NORTH AMERICAN LAKE MONSTERS, a Shirley Jackson Award-winning collection of tight horror tales

NORTH AMERICAN LAKE MONSTERS
NATHAN BALLINGRUD
Small Beer Press
$9.95 ebook editions, available now

The Publisher Says: Nathan Ballingrud's Shirley Jackson Award-winning debut collection is a shattering and luminous experience not to be missed by those who love to explore the darker parts of the human psyche. Monsters, real and imagined, external and internal, are the subject. They are us and we are them and Ballingrud's intense focus makes these stories incredibly intense and irresistible.

These are love stories. And also monster stories. Sometimes these are monsters in their traditional guises, sometimes they wear the faces of parents, lovers, or ourselves. The often working-class people in these stories are driven to extremes by love. Sometimes, they are ruined; sometimes redeemed. All are faced with the loneliest corners of themselves and strive to find an escape.

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life in the South. He worked as a bartender in New Orleans and New York City and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His story "The Monsters of Heaven" won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES! WATCH THE TRAILER!

My Review:

With my usual verve, I'll use the Bryce Method to explain my ideas about each story as I come to it.

You Go Where It Takes You

Wild Acre

S.S.

The Crevasse

The Monsters of Heaven [read this story on Tor.com]

Sunbleached

North American Lake Monsters [read this story free at the Weird Fiction Review]

The Way Station

The Good Husband

DUNE, the classic novel made into a bad movie, a good miniseries, and now...?

DUNE
FRANK HERBERT (Dune #1)
Penguin Books
$18 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Here is the novel that will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family--and would bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.
A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what it undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

My Review: I first read this novel in 1975. It seems impossible that it was over 40 years ago, but the math is inescapable and time inexorable. My teenaged brain was rewired by the read. I had a standard by which to judge all future SFnal reads, and it was a high one. I was transported into a future I was utterly convinced would be the the one I'd have descendants to live in. I suppose that could yet happen. I'm a lot less convinced now that the human race's future is that long. Age might bring wisdom, I wouldn't know about that, but it sure brought me a booster shot of cynicism.

The Orange Catholic Bible, the books of the Empress Irulan, they all seemed to me so real...the cry "never to forgive, never to forget" rings louder today than it did in 1975 because I've lived through so many iterations of it by now. Us people, we love the shit out of our vicious vengeful vendettas, don't we. Frank Herbert got that right as all hell.

Trouble is, ol' Frank wasn't any kind of a writer, was he? He had flashes of good phrasemaking, he had long stretches of competent prosemongering, and then there was the rest of the ninety jillion words in the novel. Serviceable is le mot juste. And TBH I feel pretty generous putting it that way.

But then came David Lynch. Oh dear, oh dear. I'm not a worshipper of Lynch's at the best of times. I thought Blue Velvet was brummagem and boring; Twin Peaks was portentous twaddle. So the Kool-Aid passed my seat, I fear. His 1984 adaptation of Dune was downright laughable. I left the theater torn between gales of laughter and gusts of grief-stricken tears. Sting in that stupid winged underwear! KYLE MacLACHLAN as Paul Atreides!! Ludicrous, all of it, and the problems started with the butchery of so much of the novel that even the bones were scattered in no sensible pattern. Inevitable, really, as the runtime of the film was a paltry two hours and seventeen minutes. Imagine trying to wedge a 600-page magnum opus dense with world-building and replete with internal ironies and levels of meaning into the length of a good winter's nap. Didn't work so good.

SciFi Channel, gods please bless their collective hides, approved a mini-series written and directed by John Harrison in 2000. It was 4:17:07 in total. That was *almost* enough to do justice to the story. The result was infinitely superior to the Lynch version. It was a joy to watch for me, a forty-year-old cruelly wounded mess of a man, and felt like a balm to my fanboy memory of the novel. Perfect? No. Great? Yep!

Then I found it on YouTube and thought I'd take a respite from reality by giving it a rewatch.

