Tin House has an illustrated edition of Moby Dick and a video to promote it.
Category Archives: Fiction
Temporary Duty, by Ric Locke
First of all, the disclaimer: Although I didn’t get the book free, I should probably note that Ric Locke is a Facebook friend, and has been giving me helpful advice on e-publishing, at which he has been (very deservedly) successful.
I have good and not-so-good things to say about Temporary Duty
Considering its length and its price ($2.99 for the Kindle book), Temporary Duty is one of the best reading entertainment values you’ll find today. It’s quite long, and it’s simply lots of fun. If you go back far enough to remember the sheer pleasure of the old space opera novels, like Heinlein’s juveniles, that same pleasure is here in abundance—the wonder of space, the fascination of exotic aliens and strange cultures, the excitement of human ingenuity applied to interstellar challenges. You’ll have a good time reading this book.
For the negative… well, I’ll leave that for further along.
The time is about 40 years in the future. There have been big changes in the world. A terrorist war and a financial collapse have turned America into a highly regulated, rigidly stratified society. The American military mirrors that stratification. There’s very little mobility between the upper and lower ranks.
So when history’s first alien contact occurs, and the aliens—the mercantile Grallt—ask for an advance party to prepare quarters on their ship for the humans who have contracted to join them on their merchant voyage, the Navy asks for two initial volunteers. They are to be lowly Petty Officers, and their duties will be simply to clean the place up and make it ship-shape. Still, John Peters and Kevin Todd are eager to volunteer, partly for the adventure and partly for the (seeming remote) possibility that they’ll be able to better their prospects. Continue reading Temporary Duty, by Ric Locke
Poems on Violence
Tom Nolan quotes Philip Dacey on his poetic depiction of a poisoned Russian agent poisoned in “With or Without Milk”: “I drank a tea not made in front of me. / Beware tea brewed in ways you cannot see.”
“The poetry of violent death,” he says, “spans hundreds of years.” (via Books, Inq.)
More Lewis than Lovecraft
William Peter Blatty, best known for writing the horror classic, The Exorcist
…for the humiliating God’s-honest truth of the matter is that while I was working on “The Exorcist,” what I thought I was writing was a novel of faith in the popular dress of a thrilling and suspenseful detective story – in other words, a sermon that no one could possibly sleep through — and to this day I haven’t the faintest recollection of any intention to frighten the reader, which many will take, I suppose, as an admission of failure on an almost stupefying, scale.
I’ve read the original book, though that was a long time ago (I clearly remember reading it in the Minneapolis bus station while waiting for transportation home to the farm for Christmas, and I haven’t ridden a bus or had the farm to go home to in a long, long time). My memory is faint, but I’m pretty sure he’s telling the truth. The book is a thriller about a crisis of faith, not a work of horror in the usual sense. Even the movie bears the marks of that purpose, although the pea soup and revolving head tend to dominate one’s attention (Did her head spin around in the book? I don’t actually recall).
Anyway, if you’re looking for Halloween reading that’s strong-flavored and faith-friendly, you can do worse than The Exorcist.
On a side note, when I hear Blatty’s name, I don’t think first of The Exorcist, but of a TV movie he wrote earlier, a comedy western movie called “The Great Bank Robbery,” starring Zero Mostel, Clint Walker, and Kim Novak. I particularly recall one scene where Kim kisses the shy and quiet Clint, making him visibly uncomfortable.
“Did you like it?” she asks with a smile, as she walks away.
“Ma’am,” he replies, “Just ’cause I talk slow don’t mean I’m peculiar.”
"The Reversal," by Michael Connelly
I felt what Maggie had tried to describe to me on more than one occasion when we were married. She always called it the burden of proof. Not the legal burden. But the psychic burden of knowing that you stood as representative of all the people. I had always dismissed her explanations as self-serving. The prosecutor was always the overdog. The Man…. I never understood what she was trying to tell me.
Until now.
I still haven’t entirely warmed to Michael Connelly’s “Lincoln Lawyer” character, Mickey Haller, who strikes me as somewhat irresponsible (a useful quality, perhaps, in a criminal defense lawyer).
But The Reversal, “A Lincoln Lawyer” novel, is as much a story of Mickey’s half-brother, police detective Harry Bosch, as it is one of Mickey’s, so I had no problem getting on board. And the story as a whole seemed to me as engaging and sympathetic as Connelly has written in some time.
It begins with Mickey doing something he’s always sworn he’d never do—go to work (on a temporary basis) as a county prosecutor, making and presenting a case against a convicted child murderer. DNA evidence has won the convict a new trial, but the District Attorney’s office still believes they have the right man. The most important element of their case is the eyewitness, the victim’s older sister, who was only a child at the time.
Mickey agrees to do the job—just this once—on the condition that he gets his ex-wife, prosecutor Maggie MacPherson, as his associate. (He wants to improve his relationship with her.) With Harry Bosch as chief investigator, it makes the entire prosecution a family affair.
