Laudanum is a Hell of a Drug: Drood by Dan Simmons

Drood by Dan Simmons

When I've been telling people about this book over the past few weeks, it usually goes something along the lines of, "Oh my god, it's about Charles Dickens and a train wreck and mesmerism and Egyptian death cults and this shadowy, nefarious creature named Drood, and the whole thing is narrated by an unhinged, laudanum-addicted Wilkie Collins! It's great!"

The weird thing is, people seem intrigued. Either that, or my slightly manic pitch just unnerves them enough to nod their heads and smile so I'll settle down. But I'm inclined to go with the former. After all, Drood's premise is pretty irresistible.

Simmons extrapolates a fantastic and, at times, very frightening tale from true events in the lives of Charles Dickens and his friend, Wilkie Collins, particularly Dickens's last years. On June 9, 1865, Dickens was riding by rail with his young mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother when their train crashed horrifically, killing 10 and injuring 40. After the crash, Dickens's writing fell off dramatically, his health suffered, and he spent much of his last five years giving strenuous reading tours in Great Britain and the United States.

Those are the facts, but Simmons introduces a sinister figure whose presence in the story gives a dark, eerie cast to Dickens's final years. This is Drood, whom Dickens first meets in the aftermath of the Staplehurst crash. Along with Dickens, Drood is seen giving aid to the wounded... or perhaps not. Afterward, Dickens becomes obsessed with Drood, venturing into London's darkest corners, sewers, crypts, opium dens, pursuing danger, courting death, and more often than not, dragging along his good friend, Wilkie Collins.

Though lesser known, Collins was a writer and frequent collaborator of Dickens's (and his two masterpieces, The Lady in White and The Moonstone have experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent years). Collins flouted convention, living openly with one mistress, while fathering three children with another. He also suffered from a number of health problems, which he self-medicated with huge amounts of laudanum. A tincture of opium meant to be ingested a few drops at a time, Collins drank the stuff by the glassful, which sometimes resulted in hallucinations (Collins claimed he saw, among other things, recurring visions of his own double as well as a green-skinned woman with tusks).

In the genius stroke of the novel, Simmons makes this hallucinating, drug-addled, perpetual second fiddle the story's narrator. Jealous, paranoid, and particularly susceptible to the dark allure of Drood, Collins is the perfect voice for this surreal story. As his confessions become more shocking, and Drood's endgame becomes clear, the reader gradually becomes aware of exactly how unreliable a narrator Collins really is. What's true about his tale and what's not? Simmons leaves that all maddeningly, deliciously up in the air.

At nearly 800 pages, Drood is something of an undertaking, but fear not. It's also packed with action, scandal, devilry, and what Brady likes to call high-grade nightmare fuel - 800 pages are rarely this much fun.

Also, I should mention that if this book sounds at all interesting to you, you might enjoy this episode of Doctor Who (a different, but somehow not all that different take on Dicken's last days).

Quarantine!

Okay, so, here's the deal: Mary's been out of town since Friday, and I'm pretty much trying out for "Superflu Victim #8,432" in the Broadway version of Stephen King's The Stand here.

You know, Jaws never ruined swimming for me, but King's plague epic has pretty much ensured that every time I catch a cold or my sinuses try to kill me, there's at least a few minutes where I'm convinced that there is a superflu, it has gotten loose from some hush-hush military installation, and I've somehow managed to become Patient Zero.

Then I get ahold of myself and bust out the Neti Pot, but it's always a fun minute or so of fever-driven existential terror.

So, just for fun, here's the trailer for the 1994 TV miniseries adaptation which had a heck of a cast (Ossie Davis! Gary Sinese! Shawnee Smith!* Dr. Kelso! Kareem Abdul Jabbar!) but not so much of an ending or a script.

visit videodetective.com for more info

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* Becker aside, I've had a soft spot for Ms. Smith ever since the remake of The Blob, which I was so not supposed to have seen at the time when it came out.

Teen Vampire Taste Test, Part 2: Wherein I Do Not Get It

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

"What is this shit?" -Greil Marcus, on Bob Dylan's Self-Portrait

I'm not one of those people who believes that YA literature is a slum for writers who can't cut it writing for adults. Writing for teens is hard -- cases in point, Michael Chabon and Carl Hiassen, both fine writers whose attempts at YA were only moderately good. And I don't believe that teen readers tolerate crap books any more than adults do. That said, I'm completely baffled by the popularity of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series.

For those who are unfamiliar with the series, it is about an ordinary teenage girl who moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father. There, she falls in love with a vampire named Edward, becomes entangled in his strange adopted vampire family, and finds herself in grave danger as a result.