You know what? Special effects age badly. Mid-budget TV ones age really, really, really badly. The screenplay clunked a good deal. The story, however, was all there and was well done, with the prunings and bonsai sculptings well chosen and well shaped. And the story was just about as timely as anything I could've hoped to avoid!

Dune bashed me upside the temples with its portrayal of the collapse of Empire and revolution of the have-nots in a way it couldn't have 17 or 42 years ago. It felt more timely, it packed more wallop than it possibly could have in fatter times. This is my idea of good myth-making: A story that isn't finished telling us the truth yet, and doing so in a way that compels, impels, propels us to go on the journey ready or not. The idea of a Savior come to rescue us is eternally appealing, the sight of the unworthy getting their comeuppance is evergreen. It wasn't what I was seeking, wasn't escapist boom-bang-blowwie, but it was what I needed. A bit of heartening to fight again, odds be buggered.

And now I'm told that there's a new version on the way, possibly to be directed by Denis Villeneuve of Arrival fame. That's some fire-power there. A director with clout and access to Hollywood's cash box could do something special with this epic...though I'm still very concerned with the issues inevitable in adapting the story to movie length.

Isn't it interesting how every decade seems to call for a new version of the story? The 1960s had the novel; the 1970s the unmade Alejandro Jodorowsky adaptation, a perfect reflection of the decade's malaise/limitation mentality; the 1980s cheesy, overblown one-note-and-it's-the-wrong-one ethos; the 1990s void, again perfectly in keeping with the culture; the 2000s TV version, as everything shrunk in the aftermath of the floodwaters of Bush's election stealing; and now a big-budget, major-talent remake! That hasn't happened yet! And bids fair not to, in the parlous economic times ahead!

Frank Herbert's Dune is a great rewatch. The novel hasn't finished with us yet. I hope it won't any time soon.

11/22/63: A Novel...a wish-fulfillment...and a warning

11/22/63
STEPHEN KING
Scribner
$10.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: ON NOVEMBER 22, 1963, THREE SHOTS RANG OUT IN DALLAS, PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED, AND THE WORLD CHANGED. WHAT IF YOU COULD CHANGE IT BACK?

In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King—who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer—takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.

It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine (where there’s Dunning business to conduct), to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.

My Review: Review republished in observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination this week.

If you had the chance to change the course of history, would you? Would the consequences be what you hoped?

Jake Epping, 35, teaches high school English in Lisbon Falls, Maine, and cries reading the brain-damaged janitor's story of childhood Halloween massacre by their drunken father. On his deathbed, pal Al divulges a secret portal to 1958 in his diner back pantry, and enlists Jake to prevent the 11/22/1963 Dallas assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. Under the alias George Amberson, our hero joins the cigarette-hazed full-flavored world of Elvis rock 'n roll, Negro discrimination, and freeway gas guzzlers without seat belts. Will Jake lurk in impoverished immigrant slums beside troubled loner Lee Harvey Oswald, or share small-town friendliness with beautiful high school librarian Sadie Dunhill, the love of his life?

So does a modestly successful high-school English teacher with a bad, broken marriage to an alcoholic behind him, a future of great sameness before him, and a date with destiny that cannot be foreseen, step up? What happens to Jake is, he actually gets that chance to change the world. Seriously. No spoilers here, Jake gets a chance to make 11/22/63 just another date on the calendar Pope Julius invented for us. How? Through a little rabbit-hole in time that a friend of Jake's finds, uses, and tries to accomplish the salvation of Kennedy through the use of: Living from September 9, 1958, until he can get rid of Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22, 1963. But the past, you see, doesn't want to be changed. So the guy gets terminal cancer, comes home to 2011, and zaps Jake with the job of changing the future by changing the past.

Jake does. Boy, does he ever. Way big does he change the future.

Nothing in life is free. Remember the first time you heard that? Was it your mom or your dad who laid it on you? How hard did you kick against knowing it, and for how long?

Jake takes a week. I aged a hundred years in the week Jake took. So will you.

And that's all I'll say. Well, no, not all.

