A Very, Very Short Book Review -- The Sleep Room

Photo: from the Washington Post's review of the book

Very good, pleasant read that will make you feel you are there, and maybe make you feel a little smarter, without taking that much out of you. As usual with Tallis, he excels at place and time, is a little short on female characters, is heavy on the psychology and philosophy, maybe mentions Freud a little too much, and adds a wrinkle that you should see coming but that you appreciate nonetheless. Such has been the case with the Leibermann series set in Vienna--actually with Freud--and the two non-mysteries I've read. The end result is a pleasant excursion that leaves you with something to think about. Especially interesting is the Cartesian confusion of reality versus dreams. Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, but how do you know you're not dreaming of thinking that? What if, in fact, what we think are our dreams are actually our reality, and our reality is nothing but slumber?

The book is set in a supposedly haunted mental health facility, which is run by a well-known and well-connected guy who believes in putting his patients to sleep for many months for therapuetic reasons. (This is all supposedly based on a real guy and a real place, according to Tallis's notes at the end.) But the discerning reader is a little wary right away, especially this one, who has seen The Others and such films, and is ready to be psychologically waylaid. When the patient reports start coming, and one of them refers to a report (one of two) that isn't presented with it, you should know what to expect at the end, in the last report.

When it comes, though, you're not dissatisfied, exactly. I think this is because Tallis doesn't seem to think that he's pulling a fast one on us. He knows we know what's coming, but it's in the getting there that matters. Tallis treats the reader intelligently, and writes intelligent stories that never become highbrow or condescending, so for that we're willing to go along for the ride, even if we know how the ride will end. It's a pleasant enough journey, and the ideas presented are interesting. It's not as depressing an ending as it could've been, either, because you saw it coming miles away.

For the record, I disagree with the "extreme paranoia" mentioned at the end, as I don't think the character's misgivings go too far, but that's perhaps the point in this made-up world of his. I think it would've perhaps been a little more interesting and convincing to have one of the other characters in that situation at the end, which would've led to more interesting world-building. But this could've also been messed-up big-time by Tallis, at which point the whole book would've perhaps felt like a waste, or maybe it would've seemed like it had a condescending tone, like it was over-reaching. Read it, and decide, and leave me a message if you'd like. Makes me want to write my own take on this whole thing in my own story or novel, and end it the way I say. We'll see.

Being Thankful--Happy Thanksgiving 2015

I recently asked some people to explain what non-material things--besides family, friends, home and technology--they were thankful for.  Here's mine:

--A job I like.  (Most people I know hate their jobs.  I love mine.  Not every day is a fairy tale, but I love the job overall.)

--A good career, with good benefits.  (I get lots of sinus infections--as if that was my career instead.)

--My numerous interests.  (Writing; literature; baseball; baseball cards; the writing industry; short story and novel reading [and writing]; antique buying and dealing; dealing baseball cards [I'm also a part-time picker]; football; walking; hiking; biking; movies...)  You get the idea.  I think boredom is the worst kind of hell.

--My abundance of energy. (Until lately, I could subsist quite well on 4-6 hours of sleep per night.)

--My "intelligence."  (Real or imagined.)

--My imagination. (Which can often get out of control, and which is often not a gift.)

--My health.  (I used to be a lot worse off, and my sinuses--as terrible as they are--used to be much worse.)

--My sense of humor.  (Again, real or imagined.  If I'm only half as funny as I think I am, then I'm still hilarious.)

--My proximity to mountains, beaches, rivers, hiking and biking trails, and big cities.

--My local sports teams.  (I've got the Patriots and Red Sox.  True, the Sox finished last the past two years, but even then they're entertaining.  And they've still got 3 World Championships in the past eleven years, with a few other post-season appearances thrown in.  Plus I've got Fenway.)

--Great neighbors.  (Bad neighbors can be nightmares.)

--Heat, electric and an affordable education.  (Most people in the world don't have any of those.)

AND A HEAD'S UP TO CHRIS AND JAY AND TO ALL MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS WHO MADE THIS THANKSGIVING STRESS-FREE AND WONDERFUL.  YOU'RE THE BEST!!!


WHAT'RE YOU THANKFUL FOR?  (It's okay to comment even if it's not Thanksgiving anymore.)

