Louis Arata's Blog, page 14

Book Review: Bruiser

Hulking outsider Brewster Rawlins, a.k.a. Bruiser, is voted Most Likely to Receive the Death Penalty.  Brontë, who gravitates toward hard-luck cases, is intrigued by him.  Her brother, Tennyson, doesn’t want her dating outside her own species.
Neal Shusterman’s novel Bruiserexamines both the debilitating and healing effects of being human.
Bruiser literally takes away people’s pain:  his brother Cody falls from the roof, and Brewster ends up with a broken arm.  His uncle suffers a stroke, and Brewster experiences the embolism.  Brontë and Tennyson struggled through their parents’ fracturing relationship, and Brewster siphons away their grief.


Bruiser’s empathic ability is foremost a curse.  He cannot allow himself to feel close to anyone or soon he will be draining off every cut, bruise and broken heart.  And yet it’s almost a superpower that he wields to keep his younger brother safe from their uncle’s drunken rages.
The problem is that he cannot shut it off.  He has learned to be wary for a good reason.  But as Brontë draws him from his shell, he experiences the exhilaration of new friendship, which comes at a cost.  In Shusterman’s world, pain is manifest everywhere, and that is part of living.  We want to hide from our individual pain, but it seems that only by embracing it are we fully human.
I feel your painShusterman employs four unique narrative voices to tell the story:  Tennyson’s sense of immediacy, Brontë’s reflections, Cody’s stream-of-conscience, and Brewster’s free verse.  He creates complex characters who all must learn how to be present to life, with all its joys and challenges.  No one is safe from harm, yet how we deal with it, how we make it part of who we are, is an important means of surviving and growing.

I had only just started this book when the library loan expired.  In a rare moment of reading-laziness I didn’t renew it.  Yet I kept thinking about the characters and wondering what was happening with them.  I’m glad I went back to find out.

Book Review: Boy Toy

Don’t let the title mislead you:  this is not a charming coming-of-age story.  This is about sexual abuse.  Twelve-year old Josh Mendel has a crush on his history teacher, Eve.  When she starts paying him particular attention, he eats it up.  What he fails to understand is that Eve is manipulating him into a sexual relationship.
Author Barry Lyga tackles a topic that is usually sugarcoated as a young boy initiated into the wonders of sex by an older, more experienced woman.  Lyga addresses the power imbalance and abuse inherent in this type of relationship.  While Josh may be ignorant of Eve’s deliberate designs, the reader is not.  Lyga deftly rolls out the story of Josh's becoming entangled in his own confusing, conflicting emotions until he believes he is the one who brings about Eve’s downfall and arrest.
Barry LygaLyga alternates between twelve-year old and eighteen-year old Josh – during and after the abuse.  When older Josh learns that Eve is to be released from prison for good behavior, he struggles to comprehend the guilt and shame he has carried around for so long.  While his parents and his friend Rachel are concerned about how Eve’s release might be traumatizing for him, Josh isn’t even sure what his reaction is.

Lyga does not shy away from the graphic reality of the abuse.  He captures beautifully the conflict Josh is desperate to untangle, and while Eve’s honesty at the end of the novel helps to bring the story to a close, life may not be quite this neat.  Still, this is a small complaint amidst a powerful novel.

If a Book Falls in the Forest ...

