Finch, by Jeff VanderMeer

In City Of Saints And Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer first introduced readers to Ambergris, the mysterious, otherworldly city of the book's title. Considered by VanderMeer to be a mosaic novel, City Of Saints was just as easily interpreted as a book of short stories, containing as it did a historical pamphlet about Ambergris, a case study of an inmate in a mental institution, a treatise on freshwater squid, excerpts from a book of art criticism, and a story written in a complex code, as well as several somewhat more conventional stories that straddled the boundary between horror and dark fantasy. As the title indicated, though, what all of the shorter works featured had in common was their setting. VanderMeer returned to this setting with Shriek: An Afterword, a fictional biography of Duncan Shriek, the historian whose pamphlet about Ambergris had been included in City Of Saints And Madmen. Duncan's sister, Janice, wrote the original text of the biography, which was interspersed throughout with editorial comments from Duncan himself. And now, after two highly unusual books set in Ambergris, VanderMeer completes the trilogy with Finch, a hardboiled detective novel with a straightforward, linear structure. I'll say this for VanderMeer; he always keeps his readers guessing.

Finch takes place about a century after Shriek: An Afterword, at a time when the mushroom dwellers of Ambergris have taken over the city. The mushroom dwellers, more informally known as grey caps, lived in Ambergris before humans arrived there. They are around four feet tall, with grey skin and large heads that make them look like a cross between humans and mushrooms. The history of Ambergris is fraught with conflict between human settlers and the mushroom dwellers, as detailed in City Of Saints And Madmen. For our purposes it is enough to acknowledge that the relationship between humans and grey caps is a hostile one, and none of the human residents of Ambergris are happy to be living under grey cap rule.

John Finch, our protagonist, is a detective in the police force run by the grey caps, and is therefore caught between two sides, neither of which trust him. At the beginning of the novel, he's assigned to investigate a double murder, in which the victims are a human man and a mushroom dweller. The murder of a grey cap is unheard of, and Finch's superiors take a keen interest in the case. But investigating a murder for the grey caps has some unusual and disturbing elements. Finch must ingest fungal growths called memory bulbs that the grey caps have caused to sprout from the heads of the victims. By eating them, Finch is given temporary access to the memories of the victims, though in an onrushing flood that doesn't really make sense. The experience leaves Finch shaken and confused.

Finch is uncertain how to approach the task he's been given in a manner that will both provide results and keep him out of trouble. The grey caps and their fungally-modified human agents, the Partials, are breathing down his neck at all times. They don't hesitate to threaten both he and his loved ones, sometimes for reasons Finch can't understand. The case he's investigating is equally opaque, and his investigation takes him in random directions that don't seem to have any connecting thread. He deals with events that seem fraught with meaning he can't divine, comes across objects that may be important clues or meaningless junk. At every turn, he runs afoul of some new faction: rebel groups opposing the grey caps, secret agents for rival states with their own territorial agenda, and others whose roles aren't so clearly defined. Underneath it all, there is the sense that powerful forces are being marshaled, though to what end is unclear. His foreboding predicament is reminiscent of 40s noir films, in which protagonists like Robert Mitchum in "Out Of The Past" or Tom Neal in "Detour" seemed unable to do anything to halt their downward spiral. There's a more surreal edge added to Finch, though, by the disturbing environment in which it takes place.

Ambergris had previously been a modern city, with motor vehicles, electricity, and a vibrant night life that revolved around art, theater, and music. The grey caps were always able to exert some control over the hot, tropical environment of Ambergris. They used their bond with fungal organisms to control varieties of spores and mushrooms, generating a constant low-grade attack on the human city. However, it is only now that they've risen from their longtime subterranean redoubt to reclaim the city that was once theirs that the fungi have really taken control. VanderMeer's descriptions of streets and buildings infested with tiny organic life makes me think of some of David Cronenberg's earlier films; the parasites in "Shivers," the bizarre organic modifications of "Rabid" and "The Brood," even the strangely alive-seeming video game systems of "Existenz," create the same sense of creeping unease that VanderMeer has created here. This is a world in which nature itself seems hellbent on the destruction of humanity.

By setting a noir detective story in this cryptobiological dystopia, VanderMeer creates a novel that is both mystery and fantasy of the darkest sort. Indeed, there are several points in Finch that veer into outright Lovecraftian horror. By the latter half of the book, Finch has realized that the case he's been given is much more deeply rooted than he had any way of knowing. Meanwhile, readers will learn details that reinterpret the events of VanderMeer's first two Ambergris novels in surprising ways. Finch begins as a detective story, but becomes much wider in scope, eventually encompassing the entire history of Ambergris. It both embodies and subverts its chosen genre, and is an excellent conclusion to a fascinating and original trilogy.

Update: what I've been reading.

First-person introductory paragraph: good lord, you guys. My reading habits have become a complete shambles over the last few months. I'm not necessarily a one-book-at-a-time sort of person all the time, but more often than not, I am. Occasionally I might get into a second book that I feel needs to be given priority, generally pausing in the first book and returning to it when the second book is done. Sometimes the first book gets shunted aside completely, but that's rare. Lately, though, all of this has been turned upside down. I've been participating in multiple book clubs, some of which read multiple books in each month, and, as always, buying way more books in any given time period than I have time to read. Combine that with my relentlessly expanding blogroll, the half-dozen or so magazines I attempt to follow, and my ballooning comic book subscription list, and what I've got on my hands is a full-scale onslaught of reading material, one that I'm completely incapable of keeping up with. At some point in April, I cracked under the strain--I blame Hunter S. Thompson's gargantuan collection of correspondence, "Fear And Loathing In America," about which more below--and found myself haphazardly reading 10 to 20 pages at a time in at least half a dozen different books. My mood, and therefore my desire for reading material, would change hourly, and I quit trying to keep my reading queue orderly and gave in entirely to my whims. Thus, in addition to the books you'll read about below, all of which I have finished in the last two months, I've also read portions of at least half a dozen other books, including a few I read a long time ago and was rereading (these were mostly short story collections by Harlan Ellison--see my recent post entitled "Dreams With Sharp Teeth." Sorry, no hyperlink, but it's gotta still be on the front page). Furthermore, I've delved into lengthy essays from blogs and magazines, 6 to 12 months of comic backlog, and I still have at least half a dozen half-read books kicking around my room that I have every intention of getting too ASAP. So uh, I'll keep you guys posted, but as of right now my reading habits are a total disaster, and the intermittent nature of these book posts will probably continue to reflect that. I just hope the quality of the writeups won't.

A Preferred Blur, by Henry Rollins
Henry Rollins' books of his collected journal entries become both more intriguing and more depressing as the years go on. There's still plenty of awesome travel writing and observations on politics and humanity in this book, as in all of them, but the more personal moments of this book were particularly tough on me. I guess there are two different reasons why that is: one being that I can relate pretty heavily to a lot of Rollins's issues with social interaction, whether it be with friends, girl...more Henry Rollins' books of his collected journal entries become both more intriguing and more depressing as the years go on. There's still plenty of awesome travel writing and observations on politics and humanity in this book, as in all of them, but the more personal moments of this book were particularly tough on me. I guess there are two different reasons why that is: one being that I can relate pretty heavily to a lot of Rollins's issues with social interaction, whether it be with friends, girls he is attracted to, or total strangers; the other being that, as someone who is a longtime fan of all Rollins' work, I've come to care about him as a person and I hate to read that he's having so many troubles with depression. Also, it's kind of hard to see him dealing with those issues the way he does; in this book, he talks often about how he has to minimize his time around people he cares about, how he can't even allow himself to maintain communication with women he's attracted to and DEFINITELY can't ever get into another romantic relationship, and how he can never let himself get too comfortable at home, because as soon as he gets comfortable or feels safe with someone he feels like he's opening himself up to be hurt. I can see the logic behind this strategy, especially coming from someone who has never completely recovered from having his best friend shot right in front of him (he talks extensively about his depression over Joe Cole's murder in this book, which was written 16 years after it happened). But I just can't feel all that good about it, because I feel like the man is depressed either way, and he operates on the assumption that a minimum level of depression is unavoidable and he has to function in a certain way that minimizes human contact that he might enjoy at the time. He sees all such contact as an inevitable path to even deeper levels of depression in the future, and again, I can understand that logic--it's often been that way for me too. But a lot of this book just reads like the thought process of someone who has given up on ever finding personal happiness, and that just bums me out. I don't want to think that that's what someone I have a great deal of admiration for will be feeling for the rest of his life, and--considering how much I relate to a lot of the feelings he describes--I certainly don't want to believe that this is what waits for me in the future. Reading this book was hard, mainly because it made me think that the only reason I haven't quite given up yet is because I'm somewhat younger than Rollins. I don't want to believe that but it seems frighteningly plausible.

I don't want this review to make this entire book seem like some miserable slog of a read, because it isn't. There are definitely parts of the book that are enjoyable in the extreme, and I think if I had been able to separate more from the parts about depression, I could have enjoyed reading them more than I did. Really, though, this book is quite a different animal from Rollins's more comedy-oriented spoken word performances, and fits a lot more closely with the dark, heavy lyrics he used to write for the Rollins Band and Black Flag. Well worth your time if you enjoy Rollins' writing, but go into it expecting a heavy emotional trip, because that's what you're going to get.

The Forest Of Hands And Teeth, by Carrie Ryan
This is an incredibly engaging book. I tore through it in less than one full day. It's a young adult novel, so it wasn't exactly heavy reading, but I never felt like I was reading something that was written below my level, and in fact, Carrie Ryan seems to have quite a bit of writing talent, not just where plotting and characterization are concerned (though she's certainly no slouch in either of these departments), but on a level of individual sentence and paragraph construction.

