Melanie Reviews: After the People Lights Have Gone Off

After the People LightsHave Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones

Pages: 310

Publisher: Dark House Press

Released: September 2014

Guest review by Melanie Page

Stephen Graham Jones is at again, writing faster than fans can read and publishers would like. This time, SGJ gives us a collection of 16 stories coming from various scary persuasions: ghosts, vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, and even some aliens. The title alone creeped me out; “people lights” imply something looking at your house, something that isn’t “people.” The cover image, too, is frightening--we see a person through a broken window, so the image creates a fore-, middle-, and background. Ingenious for a book cover, really, as the perspective makes readers wonder who’s looking at whom.

Before I started People Lights, my most recent SGJ experience was this summer when I picked up Growing Up Dead in Texas (MP Publishing, 2012), a nonfiction work that read like fiction: things too weird to be true, people who are larger than life. I didn’t finish SGJ’s memoir, though, because it seemed like he forgot someone was reading. Settings I couldn’t picture, people I couldn’t remember, farming terms I didn’t know, and perspectives that were missing. Occasionally, SGJ appears to write for an audience of one.

Although fiction, the first few stories in After the People Lights Have Gone Off read in the same confusing manner. SGJ provides a feedback at the end of the collection where readers can see what inspired each story. The first story, “Thirteen,” based on the author’s childhood, is about “some bad stuff that happened in the bathroom of the Big Chief movie theater in Midland, Texas, bad stuff that made us all so scared to go there that it finally just shut down.” In the Big Chief theater in the story, what exactly characters are afraid of is unclear. It has something to do with holding their breath during certain parts of movies and possibly disappearing. I don’t know what happened in Midland, but the story doesn’t capture the fear that SGJ felt (and, admittedly, still feels).

The second story, “Brushdogs,” was also confusing. It’s unclear whether the father’s son disappears or is actually the real son. There is a disappearing/reappearing glove. All readers know is that the father and son find a carion pile and weird things happen that make the father feel uncertain. Again, the story is based on a real experience, but SGJ fails to provide the pegs on which we hang meaning. At this point, I was disappointed that I bought the book.

Almost as soon as I thought the negatives, my faith was restored: the majority of the collection was brilliant, inventive, and truly scary. Boyfriends Jonathan and Lucas try to make it work in a time warp that sends them around one another in “This is Love.” Grandpa’s secret murderous past as a werewolf--and a human--comes home to roost in “Doc’s Story.” A husband cares for his wife after an accident in their new home leaves her paralyzed, but something haunted interferes with their lives in the title story. In “Uncle” the narrator admits, “There wasn’t even a muted scream from down the hall. Just the sound of forever. In it, I aimed the [handheld laser infrared thermometer] gun into my mouth, pulled the trigger. The readout said I was still alive, still human. As far as it knew, anyway.”

SGJ’s stories aren’t easy; in most cases the end isn’t clear, and readers are left to infer what happened. The challenge is one I want to meet, but putting the most abstract stories in the front nearly put me off the collection. Overall, After the People Lights Have Gone Off is a satisfying, terrifying read.

Melanie Page is a MFA graduate, adjunct instructor, and recent founder of Grab the Lapels, a site that only reviews books written by women (www.grabthelapels.weebly.com).

Indie Spotlight: Jeannine Hall Gailey

Here at TNBBC, we love to tug at the sleeves of the authors who pitch us, suggesting they tell us the story behind the books they wrote, the inspiration for it...

The essay I'm about to share with you, by Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of the upcoming collection of poems titled The Robot Scientist's Daughter, is probably by far the most sad and lovely, and also probably my most favorite. Read it to find out why.

Growing Up in the Atomic City

This is the story of how The Robot Scientist’s Daughter was born.  (The Robot Scientist's Daughter will be published by Mayapple Press in March 2015.)

Growing up five miles downwind of Oak Ridge National Labs outside of Knoxville, Tennessee could seem to some like an “exotic, picturesque” childhood. I spent hours roaming the several acres of mossy woods on our property, digging up peanuts and picking strawberries we grew in a large dirt patch in the back of the house, riding rescued ponies, canning pickles and apples with my mother. The spring was full of mockingbirds, lilacs, crepe myrtle. I went to a summer camp at the local private school where we had a talent show, crafts, and art classes, along with learning to shoot a rifle and a bow and arrow – I was seven years old for my first shooting lesson, and I was so proud to bring home the bulls-eyed paper target to my parents!

