The Shining

The Shining
© 1977 Stephen King
447 pages

A recovering alcoholic and recently fired schoolteacher has taken a short-term gig as the winter caretaker of a luxury hotel nestled in the Colorado mountains.  The hotel is forced to close for the season every fall because of unpassable roads and frequent blizzards, but someone is needed to ensure that the howling winds don't compromised the building and expose it to the elements. But the real danger of the Overlook Hotel isn't outside...it's inside.   It is a building with a dark past, with a history of murders and suicides -- and even from outside it strikes its three new residents as ominous.  Jack, the caretaker, his wife Wendy, and their son Danny are in for a long, harrowing winter. Whatever lurks in the hotel is awakened and strengthed by the presence of the family, and especially by the son Danny who has some ability to read thoughts and receive impressions about the future.

Imagine a haunted house that can't be escaped from, a house where the haunts are not transparent figures rattling dishes and moaning,  but rather persistent voices in your head driving you to madness, and frightening images invading your mind --  images of the past, howling laughter and screams,  blood and bodies from long-disappeared crime scenes suddenly seeming as if they've just happened.  When the story begins,  Jack and Wendy are optimistic: this will be a way to get back on their feet financially, an easy source of income, and a quiet space for Jack to finish working on his play and continuing his recovery from alcoholism. They can mend the fences in their relationship, and give their troubled boy the attention he needs.   But as the winter progresses,  both Jack and his son come under increasing mental and emotional stress,  one of them losing his mind completely.  The long descent into madness ends in horror, bloodshed, and desperate flights from mortal threats both physical and fantastic.

The Shining is an excellent story of creeping terror,   allowing readers to experience the unraveling of  sanity from multiple perspectives,  at least until one character is completely possessed by the hotel and becomes another malignant force.  What makes this effective is that the horror is not overt  -- no ghosts, no wailing. It's a smothering feeling, a corner turned to see something that shouldn't be there -- like fresh blood from an  decades-old crime scene, the shadow of a body in a tub that should not be there. As unsettling things accumulate, the characters are still going through mundane activities -- exploring the past of the hotel,  working on  a play, putting up shingles -- until there's an over-the-edge point and it descends into a more outright thriller.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
© 1818 Mary Shelley
288 pages

"Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care: I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth."

An attempt to reach the North Pole is interrupted by the sight of eerie figures chasing one another upon the ice, and they have a tale of misery to recount.  The man rescued by the ship, Victor Frankenstein,  was an enthusiast of natural philosophy, and specifically the the power to create life.    Captain Walton of the polar exploration vessel had been yearning for the friendship of someone who wanted to probe nature's darkest mysteries, but Frankenstein's story proved to be one of warning rather than encouragement.  After relating his early fascination with occult figures and scientists alike, Frankenstein describes the horror he experienced when he succeeded in actually bringing a cobbled-together man to life, and how it pursued him across Europe, driven by despair and wrath at having been created.  The monster himself also appears in the story, both through Frankenstein's recollection -- the two have a confrontation in which the monster recounts his pitiful life thus far and charges Frankenstein with giving him a companion that he can flee into exile with -- and aboard the ship as the last, before he disappears in a wintry haze. 

I read Frankenstein in one sitting, which I hadn't expected to do.  The monsters of Halloween have never had a great appeal for me, so most of this -- besides the scientist making a man --  was completely new.  This Norton critical edition proved highly readable,  supported with annotations to explain period-specific references or vocabulary which now borders on archaic. There's no getting around this book being a warning about the reckless pursuit of knowledge at any cost;  beyond Frankenstein's attempt at creating life, which only resulted in a string of bloody murders and the destruction of both creature and creation,   there's also the frequently-mentioned destruction of native American societies, specifically Mexico and Peru, as a result of enthusiastic exploration.  Captain Walton himself proves to be someone who can learn from other's mistakes, as -- faced with hostile polar conditions that threaten his ship and crew -- he retreats to England.  There were certainly surprises here, like the description of the creature as "beautiful" -- save for his eyes. (I wonder if, given that eyes were regarded as windows to the soul, if repulsive eyes hinted at the beast's depravity or brutishness.)    

This Norton critical edition is particularly helpful in understanding the book. While I only read the story proper,  it also contains a short essay on different versions of the story -- one edit implies the monster dies, another leaves his future shrouded in a storm -- as well as period responses and related poetry. 

Dracula

Dracula
© 1897 Bram Stoker
416 pages

Every attorney has problematic clients,  but few can claim an actual monster. Such is the case with Count Dracula, as  young lawyer Jonathan Hawker discovers to his dismay and horror when he arrives at the mysterious count's manor in Transylvania.  The trip was just a bit of business --- finalizing the papers for the count's purchase of land in England.  But the Count is a man who the locals fear, who can command the beasts of the earth, and who is never around during the day.   Hawker quickly finds himself an effective prisoner, shut up in a foreboding castle full of locked doors and secrets, and when he stumbles through one into the other -- discovering that the Count is a vampire, who subsists on human blood --   Hawker realizes both he and the City of London are in peril.

