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| B00DT9TFIW
| 3.60
| 107
| 1934
| Jul 06, 2013
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it was amazing
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[Doug's Note: As always, 3-star reviews are me being honest while 5-star reviews are me embracing the sheer joy of a book like this. In fact, this is
[Doug's Note: As always, 3-star reviews are me being honest while 5-star reviews are me embracing the sheer joy of a book like this. In fact, this is the first book I have read in some time that I feel I might just straight up make a hobby recommending to people without context, referencing it madly and stochastically.] "Crime was one thing, and a duchess was another." This is a weird, broken little book. For maybe a fifth of the read-time there is a quite decent if not groundbreaking horror story (most prominently towards the end in which it goes full horror for a few pages). The kind of stuff that E. F. Benson or Arthur Machen might have written when in a mood. Structure-wise, "The Great God Pan" is in evidence. It namechecks Jekyll and Hyde. It calls upon the classics but makes them a bit rougher, a bit queer-er, a lot more sexual. It openly confronts its sexuality and baseness rather than hiding it in metaphor. Take that chunk of horror and then it embed it inside a deeply satirical, fairly loud, and possibly quite angry comical novel about a slightly alternate history Britain; only bringing out the horror aspects when the jokes run out. Prior to that, jokes on top of jokes. Mock people for not reading enough. Mock the fascists. Mock the communists. Mock the prejudices. Mock the foreigners. Waves and waves of very nearly incessant jabs and jibes and taunts and wordplays. There are so many asides it is hard to tell how many of the jokes are even funny. Some are. Some are maybe more of a "had to be there to see it" variety. For instance! It was no doubt this fine nose that had steered him so comfortably through the sedentary life of a successful soldier, for in England it is wisely recognised that to a Staff Officer good looks must matter very much more than they should to a mere actor with a painted face. It was of General Prest-Olive that Maréchal Foch was reported to have said: “It is soldiers like Prest-Olive who almost unite the English and French armies in affection for the Belgians.” His wife was one of the Leicestershire ffox-Vermins, and he had to like it. What do you do with such a joke? Hug it? Cherish it? Raise as your own? Pages and pages of it. How about... “If you say so. Though one has heard of a queen having a rough-and-tumble with corporals.”More, you say?! The man,” said Crust indignantly, “was a sapphist and a nymphomaniac.”It does go on. Imagine reading ninety pages of that just to read a better-than-fair horror story across the other twenty? This is not a critique, per se. There are lots of better-than-fair horror stories. I have written a few of them, myself. I just mean, literally imagine reading quote after quote like that and then every few pages having a check-in to remind you that this is a book about brutal murders? That's how this book rolls. There is almost nothing else like it. Now we have lots of horror comedies who lampoon society while taking jabs at being serious horror. At least a few. But for that to also involve such a high brow smarmy smearing of British fascism and wastrel nobility? To just breathlessly hammer home every trope on loop so that people like Douglas Adams end up looking restrained? No, this is something unique to itself. A Jekyll/Hyde satire/horror book that is a Jekyll/Hyde style whodunit where the actual Jekyll and Hyde mostly concerned was Britain's own love of fascism. Or something to that effect. OH! Almost forgot this bit. The entire reason I found this novel was because I was researching the anecdote that Agatha Christie gives us at the start of The Murder on the Links, the one about "Hell, said the Duchess" (the eagle-eyed amongst you might realize where this is going). It looks like that was some sort of running in-joke about up-and-coming writers trying to get attention. That Arlen, who had unfortunately written a very successful novel and then been on a downward slope by this time, took that joke and just ran with it is kind of amazing to me. Is this ultimately an angry attack on the reading public? I have no idea. I am glad he wrote it, though. And I am glad it stopped at this one. By the way, the duchess never says, "Hell" in the whole novel. A web of lies, I tell you. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 04, 2024
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May 02, 2024
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Apr 04, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| B08HKDGDRF
| 4.06
| 6,561
| unknown
| Oct 08, 2020
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liked it
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The Brief: This one reads likes the novelization of a 2010 horror movie that never was but should have been. It flows (mostly) well; works best when i
The Brief: This one reads likes the novelization of a 2010 horror movie that never was but should have been. It flows (mostly) well; works best when it is funny, loud, and/or gory (which is about 70% of the time); and does a great job of setting up just enough of the land, enough of the people, and enough scenery to run mad for most of its page count. Flounders towards the end, then flounders some more. Three and half stars. The Summary: A rapidly dying Scottish town gets caught up in a centuries long curse involving a "witch". Maggie Wall has woken up and the ritual to stop her from killing everyone involves one hell of a decision. The town's last five youth (four teens and a newborn baby) get caught up in the middle of this. It bubbles, it boils, and then bubbles some more. With lots of blood, screams, car crashes, and even a bit of James Blunt (to set the mood). The Review: First off, Sodergren just nails the vibe of horror movies you might have seen around ten to fifteen years ago. Not that this is a proper faux-novelization (with ironic VHS/DVD trappings on the cover and wink-wink-nod-nudges to the medium inside), but it still embraces a style and era of horror from around 2010 and tops many of them with its ability to go further and wilder than could have been committed to screen (one town hall scene in particular would have been absolutely slashed to the implication). As much as we horror dweebs love our literary spooks, horror movies is how the genre tends to grow nowadays (and for some time). It only makes sense that this flow of energy would occasionally reverse and books like this, heavily infused with the sensibilities of film but going a step further to find the elements where films cannot follow, would show up. There are wonderfully funny