Fiction, Reviews

‘No More Lies,’ by James Scott Bell

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I’ve become a big fan of James Scott Bell, one of the very few really good Christian mystery writers out there. So I picked up No More Lies, a newly released revision of one of his earlier works. The book shows obvious signs of a writer still in the learning stages, but it also showcases a lot of the virtues that make Bell such a good storyteller.

The location is the small town of Pack Canyon, once the site of Old West movie sets, in the western San Fernando Valley. Arty Towne is out hiking in a wilderness area with his new wife, Liz. Arty has recently become a born-again Christian, and has left a good-paying job on principle. Liz doesn’t get this. Money is everything to Liz. It makes her very angry. Tragedy follows.

Caught up in the ensuing drama is Arty’s sister “Rocky,” an insurance investigator whose life has been blighted by a facial scar she acquired in childhood. And “Mac” MacDonald, an ex-con and new Christian who’s trying to keep straight in spite of numerous pressures, including recurring headaches from wartime injuries.

No More Lies is a tight, convoluted tale with lots of surprises (some of them a little far-fetched). Lots of “Noir” elements – weak-willed people wading into crime and getting caught in the undertow. I liked the characters, and the book contained moments of laughter as well as pathos.

What didn’t work – and it pains me to say it – is the “God talk.” One of the hardest things for a Christian writer trying to write for a secular audience is making the God talk sound natural. And it’s strained here. (No doubt it’s often strained in my own books.)

Also, there’s a weird anticlimax scene that serves no dramatic purpose I can discern.

But other than that, No More Lies is a lot of fun. Excellent entertainment. No cautions for language or themes.

Reviews

Amazon Prime viewing report: ‘Vinland Saga

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My curiosity got the better of me. I couldn’t resist sampling Vinland Saga, a Japanese anime series about Vikings set at precisely the point in history I’ve been writing about in my Erling books. What follows isn’t exactly a review, because I don’t think I’ll be finishing the series, but it’s certainly interesting enough to tell you about. You may be surprised to learn that I have a lot of positive things to say.

When we think of Vinland and the Norse discovery of America, the name we generally think of is Leif Eriksson. But in many ways the real hero of the saga (at least in one of its two versions) is another man, an Icelander called Thorfinn Karlsefni (the nickname means “quite a guy” or “manly stuff”). Though it’s not plainly stated, I’m pretty sure the Thorfinn portrayed in Vinland Saga is that guy – but during an imagined childhood and youth.

As the series tells it, Thorfinn is the son of Thors, the Troll of Jomsborg, a former Jomsviking (a legendary order of Vikings based in Poland) who grew to hate war and deserted, fleeing to the peace of Icelandic farming. A friend of theirs is Leif (Eriksson, one assumes, portrayed here as a wandering blowhard rather than chieftain of the Greenland colony, as he actually was), who regales Thorfinn with tales of the rich soil and mild climate he encountered when he visited Vinland, years ago.

Then the Jomsvikings show up at their home, extorting through threats of violence Thors’ agreement to join them in enlisting in the army of Svein Forkbeard of Denmark in his conquest of England. Thorfinn stows away on the ship, eager to see war. On the way to England, Thors (who’s all but invulnerable) is murdered by the pirate leader Askeladd (a name borrowed from a figure from Norwegian folklore, something like Jack the Giant Killer). Improbably, Askeladd is amused by Thorfinn’s attempts to avenge his father, and keeps him with his army, promising to kill him in a proper duel when he’s old enough.

The next episodes deal with the Danish conquest of England, as Thorfinnn grows to be a feared warrior. At that point, I kind of lost interest. Not that the story wasn’t interesting, but the whole thing got too weird for me. I think there’s a whole artistic sensibility surrounding anime as an art form that I’m too old to adjust to.

Nevertheless, I have to say that there were elements of surprising authenticity. I’d say Vinland Saga is at least 50% more faithful to history than the History Channel Vikings series. Costumes and props are surprisingly good in a lot of cases. The history follows actual chronology. Real persons show up all the time – though sometimes in bizarre ways. Thorkell the Tall is an actual giant here. King Svein’s son Knut, later to become King Canute the Great, is presented as a guy who looks like a girl (and how they’re going to develop that story line I have no wish to discover).

