Dashiell Gets His Drink On

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Thin Man is best read with a drink in hand. Do you have a drink? Do you need a refresher? Would you like another? Above all else, it is important that you be drinking!

Seriously...DRINK!

My god, a lot of alcohol is consumed in this book! It reads as if Ernest Hemingway had taken up crime noir.

Nick Charles, private detective, has hung up his hat. Nora, his wife, kinda wishes he hadn't. She likes wrapping her head around a good mystery. Well, a good one comes along in the form of murder for money, and Charles' old friends are all wrapped up in it.

The plot unfolds essentially in three places: at the Charles', at their friends', and at a speakeasy...each place being as well stocked with liquor as the next. Other than drinking, they don't do much of anything. And they don't really go anywhere, unless it's someplace to drink. They hang around and tie one on while they try to figure out whodunnit.

The writing is solid, the plot feels sound, the characters are a little dramatic (don't get me started on the women...these dames is batty!), but once all that's in motion, the book as a whole feels static. Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon pretty much invented this genre, so perhaps I should lay off. But I'm not always one to treat revered things precious-like...just the stuff that's precious to me.




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Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory

PANDEMONIUM
Daryl Gregory
2008 Del Rey

Reviewed by Carol

★    ★    ★    ★    ★ 


Pandemonium reminds me of those times when my foodie friends are dragging me to a “fabulous new restaurant” where (mostly) familiar ingredients are deconstructed, spiced and recombined in a creative way. At least this time, instead of an unsettling mess, it resulted in one of those perfect, satisfying meals that fulfill a sensory need as much as a physical one. Not so unusual that I’m left with a disturbing aftertaste, and not so routine that it is immediately forgettable. To wit:

Salvatore’s award-winning pizza with wine-poached fig, bacon and gorgonzola. Unusual but delicious take on pizza. http://salvatorestomatopies.com/2012/08/24/salvatores-wins-the-first-annual-slice-of-sun-prairie-pizza-contest-with-wine-poached-fig-and-local-bacon-pizza/ 

Pandemonium is a lot like that. Somewhat familiar elements drawn from comic books, buddy flicks and mythology are blended together in a plot that moves quickly but respects each ingredient. Add in some complex characterization, dashes of dark humor and develop it with truly fine writing, and I’m served a book that satisfying on both intellectual and emotional levels.

The simple summary: Del is returning to his mother’s home with a dual purpose: confess a recent car accident and psychiatric hospitalization, and to meet a famous demonology researcher at a national conference. Demons are real, although their manifestations usually pass quickly, while the behavior follows certain archetypes: The Painter, the Little Angel, Truth: “The news tracked them by name, like hurricanes. Most people went their whole lives without seeing one in person. I’ve seen five–six, counting today’s.” When Del was young, he was possessed by the Hellion, a wild boy entity, and Del has recently developed suspicions that the Hellion never left him. The story follows Del as he attempts to understand and perhaps free the entity inside him.

The plot moved nicely with enough balance between introspection and action to keep me interested. What I loved the most, however, was the writing. There’s the vivid imagery:

A small white-haired women glared up at me, mouth agape. She was seventy, seventy-five years old, a small bony face on a striated, skinny neck: bright eyes, sharp nose, and skin intricately webbed from too much sun or wind or cigarettes. She looked like one of those orphaned baby condors that has to be fed by puppets”

the humor:

“The question, then, was how long could a human being stay awake? Keith Richards could party for three days straight, but I wasn’t sure if he counted as a human being“

and sheer cleverness (because I’ve been this lost driving in Canada):

“For the past few hours we’d been twisting and bobbing along two-lane back roads, rollercoastering through pitch-black forests. And now we were lost. Or rather, the world was lost. The GPS told us exactly where we were but had no idea where anything else was.
Permanent Global Position: You Are Here.”

and the occasional snarky social commentary:

“What did it matter? I imagined bearded guys all over academia working themselves into a lather over this, precisely because the stakes were so low.“

For those who might want a sense of the flavor, I was reminded of American Gods, of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Card world (my review) blended with Mythago Wood (my review), but done much, much better. While I had problems maintaining interest in each of the aforementioned, I had no such challenge with Pandemonium. Each bite revealed something almost familiar but somehow unexpected. There’s a lot to enjoy, and an equal amount to ruminate on after finishing. I’ll be looking for more from Gregory.



Cross posted at my blog: http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/pandemonium-by-daryl-gregory/

We Live in Water

Jess Walter
Harper Perennial
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Summary

The first collection of short fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter-a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him one of America's most talked-about writers.

