This novel should win some kind of award for Best Character Names. Check some of these out: Henry Skrimshander. Guert Affenlight. Pella Affenlight. AdThis novel should win some kind of award for Best Character Names. Check some of these out: Henry Skrimshander. Guert Affenlight. Pella Affenlight. Adam Starblind.
No John Smiths or Jane Does allowed in this one.
Mike Schwartz is a hard working and ambitious student athlete at second rate Westish College in Wisconsin. At a summer league baseball game, Mike sees Henry Skrimshander play and instantly recognizes that he’s seeing the kind of fielding talent that can only be called genius. Skinny Henry has just finished high school and assumes his days in organized baseball are over because all the college scouts passed him over because of his lack of size and below average hitting ability. Where Henry excels is at playing shortstop where no ball gets past him and all of his throws are right on target.
Mike arranges for Henry to get a baseball scholarship to Westish, and begins putting him through a rigorous training regimen designed to turn him from a talented fielding shortstop into a complete baseball player. As eager Henry flourishes under Mike’s guidance, the Westish baseball team starts winning for the first time, and pro scouts have started talking big money just as Henry is on the verge of breaking the record of his idol for most consecutive games without an error.
Then one bad throw with disastrous consequences shatters Henry’s confidence and suddenly leaves him unable to complete the simplest toss during a game. As Henry struggles to get his mojo back, Mike is realizing that his own ambitions may be bigger than his actual talent. The school president Guert Affenlight, a Herman Melville fanatic, has fallen in love with Henry’s gay roommate Owen, and Guert’s daughter Pella has just come to the campus looking to jumpstart her life after a bad marriage.
You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this one. The author doesn’t engage in the practice of trying to sell the readers on the greatness of the game. Henry loves it because it’s what he was born to do just like a great painter was born to paint, but other characters complain that it’s boring. Even Owen, who is on the team, bitches about it and prefers to read in the dugout rather than watch the games.
For the first half of this book, I was completely sucked in by the characters. Any one of these could have made a great book by themselves: Pella’s backstory about leaving high school to marry an older man and coming to Westish to finally pick up where she left off. Guert’s falling for Owen after a lifetime of heterosexuality and fearing that he was making a fool of himself. Mike’s bitterness over thinking that he’d never be truly great at anything himself while completely dismissing his own talent for motivating and getting the most out of people. All of these were excellent and the writing makes you feel for all of them.
Where it really hits a next level is with Henry’s struggles. Harbach spends a lot of time in the early going telling us about Henry’s development into a top baseball prospect and his incredible grace on the field. And he’s also just a helluva nice guy, the kind of student who doesn’t like to talk in his English class because he’s worried that he’ll hurt his sensitive teacher’s feelings. He works his ass off not for fame and fortune but because he wants to be the best. Then he's helpless to keep it from falling apart just as he’s about to achieve his dream. It’s painful, particularly the way Harbach puts you into Henry’s head on the field where he’s over thinking every play to the point where I almost found myself yelling aloud, “Just throw the fucking ball to first, Henry!”
That’s why I almost consider this a horror story with it’s notion that no matter how much work has gone into something, talent is such a mental thing that it can be destroyed in moments if the wrong set of circumstances cause self doubt to creep in.
Unfortunately, things got a bit too drawn out in the second half of the book, and the various self-destructive cycles that some of the characters enter when things get rough almost turned them from sympathetic into tiresome whiners. Shaving about a hundred pages from this book and tightening it up would have made this a five star read. It’s still an excellent book with some great characters and very good writing. ...more
I started this book at bed time thinking that I’d read a couple of chapters before shutting off the light. I ended up reading almost a 100 pages beforI started this book at bed time thinking that I’d read a couple of chapters before shutting off the light. I ended up reading almost a 100 pages before reluctantly putting it down to get some sleep. So I’m gonna go ahead and put this one in in my personal Page Turner Hall of Fame.
Elvis Cole is babysitting his girlfriend Lucy’s son, Ben, but the kid gets snatched when Elvis takes his eyes off him for like 17 seconds. Then comes a phone call in which the kidnapper tells Elvis that Ben was taken as revenge for something he did during his time as a US Army Ranger in Vietnam. While the mission the kidnapper references was a clusterfuck of the highest order that left Elvis as the sole survivor, it wasn’t his fault, and Elvis can not think of anyone who could possibly hold some kind of grudge over it. Adding to the fun, Lucy’s rich asshole of an ex-husband shows up and makes a bad situation worse.
Crais has a background as a TV writer and often starts with a story that sounds like it could have been the set-up for an episode of Magnum P.I., but he’s got this great ability to take those initial plots into surprising and exciting new directions. So while this one begins with the idea of old war history coming back to bite someone in the ass, Crais then twists that concept into a story you haven’t read before.
