Category: books i’ve read

That’s Enough for Me

A grim, rainy Monday outside the Lost Apartment, and I can hear the wind roaring around the upper level of the house. It is pouring here right now; the leaves are glistening with wet in the gloom–and am I ever glad I got the windows in the car fixed!

Yesterday was a lovely day; I got some work done, went to Costco, and managed to finish reading Paul Tremblay’s wonderful A Head Full of Ghosts.

“This must be so difficult for you, Meredith.”

Best-selling author Rachel Neville wears a perfect fall ensemble: dark blue hat to match her sensible knee-length skirt and a beige wool jacket with buttons as large as kitten heads. She carefully attempts to keep to the uneven walkway. The slate stones have pitched up, their edges peeking out of the ground, and they wiggle under her feet like loose baby teeth. As a child I used to tie strings of red dental floss around a wiggly tooth and leave the floss dangling there for days and days until the tooth feel out on its own. Marjorie would call me a tease and chase me around the house trying to pull the wax string, and I would scream and cry because it was fun and because I was afraid if I let her pull one tooth she wouldn’t be able to help herself and she’d pull them all out.

How much has passed since we lived here? I’m only twenty-three but if anyone asks I tell them that I’m a quarter-century-minus-two years old. I like watching people struggle with the math in their heads.

Earlier this year, the book won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, and as I have mentioned previously, I’d started it before and got distracted and for some reason hadn’t finished it. I picked it up again last week and started at the beginning again, and this time read it all the way through. It’s an interesting book–well-written, certainly, and I also thought it was interesting the way Tremblay chose to deal with its subject matter: is Marjorie Barrett a mentally ill teenager, or is she possessed by a demon? Complicating matters is that her father is descending into religious mania, while her mother is quite rational and skeptical; and while all of this is going on the family, in need of money, has agreed to have it all filmed as a reality show, The Possession.

The point of view character is the younger daughter, Merry (Meredith), who is remembering it all as it happened in two ways; she is remembering it for the afore-mentioned novelist, who is writing a non-fiction book about what happened to the Barretts, and Merry herself is writing a blog about the television show AND the case under a pseudonym for Fangoria.

It’s an interesting book, and it reminded me a lot of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle in the voice; an emotionally arrested young woman telling the story in a child-like way about what happened when she was a child, and does she have an adult voice?

I’d read somewhere recently about how horror novels and films are often attacked by religious groups when the books themselves actually are quite affirmative of religion; I’ve always thought that to be true–Anne Rice’s vampire novels are actually very much about affirming Catholicism; and doesn’t almost every vampire novel, really, confirm that the symbolism necessary to defeat or keep vampires at bay those of Roman Catholicism? (Particularly interesting in that in Dracula, a Transylvanian would have been Greek Orthodox not Roman Catholic.) I don’t know enough about the genre to write knowledgeably about this, but it is definitely interesting.

And now back to the spice mines.

Not That Funny

I am awake but groggy. I slept late, am guzzling coffee, and am thinking that I may put off going to Costco until tomorrow. Today might be a stay at home, laze around, get some stuff done when and if I feel like it day. I have a bit of the ‘just turned in the book’ malaise, that bizarre funk where I just feel a bit dazed for a couple of days. Which is fine, of course, although I need to really get to work on the next. I see reading A Head Full of Ghosts in my future. I also have a Christmas party to attend this evening.

Yesterday I managed to find that Twilight Zone episode I was talking about, “Paladin of the Lost Hour,” based on the Harlan Ellison short story that is definitely one of my favorites of all time. It’s on Youtube, and if you have about thirty-two minutes to spare, it’s definitely worth watching.

Click here.

Sure, watching it now you can tell it was filmed in the 1980’s–the little bit of special effects used were especially cheesy–but the greatness of the story still comes through; it’s speculative fiction, sure, but the real strength and greatness of the story is in its human elements. And Danny Kaye is fantastic.