Willa

Photo: Bus depot in, I assume, Clifton, Arizona, considering this article where I filched the image.

I've been trying different things to get back in the writing groove again, and nothing's been working.  I slipped off the rails when I got sick about ten days ago, and though I'm much improved--I can breathe, and I can somewhat function--I'm still not up to par.  This at a bad time in the job, too, when I especially need energy and focus.  So I laid off the allergy pills for a few days--they dry me out, like they're supposed to, but I have a serious sinus infection, probably from being too dried out for too long.  Anyway, I've been very foggy-headed, and the pillow has been too comfy and too cool.  I'm sleeping like I haven't in years, but it's not a good sleep.  Long and dream-filled, which is good--but too long, too heavy, too dreamy, and all of it caused by allergies and exhaustion.  I'm yawning all the time, feeling exhausted and drained, blowing my nose, which I don't normally do because I'm so congested all the time, and everything's clear because I need an antihistamine--but to get one, I'll get congested, and around we go.  I've also been on strike against the antibiotics I got four days ago, but I'm taking them now...

Anyway, all this to say that I'm in a fairly confused place, with my novel's unwritten Chapter 41 staring me in the face, so I reverted finally to a tactic that spurred some writing a few years ago: read a short story, then write a chapter, then read another short story, then write something besides my main book--maybe another book's chapter, or a short story, or one of my very many nonfiction things...or even a blog entry.  Lots of writing to do for a guy who hasn't done any in awhile.

So I remembered a little snippet in this week's Entertainment Weekly (a friend of mine lets me read hers) that said that a show, or a movie, or something, was being made of Stephen King's short story, "The Things They Left Behind."  And I remember thinking, What the hell was that?  King has written literally hundreds of short stories, so nobody--including King himself, I'll bet--can remember them all.  But even if I've forgotten about something, I usually remember that I used to remember it, if you know what I mean.  My memory is good enough so that some kind of bell rings.  But not this time.

(What did I do--buy the book and never read it?  You know, two things go when you get older: the first thing's your memory, and I can't remember what the second thing is.)

I picked up the book collection--Just After Sunset--and read the story, which is in the middle of the book.  (It'll be reviewed in another post.  Suffice it to say it's a quick little story about the nightmare and guilt of 9/11.)  Then I remembered that reading short stories used to jumpstart my writing, so I read the first story, and--yeah, it worked again, thank God.  Chapter 41 is done, for those who care, and I like it.  (I don't always.  No writer likes his work all the time.)

Now I'll do this every day until it doesn't work anymore and I've been derailed again.  And while I'm at it, I figured I'd write a post about any of the short stories it jives me to do so.  And so...

Speaking of being derailed--

"Willa" is the first story in the book, and it's very good.  It involves a group of people who are dead (this is Stephen King, remember) from a train derailment.  Most of them know it, though just one allows herself to fully let it sink in.  Her fiancée lets it sink into him, too, finally.

But this story is more than just that.  In this genre, there are thousands of stories where the characters are dead--so much so that editors openly say they don't want any more stories where the characters find out in the end that they're dead.  (See that list of Please No More of These Plots in this entry.)  Stephen King can do what he wants, of course, and he'll get published, but he gives us more because he knows his readers have seen that before.  And maybe because he has, too.

This story is more about being different.  About walking your own road.  The Amtrak train derails and they all die, but everyone stands around in an old train depot while Willa walks away and enters a honkytonk dive in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming.  She wants people, and music.  She wants to live.  David, her fiancée, wants to find her, but everyone tells him not to go.  He'll get lost.  He'll get eaten by wolves.  He'll miss the recovery train...One even says his fiancée doesn't give a damn about him--if she did, she wouldn't have just walked off, right?

But Willa sees what's in front of her face, even if everyone hates her for it.  He finds her, accepts that he's dead, and they both go back to tell everyone else.  (Various things happen in the story to prove they're dead.)  But nobody believes them, and after many insults they start walking back to the bar.

The story ends with a lot of nice, wistful images.  Everyone's standing in that bus depot, that now we know really isn't in operation (it's about 30 years after their train accident, but time's elastic in death) and they're all wasting their time, not doing anything, not moving on, not living--even in death.  Get it?  All stories of all genres have themes and points.  This one: You can't move on if you can't accept harsh truths.  The story ends with the knowledge that the depot will be demolished soon...and what will happen to those unknowing ghosts then?  Will they just wisp away in the desert wind?

