Category: Words In

Words In: Horns by Joe Hill

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Just finishing up Horns by Joe Hill, in audiobook format. Hill’s first novel Heart Shaped Box was one of my favorite new discoveries of last year, a somewhat dark, edgy book of clever, compact nastiness. If you didn’t already know this, Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, and decided to try writing under a pseudonym to see if he could have a career of his own without his dad’s influence. Eventually his cover was blown, but he continues to use the name. His real-life name is Joe Hillstrom King so the pen name is really just the first half of his full, proper name anyway. Hey, maybe I should try to get published as “Michael Jay?”

The earlier book followed a somewhat washed-up rock-and-roller whose life is turned upside down when he purchases an old man’s suit that turns out to be cursed. Hill’s follow-up, Horns, likewise observes the intrusion into a character’s life of a dark influence. In this case, a year after Ig Parrish’s girlfriend is raped and murdered (a crime for which he was the main suspect, though no case is ever brought against Ig or any other culprit) Ig Parrish finds himself with a pair of devil-like horns sprouting from his forehead. And not just horns, but a strange influence over everyone he comes across, a certain power over their will, and insight into things they’ve done before that they wouldn’t want anyone else to know.

His life has already been essentially ruined as the book begins, as his girlfriend is gone, and everyone who knows them, including Ig’s own family, thinks Ig killed her and got away with it. Having hit bottom, Ig follows the power and influence of the horns, and though they bring him a lot of trouble they also help him to discover some facts about troubling events in his life, including his girlfriend’s murder.

Hill’s short story collection Twentieth Century Ghosts, followed by the top-notch debut novel Heart Shaped Box and now his sophomore novel effort Horns, are enough to establish him as one of the strongest talents working in the field of suspense and horror fiction. His writing has a lot of similarities to his own father’s early work, in particular such high points as The Shining, Dead Zone, and Carrie.

Overall I’d judge Horns to be slightly below the standard of the first novel, though still worth reading and still indicative of the likelihood of strong future work coming from this writer.

The Joy of Discovering Great Things

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Remember that feeling you had, twelve years old (well, I was twelve at least — what about you?) walking out of the theater after seeing Star Wars for the first time? Maybe for you it was the first time you read Lord of the Rings, or Catcher in the Rye, or it might have been time you listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall on headphones.

Sometimes in this life — not too often or else it wouldn’t have the same magic — you come across one of these amazing things you immediately know you’ll always love, and revisit over and over. Often you don’t recognize it when you first come across the thing, and only looking back later do you try to remember that first encounter, try to remember how it felt the first time you saw that opening image in Blade Runner, with the first spine-tingling notes of the Vangelis score. In other words, we often don’t recognize the discover is so special when we first see it, and only get it in retrospect.

Once in a while you may be lucky enough to be told by a sufficient number of people you trust that you have a real special treat in store. In these case you know you should appreciate it, approach with respect and careful attention to your own sense of discovery when you finally get around to listening, reading, watching or whatever it may be.

I’ve somehow managed to miss Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun these past thirty years. I’ve seen the thing recommended so many times, with such passion, that of course I know I’m in for something great. The funny thing about approaching a beloved classic like this is that you recognize other people love it, but without understanding exactly what everyone responded to, what made it special, until you actually dig in for yourself. It was this way for me with reading Dune, for example, or watching The Sopranos. In both cases, I didn’t really “get” what was so interesting about the idea, but respected the many recommendations enough to finally give in, take a look, be swept away, and become a huge fan myself.

Same thing here, with this book. I’ve read a bit of Gene Wolfe, just a few short stories, enough to recognize the guy can write as well as anybody inside the Fantasy/SF genres, or even anybody in the mainstream. There’s nothing like the dawning recognition when you read something amazing, like Severian’s interaction with the blind librarian Ultan.

This isn’t so much a blog entry about Wolfe’s books (I’ll get to that when I’m done reading), but about that amazing experience of bumping up against true greatness. That first recognition is one of the greatest feelings in life, like falling in love, or traveling to a beautiful place for the first time. I’m so excited to continue with this book!

