The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

Photo: First Edition front cover, from the book's Wikipedia page.

Quick note: I'm just the 27th to publish a review of this book on Goodreads, as of 10.10.2015.  Though I'm sure someone will have typed one up and posted it before I finish mine.  Mine, as you know, are long.

Very good short story collection, but then again they all are.  (Except maybe Everything's Eventual, which I dimly remember had more misses than hits for me.)  This one has more hits than misses--many, many more--and even the misses miss in just minor ways for me.  My biggest beef with them is that they were maybe insignificant to me.  They might not be to you.  To each his own.

The book begins with a disclaimer that most of the stories have, of course, been previously published.  There's some claptrap about how a story is never finished, but he's got to write something there, I guess.  The fact is, these stories have been published before, and only a couple have been extensively revised, and he's publishing them now because that's the cool thing about short stories: you get paid for them once, and then if you're a name that anyone cares about, you can collect them in a book and get paid for them again.  Much more this time for King, I assure you.  I wonder if he's still getting $10M per book, if he ever was.

In front of each story is a short comment about the genesis of each.  Entertainment Weekly said these were reason enough to read the book.  These are usually distracting for me, so I read them all at once, before I read any of the stories, and then I started reading the stories the next day.  Again, to each his own.  But he's written better intros than any of these.  (My fave's probably the one with The Bachman Books.)

Anyway, some quick thoughts about some (stop now if you don't want to know anything about a few of the stories):

"Mile 81" reads well, as all his stuff does.  You're maybe sick of reading the phrase "compulsively readable" in my reviews of King's stuff by now, but I'll continue typing it as long as it stays true.  Such is the case with this story, except that it's one of my "insignificant" ones in this book, which is not necessarily a terrible thing.  Who doesn't need a good, irrelevant story?  But I read this book (impulsively and compulsively) when I perhaps should have been doing something else, so I felt badly when I felt that tinge of "So what?"  In this one, an alien vehicle kills some better drawn-out characters than usual for this kind of story, and then flies away.  And that's what happens at creepy and abandoned rest areas.  A better story could be made of this.

"Premium Harmony" is a very effective story about a guy and his wife (who very much don't get along), and a dog that prefers her over him.  This one's very memorable and very well-written, and could actually happen.  Good voice and good ending--not always a King strong-suit.  I read this one before somewhere.  Maybe in Details?  Atlantic Monthly?  There's usually a Previously Published In... page, but not this time.

"Batman and Robin..." is okay, a good story that passes the time.  Won't stick in my noggin' but it may in yours.

"The Dune" is a very good story about a judge who sees names in a sand dune, and when he does, that person drops dead soon.  Clever little ending, reminiscent of King's Night Shift days.

"Bad Little Kid" was okay.  The kid in question is sort of representative of all evil, in a ghostly kind of way.  Stands in for Death itself, too.  This is actually a common theme in this collection.

"A Death" is an extremely successful little story that'll leave you guessing until the end.  Written in a different style and tone for King, and he pulls it off.  Very good detail, and it'll make you question your belief system--even if you know how far people will go to deny, and to save their own skin, even from themselves.  I've seen way too much of that, and I was still surprised.  Created a long conversation between myself and my better half.  I read this one somewhere before, and was still impressed when I re-read it again here.  Very memorable.

"Morality" is an effective, nasty long story.  Sort of like a more shrill take on Indecent Proposal.  I read this, and "Blockade Billy," in the limited-release book that had just those two stories, and something originally written for his son, if I remember right.  Anyway, this one says something about the human condition, though I'm not sure what.  Maybe that you can't run away from your own guilt, but he's done that better elsewhere.  What was that short story about the farmer who killed his wife and tried to run away from it but kept seeing and hearing the rats?

"Afterlife" was entertaining and okay.  Probably not memorable for me.

"Ur" was also good, and a welcome back to the men in yellow coats and a bit of the Tower.  Good.  No surprises.  One of the longest in here.

I'd read "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive" somewhere before and just skimmed it here.  Very good story.  A bit of a head-scratcher about life, about depression, about poverty.  About how some find peace and some don't.  Memorable.

"Under the Weather" is probably the most effective and memorable for me.  What does one do when someone you've placed your heart and soul to dies?  So effective because I can imagine this actually happening, in exactly the way that it does here.  And I think you will, too.

For "Blockade Billy," see "Morality" comment.  This is a good story that maybe baseball fans--especially those who like the game from the early 1900s like I do--will better appreciate.

"Mister Yummy" is a bittersweet take on the same themes as the bad kid story.  This one worked better for me, but again it's about getting old and dying, and about what might come next.  There's a lot of that in this collection.

"The Little Green God of Agony" didn't work for me.  Not a bad story, exactly.  A shoulder-shrugger.

"That Bus Is Another World" could have been titled "Kitty Genovese."  I liked it's point more than I liked the story, and it doesn't go with King's intro for it at all.

