Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Boat Man,’ by Dustin Stevens

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“The Boat Man” is the titular murderer’s own name for himself. He and another were the victims of a horrible crime some years ago, and now he’s back, having mastered patience and the use of a sword, to make the perpetrators understand exactly what they have put others through. And then die.

That’s the premise behind The Boat Man, written by Dustin Stevens, who is pretty good at thrillers if this book is any indication.

The hero of the story is Columbus, Ohio Detective Reed Mattox, who has suffered from PTSD since the death of his (female) partner. Since then he has withdrawn from human society generally. He manages to remain a cop through taking a K-9 partner (Billie, a Belgian Malinois) and working the night shift.

When the Boat Man murders begin, however, his superiors are forced by a manpower shortage to move him to the day shift and put his team in charge of the investigation. And gradually Reed begins to uncover a terrible injustice and a shameful cover-up.

Author Stevens creates good characters and believable situations. The writing is generally of pretty high quality, though some typos managed to survive into the final text. I liked the book a lot and recommend it.

Fiction

Kickstarter: The Wingfeather Saga

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Yesterday, Andrew Peterson posted a big announcement about his fantasy series, The Wingfeather Saga. He has formed a production company and is asking for crowdfunding for an animated series.

“Most of you probably don’t know this,” he said, “but when I was in high school I had every intention of either going into animation or penciling Batman comics. I’ve always loved illustration, but am a total hack when it comes to drawing (which, thankfully, led to a music career).”

So Peterson isn’t drawing the shows himself, but “I would really love to see the Wingfeather Saga play itself out in a different format that might just get Janner’s story into many more kids’ imaginations.”

Right now, he has 68% of his requested funding. That’s impressive for twenty-some hours.

Fiction

Brutal Satire in Eve Tushnet’s ‘Amends’

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“That skirt is so short I can see your soul.”

That’s one of the biting lines in Eve Tushnet’s novel Amends. Kate Havard reviews it. The story is about a reality show focused on alcoholics going through rehab for a month.

At first, it appears that [the right-wing journalist] and his fellow cast members [and Internet social justice warrior and a would-be saint, among others] have nothing in common except for their sustained commitment to drinking and “waiting for the alcohol to eat up the present and excrete it as the past.” But it turns out that what this group has in common is a great talent for lying, mostly to themselves. Each cast member has built an elaborate origin story that allows them to keep on living in a way they know, but can’t admit, is unsustainable. . . .

The addicts in Tushnet’s novel who are really in trouble, though, are the ones who have given up trying to justify themselves, and choose to tell the story in which they are not, and cannot ever be, good.

[via Prufrock]

Fiction

Trying to Capture God’s Mockery

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All satire exists in the gap between what ought to be and what is, and therefore remains a powerful skewer against the shortcomings of an all-too-human church. “The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel to touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them,” Mark Twain wrote in a 1905 New York Times essay.

Laura Turner reviews a book on religious satire, attempting to tie together the truth and the self-righteous.

Fiction

Facing Fears and Ourselves

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http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/joeljmiller/time-to-panic/?utm_content=buffer0edce&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Speaking of scary, Stephen King said the new movie The Witch scared the hell out of him. From what I’ve read, I think it would do the same for me, but then I don’t take to horror movies well. Josh Larsen says Christians may find some good themes in that story. “For Christian horror-movie fans, it functions as a provocative consideration of the ways religious extremists may be particularly susceptible to the devil’s whims.”

Fiction, Publishing

Are Literary Mash-ups a New Horizon for Publishing?

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Still from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Still from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Is the literary mash-up a passing fad or a fertile new genre? The art of mashing up involves putting together two completely incongruous genres, only to discover that something in the high-cultural original matches the low material with which it is mixed. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the Bennet girls prepare themselves for encounters with the undead just as enthusiastically as they prepare themselves for husband-hunting in the original.

The Guardian’s John Mullan suggests several ideas, like this mashup of Paradise Lost and X-Men.

John Milton was surely a super-hero bard avant la lettre. All those angels tumbling from heaven’s crystal battlements, flying across the universe to visit Earth. Think of the war in heaven, where the fallen angels pit “their engines and their balls / Of missive ruin” against the less well-armed Cherubim. It could surely have profited from the involvement of Wolverine and Gambit, while Satan’s concordat with Magneto would challenge the Archangel Michael, even with his sword that “felled / Squadrons at once, with huge two-handed sway”.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Missing or Murdered,’ by Robin Forsythe

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My ongoing attempt to shift my recreational reading to older novels is not, I must admit, going as well as I hoped. I’ve discovered some gems, it’s true – Frank H. Spearman’s westerns, E. Phillips Oppenheim’s spy stories. But my attempts to acquire a taste for Golden Age mysteries seems fruitless. Aside from Dorothy Sayers, I honestly can’t think of a Golden Age mystery novelist I care much for. Robin Forsythe did not change that judgment.

