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Warning Signs, Part 2

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About halfway through the first volume of the fantasy epic Legacy of the Stone Harp by James G. Anderson & Mark Sebanc (there’s no point mentioning the title of the first volume since it in no way represents a story), I had to laugh. The question: At this rate, how many volumes will it take to finish this beast?

This is a quest story, a fantasy staple, in which a group of people must go and find an important thing before the evil guy gets it. Only, here I was a couple hundred pages in and the quest hasn’t started yet. They haven’t even assembled the ragtag band of unlikely heroes yet. I started laughing when the wise old man spread out a map and outlined “first you have to go here, then here, and then here,” and spelled out the dangers, both known and suspected, along the way.

Twice the main good guy has asked the old man questions that hint at really important information, and the wise old man has said, “I’ll tell you later,” or “There’s no time for that now,” or some other way to keep the main good guy in the dark so the plot doesn’t break. I don’t even remember what those questions were anymore, but I remember being annoyed. I think the wise old man isn’t the only one keeping information from our guy. His own father is the guy from the prolog, so we all know he knows stuff, and last we heard he was carrying a magic sword as well. The sword glows when the rightful king holds it, so it’s pretty obvious why that hasn’t been unlimbered yet — it would break the plot.

Now I’m three-quarters of the way through volume one of god knows how many. One more likely party member has been introduced (still no female candidates unless you count whoever left the bloody footprints), but the quest is no closer to starting. The old guy’s been whacked on the head and may not live to tell those nuggets of information he’s been saving for later. Note to wise old men in all fantasy worlds: Tell the guy what he needs to know right away! Information taken to the grave does no one any good.

There are some caves the old guy said not to go into, and you know what’s going to happen there.

This story is not what you’d call fast-moving. Case in point: the good guys are holed up in a mountain retreat, the only haven from the bad guys. Among them is a traitor, who steals the Magic Thing the Good Guys Really Need and runs off to give this item to the bad guys. Our two main good guys chase him down and by spontaneously increasing the IQ of a giant eagle they get the Magic Thing back. Hooray!

Then, in the next chapter, they allow the traitor back into camp and guess what? The traitor steals the goddam MTtGGRN again, and this time he gets away. Oh no! Total accomplished in the first theft/recovery sequence: nothing. You could chop it from the book, whack the geezer on the head in the second theft, and not miss a thing. In fact, the theft/recovery/trust-the-traitor-again chain of events was really pushing the preposterometer into the red anyway, so the book would be better without it.

Uh, whoops, I suppose that was a spoiler. I’m not worried, I doubt many people get that far into this thing.

I’m forging ahead with this monster, nevertheless. Part of the pleasure I’m taking from the book is mentally checking off each fantasy cliché as I encounter it. For a while now we’ve been rehashing the same old clichés, so it will be nice when the select few set off into the caves to face the unseen dangers there.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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Warning Signs

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I’ve finally finished reading through my Kansas backlog, and my Things I’ve Borrowed from John backlog, and I’m back to the Books I Got at the Convention backlog. It’s the most inconsistent of the backlogs on my shelf, but I was in the mood for good ol’ sword and sorcery fantasy and there was one sitting ready for me.

Now, these days, it seems fantasy writers are simply incapable of fitting their stories inside the covers of a single volume; in fact, It’s gotten to the point where giving your reader a satisfying experience in a single book is considered a negative. So, the first warning sign was not unexpected: at the bottom of the front cover, we find Series Title: Book One in large type.

The second warning sign was also on the cover — there was an ampersand. Two authors. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it increases risk. Will the voice of the writing be consistent?

I opened the cover and turned to the inevitable map. Can’t have a fantasy novel (er, volume? fragment?) without a map. And… another map. And… a third map. I scanned the maps for anything named “of doom“, but happily I didn’t spot any. There were a few choice names to be found, like ‘Mountain of the Quivering Cromlech’, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. But then, maybe in context the silly name will make sense.

Only one more obstacle before we reach chapter one: the prologue. Gotta have a prologue. In the first movement of the prologue we have some tension, a nice chunk of action, a glowing sword, and derring-do. In the second movement we have our hero (of the prologue) riding a horse, thinking back on what has happened since all that action. My guess is that I’ve now experienced the different styles of the two writers.

There’s one guy on the good guy’s team that he doesn’t like the look of, which brings us to the action-packed third movement, which included betrayal, death, an impression of a Greater Evil, escape, and a ninja. Yeah, I’m sure when the story gets back to them they’ll have a different name, but it was a ninja.

And now, on page 37, we reach chapter one, and the story gets off to a leisurely start, including a brief history lesson on all that’s happened between the prologue and the present. There are a whole lot of names and places whizzing past, and I hope I’m not expected to remember them all. The convenient reflection by the hero is followed by action, and we see that while our guy has strengths, he’s got a lot to learn. One of the good guys found an artifact in the woods while they were at it. I hope that wasn’t a coincidence — that will really piss me off if he just happened to run across a key plot token in the woods on the day the bad guys arrive.

It all boils down to this: There are two buddies, and they’re about to begin a quest for an important thing to defeat the evil guy. And there will be ninjas. Not sure if the magical geezer is going to join them or not.

Exactly what I was hoping for.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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The Fox Woman

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I’m sitting in a bar right now, laptop open, Jane’s Addiction stomping through my ears, thinking I should take advantage of this little slice of me-time to write a book review. There is a big pile of books for me to review at home, but The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson is insisting that it be the one. In fact, I can’t even remember what the other ones are (with one exception, but I have ambitions for that review – I hope to discuss the changing landscape of the publishing world and embracing the digital age, a review that requires research, facts, and perhaps even an interview with the author. Facts are hard.)

I mentioned The Fox Woman a while back; after reading for an hour I went to sleep and the world of the book filled my dreams all night. That’s some pretty potent imagery at work.

Note: Kij is a friend of mine. My unavoidable bias is reflected in the fact that I would not post a review of her work if I didn’t like it. I liked The Fox Woman.

It’s not a complicated story, really, though it seems desperately difficult to the characters involved. Two women love the same man. One of the women is a fox, and for her love is simple and all-consuming, an animal interpretation of love, and she is willing to take human form (and bring her entire family along) to get what she wants. The man’s wife is a sophisticated noblewoman of the Japanese court, bound by tradition and honor, forced to limit her expressions of love to poetry (on carefully-chosen paper) passed to her husband by servants.