Aside from a terrific main plot with a relentless momentum, this one has many bonus features. We get some of Cole’s history, including the origin of why he’s named Elvis. Carol Starkey, the great lead character from Demolition Angel, shows up in an exceptionally strong supporting role. There’s also a top notch sub-plot with Joe Pike being less than his usual bad ass self thanks to injuries sustained in the previous book. I loved that Pike’s idea of physical therapy is going into the Alaskan wilderness and tracking a rabid grizzly bear.
And best of all, (view spoiler)[ it looks like we’re finally rid of Lucy. Which is a great relief because she was in danger of turning into a Susan level of annoyance, and I’m glad to see that Crais apparently learned from Robert B. Parker’s mistakes. (hide spoiler)]
Maybe the best feature of this book is that between it and the previous one, L.A. Requiem, Crais has added a lot of depth to Elvis and Joe Pike so that they no longer seem like just the cliché of the wise ass detective and his bad ass friend. Now they’re damaged characters, and readers have a better understanding of why they are who they are.
Not only is this my favorite of the series, it’s a new addition to my favorite novels of the private detective genre....more
With the first snow storm of the year hitting my area, it seemed like a great time to pick up a Swedish mystery novel. I figured I could put on a comfWith the first snow storm of the year hitting my area, it seemed like a great time to pick up a Swedish mystery novel. I figured I could put on a comfy sweater and sip some coffee while reading about the Stockholm police tracking criminals across a gloomy winter landscape that matched the view out my window. Unfortunately, the book is set during the summer, and the main character spends most of his time in hot and humid Hungary. So I got very confused and ended up putting on my shorts and going out on the deck with a cooler of cold beer. The doctor managed to save four of my toes.
Police detective Martin Beck joins his family on their summer holiday but gets called back to work before he even has time to get a sunburn. A journalist named Alf Matsson has vanished while on an assignment in Budapest and with the newspaper he worked for threatening to cause a political fuss, the Swedish government wants Beck to find him. Beck journeys to Hungary and since the book was written in the mid-60s, this is behind the old Iron Curtain, and Beck has no official status as he tries to locate Matsson.
Thanks to growing up in Cold War era America, I was expecting a book involving a Western European cop going into the Eastern Bloc to get political and involve Beck investigating in a harsh socialist state while dealing with a hostile Hungarian police force. However, the Budapest of this book seems like an idyllic vacation spot, and the police are polite and fairly helpful to Beck. It was a nice surprise that this was more of cop-out-of-his-element story rather than a mystery with political/conspiracy overtones.
This series gets a lot of credit for being among the first police procedurals, and it’s easy to see the influence they had on the genre. Val McDermid has a great introduction in this edition that talks about how groundbreaking the books were at the time and how many of the elements introduced in them went on to become clichés. Unfortunately, this copycatting has familiarized me with the style enough to enable me to guess the solution to the mystery about half way through the book.
However, I also liked the way that so much of what Beck is feeling and thinking is explained via his actions and not exposition or dialogue. There are several hints that his marriage isn’t going so well and you get the feeling that he welcomes the chance to get away from a family vacation, but it’s never expressed plainly. The way we only know Beck through the way approaches his police work reminds me a lot of the early Matt Scudder novels by Lawrence Block....more
A bunch of quirky characters wear clothes from the ‘70s and use old technology like a portable 8-track player while dealing with each other’s personalA bunch of quirky characters wear clothes from the ‘70s and use old technology like a portable 8-track player while dealing with each other’s personal tics? I honestly wasn’t sure if I was reading a Michael Chabon novel or a Wes Anderson screenplay for a while.
Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are co-owners of a vintage record store in Oakland, but the business is circling the drain. A former pro football player is about to finish them off by opening up a huge retail store featuring an extensive used vinyl section just down the street. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, are also partners in a midwife practice, but when a home delivery goes sour, they also find their business at risk.
Archy and Gwen are about to have a baby, but he can’t stop cheating on her. The sudden appearance of a 14 year old son named Titus he has never acknowledged doesn’t do a lot for the marital harmony. Nat’s son Julius is geeky kid with a love of comic books and Tarantino movies who is just realizing that he’s gay and falls for Titus. If that wasn’t enough general confusion, Archy’s estranged father, a former star of black exploitation movies, shows up again with a blackmail scheme in which he tries to shake down the ex-athlete that is about to put Archy out of business.
As you can tell from the summary, there’s a lot going on in this book. Archy is at the heart of it, and he’s an interesting character. An oversized vinyl buff who wears vintage leisure suits, Archy seems like a calm and mellow guy who rolls with the punches, but over the course of the book Chabon shows how he’s a man terrified of choice and consequences so he floats along trying to keep everything the same even as he knows big changes are inevitable with a baby on the way and his business going under. He reminded me a lot of another Chabon character, Grady Tripp from Wonder Boys.
