book reviews – Edward Trimnell Books

Reading notes: ‘Flint Kill Creek’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Amid all the current events and weather-related entries of late, here is a quick mini-review of Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense. I have recently worked my way through the stories in this volume by the extremely prolific Joyce Carol Oates.

Speaking of Oates: she was born almost exactly 30 years before me, in the summer of 1938. Oates will turn 87 this year, and she continues to write and publish. This is a testament to both a sharp mind and a solid work ethic. Her style has not deteriorated, nor even changed much in recent decades. Her latest books are very similar to the ones she published years ago.

Flint Kill Creek, as the full name of the book implies, is a collection of dark tales. Many of these stories involve a crime, but not all of them do.

These stories are what JCO does best: explorations of the dark corners of the human mind and its motivations. These stories often have surprise twists. Oh…I didn’t see that coming.

Joyce Carol Oates is known as a writer of literary fiction. This means, among other things, that her work sometimes requires some effort to get through. And so it is with Flint Kill Creek. Some of these stories are quite accessible and fast-paced. (I particularly liked the opening, titular story.) Others are slower and more abstruse.

As is always the problem (for this reader, anyway) where JCO is concerned: few of her characters, even the innocent ones cast in victim roles, are very likable. I often find that in a JCO story, I have no one to root for.

If you already like Joyce Carol Oates’s work, you’ll like Flint Kill Creek. If you don’t like her style, this book will do nothing to change your mind.

As for me: I have always been somewhere in the middle regarding Joyce Carol Oates’s fiction. I most always admire her work; but I enjoy it to varying degrees.

-ET

**View Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense on Amazon

‘You Like It Darker’: one of the best Stephen King collections in years

I’ve pulled no punches about the fact that I am not a fan of many of Stephen King’s post-1990 novels. Last year, I was less than thrilled with the overlong and rambling Fairy Tale.

In recent decades (King’s career is now so long that this is the most meaningful unit of measurement), his best work has often been his collections of short fiction.

No, I won’t give you another endorsement of Night Shift (1978). I already did that five years ago. King has produced plenty of good short fiction since the beginning of the new millennium, including Everything’s Eventual (2002), Full Dark, No Stars (2010), and The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015).

And most recently: You Like It Darker (2024). I purchased this book in hardcover within days of my disappointing read of Fairy Tale, because—when King is at his best, he hits them out of the park.

I only recently got around to reading this latest short story collection, though. (I have a rather large TBR backlog.) I am happy to report that You Like It Darker is one of his best short story collections in years—probably since the aforementioned Everything’s Eventual. Not every story in You Like it Darker is a home run. But a handful of them are.

“Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” is a long short story about a man who is framed for a murder he did not commit. The whole thing starts with a recurring bad dream about a buried body.

“On Slide Inn Road” is a shorter tale about a family trip gone wrong. It reverses some of the usual age dynamics that you see in stories. This one is more of a crime story than a horror tale. (There are no supernatural elements.) But it’s a good one.

Rattlesnakes is a novella set in Florida. This is also a sequel to Cujo (1981). The main protagonist of that book, Vic Trenton, is now in his seventies, and he’s been through a lot in the intervening years. He goes through a lot in this story, too.

The Answer Man is another novella. In 1937, a young man meets a roadside hawker who can foresee the future—for a price. The young man interacts with “the Answer Man” over the next sixty years.

This is ultimately a story about finding meaning in life’s unexpected challenges and tragedies. This one is an absolute gem, and worth the entire price of the book.

***

Stephen King is now 77. I started reading his books in the 1980s, when he was only in his thirties, and I was in my teens. (Note: I’ve gotten older since then, too.)

I hope that Stephen King continues to write for many years to come. That was my overriding thought, as I finished this collection.

-ET

**View You Like It Darker on Amazon

Raymond Carver’s short stories

Some time ago I purchased Where I’m Calling From, the final collection of short stories from Raymond Carver (1938 – 1988). The collection also includes some of Carver’s early published stories.

I have just gotten around to reading this collection. Overall, I would rate these stories quite favorably, for work produced during the mid-20^th century.

That doesn’t mean that Carver’s stories will suit everyone’s taste. This is not genre fiction. These are not tales of horror, crime, adventure, romantic fantasy, or alien invasions. Carver’s fiction has been described as minimalist and realist. Kind of like Hemingway at his driest, on steroids. Carver mostly wrote stories about working-class life. And when you add in the generation gap, some of these stories can seem a little dated.

And yes, there are a few that are…not exactly boring…but you finish them wondering, “Now, what was the point of that?”

That said, Carver was a master of bringing narrative passages to life. He was a master of microtension. Even when he is writing about outwardly mundane circumstances, you want to read on, to find out what will happen next.