It was a beautiful place, full of fossil rocks and old oak trees and steep banks of daffodils along the rural road. But it was also ominous – the little pond across from our house had a sign that said “Don’t eat the fish” with a slash across a picture of a fish – even while I watched my older brothers and their friends splash around in it. A lot of the neighbor boys got in trouble and went to prison, and there were incidents down the street – a wife stabbing a husband, a husband shooting at a wife – and whole families living in ramshackle houses that seemed on the verge of falling over. We lived out in the country, even for Tennessee, in an area that was mostly trailers, family farms, and forest.

My father, trying to make enough income for four children while my mother went back to college to get her degree, decided to augment his engineering professor’s salary by consulting for nearby Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in nuclear cleanup. It was here that he made a switch from a deep interest in radiation-based medical technology – he had worked with early versions of CTscan machines at Yale before moving to work at the University of Tennessee – to robotics, at the encouragement of ORNL, who needed a solution for workers (especially janitors, who came into a lot of contact with contaminated objects) who continued to get sick from nuclear waste at their location.

So our basement became a repository for all kinds of wonderful machinery – a robot arm that played chess, a Geiger counter, and some large box with large knobs that never was specifically identified. I do remember my father showing me how to use a Geiger counter by measuring the clicks on a snowman I built, and he warned me not to eat the snow – that it wasn’t safe. That was my first lesson in the dangers of radiation. I thought this was fairly normal – after all, the kids at my school were the children of physicists and specialist physicians, engineers, and I read books like The Wrinkle in Time trilogy where the parents were scientists. My father bought me radio kits that required fine motors skills and circuitry skills and brought home trinkets and books for me from Japan, where he went for robotics conferences. I watched Hayao Miyazaki's movie Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, about a young girl who lives in a poisoned forest and fights to protect the environment from human war machines and the animals that had mutated to survive what was (even to me at ten, an obvious metaphor) for nuclear radiation poisoning.

The years I spent in Tennessee were some of the happiest I ever had – though no one would call those years perfect – and I always looked forward to visiting Tennessee after we moved away. I spent fifteen years in Ohio and can barely remember any scenery, but I can still remember the exact shape and smell of certain flowers in our yard, the way I built nests for birds out of sticks and violets and mud. When I went to college at the University of Cincinnati, I majored in Biology, and took a class called “Ecological Toxicology” – rumored to be a difficult class with a demanding teacher – and a class for engineers (that I got a special exception to attend) called “Environmental Law.” I was fascinated by these two classes, which, along with learning about mutation, DNA, and environmental impact in my regular biology classes, made me think differently about my childhood in Oak Ridge. Had I been impacted? What might still exist in my body, artifact of the produce and milk I ingested (from local farms,) the mud I played with and the grass I rolled around in? Radioactive cesium, in particular, was said to linger in the bones, hair, and fingernails of children who were exposed long into their adulthood, causing mysterious illnesses, neurological symptoms.

I didn’t know then that twenty years into the future, I’d be investigating those same questions, after years of enduring medical test after test for mysterious autoimmune problems, neurological symptoms, thyroid problems. I’d be looking into EPA reports about childhood leukemia rates in the Tennessee Valley, reports on radioactive trout in my local rivers, reading books by safety physicists about the early years of Oak Ridge National Labs and their experiments with radioactive material near my house. Or that I’d write a book of poetry about the whole thing – my dad’s mission to bring robots to save humans from radioactive poisoning, the beautiful woods and gardens I grew up on (later paved over with concrete and left alone, under questionable circumstances, like a dark joke about how you can't go home again), my own early struggle to live up to my father’s expectations and my struggle with my sometimes uncooperative, unhealthy body, my love of science and nature mixed with an understanding of the dark side of science, the dark side of nature.  

This is how my fourth book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, was born. She is still a sort of cyborg, half-robot, half-human, waiting for someone to unlock her secrets.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Jeannine Hall Gailey recently served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of four books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, out in March 2015 from Mayapple Press. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review and Prairie Schooner. Her web site is www.webbish6.com. 

