Rating: 5/5
Year: 1974
Genre: Horror
Read again? Yes.
Summer is only days away; Amity's 1,000 permanent residents will soon be joined by 9,000 summer visitors.
When Christine Watkins' mangled remains wash up on the beach where tourists might see, Amity's politicians step up and bravely order police chief Martin Brody to keep his mouth shut. The beaches will stay open, the paper will stay silent.
There were no witnesses.
A few quiet days pass, and within hours of each other a 6-year-old boy and a 65-year-old man are killed.
This time, there are witnesses.
Brody gets the beaches closed, but now (as he expected) he looks like the bad guy. Those politicians wouldn't dirty their hands with responsibility.
A shark expert from Woods Hole--Matt Hooper--thinks the killer is a Great White shark.
Now July 4th--the big weekend that could make or break Amity--is less than two weeks away. People are canceling their leases or just walking away from them. The Mayor's freaking out (he's one of the major real estate owners in town) more over the financial losses than over the killings.
Brody's wife Ellen has a shagfest with Hooper; we're treated to all of her rationalizations for this (lonely, bored, unhappy, etc.), but I wasn't sympathetic to her plight. Perhaps it's mostly there to heighten tension between Chief Brody and the shark expert later in the book, but it really made me dislike her.
Otherwise, Benchley tells a good story and moves it along. Characterization is reasonably good and there's only the amount of exposition that the reader needs.
Showing posts with label Horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Horror. Show all posts
Friday, December 30, 2011
Monday, October 26, 2009
The Keep (Wilson, F. Paul)
Rating: 4
Year: 1981
Genre: Horror
Read again? In a few years.
April 28, 1941. Major Erich Kaempffer of the SS is diverted from his assignment in Ploiesti, Romania: a German army detachment has met with resistance and need reinforcements. Six men are dead. Kaempffer is sent with einsatzkommandos--SS extermination squad troops--to mop up the resistance. He will go from there to establish a death camp in Ploiesti--but he is to pacify the troublemakers first.
Kaempffer is bothered by the message sent from the army commander:
Request immediate relocation.
Something is murdering my men.
April 22, 1941. Captain Klaus Woermann and his men arrive at a small castle in Dinu Pass, in the Transylvanian Alps north of Ploiesti. It's always been known as the Keep, and it's been well-maintained. In contrast to the brooding, dark stone, there are thousands of brass-and-nickel crosses inlaid in the walls. Woermann warns his men against stealing any of them.
A private on guard duty finds a gold-and-silver cross and decides to take it.
Others come to investigate his screams and those of his accomplice. The private is dead, his head torn clean off. His partner in crime is catatonic.
There's a large hole in the wall, stones pushed out: something found its way out.
April 23. The catatonic thief dies, his throat torn out.
April 24. A man on guard duty dies.
April 25. A man on guard duty dies. The guard is doubled.
April 26. A man asleep in his bedroll dies. Everyone on guard duty, all night!
April 27. A man on guard duty dies in plain sight.
April 28. Kaempffer and his kommandos arrive. Two kommandos die. This time, a message is written in blood on the wall where the men were killed.
...and the Nazis' only hope of learning what is killing their men lies in a Jewish scholar.
As the first man dies, a red-haired man realizes that what he's dreaded has come to pass. He makes his way to the Keep....
The story plays out as a version of the vampire legend--Viscount Molasar hung out with Vlad the Impaler; he built the Keep to protect himself from his enemies; he casts no reflection, but silver and garlic aren't a problem; he cowers away from a crucifix, and the name "Jesus" causes him agony.
I remembered liking this book from the last time I read it, maybe 4 years ago. I'd forgotten just about everything, so I can't say whether I was as disappointed by the ending as I am now. Wilson has the red-haired man holding back on all of his important information until shortly before the Big Fight between him and Molasar. Everything we'd been led to think about the evil creature turns out to be wrong--and it feels cheap, or maybe just clumsily-executed. Still, it's much better than the movie Michael Mann made of it in 1983.
Year: 1981
Genre: Horror
Read again? In a few years.
April 28, 1941. Major Erich Kaempffer of the SS is diverted from his assignment in Ploiesti, Romania: a German army detachment has met with resistance and need reinforcements. Six men are dead. Kaempffer is sent with einsatzkommandos--SS extermination squad troops--to mop up the resistance. He will go from there to establish a death camp in Ploiesti--but he is to pacify the troublemakers first.
Kaempffer is bothered by the message sent from the army commander:
Request immediate relocation.
Something is murdering my men.
April 22, 1941. Captain Klaus Woermann and his men arrive at a small castle in Dinu Pass, in the Transylvanian Alps north of Ploiesti. It's always been known as the Keep, and it's been well-maintained. In contrast to the brooding, dark stone, there are thousands of brass-and-nickel crosses inlaid in the walls. Woermann warns his men against stealing any of them.
A private on guard duty finds a gold-and-silver cross and decides to take it.
Others come to investigate his screams and those of his accomplice. The private is dead, his head torn clean off. His partner in crime is catatonic.
There's a large hole in the wall, stones pushed out: something found its way out.
April 23. The catatonic thief dies, his throat torn out.
April 24. A man on guard duty dies.
April 25. A man on guard duty dies. The guard is doubled.
April 26. A man asleep in his bedroll dies. Everyone on guard duty, all night!
April 27. A man on guard duty dies in plain sight.
April 28. Kaempffer and his kommandos arrive. Two kommandos die. This time, a message is written in blood on the wall where the men were killed.
...and the Nazis' only hope of learning what is killing their men lies in a Jewish scholar.
As the first man dies, a red-haired man realizes that what he's dreaded has come to pass. He makes his way to the Keep....
The story plays out as a version of the vampire legend--Viscount Molasar hung out with Vlad the Impaler; he built the Keep to protect himself from his enemies; he casts no reflection, but silver and garlic aren't a problem; he cowers away from a crucifix, and the name "Jesus" causes him agony.
