Book 79. Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik

The second one of the Temeraire novels, and the series stays strong.  Again, the Napoleonic Wars, only with dragons in aerial and naval combat.  This one got almost episodic, as if Novik were settling in to stretch out her story.  This felt like middle ground, setting up later novels, in a series that’s gone five deep already.  

Essentially, now that Temeraire’s lineage has been discovered, the British are kowtowing to Chinese pressures, and so Laurence must accompany Temeraire on a sailing junket back to China, where Temeraire must be returned to the emperor.  The entire novel follows the long boat journey and wait in China.  And since the action is kind of a foregone conclusion, it’s not as dramatic or exciting.  Novik peppers the story with plenty of battles and clever banter, and it’s still delightful to watch the interaction between Temeraire and Laurence.  

It’s got all the intrigue of the swashbuckling adventures, with the added awesomeness of the dragons.  It keeps getting deeper and more nifty as it explores the mythology of the dragons and the impact on the wars and society.  Amazon recently offered the first Temeraire novel for free on the Kindle, so if you were ever interested in starting it, now would be the time.

Book 78. Pride and Prejudice and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

It’s as advertised. This book really is just Pride and Prejudice with zombies added in.  To fully appreciate it, you really need to read Austen’s classic.  Jane Austen is responsible Sex in the City, all the romantic comedies that plague our cinemas, and basically all that is Katherine Heigl.  It’s not her fault, just like Edgar Allen Poe never intended for Eli Roth to get all his awkward teen vengeance on the girls who laughed at his pimply ass in high school, but she is the seed from which all this hell has been brought forth.  So it is only respectful that Grahame-Smith sully her fine English work with zombie mayhem. 

P&P&Z stays true to the course.  It’s the exact plot to Pride and Prejudice, to the point that kids could theoretically read P&P&Z instead of Austen for courses and get away with it, but every few pages, zombie action occurs.  It doesn’t even deter from the original premise of matrimony for all, except where the book would slow down with interminable carriage rides from place to place, zombies attack the villagers.  It’s funny…at first.  Then the joke kind of gets old.  It’s like a SNL movie.  What worked as a five minute sketch gets weak when stretched out over an entire two hours.  To Grahame-Smith’s credit, he keeps true to form, and doesn’t overdo it.  If he had bothered to recraft the story more than a few moments here or there, it might have been funnier.  Instead, he gently tucks a combination of zombie brutality and bad kung fu cinema into his story.  

Here, England has been beset by dreadfuls and unmentionables, who beset the countryside.  The five Bennet daughters, trained in China by swordmasters, keep the pastoral village safe from the hordes.  Other than that, it’s still the same matchmaking swoon that makes all the period pieces pool pussyjuices.  

The movie needs to be done with all sincerity, as if it were a real romantic piece, only with occasional sword fighting.  Because Grahame-Smith takes himself seriously, it works.  His next book is supposed to be Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but again, this will be a joke that outstays its welcome.  Even when Jesus Christ took on the nosferatu, they had to make it a musical.  If Grahame-Smith was smart, he’d stick with the Victorian stuff, and do some Dickens.  A Tale of Two Cities Full of Zombies?  A Christmas Carol with Vampires.  That’s more like it.

Book 77. The Secret Life of Houdini by Larry Sloman and William Kalush

Houdini was a crazy motherfucker.  Most people know only of his escapist tricks, or that he was sort of the father of the modern magician.  But this fantastic book gets into his supposed involvement with the OSS, how he was potentially a spy for the US Government while touring as an international celebrity.  It’s an interesting concept, which makes sense.  Magicians are trained in slight of hand, lockpicking, cold reading, distraction.  They would make for excellent spies.  