The other characters are well thought out and the whole story has a funny bittersweet feel to it. There’s a couple of times where I felt like a character deserved a brisk slap for being too self-indulgent, but Chabon does a good job of sensing those moments and having another character call them on it.
I particularly liked that even though this involved a collectible industry and has a lot of geek shout-outs to comic books and other nerd touchstones, that Chabon never lets it devolve into nostalgia porn. There’s an interesting undercurrent of the old school small community based business versus the modern corporate world, but Chabon doesn’t supply easy answers. It’s pointed out that the big store would create hundreds of jobs and revitalize a dying neighborhood while the used record store is more of a hobby than a business for Archy and Nat. Gwen and Aviva have to deal with hospital politics to keep their privileges for their home birth practice while the doctors treat them like crap. The biggest struggles the characters have with each other and themselves is trying to strike the balance of trying to work on their own terms while being responsible and providing for their families.
While it’s an entertaining read filled with off-beat characters, it never really sucked me in the same way that The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay did, and I’d rank Wonder Boys and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union ahead of it. It’s certainly not a bad book, it just doesn't seem to have the depth that Chabon’s other work I’ve read had. ...more
Junot Diaz brings back Yunior from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as the narrator for most of the stories but leaves out the Dominican history aJunot Diaz brings back Yunior from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as the narrator for most of the stories but leaves out the Dominican history and the geek references. Instead we get to read about heartbreak, infidelity, remorse, alienation and cancer.
You know, the stuff that makes life worth living.
Taken as a whole, these powerful stories give us a history for Yunior as he grows up in Jersey as a Dominican immigrant dealing with his family and his tendency to cheat on the women in his life until one betrayal too many sends him into a downward spiral that seemingly lasts for years.
The odd thing here is that I never felt that depressed or sad while reading. It isn’t that Diaz doesn’t create sympathy for his characters. He does, and he does it often. So even though the stories are pretty ugly on one level, the writing flows so well that it never felt like I was stuck in a dark place even though they aren’t exactly cheerful reads.
I need only to quote the back cover of this book to give you an idea of what it’s all about:
“Crime Takes A Lot Of Punishment From STARSKY & HUTCH -- SI need only to quote the back cover of this book to give you an idea of what it’s all about:
“Crime Takes A Lot Of Punishment From STARSKY & HUTCH -- Sawed off shotguns at point-blank range can make one hell of a mess. But the goons who made the hit get more than they bargained for when Starsky and Hutch start scouring the sewers and salons of the big city for clues to a deadly crime - a crime that has the boys looking inside their own department for answers!”
I loved this show as a kid with cops racing around in a bright red Gran Torino and shooting it out with bad guys. What wasn’t to love? In fact, I remember having a toy cap gun that was sold as show merchandise that was realistic enough to probably get me shot by any cop who ever saw me playing with it. (Safety standards for children were pretty lax in the ‘70s. We didn’t need no bright orange doo-hickeys on our toy guns or helmets while riding bikes. And lawn darts featured a steel weight that was designed to be flung far into the air so it could come down and crack the skull of any kid not paying attention. Good times..good times…)
Anyhow, when I saw a couple of Starsky & Hutch tie-in novels when browsing a used book store I felt their siren call and rushed home to put the theme song on a loop to get in the proper mood while reading.
How’s the book? Well, it’s the adaptation of the screen play of the pilot episode of a ‘70s cop show. It ain’t exactly War & Peace.
But I did get a lot of laughs out of it. The tough guy cop talk with little profanity and the completely bonkers police procedures made for some unintentional hilarity. If you were ever a fan of the show, it’s a fun look back. However, I was surprised at how often two supposedly heterosexual cops end up naked together while performing their duty.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any episodes of the show so my memory of it is pretty hazy, but reading this did remind me of something that bothered me about the movie remake that was done a few years back. I understand playing the concept for laughs and casting Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear was inspired, but why did they change the basic character traits of the two leads from the show? Hutch was the more refined and intellectual one and Starsky was the sloppier loose cannon type so I’m not sure why they changed that in the movie? I mean, are Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson just so incapable of playing against type that they had to……. Never mind. I just answered my own question....more
1) Star crossed lovers who were soldiers in opposing armies of an intersteller war who have a baby and are being hunted bSome of the elements in Saga:
1) Star crossed lovers who were soldiers in opposing armies of an intersteller war who have a baby and are being hunted by both sides. 2) A royal family comprised of humanistic robots with TVs for heads. 3) Magic 4) Ghosts. 5) A bounty hunter with a giant cat that acts as a lie detector. 6) A forest that grows wooden rocketships
And that’s just the start.
I’m a huge fan of Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina so no surprise that I loved this. What is surprising is just how bat shit crazy he made this story. Yes, Y:TLM was about the sudden deaths of almost every male on earth, and Ex Machina used the idea of a super hero as the mayor of New York right after 9/11, but both of those started with the real world as the baseline and then explored what happened if you introduced a fantastic element to it.
