Hard scrabble magick

 So, a recent trip to the Book Loft piqued my curiosity about David R. Slayton's Adam Binder series, but they didn't have the first book in the series. Thankfully, the library did, so I'm now able to review White Trash Warlock having finished it.

So, our main character here is one Adam Binder, currently of Guthrie, Oklahoma, and the trailer court he lives in with Aunt Sue. As we meet Adam, he's busy trying to claim a hexed pool cue enchanted with bog iron and a saurian bone. (That there are fantasy creatures running around is the first big reveal.) Sam ends up talking to Tanner (who's Dad bought him the cue at a pawn shop in Denver) and winds up making out with him. (Adam being gay is the second big reveal.) Mind you, they guy who Tanner beat at pool prior to the make out session turns out to be what Adam thought was an extinct Saurian, which leads to Adam bargaining with the lizards to spare Tanner. 

This takes up about 3 chapters, then the meat of the story gets going, as Adam's successful brother, Doctor Robert Binder of Denver, texts Adam out of the blue because Robert's wife is evidently possessed. Robert doesn't particularly believe in or perceive the preternatural, but after finding his wife pushing a baby carriage around with a demon baby inside, he's forced to call his brother. 

Adam is justifiably upset about hearing from his older brother, since older brother had him institutionalized in high school. However, Adam does wind up driving to Denver on the advice of Aunt Sue.

When he gets there, we find out about an entity floating over Denver that eats Magick, and has begun causing problems for both the humans and the other less involved in this layer of reality species. Adam also manages to bind himself with a cop he just met, and find out his ex BF the elf is still around. 

Honestly, this was an engaging read that I really enjoyed. I loved the idea that reality is a sandwich, with humanity being the bologna in the middle, and elves, leprechauns, gnomes, etc existing in the mayo and lettuce. I enjoyed the idea that the Watchtowers changed anchors and presentation depending on where you were. (In Oklahoma, they're various plains landmarks; in Colorado,m they change based on the mountains.) About the only thing that bothered me was the alternating focus characters. While Adam is the main character, Robert/Bobby becomes the focus a few times. For me at least, that the narrative exchange was at random intervals bothered me.That's a minor gripe. 

It really fit the bill of what I was looking for in reading material at the moment.

The oddness of it all.

 Now that spooky season is over, I started back into series fiction, starting with Christopher Pike's The Yanti, part 3 of his Alosha series. Which unfortunately is evidently the end of it, since TOR was going to release the next book after some kind of development deal happened. Given that update was posted in 2006, I think we can assume we'll never see book 4.

So, we spend the book flipping back and forth between the Yellow (Earth) world and the Green (Elemental) world, as Ali tries to figure out what the hell is going on, and how the hell her sister became The Shaktra. 

This includes figuring out her Fairie Father somehow became a Deus ex Machina in the race that's invading the Elemental and Human worlds, her sister Doren fell to temptation and became an avatar of the race invading, and figuring out how to free people turned into zombie, for lack of a better word. Oh yeah, and Nemi, who everyone thought was autistic, gets cured, gets revealed as a goddess, and is now running around the the Macguffin, the Yanti. 

Quite a bit is going on here, as you can tell. 

So, long story short, invading race is one of two, this one attracted to worlds bent of self destruction. We find this out as Ali enters the chamber her sister was transformed in. We also find out here that Ra, her Tanzanian boyfriend, is also her fairie lover Jira, who died in the elemental realms jumping off a cliff. 

Doren, in human form as Sherri, has a bomb, and plans to use the connected caves to cause 7 concurrent volcanic eruptions to cover the invasion of Earth by her Fairie form's Elemental army. 

We wind up with Ali in the human world, running around trying to fix this. Her Dad; Sherri's ex, Hector; Cindy; and Nemi all wind up running around together in the Human world. Ali, having woken up her fairie body, now has Geea running around the elemental world, taking possession of the dragoin armies and trying to stop the invasion. 

It's exceptionally convoluted, but it somehow stays together right up until the cliffhanger ending, which will probably not be resolved any time soon. 

I guess we can hope someday the rights get fixed so we can find out what happens next.

Once upon a time, a 3.5" floppy disk could end the world!

