Honky Tonk Samurai

Honky Tonk Samurai by Joe R. Lansdale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When an old lady shoots some video of Leonard kicking the shit out of a dog abuser, she tasks Hap & Leonard with finding her missing grand daughter in exchange for not informing the authorities. Hap & Leonard are soon up to their eyebrows in a stew of blackmail, prostitutes, and a testicle taking killer called The Canceler...

The dynamic duo really stepped in a steaming pile in this one. Brett, Hap's girlfriend, bought Marvin Hanson's detective agency and the boys are now legit private eyes. Their first licensed case might be their last. Honky Tonk Samurai brings a few of the Hap & Leonard supporting cast members together like the A-Team. Jim Bob Luke, Cason, and Vanilla Ride all have pretty big roles as Hap and Leonard try to unravel the case. Booger, the newbie, was much more interesting than I originally thought. Complicating matters are a young woman who may be connected to Hap, bikers, the Dixie Mafia, the Barbecue King, and The Canceler.

This story is vintage Lansdale. The jokes are hilarious, the writing is crisp, and the violence is gore-soaked. Since it's Hap and Leonard we're talking about, I knew asses would be kicked and shots would be fired but the climax was even more than I expected.

Honky Tonk Samurai is much beefier than the previous two H&L outings but Lansdale's latest tale is balls to the wall for much of its 350 pages. I lost track of all the quotable lines I meant to remember in the mad rush to the end.

While the climax was great, one of the twists nearly had me shitting myself. One of my few complaints with the series is that all the wisecracking makes you forget lives are at stake. No more! The book left so many unanswered questions that I hope the next Hap & Leonard book is already at the press.

Four out of five stars. If you can handle 350 pages of pure Mojo, get it now!

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Miracleman, Book Three: Olympus

Miracleman, Book Three: Olympus by Alan Moore
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Aliens come looking for Miracleman. Winter, Miracleman's daughter, begins speaking before she's a month old. Miraclewoman makes her presence known. Kid Miracleman returns. A utopia is created.

The third Miracleman volume is kind of a disappointment. Firstly, it's a wordy son of a bitch, huge blocks of purple prose on every page. Secondly, apart from Kid Miracleman returning, it's pretty damn boring. Utopia is just as uninteresting as it sounds. Not only that, Miracleman went from being a revisionist Captain Marvel character that was bursting with potential to looking more like his ancestor, Superman.

All that being said, it's still an interesting piece of comic book history and asks the same question as the Squadron Supreme miniseries that came out shortly after this. What would happen if the superheroes took over the world? Too bad what Miracleman, Miraclewoman, and the Warpsmiths cook up is on the bland side. Two out of five stars.

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Scared Stiff

Sara Latta
Zest Books
Reviewed by Nancy
4 out of 5 stars

Summary

Everyone knows what it is to be afraid. But phobias take the normal (and even helpful!) human emotion of fear to a much more visceral, even primal, place. For some people, it’s a spider that does it. For others it’s a clown, or a trans-Atlantic flight, or even just a puddle of water. It’s the thing that stops us in our tracks, sets our hearts racing, and stands our hairs on end. Scared Stiff takes readers on a journey through these experiences—using biology, psychology, and history (not to mention pop culture) to explain where our phobias came from, how they affect us, and how we might eventually overcome them.

Inside You’ll Also Find:

✳ An explanation of the history behind each of these fifty phobias, and a discussion of notable people who have suffered from the fear
✳ Sidebars that highlight famous phobic moments from history and pop culture
✳ Updates on how successful the various phobia treatments have been

Phobias are no laughing matter, but sometimes the first step to overcoming our anxiety is understanding that sometimes we’re afraid of some really weird things. So whether you’re looking for perspective, information, or just want to know what keeps Madonna and David Beckham up at night, this is the book for you. (Bibliophobes, however, should probably keep their distance!)

My Review

This is a fun and easy-to-read guide on 50 different types of phobias.