And I disliked it more intensely than I have ever disliked any book, with the possible exception of The Scarlet Letter.

My reasons:

1. It is incredibly boring. It takes about 200 pages for the vampire love story to kick in, and up until that point, Twilight is just a really unmemorable high school story.

2. Bella is quite possibly the dullest 17-year-old girl who ever lived. Her only remarkable trait is that she falls down a lot, and she reminds me of Anne (aka Bland) from Arrested Development.

3. The relationship between Edward and Bella is creepily intense, but entirely without passion. The source of their attraction seems to be that he's very pretty, and that she smells very good to him. After he rescues her from a few sticky situations, he becomes very protective and possessive, sometimes to the point of sitting in her room and watching her sleep. I think there's a name for that, when your boyfriend starts isolating you from your friends and won't let you out of his sight, and I don't think it's "love."

4. The book's big climax is unnecessarily elaborate and convoluted. I have no idea why an evil vampire would go to such lengths to kill Bella, when she could easily be done in by a frayed electrical cord or perhaps a plastic bag left laying around.

I would have found explicit sex or wanton drug abuse or splattery violence less offensive that the implied message of the relatively "wholesome" Twilight, which is:

1. Girls are helpless, and need to be rescued... almost constantly.

2. Teenage girls should strive for unhealthily obsessive relationships because that's what true love is.

I can't discount the opinions of hundreds of thousands of readers who clearly adore this series. However, I have no idea why people like it when it is clearly awful.

Teen Vampire Taste Test, Part the First: The Society of S Series by Susan Hubbard

The Society of S and The Year of Disappearances by Susan Hubbard

Now that Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series has amassed a Prisoner of Azkaban-sized following, I got curious about how the series stood up to its contemporaries. And while Meyer doesn't have any serious challengers to the teen vampire throne these days, I wondered if she should.

So first up, The Society of S series.

Ariella and her father, Raphael, live in Saratoga Springs, depicted with such a strongly gothic sensibility that it took a chapter or two to become clear that the book was set in the present, and not the 1880s. Ariella's mother disappeared shortly after giving birth, and since then, the girl's life has been extraordinarily sheltered. While her education includes Latin and the writings of Bertram Russell, she's never had a friend her own age or bought her own clothes at the mall... or eaten meat.

As Ariella begins taking stabs at a normal teenage life, she begins to suspect that she's different from other people. There's no single moment of revelation. The pieces come together over the first half of the book from her own observations, her internet research, and the stories about the past that Raphael tells her in starts and fits.

Ariella eventually discovers that she's a half-breed, part vampire and part human. While some vampire sects support the colonization of the human race, her own family belongs to the Sanguinists -- a sect of ethical vampires who do not feed on humans.

Perhaps it moves too slowly, but Hubbard's writing is so lush and lovely that I didn't mind, and I'm not usually one to be distracted from other shortcomings by nice prose.

Unfortunately, action is a problem for Hubbard because once she gets going -- here, with the grisly murder of Ariella's best friend -- the story takes off on a wild, uneven trajectory that isn't reined in until the last chapters.

This is a problem in both books. Although the premise of the series is engaging and the world of the Sanguinists is inventive, I was consistently bothered by the directions Hubbard chooses to take her characters.

Despite some missteps in the middle, The Society of S finishes strong, and leaves a lot of intriguing loose ends to be explored in the next book.

Unfortunately, The Year of Disappearances doesn't do much with this incredible set-up. Instead of learning more about herself and her unique condition by interacting with other vampire characters, Hubbard inexplicably sends the 14-year-old Ariella off to college in this book. Hubbard also weaves plotlines involving politics, environmentalism, and bio-terrorism into the fabric of the vampire sects. Much of it works better than I'd expected, but it's simply too much for one book, and spread too thin.

Though the book's violence is minimal, the body count is high. But whether the characters make it to the book's end or not, it hardly matters. The cast has gotten a little too big by this point, and the supporting characters, a little too disposable. I wouldn't suggest getting too attached to any of them.

The Society of S succeeds as a stand-alone, and is definitely worth checking out. However, the forthcoming Year of Disappearances is messy, scatter-shot, and really only for those invested in the series.

Best New Horror: 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill*

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

I reviewed Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box about a year ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. But 20th Century Ghosts is even creepier, darker, deeper, and better.

