It’s been a productive week! MindHut posted my review of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan.

This is one of those books that shocked me into action. As soon as I turned the last page, I immediately ordered books 2 and 3, and will tap my foot expectantly until they arrive. Great stuff!

Read about it here!

MindHut published my review of one of the books that accelerated my interest in popular fiction: Sabriel by Garth Nix, the first book of the Old Kingdom series.

You can find it here!

In honor of Star Wars Day, Mindhut posted my rant on how the physicality of ships in Star Wars reflects a lot of unique personality. This is the sort of visual storytelling that makes the franchise resonate over decades.

Read about it here, and May the Fourth be with you!

I’ve started freelance blogging for SparkNotes’ nerd-themed blog, MindHut. Don’t worry, dear readers, I am ever loyal to you, and shall not lead you astray! But every once in a while, I may link you away to another blog kind enough to feature Your Humble Narrator.

Many thanks to my delightful girlfriend, who lent me the books that fueled this review. Check out “Across the Universe!”

Read about it here.

Many and many-a years ago, when I was a sma’ boy living several wheels back along the Path of the Beam, I picked up a book by sai King. From that moment, I knew we were well-met.

The book was the Dark Tower. It was neither science fiction nor fantasy nor horror of any conventional sort, but a category of its own making, with some eccentric influences along the way (hile to sai Lovecraft and sai Eastwood). The man-King had a shine for making readers mourn a world that had long since moved on: the bright nation of Gilead, and the gunslingers who protected her light. As sai King puts it: “If you think of the gunslingers of Gilead as a strange combination of knights errant and territorial marshals of the Old West, you’ll be close to the mark.”

If you’re reading with the eyes that God gave you, you’ll see that there’s some very fine vernacular at play — the High Speech and low speech that deserves no capital letters, and terms both alien and familiar to ones we use.

The world of the Tower is a place so old that its time is running down like a pocket watch. Robots cobbled together by the Old People still wander the wasteland, spouting half-remembered bits of mythology. It’s a place where magic and technology mean the same thing as often as not.

The Dark Tower embodies a wonderful, hurtful nostalgia. It brings me back to the brooding, fate-enslaved struggle of Elric of Melnibone, the history and scope of The Lord of the Rings, and the cryptic, unknowable darkness of House of Leaves. Like spokes driving away from the focal point of a wheel, the Tower is many things at once.

The story of Roland and his ka-tet (his brethren on the path of destiny, do ya kennit?) has long since moved on, but sai King has found another story between the cracks: The Wind Through the Keyhole.

Lest any of you think that The Wind Through the Keyhole stands in the path of the story you’ve read prior to this bloggy post, attend me: the mini-tale fits as comfortably in the reader’s hands as a certain pair of guns with sandalwood grips.

I’ll give nothing away, only to mention that it brightened my heart to visit some old friends after a long absence. Though they walk a different path along ka’s wheel — removed and yet suspiciously close to my own at times, for the boundary between worlds is thin — I consider Eddie and Susannah Dean, Jake Chambers, Oy of Mid-World and Roland Deschain some of my closest companions. Hile, bondsmen.

It was even a pleasure to cross paths with some less-welcome figures, such as a man who wears a dark cloak even on a hot day, and goes by too many names.

To the writer, I say thankee-sai. Whether he knew it or not, Stephen King steered me on a twisted path from the very beginning. I could go into greater detail, but that is surely a story for another day.

There’s a myth about books that they’re “escapist,” which implies that they’re less complicated or worrisome than the world beyond the page. Maybe those types of books are marketed to people who need a Silkwood scrub after a long day. I’ve never felt as if reading was an escape. It feels more like I’m working toward something, and I’m more actively engaged in it. A book is a focusing crystal that keeps my brain exercised, and what do we all know about exercise? No pain, no gain.

Scott Smith demonstrates that reading is not a passive escape into some alternate reality where everything works out. It embraces the most primal forms of discomfort.

The Ruins and A Simple Plan raised my standards for the term “page-turner.” I couldn’t stop reading, but at times I wanted to, because Smith worked that aforementioned edge of literary unease under my skin like a blade.

The Ruins

The premise of this book reads like a B-movie starring a young Christopher Lee and Claire Bloom: a group of college students get trapped in the wilderness, where a carnivorous plant feeds on them one-by-one. Smith draws from a combination of physical and psychological discomfort. A long series of injuries, many brought on by the bloodthirsty vegetation, made me feel genuinely grateful for the luxury of running water and antibacterial soap.

The Ruins specializes in the grotesquerie. It’s no mistake that one of the characters is a medical student. His point of view allows special insight into the nature of bacterial infection, and his enthusiastic approach to on-the-field experience leads to a few awful scenes of makeshift surgery.