The phobias are listed in alphabetical order and include the Greek and Latin terms from which they originate. There are interesting little tidbits of information along with quotes and a mention of phobic celebrities.


Author Libba Bray is afraid of dolls (pediophobia). Stephen King says, “Dolls with no little girls around to mind them are sort of creepy under any conditions.” I’m a little disappointed that Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter’s pediophobia was not mentioned, nor the fact that he gave it to his character, Tig.







I was familiar with many of the phobias, because I have mild versions of two of them and know people (or read about people) with some of the others.


My discomfort with large, crowded spaces (agoraphobia) can probably be attributed to a trip with my dad to the Bronx Zoo when I was 8 years old. He held my hand most of the time, but let me go while he was taking pictures. A large group of kids crowded in front of the elephants my dad was photographing and we ended up getting separated. I panicked when I couldn’t see him, so I tried to get around the kids. A man walking ahead was wearing a black and gray tweed winter coat and a black fur hat with earflaps, just like my dad, so I ran up to him and grabbed his hand. When he looked at me, I realized he wasn’t my dad. Just before my heart dropped out of my chest, my dad grabbed my hand and scolded me for wandering off.


A more recent experience is mentioned here.


I can’t say I’ve had any negative experiences with spiders (arachnophobia), but I’ve had a love-hate relationship with them for a long time. I’m fascinated with them when I look at pictures or see them in enclosed displays. When they are jumping, creeping around, or emerging from hidden places, I totally freak out. When I moved out of my last apartment, the easiest way to move boxes of books I had in the basement was up a short flight of stairs and out through the bulkhead door. Knowing there were lots of long-legged spiders and their hideous webs there, I lugged the heavy boxes up the steep basement stairs, through the kitchen and out the door. I’m still not sure why I loathe spiders, but don’t suffer a fear of snakes (ophidiophobia).


Some of these phobias are quite common:


- Social phobia – 7 to 13 percent of Americans

- Trypanophobia (fear of needles) – 10 percent of Americans

- Aviophobia (fear of flying) – 6.5 percent of Americans


Others are rather unusual:


- Urophobia (fear of urination) – This fear occurs more frequently in men than in women.

- Coprophobia (fear of defecation) – While I’m not a major sufferer, I feel uncomfortable doing my business in crowded restrooms and try to avoid it when possible.

- Taphophobia (fear of being buried alive) – Before stethoscopes were invented, this fear was very legitimate! Shortly before his death in 1875, Hans Christian Anderson asked a friend to make sure his arteries were severed before he was buried.


In the back of the book, the author includes tips on overcoming your fears, including seeking professional help, and a list of resources.


Recommended.

All-New, All-Different Avengers, Vol. 1: The Magnificent Seven

All-New, All-Different Avengers, Vol. 1: The Magnificent Seven by Mark Waid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a new threat appears on the Earth, a new team of Avengers is formed to face it.


This volume is an origin story of the All-New All-Different Avengers along with some minor fights.

I really thought I would like this Avengers lineup. As soon as I saw the lineup I thought, I like Miles Morales, Iron Man, and Ms. Marvel so this should be awesome. I have to say I was disappointed. I found out I didn't like Ms. Marvel as much as I thought I did. Who would have thought that I wouldn't relate that much with a teenage Muslim girl from Jersey City?

I still like Iron Man and Miles Morales the new Spider-Man, but that's just two characters on a larger team. I'm largely indifferent about Falcon as Captain America, Lady Thor, Vision, Nova, and Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel. It's hard for everyone to get enough page time with such a large lineup and being apathetic about the majority of the team led to me not being that excited about this volume.

My other complaint is the Avengers are only viable when facing incredibly difficult odds. Anything else should be overkill, but for some reason this particularly capable group of crime fighters aren't nearly as competent as a group. Each of these characters headlines their own comic, they should easily be able to throwdown against any normal villain.