Raymond Carver lived only 50 years, and published fiction for about 20 years. He wrote only poems, short stories, and screenplays. No novels. As a result, he did not leave a massive body of work behind. But what he did leave is well worth exploring.

-ET

View WHERE I’M CALLING FROM: SELECTED STORIES on Amazon

A story that scared me in 1977

I can recall the first time that I was actually scared by something that I read.

It was the summer of 1977. Somehow a book of short horror stories had come into my possession: Stories of Ghosts, Witches, and Demons. This slender 80-page volume, edited by Freya Littledale, was published by Scholastic in 1971.

Although I read the book cover-to-cover, I have forgotten all of the stories—except one: an especially creepy tale called, “The Demon of Detroit”.

This is the story of a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Adams, who move into a house in the Motor City. They soon discover that they aren’t alone. Something horrible inhabits their back bedroom.

After a series of disturbing events, the couple decides to move out of the house. The last lines of the story are particularly haunting: They indicate that the Adamses “admit defeat”. Whatever lurks in the back bedroom will now have the rest of the home to itself, too.

The full text of the story (along with a clip of the artwork appearing in the original Scholastic publication) is available online. I do recognize the artwork. I can’t say for certain if the transcription of the 1971 text is one hundred percent faithful. (I was nine years old in 1977, after all.)

“The Demon of Detroit” seems to be based on an urban legend from the 1960s, which has enjoyed a modest contemporary revival. Urban legends, I’ve found, often make good source material for horror films and short stories, because urban legends are instantly relatable and easy to grasp. They aren’t overly complex. That’s important in horror film and fiction.

“The Demon of Detroit” also demonstrates the effectiveness of the short form in horror. This short story is perhaps a thousand words long. Obviously, they won’t all be that short. But as a rule of thumb with horror: the longer the story, the harder it is to maintain the suspension of disbelief. (Notice that Poe, Lovecraft, and even Stephen King are at their best when writing in the short form.)

“The Demon of Detroit” is a story that begins with a subtle atmosphere of darkness, and builds, over about a thousand words, to something truly malevolent.

“The Demon of Detroit” scared the bejesus out of me in 1977. I reread it today (the online version). It still brings a chill to my spine, forty-three years later.

‘The Dead Zone’ and narrative drive

At the end of 2024 I read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone for the second time.

I had read this book for the first time back in 1984, when I was fifteen going on sixteen. In the intervening years, I had never revisited the book. (I did see the 1983 film adaptation starring Christopher Walken. While this was a valiant effort on Hollywood’s part, the movie simply didn’t capture the essence of the complex, multilayered source material of the novel.)

‘The Dead Zone’: an experiment in rereading

I decided in December 2024 that forty years was enough time to wait between readings of The Dead Zone. I therefore gave the book another reading. While I remembered most of the major plot points, I had forgotten enough that the book was “fresh” in my rereading.

I also did this as an experiment of sorts. I have been disappointed by Stephen King’s recent novels. Last year I plodded my way through the meandering Fairy Tale (2022), and I struggled to finish it. I was glad when Fairy Tale was over. I nearly gave up on The Outsider (2018) and Doctor Sleep (2013). I did give up on Cell (2006), Under the Dome (2009), and Lisey’s Story (2006), abandoning all three books midway through.

And yet, I recalled loving Stephen King’s early novels so much. Seemingly everything published under his name between 1974 and 1983 was pure gold. Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, The Stand…I had gone through all of those books like a hot knife through butter. And that was back when I had the distracted mind of a teenager.

I wondered if my tastes had changed, or maybe matured. For example, I still enjoy the music of the Canadian rock group Rush. But I have backed off from my teenage assertions that Neil Peart’s lyrics are absolutely brilliant, a complete system of philosophy set to music.

The fifty-something eye can simply not see the world through the teenage lens. Therefore, a rereading of The Dead Zone would be a worthwhile test. Had Stephen King changed? Or had I changed?

‘The Dead Zone’: not quite a horror novel

The Dead Zone is the story of Johnny Smith, a Maine English teacher who emerges from a car accident and a four-year coma with psychic powers. Not long after his awakening, Smith discovers that he has an important mission to perform, one involving an act of political violence. But in committing this one act, Smith will literally save the world.

Although there is a serial murderer subplot, The Dead Zone is not a horror novel in the conventional sense. If Stephen King hadn’t written it, The Dead Zone would have been shelved in the science fiction section. The Dead Zone reminds me of something the late Michael Crichton would have written.

