The Intersection: IT
I’m a Stephen King fan. He’s not perfect. No writer is. To this day, I still love his work. Anyway, I read IT ages ago, and the book gave me nightmares. My experience with the book was mostly positive. Mostly. One of the things that I like about King is that his characters often choose to be their better selves under dire circumstances. Also, in The Stephen King-verse, violence isn’t always the answer. I adore that. Of course, this philosophy complicates the task of writing a satisfying ending. Audiences want to see the Big Bad™ roughed up. This is why employing “Love defeats Hate” isn’t a simple or easy way to write a story. And this is why the end of IT…stumbles. To make matters worse, the novel suffers from one of the worst tropes when it comes to female characters: the “Woman equals Love” trope, even the children’s part of the story. The newest movie has similar issues, but at least it didn’t involve raping an eleven/twelve year old girl. I do like the novel—just not that part of it. Which is why I was relieved it wasn’t in this movie. (Thank the gods.)
Book Review: Skyfarer by Joseph Brassey
You’ve kind of heard this story before, or elements of it. Young trainee in a new power, from a sheltered backwater land, gets caught up in a struggle against an implacable tyrannical foe sweeping all comers against it. Young trainee is talented, perhaps more than they know, but the opposition is led by a charismatic and implacably evil head who would stop at nothing to get what they want, including using a doomsday weapon to get the Macguffin first. Magic, battles, intrigue, adventure and full-color glorious epic as forces collide and the fate of a world hangs in the balance. Off the shelf components in some cases, maybe, but infused with a mixture of fun and adventure, such a combination can be darned entertaining. Skyfarer is the debut novel by Joseph Brassey. The worldbuilding drew me in hard and early in the novel. We need a word for this kind of setting, since here at Skiffy and Fanty one of my fellow bloggers, Kate Sherrod, recently reviewed An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors. That novel’s universe features a set of floating continents in a Jovian planet’s atmosphere. Airships fly from continent to continent, with different cultures and polities on them. The roleplaying game Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies had a world like this, with a variety of layers of skies that islands from the small to continent sized drift in, and can be reached with ships made of a wood that defies gravity. And then there is the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game where one of the Elemental Planes, the Elemental Plane of Air, is mostly an empty sky dotted with floating islands of various sizes. The Larry Niven novels The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring, set in a giant oxygen bearing atmosphere in free fall, is an early example of this.
Horror Review: John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester (Reviewed by Penny Reeve)
I have to admit, I’m a sucker for a glorious cover. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with flying in the face of the old adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” in my opinion, especially when it’s for John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester, a glorious anodized looking thing which calls to mind a washed out ’70s psychedelic vibe, the colors layered over a cornfield ready to be shorn of its produce. Strangely haunting, one look saw Universal Harvester make its way onto my Amazon wishlist almost before I’d read the synopsis. It also helped that the novel is the second by John Darnielle — brainchild behind the Mountain Goats, whose work I admire — though I must confess this is my first foray into his literary work. Universal Harvester follows Jeremy, a motherless 20-something guy working at a video store, with little desire to move on. He has a quiet life and an unassuming relationship with his dad with whom he still lives, eating tacos and chilling out with beers, comfortably watching films together. It all seems to suit him just fine. This quiet life of Jeremy’s is disturbed, however, when during one of his shifts at the store a woman returns a video, which she mentions cuts to another movie halfway through. The spliced movie — or movies, as it later turns out — are unsettling; images of people with sacks over their heads standing on one leg, or lying in a heap, the videographer rarely shown but always present, their breath casting an eerie soundtrack to the footage. Jeremy, along with store owner Sarah Jane, don’t want to get involved with the tapes, fearing what will happen if they do, but quite rightly can’t seem to get the images out of their heads. Should they risk their quiet lives to find out what how the tapes came to be, or ignore them and stick with their peaceful lives?
Top 10 Posts and Episodes for August 2017
Another month, another list of our most viewed things! Here are the most popular posts and episodes from July 2017:
Book Review: A Passport to a Nation of Talking Slugs by Andrew Kozma
In all honesty, this should really be called a booklet review, or, to be fancier, a chapbook review, because this is a slight little thing that a person could easily read all the way through while waiting in line at the DMV, still having time to start on another short story collection or anthology before her number was called. Which is to say that A Passport to a Nation of Talking Slugs could actually fit into a passport, as its amusingly apt cover might suggest. But though it be little, it is fierce, is this collection of Kafka-meets-Ionesco-as-Introduced-by-Borges bits. With just four wee stories, Kozma manages to sneak a few emotional wallops among what seems like whimsy, and, to readers like me who have been trained on Gene Wolfe for so long, he’s managed to suggest a degree of intertwined meaning that he might not have intended but feels like it’s there.
Book Review: MJ-12 Shadows by Michael Martinez
Syria, in the Middle East, is full of turmoil. Violence, political chaos, powers outside the region meddling and backing various factions and individuals, only enflaming and extending the conflict. The government there is on the edge of collapse, as outside agencies and internal struggles threaten to destroy Syria entirely. Good people trapped in a horrible situation that there seems no way out of, and everything even the United States tries to do just makes it all worse. A novel detailing the modern-day tragedy there? Sadly, no. The year is 1949, and we are in the midst of an alternate history, a history where the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War was marked by the emergence of paranormally gifted individuals, individuals who are scooped up by the espionage apparatuses of the United States and the Soviet Union, as the game of espionage takes a fantastic turn.