Despite the incredible film success for the Avengers, I have rarely found Avenger comics that hold my attention and unfortunately the All-New All-Different Avengers are no exception.

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THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE BY DOUGLAS PRESTON

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”This is the nature of the evil of the Monster of Florence. And this is the nature of the evil in each and every one of us. We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”


The number of victims involving the Monster of Florence are staggering, those murdered and those accused.

We are all potential killers. Each and every one of us is capable of killing someone, usually that would be while protecting ourselves or protecting someone we love. Then there are those who live in a world of revenge fantasy. They are sensitive to every slight. They keep lists in their heads of every negative thing that has ever happened to them. They are a bomb building inside, and given the right circumstances, the fuse could be lit. They might kill their family or friends or coworkers and feel justified in doing so. They know who they kill. It is very personal.

Then there are what I think of as the soulless people, not in a religious sense, but people lacking a fundamental empathy for others. They are missing something critical that allows them to value life. They are empty and angry. They kill indiscriminately. They walk into night clubs, movie theaters, malls, schools, or churches and kill whoever happens to be there. They might say they have a cause or a specific hate, but fundamentally what it really comes down to is they hate us all.

The Monster of Florence killed 14 people, 7 couples, over the course of a decade...and he got away with it.

Douglas Preston decides to move to Florence, Italy, to write his next thriller. He has fond memories of living in Florence as a teenager and wishes to recapture some of the excitement and wonder he felt in 1969. Of course, as we get older we realize that gossamer wrapped memories are nearly impossible to recreate. Moments of true magic are fleeting and fickle and belong to the age that created them. So maybe Preston didn’t think he could recapture the Florence of his youth, but he certainly didn’t have a clue that he might be imprisoned.

It isn’t his fault.

What was he supposed to do.


Mario Spezi the Florentine reporter who spent decades hunting a Monster, and kept the pressure on the police much to his detriment.

He meets a reporter by the name of Mario Spezi, and he tells him a story. It is an intriguing story of murder, mayhem, Sardinian gangsters, sex, and illusive facts. These are the very things to make a writer’s nostrils quiver like a bloodhound catching the scent of a quarry. To add some more spice, the very olive grove in the backyard of the villa that Preston is renting was the scene of one of the most horrific double murders in Italian history. Most people would be alarmed to discover that such a terrifying event had happened in the place they have chosen to live, but for Preston it seems like his muse has given him a gift.

A living, breathing serial killer trumps a sketchy idea for a thriller.

The police files are full of false leads, bungled investigations, wild speculations, lost clues, and political pressure. Men are arrested and convicted of being the Monster of Florence only to have the true Monster kill again. If this were a novel, the reader would not be able to believe the level of incompetence shown by the Florentine detectives.

There is a desperation to catch the killer, not only because he is murdering necking couples, but also because he is screwing with the sex lives of the entire city. It has been speculated that 1 in 3 people in Florence was conceived in the backseat of a car in the Florentine Hills. As the murder tally grows, more fear is produced. The result is a frustrated city full of people in need of sexual release. The burner needs to be turned down on the boiling pot.

And what about the poor peeping toms or Indians as they are called? Those men who, almost on a professional basis, go out every night to creep around The Hills looking for a good vantage point to watch couples making out. Those perverts are also in need of release, one hand working furiously, as they live, at least for a moment, vicariously through the steamed windows of someone else’s passion.

It begs the question, with so many of these men out there every night, it is almost inconceivable that none of them ever saw anything suspicious. Of course, it is hard to explain to the police why a man is out in the Florentine Hills…ALONE, but then is a man ever alone when he has some spit and a firm hand?

As Mario Spezi and Douglas Preston sift through the evidence and become critical of the investigations initiated by the police, detectives start to focus on them. This is frankly baffling. ”As an American, an author and journalist, I had always enjoyed a smug feeling of invulnerability. What could they possibly do to me?” When two burly cops come to pick him up for questioning, his invincibility starts to feel like a house built on sand.

He became trapped in his own thriller.

