Kristopher Kelly's Blog, page 11

Review: The Children of Hurin

The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hurin, a typical Tolkien hero who is a renowned warrior and a good friend of Elves, is captured and cursed by his nemesis Morgoth (proto-Sauron, for those familiar with Lord of the Rings), imprisoned in a chair on a mountain where he's forced to watch tragedies befall the family he left behind when he went to war. Namely, those tragedies happen around his son Turin, who is a great warrior who means well yet cannot escape the grim curse he lives under. Everything Turin does pretty much ends badly for all involved.

It's a reeeeeeal downbound train, this one. It starts ominously, gets bad, and then gets worse. This is not the happy-go-lucky romp through the forest of The Hobbit, although there is a dragon! (And a good one, too.)

Christopher Tolkien did a great job putting together this novel, which he fashioned from assorted fragments let by his father. After a clunky opening dumps a dizzying number of names on the reader, the story settles down and becomes quite readable and engaging. The thematic repetition of the attempt to jump across a chasm was a very nice touch. And, as always, the detail of the world is delightful. Turin is a nicely complicated character.

Overall, it feels a bit like a bridge between the more optimistic worldview of The Lord of the Rings and the more nihilistic of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series.

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Review: Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories

Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories by Brad Watson


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eight great short stories about people, dogs, life, light, and darkness. Watson can write the hell out of a sentence while telling some of the most surprising stories you're likely to find. These are rough Southern pieces, steeped in an unflinching but fair view of humanity, recommended for serious readers who aren't looking for sentimental Disney-ish stories about people and the pets they love. A few of these qualify in my opinion as flat-out horror stories. So … be warned. Marley and Me this is not.

Standouts in the collection for me are the title story, "Agnes of Bob," and "Kindred Spirits," but really they're all terrific. I'm always inspired by Watson's prose and gift for the unexpected.

Highly recommended for adventurous readers who don't mind some harsh realism.





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Review: The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This fast-paced Western tells the story of the two Sisters brothers, Eli and Charlie, who've been hired by the Commodore to go to California and kill a man for allegedly stealing something from the Commodore. What it's really about is the relationship between the hard and bold Charlie, who accepts their mission out of idolatry of the Commodore, and the softer-hearted, obese Eli, who questions their mission and the value of doing work for the Commodore at all.

None of which accurately describes what I adored about this novel, which was a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining trip. For me, it's all about Eli's obsessions, which include his brother, his broken-backed horse Tub, the newly-discovered art of brushing his teeth, and the women who are kind to him along the way. I found it impossible to not like and care about Eli, even if he was at times just as much a cold-hearted killer as his brother.

The final act of the novel is something perhaps I'll like more as time goes by, but on first read it felt just a bit flat for me, and I thought the ending, while good, was slower than the rest of the book, which had until that point moved at a near-perfect pace. Still, deWitt's genius is all in the details, from the horses to the beavers to the River of Light. There's always something on the page worth reading, and surprises everywhere.

Funny, sad, thoughtful, and so incredibly easy to read — I really recommend this one.

I just hope when the inevitable film version comes out they cast Tucker & Dale instead of Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill.





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Better Oscar Nominations

Best Actor

* Oscar de la Hoya

Best Supporting Actor

* Oscar Wilde

Best Original Screenplay

* Oscar the Grouch

Best Director

* Oscar! (1991)

Best Picture

* Oscar Meyer

Review: The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The trouble with this book is that the first third is a blisteringly well-written story of young love while the second two-thirds flies forward forty years and is the blisteringly well-written story about a man writing emails to an angry ex-girlfriend.

The plot concerns Tony, an isolated man in 60s, who is trying to recover the diary of an old friend from an ex-girlfriend, Veronica, who refuses to let him see it. Why Veronica is upset with Tony after forty years of no communication is the novel's big mystery–and it's one I found myself quite invested it. Tony wants to figure out why Veronica hates him and overcome her contempt, but searching for answers seems to only further infuriate her.

"You never got it, Tony–and you never will," she says, and Tony wonders if the key to understanding everything isn't buried somewhere in his own frustratingly imperfect, shifting memories.

At times, I was reminded of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, insofar as the story's protagonist is a man with little to do but sit around and find the world endlessly perplexing and inscrutable.

But while I hated the endless drone of Murakami's book, I really liked Julian Barnes's book a lot. Maybe because it was tightly focused and had a compelling central mystery that actually resolved in the end. This book was more of a page-turner for me than all the genre fiction I've been reading lately. While I was a touch disappointed with the ending (it felt like it relied too heavily on a reveal that I didn't find entirely shocking, and I was left wondering what becomes of the main character), I was enchanted and moved by the idea that as life progresses and friends are lost, so too is the sense of one's own history without corroborators needed to give us some sense of our own reality.

Brilliant, and close to perfect, but the ending struck me just a shade too prudish and judgmental.





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I'm Gonna Die (On My Way to Work Today)!

