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Bruce Jones
is now following J.W. Thompson's reviews
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Bruce Jones
is now following James's reviews
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No, this is not a joke. Hank Searls, author of THE BIG X, THE CROWDED SKY, THE PILGRIM PROJECT, BLOOD SONG, and OVERBOARD (my favorite) is one terrific writer. Retired now with an online shop that helps beginning and even veteran writers hone their c...more
No, this is not a joke. Hank Searls, author of THE BIG X, THE CROWDED SKY, THE PILGRIM PROJECT, BLOOD SONG, and OVERBOARD (my favorite) is one terrific writer. Retired now with an online shop that helps beginning and even veteran writers hone their craft, Searls should get back in the game, especially in light of the ebook boom. He’s simply one hell of a stylist. He puts you in the book!
JAWS 2 is one of those weirder than life scenarios only Hollywood could concoct: a movie tie-in book that’s actually better than the movie on which it’s based which is worse than the movie before it, which is better than the original book. It’s complicated.
As anyone who wasn’t off the planet for the last 30 years knows, author Peter Benchley wrote a novel called JAWS, all about a big, hulking shark dining on the locals of a Long Island resort town in the summer of 1973. Benchley’s book, incredibly, was inspired by the true events of a big hulking shark (or sharks, depending your theory) dining on the locals off the beach and in a creek off Matawan, New Jersey, in the summer of 1916. No one is yet sure of the exact breed of the real-life culprit, but Benchley chose a Great White for his tale because that was the then-presumed offender of the 1916 killings. It’s generally accepted now that the real killer was a Bull Shark owing to its abilities to navigate and survive fresh water estuaries like the brackish Matawan creek. If people were afraid to go into the water after seeing the 70’s movie, a dark fin cruising an innocent-looking 1916 neighborhood creek must have been beyond traumatizing.
JAWS the novel was published in hardcover with success in 1974 by Doubleday. Before that, however, unknown young director Stephen Spielberg got hold of the book’s galleys on the Universal lot and pleaded the producers to let him helm the film. The paperback sales released in tandem with the film helped bolster an already gigantic hit. And you know La-La land: “If they liked it once, they’ll love it twice.” So JAWS 2 was green-lit. Actor Roy Scheider reportedly begged Universal not to make him appear in the sequel, not surprisingly, but a contract is a contract. The plot surrounds the wholly improbable idea of yet another enormous shark snacking on the good folks of Amity Island (read: Martha’s Vineyard), mostly its adolescent population. Directed without an ounce of finesse by Jeannot Szwarc, this is an instance where you’re actually rooting for the shark to eliminate the obnoxious teens. Strangely IMDb lists the writers of this mess as Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, who also penned the screenplay of the original. But the tie-in novel of JAWS 2 credits Howard Sackler and Dorothy Tristan. Given the dubious distinction between the two, I’d bet on the latter. At any rate, Hank Searls was invited to make sense of the whole thing in novel form.
A move-tie novel assignment is almost always a thankless task. There’s little original glory in it. Published in 1978 as a PB original (tie-ins always are) by Bantam, I can only assume a superb writer like Searls took the job for pocket money; he’d already had a reasonable hit with his own Overboard (Norton) the year before. One can readily see, however, why both H’wood and publishing brass might think Searls the go-to guy for such a venture; he was seasoned screenwriter, a WWII Navy pilot who knew his watery stuff and who even lived on a ketch in the South Pacific at the time. But with such a bad film (or script) to work from, adapting the film must have seemed doggedly tedious. Maybe Searls—who does follow the film’s nothing plot, adding some padding of his own—was simply determined to buck the averages. Whatever the case, his novel is the only good thing that came out of anything surrounding the sequel.