 So, with the spooky season, I dug out John Saul's Shadows, copyright 1992. Keep that in mind, and try not to giggle as I explain the situation contained within. 

So, we opeen on Josh, a gifted kid in Southern California, who's been skipped ahead two grades due to his intelligence. Mom is single, has a younger daughter, and waits tables. Josh gets bullied at school a lot. Josh tries to slice his wrists open (cross the street, not down the road.) 

So, Josh ends up getting accepted at a school for the gifted in Northern coastal California, where he meets Amy (two years younger) and Jeff and Adam, twins about his age. Jeff is the social twin, Adam is the introverted computer nerd. Who has a VR headset on his PC. In 1992. That produces realistic moving images.On what one can only assume is Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.

Anyway, We're lead to believe Adam commits suicide by getting hit by a freight train. In the meantime, Josh and Amy get moved into the seminar conducted by George Engersol, the man running the academy who is also studying the students living at the Academy. Said Seminar being about creating AI, while using Skinner taken to extremes to experiment on cats. 

So, at the risk of spoiling a 30 year old book, it seems that what's actually been going on is that Engersol, along with Housemom Hilde, has been removing the brains of certain students, putting the brains in a life sustaining apparatus, and using them to power a computer in the basement that can magically connect to almost every computer in the world (presumably using AOL or a VAX machine, or maybe UNIX...) One attempt to do so before Adam failed, but Adam seems to be doing ok. Amy, who gets the treatment following an experiment Engersol put her up to (which leads to Hilde throwing the body over a cliff, then using the only interesting character in here, who teaches English, over the cliff along with his car) also reacts well, but she ain't happy about it. 

Josh finds out about this stuff as Adam is able to reach out to his mother and Josh through computers and TV. Adam's mom thinks its his twin Jeff playing games and pulls him out of school. Jeff gets even by using Adam to give him directions on how to screw with the computer in their car, sending Mom and Dad spiraling off a bridge over a canyon on the 101. 

By the end of this, Amy and Adam become murderous psychopaths, not that Engersol and Jeff aren't psychopaths as well, but yeah, it gets ugly, and Josh reveals the truth to the world, which promptly tries to forget about it. Josh goes back to normal school and seems to have readjusted ok. 

As I may have mentioned, here in the 30+ years later vantage point, one can't hep but laugh at how ridiculous the plot is. The brains in jars are straight out of a 50's creature flick, and technology in the current era is nowhere near being able to do any of the stuff they do in here. Even 5 years past the release, the dancing baby on Ally McBeale was probably as advanced as it got. On the other hand, such wonderfully similar shows and movies like Lawnmower Man and Oliver Stone's Wild Palms were all about similar technophobia about the horrors of Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, and this was an era when all a cartoon villain needed was a 3.5" floppy disk to control/destroy the world.

 

Yeah, this will destroy humanity! 

Honestly, I was entertained, even if my suspension of disbelief failed quite a bit.

A guide to happy marriage

 So, as part of spooky season reading, I got a copy of Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives from the library. I vaguely remember watching bits and pieces of the 70's movie on TV, and I fully remember watching the early '00s Frank Oz version, so I was interested to see what the actual source material was like. 

Hoo boy.

Let me start this by saying the copyright is 1972, so there are quite a few references that either left me scratching my head, or worse, having flashbacks. (I'll note these as we go.) 

So, we open with Joanna and Walter moving to Stepford, Connecticut, to raise their son and daughter away from Manhattan. Walter, a lawyer, commutes to and from the city by train, suggesting they're in the southwest corner of the state. Joanna is a semi professional photographer who's also active in Women's Liberation and National Organization of Women. She's less than pleased that the men in town all seem to belong to the Men's Club, high on a hill in town. Walter, of course, loves the Men's Club, even if he starts off suggesting making it coed. 

Joanna tries to make friends, but the women of Stepford all seem to be obsessed with household chores, except for Bobbie (with a big behind and small mammaries), and Charmaine, a semi professional tennis player who's into astrology. Except Charmaine goes away for a couple's weekend, and returns as a dedicated hausfrau, even tearing up her clay tennis court to give her husband a putting green. This gets Bobbie and Joanna suspicious, to the point they write a letter to the state board of health to see if chemicals from the nearby factories are acting like the lithium in El Paso water to make the women all docile. That gets disproven, and we start getting signs that something is amiss, as men from the club sketch Joanna and have her dictate on cassette words, phrases, and songs. (Cassettes. Happy it wasn't 8 tracks.)

