Book Review: The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

I just finished Michael Grunwald's The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. The book left me filled with conflicting emotions. I feel pride for my adopted state of Florida and the people that have worked so hard to make it such a fine place to live, and for our species for recognizing what a remarkable natural resource that The Everglades are. As Grunwald notes in his epilogue, there is "only on Everglades, and we have just about destroyed it. It is our ability to recognize this, and to make amends, that sets us apart from other species" (369). 

It's a fine point, and one can't help but thank folks like Ernest Coe, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Nathaniel Reed, Paul Tudor Jones, Lawton Chiles, countless leaders of the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes, and an untold list of other journalists, politicians, environmentalists, and citizens that dedicated their lives to the restoration of the River of Grass.

But I also feel disgust that the twentieth-century ethic of "slash, cut, dredge, and pave" has left the Glades a shadow of its once-majestic self. I spent some time looking at some of the most recent CERP findings (data set 2012-2017) and, while restoration has yielded some positive benefits, sprawl is still encroaching on the western Everglades and remains a threat to environmentally sensitive areas such as Big Cypress. 

South Florida is essentially built out. Grunwald notes this in his meticulously written book, which was published fifteen years ago, and that statement is even more true now. The limits for horizontal growth in South Florida have been met, and there will need to be drastic changes in how communities continue to plan and develop as we move forward in the new millennium. 

I loved this book, and I purchased a copy for my father--a hydrologist that spent more than forty years with the United State Forest Service watching commerce and conservation clash in communities throughout Oregon, Washington, and Colorado. Grunwald is both a lyrical science writer with an active prose style and a careful technical writer that is able to connect the dots between a vast amount of disparate research items. He covers the topic of the Everglades evenly and fairly, acknowledging the various usurpations and thefts of the American government toward the native people of the region with sympathy and pathos. Like many other chapters in American history, the attempted settlement of the Everglades isn't all butterflies and rainbows, and it's clear that various interests with both positive and nefarious intentions collaborated to severely damage America's Everglades. 

And yet, the text concludes on a slightly optimistic note by pointing toward a twenty-first-century dynamic of restoration and conservation that will allow the River of Grass to return to some semblance of its former glory. I hope I live to see that day, although the projections for restoring water flow to only 70% of its original capacity are still not scheduled to be met for another twenty years into the future. 

I hope to visit the Everglades in the coming months, even if only for a short time, and I wanted to post a quick review saying kudos to Michael Grunwald on writing an important book, and kudos to the various agencies now working to restore these great wetlands to their former glory.

As Marjory Stoneman Douglas said, There are no other Everglades in the world.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Stephen King's newest novel checked just about every box for me in terms of including everything I loved about the stories from the early portion of his career into the mid-1990s. 

Convincing and nostalgic representation of small-town Americana? Flint City is that and more, from the communal ball fields to the small-town police force...

Vivid, three-dimensional characters that we quickly grow to care about and relate with? Ralph and Jeannie Anderson, Howie Gold,  Yune Sablo, and Claude Bolton are living, breathing people in this story--complete with the biases and flaws that nicely balance their basic humanity. The text makes it clear--almost to a fault--that some of these folks are good people that did a bad thing. 

None of these characters is as authentic, though, as Terry Maitland. Coach T. deserves his own full-length story, and I couldn't help but picture a close golfing buddy of mine--a local coaching legend in his own right--every time I think about Terry. The thing that happens to Terry is terrifying. It's one of greatest fears, and he keeps it together better than I think I ever could, that's for sure.

Supernatural boogie-woogie based on overt childhood fears and a haunting legend? Oh, yeah. The Outsider is the physical manifestation of an infamous international legend, and he's scary as hell. 

Trusted characters from other realms of the King Universe? Holly Gibney shows up here, and she's a welcome addition. 

I read this last week and it kept me up until midnight two or three times. It's vintage King, and well worth your time...

Blackwater: The Complete Saga

Michael McDowell is a writer of great range and impressive talent. It has been a few years (maybe as far back as reading Blake Crouch's Run or Neil Gaiman's American Gods) that I became as engrossed in a story as I did with McDowell's Blackwater saga.

It's an ambitious, epic story that McDowell released over the course of six long novellas in 1983. I can't imagine what it must have been like living in his head at that time, as the story spans generations of families over the course of much of a century. McDowell's fictional berg of Perdido is fully realized as a rapidly evolving cultural center of rural Southern Alabama. McDowell never shies away from dealing with the subjects of racism, poverty, misogyny, sexuality, and the impacts of WWII on Perdido. His observational talents are keen and he writes fine dialogue. One of my favorite aspects of his writing is his uncanny ability to render Miriam and Elinor Dammert's curt responses perfectly at every turn. These are proud, powerful women, and McDowell's characterization rings absolutely true.