Houdini was a pretty fierce character, too.  When he started doing his different escapes, magicians would come out of the woodwork trying to discredit him.  Houdini wasn’t so much a fight fire with fire as a fight fire with fire, kill their families and pets, burn down their houses, and salt the earth so that nothing may grow.  It wasn’t enough for Houdini to be good at what he did, or foster some sort of commraderie with his fellow entertainers, but he had to be the best, and crush everyone who ever crossed him.  More times than not, Houdini would attend competitors shows, screaming at them from the footlights, and getting into fistfights.  He would use the newspapers, and huge publicity stunts to pimp himself.  

Even better was the portion of the book where Houdini battles the Spiritualists.  Spiritualism involved so called mediums contacting those that had passed, and became a religion that suckered in presidents, dignitaries, especially Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, whose wife was a medium.  What’s crazy about this battle was that Houdini desperately believed in the afterlife, and was offended that people were taking advantage of others by lying and faking.  The battle became extremely public, violent, and personal.  Houdini spent millions of his own dollars to discredit mediums across the globe.  In turn, the mediums would often give seances where spirits would claim that Houdini was fated to die within the year.  It got ugly, and it was amazing.  

The Houdini story is mindblowing, and the book is really outstanding.  It puts into perspective just how much of an influence Houdini had, not just on the world of magic, but on the American landscape in general.

Book 76. Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant

Bageant writes like you would imagine talk radio should sound.  He’s Garrison Keilloresque, but he tries to couch everything in a Blue Collar Comedy tour patois.  His entire schtick is rooted in claiming that he’s just one of the salt of the earth, just a beer swilling good ol’ boy sitting in the bar tossing out moderately intelligent political activism.  He’s middle of the road, with more or less democratically liberal tendencies.  The point of the entire essay collection is that if democrats want to win back the white house (written before the Obama victory, natch) they need to reach out to the trailer park folks that are being bated by the Republicans with the promise of a Omaha Steak in every Foreman Grill, and a Git R Done sticker on every big screen TV that costs more than the trailer they call home. 

It’s a valid message, that the Republicans have ben winning the great unwashed by playing on their civic and religious pride, but in actuality are raping them the same as everyone else.  The essays are well-written and cogent, essentially dealing with how the trailer folk are getting it in the poopchute, and how, by getting into high credit debt society, pooh-poohing all faithful folks in the name of the few that are fanatical, and how liberals make themselves the enemy with a sense of superiority.  

And while, sure, all that Bageant talks about it terrible and true, it’s my same problem with all political prose. What are we going to do about it? We do nothing.  All the problems Bageant foresaw came to fruition, particularly the housing crisis.  But while it’s easy to decry what’s wrong and how terrible the system is, there is not a practical way to fix it.  Everyone knows the system is fucked up, and everyone else who has a political viewpoint always comes off as an asshole, but nobody knows how to make things better.  And I’m willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, but I’m still not doing much better.

Book 75. The Annunciations of Hank Meyerson, Mama’s Boy and Scholar by Scott Muskin

So one day, I’m sitting at home, when I receive a package in the mail.  I love getting packages in the mail.  In it, was a hardcover book I knew nothing about with a handwritten letter saying “Hey, someone said you’d probably like my book.  Thanks — Scott.”  And thus, thanks to the kind ministrations of Dustin Rowles and some of our readership, I was given Annunciations, winner of the Parthenon Prize for Fiction.  

Both Dustin and The Boozehound gave this book explosively effusive recommendations, and I can only say, if you jive more with their style, you most assuredly must pick this up with hands and hug it to your chest and never ever let it go.  Knowing what I do of these fine gentlemen, their praise makes absolute sense.  This book was written for guys like them — smart asses in contented marriages, who write pithy commentary about life, mostly bitching about how inane and stupid it and everything else is.  This book is well written, and stunning, and built around an excellent story.  I just didn’t enjoy it. 

Since Dustin and Senor Boynton wrote their summations, I’m making this mostly about my take.  It felt mopey, like what would happen if Holden Caulfield grew up, went to college, and got unhappily married.  And unlike you savages, I fucking LOVED Catcher in the Rye.  Still do, bitches.  Hank, our hero, is a pudgy whiner, who spends most of the novel complaining and feeling sorry for himself.  His marriage is falling apart, but unlike mostly novelists, Muskin has the balls to have Hank desperately try to hold the shards together which in turn makes him fall the fuck apart. 

