Dirty Pop

So, technically, I read Mark Richard Zubro's Dead Egotistical Morons back in 2003 when it came out, but I wasn't running this blog back then.

Also, I remain surprised this particular book didn't get more press with its overall plot line.

Paul Turned is a Chicago detective, who, along with his partner Fenwick, gets called out to Chicago's All-Sports Arena where Roger Stendar, one of the 5 singers of Boys4U has been found shot execution style in the showers following the final show.  What follows is a very soapy murder mystery that roughly corresponds to what would happen if N*SYNC revealed a bunch of information about how they'd all been... involved... with each other, with their producer, with their choreographer...

Really, it's a lot more over the top than I remember. The main reason it stuck out in my mind was the Lance Bass character actually being gay. (In 2003, the real Lance wasn't quite the gay superstar he is in 2015.)  Zubro wrote quite a few of the Paul Turner mysteries, as well as the Tom & Scott mysteries, which were also fun and soapy. (One was a teacher, the other a baseball player.) Only real issue I ever had with them was the continuity between books was always quite a bit off, as if the timeline got thrown out the window every time someone gets killed.

Anyway, reading gay mysteries again got me thinking about how mysteries were one of the few big genres I could reliably find gay materials in when visiting a bookstore. (This is not to say that they didn't exist, but much of it was pulpy romance, or not in a genre I really wanted to start getting involved with (Sadly, Sci-Fi and fantasy are really underrepresented in books with gay protagonists. A few exist, but even then, if you manage to get a gay character, it's essentially the gay bff.)

So, with that in mind, I went digging through amazon trying to remember some of the authors and series that used to captivate me when I could afford to go book shopping.

Nathan Aldyne wrote a series that started with Vermillion, that took place in pre-HIV Boston/Provincetown. Mostly I remember the first murder involving someone getting a Prince Albert and really bot enjoying what happened after. (Loved the book, but yeah, lots of crossed legs.)

David Stukas wrote a series of books that started with Someone Killed his Boyfriend. Very silly, very CAMPY, but also fun to read.

RD Zimmerman wrote the Todd Mills Mysteries. These started with Closet, which was fairly campy, then went really serious really quickly. It was probably the first time I really started encountering the anger about how People with HIV/AIDS were being treated in regular fiction.

I can't find the gay espionage mystery series I used to love to read, so if anyone remembers, let me know.

There's also the classic Mabel Maney A Ghost in the Closet, which was 3rd in a series parodying Nancy Drew. This book introduced The Hardly Boys, and had Nurse Cherry Aimless, whom Nancy Clue was sort of in love with.

As I've mentioned previously, I'm quite ecstatic that gay lit has expanded beyond the borders I found when I came out in the 90's. Mind you, they still mostly concern gay folks who are a lot higher on the social ladder than I am, but then I doubt books concerning gay men in their late 30's working retail would sell particularly well.

As a note, I have 2 other Zubro mysteries in the TBR shelf, so you may see a few more showing up on here over time.

And the Gods heard her prayer....

As promised with my last update, we're going to Eastern Europe and the Greek peninsula.Back in time to the Hellenic and Hellenistic eras, specifically. Back when the Gods roamed the Earth, having children with nymphs and humans alike.

The problem has been for a while that most translations tend to cut out the interesting parts in favor of making it a more G-rated pantheon. And given that most Americans only study Classical Mythology once or twice, usually in Elementary School, this makes sense, since no one really wants to discuss with prepubescents that Kronos cut off Uranos's penis or testicles (depending on translation) and threw them into the ocean, thus creating Aphrodite.

However, Oh My Gods by Philip Freeman tries to correct this a bit, with more accurate translations, although he did modernize a few of them. (This is not to say that he set them in modern time, more that some of the stories get a more modern filter.) This works well at times, however, it doesn't work well in other cases.

Again, we're getting the less sanitized translations here, which means we also get information on same sex lovers different gods and heroes took. (Like Pelops. Who's life ends when his dad, Tantalus, chops him up and makes him into a stew for the gods. Only Demeter doesn't notice, because of her Persephone issues. The Gods restore Pelops to life and make him a new shoulder to replace the one Demeter ate. Then he becomes Poseidon's lover before starting his own tragic house.) I will also say it was nice to hear the story of Perseus's conception as a shower of golden coins, rather than the less specific "Zeus came on Danae as a golden shower" in most versions (which carries a VERY different modern connotation than what the Greeks intended.)

On the bad side, the author takes any considerations of consent and seduction out of the picture (which other "adult" translations generally keep), thus making it seem like Zeus is less about questionable seduction and more about sexual assault. The main reason why I can't quite go along with this (and Zeus isn't the only one who seems to be performing forcible penetration while wearing a ski mask) is that most of the actual rape gets punished rather severely and violently in the mythos.

