“So Mr. Parker, how can our employment agency help you?”
“Things haven’t been going well with my old job, and I’m thinking about a career change.”
“Let’“So Mr. Parker, how can our employment agency help you?”
“Things haven’t been going well with my old job, and I’m thinking about a career change.”
“Let’s take a look at your resume… It says here that you’ve been a professional thief most of your adult life. You’ve got some experience and skill with firearms, false identities, auto theft…. And you’ve done some very impressive jobs, Mr. Parker. I’m surprised you’re looking for another line of work.”
“I’ve had a terrible string of bad luck. A loose end I left breathing once upon a time came back and caused problems, and every heist I’ve tried lately has either fallen apart or been nothing but one headache after another.”
“Well, these little setbacks are sometimes what we need to make a change in our lives. Hopefully, we can find something that’s a good fit. We’ve got an opening for someone who negotiates the bids for a construction company. How do you feel about that?”
“I’ll give it a try.”
“I’m talking about a compromise here, and you know damn well that’s what I’m talking about.”
“But I don’t compromise,” Parker said. “My price is forty thousand dollars. Not thirty-five. Not even thirty-nine and a half.”
Petulant, Griffith said, “Never? Never in your goddamn life have you done anything for less than forty thousand dollars?”
“This job,” Parker said pointing straight down. “This job, my price is forty thousand.”*
“So I guess negotiating business deals isn’t for you, Mr. Parker. Let’s see what else I have available….Oh, how about this? This dry cleaner is looking for help.”
“There’s blood on the blanket.”
“Burn it,” Parker said.
“Forget the dry cleaner then. Don’t worry, Mr. Parker. There’s still plenty of good jobs out there. This seems right up your alley. Teaching self-defense classes to women.”
He switched his left hand grip to her face, thumb on one cheekbone and fingers on the other. He pulled her head forward an inch, then punched it back against the wall. Her eyes glazed, and he used both arms to lower her to the floor.”
“Oh, my. That didn’t work out at all. Don't get discouraged though. I talked the construction company into giving you another chance with their bids.”
"Pay me forty thousand,” Parker said, “and I’m in. Don’t pay it, and I’m out.”
“You won’t negotiate, damn it. How can I deal with you?”
“Maybe you can’t.”
“OK, so that’s a definite ‘No!’ on the construction job. But here’s something interesting; fire marshal.”
The lining caught all at once, and Parker was holding a handful of flame. He leaned way out of the window and tossed it into a second of the cardboard boxes.
“I have to admit that we’re running out of opportunities, Mr. Parker, but I still think we can find you something. This school needs a driving instructor.”
Parker was braced, one arm around the seat, the other hand on the steering wheel for guidance, both feet pressed on the floor, but it was still a jolt when the van crashed into the metal door.
“Hmmmm…. Animal control?”
Finished, he went back upstairs, took the dog by one leg, dragged it over to the cellar doorway, and pushed it downstairs.
“Mr. Parker, I have to admit that I’m about to give up on you. Here’s one last opening, and I hesitate to offer it to you, but we‘re out of options. Marriage counselor.”
“You’re married to a whore…Get used to it. Either put her on the street to bring home some money, or get rid of her. But stop trying to turn her into the little woman, it won’t work.”
“Well, Mr. Parker, I’m sorry to say that was the last job I had. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Sure you can. Give me your wallet and watch.”
“You’re robbing me??”
“I’ve decided to go back to what I do best.”
* Items in italics are direct quotes from the book....more
Duane Swierczynski has ideas so brilliant and brutal that one day the rest of us will have to tool up and kill him. - Warren Ellis
Swierczynski seems tDuane Swierczynski has ideas so brilliant and brutal that one day the rest of us will have to tool up and kill him. - Warren Ellis
Swierczynski seems to be making the transition from cult favorite to getting more main stream attention, so Ellis will probably try to make good on this threat in the near future. Since I’m enjoying the hell out of his work, I am volunteering my services as a bodyguard. What I lack in training, experience and competence, I make up for in my utter willingness to pepper spray absolutely anyone (including small children and the elderly) who’d give Mr. Swierczynski any grief.
Hell and Gone is the second part of a trilogy. In the first book, Fun and Games, ex-cop Charlie Hardie is a house sitting drunk who has a very bad encounter with the Accident People. The AP’s are a branch of a Vast Conspiracy that does a variety of nefarious things, and their specialty is the elimination of high profile targets like politicians or celebrities via untraceable ‘accidents’. Charlie threw a monkey wrench into one of their operations in L.A. but didn’t manage to escape so he figured he’d be dead in about 12 seconds.
But instead of killing him, Charlie is given a weird job offer. The Vast Conspiracy decides to make him the warden of a secret prison instead. With no other options, Charlie plays along hoping to find a way to escape. Unfortunately, the prison is a decaying underground complex at an unknown location that would make a pretty good setting for a video game. The handful of inmates are extremely dangerous and require a Hannibal Lector level of security, and the guards are only slightly more trustworthy than the prisoners. And the special sauce on this shit sandwich is that if any one tries to get out through the original entrance, it’d trigger a ‘death mechanism’ that kills everyone in the prison.
Fun and Games was a fast-n-furious action novel with heaping helpings of ultra-violence and humor. Hell and Gone is less actiony and more of a mind fuck, but it’s still powered by it’s breakneck pace and the sheer awesome insanity of its plot. This is the literary equivalent of taping a bunch of bottle rockets together, lighting the fuses and then tossing them into the middle of your 4th of July barbecue. It’s chaos, but it’s entertaining as hell. And if Swierczynski did what I think he did at the end of this one, the final book is going to be even crazier.
Also, Swierczynski is one of the authors I got to meet at Bouchercon earlier this year, and he seemed like a very nice guy who patiently answered my questions about superheroes. I may even brave the latest DC continuity reboot and pick up his Birds of Prey comics which I’ve heard good things about....more
Upon hearing that David Foster Wallace’s unfinished last novel was going to be published, my first thought was, “How do they know it wasn‘t done?” BecUpon hearing that David Foster Wallace’s unfinished last novel was going to be published, my first thought was, “How do they know it wasn‘t done?” Because it’s not like Infinite Jest was a model of story resolution.
My question was answered in the introduction of The Pale King by editor Michael Pietsch that gives a concise breakdown of what Wallace left behind and how he put it together. He makes it very clear that this is not the book that Wallace was envisioning before his suicide. As Pietsch explains, what had been completed was too good to just put in a library where only scholars would read it, and if I ever meet Mr. Pietsch, I’m going to shake his hand and buy him a drink for helping to get this published.
The book is about the examiners (a/k/a wigglers) at a regional Internal Revenue Service center in Peoria, Illinois, but there’s no real overall plot to it. It comes across as a series of loosely connected short stories. Which makes sense considering that Wallace wrote chapters out of sequence and left no detailed outline, but Pietsch also states that Wallace’s notes repeatedly mentioned that he wanted the book to be ‘tornadic’ in nature. Apparently he planned it to be a swirl of people and events that would randomly bonk the reader on the head until some kind of larger pattern emerged. Without the rest of the book, we don’t get the bigger picture, just the bonks, but almost all the bonks are fascinating.