Joanna tries to convince Walter to move, and indeed joins Bobbie in looking for houses outside Stepford. Well, at least until Bobbie and her husband have a staycation and suddenly Bobbie doesn't want to move, is suddenly wearing a girdle and a push up bra, and waxes the kitchen floor daily. Walter tells Joanna they can look at houses after Christmas, and insists she sees a shrink. Shrink thinks Joanna is just overly stressed. Joanna finds a house, calls Walter, since she can't find the bank books (When's the last time anyone used one of those?) to put down a deposit. She ends up in the library basement where she finds out the men in town have work/have worked on animatronics and synthetics, among other things. Which leads her to the logical conclusion the men of Stepford are killing their wives and replacing them with perfected sex doll robots who can wax a floor. 

The conclusion is kind of ambiguous as to whether or not Joanna is correct, which is a big point in its favor, although the matron of the one black family (introduced not long after Charmaine becomes a Wife) runs in to Joanna at the store in the epilogue, noticing how Joanna's shopping cart is perfectly organized, and how Joanna has given up photography in favor of keeping Walter happy. 

Ok, so, I really enjoyed this quite a bit, even if the overall idea of losing autonomy to please a man makes my soul itch. As Peter Straub points out in his introduction, lots of little things towards the start take on really ugly meaning as the conclusion nears. Although, I will add that while Joanna refers to Disney's Hall of Presidents as evidence robots could pass for human, we really don't have that tech now, 50 years on, so there's a lot of suspension of disbelief here. Really good read, even with some of the outdated references, since there are plenty of folks who'd like to see it happen still.

In the name of Lowrek, Prince of Elves, DEMON BEGONE!

 OK, so as I mentioned, it's spooky season, so digging through the library for scary stuff to read. Found The Nightmares on Elm Street as written by Jeffrey Cooper in a box of books I found in mom's attic, which made me mildly bittersweet happy. 

Yes, such a thing does exist.

 So, a few quick notes on this. I read this before seeing any of the movies novelized in here. (Mom for a long time wasn't happy about me watching R rated horror movie, eventually relaxing to let me see them on video, even if she complained about women screaming in the dining room [where the VCR was]. I tried explaining the Final Girl trope as Female Empowerment, which didn't go over well. Eventually, she quit caring, and the local theater didn't card most of the time, which meant the first NoES I watched was Part 4. Anyway, in a desire to be cool, I bought this collection, thinking reading them would let me pass as having seen them. We'll explain how wrong I was here in a bit. The one thing I love about finding this now, several decades on, is that there's still a faint aroma of the pipe tobacco scent every book I bought at Main News in my hometown ended up carrying. Well, that and you can still feel the embossment of Freddy's glove on the cover. 

 So, anyway, it's three novelizations of three different installments, with a short story at the end explaining Freddy's birth and death, plus stills from the first two movies.

So, Part one, the original, follows Nancy Thompson as she has nightmares about a dirty man in a red and green sweater and a fedora who lives in a boiler room. She finds out her friends are dreaming about him as well. Which leads to her friend Tina asking Nancy and Glen to spend the night at her house, with Tina's boyfriend Rob joining them. Well, Tina runs into the man in her dreams, and winds up dying in her bedroom. Rob takes the blame, and Nancy arrives in a dream to see him get killed in his prison cell. When she arrive awake, it looks like Rob hung himself in his cell. Exposition later, we find out that Nancy can pull things out of her Nightmares, and the man is/was Freddy Krueger, who her parents turned into a pig roast after he got released on a technicality after murdering a bunch of children. Nancy's mom puts bars on all the windows, her father (Sheriff of Springwood and divorced from Mom) tells her to stay at home and be safe. She asks her boyfriend Glen to stay awake and wake her up as she tries to drag Freddy out of the dream. Glen fails, and becomes a victim of a mattress volcano. Nancy winds up doing what she wanted to do without glen and uses her alarm clock to drag Freddy into objective reality, using booby traps to beat the crap out of him, although he does kill Mom on the way to her turning her back on him and robbing him of his power. Well, except the stinger, which is just as dumb in print as it is on film, where Freddy pulls mom through the window of the front door at the end.  While this one does a really good job of following the movie, there are bits missing, like exactly how drunk Mom is and how much coffee Nancy is actually drinking, and the one shot from the trailer that made 9 year old me want to go see the movie, where Nancy gets sucked into goo on the stairs isn't in here. 