Audiobook Review: Ugly Girls

Listened 11/17/14 - 11/24/14

3 Stars - Recommended to fans of edgy, straight up trailer trash fiction

Audio: 8.3 hours

Publisher: FSG

Narrator: Kathleen Early

Released: November 2014

Typical teenage girls getting into typical teenage girl stuff, only so much worse. In Ugly Girls, the writing was always on the wall of what ultimately boils down to the story of two incredibly incompatible BFF's who test one another, pushing each another from bad decision to bad decision, eschewing the consequences in lieu of the thrill of the moment, until that one final moment. The moment neither can take back though they wish like hell they could. 

Though you don't want to, you'll find the edgy, hard-core trashiness of the girls intoxicating. Baby Girl has made herself physically ugly, shaving her head, outlining her lips in a grotesque clown's mouth, donning her brother's old clothes, while Perry's ugliness is more behavioral, emotional, using her physical loveliness as a weapon. 

Home's nothing to get all worked up over. Both live boring, dead-end lives. Baby Girl lives with her uncle and struggles with the fact that her once handsome and devilish older brother has been reduced to a drooling, temper-tantrum-throwing five-year-old as the result of a tragic bike accident. Perry, she lives with her drunk-as-a-skunk mother, who never seems to care where she is or what she's up to and her step-father, a saint of a man for being able to put up with the two of 'em.

Oh god, how this book brought the memories of my teenage years rushing back to me. For all intents and purposes, I was a fairly "good girl". I'd sneak around with the boys in the middle of the night, sure, slipping out the bedroom window like Perry did, my father never the wiser. I skipped school and chilled at friends' houses listening to music and watching them get high. A group of us would hang out in the local trailer park - skin heads and hippies talking about the ways they were gonna change the world, gawking at the strung out pregnant girls shoving ice cream and pickles into their junkie mouths. Making nuisances of ourselves at the local coffee shop, batting our under-aged eyelashes at the cute college boys who worked here. Cruising the main streets by the beach with the windows down, radio blasting, the wind in our ears, like nothing could touch us, just passing the time till something better came along. 

Unlike us though, to get even with the world for the bum deck they were dealt, Perry and Baby Girl get off on having fun at other peoples expense, joyriding in the middle of the night, stealing cars, skipping school and cutting classes. They even end up in the dunk-tank overnight for attempting to steal stuff from the local pharmacy. But all that becomes child's play when the two of them discover that they're both being chatted up by the same guy - a guy who has a serious crush on Perry. When the girls finally agree to meet up and show him what's what, that's where the real trouble starts brewing. And once they start that ball rolling, there's no stopping its momentum. 

From slow start to awkward and abrupt ending, Lindsay's multi-charactered novel is all about the ugly. The ugliness inside of us, how feeling ugly makes you act ugly, like there's no other way to be. Ugly Girls is a hopeless, grimy, gritty sort of novel that leaves you feeling as unwashed and skanky as its characters do and makes you thankful that you aren't raising teenage girls. Though now I feel I have to go and warn my teenage son about girls like them. 

Katarina West Takes it to the Toilet

Oh yes! We are absolutely running a series on bathroom reading! So long as it's taking place behind the closed  (or open, if that's the way you swing) bathroom door, we want to know what it is. It can be a book, the back of the shampoo bottle, the newspaper, or Twitter on your cell phone - whatever helps you pass the time...

Today, Katarina Westtakes it to the toilet. Katarina is a novelist and a journalist who lives in an old farmhouse in Tuscany. She has published a non-fiction book, Agents of Altruism, and more recently a fantasy novel, Witchcraft Couture, which is set in the world of fashion. You can find more about Katarina and her blog ThingsI Know About Life at http://www.katarinawest.com

Sharing Your Bathroom With Imaginary People

 

Photo by Riitta Sourander

“It was big, that bathroom, much bigger than many living rooms, and the story went that she had loved it so much that she’d spent hours there, dreaming, idling, reading, designing – and even receiving guests, like a spoiled monarch. In the centre of it she had placed a nineteenth century zinc bathtub, which stood raised on an ancient wooden plinth. The space around it she had furnished like a salon, complete with an elegant Louis XVI sofa, side tables, engravings and portraits.”