I found it because I was googling the story to find out which collection it’s in–it’s not in The Essential Ellison, sadly–and I wanted to read it again, only to discover you can actually read it on-line as a pdf here.

And yes, the story as written is so much more powerful than the actual teleplay–which I believe was also written by Ellison.

The story opens with two men in a small cemetery; one is quite old and visiting the grave of his beloved wife, lost to him for twenty years. He is set upon by a couple of young hoodlums determined to rob him; they are fought off and driven away by another man in the cemetery who sees it happening and comes to the old man’s rescue. The two men develop a bond, although the rescuer is a little stand-offish and the older man has to earn his trust. The old man’s name is Gaspar, and he is quite charming and a bit opinionated. The younger man, Billy, who is haunted still by something that happened to him in Vietnam.

THIS WAS AN OLD MAN. Not an incredibly old man; obsolete, spavined; not as worn as the sway-backed stone steps ascending the Pyramid of the Sun to an ancient temple; not yet a relic. But even so, a very old man, this old man perched on an antique shooting stick, its handles open to form a seat, its spike thrust at an angle into the soft ground and trimmed grass of the cemetery. Gray, thin rain misted down at almost the same, angle as that at which the spike pierced the ground. The winter-barren trees lay flat and black against an aluminum sky, unmoving in the chill wind. An old man sitting at the foot of a grave mound whose headstone had tilted slightly when the earth had settled; sitting in the rain and speaking to someone below.

“They tore it down, Minna.

“I tell you, they must have bought off a councilman.

“Came in with bulldozers at six o’clock in the morning, and you know that’s not legal. There’s a Municipal Code. Supposed to hold off till at least seven on weekdays, eight on the weekend; but there they were at six, even before six, barely light for godsakes. Thought they’d sneak in and do it before the neighborhood got wind of it and call the landmarks committee. Sneaks: they come on holidays, can you imagine!

“But I was out there waiting for them, and I told them, ‘You can’t do it, that’s Code number 91.03002, subsection E,’ and they lied and said they had special permission, so I said to the big muckymuck in charge, ‘Let’s see your waiver permit,’and he said the Code didn’t apply in this case because it was supposed to be only for grading, and since they were demolishing and not grading, they could start whenever they felt like it. So I told him I’d call the police, then, because it came under the heading of Disturbing the Peace, and he said . . . well, I know you hate that kind of language, old girl, so I won’t tell you what he said, but you can imagine.

“So I called the police, and gave them my name, and of course they didn’t get there till almost quarter after seven (which is what makes me think they bought off a councilman), and by then those ‘dozers had leveled most of it. Doesn’t take long, you know that.

“And I don’t suppose it’s as great a loss as, maybe, say, the Great Library of Alexandria, but it was the last of the authentic Deco design drive-ins, and the carhops still served you on roller skates, and it was a landmark, and just about the only place left in the city where you could still get a decent grilled cheese sandwich pressed very flat on the grill by one of those weights they used to use, made with real cheese and not that rancid plastic they cut into squares and call it ‘cheese food.’

“Gone, old dear, gone and mourned. And I understand they plan to put up another one of those mini-malls on the site, just ten blocks away from one that’s already there, and you know what’s going to happen: this new one will drain off the traffic from the older one, and then that one will fall the way they all do when the next one gets built, you’d think they’d see some history in it; but no, they never learn, And you should have seen the crowd by seven-thirty. All ages, even some of those kids painted like aborigines, with torn leather clothing. Even they came to protest. Terrible language, but at least they were concerned. And nothing could stop it. They just whammed it, and down it went.

“I do so miss you today, Minna. No more good grilled cheese.” Said the very old man to the ground. And now he was crying softly, and now the wind rose, and the mist rain stippled his overcoat.

