Mutant Ramblings and Inane Babble

Rage - Stephen King

2007-03-16T12:58:00.000-04:00

For those of you who were kind enough to enlighten me on Joe Hill's parentage: yes, I knew. I didn't mention it in my review of Heart Shaped Box because I didn't think that it should matter - the book is either good or it isn't, no matter who his dad was.

However, immediately after reading Joe Hill's book, I was fortunate enough to find this little gem in my local used book store: Rage, by Stephen King. It is only coincidence that I followed up Hill's HSB with a book by his father. I had been looking for Rage for well over a year now (it is out of print), and I found it the day I finished HSB. Coincidence? Yes. Fate? Maybe.

I won't review the book here, but I will recommend it highly. The book's main character, Charlie Decker, reminded me a lot of Holden Caulfield. In fact, the whole book had a very "Catcher in the Rye" feel. Granted, there are a lot of differences between Catcher and Rage, but if Hunter S. Thompson had written Catcher, and Holden had been on coke, then Rage probably would have been the result.

Sound interesting? Great! But if you are looking to read it soon, try looking for it under "B" (for Richard Bachman), as that was the pen-name King used when he wrote it. However, I'm told that King voluntarily had this book pulled off the market, so you may have difficulties (I sure did). I can kinda see why - the book has some similarities to the Columbine event, but was published over two decades prior, so King would have been equally justified to leave it alone. Doesn't matter, though, it was his book so it was his choice. I'm just glad I have a good used book store nearby…

Heart Shaped Box - by Joe Hill

2007-03-07T16:27:00.000-05:00

Borders Books emailed me a 40% off coupon for Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box. I read the synopsis and was intrigued, and a quick web search later uncovered several positive pre-release reviews. It had been many years since I read an actual horror novel, so I figured what the hell and went out and bought it that day. I blew through this book quickly - the prose was snappy, the dialogue was sharp and witty, and the story was hard to put down.

The thing I liked most about HSB was the characters. The two main protagonists, the aging rockstar Jude and his girlfriend Georgia, were well realized, colorful, and I cared and feared for them. Jude jumped off the pages almost immediately, but it took a little time to get Georgia going. At first, I thought Georgia was just fodder for the ghost, but as the story grew and the situations became worse – she fleshed out as a character and showed that she was more than just a two dimensional, cookie-cutter rockstar girlfriend. I especially liked how Hill used the intense and desperate situations to build her character – instead of fading away or giving up and dying like I expected her to, she, instead, used these situations to show that even a Goth ex-stripper has true moral fiber.

As a horror novel, it was vibrant and imminently creepy. There were a few nights when this novel actually stole into my dreams and took control of them. For me, this is not an unusual occurrence - just about any book that I get heavily involved with will become part of my nightly dreams while I'm actively reading it. However, it's easy to shake off the after-effects of a dream concerning "The Hobbit." Not so much with HSB. A couple of nights I woke up, pulse racing and confused, only to find that I still couldn't quite discern reality from my dreams. This is an uneasy feeling when you still have sleep-cobwebs in your head and think you are really helping a rockstar and his girlfriend trying to escape a deranged, hypnotic ghost. One night when I was having a particularly frantic dream that was an interwoven mesh of my job horrors and the novel (not sure which was worse), my 2 year old daughter woke up screaming and bolted out of her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. I jolted awake and immediately darted into the hallway, where I found her lying, trembling visibly. When I picked her up and tried to comfort her, she just glanced towards her bedroom door and said, "there's something in there." Freaky, to say the least.

The very next night, I put her to bed and went to my bedroom to read. After an hour or so, the power went out. Complete darkness, daughter screaming, me running down the hallway and banging into the walls. I managed to feel my way to her without killing myself, and I'm glad I did, because she was one scared little girl. Luckily, I managed to calm her as we walked slowly into the hallway and then down the steps to the kitchen and the safety of the flashlight. I don't think my wife or my kid noticed, but I was one jumpy dad. I gave my wife the good flashlight and took my spare hiking headlamp and went on a house-wide search for every candle that we owned. We owned a lot, and I lit them all. I did get a few puzzled looks from my wife, and she commented, while looking at all the lit candles, that even though the electricity was out, we certainly didn't need to worry about getting cold.

Obviously, Hill did a good job at freaking me out on a mental level, which, for me, is why horror fiction is so much better than a movie. The book wasn't overtly psychological in a sense that it twisted your thoughts and made you insane. It focused more on the imagery, blending the ordinary - radios, televisions, computers, automobiles - with a hypnotic, macabre sense of danger and helplessness. His skill in delivering these scenes, and making them vivid and alive, was what impressed me the most.

HSB also punches the reader in the gut with hard action in heavy doses. Sometimes the action, especially in the first third of the novel, felt too frantic, like the characters were moving from the frying pan to the fire, and then back to the frying pan almost continuously. This may have been intentional and probably part of Hill's hook to get the story moving rapidly. It worked for me on some levels but towards the end of the first third of the book I was getting a little weary. That's just a minor nitpick, however, and the second third of the book balanced things a little better and started probing more into the depth of the characters, their backstories, and the story itself.