The wife fears the foxes living on their estate. She knows well the enchantments they are capable of.

Two women love the same man, and each has an entirely different world to offer him. The fox woman’s world is an enchantment, a world built with magic, tailored to be perfect for her lover. The man’s wife offers a precocious son, and a life of wealth and ease. She could offer him so much more, if she could find a way to tell him.

The man, for his part, is restless. He loves his wife, and wishes there were a way he could express it to her. They communicate through poetry, but what should be the language of lovers has become shrouded in imagery, obscured behind metaphor. Both long to say “Meet me by the pond and let’s rut like crazed weasels in heat,” but it’s hard to make a proper poem (one that will withstand the dictates of propriety) on that theme.

Our fox woman, Kitsune, longs to understand poetry, but it is her ignorance of the artifice that is her greatest strength. She is a fox and foxes just don’t think that way. Not, at least, without a lot of suffering first.

There is a time when everyone but Kitsune knows that her magical world is crumbling, that it cannot last. We all aware as readers that a crisis is coming, and I found myself getting impatient for the shit to hit the fan. I had foreboding, but I think a specific building threat would have given the coming events a vector; rather than “this can’t last” I would have been thinking “holy crap when the priest gets there anything can happen.”

Even as the crisis unfolds, however, we have few clues about the outcome. In this magical, spiritual world, suffering seems certain and death is possible, even for the main characters. What does it say that I entertained the idea that a first-person narrator might die during the story? To answer my own rhetorical question, it says that the writer had me all the way.

I felt the pain, I felt the love. The story meanders, but then again so do I. It’s a good read.

I don’t want to give anything away, but the end was perfect for me. I closed the book and stayed in that world for a while, thinking past what Kij gave me, satisfied but not glutted.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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Iron Angel

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I bought Iron Angel by Alan Campbell last summer at the recommendation of a friend and fellow aspiring writer. It sat on my shelf for a while (I have a pretty depressing backlog right now, and that doesn’t even include a host of more literary works I know I should read at some point), but the time came for me to dive into a good fantasy novel, and there it was waiting for me.

Fantasy stories are subject to the same standards of criticism as any other genre — characters, plot, compelling language, and so forth — but there are a couple of genre-specific criteria against which they are measured as well. Foremost among those is world building. Fantasy writers get to throw out all the rules that govern our universe (except the rules of human interaction) and build new worlds from scratch. Anne Rice built such a compelling world that there have been (probably) hundreds of stories set in it by lesser writers who do not possess her world-building skills.

Mr. Campbell has built himself a hell of a world here. It’s a sort of Steam Punk/Fantasy mashup. Mashups are all the rage these days, but it’s still refreshing to find one that’s actually done well. Here we have a world with magic and whatnot, and also giant steam-powered war machines (imbued with human souls). The world is an Earth sandwich, with an unresponsive heaven above, expansionist hell below, and angels and demons slugging it out on mortal man’s turf. From the human point of view, there’s not a whole lot of difference between an angel and a minion of hell.

The cover of the book says “By the author of Scar Night.” In fact the book is a sequel. Had I stumbled into the middle of a series? The answer to that was a pretty clear ‘yes’. In the first chapters the author went to great lengths to bring me up to speed on the events of the previous book, and while a crash course is never as fun as a well-paced story, I was nevertheless encouraged by the author’s effort to make the book I was holding a stand-alone story. Specifically, I was confident that there would be an end to at least one major story line by the time I reached the back cover of the book.

About halfway through, I began to worry. Characters had been introduced but not revisited for hundreds of pages. The vectors of the characters’ storylines were parallel. I became more worried after a part of the story that goes like this:

Leader of Good Guys: You must not be caught! I’ll sacrifice myself so you can get away!
Unlikely Hero: OK.

Unlikely hero wanders through hell, avoiding capture. There is a section where he outsmarts a magical door. It’s a nice anecdote, the sort of thing that the Odyssey is composed of, but when the little mini-story is over, the larger story is advanced… not at all. (As I recall, Odysseus didn’t learn much either.) Then, to top it off:

Unlikely hero gets caught.

Now, the unlikely hero’s adventures could have been meaningful. UH might have learned a key fact that he could use later, or he could have an experience that would teach him about himself — he could find strength or expose a weakness. In this case, none of that happened. He had interesting adventures, but in the grand scheme, they mattered not at all.

After I got through that part, I started to worry. Spending so many pages on anecdotes that don’t move the plot does not indicate an author who intends to put any sort of closure at the end of the current volume. I checked the cover again, for anything like “Book two of…” but there was nothing to warn me that this book was dependent on others. OK, no worries; the story is entertaining and the prose is solid if not magical, Just enjoy the ride.

As an aside, in a long adventure story, ‘solid’ is often preferable to ‘magical’ when it comes to the prose. When you’re spinning a yarn, you don’t want your language upstaging your story. You want the words to disappear, the same way the letters do.

On we went. Campbell pulled out some pretty cool inventions, and a transparent train that bugged me immensely. Still, the story vectors were starting to converge, the sudden appearance on the scene of a new secret society was handled with brevity and grace, and it all came down to a final cataclysmic battle. We’ll get to that in a moment.

First I have a brief quibble about economics. Humans are slaughtered in this book. Lots of them. Legions of them. And down in hell their souls are chewed up and spit out, presumably reduced to ultimate nonexistence. At the rate things are going, the world would be depopulated in short order, and not long after that, hell would run out of souls to play with. I think on our current Earth, we send about 8500 souls down to hell on any given day. Iron Angel’s world is much less populous, yet the folks down in Hell chew through souls like they’re peanuts. Somewhere in there the demand curve has to kick in, and human life becomes more valuable in the eyes of both angels and demons.

Although, in this story human extinction is a real possibility, and that’s pretty cool. It’s just that neither side is making good use of available resources.