moments. There are wonderfully gory moments. Action scenes. Emotional scenes. A geriatric orgy with a fairly spot on soundtrack. Car crashes. People ripping open. Flaming witches. When this book embraces the fun of chaos, it shines. Unfortunately, the book has a serious case of whiplash as Sodergren goes from slower, more personal-drama start to full-on delightful-carnage to then reversing the book back down to being actually a character study the whole time. A character study of the one character in the entire friend group who absolutely refuses to show any signs of emotional growth whatsoever (well, Steve doesn't count, since he is obviously there just to be the stupid one). I get this is mostly over the course of a couple of nights but your enjoyment of the book as a whole package will largely come down to your ability to actually appreciate the main character's struggle. And I do. About three and a half stars' worth. Of course, one analysis could be [and note, this is a for real spoiler, so go gently]: (view spoiler)[I suppose it would be incorrect to point out that Beth acts like the bitchy friend of the final girl but mostly because Beth truly is the bitchy friend of the final girl...maybe the bigger plot twist is Sodergren convincing you are following the main character but you are following her emotionally broken bestie, instead. (hide spoiler)] Would have most likely have rounded up if the obviously coming up plot twist (with the obvious answer) had maybe showed up earlier or had made more sense in the construct of the world. The plot twist is obvious because there are rules that Sodergren spends some time dwelling on but then it also manages to violate the rules. The Bonus Thought: It is entertaining to see this as kind of a loud, garish cousin to Thomas Olde Heuvelt's Hex. Both feature towns longer under the curse of a witch. Both have disenfranchised youth accelerating the end game. Both have ultimately ineffective authorities with plans to handle the situation. A tiny little "what to do with the town witch wakes up, oh no" subgenre. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 14, 2024
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Feb 25, 2024
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Feb 14, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| B005QE7XPK
| 3.88
| 5,218
| 1933
| Sep 27, 2011
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it was amazing
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Review Summary: Perry Mason kicks off a long literary (and beyond) career with this pulpy hardboiled novel about a lawyer not afraid to stretch the tr
Review Summary: Perry Mason kicks off a long literary (and beyond) career with this pulpy hardboiled novel about a lawyer not afraid to stretch the truth and slap a few fools to do what he considers is right. It is a good and interesting short novel but not a great example of careful sleuthing or moral authority. Well worth the read for the way it clashes with a broad general depiction of Perry Mason all these years later. For the sort of people who like a little pulp in their legal soup. === Review === Perry Mason is a hardass. I have only vague recollections of the latter-days of the Raymond Burr starring show and kind of a broad sense of Mason as a plucky, earnest sort of chap headlining an old fogey of a show. Reviews of the newer Perry Mason series demonstrate a bit of what I am talking about. Sophie Gilbert, writing for The Atlantic, writes of the older stories: "The Perry Mason of Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels, an avatar of truth, justice, and decency in the Arthurian mold, might feel about as contemporary as Adam West’s Batman, fake-running through a cityscape in baggy gray Lycra after a villain so unmenacing, he had pancake makeup covering up his mustache." And here is, that "avatar of truth..." punching a [sleazy] reporter in the face, paying and coercing folks to lie, lying himself about having signed statements, and a list of many other illegal and inadmissible acts. He slaps a fainted woman forcibly with a wet towel. He chain smokes and uses a fake name to dodge the law. He tramples the general arc of justice on the way to his own moral code. Much less an "Arthurian figure" and much more a cowboy of old western paperbacks. The OG Perry Mason is much more in line with pulp figures like The Shadow than anything else. Truth is what he makes in his machinations. It is fascinating to read. A bit maddening, as well, because it all seems so strangely plotted. Gardner set up Mason to dive head first into a case and then tries to make it sound reasonable after the fact, but there is little reason here. It is fun, though. Mason's strict code of being a fighter when it comes to his clients, defending the very folks that other literary sleuths would turn against, is a welcome contrast. Gardner explicitly spells it out. Mason wants to give people a fair fight even when they themselves do not play fair and and are not entirely innocent. He does not necessarily believe in his clients, but he believes in the right of people to stand trial. He does not disdain the police or the District Attorney, but he considers them adversaries in a battle over the truth. They must beat him in order to take his clients down, and he's willing to play dirty to win. He is not a good man, he is a man who is good at what he does. Now, there are a lot of Perry Mason novels — and radio shows and tv shows and movies and reboots — and so there is a lot of time for that pulp anti-hero to change shape and morph into something a bit more fogey, but this is a hellion of a start. If only it made a bit more sense. Fun Fact: The Perry Mason series is the third best selling series of books of all time. ...more |
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1
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Jul 05, 2023
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Jul 08, 2023
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Jul 05, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B008AS8C2C
| 3.59
| 1,213
| 1977
| Jun 11, 2012
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liked it
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Review Summary: A book that is simultaneously exciting and bloated. There's a lot of heat and sweat and sexuality and it still mostly spins its wheels
