Interview with me

For those of y'all who don't read David Cranmer's The Education of a Pulp Writer blog (and why not?!), he has posted a short interview with me. Head on over there and learn more than you probably want to know.

Forgotten Books: Justice, Inc. (The Avenger #1) by Paul Ernst

(This is my latest contribution to Patti Abbott's Forgotten Book Project. For the complete list, head on over to her website.)

Two thoughts come to mind when I finished reading Justice, Inc., the debut novel featuring the pulp hero, The Avenger. On the one hand, I thought sometimes, enough is enough. On the other, the timing of the novel’s publication couldn’t have been worse.

Let’s take the date first. The cover of the new Avenger magazine is September 1939. I haven’t read any of the World War II-era novels of Shadow, Doc Savage, or the other pulp heroes but I suspect all of them seemed trite when facing the onslaught of Nazi Germany. As relentless as Richard Benson, the Avenger, is, Hitler was rolling through Europe in his own relentless drive for the Third Reich. How terrifying must that have been.

Having said that, had the Avenger been slightly more original, he might have had a longer shelf life. Other than his malleable face, Richard Benson’s story is not very original. By 1939, Doc Savage and his team had been fighting bad guys for six years. The Shadow a year longer. Tarzan was out there. So was Zorro, Sam Spade, Superman, and the new guy on the block, Batman. Now, again, there was a lot of borrowing of ideas back in the 1930s but the Avenger, at least in this first book, didn’t have that special spark needed to carry a series.

That’s not to say Justice, Inc., isn’t entertaining. The setup at the beginning of the book is pretty good. Self-made millionaire adventurer Richard Benson, along with his wife and young daughter, force their way onto a public airliner from Buffalo, NY, to Montreal. His mother-in-law was dying and they needed to get there. Benson visits the lavatory and, upon exiting, finds no trace of his family. Moreover, everyone on board asserts that he boarded the plane alone. Benson has a breakdown and winds up in a mental asylum with a curious physical reaction: his hair is completely white, as is his face. His face, succumbing to the shock of the situation, becomes paralyzed. He learns that he can push the skin of his face around...and it remains in the altered shape. This comes in handy as Benson starts to investigate what really happened on the airplane as he can disguise himself.

The writing style is pure pulp: lots of action, lots of reiteration, and lots (and lots) of words describing the nature of Benson’s eyes. I started rolling mine when the author, Paul Ernst, would describe eyes. Isn’t there another aspect of Benson you can describe?

What follows now is pure SPOILER so, if you’re intrigued about the story and want to read it, skip this paragraph. As a reader, the more I learned about the bad guys, the more I realized what happened to Benson’s wife and daughter. Like any protagonist (and me, had I found myself in a similar position), Benson holds out hope of a happy ending, of finding his family alive and well. It wasn’t to be. Ernst leads the reader on in a few places but it ultimately falls to one of the supporting cast to tell Benson the honest truth. The ending makes sense and, with it, Benson creates Justice, Inc. to combat evil. It’s a Batman-esque origin story and a worthy origin at that. It’s just not original. But, then again, how many origin stories are original?

Justice, Inc. is a very quick read. I listened to the free version over at Uvula Audio, the same place you can get Doc Savage #1. In fact, they are going to record some additional Savage stories this summer, something to which I’m looking forward. Chances are, I won’t be reading another Avenger novel.

Anyone out there want to let me know if there are additional good Avenger novels to read? Am I being too harsh?

CSI: Miami - "Backfire" - Review

My review of last night's CSI: Miami episode, "Backfire," is now available at BSCreview.

April's Forgotten Music - It's NEXT week

As Perplexio pointed out--and I would have noticed had I but glanced at a calendar--the last Thursday of April is NEXT week, not the day after tomorrow. That is, 29 April.

So, everyone has an additional week to post on 29 April.

Apologies for the confusion.

Forgotten Music: April 2010 Edition - Call for Entries

Hello all. This is Forgotten Music week. Let me know if you are planning to post a Forgotten Music blog entry this Thursday, 22 April. I'll be sure to get you on the list.

And, as always, ANYONE can play. Just let me know ahead of time and I'll get you on the list.

Oddly, I haven't determined what album I'll be writing about yet, although I have a few contenders.

Forgotten Books: Doc Savage #2: The Land of Terror

Doc Savage and dinosaurs. Do you need any other enticement to read this book?

The Land of Terror was the second Doc Savage novel, published in April 1933, a mere month after Doc’s debut in print. It’s an interesting time to have a new superhero to follow. The Great Depression was in full swing, America had a new president, and pulp novels and stories were in great demand.

