Off Topic---All Hallows' Eve and All Saints Day and Stories That Go Bump In The Night

Carrie (1974), Mile 81 and The Dune (2012), Joyland (2013), Stephen King; In The Tall Grass, Stephen King and Joe Hill (2012), A Face In The Crowd, Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan (2012).

Well, the leaves and turning and a fresh crop of zombies are rising from their graves. In the twilight, atop ivory candles are small white flames with amber and honey colored edges that honor and remember the saints who continue to intercede in behalf of humanity. All Hallows Eve and All Saints' Day are upon us.

Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows' Evening (October 31), a day in the liturgical annual calendar dedicated to remembering dead saints and martyrs, and all departed, faithful believers in the resurrection of the dead.  All Saints' Day [also known as All Hallows, Solemnity of All Saints, The Feast of All Saints] is celebrated on 1 November.  As for myself, I use the liturgical calendar and the Hagerstown Farmers' Almanac. My first 18 years included planting and harvesting crops, birthing and slaughtering cattle, and even, after one heavy but brief July rain storm, listening to two acres of corn grow. I respect the saints, mother nature, and those who have been committed to the earth and continue to await their resurrection.

Carrie is  Stephen King's first published novel; it was released on April 5, 1974   Set future year of 1979, the novel's focus is on Carietta White, a much bullied female who lives with her mother, a sociopath who uses small portions of The Bible to justify her abuse of Carrie. During a incident in high school, Carrie becomes aware of her latent telekinetic powers. By the end of the novel, the body count is above 500 and most of Chamberlain, Maine is ashes.

Carrie is an epistolary novel that offers a limited omniscient narrator and portions of documents that include fictional letters, commission reports, and imaginary non-fiction books. The novel's several main and secondary characters are compelling; the pace of the novel is neither too slow nor too fast.
If there is a problem, it is in the denouement. Carrie's path of destruction is too wide and the body count too large. It appears that King may wanted to use fictive documents to help him plot his first published novel and needed a castrophe to be investigated in order to justify their use.  Carrie appeared after the novels Rosemary's Baby (1967) and The Exorcist (1971) and the films (1968, 1973) respectively. Both novels and films broaded the territory which King could explore, such as a bullied child with delayed menstruation.

Mile 81 and The Dune (2012), Joyland (2013), In The Tall Grass, (2012), A Face In The Crowd, (2012) are better paced, more subdued and more creepy than Carrie.  The novella Mile 81 offers a malevolent, supernatural, shape shifting force stymied by a vulgar but clever adolescent. The short story The Dune is set, for the most part in a single with an older gentlemen reporting a prophecy of eminent death to his listener. Joyland is a short (for King) novel set in the early 1970s set in a North Carolina amusement park where a ghost prompts an investigation into the possibility of a serial killer travelling between amusement parks. In The Tall Grass and A Face In The Crowd are longer short stories which are reminiscent of Peter Mathieson's work and the television series The Twilight Zone. Mile 81, In The Tall Grass and A Face In The Crowd are offered only as audio and Kindle products.

With a twice a day 45 minute commute, audio books are nearly always sliding around my passenger seat. In autumn, on purpose I avoid the interstates and take two lane highways.  I pass small churches and their neighboring cemeteries, forests preparing for winter, pumpkin vendors and harvested fields. I slow down. I listen to stories and ponder mother nature, the departed, and the liturgy .

Off Topic Fiction---Rogue Island, Rhode Island and Relationships Between Lawyers and News Writers

Rouge Island: A Novel, Bruce DeSilva, Forge/Tom Doherty Associates Publishing, 2010,  302 pp., $24.99 hardcover, $14.99 trade paper cover.

 

From The Publisher: Liam Mulligan is as old school as a newspaper man gets. His beat is Providence, Rhode Island, and he knows every street and alley. He knows the priests and prostitutes, the cops and street thugs. He knows the mobsters and politicians--who are pretty much one and the same. Someone is systematically burning down the neighborhood Mulligan grew up in, people he knows and loves are perishing in the flames, and the public is on the verge of panic. With the police looking for answers in all the wrong places, and with the whole city of Providence on his back, Mulligan must find the hand that strikes the match.

From Publisher's Weekly:  DeSilva's lengthy career as a reporter for the Providence (R.I.) Journal has provided him with the writing skill and the in-depth knowledge of city room and cityscape so well displayed in this strong debut crime novel. It's also allowed him to create a totally believable protagonist in Liam Mulligan, a beleaguered journalist seeing his old neighborhood being destroyed by arson and his newspaper by reader disaffection. Mulligan's first-person narration is filled with emotion, not the least of which is his love-hate relationship with his city and state. And there are suspenseful moments of high tension.