"Obits" worked for me, but the love-interest tie-in didn't, and it sort of peters out at the end.  Good idea; bad follow-through.  Okay story.

"Drunken Fireworks" was the clunker of the collection for me.  Skip it.

"Summer Thunder" is the bummer of the collection, but still a very good story and very memorable, though the ending is never in doubt, and there really wasn't any other ending King could've given it.  Because of all this, it's a huge victory that this story is still so readable and memorable and sad.  It tries for a strong human will ending that was just more sad for me, though it may register a little better for you.

All in all, this is a great short story collection that shows some of King's best writing in years.  Worth your money and time.  Get it.

New Disasters--The Black Death

Interesting little book--just 111 pages--about the Black Death of the Middle Ages, between 1347-1351.  I saw it in my local library while I was researching plagues and flus for my next novel.  Though I'm focusing more on the Great Plague of the 1660s in England, and not the Black Death of the Middle Ages (for they're not the same thing, and there are a great number of differences), I figured I could learn a little something from this.

It's broken up in sections: its arrival; recent scientific re-assessments (this was published in 2003, so it's still relatively recent); writings about the plague from the time; and the repercussions of the Black Death.

What I learned, in no particular order:

--It seems now rather certain that the Black Death wasn't just the Justinian Plague, carried by fleas on black rats.  Lots of evidence indicates that anthrax (the disease that killed cattle, not the powdery stuff used in germ warfare today) was also going around, either on its own or as a unique anthrax / plague strain.

--Part of the evidence for this was the unbelievable number of animals dying before the people started to die.  Also, the deaths did not abate much in the winter--odd for a plague dependent on fleas and rats to spread it.  (Neither survive or move around much in the winter.)  And people died with extreme rapidity from a third strain of the plague; it was said that they could go to bed feeling fine and be dead by morning.  (This does not seem to be an exaggeration.)

--The plague was said to come from vapors within the Earth, released during earthquakes.  It was believed that breathing man-made yuckiness--like from latrines--was beneficial, and would fight off the nastiness from within the Earth.  Planet alignments and other astrological things were also blamed.

--People died faster than they could be buried.  Putrefying bodies of people and animals would lie in the streets, and the stink was said to be incredible.

--Gravediggers, doctors and clergy died fastest, as they attended to the dead and dying.  Since nobody was left alive to bury the dead--and since those left alive didn't want to touch the dead or dying for fear of getting sick from their "humours" and "vapors"--a lot of money was paid to people who called themselves becchini.  These people would take the dead from their homes, from the streets, etc. and bury them.  But after awhile, nobody wanted to touch or associate themselves with these people, either, so the becchini became disgruntled and homeless, and often turned to crime.

--Those who couldn't afford to be cared for or buried simply weren't, and died alone in horrible conditions, and their bodies left to rot wherever they died.

--The Black Death may have some DNA in common with the HIV / AIDS virus.  Recent evidence suggests that 12%-15% of those with European descent--and an ancestor who contracted the plague and survived it--may be immune to the HIV / AIDS virus as well as the Black Death.

--The same plague from the Middle Ages is alive and well in a few spots, including the Midwestern U.S.  Some cases have cropped up in Colorado recently.

--A strain of the Plague--as well as strains of other viruses--are immune to today's strongest antibiotics.  A cocktail of super-antibiotics is used to fight these resistant viruses now.  Once the viruses become immune to these cocktails--which is very soon--there won't be anything left to stop them.

--God, then like today, was thought to be punishing the bad people.  [See: AIDS in the 80s.]  But then everyone, of every stripe, class, age and religion, started dying, so that theory was dashed by everyone--except the living, of course, whose every breath proved their moral superiority.

--A common "cure" was to bleed and purge the victim.  This led to an even more rapid death due to blood loss, exhaustion, dehydration, and a weakened immune system.  Those who came in contact with the blood or feces of the victim could contract the illness as well, so that the "cure" killed them, too.

--Mercury was often recommended, which made plague victims die of the plague and of mercury poisoning.  Several learned people complained that their doctors were killing them quicker than the pestilence was.  (BTW, the plague was never called the plague at the time.  It was called a "pestilence" or "the Great Pestilence.")

--The most common thing doctors did for the victim?  Study their urine.

--In some towns, when one member of a family got sick, the entire family was sealed inside the home, so that everyone--the healthy and the sick--died.

--Before everyone died of the plague, those blamed for it the most were the Jews and the undesirables of society.  [See: World War II.]  It was commonly believed that Jews were poisoning the wells, and tens of thousands of Jews across Europe were hunted down because of this belief, including entire communities.

Anyway, a little book that, in these virus-ravaged days, makes for some eye-opening, if not chilling, reading.  With the Earth long overdue for a pandemic like the 1918 super-flu, and with our current attitudes about change and blame, this book made for some quick, interesting and thought-provoking reading.

