Romance reminded me of a Dario Argento movie in many ways. If you don’t know Argento, he is an Italian director who became famous in the 1970’s for his thriller/horror movies. It reminds me a lot of Deep Red, a movie about a murderous insane mother.  Argento would do a pretty good job with this as a movie. He does beautiful work with stabbing and blood.

Romance, however, got a bit long in the tooth too me too early on. I think it came down to the idea of likeable characters. I liked the cops in the story, but I was glad that the Actress died.  In a mystery, I don’t think you want the reader to not really care who killed the victim.  The mystery element in the novel wasn’t strong enough for me to really care about whodunit without the compassion for the Actress.

One thing that I did like and learned from Romance was this: series writing can be rough for the reader. There were certain elements in this story that wouldn’t appear in a stand alone or if they did wouldn’t have as much significance. I think the romance in Romance had a tacked on feel. I understand why it was there though. This is a series in which the entire series is the master work not the individual novel. It’s Gestalt reading if you will, the whole as opposed to the parts.  As a reader who had no real intention of following this series after this book, I eventually just started skimming over the sections of Kling and Sharon, SharOn, SharYn, Sharyn. I also didn’t like the running gag. It doesn’t work in print. It’s like reading: what’s black and white and read all over?  The joke just isn’t there.

McBain does some wonderful characterization, however. I thought he nailed the pompous playwright, Freddie, who makes such a difference between authors and writers. He even refuses to see himself as a genre writer because it would demean his precious ego. That was just tasty. Also the guilty party was a well described, sociopath for the means of getting ahead. She almost had a manic flare to her, but the plan was too well thought out for that. I think McBain kept a good rein on the psychopathological stuff. If he would have Andrea as a psychotic or full blown manic, I’d thrown the book across the house. (I’d say room, but my house has no interior walls. Ask me about it later.)

In the hands of Argento, this could be a cracker jack movie.

The greatest to me still remains Halloween.  The story is simple and so are the characters.  Michael Myers never speaks more than a grunt.  We never get insight into his madness, and he wears that creepy white William Shatner mask.  He is a killing machine with no known reason or motive (in the original).  He just seems to want to kill fornicating teenagers and babysitters.  There is the plot of most every other slasher made.

The great thing about Halloween is that it is the daddy of the slasher.  Psycho really brought the genre about, and there are a few movies along the way the contributed to it, but when you look at the murders in the slasher movies nearly all are based off of Myers in some way. Jason wears his white hockey mask.  Ghostface has his special mask and even seems to admire Myers.  The Fisherman from I Know What You Did Last Summer has his own motives more like those of the original Friday the Thirteenth,  but he keeps his face covered.  He also moves with pace and cadence of Myers. The slasher is international.  Argento made them in Italy and several J and K films have been of this variety

Long live the slasher I say.  There is always a place for it.  The slasher in so many ways has become our campfire tales and urban legends.  “Did you hear the one about the killer with the hook?”  “This man escaped from insane asylum and started killing babysitters.  He was upstairs while they were unawares in the living room.”  “Did you hear about all those strange murders at Camp Crystal Lake?”   “I know what you did last summer was written on the slip of paper.”

Without the suspense of disbelief, the twist of the novel didn’t work.  I didn’t care.  I’ve tried to track down why I had such trouble with this story, for learning purposes.  The only thing I could come up with was the story being told from the first person POV of Corey.  Many found that his sarcastic interludes were great and engrossing.  I found him stereotypical.  Corey was every stereotype I’ve heard and been exposed to growing up and living in Alabama.  If you let the average person around him here in northwest Alabama read a paragraph of this book without telling the reader where this guy was from, everyone would get he was a Yankee and most would say a New York Yankee (not the baseball players).  Why?  This is how we see everyone from New York.  Many people may not even pick up on the fact that Corey is so stereotypical. In an essay in Writing Mysteries, Aaron Elkins writes about creating realistic dialog (2002). He mentions that no matter how good the plot without realistic dialog the story loses its appeal.  This is what happened with me.  The actual dialog in Plum Island might have been realistic, but Corey’s dialog (internal mostly) was so stereotypical, it was like reading bad dialog.  I never got into the work to appreciate it.  I think this a good study of being careful of stereotype and being aware that people besides the writer my perceive something as stereotypical. 