"The Forest Of Hands And Teeth" is a new take on the zombie novel, which has become a rather popular subgenre in recent years. Rather than concentrating on the zombie apocalypse, as every book about the subject that I've ever read has done, "The Forest Of Hands And Teeth" takes place several generations after the coming of the zombies (referred to as "The Unconsecrated" in the book), in a town with a strong fence surrounding it, outside of which lies the forest of the title. The forest is filled with zombies, which never seem to rot or lose their energy, instead continuing to "live" in the forest and representing a constant threat to the inhabitants of the village. This has caused the village's social structure to adapt, and the inhabitants now live in a manner similar to the Puritans of the 17th century. The cathedral is the social nexus of the town, and is inhabited by the Sisterhood, who preserve the history of the town. Marriage and continuation of familial lines is paramount to the preservation of the town--said by the Sisterhood to be ordained by God, in order to keep humanity alive in the face of the Unconsecrated.

This book is told from the point of view of Mary, a young woman of marrying age who longs to visit the ocean, even as she's told by most of the village that this is not possible, that they are the only humans left and must stay within their village forever. Mary's hand in marriage is desired by Harry, but she loves Harry's brother Travis. After the death of her parents at the beginning of the story, and after Mary hesitates to accept Harry's marriage offer, Mary's brother Jed forces her out of their family home, and she is forced to join the Sisterhood, the one fate she wanted least. However, once in the Sisterhood, Mary begins to learn more about the history of humankind as a whole and the village in particular, and begins to think that many secrets have been kept by the Sisterhood from her and the rest of the village's inhabitants. What she ends up discovering turns her world upside down, but I don't want to explain further, as there are many twists and turns of the plot in this book, and it would be easy to spoil one or another of them. Suffice it to say that the story moves farther and faster than I ever expected based on the first few chapters of the book, and stays entertaining and unpredictable throughout. I'm not sure if there'll be a sequel, though the ending leaves it open, but if there is one, I'll definitely pick it up. And even if there isn't, I'm very interested to see what else Carrie Ryan writes in the future. This book, her debut, is enough to convince me that she's very talented.

A Test Of Wills, by Charles Todd
I read this book a few weeks ago but have been doing a poor job of maintaining my goodreads page and so am only reviewing it now. I don't have a perfectly formed review in my mind the way I might have if I'd written about it the day I finished it, but I can remember enough to know that I quite enjoyed it. This is the first in a series of mysteries by Charles Todd, which take place in England in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Ian Rutledge has returned home to reclaim his job as a homicide detective, but he's shellshocked from the war and now suffers a persistent aural hallucination--the voice of one of his now-dead comrades, Hamish MacLeod, speaking to him from over his shoulder. Rutledge knows that Hamis is a delusion, but this knowledge alone is not enough to chase him away, and so he must spend all of his time being careful not to respond to Hamish's non-existent voice in the presence of other people.

Meanwhile, he's still trying to solve murders, such as the one he's sent to investigate in "Test Of Wills," of a retired Colonel. The details of the plot were interesting and unpredictable enough to keep me guessing until the very end, but what I enjoyed most about this book was not so much any of the whodunit aspects but more the characterizations of Rutledge, the suspects in the murder case, and even Hamish, Rutledge's imagined partner. Todd creates a dark atmosphere around all of these people, and shows us the more sordid aspects of their lives, which is a lot of what makes the murder's solution so tough to predict--so many of the characters seem like they could have done it. Perhaps its morbid or pessimistic of me, but I really enjoy reading books that come from as dark a perspective as this one, and I look forward to checking out more of the Charles Todd mysteries.

Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein
So this week my book club read "Starship Troopers." I of course read it when I was 12 and a few times since, none since I was in 9th grade or so. I loved it as a pre-teen. Going back to it, though, kinda ruined it. What I--and most of the book club--realized was that the society depicted within the book is basically fascist, and that there's a lot of Heinlein philosophizing scattered throughout, in which he makes absurd claims like that the juvenile delinquent scare of the 50s was caused by parents not spanking their children enough. The parts that are a space adventure/war story are still pretty good, but they are hugely overshadowed by all the ersatz philosophy. I didn't remember this at all, but nearly a quarter of the book is devoted to lectures in which Heinlein "proves" various theories based on an imagined future history that doesn't even remotely resemble what has happened in the 50 years since this book came out. And thank god, because this would be a military-run fascist society by now if it had.

The Writing Class, by Jincy Willett
At a time when I was already in the middle of several other books (just as I am right now), the bookstore where I work got a shipment of new books in, and this one looked fascinating to me. I dropped everything else I was reading in order to blow through this book in about three days, and I never regretted it for a second. At first glance, "The Writing Class" might seem like a standard cozy mystery, one structured in a similar manner to the endless craft mysteries pumped out by Berkeley Prime Crime month after month. This is far from the truth, though. For one thing, the book's mystery elements seem more secondary than like the primary focus of the book. What this story is really about is a writing class, as detailed mostly from the perspective of its teacher, a middle-aged writer named Amy Gallup who hasn't published a novel in 20 years and does editing work from home in order to pay the bills. She doesn't need the pay from teaching the writing class, but she does it as a way to have regular contact with people other than herself. The group that takes her class in the fall semester of 2007 is unusually interesting, and includes a prankster with a mean streak that gets more vicious with each passing class.

To tell you any more of the plot than this would be criminal, and with that in mind, please do not read the back of this book, as it spoils something that happens two-thirds of the way through it. But do read this book, as it is full of fascinating characters that are lifelike and multi-dimensional, and who have very entertaining interactions. There's also some interesting stuff about the art and craft of writing, which you the reader may find yourself learning alongside the students in the writing class. Perhaps my favorite element of this book was its casual but effective realism; none of the characters are living perfectly happy, fulfilled lives, but none of them seemed like overly maudlin sufferers, either. They just come across as real people, with the sorts of ups and downs that play out in normal lives.

I wouldn't consider "The Writing Class" to be literary in any real way, but I do feel like it's an incredibly well-written book. A lot of more literary writings that I've read in my life have seemed almost to beat you over the head with their brilliance. They may be full of beautiful sentences, but those sentences almost seem to get in the way of the story they're telling. In "The Writing Class," Jincy Willett displays a much more subtle form of talent, writing quietly eloquent sentences full of intelligence and wit that could escape a reader's notice completely if they weren't looking for them. She proves that a writer doesn't have to write a big, important book to display a ton of talent. This is only her third book in over 20 years; here's hoping she writes more soon.

Fear And Loathing In America: The Gonzo Letters Volume II, 1968-1976, by Hunter S. Thompson
This huge tome of Hunter Thompson's correspondence took me approximately two months to read, but that doesn't mean that I didn't like it. In fact, I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, the format leant itself to being put down for extended periods of time before returning to it. There's not much of any connection or narrative flow between one letter and the next, and most of the time, the other half of Thompson's correspondence is not reproduced here, so the reader is left to guess at what exactly has inspired him to hurl invective at this person or that one. That's most of what he does in this book, too--hurl invective, both at people he likes and people he's sincerely angry with. His correspondence with Oscar Acosta is full of such rancor, and moves over the course of the book from seeming like good-natured bickering between friends to real animosity. One wonders if Thompson and Acosta would have worked out their differences over time, were it not for the latter's untimely disappearance.

It's a lot of fun to read each individual letter, especially the lengthier ones that delve into more complicated thought processes that Thompson was working through at various stages of completing books or articles. There are several detailed outlines herein for books that were never completed, all of which are entertaining, but also of course frustrating due to the fact that we can't go read those books in full. There are also many interesting arguments back and forth between Thompson and his various publishers, in which we learn his exact feelings (generally predictable but hilarious fury) about the various edits and bowdlerizations he was forced to suffer throughout his career. It becomes clear that Thompson always took his writing very seriously, and had a lot invested in his work being read exactly the way he intended. He also got very frustrated with those who saw his "gonzo" style as just an excuse to make shit up. As far as Thompson was concerned, he was telling the truth in all of his pieces, even if he didn't always use a format that was approved by standard journalists of the time.

I wouldn't really recommend reading this book to anyone who isn't well-versed in Hunter S. Thompson's writing career; in order to be most properly enjoyed, the reader should probably already be familiar with "Hell's Angels," "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas," "Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail 72," and "The Great Shark Hunt," as work that ended up in all four of these books is discussed in detail here. As I said, not that much information is given to the reader outside of the actual text of the letters, so it'll be a lot harder to keep up if you haven't read those books. If you have, though, and you're interested in an even deeper examination of Thompson's life and mindset during that period of his career, "Fear And Loathing In America" will provide you with a very entertaining read. And honestly, you'll probably be better off setting it aside every now and then and cleansing your palate with something a bit lighter before returning. Trying to take this whole book in one fell swoop would probably amount to biting off more than one can chew.

