Dark & Twisty

I finished Dan Simmons' The Terror recently.  I liked it alot.  It was a bit long, but I never got slogged down in it.  I happened to be in my very small, very crappy local bookstore a few weeks ago and picked up an anthology called The Living Dead.  The first story in this book was "This Year's Class Picture."  by Dan Simmons.  I sat down in the mall and started reading this story.  My wife was in JC Penney buying shoes or something, which I cared nothing about.  As I studied the story, I found it very interesting.

The premise is that the world has ended for living life, for the most part. It never mentions why which in most zombie stories isn't that important.  The main character is in a school with her dead fourth graders.  She has been teaching her zombie class for a long time which is illustrated by the mention of the class pictures from various years going from professional to polaroid.  She finds a new student (zombie of course) trying to get into her compound.  She makes him part of her class. 

The teachers attempt is to teach the dead students.  She uses some Skinnerian training techinques of positive reinforcement.  However, she is never really successful.  After a terrifying onslaught of zombies that she fights off.  She lets her class go only to realize that they had learned.  She saw several smiling at the camera from the picture.  Then her class returns ready to learn.  She starts to teach again.

This story kept me wondering what was going to happen.  I didn't know if the teacher would be eaten when her class turned on her and that would be part of the picture or what.  I enjoyed the story.  It gave much to think about that zombie stories don't have to be all gory and death to all humans.  It also doesn'thave to be death to all living dead.  This story wasn't The Terror, but it was good and gave me much to ponder. 

Yea, Dan Simmons.

Posted by Jared at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Stephen King.  What else needs to be said?  I recently read "Autopsy Room 4" just as a pallette cleanser.  This is a King short story.  Those who know me, know that I think King is a better short story writer than anything else. I've liked some of his books in the course of my readings, but he usually always gets me with a good short story.

This story is good.  The guy is awake as they prepare to do his autopsy.  It turns out he was bitten by a snake that causes death-like paralysis.  He is saved because someone finds the snake, and he gets an erection when the female medical examiner plays with his snake while examining a war wound. 

There is nothing extraordinary about this tale.  There have been plenty of near death, buried alive stories written.  I just can't say that any of the end with the person being saved because he pops a postmortem, non rigor mortis boner.

Stephen King.  What else do I need to say?

Posted by Jared at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't often finish bad books, but I had to when it came to Scott Smith's The Ruins.  This book follows a group of stale WASPY Americans in Mexico on vacation.  They end up in the jungle looking for Mayan ruins.  What they find is an abandoned mine that has wicked vines.

This was a horrible book.  The characters were stale and the plot rusty.  All they needed was some Ortho Weed-Be-Gone and the story was all over.  It was even for the fantastic world of horror unbelievable.  I wanted the main characters to be dead from about page 4.  The men were all douche bags (That is the proper terminology for such) and the women whiney.  It was like watching some god-awful MTV television show.  Real World Death Island.  With all the horror going on around them, no one seemed to think suicide the best way out.  These vines were even intelligent.  They could imitate animals, cell phones, and human speech patterns.  there was no explanation as to where they came from or anything else.  Were these alien creatures?  Curses from the Mayans?  We don't know.

Avoid this book like you would Mexico during a swine flu epidemic.

Posted by Jared at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I finally made it to see the new Star Trek movie.  I have to say that I really enjoyed it.  I had heard good things about it, and how it would appeal to not only the Trekkers (like myself) but to the layman.  They were right. 

This movie does an excellent job of capturing the character of the orignal series.  The casting was done well for the most part.  My biggest problem was that all the Vulcans and Romulans looked like vampires.  This upset me somewhat.  These characters have always had the creepy undead appearance but this was to the extreme.  Beyond that everything seemed to work well.

I had wondered how the writer and director would relaunch such a storied series and be able to keep it fresh.  They suprised in the way they did it.  I was delighted.  I'm not going to give it away because I don't want to be that spoiler guy.  I loved that now we can have a whole other series of adventures with the original characters that made history so long ago.

Now, I didn't like some things.  Uhura wasn't ballsy enough for me.  She needed more of that I've got a razor in my boot attitude that Nichols had in the television series.  I was displeased with her character in that way.  The villian as well was too one dimensional.  I didn't fully feel why he was doing what he was doing.  In all actuality, the villian and his plot almost seemed to me to be a non-issue in this mostly character driven action adventure.  I cared more of the development of Kirk and Spock than anything else.

What about the USS Enterprise?  I love it.  The designers kept the television style with a more technilogical advatange.  It also fixed some of the issues that plagued the original.  The engineering room looked much more like an engineering section.  The original never seemed to be realistic.  The bridge seemed much better as well.

The last thing I'm going to say about this movie is this: The USS Kelvin really took it for me.  The ship was claustrophobic and old school looking.  It reminded me of the WWII battleships.  This was great in showing the evolution of starships.  I loved it.

See Star Trek.  If you are fan already, you'll still like it.  If you aren't a fan, you'll love the action.