View ‘THE DEAD ZONE’ on Amazon

The results of my reread

So what did I think? Forty years later, I will tell you the same thing I would have told you in 1984: The Dead Zone is an absolutely brilliant novel. I enjoyed The Dead Zone just as much as a 56-year-old as I did at the age of not-quite-sixteen. In fact, I enjoyed it more, because there were some layers and references that went over my head forty years ago, that I appreciated this time around.

The power of narrative drive

Why is The Dead Zone such a good novel? The premise? Well, yes, the premise is an intriguing one. But Stephen King, in the early years, made magic with vampires in ’Salem’s Lot, his second novel. Vampires were hardly original by the time ’Salem’s Lot was published in 1975. Bram Stoker had already done them seventy-eight years earlier.

The Dead Zone has a compelling premise and strong central characters. More than that, though, The Dead Zone has a strong narrative drive. Although by no means a short book, there is not a single wasted scene in The Dead Zone. There are no meandering subplots.

The problem of the Frankenstory

Fairy Tale, by contrast, is what I would call a Frankenstory. It lacks a coherent wholeness. If you read the book, you’ll find that it is actually two novels in one. There is the “in-this-world” story that comes in the first half of the book. And then there is the portal fantasy.

Or, no…that isn’t exactly right. It would be more accurate to say that Stephen King devotes a full novel’s worth of space setting up the main story premise in Fairy Tale.

I first noticed that Stephen King’s style had changed back in 1986, when I read It. Whereas before his novels and stories had moved along a straight narrative throughline, now they meandered to and fro.

What else makes a novel a Frankenstory? A story with too many characters, especially point-of-view characters. (This is a particularly pernicious trap for many fantasy authors.)

***

Anyway, I very much enjoyed my reread of The Dead Zone. The book really is that good. I recommend it for those who would like to read Stephen King at the top of his game.

-ET

Reading notes: Michael Connelly’s ‘Chasing the Dime’

One day in 2004, I was browsing through the bargain books bin at my local Borders bookstore. (Yes, we still had brick-and-mortar bookstores back then, though only for a few more years.)

I came across a hardcover copy of a mystery novel, Chasing the Dime. The author was Michael Connelly, whose name I recognized, but whose books I had yet to read. The price of the hardcover book was cheap, even by 2004 standards: $5.99, or something like that. I decided to give Chasing the Dime a try.

Drawn in by the story, I read Chasing the Dime in a few days. I then moved on to Michael Connelly’s series mysteries: those of Harry Bosch and Jack McEvoy, and then Mickey Haller, aka the Lincoln Lawyer.

Chasing the Dime is a standalone novel, of the “amateur sleuth” genre. Originally published in 2002, this is the story of a tech entrepreneur, Henry Pierce, who gets a new phone number after he changes his residence. The new phone number was recently held by a woman named “Lilly”.

Pierce gets numerous calls from men, many who are phoning from Los Angeles-area hotels. These men all seem eager to make evening appointments with Lilly.

Pierce quickly determines that Lilly is an escort. He also learns that Lilly went missing about two months ago. The phone company reassigned her number when she failed to pay the bill.

Pierce becomes obsessed with finding Lilly, or discovering what happened to her. (Not far into his investigation, Pierce concludes that foul play is involved.) This leads him to neglect his work and personal life. The search for Lilly also leads him to risk his physical safety.

**View CHASING THE DIME on Amazon**

Twenty years have gone by since I first read the novel. I recently decided to listen to the audiobook version of Chasing the Dime. As is often the case when I watch a film or read a story for the second time, I noticed things.

There are two major challenges in any “amateur sleuth” story. The first is: how does the amateur sleuth become involved in the mystery? The second: what motivates the amateur sleuth to investigate?

Michael Connelly plausibly answers the first question. In a big city like Los Angeles, just before the iPhone era, it is easy enough to imagine the phone company quickly recycling abandoned phone numbers, with some odd coincidences resulting.

The amateur sleuth’s motivation is less believable here. Connelly does create a childhood backstory for Pierce that partially explains his sudden obsession with Lilly’s fate. Also, Pierce has just broken up with his girlfriend, so he is emotionally vulnerable.

But as numerous secondary characters tell him, missing persons cases are best left to the police, or a trained private investigator. Also, Henry Pierce is a very busy man in the middle of some all-consuming, high-stakes endeavors. Would such a man really devote so much time to investigate the whereabouts of a stranger?

But that’s a flaw I noticed on the second reading/listening. There is no such thing as a perfect story, and Chasing the Dime is not a perfect novel. But this was the book that got me hooked on Michael Connelly. Twenty years later, I’ve been a fan ever since.

-ET

‘Salem’s Lot’: then and now

I was poking around on YouTube when I discovered the above trailer. Apparently Max (formerly HBO Max) has created a new screen adaptation of ‘Salem’s Lot, Stephen King’s 1975 novel about vampires taking over a small town in Maine.