Consider The Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
I took a long time to finish this book, primarily because it was a set of essays and I often took breaks inbetween them. Also, because I've been reading way too many books at once lately, which has led me to feeling overwhelmed and then ignoring all of the books I'm reading in favor of starting yet more new ones, or just reading magazines and comic books, or rereading stuff I've already read... whatever, the point is that it took me forever to finish this book, but absolutely NOT because it wasn't amazing. It is amazing, just like "Infinite Jest" is amazing. It seemed like it would be a complete departure from that brobdingnagian novel, simply by virtue of the difference between formats, but I ended up finding a lot of common threads between the two. Now that David Foster Wallace is, unfortunately, no longer with us, I feel a bit more confident in describing certain of his themes as universal to all of his work, and it seems like those universal themes were just as present in his essays as collected here as they were in his magnum opus, "Infinite Jest." Asking me to specify the themes might result in a bit of evasion though, really just because I'm afraid that I'll describe them badly enough that I end up being wrong. But what the hell: sincerity, compassion, the desire among all humans (and maybe even non-humans) to connect with one another, to feel part of something greater than oneself. This shows up in all sorts of places in this book, from DFW's profile of a right-wing radio talk show host (John Ziegler, he of more recent "How Obama Got Elected" fame), to his review of a dictionary of English usage, to his description of two weeks spent on the campaign trail with John McCain during his 2000 run for president. And in fact, it seems like Wallace's main beef with the John Updike novel he reviews negatively in this collection is its protagonist's narcissistic inability to connect with anyone/anything other than himself/his penis. A lot of times, I see reviewers make allusions to some sort of post-modern ironic-detachment sensibility when they write about David Foster Wallace's oeuvre, and I must conclude that these people just don't get it. If anything, I see DFW's writing as coming from an anti-ironic-distance perspective. He wants us to talk more, and more honestly, with each other. And in light of his depression and ultimate suicide, it seems to me (though I may be overstepping my bounds here) that this impulse in his writing stemmed from a desire to talk openly and honestly, and make connections, with those around him. I don't know if it'd be any comfort at all, but he connected with me when I read "Infinite Jest," and I'd say he's connected even more with this fascinating and brilliant collection of essays.

Burning Fight: The 90s Hardcore Revolution In Ethics, Politics, Spirit And Sound, by Brian Peterson
I feel compelled to give this book four out of five stars simply by virtue of its existence. As someone who grew up in the 90s hardcore scene, who found the whole era to be vital and fascinating, to be filled with musical experimentation and growth on personal and community levels, I've always hated the standard line about how hardcore died in 1986 (or whenever Steven Blush said), about how it just got easier to be a hardcore kid after that, and the music therefore got worse and the kids got wimpier. That's damn near the opposite of my personal experience of the 90s scene, and I've long wanted to write my own book debunking that personal myth. So I'm very glad that Brian Peterson got the ball rolling with his book. That said, I don't feel like "Burning Fight" obviates my own need to write a book about the subject, because the fact is that this one just isn't that good. Peterson, who ironically teaches high school English, is not what I'd consider a good writer, and I'd even feel like I was gilding the lily a bit to call him mediocre. Fact is, the guy is a barely capable wordsmith whose thankfully infrequent interjections of narrative read like the sort of high school senior thesis that might get you a B if your teacher grades on a curve. The passages Peterson wrote for the book are as free of insight as they possibly could be, and tend to explain band after band, movement after movement, in the same tired language. I swear Peterson mentions the Bad Brains and the Cro-Mags as sonic references for at least a dozen different bands, none of whom sound anything alike. It seemed at least somewhat legitimate when he first said it about 108, who are first in the alphabetically-ordered section of interviews with various bands; 108 were definitely influenced hugely by both of those bands. When he brought the same two bands up 300 pages later in a discussion of Unbroken, though, I damn near threw the book across the room. It's lazy writing, pure and simple. And to expand on that theme, 90% of the book is structured like an oral history, leaving the bands and kids who were there to fill in the gaps and provide insight into the subjects that Peterson doesn't explore in any depth himself. It's the luck of the draw as to how much insight the quotes provide, and for every intelligent, well-spoken person in the book, such as Jes Steineger of Coalesce, Vic DiCara of 108, or Norman Brannon of Texas Is The Reason, there are 20 more people whose quotes serve only to demonstrate how little thought they've given to the questions Peterson is asking. Sometimes two quotes on the same page about the same subject will have completely contradictory viewpoints, and while this is interesting in that it shows the multiplicity of opinions and perceptions in the scene at the time, it ruins the narrative framework of the section and makes it very hard to understand what sort of conclusion we're supposed to draw. I feel like a lot of the reason that I was able to get something out of this book was because I was there during those times myself, and could add what new information "Burning Fight" provided me to my own memories, knowledge, and insight. It helped me complete my picture of the scene during that era, but if I were coming into this book with no foreknowledge of the time, I don't know how accurate or fleshed-out the picture I'd get would be.

One thing's for sure: the 30 or so band interviews that make up the lion's share of this book, while doing even more to completely undermine any narrative framework established in the more universal opening chapters than was already done in those chapters themselves, were far more interesting, insightful, and entertaining than the opening sections. While the opening chapters were the sort of slog that I only endured because I was having trouble admitting how far short of my expectations this book had fallen, the band interviews were very interesting and kept my attention throughout. Really, though, they made this book far more like a big fat zine than any real history of an era, and if you want a book that really does a great job of encapsulating 90s hardcore on that level, you're better off with Norman Brannon's "The Anti-Matter Anthology." Or, perhaps, the book about all of this that I'm gonna write in another few years. [Famous last words.]

Dreams With Sharp Teeth.

I've never really been a guy who had heroes. I don't look to other people for inspiration or motivation, per se. Nonetheless, there are people out there in the world, some living, some not, who have provided those things for me at certain points in my life. They've influenced me, maybe to go in the direction with my life that I have, or maybe just to believe in myself a little bit more than I otherwise would have, and regardless of how actively they influence me now, I'll always think of them fondly, because of the positive effects they had on me at some point. I see these people as "my people," a small, select group that are on my team--or, as the case may be, I'm on theirs. Henry Rollins is in this group, and so is Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas. Peter Parker is totally on this list, even though he's not real, and none of his creators or writers would make the list. But I'm not here to talk about any of those guys; at least, not tonight. I'm here to talk about Harlan Ellison.

I've felt like Harlan Ellison was one of my people ever since I first encountered his writing, at the age of 11. I had to run downstairs and check my copy of "Harlan Ellison's Watching" in order to verify that, and it informed me that that first film review essay that I read by him was published in the July 1987 issue of The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction. That was the first issue I received when I subscribed to that magazine (through the Publisher's Clearinghouse, if I remember correctly. God, remember those big yellow sweepstakes envelopes? Am I dating myself?), and I was 11 that month, so there you go. Anyway, Harlan's exuberant essay style drew me right in, got me thinking, and got me laughing. Here's a choice bit from that first column:

"Woody, that brave little beast (as Moorcock once called your humble columnist), was the fauna (or was it faunum?)(what the hell is the singular of fauna?)(who the hell am I?)(it only hurts when I screw the electrodes too tightly, doctor) who saved all of us from the cockroaches, but to buttress my new faith in the human race you also have to thank the flora called Audrey."

I barely knew who Woody Allen (the Woody in question) was at the time, had no clue who Moorcock (Michael, author of the Elric saga, which I'd love in less than two years time) was, and understood that "Little Shop Of Horrors" was a remake of a 60s film but not who Roger Corman was. But I was enjoying reading these little rants, which, unfortunately for me, only seemed to make every third or so issue of the magazine. What really blew my head wide open, though, was his February 1988 column, which savaged both Mel Brooks's "Spaceballs" and the juvenile sense of humor (plus total lack of wit) of the sci-fi fan community at large. By now, I was 12, which certainly seems quite an advanced age when you're living in it but seems from my 21-years-on vantage point almost impossibly young. But regardless of how mature I really was, I connected with what Harlan was saying. I was tired of morons and bad puns too. After all, I was a 12 year old boy. That was the level of humor I was surrounded by. But really, I was just inspired by Harlan's pure, incendiary rage. I pretty much hated everyone I knew at that age, and though I would never admit it then (and probably wouldn't now, under any other circumstances), the real reason I hated them so much was because I was better than them and yet all they did was push me down and tell me I sucked. I was torn between believing them and knowing how wrong they were, and I still am. Harlan Ellison had a tremendously powerful literary voice, and the righteous fury that he expressed with it struck a chord deep within me. I'm not sure if it was he or Stephen King who first made me feel like I wanted to be a writer, but the two of them were definitely the first examples I had, the first two writers I unconditionally loved.

Since those days, I've moved through phases where Harlan is concerned. Sometimes I devour his stuff insatiably, and at other times I go for years without reading anything by him. I have nearly a dozen of his books, and I feel ashamed to admit I've only read a little more than half of them. But no matter whether I'm reading him that week or not, I always think when I hear the name Harlan Ellison--"That's my man right there."

The reason I'm telling you all of this is by way of introducing a documentary called "Dreams With Sharp Teeth," which was released last year and aired earlier this month on the Sundance channel. Of course, I saved it to my DVR, and as soon as I got the chance, I watched it. Tonight, I watched it again, my second time in less than a week. It's reignited a fire in my guts for the work of Harlan Ellison, reminded me of every reason that I loved him so much back when I was 12--and, really, still do.

I'd love to tell you that "Dreams With Sharp Teeth" is a brilliant documentary. It sure seems that way to me. However, I'm a particularly biased audience, and not just because of my Ellison love. It's also because I'm predisposed to like documentary films, regardless of their quality or subject. I'm a process nerd; I like hearing about how things happen, and especially about how artists and creative types come up with their work. Sometimes I feel a bit weird about this, like I'd rather read a book about how a movie was filmed or an album was recorded than watch the movie or listen to the album. And sometimes, that's probably true. Should I feel guilty? I don't know. But the truth is that I have trouble, at this point in my life, engaging with the work of Harlan Ellison, because I don't really do too well with short stories. I prefer a novel, one with a world that I can get lost in and not resurface until I've read the whole thing. Short stories want you to resurface in 10 or 15 pages, then plunge right back into a completely different world. That's tough for me to do. It's not really how my narrative imagination works. This is also probably why a lot of my Harlan Ellison books are only half-read; it's not the novels or the essay collections that suffer from that problem, it's the short story collections.

