Well she wants to be the queen as she thinks about her scene

 So, since I'm waiting for missing books to arrive, I went digging through the library again and came up with Christopher Pike's Alosha, which looks like it was marketed as one of his adult novels, even if the main characters are 13 years old or so. 

As an aside, let's talk Christopher Pike. I'm pretty sure several folks around my age have fond memories of his YA books, as do I. (His YA fiction was about 90% fun reading and 10% WTAF. And there's more than a little crossover between them. From interdimensional sapient dinosaurs trying to kill teenagers, teenage ghosts solving their own murders, or the worst YA novel I ever read of his, where the main character is being tormented by the baby she's having aborted while both of them are dying...) His Adult novels haver a less favorable ratio. A few are pretty interesting, but plots that you can slide by with in YA don't work as well in adult fiction, like having Satan and Nazis use ketamine to force people's souls out of their bodies so the bad people can move in.

Ali is a 13 year old girl, living with her truck driver father after her mother died in a car crash on Ali's 12th birthday. Much of her free time is spent in the woods on the side of the nearby Pete's Peak, where she tries to guilt the loggers into not cutting down the forest. Her best friend Cindy isn't as keen on this as Ali is, but... 

Anyway, as we open, Ali is on her way up to the forest to tie ribbons on the trees as a small form of protest. She, however, gets interrupted by unknown creatures and winds up buried alive in an avalanche. She manages to escape, and convinces Cindy and Steve (a geek acquaintance) to go back up, since Ali is convinced it was Bigfoot. This occasion leads to finding Bigfoot prints, and Ali getting thrown in the river not far from the falls. She manages to escape and meets a talking tree who tells he she has passed two of seven tests and gives her the thrust of the plot: A Yanti has opened on the top of Pete's Peak, and she has two days to reach the summit and close it to keep Elementals from another dimension from entering our world, all while passing the other 5 tests. 

Which leads to Ali roping in Karl, who is slightly older, Cindy, and Steve to climb the mountain the next day, along with a rather larcenous Leprechaun and a troll she meets on the way up. 

For the most part, it plays out like a YA urban fantasy, and it's pretty good reading. 

Unfortunately, it's also book 1 of a trilogy, and while I found book 3 in my collection, I'm missing the second book, so we'll return to this when book 2 arrives.

And the Guf was empty

 For reason I still can't quite fathom, I decided to at least attempt to reread Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series, which unsurprisingly starts with Left Behind. (As a note, I read the series back when I first moved to Columbus in 2001, found the entire thing [mostly] at a used book sale, and decided to grab it, since it cost roughly $2.) Well, gee, let's start unpacking this.

We open with Rayford, Pan Continental pilot, flying New York to London. He's contemplating putting the moves on his lead flight attendant, Hattie. Well, problem being quite a few people on the plane vanish into thin air, leaving their clothing, implants, fillings, etc behind. One the flight also is Buck, reporter wunderkind for a weekly news magazine. Buck had been in Israel a few months earlier and watched as Russia bombed it, but through a miracle, no damage was done. 

So, Rayford finds his wife and son have vanished, but his daughter in San Jose is still there. Buck goes to Chicago, then does manage to get to London, where one of his sources blows up in a car bomb.

Rayford reaches out to the church his wife attended, and learns that this was The RAPTURE, and he missed being taken to heaven by Jesus, and must now become a Christian to make it to heaven 7 years hence after the world more of less gets destroyed. He works on bringing daughter Chloe into the fold, Hattie and Buck as well. In the mean time, a rising political star out of Romania ascends to the presidency of his country, then takes over the United Nations by the end of this book. That would be Nicolae Carpathia. By the end, Buck, Rayford, and Chloe join Pastor Bruce in forming the Tribulation Force, trying to survive the upcoming seven years of Tribulation. Hattie has become Nicolae's personal assistant. 

Now then. Anyone who's read this objectively will testify that the prose is horrible. That becomes fairly obvious after a chapter or two. The dialogue is stilted, and the world seems to recover from the disappearances a heck of a lot more quickly that one would imagine. Depending on how one reads The Book of Revelation, the Antichrist is the first seal broken, so his appearance isn't a great surprise. (I always through it was War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, but some translations lump War and Pestilence into one horseman. Neither here nor there. Given the series needs a villain, Carpathia steps up fairly easily.) We also get the "Two Witnesses" (Eli and Moshe) quite a bit earlier than the book this is supposedly coming out of places them. Here, they show up about 2/3 of the way through book one. In Revelation, they show up in Chapter 11 after the 6th trumpet. Again, not my concern. I'm not a biblical scholar by any means. Then again, as I understand it, the entire Rapture scenario isn't actually in Revelation, and instead comes from Paul's letters, and given there are entire non fiction books dedicated to arguing when exactly in the end of the world its supposed to happen, I can only roll my eyes and think of the scene in Life of Brian when everyone picks up his holy relics to make everyone else worship. Or the whole thing about how Carpathia resembles an original Roman, blond and blue eyed. (Sweetie, that's Northern Europe.) Or the complete lack of poor people or people of color in this. Or the random conversation between Hattie and Rayford about how Abortion doctors need pregnant women to stay in business. (Seems the babbies and embryos and fetuses all got taken up with the children.) 

