But you will snort and spew your milk alone.
Frank Wilson points out an article on funny books with a couple recommendations. Note also that some jokes never die. Take this example from Spike Milligan:
With hand signals
Or polite cough
He bid twenty-five million
For a Vincent Van Gogh
For that sort of money
I’d chop my ear off
A few years back, as Dean Koontz explains in an introduction to the first book of this series, Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, he made a deal with the USA Network to write a contemporary television series based on the characters of the old Frankenstein book. One assumes that the network execs either misunderstood his script, or understood it all too well, since both parties agreed to go their own ways in the end, each party producing a Frankenstein after their own heart.
The conceit in this series of books is that, although Mary Shelley’s famous novel is based on fact, she got the ending wrong. The monster did not kill Dr. Frankenstein, nor did he die himself. Instead, endowed with extremely long life through being struck by lightning during his creation, he has lived on, mostly in hiding because of a facial injury, gradually learning to control his rage. At the start of Prodigal Son he is residing in a Tibetan monastery. He does not yet know that Dr. Frankenstein has survived the last two centuries as well, his life extended through a series of self-designed surgeries. When he does learn this, the monster leaves the monastery and travels to New Orleans, where Dr. Frankenstein now lives the life of a biotech millionaire and VIP, under a new name. Continue reading Frankenstein: Prodigal Son and City of Night, by Dean Koontz, Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Gorman
The original D’Artagnan (or one of them; Alexander Dumas actually conflated the adventures of two different relatives in The Three Musketeers and its sequels) died in battle in the Netherlands, during the siege of Maastricht, in 1673. Now Dutch archaeologists think they’ve located his place of burial.
The story is here.
Tip: Mirabilis.
Last night I set up a scene from an imaginary novel, in which a police detective says too much to his superior officer (a guy he doesn’t get along with). The imaginary author (who would appear to be me. I’m not sure how that works) is trying to give us some background on the tragic roots of our hero’s (his name is Slade) obsession with an unsolved child murder. But the method he chooses—having Slade unburden his heart to a guy he doesn’t even like (and certainly doesn’t trust), rings false for any reader with a minimal amount of human experience.
So how could the author convey this information to the reader more naturally? Continue reading Exposition lesson, Part 2
I filled up my car today for less than twenty bucks. (It should be noted that my car has a pretty small gas tank.) What a good feeling that was! That’s a genuine economic stimulus payment. I can’t help thinking that people all over this country are enjoying the feeling of extra weight left in their wallets, and are getting ready to do some spending they’ve been putting off.
I’m probably wrong, but it feels that way to me.
I’m reading another Dean Koontz novel (I’ve pretty much read all his books now). It’s one of his re-issued early works and, typically, shows numerous marks of artistic immaturity. Particularly notable are the lame jokes (his jokes tend to be a little lame even nowadays, but he’s made great progress).
But what really caught my attention was his problem with exposition, a problem I’ve discussed before in reference to other early efforts. I’m not going to excerpt any of his scenes here, but I’ll compose a Koontz-like chunk of dialogue. Continue reading Exposition lesson, Part 1
It’s late in the day, but to all you veterans, thank you for your service. Slackers like me owe you big.
The Second Saladin, it appears to me, marks a milepost on author Stephen Hunter’s journey toward finding his niche as a novelist. Some of the elements that will make his Bob/Earl Swagger books so compelling are already there, but he hasn’t yet shaken off a tendency to demonstrate his realism through grim pessimism.
Nevertheless, I found it a compelling book. Though published in 1982 and set in that same time period, the centrality of Kurdistan to the plot makes the whole business remarkably relevant more than two decades later. Continue reading The Second Saladin, by Stephen Hunter
Tonight, a snippet from a scene I’ve had in my mind for a long time. It’s basically my memory of a conversation I listened to while working in a shipping and mailing room, years ago. Someday I may work it into a book, if I find a place where it will be of some use.
“People think I don’t know nothin’, but I know a few things,” said Ray as he used the slide to cut a length of corrugated cardboard from a roll at the left of his workbench. He quickly cut the length into short sections, then piled them on top of one another to fill space at the top of the box he was packing. His motions were sure and practiced, though his hands trembled a little.
“They didn’t believe you?” asked Bill, a thinner, younger man. Bill was working at the bench behind Ray, unfolding a fresh carton as he reached for the sealing tape.
“They said it was nothin’. They wouldn’t listen to me. These young snots, they think I’m all old war stories, don’t know what’s goin’ on around me. So what if I like to have a few drinks now and then, fall down sometimes? It don’t mean I’m ignorant.”
“That’s sure enough,” said Bill.
“The apartment was right next to mine. I noticed it before anybody else, but pretty soon everybody could smell it. I went to the manager and told him. He said, no, you’re wrong. He said the guy’d gone on vacation, left some garbage in there.”
“Huh,” said Bill.
Their workbenches were gray. The box conveyer to the left of the benches was gray, too. So were the steel supply shelves, and some genius from the Facilities Office had recently brought in painters to give the walls two tones of fresh gray.
“I told him, I said, ‘I was in the war. I’ve smelled dead bodies before. You listen to me. There’s a dead body in there.’”
I feel the need to say something political on this last evening before the election.
But I can’t think of anything that hasn’t already been said. And since I know for a fact that our readers are a smart, erudite segment of the population, I’m pretty sure you’ve already made up your own minds.
So I’ll do a book review. It must be days since I’ve reviewed a Dean Koontz novel.
Koontz’ latest in paperback is The Darkest Evening of the Year. On a purely technical level I can make a lot of criticisms.
Since the death of his beloved Golden Retriever, Trixie, Koontz seems to be writing out his grief, with occasionally uneven results. The dogs in his books have gotten wiser and more mystical. In this book he cries havoc and lets slip the dogs of transcendence completely, coming close to caninolatry (if there is such a word. Of course there is! I just made it up!). That “Dog is God spelled backwards” palindrome that so impressed Annie Hall is almost (almost) at work here. Continue reading The Darkest Evening of the Year, by Dean Koontz
Americans appear to read a good bit of fiction, from what we see from the last 15 years of bestsellers as tracked by USA Today.
Alexander McCall Smith is delivering a novel through The Telegraph Online, day by day in twenty weeks. Corduroy Mansions is on chapter 33 today, and you can read it at The Telegraph site or get them in your email or rss feed. It begins “in the bathroom.”
Passing off, thought William. Spanish sparkling wine – filthy stuff, he thought, filthy – passed itself off as champagne. Japanese whisky – Glen Yakomoto! – was served as Scotch. Inferior hard cheese – from Mafia-run factories in Catania – was sold to the unsuspecting as Parmesan. Lots of things were passed off in one way or another, and now, as he stood before the bathroom mirror, he wondered if he could be passed off too.