Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bad Weather Friend,’ by Dean Koontz

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She was about five feet eight, slim, with ink-black hair cut short and eyes as green as the plastic on certain Memorex high-density diskettes, which were still in use in those days.

One of the delights of being a Dean Koontz fan is the constant surprises. Far from writing the same book over and over (as some authors tend to do), Koontz keeps obsessively changing it up. Some of his books are terrifying. Some are suspenseful, some plaintive and melancholy. And sometimes he just likes to have fun. The Bad Weather Friend is Koontz in sheer fun mode.

When Benny Catspaw loses his job, gets dumped by his girlfriend, and has a bank loan turned down all in one day, it’s not even the worst day of his life so far. Benny has been through a lot, but he faces it all with his customary optimism and good humor. Benny is a nice guy.

Then he gets a message from a great-uncle he never knew he had. The old man says he is sending Benny a shipment, his inheritance. It will be alarming, he says, but Benny should not be afraid.

Benny will be afraid, though, when the shipment turns out to be a muscular giant with superhuman powers and a deep hatred for postmodern interior decoration. His name is Spike, he says, and he’s a “craggle.” Craggles are supernatural beings entrusted with the protection of the world’s nicest people, of whom Benny is one. Along with Harper Harper, a charming young woman training to be a private investigator, Spike listens to the story of Benny’s day, and concludes that there’s a conspiracy to destroy him. These conspirators must be hunted down and stopped (Spike never kills anyone). The three of them set out on the quest. Along the way, Benny will recall the strange course of his unusual life up to now, and will fall in love with Harper.

Dean Koontz is a practicing Roman Catholic, and many of his books shows traces of his faith. I can’t say that element is very apparent in The Bad Weather Friend. This story is all about “niceness,” which has (correctly) been denounced in countless pulpits as inferior to the righteousness God demands. I don’t think any conclusions should be drawn on that score. This is a fun book, not intended to be taken very seriously.

The Bad Weather Friend was a pleasure to read, and I wished it were longer. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Written In Bone,’ by Simon Beckett

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It’s always a pleasure to read a book by a professional who knows his business (better than I do, to tell the truth). And yet a professional can carry his craft to the point of manipulation, and that can be annoying. That’s my take on Written In Bone, by Simon Beckett.

Dr. David Hunter is an English forensic scientist. He has a girlfriend he’s trying to build a relationship with, and he’s planning to spend some time with her when he gets an emergency call for help. A body has been found on the island of Runa in the Hebrides, and all the other crime scene investigators are tied up. Could he go and check it out? Shouldn’t take long, it’s probably nothing criminal. David agrees, raising doubts both in his girlfriend and himself about his commitment to the relationship.

When he arrives in the small, close-knit community, he goes to see the body, that of a woman, lying in a ruined cottage in the hills. It looks like an unusual, but most often innocent, phenomenon, “spontaneous human combustion,” which is actually the result of a wicking effect on clothed, burning corpses. But a closer examination of the skull proves this was no accident. The woman was murdered.

At that point, David ought to call in the professionals, but a sudden freak storm descends on the island and lasts several days, disrupting communications and making travel impossible. Meanwhile, more bodies start turning up…

Good characters. Good pacing. Good prose. Lots of rising tension. Written In Bone is plotted in a masterly fashion, and it kept me fascinated all through.

And then we got to the end, and (for this reader) the author kind of spoiled it.

This is one of those stories where you have a solution, and then you find out that solution is wrong. And then you find out the revised solution is wrong too. And finally there’s a twist that leads to a cliffhanger.

A cliffhanger.

That’s excessive, in my estimation. Aside from the fact that I don’t like cliffhangers (I consider them a cheat), when an author gets cute and keeps second-guessing solutions, it violates the principle of Occam’s Razor. Solutions that get too complicated grow decreasingly interesting.

So there it is. The writing is great. The resolutions were disappointing. For me, anyway.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Hills Be Shaken,’ by Michael Stewart

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When I encounter a poorly written Christian novel, I tend to assume it comes from an Evangelical Protestant author. As an Evangelical Protestant myself, it’s one of the things I have to live with. I instinctively expect better things from Roman Catholic writers, probably because I mostly read good ones (Undset, Buckley, etc.) Nevertheless, there are badly written Catholic novels, and Michael Stewart’s The Hills Be Shaken turned out to be one of those. Which isn’t to say the author doesn’t show some promise.

The premise is original and engaging. An act of terrorism destroys a large swathe of Manhattan, Kansas. Just before the explosion, police officer Sam McGuire stops a woman who’s jogging in the park, carrying (legally) a pistol and an AR-15. Though she seems to have no connection to the disaster, Sam can’t shake a feeling that something was off about her, and he studies his dash cam footage of the incident obsessively.