And that's to say nothing of Mary-Love Caskey--the matriarch of Perdido's first family. Mary-Love is a piece of work, and that's putting it nicely. Her dealings with Elinor, who marries Mary-Love's only son Oscar, escalate from terse to all-out war in the span of a few chapters. It's compelling emotional warfare as members of the family (and Perdido itself) take sides. 

This is a ghost story and an historical melodrama. It's a horror tale and a coming-of-age story. It's a brutally honest testament to the human condition while also peering unapologetically into the abyss of the monstrous. It's taken as a given that Elinor is different than the rest of Perdido, but the nature of her differences is always treated with hushed gossip as she frolics in the turbid waters of the Perdido and Blackwater Rivers.

This is an achievement in literature, folks. If you haven't read McDowell's work, start here and then be prepared to be repeatedly surprised by the quality of the writing and storytelling...

The Wind Through the Keyhole

I am re-reading The Wind Through the Keyhole, and I am enjoying it just as much the second time through as I did a few years ago. I love the narrative approach here, as Sai King both fills in some backstory on Roland's life as a greenhorn gunslinger while also delivering a truly delightful (if not somber) embedded narrative in the center of the tale. 

King does this often, and to great affect. Whenever writers trot out that old saw about showing versus telling, folks are curious about the actual strategies one might use to reveal character or setting or plot in a way that feels natural and unforced. That is showing, and one of the best strategies is to tell a related story. King wants to illustrate the scope of Bobby Fornoy's genius in "The End of the Whole Mess," so he has his narrator tell a pair of stories about how he built a glider and a radio as a child. His chilling novella 1922 is chock full of great tangential, but wholly engaging and necessary, stories. All of it amounts to depth and complexity in the storytelling. 

I am also reminded of King's depth as a writer when I revisit his stories from this universe. It's easy to overlook his skills in writing magical realism and epic fantasy, but one shouldn't. He's got a lot of Tolkien and Lewis and Bradbury in him, to be sure...

This is a fine novel for both engaging with a great story and studying the structure of a pithy fantasy with a keen embedded narrative...

Mr. Mercedes: A Review

I can't imagine that it took Stephen King long to write Mr. Mercedes. Still a gifted and prolific writer, King produces two or three book-length projects each year, in addition to his myriad short stories, columns, and essays. Within that bunch there is usually a true gem or three, but this one is, alas, merely average.

King trots out the old chestnut of the retired cop and his daily face-off with the prospect of eating his old man's service revolver. There's a psycho whose sexist and racist tendencies just seem tired and distracting here. Yes, we understand that he doesn't like women (even his mother, who repulses him even as she relieves him of certain tensions...ick) and anyone that is different than him. By the way, he's a generically handsome young white man who is good with technology and, for some reason, hates the world.

It's like King ordered Brady Hartsfield straight out of the literary characterization catalog (probably filed under 'P' for Patterson). This is a major failing in the book, as King could have offered a glimpse into the nature of evil by going against the grain here and creating a character outside of the homogeneous tradition of sociopathic behavior. But with nothing new to offer, this just reads like another dime-store serial-killer paperback. 

Hodges is similarly one-dimensional. Overweight. Obsessed. Unorthodox. Tough. He's a rhino whose subtle move is to hit perps with a sock filled with ball bearings. Sheesh...

The strangest element of the story is the plot point concerning Olivia's suicide. I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that a person whose Mercedes sedan was stolen to execute such a nefarious task would feel such enormous guilt that she would actually commit suicide.

Tragic and horrifying that someone might take a car for that purpose? Oh, certainly. I wouldn't keep the damned car, as she did--that's for sure. 

But she was the victim of a crime as well. Whatever folks do with her car (and the explanation of leaving the car unlocked and having that leaked to the papers--well, it just strains credulity) after they steal it is on them. She didn't drive that car into the crowd and, as it turns out, she never left the car unlocked in the first place. Just absurd... 

Mr. Mercedes is not without its charms, of course. Much of it is written in the present tense, a device King has proven exceedingly adept at executing. That's no small trick. And I really like Holly's character development, and Janelle's positive spirit. The pathos created in the opening passage, while folks assemble for a job fair in the early hours of the morning, is vintage Stephen King. Too bad the sincerity and heart captured in those opening pages wasn't sustainable throughout the remainder of the novel.

About every fifth King effort is average. This is that fifth book (put it out there with Lisey's Story and From a Buick 8 and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), and that's okay. 

