Good reads: "The horror... the horror..."

After a long break from the genre, I read a couple of novels this past year that at least nominally fall into the horror category.

As a teenager, my favorite author was Stephen King.  ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining and The Stand remain touchstones of my early adolescence, and I still own a good chunk of the man’s catalogue, though I shed a few of his thicker and less memorable ’80s and ’90s novels in our 2009 move. I think even the ever-frank King would agree he hit a sort of rhythm in that period where his stories became somewhat formulaic. I’ve continued to enjoy his short-story collections—they’re always a kick, full of tightly-written bite-sized morsels and O. Henry endings—but I stayed away from the novels for a number of years until picking up the well-reviewed Under The Dome last year.

Under The Dome is not, strictly speaking, a horror novel, although a number of horrible things happen in it… it’s more like a mash-up of Our Town and Lord of the Flies, with a bit of ’50s B-movie sci-fi thrown in for seasoning. To wit: an entire small town in rural Maine is suddenly, inexplicably encased in a perfectly clear, almost impenetrable, mile-high dome that cuts it off from the outside world. This offers abundant opportunity for King to do what he does best—examine with a keen eye and ear how ordinary people react under the most extreme circumstances imaginable.

A few near-stereotypes are present—the instinctively heroic military veteran, the devious and megalomaniacal used car magnate, the straight-arrow small-town New England newspaper publisher—but King gives them depth and shading aplenty and comes up with one of his most convincingly horrific creations in the person of Junior Rennie, a small-town bully whose brain tumor turns him into a depraved serial killer even as his manipulating daddy gets him installed him as part of the town’s emergency police force. There were also a couple of twists that I didn’t see coming (although I might have “smoked out” one of them if I’d started watching Breaking Bad before reading the book), and King’s writing feels energized in a way it hasn’t for me in some time.  Under The Dome was a solid read and a keeper. Welcome back, Steve.

Mr. King also supplied a laudatory jacket quote that contributed to my decision to pick up Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Not that I have a constant jones for either post-apocalyptic survival stories or vampires, but when the author of two of the best novels ever written on those particular subjects praises a post-vampire-apocalypse novel, it might be worth a look.

And it was. Cronin, a writer once better known for the literary novels Mary and O’Neil and The Summer Guest (the former a PEN/Hemingway Award winner), dives into the genre with aplomb and recognizes instinctively how to drive this sort of narrative forward in a way that’s both captivating and satisfying. There’s always a necessary balance between answering all of the obvious what-if questions about a world-changing event, while at the same time keeping you engaged with and invested in the characters’ very basic struggles to survive in an extraordinarily hostile world.  Cronin’s insights about how a crumbling modern society might react, and what sort of physical and socio-cultural landscape that reaction might leave behind for the survivors a generation later, are sharp and feel remarkably realistic considering the sci-fi-with-hints-of-supernatural nature of the disaster that strikes humanity.

The ambitious Cronin has declared The Passage to be the opening act of a planned trilogy, and he structures his narrative well for that plan, delivering a finish that satisfies while leaving many more questions and possible directions unexplored for the forthcoming chapters in the story. Count me in.

Return of Good Reads: Robert B. Parker redux & requiem

I don’t generally do New Year’s resolutions. Let’s face it; in recorded history, what percentage of them has lasted beyond February 15th?

But just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend I made some this year. Two of them would have been: read more, and write more. Nothing like a busy schedule and a touch of OCD to convince me I could more or less do both simultaneously by writing more about what I’m reading. And so… off we go, yet again. (There will of course be occasional interruptions for baseball, politics, etc. along the way, but that sort of thing tends to end up on Facebook these days and I’m not going to double post.)

So. Overall, 2010 was a solid year, reading-wise. I didn’t do that much heavy reading – a lot of comfort-food books, I’ll cop to that – but it was good stuff, and some interesting tangents developed along the way. Today’s entry is going to focus on the biggest loss for me as a reader this year: Robert B. Parker, who passed away quite suddenly in January at a robust 77 years of age.

