Man, I'm getting no breaks on my reading lately. Counting Heads turned out to be an amateurish gambit on how many madeups an author can stuff between book covers before the story becomes as cold and dead as the paper it's printed on. I made it about 1/2 way through, then--damning all that cyber-punk, post-modern crap--decided to get out of genre fiction altogether for awhile. My next choice? Tree of Smoke, a 2007 National Book Award winner by Denis Johnson about last century's SouthEast Asian nightmare for Johnson/Nixon's America. It was humping along well until I threw the book against the wall at the post office. They had turned back my payment letters from the previous day's mailing, claiming insuffient postage of one cent. The stamps I used said "first class" with a gloriously-waving American flag, but without a printed numerical value. Evidently they weren't today's "first class" which caused me to miss financial deadlines and incur almost certain late penalities. I felt like D-Fens, hence the loss of a good book to my rage.

There are some authors I just don't get. Apparently, Gary A. Braunbeck is one of them. Three years ago I tried his debut novel, In Silent Graves, 2004 (published four years earlier as The Indifference of Heaven) and ended up bumbleheaded. So now I try Keepers from 2005 and find my way 3/4 through without a clue.

It seems that there are layers of translucent tissue paper between me and the crux of things. When I start reading the next day everything is just a detail-less convolution and I get tired of peeling backward when I want to go ahead with the story. I am not able to warm to his devices (Magritte-style bowler hats for identification), nor trust his transitions (dimensional doors inside comic books). I like his characters: what's not to like about a 16-year old hottie helping a 9-year old boy not act his age? But, somehow, I can't find a way to live in their skins, let alone care about the mysteries that are so attached to them, or wade through the pages of bleating at what ails them. Hey, I'm a sensitive, New Age kinda guy. I started choking up half-way through The Reader and was still sniffling by credit time. But too many sentences like “I just don't want to reach the end of my life and have only regrets” (Leisure Books, ISBN 0843955775, c.2005, p.217) and I start looking around for the Wite-Out. The heart on author Braunbeck's sleeve is just a little too contrary to my own afflictions.

While catching up on some of my neglected reviews, I've been reading John Shirley's short story compilation, Black Butterflies: A Flock on the Darkside, circa 1998. Wow. They are explicit, non-PC, downright weird, repulsive, curiously empathetic, fixating, grisly, fucking sick, pornographic, wickedly humorous, and fascinating studies, not plotted so much as spewed. I can now see his innocuous Crawlers was probably a serious attempt to burglarize the marketplace, but he just kept biting his tongue and cheek and it bled to death. Shirley should be savored in his own, inner juices, which probably means read only his works from exclusive, small run presses like Mark Ziesing's, that exist in relished antonymy to the mainstream. I'll call on Shirley again, if for no other reason than to tango with some of these hosebag characters, which move more like remnants than the rejects of society. And I'll watch out for any sarcasm fumbling the dance steps. Write what you know, right John?

Phew! After 1500 or so pages with Conan the Homicidal and a wizard who wants to rename Earth the Pequod out there in Joe's MedievalWorld of The First Law Trilogy, I clawed for the safety net of Neo-Noir with a Jim Thompson wannabe called Small Crimes by Dave Zeltserman. It was pretty much by-the-numbers with a victim-hero who couldn't add anything up, so, like him, I found myself "drifting back into whatever was easy" (p.95) and erasing at page 99 out of 263.

If you haven't noticed by now, I am having a tough time writing reviews these days. That's because my 86-year old Mom is in the last stages of renal failure. She is in a care facility in Phoenix 100 miles away, and, after a number of trips to the hospital and a brief affair with dialysis, she's currently under the kindhearted umbrella of Hospice with a prognosis calibrated to days, not weeks or months. I am reading strictly for distraction. My thoughts and actions--the ones that are fused to feelings, anyway--are on more important things right now.

Since I'm still reading but just not into writing reviews at the moment, I've capsuled the above 6 books into MINI-REVIEWS and posted them on a specially-created page. A shotgun-style save, really. Not worth reading. A pass for now, but I'll be back, maybe.

Here's more MINI-REVIEWS for the 3 books listed above.