King is still hitting homers at a rate that makes him a first-ballot HOFer...

The End is Nigh

I am really enjoying the stories in The End is Nigh. This is the first anthology in a series that will cover the apocalypse from a variety of angles. These stories chronicle life before the destruction, and they are filled with creative plots, interesting characters, and loads of pathos. 

I'm five stories in and haven't encountered a story that didn't place the emphasis where it should be in apocalyptic storytelling: on the characters. These are heart-warming (Liu's story) and heart-rending (Due's story) glimpses into the lives and actions of the stressed.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in Jake Kerr's "Wedding Day." As the author says himself, it's a love story. It's also a chilling glimpse into devolution, bureaucracy, and the maddeningly arbitrary nature of haves and have-nots.

I found this collection on sale for $1.99, but it's more than worth the seven bucks. Quality writers, interesting themes, and lots of fine storytelling. Highly recommended...

The Troop and "Blackwood's Baby"

Nick Cutter (a pseudonym for a Canadian writer) did a nice job with characterization and pacing in The Troop. I liked aspects of the book quite a bit, including the use of a variety of epistolary techniques and creative narrative elements. The faux GQ articles and the transcripts from the sworn testimony on Falstaff Island were a nice touch I liked the little advertisement in the third act.

It's well written, but it's not the kind of horror I really like reading anymore. I am okay with some aggressive gore in my visual horror, and I don't cringe from it when looking at movies. But when it comes to my reading impulses, I like mundane horror--quiet horror--so much more than the squeamish, body-altering stuff taking place here.

It's a book about parasites, so you can get the picture (funny, because I just read Stephen King's "Gray Matter" last night and loved it all over again). There's a lot of rupturing, and a lot of disgusting transformation. There are parts that will make you want to grab a shower.

But all in all, it's a good little yarn because Cutter never loses sight of the horror of what happens to ordinary people when they are subjected to things beyond their control. These kids (and Scoutmaster Tim) don't deserve this. They're collateral damage in a government experiment gone haywire, and they're no more deserving (well, maybe Shelley is deserving) of their fate than is a house full of regular folks just living their lives in the Middle East that get bombed into oblivion when one of our drones hits the wrong target. To his credit, Cutter plumbs the psychological sense of repulsion these adolescents feel as they are plunged into the world of adult mistakes. These poor kids keep waiting for their parents, until finally they have to throw their hands up and face the facts: adults are messed up, and they don't have things under control.

It's well written and it moves well. Just be warned that this falls into the category of gross-out horror if you're looking for a summer read...

Laird Barron's "Blackwood's Baby" is a solid short story. Not as good as much of the work in The Imago Sequence, but certainly a nice way to pass an hour...

Halloween and Other Seasons

I know this little web journal has accumulated some dust in the last months, but things on my end have been busy and hectic. Still (and despite a serious chest cold that's keeping me indoors), I love Halloween and I had to drop by for a few moments. I love everything about the holiday, and I've been trying to sneak in a few short stories here and there in between the books I've been reading for my studies at UCF.

Lyla has never been this excited for a holiday. At three years of age, it's amazing to see how animated she gets about the idea of trick-or-treating and dressing up. I often wonder what life must look like to her--everything new and vibrant and exhilarating and novel. Dang, she's a good kid. We couldn't have been more blessed in that regard...

If you're looking for some Halloween goodness, look no further than Halloween & Other Seasons, by Al Sarrantonio. Be forewarned, though: this collection is seriously dark.

Sarrantonio's collection of short stories doesn't pull any punches.

In fact, it hits you right in the throat from the first story, "Summer," and keeps the pressure on throughout the collection. "Summer" is a cautionary tale, a realistic view of youthful nostalgia that plays with the old maxim be careful what you wish for to keen effect.

"Sleepover" is haunting and sorrowful. Those kids (shakes head) deserve so much more from life. Sadly, there experience is the reality for some, and Sarrantonio's central message here holds much truth.

"Eels" is perhaps the most frightening story. Sarrantonio doesn't shy away from serious themes, dealing here with child abuse. It's a dark, dark tale, and I can only hope that a reunion was in store in the third act...

"Letters from Camp" tells the tale of a punishment camp for wayward boys. Macabre stuff, this one...

"Roger in the Womb" had me in stitches. Again, this one has much to say about the human condition and the notions we hold about the facade of safety...

There's a kinship in these tales, both in style and spirit, with Ray Bradbury's best short fiction. In fact, this feels like a companion collection to the late great author's unrivaled The October Country. In a few cases ("Roger in the Womb" probably being the best example), it expands on the themes Bradbury explored in that collection.