I can certainly understand why Douglas Preston became so enthralled with this monstrous tale. He and Spezi even offer up their own ideas about who the killer was, and certainly convinced me that, in the end, the Florentine police abandoned a line of inquiry too soon that would have yielded the identity of one of the most notorious serial killers in world history.

Florence will never be the same for Douglas Preston.


George Clooney


is Douglas Preston

The movie starring George Clooney (playing Douglas Preston) is due for release in 2016. I’m not sure at this point how loose an interpretation the movie will be of the book, but if you’re Preston you have to be thrilled that people will associate your name with Clooney’s face. Yes, George Clooney played me in a movie.

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Up With Watership Down

Watership Down by Richard Adams
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

DAMN YOU, WATERSHIP DOWN, STOP MAKING ME CRY!!!

When I was in school, the teachers played the movie version (the one with Art Garfunkel songs, Zero Mostel as the bird, and a bevy of well-respected English actors providing voice-overs) of this epic drama of courageous rabbits and us kids just bawled. The sadness, she was too much!

It's been 30, maybe 35 years on since then and I figured, despite the tears, I have fond memories of the story, so why not finally read the book? Well I did and I cried at the end again, god damn it.

It's not an overly sad ending to be honest, however, I cried because author Richard Adams ends his book with the passing of life. The relatively long life of one of the rabbits depicted here is shown coming to an end and that shit gets me every time (ie Bilbo as he passes on to the Grey Havens...friggin' hell, I've got something in my eye). It makes me think of living out a long, beautiful life with my wife and then eventually having to say goodbye to her for the final time as we pass away. Dang it, it's getting to me again...

...just talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: Watership Down, which is the more important theme, the friendship bond or the struggle for survival? Discuss!

...

Okay, I'm back.

Another lovely thing about this epic novel is that it started out as an oral tale Adams told to his daughters on car trips. The best stories are organically homegrown. Plant the seed, water it, let it grow, nurture it and in the end you'll have...well, you'll have a plant, but you get what I mean.

In the intro it was revealed to me that apparently Watership Down is a real and locatable place out west of London, I think in the Hampshire area. So, now I've got another reason to go back to England, to track down the Down!

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The Drive-In 3

The Drive-In 3: The Bus Tour by Joe R. Lansdale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jack, Grace, and Steve leave the Drive-In behind for the open road in a bus. On their quest for answers, they encounter a catfish of enormous size and find things leading them to question the nature of their existence.

The third volume in the Drive-In series takes everything in a whole other direction. It keeps the lost world flavor of the second book but sends the gang on an odyssey to parts unknown. The first half is straight up Lansdale but the second half moves into Phillip Jose Farmer territory.

I didn't enjoy most of this book as much as the previous two, mostly because of the lengthy section inside Ed the giant catfish. Once they escaped the catfish, the book felt like a Twlight Zone episode written by Richard Matheson collaborating with the previously mentioned Phillip Jose Farmer. Either I read that Lansdale liked PJF in the past or just inferred it from some of his stranger writings.

The Lansdale flavor is in full effect here. I read a few lines out loud to my special lady, interrupting her Harry Potter read. Lansdale can wax philosophically with the best of them, in his trademark front porch style.

Anyway, the ending was fantastic, a stew of World of Tiers, Wizard of Oz, and The Dark Tower, in my opinion. While this is the final Drive-In volume, as far as I know, I'd eagerly read a fourth. 3.5 out of five stars.

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Fire in Boston's Cocoanut Grove

Paul Benzaquin
Branden Press Publishers
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Summary

A detailed account of the deadliest nightclub fire in history.

My Review

Reading Stephanie Schorow’s excellent, but short, The Cocoanut Grove Fire, made me hungry for more details, so I borrowed Paul Benzaquin’s history, which is far more comprehensive. It was first published in 1959, and while the language felt dated in places, it enabled me to feel closer to an event that occurred well before I was born and helped provide more insight into life in the 1940’s.

