Dark & Twisty

So this is my 100th Blog Entry, and I decided to make it epic.  I'm doing my year in review.

There are two major events that have marked this year for me. 

The most important thing that has shaped my year is the death of my father, Lacy Vickery.  He passed on April 22.  From the beginning of 2009 until that moment much of day to day activity revolved around helping my mother care for him as he slowly passed.  Then the rest of the year has dealt with the aftermath.  I have spent most of the year in a depressed funk.  I am just recently coming out of this. 

The second thing is I turned 30 this year. This had much less impact than it might otherwise have due to the most important event.  Nevertheless, I am thirty this year.  I made a milestone.

Other things: I still work on a psych unit despite not wanting to.  I'm still in school but now I'm going after an MFA instead of an MA.  I didn't make my goal for publication this year.  I fell one short.  I believe in keeping goals reasonable.  I planned for 4 publications and only made 3, but I was paid the most for a story at that time.

Other good things that happen is that I've made good connections with three editors. 

I finished the first draft of my thesis novel, only to have to completely rewrite it, but it is all good. 

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I picked up this book ages ago to help me with my thesis, or I thought it would be helpful.  The book deals with the Devil coming back to a small town in Arizona to kill people with aborted fetuses.  This happens about once every 100-150 years.  A mysterious drifter (who is immortal) comes to help.

The true problem with this book is that there was a lot of build up for a very small pop.  The ending was anticlimatic and seemed to be just a flash in the pan.  When I finished the great battle scene that the author built for pages, it ended in a few paragraphs.  I had to say to myself "That was it."  The ending was disappointing.  It wasn't that good didn't triumph over evil.  It was that the end seemed so out of place.  Two hundred pages went into building the suspense of what will happen for a chapter to end it with a man splitting into and the drifter saying, "if we had been sooner that wouldn't happen."  Little just leaves us there.  We don't get an explanation about what he meant by if we had been sooner.  Why couldn't things be done without the person splitting apart.  The problem was that the sacrifice seemed to be for nothing.  The priest, who was killed by the devil, doesn't really have sympathy from the reader.

I read this book both as a writer and a reader.  Both were disappointed.  The reader wanted the story to end differently with more pizazz.  The writer learned that if you are going to build up high, you need a blow out ending to not disappoint.  I was very disappointed.  This story was built so high I needed the Death Star to explode or the Ark of Covenant to melt a bunch of Nazis.  Instead, I got two yahoos shooting giant dead babies and a priest getting rent into. 

The reader and writer in me says, avoid this book.  I may even start to avoid Little.  Until this novel, I had mostly read his short stories, which don't impress me either ("Paper Work"). So I am beginning to be disappointed with this author.

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I finally finished my reading list from June.  After all the texts I actually got grades on, I made it Edward Lee.  This particular book was not on my reading list specifically. I was just instructed to read something (or more than one text) by Ed Lee.  Golem was the only book I could find at the local book store. (Since then I found another paperback, which I bought and will get around to reading at some point.)

I will say that Ed Lee may have passed Jack Ketchum as the most disturbing writer I've ever read.  He's really intense and will not pull a single punch.  (I thought this of Ketchum until The Girl Next Door, but I'm glad he pulled the punch.) Ed Lee takes no prisoners or leaves nothing too taboo for his books.

Golem is a recent book by Lee.  It deals with a sect of Satanic Jews who deal crack and use golems to kill the competition.  There is a back story from 1880 where the ancestors of the Satanic Jews use golems to fight against prejudice.  The modern and historical story intertwine throughout the book. 

The story is set in rural Maryland, and deals with crooked sheriff's and crack dealers.  (Maryland must be different from Alabama because our big rural drug is methamphetamine.) The story revolves around a excrack addict, professor of theology and her recovering alcoholic game designing boyfriend.  They buy a house that contains a skull and some holy relics the Satanic Jews need to make more evil golems. 

The story involves a lot of dismemberment and rape.  I was surprised at the excessive number of rapes in this story. (My mentor told me to read this author after chastizing me for having too much rape in my own work of fiction.) The story is very shocking. It deals with a monster not often seen in horror literature, and he did a good job.

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