I remembered liking this book from the last time I read it, maybe 4 years ago. I'd forgotten just about everything, so I can't say whether I was as disappointed by the ending as I am now. Wilson has the red-haired man holding back on all of his important information until shortly before the Big Fight between him and Molasar. Everything we'd been led to think about the evil creature turns out to be wrong--and it feels cheap, or maybe just clumsily-executed. Still, it's much better than the movie Michael Mann made of it in 1983.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Aliens (Foster, Alan Dean)
Rating: 3.5
Year: 1986
Genre: Sci-fi / Horror
Read again? Maybe in 57 years
It's been 57 years for Ellen Ripley. She and Jones the Space Cat have been adrift in the Nostromo's shuttle ever since their escape from that first alien.
She finds herself even more alone. Her daughter died at 66, older than Ripley is now: Rip van Ripley spent those 6 decades in a sleeper capsule.
Some things haven't changed, however. The Company--the same Company that owned the Nostromo and her cargo--is still there, inevitable, like death and taxes.
The dusty little planetoid where Nostromo's crew set down, answering what they thought was a distress signal, is now home to a colony of Terraformers. They've built massive atmosphere processors to make the unbreathable breathable.
There's a little problem, though.
Contact with the colony has been lost. Space Marines are being sent to check it out, and the friendly Company Representative wants Ripley to go along as a consultant. Just in case.
We all know what's gonna happen.
Still not ready to go back to Lackey. I probably shouldn't be reading Foster back-to-back, either, given that it took more than a week to hike through 270 pages of molasses. But I had to know: was "Alien" simply the most tolerable of Foster's books? I already know that his worst is the hideous "Alien 3," which is so full of misspellings that one English teacher would make the pages run red with ink.
My biggest beef--and the first thing I noted--is that Foster doesn't like "dirty words." He uses "heck" and "horsepucky" instead. Holy shoot, he sanitized the entire goshdarn book! Inexplicably, he leaves a single "fuck you" intact. I'm guessing he missed this one, since he wiped all the others out. He even clipped Ripley's famous, "Get away from her, you bitch!" to a much weaker and clumsy-sounding, "Get away from her, you!" I'm gonna cuss away one point for that, and another half-point for being such a prissy wanker. The list is below, for your amusement.
Pacing is quicker than that of the first book. Twenty pages in, people are actually doing things that advance the story. Things slow down after the first big firefight between the Marines and the aliens; the book plods at near-idle speed at times. It's still not as boring as the first, but Foster doesn't seem to write for suspense. There are times when his style reminds me of the stilted, overly-formal-yet-overly-friendly announcers of 1950's movies; at others, he sounds like a bad door-to-door salesman who just can't get the pitch right. Then there's his knack for picking the wrong word for the job:
"Airborne particles of sand and grit had corroded much of the steel plate."
What about "eroded"? He's using a word for a chemical process to describe a physical process. By his use of the word, we could say that the Grand Canyon was formed by corrosion over millions of years. That's some strong river water.
Oh, well. In the first book he described the alien's acid blood as "caustic"...which describes the action of a base, not an acid. I suppose we could shrug and claim literary license, but I won't shrug. I demand better from a writer if it's SCIENCE fiction. So there.
"Dirty Words"
This is the entire list, not cherry-picked. He sanitized the damn--sorry, darn-- story!
heck: Ripley, p. 5
whattheheck: Ripley, p. 8 (yes, one word.)
horsepucky: Ripley, p. 13 (thinking to herself; she even sanitizes her own thoughts?!)
heck: Simpson, p. 30
heck: Russ Jorden, p. 36
heck: Ripley, p. 45
lazybutts: Apone, p. 53 (a Marine Sergeant who euphemizes cussin'?)
poontang: Wierzbowski, p. 55 (maybe Foster doesn't know what this means)
fuck you: Vasquez, p. 59 (I wonder if he forced himself to type it, then felt dirty afterward?)
screw you: Hudson, p. 112 (after 53 cuss-free pages, Foster really unwinds!)
pendejo: Vasquez, p. 133 (does Foster know Spanish?)
mierda: Vasquez, p. 145
ass: Vasquez, p. 175
bullcrap: Hicks, p. 204
fu--?: Hudson, p. 208 (maybe Foster was all fugged out by this point)
All in all, Foster isn't the mediocre hack, the destroyer of stories, the towering inferno of ineptitude that I remembered. I was wrong about him being the male Mercedes Lackey: he's just not a great writer, and she tells a much better story. Usually.
At least he's not George Luca$.
Year: 1986
Genre: Sci-fi / Horror
Read again? Maybe in 57 years
It's been 57 years for Ellen Ripley. She and Jones the Space Cat have been adrift in the Nostromo's shuttle ever since their escape from that first alien.
She finds herself even more alone. Her daughter died at 66, older than Ripley is now: Rip van Ripley spent those 6 decades in a sleeper capsule.
Some things haven't changed, however. The Company--the same Company that owned the Nostromo and her cargo--is still there, inevitable, like death and taxes.
The dusty little planetoid where Nostromo's crew set down, answering what they thought was a distress signal, is now home to a colony of Terraformers. They've built massive atmosphere processors to make the unbreathable breathable.
There's a little problem, though.
Contact with the colony has been lost. Space Marines are being sent to check it out, and the friendly Company Representative wants Ripley to go along as a consultant. Just in case.
We all know what's gonna happen.
Still not ready to go back to Lackey. I probably shouldn't be reading Foster back-to-back, either, given that it took more than a week to hike through 270 pages of molasses. But I had to know: was "Alien" simply the most tolerable of Foster's books? I already know that his worst is the hideous "Alien 3," which is so full of misspellings that one English teacher would make the pages run red with ink.
My biggest beef--and the first thing I noted--is that Foster doesn't like "dirty words." He uses "heck" and "horsepucky" instead. Holy shoot, he sanitized the entire goshdarn book! Inexplicably, he leaves a single "fuck you" intact. I'm guessing he missed this one, since he wiped all the others out. He even clipped Ripley's famous, "Get away from her, you bitch!" to a much weaker and clumsy-sounding, "Get away from her, you!" I'm gonna cuss away one point for that, and another half-point for being such a prissy wanker. The list is below, for your amusement.