SF Academy 06 – Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear

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As I’ve discussed here previously, I believe some science fiction writers are more about the “big idea,” the concept that would be just as interesting in summary as in story form, and others are more about story and character, narration and philosophy, that is to say, the writing. My favorite science fiction writers are good at both, and one of my overall favorites is Greg Bear. His work can be uneven (avoid Dead Lines for example, which can’t decide whether it’s a ghost story of a muddled, supernatural-tinged attempt at sci-fi), but when it’s good, it’s really good. My favorites of his books include Blood Music (which seems to be out of print in the US, which is strange), and Moving Mars (which won Bear his first Nebula for Best Novel). I’ve been working my way gradually through his bibliography.

Darwin’s Radio came out in 1999 and won Bear the Nebula award. The book develops at a modest pace, with the discovery of mummified human remains which may suggest something unusual about human evolution. Coincidental to the very old remains being found, a virus that infects these mummies also begins to manifest itself among modern humans.

Bear’s strength is believable characters (especially scientists) and relationships that seem real, and run the gamut from love affairs to career betrayals. He’s also one of the few SF authors that attempts to write fairly explicit sex scenes in style that’s serious and unexaggerated.

By the end, Darwin’s Radio ends up being about a strange genetic trick that combines qualities of a pathogenic virus, and a mechanism for triggering a new stage in human evolution. The great majority of the book, though, is spent on political wrangling, and the formation and breaking-up of alliances between major characters including scientists, archologists, and political functionaries at the Centers for Disease Control.

The scientific ideas under exploration here are fascinating, but the book is much more about the struggle to understand, and scientific detective work thwarted by the need to compromise, all aspects of the process. The ending builds slowly but once crucial events occur the conclusion happens too quickly. Given that Bear wrote a sequel,
Darwin’s Children, I had to wonder whether he said to himself “Shit, this one’s getting way too long… better chop it off here, and finish it up in a sequel.” Then I looked up the sequel’s publication date and saw that it came 5 years later, so maybe not.

Maybe I’m the only one, but by the time the epilogue arrived, I thought we were just getting to the meat of the action. I’d recommend this one, but with reservations, and I wonder how I’ll feel after I read the sequel, which was not as well-reviewed as this book.

Overall, not dissatisfying exactly, but imperfect. At times, Greg Bear writes science fiction as well as anyone alive, and I’ll continue taking a chance on his books so long as there are more like this Blood Music or this one (successful, or almost), and not too many like Dead Lines.

E-book publishing will never succeed until…

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E-book publishing will never succeed until an electronic book version costs less than the printed paper costs, including shipping. That’s all.

Sorry, Amazon, or clueless publisher, or whoever’s at fault. I will not pay $14.89 for a bunch of bits and bytes when you’re selling a nice trade paperback version for $9.89 with free shipping. Seems like elementary economics to me. You can either buy the intellectual property only, or you can buy the intellectual property PLUS a tangible carrier, and the former should be cheaper than the latter.

Probably somebody at Amazon or at the publisher is having a big meeting this Monday morning to figure out why ebook sales are so slow, and I just thought I’d save them some time.

Quick rule for pricing: New-release hardback should cost more than trade paperback, which should cost more than mass-market paperback, which should cost more than electronic version. I’m OK with you charging 50% of the hardback price for the ebook version when the hardback is the only tangible paper version available, but once the paperback comes out, then you need to lower the ebook price so it’s less than the cheapest paper version.

There you go, I won’t even charge you a consulting fee for that one.

SF Academy 05 – Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

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Just recently finished The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson, which I liked quite a bit. It reminded me of Spin in a superficial way, as if drafted from the same rough outline, with different details. You can always tell when an author has traveled in a certain part of the world because they start making all their characters visit that area so they have an excuse to sprinkle in details learned in their travels. In Wilson’s case, without knowing for sure, I’d wager he’s visited SE Asia.

In this one, the protagonist is a sort of hippie slacker living in very poor conditions in Bangkok, when a giant artifact from the future materializes nearby. This monument, the Chronolith of the title, announces a future victory by the conqueror Kuin, a name note yet known at the time of the story. This sudden “visitation,” constituting proof of a looming, threatening force, spreads fear throughout the world and causes societies to virtually all at once close up shop. In other words, most people become so fearful of something bad happening in the future they essentially give up twenty years before any conquering has even happened.