Saga has no similar foundation in a recognizable reality, yet once again Vaughan creates familiar and likeable characters that you can’t help but root for. Alana and Marko’s quest to find a safe place to raise their baby is something that anyone can relate to. When they bicker, it reads like real people squabbling. So even though he has horns like a ram and she looks like Rosario Dawson with wings, they could be any young couple trying to protect themselves and their child in desperate circumstances. That the circumstances are like a dream that Neil Gaiman would have while running a high fever and taking too much cold medicine is just the window dressing that make the story so much fun.
It’s like a sci-fi fairy tale with a layer of gritty realism to it. It’s also one of the best comics I’ve read recently, and I can’t wait to see how this story plays out....more
Private detective Milo Milodragovich could share the old Pinkerton’s motto of “We Never Sleep”, but in Milo’s case that’s probably because of all the Private detective Milo Milodragovich could share the old Pinkerton’s motto of “We Never Sleep”, but in Milo’s case that’s probably because of all the cocaine he does.
Actually, at the beginning of this one, Milo is keeping a reasonably low profile following the events of The Wrong Case. He’s working as a low level rent-a-cop for a security agency run by Colonel Haliburton* and is staying relatively clean and sober by restricting his chemical intake to peppermint schnapps. However, after a nasty incident on the security job and a meeting with the elderly mistress of his late father, Milo finds himself working two cases that soon have him back on the bottle and tooting coke like a character on Miami Vice.
What should be a couple of routine matters soon turn ugly and in true Crumley fashion, Milo’s method of working a case involves many miles of driving around with lots of guns and drugs and there’s more than a little drinking going on. It’s glorious!
This one is pretty typical of the Crumley crime novels with one of his two main characters getting in way over his head and trying to cope with it through drug abuse, excessive violence and black humor. It’s been said many times, but it bears repeating that these books are like a mix of Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson.
It’s frantically paced noir with a cynical world view that’s a helluva lot of fun to read.
* (The idea that Milo is working for a security company owned by a guy named Haliburton made me laugh repeatedly as I thought about this joke from 30 Rock.)...more
What’s this? Faint signs of hope? A small sliver of optimism in a world filled with death and despair? I must have picked up the wrong book. This can’What’s this? Faint signs of hope? A small sliver of optimism in a world filled with death and despair? I must have picked up the wrong book. This can’t be a Walking Dead collection. Let me check the cover….. Huh. I’ll be damned.
Rick and the small community of people who have managed to avoid becoming zombie chow are trying to find enough food to survive a winter and keep the undead from bunching up at their walls when a stranger shows up. The guy looks like Jesus and has the fighting skills of the X-Men’s Gambit, and he’s got a story that seems too good to be true.
Jesus Gambit claims to be the representative of a community of over two hundred people who have carved out a safe zone and trades with other communities in the area, and he wants Rick’s people to join in. Since Rick has had some pretty shitty luck with strangers, he is more than wary of Jesus Gambit’s offer. In fact, some worry that Rick’s suspicion is going to cause Jesus Gambit’s people to not work with them.
In a normal Walking Dead story, everything should go to hell with lots of people getting dead, and Rick ending up in ever more desperate circumstances. But there’s a change in this that could be the beginning of a new phase where Rick and company begin to build a new world rather than just try to survive the wreckage of the old one.
Or Kirkman could just pull the rug out from under them and have a whole bunch of them eaten by zombies or murdered or raped or have their limbs chopped off, etc. etc.
Bomb technician Carol Starkey got blown to hell. Then she came back. Actually, that’s not right. Starkey got blown up, died for a couple of minute, waBomb technician Carol Starkey got blown to hell. Then she came back. Actually, that’s not right. Starkey got blown up, died for a couple of minute, was revived and her life has been hell ever since.
Three years later and Carol has never emotionally recovered from the blast that temporarily killed her and permanently killed her partner/secret lover. Working as a detective in the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section, Carol is trying to convince the bosses to bring her back as a bomb tech, but she’s drinking on the job and prone to panic attacks that she‘s trying to hide. She’s also smoking three packs a day, can’t sleep more than a couple of hours a night even after liberal doses of gin, and she changes therapists constantly.
After another bomb tech is killed by a sophisticated device, an ATF agent named Pell shows up with the news that a serial bomber who calls himself Mr. Red has come to LA. Mr. Red’s goal is to make it onto the FBI’s top ten most wanted list, and he likes to target the cops who defuse explosives.
