Potato Weather

MONDAY MORNING

2012-02-27T08:45:00.000-06:00

PHILIP K DICKATHON 20: THE CRACK IN SPACE

2012-02-22T17:34:00.000-06:00

Regular of readers of Philip K Dick would not expect him to write a novel exploring social issues, but in this case that is what he seems to think he is doing. The result is a muddle of ideas that try to stay topical while medium level PKD weirdness circles around them.

The setting is the late 21st century, and overpopulation, combined with a shortage of jobs, has become the major problem facing the human race. The solution has been to warehouse those who request it in suspended animation with the promise of awakening them when social conditions change. This is also a racial issue. "Cols" are now the majority population, and also the least employable. "Caucs" maintain the systems of government while millions of Cols become "bibs," -- the name given to those warehoused sleepers. (I never quite figured out the "bib" allusion. Also in the book are "Jerries," the older generation that can still remember the way things used to be.)

It is a presidential election year, and the Republican Liberal Party candidate for the first time is a Col. Jim Briskin wants to be president and in his brilliant speeches is willing to say what he thinks the people, and the Col majority, want to hear. He promises to close the warehouses and find a way to resolve the bib situation. He proposes pursuing some outdated technology called planet wetting to create habitable colonies. He will also close down Thisbe Olt's pleasure satellite The Golden Door, an orbiting brothel with thousands of working women and a enormous clientele. Thisbe's operation has been legalized as a means of keeping the population down. (Question mark. Exlamation point. WTF) None of Briskin's ideas are really feasible.

Then there are the Jerry Scuttlers, devices that are intended to transport their owners anywhere they want to go. Unfortunately they have design flaws. One owner complains that his always delivers him to Portland, Oregon. A repairman, however, discovers that the machine has a rent in its fabric that delivers one to a verdant, apparently virgin land that could solve the immigration problem.

So PKD has his usual half dozen plots in play, but much centers on that flawed Jerry Scuttler and the fact that Briskin may be able to come through with his promise of closing the bib warehouses. But when the new land is discovered to be a version of Terra itself that has followed a different evolutionary path than our own planet, new racial problems arise with how to treat the inhabitants there. They are not homo sapiens but intellectually capable offspring of hominid strains removed from our history.

The Crack in Space has subplots that go nowhere and either resolve themselves almost as soon as they are introduced or need quick sentence summaries toward the end of the novel. Nothing about it addresses in any coherent way the social issues it raises. It is at its best when played as farce, with characters traveling the planet in their Jet Hoppers and scrambling to put together a winning presidential campaign, But it remains a muddle and, unusual for a PKD novel, manages to become somewhat dull. This despite that fact that one character is the unicephalic twin George Walt -- one head, two bodies, two personalities. He is the proprietor of the Golden Door and is briefly worshipped as a god by the inhabitants of the parallel universe opened by the defected Jerry Scuttler.

MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE Vol 7 by Hitoshi Iwaaki

2012-02-19T16:52:00.002-06:00

Another volume, another blood bath. This time it does not involve a high school. Humans are onto the parasyte infiltration of municipal government, and they plan a raid to determine just who is infected. For some reason they think it is a good idea to bring in a necrophiliac serial killer with a talent for spotting aliens to help. But you just can't trust those necrophiliac serial killers.

We also learn that not all parasytes are created equal. Some are tougher than others, especially those who look like a G.I. Joe. They can absorb bullets and spit them back at you.

In the concluding portions of this volume, at last love comes to Shinichi. And Migi, the parasyte inhabiting his right hand, has been sleeping more than usual but wakes up to work out a spectacular escape for the climax.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

2012-02-14T08:28:00.000-06:00

MONDAY MORNING

2012-02-13T08:57:00.000-06:00

THE HORROR, THE HORROR: TOM PICCIRILLI

2012-02-09T18:27:00.000-06:00

Tom Piccirilli with a cute dog

The less Tom Piccirilli encumbers his novels with plot, the better they are. At least that has been the case in his five early horror novels I have read: Hexes (1999); The Deceased (2000): Night Class (2002): A Choir of Ill Children (2004); and, Headstone City (2006). The novels are by no mean short of grotesque and often unpleasant incidents. But Piccirilli works by accumulation not by character arcs and interwoven themes. His theme is consistently that of a young man, in his late twenties or thirties, who must come to accept his role in society, wether it is the gangland of Brooklyn or a backwater town somewhere in the American South. But the novels are not traditional Bildungsromans. This is not in the world of David Copperfield or The Apprenticeship of Wilhem Meister. These are nightmares.

Demonic evil, ghosts, astral projections, some handy knowledge of witchcraft, and alternate realities are daily issues for Piccirilli's protagonists. In Headstone City, Johnny Danetello endures frequent visitations from the dead, ranging from the girl he could not save from an overdose to his mother to "the boy with the damaged head." Caleb Prentiss, an alcoholic upperclassman at a small, snowbound Midwestern university, wants to find out more about the girl murdered in his dorm room over winter break. He is often accompanied by his sister who committed suicide; and, when he receives the unasked-for blessing of the stigmata in both palms, he leaves bloody paths across the snowy campus. Thomas, the central character of A Choir of Ill Children has too many issues to go into here, but one involves the care of his brothers, triplets conjoined at the frontal lobe.

Piccirilli's locales are sharply observed locations that could exist nowhere but in his novels. In addition to the snowbound campus in Night Class and the swampy town of Kingdom Come in A Choir of Ill Children, Piccirilli delineates in Hexes the town of Summerfel -- Summerfell!-- a small town dominated by an asylum named Panecraft, a lighthouse undermined by tunnels containing some unspeakable horror, a local hangout called Krunch Burger, and a rich man's house that is more like a castle than a mansion. If you don't like things in Summerfel, you can always move the next town over to Gallows. Headstone City takes place in an imaginary neighborhood of an otherwise identifiable Brooklyn, a neighborhood where the decaying mansions of stars from the earliest days of silent film surround the enormous cemetery of the title. The neighborhood is still run by some goonish gangsters who have mostly moved their money into legit businesses but who still, guided by a misplaced enthusiasm for their once glorious past, enact the occasional bloody vendetta against one another,

Several internet customer reviews complain that these books make no sense, but I think those readers are looking for the wrong things. Like a coherent plot. Piccirilli is a lot of fun to read. There is always that central character who knows a bit more that those around him, whether it is more effective magical spells or just that so much of what is going on is bullshit. When Piccirilli brings more plotting into the mix, things tend to wrong. The Deceased turns into little more that a pretty good horror movie, with girls, who I assume have large breasts, running around an old house during a thunderstorm. The gangster story that runs through Headstone City is not as resolved or effective as the weirdness that underlies it.

But these books are just the kind of fun I hoped modern horror novels could offer. They are literate, amusing, at times really icky, and never slow down. I understand that Piccirilli's recent novels are more straightforward crime stories, so I hope he has worked out those plotting issues. On the off chance that anyone reading this might actually pick up a Piccirilli novel, I recommend starting with the best, A Choir of Ill Children. If nothing else, you will learn a really interesting new use of the word "vinegar."

You can read my individual reviews of Piccirilli novels at World's Without End

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL. 11, by Kazuo Umezu

2012-02-08T10:37:00.000-06:00

OK, I was wrong on this one. After Vol 10 I was saying the series had jumped the shark and was headed for an inevitable anti-climax. But I forgot one thing. It is Japanese.

Since this is the final volume, it would be easy to make these comments into Spoiler City. So I will just list a few stand out moments:

That arm is not connected to a body

1) Sixth graders confess their undying love for one another.
2) The school cafeteria man who will not die is finally done in by the severed arm and half the face of a character that I do no believe has made an appearance before this episode.
3) Sho's mom goes on national television to ask all the children of Japan to pray for the safe return of her son.
4) And only in Japan would you get a plot development that finds the first signs of hope for a new society in the plants that sprout from the corpses of the dead school kids scattered over the desert and around the campus.

Troy about the time of his role in The Drifting Classrom

Umezu's manga was originally serialized in the early 1970's. It is still the wildest ride of any of the manga series I have looked at. A film version was made in 1987, but I can find only snippets on Your Tube. It appears to take place at an international school, so half the dialog is in English and all the characters are turned into older teens. There are musical numbers. Troy Donahue plays one of the teachers. Did I just write that. Yes, Troy Donahue plays one of the teachers.

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: JACK WILLIAMSON

2012-02-07T16:17:00.002-06:00

(The science fiction site Worlds Without End is sponsoring a challenge for members to read one novel a month by a recipient of the Damon Knight Grand Master of Science Fiction Award. You can participate or read my and many other reviews at Worlds Without End)

Jack Williamson
1908 - 2006

Newspapermen and one gorgeous, redheaded, green-eyed newspaperwoman wait on the chilly tarmac of the Clarendon airport for the chartered plane returning the Lamarck Mondrick expedition from their two your stint in Nala-Shan. (Nala-shan actually exists. It's a mountain range in Northern China between Ninxgia and inner Mongolia's Alxa League. This could be the only trace of verifiable fact Williamson brings to his novel.) Along with the press are family members of the four returning explorers, including the elderly, stately Rowena Mondrick, blind since a panther ripped out her eyes in Nigeria some years before.

Mark Barbee is there, an old friend of the explorers and now an alcoholic reporter for the Star. He introduces himself to the beautiful readhead, April Bell, novice reporter for Clarendon's rival newspaper. She carries a small snakeskin bag that holds an adorable black kitten. Don't get too attached to the kitten.

The plane lands, the much aged and visibly frightened explorers descend the ramp. They carry a heavily locked green case. The enfeebled Mondrick begins a speech, promises world-shattering revelations, then dies of asthma or a heart attack or a combination of the two, Much consternation. April Bell vanishes, but Matt Barbee has already made a date for later that night. His nose for news leads him to a dumpster near the airport terminal where he finds the snakeskin bag containing the kitten. It's been strangled by a red ribbon and it's heart punctured by an ivory pin decorated with a running wolf. It must be that same nose for news that does not make Barbee consider canceling his date.

This is the set-up for Darker Than You Think. (Oh, in case you need more clues to coming events, Rowena Mondrick drapes herself in silver jewelry and her mastiff, wearing a silver-studded collar, goes beserk when he sees April Bell.)

Williamson's novel first appeared in John W. Cambell's Astounding in 1940 as a 40,000 word serial. After WWII, the market for science fiction changed. Pulps were losing out to radio and paperbacks, but the now grown-up kids who loved sf from its pulpy origins wanted to see the stories in book form. Lloyd Arthur Eschbach founded Fantasy Press in 1946 and brought out Williamson's The Legion of Space. Respectable sales prompted Llyod to ask Williams to double the length of Darker Than You Think, and its sales equaled those of the previous novel. It's been reprinted many times. The edition I read was a Dell 1979 paperback that reproduced the original drawings by Edd Cartier, whose work, according the book's blurb, adds an extra dimension of enjoyment. Well, maybe. Certainly it adds an extra dimension of camp. My favorite is the frontispiece that features a nude woman seated on the back of a sabre-tooth tiger. She has the perky but nipple-free breasts not uncommon to illustrations of the time.

April Bell is a witch, part of the Old Breed that Mondrick wants to eliminate from the earth. Barbee, it turns out, is a shapeshifter himself. I thought is was cheating to have them turn invisible when they took animal form, but it is necessary to make the plot work. Because Williamson wanted to write science fiction and not occult fantasy, he provides some anthropological background for this demon breed and some fanciful physics for why they can walk through walls. This theory is put forth at length several times in dialogue that bears no hint of realistic human speech.

Williamson lists this among his favorite books because it embodied much of what he learned about himself in psychoanalysis. He had been selling erractically to the pulps for years, but in 1936 he hit a wall. (He was 28.) He had been reading about psychiatry and wrote Ives Hendricks , the author of Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis about coming to Boston from New Mexico for treatment. Hendricks suggested the Menninger Clinic in Topeka and Karl Menniger agreed to see him on April 13. With enough money to live frugally in Topeka, even paying the five dollars an hour for treatment, Williamson stayed. He was under the treatment of Dr. Charles W. Tidd, until two years kater when money ran out and he and his doctor agreed there was nowhere further to go at the time.

In Darker Than You Think Topeka becomes Clarendon. Glennhaven is an enormous and very active psychiatric hospital where Barbee makes a brief stay. There is too much plot to keep him there for any length of time. What Williamson learned with Dr. Tidd at the Menninger was to let go of some of his inner conflicts and accept parts of himself he had attempted to keep rigidly separated. How this works out for Barbee in the novel some readers found shocking.

Darker Than You Think is enjoyable but dated and creaky. Here is a clue to how you might enjoy it more. Imagine it as a black and white movie from RKO studios in the 1940's, produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur. That is if you want to emphasize the moodier aspects. For a crisper image turn the project over to Robert Wise.

Cool French cover to
Darker Than You Think

(All the biographical information in this review comes from Williamson's memoirs, Wonder's Child.)

MONDAY MORNING

2012-02-06T06:30:00.000-06:00

MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE

2012-02-01T17:00:00.000-06:00

When you are in a business called the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, you do not expect one of your clients to get up and walk away. That's what happens early on in this installment, but the kids find him later, genuinely dead. In fact, he is dead twice over. He is carrying an older, deader transplanted kidney. This discovery leads the team to a very dodgy trade in organ harvesting from illegal immigrants. It also takes the to Iraq. Since this third volume is episodic unlike the single, book-length tale that made up Volume 2, the Delivery Team still has time to encounter a murder/suicide club operating in Tokyo.

A significant feature of this series is the Glossary and Notes at the end of every volume. The glossary mostly translates the kanji used for sound effects. I used one as a Potato Weather Posting here . But there are helpful notes that give some cultural background to the plots. The notes also explain various misconceptions the authors have about Western societies that make their way into the stories.

MONDAY MORNING

2012-01-30T06:39:00.000-06:00

PHILIP K. DICKATHON (19): THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH

2012-01-29T18:34:00.001-06:00

Robots make great workers

I never care for books that claim to be as pertinent today as the day the day they were written, or to contain a story that could be ripped from today's headlines. Copies of The Penultimate Truth(1964) do not make those claims, but as we watch the various "Occupy" movements take place, I couldn't help but think that PKD's novel described a society badly in need of an Occupy Earth movement.

As is so often the case with PKD novels, there has been an atomic war. I think he places this one in the 1980's, and he still imagines such a conflict would involve Western democracies and Soviet controlled countries. As bombs drop, much of the fighting is carried on by "leadies," robots manufactured to be soldiers. With spreading radiation, millions of earthlings are moved underground into what are unflatteringly known as Ant Tanks. Now safe from the radiation and destruction, the tankers' sole function is to manufacture an unending supply of leadies for the war effort.

