Ocean at the End of the Lane

So Neil Gaiman went and wrote another story for children! Then another one, about a child, that I sort of had the impression might be a children’s book in the same light as His Dark Materials are children’s books.

It is about a man who is attending a funeral and makes a stop at the house on the end of the lane where he grew up, remembering his friend Lettie who had an ocean in her small pond. He then flashes back, and the story takes away to the time when he was seven, remembered by referencing his seventh birthday party – a party in which nobody showed up and he took his books and his Batman figurine upstairs to his room. He then learned that he was to be moved from his room to make way for a new tenant, as money was tight, and a South African opal miner shows up, runs over his cat, gives him a stray to make up for it, then steals his father’s Mini and kills himself in it. This event brings about a creature from another dimension, and she throws money at people and tries to hurt them whilst giving them things they desire. Lettie and the young man venture into the other realm to make sure the creature no longer throws money at people, and it uses the young boy as a door to cross into our realm. The monster shows up as an attractive young nanny to take care of the boy and his older sister, very much in a creepy Merry Poppins sort of way, if Merry Poppins were a babe, and named Ursula Monkton. Ursula puts everyone else into some sort of trance, becomes vindictive and nasty towards the boy, then gets his non-violent father to try and kill him by drowning him in the tub, then has sex in the study with the boy’s father as he escapes, then gets eaten by ravenous shadow-figures that are sort of like birds.

Pretty cool children’s book, if you ask me. I would let my kids read it. But not before they finished His Dark Materials.

I liked it, not just for all the reasons I mentioned, but because the story telling was so good. Gaiman really never ceases to surprise me with his quickness in taking a story from one direction and turning it on its head. This one had a lot of elements from others, namely Neverwhere, Graveyard Book, and Stardust, for me. Neverwhere, in the sense that a person visible and knowable in our world can become a door to the other world, which is not just a cliché fantasy but some sort of fucked up imagination I probably would not voluntarily visit that exists in Gaiman’s mind. And Graveyard Book because of the way the Hemstock family are all liminal figures who understand and can determine who and what goes in and out of each realm and orchestrate maneuvers that keep everything in their proper place within the two. But, because they are liminal figures (which many of my favourite characters throughout literature often are), they share nothing about how they are able to do these things.

Also similar to Stardust is that misdirection, where Gaiman builds an air of children’s fantasy story-telling, letting you think that you may be reading a bit of a kids’ book, then presents fucking. And not “proper British sex,” either, but babes fucking dudes. It always gets me!

 Another, this time unfortunate, thing I realized when I read this book, is that Gaiman drew many of the background events to set up the plot from his own life. Which tend to be pretty fucked up. I say this is unfortunate, because the story-telling is so good that I finally came to the realization that all great authors pour into their works some elements of their own background, and the darker their past, the better the book. So events such as him climbing his drain pipe growing up, having a tenant who killed his kitten, stole his dad’s Mini and killed himself in it, being the only one present at his seventh birthday party, and still being excited to go read books and play with Batman toys, these things all make for a dark past and a great story. I was pretty regular, and pretty damned spoiled as well. I am therefore incapable of entertaining you all with something so inspiring.

Loins Series - Once Burned

Loins. Grab ’em if you got ’em. That line is borrowed from the rap song in that link, which is a song about being a Tucson gangsta from a former peer of mine in university who left his very aggressive stance as a hardcore evangelist born-again Xian to return to a life of debauchery. So, good for him.

Anyway I’m not sure how else a book that makes Stephanie Meyer appear as though she beholds the craft and imagination of Bram Stoker slithers its way onto my blog, other than to point out it was a book club recommendation by someone that definitely was not me. Because if I am to be getting off to vampyres for 300 pages, it is at least going to get weird. None of this pop-sensation Trueblood nonsense, or Queen of the Damned, or Blade, or stories that Joss Whedon craps out and people salivate over because OH MY GAWD IT’S JOSS WHEDON!

