When I was sixteen, I had what I thought was the most brilliant idea of my entire life. I was going to somehow merge the two overriding elements of my existence - being a homosexual and being a Stephen King fan - into one. I would call my group GLISK (an acronym I went giddy for because I was 1. a huge nerd and 2. a huge gay) and it would be short for Gays & Lesbians Into Stephen King. This was going to be massive, and I'd find other gay fans of King, and we'd hang out and talk about how we all had crushes on Steve Kemp in Cujo, despite the fact that he was pretty much a tool. A sexy, sexy tool.
A few things prevented Glisk (the acronym has now become a regular word due to my familiarity with it, like Epcot) from happening. (1) I'm not really good with organizing, and (2) a lot of gay people think Stephen King is homophobic.
There are a lot of reasons for this, I think. There's a scene in It where a gay guy is brutalized and murdered, and cries of homophobia following its publication were rampant. King explained the scene saying that it was pretty much - no pun intended - straight reporting. An actual gay murder happened in Bangor, and King used it in the book as a way to tie into It's targeting of the fringier members of society. Reading the chapter carefully, you'll actually find a lot of pro-gay sentiment in it, including some thoughts from a straight bar owner who sort of accidentally opens a gay bar and is relieved to find that his clientele "has found a way of getting along that straight men haven't."
In The Stand, a bisexual woman kills herself ... but it's a heroic death. In "Rita Hayworth & Shawshank Redemption," there's a lot of gay rape, but King is careful to mention that there are other, non-rapey relationships that go on in prison that work just as well as straight ones. After King's daughter came out, there was a huge uptick in gay supporting characters, including heroic ones in Insomnia and Cell.
Yesterday, I picked up 'Salem's Lot for the first time in a few years because I need to do a review for an upcoming book. In the first hundred pages, I ran across a number of epithets - fag, queer, sissy, etc. But what struck me weren't the words so much as the sentiment behind them. The characters in 'Salem's Lot are using hurtful words, but people seem to accept "gay" as a fact rather than something gross or aberrant. At one point, one blue-collar worker remarks to another that Barlow & Straker, the new people in town, "are probably queer for each other. Going to redecorate the house and make it look nice. Good for business." And that's it. And that's interesting. They go immediately from the concept that these guys are probably gay to their good business sense. And these aren't high-education people, but grunting moving dudes. Later on, someone mentions he buys his used books from "a sissy fella" a few towns over. It's mentioned, sure, but there's no revulsion or even pause with it. It's like saying he buys his books from an Irish guy.
Now, look. Maybe I'm being overly apologetic. There is a scene in It where the mere suggestion of homosexuality drives someone insane. But I honestly think this is a character-by-character basis. The same character is a racist, half-nuts bully who also poisons a dog and shoots his father, sort of susceptible to going full-on psycho.
I've long thought about writing a book on the subject, or a long essay, but the truth is, it's a really narrow subject. I'm not sure anything like this would sell, or even be interesting to any section of the population. But still, I find it interesting. So maybe I'll write it sometime anyway. Thoughts?
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Blockade Billy, by Stephen King: A Review
A simple story, well told.
Blockade Billy tells the tale of William Blakely, perhaps the greatest baseball player ever to put on the gear, and who was summarily erased from the record books and forgotten by the world. King’s novella is primarily concerned with the questions raised by these opposing histories: why Blakely was the greatest, and what made him disappear. The answers lie in George Grantham, former third baseman coach and equipment manager for the New Jersey Titans. Grantham – Granny – spins his story of the 1957 season that introduced William Blakely to the big leagues. It’s an uninterrupted first-person narrative, the kind King used to great success in Dolores Claiborne, and that success is matched here. Only Granny isn’t speaking to fictional, off-screen listeners is Blockade Billy; instead, King cleverly inserts himself as the one taking dictation. While King’s presence doesn’t intrude (he is only mentioned by name three or four times), it adds a certain verisimilitude to a story one believes actually, tragically, could happen.
Clever, too, is the setup. King tackles old-time baseball the way he tackles prison life in The Green Mile or “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” or the way he tackles small towns in ’Salem’s Lot or Needful Things: he assumes the reader knows nothing about it, and builds from there. One of the subtle pleasures of Blockade Billy is that readers don’t have to be baseball fanatics to love the story; similarly to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the reader is given just enough information so that one cares about the outcome of the game as much as the characters do. Unlike in Faithful, King does not overwhelm the reader with baseball lore and stats. He is instead concerned with getting you invested in the suspense of what’s happening, and why.
That suspense lies at the heart of Blockade Billy. Stephen King has long been a master of the action sequence, those amped-up moments of intensity that make the rest of the story feel like a single held breath. Witness the dog attacks in Cujo, the painting sequences in Duma Key, or the psychic flashes in The Dead Zone. Here, the same treatment is given to Blockade Billy’s baseball games … and what happens when someone on the opposing team goes up against Billy directly. Billy’s single-minded devotion to baseball and to his team drives these scenes, spiking in what seems to be inevitable violence. It’s not whether the Titans win or lose, it’s how Blockade Billy plays the game. And the crowd eats it up.
So many of King’s fascinations are on display here, and it’s a delight for longtime readers to see them deconstructed and reassembled into this fantastic new book. Blood sport has been central to King’s imagination since The Long Walk; even though Blockade Billy focuses on baseball instead of dystopian-future game shows, blood does indeed spill. In his depictions of the crowd’s enthrallment with violence, King recalls The Running Man and, again, The Long Walk. A startling scene near the end brings to mind certain scenes in Hearts In Atlantis, and King’s ongoing interest in the William Golding book Lord of the Flies. If the technique is reminiscent of Dolores Claiborne, the voice is similar to that of Paul Edgecombe’s in The Green Mile, or even the older men describing the central mystery of The Colorado Kid.