Pacing is quicker than that of the first book. Twenty pages in, people are actually doing things that advance the story. Things slow down after the first big firefight between the Marines and the aliens; the book plods at near-idle speed at times. It's still not as boring as the first, but Foster doesn't seem to write for suspense. There are times when his style reminds me of the stilted, overly-formal-yet-overly-friendly announcers of 1950's movies; at others, he sounds like a bad door-to-door salesman who just can't get the pitch right. Then there's his knack for picking the wrong word for the job:
"Airborne particles of sand and grit had corroded much of the steel plate."
What about "eroded"? He's using a word for a chemical process to describe a physical process. By his use of the word, we could say that the Grand Canyon was formed by corrosion over millions of years. That's some strong river water.
Oh, well. In the first book he described the alien's acid blood as "caustic"...which describes the action of a base, not an acid. I suppose we could shrug and claim literary license, but I won't shrug. I demand better from a writer if it's SCIENCE fiction. So there.
"Dirty Words"
This is the entire list, not cherry-picked. He sanitized the damn--sorry, darn-- story!
heck: Ripley, p. 5
whattheheck: Ripley, p. 8 (yes, one word.)
horsepucky: Ripley, p. 13 (thinking to herself; she even sanitizes her own thoughts?!)
heck: Simpson, p. 30
heck: Russ Jorden, p. 36
heck: Ripley, p. 45
lazybutts: Apone, p. 53 (a Marine Sergeant who euphemizes cussin'?)
poontang: Wierzbowski, p. 55 (maybe Foster doesn't know what this means)
fuck you: Vasquez, p. 59 (I wonder if he forced himself to type it, then felt dirty afterward?)
screw you: Hudson, p. 112 (after 53 cuss-free pages, Foster really unwinds!)
pendejo: Vasquez, p. 133 (does Foster know Spanish?)
mierda: Vasquez, p. 145
ass: Vasquez, p. 175
bullcrap: Hicks, p. 204
fu--?: Hudson, p. 208 (maybe Foster was all fugged out by this point)
All in all, Foster isn't the mediocre hack, the destroyer of stories, the towering inferno of ineptitude that I remembered. I was wrong about him being the male Mercedes Lackey: he's just not a great writer, and she tells a much better story. Usually.
At least he's not George Luca$.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Alien (Foster, Alan Dean)
Rating: 3.5
Year: 1979
Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Read Again? Maybe.
** New material added 4/14/09
Yet another short book before diving back into Lackey Land. I've been an unrepentant hater for a couple of decades where Alan Dean Foster's movie tie-ins are concerned, and in the interest of fairness I wanted to see if I was remembering things right.
A few pages into "Alien," I decided that Foster is the male Mercedes Lackey, only not as good. Both of them tend to pad out their prose, as if they're paid by the word. Good writing doesn't need padding; style shouldn't call attention to itself over the story. It should be subtle. But where Lackey favors "in no way" and other passive fill, Foster goes for the thesaurus (i.e., why use "contact" when "apposition" has more syllables, and therefore sounds more science-fictiony?).
I've wondered about this "technique" (having seen it in other writers) from time to time--is it just boredom? A desire to seem smarter? An attempt to make the prose more technical or complicated sounding (it's SCIENCE!-fiction, after all)? It's never seemed effective to me, either in writing or in the real world. The principal at my high school did the same thing, trying to sound highly educated and upper-crusty, yet incapable of pronouncing some of that multisyllable word salad pouring out of his pie-hole. I've heard cops, management, politicians, and other "authority" types padding out a statement with extra syllables or words that don't see much common usage. But if you can't do it effectively, it just sounds phony--and your audience can see through it.
Some readers won't give a rat's about that; I went to the Google and asked it if Alan Dean Foster sucked. Computer said "no." I was shown interviews with him, articles about him, and the word "suck" wasn't attached to him. I also tried "crap" and "hack," but by far the praise outweighed the pans. Gotta say, I just do not get it. I don't hate his style like I used to in my firebrand teenager days (when I knew everything); I just find it distracting from the story. I just HAD to include these two samples:
'The captain had assembled a metal tripod from short lengths of metal.' (page 83; Dallas, Kane & Lambert have found the derelict ship; Kane's about to take his trip down into the belly of the beast). As opposed to a metal tripod made from pieces of paper?
or dialogue like this:
"The emergency lies elsewhere--specifically, in the uncharted system we've recently entered. We should be closing on the particular planet concerned right now." (page 28; Dallas is briefing the crew on the reason for coming out of hypersleep).
Who talks like that? A good bit of the dialogue is strangely formal and everyone sounds like Foster himself, especially within the first 50-60 pages.
That said, Foster does stay faithful to the script, but we're a third of the way into 270 pages before Kane actually meets the face-hugger (p.96). We don't see the chest-burster for nearly 80 pages after that (p.171). It's an easy enough read, but the true crime of this book is that it is boring and plods along, and even the actiony stuff isn't actiony so much as boring. Gotta pour 1.5 points of acid alien blood on it.
On to the story:
The space tug Nostromo is on a return leg to Earth, towing a load of petrochemicals in a massive refinery barge. The ship is diverted to answer a supposed distress call. They leave their load in orbit and run down to investigate. Of the three who go hiking across the face of a rocky planetoid, two come hiking back, carrying the third...and a passenger attached to his face. Hey, guys! Let's try to cut it off of him! Acid for blood? Okay, it can stay.
Seven against one, right? Well, six against one. The passenger chews its way out of its first victim and skitters away. Little thing like that should be easy to catch with six people working on it...
Well...five. How'd it grow so fast?!
Four? Flame throwers and motion-detectors are no match for a 7-foot tall alien, kid.
Three. This one doesn't count--he was a murderous android, and it was self-defense. He was trying to keep the alien alive.
Two. Oh, I forgot the cat. THREE, then.
Two.
