Category Archives: fiction

READING REPORT: February 6, 2015

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I polished off three books this week. That’s not as impressive as it might seem; they were all slim volumes. I’ll do reviews on these books in the near future, but a few words about each will suffice here.

The first was Zen Mind, Strong Body; a book about which I had mixed feelings. It’s by a calisthenics expert named Al Kavadlo, who is a personal trainer, author, and YouTube phenom. On the positive side, Kavadlo is a sharp guy with many useful insights into bodyweight exercise and fitness in general. Additionally, Kavadlo eschews the snake-oil salesmanship that is rampant in the fitness world.

On the other hand, the book is basically a rehash of blog posts, and the “new / first time seen pictures” aren’t useful for learning the exercises because they’re mostly just the author standing in random places with his shirt off. Furthermore, there’s no such consolidating theme to the book as is suggested by the title. I think it just has that title (a take-off on DT Suzuki’s classic work on Zen) because “The Best of Al Kavadlo’s Blog Posts” doesn’t scream “buy me.” I thought a little extra value-added could have been provided for the people who paid for the book, but you will learn from it.

The second book was Quarantine in the Grand Hotel. This novel brings satire and humor into a locked-door mystery. It was written by a Hungarian author in the 1930’s, but remains a readable and enjoyable book.

IHaveNoMouthThe third book was the short story collection by Harlan Ellison that I mentioned I would begin this week. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream consists of seven stories that are nominally in the genre of science fiction, but could also be classified as tales of the strange. This book was first published in 1967. Ellison writes stories in a readable style, though one that can sometimes be called “trippy.” If I were going to award a “book of the week” for the book that I found most engaging, it would be this one.

I only got a couple of chapters each into the Mo Yan novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and the epic poem The Aeneid. The former is readable has a fascinating premise, but the latter–not unexpectedly– is a little more of a chore to read (but is a classic and seems worth the difficulties.)

Having finished off some nonfiction in the preceding week, I made room to resume reading a book that I started a couple of months ago entitled Why Do People Get Ill? A two-man team consisting of a psychoanalyst and a neuroscientist joined together to write this book. It examines the role that stress and the mind play in illness. Yes, things like germs (i.e. bacteria and viruses) cause illness. However, that’s not the whole story, and a couple of key questions remain. First, how come some people can be repeatedly exposed to causative factors and their bodies knock out disease leaving them asymptomatic. Second, how come others readily come down with ailments–sometimes even when they haven’t been exposed to causative factors. To put matters in scholarly terms, germs may be a necessary condition for disease, but they are rarely a sufficient condition.

WhyDoPeopleGetIll_Leader&Corfield

 

I didn’t do much yoga or martial arts specific reading this week. However, today I finally began The Pyjama Game, which is a book about Judō that I mentioned in one of my previous Reading Reports.

I purchased four books this week, all on Kindle and mostly on sale.  Those books, which I’m sure to be discussing and reviewing on later dates are:

TheThreeStigmata

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: Because I’m a huge PKD fan, and this is said to be one of his best books–of his books that I haven’t yet read. This was in the Kindle Monthly Deals.

FirstHubby

First Hubby: This will be my first Roy Blount Jr. book, but I did enjoy him on that NPR game show (i.e. Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!) This was also a Kindle Monthly Deal as I recall.

Ikkyu_Berg

Ikkyu: Crow with No Mouth: This is the story of a Zen master who lived in Kyoto in the 15th century. He sounds like a fascinating man, and was also a skilled poet. This one wasn’t on sale, but neither was it expensive at the usual price.

TheElementsThe Elements: This book is a Kindle Daily Deal as I’m writing this. I love me some science. I did have to look through the sample pages before buying. Even though it was inexpensive, I was concerned that it might not have much usefulness on my black&white, base-model Kindle because the graphics are an important part of the book. However, it looked like there was enough text explanation to be worth the $2.00–even if the graphics don’t show up well.

And that was my week in books.

BOOK REVIEW: 999 ed. by Al Sarrantonio

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999: Twenty-nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense999: Twenty-nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense by Al Sarrantonio

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amazon page

999 is a collection of 28 short stories and one novella that are all in the genre of horror and dark suspense. The collection includes some superstar authors such as Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, and David Morrell, but all of the authors are established writers and most will be familiar to readers in this genre.

I won’t go into each story in-depth, but will list and briefly describe each. A few of the stories stuck with me, while others were quite forgettable—so I’ll point out which were which. Your results may vary.