In fact, Blockade Billy – whose cover, like that of The Colorado Kid, was painted by the amazing Glen Orbik – almost works as a spiritual cousin to King’s Hard Case Crime outing. Though the stories are wildly different, they read the same, and have the same feel. There are two essential differences here, though: first, the mystery of Blockade Billy is never asserted as a mystery. The reader has only just begun asking serious questions about the central character before the truth begins to emerge. And second, the truth does emerge. Unlike the origins of that body on the beach in The Colorado Kid, just where Blockade Billy came from and how he got there are startlingly revealed.
Coming so close on the heels of a mammoth novel like Under the Dome, Blockade Billy is refreshingly slender. It’s short enough for a reader to gulp down in one sitting, and compelling enough that he or she is helpless to do anything but. A small masterpiece of voice, pacing, and situation, Blockade Billy once again proves that Stephen King is a master of the novella.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Wetware: On the Digital Frontline With Stephen King
Cemetery Dance Publications Announces WETWARE: ON THE DIGITAL FRONTLINE WITH STEPHEN KING, by Kevin Quigley
WETWARE: On the Digital Frontline with Stephen King
a chapbook by Kevin Quigley
About the Chapbook:
Stephen King has long been at the forefront of experimental publishing. As the world grows more digital each day, King has consistently remained on the edge of breakthrough trends and technology, finding new ways to publish and interpret his stories. King's digital journey has been strange and fascinating. Wetware is your guide.
From the prehistory of King’s involvement with digital media such as the Dark Half video game and F13 to his online release of the lost work, The Cannibals, Wetware covers it all — in a concise and engaging pocket history. Explore the controversy surrounding King's online serial publication, The Plant. Relive the groundbreaking excitement of King's landmark e-book publication, Riding the Bullet. If you ever engaged in interactive fiction with The Mist, were intrigued by the Kindle-only release of "UR," or terrified by the motion comic "N.," Wetware is essential reading.
To read more about Wetware or order your copy today, visit the Wetware purchase site on Cemetery Dance today!
About the Author:
Kevin Quigley's website, Charnel House has been a premiere Stephen King resource for nearly fifteen years. Charnel House was the first website to feature full-length reviews of every Stephen King book; today, it also includes up-to-date King news, a section focused on books about King, and a comprehensive listing of unpublished and uncollected shorter works. Quigley is also the author of two previous chapbooks on King — Chart of Darkness and Ink In the Veins — and co-wrote the upcoming Stephen King Illustrated Movie Trivia Book. In addition to his works on King, Quigley is also the author of several novels, and has recently published a collection of poetry, Foggy At Night In the City. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his partner, Shawn.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Foggy At Night In the City
It's here.Foggy At Night In the City: It's midnight, but the hunched, frightened clocks refuse to strike. Cold rain has blasted the hot asphalt where lovers scramble and madmen skulk. It's foggy tonight in the city, outside curtains where lust meets violence, where indulgence becomes addiction, and where dreamers explore the dark terrain of the heart.
Foggy At Night In the City the first collection of verse and poetry by novelist and diarist Kevin Quigley. Inside you will find stories of love and hate, of airships and footraces, of life and death. Alternately light and dark, sunshine and shadows, Foggy At Night In the City is an eclectic anthology that will pique your curiosity and challenge your perceptions.
Folks, this new collection of poetry and verse represents nearly two decades of work. The poems might have come hard for me, and some of them take you to dark, dark places, but I think you'll like them.
To reiterate: Foggy At Night In the City is an actual book, one that you hold in your hand and whose pages you physically flip through.
Two Ways To Get It
Bonus Material: Six Poems
The first 50 purchasers of Foggy At Night In the City will receive a bonus PDF from me - a small collection titled Six Poems, featuring six pieces I didn't feel fit in the main volume. "Fantasies Of A Maniac," "No Show," "There Must Be Something Good for Dinner Tonight," "A Place With Picnic Tables," and "Fissure" represent the best work from my earliest days of writing through my more inward-looking recent poetry. Three of these poems are flat-out horror stories, including the award-winning "Fantasies Of a Maniac." I've stayed away from horror verse in later years; it's a pleasure to share it now.
If you have purchased Foggy At Night In the City, please comment here with a valid email address, and I will send you Six Poems. Sorry, Six Poems does not come separately.
The Foggy Future
As we roll out publication on this book, there's still more to come. In the upcoming weeks and months, I will hopefully be publishing Foggy At Night In the City on several ebook platforms. The Kindle is the first, with the Sony Reader, the Nook, and of course the iPad - I am in negotiations now to get this book in the hands of electronic readers as soon as possible. Keep an eye out!
The Final Word
Foggy At Night In the City is available from both the publisher and Amazon for the amazing price of $7.95. It is a large-sized paperback, also known as "trade" or "quality" paperback, and features thirty-five pieces of poetry and verse, along with an introduction. And that's not to mention the bonus PDF, bringing the total number of pieces up to forty-one works. Even if you generally aren't a poetry reader, I urge you to give Foggy a try - quite a few of these pieces read more like prose. I have tried to make this volume as accessible as possible, without sacrificing the work.
Thank you for your time and consideration, and thank you for taking a chance on pioneering authorship.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Looking For Robert Parker
Robert Parker came into my life in the early 1990s, when my friend Tracey admonished me to oh my God, read someone who wasn’t Stephen King. The first book I read was a slim little volume called Looking For Rachel Wallace, featuring a tough-guy private eye named Spenser investigating the disappearance of a prominent lesbian-rights activist. What struck me at once was how all the characters seemed instantly real: Spenser, his psychiatrist girlfriend Susan, his best friend Hawk, and Rachel Wallace herself. The fact that the burly man’s man who appeared on the back cover had written a sympathetic, real individual in Rachel Wallace – and allowed Spenser’s reactions to her be real – surprised me. As it turned out, Robert Parker wasn’t done surprising me.
