Robert R. Mitchell's Blog, page 6

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Insomnium #1 Asleep by Zachary Bonelli

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


SPOILER ALERT!! Out of the frying pan into the fire. Burnt eggs are nothing when you wake up in Nowhere. Begin with a 206 version of the Statue of Liberty scene from Planet of the Apes and then fall out of sleep into another reality whose inhabitants one-up the Star Wars Cantina menagerie and prompt an Oz-esque search for the The Farseer because yeah, Nel, we aren’t in Seattle anymore. One of the many cool things about the first installment of Insomnium by Zachary Bonelli is that he knows what the hell he’s doing. So yes, you’re hooked and want to read more but while you’re digging post-Collapse Queen Anne, Bonelli is looking long-range and discreetly launching several thematic ships that you know will eventually slice across your bow like some bot-crazed buccaneer. Anyone can bulldoze a mountain of grist into an Episode 1 but to do so discreetly is hard. Bonelli pulls it off AND has some fun with Canada at the same time. Can’t beat that.




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The Big Show - Review

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I ordered The Speculative Edge for Jeff Suwak's story, The Big Show, and my rating/review apply to it specifically. SPOILER ALERT. This is the second Suwak work I've enjoyed and I was happy to find that the moral ambiguity of his outstanding novella, Beyond The Tempest Gate, is alive and well in this gem of a short story. Life ain't black and white and the longer you (or a civilization) live(s), the less chance you've got of claiming 100% righteousness. Do the best of intentions vindicate you if you're wrong? Does the devil always lie? Jeff Suwak isn't interested in mindless, idealistic jaunts: he's focused on taking a milieu, honing in on where the proverbial rubber meets the road, and then following the "hero" as he does what he thinks he has to do. Is action always better than passivity? Do you have the right to risk others' existence to "save them?" Read The Big Show. It is a compact, skillfully crafted parable co-opted by reality.



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There's A Somebody: A Novel - Review

There's A Somebody by Stephen W. Long

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Clean, compact, energetic prose, punctuated by wry wit and brilliant similes, propels the reader effortlessly forward through an immediately compelling, relevant story filled with human beings you’re still convinced exist even after finishing and remembering it’s a novel. Stephen W. Long is a masterfully inconspicuous, all-knowing story-teller who fades from view with the first word and is entirely forgotten until the last. Jim Bass, Owen, Niki, Allison, Amanda, Mrs. Garcia and the rest of the ensemble are the undisputed stars and Long is content to relinquish the limelight while he writes, directs, produces, runs the lights, plays the music, takes tickets, builds the sets, and scoops the popcorn. It is the ultimate illusion: a mind-blowing magic show with an invisible magician. How does he do it? Think Hemingway or Kesey instead of Faulkner or Kerouac. Long works hard to present the perfect details at the perfect time with the perfect, understated delivery. He is the maître d’ who seats you at an apparently unremarkable table knowing full well that the moon will rise over the bay at the exact moment the espresso and tiramisu arrive after dinner.

There’s A Somebody: A Novel is a blue-collar, regular Joe, decent hard-working American story that illuminates truth with the blast of a Kenworth’s headlights, hits us in the gut with a fast break pass down to the baseline and moves us with heart-broken, unspoken goodbyes. Like the proverbial “place where everyone knows your name,” the conversation is poignant, humorous, coarse and flirtatious. Etta James is on the antique jukebox, the working girls aren’t glamorous and there’s a payphone by the restrooms. When they holler “Last Call” and you’re among the last to leave, Long throws his arm around your shoulders and guides you out to the California night, pointing out the broken glass, uneven sidewalks and fast food trash not only so you don’t walk into them but so you fully appreciate the atmosphere.

He juxtaposes daydreams with nightmares, common sense with panic attacks, cold-heartedness with flawed, effusive love. He understands that the chorus is only as good as the verse and vice versa. He knows what you want to know and when; that it’s a California Poppy, the peak in the distance is Mt. Baldy and that owner/operators often rely on a broker. There’s A Somebody is a story of the open West Coast highway, downtown side streets and country roads. It’s a debut novel that will stand the test of time like a good rig or the Rose Bowl Parade.




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An excerpt about Death.