Severeraldecades pass, the war goes on, and tankers receive nightly news reports of just how bad the situation continues to be. There is just one catch. A treaty ended the war years ago. As radiation hot zones continue to decrease, the ruling elite that has remained topside has decided that life without hundreds of millions of the common sort is not so bad. Let them stay in their ant tanks, producing leadies that go not into the war effort but become the worker bees for that 1% that now live in lavish mansions on thousand acre demesnes. The only real work done by humans is the effort to maintain the illusion that life topside is hell and that the tankers are best off where they are.

But the strains are beginning to show. Radiation has sterilized most of the human race, and the advertising men, government officials, and police agencies that rule the globe are paranoid, bored, and slipping into senility. Down below, tankers realize that certain things just don't add up. When the chief engineer of the Tom Mix Tank dies of pancreatic cancer, his tank colony is terrified that they will not be able to meet their leadie production quotas. The engineer is flash frozen and the president of the group is sent tunneling to the surface, despite all the dangers, in search of an artiforg pancreas that will save the day.

The Penultimate Truth is one of PKD's more tightly constructed and coherent narratives. There are plots and counterplots and mysteries; and the characters have coherent motivations. Perhaps readers will miss the wild ride of something like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch but coming after the grab bag of The Simulacra and the perverse incoherence of Lie's, Inc I found it a satisfying read.There is a lot of talk as characters explain the situation to one another, and tortuous internal monologues are not uncommon. But this keeps the novel to the 200 page sweet spot, and what action set pieces take place are well told. An assassination scene is one of PKD's most creepily effective episodes. You may want to toss any old portable TV sets you still have lying around after you read it.

One highlight of twisted thinking among the elite topsiders is that if the hoi polloi come streaming back to the surface, another war will be inevitable. Since when did commoners start wars? I think they are mistaking war for some serious ass kicking. If I remember my history correctly, wars are started by those very people who are currently running the PKD's future earth like a well-oiled but fatally flawed machine.

INTO THE SLIPSTREAM: BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE BY RYAN BOUDINOT

2012-01-27T16:21:00.001-06:00

(Science fiction author Bruce Sterling wrote an article in 1987 that defined "Sliptream" as those novels that incorporated elements of genre fiction into literary fiction. In other words, novels that at the time gave a sense of what it felt like to live in the late twentieth century, and could be even more descriptive of daily life now in the 21st. INTO THE SLIPSTREAM will take a look at some of these novels.)

Let's imagine that at some point during the 1980's a group known as the Kirkpatrick Academy scoured the country, maybe the world, for the brightest young minds they could find. They then took them to the Academy, which to the ouside world does not appear to exist, and set them to work on whatever projects they found most interesting, And what if their plan for saving the earth involved eliminating 95% of the polulation, the only schism in the group being whether to do it sooner than later.

That's the underlying story of Blueprints of the Afterlife, a novel that takes place well after the FUS --the Era of Fucked Up Shit -- when a largely de-poplulated earth, helped by some truly amazing technology, does not seem to be doing so badly. The scars are there. There has been a devastating war against the newmen, anthropoids, possibly from China, who fight ruthlessly and long. But now they are humanity;s servants. Global warming is still a problem, and retirees in Phoenix have to vacuum seal their homes and head north for the winter. Most cities are decimated, victims of the Melaspina glacier that leaves its home in Alaska and goes on a self-guided tour across North America destroying most major polulation centers. A innovative building project is turning Bainbridge Island off the coast of Seatlte into a carefully reconstructed New York City.

Boudinot's novel is told in many voices. Scattered through the novel are taped, pre-FUS interviews with Luke Piper, a young man who has lived through a middle-class childhood, a late hippie phase, become a dotcom millionaire, and happens to be the best friend of one of the architects of the FUS. Skinner is an aging war veteran who provides accounts of just how bloodthirsty the war against the newmans really was. Abbie slips into the darker side of the new society. The bionet is a technology that can cure everything from the common cold to paralysis, But DJ's use the bionet to highjack personalities, controlling their every move until they get tired of them and put them on autopilot programs that may be either destructive or simply boring.

Boudinot keeps a lot of balls in the air over 400 pqges, and I am not sure if all the story lines reach real conclusions or if he intends for them to, What he can do is keep you entertained with episodes that range fro outrageously funny, to excruciating, to downright creepy. Residents of New York Alki, the name of the project on Bainbridge island, find themselves slipping into the personalities of the dead New Yorkers; whose apartments they take over. (Creepy.) The war veteran Skinner, when he has finally had enough, contacts the bionet and orders "Combat Ready!" Immediately his old head is on a G. I Joe torso. (Funny)

Not the current cover

I've read that this novel fits into the "Slipstream" category of books that employ genre conventions but are not genre books. So despite plot elements involving marauding glaciers, dj's hacking into personalites, mass cloning, and the vacuum-sealing of Phoenix, this is not a science fiction novel. Right. Perhaps its a question of the publisher, in this case Grove Blackcat, and the cover style they choose. Blueprints has a classy blueprint cover and does not show panicked crowds fleeing the glacier Melaspina. Perhaps a mass market edition will have that latter cover.

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MONDAY MORNING

2012-01-23T07:33:00.000-06:00

GRAND MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: A. E. VAN VOGT

2012-01-22T17:00:00.000-06:00

(The sf website Worlds Without End is encouraging members to read and review a book by one of the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Masters each month for the year 2012. Participate or read other reviews here)

Count Alfred Korsybski

Science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt liked big ideas. In the 1950's he became head of fellow sf writer L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics Institute, the secular precursor to the Church of Scientology. When Hubbard's institute failed within a year, van Vogt and his wife formed their own institute and kept it going for the entire decade.

Earlier, the big idea that captivated van Vogt was the Gerneral Semantics program of the Polish count Alfred Korzybski, a program defined in the count's 800 page self - published book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.(1933). This was a grand system intended to make people think more clearly, reach better decisions, and create a better world. Much of General Semantics seems like common sense, but the insistence on its "science" is shaky and always prompted as many detractors as followers. Van Vogt was enthusiastically among the latter. Martin Gardner is among those who dismiss the enterprise as "pseudo-science," but there is a still an Institute of General Semantics in Chicago. Of course there is also an International Center of Theosophy, and London is home to the Swedenborg Foundation. Sorry to sound dismissive but I am.

True Believer van Vogt used Kozybski's ideas as the underlying philosophy of his breakthrough novel The World of Null A and two sequels, one of which has only been published in France. (Van Vogt, while not as popular as Jerry Lewis, is highly regarded in France.) The story originally appeared serialized in 1945 in Astounding Stories and was published, in hardback and to general acclaim, in 1948. Van Vogt revised the novel again and wrote a new introduction in 1980.

"Null A" is shorthand for non-Aristotelian, and in his 1980 introduction van Vogt lays out how integral Korsybki's ideas are to the novel. I will have to take his word for it. The novel reads like a dated sf adventure story involving an intergalactic plot to take over the Sol System. Our hero, Gilbert Gosseyn has lost his identity but is somehow central to the saving the earth. Clunky prose does nothing to help the storytelling. In his introduction, van Vogt makes a statement that is either poorly phrased or breathtaking in its hubris:

I cannot at the moment recall a novel written prior to Null-A that had a deeper meaning than that which showed on the surface.

A. E. van Vogt earned Grand Master status from the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1996, but his reputation has always had significant detractors. Damon Knight wrote a blistering evaluation of van Vogt in the 1950's that some say finished his career. Other writers, like Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick, write about how significant van Vogt was to the own, early immersion in science fiction. Perhaps today van Vogt is of "historical interest only," but I will not make so sweeping a judgment based on this one book. I am certain he earned his Grand Master status, but I am not tempted to delve deeper into his work.

MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE VOL 2 by Eiji Otsuka

2012-01-17T13:50:00.002-06:00

Times are tough for the enterprising young people of the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. They haven't had a client in weeks and the local government has cancelled the annual sweep of the forest for the bodies of suicides and murder victims. The KCDS has been reduced to advertising as a general disposal service.

Fortunately, the first call comes from an area prison, where, due to some sloppy handling, the guards have left the corpse of a recently hanged murderer in with the daily garbage. The corpse, of course, has a story to tell.

Volume One of the series was episodic, but this time out you get a book-length adventure that involves the families of the protagonists, a very shady funeral home, a little girl who can bring the dead back to life, and some over-the-top gore. A good time will be had by all.

MONDAY MORNING

2012-01-16T08:30:00.000-06:00

MANGA MADNESS: PARASYTE VOL 6 by HItoshi Iwaaki

2012-01-15T09:00:00.000-06:00

After an installment that consisted mostly of one long, cinematic fight sequence, Iwaaki gets back to the plot. In-fighting among the parasytes, plots against family members and humans in the know. Of any of the manga I have read or am currently reading, this series is the only one that has me genuinely hooked on a story, not just its weirdness or wildness.

PHILIP K DICKATHON 18: LIES, INC.

2012-01-13T13:47:00.001-06:00

Over the past year I have read I think 15 PKD novels in more or less chronological order. I have read some good ones, some bad ones, some sloppy ones, and a couple of brilliant ones. Lies, Inc, is the first I have read that pissed me off. A certain level of incoherency comes with the PKD territory, and keeping up with what he is thinking and typing furiously onto the page is part of the fun. But this time out, he creates an irritating mess.

Cool Cover from 1966

This novel had a chaotic publication history, and it's problems stem from editors' determination, early on with Dick's approval, to make it into a book. In 1963 or 1964, PKD wrote, along with about a dozen other novels, The Unteleported Man, intended for Fantastic Stories or some other Ace Publsihing outlet. (All this information comes from the afterward to the current edition of Lies, Inc., published by Vintage.) With the short novel already in hand, Donald Wolheim, publisher of Ace Books, received what he thought was a really cool cover painting and asked PKD to expand his novelette into book form so the cover might be used. PKD doubled the length of the novelette, but Wolheim, reportedly, was not pleased with Part Two. (If his reaction was indeed that mild, publishing, in the 1960's, remained a "gentleman's profession.) Part One appeared in 1966 as part of an Ace Double. In 1979, now working with Berkeley Publishing, PKD had the idea of issuing the complete novel, although what he found of Part Two was missing around a dozen pages of text. PKD wrote a new opening, filled in most but not all of the gaps, and decided that Part Two, rather than succeeding Part One, should appear about halfway into Chapter 8 and end somewhere in Chapter 15. The book, retitled Lies, Inc., winds up in another 25 pages. It was not published until 1983, sixteen months of PKD's death and melodramatically labeled "uncensored."

All of the above is more interesting than anything else about the book. I will not pretend to summarize the plot, but Part Two has the main character appearing on another planet under the false identity that had been assigned to a different character. He is immediately injected with LSD, and PKD wallows in a hyperbolic description of the LSD experience for almost fifty pages. Somebody, more dedicated than myself, might dig up a copy of the short Unteleported Man and see if it makes sense. But Lies, Inc., spins so seriously out of control that I cannot even recommend it for PKD Completists. It is only for PKD Masochists.

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 10 by Kazuo Umezy

2012-01-10T17:00:00.000-06:00

I am afraid this series jumped the shark some volumes back. This time round it's more clouds of toxic gas, more fights to the death between 10 year olds, more of what's becoming mundane for our long-suffering heros. There is one shocker after they reach Paradise, which turns out to be an old amusement park, but even it I had been predicting since the first volume.

I thought Volume 10 finished the story, but no, there is more. One more volume that is going to have to be pretty spectacular to not to be an anti-climax.

MONDAY MORNING

2012-01-09T07:52:00.000-06:00

MONDAY MORNING

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000-06:00

MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE (VOL 1) BY Eiji Otsuka

2011-12-28T20:00:00.000-06:00

What do you do if you are about to graduate from a small Buddhist college but do not come from a priestly family and therefore have no job opportunities open to you. If you have the proper skills, and a strong stomach, you might join The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. This group sees to it that corpses abandoned in garbage dumps or found in the woods or the trunks of cars make it home to where their remains truly belong. But special skills do come in handy. One is a computer hacker; one is a dowser able to find corpses not water; one channels a foul-mouthed alien through a hand puppet; another, who for some reason appears to be a little girl, is an embalmer; and, most helpful of all is Kuro Kuratsu who is able to speak to the recently deceased.

Eiji Otsuka's manga series promises to be ghoulish fun. One story involves a necrophiliac father, another a hair dresser determined to assemble the perfect woman. Most surprising is Eiji's ability to write funny dialogue, something you don't get a lot of in manga. There may be visual gags and outrageous situations in most series, but The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service at times has the verbal spark of good comic film writing. In one scene the group argues over whether they need to buy a train ticket for a corpse. Numata, the dowser, has the group constantly eating the same brand of instant noodles so he can collect the labels and enter a contest for a Prada windbreaker. Throughout, they banter and give one another a hard time like any group of twenty-year-olds, they just happen to be carrying around dead bodies.

THE PHILIP K DICKATHON (16): THE SIMULACRA

2011-12-28T17:00:00.000-06:00

The Simulacra is PKD's grand, panoramic novel. He sweeps the reader from the highest corridors of power in Washington, D.C., to the lush rain forests of the Pacific North West and the colony of mutants who inhabit them. We meet Nicole Thibodeaux, the First Lady of the United States and the most powerful woman in the world; Richard Kongrosian, a psycho-kinetic musician who performs without touching the keyboard; and Looney Luke, semi-legal dealer in jalopies, outdated spacecraft good enough for a one-way trip to Mars. There is intrigue, betrayal, deception, and the threat of war.

Wait a minute. PKD didn't write grand, panoramic novels. Not that all the above isn't true. In fact it suggests no more than a fraction of the goings-on inThe Simulacra. But it all goes on in the usual two hundred or so pages common to PKD's novels. This is his most chaotic book. Every chapter for the first third of the novel introduces two or more new characters. What connections there will ever be among them is difficult to imagine. But much of what happens focuses on pleasing Nicole, who spends much of her time auditioning new acts to perform at her functions, or planning yet another televised tour of the White House. (Only readers of a certain age will get this joke.)

PKD tossed a lot of stray ideas into this one. Most of the ideas or good, the situations very funny, but he does not manage to do much more than let them fizzle out towards the end. Readers may be either irritated or exhausted, but the wiser choice is to just go along for the ride.

As in most of the novels from this period, there is moment when a female character lets loose with either a kind of praise or criticism that PKD must have wished for or dreaded hearing from whoever was his wife at the time. Here is Nicole talking about Richard Kongrosian.

"Oh the hell with it," Nicole said. "I'm tired of his ailments. I'm tired of having him pamper himself with his hypochondriacal obsessions. I'm going to toss the entire power and majesty and authority of the state at him, tell him point blank that he has got to give up his imaginary diseases.

Ouch. But even though Kongrosian is a hypochondriac he still has the power to psycho-kinetically transport one of Nicole's gun-wielding agents to the White House laundry room when necessary. The author remains in control.