Nearby, yet at a distance, Billy Kinetta stared down at another grave. He could see the old man over there off to his left, but he took no further notice. The wind whipped the vent of his trenchcoat. His collar was up but rain trickled down his neck. This was a younger man, not yet thirty-five. Unlike the old man, Billy Kinetta neither cried nor spoke to memories of someone who had once listened. He might have been a geomancer, so silently did he stand, eyes toward the ground.

One of these men was black; the other was white.

THAT is great writing. The story, which I read again last night, moved me to tears again; just as the cheesy 1980’s production of the beautifully written teleplay did as I watched it again. All of Ellison’s stories are engaging, superbly written; he writes about enormous themes and yet his characters, his situations, are incredibly real and relatable. He writes about the human condition, and humanity; and often he writes of humanity’s loss of humanity, if that makes sense. Ellison was the person who introduced the all-encompassing term speculative fiction as the tent that contains science fiction, fantasy, and horror; he is a master of all of them.

I’m really looking forward to rereading the stories I’ve already read; and I am also looking forward to reading stories of his I’ve not read. I encourage you, if you’re not read Ellison but are a fan of great writing, to click on the previous link and read “Paladin of the Lost Hour”; I would be very surprised if you didn’t want to read more. His website is at Ellison Webderland; you can find information there about the project (and possibly donate) to digitize all of his writing so it won’t be lost.

And on that note, back to the spice mines.

Here’s another French farmer.

That’s All For Everyone

Good morning. I finished Wicked Frat Boy Ways yesterday and turned it in. I am now in that weird afterglow of it’s done! it’s done! and oh my God it’s probably the worst piece of crap ever turned in to an editor.

Such is life as a writer.

I have decided that January is going to be yet another attempt at Short Story Month for me, in which I try to read, and blog about, a short story every day. I have tried this before, and have failed, but yesterday’s mail brought copies of Harlan Ellison’s The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, Strange Wine, Stalking the Nighmare, and Approaching Oblivion, so there is THAT, and I have lots of anthologies and single author collections haunting my shelves and my iPad.

I am also looking forward to reacquainting myself with some of Ellison’s short stories, and discovering new ones.

I am going to spend this weekend getting ready to dive headlong into finishing the next book, due on January 1, getting caught up and varied sundries that have fallen through the cracks, perhaps outlining the new book I started writing this past week, writing an essay that’s due soon, and maybe crafting/editing some other short stories that have been lying around unfinished or in need of a second go-round. My plans for the weekend are obviously rather ambitious, and I won’t get everything done I need to, but I also don’t think it’s a bad idea to have lots of plans; even if I feel like a complete and utter loser when I don’t accomplish everything I set out to. I also want to finish reading A Head Full of Ghosts as well as start reading something new; and there’s lots of organizing and cleaning in the kitchen/office that definitely needs to be taken care of.

It truly never ends.

The weather here has also finally turned; it’s chilly and I have to wear sleeves and head covering–probably what most people would call fall or autumn; what we consider the start our brief winter. It’s kind of gray out there today; but it is Friday which is lovely.

All right, I need to get my day started.

Here’s a hunk from the French Farmers calendar.

Storms

Ah, Thursday. And it’s December already. MADNESS.

Tonight is my late night, and so I have the day relatively free before I literally am testing all night (it’s also World AIDS Day–know your status, people!) so am debating on just which errands need to be run today and which ones can wait until the weekend. There are a few things I need to pick up and I may as well swing past the post office since it’s sort of near my CVS where I need to get my prescriptions…sigh. I also have some serious writing to do today. Busy day for one Gregalicious. I also have gotten some lovely news this week that I can’t share as of yet, either.

But I am chair dancing.

And I’m almost finished with the book. I hope to have it done today. Huzzah!

And then a free weekend and then it’s on to the next one.