Immediately after the event, engineer Moses Haley was arrested by the FBI, simply because he happened to be taking a break on the roof of his workplace at the fatal hour. He was soon released, little guessing that he’d soon be recruited by that same agency. His new career will put pressure on his family life and demand courage of him he never knew he had.

My reaction: First of all, I did finish the book. I don’t always do that. The plot was interesting enough (though far-fetched), and kept me interested. I liked the characters. The values were good.

But the writing was amateur hour. All the characters talked the same way, and they spoke like someone writing a book, not like real people talking. The religious passages were awkward, too long, and preachy. The action (as in so many novels nowadays) was more cinematic than realistic.

Also there was a long sequence involving action in a very high place, with an escalating danger of falling. I hate scenes like that for personal reasons, though it certainly kept my interest.

Anyway, The Hills Be Shaken was an admirable story, awkwardly told. But we might look for better things to come from the author.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Recital,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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Occasionally a short story shows up on Amazon, and occasionally I’ll buy it, if it’s from an author I like. But I usually won’t waste a blog review on one.

But an Orphan X story by Gregg Hurwitz is another proposition altogether. The Recital is definitely worth a notice here.

As you may recall, Evan Smoak is Orphan X, a former assassin for a super-secret government agency, now (for all practical purposes) Batman. He has taken a young woman under his wing as a sort of foster daughter, the hacker Joey Morales. Joey is attending music school now, and she tells Evan she’d like him to come to her first recital along with a few of his friends, about the only people she knows in the world. Evan, whose whole life is focused on staying anonymous, has some difficulty wrapping his mind around the concept of a recital. She wants him to watch her training? Even more difficult is recruiting his friends to come along to the event – his friends being a nine-fingered illegal gun dealer, a retired cartel kingpin, and an uber-sexy female assassin. But Evan has acquired enough minimal empathy to understand this is important to Joey, so he goes to work on the problem.

It will involve trading some favors with people, not entirely legal stuff. And his friends won’t exactly fit in with the conservatory audience. But in their own ways they all care about Joey, and they’ll support her or die (maybe kill) trying.

I’m confident The Recital will be the most touching, endearing story about assassination, gunrunning, and personal security you’ll read all year.

Fiction, Reviews

Steelheart, a Superhero Thriller, by Brandon Sanderson

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“You’ve said it yourself—we can’t kill every Epic out there. The Reckoners are spinning in circles. The only hope we have, the only hope that humankind has, is to convince people that we can fight back. For that to happen, Steelheart has to fall by human hands.”

Ten years ago, an undefined cosmic entity called Calamity eradiated the Earth, causing some people to develop superpowers. These people were quickly labeled Epics and they began to claim territory for their own kingdoms. Some areas, in what became the Fractured States, were completely wasted as Epics fought over them, but Newcago, the city claimed by the title villain, Steelheart, was at least functioning under new management.

Epic powers range from standard (invincibility, premonition, illusion-making) to non-standard (the ability to fire a handgun without running out of ammo). Power sets and limits are discussed in detail throughout the book, as you might expect but also in a way that raises questions. More on that later.

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson is a compelling sci-fi story. David Charleston, the young main character, witnesses the cataclysm that began Steelheart’s reign and becomes the sole survivor of the only time their invincible overlord has been injured. “I’ve seen Steelheart bleed,” he says at the beginning, and though he doesn’t know why this man who typically deflects all attacks was superficially wounded, he’s confident something in his memory will lead them to his fatal weakness.

This is the first of three books in The Reckoners series. It stands well as a single book, but with the open ending to one problem clearly to be addressed in book two (as can be seen in that book’s title), I’m eager to pick up the other books. But this one is not without problems.

I hesitate to much because maybe I’ve thought about this kind of sci-fi/fantasy too much and am in danger of complaining about reasonable choices I wouldn’t have made. For instance, Epic powers and weaknesses can be anything, and the heroes discuss how they defy scientific understanding. Thus, we have a character who can shoot a handgun indefinitely but not a rifle or any other weapon. That’s . . . silly. It reminds me of a guy in My Hero Academia who can use the lines on a street as weapons. Maybe the visual medium (manga) and the level of crazy at that point in the story makes such a power seem normal enough. It’s a long story with tons of power sets, so perhaps silly gets lost in diversity. In Steelheart, the handgun character is one of the first Epics we meet.

Plot tension and main characters are strong throughout. The conclusion is satisfactory, if somewhat forced.

