Loren points out a short short story contest he entered which asks writers to run with ideas from a photo of a wine glass. I would call Loren’s submission chilling, but somehow that word does not fit. . . .
Category Archives: Fiction
Tell No One, by Harlan Coben
Notice of personal appearance: I’ll be at the Norway Day celebration in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, with the Vikings on Sunday, from about 11:00 to 4:00 or so. They say the weather will be nice.
I appreciated Gone for Good so much that I immediately launched into reading Tell No One, which Harlan Coben wrote just before it. I suppose it was inevitable that I’d be a little let down. There’s nothing at all wrong with Tell No One. It’s a gripping, fast-paced thriller with engaging characters and plenty of surprises. But for some reason (perhaps just a subjective identification with one main character over another), I didn’t like it quite as much.
There are actually a lot of similarities in the set-ups of both stories. Gone for Good’s hero was a gentle do-gooder, a volunteer who works with the homeless, whose girlfriend disappears and who soon comes under the suspicion of federal investigators. In Tell No One, the hero is Dr. David Beck, a young physician who has voluntarily chosen to work with charity cases in Manhattan. Three years ago, he was gravely injured when his wife, Elizabeth, was abducted and murdered by a serial killer. But now he starts getting e-mail messages that seem to be coming from Elizabeth herself. Meanwhile, the FBI has suddenly decided that he must have murdered Elizabeth, and they’ve got a warrant for his arrest. But David has an appointment to meet with Elizabeth—or whoever’s pretending to be her—this afternoon, and there’s no way he’s going to be sitting in a cell when that happens. So he runs.
Very good story. I’ve got no complaints. The language is not bad for the genre; the violence (some of it quite horrifying) is mostly off camera. There is a lesbian couple with a child who are highly sympathetic characters, so you might (or might not) want to be warned of that.
I liked it, and I’ve got no legitimate complaint.
The Meat of Allegory
Frank suggests The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is “a better work of apologetics than Mere Christianity” because it is allegory.
Questions on West Oversea
For those of you who waste your time on the Interweb playing on Facebook or doing who knows what, Lars had a great book published recently called West Oversea. I asked the author, Lars, who blogs right here if you haven’t noticed, a few questions about the book, which is also called “Westward Ho.” These questions may be more interesting to those who have read the book, “Go West, Young Viking,” but even if you haven’t, I hope the following will pique your interest a little more, assuming the strong reviews have not piqued it enough already. And if this introduction has just confused you . . . so let’s get to the questions.
- One of the major tensions in West Oversea comes from a magical object called The Eye of Odin. Is that object entirely your creation or did you pull it from one of the old myths? If it was from a myth, did the story you give in the novel about it’s origin come from the same myth?
A: The myth says that Odin plucked out his own eye in return for a drink from Mimir’s well of foreknowledge. He dropped the eye into the well, and we know nothing more of its history. I suspect I may be the first person to wonder about it.
- In both this novel and The Year of the Warrior, Odin or the power of Odin is a major villain or evil force. Is that just the way it worked out? Did you weigh Odin against other Norse gods when planning stories?
A: I find it impossible to think of heathen gods as having any real existence other than as evil spirits. C. S. Lewis hinted at some order of good daemons, at least in the past, but that’s kind of rarified for my ideas of the spiritual world. In any case, Odin has always been a sinister figure. He can look kind of noble and ethereal in a kid’s book, but in the poetry of the period he’s associated with corpses and hanged men and carrion-eating ravens. He routinely betrays those who put their trust in him.
Thor’s a little more sympathetic, and I treated him more kindly in THE YEAR OF THE WARRIOR. So I guess I’m doing the good daemon thing anyway. I imagine I’ll be sorry someday.
- At one point in West Oversea, Father Aillil has a vision of the future with several distinct figures speaking from their viewpoints. Did you have specific people in mind for those figures? I tried to peg one of them as Sigmund Freud, but I’d have to study them a bit before making my final guess.
A: Some of them are meant to be well-known people, some are just representatives. But I’m not going to spell it out. That would spoil the fun. Or the irritation, as the case may be.
- I could ask the same question of the American natives you describe later in the novel. Did you have specific tribes or people groups in mind there?
A: I did some research on pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands tribes. But our information on their cultures that far back is limited, and I made a lot of guesses. I think I vaguely meant the “nice” Native Americans to be Algonckians, or their ancestors.
- At one point, Erling, the hero of many and admired figure for many in that time, explains one of the things it takes to be a good leader. As a novelist, do you think you understand different types of people, at least academically if not more so, even if you couldn’t emulate them yourself?
A. I observe leaders and brave men with considerable interest. The novelist’s working question is always, “What would I be like if I were like this person?” We’re very different from one another, we humans, but we’re not so different as to be mutually incomprehensible–in most cases, at least.
- Have you thought about writing a novel in the same time period with a different focal character, say Olaf Tryggvason or someone in his court or maybe St. Olaf after him?