1.) “Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue” by Kim Newman: This is a Cold War Zombie story. It was intriguing.
2.) “The Ruins of Contracoeur” by Joyce Carol Oates: The family of a disgraced Judge move to a remote area to stay out of the limelight, and faceless monster sightings ensue. How bad could a Joyce Carol Oates’ story be? It’s solid and well-written. It wasn’t among my favorites.
3.) “The Owl and the Pussycat” by Thomas M. Disch: An “inanimate” stuffed owl and plush-toy cat converse about their wicked, spouse-abusing owner. Creepy, but not one of the strongest entries. The stories in this collection range from realism to far-fetched speculative fiction. This work is toward the latter end of the spectrum.
4.) “The Road Virus Heads North” by Stephen King: A mutating “killer” picture is obtained at a yard sale. This is among the stronger stories.
5.) “Keepsakes and Treasures: A Love Story” by Neil Gaiman: About a collector of the “exotic.” While Gaiman is my favorite author of this bunch, I can’t say this is story was among my favorites of the collection. I will say that it has some of the cleverest wording of any of the stories (as one would expect of Gaiman), but maybe that humor works at right-angles to the story. You decide.
6.) “Growing Things” by T.E.D. Klein: About a husband / Mr. Fixit and his following of advice columns on a growth. This is a short piece, but not among the more memorable stories. It’s innovative, but not the least bit intense.
7.) “Good Friday” by F. Paul Wilson: A vampire story set in a convent. A good story, but obviously not particularly innovative. However, if you like the idea of nuns battling vampires, here’s your story.
8.) “Excerpts from the Records of the New Zodiac and the Diaries of Henry Watson Fairfax” by Chet Williamson: A swanky dinner club that rotates hosts and each host tries to outdo the last in the presentation of “exotic delicacies.”
9.) “An Exaltation of Termagants” by Eric Van Lustbader: I’ll have to be honest; this was the least memorable of these stories. When I flipped back through to write this review, I found that I’d completely forgotten the piece. I think its lack of memorableness speaks for itself. It’s about an unappealing man and his sucky life that’s tied to his poor relationships with women. I think the problem is two-fold. First, it’s one of the longer stories in the collection. Second, unlike Joe R. Lansdale’s “Mad Dog Summer,” it’s a long short story without memorable characters or a taut story arc. In short, if you’re going to go long, you’ve got to give us characters we can either love or despise, and you’ve got to give us a pace that keeps us intrigued. This story does neither. I know it’s all subjective, but I think this collection without this story would be improved.
10.) “Itinerary” by Tim Powers: A mysterious caller asks the protagonist to tell an unknown woman caller that said caller “just left” in response to her inquiry. From there the story meanders into personal tragedy before bringing it all back together in the end. It was so-so. I liked the premise, but it didn’t have that x-factor in execution.
11.) “Catfish Gal Blues” by Nancy A. Collins: A river catfish mermaid story. This was a weird but highly memorable story.
12.) “The Entertainment” by Ramsey Campbell: Man thinks he’s checked into a hotel, but it’s really some sort of asylum. Not the most memorable, but not the least either.
13.) “ICU” by Edward Lee: Man awakes in an ICU, and is informed that he’s a gangster involved in pedophilia and other hardcore taboo pornography. Vivid and well-crafted.
14.) “The Grave” by P.D. Cacek: A young woman with a horrible mother discovers a grave in the woods that she’s never seen before. This one is eery and visceral.
15.) “The Shadow, The Darkness” by Thomas Ligotti: About a tour group promised “the ultimate physical-metaphysical excursion.” This paranormal story is just OK.
16.) “Knocking” by Rick Hautala: Remember Y2K? It was the idea that the entirety of the world of computing would come to a screeching halt because their little (inadequately programmed) computer minds would be blown by a date starting in “20?” This story is based on that notion.
17.) “Rio Grande Gothic” by David Morrell: A cop keeps finding shoes left in the same section of road, and eventually begins to wonder if someone isn’t trying to tell him something. This story does a good job of capturing one’s curiosity and keeping one’s attention.
18.) “Des Saucisses, Sans Doute” by Peter Schneider: This is one of the shorter stories in the book, and it’s also an almost absurdist dark piece. You may laugh or you may vomit, either way the writer had an effect.
19.) “Angie” by Ed Gorman: This story is white-trash gothic. It’s about a couple that are “stuck” with this kid, and are concerned that the child has learned their dirty, little secret and will turn them in. It was one of the stories that stuck with me most intensely. The unlikable character development is exceptional.
20.) “The Ropy Thing” by Al Sarrantonio: A couple of kids in a neighborhood assaulted by a thing that is… well, ropy (rope-like.) Not one of the better pieces, but it has the virtue of being short.
21.) “The Tree is My Hat” by Gene Wolfe: A man befriends an outcast on island in the South Pacific. It’s a solid piece.
22.) “Styx and Bones” by Edward Bryant: A cheating man comes down with a mysterious ailment. This is a well-executed story.
23.) “Hemophage” by Steven Spruill: Another vampire story, this one set inside a detective story.
24.) “The Book of Irrational Numbers” by Michael Marshall Smith: It’s about a guy from Roanoke, Virginia who is obsessed with numbers. As there aren’t many math short stories, if you are a big fan of math fiction you may find this interesting. The writing style is fun. If you aren’t a math fan, you may lose the story.
25.) “Mad Dog Summer” by Joe R. Lansdale: A man recounts a story of murder from his youth living in a rural community. This is one of the strongest stories in the collection. It’s also one of the longest, but the author does an outstanding job of keeping one’s attention throughout.
26.) “The Theatre” by Bentley Little: A clerk at a bookstore ventures into a forbidden floor above the store to find a creepy theater that will change his life. It’s a good, creepy story.
27.) “Rehersals” by Thomas F. Monteleone: I don’t know that I would have put this in the same genre as the other stories, but it’s an excellent story—and so I can see why the editor was eager to include it. It is speculative fiction, as opposed to being realist, but I wouldn’t count it as either horror or suspense. It’s about a man handling props in a community theater who is given glimpses into what his life could have been like if he’d stood up to his abusive father. It’s one of the best stories in the collection.
28.) “Darkness” by Dennis L. McKiernan: A man moves into a beautiful house willed to him by an eccentric uncle. The problem is that the lights in the house are so bright as to be an assault on the eyes—leaving not a shadow or dark space in the house. The lights are wired to be either all on or all off. It doesn’t occur to the nephew that the lights might be that way for a reason.
29.) “Elsewhere” by William Peter Blatty: This is the longest piece–a novella / very short novel and not a short story. It’s about a realtor who’s trying to sell a house that’s haunted. She brings together a writer and a couple “experts on the paranormal” to debunk the haunting so that the house will become salable. But everything is not as it appears.