Photo: Aaron Bean on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Careless Kitten’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

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Picked up another Perry Mason mystery by Erle Stanley Gardner. I enjoyed the first one I read. The Case of the Careless Kitten didn’t please me quite as much, but it offered some interesting looks at some of the characters.

Helen Kendal wants to marry a soldier (the book is set in 1942), but her guardian, her aunt, is opposed to the match. If the aunt’s husband, Helen’s uncle, who disappeared ten years ago, were declared legally dead, Helen would have money coming from his will, and would be able to afford marriage. But the aunt insists her husband is still alive.

Then one day, Helen’s pet kitten shows signs of poisoning. She rushes the animal to a veterinarian. But that same evening, the aunt suffers poisoning too, and has to go to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Helen has gotten a call from a man who identifies himself as her missing uncle. He wants her to hire the lawyer Perry Mason, and go with him to meet a man at a seedy hotel. That man will lead them to a meeting with the uncle. Thus the mystery begins.

If it all seems a little convoluted, I thought so too. This was a complicated story, and I found it a little work to keep up.

On the other hand, I was intrigued to see the Perry Mason characters in a pre-Raymond Burr light. I’ve often read that author Gardner rarely described his characters, but this book was richer in character description than most. And it contradicts the later TV portrayals. I wonder if Gardner didn’t make it a point to eliminate descriptions after the show started, in order to promote it.

Perry Mason was, we are informed here, a tall man. I don’t think Raymond Burr was notably tall. (I remember reading, in one short story, that Mason was slender-waisted. Definitely not true of Burr.) Mason and his secretary Della Street also seemed much more romantically involved here than they would on TV.

We’re told here that Hamilton Burr was a big, bullish man. Not much like William Talman.

Lieutenant Tragg, the police detective, was the greatest surprise. He’s a young man, we’re told here, and well-dressed. The TV casting people definitely went another way with Ray Collins.

I found the final solution of the book pretty complicated, and Mason’s choice for explaining it all a little disappointing. Nevertheless, The Case of the Careless Kitten was professionally written and highly readable.

Music

Christmas Singing: Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning

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“Brightest and Best” performed by The USC Thornton Chamber Singers

Today’s hymn may be in your hymnal but it won’t be arranged to a rollicking folk melody as Shawn Kirchner has in the video above. It’s a song about the Magi finding the infant King of the Jews after a long trek in pursuit of the star. It was written by Englishman Reginald Heber (1783-1826) while he was rector in the village of Hodnet, Shropshire.

“The LORD is near to the brokenhearted
and saves the crushed in spirit” (PS 34:18 ESV)

Refrain
Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star of the east, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer is laid.

2 Cold on His cradle the dew-drops are shining,
Low lies His head with the beasts of the stall;
Angels adore Him in slumber reclining,
Maker and Monarch and Savior of all.

3 Shall we not yield Him, in costly devotion,
Odors of Edom, and offerings divine,
Gems of the mountain, and pearls of the ocean,
Myrrh from the forest, and gold from the mine?

4 Vainly we offer each ample oblation,
Vainly with gifts would His favor secure;
Richer by far is the heart’s adoration,
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.

Blogs, Socials

Making New Connections, Patterns, and Links

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I believe it’s common for Christian pastors and ministry leaders to say believers don’t need to learn more about the Bible as much as they need to apply what they already know. Maybe it’s only common in South. I’ve heard statements like this many times, and they’re good so far as they go. People who know Christ Jesus is risen and will come again in the flesh, who know to seek first his kingdom and not to worry about other concerns, who have passing familiarity with the fruit of the Spirit, may just need to apply what they know to their daily decisions.

But if that’s the case, why do these pastors continue to preach?

There are many reasons to continue to preach. Let me offer one reason that pushes back on notion that we don’t need more Bible knowledge, just more Bible application. Good preaching and teaching can make connections people haven’t, and maybe can’t, make for themselves. This is often the missing piece. It isn’t that church congregants aren’t familiar with biblical principles. Of course, they may not be, but familiarity doesn’t change the heart without reflection. We naturally take up unbiblical assumptions and patterns that work against the life God has called us to. Most of us don’t recognize what unbiblical beliefs we still hold, and we need godly preachers to show us how God’s truth applies to life. We need them to show us the patterns of a Christian mind.

Bible knowledge—in fact, straight, dry, matter-of-fact biblical knowledge—can make these connections if the Holy Spirit would graciously apply it to us, but often we need to hear a godly preacher or teacher reflect on a text with illustrations and applications for us. This is the way the body of Christ works. We aren’t copies of each other. Some of us don’t think well. We are hung up on ourselves. If we have passing familiarity with the Bible, we don’t understand how to get from what we know to an application like The Heidelberg Catechism’s first question.