I’m at a point in my life where it feels like I’m doing that.  I’m standing at the door of my own fucking dreams, and I’m not any closer than I was three fucking years ago, when I hauled my fat ass out to California.  The only thing keeping me from putting a ring on my beloved’s finger is that my shitty credit would fuck up her credit, and we wouldn’t have the ability to buy a house. (That’s right — bad credit is keeping me a bachelor.  Put that in your fucking commerical, Chase.)  I spend every day wondering why the fuck I haven’t given up yet.  Why I haven’t just up and fucking given up and taken a goddamn teaching job in some inner city school, or settled in to mind-numbing cubicle job like I’ve been struggling with the last five or so years.  I haven’t tried to get an agent, haven’t really written anything new in some time, haven’t joined a theatre troupe or improv group, haven’t gotten headshots with my face shaved, haven’t even fucking auditioned for everything, and I have the fucking cojones to call myself an actor-writer.  I’m doing neither.  And I hate fucking California.  But here I sit, bitching and moaning about how I’m not doing it.  Instead of getting up and fucking doing it.  And that’s what fucking Hank’s doing.  He sits there blubbering about his future and his failures, and then when shit gets real, he runs away or apologizes.  He moves to fucking Montana to live in a barn owned by two gay guys named Tom and Jerry.  Do you know how many times I’ve bought that fucking bus ticket?  How my dream changed from making it huge to stuffing notebooks in a backpack and disappearing from my loved ones because I can’t bear to stand in the face of my own fucking shame at failing?  

I think this book depressed me because I could relate.  I’m not on the successful contented side of the street with Dustin and The Boozehound.  I’m on the miserably mopey teen angsty side.  And angst isn’t pretty when you’re thirty.  Muskin spoke to me, because I’m a schlub talking shit and self-deprecation at my failures. Only I don’t use so many fucking yiddish slang words in my writing.  Okay, maybe a little.  Muskin wrote an extremely effective novel, because it reached into my chest and pulled out my fucking failure and made me fucking stare at it.  And I don’t want to do that.  I don’t need that shit right now.  I don’t want to know there are other assholes out there fucking up their lives and not having everything turn out happy and okay.  I don’t want to be that asshole anymore!   But I sit here, surrounded by half-started manuscripts and screenplays, a fucking digital camcorder I bought with my first Pajiba check sitting in the bedroom having never shot a single fucking frame, with my single greatest achievement of celluloid sitting on my fucking DVR (me giving the as my brother deems it the “Whatthefuck?” face to Damian Lewis on “Life”) and begging myself “How much longer?”  How much longer am I going to have to endure this not doing what I want with my life?  How much longer will I fucking stick it out until I’m a joke?  How much longer until I fucking quit?  And the answer is never.  I’m going to keep plodding along like doughy ass Hank until my brother or my mother or my lover beats some fucking sense into me.  And that’s not a rally cry.  It’s that I don’t know anything else.  I’m too fucking scared to invent a plan B that doesn’t involve a short rope and a high shelf that’ll hold me.  Do you see?  Even this fucking post is more fucking whining!

So I write.  I write angry hateful things about people making money doing what I want to be doing and doing it poorly.  I’m that fucking kid with my nose up to the window begging to be let in.  I’m just trying to figure out when I’m going to stop being retarded and start using the front door instead of the fucking window. So anyway, Scott, your book is great, but it’s so much my cup of tea, it’s not my cup of tea.  But it’ll kick your ass people.  And Muskin’s a solid fucking writer, so do him a favor, and pick up a goddamn copy.  Because someone’s gotta be making money off depression.  Mine as well be a Minnesotan.