In short, you can learn some genuine history by watching Vinland Saga. I did not expect to be able to say that. If you appreciate anime as an entertainment form, you just might enjoy it.

Music

Sunday Singing: Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart

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“Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart” performed by the Tapestry Chamber Singers of Ft. Loudon, Penn.

“Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart” is a moving prayer that I hope hasn’t been completely forgotten by today’s church members. It was written by Catholic minister George Croly (1780-1860) of Dublin, Ireland.

This recording skips the fourth verse given here, which is the most challenging verse of the five. It asks the Lord for the grace to put ourselves aside and trust Him even though he doesn’t respond as we want Him to.

1 Spirit of God, descend upon my heart;
Wean it from earth, through all its pulses move;
Stoop to my weakness, mighty as thou art,
and make me love thee as I ought to love.

2 I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
no sudden rending of the veil of clay,
no angel visitant, no op’ning skies;
but take the dimness of my soul away.

3 Hast thou not bid us love thee, God and King?
All, all thine own, soul, heart, and strength and mind.
I see the cross– there teach my heart to cling:
O let me seek thee, and O let me find.

4 Teach me to feel that thou art always nigh;
Teach me the struggles of the soul to bear,
to check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh;
teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.

5 Teach me to love thee as thine angels love,
one holy passion filling all my frame:
the baptism of the heav’n-descended dove,
my heart an altar, and thy love the flame.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Music, Reading

Ranking Dostoevsky’s Works and Life as the Ice Grows Thinner

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Amazon’s Middle Earth series, The Rings of Power, will begin September 1 and run into October. I don’t know much about it, but I hope to enjoy it if we still have a Prime membership (which seems to come and go regularly of late).

Because of the series, I intend to read The Silmarillion soon. I know I read about half of it before, but I don’t remember where I stopped. One of the chapters, perhaps thirteen, dragged on about geography about as warmly as a fifth-grade social studies text. I aim to push past those parts and enjoy the stories beyond them.

I don’t know if I will attempt to blog about the series if I’m able to watch it near the release days. I probably wouldn’t have enough thoughts to share.

Crime or Punishment? A Dostoevsky enthusiast categorizes all of the famous author’s novels and novellas into must-reads, read-afters, and only for other enthusiasts.

Notes from Underground, Poor Folk, and The Brothers Karamazov are among the must-reads. The Double and The Gambler are on the list for reading after the must-reads. Uncle’s Dream and The Permanent Husband are only for the most dedicated readers.

“I won’t be exaggerating,” she says, “when I say [The Brothers Karamazov] brought me back from abyss. It might not work the same way [for you as] it did for me, but there is an obvious need for more people to read and understand the beautiful intricacies of life and its fallacies, to love life in its entirety.”

Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

“Notes from Underground,” Fyodor Dostoevsky

On Death: R.L. Stevenson wrote, “[A]fter a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”

Social Media: “How teens use social media often drives how everyone uses social media.” YouTube is the most-used social media platform and the second most-used search engine.

Online Fiction: “China is producing and consuming the largest amount of web fiction in the world, with an estimated 20 million full-time, part-time, and dabbling writers. The grind is hard, and the conditions can be exploitative, but those who do it are on the vanguard of a reading revolution.” (via Literary Saloon)

For Love of a Hero: Mo Ghille Mear (My Gallant Hero), performed by The Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin.

Photo: March Mobil Gas, Mount Clemens, Michigan. 1986. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shaking the Tree,’ by Mike Donohue

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Max Strong works as a baker in a diner in the small town of Essex (which I learned, about half way through the story, is in Minnesota). That’s not his real name, though. He’s in the federal witness protection program. He has a history in organized crime that’s not clearly explicated. But he’s trying to make a fresh start, to keep his nose clean. He likes the place and the people. That’s the setup for the thriller, Shaking the Tree.