Part 2, Freddy's Revenge, picks up five years later as Jesse Walsh moves into Nancy's old house and starts having nightmares. Things get weird fairly quickly, as Jesse makes friends with jock Grady over a mutual hatred of Coach Schneider and gains a sort of girlfriend in Lisa. (There's a hell of a lot of homosexual subtext that doesn't quite show up as much in the novelization. At the time, from what I remember, it was thought to be homophobic, but particularly with a bunch of revelations as time went on from the lead actor and the screenwriter, it's actually meant to be homoerotic.) Anyway, seems Freddy is working on possessing Jesse to reenter reality. Which leads to a bunch of silliness involving exploding birds, an S&M scene with the coach, Jesse sleeping undressed with Grady, and being unable to perform with Lisa. (You can watch clips on YouTube if you're curious.) Anyway, Jesse defeats Freddy with the power of teenage virgin hormones, except the stinger where Freddy's glove comes out of Lisa's chest. Again, novel follows the movie fairly closely, although it tends to gloss over the stuff that makes the movie more interesting in the modern age. 

Part 3, Dream Warriors, which is where my ruse of having seen the movies fell apart. See, the novelization is based off Wes Craven's original script, while the filmed script got revised quite a bit, meaning there are quite a few derivations in the novel vs the movie. The biggest ones being that Joey and Kinkade die in the book, while they survive 15 minutes into Part 4 in the films. The deaths and powers are also a bit different, like the Wizard in the film is here a D&D nut without a wheelchair, the drug addict shoots fire, Joey talks (and doesn't get taken hostage by a cross dressing Freddy when g=he gets trapped), and Nancy isn't a professional. There's no mention of Amanda Kruger, although it's revealed Nancy's house in the original was where Amanda got raped by 1000 maniacs. Oh, and our sleepwalker gets thrown in front of a speeding ambulance rather than off a building, and Freddy quotes Johnny Carson when TV girl dies. The one thing the book does a bit better than the movie is explore how it stops mattering so much whether anyone is in the dream or not, by the end reality and dreaming have become one entity. 

Honestly, the biggest issue with these novelizations is that the film series highly relies on visual images, and the author really can't shape the words in ways that let you see them the way film can. (Although with the dawn of DVD, Blu-Ray, and 4k, they look pretty threadbare with the cleaned up visuals.) On the other hand, the author does give us occasional peeks into the minds of the protagonists, something the movies couldn't really do. While you're probably better off renting/streaming the movies, the novels are a fun way to spend some time, and even catch a glimpse of what might have been.

The Scorpion or the Grasshopper?

 So, I've technically reviewed this previously, but I hate that review and kind of want to redo it.

With it being spooky season, I pulled Gaston LeRoux's The Phantom of the Opera off the shelf and spent the week reacquainting myself with late 1800's Paris as our narrator in teenage Paris narrates the strange affair of a missing singer, a missing Viscomte, a dead Count, and various goings on at the Palais Garnier Opera in Paris. I have some tangents to go off on, but we'll put them at the end as I try to spoil a century old book. 

We open with our narrator breathlessly telling us he has evidence proving the legends of the Opera Ghost were true, and that hey can narrate for us, the reader how such tangled threads can be related to a non supernatural man. This transports us back to the night when management of the House traded hands, and new management came in, unaware of the codicils in the charter involving on particular Opera Ghost, like leaving Box 5 open for him and paying him 20,000 Francs every month. Several things are happening during the turnover, as Joseph Buquet is found hanging in the third cellar behind a scene from La Roi de Lahore (although the noose is missing by the time half the corps de ballet make it down to investigate), the Opera Diva, Carlotta, has called out for the gala, so one Christine Daae steps up and sings in her place, surprising everyone with his voice and range. Christine's old playmate from childhood, Raoul, Viscompt de Chagne, happened to be in the audience for the gala with his older brother Philippe, Count de Chagne, and goes backstage  where he hears Christine talking to a man in her dressing room, even though no one is in there besides Christine. 