So: the final cataclysmic battle. I don’t want to give away too much, but…

SPOILER! SPOILER!
It wasn’t final. It was a trap! The “book” (actually a volume) ends with the bad guys pulling a major coup and the real evil army arriving on the scene. We ran out of pages with not even a pretense of an ending. AAAAHHHHHHH!
END OF SPOILER

So here we have a peeve of mine — a book that does not have an end at the end. At least most of the time when this happens the publisher has the grace to put “Book 2 of the Steampunk Angel series” or something like that on the cover. Not this time. “By the author of” does not communicate that you are not buying a complete story. Quite the opposite. This was not a novel. It was not a story. It was a well-written fragment. In the back pages where they tried to sell me the next installment, I found the words “book three.” HA! They knew all along it was simply an episode in a series, they just didn’t put that information on the cover.

Why would they hide that fact? There’s only one reason I can think of. They want to trick people like me into buying volume two. Man, this gets my goat. Mr. Campbell probably had no control over this; he wrote a big-ass story that took three volumes to tell, and sold it to unscrupulous people who actively hid that fact to the naïve book-buying public.

So, here’s the label I would put on the cover of this book: WARNING: This well-written and downright clever work has study hall at the beginning and CONTAINS NO END! The next book will have an end, we promise — and if you read this volume study hall next time will be really easy.

Personally, I think I’ll wait for the box set.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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Fox Dreams

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I started reading The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson. I read for perhaps half an hour before turning off the light and going to sleep. The next morning I awoke with all sorts of memories about elegant Japanese gardens gone partly wild, about foxes transforming into people, about magic and desire.

In fact, I had memories of far more events than were the book. There was something about the language and the setting that fed straight into my dreams, and all night my sleeping self continued to explore that world. Pretty sweet!

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Not Bad Enough?

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My story this November is about bad writers getting murdered. One of the things that makes this an excellent NaNoWriMo idea is that I can include excerpts of the fictitious bad writers’ fictitious bad novels. Which means not only can I just let fly with the prose, I don’t even have to cringe and tell myself that I will fix it later. I can revel in the mediocrity, even add things that normally I would never do.

Except for the complete absence of structure, however, even this draft of Step on a Hack is ahead of some of the crap out there.

Occasionally I will write a scene specifically intended to showcase common crime story clichés and blunders. Paragraphs of exposition and loose-end-tying while the protagonist and antagonist are in a burning building, for instance. It is a fun world to write in, where all the good guys are named ‘Buck’ or ‘Dirk’ and all shoot with far better accuracy than a bad guy ever could, where they live a solitary existence, all girlfriends and partners murdered, and are tormented by demons from the past. And out there somewhere, a criminal mastermind seems to have it in for that one detective.

Yesterday I thought, “I need a scene with cars and guns,” so I wrote one. Such freedom! As I wrote it I had several opportunities to include details that are personal peeves of mine (car doors stopping high-velicity bullets, for instance), but I didn’t. Instead I let the scene play out the way I would do it. It’s still mildly preposterous, but I think it scores in the acceptable range on the preposterometer for a story of this genre.

Were I to go back and tweak it, I can see several ways I could make it better, especially at the start, where I still had word-inflation and bad prose as goals. Overall, however, this scene scores a “not bad” from the not-as-dispassionate-as-it-should-be part of me that judges everything I do. Which, ironically, makes it unsuitable for Step on a Hack. Not enough for the cop reading the story to mock. Oh, well.

Here, for your amusement, is a scene with cars and guns. And swearing. If the occasional f-bomb is going to sour your stomach and cast a pall over the rest of your day, then you probably should stop now.

Ace Martingale shifted into fourth as the sleek black Dodge Charger roared up the ramp and onto the highway, a steel shark in the night. Ace lit one cigarette with another and threw the smoldering butt of the first out the window. The speedometer crept upwards, 70 then 80 then 90. He let it settle in at 100 miles per hour. A good speed. Fuck kilometers.

The mighty engine purred and the hot desert air blew Martingale’s hair and dried his sweat instantly. He punched in an eight-track tape to help him think. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Free as a bird now. Free as a fuckin’ bird. Maritngale smiled for the first time in five years.

He was out, he was in a fast machine, a twelve-pack of corona blondies in the passenger seat, bolt cutters, pick and shovel in the back seat. In the trunk, the last of his problems. Life didn’t get any better than this.

“Fuck yeah!” he shouted into the night. “Fuck yeah!” he threw his empty out onto the road and reached for another. By the time the glass bottle hit the pavement he was long gone. He was a spirit, a shaman, a god of the desert and he was going to live forever.

At Desert Center he left the interstate highway, turning north on state road 177, past a couple of industrial sites and into the breathing desert. Two lane blacktop. The way it was supposed to be. He slowed it down to a safe and sane 90 per and popped open another brew.

For the next hour he floated along the highway, in harmony with machine and road, alone and unencumbered. Past mile marker 239 he slowed. There it was. Martingale’s heart sped up a bit as he pulled into the primitive rest stop. Nothing more than a table and what had once been a sun shade. A rusting barrel overflowed with garbage.

He turned off the music and rolled gently to a stop, his tires popping over the gravel. Behind the table his headlights splashed on a gate adorned with a rusted, bullet-riddled “No Trespassing” sign swinging on a piece of wire. He left the motor running and reached back for the bolt cutters.

He opened the car door and stood, stretched his spine. The desert’s hot breath kissed his face. “I missed you, baby,” he whispered into the darkness. The gravel crunched under his boots as he walked to the gate. Before he even reached the gate, he froze.

The chain was already cut.

He dropped the cutters and ran back to the car, dove back in the waiting door.

A hole appeared in the windshield, nice and clean, matched by a larger, more ragged hole appeared in the rear window. The round passed his head with a supersonic crack and vanished into the night.

Martingale stayed low, cranked the wheel and mashed the gas. The car slewed and jumped forward, slamming the door shut. The passenger door made a booming sound like someone had kicked it, and a slug tore into the upholstery.

“What the fuck!” He screamed. Killing another man was one thing, but this car was a classic. It was art. You don’t shoot art. He lifted his head a little to guide the car out onto the blacktop, pointed north. The spinning tires screeched when they hit the pavement and thrust the car forward. The engine roared as Martingale went through the gears. The car started to float at one hundred twenty miles per hour, and Martingale held on for sweet life.

Two lights stared back at him on the road ahead. The eyes of an animal, reflecting his headlights. He hit it before he even had time to wonder what it was. Night insects flashed in his high beams, there and gone faster than a prayer.

