Louis Arata's Blog, page 13

Dead Hungry Halloween Giveaway

It's Halloween, and the Ghouls are feeling generous.  Enter for a chance to win 1 of 7 copies of Dead Hungry.  Click on the link below, and follow me on Twitter.

Halloween Giveaway



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NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.  Every 13th eligible entry will win, up to 7 winners.  This giveaway started October 11, 2015, 12:50 PM PDT and ends the earlier of October 18, 2015 11:59 PM PDT or when all prizes have been awarded.

Reblog: The Writer I Was: Six Authors Look Back on their First Novels

Here's a great post by Meredith Turits, from TheMillions.com, on writers and their first books.  I particularly like Anthony Marra's observation that books belong to whoever reads them.

The Writer I Was: Six Authors Look Back on their First Novels

Reblog: Cooler By the Lake

Paulette Livers is the author of the novel Centreville, winner of the Elle Lettres Prize.  She also teaches courses at StoryStudio Chicago.

Here is a link to her great blog on why your fiction needs backstory:

Why Your Fiction Needs Backstory

Book Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Damn! I wish I’d thought of it first!
As soon as I started reading Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, I was suffering from author envy and reader delight.  Here is a curious tale of sixteen-year-old Jacob Portman whose grandfather shares with him stories of his unusual friends at a Welsh orphanage:  the boy with the bees inside, the girl who can levitate, Emma who can conjure fire, Millard who is invisible.  But it’s not only the stories, it’s the photographs:  his grandfather has a collection of vintage photos that appear to give proof to his wild tales.


Oh, the people I've seen!As he gets older, Jacob, of course, grows skeptical, but when his grandfather is murdered by a monster, Jacob is forced to reconsider everything he has been told.  He convinces his parents that he needs to make a pilgrimage to Wales to his grandfather’s orphanage.  Once there, he discovers a time-loop that takes him back to the 1940’s on the day the island was bombed by German fighter pilots.
But the true danger comes from the Hollowgasts, creatures that enjoy feasting on the bodies of peculiar children.  They've followed Jacob to the island.
The most notable aspect of Riggs’ novel is that he uses actual photographs culled from various collections.  All the pictures have a peculiar quality about them:  a solitary girl standing by a pool that casts reflections of two girls; a clown face painted on the back of a child’s head; a girl apparently levitating; a boy clothed in bees.  These are images that suggest untold stories, but since the photographer and models are anonymous, Riggs can make anything he wants out of them.  He uses them as a template to create a bildungsroman of a boy discovering who he is and what he values. It all depends on how
you look at things.
If the novel relied solely on the novelty of the photos, it wouldn’t have worked.  Riggs is careful in crafting his story so that Jacob’s growth is at the center.  This isn’t merely a story about peculiar children, but rather about personal identity and finding a place where you belong.  Riggs also cleverly creates the history of the Peculiars and Hollowgasts so that it dovetails nicely with actual events, such as the Tunguska asteroid that flattened 770 square miles of forests or the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer.

There are already two more novels in the series:  Hollow City and Library of Souls.  Now added to my reading list.

Book Review: Tilt

Tilt is the second Ellen Hopkins novel I’ve read, and I confess that I’m a fan.
Primarily the novel focuses on Mikayla (an unexpected pregnancy), Shane (reeling from his sister’s death), and Harley (barely a teen and already in over her head).  Each story is carefully explored, all through the messy emotions, with no simple solutions at the end.  Each teen is on a certain trajectory, but the emotions are coming at a furious pace, and nothing works out quite as expected.

Teens are typically portrayed as living insulated lives; while they have cliques and family, the story focuses predominantly on their own individual experience.  Hopkins takes another route:  she gives all of her characters private lives.  Even the parents are going through tumultuous times, and though they try to hide the trouble from their kids, everything has an impact.  Life is a web-work, so when one life tilts out of control, others are affected. 
While the majority of Tiltis told from the perspectives of Mikayla, Shane and Harley, the author uses the supporting characters for interstitial chapters.  You get glimpses into their internal worlds, which emphasizes the empathy necessary to interact with friends, family, strangers.  Hopkins gives you the chance to walk in each character’s shoes.
I am impressed with how much story Hopkins packs into the pages.  Her prose is precise in conjuring the internal life of each character: My next book will be a haiku
SHANE:
Jäger and DownersMake me feel great. Make me feelLike shit. Make me go ahead and cry.I spiral down into a whirlpool of tears.And I like how it feels and I hate howIt feels and right now I really just wantTo keep going down and never come upFor air.
And that’s the other interesting aspect of Hopkins’ writing – her use of a prose-poem style with stanzas and page headings.  Her choice of verse over traditional prose turns the characters’ lives into poetry, full of raw emotion.  As a result, the story is propelled at a compelling pace.  The short verses/chapters make it a difficult book to put down (i.e., just one more chapter!).
The novel ends more on a series of resolutions rather than neatly constructed conclusions.  You get the sense that there are more struggles to wrestle with because life isn’t over for these characters.  They are on a trajectory, and Tilt is one part of their story.  In other words, life continues.

Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov

In reviewing Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, I could address concepts of justice versus punishment, the church versus society, and all sorts of grand issues that more knowledgeable critics have wrestled with.  I could delve into philosophical concepts of free will and morality at the center of the human condition.  I could focus on major themes of sin and redemption.
Or I could take it down from its pedestal and kick it around.  In a nutshell, the father Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is an old reprobate who has swindled his eldest son Dmitry out of his inheritance, and to make matters worse, he is trying to steal away Grushenka, Dmitry’s lover.  Dmitry threatens to kill the old man, and lo and behold, two days later Fyodor is dead, and Dmitry is dragged off for trial.
Along the way, there are lengthy episodes which detail characters’ reactions to Dmitry’s craziness, and by the time the trial comes around, everyone in the one-horse town is invested in the outcome.  It’s like reality TV before the OJ Simpson trial.
First off, I read The Brothers Karamazov twenty years ago during a 3-month sabbatical in Penzance.  I’d quaff a pint in my favorite pub, eat my steak and kidney pie, and immerse myself in the crazy antics.  I loved every page of it.
But if you asked me about it later, all I could remember was one long chapter about the Grand Inquisitor casting out the resurrected Jesus from the Church, pretty much saying, “You have no business in what we do nowadays, so beat it.”

No, wait.  I also remember that I had difficulty keeping the characters straight.  Now which one was Dmitry?  Is he the same as Mitya, Mitri or Mitenka?  Is Alexei (a.k.a Alyosha, Alyoshenka, Alexeichik, Lyosha, Lyoshenka) the saintly one or the atheist?


But this time around, I had no problem keeping the characters straight (probably because I wasn’t drinking pints of Boddington).  The characters come alive:  big, messy, uproarious people which the margins of the page can barely contain.  Dostoevsky invests them with manic energy:  they are impulsively changeable, exuberant, sullen, passionate, and certifiably crazy.  And what is so marvelous is that in their impetuosity, they are completely human.  They don’t know what they’re feeling from one moment to the next, but whatever emotion it is, boy do they feel it.
As the defensive attorney Setyukovich states, the Karamazovs are larger than life:  “[A] Karamazov is a man of opposites, of extremes, a man who can call a halt in the midst of the most reckless abandon the moment he feels himself subject to another force.”
Later, when Dmitry is in prison, he speaks with Katya, his former fiancée:  “They went on like that, babbling ecstatically, mouthing meaningless phrases which were not even true, perhaps, and yet at that moment everything was true, they themselves believed that unreservedly.”
"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"What makes it all work is that Dostoevsky does not back off.  He milks the story for every last drop of detail.  He throws a lot of discourse at you, page after page, until your head is spinning, but the point is you’re hooked.  You want to find out what happens next.
That is not to say that, by today’s standards, the book doesn’t drag.  At close to 1000 pages, it’s long.  We’re used to novels that hold it together at 300 pages, so it’s comic when the narrator admits that the story is getting out of hand:  “I can see, however, that I cannot continue in this vein … because, as I have already said above, even if I could remember all that was said and all that took place, I would literally have neither the time nor the space to record it.”  Too late.

The Brothers Karamazovis a satchel full of wild cats fighting to get out.  It’s about philosophy and religion and love and passion and jealousy and even a literal bag of nuts.  Maybe the best summation of the novel comes from brother Ivan’s hallucinogenic devil:  “We all know it’s a comedy.”

Book Review: The Buried Giant

The tenuous reliability of memory:  in all of his novels Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters recall the puzzle pieces of their lives, only to discover that the fragments do not fit together perfectly and often details are missing.  They struggle to construct the whole of their past but are left with fragments that intimate aspects of reality rather than reveal the truth. 

In The Buried Giant, Ishiguro brings the theme of memory to the fore.  In the mythical landscape of King Arthur, a mysterious fog has descended that obliterates memory.  Villagers respond to the immediacy of an event then quickly forget its importance.  They live in dazed unconcern, not necessarily blissful but rather befuddled and oblivious.  For Beatrice and Axl, an elderly couple, they have the aching sense of things forgotten, and so choose to leave their village to return to their son.  Without even a clear sense of where he might be, they travel a long road.  Along the way, they encounter Wistan, a Saxon Knight, and Edwin, an ogre-wounded child.   As fragments of memories begin to return, Beatrice and Axl discover the source of the mysterious fog – the sleeping dragon Querig.  To rid the land of its terrible force, they assist Wistan and King Arthur’s own Sir Gawain to track down the dragon.
I think I possibly don't remember ...While the story follows a traditional journey motif across a medieval landscape, Ishiguro uses the structure as a metaphor for the unexpected discoveries of memory.  Places may seem familiar, yet they retain a dreamlike quality, and so Axl and Beatrice must confront the unfolding discovery of their past together -- all the love and all the pain.  Their sense of dread at what will be rediscovered does not keep them from desiring the return of their memories, even as they fear the damage that may occur.
This is not an adventure story.  Ishiguro takes his time setting up scenes, so the pace is slow, yet this is his typical style.  This allows him to explore the nuances of a situation as the characters tentatively touch their relationships.  It is as though they fear the pain of intimacy, even as they crave it.  When the mysterious fog does begin to lift, there is the awful reality of the cost.  The peace that has enfolded the land is at stake now that old enmities will be recalled.  But Ishiguro seems to suggest that the safety of ignorance is no substitute for the complexity of remembering.  Memory, no matter how faulty, is how we connect with each other.  He leaves us with an ambiguous ending that left me hoping for one outcome but knowing that the other is more likely.
The Buried Giantshares with The Remains of the Daythe questions of unreliable memory, but chooses a more allegorical path to its destination.  Ishiguro’s textures of language are as beautiful, capturing the pervasive melancholy of longing for connection.

