For the record, I received a copy of Thomas M. Sipos’ comic horror novel Hollywood Witches by way of S. T. Karnick of the American Culture, for review purposes.

I love a good Hollywood story. The town’s like an old trollop with a million tales to tell, proud of her very corruption. Not for nothing is the Hollywood fable a traditional setting for morality tales (a triumph of hypocrisy in itself).

Thomas M. Sipos’ novel shows considerable promise and delivers a number of laughs, but gets weighed down by its lack of narrative discipline.

The chief eponymous witch of the story is Diana Däagen, a figure of satire, gargantuan in her vices and terrifying in her lack of self-awareness. A failed actress, she now works as “development executive” in a movie studio. She believes herself intensely spiritual and full of love for all humankind, but that doesn’t prevent her from treating her underlings like dirt, using black magic to thwart or kill her enemies, and planning to murder thousands of people at once—all for enlightened, politically correct purposes, of course.

There is no subtlety in Diana’s character. If you like characters in novels, even bad characters, to have sympathetic sides, you won’t find one here. Diana is pure black-hat witch, evil all through.

But of course she’s a Hollywood production executive, so that doesn’t strain credibility much. Continue reading Book Review: Hollywood Witches, by Thomas M. Sipos →

The legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller seems to have risen in the Middle Ages, and is today considered entirely folklore. Possibly inspired by the story of Oedipus, it tells of a young man of noble family cursed to commit an appalling, shameful crime. As with Oedipus, his very efforts to make the crime impossible actually bring it about, but Christians added the element of redemption, a demonstration that no crime is beyond the mercy of God.

Author and clergyman Walter Wangerin Jr. has written Saint Julian, a version of the legend (published 2003) in his own dreamy, poetic style. It’s not his best work, but it’s worth reading for those with eyes to see.

Medieval Christians believed that Julian lived at the beginning of the Christian era, but Wangerin places it in the epoch that produced it—somewhere in the Middle Ages, apparently during the Crusades. His book combines the classic style of the hagiographical tale with the allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress. Julian is a sort of Everyman, or Everychristian. Born to many advantages, blessed with physical beauty and rich natural gifts, he falls—almost innocently, one might say—into the sin of pride, seeing no need to curb his desires. His immoderation leads to a great sin, which brings upon him the curse of the tale. And when he commits his crime, it is again because of his intemperance. What follows is a long journey to discover the miracle of grace, a journey in which God is always guiding, generally unseen, along hard and painful roads.

Saint Julian lacks the emotional peaks and valleys that broke so many of our hearts in Wangerin’s greatest novel, the delightful The Book of the Dun Cow. In his attempt to mimic the style of medieval chroniclers, the author starts the book slowly, and probably loses a lot of readers along the way. The very universality of his themes tends to make the characters one-dimensional, like figures in a Gothic church painting.

Fans of Wangerin will enjoy Saint Julian, but not consider it his finest work. Those new to him would do best to start with The Book of the Dun Cow.

Minnesota author John Sandford (real name John Camp) has established a nice little franchise with his Lucas Davenport Prey novels. Davenport is a Minnesota state cop who also happens to be a millionaire. He enjoys driving his Porsche fast with the siren on. As skillful as the character’s handling of his car has been the author’s own steering of the series, keeping out of both the left and the right ditches on a pretty winding road.

The early Davenport books portrayed a cop who was also a designer of computer games. He used the same skills he employed in game design to out-think the most devious and insane of criminals, and more than once he applied a little private justice in cases where he was confident the courts would let a dangerous killer back on the streets. In that period, Davenport seemed to be gradually losing his own grip on sanity, torn between duty to the job and his personal commitment to protecting the public.

Sandford deftly saved Davenport’s sanity by having him meet and marry a female surgeon. As Davenport acquired not only a wife, but a foster daughter and a baby son, he grew happier and more stable. Unfortunately, he ran the risk of getting a little dull. The old edge seemed to be going.

With Wicked Prey, Sandford has found a solution to that problem too, bringing in another legal corner-cutter, close enough to Davenport to make his world perhaps even more dangerous and morally ambiguous than before. Continue reading Wicked Prey, by John Sandford →

At Evangelical Outpost, Rachel Motte reviews West Overesea.

I caught a few minutes of a BBC dramatization of one of the Kurt Wallander mysteries this season, but I was distracted and don’t even remember which story it was (it might even have been this one, the first novel of the series). Still, I’ve decided I need to acquaint myself with the booming Scandinavian mystery scene, and so I picked up Faceless Killers. I enjoyed it, with some reservations.