In all truth, if Plum Island hadn’t been required, I would quit reading after twenty-five pages.  Just for a little personal information, twenty-five pages is about how far I made into Treasure Island another Captain Kidd story. 

Elkins, A. (2002). How to write convincing dialog. Writing Mysteries (2^nd ed.). Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books. pp 129-138.

I just finished the book Harvest by Tess Gerritsen.  It was a medical thriller.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I usually don’t like books that is heavy on jargon, but my years of working in the hospital has made her jargon my everyday language. 

The book is pretty old being published in 1996, but it doesn’t seem too aged.  There are some telephone things that we don’t have anymore, but everything else seemed fine. The plot is very akin to a horror novel.  Russian mobsters are “adopting” out poor orphans in the post fall of communism motherland.  They then put them on ships bound for America where they harvest their organs for black market profit.  A group of doctors in Boston are in on it, and the fun begins.  The nice thing is the main character, DiMateo, seems to be going crazy.  She’s paranoid, but we find out there is a reason.  There’s some gore involved too.  Pig guts rotting in her car is a horrific highlight. 

I’ll even admit that I was tricked.  Gerritsen got me.  I don’t usually get tricked but I was so focused on the true villains name to be aware of his badness.  The ultimate evil doc was named Tarasoff, an ironic name.  The Tarasoff act is the duty to warn act to prevent harm to people in a hospital setting, but in this story, he’s the one causing the harm.  Delicious.

I read the book to get a glimpse at how other writers envision religion in the horror genre.  Religion’s always seen in vampire books and monster stories, but zombies are a bit different.  Even though Paffenroth’s book deals with movies, the ideas are still there.

The main issue this book puts forward is that Romero never overtly discusses religion beyond the “crackpot preacher” denouncing the evils of society or an occasional reference in passing.  None of the movies discussed have a preacher or religious character as a protag. Instead, what Romero appears to have done is made parallels to Dante’s Inferno.

Paffenroth discusses how each movie is another level of Hell descending to the bottom.  The movies discussed are the original Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (a shopping mall favorite), Day of the Dead, the remake of Dawn of the Dead, and Land of the Dead.

Night of the Living Dead was the first and was discussed as being the darkest and most frightening of the movies because of the ending in which no one is a hero.  The story plays out with the sins of racism, sexism, classism, and murder played out well.  The things is sexism, classism, and racism are not usually thought of as sins, but they do lead to them.  The murder part of the story is not as obvious as  I had thought.  I thought the killing of the human like ghouls was the murder, but Ben, the black protag, kills the older husband.  It was all because of a power struggle. Most viewers don’t even think of it as murder, because the husband is so unlikeable, but it is.  The viewer accepts it as part of this Hell where evils can exist in almost a vacuum.

Through the rest of the movies sexism, racism, greed, gluttony, sadism, and homosexuality become the major sins.  All are shown the human characters, and the characters that deal with this sins the worse die at the hands of the zombies, but something else happens.  The zombies start to show some of these sins.  In Dawn of the Dead (both versions) the zombies start to shop a bit while rampaging through the mall. The Devil doesn’t show up until the last film, Land of the Dead, and then the devil-like character is a human that does all the sins of the previous films. 

What I learned from this book and from Romero (second hand) is that you don’t have to push the religious aspects of a book into the reader’s face.  He or she will find the message, even if it takes two or three looks for it.  Heavy-handedness isn’t need to get the point across.  Although, some would argue that ravenous hordes of the undead isn’t subtle.

I loved the book. A monster that grew out of a serial killer who was doing what he thought was right.  The story has lingered with me long after many things that I have read.  It was the introduction to Gary Braunbeck. I've bought other books but haven't gotten to them yet. 