GLOSSARY (5)

2011-12-27T17:30:00.000-06:00

BAO BAKO BAKO -- sound of a distant helicopter

ZU ZURU -- sound of body dragging itself on the ground

PAN PAN -- brushing dirt off pants

PITA -- sound of fly landing on eye

BUBUN -- sound of flies

BUUUUN -- buzzing flies

GA -- footstep

PURAN -- sound of an arm falling off a stretcher

JI -- zipper starting to open

JIIIII -- zipper unzipping

BIKUN BIKUN -- body starting to twitch

GEBOBOBO -- vomiting blood

DO -- an organ hitting the floor

GAKO GAKO -- old car sounds

GIKU -- gulp sound effect

PORI PORI -- scratching head

SHIN -- sound of silence

GATA GATA KATA GATA -- headless body starting to shake

GOGOGOGOGO -- rushing water

Selected from the sound fx glossary of The Kurosogi Corpse Delivery Service (vol 1) by Eiji Otsuka

(English translations of Japanese manga usually leave the sound effects that are crucial to the image in the original kanji lettering. The above are transliterations of kanji words into Roman lettering)

MONDAY MORNING

2011-12-26T06:31:00.000-06:00

MONDAY MORNING

2011-12-20T07:00:00.000-06:00

MANGA MANIA: GENKAKU PICASSO by Usamaru Furuya

2011-12-15T17:17:00.003-06:00

The set up for the story involves a pun that only works in Japanese. When Hikari wrote his name on his shoes -- is this something Japanese teenagers do? -- he accidently wrote Hikaso. And since he draws all the time, all this schoolmates call him Picasso.

So that's not very interesting. But things pick up when Picasso and his almost girlfriend Chiaki have a helicopter fall on them. Chiaki dies. Picasso suffers only minor injuries. Several days later, Chiaki appears Tinkerbelle-like from the pocket of Picasso's school jacket. Surprise! Picasso is also dead, and his body will rot unless he uses his drawings to help others. First he spots a schoolmate with a dark aura, then he draws a mysterious picture, then he is physically sucked into the picture, then he figures out what is wrong, then he makes things right. In Vol. One he does this four times.

Finally, some one has created a manga that uses an absurd premise you might expect from a prime time, network series. It has good production values but it's boring.

THE HORROR! THE HORROR! -- RAMSEY CAMPBELL

2011-12-14T16:30:00.000-06:00

Ramsey Campbell's home page opens with a quote from the Oxford Companion to English Literature. It informs us that Campbell is "Britain's most respected living horror writer."

My copy of the OCEL is a fifth edition and has no entry for Campbell at all. If it did, that first statement might be followed by this bit of information: Charles Dee Mitchell has attempted to read five of Mr. Campbell's works and only succeeded in finishing three. And trust me, in the case of those I abandoned it was not because I was too terrified to turn another page.

Ramsey Campbell, Family Man

Ramsey Campbell may neither travel well nor date well. He has an American following but is a much bigger deal, obviously, in Great Britain. He is, after all, their most respected living horror writer. He has been publishing since the late 1950's, and his most recent novel came out just this year from one of the presses that do high-priced, short runs of fantasy, horror, and science fiction titles. The books I tried were early to mid career novels. The Doll That Ate His Mother (1976), The Face that Must Die (1979), The Nameless (1981), The Hungry Moon (1986), and The Influence (1988). Perhaps the past two decades have seen a remarkable transformation of his style and storytelling, but it is not as though the ones I read came un-recommended. The Face That Must Die was a somewhat fancy reprint with an introduction by Poppy C. Brite and a few really bad illustrations. The Influence won the British Fantasy Award and is on the Guardian's list of best sf and fantasy. The Hungry Moon, absolutely the worst of the lot, is the novel chosen by the Horror Writers' Association to represent Campbell's work.

So is it just me? Of course, if that turned out to be the case, I would be the last person to admit it. I found the books mildly entertaining to unreadable. The thought that they might be genuinely frightening or even unnerving never crossed my mind.

To start with the ones I didn't finish. The Hungry Moon is an overlong tale of Druid magic resurrected in the modern day by a religious nut. Campbell introduces us to too many of the residents of Moonwell, a village in Northern England. We learn what supposedly makes each one interesting and that takes a while. Then the event happens and we see how each of them react. Since I started skimming and finally quit the book, I don't know the full panoply of horrible things that go on. But in the first chapter you learn that the village of Moonwell not only no longer exists but has been removed from maps, memories, and the telephone directory. The Influence concerns an evil great aunt out to possess the soul of her grandniece. If it had been a movie on TV and I could fast forward the commercials I would have watched it. But I couldn't read it.

Random Spooky Image

The other three novels are about psychopaths, two of them with some black magic references. The best of them is The Face that Must Die. The anti-hero, a Mr.Horridge, is a deranged young man obsessed with the evils of homosexuality. Great Britain decriminalized homosexuality in 1967, and decade later, Horridge sees the twisted results of the legislation everywhere he turns. He and his hammer will do what they can to remedy this situation. When the book first came out, portions were excised supposedly because they were too shocking. The complete text did not come out until 1982. Now the book just seems like fun. Horridge is crazy, and the block of flats on which he focuses his rage is peopled by characters only one of whom is gay and none whom have any idea what's coming. Like some of those old British stage thrillers, this is a shocker that now plays as black comedy.

Campbell lives in Liverpool, and what he does best it create the down-in-the heel atmosphere and characters of that dismal, at least in his rendering, Northern England city. Everything is rundown, the weather is miserable, the people often not very bright. I especially liked the paranoid, pot-smoking hippie and the scatterbrained artist who lets a psychopath into her flat thinking he is the plumber.

So big deal, Mr. Campbell is not my cup of tea. If anyone, however, finishes The Influence, I am curious to know if anything even vaguely unpredictable happens by the time it is over.

Read my reviews of individual Ramsey Campbell novels on Worlds Without End

PHILIP K DICKATHON (16): CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON

2011-12-12T16:12:00.000-06:00

PKD spent a great deal of time in and out of psychiatrists' offices. He had bouts of agoraphobia from the time he was a teenager and went through several spells of clinical depression. He knew the psychiatric lingo and at times used it as rigorously in his personal relationships as he did in his books.

Alpha III M2 is one of the purest creations of his experiences with mental health professionals. Alpha III M2 is a small moon in the Alpha Centauri system used by Earth as a global mental facility. The moon was one giant hospital treating all known forms of mental derangement. The fact that these break down to only a half dozen or so reflects the mid-sixties when the novel was written. The DSM had not yet expanded to include everything from psychosis to social anxiety disorder (shyness.) A minor war with the Alphanes has left Alpha III M2 to its on devices for over twenty years. Earth is finally sending ships to check up on how things are going.

Meanwhile back on earth, Chuck Rittersdorf has been tossed out by his wife, a successful marriage counselor, and now lives in a rundown conapt that sounds a little bit like the first apartment I had in college. He survives on the small salary he makes programming simulacra for CIA propaganda missions. His best new friend is a Ganymedean slime mold named Lord Running Clam.

One reason I enjoy writing about PKD is that I can write Paragraph Two (above), follow it by Paragraph Three (above), and still be writing about the same novel. PKD said later in his career that he realized his writing technique involved starting multiple plots and then seeing how he could bring them together. I think this is usually referred to as "making it up as you go along." Chuck contemplates murdering his wife. .Bunny Hentzman, one of PKD's frequent world-renowned entertainers that exercise a bizarre control over Earth's culture, hires Chuck at a terrific salary, but counter-intelligence operations within the CIA and the Hentzman organization make Chuck a hunted man. As in a French farce of a Preston Sturges comedy, everyone ends in the same place, Alpha II M2, either shooting it out with laser pistols or making desperate diplomatic moves to keep Earth and Alpha out of a war and the main characters out of prison.

A strangely touching and revealing moment comes when Chuck, having agreed to another battery of psychological testing, has these thoughts which sound straight from the heart of PKD:

"Suppose the tests show no drift, no neurosis, no latent psychosis, no character deformation, no psychopathic tendencies, in other words, nothing. What do I do then?" ... he had an inkling that that was exactly what the tests would show. He did not belong in any of the settlements here on Alpha III M2; here he was a loner, an outcast, accompanied by no one even remotely resembling him."

Maybe not exactly a cri de coeur, but it seems one of the most personal statements PKD has made in his work to this time.

But then again, his is also improving his knack for toss away nuttiness. Here's the opening to Chapter 8:

When, late that night, Chuck Rittersdorf wearily returned to his rundown conapt in Marin County, California, he was stopped in the hall by the yellow Ganymedean slime mold. This, at three a.m. It was too much.

MONDAY MORNING

2011-12-12T07:08:00.000-06:00

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL. 9 by Kazuo Umezu

2011-12-07T17:08:00.001-06:00

So what is the highlight of Vol 9?

A grown man slugging a ten-year-old girl in the face? No, that happens in just about every volume.

A revolt among one faction of the school that leads to dividing the buildings into enemy territories. No, that's been coming a long time.

The attack of the giant, flesh-eating starfish. Sorry, Umezo-san, you will have to try harder than that.

Sho's sudden attack of appendicitis? Really, after the bubonic plague outbreak some issues back, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

The decision to operate on Sho using only an exacto knife and a pair of scissors? Now we're getting somewhere. Combine that with Sho's mother's mystic communication through the voice of the crippled girl who for some reason is suddenly near death, and you have one hell of an issue.

I can't believe there is only one volume more to go.

BOOK REVIEW: NOISE, by Darin Bradley

2011-12-06T17:01:00.001-06:00

Without realizing it, Hiram and Levi had been in training for the Collapse most of their lives. They learned lessons in shop class, Boy Scouts, Renaissance Fairs, and all night sessions of Dungeons and Dragons. The began to receive instruction and train in earnest after television went all digital. On the unmonitored analog channels, 'Casters began sending out coded messages buried in the static, saying what to expect and how to prepare. Other messages were hidden in the wild style graffiti covering the walls of their college town somewhere in North Texas. When the Collapse occurred, Hiram and Levi would be among the prepared. The 'Casts had helped them assemble The Book, a sort of army training manuel for the survival of your Group. Following instructions Hiram and Levi already have established their Place in the country and stocked it with Salvage, i.e. stolen stuff. They have planned an escape route.

I was reading Noise on Black Friday. I took a break after about fifty pages, turned on the computer to check email, and saw first thing the videos of ambulances driving the fallen away from Best Buys in Colorado. Then I read the story of the woman at the California Wall Mart who pepper sprayed her fellow shoppers to protect her xbox console. And all morning I had thought I was reading a novel.

What Hiram and Levi have been learning, what they have assembled in The Book, are lessons in ruthlessness. They will not be victims. They will take advantage of chaos. They will regard all those outside their Group as enemies, and they will neutralize them when necessary. They neutralize some unsuspecting National Guardsmen who have been called in to discourage the turmoil breaking out in malls and on the campus. They steal the NG's Humvee with its 50 caliber machine gun. It comes in handy when dealing with disgruntled suburban males who don't like the look of what's going on. Hiram and Levi pick up some followers before their escape from the city, but this crowd, only partially trained in the disciplines of the 'Casts, prove to be a mixed blessing. When one thirteen year old is caught trying to escape -- he wants to go home to his parents across town -- he is tied to a porch railing, judged, and neutralized. The Group has done the right thing. The kid knew too much.

Noise is an unsettling read. It follows its relentless logic for just 200 pages and gets the survivors of Hiram and Levi's group to their Place of safety. I am one of those movie watchers who always wonder why characters hit guards and bad guys over the head instead of killing, I mean, neutralizing them, but I also know there is always payback time. Much of what is in The Book makes an awful sort of sense, given the situation. But nobody's long-term prospects look good.

Get the message?

PHILIP K. DICKATHON (15): THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH

2011-12-05T15:33:00.000-06:00

This is how bad things have gotten. Earth is over-heated and over-crowded. If you go outside during the day you must wear a portable cooling pack and stay under anti-thermal protective shades until you can grab a passing jet taxi or "thermosealed, interbuilding commute car." The U.N. has a forced emigration policy designed to provide colonists to Mars and a few other locations. But everyone knows that life off Earth will be even more miserable than what they face here. The colonists serve no real purpose since agriculture is difficult with frozen methane storms and pesky alien creatures that may eat either your struggling crops or yourself. When draft notices arrive, anyone who can afford one hires a psychiatrist in a box. Its purpose is to keep your mind so addled you will never pass the psych examine when the U.N. tries to ship you off to the boonies.

Barney Mayerson's shrink is Dr. Smile, and he is supposed to be one of the best. But Barney should be able to beat his draft notice in any case. He is the New York Pre-Fash consultant for Perky Pat Enterprises. This means he uses his precognitive abilities to judge whether products presented as possible new additions to Perky Pat's layout will be a success. PP is a doll with a dreamy life and dreamy boyfriend --let's face it, they're Barbie and Ken. Colonists in their Martian hovels spend hours playing with Perky Pat, aided by the illegal drug, Can-D. (The drug is manufactured on Venus by Perky Pat Enterprises.) A chaw of Can-D gives participants up to an hour or so of complete identification with PP and her world.

Life for Barney, his new girlfriend/assistant Betty, and their boss Leo Bolero is good until word comes that renegade industrialist Palmer Eldritch has crash landed on Pluto after a decade spent outside the solar system. Rumor has it that that he has brought back with him a new drug, Chew-Z. (PKD was never one to shy away from puns.) Chew-Z is better than Can-D. It requires no layouts but instead puts the user into a completely realized fantasy world. And Eldritch has won U.N approval, so it is legal. Perky Pat Enterprises will be destroyed.

This might be a good time to mention that The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is PKD's first overtly religious novel. It is one of seven novels written during the amphetamine-fueled years of 1963/64. There is some question as to when PKD first took LSD, but it is difficult not to imagine Can-D and Chew-Z as versions of marijuana and acid. Can-D is a party drug. Chew-Z promises to reveal new levels of reality. It is part of a spiritual quest, but it could also be a trap. There comes a Voltairian moment when Barney decides to chuck everything and just tend his own scraggly Martian garden. That doesn't last for long. Barney's quest will bring him into contact with the world of Chew-Z, Palmer Eldritch himself, and whatever exists beyond Palmer Eldritch.

This is the book that 30 years ago sold me on Philip K. Dick. I had seen Blade Runner and read, since it was supposed to be PKD's best novel, The Man in the High Castle. I liked it OK, but then I happened to pick up Palmer Eldritch. The screwball pacing, deadpan humor, and imaginative monsters were the perfect cover for the serious thought that lurked in the background. Even though I was hooked -- an appropriate term when discussing PKD -- I read him only sporadically until this past year. Now reading all his SF in more or less chronological order is at times a pleasure, a chore, and even saddening. It's my own Chew-Z trip. And I am just now getting to the good stuff.

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MONDAY MORNING

2011-12-04T12:06:00.000-06:00

NARROW YOUR SEARCH (1)

2011-12-04T06:05:00.001-06:00

Did you mean Jordan River?

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MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE VOL 5 by Hitoshi Iwaaki

2011-11-29T06:34:00.001-06:00

Shinichi's problems continue in a series that shows signs of slowing down. The best part of Vol V is an extended chase and fight sequence with five aliens inhabiting a single body. The storytelling is cinematic, with the characters' parasitic components allowing them to swing through trees and grab hold of speeding trucks.