The narration switches back and forth from Mickey’s point of view (presented in the first person) and Harry’s (in the third person). The alternation makes an interesting counterpoint. Mickey is all about tactics and strategies, intuiting the Defense’s moves on the basis of his own considerable experience on that side of the courtroom. Meanwhile Harry runs down leads and dogs the suspect in his accustomed, obsessive way, his focus always on his duty (or vocation), as an officer of society itself, to see justice done and the evil removed from our midst.
This being fiction, of course, even the best courtroom strategist can’t foresee, or prevent, the big surprise that takes the story’s climax out of the safety of the courtroom and into the perils of a city full of innocent bystanders.
The Reversal is an excellent thriller from a master storyteller. Recommended for adults. Cautions for language and icky stuff.
The Unreliable Narrator
Anne Enright talks about her novel, The Forgotten Waltz, with The Paris Review:
Gina Moynihan is the kind of person who realizes what she’s saying in the saying of it. And I think many of us are similar. Until you start articulating something, you don’t quite know what it is, and you don’t see the mistakes or flaws in your own argument until they’re in the air. She’s in the process of realizing what she’s saying, in the process of realizing what she knows or what she has refused to know—that’s the journey of the novel.
The wonderful thing about this kind of unreliability is that it reflects the unreliability of our own narratives about our own lives. You tell a story about how you ended up at this place, rather childishly thinking that there is no other place that you could have ended up—especially when it comes to love, which has this destined, momentous feel to it. I was balancing that momentous and eternal sense of love with the cause and effect of meeting people and shagging them or not.
What Our Superheroes Say About Us
Steven Greydanus discusses this summer’s superhero movies.
Perhaps Captain America offers the best depiction of what makes for a good hero: being a good person in the first place. … Like others of his generation, Steve’s character was tempered in the forge of the Great Depression as well as the shadow of world war. Next year’s Avengers movie will throw this Greatest Generation warrior into the mix with the Tony Stark generation. What will that show us about ourselves and the world we live in? I’m almost afraid to find out.
Suicide Run, by Michael Connelly
Harry Bosch is not my favorite among Michael Connelly’s continuing characters. That honor goes to Terry McCaleb, whom Connelly killed off a few books back (McCaleb makes a welcome appearance in one of the stories in this book). But I appreciate Harry more than Connelly’s replacement for McCaleb, Micky Haller, the “Lincoln Lawyer.” Not that there’s anything much wrong with Haller. He’s just newer and (to all appearances) less damaged by life than the others. It’s the scars and calluses on the older characters that make them interesting to me.
Suicide Run is a collection of three short stories starring Harry (Hieronymus) Bosch, Los Angeles police detective. Warning: It’s a short collection. Much of the bulk of the book is taken up by a preview of Connelly’s next novel, The Drop. Since I never read such previews (they only frustrate me), I was a little disappointed in that.
But I enjoyed the stories nonetheless. In “Suicide Run,” Bosch investigates the murder of a beautiful Hollywood starlet, disguised as a suicide. In “Cielo Azul,” he goes to visit a killer on death row, in an attempt to persuade him to reveal the burial site of one of his victims. In “One Dollar Jackpot,” he tackles the murder of a famous female poker player, shot to death in her automobile.
The genius of the Harry Bosch stories, in my view (and in all Connelly’s work), is the compassion at their heart. Harry, like a character in a painting by the artist he was named after, lives in a world filled with horrors and apparent irrationality. Yet his personal vocation is to speak for the dead, to do them the last possible service through seeing that their killers pay the price.
For me, the outstanding story here was “Cielo Azul,” a bittersweet tale in which Harry goes on a seemingly hopeless quest to learn one truth before it’s too late. I don’t know what author Connelly believes about God or the afterlife, but he asks the right questions here, and that’s something.
Recommended for adults.
Chekhov Writes about Nicole Kidman, Eminem, etc.
Ryan Britt praises Ben Greenman’s efforts in his short story collection, Celebrity Chekhov: Stories by Anton Chekhov (P.S.)
The Shakespeare Manuscript, by Stewart Buettner
This disappointing novel is another book I can bury in my “not very good, but at least I got the e-book free” file.
I was drawn to Stewart Buettner’s The Shakespeare Manuscript because of the remarkable (though surely coincidental) parallels between it and my own novel, Blood and Judgment.
Both books deal with the discovery of a lost Hamlet manuscript—in my story an original draft, in this one an original of a lost prequel, “Hamlet Part I”.
Both involve the relationships and frictions involved in the production of a play—in my case an amateur company, in this case a professional one.
My book, however, was a fantasy. This book is… I’m not sure. It seems to be a sort of mystery, but the stakes are never raised high enough to build much tension, and the only death that occurs turns out to be natural.
And that’s the problem with The Shakespeare Manuscript. A lot of people run about doing things and irritating each other, but there’s no real dramatic arc.
The book starts with a New York rare books dealer, Miles Oliphant, on a trip to England, being mugged. While he’s unconscious in hospital and still unidentified by the police, a box of manuscripts he sent home is opened by his daughter, April. She finds a manuscript among the papers which, she soon realizes, looks very like a lost play of Shakespeare’s, in his own hand. Continue reading The Shakespeare Manuscript, by Stewart Buettner