Sarrantonio's prose is good--lyrical and rhythmic. He has a great eye for observation, though that also gets him in trouble in spots. He lingers over the smallest details, often to great effect, and occasionally to ill effect. In spots, the writing bogs down with saccharine sweet details that might make some skim forward to get back to the story.

That's a minor quibble, though, and it, too, is evidenced in Bradbury's writing. I liked this collection very much (B+) and would recommend it to anyone with a stomach for stories that don't finish up with the traditional happy resolution.

To my thinking, we need more stories like these.

And, for those of you looking for a little darkness in your day on this, the final afternoon of October, my collections These Strange Worlds: Fourteen Dark Tales and The Silver Coast and Other Stories will be free until midnight this evening. Take a look and drop me a line if you like what you see!

Happy Halloween!  

Beware the Cults of Old Leech!

It's been said before in almost every review that I've encountered on Laird Barron's The Croning, but I'll have to just repeat it here to have it on the record: this is one of the best debut novels I've ever read.


It's not just a terrific debut, it's a frightening masterpiece of a novel. Barron's longish short fiction set the bar exceedingly high, but he didn't waste any time vaulting those expectations with this piece.


Barron's prose style is complex and filled with haunting imagery. His locales, from the Olympic Mountains to the Mexican slums, are exotic and vivid; his characterization is nuanced, particularly his depiction of Don Miller, our protagonist that always seems a step behind the story that is chasing him from the shadows.


It's a tale of madness, dementia, love, generational obsessions, cosmic evil and power. It features rifts in time and space, and it shakes the reader's foundation on the possibilities of things that lurk in shadow, those limbless, hungry children whose chief pastime is infanticide.


I finished the novel some time ago, and yet it still bounces around in my head. I marked some passages in my Kindle (the embedded narrative Kurt tells on The Witch is brilliant, as is the retelling of the opening fairy tale), and I've returned to them a time or two over the last month. 


This novel, complete with its wholly satisfying conclusion (so sad! so very, very sad!), instantly marks itself as a classic in the horror field. Atmospheric and damned scary, this book delves into the heart of madness to underline its central point:


There are frightful things.


Indeed there are! Beware the cults of Old Leech, and the servitors that furnish his sustenance!

Reading Richard Laymon

I was driving my wife's Prius the other day when I looked up into the rearview and all I saw were a pair of tires and a huge dented grill. It was a scene straight out of Jeepers Creepers, only this is nothing out of the ordinary for a day on the roads out here in Northeast Florida. 


The rig (for that's what these vehicles become after a certain level of modification and elevation) pulled up alongside us and I saw that it was a lime-green monster Ford Bronco with huge rims. The whole thing was covered in mud and the driver bounced along in his seat, studying me with same level of curiosity a toddler has for a bug just before he or she decides to stomp on it.


The driver tipped me a nod and surged forward, revealing a collection of strange bumper stickers (including a shiny rendition of the stars and bars). The rig barked a cloud of smog onto us and the fellow tore off down the road like he was late for a monster Bronco show.


I tell you, there was glee in the man's driving. 


Might be a weak comparison, but that monster Bronco is a Richard Laymon novel. It's bright and audacious and shiny in places and damned fast. It's amusing and its heart is, for the most part, in a good place.


And I'm also glad that it's a rarity.


Laymon's novels aren't very well written. The man abuses sentence fragments, and his cliffhangers are all-too-often duds. He has an obsession with the word "rump," a term I really don't like. Everything is breathless, which is part of the charm (in small doses). Laymon goes from zero to sixty like that Bronco on A1A, and everyone else needs to either get out of the way or he's just going over them.


I only read his stuff about once a year. Like Tim Dorsey's gonzo stories, that's enough to fill me up. I like the stories, but I have trouble with the characters at times. In most Laymon novels, and in Midnight's Lair, which I finally finished last night (I put it down about four times, but I came back, which is something), we get a clear view of good and evil. The character lines are drawn quickly, and this is usually a direct conflict.


Only everybody in these books--and I mean everybody--shares one trait: all they ever think about, even in the most harrowing moments of their lives, is sex. Read a smattering of reviews of Laymon's works and you'll see it over and over again. Readers think he writes like a fifteen-year-old boy thinks. 


There is some of that.


Laymon presents Darcy as sexually selective in Midnight's Lair, which makes her actions toward Greg unintentionally hilarious. I mean, even as she's about to be skewered by subterranean cannibals, she's so distracted by the urge to rub her breasts on a guy she met ten minutes ago that she forgets to grab the pick axe.