This is a good collection of stories. Some are better than others, but the best are extraordinary. I’d highly recommend it for anyone who likes horror, dark suspense, or the macabre. Within that genre, it’s an eclectic mix of stories in form, substance, and style.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Martian by Andy Weir

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The MartianThe Martian by Andy Weir

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

If you like suspenseful science-fiction, humor, and are fascinated by science, you must read this book. I’m not kidding.

The premise is a simple cast-away story, except that it takes place on Mars—an environment in which a human can’t last for seconds without a lot of properly functioning technology. Astronaut Mark Watney is left for dead when a severe storm blows in, impaling him with a piece of metal, knocking out his vital statistics monitor, and blowing him into a drift. Having lost visual contact with Watney, showing no vital statistics, and facing the toppling of the crew’s escape vehicle by high winds, the mission commander decides that she can’t risk the lives of the entire crew to cart Watney’s body back home. The thing is; Watney isn’t dead.

The book is a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows associated with events that nearly kill Watney—either in an instant or by making his long-term survival impossible. The botanist / engineer must figure out how to survive for four years (until the next Mars mission is due—if it doesn’t get cancelled) with less than six months of supplies. (The mission was supposed to be one month but was aborted in the first week, but there were five other crew members whose rations were left behind.) If you think Tom Hanks had it bad in Cast Away, imagine having to produce food on Mars.

This book taps into the visceral feeling that works so well in the movie Gravity (but Weir does more homework on the science.) For tension, it’s hard to beat being adrift in space, utterly isolated from one’s species—or any species for that matter–and knowing you will die when your resources run out.

The main character, who is the only character for the first six chapters or so, is intensely likable. Mark Watney is funny, intelligent, self-deprecatingly humble, and can confidently problem solve in the midst of any crisis. If there’s a critique of the realism of this story (as sci-fi goes it is extremely realistic), it’s that Watney is preternaturally skilled at adapting to complete solitude. However, I don’t deduct for this, because if it showed him at the depths of despair that someone in his circumstance would inevitably go through, it wouldn’t be nearly as pleasing a book to read. If you’ve read a lot about sensory deprivation and / or what happens to prisoners over long stints in solitary confinement, I’d suspend the disbelief that might come from that knowledge and just accept that Watney is exceedingly good at saying, “Pity-party over. It’s time to make this work.” In short, humorous Watney is just a lot more fun to read than would be a despondent astronaut.

I think I’ve been clear that this is an outstanding book, and everyone should read it. I guess if you absolutely hate science (of any kind–because there’s botany, biology, physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. all rolled up into this book), you may find that it’s hard to stick with the glut of scientific / engineering discussions coming at you. Still, you shouldn’t hate science that much—what the hell is the matter with you. Weir writes in a readable style and the reader doesn’t get awash in minutiae. (For example, Watney even names the unit kilowatt-hour/sol [sol=a Mar’s day] the “Pirate-ninja” to make it more palatable and humorous.)

Read it. You’ll like it. Also, don’t wait because the movie is supposed to come out in the Fall.

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READING REPORT: January 30, 2015

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Welcome to my second weekly dispatch on what I’ve been reading. Owing to my weird approach to reading, I tend to finish books in clusters, and this week I polished off the novel The Martian, the horror short story anthology 999, and three nonfiction books (Principles of Tibetan Medicine, The Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga,  and How Pleasure Works.) The only one of these that I’ve completed a review on is Principles of Tibetan Medicine, but reviews of the others will be in the works in the upcoming week(s.)


The star of my completed pile was Andy Weir’s The Martian. It’s a spectacular science fiction read that’s engaging from beginning to end. Readers who love science will find it particularly fascinating and well-researched. For the yogis and yoginis out there, Ray Long’s book on muscles as applied to Hatha Yoga is well-organized, easy to follow, and easy to use.

