The Saturday Review: Deeply Odd

I think this is the second book of Koontz's I've reviewed here this year. (Well, maybe this year. I know it's been ... a while... since I've been regular here. ... Do they make an equivalent of writerly prune juice to keep the ideas flowing? Only that leads to an easy and uncomfortable metaphor, doesn't it? Never mind on that one.) This one is going to go much the way of that last one, and if you'd rather not sort through the rest of this, here's the final verdict up front: meh.

That's an official "meh" as in: I didn't quit half-way through but seriously, seriously thought about it and only really finished it because I was sufficiently mildly interested in how the train wreck would resolve itself. I gave it three stars on Goodreads only because they don't have a half-star system, and two seemed a little too harsh.

This is a "read if you've got nothing else better on your TBR list or there's nothing better in the library. Or on TV." I mean that. There's better storytelling on television. Even on the networks.

As for the details...

When I started thinking about how to best summarize my feelings on this, I was going to devise a "Deeply Odd Drinking Game." Only I realized it would more likely be the "Deeply Odd Sure-fire Path to Alcohol Poisoning" which doesn't really sound like anybody's idea of a game. Least no one I want to go drinking with, at any rate. So, instead, I've devised a game we'll call "Spot the Plot." Here's how you play. Open the book, anywhere, at random. Read a paragraph. Does it have anything to do with the plot?

Odds are, no. (Pun not intentional.)

Try again.

Odds are, the next one won't, either.

As you could be at this a while, let me tell you what you will find, in no particular order:

Odd reminisces about his dead girlfriend

Odd tells someone to call him "Odd" - and the they don't. Or vice versa as in someone tells Odd to call them "X" and he insists on saying "Mr X" or "Mrs X" or some such.

Odd ruminates on the nature of evil and evil people, which, frankly, he does so often I figure he's got more stomachs than a cow.

Someone tells Odd how special he is, how much he's going to do. Bonus points for it being random characters who more or less exist in the book solely to tell Odd how special he is.

Odd then goes "gee aw shucks." (This is a separate point because he does this a bit.)

While I normally write spoiler-free (as much as possible) reviews of the things I read, please be aware I have now spoiled half the book for you.

Yes, half. I wish I was making that up.

Koontz is one of those authors who is largely hit or miss for me. Either I really like the book, or I don't, and the reasons why I don't have become somewhat predictable over his long and very prolific career. I have thought, in the past, that some of his prolificness may be what hurts certain books, and why, in more recent years, he's become a bit more miss for me than hit. I've learned to read the book jackets, anticipate the plot, and know beforehand whether I want to give it a go. Occasionally I'm wrong - his "Shadow Street" book fell flat for me despite my hopes - and so far the Odd series had avoided Koontz's more problematic pitfalls.

This one, by contrast, was a study in them. (The only thing it was missing was a dog. I mean, there was a dog, of course there was, but it was a much less precious and precocious pooch than the usual canines that show up in Koontz's books. Oh, and the precocious "special" child was missing from this one. Sort of.) I figure there was only about enough plot in this, as written, to sustain half the total pages. This could have been a novella, and a much more satisfying one than it was as a novel. Moreover, although the series is clearly building on things, you could easily skip this one, as now doubt all the things you really need to know will be gone over in great depth and far too much detail in the next installment. Or, better yet, they won't be, and this little escapade in Odd's tales will be written off as a bad dream.

I'm really hoping this doesn't mark a turning point for the series, though I have reasons to fear it does. I started off liking Koontz's Frankenstein series, though that series went off the rails much, much faster. The first book held so much great promise, and the second one mostly spent its time breaking that promise by partially or wholly abandoning most of the premises that made the first one so good. (And by slipping into the standard Koontz cliches. Though I think it avoided the dog, there was the child.) By the end of the Frankenstein books I was so thoroughly unimpressed that I read them mostly for completion's sake.

If the Odd series keeps going the way of this book, I may not be able to even muster that much effort.

The Problem of Ernest Frankenstein

It's nice to know even the classic authors made mistakes. Not little typographical mistakes, either, but large, "how the heck did that happen" mistakes.

Take, for example, Ernest Frankenstein.

Now, at this point I expect half of you are going "Ernest who?" and protesting that the protagonist's - or, depending on your point of view, antagonist's - name is Victor.

The other half of you are going, "It's Franken-STEEN." (Actually, I hope all of you were doing that, first, then splitting into two factions.)

