All posts by Lars Walker

Reading, Reviews

The Door to December, by Dean Koontz

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I’m becoming a fan of Dean Koontz, almost against my will. As I familiarize myself with his body of work, I’ve developed a theory about him, which I’ll share at the end of this incisive review.

The Door to December is one of Koontz’ earlier works, first published under a pseudonym. It exhibits the usual weaknesses you expect from early Koontz. And yet… I loved it.

As the story begins, Laura McCaffrey, a psychologist, is summoned by the police to a house where her ex-husband has been found horribly murdered, along with two other men. Her concern is not with her ex, but with her daughter Melanie, whom he kidnapped six years ago. Besides the bloody corpses in the house, beaten beyond recognition, a room is found containing a sensory deprivation chamber and an electro-shock aversion therapy chair. Of Melanie there is no sign at first, but the little girl is soon discovered wandering naked on a nearby street. She is physically unharmed, but appears to be autistic.

At the crime scene Laura meets police detective Dan Haldane, who immediately takes an interest in the attractive doctor and her vulnerable child. As they look at the evidence, it becomes clear that Melanie has been the subject of a heartless, long-term psychological experiment.

And the horror isn’t over, because whatever killed the men in the house is killing others connected with the project. And Melanie, in her rare lucid moments, expresses her certainty that when the Thing is done killing the experimenters, it will kill her too.

I found lots of things to complain about in the writing here. The dialogue in particular was clunky. There’s one scene where Det. Haldane has a long argument with his greatest enemy in the world, his police superior. At one point he starts explaining himself to the man, sharing his deepest fears and motivations. This is ridiculous. Men hate to bare their souls to their closest friends. They don’t voluntarily point out their own weak spots to people who are likely to use the information against them. I know why Koontz did it. It’s a temptation for an author—you need to insert some exposition, explaining why your character acts the way he does. You’ve got a passionate dialogue scene; your character’s emotions are up. It seems to be just the place to throw the exposition in. You willingly ignore the fact that your character is expositing to the wrong person.

It’s easy to do. I’ve been tempted to do it myself (and have probably succumbed). But it’s bush league, and it damages credibility. (I’m reading the more recent The Good Guy now, and Koontz’ craftsmanship seems to have improved a lot.)

In spite of my criticisms, I liked this book exceedingly. And I think I know why (here comes my theory). Koontz is different from the average thriller writer. The average thriller writer is interested in examining the Problem of Evil. That’s an important question, and well worth looking at.

But Koontz prefers to examine the Problem of Good. When you consider it, the problem of good is just as puzzling, and certainly as important, as the other problem. And there’s the added advantage that there’s a whole lot less being written on the subject.

From that point of view—the point of view of looking at why people do good things, why they love and sacrifice and care for one another—I found The Door to December very moving. The climax, in particular, surprised me completely (it would probably not surprise a more virtuous reader as much).

I won’t say I like Koontz as well as Andrew Klavan, even now. But I’m liking him better and better. And he has a lot more books out there for me to find and read.

Reading

George McDonald Fraser’s last column

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Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard links to a last opinion piece written by George McDonald Fraser, author of the brilliant Flashman series, who passed away this week. The more I read about Fraser himself (who also wrote the Michael York/Olver Reed film version of The Three Musketeers, one of my favorite movies), the less guilty I feel about enjoying the Flashman books.

The sex in the Flashman books always embarrassed me. But (it seems to me) the secret of the Flashman stories is that you’re not supposed to like Flashman. He’s a coward and a hypocrite and a goat. But the “flashy” action of his adventures is a medium for conveying a lot of solid information about the whole business of British Colonialism in the 19th Century. And there’s a moral lesson too, it seems to me. Harry Flashman does indeed die “a thousand deaths,” and suffers considerably more than the “idiotic” heroes he disdains, who die with their faces to the enemy.

Goofing

I’m kidding, I’m kidding! Sheesh, you people have no sense of humor

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Everybody seems to be talking about the Iowa Primaries today, wondering how the cold weather will affect turnout.

This is nonsense. In general (there are exceptions) there are only two temperatures in winter, up here in the northern plains—colder than yesterday, and warmer than yesterday. Today is warmer than yesterday, so cold shouldn’t be a factor.

What, you ask, is the significance of the Iowa Caucuses?

The answer is simple—none at all. As all informed people know, nothing of any importance of any kind has ever happened in Iowa. Iowa is like a square-shaped force field that sucks significance out of everything that crosses its borders.

Full disclosure—I have Iowa roots. Both of my father’s parents were children of first-generation Norwegian immigrants who settled in Iowa, then relocated to Minnesota in the 1910s (for the sake of the children, I have no doubt). Even when I was a kid, forty or fifty years later, people still referred to us as “the Iowa folks” in my home town (I think that counts as hate speech nowadays). I also attended two colleges in Iowa, one of which I liked.