Satomi, Shinichi's supposed girlfriend, must be trying for the "most-long-suffering-girlfriend-in Japan" award. If I were her I would be more concerned with the dead bodies that turn up in his vicinity.

An interesting linguistic note: When characters are startled they may say either "eep" or "eek." I wonder if there is some subtle difference in Japanese.

MONDAY MORNING

2011-11-28T04:09:00.000-06:00

OF ANNA KARENINA, HYDROCODONE, AND ME

2011-11-23T16:00:00.000-06:00

Late at night on November 7, I fell and badly sprained my ankle. It hurt like hell.

By the afternoon of November 8 I was periodically soaking it in a bucket of ice water and taking the hydrocodone my doctor had prescribed.

Sitting with my foot elevated, only mildly bothered by the pain, and feeling generally pretty good, I decided to read Anna Karenina. It was an excellent choice. The hydrocodone lasted only four days and it took me over a week to read the book, but I enjoyed every moment of it.

For the past couple of years I have been reading a lot of science fiction and crime. I've enjoyed most of what I've read. I've been genuinely impressed by much of it, but you know, just a few pages into Tolstoy's novel I remembered it is hard to beat masterpieces of nineteenth literature when it comes to storytelling and characters. Especially the characters.

Characters in science fiction are in service to the author's idea. (I read a lot of Philip K. Dick.) And when most science fiction writers think they a developing fully rounded characters they a just scratching the surface. It could be that since those characters have to act out their stories in imaginary worlds, their interactions with those worlds cannot be as complexly realized as the actions of characters in realistic fiction. Crime novels satisfy my innate, pessimistic worldview, and you get to know some really horrible people, but I don't care what happens to these people. I am only curious to see whether or not they will get their comeuppance, and if the novel is good, I am satisfied either way.

But in Anna Karenina I remembered what it was like to live with characters. When Kitty's pregnancy stretched past nine months, I feared the worst. When Anna was snubbed at the opera, I thought she should have seen it coming. When Levin went out to mow with the farmers, I hoped he wouldn't make a total ass of himself.

Now I have my eye on The Red and the Black. I've already read War and Peace and I think it would take more than a sprained ankle along with stronger drugs to get me settled down forThe Brothers Karamazov. I am also reading a 1970's novel by Ramsey Campbell called The Doll that Ate His Mother. The life of the mind goes on.

THE HORROR! THE HORROR! (1): POPPY Z. BRITE

2011-11-22T16:30:00.000-06:00

This is not going to be a easy to write as I thought. I had my first line all planned out and can still use it.

"Of course her real name is not Poppy Z. Brite. It's a pseudonym used by Melissa Ann Brite, born May 25, 1967 in New Orleans, Louisiana."

I got that much by glancing at Brite's Wikipedia entry. But further down the page I picked up this bit of information: "Brite is a transgender man, born biologically female. He has written and talked much about his gender dysphoria/gender identity issues.^[3] He self-identifies with gay males, and as of August 2010, has begun the process of gender reassignment. "

That I didn't know, but it goes some ways towards explaining why almost all of Brite's male characters, whether they are vampires, musicians, artists, drug dealers, or serial killers tend to be gay men.

An early publicity photo.
You don't want to know what she's thinking.

When I decided to read some horror fiction, I thought I would start with Brite because I had heard the novels were good, moody, sexy, and very bloody. She, as I thought at the time, represented the new generation of horror writers, steeping the novels in a gothic punk atmosphere the no other writer at the time -- the early 1990's -- had explored. Although she wrote stand alone novels, some characters and settings reappeared, creating a world of the supernatural and the grotesque that alternated between Missing Mile, North Carolina and New Orleans. (I love that name, Missing Mile.)

Brite's horror publishing career lasted only half a decade and produced three novels and two volumes of short stories. His first novel, Lost Souls, he began while still a teenager. When his last horror novel, Exquisite Corpse came out in 1996, he was 29. Brite then turned to writing comic novels centered around the New Orleans restaurant scene. For the past several years, he as been on an official hiatus from writing at all. But I think with Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Exquisite Corpse Brite has left a significant legacy in the horror genre. (I have not read the short stories.)

Lost Souls is a lushly over-written, almost plotless tale of vampires traveling the country in what must be a very smelly van given their sloppy feeding habits. Their handsome leader, Zillah, keeps things somewhat under control with his more party-minded friends Molochai and Twig. They meet up with a confused, not yet out of the vampire closet fifteen-year old named Nothing. Nothing and Zillah almost instantly hit the sack,. In a scene that involves killing his best friend, Nothing learns he is a vampire. Later he learns that Zillah, due to a one night stand in New Orleans many years ago, is his father, a fact that does not put a crimp in the sexual activity. They hang out in Missing Mile, NC, which is a much hipper place than it sounds. They seduce some people, they kill some people, they meet up with an old friend from New Orleans and relocate. There they get involved with some other kinky types -- there's no point in going any further with this. Brite's enthusiastic prose keeps things happening if not exactly moving in any particular direction. It's fun, although long.

Poppy Z. Brite is now Billy Martin

Drawing Blood returns to Missing Mile where the sole survivor of a family massacre returns twenty years later to confront family ghosts. He meets up with a computer hacker on the run from the feds and guess what, they spend almost all their time in bed -- or on the floor or in the shower. They are at the age when erections are so hard they ache. If the traditional horror audience of 16 to 25 year old males actually read this book, things have changed. Or maybe that demographic only applies to horror movies and not horror fiction. Drawing Blood is a haunted house story of sorts, with lots of rock and roll, gay sex, and mushroom ingestion. It is also a romance with a happy romance ending that I personally thought was out of place, but I suspect Brite, or at least his publishers, know their audience.

And what to make of Exquisite Corpse? Brite says his original publishers turned it down because it was too extreme. They would have had a point. The descriptions of necrophilia, torture, and cannibalism are like nothing in the previous novels. The book has at least a couple of images that unfortunately will most likely always be with me. But her publishers might also rightly have considered this novel something of a mess. HIV and AIDS are prominent elements in the story, and perhaps the serial killers are meant to represent the death sentence the disease was considered at the time. This is Brite's best writing. The grotesque sex is like the Marquis de Sade minus all the frou-frou. or Georges Baitaille without the pretension. What ever was intended, Exquisite Corpse might best be considered grand guignol fun. It is also a book I would never recommend to anybody I know, fearing recriminations.

Brite's three novels are quickly becoming period pieces, and you have to find them squeezed onto the shelves surrounded by all the paranormal romance and zombie crap that dominates the field. I like to imagine some unsuspecting Laura K. Hamilton fan will pick up Exquisite Corpse and live to regret it.

Read my reviews of individual Poppy Z. Brite novels on Worlds Without End

MONDAY MORNING

2011-11-21T07:35:00.000-06:00

BOOK REIVEW:SINEATER by Elizabeth Massie

2011-11-20T20:00:00.000-06:00

I picked this up because it was on the Horror Writers' Association list of horror must-reads. I have always been a pro-horror film voice, but was never attracted to reading horror novels. Movies are over in 90 minutes. Novels takes hours and hours. And I also had the not-uncommon prejudice against the genre, or at least against anything written much later than the turn of the 20th century.

But I liked Sineater. I guess it's a horror novel, although I wondered if Massie's publisher didn't promote it as a genre book so it would not get lost in mid-list literary fiction. It's really a pretty good coming-of-age story set in a grotesque situation. If there is such a thing as the Hillbilly Anti-Defamation League, I am sure this book is on its radar. One lesson I took away from it was to fill up the car with gas before driving through Virginia and don't make any stops. These people are crazy.

Sineaters, a tradition that made it to the states from Scotland and Wales, are outsiders, shunned by the community but necessary to its functioning. They appear at wakes and eat a light meal prepared for them by the grieving family and placed on the corpse of the recently deceased loved one. The meal is the sins of the one who has passed on, and by consuming it the sineater assures their soul will go to heaven. No one must ever look on his face.

Avery Barker is an unusual sineater. He is married to the woman he loved before he took up his profession, and although even she must never look on his face, that have managed to have three children. Joel Avery, the youngest son, is the central character, the first Avery allowed to attend school. His only friend was the son of the liberal Methodist minister who has recently moved his family to a parish outside Washington, D.C. Joel's potential new friend is a very different sort of person. Burke Campbell is a skinny, angry redhead sent to live with his religious nut aunt after her daughter has gone missing. Burke's friendly overtures to Joel involve shooting him the finger every time he sees him in the halls at school.

Sineeater is not the gorefest I assumed contemporary horror novels to be. The story is long and leisurely Southern Gothic with lots of character development and one moment so repulsive that I made that pledge about never getting out the car in Virginia.

(Below is a sineater currently plying his/her(?) trade in the Baltic states.)

JONATHAN SWIFT ADDRESSES THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT, THE TEA PARTY, THE CURRENT FIELD OF GOP PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFULS, AND OTHER TOPICS RELEVANT TO TODAY

2011-11-15T14:46:00.001-06:00

... their next principle was that man brings with him into the world a peculiar portion or grain of wind... This quintessence is of a catholic use upon all emergencies of life, is improveable into all arts and sciences, and may be wonderfully refined as well as enlarged by certain methods in education. This, when blown up to to its perfection, ought not to be covetously hoarded up, stifled, or hid under a bushel, but freely communicated to mankind. Upon these reasons and others of equal weight, [they] affirm the gift of BELCHING to be the noblest act of a rational creature. To cultivate which art and render it more serviceable to mankind, they made use of several methods. At certain seasons of the year, your might behold them, ... in several hundreds linked together in a circular chain, with every man a pair of bellows applied to another man's breech, by which they blew each other up to the shape and size of a tun;.... When by these and the like performances they were grown sufficiently replete, they would immediately depart and disembogue for the public good a plentiful share of their acquirements into their disciples' chaps. For we must here observe that all learning was esteemed among them to be composed of the same principle. Because first, it is generally affirmed, or confessed, that learning puffeth men up; and, secondly, they proved it by the following syllogism. Words are but wind, and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind...wherein they had acquired a wonderful eloquence, and of incredible variety. But the great characteristic by which their chief sages were distinguished, was a certain position of countenance, which gave undoubted intelligence to what degree or proportion the spirit agitated the inward mass. For after certain gripings, the wind and vapours issuing forth, having first by their turbulence and convulsions within caused an earthquake in man's little world, bloated the cheeks, and gave the eyes a terrible kind of relievo. At which juncture, all their belches were received for sacred, the sourer the better, and swallowed with infinite consolation by their meagre devotees.

MANGA MANIA: MW by Osamu Tezuka

2011-11-15T14:29:00.001-06:00

This is by the creator of Astro Boy?

I read that later in life, Tezuka wanted to do something with a more adult theme than the work he was best known for. "More adult" in this case does not mean more emotionally or morally complex. It is simply outrageous, blissfully disdainful of credibility, and full of sex -- hetero-, homo-, and bestial. It is also over 500 pages long, but I suppose all those manga that come in installments are this long or longer. Still it is an intimidating tome.

Michio Yuki is a ten-year-old kidnap victim held prisoner in a cave on a Japanese island. He and his teenage captor make love that one night together. ("You're as pretty as a girl," the older boy keeps saying.) The next morning, everyone on the island is dead, due to the leak of a poison gas, the titular MW, stored there by Country X. (Now who could that be?) Yuki and his captor/boyfriend have escaped because of the altitude of their cave hideout. But tiny Yuki. it turns out, is short enough to inhale enough of the residual gas to lose any sense of morality.

Jump twenty or so years forward. Yuki is a strikingly handsome assistant bank manager by day and notoriously violent kidnapper on his off hours. His childhood captor, sorry I forget his original name and don't have the book in front of me, has become a Catholic priest named Father Garais. Yuki, knowing that what is said in the confessional cannot be repeated, confesses on a regular basis to Father Garais, They also have frequent sexual liaisons. Father Garais suffers spiritually but never turns down a roll in the hay with the still quite fetching Yuki. Yuki can also pose as a woman -- his family has a history of playing female roles in the Kabuki theater -- and seduces and murders his way to the top of the banking and political machine of modern Tokyo. His plan all along is to discover where the MW gas has been relocated and use it to destroy all life on earth. He is slowing dying from the low level MW contact he had years before, and wants to take the whole world with him. This kid wrote the book on nihilism.

MW is an entertaining farrago of sex and violence. Having it all in one, chunky volume made me feel like I was reading the worst, or maybe the best, Harold Robbins novel ever written.

MANGA MANIA: MPD PSYCHO VOL 1 by Eiji Otsuka and Sho-u Tajima

2011-11-12T14:11:00.001-06:00

Nutty and outrageous. The hero is a police detective with multiple personality disorder who is convicted of a string a killings while he was not himself, or rather while he was one of his more violent selves. After what seemed like a surprisingly short prison term, he is hired by a policewoman friend to set up a detective agency specializing in profiling killers. In this first installment the bad guy is a world-renowned architect with a passion for kidnapping beautiful women and planting flowers in their brains while they are still alive. Given the roller coaster pacing of the series it would be rude to question exactly how this is done.

Takishi Miike, that Japanese movie-making machine, did at least two TV episodes based loosely on this series. Reviews of the DVD's complain that the gore sequences have been pixilated out of the prints, I suppose in deference to the TV censors. But since one of the episodes involves a killer who cuts the fetuses from pregnant women, I surprised that is was on TV to begin with. I like to imagine a Japanese mom calling out, "Hurry kids. Dinner is ready and MPD Psycho is about to start!"

MONDAY MORNING

2011-11-12T13:01:00.000-06:00

PHILIP K DICKATHON (14) THE GAME PLAYERS OF TITAN

2011-11-12T12:52:00.001-06:00

"Anyhow, Pete Garden, you were psychotic and drunk and on amphetamines and hallucinating, but basically you perceived the reality that confronts us..."

PKD must have dreamed that any one of his five wives or several girlfriends would one day sit across the breakfast table and speak those words to him. I don't know that he was ever psychotic, that term was tossed around differently in the 1960's than it would be today. But drunk and on amphetamines,? Yes. Hallucinating? During the time he was writing this novel PKD walked daily from his home to his "writing shack" about a mile down the road. In the blue, Northern California sky, he saw a gigantic malevolent face. "It was immense, it filled like a quarter of the sky. It had empty slots for eyes -- it was metal and cruel and, worst of all, it was God." An Episcopal priest PKD consulted suggested it was a vision of Satan. Whatever the case, it didn't go away for days. So, I think that is another "yes" for hallucinating.

