There's always more to the story

While we were away for the weekend, I finished reading the newest edition of an old favorite. For those unaware, Neil Gaiman's American Gods has a new Annotated edition, with notes added in to the Author's Preferred Text added by one Leslie S. Klinger.

While the plot remains the same as it did 20 year ago, the annotations add more details to the text in places. Sometimes. We'll return to this here in a bit.

So, we open on Shadow Moon finishing up his last week in an unidentified prison, waiting out his last week to return to his wife Laura. He gets called into the Warden's office, and informed he's getting released early because his wife is deceased. Thankfully, transportation had been arranged prior to his early release, so Shadow is able to switch around airline tickets to get back to Eagle Point, assumed to be somewhere in Northern Indiana. (While there are real locations used in the text, a few, like Eagle Point are very vaguely defined as to where they actually are as they don't exist.) On Shadow's last flight, he gets bumped to First Class, where he winds up sitting next to Mr. Wednesday, who offers him a job, given the job he's supposed to be returning to doesn't exist. Shadow ignores this at first, until Wednesday provides proof his would be employer died in the same car crash that killed Laura.

Needless to say, Shadow does eventually take Wednesday up on the job offer, but not before dealing with Laura's funeral and getting a gold coin from Mad Sweeney, the Leprechaun. The coin has a weird property that brings Laura back to an intelligent zombie like life after Shadow drops it in her casket.

To skip ahead a bit, we soon find out Wednesday is really Odin, and just about everyone Shadow meets and interacts with in the novel winds up being an American incarnation of a deity or folk tale from outside the US. Except the New Gods, who represent ideas important in the US, like Media (with whom the opportunity to match up with Medea is sadly never realized), Technology, Television, and MIB.

Wednesday is trying to line the old gods up for an upcoming war and winds up dead because of it. Shadow has his own issues, as he moves from Cairo, Illinois to Lakeside, Wisconsin with several trips between before the biggest scenes in Virginia and Rock City, Tennessee.

Between chapters, we get pictures of the arrival/and or mostly unrelated modern lives of foreign gods and creatures on US soil. The chapter involving the Irfrit/Djinn still has the ability to make me cry, as does the one concerning the slave trade.

It's a magnificent read from start to finish, filled with memorable characters and interludes discussing arrivals in America. It also introduces the biggest scene stealer ever, Anansi, who's children fill up another volume down the road.

As for the annotations... These were somewhat of a welcome addition to the text, since they were nowhere near as obnoxious as the are in, say, House of Leaves. and generally informative when they weren't mentioning that "This Passage/sentence was not in the First Printing", which is roughly what 1/3 of the annotations consist of. Many of them include further information on who particular Gods are (although we still get no clues as to whom the Nameless God might be), notes from the handwritten first draft, pictures of locations visited, and pointing out connections in the text that one might not catch during a first reading (like Sam's "I believe" speech en route to Peru containing a reference to the later Coming to America story about prehistoric people crossing the Bering Strait during the ice age). A few appendices follow the main text, with a deleted scene of Shadow meeting Jesus during Odin's vigil, a list of gods appearing, and other references.)

While I would recommend the main text to everyone I know, I wouldn't recommend the Annotated Version to first time readers. More than a few plot points intregal to the big reveals gets given away in the notes, which would spoil the fun for a newbie.

Crossovers aren't normally this fun.

So, Unholy, pseudonymous Morgan Brice's new Witchbane entry crosses over into the authors other works in a big way, as Evan and Seth enter Charleston, South Carolina, and thereby enter the author Gail Z. Martin's other same world characters. Which gets interesting, since half the appeal of Witchbane is that the protagonists are fairly underpowered humans running around trying to stop fairly high powered temporarily immortal witch disciples, and the folks we meet in Charleston....aren't. On the other hand, we get around this major power level gap by having the main antagonist be someone working on a much more hidden level than what the crossover characters normally deal with, while doing things that eventually get them helping out in ways that don't detract from the actual hunt.