Fine, so what’s this? A passage from a fifties paperback I found in a second-hand bookshop? A paragraph lying dusty and forgotten in the furthermost corners of my Facebook page? No, no, and no. It’s an excerpt from my novel, and the ‘she’ in question is a famous Italian fashion designer of the old school, a little like Coco Chanel or Elsa Schiaparelli.

But the bathroom is ours. Literally. It is just the same in the novel as it is in reality.

Which means that I share the toilet with my fictional characters.

How did this happen? I mean, how did I ever allow my characters to break free from the strict confines of my imagination, and take control of our toilet? Because it’s like giving the devil a finger and him taking the whole hand, it really is.

In all honesty, I still don’t know how it all came about. It might well be that there was a day when I forgot to bring bathroom reading with me (more about that later on) and seated there, bored, my imagination galloping, I stared at the zinc bathtub… and, abracadabra, a scene was born. And once that had happened, there was no going back.

 

Photo by Riitta Sourander

So our bathroom is populated by two seemingly alike yet fundamentally different species, homo sapiens and homo fictus. Usually the coexistence is peaceful, not least because my characters know that I am their God, and no matter what you do, you should never make your Creator angry. But it can happen that it’s past midnight and our centuries-old farmhouse is ghostly silent, and, brushing my teeth, I look at our bathroom and suddenly see it from the eyes of my mentally ill protagonist. And though I know that he wasn’t quite right in the head and imagined it all, unexpectedly I see his mother lying underwater in the bathtub, her shoulder-length hair billowing around her, and her eyes wide open and blank. And I swear I can hear the water gushing and pouring over the edges of the zinc bathtub.

That’s when I know I’ve written too much and it’s time to go to sleep.

So do I read in that bathroom? You bet. And not only have I read there, I have even written there. Years ago, when my son was a lively toddler and life was nothing but constant checking that he hadn’t fallen off the stone staircase or swallowed the batteries inside the remote control, his evening baths were my best bona fide writing time. And they always took place in that bathroom. I can still picture the two of us: my son, splashing the water happy and carefree; and me, anxious and absent-minded, hell-bent on putting down each and every idea that had been haunting me during that day. ‘Just one sentence, honey,’ I kept repeating, even if no one was listening to me. ‘Mum’s got to write just one sentence.’

Which kind of says everything about being a writer and a mother.

Photo by Riitta Sourander

There is even a little bookshelf in our bathroom, making toilet reading the easiest thing in the world. And it’s rather edifying toilet reading: there are Victor Hugo’s collected works in French and Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto (now how did that ever end up there?) and a number of twentieth century classics in Italian, their spines elegant and aesthetically pleasing, just like almost everything made in Italy is elegant and aesthetically pleasing, from shoes and bags to lamps and statues.

But since my French is poor and Marx is not my cup of tea, I always take my own bathroom reading with me, usually in the form of my ever-so-present Kindle. And if it isn’t my Kindle, then it has to be one of my dictionaries and thesauruses, which I love to read in the toilet, because there is no limit as to how few or many words you can check while doing whatever it is you’ve got to do in the toilet. In this category my absolute favourite is Eugene Ehrlich’s The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate, and I warmly recommend it to anyone who wants to broaden their bathroom reading horizons.

Or then it’s a printout of whatever chapter or scene I am writing – and here lies the danger, I can see it clearly now, because the moment you bring your own texts to the toilet your characters enter there, too.

And once they’re inside, there’s no way of getting rid of them, and you just got to share your bathroom with imaginary people.

So read what you must in the toilet, as long as you have not written it. That’s my heartfelt advice for all fellow authors.

Indie Spotlight: Sonia Taitz

I love doing spotlights with small press authors. It's a great opportunity to get them talking about all sorts of behind-the-scene-y kinds of things with their books. 

Take this one, for example. Sonia Taitz (no stranger to TNBBC) dishes on her newest release, Down Under, a fictional story of love and loss, which she claims is loosely based on Mel Gibson. 

Take a peek at the three most common questions she gets hit with when she mentions that fact:

The Gibson Girl Speaks Out

                                                           

 When I tell people I’ve just published a novel loosely based on the life and loves of Mel Gibson, I usually get the same reactions:

            1. “Aren’t you afraid of him?”

            2. “Did you hear what he says about his critics?”

            3. “Does he know about your book?”

I’ll answer each question in turn.

