Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death’s Doors’ reviewed at ‘I Saw Lightning Fall’

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Our friend Loren Eaton, at I Saw Lightning Fall,reviews Death’s Doors:

Imagine a blender. Chuck in Atwood’s aforementioned novel, Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and Walker’s own West Oversea. Add a generous pinch of profanity, a scoop of Christian church history, and several comment sections plucked at random from various Huffington Post articles. Now pulse for two or three seconds. Voila! That’s Death’s Doors. Yes, it’s just as lumpy as it sounds. But it’s also works.

Fiction

Song of the Sea Movie

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In case you didn’t see this at the beginning of summer, here’s the teaser trailer for the next animation from the people who brought us The Secret of Kells.

“SONG OF THE SEA tells the story of Ben and his little sister Saoirse — the last Seal-child — who embark on a fantastic journey across a fading world of ancient legend and magic in an attempt to return to their home by the sea. The film takes inspiration from the mythological Selkies of Irish folklore, who live as seals in the sea but become humans on land. SONG OF THE SEA features the voices of Brendan Gleeson, Fionnula Flanagan, David Rawle, Lisa Hannigan, Pat Shortt, Jon Kenny, Lucy O’Connell, Liam Hourican and Kevin Swierszsz. Music is by composer Bruno Coulais and Irish band Kíla, both of whom previously collaborated on The Secret of Kells.“

Authors, Fiction

Reviewing ‘Herzog’ after 50 Years

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Jack Hanson writes about Saul Bellow and his 50-year-old novel, Herzog, a story about a professor who can’t handle his life after losing his wife to divorce. Bellow, who died in 2005, said the story is something of a joke about how education can ruin you, but many are not convinced that’s all there is to his National Book Award winner.

“It may be hard to imagine what the neurosis of a restless, mid-century academic have to do with Ferguson, militant jihad, or any of our other woes,” Hanson states. “But if the book has a single theme, it is that we are dominated more than anything else by ideas, and it is only when we confront ideas and our allegiance to them that we might be able to set our house back in order. Life will never be an easy affair, but it may become, at times, manageable. Herzog is not a morality tale, in the sense of being didactic, but it is highly moral, while being forward-looking.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘Russian Roulette’ and ‘Mr. Swirlee,’ by Mike Faricy

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I’m inclined to support my local mystery writers, as you know, so when I got a Kindle deal on one of Mike Faricy’s Dev Haskell mysteries, I thought I’d try it out. Glad I did. These are not highbrow mysteries, nor are they world-weary meditations on existential dilemmas. They’re just fun private eye stories that poke gentle fun at the form. I liked them.

Dev Haskell is a private eye in St. Paul. He has no office, but does a marginal business out of a string of scruffy bars. At the beginning of Russian Roulette he’s approached in one of those bars by a drop dead gorgeous woman with an accent (she says it’s French and he goes along with it) who asks him to look for her missing sister. Thinking more with a lower organ than with his higher functions, he follows her into a plot involving prostitution and sex trafficking.

The big joke in Russian Roulette is the way Dev overworks the traditional private eye pastime of getting injured and not letting it stop him. Not only does he suffer the liturgical beatings and a bullet wound that any literary private eye expects, but he also gets poisoned and car bombed. It stretches credibility that he’s able to function at all, let alone defend himself, by the end of the story, but that’s all part of the joke. Continue reading ‘Russian Roulette’ and ‘Mr. Swirlee,’ by Mike Faricy →

Fiction

Non-Reviews of Two Books

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Loren Eaton refuses to review Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep. “Can’t talk about how Abbott walks a tightrope over the chasm between the literary and genre worlds, every sentence showing her knowledge of the writer’s craft while the subject matter stays committed to delighting the reader,” he says, leaving us to wonder what could possibly be in this book.

Jonathan Rogers talks about the origins of one of his books. “When I sat down to write The Charlatan’s Boy, the first sentence I wrote turned out to be the first sentence of the finished product: ‘I don’t remember one thing about the day I was born.'”

Bookselling, Fiction

‘Death’s Doors’: a snippet and an apologia

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CHAPTER I

The Lifestyle Services case worker seemed friendly and genuinely interested in him. Tom Galloway wasn’t entirely pleased about that. The case workers he’d dealt with in the Twin Cities had all seemed overworked and time-pinched. The desks in their cubicles had been piled with file folders and official bulletins, and they themselves had exhaled an institutional miasma that seemed to say, “Don’t show me any red flags and we won’t ask too many questions.”

But Megan Siegenthaler seemed to have all the time in the world, and was cordially curious about everything having to do with Tom and his family. Her small office had been painted a cheery mint green, and a tasteful landscape print hung on one wall. No family pictures though. He supposed those might be stressful for some of the case subjects. Or just as likely she had no family.

She herself was a honey-haired woman who must have been very attractive once and was still comfortably good-looking. Her green eyes were especially remarkable. She smoked a long thin cigarette, as was her right in all places except for hospital ICUs ever since the passage of the Smokers’ Re-enfranchisement Act. She’d offered Tom a breathing device, in accordance with the provisions of the Act, but he’d turned it down. Tobacco smoke had never bothered him much.