The more things change, it seems, the more things stay the same.

Comfort by Ann Hood

Photo: from Ann Hood's webpage, here.

When a 5-year old child dies...Well, I can't really even finish the sentence, much less write a book about it.  Such loss is inexplicable.  It is impossible to imagine, even by a person like Hood who makes her living from her literary imagination.  The talent to do so must be immense.

You have to do honor to yourself, your own emotions, the child, to the death, to the reality of how it happened.  The details.  The exact details.  Details so exact you have to live your own worst nightmare over and over and over and over just to get the details right.  Because to get them wrong--purposely wrong--is a sort of blasphemy.  Yet you also don't want to sound whiny, or maudlin, like you don't realize other people have lost their kids, too.  You have to write about the cold hard facts, and how do you describe emotions at all, especially as cold hard facts?

And you have to write it well, not like a diary or a journal.  You have to write it over and over, drafts innumerable, to get the tone of everything above, and everything I can't even think of, just right.  It is a high-wire act, a balancing act of art, and therapy, and confessional, and literature, and a sort of diary-journal in memoir form.

I'm a writer--hopefully a pretty good one--and I can't imagine ever being able to do this.  Ann Hood, a former (or current?) Rhode Island College professor [full disclosure: I attended RIC but did not have the good fortune to get Ms. Hood as a professor, though of course I did have some good ones] does the high-wire act and succeeds because her writing is that direct, that honest, that good.  This book will jab you with its simplicity and it's reality.  Not realism, which is a fakeness of literature that makes the unreal real.  This book is all real, all the time.  It is one of the heavier 186-page book you'll ever read, and read it you should.

It doesn't matter if you've never lost a child.  When you reach a certain age, as I guess I have, you've probably lost somebody, and no matter how old they were, I'll bet you thought they weren't old enough.  And you're right.  At least, I think you are, because that's how I've felt about my loved ones who've died.  In fact, I feel that way about everyone I know who've died, even those who were quite old.

More than the death of her child, that's really what Comfort is about: Death.  The death of anyone.  Anyone you've loved.  Anyone you thought died too young.  Weren't they all too young?

Of course, it's harder to explain when they are really that young.  How do you explain the death of a 5-year old girl?  Especially when it's your own daughter, how do you explain that?  Another thing this book tells you is that there is no explanation.  There's no Why.  How can there be?  How can we possibly understand why such a thing happens?  Hood makes it very clear right away, and reminds us throughout, that she doesn't know why it happened.  She doesn't have a belief about it, either.

It happened.  That's the source of the grief, and maybe of the comfort.

It happened.  And there is no why.

A remarkable work that deserves to be read.  When you're done you'll feel something, which is what good books are supposed to make you do.

Revival by Stephen King

Photo: The book's cover art, from its Wikipedia page

Another compulsively-readable book by Stephen King, Revival is one of his recent best.  A mish-mash of Frankenstein (thematically) and Lovecraft (in plot, Otherness, and The Angry Ones, as well as some fairly fearsome Gods) and Hieronymus Bosch, it reads like a first-person confessional (which is a well King has tapped for some time now) and it ends with one of the more horrifying things that King--or anyone I've read--has ever written.
 
Especially if it's true, if that's really what's waiting for us Afterwards.  If you've ever seen Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins or his Garden of Earthly Delights, you'll know what I mean.  Nasty, disturbing and memorable stuff.  This book's ending--and the potential ending for us all, good or bad--are just that: nasty, disturbing and memorable.  Frightening, because the "good" or "bad" doesn't matter.  The ending depicted here isn't the ending of the bad.  It's the ending of all of us.

In recent interviews, King has said that the views expressed by the narrator are not necessarily his--a fact that any reader is well aware, in anyone's writing.  But he has also said recently that he thinks about Death and God a lot (which King fans have always known), and that he does believe in God.  Sometimes he says that there has to be a God, because otherwise he would not have survived his accident or his addictions.  (This begs the question: Since others have not survived being hit by a car, or concurrent alcohol and coke addictions, does that mean there isn't a God?  Or does God simply not want them to live?)  Lately, King's been using Pascal's Wager to express his views.
 
(Pascal's Wager has always seemed like a cop-out to me, but it's really not meant to be.  And as I get older, and I contemplate that slab of stone more and more, Pascal's Wager sounds infinitely more rational.  Though I don't know how one can live a life as if one believes in God, which is what the Wager advises, if one truly does not believe.  But I suppose an agnostic like myself could pull it off.)

This is actually not much of a digression, as a belief in Something is very much at the core of this novel.  Picture an agnostic who grew up with devout, religious parents, and throw in some family tragedies, a wasted life of coke and booze, and some Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror, with Bosch's view of a potential eternity in Hell and a Frankenstein theme, and some hellish chaos on Earth at the very un-Stephen King-like end (after all the Frankenstein / Lovecraft / Bosch stuff), and you've just about got the narrator and his story.