         

   1.  I am not afraid of him. The Mel Gibson I know (not that I actually know him, but I’ll get to that) is – when not under the influence of alcohol or other distorting neurochemicals – a good, loyal, and kind man. Not to mention a multimodal genius. On top of which, he is known to be a good parent, and I place a great value on that.

           

 2. Yes, I did hear what he’s said about his critics.  And there have been a few. When his movie “The Passion” came out, reaction was not uniformly positive. One of Mel’s most vociferous opponents was Frank Rich, former head theater critic for The New York Times, and now a cultural columnist on pretty much anything he likes. Or doesn’t like. Mr. Rich hated “The Passion,” and said so in bold black and white, in the paper of record.

           

         Mel’s reaction to this negative, very public disdain was to say (and I paraphrase slightly):

          

         “Oh, Frank Rich? I want to rip out his intestines and put them on a stick. And then, I want to feed them to my dog.”

           

          That’s a critique in itself, I’d say – and nothing that I’d want to have directed at me, or my middle.  But I’ll make allowances. Mel’s world is macho, and his movies can be graphic. Have you seen what happened to Braveheart? Or what the ancient Mayans did to the unfortunates in “Apocalypto?” Add to this that the man may have felt beleaguered. At the time Mel made this comment about disemboweling his denigrators, he was inundated with criticism. He was peppered with daily buckshot. And this guy is not shy; he’s nothing if not outspoken. I think he was saying, essentially: “Ouch.” I don’t think Mel Gibson literally wanted to excise Frank Rich’s upper and lower intestines (including appendix and duodenum) and feed them to his Fido in a bowl.

           On the other hand, I did feel some small misgivings when my brother, who lives in LA, reported sighting Mel at his gym, working out in the company of someone the muscle mavens call “Mr. Testosterone.” The possibility of androgen being given to this already slightly touchy man – a man with growing lats and delts – did not enhance my own sense of bodily safety.

            Still, essentially, I feel my bowels and all my other parts are under no threat. And, to milk this metaphor to death, I think Mel Gibson likes people to have some guts. He does, so why can’t I?

3.  I highly doubt that Mel Gibson knows anything about DOWN UNDER. I will tell you why. First, I explicitly warned my brother not to greet the superstar, mid-rep, hoisting iron and grunting, like this: “Oh, thought you’d wanna know. My little sis wrote a book based on you. She’s Jewish, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, so you know she might wants to start a war here.  And, funnily enough, she lives pretty close to your favorite person, Frank Rich.” (Note – Frank actually used to live in my building.) No, my brother heeded my request and said nothing.  Of course, he chatted to Mel, who was there day after day, but mostly about he-man stuff. Nothing that would lead to homicide, or even a slight tantrum directed at an innocent female scribe, however Semitic.

Second, no one knows much about any novel, unless it’s been written by Stephen King or Danielle Steel. (That’s why sites like this are vital in getting the actual good word out.) Even big media coverage doesn’t always change this calculus. I remember appearing on the “Today” show to promote my first book, large publisher and all. Katie Couric herself, in her heyday, interviewed me! I thought I’d have to wear shades for the rest of my life, cowering from the Kliegs, shouting “no photos, please!” Not so. Can you name that book? (It was MOTHERING HEIGHTS. It is out of print.)

Third, and last, Mel and I had the chance to meet and speak, but we did not. Twice, he shot movies on my very block.  I watched him ambling around my corner of the world, catching some breezes and rays near his trailer.  For a moment, I thought of speaking to him, but knew that stars don’t like to be bothered, and that he was working. But I could tell Mel was a good guy simply by the way he treated others on the set. At that time, I’d been writing culture pieces for The New York Times for several few years. I’d interviewed lots of stars, not all of whom were as nice as they appeared. One who was not only nice, but intelligent and grounded, was Jodie Foster. This two-time Oscar winner has always remained loyal to Mel Gibson, even as others (former friends) ran for cover. Jodie was clearly a wonderful person herself, and her positive view of Gibson – staunchly expressed over recent years – says something about both of them. 

If you add my two neighborhood sightings to the Foster connection (not to mention my brother as Mel’s gym buddy), I have practically met the man, right?