Overall, this was a pretty entertaining thriller. Crais has a background in TV writing, and he tends to set things up in terms of clichés. (His Elvis Cole/Joe Pike characters are classic examples of the smart-ass private detective and his bad ass friend.) This one follows that pattern because the whole cop-traumatized-by-terrible-event-working-another-case-that-brings-back-memories is nothing new. What Crais does well is to start with a familiar set-up and then twist it. That’s definitely the case here with the story zigzagging in several directions I didn’t see coming.
I also liked Carol as a character because she’s a hot mess, but she’s got real reasons for being so. She’s in pain, she’s socially awkward, her life is in shambles, but she’s still trying to pull it together even if she isn’t doing a great job of it.
The main complaint with this is the romantic sub-plot between Carol and Pell that gets shoe horned in here. Far too many stories in the crime thriller genre feel the need to work these in, and they’re generally unbelievable and add nothing to the story. An attraction between Carol and Pell might have been a nice complication, but having two people talking about loving each other just a few days after meeting made me roll my eyes. It felt like Crais put this in just because it’s expected, and that he didn’t really buy it either.
Still, it’s a tense and entertaining thriller with good twists and turns to it. I would have gone a low 4 star on it, but the romance dropped it a high 3.
Bonus feature: Dan and I saw Crais do an interview at Bouchercon last year, and he had a very entertaining story about how he wrote this book in secret when he should have been working on another Elvis Cole novel. You can watch it here....more
The never ending battle between Batman and the villains of Gotham City continues, and the cops of the GCPD’s Major Crimes Unit are often caught in theThe never ending battle between Batman and the villains of Gotham City continues, and the cops of the GCPD’s Major Crimes Unit are often caught in the crossfire.
The second collection of the comics finds the detectives trying to figure out the mystery of two murders that had an exotic poison as the weapon, and the suicide of a disturbed man leads to the cold case bombing of a high school baseball team. Oh, and the Joker terrorizes the city with a sniper rifle.
You know, just another day at the office.
I’m absolutely loving this comic with it’s combination of a noirish police procedural filled with great characters that occasionally brushes up against the mass insanity of Batman’s villains. It’s kind of like if the TV show Homicide was mixed in with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.*
* You can tell that Nolan’s movies were heavily influenced by Gotham Central with their focus on Batman’s relationship with the cops. I heard an interview with Ed Brubaker recently where he noted that one scene from Dark Knight was so obviously drawn from the comics that DC actually paid him for it while including a legal letter that they were under no obligation to do so.
It’s the little touches that make this thing work for me. For example, the first story is based on Stacy, the temp clerk who technically isn’t a city employee which makes her the only person who can legally turn on the bat signal since any police personnel doing it would be an admission that the department uses a vigilante. That's such a great touch of bureaucratic and legal tomfoolery that it makes Gotham feel that much more real.
I also continue to love the mixed reactions of the cops to their predicament in being caught up in Batman’s world. When they figure out that its the Joker shooting people, there’s a level of fear and panic that causes some to essentially hope that Batman will save them, yet there’s also the resentment that comes because he seems to be the source of the freaks who do so much damage to the normal citizens of Gotham.
What makes this series really shine is the stable of great characters that make up the MCU. Each of the cops is a fully realized person that struggles with their own issues as they try to do their job in a city that seems always on the verge of utter chaos. ...more
Three men who are down on their luck go looking for gold in the mountains of a desert.
“Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don'Three men who are down on their luck go looking for gold in the mountains of a desert.
“Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!”
No, no, this isn't The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The characters in this have far more in common with Donald Westlake’s luckless thief Dortmunder than they do with Humphrey Bogart.
In a little shit splat of a town Harry is a prison guard scamming disability checks that he uses to finance his drinking. Frank is an elderly Native American who is more scared of his angry overbearing daughter than he is of the cancer that is killing him. Ricky isn't too bright but dearly loves his wife and daughter and hopes to someday get them out of the trailer park they’re living in.
While lying in an alley outside a bar with puke in his pants, Harry overhears a conversation that gets him interested in the gold mines of the nearby Chocolate Mountains, and he decides that’s the way to change his fortunes. When circumstances bring Rick and Frank into the plan, Frank reveals some family history that gives them a clue to a fortune in gold that might be hidden away in the old Big Maria mine.
The problem is that the Big Maria is located in the middle of the mountains where the US military tests out all of its artillery, bombs, and mines. Their efforts to locate the gold result in a dark comedy of errors and explosions.
Like his first novel Dove Season, Johnny Shaw has written a very funny story set in the desert country of the California/Arizona border populated with a collection of misfits and losers. The great thing about it is that Shaw makes you care about these people and their struggle to improve their lives and doesn't treat them like cartoon cliches.
There are a lot of twists to the story that is often funny and graphically gross, usually at the same time. The ending was somewhat abrupt, and I liked Dove Season a bit more than this one. Still it’s a fun read and a humorous story about guys seeking their fortunes with grim determination no matter what life throws at them.