The hero is Detective Kurt Wallander, a policeman in the rural town of Ystad (pronounced EE-stad), Sweden. Wallander is no McGarrett, no supercop. He’s barely keeping it together, in his personal life and his profession. His wife recently left him, which spun him into depression and heavy drinking. His adult daughter simply disappeared from his life, though she makes occasional contact. His artist father is sliding into dementia. Meanwhile at work, it’s his bad luck to be the senior detective on the squad (his superior is on holiday) when an elderly farm couple is brutally murdered in their home. A whispered statement by the female victim suggests a “foreigner” was responsible. Somehow the word gets out, and there are reprisals against local refugee camps.

Wallander manages to do his job creditably, but sometimes it’s touch and go, thanks in particular to exhaustion and imprudent drinking. Leads are followed until they play out, and Wallander manages to get himself pretty severely beaten up more than once. There’s even an almost-comic car chase, in which Wallander follows a suspect driving a stolen car, in a commandeered horse van.

The story lost some steam toward the end, though I had no trouble sticking with it. As a conservative American, I had mixed responses to the ethos of the story. Wallander is surprisingly conservative (it seems to me) for a Swedish cop. Although heartily anti-racist, he has serious doubts about Sweden’s open borders policy, a sentiment which sat pretty well with me. On the other hand, as a typical Swedish civil servant, the idea of a right to bear arms is entirely foreign to his universe. I had a hard time, puritanical American that I am, swallowing his guilt-free pursuit of another man’s wife.

Still, it was an interesting story, and not quite what I expected. I may read more Henning Mankell.

A note on the translation—it could have been a lot better. The translator opted too often for literalism over idiom, and the story suffered for it. I need to get into the translation business. It would appear they need me.

In March of 2009, mystery author Stuart M. Kaminsky moved with his wife from his Sarasota home to St. Louis, Missouri, in order to wait for a liver transplant (he’d contracted hepatitis during service as a military medic in France in the late 1950s). Two days later he suffered a stroke, making him ineligible for the surgery, and he passed away the following October.

The online accounts of his death I’ve read give no hint how (or whether) Kaminsky’s health affected his writing plans. But these last two novels in his Lew Fonesca series (my favorite of his four detective series) possess an elegiac quality, as if the author was tying up loose ends.

I’ve told you about Lew Fonesca before. He’s a bald, skinny process server in Sarasota, Florida. During most of the series, he lives in the back room of his tiny office, next to a Dairy Queen. He gets around chiefly by bicycle. He doesn’t want to own anything, and he doesn’t want people in his life. He’s chronically depressed, overcome by the death of his wife, in a hit-and-run accident in Chicago a few years back. He drove south until his car broke down in Sarasota, and settled where he stopped.

And yet he doesn’t stay alone. Over the course of the books he acquires a staunch friend in the old cowboy Ames McKinney, who backs him up in tight spots. An old woman he once helped took in an unwed mother he rescued, and now he’s sort of an unofficial godfather to the baby. He has a girlfriend. There’s a “little brother” (who likes going around with him because shots tend to get fired). A therapist. And (in the final book) a Chinese man who sleeps on his floor, for reasons you’ll have to read the novels to learn.

You might think these books would be depressing. They’re not. In fact—it occurred to me while reading Bright Futures—they’re actually rather funny. Lew Fonesca, like some farcical Job, is the butt of a cosmic joke. The God in whom he claims not to believe (he’s a lapsed Episcopalian) seems to be playing games with him. Continue reading Always Say Goodbye, and Bright Futures, by Stuart M. Kaminsky →

Once again, I offer something more in the line of a reading report than a book review, because (alas) the novel I’ve just finished reading isn’t available in English.

My friend Baard Titlestad of Saga Publishers sent along a copy of Edvard Eikill’s Lokes Lek, personally autographed for me by the author. I was fascinated and moved by what I read in its pages.

Lokes Lek (Loki’s Game) isn’t precisely a Viking book, but is set about a century after the death of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my books. Indeed, Erling’s descendents at Sola are part of the story.

When Norwegians look back at their history, they see a Golden Age beginning with the Viking raids, and ending with the death of King Sigurd Jorsalfar (the Crusader). King Sigurd did mighty deeds in the Mediterranean as a young man, then settled down to a peaceful joint rule with his brother Øystein the Good, one of the country’s most beloved rulers. After Øystein’s death, Sigurd ruled alone, sometimes heedlessly, but there was peace in the land and the people loved him. Continue reading Reading report: Lokes Lek, by Edvard Eikill →