 

The completion of several books this week creates openings in what fiction and poetry I’ll be reading on Kindle in the coming weeks. Drum-roll please… I will be starting the following books this week:


MoYan_LDWMO

1.) Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan: Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2012, and this 2006 book is about a benevolent land owner who is killed on orders by Mao Zedong, and is subsequently reincarnated as a series of farm animals.


 

IHaveNoMouth

2.) I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison: The title of this collection of short stories is also the title of the most prominent piece in it. The 1968 Hugo winning story is a post-apocalyptic tale of artificial intelligence run amok.


 

Aeneid

3.) The Aeneid of Virgil: I’m overdue to read this epic poem by the famous Latin poet written during the first century B.C.


 

In nonfiction, I made an impulse purchase this week that I’m about half way through reading. It’s called Zen Mind, Strong Body and it’s by Al Kavadlo. I’m having minor buyer’s remorse, not because it’s a bad book, but because it turns out to be a collection of blog posts, and so I could have probably gotten all this for free by digging around the world wide web a little. (Moral: always read the fine print on the dust jacket. I wouldn’t mind, but it was a bit pricey for rehashed blog posts.) Kavadlo is a personal trainer and advocated of calisthenics and advanced bodyweight exercises, and he has many interesting ideas on both mind and body. It has provided some interesting food for thought, but I don’t really need the hundreds of pictures of the author with his shirt off.

ZenMindStrongBody



 

I’m about halfway through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest book, Antifragile, and would like to make some headway on that in the upcoming week. While I’m a fan of Taleb’s work, I’ve gotten bogged down in this one because it keeps going and going and going on about a rather simple concept–i.e. that some things become stronger or more robust when exposed to stressors. I’m not sure the book needed to be this long. I suspect that Taleb is the kind to throw a world class tantrum if an editor took a hatchet to a word of his writing–and now he has the following to make it work. He’s a smart guy and raises many excellent points, but he seems like a major prima donna. At any rate, maybe he’ll surprise me in the second half with something novel and interesting–in lieu of endless restatement of his (admittedly fascinating) thesis.

Antifragility



 

I also started a book a few weeks back called Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin that I’d like to get back to. It examines what science has to say about the practice of meditation from the perspective of a neuroscientist who’s also a Zen practitioner.

Zen&Brain



 

At the end of last year, I did a post about the Book Riot 2015 Read Harder Challenge. It’s a sort of scavenger hunt for readers. There are 25 categories of books, of which one is supposed to read at least one book each. If you can count the same book for several categories (I don’t see why not as long as they fit the description) then I have so far covered seven categories. (Not bad for the first month of the challenge.)

-Collection of short stories: 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense

–Author of a different gender: Tears in Rain (Rosa Montero) and Principles of Tibetan Medicine (Tamdin Rither Bradley) [Both females]

–Science-fiction novel: The Martian

–Collection of poetry: Leaves of Grass

–A book recommended for you by someone else: The Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga

-A book originally published in another language: Tears in Rain  (Spanish)

–A book published in 2014: The Martian (Some might dispute this as it was self-published in 2011, but not picked up by a publisher until 2014.)

READING REPORT: January 23, 2015

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If I were a kid today, I’d be diagnosed with ADD in a heartbeat. I rarely read one book straight through. However, I read a lot, and that means I switching from one book to the next–reading a chapter at a time. I do try to read no more than one book of a given type/genre at a time–often unsuccessfully, as you’ll see. With this in mind, I thought I’d experiment with a weekly post on what I’ve been reading that week.

Book-Review-The-Martian

Fiction: The novel that I’m currently reading is Andy Weir’s The Martian. This book is gripping. It’s considered to be one of the best–if not the best–science fiction works of 2014, although it was self-published in 2011. This is a great example of a book that couldn’t get published despite being spectacular, and which will now make a bazillion dollars. It also explains how a 2014 novel is set to have a big budget movie adaptation come out in late 2015. This book is like the movie Gravity set on Mars, except that it’s smarter.  It taps into that visceral fear of what it would be like to die alone in space–not in a flash but with time to know you are going to die. An unlikely, but plausible sounding, set of circumstances result in astronaut Mark Watney being left for dead on the surface of Mars. But, of course, he’s not dead. Watney has to be creative to figure out how to live for four years in hopes that the next manned Mars mission will go forward as planned. It’s a roller coaster ride between him thinking he will surely die and him coming up with clever solutions. If you are into science, it’s particularly intriguing. I’m about 20% of the way through.

 

Foreign Fiction: I’ve also continued to read a Hungarian novel called Quarantine in the Grand Hotel by Jenő Rejtő. This is a silly (in a good way) locked-door murder mystery. I picked it up in Hungary over the holidays, and will probably finish it in the next week or so. (I’m about 2/3rds of the way through, and it’s only a 160 page book.) It’s short, highly readable, and humorous.

I also read a chapter from The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu. A number of authors have picked up the mantle of Sherlock Holmes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  (Not to mention TV shows and movies.) This book is published in India by a Tibetan author who imagines Sherlock Holmes traveled to India and Tibet after he was believed to have been killed (along with Professor Moriarty) in Switzerland. (Going over the falls as depicted in the second Sherlock Holmes movie featuring Robert Downey Jr.) There are three parts to the book: India, Tibet, and Beyond. I’m in the last couple chapters of the first part, most of which takes place in Bombay.