I am currently reading Paul Tremblay’s Stoker Award winning A Head Full of Ghosts, which I started reading another time and had to put it aside for some reason; I don’t remember why, but when I finished reading Elizabeth Little’s superb Dear Daughter, and was looking for the next book to read I ran across it in the TBR bookcase (yes, I have a TBR bookcase, don’t judge me) and thought, I never finished this and picked it up again. It is riveting; I started from the beginning and now I can’t wait to get back to it again.

I also started writing another book yesterday; one that isn’t contracted anywhere, one that I don’t even know if anyone would want to publish–but it’s one that’s been dancing around in my head lately, and it’s actually the combination of several ideas I’ve had over the past few years that have come together cohesively and meshed into one book idea. The opening hit me the other day when I was finished working on the current work-in-progress, and so I wrote three paragraphs. It’s very different from anything I’ve ever done before–so is the current work-in-progress–which makes it very exciting for me; of course I have a multitude of other projects to work on and finish, but maybe it’s something I can work on around the others. I also have another couple of ideas I am toying with as well….I am never so creative as when I am on a deadline; but it’s never with the project ON deadline.

Heavy sigh.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk for the day:

Think About Me

My vacation is over, and while I do regret that–a stay-at-home vacation gives you a taste of how my life could be; just doing errands and chores around the house and of course, writing without interruption, without an eye on the clock knowing I only have so much time to get so much done; the leisure to take my time on projects and not feel rushed, to not feel like I’m not doing the best I can because the clock is ticking and there are other things I have to do…

It’s kind of nice, although it makes me kind of sad to have to go back to the clock-watching and time-scheduling,

I did finish reading Elizabeth Little’s superb Dear Daughter last night.

As soon as they processed my release, Noah and I hit the ground running. A change of clothes. A wig. An inconspicuous sedan. We doubled back once, twice, then drove south when we were headed east. In San Francisco we had a girl who looked like me board a plane to Hawaii.

Oh, I thought I was so clever.

But you probably already know that I’m not.

I mean, come on, you didn’t really think I was just going to disappear, did you? That I would skulk off and live in the shadows? That maybe I would find a distant land, a plastic surgeon, a ceramic half mask and a Punjab lasso? Get real.

But I never meant for it to come to this. There’s attention and then there’s attention, and sure, the latter gets you fame and money and free designer shoes, but I’m not Lindsay Lohan. I understand the concept of declining marginal returns. It was the not knowing–that’s what I couldn’t stand. That’s why I’m here.

It’s hard, really, to believe that Dear Daughter is a debut novel; Little writes with the punch and skill of a much more experienced writer. The main character’s voice is exceptional, strong, and even though she can read as vastly unsympathetic, she is always compelling.

A technicality has overturned Jane Jenkins’ murder conviction; when she was seventeen she was tried as an adult for murdering her socialite mother, with whom she had a rather combative relationship. Jane herself was what is called a ‘celebutante’, like Paris Hilton and others before her, famous really for being famous. (Imagine the circus a Paris Hilton murder trial would have been…) Now that she’s free, Jane wants to prove her innocence (she really doesn’t remember if she actually killer her mother or not) so, with the help of a trusted attorney, she takes on a false identity and disappears; even lying to the lawyer about where she is going. The night of her mother’s murder she heard her mother arguing with a man, and the only words she caught were ‘Tessa’ and ‘Adeline’; she has found a remote town in South Dakota named Adeline, and that’s where she is heading.

The twists and turns and surprises come fast in this novel, and once it kicks into high gear there’s no stopping. Jane herself is a strong, full-fledged character; smart yet vulnerable, lonely, yet the loneliness makes her stronger. She tries to sort out the complicated relationship she had with her mother while trying to find out the truth, not only about her mother’s murder but her mother’s past, as well as her own…very compelling reading.

And the writing itself is quite extraordinary, as well.

I highly recommend this! And can’t wait for her next novel.

And now back to the spice mines.

Ledge

I worked yesterday morning and in the early afternoon yesterday; the work didn’t go as well as one would have preferred but those are the breaks. Hopefully today it will be better. One can always hope.