Feedback from a few beta readers has given me pause.
They are reading a draft of Reston Peace, a novel I’ve been working on for many years.  Each time I’ve handed it over to a reader, I’ve given the disclaimer that this is an intense novel.  It is about sexual abuse, sexual addiction and recovery.  It has strong language and explicit scenes.  It is not for everyone’s tastes, and all I ask is for honest feedback.
My beta readers have given me nothing but.  They’ve told me that, while the storytelling is powerful, the topic itself is so unpleasant that it is a difficult book to get through.  One reader said that while I’ve written an accurate depiction of abuse, she questions who would want to read it.
Which raises the question, if a book isn’t readable, is it still a book?
If I’ve written something – no matter how realistic, no matter how “artistic” – yet it has a limited chance of finding an audience, does this mean I’ve been wasting my time?  Do I need to tone it down?  Do I need to reimagine the story in a more palatable fashion? 
If the story pushes the reader away, makes her become detached from the emotions because it is too intense, am I doing a disservice to the reader?  Are my expectations for what a person is willing to read too high?
I know my intentions.  I know that I am going for honesty and directness.  I don’t want to shy away from the topic.  I don’t want to couch it in euphemism, nor do I want to put the abuse in the past or leave it offstage.  I want to hold the camera, as it were, on the awful moments so that they have immediacy and impact.
Of course, this is a work of fiction.  Even if I based it on actual events, it is still a work of fiction, so I hesitate to state that this is an accurate depiction of abuse.  It is foremost a story, contrived and constructed.  But within those limited parameters, I want to give an emotional resonance to the experience.
Yet have I gone too far?  If the topic scares away readers, then who will be the audience?
It’s a fine line to walk – staying true to the integrity of the original vision for the novel and giving the readers something they can enjoy. 
It’s a tough lesson to take – that something I’ve worked on for years may not find the audience I hoped for.  That the story needs streamlining and yet more revisions.  That my choice of topics may not be palatable in its current incarnation. 
And it’s tough to trust my own artistic vision when it is clearly at odds with the views of several readers.  This is why writers put in disclaimers in their acknowledgments: “Thank you to all my editors, readers, experts who helped with this work, but any errors or mistakes that remain are my own.” 
So here is my preliminary acknowledgments for as yet unpublished Reston Peace:  “Thank you to my beta readers for putting forth the tough questions and challenging me to grow as a writer.  No matter what happens with this book, I will continue to wrangle with the best way to tell a story.  Artistic vision and reader enjoyment are not mutually exclusive territories, but finding the common ground will always be my intended destination.”

Tattoos

In Dead Hungry, Tucker’s young brother Robber sports a number of tattoos: 
Tucker cleaned up leftover pizza, chip bags, and empty bottles.  When he returned to prepare the futon with the sheets, he found Robber already snoring.  His brother had removed his shirt, revealing a Celtic vine that extended across his shoulder and down his left arm.  Beneath the vine was the detailed links of chain mail.  It must have taken thousands of tiny pricks of a needle to fashion the armor.  Morbidly fascinated, Tucker wondered where it would stop.  Would Robber encase his body in art work?
Cool!
from http://jelly-jeremiah.tumblr.com/
post/71796904072/thollukthcaptor-alchemist-risingThe first version of the scene had a lot of loaded descriptions of tattoos as something disgusting.  I had intended to set tattoos up as a form of self-mutilation, something outside of societal norms (just as the Ghouls’ appetites would be).  Lots of things in this seemingly normal landscape would be re-envisioned as repulsive:  food, body art.
I focused on tattoos because I confess I was uncomfortable with them.  I have a difficult enough time choosing a style of shirt, let alone something that would be part of me forever.  I couldn’t imagine what would drive a person to permanently ink their skin.
That’s when I caught on that I was letting my personal viewpoint get in the way of telling the story.  I was using Tucker to express my prejudice.  When I managed to step back, I realized that Tucker had a very different reaction to Robber’s tattoos.  He wasn’t disgusted by them; rather, he was concerned about what the images of chain mail represented:  Robber covering himself with symbolic armor against the hurt he has felt from his parents.
It was an important lesson for me to pay attention to what my characters think as opposed to using them as spokespersons for my own hang-ups.  While my characters may express some of my viewpoints, they have their own unique take on life.  What I’m challenged to do as a writer is to give voice to a wide variety of ideas, and sometimes they are going to be outside my comfort zone.  My characters may do and say things that are very different from what I would do.
Forcing myself to reconsider how Tucker would look at tattoos ended up changing my perception of them.  Now I find them fascinating, beautiful, and I admire the skill of the inkers.  When I see someone with a whole sheath of tattoos on their arm, I want to ask the story behind each selection.
It’s amazing to me how much this discovery has helped relax me about other forms of self-expression:  hair styles, hair color, tattoos, clothing choices.  They look beautiful to me now, and I celebrate the individuality (even when it’s outside my comfort zone).
In other words, my eyes wouldn’t have been opened if Tucker had held the same opinions that I did.  I’m grateful for the lesson he taught me.