Ultimately it's Ellen Ripley and the ship's Space Cat, Jones, who face off against the alien, holed up in the Nostromo's shuttle.
How does it stack up against the movie? The movie's pacing is much better, given that they need to get us into the suspense more quickly and keep us wondering who the critter's going to kill next. This book would have been much better had Foster gone the same route. I could even deal with his oddball choices of words if the book wasn't so boring.
There's not a lot of character development. Foster's Dallas comes across as an ineffectual nonentity (Tom Skerritt plays him as an actual man who is tired of your shit, now get back to work). Only Ripley seems to care about chain of command or proper procedures--and only Ripley and the Space Cat get out alive. Foster throws a few weak hints about Ash the Mandroid, but it all amounts to "he's different." Wow. Ian Holm played him much better: creepy guy who just doesn't seem to play well with others. The quiet one that you really should watch out for.
The most amusing thing for me is the back-cover blurb: "This was not their galaxy." NOWHERE in the book or movie is it mentioned that the Nostromo is traveling outside the galaxy, just between star systems. When they're brought out of hyperspace to investigate the "distress" signal, they're roughly 6 to 10 months from Earth. But we all know that cover-blurb writers are insane and incapable of summarizing a book properly.
Maybe I've mellowed out: I was locked & loaded, ready to nuke Foster from orbit (it's the only way to be sure), but he's not as awful as I remembered. Bad, but not awful.
Watch the movie instead.
Year: 1979
Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Read Again? Maybe.
** New material added 4/14/09
Yet another short book before diving back into Lackey Land. I've been an unrepentant hater for a couple of decades where Alan Dean Foster's movie tie-ins are concerned, and in the interest of fairness I wanted to see if I was remembering things right.
A few pages into "Alien," I decided that Foster is the male Mercedes Lackey, only not as good. Both of them tend to pad out their prose, as if they're paid by the word. Good writing doesn't need padding; style shouldn't call attention to itself over the story. It should be subtle. But where Lackey favors "in no way" and other passive fill, Foster goes for the thesaurus (i.e., why use "contact" when "apposition" has more syllables, and therefore sounds more science-fictiony?).
I've wondered about this "technique" (having seen it in other writers) from time to time--is it just boredom? A desire to seem smarter? An attempt to make the prose more technical or complicated sounding (it's SCIENCE!-fiction, after all)? It's never seemed effective to me, either in writing or in the real world. The principal at my high school did the same thing, trying to sound highly educated and upper-crusty, yet incapable of pronouncing some of that multisyllable word salad pouring out of his pie-hole. I've heard cops, management, politicians, and other "authority" types padding out a statement with extra syllables or words that don't see much common usage. But if you can't do it effectively, it just sounds phony--and your audience can see through it.
Some readers won't give a rat's about that; I went to the Google and asked it if Alan Dean Foster sucked. Computer said "no." I was shown interviews with him, articles about him, and the word "suck" wasn't attached to him. I also tried "crap" and "hack," but by far the praise outweighed the pans. Gotta say, I just do not get it. I don't hate his style like I used to in my firebrand teenager days (when I knew everything); I just find it distracting from the story. I just HAD to include these two samples:
'The captain had assembled a metal tripod from short lengths of metal.' (page 83; Dallas, Kane & Lambert have found the derelict ship; Kane's about to take his trip down into the belly of the beast). As opposed to a metal tripod made from pieces of paper?
or dialogue like this:
"The emergency lies elsewhere--specifically, in the uncharted system we've recently entered. We should be closing on the particular planet concerned right now." (page 28; Dallas is briefing the crew on the reason for coming out of hypersleep).
Who talks like that? A good bit of the dialogue is strangely formal and everyone sounds like Foster himself, especially within the first 50-60 pages.
That said, Foster does stay faithful to the script, but we're a third of the way into 270 pages before Kane actually meets the face-hugger (p.96). We don't see the chest-burster for nearly 80 pages after that (p.171). It's an easy enough read, but the true crime of this book is that it is boring and plods along, and even the actiony stuff isn't actiony so much as boring. Gotta pour 1.5 points of acid alien blood on it.
On to the story:
The space tug Nostromo is on a return leg to Earth, towing a load of petrochemicals in a massive refinery barge. The ship is diverted to answer a supposed distress call. They leave their load in orbit and run down to investigate. Of the three who go hiking across the face of a rocky planetoid, two come hiking back, carrying the third...and a passenger attached to his face. Hey, guys! Let's try to cut it off of him! Acid for blood? Okay, it can stay.
Seven against one, right? Well, six against one. The passenger chews its way out of its first victim and skitters away. Little thing like that should be easy to catch with six people working on it...
Well...five. How'd it grow so fast?!
Four? Flame throwers and motion-detectors are no match for a 7-foot tall alien, kid.
Three. This one doesn't count--he was a murderous android, and it was self-defense. He was trying to keep the alien alive.
Two. Oh, I forgot the cat. THREE, then.
Two.
Ultimately it's Ellen Ripley and the ship's Space Cat, Jones, who face off against the alien, holed up in the Nostromo's shuttle.
How does it stack up against the movie? The movie's pacing is much better, given that they need to get us into the suspense more quickly and keep us wondering who the critter's going to kill next. This book would have been much better had Foster gone the same route. I could even deal with his oddball choices of words if the book wasn't so boring.
There's not a lot of character development. Foster's Dallas comes across as an ineffectual nonentity (Tom Skerritt plays him as an actual man who is tired of your shit, now get back to work). Only Ripley seems to care about chain of command or proper procedures--and only Ripley and the Space Cat get out alive. Foster throws a few weak hints about Ash the Mandroid, but it all amounts to "he's different." Wow. Ian Holm played him much better: creepy guy who just doesn't seem to play well with others. The quiet one that you really should watch out for.
The most amusing thing for me is the back-cover blurb: "This was not their galaxy." NOWHERE in the book or movie is it mentioned that the Nostromo is traveling outside the galaxy, just between star systems. When they're brought out of hyperspace to investigate the "distress" signal, they're roughly 6 to 10 months from Earth. But we all know that cover-blurb writers are insane and incapable of summarizing a book properly.