If Searls’ book has any drawbacks it may be in trying to live up to its vivid first chapter. In the movie’s opening, a couple of divers we don’t care about stumble upon the wreckage of the Orca, Quint’s original not-big-enough-ship, now sunk somewhere off Long Island Sound. While taking pictures of each other near the canted icon, they get attacked by--what else? In a virtuoso display of how words can be far more potent than images, Searls turns a predictable prologue into a heart-stopper by taking us into the hearts and minds of the victims as well as the internal workings of the shark itself, wrapping all this in a green world of cold, murky twilight with verisimilitude as vivid as your worst bad dream. It begins the moment the two divers—lawyer and doctor part-owners of a Hatteras powerboat—don their wetsuits and slip into the water to start the final downward journey of their lives:
"Halfway down the anchor-line the doctor paused. His panting, amplified in his regulator, was earsplitting. He was sure his partner, descending in a green flowering of bubbles 10 feet below him, could hear every gasp. Clinging to the half inch rope he tried to relax…he could not understand the apprehension that was making him pant.
"The strobe light flared, turning everything momentarily white. All at once he heard a sound like a subway train, fast approaching from his rear. His partner, dancing on sand as he tried to balance in the current, wound his camera, then stopped. He stared at something approaching from above and behind the doctor. His mouthpiece fell from his face.
"The doctor, startled, began to turn but instinctively hunkered down instead, clinging to a broken plank. His eyes were riveted on his companion. A great bubble soared from his partner’s mouth. The lawyer threw up an arm to protect himself…the green surface light faded. An enormous bulk, descending like a gliding jet, swept by, a foot above the doctor’s head, blotting out the dancing sunlight. It seemed to pass forever. The last of the shape became a tail, towering taller than himself. It swished once, almost sweeping him loose and blotting his view of the partner in a cloud of bottom-silt and mud. There was silence. The barrel clanged. The doctor clung to the plank, peering into the settling murk. He could hear only his own tortured breathing. He was terrified of the loudness of it, beckoning whatever it was back to the spot…One of his partner’s diving fins bounced past, heading to sea on the tidal current…"
The beauty, of course--the deftness--is in revealing no visceral imagery at all, only the imagined horror of it. In his great book THE SILENT WORLD, Jacques Cousteau describes being underwater as so quiet “you couldn’t hear a whale swim up behind you,” so I can’t credit Searl’s subway sound of the attacking shark. But I don’t dispute it either; you can’t write that well about the ocean depths without having experienced them. But it gets better—or worse, if you’re the poor doctor. His partner gone, and something still lurking about, he must return to the surface and the safety of the boat. We feel the terrified rattle of his nerves right down to our fingertips during the course of a few minutes journey that feels to the terrified swimmer like hours…
"He eased his head from the water. The Hatteras slapped at anchor hardly a hundred feet away…carefully, he slithered toward the boat. He hardly broke the water. Once he stopped and glided, gazing straight down. He saw nothing but shafts of emerald light lancing the depths below. He shivered suddenly. Deep in his soul he felt another onrush of terror. He quickened the beat of his fins. One of them plopped loudly, and then the other, but he had less than 30 feet to go. He could no longer stand the dragging pace. With 20 feet to go, he was sprinting, thrashing recklessly, breathing in enormous chest-searing gulps. All at once, 10 feet from the boat, he felt a bump and a firm, decisive grasp on his left femur some three inches above his knee. It was surprising but not at all violent…He dipped his mask, looking down. He was amazed to see half a human leg, swathed in neoprene, tumbling into the depths…"
Brrrrr! Great stuff!
The film features a segment involving a young girl parasailing, being plucked off the ocean surface and set down again like a bit of living catnip to tempt the pursuing shark. Searls wisely dispenses with such gimmickry in his book by foregoing the sky antics and letting water skis and shark alone be tension enough. All this is framed from the POV of the horrified husband driving the speedboat that pulls his hapless skiing wife. With terse prose choppy as the waves around them, Searls milks the scene for every ounce of nail-biting suspense. If the panicked husband can just get that ski boat back to shore in time:
"A hundred yards behind her an enormous, lazy fin was beckoning. She did not see it, and while he stood frozen in horror, he saw it move, in a leisurely manner, up their trail. “Dee!” he screamed. She smiled at him over the water and took her hand off the towbar, waving him ahead. The fin was coming up on her now, weaving across their dying wake. It was simply gigantic. He jammed the throttle forward, way too fast, catching her off balance…in a moment he was afraid she would pitch headfirst into the wake…she was on the ski now and rising. He stood erect, searching their wake for the fin. The thing must have dived, that was it, he had fooled it.