There is a very brief list of things I liked, so we’ll just cover that and be done. First up: Electrocution. I like how this author’s audacious nature re-defined what it means to be electrocuted. “I mildly electrocuted the perpetrator…” no. No you did not. “When I was a child, was electrocuted and didn’t come out of the coma for weeks OMG!” Again, no. Can’t happen. Think of being mildly murdered. That is how much sense the author makes. What boggles my mind is to think –  or rather trying to think – of friends, family, editors, and publishers actually reading “mildly electrocuted” and just totally being okay with it. Like it means a little zap. It means death by electricity. I would not let someone try to pass off “mildly drowning” and then gaining the power of making people wet when they touch them as a means of a premise to a novel. What further discourages me is to think this person got paid. Paid in real, actual, dollars to write this stuff. It boils my blood.

Pictured: Whampire

The other favourite part of this story is that vampires just are. They just can! And what sort of vampires are they? Of course they’re basically cliché TV vampires from the modern era. No effort goes into the foundation mythology (a subject I particularly enjoy in any fictional universe) or how they came to be. And why can they fly, any explanation there? Of course not, don’t fret your brain, this is just a story about thrusting in a meat sword to the hilt. Can the author describe why they die, or appear to die? How that happens yet they still don’t decay? Any sort of insight as to why that would happen would be grea- Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I still want to know how Vlad the Impaler licks up messy virgin girls’ remains when he takes their honour from them, I just meant after that…could we then explore the universe of vampires and their defiance of modern science or at least make some shit up about how their disease, affliction, gifts, what-have-you, came into existence?

In the end, I thought these scribblings of a rather boring, uninteresting, unadventurous middle aged woman’s fantasies are better left in a shoe-box with her other quick release apparatus of equally lame, predictable, greasy nature. To the hilt!

John Dies at the End

Good news everyone! It's a fucking movie now, so you don't even need to read this book!

The first thing I realized about this book is that it is funny. Not like, here is a shitty joke, or that character has a weird tweak, or the idea that monsters and demons are just like bullies, sort of funny. I mean full on f***ing hilarious. If you have a dark sense of humour, think exploding people and goofy spiders with little hands and fake wigs could be funny, combined with the absolutely strange intuitive near-superpowers of demon slaying kids who are basically f***-ups and a guy who loves to deliver cheesy one-liners before he blasts monsters, then yeah, this shit is really great.

I can’t speak too much of the plot, because I think it is actually quite messy and not very good. The fact that it bounces all over the place only to be tied in all together at the end is cool, but nothing unique and leaves for a lot of unanswered questions in terms of how and when things took their turn into the alternate reality or crossed-universe that the narrator, and the reader by the end, are familiar with.

But my goodness, weak, discontinuous or fragmented plot slopped together or not, this book is full of great moments. So much so that I honestly laughed out loud, in real hearty gutlaughs, and it really made me feel like I didn’t care what was happening in the plot at that particular moment; the writing is funny enough to cover the tracks of any literary crimes.

David Wong, the alter-ego of Cracked.com writer – Jason Pargin – is the main character/narrator and has a really great way of bringing a subtle fantasy of monsters and demons into the world of a semi-rational, cynical young bastard. He was troubled as a youngster, and this helps him touch upon actual issues that affect real people, making him a character that’s pretty easy to relate to. Even aside from him calling John a dumbass repeatedly, there is a large amount of angst he holds against humanity. As the story moves along, we learn more about why he was sent to special school to finish his senior year of high school, as he comes clean to Amy about committing the violent crime against jocks that were bullying him that landed him there.