Very good story.  Makes me think of a few to write myself.

Check it out if you haven't already.  Or, even if you have.

P.S.--I often wonder how authors come up with their characters' names.  I try to come up with a name (I have one tried and true--and...different...method) and I see if it matches the character's traits in any way.  If it's too obvious--well, that might be okay.  So I'll guess Willa's origin:

1.  The story takes place in the desert prairie of Wyoming.  Willa Cather (or, how many other Willas are there?) wrote novels and stories that took place on the open prairie, though usually in Nebraska.  (Though she lived mostly in NYC and, before that, in Pittsburgh.  And she was born in Virginia.  But, whatever.)  Stephen King--a former English teacher and a very literate (if not literary) writer--would know this.

2.  Willa Cather's stories were often about headstrong women, a century ahead of their time.  Willa Cather herself was a headstrong woman well ahead of her time, for many reasons.  The Willa in King's story is a very headstrong woman, different from everyone else derailed in the train.

3.  They both had a very strong will.  I mean, c'mon.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King--Book Review

Photo: Book's cover art, from its Wikipedia page.

Mr. Mercedes is a much better book than King's last, the truly terrible Dr. Sleep.  (Is he starting a trend of putting titles in his titles?)  It is compulsively readable, as always--as is even his really bad stuff--but it is also better told, without author intrusion or author judgment.  He does not judge his characters here, and he even seems to go a bit out of his way to not let his characters judge each other, as well.  The result is a quick, satisfying read that's a bit skimpy on the supernatural--a pattern for King now as well, it seems.

It starts like an episode of Law & Order might, with a longishly short segment on some soon-to-be victims of a guy who purposely plows a stolen Mercedes into a line of people.  Soon we turn to a typical burned-out cop who's about to eat his gun--that is, until Mr. Mercedes (Get it?) sends him a taunting letter.  This revitalizes the cop, and the search is afoot.

It's told via differing limited-but-omniscient third-person POVs (another King staple) between the perp (who incorrectly refers to himself as the "perk") and the retired cop.  There's nothing in the perp's life we haven't seen before (including a sad little brother right out of "The Scarlet Ibis"), but it's told directly and honestly, and we believe it.  (If you've been watching Bates Motel, you already know almost everything there is to know.)  There's some good stuff about how this guy is all around us--that such people "walk among us," which is another common theme lately in King's work--and there's a bit of computer savvy here that almost is too much, but stops just short.  The peripheral characters in these guys' lives all ring true.  King took pains not to be as lazy with his characters as he was in Dr. Sleep.  Every single character rings true here.

The obligatory younger woman is here, just as she was in 11/22/63 and Bag of Bones, and it seems as real here as it did in those.  Which means, not so much.  This is one of the two minor caveats here: The protagonist's relationship with a woman almost twenty years younger (He's 62 and she's 44, but still...) is so unrealistic that almost everyone in the novel comments on it--especially the guy, who keeps saying to himself that he's unattractive, very overweight, and almost twenty years older than the woman, who's described as very pretty.  And she, of course, comes on to him.  Very, very directly, I might add.  This worked a lot better in 11/22/63 and in Bag of Bones.  As you read, you'll see why it's necessary for the plot, for the main character's motivation at the end, but still...It doesn't bother me too much, except that it's a pattern by now in his work, and it really sticks out in this narrative.  More of an itch than a problem, I guess.  The reader will roll his eyes and easily move on...

There's a lot to like here, especially with the minor characters.  King gets a bit maudlin with one of them, the way Robert B. Parker did with Hawk, and it works as well here as it did for Parker--which, again, means not so much.  This is the second minor caveat.  It could've been cut and nothing would've been lost.  Now that I write about it, I see that this bothers me more than the relationship did in the paragraph above.  But, again, it was easy for me to roll my eyes and move on.  I actually skipped those passages as they came.  You'll see what I mean when you read it.  Feel free to skip those spots as well.  You won't miss anything.

Anyway, this is a likeable read with mostly-likeable characters, except for Mr. Mercedes, his mom, and a certain aunt.  I read its 436 pages in a few days.  It's not his best, but it's far from his worst, which is sort of all I hope from King these days.  That sounds depressing, but I don't mean it to be.  It's like watching a Hall of Fame ballplayer in his last few years.  Good enough is good enough (exactly the opposite of what I believe for most things in life), and you smile as you compare what's in front of you with what used to be.  Not a bad thing, at least for me.