We Live in Water is a darkly comic, moving collection of stories, published over the last five years in Harper's, McSweeney's, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Non-Required Reading, Byliner, Playboy, and elsewhere. The stories veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

In "Thief," an aluminum worker turns unlikely detective to solve the mystery of which of his kids is stealing from the family vacation fund. In "We Live in Water," a lawyer returns to a corrupt North Idaho town to find the father who disappeared thirty years earlier. In "Anything Helps," a homeless man has to "go to cardboard" to raise enough money to buy his son the new Harry Potter book. In "Virgo," a local newspaper editor tries to get back at his superstitious ex-girlfriend by screwing with her horoscope. Also included are the stories "Don't Eat Cat" and "Statistical Abstract of My Hometown, Spokane, Washington," both of which achieved a cult following after publication online.

My Review

Brilliant!

It usually takes me forever to get through short story collections. If a story doesn’t grab my interest, I’ll put the book down and read something else. Often, so much time has passed that I end up returning the collection to the shelf and forgetting about it.

Not so with Jess Walter’s first collection of short fiction. I inhaled these stories in just two sittings and by the end I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to:

a. empty my wallet every time someone asks for spare change.

b. take weight-loss pills that keep me up all night having wild monkey sex, but have the unpleasant side effect of turning me into a zombie completely unsuitable for nearly any type of employment.

c. grab some Greenpeace brochures, some young helpers, and create a scam to relieve rich liberals of their hard-earned dollars.

The prose is spare and powerful, making me forget I was reading a book and feeling at one with these characters who struggle through life, make poor choices, and suffer terrible injustices. Though there is bleakness and hardship here, there is just enough humor to make me laugh out loud a few times and keep the stories from being painfully depressing. The author writes from the heart and has a deep sense of empathy for his characters. It was hard for me to let them go.

The last story is Statistical Abstract For My Hometown, Spokane, Washington. It is much more than facts and numbers. Walters provides an intimate glimpse of his life and his conflicting feelings about his hometown.

Very highly recommended.

THE GIRL WITH A CLOCK FOR A HEART BY PETER SWANSON

The Girl with a Clock for a Heart by Peter Swanson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”I always knew it was temporary. Being Audrey was temporary. I had become this different person, this person I’d rather have been--you know, in school, doing well, with a boyfriend, a boyfriend like you--but it was like I had a secret disease, or there was this clock inside of me, ticking like a heart, and at any moment an alarm would go off and Audrey Beck would no longer exist. She’d die and I’d have to go back to being Liana Decter. God, it’s like a dream now….”


With this book title Peter Swanson was paying homage to other noir books.

I have a crazy girlfriend story.
I have an even better crazy stalker story, but I’m not going to tell you about either one of them because George Foss has a better story, a tale of deceit, a yarn woven with woe, a first love that might have lasted forever, and murder most foul.

George is an ordinary guy, maybe so ordinary that you might even think he is extraordinary. He is in his early forties. He keeps the accounting books for a Boston literary magazine. He made himself indispensable, so even when the inevitable downsizing started to leave empty desks and tragically orphaned coffee mugs in it’s wake, he survived.

He has a girlfriend named Irene though girlfriend might be imprecise. They have been friends a long time, but somehow in the long arc of their relationship things never quite came together for them to get married. They are more than friends with benefits, more like ex-spouses who still like each other and fool around with each other between attempts at relationships with other people. Although even when they are seeing other people there is no let up with seeing each other. One could say their relationship is complicated, but really it is rather uncomplicated.



George has this rent controlled attic apartment with slanted walls and too many, just enough, bookshelves stuffed with...wait for it...books. Exactly what BOOKshelves were designed to hold. He goes to the same bar, maybe not everyday but most days, and watches the Red Sox. Irene usually meets him there and they give each other updates on the small matters of their well organized lives.

And then he sees her...in his bar.

The girl he’d tried to forget about.

The girl that was unforgettable.

Audrey Beck/Liana Decker or she could have just as easily been Phyllis Dietrichson (Double Indemnity) /Kitty Collins(The Killers)/ Brigid O'Shaughnessy (The Maltese Falcon)



She is a witches’ brew of femme fatales. She is the Mata Hari of George Foss’s life. He knew her as Audrey first until he discovered she was Liana. It is now becoming nearly impossible to shed our skins and assume new identities. We used to be able to ride the train from Kansas to California and somewhere around Arizona start to call ourselves by a different name. Those days are long past as we are compressed more and more into our own identities. We are stuck with ourselves unable to shake off our past or ever really get a fresh start.