Because this is a Robert Charles Wilson book, the relationships are all haunted and broken (not saying that’s how Wilson’s own relationships are, but in the books I’ve read, his characters are all in that boat), and the parent-child relationships are especially tortured. It’s an engrossing story, though, as our protagonist gets caught up into an effort to understand the Chronoliths (because the one in Thailand is not the last to appear) and realizes his proximity to the first appearance gives him a sort of unavoidable connection to the entire drama of Kuin, attempts to prevent more monoliths, and those who worship Kuin (who doesn’t even exist yet) as all-powerful.

My first experience with reading Wilson’s work was Spin, probably his best book. While the others I’ve read have also been quite good, they’ve been at least a notch below that high point. I’d recommend this book if you’ve already read Spin and enjoyed it, but if you haven’t, then just read that one!

I love this writer, though, and plan to keep working through his books. Canadian sci-fi is strong these days! Next up, Blind Lake.

Literate Yet Happily Book-Free?

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Just a quick one today.

As this blog focuses almost entirely on reading and writing, I think you know where I stand on the value of the written word. Not just the written word, which includes newspapers, blogs and magazines, but books, especially novels, but also collections of stories. I have a house full of these things, and it always amazes me to meet intelligent, educated adults who have no problem reading and understanding a textbook or a magazine article but who never, ever read a book for pleasure.

I struggle more than a a little with understanding people who never read a book, ever. Strange enough to read nothing but historical nonfiction, or instructional books about your favorite hobby, but to never, ever read a book of any kind is so strange to me. Some of the people I know like this claim they’d read more if they had more time, though of course they have plenty of time for television, DVDs, video games and all other sorts of entertainment.

Sometimes I admit I think less of people like this, even people I know to be intelligent, and otherwise capable. Mostly I feel sorry for them. It really seems to me like a person eating nothing but Wonder bread for every meal, never enjoying a great pizza, or a bowl of steaming clam chowder at the Oregon Coast, or a rib eye steak hot off the grill. It’s sad. It’s a closing-off against one of life’s greatest pleasures. Perhaps more than anything else, it’s like voluntary celibacy, not out of any kind of spiritual desire to abstain, but from simply not understanding what the attraction is in the first place.

It’s a great mystery to me and also to most of the people I know, who wish sincerely for more time to read, and more space to store their books!

SF Academy 04 – Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

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Consider Phlebas is the first novel in Iain M. Banks’s highly-regarded “Culture” series. I’ve been meaning to jump into these books for a while but when you look at them all stacked up next to each other the book store, all those thousands of pages, it can be daunting. Banks is known not only for his science fiction but for some edgy-but-mainstream books (which he differentiates by going as Iain Banks, without the middle initial), and the writing here is at a high level. This is definitely not a case of a “literary” writer slumming in sci-fi and just throwing a few spaceships and alien planets into the mix. There are sections that seem less adeptly written than others, which makes sense given that this is an earlier work by Banks re-written into publishable form after his first novel was released. Most of the book exhibits the confidence and polish of Bank’s more recent work, and overall the story keeps the reader swept along.

The story has quite a bit of action and violence, and covers a very broad swath of space. In the “Culture” series, at least at the beginning, there’s a war between The Culture (a very advanced race, or collective of races, who rely on powerful artificial minds to make live in the Culture one of utopic leisure) and the Idirans, which are a strange race of very large, shell-covered, three-legged beings who don’t age (but can be killed). The war arose due to the Idirans expansion or empire-building (driven by religious fanatacism), which the Culture determined to stop. Banks leaves no question which side he considers morally justified, and his dislike for religion comes through pretty clearly as well. Interestingly, though, the main character (a member of a shape-changing race) is actually working for the Idirans on an agent in their efforts against the Culture.

Consider Phlebas at Amazon.com

The novel has a few flat spots, and there were times I set it down and didn’t pick it back up for several weeks. Overall, though, the story’s world is compelling and its scope is truly impressive. I look forward to taking the next several steps in this series, especially as I understand the second Culture book, Use of Weapons, to be considered the best installment. The whole concept of the Culture spread across vast areas of space, creating utopic living environments free from poverty and disease, is intriguing and well-executed. I look forward to reading future Culture novels that focus more on the Culture and less on the Changers and Idirans.

