Almost over, but there’s still time to jump in line in front of an Italian. Depending on when you read this.
The Severance Kill, by Tim Stevens
I reviewed a previous novel by Tim Stevens, Ratcatcher, a while back. I liked it, but thought it went a little over the top, demanding the kind of suspension of disbelief that’s better suited to action movies. Severance Kill dials the improbabilities back a little while remaining a fast, tense, wall-to-wall action story.
Martin Calvary works for a top-secret English intelligence organization called the Chapel (and yes, I’m sure the names are significant). The Chapel specializes in assassinations, deniable by the government. Martin joined up after a military stint in Bosnia, where he spared someone’s life with horrific consequences. For a time he was content to kill the bad guys good and dead.
But recently he’s grown weary of the exercise. Perhaps they deserve to lose their lives, but does he have the right to take them?
So he quits. Only his boss has incriminating evidence on him. He wants one more job out of him. There’s an English traitor, a defector to the old Soviet Union. It’s been decided he has to die. If Martin will just do this one, he can walk away free.
Martin doesn’t trust his handler, but he goes to Prague to do the job. Before long he’s tangling with Russian spies, Czech mobsters, and a group of naïve young activists. Martin gets attacked repeatedly, captured, and tortured, gradually figuring out he’s been lied to, and setting a trap of his own.
Severance Kill is not for the squeamish. There’s lots of violence – the scenes of Martin’s torture are particularly intense. As in Ratcatcher, one wonders how the hero can continue functioning physically, but it’s less of a stretch this time out. The plot doesn’t bear close analysis, but taken as an action romp the book works very well indeed. The characters are especially good. Recommended for those who like this sort of thing (I do). Cautions for the aforementioned violence, some sex, and language.
Ira Glass: Work Through the Gap
The Unburied Dead, by Douglas Lindsey
I finished this book before I left for Minot, but a review of The Unburied Dead by Douglas Lindsay didn’t fit my schedule at the time. As a result my memories of details are a little faded. But I’ll give you my general reactions, which remain vivid.
G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that there are two meanings of the word “good.” If a man could shoot his grandmother with a rifle at 500 yards, he would call him a good shot, but he wouldn’t necessarily call him a good man.
In the same way, The Unburied Dead is an excellent book in terms of technical achievement. It provides a grim and gritty picture of police life in Glasgow, where Detective Sergeant Thomas Hutton gets involved in a hunt for a serial killer. Thomas is a relatively honest cop, in an indifferently honest department where the police aren’t above “stitching up” a suspect if they know he’s guilty. But some cops have gone over that fuzzy line, and it only serves to muddy the investigational waters. Thomas himself is contemplating a reconciliation with one of his ex-wives, the mother of his daughters, but he can’t resist a dalliance with his sexy boss.
In short, this book is extremely short on sympathetic characters. The violence is horrifying, the language filthy. The Unburied Dead was a masterful piece of contemporary noir, which I was delighted to be done with when I finished it.
Picture from an alternate universe
Photo credit: Kelsey Patton
In a moment, the story behind the photo above, tentatively titled, “The Most Interesting Viking in the World.”
Høstfest 2013 is history, but my aches and pains linger. Those aches are not, as you might think, primarily the results of bruises suffered in fighting. I actually took remarkably little damage this year. It helps to have enthusiastic young men to bear the brunt of the combat. No, it just seems I have reached an age where sitting in unfamiliar chairs and car seats causes you to stiffen up.
Høstfest as a whole seemed to be quite a success, so far as I could tell. Minot, North Dakota hasn’t fully recovered from the flooding a couple years back, but the festival and the visitors have. Not the busiest festival I’ve seen, but plenty lively.
The interesting thing this year (as I mentioned before I left) was the involvement of the History Channel “Vikings” TV series people. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have almost no respect for that production, which sins against history in all kinds of significant ways. And pretty much everybody in our Viking Age Club & Society feels the same way.
But we have a relationship with Høstfest itself, and they asked us to welcome the History Channel people and participate in the promotion, particularly a “Viking cosplay” contest in which people were invited to upload photos of themselves in Viking costumes in order to win prizes. This we did. The “people from the History Channel,” in fact, proved to be (aside from a PR guy) the four lovely girls you see above, who wore copies of the battle costume of Ragnar Lodbrok’s wife in the series. They were not in fact actors, or even Hollywood people, but models recruited from an agency in Fargo. So it was easy to be nice to them, especially for me, whose idea of being nice to pretty girls is to leave them strictly alone, out of fear that they’ll think I’m hitting on them.
Nevertheless, somebody in the club – I won’t say who – thought it would be hilarious to do the photo above. And I was not hard to persuade.
As for fights, I won a few and lost a few. As so often happens, the younger guys seemed to figure out my moves as time went on, and my score went down.
I sold nearly all the books I brought. This will be the last event where I sell The Year of the Warrior paperbacks, as I’ve nearly run through the stock I acquired in my divorce settlement from Baen Books. In future I’ll just direct people to the e-book, available due to the Baen Reconciliation (new from Robert Ludlum!).