Oh, and the reason she went off into the darkness in the first place was to get the pick axe.


Lynn and Brad (he's a bodybuilder, of course) are the same way. Even poor one-dimensional Carol can't have a meltdown over losing her best friend without dissolving into a sexual frenzy.


It's pretty odd, and more than a little funny to boot.


Like I said, I like Laymon's stuff in tiny doses. And he certainly understands the desires of his niche audience, as a pioneer of a certain horror aesthetic of the 1980s and early 1990s. Give one of his novels a shot for the experience, but be forewarned that some of it can get kind of silly...

After the Apocalypse

There are some really great stories in After the Apocalypse, by Maureen F. McHugh. It's a 3.5/5 for me, so I'll round up in this case. "The Naturalist," "Special Economics" and "After the Apocalypse" were my favorite stories. These tales each had a sense of urgency, a narrative tension that begs the reader to work quickly toward the pay-off. That's a double-edged sword with McHugh's writing, though, because there is some serious beauty in her prose. She's a keen observational writer, and she turns a phrase well.


In "Useless Things," she effectively pegs the circumstances attendant to the financial meltdown in America. She uses setting to effectively add dimension to her characters:


The suburbs are full of walkaway houses--places where homeowners couldn't meet the mortgage payments and just left, the lots now full of trash and windows gone. People who could went north for water. People who couldn't did what people always do when an economy goes soft and rotten: they slid, to rented houses, rented apartments, living in their cars, living with their families, living on the street.


But inside Sherie's parents' home it's still twenty years ago. The countertops are granite. The big-screen plasma TV gets hundreds of channels. The freezer is full of meat and frozen Lean Cuisine. The air conditioner keeps the temperature at a heavenly seventy-five degrees. Sherie's mother, Brenda, is slim, with beautifully styled graying hair. She's a psychologist with a small practice.

Indeed, one of the charms of this collection is the variety of crises explored throughout the stories. The apocalyptic narratives run the gamut, from disease to zombie problems and financial ruin. 

A few stories didn't quite deliver on the promise set up in their first acts, sometimes grinding to a halt in their focus on scientific minutia, which took the spotlight off of the characters. 

Still, this is a good collection and well worth the attention of fans of speculative fiction and post-apocalyptic stories.

The Odds and The Debt

Stewart O'Nan's The Odds is, appropriately, subtitled "A Love Story." It's not of the Nicholas Sparks or Danielle Steele school of love stories, which is probably why I found it such an interesting story.


There's a great line in Joan Didion's essay "On Going Home." Didion writes that "Marriage is the ultimate betrayal." Within the context of her essay, she's talking about how marriage changes the familial dynamic, how her people call her husband "Joan's husband" in his presence because he hasn't quite cracked the barrier to becoming part of the immediate family.


But there are an infinite number of betrayals--some small and innocent, others huge and unforgivable--that color the glass of most marriages. In this case, we see infidelities on both sides that would choke the life from many unions.


Art and Marion are approaching middle age and lurching toward divorce. They still harbor a sort of love for each other, though more often than not their interactions are strained and calculated. The frivolity, the fun, the relaxed love that should accompany a marriage has flown away, because of Art's infidelity (Marion's, curiously, remains hidden in this novella--a plot point that would probably create a much different story if she had come clean).


O'Nan paints these characters in three dimensions; neither holds a place of moral superiority. The author's complex prose style is very descriptive and the story unfolds quickly. They are taking one last vacation to Canada, where they will wager their savings on games of chance at the casino. Both recently laid off and falling beneath the burden of crushing debt, this is as much a tale of the times as it is a story of mutual redemption for our protagonists.


I enjoyed reading this story very much, partly as a guidebook on what to look out for in avoiding Art and Marion's traps. I'm very thankful for the life my wife and I have made together. We'll have our ten-year anniversary this fall, and ours has been a happy marriage.


Ultimately, it comes down to trust. Doesn't it always? We love each other and we treat each other kindly, and I think that's where Marion and Art went wrong. Still, I'm hopeful that their marriage will have a happier second act. That final line, in spite of everything that comes before it, seems to indicate that's at least a possibility.


Recommended...



The Debt (2011) has a lot going for it. Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain deliver fine performances in their portrayal of an Israeli intelligence officer charged with bringing a heinous Nazi war criminal to justice. The story spans three decades, and shows what a burden guilt and treachery can have on one's conscience. 


I liked the score very much, and the performances were good. The story delivered some very tense moments (I hated watching Jesper Christensen eating over and over again, but that's a personal deal, not a flaw in the storytelling) and I liked the third act quite a lot.