I plunged in at one, relishing the how the seeming simplicity of the writing masked the complexities of the plots. Of course, sometimes the Spenser adventures could be just that – fun, entertaining jaunts punctuated by Spenser and Susan bang-a-thons and extremely detailed descriptions about food and clothing. The more interesting ones, though, were those that delved into deep character development. Early Autumn, which was a departure from the Spenser formula, and for the better. Potshot, a later book that cast Spenser and his cronies become The Magnificent Seven. Small Vices, in which Spenser is shot and partially paralyzed. Spenser is friends with sympathetic hookers and madams, hitmen and Mafioso, gay bodybuilders and police officers. He’s everything to everyone, and despite his mythic status, he always seems real. It becomes easy to ignore that in the early books, Spenser was a Korean war veteran, and in the more recent ones, he was just approaching fifty. What isn’t easy to ignore is that there won’t be any more Spenser stories.
Relatively late into his career, Spenser developed series around two other characters – small-town lawman Jesse Stone and female P.I. Sunny Randall. The first Jesse Stone books seemed hungry, necessary – the work of a writer who has been doing one thing for so long, he needed to make some sort of change. The Sunny Randall books started off as a weird experiment and then got more interesting as they went along. And Wilderness, one of his stand-alone books, is one of the best suspense novels I’ve ever read.
Robert Parker wrote his college dissertation on Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, but when he wrote, the voice was his own. When I decided to start writing novels, it was Parker’s voice that resonated with me, especially when working on my Wayne Corbin books. The man was such a master of simplicity and grace in his writing – making the difficult look easy, but never frivolous. I had the chance to meet the man two years ago, in his home. It was such an honor to stand with the man in his place of writing, and shake the hand that had written such wonderful stories.
Every year, I pick up a Robert Parker book or two that I may have missed and plow right through it. They go down easy, his mysteries, but they stay with you. The idea that that seemingly endless supply of books now is finite is a crushing thought. He was one of my heroes, and I’m going to miss him terribly.
I plunged in at one, relishing the how the seeming simplicity of the writing masked the complexities of the plots. Of course, sometimes the Spenser adventures could be just that – fun, entertaining jaunts punctuated by Spenser and Susan bang-a-thons and extremely detailed descriptions about food and clothing. The more interesting ones, though, were those that delved into deep character development. Early Autumn, which was a departure from the Spenser formula, and for the better. Potshot, a later book that cast Spenser and his cronies become The Magnificent Seven. Small Vices, in which Spenser is shot and partially paralyzed. Spenser is friends with sympathetic hookers and madams, hitmen and Mafioso, gay bodybuilders and police officers. He’s everything to everyone, and despite his mythic status, he always seems real. It becomes easy to ignore that in the early books, Spenser was a Korean war veteran, and in the more recent ones, he was just approaching fifty. What isn’t easy to ignore is that there won’t be any more Spenser stories.
Relatively late into his career, Spenser developed series around two other characters – small-town lawman Jesse Stone and female P.I. Sunny Randall. The first Jesse Stone books seemed hungry, necessary – the work of a writer who has been doing one thing for so long, he needed to make some sort of change. The Sunny Randall books started off as a weird experiment and then got more interesting as they went along. And Wilderness, one of his stand-alone books, is one of the best suspense novels I’ve ever read.
Robert Parker wrote his college dissertation on Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, but when he wrote, the voice was his own. When I decided to start writing novels, it was Parker’s voice that resonated with me, especially when working on my Wayne Corbin books. The man was such a master of simplicity and grace in his writing – making the difficult look easy, but never frivolous. I had the chance to meet the man two years ago, in his home. It was such an honor to stand with the man in his place of writing, and shake the hand that had written such wonderful stories.
Every year, I pick up a Robert Parker book or two that I may have missed and plow right through it. They go down easy, his mysteries, but they stay with you. The idea that that seemingly endless supply of books now is finite is a crushing thought. He was one of my heroes, and I’m going to miss him terribly.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The Truth Outside the Lie - A Review of "Stephen King: The Non-Fiction"
I didn’t think I could be surprised anymore.
I’ve been reading books by Stephen King since I was twelve, and reading books about him for almost as long. My first such book was The Stephen King Quiz Book, and it neatly kicked off my fascination with the stories behind the stories, and behind the man. Have I read more books about King than I have by King? I’m not sure, but it’s close – to the point at which I was convinced that the only new subject to cover would be new books by King himself.
I have rarely been happier to be wrong.
Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks’s Stephen King: The Non-Fiction puts the spotlight on an element of King’s writing that is woefully underappreciated. When I first heard of the title, I assumed it would be some sort of bibliographic text, a list of all the non-fiction stuff I was already familiar with. Again: wrong, and wonderfully so. The Non-Fiction can be used as a bibliographic reference, certainly, but authors Wood and Brooks take the time and effort to actually review all the pieces they talk about. Starting with the higher-profile work such Danse Macabre, On Writing, and Faithful (along with King’s Garbage Truck and Pop of King columns and introductions to his own work) they quickly move into less charted territory: opinion pieces, book reviews, website updates, and unpublished work. Included in the text is a reprint of the little-known King work, “My Serrated Little Security Blanket,” a short bit of nasty fun.
Every work listed receives an explanatory or critical note, along with instructions on how to track down a copy (especially useful for the more obscure pieces). Some are accompanied by tales of the authors’ great lengths to which they’d gone to secure copies, illustrating the immense level of dedication and care it took to craft this book. While other books on King have discussed his non-fiction as an adjunct to his fiction, this is the first book to take on the subject comprehensively. Not to mention the fact that Wood and Brooks are actually terrific writers – this book is as compulsively readable as it is meticulously researched. I was blown away by this book.
Stephen King: The Non-Fiction is an entirely new sort of book on King. If you’ve ever been curious as to King’s truth outside the lie, this book is an absolute must.
(You can get it here.)
I’ve been reading books by Stephen King since I was twelve, and reading books about him for almost as long. My first such book was The Stephen King Quiz Book, and it neatly kicked off my fascination with the stories behind the stories, and behind the man. Have I read more books about King than I have by King? I’m not sure, but it’s close – to the point at which I was convinced that the only new subject to cover would be new books by King himself.
I have rarely been happier to be wrong.
Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks’s Stephen King: The Non-Fiction puts the spotlight on an element of King’s writing that is woefully underappreciated. When I first heard of the title, I assumed it would be some sort of bibliographic text, a list of all the non-fiction stuff I was already familiar with. Again: wrong, and wonderfully so. The Non-Fiction can be used as a bibliographic reference, certainly, but authors Wood and Brooks take the time and effort to actually review all the pieces they talk about. Starting with the higher-profile work such Danse Macabre, On Writing, and Faithful (along with King’s Garbage Truck and Pop of King columns and introductions to his own work) they quickly move into less charted territory: opinion pieces, book reviews, website updates, and unpublished work. Included in the text is a reprint of the little-known King work, “My Serrated Little Security Blanket,” a short bit of nasty fun.
Every work listed receives an explanatory or critical note, along with instructions on how to track down a copy (especially useful for the more obscure pieces). Some are accompanied by tales of the authors’ great lengths to which they’d gone to secure copies, illustrating the immense level of dedication and care it took to craft this book. While other books on King have discussed his non-fiction as an adjunct to his fiction, this is the first book to take on the subject comprehensively. Not to mention the fact that Wood and Brooks are actually terrific writers – this book is as compulsively readable as it is meticulously researched. I was blown away by this book.
Stephen King: The Non-Fiction is an entirely new sort of book on King. If you’ve ever been curious as to King’s truth outside the lie, this book is an absolute must.
(You can get it here.)
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
I'm In Love With My Car, and Other Stories
You want to hear something funny? So, I was going through the list of all the books I read this past decade, January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2009. The mission was to make a big definitive list of the Top 50 Books of the Decade, which as you might have gleaned didn’t happen. Yet.
Of course, there’s been an obvious trend in my reading. I read a lot of Stephen King this past decade. Okay, yeah, you knew that, but what I thought was kind of interesting is how often I read King during this decade. It certainly wasn’t as much as in decades past, but it was a pretty sizable delving. Aside from the young adult novel Singularity, King’s books are the only ones that have benefited from re-reads, and as I went throughout my lists, I thought it would be fun to figure out which ones I re-read the most. I was a little taken aback at my findings. A brief chart!
King Books I Read Only Once: Dreamcatcher, Desperation, Needful Things, Everything’s Eventual, Firestarter, Cycle of the Werewolf, The Gunslinger, Wolves of the Calla, From a Buick 8, The Shining, Song of Susannah, Silver Bullet, Black House, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Cell, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, Rage, Faithful, Insomnia, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Thinner, The Regulators, Blaze, The Mist, Dolores Claiborne, Different Seasons, Under the Dome, The Dark Tower
King Books I Read Twice: Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, Misery, Hearts In Atlantis, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Roadwork, It, The Colorado Kid (back to back!), Pet Sematary
King Books I Didn’t Read At All This Past Decade: Carrie, Night Shift, The Dead Zone, Danse Macabre, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon, Skeleton Crew, The Tommyknockers, Four Past Midnight, Gerald’s Game, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Storm of the Century, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
And the Only Book I Read Three Times This Past Decade: Christine.
Seriously? I read Christine more than any other book in the decade? What the French toast!?
* * *
And for those of you who don’t care about Stephen King,here’s some stuff about the books I read last year!
It’s hard to pinpoint my favorite book I read last year. I read eclectically. Buzzing through Ruth Reichl’s entire oeuvre in under three weeks was kind of a huge rush. Tender At the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples, Garlic & Sapphires, and Not Becoming My Mother were all pretty kick-ass, even though Mother was a tad bit pricey for what amounted to a gift book. While Julie & Julia the year before introduced me to food writing, Ruth kind of stabilized my love for the genre. Of her books on food, I liked Comfort Me With Apples the most, because I’d gotten used to her voice by then and I felt cozy with it, even when she was being selfish and strange.
Speaking of food writing, I totally incongruously dug Born Round, by Frank Bruni. A lot of the book details his struggles with weight, and ends up on the decision that thinner is better – at least for him. Which should offend me to my core, except that Bruni’s journey is a personal one, and he doesn’t make any huge pronouncements about fat automatically equaling bad. It’s just his thing. Plus, he’s a terrific writer and a gay dude, and despite his crazy-femme author photo, I really related to him.
Trends I was not in favor of? Follow-up books which totally failed to live up to their predecessors. I was coerced into reading Tom Standage’s A History of the World In Six Glasses and couldn’t put it down. Then he puts out An Edible History of Humanity and it was dull as shit. Ironically, not even the section on the spice trade was spicy. Same happened with Audrey Niffenegger. I literally read The Time-Traveler’s Wife largely in one sitting. I kept thinking I should put it down, go walk, get exercise, perhaps go to the bathroom. No. It was compulsive. Then she releases Her Fearful Symmetry, which has a kick-ass title and nothing else going for it. One of the plot twists is so contrived and out of character that I had trouble even finishing it. It’s maybe not a bad book – there are character pieces I loved, and the structure was fun – but it fell way, way short.
I kind of fear that I’m taking authors I love for granted, so I want to highlight four that deserve special recognition. While I liked and respected Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, I found it hard to love; I far preferred Take the Cannoli, which I read for the first time this year. If it’s maybe not as good as Assassination Vacation, it’s absolutely better than Radio On and on par with The Partly-Cloudy Patriot. Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur might be his best collection of essays, despite a chapter on football (though, helpfully, he says we can skip). Nick Hornby’s last collection of book essays, Shakespeare Wrote For Money, is maybe not his very best one – that distinction probably goes to Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt – but it was delightful to be back in his voice and tone again, and I got some good recommendations, which is kind of the point. And A.J. Jacobs, who has yet to disappoint me, released The Guinea Pig Diaries. If The Year of Living Biblically felt a little heavy after The Know-It-All, this is a return to light reporting about his weird, experimental life. Light, but not fluffy. You get a little substance with your dessert here, and now I want a new book.
Some big surprises this year? Shawn brought home I Hate New Music: A Classic Rock Manifesto, by Dave Thompson, which I scoffed at because I thought it was going to be a lot like John Seller’s atrocious Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life. I snatched it out of Shawn’s hand to read the introduction and didn’t put it down until the next day, finished. It’s cranky but readable and understandable. I don’t agree with all his points, but I don’t think you have to agree with an author to like him. Same with Tattoo Machine, by Jeff Johnson, a short but comprehensive story about the recent history of tattooing from someone who was there. There’s a lot of really cool stuff about tattoo trends, stories of crazy people, drunk people, bad tattooists, good tattooists, portrait ink, all that. It’s amazing.