Never one to waste time, author Lester Dent (writing under the house name Kenneth Robeson), launches the story in a single paragraph. Jerome Coffern, chemist and friend of Doc, is murdered by a poison gas dubbed the Smoke of Eternity. This isn’t some supernatural creature; this is a weapon shot from a gun. The end result of a Smoke of Eternity strike is the body completely dissolving save for a forearm that extended outside the cloud. Doc, of course, was waiting for Coffern and chases the thugs who killed his friend. After a scuffle, Clark Savage, Jr., determines the men worked for a criminal mastermind (is there any other kind?) nicknamed Kar. He is responsible for creating this death cloud and weaponizing it.

Now, judging by the cover image posted above (from the Bantam edition), you’d be expecting Doc and his Fabulous Five Friends to get to wherever the dinosaurs are as soon as possible. Oddly, you don’t. More than half the book is spent with Doc investigating clues to discover more truths about Kar, why he wanted to kill Coffern, and all sorts of other dastardly deeds. Along the way, the team picks up Oliver Wording Bittman, a taxidermist who saved Doc’s father sometime before. Together, all seven men fly across the continent and land on a South Pacific island named Thunder Island. It’s the source for the chemicals used to make the Smoke of Eternity. Oh, and there are dinosaurs.

Doc saves the day and constantly saves his friends, too. Hey! I didn’t give anything away. There are still 179 more books to read, okay. How he does it never fails to impress and entertain. There’s a big plot twist my 2010-era brain saw coming miles away but it’s still fun to see it play out.

The body count in this novel is higher than in the debut novel. Doc gets mad and kills the criminals—usually in self-defense—but he also kills some of the dinosaurs. I’ve read elsewhere that Lester Dent toned down the violence in subsequent books. I was okay with the violence here, especially given the era in which it was written. Things were bleak in early 1933. Sometimes, our entertainment merely mirrors what’s already in the world. That would include some of the cultural biases of white folks against native Pacific islanders. I don’t hold that against Dent. It was the time, after all.

This book is quick, escapist, adventure-filled fun. You don’t need a lot of brain cells to enjoy this stuff. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Adventure House publishes two novels in a single volume. They also include historical essays and background information on Dent, Doc Savage, or other pertinent subjects. Plus, you get the black-and-white illustrations to boot. I’ll easily be reading more adventures in the coming months and years.

CSI: Miami - "Spring Breakdown" - Episode Review

My review of last night's CSI: Miami episode is now available at BSC Review.

Writing about reading

I've written a third post about the nature of reading over at Do Some Damage. Today it's how books are time capsules.

The first was titled "What is Reading?"
The second was titled "The iPad: is it medium or is it the message?"

Needle Mag #1 is live!

All you have to do is head on over to Lulu.com.

Book Review Club: Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

(This is the April 2010 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For a complete list, click the icon at the end of this review.)

In my reading life, I can list only a handful of books that have truly captured my fascination: To Kill a Mockingbird, Mystic River, The Shadow of the Wind, Ender's Game, Money Shot, Hyperion, The Dawn Patrol, Tarzan of the Apes, and Treasure Island. These nine novels just landed themselves a tenth sibling.

Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville, is a huge, engrossing, towering, dense, baroque, and incomparable novel. It's a fantasy story in that magical elements exist in the world of New Crobuzon. It's also a science fiction novel in that there's a prominent steampunk element running throughout the entire story. It's part horror since there are monsters in this land, as well as man-made monstrosities. It's part social fiction in that Mieville's political philosophy clearly comes out in how his characters interact with each other. Perdido Street Station (PSS), however, is more than the sum of its parts.

Other reviewers have tried to put into words the scope and style of this gorgeous novel and more than a few have chosen Dickensian. That adjective carries with it more than a century of baggage and not everything to which it is applied deserves it. PSS does. In his novels, Charles Dickens explored then-contemporary social issues within the framework of a complex, sometimes convoluted, plot structure. Characters abound in a Dickens novel, little ones and big ones, some playing only a minor part, others consuming whole chunks of the story. Mieville's characters operate in a similar way, only their world is fictional, fantastical, and more than a little depressing.

The level of detail in which Mieville describes the architecture, history, geography, and population of New Crobuzon warrants it's own, separate essay. If you've followed my discussion of world-building over at SF Safari, you'll remember my thoughts on world-building. In short, I think many SF/F books suffer from bloated world-building--too much travelogue, too little narrative-- so much so that the plot gets sacrificed along the way. It's why you see so many thousand-page doorstops on the shelves of bookstores and libraries. Mieville straddles this line tenuously. He doesn't stop the action so long as to give a five-page mini-history. Instead, he gives you a page here and there, the cumulative effect being a wider understanding of New Crobuzon and it's place in the world of Bas-Lag.