So, Carlotta is a bit upset about being upstaged by the younger soprano. Indeed, she spends some time trying to get her supporters to help with this. Christine runs off to her father's grave, where Raoul follows. Christine isn't exactly happy to see him. He follows her, hearing someone playing "The Resurrection of Lazarus" on a violin near her father's grave. He sees a shadow among the ossuary, and wakes the next morning on the church altar. 

Anyway, Christine vanishes for a month or so, eventually returning and giving Raoul specific directions on how to dress and where to meet her at the Masquerade Gala. The new managers are mildly upset by some rather pointed notes from the ghost, and indeed get in a fight with Madame Giry, the Ghost's personal usher. (One should note, in the text, Giry has 3 teeth in her head and is particularly frumpy. She's also portrayed as rather unintelligent about a lot of things. Even if she's French, she comes off as Cockney.) 

 I think Box 5 is in the top picture in the visible row.

Anyway, the Masquerade doesn't go well for Raoul, as Christine tells him to leave her be. He watches as she vanishes into the mirror in her dressing room. 

The Ghost tells management to let Christine sing Marguerite in Faust as Carlotta will be sick and to let him have Box 5. Management gets annoyed and fires Giry. They then sit in Box 5, watching Carlotta sing the lead. Which leads to two famous set pieces from this. First, Carlotta starts "Co-ack"ing as she's singing. The ghost tells the managers in a diembodied voice that she's going to bring down the chandelier, which does indeed fall right after, killing Madame Giry's replacement.

Yes, this one, even if it is a replacement.

This all happens in the first third of the book. Anyway, Christine does eventually confess he love to Raoul, but only above the stage, indeed on the roof, by the statue of Apollo. 

 

Top Center

This leads to a secret engagement, and Christine finally confessing as to what the hell has been going on. After the death of her father, she lost interest in music. Then the Voice came, teaching her to sing better and with passion. The voice was jealous and told her if she saw a man, he'd leave her forever. The Voice also claimed to be the Angel of Music her father told stories of when she was a child. Anyway, long story short, said voice eventually kidnapped her and took her to his house on the lake in the 5th cellar. Where she learned he was the Opera Ghost, Eric, who wears a black mask to cover the fact he has glowing eyes and a face like a skull.

He also knows all and hears all that happens inside the Opera. Raoul arranges to elope with Christine the next evening after the performance. 

The next day, a gossip rag posts something about the engagement, Christine is upset that the ring Eric gave her vanished on the roof, Phillipe things Raoul is embarrassing the family name, the managers question Giry about how she delivers the money to the ghost. 

 Quite a few things happen. Giry confesses she has no knowledge of there being money in the envelope. She indeed slips the envelope in the manager's pocket, where the ghost gets it. Her whole motivation is a promise the Ghost made that, like other ballerinas in the corps, her daughter Meg will marry into the nobility (namely Empress). (I should note, an aside in the first chapter mentions Meg did become a baroness, so she did get upgraded.) The managers suspect each other of stealing the money, and recreate the evening the money vanished, confusing everyone there to see Faust. Christine sings Marguerite and vanishes during her appeal to heaven towards the end. Raoul eventually meets the Persion, the ebony skinned gentleman who hangs out at the Opera, who leads Raoul into the cellars to find Eric and Christine. (SIDE NOTE: there are some very interesting but never really well explained people running around the cellars, like the shadow the escorts the uninvited to the manager's office, the rat catcher with a flaming face, and the firemen who tend the furnaces. One could almost see another novel of errata explaining how they work.) The Persian leads Raoul into the 3rd cellar where a trapdoor opens into the Ghost's house, behind a certain scene from La Roi de Lahore. 