Now, for those of you who either haven't read it, or haven't read it in a while, a great refresher read on the classic novel has been put out by Gris Grimly (whom you can find here). Grimly gave Shelley's novel the graphic novel treatment, and it is GORGEOUS. If you haven't yet read Frankenstein, and have always wanted to, but argue you don't have the time, this is the version for you. If you have read it, this is still the version for you. So go, read, now, and then come back so we can continue.

[I know I joke about this all the time, but on this one I mean it. Even if you've read Frankenstein before, you've not seen it like this. Go, get it from your library, and read it. Or better yet, buy it. Or even better still, buy it for me, because you missed my birthday and Christmas. I shall wait anxiously by the door for the Amazon drone.]

I picked it up from the library, and before I could finish it, my 9 year old daughter picked it up and finished it first. Took her two days, and she enjoyed it immensely. But then she asked me something.

"What happened to Ernest?"

And, because I had not yet gotten that far, I said, "Who?"

So, in case you did not take my instructions seriously, Ernest is Victor's younger brother. Not THE younger brother, however, because that would be the youngest brother William (looking in Grimly's version like a creepy Pillsbury Doughboy). It is William who plays the role of the Monster's first victim. It is William who gets all the press. It is William whose death sets many horrible things in motion.

Ernest is the other brother. The middle brother. And if ever there were an argument for the middle sibling being overlooked between the eldest and the youngest, Ernest would be the poster child. In the first version of the book, which is the one Grimly adapts, Ernest just... disappears. Something is mentioned about him becoming a farmer in a letter and then... nothing. He's just gone.

Meanwhile, the Monster continues the roaring rampage of revenge through the rest of Victor's family and even friends. No one is left untouched. Heck, no one else in Victor's circle is left alive by the end of the book.*

Except Ernest.

Now, in fairness, Shelley wrote the novel quickly, by hand, and seemed to realize what she had done with regards to poor Ernest after the first version was published. By which I mean instead of relegating him to some farm, she sent him off to join the military.

And then forgot about him. Again.

He doesn't get mentioned again. Not for the wedding, not when the father dies... nothing. Again. I'm presuming that it was easier to simply ignore him for the latter sections of the book than somehow rework him in, but the attempt to explain his absence only highlighted it further. Ernest is the only Frankenstein to survive the book, but even in subsequent editions he's never mentioned again once William the Creepy Doughboy dies. I think it might have been less obvious if Shelley had just continued to ignore him.

In this modern age of computers and searchable files, it's all too easy to sit here and poke fun at Shelley. She could not, with the press of a few keys, discover she had created a character in the beginning of the novel that she then subsequently forgot about. I cannot even begin to imagine writing a novel by hand (though I know some still do), let alone everything it took for a woman to get a book published back then.

Still, I find myself asking why, in subsequent editions, she just didn't take him out completely. He adds nothing to the story, serves no discernible purpose, and other than arguing that he just takes on a life of his own (Frankenstein's Monster-like) once he's in that first edition, there's no rationale for his being there.

And it makes me wonder how many other unaccounted for characters are out there in classic fiction. Did Long John Silver have a brother? (Short Tom Bronze, maybe?) Was Ahab avenged by a cousin we didn't know about? Was there a fifth rabbit besides Peter, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail who is not perpetually at the mercy of Farmer McGregor? Maybe the literary world is littered with the likes of Ernest Frankenstein.

In the end, the only answer I could give my daughter was, "Ernest lives."

And maybe someday, someone will write his story.

*(I am not putting a spoiler warning on a post that talks about a 200 year old story. If you don't know it all ends badly at this point, someone neglected your literary education. Possibly you.)

Review: The Fall

This is the second "part two of three" book I've read in the past couple of months, and, sadly, it fell into the well-established category where the follow-up book is not quite as spectacular as the first. I finished The Strain all in a rush, because it was that good. Sadly, The Fall, DelToro and Hogan's follow-up, was only finished quickly because it was short, and because I checked two books out at once and so needed to get through it to move onto the other one.

After the phenomenal pace and plot of The Strain, this one felt kind of rushed. There were scenes where it took me a bit to understand what was going on, and that kills any edge-of-your-seat momentum that might be building. I won't spoil any plot points, but there was a needless macguffin introduced early on - one that wasn't even hinted at in the first book. It felt too much like a "let's throw this in to move the plot along" kind of thing, and while done right that might have worked, here it was just cliche and rather ham-fisted. Not to mention that it put up not one but two major plot holes that weren't addressed by much more than a hand-wave.