By now you're probably knocking on your computer screens and saying, "Yeah, Scott, but what is the book about?" [Deep breath] Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is a scientist, a human, who studies crisis energy. His girlfriend is Lin, an artist and a Kepri (a humanoid with a insectile head who "speaks" in sign language). Isaac and Lin each get commissioned at the same time for different jobs. Isaac is hired by Yagharek, a Garuda (race of humanoid-bird creatures) to restore his flight (his wings have been hacked off for an unknown crime). Lin is hired by Mr. Motley, the godfather of all crime lords in the city, to sculpt a statue of him. (If you thought Jabba the Hutt was disgusting, you'd be horrified at Motley's description. He has altered, AKA "re-made," himself by adding various body parts to his original human frame.)

For the first third of the novel, you see Isaac and Lin accept their commissions, interact with their friends, and you, the reader, are treated to a sepia-tinged snapshot of New Crobuzon. The novel is hardly flawless and the dense prose at the beginning--replete with overly descriptive passages detailing just how old and fetid the city is--can be daunting. More than once I wondered when the story was going to pick up and what the main narrative arc was going to be. It shows up in the most unlikely source: Isaac's research. In an attempt to learn how natural things fly (to better understand how he can give Yagharek new wings), Isaac sends out secret word that he'll pay for anything with wings, even things like caterpillars who will eventually get wings. His is given a stolen larva that has been secreted out of the main research area of Parliament (located in a giant tower named Perdido Street Station, so named because of the elevated railway that crisscross the city). Oddly, this larva only responds to a hallucinogenic drug called "dreams--t." Not knowing what the creature is, Isaac buys some of the drug and feeds it to the larva.

You remember when your mom told you never to mess with things you don't understand? Clearly, Isaac forgot that lesson. The larva grows and the thing--yes, Thing--that emerges is a slake-moth. One of the more unique aspects of Mieville's writing is that he gives you just enough description of an object or person but you still never quite get the entire picture. In addition, different readers will have different takes on the same creatures. To say the slake-moth is bad news is a gross understatement. It's wings hypnotizes it's victims, bringing in their minds myriads of nightmares. The moths then drink the dreamlike juices. Yuck. It's been a long time since I read any horror literature. I'm not squeamish by nature but the first time a moth fed just about got me. To give you an idea of how ferocious these things are, the aliens from "Alien" wouldn't stand a chance.

And there are five slake-moths. The one in Isaac's lab escapes and frees it's siblings. The rest of the novel is Isaac and his friends trying to kill the moths. Other characters enter the stage. The mayor of New Crobuzon, Bentham Rudgutter, rallies the military and other Re-Made creatures, trying to capture the moths for his own corrupt reasons. The Weaver, a giant, spider-like, god-like creature who has human hands but can also travel between planes of existence, has his own agenda when it comes to the moths. There are other things that populate this chimeric city but I won't spoil the fun of their discovery.

Perdido Street Station is not without its weaknesses. Certain characters that you think are important drop from the main stage and, inexplicably, never return. There's a giant coincidence that pushes the story along that I saw coming and was a little let down when it proved to be true. The denouement at the end of the story is satisfying. I can't say the same thing about the epilogue after the big ending. It was rather disappointing and it keeps me from giving this novel my complete five-star recommendation.

But I wholeheartedly give it four-and-a-half or more. It's not a perfect book. But it is unlike anything I've ever read. I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite it's flaws. I was completely engrossed by the world and want to return. After I finished the book, I was spent. It took me a week to figure out what to read next. There are so many books and authors I want to read that I usually have a rule: I don’t read the same author back to back. In my audiobook world, I’ve kept that rule, listening to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (completely the opposite type book). In my reading world, I’ve broken the rule. I realized that the only person who can follow Mieville is Mieville.

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Needle: A Magazine of Noir - Coming Soon!

For those of you who don't know, Steve Weddle has got it into his head to create an ink-on-paper noir magazine. It's called Needle, a metaphoric name that indicates the type of prose you'll see within the covers: sharp, hard, and edgy. John Hornor has designed the look of the mag and it's sharp as well. Naomi Johnson and I shared editing duties along with Steve.

For more information, head on over to the Needle Mag website. There's a photo of the first issue proof here. There's a Facebook page here.

All things considered, it's something I'm looking forward to having on my shelf. And I feel proud to have a part in its creation. Thanks to Steve for inviting me along for the ride.