Review Summary: A book that is simultaneously exciting and bloated. There's a lot of heat and sweat and sexuality and it still mostly spins its wheels right up to the sudden and largely uninteresting, though perhaps symbolically appropriate, ending. A mash-up of pulp and Southern Gothic that spouts a constant stream of Jim Crow tropes. While the African spiritualism and voodoo portions are surprisingly well done, and there are good action sequences, there is something missing from the center of the tale to make it feel properly worthwhile and classic. Maybe for fans of a certain type of paperback horror story, but there are better variations. Content warnings: Racism. Lots of it. Hope you like the n-word because it shows up in here in a lot of different formations. There is also bestiality, pedophilia, and a variety of other icky bits. It's a 70s horror novel, so maybe none of this comes as a shock. Some of those things are, as they say, part of the process. === Review === I have been aware of this novel for some time, and it has always sat in my internal notion as one of the horror novels of a certain age. I knew basically nothing about it. I picked it up, and started reading, and realized a goodly few dozen pages in than I still had no idea. What was this novel? There was a hell of a bloody wedding to start. Then there was a John Blackburn-esque about-face to a British retirement community and a strange death there along with some backstory. Then the Southern Gothic opening and the Blackburn-strange second chapter give way to a much more normal 70s horror pulp third section, which eventually jumps back into the Southern Gothic with melodramatic pulp overtones. Those first two sections, treated as sort of short stories on their own, are five-star works. Sure, there is racism and exoticism but it fit about as well as it could (Farris wallows a bit, mind). As the novel goes on, two things occur. First, it generally gets better at building up characters and developing excitement. Second, it drifts downhill. This is too much novel for itself. Farris is plucking too many different chords trying to make a melody. Besides the voodoo and African spiritualism; besides the Southern Gothic vibe and family drama; besides the sultry, sweaty sexuality; besides the mostly-racist setting and talks about the dangers and foolishness of racism; besides the stalled out mystery elements; besides the sometimes sweet but also dangerous love story; besides the...well, besides all of it there is the rest of it, and a lot of it competes for you attention. It eventually runs aground trying to bring its many threads to shore. Had it reeled in its elements and found an internal balance that Farris denied virtually all of his characters, this could have been a more endearing classic. Though a good chunk of the subject matter would no doubt feel dated even if the novel was better, Farris very nearly finds a way to turn the racism and exoticism on itself before finally dropping back to the lowest point of gravity. Ultimately this flesh golem of a novel, stitched from so many disparate parts, dooms itself completely with an ending that symbolically brings the snake motif to bear by having the head bite its own tale, a great and terrible cycle. It would have been smashingly clever in a shorter, tighter work but in this waterlogged raft it poisons nearly everything the book tried to do in the meantime. The final page felt like a final page for its own sake. Biting, sure, but also a poor measure compared to anything more interesting that came before. It is little surprise that a book that is considered one of the books of the genre is also so rarely talked about. It is a piece of its time. One that eventually forgot it was having its own twisted flavor of fun. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 17, 2023
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Jul 05, 2023
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Jun 17, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1932806830
| 9781932806830
| 1932806830
| 3.90
| 21
| Dec 15, 2007
| Jan 01, 2008
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really liked it
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Another collection of original The Shadow reprints? Yay! Two of author's Walter Gibson's personal favorites? HURRAY! The first of which involves a Chi
Another collection of original The Shadow reprints? Yay! Two of author's Walter Gibson's personal favorites? HURRAY! The first of which involves a Chinatown mystery? Hmmm. And thus we come to perhaps the single whitest line that I have ever written in one of my reviews, Space Pilgrims: As long as you don't mind the racism, The Grove of Doom is quite good.* It is good. It's sort of different from The Shadow's normal fare but not so different as to feel out of place. A family with a fairly prosaically complicated past (basically, folks had some historic personal squabbles and there's a sizable estate to inherit linked to these squabbles) eventually become involved with strange disappearances into "The Grove of Doom" [visualization is sort of hard, throughout, in that a birch grove of not immense size is nevertheless effective as a killing ground within a short distance of two houses and a popular golf course...just roll with it]. The best part about this novel is how well the lower-bourgeoise squabblings work as a background plot. It is simple enough to grasp without too much thought and meaty enough to justify some hooks. It reads as something like a New Englander's take on Southern Gothic literature mushed with some penny dreadful elements. It also benefits that while the reader understands some of what is happening, there are a few twists and turns to be explored as to exactly how and why everything is happening. As for the second story, The Masked Lady, my feelings are more mixed. It's also sort of different from the usual The Shadow formula (but, like the first one, not too different). The real change, that the criminal mastermind at the center of the mystery may in fact be anything but and actually be something of a victim, is ultimately wasted on this story where very little is done to make the eponymous masked lady (whose identity the reader is let in on really early) anything like properly sympathetic and her actions anything like interesting. There are a dozen ways this road could have been mapped out and the way that Gibson chose is adequate, but seems like one of the least satisfying paths to take. It becomes obvious that there has to be twists within the twist (and there are) because otherwise it barely would have been a story justifying having The Shadow at all. At least there are plenty of gun fights and night clubs to keep the reader entertained (and the "choreography" of the fights are a bit better than usual, though some of the locational details are a bit murky). Perhaps most fun for this one, "Lamont Cranston" [aka The Shadow in norm-drag] takes a fairly large role in proceedings, justifying the double-identity a fair bit. There is just nothing like the gothic charm of the first story to help the reader truly enjoy this one. The supplemental essays are fair. The one that goes into more detail about Orson Welles and his part to play with the radio show version is by far the more interesting. The inclusion of a "lost" script is also nice. ===== * Now you may be asking, "Doug, you are reading 1930s pulp fiction...why are you complaining about racist overtones?" and I feel this requires a degree of explanation, because I feel it hints at something behind the scenes. The very first piece of dialogue in the first novel, The Grove of Doom, is this... "You have come, Lei Chang," he said.Here's the thing, after this first scene, neither Chang nor the novel's other Chinese character speak in anything like over-the-top piglin (well, outside of saying "Koon Woon" a lot, Chang barely has any other lines). This gives that first burst of dialogue a mechanical feel, one either added in by Gibson in an attempt to be funny or was forced in by an editor for similar purposes. This ultimately exposes it as racist-joke-for-racist-joke's-sake, something that could have been easily avoided by just not saying anything at all. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 22, 2021
