with mud, torn clothing, personal injury, or public humiliation. He turns his eyes to heaven and carries on.

The series has an inherent weakness, I think, in the fact that it’s clear that Davies is not only a very competent cop, but the only non-idiot on the squad. Again and again he figures out the puzzle, but his reputation never seems to rise. (In one episode he actually takes responsibility for one of Insp. Aspinall’s errors, saving him a demotion, but even that doesn’t seem to buy him much.)

I think you could work out a Christian message in this. Davies is a man with a servant heart, who dies to himself daily and expects no reward for good work. Still, it’s kind of aggravating in the aggregate.

I thought the final, fourth season was the weakest, and it was probably time to draw the curtain on it. One positive development in Davies’ personal life was gratifying, but the writers seemed to be running out of ideas. One episode in particular, in which Mod got involved with a beautiful young Russian woman (that’s the sort of thing that TV writers love to invent, although it’s deadly to credibility) involved the series’ only moment of nudity (that I recall). Also, in another episode, Davies makes a “brilliant” suggestion to the forensic technicians which, I believe, ought to have been one of the first things they’d checked for.

The series is mostly unobjectionable, all in all. But if you’re prone to depression you might want to look for cheerier fare than this dark comedy.

Carrying Seedlings in a Bucket

Tree Seedlings

Andrew Peterson talks about discovering a poem by Wendell Berry. “Just a few days ago my kind neighbor Tommy gave me permission to harvest a few maple seedlings from his property and I spent an afternoon replanting them around the Warren with these same hopes for the blessing they might be to my children’s children. Once again, the sage words of the Mad Farmer gave me a clear picture of what it means for us to be keepers of his creation, standing amidst a breadth of old beauty that we didn’t ask for and don’t deserve.”

Skipping Around the Bible

Kathy Keller, wife of New York pastor and author Tim Keller, reviews Rachel Held Evans’ new book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master”, asking some hard questions about the book’s intent. Keller writes, “Evans wants to show that everyone who tries to follow biblical norms does so selectively—’cherry picking’ some parts and passing over others. She also says she wants to open a fresh, honest dialogue about biblical interpretation, that is, how to do it rightly and well.” But Evans apparently cherry-picks on her own, some of it for humor’s sake, some of it seriously.

See many positive reviews on Amazon.

The Bounty’s sunset, and Undset



Photo credit: Inverclyde Views

It appears that the first victim of Hurricane Sandy is a sailor from the replica sailing ship Bounty, built in 1960 for the 1962 movie, “Mutiny On the Bounty,” starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard. The ship herself, God rest her, went to the bottom off the North Carolina coast. Twelve sailors were rescued by Coast Guard helicopters, and one further missing sailor was found floating in a life jacket, and has been rushed to a hospital.

This is only the beginning of sorrows, as Revelation says, but it’s a particularly bitter one for me. I love those old sailing ships. Viking ships are in a class by themselves, of course, but all the tall ladies move me to the depths of my Scandinavian soul.

At first I assumed this was the ship built for the 1984 Mel Gibson/Anthony Hopkins film, “The Bounty,” my personal favorite of the Bounty movies. But this goes back to the 1962 film. However, it was also used for another movie I love, the Charlton Heston/Christian Bale “Treasure Island” (1990), by far the best dramatization of the story I’ve ever seen. I see by its Wikipedia entry that it was finally released on DVD last year. I’ve got to get a copy.

Anthony Esolen, over at Front Porch, has posted a profound meditation on freedom and despotism, drawing on an obscure book (which I haven’t read, I confess) by the great Sigrid Undset.

TV review: “Elementary”



I ought to dislike the new CBS TV series, “Elementary” more than I do. Conan Doyle’s immortal character has recently been brilliantly updated by the BBC in the series “Sherlock,” which extracted the soul of the character with exacting precision and inlaid him in the 21st Century with barely a seam showing. This American version (starring Jonny Lee Miller) is far more ham-fisted. It takes an attitude to the source material closer to that of the recent Robert Downey films (which I did not like), except for the martial arts stuff, particularly in adding a grunge element which the original Holmes, a fastidious dresser, would have sniffed at. Nevertheless, I think it’s the very crudity of the adaptation that makes it watchable for me. I can never take this character seriously as Holmes, so I can watch him with amusement as a vaguely Holmes-like TV detective.