For a century-old gothic thriller, Dracula stands up very well. It uses an unexpected format, its story rendered in the letters and diary entries of the participants, who occasionally pool their notes to get the bigger picture. This epistolary approach allows the reader to piece the story together, instead of having all the work done for us by the narrative.  (A good bit of the characters'  work is done by Dr. van Helsing, who has a tendency to lecture.)  Modern readers of vampires will recognize the creature here, but books like Twilight and In the Forests of the Night divorce the monster from his background. Stoker's vampire is a creature of Hell,  experiencing a corrupted and bastardized version of eternal life;   his association with the devil is not merely one of hyperbole, but real to the point that Dracula and his victims are completely disabled by the presence of a Eucharistic wafer. (Not included as vampire traits are a tendency to say "Bleh!" and an obsession with counting. Sesame Street lied to me!)

From its beginnings -- the dread-laden arrival in Transylvania, the creeping horror as Hawker and others piece together the truth -- until the chase at the end,  Dracula remains a very effective thriller.

World War Z

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
© 2006 Max Brooks
352 pages

Reading Night of the Living Trekkies put me in the mood for more weird fiction, and World War Z fits the bill!  Fictional, but not a novel, it presents itself as an 'oral history' of the great zombie war -- one that began as a medical crisis before metastasizing into a global struggle to survive.

 The writing is clever;  this isn't the retelling of an action novel, but a depiction of global society  reeling under the threat and changing to take on new circumstances.  Early on we see nation-states struggling under waves of refugees, the stresses producing conventional warfare. As the epidemic morphs into a war,  we are with the soldiers and generals who realize how poorly suited modern warfare is to fighting the undead.   Zombie hordes have no supply lines to guard, no officers who can be shot,  and no problem replacing fallen comrades: every enemy they kill reanimates to fight for the horde.  Destroying their bodies merely slows them down; death necessitates headshots or decapitations.    The author has a good handle on how diverse the human race is;  the plague has different names throughout the globe, depending on how it was first discovered.  This can lead to tragedy;  one name for it, "African rabies", lead people to think that rabies  inoculations would keep them safe.

 Responses to the threat vary by nation; some survive, some vanish, and some -- Cuba, incredibly -- thrive.  The author also create some sense of the psychological toll the war is having on people, through the creation of 'quisling's, humans who pretend to be zombies. It's not simply a matter of playing possum; they actively live as the undead, even trying to eat people.  Civilization doesn't collapse completely; although strategic retreats abandon much of the planet, castles and strongholds provide safer areas where abandoned material can be refashioned into tools for war. The war has a strange combination of modern and medieval;  airplanes are used only for  supplies and recon, and melee combat returns in a big way.  The American infantry's favored melee weapon is a combination spade and axe, the Lobo.

With characters from across the planet, and a similarly diverse set of pondered topics, World War Z  must be the most intelligent zombie fiction out there!

Night of the Living Trekkies

Night of the Living Trekkies
© 2010 Kevin David Anderson
256 pages

Braaaains and braaaains, what is braaaaiiins?!

Oh, reader, good times ahead.  When Jim Pike returned from Afghanistan as a psychologically scarred veteran, the last thing he wanted was responsibility. That's the reason he took a lowly job at a hotel as a bellhop; lives weren't on the line. Too bad his hotel and the entire Houston area are ground zero for an zombie epidemic -- one that erupts most dramatically at a Star Trek convention. To protect his sister, Jim will fight side by side with a squad of redshirts, saving Princess Leia in the meantime. Night of the Living Trekkies is a glorious parody of both zombie fiction and Star Trek, grounding its invasion of the undead in science fiction. Its reanimated corpses are under the control of an invasive alien parasite, not a necromancer's spell, but the attraction here is not the zombies or the action, but the humor.  This is a novel saturated with Trek references; every chapter  heading is drawn from the shows' bank of episode titles, and virtually all of the characters are Trekkies who constantly argue about the shows -- about whether the Animated Series is canon, for instance. Gloriously, though, the authors also have the chutzpah to include a character dressed as Princess Leia, who (as a running joke) 'unwittingly' drops lines from Star Wars in stressful situations.   ("Some rescue! When you came in here, didn't you have any plan for getting out?!") It takes chutzpah to mix Star Wars references into a Trek book, but I thought it succeeded marvelously.  This being a zombie novel, naturally there's a body count....but even that becomes funny when so many corpses are wearing red shirts.  Similarly appropriate are the zombies still dressed as Borg, whose shamble lacks only the Borg clacking and whirring to be authentic.  I purchased this on vacation and it made my night.

Seriously the most fun I've had with a book this year.

Sphere

Sphere
© 1987 Michael Crichton
385 pages

 Norman Thomas is accustomed to government officials asking for his assistance to counsel survivors at plane crashes, but traveling fifteen hours into the middle of the Pacific is a first.   Upon arrival, John finds not an island with aircraft remains, but a small fleet of ships from the US Navy:  and the object of their concern isn’t a crashed vessel at all. It’s a sunken ship…a spaceship….that is three hundred years old.   So begins an eerie psychological thriller, as Thomas and a team chosen to make first contact with unknown life forms are taken by sub deep into the bottom of the ocean, into a lightless world of fear and wonder.

