The 2009 film version of Robert E. Howard’s second most famous fantasy hero, Solomon Kane, came and went almost without my notice. I think many people, even fellow Howard fans, had the same experience. But I caught it on Netflix yesterday, and found it considerably better than I expected, though not without faults.
For a writer of no particular religious belief and rather freethinking sexual views, it was an odd choice on Howard’s part to create a character who was an English Puritan. Of course he made up for that by essentially having no idea what Puritans believed, and the movie shares that ignorance. Still he created an interesting character – more a type than a character, really – who lives and travels the world for the sole purpose of fighting evil.
This movie, intended as the first of a trilogy, is an origin story for the character, giving us background Howard never bothered with. In this imagining Solomon is the son of an English West Country nobleman, banished by his father. At first he traveled the world as a sort of pirate, cruel and greedy but unmatched in his fighting skills. Then, after an experience when his lust for gold brought disaster to his crew, he retired to what appears to be a monastery in England (which is historically problematic, as the story date, though uncertain, must be later than Henry VIII’s dissolution of Catholic institutions). There he comes to the questionable conviction that he can achieve redemption by living “a life of peace.” Continue reading Netflix review: "Solomon Kane'
All posts by Lars Walker
Not my usual Halloween
If I’d known what I was getting into when I agreed to be one of the Vikings present last night at the American Swedish Institute’s annual “Loki’s Bash” Halloween party, I might not have done it. It was only after agreeing that I learned that one of the event’s sponsors was a local paranormal society, and that divination would be performed as part of the festivities.
But I’d given my word, so I set off. As it turns out, it wasn’t so bad. No doubt I was surrounded by people who would have considered me a Nazi if I’d shared any of my views, but that’s a less and less infrequent experience for me. And I don’t think anything went on, in terms of the occult, that didn’t also happen at the Science Fiction cons I attended. In any case, all of that was out of my sight.
What I did see was an endless parade of (mostly) young adults (total attendance, I’m told, was 1,600) adorned in costumes of varying degrees of quality, cleverness, and good taste. A fair number were dressed as they imagined Vikings would be, in keeping with the event theme. Many were identifiable characters from movies and TV shows. Many others, no doubt, were identifiable characters from movies and TV shows I’ve never heard of. Others were puzzles. Some were meant to be puzzles.
Take for instance, my favorite. There was a young woman there dressed in a black dress with white collar and cuffs. She wore a gray wig plaited in two pigtails. And she had an eyepatch and two toy ravens perched on her shoulders.
I finally had to ask. “Schoolgirl Odin?” I asked.
“No,” she laughed. “I knew it was too complicated. I’m Wednesday Addams. But Wednesday is Odin’s day.”
Makes perfect sense when you think about it.
I got home after midnight, and to bed after 1:00 a.m. My alarm clock picked this morning, of all mornings, to lose its bearings and set off its alarm about forty minutes early.
I blame witches.
"It's alive! It's alive!"
Actor T. P. Cooke portraying Frankenstein’s monster in an 1823 theatrical production.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! –Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was a lustrous black, and flowing. His teeth of a pearly whiteness. But these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, 1818.
I probably won’t be posting tomorrow, as I have a thing going on in the evening. Silver bullets to shoot, stakes to drive through hearts, you know the sort of thing.
Dead Man's Footsteps, by Peter James
I read and reviewed one of Peter James’ earlier Det. Supt. Roy Grace novels, Dead Simple, several years back, and gave it a middling grade.
But I unwittingly downloaded the Kindle version of another one, Dead Man’s Footsteps, recently, and enjoyed it very much. I thought the characters were better developed here, and Superintendent Grace’s (to me) regrettable interest in psychic evidence only got a passing mention.
The story involves several seemingly unconnected threads, which duly come together in the end, as the real identities of various characters are gradually revealed (with some red herrings thrown in for the fun of it). Supt. Grace is called out to a construction site in his city of Brighton, where a skeleton has been discovered in an old storm drain. Several indications lead him to believe that it might be the remains of his beloved first wife Sandy, who disappeared, as if into thin air, some years ago. Meanwhile a woman is caught in an elevator in her high rise, spending more than a day in terror, unable to send an alarm or use the emergency phone. And we flash back to the morning of September 11, 2001, as a shady Englishman in Manhattan heads for a fateful meeting in the World Trade Center.