I saw the original TV miniseries when it aired back in November 1979. I was 11 years old, in the sixth grade. There were some scenes in the 1979 original adaptation that were genuinely creepy–especially to the 11-year-old me.

When I started reading Stephen King’s novels in 1984, ‘Salem’s Lot was the one I started with. About five years had passed since my viewing of the miniseries. And I was then a sophomore in high school instead of a sixth-grader.

I read ‘Salem’s Lot in about three days. I found the book an absolute page-turner. (I seem to recall doing poorly on a geometry test, because I was reading ‘Salem’s Lot when I should have been studying!)

I’ve reread the book several times since then. From my more critical (and more jaundiced) adult perspective, I can see some flaws that I didn’t notice back then. But no matter. ‘Salem’s Lot is still a humdinger of a story, at the end of the day.

‘Salem’s Lot has a modern (1970s modern, anyway) feel to it. You don’t get the sense that you’re reading a story set in a remote location in 19th-century Europe, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). ‘Salem’s Lot therefore seems like a story that could happen. (If vampires existed, that is!)

Moreover, ‘Salem’s Lot is a real vampire story. Not a fake, teen girl romance tale masquerading as a vampire story, like that Twilight nonsense. (Don’t even get me started on Stephenie Meyer’s high crimes against the vampire genre.)

The 1970s/80s paperback version of ‘*Salem’s Lot* that I read in 1984

The new Max film version of ‘Salem’s Lot looks scary, based on the trailer. I will doubtless get around to seeing it a some point, but this is one that can wait, in my case.

‘Salem’s Lot, great story that it is, is one that has been with me for 45 years now, in one form or another. I watched the original TV miniseries at age 11. I read the novel for the first time at age 15. I’m now 56, and I know this story so well that I cannot help anticipating all the major plot points before they occur.

But such are the vagaries of age, and of rereading books, and watching their screen adaptations over decades. If your history with ‘Salem’s Lot is less extensive than mine (and it probably is), you’ll want to rush to the new Max version of it. A younger version of me would have felt the same way.

-ET

View ‘Salem’s Lot on Amazon!

The Prince of Tides: too many stories for one novel

Many years ago, I watched the movie adaptation of Pat Conroy’s 1986 novel, The Prince of Tides. I only recently got around to reading the book.

The 1991 movie stars Nick Nolte as Tom Wingo, a South Carolinian who finds himself a fish out of water in New York City.

Why is Tom Wingo in NYC? His famous sister, poet Savannah Wingo, has just had a psychotic episode. Savannah requires the intervention of psychiatrist Susan Lowenstein, played by Barbara Streisand.

*The Prince of Tides* movie poster, 1991

The movie revolves around the resultant romance between Tom Wingo and Susan Lowenstein. The movie poster collage even features an image of Streisand and Nolte in a moment of what appears to be post-coital tenderness.

This was done, no doubt, so that Hollywood could bill the movie as a romantic drama, targeted at the then middle-aged Baby Boomer demographic. But this represented a vast departure from the emphasis of Pat Conroy’s long novel.

The novel does include a romantic, adulterous interlude between Wingo and Lowenstein, both of whom are trapped in unfulfilling, ill-fitting marriages. (A very middle-aged Baby Boomer theme.) But most of the novel consists of flashback stories from Wingo’s troubled, colorful childhood.

Tom Wingo, his twin sister Savannah, and his brother Luke were all scarred by their formative years in South Carolina. The 600-page novel is mostly a long series of flashback stories that drive home this point, again and again. This is all that happened to them…This is why Tom Wingo and his siblings went so very wrong…

As a result, The Prince of Tides is less a single novel than a series of loosely connected stories, which Wingo revisits in memory during his extended stay in New York City. Some of these stories are interesting, or at least have the potential to be interesting. Far too many of them, though, come across as random and far-fetched.

For example, there is a subplot in which the Wingo siblings, as adolescents, abduct an albino porpoise from a public aquarium. The elements of this side tale are so improbable as to resemble slapstick.

There is an early flashback story in which the children’s coarse, abusive father, Henry Wingo, is a downed pilot behind German lines in World War II. This story seems rushed, and almost as improbable as the subsequent white porpoise tale.

And then there are the really weird subplots involving miscarried infants and the Wingo siblings’ grandparents. I’ll leave those for the reader to explore on her own, if she decides to read the book.

The Prince of Tides would have been much better if Conroy had written it as a series of books. Or, perhaps, a series of long short stories about the same characters. But the publishing industry of the mid-1980s was focused on delivering thick, standalone novels for the shelves of B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. That’s what The Prince of Tides is, in terms of its packaging. The storytelling suffers as a result.