No surprise then that most of what is sticking with me about the book is random, too. In no particular order:
* There’s a lot here about boredom and bureaucracy, but it doesn’t go in the direction you’d expect. While Wallace repeatedly explores the soul-crushing tedium of going through tax forms and the dull inner workings of the IRS, there’s no real raging against the machine going on here. In fact, Wallace almost seems to celebrate the focus required to do the job in the face of unending boredom and make it seem noble. One could argue that his point was that the majority of us waste our time trying to avoid being bored without accomplishing much so you might as well sit down and get something done.
* I am going to change my name to Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist even though I’m right handed and can’t paint.
* The early chapter featuring Leonard Stecyk as the kid who is so helpful and charitable that everyone hates him is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. Impressive how Wallace was able to make the reader want to punch Leonard in the face during this portion, but later on turned him into a more sympathetic character who gets to shine in a crisis.
* Like a lot of people, I think my favorite part of the book may be the long story of how Chris went from a self-described ‘wastoid’ with father issues to a guy who actively seeks out a career in the IRS after mistakenly sitting in on a class about taxes.
* Wallace wrote himself into the novel, and then went to a lot of effort trying to convince the reader that what he/she was reading was actually a memoir disguised as a fiction for legal purposes. He recounts long discussions with lawyers and having to get a bunch of releases signed by various real people at the insistence of his publisher, and I was just nodding along with this part when it suddenly hit me that since Wallace had died before finishing the book the whole thing was an elaborate ‘Gotcha!’.
* I was often listening to the audio version of this at work while performing a bunch of dull tasks. So I was listening to a book about people doing boring work while doing boring work.
I got so into the audible book that I took the personally unprecedented step of getting the print version from the library while in the middle of it so that I could go back and look up some points.
* Another chapter I found oddly fascinating was the part where beautiful Meredith Rand is telling the strangely literal Shane Drinion about how she met her husband when she was committed to a mental institution as a teenager for being a cutter. Drinion seems like he could have Asperger’s or some other kind of social impairment, but gets very interested in her story. This leads to a weird dynamic of him be completely tuned to her with no agenda of his own, and Meredith finds this kind of attention appealing. It was like Scarlett Johansson telling her life story to Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory.
* Creepiest part of the book was the section about a kid who decides to kiss every square inch of his own body and embarks on a long-term campaign of freaky contortions and lip extending exercises. That whole story just made me want to lay down with a bottle of ibuprofen and a heating pad.
* The notes included at the end indicate that there was a lot that Wallace planned to write didn’t get to it. I find this one particularly interesting: “Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. Turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious things you can find (tax returns, televised golf) , and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.”
I would have loved to read what Wallace could have come up with along those lines and the rest of what he had been planning. The Pale King is brilliant in a lot of ways, but it’s also a sad, sad read because most readers will be left haunted by the ghost of what could have been....more
Steve Rogers may be back from the dead, but James ’Bucky’ Barnes is still Captain America. James is dealing with the consequences of a hard decision wSteve Rogers may be back from the dead, but James ’Bucky’ Barnes is still Captain America. James is dealing with the consequences of a hard decision when Baron Zemo targets him for revenge. Zemo uses a variety of methods to make James look out of control and leaks his real identity to the media. Since James’s history includes a long stint as a brainwashed Soviet hitman called Winter Soldier, the American media goes into a typical frenzy as James insist on taking on Zemo by himself despite warnings from his friends that he‘s walking right into a trap.
Brubaker has managed to make the only ‘death’ of a superhero into a story that I’ve actually enjoyed reading instead of just a stunt. However, while I’ve liked these tales of James trying to live up to legacy of Steve Rogers, Brubaker might have used James’s twisted past one too many times now. His time as Cap has been a long struggle for redemption as well as trying to fill the shoes of a legend, but I’d hoped that we’d start seeing James put some of that behind him.
Still, it’s another solid tale from Ed Brubaker, and it feels like this story is going somewhere and not just treading water....more
After several stand-alone literary crime novels and working on television shows like The Wire and Treme, it looks like George Pelecanos is getting bacAfter several stand-alone literary crime novels and working on television shows like The Wire and Treme, it looks like George Pelecanos is getting back into series mode, and he’s created a helluva main character who I hope we will be seeing in many, many books to come.
Spero Lucas is a young veteran of the Iraq war who now works as an investigator for a defense attorney, but Spero also moonlights in recovering stolen property for 40% of the value. A big time pot dealer is awaiting trial in jail, and he asks Spero to look into the theft of several valuable packages of marijuana. While he has a few reservations about working for the dealer, Spero takes the gig and gets mixed up with some dangerous people. Of course, Spero’s time in Iraq taught him a thing or two about dealing with dangerous people.
The set-up for this seems like it could have been the basis for a cheesy action movie starring someone like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, but Pelecanos has crafted a realistic and complex character in Spero. His time in Iraq has left him impatient, unwilling to sit through college classes or to work for anyone but himself. He wants to live his life now, and on his own terms, but he’s also a careful man who handles his affairs with the discipline of a soldier. Having fought for his own life in the desert has also left him more than willing to lethally deal with any threats with a minimum of guilt. Spero isn’t a mad dog or a guy looking to be a bad ass, but if the situation arises, he won’t lose a minute’s sleep if he has to kill someone.
Like all Pelecanos characters, Spero is also a product of his environment. The adopted son of a Greek family, he has deep ties and roots in that community as well as long personal history in Washington D.C. Spero wandering around D.C. while trying to work out who stole the pot while meeting up with a varied cast of characters reminded me a bit of how Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder roams around New York and weaves his personal life into the case he’s working.
Pelecanos also worked a nice hat tip into some old school crime writers in this one. Spero’s adopted brother is an inner city English teacher who uses crime novels by Elmore Leonard and Richard Stark (a/k/a Donald Westlake) in his classes, and there’s a couple of funny and interesting scenes where he’s talking about those books to his students.
If you’re looking for a realistic and gritty crime story with an interesting character, grab a copy of The Cut and enjoy the ride....more
This was a good year for fans of Lawrence Block’s detective Matthew Scudder. First we got a new novel with A Drop of the Hard Stuff and then this collThis was a good year for fans of Lawrence Block’s detective Matthew Scudder. First we got a new novel with A Drop of the Hard Stuff and then this collection of short stories.
In Matt’s long history he’s gone from alcoholic ex-cop dealing with the guilt of accidently killing a child while breaking up a robbery to his eventual sobriety all while acting as an unlicensed private detective who follows his own sometimes odd brand of justice instead of a law book.
