American Horror Story--Freakshow--Edward Mordrake, Part 2--Episode 4--An Excerpt

Photo below: Just as last week, from http://verumfabula.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/the-curious-case-of-edward-mondrake/

Photo below: from the Huffington Post, at this site.

It's late at night and I've got writing to do, so--very quickly:

--Well, I sort of called it, as I did say that the Killer Clown was by far the most worthy of Mordrake to take with him.  AHS's creators did a good job of making the trailers look like Elsa was going to go.

###  Go to the whole blog entry at my AHS site to read the deleted stuff.  ###

--John Carroll Lynch--a.k.a. Twisty the Clown--has played tons of other roles in good TV shows and movies.  I remember him most as the main suspect in Zodiac (Didja catch the Zodiac homage in the first episode, the killings at the lake?) and as the pregnant cop's husband in Fargo.  Ayuh.

--And, strange to say, sorry to see Twisty go.  Felt the same about Gareth in Walking Dead.  They had charisma, man.  Which is hard to do if, like Twisty, you don't have any lines.

--Heard today that Lily Rabe will be back this season after all.  And she's bringing Sister Mary Eunice with her!  Apparently she'll explain how she and Pepper got to the Asylum.

--Speaking of Pepper, I met the real actress--Naomi Grossman--at a recent TerrorCon.  And she's pretty!  I was going to get her autograph, but I was short on cash, having bought waaaaaaaayyyyy too many posters.  Won't do that at Saturday's Comic Con.

--And I made eye contact with her twice, so hopefully I was polite enough to at least say Hello to her.  Knowing my social skills, probably not.  It was sort of like driving by a yard sale, really slowly, looking over everything, but never stopping the car or getting out.  Just a drive-by look and nothing.

***  Go to the whole blog entry at my AHS site to read the deleted stuff.  ***

--And now the twins are getting that way, too.

--Not sure Desiree Dupree's response to that kid was altogether appropriate.  She said, "I'm a woman and a whole lot more," or something like that.

--Let's hope we don't see Evan Peters and Emma Roberts in the tabloids again.  Last year, she apparently beat him up.  But she's likeable, and his character is already much better than last year's travesty.

--Word has it that the last three or four episodes haven't been shot yet, which is why they can add actors to the cast this late in the game.  I mean, Lily Rabe agreed to join the cast this week, which means she hasn't shot her scenes yet.  And only three or so episodes remain to be shot.

--Things apparently don't need to be planned any better than that.  Weird business.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Faceless Killers--Henning Mankell

Mankell is a writer of Swedish noir; he inspired Stieg Larsson, and, perhaps, me.  I've been purposely trying to learn as I read these days.  Not in an academic way--at least until I take my next Masters class--but in a way that I understand writing better so that my writing is also better.  I wrote a recent blog about this, using Dan Simmons' Drood as a primer, so I won't do that again here.

In short, here's what I liked about Faceless Killers (besides the title).  The thing that struck me first, by about page 20, was that if Raymond Carver wrote Swedish noir, it would turn out like this.  Carver was a writer of more depth than this novel, appropriately, shows, but the type of writing is the same.  Both writers make the very ordinary seem very important.  Carver would write, "He placed the bottle of champagne on the table," in exactly the same way several times in the same 12-page short story, and it would carry weight each time.  (I still don't understand how he was able to do that.)  Mankell does the same here, but, again, without the strange depth.  His words and sentences do have depth, just not the same emotional (or emotionless) as Carver's did.

Secondly, Mankell's Kurt Wallander has very real, gritty problems, shown in very gritty sentences.  For example, and pardon the lack of etiquette here, but Wallender has this gastro-intestinal problem--a combination of bad eating habits and lots of stress, caused by his job and his recent marriage break-up--and the novel shows twice that he eats a hotdog, or a pizza, too fast and has to rush to the bathroom with diarrhea.  And I'm not paraphrasing or inferring here.  It says that he ate too fast, that he had to run to the bathroom, and that he had diarrhea.  The first time, it also says that he realizes he has to change his underwear.  Now that's intense.  The short, clipped, Carver-esque sentences create a dreamy, distant, slowly re-awakening feeling in the character that really is what the novel is about.  That, and what is going wrong with Sweden in those days.  The two-headed theme is: What went wrong with my marriage?--and--What went wrong with Sweden?  They go hand-in-hand here.  The setting, as you'd might expect from Sweden, is a character in of itself in the same way that the same type of weather was for Fargo and Smilla's Sense of Snow.

Anyway, this novel got me to consider ditching the 1st person narration of one of my "finished" mystery mss. and allowing my writing style to show the main character's traits in ways that I thought only 1st person could.  And it also made me realize that although the mystery starts right away in my novel, the actual crime isn't shown until midway.  (Other crimes, including murders and other cases the character takes on, are shown much earlier, all starting on page 1.)  But this was a real eye-opener for me in that it shows that maybe the packaging of my novel is all wrong.

We'll see.  Anyway, Faceless Killers is highly recommended.  I just bought most of the Wallender series a few hours ago.  The supposed last one, A Troubled Man, comes out very soon, the first Wallender book in 10 years.  Mankell says it's definitely the last, but I'll bet he also said that 10 years ago.