I mean, when I originally read this series, I was looking for insight into how certain segments of society I was interacting with thought. 20 some years on, after listening to dog whistles being blown through megaphones for several years, yeah. There are several in here, like ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT, ONE WORLD CURRENCY, PEOPLE WITH MONEY AND INFLUENCE DESTROYING EVERYTHING (ok, that last one is kind of true, but here, it's more George Soros is working for the Antichrist than Elon Musk is flooding a platform he bought with racism and fascism.)

I just can't wait to get into the later books again, where we get condescension to any belief that isn't either Orthodox Judaism that will accept Jesus by the final book  or Crispy Christianity, or some Dante-esque moments where people they don't agree with are shown to have failed to be good Christians and are therefore being Tribulated. Wee.

Twisting your tinsel

 In yet another "Where did this come from?", I just finished The Fat Man: A Tale of North Pole Noir by Ken Harmon, about 3 months before the season it was meant to be read in.But hey, out of season is occasionally my thing, so....

Anyway, the book is narrated by Coal Patrol leader Gumdrop Coal. His entire job at Santa's workshop is to deliver coal to all the bad boys and girls. Until Santa fires him a few months before Christmas. Which leads to the promotion of one Candy Cane taking over a bunch of Santa's activities, an intrepid girl reported named Rosebud Jubilee working with Gumdrop to find out why, particularly after a human Gumdrop beat up to teach the son some manners winds up shot dead with a BB from a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model Air Rifle with a compass on the stock. (Yes, references to just about Christmas story ever told on film or in prose shows up at some point in here. And entire chapter in Whoville is written in Seussian verse.) 

By the end, we get a heck of a lot of Christian allegory on the meaning of Christmas, largely due to the appearance of a child with a blanket), a hell of a lot really funny scenes involving holiday entertainment references, and a pretty good mystery. We also get one particular scene in the Mistletoe Forest that doesn't really fit a Christmas trope or a hard boiled mystery. On the other hand, we do get an absolutely hysterical sequence involving all 12 days of Christmas.

After Halloween, if you find yourself wanting something fun to help you get past the sap and treacle that normally fills December, this is a great way to do so.

If only middle age refraction worked like that

 Once again, digging through the library as I continue towards shelving everything finally, and found Gary Zebrun's Someone You Know in a box. I have no idea when I acquired this, as it has no price tag, no scratched out library stickers, etc. Looked at the dust cover synopsis and decided "Why Not?"

Which may have been a mistake, since the first half dovetailed with my personal issues in unexpected ways. 

Anyway, We're following middle aged Daniel Caruso, a newspaper feature columnist (Think Dave Barry or Erma Bombeck), who is married with an 18 year old daughter. As we open, he's in Seattle for a news paper conference, and cruising a local S&M bar looking for penis. He picks up a firefighter, who takes him home. Daniel leaves Seattle for his home in Providence the next morning (Good Friday), and as he's waiting in O'Hare for a connection, he hooks up with a guy in a bathroom stall. After finishing, he finds someone has slipped a bottle of pills he found at the firefighter's house under the stall door. 

Seems ol' Daniel has an oddball stalker, one who kills every one of Daniel's tricks an hour or so after he finishes. 

I think we end up with 6 dead bodies with a condom attached to their chest by the end, which is Easter Monday. Admittedly, one of those is a person Daniel only kisses, but still... And to make matters worse, the stalker is emailing Daniel, sending souvenirs, and involving Daniel's family in the game. 

Given it's only about 200 pages, I can't get into too much detail abut everything that happens, but...

On one hand, the book is engaging, and Daniel's spiral is very well portrayed. On the other hand, we're again dealing with situations where Daniel should have been shooting dust or comatose from over exertion in the overly tight timeline we're given. That Daniel also travels quite a bit, winding up in New York City on Easter, the suspension of disbelief starts flying out the window after reading it. Mind you, the other problem was that I was pretty sure the identity of the stalker after about 50 pages, was correct, then tried to figure out how said stalker managed to avoid being seen in areas where Daniel would have recognized a familiar face in a strange place. 

I mean, like I said, it held my attention, but the engagement ended not long after the final page and the last bit of trying to insert Jesus into the narrative.