The Persian takes over narration duties for a bit, explaining how he and Raoul wound up in Eric's torture chamber. (For the record, it's a hexagonal room with mirror on all sides and a painted tree that revolves to change the images to eventually get prisoners to hang themselves.) Raoul and the Persian hear Eric and Christine through the wall, as he tells her she has until 11 the next night to choose between the Scorpion and the Grasshopper (two Japanese bronze sculptures), meaning yes, she'll marry him or no she won't. The Persian finds a trapdoor and a room filled with gunpowder filled barrels. Meaning the Grasshopper will jump if she says no, and take a quarter of Paris with it. Christine does eventually choose the Scorpion, and indeed marries Eric however briefly. He relents after a few days and sends her off with Raoul to their own love, before dying in the dungeon used by the Commune under the lowest cellar. In the end, he claims he didn't directly kill anyone (the chandelier chain was worn out, Buquet hung himself, Phillipe ran into a trap and drowned), and he did right by Christine even if it killed him. By all accounts, she returned when he died and returned his ring. 

Anyway, a few errata here. The version I currently own is not quite the same translation as what I had in High School. There are a few paragraphs missing in it that I remember quite clearly (one pretty much calling Carlotta a hussy and another describing not only how Carlotta's supporters cheered her on, but were downright rude to Christine) and here it is a secret engagement rather than a pretend engagement. On the other hand, the phrasing in this edition flows more naturally. 

My original copy I ended up giving to a homeless kid in 1995. I had dressed as a cheap Broadway Phantom (plastic half mask, black bedsheet cape) to lead kids from the emergency shelter around the dorms trick or treating, and the kid thought I was the Undertaker from the WWE.  He asked for my mask, I gave it to him with the book. 

As you can tell, the book is majorly different from almost all adaptions, but then, in acting, one needs the big set pieces in a different order to compliment the flow of the performance.

There's a small hint Eric knows he's in the wrong, since the duet he sings with Christine from Faust is during the seduction, when Faust and Mephistopheles don't really have Marguerite's best interests at heart. 

As a side note, the chandelier did fall at one point, inspiring this entire novel, but it fell during routine cleaning, injuring no one.

Overall, despite being a century old, it's still fun to read and enjoy wandering around a haunted theater with people who all are doing wrong, but doing it with heart. 

Oh good, something's actually happening finally

 Ok, so we're back with Book 3 in Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins's Left Behind series, Nicolae.

After two books of what mostly consisted of setting up Armageddon, we finally start getting payoffs as the Horsemen ride. Oh look, the United Nations (now Global Community) is using its 10% of all arms on Earth to bomb major cities! Oh look, Bruce is actually dead! 

Let's see, Carpathia, the Antichrist, has moved the GC to New Babylon somewhere in Iran. His new plane, flown by Rayford, has a special gadget that lets Rayford listen in to conversations in the back while he's flying. Buck winds up in Israel to sneak Tsion Ben-Judah out since two factions want him dead. Oh yes, and after the major story lines are resolved and Buck's magazine predicts the "Wrath of the Lamb" Earthquake when the 6th seal is broken, we get a world wide Earthquake that removes the global population down to roughly 75% of the population pre-Rapture. Ben-Judah is living in the fallout shelter under New Hope Baptist. Buck, who survived the quake in a Range Rover is trying to find Chloe and Ben-Judah in the wreckage. Hattie has more or less vanished, having spent most of the book being a strawman of why it's not OK to abort the Antichrist's baby. And Rayford is in the air with Carpathia when the quake hits, so he's fine. 

Ok, so, none of the major core characters dies until towards the end, and they all come back for the finale, so we're not worried about any of them at this point, nor are we particularly worried about them anyway, since they remain flat characters, acting as cyphers to relate the beliefs and arguments of the authors. 

Like I said, there's literally a few chapters devoted to arguments against abortion, that later get roped in to how abortion leads to Eugenics. There's the big reveal that Buck's personal nemesis is a lesbian, which gets thrown in with the whole "Fidelity in Marriage, chastity in singleness" argument that was viewed as a compromise in the 90's. (I'd say I wonder if that argument changed at all when Same Sex marriage became a thing, but I'm pretty sure legalizing marriage more or less threw off the veneer of that argument, revealing again the absolute repulsion certain people have towards non cishet relationships.)