The anti-bullying explosion of his was a very interesting point, I thought. It comes as he learns the truth about Amy, and why he feels bad about noticing her lack of a left hand when John never made an issue of it, and her depression, which actually makes David feel less optimistic about humanity than normal. He reciprocates by telling her of his story, and why he felt he had to do it. Bullies can only push so far before it all collapses against them. There was a moment the book, though funny and not truly very thought provoking, really got to me though. When he finished his spiel on stabbing a bully’s face, and was making a point of how no one should feel bad for those who prey upon kids – kids they feel are weaker in order to get an emotional high from beating them up or making them cry – when the victims fight back with an uncontrolled eruption of psychotic rage, he mentioned a bit about the Columbine School Shootings I had never considered: that the look on those jocks faces when the kids they had bullied had guns aimed for their chests must have been fucking priceless.

So yeah, if you are thinking of bullying someone, please don’t. Especially if the potential victim is a Cracked.com editor.

In all, very funny, very silly and though not a great plot line, carries a bit of a cult sensation to it that I can get behind. I’m happy the author is having it turned into a movie. I will watch it, and whether or not it is any good, I hope he made a serious amount of money from it all.

The Drawing of the Three – The Dark Tower: Book Two

 Very discontinuous from my post on Book One: The Gunslinger, sure, but review that one if you need to, because I wrote this one shortly thereafter and it follows a similar style and train of thought. Here we go:

Well now this is more like it. I recall saying something along the lines of

“Besides, I don’t dislike all of his work, I just find him a bit too bizarre and gory for me sometimes; really drawing out the scenes that are intended to make one uncomfortable but don’t add much, if anything at all, to the story.”

And guess what? It happens…but not in such a way that I can’t enjoy the story overall. The truly horrible thing (he is a “horror” novelist, right? Even if these aren’t particularly scary books) is that it happened at a particularly odd time. Being a man who doesn’t believe in coincidences, I have to say this may be an event that will stick with me for a while. How it happened was that I was listening to an Audiobook of this story, narrated by Frank Muller and using my Audiobook application on my smartphone as I traveled to Phoenix from Safford to watch a Red Wings game.

Stephen King’s “Kinginess,” wherein he describes the gruesome crime that leads to Odetta Holmes losing her legs above the knee after being pushed in front of the A-train in NYC, was more gore with less plot-relevancy than I felt I should be putting up with during a narrow canyon pass through the most dangerous part of my drive. I promptly switched from Audiobook to music on my smartphone, and as I did, there was an accident ahead of me. The details of this accident relate more to another story, which can be found at another blog for which I sometimes stop by and write. And that story blossomed to even more unexpected, stranger-than-mere-coincidence, deeper relationships. Very strange, to say the least.

I think for that, this book will always be looked upon strangely, and fondly. To get away from what happened in my life as I went through this story, it was very much fun. Eddie Dean was a very enjoyable character and his rite of passage from drug mule in his world to sidekick of the Gunslinger was well done, and at times fun to cheer along with. Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker, not so much. But the drawing of the third one made it all better.

And of course, how can I recap this story without mentioning the giant, bloodthirsty lobsters? Does Stephen King really hate lobsters? Being a native Northeastern US celebrity and representative of that region, I can imagine. But maybe the man had nightmares of them when he was a kid. In any event, the narrators take on their psychotic questioning (“Dum-a-chum? Ded-a-chek?”) makes me laugh everytime I think about it. It was perfect.

I also really enjoyed the gunslinging in this book. Whether it was his threats, a blasting of a human-hungry lobster, killing off people from Eddie Dean’s world or doing his thing with ammo and drugs in Jack Mort’s world, it was always entertaining. And Jack Mort represented a typical Stephen King villain to me, and I’m glad he wasn’t in there long enough to ruin the book for me. A sociopath who gets off causing serious injury to people…and yes, I mean actual orgasms when he does. Very King-y, I should think.

But there’s a great plot development with him at the end, and great character development too, pulling everything together and preparing you for the long, difficult journey onwards as they leave the coast and head up into the foothills on their quest for the Tower. Not much is said about the Tower in this book, but with the Man in Black gone, it’s not as though any one here knows that much.

Needless to say, I liked this book more than its predecessor and if the third one is half this good, I’ll enjoy it as well.