More lights ahead. This time, a car. He hurtled toward it. Motherfucker had his brights on. Martingale pushed his speed up to 140. Holding the wheel with sweaty hands, twitching to keep it in his lane.

Just before the other car flashed past he hit the brakes. Flame burst from the other car, the muzzle flash of an assault rifle on full-auto, spraying the space he would have occupied had he kept a steady speed. The enemy flashed past as Martingale punched the gas again and heard bullets tearing into the rear of the car. Then he was away, and, for the moment at least, he was alive.

In the rear view he watched as the other car hit the brakes and began to turn around. Martingale was going to be a long was down the road before they even got turned around. They’d have to be driving one hell of a car to catch him.

He took a deep breath. Time to stop reacting and start acting. They had men and guns, he had a fast car and the desert.

This was his desert. Whoever those people were back there, they had missed their chance.

They knew about the rest stop, and that meant Olaf had spilled his guts. Which meant he was probably dead. Anybody with the means to make Olaf talk wouldn’t be the type to keep him around after they got what they wanted from him.

Martingale slowed to take one white-knuckle turn, then another. He checked the rearview. Nothing. Just before the next corner he switched off his headlights and slowed. He pulled off the road, over a cattle guard concealed by a boulder. He stopped the car and ran back to the road, brushing over his tire tracks with his boot. It didn’t have to be perfect, as long as they weren’t obvious.

In the still night he heard the hiss of the car as it approached, augmented by the roar of a large engine. He ducked behind the rock as the pursuit car screeched around the corner, then around the next curve and out of sight. He jogged back to his car. He’d be easy to spot by anyone coming back the other way.

He stopped short when he saw the bullet holes in the trunk, the metal shining silvery in the moonlight against the black paint. He put his hand on the trunk lid, afraid to open it. “Fuck!” he said, but there was nothing to do now except get well down this road before the others doubled back. He thumped the trunk twice with his fist and jogged to the door. He drove slowly, lights off, steering by moonlight but wishing it was darker.

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November 1st, 2010

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Well, another NaNoWriMo is under way, and this year my mystery/comedy (with action and adventure!) is off to a roaring start. It’s become a tradition for me to put my first day’s output here, and this year my novel’s prologue has guns, cars, hookers, explosions, and profanity! Not bad! Chapter 1 loses some of the momentum, but there’s no time to go back and fix it.

For those new to these parts, National Novel Writing Month is an event where participants are challenged to write an entire novel in a month. Quality is optional and often counterproductive.

There are a lot of ironies here, but I think I’ll discuss them in the comments thread.

Step on a Hack

Prologue

Benny Hamwich regained consciousness slowly, as if his brain knew something bad was out there and didn’t want anything to do with it. Someone was slapping his face, he realized.

“Benny.” The voice was low and gravelly and came from nearby. Another slap. Benny’s tongue was sandpaper against the roof of his mouth. The air tasted like hot metal.

“You really doped him up good.” That was a female’s voice, to his right, a little farther away.

“Benny!” Another slap, harder. “I know you can hear me.”

Benny blinked with sandpaper eyelids and tried to focus. He was sitting upright in the driver’s seat of a car. Convertible. Big. Beyond the long hood the city lights stretched before him. They were pretty high up.

“Benny.”

Benny wheeled his head to point it at the man crouching over him. He was a big guy, his lined, pale face divided by a thick dark mustache. Under the brim of the man’s hat one eye was squinted almost shut. The man’s smile revealed perfect, white teeth.

“Hello, Benny. Are you ready for a little science project?” The man’s adam’s apple bobbed as he talked, drawing Benny’s attention to a scar there.

“A… wha?” asked Benny.

Behind him a woman cackled. He turned to see her sitting in the passenger seat, her short skirt revealing long, slender legs. Her outfit was business sexy, and it worked well on her. She laughed again. Her teeth were not as straight as the man’s. “You should see yourself,” she said, and made a stupid face.

“Now, Marybeth,” the big man said. Benny turned back to meet his cold gaze. “Benny here’s been drugged. It’s hardly fair to judge.” The man reached inside his overcoat and pulled out a slender paperback novel. “Do you recognize this, Benny?” The man’s voice was cold and hard.

Benny nodded, too afraid to speak.

“Look, it’s got your name on it.” The man held out the book so Benny could see his name on the cover, near the bottom. At the top was another name, Penn Jetterson. In between, there was a picture of a rugged-looking man and a sexy woman in a massive white convertible. They were airborne, and she was kneeling in the passenger seat (showing a lot of leg), firing a wicked-looking assault rifle at unseen assailants behind them. He was gripping the wheel like a man possessed, grinnig. “TWO TO TANGO” the title screamed.

“You wrote that?” Benny turned back to the woman in the passenger seat. He was going to hurt his neck wheeling back and forth like that. She looked a bit like the woman on the cover of the book. “Really?” she prompted.

Benny nodded. “Yeah.” His voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. “I wrote that.”

The woman smiled. “That’s terriffic.”

“That remanis to be seen,” the man said. Benny turned back around to face him. It was much more pleasant to look at the woman. The man tossed the book into Benny’s lap. “Thus, our little experiment.”

Benny forced himself to look around. He was in a white Lincoln convertible with red leather seats. A mighty piece of Detroit iron from back when big really meant big. The same kind of car Dirk Freemont drove in Two to Tango. They were on the roof of a building half a mile from downtown. In front of the car, rails stretched to the edge of the roof. Behind him a machine hissed with escaping steam.

“We are going to do a little reenactment,” the frightgning man said. “Have you memorized your lines, Marybeth?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Since you haven’t had time to prepare, Benny, we’ll let you read from the book. Chapter one, as you have no doubt surmised.”

“Wait, what’s—”

“It’s like this, Benjamin. I have a difficult time accepting that chapter one is, well, possible. Which sort of undermines the rest of the story. So we’re going to reenact some parts of it and see. Perhaps I am mistaken, in which case you’ll have my most sincere apologies.”

“What about all this?” Benny indicated the rails.

“It’s like a flight simulator. We’re going to make it feel like you’re flying while you go through the dialog. We’ll plug that back into the computer to see just how far you actually would have flown.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Benny, I’m afraid I must insist.”

