I saw Stewart Hotston's Project Hanuman on the new books shelf at my local library, and it seemed like very much my thing (space opera with elements of Indian mythology, and an author influenced by Iain M. Banks!). I immediately moved it toward the top of my to-read pile.
The science fictional and philosophical ideas are quite Banksian. Sometimes I just need some spacey SF in my life, and this hit the spot. It's not a perfect fit (more on that later), but overall I really enjoyed this!
My Random Thoughts series has been running so long I'm starting to worry it's not really random. Oh, well. I did take a few months off from posting them, but that only means I have a few months of thoughts to post. And some memes and other stuff to look at just to keep it all a bit random. And now I've reached the milstone of 928 thoughts! What makes that a milestone? Nothing, really. It's just random. Enjoy!
Dear reader, I haven't been posting book reviews here on the blog as much as I would like the last few months. I've still been writing some reviews over on Goodreads, but I haven't even been keeping up over there. It has been a busy few months, and the energy for blogging has often been elusive.
I could keep castigating myself, or I could just post the reviews!
After I post this, I have two more reviews to finish of Death's End by Cixin Liu and Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. I may also return to a holiday tradition from my past: reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings! I may even read A Christmas Carol, which I've been thinking about the last few years in line with my tradition of watching holiday horror movies.
Anyway, here are my reviews of The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, Books of Blood, Vol. 3 by Clive Barker, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Fall of Gilead (graphic novel inspired by Stephen King's Dark Tower), and The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.
Happy Holidays to you and all sentient beings! May all beings be jolly!
Dear reader, I have been remiss. I have not posted in my Random Thoughts series in almost seven months. I have been doing a lot of random thinking since then. And I have collected even more random funny images. So without further ado, enjoy this Super Sized and Super Random collection of my Random Thoughts!
Don't Fear the Reaper is Stephen Graham Jones's sequel to My Heart is a Chainsaw. As with the first one, I'm not sure I'm quite a big enough slasher fan to fully appreciate this and the characters other than Jade/Jennifer aren't as memorable for me, but Don't Fear the Reaper is still a really fun and interesting book overall.
Dear reader, the last month has been ... a lot. I lost two friends in October, and then there was the US election (I wrote about the election and Plato beforehand, and post-election thoughts may be coming soon). I admit I've had trouble finding the energy and time to do much with the blog lately (although I keep reminding myself that my tenth blog-aversary is coming next month!). Part of my blog-based reticence has been dealing with the aforementioned events. Some of it is that I've just been busy: there was Halloween, the election, and then in the last week, my Horror and Philosophy students had their film festival showcasing their short philosophical horror films (which were great!), and then the next day I went with a friend to Charlotte, NC to see Iron Maiden in concert for the first time since 2010 (see below for more on that experience!). One might say that I've been living a random life. Which of course calls for more random thoughts! And memes!
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| To absent friends... |
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| Credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/580823683164479108/ |
Stephen King has been publishing short story collections since the 1970's, and they often include some of his best work (my favorite is "The Jaunt" from Skeleton Crew). I don't know if any of the stories in You Like It Darker are destined to rank among my favorites, but I really loved a few of these stories and I think they're all at least pretty good. I'm happy to report that Uncle Stevie has not lost his Shine when it comes to short stories.
My trip to Worldcon in Glasgow and Eurocon in Rotterdam was great! I may write a little about that later, but I came home to immediately start teaching for the fall semester (literally the next day), and the last month has been a whirlwind.
I'm finally ready to get back to my regular blogging with one of my most regular types of posts: a book review!
I imagine Cormac McCarthy asked himself, "What if I wrote a book filled with beautiful sentences about horrific things, set in a bleak post-apocalyptic wasteland? And what if I only occasionally used apostrophes?" And that's pretty much what he succeeded in doing with The Road.
At some point in the last few years, I made a low-key plan to someday read all of Stephen King's books. I don't have a specific timeline, but it's an ambitious goal as King has published over 70 books, counting his novels, short story collections, and nonfiction works. And the list keeps growing with a new Stephen King book coming in a couple weeks.
But to paraphrase the Daodejing, the journey of a thousand miles (or 70+ books) begins with a single step. So I recently decided to take two short steps with Joyland and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. With these two complete, I'm about 80% of the way toward my goal (at least if this fun spreadsheet from one of my favorite podcasts, Dark Tower Palaver, is accurate). Someday I may post the end of this journey (bittersweet though that will be), but for now, here are two short steps on my Stephen King path.
