Category Archives: Reviews

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Muus vs. Muus,’ by Bodil Stenseth

Leave a comment

It must have been the biggest news story to ever come out of the community where I grew up. Perhaps it says something about our spirit of reconciliation that I never heard about it until I was an adult.

A group of my surviving high school class members gathered for an informal reunion back in (I think) 2010. We were at the home of one of my classmates, in the township of Holden, just north of town. I was standing in the yard, looking over at the church a little to the east, and a friend came up beside me and said, “You know there was a big scandal with the pastor in that church, back in pioneer days.”

“B. J. Muus?” I asked. I knew that Pastor Muus, the founder of St. Olaf College, had been the original pastor there.

“Yeah,” he said. “Something about his wife suing him for divorce.”

Later on, I was told that the house where we were meeting that evening had been the home of the local doctor, who’d been accused of having an affair with Mrs. Muus.

After that, I started reading up on the story, which turned out to have been a big deal back in 1880. But I didn’t have the full story until I read Muus vs. Muus: The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America, by Bodil Stenseth. I had had the impression that adultery was at the center of the scandal, but the real bone of contention turned out to be the one that remains the most common cause of marriage breakups today – money.

Bernt Julius Muus (pronounced “Moose”) and Oline Pind were not your average Norwegian immigrants. They did not come to America because of hard economic necessity; they came from privileged families. He felt called to minister to Norwegian Americans in the new country, and Oline felt called to be his helpmate.

They settled on the virgin prairie of Goodhue County, Minnesota, in the tiny settlement of Holden. Bernt, a hard man and a preacher of fiery sermons, worked tirelessly, not only to build his own congregation, but to plant churches all over the upper Midwest. In time he rose to be the first president of the Minnesota District of the conservative Norwegian Synod. Oline worked hard too, keeping the house, raising their children, filling in for her husband in practical matters of the congregation during his frequent absences.

Then, in 1879, she dropped a bombshell. She sued her husband for the money she had inherited from her father, which he had taken into his possession under Norwegian law. But they were in the U.S. now (though both Oline and Bernt remained Norwegian citizens) and she felt she should be able to control her own money as U.S. law permitted.

The matter might not have become a cause célèbre, though, if a document called “the Complaint” hadn’t been appended to the legal text. This document accused Pastor Muus of mental cruelty, neglect, and a stingy refusal to spend money on basic household necessities, to the point of damaging her and their children’s health.

Critics of the Norwegian Synod found this story irresistible. My people, the pietist Haugeans, who considered the Norwegian Synod papist and aristocratic (and were much more open to feminism than the Synod men), saw Bernt Muus as a power-hungry ecclesiastical tyrant. The men of the Lutheran Free Church, whose successors I worked for many years, supported Mrs. Muus after the divorce was finalized. Norwegian-American freethinkers, like Marcus Thrane whose comic opera “Holden” was performed in Chicago, used the case to attack orthodox Christianity itself. And nativist Americans were shocked by the bizarre goings on in an immigrant community which had so far made little effort to assimilate.

I was impressed with Muus vs. Muus. The story was well-told, and the translation very good. I expected a lot of heavy-handed feminist theory, but in fact (though the author’s sympathies are hardly concealed), the book does a pretty good job of being even-handed. I was impressed with the way the Holden congregation – within the strictures of its church rules, which did not allow a woman to address the congregation – went out of its way in many cases to be fair to Mrs. Muus.

I was also interested to see a lot of last names, like Finseth, Langemo, and Huset, that I knew well during my childhood in the area.

The book was marred by a mandatory, hypocritical land acknowledgement embedded in the editor’s afterword. But all in all, I was highly impressed by Muus vs. Muus. I recommend it for that (small, I’ll admit) audience interested in Norwegian-American history, especially church history.

Fiction, Reviews

‘I’ll Keep You Safe,’ by Peter May

Leave a comment

It had an atmosphere all of its own, that place. Sometimes mired in the mist that would drift in off the water on a still morning, or lost in the smirr that dropped down from the moor. I came into the loch once on a boat just as the sun was coming up, and mist like smoke rose up all around the lodge in the early-morning light, moving wraithlike among the trees. The water itself was alive with salmon breaking the still surface as they headed in from the sea on their journey upriver, and otters played around the stone slipway. It was magical.