  Johnson came to the Navy’s attention when, during the Carter Administration, he submitted a report to a committee concerned with extraterrestrial life.  It wasn’t a subject he took seriously, but they offered him money for educated guesses, and with a house to pay for he was more than happy to make guesses.  Those guesses have become US policy, and the recommendations he made have become his own hand-picked team of zoologists and other professionals.   From the beginning Johnson and the other civilians suspect the Navy knows more than it is letting on,  but the surprises are only starting: when the craft is breached, it proves to be not of extraterrestrial origin, but is human-made, with English signage and stocked with Coca-Cola!   But the interior of the ship has still more surprises, alien and powerful, and after a hurricane scatters the surface fleet the explorers are left marooned thousands of few below. There, as strange happenings start to claim their lives, the slowly-dwindling survivors begin to question their own sanity.

Sphere  is a remarkably creepy book, a genuine thriller: from the beginning, its developments incite curiosity, and later dread.  How did a human spaceship, whose operating principles and material are far beyond the present’s abilities, come to be buried beneath centuries of coral and the oceans themselves? What was its mission,  what is the meaning of its baffling cargo (a mysterious black sphere), and…why do people keep dying?  Strange animals keep appearing around the underwater habitat,  including a giant squid that can heavily damage it;  the built environment around them keeps adding surprises,  things suddenly being there that weren’t before…and then there’s 'Jerry',  some strange entity attempting to communicate with the crew. “Jerry’s”  conversational skills have an uncanny aspect, familiar yet menacing.   Ultimately, even the psychologist-narrator seems on the verge of cracking up before an explosive conclusion.

 I’ve only read a few of Crichton’s works (Andromeda Strain, Timeline, Jurassic Park, Lost World), but this ranks near the top. It is a psychological thriller, not only because the characters seem to be collectively losing  their mind, but because Crichton’s author-lecture addresses perception, imagination, and reality.  The alien here is utterly alien; this isn’t a Star Trek humanoid with a bumpy nose, or even a SF monster that has a mouth, eyes, and the desire to eat what it sees.   The alien presence here is not comprehensible; the characters don’t even know if they’re seeing an actual sphere, or some part of a transdimensional object that merely looks like a sphere in our plane of existence.  Crichton’s writing may be plain, but what a scientifically-inspired imagination!

Carrie

Carrie
© 1974 Stephen King
199 pages

A word to the wise: if you're going to execute a horrific public prank on the school outcast, like having her elected prom queen and then dumping a bucket of freezing pig blood on her, make sure she's not secretly telekinetic. Otherwise, she might trap the entire senior class in a burning gynasium, then become a one-woman reenactment of the Dresden fire bombing just for good measure.

Carrie was Stephen King's first horror novel, and it is, truly. The title character is Carrie White, a teenage girl raised by a deranged mother who regards anything connected to sex (including the existence of genitals,  curves, and menses) as evil.  Carrie is the soul of psychological isolation, spending much of her time in a locked closet as punishment, and so warped by her mother that she has virtually no way of relating with her peers. She's also oblivious to the facts of the life, and when she has her period for the first time, it couldn't come at a worse point: the school locker room, in full view of her school's clique of Mean Girls. High schoolers being what they are, she is immediately subject to public humiliation. The Mean Girls receive a little comeuppance; they are barred from the prom and one manages to be genuinely remorseful, asking her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom in her stead. Carrie deserves one night of happiness before high school is over, she thinks -- but this moment of good intentions is turned into hell.

Unfortunately for...everyone, at least those outside the funerary trades,  Carrie's one night of happiness is turned into one of horror when the barred mean girls decide to strike back.  Carrie, who spends the entire book being mentally tormented either by her mother or the bullies, snaps. She has a gift, or a curse, of telekinesis; she can make things happen with her mind.  (Her mother was already crazy before she was born, but having a child whose mood swings manifest themselves as a poltergeist probably didn't help..)   On the night of the prom, when she is drenched with blood and the entire school laughs at her, with the potential of happiness turned to utter degradation, Carrie decides to wreak havoc.  Whatever fragile grasp she had on sanity evaporates away under the boiling outrage, and she stalks through town blowing things up. Eventually she succumbs to the physical toll her powers took on her body, as well as an injury and even further mental trauma, but not before killing four hundred people and turning a quiet Maine city into a ghost town.

Carrie is fairly gruesome; definitely not the sort of thing I'd read twice, between all the murder, mayhem, and insanity.  Interestingly done, though;  King breaks from his narrative to insert clips of scientific articles, news reports, legal commissions, and survivor accounts that tell more of the story.

One Second After

One Second After
 © 2011 William R. Forstchen
528 pages

When the power blinked, Colonel John Matherson wasn't alarmed. These things happen. But they don't happen at the same exact time as failing phones, stalling cars, and falling planes.  As night fell and nothing changed, he began to suspect the worst: that America had been attacked. One Second After turns a Norman Rockwell life into a horror story, taking readers through a town trying desperately to hold on to survival after its entire world collapses.

Like any horror story, this is grisly and exciting; as Matherson quickly realizes, his city has been the victim of an electromagnetic pulse,  probably generated by a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere.  Virtually every electrical device is now kaput. Cars, computers, even telephones and clocks are dead.  One character notes in alarm that they've been thrown into the Civil War era, but their fate is far worse than that; as the historian Matherson notes, the world of 1865 had its own infrastructure. That was a world of widespread farming and home industry, of self-reliance. With electricity went every tool and system the modern world depends on; the trucks, trains, and ships that moved food from across the continents;  the computers that managed the money. The integrated world economy, David Ricardo's dream coming true, meant the utter dependence of every community on thousands of others.  With thousands of people needing medicine and food every day, and without the means to produce it or import it again as needed, One Second After is a tale of slow death.