My First Critic

No short stories for me.  My first foray into writing (at the age of 13) was a fantasy novel.  You didn’t have to squint too hard to see that Greyhold the wizard was a low-budget Gandalf and that the Sword of Pengol was a poor replacement for the One Ring. 
My name isn't Gandalf,.
It's Greyhold.  Really.After nursing Greyhold and his kin through seven novels, I decided to try a new story.  New world, new characters.  A plot that wasn’t a There-and-Back-Again adventure but something with a little meat.  By this time, I was sixteen, and I had a better appreciation for story.  I became fascinated with how a plot unfolded, not simply as a series of events, but rather as the pieces of a thematic puzzle.
I was raised Catholic, so of course I attended church every Sunday.  That didn’t mean I necessarily paid attention during Mass.  But somewhere around sixteen, I became curious about the narrative of Jesus’ life.  Not only as a spiritual guide but more particularly as a story.  I mean, look at all those amazing story elements:  the Virgin Birth, the baby in the manger, the Star of the East.  And later, his rise as a teacher, his gathering of his disciples.  The miracles, the sermons, his compassion, his fiery assault on the merchants in the Temple.
And of course the stellar climax:  trial and crucifixion.  But then comes that phenomenal epilogue:  he isn’t dead!  He rises from the dead!  He ascends into heaven!
What a great story!
So it’s no wonder that I decided to write a mash-up:  fantasy and the Bible.  Meet Haverlock, the Savior of Manaru, a prince who is called upon by the goddesses and gods to bring peace to a war-torn land.  He is granted magical powers to heal.  He is given limited sight into the future.  His closest companion betrays him.  He must make a terrible sacrifice.  Etc etc.
So, I spent the next 12 months writing Haverlock.  And when I was finished, though I knew the story had major problems and needed work, I handed it over to my first critic:  my mother.
First off, my mother was an avid reader.  Every afternoon, she would curl up in an armchair to read for an hour.  She loved mysteries:  Ellery Queen, Ed McBain.  She also was a huge fan of Tolkien, one of the few authors she re-read.  I credit her with my own love of reading.
Second, my mother did not coddle.  She was not one to indiscriminately praise her kids’ work; she was honest and direct.
So I gave her Haverlock, and over the next few days, I waited for her feedback.
She was proud of my achievement, so much so that without asking my permission, she passed the book on to my oldest brother, who was getting his master’s degree in English (see note below).
She read it as a reader and not as a proud parent.  She critiqued the work:  she told me what she liked, and she told me what didn’t work.  She gave me her full support that I should keep writing, and she made suggestions for how I could improve.  She pointed out where the story went off the rails, and she delighted in the parts that caught her by surprise.
My favorite comment of hers:  “Your story never goes in the direction I expect it to, but when I look back on it, it makes perfect sense.”
Over the next few years, I gave her other novels.  Some she liked, others didn’t do much for her.  Her critiques taught me a number of lessons:
Her critiques could be
quite succinct
There are ways to be supportive while still being honest.

Not everything I write is perfect.

Not everything I write is trash.

Trust my imagination, but always keep an eye on logic.

Keep trying.  Keep learning.
I feel amazingly fortunate to have that type of support early on for my writing.  It helps me handle feedback even now; I listen with an open mind, sift through the comments for the salient points, learn what I can, and still trust my inner voice. 
That’s what I learned from my first critic.

[Note:  my second critic, my brother Steve, wrote a five-page critique of the novel which I still have.  It gave me some great advice on learning basic grammar (not my strong suit at the time), reading eclectically, and thinking carefully about what I am trying to say.]

Book Review: The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Who knew?
Who knew that Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist and lawyer, who lived an unconventional life with his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and his former grad-student, Olive Byrne?  Who knew that the character of Diana Prince and her homeland of Paradise Island was a direct result of suffragism, early feminism and the creation of lie detectors?
Author Jill Lepore delves into this complex history to weave together the variety of characters whose lives directly inspired Wonder Woman.  As much as William Moulton Marston wants to present the notion that Wonder Woman sprung from his forehead like he was Zeus, there were many more people involved in developing the atmosphere – and not to mention in supporting the environment in which Marston worked – out of which the superhero evolved.
Lepore initially focuses on Marston’s work on the lie detector – which manifests itself in the comics as Wonder Woman’s golden lasso that forces people to tell the truth.  In this opening section, Lepore’s narrative skills are a bit shaky.  Episodes appear fragmented, facts are tossed in as though everything has relevance.  But once she moves into the early history of the suffragettes, the author takes off, and the work unfolds in fascinating detail.