Book 74. Urban Shaman by C.E. Murphy

I really wanted to like this book more, but it felt to me like a particularly effective version of someone trying to bank on the Harry Dresden crazy.  You like vampire hunters and wizard detectives?  How about a shaman cop?  It felt like something a housebound librarian/English major — and definitely a femme one — would scribble in her dream journal.  It’s stuffed with all the elements that make the quiet girls shudder: Celtic mysticism, Native American folklore, tall gangly women who aren’t good at relationships.  It’s set in Seattle, so Murphy feels obligated to mention coffee every five chapters.  

It’s established exactly like everything in this ilk, namely the fantasy books with a romance-level pose of some long haired brunette in jeans with some sort of tramp stamp inked on her back. Joanne Walker nee Siobhan Walkingstick, a mechanic for the police, mysteriously spies a woman fleeing a pack of dogs and a long-coated menace from her descending plane.  She tracks the woman — through preposterous logic — and ends up getting murdered in a diner by the God Cernunnos who leads the Wild Hunt.  Of course, she gets better. 

The book’s clumsily well-written, in that Murphy’s done her share of reading of the genre and is able to burp it up with a klutzy charm.  The story spurts like a faulty tram car from plot point to plot point, lurching in and out of the fantastic in some manner aping that of the reluctant mystic.  What I like most about Dresden — and even Anita Blake back in the day and Sookie Stackhouse — was that the weird began earlier.  We stepped in the story in the middle of them working shit out.  It wasn’t this awful sort of tutorial first video game level style of “I’m still learning my powers and what the B button does here” motif.  We’re supposed to feel and stumble along with Joanne as she pairs up with Gary the portly old cabby and Bruce, who’s a (hold on to your hats!) cross-dressing mystical believing detective!  

It’s not a bad book, just sort of a TBS copy of a better book.  Jo spends most of her time falling down and falling in love.  Her dialogue’s not as quippy as Murphy thinks it is.  And it gets all herky-jerky when it moves from fantasy to reality.  It’s part of a series called The Walker Papers, and I’ll give it a fighting chance.  I mean, I decided to maybe pick up the fucking Anita Blake’s again after I threw them down in disgust.  Maybe this just wasn’t my cup o’ tea.  But I bet some of you harridans will just eat it like that other piece of cake you don’t need.

Book 73. Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill

This was like watching a Canadian version of Jerry Springer.  It would have felt too awkward were it set in America.  It wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.  

Lullabies tells the story of Baby, a twelve year old girl stumbling through life in Montreal with her twenty-something heroin junkie father.  Baby’s mother died when she was but an infant, so she never really knew her.  Her father is still a child himself, having been a father at 15, and essentially spends his days trying to be twenty with a tween in tow.  Most of this is coped with a bizarre semi-homeless gypsy lifestyle, leaping from flea markets to dingy apartments to rehab, while Baby follows in his undertow, swirling in and out of the social services system, juvie, and staying with kind strangers.  

Baby falls through all the tropes one would expect of this kind of coming-of-age streets novel.  She has loves, both innocent and sinister, dabbles in drugs and prostitution, drinking and mischief.  What’s amazing about the novel is there are moments where you are suddenly socked in the gut with the notion that “holy fuck — this girl is 12″.  Awful, awful shit befalls her — things that would be tragic in most any age — but then it becomes apparent that this is all happening to a girl just barely beyond puberty’s dusk.  

Most effective is the narrative style, which comes straight from Baby, so it’s a lethal combination of the playfulness of a child and the wisdom of the streets.  She’s the kind of girl who still plays with dolls, but also knows where to go to score weed and mushrooms.  She swears like a sailor, and giggles like a schoolgirl.  It’s endearing, but then the dawning of her actual age and what she endures comes along and tucks you under. 