Last year I wrote a post called "So I Watched All the Oscar Nominees for Best Picture." I didn't set out to do so, but at some point I realized I had seen a few of the nominations and figured I might as well complete my tour. So I did! And it was mostly pretty fun. It didn't hurt that my favorite, Everything Everywhere All At Once, was the winner.
Well, dear reader, as Britney Spears once said, "Oops, I did it again."
It's randomly that time again: My Random Thoughts series continues with Part 21! I haven't been moved to write much on this blog lately, but that doesn't mean the random thoughts have stopped. Far from it! I doubt I could turn them off if I wanted to, but lucky for me and for you, dear reader, I don't want to. And it's also an excuse for a random assortment of memes curated from my random internet amusements. Enjoy!
The Long Walk is powerful, engrossing stuff, up there with Pet Sematary in Stephen King's literary explorations of death. I'm glad I finally got to it in my low-key plan to read all of King's novels, and it may be favorite so far of the Bachman books originally published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
Like King himself, I take a walk almost every day (although never a "Long Walk" thankfully!). I did an experiment while reading this book: I walked one mile in 15 minutes to get a sense of how fast the characters have to walk (four miles per hour). It's a somewhat brisk pace that only deepened my sense of the stark horror of the novel. Or maybe the real horror is that, much as we try to ignore death or make it an object of entertainment (like the Crowd and King himself to some extent), we're all moving briskly toward death.
Carrie was King's first published novel, but this may be the first novel he wrote; he started it in the late 1960's, and it was published as a Bachman book in 1979. It's the work of a somewhat less polished, less mature writer (some of the prose early on feels a bit more clunky than King's later work), but King's brilliance is still there, as is his honest, unflinching look into the darker corners of human experience.
In a future dystopian America, complete with military dictatorship and Squads that disappear unruly citizens, a contest is held every year called The Long Walk. One hundred teenage boys begin walking at the US-Canada border in Maine, and they don't stop until all but one are dead. If they walk below four miles-per-hour (a brisk pace as my personal experiment attests), they are given a warning. After three warnings, they are summarily shot by soldiers. The winner (i.e., survivor) receives a large sum of money and a Prize of his choice. (Remember: this was written decades before The Hunger Games!)
The science fiction nerd in me wanted a little more information about how we got to dystopia and the history of the Long Walk, but given what happens when Stephen King tries to do info-heavy science fiction (The Tommyknockers, Under the Dome, etc.), maybe it's best some of this is unexplained.
Where King shines, as usual, are his characters and engrossing the reader. We have, in effect, a moving small town in Maine, and the boys are all the types of characters you'd expect from King (one is even wearing a chambray work shirt). There's the main character, Garraty, an all-American, if slightly nerdy, protagonist (perhaps like a young Stephen King), the wise-cracking McVries, the good-natured Scramm, the stoic Stebbins, the cruel Barkovitch, and several more, each more complex than I've explained (but not too many: thankfully King didn't try to introduce all 100 boys!).
I think for me what sets this one above King's other Bachman dystopia (The Running Man) is a more likable protagonist and a wider cast of characters; I cared about these characters and was engrossed in their experience, horrific though I knew it would be for all of them.
And this guides the reader into the deeper themes of the novel. One way to read this novel would be a commentary on the war in Vietnam, which was raging as King started writing the novel and ended not long before it was published. The young men are literally marching toward their deaths after being chosen by the state; nobody is sure why, but everybody is celebrating along the sides of the roads.
But even more deeply, aren't we all on a long walk of sorts? We all know what the destination will be even if we don't know precisely how or when we will arrive. Like the Crowd, we try to take our minds off it, or even make it a form of gruesome entertainment, but the walk goes on nonetheless. King includes a bit of existential dread among the boys here and there just in case you didn't get it, but it's never overbearing (existential, yes, but he's not quite Sartre or de Beauvoir).
You could read this as an engrossing tale of an imaginary dystopia, or you could read it as that and something deeper at the same time. I think King's ability to work so well at multiple levels, of which The Long Walk is maybe the best early example, is a big part of why Stephen King has been successful for almost 50 years.
Here at Examined Worlds, er, we don't say stuff like, "here at Examined Worlds." But if we did, and if there was a "we" beyond you and me, dear reader, I'd say something like, "Here at Examined Worlds, we consider spooky season to be a state of mind, not a month on the calendar."