“I suppose it’s pretty dull here in Epsom compared to life in the Cities,” she said.

“I like it dull,” said Tom.

“Does Christine like it dull too?”

Tom adjusted his mouth in something like a smile. “No. She’d like to move back.”

“What do you think about that?”

“I don’t care what she’d like. I’m trying to keep her alive.”

Megan picked up the Galloway file and flipped through it. She had very long fingernails, enameled in red. Tom had always wondered why anyone who had to work with paper or keyboards would bother with such a self-inflicted handicap. “I think we ought to talk about this,” she said. “Your last case worker made a note about your attitude. You realize that, in the long run, you can’t keep your daughter alive, don’t you?”

Tom kicked himself in a mental shin. He should have learned to keep his mouth shut by now. He didn’t want to have this discussion again.

“I know what the law says,” he grunted.

“Then you know that if Christine decides to end her life, you have no legal power to stop her. The Constitution’s on her side. If she complains to us that you’re interfering, she can be taken from you and escorted to the Happy Endings Clinic by a Lifestyle Services worker. The law is very explicit.”

That’s just a snippet from Death’s Doors, my newly released e-book (by the way, Orie says it’s non-DRM, which means you can convert it to your e-reader’s format using the Calibre utility, even if you don’t have a Kindle). I thought I’d just take a few moments to talk about this book, and what I think it means (I could, of course, be wrong). Continue reading ‘Death’s Doors’: a snippet and an apologia →

Fiction, Publishing

Death’s Doors

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Dateline: Minneapolis

My new novel, Death’s Doors, is now available for download for Amazon Kindle.

In the near future, suicide is a constitutional right. Tom Galloway is an ordinary single father, just trying to keep his rebellious and depressed daughter from going to the Happy Endings Clinic.

The last thing he needs is a ninth-century Viking time traveler dropping into his life.

But Tom is about to embark on the adventure of his life. One that will change the world.

Bookselling, Fiction

Death’s Doors, Snippet 1

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(As best I can figure out, we’re close to releasing my next novel, Death’s Doors. To whet your appetite, here’s a snippet. lw) [Available in eBook]

PROLOGUE

We have no use for barns anymore, but are ashamed to tear them down. So the lofted sheds stand here and there across the land on derelict farmsteads, redundant, their backs swayed like old horses’.

The woman tossed her cigarette away. It arced like comet spit in the dark. She went into the ruined barn through a Dutch door, pulling open first the upper panel, then the lower. The granulated hinges screamed and the bottom scraped an arc in the earth. She was afraid the noise would wake the baby she cradled in her left arm, but it did not. Such a good baby.

The law said she could be rid of a baby up to the age of eight weeks. She would never have let this one go except for something like this – something terribly, cosmically important.

Her flashlight showed her a low-ceilinged side-shed with animal stalls along its inside wall, its dividers and wooden posts scaly with brown flakes of ancient, petrified manure.

The old woman she’d come to see sat so still that she overshot her with the flashlight beam and had to back it up. Once fixed by the beam, the old woman smiled – a smile of radiant beauty that brought to mind a Renaissance Madonna gone wrinkled and white-haired.

“You – you’re the one I was to meet?” the younger woman asked.

Continue reading Death’s Doors, Snippet 1 →
Fiction, Reviews

Coffee delenda est

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Coffee week, huh? That’s what I get for being gracious, in a moment of weakness.

Getting into the spirit of the thing, I want to recommend to you Mark Helprin’s masterful novel, Memoir From Antproof Case. It’s a moving story about a man who goes into violent rages whenever he smells coffee, or sees anyone drinking it. Needless to say, he’s a sympathetic character.

I wanted to re-post my review, but it seems to be on the old blog, where I can’t search.

Also, on another note, I want to thank Loren Eaton for giving me a mention in his latest review. I have trouble commenting over there, so I’ll say it here.

Now get some sleep. Helpful hint: It helps if you lay off the caffeine.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Fiction

10 Fictional Coffee Scenes

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Benjamin Obler has collected ten scenes or lines which include coffee, like this one from Muriel Spark’s The Comforters.

“Tell me about the voices,” he said. “I heard nothing myself. From what direction did they come?”

“Over there, beside the fireplace,” she answered.

“Would you like some tea? I think there is tea.”

“Oh, coffee. Could I have some coffee? I don’t think I’m likely to sleep.”

Isn’t it terribly English of the Baron to offer tea to Caroline, who’s just fled a religious centre (not a nunnery, not a retreat), has separated from her husband, and is now suffering delusions – hearing the clacks of typewriter keys and a voice narrating her very thoughts! Take comfort in tea. It is in character of the Baron to think so: he’s a man of affected intellectualism, calling the sections of his bookshop “Histor-ay, Biograph-ay, Theolog-ay,” and addressing everyone as “my dear”. But only coffee is up for the job. This is coffee as antidote to madness. What else to clear her head in this fix? They’ve already had Curaçao – that didn’t help. Coffee as realignment. Coffee to reconnect with your own synapses, to reset the senses and solidify reality in the forefront.