So then, of course I think "Dreams With Sharp Teeth" is brilliant. It gives me a look into the philosophy, the personality, the life and times of one of my favorite writers. It's a document of process, and of the little details that came together to form the character that Harlan Ellison is. And to top it all off, it actually makes me want to read his short stories. There are several spots within the movie, gaps in the narration, that are bridged by shots of Harlan reading from one story or another of his. All of them are absolutely gripping. That amazing voice of Harlan's, which came through in his film reviews so well that it grabbed the attention of an 11 year old boy (and hasn't completely let go anytime since), is present in his natural speaking voice. He reads his stories like he's speaking off the cuff, saying the words for the first time, and in so doing, breathes life into them that makes you want to stop the movie right then and there and go read the rest of the story he's just read from. I own several of them in one collection or another, and since watching "Dreams With Sharp Teeth" for the first time, I've located my copies of "'Repent, Harlequin!' said the Ticktockman," which I'd read before (and loved), and "All The Lies That Are My Life," which I'd never read before, and now can't believe I'd missed for the 15 years since I bought the collection in which it appears (also named "Dreams With Sharp Teeth").

God, I'm afraid I'm making a hash of this whole thing. I'd love to have some obvious, linear narrative in my head for this rambling appreciation of both the writing of Harlan Ellison and the documentary about him, but I don't. I'm just jumping from one thing to another willy-nilly, in whatever order they come to me. But hey, at least I'm writing. As some of you will no doubt have noticed, this has been hard for me to do lately. I've left this blog un-updated for most of the past two weeks, and before that, I was posting those short movie diary things that I write with almost no forethought. I haven't even done movie diary entries for the last two movies I've seen, and I think they might just get skipped. This bothers me on an obsessive-compulsive level, but I think this time I'm gonna fight through the compulsion and let it go. Best to just keep typing, getting out what's in my head and keeping the flow moving.

I was originally gonna write this entry last week, after seeing "Dreams With Sharp Teeth" for the first time. I had a lot to say, and was feeling inspired both to read Harlan Ellison stories and to write. Harlan always inspires me to write--that's one of the great things about reading his stuff. He makes writing seem both falling-off-a-log easy and set-the-world-on-fire important, and if I feel guilty when I don't write anyway, I feel twice as guilty if I'm thinking about what Harlan would say if he knew. I know, I know, like he would care what some 30-something blogger who has barely even tried to get published was doing... and yet, I feel like he would. I feel like he'd tell me that if I wasn't pounding on that keyboard every day, I was wasting my potential and my life. And he'd be right, god damn it, that's the worst part. I know I could do this every day if I could just fight through my own ennui. I've always got something to say, and the hardest part is always just making myself sit down in front of the keyboard and fire up the word processing program instead of checking my fucking email for once.

Harlan Ellison never holds back on anyone, and that's one of the most interesting aspects of his personality documented in "Dreams With Sharp Teeth." In particular, the first third or so of the movie is gut-bustingly funny, listening to Harlan tell stories about mailing dead gophers to publishers that fucked him over, and reading the riot act to TV producers who didn't want to give him his due (monetary, creative, or both). The man seems to have a vigorous love-hate relationship with everything in the entire world, and as he admits early on, pretty much everything makes him angry. His problem is that he has tons more intellect than patience, and not only can he slice through the world's bullshit like a hot knife through butter, he can't stand the fact that he's then left sitting there waiting for the idiots to catch up. This is another thing I love about Harlan. He's always been someone willing to stick his neck out for what he believes, to call out the rest of the world on their shit, and to let his ass get beaten if that's what's necessary to stand up for what he honestly believes is right. I could draw parallels to my own life, most efficiently to the time I got beaten up by 20 tough-guy hardcore kids because I "talked shit" about their "crew." I was tired of seeing people get beaten up at shows because they didn't know the right people. I was tired of watching a bunch of assholes intimidate an entire room just because nobody wanted to be the one to get punched. Harlan would understand exactly why I stood up and said things when no one else would, why I basically put myself on the line to take one for the team, to be the guy who got punched for saying things that everyone else felt but were afraid to say. Harlan marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama--you think a bunch of crew kids would have scared him? And you've gotta respect a guy who stands 5'5", weighed maybe 110 pounds in the prime of his life, and yet never backed away from a fight.

In fact, during the course of "Dreams With Sharp Teeth," it's this toughness in the face of all easily observable adversity that introduces the flip side of Harlan's personality--a deeply vulnerable sensitivity, that of a person who grew up his whole life being told he was inferior. He was a Jewish kid born in small-town Ohio in the 30s, back when anti-Semitism was pretty much the norm, and all the other kids in his class towered over him. Plus he had a big mouth, and the combination of the three factors surely sealed his fate where bullies were concerned. Maybe they thought if they beat him up on the schoolyard enough times, they'd cow him into submission. If anything, it had the opposite effect. The more shit Harlan had to take, the more determined he became to take no shit from anybody. He'd show them all what he was made of. And he did--going on to be one of the most respected writers of the 20th century is not too shabby. But then, in one of the interstitial bits, he reads from a piece he wrote when he was 35 years old, entitled "One Life, Furnished In Early Poverty." He talks about how he went back to his old hometown, having finally become the success that they always said he'd never be, seeing all of his old school bullies worn down and working dead end jobs. But instead of feeling vindicated in his triumph, the whole thing just depressed him. I can't really explain the feeling that he's describing in that short excerpt, but I sure have felt it.

I think maybe I'm losing the thread here, so let's just wrap this up. "Dreams With Sharp Teeth" is a tremendously engaging film, documenting as it does the fascinating life and brilliant work of an endlessly entertaining man. With the sort of off the cuff storytelling prowess Harlan displays throughout this film, not only in recently filmed interviews but in archival material going back several decades, it's clear that the movie could have been amazing even if all it contained were shot after shot of Harlan ranting, raving, and reeling off anecdotes. But there's so much more than that here. Throughout the stories of his triumphs and struggles, his fighting with fandom and extoling the virtues of other brilliant writers, his successful TV work and his many lawsuits against various major Hollywood players (check out the bit about him suing James Cameron and winning), runs a deep, unifying thread. Harlan's entire life is a consistent embodiment of his personal philosophy. This man, raised Jewish and now proudly atheist, has a fierce moral code, and cannot break it or allow others to do so. He's angry all the time, but he uses his anger towards a very noble goal--that of ensuring that he and his fellow humans are all treated fairly. Underneath all of his curmudgeonly behavior, he's an incredibly sensitive person, and he just can't stand to sit idly by, watch people do the wrong thing, and not do something to try and stop them. At the end of the movie, he says something about the fact that he's extremely hard to live with, and that most people would blow either his or their own head off if they had to. But then, as the credits roll, he tells a great story about a man coming upon an ant lying on its back in the dirt, raging at the sky. The ant tells the man that he's heard that the sky will fall. The man asks him what good his current course of action can possibly do, and the ant looks up at the man and says, "I do what I can." Harlan does what he can, and while he may not accomplish everything he wants to accomplish, he sure has managed to create an incredible body of work. Long may he rage.

The week in books.

Krautrocksampler, by Julian Cope
I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to read this book at all. Back when British postpunk/psychedelic musician Julian Cope self-published this book in the mid-90s, it sold quickly and soon went out of print. He's done a couple of reprint editions since then, but there just aren't that many copies of this in existence, and since it is currently out of print, any that are for sale tend to go for upwards of $100. I wasn't willing to pay that much, but due to the good graces of the internet, I was recently able to locate a .pdf copy that was available for download from a blog.

I'm so glad I did. I had an absolute blast reading this book. While it was every bit as informative and entertaining as my most recent music-history read, Simon Reynolds' "Rip It Up And Start Again," Cope's book is far shorter--only about 150 pages total--and read less like a scholarly work and more like a nonstop thrillride. If Reynolds is comparable to Greil Marcus, then Cope is more like Lester Bangs, filling every page of his book with overbrimming enthusiasm and out-of-control stream of consciousness rants about all of the great Krautrock records he grew up listening to. He couches these rants in a framework of the genre's history, and does a very good job of delivering a primer for all those (like myself) who are only vaguely aware of the circumstances in which these records were created. Cope explains how "Krautrock", far from being the derogatory term many have taken it to be, was actually a self-created label jokingly applied to their own records by many bands of the genre--Faust even going as far as calling the opening track on their fourth album "Krautrock." He explains the genre's roots as well, pointing to such disparate influences as the West German-based group of American GIs The Monks, 20th century German minimalist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and The Velvet Underground as essential building blocks for what came to be known as Krautrock. He further details the movers and shakers of the genre, both those who were inextricably linked to one project (Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream, the members of Can and Faust) and those who bounced around from band to band willy-nilly (Klaus Schultze, Manuel Gottsching, Klaus Dinger), and tells the hubristic story of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and his manipulative power trip as the mastermind behind the Cosmic Jokers.

Above all, Cope expounds gloriously upon the merits of nearly every album he mentions, creating within his reader an insatiable urge to hear them all with such sentences as: "What the hell is going on in that song? Something scary is implied but the meaning always eludes me." and "Fuck Jim Morrison's ridiculous 'Renaissance Man of the Mind' description. That was just an excuse to be a fat slob. That was just an existentialist knee-jerk. No. No. No. These freaks were fit. Superhuman. Superman. They were here to go. But all in good time." (Those excerpts pertaining to Amon Duul II and Ash Ra Tempel's collaboration with Timothy Leary, respectively.) I tried so hard not to get out of control, not to toggle constantly between the .pdf and my downloading program, recklessly cueing up every new album Cope mentioned. But in the end, I couldn't restrain myself. I've downloaded at least 30 Krautrock albums in the last 24 hours, and I don't even want to think about how frustrating an experience reading this book would have been back in the days when I couldn't do such a thing, and had to hit up record stores in the often-fruitless quest to locate some of thse obscurities. Rest assured, I will eventually buy many of these albums (the Can and Neu! albums alone have been on my list for years). But it is a relief to get to hear them right now, and even more of one to discover that Mr. Cope is almost always justified in his effusive praise. This truly is a musical genre inhabited by an embarrassment of riches. And there is no better book to read in order to get excited about discovering all of them. Check this thing out--but try to avoid getting soaked on Ebay in the process. Some judicious Googling will work wonders.