The true test of how well I like this book is that I talk about it in my psychology class. The image of Mr. Hands with his nonexistant legs and giant hands sticks with me.  We discuss it when talking about en utero damage from drugs.  There's a reference in there. 

Read this book.

The story does a lot of focusing on Abby Normal.  This is okay.  It follows an order, Jody in the first book, Flood in the second, Abby in the third.  The problem is that you can only read in her voice for so long.  Then you get tired of it.  It’s hard to read her rambling, ultra catchphrase voice. ‘Kayso, now more about the book.

Vampire kitties is all I’m saying.  The world has to be avenged from the attack of the undead cats of San Francisco.  Apparently, Beijing had this problem before, and one crazy old Chinese lady remembers.

The major problem with me and this book is, the clichés.  You can only keep a story arc going for so long before you fall prey to these, and this happens.  Usually Moore builds his humor off of misusing the cliché or twisting it, but this time he gives us the smack talking “my nigga” loving Chinese granny, who only knows offense English phrase.  Give me a break, please.  There was so much more that could have been done for that character than that.

This book is good old fashion splatterpunk.  Many people don't like Ketchum's "Off" books because of the amount of gore and canabalism, but every horror writer has to indulge these two topics.  He just started off with them.  He was a good answer to Stephen King, when he was burning up the book lists in the beginning of the 1980's, but back to the story.  It follows the offspring of a clan of flesh eaters who inhabit the rocky coast of Maine.  I have friends from Maine, by the way, and they've never tried to eat me. 

The book deals with teens as the hunters and younger children.  It's more like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with recipes for cooking humans.  It's not as enjoyable a story as Off Season but it is still well written.  Ketchum has a way with the gore, and this book proves it.

The Lost isn’t going to be on my list of linger texts.  It was  a good read with plenty of pay off, but it was a slow build.  There were times when reading it that I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen next. I knew the main character/villain, Ray, was going to do something spectacularly evil, but I wasn’t sure what.

It ends up that this book is about hypocrisy.  Ray is a twenty-something guy in the late sixties who hates all things that the late sixties represented (peace, love, flower power), except drugs and certain rock bands (mainly Mary Jane and The Stones). He despises hippies, but in the end, imitates the most infamous murdering band of hippies ever, the Manson family.

Ketchum also makes a point that all the main characters are seriously flawed.  There’s a reason it’s titled the Lost instead of the Innocent.  No one is unspotted.  Almost everyone is an anti-hero or villainous protagonist. The two cops are an alcoholic who lost his family due to his work habits, and a lecherous older man who is having sex with an 18 year old.  The 18-year-old, Sally, is having the relations with this older man, which is a scandalous thing to do in the late 1960’s.  Most all the young characters are drug addicts or hoods in some fashion, but you feel for them. 

The only innocent character is Gimp the cat.  The whole time reading I knew that Ketchum was going to kill the cat.  I knew it.  In past works, he’s filleted humans and roasted them, hung them from trees to be dressed like a hog, and tortured young teen girls, so why not whack a cat.  He didn’t.  And I was glad of it. 

This book lacks a few things.  One is a satisfying ending.  The carnage is what you expect from Ketchum, bloody, brutal, and always pushing the envelop of bad taste (a Sharon Tate type murder by Ray). At the very end, Ray get convicted of his crime, but we’re left with he’s going to get AIDS and die.  For all the gore tossing at the end and beginning, and the slow suspenseful build up to Ray’s snapping, an allusion to AIDS at the end given to him during stereotypical prison rape, seems like a cop out. 

The overall storyline involves a town in Tennessee where they celebrate a thanksgiving-like holiday with human for food.  There isn’t really ever an explanation as to why.  All the characters in the story are captured for this feast, which never comes. 

The most intriguing part of the “novel” was a storyline about a demon-man trying to take on a new body.  This part of the story reminded me of a old B-movie from the 1970’s called The Messiah of Evil.  Everything else in the story could be left alone. 