I was also gratified by Charles Ardai’s crime book Fifty-To-One, which is the fiftieth book published by the Hard Case Crime imprint. The goal of the publisher is to put back in print classic crime novels from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and also release new novels by current authors writing in that style. Fifty-To-One manages to title each chapter after each of the preceding books, and was a terrific crime caper in itself. The Abstinence Teacher was a very good follow-up to Tom Perrotta’s Little Children – more readable suburban ennui, dealt with deftly and accessibly. It’s depressing, but not so much that you don’t want to keep reading. Bev Vincent’s The Illustrated Stephen King Companion was a first-of-its kind for King fanatics, featuring removable documents that reprinted unpublished King stories and early drafts from his novels. At once, it became one of the best books on King ever published.
Finally, Stephen King himself put out a new book this year, Under the Dome, which I liked a lot but had some problems with. Almost everything in the book – from the weirdly balanced characters (bad people doing heroic things, heroes fucking up big time) to the interesting movie-camera point of view (used more sparingly here than in Black House) to the ending that skirts a big battle in a really interesting way – works. What doesn’t work is the same thing that didn’t work in Cujo and almost didn’t work in The Stand: big plot turns relying on coincidence. There’s this file folder that, if found, would probably have changed everything in the book, but it keeps getting lost and almost found and it’s frustrating as hell. Despite this, though, the book has a lot to say about Big Issues without ever making them feel like Big Issues, and the characters are very real. (I actually wrote a huge full-length review!)
Huh. I did it. Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? For further elucidation: Everything I Read In 2009.
Now, onto reading in 2010!
Of course, there’s been an obvious trend in my reading. I read a lot of Stephen King this past decade. Okay, yeah, you knew that, but what I thought was kind of interesting is how often I read King during this decade. It certainly wasn’t as much as in decades past, but it was a pretty sizable delving. Aside from the young adult novel Singularity, King’s books are the only ones that have benefited from re-reads, and as I went throughout my lists, I thought it would be fun to figure out which ones I re-read the most. I was a little taken aback at my findings. A brief chart!
King Books I Read Only Once: Dreamcatcher, Desperation, Needful Things, Everything’s Eventual, Firestarter, Cycle of the Werewolf, The Gunslinger, Wolves of the Calla, From a Buick 8, The Shining, Song of Susannah, Silver Bullet, Black House, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Cell, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, Rage, Faithful, Insomnia, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Thinner, The Regulators, Blaze, The Mist, Dolores Claiborne, Different Seasons, Under the Dome, The Dark Tower
King Books I Read Twice: Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, Misery, Hearts In Atlantis, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Roadwork, It, The Colorado Kid (back to back!), Pet Sematary
King Books I Didn’t Read At All This Past Decade: Carrie, Night Shift, The Dead Zone, Danse Macabre, The Talisman, The Eyes of the Dragon, Skeleton Crew, The Tommyknockers, Four Past Midnight, Gerald’s Game, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Rose Madder, The Green Mile, Storm of the Century, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
And the Only Book I Read Three Times This Past Decade: Christine.
Seriously? I read Christine more than any other book in the decade? What the French toast!?
* * *
And for those of you who don’t care about Stephen King,
It’s hard to pinpoint my favorite book I read last year. I read eclectically. Buzzing through Ruth Reichl’s entire oeuvre in under three weeks was kind of a huge rush. Tender At the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples, Garlic & Sapphires, and Not Becoming My Mother were all pretty kick-ass, even though Mother was a tad bit pricey for what amounted to a gift book. While Julie & Julia the year before introduced me to food writing, Ruth kind of stabilized my love for the genre. Of her books on food, I liked Comfort Me With Apples the most, because I’d gotten used to her voice by then and I felt cozy with it, even when she was being selfish and strange.
Speaking of food writing, I totally incongruously dug Born Round, by Frank Bruni. A lot of the book details his struggles with weight, and ends up on the decision that thinner is better – at least for him. Which should offend me to my core, except that Bruni’s journey is a personal one, and he doesn’t make any huge pronouncements about fat automatically equaling bad. It’s just his thing. Plus, he’s a terrific writer and a gay dude, and despite his crazy-femme author photo, I really related to him.
Trends I was not in favor of? Follow-up books which totally failed to live up to their predecessors. I was coerced into reading Tom Standage’s A History of the World In Six Glasses and couldn’t put it down. Then he puts out An Edible History of Humanity and it was dull as shit. Ironically, not even the section on the spice trade was spicy. Same happened with Audrey Niffenegger. I literally read The Time-Traveler’s Wife largely in one sitting. I kept thinking I should put it down, go walk, get exercise, perhaps go to the bathroom. No. It was compulsive. Then she releases Her Fearful Symmetry, which has a kick-ass title and nothing else going for it. One of the plot twists is so contrived and out of character that I had trouble even finishing it. It’s maybe not a bad book – there are character pieces I loved, and the structure was fun – but it fell way, way short.
I kind of fear that I’m taking authors I love for granted, so I want to highlight four that deserve special recognition. While I liked and respected Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, I found it hard to love; I far preferred Take the Cannoli, which I read for the first time this year. If it’s maybe not as good as Assassination Vacation, it’s absolutely better than Radio On and on par with The Partly-Cloudy Patriot. Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur might be his best collection of essays, despite a chapter on football (though, helpfully, he says we can skip). Nick Hornby’s last collection of book essays, Shakespeare Wrote For Money, is maybe not his very best one – that distinction probably goes to Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt – but it was delightful to be back in his voice and tone again, and I got some good recommendations, which is kind of the point. And A.J. Jacobs, who has yet to disappoint me, released The Guinea Pig Diaries. If The Year of Living Biblically felt a little heavy after The Know-It-All, this is a return to light reporting about his weird, experimental life. Light, but not fluffy. You get a little substance with your dessert here, and now I want a new book.