Poisoned Cherries, by Quintin Jardine
I have mixed feelings about this book, and I think some of the negative feelings I have might have been alleviated had I read the five previous books in this series before reading this one. There are some series, especially in the mystery genre, where a new reader can just jump in wherever they feel like it, and still get every bit of enjoyment from the book they'd have gotten if they'd read all the previous books. I don't think that's true of Jardine's Oz Blackstone series, though. The entire first third or so of this book was devoted to subplots that had continued from previous books. Oz, a former detective now turned movie star, has tried to reconcile with his wife, Primavera, but she has left him for another man, which makes him feel better about the fact that Susie Gantry, whom he slept with while on his honeymoon (!), is now having his baby (!!). Oz is so charmed by the baby, and surprised by his affections for Susie, that he commits to a relationship with her by the time the baby's been around for a week or so. Meanwhile, other women are throwing themselves at him--old flames, co-stars in his new movie, even his not-yet-ex-wife--and he finds it hard to resist them, womanizer that he has traditionally been. Oh, but he must! Think of the children!

The whole time I was reading this section of the book, I was thinking two things. 1: Is there going to be a mystery in here somewhere? and 2: Jeez, every woman this guy meets tries to jump in the sack with him. Seems like a textbook case of wish fulfillment on the author's part, as does the fact that Oz is starring in a movie that's an adaptation of one of the novels in Jardine's other crime series, featuring Detective Bob Skinner. And you know, more power to him I suppose, but the fact is that the women just kept throwing themselves at Oz to the point where it really upset my ability to suspend disbelief. By halfway through the book, when the sixth or seventh woman in a row seemed determined to set an aggressive course for his bedroom, I was thinking, "Oh, well, of COURSE! After all, every woman in the world wants to fuck Oz Blackstone!"

That was the part that no amount of previous series reading would have made better. Who knows, maybe it's like that in every book, and if I'd started with the first book, I never would have gotten to the sixth. But even that would have been something I could have worked with if there wasn't so much of the story that I had no involvement in, and therefore no real interest in. As I said, there was no real mystery until 100 pages in or thereabouts, when the mysteriously reappearing old flame (who throws herself at Oz on multiple occasions, natch) discovers the body of her ex-fiancee and business partner. Oz is convince that she didn't kill him, but the police are just as convinced she did. After a while, other bodies start turning up, in a pattern that seems obvious to Oz, but is missed completely by the police because they don't have the information that Oz has--information that, if revealed to the police, could get his old flame, and even Oz himself, into all sorts of additional legal hot water. So Oz has to figure out who is committing the murders before the poliice charge his ex with them, or turn up any unsavory details, or both.

Once the main plot of the book got going, I'll admit that I did enjoy it a good bit more than I had towards the beginning. I still found the main character's unfortunate combination of rampant egotism and seeming irresistibility to women annoying, and had trouble liking him as a protagonist, but the process through which he solved the mystery was enjoyable to read, the action scenes were engrossing, and the plot kept me guessing right up to the end. However, the detailed subplots that tended to relate to incidents that had occurred in past books, which I knew nothing about, were distracting, and at risk of belaboring the point, I found several aspects of the main character unappealing. This book was OK at best. I doubt I'll read more by the author, at least not anytime soon.

What I've been reading recently.

I said I was going to start posting individual book reviews as I wrote them, and while that's been an easy transition to make with the movie diary entries, it has for some reason been much harder to do with the books. So now, once again, I have half a dozen or so book entries built up. And once again, I'm going to drop all of them on you at once. Maybe I'll start doing them individually after this. You'll be the first to know.

The Mystic Arts Of Erasing All Signs Of Death, by Charlie Huston
A couple of months ago, I was really excited to get this book, but since it took longer than I expected for the copy I ordered to arrive, I ended up feeding my jones for Charlie Huston books by reading "Six Bad Things" instead. As I mentioned in my review of that book, it was the first Charlie Huston book I'd read that didn't live up to my expectations. As a result, I ended up getting spooked away from this book, and once it arrived, I let it sit on my to-be-read shelf (yes, I don't just have a pile for this, but an entire bookshelf) for close to a month before finally picking it up. I just didn't want a book that I'd been so excited for to let me down the way "Six Bad Things" had. As long as I didn't actually start reading it, it was Schrodinger's crime novel, if you know what I mean.

But, well, last week I needed something to read while I waited for the signifcantly lengthier UK edition of Simon Reynolds' "Rip It Up And Start Again" to arrive (more about that will doubtless be hitting the feed in a week or so), and in spite of my misgivings, I quickly realized that "The Mystic Arts Of Erasing All Signs Of Death" was the best thing I had in the queue. So I picked it up, I started reading it, and within 20 pages or so, all of my doubts had been laid to rest. In fact, I can now report that this book stands at an equal level with Huston's previous high water marks, "Caught Stealing," "Already Dead," and "No Dominion." It might even be better than those books, in fact.

"Mystic Arts" introduces us to a new ongoing character in the Hustonverse, Webster Fillmore Goodhue, known to his friends (what few he has left) as Web. He's freeloading off his oldest friend, Chev, a tattoo artist, behaving like a complete asshole to close family members and complete strangers alike, and spending something like 14 hours a day asleep. Web's background is opaque to us at first, but one thing is clear: something is wrong in his mind.

As soon as the book starts, Web pulls a totally lame move on his friend Chev, one which requires him to get a job and pay Chev back with the quickness. He hooks up with Chev's biohazard disposal man, a large Chinese man named Po Sin, who has an opening in his business for a trauma cleaner. Maybe you're not the sort of person who has ever wondered who cleans up the mess left after a deadly car crash, or after someone has committed suicide by means of a gun in the mouth, but if you have, rest assured that there are businesses out there who earn a living doing exactly that. That's what Web is doing in order to earn the money he needs to pay Chev back, and that's what he's doing when he meets Soledad, a young woman whose father has just blown his brains out. Web is attracted to her, which is why he comes running when she needs someone to do some late-night, hush-hush trauma cleanup. That's how Web and his smart mouth get both himself and Po Sin into a really problematic situation, one that involves stupid redneck smugglers, a spoiled young man with more money than sense who fancies himself a movie producer, and large amounts of almonds. Complicating all of this is Web's own precarious mental stability, Chev's budding relationship with a cute 18-year old that Web despises, and vicious rival trauma cleaners who will stop at nothing to win their current turf war with Po Sin and his crew. Huston keeps the reader guessing, constantly adding layers to the plot and jumping back and forth from one plot thread to another, finally weaving them all together for a surprising and hard-hitting climax. In fact, I ended up missing my chance to get lunch before work last Tuesday because I just couldn't make myself put this book down without finishing it. I may have had some misgivings coming into this book after "Six Bad Things," but it turns out that I needn't have worried. Charlie Huston is not only at the top of his game, he seems to be getting better as he goes. I'll be waiting eagerly for whatever he decides to grace us with next.

Grave Sight, by Charlaine Harris
I read through this book quickly, in two settings, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I read it for a book club that I am sort of a member of (only "sort of" because I only ever started reading the books they were reading because they meet at the store where I work, while I'm working), and wasn't sure if I'd get much of anything out of it. It is a book that walks the tightrope between two currently-popular genres, "cozy romance-themed mystery" and "chick-lit paranormal mystery." Not being the target demographic for either of these categories, I wasn't sure what this book would have to offer me. While it was hardly deathless classic literature, though, I did find myself enjoying it.

For one thing, I wasn't expecting it to have as dark of a tone as it had. The main character, Harper Connelly, was struck by lightning as a teenager. In addition to the recurring health problems that she's had ever since, she also gained the ability to detect corpses, and to see how they died. Working with her (step)brother, Tolliver, she parlayed this ability into a career, doing freelance work finding bodies and naming causes of death for curious relatives and others with an interest in such things. This is a rather dodgy and unreliable line of work, as the plot of "Grave Sight" shows us.

Harper and Tolliver arrive in a small Arkansas town to attempt to find a local teenaged girl who disappeared months before. She had been dating a local boy who'd been found shot and killed in some woods outside of town months before. A lot of the townsfolk think that the boy, Dell, must have shot the girl, Teenie, and then killed himself. Dell's mother hires Harper to locate Teenie's body and determine how she died, with the hopes of proving that Dell didn't kill her. Harper locates the body quickly, and determines that Dell indeed did not kill Teenie, but instead of calming the situation, this only sets the town into a more pronounced uproar, which drags both Harper and Tolliver right into the middle of it and ends up involving everyone from high school football players to the town drunk to high-powered lawyers and the local sheriff. All of these people are related, you see, in one way or another, and the nature of the town, which has everyone in everyone else's business, makes the whole thing an emotional powderkeg waiting for a spark just like the one Harper has unwittingly struck to send the whole thing sky-high.

Some of the plot points of this book seemed a bit obvious, while others seemed a little tossed-off and not explained all that well in terms of character motivation, but on the whole, I did find the story to be well-told. The characters mostly worked most of the time, and while most of the secondary ones were one-dimensional and not fleshed-out much at all, Harper and Tolliver were at least multi-dimensional, compelling, and sympathetic. In terms of quick, engaging mystery that requires little deep thought, this book did a good job of filling its role. I typically look for more profound reading material than this, and probably won't return to the series anytime soon, but all in all, it really wasn't too bad.

