The Trousers of Time

 Been rereading Pratchett again, particularly titles I only read once. In this case, I actually finished Lords and Ladies a few days ago, but my work schedule has made it hard for me to sit down and type a review. 

This is one of the "Witch" novels, set after Witches Abroad and right before Maskerade , in which the old witches run afoul of the new witches, who are also accidentally about to release the Elves. (The elves are right rotten bastards, more in line with tales of the Unseeleigh Court than with say, Mercedes Lackey.) The ruckus gets going, as Margrat is finally going to marry Verance, which means the king, as he does again in Carpe Jugulum, has invited a bunch of dignitaries. (In this case, Ridcully, the Bursar, The Librarian, and Ponder Stibbons come to Lancre from Unseen University. Which leads to a rather funny B plot in which we find out Ridcully and Granny Weatherwax nearly had a thing in their blossoms of youth.)

So, the new coven (of which Agnes/Perdita is part of) has been dancing naked by the "Dancers", iron stones protecting a portal to Elfland. For better or worse, the elves do break through, leading to things like Margrat becoming a sword bearing armor wearing queen, Nanny Ogg and Casanuda going to visit the Horned Lord, and Granny figuring out how to Borrow bees. 

It's quite a bit of fun, actually.  

The Holy Spirit can WALK!

 So, a friend of mine I will hopefully get to see however briefly in November posted a bit about Zora Neale Hurston, and her books on pre depression era African-Americans along the Gulf Coast. (There's a lot more to it than that, but that definition at least narrows down the scope.) At any rate, this lead to me finding her Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro folk-tales from the Gulf States, which prints a manuscript she had assembled but never gotten published. (She had several published, this one seems to have gotten blocked/mislaid/filed incorrectly.) 

There are several categories of tales in here, and one of the appendixes lists which state and a bit about the narrators of the tales. Which is helpful, since the dialect changes by region of narrator. (One Alabama narrator talks about  "Br'er [animal]" quite a bit, while ones from Florida and Louisiana use the full "Brother [Animal]".) And, not all of the tales are funny, although quite a few of them had me laughing. (Indeed, the title of this post comes from one early on where the Preacher is getting the "Hallelujah Corner" all riled up, causing one parishioner to constantly yell "The Holy Spirit can RIDE!". When the preacher puts out the offering plate at the end of his sermon, the same lady yells, "The Holy Spirit can WALK!" In the mean time, the book title comes from the same section of Preacher tales, in which the preacher says "Every Tongue Got to Confess!", which leads to a skinny parishioner yelling, "I confess I wish I had a bigger butt!") 

More than a few tales in here involve someone outsmarting the Devil, and more often than not stealing the Devil's Daughter away from him and his wife. (This must be a southern thing, since I've heard a few idioms from my southern friends and husband about the Devil and his wife.) There's a section of Tall Tales that read like proto-"YO MAMA!" jokes. More than a few tellers use the "N-word" quite a bit, which kind of shook me. And occasionally, a teller has a device they use that clues you in to who is telling it. (The most noticeable one is the gent who ends his tales with "And that when I put on my hat and left.") 

While I enjoyed this collection, and indeed will likely be telling a few of these as occasions arise, the forward by John Edgar Wideman has me wanting to do more reading into the era this came out of.  Seems Ms Hurston came out of the Harlem Renaissance, with a white sponsor who wanted to edit the tales as she saw fit (make the black folks look like noble savages or some such) and an African-American mentor who wanted to edit them to make the the tellers come off as good as white. Indeed, his talk of the Harlem Renaissance reminded me quite a bit of David Carter's book on Stonewall wherein the poor folks got the ball rolling, and the middle class stepped in to try to shape it to better benefit them. (That's a gross oversimplification, but close enough.)

Any rate, a good read filled with good stories.  

Drop a house

 So, been in a Pratchett mood of late, and decided to reread Witches Abroad, which follows Esme Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg, and Margrat Garlick to Genua after Margrat inherits a Fairy Godmother wand. 

Essentially, we get two themes here, the magic of mirrors, and the magic of stories. Seems the current Genua fairy godmother likes trapping everyone in stories and using mirrors to amplify her powers. This kind of irks the Voodoo priestess in the swamp who has resurrected the former leader of Genua. That she can read the future in jambalaya is just a neat trick. 

Any rate, before the trio reaches Genua, we get a few interludes where they deal with local superstitions, including a vampire who winds up gettinmg beaten by Nanny Ogg's cat Greebo. Not long after we get to Genua, a house drops on Nanny Ogg. 