That said, at key points Smith brings to bear devastating psychological torture. The mysterious plantlife feeding off the hurt and exhausted protagonists has an arsenal of hidden abilities that slowly unspool–from parroting dialogue to exuding the scent of food to amplify the horror of starvation. Smith employs these tools like a sniper, narrowing on the perfect shot with promises of awful damage.

The nature of the “plant” introduces an element of the unknown and unknowable that would make H.P. Lovecraft smile. Any question of whether they’re dealing with a prehistoric organism or some vast, subterranean monster is glossed-over: they’re simply too hungry to care. The consequences also don’t amount to a hill of beans, since the fact remains that they are helpless prey.

The Ruins is part survivalist and part monster movie, with a minefield of ravaged emotions and the constant threat of the predator under your feet. Go for it.

A Simple Plan

This book brought me back to the Nickelodeon show “Doug.” I remember as a kid feeling hopelessly uncomfortable by Doug’s social ineptitude. He would get in the thick of some awkward encounter, and his efforts to evade or cover it up would snowball in the worst possible ways.

Such is the case in A Simple Plan, on a vastly different scale. The book starts off with 3 characters finding a duffel bag filled with money. Without giving anything away, events spin so far out of control that, had it not interfered with the reading process, I would have kept my eyes covered the whole time. What fascinated me about A Simple Plan was that the most awful and horrific events imaginable transpire in the middle of the book. Usually these things have a way of escalating until a breaking point at the 3/4 mark. After hitting that tidal wave, I found myself paging through with a numb sense of bewilderment, wondering what further tortures Smith could inflict upon me.

This was one of the rare occasions when I wanted my protagonist to die immediately and unexpectedly before he could dig himself any deeper.

There’s a long scene in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov, a newcomer to the world of murder, has an extended and one-sided conversation with an inspector who seems both out of his mind and keenly aware of the protagonist’s crimes. I couldn’t help but return to that moment in A Simple Plan. It’s that same awful threat of discovery, and the thought of what lengths you’d have to go to cover every single track.

One of my closest friends is petrified by horror films, so naturally I would take him to every single showing. He used to reach such heights of panic that he’d bundle his face behind his jacket and watch the movie through the button holes. A Simple Plan is a button hole kind of book. Rather than the proverbial train wreck, it feels more like watching a whale getting lowered through a food processor, tail first. You can’t look away, and for the love of god you wish it would die quicker.

Which isn’t to say that the book carried on, or that I failed to enjoy myself in any way! My only gripe was that Smith fit in a wealth of “If I knew then what I know now…” asides. These tear the story out of the moment and expand the limitations of the book exactly at times when they should feel more claustrophobic and high-stakes.

If Scott Smith had published a third book, no doubt I would have added it here with similar praises heaped onto it, but amazingly he just has these two. In a world where I expect my favorite writers to produce a library of work to keep me perpetually entertained, I have to commend Smith for taking his time and prioritizing quality over quantity. Good show!

In the meantime, let this blog act as the grease trap to catch my creative runoff.

(Note — I’m writing from an application of questionable quality. Forgive any formatting errors)

Chess community shocked at villain’s use of metaphor

Discord rippled through the International Chess Federation after a notorious kingpin and dirigible pilot used their time-honored game to reflect upon his success.
Baron Von Monocle, known by some as the “Aristocrat of Crime,” is under fire for recent comments regarding the 32-piece game of strategy. The ne’er-do-well is accused of chuckling mischievously in his study, saying: “Bishop to king’s rook.”
According to sources, this self-congratulatory expression correlated with a radio broadcast describing the assassination of a foreign dignitary.
Not everyone shared the Baron’s mirthful sentiments. “It’s a disgrace to the game,” said Jacob Smyth of the ICF. “I’ve studied chess for thirty years. It takes deep contemplation and forward-thinking strategy. The Baron needs to find a better way to articulate his delight for a job well done.” He added, “Jerk.”
Von Monocle, last seen handing off a suspicious package and twirling his mustache as he strolled down an alley, was unavailable for comment. A witness to the encounter testified that as the Baron turned a corner, he whispered: “Rook takes bishop.”
M. Gunnderlead, the Baron’s publicist, was quick to guard his client from the barrage of criticism.
“The ICF has no authority to restrict my client’s freedom of allusion. It’s like the boss always says, ‘A true king never shows his back to a knight.’” He added, “Never.”
Eyewitnesses claim the Baron has weathered the accusation with a snifter of brandy in one hand and an expressionless cat in the other, both staring into the mouth of a roaring fireplace.
While there is no legal precedent for infringement of chess metaphor, the ICF maintains that Von Monocle is taking it a bit too far:
“We’re not here to strip anyone of their rights,” asserted Smyth, “but the Baron could stand to change his approach. Chess is by no means the only game with clever double-meanings.”
Hours after this comment, the Poker League posted to their Twitter account: “If the ICF thinks they can deflect their problems onto us, they’re a bunch of jokers.” The Baseball Confederacy expressed confidence that any attempts to manipulate sports terminology for unjust aim would “never leave the dugout.”
According to sources within his island compound, Baron Von Monocle has no intention of adopting an alternative strategy to express self-satisfaction. He spent the last week in front of a floating hologram of the Earth, drawing red lines that zigzagged ominously across continents.
“Even a pawn can take a queen” he whispered to his cat. “Even a pawn can take a queen.”