Though I'm still waiting for him to write something really scary again.  It's been too long...

Book Review: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Photo: The book's cover, from goodreads.com

Eh.

That's really all I was going to write.  After months of anticipation, after all that time reading its 528 pages (well, okay, that took me just a few days), even after being the tome that drove me to the bookstore to write the most recent blog entry--yeah, "eh" was all I was going to write.

But then I got disappointed.  Really, really disappointed.  I mean, this is how Danny Torrance ended up?  Not bad, but...eh?  That's it?  After everything he went through in The Shining, this is the denouement of his life?  (Or, probably, the Act IV before the Act V resolution.)

Okay.  Speaking of The Shining, this book is obviously its sequel, and the comparisons, while impossible not to make, are unfair.  As King himself wrote in his afterword, "...people change.  The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining..."  True enough.  And on the same page, he makes the point that the first real scare will always be the best (He compared Hitchcock's Psycho to Mick Garris's good, but not as good, Psycho IV).  This is also true enough.

But the disconcerting thing is that I wasn't expecting the genius of The Shining.  I believe, as King said above, that that man is gone, never to return.  I don't expect the genius, the scariness, of The Shining, of IT, of a few others, ever again.  And that's not necessarily a bad thing.  The creepiness and the wistful and sad nostalgia of the last third of Insomnia (which I thought was a different kind of greatness) could not have been written by Shining's King, for example.  Other good parts of other better books could not have been written by 70s King, including Bag of Bones (which is very underrated) and any of the four novellas of Different Seasons.  So different and new is not always bad.

What is bad here is that this book does not scare.  At all.  In fact, only three small sections were even creepy--and I'm not sure if it's because of how he wrote them, or because of the imagination I brought to them, of how I interpreted them and imagined them.  I'm pretty sure that the images I gave myself after I read those three small parts creeped me out more than the parts themselves did.  So the book does not scare at all.  It only barely creeps you out.  And it's got a little of that sad nostalgic thing he's been doing for a long time now, but even that was miniscule.

Unfortunately, what it does do is judge.  There's a lot of author intrusion there, mostly upon the RV People.  (What else is there to call them?)  They're called lots of bad names, and often not just by the characters.  King often seems to jump in the fray and cuss at them, too.  Of course, they're killers (and, most notably, child killers), so you don't feel bad for them, per se.  But the way he draws them, what else could they be?  They're not really people, but they once were, perhaps, and there's the rub, maybe.  But maybe not.  Essentially, they were all once victims of somebody else, like a vampire who kills by sucking blood exactly, and only, because they were victims of a vampire themselves.  At that point, they're no longer fully responsible for what they have to do to survive.  Maybe such creatures kill themselves in Anne Rice's world (or in Stephanie Meyers' world), but that's not "realistic."  Something needs to be done about them, of course, but with such anger and hatred?  Very unlike King.  It's very distasteful.  Especially when you consider that King portrays them all as so human otherwise.  Some RVers are funny; some are smart.  Some are annoying.  A few are physical goddesses.  There's an old man who smells, and a computer geek who loves the newest technology, and a numbers guy who you'd love to be your own accountant.

And there's Andi, the victim that the book practically starts off with.  She's been raped and molested by her father for years, and then she finally kills him, and to survive, she steals money by (sort of) seducing men--who we're blatantly told she doesn't like--and while she doesn't kill them, she leaves a visible calling card on their faces that they won't soon (if ever) forget.  The problem here is that the reader sort of likes that about her, and when she becomes a victim of the RVers, we don't like it, and we wish better for her.  And then the book virtually ignores her as it focuses on the sex goddess in charge (see the cover), and we don't see Andi again until about 80% to 85% of the way through the book.  When we do, it's all over so fast that we wonder why we got to know her to begin with.  And if you're like me, you won't like how that happens, either, or the meanness behind it.