These stories cover all the phases of Matt’s life and showcase his complex nature. In one story, Matt becomes enraged at the sleazy boyfriend of a dead woman for stealing her possessions and goes out of his way to screw with him even though he knows he’s not guilty of killing her, yet he’ll also sit down and have a nice lunch with a man he once sent to prison for murder. Matt spent his career identifying various shades of gray in other people and himself and still managed to hang onto his moral compass and a basic sense of decency.
Summing up the stories:
Out the Window - Matt’s still drinking and looks into the apparent suicide of a waitress who worked at his favorite gin joint.
Candle For the Bag Lady - Another one where Matt is still boozing. A neighborhood bag lady was stabbed to death and Matt is surprised to learn that the woman had money and left him a tidy little sum for no reason he can think of. Feeling an obligation he doesn‘t really understand, Matt starts looking into the murder and his investigation gets the neighborhood talking and turns the woman into a minor folk hero with surprising consequences.
By the Dawn’s Early Light - No AA for Matt yet. His drinking buddy Tommy’s wife is murdered and he hires Matt to help solidify the evidence against the two burglars accused of the crime. This is the story that inspired Block to continue the series after he thought it may have reached a conclusion and it’s the basis for the novel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.
Batman’s Helpers - Holy crossover! Matt Scudder teams up with Batman. Sort of. Matt works a freelance gig for a big agency trying to get bootleg Batman merchandise off the New York streets.
Merciful Angel of Death - The administrator of an AIDs hospice fears that a mysterious woman has been killing the patients and asks Matt to investigate.
The Night & The Music - Matt and Elaine hit New York's after hours clubs to hear some jazz. This is just a very short story with no crime at all, but I got to hear Lawrence Block read this one years ago at a signing for Hope to Die so it’s one of my favorites in the book.
Looking for David - While on vacation in Europe, Matt bumps into a man he had once sent to prison for murdering his male lover. Surprisingly, the man invites Matt to lunch and tells him exactly why he committed the crime.
Let’s Get Lost - Another flashback story when Matt was still a cop, and he provides some odd advice to players at a poker game who have a murdered man on their hands.
A Moment of Wrong Thinking - Yet another flashback to his police days where Matt tells Elaine of how his partner handled a case of apparent suicide.
Mick Ballou Looks At the Blank Screen - Matt’s best friend Mick wants to talk about the Soprano’s finale and share some news.
One Last Night at Grogans - Written especially for this collection, Mick has sold the saloon where he and Matt spent so many long nights talking, and the two of them and their spouses spend one last evening in the bar. Hard not to think that this may be Block having Matt take one last bow at the close of the series, but if this is the end, then it was a perfect way to say goodbye....more
Full disclosure about this review: Scribner offered me an ARC in exchange for this write up, and being the cheap and shameless person I am, I acceptedFull disclosure about this review: Scribner offered me an ARC in exchange for this write up, and being the cheap and shameless person I am, I accepted it in the hopes of opening a pipeline of free books. The problem is that I’ve only got about three stars worth of love for this, and I don’t know if that’s good enough to convince them to send me more. So if anyone from Scribner’s asks, I gave it an enthusiastic five stars. Shhhh. It’ll be our little secret.
This starts with a pretty intriguing premise. Niels Bentzon is a Danish police negotiator who has irritated his colleagues with his almost complete refusal to resort to force in hostage situations. As Denmark prepares for an international climate conference with high profile politicians from all over the world attending, Bentzon is given an odd assignment. A cop in Venice has put out an Interpol bulletin documenting the mysterious deaths all over the world of several ‘good’ people with strange marks on their backs and predicting that the next victim is in Denmark.
Bentzon is supposed to find potential good people and warn them but struggles with how to identity potential targets. What constitutes a good person and what is he supposed to warn them about? Niels gets some help from Hannah, a scientist dealing with her own tragedy, and they soon learns that the case is based on an ancient Jewish legend that claims that there are always 36 righteous people on earth. They don’t know that they’ve been chosen, but their presence is necessary to keep the world from ending. And 34 of the 36 are already dead.
If I can believe the blurbs on the back cover, this book was pretty well received and won some prizes in Europe. Overall, I thought the writing was good and the characters interesting. The idea of the 36 righteous people dying off certainly had a lot of potential. However, while it was good enough to hold my interest, I found it lacking in a lot of respects.
It takes a long time to get started. I figured out one of the biggest plot twists early in the book, but then had to endure a few hundred pages of red herrings to get to the big reveal. Time is spent developing characters just to drop them the second they’ve served their purpose. (view spoiler)[What was the point of the subplot of the Arab terrorist? And Niels spends the first half of the book worrying about his wife Katherine in South Africa and their crumbling marriage, but after meeting Hannah and using Katherine to find another victim, he hardly thinks about her at all for the rest of his book and she seemingly vanishes.
This ends up being a story about trying to outrun your fate, but I still don’t know why. If the good people were chosen by God, then what force was killing them off? Was God testing them? And passing the test and generating a new generation of the 36 is accomplished by attempted murder to become ‘evil‘? I understand that they were trying to link this to the story of Abraham and sacrifice, but everything about the threat and it’s resolution just came across as murky and confusing. (hide spoiler)]
Overall, this is one where the execution of the story just didn’t live up to the potential of its basic idea. I enjoyed reading it, but found myself disappointed that there wasn’t more meat on the bone.
I have to think that Robert Crais got a little freaked out during the O.J. Simpson murder trial when the allegations of racism against detective Mark I have to think that Robert Crais got a little freaked out during the O.J. Simpson murder trial when the allegations of racism against detective Mark Fuhrman came up because just a few years earlier he had written this book that had some corrupt LAPD cops including an officer named Mark Thurman.
“Life this is Art. Art, meet my good friend Life. Try not to imitate each other too much if you can help it.”
Private investigator Elvis Cole is hired by a young woman named Jennifer Sheridan because she’s worried that her boyfriend, LAPD officer Mark Fuhrman Thurman, has been behaving oddly and she’s convinced that he’s gotten involved in something illegal. Elvis and his partner Joe Pike are soon caught up in a nasty mess involving South Central gangs and crooked cops
This one was humming along as an entertaining private detective yarn when Crais threw a huge curve ball in the middle of the story that I did not see coming at all. With that one twist, he spun the plot off into an unexpected direction and raised the stakes enourmously. Very nicely done, Mr. Crais.
I particularly like how Crais portrays the relationship between Elvis and Joe when things get hairy. There are no long speeches or discussion of how they know they can count on each other, but when the shit hits the fan, the two men are perfectly in sync and know the next steps they’ll need to take without even discussing it. It’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite tough guy partnerships. ...more
I’d been hoping that I’d enjoy this series to give me some fresh detective stories, but the results had been mixed so far. TheNow that’s more like it!