"Now all he had to do was head for the beach: no fish like that would go into shallow water…he scanned the beach for a safe place…gently, his eye on his wife, he began a sweeping curve toward the cottage. She was weaving again, jumping the wake each time, exuberantly. He signaled her to take it easy, simply to ski, finally slowed the boat so that she couldn’t do it at all, and then saw the fin again, coming up fast astern…"
Does Searls have time for deep emotional insights and titanic literary themes? Hey, this is a tie-in novel. You’re on board for the thrills and if you’re not on board, grab that Tolstoy you never got around to. Is there more character weight and revelatory catharsis in his stand alone Overboard?--you bet, and that novel ends with a shockingly poetic punch you won’t soon forget it. What Hank Searls delivers in JAWS 2 is a high speed read with surprising resonance, themes and descriptions that linger in the mind and on into our dreams. He could have tossed it off, sure, but he chose to go the other way: make pulp profound. At times he succeeds well beyond the call of duty.
In truth there are passages in JAWS 2 that are every bit as good as anything I’ve read by the author. I’ve given that considerable deliberation. Is this a case of a really good writer getting out of his own way, going with first-gut instincts and turning a quick paycheck into a mini-masterpiece of suspense? I don’t know. Sadly, his next sojourn in the saga, JAWS 4 (or was it JAWS 4.0?—I can’t keep up) is a less satisfying one. By then, attempting to novelize an idea no longer remotely novel may have proved beyond even Searls’ gifts.
A hint of this future futility comes in JAWS 2 when the author is expected to follow the movie’s preposterous script at its most ludicrous. Fending off the shark from a small craft, Brodie and a gang of adolescents are trying to haul up the anchor when its flutes become hooked on something below. Together they somehow heave the ‘something’ up—which turns out to be part of a length of miles long impossibly heavy power line to the lighthouse on the distant point—what the shark eventually bites into and electrocutes itself with. Even a writer of Searl’s talent must have hung his head in despair at such Herculean incredulity. But he plunges bravely ahead despite the laughable images: “It was black, shiny and as thick as his upper leg. How he and a few teenage kids had got it from the bottom, he had no idea.”
Nor clearly did Searls.
Some genius in Hollywood, maybe?
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Review of KARMA by Mitchell Smith
Not saying anything particularly revelatory here, but I’m continually astonished by how many mediocre writers hit the jackpot these days while really terrific ones are all but dismissed and forgotten. Oddly the case w...more
Review of KARMA by Mitchell Smith
Not saying anything particularly revelatory here, but I’m continually astonished by how many mediocre writers hit the jackpot these days while really terrific ones are all but dismissed and forgotten. Oddly the case with most of my favorite authors. Is it just me?
The only thing maybe worse that a great writer like Mitchell Smith completely falling off the map is the idea he may still be out there somewhere cloaked under a pseudonym, and I can’t find him. I’m especially sensitive to this idea in Smith’s case having recently discovered he began his writing career under a non de plume: a series of Western paperback originals from one of the, shall we say, less reputable houses (I should know, having begun my own career with them). Is it cricket to mention a series of books an author purposely chose to remain estranged from? I don’t know; even a clearly exploitative title in the hands of a master can bear rewards.
