Seeing the Light -- Midnight Sun by Jo Nesbo

I read this in just a few hours today, the day after Thanksgiving--fitting, given what the book's about. I'm happy to say that this book also is maybe the first of Jo Nesbo's books that I haven't been at least a little chagrined with. It's also in 1st person, but it doesn't cop-out like his latest non-Harry Hole, Blood on Snow. That one had a short chapter at the end that was in 3rd person, after the whole book previously had been in 1st person. This one doesn't cheat like that, and is told in 1st person the whole way.

Nesbo plays with his following here, as he knows he's known as a writer who writes about potentially bad men who try to be good, and it doesn't work out for them. (See: Blood on Snow.) This one almost has the same set-up, but the big difference here is that the fixer here never fixes anybody, even at the end, when he really needs to. Well, then he does, but that's okay. And this guy--who calls himself Ulf--had even stolen all that money to pay for a little girl's cancer treatments. Nesbo goes out of his way here--perhaps a bit too much--to show us that this guy is a good guy. He is that, perhaps a bit unrealistically.

Speaking of that, this is yet another book in which the main character falls head over heels for a younger woman with a young child and no husband. While this occasionally happens in real life, what doesn't normally happen (or, shouldn't) is that said woman puts herself and her child in danger by helping out said main male character. We've all heard of stories in which a parent sadly chooses bad man over her own child, but even in real life, it doesn't happen like this. Stephen King has had a mini-genre doing this--See: Bag of Bones--but it's beginning to get to me a little bit. The female character always says she can't be with the guy or help the guy because she has to think of her kid first, and then she does it anyway! Now if the said character were a bit scattered to begin with, this may be a bit easier to swallow, but most of these female characters--including the one here--is so straight-laced and responsible that it comes across as unrealistic. It does so here, for me, anyway. It doesn't detract from the reading, but it made me roll my eyes a bit. I mean, we all understand the pipe dream, and it seems to effect writers when they hit 45 or so, but, come on...These woman, of course, also profess their love for these shadowy guys. In this case, she literally throws herself at him. Hey, you take your ego trip, I'll take mine, I guess, but, jeez...

But I digress. Obviously this was a good read, as I began and finished it's almost-300 pages in a few hours. There's a bit of philosophical and religious pondering here, which has slipped into Nesbo's work lately, and the narrator again seems to know a little bit more about--in this case--William Blackstone (who founded Blackstone, Massachusetts, which is a lot closer to my neck of the woods than it is to Nesbo's Oslo), Kierkegaard, and other blokes that, I'm guessing, your typical Norwegian fixer wouldn't ordinarily know. This speaks more of Nesbo, I think, than it does his characters, and it may be time now for him to look at that. I've got a philosophy degree, so I certainly appreciate that he tries to go there, but, really, how many fixers who say they don't know anything about anything will actually know this stuff?

But I digress, again. Sorry. The fact is that this is pretty entertaining stuff, even if you wonder why the woman, in a town of about 50, lets herself be seen with this guy, alone in her house, driving with him...and, yeah, she runs into her sort-of brother-in-law after a 45-minute drive to Alta, a bigger city, which is sort of like me running into one of my exes when I go to Fenway. Not yet. And they run into a woman he'd just been with--on the same drive! But it works, somehow. There are a few oddly amusing passages where you'd least expect them--this happened in Blood on Snow, too--though here they seem more purposely out of left field, like we're given permission to know that it won't all end up like the previous, very similar novel and 1st person narrator.

It doesn't, and you'll probably be able to see how it's all going to come together before it does, which I suppose is part of the charm. This narrator isn't a bad guy, at all, after all, and so we feel he deserves to get away, though readers and writers shouldn't moralize. So if you were disappointed with the last one, which I was, although it deserved the otherwise good write-up I gave it, then you'll be very satisfied with this one, as it's almost a complete opposite of the same story, with the same set-up and almost the exact same situations. You'll probably roll your eyes, as I did, but you'll wish well for everyone, and it'll turn out the way you'll want it to.

Vienna Blood -- A Very Short Book Review

Photo: The book's paperback cover.

The sequel to Tallis's slightly better A Death in Vienna, this one is still a success. The Washington Post called it "the first great thriller of 2008." I'm not on top of my 2008 thrillers, but this book is very good.

The mystery is less mysterious than the first in the series, and it shouldn't be hard for the reader to guess the killer. Because there are lots of red herrings, both in the plot and in other characters, the book won't be a disappointment if you correctly guessed the killer. The interesting historical fact this time is that the swastika--forever to be associated with evil and the Nazis--was actually a much older symbol that, ironically, stood for peace and unity. Not anymore, and not ever again.