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Feb 28, 2021
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Feb 28, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0452253802
| 9780452253803
| 0452253802
| 4.07
| 38,718
| Jul 1982
| Aug 01, 1982
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liked it
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This book has long sat cozy near the top of a "Things Doug Wishes He Had" list. The list often isn't very long (I am notorious about just getting the
This book has long sat cozy near the top of a "Things Doug Wishes He Had" list. The list often isn't very long (I am notorious about just getting the books/etc I want, ask my wife when she gets on a rant trying to do Christmas/birthday shopping for me) but for various reasons the items on it have proved somehow elusive. It's not hard to see why I wanted it so badly. For a horror nerd growing up in a lower Alabama bookstore desert, King was a natural highlight. Books tended to come from a small public library with a horror selection that would fit on Ikea's smallest bookshelf, Goodwill, yard sales, the supermarket paperbacks shelf (later, half-hour trips to Walmart or hour+ trips to a bookstore in Mobile). Stephen King wasn't the only horror author represented in these sparse nodes, but they tended to be the easiest to get with regularity. And his stuff showed up on the sort of network TV that a miles-from-anywhere-that-broadcasts-TV aerial could pick up (and there was enough of it that not all of it would be rented out at the Movie Gallery and various pre-franchise rental places that were within a half-hour driving distance). Romero is...well, Romero, and needs no explanation. And Bernie "It's Bernie Damned Wrightson" Wrightson was a comic illustrating genius big enough to actually penetrate my relatively small informational world. I can still bring to mind several of his Swamp Thing illustration I saw at a youngish age and some of his black&white horror stuff I saw at a less youngish age, years later. Also, a cover by Kamen? Bless. Not to mention the fact the movie, Creepshow, is one of the defining horror movies of my youth, right up there with Alien and Nightmare on Elm Street and Pumpkinhead (though nothing touches Night of the Living Dead...I miss you, George). Why three stars, then? It is not for the artwork. There aren't many groundbreaking illustrations, true, and several of the more striking visuals are taken right from the movie, but the artwork is good. It's not even really for the writing, in itself. The stories work. They work just fine. At least alright. I mean, the concept is genius: a novelization of a movie tribute to old horror comics done up as an old horror comic? Perfect. It is more that the book sort of exposes the strings behind the tricks, as it were. Which I will get to in a minute. And also, the book illustrates (pun!) how much the overall lightweight storylines need the longer visuals of the movie format to really bring out their best moments. While it is broadly true (though not entirely) to say the book contains the basic scenes of the movie, quite a few of the scenes on screen are there simply to build up tension, to dwell on quirks of the characters, or just to allow the ambiance to seep in. A lot of stuff bubbles up in moments where the dialogue dials down, caught up in the art of Romero's direction and Savini's special effects, little lacunae pockets where the audience can be brought into the world for those couple of extra seconds. The book misses many of the "nothings" to focus on the bits where things more outright happen. Wrightson would have had to almost double the panel count, at least increase it by a third, to really correct this. Without these transitions, you get some near whiplash moments as one scene slams into the next without breathing room and, worse, without comment. The assholes being assholes from "Father's Day" feels cursory and trite, here, without the sleaze and odd camera shots. Jordy Verrill's abode misses that spark of desperate poverty (which, in some ways, barely differs from the desperate richness of the opening tale) without the visual realia surrounding him (and the scene of him talking to his "father" barely works without the whole audovisual impact of the movie's framing...though one can forgive Wrightson for going a bit Swampthing, yes). Or, for one more example, the certain glee as Henry plays out his wife-killing fantasies, which in the screen is darkly comic and shocking, but on the page just seems...eh. The movie both casts Henry as a monster as forgives him. Neither of these quite come through in shorter comic form (even though, if anything, Henry is more of a villain, here), where the entire story can be read in a couple of minutes. As for exposing the behind the scenes, it is while reading this that you get a feeling that few of these properly feel like shout-outs to the old horror comics, at all. Two of them are taken from King short stories and have little to do with the parsimonious genius of those old comics. There was a certain...inner morality to the old stories (sometimes overt, other times not), a certain chaffing against cruelty, where deaths might be gruesome but they often fit into the logic of the piece. You see this, perhaps, best reflected in "Something to Tide You Over," here, where the cruelty of husband is reflected back upon him. Three of the others (the exception being "The Lonesome Death of Jody Verrill," which is cruel for its own sake, though in some ways becomes the most interesting story because of it) take a stab at that same sense of bad people getting their due, but feel almost like the audience is being invited in not to see how asshole behavior can backfire but to delight in death barely associated with the "crime" committed (nagging wife? better have her eaten!). Because Mr. Pratt is a racist asshole who screws over folks in business, we are supposed to consider the roaches infesting his