It was also short, too short really for me to understand why this is a trilogy instead of just one big book (unless I want to be cynical). If this second volume had been fleshed out better, then perhaps having three separate books would make more sense. And if the authors had taken the time to flesh things out, it might have made for a better book.

Bottom line, while I liked The Fall, and liked it well enough to both finish this book and move on to the last one in the trilogy, it's raised the stakes a lot for that third book. I'm hoping that one will be more like the first, so I don't find myself wishing they'd just stuck to one book only.

Review: The Strain

Let me first say that I don't read "end of the world" books. Prior to this first book in Guillermo DelToro and Chuck Hogan's trilogy, that category was largely comprised of The Stand and The Road. Actually, come to think of it, that might be the entirety of the category. Nor do I watch a whole lot of movies in that genre. I could count those using my fingers, and still have some left over. I might even get away with just one hand if I exclude movies based on books, because that would eliminate the television and film versions, respectively, of both books. Nor am I really sure the Mad Max trilogy counts in that genre. And while I do have two end of the world books on my "want to read" list, one of them is mostly on that list for the novelty of it. The other is on the list because I know the author - a little - and it is, by all accounts, really, really good. (That would be Alex Adams' White Horse.)

But I haven't read those yet.

I have read The Strain.

Technically, the book took me weeks to finish. I even had to renew it from the library. Ignore that. The sad truth is, I cracked it open, and then other things got in my way, and the book sat on my kitchen table for weeks through no fault of it's own. I take the blame for those first weeks. Whereas all credit is due to the book itself for the last four days. Because that's how long it took me to go through three quarters of the book. If there hadn't been pesky things like my having to work during the day, I probably would have finished it in half that time. It's that good.

I immediately went to the library and picked up books two and three of the trilogy.

It's that good.

To steal from a professional review blurbed on the inside cover: it's like crossing King with Stoker with Crichton. Two of whom are authors I like, and the other one wrote Dracula which pretty much set the tone for the entire vampire genre. Although you should know that already. Come to think on it, seeing as King wrote his own vampire book, I could probably take Stoker off the list. And it owes more to King and Crichton anyway in terms of it's scope and characters and pacing.

"Owes to" is not the same as "steals from," however, as this is it's own work and not simply a cut and paste from other books. Del Toro and Hogan make the genre - or genres, as it is end of the world by vampires - their own. There's just enough science in it to ground it in modern times. There's just enough supernatural to make you turn on all the lights. And while the book isn't perfect - the description of the vampires will seem very familiar to anyone who saw Del Toro's Blade II - it was enough of a ride to overlook the occasional jostle.

I won't give away any plot points, other than to say it ends on the kind of cliffhanger that makes me glad I can get books two and three from the library. It also sets things up so that if the series doesn't end happily for all involved, I'm not going to be surprised.

All involved excluding the reader, of course, as I have already started The Fall, and so far it is living up to the expectations set by The Strain.

Childhood Fears

I have never outgrown my childhood fears. I am not afraid to admit this. (On the other hand, that was never  a childhood fear, either.) I suppose I should clarify this at the outset and say that this does not apply to all my childhood fears. I have conquered some, as anyone must do as they advance into adulthood where polite society frowns upon you taking Mr Cuddles with you everywhere. Openly, anyway. Even if the world would be a much better place if we all carried a teddy bear or stuffed tiger with us in our bags and briefcases and purses. Just a thought.

(No, none of my stuffed animals were ever called "Mr Cuddles." I swear. And no, I do not have a stuffed animal in my bag. Really I don't. ... There is one in the chair in the corner, here, but it's my daughter's. Really, it is.)

That aside, there are some fears from my childhood that, despite my best efforts, simply will not go away. I know they are irrational. I know they are silly. I know that, even if they aren't and are actually 100% justified, in real life if the monster jumps out at me I am likely toast.

So I still walk a little faster in strange dark places, or out in the woods, even though my rational mind knows there's really no difference between daylight and darkness in the upstairs attic. (There used to be bats, though, but that's a different thing.) On the other hand, I draw on my non-rational mind as a writer, and my imagination often goes to dark places, so a little creep into my rational waking world is to be expected. The only real difference between my childhood and now is that back then I was 100% sure there were things out there, and now it's down to about 50/50.

Okay, maybe 70/30.