Every life has its losses, mine included. They're not so interesting to other people, of course, because folks are mostly interested in their own miseries and haven't got a lot of energy to spare for the troubles of others. Okay, fine; what fiction does is, it gives us a chance to have a catharsis, in the ancient Greek sense, the reason they invented plays and melodrama and tragedy and comedy. It was therapy to go to a play and scream and cry and howl with laughter. The whole point was to get it all out. Catharsis.

I experienced many moments of catharsis in reading this book. I was wrung dry of tears on several happy and several sad occasions. I relived the might-have-beens of my own little life. I redrew the contours of history a couple times, inspired by King's redrawings.

I was swept up in a story that I so wanted to be told, and I was completely aghast when it was over because I didn't want it to be over, and I didn't want the finality of the ending to step on my gouty toes the way I thought it would.

But, like so many before me, I stubbed my toe on the stair of King's story and said ouch, before I realized it was a stair. Stairs go up, or they go down, but you'll never know which in the darkness until you feel for the next one.

But the deal is, once you know which way you're going, you're already there, committed to the movement. Exactly, in other words, like living life.

This is why Stephen King is our own Mr. Dickens. I hate Dickens' bloated, boring prose and his tedious, ridiculous plots, but he and King both write the books that offer catharsis to the audience of the age. (Just for gods' sweet sake, quit trying to pretend Chuckles is still speaking to you! And those gawdawful dull Shakespeare plays, stop it! You know you hate 'em like the rest of us do!)

The ending of the story was, for this reader, a catharsis of epic proportions. I hate and envy Jake, I bleed inside for him, I want to comfort him and slug him. I am undone by jealousy for his last harmony between past and present. I want one, too.

I got it, my last harmony, and you might too, if you'll read the 840pp of exciting and fast-paced life in 11/22/63. Please do.

DEFENDING JACOB, routine courtroom drama redeemed by a wallopin' good ending; Posted 6 April 2013

DEFENDING JACOB
WILLIAM LANDAY
Bantam Books
$17.00 trade paper, $12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.

Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent, and Andy believes him. Andy must. He’s his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own—between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he’s tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.

Award-winning author William Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis—a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control.

My Review: Courtroom legal thriller. Nothing new there.

Redeemed from two-star basement by two things: The ending, which I am surprised to say I didn't see coming. It was a gut-punch.

And also two quotes, things I closed the book and nodded sagely after reading, things that were So Well Said I had to take a pause for absorption:

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.

Yes, yes, anyone who has ever lived through A Tragedy knows this feeling intimately, knows how this sentence encapsulates the aching need to be normal and better and fixed...that never comes....

And this:

At some point as adults we we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

Anyone who has read some of my more dyspeptic posts on Facebook will realize how little I think of the adolescent exceptionalism that pervades our adult culture. You don't have a *right* to own a gun, unless you're in a "well-regulated militia," you have a stupid-ass paranoid fear that results from imaging They are out to get you. It's a symptom of a brand of stupid arrogant vanity, a sense of self as Uniquely Valuable, that is ridiculous and borderline mentally ill.

No one is so damned important that They are Out To Get You. And that sentence, that piece of Landay's wisdom, explains why it should be okay to say "Oh just STFU and grow up!" to more people more often.

Anyway. Up from a rocklike two all the way to three and a quarter stars. An enjoyable read redeemed by surprise and wisdom...helluva job, Landay!

2020 UPDATE FOUR TV-SERIES STARS Chris Evans plays Andy Barber with a complexity and focus that made me invest even more heavily in the AppleTV+ adaptation than I had in the book (as the ending approached). I like Mr. Evans's style of acting in general, but he sets the knobs to 11 and then wraps every-damn-thing in lead shielding as Andy's universe shreds...and then there's the slightly altered ending, which was pretty big stuff for Evans to play.

Still, eight episodes was two too many in my estimation, leading Michelle Dockery's performance as Laurie Barber to wear thin. It's hard to watch her reach deeper and deeper into herself and come back with much the same intensity...nonetheless, anything mildly critical I say shouldn't keep you from signing up for the free trial, binging the series, then canceling. Whatever you do, don't give those sleazebags any more of your money than is impossible to avoid.