Category: writing

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:

Over and Over

My documentary binge continues. I was actually wrong–the series about castles in England was called Secrets of Great British Castles, and the presenter is a very attractive Brit named Dan Jones. The first episode was Dover; the second The Tower of London. The third episode was Warwick Castle, but I decided to skip that one. I’ll go back to the show eventually, but I wasn’t really in the mood to watch about Warwick Castle, so I went back to the documentary category on Netflix while waiting for Paul to get home (I wrote a lot yesterday) and found one called Shenandoah.

It was incredible, and I can’t get it out of my mind.

The documentary is about the death of an illegal immigrant from Mexico in the small town of Shenandoah Valley, Pennsylvania; a coal mining town which is dying a slow economic death. The town was made up of families descended primarily from European immigrants: Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish–but has also seen a recent influx of Mexican immigrants. Luis Ramirez was attacked and beaten by four stars of the high school football team (again, yet another town whose identity is wrapped up entirely in its high school football team) and later died of his injuries. Two of the four boys pled guilty and agreed to testify against their friends; an all-white jury in the town shockingly (sarcasm) found them all not guilty on every charge other than simple assault. The federal government then stepped in and charged the boys under federal hate crime statutes, along with four local cops accused of hindering the FBI investigation and conspiracy to cover up the crime. All six were convicted.

What was disturbing, for me, was the horrific racism exhibited by the townspeople during the investigations, and how they saw the original verdict as a triumph for “white America”; the horrific xenophobia and the blaming of Mexicans for all their troubles. I am glad some of these people are now on film; some day they will be as embarrassed, hopefully, by their behavior and conduct preserved for all time as the racists during the integration struggle in the south. Chanting “USA!” in response to the death of a Latino at the hands of four white teenagers? Calling them good boys?

Despicable, really. And for the record, these are the white working class voters of ‘real America’, of ‘small town America’, that are held up as paragons of everything that our country supposedly is at its best.

Not all of them, of course. The documentary showed several points of view that also showed there were people who aren’t racist and were appalled by what was going on in their town. The young boy who was involved and pled guilty initially, Brian Scully, was kicked off the football team and the documentary actually traces his growth as a person, and how the horror of that night and what he was involved in changed him. He actually found some salvation and solace from, of all things, musical theater; joining the cast of a school production of Into the Woods (which, ironically, opened the night before he had to testify against his friends in the initial trial).

It’s an incredibly powerful documentary that I recommend everyone watch; it’s on Netflix.

I also watched Ghosts of Ole Miss, which was about the integration of the campus in 1962 by James Chambers and the campus wide riot that resulted, with the students attacking the National Guard and the National Guard having to fight back, resulting in the US Military having to come to the campus to put down the riot and finish the integration process. The documentary also talked about the 1962 undefeated Ole Miss football team, which held the university together and gave the students something to be proud of after the Battle of Ole Miss; yet at the football games the students were all waving Confederate flags and their mascot was still Johnny Reb, and…

Sigh.

Both documentaries have given me a lot to think about, and even some ideas about things to write; which means both films did their jobs.

Today I am going to write some more (the goal is five thousand words; I achieved that yesterday but I don’t know if I can do it a second day in a row but you never know!) and continue reading Elizabeth Little’s Dear Daughter around doing some chores. I don’t have to leave the house again until Monday when I go back to work (sob), so there’s that. I also got another deep good night’s sleep last night, so….can’t complain!

And now back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hunk for today:

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:

Oh Daddy

work work work work work.

Can’t complain, though. I love my work, I really do–although I can always complain. Work on Wicked Frat Boy Ways is coming along swimmingly, if I do say so myself (and I do) and I project that I may be able to get it done by the (extended) deadline if things keep going as swimmingly as they are now. Of course, now that I’ve said that I will undoubtedly hit a snag. Heavy heaving sigh.

Ain’t that the way it always seems to go?

But I am very pleased with it so far; I am not having any of my usual doubts/fears/terrors about this one the way I usually do. I’m not sure if that’s progress on my part as far as confidence is concerned, or blithe unawareness. Perhaps both; we shall see.

After writing a significant chunk of the book yesterday–and cleaning–I settled in to watch some documentaries while waiting for Paul to come home; first I watched Trojan War, the ESPN documentary about the USC football program while Pete Carroll was coach, and then moved on to a three episode BBC documentary called Empire of the Tsars, about the Romanov dynasty of Russia. (It was also the first time I’d ever heard it pronounced ro-MAHN-off, which is probably correct.) As I had just finished watching the series Versailles earlier in the week and marveling at the magnificent beauty of that palace, I was also struck in this series about how incredibly beautiful and ornate St. Petersburg and the imperial palaces must be; both Moscow and St. Petersburg have always been places I wanted to visit–but it’s not like it’s particularly safe for a gay to go there. One never knows, of course–it may happen someday.

After Paul got home we also watched the most recent episode of Eyewitness, which is SUCH a good show.

I also finally started reading a book that’s been languishing in my TBR pile for far too long; Elizabeth Little’s Dear Daughter, and while I am only a couple of chapters in, it’s pretty terrific thus far.