Full disclosure: I have done an unpaid review for the Blood & Tacos quarterly e-magazine that Johnny Shaw edits and writes for. ...more
The interwebs tells me that his official title of this is Kick-Ass 2: Balls to the Wall, but my copy is titled simply Kick-Ass. I’m not sure what happThe interwebs tells me that his official title of this is Kick-Ass 2: Balls to the Wall, but my copy is titled simply Kick-Ass. I’m not sure what happened, but if Mark Millar needs any suggestions, I came up with these options:
Kick-Ass 2: Kick Harder
Kick-Ass 2: The Kickening
Kick-Ass 2: Wrath of Ass
Kick Ass 2: Electric Boogalo
You’re welcome, Mark.
In the first collection, teen-age nerd Dave Lizewski took his love of superhero comic books to the extreme when he put on a costume and started patrolling the streets while calling himself Kick-Ass. Unfortunately for Dave, his enthusiasm was far greater than his fighting skills so he took far more punishment then he dished out, and his naïve efforts got him mixed up in a war between the mob and another costumed vigilante, Hit Girl. Despite being only ten years old, Hit Girl is a deadly fighter with a foul mouth.
Picking up shortly after the events of the previous story, Hit Girl has retired to her civilian life as Mindy and is just trying to be a normal kid. Dave apparently didn’t learn his lesson and is still trying to be a superhero. His efforts have inspired others to put on masks and join the fight against crime, and Dave fulfills one of his nerd dreams by becoming a member of a superhero team. Unfortunately, his old foe Red Mist is back and is spending a fortune recruiting so-called super villains. Changing his name from Red Mist to The Motherfucker, his gang of thugs embark on a sadistic and brutal round of crimes to take revenge on Kick-Ass.
While I liked the original Kick-Ass and it’s movie adaptation, I thought it had a contradiction at the heart of it in that sometimes Millar strips away the illusion of stylized violence to show how ridiculous the idea of putting on a costume and taking on criminals is by having Kick-Ass being badly injured repeatedly yet then he’ll have Hit Girl engage in graphic over the top violence that asks the reader to believe that a pre-teen girl could defeat an army of heavily armed mob thugs.
That contradiction is even more evident here since Dave’s life is wrecked and permanently damaged by his actions as Kick-Ass. Dave has clung hard to the delusion of being a superhero but this time a lot of innocent people are killed or hurt as a direct result of Kick-Ass and for a long time it seems that Millar’s point is to show how even a well-meaning fantasy can screw someone up if they refuse to acknowledge reality. However, when things are at their worst for Dave, the solution becomes to once again put on a costume and engage in even more graphic violence.
This really hit home for me in one scene where Hit Girl is talking to a cop and refers to herself as a superhero. The cop scoffs, “You are NOT a superhero. You’re a little girl with a personality disorder.” And he’s absolutely right. Yet the comics set Hit Girl up as the one we’re supposed to cheer for as she routinely engages in mass murder.
Maybe Millar is trying to make some complex points about violence as entertainment, but it seems more like he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too.
Fans of this should also check out the movie Super for more carnage resulting from a geek trying to play superhero....more
While some people waste their time writing Twilight fan-fiction and then convert it into best selling mommy porn, I prefer to concentrate on my own brWhile some people waste their time writing Twilight fan-fiction and then convert it into best selling mommy porn, I prefer to concentrate on my own brand of fan-fic in which American vampire Skinner Sweet messily murders every character that Stephenie Meyer ever created. I’m hoping to get that book deal any day now.
There are several different stories contained in this collection. A flashback to Skinner’s pre-vampire days as a cavalry officer fighting Indians shows that he may once have been human, but he’s always been an asshole. This one also adds some surprising layers to his relationship to Jim Book.
In the 1950s, a young greaser named Travis Kidd is a rogue vampire hunter and mixes it up some suburban bloodsuckers while refusing to work for the Vassals of the Morning Star.
Calvin Poole is a black man traveling through the segregated south as the civil rights movement is heating up which is dangerous enough but being a vampire helps him deal with a pack of murderous racists.
This is a series that is getting more intriguing the deeper I get into it. There’s several shocking revelations in this one that build on what we've seen before while Scott Snyder patiently creates a mythology that is based on different vampire species at war with each other and humans through American history. I can’t wait to see what kind of blood soaked horror he comes up with for those damn dirty hippies in the '60s. ...more
Looking back at it, I’m not even sure why I read this book. The Passage left so little impression on me that I remembered almost nothing about it and Looking back at it, I’m not even sure why I read this book. The Passage left so little impression on me that I remembered almost nothing about it and could barely muster the energy to look on-line for a summary of it. So why read another 500 pages of that story? Maybe it was the hype? Or because I’m such a sucker for post-apocalyptic stories?