Usually I don't gush about collections of short stories -- they make me fidgety and impatient. While I'll give a novel a few chapters to lure me in, if a short story doesn't grab me on the first page, I ditch it. I only ditched one story in this collection, "Pop Art," and it's been so universally praised and singled out in every review I've read that I'm willing to chalk it up to a lapse of judgment on my part.

These stories run the gamut from the titular ghost story to surrealist gore, real life horror, and touching explorations of family relationships, and there are too many standouts in the collection to mention individually without spending all night on it.

My favorites in the collection included "The Black Phone," about a kidnapped boy trying to escape from his captor's basement, and "Last Breath," about a curator of dying breaths, and one family's varied reactions to his strange collection. Appealingly offbeat is "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead," about two high school sweethearts reunited while working as extras on the set of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. And the title story, about a small town movie theatre and the ghost girl who selectively visits its patrons, is hauntingly beautiful.

There's not a dud here, and I can't wait to see what Hill does next.
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* The post title refers to the lead-off story in the collection, a skin-crawling little ditty reminiscent of that X-Files episode, "Home," as well as to the book's general awesomeness.

This Is Why They Invented The Internet

Some enterprising soul has rigged up a Choose Your Own Adventure over at OKCupid.

It is a zombie choose your own adventure.

And now my life is complete...er, literally. Dang zombies.

Your Score: Red Shirt

You killed 18 zombies and earned 14 manliness points!

You've contributed heavily to the excitement of the story, but ultimately died in the end. What can I say? I guess you weren't the main character.

Take another swing at the zombies?

Goin' Back to Cali

Ahhhhh...back in LA after a trip to Wisconsin so excellent as to take all other trips I've ever taken and shake them soundly by the scruff of the neck. (Photographic record can be found here, sonic evidence here.) I think by tomorrow I will have recovered, though the jury's out as to when the ol' liver will uncalcify.

Anyways, long and unpleasant airplane rides in the service of rock and roll means one thing: reading. As I had a particularly stressful return flight, I visited the airport bookstore looking for something that I would enjoy, but that would put me to sleep.

And lo and behold, H.P. Lovecraft really did the trick. His stories have, for the most part, pretty much the same plot: ancient evil discovered by cultured gent who should have known better, other realities and dimensions bleeding into ours such that we are constantly surrounded by invisible and profoundly inhuman evil, etc. Someone, at some point, will see one of Cthulu's tentacles or something, and then they start to gibber, they lose their mind, their hair turns white or falls out, and they might turn to jelly.

I don't even know how to describe his writing style, other than Gothic, Gothic, GOTHIC. Lovecraft makes Poe look like Hemingway - it's kind of endearing, actually - and he's occasionally wickedly funny.

Stephen King, of course, owes a monstrous (sorry) debt to Mr. Lovecraft, and if you've never read any of the latter's stuff, it's worth a trip to the library to check out this particularly idiosyncratic and highly influential horror writer. I'd recommend the following short stories: "The Shadow Out of Time", "The Lurking Fear", and "The Nameless City". (I found 'em in the Penguin Classics collection, The Dreams in the Witch House, which is handily annotated if you have no idea who, say, Abbadon is.)

As much as I enjoyed those three stories, and several of the others, the book does make an excellent sleep aid if you're already a little tired and on an airplane. Something about the dense, florid writing full of weird names and dry lessons in ancient history - combined with the low buzzing sound coming from the jet engines and the feeling you get when you realize you're somewhere nature definitely did not intend for you to be, altitude-wise - fits really well with Lovecraft's aesthetic.

I perked up for the good stories, and dozed off for the more unfortunate ones, and I managed not to give myself an ulcer thinking about where my lap steel might be on route to, or how many pounds of luggage it was being crushed under. Everybody wins.

Of course, I did have this whacked out dream where I opened the door to the airplane lavatory and inside I saw a luminous effulgence of pale globs of putrescence that did seem to me to pulse with a malicious intent, drawing into the silent corners of my mind and filling me with dread of nameless horrors older than time, of Yigg, and Ib, and of sonorous rites of ethereal priestcraft...Yigg! Shuggath!! AIIIIE, R'LYEH!!!!!!!!!! Hei! Hei! The venegance of the infinite abyss is upon me...In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!

Why Book Snobs Read Stephen King, Even If They Won't Admit To It

My high school AP English teacher believed two things: a) that the New Yorker was God's gift to small town hicks like us and we would all do well to subscribe to it, b) that Stephen King was trash and should be read by no one. So, you can imagine our delight when a Stephen King story was published in the New Yorker that year. And since we all subscribed to it, we all brought in our copies on the same day to show him.

This just goes to show that everybody, except Mr. Warner, likes Stephen King at least a little bit.

