Fairy Tale by Stephen King Look, I don’t think I’m making any grand statement when I say that King can write. We all know that. He’s been writing since the 1970’s and I’ve statistically proven his books have never gone down in popularity or quality, even after getting sober, even after getting hit by a truck, even after being shoved out of a tree by his son Joe Hill. But we’ve all known that King is not sophisticated. He’s not Proust. He’s not “Where the Crawdads Sing” or “The Goldfinch”. Which is fine. King writes for the masses. And that’s fine. I want to write for the masses. I’m just…
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The Books I Read: September – October 2022
The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke(unfinished) Do not trust the title. For something called “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter” I was expecting a story about the relationship between a father and daughter. It turns out this is a love story about the daughter and the android he invents. Said android is made out of human flesh, so he looks real, but never ages and has a cold computer-like personality. Nonetheless, the daughter grows up with him and ends up falling in love with him. But she does nothing about it because she’s not supposed to love an android. So this is essentially a romance with a passive protagonist. If…
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The Books I Read: March – April 2022
Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots If you’re looking for some superhero fiction, this would be an excellent place to start. This is about a henchwoman who becomes chief assistant to a supervillain because she figures out a way to really defeat heroes–in the court of public opinion. It’s all a matter of perspective–if you account for all the collateral damage they do, they end up doing more harm than good. There’s a little bit of John Scalzi’s Redshirts in here combined with Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible. But more to the fact, it’s “My Fair Lady”. The main woman starts at the bottom and becomes a super-villain in…
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The Books I Read: January – February 2022
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard This is a short collection of beautifully written essays that don’t seem to have a point. Only about a quarter of this book is really about “writing life”. That section is nothing you haven’t heard before. It’s getting your ass in the chair and writing and looking around. Nothing about the publicity tours, the writer’s block, the interactions with an editor, with fans, the relationship changes with a family (i.e. what to say during gatherings where you just want people to buy it) The rest is about… something else. I guess it’s the things you think about when you should be writing but you’re…
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The Books I Read: September – October 2021
The Deep by Nick Cutter It starts really strong. It’s straight and direct. And it reminds me of a horror version of Merm-8. But once the catalyst was reached, the story went from five stars down to three. There wasn’t enough of the plot moving forward. This is a common thing I see in horror novels–the story stops for the scares. That might work in movies, which reward you with a gory death in return for the anticipation. But in a novel you can’t do that because you stay with one character, and that character has to live through the entire book. The scares are good, thanks to the surreal…
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The Books I Read: July – August 2021
Memory Man by David Baldacci The first thing I thought of when I read the first chapter was Max Payne. It’s a very old game shaped like a crime noir graphic novel. In it, the detective (who doesn’t have the personality of a family man) comes home to find his wife and child killed by a druggie home invasion (which later turns out to be a conspiracy, but that’s not relevant here). The same thing happens here–this is a detective novel where the main character discovers the bodies of his wife and child brutally killed in their home. The exception he doesn’t know who did it. Also, instead of John…
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The Books I Read: March – April 2021
Somebody’s Gotta Do It: Because Civilization Won’t Save Itself and Other Truths about Democracy I Learned by Winning a Lowly Local Office by Adrienne Martini I was honestly scared to read this because it talks so much about the dark times of 2016. That confident optimism (“oh, we’ll get our first woman president. No one will vote for this reality show clown who’s gone bankrupt three times.”) then shock is what provokes this book. Which is exactly why I wanted to read it. I get so frustrated reading tweet after tweet about the bad guys getting away with it, sowing discord and doubt, all to keep power and money, their…
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The Books I Read: January – February 2021
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman(re-read) I was watching the Netflix series Ragnarök and decided I needed to catch up on my Norse gods. It’s not Marvel’s Thor, so you can’t just wing it. You have to remember who Tyr and Fenrir are and that Frost Giants aren’t just cannon fodder to be whacked around. It still holds up pretty well. I maintain the same opinion from my first review. One new problem I realized is that there is a lack of continuity between tales. One guy dies and is immediately resurrected in the next story. No explanation why (or ever). But that’s a symptom of a spotty written record. I…
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The Books I Read: November – December 2020
Death of a Rainmaker: A Dust Bowl Mystery by Laurie Loewenstein I read this because my wife was reading it for book club. Plus the idea intrigued me–a mystery story set in a piece of history rooted in Americana. I had never heard of it, the author, or the publishing company before. But I thought I could use a break from the robots and aliens. The thing is, it’s just tedious. The characters are dull as dishwater. There’s no intensity to the mystery. There’re no stakes. It’s as dry as the dust bowl it’s telling about. The thing about a mystery book is that bad mysteries contain large swaths of…
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The Books I Read: July – August 2020
Part of Your World: A Twisted Tale by Liz Braswell So there’s this “Twisted Tale” series from Disney books that’s essentially all about screwing the heroines out of their happy ending and making the story “what if” instead. I don’t know why Disney’s trying to do this. To reach a mature audience you have to make everything grimdark and miserable? The first series was villain-focused with works like “The Beast Within” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and then a YA adventure of Disneyland crossed with “they only come out at night”. I hated all of them passionately. I did not hate this. In fact, I kind of like it. It’s like…