Some big surprises this year? Shawn brought home I Hate New Music: A Classic Rock Manifesto, by Dave Thompson, which I scoffed at because I thought it was going to be a lot like John Seller’s atrocious Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life. I snatched it out of Shawn’s hand to read the introduction and didn’t put it down until the next day, finished. It’s cranky but readable and understandable. I don’t agree with all his points, but I don’t think you have to agree with an author to like him. Same with Tattoo Machine, by Jeff Johnson, a short but comprehensive story about the recent history of tattooing from someone who was there. There’s a lot of really cool stuff about tattoo trends, stories of crazy people, drunk people, bad tattooists, good tattooists, portrait ink, all that. It’s amazing.
I was also gratified by Charles Ardai’s crime book Fifty-To-One, which is the fiftieth book published by the Hard Case Crime imprint. The goal of the publisher is to put back in print classic crime novels from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and also release new novels by current authors writing in that style. Fifty-To-One manages to title each chapter after each of the preceding books, and was a terrific crime caper in itself. The Abstinence Teacher was a very good follow-up to Tom Perrotta’s Little Children – more readable suburban ennui, dealt with deftly and accessibly. It’s depressing, but not so much that you don’t want to keep reading. Bev Vincent’s The Illustrated Stephen King Companion was a first-of-its kind for King fanatics, featuring removable documents that reprinted unpublished King stories and early drafts from his novels. At once, it became one of the best books on King ever published.
Finally, Stephen King himself put out a new book this year, Under the Dome, which I liked a lot but had some problems with. Almost everything in the book – from the weirdly balanced characters (bad people doing heroic things, heroes fucking up big time) to the interesting movie-camera point of view (used more sparingly here than in Black House) to the ending that skirts a big battle in a really interesting way – works. What doesn’t work is the same thing that didn’t work in Cujo and almost didn’t work in The Stand: big plot turns relying on coincidence. There’s this file folder that, if found, would probably have changed everything in the book, but it keeps getting lost and almost found and it’s frustrating as hell. Despite this, though, the book has a lot to say about Big Issues without ever making them feel like Big Issues, and the characters are very real. (I actually wrote a huge full-length review!)
Huh. I did it. Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? For further elucidation: Everything I Read In 2009.
Now, onto reading in 2010!
Monday, February 16, 2009
Tender At the Bone: A Review
I didn’t make New Year’s Resolutions this year, and here’s why: there are so many good intentions followed by such little follow-through. If everything I promised I would do over the years had come to fruition, I would not only be competing in Strongman challenges and be rich beyond my wildest dreams, I would also have a series of twenty published novels to my credit before I turned thirty-five. Instead, I’m tubby and lower-middle-class and writing weekly columns for this place. Hooray!
If I had made a resolution this year, it likely would have been learning to cook. Had I done so, I would have probably failed miserably and gone back to eating Frosted Flakes for dinner. But because I didn’t promise myself I would take on a new skill, I’ve been cooking three to four nights a week, and baking on the weekends, and attempting stuff like mushroom bisque on special occasions. Ah, the many ways my own self-interest works against me.
When I stumble across a new interest, what solidifies it in my mind is the peripheral stuff. I love Star Trek, but review sites and message boards are what keep the interest perpetuating. I make it to Disney World as often as I can, but I’ve got website and podcasts during the in-between times. So when I got into cooking, I went casting about for interesting people talking about cooking. What I found was Ruth Reichl.
Funny but true: Reichl’s name was not unfamiliar to me. I used to work in a bookstore, and I’d often shelve Reichl’s stuff. I loved the titles – Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples, Garlic and Sapphires – all of which very evocative. So when I stepped into a bookstore this time with the intention of casting about for food writing, the very clear thought in my brain was, I need to find someone like Ruth Reichl to read.
I searched for a good fifteen minutes – fifteen minutes! – before I literally stopped myself and thought, Oh, guess who writes EXACTLY like Ruth Reichl who you haven’t read yet, Kev? Ruth fucking REICHL! My brain, I swear to God.
I purchased the book and dove in immediately. Sometimes there’s a barrier between me and new writers, one I have to dissemble bit by bit in order to start falling under their spell. It’s that self-interest thing again: I always want something new to read, but I have psychological blocks that prevent me from enjoying new stuff, at least at first. At all events, that didn’t quite happen with Reichl. Instead, her writing acted like a Space Invader, one of the really nasty ones that blast your forcefield away far quicker than you can shoot them back. Reichl didn’t just break down my silly reading barriers; she obliterated them:
“Most mornings I got out of bed and went to the refrigerator to see how my mother was feeling. You could tell instantly just by opening the door.”
She had me hooked by the first paragraph.
I had expected something like a cookbook with anecdotes about how these recipes came to her. What I got instead was a memoir of a fascinating, schizophrenic childhood and adolescence, and how food and cooking served as one of the very few constants in Reichl’s life. It might not have worked so effectively if Reichl’s life weren’t fascinating – or if she had allowed herself to get lost in the fascination – but just as food is Reichl’s anchor throughout her weird journeys, she is ours. We relate to her because she seems like an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary situations.
The best portion of the book – and it’s hard to choose, really, because almost everything in here is “best” – is her recounting her first excursion to France. The excursion had not been her idea, but rather that of her bipolar mother. For a time, Ruth resents the trip … until a friend of hers invites her home for dinner. The description of Reichl’s first fine French meal is worth the cover price alone – you can almost taste the soup sliding down your throat. It’s moments like these – high points among the high points – that make Reichl’s writing so extraordinary.
As the recipes become more complicated – and there are plenty of recipes, despite my insistence that it’s not a cookbook – so, too, does Ruth’s life, and we as readers are richer for it. Tender at the Bone hurtles toward its anxious cliffhanger finale (yes, anxious cliffhanger finale; if you didn’t think a cooking memoir could have one of those, you’re wrong), and we hurtle with it, identifying not only with Reichl’s ability to find solace within chaos, but also with her sheer storytelling genius. Anyone can write a cookbook or a memoir; it takes a special sort of writer to combine them into something greater than either.