Whether to use Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform...

Whether to use Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform certainly stirs up a lot of discussion.

I found this post from Self Publishers' Showcase helpful.

Five Reason to Not KDP Select

Book Review: Creed

What a quaint town.
What a lot of blood.In Creed, three teenagers – Dee, Luke and Mike – on their way to a concert get stranded outside of Purity Springs, an isolationist enclave of Fundamentalist Christians who treat all outsiders as a lesser form of life, perpetually damned to hell.  The sinisterly charismatic leader Elijah chooses Dee to be his next wife, going so far as to rename her Rebekah and to create a bogus family history for her.  As Dee endeavors to resist, she learns that Luke and Mike are being held hostage against her good behavior.  If she doesn’t comply, Elijah insists that it will be their blood on her hands.  The only chance she has of escaping is through the aid of Elijah’s son, Joseph, who recognizes his father for the megalomaniac that he is but lacks the backbone to stand up to him.  Dee plays along with Elijah’s game as best she can, but it’s only when she realizes that Luke and Mike’s lives are at stake does she manage to fight back.
Co-authors Trisha Lever and Lindsay Currie employ a recognizable template:  teens in danger from an unstoppable monster.  The too-perfect town with its creepy secrets.  Bloodshed and torture, as well as perverted versions of Christianity.  We’ve seen this all before.
Trisha Lever Lindsay CurrieAnd that’s where I have a problem with Creed.  How do I rate a book that certainly has serviceable writing and a well-paced sense of dread, and yet leaves me craving for the unexpected?  The story unfolds pretty much as I expected, and when I got to the end, I thought, yeah, that’s about it.  Nothing new, nothing that pushes the imagination.
Here’s the thing:  Lever and Currie’s villain is certainly aggravatingly sanctimonious with a large splash of sadism.  They keep him offstage until about halfway through the book, but you get the sense of his presence in the town, so the authors’ use of anticipation makes Elijah’s appearance that much more dreadful.  And yet, there he is – a sadistic villain on a power trip.  Nothing new.
For the most part, Dee has spirit and a healthy dose of defiance.  But her helplessness is irritating when it should be eliciting the reader’s sympathy.  It seems as though she submits to Elijah’s authority because Joseph keeps warning her that his father is a monster and she should bide her time.  I realize that she fears for the safety of Luke and Mike, but I kept expecting her to fight back more. 
Not surprisingly, the end is bleak.  I can’t decide if that was a choice in storytelling or that the authors couldn’t come up with something more compelling. 
In the end, Creedis easily readable and that’s about it.

Book Review: Olive Kitteridge

It’s no wonder that Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, won the Pulitzer Prize.  A blend of short story and novel, it tells the stories of the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine, and how the milestones of life are not always marked by enormous events.
Olive Kitteridgeis a collection of thirteen tales, each self-contained yet also part of a larger whole.  We get glimpses into the lives of a piano player breaking off an affair, the owner of a hardware store trying to save an anorexic girl, and a suicidal psychiatrist returning to his home town.  Strout’s language is exquisitely precise.  She deftly describes the emotions of a passing moment as well as the aching years of longing that are part of being human.  Enduring emotional isolation, the residents of Crosby live lives of quiet desperation.  Across these tales moves Olive Kitteridge, a former math teacher.  Abrasive, opinionated, aloof, Olive is like a single-masted cutter crossing through people’s lives.  She is difficult to get to know, yet her presence in the town is pervasive.  Residents can feel her enter a room.  Some like her, others not so much, but they all have a grudging respect for her.
Elizabeth StroutOlive’s own poignant story primarily focuses on her relationship with her son Christopher.  In essence, it reveals how even those who appear indomitable are victims of personal insecurities.  In “Security,” on entering her son’s New York brownstone, Olive experiences a sense of displacement:
“[She] followed him through a capacious, dark living room, into a small kitchen that was cluttered with toys, a high chair, pots spread over the counter, open boxes of cereal and Minute Rice.  A grimy white sock lay on the table.  And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own … It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child – that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else’s home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one’s own.”
Where's the doughnut shop?" Strout pays attention to details; she paints individual portraits that become a larger landscape as the novel progresses.  Life and death occurs, often in-between the stories, so that when we return to the characters, they have changed. 


I read this book slowly because the details are so rich, and I wanted to let them sink in.  When I read it again, and I will, I will have the pleasure of discovering new details and new connections across the cast of characters.  Still, it is Olive herself who is the most compelling character.  For all her abrasiveness, she is truly fascinating.