“Come on, Benny,” the woman said. “Just say your fuckin’ lines so we can get out of here. If you’re fast enough I’ll throw in a blowjob.”

The scary man smiled. “Most of Marybeth’s acting career involves less clothing,” he said. “You two have a lot in common.”

Benny opened the book with fuddled fingers and found chapter one.

“I highlighted where we will start,” the man said.

Benny scanned ahead until he saw the mark.

 

“We’re cornered!” Marybeth cried out.

“Hardly,” Dirk grumbled. He mashed the gas pedal down to the floor. With a throaty growl the 455-cubic-inch engine thrust the Lincoln toward the edge of the parking structure. With a roar the mighty beast crashed through the rail and out into space. Directly ahead an office building loomed.

Marybeth flipped down the visor and inspected herself in the little mirror there. With her little finger she fixed a flaw in her lipstick. “I think you should know that I’m sleeping with Steve,” she informed him.

“What?” Dirk growled. “Steve’s my partner!”

Red-tipped tracer bullets streaked past, leaving burning trails of magnesium and strontium nitrate…

 

“Ready, Benny?”

Benny glanced up from his writing. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

“All right, then. Marybeth, you start when I say ‘action’. Really go for it, all right? Show me what you can do.”

“You said this was an audition.”

The man indicated a video camera on a tripod nearby. “It is. If this works out, I’ll be optioning the screenplay rights. This is your chance to be a real actress.”

“You’re going to make a movie out of Two to Tango?” Benny asked. It was the opportunity he’d always dreamed about — only, in his dreams things were… different. Less scary.

The man patted his shoulder with a gloved hand. “Whether the movie gets made is up to you, now. Let’s see if we can’t resolve some of these pressing questions.” The man stepped away from the car. The night hung dead still around them, the city below lay quiet. The man glanced around, assured himself that all was ready, and pulled a stopwatch from the outer pocket of his coat. He practiced with the buttons a couple of times. Satisfied, he looked up and said, “Action!”

“We’re cornered!” the woman shouted, her voice an icepick in Benny’s ear.

“Hardly!” Benny said, and grabbed the steering wheel for effect. He mashed the gas pedal even though the engine wasn’t running.

His head snapped back againt the seat’s headrest and he was pressed into the leather upholstery with such force the air was driven from his lungs and spots appeared in his vision. He stomped on the brake but that had no effect as the car was launched into the air and sailed over the edge of the building.

On the rooftop, the man stood in the steam washing out from the catapult and watched the car float through the air, slowly rolling over and going nose-down. He could hear the prositiute screaming. Damn her voice was annoying. After a few seconds the white streaks of tracer rounds flashed up from another rooftop, slowly converging with the the sailing car. Would Benny appreciate the bullets’ red tips? It seemed unlikely. If Benny survived, as his protagonist had, the scary man would be sure to ask.

The Lincoln was no longer right-side-up but still a bullet found the gas tank. The car didn’t explode but a nice gout of flame erupted from the back just before the land yaht slammed people-first into the side of a building downtown. The man stopped his timer.

There was a delay before the low whump reached the man’s ears, followed by the crunch of metal against concrete, and the crash of shattered glass. The flaming wreckage bounced to the side and fell out of sight to the street below. The surrounding buildings were lit by the yellow glow of the fire.

The man looked at his stopwatch. Thirty-five seconds. Not quite enough time for the dialog as it had been written, but he thought he had made his point.

Chapter 1

Penn Jetterson stared at the book lying on his polished oak desk. Kissed a Snake, the title read in bright red lettering, underneath that, A Jake Marten story. The type arched over a glossy drawing of a man in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. Behind him a hot nun stood in the entrance to a cathedral. She held a gun, and was poinging it at the man’s back. Or was she aiming at the man holding the rifle?

As covers went, he’d seen worse. This particular book cover had two real problems, though: His name across the top and the name of Andrew Zen across the bottom. The name at the bottom meant the book would be awful. The name at the top meant he would be blamed for it.

#1 BESTSELLER! A banner in the corner said, although the book had yet to sell a single copy. That didn’t matter; his name was on it. Reviewers would rave in exchange for advertising dollars. Jetterson would make a lot of money. Preorders were strong, but not as strong as they had been for the previous book. Still, lots of people would read it. A few of those would never pick up a Penn Jetterson book again. People were starting to realize the Emperor had no clothes.

He lifted his whiskey glass and found it empty. Seemed like he’d just filled it. He knew he shouldn’t, but some days there was no helping it. He pulled open the large, lower desk drawer on his right and pulled out his bottle of Ardbeg, his beloved Islay single-malt. He poured himself a couple fingers of the amber liquid and paused to let the earthy smell fill his sinuses. He put the bottle back, noting that there were only two left in reserve. He closed the drawer.

The book sat in front of him, waiting.

Before he could stop himself he reached for his phone and dialed a number he knew by heart.

“Penn! Darling!” Emma Coe’s voice gushed down the line. “How’s my favorite writer?”

“I haven’t been a writer for a long time.”

“Poppycock!” Somehow it didn’t sound ridiculous when Emma said words like that. “You’re at the top of the best-seller list. Did you get the book?”

“Yeah. I’ve got it right here.” He picked up the object in question, gazed at the brightly-colored cover. “Looks nice.”

“Wonderful! I’ll tell them we’re ready to go.”

“Uh… hold on a sec, Emma. I’m not sure I’m going to approve this one.”

“Don’t joke with me like that, Penn. You’ll give me a heart attack.”

“It’s not very good, Emma.”

“Have you even read it, Penn? You can’t have had it for more than half an hour.”

Not that it would take much longer to read this fluff. “No, Emma, I haven’t.”

“Well then, there you go. What makes you think it’s so bad?”

“It’s a Jake Marten story, written by Andrew Zen. They’re all bad, and each is worse than the last. I think Zen is unlearning his profession. And seriously, what the hell kind of nom de plume is Andrew Zen?”

“Oh, Penn, let me be the judge of what’s good and what’s bad. Didn’t I help you when you were a struggling writer?”

“Yes, Emma.”

“Really, Penn, Andy may not be as good as you, but he’s plenty good enough.”