There are some other horrors until then as well, neatly tucked into this novel.  There's a car accident you won't soon forget, and a dream about dead family members that those of us with dead family members will all relate to--and not happily.  And his ending after the ending (a writing style I've pointed out in my last ten or so reviews of King's work) is even more unforgettable.  It's debatable, in fact, if the first or second ending is more horrible.  Since I don't believe in the existence of the first, and since I very much believe in the existence of the evil--or of, worse, the tragic inexplicable--portrayed in the second, I'm going with the latter.  You watch the news, you see this.

The writing is as compulsively-readable as always, but--finally!!!--here are some horrors, terrors and chills, too.  If forced to rate out of five stars, I'd say this is a four--only if compared to his truly great stuff, like IT and The Shining.  But compared to his most recent stuff--some of it quite terrible, and sometimes, at best, rather pedestrian--Revival would get five.  Though the title refers to the revival of the narrator and a few of its almost-dead characters, it could well refer to King's horror writing as well.

Read it, regardless.  And then Wikipedia Pascal's Wager, if you have to, and tell me whether it makes more pragmatic, rational sense than it may have in your youth.

Police

Photo: An uncopyedited proof, the type given to early readers, or beta-readers.  And, considering the editing job done on this book (see comment below), it apparently remained uncopyedited.  From crimefictionlover.com.

Very, very, very disappointing follow-up to Nesbo's Phantom, a far superior book, even with the ridiculous passages from the rat's POV.  In equal parts boring and frustrating--but mostly frustrating--Police is a book that could've been, and should've been, much better. 

It fails because it's all over the place with its plot and story, and because it doesn't focus enough on its characters.  Nesbo said in an interview that he essentially wrote Phantom and Police as one book, and it shows.  At over 1,000 pages combined, it seems like Nesbo couldn't wait to finish with the ending, that even he became bored and frustrated with it.

How else to explain the inexplicable demise of a major recurring character?  How else to explain how the killer could've had the time to draw and quarter this well-liked character while on the run from everyone?  Could the killer really have chopped off her arms and legs and head in (seemingly) minutes?  Then stash them all in different bags and deposit them in the trash just in time for the trucks?

What?!?  And, by the way, didn't this character deserve so much better?  She's rarely considered for the rest of the book--though everyone was sure not to sit in her chair--and it's never explained why she was done away with when other characters were not, even when we were tricked into thinking they would be.

And that was another thing.  Way too many cheap tricks, like making us think a character's young daughter was in danger when her father calls her friend Emilie's house to inquire about her sleepover.  Turns out, she was at the sleepover after all--just at a different girl's house...another girl in the same class, also named Emilie!!!  Ugh...

Another time a character looks like she's about to get it, but it was just another character sneaking up on her.  She even says that, hey, you're not John Doe--but it turns out he was.  She just meant that he wasn't acting like himself.  Please...

Another time a very distraught father was acting strange at the scene of his daughter's death, just after a character in the previous section said that murders were committed by someone distraught about love, and at the death scene of those he loved.  Turns out, though, that this guy was actually just in grief about his daughter dying, one year to the day...Argh!

The real bad guy is a case of who cares.  The ones you wanted to be guilty--two REALLY bad guys--lose an eye and gets his face burnt off, apparently without too many aftereffects or problems.  They go out in public and live their lives as if nothing happened.  Must've been a great surgery for the guy who lost his eye, though the guy who did it was never a doctor or surgeon, or in any health-related field at all.

And who was that body in the hospital all that time?  Not who you think, but considering how Phantom ended, you couldn't be blamed for not knowing.  Turns out, a character from that book hadn't died after all!  How could the reader have known?  Well, you couldn't, but that's the way it is, anyway.

And where's the REALLY, REALLY bad guy everyone spends most of the book looking for?  Nobody ever says.  Wait for the sequel, I guess.  The only intriguing character is a very beautiful, and very unbalanced (Isn't that always the way?) young woman who does something very touching--and out of character--at the end.  You won't believe it, just like I didn't.

Very cheap.  Very lazy.

And really disappointing, because I like the series and I like the writer.  In fact, I was just thinking of incorporating a technique of his that he uses at the end of every book--what some writers have called his "set pieces," which they essentially are, in a play kind of way.  I now realize that these have to be exquisitely staged and described because a) they end every book; b) they're the resolution of the action / mystery / who-dun-it? / police procedural; and c) they're actually the climax, if you combine them with the next book, which I realize is how Nesbo actually writes these.  So they serve a ton of functions.

But, because of this, they have to be perfect.  Great when they are, as most of them have been.  Really bad when they're not.  And when you combine that with everything I've described above, and throw in a lousy editing job (this could've easily been a few hundred pages shorter), you have a real clunker.