About once a year, both Potts and I become compelled, as if by a force greater than ourselves, to re-read It, or The Stand, or The Shining. I just came off a Talisman/Different Seasons bender a few days ago.

Since reading It under the covers in the eighth grade, I daresay my tastes and critical sensibilities have become somewhat more refined. I'm well aware of King's bad habits as a writer, but still, I keep coming back, along with millions of other readers.

Obviously, King's a great storyteller -- everybody knows that. But here are a few of the other reasons why even those who "should know better" or something can't stay away.

1. Nostalgia: And I'm not just talking about the nostalgia for re-reading books you checked out from the library on the sly, though that's certainly part of it. King is very good at evoking childhood, as well as a vision of a "simpler" America in "simpler" times. Of course, this is problematic, but the here and now is sometimes a booger, and if it makes one feel better to read about little boys who collect baseball cards, and convicts who are basically good people who made one mistake, and where listening to Blue Oyster Cult on the radio is the best thing ever, I say why not?

2. Back Story: King's characters have places to go and evil to fight, and basically, a lot of stuff to accomplish in the course of a novel. But still, King takes the time to explain who they were before the action started and why they're so messed up. Sometimes, these sections are better than the action itself.

3. Mythology: Typically more popular with fans of The Dark Tower series, everything in the world of King's books is so intertwined it makes the Buffy-verse look downright simple. Even a relatively unambitious book like Hearts in Atlantis echoes back to the Dark Tower.

4. Wiseass-ery: Stephen King characters are great at put-downs, one-liners, and snappy comebacks. They somehow manage to sound cool saying things that would get your ass kicked in real life. Like "Suck my fat one, you cheap dime store hood" in Different Seasons In the book, Gordie gets his ass kicked then for this insult because it is considered insulting. In real life, he would get his ass kicked for this insult because "Suck my fat one, you cheap dime store hood" is a douchebag thing to say, as well as being a little too verbose to be a truly effective insult. Still, having read a lot of Stephen King, I like to think that if I ever stared evil in the face, I'd say some pithy, wiseacre thing to it before it ate my eyes.

So, why do you read Stephen King, and which of his books is your favorite?

Scariest, Best Book of 2007 So Far

A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans

George Davies is a new father who finds he can't bear to touch his infant son. At first, his wife is willing to laugh this off as new-dad jitters, and George acts like he's just a "man's man" dad, not the type to change diapers and play "This Little Piggie." However, it quickly leads to serious marital strife, and George's wife issues him an ultimatum: go to therapy, or your family is leaving you.

In his first therapy session, George reveals that he's seen a therapist once before, when he was 11, and that he hasn't thought about that time in his life for many years. The therapist encourages him to explore those childhood memories by keeping a journal, warning him to "be ready for what comes out. When you lock something in a box for twenty years... it begins to stink."

This turns out to be something of an understatement.

The reviews I've read of this book turn cryptic after this point in the story, alluding to the mysterious death of George's father, imaginary friends, mental illness, and demonic possession, but giving up nothing concrete. After reading the book, I'm afraid I'm going to have to join those reviewers and keep mum.

But I will tell you this much. First, its comparisons to Donna Tartt's The Secret History and to The Exorcist are apt (I'd also include The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova in those comparisons). Second, when I got into bed last night, I looked under it first. I also checked the shower and closets. I'm not proud.

Gwen recently posted about reading The Historian, and about the irrationality of being an educated adult who is still terrified of vampires. As an educated adult who finds any horror story involving religion to be petrifying, I can totally relate.

He's Got His Daddy's Prose

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

This book by Stephen King's son has been getting diabolically good reviews. That's for a reason. This kind of John/John Quincy literary event can only take place when the spawn in question writes a book that is really really good, or really really bad. And this book is not really really bad. This book is really quite enjoyable and quite well-written. But let's not lose our heads about it.

Jude Coyle (real name Justin Cowzynski) is a man who ran screaming from his rural Lousiana horror show of a family with a guitar slung over his shoulder, and never looked back. When the book begins, Jude is the kind of aging rocker that King might have dreamed up had his legends been Trent Reznor and Ozzy instead of Pete Townsend and Mick Jagger. Jude collects morbid curiosities, like cannibal cookbooks and snuff films. So when a haunted dead man's suit comes up for auction on an eBay knock-off, he bids in a heartbeat.

What he doesn't know is that the ghost is very real, and that the whole thing is a set-up. The ghost-suit was designed for the explicit purpose of wreaking harrowing, life-ending destruction upon Jude and anyone who holds him dear. Jude knows what he did, and that son of a bitch has it coming.