apartment (and himself) as a kind of...feedback loop? The movie at least manages to stretch out the scenes and add a definite visual ick to the whole thing with the white walls and the phone calls and the the interactions that feel off, but without that element the comic just feels sort of...an excuse to have roaches. Most of these stories would have been right at home with Wrightson's Heavy Metal days, and fit right in with late 70s and early-to-mid 80s horror (the beast punching through the crate at the end of "The Crate"? Very 70s/80s horror cinema). In that regard, they are good stories for the time they were made, no problems there. They just don't quite feel like the sort of thing that Gaines, Feldstein, and the crew would have really worked with. There's a certain spark missing. Maybe even a certain innocence. The addition of the narrator ghoul is a nice touch, as well as some of the elements to make it feel more Tales or Vault, but they come off feeling more a minor fix than a complete correction. And by this, it makes the movie, itself, feel almost more of a gimmick than a true tribute. Though I will still rewatch it and appreciate it for what it is (which is good, great even). ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 07, 2019
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Jul 09, 2019
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Jul 09, 2019
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0890836620
| 9780890836620
| 0890836620
| 3.64
| 1,135
| Nov 1980
| Jan 01, 1980
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really liked it
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The short review: This book is good, but overlong, and though it really repeats itself...there is something to be said about a book that features mult
The short review: This book is good, but overlong, and though it really repeats itself...there is something to be said about a book that features multiple scenes of people having roaches tunnel through their eyes into their brain. I mean, goo, huh? Also, there's a bit with a handcuffed man on a small island confused about how to find the sheriff and so he decides to dry hump a pile a leaves and roaches tunnel through his eyes and eat his brains. How about that, huh? The late 70s to early 80s? Am I right? The long review: My old man heart loves a bit of campy 70s/80s swarms-of-things creature features. At least from a distance. I mean, actually watching the movies was nine-times-out-of-ten sitting through really poorly executed shots of folks standing just about perfectly still while some killer mutant {squirrel | opossum | dandelion} slowly gnaws off kneecaps and man, some/most were as boring as listening to a tabletop gamer just go on and on about the aerodynamics of metal dice. But, hey, there's a certain delight in watching Nature Fight Back(tm). And who can forget scenes like [blonde actress] screaming as she finds the mutilated corpse of her {father | friend | teacher} and there's like...a frog just sitting on the sill and it's a really long extended shot of that frog in that window and the camera just zooms in on that frog and everything else is all super-bokeh and when it finally cuts it's to [dude in turtleneck] looking concerned next to his [read: the director's, bought with production money] car. That scene, you know? Anyhow, this book is like...one of the better creature feature films. This *book*, mind. There is actually a film made from this book and it is...see above. This book has everything it needs: old sassy grandpa, tough-as-shark sailors, slimy overweight mayors, cute little children, suburban anarchists drugging it up, dated worldviews that seem almost overly dated to be comical but then it sticks with it and you don't know if the author is having a gag or actually kind of sexist and a little overconcerned at taking potshots at The Youth(tm) and their Modern Society(tm), New England fishing jokes, attractive college students, attractive scientists, dudes going on a rampage against some goshdarn roaches, forest fires, storms, abandoned lighthouses, discussions of heritage, middle-aged couples getting into drunken fights, dogs getting eaten by roaches tunneling through said dogs eyes into their dog brains. Everything. It has so much of everything it needs that it actually spends at least...a hundred pages repeating everything and doing much the same over and over. Out of town person of color falling in love with the young sailor? Keep mentioning it! Love triangle between semi-local beauty and attractive scientist and other attractive scientist? AGAIN! The hissing sound that cockroaches make? Pump that page count, baby! The detailed entomological details of how such a mutation might happen and how it impacts the ecosystem on such a tiny island? Surely time for another! An oncoming storm that takes, like...a third of the book to show up? Can we stretch that?! One ending? Surely we can get two in here! Maybe a third! The thing is, even with its bloated page count and general slowness to actually get down to the storyline that people care about, and the whiff of inserting Jaws's mayor almost verbatim, it mostly floats.* The fact that it holds no real punches adds to it. Dogs and children get just as eye-tunneled as everyone else. Sometimes, folks survive. Sometimes they don't. Characters that sort of outlive their usefulness to the plot kind of drift to the back (or become gore fodder) while audience favorites drift forward (or become gore fodder). It has an interesting mix of kind of old school writing, feeling like a 40s/50s-era pulp novel complete with hero scientists and Real Men(tm) in places, and modern-for-the-time horror panache. It's camp and it's icky and it's amazingly never quite cruel in all the ways it can be. The scientific insertions are kind of interesting. The methods to fight back make sense. The dumb choices are dumb (see the short review and dude humping leaves) but kind of in a well-why-not kind of way...some of them. Most of them, even. Even when you can tell that doom is on the horizon, you root for folks to escape...or at least take some roach buggers with them. Even the false ending only felt a little cheaty (we can see there's a tenth of the book, left, man...). All in a story that feels extremely cinematic while still retaining a nice...literary (?)...quality. It doesn't fly by, per se, but it keeps going...and when it gets really going, it's actually fairly exciting. Recommended. * Speaking of floating, there's a sex scene that has like...twenty nautical puns. I'm still in awe. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 03, 2019
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May 10, 2019
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May 10, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1932806725
| 9781932806724
| 1932806725
| 3.86
| 42
| Jul 15, 2007