Oh yes, we get more about how Militias, even prophesied to fail against the Antichrist, are a good thing, about how one should invest in gold, because one we get to one world currency, Christians will not be able to use it because it requires the Mark of the Beast... (Deeper you go down the hole, the more the commercials on Faux News make sense.) About the only argument they present that I halfway agree with once you separate it from the Abortion leads to Eugenics and thought control by a strong man, is the one they make about Free Speech as the GC creates the Morale Monitors (secret thought police, and I might add I think they're using the wrong word, since in context, it really should be Moral) to start silencing dissenting voices. Yeah, I tend to believe people should be allowed to speak their mind, and I frankly could give two shits about Evangelists praying me into hell. (I grew up in an era when Brother Jed would come preach on the Quad at Wright State, and the shit the Westboro Baptist did and still do.)I still fight with myself about how responsible one is for what actions one's words inspire. The problem here is that instead of actually exploring the argument, we instead get "The bad people are trying to silence the Christians!" because there is no gray area in these books. 

Honestly, while the writing is slowly getting less wooden, it doesn't change the fact that every character in here feels like they're marionettes dancing on strings while lipsyncing to a recorded message. 

As a side note, since it is October, I'm switching out of series reads to start having fun with one shot horror novels in my collection for a bit.

Shaktra Shaktra you body Shaktra your body lime

So, the used copy of The Shaktra, book two in Christopher Pike's Alosha series showed up, and I finished it yesterday. 

We pick up a few weeks after the end of book 1, with Ali realizing she is the incarnation of a Elemental Fairy Queen from a different layer of reality, and her friends Steve and Cindy still processing everything that happened, plus a troll and a leprechaun living with her, it's a bit of a mess, particularly with the police investigating the vanishing of Karl (who we found out was actually one of Ali's fairy subordinates before betraying her), life is full. 

Ali decides to return to the Elemental world to try to figure out what's going on there, after first learning that Steve cracked Karl's e-mail and found out he's been talking to someone with a Shaktra (the big bad so far) e-mail domain who lives a town over. (Seems the owner of a gaming company specializing in Apocalyptic games is the own of the account.) 

So, while Ali, Farble and Paddy end up crossing back into the Elemental realms, Steve and Cindy wind up digging deeper in to the computer comapny thanks to a run in with the owner's daughter, who is autistic/marked by the Shaktra.

Ali does find out the cave she's using to cross the realms also connects to other places on Earth, as she meets the Shaman Ra from Tanzania in one of the caves. 

Steve and Ali find out "Why yes, the owner is a bad lady" after being chained up in a cave under her house. 

Now to be fair, I was prepared to get really annoyed with this book when Nemi, the daughter, showed up, since the caretaker said her autism was from a vaccine. However, by the end, we find out that was a lie, so I lost my mad a bit.

Interesting book and series, getting back into the more New Age ideas that populated Pike's other fiction.

Why did I decide to reread this?

 OK, so we're continuing our really rather sad rereading of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins' Left Behind series, now in volume two, Tribulation Force. 

So, we start off not long after the end of Book 1, where our core group of Rayford Steele, Chloe Steele, and Buck Williams formed the Tribulation Force under Pastor Bruce Barnes. The Antichrist is still up an running, but, even though the Rapture has happened and the two Witnesses are preaching at the Wailing Wall, the "Period of Tribulation" with its 7 year countdown to the Reappearing of Jesus has not yet started.

Which means by the end of book 2, the Lamb has yet to crack open the second seal. The first is supposedly the Antichrist, in this series Nicolae Carpathia. And he gets 18 months before the second seal gets broken after some kind of treaty with Israel. 

(Again, the authors are pulling a bunch of shit out of several books in two different canons. For the sake of accuracy, doing my best to present this from their viewpoint.) 

Anyway, Rayford gets offered a job flying Air Force One, and Buck gets offered a job working for Carpathia as a reporter. Neither wants it, wind up taking them anyway. (Given the story needs people on the inside that can keep us informed as to what Satan is doing, it's not like they had a choice in the matter, and indeed, they kind of violate their own rules later on in the series once the Mark of the Beast happens. If and when I get that far, we;ll return to that.)