Penn flipped the book and looked at the back cover. His heard skipped a beat as he read the description. An asp in a copy machine? Had that really been his idea? He vaguely remembered an outline he had tossed off one night, maybe three years ago. Paper Jam, he’d called it back then, but the publisher never kept the titles Penn gave the stories. “Emma, I don’t think that was one of my best ideas. And after seeing what Zen does with my good ideas, I’m afraid to even open this one. The stink will kill me.” Jetterson took another healthy swig of whiskey to fortify himself against such an occurrence.

“Penn. Honey. Relax. The reviews are in, they love it.”

“They’re paid to love it.”

“We’ve got a big signing scheduled, we’re bringing in busloads of people from nursing homes to pack the place. Blockbuster! Lines out the door. New York TV coverage. Great buzz on the blogs.”

“For this?”

“For Jack Marten. He’s huge. They’re talking about Schwarzenegger for the movie. People want this, Penn. Look, you and I both know that the books aren’t perfect, but they sell. And that’s what matters.”

“But…”

“Now, Penn. It’s your name on the book. Jack Marten is your creation. If you tell me to kill this book, I’ll kill it. I’ll kill myself, but I’ll kill the book, too. So. Do you want me to throw away millions of dollars and kill this book, or do you want me to push the hell out of it and get us a sweet movie franchise?”

Jetterson felt one of the last remaining bastions of integrity crumble in his soul. He’s sold out long ago. He lived on a farm in the country, drove a nice car, traveled the world, entertained mistresses. All he had to do was produce two outlines per year for each of six series that bore his name, along with the name of some talentless English major that Emma met at a party somewhere. He had no doubt that the hacks actually believed they were good.

“All right. Publish it.” He put down the book and emptied his glass.

“Fantastic. I’m sure you’ll feel better when the checks start arriving.”

“Yeah.” He reached for the drawer and stopped himself. At least wait until the end of the phone call.

Emma’s voice dropped and became breathier as she moved her mouth closer to her phone. “They found out who was with Benny.”

“Who’s Benny?”

“Benny Hamwich, of course. It was a prostitute.”

“I see,” he said, even though he didn’t. It didn’t surprise him at all that his co-author couldn’t get laid on his own. The only mystery was why anyone else would care. “I don’t pay attention to gossip.”

There was a pause. “You didn’t hear?” Emma asked.

“About Hamwich and a prostitute? No. I couldn’t care less about his personal life.”

“Benny’s dead, Penn.”

“Oh? Really?” Jetterson made a half-hearted attempt at sadness and failed. The man had actually used the phrase “As you know, Bob,” in a story. There were times his stores grew so preposterous that Bennie Hamwich made Andrew Zen look like Shakespeare. “What happened?” Jetterson asked to fill the silence on the line.

“Oh my God, Penn. You will not believe this. He ran into a building in a car.”

“What an idiot.”

“Three stories up, Penn. Three stories up. Just like in Two to Tango. No one has the slightest idea how he did it.”

“When did it happen?”

“Three a.m. this morning. They say the car just came out of nowhere.”

4

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NaNoWriMo 2010 is Upon Us!

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I haven’t done much (well, any, really) planning for my novel-in-a-month adventure this year, but I’m really hoping to restore my writing momentum with a good, hard deadline. I’m pulling out an idea for a story that my sweetie and I hashed out. After I make this awful draft, we’ll work together to make a not-awful version. The idea has a lot of potential. Here is the synopsis I tossed together this afternoon:

Step on a Hack

Penn Jetterson is a best-selling author. The thing is, he doesn’t do much of the writing anymore — the publisher assigns writers to churn out novels based on outlines Jetterson jots down between highballs. Lately, the quality of the work has suffered dramatically. For a while he’s been content to simply sit back and rake in the cash, but lately the writers assigned by the publisher to fill out the plots he dreams up have been, well, awful.

The latest stinker, pooped out by one Bennie Hamwich, opens with a couple having a marital spat while in a car, flying through the air after driving off the top of a parking structure during a high-speed shootout. She is doing her makeup. He is lighting a cigarette. The car continues its improbable arc. She tells him she’s having an affair with his partner on the force just as tracer bullets (tracer bullets!? really?) hit the gas tank, exploding the car.

That’s chapter one. Through an improbable (and unfortunate for the reader) series of events, the bickering couple is still alive in chapter two.

The excerpts from those novels would be downright funny — unless it’s your name on the cover of the book. Penn Jetterson needs a way to salvage his name.

Conveniently, the horrible co-authors are being murdered in horrible, improbable ways that only they could have dreamed up. When poor Bennie Hamwich’s body is recovered from the fiery wreckage of a car that slammed into the side of a building (three stories up), with the charred remains of an unknown woman in the passenger seat, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make a connection between the novel and the method of his demise. (Although it might take a rocket scientist to actually make it happen.)

Sales of Bennie Hamwich’s last piece-of-crap novel skyrocket on the news. Another untalented co-writer is eaten by piranha in the sewers of New York. A third meets his demise in an unlikely incident with a photocopier and a bottle of snake venom.

Who is killing the hacks? Is it Jetterson, trying to clear his name? Or is it the publisher, in a despicable attempt to boost sales? Or is it someone else, revealed at the last moment in a true crime against the mystery genre?

Only time will tell, my friends, only time will tell.

Any connection you might make to this horrible book is strictly coincidence.

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The Windup Girl

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A while back I put up an episode called “Something New to be Afraid Of“, in which I wondered out loud about the power that agribusiness is gaining through genetically modified foods. I didn’t realize at the time that Paolo Bacigalupi was way ahead of me, not just in time but also in fear level.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacagalupi takes place in the future, after fossil fuels have been nearly exhausted. Agriculture is now one of humanity’s main sources of energy as well as how we feed ourselves. The crash from the energy-intensive civilization we enjoy today was swift and brutal. Once-great nations have been nearly depopulated, and hunger is everywhere. Genetic modification is one of the primary tools mankind is using to survive. For instance, we have genetically modified animals that are very efficient at converting vegetable calories into useful work. Many humans are used this way as well, and would not eat otherwise.

Genetic modification is also making things much worse. Where I worried about companies manipulating markets, forcing farmers to buy their seed stock year after year, in The Windup Girl agribusiness has gone the next logical step: unleashing plagues on countries that refuse to do business with them, plagues that only their products are immune to. Whole families of plants are now extinct (there are no peppers, no tomatoes anywhere in the world). Seed banks have been destroyed in the social upheaval and many plants are irrevocably lost. In the words of one “calorie man” in a moment of hubris, “I’ve been inoculated for diseases that haven’t been released yet.”