And I'm not one of those folks that has to have a tidy ending. I think ambiguity often is the best conclusion, but in this case I would have liked to learn the end results of the note she left. I'll leave it at that, and just say that this is a solid B+ for me, and that you'd do well to give it a look...

Stephen King's 11/22/63

11/22/63 was a very enjoyable trip back in time. Stephen King's sprawling novel examines and reinterprets the Kennedy assassination while simultaneously delivering an important message on the nature of time: be thankful for the present. Don't neglect your life in the moment you're in, because it's pretty likely that the past suffers from nostalgic selection bias and the future isn't promised.


One of the themes King returns to time and again is the idea that 1958 smells better--that the air is cleaner and the sunshine feels just a little warmer. But as the novel progresses, we see this for what it really is: wishful thinking. 1958 is filled with racist Americans. The air is clouded by cigarette smoke. People aren't any nicer or more cordial to each other than they are now, all things considered.


I was talking about the book with a buddy the other day, and I think it's pretty easy to get lost in the idea that the past was, somehow, more pure. But honestly, people ten years will fondly look back at 2012 as an age of (relative) innocence, just as they always have. When you stand perpetually at the cusp of the future, as all current living human beings do, it's pretty easy to forget that misery and heartache and triumph and joy are all achievable in all times.


And the future in this book? Let's just say that it's not a rosy picture, folks. King only spends a few pages on it, but it's not necessary to dawdle there. 


The book featured many standards of King fiction that I enjoy. I liked the interactions between Jake Epping (George Amberson) and Al Templeton very much. King writes older folks well, and he writes wistful cancer patients exceedingly well. Templeton fits both bills here, approaching the monumental task of convincing Epping with humor and grace. 


The central romance between George and Sadie Dunhill is classic King. Peppering the novel with vivid popular culture references grounds the narrative in time and place and gives it a voyeuristic feel. Dunhill's character vacillates between uncertainty and trust in such a realistic fashion that this is a really believable love story, given its crazy core of time travel.


It's not a perfect book. I think it could have been a few hundred pages shorter in the middle act, and that we spent an awful lot of time exploring big-city/small-town sociocultural norms (I'm sure the Jessica Caltrop dressing down was authentic to 1958, but it seemed like we hammered those ideals waaaay too frequently here). And I was a little put off by the number of really short fragments King seems to have begun using to underscore main ideas. We get it...


Also, a huge percentage of the vignettes ended with George going to sleep. I have to really edit my own work to be careful of doing just this. It reads like a "day-in-the-life" expose, and that gets tiresome.


But those are small quibbles. The narrative fluidity and flair for description are spot on, and King really pays it all off in those final pages. This is a very good novel, and it might send you down your own personal rabbit-hole when it's all said and done.


I Googled "Marina Oswald" yesterday, and I'd barely reached the "i" before her name populated the search field. King's book has people curious about this time period and event all over again, and that's a good thing. 


Highly recommended...

Desert Places

Blake Crouch's Desert Places was gripping. I read this story in an afternoon--the perfect way to spend a few hours during the long holiday break.

Crouch wastes no time in plunging the protagonist into a chilling, life-threatening scenario. There's a body on his property, covered in his own blood, and if he doesn't follow instructions, the evidence will be turned over to the Charlotte Police Department.

Crouch's plotting is meticulous. I found the details believable, and I was really impressed with how quickly things devolve for Andy Thomas.

Thomas is a likable, interesting character. His virtues are apparent. He has a fine-tuned sense of right and wrong, and his love for his mother seems genuine. He's a good guy. But he also has a dark side, and his flaws are abundantly apparent as well. He does some pretty deplorable things to stay alive, and Crouch's handling of a fundamental philosophical question (where is the line between the things we do for self preservation and true evil intent?) will probably shock a lot of readers.

Orson Thomas and Luther Kite? Jeez--those guys are sick. After reading this book, it makes me think twice about the true intentions of every interaction I have. I played golf with a stranger yesterday, and I'm glad he didn't drug my Gatorade and hack me to bits in a remote mountain cabin. That was nice. I mean, after reading this book I sure won't drink anything given to me by someone I'm not familiar with, and I see no good reason to stop and help others when their cars break down on the side of those deserted country roads...

It's a sprawling, fast-paced story that I enjoyed from start to finish. I'm very glad to have encountered Crouch's fiction, and I'm looking forward to reading more of his work in the near future.

Blake Crouch's RUN

Run is the best new story I've read in 2011. I liked it so much that I immediately purchased Fully Loaded and bought some print copies of the novel for my homies for Christmas.