| Jan 01, 2007
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really liked it
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I've been reading through some of the Doc Savage books, figured I should trip over to the darker side of pulp fiction and read some of The Shadow, as
I've been reading through some of the Doc Savage books, figured I should trip over to the darker side of pulp fiction and read some of The Shadow, as well. A couple things, first off. One, this is possibly/probably not The Shadow you know. The catch phrases are still sort of there, overall, but the power to cloud men's minds and the quasi-Eastern mysticism is gone. Well, not gone. Never arrived. The Shadow radio show had to condense various Shadow stories to sub-30-minute tales, and so stuff like the clouding of men's minds and the mystic powers was added in to help give The Shadow some punch and allow him to talk in rooms full of criminals without the criminals knowing exactly where he is. Radio doesn't handle a man skulking about quietly for twenty minutes. Two, this collection is meant to show how The Batman was inspired by The Shadow, if by inspired you mean "Originally, The Batman was basically a copy of The Shadow with a different visual flare". In that context, you have one tenuous link, one link that seems very likely but has seemingly disproven, and one link that is pretty much a smoking gun (insomuch as one of these stories was directly lifted for The Batman). The tenuous one is "Lingo," a Shadow novel that is mostly a trifling. The Shadow is playing gangsters off of one another and interfering with a racket to cause it to fall apart. There is a lot of trumped up gangster-ese ("These gazebos have greased a sure pineapple," or some such nonsense), a fairly high body count, and fair gangland political strife; but not only does it drag on an additional ten-pages (an eternity in pulpland) but so much of the story seems so pointless. If The Shadow is mostly out to wreck a gang, and doesn't mind shooting, there are several chances to simply just toss a grenade into the works and explode some folks. Possibly it is about drawing certain key players out, but The Shadow knows the hidey-holes and even gets right into them when he choses. Once it is revealed that [massive spoiler deleted], the nonsense factor increases. It was a cool enough twist, but it exposes the whole thing as just a stalling for time. I suppose there was methods to the madness, but I think it was mostly just trying to play out a game of cat and mouse and didn't stop to realize the mouse was dying at the very start and barely limping along. The tenuous connection, by the way, is that one scene has The Shadow toss a boomerang with a string tied to it to get on the roof of a nearby building, potentially foreshadowing a similar set up with the batarang back before the the bat-grapple-gun-thing got introduced in the 90s. It's not super-strong as far as connections go (I mean, Doc Savage carries around a portable grapple, too), but I get what they are going for. The definite one is "Partners of Peril," a novel that Bill Finger and Bob Kane admit to riffing on. It's pretty obvious if you've read the first Batman story: a group of chemical industrialists start dying off when betrayed by one of their own and there's some back and forth about who the culprit is and finally The Shadow/Batman end up surviving a gas attack in a glass jar and exposing the baddie. This one is actually a pretty good story. It is pretty constantly action heavy. There are enough players on the stage to keep the reader guessing. There are some high-stakes explosions and lots of gunfire and injuries. A locked room mystery has a satisfyingly "espionage" flavor. Some "high tech" gets blended in, a train chase sequence, disguises. It's pretty chock full and exciting. It breathes in its pulp roots. Of the three, if there was just one to read, it would be this one. The other one, the "disproven" one, is not actually a The Shadow story, but a Bulldog Black short where that detective squares up against a clown faced killer called The Joker. About 50% is nothing like The Batman's Joker, but the other half has a definite "The Joker" feel. It is a quick read, and more surface level than the baroque adventures of The Shadow, but it was a fun little excursion that demonstrates how the pulps manufactured constant micro-dangers for the hero to have to escape from. All told, the read was pretty sweet. "Lingo" is way too slow for its own good, and "The Grim Joker" is only about 10 pages of quick reading, but "Partners of Peril" punches out well enough that it carries much of the book. ...more |
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Feb 07, 2019
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Feb 12, 2019
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Feb 12, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1932806717
| 9781932806717
| 1932806717
| 4.06
| 52
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| Jan 01, 2007
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really liked it
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First off, I am giving this thing four stars, but let's talk about that a little. I recently reviewed another of these Vintage Media Doc Savage two-no
First off, I am giving this thing four stars, but let's talk about that a little. I recently reviewed another of these Vintage Media Doc Savage two-novels-in-ones, and I also gave that collection four-stars with a hefty slice of fudge. This time, though, I more earnestly mean it, sort of. I guess as a collection scored upon the median, I would give it a 3-star or 3.5-star score, because there are two novels here and one is barely a two-star story while the other is currently my favorite Doc Savage tale. I am judging it based on overall impression, nearly all of which positive comes from the latter. The two novels contained here - The Lost Oasis and The Sargasso Ogre - are structurally similar. In both, Doc and crew have a few mishaps in civilization, embark on a voyage knowing danger is afoot and knowing this embarkation will put them in the hands of their enemies, get to some exotic locale where the enemy has the home advantage, and then fight back. In both, there is a honest-to-goodness treasure (these are back-to-back novels, so some of the treasure is literally the same thing). In both, there is a beautiful woman and an enemy brute. There is lots of sleeping gas. Lots of talk of fast-shooting guns and how awesome Doc Savage is and how women just love him. There are near deaths and desperate lunges and imminent threats. And more talk about how awesome Doc Savage is and how much women love him. It goes on a bit about it. Both have boorish badmen being strangely chivalrous to women (Oasis more so than Sargasso by a notch), which does help to highlight the absence of overt sexual