I’d been hoping that I’d enjoy this series to give me some fresh detective stories, but the results had been mixed so far. The Monkey's Raincoat and Stalking the Angel had a lot I liked, but Elvis Cole and his bad-ass friend Joe Pike were seeming like pale imitations of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser & Hawk to me. Plus, the over the top quirkiness of Elvis’s character and his constant smart ass comments got on my nerves. I’m now thinking that Crais needed a few books to find his own rhythm, and I enjoyed the hell out of this third book in the series.
Elvis gets hired by famous action move director Peter Alan Nelson to locate the son he had from a brief marriage ten years earlier. Nelson is a self-centered prick and supreme asshole enabled by the movie studio and a squad of sycophants. He’s like a less charming version of Brett Ratner. Elvis quickly tracks down the ex-wife Karen to a small town in Connecticut where she’s built a good life for her and her son, but she’s having some issues with being tangled up with the Mafia and a psychotic gangster. Elvis wants to help Karen out, but dealing with the mob will be easy compared to trying to cope with Peter Alan Nelson and his gigantic ego.
I got to meet Robert Crais and watch him on a couple of panels at Bouchercon in St. Louis, and after listening to the guy, my opinion of him improved tremendously. (See Dan’s write-up about our Bouchercon adventure and watching an interview with Crais for more details.)
There were several things that impressed me about Crais. He seemed to take his writing very seriously while still obviously enjoying the hell out of his success and having a great sense of humor. I was surprised at the amount of work he said he put into the books because I think a lot of us tend to imagine that popular thriller writers churn these books out with a minimum of effort while checking their bank accounts, but per Crais, he goes through some long hours in front of the computer and is more than a little frustrated that it hasn’t gotten easier over the years like he once thought it would.
I also liked that Crais can admit when he’s made mistakes and then corrects them. One of my biggest complaints about the first couple of Cole novels was that Elvis was just such a relentless smart ass. I like a wise cracking detective as much as the next crime fiction fan, but if the hero responds with snark to every situation, it gets old in a hurry. Crais said that he realized early in the series that you can’t use humor to respond to things like serious crimes, and he scaled that back. It was evident in this book because when things get ugly, Elvis doesn’t react with a parade of one-liners like he did in the previous books.
I think I’m on my way to becoming a big fan of Robert Crais. You can check out some of the Bouchercon interview I mentioned here. ...more
“Hey, you just appeared out of nowhere! How did you do that? And is that a laptop melted onto a lawn mowAdventures in Time Mowing
Dallas, Texas 11/22/63
“Hey, you just appeared out of nowhere! How did you do that? And is that a laptop melted onto a lawn mower?”
“Yeah. See there was this lightning strike and now I can use my time mower to visit the past and …. Wait a second. If you’re from 1963, how did you know what a laptop is? Oh, shit! You’re a time traveler, too?”
“Yes, I am. What year are you from?”
“2011. My name’s Kemper.”
“No way! I’m from 2011, too. My name is George Amberson. I mean, it’s really Jake Epping. Amberson is the alias I’m using here in the past.”
“Nice to meet you, Jake. So I assume you’re here for JFK and the …uh…event.”
“Of course. You too?”
“Yep. I thought I’d hang out by the grassy knoll, take a few pictures of the fence during the shooting and hopefully put this conspiracy bullshit to bed once and for all.”
“You’re just going to watch? I’m here to stop it.”
“Stop the JFK assassination? Oh, man. That old chestnut? Really? You‘re buying into that myth?”
“What do you mean, Kemper?”
“It’s the old baby boomer fantasy. ‘Oh, if only JFK had lived, everything would have been better. He would have gotten us out of Vietnam and the ‘60s wouldn’t have turned ugly and we’d all be living in paradise filled with puppies, unicorns and rainbows.’ Never mind that JFK was the guy who kicked off the really serious troop escalations into Vietnam and gave a wink and a nod to their army for the coup and assassination of the Diem brothers. It’s the Oliver Stone idea where JFK would have saved us from ourselves if only the Vast Conspiracy hadn’t killed him first.”
“Oh, well, I guess we did think that saving JFK would make things much better, but we don’t think there’s a big conspiracy. I’m just here to stop Oswald.”
“At least we agree on that. But are you sure you should be changing stuff in the past? That seems really dangerous and could cause all kinds of paradoxes. I just wander around and look at stuff, I don’t try to change anything. You don’t want to end up killing your own grandfather, do you? Or worse yet, accidentally become your own grandfather. Yuk!”
“It should be fine. We did a few trial runs, and everything seemed OK.”
“How did you do trial runs? In fact, how do you time travel? I don’t see a time mower around. And who is this ‘we’ you keep mentioning, Jake?”
“I’m a high school English teacher from Maine. I have a friend named Al who found a kind of portal in time. We call it the rabbit hole. Every time you go through it, you wind up at the same day in our home town in 1958. Al went through the rabbit hole over and over for years and discovered that no matter how long you stay, when you go back through the portal, only two minutes have elapsed since you left.”
“Didn’t Al end up with a bunch of versions of himself in 1958 then?”
“No, because every time you go through the portal, history resets itself like you were never there the first time.”
“Let me see if I understand this, Jake. So if your buddy Al went through the portal to 1958 and changed something like saved somebody’s life, and then he went back through to the present, the change would have been made. The person he saved was alive, but if he goes back through the portal to the past again, then everything resets to the original timeline and that person would die, unless Al saved them again, right?”
“Exactly. But there’s a few odd things like you could go back and buy something like a hat. You could wear that hat back to the present, and it’d still be there. And you could go back to the past wearing that hat which resets everything, but when you went to the store you bought it from, the same hat would still be on your head and on the shelf at the same time! Isn’t that cool? It’s how Al was able to accumulate money and a few other items and still take them back to the past when he needed.”
“That doesn’t sound….right. Jake, are you sure about this? I’m getting very nervous that you’re going to wipe me out of existence or something.”
“I told you, Kemper, we did a few trial runs where we saved people from some ugly fates and then went back to the future and everything was fine.”
“Still, you’re talking about saving a guy who is going to have a huge impact on history with no idea of how it will play out.”
“Don’t worry, Al spent a lot of time thinking about this and doing research. He worked it all out.”
“Let me guess. Al is a baby boomer, right?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“OK, so he talked you into doing this, right? He convinced you that everything would be peaches and gravy if JFK had lived, didn‘t he?”
“Uh….kind of.”
“Who is Al then? A physicist? A historian?”
“Uh…no. He owns the local diner.”
“He owns a diner?”
“You see, the time portal he found was in his pantry.”
“He’s a diner owner with a time portal in his pantry?”
“Yes.”
“If Al’s so convinced that this is the right thing to do, how come he didn’t do it himself?”
“He tried. He came through and lived here several years while he watched Oswald. That‘s why neither of us just killed him. We wanted to be absolutely sure he was acting alone, but then Al got really sick and knew he wouldn’t be able to stop Oswald. So he went back to 2011 and told me about the rabbit hole.”
“Oh, hell. I just realized that you had to live here for five years waiting for this moment. Damn, five years in the past must have sucked, Jake.”