Nevertheless, the tragic fact remains that speaking of important events in Iowa is like talking about monsoons in the Sahara, or thoughtful Hollywood actors. It’s an oxymoron. Tonight’s exercises will give Iowans a short-lived feeling of being in the spotlight, and they’ve got it coming, heaven knows. But when the winners tell you they’ve got momentum, remember they’re talking about a state whose greatest claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Capt. James T. Kirk.

Who doesn’t even exist.

But they don’t know that in Iowa.

UPDATE: Just to let you know, I probably won’t post tomorrow evening. I have an appointment to give blood, and then there’s a Viking Age Society meeting, so my time will be tight.

Do not believe any rumors that I’ve been kidnapped by Iowan terrorists. There is no truth whatever to that rumor. And I’m being very humanely treated.

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Don’t put your tongue on the lock in this weather

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To all you southerners who are sharing this delightful cold snap with us, let me just say, “Welcome to our world!” And let me remind you that Global Warming Is Your Friend. Burn some wood tonight. Take an unnecessary trip in an SUV. Stock up on incandescent light bulbs. If we all work together, we can make this a better—and more temperate—world.

It’s supposed to be warmer tomorrow, though. And above freezing by the weekend.

See, it’s working!



I was going to tell you about my niftiest Christmas present. My brother Baal, from boyhood, has had a remarkable gift for finding good presents for people. I can only attribute this to his actually paying attention to other people’s wants and tastes. This has always made me suspect he was adopted.

This is what he gave me this year. I knew what it was the moment I opened the package, and my heart leaped up, because I’d wanted one of these for some time:

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It’s a Viking padlock, based (according to my internet research) on an archaeological find from Ireland. They came in much more elaborate styles, but this bare-bones model is fairly easy to explain. In the picture above, it’s locked. You can see the key, with its square-holed business end, resting on top of the locking arm.

This is how it looks opened:

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As you can see, the lock actually has three parts. The locking pin engages with the end of the locking arm, and the spring holds the pin in place. The key is pushed over the pin (as shown above), and compresses the spring to unlock it and allow the pin to be removed. Simple, and secure enough for general purposes.

It was made by a friend of Baal’s, who blacksmiths as a hobby. I hope to have him make me a new latch for my Viking chest, to go with this lock, if I find I can afford it.

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Happy New Year

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I spent today in bed, in a dim room. This would make sense if I’d been celebrating last night, lapping up champagne and jitterbugging past the Magic Hour and on to morning, like a character from Wodehouse. But I did none of those things. I stayed up till midnight, reading a book, and then went to bed. I just don’t feel very well today, and chose to rest up so I’ll be ready to go back to work tomorrow. That’s my life—all the discomfort of a hangover without having any fun.

I’ll make a few bold predictions for 2008:

Liberal political candidates who support gay marriage, abortion on demand, surrender in Iraq, gun confiscation and higher taxes will promise to “bring us all together.”

Liberals will continue to insist that they’ve been muzzled, since “the media are dominated by the conservatives.” When challenged on this contention they will cite the mere existence of Rush Limbaugh.

Hollywood will make more movies attacking America, or Christianity, or both. When asked why, they’ll say that this is what the public wants.

Whatever the weather in 2008 is like, it will be used as evidence of… well, you know.

The rich will get richer. The poor will get a little richer, but not enough to stop them envying the rich.

The Left will continue to insist that Christian fundamentalists are not different in any way from Muslim terrorists.

There will be a new Third Party. If it’s not called “The Conspiracy Theory Party,” it should be.

Writing

The Year of the Surrender

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Just so you won’t have to enter the new year sick with worry over how the Walker Christmas gathering went, I’ll note here that it went just fine. The weather was utterly perfect, in accordance with the demands of the genre. You know how Christmas looks in those Hallmark Theater TV specials? All the deep, snow-covered scenery, with big, fat flakes falling? It was just like that on Saturday. But the snow wasn’t heavy enough to interfere with travel. (I probably shouldn’t have described it to the Youngest Niece, when she called from China. I think she was homesick enough without having to listen to a description of Postcard Christmas Weather.)

The great advantage of having the family gather at my place for holidays (aside from the motivation it gives me to dust once a year) is that I’m more or less centrally located, so that the brother in Iowa doesn’t have to drive up to the North Woods, and the brother from the North Woods… well, you follow the logic. The drawback is that once we’re all in the house there isn’t actually any room to move around, so we all have to stand in one place for the entire length of the visit, employing an elaborate choreography to allow us to visit the bathroom in rotation. However, we overcame that difficulty, even making room for the Oldest Nephew’s girlfriend, by sucking our stomachs in. I can only assume it’s serious, if he was willing to put her through such an ordeal.