The set up for this one involves finding out that the Disciple in this one, Longstreet, traffics in relics and in human magical trafficking. However, we find out Longstreet has already made his sacrifice prior to Seth and Evan's arrival, which allows him to cause a car wreck involving the two, followed by a soon to be fatal curse that prevents them touching each other.

At which point Martin's characters come to the fore, helping stave off the effects of the curse, as well as helping speed up the research portion of figuring out where Longstreet is and what his amulet and reserve are. We get phone cameos from Brice's other series, as two of her other series protagonists phone in with psychic visions.

And we wind up with a satisfying ending that kind of helps point out the magical ivory tower verses the marginal magicians of the proletariat, and how a sneeze in one group hits the others.

It's a good entry, and I look forward to a point where the novella that covers what happens after this gets a physical copy.

Going back in time

So, I'm a few days late writing this, but it's been a rough week.

As I mentioned last time, The 6 Messiahs was a sequel volume. As it happened, I found out I owned the previous volume, The List of 7 by Mark Frost already, but only after ordering a used copy. Anyway, I finished this Friday afternoon, so here we go.

We start with a pre-Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle trying to get various stories published that have naught to do with his detective, as he isn't excited about being a doctor. He also seems to be a lapsed Catholic, more interested in examining the nascent Spiritualist and Theosophy movements than surgery. We open on his invitation to a seance, invited by a landed noble to prevent something catastrophic. The seance goes to hell pretty quickly, and Doyle is good to escape with his life intact, rescued by Jack Sparks, an agent of Queen Victoria, who's trying to figure out who is behind a recent spate of supernatural occurrences in the country.

We travel the English countryside, meeting such luminaries of Madame Blatlavsky and Dion Fortune; Queen Victoria herself at one point. We find out some of the criminal element is getting Zombiefied through Haitian drugs and vicious surgery. And we find out that Jack's brother is the mastermind behind this.

It's quite thrilling until about the last chapter, when after a very big lead up, we, along with Doyle hear about the conclusion through a third party.

Other than that horrible ending, it's a fun read, with a few really funny moments, such as Doyle throwing a very heavy book at a zombie pursuer, only to find out the volume was none other than HPB's Psychic Self Defense. Fun read. Just don't expect to be impressed by the ending.

Ecumenical Silliness

Mark Frost's The Six Messiahs has been an interesting beast to solve, what with figuring out partway through that it's a follow up, ordering the first book, then realizing I already own the first book.Which will make reading through that volume more interesting, since some of the major characters here have a history there.

Anyway, we open on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his brother Innes getting ready to board a ship for America for tour to celebrate Doyle's most famous creation, who had recently been revealed to have gone flying off a cliff with his archnemesis Moriarty. Mind you, people in both England and the US spend most of the book asking Doyle how Sherlock survived the fall, since no one can believe he died.

As the ship sails, we get glimpses of other characters, some of whom are already state side, like Walks Alone, the Dakota assassin; Rev A. Glorious Day, who's busy building a utopia west of Flagstaff; Jacob, the Chicago Orthodox rabbi and kabbalah headed to Arizona; Kanazuchi, a Japanese man hiding among the Chinese with a quest of his own.

On the way over, Doyle meets Lionel, Jacob's nephew; and in New York, Presto, a Indian man with a quest of his own. As the book continues, we find that most of the characters are seeking stolen holy books, most of which have been stolen by a German man, who a few decades later would have been an Aryan ideal.We also connect with Jack, who Doyle knew ten years prior, and whom served as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, it would seem, including falling off a cliff while killing his evil brother. Most of the characters have been having dreams of tunnels under the sand, and standing with five others to do...something. None of them particularly remember the dream well enough to figure that part out.

It becomes a very merry chase through New York City to Chicago, then west to Phoenix and eventually The New City as we finally find the destiny of the Six Messiahs (from a Jewish concept that the Messiah is less a single person destined to throw off oppression and more a handful of people throughout time who hold the world on their shoulders) and the redemption of some while others fall.