Don’t get the impression that I’m feeling any sympathy for Liana because that would be a mistake.

Like a moth to the flame he has to go talk to her, after all, she was sitting in HIS BAR.

She needs help. She needs the kind of help that at first you laugh about and then she convinces you with glistening tears and a series of beautifully manipulated body signals that she is desperate. Thus, it became perfectly logical that George was going to return nearly half a million stolen dollars to her ex-boss, ex-lover for her.

That is crazy!

Why would you even contemplate such a thing George?

It is embarrassing for me to reveal this, and it is hard to explain it in such a way that it doesn’t seem stupid, but ultimately, he did it, because he wanted to get laid. Sex and gasoline make the world go around so don’t discount the importance of such a potential event in a forty something man’s life. And it isn’t as if we are just talking about sex, ordinary sex, this was mind blowing sex...fireworks, brass band playing, howling at the moon sex. This was one of those moments that when we are on our deathbed and the sepia tone memory of this event floats into focus that we will grin. It might even take some of the sting out of dying.

Was it worth the punch to the kidneys compliments of Donnie Jenks?

No, of course not.

Yes, yes, of course it was. So you piss blood for a week. It will heal.


Ava Gardner in The Killers. A man would do a lot of foolish things for a woman like that.

This is a plot driven novel, so I can’t talk about the plot. Let’s just say that George Foss gets taken on the ride of his life and if he survives it you will buy the beers for him all night long to hear the story. You will remember Liana Decker’s name for the rest of your life. Every time she swims into your memory you will shake your head, shiver, and thank all that is holy for your amazingly pedestrian significant other. This was a terrific, perfect Sunday afternoon read. I kept muttering to myself and kept flipping pages. The ending will wake you up in the middle of the night and have you exclaiming...no, it can’t be!

Peter Swanson hit the Hollywood lottery. The movie rights have been sold. James Marsh will be directing. Chris Coen will be producing. It should make a spectacular movie. My vote is for Ethan Hawke (43) cast as George Foss. I would like to see Ali Larter (38) cast as Liana Decker and Cristina Ricci (34) cast as Irene.

***4.25 stars out of 5 and rising.***



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The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When a freak dust storm scrubs the Ares 3 mission and Mark Watney is left for dead, he finds himself alone on Mars. Can he survive alone on an alien world until NASA is able to save him as his equipment breaks down and his supplies dwindle?

I have an aversion to any book that is over-hyped. Most of them wind up being crap and, besides, I already have more than enough things to read. Sometimes, you just have to stop being a stubborn asshole and let yourself get swept up in the hype of a critical darling.

The Martian is a hard science fiction novel about one man being stranded on Mars and trying not to die. It features such riveting activities as growing potatoes using your own feces as part of the soil and repair work on multiple pieces of equipment.

What keeps The Martian from becoming a yawn-fest is the way it is told by Mark Watney in a series of journal entries. Mark is a funny guy, serving up such gems as "My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain." He's also a Martian McGyver, fixing and re-purposing a lot of his equipment, including the Pathfinder probe, which he drove across the Martian surface in a rover to find.

The humor keeps the story going even during the dull times. Thankfully, Mark is funny without being obnoxious about it and Weir has the chops to know when the tone needs to be more serious. He also has the timing to get the most of his one-liners.

Once NASA finds out Watney is alive, they scramble to figure out a way to get him back as he battles problems like running out of air, too much water, and his growing dislike of potatoes and 1970's television. There were some pretty tense moments, especially near the end. This book has "blockbuster" written all over it when it inevitably becomes a movie.

I blazed thought this in three sittings and would have been perfectly willing to read about more of Mark's trials and tribulations, as well as his comrades on the Hermes on their long journey back to Earth. Andy Weir has hit a home run with The Martian. I'll be anxious to see what else he can do. 4 out of 5 stars.





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Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When he embarks on a project to write a book about the creators of the atomic bomb, Jonah has no idea what he's going to unearth: Dr Felix Hoenikker and Ice-Nine, a substance that will instantly freeze any water it comes into contact with into more Ice-Nine, a substance capable of destroying all life on earth. Can Jonah find the missing Hoenikker children and secure their chips of Ice-Nine to safeguard the world?

Here we are, my second experience with Kurt Vonnegut and one of his Big Important Books. This time, he takes on science, religion, politics, and man's ability to destroy himself.