The best part about this tale is that it reads like a good British sex farce, which is great because Moore is American.  Americans usually don't possess the ability to pull of very British humour. It's difficult. The Brits have such a different take on what is funny and how to present it.  Moore did excellent research on British humour, and I bet he enjoyed every minute of old Monty Python and Benny Hill episodes.

This tale is more sophisticated than a Benny Hill skit, but you can still here the music playing in the background while the characters move around. 

Of all the novels I've read so far by Moore, this one is my second favorite so far.  The only thing it needed was a blue prostitute.

The fact is horror is losing ground.  Many of our old standards have been stolen by other genres.  Romance writers decided that vampires were sexy, ignoring the whole fetid breath thing.  Ghosts have been passe in many ways for a long time.  We, as horror writers, overdid zombies ourselves.  Werewolves are still there but I just yesterday saw a romantic anthology featuring those lycans.  So that leaves us with two things.  One is we have to adapt or two come up with something new.

There isn't anything new.  Solomon said that in the Bible over four thousand years ago give or take a thousand years.  So, we have to take what we have and make it fresh.  That's quality.  All genre's suffer the same fate as horror.  Vampires are really just undead lovers in the bodice ripper world.  Ghosts are just the lovers who don't have bodies. The same tropes apply.

The essay discussed how freshiness and realiness is the maker of quality in horror fiction.  Vampires can be many things besides blood suckers.  They can be emotional vampires. They can live off of fear, love, laughter.  Imagine a clown that feeds off of laughter. Right there is (probably not) a fresh view of a vampire. It's grounded in reality as well.  A common phobia is that of clowns. 

Reality can also mean making sure the story, the horror is geniune.  Horror is one of the most fantastic genres.  There is little literal reality in it.  Vampires, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, witches and wizards none are real. But they can exist in a reality.  Part of writing good horror, or good fiction of anytime is making the world of the story real. That's all in quality. In the world of my clown laughter vampire the creature is real, but has to be bound by the conventions of that world.  Just as magic has to have its laws, which seems out of sorts, our monsters have to have theirs.  Our stories must be bound by the reality of that world we have created and that is quality.

One of the things I like about books similar to WWH is that each chapter is by a different author.  This lends to easy reading.  Each chapter is an essay into itself with its own lesson.  I read the book over the whole course of the semester, not as a book to finish in a more finite time.  It lent itself well to this type of reading.

Besides, the praise I have for this book, which is plentiful, it also won this year’s Stoker Award.  So, we all know that it is a good book. 

Many times when reading these “how to” books, all the advice is the same.  This book did a different take on that.  Every author had a different topic to cover, and each brought his or her style to it.  This made for a wonderful read.  Some of the most memorable information still sticks with me. 

Gary Braunbeck wrote that he imagines characters by how they treat their coats and how they eat their cereal.  This fascinated me.  His explanation of what each treatment meant was very humorous and insightful.  We don’t often consider how the mundane things in life guide the greater parts of personality.  This is something that I cannot believe I missed before. (I worked for 7 years as a psychotherapist.  Personality is something I know.)

Robert Lee essay on how trying to be Stephen King ruined his life put a humorous take on things as well.  The essay had a very serious point that no writer should try to be another writer, nor take all advice with some grain of salt.  Ironic that such an essay would be in a “how to” book? Maybe not.

The only downside to this book was the interview sections.  To me, interviews with writers recorded in books rarely offer much insightful information.  This is case with the few interviews in this book.  I liked that several editors weighed in on the importance of the look of the project and how to keep to the rules.  I usually try to do this, but it’s nice to know that some more cavalier writers might learn from this.

The book is also assessable.  Unlike books like On Writing Horror or Stephen King’s On Writing, this book is written by mostly midlist writers in the grand scheme.  Though most of the names are familiar to the horror writer, and the true horror enthusiast, they might pass without notice by the lay population.  The book is written by writers who aren’t part of the literary superstar status.  These are the blue collar writers.  The Joes and Janes that make their living by writing and maybe some other job.  This is me or where I want to be.  It is the accessible dream.  It’s the level that I can reach.  What a great bunch of folks to get advice about writing and the business from.