Sunken Treasure, by Wil Wheaton
I've been aware of Wil Wheaton as an actor since I was a kid, having seen "Stand By Me" and various episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" when I was as young as 12 years old. However, I've only known of him as a writer for a very short time, since I discovered his blog about 6 months ago. Apparently this is the main focus of his creative endeavors these days, as he has several books out and has been maintaining his blog for close to a decade. I'm glad I finally figured all of this out; I've really enjoyed his blog since starting to read it recently. That's why, when he announced that he was self-publishing a short collection of writing that would make a good introduction for new fans, I went ahead and ordered myself a copy.

"Sunken Treasure" is a quick and enjoyable read that you can get through in a couple of hours before getting out of bed on a lazy Sunday morning, which is exactly how I read it this morning. And actually, I'd say that "Sunken Treasure" is probably worth it for even the long-running Wheaton fans. While it's rather short at 84 pages, only about 30 of those pages have been published in previous books of his, making 2/3 of this material new even to those who've bought all of his books. And that material is some of the most worthwhile stuff here; I particularly enjoyed the volume's longest piece, a production diary from his recent guest-star turn on the TV show Criminal Minds. This diary takes up about the last third of the book, and does a great job of giving random readers like myself who've never done any sort of acting an idea of what it's like to work on a TV show. I think it helped that I prepared for reading the book by making sure to catch the episode when it aired, so that I could compare Wil's behind-the-scenes descriptions to my memories of the finished episode (which, for the record, was quite good).

That wasn't the only thing I enjoyed here, though. The stories of Star Wars toys and arcade games that he loved as a child could have come from my own memories, while his stories about happy moments with his wife and teenaged sons made me think that maybe the domestic, family-man lifestyle isn't quite as bad as I've always imagined it to be. I even enjoyed his recap of a Star Trek: TNG episode that I've never seen, especially in the moments when he stepped back from his rather snarky recap (which, don't get me wrong, was itself fun and amusing) to share some of his personal feelings about working on the show. His heartfelt frustration at playing a character that ended up being hated by a great many Star Trek fans, and further at feeling like it wasn't his fault, that his hands were tied by writing failures and flawed character decisions, was something I found myself empathizing with. It sucks to carry the blame for something that, for the most part, is not your fault.

Ultimately, what I get from this book is that Wil Wheaton is a really nice guy with a pretty happy life. He's gifted with the ability to communicate the joys and, occasionally, the sorrows of his life to his readers in clear language that's easy to relate to. He knows how to tell an entertaining story. And ultimately, he's an incredibly likeable person, whose writing I want to read more of, as soon as I get the chance. If Wil's goal with this short sampler was to inspire more sales of his other books, well, he sure has succeeded where I'm concerned. I plan to pick up some more of his stuff as soon as I get the chance.

Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84, by Simon Reynolds
This is what happened: I bought the US edition of this book back when it was released, read it, loved it. Six months or so later, I learned that the original UK edition had been cut all to hell for its US release. Something like 200 pages had been removed in order to pare the US edition down to its 400 page final length. I was shocked and appalled, but never knew quite how to get myself a copy of the UK edition, short of doing an international order through Amazon UK, which I told myself would be prohibitively expensive. So that was all there was to it, for a long time.

Then, a couple of months ago, I came into a large sum of money (four figures) with which I was free to purchase whatever I wanted. Well, in addition to paying off all of my past due utility bills and purchasing the laptop I'm currently typing this review on (a steal at $450), I went ahead and did the Amazon UK order to obtain the original, director's-cut edition of "Rip It Up And Start Again." Boy, am I glad I did. The 400 page edition that I originally read was thoroughly enjoyable, but it still couldn't compare to the author's original intention. With smaller print, the UK edition still came out to be 125 more pages than the US edition, and where the US edition included no pictures at all, the UK edition presented at least one image every half-dozen pages or so. I finally got to see the Scritti Politti EP cover depicting the squalor in which they lived, as well as photos from Throbbing Gristle and James Chance performances, amongst many other things. And the text was greatly expanded, not just in additional coverage for bands that had been unmentioned in the US text but also in additional sections, sometimes great portions of one chapter or another that were completely removed, which I was now reading for the first time. It was a revelation to me, especially since the sections that were removed often dealt with bands that I'd been far less likely to already know about than the bands that were left in the truncated manuscript.

All of this is just a comparison between two editions, though. What's really important here is the work itself, and in reading this book, the first work I ever encountered by Simon Reynolds, I found myself going from barely aware of him to being a huge fan. That experience is only amplified by reading this new, expanded edition. Reynolds is one of the best music writers I've ever read, able to integrate literate, intensely rational analysis of the ideas behind particular groups and their recorded works, with far more emotionally-centered reactions to the feel and sound that those works ultimately emanated. Reynolds is more of a Greil Marcus than a Lester Bangs, but he's able to incorporate the strengths of both of these writers as well as those of many others, including British rock critics that I'm, again, less familiar with than I should be, into an ecumenical overall approach that leaves no stone unturned in its in-depth analysis of bands, scenes, movements, and overall periods in punk/rock history. I say "periods" because this book, despite its subtitular reference to postpunk, covers a great deal more than just that few years after the dissolution of the Sex Pistols in which Joy Division and Public Image Ltd. represented the cream of the creative crop. The book delves deeply into the New Wave/"New Pop" movements of the early 80s, probing the depths of synthpop and fey British "haircut bands" to find the serious ideas and important creative moments that were at the root of a great deal of the era. In so doing, Reynolds makes a persuasive case for the likes of the "Don't You Want Me" era Human League, Duran Duran, and even Culture Club. I almost find myself wanting to give certain era-defining synthpop albums another listen. Almost.

Ultimately, that's the biggest tribute to the power of Reynolds's writing here. He not only makes me want to dig out records by groups I like that I haven't heard in quite a while, but also records by groups I've always hated. If his writing unearths a valuable truth or a worthwhile musical moment on the second Culture Club album or in Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax," I feel like I should hear it again, even though I'd ordinarily tell you that I'd be happy if I never heard any of that garbage again. That's enough to tell me that this is a writer worth paying attention to. "Rip It Up And Start Again" may be the first Simon Reynolds book I've ever read, but it won't be the last.

Appaloosa, by Robert B. Parker
I read this book for a book club that normally tackles literary classics and works that we feel have some sort of resonance in the wider world. This time, though, a new member of the group picked something out, and we ended up reading this Western novel, which I personally blew through in a day. I'm not sure what motivated him to pick it, as there were really no wider cultural resonances here that seemed to me to have any significance. This is pure pulp Western, narrated by a hard-working lawman who is quick on the draw and always able to do what he needs to do to keep the peace. Of course, sometimes that means killing people. In fact, in this book, it often means killing people. Our lawman narrator, Everett Hitch, is second fiddle, though, to Virgil Cole, an even tougher, even faster, even more successful lawman who is depicted as somewhat of a sociopath. Hitch backs up Cole rather than taking the lead on any particular operations, but sometimes it also seems that he's there to keep Cole in line, to check his more violent impulses.

In this book, Cole and Hitch hire on as marshals in a town called Appaloosa, where a local rancher has killed the previous marshal and basically taken over the town. He and his men take whatever they want for free and rape and murder at will. The town is tired of the situation and expect Cole and Hitch to fix it. Which they do, at first. It's what happens after that that causes the problem.

And don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading about all of it. It was a fun, pulpy novel about crime and violence in the old West. I like crime novels anyway, so I was pretty much guaranteed to enjoy this one. But it wasn't quite what I expected, and certainly isn't some sort of deathless work of literature. So hey, this book is pretty fun, but I can't say it's amazing or anything. Good, not great.

When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir Of A Political Childhood, by Said Sayrafiezadeh
This memoir of a childhood in the Socialist Workers Party interested me mainly because of my own interactions in the past with radical political groups, and also because the author is a Gen-Xer like me (typing that makes me gag... I mean it somewhat jokingly) and I think all of us had at least somewhat alienated childhoods. So I was interested in reading about his, and although his experience was quite different from mine--absentee father; withdrawn, moodswinging mother; childhood spent mostly alone--I could really understand where he was coming from. His own inability to connect with other children sometimes had more to do with his being Iranian during a time of widespread hostility towards Iran in the United States than anything else, but still, it's something I've lived through myself. His stunted relationships with his parents were also something I could understand, even if, again, the circumstances couldn't be more different than my own.

The real reason I enjoyed this book as much as I did, though, is because of Sayrafiezadeh's writing style, which is evocative of emotion without being overwritten. He's good at staying subtle, at showing instead of telling, of giving us his perspective of a particular situation in a way that makes clear what reaction he'd have to it and why. Another interesting factor in the telling is the stuff he inserts in which he talks about his adult life, living on his own in New York, trying to make it as an actor, having uncomfortable and infrequent interactions with his parents, trying to date. And through it all, there's the thread of his indoctrination into Socialist Workers Party ideology at a very young age, forever affecting his thought patterns and making him feel set apart from everyone else he meets. This was the most interesting part, for me; I've always felt like the radical political movements that I encounter encourage the sort of blind faith that is just as often part and parcel with evangelical Christianity, and this book made it clear that this is true, or at least that it was for both Said Sayrafiezadeh and both of his parents. The way Said writes the book makes it clear that he has started to question a lot of these beliefs now, but that back when these stories occurred, his own dim understanding of them was often a source of discomfort. I feel like this book, if nothing else, once again proves that it's not a good idea to adhere too closely to one particular school of thought where politics is concerned, to make up your own mind on specific issues and not let a pre-designed ideology box in your own thought patterns. By the end of the book, you can tell that Said has learned this lesson, even if, again, he never says so. In a book that is more often depressing than uplifting, it's nice to at least come away with this one positive conclusion.