I spent the rest of the day watching college football–it was a most interesting day–and reading, of all things, comic books on my iPad (the recent DC mini-series The Coming of the Supermen, which, not being up on my current DC Universe, was a bit confusing in places but over-all, kind of interesting), started rereading Garden District Gothic because I am getting ready to start writing Scotty VIII, and also rereading some short stories from one of my favorite collections of all time, Harlan Ellison’s Alone Against Tomorrow.

It occurred to me yesterday, as I was marveling at the mastery of Ellison at short story writing (he really is one of the best short story writers of all time; his “Paladin of the Lost Hour” might be my favorite short story) that with all my talk about short stories lately I never talk about Ellison, which is a shame. (Also, rereading these stories and being reminded of how extraordinary a writer he is sent me into an ebay wormhole of ordering copies of his collections; I do have The Essential Ellison omnibus, but it doesn’t have everything; he is so prolific I don’t think all of his work could be collected into a single volume.)

But in fairness to me, these entries are usually unplanned and written while I am enjoying my morning coffee and waking up, so I am not as clear-headed as one might think when I write them.

I first discovered Ellison through, as so many other things in the speculative fiction world, Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. I knew from reading that book that he had written probably the best episode of Star Trek ever, “The City at the Edge of Tomorrow”–also known as ‘the one with Joan Collins’, but in those pre-Internet days finding books wasn’t as easy as it is now. It wasn’t until several years later, when I was at a friend’s apartment that I discovered she had a copy of his collection Strange Wine, which she not only loaned to me but gifted it to me, saying, “Reading Ellison will change your life.”

And it did. Several of those stories haunt me to this day. I was poor then, very poor, and so rarely bought books new; I haunted second-hand bookshops (do those even exist anymore?), and started hunting for Ellison whenever I went into them. That was how I found Alone Against Tomorrow, among others, and became a big fan.

Looking over these stories again last night, I was reminded why I was a fan.

And rereading Garden District Gothic after spending some time with Ellison was quite humbling.

I ordered a copy of Strange Wine last night–because I definitely need more books–and think I am going to dig out my copy of The Essential Ellison because I want to read more short stories (I say that all the time, don’t I?) and maybe I’ll make my entries for January all about short stories again this year. But I have so many short story collections lying around the house that I’ve never read; single author collections and anthologies and magazines and so forth, that a focused effort is really necessary.

And I really want to reread “Paladin of the Lost Hour.”

And now I should get back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk for the day:

Gold Dust Woman

My windows are filthy.

Embarrassingly so. It’s always amazing to me how dirty the air in New Orleans must be; because I don’t think I’ve ever lived anywhere before in my life where dust accumulates so quickly.

Anyway. At some point this weekend I shall have to do something about it.

Thanksgiving was a lovely day; the pizza was amazing and we watched two movies, Absolutely Fabulous (which was so bad it was sad) and Neighbors 2, which was actually quite funny. If someone would have told me before watching that the movie I was really looking forward to would be terrible and the one I was watching because I thought it would be terrible would be enjoyable, I would have scoffed in utter disdain. But Rose Byrne is quickly becoming a favorite actress of mine, and this is the first thing I’ve ever seen Zac Efron in, and he played the role of douchey frat bro aging out much better than Rob Lowe did in St. Elmo’s Fire; in fact, I kept thinking as I watched that he would be perfect in the inevitable remake.

I also got further into Elizabeth Little’s wonderful Dear Daughter, which I am also really enjoying. I started off the day watching another documentary series, Secrets of English Castles, and was about halfway through the episode on Dover Castle when Lisa arrived with our pizza, and once I’m finished working today (Paul won’t be home until really late this evening yet again)I am diving back into it. I really am delighted to discover all the documentaries on all of my streaming apps; I see plenty of informational and enjoyable viewing in my future.