And that's why I'm posting Part Two of my "Mini-Reviews of Spooky Stuff for Spooky Season" in the middle of November, a week before US Thanksgiving (although I may revisit some of my Thanksgiving horror favorites soon!). Enjoy!
Here I am continuing to wander through my mid-40's. That's right, it's time for my annual birthday post!
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| Uncanny Magazine: Source of half the nominees in this post! |
Now that I've posted about my picks for novels and novellas for this year's Hugo awards, here are my picks for Best Novelette and Best Short Story. I did manage to read all of these (except for one I couldn't get into), but I usually do well with the short fiction in that regard. Hopefully I'll get to some of the other categories soon. I even listened to some of the podcast nominees this year--a personal best! The voting deadline is Aug. 11, so I'd better get to it.
In my perhaps ill-advised and loosely-resolved quest to read all of Stephen King's books, I have come to two shorter ones published over 20 years apart (2005 and 1983). I figured I would review them together on the blog. So here are The Colorado Kid and Cycle of the Werewolf!
The Colorado Kid
I don't know how Stephen King does it, but he took a story of two folksy small town newspaper reporters telling a 25-year-old story to a 22-year-old reporter and turned it into a probing thought experiment on two kinds of stories: those that recount events loose threads and all and stories that wrap things up with a nice beginning, middle, and end. If you think about it, the first kind of story is what really happens in life. And if you think about it some more, you'll see that the "complete" stories where everything is wrapped up are entirely artificial: they always leave some things out or take liberties for the sake of narrative unity.
In The Colorado Kid, our folksy reporters call these news stories versus features stories. I'm also thinking about a distinction used by Noam Chomsky between mysteries and problems. A problem has a solution, or at least a resolution. But a mystery may not. It may go far beyond our cognitive capacity as human beings to understand. It may remain open-ended. Like life itself.
A lot of the so-called "mystery" genre really consists of stories of problems in this sense, or features stories to use the terminology of this book. And if I'm being honest, this is probably why I usually don't care for the mystery genre (and why I have only recently delved into King's forays into more mystery-tinted fiction, but I should have known that King's mysteries would still be, well, Stephen King).
While I understand the appeal of wrapping up a mystery or solving a problem with a nice little bow (maybe precisely because we are usually denied such things in real life), my experience in my decades of existence has taught me that reality is rarely like that. It's simply not true to my basic sense of this universe. Our universe is full of mysteries that we may never solve. This could in some cases be horrifying or disappointing (and King explores those Lovecraftian depths elsewhere), but I prefer the answer that King hints at in this novel and seems to confirm in his Afterword: it is precisely these unresolved mysteries, these loose threads of reality, that make our lives more interesting, perhaps even more meaningful.
Cycle of the Werewolf
This is a fun little story (maybe a novella, maybe really just a long-ish short story) that was originally based on an idea for a calendar (no, really). It's vintage 80's Stephen King: mysterious murders are taking place in the small Maine down of Tarker's Mills (no relation). And of course the murders take place when there is a full moon each month for a year (so this is a kind of calendar, after all!).
And you get all of this with cool artwork from Berni Wrightson. Honestly the artwork is probably what sells this for me. The werewolf story is solid enough, but nothing all that great within King's larger oeuvre. The movie Silver Bullet is a bonkers expansion of the story in the tradition of the best schlocky 80's Stephen King adaptations.
Like other monsters, werewolves are, from the outside, a reminder of our mortality. Be they werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein monsters, mummies, creatures from the Black Lagoon, etc., monsters are there waiting for us all. You don't know when. But they will get you eventually. In particular, werewolves are a reminder of the duality within us all and a reminder that the more brutal, base side of our nature can sometimes come out unexpectedly.
I hesitate to say "animalistic," because I like animals just fine and think they get a bad wrap. As a werewolf in wolf form, you're just trying to eat, which is little comfort to the victims, I suppose, and a horror all its own.
Still, the real evil in this story is the conscious decision made by the human side of the werewolf character. I won't spoil it, but that, I think, is a common theme for King: the real evil isn't the monsters, it's the people. And what they do with their inner turmoil. That's a far more terrifying idea, ultimately much harder to escape, which is probably the key to King's enduring popularity. (Along with the schlocky adaptations, of course!)