Some people live 99.99% of their lives without facing Death, while others meet Him at birth and spend the rest of their short existence dodging Him at every turn.  There is an enormous difference, of course, between the recognized and acceptable risk that most people in affluent, developed nations all over the world intentionally accept on a daily basis; the kind of risk incurred when driving, flying, walking down city streets, swimming in water over one’s head or living in a tornado-prone area; and the imminent danger of dying to which these relatively mundane activities can on rare occasions degenerate.  Until your car’s brakes fail as you’re exiting the freeway, the plane in which you’re flying loses an engine, you’re mugged, you sink exhausted below the water’s surface for the second time or climb out of your storm cellar to find your home demolished, everyday activities remain just that.  There is a similarly obvious difference between the lives these folks live and the lives led by people in the world’s less hospitable regions, so many of which seem to congregate below the Sahara, where it’s not unusual to be born without medical care in a dirt-floored hut to AIDs-infected parents in a malarial village on the verge of starvation perpetually being overrun by soldiers and rebels who regularly rob, rape, kill and kidnap.  Death is in the air, it’s in the dirty water carried two miles in an old petrol can, it’s in the bullets, it’s in the machetes, it’s in the fire and explosions, it’s in the mosquitoes, it’s in the neighbor next door, it’s in the blood, it’s in the mind, it’s in the gut, it’s in the flies, it’s in the filth.     

Only Shot At A Good Tombstone (pages 283 - 284) Copyright 2010 by Robert R. Mitchell

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Review: Beyond the Tempest Gate by Jeff Suwak

Beyond the Tempest Gate by Jeff Suwak

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The double-edged sword of so-called genre fiction, of course, is that the form can either serve as the anchoring melody upon which the artist improvises, or the leaden burden that pulls all lightness and joy down beneath the dark surface of staid obligations and conventions. Beyond the Tempest Gate, a pithy tale as direct and determined as its cliché-killing hero, follows the first path, turning expectations on their head and establishing unexpected tensions between traditional thematic elements. This makes it the perfect fantasy story for either a newb like me or a devotee of the genre. Even I know enough about fantasy (I think) to realize when Jeff Suwak is veering off the beaten path. The hero faces a test and/or series of temptations: totally cool. The hero might be a douche? That’s a bit unsettling…and real. So what do you do with a fantasy tale that’s dirty and gritty and real? You read it like crazy and you mull it over afterwards like a tornado that leaves the car in the driveway upside down but the tulips along the front walk standing tall. I’m not the only one: read the other reviews. Suwak is a talented writer who describes his world succinctly and effectively. As in his hero’s exploits, there is no wasted effort. Even the fantastical elements are presented with confident, believable matter-of-factness like Rod Serling’s “Submitted for your approval.” Read Beyond the Tempest Gate. It’s fantasy for the 21st century.



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"the black, heavy, backlit Big Top of reality"

The city was like a giant million-car garage shut up tight with all the motors running.  The last smoldering hint of the sun in the West was gone, rubbed out in the foothills and pocketed like a half-finished cigarette.  The increasingly inky darkness and the lonely 2nd-rate trek of the moon, were all that were left to mark the progression of the night.  Smog and city lights obscured the brilliant legions of stars, the cold diamonds of the sky.  Only the moon was bright enough to compete with the neon, halogen, sodium vapor and mercury.  What kind of place is it when you can’t even see the stars?  We throw up arcs and filaments and ballasts like Babels of illumination, swaggering about as if lighting up ballfields, airports and city streets makes any real difference in the world, let alone the universe.  All of it amounting to less than a pin prick in the black, heavy, backlit Big Top of reality.  We erase the night sky and forget that there’s infinity all around us.

Only Shot At A Good Tombstone (p. 249). Copyright 2010 by Robert R. Mitchell

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the inevitable....

Writing's on the wall...Twitter is the social media of choice for a good portion of my book's demographic. So here we go. Follow me on Twitter!
https://twitter.com/sameashim2

Read more Murray!

The Seven League Boots by Albert Murray

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Albert Murray probably wrote someplace why he titled the third book in his semi-autobiographical trilogy “The Seven League Boots,” but I haven’t found it yet. The definition of the term, at least by consensus on the internet, makes sense: Seven League Boots are boots of myth and fairy tale that enable their wearer to take seven league strides (about 24.5 miles). Googling the phrase even uncovered a 1950s newspaper advertisement from the American Trucking Association arguing that the trucking industry is “Today’s Seven League Boots…overtaking your high cost of living.” The wonder of traveling great distances in very little time is ubiquitous in Murray’s third, triumphant novel. His protagonist, Scooter, faithfully stops amidst his various Swing Era adventures to assess his distance from the Spyglass Tree back in Gasoline Point, not only in terms of miles, but in terms of history, personal development, achievement and enlightenment. It is tantamount to an involuntary reflex for Scooter to credit the folks back home who put him on the right path and encouraged him along the way, especially the various “fairy godmothers” who intervened at pivotal moments just like those in the stories he heard when he was a boy.