The Prince of Tides lacks a central narrative drive. Look here! Conroy tells the reader. No—now look over here at this!

Pat Conroy’s novels tend to be hit or miss for me. I loved The Lords of Discipline (1980). I found South of Broad (2009) to be a slog. The Prince of Tides is a novel that I do not regret reading once, but not one that I am ever likely to read again.

Conroy grew up in South Carolina, the son of a harsh military father. Just like so many of his characters. All of his novels, in one way or another, tend to be autobiographical. Conroy seems to be revisiting his own troubled childhood in fiction, again and again.

Self-focused fiction can be both beautifully authentic and numbingly self-indulgent. The Prince of Tides is some of both.

-ET

View THE PRINCE OF TIDES on Amazon

Reading notes: ‘Fairy Tale’ by Stephen King

I just finished reading Stephen King’s fantasy-horror-adventure novel, Fairy Tale.

This being a recent Stephen King novel, it’s been summarized in detail throughout the Internet, so I’ll stick with the high points here.

Length, scope, and pacing

This is a long book (almost 600 pages).

Fairy Tale begins with a coming-of-age plot, something that Stephen King has always done well. That goes on for about 200 pages before the fantasy part really gets going.

The fantasy portion of the novel takes place in a parallel world called Empis. Fairy Tale is almost like two stories stuck together. Depending on your tastes, that may be a feature, and it may be a bug.

Overall, Fairy Tale takes a long time to get going. The grand finale is a page-turner, but there are long sections of this very long book that are extremely slow-burn, and kind of a slog.

Stephen King’s evolved style

I should provide a bit of context here. Sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s, Stephen King’s style changed dramatically. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he wrote plot-driven stories that were tightly structured with minimal fat (Stephen King’s well-known aversion to outlining notwithstanding).

I became a rabid King fan based on the early novels: ‘Salem’s Lot, Christine, The Dead Zone, The Shining, etc.

Some of those early books were actually quite long. But you never noticed, because the plots were so engaging.

Later on, King started writing long, meandering novels like Duma Key, Desperation, The Outsider, etc. I first noticed the change in style with It (1986), but the longer, slower storytelling has been a consistent feature of Stephen King’s writing for decades now.

And some fans, I should note, prefer the later style. 11/22/63 is an 850-page fantasy/alternate history tale that was published in 2011. It has a huge fanbase. It left me very lukewarm. Give me Pet Sematary or Cujo any day.

Or better yet, King’s first short story collection, Night Shift.

Among the books that King has written and published since 1990, I have definitely tended to prefer the novellas, short story collections, and short novels. I particularly liked Joyland (2013) and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

Am I glad I read ‘Fairy Tale’?

Overall, yes. This is still a good book, compared to most of the horror/fantasy novels being published nowadays.

I am admittedly prejudiced, because as an early (since 1984) reader of Stephen King, I always want him to write the kind of book that he might have written in 1978 or 1982. And lo and behold, he rarely does.

That’s rather presumptuous on my part, of course…especially since Stephen King’s longer, less plot-driven style has been a thing for 30 years now.

-ET

View FAIRY TALE by Stephen King on Amazon

Reading John Jakes, again

I discovered the books of historical novelist John Jakes (1932 – 2023) as a high school student during the 1980s. The television miniseries adaptation of his Civil War epic, North and South, aired in 1985.

North and South was extremely well-done for a network (ABC) television production of the mid-1980s. The cast included Patrick Swayze, Kirstie Alley, David Carradine, Lesley-Anne Down, and Parker Stevenson. The sets were realistic and the production values were high.

After watching that, I decided to give John Jakes’s books a try. I read North and South (1982), plus the subsequent two books in the North and South trilogy, Love and War (1984) and Heaven and Hell (1987).

Then I delved into The Kent Family Chronicles. The books in this long family saga were published between 1974 and 1979. These are the books that really put Jakes on the map as an author of commercial historical fiction.

I emphasize commercial. John Jakes never strove for the painstaking historical accuracy of Jeff Shaara, or his approximate contemporary, James Michener. Jakes’s first objective was always to entertain. If the reader learned something about the American Revolution or the Civil War along the way, that was icing on the cake.

As a result, John Jakes’s novels lie somewhere along the spectrum between literary fiction and potboilers. His characters are memorable and he imparts a sense of time and place. But these are plot-driven stories.

At the same time, Jakes’s plots have a way of being simultaneously difficult to believe and predictable. Almost all of his books have a Forrest Gump aspect. His characters are ordinary men and women, but they all seem to rub shoulders with figures from your high school history classes.