Broken Summers, by Henry Rollins
This was my second time reading this book, which collects Rollins' journal entries from 2002 and 2003, which mostly focus on the album of Black Flag covers he and his band did as a benefit for the West Memphis 3, as well as the tour they did in support of that album. This book intrigued me the first time I read it, as Rollins seemed to be moving away from the dark, misanthropic tone that often pervades in his books of journal entries. Granted, he still seemed closed off from the human race to an extent I find uncomfortable to even contemplate, but I could see some hope for him. Since that first reading, though, I've read "A Dull Roar," a more recent collection of journal entries, in which it seemed that his perspective had returned to previous high levels of misanthropy. Now, with a second reading of "Broken Summers," I see far less of the hope that I saw in my original reading. Looking back now, I'm not even sure where I was getting that. For the most part, Rollins continues to have a pretty antisocial attitude towards humanity. If anything, I can see hints in this book that he's sometimes disappointed in the bad behavior of other people rather than angered by it, but those moments of sadness are mitigated by other moments of absolute anger.

In sum, it adds up to a pretty entertaining book that delivers on what I look for in a book by Henry Rollins. His perspective on the world is always unique and interesting, and he often says things that I can relate to on a deep level. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, since the things he's saying that I relate to tend to be pretty bleak, but at least I can feel like someone understands. I admit that, in reading these books, I often find myself wishing for happiness for Rollins, but I can see that, due to his unique lifestyle, worldview, and experiences, that it will be hard for him to ever attain such a thing, or even to describe what it would look like for him. I guess this is one of the things I relate most closely to him in--I don't really know what a happy life for me would look like, either. I hope that both of us find it someday. Until then, though, I'm sure I will continue to enjoy these books of journal entries that Rollins releases onto the world every few years or so.

Books I've read lately (big-time catchup edition).

I've decided to start posting book reviews individually, as I write them, just like what I'm doing with movie reviews now, but before I can, I have to post all the reviews I've written over the last month or two in order to get you caught up. Hopefully this huge post will make up for the fact that I haven't posted anything in almost a week.

Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis
I originally became interested in reading this book after reading a New York Times article the author wrote earlier this year, dealing with the recent economic downturn. In the article, he mentioned this book, and how he'd written it at the time of the S&L-bailout-related economic dive. At the time (he said in the article), he'd thought that that stock market crash would end the era of greed and recklessness that had reigned on Wall Street during the 80s, and figured that he could come up with a good cautionary tale based on his insider's perspective, gained while working at a powerful bond trading company during that era. What he found (he continued) was that his book was seen more like a how-to manual, especially after the stock market quickly rebounded, and more people than ever desired to get into the Wall Street free-money business.

I myself am still not sure if Wall Street's reckless, no-tomorrow practices are over. After all, while I feel that the current policy of bailing out certain institutions is fundamentally a good idea, the way it's being handled seems almost guaranteed to create more recklessness in companies who can continue to think that, if they fuck up, they can just get more free money from the government. That all being said, I fully expect those companies to be headed straight downwards in the coming years. With that in mind--and believe me, throughout my reading of "Liar's Poker", it was at the forefront of my mind--this book is a revealing look that uses readable terminology and a briskly flowing, engaging, and oftentimes hilarious writing style to turn what could easily be an incomprehensible tale of complicated economic matters into an eminently understandable account that will keep anyone entertained. And, I hasten to add, horrified. There's a lot of ridiculous, stupid, reckless shit going on in this book, and the fact that all of it really happened is downright frightening. After reading "Liar's Poker", you'll find yourself thinking of Wall Street traders as billionaire gamblers with nothing to go on but hunches and superstitions. You'll probably be right, too. After all, as Lewis points out on numerous occasions throughout this book, if you have enough money, you can cover up any mistakes. And at this point in history, 20 years after the conclusion of this narrative, there's no doubt in my mind that Wall Street traders are behaving several orders of magnitude more recklessly than they were during the 80s.

If you're scared about the state of our economy going forward and gallows humor is your thing, this book is a perfect read for you right now. You can laugh yourself sick at all the ridiculous bullshit that people at places like Merrill Lynch were (and no doubt still are) doing. If, on the other hand, you've got a weak stomach, you might want to give this one a miss. It will make you lose sleep.

Six Bad Things, by Charlie Huston
I've loved every other Charlie Huston book I've read so far (those being all four of the Joe Pitt novels, as well as the first of the Hank Thompson trilogy, of which "Six Bad Things" is the second), and I enjoyed this one too. However, I'd definitely have to rank it my least favorite Huston novel thus far. I think the main reason for that is that the main character started to lose my sympathy somewhat in this novel. In "Caught Stealing", Hank Thompson took a lot of abuse and dealt out a lot more. This is true in "Six Bad Things" as well, but some of the abuse he deals out seems less deserved and more gratuitous, and some of the bad events he suffers seem a bit less plausible and, again, more gratuitous. I understand that Huston is trying to push some crime-novel envelopes here, and he's to be credited for that, but I think he might push it a bit too far in this one. I'll still read the final book in the trilogy, "A Dangerous Man", but considering the fact that I enjoyed this one less as it went along, and the fact that I'm particularly unhappy with the ending of "Six Bad Things" and the position it left the main character in, I don't really expect too much. Right now, I'm a lot more excited to read Huston's latest, "The Mystic Arts Of Erasing All Signs Of Death". I know that the Hank Thompson trilogy are the first three books Huston had published, so I'm hoping that their relatively lower quality is more due to the fact that they were written by a novice than anything else, and that the upward trend I've now observed running from the Hank Thompson to the Joe Pitt novels only continues from here. Guess we'll see.

Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days And Party Nights of The Dallas Cowboys Dynasty, by Jeff Pearlman
OK, first of all, as a Washington Redskins fan, I fucking hate the Dallas Cowboys. It's something I was raised to do, and they've given me plenty of excuses to maintain that policy in the 25 or so years that I've spent following professional football (I started when I was 5, and I'm 33 now; the missing years in there are the late 90s, when Norv Turner coached the Redskins and hope vanished from the lives of Redskins fans for years. I just couldn't stand to watch for a few years there). The Redskins have never been a star-driven team; instead, they're generally coached by people who believe in old-school smashmouth football, as best personified by Joe Gibbs, who coached the Redskins throughout my childhood and led them to three Super Bowl wins. Back in those days, the Cowboys were coached by aging Hall Of Famer Tom Landry, who'd started out as the defensive coach of the Giants back in the 50s. I hated him too, don't get me wrong, but I could at least respect him. That all changed when I was 13; filthy rich Texas oilman Jerry Jones purchased the Cowboys, fired Landry, and brought in ethically-challenged Miami Hurricanes coach Jimmy Johnson. This is the point at which Dallas really began to justify my hatred for them, and, not at all coincidentally, the starting point of this book.

Author Jeff Pearlman knows that he's latched onto a hell of a narrative here, and he tells the story in high style, detailing the heights of insanity and depths of debauchery that were the hallmark of the 90s Cowboys, even as they took over from the Redskins as the NFC East team most likely to win the Super Bowl in any given year (grumble grumble). Pearlman tells stories you've never heard before, about Troy Aikman battling with the Dallas media, Michael Irvin indulging in drugs and sex for hire, and most notoriously, about monstrous defensive lineman Charles Haley's propensity for indecent exposure, which is one of those truth is stranger than fiction things that's hard to believe for me even after reading so many corroborating quotes, both in this book and in articles about it. Pearlman's narrative is often humorous and ribald, and keeps this book far more entertaining than the most recent football-related book I read, "War As They Knew It". Where that book maintained a studied impartiality and a factual delivery of the history, Pearlman's narrative moves with the emotional tenor of each scene he describes, and keeps the reader emotionally invested in all of them. And I WAS emotionally invested. Even though I was horrified whenever I found myself sympathizing with the Cowboys as a team, I often felt compelled by the stories of individual players. Growing up, I felt a rival fan's instinctive rage and repulsion at the mention of players like Michael Irvin, Troy Aikman, and Emmitt Smith, but at various points while reading this book, I found myself concerned about them, and how their stories would turn out. All of them came off, in the end, as standup guys, even if some (Irvin) had quite a few personal demons to struggle with.

On the other hand, a couple of the biggest players in this story did not come off as standup guys. Jerry Jones has always seemed to me like a guy with more money than sense, at least where football is concerned, and "Boys Will Be Boys" makes it abundantly clear that Jones indeed values his ego above the success of his team as a whole. He doesn't know when to delegate, and has made a career out of drafting players that go bust in a hurry. Of course, Redskins owner Dan Snyder has problems of his own in this area--while he's not his own general manager, he does employ his best friend, Vinny Cerrato, in this position, which has largely the same results--but that being said, the Redskins still aren't nearly as likely to reach for high maintenance prima donna veterans that have been run off from other ball clubs due to behavioral problems as Jerry Jones is. There were stories in the book of him behaving this way with Deion Sanders and others that very closely parallel his more recent escapades with Terrell Owens and Adam "Pacman" Jones. Some things never change, I suppose. All of that having been said, Jerry Jones, to his credit, at least seems like a nice enough guy on a personal level. Jimmy Johnson comes off like a flaming asshole throughout this book. He may have been a good coach, and the record shows that he indeed was, especially considering the shape of the Dallas club that he took over in 1989, after a few years of Tom Landry's obvious decline. That said, he was such a poisonous figure in the team's makeup that he eventually got fired after winning the Super Bowl for the second straight year. That's how little he was liked by the end.