We also watched the LSU game last night; GEAUX TIGERS. It’s really quite a shame, as they lost four games by a total of twenty points. Yet another season so close, and yet so far. The coaching situation should be resolved soon; one thing for certain is that LSU football is never dull.

I also can’t believe my vacation is almost over. Where did the time go? I didn’t get nearly as much finished this week as I wanted to, and yet…I can’t really see where I wasted time or goofed off a lot. But the primary purpose of a vacation is to get rested, and I certainly have rested this week and gotten a lot of wonderful sleep. We shall see how that translates into next week when I return to work, won’t we?

And now I suppose I should return to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk for the day:

I Don’t Want to Know

Thanksgiving Eve, and all is well in the Lost Apartment. I’m up early for Wacky Russian, and I actually woke up a half an hour before the alarm went off, well rested and not tired in the least. There’s something to this vacation thing, or it’s the sleepytime tea I’ve been drinking before I go to bed every night (I started that this week, and so far it’s been pretty effective).

Of course, now that I’ve said that, tonight it won’t work.

Last night I finished reading Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg.

It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday’s snowstorm lingered in the streets like a leftover curse. The slush outside was ankle-deep. Across Seventh Avenue a treadmill parade of lightbulb headlines marched endlessly around Times Tower’s terra cotta facade…HAWAII IS VOTED INTO UNION AS FIFTIETH STATE: HOUSE GRANTS FINAL APPROVAL 232 TO 89; EISENHOWER’S SIGNATURE OF BILL ASSURED…Hawaii, sweet land of pineapples and Haleloki; ukuleles strumming, sunshine and surf, grass skirts swaying in the tropical breeze.

I spun my chair around and stared out at Times Square. The Camels spectacular on the Claridge puffed fat steam smoke rings out over the snarling traffic. The dapper gentleman on the sign, mouth frozen in a round O of perpetual surprise, was Broadway’s harbinger of spring. Earlier in the week, teams of scaffold-hung painters transformed the smoker’s dark winter homburg and chesterfield overcoat into seersucker and panama straw; not as poetic as Capistrano swallows, but it got the message across. My building was built before the turn of the centuryl a four-story brick pile held together with soot and pigeon dung. An Easter bonnet of billboards flourished on the roof, advertising flights to Miami and various brands of beer. There was a cigar store on the corner, a Polerino parlor, two hot dog stands, and the Rialto Theatre, mid-block. The entrance was tucked between a peep-show bookstore and a novelty place, show windows stacked with whoopee cushions and plaster dog turds.

The book was originally published in 1978 and was an Edgar Award finalist for Best First Novel; it didn’t win, losing to Killed in the Ratings by William L. DeAndrea. It was filmed in the 1980’s as the infamous Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke, Charlotte Rampling, Lisa Bonet, and Robert DeNiro. I enjoyed the film very much when I saw it, not knowing it was based on a book; it was another one of those films that drew me to New Orleans and Louisiana. Recently (in the last several months) I came across a listing of great crime novels or the ten noir novels everyone should read or something like that; so I thought, oh, I have to read that and there you go.

The plot of the novel itself was adapted almost perfectly for the film; a private eye named Harry Angel is hired by a strange man named Louis Cyphre to find Johnny Favorite, a singer who was apparently severely injured and left with amnesia during World War II; he owes a debt to Mr. Cyphre and he suspects that Favorite may not be in the hospital he is supposed to be. Angel starts looking for Favorite and discovers that Cyphre is right; Favorite is no longer at the hospital, and soon is drawn into a creepy world of black magic, voodoo, and ritual murder. The primary difference between the novel and the film is that the novel takes place entirely in New York; in the book Favorite’s trail leads Angel to New Orleans.

I guess the filmmakers felt voodoo, black magic, and ritual murders fit better in New Orleans that New York. Whatever; I’m glad they did because again, the film was another step in my journey to New Orleans.

