Every once in a while, you visit a used bookstore and happen across a forgotten classic. In May, I drove through the little town of Kinsman, Ohio, on my way to Pymatuning to sit in a cabin and finish a novel that won’t be published for some time. A used bookstore has slowly eaten away most of the other businesses in town and now occupies several storefronts around a convenience store/soda stand. Near the register I noticed a shelf devoted to an author I’d never heard of. Turns out Leigh Brackett is a local legend, a woman from California! who moved there with her husband and wrote scifi novels in a house down the street.
Brackett, I learned, also wrote several screenplays. Big stuff. Rio Bravo. The Big Sleep. And, the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back. I picked The Long Tomorrow up because I thought this was such a beautiful cover. See more Brackett covers here.
I’m glad I did. The book is just wonderful, classic scifi. It begins in Pymatuning, 100 years after a nuclear war has destroyed every city on earth. In Brackett’s world, it’s the Amish and Mennonites who survive the apocalypse. One day, a precocious boy, Len, and his cousin, Esau, come across a radio, a forbidden piece of technology that may have come from the last remaining city. The object kicks off the adventure as Len and Esau set out into the territories in search of the truth.
Like all good sci fi, the story is compelling even as the bigger themes develop in the writing. Visit a used bookstore and get a copy for yourself!
I was lucky enough to get a galley of The Devil All The Time and actually read it in March, but now that it’s coming out soon (July 12) you can read it, too.
Here’s the gist: A handful of smalltown folk grapple with the notion of what God wants for them and their kindred, how much prayer and faith effect their day-to-day business. Characters include a man who gave up everything to God by warring in the South Pacific, only to return home to find a paradise he can’t hold onto no matter how much he prays; a latent homosexual and his wife who collect strange men on a cross-country killing spree; a fire-and-brimstone preacher and his wheelchair-bound cousin; a corrupt sheriff and his prostitute sister.
The prose is…wonderful. Parsed down to the basics in a way I thought only Cormac McCarthy could pull off. Brutal. Unrelenting. Several times I found myself thinking “you can’t do that!” and Pollock just does and it works brilliantly.
I think some will read this as a validation of atheism but, for me, God was pulling the strings for these characters all along, leading them toward each other for that ultimate confrontation at the end.
There is a shifting of perspective throughout, a kind of hyper omniscient point of view, that was a little jarring at first but something I came to accept quickly.
I want to direct this movie. Will someone please give me a bunch of money so we can make that happen?
I love fantasy but I’m feeling a bit burned out from all the awful vampire/werewolf/alien books, lately, and have been searching for some new re-imagining of a forgotten legend that has not been played out. I found it in The Stolen Child. I guess I missed out on the whole zeitgeist for this thing as just about anyone I mention it to has already read it. Someone gave it to me as a gift and I read it immediately.
The story is inspired by Yeats’ melancholy poem about the creepy changeling myth and it manages to capture its essence and tone for some 300 pages. It begins as young Henry Day fights with his mother and “runs away” into the forest to scare her into paying attention to him again instead of doting over his twin sisters all the time. There, he is captured by a tribe of changelings, faeries that can alter their appearance to look like human children. One of the changelings switches places with Henry and the rest of the book is told in alternating chapters from their different perspectives as they search for their true identities.
Perhaps I brought too much of myself into the book as I read, but I also felt as though the story was a bit of an exploration on that time in a man’s life when he is forced to put his childhood aside and become the man he must be. For each of us, there is a time when we realize the darker nature of the world and are forced to either find our place in it or lose ourselves to it.
Blah blah blah, psychobable, right? Whatever. The story is great. And, better, it’s something new. Read it.
I’m finally caught up on my John Hart, having finished his most recent crime novel, The Last Child. I was introduced to his work by a nice editor at St. Martin’s last year and thought it would be a cool learning experience to read his three books in the order they were published, beginning with King of Lies, to see if I could watch him grow as a writer. I thought maybe I could pick up some tricks along the way.
The Last Child, when you really get into it, is not one mystery, but three, which slowly unravel from the core narrative which is the search for Alyssa Merrimon’s killer, a search that is conducted by her twin brother, Johnny, age 13. What Hart does here is counter to what most mystery authors do. Instead of bringing his threads together as the novel progresses, these separate mysteries (who abducted Alyssa? who kidnapped a second girl? what’s up with this black man who speaks to God?) actually pull further and further apart until you realize they have very little to do with each other, in the end. Or, maybe they are all linked in some metaphysical way. The end product is a more mature story than anything Hart has attempted before, and the one that reads most true.
As in real life, there is no tight, happy ending. Not everything is connected. Or has to be. Sometimes we move from one tragedy to another. I think what Hart is going for here is the idea that grace, in the end, will win against the forces of darkness. And I can get behind that.
Like all Hart’s novels, it’s crazy hard to put down. He’s perfected his pacing and structure over the course of three books. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
A memoir about love and murder as told by a chimp? Yes, please, I thought when I first heard about Benjamin Hale’s debut novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. What I imaged and hoped for was an adventure story in the vein of Conquest for the Planet of the Apes or something. Some cross-country journey from the point of view of the world’s first speaking chimpanzee. A forbidden unrequited love. What it’s like to be an alien in a world of men.
And, all that’s there, in some form. But, that’s not what this book is about. This book is about language. Language as philosophy. Language as love. Language as evil. Language as grace. It is not about the moment Bruno becomes self-aware (through language) but about the process of becoming self aware (through words, words, words). Learning to think is a process, after all.
The book, itself, treats language as a commodity. It is beautifully written, the words streaming through your head, gently, in time. But, only if you have the lexicon to keep pace. This, of course, will limit the novel’s appeal to a wider audience. But maybe that’s okay. Bruno, himself, would care little about how many readers he reached so long as the ones he did enjoyed the show.
The hardest leap for any reader, though, comes with the story of Bruno’s love for Lydia, the scientist (partly modeled on primatologist Jane Goodall) who rescued him from the Lincoln Park Zoo. For, that love is decidedly not unrequited. And this central narrative owes much, I think, to Nabokov.
Hale, as a writer, delights in allusions to great works of literature and popular culture, throughout. Planet of the Apes is there, of course, but also and mostly, Pinocchio (for who is Leon Smoler, Bruno’s best friend, if not a present-day Stromboli?). If I’m not mistaken, I also caught references to The Twilight Zone and (perhaps) Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
I loved the book but I wanted more whimsy. This is a fun idea. But it is seldom fun. It’s too busy being serious. Will I recommend it? Yes. But not to everyone.
Perversely, I really want to see this adapted for cinema. Spike Jonze would make this sing.
Two books in, and I’m really starting to dig mystery writer John Hart. DOWN RIVER, a hard-boiled thriller about a prodigal son returning to a small southern town just as the killin’ starts, again, reads easier than Hart’s debut KING OF LIES. In fact, I think you can almost see Hart’s writing become more confident and literary (whatever that means) as this novel progresses. While the beginning reads like an extension of LIES’ noirish world, by the end DOWN RIVER becomes something stronger, sweeter. There are twists and turns at every chapter and the pace is so unrelenting you can’t find a place to stop. And, like all good mysteries, the story here is what lies in the hearts of the family members at the center of the novel. Who knows grace? Who knows evil? Good stuff. Highly recommend.