From Book List: *Starred Review* Born and raised in the Mount Hope section of Providence, Rhode Island, journalist Liam Mulligan won’t simply report on the rash of arsons killing lifelong friends and loved ones in his old neighborhood. He wants to know more and launches an investigation, discovering a heavy-handed plot to own Mount Hope in order to redevelop it. Along the way, he’s threatened, beaten, arrested on suspicion of arson and murder, suspended from his newspaper, and targeted with a Mob contract on his life. Mulligan must turn to some unlikely allies to save his tired old neighborhood and secure justice. Rogue Island has everything a crime fan could want: a stubborn, street-smart hero with a snarky sense of humor; more than a baker’s dozen of engaging characters; a fast-paced plot; a noirish style; a realistic postmillennium newspaper setting; mean, pot-holed streets; and, best of all, a knowing portrait of a small city and a tiny state famous for inept government, jiggery-pokery, and corruption. Debut novelist DeSilva began a four-decade career in journalism as a reporter for the Providence Journal, and his take on the city and state is harsh but also affectionate, as when he describes graft as Rhode Island’s “leading service industry,” noting that “it comes in two varieties, good and bad, just like cholesterol.” This tremendously entertaining crime novel is definitely one of the best of the year. --Thomas Gaughan 
 

CWL:  DeSilva's writing style is short, quick and to the point, with lots of dialog and very few descriptive paragraphs.  The author develops characters in their conversations. The settings are a newspaper's offices, bars, grocery stores, fire engine houses, cars, police interrogation rooms and bedrooms.  Rogue Island accurately describes the slow demise of a metropolitan newspaper and a mill town. The main characters are interesting and somewhat unique.  Rogue Island is detective fiction in which the detection is performed by a print news writer.  Overall, a second novel with the same characters would be welcomed.

Off Topic----Walker Percy, Classic American and Southern Literary Voice For the Modern and Post-Modern Age

Walker Percy [1916-1990], is recognized as a unique American literary voice from Louisiana.  Writing from a a sensibility he shared with Flannery O'Connor, Shelby Foote and Truman Capote. Deeply Roman Catholic and deeply questioning, Percy's life dramatically unfolded throughout the 20th century.  He was 13 when his father committed suicide; his mother died in a one car accident two years later, an event that Percy viewed as a suicide. Walker and his two younger brothers, Roy and Phin, moved to Mississippi where their cousin, a bachelor lawyer and poet, became their guardian.  Percy's parents had raised him to be an agnostic; William, his guardian,
 was  a member of a liberal Protestant church. William Percy introduced Walker and his brothers to the regional writers and poets his own age. Shelby Foote became a lasting friend. Later, Walker  and his wife would both join the Roman Catholic Church and they were confirmed with their children.

Many years of writing and rewriting,in 1961 Percy published The Moviegoer, his first novel; it won the National Book Award of that year. He described it as a story of "a young man who had all the advantages of a cultivated old-line southern family including an appreciation the arts and sciences but feels himself quite alienated from both worlds, the old South and the post World War Two America.
Time magazine included it among the best English language written between 1923 to 2005".  Other list compilers agreed. The Moviegoer contains elements of both existentialism and poetry.

In The Moviegoer  Binx Bolling, a young stock-broker in post- Korean War  lives in New Orleans and vaguely understands that the traditions of the Old South are in decline. Included in these traditions are established families and social relationships. Bolling continually day dreams, has troubling establishing deep friendships and is quite content to view life and relationships explained through film.  Spiritually he is depressed and unengaged.  During Mardi Gras begins a journey to find for himself something other than big screen stories. Bolling wanders through parades, the French Quarter and then travels to Chicago and back to the Gulf Coast. Family members and occasionally friends superficially intrude into his thoughts and observations. In several ways, he travels the same philosophic and religious path that Jack Kerouac treads in On The Road.  Percy's The Moviegoer is more sedate, less adventurous than Kerouac's On The Road. Percy's The Moviegoer shares with Kerouac's On The Road a narrative in which the main character is much more compelling than the country through they pass and the journey which they take.

At it's core, The Moviegoer presents an individual numb from war, allowing Hollywood movies explain life, roles and relationships to him. He is satisfied with that explanation bcause it protects him from disappoints and risks in relationships and his own self-awareness.

Percy's works include The Last Gentleman [1966], Love In The Ruins [1971], The Second Coming [1980] and The Thanatos Syndrome [1987]. He also published non-fiction works on the philosophy of existentialism, symbolism and communication theory. He taught at Loyola University in New Orleans, helped found the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and received the University of Notre Dames' Laetare Medal in recognition for his contribution to the arts and science, the ideals of the Catholic Church and humanity. The National Endowment for the Humanities chose him as the Thomas Jefferson lecturer of 1989; his lecture was entitled 'The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind."