Maybe I've mellowed out: I was locked & loaded, ready to nuke Foster from orbit (it's the only way to be sure), but he's not as awful as I remembered. Bad, but not awful.
Watch the movie instead.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Tregarde 03: Jinx High (Lackey, M.)
Rating: 3/5
Year: 1991
Genre: Horror/fantasy
Read Again? Eventually
Third and final in a series of horror/fantasy/mystery novels. "Jinx" takes place about a year after "Burning Water." Say late 1987. Diana Tregarde comes to visit her old pal Larry Kestrel in Jenks, Oklahoma (get it? Jenks, Jinx, hahaha), and to sit in on an English class as a living, breathing example of a Real Author. The two of them are soon working on a mystery (just like old times): something hungry and evil is after Larry's son Derek.
Derek is the "It" boy at Jenks High School, if only because the school's reigning princess Fay Harper has the hots for him. He's not a jock, doesn't wear the "right" brands, doesn't have rich parents, and doesn't drive a flashy car...so why does a girl who gets everything she wants even bother breathing the same air as Deke?
Monica Carlin is the New Girl, and she likes Deke. But everyone knows that Deke is with Fay. Bad luck for her. The thing that's after Deke wants Monica, now, too.
Jinx High drags, holy crap does it drag, and starts off disappointingly in that Lackey continues being heavy-handed and clumsy--something "Burning Water (1989)" didn't suffer from, but its prequel "Children of the Night (1990)" did. She started with a tight concept and solid writing with the first, but went flabby for the next two. Again, she can tell a good story, but it's how she tells it that annoys me. It's a combination of word choice, wordiness, emphasis and convenience.
Word choice: some of her descriptions read like a vocabulary list. Writing about cars? Find a car magazine and randomly pick out words. Steering box. Rat. Undercarriage. Fiberglass. Now just toss them into a paragraph when you're writing about a car and don't worry about whether they belong where they go.
And don't be afraid to throw clumsy combinations out there. "Max limit"? "About to reach the max limit on their library card"? Why not "about to max out the library card"? Less wordy, less clumsy, and it echoes a term we've all heard about credit cards.
Wordiness: Never, never make use of a half-dozen words when thirteen will do. Does she get paid by word-count?
Emphasis: She _likes_ that italicized text; she also literally likes "in no way," absolutely. Stuff like this should be used sparingly, if at all.
Convenience: Cheap little tricks that manipulate the plot where she wants it to go. Monica just got her license a month ago, but she's allowed to drive alone at night? Well, yeah--but only so the bad guy can try to scare her into a wreck, and so Diana Tregarde can explain psychic phenomena to the kid, Learner's Permits be damned. The kid doen't touch ass to driver's seat again for the rest of the book.
One particularly ironic scene has Diana lecturing the class on writing style, warning about unrealistic protagonists and unnecessary repetition. Is Lackey's own character telling her how to write?
On top of all this, the reader isn't really involved in the mystery in any of the Tregarde books. We know early on who the bad guys are, and we have to follow Diana around for the rest of the book wishing she'd figure it out, already. I was done reading halfway through, and still had half the book to go. Gonna have to take two points this time.
And for all three books as a series, I'll give it 3/5. That's too bad, because this series could have been much better.
Year: 1991
Genre: Horror/fantasy
Read Again? Eventually
Third and final in a series of horror/fantasy/mystery novels. "Jinx" takes place about a year after "Burning Water." Say late 1987. Diana Tregarde comes to visit her old pal Larry Kestrel in Jenks, Oklahoma (get it? Jenks, Jinx, hahaha), and to sit in on an English class as a living, breathing example of a Real Author. The two of them are soon working on a mystery (just like old times): something hungry and evil is after Larry's son Derek.
Derek is the "It" boy at Jenks High School, if only because the school's reigning princess Fay Harper has the hots for him. He's not a jock, doesn't wear the "right" brands, doesn't have rich parents, and doesn't drive a flashy car...so why does a girl who gets everything she wants even bother breathing the same air as Deke?
Monica Carlin is the New Girl, and she likes Deke. But everyone knows that Deke is with Fay. Bad luck for her. The thing that's after Deke wants Monica, now, too.
Jinx High drags, holy crap does it drag, and starts off disappointingly in that Lackey continues being heavy-handed and clumsy--something "Burning Water (1989)" didn't suffer from, but its prequel "Children of the Night (1990)" did. She started with a tight concept and solid writing with the first, but went flabby for the next two. Again, she can tell a good story, but it's how she tells it that annoys me. It's a combination of word choice, wordiness, emphasis and convenience.
Word choice: some of her descriptions read like a vocabulary list. Writing about cars? Find a car magazine and randomly pick out words. Steering box. Rat. Undercarriage. Fiberglass. Now just toss them into a paragraph when you're writing about a car and don't worry about whether they belong where they go.
And don't be afraid to throw clumsy combinations out there. "Max limit"? "About to reach the max limit on their library card"? Why not "about to max out the library card"? Less wordy, less clumsy, and it echoes a term we've all heard about credit cards.
Wordiness: Never, never make use of a half-dozen words when thirteen will do. Does she get paid by word-count?
Emphasis: She _likes_ that italicized text; she also literally likes "in no way," absolutely. Stuff like this should be used sparingly, if at all.
Convenience: Cheap little tricks that manipulate the plot where she wants it to go. Monica just got her license a month ago, but she's allowed to drive alone at night? Well, yeah--but only so the bad guy can try to scare her into a wreck, and so Diana Tregarde can explain psychic phenomena to the kid, Learner's Permits be damned. The kid doen't touch ass to driver's seat again for the rest of the book.
One particularly ironic scene has Diana lecturing the class on writing style, warning about unrealistic protagonists and unnecessary repetition. Is Lackey's own character telling her how to write?
On top of all this, the reader isn't really involved in the mystery in any of the Tregarde books. We know early on who the bad guys are, and we have to follow Diana around for the rest of the book wishing she'd figure it out, already. I was done reading halfway through, and still had half the book to go. Gonna have to take two points this time.