The book itself is organized by different subsets of myths, starting with Creation and running through the Aeneid and some of the myths surrounding the founding of Rome (Romulus and Remus, who sadly have nothing to do with Star Trek. Then three very brief tales of Romulus's descendants.) Most of them are fairly familiar, just more fleshed out than what one was taught early in life. And it becomes very obvious which tales the author loves the most, based on the treatments they get. (Really, he spends most of The Odyssey quoting directly from Homer, which is beauteous  in its own right. However, Theseus's travails get very glossed over, meaning we never really get a good glimpse at the challenges he faced. He also leaves off the tail end of Bellepheron's tale, where Bellepheron tries flying the Pegasus up the side of Olympus to join the gods and gets struck by Zeus's thunderbolt for hubris.)

Things I very much liked were his habit of discussing different tellings of the myths when multiple sources disagreed as to what happened. (The creation of man get lumped in here, since Plato's Republic and the discussion on the origins of soul mates gets thrown in. As do some of the fates of characters from Homer's epics.) I also loved the tales included under "The Lovers", since more than a few of them were new to me. Like Ceyx and Alcyone, who get turned into Kingfishers at the end. Or Pyramus and Thisbe, who are the subject of the play within a play in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. (I chuckled and said, "Oh Wall, show me thy chink!" when I read the myth.)

I also really enjoyed how Freeman presented gods about whom we can prove little about. Hades, for instance, is an Olympian, but the only major myth he really is a part of is more a story about Demeter. Or Hecate, whom we know was worshipped, but she shows up once in the myths. Much as I'd like to know more about those two and Hestia, who also really doesn't seem to have much to do, there really isn't much material that survived that goes into any detail about their stories.

One thing I really disliked is that there's no real chronology here. There isn't a real sense of what order this stuff happened in beyond the initial Creation and Clash of the Titans (when Zeus overthrew Kronus and cut off Kronus's genitals with the help of the Hundred Handed Ones) and the Heroes and the Lovers. Honestly, we don't enter any kind of chronology until the last few sections when we meet Jason and the Argonauts and proceed into the Illiad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid.

Now, I'm going to mention another book here as a contrast to Oh My Gods, one very near and dear to my heart. Great Zeus and All His Children by Donald Richardson, which is out of print. (Or at least it was in 1996.) The reason I know this one is that it served as the textbook for CLS 101 at Wright State University where I took the class and had my eyes opened to the myths beyond what I remembered loving as a kid. (Yes, I was a Classics minor.) Again, it's the unsanitized version, but, unlike Oh My Gods, Richardson made the myths as linear a narrative as could be done with several centuries worth of myths with lots of variations cropping up as the stories evolved. Richardson also kept as many of the titles and mnemonics as he could when referring to people places and things. Thus we hear about rosy fingered Dawn  spreading her fingers over the sky, the wine dark sea, etc. Richardson, however, left out more than a few stories that Freeman includes, and Richardson's gods are mostly heterosexual. I think Ganymede gets mentioned in passing.

There are also entire myths and fragments both books miss that I know from other sources. Like that of how Athena became Pallas Athena (Thus her Palladium in Troy), or bits of the story of Persephone before and during her abduction to Tartarus. (Like the boy she turns into a lizard who dies, then his shade feeds her the pomegranate seeds in Hades. Or how she takes the time to give Tantalus food and drink.)

I did label this as survey/synopsis, mainly because there are other things I want to mention while were here. The Greek myths have been around for quite some time, and show up both obliquely and blatantly in literature. The aforementioned Shakespeare borrowed heavily from them. Neil Gaimen borrowed from them for Sandman. There's a wonderful book by Marie Phillips called Gods Behaving Badly about the Greeks in the modern age. Heck, even I have borrowed from the myths to write a story or two.

There's also the exceedingly awful The Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Which removes all the fun of the Illiad and replaces it with a so over the top parody of feminism Cassandra as to make it unreadable. I should have known better than to read it after reading The Fall of Atlantis. With a title like that, I was expecting Atlantis to sink. It didn't.

I'll also mention Ilium and Olympos by Dan Simmons, which is a very bizarre mix of Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and science fiction. Like 30th century recreations of Troy bizarre. With Caliban running around on Earth bizarre.

And the WebMage series by Kelly McCullough, which centers around the Greeks in the modern era as well. Even if his version of Persephone is much darker than what most of us will encounter in other collections.

There is one last book I'll mention, and this may be the only time I ever link to Amazon on here. Olympus, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Bruce D. Arthurs is one of the most amazing anthologies of modern Greek mythology. Like any anthology, some of the stories are hit or miss, but there are two standout comedies; one involves the entire House of Atreus on a Jerry Springer type talk show, the other involves Demeter getting annoyed that Persephone comes home early after a marital spat with Hades, forcing her to start Spring early. Those alone make it worth owning.