            So, with that authority vested, what I want to say about my novel and Mel is this: DOWN UNDER has little to do with the “facts.” The story I wrote flowed out of my head. It’s my vision of what a man like him would have been like as a vulnerable boy. How he grew, whom he loved, what broke his heart, and the journey he takes to mend it. DOWN UNDER is fictional, down to the bottom. It’s true to my own heart, and that’s all it wants to be. There’s a touch of its magical source in there, but it’s like the twitching of a wand. A sprinkle of stardust.  Now you see him, now you don’t.

What Mel would make of the book is secondary, but I do hope that he’ll like it.

            

            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sonia Taitz is the author of In the King's Arms (2011), a novel described as "beguiling" by The New York Times Book Review. Her last book was the prize-winning memoir, The Watchmaker's Daughter (2012), which was praised by Vanity Fair, The Readers' Digest, and People, featured on C-SPAN's BookTalk, and nominated for the Sophie Brody Medal by the American Library Association.

Book Giveaway: Winterswim

Since July 2010, TNBBC has been bringing authors and readers together every month to get behind the book! This unique experience wouldn't be possible without the generous donations of the authors and publishers involved.

It's the first of the month and you know what that means.

It's time to bring you January's Author/Reader Discussion book!

We will be reading Ryan W Bradley's novel

Winterswim

Ryan  has made a total of 12 copies available, 

4 print (for US residents only), 4 digital PDF's and 4 audio downloads (both open internationally) 

Here's the goodreads description of the book:

Pastor Sheldon Long was born of the woods, raised in a secluded cabin by a mute mother and an abusive father who preached God's vengeance. Forced to take control of his own destiny, Pastor Long found God in his own way, melded with the mythologies of his mother s tribe. Now he's out to send the wicked, as he has judged them, to heaven.

Steven, Pastor Long s son, is simultaneously pining for his former babysitter who has moved to Hollywood and crushing on nearly every girl he goes to school with. Soon his preoccupation with the opposite sex lures him into investigating a string of drownings that local police are declaring accidents.

Ryan W. Bradley's novella weaves religiosity and mythology into a tale of drugs, sex, and murder set against the frozen backdrop of blue-collar Alaska. 

This giveaway will run through December 8th. 

Winners will be announced here and via email on December 9th.

Here's how to enter:

1 - Leave a comment here or in the giveaway thread over at TNBBC on goodreads, stating why you'd like to receive a copy of the book, what format you prefer (choose one option from above), and where you reside. Remember, only US residents can win a paper copy!. 

ONLY COMMENT ONCE. MULTIPLE COMMENTS DO NOT GAIN YOU ADDITIONAL CHANCES TO WIN.

2 - State that you agree to participate in the group read book discussion that will run from January 19th through the 24th. Ryan W Bradley has agreed to participate in the discussion and will be available to answer any questions you may have for him. 

 *If you are chosen as a winner, by accepting the copy you are agreeing to read the book and join the group discussion at TNBBC on Goodreads (the thread for the discussion will be emailed to you before the discussion begins). 

 3 - Your comment must have a way to contact you (email is preferred). 

GOOD LUCK!

Audiobook Review: Station Eleven

Listened 10/28/14 - 11/10/14
3 Stars - Recommended to readers who enjoy apocalyptic fiction that focuses less on the apocalyptic and more on the relationships of those who are surviving it
Audio 10.7 hours
Publisher: Random House
Narrator: Kirsten Potter
Released: September 2014


I was talking to a girl at work the other day, when I was about halfway through the audio, about the freakish timing of this book's release. Emily St. John Mandel's entire novel hitches on the Georgia Flu pandemic, which nearly wipes humanity clean out - spreading around the globe at break neck speed, claiming its victims within days of exposure. And here we are, in the midst of the Ebola breakout... wondering and worrying over its potential to do a similar thing.

Chilling, to be reading a work of fiction that so closely mirrors our current reality. Because as you slip into the pages of Station Eleven, it practically begs you to question "would I survive the pandemic?" And if I did, which is a big fat if, "would I be able to survive in the aftermath?" And to that I'd have to say Oh. Hell. No. As much as I'd like to THINK I'm a survivor, I have to be honest here. I know nothing about scavenging for food, making a fire from nothing, living off the land. Unless I lucked out and hooked up with a group of people who kinda knew what they were doing. Then I might be ok. But otherwise, I'm as good as dead.