And for all three books as a series, I'll give it 3/5. That's too bad, because this series could have been much better.
Tregarde 02: Children of the Night (Lackey, M.)
Rating: 4/5
Year: 1990
Genre: Horror/Fantasy
Read again? Yes.
Warnings: None
This is the second of three Diana Tregarde novels, combining elements of horror, urban fantasy, and gumshoe mystery. In this one, Diana faces vampires in three flavors: psychic, soul-eater, and blood-sucker. There are, of course, romantic complications, since one of the psychic vampires is her ex-boyfriend Dave, and her new boyfriend is the blood-sucker, a charming Frenchman named Andre.
Dave plays rhythm guitar in a rock band called "Children of the Night"; such music they make! They're all vampires, as is their wealthy patron.
There's your sex and rock 'n' roll. What? The drugs? Yeah, well, they were at this party, man, right around Halloween, y'know? And the guy who was throwing the party passed around this Tupperware bowl full of blood-red pills, and Dave was like "Aaaaaahhhhhhh!" and then he woke up as a vampire, man. It was a total bummer, man.
At least he didn't wake up with a turkey head like the guy in that wonderful Thanksgiving film, "Blood Freak."
Diana manages to mention that she's a brown-belt in karate three times, and it's supposed to mean that she's some sort of bad-ass, but I'm nearly a brown-belt, myself, and can only get my ass whipped in Japanese. Belt rank doesn't mean you're any sort of a fighter; all it means is that you've done well in testing. At any rate, she doesn't do well in real-world--she tries punching a vampire and he simply catches her wrist. Hyyyyy--ahhhhh, bitch!! I think Steven Seagal could take her. The next time she goes up against a different vampire, a Japanese "gaki" demon, the soul-eating vampire. He's Japanese, so of course he knows karate, and he goes all Sonny Chiba on her ass with nunchaku (numchucks, to you Americans). This chick really needs to pick her fights a little better.
In all, she's an interesting character. She's got some pretty heavy magic skills, but is forced to make a living in the mundane world. She wants to write the Great American Novel, but her agent got her a contract job writing a crappy, boring romance. Her fatal flaw? She has debilitating panic attacks because of a demon that wanted to eat her. I like it--she has a calling as a sort of magical protector--a Guardian--and could drop into a panic attack at any moment if something trips her triggers. Her vampire-boyfriend helps her deal with it--and amazingly it only seems to take one evening for her to go from complete paralysis and hysteria to "well, that is scary." Too easy, and that sucked a little blood off the score.
My relationship with Mercedes Lackey's writing has lasted much longer than my relationship with the unlamented ex-girlfriend who introduced us back in 1995. For the first 6 years, Lackey was very close to pushing Roger Zelazny aside as my favorite author, period.
Now, not so much.
Her actual storytelling is typically good, if a bit heavy-handed, but I have issues with her dialog and "internal dialog" (where a character's thinking to himself), and it's mostly about word choice. One example that I can remember off the top of my head is that male or female, in this book three different people needing to go somewhere think to themselves, "I need to move my buns." It doesn't ring true, especially when one of the three is a plain old straight-up dude. In the book's setting of mid-70s New York City, I can't really see a straight guy thinking this unless he's being sarcastic. And it's not as if Lackey is being prudish, censoring out "dirty words," because in a different scene the same guy is sizing up a girl and admiring her ass, not her tail.
Then there's the over-use of "in the least" and "in no way" and similar phrases. It's part of her style, and it's in pretty much every book she writes. It's become somewhat distracting, so I cannot in the least let it by without sucking the rest of a point out of the score.
Year: 1990
Genre: Horror/Fantasy
Read again? Yes.
Warnings: None
This is the second of three Diana Tregarde novels, combining elements of horror, urban fantasy, and gumshoe mystery. In this one, Diana faces vampires in three flavors: psychic, soul-eater, and blood-sucker. There are, of course, romantic complications, since one of the psychic vampires is her ex-boyfriend Dave, and her new boyfriend is the blood-sucker, a charming Frenchman named Andre.
Dave plays rhythm guitar in a rock band called "Children of the Night"; such music they make! They're all vampires, as is their wealthy patron.
There's your sex and rock 'n' roll. What? The drugs? Yeah, well, they were at this party, man, right around Halloween, y'know? And the guy who was throwing the party passed around this Tupperware bowl full of blood-red pills, and Dave was like "Aaaaaahhhhhhh!" and then he woke up as a vampire, man. It was a total bummer, man.
At least he didn't wake up with a turkey head like the guy in that wonderful Thanksgiving film, "Blood Freak."
Diana manages to mention that she's a brown-belt in karate three times, and it's supposed to mean that she's some sort of bad-ass, but I'm nearly a brown-belt, myself, and can only get my ass whipped in Japanese. Belt rank doesn't mean you're any sort of a fighter; all it means is that you've done well in testing. At any rate, she doesn't do well in real-world--she tries punching a vampire and he simply catches her wrist. Hyyyyy--ahhhhh, bitch!! I think Steven Seagal could take her. The next time she goes up against a different vampire, a Japanese "gaki" demon, the soul-eating vampire. He's Japanese, so of course he knows karate, and he goes all Sonny Chiba on her ass with nunchaku (numchucks, to you Americans). This chick really needs to pick her fights a little better.
In all, she's an interesting character. She's got some pretty heavy magic skills, but is forced to make a living in the mundane world. She wants to write the Great American Novel, but her agent got her a contract job writing a crappy, boring romance. Her fatal flaw? She has debilitating panic attacks because of a demon that wanted to eat her. I like it--she has a calling as a sort of magical protector--a Guardian--and could drop into a panic attack at any moment if something trips her triggers. Her vampire-boyfriend helps her deal with it--and amazingly it only seems to take one evening for her to go from complete paralysis and hysteria to "well, that is scary." Too easy, and that sucked a little blood off the score.