What is thy only comfort in life and death?

That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, both in life and death—unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with His precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto Him.

What end of the year links do we have?

Poetry: A little on Thomas Gray’s other poems, not “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but since you brought up Gray’s famous poem, here’s Dr. Iain McGilchrist reading it.

Charles Williams: C.S. Lewis had high praise for one of Williams’s novels. “A book sometimes crosses one’s path which is so like the sound of one’s native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer,” said Lewis in his letter. “I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris.”

Williams and Lewis became friends shortly after this.

Every day we must make countless decisions about whether we will allow ourselves to be trained in habits of acontextualization, distraction, and incoherence. Resistance requires awareness, persistence, and intentionality. Dr. Keith Plummer is Dean of the School of Divinity at Cairn University.

Christmas: On Jan. 2, 1927, Arthur Machen wrote about Christmas traditions of his youth. “It is still Christmas, let it be remembered, and Christmas customs have not ceased to be topics of the day. And I am reminded of a curious old Welsh custom, which lingered well into my young days, which, for all I know, may still linger. Christmas in the very old days was one of the feasts on which the parish spent all they could afford on lights. . . . to simple village eyes accustomed to a dim tallow to get to bed by, if so much illumination as that, the church on Christmas morning must have been a place of splendour and glory, a paradise on earth.”

Photo: andreas kretschmer on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Barrier Island,’ by John D. MacDonald

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John D. MacDonald, who had a business degree, occasionally strayed from conventional mystery scenarios to write a business story. I don’t think Barrier Island was a publishing blockbuster, but MacDonald had the clout to get it published, and it’s effective.

Our hero is Wade Rowley, a real estate broker on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He has a partner, Bern Gibbs. Bern is an old friend, but their different business styles (and willingness to skirt legalities) are beginning to strain their association. Wade is especially concerned about a recent deal Bern took them into with Tucker Loomis, a swashbuckling local property developer. Bern assisted Tucker with land purchases for an extravagant new development on a barrier island. But now the government is seizing the island for environmental protection, and Tucker is suing for lost profits. Wade has a sneaking suspicion that the whole thing was a scam from the start. Tuck Loomis must have known the island was fragile and unstable. He probably leveraged his assets to buy up the land cheap so he could profit big from the government settlement.

Wade goes to visit one of the “property owners” listed in the development records, and discovers that the man is both poor and a Loomis employee. So he goes to a friend in the government and gives him the information, just in case the whole thing blows up on them. When Bern finds out about that, they get in a fight and agree to dissolve their partnership.

But that’s all before a murder happens.

Barrier Island was John D. MacDonald’s last novel, published in 1986. It reflects the author’s long-standing concern for environmental preservation, as well as (I suspect) the influence of the “Dynasty”-style prime time soap operas that were popular at the time. There was the same fascination here with the lifestyles and peccadillos of the rich, but at its heart the story is a morality tale. All the main characters are fully fleshed out, and even when we don’t like them. we’re permitted to observe their motivations, which are not always base.

Barrier Island wasn’t John D. MacDonald at the top of his game, but he was incapable of writing a bad story. Cautions for adult situations.

The Press

The Long Decline of the New York Times

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Former NY Times editorial page editor James Bennet has a long essay in The Economist about his experience at the Gray Lady. He focuses on efforts to diversify the printed opinions and the fierce opposition that effort got from reporters and readers. In short, the Times staff is making itself comfortable in a handbasket on the road to an undisclosed location. (via The World and Everything in It)

During the first meeting of the Times board of directors that I attended, in 2016, [executive editor Dean] Baquet and I hosted a joint question-and-answer session. At one point, Baquet, musing about how the Times was changing, observed that one of the newsroom’s cultural critics had become the paper’s best political-opinion columnist. Taking this musing one step further, I then noted that this raised an obvious question: why did the paper still have an Opinion department separate from the newsroom, with its own editor reporting directly to the publisher? If the newsroom was publishing the best opinion journalism at the paper – if it was publishing opinion at all – why did the Times maintain a separate department that falsely claimed to have a monopoly on such journalism?

Everyone laughed. But I meant it, and I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too). The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism. Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news. But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases.

The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics. Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion. It became a running joke. Every few months, some poor editor in the newsroom or Opinion would be tasked with writing up guidelines that would distinguish the newsroom’s opinion journalists from those of Opinion, and every time they would ultimately throw up their hands.

I remember how shaken A.G. Sulzberger was one day when he was cornered by a cultural critic who had got wind that such guardrails might be put in place. The critic insisted he was an opinion writer, just like anyone in the Opinion department, and he would not be reined in. He wasn’t. (I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)