 

Short Stories: I’m about 85% of the way through 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. This is a collection of short fiction of horror / dark suspense. It features authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Eric Van Lustbader, and David Morrell.  All of the  works are short stories except for a novella/short novel by William Peter Batty. The novella is the last piece, and I’ve just started part II of it.

999_Horror&Suspense

 

Martial Arts: I just finished Dr. Anthony Catanese’s The Medical Care of the Judoka, but I posted a review yesterday so I won’t get into that book. My next martial arts book will be The Pyjama Game by Mark Law, but I haven’t yet begun it.

 

Yoga: I’ve been reading two books related to yoga this week. I just finished Chapter 2 of Coulter’s Anatomy of Hatha Yoga. This chapter dealt with the anatomy and physiology of breathing. This book is an excellent resource for yoga teachers, but it’s pretty dense–which may explain why I’m only on Chapter 3. Not only does the chapter give general information on respiration, it also provides information specific to various yogic breathing methods such as abdominal, yogic, thoracic, paradoxical, and diaphragmatic.

The second yoga book I’m reading is Singleton’s Yoga Body, which is a history of yoga postural practice (asana practice). This book presents a controversial thesis, which is that postural practice (asana) wasn’t really a part of mainstream yoga until quite recently, and that it’s as much a product of what happened in the Western world in the early 20th century as it is a result of Indian yogic traditions–if not more. Having finished the first three chapters (about 30% through), I’m not sure whether I buy his argument or not. He has some documentary evidence on his side, but I know there is also a proclivity to equate the current era in which everybody documents laundry day with the past in which many people were much more secretive. It’s also often not true that the most vocal are not the mainstream. He may be correct, but he has yet to wow me. (Part of his argument is people like Max Muller and HP Blavatsky found hatha yoga [the style which most emphasizes posture] to be the domain of conmen and beggars.)


AnatomyHathaYoga_CoulterYogaBody_Singleton

 

Miscellaneous Nonfiction: I’ve got about 70 more pages to finish in a book called How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom. As the title implies, this book is about the science of why people get pleasure from various things from food to sex to freaky sex to art to music, etc. The primary thesis is that there are hidden essences that are the source of pleasure. The chapter I just finished talked about an interesting study in which violinist extraordinaire Joshua Bell went into a subway station and played his $3.5million violin, and barely netted $30–even though there were people passing him who’d paid $200 to hear him in his tuxedo at a concert hall later that evening. The chapter also talked about art forgeries, and how some art is valuable when it’s associated with a famous painter and worthless when it’s a forgery by a presumably equally skilled forger (I say equally skilled because these individuals have been able to pass their work off to experts as a painting by a famous artist. In some cases, they weren’t forgeries but rather originals in the style of the famous artist and submitted as an unknown work found in a basement somewhere.)

HowPleasureWorks

 

I also finished the letter “B” in the book The Painted Word  by Phil Cousineau. This book is organized like a dictionary, except that it only contains certain English language words that the author finds particularly intriguing, and it gives background on usage and how the meanings have migrated. If you love language, you’ll find this book much less painfully boring than I have made it sound.

Painted Word

 

That completes the books I’ve been reading over the past week. I did purchase two books this week, but they’re far down the queue to be read. One is the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentleman by Alan Moore, and the other is Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.

BOOK REVIEW: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

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NeverwhereNeverwhere by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

Neverwhere taps into a reader’s imagination and the fantasy that beyond closed doors and locked grates, beyond the prying eyes of common men, lies something magical—not just the mundane sewers and conduits our rational mind tells us exist there. This magical world is “London Below,” and–to a lesser extent–rooftop London. It’s a world that exists below the workaday London that we know. It’s a London of angels and cutthroats, witches and warriors. It’s a London trapped in time, but unconstrained by the laws of physics or men as we know them.

The lead character is Richard Mayhew, a perfectly normal resident of London Above. He has a fine—if boring—job in the business world, and a fiancé isn’t right for him, but who he believes is close enough for an imperfect world by virtue of her being pretty, smart, and capable.

Mayhew is living an ordinary and comfortable life until he and his girlfriend come across an injured young woman on the street. While his fiancé, Jessica, steps over the girl because the couple are on their way to meet Jessica’s VIP boss, Richard refuses to leave the girl. The injured girl is a resident of London Below, and had collapsed to the sidewalk after escaping from the two London Below master assassins who killed her family. It turns out the girl, Door, is from a family whose magical gift is the ability to open doors—even doors that are locked, sealed, or that no one even recognizes the existence of. As no good deed goes unpunished, Richard’s assistance of Door pulls him into the world of London Below, and he soon finds that he’s almost invisible to the residents of London Above and that he’s been forgotten by Jessica, his friends, and his coworkers.