In this adaptation, the self-possessed, comfortably self-supporting character of the original stories is turned into a desperate drug addict who’d be living in an alley if his wealthy father (a character who never appears in Doyle) hadn’t hired Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) to be his companion and nursemaid in his exile in New York City. He worked as a police consultant in London before his breakdown, and in that capacity met Captain Tobias Gregson of the NYPD, who hires him for the same purpose here.

If you think the idea of casting a woman as Watson is fresh and edgy, well, it’s not. The idea was first bruited by Rex Stout to the Baker Street Irregulars (the foremost Sherlock Holmes fan group) back in the 1940s. It’s been done before too, both on film and on TV. Actually it would be a little surprising if they hadn’t cast a woman in the role. And if you’ve got to have a female Watson, Lucy Liu is always nice to look at.

As far as stories go, based on the two episodes I’ve watched, they seem to be adequate. Last night’s plot concerned bankers, which gave the writers the opportunity to have Holmes spout their favorite Occupy Wall Street talking points for them. But this Holmes is pretty deeply disturbed, so nothing he says not directly related to clues really needs to be taken seriously.

In brief, I don’t consider this Holmes a real Holmes in any meaningful sense. But once you’ve made peace with that, the show is watchable.

Cold day, cold world

And it snowed today. The first real snow day of the winter. It didn’t accumulate; not quite cold enough for that. But it snowed seriously, with deliberation. Notice has been served.

I spoke with a persecuted pastor in the library today. Pastor Tom Brock, my former pastor, victim of the Gay Inquisition, whom I’ve written about here before. He’s got a TV and radio ministry now, and he told me he was featured in this article at the Christian Post. You can read more about his story there.

Losing to win, in stories

One change owning a Kindle has made in my reading habits is that I’m now a whole lot more likely than I used to be to dump a book that fails to please me.

When I was younger, it was kind of a point of honor to finish any book I started. (This sprang in part from the fact that books were copied by hand on calfskin in those days.) But as I got older, and especially as I crystallized my political and social views, I became more willing to ashcan a book whose author (as I imagined him/her) obviously wouldn’t want a person like me for a reader.

The Kindle makes this easier because I’ve been getting a lot more free books, especially from the Free Kindle Books and Tips blog. Easy come, easy go. A lot of these books are fully worth their price of nothing, and I feel no guilt (OK, not much guilt) in showing them the virtual door.

I dumped one book yesterday, and another today, which I think is a new record.

One was a mystery/thriller, pretty competently written. The characters were mostly good, and the writing slipped only rarely. But around half way through I discovered that the evil District Attorney, whom we had been schooled to hate (the one-dimensionality of his character was one of the book’s weaknesses from the start) was a political conservative, getting money from those evil conservative political action committees.

I could have finished it. I’ve finished worse. But I wasn’t in the mood. Maybe it’s the election season.

The second book was more congenial in viewpoint, being a sort of contemporary Christian fantasy. And the writing was pretty good for Christian literature. But then the main character, a non-Christian, got into a conversation with his Christian neighbor at one point, and it all went south as far as I was concerned.

I have strong views about how conversations about matters faith in novels ought to go. I like to think I do it pretty well in my books, but maybe other people find my approach as offputting as I find so many that I see.

Here’s how I think such conversations should be handled—generally.

1. Avoid easy victories. Christians love anecdotes about how some Christian silenced an atheist through a single pithy, incisive remark. In my experience this never happens in real life. In real life the atheist has a good laugh, and the Christian trickles away humiliated (this isn’t necessarily bad. I know of instances when such conversations have resulted, eventually, in the conversion of the atheist). You gain realism points if you allow your Christian character to lose at least the initial skirmish.

2. Remember that the point of the exercise is not winning the debate, but winning the person. The action of the story is where the non-believer will have his world-view truly challenged. A story where he gets converted merely by an argument is by nature a weak story. Use the rising tension of the story’s action to make him doubt his preconceptions. This is both good storytelling and true to life.

3. Eschew Triumphalism. This really summarizes the two points above. James Bond is not a Christian. The smooth character who always makes the right choices and is always in control of the situation is not realistic, and would be a poor example in any case, since none of us live that way. The Christian conquers through bowing, through dying, through the way of humility.

And no, I’m not going to tell you the names of the books I dumped. I deleted them from my Kindle, and I don’t think I remember the titles. I’m sure I don’t remember the authors’ names.