Which brings up one of the interesting things about Tallis and these books: You learn something. Like Dan Brown's thrillers, you get entertained and you get educated at the same time. I used to sometimes stop reading Brown's books and write something down that I wanted to Google. With Tallis, I've written things down that I wanted to hear on YouTube. Some have been hits, and some have been misses (such as Stockhausen, Studie 1, from a horror novel of his I'm reading now), but I've always been curious and interested. Tallis is more interested in music than in images, like Brown is, and Tallis writes historical thrillers, so you learn about the past--in this case, Vienna in 1902. Brown doesn't do that, as he brings things from the past into his thrillers in the present. But it's all good. As long as you're reading and learning, who cares?

You learn that the main character--and, one assumes, more popular Jews in Vienna, like Freud--were daily victims of bias. For example, both men (at different times) have been the recipient of snide, vulgar remarks about being Jewish, from supposedly learned and sophisticated men. Freud ignored it and Liebermann shrugged it off, but both explained it was a daily occurrence. (On a side note, Freud was apparently a teller of funny, but often crude and stereotypical, Jewish jokes. One of them, about how you could tell Jesus was Jewish, I'd heard before.) There may be a bit too much about the Freemasons of Vienna here, but that's okay, too, and you may think, as I did, that you're learning something new, as they don't seem much like the Freemasons of America I've read about.

Poor Clara is treated a little curtly here, but if you've read the first one, you've seen it coming. She immediately (and a little too patly) recovers, but that was okay with me, because she was likable, and not as dim as Liebermann thought (which he often recognized), and you don't want her to be sad. It wouldn't have worked out with me, either, but I would also have been glad that she was happy. Whatever.

So a very quick read, and worthy of your time if you like historical thrillers. I'm taking a break from Tallis's historical thrillers for now; I'm in the middle of a horror novel, written by him as F.R. Tallis. I'll let you know.

P.S.--For the waltz by Strauss that gives the book its title, click this link to YouTube.

Signs You're Gettin' Old

--You read an article about seven necessary exercises for men and you read this, "Functional exercises train the muscles that are used for everyday activities like mowing the lawn..." and you think, Damn it, mowing the lawn IS my exercise.

--Followed immediately by: Now it's an everyday activity I need to exercise for?

--You put two bricks into the ground to complete a planting barrier, and then surround a plant with six more bricks that you basically just stomped into the ground, and you think that's a good day's work in the sun.

--And it's just in the high 40s. And it took just half an hour.

--You wake up the next morning and your body is a tad sore from this "rigorous work."

--You appreciate sitting in the sun--in a room in your house that gets a lot of sun.

--And you appreciate this room, like you never knew it got so much good sun.

--Because you didn't know, though you've lived in the house for almost five years.

--You realize you're as old as your father was when you thought he was old.

--Your doctor says, "We need to think about your prostate."

--And, "When was the last time you had your cholesterol tested?"

--After hearing this, you feel your blood pressure spiking and you're grateful they've already done that test.

--You monitor how much coffee and water you're drinking, so you don't have to do #1 when you know you'll be in the middle of something important.

--Like, going to see a movie. Or "working" outside.

--You're seriously considering fiber bars and cranberry juice.

--You find yourself typing articles about what gettin' old feels like.

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.

A Visit to Lizzie Borden's House

Photo: Lizzie Borden's house--the murder house, not Maplecroft, where she later moved--at 92 Second Street, Fall River, MA as it looked in 1892.  From Lizzie Borden's Wikipedia page.
 

Photo: Lizzie Borden's actual books, in the Lizzie Borden house.  The 9th one from the left--the thick blue one, is titled When Ghost Meets Ghost.  This photo, and all the following photos, were taken by me in the Lizzie Borden house.  Please note: Out of respect for the proprietors of the Lizzie Borden House, I do not show any of the meatier (reads: gruesome, but better to draw in blog readers) pics that are available there (and on my phone's camera).  The address is 92 Second Street (GPS address is 230 Second Street) in Fall River, MA.  It's open from 11-3, seven days a week.  You can reserve a day and time as well.  Go to the official website: https://lizzie-borden.com/.  They have a cool thing going on over there, and I don't want to rain on their parade, so you'll have to take the tour (just $15 per person for 50 minutes) to see the pics I speak of here, and in the blog below.  Many of the pics you'll see in this entry are ones I took at the Borden House, but are also popular pics of this case, and are commonly found online.


Recently (on Lizzie's birthday, July 19th, as it turned out; 1 in 365 chance there) I went to Lizzie Borden's house, just half an hour away from my own house, just to have a look-see.  I'm planning to write a novel (one of many planned; if I had world enough, and time) about the murder and trial, told from the POV of the maid, who moved away from the house on that fateful day, and died in Montana.