In short, Oh My Gods is a worthy read for anyone with an interest in the mythology of the Greeks and Romans. While you won't find all the myths, you will find a very wide selection and a bibliography of where the author found them. Which is very handy for when I actually learn Greek and brush up on the Latin.

So, I saw this going around...

"In the status line list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes and don't think too hard-they don't have to be "right" or "great works" just ones that have touched you."

The problem is, as I came up with my list, my desire to explain my picks filled the status section with too many characters. So, I'm blogging it here and adding explanations.

1) Greek Gods and Goddesses (I don't remember the author's name).

 I found this one in 3rd grade, I think. It was a slim volume, consisting of 24 stories, the 12 Olympians and 12 tales of figures in myths. It was black with white lettering and a stylized picture in thin blue lines on the cover. Admittedly, it was geared towards juvenile readers, but it awakened my interest in Greek mythology, something I've been studying ever since. (When I finish the book I'm reading now, we'll be returning to this.)

2) Adolph Hitler (Again, I don't remember the author.)

Found this one in 4th grade, I think. Having never heard of World War II or Nazis, or the Holocaust, it was a bit shocking to plunge into such a biography. I kind of chuckle, since the tone was one of "Hitler was born, and for that he deserves flaming bamboo shoots under his toenails"... (While I'll not be defending Hitler, I will say that he did actually do a few good things before going totally insane. I'll also point out that he had a lot of help in instituting his policys of evil. And yes, he deserved the bamboo shoots. But not just for being born.) This book makes this list since it got me interested in World War II. This book also got me discussing my own family's role in said war. It's a very interesting topic to me, and one I love researching.

3) It by Stephen King

Read this one the first time in 7th grade. While it isn't scary to me, nor did I find it scary at the time, it was a huge undertaking for me. It's also one I understand better as an adult than I did as a kid.

4) Lightning by Dean R. Koontz

Read this one in 8th Grade. Again with the World War II connection. Plus my Reading teacher loved Dean R. Koontz, and I loved her. We had some great bonding moments over discussions on books in this vein.

5) Imajica by Clive Barker

I can't begin to describe how much this book influenced me. Multiple worlds, bunches of theology, a non binary gendered character, and one of the sweetest gay couples in literature.

6) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

This is the only book on this list I haven't read multiple times, and indeed, one that I really hated. So why is it on here? Because, even as much as I disagree with Rand on most things, and disagree with her reasoning on the conclusions she came to that I do agree with, and as poorly written and deathly dull as the book is, it also forces you to think. "It's not right" is not an argument. It required me to figure out why I hated it.

7) Great Zeus and All His Children by Donald Richardson

This was my Classics 101 text book, actually. Much more in depth than what I'd read previously. Again, we'll be returning to it after I finish the current book.

8) Men With the Pink Triangle by Heinz Heger

Interestingly enough, if you ever watch Bent, it borrows heavily from the account here. Well, except the ending. It's a depressing read, talking about the author's experience as a gay man from Austria convicted of being gay after Germany invaded Austria. While it's not Night by Elie Weisel, it shares some common themes and a lot less of the losing faith that colors Weisel.

9) The Midnight Club by Christopher Pike

Yeah, it's Young Adult. But it's a fairly solid meditation on death and coming to terms with mortality.

10) Midnight Express by Billy Hayes

Don't ask me why, but I loved this book. Yeah, the author was a bit of an ass, but his account of Turkish Prison was facinating. Even if they did edit some of the more interesting things out for the movie.

When we were young and our Mood Rings were blue...

National Coming Out Day is October 11th, and I'm only about halfway through my current read, so YAY survey/synopsis!

I'll preface this by saying I had never heard of this series until TV guide spotlighted the PBS premier of the mini-series based on book 1, Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. I watched the series, and wound up enraptured by the full on 70's in California story. As I recall, I had an appointment with my shrink in Dayton not long after, and wound up buying the first three books at the old Books & Company I'd visit after sessions.

The story starts with Mary Ann Singleton, on vacation in San Francisco from Cleveland, calling home and explaining to her parents that she's decided to stay in San Francisco. A few chapters later, after taking us shopping at Safeway for more than veggies, Mary ann winds up moving in to 28 Barbary Lane on Russian Hill, under the management of one Mrs. Anna Madrigal. Along with the other tenants; Brian, the straight himbo who waits tables at Perry's and Mona Ramsey, an aging hippie who works at Halcyon as an advertising executive, a sort of family forms. As the novel progresses, we meet Michael, Mona's new roommate, who's ex boyfriend Mary Ann tried to pick up at the Safeway. We also meet Norman Neil Williams, who has the roof apartment and sells vitamins.