We took the cowards’ way out with food, and ate Kentucky Fried Chicken, with heavy side orders of chocolates and pies and cookies.

I’ll tell you about my favorite Christmas gift in a later post. I want to share pictures, and I have other plans for just now.

Some people think of the New Year’s season as a time to look forward and make resolutions. I prefer to make it a time for looking back, for evaluating the events of the past twelve months and beating myself over the head about every mistake, real or imagined.

2007 was a big year in my history. I will always remember it, I suspect, as the Year of the Surrender. This was the year I admitted defeat. I haven’t talked about this, at least directly, in this space before, but I’ll do it now, because it seems time.

I’ve had a strategy for my life from the time I was a boy. It was a fairly simple strategy—one that made sense to me, considering the circumstances of who I am and what I wanted to do.

This first step was to get published and be a famous novelist. This, I assumed, would provide me the validation I needed to get some woman to marry me.

I’m not what you’d call a fighter. Faced with human opposition, I generally fold my hand and walk away. But in matters of living, where it’s just me against Life, I’m pretty stubborn. I take my lumps and continue doing what I was doing before. It’s actually a lot like that classic definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. So it’s taken me 57 years to realize that my Grand Strategy isn’t a winner.

Losing my publisher didn’t convince me. Even my agent going out of business didn’t quite do it. (It’s often said among writers that everybody wants to be an author, but nobody wants to actually write. The irony of my position is that I’m perfectly willing to write. It’s the being an author thing—the business and relationships and self-promotion—that kill me.)

Anyway, there’s serious talk at the seminary where I’m librarian. The Board is going to ask me to get my Master’s in Library Science, online. This will be very useful for their institutional plans, and also ought to make me better able to competently do my job, which any honest employee wants to do.

But it also means I can’t go to an agent and promise him that I’ll be turning out fiction in a steady manner. There just won’t be time for that.

So for now, I officially declare myself a former novelist.

This may change. It should only take two or three years to get the degree, and then I’ll have time to write books again. And maybe God will open the door.

But right now, it’s the time in my life (it comes to everyone, I think) when I have to bow to God, and lay down my own plans, and embrace His.

I guess that’s my New Year’s Resolution.

Have a blessed new year.

Reading

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel DeFoe

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My plecostomus died today. Or last night. (In case you joined us since my last fish update, we have a fish tank in the library where I work. The plecostomus is an ugly, brown fish which eats scum, and I’ve kept a series of them in the tank, with greater and lesser success). This specimen had lasted a fair amount of time, but he’d gotten fussy lately, liking neither his native algae nor the commercial wafers they sell you to vary his diet. This morning I found him on the floor next to the tank, dried up and stiff like a plastic novelty fish. So the algae will accumulate over the New Year’s break, and I’ll have to buy a replacement soon.



I just finished reading Robinson Crusoe. I ran out of reading material over Christmas, when all the stores and libraries were closed. I’d been watching three versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as is my Christmas tradition, and there’s a scene in the original book (and in the George C. Scott TV movie) where Ebenezer recalls the books he enjoyed as a boy, and one of them is Robinson Crusoe. I had a copy on my bookshelf (a paperback left behind by a long-ago roommate, stamped as property of “English Resource Center, Bemidji High School”), so I figured I’d go ahead and add it to my reading achievements.

I think it was fairly rare for a bookish boy of my generation to miss reading R.C. I seem to recall trying it once, but it failed to grab me. I have more patience now.

Novels were written differently in the 18th Century (which isn’t surprising. Robinson Crusoe is considered by many the first English novel, so DeFoe was making it up as he went along). Today they teach writers to start with an action scene, to get the reader engaged immediately. Back-story can be added later. DeFoe began in the natural, logical manner that modern writers have to un-learn, by starting at the beginning. Robinson Crusoe tells us more than we really want to know about his birth, education and early life. We’re told from the beginning the chief lesson DeFoe has in mind to teach us—stay at home. Don’t have adventures. Crusoe bewails his youthful folly in insisting on going to sea instead of remaining in York, to be set up in business by his father.

We all know the bulk of the story—the shipwreck, the salvaging of the ship’s supplies by Crusoe, the sole survivor. His years of solitude until he sees a footprint in the sand, and finds a friend in the native he calls Friday, whom he rescues from cannibals. I had been unaware of the shorter exploits before and after the island episode—Crusoe’s early adventures at sea, including slavery in North Africa, and afterwards a harrowing winter journey through Europe on his way home to England. Any competent editor today would have advised the author to leave that stuff out. Or save it for the sequels.

The prose was pretty vivid and engaging in the early 1700s. Today it’s a little tougher to follow, though that’s mostly the fault of our inferior educations. Even so, the story remains compelling, and once I was into it, I turned the pages eagerly.