In the end, we find out the bad grandmother is Esme's sister(!), who's been turning animals into humans to feed the stories. 

While this is not my favorite of the Witch stories, it's really funny and has a few things to say worth pondering.

4 derivations and a funeral

 So, a while back, I bought a copy to Alexis Hall's Husband Material, since I enjoyed his previous volume a bit. 

We're back to listening to Lucian whine, although at this point, he and Oliver have been dating 2 years, so none of it is particularly high angst. We do, however, deal with Luc proposing and Oliver accepting, and then a mad dash through 3 weddings, a funeral, and Luc and Oliver's nuptials to round out the event. 

We start with best friend Bridge's wedding, which ends up being a trainwreck, as the venue burns down a week beforehand, which requires relocating to a friend of Luc's mom's estate. 

Then we get the gay wedding of Luc's ex, the one who sold him to the tabloids for a tidy sum. 

And the wedding of Luc's coworker, where we get a view of CoE wedding rites. 

Luc and Oliver have dinner with Oliver's parents, wherein Oliver finally tells his father what he can do to himself. Oliver's father responds by dying. 

Which leads to the funeral portion. 

And then we have Luc and Oliver's wedding, which doesn't quite go as planned. 

Honestly, while I didn't love this one, and indeed, got kind of annoyed with the finale, it was readable, and there were some rather cathartic moments tucked in with the bad rom-com set up. It's not perfect by any means, but it provided what I needed in a moment.

Well, at least they ain't after the levee this time

 So, as part of my evil plot to catch up with a book in a series I read previously, I finished Greg Herren's Jackson Square Blues a few days ago, thus getting me current with the next volume, which is where I started all this. And now I've come to find out the series has nine volumes, and the library only has volumes one and two, with me owning three. 

So yeah. 

Anyway, Scott starts the book off visiting DC to spend time with Frank, his hot FBI boyfriend of sorts. Which sets off a typical gay crisis of "Can I be exclusive, or am I always going to be a raging slut?" soliloquy with Scott. Shameless hussy seems to be winning, as Scott ends up hooking up with a famous amateur figure skater in town for the World Finals. Not that he remembers the hook up, or even the name of the guy, since tequila was involved.

All of which leads to discovery of who the hook up is, the murder of what everyone assumes is a tabloid writer seeking to out the figure skater, and a missing Death Mask of Napoleon's.  Eventually we get a clear picture of what's going on, and how things are and aren't related, and Colin, the stripper cat burgler from the last book, comes back and changes a bunch of relationship ideas. (Having seen how this affects everything in Book 3, I kind of feel like the author liked the character, but couldn't really figure out how best to utilize him.)

Fun book, lightly smutty, and making me really want to go see New Orleans. 

Negative, Ghost Writer

 I only recently found out about the existence of Leslie McFarlane's Ghost of the Hardy Boys, which made me sad, given it has a copyright of 1976, well before I read any of his work. (While I get the impression this is a much later edition, and heaven knows if it itself got edited and ghostwritten...)

See, Mr. McFarlane wrote under many different names, probably the most famous being Franklin W. Dixon, as well as a handful of Carolyn Keene, Victor Applegate, ad Roy Rockwood. The former there being most of the first 40 hardcover volumes of The Hardy Boys, which sold for 10 cents, with him being paid roughly $100 a volume. That he also enjoyed a writing career outside of the Strathmeyer Syndicate isn't what he got asked about that often though. Which I think is largely why he wrote this, since he did have quite a life when he wasn't being a phantom novelist. 

Admittedly, the narrative here is on the non-linear side, as we learn about how he came to be employed by Strathmeyer before jumping back in time, before returning to  the Boys near the end. This gives us time to hear about his newspaper days, and any number of good stories of people he worked with through Ontario and Massachusetts, as well as discussions on what he was thinking when he wrote certain books.

Along the way, we get an education in how syndicate writing works, and his rather ...aloof... feelings towards the series he created.  (So, when he starts with the syndicate, he's writing Dave Fearless, a young man who's also a deep sea diver, and therefore is running afoul of bad storms, murderous relatives, man eating sharks, octopi that are hungry, etc. I'd love to track one or more of this down, since they sound like pulpy fun. He gets asked to start the Hardy Boys, which means writing three "breeder books" that will get released at the same time, and hopefully spark enough reader interest to get a series going. The process is, he gets an outline, he fleshes out the outline into a novel, occasionally adding his own own flourishes to the narrative; things like the Boys getting monetary rewards AND a big feast, since the readers in the age range are always hungry. He does get feedback on things like "Make the cops less buffoonish", which leads to making spinster Aunt Gertrude a source of humor. Given the Syndicate gave birth to Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, The Rover Boys....they knew what they were doing.)