By the end of the first book, Mary Ann has had an affair with Beauchamp Day, who is married to her boss's daughter, DeDe. Beauchamp has also been screwing around with Michael's on again, off again lover, Jon Fielding, who's also DeDe's gynecologist. (DeDe gets knocked up by the Asian grocery delivery boy.) DeDe's father, Edgar, has been having an affair of his own with Mrs. Madrigal, even if he doesn't like her marijuana habits. (She has plants growing in the yard with names like Barbara Stanwyck. She also has joints at the ready for all of her "children".) Mona has moved in with D'orothea, an African American model, but that ends in disaster when Mona invites D'or parents to Christmas dinner. Brian, in the meantime, has hooked up with several women. (As a character, he really doesn't grow much until the next book.) Oh, and Mary Ann has found out Norman Neil Williams has been investigating Mrs. Madrigal, stars in child porn, and manages to drop him off a cliff.

 The next two books expand on these characters. More Tales of the City starts with Mary Ann and Michael on a cruise and ends with a cannibal Episcopal cult. Further Tales of the City winds up with a bunch of Jim Jones in Guyana aftermath. (Given I read this one before I had ever been on the internet, I had to do a bit of research. I was familiar with some of it, but there's a heck of a lot involved.)

Now, to a high school senior dealing with a bunch of issues related to coming out, these books were awesome. Gay characters abounded, and a virtual array of possibilities were explored by pretty much everyone. Plus there's an awesome letter that Michael writes to his mother during the Anita Bryant affairs. They gave hope to a fairly lonely gay young man who had a few issues of his own at the time.

I didn't pick up the next three books until my sophomore year in college. See, book 3 ends right on the cusp of the time that so many gay men in San Francisco started getting odd cancers. Book 4, Babycakes, picks up after AIDS has pretty much destroyed gay life as portrayed in the previous books. I cried for about 30 minutes after starting, since it seems Jon died between books. Out of all of the things in the series, having Jon die off screen was probably the one thing that made me angry. Anyway, Significant Others and Sure of You round out the next three books. Which basically turn Mary Ann into a shrew. After she marries Brian,things...don't go well. They have a kid via adoption, but Mary Ann, who becomes something of a TV personality. We see Michael not only survive AIDS, but thrive as a gay man entering his 40's. And fall in love again. We see Mrs. Madrigal growing older. We learn that everything changes over time. And we end in 1989.

Which, as I read these in 1996, I was really upset by the way things ended. I mean, on one hand, Michael, to me and so many other gay men, was proof that we're not alone in our feelings of insecurity and that we can survive just about everything. But when Mary Ann ceases to be a likable character, it's a bit like losing an old friend. And given that book 6 was the last in the series for quite some time...

Then 2007 rolled in and Michael Tolliver Lives hit the shelves. It was a bit different than what preceded it, since it was written in first person. We see Brian and Mary Ann's daughter all grown up, meet a trans man, and see Michael who's survived AIDS and the dot-com boom as he tries to choose between his biological family and his family of choice. We also meet Mary Ann again, living in Connecticut, and find out a bit of what happened to her after 28 years or so. In the end, Michael's decisions make sense and hit right in the feels.

And in 2010, Mary Ann in Autumn brought us back to San Francisco, again with the multiple perspectives, and added some closure on one very old plotline in the process. We deal with Mary Ann's fear for her health, and her attempts to fix relationships she messed up years ago.

These two did much to repair the anger I felt after Sure of You. It was almost like a reunion of sorts, where you find that tiem healed a bunch of wounds you'd forgotten you had.

And now, I get to add The Days of Anna Madrigal to my watch list, since it will be the last. Sort of a trilogy of trilogies, I guess. It's going to be odd realizing that this will probably be the last time we see a family that's been around in fiction for 35 years, but it helps that the final act has rectified some of the worst moments of earlier years. I only hope that we get a happy ending, or at least one that is fulfilling here.

He's so prolific that his first book was in 1939 and his latest was last year....

A few dollars on Ebay later and I seem to have bought a few lots of Hardy Boys novels.

Which, given this blog is mostly devoted to adult reading material, the works of unappreciated ghost writers needs some recognition from the youngster in me.

Given how long the Boys have been around, I'm fairly certain most of you are familiar with their exploits, or that of their occasional cohort Nancy Drew (or Tom Swift, or Cherry Ames, or The Bobbsey Twins...)(or the TV show, which I watched on DVD a few years back for no real reason) and so I should be able to get by with a fairly short synopsis here.