That said, Jakes is one of the few authors whose books pleased both the teenage me and the fiftysomething me. This past year, I started rereading The Kent Family Chronicles, and catching up on the few installments I missed back in the 1980s. I have changed as much as any person changes between the ages of 17 and 55, but I still find these books to be page-turners.

This past week, I started listening to the audiobook version of California Gold. This one was published in 1989, after Jakes’s long run of success with The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.

California Gold is the story of Mack Chance, a Pennsylvania coal miner’s son who walks to California to seek his fortune in the 1880s.

I will be honest with the reader: I don’t like California Gold as much as Jakes’s earlier bestsellers. California Gold is episodic in structure, and the main character is far less likable than some of Jakes’s earlier creations. In California Gold, Jakes indulges his tendency to pay lip service to the issues of the day (in this case: the budding American labor movement and early feminism) through the voices of his characters. Most of these pronouncements are politically correct and clichéd.

Worst of all, California Gold employs sex scenes as spice for low points in the plot. This is always a sign that a writer is struggling for ideas, or boring himself as he writes. When Jakes wrote California Gold, he may have been a little burned out, after writing The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.

California Gold, though, won’t be tossed aside on my did-not-finish (DNF) pile. This is still a good novel. Just not the caliber of novel I’d come to expect from John Jakes. No novelist, unfortunately, can hit one out of the park every time.

-ET

**Quick link to John Jakes’s titles on Amazon

Reading notes: ‘Gulag: a History’ by Anne Applebaum

I’m a child of the Cold War. I was twenty-one when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. I well remember the Soviet Union as a topic on the evening news. I grew up with a dark fascination with the USSR. I am always interested in acquiring new books and other materials about it.

I was therefore eager to listen to Anne Applebaum’s book: Gulag: A History. Although she’s recently taken to opining about current events on Twitter, Applebaum is the author of a handful of books on Soviet history.

Gulag, as the title suggests, is focused on the Soviet work/concentration camp system, which often housed political prisoners.

Gulag is a thoroughly researched book. Applebaum draws not only on Soviet-era documents, but also on extensive interviews she conducted with camp survivors.

The book has no ideological ax to grind. Applebaum doesn’t soft-pedal the human cost of the Soviet gulag system. Nor does she endlessly bludgeon the reader with authorial intrusions of shock and disapproval. Applebaum assumes that the reader can make her own moral judgments.

While there are passages about the leadership of the USSR and Kremin-level politics, the emphasis of the book is on the prisoners’ experience. Gulag gives the reader a sense of what it was like to have been an inmate in a Soviet prison camp, as much as any book could.

The only downside to this approach is that the many, many firsthand stories sometimes overload the reader with repetitive details.

I’m listening to the audio version of this book, but the printed version is 736 pages. My guess is that 436 pages could have accomplished the same ends in a more succinct manner.

But no book, either fiction or nonfiction, is perfect. Gulag: A History is a worthwhile read for anyone with a serious interest in Soviet history.

-ET

View GULAG: A HISTORY on Amazon

The story of Led Zeppelin (book recommendation/quick review)

Led Zeppelin formed in 1968, the year I was born, and disbanded in 1980, when I was twelve.

I was therefore too young to become a Led Zeppelin fan while the band was still a going concern. But Led Zeppelin was still enormously popular when I discovered rock music as a teenager in the early to mid-1980s. Lead singer Robert Plant, moreover, was then launching a solo career, and making use of the new medium of MTV.

Most of my musical interests lie in the past. I admittedly lack the patience to sort through the chaotic indie music scene on the Internet, and I shake my head disdainfully at the overhyped mediocrity of Taylor Swift. When I listen to music, I listen to the old stuff: Rush, Def Leppard, Led Zeppelin, and a handful of others.

Led Zeppelin is very close to the top of my list. I listen to Led Zeppelin differently than I did in the old days, though. The lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” sound less profound to me at 55 than they did when I was 15. I now appreciate Led Zeppelin when they’re doing what they did best: raucous, bluesy rock-n-roll that had only a hint of deeper meaning: “Black Dog”, “Whole Lotta Love”, “Kashmir”, etc.

And of course, reading remains my first passion. I’m still waiting for an in-depth, definitive biography of Canadian rock band Rush. (I suspect that someone, somewhere is working on that, following the 2020 passing of Rush’s chief lyricist and drummer, Neil Peart.) But a well-researched and highly readable biography of Led Zeppelin already exists: Bob Spitz’s Led Zeppelin: The Biography.

At 688 pages and approximately 238,000 words, this is no biography for the casual reader. But if you really want to understand Led Zeppelin, its music, and the band’s cultural impact, you simply can’t beat this volume. I highly recommend it for the serious fan.