The Colcloughs are stuck. They have a hell of a proposition--get north or get dead. And they pull together in a way that I find simply redemptive.

Crouch is a fine writer. Those scenes in Wyoming in which the family has to deal with the mountain are both harrowing and well written. Take it from a guy that's questioned himself on the side of the Grand Canyon--those fears are real, and Crouch brings them to life in a way that makes your knuckles go white.

It's the protagonist's drive to keep his family in tact, and his ability to understand the situation in the minute and the second that it's happening, that makes this a believable narrative. I loved the observational detail in this story, and I thought that the framing technique worked out really well.

Crouch did a fine job with this story. Very highly reccommended...

Ania Ahlborn's Seed

Ania Ahlborn is a very good writer. Seed takes off with a flash and the pace never lets up. Ahlborn draws round characters, which makes the third act all the more crushing when the story runs its course. Aimee and Abigail and Charlie represent a great little family--filled with innocence and hope and a genuine caring for one another that touches the reader.

Then there's Jack Winter. He knows things are wrong, and he knows things are happening, and he does nothing at all to change the course of his family's fate.

I don't get it.

I liked the writing and, in places, the story is quite unsettling. That's about the best compliment I can pay a writer of dark fiction, as it's so rare nowadays to feel uncomfortable while reading.

But I just didn't buy it in the case of Seed. Sure, the plot works for the novel. In that sense, Jack's decision to leave his home at the most inopportune time serves the story.

But it doesn't ring true for what a father would do to protect his family. In this case, I grew frustrated with the novel. I kept wondering why Jack was "trying to buy some more time" before he finally did something to protect his loved ones.

And, to her credit, Ahlborn pulls no punches in the final act. The horrific realization that takes place in those final pages is crushing. Part of what she is doing with this piece is writing about the nature of evil, and how it can corrupt even the most innocent among us (Am I right, chief?). And I'm no puritan--I don't need a happy ending to enjoy a text.

But the manner in which Jack allowed things to happen felt false to me. It just didn't feel like an authentic fatherly reaction.

As I said, Ahlborn is a very good writer, and I'm looking forward to her next work. Seed is well worth horror fans' time.

But it got under my skin at times (probably a sign of a good piece, really) because it didn't feel authentic.

Crucified Dreams

Despite the odd title of this anthology of urban fiction, Crucified Dreams represents a solid collection of interesting storytelling. I've said it before here on this blog that Joe Lansdale is, for my money, one of the most consistent writers in the business for my tastes. I've never put one of his books down after starting it, and I find most of his offerings to trend toward the high limits of the quality scale.

He proves he's no slouch here as an editor as well.

Most of these are dark, dark tales. As he states in the introduction, the only thing these tales really share is a climate of originality, and there is that in spades here. There's a little fantastic whimsy in stories like Ellen Klages's "Singing on a Star" (makes one wonder about the family down the street--and the ominous record or toy your son or daughter might bring home after a play date).

There's brutal, no-hold-barred stories like "The Pit," by the editor, and "Quitters, Inc.," by Stephen King. Tom Piccirilli's "Loss" reminds me of the surreal, dark output that I've been reading by Laird Barron.

My favorite story in this fine collection is "Coffins on the River," by Jeffrey Ford. Ford's ability to nail the protagonists' character and flesh them out with real pathos is enviable. I also really enjoyed the subtleties exhibited by the nuanced storyteller. Ford, in one passage, mentions the tale's central redeeming plot conflict in such a cursory manner that, when we re-encounter it in the story's third act, the redemption is all the sweeter for the reader. It's masterful narrative.

Lucius Shepard's "Beast of the Heartland" is a startling tale--the writing is crisp and beautiful, the characters three-dimensional and round.

There are fine stories here by Octavia E. Butler, Joe Haldeman and Michael Bishop. Very good anthology, and highly recommended.

Now off to class...

Book Review: Best New Zombie Tales, Vol. 1

James Roy Daley did a great job in collecting this first volume of zombie fiction. It's a large book (110,000 words and nineteen stories) that's filled with all sorts of narratives: shocking humor rubs elbows with more mundane existentialism in these pages. It's a nice break from the "run, scavenge, fight" school of zombie fiction (although fans of that type of thing won't be turned off by this book, either).

Best New Zombie Tales, Vol 1 was in the first batch of books that I purchased for the Kindle, and it has some formatting issues. Many of the paragraph indents didn't make translate for a few stories. It's a minor deal and wasn't a distraction. There were some pretty glaring typos, strangely enough, in just one of the stories (which is a little strange).

Still, minor stuff...