I really enjoyed the book, although frankly, the ending is quite abrupt. We get several big revelations, followed by wrapping up 400+ pages of ecumenical mysticism with about 2 pages of doing the thing and finishing the story, which leaves several dangling plot threads. It would have benefitted from a bit of expansion here.

Ain't No Canyon Low Enough

So, in finishing up Gregory Hinton's published works, we close with Santa Monica Canyon, which is another California story, this time set in and around Los Angeles. Focused on Mark, a younger man dating a big time film actor, and John, an artist living in the eponymous canyon, we watch as their lives entwine and connections that shouldn't exist between them become apparent.

We open on Mark, who teaches poetry at a city college, swimming in the Pacific, getting noticed coming out of the sea by John, who needs models for his paintings and sketches. John has taken to hiring in models from various agencies, but this hasn't worked out well, since the first one we meet is on drugs and wants to be an escort more than a sitter. We see Mark returning to the stylish DeMille estate home he shares with long time lover Edward, who's hosting the Lame Ducks, the inner circle and the only people who particularly know about the relationship between Mark and Edward. Mark is uncomfortable with the trappings of fame and the severe closet Edward is forced to reside in. Edward is also over 10 years older than Mark, and uses "Boy" as a pet name. Besides the obvious stresses there, a video of Edward getting serviced by an anonymous john has been making the rounds, leading to the favorite game of rumor quashing.

Eventually, John does approach Mark on the beach, and convince him to be a sitter for his art. What eventually causes Mark to relent is finding sketches of Edward among John's drawings that he knows nothing of. Edward gets an offer from an up and coming actress to star in a project she's working on, and ends up leaving Mark for the summer to film, citing Mark's need to heal from the recent death of his father as a reason for Mark not to tag along. Mark hits a local lit store and gets more information on John from a gossipy frenemy of John's, who discusses how John's lost talent since his break up with Danny, a caterer who also served as a model for John.

As John and Mark grow closer, Mark's distance from Edward leads to fighting between them. Edward eventually calls and tells Mark he sent him a letter that he wants Mark to burn without reading. Which spirals into Mark finding the full series of sketches John did of Edward that reveal the truth about a lot of things between all sets of lovers.

In the end, we are left to decide for ourselves what we think of everything, as we see everyone without masks or pretenses, and like viewers of the portraits, it's up to us to see what the artits wants us to see and make up or own minds about the truth in the picture.

Like the last one, this one also name drops quite a bit, as we in flashback meet Christopher Isherwood and his partner and their circle of friends.

It's also kind of a heavy trip, and I find myself understanding but hating the choices made in the end.

Rocky Mountain High

The Way Things Ought To Be by Gregory Hinton tells a variation on coming out that becomes odd in its contemporary historical narrative. I think some of this comes from being published in 2003, but telling a story from 30 years earlier, in 1974 Boulder, Colorado.

We open on the break up of our main character, Kingston James, and his boyfriend, Lex, following witnessing an airplane crash while hiking. We hear bits and pieces out their foibles, from moving to California and back, how they met in a bible study group, how their Study group leader Nicolas called King's parents and told them about their son's sins.

King ends up moving out, taking on a rental room in an off campus apartment, where his new roommates share a bedroom with a bunk bed. The one roommate's girlfriend, Jen, makes lot of noise when she visits. He starts dating Sam, but Sam worries that King is growing too attached. Sam and Theo get King to attend a dance, where same sex couples dance to gain visibility, seeing one of Jen's sorority sisters on the floor. This leads to his roommates kicking him out, leading King to move into a studio courtesy of Theo, who's the brains behind the local Gay Rights organization. (Theo isn't comfortable being the face of the movement, so that falls to Sam; Theo is the one behind the scenes organizing everything.)

King goes back to a hotel with Matthew, whom he meets at a bar. Matthew is a romantic, like King, but Matthew, who's real name is Ralph, is also married to a woman in Pittsburgh. He buys King a leather jacket and goes back to Pittsburgh.