If I had made a resolution this year, it likely would have been learning to cook. Had I done so, I would have probably failed miserably and gone back to eating Frosted Flakes for dinner. But because I didn’t promise myself I would take on a new skill, I’ve been cooking three to four nights a week, and baking on the weekends, and attempting stuff like mushroom bisque on special occasions. Ah, the many ways my own self-interest works against me.
When I stumble across a new interest, what solidifies it in my mind is the peripheral stuff. I love Star Trek, but review sites and message boards are what keep the interest perpetuating. I make it to Disney World as often as I can, but I’ve got website and podcasts during the in-between times. So when I got into cooking, I went casting about for interesting people talking about cooking. What I found was Ruth Reichl.
Funny but true: Reichl’s name was not unfamiliar to me. I used to work in a bookstore, and I’d often shelve Reichl’s stuff. I loved the titles – Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples, Garlic and Sapphires – all of which very evocative. So when I stepped into a bookstore this time with the intention of casting about for food writing, the very clear thought in my brain was, I need to find someone like Ruth Reichl to read.
I searched for a good fifteen minutes – fifteen minutes! – before I literally stopped myself and thought, Oh, guess who writes EXACTLY like Ruth Reichl who you haven’t read yet, Kev? Ruth fucking REICHL! My brain, I swear to God.
I purchased the book and dove in immediately. Sometimes there’s a barrier between me and new writers, one I have to dissemble bit by bit in order to start falling under their spell. It’s that self-interest thing again: I always want something new to read, but I have psychological blocks that prevent me from enjoying new stuff, at least at first. At all events, that didn’t quite happen with Reichl. Instead, her writing acted like a Space Invader, one of the really nasty ones that blast your forcefield away far quicker than you can shoot them back. Reichl didn’t just break down my silly reading barriers; she obliterated them:
“Most mornings I got out of bed and went to the refrigerator to see how my mother was feeling. You could tell instantly just by opening the door.”
She had me hooked by the first paragraph.
I had expected something like a cookbook with anecdotes about how these recipes came to her. What I got instead was a memoir of a fascinating, schizophrenic childhood and adolescence, and how food and cooking served as one of the very few constants in Reichl’s life. It might not have worked so effectively if Reichl’s life weren’t fascinating – or if she had allowed herself to get lost in the fascination – but just as food is Reichl’s anchor throughout her weird journeys, she is ours. We relate to her because she seems like an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary situations.
The best portion of the book – and it’s hard to choose, really, because almost everything in here is “best” – is her recounting her first excursion to France. The excursion had not been her idea, but rather that of her bipolar mother. For a time, Ruth resents the trip … until a friend of hers invites her home for dinner. The description of Reichl’s first fine French meal is worth the cover price alone – you can almost taste the soup sliding down your throat. It’s moments like these – high points among the high points – that make Reichl’s writing so extraordinary.
As the recipes become more complicated – and there are plenty of recipes, despite my insistence that it’s not a cookbook – so, too, does Ruth’s life, and we as readers are richer for it. Tender at the Bone hurtles toward its anxious cliffhanger finale (yes, anxious cliffhanger finale; if you didn’t think a cooking memoir could have one of those, you’re wrong), and we hurtle with it, identifying not only with Reichl’s ability to find solace within chaos, but also with her sheer storytelling genius. Anyone can write a cookbook or a memoir; it takes a special sort of writer to combine them into something greater than either.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Stephen King Goes To the Movies: A Review
At current, Stephen King has released seven collections of shorter works, give or take. That “give or take” addendum has to be in there because of the nature of King’s writing. The Gunslinger, the first of the Dark Tower books, can technically be considered a short story collection – after all, the tales came out one at a time in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. But are they stories or are they chapters? The verdict remains foggy. Same goes for The Green Mile, whose chapters were released in chap-book format over a period of six months. The collection is absolutely a novel … but there are some who would disagree.
Then there’s the curious conundrum of Hearts in Atlantis, whose cover categorizes it as “new fiction,” thereby avoiding the question of its nature. It’s a volume of five interlocked works, most of which can be taken alone (with the exception of “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling”), but gain a certain resonance when taken together. Personally? I think the thing’s a novel.
Ah, but then there are even wackier cases. The Bachman Books? Those were five individually-released novels before collected into an omnibus edition. And what of the Octopus Press collection that includes Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and The Shining? There’s no way anyone’s going to sit back and tell me that The Shining is a short story.
So: conundrums, and plenty of them, but at least we can agree on some definites. Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual, and the new Just After Sunset are definitely short-story collections. Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight are King’s two novella collections … forgiving the fact that every piece in Four Past Midnight is longer than Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Dolores Claiborne.
But now in marches Stephen King Goes to the Movies, and I have to tell you, I have no idea what to make of it. It’s comprised of five stories, and taken in this context, I suppose we must refer to them as stories: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (made into the film The Shawshank Redemption), “Low Men In Yellow Coats” (made into the film Hearts In Atlantis, which continues to strike me as odd, since there is a story called “Hearts In Atlantis,” and it has nothing to do with the movie), “Children of the Corn,” “The Mangler,” and “1408.” Two of these come from Night Shift, and one each from Hearts In Atlantis, Different Seasons, and Everything’s Eventual.
So I reiterate: I have no idea what to make of this.
Each story is preceded by a short introductory note – a page or two, in general – regarding King’s feelings on the stories and the movies that eventually sprung from them. The Amazon.com product description raves: “This collection features new commentary and introductions to all of these stories in a treasure-trove of movie trivia!” I need to make this point quite clear: there is no movie trivia in this book. At all. The closest the book comes to insider gossip is that King alludes to the fact that one of the movies needed a reshoot. Maybe.
There is some fiction trivia here, though, and it’s pretty good. King talks a little – and I do mean a little – bit about where the genesis of his stories come from, along with some writing-process tidbits (I liked his assertion that, despite “Shawshank” pointing to the contrary, he’s usually very good with titles.) There’s also a very, very exciting mention of the fact that Hearts In Atlantis, as a collection, is not quite finished. Here, sir, there are always more tales.