Anyway, we’re here to discuss Smith’s mainstream era thrillers, DAYDREAMS, STONE CITY, DUE NORTH, SACRIFICE, REPRISAL and particularly KARMA, probably my personal favorite—though I hesitate to categorize them as mere thrillers, especially DUE NORTH which, like the others, has its thrills but is so much more than that. They say Richard Matheson was a mainstream writer masquerading as a horror/sci-fi writer; I’m guessing Mitchell Smith was a mainstream writer masquerading as a thriller writer. Certainly if the line can be blurred between the two, Smith did it brilliantly. His big push began with the police procedural-oriented DAYDREAMS, followed by the claustrophobically-male prison epic STONE CITY, both generally considered his best and most literary offerings. I think this is giving short shrift to his later, more overtly genre pieces like SACRIFICE and REPRISAL. Finely crafted, exceptionally well written with a style I can only describe as uniquely his own, all of Smith’s titles bear his emblematic signature prose, at times an almost musical leitmotif that, when juxtaposed with passages of violent action, border on the poetic—but somehow, amazingly (damn him!) drawing us in rather than distancing us from the narrative. No mean feat. Yet we never doubt we’re in the hand of a confident master.
KARMA’s handsome, blue-blooded architect Evan Scott witnesses the 70 story falling death of a young woman from an in-construction Madison Avenue edifice. Or was she pushed? When others around Scott meet similarly unexpected ends he soon learns his witnessing the girl’s fall has put his own life, and eventually those of his Greenwich, Connecticut family, at dire risk. This in the form of Rao Electrical, a company with a multimillion-dollar wiring contact for the building and secrets they’d just as soon keep hidden. They’re doing a good job so far; even the fallen girl’s construction foreman father hides fearfully silent behind the truth of her death. And Evan gets a particularly unnerving warning from a Hindustani NYPD Detective Prasad, who should know what he’s talking about when not too subtly suggesting the inquiring young architect keep his ivy league nose out of things. Rao Electric plays tough: “..we think they use a Pathan—a Dond savage…a mountain people; they are not minding heights at all, if you catch my drift.”
Evan might have listened, too, had one of the mysterious deaths not included his coworker/Hispanic lover Sanchia Fuentes. Ignoring the obvious warning, Evan pursues the brutal Rao brothers, a powerful Hindu crime family even the Mafia fears. He finds help in the only person who doesn’t think he’s crazy, elderly newsstand owner Ram Das Lal, whose nicely delineated appearance eventually forms what becomes essentially a buddy-picture. Deliberately paced at the beginning to reveal both Evan’s current home life and past Vietnam skirmishes (Kirkus, who is always wrong, accuses Smith unable of deciding if he’s writing a post-traumatic war pastiche or a vulnerable loner thriller—duh!—he’s writing both) the thrills and action ratchet up soon enough along with a host of wonderfully realized characters, especially Evan’s Indian pal Das, who nearly steals the show. Not to be outdone, the baddies are as repugnant as spoiled curry, especially the Rao’s imported goon, the Pathan Dond. A long-bearded, sword-wielding psychotic, the Dond thinks no more of table-leg raping and strangling Evan’s secret lover in her own bed than he does of disemboweling a group of subway toughs in broad New York City daylight.
With a prose style rife with frags, disruptive ellipses and occasional not-quite-purple passages, Smith’s mesmeric, deceivingly languid style closes the circle of terror around both Evan and reader with unnerving skill and bravado. It’s on full display during Evan’s witness of the iron worker’s fatal fall near the novel’s opening:
(Evan) looked out over the wall, looked up—expecting some workman waving across the way—looked up and saw through soft, richly golden light, a girl come falling.
She fell from far higher, out from the red steel skeleton of the building in progress—not more than yards away across empty air.
Evan heard her call again…something. Only a startled exclamation—certainly not a scream, not a shriek as she fell. And he saw her, and she saw him watching as she fell so seemingly slowly, lying spread-eagled in the air, wearing a tool belt, work clothes—jeans, shirt—all softly beaten by the air, and her long black hair bannering out, ruffling in the wind of descent so Evan heard it through the silence.