The technological order having collapsed, and the old traditional skills having been forgotten,  the people of town are in a bad way. An early scene in a nursing home overwhelms Matherson and readers with a hint of the tragedy that is to come;  its staff unable to come to work, and medications running low,  four medical personnel are alone in a building filled with dozens of elderly who need constant care. Matherson is there to evacuate his father in law, but when he arrives he finds death, disease, and despair; the staff are overwhelmed, unable to cope.  It's a gut-wrenching scene, but devastation won't be limited to the nursing home. Those dependent on medications in the civilian population are first to decline; food poisoning, disease, and strife ravage the population in turns.  Without comforts, ferality rears its head; as some give in to their inner beasts, Matherson and others do their utmost to preserve some dignity. They study the situation, make plans for the future, organize defense against what mobs and nature are throwing at them, and  strain not to break themselves.

While rock bottom is never reached, and there is some marginal reason for hope at the end, this is a truly harrowing story. There are minor issues with the style --  the characters often remind themselves  that "we're still Americans",  invoking memories of higher ideals, but in too unvarying a way --  but this is a small fly in the soup. As devastating as the barrage of crises is,  the main character continues to hold on, making it inspirational. There's no question that this novel was written as a warning; the story is bookended with notes from a  congressman and a military intelligence officer who remark on the dire need to prepare for the aftermath of this kind of an attack. That warning applies not just for Congress, however, but for people, too;   Matherson's city profits from the skills of a few survivalists and hardcore Civil War reenactors, but  the townsfolk on the whole are not prepared. Accustomed to buying everything as needed from the store, no one has any extra provisions or supplies set aside.  Little wonder 'prepping' booklists often include this one.

While I don't know how likely an EMP attack is, One Second After is a chillingly effective warning of how fragile everyday life has become.

Related:
Lucifer's Hammer.  An apocalyptic novel following an asteroid impact, this also has a cannabalistic horde. It's also more firmly a science fiction novel.
World Made by Hand, James Kunstler.  This is far gentler, since it's set long enough after the peak oil scenario that collapses the modern world that characters have adjusted to living in the 19th century.
Supervolcano: Explosion, Harry Turtledove.  Similar scenaro

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
© 1820 Washington Iriving; illustrations 1966, Leonard Fisher
58 pages

Long ago in a quiet part of the north country near Hudson Bay lived a superstitious and gangly schoolteacher whose amorous affections for a local heiress threw him headlong into trouble. The man's name? Ichabod Crane, and if that name sounds familar to you, so might the Tale of the Headless Horseman. Though I've been familar with Crane, the Horseman, and name "Sleepy Hollow" since childhood, I have never read the story.  It's a short story, a fantasy-horror tale with a comic main character in a barely independent America. While I initially peeked into the petite volume to learn where the tale went (ending in dread mystery),  surely it was worth reading for the language alone. Irving's prose is ornate, yet highly readable, like the rare piece of cursive writing that is rendered artfully without slowing down communication.  The work has the added appeal of painting a picture of an America still very much wet behind the ears;  America is still more a colony than a Nation, and the Dutch population of Sleepy Hollow have not yet been ironed out of existence by the forces of cultural homogenization.  It is thus not only an elegantly-told short story perfect for occasions such as Halloween, but a charming piece of early Americana.  Another example of such is the story of Rip Van Winkle, also laden with Dutch characters though much shorter.  I trust the name and story are singularly familiar to most;  the tale of a happy-go-lucky farmer who has a lie-down under a nap and wakes up twenty years later to find  his wife dead, his country a republic, and his town burgeoning is also captivating.

Anthem

Anthem
© 1938 Ayn Rand
128 pages

In a dark future, the triumph of collectivism has created a global society deteriorating to near-medieval conditions.  Man is utterly broken by the state, dominated by institutions from birth onward. Raised in cohorts in government offices, not by families,  children come of age at fifteen and are assigned their lot in life by the governing authorities.  They toil as drones for the next thirty years before being consigned the House for the Useless, where if they are lucky they will find some meager pleasure in the social programs before being execution as a burden to society.  The state and society are all, so triumphant that even the pronoun "I" has been extinguished.  The human spirit, however, is irrepressible.

Equality 2521 is a sinner in the hands of a suffocating state, a young man who yearns to study the ways of the world and perhaps even to become a scholar, but who is consigned to be a street-sweeper. After stumbling into an abandoned subway tunnel, Equality finds himself for the first time alone, and there in the dark with just his thoughts for company, a psychological journey begins. The tunnel, which he and a couple of sympathetic friends keep hidden from everyone else, becomes their sanctuary, a place for Equality to read books and experiment with the things he finds in the rubbish, a place where he eventually discovers that there are things not written in the Global We's philosophy. There is Electricity, and if he can realize its power he can make the world a better place. Breathlessly he takes his findings to the convention of Scholars, who promptly imprison him for many manifold presumptions (among them, threatening to put candle-makers out of work). Happily for him they are incompetent at incarceration, since so few people have ever rebelled against them, and soon he's escaped to make his fortunes elsewhere.