I enjoyed all of the stories to some extent, though a few clearly stood out. Ray Garton's "Zombie Love," a chilling story of the occult and the sorrow of lost love, was a fantastic way to begin the anthology. Mrs. Kobylka is the star here, a finely drawn character with veiled intentions. Keith, our protagonist, is a sympathetic character; the scenes in the third act, when the horror of just how far his love for Natalie has pushed him over the edge, are chilling. I think I honestly flinched while reading them.

Oh, and then there's Baltazar. Balty is a trip and, even though we see it coming, nothing quite pulls at the heartstrings like the thing Balty says to Keith in the third act.

Scary and compelling, this was a great tale among a bunch of fine work.

"Feeding Frenzy," by Matt Hults, was an interesting, frightening story. It felt like a mix between some Lovecraftian dimensional horror with a little bit of Serlingesque Twilight Zone on the side. Oh yeah, and it takes place in one of my favorite horror locales--the bizarre country diner. Scary and well written, this one will stick with you...

"The Man Who Breaks The Bad News" and "On The Usefulness Of Old Books" were really strong, polished tales that excelled in world building and delivered the chills with a dose of caution and morality.

My favorite tale, and one that was echoing through my mind a few days after I read it, was Simon McCaffery's "Connections." The relationship between father and son was very nicely rendered, which made the heartbreaking final act all the more difficult to take. McCaffery writes well--clear, concise prose that slowly ratchets the tension up until our characters' lives are literally crashing down all around them.

It's a nice collection--one a zombie lover will enjoy, but also an anthology that fans who like a little bit of attention and care in their narratives can appreciate. Exposition is accentuated in many of these stories, to good effect, and the authors took their care with plot. And a majority of the stories shared, at their core, some interesting discussions on the nature of human experience in the face of harsh conflict.

Very satisfying collection--I'll be taking a look at volume two down the road...

Kind Words on These Strange Worlds

It's been a humbling month.

I'm very fortunate to have a support system of family and friends that encourage me often in my writing. Staring at the blinking cursor can sometimes be a daunting proposition, but the positive regard I've had from those who have read These Strange Worlds has been overwhelming.

I sincerely appreciate the support.

The collection has had a strong month, and reviews are starting to come in. I'm particularly thankful for the opinions of others in the speculative writing community, so I was very excited to read this review penned by writer and illustrator Lavanya Karthik.

Thanks, Lavanya, for looking at the stories. I'm glad there were a few that struck a chord with you!

Not Before Bed

I first encountered Craig Hallam's writing in Murky Depths*, an enjoyable blend of art and fiction that is produced in the United Kingdom. I was intrigued by his writing--there's a very confident approach to voice and pacing in the work--so I was happy to dive into Not Before Bed. I've been reading these stories in sips and swallows over the last few busy weeks, and I'm happy to say they've provided many moments of entertainment.

The collection runs from the atmospheric to the darkly visceral, with some nice injections of humor in the prose along the way (there is a Robocop reference I couldn't help but chuckle at). The influences and subjects were diverse: some supernatural, others of the creature-feature variety; some Lovecraftian, others of the shambling undead category. In short, there is a little something for all tastes.

What really made the collection go for me is the afore-mentioned voice/pacing combination. Hallam uses fragments really well--I like the fluidity of the prose as he underscores action with simple, succinct phrases. I also liked the dialogue. It wasn't tag-heavy and it felt very authentic. I like the use of italics for emphasis, and the descriptions. Consider this snippet from "Laughter on the Landing":

Then a sound from inside my own apartment. If it hadn't been for the silence, I would
never have heard it.

Poit.

I leant to see around my feet which were up on the coffee table.

A drip. A splotch of dark crimson on the oak surface. For a second, I watched it as if
waiting for something to happen. It did. Another droplet fell in the same spot.

Plit.

Drawn upward, my eyes widened.

On the ceiling, a line of the same fluid had trickled before dripping. It was leaking
through the floorboards in Jenny's apartment...

The tension in most of these stories is a creepy, slow build, and they deliver the goods in the third act.

There were a few minor typos and some of the font types and sizes were inconsistent (I read the Smashwords edition), but there was nothing that detracted from what is an otherwise strong collection. "Laughter on the Landing" and "Sarah and the Monster" were two of my favorites; they also best communicate the notion espoused in the collection's title.

Still (and if you're like me), you'll want to give these tales a look just before bed. Read them when the lights are down, when the sounds of the house settling add that wonderful little kick that makes good dark fiction so fun to read.

*Craig and I correspond from time to time on writing fiction. Please don't confuse our friendship for a lack of objectivity in looking at these stories...