Some things, however, I think are completely justified, and don't make me feel silly. Such as the pool that has long since given up any pretense to being a clean, clear, safe place to swim and has devolved into a black, foul-smelling, flotsam and jetsam-filled bog. Even if it's just a kiddie pool, no deeper than my ankles, these are frightening things. You have no idea what's lurking under the water, not to mention what might be in the water. There is also that sense of urban neglect and decay that triggers more reasonable, if no less irrational fears.

I bring this up because while I adore the monsters, and the sorts of horror things that rely on them, I find the horror of the everyday things just as frightening, if not more so. Haunted houses still remain scary precisely because we all know of at least one house that, even if it is not, looks like it should be haunted. Places that, like the pool, also trigger more grounded fears that are harder to dispel with the simple flick of a light switch.

Which may perhaps be an unconscious reason to hold onto childhood fears: these are the kind of fears I can vanquish easily. I can do little about my fear of not having enough money, or of being out of work, or half a dozen other adult fears I am forced to confront on what seems an almost weekly, if not daily basis. Holding onto the things that frightened me when I was small also gives me some hope that I have held onto some of the better aspects of my childhood, too. So that while I have nightmares, I still have dreams.

And persistent dreams are a fair trade for having to walk a little faster down the darkened steps.

When Tragic is Better

I'm normally all for a happy ending. This does not mean I necessarily want everything to work out for the "happy ever after." Given my preferred genres for writing - namely sci-fi and horror - I am all too aware that sometimes what you're left with is the "happiest possible ending." Let's face it, at the end of an apocalyptic film, it's still the end of the world. Mad Max does not get to settle down someplace with a wife and kids. The world still sucks. Sometimes that's all implied, especially in a horror film. Yeah, you've survived, but you've also watched several people get whacked. Usually in horrible fashion. So there's going to be a bit of mental trauma, I think.

But on the whole, especially with movies, I prefer not to have things end on too down a note. This is why I eschew a lot of foreign cinema. Everything I know about Chinese cinema can be summed up as follows:

• The girl dies.
• The boy dies.
• The girl goes crazy.
• The boy goes crazy.
• The girl goes crazy and then dies.
• The boy goes crazy and then dies.
• They both go crazy and/or die.

Which, seeing how most of the movies I watched to determine that formula were either two hours or longer, seems a bit more of my life than I want to invest in being depressed. If I'm going to sit down and give up two or three hours of my life, I'd like it to end on a good note.

Which does not always me everyone walks away in the end. Sometimes the tragic ending is the better ending.

And fair warning, there are spoilers below.

Take 1408, for example, which is based on one of King's best short stories (in this humble reader's opinion, anyway). In the original story - this is the spoiler part, so consider yourself forewarned and stop here if you don't want to know - the ghost hunter protagonist does not make it out of the hotel room alive. I can't remember off the top of my head if we learn exactly how he dies, only that he is, in fact, claimed by the room.

In the film, he gets out. He "beats" the room, so to speak, and survives his ordeal, reconciles with the important people in his life, and everything goes on, with our hero in theory a better person. Which was fine, I didn't mind that, only there was an alternative ending, a tragic ending, in which he still "beats" the room only he doesn't get out. Instead he dies, but he takes the room with him.

Now, aside from giving Samuel L Jackson more screen time, which as a general rule I am always in favor of, I thought the tragic ending had more weight to it. Aside from reuniting our character with his dead daughter - as having her taken from him twice was a particularly cruel touch and the kind of thing that even if you survive it will truly mess with your head - it seemed more fitting with the overall tone of the movie.

(I suspect the ending was changed for much the same reason that I Am Legend and The Forgotten went with the weaker ending - it tested better. )

There are some other instances I could think of if I put my mind to it where, for whatever reason, the ending needs that little bit of tragic element to it to make it work. It's not the same thing as a tragedy where everyone dies, like Hamlet (and if that was a spoiler than you need to write a letter of apology to your high school English teacher), it's just tragic in one fashion or another. These are also often the more realistic endings, I think, the ones that more often make sense within the framework of the given story and are less likely to feel merely tacked on at the end.

Sometimes that happy ending just doesn't feel right.

Just Because I Write It, Doesn't Mean I'd Survive It

I was having a conversation with another writer about something that happens in her story to her main character. There's a portent in this other writer's story, one of those "bad things will happen" moments - though as is so often the case it's more like "bad things have happened but worse is coming" - and it got me thinking about heeding the warning signs. I write, sort of, within the horror genre and certainly read a fair amount of it. I've seen my share of zombie movies (some good, others not so much), vampire movies (ditto), and werewolf flicks (mostly bad), and know everything I probably ought to know when it comes to dealing with these things, assuming it would ever happen.