violence. That's a pleasant touch. Had these been written just a decade or two later it would have been much more prominent a topic (and Doc would have been banging every pretty woman he came across). Rest assured, Space Pilgrim, there is no sex to be had, here...of any stripe. The Sargasso Ogre gets this formula fairly spot on. After an attempt on one of his aides' life, seemingly connected to Doc and his men boarding a particular ship, the adventuresome six for sure board the ship and match wits, gadgets, and muscle with a group up to no good. There's a bit of cat and mouse, trying to figure out what dark fate awaits the ship (this dark fate being spoiled by the title, obviously). This bit drags on more than it should, with some aspects stretching any willful disbelief you might toss at it. Once they get to the eponymous Sargasso, though, the action picks up. A series of wrecks and derelicts make an interesting backdrop for (effectively) warring tribes to scramble upon and about. Various ships and technologies and weapons and personalities float in an ongoing clash where both sides build defenses and plot out schemes. Yes, there is too much "knock out gas" and too much back and forth, but the locale is exotic, the social structure is imaginative (including something like precursors to the orphans of space trope), and much of the action is fine. The more-brawn-than-brains Bruze, a blustering bluff of a baddie, makes a fun counterpoint to Doc...Doc is noble, goes first, protects his men, barely feels fear...while Bruze fakes injuries to avoid direct confrontations, uses his men as a shield, uses sneaky attacks and traps...but for all that still is kind of played off a not-terrible-guy. You can sort of understand why people follow Bruze (unlike some maniacal villains from pulp novels and comics). It's fun, sometimes funny, interesting and actually has a sense of danger and tension (as much tension as a series that will not kill off or even deeply scar any of the main characters can have). If I had to recommend a Doc Savage novel - including some deep warts when it comes to issues of race or gender - it would be this one. The other novel, The Lost Oasis, is so far the worst I have read. Doc and crew (eventually) find out about a group of slaves being held in Africa and forced to mine diamonds (which is just...the early 20th century diamond trade...right?). The crew zip about nonsensically (there are least two scenes where equipment/vehicles are gotten and no explanation as to how) and do things like blow up really expensive, and somewhat unique, vehicles for tiny advantages, until they eventually accompany the novel's super beautiful woman on a trip that involves the most inexplicable non-euclidean description of the layout of a dirigible I have ever read. And it is tedious. While there should be some sense of danger with being trapped on a not-huge dirigible being flown by one's deadly enemies, none of the fight scenes have any spark of real danger of tension. There is the inclusion of a certain "creature of the night" that sort of adds to it, but by the time Doc and crew come across it, so much has been done to discredit it that it's just fluff. Once, after much of the novel has plodded along, the crew actually get to the "lost" oasis, the novel enters into a nearly-nightmare-logic sequence of the good guys having to hide out right under the noses of the baddies, and fight off a siege and so forth... but like the long airship section there is so little tension that what could have been a constant life-or-death struggle just becomes....waiting a chapter or two. The scene depicted on the cover (I'll give you the decision of looking it up) happens in something like the next-to-last chapter (maybe next-to-next-to...) and is literally resolved before the chapter is finished. It all feels so fake. Speaking of fake, both of these novels talk up Doc's (later copied by a lot of super heroes) policy of not killing unless absolutely necessary, and while The Sargasso Ogre uses this to ratchet up tension and tighten the screws, The Lost Oasis just flings it out the window just as soon as the page count is sufficient to warrant a wrapping up. It is pretty much only there in the first novel just to space out time. It is not handled in a morally or narratively interesting way (though a discussion of Doc's alternative to killing - forced lobotomies - does have that ring of "what did you just say?" about it...so there's that). Then, the ending of The Lost Oasis slightly sets up the The Sargasso Ogre, and that is really the only good thing it does. Will Murrary's added historical essays are interesting reading, at least. And the included failed pitch for a comic strip series is a nice addition, even if it just goes to show that it was probably good to pass on it. If you read this two-in-one, skip the first book and just trust me when I say that Doc does some stuff and comes in possession of some diamonds. That's about all you need to know. Later, if you are jonesing for more Doc adventure, maybe come back to it, if you want. ...more |
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Jan 26, 2019
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Feb 2019
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| Jan 01, 2006
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really liked it
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When I was - 11 or 13 or so, I think, around that - I got a hold of an omnibus edition of Doc Savage novels. Details are pretty blurred in the old Dou
When I was - 11 or 13 or so, I think, around that - I got a hold of an omnibus edition of Doc Savage novels. Details are pretty blurred in the old Doug brainbox, but looking through Amazon, it was possibly volume 2. The only actual memory I have, besides a blurred impression of the cover, is that I enjoyed it. I remember being invested in it for awhile. I do not remember plots or characters. My primary book shopping avenues, at the time, were when the library sold off paperbacks and when we took a trip out to Brewton (AL) to visit the Good Will. Or the Walmart, also in Brewton (as well as on in Andalusia). I presumably got the first paperback from one of these places (I'm thinking Good Will), but I never spotted any more. I did see the movie, at least partially, but I did not invest into it in the way I invested in the books. That Doc Savage book, and the hint of other stories in his line, took on something like a mythical quality to me. I would occasionally perk up when I heard the name. It was like an one-time imaginary friend that had been beloved, had stuck with me, and then had left and I was left only with vague memories. If you had asked me, I would told you the books were "quite good" and then be left with the problem of not being able to tell you why. "Because I was once 12(ish), and I read four of them, and they seemed