The rest of the book is a hero’s quest in which Door is trying to discover who ordered the assassination of her family and why, and Richard is trying to find out whether (and, if so, how) he can get back his life in London Above. Because the fates of Richard and Door are intertwined, they travel together along with a bodyguard named Hunter and a Marquis / conman in the debt of Door’s father named the Marquis de Carabas.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It’s highly readable and the reader will be drawn to the fate of the characters. It has that page-turner quality. I’d highly recommend this book for anyone who reads fantasy / speculative fiction–or who doesn’t but is willing to give it a try.

Neil Gaiman is, as always, the master storyteller. When the story calls for humor, it is genuinely funny. When it’s time to be scary, it creates shivers. The storytelling was good enough that I was willing to overlook an ending that—in less capable hands—would have felt flat and too easy.

I didn’t realize that Neverwhere was based on a BBC miniseries. In other words, for a change the book is based on the movie rather than the other way round. However, the book does concisely but vividly portray setting—a task that one might imagine being easier having gone in this developmental direction. And, of course, setting is extremely important in this book. The distinct feel of London Below, London Above, and Rooftop London must be conveyed.

Here is a link to a piece of said BBC miniseries:

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BOOK REVIEW: Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero

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Tears in RainTears in Rain by Rosa Montero

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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The title of this book, Tears in Rain will be instantly recognizable to sci-fi fans as a reference to the Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) monologue at the end of the movie Blade Runner. For those who aren’t familiar, Roy Batty is an android who is about to die as the result of a preset lifespan established in his programming, and he’s reflecting on all those unique experiences that he’s had that will be forever lost with his demise—as tears in rain.

When I picked up this book, I thought it would exist in the Blade Runner universe. It does not. However, it exists in a universe that shares several common features with the world of Blade Runner, and—in fact—it gives a nod to the film as a prescient historic work of fiction. What Montero’s novel has in common with the Ridley Scott film is a world in which there are both humans and androids that have surpassed the uncanny valley—i.e. they are generally indistinguishable from humans (if they want to be.) Furthermore, these androids (also called replicants) have a short and predictable lifespan–though it’s presented as a mysterious flaw rather than intentional programming. Further, there is a degree of tension between humans and replicants (reps.) The book also shares the movie’s film noir feel. The book’s lead character, Bruna Husky is a private dick–if you will—and a replicatant, and she is investigating a series of murders by replicants gone haywire.

The focal point of the book is something not extensively addressed in Blade Runner or that film’s point of origin, the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and that is the need to build memories into these androids so that they can function like humans. Reps discover at some point that all their childhood memories—good and bad—are fake, and this is a point of consternation for Husky. It is the corruption of the memories that leads the replicants to kill. That fact is established almost from the novel’s beginning. What isn’t clear is who is doing it and why, and book follows Husky through her investigation of these questions.

For the most part, I found the book to be readable. It’s a translation from the original, which was written in Spanish. It didn’t have that rare page-turning aura that made me have to find out what would happen next, but it was a good, solid science fiction work. The characters are—as one might expect from my “film noir” comment—overwhelmingly gruff and terse and / or broken people. Not that the unlikable nature of the characters is responsible for the lack of intensity of interest in what will happen to them. I recently read an article about unlikable characters, and it pointed out (correctly in my view) that Nick and Amy Dunne of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl are among the most detestable characters of recent literature, and yet that is a book one can’t put down. It’s difficult but not impossible to build intense interest with such characters.

Interspersed throughout the book are a few multi-page information dumps in the form of reports to an archivist who is a secondary character in the book–and who probably only exists to justify these info dumps. While the dumps aren’t excessive, neither do I think they are necessary. I don’t think there was much information in them that was necessary to the storyline, and what was could have been communicated more smoothly.

Part of Montero’s problem is that by tying her work’s title and important background details to Blade Runner, it becomes almost impossible to not compare her novel to either Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I might have given this work another star if I wasn’t thinking about how it was less visceral than the movie and less clever than Dick’s book. (Without the info dumps or the comparison it would have been a 4-star for me.)

This is a worthwhile read for sci-fi fans.

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BOOK REVIEW: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

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ShantaramShantaram by Gregory David Roberts

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Shantaram is a journey through the life of a convict on the lam, a slum dweller, a prisoner in a crowded Indian jail, a de facto combat medic in the Soviet-Afghan War, and a Bombay gangster. The book is a novel, but mixes in autobiographical elements—at least in broad brush strokes. The author, Gregory David Roberts, was—as with his lead character–an escaped convict who fled his homeland of Australia to find anonymity among the Bombay (now Mumbai) masses. Roberts had taken up armed robbery of banks and institutions to support a heroine habit. However, it’s not clear to what degree the details described in the book echo reality. Roberts is adamant that the other characters in the book are completely fictional, but at least some members of this cast were recognizable as real people—some of whom disagree with the accounting of events in the book.