Parker’s wisecracking yet wise Spenser and his memorable cast of supporting characters have been the focus of one of the most venerated and honored series in mystery fiction for nearly 40 years. Parker also successfully launched three other character-driven series in recent years, two mystery series focusing on small-town police chief Jesse Stone and Boston detective Sunny Randall, respectively, and a series of Westerns about quiet but deadly friends Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. (The Stone books have been adapted into a series of successful TV movies starring Tom Selleck as a somewhat older but equally troubled Jesse Stone; and Appaloosa, the first of the Westerns, was made into a terrific feature film with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen.)

Parker’s passing means the end of all four series, though he was so prolific in his later years that he was five or six books ahead of his quarterly publishing schedule at the time he died, so that new releases will continue through 2011. After gobbling up The Professional (2010’s typically engaging Spenser paperback) and the third in Parker’s terrific Western series (Brimstone), I decided to delve into some of his more tangential work to satisfy my craving for his lean, witty style. The Boxer And The Spy and Chasing The Bear are young adult novels, the former an original and the latter a story of Spenser as a teenager. Both were like small plates at a favorite restaurant—tasty but not substantial enough to be entirely satisfying.

Gunman’s Rhapsody, a retelling of the Wyatt Earp story, was oddly frustrating. In attempting to tell a true tale as faithfully as he could, Parker managed to muddy the waters in several directions at once, I think. The story doesn’t flow as you might wish because real-life events rarely take on the rhythms and plot-development pace of a good novel, and by virtue of the fact that the Earps’ entourage and approach to confrontation bear significant similarities to Spenser’s own fictional milieu, the whole exercise ends up feeling a bit like Spenser Gunfights at the O.K. Corral.

Let’s set the analysis aside for the last part here, though, and focus on the real world. The most remarkable thing that happened in the post-RBP world of 2010 was this: after decades of being known by readers mainly through references made by Parker in interviews, his wife Joan and sons David and Daniel chose to remember his life by starting a Facebook page in his honor and beginning for the first time to communicate directly with his many thousands of fans. The quality of the conversation on this page has been faintly astonishing, as family and fans have jointly mourned him as both an author and a man. Each camp, it seems, has been of considerable comfort to the other, and the family’s decision to share various old letters and funny anecdotes about RBP has made it feel at times as if he is still in the room, chuckling softly from the corner at all this fuss about a guy who could never abide pretension, and really just enjoyed spinning a good yarn, and being a father to Daniel and David, and being a partner to his beloved Joan.

R.I.P.

Bookshelf update: Randy Pausch & Robert Crais

This will be quick. I'm 3/4 of the way through Randy Pausch's book version of The Last Lecture, and calling it inspiring is like calling grass green. The very act of writing it was inspiring; the end product could hardly help but be so. It really is a good read, though. Pausch emerges as a quirky, three-dimensional character for the ages, a self-professed recovering jerk whose intellectual arrogance is thoroughly undermined by his deep loyalty to his family and belief that some vital part of the secret of life lies in striving to achieve your childhood dreams. If Peter Pan had grown up to be a computer scientist with terminal cancer, he might have written this book.

The other thing that led me to post today was Robert Crais, whose Elvis Cole series is among my very favorite reads, and who just published a typically smart, witty, multilayered and purposeful essay about his own creative process, in the form of an imagined conversation between himself and Cole. If you aren't already a fan of this series and are curious about it, give this a read and see if it doesn't tempt you to pick up one of the books.

Good Reads: Middlesex and Chasing Darkness

After a dry spell in the reading department, I just finished two terrific books that could hardly be more different. A few words about each:

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize for literature, which means (a) I was late to the game as usual, and (b) I was predisposed to believe it would be overwritten, pretentious and deadly serious. Instead I found myself immersed in the book almost immediately. Eugenides writes beautifully, of course, but his genius is the way he draws you into his characters' experience with a series of deftly staged and deeply interconnected story arcs. The story is nominally of a family of Greek immigrants who come to Detroit early in the 20th century, and how generations of inbreeding bring about the novel's unique narrator, the intersex wunderkind Cal, nee Calliope, who lives her childhood as a girl and his adulthood as a man. Reflections on the immigrant experience, the nature of sexuality and identity, and all sorts of other fascinating ideas emerge through Cal's witty, self-aware and ultimately deeply wise observations. A "great book" that earns the label.