Anthem is a short work, a novella of no more than 90 pages; I read it chiefly because it was available for free on Amazon, and the delicious irony of something of Rand's being offered for free was too good to pass put. Altogether it's the tale of an individual's self-realization, his struggle for consciousness. Eventually he does, and as in 1984 his rebellion is urged onward by forbidden love for Liberty 5-3000, and given safe harbor by the wild;  the rugged forests outside the bleak We-ruled cities are teeming with life and energy. But among the wild are grown-over homes, and inside them books which reveal how much was lost.  Ultimately Equality and Liberty shed their old identities and emerge as Individuals, and  here the book descends into preaching.  All of the lost passion of twenty years comes bubbling up into Equality's realization that the individual is sovereign, the individual makes the world, and so carried away by it is he that when Liberty professes, "I love you," he replies with a half-page speech about the importance of names and the individual.

I have never Rand before, and will own a bias against her, one I've had since listening to a radio interview with her years ago. Even so, I enjoyed this work for the most part; any tale of man versus the state, of  the natural vs. the contrived, is sure to win me over despite the overweening pronunciations of the last few pages  Considering  that the union of the happy couple results in a pregnancy, there is hope that the book's heroes will learn what the childless Rand never did, that people are born into society as surely as fish are born into the ocean. It is a society of the family, however, a natural one, where we are reared by the bone of our bone and the flesh of our flesh, not an artificial and imposed "Global We".    Even so, this is a fascinating little book, well worth the time spent reading it; regardless of my animosity toward Rand's praise of selfishness, hers was a quick and artful pen.  The similarities between this and 1984 make it a beacon of hope after Orwell's singularly depressing work about the triumph of the state.

Related:

• 1984,  George Orwell
• Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

1984

1984
© 1949 George Orwell
326 pages

1984 needs no introduction. Written in 1949, it envisioned a world of constant surveillance, perpetual war, and a state with  complete control over people’s minds. Concepts from it – “Big Brother”, “thought police”,  and “doublethink” --  appear in pop culture from time to time.  Written as a warning, it has gone unheeded. Today, systems of surveillance are more sophisticated than ever, featuring “SmartCameras” that  track automatically and signal if they exhibit ‘aberrant’ behavior; meanwhile, SmartPhones like the iphone from Apple allow anyone’s location to be tracked – and governments like that of the United States engage in widespread warrantless wiretapping.   Such rampant invasions of privacy are condoned in the name of National Security or convenience, and one wonders when people will say “Enough!”

            I read 1984 back in high school, and it was the first work I ever read without an encouraging ending. I found it depressing, and it had that same effect this week, even though what was coming.  If you have never read it, or if it has been a while since experiencing the story,  it’s one of a man named Winston Smith, who thinks he is the only sane man in the world. Like many others in Airstrip One, an area of a global empire once known as England, he lives a bleak, depressing life. The buildings around him are decaying, the food is terrible, and  most manufactured goods are shoddy if available at all. And there are no arts to feed the soul, to give the mind relief from the universe – no culture, no science, not even honest laughter.  Smith is miserable, and so is everyone else – but he’s seemingly the only man who knows he is miserable, who knows that life can’t be this bad on accident. But then he chances to find a kindred spirit, and his spirits begin to soar…until they’re captured again, and ground up like so much beef chuck.

            What strikes me most about 1984 is the utter inhumanity that people are subjected to.  Every aspect of life is Controlled:  there is no spontaneity. Even the English language is being steadily reduced, a mighty oak turned into a utility pole stinking of resin. English in its altered form, “Newspeak”, is an engineered tongue, crafted carefully with the intention of making seditious – free and expressive – thought impossible.  Virtually everyone live under the constant view and orders of the Telescreen, which not only spews forth propaganda, but issues orders. Under such scrutiny, people live behind masks, constantly managing their faces and preventing any kind of expression, even unguarded eyes, from betraying them to the telescreen. Everything sacred to the human experience – music, family life – is broken and its remnants put to use: children, for instance, spy on their parents.  Little wonder that Winston’s greatest acts of defiance comes in having sex in a field:  such passion is impossible to govern, which is why the Party seeks to destroy it completely.

            How, in 1949, did Orwell manage to predict such supremacy of institutions and machines over men?  He had witnessed elements of both already, at work both in totalitarian and democratic states during World War 2, but considering how primitive television was in those days the domination of the telescreen in his work is remarkable. What would Orwell make of the dominance of computers and the internet in our lives, wherein we expose so much of our private selves thinking we are safe…when in reality,  every search query into a Google box, every click of the mouse, can be monitored and saved into a database?

            1984 is a short work, barely three hundred pages, but it speaks volumes about the human condition. It's never been more important to read than this day and age.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
© 2009  Seth Grahame-Smith
319 pages

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the old story of girl meets boy, girl declares boy to be Worst Man in the World and humiliates him, girl and boy fight off horde of drones from hell together and decide the other's alright after all. And there's dancing, lots of dancing.

Hearing about this book some many months ago scandalized me at first. The idea of modern people, taking a Classic and sullying it with their infantile obsession with monsters and sparking vampires! -- and yet after I read the  Classic, the idea of Elizabeth Bennet dispatching zombies with a musket was too good to pass up. (It was a bit silly of me to defend the honor of a book I hadn't read, anyway.) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in a word, hilarious, largely because the author has managed to take most of Austen's text and set it against a completely bizarre background, one in which England is suffering under a prolonged plague of zombies.  The dead refuse to stay properly buried, and insist on shambling around trying to nibble on people's heads -- and being bitten can cause the transformation of the living into the undead.  In this world, families who can afford it send their sons and daughters to the East to learn martial arts, and children spend their time learning musketry instead of the pianoforte.