The house is now a bed and breakfast, and it gives tours through the day.  The tour guide (who seemed honestly surprised that our tour took about an hour) through the house was the daughter of the guy who now owns the place.  She did a great job, and clearly likes what she's doing.  How many high school seniors can say that they work at a (possibly) real haunted house (though for the record I didn't get any creepy vibes), and that they talk to people about a famous murder that, at the time, was called "The Crime of the Century" over 100 years before O.J.?  Well, she can.  (And she said a ghost pulled her earlobe there when she was a kid, and that other guests report strange things, including Abby Borden's ghost saying nice, motherly things).  She was very knowledgeable about her subject matter (though she may have fudged a little about the maid's infamous last words--that weren't; I'll explain later, at the end of this blog entry), very friendly and energetic, and very interested in Fall River in general.  She has a career as an actress or guide, but she said she was going to college to be a biologist.

I highly recommend the tour.  You can just show up like I did, and (because they were running late) go right on the tour without any waiting.  It's only $15 a person, and you can take all the pics and all the notes you want.  No film, though, I think.  But you can ask.  The address is 92 Second Street (GPS address is 230 Second Street) in Fall River, MA.  It's open from 11-3, seven days a week.  You can reserve a day and time as well.  Go to the official website: https://lizzie-borden.com/.  They have a nifty catchphrase on the page: "Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast Museum: Where Everyone Is Treated Like Family."  Well, I hope not!

Anyway, it's a well-maintained place with some of the real house stuff, though most of the things in there now were time-accurate pieces bought at auctions, etc.  (But the couch Mr. Borden was murdered on, the one you see in all the online pics, is the exact one that is still in the house.  If you look at the pics [too gruesome to put here], you'll see why--Who could get all that stuff out in 1892?)  I think the step-mother's bed is the same, but I could be wrong.  Unfortunately, the real things fell into neglect, as Lizzie was jailed for a long time after the murder, and the sister and maid moved away, and everything just kind of went to hell.  After the acquittal, they took whatever they wanted with them (Lizzie went to Maplecroft, up the street, which actually looks creepier than the Lizzie Borden house does today) and the rest went into storage.  What happened to all that 1892 stuff after that is anybody's guess.

The Lizzie Borden House was bought by people, and then again, and again...the current owner has really spiffed the place up for his business (the place and tour aren't as business-y as the website is), and the house itself is really well-cared for.  The tour guide was very honest about the things in the house--but as a writer, I really just needed to see the house, to stage what happened in there in my mind.  For example, how else would I have known that there aren't any hallways in the place at all?  One door opens into a room, and then another does the same, and so on.  No hallways with rooms off of them; no privacy at all, one would think.  And, as the informative and energetic guide pointed out, if you compare some of Lizzie's testimony with the layout of the house, you can see that she was lying.  For example, she said that she was in the dining room, ironing, and didn't hear the step-mother or her father being murdered.  But if you stand in the room she said she'd been in, you could see this would not be possible.  It's amazing how close everything is in the house.

So, if you're in the area, go see the Lizzie Borden House.  I also went to see Maplecroft, where she moved later.  (Just a few minutes away, the house is nothing to be named.  Only Newport mansions were named back then, and this place is a far cry from that, and even more so today.  As I said, it looks like it would be more haunted than the murder house does.  It's possible that she was putting on airs.)  I also went to see the cemetery where all of the Bordens are buried; that's just up the street in a huge cemetery on the peninsula.  The cemetery's main road has small white arrows pointing to the exact spot the Bordens are interred so that nobody gets lost and / or defaces any other gravestones--like people have at poor Mercy Brown's grave.

Blogs will follow about the murder house, Maplecroft, Fall River, and the cemetery.  Until then, a few pics:

This is a picture of the Borden house and surrounding homes as they would've been in 1892.  Today, only the Borden house is left.  It's a busy street now--as it was then--but there are newer homes, businesses, apartment houses, a cathedral.  I know it's 122 years later, but it's still shocking how much things change.

This is the room where Andrew Borden was killed.  The actual couch he was killed on is to the left in this pic.  Here it is, closer up:

And here's the bed beside which Abby Borden was killed.  The famous picture of her kneeling beside the bed was taken after her body had been moved for the picture.  Initially, she'd been trying to get under the bed, her arms were outstretched, and her skirt had ridden up.  The first doctor on the scene moved her body to a more "lady-like" position.