But what else? Unfortunately, not much … and I can’t seem to figure out who this collection is for. New readers who like King’s movies and want to try out the fiction? It might just be easier to hand them Different Seasons and tell them two amazing films and one pretty good one came out of it. Maybe it’s for completists like me who need to own everything by King that’s been put between two covers? Could be, and for a paperback at $7.99, it’s not really a huge investment (although if you’re a lunatic collector, like I was in the mid-90s, you can always pick up the Subterranean Press hardcover for $75. But … really?)
As a book, Stephen King Goes To the Movies just doesn’t make any sense. There are three outright horror stories, one Dark Tower story, and then “Shawshank,” which is neither. It’s a hodgepodge of ideas spread across an entire career. It can’t even rightly be called a “greatest hits” collection, because while most of these stories are terrific, “The Mangler” is merely very good. Among these giants, it can only look small in comparison.
For a collection like this to work, you would need (a) longer, more in-depth introductions to the tales, and/or (b) a different line-up. How about “The Lawnmower Man,” and a discussion about the controversy surrounding that? “The Woman In the Room,” maybe, which was Frank Darabont’s first King adaptation. Maybe a look into why Different Seasons has yielded pretty terrific results, but Four Past Midnight hasn’t given us any films that rise above mediocrity. Or what about “Trucks,” from which King’s own Maximum Overdrive sprang, or some of the more interesting “dollar babies,” like “Paranoid: A Chant,” or “The Last Rung On the Ladder.”
I love Stephen King, I really do. I am looking forward to Under the Dome with a palpable fervor. But putting out a collection of recycled stories without much in the way of new material (a Top 10 list of King’s favorite movies based on his work is the best of the new stuff) just isn’t something I can recommend. The new stuff in Stephen King Goes To the Movies took me all of fifteen minutes to read, and for eight bucks, that’s just not enough.
Then there’s the curious conundrum of Hearts in Atlantis, whose cover categorizes it as “new fiction,” thereby avoiding the question of its nature. It’s a volume of five interlocked works, most of which can be taken alone (with the exception of “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling”), but gain a certain resonance when taken together. Personally? I think the thing’s a novel.
Ah, but then there are even wackier cases. The Bachman Books? Those were five individually-released novels before collected into an omnibus edition. And what of the Octopus Press collection that includes Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and The Shining? There’s no way anyone’s going to sit back and tell me that The Shining is a short story.
So: conundrums, and plenty of them, but at least we can agree on some definites. Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual, and the new Just After Sunset are definitely short-story collections. Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight are King’s two novella collections … forgiving the fact that every piece in Four Past Midnight is longer than Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Dolores Claiborne.
But now in marches Stephen King Goes to the Movies, and I have to tell you, I have no idea what to make of it. It’s comprised of five stories, and taken in this context, I suppose we must refer to them as stories: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (made into the film The Shawshank Redemption), “Low Men In Yellow Coats” (made into the film Hearts In Atlantis, which continues to strike me as odd, since there is a story called “Hearts In Atlantis,” and it has nothing to do with the movie), “Children of the Corn,” “The Mangler,” and “1408.” Two of these come from Night Shift, and one each from Hearts In Atlantis, Different Seasons, and Everything’s Eventual.
So I reiterate: I have no idea what to make of this.
Each story is preceded by a short introductory note – a page or two, in general – regarding King’s feelings on the stories and the movies that eventually sprung from them. The Amazon.com product description raves: “This collection features new commentary and introductions to all of these stories in a treasure-trove of movie trivia!” I need to make this point quite clear: there is no movie trivia in this book. At all. The closest the book comes to insider gossip is that King alludes to the fact that one of the movies needed a reshoot. Maybe.
There is some fiction trivia here, though, and it’s pretty good. King talks a little – and I do mean a little – bit about where the genesis of his stories come from, along with some writing-process tidbits (I liked his assertion that, despite “Shawshank” pointing to the contrary, he’s usually very good with titles.) There’s also a very, very exciting mention of the fact that Hearts In Atlantis, as a collection, is not quite finished. Here, sir, there are always more tales.
But what else? Unfortunately, not much … and I can’t seem to figure out who this collection is for. New readers who like King’s movies and want to try out the fiction? It might just be easier to hand them Different Seasons and tell them two amazing films and one pretty good one came out of it. Maybe it’s for completists like me who need to own everything by King that’s been put between two covers? Could be, and for a paperback at $7.99, it’s not really a huge investment (although if you’re a lunatic collector, like I was in the mid-90s, you can always pick up the Subterranean Press hardcover for $75. But … really?)
As a book, Stephen King Goes To the Movies just doesn’t make any sense. There are three outright horror stories, one Dark Tower story, and then “Shawshank,” which is neither. It’s a hodgepodge of ideas spread across an entire career. It can’t even rightly be called a “greatest hits” collection, because while most of these stories are terrific, “The Mangler” is merely very good. Among these giants, it can only look small in comparison.
For a collection like this to work, you would need (a) longer, more in-depth introductions to the tales, and/or (b) a different line-up. How about “The Lawnmower Man,” and a discussion about the controversy surrounding that? “The Woman In the Room,” maybe, which was Frank Darabont’s first King adaptation. Maybe a look into why Different Seasons has yielded pretty terrific results, but Four Past Midnight hasn’t given us any films that rise above mediocrity. Or what about “Trucks,” from which King’s own Maximum Overdrive sprang, or some of the more interesting “dollar babies,” like “Paranoid: A Chant,” or “The Last Rung On the Ladder.”
I love Stephen King, I really do. I am looking forward to Under the Dome with a palpable fervor. But putting out a collection of recycled stories without much in the way of new material (a Top 10 list of King’s favorite movies based on his work is the best of the new stuff) just isn’t something I can recommend. The new stuff in Stephen King Goes To the Movies took me all of fifteen minutes to read, and for eight bucks, that’s just not enough.
Friday, January 2, 2009
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