 It is kind of interesting to lean that Mr. McFarlane never really did realize exactly how much impact his unknown work had on generations of boys, and indeed, the only thing that seems to upset him about the entire situation is seeing what happened in the 50s when the revisions to the books happened. (By most accounts, the books got revised to get rid of some unfortunate racism and update the language; the side effect was the books got rewritten and a lot of the things people enjoyed [pacing, character relationships] got taken out. [Fer instance, it's mentioned that in the original introduction of Aunt Gertrude, there's a scene of her arriving from the train station and haranguing the Hardy Household, adding comedy to the scene. In the revision, she's just kind of appears and never leaves.] Some of this, I get. Of the reprinted and revised hardcovers, I only finished a few, and that was mainly due to the pulpy illustrations drawing me in. Even in the very early 80's the revisions from 30 years prior made the books seem horribly outdated. Which is probably whey I got sucked into the more contemporary "Digests", which saw publication starting in 1979.)

I'm kind of needle dropping here, because there's a hell of a lot in the book that really deserves discussion that I really just don't have the energy to explore here. I will say I highly recommend reading this to anyone who got sucked into one of the Syndicate series.

The Saints are Coming

 I had to do some checking on the timeline of when Greg Herron's Bourbon Street Blues was published (2003) vs when Katrina hit the Delta (2005), since some of the plot involves a plot to blow up the levee to flood New Orleans. I think this can be chalked up to horrible timing, as anyone reading the book now will have the actual horror come to mind vs the fictional events here that have a happier ending. 

So, this is the first book in the Scotty Bradley series, which I was happy to finally read after finishing book 3 a few weeks ago. Scott in this one is working as a personal trainer and stripper, and we're opening oin Southern Decadence, aka the big gay party New Orleans hosts every Labor Day weekend. Here, he's single and ready to mingle, although he's working with a methed up porn star and a non local named Colin on top of a bar. 

Well, first, a former trick he still talks to on occasion winds up executed in front of his apartment. Then he finds a disk another former trick shoved in his boot while tipping him. Which in turn evolves into stopping a plot by a gubernatorial candidate to blow up the levees and kill all the gays in New Orleans in order to get elected to state office. (Mostly due to New Orleans, much like Detroit and Chicago, both having large enough voting populations to swing the entire vote of the state.)

I enjoyed this; the humor leavens the seriousness of the plot, and everyone mostly winds up with a happy ending.

Digging deep

 So, as I've been slowly sorting boxes of books from the basement that came out of Mom's house, I found a high school favorite, Thrill by Patricia Wallace. Now, let me point out the obvious, it is a Zebra Imprint from the early 90's, and therefore generally regarded as supermarket pulp. To which I say, who cares? it's readable and memorable, even with a few formatting errors and a resolution that makes no sense at all. 

Anyway, the whole set up in that Billionaire Sheldon Rice has built an exclusive amusement park north of San Francisco, excavating a mountain to do so. ($3000 a day, 7 day stay for everyone coming.) Wesley Davidson, who's barely 20, designed all the rides. Part of Wesley's contract stipulates that once a month, 5 disadvantaged youth get to come for a week free. Which gives us child prostitute Celeste, tough guy Max, oddball Ben, good girl Betsy (who's being groomed by her principal), and Jesus, who slipped over the border from Tijuana after his family died. 

We have local doctor Taylor, who's father owned part of the mountain The Park is built on. When he sold it, he got harassed to death. We have Sheriff Young, who really doesn't want to deal with the headaches The Park brings. And then there's the enigmatic Ezra, the mountain man who Rice thinks is sabotaging The Park. 

Anyway, other than a few minor accidents on opening day, things go ok until the Thursday, when all hell breaks loose. There's quite a bit of "Did Ezra sabotage things? Did the insects do this acting on behalf of a deeper power? Was it an EMF pulse?" to go along with the known things, like the security guard who covers up crushing a man to death when the man breaks into a ride, or the software engineer who maybe was screwing with Wesley's code. 

I mean, it's a fun, in nonsensical at times ride, that brought back a sense of vicarious excitement I felt reading it years ago. Much love to an old classic.

Papa Loves Mambo

 I had picked up Greg Herren's Mardi Gras Mambo at Half Price Books a while back, but kept pushing it down the TBR pile for shinier books. While I will never regret my decisions on reading order, it wound up being better than I had anticipated.