If you only know the story from a cartoon or a children’s book version, you may not be aware how religious it is. Robinson Crusoe sees himself as living proof of God’s providence in the world, and his story as a series of lessons in faith and trust in God’s plan.

The chief problem with the story, for the modern reader, is its primitive, unself-conscious racism. Although Crusoe bewails the wickedness of his early life, before the shipwreck brought him to repentance, the fact that he was on a slave-hunting expedition at the time of the disaster does not seem to count in his mind as one his sins. Although he has the highest praise for Friday’s courage and character (in one place he judges him a better Christian than he himself is), his assumption seems to be that dark-skinned people (like dogs) are happiest when they are owned by kindly white people.

Which means, sadly, that this book will probably not be read by anybody except scholars for a while. Perhaps the day will come when we’ll have gotten past the race thing sufficiently to be able to evaluate a book like this in the context of its own culture and time. Because it’s an important classic, and a very good story with a large “footprint” in English-speaking culture.

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Mountaintop shopping

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Since the Walkers are doing Christmas this Saturday, I haven’t actually gotten much in the way of presents yet (special thanks, though, are due to Cousin Trygve in Norway, who sent a chocolate Santa from the inimitable Freya Company). One gift I have gotten was a fifty dollar grocery store card from the dominant local chain.

Since I have to get ready for Saturday, I figured I’d use the card to get what I needed, and do some stocking up, too. I mean, fifty bucks! I’ve never spent fifty bucks at the grocery store in my life. The very idea of spending that much seemed to me an all but impossible task. Do they make grocery carts that big, I wondered.

So when I went through the check-out line with my laden cart, imagine my surprise when the total came to more than a hundred dollars.

I was able to pay the balance. That’s not a problem. And I wasn’t throwing away money on non-essentials, by and large. Mainly I was stocking up on my usual staples.

And I realize that, when I deduct the value of the card, I got a really good deal.

It’s just that I’m not used to spending money at the grocery store the same way you folks with families do. I’m not used to shopping at that… altitude.

The oxygen’s a little thin up there, isn’t it?

Reviews

Christmas report, and The Husband by Koontz

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Hope you had a good Christmas. I’ll be celebrating (if anything I do can properly be described by that word) with my family here on Saturday.

So how did I spend the holiday? Mostly shoveling snow, as best I recall. We got another couple inches on Christmas Eve night, and my renter and I cleared that out. Christmas Day snow was predicted to be light, but Mother Nature was in a giving mood, so we got a couple more inches on Christmas Day and overnight. My renter being at work today, I shoveled all that by myself. My neighbor, who generally does our shared driveway with his snowblower, continued his tradition of perfect timing by being out of town. (Traditions mean so much at Christmas, after all.)

But I found time to stretch out on the couch with a book too. (Actually I had little choice after all that snow shoveling.) I read Dean Koontz’ The Husband. Good book. I won’t make this reading report an actual review. I think most of you know (and I’m figuring out by now) what to expect of a Dean Koontz book. He appears to be improving as a writer with the years, from what I can tell, but I wouldn’t rate him as a great novelist. But I’ve discovered that he’s an author I can go to and pretty much count on for a good experience—even a moving experience. The Husband is about a man who’s a husband in two senses. He’s married to a woman he loves, and he also runs a lawn service (which makes him a “husbandman” in the traditional English parlance). He lives a conventional middle class life and is happy in it. So it makes no sense when he gets a call telling him the caller has kidnapped his wife, and wants two million dollars in ransom.

Great story. Not (I think) a typical Dean Koontz thriller in that the supernatural element is almost entirely absent. But the tension never lets up, and the morality is excellent. There’s also some insightful social commentary. Enjoyed it very much.

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We children at Christmas

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I suppose it wasn’t my first Christmas. I would have been about five months old then. And almost certainly not my second either. But it’s one of my earliest memories. A dark winter morning. My father woke me and carried me down the stairs into the living room. And there was a tree decorated with colored lights and glittering ornaments. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. In fact, I’m pretty sure that that was the moment when the category “beautiful” entered my conceptual world. The tree was wonderful in itself. But then he showed me that there were brightly wrapped packages under the tree. Presents! Toys for me! My joy was total, unmarred by philosophy or irony or trauma or experience.

And someday—and fewer years are left between today and that day than now have passed since that first remembered Christmas—my Father will take me, not down the stairs, but up the stairs, through the dark into a place full of lights and color and beauty. And there will be gifts there too, wonderful enough to make me forget all the wrong lessons I’ve learned in the course of sabotaging my own life.

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) We often say that Christmas is for children, but we forget that we are all to be children, when it comes to receiving the Gift.

Merry Christmas.