ok," would have been the only honest response. Once I found out that there were indeed reprints of the venerable series, I thought it would be good fun to get back into a series that had had such a strange impact on me, and ordered the first three volumes (note: I mean the first three from the Vintage Library repints*, which are not the first three in character or publication order). Now that I have started reading them, feelings are mixed. It's a little like some indie movie where a 30+ man goes through a second-coming-of-age story because he finally meets his {father | grandfather | high school buddy | childhood hero | new favorite manic pixie dream girl } and is largely underwhelmed, even maybe repulsed at first, but learns how to relax and love the situation over time. This collection deals with the first "two parter" badguy seen in the series (and since pulps were kind of a new thing, surely one of the first recurring villains in literature, overall...I mean, Moriarty, the king of literary villains, is only directly in a single story), John Daylight, who dresses in striking single color outfits and seeks world dominance. This weird science Napoleon is pretty much like many other Doc Savage villains according to basic readings of the plots, but for whatever reason he tends to be treated as the villain. First off, I give this first collection of two "novels" (more like pulp novellas, I think, but the magazine printing style gives a hard guess as to how many pages these would really be) four stars and I stick by that, but honestly these are largely 2 (or even, if you are a big meanie, 1)-star books if you go by the standard notches of the craft: the writing is mediocre with occasionally highlights, the dialogue is often poor, the characterizations are outsize or ludicrous and not always in a fun way, the grasp of world-politics and human issues is pitiful**, and the plot is largely a device of ebbs and flows to drive a story toward a particular page count. However, and this is something that more modern faux-pulps seem to miss, there is a certain innocence in these stories, a type of joy that is had in telling a tale about good guys and bad guys and dames and airships and hidden citadels and savage armies and world domination and weird science and fistfights and gunfights and truth serums and hypnotisms. It is delightful myth building, but unlike actual, real world myths that are often complicated and morally confusing and as much metaphors for psychological and scientific principles our forebears did not understand, these are much more of a lighthearted version of bloodshed and murder and monmania and despair. According to an unsourced quote on Wikipedia (as of January 2019), even Lester Dent, the man most responsible for writing them, considered them mostly "sellable crap". And yet, they are good and pure in their own way. There are air fights and British hotels gun battles and New York concert halls and espionage agents and invisible ink messages and Arctic sanctuaries of weird, dangerous inventions and it is a time of voluntary madness. Timeless and so utterly rooted in their time. Wonderful and so...uninformed. Full of danger even though you know that Doc and his boys are going to pull through (and somewhat bloodlessly, as far as innocent lives are concerned). No wrong can they not fix. No spot of bother they cannot overcome. No life they cannot save. No matter how dark (and Lester Dent knows how to keep the stakes looking like they are impossible, James Wan could learn a thing or two about constant pacing of danger). I mean, there's an industrial chemist who goes by Monk, and Monk has a weird pig named Habeas Corpus, and his best-friend/worst-enemy is a lawyer nicknamed Ham, and Ham has a weird chimpanzee named Chemistry, and by gods did that make me giggle for a good three minutes at one point. This is what we are dealing with, folks. By the time Daylight gives a speech about conquering the world under a single rule to bring about peace, you see in him the archetype of major comic book villains and James Bond villains and science fiction baddies...but maybe you also see a sly jab towards Hitler (who was starting to ramp up hostilities at the time this was being written). You very nearly can accept his philosophy, but you see it as wrong and as bad, and you delight the overthrow of it. The pulp has gotten you. Swing the fists in, old chap, and let's get home for supper. Speaking of comic books, one of the best ways to read these now is to see them in the context of being progenitors of comic books and the various post-pulp entertainments that followed.*** In Doc Savage's larger-than-life-and-twice-as-innocent strength and reflexes and wit you can very much see a forerunner to Superman. Likewise, his many gadgets and gizmos lead one to seeing a proto-Batman. There is even a Fortress of Solitude (presumably, Superman's Fortress is a direct reference to Doc Savages, much like Batman's Arkham Asylum is a direct nod to Lovecraft). The crime fighting team of experts would go on to be copied any number of times. Likewise, this sort of "science group" of world-saviors leads to similar set-ups in Ultraman and other science fiction series. This is the genetic code. The birthplace of the 20th century's new mythology. No somewhat forgotten, considered outdated. But still containing their magic. * As a warning: I placed a second order last week and have received no sort of confirmation nor does it look like the "number in stock" number has changed, before you order directly maybe let me confirm that they are still functioning as a store-site. I sincerely hope so. ** As Will Murray discusses in his informative afterword, Lester Dent seems to think Genghis Khan's name is the honorific and so has war leaders of a region somewhere past Afghanistan and near Tibet (which, really, could be a huge amount of land) called "Genghis" instead of "Khan". Likewise, the country he most associates with the burqa is India, which isn't wrong, per se (there are Muslims in India that wear burqas, though it wasn't exactly the standard mode of dress for women), but odd. While his discussion of London is better, it does feel like he avoided even the most basic research and just went for something like perceived wisdom on facts. Of course, racism and sexism abound. At least the larger-than-life masculinity tends to not be too terribly toxic. *** See also The Shadow, Zorro, Lone Ranger, and the Scarlet Pimpernel (whose secret disguises and pretend dandyism very much sets up most "secret identity" comic book heroes). ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 20, 2019
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Jan 21, 2019
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Jan 20, 2019
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Mass Market Paperback
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