Jen winds up pregnant and moves in across from King and adjacent to Theo. When King's friend Tim gets killed by the cops after being caught doing lewd acts behind the Taco Bell, Jen joins the protest with King.

We see King meeting his Creative Writing teacher. Connie, at Le Bar, one of the 3 bars at the Boulderado hotel. She shows up with her bisexual boyfriend, Robert, because Allen Ginsburg will be there reading his work. (There's a bit of name dropping in here, as Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs both show up. By far the best moment is a few pages when Ginsburg and King wind up doing Transcendental Mediation together later on.)

King and Theo hook up, but despite Theo's insistence on sex being sex, it becomes obvious he has feelings for King; indeed, when Theo winds up dating Barry, Theo starts bringing home as many men as he can to make enough noise to annoy King through the walls.

Barry is the UC quarterback whom King meets at the local bathhouse. While Barry is very closeted (indeed, he has a fiance) due to his football stardom and likely draft by the Miami Dolphins, he and King share a very nice romance. Which ends rather abruptly one night as King sends Barry home so he can think, and the next thing we as readers know is King is in the hospital having been raped and bleeding profusely. Given Barry is the one who called the ambulance, everyone thinks he did it, but King denys that. (We do find out later on what actually happened.)

King's father gets drunk and drives to the hospital, but he takes a header off a cliff on the way. (King's family relations are a long involved subplot of the book. Dad's a drunk who gets sober; Mom hates sober dad. His brither is distant from the parents, and is also gay.)

Anyway, eventually all the plots come around and we finish with King graduating.

So, ultimately, I can't really comment on how close to reality this is in terms of 1974 Boulder. I will say it is nice to read a book about gay folks of the 70's which isn't coastal or all about rich gay folks, or worse, some midwestern morality play. On the other hand, most of the language of liberation and assimilation take on more modern terminology, and no one gets referred to as a homophile. While I'm sure someone will point out where I am wrong here, I don't think there was any kind of coordinated national movement quite this early, most of the organization was regional at best.

However, I think King is kind of Shakespearean in his own way, I'm sure more than a few readers can identify with his struggles with love and sex, and how the two, while separate, intertwine.

Valley of the long Elven names

So, Blade of Empire by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory picks up not long after the last book, as Vielessar Gets physically throned on the Unicorn throne. She sends a few folks north and westm and we hear no more of her forf the rest of th ebook, instead mainly focusing on her unwilling bonded,
Runacar, who goes from War Prince of one of the 100 Houses to leader of a rag tag army of Beatstling, basically sentient Otherkin, like centaurs, minotaurs, gryphons, and bearkin. We get a few interludes, as the dark ones begin the Red Harvest in the Windsward, and more than a little bit of politicing around the Sanctuary of the Star, but yeah, we're mainly focused on Runacar as he sweeps folks to take the coast.

Which is odd, since most of the Otherkin hate the elves. Yet he earns their trust, and ultimately leads them to victory over the remaining coastal cities with help from the Waterkin.

It's one big campaign, and it's mentioned that no one has heard from Vielessar since the enthronement, in what they refer to as the Great Silence.

By far the biggest problem here is that any concept of time goes out the window. I think by the end, we figure out 10 years have passed between the beginning and end, but the sense of time is really awkward.

PAst that, it's a good follow up, and I hope they actually finish the trilogy eventually.