Actually, I now think that these books are like one of those B-level restaurants that you end up eating at all the time, but you don’t really know why. The food is just OK and the price is right and it’s close to your house and you never got a nasty case of the screaming greasies after eating there, but it’s not a place you’d recommend to any of your friends or pass up a decent frozen pizza for a meal there. Much like one of these middle-of-the-road restaurants provides gut pack for your belly, these books are gut pack for the mind. It’s not terrible, but you can think of a lot better options.
Which is weird because it’s a horror novel going for epic scale with no shortage of blood and monsters so you’d think it’d elicit some kind of response. Instead it just kept reminding me of other things I liked more. A post-apocalyptic world with a huge battle between good and evil is more satisfying in The Stand. Playing with the idea of different strains of vampires is done much better in Scott Snyder’s American Vampire comics. The crazy vampire lady concept was a lot more fun when Drusilla did it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Blade wielding Alicia certainly resembles Alice in the Resident Evil films. (You know a book isn’t entertaining you much when you start daydreaming about watching Resident Evil movies instead of reading it.)
I don’t know if it’s because of his background writing the Serious Lit-A-Chur (I haven’t read any of his other books.), but it felt like Cronin glumly slogged through this and that his pulse rate never jumped once. If you’re going to write a post-apocalyptic novel, there needs to be a certain amount of inappropriate excitement involved. I read something by Stephen King once where he talked about taking grim satisfaction in destroying the world in The Stand and when you read that, you can feel the dark glee he took in just smashing the whole thing. Cronin just doesn't seem like he’s that into it. Why bother writing the end of civilization if you’re not gonna have some fun with it?
Part of the problem may be that Cronin skips over that phase for the most part. He showed us the beginnings of the vampire plague but then jumped forward by decades so we never really got to see things come undone. I think it’s telling that the part I enjoyed the most in both books was the glimpse we got of the world going belly up during the outbreak with Kittridge, Danny the autistic bus driver and all the others. That’s the one part of the book where the characters seemed distinctly different from one another and where there’s some real passion flowing. Even though I found the character of Lila extremely annoying because a pregnant surgeon who avoids dealing the with the on-going apocalypse by going crazy town banana pants and acting like nothing is wrong should be the first one to get her blood drained, at least she evoked some kind of reaction from me. Whereas the other characters in the book were essentially a big shrug.
This book is such a yawn that I had a hard time deciding on whether to give it 2 or 3 stars. I finally decided that giving it 2 stars would actually mean that I cared enough to downgrade it. But I don’t. This thing is the epitome of average so 3 stars it is....more
If Andrew Vachss did his books Sesame Street style, then this one would be brought to you by the letter M because in addition to Max, Michelle, Mama aIf Andrew Vachss did his books Sesame Street style, then this one would be brought to you by the letter M because in addition to Max, Michelle, Mama and the Mole, he adds characters named Mortay, McGowan, Morelli, Morales and Marques. Of course, if Vachss did Sesame Street then Bert and Ernie would turn out to be pedophiles that would lure Elmo into their house with promises of candy while Big Bird filmed it. And you don't even want to know what that freak Mr. Snuffleupagus would be doing.
Vachss’s hero Burke is back for another lighthearted and fun-filled adventure in a glittering New York filled with rainbows and unicorns. Someone has been rolling around in a van and randomly shooting prostitutes. A stripper named Belle contacts Burke to arrange a meeting with a pimp who wants to offer a bounty on the so called Ghost Van. Burke accepts the gig and strikes up a relationship with Belle. Since this is a Vachss novel, Belle turns out to have a history messed up enough to keep Dr. Phil booked for years.
Things take a dark turn when Burke’s friend Prof is badly injured while making inquiries on the street about the van. Prof’s attacker was a crazy kung-fu master named Mortay who wants to draw their buddy Max into a fight to the death. Burke scrambles to protect Max, learn Mortay’s connection to the Ghost Van and deal with his new romance.
While I generally like the Burke novels, they wear me down. Burke’s world is a relentlessly grim place with freaks and criminals waiting around every corner. While I like the idea of this urban survivor living off the grid and working these crazy jobs, the stories are just so goddamn bleak that I don’t dare read them too often lest I fall into a dark depression that would leave me weeping under the covers for days at a time.
I had a lot of other problems with this one, too. Far too much time is spent with his relationship with Belle. Essentially they instantly fall in love, and Burke is showing her every aspect of his life which doesn’t really fit with the character's paranoid nature. And as you’d expect from two people with traumatic issues in their childhoods, their relationship is pretty fucked up. She’s needy and constantly demanding more while Burke is always instructing her on how he expects his woman to behave. And of course (view spoiler)[ Belle ends up sacrificing her life for Burke at the end. Was it even necessary? Didn’t seem like it. (hide spoiler)]
This relationship stuff was almost enough to get me to drop this to two stars but one of Burke’s crazy and ultra-violent scams to draw out Mortay was enough to bump it back up to three. ...more
I didn't really need this book because as the proud owner of five cats, I know full well that the only reason I’m still breathing is because their lacI didn't really need this book because as the proud owner of five cats, I know full well that the only reason I’m still breathing is because their lack of thumbs makes it impossible for them to open their favorite cans of food.