And what he did to that recurring female character--chopped her up into many pieces, without mentioning how important she'd been to the series, or her now-orphaned young son--and throw in the fact that she was apparently alive during most of the chopping up...Indefensibly awful.

So bad I'm driven by it to work on my own book, and to treat my characters much better.  Bad things will still happen to them, but they won't be (or remain) unexplained.  And I'll treat them, as I hope I always have, with much more respect.

So frustrating because, again, Nesbo is a good writer, and though the tricks in this book are cheap, they work because you turn the pages.  You want to figure everything out.  You want to see what happens.  You want to see it all unravel.  And in that sense this book isn't awful, exactly, because I read its 550 hardcover pages in about 24 hours or so.

And I'll read the next one, too.

But...

When Plague Strikes: Blame and Bias

 

Photos: Pieter Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death," and an AIDS victim, from this link: http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/photos/plague/#/plague-painting_3338_600x450.jpg

This book is an excellent primer for anyone interested in plagues.  I read this to research The Gravediggers, and while it didn't teach me anything new (except exact names and dates), it does put many of my novel's themes in the same place for ease when I'm writing.

Essentially it focuses on the social, political and historical aftermath of the plague outbreaks.  I like that it groups AIDS together with the Black Death, as my novel does, and that it connects the social biases at the times as well.  My novel does that, too, but it's nice to get reinforcement of your ideas.

When the plagues hit, nobody understood them, and so many prevailed upon the bias of the time to find scapegoats.  But, really, if allowed to hate and maim, certain people will be happy to do so, regardless of the circumstances surrounding their actions.  And so:

From the chapter "Looking for Scapegoats" re: the Black Death:

"In 1213, Pope Innocent III decreed that both sexes, from age seven or eight, had to wear circular badges of yellow felt that identified them as Jews..."  The book then draws the parallel between those badges and the ones forced upon the Jews by the Nazis almost 600 years later.

"According to the rumors, the Jews were polluting the wells in the Christian communities with poisons imported from Moorish Spain and the Far East.  If Christians drank water from the wells...they would be infected with the plague and die..."

"...the rumors led to eleven Jews being put on trial in September 1348.  They were charged with having poisoned the wells in a small south German town.  After hours of painful torture, the eleven confessed to the deed and said they had received the poison from a rabbi in Spain...

"...In January 1349, the two hundred Jewish residents of Basel, Switzerland, were herded into a wooden building on an island in the Rhine River and burned alive..." (Giblin 36-7).

There's much more, but you get the idea.  (I don't know why I was surprised by Switzerland's involvement, considering its history of neutrality, but I was.)

Though the Native Americans were not blamed for causing smallpox, colonists and Europeans were quick to use it against them.  The most infamous was Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, who was unwise enough to put it in writing.  This was sent to a colonel:

"Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among these...tribes of Indians?  We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them."  The colonel's response: "I will try to [infect] the Indians with some blankets that may fall in their hands..."  Amherst's enthusiastic response: "You will do well to try to infect the Indians by means of blankets...as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race" (Giblin 86-7).

The British and the colonists were so happy with the results that Amherst, Massachusetts was named in his honor.

Those of my generation remember the bias against homosexuals when AIDS made its appearance here in the early-to-mid-80s.  I do specifically remember (unfortunately) some diatribes by Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell.  So, too, apparently, did this book's author:

"The conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan wrote, 'The poor homosexuals--they have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.'...

"In a statement that sounded remarkably similar to some made by clergymen at the time of the Black Death and during early smallpox epidemics, the Rev. Jerry Falwell said: 'When you violate moral, health, and hygiene laws, you reap the whirlwind.  You cannot shake your fist in God's face and get away with it."

And it hasn't always been just the clergy, or the conservative.  Haters will hate, if just given a cause to hate about:

"Wielding baseball bats, the youths rampaged through a public park frequented by gays.  They shouted 'diseased queers' and 'plague-carrying faggots' as they beat up every man unlucky enough to be in their path.  After his arrest, one of the attackers tried to defend his actions.  'If we don't kill these fags, they'll kill us with their f---[ing] AIDS disease,' he said" (Giblin 135-6).

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

What will the next plague be?  And who'll be blamed and persecuted for it then?

My guess: Ebola.  Who'll be prejudiced against for it?  We'll see.  Hopefully not brown-eyed little Frenchmen, but who knows?

Innocent Men Set Free After 30 Years

Photo: from the AP article mentioned below: "In an an Aug. 12, 2014 photo, Henry McCollum sits on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C. He and his half brother Leon Brown have spent more than three decades in prison for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in 1983."

I credited the caption from the article, but what I really wanted to write was:

For every overturned case due to newly-found DNA evidence that highlights a murder conviction based solely on bias--Doesn't this photo really say it all?

For the full report, read this article at this link.  Most of this entry is copied and pasted from this article, which states the facts much better than I could have.  Below the line is where I step in.