The Innocence of Youth

So, Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life has been on the TBR pile for a while now, but it's taken some time for me to actually get around to reading it. Now, a quick perusal of wikipedia shows McCammon was popular in the late 80's to early 90's, during the horror boom that Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Saul were all household names, but for some reason, despite my brother having a few titles on his shelf, I never read any of his stuff. As such, it shouldn't come to anyone's surprise that his works draws comparisons to the others' work mentioned. Which is sad, since even if Boy's Life shares a few passing similarities with IT, it's really got more in common with John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

We open on Cory, 11 years old in 1964 Zephyr, Alabama, in the early Spring of 1964. Cory's dad delivers milk for the local dairy, and occasionally Cory will make the rounds with his father. Which is nice, until the morning they round a curve by Saxon's Lake in time to see a car go across the road and into the lake. Cory's dad swims out to try to rescue the driver, only to find that the man is lead, bludgeoned in the head and garroted by a wire. He has a visible tattoo of a skull with wings. Cory, in the meantime, also notices someone watching and finds a green feather on his shoe. Keep in mind, we see this at the start, but it really doesn't wind up having much to do with anything until the very end, as the story keeps wandering around like a boy on a bike and nowhere in particular to be.

Anyway, Cory's dad is a bit upset by this, obviously. He spends most of the book getting more and more despondent as he's haunted by the man in his dreams.

On Good Friday, we see the Parade, when the elderly black woman, The Lady, from the town across the Gargoyle Bridge (with busts of Confederate Soldiers) goes to the middle of the bridge with his husband, the Moon Man (who evidently has vitiligo; his face is half black and half white, thus the Moon Man moniker) goes to feed Ol' Moses, one of the local creatures that lives in the river. Except she calls it Damballah, and feeds it all kinds of fun things like chicken's feet and beef heart. Ol' Moses ain't feeling it this year, as he doesn't show up. Later on, when the rains won't quit, after the rains wake up the wasps in the Methodist steeple during Easter services, and the Tecumseh River starts flooding, Cory and his Dad join the rest of the men of Zephyr across the river in the Black town helping sandbag the flood waters (after much protests by some of the white folks.) While fighting the river, Cory comes face to face with Ol' Moses, saving a young black boy from the hungry sea monster by using the old cartoon trick of sticking a broom in its craw. This earns him the attention and affection of The Lady, who begins to find ways to help out Cory and his family.

We see his childhood adventures with his friends, we see him stumble into more adult matters that end up causing trouble down the road. We see him become a storyteller, winning a local writing contest. We meet the characters that inhabit the town. About 2/3 of the way through, he has dinner with Vernon, the local nudist whose dad owns most of the town. Vernon himself published a book, and his man-child speaking reveals that he set out top write a book about a southern community and the publishers wanted a hard boiled mystery. As such, Vernon edited in a mystery to his novel, which is pretty much how this all works out.

By the end, we do find out who killed the guy in the car and why, but not before we watch Cory confront death and learn to hold on to his boyhood. Indeed, one of the most affecting moments for me involved Cory's dog Rebel getting hit by a car and Cory's accidental zombification of the dog. Until the ghost of a dead boy comes to claim it.

While Cory is an unreliable narrator, his story is compelling and sad and joyous in equal amounts. It just takes its good sweet time to get there.

Desert Bloom

So, I found out recently that Gregory Hinton had written a sequel to his Cathedral City, and thus did Desperate Hearts show up in my mail a few days later.

While it's mostly the same cast, the situation in Cathedral City is quite a bit changed from where we left it. Father Gene has been removed from St. Louis Church, and the new priest cares more about his new upscale parishioners than the dispossessed seniors and Mexicans that had been the backbone of the parish. Solia, of the port wine birthmark, works at the church when not babysitting Kenny and Maria's baby Concha. Maria is busy running her restaurant, although the clientele is not the same as when Nick and Kenny ran it. Ruthie still sings at Maria's, but the new clientele doesn't seem to care that much. Kenny and Nick are in Reno, still keeping secrets from each other. Pablo is back in Cathedral City after graduating from Stanford.

We also have new characters Bambi and Madonna, the mixed race lesbian couple that delivers produce; Officer Bob, the Border Patrol agent; and Sister Agnes, the nun at St. Louis who harbors more than a few secrets of her own.