The story is long and convoluted, but that’s more a feature than a bug; there are a lot of puzzles here for the reader to work out. And this time the characters were pretty interesting, at least to me. And the story ended with a surprise neat enough to give me a little chill.
Recommended. Cautions for language, adult themes, and a steamy sex scene.
And now I aspire to a nap
What a strange day. I was very low and very high within a few hours, and all through the mediation of the Internet. This whole thing would have been inconceivable just 20 years ago.
First, though, the weekend report. My big project was my annual ceremony of seeking out and repairing cracks in the retaining wall on the west side of my property, so it doesn’t rain chips down onto my neighbor’s driveway, or give way altogether in small landslide. The neighbor and I have discussed replacing the whole thing, but that awaits the Day When My Ship Comes In. A movie deal would do it.
I knew ahead of time that the work would leave me walking like Walter Brennan on the old Real McCoys TV series, which most of you are too young to remember. Which is just the sort of thing Grandpa McCoy would have said himself, except that he would have said it about Vaudeville or nickelodeon shows.
The other big accomplishment of the weekend was submitting my first research paper for my grad school class. Worked hard trying to master the APA style, and had to cut out half my text after I realized I’d forgotten to make it double spaced. I’ve often had people (some of them with doctorates) tell me they can’t imagine writing a novel. I for my part have a hard time imagining writing a doctoral thesis.
So I hobble into work today and check the grad school web access page, and find that my instructor has critiqued my paper, but not given me any grade points. I took that to mean I’d failed the assignment, and so plunged into Stygian depression. I have to maintain a B average to stay in school. All that was over now, I thought. I was done. Bound for unemployment and life on the street.
Then I e-mailed the instructor, asking her to explain. She e-mailed back that she just hadn’t assigned grades yet.
OK. Never mind, then.
And then I get a plug from John Wilson at Christianity Today’s Books & Culture podcast (see below). That’s like a bucket list thing for me. All my life, Christianity Today has been the standard of intellectual respectability in the evangelical world. And I made it! In a way.
My grandmother would have been so proud. Though I’d have to explain to her what the Internet and podcasts are.
Then we could commiserate about our stiff joints.
Networking
Had a small adventure today, a step outside my customary work orbit. It involved a connection with a fellow blogger, too.
Dennis Ingolfsland (a fine Norwegian name) is the chief librarian at Crown College in St. Bonifacius, Minnesota, a school of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He’s also the blogger at The Recliner Commentaries, a fine blog I’ve been following for years. He doesn’t post as often as I’d wish, but then he’s a teacher as well as a librarian. Also the pastor of a church. That’ll eat into your time.
I’m in the last stages right now of composing a research paper on Theological Librarianship for my grad school class. One thing I was required to do for that project was to interview some working librarians in the field I’m covering. I e-mailed three, and they all agreed to help (librarians, I’m discovering, are a remarkably helpful and accommodating group. Which makes me wonder whether I’m cut out for the job). Dennis invited me to come out to Crown and look at their set-up, and I decided it would be a good idea.
He showed me through their library, which is far larger, better organized, and more sophisticated than mine is. He gave me some good suggestions for connections to online resources. And he bought me lunch, on the college’s dime.
I think they must have confused me with somebody else.
In any case, thanks, Dennis.
The Boring Dead
A still from Night of the Living Dead, 1968.
It’s Halloween season now, I guess, so I think I’ll speak my mind about zombies.
I don’t like them.
Not in the Bruce Campbell Evil Dead sense of, “I hate those bleeping zombies and I’m gonna blow them away.”
No, I dislike them because they’re boring. Of all the monsters invented by the mind of man, the zombie (as imagined in America ever since the movies altered a Haitian folk superstition into a semi-systematic popular mythology) is the least intriguing.