There are some very gruesome pics indeed I could have shown here, but out of respect for the proprietors of the Borden House, not to mention of the dead, I won't do so here.  You'll have to go to the Borden House (again, which I highly recommend) to see them; or, if you're interested in this stuff, you've probably already seen the more hideous and infamous pics online.  The one above is a popular pic.  But at the House you can see a pic of what Abby's head--and the huge thick puddle of blood--looked like.  The House has a picture of a camera taking a picture from the other side of the bed, facing the mirror / dresser you can see in this photo, to the upper left.  Reflected in the mirror is an 1892 camera taking the picture--and it is very bloody and gory.  If you're into this kind of thing, you've probably seen the online pic of Andrew Borden's devastated face and skull, as he'd lay on that aforementioned couch, his head on his folded coat, which he used as a pillow.  Very creepy, because it's taken from a short distance, and there are shadows, yet you can still see the damage.  There's another one at the Lizzie Borden House that I hadn't seen: the autopsy shot of him lying on an 1892 gurney at the Borden home, just hours after he died.  (A second autopsy was done later, after his funeral, at the Oak Grove Cemetery where he, his wives and his daughters are now buried.)  This is one of the most gruesome I've ever seen, which is saying something.  Creepiest thing is that, although the face is almost completely obliterated, you can see hair and ears that look perfectly normal.

To give you a sanitized feel for it all, here are their fake--but historically accurate--skulls.  His on the left, hers on the right.  (Their real skulls were infamously separated from their bodies and used as visual aids at the trial--and then put back with their bodies, in the wrong places!)  Notice the damage done on his skull on the side, as that would be the side facing up while he was asleep on the couch, facing out.  Her damage was done on the back and right side, as she'd been facing away at the time of the first blows, and Lizzie was right-handed.  Supposedly Abby then turned to the side, either in stunned surprise, or because she was folding something on the bed, and that's why much of the damage is there as well.

Well, that's it for now.  More of this morbid stuff to come, including paragraphs and pics of Lizzie's murder house and her later abode, at Maplecroft, as well as of the people involved and of their final resting place.

Oh, yeah, the maid.  So it's in the 1940s now, and Bridget Sullivan, the maid, lives in Montana.  As the story goes, she gets really sick with pneumonia and thinks she's dying.  She sends word to a friend to come see her before she dies because she has something very important to say.  (Why she couldn't just call this person is a mystery, since by the 40s phones were commonplace.)  Anyway, this friend travels to Montana, but by the time the friend gets there, Bridget has recovered and doesn't say anything about the murder.  Then she dies four or five years later, never having said anything about what she was going to say when she was sick.

This is, by the way, where my planned novel starts.  Flashbacks, then it bookends with her getting better--and then dying, never having said whatever it was she thought it had been really important to say.

Or...did she say something after all? 

American Horror Story: Asylum

Photo: A promo poster for the show, on its Wikipedia page

I've been trying forever to get to this series, which I'd DVR-ed.  Turns out, I somehow missed the first episode, and--since two episodes started later than they were supposed to--I missed fifteen minutes or so on those two episodes.

At any rate, I came into the house exhausted from working outside in the heat for five hours--I didn't take any breaks, and was often so lightheaded that I became dizzy and nauseous, but I did the day--and sat down and didn't want to get up.  Thinking I was now in my best position to at least start the series, I did so--and then watched them all, until about three in the morning.  That was about 11 1/2 straight episodes--fast-forwarded through all the commercials, of course.

So, since it's been nominated for a million Emmys, here's my two cents of it:

--Very compulsively watchable, despite the characters being in so many implausible situations.

--Jessica Lange was the best of the bunch, as she apparently was last year when she took home the Emmy. 

--I don't know what's so exactly American about American Horror Story.  Seems more French to me, in a very Sartre-like, "Hell is other people," kind of way.   But if you don't know that, and you thought it was a lot like Lost, well, then, there you go.  I got an Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None vibe while watching the series, too.

--(I'm reminded of the time I saw a few minutes of one of the first episodes of the first season of Lost.  I told someone the island was obviously a Sartre-like Hell, and that "Hell is other people," and I never had to watch a single episode again.  When it was all over, years later, the girl I said that to said I'd ruined it for her, that she wasn't surprised at the end, and that she'd been ticked that I'd been right about the whole thing in five minutes.  I admit that I'm a bit of a killjoy that way.  I did the same thing while sitting in the theatre, watching The Sixth Sense.  The Bruce Willis character was obviously dead, and the real tipping-point for me was when he was at dinner with his wife, and the waitress placed the bill on the table, facing her.  Waitresses purposely don't point the bill at the guy anymore, but they still did in 1999.)

--I got the Hell aspect of the show, and that Briarcliffe was supposed to be that, but it became suspension-of-disbelief impossible that they'd all get put back there by the State of Massachusetts so many times.  I mean, I went with it, but...it almost derailed my viewing between episodes six through nine, or so.