We get uncomfortable by the idea of technology imitating life. Granted – there are pace makers, bionic eyes, prosthetic limbs – but when we wander too far off the beaten path, technology stops being useful and gets downright creepy.

I came to this realization after playing Half-Life 2. In the context of the story: an alien civilization has colonized Earth, squeezing humanity into the iron grip of a 1984-esque regime. One of the reasons Half-Life stands out from the fold is the calculated and methodical visual tailoring.

The presiding technology in Half-Life 2 is brilliantly inspired — especially the dropships, gunships, the tripodal “Striders.”  I use the word “inspired” intentionally, because the mechanical bits of the Half-Life world don’t resemble our genetic memory of UFO’s or ray guns. Quite the opposite. Most of the technology in Half-Life looks like it was designed by insects. At multiple points of the game, I was left wondering if my character was fighting a captained vessel  or some monstrous, long-snouted, flying grub. Some of the “robots” have wet innards, or howl ominously when they perish.

In many ways, a medium-sized organic-looking vessel is more unsettling than the largest spaceship. Perhaps it has to do with the psychic distance between combatants. When two pilots are engaged in a dogfight, our perception of the interchange has as much to do with the maneuvering of ships as the personalities of the pilots. When one organic is fighting another organic – especially an organic that defies our ability to understand it – the stakes feel different. They feel personal, disgusting, unsettling.

War of the Worlds may have spearheaded this movement. No matter the artist depiction, the Martian tri-pods always seemed patterned from actual life forms. The aliens inside barely seemed to matter at all.

When a bunch of humans pit themselves against a giant, possibly organic form, I keep thinking of ants ganging up on a ravenous spider. It’s an awful image, grotesque in its scale and ferocity. Keeping our enemies alive, mysterious, and partially-unknowable in their design serves to underline humanity’s relative smallness to the rest of the universe.

And what is fiction if not the quest to manufacture discomfort?

There’s a blanket assumption supported by the nerd-run media that you have to be either a Star Trek or Star Wars fan. Anyone with a pair of graphing calculators to rub together will tell you that this isn’t the case, and that we approach the franchises for very different reasons.

I discovered Star Trek late in the game for my generation. I flipped the TV to the Sci-fi channel (when it was still the Sci-fi channel) as background noise while I trudged through a quagmire of high school calculus, and found myself in the midst of a Voyager marathon. I glanced up to catch  what was happening every few minutes. At length, the interims between unfocused me and attentive me narrowed, until I found that I had sat, enraptured and unblinking, for the entire two-part saga entitled Year of Hell.

People roll their eyes when I speak of my affection for Voyager. The greater nerd community seems to think that I missed out because I don’t have a solid grounding in Next Generation. While I have to admit that Seven-of-Nine’s bodysuit struck my hormones like a tuning fork — I still genuinely feel that I had every bit of an enriching Star Trek experience for more dignified, creatively-inspired reasons.

Plot
With the advent of Lost, I’m seeing an increasing quantity of shows that demand a viewer’s uninterrupted devotion from day one. Star Trek is the high watermark of episodic content. You can dip your toes into any point of the series and find yourself in familiar territory. They’re still in space, Klingons are still out of touch with their emotions, and the Borg are still philosophically unsettling. Most of the substantial changes occur on a one-off basis.

One could tear this argument to ribbons by asserting that the Star Trek universe is simplistic and unvarying. I’d argue that the high-stakes subplots and a thin sense of continuity between episodes makes up for it.

