Author: Rod Rees

2011, William Morrow

Filed under: Sci-Fi

Goodreads

This was my own fault. I’d been reading a lot of books that were good, but not very memorable. I wanted something that would get my juices flowing, and that meant either a really good book… or a really bad one. Bad books are much easier to find.

I’d taken a look at the The Demi-Monde: Winter a few weeks before, and I’d given up because its writing, even in just the first few pages, was wretched—full of cliches and clunkily unpoetic. But then, wanting a bad book, I turned back. And I got a bad book. I got everything I was asking for and much, much more. I barely made it through a hundred of Rees’s dense, awful pages before I had to put it back down. This review will be less a review than a catalog of what makes this book so bad. Take a deep breath.

Premise

In the year 2018, the “Demi-Monde” is an elaborate computer simulation made to train military cadets to fight in “asymmetric warfare environments” like Iraq and Afghanistan. The bulk of the action, as you might guess, will take place inside the simulation.

So far, this is a solid, if boring, idea. It’s also rather dramatically weak. Militaries use a lot of simulations, and they use them because there’s no risk for the participants. But “no risk involved” is not a good recipe for a thrilling novel, so Rees has to turn up the heat. Unfortunately, a concussed 5-year-old could come up with a more coherent imaginary world.

First of all, there’s a critical flaw in the Demi-Monde itself: if you die inside it, you die in real life, much like the Matrix. That makes it a more interesting place to set a thriller, but an utterly ludicrous method of training your army personnel. If a simulation is actually life-threatening, what’s the point of it? Just send your recruits straight into battle, where at least their deaths might not be entirely in vain.

Next up in Rod Rees’s cavalcade of bad ideas: the fact that the Demi-Monde is restricted to technology from the 1870s. A military simulation in 2018 teaches its participants how to use muskets. By gaslight. Ugh.

To make matters more ridiculous, all of the computer-controlled NPCs in the Demi-Monde (called “Dupes” or duplicates) are vampires. Why? Because the moronic simulation-designers needed a reason for everyone to be fighting all the time. And yes, they made a point of modeling their Dupes on history’s most notorious murderers and villains, but they needed another reason. They also programmed religious conflict literally into the dupes’ DNA, but they needed yet another reason for everyone to fight all the time. So they made the Dupes vampires, who must consume a lot of human blood every day in order to survive. Unfortunately the Dupes don’t have any human blood, only the army recruits (called, excruciatingly, “neoFights”) have blood. So every time the army sends in recruits, the Dupes capture them and turn them into living blood farms. The army can’t unplug them or wake them up because they’ll die.

Here’s another moronic detail: before the soldiers-in-training are dropped into the Demi-Monde, they are each implanted with a nano-computer that gives them a nearly unlimited store of knowledge about combat techniques, important people, terrain, etc. Remember, the Demi-Monde is itself a training ground for some other greater war. So, as I found myself asking, why don’t they use the nanocomputers to train their soldiers instead of this stupid simulation?

After considering all of these painfully stupid facets of this painfully stupid premise, it becomes clear that the Demi-Monde is not a simulation and was never intended to be. If it was, it would be the worst, most idiotic simulation in the history of the world. There’s a big plot twist down the road, and Rees thinks that we readers are as stupid as his characters (more on that in a minute), and can’t see it coming. But, of course, we can.

Plot

“Why don’t you just cut bait and close it down?” says the voice of reason in the person of one of the book’s heroes, Ella Thomas.

“Somehow,” an idiot Demi-Monde designer replies, “Norma Williams, the daughter of the president, has become lost in the Demi-Monde.”

Dear Rod Rees, please go look up “deus ex machina” and then never write again.

Characters

Ella Thomas is an 18-year-old black female jazz singer and genius. She talks like this, “‘Are you on the level? You’re not just blowing me shit… winding me up?’” and she thinks like this, “Jazz was so unhip it had a limp,” and also like this, “I ain’t got a ‘racial aspect.’ I’ve got a black skin.”