I didn't enjoy Cat's Cradle as much as Slaughterhouse-Five but they probably shouldn't be compared since they aren't the same kind of book. Slaughterhouse is experimental and timey-wimey and Cat's Cradle is much more straight-forward and easy to digest.

Jonah's project leads him to Felix Hoenikker and his three odd children, and eventually, to San Lorenzo and Bokononism, a new religion. Having been through 12 years of parochial school and a couple decades of weekly doses of church, fiction with a religious bend doesn't need much effort to hook me so I was engaged right away. Bokononism is Vonnegut's way of showing how full of shit most religions are, since Bokonon is pretty open about his religion being a pack of lies.

I don't have much else to say about Cat's Cradle. It was a piece of funny yet thought-provoking satire about science, religion, and mankind destroying itself. Four out of five stars.

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A Fitting Conclusion to a Very Good Series

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Four out of five stars


This is the third and final volume in Ben H. Winters' series featuring Hank Palace, the Last Policeman. When the first volume, The Last Policeman, opened, Hank had just been promoted into his dream job of being a detective on the police force in Concord, New Hampshire. Sadly, though, the job is not going to last very long because in only six month's time, a giant asteroid is going to slam into the earth, ending Life As We Know It.

The Last Policeman and Countdown City detailed Hank's activities for the first five and a half months of the asteroid's approach. As civilization rapidly unravels all around him, Hank works as diligently as he can to remain a decent and responsible man, continuing his investigations at a time when many, including not a few readers, might wonder if he has lost his senses.

There are now two weeks left before impact. Food is scarce, potable water even more so. Things like the Internet, electricity, working phones, and gasoline are a dim, distant memory. Hank is reduced to traveling by bicycle and scrounging for food and water where he can find it.

His last investigation is his most personal. His sister, Nico, is his last remaining relative, but the two have become estranged for reasons described in the first two books, and Nico has disappeared. Hank is desperate to find her so that they might spend their last few days on earth together.

The search takes him to a small town in Ohio. In a world that has arrived at a post-apocalyptic state a few days ahead of schedule, hardly anything will surprise Hank or the reader, until Hank arrives in Ohio and discovers that things may have gotten even stranger than he could possibly have imagined.

I thought that the second book in the series was a bit weak, especially when compared with the first, but Winters returns to form here and provides a very fitting conclusion to what was, overall, a very unique and entertaining series. The story itself is gripping and the larger questions that have hung over the entire series grow even more important here. Readers contemplating the matter might well decide that they would have chosen to spend their last few weeks on Earth is ways far different than Hank Palace, but hanging out with the guy for the last six months has been a helluva ride.

A Tempestuous Introduction to The Tempest

The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What was that?

I expected a long drawn out battle of mariners versus a violent sea. There's a few lines of sailors fighting a storm at the start and then the rest is played out on land. Ah, "played," there's the nub! For this is an early 17th century play meant for the stage. Not a likely time and place for a lavish production with a water tank, ship and wind machine, though that would've been hella cool. Some Shakespeareanophile tell me my envisioned production went down at least once back in the day, please!

Once I figured out I'd been duped, I still didn't know what was going on. The story felt muddled and frankly not particularly intriguing. Apparently an Italian duke is trying to trying to get revenge on those who ousted him by marrying off his daughter to one of the plotters. That I understood. To make this happen, magical spirits are prevailed upon. That I understood. But who was magical, who was human, who was in between, and what was everyone's motivation, that's where I got lost.

Didn't matter. By the midpoint I'd grasped enough to follow along and what I thought was going to be a 1 or 2 star catastrophe turned out to be a fairly enjoyable romp in a semi-fairy land...kind of a mix between Macbeth or Othello and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I listened to an audio version for this reading. I prefer to hear Shakespeare when I get the chance. I may have received a 4.0 in my Shakespeare class in college (a little more impressive than my 4.0 in my mountain hiking class), but that doesn't mean I understand half of what's being said. Put into context, the otherwise archaic phrases often will reveal their meaning.

The one thing that really perplexed me was that the actor playing Caliban, the monstrous humanoid creature stranded for years on the island, played him - as old timey, racist comedians (and Jon Stewart) would say - "Jewy". Think Alec Guinness' rendition of Fagin. Yeah, heavily over the top. Was Caliban Jewish? I thought his mom - the only person he was stranded on the island with - was a witch from Algiers. Now, I don't know from Algiers witches, but this? What is this? Oy vey...