The book predicts our current phobia of foreign terrorists more than half a decade before 9/11, though when written it was probably more a metaphor for ‘70’s big business developers ravaging NY. Some may read bias bordering jingoism in Smith’s subtest. Evan is an unapologetic WASP war hero haunted by Vietnam dreams, his Aryan wife Catherine a privileged snob who, in the book’s explosive finale, wielding a shotgun to defend hearth and home against foreign invaders, is found “standing high at the end of the deck as faint gunsmoke drifted, her blond hair frosted white in moonlight, standing with the full moon behind her—a northern goddess, and grim.”
Still, Smith smooths any outright bigotry with the appearance of the Hispanic Fuentes and, more pointedly, in the wonderful Hindustani Ram Das whom Evan regards at novel’s end as his dearest friend. Walking New York streets together, Das, worried that the invasion of so many foreigners is taking its crowding toll on the Yale, Groton’s native soil, is reminded by a worldly-minded Evan: “The city was made by foreigners.” True enough. But Smith makes it sound just short of a warning.
Hidden agendas or not, there’s no denying the power of Smith’s story-telling during scenes both thoughtfully introspective and savagely, almost uncomfortably real. It’s not even the outward threat of foreign gangsters that provides Evan’s biggest nightmares, but the doubting indifference of associates and family around him. Where’s the real enemy here--self-assured American complacency and arrogance? Is the most obvious metaphor Evan Scott himself, the disillusioned lonely big city dweller hiding in plain sight? Clearly the war has left its scars and scares enfolded deep--going off to one thankless war only to return home to another kind of battlefield in its own way just as bafflingly isolated.
War in all its deceiving faces, though only shown in brief flashbacks, permeates the book as a constant, lurking menace. Early on, we’re shown Evan coveting dead Marine buddy Beckwith’s bowie knife, kept ever sharp and oiled in loving memory back in Evan’s civilian life. And in dark contrast, we see the demonic Dond’s lethal sword, dispatching the subway toughs with near psychotic detachment. We just know, as events unfold, these gleaming weapons are destined to meet in an analogous war from which only one can emerge. When it finally comes, Smith’s vertiginous stage is the unfinished lattice of narrow I-beams wrapping Evan’s own workplace, high amid the darkened canyons of NY. It’s one of the book’s defining and perhaps most memorable moments: a clash of cultures and mindsets that in its fury morphs the flailing combatants into a near balletic death dance that turns all soldiers into borderless brothers. Evan’s first glimpse of the Pathan is like an explosively evil apparition of Chernabog himself:
Something was running toward him over the steel. Huge, oddly shaped, and galloping with a long cloth coat swept back by its speed—looking barely human in moonlight, its head thrown back in a great grin of pleasure, long moon-silvered beard, long hair fallen loose and streaming behind it…this man came running barefoot over the steel as if there were no spaces, no emptiness, as if sparse structures were solid flooring all across. There was no sound but the eager padding of his feet, their swift rhythm humming through the steel.
Running away like a terrified child against such indomitable fierceness, Evan finds soon enough that the Dond savage is far swifter, and his shrieking saber a good deal longer than the Bowie war memento the young architect brought along for comfort. When the Pathan’s blade finally descends:
--Evan was saved by Beckwith’s knife and what was left of college fencing, and by twenty years of polo. Born and built for this, the Bowie hooked the Pathan’s blade as it came, turned it just enough, and carried it clanging away. And Evan’s right hand and arm and shoulder—packed with muscle from years of swinging a mallet whipping left and right from a galloping pony—his hand and arm and shoulder parried, and took the shock.
The Dond stood back and relaxed, a bird of prey at ease, and stared at Evan considering, while they both breathed. The two of them were alone in the world; there was no world beside the narrow beam they fought on, nothing beyond the striking circle of their knives. They had become as close as friends, and knew each other.
Do yourself a solid and know this book.