I had not gotten far into reading Peter May’s I’ll Keep You Safe before I realized I’d read it before – even though I had just bought it on Amazon for the first time. Perhaps my previous reading was through a free giveaway, or perhaps I bought the paper version; all I know is I’ve reviewed it already, way back in 2018. Still, I’d forgotten how it came out, so I read on. With considerable pleasure.

Niamh and Ruairidh Macfarlane run a small tweed knitting company on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. It’s not the famous Harris Tweed, but a more refined fabric derived from it. They’ve made it through hard times to become big successes in the fashion world – some of the foremost designers in the business use their product. And they’re still very much in love.

They’re in Paris for an exhibition when Niamh gets an anonymous e-mail telling her Ruairidh is having an affair. She confronts him, and he walks away without explanation. A few minutes later, he’s dead. Niamh is devastated, lost and betrayed. The French police consider her a suspect.

When she’s allowed to take Ruaridh’s remains back home, she faces a hostile world. Both sets of their parents have always opposed their marriage. Lifelong friends turn against her. A French police woman is sent out to investigate her affairs. And she has a sense that someone is stalking her.

I note from my first review that I figured out whodunnit quite early on. Which amuses me, because I didn’t do that on this second reading. The story is told in a complex, non-sequential manner, with varying viewpoint characters, which is just confusing enough to keep the reader intrigued.

As always, one of Peter May’s greatest strengths is his scenic descriptions. One gets a vivid sense of the place – of the geology, the changeable, dangerous weather, the plants and wildlife. I greatly appreciate that quality, very much like taking a brief holiday in the islands.

Cautions are in order for language and some drug use, but I was intrigued to note (on this reading) that the book actually takes some very traditional moral views. That surprised me. Probably unintentional on the author’s part, but appreciated.

I highly recommend I’ll Keep You Safe – again. Women and men alike will enjoy it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Going Home In the Dark,’ by Dean Koontz

Leave a comment

…all in all, his condition was so pitiable that an extraordinary and inadvisable number of semicolons were required to connect the closely associated clauses describing it.

A Lutheran pastor appears as a villain in Dean Koontz’s latest novel, Going Home In the Dark. I think I can be confident that that pastor is a member of the Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless, because he’s committed to the extinction of the human race. (I don’t think that’s too big a spoiler. The guy isn’t the main villain.)

Dean Koontz likes to mix it up, style-wise. He can be dark and tragic; he can be deeply creepy and scary. He can even be funny, and he’s often quite good at that. He’s mostly going for funny (in a scary way) in Going Home In the Dark, and it works, I think… by and large.

The friends who call themselves the Four Amigos grew up as nerds and social outcasts in the midwestern town of Maple Grove (not the one just up the road from me, in Minnesota, I’m pretty sure). They all went on to be rich and famous – Rebecca is a movie star; Bobby is a bestselling novelist; Spencer is a renowned painter, and Ernie writes hit Country songs. Only Ernie still lives in town, near his cold and intimidating mother.

When Ernie is hospitalized in a coma, his friends rush to visit him – but are informed by his mother that he has died, just before their arrival.

Nevertheless, they are all convinced – irrationally but with certainty – that Ernie is not really dead. He’s in some kind of suspended animation. So they conspire to sneak his body out of the hospital and hide it so no one can embalm it before they figure out what’s going on.

Because something is going on. All three of them are suddenly recalling – all at the same time – strange events that happened when they were teenagers, memories they have suppressed until now. Why was the Lutheran pastor concealing half-formed, humanoid creatures in the church basement? Who was the monstrous giant they saw eating a man’s head in the park pavilion on Halloween? Also, why is Maple Grove – a town where the streets have names like Cunningham, Cleaver and Capra, so relentlessly friendly and utterly crime-free?

In spite of its horrific subject matter, the story is presented in a comic, self-parodying style. The unnamed narrator is always explaining why he tells us some things and ignores other things, undermining his stylistic effects by pointing them out. I did find it funny, and laughed more than once, though I thought Koontz was working it a little too hard this time.