--The demon didn't seem to have a fully compelling agenda.  I know that the angelic sister was battling the demon the whole time, but, still...Demons normally have plans of destruction, or something, right?  This one seemed content to take part in a battle of wills with the Nazi doctor, the sister in charge, and the Monsignor--all battles that she was apparently content to lose most of the time, as well.  The demon in The Exorcist at least wanted to conquer some souls and kick some ass.

--Jessica Lange's Boston accent was both right-on, and too exaggerated, at the same time.  Odd.

--It also doesn't seem reasonable that the girl she ran over ended up living a productive, mobile life.

--Her thinking that she'd run her over, blaming herself her whole life, drinking again, and all for what?  I realize there's a lesson in there, somewhere.

--What're the chances of a fake nun, a demon, a possessed man, some aliens, some inhuman creatures, and a Nazi doctor all being in the same building at the same time?  Maybe that's the American part.

--There were many homages to Psycho, especially, but other American films as well.  One of the many notable Psycho homages was when a woman entered the behavorial therapist's (or whatever she was) office, and found the therapist sitting in her chair, hair to us, facing away.  I expected her to turn the chair around, and to hit a swinging light fixture as she screamed.

--I'm no prude, but...I don't know.  I have to admit to being a little uncomfortable knowing that so many crude sexual references, so much cursing, and so much nudity was on commercial television.  I'm surprisingly prudish for such a liberal-minded guy.

--I still watched it all, of course, hypocrite that I am.  Perhaps that's the American part as well.

--It's not every day that you see a nun forcing sex on a Monsignor.  While wearing black garters.

--The suicidal driver who picked up the reporter when she escaped must've been thinking, "Of all the suicidal guys' cars in all the state, she has to jump into mine."

--While watching, I must've said, "What?" two hundred times.  Usually after what someone said.

--Speaking of being such a prude, I couldn't get over the constantly-repeated massage gel commercial.  Times, they are a changin'.

--I didn't expect the Monsignor to throw the nun off the stairway.  But I did expect the Nazi doctor to become permanently bereft about it.

--Of course, he was already permanently bereft, in many other ways.

--I expected things to get easier for Lange's character after she was born again, but instead they got much harder.  I know the Lord works in mysterious ways, but after awhile He didn't seem to be working in Briarcliffe at all.

--Of course, the asylum was Hell on Earth, so that sort of makes sense, but still...

--The series wrapped up very well, showing what happened to all the characters.  It ended like a Stephen King book has ended lately, at least in the last ten years or so.  Very bittersweet, sad but not.  That speaks well of how the show (and King, I suppose) led us to care about the characters.

--The aliens seemed to also be very hands-off in the series, much like the demon.  It feels odd to have just typed that.  But it's true.  The aliens didn't try to save the two women at all.  And I can understand each of the women's POV, too.  One felt raped, the other raptured.  I would've felt like the first, too.

--I saw the rebooted Star Trek movies before this, so it was hard for me to see Spock doing those things.  Speaking of being a killjoy, I nailed him as Bloody Face right away.  Had to be him.  He was the only good character on the show at the time.

--Speaking of that, Jessica Lange has come a long way since King Kong.  That was in 1976, by the way, for those of you who didn't feel old enough already.

--That little girl perhaps disturbed me the most out of everyone.  I've read lots of nonfiction books that said that five-year-olds can indeed by evil psychopaths.  After killing her family, she's never referenced again, with quite a few episodes remaining.  Maybe in Season Three?  Though every season is a different story, she can find her way into the show again if the writers really want her to.

--Having a show's cast be like a repertory theatre troupe is a good idea.

--Very good show, overall.  I did watch it for about twelve straight hours, which perhaps says something unfortunate about me as well.  And, no, I didn't have to get up for work in the morning.

Stephen King's Blockade Billy / Morality: Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon

Photo: The book's hard cover, from bookdepository.com

The small hardcover of Stephen King’s Blockade Billy / Morality is handsome to hold and to look at, and it looks different than any of his other actual physical books.  The two stories inside are the same: very different than usual for him.  Not bad, exactly; just different.  But to compare them to his other works—and their quality—is like comparing apples to oranges.  There simply is no comparison.

"Blockade Billy" is about 80 pages long; "Morality" checks in at about 50.  They're both written in an oddly (for King) distant tone.  I wonder at that writing choice, especially for the second story, because it seems like he could have done more with them if he'd focused his lens a little more upon them.  "Morality," especially, could have gone places if he'd created actual scenes from the man's and woman's POV, rather than just tell the story in a detached, long distance way.  It's like he wanted to tell the stories without focusing on them too much.  The stories aren't bad, exactly, because of this; it's just that they could have been better.