And the poetic prowess of very cutting edge action/suspense Mitchell Smith-style.(less)
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REVIEW OF PLAYGROUND BY JOHN BUELL
A native and lifelong resident of Montreal, Buell held both master’s and doctor’s degrees from the University of Montreal and was a member of the Communication Studies faculty of Loyola/Concordia University where he...more
REVIEW OF PLAYGROUND BY JOHN BUELL
A native and lifelong resident of Montreal, Buell held both master’s and doctor’s degrees from the University of Montreal and was a member of the Communication Studies faculty of Loyola/Concordia University where he served as professor emeritus. More than that about him I’ve been unable to uncover, including whether he’s still living. All five of his known novels were published by Farrar. Straus, Giroux and each well-deserved of your time. His magnum opus though, for me, is 1976’s PLAYGROUND.
Buell’s works contain a similarly continuing theme: one perhaps best described by author Richard Matheson when speaking of his own work: “One guy, alone in the world, up against the wall.” The books often share a linear nature, but there the likenesses end. The settings, struggles and motivations are always fresh and inventive, never self-imitative.
The “plot” for PLAYGROUND is simplicity itself: Spence Morison , typical suburban family man and wage earner, is en route for a two week fishing vacation with friends when unforeseen weather blows his Cessna off course and sends him crashing into a lake somewhere in the Canadian wilds. He struggles ashore to find himself a man alone, unfindable, and wholly without resources. Even navigation is limited to the sun and stars. With only a layman’s knowledge of survival and nature lore, the vast beauty and grandeur of his surroundings quickly become a mocking reminder of his uselessness outside society’s womb and his scant chance of survival without it. And that the terrors of the human psyche can be as darkly forbidding as the deepest forest night.
Reminiscent of Jack London’s terse prose and eerie solitude in TO MAKE A FIRE, Buell weaves a riveting balance of first and third person narrative describing Morrison’s inward and outward plight. We learn who the real Spence Morrison is even as he learns it himself-- the painful shedding of old ways that no longer work, of missed opportunities and discoveries that one moment parallel societal life and the next determine his fast vanishing future, what it means to truly be alive and how death is a distinct and discernable face hovering ever at one’s shoulder. So in touch is the author with his protagonist and surroundings, his frailties and minor triumphs, experiencing PLAYGROUND’s authentic ring we have to remind ourselves this isn’t biography. Once you’ve walked in Spence Morrison’s shoes, it’s hard to look at the magic wonder of a simple cigarette lighter in the same way again. We know the story can only end one of two ways, but feel that to stop or skip ahead would somehow betray Morrison.
Just how good the writing is, can be shown in the last pages of Spence’s plight, when physical deprivation begins to win its war over mental…
"He waited and planed and even hoped. But he had already spent himself. He felt a slight dizziness, then the momentary seizure of sleep, and more, and tried to fight it off and couldn’t. …He managed to move away from the fire and crawled more and more into nothingness.
He didn’t do it the next time. He couldn’t even get to his knees. He was aware of day, and heat, and of deciding things that drifted into vague dreams, memories he couldn’t be sure of. There was a nighttime and fire, and presences, and no words to know them by. Once, it was raining a little. He kept slipping in and out of consciousness. He knew he’d taken his boots off. The waking told him he was alive. The other kept arriving like nothing. At any moment it would stay."
The whole world knows about Cormac McCarthy, his deservedly won honors and awards. But like his creation Spence Morrison--vanished and forgotten in the vast Canadian woods--John Buell has become lost in a forest of words, most of them vastly inferior to his own. It is our loss as well. Find this book today and treasure its power.(less)
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Thanks very much for including me among your friends, Bruce. I really enjoyed Is Fiction Dead? Guess we have to face it: we're writers. Also I think that thinking about death is key to learning, as long as it's not just sensationalism, but actually seeking truth. 
Hi Bruce, It is nice to meet you! I look forward to sharing book reviews and recommendations. I saw that we have a lot of books in common already, which is fun.
Mary Anita And The Second Liberation In Kenya consider getting entertained by the African passion and flavour, the culture, social life and politics