Paul Benzaquin began his career as a journalist for the Boston Globe in 1948 and later became known as a talk radio host.

His crisp, lean writing style worked well for imparting facts from that tragic day on November 28, 1942, while the tension and energetic pacing would have worked well for an action-packed thriller.

“First came a fast-moving puff of black smoke. A rosy dart of flame shot along the ceiling fabric for ten or twelve feet. It was instantly followed by a massive ball of flame – bright, noisy, and terrifying. It seemed to burn in the air, without need of fuel. Suddenly everyone in the room was in motion, desperately seeking escape.”

Schorow focused more on the history of the nightclub and its owners and government corruption, while Benzaquin covered life stories and details surrounding the aftermath of the fire, including significant medical advances made in the treatment of burns.

In the center of the book there are photos of Cocoanut Grove guests, some of whom were among the dead or injured, including Western star Charles “Buck” Jones. There are harrowing photos of servicemen, firemen and volunteers who helped evacuate victims, and pictures of the building after the fire. There is a photo of Clifford Johnson, who recovered from massive burns and made medical history, only to die in a fiery car crash in 1956.

At the end of the book is an acknowledgment section outlining the author’s sources of information and the individuals and groups who contributed toward his research. He spoke with reporters, photographers, fire and police departments, government officials, medical personnel, and survivors who shared their stories.

492 people died in this fire, making it the deadliest nightclub fire in history. Because of this tragedy, laws have been made and fire codes revised to ensure the safety of people in public buildings.

This is a detailed, informative, and gripping story of the events and people involved. Very highly recommended.

Faith and Moonlight: Part 2

Faith and Moonlight: Part 2 by Mark Gelineau
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Roan and Kay are students of the Faith School now. While they should be the happiest they've ever been, they are both disturbed by their dreams. Roan fears his past and Kay fears what she's becoming.

Faith and Moonlight: Part 2 is a case of the other shoe dropping. Not in a bad way, but in the sense that the school isn't the cheery place for talented students Roan and Kay believed it was. Like many fantasy schools, the Faith School is far more brutal than it appeared on the outside. Roan and Kay are fighting not just for their futures, but perhaps their lives as duels between students can become devastating and the possible future for those who don't make the tournament is dismal.

In the last book I was more interested in Roan as a character. His back story and devotion were significant. Roan doesn't show much growth in this story outside of learning more about the Faith School from Gideon and Dreah. Kay on the other hand had her deep well of fear and uncertainty turned into something quite intriguing. There are rumors that others have taken things to gain entrance in the Faith School and some say at least one person who did so became a monster because of it. Kay's worries are what makes this story work because it doesn't seem to simply be in her head like the last book.

Faith and Moonlight: Part 2 is a strong continuation in the unorthodox Echoes of the Ascended series.

3.5 out of 5 stars

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Invincible Iron Man, Vol. 1: Reboot

Invincible Iron Man, Vol. 1: Reboot by Brian Michael Bendis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Tony Stark is concerned he hasn't been spending enough time in the lab. He's supposed to be the cutting edge for technology, but his Iron Man suit is behind the times. So Tony made a new, all in one suit.

Meanwhile Madame Masque is playing a dangerous game in Latveria that Tony is determined to stop. He receives help from the most unexpected of individuals.


Reboot was really good. Brian Michael Bendis's Tony Stark is more akin to the film version of Tony played by Robert Downey Jr. The brilliance, arrogance, humor, and occasional self loathing are fully on display and it just made the story a lot of fun.


Unbelievably Victor Von Doom, healed face and all after Secret Wars, has appeared to help Tony.

Doom isn't sporting a single recognizable part of his Dr. Doom outfit, but his power hasn't change at all.

For some unexplained reason Victor, who now looks like a simple businessman, wants to help Tony. He even goes through the effort to prove he's genuine.

Everything about Reboot was really fun. I hope to see Tony and Victor keep teaming up as the series continues.

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