The basic premise is that the Hardy Boys are brothers, Frank, 18, with dark hair and Joe, 17, with blond hair. Depending on what series you're reading in and what year will bring out a picture of what they look like for that era. Some of the older hardcovers have them in chinos, while the newer paperbacks involve jeans and tee shirts. Frank and Joe are Fenton Hardy's progeny, Fenton being a famous detective. The family lives in Bayport with Mom, Fenton, and Aunt Gertrude. They have a fairly diverse group of friends, like Phil Cohen  (Jewish) and Tony Prito (Italian immigrant). Chet Morton was chubby to fat, and Iola Morton was Joe's girlfriend until she blew up in a car bomb in Casefiles #1, Dead on Target. Frank, on the other hand was dating Cassie. Almost all of these characters got dragged in at one point or another, and usually in some kind of jeopardy by the end of it.

The cases rarely involved murder, although they did seem to wind up breaking up smuggling rings quite frequently. The usual scenario was people would seek Fenton out to solve something, and he'd either ask the boys for help, or being unavailable, the boys would take on the case. And they traveled extensively. I wish I had their travel budget at their age. (Mind you, based on the very few Carolyn Keene books I read about Nancy Drew, she also had a travel budget from hell. The one book of hers I bought involved Nancy and Co. in Venice, Italy.)

I still remember my 1st grade introduction to the boys. My classmate, with the name Sixten Otto (who'd write it out as 610 and a picture of a car and who also taught me to play Canasta) brought in either The Mystery of the Chinese Junk or Night of the Werewolf. Which of course lead to one of my family's visits to Upper Valley Mall in Springfield, Ohio, where my brother would buy music at Camelot and my Dad would escort me to B. Daulton, wherein I found shelves and shelves of Hardy Boys books waiting for me to blow my allowance on. (And oh boy, did I blow money on them.) I usually bought the paperbacks, numbered from #59 up, since they were cheaper  than the hardcovers. Well, that and the hardcovers got tripped up in archaic language and the aforementioned chinos. (I kind of thought The Missing Chums would be about stolen shark bait, actually.)

I used to half-joke that Joe was my first crush and a strong indicator early in life that I was gay.  I found out later that I obviously wasn't the only one with feelings like that when I found Mabel Maney's Nancy Clue and the Hardly Boys: A Ghost in the Closet at one of the small bookshops near Wright State. I still laugh at that book, what with one modern lesbian trapped with stuck in the 50's Nancy and her "friend Nurse Cherry Aimless and the Hardly Boys... It was a spot on spoof of the genre made even funnier by the straight faces all the principles had.

Some notable titles in the original 190 + a few one offs series include While the Clock Ticked, which featured Joe and Frank tied to chairs while a mas scientist tried to blow them up; Cave-In, where Frank and Joe wound up in California during ski season trying to figure out who the ghost miners were; Sky Sabotage, where Frank and Joe go to Florida to figure out what happened to a missing satellite and a pair of missing dolphins; and The Hardy Boys Ghost Stories, which involved 6 cases of the boys encountering the actual supernatural.

That list title bears mentioning since pretty much every other book in any of the various series  that had supernatural elements ended up being a Scooby Doo mystery, wherein the element was not real, and easily explained during the resolution. In the Ghost Stories, we get real ghosts and phenomena, but they of course do no real harm. Like the Scarecrow that comes to life and chases them out of an abandoned farm house just before lightning hits and burns the place down. (May I add that one gave me nightmares for a few nights.) Or a later tale where the boys wind up on an 18th century Ghost Ship filled with whalers, wherein the ghost on the ghost ship gets them to safety.

I mentioned the Casefiles above, and I suppose I should mention them in passing. In Book 1, Dead on Target, Joe turns 18. His girlfriend blows up in a car bomb. The series was aimed at older kids, and read a bit like Rambo solves mysteries. It was more miss than hit for me, mainly because I got sick of the whining that tended to become vigilantism in Joe following Iola's death.

I guess they have a newer series aimed at millenials and the generation that are kids now, but I haven't bothered, since the updated graphics make the boys look like escapees from 1 Direction.

I still love the boys, even if I long since outgrew them. So many memories of my childhood are tied to them. And I really hope that other kids find as many happy memories in them when they grow up.

Fhtagn

(Note: This is a concurrent post with Candy-Coated Razor Blades by my friend Bob. He's covering movies. I'm covering the writing.)

That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.

I'll confess, I'm a Cthulhu groupie. (There used to be cultists, but since Cthulhu went mainstream... It used to be one had go diving beneath the waters or go hit up profane cults in isolated places to get icons. These days, one can go to a store and buy all the iconography you want of he who lies dreaming.)

Like this.

 Or this.

I'll also confess I'm not fond of H. P. Lovecraft's writing. It's a bit like reading Hawthorne, if Hawthorne had Hester giving birth to alien babies after Dimmesdale himself found out he was a hybrid of normal isolated New Englanders and underwater fish people.