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Gotta love the old-school dash!

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Arthur Conan Doyle created such an intriguing vehicle for his mystery stories in the figure of Sherlock Holmes, a man almost inhuman, nearly robotic in his exacting speech and actions, so much so that the reader longs for and grasps on to the minute human aspects (a hint of carnal desire, for example) on the fleeting instances they appear.

In story after tightly-wound story intelligence and rational thought wins the day. But before it gets all too academic, Conan Doyle throws in a bit of action, some good old fashioned horror or a grotesque morsel for the reader to chew on, for he realized man can not be sustained on thought alone.

Taken on their own, each short story in this collection would receive 3 or 4 stars, but put them together and you've got a 5 star body of work. A lone stick breaks easily, but bundled together the sticks form a strong bond. Case after solved case impresses with its almost overwhelming accumulation of ingenuity. The character of Holmes eventually develops with nuggets of personal detail and, on rare occasion, even a display of pathos.


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If There's A Heaven Above

Andrew Demcak
JMS Books
Reviewed by Nancy
2 out of 5 stars

Summary

It's the early 1980's and Matt is on the cusp of adulthood in the flickering shadows of Los Angeles' Gothic music scene. He dives into a pulsating world of death-rock music, sexy musicians, and strung-out groupies in leather bondage pants and vampire makeup. Through the faded glamour and glittering whirlpool of alcohol and drugs, Matt moves from one good time to the next, searching for something more.

Then he meets Patch: shirtless, tribal-tattooed, wearing cut-off jean shorts still damp from an afternoon at the beach. Patch is a punk-rock Adonis who wears his dark hair spiked up and whose blue eyes are bloodshot from too much late-night fun. Patch doesn’t say much when they first meet, but his body speaks to Matt’s on a cellular level, pure chemistry. To Matt, Patch's tattoos tell him they are part of an invisible tribe, the night people.

But one night is all Matt gets with Patch before he disappears into the neon-washed streets. Matt sets out to find him again, sure Patch is "the One." Along for the ride are his friends Annie and Suzy, one straight, one gay. Wearing too much Aqua-Net and torn fishnets, the girls cruise L.A. in a white Mustang whose seat belts are perfect beer bottle openers. The ultimate Goths, they adore Siouxsie and the Banshees, paint their eyes with kohl, and vow to help Matt in his quest to hook up with Patch.

Will Matt be able to find Patch in L.A.'s drug-soaked clubs? Will one night be all he gets with the man of his dreams? If there's a heaven above, will Matt ever find it?

My Review

Meh.

I so wanted to like this book. It took place during the mid-80’s, a time of my life I’ll always remember fondly. I had a job, a brand new car and my own apartment.

I loved my Jordache jeans.


I loved my very practical and stylish mullet.



I loved my denim jumpsuit.




And I loved Queen, Depeche Mode, U2, Kate Bush, Alphaville, Pet Shop Boys, Talking Heads.

What I didn’t love was that my younger brother was newly gay during a time of ignorance and irrational fear about the AIDS epidemic.




When I think about all the crazy shit I did then, it’s a miracle I’m still alive today.

So, even though I wasn’t a huge fan of Bauhaus or Love and Rockets, I had no reservations about spending time with three crazy Goth kids from Los Angeles – 18-year-old Matt and his best friends, Annie and Suzy.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t warm up to the characters at all. Their lives were boring, shallow, and pointless. Sure, this story explored sexuality, family relationships, drug addiction, and growing up, but it all was done so superficially. Knowing more of the characters’ feelings and thoughts rather than listening to their mindless banter would have helped me understand and empathize with them a little better.

While I enjoyed some of the memories this story evoked, I couldn’t stand being around Matt and his friends after a while. Reading this made me feel like the old woman yelling at the neighborhood kids to stay off the lawn and turn down that infernal noise they call music.

I might have tolerated this story better if it had been more skillfully written and not full of annoying similes.

“Suzy sped home like a wounded animal.”
“Her stepmother’s purse lay like an injured animal on the bed.”
“You’re as useful as a cunt full of cold piss.”
“The words came out like burning animals.”
“He grabbed it, flaying it open with his hand like a surgeon’s blade.”
“The lime bobbed in the bottle’s throat like an unkind comment.”
“The brightly ringing song rolled over us like a golden hoop.”

It’s a nice tribute to Rozz Williams and the American and English gothic rock artists of the 80’s, but I’m glad these kids are now out of my hair.