Readers of Matthew Inman’s website The Oatmeal should have a pretty good idea what to expect here. There are lots of very funny comics related to cat behavior well as a chapter filled with The Bobcats, two necktie wearing felines who make the office hell for their coworkers.
The bonus on this one is that the wife and I got to meet Inman at a book signing where he did a Q&A as well as relate several stories about his life that included cats, dogs, horses, bears, frozen gerbils, a fish named Peter Jennings, a house fire and acting friendly towards a neo-Nazi kid just to use his Game Boy....more
I always thought that James Ellroy was exaggerating the corrupt and scandalous nature of Los Angeles in his books. After reading this, I’m thinking thI always thought that James Ellroy was exaggerating the corrupt and scandalous nature of Los Angeles in his books. After reading this, I’m thinking that he may have actually toned it down.
This is essentially the parallel biographies of two men: Mickey Cohen and William Parker. Cohen was an illiterate small time thug who made a name for himself by working for the Capone mob before heading west and apprenticing under Bugsy Siegel and eventually becoming the head of organized crime from late ‘40s into the ‘60s. Parker joined a corrupt and highly politicized police force in the ‘20s and eventually worked his way up to the top position in 1950 through a mixture of incorruptibility and shrewd use of the bureaucracy
Buntin uses the lives of Cohen and Parker to tell the history of the city itself. Their combined story includes local politicians, Hollywood stars, presidents, gangsters and strippers just to name a few. The push and pull between the criminal element and the police would go on to shape the city in various ways. By the end of it, Buntin does a long section that details how Parker’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimate grievances that minorities had with the police department created a culture that got passed on and had a hand in the Rodney King riots and other image issues that haunt the LAPD to this day.
It was an interesting way to tell the history of a city and includes a lot of interesting anecdotes and trivia. For example, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was a LAPD officer in their public relations department who wrote speeches for Parker, and it was his work reviewing scripts for the TV show Dragnet as part of their deal with the department for access to police files that got him into television. ...more
I like comic books. I like Iron Man. I like noir. I like Scott Snyder’s writing. So I liked this. More creators of entertainment should make stuff basI like comic books. I like Iron Man. I like noir. I like Scott Snyder’s writing. So I liked this. More creators of entertainment should make stuff based on things I like. Because then I will like them.
In the 1930s wealthy Tony Stark races around the world seeking rare and weird objects of historical and scientific significance. The team that helps him includes a writer who documents Tony’s adventures in adventure magazines. However, Tony has a secret that is making him reckless, and when he finds clues about a powerful artifact located in the sunken depths of Atlantis, he rushes off to find it.
Oh, and his company has been building a new personalized version of a tank for the military. That kind of comes up later.
If I want to nitpick, I’d say that this is really pulp adventure, not noir. It’s got a lot more in common with Doc Savage than anything written by Raymond Chandler or James Cain. But if you’re in the mood for a story that puts that kind of twist on a modern superhero, you’d probably enjoy this. It’s quick and clever, and it’s a lot of fun watching Tony Stark act like Indiana Jones. Only it’s like Indy has an Iron Man suit instead of a bullwhip when he fights Nazis.
Setting today’s superheroes in different time periods or genres has been done often enough that this isn’t groundbreaking, but it makes for an entertaining story. ...more
After all these John Sandford books I’m starting to wonder how there could possibly be anyone left alive in Minnesota.
Three young people try to pull aAfter all these John Sandford books I’m starting to wonder how there could possibly be anyone left alive in Minnesota.
Three young people try to pull a burglary that turns into murder and starts them on a killing spree through a rural area. State cop Virgil Flowers is in hot pursuit, but it’s impossible to predict where they’ll go next and many an innocent person winds up dead as the kids rampage across the countryside.
Sandford continues to add new layers to Virgil and differentiate him from the Lucas Davenport character so that this series is seeming less like a spin-off side project and more than capable of standing on its own. The ending really illustrates how far apart the two cops are. (view spoiler)[ Davenport’s reaction to Virgil’s outrage at the sheriff’s ambush of Jimmy and Becky is especially interesting when you consider some of the things Lucas has done in his career. (hide spoiler)]
Virgil’s roaming around the area he grew up and interacting with people from his past reminded me a bit of the dynamic of Justified. Flowers isn’t a shooter like Raylan Givens, but he’s equally good at laying on the good ole boy charm and knowing precisely how to work a redneck to get the info he needs.
It’s another fast and furious thriller from Sandford that ends up going in some surprising directions....more
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