Seriously. That's Baby Pearl up there.

 
(This must just be a Southern New England thing. Writers from Northern New England tend to write like a tabloid reporter. "Captain Trips is taking out 99.4% of the world's population, and Frannie's pregnant!!")

Lovecraft is quite a bit like Bob Dylan. I much prefer his stuff when it's done by someone else.

(I'll be citing examples here in a sec.)

But, the real reason I'm writing this has to do with The Lovecraft Anthology Vol. 1, edited by Dan Lockwood, that turns HP Lovecraft's words into illustrated graphic novels. Or graphic short stories, to be more precise. This particular collection includes " The Call of Cthulhu", " "The Haunter of the Dark", "The Dunwich Horror", "The Colour Out of Space", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Rats in the Walls", and "Dagon". It makes Lovecraft's words much more accessible to the readers who may have run across Cthulhu in other places and tried to find the source.

But then, based on what I've read, Lovecraft never really set his pantheon in stone, preferring to use it as  background noise, for lack of a better term. What does emerge from what he wrote (usually based around Arkham, Massachusetts, or Miskatonic University, or some isolated New England backwater) is the idea of the Outer Ones (Like Azathoth, the blind idiot god at the center of the universe), Great Old Ones (like Cthulhu, sunken in his house at R'lyeh), and lesser horrors (The shoggoths, more or less used as slave labor and the Mi-go, who either worship Nyarlathotep or are at war with the elder gods. Given how many people who have worked in the mythos, this kind of confusion is bound to arise. However, just keep in mind that this is like Alien vs. Predator. Whoever wins, we lose.)

We also have what generally remains a pattern in Lovecraft's fiction. The narrator reads someone else's mad ravings, investigates, then goes mad himself. Mind you, if I, like our narrator in "At the Mountains of Madness" ran across 5 foot tall penguins being used as cattle for either the shoggoths or Cthulhu himself, I think I might go a little mad as well.

Cthulhu has become a cultural icon of sorts the farther from the original writings we get. From the RPGs The Call of Cthulhu and Cthulhu Tech to movies, books and graphic novels...

Cthulhu shows up briefly in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Cthulhu shows up fighting beat poets in Nick Mamatas's Move Under Ground. An entire graphic novel series entitled The Fall of Cthulhu concerns The Harlot fighting Nyarlathotep as the latter tries to wake up Cthulhu.

We have Brian Lumley's non-vampire series concerning the Dreamlands. (I liked these a bit better than Necroscope. That one got a bit confusing after a while, what with time travel, psychics, vampire planets and all. Fun to read, but I really needed a damn flow chart to keep up with it.) 

There's also Mick Ferrin's very wonderful Victor Renquist Quartet, where Cthulhu shows up in Book 2, Darklost. In that appearance, Cthulhu ties in with the vampire mythos Ferrin created as something of an enforcer the Nephilim created to keep the Nosferatu in line. Mind you, Merlin shows up in book 3, and book 4 concerns Nazis in the Hollow Earth, but the series itself is a wonderful read. The vampires aren't mindless antagonists, nor are they Twilight sparklers. (Seriously. Find copies of The Time of Feasting and keep reading.)

If you like a little humor with your insanity inspiring pantheon, there's The Eldritch Pastiche From Beyond the Shadow of Horror by Christopher Welch (from the Blood Lite anthology. This one gets a shout out, since I've felt much like the narrator on more than a few occasions.)

There's even a Dr. Seuss version of Cthulhu out there.

And of course, more recently, there's The Six Gun Tarot by R. S. Belcher, which I reviewed previously on here.

In all honesty, as bad as his writing is, H.P. Lovecraft's influence is felt far and wide in contemporary horror. And really, if you can find a good introduction, the writing gets easier to plow through.

I leave you and your sanity with the following.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Dragons and guardians and elves and bards... OH MY!

So, since I said I'd start writing a weekly survey/synopsis entry on here, I figured I'd start with another favorite shared world series by an author I've reviewed before. Now, I was thinking about reviewing the NYC of the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle  (mainly because I'm halfway through book 11, A Brew to a Kill) or catching everyone up on Southern Vampires (aka Sookie Stackhouse) by Charlaine Harris or Destroyermen by Taylor anderson (both of which have a new book out or getting ready to come out.) Instead, I got to thinking about Bedlam's Bard and the very interesting shared world it inhabits.

As a story behind this, many many years ago, I worked at a Dayton, OH, pizza chain named Cassano's. It remains one of the few good things in Dayton. (Ok, there are 3 really good chains down there. Milano's and anothe M which just brain farted out of my mind.) (And seriously, should you ever wind up in the cesspit that is Dayton, go to Cassano's. best pizza EVAR!) One of my drivers was also a fantasy nut, and as such got me involved with a few authors I'd either read a book by (Lois McMasters Bujold) or introduced me to series outside of the ones I had read (Mercedes Lackey). In this case, it took me a while to track down some of the books in question due to being out of print and assorted other drama...