I don't think I can stand any more McCammon after sloshing through four in a row, so I've combined his books listed below into one encapsulization, as they are the very 4 the author himself has tossed into the eternal OOP fire.

08/15/09

Decided to read short stories for awhile, so I picked up JohnVarley's Blue Champagne from 1986. Publisher's Weekly said, "the heavy streak of sentimentality leaves the reader feeling manipulated." Well, that was obviously written by a total curmedgeon. I gotta admit "Tango Charlie & Foxtrot Romeo"--poor choice for a title--choked and sniffled me up. For any prose this side of The Red Pony to do that, especially to my notorious noir heart, is accomplishment enough. Cream of the crop is that title plus "The Pusher" & "Press Enter".

Well, that wasn't enough Varley, so I backpedaled to the first collection, 1978's The Persistence of Vision. There's a group of stories in the middle--The Barbie Murders/Picnic on Nearside from 1980--that never made it out of PBO jail, but nostalgia for "Air Raid" and the title story pulled me in like Jupiter's gravity. "Air Raid", OMG! This story idea is so good Varley expanded it into the novella Millennium, which is also fantastic, but AR is so laconic, so lean an' mean, the 1P voice so brandishly posed, yet terrified and ultimately embracing, that it is one of the best Science Fiction stories I've ever read. The plot is too driven for further characterization. For that, you'll have to turn to the title story.

08/25/09

With damn near 10 million books in 16 languages with her name on 'em, I figured another look at Laurell K. Hamilton was grudgingly in order. After all, the Romance side of her category description seems to have lubed into Pornography, according to a number of alienated--and righteously indignant--fans. The other side of her category description is obviously Horror, a decidedly male genre, as is Pornography, yet Laurell's fan base appears to be 20-something, and younger, females. To me, that indicates a cultural phenomenon of attitudinal changes. So, I wouldn't go spewing Road Rage at some mousy, woman driver anymore. They might fork your tongue with a .357 Magnum.

Or a stake through your heart followed with a quick head removal.

So I jumped back into Guilty Pleasures, making it about 1/2 way this time. Laurell's a competent writer with a fairly comedic sense of the Black Grin, but definitely imbalances imagination over rationality. The basic premise--that our society has been overwhelmed and accepts lycanthrope and bloodsucker magic--seems patently ridiculous. I mean, humans would put up with vampires' pressing superiority about as much as we allowed WMD in Iraq. Oops, I forgot--we fought a war over that and there weren't any. Anyway, you get what I mean. But I'll go along with the fun. It's the tedium of stupid intrigue that I can't put a bear hug on. Sorry, but it's meaningless; it's cotton candy for the carnal and charnal crowd. And, just to shake your bones, why not read de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom instead? What? Too much Philosophy an' such? Besides, I want deviant sex without being labeled a deviant for reading it, right?.

Laurell K. Hamilton is not writing Pornography, but the time, attention, and money handed her seems pretty obscene.

Here I am banging around genres again. After Ursula's precise and determinded prose, I wanted to get hit with something a little more offensive, like a blindsiding haymaker. Natch, I wandered back to Horror, sliding easily into the seat with my old buddy, Graham Masterton. With Trauma from 2002, I pretty much caught him between yawns. It was like that Amy Adams vehicle from last year, Sunshine Cleaning, but without the laughs, as our overworked wife/mom in this novella keeps finding the chrysalis of a Clouded Apollo butterfly among the grisly, blood-mad crime scenes she's vaporizing. Very Palahniuk's Lullaby--also from 2002--but without the frothing social commentary, as this is Aztec demon Itzpapalotl's hidey-hole. "She drove people mad so that they killed the people they loved the most" (p.85). Dead at 98 out of 218.

Thinking infestation, I wormed into Ian Watson's 1st SciFi stunner, The Embedding from 1973, but, after chewing through info blocks of dry linguistics jargon, it burped up "ever since Chomsky's pioneer work . . ." (p.45) Da-da-da. Language determines 'Tude, dude. That's a worthwhile subject because War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength, right? Well, Ian's rationale is a little too uninspiring for me right now. Dead at 57 out 254.