My only other complaint about the book was the ending. Without giving anything away, I'll just say that it was a little too... tidy... for my tastes. Don't get me wrong, though - the ending was good, but I like my endings to be more like a pile of dirt with a few bits and pieces of gemstones hidden inside. HSB ended like a good port and a cigar after a nice steak dinner.

While reading this novel I decided to peruse the internet and see what other reviewers had to say. I was enjoying the book very much, so perhaps I wanted a little validation. What I found was overwhelmingly positive - almost every reviewer was excited and impressed. They also expressed praise for Hills’ previous book of short stories - 20th Century Ghosts. I did find one negative comment about the book on someone's blog. I found it quite amusing:

I'm curious as to what part of this mess of a novel you found frightening. Was it the clichés that ran through it from literally the beginning to the end? (Ghosts driving sadistic cars is one that seems most pressing here.) I've never understood why genre fiction gets off the critical hook for doing the things literary fiction would be slapped over.

Hmmm… Where to start with this? Well, if you're going to give a ghost a car to drive, don't you think it would be a little more intimidating for him to drive a sadistic vehicle rather than a Vespa scooter? And while we are on the subject, the ghost's vehicle wasn't really that sadistic. It was an old truck. That it was driven by a sadistic ghost made it intimidating. Or is this reviewer trying to tell us that sadistic, mean-spirited ghosts and horrifying situations are cliché to a horror novel? Well, duh. Let's be honest, though: this comment wasn't about clichés. It was about genre vs. literary fiction. I thought the world got past that issue twenty years ago, but, apparently, the commenter is still a little insecure. Perhaps we should all give him a hug. Allow me to throw my own polarizing, intellectually dishonest jab into the ring: Why does literary fiction get off the critical hook for delivering such pretentious, god-awful stories that genre fiction would be slapped over?

Bottom line – I highly recommend this book, especially if you’re in the mood for a good, old-fashioned horror novel with many 21st century concepts and gadgets.

GRRM and the Moon

2007-01-18T17:04:00.000-05:00

My year has been made, and it's only January the eighteenth. Unfortunately, I have now been set up for either a very long wait or a huge disappointment. I am talking about, of course, the recent announcement that HBO has acquired the rights to make a series of George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, or ASOIAF, as us fanboys like to call it. For those of you that don't know, ASOIAF is a masterfully written series of fantasy books that is leaps and bounds better than anything else out there, past or present. I won't go into too much detail here, but if you want to learn more, click on a few of my favorite links and you're likely to get enough information to satisfy your curiosity for some time. And no, George R R Martin is not that objectivist asshole prick. That's Terry Goodkind.

Why is this so important to me? ASOIAF represents a watershed moment in my life. I've been reading books for a long, long time, and have had a few favorites come and go. I've had favorite authors, and I've had favorite books. Occasionally, the planets would align and one of my favorite authors would write a book that ranked among my favorites. Over time, some of them fell out of favor, some I got tired of, some got replaced by others, then forgotten, and some shot themselves in the head. But I've never been able to proclaim a book or an author to be my absolute, undeniable favorite. Until ASOIAF.

When I first read A Game of Thrones, the first book in the series, back in 2002, I had no clue what I was getting in to. Two years prior, I had just gotten back into reading fantasy after picking up a couple of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. I read them and enjoyed them. They were an improvement over what I used to read back in the 1980's, but they still weren't exactly what I was looking for. But my interest was piqued and I started buying books at random from the fantasy shelves, with hopes of finding the "perfect fantasy story" to suit my tastes. The problem, with hindsight, was that I really didn't know what I wanted. If, in early 2002, someone would have asked me, "what, exactly, are you looking for in your fantasy stories?" My likely response would have been either "I don't know," or "I'll know it when I read it." The latter happened to be true - once I read A Game of Thrones, I knew. It was well written by a very experienced and polished author. The world was full of grim and gritty realism. The use of magic was subtle and didn't interfere with the plot. And then there were the characters - the clincher, as it were. The characters came alive, were flawed, and were believable because they were flawed. There were no absolute good guys out to save the world. There were no absolute evil overlords bent on destroying it. In fact, that was one thing that always bothered me about high fantasy - why were the evil overlords so hell-bent on destroying the world when they actually lived in it as well? It all seemed kind of counterintuitive to me. I loved ASOIAF because the good guys did bad things and the bad guys did good things. Heroes made dumb, sometimes self-serving decisions and got people killed. Bad guys, when given opportunities to reflect, actually felt remorse.

There are four books in his series now, with three more due over the next several years. Mind you, these are not small books, but there are flocks of loyal fans that devour each one the day they are released, myself included. And so far, every one of these have ranked over any other book I have ever read. Undoubtedly. And those are strong words from me - I'm very reluctant to call anything my favorite. I'm one of those types that will give you a list of twenty things when you ask things like, "hey, what is your favorite such-and-such?" Because I rarely, if ever, believe in absolute favorites.