Anyway.

My first introduction to the "Elves on the Road" world (at least that what Wikipedia calls it... I don't think it ever had a real name) was Burning Water, the first Diana Tregarde mystery. It was...interesting Very slow, but really interesting. It dug deep into Pre Conquista Mexican theology and some rather dumb photographer trying to complete the ritual rites of Tezcatlipoca (AKA Burning Water) in order to bring him back. Luckily, Diana Tregarde, Romance novelist and witch with Guardian powers gets involved, mainly because the wife of said photographer (and likely sacrifice) happens to be a friend of hers.

The next book, Children of the Night, was set in the late 60's early 70's (guessing on time frame based on references within the story) and involved bad vampires working with soul eating Japanese spirits. It too, was kind of drawn out. And gave Diane a vampire boyfriend about 7 years before Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 10ish before Twilight. 

It's the third book, however, that seems  to have caused the most issues, and sadly, it's the best in the series. Jinx High follows the child of one of Diana's paranormal investigator friends who's involved with a psycho girl. When Diana gets involved,  we find out the psycho in question is a body switching witch who's modus operandi is to have a daughter, then switch bodies with her. And had been doing this for quite some time.

There are also two short stories ("Satanic, Versus..." and "Nightside") collected in the anthology Werehunter. I'm pretty sure both are available to read on her website. The former has one of my favorite joke incantations in it, and references an old RPG: Bureau 13. For those who never played, it has a class called Kitchen Witch. The kitchen witch has the ability to take old grimoires and convert them with modern ingredients. Including replacing some obscure/rare/extinct ingredient  with... Twinkies. She also wrote a novella for the collection Trio of Sorcery called "Arcanum 101".

Then there was the absolutely wonderful Bedlam's Bard series. The first two (Knight of Ghosts and Shadows and Summoned to Tourney) were later published as a single volume and co-written by Ellen Guon. The next four volumes were cowritten with Rosemary Edgehill and sort of retcon a few major developments from the first two. The first two books revolve around Eric, a bard with a flute; Beth, a guitarist with a band; and Kory, an elf. At the end of the first book and continuing through the second, they're a triad. When the thirst books starts, Kory and Beth move Underhill and the idea of them being a triad for several years is swept away. Which is sad, but ot does allow for the redemption of the sort of antagonist from Book 1 who ends up dating Eric. Eric also winds up moving to NYC and into the same apartment building Diana Tregarde lived in. he also meets Hosea, a bard with a Banjo. And more Guardians. And more Elves.

By far, Mad Maudlin is my favorite in the last 4 volumes. One of the plotlines running around has to do with a mythology created by homeless kids involving a demon named Bloody Mary who both protects and harms children on the streets. Not long after reading it, I found an article on the street children of Miami and a similar mythology that has evolved among them. I personally get sucked into folklore, and finding an evolving one is a quick way to grab my interest.

The last series in this Modern Elf world is the SERRAted Edge series. Which is almost a shared world in and of itself, since none of the book really follow the same characters the rest did. (Most of these were co-written with Mark Shepherd, one with Larry Dixon, and two with Holly Lisle.) It concerns itself with elves who race Elven Steeds disguised as race cars. (Although they have made progress making racing cars with non-ferrous materials. Since we all know iron and elves get along about as well as Superman and Kryptonite.) One should not that the young mage Tannim gets a lot of face time in this series. Which is good, since he makes a cameo in Jinx High and Spirits White as Lightning.

According to Wiki, there's a historical elf series set earlier in the timeline of this world, but I've not read them.

But, if you've read Valdemar or enjoy Urban Fantasy, you could do a lot worse than these series.

So wait, the clans got involved with dragons?

Since I'm really not updating this blog as much as I'd like, and I'm not reading with the alacrity I used to read with, and there are so many other blogs doing similar to this one...

Trying to take notes from Bob over at Candy-Coated Razor Blades and posting occasional updates that aren't about a specific book, but maybe a synopsis of an ongoing series, a survey of books from a specific genre or world...stuff like that. Particularly given how many of the series I'm reading are getting ready to release new books soon-ish, it would be helpful to the 5 of you, out there alone in the dark looking at this, to have a ready log of what came before, so I'm not having to explain a world to you before talking about the newest book

Any rate, with that in mind, and the fact I'm about 30 pages from the end of the book I'm reading right now, I thought I'd spend some time talking about some of my first real introductions to the fantasy genre, Role Playing Games tie in novels.