However, the book’s conclusion did move me, which is the most important thing.

Not Koontz at his best, Going Home In the Dark is nevertheless a very entertaining book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Safe,’ by George Prior

Leave a comment

James had just returned from the crime scene, and he had the extremely tense look that he got when he was far behind in admin tasks—which he would be after spending the day at a scene. Tense but dead still, like ten pounds of springs in a five-pound spring can.

The basic idea of George Prior’s Casey Stafford novels, of which Dead Safe is the second, strikes me as remarkably similar to John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport books – millionaire cop who drives fast cars, dresses well, and fights crime essentially for fun. But I’d say (based on reading this book) that accusations of copycat-ism would be unfair. Casey Stafford, who works in Los Angeles, is a fully realized character in his own right. (For one thing, he’s free to pursue women, which Lucas Davenport gave up when he married some time back.) Also the writing here is very strong, and the story is pretty original.

There’s a private security vault in Beverly Hills where anyone who can afford it can store anything at all, without any fuss about identification. Obviously a business like that will cater to criminals, though it’s technically legal.

A group of young men who run a YouTube channel where they demonstrate “jackass” stunts has fallen on hard times, and needs an infusion of cash. They figure out how to disguise themselves digitally from the security cameras, and they clear out a number of safe deposit boxes, collecting a lot more money than they ever dreamed.

They’re clever and tech-savvy, but they lack the imagination to guess that the kind of man who hides that kind of money is not likely to be either philosophical or forgiving about loss. Before long the young YouTube stars are dying in horrible ways. And our hero Casey Stafford, along with his female partner Banchet Suwan, are several steps behind, following a digitally erased trail after criminals unknown to the police. In the end it will become a three-way game between Casey, the murderer, and the last, resourceful survivor of the YouTube gang.

I was very impressed with the writing in Dead Safe. It was smooth, elegant and expressive. The dialogue snapped and the characters – of which there were many – were well drawn. I particularly liked a gunfight scene where things went wrong in a highly plausible manner. No overt politics came up, though I thought I saw some subtle hints of conservative ideas (could easily be wrong).

My only real objection was that I thought a scene of a home invasion was unnecessarily graphic (I prefer to enter such stories after the violence is over, when the cops are viewing the crime scene). Plenty of cautions are in order for violence, sex and profanity. (The cop banter here is pretty good; perhaps just a notch below John Sandford’s. But I still don’t buy the women cops’ good-humored participation.)

All things considered, Dead Safe was an excellent detective thriller. This reader was impressed.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Chill,’ by Scott Carson

Leave a comment

The day was dull and gray but the leaves were a brilliant assortment of orange, yellow, and red. A long, lovely summer with its throat cut.

Long ago, the town of Galesburg, in the Catskill Mountains of New York state, was taken by eminent domain and drowned under what became the Chilewaukee Reservoir (popularly known as “The Chill”). The purpose was to provide backup water for the City of New York. The residents, fiercely superstitious folk, had warned the planners and engineers that the land there was dangerous, and they had sealed their warnings with violence and fire. But the dam was built and has stood ever since.

Gillian Mathers is a descendant of the Galesburg folk. She was raised by her grandmother near the reservoir, but her father fetched her to the city after the grandmother’s disappearance. Somehow Gillian felt compelled to come back, though, and now she’s on the water authority police force, guarding the man-made lake where her ancestors are buried.

Aaron Ellsworth is the son of the county sheriff. He once set his heart on being on a Coast Guard rescue crew, but he washed out in training. Now he’s a ne’er-do-well, shiftless, on the road to criminal life. Until the day he accidentally kills a man at the dam, but then the same man reappears out of the water, apparently uninjured.

Old prophecies are beginning to come true. Unseen, unknown forces are at work under the earth. And Gillian is feeling the pull of her grandmother’s earliest lessons – of the old faith of Galesburg, and the sacrifices it demands. Meanwhile, the rain falls, threatening to overwhelm the old dam, and the people downstream have no idea what danger they’re in.