A: I hope to extend the Erling series into the reign of St. Olaf, and to do a St. Olaf-only book to cap the series. And I hope to write a non-Erling Viking book sooner or later. Maybe several.
Gone For Good, by Harlan Coben
Oh my goodness, Gone For Good is a splendid novel.
I hate to blaspheme Andrew Klavan by calling it the best suspense novel I’ve ever read, but I’ll go so far as to say I’ve never read a better one.
Will Klein, the hero and narrator, is a do-gooder. He works in New York City for Covenant House a (real-life) humanitarian organization that tries to reach out to street kids and (when they’re lucky) help a few of them escape that world before they’re irreparably damaged (which doesn’t take long).
He lives with his girlfriend, Sheila. She’s his “soul-mate,” and he’s planning to propose soon. The only reason he put it off was because his mother died of cancer recently, and life got complicated.
It didn’t help that, shortly before her death, his mother told him his older brother Ken was still alive. Obviously she was just raving.
Ken had been Will’s hero as a boy, up until the day his girlfriend (Will’s former girlfriend) was found murdered, and Ken disappeared. The official assumption has been that Ken killed her and ran.
Believing his brother innocent, Will has always assumed he was also murdered, his body never found.
Then Sheila receives a mysterious phone call, leaves a note saying, “Love you always,” and vanishes completely.
Will has always been a passive guy (I identified with him heavily). But now, the weight of personal loss becomes too heavy to endure, and he sets out (with the help of his friend “Squares,” a millionaire yoga guru) to find the woman he loves. Quickly he learns that it has something to do with his brother’s disappearance. And we are given just enough glimpses (in Hitchcockian fashion) of the plans and deliberations of his enemies to understood the extreme danger he’s walking into. Very powerful, very ruthless people are interested in the whereabouts of Ken Klein. But even this information leaves plenty of surprises along the way. The twists come relentlessly, right up to a jaw-dropping revelation at the end.
What I loved about Gone For Good was that the plot and the surprises all rose from believable, complex characters. Coben understands Solzhenyitsin’s dictum that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Every character in this book is flawed, but also well-meaning (by his own lights). The wide disparity between the things that individuals consider right and necessary is almost a part of the background scenery, like the Grand Canyon.
Outstanding. Recommended highly for adults.
I think she liked it
“Superfast Reader” at “Reading Is My Superpower” praises West Oversea to an extent that almost embarrasses me.
But not so much that I won’t share it with you.
Should Christians Read Fiction?
I mean, aren’t there more productive things to do than read novels or short stories?
The Venus Throw, by Steven Saylor
I was trying to figure out why I feel so depressed today, and then I remembered that Al Franken is going to be my new senator.
In related news, the official Minnesota State Accessory is now the red rubber clown nose.
I decided to try reading a mystery by Steven Saylor on the recommendation of James Lileks (not, I probably ought to add, a personal recommendation, but one heard on the Hugh Hewitt Show). I’m glad I did, and I’ll be reading more. But they’re odd books.
The hero of The Venus Throw is Gordianus the Finder, an established private detective in Rome in the time of Julius Caesar. This story takes place in the year 56 BC, and is based on actual events.
Gordianus is visited, unexpectedly, by an acquaintance from the past, an old Egyptian philosopher named Dio, with whom he used to have informal dialogues when he lived as a young man in Alexandria. Dio explains that he is part of a delegation from Egypt which has come to petition the Roman Senate. One by one or in groups, most of the original 100 emissaries have been murdered or scared off. Dio asks Gordianus for just one favor—to do a sort of security check on the house where he is staying, so that he can eat the food without fearing poison.
Gordianus, very regretfully, has to refuse. Not only does the case involve political risks, but he is leaving on a trip to visit his oldest stepson (a soldier of Caesar’s in Gaul) the next day.
On his return from Gaul, Gordianus learns that Dio was murdered that very night. Continue reading The Venus Throw, by Steven Saylor
50 Manly Fiction Options
This just in: The Essential Man’s Library: 50 Fictional Adventure Books Edition. Hey, where’s G.A. Henty on that list? And I have to say up front, She and Ayesha are just not going to make my read-in-this-lifetime list. Maybe I’m missing out, but I think I’d rather read Patrick O’Brian and Wodehouse again.
Hey! Where’s O’Brian on that list?
Have You Seen “District 9” Trailer?
What do you think about a new sci-fi movie called “District 9”? You can watch the trailer in several places, one of which being this blog from one of the movie aliens. You have to click a button to translate his posts into English. It looks as if the story focuses on the politics of modern day illegal aliens or undocumented workers. In fact, a YouTube video I saw in which someone shouts, “Do your part. Marry a non-human,” makes explicit the illegal aliens angle. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good story or that there isn’t plenty of truth in it. Hopefully, it won’t boil down to a plea for everyone to just get along.
You can see some back-story for the movie on this official site. I have some thoughts on American’s immigration problem too. Perhaps I should write on them here. Conservatives need to raise their voice on this, b/c the opposition isn’t going to lead us anywhere healthy. Look at the rotten sewage the House passed in the name of environmental progress. Help us.