If I go on, this entry will become (even more of) a rant against the Dallas Cowboys, though, so I should probably just stop here. This is a great book. If you like football, you should read it. This is especially true because, regardless of what team you root for, you probably have a very strong opinion about the Cowboys. They're the New York Yankees of football, and for very good reason. Thankfully, they're also an incredibly entertaining team to read about, and it seems like no one could have told the story of their 90s-era rise and fall than Jeff Pearlman has done here. Don't miss this one.

The Last Quarry, by Max Allan Collins
After tremendously enjoying Collins's other Hard Case Crime contribution featuring his hitman character, Quarry, I just had to go back and check out this one as well. Weirdly enough, despite this being "The Last Quarry" and the other Quarry novel I read being "The First Quarry", this one was actually written first. It tells the story of a much older Quarry, who stumbles upon an old mob associate while living as a retired resort-keeper on the shores of a lake in Minnesota. This book is an expansion of two different short stories Collins wrote that starred Quarry, and this is reasonably easy to tell due to the somewhat episodic structure of the novel. It all hangs together well, though, and it's such a quick and engaging read that I finished the whole thing in a mere few hours. The way the plot will finally all come together at the end is tough to guess in advance, and I only even understood it as well as I did because I read Collins's afterword first. There are mild spoilers in said afterword, so don't do what I did if you don't want to give yourself a couple of crucial clues that will let you know what to look for. I'm kind of sorry I did so, myself. It didn't hurt my enjoyment of this book any, though, so in the end all was well.

And yet again, a Max Allan Collins novel turns out to be gold. Who knew that the first crime writer I ever discovered in my life (first with his Batman comics writing in the late 80s, when I was 11 years old, then with his novel "True Detective", which I found in the library when I was 13) would end up being one of my all-time favorites? But over a dozen novels later, Collins continues to deliver time and time again. His consistency is admirable and, from a reader's perspective, rewarding.

Halting State, by Charles Stross
This book is set up in a daunting manner. The narrative switches between three different points of view, and each of them is told in the second person, present tense. For example: "You check out your shoulder in the bathroom mirror. That's quite some bruise Mike landed on you at the club." Between the somewhat disorienting second-person approach and the constantly shifting viewpoints, "Halting State" can be a challenging book to engage with. This is leaving aside the rather technical nature of much of its narrative; the book tells the story of a software company that's had a bank robbery occur inside one of its most popular video games, which threatens to disrupt its imminent IPO and lose it assloads of money. One of the characters is the local cop inexplicably summoned to the scene of this virtual robbery, while the other two are working for the parent company of the robbed software company. Or something like that. There's a lot of technical jargon, about stocks, international relations, banking, video games, and hypothetical technologies that Stross is creating as he relates the narrative. Did I mention that this book takes place a decade from now, in a future that is, technologically speaking, borderline unrecognizable to a citizen of our current time? Well, it does. Having only read Stross's "Merchant Princes" series before now, I was unprepared for what he gets up to when he really lets his science-fictional side run wild.

That said, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Sure, there are technical elements that were discussed at points in the narrative that I didn't understand as I read them, but they were never central enough to the plot to confuse my understanding of the story as a whole. I do wish Stross was a bit better at explaining points like this, as, for example, Neal Stephenson is, but that's a minor quibble. Really, if you strip away the technological bells and whistles, as well as the scientific grounding of the novel's central conceit, what you have here is a fast-moving espionage novel. You've probably got to have at least somewhat of a geeky, sci-fi oriented mindset to enjoy this, so I don't exactly recommend passing it along to your great uncle who loves John Le Carre, but it's really not that different from his Le Carre novels for all that. What's more, I think it would make a great movie. It's fast-moving, features a complicated and engaging plot, and throws around plenty of big ideas to engage the geek in all of us. It's well worth checking out, and it only further cements my impression that pretty much any book by Charles Stross is worth picking up... even the ones that are slightly confusing at points.

Heartsick, by Chelsea Cain
This was an intense, brutal crime novel that also featured quite a bit of emotional depth. I was pretty impressed with the author's ability to explore the wounded psyches of the two main characters, detective Archie Sheridan and newspaper reporter Susan Ward, without making either of them seem insane or even hard to empathize with. The book focuses around the first case Archie Sheridan has taken on since spending four years heading the Beauty Killer task force, attempting to catch a serial killer in the Portland, Oregon area. Archie caught her, all right, but maybe it'd be truer to say that she caught him. Gretchen Lowell, The Beauty Killer, spent days torturing Archie, at one point killing him and then rescuscitating him, before finally calling 911 and surrendering him and herself to the authorities. [None of this is a spoiler--it is revealed in the first ten pages of the book.:] Now, after Archie has spent two years on disability leave, he's returned to the police force to attempt to track down another serial killer. He still has a pretty massive painkiller addiction, which seems less than healthy, but he is able to function, although he must get rides from his partner or call a cab whenever he needs to go somewhere. Susan Ward, a writer for the most prominent daily paper in Portland, has been assigned to write an ongoing series of feature stories on Archie. Her father died when she was still quite young, and now, she seems to have some self-esteem issues, which show up in her less than healthy love life. Very soon after the book begins, we know that both of our main characters have serious problems. From there, though, the plot mainly focuses on the serial killer that Archie is trying to catch, although it seems pretty likely that both Archie and Susan's issues will factor into the story by its end. Gretchen Lowell has a role to play as well, and while it wasn't very different from the Hannibal Lecter-ish role I expected her to play when the book began, Chelsea Cain's use of the character managed to differentiate itself enough from Thomas Harris's use of Hannibal Lecter to avoid seeming too derivative.

One thing that's been noted quite a bit in discussions of this book is the graphic nature of the violence within it. The violence that we see occurring, as well as its bloody aftermath, is often described in near-clinical detail. That's not to say that it reads like a medical textbook--oh, not at all. Instead, the descriptions of violent acts, and of beaten, mutilated corpses, which occur on multiple occasions throughout the book, are shocking in a visceral sense. The effects of the violence, the physical damage that is inflicted on some of these characters, is intense enough that I would go so far as to warn those with weak stomachs away from this book. I'm not usually that bothered by the gross parts of even the most brutal crime and horror novels, but I've encountered some exceptions in my time, and this is definitely one of them. Proceed with caution.

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Now that I've finally read this book, I can see why it's considered a classic. Margaret Atwood's tale of a (somewhat) post-apocalyptic future in which religious conservatives have overtaken the United States of America and established a dictatorship based around a rigid caste system for women not only presents a potential future that is as terrifying as it is fascinating, it does so in beautiful language, with strong storytelling and stunningly well-defined, multi-dimensional characters. This book would probably be a classic simply because of its subject matter, and could have been elevated to its current regard even if written with much sparer, more workmanlike prose. However, the thing that makes it truly great is what a great writer Margaret Atwood is. I was reading this book for a book club, and finished it before the discussion with only hours to spare, but nonetheless, I sometimes could not help but linger over a particular sentence or paragraph that stood out to me. And make no mistake, many of them did.

This book has a lot to offer, on multiple levels, and none of that should be neglected. But if you come for the social commentary, you will most likely stay for the excellent writing on display. Don't miss this one.

Money For Nothing, by Donald E. Westlake
The recent death of crime fiction pioneer Donald Westlake has been a clear reminder to me that I haven't read nearly enough of his stuff. This is a lot of why I picked up "Money For Nothing," just to begin familiarizing myself more thoroughly with his work. It was such an awesome book, though, that I ended up having more fun doing so than I ever could have foreseen.

"Money For Nothing" begins with a young man named Josh Redmont, who begins receiving $1000 checks in the mail every month apropos of nothing. He's not destitute, but he's definitely still making a small enough amount of money to be strongly tempted by the not-insignificant monthly sum. When he deposits the first one and it clears, he's sort of nervous, unsure of whether someone will eventually correct what he assumes is an error, and demand their money back. But after seven years of getting the checks, he's long since grown used to them, and now deposits and spends them without a second thought. In the interim, he's acquired a young wife, Eve, and the two of them have a two-year old son, Jeremy. Therefore, Josh is totally unprepared when a man from a former Soviet country shows up and informs him that he, a sleeper agent, has now been activated, and needs to start performing certain small tasks for his employers as payback for all the money he's been getting over the years. Josh plays it cool while in the presence of this man, Levrin, but immediately sets out to locate the man who Levrin names as having initially recruited him, Mr. Nimrin. When Josh locates Mr. Nimrin, he learns that his checks were originally part of a moneymaking scheme on Mr. Nimrin's part, that the scheme was disrupted 7 years ago by Nimrin's arrest, and that if Josh gives Levrin any clue that he's not actually a sleeper agent, he and his family, along with Nimrin himself, will surely be killed.

This all happens in the first 20 to 30 pages, and this book is a nonstop wild ride from this point on. Josh is in over his head, and realizes this from the first, but nonetheless decides that he's going to get himself and his family out of this situation, which he sees as leading to certain doom sooner or later. Plus, he doesn't like that he's acting against the interests of his own country. But it quickly becomes apparent that getting out of the situation is going to be even harder than it initially seems, and Josh is off on a frantic, nonstop effort that is considerably complicated by the appearance of other sleeper agents, both faked ones "recruited" by Mr. Nimrin and real ones connected with Levrin and his crew. There are points in this novel at which the madcap action starts seeming quite humorous, which was no doubt intentional on Westlake's part, and is a nice counterpoint to the work of his with which I'm much more familiar, his dark crime novels written under the pseudonym Richard Stark. For a long time, I considered the Stark writings the more interesting and important part of Westlake's work, but I think that idea might be due for a reevaluation. If "Money For Nothing" is any indication, the books under his own name, while quite different in tone, are every bit as entertaining.