“Actually, I’ve gotten used to it. It was hard at first because I had to go back through and fix some things we’d done on our trial runs again. You know, because of the reset. I couldn’t stand to let those bad things happen. I had to spend some time in a really nasty town in Maine called Derry.”
“Derry? I think I’ve heard of it.”
“Really? It was a very ugly place in 1958. They had some child murders.”
“Wow, that sounds really familiar for some reason.”
“Anyhow, then I spent some time in Florida and then moved to a small town in Texas. I started teaching again and built up a whole life for myself as George Amberson. I really like it here in the past now. I’m thinking about trying to stay forever.”
“But what about the segregation and the sexism and the second hand smoke and the lack of high-def television, Jake? Doesn’t that bother you?”
“A little. But they have really good root beer in this time. And stuff is really cheap! I can buy a new car for peanuts.”
“Nice to see that you don’t let a little thing like institutional racism ruin your appreciation of a good deal. Speaking of which, how did you make money? Just teaching?”
“Al gave me some and he had a sheet of sporting events I could bet on to make more. Like I made a pretty penny betting on the Dallas Texans to beat Houston the other night. It was very cool to bet on the Cowboys before they were even the Cowboys.”
“Uh…Jake, do you think the Dallas Texans became the Dallas Cowboys?”
“Sure.”
“That’s not right. The Texans were the AFL team started by Lamar Hunt. The NFL started the Cowboys in Dallas just to screw with him, and he eventually had to move the team to Kansas City and change their name to the Chiefs. The Cowboys were always the Cowboys.”
“Really? Are you sure about that, Kemper?”
“Yes, I’m goddamn sure about it, I’m from Kansas City. Jesus, you are scaring the shit out of me.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you’re back in time screwing around doing stuff like betting football games when you have no idea what the hell you’re even really betting on. I hope to hell you know a lot more about the JFK assassination than you do about pro football.”
“Not really.”
“What??”
“I told you, I was an English teacher, not history. I don’t really know much more than what I remember from my classes in college. I’ve got Al’s notes…”
“The research done by the diner owner with the JFK obsession? That’s all you have to go on as you muck around with history, Jake? Did you at least bring some history books with you?”
“Uh…”
“Oh, you have got to be shitting me.”
“We were pressed for time, Kemper!”
“Pressed for time?? You said that Al spent years getting ready for this? And each time hop only takes you two minutes, right? You guys couldn’t have found twenty minutes to run into a damn library and check out an American history book?”
“Well, in hindsight I guess that would have been a good idea.”
“Ya think? I really wish you would have thought this through more than just doing a couple of test runs. You should have done that like twenty times. It would have taken you just forty minutes, right?”
“It’s not that simple, Kemper. You see, for one thing, the time we spent in the past is still elapsed time. I started this when I was thirty-five, and if I go back, only two minutes will have passed in 2011, but I’ll still be forty. If something goes wrong now, I’d have to go back and do all of it again from 1958 on. I don’t think I can handle that.”
“I hadn’t thought about that. I guess it’s like playing a video game with a really crappy system of save check points. The deeper you get into, the more you have to lose.”
“Exactly, but it’s not just that. You see, the past does not want to be changed. If you try to revise something, it fights back. When we did our trial runs, it threw everything it could at us from car trouble to illness, and the bigger the event, the harder it tries to stop you. So doing a bunch of trial runs just isn’t very practical, Kemper.”
“Summing up here: You’re an English teacher who was talked into trying to stop the JFK assassination via a time portal. You’ve spent years of your life doing this even though there’s clearly some very wonky elements to the resetting of the past when you go through and time itself seems to be working against you? And this seems like a good idea, Jake?”
“Please don’t yell at me, Kemper. I did this with the best of intentions. It’s been very hard living like this, and the past seems to be trying to sabotage my life here now. I’m very tired and scared, and this is all coming to a head, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen …*sob*.”
“Don’t cry. I’m sorry. It’s just…. This doesn’t seem like it was thought through very well, Jake. I mean, you seem like a nice guy. I’ll admit that it sounds like you have good intentions, but you know what the road to hell is paved with.”
“I know, I know. But I’ve come too far to stop now.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Good luck you poor bastard. Try not to break the space/time continuum.”
******************************************
Kemper’s Present Day Note About Stephen King and Kansas City Sports Errors (Or Are They?)
The error where Jake thinks about the Dallas Texans someday becoming the Dallas Cowboys is actually in the book, but since it’s a first person account and Jake is definitely not a historical expert, it’s possible that King knew this and just meant for it to be Jake’s error.*
(*Edit - Actually, I realized later on that even this doesn't make sense since the Cowboys and Texans were both formed in 1960. It was part of the rivalry between the NFL and old AFL. This was a big story in Dallas at the time and both teams did tons of promotions and advertising so it doesn't seem possible that Jake was somehow unaware of the existence of the Cowboys.)
However, this isn’t the first time King has caused me to scratch my head with KC sports references. In The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, there is another oddity when the gunslingers are in an alternate version of Topeka, Kansas, that seems to be the one where King’s The Stand took place. There, they see a car with a bumper sticker that says Kansas City Monarchs instead of Kansas City Royals and this is supposed to be evidence that they’re in an alternate world. But the old Negro Leagues baseball team that had players like Satchel Paige was called the Monarchs, and you can still purchase Monarchs merchandise in KC today. (I’ve got a spiffy Monarchs hat I got at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.)
These wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought for sure that they were just errors, but the fact that they’ve both involved a possibly unreliable narrator or hopping to alternate worlds leaves King some wiggle room that bugs me for some reason. Are they mistakes or is King just being cute? I. DON’T. KNOW.
And that makes me nuts.
Kemper’s Spoilerific Present Day Note About the Ending of 11/22/63
(view spoiler)[ You can tell from my little flight of fancy above that I’m not a big believer of the notion that JFK was some kind of awesome president who would have saved the country from Vietnam and the chaos of the ‘60s. When I heard the concept of this book, I worried that King was succumbing to a bad case of baby boomer JFKitis, and the early parts of the book seem to have confirmed this. Also, while I enjoyed the rabbit hole and reset the timeline rules, I thought the idea that you could bring objects back but they’d still exist in the reset past as a cheat and the kind of internal inconsistency that King allows in his work whenever it’s convenient to the story.
I was greatly relieved that by the end of this book, King seemed to have set aside the rose colored JFK glasses and made that oddity about the objects part of a paradox instead of just a plot contrivance. (hide spoiler)]...more
This isn’t so much a comic story as it is a counseling session for Iron Man, Thor and Steve Rogers (Who usually goes by Captain America but is still oThis isn’t so much a comic story as it is a counseling session for Iron Man, Thor and Steve Rogers (Who usually goes by Captain America but is still operating under his own name after coming back from the dead.) These three were once the core of the Avengers and key players among the superheroes in the Marvel universe, but they’ve had some issues. Steve and Tony Stark had a political disagreement about oversight of super powered types that turned into a full blown civil war so things are a bit tense between them. Thor has been off dealing with his own issues and drifted away from his old friends.