One of the people Max likes is his roommate Stevie, an inveterate runner who is nearly beheaded by a briefcase falling from the sky, one morning out in a country road. When he gets the case open, he finds it contains millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, a man’s body is found impaled on an apple tree in a farmer’s orchard.

Suddenly a shady DEA agent and a Russian hit team show up in town. The local sheriff, who’s involved in cooking meth, is trying to figure a way to keep the heat off his operation while locating the missing money for himself. He will lie, bully, torture or kill to make his pile and get out of this town.

Innocent people are going to die. And that will make Max Strong mad.

There was a lot about Shaking the Tree that intrigued me. The story was complex, and the shifting points of view through which it was told were well-realized.

But I found the book hard to like. It was grim, grim, grim. Noir-ish in the sense that sin is punished brutally. It reminded me of No Country for Old Men. I didn’t like Max Strong well enough to care about reading the next book.

There are odd, obscure references to the Bible through the story, but I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of them.

Cautions for language, violence, and mature themes.

Reviews

Amazon Prime review: ‘The Terminal List’

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I finally got around to watching Chris Pratt’s critically panned but commercially popular miniseries, The Terminal List, on Amazon Prime. In case you’re even slower on the uptake than I am, I’ll review it here.

James Reece (Pratt) is a Navy Seal lieutenant whose platoon is cornered and nearly wiped out in a botched operation. Returning home, he learns that the other survivor has been killed, and an attempt is made on his own life. At the same time, he starts noticing problems with his memory – blank spots and certain recollections of things that apparently never happened.

As he grows increasingly frightened of threats to his family, he starts to believe he’s the object of a conspiracy – but can he even trust his own thinking?

The Terminal List is violent and loud and full of dramatic tension and pathos. Critics have panned it, but the audience loved it, and I agree with the audience. I strongly suspect the critics reacted to Chris Pratt’s politics rather than to the story itself. Government conspiracy stories have been common since the 70s, after all, and many have come from filmmakers on the left. What the production lacks, I think, is the obligatory sermons about Woke doctrines that are expected in today’s productions.

I was expecting the final surprise, I must admit, simply based on the process of elimination.

Recommended, for adults with high tolerances for violent scenes and language you’d expect from the military.

Goofing, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Best. State. Ever.’ by Dave Barry

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When you enter Gatorland, the first wildlife you see is—Spoiler Alert—alligators. A buttload of alligators, dozens and dozens of them on wooden platforms surrounded by water. They are sprawled haphazardly, often on top of each other, as if they’re having a wild reptile orgy, except that they are not moving. Some of them look like they have not moved since the Reagan administration. It’s like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but with alligators.

I spent 11 years of my own life in Florida, so I feel a certain ownership in the place. Thus I share with Dave Barry the slight pang that comes when I read yet another story about “Florida Man,” the archetypal doofus who does something magnificently stupid and self-destructive in the sun. In his book, Best. State. Ever., Barry provides both an apologia for, and an appreciation of, the state where he’s made his home. And, oh yes, it’s also very funny.

Most of the “Florida Men” you read about, Barry notes, actually come from someplace else, and it’s Florida’s misfortune that having water on three sides makes it difficult for them to find their way out. But that doesn’t alter the fact that strange things do go on in Florida. He proceeds to provide “A Brief History of Florida” and then to report on personal visits to a series of tourist sites that I, though I lived there a while, never got around to myself:

  • The Skunk Ape [Research Center]
  • Weeki Wachee and Spongeorama
  • Cassadaga
  • The Villages
  • Gatorland
  • Lock & Load Miami
  • LIV (a Miami nightclub that was hot at the time), and
  • Key West.

The book is, as mentioned, very funny, featuring Barry’s signature style of strategic exaggeration. It might have been funnier if it were crueler, but Barry seems to genuinely like the people he meets, and he has no intention of humiliating them.

The most striking part of the book, for this reader, was the description of The Villages, a group of large, planned communities for the elderly. All the houses look alike, and all the people seem to be alike too – they live for golf and early bird specials, and they dance – a lot – like nobody’s watching. It almost comes out sounding like a pleasant gulag, where dying people go to deny their mortality.

Kind of the perfect finale for Baby Boomers, when you think about it.