The book is very well done, the pacing is great and as I have said in previous entries, that cynical, hard-boiled noir voice is captured perfectly. I myself have never been able to quite get that style down absolutely right; I do intend to keep trying as I love both hard-boiled and noir styles. Having seen the movie I knew the big surprise twist; I can imagine how surprising and shocking it was back in 1978, or if you haven’t seen the film; the twist was one of the reasons I loved the movie. Even knowing it, I still enjoyed the book tremendously because of the writing.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Songbird

I always say that short stories are much harder for me to write than novels, and I also realize that makes me sound completely insane. But it’s true. I don’t know why I have such a mental block about writing short stories, but the sad thing is I do. I make it much harder than it probably needs to be, most likely. And there’s nothing I admire more than people who write excellent short stories. There’s apparently nothing Stephen King can’t do when it comes to writing; I can name of the top of my head any number of absolutely brilliant short stories he’s written. Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner–the list goes on and on. I wish I read my short stories, honestly; it makes sense to read short stories when I don’t have a lot of free time to read a novel, or between clients at work, etc. I really want to reread King’s collections Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, and I have anthologies all over my house, as well as back issues of both Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine that I should really read.

Music often inspires me; all of my blog titles are song titles, for example, or a lyric from a song, so when I heard about Jim Fusilli’s new anthology Crime Plus Music, crime short stories inspired by music, I had to get a copy.

Thus far, I’ve only read one of the stories, but it’s quite exceptional and may be one of the best short stories I’ve read this year: Alison Gaylin’s “All Ages.”

Gaylin is one of my favorite authors. I’ve loved all her novels (there is one I haven’t read; I’m holding it back because of that weird thing where I always want there to be one more book I haven’t read by a favorite writer), and her What Remains of Me is one of my favorite novels of 2016. Her contribution to my own anthology Blood on the Bayou, “Icon”, was something I was incredibly proud to publish.

But “All Ages”–wow.

We started with the hair. Bret said that was where all adventures started–Great hair, great music, great buzz. And so the first thing we did on the night of the all-ages X show at The Whisky was to lock ourselves in her upstairs bathroom with two cans of Aquanet, three boxes of Midnight Raven temporary dye, and an assortment of pics and combs, gels whose names I can no longer remember but whose colors I do–battery acid green, radioactive yellow…Each of them with anepoxy-like consistency and a sickly chemical smell. We teased the mercy out of each other’s hair and took swigs from a bottle of peach schnapps we’d found at the back of her parents’ liquor cabinet and we played X albums–Under the Big Black Sun, Los Angeles, some bootleg tape recorded live at one of their local shows. Bret’s trifecta in action. And it was working. Exene’s steely voice grew more and more beautiful with each gulp of schnapps, John Doe’s growl a cloud I could float on. My hair turned stiff and black and defiant and before long I was a star, a punk rock star. I felt like dancing.

Gaylin captures the 80’s beautifully, and what it was like to be a kid during that time (she also does this in What Remains of Me). The story, also like the novel, flashes back in time from the present to the 80’s, as the main character remembers what happened the night of the X concert, and how she and Bret hadn’t been friends for years, now that she is attending Bret’s funeral. It’s a lovely story, about friendship and loss, the complicated relationships between girls…and there’s a twist that will knock you out of your chair.

The book is worth the price for this story alone, and it has an amazingly stellar line-up of top crime writers in addition to Gaylin as well: Craig Johnson, Val McDermid, and Gary Phillips, just to name a few.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest.

And now back to the spice mines.

Go Your Own Way

I had planned, all week, to take yesterday as a day off. I am going to have to write and edit like a madman all of my vacation (woo-hoo! I’m on vacation!) and decided that yesterday, and Thanksgiving day itself, would be my days to do nothing but putter around the house and read and so forth. I also somehow wound up in Facebook jail for posting a photo of a guy in a bikini three years ago that someone somehow decided yesterday ‘violated their community standards of nudity’–who knew that a man in a bikini was naked? Puritans. So I went to Costco and cleaned up around the house and spent the day finishing reading Owen Laukkanen’s The Watcher in the Wall, and once I was finished with that, I started reading William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, around essays from Barbara Tuchman’s Practicing History.