LUMBERTON, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina judge overturned the convictions Tuesday of two men who have served 30 years in prison for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl after another man's DNA was recently discovered on evidence in the case.

Superior Court Judge Douglass Sasser ordered the immediate release of Henry McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46. The half brothers were convicted in the 1983 slaying of Sabrina Buie in Robeson County.

Lawyers for the men petitioned for their release after DNA evidence from a cigarette butt recovered at the crime scene pointed to another man. That man, who lived close to the soybean field where the dead girl's body was found, is already serving a life sentence for a similar rape and murder that happened less than a month later.

Sasser ruled after a day-long evidence hearing during which Sharon Stellato, the associate director North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, testified about three interviews she had over the summer with the 74-year-old inmate now suspected of killing Buie. The Associated Press does not generally disclose the names of criminal suspects unless they are charged.

According to Stellato, the inmate said at first he didn't know Buie. But in later interviews, the man said the girl would come to his house and buy cigarettes for him, Stellato said.

The man also told them he saw the girl the night she went missing and gave her a coat and hat because it was raining, Stellato said. He told the commission that's why his DNA may have been at the scene.

Stellato also said the man repeatedly told her McCollum and Brown are innocent.

Still, he denied involvement in the killing, Stellato said. He told the commission that the girl was alive when she left his house and that he didn't see her again. He told the commission that he didn't leave the house because it was raining and he had to work the next day.

Stellato said weather records show it didn't rain the night Buie went missing or the next day.

Authorities said McCollum, who was 19 at the time, and Brown, who was 15, confessed to killing Buie.

Attorneys said both men have low IQs and their confessions were coerced after hours of questioning. There is no physical evidence connecting them to the crime.

Both were initially given death sentences, which were overturned. At a second trial, McCollum was again sent to death row, where he remains, while Brown was convicted of rape and sentenced to life.

The DNA from the cigarette butts doesn't match either of them, and fingerprints taken from a beer can at the scene aren't theirs either. The other man now suspected in Buie's killing was convicted of assaulting three other women over 30 years before his last conviction.

Lawyers for the two men said the new testing leaves no doubt about their clients' innocence.
Ken Rose, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, has represented Henry McCollum for 20 years.

"It's terrifying that our justice system allowed two intellectually disabled children to go to prison for a crime they had nothing to do with, and then to suffer there for 30 years," Rose said. "Henry watched dozens of people be hauled away for execution. He would become so distraught he had to be put in isolation. It's impossible to put into words what these men have been through and how much they have lost."

_________

I have nothing but outrage to add to this, a pity since outrage doesn't come across well in a blog.  So I'll just reiterate one point: 

"There is no physical evidence connecting them to the crime."

However, despite this, "...[b]oth were initially given death sentences, which were overturned. At a second trial, McCollum was again sent to death row, where he remains..."

How do you give someone the death penalty--TWICE--for a conviction not based on any physical evidence at all, ever?  How does a mentally deficient man get the death penalty based on a confession he couldn't possibly have given willingly, in a case in which there's zero physical evidence against him?  And this wasn't in the bigoted first half of the 20th Century.  This was in 1983--just 31 years ago.

How many times do you think a black man with a very low IQ has been given the death penalty based solely on a "confession" and zero physical evidence?

Why doesn't somebody of national relevance order a review of every single case in which a black and /or mentally deficient (because of an extremely low IQ) man has been incarcerated due to convictions based on a "confession" and zero physical evidence?

My HWA Screw-up / Nice Authors

 Photo: HWA's Stoker Award for Specialty Press, won by Gray Friar Press from the UK.

Well, this is embarrassing, but here's my admission:

As a member of the Horror Writers Association of America, I thought I was eligible to vote for the HWA's Stoker Awards, but I'm not.  Unfortunately, I didn't know that until after I'd asked for some review copies of some nominated works.  In other words, I emailed a few writers and asked them for review copies (which voters are supposed to do) so I could consider voting for their works.

Except then I found out I wasn't eligible to vote.

And the books had already come.

So let that be a lesson to you: When you join a club, know its rules.

Immediately I knew I had to email all these writers back, admit my mistake, and ask them if they wanted me to pay for the book, or pay to send it back to them.  Books, especially hardcover books, are not cheap.  I'd received seven books overall.  The least costly: $14.00.  The most: $26.00.  Overall I'd received over $120.00 worth of stuff under incorrect pretenses.

Could this have gotten ugly?  I don't know.  But as a professional writer / novelist wannabe, I certainly didn't want to take that chance.  More importantly, bottom line: I had a writer's property that initially I shouldn't have had.  That's bad in of itself; for a professional writer / novelist wannabe like me, that's really, really bad.

I put off sending out the emails for a few hours, which is very unlike me.  But finally I sent them; each one began, "Well, this is embarrassing, but..."  It took me about seven hours to send out all of the emails.  Each one was painful.  Doing that really, really sucked.  What a professional they must think I am!