But hang on. Here I am, taking about the pandemic as if it's the entirety of the book when in actuality, it's treated more like a back story, since Station Eleven is much more concerned with Arthur, an aging Hollywood actor who died of a heart attack on stage while performing King Lear on the same evening that the Georgia Flu begins taking lives, and the way he is still remembered and connected to (and connecting) survivors 20 years later. Because when the human race is facing complete extinction, it totally makes sense that a handful of people will survive who all knew the same dude way back when... AND end up in the same place together, right? We're talking only 1% of the WORLD'S POPULATION exists now five of the non-infected knew Arthur in the time before are about to start hanging out. Really? Really?!

Kirsten, a child actor, was on stage with him when he died. She stood by and watched as an audience member attempted CPR on him. Fast forward 20 years later, and she is now part of a Traveling Symphony who roam town to town playing classical music and -oh yes- putting on renditions of King Lear. She also carries copies of two limited edition comic books that were written and designed by Arthur's first wife pre-collapse. The CPR guy, Jeevan, also survives the collapse, and remembers those few anxious moments trying to save Arthur under the bright stage lights. Though no one knows who he is, Kirsten often thinks about Jeevan and how he attempted to calm her during the whole  Arthur-dying ordeal. Then we have Arthur's closest friend Clark, who was traveling to Arthur's funeral with Arthur's second wife Elizabeth and their only son. Arthur, Elizabeth, and the kid end up stranded at an airport during the outbreak and manage to survive, along with other lucky/unlucky airport-goers.

Told in chapters that rush back and forth between the early days of the Georgia Flu and the collapse to the here and now, Station Eleven puts a special emphasis on the importance of art and culture, and the role it plays in keeping the last vestiges of civilization... well, civilized. As I read, I found parallels to other post-apocalyptic novels - in the sense that people must make a conscious choice to remain human. Otherwise, they're bound to become monsters, letting their animal instincts take control. That's the power behind the post-apoc novel, isn't it? That tender balance between managing your humanity and totally forsaking it in the face of survival. Mandel's focus seemed to be placed more so on the THINGS of civilization and how they influenced her characters to remain human, rather than delve deeper into the internal struggle. But even that plot point was mashed in and sometimes completely sideswiped by Arthur's story and the ultimate climax to the story lines of those who were impacted by him.

I suppose when I first asked to review this book, I had been under the impression it would've concentrated more on the actual collapse of society, and was rather disappointed to find that it had chosen to center itself on this jaded, womanizing actor and the influence he still yielded over people when, frankly, influence no longer seemed to matter. I began to grow tired of the chapters that shared his history, and much preferred to be in the post collapse world Mandel was developing.

As I have in the past with big-press books that garnered impressive pre-release buzz, I sit here and wonder if I read the same thing as everyone else. Don't get me wrong. I would definitely recommend this to readers who want a slow paced, multi-charactered death-by-pandemic novel in which almost nothing seems to happen. But calling it the best book of 2014? I'm not seeing it. If you want a kick-ass book about the collapse of civilization, I'd highly recommend Eric Shonkwiler's Above All Men, which I called out as the best book of 2014 when I first read it back in January, and which still hold the title, in my opinion!

Book Review: King Shit

Read 11/26/14
3 Stars - Recommended to those who appreciate Sam Pink and Charles Bukowski and the likes for their scrapin-the-bottom-of-the-barrel outlook on humanity
Pages: 45
Publisher: House of Vlad
Released: June 2014


Disclaimer: Yes, I am quoted on the second page inside this novel. And yes, I am the only blurb on the back cover. No, that super squee-worthy, holy-fucking-awesome fact has had no impact on the honesty of this review. And no, I really don't care if you don't believe me.


King Shit is a super-shortie. No, not the dude himself, though I guess he's not really all that much to look at if we take him at his word. He's a scrawny, pudgy bellied, thin haired guy rumored to have been named for either Elvis "The King"  Presley or Elvis "the shy and geeky" Costello. Either way, we get the sense our main man falls extremely short of both namesakes.