And then sometimes she talks like this, “I don’t wish to seem brutal,” and sometimes she thinks like this, “He looked like an undertaker, though his long, Roman nose, his dark button eyes that snarled out at Ella from behind shaded glasses and his oiled black hair made him an extremely aggressive-looking undertaker.”

In other words, she’s not very well-developed because Rod Rees is hopeless at writing a character with a single voice, especially when that character is an 18-year-old black woman. I mean, he’s hopeless at writing in general (eyes don’t “snarl,” and definitely not from behind shaded glasses intended to block those eyes from view), but he’s really bad at characters and especially really bad at Ella.

Ella is supposed to be a genius, but she is in fact really really stupid. When we first meet her, she’s spent a full week auditioning for a gig singing jazz for the Army. That week has included a battery of physical and psychological tests, and field tests such as “building … a raft from a couple of old oil drums, some driftwood and a length of rope and use it to float across a river.”

After all this, an officer lets it slip that she’s going to the Demi-Monde. Instead of cottoning onto the fact that she’s been lied to, this is the sum total of her thinking on the issue:

“Demi-Monde? wondered Ella. Weird name for a club.”

Yes, because a) the Army hires a ton of jazz singers, and b) they all have to be to good raft-builders. You moron.

Writing

The marquee Dupe in the Demi-Monde is modeled after Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s underlings and the architect of the Holocaust. This kind of thing—real people interacting with history’s worst monsters—is ostensibly the big idea behind the book. But, in Rees’s hands, it flops.

Before the idiot Army honchos send Ella into the Demi-Monde, they sit her down with a copy of Heydrich’s Dupe. This is quite stupid, because it will show her the kind of evil she’ll be up against, but of course, those men are quite stupid, so I guess it makes sense. In any case, Ella’s meeting with Heydrich is predictably ludicrous and poorly written.

The honchos, for whatever reason, want Ella to get Heydrich to explain who he is and what he’s done. Again, this is a young black woman speaking to the man who created the Holocaust, a racist and bigot if ever there was one. Here’s a brief synthesis of their conversation. Heydrich speaks first:

“I am wondering why I should be obliged to discuss my career with … a member of a more primitive race.”

… “I understand you are an officer, Herr Heydrich. Then surely your duty as an officer is to help those of lesser ability?”

… “Very well.”

Excuse me, what? Why would the job of military officers, especially NAZI officers, be to “help those of lesser ability”? Why would a Nazi officer want to help anybody? And why does that fool him into doing what she wants? Why would he talk to her at all? Why would discussing his career help her anyway? NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE AT ALL.

This kind of face-to-face conflict with one of history’s most evil men appears to be the emotional heart of the novel, and yet it’s neither interesting nor realistic, and it shows Rees’s utter lack of intensity and creativity.

The Final Accounting

I could keep going, about the misconceived characters, more holes in the plot, gaping logical inconsistencies patently ignored or not seen by both author and editor (and remember, I only read the first hundred pages)—but 1500 words is enough.

This ill-conceived novel is the first of four that Rees has planned (and evidently already written) about the Demi-Monde. Obviously, this project should never have been accepted by a major publishing house—I don’t honestly know how they got past the first few pages.

The Demi-Monde: Winter also got nominated as an Indie Next book, which is where I heard about it. In the Indie Next blurb, the recommending bookseller compares Rees to Neal Stephenson, which would be a capital crime if I ran the world.

The difference between Rod Rees and Neal Stephenson, or any good author, is that Rees offers absolutely nothing new. There’s nothing new in his prose, and there’s nothing new in his idea of the Demi-Monde. It’s the Matrix, minus a believable reason for existing, plus some random paranormal/steampunk elements, because, hell, that’d make a cool book, right?

AVOID.