Most of the book is set in Bombay in the 1980s, and for many the book serves as portrait of the good, the bad, and the ugly of that city. The book picks up with the lead character’s arrival in Bombay, where the gregarious convict soon makes equally vibrant friends. There’s very little backstory, except for one chapter that details the protagonist’s escape from prison. There are occasional mentions of his heroin addiction and crimes peppered throughout the book—often delivered in doleful or apologetic moments. Also, he occasionally mentions the family that is missing in Australia—particularly a daughter—usually when the close nature of Indian familial relationships remind him of what he’s missing. This vague background makes sense as this was supposed to be book two in a quartet. Another book is supposed to be coming out called The Mountain Shadow, that I suspect would be the third book of this quartet.

The book excels at creating characters that are multidimensional in the extreme, but who one still finds engaging. The protagonist and several major characters should be unbelievable, given the degree to which they mix virtue and vice, cynicism and idealism. However, maybe they reflect human nature more than we’d like to admit.

Consider the protagonist. He is called “Shantaram” by the family of his best friend in Bombay. Shantaram means “man of peace,” and that’s supposedly what those characters saw in him, but he’s also a man of violence—by his own admission. He’s stabbed, beaten, and shot at other people, and continues to do so. It’s not just the lead character who is like this. It’s the same for his love interest, his gangster friends, his Mujahedeen friends, and his fellow prisoners. Many of them are anti-heroes, and others vacillate between hero and villain. “Doing the wrong thing for the right reason,” is a recurring theme throughout the book.

It should be noted that the anti-hero characters are also the source of loathing for those who hate the book—and there are those who hate it. It’s not just the frequent and raw violence from the “man of God’s peace,” but how the book glorifies gangsters—at least some gangsters.

There was one feature of the book that made this acceptable to me, and that’s that the character knows he’s flawed. As with any veiled autobiographical book, there’s probably some dancing events around to make the characters look more reasonable and likable than they really were. However, Shantaram does admit his mistakes and flaws. One can see how an element of self-loathing plays into these people’s behavior. The virtuous half of Shantaram can be seen as a desire for redemption.

One of the best encapsulations of his self-loathing is when Shantaram gets a promotion in the Bombay mafia, and he tries to recruit a couple of his friends from the slum. He is shocked to find that they would rather stay slum-dwellers who eke out an existence than to make good money breaking the law—even if only as document couriers (the documents being fake passports and the like.) [To be honest but non-PC, if you think Roberts glorifies gangsters, you should see how he glorifies slum-dwellers.] Shantaram also envies a man who refuses assistance to get his sentence reduced after the virtuous slum-dweller killed a horrible person in the heat of passion. In both of these cases, he has a “who must I be?” moment. Maybe that’s why we believe that this ex-junkie mobster would set up a free clinic in the slum or help his friends without question, he’s in a constant search for redemption. It could be said that the engine of this book is the search for redemption, but it’s a Promethean task because Shantaram keeps accruing karmic penalties in his tight-rope walk between good and evil—or maybe a damaged moral compass.

The book weighs in at almost a thousand pages, but it does a good job of keeping one reading. There many exhilarating and tragic events to keep one turning pages such as a fight against a cholera outbreak in the slum, torture in a Bombay prison, taking fire in the mountains of Afghanistan, the deaths of close friends, and fighting turf wars between factions of the Bombay mafia. However, the glue that binds all those climactic points together is the tension created by the various relationships from the expat community to the slums to the Mumbai mob.

Love it or loathe it, Shantaram is a powerful book. I define “powerful” as attracting love and hate at the extreme. This isn’t a book one feels indifferent about. I’d recommend it for a general audience.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Strain, Vol. 1 by David Lapham et. al.

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The Strain Volume 1The Strain Volume 1 by David Lapham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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I sometimes wonder what Bram Stoker would think about the fact that his work spurred an entire industry of copy-cats. Everybody thinks that they can make an interesting and novel contribution to this vampiric genre. In very few cases, see: Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, they are correct. However, even though most of these works don’t take us into uncharted territory, they can still be entertaining. In fact, some of the versions that stay true to the concept seem more entertaining than others that moved into new territory but are patently stupid. I’m speaking, of course, of Twilight and other vampire-as-romance books that feed a widespread malady of the age afflicting teenage girls and, sadly, middle-aged women. I think The Strain, Volume 1 makes for an interesting and entertaining modern-day vampire story, without being particularly brilliant or groundbreaking.

The Strain, Volume 1 is the first installment of a graphic novel adaptation of the novel written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. The Introduction states that the graphic novel isn’t meant to precisely mirror del Toro and Hogan’s prose novel. I haven’t read the del Toro / Hogan book, but the synopsis indicates that at least the beginning and the characters are largely the same. I can’t comment as to how much the two works differ in detail, and whether the authors of the first book emphasized the difference so as to encourage readers to pick up both books (instead of cannibalizing each other), versus because the works are truly substantively different.

The inciting incident, apparently for the novel as well as the comic, occurs when a commercial jet liner lands in New York, coming to a stop and going out of contact with the tower. It turns out that all but three of the individuals on the plane are dead.