But Marvel’s got The Avengers movie coming out next year so we need to start getting these guys together in some comic books pronto. When superheroes need to work out some stuff, they don’t go retreats to talk about their feelings, they get sucked into other medieval style dimensions and have to fight for their lives. That’s how the healing begins.
This was a light weight story in a lot of ways, but it’s kind of fun if you’re a Marvel fan. I liked that Tony is stuck using an old version of his armor (The one he wore in the comics of my youth and still my favorite.), and that he constantly bitches about how outdated it is. I also like that you can plop Steve Rogers down into an alternate dimension with nothing but the clothes on his back, but in about fifteen minutes he’ll have whipped much ass and equipped himself with a sword and armor as well as picking up a hot elf woman.
My favorite bit was the guys having a conversation around a camp fire about who did or didn’t hook up with a certain female super hero years ago.
Not ground breaking but does a good job of laying some groundwork for the three of them to start interacting again....more
SHIELD Surveillance Report - Subject: Team code named ‘The Avengers’ - Top Secret - Nick Fury’s Eyes Only - Transcript that follows documents a converSHIELD Surveillance Report - Subject: Team code named ‘The Avengers’ - Top Secret - Nick Fury’s Eyes Only - Transcript that follows documents a conversation between Steve Rogers (Former Captain America) and Tony Stark (a/k/a Iron Man).
Steve Rogers: Hey, Tony. How are you doing?
Tony Stark: Not too bad. You wanted to talk about something?
SR: Yeah, I do. Take a seat. I just wanted to let you know that I was initially a little leery of putting you on this team of Avengers.
TS: I understand. After all, we were leading opposite sides of a civil war. And I did have you arrested. Which led to you getting shot and killed. For a while. By the way, now that you've returned are you ever going to take back the Captain America name from Barnes?
SR: Well, Bucky has been doing really well with it, and I’ve got this job keeping tabs on all the super powered people and threats so I’ll just be Steve or now. But I have a feeling I’ll be back in the old red, white and blue before too long.
TS: Funny. I had the same feeling. Anyhow, thanks for letting me on the team. I need to make a lot of things up to a lot of people and this is a good way to do it. It’s great being an Avenger again.
SR: Like I was saying, I was hesitant, but you’ve been doing excellent work so I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate you doing things my way. I know that’s hard for a Type A personality like you to let someone else run the show so…. Are you OK? Got a headache?
TS: I’m getting a psychic message from Professor Xavier.
SR: Charlie’s calling you on the mind phone? Tell him I said hi.
TS: Weeeeelllllll… First I need to tell you something, and you’re not going to like it.
SR: *sigh* What have you done now, Tony?
TS: It’s not like that. Nothing new at least.
SR: Tell me.
TS: Remember that alien Kree/Skull war a while back? After that was done, I got to thinking that we couldn’t just wait around to get surprised by stuff like that. So I made a few calls. Got some guys together, and we kind of decided that we would ….handle certain things…try to steer some big events…take charge of situations that…
SR: Is this a government thing? Some secret team I haven’t heard of before?
TS: Uh….no. We just kind of decided that we’d take care of some things on our own.
SR: Who exactly is ’we’, Tony?
TS: There’s me and Professor Xavier. Because I thought the mutants should be represented. Then Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four because that guy is almost as smart as me. And Dr. Strange. I don’t understand all that crazy new age shit he spouts, but I figured we’d need to keep an eye on the magic side of things. Black Bolt from the Inhumans, but he’s dead now. And Namor…
SR: You included Namor? Hell, Tony, he’s tried to destroy New York before!
TS: Yeah, but he rules the oceans and you know how he gets if he isn’t included.
SR: What did you guys do?
TS: It’s no big deal. We would just meet every now and then and trade some info. If one of us saw a big threat rising, we’d let the others know.
SR: If it wasn’t a big deal, why’d you keep it a secret?
TS: You know how it is, Steve. Look at the weird shit we deal with. So every once in a while we would do something….
SR: Like what?
TS: Oh, like each of us took one of the Infinity Gems and hid them in secret and secure locations to keep them safe.
SR: The Infinity Gems that are so powerful that they control all of reality when put together? The ones we all risked our lives to keep from being used for evil? Those Infinity Gems?
TS: Yep.
SR: Tony, where do you get off thinking that you and your little secret club were entitled to do that?
TS: Hey, who else would you trust to do it? The U.S. government? Hell, they can’t protect their own nuclear secrets and Congress can’t pass a bill to handle the budget, and you want us to turn over objects that could destroy the universe to them?
SR: No one gave you the authority to run a secret society that would make decisions that impact every person on earth.
TS: That’s the point, Steve. There is no traditional authority that’s even close to being able to deal with the stuff we see every day. Think about doomsday weapons, aliens, magic, super villains. Who can handle that crap? The United Nations? Please. It’s gotta be us. We’re the only ones equipped and responsible enough to do it. Honestly, do you feel safer thinking that some government has possession of the Infinity Gems or would you sleep better knowing that Reed has put one in some alternate dimension he created in a lab or that Namor has stashed one on the deepest part of the ocean floor or that I’ve used all my engineering genius to secure the one I have?
SR: Wait a second. You said Black Bolt had one, but he’s dead. What happened to his?
TS: Uh…. We actually didn’t get that one back after he died. That’s why Charles was contacting me. Apparently someone found it and is using it to locate and take the rest of them.
SR: That is just great, Tony. Someone is rounding up the Infinity Gems so now we’re all going to have to…. Hang on. Just got a text. Apparently the Hulk wants to talk. He says he met some guy with some crazy gem who kicked his ass. He has some info.
TS: Uh…Hulk? I probably shouldn’t be around him.
SR: Why not?
TS: Um….Here’s the thing. A while back me and the other guys in the secret group decided that having the Hulk on earth was too big a risk in case he ever goes rage crazy again so we kind of tricked Banner into getting on a space ship and then shot him to another planet.
SR: Would this have anything to do with that thing that happened while I was dead where the Hulk declared war on the entire Earth and showed up with a bunch of aliens and tried to take over?
TS: Yeah, he was kind of pissed.
SR: Just to recap, your argument is that your little secret group is the only one powerful and responsible enough to decide the fate of the world yet your plans have resulted in a pissed off Hulk and someone stealing the Infinity Gems?
TS: When you say it like that, it does sound kind of bad.
SR: We’re going to need to have a long talk about this, Tony. But you’re OK on this Hulk thing. It’s the Red Hulk, not Banner as the Green Hulk who we’re meeting.
TS: Wait. There’s a Red Hulk now? Since when?