Like all Scott Carson novels, The Chill is very well written. I thought of Dean Koontz as I read, though I guess the style and subject matter are closer to Stephen King. I don’t like horror as a genre generally, though I do like Koontz, and The Chill seems to bear some of Koontz’s essential optimism. There are even faint echoes of Christianity: “Sacrifice is about salvation, Mrs. Baerga had said. Not vengeance. Whoever told you that story used the wrong word. Lots of people would die for family, honey. But how many would die for a stranger?”

I enjoyed The Chill. Not as much as I liked Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane, but it’s quite good of its kind.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Red Harvest,’ by Dashiell Hammet

Leave a comment

He was a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope. The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.

Dashiell Hammet wrote a number of stories about “the Continental Op,” a fat, nameless private detective working for a company based on the Pinkertons, as well as two Op novels. I reviewed the second Op book, The Dain Curse, not long ago, so I thought I might as well do Red Harvest (1929) too. I’d read it before, but way back in the 1970s.

We find the Continental Op in the western mining town of Personville, which seems to be in Utah. The town bears the nickname of “Poisonville,” and well deserves it. It used to be controlled by old Elihu Wilsson, the mine owner, but he’s allowed it to fall into the hands of various groups of criminals (these are Prohibition days, after all). Elihu’s son, Daniel, who has taken over the local newspaper, has decided to be a reformer. He’s requested a detective to come and help him ferret out corruption.

But Daniel is dead before the Op can even meet with him. The Op manages to get in to see Elihu, the old man, and eventually gets his permission to investigate his son’s murder.

Poisonville is in every way worthy of its name. The police are just as corrupt as the various criminal organizations, and as the Op stirs the waters, he finds that poison entering his own soul: “This d**ned burg’s getting to me,” he says. “If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” (This is where the Coen Brothers got the title for their movie, “Blood Simple.”)

There is no subtlety in Red Harvest. This is a story about killing, and lots of it. As in Hamlet, the stage is nearly empty at the end, most of the main characters dead, our very unromantic hero still standing, but shakily.

There is a pervasive rumor (denied by director Akira Kurosawa himself) that his classic samurai movie, “Yojimbo,” was inspired by Red Harvest. If so, it would be the grandfather of “A Fistful of Dollars” and a score of other imitators. However, Red Harvest is more complex than those movies. Instead of a scenario with two warring gangs, this novel features a complex situation. There are multiple factions, and the Op busies himself with inciting each of them against the others in various combinations, just stirring things up to see what reactions he can get, increasingly callous to the sanguine results.

When one has grown accustomed to Raymond Chandler’s prose (I can never resist the comparison), Dashiell Hammett comes off as something of a blunt instrument. But Hammett came first, and was breaking new ground, so to speak. Critics consider Red Harvest a classic and a groundbreaking literary work.

But it’s pretty grim.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Digital Barbarism,’ by Mark Helprin

Leave a comment

For modernity, ceaselessly mercurial, is nothing more than obsolescence yet to occur. To put one’s faith in or devote one’s attentions to it is to chase after a vapor.

Back when I was toiling through library school, one of the topics we were supposed to study was Copyright. The material they gave us to read was pretty uniformly partisan – on the side of the Creative Commons and against Copyright (or at least its extension). Much was made of the tyranny of Disney (though Disney generally holds trademarks rather than copyrights, but it’s all Intellectual Property). As a holder of copyrights myself, I found such material a little troubling, but I had no established principles on the topic in general (I hadn’t even known it was a topic), so – as I recall – I accommodated myself to the crowd, and wrote something about how copyright might be necessary for a while, but the free flow of information meant copyrights ought to end as early as reasonably possible.

Meanwhile, Mark Helprin, one of our greatest living authors, wrote (as he tells us) an op-ed for the New York Times. He thought an article about Copyright would be innocuous. He argued for its extension, so that a writer’s heirs can enjoy the fruits of their parent’s work just like the heirs of businessmen. He was astonished to discover that he had unleashed a firestorm of online comments from copyright abolitionists, who understood him to be arguing for everlasting copyright. This roused his fighting spirit, and so he came to write Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.