Posted by Jared at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the few books that I took away from high school loving very much was Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. I first became fimilar with this tale in 10th grade lit class.  The book featured a chapter from the story about Lavina when she is confronted with the Lonely One.  The chapter ended with someone clearing his throat. I then read the book and loved.

So a few years ago, Bradbury released Farewell Summer the long-awaited sequel to Dandelion Wine.  I couldn't wait to read it, but I did for nearly two years.  I wish I had never read it.  This book ruined Dandelion Wine for me. 

The story never starts to make sense.  It rambled on about armies and war and had the children acting strangely adult and the oldesters strangely young.  The story ended in a such a way that made me regret the ever taking it up.  Bradbury seemed to be struggling to write this tale.  The work seems more like a beginner's work than one of an old master like Bradbury.

The story didn't even work to hard to be a sequel.  If a person didn't know it was sequel, they would never guess it from reading this book.  Also the story seemed to have time shifted from the 1920's to at least the 1960's.  It had a nostalgic feeling but like I said for a totally different decade.  This made the story much less enjoyable because I spent too much time trying to figure out why the old man called people on the telephone so much.  He was always on it.  This doesn't seem like 1920s behavior.

Bradbury is showing his age and cognitive problems in this book.  His delightful way of writing has faded away.  Farewell Summer for me was farewell to an enjoyable book I've loved for years.  It also has marked my farewell to Bradbury.  I will pick up his old works, but it has become evident that he has faded with age like an old billboard, instead of growing better like fine wine.

Posted by Jared at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, today is my first day back from vacation in Pensacola Beach, Florida.  First thing first, I hate the beach, but this is a very pretty beach all the same.  I was able to find some really good shells that I was happy with.  I also got to eat at a lot of good places, but I must comment that I had too much seafood. 

While I was there, I figured out that writing scenes of dark horror are difficult to do while sitting on a brightly lit beach.  I was shocked.  I also discovered that stingrays jump out of the water. 

 Well, that's that.  I'm done with Florida.

Posted by Jared at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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As many who know me personally know, I love sweet tea.  I have referred to it on numerous occasions as the nectar of the gods.  This brown sweet nectar is my usual drink.  I order it at most restaruants.  Some places don't have it. (None around here mind you.  It's just down right unSouthern to not have sweet tea.  We'd run a cafe owner out on a rail if he didn't offer this libation.) Some place offer it, but it's intolerable. 

I've drunk sweet tea that tasted like coffee and some that tasted like Robetussin. Now I will talk about the greatest irony of all.  The location I eat lunch at everyday has the worst sweet tea in the world.  It taste like a mixture of sweat, coffee and some bitter substance similar to quinine.  This forces me to drink Pepsi, which is my least favorite soda. 

The location is my work site a medical center which has the name of my home county in it and the name of particular religious group famous for baptizing people.  I won't name names.  The worst thing is, they don't seem to care.  What are poor tea tottlers like myself supposed to do with this inferior swill?  Drink Pepsi from now on?  Nay I say, nay.  I walk across the fast food restaraunt and buy a mega sweet tea with no ice. 

The world is well.

Posted by Jared at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was a kid, there was a series of books that every student tried to keep checked out of the school library.  If you got your hands on one, you were lucky.  It wasn't Harry Potter.  Those came way after my time.  It also wasn't C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicals.  It was a series of spook books by a story teller named Katherine Tucker Windham.  They were the 13 ____ Ghosts and Jeffery books.  There was volume in this series called 13 Tennessee Ghost and Jeffery.  This volume featured the following "true" ghost story.

A farmer was walking through his pasture in Eastern Tennessee.  This is an area of the state that is full of limestone outcroppings and caves.  He was walking to great some neighbors that had come to see him.  As he walked toward them, he disappeared and was never seen again.  The neighbors couldn't figure out what happened. 

An interesting thing about this area of Tennessee and limestone is that sinkholes can develop from out of nowhere at anytime.  It would seem that this farmer fell into one and the ground sort of swallowed up the hole.  Back in the 1800's, people probably wouldn't have understood this.

Now what does this old Southern ghost story have to do with The Terror, which is about a failed arctic expedition?  That's easy. Dan Simmons story is set in the bleak arctic circle.  The crews of two British ships are trapped in ice that can open up and swallow them up.  There is a scene in this book which most of the Royal Marines are killed when their tent is swallowed by the ice.  It opens underneath them, they fall in, and the ice freezes back over them.  The image of that Tennessean farmer trotting across his field then disappearing into the earth instantly came to mind. 

That is a terrifying idea, that at anytime the ground might swallow you up.  The Terror has all sorts of horrors: the great white creature, the neverending winter, the ice, the ever present fear of fire, and the unsavory characters aboard ship. 

The most unnerving part of the story to me was the ice and the closing up around people and swallowing them up.  The constant moving floor under  your feet like walking in a fun house or atop of a water bed. 

I had much rather face the great white beast or Hickey or even fire than I had the troublesome ever present and plotting ice.

I would the Alabama therapist walking across the ice field that disappeared never to be seen again.

Posted by Jared at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)