SR: I don’t know. I’m supposed to be in charge of this shit, and I can’t keep up with it. ...more
Brian Michael Bendis seemingly ended the Avengers as a super team back in 2004 with his Avengers: Disassembled storyline which promptly led to about 7Brian Michael Bendis seemingly ended the Avengers as a super team back in 2004 with his Avengers: Disassembled storyline which promptly led to about 73 different titles starting up in place of the old one. Somewhere after Young Avengers, New Avengers, The Mighty Avengers and Dark Avengers I started losing count and worried that it was a matter of days before we got Geriatric Avengers and The Avengers: Iceland. So it’s kind of fitting that Bendis is the one bringing back a version somewhat close to the classic Avengers line-up.*
*And I’m sure that big budget movie coming out in 2012 with Iron Man, Captain America, Thor etc. had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Steve Rogers is running superhero related matters these days, and he’s been forming Avengers team to help him manage things. This one is the closest thing to a classic Avengers line-up that we’ve seen in a while with Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye and the replacement Captain America on the team. Plus they threw in Spider-Man and Wolverine for sales purposes and Spider-Woman because…. Well, I’m not really sure about that one. Maybe because Wasp is dead and Black Widow is already on the Secret Avengers and they needed a woman who looks good when drawn in skintight outfits? That’s my best guess.
No sooner is the team formed than they get a visit from old Avenger's enemy and evil time traveler Kang. But Kang isn’t on the attack. Instead he pulls a Doc Brown and warns the Avengers that their kids are ruining the future. Soon enough time itself seems to be breaking down and while some of the team stay behind to try and deal with the chaos, some of the others go to the future and learn some disturbing things about their fates.
There’s a lot of fun stuff in including some good banter and crazy action. I also liked that there’s still a lot of tension brewing between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark over that little civil war they had that led to Steve getting killed for a while. The overall time travel story was kind of a rehashed version of the X-Men classic Days of Future Past and a lot of it seemed more like set-up for a future event than a story concerned with relaunching the title. (Beware the upcoming crossover!). Plus, I am not a fan of John Romitia Jr.’s art. All of his characters are so blocky that they always remind me of Legos.
Still it was good having a version of the Avengers close to the one I grew up with back in action, and I’ll check out more of the title....more
Steve Rogers is back from the dead but not acting as Captain America. Instead, Steve has been appointed the ‘top cop of the world’, the individual in Steve Rogers is back from the dead but not acting as Captain America. Instead, Steve has been appointed the ‘top cop of the world’, the individual in charge of dealing with threats from all the super villains, alien attacks, black magic, powerful artifacts and evil corporations in the Marvel universe. Steve-O probably won’t be getting many days off.
Steve is recruiting new teams of Avengers to deal with all this crap and this includes a secret team to gather intelligence and do covert type operations to head off threats. It’s a bit of a weird mix of heroes with Steve, Black Widow, War Machine, Beast, Valkyrie, the new Ant-Man, and Moon Knight. It gets even weirder when they learn that the powerful Serpent Crown they’ve been trying to locate is linked to a mining effort on Mars so Steve calls in Nova to help and soon they’re all off to the Red Planet.
I love the idea of Steve Rogers heading up a world-wide effort to deal with the all the dangers of the Marvel universe and personally leading a covert team, but I had some doubts about this book. The roster seemed to be a bunch of B-list heroes, and Steve isn’t even sporting his old Captain America duds these days. Plus, launching a title about a group supposedly designed to do sneaky covert stuff but then immediately sending them to Mars to face an interstellar threat seemed a bit out of whack.
But Ed Brubaker wrote this, and Ed Brubaker is The Man in comics to me these days and he delivers once again here. Part of the charm of the Avengers is that their line-ups and adventures have always seemed like genre fusing to some extent with a Norse god teaming up with an armored high-tech billionaire along with a guy who is really good at shooting arrows and then they’ve done everything from standard super villain punching to time travel and fighting aliens. To make that work takes some skill, and Brubaker has plenty of that.
The mix of hero types and personalities gels nicely from the scientific Beast making little quips as he delivers the technobabble to Black Widow’s spy talk to Ant-Man’s nervous chatter. The group works because Steve Rogers is running the show and in Marvel comics, when Steve Rogers talks, superheroes listen.
It’s also nice to see a team comic didn’t feel the need to find a way to shoehorn Wolverine into it for sales purposes....more
In Marvel‘s Ultimate line of comics, the team called the Ultimates is what a long time fan would consider the traditional Avengers with the likes of CIn Marvel‘s Ultimate line of comics, the team called the Ultimates is what a long time fan would consider the traditional Avengers with the likes of Captain America, Iron Man and Thor making up the team. However, the Avengers in this reality are a covert black-ops wet work group that gets the jobs that are too dirty for the more public Ultimates. Since they’re doing the bloody work, Nick Fury needs a bullet-happy maniac on the payroll so naturally he captures Punisher and forces him on the team by implanting a device in his skull that will give him painful jolts if he doesn’t stick to killing only the people that Fury wants dead.
The Avengers are also made up of War Machine, Hawkeye, Black Widow and a new character named Tyrone Cash who was the beta version of The Hulk, and their first assignment together is a doozy. Some freak with a flaming skull and a motorcycle with fire for wheels has been killing several rich men connected to the White House. Since politicians can’t have their biggest campaign donors getting ganked, the order has come down to find and kill the guy everyone assumes is a mutant or some other super-powered weirdo. The Avengers don’t realize that they’re going up against a genuine spirit of vengeance from hell called Ghost Rider.
I usually like Millar’s darker style with superheroes and the way he manages to ground his stories in a recognizable and more realistic world. He actually managed to get me interested in this Punisher (Who I generally don’t care for.), and I was excited to get the Ultimate version of Ghost Rider.
The problem was that there’s some apple and orange mixing going on here. There’s a lot of set-up with the background and capture of Punisher and the recruitment of Cash and that had a lot of promise, but making their target be a supernatural entity just doesn’t work well. There’s a bit of common ground in motivation between Punisher and Ghost Rider, and the Ultimate version of Hawkeye, but having a team that’s primarily about big guns and punching stuff really hard fighting a demon from hell just doesn’t work very well. It’s too out of balance.
Still kind of fun and with some decent character work, I would have liked a villain that was more closely matched to the heroes of the story....more
It’s about time that Joss Whedon started listening to me.
In my review of Vol. 7 - Twilight, I complained that Whedon and his stable of writers had goIt’s about time that Joss Whedon started listening to me.
In my review of Vol. 7 - Twilight, I complained that Whedon and his stable of writers had gotten so excited about being free of the limitations of a television show that they had made the scale too epic and the big sci-fi concepts too wacky and lost the emotional core that always made the show so good. In the afterwards of this collection, Whedon admits that he got carried away and that this finale of the so-called Season 8 was the start of a more down-to-Earth Buffy that we’ll see in Season 9.
Validation!!
Hey, Joss, if you want me to look over anything you’re doing on The Avengers, just let me know. I’d be happy to help you out. For a reasonable fee.