Similar books: The City & The City, by China Mieville; The Girl She Used to Be, by David Cristofano

Author: Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Graphic Novels, Historical

It’s not difficult to understand why the Red Army Faction, a leftist revolutionary sect that was founded in Germany in 1970 and existed in various forms for nearly 30 years, has inspired so many books, films, plays, songs, paintings, and other works of art. Young, politically minded people banding together under charismatic leadership, the journalist who puts her ideals into practice and co-founds the group, the campaign of violence, prison break, subsequent arrest and final fate of the leaders – the story is an a la carte menu for any kind of statement you’d want to make. And largely because of that appeal, it’s also easy to romanticize the group, and gloss over the consequences of the violent acts attributed to the them, which include 34 deaths. Even Uli Edel’s 2008 film The Baader-Meinhoff Complex, which effectively charts the group’s violent pathology, can’t resist a bit of mythologizing.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg’s graphic novel One Model Nation, originally published by Image Comics in 2009 and now republished by Titan Books, attempts a corrective to that dynamic, presenting the RAF as a frustration in the lives of four musicians who are trying to progress to the next stage of their career. But none of the criticism levied against the RAF, and Andreas Baader in particular, by the main characters amounts to anything more than insults like “assholes” and “turd.” They seem more concerned that their young fans’ sympathy with the gang has ruined some of their gigs and attracted unwanted police attention than with the RAF’s ideology, or the bombings and killings they commit. As an indictment of violent political action Taylor-Taylor’s story is toothless; it doesn’t fare much better as an account of a mythical band’s glory days.

One Model Nation begins with a framing sequence set in the present, in which an American documentarian meets with Olaf, a former member of the German art rock band Werkstatt, the subject of his next film. He’s unable to help, but the director presses ahead, asking “what really happened to the band called One Model Nation?” You’d be forgiven for assuming that Olaf would play some pivotal role in the flashback that makes up the rest of the story, but neither Olaf nor Werkstatt are mentioned again until the final pages, when we return to the framing sequence for a non sequitur ending. This kind of elided storytelling continues throughout the book, such that it feels like Taylor-Taylor is deliberating leaving details out, as if to preempt accusations that he’s holding his reader’s hands. But there’s a difference between expecting readers to think and engage with the text, and preventing them from doing so by excising important story elements.

The flashback takes us to Berlin in 1977, when One Model Nation is an apparently internationally popular krautrock band in the Kraftwerk vein, who are tormented by both the RAF and the police. During a meeting with a local promoter, the band is faced with two options: appeal to the West German government to get the police off their case, or play at an illegal festival in Frankfurt. They can’t come to a decision, but soon it doesn’t matter because one of their numbers, Sebastian, leaves the group after their specially-equipped studio is destroyed during a police raid. The remaining members tinker with electronics and meet David Bowie while Sebastian spends time in the countryside with his elderly father, a former Nazi officer, who convinces him to return to the group and face his frustration with the deterioration of society. The group eventually decides to play the festival, but an encounter with Badder, Ulrike Meinhoff, and their former roadie who’s become a full-fledged RAF member, lands them all in prison.

As a central tension, deciding whether to keep it real or sell out isn’t particularly compelling, especially when it’s already been established that One Model Nation is famous in Germany, England, the United States, and elsewhere. Taylor-Taylor inexplicably begins the story after the more interesting conflicts that arise in stories about mythical bands/artists have already resolved, and ends before a compelling mystery or ambiguity about the characters is established. The sound of the band’s music is never addressed, either – fans of bands like Kraftwerk and Can probably have an idea, but anyone uninitiated in krautrock would be largely in the dark (Note: Taylor-Taylor – the frontman of the Dandy Warhols – is releasing music under the name “One Model Nation” to accompany the Titan reissue, which is a fun marketing idea, but it doesn’t really solve the problems raised by the text. The songs I’ve listened to are ok.) The answer to “what really happened to the band One Model Nation” turns out to be “nothing, really,” and as the plot returned to the framing sequence I wasn’t sure why the question had been asked in the first place.

It’s often difficult to distinguish the members of One Model Nation from one another, with the exception of Sebastian, as their surface personality quirks (Ralf is sheepish, Wolfgang is outgoing) come and go as the scene dictates, and their dialogue is mostly interchangeable. Artist Jim Rugg makes an effort to differentiate them through facial features, but still, they’re all tall, thin, and pale with long dark hair (except Wolfgang) – it wasn’t until 2/3rds of my way through the book that I felt comfortable pinning names, much less motivations and personalities, to the characters.