Best. State. Ever. is a very funny book. Cautions for language, drugs and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

What Would You Do If You Could Become Invisible?

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Heist movies have many examples of criminals slipping into a crowd and becoming essentially invisible. Either there are too many similarly looking people to spot the ones the cops want or there are too many people period. Without an identifier of some kind, the criminals have gotten away without consequences, at least for the moment.

In H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, a gifted chemist works out his theory for making things invisible. Recklessly, he applies his experiment to his own body and becomes an inhuman and invisible man.

His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.

“Measure for Measure” Act 2, scene 2

When the invisible man tells his own story, you see his arrogance runs deep. He attempts to live without any social obligations, taking food or clothing for himself without payment, assuming these things would simply disappear like he has. He quickly learns it won’t work that way, because he isn’t an incorporeal ghost; he’s a naked man that no one can see. If he weren’t such a hot-tempered fool, he might have worked more methodically and converted a set of clothes into invisibility before converting himself.

After a few months of experimental living as an invisible man, the chemist wants to terrorize people. He wants to pursue his scientific interests without having to earn anyone’s favor or deal with normal social pressures. He probably blames his father, his old boss, and all of his research colleagues for his jaded view of the world, but I think Wells may intend these people to represent everyone. There are no contrasting noble characters in this story. Even the chemist’s closest friend may have been just as self-seeking as everyone else.

Wells provokes readers to ask what anyone would do if he or she could be invisible, or to put it another way, what would you do if there were no consequences to pay? Would you plagiarize? Steal someone’s research? Slander someone’s character to get rid of them?

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fortuitous Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I continue to follow Dennis Carstens’ Minneapolis-located Marc Kadella series of legal mysteries. I also continue a kind of love/hate relationship with the books. The writing doesn’t impress me a lot, but the storytelling is good, and I generally like the characters.

Marc Kadella, as you may recall, is a Minneapolis attorney. He is now engaged to Maddy Rivers, the uber-hot private detective. In Fortuitous Justice, we pick up several plot threads, which had appeared to be tied up, from the previous book, Twisted Justice. That book involved a group of former Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders who’d formed a prostitution ring, and who found themselves way out of their depth when they became a security risk to some of the richest – and most ruthless – movers and shakers in Minnesota politics (which means, in case you’re not familiar with my state, Democrats. It’s not stated in so many words in the book, but that’s the way it is).

At the end of Twisted Justice, Burt Chayson, a local political fixer who knew too much, was reported dead, an apparent suicide. But now the police say murder, and they have their eyes on one of the Housewife Hookers, Hope Slade, the last person seen with him. Hope had enough on her plate already with prostitution charges and public humiliation. Her husband has left her. Now she’s facing Murder One. She goes to Marc Kadella for defense.

The investigation will be complicated, really scary hired guns will come to town to shut people’s mouths, and the final resolution will be a surprise.

As a mystery, I thought Fortuitous Justice was pretty good. I was annoyed by too many typos (a common problem these days, alas), and by Carstens’ habit of inserting paragraph breaks at unexpected places in the midst of chunks of dialogue, leaving the reader wondering who’s talking now.

I was also peeved when one unpleasant character was identified as a member of the “far right religious bunch.” That peeve turned to utter confusion as the character was later identified as a Democrat. (Insert image of Leonard Nimoy here, with one eyebrow cocked: “Highly illogical.”) Honestly, I think the author just lost track.

Not a great book, Fortuitous Justice was entertaining and fun. Cautions for language and mature themes.

Authors, Religion

R.I.P., Frederick Beuchner

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(Religion News Service:) Frederick Buechner was asked on numerous occasions how he would sum up everything he had preached and written in both his fiction and nonfiction.

The answer, he said, was simply this: “Listen to your life.”

That theme was constant across more than six decades in his career as a “writer’s writer” and “minister’s minister” — an ordained evangelist in the Presbyterian Church (USA) who inspired Christians across conservative and progressive divides with his books and sermons.

Buechner died peacefully in his sleep on Monday (Aug. 15) at age 96, according to his family.

Read the whole story here.