And now, pardon me while I lapse into a brief coma.
"Goggled-Eyed" at Høstfest
News from Høstfest in the Minot Daily News: “On Friday, a quartet of ‘shield maidens,’ better known as models for a Fargo modeling agency, appeared at Høstfest during a live steel combat demonstration by The Viking Age Club…” probably drawn by Lars and his colleagues.
Andrea Johnson writes, “The [elementary school] boys were goggle-eyed as [Gary] Anderson and Lars Walker gave a thoroughly realistic demonstration of live combat, involving the clashing of swords, the splintering of a wooden shield, and men falling to the ground so hard they lost their helmets. The weapons they were using were real, but the men are well-trained in combat.”
Aren’t those maidens cute? No doubt Lars will tell us about this year’s festival next week, but you can see him and Gary now in this video from three years back. Not a glorious moment for Lars, but every teaching moment can’t be glorious, I guess.
Life Without Garfield
Have you seen Garfield Minus Garfield? The book has been out since October 2008, collected from the comics posted on Dan Walsh’s website. The gist is to remove the cat from the strip and discover a remarkably funny, albeit dark and usually depressing, comic strip.
Publishers Weekly says, “If Samuel Beckett had been a strip cartoonist, he might’ve produced something like this.” Here are a couple.
For a slightly different angle on this joke:
Otherworld, by Jared C. Wilson
A UFO craze has hit Trumbull, TX, a little town outside Houston, in Jared C. Wilson’s Otherworld. It starts when Pops Dickey, a transplanted farmer from Wisconsin, discovers one of his cows dead one morning. He calls the local police, who call a local vet because the cow has been slaughtered with little or no blood spilled on the ground. Not the norm for vandalism. The vet labels the killing the work of aliens, and that’s the cue Pops needs to step into the media limelight.
Aliens had visited Trumbull. They took some cow parts as souvenirs. Pops Dickey will tell you all about it and make up more along the way. Police Captain Graham Lattimer won’t have any of it, and when another cow dies, he wants to resolve the two incidents in entirely human terms.
In Houston, Mike Walsh is a magazine writer, who has been assigned a background story on UFOs with a few details from the Trumbull encounter to make it relevant. As he does his research, he is fed up with the hype and tumble of alien books and TV shows until he meets a philosophy and culture professor, Samuel Bering, who seems to know more than anyone else about alien phenomena. But for all of his knowledge, Bering has neglected wisdom, and now he hopes to gain a secret knowledge that will lift him above everyone in the world.
In another part of Houston, a troubled young man gives in to the voices in his head and starts killing people, because this isn’t actually a book about visitors from outer space. It’s a book about an ancient evil.
And it’s fun. At one point, Mike Walsh says the events are getting too much like Peretti, which is a great comparison for Otherworld. The pace and plot read like This Present Darkness
While the characters aren’t depicted very deeply because of the fast-paced story they are in, they are all well-rounded. For example, the pastor, Steve Woodbridge, isn’t the Bible-quoting pillar of strength nor is he a villain. He’s a burned out, materially successful preacher, who wants to follow the Lord and may not be very good at leading his church. His character arc is beautiful.
Otherworld is a good story without Amish people falling in love or frowning on those who do (as Jared notes on his blog). If you have been a Thinklings.org fan for a few years, you may notice some familiar names for background characters. I don’t doubt that his next novel will be twice as good as this one and the following one twice as good as that.
Bill O'Reilly on Jesus of Nazereth
Bill O’Reilly’s new book, Killing Jesus, is surging in sales now. He talked to 60 Minutes last Sunday, saying he felt God inspired him to write a book describing Jesus as “a regular guy, very afraid, scared to die.”
“Jesus of Nazareth was the most famous human being who ever lived on this planet and he had no infrastructure and it’s never been done,” O’Reilly said. “He had no government, no PR guy, no money, no structure. He had nothing, yet he became the most famous human being ever.”
Fox Business has a brief interview with O’Reilly, in which he explains that he trusted other sources of history and his own reasoning more than the gospels on every detail of Jesus’ life. For example, he believes it was impossible for Mary and Joseph to flee Herod all the way into Egypt, which is what Matthew’s gospel says. I suppose he found no other sources saying it happened, so that was enough to rule it out. And though he has no evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, he takes it on faith as a good Catholic.
Apparently, the Bible’s historicity is no obstacle or support to his faith, and I wonder if most contemporary church-goers believe as he does. How many of us hold the line because we have been told which line to hold, not because we believe it actually happened? If we do, we fail to understand how much God has given us in His Word which can be verified, details intended to show us that the stories aren’t mere imaginary morality tales. They are accurate depictions of what happened.
So did Jesus rise from the dead? Paul tells us if He did not, our faith is useless (1 Corinthians 15:14). I guess that makes Paul is pretty poor Catholic.
For your Spectation
I have a piece up at the American Spectator Online today, here.