No atheists in the trenches

 So, KL Charles's Slippery Creatures wound up being a surprisingly good period erotic novel. (Yeah, I know.) 

We open in Jolly Olde England not long after Armistice Day, as one Will Darling, former British soldier who fought in the trenches for most of the war is back in London having pawned most of his medals to keep going. However, an estranged uncle he managed to find did leave him a used book store, which is currently tied up in probate. Which, other than the fact the store is kind of like the better used stores, where things aren't exactly well organized, is a step up. 

We get an early hook when two different sets of men enter the store at two different times demanding information promised to them. Problem being, the information is something Will has no clue about. (Of the two groups, one is the War Office, whom Will wants nothing to do with. The other is a group of Tories going under the group alias Zodiac. Whom Will also unceremoniously kicks out of the shop.) During one of these visits, the Honorable Kim Secretan comes a shopping, and he and Will hit it off.

Sort of. While they do eventually manage to get into some fairly smutty scenes, every time Will starts trusting Kim, he finds out another way Kim betrayed him. (Now at the outset, it's a bit like the movie version of Clue, where we find out The Honorable Secretan supported the Bolsheviks prior to the Great War. Then it gets into the fact that Kim is engaged to a woman, that he's tipped off the War Office, that he... well, lets just say while he isn't exactly a Bond Girl double agent, he does some rather dastardly things. 

 While the central mysteries are engaging, I was more sucked in by the conversations on homosexuality is 20's London. Reminded me quite a bit of a conversation in God and Monsters where James Whale makes a comment about how there are no atheists in a foxhole, but plenty of lovers. Given that Weimar Berlin in the years after this novel became a Homosexual Hangout, I kept pondering if the main characters might find time to slip off to see a certain Sally Bowles in later volumes. 

While I'm sure there are historical inaccuracies, it was a fun read with characters who while not morally pure certainly made understandable gray characters.  

The long road

 So, finally finished Deadbeat Druid, the final book of David R. Slayton's Adam Binder Trilogy.

Now, when we left off, Vincente got pulled into the Underworld along with Adam's Great Grandfather, leaving Adam to seek out Death herself. In this volume, we get to spiral through hell, as Vic and Jodi (and new acquaintance Mel make their way from the Ebon Sea to what they hope is Adam, while Adam is spiraling down to hopefully find and recover Vic and Jodi and Mel as well as Grandpa. While the actual plot here doesn't matter as much, since it really boils down to everyone meeting in the middle followed by some twists that get resolved by the end, but I will say this vision of the migration of souls after death is actually kind of interesting. See, in an underworld not polluted by the living (of which we have 7, as Bobby and Vran are with Adam), souls journey down the spirals to the sea, losing their emotions, hurts, longings, etc to demons on the way down. (It's kind of a whole biome/ecosystem.) Problem being with Mel having arrived roughly a century before, many of the demons have gained some form of sentience, which means they're no longer fulfilling their function. Which leads to things like Sanctuary, where one of the "living demons" is saving souls not ready to move on from moving on, or a living hotel demon using Bobby Sr to draw in Adam and Bobby Jr. 

Really, the entire cosmology here is what ended up sucking me in, as did the appearance of Death's opposite number, and exactly what he represents.

It's a good read, although the stakes aren't exactly world altering, but they're extremely personal.

I'd be more than interested in reading more in this setting.

And you thought your family had skeletons

 So, finished David R. Slayton's Trailer Park Trickster this morning, which was a worthy follow up to the first book. 

So, this time we have TWO focus characters, and it's a bit better balanced as to who we're following at any given point in time, although frankly, it's basically two very different stories that overlap a lot. The major one, focused on Adam, involves what happens when he goes back to Guthrie, Oklahoma, to deal with the death of his Aunt Sue, the woman who taught him to use what magic he has. The other involves his boyfriend Vincinte, who catches a ride to the funeral with the Queen of Swords, AKA Argent, of the Winter Elves. Except...well...

See, Bobby is dealing with the fact that Aunt Sue left all of her possessions to her sister Noreen and Noreen's daughter Jodi. Neither of whom like Adam. And who happen to be there when Sue's trailer blows up when he arrives. Which sets off Adam's part of the story, as he finds out Jodi has a bit of the Sight, and has been hustling money trying to pick up Sue's old customers. Unfortunately, she's also been invoking The Druid, the bad Warlock who's been making bog iron charms and who up until recentkly, Adam thought might be his father.

Vincinte (AKA Vic), on the other hand, winds up getting mixed up in Elvish affairs as someone attacks the car on the way to Oklahoma from Denver.  This leads to the Sea Elves (suite of Cups), who want control of the fallen Tower of the East, and also want to flood the human world to get rid of all humans. The Sea Elves try to kill Silver, the Knight of Swords and Ada's ex boyfriend. Which Vic, being a Reaper, is then charged with being a witness at a meeting of the Races. He's also pissed when he figures out Adam lied to him about what happened to Adam's father, and more irritated when he finds out the bond he shares with Adam is considered a marriage by the Immortal races.