Taylor-Taylor’s depiction of Ulrike Meinhoff as Sebastian’s vapid, easily manipulated ex-girlfriend is particularly deplorable. When we first encounter Meinhoff she is faking the sounds of sex from inside her apartment to prevent Sebastian from knocking on her door – in the afterward we learn that this actually happened to Taylor-Taylor, but does such behavior square with the historical Meinhoff? Later they meet in a café, and in response to Sebastian’s rambling about the nature of mankind, Meinhoff can only say “I really love you” and “I’m bummed we never could get it together.” Couple that with Taylor-Taylor’s description of Meinhoff in the Titan edition’s backmatter as a “left-wing political journalist with the facial structure of a bull terrier” and “German radical left-winger she-beast” and it’s clear that One Model Nation’s gender politics are retrograde (and I haven’t even mentioned the sexy punk rocker who only shows up in the final act to dispense some exposition and act as a romantic interest for Wolfgang).

Plot and characterization problems aside, Jim Rugg’s art is gorgeous, particularly his detailed views of the Berlin cityscape. There’s a sense of location, both geographically and temporally, in every panel – little touches with clothes, cars, hairstyles, and other signifiers of the late 70s reveal the care and precision in Rugg’s disarmingly simple linework. He sticks to a nine-panel grid for most of the story, which drags the pace down a bit, particularly in dialogue heavy scenes that might play better in larger panels, but does set up some nice surprise moments when the grid is broken, particularly a stunning explosion and the few concert sequences that convey the excitement and energy of a One Model Nation show. Colorist Jon Fell also deserves praise for the palette of grays, browns, and whites that give the book a quiet, subdued feel, and the moments of shocking color that accompany major plot points.

There’s an interesting story in the intersection of competing youth-oriented cultures, but One Model Nation is a few drafts away from really telling it. It’s revealing that Taylor-Taylor originally conceived of the story as a screenplay, and only adapted it into a comic after it failed to gain momentum with producers and directors – comic scripts and screenplays suit different purposes, and one can’t and shouldn’t just replace the other. That Taylor-Taylor’s friend, indie comic stalwart Mike Allred, guided that transition is encouraging, but I can’t sense his expertise in the final product. One Model Nation is a beginning writer’s good effort, but is ultimately disappointing.

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

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Drinking Closer to Home

sprawling family tale

Great Read kicks off the new year

warm humour abounds

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The Call

book about a vet

uncommon presentation

some great writing here

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Live Free or Die

not a brain-buster

sometimes gets too housewife-y

but a pleasant read

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Nocturnes

5blends King and Gaiman

ranging horror collection

stories spook, not scare

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Robopocalypse

shallow, no diving

does what it sets out to do

like the title? read

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The Big Sleep

hard-boiled sleuth book

seminal gumshoe novel

mystery fans: read

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We The Animals

more a novella

love your family, and hate them

library check out

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Zona, by Geoff Dyer (2/21)

The subtitle is “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.” It’s a rumination on Stalker, a weird old Russian sci-fi movie considered to be one of the best films of all time. So far this sounds utterly boring, but Dyer has a secret weapon: he’s unpredictable and his thought process is entirely unique. A really weird book is at least better than a bad book. The flap copy says, “the film is only the entry point for a radically original investigation of the enduring questions of life, faith, and how to live.” And James Wood, in the New Yorker, says Dyer “combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. The result ought to be a mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight.” Sounds like a dice-roll, but one with a good prize for a winner.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander (2/7)

Englander has a world of talent, and his books are reliably very good, if perhaps not always phenomenal. The eight stories in Englander’s second collection explore themes as big in scope as the nature of evil and justice, and as personal as sexual longing and intimacy. One of these stories even apppears in the Best American Short Stories of 2011.

Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan (2/28)

When the Booker prize shortlist was announced five months ago, several of the books weren’t yet available in America. Rather miraculously (if the incompetence of publishers can be considered a miracle), one of them still isn’t available, and it’s the one I wanted to read most (except for the one I’d already read). Half Blood Blues follows a black German trumpeteer who gets vanished by the Nazis during WWII. Fifty years later, his bandmates embark on a journey to find out exactly what happened to him, and who betrayed him.

The Technologists, by Matthew Pearl (2/21)

In post-Civil War Boston, the fifteen-member inaugural class of the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology is nearing graduation, when a series of mysterious explosions in Boston Harbor pits them against the more well-renowned (but less scientifically masterful) Harvard. That appears to actually be the premise of Matthew Pearl’s new thriller. It sounds pretty far-fetched for historical fiction, but Pearl comes highly recommended. I’m on the fence.

The Bedlam Detective, by Stephen Gallagher (out 2/7)

The synopsis of this detective novel starts out a little limp—a medical investigator sets out to see if a wealthy old man is mentally capable or not. Ho-hum. But then the old man seems tied to a series of child murders, and the plot promises a traveling freak show, a trip to the Amazon, and more. Again, an on-the-fencer.

No One Is Here Except All of Us, by Ramona Ausubel (2/2)

I can’t imagine pitching this novel. In a remote Jewish village in Romania in 1939, people sense and fear the war coming for them. So, naturally, they “decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch.” This imagining creates hope somehow, but as “the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one,” things get complicated. If I pick this one up, it’ll be to see how the hell Ausubel portrays a village consciously living in a parallel, fictional reality.

The Odds, by Stewart O’Nan (out now)

O’Nan’s 13th novel is a “bittersweet love story” about a couple that goes to Niagara Falls to save their finances (via roulette wheel) and their marriage. I’ve yet to try him, but O’Nan comes highly recommended, including kind words by Ed Champion, who doesn’t give As to every kid in the class.

Stay Awake, by Dan Chaon (2/7)

I’ve read some great Dan Chaon stories and some quite boring ones. In this latest collection, “lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland.”

Not looking forward to: The Mirage, by Matt Ruff (2/7)

Will an alternate-history 9/11 novel feel less exploitative and uncomfortable than a real-history one? In Ruff’s designed-to-provoke-controversy premise, Christian fundamentalists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in Baghdad on November 9th (11/9 … GET IT?!), and the United Arab States declare a War on Terror against America. But don’t worry! It’s all, as the title promises, a meaningless mirage.

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The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers (Barnes and Noble Review).

This book sounds really good. The son of a kidnapped mother and orphanage warden father living in North Korea eventually becomes a kidnapper himself. By Powers’s account, Johnson has done his research and recreated a very complete, and harrowing, vision of a world that is very difficult for much of the West to fully comprehend. If the writing is as good as she makes it out to be, and the “crafty, even devious story work” Johnson uses employs holds up, this could become a book we hear a lot more people talking about.

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How It All Began, by Penelope Lively. Reviewed by Machiko Kakutani (New York Times).

I really like meticulously plotted novels. This book–a “big snowball: an avalanche of events that starts with the mugging of an elderly woman”–looks to be just that. I’ve never heard of Penelope Lively, but after reading Kakutani’s review, I think maybe I should have. Her impression of the book is astute and worth checking out.

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All the Missing Souls, by David Scheffer. Reviewed by Anthony Dworkin (Washington Post).

This one’s pretty heavy, but also looks quite interesting. Scheffer “was the Clinton administration’s point man on international justice … [and] senior adviser and counsel to Madeleine Albright.” During the mid-to-late 90s, the U.S. and Albright (along with other countries in the U.N. Security Council) launched an “effort to entrench accountability for mass atrocities as a central principle in international affairs.” In other words, trials for war crimes such as the world had not seen since Nuremberg. The U.N. focused first on Slobodan Milosevic and the genocide in Yugoslavia. I could keep going, but if international politics interests you, just read Dworkin’s review for yourself.