The first story was published in a (very) limited edition previous to this.  The second story was previously published in Esquire, which seems right.  It's definitely an Esquire type of story--and a bit of a Playboy story, as well.  King's been published in The New Yorker and in Esquire recently.  He's always been mainstream, of course, though now he seems to be more of a mainstream writer for mainstream literary magazines, which is quite new for him.  You can add his column in Entertainment Weekly to this phase, too.  I don't know quite what to make of it, if anything.  I suppose the tremendous (and well-deserved) success of On Writing opened these doors for him.

Lastly, something needs to be said for the quality of stories that King gives to limited only editions.  All of his novels, of course, come in limited editions--signed, gold-plated, leather-bound with ornate boxes; you name it, he's got it going on--but some, such as this, come in editions that are only limited.  Even previously-published stories such as these are usually later published in mass-market hardcovers and paperbacks.  Stories of this length would be packaged with two others and sold in a book of four, like Different Seasons, or Four Past Midnight.  Why weren't these, and others like these?  (I'm thinking of the Hard Case paperbacks recently reviewed.)  I don't know, exactly, but I have to assume it's because he felt that they weren't worthy of such packaging and selling.  Are these two worthy?  I don't know that, either.  But I'm going to say No.  I think that because, as I mentioned, King himself seems to have just sort of let these go.  You have to sell what you write, of course, and they'll sell because King wrote them.  So you sell them to Esquire, or a (very) limited edition, and then you package them into a book.  But then why not mass market that book?  I come back to how he wrote them: tells more than shows; no exactly focused scenes in either story, exactly.  The first one is a dramatic monologue (a la Dolores Claiborne) told to Stephen King himself.  Huh?  This conceit is left completely unexplained.  I feel that he wrote them, and sort of shrugged, and didn't know what to do with them.  Then someone called him, some limited edition publisher, and asked him if he had anything.  He did.  Then Esquire called and asked the same thing.  And then, later, when the rights reverted back to him, he realized that they didn't go together with any other two longer short stories (fifty pages isn't quite a novella, in my opinion, though eighty pages is), and so he packaged them together for another limited edition publisher, since I feel he felt them sort of unworthy of mass market sales.  I mean, can you package a baseball meets In Cold Blood story with anything else?  How about an Indecent Proposal meets sadomasochistic behavior story?  Nope, not so much.

Well, whatever.  Stephen King fans will like these two stories.  Baseball fans will like the first one, as a certain 40s or 50s era game is brought back, though the players described seem more 1890s to 1910s to me.  Fans who've read his Esquire and New Yorker pieces will like the second one--and I read somewhere that it's won some awards somewhere.  This was the last of his (relatively normally published; not-so-limited) books that I didn't have, and I was annoyed because I remember seeing this at Barnes & Noble when it was released for (seemingly) a few days.  I didn't buy it because I was in some sort of mood; I remember thinking that a baseball story didn't belong in the same book as an S&M sort of story, and I remember thinking that some kid would buy it for the baseball story, and then be shocked out of his pants by the second story.  I was nuts at the time, of course.  I went back to the store, and they didn't have it anymore, of course.  But they could order it for me for $25.  Um, no.  So I went to my local used bookstore.  Nada.  So then, belatedly and with a sigh, I went to Amazon (which you should never do when buying a book because the author usually won't see a cut of it) and bought a brand new, never opened copy, delivered to my door, for a total of $11.  I hated to do it, but I can't afford to pay $14 more, not including tax and shipping, from the bookstore.

So I'll leave this rambling review with that.  I had to buy a limited edition book, from an even more limited edition run before it, from Amazon, because the bookstore charged way too much (it was a bit less on BN.com, but nowhere close to what Amazon had it for) and because the limited edition (limited, for whatever reason) didn't produce enough copies for a used bookstore to have a realistic chance to get it.  I know this is bad, and that I would hate it if people bought by books on Amazon for a penny, rather than from the bookstore for the real price, because I wouldn't see a cut of it at all, and it would be literally be taking money out of my pocket.  And that sucks, but in the same exact position, I'd have to do it again.

Would you?

Comments for "So Many Reasons," now published in On the Premises

Photo: Norman Rockwell's "Merry Christmas, Grandma!" at addictinginfo.org (Not my kinda site, but it had a good photo of this painting).  Is Christmas ever this old-fashioned and homey?