Man’s tinkering is not limited to plants; there now exists a breed of supercat than can change color and become almost invisible. House cats are now extinct and there are few birds left. Perhaps the lesson of the cats is why modified humans are sterile.

Tucked away in a far corner of the globe, one tiny nation has managed to resist the agricultural conglomerates. Thailand’s independence was hard-won; the people of the country must be prepared to raze villages and quarantine thousands, burn entire crops and even forests, to keep the plagues at bay. Now times are changing. International trade is picking up, and internally the ministry charged with protecting Thailand is suffering for its own success, becoming marginalized.

In Thai street markets, plants long thought lost are starting to reappear. The only possible conclusion: Somewhere they have a seed bank, a treasure of incalculable value (especially to agribusiness).

This story contains a whole bunch of conflicts, between old and new, survival and altruism, pride and duty. The characters are complex and interesting, from the Calorie Man sent from one of the big agricultural companies, to the wily Chinese man just scraping by but always hoping to get back on top, to the cast-aside New Person, a genetically modified woman whose life, well, sucks. Then there’s Kanya with her divided loyalties, who must make a decision that will echo for eternity. Add corrupt politicians, a powerful slum lord, mutating plagues, and a rogue genetic engineer, and you’ve got yourself a fine stew.

Everyone in this story has tragedy in their pasts. Entire families massacred or lost to disease. They are not exceptional; to live in this world is to live with tragedy. Thailand’s past, its history and legends, remain current and meaningful, and inform the actions of the principals in really interesting ways, becoming a template for how once more the Thai must stand against a much more powerful foe.

These are not gentle times, and not gentle people. When things get ugly the author does not pull his punches, including graphic (but heartbreaking) depictions of sexual humiliation visited upon Emiko, the windup girl. The writing is powerful at times, always clear, and the characters change organically, adjusting to circumstances and learning, without needing any sort of epiphany or magic wand to propel them.

I did have a couple of quibbles, in particular: Where are the windmills? It seems like every derelict tower in Bangkok would have a big ‘ol windmill on the top, and the dike keeping the much-higher ocean at bay would be lined with them. Solar panels would be everywhere as well.

In the big picture those things didn’t matter that much; this was a fine read, a real page-turner with language that wasn’t afraid to get down into the gutter with its characters. I really enjoyed it.

Wow – did I just write an entire book episode and talk only about the book? Can this be? Of course not. Let’s talk about sequels.

While I look forward to the next novel Mr. Bacigalupi writes, I hope it’s not a sequel to this one. Well, let me rephrase that. I find the world he’s created to be fascinating and I’d love to visit it again, but a sequel to this story would face problems similar to sequels for The Matrix (should anyone be so foolish as to attempt one). IF there was a sequel to The Matrix (or, God forbid, two of them), the first thing the writer would have to do would be to limit the power Neo had at the end of the first movie. Essentially they would have to rewind the story a little, revoke the payoff of the first movie, and pretend his dramatic little speech never happened. Otherwise the fight between Neo and the Agents would not be compelling – and, let’s face it, Agent Smith makes that movie. Overwriting the end of the first film would be a cheap-ass thing to pull off, so I’m glad no one has tried.

While such a gimmick would not be so immediate in The Windup Girl Goes goes to Omaha, a genie or two have been let out of their bottles, and it would be lame to try to stuff them back in. So, “sequel” as a continuation of this story – I hope not. “Sequel” as an exploration of the changing world set in motion by the events in this book, I wholeheartedly look forward to.

Larger-than-usual disclaimer: I have met the author of this book, and he seemed like a good guy, so I might be a little biased. My bias is expressed in that had I not liked the book, I might not have reviewed it. No worries in this case.
If you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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Novel: A Novel

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According to the back cover of the book, George Singleton is a ‘master of the comic short story’. He has been published in some pretty impressive places, and I like humorous prose, so despite some rather negative things my sweetie said about the book, I secretly held hopes that her negative experience was more an issue with Singleton’s style and that I would enjoy the ride.

Novel is written in the first person, narrated by a man named Novel who spends a significant chunk of the story trying to write a novel. Because of a divorce surrounded by an odd series of events, he finds himself in the backwater South Carolina town of Gruel. Gruel is populated by an odd assortment of characters, but it is a dying town. The locals are convinced that Novel’s novel will put them on the map, and rekindle the economy of the town.

The book is written in a rambling, meandering style that took me along with it. Believe me, I know rambling. The opening two-thirds of the book is about our narrator bumbling along, becoming increasingly paranoid, and telling and retelling his history — which changes, evolving in a very interesting way. There’s a lot of foreshadowing in the opening 75%, which is to say we haven’t really got to the plot yet.

Mr. Singleton’s humor shows through, as do his short-story leanings. In a short story he wouldn’t have had time to beat some of the jokes into the ground with such force. (For instance, his adoptive older siblings are named James and Joyce, and “James, Joyce, Novel” is worked pretty hard.) Other parts seem like they’re in there to set up some sort of comic payoff, but never come through.

One of the jokes Singleton beats on quite often is “Books about writing novels say never to do…” and then in the next sentence he breaks that rule. He breaks a lot of rules in this book, and seems to think that pointing out that he knows he is breaking the rule makes it all right. Usually what he accomplishes is to demonstrate by counterexample that the rules exist for a reason. Rules are made to be broken, but not just so you can point at the rule like a proud three-year-old who just broke a vase.

The town has secrets, lots of secrets. As we learn more about the people of Gruel, we discover that they are not the simple, naïve country bumpkins we first thought. Oh, no, not at all. That’s pretty cool. But wait — under a veneer of obtuseness, their plan for Novel is woefully simple-minded. How do these savvy people ever buy into it? The contradiction is never resolved, in fact, Singleton is caught in his own trap. All the characters he introduces are against the grand scheme for Novel. He can’t show us any of the people who think the plot is a good idea, because they would betray the inherent contradiction.