The woes of Mother Bennet in trying to marry off each of her five daughters are now complicated by the fact that every trip into the countryside between homes is perilous  attacks on  carriages by zombie bands are common, and solitary travelers are suicides. It's not as if she's rich enough to support a security force of ninjas, not like Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Those who have seen the Leonardo de Caprio version of Romeo and Juliet may have been amused, as was I, by the combination of Shakespearean language and modern scenery, wherein the Capulets and Montagues fight not with swords in a plaza, but with pistols at a gas station.  That kind of contradiction is here: the archness of Austen's writing and the dignity of her characters stand against the absurdity of zombies and ninjas. For the most part, Grahame-Smith makes subtle adjustments: Mr. Bennet is cleaning his musket while Mrs. Bennet prattles on, Mr. Darcy admires Elizabeth's martial poses rather than her piano playing, and so on. He also adds to the plot; characters in general are much more aggressive here, with Mr. Bennet and Darcy both threatening violence against chatterbox women who won't leave them alone.  Some alterations are more substantial, like the fates of Charlotte, Mr. Collins, Lydia, and Wickham. At its best,  the tension between Austen and Grahame-Smith is wildly funny, as when a ball is interrupted by a zombie attack and Elizabeth's impulsive plan to follow Darcy outside and kill him for insulting her (it's the warrior code, doncha know) falls apart.  Other times, it's a bit too absurd.The Bennet sisters being warriors, renown for their expertise in slaying the walking damned, that's hilarious -- ("Girls! Pentagram of Death!"). But ninjas? That's just silly. At its worst, Graham's brief additions can be gratuitously vulgar:  one character becomes lame and incontinent in the course of the story, and the humiliation of their constantly soiling themselves becomes a running joke for the final third of the novel -- a tasteless display which dampened even my enjoyment of the Epic Duel between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth.

I would have like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a lot more were it not for the toilet humor.  The zombie plague almost makes the book like a western, with lots of action and the wilderness being a dangerous, hostile place.  Unlike in the original novel, here the blue-blooded characters have use: they're not sitting around gossiping, they're out defending the realm against the 'sorry stricken'. And the invisible 'other' characters, the legions of servants  and laborers who were nonexistent int the original, make quite a few appearances here. Usually they're beating eaten, but they're there.   I don't know that I'll be reading any more of the "Quirk Classic" series, but this is definitely a work I'll remember, and it met the yearning in me for more of Pride and Prejudice.

Enemy of God

Enemy of God: A Novel of Arthur
© 1996 Bernard Cornwell
416 pages    

      Enemy of God  stunned me. I thought I knew what to expect from a Bernard Cornwell novel: a solid, irreverent hero with a talent for fighting, enticing and dramatic narration of historical battles, and a lot of wry commentary thrown in.  And Enemy delivered that, but it’s a much different beast than I anticipated. Second in his King Arthur trilogy, it sees Cornwell flirt with the realms of fantasy and horror. Although I opened it planning to continue an thrilling historical series, Cornwell surprised me with a read very much appropriate for the Halloween season.

        The Winter King set the stage:  it is the twilight of the fifth century, the dawn of the sixth, and Britain is going mad as the year 500 approaches. The isle is rifle with conflict between the invading Saxons and the defending Celtic Britons. The Britons were once united under High King  Uther, but his death left a baby on the throne, and now all of the British kingdoms fight with one another as eagerly as they do against the Saxons. In Winter King,  Arthur emerged as the baby king’s half-uncle, the eldest son of the deceased high king but illegitimate. Arthur strove to unite the Britons, and succeeded – but in Enemy of God, he must defend the  peace from internal strife, dark conspiracies,  and the growing Saxon hordes.

         Cornwell’s usual strengths are present here, but the Arthur books are exceptional because of their larger-than-life characters and the fantasy elements, which are not found in any other of Cornwell’s novels to my knowledge.  Arthur and Merlin are the titans;  Cornwell’s Merlin surpasses even Albus Dumbledore for being a half-mad mentor – and like Dumbledore, Merlin has his own plans and ambitions which ensnare Arthur and his lieutenant, our narrator Derfel; plans  that may run contrary to those of the heroes.  Merlin is a chessmaster, forever pulling the strings, and there’s a shadow of malevolence to his  hoped-for future. Mordred, Morgan, Galahad, and Lancelot are here as well. I didn’t mention Lancelot* in my comments on The Winter King, in part because he’s a truly unpleasant character, ambitious, vain, and deceitful. Believed by most (especially the ladies) to be a mighty white knight in shining armor, he manages to achieve great praise despite never accomplishing anything, aside from keeping his pretty face free of battle scars.  Arthur, of course, dominates the novel, and is legendary – an almost perfect leader, but he is hopelessly in love with Guinevere and doggedly loyal to his friends. Alas for him and Britain,  he is not as sound a judge of character as he is a friend, and the result is disaster...and for Arthur, heart-rending pain.