"So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season," my most recently-purchased story, about how a best-selling author deals with a collapsing marriage on Christmas Eve, was published by On the Premises (Link: www.onthepremises.com) on March 10th, in Issue #19. Use the link above, then click on "Latest Issue (March 2013)" and then click on "So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season," four stories down on the page. Check out other good stories in that publication as well. It's all free. When you're done, please go to this blog entry and leave a comment. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

For those who care about such things, this story is especially important to me because it is the first non-genre piece I've sold.  This means that it's not science fiction, or horror, or mystery, or speculative fiction, or a specific genre like that.  It's a more everyday story, very contemporary, very today.  And it's about relationships, about how they end, and about not lying to yourself about them.  It's a tough lesson to learn that your life is crappy, and that you're full of crap as well, but that's what happens here.  But I digress: this is especially rewarding because there aren't any tropes of a genre that the writer can fall back on.  For example, in a horror story, you expect some blood, some terror, some fear.  In a mystery, you expect a puzzle, a whodunit.  In both cases, the writing itself doesn't have to be all that good, in a way, as long as the blood and terror keep coming, or as long as the reader is hooked so much on the whodunit that he doesn't notice how terrible the writing is.

In a non-genre story, it isn't that easy.  There are no bloodletting scenes, no whodunit, no YA romance, nothing that a genre writer can fall back on when nothing else is working.  It's just a real-life guy and his real-life problems.  Characterization is more important here, and so is the conflict and the reality.  So when something like this sells, the writer feels a little more confident because this type of writing can be much harder to create than a genre piece.

So if you've taken the time to read it, thank you; if you haven't, please do.  And please comment below.  Let me know what you think, good or bad.  Let's have a discussion about it.  As long as your comments are politely stated (and a specific example from the story would help), I promise to publish them.  Please, and thank you.

As usual, thanks for reading my stuff.  I appreciate and respect the time you sacrifice to do so.

My Day at the ER

Photo: Not Dr. Redhead.  A redhead from everydayhealth.com

So I'm at the emergency room the other day, never mind when--and, actually, I'd been there two days before that, too, but I needed to go back for more bloodwork--and despite bringing two books with me, I was captivated by the following things:

--Both times I went, two days apart, I got very thin, pretty doctors, a brunette and a redhead.  (The redhead was especially pretty, and I'm not usually one for redheads.)  And they were outstanding doctors, too, very thorough, very good at listening and explaining, very steadfast and in-charge.  I'm not just saying that to sound politically-correct, either.  Almost makes me want to get really sick again soon.  Almost.

--Medical care has undergone some serious transformations since I was last in an emergency room.  The one I went to had the worst reputation, and deservedly so, as someone actually died in the waiting room about six years ago.  I'd been there while younger (and poor) and I'd waited five, six, seven hours to get waited on.  These two times, no wait.  (When I asked how long the wait was, the girl said, "There's no waiting here."  I was so surprised, I couldn't stop from blurting, "No wait?  Since when?")

--I soon learned that "No waiting" was a relative term.  There's no waiting in the waiting room, but you'll wait awhile in the receiving room, behind the curtain thing.  But this is still nothing compared to the beard-growing wait it used to be.  Obviously, the death in this emergency room made them get volunteers (the second time, there were two older ladies smiling and preening at me the whole time; the smiles were so wide it was sorta weird. I mean, don't they see illness, injuries and blood all the time?  What the hell do they have to smile about?  Customer service, I know, I know.) that would separate the life-and-death cases from the not-so-much.  I'll bet the dying lady from years ago would've been escorted right in--and wheeled upstairs rather fast, as I saw last time.

--I kept nodding at the doctor like a damned fool.  She could've asked me if my name was Samantha, and I would've kept nodding.  "Would you like to strip now and say 'Woof, woof?'"  Nod.  Nod.

--The employees are like anyplace else: they whine and complain.  I listened for several minutes as some guy whined about how nobody's come to escort me to the x-ray.  Turns out, it was around the corner from my pod, maybe fifteen feet away.  I finally got there about half an hour later.  I felt like shouting, "If someone just wants to point me in the right direction..."

--When I was told to put on the johnny for the x-ray, I asked if I could put it on in the x-ray room, as we didn't know how long I'd be waiting.  This turned out to be a very wise move on my part, as they had me wait in the PIT (an acronym I also heard them complaining about; it stands for Patients in Transit) for about an hour, and it was FREEZING there.  I couldn't imagine sitting there in a johnny all that time.  And who wants to sit in a johnny in a waiting room, while tons of regularly-dressed people are milling about?  Odd.  The lady who told me to get into it I'd already diagnosed as a bit wacky and frazzled, so I didn't hesitate to pull the Jedi Mind Trick on her about the johnny.

--Also, having spent way too much of my life in hospitals, I knew that they rarely insist on the johnny when in the x-ray room.  I was correct here with that, too.  When I got in the room, the lady just asked me to take off my shirt.  I don't think she even knew I was carrying the johnny amongst my stuff.  When she was done, I put my shirt on and asked if she wanted me to leave the johnny there, and she said, "Oh, yeah.  Ummm...Sure."  And the pretty girl who led me in had a dragon on the back of her thin neck.  And she didn't know how to slide the background up and down.  I moved it for her a couple of times.