I'm a little to young to actually remember the moon launches of the late sixties and early seventies. I was alive, but still in diapers, so I can only imagine the actual excitement and fervor the general populace felt when the first Saturn V rocket was launched with three astronauts on board - two of which were going to be walking on the surface of another planet in a few days time. I'm such a sucker for moments like these that I really wish that I could have been more aware of what was happening. I wish I could remember what it felt like to be there that day and understand that I was witnessing the one of the most important events in the history of mankind. If and when HBO decides to take their rights and actually greenlight this thing, the day the ASOIAF series premiers will be my own, personal moon launch. Like I said, books are important to me, and to see my most important books ever be made into a TV series will be exciting, eagerly anticipated, and hopefully not disappointing. Why am I so excited? I don't really know. Perhaps it validates my tastes to know there are others out there that feel as strongly as I do. So strongly, in fact, that they are willing to spend millions of dollars and years of time to bring the greatest story I have ever read to the most popular entertainment medium ever - the television set. And in the process, maybe, just maybe, it will hook an entirely new audience into the world of ASOIAF.

Oh No!!!

2007-01-12T14:25:00.000-05:00

Well, It's been a little too long since my last post, so I am already breaking my promise to myself to keep on top of this blog thingy. It doesn't bode well for me as a writer, and it certainly doesn't bode well for keeping any form of consistency on the web. I am a shadow - a ghost if you will - here one moment and gone the next. If anything, my avatar is certainly appropriate.

However, a lot has happened in my world since the last time I reared my head. The Democrats actually managed to pull off a successful election finally, and they did it by posing as moderate conservatives. Surprise, surprise. I guess I was right all along… ;-) Kidding aside, I think this election was an important wake up call for all politicians (not just republicans). The republicans made a crucial misjudgment of the psyche of the citizens of the US by using their advantageous majority to swing us from one extreme (the loony liberal) to the other (the dangerously psychotic neo-conservative). In other words, they missed the point. The reason why we ran the loonies out of office in the first place was the sheer extremeness of their views. Granted, to some of us, the neo-con extreme was a refreshing change from the original, but too much of anything is not a good thing, and we soon learned that everything in moderation is the key. I like to compare good politics to that of a good restaurant - good menu variety comprised of foods with delicate balances of contrasting flavors and spices. The republicans fed us nothing but Big Macs with extra onions for 6 straight years. Perhaps an Alton Brown/Rachel Ray ticket in 2008?

I wish my football season was as successful as the Democrats were. As it happened, my season was a mentally and emotionally exhausting roller-coaster ride into oblivion. It started out with such shining and high hopes - The Buckeyes were ranked number 1 and beat number 2 Texas at the start of the season. And the Bengals, my beloved Bungles, went 4-0 in pre-season and Carson Palmer looked well recovered from his devastating knee injury that knocked him out of the playoffs last year. But we all know how it went - the hated Ravens dominated the division, the Bengals teased (heartbreakingly) a few times, but never could quite clench a playoff spot, and the Buckeyes got their asses handed to them by the heavy underdog Gators in the National Championship. I console myself that, at the very least, the Cowboys ended on a low note, which does do my heart some good.

Oh well, there's always next year. Besides, the Bengals will get a better draft pick and an easier schedule, and the Bucks have a lot of starters returning. And we did kick the crap out of Michigan.

My 2 year old daughter is smarter than me

2006-10-06T15:24:00.000-04:00

This is my first post here, so I want to test the waters a bit. I'll start off by digging up a blog entry made on Aug. 16, 2006 on Live Journal.

I'm afraid I'm not terribly good at keeping my blog updated, but I doubt anyone notices since I am the only one that reads it. This is probably a good thing, since I have trouble making sense even to myself sometimes. I save the good stuff for heated emails to my boss.

A lot has happened since my last post, the most important of which is my daughter's second birthday. She's really stinkin' cute, and gets moreso everyday. Yesterday I was changing her clothes and she decided to sing her ABC's. All of them. I didn't even know she could get to "D," let alone all the way to "Z." Apparently my wife didn't either. The real kicker is that I was the only one that witnessed it, and she hasn't sang them again since. I told my wife about it, and now she's jealous that she didn't get to see/hear it. I've already caught her a few times trying to badger the daughter into singing them. Not gonna happen though, since she's a stubborn little thing and knows she can get a rise out of the wife by doing the opposite of what she asks.

Damn, they change a lot, and quickly too. But so far it hasn't been too quickly, at least for myself. I love the way she changes, grows, and learns. I can interact and communicate with her better and better each day. The wife is also very excited to see her change and grow, but she does do her share of pining for the small "baby days," where she could swaddle and cuddle the little tyke. Not me though - perhaps I'm more comfortable now that my little girl is walking and talking. Each day is a new adventure, and I enjoy each one. Even the meltdowns and tantrums are appealing in their own odd, sick way. I guess they just assure me that my daughter is not just a little machine - she has a mind of her own and can be quite willful when she wants to be (and she wants to be a lot). Good for her. I hope she keeps it up, provided she also keeps that smart head on her shoulders as well. Sure, willfulness may be an extra challenge for me to deal with, but if it benefits her, then so be it. Because, in the end, it's not about me.