-ET

View Led Zeppelin: The Biography at Amazon

Jack Reacher shows his age

I’ve just finished reading Better Off Dead, the second Jack Reacher novel coauthored by Lee Child and his younger brother, Andrew Child.

Better Off Dead is not a horrible novel. The book is by no means unreadable, or risible, or anything like that. But “it doesn’t completely suck” is not the sort of recommendation that any author—or publisher—hopes for.

I share the opinion of many longtime Jack Reacher fans: that there is something missing in the collaboration between Lee Child and his younger sibling. The last novel written solo by Lee Child, Blue Moon (2019), was much, much better. So was 2018’s Past Tense, and all the others before that. (I’ve read almost all of them.)

This doesn’t mean that Andrew Child is a flawed writer. Writing as Andrew Grant, Andrew Child has already written at least two series of traditionally published thriller novels. I haven’t read any of his books, but the overall trend of his reader reviews is positive. (Needless to say, though, Andrew Child has yet to achieve the conspicuous success of his older brother.)

The problem is that the collaboration isn’t working. This likely has less to do with the raw skill of either author, than the difficult nature of the collaborative process.

In the 1980s, horror authors Peter Straub and Stephen King collaborated on several novels, including The Talisman (1984). Straub and King are different writers. The Talisman fell far short of either man’s best work. I suspect that is the best analysis we can offer for the combination of Lee and Andrew Child, too.

The main problem I see is not in the plotting of Better Off Dead. The Jack Reacher books, after all, were never plotted with the intricacy of a Robert Ludlum novel. We read Jack Reacher books primarily for the distinctive personality of the series’ eponymous hero. Yet the voice and characterization of Jack Reacher are distinctly “off” in Better Off Dead. The Jack Reacher of Better Off Dead has far less wit and humor, and a lot more meanness. And much, much less charm.

Andrew Child, I suspect, doesn’t really “get” Jack Reacher. The personality of Jack Reacher is so quirky and idiosyncratic, that I wouldn’t want to attempt writing him, either. Jack Reacher is a creation sprung from Lee Child’s imagination, and perhaps that is its only reliable source.

Another likely difficulty is Lee Child’s writing process. Lee Child has always been what we call an organic writer. He doesn’t outline in advance; he makes up the story as he goes along. That can work for a one-man operation; it’s much more difficult for an authorial team.

In January 2020, Lee Child announced his intention to retire from writing the Jack Reacher novels. After coauthoring a few transitional novels with his younger brother, he plans to completely hand over the series to Andrew Child.

In 2020, at the age of 65, Lee Child told an interviewer that he was “aging out” of being able to produce the novels. While the author may have undisclosed health problems, it is worth noting that Stephen King is still churning out new books at the age of 76. Joyce Carol Oates, age 85, continues to put out at least one major work per year.

But neither King nor Oates is a single-series writer. While Stephen King was originally known as a straightforward horror author, his work has always had a tremendous breadth and variety. Joyce Carol Oates writes literary novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and the occasional horror tale.

Lee Child, meanwhile, has published almost nothing but Jack Reacher novels for twenty-five years. Don’t get me wrong: I love Jack Reacher. But maybe Lee Child loves him a little less than he used to. And he can’t be hurting for money. Hence (perhaps) his decision to pass the baton to his 55-year-old brother.

But does this move even make much long-term sense for Andrew Child? According to the biographical details one can glean from the novels, the Jack Reacher character was born in 1960. That means he’s now in his mid-sixties. Almost the same age as Lee Child, who believes himself a bit too advanced in years to write the stories.

Jack Reacher’s adventures rely on the character’s itinerant, minimalist lifestyle and physical prowess. Many aspects of the Jack Reacher routine stretched the reader’s credibility when he was an early middle-age man. But for a man of sixty-something? Hmmm.

And then there are the interests of the long-term fans. Most would probably prefer to reread the good, previously published Jack Reacher novels, versus reading new ones that don’t quite fit the mold.

Speaking for myself: I don’t want Jack Reacher to become another Star Wars, Star Trek, Spider-Man, or Superman—a cash cow franchise that is endlessly propped up by a movie studio or publishing company for yet one more performance.

The best story franchises are the ones that give up the ghost when the subject material has been reasonably exhausted. The AMC period spy drama, The Americans, comes to mind here. The producers of that enormously successful series ran it for six amazing seasons—and then quit while they were ahead. They never phoned it in. Every single episode of The Americans is pure gold.

Twenty-eight Jack Reacher novels have been published to date, and number twenty-nine will come out this fall. Perhaps this series would be better if it stopped around book number thirty, or somewhere thereabouts. Jack Reacher, after all, has more than earned his retirement.