All this makes for a fantastic story: this series is truly set apart from Cornwell's other work. If the characters, humor, historical details, and intense storytelling weren't enough, the backdrop is faintly fantastic, and increasing horrific  Regular fantasy readers may not notice it, but it's a jarring difference from Cornwell's other work, and definitely gives the story and edge.Arthur and Derfel go on quests to dark ruins, fight against monsters (people given to madness, rather reminiscent of the Reapers from the Firefly universe),  and return to find  hell releashed on the peaceful world of Camelot. It would have made for perfect Halloween reading, especially as one of the incidents fell on Samhain and Celtic mythlogy plays a crucial role.

Enemy of God is magnificent.I await Excalibur to arrive in the mail.



* Think of Prince Charming from Shrek 2. Seriously, I watched the movie last night and thought, "That's who Lancelot reminded me of!".

The Good Guy

The Good Guy
© 2007 Dean Koontz
400 pages

"Good guys finish last, Tim."

"Maybe not if they stay in the race."

Tim Carrier's just an honest working man who enjoys relaxing at a local bar in the evenings, exchanging insults with his friend the barkeep and drawing eccentric strangers into interesting conversations. Only...the last conversation ended with him being given an envelope containing $10,000 and instructions that he would receive the rest once the woman was dead.  Tim's been mistaken for a hitman.

Being mistaken for an assassin is odd enough, but then the actual hitman takes for Tim for his new boss. Thinking quickly,  Tim tells the man that his services are no longer required: the job is off, but he'll still be paid. The ruse works long enough for Tim to escape and find the woman whose life hangs in the balance. Soon both he and she are on the run from a talented killer with vast resources.

A friend of mine has persistently recommended Dean Koontz,  and after reading The Good Guy I can understand why. Koontz is an effective horror writer: alternating chapters tell the story from the vantage point of both Tim and the hitman, who is one of the most disturbing characters I've ever encountered.  He's a genuine sociopath, and while in his head Koontz uses small details to creep the reader out. The flowers that Tim notes for their smell are seen and dismissed by Krait reflexively as not being useful; they're nontoxic.  The plot advances quickly, and Koontz's writing constantly hits the reader -- his descriptive prose and dialogue are evocative, and every paragraph made putting the book down more difficult. I read it in one sitting, not being able to resist the feeling of "Just one more chapter..." until well after midnight, when the story ended for these characters who had so ensnared my attention.

Koontz is a compelling author, and will remain of interest for future reads -- though, like King, I wouldn't be surprised if I avoided him given the creepiness factor. Suitable reading as we approach Halloween, though.

Christine

Christine
© 1983 Stephen King
471 pages

Let's go for a ride, big guy. Let's cruise.

It's 1983, and Dennis Guilder is just starting to get a handle on what happened four years ago, in that last and terrible year of high school when his best friend lost his mind and the university town of Libertyville, Pennsylvania was visited by ten murders.

It all started the summer before their senior year, when they drove by a ruined car marked by a "For Sale" sign. The car -- a 1958 Plymouth Fury -- instantly enraptures Arnie Cunningham, Dennis' friend and pimply ward. To Dennis, the rusting wreck is a horror to behold,  a genuine money pit, and he pleads with Arnie not to buy it -- but love is blind.  Renting garage space from a shady businessman, Arnie devotes himself to restoring the hulk named 'Christine' to its -- her -- former glory.  His devotion to Christine changes him. The timid high-school reject suddenly gains confidence, pride, defiance -- and anger. The change unsettles those who know him, and it is only the beginning. As the months past, Arnie seems to be speaking with another man's voice -- a voice contemptuous and bitter.

And then there's...Christine. Christine provokes an instant reaction from everyone who draws close. For Arnie, that feeling was love. To others -- his parents, to Dennis, to his newly-found girlfriend Leigh -- the car is spooky.It smells of death, and haunts those who are close to Arnie: they feel watched by cold eyes.  Everyone but Arnie knows there is something wrong with this car: it should have been left to decay. As the year develops, Dennis digs into the history of Christine and the man who sold it hoping to find answers and realizes there's far more to this story than a young boy and his first love. This is a car possessed -- by hatred, by implacable maliciousness, and those who cross paths with it and those it claims as its own are destined to a grisly fate.

I'm not one for horror, usually: as mysterious and creepy as horror stories can be, the bite is usually dulled by their reliance on the chaotic and supernatural. Even so, King had me with Christine. I read it in two sittings, listening to the fifties hits that Christine always seemed to be playing and glancing from time to time at a large image of Christine displayed on my computer monitor. Christine is...spooky; a car seemingly lost in time. Throughout the novel I puzzled over the relationship between Christine and Arnie -- what was it that held them together, and to the Fury's previous owner? Did the car possess the man, or the man the car? What lives on this murderous car?

Christine is compelling and creepy, drawing the reader into a world of deathly nostalgia. I don't recall either The Stand or Firestarter having this effect on me, nor did I notice the way King sometimes throws the reader under the bus of his characters' horrified thinking.  I'd recommend it if you're in the mood for a little horror, although it's a well-done novel even if you're not in the mood for goosebumps.

Demon in my View

Demon in my View
© 2000 Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
176 pages

During my high school years, while roaming through a bookstore, my eyes fell upon a book titled Tiger, Tiger. That sounded similar to William Blakes' "The Tygre", which is one of my favorite poems, so I picked it up. Tiger, Tiger was a vampire novel, the first I had ever read, and I found its story to be incredibly interesting and well-written. Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire let me down compared to it. Although I'm not usually much for horror, Rhodes is so readable that I decided try another book by her -- albiet many years later.