Off Topic---Richard Matheson, Master of the Uncanny

Shadow On The Sun, Richard Matheson, TOR Books, 192 pages,$13.99 and Other Kingdoms, Richard Matheson, TOR Books, 320 pages, $24.99.

Richard Matheson is the author of the classics I Am Legend, Hell House, Somewhere in Time, The Incredible Shrinking Man, A Stir of Echoes, The Beardless Warriors, What Dreams May Come and others. Now forget the movies made from his books. Remember The Twilight Zone episodes.

Named a Grand Master of Horror by the World Horror Convention, and a recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, Matheson has won the Edgar Award for Mystery and Detective writing, the Spur for Western novels and stories, and several of the Writer's Guild awards. In 2010, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Yes, this is the author that the best storytellers, such as Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Peter Straub and others, read.

Matheson has authored screenplays for film and television. His most recognizable work is for The Twilight Zone including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” based on his short story and featuring a very young William Shatner. Born in New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, and a World War 2 combat infantryman, Matheson earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

Shadow On The Sun, originally published as a mass-market Western in 1994, has been out of print for years. This tale of supernatural terror is best described by a comment of a friend who had just finished the book. "Wow! Couldn't put it down. I wonder if the makers of Cowboys and Aliens [the film] read this before they made their movie." Set in Arizona, a century ago during a truce between the remote frontier community and the Apaches. A delicate peace is literally shredded when the mutilated bodies of two white men are found. Billjohn Finley, the local Indian agent, fears that darker, more unholy forces may be at work: a tall, dark stranger who rides into town and is wearing the dead men’s clothes.

In Other Kingdoms the setting spans decades in France, England and Brooklyn. In 1917 a young American soldier is recently wounded in the Great War. The young veteran, Alex White, travels to Gatford, England because of a promise made to a dying comrade. This pastoral English village, seems to be the perfect spot to heal his wounded body and soul. In truth for the reader, Gatford and its forests are not as distant as Narnia but closer that Brigadoon. The neighboring woods are said to be haunted by capricious, even malevolent spirits, but surely those are just old folk tales.

In the forest dwells Magda Variel known as a witch but confesses to Alex that she is merely a practitioner of Wicca and has healing powers. She warns him of a more real danger, one that is located deeper into the forest. It is another kingdom. A World War One veteran, Alex is bold and undaunted. He becomes a resident in three kingdoms: rural England, the Wicca religion, and live among shape-sifting spirits. He willing enters bondage to love, sex and magic and has dual citizenship in two of kingdoms. Each has a dominant woman who wants him.

To read these two shorter works by Matheson is to engage a master storyteller who will very subtly cause you to suspend your disbelief. The literary genre of The Uncanny deals with the notion that a person or a thing has or seems to have a supernatural basis. The Uncanny genre deals this events that are beyond the ordinary, that are mysterious, superstitious, fearful or dreadful. Like Stephen King's work, Richard Matheson work is both an uncomfortably strange but a comfortably thoughtful experience.

Off Topic Fiction----A Soul In A Bottle

A Soul In A Bottle, Tim Powers (Author), J. K. Potter (Illustrator), Subterranean Press, 86 pp, hardcover, 2006, $22.00.

It would be a stretch to call A Soul In A Bottle a novella. It is an illustrated short story. George Sydney, a second hand book hunter finds a 1968 first edition of poems which is very unique. There is within it a poem which does not appear in any other first edition of the book. The discovery is preceded by the appearance of a waif who George realizes later, may be the poet, Cheyenne Fleming. Soon George's new acquaintance reveals a fountain-pen and requests a special favor from George.

But first edition experts report that Cheyenne Fleming committed suicide and the estate is administered by her sister, Rebecca Fleming, who is also a poet. Can George bring the poet who may be the waif, back to life? If he does, will lose his much younger love interest who maybe the author or the author's ghost?

If George helps the author change a poem in the first edition that she authored then will the innocent Rebecca be harmed, or the author Cheyenne be avenged? Powers's intricately crafted story explores loneliness, alcoholism, vulnerability, and the afterlife. The story's impact is both visceral and moral. Personal choice and personal freedom, vengeance and justice, fear and pity are countervailing issues that are entangled within the three main characters.

Potter's evocative illustration are black, white and gray photographs superimposed on each other. Power's story is reminiscent of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone and Richard Matheson's stories from the 1950s and 1960s. Enjoyable and clever, A Soul In A Bottle is short story that is both entertaining and representative of fine writing.