Damn, I do love to read.

We also started getting caught up on the shows we watch last night.

It was time.

Adrian Miller had planned to wait, a few more days, another week, maybe. Hell, when he woke up for school that morning, before school, he wasn’t even sure he would do it anymore. He’d thought about his mom and dad and sister, about Lucas, and wondered what kind of monster would want to hurt them the way he was planning. He’d hugged his parents goodbye and walked out the front door, and it was a beautiful fall morning, crisp and bracing and clear, and he’d decided, not yet. Maybe not ever.

But then he showed up at school, and it all started again.

Lucas wouldn’t talk to him. Lucas never talked to him, not in public, anyway. Lucas avoided his eyes in the hallway, wouldn’t eat lunch with him, made him wait until the final bell rang and they could go to the park, or to Lucas’ dad’s basement, somewhere far away from school and Lucas’ real friends.

I really, really loved this book.

Take this opening. Laukkanen perfectly captures the experience of what it feels like to be that kid; the one who has no friends, the one who counts the minutes until the final bell rings, who dreads going to gym class or the cafeteria for lunch and going to school every morning; who dreads going to bed every night because it means when you wake up you have to go to school again; what it feels like to wish you would die in your sleep so it would all be over; to wonder if you would ever have the nerve to kill yourself.

I was that kid once.

When I bought the book (because I wanted to read one of Owen’s books) I didn’t realize it was a book in a series, but to be honest, I didn’t realize it was a series until I was well into it, and by then I couldn’t stop reading even if I had wanted to; and it didn’t matter at all. Maybe the reading experience would have been heightened by having read the series in its proper order (I’m a bit obsessive about this sort of thing) but I didn’t feel like I missed anything. It worked perfectly well as an introduction to the series (which I am now going to go back and read), and that’s truly not an easy thing to do. (I don’t think, for example, my series can be read out of order.)

The series characters are Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere, who work on a joint FBI-BCA violent crime task force. They get involved in this particular case when Stevens’ daughter–distraught about her classmate Adrian Miller’s suicide–asks them to do something about it. There isn’t much they can do at first, but as a courtesy they start looking into it, and soon discover an ugly world on-line of suicide groups and chatboards…and disturbed individuals who encourage the suicidal to go through with it. Adrian was the victim of one such person, and as they start to dig into this subculture more, they soon realize that there will be more kids talked into killing themselves while this person watches via webcam.

What makes the book so brilliant, though, is that Laukkanen takes us into the mind of the psychopath as well; how he became this person who enjoys watching young people kill themselves, how much he enjoys playing the game, and how he has turned it into a for-profit business. And while it is a slithery, creepy, horrifying place to be–at the same time you can’t help but feel some empathy for this awful, horrible person you want to be caught; since you know the backstory of how he came to be this monster. This fleshes him out, makes him more real–and all the more terrifying, as it is easy to see how such a psychopath is created.

Laukkanen also shows us the point of view of his new target, a sad lonely girl who hates her life, lured in by an Internet boyfriend she meets on one of the suicide chat boards and comes to know through Facebook and other social media (he uses the pictures of an attractive boy who committed suicide already to create this fake presence, and we learn how he does this and how easy teenagers are prey to this sort of thing–which is also terrifying), and finally she decides to go meet him, taking a bus from Tampa to Louisville…and the race is on for Stevens and Windermere to save her.

The pacing is amazing; you never want to put the book down. The writing is superb, and Laukkanen’s characters are all very real.

Oddly enough, once I finished reading this I realized I actually already had the first book in the series, The Professionals, in my TBR pile.

Looking forward to reading some more of Owen Laukkanen.