One block from work, my phone stops playing music for no good reason. Ordinarily, I'd assume I'd hit my pocket just so, but there's no chance this time. My hands were out, drumming the air in a mostly unobtrusive way to "Zero" by the Smashing Pumpkins. I really don't think it was me. The phone's on the fritz. Sometimes it does this, and I have to just find another song. Just one of those things–something else in the world going wrong. I'm scrolling through artists, wondering if I want to spend the rest of the day listening exclusively to The Police, when I think, "HOO BOY! I'm really going to die someday!"

I said I thought that, but really I shouted part of it at a street vendor. Picture a man walking along, thumbing through his iPhone, walking past a food cart, suddenly screaming, "HOO!" with a look of surprise and a bit of a faint smile.

It's certainly not the first time this thought has occurred to me; first time I had it I believe I was three or four years old. In the pie chart of Thoughts Most Thought in My Head, it's probably somewhere between "I want to have sex" and "I could really go for some tater tots." In junior high, I almost stopped reading horror novels because it no longer seemed to matter if the characters lived or died, since they were all going to die someday (only later realizing that, all things considered, it was better to go in one's sleep than to be carved up by a clown wielding a rusty chainsaw). These days, I've gotten used to the thought, scolded it for being cliche, and yet still it comes bounding along from time to time, in varying strengths and severities. It stops by, says hello, menaces me a bit, then flitters away again to wherever it goes after that.

But like a slap, the thought can be playful or painful. For whatever reason, this morning, it's born hard–a real sharp crack right across the cheek of my half-awake mind. The smile on my face is because I find the sudden severity of it amusing, and my masochistic side is closely tied to my sense of humor. Call it self-schadenfreude.

It'd be the same if someone came running around the corner with a giant mallet and hit me hard in the stomach. I'd go down, sure, but I'd do so laughing, because, honestly, who does that to someone? Like putting pureed habanero in someone's OJ, it's rude but so funny.

Then I'm on the south side of 20th Street, heading west toward my building, watching people walk past me with their dogs and their own iPhones and iPads and Kindles and things, thinking, "Yep. I really am gonna die. Rumor has it it can't be avoided. And no afterlife, not for me, dirty atheist that I am. It'll be like before I was born. Remember that? Sure don't! That's the good part. I don't think I know what death's like, but, really, I do."

The mind-melting idea of nonexistence, the suffocating lack of any thoughts at all, terrifies me. I cling to fantasies: that maybe everyone else is playing a giant joke on me and no one really ever dies and someday all the people I think are dead, like Stanley Kubrick, my grandfather, and Osama bin Laden, will pop up over the other side of my cubicle and say, "Surprise!"; or that someday, given infinite time, the universe simply has to repeat itself, and I will return to relive my life an impossibly long time from now–a resurrection through recycled molecules, the spiritual equivalent of monkeys eventually randomly retypingHamlet.

Such thoughts rarely work, and they didn't today, either. The people passed me, I passed the people, that old drink-to-the-face thought evaporated, and I pushed play on "Next to You."

Then I went into work and wrote some computer code.

Review: Seed

Seed by Ania Ahlborn


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the story of Jack Winter, who ran away from home when he was a boy to escape a demon he met in a cemetery behind his house. Now that he's older and has a wife and two daughters, Jack discovers his youngest daughter has been claimed by the same demon he's been trying to avoid for so long — a demon which may or may not have caused him to do some diabolical deeds when he was a boy.

Seed has a good ending, and it obeys a lot of my own guidelines for horror stories (try to be actually scary, make us care about the characters, limit the involvement of computers and guns and cops, and make your villain as lethal as possible), but the trouble is that the book is mostly stage direction and internal monologues, neither of which proves that interesting (Jack tends to think most about things the narrator chooses not to share with the audience, which is annoying). Also, it's a little unclear if the demon is inside the daughter or an external presence. (It can be photographed, annnnnd yet it never attacks anyone? Huh? What IS that thing?)

But hey, at least it's not vampires or werewolves and no one is sparkly shiny! Points for original horror.

I think this would have made a totally badass short story. As a novel, I think it's stretched way too thin, and there aren't enough details to keep the prose interesting. There's also no second act at all, and the story spins its tires forever until the end decides to happen. I like Ahlborn's sensibilities, but this feels like a warmup to something better.

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Flash Fiction: Red Bent Fold Chaos Chasm

The following piece was written over the weekend for a short story contest on Janet Reid's blog, with the constraint that it had to be 100 words or less and use the words red, bent, fold, chaos, and chasm. While I did not win (maybe next time!), I'm quite pleased that I was mentioned as one of the stories which made her laugh.

Here's the piece …

* * *

Toss me body off the mountain into the chasm. Say something foul about me before me pirate guts paint the rocks red! These be the wishes of your loving father, Arrrchibald!

"Always a force of chaos," said the sheriff. "Whaddaya gonna do?"

"Fold the will back up, bury him like a normal person?"

"We already agreed."

"Fine!"

They walked to the pickup's bed. The sheriff put an eyepatch on the body. Paul bent over the corpse, pressed a saw below the knee, and asked, "You think Dad'll be the first CPA buried with a peg leg?"

"Just start sawing, brother."

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