Today, for Thanksgiving, I am probably not going to get as much writing done as I would like (I am not ruling it out, of course) but our friend Lisa is coming over and we are having our traditional That’s Amore Chicago-style deep-dish pizza meal while watching the Absolutely Fabulous movie and Neighbors 2.

So, Happy Thanksgiving, one and all.

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.

You Make Loving Fun

Another good night’s sleep. There must be something to this stay-at-home vacation thing, don’t you think?

I didn’t get as much writing/editing done yesterday as I wanted to, but I also had to run errands and bouncing back into a creative mode after dealing with the General Public is never easy; I find that always to be all too frequently true. But as I waited for Paul to come home last night, I watched the season finale of Versailles (which I am going to miss) and the Netflix documentary Audrie and Daisy, which made me smolder with rage, and made me realize my rape culture novel, sitting collecting dust now for over a year, really needs to get out there for people to read.

Will it make a difference? I doubt it, but change is water wearing away at a rock, and maybe at some point our culture and society will finally recognize that men do not have a right to women’s bodies.

I also read a few more chapters of Falling Angel last night. It’s the Edgar Award nominated novel the film Angel Heart was based on, and while I haven’t seen the film in decades, I remember liking it a lot (it was another one of those films that heightened the connection I felt with New Orleans before I moved here); once I read the book I am going to watch the movie again, see how it holds up. The book is quite good; as I read it I remember the film more and more; the book’s quality lies in that hardboiled noir voice I mentioned the other day having trouble capturing in my own work. I think part of the problem I have with that, frankly, is the straight male machismo aspect of it. One of the reasons I stopped reading crime fiction in the late 1970s (having exhausted Christie, Queen, and Gardner) was because the current stuff was pretty much the straight male gaze and that macho bullshit. (Not everything, of course, and that was, I realize now, an over-generalization; but that was how it seemed to me.) I eventually returned to crime fiction, primarily thanks to Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky; their work led me to a greater appreciation of the genre and enabled me to read and appreciate John D. Macdonald and eventually get back into the genre over-all, and is partly why, in my own work, I tried to develop my own version and style; the gay male gaze. Whether I succeeded or not is for future generations to decide–whether I am remembered at all or not.

Probably not, is the most likely.

And I’m fine with that, really.

Yesterday I did manage to get the kitchen cleaned (not quite organized as I would have liked, but small victories), and today around editing and writing I intend to do the same with the living room and start working on the kitchen cabinets and drawers. It is truly sad how these things give me pleasure, but on the other hand, I like cleaning up my house and feel truly satisfied when it is cleaned and organized and sparkling. (If it remains sunny but chilly, I am going to do the windows in the kitchen as well.)

And that is, really, the genesis of my story “Housecleaning”, in the wonderful anthology Sunshine Noir.

The smell of bleach always reminded him of his mother.

It was, he thought as he filled the blue plastic bucket with hot water from the kitchen tap, probably one of the reasons he rarely used it. His mother had used it for practically everything. Everywhere she’d lived had always smelled slightly like bleach. She was always cleaning. He had so many memories of his mother cleaning something; steam rising from hot water pouring from the sink spigot, the sound of brush bristles as she scrubbed the floor (‘mops only move the dirt around, good in a pinch but not for real cleaning’), folding laundry scented by Downy, washing the dishes by hand before running them through the dishwasher (‘it doesn’t wash the dishes clean enough, it’s only good for sterilization’), running the vacuum cleaner over carpets and underneath the cushions on the couch. In her world, dirt and germs were everywhere and constant vigilance was the only solution. She judged other people for how slovenly they looked or how messy their yards were or how filthy their houses were. He remembered one time—when they were living in the apartment in Wichita—watching her struggle at a neighbor’s to not say anything as they sat in a living room that hadn’t been cleaned or straightened in a while, the way her fingers absently wiped away dust on the side table as she smiled and made conversation, the nerve in her cheek jumping, the veins and chords in her neck trying to burst through her olive skin, her voice strained but still polite.

When the tea was finished and the cookies just crumbs on a dirty plate with what looked like egg yolk dried onto its side, she couldn’t get the two of them out of there fast enough. Once back in the sterile safety of their own apartment, she’d taken a long, hot shower—and made him do the same. They’d never gone back there, the neighbor woman’s future friendliness rebuffed politely yet firmly, until they’d finally moved away again.

“People who keep slovenly homes are lazy and cannot be trusted,” she’d told him after refusing the woman’s invitation a second time, “a sloppy house means a sloppy soul.”

Crazy as she seemed to him at times, he had to admit she’d been right about that. In school after school, kids who didn’t keep their desks or lockers neat had never proven trustworthy or likable. It had been hard to keep his revulsion hidden behind the polite mask as he walked to his next class and someone inevitably opened a locker to a cascade of their belongings. He’d just walked faster to get away from the laughter of other kids and the comic fumbling of the sloppy student as he tried to gather the crumpled papers and broken pencils and textbooks scattered on the shiny linoleum floor.