-ET

**View Better Off Dead on Amazon

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

The period between the two world wars was the golden age of the pulp fiction magazines. This was a time before television, or (of course) the Internet. Entertainment options were limited. (Heck, they barely had radio in those days.) Many people therefore turned to magazines that specialized in quickly written and fast-paced stories of romance, western adventure, crime, science fiction, or horror.

What happened to pulp fiction? The pulp magazines weren’t the victims of television, as is commonly thought. They were the casualties, rather, of the cheaply printed paperback. Modern paperback books were first introduced in 1935, but they really caught on during and shortly after World War II. The paperback completely changed the publishing and bookselling landscape, much as Amazon would about sixty years later.

Some of the original pulp content is still with us, of course. Horror fans who adore H.P. Lovecraft may not know that favorites like “At the Mountains of Madness”, “Dagon” —and most other Lovecraft stories—were originally published in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine founded in 1922. (Note: Weird Tales technically still exists, though its format has undergone some modifications; the magazine has a site on the Internet.)

I’ve read and reread Lovecraft’s oeuvre as much as I care to. So when I was recently in a mood to do some reading off the beaten path, I decided to indulge in a bit of vintage pulp crime fiction.

Or actually, quite a lot of vintage pulp crime fiction. The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps contains forty-seven stories and two complete novels. Writers represented in this collection include well-known names like Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). There are also plenty of stories by writers who are long forgotten.

Why read pulp fiction? Well, you probably already watch pulp television.

I’m a longtime fan of pulp TV, in fact. During the 1980s, I regularly tuned in to action television shows like The A-Team, Knight Rider, Airwolf, and the original MacGyver. These shows were all escapist television, with plots that roared out of the gate like a 1981 DeLorean or a 1987 Toyota Supra.

My favorite was The A-Team. An episode of The A-Team kept you on the edge of your seat. Each episode ended with a blazing gunfight, in which no one was usually killed or seriously injured. The A-Team made absolutely no attempt to provide any sort of messaging on social, political, or philosophical issues. The other aforementioned 80s-era pulp TV shows were done in a similar vein.

Most of these shows did not age well. For nostalgia’s sake, I recently tuned in to a few old episodes of The A-Team and the original MacGyver. In the MacGyver episode, the eponymous hero found himself in the Soviet Union, where everyone conveniently spoke English. The Russians even spoke English with each other. I managed to sit through about twenty minutes of this. Life is too short.

The same might be said of the stories in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. You can detect the literary and storytelling skills at work; but you can also tell that you’re reading fiction produced in a different era, when expectations were very different. My 1980s pulp TV shows did not have to compete with Netflix. The writers whose work is collected in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps did not have to compete with Michael Connelly or Lee Child.

The stories in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps are interesting as artifacts of the pulp era, in the same way that a Ford Model T is an interesting artifact of automobile technology in the 1920s. But as entertainment for present-day audiences? Keep in mind that some of these stories are more than eighty years old. You had might as well ask me if I would like to use a Model T for my daily commuting needs.

I suspect that this massive tome (more than one thousand pages in print) is so massive for a reason. The editors knew that the phrase “your mileage may vary” would be very applicable here.

What about their usefulness for writers? Those of us who write fiction are always thinking of a story in market analysis terms, after all.

I wouldn’t recommend that any twenty-first century writer try to imitate the style of these stories, exactly. At least a quarter of these tales contain plot holes that you could drive a Model T through; and almost all of them contain hackneyed dialogue. (“He’s on the square!” “The place looked swell.”)

And oh, the eyebrows that will be raised among the finger-wagging social justice crowd. While these stories aren’t intentionally sexist, they are the product of a different time, when ideas about men and women were different. They overflow with gendered terminology that would make any writer the target of an online pitchfork mob today (“honey,” “doll”, “sugar”, “dame”, etc.).

The female characters in these crime stories are mostly props. But then, so are most of the men. These stories are all about plot, plot, plot.

And that is where this book may be instructive for writers who have found themselves too immersed in navel-gazing literary fiction. The writer who suspects he is spending too much time on flowery descriptions and internal monologue may learn something valuable here: how to get to the point, or to the plot. The pulp-era writers were certainly good at that, despite their other shortcomings.

-ET

**View ‘The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age–The ’20s, ’30s & ’40s’ on Amazon**

JFK, Marlene Dietrich, and the problem of the aging Lothario

Eleanor Herman’s Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House, is well worth reading both for its historical content, as well as its human interest angle.

In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.

There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)

Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.

According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)

While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.

Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.

But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”

Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35^th president.

Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.

For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.

And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.

What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)

We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.

It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)

Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.

But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.

I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.

Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.

-ET

View it on Amazon: Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House