The book is quite long. It probably could have been shorter, but Helprin clearly warmed to his topic as he labored. He regards the anti-copyright movement as a branch of Marxism, its general war against property. The world has no lack of people (generally without productive ability of their own) who believe that property is theft, and that if the greedy owners would just fork over, all the world’s problems would be fixed. Creators, it is assumed, will just continue toiling away for the love of creation itself.

As far as I can learn, Helprin’s fears haven’t come true. Copyright continues in force, and its opponents seem to be a small (if loud-voiced) group. He must also be gratified by the current resurgence in the purchase of paper books, something he does not foresee in this work.

Digital Barbarism is full of Helprin’s vivid prose, which is always worth reading. I did weary of the argument somewhat after a while, though.

Non-fiction, Reading, Reviews

‘The Saga of the Sworn Brothers’

Leave a comment
A scene from Ravnsborg in Missouri, which sadly no longer exists. The man addressing the feast is not a skald, but Sam Shoults, the owner of the place. But you get the idea.

I have apparently survived my first Viking weekend of the “summer season.” It’s not quite summer yet, of course, as was made abundantly clear by events. The skies were overcast, the breeze (though fortunately light) was a-chill. I don’t wear my fine woolen tunic a lot, as Viking reenactment in the country is mostly a warm-weather activity, but I was glad of it this weekend. The crowds at the Fantasy of the Lakes Renaissance Festival in Lindstrom, MN were not large, but that’s hardly the fault of the organizers, who did their best. Oddly enough, my book sales were better on Saturday (the colder day) than on Sunday.

Instead of reading from my Kindle in my abundant free moments, I chose to bring along my current volume of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I had a long saga to read, and one I’d read before – at least in the variant recorded in Flatey Book. The version printed in this edition is compiled from four source texts, including some variant passages, which are clearly marked.

This one is The Saga of the Sworn Brothers, quite a famous saga. It seems to be based on a skaldic poem by a man who you may recall if you’ve read my novel The Baldur Game – the poet Thormod Kolbrunarskald (Coal-Brow’s Skald). (I’ve blogged about the Flatey Book version before in this space). The poem, of which this saga preserves passages, celebrates the achievements of Thormod’s friend and sworn brother, Thorgeir Havarsson. Sworn brotherhood was a serious matter in Viking society – once the oath was sworn, each brother was honor-bound to avenge the other’s death. Judging by the poem, and the saga built on it, Thormod was likely from the git-go to be called on to do just that – because Thorgeir seems to have been a complete psychopath. Thormod says of him that he never knew fear – not even bothering to call for help while clinging for life to nothing but a clump of angelica at the brink of a cliff.

The saga is episodic, as sagas tend to be, but it follows the two friends as they carom from one adventure to another, casually killing men and getting outlawed here and there on the way. In time they part company. Thorgeir (the psychopath) enters the household of King (Saint) Olaf Haraldsson, but leaves him eventually to meet his fate. Thormod, when he learns of Thorgeir’s death (at the hands of several killers, of course), sets out to get revenge, a quest that will take him as far as Greenland. Later he enters Saint Olaf’s service in his own right. He is a prominent figure in the legends of Olaf’s death at Stiklestad. His death from an arrow wound after the battle takes place here (as well as in Flatey Book, which I’d forgotten) in a barley barn. I made it a cattle byre in The Baldur Game – Snorri’s Heimskringla does not specify what kind of building it was.

Another difference from Heimskringla is Thormod’s famous last words. In Heimskringla, he pulls an arrowhead out of his chest, looks at it, and says, “The king has fed us well – I am fat at the heart-roots.” Then he dies. He does not say that in this version, but dies in the midst of the last line of a poem he composes on the spot, which is finished by Olaf’s brother Harald (later King Harald Hardrada). This reinforces my guess, which I employ in The Baldur Game, that Harald must have been present at Thormod’s death, and would have been the source of the story.

(The veracity of the “heart-roots” line is also questionable due to the fact that the same line occurs in other sagas, notably when Leif Eriksson’s brother Thorvald is dying after a fight with Native Americans in Vinland.)