The writers were very nice, of course.  Some just asked that I post a review, which I was more than happy to do.  A few didn't ask me to do anything and said not to worry about it.  One of them even said that sending the emails was a classy thing to do.  (Having class is not something I'm often accused of.)

So one of the few good things to come out of this is that I can now review each of these books and collections.  Which I will do.  The voting has been done, too.  The results will be announced this summer during the World Horror Convention in Portland, Oregon.  I read these books and write these reviews now not for the Stoker Award, but for the books and the writers themselves, which I am more than happy to do.

And I'm happy to say that they are all nice people as well.  Each one could have given me a hard time, but didn't.  A few of them even said kind things.  So, here they are, in a list.  Please consider reading their books--the ones I'll review, or any other.

Eric J. Guignard, Editor: After Death... (short story collection)

Jonathan Moore: Redheads ("Part horror, part CSI, part revenge thriller..."--Jay Bonansinga, NYT Bestselling Author)

Michael Knost and Nancy Eden Siegel, Editors: Barbers and Beauties (short story collection)

S.P. Somtow: Bible Stories for Secular Humanists ("Skillfully combines the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John!"--Robert Bloch, author of Psycho / "He can drive the chill bone deep."--Dean Koontz.)

Anthony Rivera and Sharon Lawson, Editors: Dark Visions, Vols. 1 & 2 (short story collections)

Christopher Rice: The Heavens Rise.  And check out the Internet radio show of this NYT bestselling author, too. 

Star Trek Into Darkness

Photo: One of the many movie posters, from its Wikipedia page

I'd been apprehensive about seeing this movie because the first re-boot hadn't overly impressed me.  In fact, I don't actually remember too much of it.  I remember that I'd thought it was okay, but nothing great, nothing memorable.  I'd also thought it was a tiny bit blasphemous, but actual Trekkies were much more concerned about that than I.  I don't remember the Uhura/Spock relationship from the show or from any of the other movies.  Was that created just in the re-boot?  Someone needs to tell me.  As unemotional as Spock had been in the show and in the movies, I couldn't (and still can't) see him in any kind of romantic relationship.  But, whatever.  That's minor, too.  The biggest thing was how bleh I felt about the first one.  Not something I wanted to waste about $23 for two tickets.

But I was wrong.  This time the movie was very well written, very well directed--and just very well-done.  I won't get too much involved in the plot, since such things are secondary in movies like this, anyway.  But the special effects are outstanding.  The acting is good--which you couldn't really say from any of the other films, besides maybe Patrick Stewart, who cannot act badly.  The best actor in this movie plays the bad guy, if you will, and I won't tell you who the character is--and the reviews shouldn't have, either.  (His smile is one of the creepiest in recent memory, and the way he made it a perfect V-formation is super-weird.)  I will tell you, though, that you should see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (that sort of gives it away, doesn't it), or you won't get how great the writing and mirror-image homages are for the last twenty minutes or so of the film.  Many people sitting around me got most of them--including an homage to the famous scene of Shatner / Kirk completely losing his sh*t and having a conniption as he screams, "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"  This got a huge laugh.  (Those around me thought the movie was much funnier than I did, though I will say that it was pleasantly amusing, even if I never actually laughed out loud like many of them did.)  Remember that these are homages done in reverse here, which was done so well that I didn't even think until much later about how catastrophically bad it could have backfired on the moviemakers (mostly J.J. Abrams) had it not worked.  But it did work, and really, really well.

Having said all this, I have to close by saying that I am more than a bit bothered by the extreme mayhem and death in this movie--all of which was almost blissfully ignored by the main characters.  There was a (rather dim-witted) security guard sucked into space, though he was just doing his job.  Rather innocent dimwits like this guy are often saved in movies like this, by being warned of a problem, or conveniently knocked out, or whatever.  There were a million ways this guy could've been saved.  But there were also hundreds, if not thousands (or maybe even tens of thousands, depending on how populated this very over-populated city and world was) of people who died when hundreds of buildings were destroyed at the end by a crashing spaceship that plowed through an entire metropolis, much like how the Enterprise plowed through the land in one of the Next Generation movies, before the Nexus killed everyone on the planet (for a short time, in an alternate universe).  Anyway, such ignored killing and mayhem makes the whole thing like a silly comic book, which this movie was very seriously trying not to be.  This series is taking itself very seriously, indeed--even with the lines some in the audience found very funny.

So go see this movie, and see it in the theatre because this is certainly a big-screen flick, and marvel at all of the things that I did, and have a (mostly) good time like I did.  And feel free to comment if all of the ignored death and mayhem didn't bother you.  (It's the ignoring of the thousands of deaths that bothered me the most, not that it happened.)  But see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to fully appreciate the last twenty minutes or so--and, if possible, take a look at the episode of the series that all the polls say the audience liked the most, "The Trouble with Tribbles." 