There’s not much to the story itself.  Baby sort of abides like the Hannah Montana version of The Dude.  She’s self-aware at how fucked up her life is, but hasn’t lived enough of it to realize just how wrong that shit really is.  But the narrative is so buoyant and without structure, that it comes off like a particularly effective afterschool special or episode of Maury.   It’s like, Damn, I’m glad I’m not the father, like that fucking dood.  Then you flip the channel and it’s already gone.

Book 72. Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

Rarely do I say this about literature, but….

The TV show is so much better. 

It’s a rare instance where a program is able to really develop characters in interesting ways, without totally devastating what made the novel so enjoyable.  I mean, they’ve fucked the Sookie Stackhouse books into a goddamn telenovela.  Only with sparkle porn and a mouthy black girl.  

However, in the case of Dexter, the writers for the series essentially took every single one of Jeff Lindsay’s tragically underdeveloped and trite characters, polished them off, snipped off the ungodly terrible ending to the book, and then created a fascinating series on the talent mostly of Michael C. Hall. 

Lindsay’s Dexter is more of a legit sociopath, who follows the beck and call of a Dark Passenger who demands blood sacrifice and justice against the wrongdoers who hunt like Dex.  While Hall plays Dexter as a bit of a pathological android, the Dexter of the novel is unlikable and savage.  All the characters are poor shadows of what Showtime swells them into.  LaGuerra is a slang spewing stooge, Deb is an enraged Barbie doll, and the black cop is played off like he’s a psycho too.  Instead of his chained bulldog, he’s more like a fart button, staring at Dexter and grunting “psycho” and “fucker” without any sort of rhyme or reason.  

Now while they have to spread a story over several episodes to make a season, obviously the grand finale is bound to be modified to fit your DVD box.  But the ending in the novel is so awful, so blindingly stupid that I won’t even risk spoiling it by typing it here.  Suffice it to say, I want to read the other novels just to see how plaidly they clash with the stylish series.  They’ve already fucked themselves into a boring little pickle, like Lindsay himself didn’t even trust that they were going to give him a chance to write more books.  It’s an amazing adaptation, taking shit and turning into a gourmet shit sandwich.  On foccacia!

Book 71. Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston

Let it never be said good things can’t ever be free.  When the Kindle 2 was released, Amazon boasted a full compliment of free downloads on the site, among them the three novels of Charlie Huston’s Hank Thompson trilogy.  Now, it begs the question, why in the pickled fuck would you want to just give this shit away?  Maybe the first in the set, but all three?  Surely you jest.  Surely, it cannot be of any sort of discernible quality.  I mean, it looks like Huston’s published a mad assortment of novels.  So how good could these really be, right? 

Fucking awesome.  That’s what, motherfucker. 

I find myself tossing down one fantasy novel only to pick up some sort of hardboiled action/mystery novel next.  Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, John Connolly’s Charlie Parker, Matt Reilly’s Scarecrow, even the Rollins’ Sigma.  My brother’s trying to sell me on this new series by Jonathan Maberry that sounds like Sigma pumped full of zombies.  And I decided to throw a homeboy a bone and start in on Duane Swiercyzski’s (that’s probably fucking totally tore up, but with a handle that that, brother’s gotta understand) Wheelman novels.  I call this my TK zone: badass motherfuckers just trying to Rambo their way out of tough breaks.  

So here we go again, I think.  We’ve got a nameless narrator, in this tough guy first person staccato prose, essentially in a world of fucking hurt.  He was a former baseball wunderkind, who suffered a crippling career ending injury during a high school game, and basically ended up pissing his life away.  Now, he’s a fucking drunk, and I mean a hardcore motherfucker.  He actually passes out during a routine exam only to have to have a kidney removed because he destroyed it with all his fucking boozing.  So now, he’s fucking limping around with only one kidney, not able to drown his sorrows in even beer, when his neighbor asks him to watch his cat.  That fucking cat.  What a fucking cat. 