This collection does a decent job of trying to settle all the wild ass craziness that the previous volumes had built up to with Buffy and her crew engaging in a massive battle with dimension hopping demons and the US Army to decide the fate of all magic on Earth. Or something. There’s still a whole bunch of metaphysical mumbo jumbo that’s confusing as hell, but by the end, it does appear that Whedon is trying to get back to the Buffy basics.
In fact, despite my previous bitching on this very subject, I think the Joss-man may have hit that reset button just a little too hard. While I was all for scaling back some of the bat shit craziness in the comics, it seems like there was a bit too much baby in that bathwater. It definitely felt like Buffy had taken several steps back towards the Sunnydale days by the end of this. Fingers crossed that the next phase manages to advance the overall story without going too far over the top but doesn’t try to revert back to an earlier incarnation of the show. ...more
“Wow! I’m a huge fan, Mr. King. It’s an honor to talk to you.”
“Of course it is. The reason“Hello, this is Scott Snyder.”
“Scott, this is Stephen King.”
“Wow! I’m a huge fan, Mr. King. It’s an honor to talk to you.”
“Of course it is. The reason I’m calling is that I was just looking over this American Vampire story you’re working up as a comic series. This is great stuff, kid.”
“Thanks! That means a lot coming from you, Mr. King.”
“Of course it does. This is a fun idea, and I really like this Skinner Sweet character. A vicious Old West bank robber who gets turned into a new breed of vampire is very cool. And I love that your vamps are bloodthirsty monsters. None of this forbidden-love-sparkling-in-the-sun bullshit.”
“Yes, I definitely wanted to make this more of a horror comic with a character who could move through different phases of American history.”
“So in this first phase, you’re going to tell the two parallel stories of Skinner Sweet’s origin back in the cowboy days along with the one set in 1920s Hollywood with the struggling actress and the powerful vamps running the town?”
“That’s the plan, and I’m so glad you liked it. I was hoping we could talk you into writing an introduction for it when….”
“Introduction, hell. Give me a piece of this action. I want to write some of it.”
“You want to write for my comic? Uh….I don‘t think Vertigo can afford to pay what you usually make, Mr. King.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll work something out. Now, I was thinking that I could write up the origin piece of Skinner, and you could do the Hollywood story. How does that sound?”
“You want to write the origin?”
“Is that a problem? You don’t sound very happy about it, Scott.”
“Oh, I’d love to work with you, Mr. King. It’s just that….I’ve been thinking about this Skinner Sweet character for years, and now that I’m getting a chance to finally do it, I was really looking forward to writing that origin.”
“I understand you’re a little disappointed, but this was more of ‘I’m-Telling-You’ versus ‘I’m-Asking-You’ kind of a thing.”
“Uh…You’re telling me that you’re going to get involved with my comic and write the origin story of my character when I was just asking you for an introduction?”
“Basically. But don’t take this as a bad thing. Do you know what having my name on this is going to do for your sales?”
“I know it’d mean a lot more visbility for the series, but I really just wanted an introduction, Mr. King. I mean, have you ever even written for comics before?”
“No, but what’s the big deal? I directed a movie once and had no idea what the hell I was doing and everything came out fine.”
“Mr. King, I don’t know about this…”
“Scott, let me put it this way. I’m all inspired. If you don’t let me work with you on the comic, then I’m just going to have sit down and crank out a 1000 page novel in the next 72 hours about a cowboy vampire working his way through American history. I can probably have it available on Amazon by next Tuesday. Is that what you want?”
“No, definitely not. I guess I should say….Welcome aboard… Maybe?”
“That’s the spirit, Scott. We’ll crank this mother out and then I’ll jam a copy up Stephenie Meyer’s ass the next time I see her. She just annoys the hell out of me.”
“Uh…OK.”
“This is going to be great. I always wanted to write a funny book. Talk to you later.”*
* King’s introduction and Snyder’s afterward don’t give any indication that Snyder was anything but thrilled to have King involved, but I just found it really funny that King was asked for an introduction and essentially invited himself to write half the story. Not too many writers could get away with that. It didn‘t hurt the story one bit and this is a fun and nasty twist on vamps in horror comics. ...more
When the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers and undead caWhen the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers and undead cannibals trying to eat your brains will definitely suck, but I always figured that the trade-off was that at least there’d be no more paying bills, standing in line at the DMV or having to tolerate corporate buzz words and slogans.
But in Zone One not only are there plenty of zombies, there’s still silly bureaucratic rules and paperwork as well as a government more concerned with public perception than in actually accomplishing anything. It’s like the worst of everything.
Mark Spitz (a nickname explained late in the book) was completely average and his only real talent seemed to be a knack for coasting through life with a minimum of fuss. Once the zombie apocalypse comes, Mark Spitz’s ability to get by served him well and allowed him to escape the initial zombie outbreak and survive in the aftermath.
Now Mark Spitz is one of the sweepers assigned to clean-up Manhattan. The surviving government in Buffalo sent the Marines through to kill the most vicious zombies, but there’s a remaining element of ‘stragglers’, about 1% of the undead who just return to old homes or jobs and seem vapor locked there as they mindlessly watch blank tv screens or punch buttons on dead copy machines.
Buffalo has rebranded the refugee camps of survivors with names like Happy Acres and has a plan to clear and repopulate New York. As Mark Spitz spends his days popping and dropping stragglers, he reflects on his aimless days before the zombie outbreak on Last Night and his time as a wandering refugee before he was found by Buffalo’s army.
This is the first book I’m aware of that tries to do the zombie genre as Very Serious Literature. (No, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies doesn’t count.) Overall, it succeeds remarkably well. Mark Spitz’s reflections on pre and post zombie life are intriguing and his melancholy drifting through his days cleaning out Manhattan have the feel of a guy eulogizing an entire world. My only complaint is that the memories and current events sometimes get so tangled that it made it a tad confusing at times to figure out where we were in the story of Mark Spitz.
On the zombie front, Whitehead delivers some tense and horrific action in the encounters with the undead. (In fact, Whitehead delivered more zombie fightin’ action and detailed descriptions of the walking dead in 240 pages than Mira Grant has in her two 500+ page horror genre novels. Read this and take notes, Mira.)
I especially liked the idea that the government in Buffalo has started doing asinine things like issuing orders against the sweepers doing more property damage than necessary while clearing buildings and prohibiting looting while also issuing pamphlets about the dangers of zombie post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems kind of insane at first but after thinking about it a while, I came to the conclusion that it was highly likely that the political image consultants and corporate marketing whizzes would probably, like cockroaches, be the ones to survive a zombie apocalypse and promptly start trying to rebuild the world the only way they know how, conning people into doing shit even if it flies in the face of common sense.
Great book that elevates the entire horror genre. It doesn’t take the #1 spot from my favorite zombie novel, World War Z but I think it’s got a lock on the #2 spot for now. ...more
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