Zombies have no style, like Dracula. They (generally) have no pathos, or capacity for it, like Frankenstein’s monster. They have no tortured self-awareness, like the wolf man.
They just lurch around hungering for brains, compelled by mere appetite, without choice or agency.
They are a metaphor for modern humanity, as seen by itself.
And I hate that most of all.
A Heck of a Lewis site
Our friend Gene Edward Veith, of Cranach blog, linked today to Joel Heck’s Lewis Site, where the author, who teaches at Concordia University, Austin, Texas has done a lot of work compiling a chronology of C. S. Lewis’s life.
He’s now produced a perpetual desk calendar with an event for every day of the year. The perfect gift for… well, for me. And for those Lewis fanatics on your list, whose name is surely Legion.
Now You See It, by Stuart M. Kaminsky
One of the things I love about the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s novels is their general lack of sociopaths. I first encountered the sociopathic villain in the novels of John D. MacDonald, whose work I also love. It was fresh at the time. Since then sociopaths have been done to death. As mysteries have moved from being puzzles framed by characters to thrillers framed by monsters, authors have offered up an increasing number of semi-human, sociopathic serial killers for their intrepid heroes to blow away, to the cheers of the audience.
Kaminski, like all mystery writers of the later Twentieth Century, had the opportunity to go that route, but he didn’t do it. He continued to write approachable books, populated by people we could recognize. Even the villains were people like us, who’d made one or many bad choices and gotten out of their depth, some enjoying it, some not.
The seriocomic Toby Peters mysteries, of which I’ve reviewed several already, are set in Los Angeles before, during, and after World War II. Toby is a small time, low-rent PI who somehow ends up handling problems for many of the greatest celebrities of the time. In Now You See It it’s Blackstone the Magician, who was an extremely big deal just after the War, when this story is set. Actor Cornel Wilde also plays a small part.
Harry Blackstone hires Toby Peters to protect him. There’s an amateur magician named Marcus Keller who has threatened to destroy Blackstone for some unspecified offense, or just out of general envy. He’s vague about what he plans to do, but he says he’ll destroy Blackstone before the eyes of the world. When Keller finally plays his “trick” it turns out to be more horrible than he planned, and Toby is faced with the challenge of saving the magician from a murder charge.
All Toby’s colorful stock troupe of eccentric friends and allies are on hand and doing their funny stuff, but Now You See It had one change that pleased me a lot. Toby’s brother Phil, formerly a Los Angeles police detective, has retired from the department and gone into business with his brother. Phil’s dangerous temper, which has led him to punch Toby more than once in the past, is now turned to protecting him, which I found heartwarming.
Sadly, this was to be the last Toby Peters book, published the same year the author died.
Recommended.
Three from the past
When you grow older, you find yourself thinking more about the past than the future. This makes sense, because you’ve got more of the former than the latter. This weekend I watched a little TV in between studying sessions, and noted the following things…
I love the new digital broadcast TV channels, like Me TV and Antenna TV, that show old programs from my childhood and youth. I watch them quite a lot, especially on weekends. On Sunday after church I had the Burns and Allen show on. They did a story centered on some absurd plan to bring a carpenter in to George and Gracie’s house to build a dresser, so they could pretend to their friends that George had built it himself. (I know that makes no sense. If you know Burns and Allen, you’ll understand sense has nothing to do with it.)
The carpenter shows up, ready to go to work.
He is wearing a suit and tie.
I’m not kidding. It seemed perfectly normal in the 1950s for a carpenter to show up at a work location in a suit and tie.
Of course it was Beverly Hills. That probably makes a difference.
On Saturday night, I was working on a paper for my class, and looked for something to watch on the tube. (I like to study in silence, but years of writing books have led me to prefer TV buzz for writing.) To my delight, Antenna TV was running a Rita Hayworth marathon. You know how I feel about Rita. So I settled in with Fire Down Below, a 1957 flick co-starring Robert Mitchum and a very young Jack Lemmon. The guys play seedy Americans running a smuggling boat in the Caribbean, who end up transporting a passportless Rita, who’s supposed to be a woman of mystery with questionable associations from World War II. Continue reading Three from the past