To be fair, most of these get a really bad rap. Mind you, most of the time, it is a deserved reputation... But some of it is fairly entertaining and only held back by the fact it has a game logo on the cover.

I think I started with Troy Denning's Prism Pentad, set in Dungeons and Dragons' Dark Sun setting. Also known as "Let's make the Hobbits cannibals and everyone lives in a desert!" The five book series covers the freeing of the City State of Tyr, the origins of the dragon that comes and eats folks as tribute, and what actually happened on Athas that caused the desolation of the planet. It wasn't exactly happy reading. It also gets points taken off for introducing psionic powers to D&D, which basically increased the math exponentially.

Then there were the loosely related Ravenloft novels. Ravenloft was a gothic-horror setting tied into Strahd the vampire. The novels here were generally tied to one or two dominions within the Demiplane of Dread, and usually involved one or more Darklord, ruling over that geographical area. Some of them were quite good, like Christie Golden's Dance of the Dead. That one involved a theatre troupe on a boat facing down an evil boat captain in the island of Souragne. So, basically, the main character learns to control zombies with magical dancing. It sounds silly, but it worked well. There were others, though, like Mordenheim, which were more or less retellings of the source material. (In this case, Shelley's Frankenstein.) One thing that should be pointed out about the Ravenloft novels, however, is that they attracted a lot of talent before they became big names in the genres they write in. Like Tanya Huff, Laurell K. Hamilton, and P. N. Elrod.

And the grandaddy of all D&D literature, Dragonlance. Which I still love the hell out of, even if the Chronicles are an unholy mix of Mormonism and Lord of the Rings. And that series is still going strong. Just stick with Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis and you'll be fine. Some of the stuff they didn't write together or separately delves off into silliness.

And of course, as much as I wish we could, I can't talk about D&D without mentioning the damned Forgotten Realms. I enjoyed the Avatar Trilogy by  Richard Awlinson, but hated the two sequels. (The first 3 concerned all the Gods of Faerun being kicked out of their realms and forced to live among their subjects. The followups concerned folks who ended up becoming Gods to replace dead gods. And they got progressively dumber.) And I'm seemingly alone in my hatred of R. A. Salvatore and his Dark Elves, monks, and frozen waste series.

Moving on then, we reach White Wolf's World of Darkness fiction. Which, again, is kind of a grab bag, usually continuations of short fictions published in anthologies accompanying ever game's release. Or interrelated stories set in late Medieval (for the release of Vampire: the Dark Ages) and the modern age. Or the Clan Novels (13 novels and an anthology. Each novel centered on a specific clan. Some were really good. Others, like Tremere, were horrible. Thankfully, they released 4 Omnibus editions that more or less assembled the plot lines in chronological order.) and the Tribe Novels (14 novellas centered around the Werewolf tribes, printed in two novella editions.) All of which lead up to the end of the shared Universe. Gehenna: the Final Night (Vampire) was well written, The Last Battle (Werewolf) was probably the best, because Judgement Day (Mage) was like ending a plotline in an outhouse. (Seriously. It had nothing to do with much established metaplot, well loved characters, or anything to do with Mage at all. Instead, we got people fusing 3 souls into one body and then being judged. The actual supplement they released to end the line would have made a MUCH better ending.)

Which brings us to the last shared world I wanted to discuss, Shadowrun. SR was very interesting in setting, mixing high fantasy and cyberpunk. Other than the system's reliance on d6...(First time I played, I had one roll that involved rolling 10d6. (10 six sided dice, for those not up on terminology.)

I found a used copy of a book called Crossroads by Steve Kenson at a local gaming store. And I got sucked in, buying the other two stories revolving around the main character (Ragnarock and The Burning Time) because I liked the story. Basically, Tommy Talon was an Arcane Mage in the setting who also happened to be gay. (Let's face it, finding gay characters in any RPG is a rarity. One who survives 3 novels, has a dead lover who figures prominently into the plot, and kicks ass in pretty much unheard of.)

I'll also tell a story of Mr. Kenson here. At the time I read the trilogy, I called a friend of mine who informed me that Steve;s husband was a New Age/Pagan/Witch author of some renown, Christopher Penczak. I read some of his stuff as well, and still highly recommend two of his books to friends. (One on Gay Spirituality, and one on city life.) Anyway, it seems the majority of my circle of friends knew of Mr. Penczak before they knew of Mr. Kenson. Seems I was the odd man out in that situation.

Anyway, a review of Doktor Glass should go up this weekend, and I'll see about doing another survey/synopsis post later next week.

And before I forget, since my friend Robert over at This is who I AM always acknowledges his followers as they sign up, I'd like to recognize Bob from Candy-coated Razor Blades, Lady Justice at Justice Is Served, and Chris from Renrields. Go read em. They all have interesting things to say.