Avid readers always hope every time they pick up a book by a writer new to them, they’ll be discovering a voice and a creative mind that will grab hold of them and make them want to read through everything the writer’s ever written. Consider Phlebas worked exactly that way for me, and I look forward to reading the entire “Culture” series (I’ve already purchased the next four books), as well as other works by Banks.

Do You Read Novel Excerpts?

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I’m almost finished with the 2009 Nebula Awards Showcase collection, edited by Ellen Datlow. It’s an anthology sampling, as you might guess, stories nominated for Nebula awards (one of the big two annual Science Fiction awards). The stories were first published not during 2009, or during 2008 (when the awards were actually given), but during 2007. That’s not a problem, and it sort of makes sense that 2007 stories might be nominated for awards given in 2008, and it takes a while for the book to be assembled and published so they can call it the 2009 showcase. That’s fine, because I didn’t buy this book thinking these stories were brand new, but if you want to read a collection of stories from 2009 nominated for Nebula awards, those awards will happen in 2010 and the book will come out in 2011.

Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

I’ll write a more complete summary of what I found worthwhile and not so great in this space as soon as I finish up the last story or two, but as I contemplate whether or not to read each and every item in here, I realized: I hate reading “excerpts.” This collection includes a tidbit from Michael Chabon’s well-received novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a book I’d consider reading, but I don’t want to give it a try. If I want to read the book, I’ll read it. I don’t want to give the excerpt a try and get all excited about the story, only to find myself stuck at page twelve.

Likewise, I hate serialized stories (you know, appearing in installments in a periodical), and I hate watching TV shows week-by-week with a wait in-between. My favorite way to watch TV, really just about the only way I’ll bother, is to discover the show on DVD after it’s been out for 3-5 years already, so once I start I can run just about straight through without any delay.

I also just finished a book by a favorite writer of mine, a little surprised to come to the end with such a thick chunk of pages remaining in the book. I thought maybe there’s some kind of essay or glossary or maps or something, but it was just a first chapter from the guy’s next book. I skipped it, because if I really loved it and wanted to read it, I couldn’t yet. The book isn’t available. Stop teasing me!

I’ll follow up with a post on the Nebula collection soon, but for now I’m just venting about those excerpts. I consider them a sort of tease without payoff, rather than a pleasant, enticing little sampler. I’ll have none, thanks.

John Cheever, Master of the Short Story

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One of the great things about the appearance of a major biography of a beloved actor, or filmmaker, or writer, is the surge in magazine and newspaper stories revisiting the individual, taking the biography as a trigger for reappraisal. So if you love John Cheever but you’re not inclined to read through a fat new biographical book, you can read the features in New York Review of Books or Vanity Fair, or both. Both arise in response to Blake Bailey’s new book, Cheever: A Life (Vintage)



The two articles linked above are one part review of the new Cheever bio, and one part discussion of Cheever himself, one of the more interesting American writers from the middle of the twentieth century onward. Often referred-to as “American’s Chekov” for his focus on short fiction rather than novels (though he did write a few noteworthy novels, eventually), Cheever’s mastery of the short form was equalled by few. His works appeared most often in the New Yorker in the 50s and 60s, rubbing shoulders with stuff by John Updike, and competing for the attention of the contemporary American literary scene with J.D. Salinger’s stories and Catcher in the Rye, and Norman Mailer’s fiction and journalism.



I always thought of him less as an American Chekov and more as an F. Scott Fitzgerald for the latter half of the century. Though Fitzgerald ended up being better known for novels, the two writers really flourished in their shorter works, wrote crystalline, poetic sentences, and struggled to keep their personal lives on the rails despite the seeming effortlessness of their prose. Excess of drink, self-destructive affairs, and relationships of unbelievable volatility characterized both lives, and had similarly detrimental effects.



I carried this red paperback around with me, this collection of Cheever’s stories, off an on for years. I never sat down and plowed through the whole 700 or so pages at once, just enjoyed a few stories here and there. It always seemed to me very raw and difficult work, despite the preoccupation with bourgeois, suburban concerns. In fact, if Cheever carried on where Fitzgerald left off, I’d say maybe Raymond Carver took the handoff from Cheever and ran with it.