In Game Players of Titan, earth has been dealt a double blow. As per usual with Dick, there has been an atomic war, this one started by the Red Chinese using a new weapon developed in East Germany. (Nice period details, there.) The radiation released by the new weapon sterilizes the populations it is directed against, but wind currents being what they are, the Red Chinese have inadvertently almost completely sterilized the human race. To add insult to injury, beings from Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, have invaded and conquered earth. They are the Vugs, oversized amoebas that sound a bit like Al Capp's Shmoo. Humans find them irritating and keep Vug sticks on hand for pushing them out of rooms. But the Vugs are, in their way, benevolent landlords. Longevity drugs allow humans to live into their hundreds while never looking much over 30 or 40 years of age. With earth's population in the low millions, lucky humans are Bindmen, property owners whose properties include towns, cities, and vast swathes of the depopulated planet. If you are a Bindman you must also play the Titans' game.

The Titans' game seems like nothing more than a rudimentary board game, a simplified form of Monopoly but with all your landholdings at stake. Peter Garden's loss of Berkeley in the first chapter of the book sets in motion events that will involve murder, interplanetary travel, telekinesis, ESP, and large quantities of alcohol and amphetamines.

Along with Berkeley, Garden loses his current wife, but acquires a new one that same night. Another purpose of the game is to keep reshuffling human couples in hopes of finding those who can still "get lucky," the current term for becoming pregnant. Garden's spectacular bender that takes up much of the book occurs when he discovers that with his new wife he has gotten lucky for the first time and on their first night. He ingests every pill in the house and starts hitting the bars. What he discovers are conspiracies within conspiracies, Vug infiltration of his closest friends, and a offer to play the ultimate game to decide the fate of the earth.

Game Players of Titan is PKD really hitting his stride. It is a masterpiece of paranoia, where no one can be trusted to be who they claim to be, where rules are made to be broken, and the protagonist must bluff his way through a game that he knows is a deadly sham. And how do you go about bluffing if half the people in the room can read your mind? The fact that PKD works out a method implies that he had spent for too much energy in his personal life dealing with just barely more earthbound versions of these same issues. And remember that every morning, on his walk to his typewriter, he must endure the glaring, empty eyes of a malevolent god.

GLOSSARY 4

2011-11-09T17:27:00.000-06:00

ambages, circuitous, roundabout ways

atrementous, black as ink

bait, to stop for rest and refreshment

boutade, a sudden motion, like a kick from a horse's hind legs

butter weight, good measure, 18 or more ounces to the pound

cockle, the weed corn cockle, whose seeds had to be sifted out of the seed corn; the task gave rise to several proverbs

cully, a simpleton, gull

ends, shoemakers' threads pointed with bristles

exploded, clapped or hissed off the stage

garnish, money extracted from a gaoler for better treatment, particularly allowing light manacles, or freedom of movement within the prison

gossips, the women friends invited to be present at a birth

hic multa desiderantur, a great deal is missing here

horsed for discipline, placed piggy-back to be flogged on the posteriors by a school master

jordan. chamber-pot

kennel, the open drain or gutter in a street, usually in the middle

mopus, a stupid or moping person

pinner, coif (q.v.) with two long hanging strips pinned on each side, worn by ladies of rank

pure bite, completely successful hoax

put, (country) bumpkin, 'buffer'

rubs, disagreeable experiences

sack-posset, a drink made of hot curdled milk, white wine, and perhaps spices

smock, fornicate

stews, brothels

tentiginous humour, an inclination to lust (from the L tentigo, an erection)

truckling, subservient, obsequious

vapours, hysterics

Selected from the glossary to

Jonathan Swift. Major Works,

ed. by Angus Ross and David Woolery

Oxford University Press

MONDAY MORNING

2011-11-07T07:01:00.000-06:00

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 8 by Kazua Umezu

2011-11-04T17:04:00.000-05:00

By the 8th volume it should come as no surprise that these kids just can't get a break. The maniacal cafeteria worker is back and taking charge. He sends Sho and his friends into the desert to dig a well -- yeah, sure. He abandons them in the pit. But they find a crack in the wall that leads them into the ruins of the Tokyo subway system. There they learn, through a convenient, ritual showing of an educational film for the mutant insect creatures who populate the underground, that Japan in the the late 20th century -- Umezu wrote these stories in the 1970's -- had so despoiled the land that women began giving birth to mutant babies, hence the insect creatures, and massive earthquakes buried their civilization. This is another lesson in eco-awareness from the country that gave us Godzilla Vs. the Smog Monster.

In a typical twist for Umezu, at the end of the installment the enormous spring of fresh water the kids discovers turns into an active volcano. Damn! Only two more installments to wind this thing up.

IN WHICH I CONFRONT FEAR

2011-10-31T17:40:00.000-05:00

Depending upon which survey you read, somewhere between 30% and 50% of Americans believe in ghosts.

That number seems high to me, and I would like to know how each survey phrased the question. If some one hated to be rude to the lingering dead and deny their existence entirely, did they waffle and say, "Well, maybe," and then get classified with the yea sayers? Were they merely ghost agnostics, wanting to leave at least a tiny rent in the veil that separates the living from the dead? After all, how can you really know?

I realize that I am about to lose potentially between a third and one half of my already scant readership here, but I have to say that on this one point at least, people who believe in ghosts simply are not very bright. Now all those same people are saying that I'm not very open-minded to shut the door on the very possibility of a spirit lingering after the body's death, but you know, fuck that. Grow up. Ghosts answer a variety of needs in peoples' lives, from comfort to punishment, but they are not real. There are many creepy aspects to deserted houses, lonely country roads, bad parts of town, and abandoned mental hospitals, but they have nothing to do with ghosts. The night you saw your grandmother, a week after her death, sitting at the foot of your bead may have seemed very real -- I know it did in my case -- but she was not a ghost.

Having said all this, I admit that the only thing that really scares me, in movies or stories, is a ghost or a haunted house. Vampires, werewolves, serial killers, monsters large and small are there for my entertainment. If one leaps out from behind a closed door I may jump out of my seat with the rest of the audience, but I would do the same thing if a CPA jumped out from behind a closed door. That is nothing more than being startled. But ghosts are uncanny. They worm their way into that part of my brain that knows better but cannot fight back the reflex reaction that raises goosebumps or makes you wish the wife would just stay in her room and not check out those noises downstairs.

I blame my parents. When I was in seventh grade they gave me the Modern Library Giant Edition Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. The stories terrified and delighted me. They were almost all of either Victorian or Edwardian vintage, and that specific diction in a story, the sound of the Oxford Don hesitant to tell his tale for fear of being thought mad, still does it for me. Films and modern writers that attempt that exact atmosphere tend to be creaky and ineffectual. But there are endless modern variations. I find modern vampire stories silly and serial killers tedious if sometimes disgusting, but a film like Paranormal Activity can have me squirming in my seat. (At least the first one did. I just saw Paranormal Activity 3 and felt like I was hearing the same joke for the third time. Although it had its moments.)

Recently I have begun reading horror novels. The Horror Writers Association has published a list of 40 must reads in the genre, many of which I must have read in Junior High and High School. I have also taken a look at the annual Bram Stoker Award winners. It's an interesting list with some surprises. Joyce Carol Oates, no doubt, was delighted to win in 1996 for a book I've never heard of called Zombie, but how must a writer the quality of Stuart O'Nan have felt about first being nominated and then losing out to a novel by Peter Straub in 2005?

I have misgivings about the length of most of these books. How can anything be scary for 400 pages? But I am approaching this with an open mind, hoping for entertainment and the occasional creepy moment. And yes, they will find their way onto Potato Weather. I hope to use the word putrescent a great deal.

MONDAY MORNING

2011-10-31T07:42:00.000-05:00

BOOK REVIEW: COMEBACK, by Richard Stark

2011-10-29T08:11:00.000-05:00

This was my first Parker novel and I am a convert. Never a fan of police procedurals, I was seduced in the first pages by this "crime procedural."

Parker is a good criminal -- in this instance a thief. I am not sure what additional talents he may exhibit in other novels. He is not an anti-hero along the lines of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley or TV's Dexter. I did not watch Parker with the mix of disbelief, horror, and pleasure I do those other characters. Parker is simply a criminal who gets away with things because he is smarter and when necessary more brutal than those around him. Those around him are often sleazy, but that doesn't mean "they have it coming to them." Some are pathetically naive, and some a downright stupid. Parker is intelligent and anything but naive. Sleazy? Is there not something inherently sleazy about stealing $400,000 from a traveling evangelist, knowing all along that your inside man on the job will be killed or at the very least never see his share of the money?

If Parker took a bullet and died in one of these stories, I suppose the world would be an infinitesimally better place. But we, the citizens, would be denied the pleasure of watching Richard Stark, one of the late Donald Westlake's several pseudonyms, practice his impeccable craft.

As Billy Preston would say

I got a story ain't got no moral
Let the bad guy win every once and awhile

BOOK REVIEW: SANDMAN SLIM by Richard Kadrey

2011-10-25T17:58:00.000-05:00

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

How could I not read this book? William Gibson called it a "...deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece." The bits I read promised a hard-boiled, noirish novel about a living human who escapes from Hell and returns to Los Angeles to kill the men who not only sent him there but murdered his girlfriend. The bastards. Jack Stark, the narrator, is a magician, as are all those he is sworn to kill. There are also angels, alchemists, a vampire-like creature who's trying to reform, men from the Department of Homeland Security, and some particularly unpleasant demons called Kissi.

I really loved this book for the first fifty pages or so, then I thought, "So what?" If everything is supernatural, nothing really matters. The pleasure in noir fiction and film lies in experiencing the lives of desperate people, on both sides of the law, trapped by the systems that will crush them. In Sandman Slim the fate of the world hangs in the balance, but big deal. The novel is a very clever, carnival spook house. But maybe that's what Gibson meant when he called is a "..deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece."

Kadrey is very funny and he keeps the pace swift. Catching all his pop culture references will make you feel in with the in crowd. I was batting a hundred until I was wrong about Lawrence Tierney. Kadrey does fall prey in the extended denouement to the common fault of superhero movies -- he spends twenty pages setting up the basis for a franchise. The second book is already available.

View all my reviews

MONDAY MORNING

2011-10-24T07:31:00.001-05:00

IN WHICH I CONFRONT FAILURE

2011-10-23T15:59:00.000-05:00

When you open an account on Blogger, they immediately hit you with the pitch to "monetize" you blog. I never took it seriously, until I noticed the ongoing worldwide interest in my posting SOFT CORE NUN PORN AVAILABLE NOW! Since the day it went up, it has been the most heavily trafficked post on Potato Weather. I can only imagine the disappointed Serbian teenager or Brazilian octogenarian when he finds the unsalacious and actually quite thoughtful analysis I provide of Italian and Japanese nunsploitation films of the 1970's. But like flies to honey, everyday they come to check it out.

That's when I decided to look again at monetizing my blog. It is easy to become an Amazon Associate. Three clicks and you're signed up. From your blog you can link to any Amazon item and if it is purchased by someone directed from your blog, you receive a whopping 4% of the transaction. I told myself I was doing it as a joke, but then again, why not knock a bit off my monthly Amazon bill.

My background in trade led me immediately to SCNPAN! and I built links to the titles I discussed and even added some higher-priced box sets. Good merchandizing, I thought. Get those price points as high as possible. I also added copies and supporting material of all the books I reviewed, and eventually got around to plush toys and t-shits related to my postings.

This was all about a year ago. My total balance with Amazon stands at $1.80. They do not release the funds until you break $10.

What went wrong? Why has nobody bought the Library of America Philip K Dick box set? How have my readers resisted stocking up on the Georges Simenon romans durs available from New York Review Press after my over-the-top praise. Who wouldn't want a Chthulu plush toy for the little H. P Lovecraft fan in the family?

I was right about one thing. The nun porn sets get looked at the most. But no one buys them. Of course I think most of the people are in countries where the films would be seized by customs and I would end up on an Interpol list.

So I'm dropping the sales links. You will no longer feel pressured to buy 10 volumes of The Drifting Classroom manga series just because I think it's cool. Potato Weather is going commerce-free.

I spent my professional career as an integral part of a successful retail business, but I am no entrepreneur.

BOOK REVIEW: THE BALLAD OF PECKHAM RYE by Muriel Spark

2011-10-17T19:36:00.000-05:00

Dougal Douglas, or Douglas Dougal depending upon when and on what side of town you meet him, is a Scottish devil. He offers to let most anyone feel the nubs of his horns buried in his curly red hair. The good working-class citizens of Peckham Rye, a South London suburb where people speak with distaste of any need to "cross the river," don't know quite what to make of Dougal or his nubby horns. If he is not a devil he is certainly a rascal, a young man who cons his way into local industry as an "arts man," a position recommended by progressive minded politicians who think if only workers could expand their minds they might also be less inclined to absenteeism. Dougal takes this position at two competing firms, hence the name change, and sets about his "human research" that assures he seldom darkens either of his offices. Instead he makes friends all over Peckham, which means, in effect, he sets about ruining several peoples' lives.

When Spark published her novel in 1960, Peckham Rye was a shining example of British pettiness and tedium. During the next decades it would become one of the highest crime districts in London, and hints of violence among discontented youth run throughout the novel. For her characters the sophisticated city across the river was equally a lure and a object of distrust. They like their quiet life in Peckham Rye, which retains some of its pre-suburban village character. They are sitting ducks for Dougal's freewheeling, mayhem-inducing charades. By the time the Scotsman feels its time to leave, he has left broken hearts, cancelled weddings, and crimes of passion in his wake.

Spark tells her story in an economical 140 pages.

I like to think that in the picture below she is writing the scene that involves murder by corkscrew.

MONDAY MORNING

2011-10-17T11:39:00.000-05:00

BOOK REVIEW: THE MOVING TARGET, by Ross MacDonald

2011-10-16T07:43:00.003-05:00

This was my first Lew Archer book, as it was its author's. MacDonald is considered the heir of hard-boiled detective novels after Hammet and Chandler. Perhaps because this one was written in 1949, it seems especially close to its predecessors. Southern California. Wealthy people. Creepy people. Beautiful people. Corruptible people. Losers from the word go. They are all here and they all play their roles.

MacDonald is credited with bringing more psychological depth to the genre. I didn't see a lot of that here but it is his first novel. I admit an innate prejudice against detective fiction. I like crime novels -- Patricia Highsmith, Georges Simenon, James Ellroy, recently Richard Stark. Crime novels can take you in unexpected directions and leave you slack-jawed when they are over. Detectives, whether they are Miss Marple, Richard Marlowe, or Lew Archer, will take some serious beatings but figure things out in the end. (Actually I doubt Miss Marple every took any serious beatings.)

Detectives suffer betrayals, but it's all part of the job. They go home to more cigarettes and rye. (I should have left Miss Marple out of this.)

In a good crime novel, the world shifts under your feet and settles into a place you feared it belonged the whole time.

Paul Newman played Lew Archer, renamed Harper, in the 1966 film version.

MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE VOL 4 BY Hitoshi Iwaaki

2011-10-13T16:49:00.003-05:00

Now the parasytes are working their way into public office. Their leader, a woman who was pregnant when she was taken over, has given birth. Her nanny is alarmed to see that she silences her child's cries by squeezing its head, and she carries it around in a bag like a loaf of bread. And there is one unexpected killing. A primary lesson of all Japanese horror manga seems to be: do not get too attached to any one character. Everyone's life is up for grabs.