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Quickly: On Dr. Seuss’s Mulberry Street. The Death of Mao, and the earthquake that preceded it. American Dervish had promise, but falls flat.

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Bonus Book Trailer: You’ll need some of those old red and blue 3D glasses for this one. The purple coloration really makes the boobs in this (NSFW) video really something to look at.

Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! from Tricia McLaughlin on Vimeo.

The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus, reviewed by J. Robert Lennon (New York Times)

Ben Marcus, while an excellent prose stylist, has never written a book with a “traditional narrative.” His latest, the uber-hyped Flame Alphabet, has only metaphorical plot struts (children’s voices become toxic to adults), but “It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller,” which makes it, as Lennon sees it, a hybrid of experimentation and traditional narrative. As should be expected, by virtue of Marcus’s extensive experience with experimentation, and null experience with narrative, the traditional implodes and the experimental succeeds. The implosion, says Lennon, takes with it the thrill of Marcus’s sentences, his greatest strength. I was on the fence about Flame Alphabet. Now I am not.

The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung, reviewed by David L. Ulin (L.A. Times)

Chan Koonchung’s first novel to be translated into English imagines 2013 in China, after a devastating economic collapse has crippled the rest of the world, and the Chinese government, thriving according to the Chinese government, has loosened its grip on its people. As the narrator says, “90 percent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough?” It’s simultaneously a satire of contemporary China, in which only being censored a little would be a big improvement, and the West, where freedoms of speech and information are fiercely protected, but most citizens are too lazy to take advantage of them. David L. Ulin sorts this all out, as well as the role of atmosphere in fiction.

The Face Thief, by Eli Gottlieb, reviewed by Anna Mundow (B&N Review)

This thriller about face-reading and con artistry appears to be brash and melodramatic, if this line—spoken by the deceptive, seductive female lead—is any indication: “The real reason we have faces is to hold back what we’re thinking from the world.” That rather soapy philosophy hints at a narrative less rigorously realistic than perhaps a novel about the quite-real science of face-reading should be. But it could also be fun.

The Flight of Gemma Hardy, by Margot Livesey, reviewed by Sarah Towers (New York Times)

Emerson’s own Margot Livesey has a new novel, and it’s been getting a ton of press. Gemma Hardy is a combination and “recasting” of Jane Eyre and Livesey’s own childhood. Towers calls it “a delight.”

In brief: Authors are finally starting to take advantage of the unique abilities of digital books. … The L.A. Review of Books’s monthly crime fiction column is worth reading for crime fans. … And Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has inexplicably been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The Onion A.V. Club gave Extremely Loud a rare unqualified F, and the it was voted 5th worst movie of the year in Vulture’s critics’ poll. Evidently its director threatened to keep running these tasteless ads unless it was nominated.

Author: Justin Torres

2011, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Literary

An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”

That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:

These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.

You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.

We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.

Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.

We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one.  It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.

It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.

Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller

Author: Raymond Chandler

1939, Alfred A. Knopf

Filed Under: Mystery, Literary

As part of my quest to immerse myself in the mystery genre, I’ve been asking what books to pick up. Chandler’s books came up frequently, so I started with his first and most famous. For reasons that become immediately apparent upon reading, this is a seminal work in modern detective stories, and Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s recurring protagonist, though this is his first novel) is the quintessential gumshoe. He’s tough, clever, wisecracking, and suave (and he drinks a lot).

Marlow is hired by a dying billionaire to uncover a blackmailer. He ends up embroiled in a large plot with many players. This is a hardboiled detective novel through and through. It’s full of socialites with dirty laundry, lowlifes with secrets, gamblers, pornographers, racketeers, and murderers. But it also has much greater literary chops than I expected. While there’s plenty of now-cliche hyperbole (“She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch”), there’s also more eloquent writing found throughout. Lines like this:

Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.

The billionaire’s two wild daughters are at the heart of the blackmailing scheme. Eventually Marlow stumbles upon the younger daughter, drugged, naked, and posed for a camera. Beside the camera, a dead man. As he follows the case from clue to clue and suspect to suspect, Marlowe continually observes scenes with keen detail, giving the reader not just a visual, but a subtle sizing up of every person and place.