For example, there's the horror staple of the spooky shopkeeper. You know, the one that runs the shop in the basement, where it's kind of dark and dusty, or badly lit with flickering bulbs, and even if the shopkeeper looks reasonably normal, you just know something is off. Surely, having written and read enough stories where this is just the beginning of bad things, I'd know better than to buy anything in such a store, right?

Wrong.

Because I have bought things, or at least browsed and wanted to buy, in places just like that. All the time. (Heck, it sums up any number of comic shops I used to frequent in my younger days.) And quite honestly, as these objects are always something slightly old and slightly odd, they are precisely the kind of things I would buy at a flea market or antiques shop, no matter that the purveyor looks like a gypsy who was around selling trinkets for the crusade.

Or zombies. Never actually met one, but I don't own a flamethrower. I don't own a gun. I only nominally know how to fire any weapon, and that would mostly be the kind of weapons without enough firepower to do anything other than annoy a zombie. Assuming zombies get annoyed. Sure, there's the baseball bat... but honestly, my athletic skills are kind of like my combat skills. In other words, they are really limited. I might get in a lucky hit, but odds are, I'm toast.

As for staking a vampire.... Yeah, right. Sure. My best hope would be to keep running until daylight, and hope like heck that works. Which would not be a great hope, because I don't run very well. I'm not a jogger.

Nope, my athletic skills are mostly water-based. I'm great in the pool. Trouble is, all the horror nasties that are in the water are a lot faster than I am. I've see Jaws. Heck, I've even seen Deep Blue Sea. I'd definitely be more Samuel Jackson than LL Cool J in that one. So unless the terror is, oh, say, a sea urchin, or better yet a turtle, I'm probably dead in the water there, too.

And I strongly suspect yoga's absolutely useless as a monster survival skill.

All of which leads me to conclude that in real life, I'd much more likely be a sheep to the slaughter than the last survivor.

Thankfully all the monsters are staying where they belong. For now.

This is Supposed to Scare the @#$% Out of You, Right?

During a recent trip to the library, my little one decided to rent Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I presume this decision was based on the picture of Esmerelda on the cover, and my daughter's fondness for Disney Princess movies. Now, I should have known better, because I am familiar with the story, but in my defense it is a Disney film and it did carry a G rating. Pixar's "The Incredibles" has a PG rating, and my daughter has seen and enjoyed that film. (So have I, for that matter, but that's another story entirely.)

All I have to say is, the MPAA dropped the ball on Hunchback. Or else Disney bribed them. Something. Because about half an hour into the film, around about the time of the carnival when things go from good to bad, I turned it off. With my daughter's approval. She's only 5 1/2, and the film was scaring her. Badly. And this is a girl who doesn't flinch at the dragon in "Sleeping Beauty" which let me tell you made an indeliable impression on my young self. (I saw that one again recently, and am pretty sure I've already commented here on some of the hidden meanings I saw in it.)

It was dark, it was scary, and we hadn't even gotten to the bit where the Judge lusts after Esmerelda yet. (Though Tony Jay is an excellent villain, had they stuck to the story and kept the archdeacon the villain, I think listening to David Ogden Stiers would have been far creepier.) This was not a film meant as a horror outing, unless the executives at Disney wanted to see how far they could push the envelope with the ratings board. And it masquerades as a typical Disney flick, right down to the talking gargoyles. Yet, as dark as it was, I know adults who would have a hard time with it.

Which got me to thinking that it's often these kind of horror outings that are most effective, even when they aren't intended as such. I freely confess that the majority of the slasher films out there bore me to tears. Or worse, amuse the heck out of me. Saw was so preposterous, so ridiculous, that I fast-forwarded through the better part of it just out of morbid curiosity to see how they were going to end the train wreck. Give me a subtle, creeping horror any day over some whack-job with a sharp blade and too much free time on their hands.

Some stories just seem to have an inherent creepiness, again even if they weren't originally designed to scare. Sometimes it's not even the story itself, but one of the characters in it that sends chills down your spine. The kind of character that you just wouldn't want to meet in a lit hallway, never mind a dark alley. Aside from the Judge in Hunchback, I can't think of any off the top of my head - but I know they're out there. I've seen them. And they can turn anything they're in into a "don't watch this in the dark" experience.