BOOK REVIEW: THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE by John Varley

2011-10-11T16:15:00.001-05:00

Try not to take this personally.

In the year 2050, invaders from another galaxy enter our solar system and take over Jupiter and Earth. They have come to make contact with intelligent species like themselves, which unfortunately does not include the human race. On earth they are interested in only whales and dolphins. Human beings they put in the same category as beavers and muskrats. By plowing under the surface of the planet, they cause most earth life to starve. I suppose the invaders are meanwhile in the oceans partying down with whales and dolphins. Humans that have already begun populating the moon and the eight other planets the invaders leave to their own resources. We are like squirrels: just part of the landscape unless we become a nuisance and require an exterminator.

Progress on the eight worlds has been speeded along by transmissions that appear to come from Ophiuchi, a star seventeen light years away. Even though most of the information is unintelligible, mankind now has sophisticated technologies such as cloning, advanced space travel, and these really nifty suits that fit you like a skintight mirror and allow you to exist for thirty hours in a vacuum.

Lilo is a geneticist condemned to death for unlicensed experimentation. She is freed by Boss Tweed, ex-president and now among the wealthiest men in the universe. (Why the historical reference here I never understood.) Tweed finances the Free Earth movement, a fool's errand that hopes to expel the Invaders. Lilo is smart and spunky. She has been killed three times trying to escape and is now living as her third or fourth clone. She finally goes off on Tweed's sponsored expedition to Poseidon, Jupiter's crummiest moon. From here on out there are so many plots and so many agendas that the book turns into the wild adventure that has earned it classic status. The characters are smart and capable of facing each challenge thrown their way. Varley's settings, whether they are the manmade caverns on Poseidon or Tweed's absurd Disney-like environments, stay true to their own logic and give each episode its own feel.

There has also been a disturbing new transmission from Ophuichi. It is garbled like all the rest, but it is unmistakably a bill, and there are some serious late charges.

flag

Here is an actual photograph of Ophiuchi. It's one of those brighter dots.

MONDAY MORNING

2011-10-10T06:56:00.000-05:00

BOOK REVIEW: SON OF MAN by Robert Silverberg

2011-10-06T15:54:00.000-05:00

A few pages into this book, I groaned. I picked it up because I was reading Robert Silverberg books. I barely glanced at the cover to get a sense of what it was going to be about. On the first page, Clay, a man of our time, which in the case of the book would be around 1970, finds himself caught in a time flux and deposited in some future world, a verdant paradise possibly a million years in the future. Soon he meets Hanmer, one of the current human specimens, a soft spoken, somewhat androgynous young man with green skin and red eyes. Hanmer will be Clay's guide.

That's when I groaned. I seldom like books that involve a stranger trotted around a wondrous new world and shown wonders. Dante set a high literary standard for this format around the beginning of the 14th century. Utopian novels employ this method, and they are a drag. In science fiction from about the same tame as Silverberg's novel there is Theodore Sturgeon'sVenus Plus X, a silly and tedious book. Nothing much can happen in these stories, if they are stories. They read like account of visits to futuristic theme parks that prompt from their authors inflated language suited to the wonders on view. Silverberg is an author who can describe some pretty outlandish worlds and make them totally believable. For Son of Man he slips into highfalutin language that he imagines does justice to the mystic and ecstatic rituals Clay experiences. It doesn't. It just sounds strained.

Few books I have ever read spend such time on the state of their protagonist's genitals. Everyone is naked in this world. Hanmer and his five friends, known as Skimmers, not only look androgynous but change gender at will. Clay's frequent erections, whether prompted by sexual arousal by a Skimmer in his/her female mode or at times simply by something in the air, are mighty things. Except for one gender-bending encounter that must have much more titillating and shocking in 1971 that it is today, Clay finds himself mounting not only the Skimmers but in some cases the primordial ooze he drags himself through and even wet sand on a beach. (Think about the last one.) There is much engulfing and thrusting described, although at times Clay ejaculates more spontaneously. We also learn how the varying atmospheric conditions affect his penis and testicles. Silverberg was a hardworking, full-time writer who in addition to SF wrote dirty books for long forgotten paperback publishers like Nightstand Editions. That industry was done in by home video and the internet, but if you were around in the seventies you probably encountered these kinds of publications and you will recognize their language in Son of Man. Where else would you come across the word "encunted"? (It doesn't make it through spell check but it is in Wiktionary.)

But I digress. No, I take that back. Clay's erections are a central feature of the book. His other experiences involve body-dissolving trips to the edge of the universe, time spent as a giant carrot, and struggles alone through the "Unpleasant Zones," areas with names like Heavy, Slow, Dark, Cold, Empty. The Skimmers, who are not unlike H.G. Wells' Eloi minus the inconvenience of the Morlocks, live a carefree existence, their only duty being certain rituals that keep the world humming along. Sound boring? It is. But to Silverberg's credit, and his love of monstrosities, Clay meets along his journey some pretty interesting throwbacks to earlier human forms that range from spheres who live in mobile cages, to pimply, stinky goat men, to ravenous dinosaurs -- each of them some evolutionary adaptation to an era of earth's history.

The conclusion is a cosmic experience, at the Well of First Things. (Endemic to this kind of book is an absolute lack of humor, and yet much in Son of Man could be transferred to a Douglas Adams book with little rewriting.) In addition to a prolonged ejaculation this climactic eperience involves an immersion in the full panoply of humanity and a quasi-religious experience in which Clay takes on all the sorrows, fears, and boredom of everything from his Skimmer friends to Neanderthals and the spheroid thing in the cage, Why he feels compelled or even has the right to do this is not clear, except that he is Clay, he is one special dude.

BOOK REVIEW: THORNS by Robert Silverberg

2011-10-05T07:56:00.000-05:00

Duncan Chalk begins every working day climbing the iron rungs that form a switchback trail to his desk perched forty feet above the floor. Duncan Chalk weighs over 600 pounds. "Pain," he explains to his minions, "is instructive."

Chalk should add that it is also profitable. He runs a media empire that ranges from carnival attractions to the most exclusive resorts in the solar system. His broadcast speciality is programming that allows the audience to watch other people go through hard times, or simply to suffer in general. Actually, none of this is made particularly clear by Silverberg, but given that the novel dates from 1967, he rates "fortune teller" status for his prescient view of what the future viewing public will want to watch.

Chalk, through a process that is also not made clear, feeds off the misery he markets. And he needs a new attraction. Fortunately for him. an astronaut named Burris has recently returned from a disastrous encounter with the inhabitants of the planet Manjipoor. (Yes, it sounds like an Indian restaurant.) The Manjipoorians, for what seems to be no better reason than idle curiosity, performed operations on Burris that killed two of his shipmates and left him a grotesque deformity. Then there is Lona, a young woman who is mother to 100 children. She donated eggs for what turned out to be fantastically successful experiment. He anonymous participation was blown by the press, and she became more famous than our own, beloved Octomom. Months later, her unwanted celebrity a thing of the past, he lives in seclusion with severe post-partum depression.

Chalk decides these two should get together, have a very public romance, followed by an inevitable public breakup, a scenario that will delight both him and his millions of consumers. I know none of this makes any sense, but Silverberg pulls it off. Every character, from Burris and Lona to Chalk's lowliest minions are well-developed individuals. The settings, that range from shopping malls for the vulgar masses to resorts that only the most fabulously wealthy humans can afford, are more believable today than they would have been to Silverberg's readers forty years ago. The resorts are like Steven Wynn wet dreams.

Thorns is consistently entertaining but I am not sure that it has a point. Our absurdly mismatched lovebirds learn some hard lessons, Chalk receives a spectacular comeuppance, and I suppose the ending in more or less positive. It's a great ride with just a bit of a letdown at the end.

MONDAY MORNING

2011-10-03T07:39:00.000-05:00

MANGA MANIA; 7 BILLION NEEDLES VOL 2 by Nobuaki Tadano

2011-10-02T07:40:00.000-05:00

7 Billion Needles, Volume 2 by Nobuaki Tadano
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a not very exciting follow up to Volume 1. Hikaru and some of her friends return to the island on which she was raised. Hikaru wants to visit her father's grave. He died in a suspicious accident after he let down the islanders' dreams of wealth by misinterpreting granite for some substance known as "black ore." (Googling "black ore" comes up with references to its uselessness, although there are directions for making earrings from it.)

Hikaru cannot shed her alien inhabitant, since he has not finished repairing her body after blowing it to bits when he crash landed on earth. Maelstrom, the bad alien, shows up on the island even though he was apparently killed at the end of Volume 1. There are lots of flashbacks and dream sequences and another battle to the death at the end. But Tadano has a surprise ending that bodes well for Volume 3.

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BOOK REVIEW: THE END OF ETERNITY by Isaac Asimov

2011-10-01T15:28:00.001-05:00

The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Granted it's a classic, but also, let's face it, it's a drag. This is the only Asimov novel I have read, and it doesn't make me want to dive right in to the Foundation books or anything else. The ideas are intriguing, the writing is pedestrian, the characters are a bore.

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MANGA MANIA: 7 BILLION NEEDLES Vol 1, by Tadano

2011-09-29T16:06:00.000-05:00

7 Billion Needles, Volume 1 by Nobuaki Tadano
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tadano's manga announces that it is a homage to Hal Clement's Needle, a novel published in the early 1950's. The change is tone is obvious from the titles. Note Clement's title is "Needle," singular. I guess for today's manga market you need to up the ante by 6,999,999,999 extra needles.

Clement's novel was possibly the first to concern an alien living in a symbiotic relationship with an earthling. He's a "good alien" chasing a "bad alien," a motif that has been worked so often in the past sixty years that Tadano's nod to Clement, given how radically transformed the material is, is polite but hardly necessary. Clement's novel is good but a bit Hardy-Boyish. The gelatinous alien enters the boy's body while he sleeps on the beach, and the narrative is an SF detective story where boys out on their bicycles are always careful to be home in time for dinner. In the opening scene of the manga, Hikaru, a disaffected teenage girl who seldom takes off her headphones, is blown to pieces by the alien's crash landing. He knits her back together and explains that he and she must search out and destroy Maelstrom, the bad alien, before it kills all life on earth. Hikaru's response is, "Leave me alone."
She is more willing to pitch in after a massacre in the gym, during which Maelstrom briefly manifests itself as a dinosaur-like monster. "How about this!" he screams. "Humans tend to fear this kind of form."

Tadano's action sequences are as incoherent as any in a Michael Bey film. There's no build-up of tension, just lots of explosions and bloodshed. His best artwork are the cityscapes, schoolyards, and suburban neighborhoods that set up each scene.

Good triumphs, but there are four more books in the series so I assume Maelstrom will be back.

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BOOK REVIEW: SHOW UP, LOOK GOOD,, by Mark Wisniewski

2011-09-27T10:27:00.002-05:00

Show Up, Look Good by Mark Wisniewski
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This may be the book that gets me into and out of the Rumpus Book Club in a single month. For the Rumpus club, you pay good money for an advance copy of the book of their choice, and then have the chance to discuss it on forums and eventually have a live web chat with the author,

I was left so cold by Show Up, Look Good that I am not inclined to participate in either of those activities. The advance copy come slathered with praise from notable readers who possibly read a different book than I did. I did not find it the "laugh-out-loud romp" described by Ben Fountain. Wisniewski's was not Jonathan Lethem's "riotously original voice." T. R. Hummer is right that the book is "part Carson McCullers, part Truman Capote, and part Elmore Leonard," but those parts never come together in a dynamic way.

The opening paragraph promises all the readerly pleasures Wisniewski's book delivers at best half-heartedly.

I know of a secret murder, and I have loved a speechless man, and sometimes I'd like to tell someone about how death and love have changed my life, but any of three thoughts give me pause. For one, if I talk about the murder, I myself could be killed. I can't know how true this is, but the speechless man said it was, and even though he disappointed me, I trusted him. Two, if someone's murdered, she's murdered, and talking about her will never change that. Then there's the reality that very few people care to face: unless you have majestic beauty and power, your secrets rarely matter to anyone but yourself.

That's the best part of the book.

Michelle is a thirty-something who breaks up with her boyfriend of eleven years when she catches him masturbating with a plastic vagina. She leaves Kankakee, Illinois for New York City, and promptly begins to live the life and have the kinds of -- somehow adventures doesn't seem the right word -- that Midwestern transplants should have in their twenty's. There's the offbeat, bizarre yet friendly living arrangement that must be traded in for an apartment shared with posers possessing their "MFA's from NYU." She nonchalantly earns money by scalping tickets to David Lettermen. She moves in with a an older married couple in Astoria who have so much love in their marriage that need to share it with others. (She really should have seen that one coming.) She works for a horrible boss in a Queen's supermarket. Back in Manhattan she moves into a tiny apartment where her only job is to free it up for lunchtime and afterwork assignations between businessmen and their pick-ups. And there is that murder.

When towards then end of the book, Michelle proves be an unreliable narrator, the revelation does not cast the preceding events in a more interesting light, they simply make her more irritating,

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MONDAY MORNING

2011-09-26T07:27:00.000-05:00

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 7 by Kazuo Umezu

2011-09-23T07:54:00.000-05:00

The Drifting Classroom Vol. 7 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So far these kids have endured the following: The transportation of their elementary school to some future wasteland. A maniacal cafeteria worker. Homicidal teachers. Mass suicide among first graders. A giant bug that laid eggs that created little bugs. Pre-adolescent power struggles -- and those can get nasty. Bubonic plague.

Did I leave anything out? I must have.

In this installment, the rain that allowed their garden to grow brought with it a proliferation of mushrooms. Are they edible? Those who eat them experience strange feelings of power followed by dementia. The kids decide they should pray for help, and in one of the most non-American moments so far, one child asks, "Who should we pray to?" They settle on a bust our hero, Sho, made of his mother in art class. Meanwhile the mushroom eaters make a one-eyed idol of mud who proves to be the more receptive deity and manifests itself as a tentacled monster.

Umezu's drawings are the most storyboard-like of any of the manga artists I've read. His action sequences, consisting almost entirely of dark pages with kids grappling, shattering wood, raised weapons, and close-ups of kids shouting "aaaargh" and "gyaaah" are genuinely exciting in their own ridiculous way. When Yoshikawa, formerly one of the good kids, eats mushrooms and goes down on all fours to scurry out of the schoolyard to her new god, it is genuinely creepy. Takamatsu, the cafeteria man, who has gone from a threat to a retarded man child, and now back to an incredible danger, looks like a deranged, overweight Desi Arnaz -- the very essence of horror.