Certainly the best-known of Cheever’s stories is “The Swimmer,” not only because it’s one of the best, but also because it was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster. In that story, one of the more strange and unreal by this author, an affluent suburban guy sets the goal of swimming around his entire neighborhood, climbing fences and going through the back yards of strangers, swimming one pool after another, stopping to talk to his neighbors (who seem to know what he’s doing). Snippets of conversation allude to something in the guy’s situation being wrong, and eventually the reader realizes the guy’s swimming circuit is not the purely lighthearted adventure it may have seemed at first. Most of Cheever’s stories are about such men, and their wives and families and jobs, but “The Swimmer” is more raw and primal, and touches a nerve without the writer ever cranking up the narrative volume.

Many of Cheever’s stories I’d call more “vignette” or “anecdote” than story, something creative writing teachers (and books) warn new writers against. If you can’t set a scene or draw a character with the finesse of Cheever or Hemingway, probably it’s best not to try to have a story in which not much happens except talk over cocktails, or reminiscence about what an acquaintance used to be like compared to what he’s like now.

I guess the “red book” is out of print now, and a new collection of Cheever stories is available now… this one. Same 700-ish pages so probably the same stuff. Some time soon, I’ll have to get out my red paperback and rediscover some of the most adept and dexterous short stories ever crafted by an American writer.



The Stories of John Cheever

SF Academy 03 – The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein

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Often I plan out which books I’ll read next well in advance, like a Netflix queue, but with a tangle stack of actual objects lined-up to read. This time at the last minute I grabbed this one rather than the Robert Charles Wilson book I’d planned on.

The Door Into Summer was originally released in 1957. Hey, check out this old paperback cover. Remember when books used to look like that? If you’re old like me, you probably do. This was somewhere near the author’s peak, and this novel is one of Heinlein’s best-regarded works.

It’s a story of a clever engineer named Daniel Boone Davis (though he goes by Dan or DB most of the time), and Heinlein certainly gave him the name “Daniel Boone” in reference to the American folk hero & pioneer. DB possesses a good, confident nature and seems mostly unrattled by the screwing-over dealt him by his fiancee and his business partner. He’s unhappy enough about things, though, that he decides to go in for “the long sleep,” a hibernation newly offered in the 1970 in which the novel begins.

I don’t want to reveal the convolutions of the aforementioned screwing-over, or the jumps forward and backward in time between 1970 and 2000 involved in DB’s efforts to set things right. But this is a cracking good tale, old fashioned in some details and yet fresh and futuristic even a half-century after it was written. Many of the other characters are better-drawn than the protagonist, and some of the more interesting parts of the novel are told in summary, such as Dan’s quick recap of all he learned after coming out of the sleep. This is a book packed with ideas, and it’s a great example of why Heinlein was so influential over the science fiction field for such a long period of time.

One aspect of the story that “feels” a bit strange is Dan’s very close relationship with a girl of eleven or so. They start off as buddies, though young Ricky clearly has a crush on Dan. At some point, after a bit of time-shifting to adjust the relative ages, Dan sets his sights on her as a sort of romantic partner. Without spoiling anything, there’s at least one fairly queasy sequence in which Dan fixates on the little girl as a potential future partner while she’s still a little girl. I wonder if this part raised many eyebrows back in the fifties?

Another surprising element is Heinlein’s inclusion of a nudist couple who become Dan’s friends. The manner in which Heinlein portrays the members of this nudist colony is somewhere between affectionate and admiring, and the only really “good” characters in the book, other than Dan and Ricky, are the two nudists who befriend Dan. There’s nothing too racy in the nudist colony part of the book, but it’s surprising that an author as plainly conservative as Heinlein would be so cool about an edgy issue so long ago. Then again, conservative meant something different in those days, and Heinlein might better be called libertarian. And of course I haven’t read Stranger in a Strange Land yet (scandal!) so maybe I’m the last to discover Heinlein was actually a swinging wildman.

I recommend this book highly, and it’s probably one of the top two or three dozen favorite science fiction books I’ve read. Really a lot of fun, and as I mentioned in an earlier post here, it made me grin quite a few times at one turn or another. That quality, fun, is something I value very highly in a story, and this one’s got it.

The Door into Summer, on amazon.com