The stories overlap a few times, as everyone gets together to share notes. We do eventually find out the name of the Evil Druid, and Robert's new job title gets used twice between the story arcs. And there's one passage towards the end that really really kind of hurt to read, as Vic gets a visit from his father's ghost and has a heart to heart that had me wondering how much of it was the author trying to reconcile with his own father, all the while making me wish it was MY dad and I having this long distance conversation. 

I look forward to book 3 and how we're going to resolve everything that happens here.

A surefire cure for insomnia

 So, on one of my recent bookstore trips, I ran across Stephen Graham Jones's I Was A Teenage Slasher and wound up checking it out of the library. Which made me really happy I didn't pay to own a copy, since frankly, it was was about exciting as watching paint dry. 

The story is narrated by one Tolly Driver, who is narrating his tale of his 17th summer in Lamesa, Texas. We find that Tolly's dad had died within a year of the start of this tale, his mother owned a hardware store, and he was essentially just short of being a juvenile delinquent. He and his best friend Amber decide to crash a popular teen's party one night, and Tolly gets really drunk and throw up on a band member. The band members at the party tie Tolly to a chair and force a Coke down his throat. Problem being, the Coke has peanuts in it. which Tolly is allergic to, which sends Tolly into anaphylaxis. 

Tolly's fomer babysitter and current crush, Stace, finds Amber and gets the Epipen, which gets Tolly breathing again, just in time to witness a zombie crash the pool party. Seems said zombie was a former peer of the students at the party, who had been egged into trying to bronco ride an oil jack, which wound up decapitating him. Now, with a bit of some kind for a hand, said zombie is back for revenge. 

Mind you, this gets introduced on page 90 or so, and has next to no effect on the plot beyond zombie getting blood on Tolly's forehead and being found the next day ripped apart by another grasshopper, with the bodies of his main tormentor and his final girl also trapped in the rigging. 

In this setting, it seems that Slashers are born out of some kind of infection that makes them seek revenge. 

So, Tolly finds at night he goes color blind, can move really fast as long as no one is watching, and his Mom's belts can be a mask, along with some other things common to movie slashers. 

This leads to a few hundred pages of avoiding the cops, killing six people who tied him to a chair, and did I mention lots and lots of whining?

Because seriously. With his just above poverty life and the whining, the entire narrative is like reading Holden Caufield of Catcher in the Rye narrating traveling to California with the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, only with a left field zombie attack that shoehorns Friday the 13th: Jason Goes to Hell into the narrative. I mean, it's not only bad, but boring. I realize it's up for Best Horror Novel of 2024 on Goodreads, but I fail to see why, unless the other finalists were even worse somehow. Either that or everyone else got something from it I didn't. I mean, I could say the flaws come from lacking the visual and audio cues that make a slasher movie work, but adjacent thematic books I could name take similar tacks and still work better than this mess. (Zombie Ohio by Scott Kenemore in particular. It's narrated by a zombie who manages to retain some of his brain function.) 

While some people obviously enjoyed this, I can't list myself among them.

I find your lack of real conflict disturbing

 So, after seeing his book floating around and getting good reviews for a while now, I got TJ Klune's The House By the Cerulean Sea out of the library and took it for a test drive.

The plot centers around Linus, a caseworker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's been there for several year, investigating orphanages that house magical youth. His supervisor is a nasty boss, and acts oddly when Linus gets summoned before Extremely Upper Management and given a highly classified assignment to go evaluate an island orphanage off the coast. (We're never given much in the way of locations here, but given this reads a bit like Terry Gilliam, I pictured the orphanage as being off the coast of Scotland.)

He's given very little knowledge of what the residents are like, and the town nearest the island tends to looks with suspicion on the children and Mr. Parnassus, who runs the place. We find out fairly quickly the major concern is one Lucy (short for Lucifer), who is the Antichrist. There's also a Sprite, a gnome, a blob, a wyvern, and a werepomeranian. That the two adults on the island also turn out to be magical adults should not be a surprise to anyone. 

Most of the book is focused on Linus learning and helping the children while being castigated by Extremely Upper Management about losing his objectivity. And falling in love with Mr. Parnassus, but that never really becomes a major plot point until well after the climax. 

I mean, the overall theme about accepting people as the are without judgement I can get behind, and frankly, most readers of fiction spend so much time in other people's heads that I think the message is a case of the preacher giving his sermon to the choir. I mean, it's charming, but it really has no major emotional or physical conflict, beyond "Most of the townspeople hate us!", which in turn kind of falls on the whole "There are good people working to change that" trope.

While I might end up reading more of Mx. Klune's work at some point, I feel like this one is missing something to give it heft and oomph.

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.