The graphic novel weaves together the story from two perspectives. First, the lead in the story is Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, a Center for Disease Control (CDC) employee who heads a rapid response team. As circumstances somehow indicate that this event involves a biological or toxic substance—though they have no ability to see into the plane, Goodweather’s team is called to investigate. (How they concluded with such high certainty that it was a substance in CDC’s bailiwick and not smoke inhalation or a terrorist hijacking is beyond me. But the CDC team enters on the heels of SWAT, and with operational control.) However, it’s a graphic novel with limited page constraints, so I didn’t grade too harshly on this particular type of credulity stretcher.

Second, the graphic novel begins with a vignette from the point of view of Abraham Setrakian who is a holocaust survivor and former Vampire hunter. Setrakian knows what is going on from his experience in the old world. It’s this odd couple pairing of an old man who knows an unbelievable truth and a scientist who doesn’t believe in the supernatural that makes this work interesting. The latter anchors the work in the world as we know it, but the former adds an element of mystery and charm. These mixed atmospherics are where this work really excels. The two men end up teaming up to fight a threat that will spread with unchecked fury unless they do something about it.

Unlike the hunky Vampires of Twilight fame, the vampires in Lapham’s work are meant to be as repulsive as possible. They have six-foot tongues with stingers by which they take their blood meals, and the giant slobbery maws necessary to accommodate such an appendage. Instead of having a new twist on the Vampire story, this work attempts to create value added in part by putting the horror back into Vampires in a big way (also, through skillful atmospherics.)

It should also be noted that this isn’t a work for young kids. That should go without saying, I know. Freak-show parents who reason that it’s only violence, and who have no problem with their child seeing someone take a shotgun blast to the chest, but who’ll write a death threat to networks, publishers, or congressmen if said shotgun blast exposes a nipple should be forewarned that the work has a short but sexually graphic section in it—in addition to all the stakings and proboscis stabbings.

This was an entertaining enough horror-genre take on the Vampire. Scientists may find it a bit ridiculous that their comic book counterparts go about their jobs sticking their hands in unknown substances found at the site of the mysterious deaths of almost 200 people. However, despite some credulity challenges, the book creates an interesting atmosphere for a vampire story.

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BOOK REVIEW: VALIS by Philip K. Dick

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VALIS (VALIS Trilogy, #1)VALIS by Philip K. Dick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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VALIS is the first book in a final—unfinished–trilogy of Philip K. Dick. The other two books of the trilogy were to be The Divine Invasion (finished) and an unfinished book that would have been entitled The Owl in Daylight. Some (notably people who want to sell books at any cost) will claim that The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is the last novel of this trilogy. It’s true that “Transmigration” was Dick’s last complete book and that it shares a domain at the nexus of religion and science fiction with the VALIS trilogy, but it wasn’t intended to be part of the trilogy.

“Trippy” might be the best word to describe VALIS. The narrator is a writer named Phil, who we know from details like the mention of past titles is really the book’s author, Philip K. Dick. The lead character is a man named Horselover Fat. If one is reading carefully, one learns early that Horselover Fat and Phil are one in the same—although we don’t learn until late in the novel that Philip means “fond of horses” in Greek and Dick means “fat” in German. For most of the novel Phil speaks of Horselover Fat as though he was an entirely separate person, and even describes times when the two were said to be in two different places (Horselover goes on a global search for the new messiah, while Phil seemingly stays home.) There’s a point late in the novel in which Phil is “cured,” and his multi-personality delusion disappears.

It’s hard to concisely describe what the book is about because it’s so strange and ranging. One can easily vacillate between thinking it’s brilliant and that it’s gobbledygook. Horselover Fat is in search of a messiah, and he thinks he can simultaneously see the world as it is and as it was in Roman times. He has visions that he comes to believe were laser transmitted into his brain. He is writing a rambling exegesis that features throughout the book in random order as seems “relevant.”

Horselover has friends that are in their own ways both less and more crazy than he—not including Phil who is actually one in the same and, therefore, is equally insane. His big break comes when one of these friends, Kevin, introduces him to a surrealist film that seems completely incomprehensible, but—given their laser beamed “inside knowledge”—they’re able to discern clues in what seems like nonsense. This leads them to rock star and actress, respectively, Eric and Linda Lampton. (While I was under the impression that this was a thinly veiled pseudonym for Eric Clapton, it was apparently a more sophisticated pseudonym for David Bowie.) It turns out that the Lamptons are even crazier than Horselover / Phil, but—nonetheless–they do have the messiah with them in the form of an immaculately conceived two-year old girl named Sophia. I won’t get into what happens next as I don’t want to give away too much.

The ending is not strong, but that’s the nature of writing in trilogies (or multi-book sequences more generally.)

If you are wondering about the title, VALIS is the name of the surrealist film that leads Horselover and his folks to the Lamptons (who were involved with the film along with an electronic musician who is supposedly supposed to represent Brian Eno.) In said fictional film the acronym stands for “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” and it’s an artificial intelligence and / or god.

If you like Philip K. Dick for his clever and clear science fiction story arcs, you may like this work but you probably won’t find it to be Dick at his best. If you like Philip K. Dick for taking you on a walk inside the mind of a drug-addled and bat-shit crazy genius, you’ll find this to be one of his best works.

I found it to be an intriguing read and would recommend it for lovers of the strange.

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