Robert Crais started out as more or less just another detective novelist searching for a niche. There are plenty of those; the difference with Crais is that he's found it and is busily mining it for one great story after another. His prose is rather clipped and direct in the Raymond Chandler - Robert Parker school, but over the course of ten novels featuring LA private detective Elvis Cole he has brought such rich three-dimensionality to Cole and his supporting cast that every page sings with wonderful character bits. To top it off, Crais' plots are better than ever, as evidenced by Chasing Darkness, which starts out with Cole guilt-ridden for having provided evidence clearing a man whose later suicide suggests he was a serial killer. Cole's driven search for redemption takes some terrific twists as he discovers that just about everything he thinks he knows about the case and those involved with it is false.

Enjoy...

Happy(-ish) New Year

It's a new year and so far all we have to show for it is:

• Polls showing it's still anyone's race in the Iowa Caucus, especially on the Dem side.
• David Letterman and Conan O'Brien wearing "strike beards." (With scary pictures.)
  
• Nick Hornby's great young adult novel Slam (yes I finished it and yes it's wonderful).
  
• And the worst news of all: the San Francisco Giants have accomplished virtually nothing in what was supposed to be a substantial offseason makeover. Sigh.
  

Good reads: Robert B. Parker

Enough about things that annoy me, already. Time to talk about things that delight me.

Robert B. Parker delights me.

The author of over 50 novels, Parker is best known for his Boston private detective character Spenser, around whom he’s spun something like 35 novels since 1973. Some have been adapted for the small screen -- you may remember the 1980s TV series Spenser: For Hire starring Robert Urich, or the more recent cable movies starring Joe Mantegna -- but like his contemporary Elmore Leonard, Parker’s material has never had the impact on screen that it does on the page.

That’s because Parker’s detective stories really aren’t detective stories at all. They are explorations of (in no particular order) psychology (Freudian and otherwise), family dynamics, self-deceit, love, loyalty and -- perhaps most of all -- honor. Spenser and his supporting cast -- he has one of the most colorful and entertaining supporting casts in detective fiction -- are all damaged in one way or another, but all share a common thread of trying to redeem their flaws by observing a largely unspoken code of honor. In Spenser’s world, it’s not which side of the law you’re on that determines your worth as a human being -- it’s how you conduct your life, whether it’s with loyalty and courage and honor, or lies and concealment and betrayal.

Fifteen years ago or so, Parker began branching out, interspersing new entries in the Spenser series with stand-alone novels and now two new continuing series. The Jesse Stone novels focus on the police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts, a man of few words and many demons, including alcohol and his emotionally co-dependent ex-wife. The Sunny Randall novels feature female private detective Randall, who’s also still in love with her ex-husband, the only guy in a major Boston crime family to go straight. All three series have distinct tones and narrative approaches, but all share Parker’s supreme gift for snappy dialogue and psychological intrigue. He has also managed to have each protagonist cross over into one of the others’ series at least once, with entertaining results.

Parker’s latest is Now & Then, a Spenser novel, and while I highly recommend it, you won’t be able to fully appreciate it without the context of the 30-some-odd novels that preceded it, as Parker continues to poke around and find new angles to explore themes and events that he’s been percolating for thirty years. My advice is to start with 1973’s The Godwulf Manuscript and read them in order. It’s fun to watch supporting characters get introduced and then reappear over time, to observe how Spenser evolves from a wisecracking self-absorbed male chauvinist to a wisecracking self-aware renaissance man, and to see how neatly Parker pulls off the trick of writing a 35-year series of novels in which the main characters barely age, while lesser ones observe the normal calendar.

Parker is a master. Enjoy.