I kept being shocked by Marston’s charismatic egoism – he sounds charming and infuriating.  He comes across as a grandiose personality that needs constant affirmation of his somewhat questionable skills.  There’s no doubt that he had the best intentions in his work, but he sounds more like a smarmy salesperson than a professional academic.
What is most fascinating about Lepore’s book is how Margaret Sanger and other influential feminists deliberately kept themselves one step removed from Wonder Woman, as though the comic book character would taint their ferocious fight for equality.  Even into the 1960s and 70s, Wonder Woman remains a questionable icon to Gloria Steinem.  What does it mean to have this powerful superhero as a symbol of equality when women question the efficacy of her use? 
Lepore’s book has less to do with the history of comic books and more the social mileau out of which Wonder Woman grew.  It’s a fascinating read, once she gets going on the history of feminism.

Book Review: The Strange and Marvelous Adventures of Puddle: Fragment One

You’ve got to like a writer whose Twitter handle is Claytonsaurus.  Clayton Smith, the author of Apocalypticon and Pants on Fire: A Collection of Lies, is now embarking on a serial novel entitled The Strange and Marvelous Adventures of Puddle.  He plans to publish fragments each month.

Puddle is a young girl living with her eccentric parents in an old house that is on the edge of a cliff.  Down Below, in the canyon, is a magical world in which leaves talk and werewolves are talented blacksmiths.Puddle soon finds herself plummeting into this canyon, with her parents not far behind.

Given the nature of the story – a girl plummeting down into a peculiar world – there are, of course, similarities to Alice in Wonderland.  But there are also touches of Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. 
Smith’s style is whimsical without turning precious.  He hits the proper narrative tone that is as much aural storytelling as it is imaginative.  When describing the significance of Puddle’s name, he writes that she “was a puddle, through and through, because despite the fact that she was not the splashy sort, she did share some common traits with conventional puddles.  She was usually quite reflective, and she was often quite still.” I got myself into this tube. Now how am I going to get out?
Since Puddle’s house is literally teetering on the edge of a cliff, you know that each month’s fragment is going to end in a cliffhanger.  Also, Puddle’s father is an inventor who doesn’t always know what he’s inventing.  He makes a flubbernator without even knowing what a flubbernator does.
Which also is how Smith plans to write these monthly segments:  he plans to publish each one before starting to work on the next.  It’s a tricky place to be as a writer – hanging onto the side of a cliff and making it up as you go – but the immediate playfulness of the story suggests that Smith is resourceful with his imagination.

I’m looking forward to Fragment Two.

Book Review: Let the Old Dreams Die

Vampire stories don’t come any creepier than Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s saga of Oscar and Eli.  There’s no romantic, sparkly Undead in this tale; this novel focuses on various real and unreal horrors in our society, all glazed over in existential angst.
Lindqvist’s follow-up, Let the Old Dreams Die, is a collection of short stories which include a sequel (of sorts) to Let The Right One In. 
The opening story, “Border,” focuses on Tina, a customs officer who never quite feels like she fits in.  When she encounters Vore, a peculiar man she insists is hiding contraband, she feels a peculiar affinity.  The remainder of the story shifts from naturalistic to an almost fable-like unfolding of who these characters are.
Other strong stories include “Equinox” (focusing on a compulsive trespasser who discovers an unexpected object in one house) and “Eternal/Love” (about the unraveling of a marriage when one partner has a near-death experience and becomes convinced that he knows how to elude death).
The longest tale is “Final Processing,” a sequel to the author’s novel Handling the Undead.  Not having read that book, I don’t know how it fits in with the original novel, but it was satisfying as a stand-alone story.  It does make me want to read the book.
No sparkly vampires hereMy favorite story is “Majken,” a quirky revenge tale of middle-aged women who resort to vandalism.  The story is predominantly told from Dolores’ point-of-view (first-person narrative), but at the end the author shifts to a third-person perspective to reveal the aftermath.  The ending is one of the best in the collection.
What strikes me about Lindqvist’s approach to horror is that he doesn’t resort to the literary equivalent of the jump-scare; rather, he first concentrates on who his characters are and the world they live in.  The evil encroaches slowly, so by the time it manifests, it is a specifically human struggle that ensues.
The stories are haunting, creepy, unsettling.  They’re the slow burn of horror, with images and concepts that linger long after the book is finished.  Lindqvist is an author I will definitely continue to explore.