The Prime Directive
The Prime Directive is a galactic law stating that the Federation (Good Guys) shall not interfere with any planet’s conflicts in a way that could tip the balance. The charm of the Prime Directive is that no one has followed it in years. There’s a constant ethical battle that goes something like this:
“Captain! We can’t interfere! The Prime Directive–”
“Don’t quote Federation law to me, Ensign! I was breaking the Prime Directive before you were born. Fire photon torpedoes!”
“…Yes, Ma’am.”
It’s as if the Federation wanted to give starship Captains a reason to become vigilantes, and wrote a law that –by its very design — would have to be broken. I’ll bet they had webcams installed on all the bridges, and somewhere on Earth a room full of starchy NASA Control scientists cheered and popped champagne bottles every time another Captain broke the Prime Directive. They probably gambled on it. “Janeway’s about to crack!”

Heightened Ship-Awareness (this one is my favorite)
After a few weeks of saturating myself in Voyager, I realized that I could pilot a Federation starship as effectively as any officer. When shit got real, I instinctively knew where power needed to be re-routed, what systems to target on an enemy vessel, and what maneuvers would create a quantum paradox that would tear the ship apart. I knew that you were dead in the water if anything happened to your warp core. I knew that if anyone had to go crawling through a duct to re-wire something, they were going to find evidence of sabotage.

Star Trek excelled at continuity and familiarity when it came to wartime tactics. “Do we target weapons or shields? Do we divert power to life support or thrusters? Dismiss that man to his quarters!” The available split-second choices were arranged in different combinations, but they all came from a shared pool of possibility. If you watched enough Star Trek, you got the chance to take part in the decision-making process.

Star Wars never offered this sense of oneness with the technology at play. One of my favorite moments from the series is when Luke stares up at the Millennium Falcon and says: “What a piece of junk!” It’s an amazing line, because the viewer has no context in the Star Wars universe to judge one spacecraft from another. That moment does some great things from a storytelling perspective — demonstrating Luke’s savvy, introducing doubt in Han Solo’s capability, and adding some character to the Falcon herself — but it underlines the fact that Star Wars keeps the viewer at a distance from the nuts and bolts of technology.

Call it “formulaic” if you must. I think formulae work because they speak to our nature. We pattern our lives in all sorts of ways — consciously and unconsciously. In the case of Star Trek, the writers found a way of dredging out of deep space that which is inherently human, and that’s never going to stop being cool.

I’ve been away from this blog long enough that WordPress has changed its interface dramatically, in ways that threaten and frighten my delicate sensibilities. Bear with me on this technical learning curve!

First of all, I have to give major credit to my readers. Nearabouts 3,900 hits in 2011! That may not seem like much to a laughing baby, but every one of you is precious to me. I seldom get to say that I have 3,900 of anything, except maybe legos. My favorite experience by far was when I fought the law and the law won over Boris the Burglar. The support I received after that incident was second only to the novelty of it. Thanks for a great year!

Joe Lansdale grabbed my attention when I read the anthology Steampunk, Jeff & Ann VanderMeer, ed. His story was entitled “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel,” which I found simultaneously horrifying and delightful. Time travel, robots, Morlocks, torture, mutilation, brooding immortals — need I say more? I had crossed his name before, but suddenly I had to know what else he had done. Turns out the man also wrote the original story for Bubba Ho-Tep (included in the following collection). If you haven’t seen that movie, cease reading and get thee to a television now!

Some of the stories in The Best of Joe Lansdale feel warmly familiar, like episodes of The Twilight Zone that took cocaine cut with ground-up glass. Other times he takes you completely off the rails into head-scratching territory.

Joe manages to toe the invisible / imaginary line between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” There’s no reason that some of these stories shouldn’t be taught in English classes, and indeed many of them deserve such treatment. In the same way that Stephen King’s work opens a lens to the culture of Maine, Joe drags a curtain open for the audience to take in a freakshow glimpse of the American South during a brutal historical period. In one sense, these stories serve as a loose biography – you can infer a lot about Joe after reading them. Even if that’s not your thing, it still means that Joe’s writing is infused with the sympathy and understanding of great literary narratives. His points of view stick with you. Even if they come from a different, less safe world than yours, you grow to experience the story on their level, and bring progressively less and less of yourself to the experience.

That’s what I truly take from Joe’s work — the ability to submerge in a unique personality, with none of my prejudices or erstwhile opinions infecting the words on the page. I trust Joe to lead me through the labyrinth, through Hell, and see me out the other side with a few deserved scars and kills to my name.

My thanks to Asher Ellis for the recommendation, with a sincere belief that I’ll be reviewing a collection of his works before long.

Thanks for a great 2011, folks, and here’s to an apocalyptic 2012! You can bet I’ll still post here long after Planet X has turned us all into zombies or at least melted the flesh from my beautiful face. The post-apocalypse will need someone to take care of its literature, and I am more than happy to fill that capacity.