As I said, I like to clean, and I often joke that my own mother makes Joan Crawford look like a slob. One morning, when I was filling up my blue bucket with water and bleach, the smell of bleach reminded me of my mother and voila! A story was born. I actually stopped cleaning to sit down and write the entire first draft.

Sigh. I love when that happens.

And now back to the spice mines.

The Chain

Vacation all I ever wanted…interestingly enough, I’ve been sleeping extremely well since Friday; maybe it’s the cold (for us) snap, but I’ve been getting at least nine hours of divinely deep sleep every night since Friday. Which is lovely, really–the whole point of this stay-at-home vacation was to not only get a lot of work done but to get rested and relaxed. So, I have to say that’s all working out quite well so far, which is lovely. Yesterday I worked and we got caught up on watching some of our shows (Eyewitness, Gotham, Supernatural, The Exorcist, with Arrow and The Flash and Secrets and Lies on deck), and I read some of Falling Angel, which has a great noir voice.

I love me some noir. I think one of the problems I have with writing noir–or when I’m trying to write it–is I can’t ever get that noir voice right. I’m going to try to write a noir novel in 2017; it’s been dancing around in the back of my head for a really long time, and I think the time is ripe for me to try to write it at long last.

Woo-hoo!

The kitchen is a mess this morning, and I do have a couple of errands to run today, in addition to the work I want to get done. One of the purposes of said vacation was to get a good deep cleaning on the Lost Apartment done, and I plan on working on the kitchen today around the work I have to do. It’s funny how you can let things slide for so long…actually, no, it’s not, but I also have to cut myself a break. I work full time, write full time, and edit part time. Something has to give in that scenario, and two of the things that have are my workouts and my cleaning schedule around the house. I need to stop beating myself up over these things; there are only so many hours in a day, and I am fifty-five and need down time sometimes.

I think maybe one of my goals in 2017 will be to cut myself a break every now and again, and accept that I don’t have to try to be Superman anymore.

Wow, just typing that felt freeing.

We’ll see how that goes.

But I feel up to the challenge. In 2017 I am going to write another Scotty book, a noir, and another y/a. I also want to get some of these short stories revised and redone and submitted out and out there. (I also need to update calendar reminders for deadlines re: some anthologies I want to submit to.) I also need to step up my reading, and spend less time on social media.

All right, I need to dive into the spice mines or I’ll start goofing off and get nothing done.

Here’s today’s hunk:

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.

Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)

One more day to get through and then it’s vacation. Woo-hoo!

I have literally been riveted by Owen Laukkanen’s The Watcher in the Wall; I hated having to put it down and go to bed last night. I’m about halfway finished; Paul won’t be home until late tonight so I am hoping I’ll be able to finish it tonight. I’m probably going to read Michael Thomas Ford’s Lily tomorrow; the LSU game is on early and after that I am probably going to do a lot of cleaning and organizing and reading. (I’ve decided to take Saturday off from all projects, in order to recharge my batteries.) There’s no Saints game on Sunday, so I am debating whether I should attempt Costco before the LSU game tomorrow, or just go Sunday while everyone’s at church.

Decisions, decisions.

Of course, while I juggle these multiple projects, I’ve been thinking a lot about a couple of short stories I’ve been working on for years, “The Ditch” and “Fireflies”; this was triggered, I think, by reading the Lisa Unger novel. I’ve been also thinking about a y/a novel I’ve wanted to write for years called Ruins; rereading the two Barbara Michaels novels in October started me down that path, and the Unger kicked it into overdrive. The problem with Ruins is that I borrowed some of it for Lake Thirteen; if I am going to write Ruins I’ll have to come up with some new things to say, and replace the scenes I borrowed. The problem with Ruins, of course, is that it’s a Civil War ghost story, and you can’t write that kind of book without addressing the elephant in the room: slavery and racism. I originally wrote it as a short story a long time ago (correction: make that a really bad short story; I think it was one of the stories I wrote in the 1980’s when I was trying to emulate Stephen King. I didn’t address any of those issues in the short story; I blissfully pretended, as so many others have done, that none of that mattered. God, the naivete. I think this is why I have so much trouble with trying to write about Alabama. Is there anything more annoying than a progressive white person trying to address race issues? I loved To Kill a Mockingbird when I read it as a kid; I reread it again recently and, while still thinking it was a moving story that was beautifully written, recognized several problems with it. I have copies of the Colson Whitehead novel that just won the National Book Award and the controversial book Ben Winters published earlier this year; I also found a copy of William Bradford Huie’s The Klansman, about the civil rights struggle in Alabama in the 1960’s, on ebay that I want to reread. (I read it when I was young; I’d like to give it a reread as an adult.)

Maybe after I read Lily. The time has never been more ripe for reading about racism, and studying America’s history of it. I also have Philip Roth’s alternate history The Plot Against America.

Hmmmm.

Of course, actually writing Ruins is a long way away; I have so much to do before the end of the year…

But it’s lovely feeling creative again. I am making lots of notes. The book is coming along rather well, too. I may even get all these things done when I am supposed to

Scary. Who am I?

And on that note, I should probably head back to the spice mines.

Here’s a hottie for today:

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