My relationship with Mercedes Lackey's writing has lasted much longer than my relationship with the unlamented ex-girlfriend who introduced us back in 1995. For the first 6 years, Lackey was very close to pushing Roger Zelazny aside as my favorite author, period.
Now, not so much.
Her actual storytelling is typically good, if a bit heavy-handed, but I have issues with her dialog and "internal dialog" (where a character's thinking to himself), and it's mostly about word choice. One example that I can remember off the top of my head is that male or female, in this book three different people needing to go somewhere think to themselves, "I need to move my buns." It doesn't ring true, especially when one of the three is a plain old straight-up dude. In the book's setting of mid-70s New York City, I can't really see a straight guy thinking this unless he's being sarcastic. And it's not as if Lackey is being prudish, censoring out "dirty words," because in a different scene the same guy is sizing up a girl and admiring her ass, not her tail.
Then there's the over-use of "in the least" and "in no way" and similar phrases. It's part of her style, and it's in pretty much every book she writes. It's become somewhat distracting, so I cannot in the least let it by without sucking the rest of a point out of the score.
Tregarde 01: Burning Water (Lackey)
Score: 5/5
Year: 1989
Genre:
Read Again? Yes
Second of three in a series of horror/fantasy/mystery novels. It takes place maybe 10 years after "Children of the Night," though it was actually published a year before (hence me putting this one first), and this one comes off much better in execution and style.
This one's a lot more graphic than "Children." People start dying shortly after the big 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, turning up hacked-up, diced-up, sliced-up, and toes-up. Diana Tregarde's college pal Mark Valdez--a cop in Dallas--summons her to help out. The killings have everyone freaked out--mundane folks are disturbed by the brutality, but those with any magic or psychic abilities are affected even more deeply. Something is building. Something evil. It started with cattle mutilations. Then people. This is all a build-up to a ceremony in which an Aztec god is born into human form so he can raise up his people and go forth to smite Whitey. That whole Conquistadors thing, with the butchering of an entire culture and the sacking and the looting? Yeah, he didn't appreciate that.
That seems bad--but he's gonna lay waste to Dallas. Is that so wrong? One amusing bit: at least one killing happens in Possum Kingdom (State Park), inspiration for the Toadies song of the same name.
The main subplot is about Sherry and her husband Robert, both friends of Mark's. Smilin' Bob is a famous photographer and an abusive, controlling asshole, and Mark is caught up in the middle.
Like so many of the books in my collection, it's been close to ten years since I last read any of the Tregarde books. This copy used to belong to that unlamented ex-girlfriend; it's got scribbles in the margins, little notes I wrote to her with her permission--normally I'll only do that with my own books, commenting on a scene or a phrase. I can't even identify with the guy who wrote those stupid, banal scrawls. In another ten years, I won't identify with the guy writing this stupid, banal blog, so it all evens out.
Year: 1989
Genre:
Read Again? Yes
Second of three in a series of horror/fantasy/mystery novels. It takes place maybe 10 years after "Children of the Night," though it was actually published a year before (hence me putting this one first), and this one comes off much better in execution and style.
This one's a lot more graphic than "Children." People start dying shortly after the big 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, turning up hacked-up, diced-up, sliced-up, and toes-up. Diana Tregarde's college pal Mark Valdez--a cop in Dallas--summons her to help out. The killings have everyone freaked out--mundane folks are disturbed by the brutality, but those with any magic or psychic abilities are affected even more deeply. Something is building. Something evil. It started with cattle mutilations. Then people. This is all a build-up to a ceremony in which an Aztec god is born into human form so he can raise up his people and go forth to smite Whitey. That whole Conquistadors thing, with the butchering of an entire culture and the sacking and the looting? Yeah, he didn't appreciate that.
That seems bad--but he's gonna lay waste to Dallas. Is that so wrong? One amusing bit: at least one killing happens in Possum Kingdom (State Park), inspiration for the Toadies song of the same name.
The main subplot is about Sherry and her husband Robert, both friends of Mark's. Smilin' Bob is a famous photographer and an abusive, controlling asshole, and Mark is caught up in the middle.
Like so many of the books in my collection, it's been close to ten years since I last read any of the Tregarde books. This copy used to belong to that unlamented ex-girlfriend; it's got scribbles in the margins, little notes I wrote to her with her permission--normally I'll only do that with my own books, commenting on a scene or a phrase. I can't even identify with the guy who wrote those stupid, banal scrawls. In another ten years, I won't identify with the guy writing this stupid, banal blog, so it all evens out.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Floating Dragon (Peter Straub)
Floating Dragon (Peter Straub)
Rating: 4/5
Year: 1982
Genre: Horror
Read again? Yes.
This is the only book in maybe 25 years that ever scared the crap out of me. The first time I read it--17 years ago--I couldn't sleep soundly for a few nights. The last book that affected me that way was Benchley's "Jaws" in early-Eighties middle school.
The only thing that scares me anymore is the knowledge that George Lucas is lurking under an expensive rock somewhere, ready to ooze out and make another movie.
"Floating Dragon" is set in Hampstead, a small Connecticut town, a bedroom community for New York City. A woman named Stony Friedgood is murdered on May 17, 1980. In nearby Woodville, there's the inadvertent release of a toxic gas at a secret military facility.
Shortly thereafter, people in Hampstead turn up with a bad case of dead. Some are suicides. Some simply drop where they stand. Some begin to liquefy and have to wrap themselves in bandages to keep themselves together. Some have visions and go insane. Some are carved up by an unseen murderer. The survivors--those who didn't leave Patchin County when the troubles
began--are treated to an awful ride from which there is no escape. But is it the effect of the gas (known as DRG-16 to the military wonks)...or is it the evil that has manifested in cycles in Patchin County for two centuries?
Hampstead's a small town, one of those everybody-knows-everyone-else places, home to famous actors, New York power brokers, and professional snobs.
Some of the town's founding families are still here more than three centuries later: Williams, Smyth, Green, and Tayler. These names and more are part of the county's history from the 1700's on. In that regard, "Dragon" reads like a family tree: each generation of these core families bears witness to--or causes--horrifying murders.