A Cast of Thousands

Maybe it’s because I’m an actor.  Or maybe it’s because I love Victorian novels.  Or maybe I just like lots of elbow room when I’m telling a story, because it’s really hard to keep my character lists under control.  If I don’t keep an eye on things, I will end up with a Cast of Thousands in my 100K word novel, and that’s just too many.
As an actor, I’ve been involved in musicals and dramas that utilize an energetic ensemble to fill in all the miscellaneous characters that populate a town.  And given actors’ propensity for making one-line characters or even faces in the crowd have distinctive personalities, I tend to want to fill out my fictional world with all sorts of persons, no matter how small the role.
And Victorian novels – those great, baggy monsters – are filled up with cousins and half-brothers and servants and clergy, all serving the author’s theme.  Dickens, especially, created large casts from the highest to the lowest social standings (as in Bleak House) to illuminate the web work that connects us all.  In other words, Jo the crossing sweep, through six degrees of separation, lives in the same world as Sir Leicester Deadlock, baronet.
I have to catch myself from cluttering up my story with momentary characters who, in the scheme of things, do serve a purpose, when it would be much more efficient to use a smaller cadre of characters in those same roles.
In an earlier draft of the novel I am revising now, Reston Peace, Kenny Reston has a rather embarrassing encounter with a bunch of sorority sisters.  In a sexual capture-the-flag moment, the young women manage to steal a piece of his clothing (his boxers) to mount on their sorority’s wall.  For Kenny, it’s a humiliating experience.  A week later, he encounters another guy on campus who had the same thing happen to him, but for this guy it’s a hugely comic story:  his boxers stolen by six beautiful women!  Kenny is perplexed about why he goes down the shame route while this other guy (a one-off character) can shake it off.
It’s an important moment in Kenny’s development, but the incident felt watered down by this nameless character who will never show up on the pages again.
So I step back to consider a better way to illustrate the same concept.
In the novel, Kenny and Peter (one of his football teammates) agree to model for a photographer, who insists on going for increasingly graphic sexual content.  And here is where Kenny and Peter part ways:  for Kenny, again it’s about the sense of shame.  For Peter, he gets off on the exhibitionism.
Same concept, separate episode.  So what’s the solution?  Jettison the one-off character who loses his boxers and spend a little more time developing Peter’s character, because Peter is more crucial to the story.  It also reduces the redundancy of scenes.
At a writer’s conference I attended, an author described how he had a novel with seventeen characters.  Overall, he felt the story worked well, but he was concerned that some of the characters were less developed then others.  He started retooling the cast – combining characters, merging storylines – so that by the end he had eight much better developed characters telling the same story.
The guy on the left has a story.  And the one on the right.  And the one in the third row, fifth from the end ...

It’s a lesson I continue to learn.  So maybe I should say, “Get behind me, Cecil B. DeMille!” because I don’t need a cast of biblical proportions to tell my story of one hundred thousand words.

Book Review: Compulsion

In Compulsion, Jake Martin is gearing up for his third state soccer championship when his OCD ramps into high gear, forcing him to struggle to hold it together until after the big game.  His life is already a challenge, given that his mother suffers from mental illness, his father is emotionally aloof, and his younger sister is focused on improving her social status in school.  But when the spiders (as he describes the compulsive thoughts) get a hold of his brain, he has to follow the patterns, add the numbers to make primes, and do everything absolutely perfectly to keep the “magic” intact.


Author Heidi Ayarbe sets herself a difficult challenge in writing in Jake’s voice, because everything is filtered through his compulsion.  It gives the reader a powerful take on the overwhelming constrictions that a person endures, but unfortunately a little of it goes a long way.  The problem with seeing the world solely through Jake’s eyes is that reality and illusion blur, so sometimes the narrative gets muddy, and it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in particular scenes.  When Jake is one step away from falling apart, somehow the people around him don’t seem to suspect, and given the enormity of his emotional reaction, it’s hard to imagine that people would overlook his anxiety.  No one speaks about it.  They go through their lives as though everything is normal.  And what is normal, anyway?
Ayarbe gives hints about the private lives of the other characters – Jake’s best friend Luc, his teammates, his pseudo-girlfriend.  They all have their secrets.  Luc’s father beat him, Tanya may be anorexic, a teammate may be gay, but these hidden worlds are much like Jake’s own efforts to mask his compulsion.  He hopes that if he can create the perfect magic to win the soccer championship, all the spiders will disappear.  But life doesn’t work that neatly.
The novel’s greatest impact is the glimpse of Jake’s internal life, but the storytelling suffers.  Perhaps by giving the reader a little more time with pre-spider, pre-OCD Jake (before the anxieties becoming so overwhelming), Ayarbe could better set the foundation of the story and the relationships of the characters.  Another possibility is to allow one of the other characters, such as Luc, tell some of the story so that the reader gets a broader view of events.