Gravediggers: Respecting Death, Part 2

Photo 1: Elmsgrove Cemetery, NH.  Notice the doorknob on the upper left.  And think: What if something were to suddenly peer at you from the hole?
Photo 2: Weeping willow, or tree, or fountain design.  Cemetery in the middle of a gravel road in the mountains of NH. 
Photo 3: Tree and urn design.  Very common.  Sometimes just tree; sometimes just urn.  Sometimes tree and urn.  In Sharon, MA.
Photo 4: Sometimes a grinning skull with wings design.  Billings Cemetery, Sharon, MA.
Photo 5: And sometimes nothing at all, especially if you're poor.  A crude and uneven cut that you can tell someone did his best with.  (Notice the equidistant measuring line down the middle.) In NH.
Photo 6: And sometimes you get a stone that's isolated and forgotten about forever.  (Stone's buried in greenage just to the left of dead center.  Sorry.)  Upon closer inspection, this was of an Abigail A.  Up the street from #2, one gravestone by itself in the woods.  Makes you wonder.

(cont'd from previous entry)

It wasn't always that way.  People used to die in their homes all the time--i.e. Romeo and Juliet and The Last Days of Dogtown, among many other works.  This was up until the early 20th century.  During plague and flu epidemics, people had wakes in their living rooms on a weekly basis, if not daily.  And elderly and/or dying people weren't shipped away to die, either--they stayed home and died in front of everyone, slowly and often painfully, and not without a little bit of smell.  They were there, always in the mind's eye--and the center of the living room, if not in their own little room, hidden away upstairs.  But this was why Death was more of an actual character in fiction and poetry then--like in many of Chaucer's, Caravaggio's and Poe's tales.  Death was always there, a part of daily, accepted life.  Gravestones show this (see last post)--as Death predominated, so it did on headstones, often dancing and smiling.  Later, as it ebbed somewhat from daily occurrence and acceptance--as medicine improved and facilities and hospitals flourished--angels and fountains replaced skeletons and grinning skulls on tombstones.  Life got easier--or at least we made it seem that way.  Today, if you've noticed, the faces of the dead people themselves are frequently on their own gravestones, as the focus has shifted completely from Death to ourselves.  Or we make it seem that way.  I can't tell which is creepier--the grinning skulls or the grinning, life-like, dead people.  I think I'd take the skulls.

Or maybe Death just used to be handled more immediately, more respectfully.  Not as something to be dismissed and shunted aside--like we do when we banish the dying or elderly to facilities--but as something instead that must be DEALT WITH.

So, anyway, Gravediggers does that.  Death is IN YOUR FACE on every page--because, man, that's the way it used to be.  That's the way it was before we got so scared that we SANITIZED everything.  Gravediggers has an incubus (or is it a succubus?) and flus, and plagues and AIDS and a future filovirus so that there'll be no one to sanitize death anymore--it'll be a dead body in every room in every house, or in every backyard, basement or attic, every crypt, every church--it'll be everywhere, felt by everyone, so that there'll be no one left to even bury the gravediggers.

Gravediggers: Respecting Death

Photo 1: A stone with a flying skull design. "Sept. 22, 1745."
Photo 2: A crypt with its own gate and descending stairs.  "No, please, after you."
Photo 3: A stone with a flying angel head design."Feb. ye 25th, 1785."

All photos taken from the same cemetery in Wentham, MA.  All designs are typical of the years on the stones.

I see Gravediggers working on many levels, especially how close the living are to the dead.  Death is all around us, psychically, emotionally, psychologically--but also spatially.  Has anyone noticed how many historic cemeteries there are out there?  We don't see them as we ignore Death, and the dead--the living equivalent of sending the elderly to their own slow demise in facilities.  These historic cemeteries are everywhere in New England--beside homes, next to Wal-Marts, behind churches, in the woods--everywhere!  They're also torn down and removed, like the one that used to be on a raised plot of land on the corner of West Shore and Buttonwoods, not where there is one now, in front of a small plaza, but where the senior care facility is now.  (So I guess that at least is an appropriate replacement; shows that we're not completely shunting Death aside.)  Also cemeteries are crudely vandalized these days; one on my father's street is now a pot den, as the descendents put up tall hedges that hid it from the road, and someone knocked down all the stones and piled them in the corners.  No respect for the living or the dead, there, and it shows you again the lack of respect for Death itself.  We do that all the time: the dying end their days in hospitals and only rarely at home (a parent and two grandparents of mine died at home); the elderly and soon-to-be-dying get shipped to facilities.  Hell, even the Eskimos used to do better: when short on food, they'd place the oldest on ice floats and chip away at the ice until they floated away by themselves into the distance, never to be seen (or fed) again.  Is what we do to our elderly really that much different?