The title choice could also be a nod to Richard Halliburton’s book published in 1935 detailing his swashbuckling adventures all over the globe. Back in Scooter’s childhood, detailed in the first book, “Train Whistle Guitar,” Scooter and his best friend Buddy Marshal explored the canebrakes, woods and rivers of Gasoline Point imagining themselves to be “explorers and discoverers and Indian scouts as well as sea pirates and cowboys and African spear fighters not to mention the two schemingest gamblers and back alley ramblers this side of Philmayork." In The Seven League Boots, Scooter achieves his childhood dreams of adventure and exploration, crisscrossing the country with a top shelf jazz band, living the high life in Hollywood and touring Europe.

At one point during his European jaunt, Scooter contemplated the Americans who’d visited Europe before him, the veterans of World War I he’d listened to back in the barbershop in Gasoline Point, other famous musicians, and the Lost Generation of writers, particularly Hemingway. That moment reminded me of another American novel written by another iconic lover of Jazz, Jack Kerouac. Comparing Kerouac’s Desolation Angels and Albert Murray’s The Seven League Boots, for example, illuminates the potentially enormous contribution to America Murray’s works could be if they were only read more. The jazz in The Seven League Boots is the jazz of Duke Ellington, the Swing Era and big bands; while the jazz in Kerouac’s many works emerged shortly thereafter in an age of the avant garde, improvisation and Bebop: think Thelonious Monk. Both writers, neither of whom were musicians themselves, wrote like the jazz they loved. Murray’s prose is smooth, blues-filled, shouting and cool. Kerouac’s is frantic, ecstatic, dissonant and tangential. Both books follow their protagonists across our country and across the globe, pay homage to those who came before and preach the gospel of jazz, but only Murray’s provides young Americans with a game-plan for success in every aspect of the word. We could have used another forty years of Kerouac. We are fortunate to have enjoyed 97 years of Murray. This triumphant final novel of the trilogy riffs on hard work, respect for elders, imagination and love of country in the context of a young black man making his way in Jim Crow America. Have your students read Kerouac and then transition to Murray. Have Thelonious open the set for the Duke.

"Listen Schoolboy, he kept repeating during my first month or so in the band, this stuff we play for this band is not just music. This stuff is life, Schoolboy. Life! LIFE. Man, I mean I'm not just talking about cutting some dots, Man, I'm talking about making them dots mean something." (p. 322)

Amen.



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Searching for Safe Passage

A small rock disengaged itself high above them on the other side of the road and skittered down what sounded like the face of a cliff, ricocheting sharply left and right as it fell like a little steel ball in a giant pachinko machine. Feeling slightly vertiginous and searching for visual context, for something solid and immovable in the midst of the disorienting, spectral grayness, the young man bent over and looked down at the misty, pock-marked surface of the ramshackle road, temporarily orienting himself and spotting a healthy coil of bleached white coyote scat filled with fur and small bones. He slowly stood upright and listening again to the creek gurgling hundreds of feet below them, gently grasped her elbow with his finger tips and guided her away from the invisible abyss towards what might have been the center of the road. He then slowly walked up to the impenetrable woven wall of alder branches, hands out in front, slightly stooped to see the road surface, and then followed the alders sideways towards where he’d heard the rock fall. There should be a narrow space, he reasoned, between the face of the cliff and the first alder trunks, a space that would allow them safe passage.

Copyright 2013 by Robert R. Mitchell

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Perforated Life

Come get your perforated “Easy Tear” life
With re-sealable edges that are even and straight
Convenience and value and you don’t need a knife
Just rip ‘er on open above the “Best By” date.

Hold up the product with a stark white smile
Yeah those are fangs and they don’t retract
Pull up a chair and stay for a while
And please sign this non-aggression pact.

Luxury and comfort, no soul required
Stretch out your legs and enjoy the breeze
From the human fans that we just hired
Life is about entertainment and ease.


Oh here comes someone who don’t fit the bill
Their edges ain’t straight and they’re kind of curvy
Obviously from the valley, don’t belong on the hill
I suspect their motives are a little blurry.

Hold on there, you ain’t coming in here
Nothing personal but you lack self-esteem
We’re playing ping pong and drinking free beer
Just walk on by before I make you a meme.

You’re not a member of this exclusive club
Your identification does more harm than good
Keep on walking with your bus pass stub
Down across the tracks, you’ll find your hood.


Yeah, they’ve gone and passed on by
It was touch and go but I did not yield
Kept on trying to look me square in the eye
But that don’t work when I got my eyes peeled.

You can see them coming a mile away
Anxiety without the money for drugs
We need one hundred percent these days
Don’t need coding that’s full of bugs

It’s all done, let me refill your drink
We make the rules and the rules make us
It’s really easier than you might think
No ring-around-the-collar, no muss, no fuss.

Copyright 2013 by Robert R. Mitchell

There's a poem I like a lot more hidden in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-Good-...