--Then, back to The Pit for awhile.

--While in The Pit again, this one guy kept babbling at me as I was clearly reading.  (I thought of Holden Caulfield.)  Turns out, he'd somehow gotten something metallic in his index finger, which had swelled to the size of a sausage.  Ewwwwwwww!!!  He said he'd heard they were getting a hand expert in for him.  Then he laughed hysterically at something I said about the show that was on, and then spoke at the show, in bitter, angry, unfunny tones, until he realized I was ignoring him.  Finally he laughed at himself and shut up.

--Another guy waited with me for awhile, but didn't say much.  But when I waited for my discharge papers at the end (which was quite a wait both times, though the stuff was the same), he talked up a storm.  He babbled about how he was sorry that he was called in front of me for the x-ray, even though I'd been waiting there much longer (the thin-necked dragon girl apologized, too; if she hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have noticed, as I was feverish, and reading, and otherwise distracted), and about how he was sorry about how much he mentioned that the cops had busted his fingers (he wore a large, bulky half-arm cast that covered most of his hand, but for two fingers, which jutted out like confused, recently-hatched birds), but that he kept mentioning it because he wanted it in the paperwork, so that when he went to the courtroom, it'd be in the paperwork, and how he respected the older, professional cops, but that the younger cops these days are too violent, and how he tries to stop drinking, but...I really wanted to ask him what he'd gotten arrested for, but I simply didn't want to engage him more than he was engaging himself.  Just didn't want to get involved.  But it's nice to see that even violent, drunken offenders who fight with cops have the decency to apologize for cutting you in the x-ray line.

--When the red-headed doctor called me into her office to explain the diagnosis, I felt special.  I mean, everyone else got talked to in The Pit, or in their curtained cell.  I got brought to her office!  And it was about the size of a shoebox.  When she smiled at me, which was often, I was happy.  Can I get a prescription for that instead?

--$100 co-pay EACH time.  Apparently the drastic transformation in health care isn't cheap.

--And another thing I noticed: lots of "providers," lots of "assistants," and lots of "volunteers."  Is there a doctor in the house?  I mean, besides Dr. Redhead, of course.

--As I was paying, a woman came out, strapped to a huge, tall, thick-metal, yellow rolling bed, which looked like the bed version of the thing Sigourney Weaver strapped herself into at the end of Aliens. The woman in that bed was grunting and groaning like a zombie with appendicitis, and her eyes were rolling back into her head.  The five or six people pushing her in that thing all looked worried and shocked.

--Upon seeing this, I said to the woman behind the counter, "She must've just gotten her co-pay bill, too."  I received no response to this at all, not even a GFY smile or an eye-roll.  But I thought it was pretty funny.  The timing was perfect, too, I assure you.  But her job is hard, and I'm sure she sees a lot of scary things.

--I made it a point to notice: every male employee (and quite a few of the male patients) went out of their way to talk to Dr. Redhead.  The pretty girl with the thin neck and dragon tattoo just gave these guys a little smile as she walked by, never once stopping to talk to any of them, though they were clearly trying to engage her in conversation.  You could tell that she very much enjoyed doing this.  She sort of sashayed when she walked.  One guy in green scrubs practically invited himself into Dr. Redhead's kitchen.  He was the fifth one to ask her where she'd been lately, hadn't seen her around.  (She'd been to a Boston hospital and two other Rhode Island ones.)  When she took me into her office, I felt like asking her where she'd been, hadn't seen her around lately.

--A special shout-out to one of my doctors, who undoubtedly has better things to do than read this, but I'll post it anyway.  This kind man, whom I've known literally all my life, gave me a follow-up call tonight.  From his office.  Just past 7 p.m.  Now that's good health care.

--Total time at the emergency room ER on the second day: Three hours.  That's really good.  I got received; I spoke to two doctors (the follow-up guy was a mystery this time and last time); I got listened to; I got treated with respect and intelligence (though I got the impression once that Dr. Redhead was lightly mocking me, but this was, of course, perfectly fine, as she smiled a few times, and laughed, and I don't even want to imagine what stupid expression I had on my face); I got lots of bloodwork done; I talked to a weirdo and a criminal, and I saw a woman have a psychotic break; I saw two very pretty women; I got apologized to by a cop-beating guy with multi-colored hair; I got off a couple of good one-liners, of which only one was laughed at, by the annoying guy with the sausage-swollen finger; I got lots of blog material; I got a cheap scrip that's working fine, without the nasty after-effects of the previous one (Don't go there.); and I essentially got my groove back.  What else can you ask for?

--Woof, woof.  Nod.  Nod.