The plot has a few different centers as it meanders around, what with Bambi and Madonna's involvement in smuggling a pregnant woman across the border, Pablo's romance with Bob, Ruthie's detox from anti depressants that eventually leads to her kidnapping of Concha and eventual death in a flood, and Nick and Kenny's revelations. We also finally get a bit of closure with Inez and Thomas, as Inez comes back to Cathedral City to be with her family as Thomas dies of El SIDA. We also have the odd case of Solia and her birthmark removal following it taking on the shape of the Virgin of Guadelupe.

While the first book was heavy on the pathos, this one is much darker by turns, with touches of the mystical sprinkled throughout. Indeed, while everyone does eventually get a happy ending through quirks of fate, I felt like most of that was a forced Deus ex Machinae, as none of this would likley have ended up as well in reality. Still worth reading though.

This seemed appropriate

So, along about the time the Stay-At-Home orders started, I wound up ordering a new copy of Stephen King's The Stand, which, thankfully, unlike my old copy that I think I donated to the local homeless library a few years back, is the Complete and Uncut version. (There are noticeable differences between versions; the first time I read it was right after the release of the long version. Then several years back, I picked up the original published version on paperbackswap.)

Anyway, for those who've never swam across the ocean that is the 1200 pages...

The set up revolves around a superflu that breaks out in 1990. A manmade shifting antigen flu. With 99.6% fatality rate. That escapes from a California lab with a security guard who gets out before everything locks down. Most of the first hundred pages take us through the initial outbreak and the plethora of death that accompanies it, giving us glimpses of our main characters before the world after gets going. We meet Stu, a quiet man in East Texas, who is one of the first immunes identified by the government, since he was one of the first in contact with Patient Zero. We meet Frannie, of Ogunquit, Maine, who has just found out she's pregnant. We meet Larry, who's new single is going up the charts, but whom is in deep debt following living the high life on the royalties. We meet Nick, a deaf-mute who we first meet getting mugged in Arkansas.

And people die. Quite a few people die. If not of flu, but of the aftermath. Stu, who was sent first to Atlanta, and then to Vermont, winds up meeting Glen, and then hooking up with Frannie and Harold, who is the brother of Frannie's now deceased best friend. Larry escapes from New York with Rita, who ends up ODing upstate. He then meets Nadine and Joe, who have their own issues. Nick meets Tom, a mildly retarded man, and they eventually meet Ralph. In the background, we have The Dark Man, Randal Flagg, and Mother Abigail, the 108 year old black woman who still bakes her own biscuits. And Lloyd. Lloyd who's in prison after being part of a tristate murder spree. The Dark Man breaks Lloyd out of jail eventually, and they head west. Oh yes, and we can't forget The Trashcan Man, who's a pyromaniac who starts turning refineries on Lake Michigan into giant bombs.

Anyway, survivors are all having dreams of both The Dark Man and Mother Abigail, so everyone starts moving West to Nebraska or Vegas. Mother Abigail is in Nebraska, and is other directed by G-d. Although G-d sends a vision to Mother Abigail, so everyone winds up in Boulder, where a rumor during the plague meant a large scale evacuation and the lack of humidity makes for a lack of rot.

Everyone has adventures getting cross country, picking up people as they go. Boulder tries to restart a government, Vegas is ruled with an iron fist by a psycho who's crucifying those who cross him. Nadine and Harold end up switching sides, cause issues, and four of the men end up walking from Boulder to Vegas. Then we get a few hundred pages after the climax of two people trying to get back to Boulder.

In any book this large, any reread is going to uncover things you missed on previous readings. Like, in modern parlance, Harold is essentially an Incel. Like the ending likely taking place somewhere other than the Earth of the rest of the book. (Mind you, if you wade through The Dark Tower, The Dark Man shows up quite a bit there, as well as in The Eyes of the Dragon, so this makes sense.)

Is this my favorite King? No, that still belongs to either It or The Waste Land. Is it good King? Yeah, because the pacing, despite the volume, keeps it going for the most part. Mind you, it's the hundred of so pages of story afted the Climax that keeps it from being downright stellar, but....