So, maybe I'm in the wrong genres. How 'bout a Western for a change? What's that old Fonda-Widmark oater directed by Dmytryk I try to get people to watch with me? Yeah, Warlock, written by Oakley Hall in 1958. That's the ticket. But hell, I couldn't sink into Henry Holmes Goodpasture's journal epistolaries enough to get through the backstory. Dead at 16 out of 471.

I guess I'm destined for a rubberball clown nose and a good comic book, huh?

But wait, there's a final hope. Because, when in doubt, turn to the classics. I recall that Robert Louis Stevenson said he wanted to be remembered by two of his books. Since I've read Kidnapped, I turned to The Master of Ballantrae.

At midnight on September 25th, Mom turned 87. Four and one-half hours later, she succumbed to renal failure and passed away at the Friendship Village Health Center of Tempe. It was a good death. Painless, quiet, and seemingly content. Mom proclaimed she'd make it to her birthday, and, uncannily, she did.

For some inexplicable reason, I am reading Dean Koontz before, after, and around her demise. Fortunately, I was able to focus this spiriting away into his works during the Golden Decade. I expect no revealed arcana of knowledge or wealth, but there's something strange in this. But then maybe I'm just so constipated right now I can't see past my own tightened sphincter. What's with Koontz, then? Is he my colonoscopy probe?

I must say reading 7 Koontz novels in a row--I dropped Twilight Eyes & Hideaway after initial persuals--from the '80s Golden Era of Horror--I passed up Lightening and anything written under a penname--I've come away quite unruffled and lethargic; numbed, if you will allow, but not soiled or abused, just kinda left by the side of the road with my thumb out. All the novels are attention-getters/page-turners for sure, but quite unremarkable from a literary viewpoint, I'm afraid. There are moments of sheer brillance, terror, teeth-grinding, joy, sympathy, laughing--even tears and whoops of moral upstaging--but each novel in and of itself seems to float away in memory like an overfilled helium balloon, slowly losing air and any purported weight. As a result, I've decided to bunch any Koontz-atics I might share into a single jotting designed for my personal and singular refreshment. They are more like notes cocked and armed for party conversation skirmishes.

GOODBYE 2009

As the year progressed, reading became less important. The economic meltdown kept me hunkered down, and with it, came regression. I was no good photographically, either, giving up on even taking the time to shoot decent snapshots. The books I liked the best typically left me as brain dead as a killer bong hit. I turned pages on a little over 45 books this year, finding substantially less interesting reads, and subsequently lollygagging in the vacuous pleasures of escapism. I discovered a few new authors to explore:

1. Jack Ketchum

2. Joe Abercrombie

3. Elizabeth Kostova

The best book I read this year was probably her The Historian after factoring out the demi-god works of:

The Word for World is Forest

Lord of the Flies

And lotsa old friends visited this year:

1. Tom Piccirilli

2. Suzy Charnas

3. John Wyndham

4. And, of course, the Holy Trinity of American-bred 80s Horror: King-Koontz-McCammon.

Summarizing 2009 with regards to fantasist literature is probably best illustrated by the major award winners for best novel.

The Nebula was won by Ursula K. Le Guin for Powers.

The Hugo by Neil Gaimen for The Graveyard Book.

The World Fantasy Award was tied by Jeffrey Ford for The Shadow Year and Margo Lanagan for Tender Morsels.

The International Horror Guild Award was discontinued this year, but we still have the Stoker, which was staked out by Stevie for Duma Key.

Across the pond, Memoirs of a Master Forger from William Heaney/Graham Joyce rode off with the British Fantasy award, The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod took the checkered flag for the British Science Fiction award, and Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod finished off with the Arthur C. Clarke award. PBOs were distinguished with a tie between Emissaries from the Dead by Adam-Troy Castro and Terminal Mind by David Walton for the Philip K. Dick award. And last and certainly least, the John W. Campbell Award smiled down upon Cory Doctorow for Little Brother and Ian MacLeod for Song of Time.

This is the first year I can remember when I have not read a single winner from these career-making awards. And, you know something? Not a single damn one of them sound interesting enough to persue.

My recommendations? Try reading something out of the new section at your local bookstore that's taken the shelf space from Horror. Just look for the fresh sea-foam green paint spelling out Paranormal Romance.