Buck and Chloe get married. Rayford marries Amanda, someone who knew his wife. The UN consolidates under a 10 member security council, all global currency becomes the Dollar, and every country is expected to destroy its arm. Carpathia signs a treat with Israel, allowing them to rebuild the temple, but only after the Cincinnati Archbishop takes over as Pope and consolidates the world's religions into the new Enigma religion. Well, except the Christians who believe as our protagonists. Oh yeah, and it's revealed that Hattie, who Rayford nearly cheated on his wife with, is knocked up with Carpathia's baby. And we meet Ben-Tsion, the Orthodox Rabbi who tells everyone at the end he has found Jesus is the Messiah promised in the Torah.

Most of the reviews I've have read of this particular volume written by people who aren't of the same mindset as the authors focus on the severe misogyny in the treatment of Hattie. Which is very true, but ignores the rather nasty Anti-Catholic and Antisemitic strains that also ooze out of the pages in places. Probably a bit of Anti-Islamic stuff as well, but so far the only real mentions of the other Abrahamic faith center of the moving of the Dome of the Rock to New Babylon since the rock matters more than the place, bits about planting a cemetery in front of the gate so that the messiah can't walk into it, and a lone Muslim being burned by the Witnesses. I seem to recall later on that a group of Armed Muslims help the Tribulation Force and are beset by Angels telling them to accept Jesus, but that's several books down the road. And frankly, given the new religion as of yet is not fully organized, we haven't hit the eye rolling commentary on anything that ain't Crispy Christian. 

And lest we forget, I should also mention the rather startling endorsement of Militia groups to resist the NWO, even if they're fated to be defeated by the Antichrist. Or the fact Pastor Bruce is at one point setting up a worldwide network of Xenos style home churches....

I mean, honestly, the wooden writing is bad enough without the other bad ideas getting thrown in here. I find myself again wondering about who they thought the target audience was, as the majority of people most likely to read the series would be taken up in the Rapture should such a thing occur, I kind of doubt the rather confrontational style of Evangelism within would particularly motivate a non believer, and I seem to recall their placement of the Rapture is controversial in their own circles. (Ever want fun, go read through some of the wiki articles on pre and post millennial rapture. It really is proof Unverified Personal Gnosis isn't just a pagan/wiccan thing.) I know they probably made bank on this series, given it hit the bestseller lists, and the back has adverts for the YA series as well as videos you can order for the sinner who get left behind...

I mean, the sunken cost fallacy means I'll likely finish this reread, but wow, is it painful.

How can one little street swallow so many lies?

 So, as I generally point out once a year when the Riley Sager pseudonym publishes a new volume, these improve with every iteration, even if they tend to recycle concepts. 

In Middle of the Night, we're dealing with 40 year old Ethan returning to the Hemlock Circle cul-de-sac in the middle of New Jersey outside Princeton. With one exception, all of the houses on the circle are occupied by the same families who lived there 30 years ago when Ethan's best friend vanished from a tent in Ethan's backyard and never reappeared. Ethan is separated from his wife, and living at the house he grew up in as his mom and dad have moved to Florida. Ethan is plagued by recurring nightmares of the sound of someone slitting the side of the tent. 

Throughout the novel, we get flashbacks (from other character's perspectives, even) chronicling the 24 hours prior to Billy vanishing, showing how none of the kids or adults in the Circle are particularly honest about anything going on 30 years prior. We have Russ, in the past the younger brother of one of the neighborhood bullies who OD'd/committed suicide, in the present he runs a sporting goods store; we have Angela, Ethan's former babysitter who's now home watching over her dementia ridden dad with her10 year old son; we have Ragesh, also a bully in the past who's now a cop with a husband. We have the usual strange and mysterious in the Hawthorne Institute, now a State Park. 

While this being Sager does mean we get 4 or 5 major twists as we get towards the end, this time they're better paced so the reader can actually absorb and react to them before the next one springs. We also get a throw away reference to both Final Girls and The Last Time I Lied, thus giving us a fairly unconnected shared universe. 

Honestly, this is probably the best the author has achieved, and I found myself enjoying it, even as I wondered how certain facts were overlooked in the past.