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BOOK REVIEW: RED LIGHTS by Georges Simenon

2011-09-21T21:33:00.000-05:00

Red Lights by Georges Simenon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third of Simenon's roman durs that I have read, and even though it is my least favorite so far I admire the lean prose and psychological complexity. But at times the story read like an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

Steve and Nancy Hogan, Long Islanders who work in Manhattan, head out on Labor Day Weekend to pick up their kids at Camp Walla Walla in Maine. Even by the lax standards of the 1950's, when the novel takes place, Steve has a "drinking problem." He sneaks extra drinks when his wife isn't looking, though she is hardly unaware of his habits, and once on the road he stops for quick shots at roadhouses along the way. He insists he drives better when he has had a few. At his first stop, he finds that Nancy has not waited for him in the car. She has left behind a note that she is taking the bus the rest of the way. Steve's drunkeness sidetracks his attempt to catch up with the bus. He stops at another bar to further "clear his head." He is drunkenly voluble with a silent man seated next to him at the bar. Although it stretches credulity is comes as no surprise that this man, whom Steve finds waiting in his car, is the armed-and-dangerous escapee from Sing Sing discussed on the televisions in the bar. Steve gives him a ride, blathering all the time about true manhood and the qualities he imagines he shares with the criminal.

The novel has attitudes towards alcoholism and sexual assault that will not sit well with contemporary readers, which is perhaps why the ambiguities at the end of the novel seem more unsatisfying that intriguing. But Simenon's style remains impeccable, and Steve's delusional drunken consciousness is presented in excruciating detail.

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MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE VOL 3 by Hitoshi Iwaaki

2011-09-20T18:10:00.000-05:00

Parasyte, Volume 3 by Hitoshi Iwaaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The presence of flesh eating parasites inhabiting a certain proportion of the population is becoming more difficult for the authorities to cover up. Shin is fortunate that Migi, the parasite possessing his right hand, is an easy-going sort. The others, like the one that ate Shin's mother or the one posing as a new kid at school, are a different matter entirely,

In Volume 3 of Iwaaki's manga, secrecy begins to break down. Shin discovers the mild superpowers he is developing with Migi's presence in his body. Shimada, the new parasite student, goes on a killing spree at the school. And Shin continues to have girlfriend trouble.

Iwaaki's visual style comes to life only when he depicts the aliens' fantastic transformations. His human characters tend to open their mouths into enormous gashes when screaming, which they do a lot, and the least to the most extreme situations make them break out in globules of sweat.

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MONDAY MORNING

2011-09-19T06:40:00.002-05:00

BOOK REIVEW: THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS by Muriel Spark

2011-09-18T20:10:00.000-05:00

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Muriel Spark novel I have read, and I have always had the notion that she was an author one read entirely, not just a random novel here and there. But The Girls of Slender Means is a completely satisfying three hours' read. Spark had me from the first paragraph, and when the novel was over, the incidents of death, murder, and insanity seemed all of a piece with the sort of girls' boarding house comedy I associate with something along the lines of Stage Door.

The setting is London, 1945, after the war in Europe but with VJ day still in the future. Ration cards for everything from powdered milk to clothing are tradable commodities, and bombed-out ruins litter the urban landscape. It was a time, Spark says, when "all the nice people of England were poor, allowing for exceptions." The May of Teck Club stands opposite Kensington Gardens and provides a home for the daughter of country clerics and other respectable middle-class families who must find work after the war. Exactly what many of the young women do remains vague, but they date a great deal, the youngest settling for RAF pilots and the more mature girls setting their eyes on American officers.

Spark's voice provides insights and asides that are remorseless rather than cruel. The action, such as it is, builds towards the kind of flamboyant set piece Alfred Hitchcock favored in his films of the 1940's. The denouement, which Spark intersperses throughout the book starting on about page three, takes the reader out of the closed-in world of the May of Teck Club and into the 1960's.

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BOOK REVIEW: NEEDLE by Hal Clement

2011-09-15T07:56:00.000-05:00

Needle by Hal Clement

Hal Clement had a fifty year career in sf and was made a Science Fiction Writer of America Grand Master in 1999.

Needle (1950) was his first published novel and it suffers the dubious fate of containing so many new sf elements that they have become standards of the medium over time. Two aliens, one good, one bad, crash onto Earth, The good alien, Hunter, is after the criminal alien and yes this is roughly the plot of Critters along with many lesser sf movies and books. Just the other night I decided not to watch something called Alien Hunter which I suspect had a similar plot.

These aliens are gelatinous beings that must find a host organism for survival. They exist cooperatively with their host, doing generally good things for its immune system and such, although they are also capable of killing it in a variety of ways. The good alien, Hunter, enters the body of a fifteen-year-old boy and is ready to track down his prey, but finds himself transported from the research island in the South Pacific where he landed to a boys boarding school in Massachusetts. Bob, the alien's host, gets on well with his new bodily resident and manages to leave school and return to the South Pacific so the hunt can proceed.

If published today, Needle would be YA fiction. It's dated. The world of Booth Tarkington is in its past, but the spirit of the Hardy Boys makes itself felt. Everyone rides bicycles, wears swimming outfits, and they organize their days around returning home in time for dinner. Various of Bob's friends are suspects, and clearing them of potential possession drags on for the middle third of the book. This gets a little boring. Also, I am not particularly good at this sort of thing, but I guessed where the bad alien was hiding out just by deciding which character would offer the biggest payoff for a finale.

Clement's strengths, as in Mission of Gravity, his only other novel I have read, is working with alien psychology, alien/human interaction, and those scenes where the alien acts like an alien. Clement returned to these characters almost thirty years later, and even as unengaging as I found much of this novel, I am curious to see what he does with them a second time around.

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MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 6 by Kazuo Umezu

2011-09-12T16:39:00.000-05:00

The Drifting Classroom Vol. 6 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Several volumes back in this series I was bothered that the elementary school students stranded in the future, their school building surrounded by a desert wasteland, were delighted to find they had a swimming pool full of water for their survival. What about chlorine? I wondered. How can Umezu ignore the chlorine issue.

Such concerns now strike me as petty. In this current installment, our hero Sho re-establishes the psychic link with his mother so that she can embed inside the corpse of a soon-to-be mummified baseball star the medicine the students need to combat the bubonic plague that threatens their existence. The mummy they happen to have found somewhere nearby in their future world.

So the whole chlorine thing no longer seems like such a big deal. I am curious still about certain behavioral traits of Sho's mom. During her single-minded pursuit to save her son, she gets punched several times in the face, although she is capable of giving as good as she gets. But are Japanese men and women so quick to slug one another? To get into the same hospital as the ailing baseball star she gashes her arm with a carving knife.

Meanwhile, the students who claim not to be suffering from Bubonic plague decide to burn down the building containing the stricken schoolmates. But the infection has spread everywhere and it is only the packet of medicine retrieved from the mummy's gut that saves the remaining students.

But with four pages of the book remaining, you know there is plenty of time for something really bad to happen. It does. The smoke from the fire, entering the cloud heavy atmosphere, combines with the celebratory group singing of the survivors to produce an effective rain dance and some much needed rain. Volume 6 ends with flash flooding and quicksand. But at least there is no chlorine in the rainwater.

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MONDAY MORNING

2011-09-12T06:08:00.000-05:00

BOOK REVIEW: MISSION OF GRAVITY by Ha Clement

2011-09-11T06:20:00.000-05:00

Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The science in "hard science fiction" doesn't have to be all that hard to go over my head. If publishers and critical readers say an author has done his homework and knows what he's talking about, I find myself taking a lot of things on faith. On the other hand, I am just as happy reading Philip K. Dick who ignores the niceties of scientific plausibility and has a fully recovered earth with citizens zipping around in flying cars and planning to colonize the galaxy just a few years after an atomic war.

During a 50 year publishing career, Hal Clement established himself as a master of hard sf. He held degrees in astronomy and chemistry, was a WWII pilot, and taught science at Milton Academy. Mission of Gravity(1954) is generally considered to be Clement's best novel. It appears in the Jim Pringle list of 100 best Science Fiction novels, but the description there goes beyond damning with faint praise. Pringle writes, "Of course the psychology is minimal, the characters wooden, and the prose flat." I finally picked it up with low expectations. I was wrong.

The setting is the planet Mesklin, a dense, discus shaped planet that rotates so rapidly so close to its sun that its gravity ranges from about twice that of earth's when near the equatorial rim to 700 times earth's near the poles. Clement later rethought this, and reduced the maximum gravity to 250 times that of earth, but you get the idea. Mesklin is largely inaccessible to earthling space explorers, and you would think to any form of life whatsoever. But earth has sent a probe to Mesklin which is stranded at the south pole. A research station orbits the planet, and our boots on the ground is a single astronaut names Charles Strickland. His craft must stay near the rim, but there he has found the planets intelligent life form. The Mesklinites are tough-shelled caterpillar like creatures, about fifteen inches long, built low to the ground, and highly intelligent. Barlennan, our Mesklinite hero, leads a group of ocean traders. He has befriended Strickland, who must spend most of his time in his surface craft, learned English, and agreed to undertake the dangerous trip to the pole to retrieve the recording devices off the space probe.

I don't know why Jim Pringle held so low an opinion of the psychology and characterizations of this book. Barlennan and his crew are true adveturers, clever problem solvers, and determined when trading to get the better end of the deal. Strickland and his scientist co-workers orbiting the planet come off as enthusiastic, brainy grad students. A nice period touch is their rush to their slide rules when they need to work out complicated mathematical formulas. (Do they even make slide rules anymore?)

The adventure on the ground involves storms, unfriendly natives, some peculiar beasts in the mid-gravity zones, and the Mesklinites determination to overcome their justifiable fear of heights in a world where a fall of less than a foot would be fatal, The mixture of science and adventure here is closer to the spirit of Jules Verne than any sf novel I have read. Twenty years later, Clement returned to the Mesklinites, transporting them a giant rock in the sky, again inaccessible to earthmen, in a novel called Starlight.

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MONDAY MORNING

2011-09-05T06:28:00.000-05:00

MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE VOL 2 by Hitoshi Iwaaki

2011-09-01T07:58:00.000-05:00

Parasyte, Volume 2 by Hitoshi Iwaaki
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Japanese really know how to set up primal situations for adolescent protagonists.

Sinichi and Migi, the alien parasite that inhabits his right hand, are getting along pretty well. But when Sinichi's parents leave for vacation, his mother has her head stolen by a parasite in need of a new one, and Sinichi is faced with the reality that he must kill his mother, or what used to be his mother, before she gets either himself or his father.

Along the way he meets up with a kinda pathetic possessed human, a loser contemplating suicide over his lost girlfriend about the time a parasite becomes lodged in his jaw. He also discovers that thanks to Migi's ability to subdivide himself, he is developing something close to superpowers. He quits taking shit and starts kicking ass.

Iwaaki's images in this second volume are more extravagant than the first. The transformation scenes and the scenes of two parasites swapping stories while their human hosts stand around with nothing to do have a loopy nuttiness about them that can make the parasites, whose only interest in self-preservation, strangely appealing.

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BOOK REVIEW: BLACKOUT by Connie Willis

2011-08-30T17:51:00.000-05:00

Blackout by Connie Willis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't like cliffhangers. I knew this was a continuous story with All Clear, but I am not inclined to jump into another 500 page novel with these same, quite frankly, not very interesting characters and their predicament as time travelers stuck in London during The Blitz.

The opening scenes in Oxford have a madcap energy that got me all excited about what might come next. In 2060, historians have become time travelers, going back in time for firsthand information on everything from the Crusades to World War II. In Oxford, the historians are the cool kids on campus, rushing from wardrobe, to props, to research, crossing paths with coworkers and competing for slots in a crowded schedule of drops and pick-ups. There are hints, however, that something is going wrong, some glitch in the system that is causing increasingly frequent slippages in time and place. Historians find themselves arriving days earlier or later than they intended, and sometimes miles from where they expected to be.

Willis follows three main characters and a couple of minor ones, and everything would seem to be in place for a thrilling read -- Dunkirk, the Blitz, life among child evacuees. But although the situations are realistic, nothing very interesting is happening to anybody. Things are going wrong, there are injuries and confusion, and each character's drop point, which is also their retrieval point, has ceased to operate. All this mounts up to the kinds of crises you would expect to see in a British TV series available on DVD here in the states. And just like I might find myself renting the second series just to see what finally happens, I can imagine myself picking up All Clear with a combination of irritation and curiosity.

Unless All Clear turns out to be a knockout, Willis should have gotten this over in one book.

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MONDAY MORNING

2011-08-29T06:31:00.000-05:00

BOOK REVIEW: PAYING FOR IT by Chester Brown

2011-08-28T10:21:00.000-05:00

Paying for It by Chester Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Chester Brown's autobiographical graphic novel starts with his break up from long-term girlfriend Sook Yin Lee. They live in her apartment, and he agrees to move into the guest room so her new boyfriend can stay over and eventually move in with her. So from the start, Brown sets himself up as a sad sack, disappointed in romantic love and incapable of establishing his 30'ish-year-old self in the world.

He decides to act on his interest in buying sex, and Paying for It records the next several years of his life among call girls and escorts. HIs initial insecurity gives way to a practicality about what he wants and from whom. He learns to read the review websites that cover local prostitutes. He has his favorites, and takes in stride the indignities that go with paid sex: He calls up a favorite and learns that the phone has been disconnected. When he goes to meet a woman for the second time, a different woman, claiming the same name, answers the door. But no problem -- the woman he wants is watching soap operas in the room next door and is available. He finds the women consistently beautiful but worries sometimes about their true ages. For the first few months tipping poses a problem.

Don't think for a moment that this book is funny or sexy. Brown puts eight panels of the digest-sized pages of his book. The setting is Toronto, and the main characters walk generic streets and end up in anonymous bedrooms. The sex scenes for the most part could depict copulating noodles. Brown never shows the women's faces, but I doubt that I would even recognize him if I saw him on the street. (Actually that's not true, there is photo of him in the back of the book.)

Brown is in frequent conversation and debate with two friends, one of whom asks him the priceless question, "When you were a child did you think you would grow up to be whoremonger?" At times Brown seems willfully disingenuous. He feels confident that none of the women he frequents have been trafficked. He accepts their stories that they are independent entrepreneurs, not being run by organized crime or pimps. He also draws no direct line between the world of the relatively high-priced call girls he visits and prostitutes turning tricks on the street and the drugs, crime, and violence that goes with that trade, His answer for everything, explained in copious appendixes, is to legalize prostitution.

This book is not likely to change anyone's opinion on prostitution, but it is a fascinating, first-hand case study.

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MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL 5 by Kazuo Umezu

2011-08-25T06:27:00.002-05:00

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 5 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Is it a known tendency among Japanese pre-adolescents to opt for blood sacrifice whenever they are faced with a really serious threat? As the tiny but deadly bugs that have hatched from the eggs of the big deadly bug attack them, one group decides it is all one little boy's fault and he must die. Our hero Sho itervenes, but the intended victim bashes his owns brains out. The bugs disappear, so maybe he was to blame after all.

Next on the agenda is bubonic plague, and the controversy rages as to whom is infected and what to do with them -- chase them away, stab them with spears, or burn them with gasoline.