In this shorter-than-novella sized illustrated story, we are taken on a night out with Elvis and his right hand man Ralph and are made to bear witness to the oh-so-sad shenanigans that follow. Bar crawling around town, they rub elbows with an obese Mexican Santa, a strange jukebox bike riding fella in a lavender suit, an ex-girlfriend of Elvis's who parades her lady-parts around in front of her current beau (an angry dwarf of a dude), two grease-heads puking it up in the men's room, and a whole lot of nothing to go home to.

Typical of  Brian Alan Ellis, we're hanging with the grimy, dingy underbelly of society here. His characters are the kind of slimy, pickled, sleazy bastards that, were they to slide their squishy behinds onto the bar stools next to yours, you'd quickly down the drink you were nursing and find a reason to up and excuse yourself before they attempted to suck you into one of their bad-breathed ballads of woe.

Ellis's straight forward approach to storytelling can be compared to that of Sam Pink and Charles Bukowski. His uncanny ability to humbly dress his characters in yesterday's dirty, beer soaked, rumpled clothing and march them back and forth from place to place like it ain't no big thang speaks directly to the insecurities in each of us. And the fact that this is the norm for these guys, that they think this is what life is and are living it the only way they know how, that's fascinating to us.

I only wish we had been given more time to get to know these guys. I get the sense there is much more to them, more raggedy adventures to be had. That their stories are only just beginning.

Where Writers Write: Bonnie ZoBell

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

 

Where Writers Write is a series that features authors as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Bonnie ZoBell.

Bonnie's new linked collection from Press 53, What Happened Here, a novella and stories, is centered on the site PSA Flight 182 crashed into North Park, San Diego, in 1978, right next to where she now lives. Her fiction chapbook The Whack-Job Girls was published last year. She won an NEA, received an MFA from ColumbiaUniversity, and teaches at San Diego Mesa College. 

Where Bonnie ZoBell Writes

We shared an office for many years then came to the realization that since our ninety-year-old garage isn't big enough to fit any vehicle larger than a model-T, one of us should move out here. I volunteered since all my gardening stuff is out here too. We had concrete poured over the rock and cement floor that hurt when you walked on it and looked, my sister said, like somebody had been murdered and buried under it. Friend and handyman Bernie and I found a great salvaged glass door and two windows at Habitat for Humanity. He put in drywall, and then there was the paint.

Hardly anybody but me and the occasional overnight guest were going to see these walls or anything else out here, so I could do whatever I wanted. The ceiling became blue like the sky.  The concrete floor is stained red and the rugs are green, ground.

Best of all, my Greenoffice or Offgreen (greenhouse and office) is now a combination of my two greatest loves—gardening and writing. When scribbling, I stare out the door, which I leave wide open most of the time, at my gardens. Ozzie and Xena, my two rescue Maltese; Beau and Lucy, my Maine Coon and tuxedo cats; and my husband Jim come out and visit.

The painting and my muse, Red Bird by Sandy Tweed, used on the cover of my book, sits over my desk and keeps an eye on things.

It feels colorful and mine, a place where my imagination can go wherever it likes. 

Indie Ink Runs Deep: Stephen Kozeniewski

Every now and then I manage to talk a small press author into showing us a little skin... tattooed skin, that is. I know there are websites and books out there that have been-there-done-that already, but I hadn't seen one with a specific focus on the authors and publishers of the small press community. Whether it's the influence for their book, influenced by their book, or completely unrelated to the book, we get to hear the story behind their indie ink....


Today's ink story comes from Stephen Kozeniewski (pronounced: "causin' ooze key"). Stephen lives with his wife and two cats in Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the modern zombie.  During his time as a Field Artillery officer, he served for three years in Oklahoma and one in Iraq, where due to what he assumes was a clerical error, he was awarded the Bronze Star.  He is also a classically trained linguist, which sounds much more impressive than saying his bachelor’s degree is in German. Like him on Facebook, follow him on Twitter, see what he reads on Goodreads, and see what he writes on his blog. 

What you're looking at is, of course, a zombie crow devouring the eye of a zombie  hyena which is itself devouring the entrails of a zombie human, which is snatching at the crow.  All just part of the circle of life really.

 

I'm not, by nature, a prideful guy.  But in the middle of having this piece done I asked my tattooist (the wonderful Emily Asylum of 717 Tattoos Mechanicsburg) what the craziest tattoo she had ever done was.  She paused for a moment before thoughtfully concluding, "This one" and I was filled with an overwhelming sense of pride.