As would be expected, shit goes sour for our dear narrator — who only until 100 pages in do we discover is named Hank — as he proceeds to essentially get the fuck beat out of him by varying assortments of thugs.  Russians in coordinated tracksuits.  Two black cowboys with rings on their fingers.  An asian safecracker with a shock of red hair.  And that’s just a few. And all Hank wanted was to watch the Giants playoff games, and maybe pet that fucking cat. 

The greatest part of the entire narrative, if you’re carefully paying attention, is that despite the entire tough guy-action hero dictation, Hank’s a fucking mook.  He’s a pussy fuck-up.  He’s constantly begging them not to kick his ass, and most of the time, he’s trying to run away.  He’s more likely to describe in bone-scraping detail how he’s getting his face smashed in rather than his own fisticuff glory.  He’s not a hero.  He’s just trying to stop people from hurting his friend’s fucking cat.  

Huston’s got a great style and pace to his novel.  It’s ridiculous without being farcical.  Shit’s just weird enough to be comical without taking away from the brutality or badassery.  Apparently, Huston’s got a whole other series about vampire mobsters.  Where’s Robert Loggia when you need that beautiful bastard?  So I’d highly recommend sinking your teeth into some Charlie Huston.  It’s meaty good.

Book 70. Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen

I am probably one of the few people who went from Tim Dorsey to Carl Hiaasen, which is akin to preferring Jimmy Buffett to the Grateful Dead.  I’ve feasted merrily upon the sheer insanity of Dorsey Serge-pocalypse up and down America’s Wang, and it’s easy to understand now that without Hiaasen, there would be no Dorsey, so I’m sort of tracing the Floridian mania back up the proverbial family tree.  And while my gut reaction is that Hiaasen reads like Dorsey after a few Heinekens, they’re just Mounds and Almond Joy in the great literary canon.  Sometimes you feel like a nut, and sometimes you don’t. 

My concern with Hiaasen has always been where to start, since it felt like there was no real logical jumping in point, and I didn’t know if there was any sort of overlap between books as with the Dorsey.  However, I closed my eyes, prayed against barracuda and dove in.  

Tourist Season tells about a group calling themselves The Nights of December, though in Spanish, it sounds more like Nachos.  They’re a counterrevolutionary terrorist group hellbent on kidnapping and murdering the tourist trade in Florida so that the land can be returned to the glades and Seminoles as God intended.  The head of the Chamber of Commerce is found murdered with a rubber alligator stuffed down his throat, and both his legs sawed off to fit him in a suitcase.  Mayhem and hilarity ensue. 

Again, it’s another madcap cast of characters, including a former reporter turned private eye, a maniac newspaper columnist, a reluctant beauty queen, a siren yoga instructor, and a beleaguered cop.  Oh, yeah, and a militant black ex-football star and a failed Cuban revolutionary bombmaker.  Plenty of zany antics to keep you amused at the beach or airport where this is apropos reading.  

My only beef with Hiaasen, and I don’t know if this will be true of the rest of his works, but it feels like he’s relying heavily on his former journalism career for inspiration.  Also, he’s unusually racist.  Not him, per se, but the characters are often rattling off in sudden ethnic slurs.  I mean, it calls out to the forgotten redneck heritage of Florida, which despite people’s insistence to the contrary, is assuredly part of the South.  Then again, there’re plenty of militias and hate groups in Pennsylvania, so let’s not throw stones in the hothouse. 

I’m compelled to compare him to Dorsey, if only because they are truly two similar flavors of Dorito.  Dorsey relies solely on his narrative crash-banging from wackiness to wackiness to be anything resembling a cohesive narrative, whereas Hiaasen feels like he takes himself too seriously.  There are great stretches of semi-serious social commentary, pushing ecological issues and conservationism.  It feels like a slightly more sitcom-safe version, but it also makes for a more coherent story.  Also, Dorsey’s basically got Serge and Coleman.  I’ve got to read more Hiaasen to see what tricks he’s got up his sleeves, but it feels to me like he’s just cracking his knuckles and getting ready to throw down.  I’m curious as to which one I should read next.