This tragedy is not bringing out anyone's best qualities. I thought volume 5 dragged a bit, but there were lots of great drawings of one or more child screaming "PLAGUE!"

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BOOK REVIEW: THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEEL JACK by Mark Hodder

2011-08-24T10:20:00.000-05:00

Hodder needed a different, meaner editor for his first novel. Anywhere from 20% - 25% could go. Every incident goes on a little too long. The second half of every compound sentence could be dropped. Conversations are over before Hodder cuts them off. He never got the memo on adverbs.

This is the steampunk novel I have read, and I am not the best audience. I don't care about the gadgetry, and the gadgetry seems to be much of the attraction here. On the other hand, I am a sucker for time travel stories. That's what attracted me to Spring Heeled Jack, and Hodder does a good job with the complications caused by going back in time, although it is not hard to guess that his time traveller will end up causing all the things he attempts to prevent.

The historical characters that fill the story range from the well known -- Captain Sir Richard Burton, Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde -- to more obscure players such as the founder of the Libertine Club, Richard Monckton Milnes, or Laurence Oliphant, a minor political figure and minor novelist more or less lost to history. The early chapters have to bring the readers up to date on who everyone is, and they read like a script from the History Channel, or The Alternate History Channel. Things don't really pick up until the appearance of Spring Heel Jack himself, a figures in a close fitting white suit, a black helmet surrounded by blue flames, and boots with a spring mechanism that allows to him to leap over buildings and disappear into the sky.

There are also werewolves who abduct chimney sweeps, mesmerists, and machines that were once human. All of this makes for an over-crowded but consistent plot, it just needs to get on with it and get it over with about a hundred pages before Hodder is able to wrap the whole thing up.

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MONDAY MORNING

2011-08-22T06:03:00.000-05:00

GLOSSARY(3)

2011-08-16T16:18:00.000-05:00

anaideia, shamelessness. The quality of a dog (the Greeks did not tend to praise dogs for loyalty of for being "man's best friend") and of a Cynic, who does everything publicly, without embarrassment and without care for the observers' opinions.

askesis, training, exercise For the Cynics it entailed ascetic practices such as sleeping rough, walking barefoot everywhere, enduring heat and cold, and generally living "according to nature" without any artificial aids.

euteleia, frugality. A Cynic virtue about which Crates wrote an encomium and to attain which Diogenes threw away his last cup.

paracharattein to nomisma, to deface the coinage. What Diogenes' father Heccesias is reported to have done in Sinope, and what Diogenes and Cynics claimed to do metphorically: putting the coin (nomissa) of custom (nomos) out of circulation.

pera, traveler's bag or sack Part of the Cynic's typical garb, and the name that Crates gave to his utopia, because it contains no coins but only simple, natural things.

philodoxia, love of fame or honor. A standard charge against the Cynics...Alexander the Great was sometimes taken as the epitome of it.

pithos, storage jar The sort of large, earthenware container (common to the ancient world) in which Diogenes as said to have lived for a time; often translated as "tub."

spoudogeloion, the serious-funny or serio-comic. A jokey style that masks a serious intent.

typhos, literally, "smoke, vapour" Used by the Cynics to denote the delirium of popular ideas and conventions. For the Cynics, these are insubstantial "smoke" in comparison with the self and its present experiences, which alone can be known and possessed. One Cynic goal is atyphia, complete freedom from typhos.

Excerpted from Glossary of Greek Terms

in Cynics, by William Desmond

Univeristy of California Press, 2008

MONDAy MORNING

2011-08-15T05:13:00.000-05:00

MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE VOL 1 by Hitoshi Iwaaki

2011-08-14T06:06:00.001-05:00

Parasyte, Volume 1 by Hitoshi Iwaaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Puffballs from outer space drift to earth, parasitic worms emerge, they crawl into human orifices, they take over human brains. Teenager Sinichi luckily wakes up as one tries to enter his nose. He fights it off but it burrows into his arm. A tourniquet keeps it from traveling further, but now Sinichi has an alien for a right hand.

Unlike the murky atmosphere that pervades much horror manga, Iwaaki's story has the clean,, crisp lines appropriate to its contemporary setting, and the situations he sets up are as much about teenage anxiety as world domination by alien life forms. Sinichi's resident alien can create embarrassing situations -- in a pubic toilet it asks in a loud, clear voice, "Make you genitals erect. I wan to see them."--but it also makes Sinichi a basketball star and very able to take care of himself in a fight. It can change shape at will, and many of Iwaaki's best panels are single images of Migi, the name Sinichi gives his hand, simply pondering the peculiar world of humans.

Migi is charming but ruthless, completely amoral in its desire to for self-preservation. Meanwhile across the globe other alien-infersted humans are chowing down on family and strangers at an alarming rate. The story becomes repetitive, but since it will run for 11 volumes there is no telling where Iwaaki will take it.

Are deeper meanings implied to this story of adolescent possession. Let's see, what organ does a fifteen-year-old boy have the least control over? His brain is probably the correct answer, but I think you get the idea.

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BOOK REVIEW: THE TIGER'S WIFE by Tea Obreht

2011-08-13T07:22:00.000-05:00

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Just as there are some movies whose main purpose seems to be garnering Academy Award nominations if not the awards themselves -- The King's English is a good example of the genre -- there are some novels that must have as part of their marketing strategy their suitability for your more literate reading groups, those that are not going to be reading The Help but are unlikely to plan an intensive investigation of The Magic Mountain.

Enter Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife. Great backstory -- first novel by author under 30, born in Belgrade but U.S. resident since age of 12. Elegant prose style. A plot chockablock with talking points -- Balkan history, folk beliefs, magic realism, the present infused with the past. As I was reading it I received in the mail an announcement of the Spring lunch time discussion group at the Dallas Institute for the Humanities. The Tiger's Wife was first on the list.

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NOT A STUNT: SF(13) LEIGH BRACKETT

2011-08-11T10:33:00.000-05:00

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

By all accounts I've read, Brackett's 1955 novel is the first, post-nuclear holocaust novel written in the U.S. It takes place around a century after what survivors call "The Destruction." Cities across the globe were bomb targets and they now exist as unvisited ruins, demonized as the symbol of the hubris that brought about the attacks. Brackett's brilliant and genuinely creepy innovation --although I guess it's not really an innovation if it is the first book of what is now a well-worked genre -- is to create a society, not unlike mid-19th century America, but where Mennonites control the government, the religion, and the ideology.

Mennonites?

Apparently after "The Destruction," they along with the Amish and whatever Shakers and like groups were still around, proved best suited to a life without technology. Their quaint ways are suddenly in great demand, and through means Brackett never fully explains, their simple, fundamentalist faith rules most of the spiritually defeated and technophobic United States, and it has, no surprise, hardened into an ideology that is not above stoning to death those they find threatening or burning to the ground towns that threaten to grow too large or introduce to many innovations. Doesn't seem l like a fair accommodation just for all the great jams and pies they bake, or that cool, pegged furniture.

The New Mennonites are also firm believers in "Spare the rod, spoil the child," a practice that keeps most youth contained but goes against the grain of our young heros, Len Coulter and his cousin Esau. They discover a short band radio that proves the existence of the fabled city of Bartorstown, which they imagine to be a thriving, mid-twentieth century American metropolis. The "long journey" of their title is their flight from home and many years' quest for this technological utopia.

This is SF filtered through Mark Twain and Frank Norris, filled with small town types, entrepreneurs, dangerous townsfolk, and mysterious strangers. And it all works. If many of scenes play out like those of early TV westerns, there's a good reason for that.

For years I thought Leigh Brackett was a man who wrote western screenplays for Howard Hawks, and that there was some other Leigh Brackett who wrote 1940's SF of the planet-hopping, space opera variety, back when Venus as a jungle and Mars a habitable desert. At some point I learned they were not only the same person but a woman. Despite this SF background, her first novel was a hardboiled detective story that caught the eye of Howard Hawks. He brought her to Hollywood to help William Faulkner with the famously troubled and outrageously convoluted script for The Big Sleep. She had both a successful Hollywood career and continued to publish SF. George Lucas hired her to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back. She died of cancer shortly after turning in the script and their continues to be discussion over whether any of her material was used by Lawrence Kasdan in the final screenplay.

Much of Leigh Brackett remains in print, but the packaging of the anthologies have too much Buck Rogers about them to tempt me. But I did read that she is the "Poetess of the Pulps." I might have to lay aside my prejudices and have a go at something like Enchantress of Venus.

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Monday MORNING

2011-08-08T07:39:00.000-05:00

BOOK REVIEW: THE LOVECRAFT ANTHOLOGY VOL 1

2011-08-07T15:33:00.002-05:00

The Lovecraft Anthology: v. 1 by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second graphic adaptation of Lovecraft material I have read from SELFMADE HERO press. The first At the Mountains of Madness was a classy production but possibly suffered from an over-respect for the material. This anthology, containing seven stories from as many illustrators, is much more fun, But the stories themselves are more fun, more lurid, more outrageous than the ponderous and self-important At the Mountains of Madness.

Here are Lovecraft classics such as "The Dunwich Horror," "The Shadow Over Insmouth," "The Call of Cthulhu," and four others. (Am I the only person who has to check the spelling on "Cthulhu" every time I type it?) There is much slithery horror to be had in these stories, and the artists relish it. Nor do the hold back when depicting the New England version of hillbillies that populate the dismal wastelands from Connecticut to Maine. Lovecraft and Erskine Caldwell may seem an unlikely pair, but I have to come to think that Lovecraft does for Yankee psychic depravity what Caldwell did for sexual depravity in the South.

A second volume is due within the year.

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BOOK REVIEW: THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS by Hesh Kestin

2011-08-06T18:11:00.000-05:00

The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The rise, during a couple of weeks in the 1963, of Russell Newhouse from Brooklyn College honor student to kingpen of a major crime organization.

Hestin fills his narrative with enough period detail to keep all the wild improbabilities and outrageous characters grounded in a very believable New York City. (Although some of it we may recognize because the cliches have been so embedded in our minds from movies and TV.) The momentum flags some in the second half, but from the time Shushan Cats, the most famous Jewish mobster in New York City, enters the Bhotke Young Men's Society in Brooklyn to arrange a funeral for his mother, Russell Newhouse finds himself adopted into a seductive world of money, glamour, and the kindly (?) attentions of the most erudite mobster character ever created.

Hestin creates laugh-out-loud episodes and also has characters let loose on several sacred cows of the period -- actually it's mostly the Kennedy family. The story reads like a fable, although the moral may be that you can justify just about anything. The book left me craving cold cuts and sharper suits.

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BOOK REVIEW: DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM by Cory Doctorow

2011-08-04T09:05:00.000-05:00

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Provide free fuel -- check
Abolish money -- check
Conquer death -- check

What have you got? One Bitchun society!

Doctorow's novel takes place in a not too distant future where all the above and more have been achieved. Much of what exists is the predictive stuff you read about in popular magazines today: our computers are embedded within our bodies, we make phone calls through our cochlea, etc. That conquering death thing could still be someways off. Happy participants in the Bitchun society do frequent back-ups of themselves, in case death comes from misadventure. You don't want to lose too much time when downloaded into your freshly cloned body. Others just enjoy an occasional change, or don't want to put up with a bout of the flu. As a result, everyone has an apparent age of their own choosing and their actual physical age which could now be a century or more older than they look. Bitchun!

Jules, our hero, has lived several lifetimes, composed well-received symphonies, and earned three Ph.D's. But he really finds himself on a visit to Disney World, Orlando. Here a finds a new lover among the employees passionately devoted to the un-revamped attractions around LIberty Square and the Haunted Mansion. Alas, even in this not particularly brave new world, hell still proves to be other people. The conniving Debra, fresh from a newly conceived Disney Beijing, has plans to bring things up to date around Liberty Square. Hiss. Boo.

This all sounds hopelessly lightweight for a novel, but Doctorow tells a good story and creates a convincing Bitchun society with hints of a darker side. Take away death and over-population becomes a problem. Jules previously lived in underground overflow facilities in Toronto. But since you spend most of your time in a virtual world, perhaps living a mile underground is no real burden. Off planet emigration is encouraged. Although he does not plan to do so himself, Jules knows more and more people who a "dead heading," having their back ups stored in canopic jars for a few years, decades, or even centuries. (You can also dead head for airplane flights, the best idea in the book.) If you have really had enough of life after a century or so, free lethal injections are available at the corner drugstore. But of course everything is free.

Is Disney World the perfect emblem of the Bitchun society? Doctorow plays lightly with his ideas with a plot that poses problems for his characters, some of them over a century old, that sound like the high-tech version of the problems kids with a summer job at a theme park might run into.

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BOOK REVIEW: FLAN by Stephen Tunney

2011-08-02T07:31:00.000-05:00

Flan: A Novel by Stephen Tunney
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Imagine Candide set in an Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Now imagine it dull and repetitious. You get Flan.

Flan wakes to find his apartment and possibly the entire world on fire. He barely escapes his building with his scorched toupee and Ginger Kang Kang, his talking fish. He is lucky to have his eyes, because many of those on the street who witnessed the bomb or whatever occurred have empty, bloody, pus-filled sockets. (A lot of things in Flan are bloody and or pus-filled.)

I made it about halfway through this one. Flan and Ginger set out from the devastated city, stumbling over endless corpses, witnessing gang rapes and mercy killings, learning that cannibalism has become a kind of spectator sport -- it's all an inventive but not very interesting endless chain of horror and black comedy. The rapid rate of mutation that sets in provides some entertaining creatures.

Tunney has also chosen a diction that slips into the cloying, repetitive prose of children's books from a nearly a century ago. It brings nothing to the narrative. I found the book easy to put down.

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MONDAY MORNING

2011-08-01T11:24:00.000-05:00

MANGA MANIA: DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 4 by Kazuo Umezu

2011-07-31T20:14:00.001-05:00

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 4 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mass suicide among first graders convinces Sho he must set up the school as a nation. First he defeats Princess in a very close election, then he sets about establishing his cabinet He knows that the insect monster from the wastelands is soon to attack. The working out of just what this monster is is the most implausible portion of Umezu's story so far, although the use of the term "implausible" here must be relative.

Monster defeated, many lives lost, almost a return to normalcy in the Nation of Yamoto Elementary School, but unfortunately the monster has laid eggs and they are hatching. These kids just can't get a break.

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MANGA MANIA: DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 3 by Kazuo Umezu

2011-07-31T10:24:00.004-05:00

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 3 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story becomes complicated by a parallel time episode involving Sho's mother. I suspect this will become a more common motif. Back at the school, enterprising pre-adolescents have decided that blood sacrifice is the way to solve their problem and they have picked out an unpopular kid for a victim. But there is a new boss in town, the leader of a girl gang who delivers possibly the best line ever spoken by a sixth-grader, "Mind your own fucking business. Bitch, no one calls me a gang leader. If you've got to call me something call me Princess!"

And a giant insect monster is roaming the wasteland.

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