Demon in my View, like Tiger, Tiger, is named after a line in a poem -- although this is not one I recognize. This book is the story of Jessica, the teen author of Tiger, Tiger and another vampire book, both of which she has penned under the name of Ash Night. Although she is becoming a literacy success, she is an outcast at school and most everywhere else. Then one day a new student arrives and seems remarkably familiar to her: it's as if a character from her novel has become alive. She is drawn to him -- both out of personal attraction or attraction to the character he reminds her of.

The explaination for this is interesting, and I'll leave it hidden for those who would be interested in reading the book. Jessica is drawn into the world of her own creation while witches attempt to protect her from the vampires and her own self. I predicted the conclusion, but not with any confidence. What I enjoy most about Atwater-Rhodes' books is that her world is different, and somewhat more believable. Her vampires do not scorn the sun, nor do they sleep in coffins or fear Christian symbols. They can change their form at will, generally live apart from humans in their own towns, and hunt humans as prey. Like predators, they all maintain a territory and conflicts arise between powerful vampires. Their predator/prey mindset dominates them to the point that vampires see one another as either their inferiors or their superiors. Only one vampire has even hinted that he has an equal in the two books I've read. Her witches are likewise different: two of the three witches in this book are "good" people, and all three are concerned with protecting humans from the vampires who hunt them.

Demon in my View was a quick and entrancing read, and I wouldn't mind continuuing with the rest of her stand-alone books. The only issue I would have with this book is its length: 176 pages goes by fairly quickly.

This Week at the Library (19/7)

Last week's reading consisted of The Stand by Stephen King and The Associate by Philip Margolin. I also checked out The Plains of Passage by Jean M. Auel, thinking that it was third in the series, but found out that night that it was not. I returned the book and focused on reading The Stand. I finished it yesterday, and it was quite a read. It was reccommended to me by a number of friends, and a blog I like to read mentioned the book in one of its articles on the Left Behind series. I've been meaning to read it for several months now, but I seem to always forget. Last week I checked it out, though, and I read it. The book is a end-of-the-world horror thriller. A virus called the "Superflu" or "Captain Trips" escapes a military lab and gives western civilization a firm kick in the 'nards. Military officials pass it on to China, the Soviet Union (the book was set in th 1980s at first), and western Europe. The book doesn't mention what happens to the rest of the world, but if what happens in the U.S. is any indicator, nearly everyone dies.

Not everyone dies, though, and the survivors in North America are drawn toward two cities through their dreams. Some people are drawn toward Las Vegas by a man who seems to embody the Devil, and others are drawn toward Boulder, to a very long-lived old woman named "Mother Abagail". The two societies begin to rebuild themselves. As the book's plot unfolds, we see that it's a good/evil struggle with severe religious overtones. That annoyed me, as I had been sold on the book because of the idea that this is a plot that could actually happen -- and some magic floating cowboy is farfetched. Good wins, of course. I don't know that I'll read any more Stephen King since horror isn't my preferred genre, but The Stand was enjoyable. I thought to compare it to two series of books. First is the Left Behind series. However far-fetched the character of Randal Flagg is, he's more believable than the oafish Nicolae Carpathia of Left Behind. Carpatha has a better name, though, so I'll give him that.

The second series that this book reminded me of is Countdown. The Countdown books were written in 1998. They were set in 1999. The first book, January, was set in January of 1999. The second book was February, and the series continued as such until the conclusion of the book at the "beginning" of the Millenium in 2000. The books were meant to cash in on the end of the world hysteria around that time. Some people thought Jesus was going to come back (as they did in in 999), and some thought that Y2K was going to destroy society. I don't know what happened in 2000 in the books, because I didn't get that far. In the beginning, though, society was dealt a grevious blow. On 1 January, 1999, all adults and all children turned into black goo and died. This left the teenagers in charge; scary. The teenagers do as the survivors in The Stand do, although it takes them a bit longer to "rebuild society". They're more concerned with partying . I recall enjoying the books, but as they progressed they included a lot of mystical prophecy, and that annoyed me. I like my apocalypses secular -- religious apocalypses are always silly. I doubt these books are still around, although I did see used copies being sold on Amazon a couple of years ago. I stopped reading around "August", because by that point the "prophecies" were everywhere. The cause of the spontaneous gooification of adults and children was a virus -- this one engineered by the Russians, I think. I never read the end of the book, so I can't be sure -- but I've read synopses of the series.

The second book I read was Philip Margolin's The Associate. It concerns an associate of a big Portland law firm who begins to think that his firm is trying to protect a big pharmaceutical that wants to sell baby-deforming drugs. I enjoyed the book, although I figured out who the "bad guy" was fairly early on. I'll be reading more Margolin in the future.

Pick of the Week: The Stand by Stephen King.

That finishes last week's reading.The third book I selected -- The Plains of Passage -- was actually fourth in the Earth's Children series, so I returned it unread. This week, I picked up:

1. The Middle Ages by Dorothy Mills.
2. Theories for Everything by John Langone, Bruce Stutz, and Andrea Gianopoulos.
3. The Mammoth Hunters by Jean M. Auel.
4. The German Empire by Michael Stürmer.
   

As always, I have high hopes.