The three creepy scenes, for me, happened in the first quarter or so of the book, and the rest is just...this happens, and then this happens, and then this, and then...without fanfare, creepiness, chills or thrills.  Really, after the scene with the woman and her child after the first 25%, it's all plot, little character (except for the RVers, which is part of the book's problem right there), and---eh.  I hate to say it, but if you were to put the book down halfway through, you really wouldn't miss much.  Seriously.  Send me an email and ask me how it ends, if you'd like, but, I'm tellin' ya...

--A little aside: Maybe I can start a part-time business like that.  I read the books, and if people don't want to finish them, they email me for how it ends, because you always want to know that, right?  For this I charge a minimal fee.  You get your ending, I get my money, and I feel that I haven't totally wasted my time reading the book, since I'm also making money from it.  Maybe I could do that for movies, too.--

Anyway, I digress.  I just didn't like it.  I hate to say it like that, but there it is.  There are maybe three or four very good scenes--and, again, I don't know if that's more reader imagination than author's writing--and all the rest is just eh.  Not bad, exactly, but not really good, either.  Sort of like the difference between an A student, who tries very hard, and a C-, D student who wants to pass, but doesn't really give a damn.  The kinds who pass, but who don't learn anything.  The ones who sit there all day long, emanating eh.

You'll see Dick Halloran, and Wendy and Jack Torrance (the last at the very end, and huh?), but you'll see them for such a short time, and with such varying degrees of solidity that you wonder why they're there at all.

And here's where I have an answer I don't like.  I think King wrote this for three reasons--and in hopefully this order:

1.  He was actually seriously wondering what Danny Torrance was doing these days.  (Who hasn't been after they read The Shining?)

2.  He wanted to write about his alcohol and drug recovery.  (AA stuff takes up a vast majority of stuff space in the book.)

3.  He wanted to distance his characters from the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name.

The first reason is solid.  The second reason is okay, too, but maybe not for the boy from The Shining.  Yes, his father was an alcoholic, and we learn that his grandparents, etc. were, too (though only the men, apparently).  But his mother wasn't, and neither was anyone on her side of the family.  And that story was more Jack Torrance's than his son's, anyway.  But if I'm Stephen King, and I'm curious about what Danny was doing, and I wanted to write about my own addiction and recovery, and that life, then why not put them together?  I didn't like the result, but maybe it was doable.  Okay.

But the last reason is maybe not as okay.  King notoriously dislikes Kubrick's movie, and I don't blame him.  I like the movie, but I don't love it.  I read the book first, and it's so unlike the book that I can only like the movie if I completely forget about the book.  Sometimes I can do that; others, I can't.  In short, the reason King and I both dislike the movie is that King's book is about a good, but very flawed, man, who has his weaknesses used against him by the evils of the Overlook Hotel, but who redeems himself by sacrificing himself at the end to save his son.  The movie is about an A-hole who becomes more and more of an insane A-hole before the movie ends.  Add into that the fact that Wendy Torrance in the book is a very blonde, beautiful, tough chick, and that Shelley Duvall in the movie was a sniveling whiner (and viewers need to give her a break, as that characterization was all Kubrick's, and he was literally driving her crazy) who nobody could stand (and the same might be said of the movie Danny as well), and there you have it.  King and I agree that the movie was visually stunning (as every Kubrick movie is), and perhaps worth seeing for that reason alone, but it's not the book, and the very spirit of the book is lost with it.  The book was a five-act Shakespearean tragedy (King himself describes it that way) and the film is a stunning movie with characters who didn't at all come from the book, which changes the texture of the whole thing.  And, considering all this, it must have been especially annoying for King when you realize that a great percentage of the movie's dialogue comes directly from the book.  I'm talkin' verbatim.

Having said all that (and sorry if I insinuated above that King and I have actually had conversations about this), Doctor Sleep ultimately fails because it also lacks consistent characterization.  Dan Torrance does not develop after about a third of the way through.  Once he settles in NH, it's all happenstance.  The characters who actually take over the character arc are the RVers, and this is yet another example lately (Under the Dome was the most recent, and don't even get me started on the bad book and the even worse tv show) of Stephen King focusing more on his antagonists than on his protagonists, as if even he is bored with what his main characters have become.  Notice that through the whole second half, the RVers are the only characters who change.

And are they really solid antagonists?  You'll have to be the judge, but I vote Nay.  They went not with a bang, but with a whimper.  And with relative ease.

So...that's it.

Huge disappointment.

Just.....eh.