The principals are:
Graham Williams, formerly famous author; now a failure and a coward (his own words). Blacklisted by Tailgunner Joe McCarthy.
James Tabb ("Tabby") Smithfield, formerly poor little rich kid; now a poor little poor kid with an alcoholic father.
Richard Allbee (Green), formerly famous child actor; now restores Victorian- and Edwardian-era houses.
Patsy McCloud (Taylor), formerly popular girl, now a beaten wife.
Williams is the first to realize that the four of them--the last of those original founding families--coming together means bad things are afoot. When he was 20, and again in his 50's, he faced that evil alone. This time around, it's plain that the four of them must band together, or all four of them will die.
Straub's writing is tight and flows well for the most part, with good description and characterization. He uses much of the book's 544-plus pages (plus thirty pages of back-story vignettes) effectively, but he doesn't tell the story in a linear manner. To keep us as disoriented as the characters, he bounces from point of view to point of view, from present to past. We see certain events through several sets of eyes.
The down side is that the story drags toward the end: it took a week and a half to finish it this time around. The Big Fight at the end is silly and disappointing in a "You mean that's IT?!" way. Had to take a point off for that.
Rating: 4/5
Year: 1982
Genre: Horror
Read again? Yes.
This is the only book in maybe 25 years that ever scared the crap out of me. The first time I read it--17 years ago--I couldn't sleep soundly for a few nights. The last book that affected me that way was Benchley's "Jaws" in early-Eighties middle school.
The only thing that scares me anymore is the knowledge that George Lucas is lurking under an expensive rock somewhere, ready to ooze out and make another movie.
"Floating Dragon" is set in Hampstead, a small Connecticut town, a bedroom community for New York City. A woman named Stony Friedgood is murdered on May 17, 1980. In nearby Woodville, there's the inadvertent release of a toxic gas at a secret military facility.
Shortly thereafter, people in Hampstead turn up with a bad case of dead. Some are suicides. Some simply drop where they stand. Some begin to liquefy and have to wrap themselves in bandages to keep themselves together. Some have visions and go insane. Some are carved up by an unseen murderer. The survivors--those who didn't leave Patchin County when the troubles
began--are treated to an awful ride from which there is no escape. But is it the effect of the gas (known as DRG-16 to the military wonks)...or is it the evil that has manifested in cycles in Patchin County for two centuries?
Hampstead's a small town, one of those everybody-knows-everyone-else places, home to famous actors, New York power brokers, and professional snobs.
Some of the town's founding families are still here more than three centuries later: Williams, Smyth, Green, and Tayler. These names and more are part of the county's history from the 1700's on. In that regard, "Dragon" reads like a family tree: each generation of these core families bears witness to--or causes--horrifying murders.
The principals are:
Graham Williams, formerly famous author; now a failure and a coward (his own words). Blacklisted by Tailgunner Joe McCarthy.
James Tabb ("Tabby") Smithfield, formerly poor little rich kid; now a poor little poor kid with an alcoholic father.
Richard Allbee (Green), formerly famous child actor; now restores Victorian- and Edwardian-era houses.
Patsy McCloud (Taylor), formerly popular girl, now a beaten wife.
Williams is the first to realize that the four of them--the last of those original founding families--coming together means bad things are afoot. When he was 20, and again in his 50's, he faced that evil alone. This time around, it's plain that the four of them must band together, or all four of them will die.
Straub's writing is tight and flows well for the most part, with good description and characterization. He uses much of the book's 544-plus pages (plus thirty pages of back-story vignettes) effectively, but he doesn't tell the story in a linear manner. To keep us as disoriented as the characters, he bounces from point of view to point of view, from present to past. We see certain events through several sets of eyes.
The down side is that the story drags toward the end: it took a week and a half to finish it this time around. The Big Fight at the end is silly and disappointing in a "You mean that's IT?!" way. Had to take a point off for that.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Hellbound Heart, The (Clive Barker)
Hellbound Heart, The (Clive Barker)
Rating: 5/5
Pub. Date: 1986
Genre: Horror
Would I read it again? Yes
This short novel is what became the movie "Hellraiser."
This is the first of Barker's works I've read. I hope all of his writing is as tight and economical as this example! He doles out only as many words as needed to express a thought, to describe a mood, and not a syllable more. Even better, he doesn't lead you by the hand through his plot or hit you over the head: you are expected to work things out for yourself.
It's been more than 20 years since I last saw "Hellraiser," so I can't say how close "The Hellbound Heart" is to its cinematic offspring. We begin with Frank exploring an intricate puzzle-box. He's been at it for hours, dreaming of pleasures promised by the man who gave him the thing: wild orgies, sated lust, women used and discarded.
He opens the box. Wild orgies, sated lust? Nope, nothing he'd imagined. Frank gets used up--but not discarded--by the horrific creatures summoned by the opening of that box.
Eight months later, his brother and sister-in-law move into the house, not knowing that Frank was even there. Hell-raising ensues!
Rating: 5/5
Pub. Date: 1986
Genre: Horror
Would I read it again? Yes
This short novel is what became the movie "Hellraiser."
This is the first of Barker's works I've read. I hope all of his writing is as tight and economical as this example! He doles out only as many words as needed to express a thought, to describe a mood, and not a syllable more. Even better, he doesn't lead you by the hand through his plot or hit you over the head: you are expected to work things out for yourself.
It's been more than 20 years since I last saw "Hellraiser," so I can't say how close "The Hellbound Heart" is to its cinematic offspring. We begin with Frank exploring an intricate puzzle-box. He's been at it for hours, dreaming of pleasures promised by the man who gave him the thing: wild orgies, sated lust, women used and discarded.
He opens the box. Wild orgies, sated lust? Nope, nothing he'd imagined. Frank gets used up--but not discarded--by the horrific creatures summoned by the opening of that box.
Eight months later, his brother and sister-in-law move into the house, not knowing that Frank was even there. Hell-raising ensues!
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