Robin Forsythe was an English civil servant who went to prison for a while for fraud, and came out determined to make his living writing mysteries. He did all right too, for the remainder of his short life.

His fictional detective was Tony “Algernon” Vereker (I never did figure out quite how to pronounce that last name). Vereker is a London artist of independent means. In Missing or Murdered, the first novel in the series, his old friend, Lord Bygrave, a government minister, disappears. Vereker attaches himself to the investigation (the Scotland Yard detective in charge is oddly untroubled by the intrusion). He follows the detective around and compares notes with him frequently. They make the investigation a sort of competition. Eventually the work out what happened to Lord Bygrave and who is responsible.

I suppose my tastes have been corrupted by postmodern culture, but I had trouble enjoying Missing or Murdered. Both Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams liked Forsythe’s work, but for my money they both leave him in the dust. There’s lots of talking in the book, with some rather forced wit, and everything is leisured and decent, and it bored me silly. Couldn’t wait for the thing to be done with.

But it’s fine if you like this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Someone to Save You,’ by Paul Pilkington

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Sam Becker, the main character of Someone to Save You, is a London pediatric heart surgeon, who met his wife on a relief mission in Africa. He’s good at his job and rising in his profession.

He’s haunted by a tragedy in his past. His sister was raped and murdered, and his then best friend was convicted of the crime. Sam’s passion for saving lives, perhaps, rises from his perceived failure to protect his sibling.

Driving home from a commemoration of what would have been the sister’s thirtieth birthday, his car is flagged down by a young girl in the road. She frantically directs him down a slope to a railroad track, where the girl’s mother has stopped her car, intending to kill herself and her children. Sam gets the remaining children out of the car in time to save them, but the mother dies.

Sam is a hero to the press, but he hates it and feels like a failure. However, something worse than that is happening. There are threatening phone calls, and attempts to sabotage his career, and hints that his sister’s true killer walked free. And then someone is kidnapped.

The whole story is very complex and tightly plotted. Author Paul Pilkington is very good at his craft. He creates interesting characters and cranks up the drama inexorably (most of his books, oddly, seem to have female protagonists. This one is an exception).

Not much objectionable material here, either. There’s one conversation about religion, which is fairly noncommittal, but not anti-God.

I happily recommend Someone to Save You.

Fiction

Bernard Cornwell: A Writing Master

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Joseph Bottum praises the achievements of historical writer Bernard Cronwell. “Cornwell prides himself on the historical accuracy of his books,” he says, “as well he ought. But it is a thin accuracy, limited to the stories’ fast-paced action.”

In his Saxon chronicles, Cornwell tells the tale of Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a child of a Saxon lord in Northumbria who was captured and brought up Danish raiders. Beginning with The Last Kingdom in 2004 and extending to the latest volume with Warriors of the Storm, Cornwell has been using the series to raise awareness of the historical foundation of England, in those moments when Alfred the Great fought off the Danes and established what Cornwell believes is the first unified people that could be called English.

Read Lars’ review of one of Cornwell’s Arthur legend books, The Winter King. (via Prufrock)

Fiction, Non-fiction, The Press, Writing

A Critic Is Like a Eunuch…

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… in a bakery. Is that how it goes? Whatever.

A.O. Scott would disagree with that metaphor, as he explains in his new book, Better Living Through Criticism. Fangirl Alissa Wilkinson reviews it.

Like a parent reconciling bickering siblings, Scott contends that criticism and art don’t merely need one another. They exist only because of one another: “criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood…”

Doesn’t interpreting art ruin the experience? Can’t we just appreciate it for what it is? “This is an old and powerful—in some ways an unanswerable—argument against criticism, rooted in the idea that creative work should be taken on its own terms and that thought is the enemy of experience,” Scott writes. “And it is indeed precisely the job of the critic to disagree, to refuse to look at anything simply as what it is, to insist on subjecting it to intellectual scrutiny.”

Because there are such things as good and bad metaphors, good and bad headlines, and compelling and lackluster stories. Critics can engage a piece on a different level than we have and challenge us to think about it and our reaction to it, which is close to, if not the same thing as, what artists do.