At the end, lots of things happen. Everything comes to a head, people are coming out of nowhere (James and Joyce? But why?), and our boy Novel is in the thick of it. Then a Huge Coincidence occurs, and everyone shrugs and goes home again, nothing changed, nothing resolved, and a lot unexplained; humor pistols loaded in the first act lie undischarged in the third.

The book grinds to a stop leaving a big a pile of unresolved events that we had passed, that I assumed would have some sort of significance. Just why the hell did the owner of the surplus store want Novel to find the knives buried behind the hotel? As I closed the book, I felt like there was some big explanation I’d missed (notwithstanding the big explanation that was provided). I suspect it never left the author’s head and found its way to the page.

I mentioned in a previous review that just because an author is writing a farce doesn’t mean he can just throw out a new coincidence whenever he loses momentum; everything still has to hang together and make sense in that farcical context. I don’t think Mr. Singleton has learned that lesson yet.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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Overqualified

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It all started here. Joey Comeau needed a job. Somewhere along the way he began to exercise a little more creativity than perhaps is optimum in job application cover letters. Some are hilarious, some are poignant, some are just plain odd. None of them are bound by any sort of requirement to tell the truth.

He didn’t get any of those jobs.

After the police showed up on his doorstep one morning, he stopped actually sending the cover letters in. He continued to compose them, however, and post them on his Web site. He didn’t really want any of those jobs, anyway. Somewhere along the way he got the idea that he could use this form to tell an actual story. Each letter would in itself be significant, but when strung end-to-end they would reveal a larger story, at first hinted at and subsequently revealed.

Put another way, it’s “take what you’re doing already and repackage it in a way that you can sell.” And thus, Overqualified was born.

It is a book of moments, beads on a string that form a larger pattern. Some of those moments are pretty powerful. Some of them aren’t. They go by quickly and before you know it you’re at the end of a brief autobiography told in nuggets of nonsense.

I was a little disappointed, I guess, that many of the supposed cover letters in the book had no ties to the job being applied for. One of the fun things about the letters I linked to above is the cleverness with which he twists the job descriptions, and the decidedly odd ways he represents himself as a candidate. While it does happen occasionally in the book, I missed that cleverness much of the time.

Of course, before there was a larger story to tell, the letters were all about cleverness. The book has a larger purpose and I suppose that means trade-offs.

Comeau certainly has a gift with language. The words he chooses are often evocative as well as descriptive, and a sense of tragedy grows as we move along. He’s at his best when he’s both funny and poignant, as near the end when he applies to be a tour guide, revisiting the scenes of past failures. That bit alone is probably worth the cost of admission.

EDIT YEARS LATER: I still think about this book. Possibly you will, too.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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The Reapers

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When one is in an airport bookstore after spending ten hours on a plane with no reading material, still looking at another few hours before reaching one’s final destination, one doesn’t take chances. One buys multiple books, in different genres, to ensure that the remainder of the journey will pass smoothly. If the first novel fails to please, there is always another.

In the above paragraph, I am the One. Among the books I purchased that fateful day was The Reapers: A Thriller, by John Connolly. Yep, they put the genre right into the title, so there could be no confusion. That might be a good thing, now that I think about it, because the ‘thriller’ part of the book is a pretty simple revenge-begets-revenge storyline without too much actual thrill. Sure, there’s some suspense (not that much, though), along with plenty of violence and action — people are thrust into bad situations and have to dig themselves out. Ultimately, though, the narrative seems to exist not to thrill but to provide the author a framework to explore the soul (or lack thereof) of people who can kill a stranger in the blink of an eye. Are such men born or made?

Connolly has written several stories featuring a detective named Charlie Parker; in this installment the crusty ex-detective plays a subordinate role as the author focuses on Louis, one dangerous mo-fo to be sure. Gay, black, soft-spoken, likes country music, frighteningly cold-blooded. Louis is unusual even among killers; his ego makes no demands, even when he is motivated by revenge. He doesn’t need to see the person die, he doesn’t need to make it poetic, doesn’t need to gloat, as long his target’s heart stops beating. (Although the author glosses over one purely egotistical touch that allows the bad bad guy to get away at one point.)

How did Louis come to be this way? It’s a long story, or a short story, depending on how you look at it. The short version: some people are just born that way. The long version is told over several long flashbacks. As a young man Louis is witness to a particularly horrific hate crime. More crimes against his family follow. After Louis takes his revenge he is discovered and nurtured (or at least trained) by men who work for The Government (or do they?). Louis is retired now, the only one of his group to walk away without being killed. Or so he thought. (insert dramatic sting)

To be honest, after a while the long backstory sections started to feel redundant, as if Mr. Connolly was himself unsure of his thesis that just because Louis was a cold-blooded killer doesn’t mean he’s a bad man. At least for me, he was selling past the close. I got it about two flashbacks before Connolly was ready to trust me that I got it, and move on with the story. The rest started to feel defensive.

Naturally to bring out the best in Louis in this story he must be confronted by a rival of similar pedigree. Turns out that he and his rival have each failed to kill the other on previous occasions. Not a bad set-up by Mr. Connolly.

One of the best things about this book: No one is safe. Even people you like, some little more than innocent bystanders, are fair game. There’s no guarantee that everyone will live happily ever after. That’s critical if you aspire to the title ‘thriller’, and in this case you better not let your guard down until you’ve closed the book. Maybe I have to take back what I said about about it not having much thrill.

Still, did I really have to know the whole backstory of the hired goon who gets whacked? Three pages of backstory for his half-page of action? No, I don’t think I needed to know that. Did I need the detailed description of a rifle, just to have the bad guy choose the other rifle? No, that just came off as the author showing off. Should someone who goes into such great detail about firearms refer to ‘clips’ in an autoloading pistol? Absolutely not.

This sort of story thrives on detail, but let’s keep it to the details that matter, please, and make sure our terminology is correct. Louis would never say ‘clip’ when he means ‘magazine’, and neither should the author.

Overall, however, the rather straightforward plot was very satisfactorily balanced by the character study of the central personality. He is a complex person, a perfect storm of intelligence, physical ability, and near-complete dispassion toward his victims. Was this a thriller? I can’t say I was on the edge of my seat. Wasn’t thrilled, per se. I was interested, and I was wrapped up in the action, however, and I really liked the central characters and they way Connolly introduced them to me. Overall, a pretty good read.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

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