Evidently there are two books in the series that precede this, and one follow up, so I jumped in at the middle of the ongoing metaplot. Scotty Bradley is the gay grandson of two wealthy New Orleans families, with very two hippie parents. As this book opens, he's works as a private investigator with his two boyfriends, which is his first real stable paycheck. (Evidently, both sets of grandparents cut him off from the family trust funds, thus why his previous jobs have been stripper and personal trainer.) One boyfriend is former FBI, the other has a rather cloudy past. Scotty can read tarot cards, and occasionally receives visions from the Goddess. 

Anyway, the book starts a few days before Mardi Gras. Scotty has convinced his two straight laced boyfriends to try Ecstasy for the festivities, while they run around in costumes that reveal how built they all are. Which is all well and good, until Scotty's dealer, Misha, winds up dead not long after Scotty buys the drugs.  

Which, since Scotty was the last one to see him alive, makes Scotty the prime suspect. 

There's a hell of a lot involved here, from nearly identical triplets all using the same name, to long buried family secrets. And the final disposition really doesn't make sense, since I can't figure out how a murderer could shoot someone from behind while standing in front of them. On the other hand, the tone of the book does a neat job of staying between total camp, total smut, and deadly serious, which is difficult to achieve in gay mystery fiction. 

Going to have to find the other 3 books now.

Violating a rule here

 So, normally I don't blog or list of good reads when I read something that qualifies as Intermediate Readings, since those reviews are generally better left to teachers teaching kids in the age range. However, after running across The Hardy Boys Ghost Stories while going through boxes in the basement, I'm going to go ahead and blog and log it, since I've actually had a lot of fun rereading this slim volume. 

Amazon has a better pic, but this is my copy.

 So I've probably owned this since second grade, and it remains in decent condition. (I have a few other volumes out of this particular set of adventures; you can click the tags on this to see the overly long essay I wrote about their history.) However, what surprised me on rereading was how well the stories in here have held up.

 That has nothing to do with the accidental homoeroticism involving Joe Hardy at all.

We start with "The Walking Scarecrow", which gave me nightmares as a kid. Boys are on their way home from hiking, break down, decided to walk to the farmhouse they saw to use the phone, but feel like the scarecrow warned them away from the house. Seriously, while not a ghost per se, the Scarecrow seems to be doing its best to drag Joe and Frank out the farmhouse. Which, at the end, we find out is because lightning strikes the house as they return from a wild goose chase and the house burns down. 

Next is "Mystery of the Voodoo Gold", in which Frank and Joe get told by a Fortune Teller in Underground Atlanta not to do a few things, which they promptly do, which leads to nearly drowning in a root cellar where Simbo, a voodoo protection doll, watches over his master's treasure. 

Then comes what it likely my favorite of all of them, "The Disappearance of Flaming Rock". Joe and Frank are in Arizona, near a town that vanished off the face of the Earth. Literally. Seems a prospector his Flaming Rock, and found the town deserted, but things like dinner on the stove still cooking, and a swinging light in the church bell tower. When people went to look, they found the town gone, as if it never existed. Frank and Joe drive up, and guess what they find? Seems the town hanged the local Apaches, so the Great Spirit cursed Flaming Rock and all its inhabitants to wander the spirit world for all eternity homeless. 

Fourth story is "The Phantom Ship", wherein Frank and Joe's fishing boat dies and they get taken aboard an 18th Century Whaler. Inhabited by 18th Century Crewman. Who think the modern boys are insane, and somehow manage to get everyone really confused as to where the are. This is also an old favorite, since honestly, the ghost ship should have made them walk the plank for mutiny.

Then comes the illustration from the front cover, "The Haunted Castle", where Frank and Joe wind up in a Haunted Castle in Scotland. Their appearance winds up fulfilling a prophecy, which sets the ghost free of a witch's curse. 

We finish with "The Mystery of Room 12", in which Joe is haunted by the ghost of a sailor's son. Joe finally gets the boys flute back to him, and resolves the ghost's fetter. 

Now, while all of this is really really improbable, not the least of which is how two high school kids can be all over the globe for this stuff to happen (a problem with the entire series, that you don't particularly think about when you're in the age range), it's still fun reading, with more than a little learning hidden in the bare bones stories. (You get an age appropriate lesson in whaling, information on Widow's Walks, exactly how poorly settlers treated Native Americans, why you listen to the gypsy lady with the crystal ball.) Even nearing 50 though, this scratched a nostalgia itch I was unaware I had, and brought back some childhood wonder that the series of this era inspired in me. 

But Seriously, I blame Joe Hardy illustrations for much of my sexual awakenings.