The book takes Jude, his ex-stripper goth girlfriend, Georgia, and their dogs on a road trip into the heart of the South to find a way to stop the murderous ghost. And as they learn more about the man who's haunting them along the way, Jude becomes less a villain, and more an avenging hero.

Hill does a great job of taking two stereotypically flawed and damaged people, and gradually giving them hidden depths, and surprisingly, the capacity for goodness.

Once I read the line, "Jude had worked his way through a collection of Goth girlfriends who stripped, or told fortunes, or stripped and told fortunes, pretty girls who he always called by their state of origin, a habit few of them cared for, because they didn't like to be reminded of the person they were trying to erase with all their living-dead makeup," I thought I knew all I needed to know about Georgia. But don't rule Georgia (aka Marybeth) out too early. The girl's got heart.

Still, some of the death-rocker, Goth-girl tropes were a little too pat for me, sometimes bordering on misogynistic. That said, the book is well-plotted, surprising, and tinged with hope. Hill writes in a style and tone similar to King, but does something King never does. I won't say how ('cuz you'd never believe me), but he gives his characters the happy endings that they don't deserve, and it never feels like a cop-out. Also, in places, it's full-on petrifying.

It you like...: dogs, Southern Gothic, and heavy metal, this book is for you.

A Rake at the Gates of Hell

Hang out long enough in stores that sell Fantastic Four t-shirts and scale models of Hellboy's stone fist, and you'll likely hear the rallying cry of "Comics: Not Just For Kids Anymore!". What is usually meant by this is that there are works that cover serious themes in fairly "literary" ways; not everyone in a comic, in other words, has a cape, web-shooters, or adamantium claws. Books like Art Spiegelman's Maus or Craig Thompson's Blankets, two recurrent poster children for the "comics-are-high-art" camp, are often then held up as evidence of the aesthetic maturity of comics/comix/sequential art.

But there is another sense in which comics are not just for kids anymore: some parents might take it amiss if their kids read a series whose protagonist's defining moment involved botching an exorcism and condemning the soul of a little girl to an eternity of torment in Hell.

(He did try to pull her back out of the clutches of the damned and all, but he only managed to grab her arm. And it kind of...uh...came off.)

John Constantine: Hellblazer is a comic, but it's certainly not for little kids.* The title character, initially created by Alan Moore in the pages of Swamp Thing, is a working class mage, a kind of populist Merlin in a shabby trenchcoat with a penchant for lager and Silk Cuts by the carton, a hard-bitten cynic rooting through the ruins of Thatcher's England whose outlook on life would make Raymond Chandler blanch. He is not exactly a good person, but for fans of noir antiheros, he's an endlessly engaging character.**


In Mike Carey and Leonardo Manco's All His Engines - a standalone graphic novel published for the benefit of non-readers who saw and maybe liked the Keanu Reeves film adaptation (which you and I will just pretend didn't happen) - Constantine finds himself traveling from London to Los Angeles investigating a mysterious illness that's leaving people in comas in both cities. Sleazy Hollywood demons, Aztec death gods who have emigrated north with their followers' grandkids, and Constantine's long-suffering driver/best friend/muscle Chas all come together in a plot that finds Constantine out of his element and right in it at the same time, double-dealing with the forces of evil while learning the hard way that L.A. ain't London.

All His Engines is a good introduction to the larger series; it requires very little in the way of knowledge of the series' mythology or backstory and provides a guide to the collected editions that Vertigo has culled from the series, which now numbers in the 200s. It also hits its marks in such a way as to suggest what the broader Constantine narrative holds, without simply rehashing the older, now classic stories.

Finally, the art is damn creepy, doing what prose often can't in the horror genre: squicking one out without becoming overwrought in the depiction of viscera and gore. I'm thinking here of the scene in which John is sucked into the chest of a demon who's made his body out of cancer cells. Gah.

If you like...
Stephen King and Ray Chandler in equal measure, or Firefly's Captain Mal in his darker moments, this book is for you.

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*I do have to admit, though, that sometimes I daydream about sending copies of Hellblazer to the children of the parents who are trying to ban Harry Potter, just to show them what they should be worrying about.

**On the one hand, he once tricked the devil into drinking holy water (in the form of a pint of Guinness) to save the soul of a buddy who'd sold it for the world's greatest collection of intoxicating potables. On the other hand, while John is smart and John is crafty, John is also prone to getting out of trouble by asking you to hold his place in the Infernal Beatings line for a minute or two while he nips out for another pack of smokes.