The Saga of the Sworn Brothers is an intriguing one, notable for being based on the recollections of a man who’s fairly honest about himself and his dead friend. The sworn brothers are not high heroes, but reckless, feckless youths who do as much harm as good in the world. Thormod’s death in Saint Olaf’s service is regarded as a grace. (The saga writer is not shy about inserting little moral homilies here and there.)

The Sworn Brothers is an intriguing – and valuable – saga.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ripped Into,’ by Jack Chandler

Leave a comment

Stuart “Fin” Finlay, the hero of Ripped Into (the first book in a new series by Jack Chandler) is a sort of a private detective in England, specializing in locating missing children. This time he takes a job from a man named Stanton, who wants him to find his missing stepdaughter, Sarah. She disappeared the same night their house burned down and his wife disappeared.

Fin starts running down leads, but the author also follows the activities of Sarah herself, living a high-stress life under a false identity. The mystery becomes one of why she’s hiding, and why she doesn’t simply go to the police.

As the story works itself out, we learn that some extremely dangerous people are hunting for Sarah. Fin eventually is able to take her under his wing, but she is very fragile and paranoid, convinced that she can trust no one, ready to bolt any moment. Only perfect honesty and a measure of self-disclosure, very hard for Fin, will keep her on his side.

I can’t deny that Ripped Into is an intense, fast-moving book. Considerable space is spent on Fin and Sarah painfully disclosing their personal traumas to one another in an effort to build rapport; I’m not sure that element wasn’t a little mushy for a book as violent as this. Which brings up my main problem with the story – it involves an extended scene of the torture of a woman. We have an occasional commenter on this blog who never fails to take umbrage at my objections to female cops in novels. I willingly admit to my sexism, but that’s not the main reason why I dislike the topic. The primary reason is that I just hate witnessing violence against women. (The fact that author Chandler turns out to be a woman herself doesn’t mend the matter for this reader.)

So my final verdict is that Ripped Into is a pretty effective mystery thriller featuring generally good writing, but it did not suit my very subjective taste.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Where They Wait,’ by Scott Carson

Leave a comment

The signature sound of the loon is a solitary sound. It’s a haunting cry of undeniable beauty with an undercurrent of sorrow. An announcement of peaceful northern isolation, the Thoreau of birds.

The sound is a lie, though. Loons are not solitary, nor are they peaceful. The loon’s life is a violent one. The birds will stab each other with their beaks, beat each other with their wings, and pull each other under the water. The midnight cry that makes people think of Thoreau at Walden Pond is anything but serene.

I picked up another novel by Scott Carson, whose Lost Man’s Lane impressed me so. Where They Wait did not bowl me over to quite the same degree, but it’s very good.

Nick Bishop is a journalist, out of work, yet another victim of the digital revolution. Living in Florida, he calls an old college friend in Maine, where he used to live and went to school. The friend tells him he’s editing the college’s alumni magazine, and offers him a decent fee to write an article about a distinguished alumnus, a young computer tycoon who lives locally. But Nick needs to come up and interview him in person, he says.

Well, it’s been a long time since Nick has gone home to Maine. His mother is there, but she’s in nursing care, her memory lost to a stroke. Ironically, she’d been a highly respected expert on memory. There’s also the family’s lakeside “camp,” what people in other states would call a cabin, on a lake. Nick drives up and interviews the young tycoon, surprised to be met at the door by a young woman who’d been a childhood friend, and on whom he’d had a crush. The tycoon shows Nick a new cell phone app he’s working on – a relaxation program. Nick tries the beta version, and it works well. Rather too well. His life will never be the same, and soon he’ll learn facts about his past he’d never guessed. Facts that could be the death of him and others.

Where They Wait is an earlier novel than Lost Man’s Lane, and (in my opinion) not quite as successful. However, I considered Lost Man’s Lane almost perfect, so plenty of room remains for this to be quite a good novel. And such judgments are subjective anyway. Where They Wait offers intriguing characters and a compelling mystery, with one foot in science and the other in the supernatural. Very much in my own line, when I’m writing such books as Wolf Time.

I enjoyed Where They Wait, and read it in a day. There are a couple respectful, vague references to Christianity, and the whole thing could be viewed allegorically, if one were in the mood.