It’s not an overly literary book by any means, though. Roughly halfway through the book, the case seems pretty sewn up. But a few details nag at Marlowe, and acting on a hunch, he uncovers a whole ‘nother layer of plot. Here the book really kicks into hardboiled gear. I won’t spoil anything, but bodies pile up and Marlowe both deals out and receives plenty of pain. He keeps a cool head through it all though, eventually unravelling the mystery. Everything ties up in a very satisfying conclusion. I was caught a bit by surprise, but not due to any deus ex machina curveballs by Chandler. Just turns out Marlowe was a better detective than me.

This book is short and awesome. If you like mysteries and crime fiction at all–even if all you’ve read is Steig Larsson–and you haven’t already read The Big Sleep, go for it

Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).

This reaction confuses me, because iBooks Author’s EULA says exactly what I expected it to say, namely that you can’t sell the books you make with iBooks Author through any distributor except Apple.

Why is this even a surprise? For one thing, iBooks Author is free. It’s obviously intended to ease creation of content for sale through iTunes, because Apple makes a ton of money on those content sales. Why would they make a free tool that would let users create content for other platforms? Why is not doing so “greedy” and “evil”?

On a more practical level, it’s frankly not that big a deal. If you’re formatting a traditional book (i.e. only words), then the process should mostly involve cutting and pasting those words from your .doc file. You will have to format your ePubs for other distributors separately, which is a drag mostly because ePub-formatting programs suck (when we publish books here at C4, we use Smashwords; it’s not perfect but it is better and easier than other formatting and publishing options we’ve tried).

So yes, Apple has not given you a free, easy, universal ePub creator. But iBooks Author isn’t geared toward creating plain old ePubs anyway, it’s specifically geared toward creating “Multi-Touch books for iPad.” In other words, this sort of thing. Because iBooks Author simplifies the formatting process, the rich-media interactive ebooks you make with it will almost certainly only work on an iPad. Even if you could export them to universal ePubs, they would look like garbage on all other devices.

Apple won’t own your copyright, your content, or the versions you make for all other platforms. You’re free to use that content however you please, even according to that reactionary ZDNet writer’s reading of the EULA. Claims that “only Apple can ever publish your work” are simply not true.

So everybody please calm down about this EULA. It’s not nearly as greedy or evil as they’d have you believe.

Spotlight

Secret Avengers #20

In his 2011 mini-series The Red Wing, one of my favorite comics of last year, Jonathan Hickman uses time travel as more than just a plot device meant to complicate the narrative and give readers a fun puzzle to solve by the final issue. That isn’t to say that the plot isn’t so tangled that it can’t be untied, but simply that Hickman describes his concept of time travel in more poetic terms (aided, it’s worth nothing, by diagrams drawn into the scene by series artist Nick Pittara) and seems less interested in the mechanics of time travel than in its effects on the story’s emotional arc. By playing with our expectations of what time travel means Hickman brings some of the danger and volatility to that sci-fi trope. Warren Ellis does the same thing in Secret Avengers #20, but from the opposite direction – rather than eschewing the paradoxes and details of time travel, Ellis luxuriates in them, creating an elaborate puzzlebox of a story that doubles as a character study of Black Widow.

The issue begins with a large panel of Captain America being shot in the chest – a shocking image, but not entirely surprising given Ellis’s very public (and likely exaggerated) dislike of superheroes – and the next few pages continue along the same lines. All of the Secret Avengers except for Black Widow are dead or dying, having received some bad intel and run a mission at the wrong moment. As he dies, War Machine gives Black Widow an emergency “escape hatch” device, which she uses to get help. As it happens, the “escape hatch” sends her back in time five years to an Italian villa, giving her enough time to figure out how to save her teammates.

Her plan is ingenious, but it’s how Ellis gradually introduces and shapes each gear in the works that makes the story such a delightful read. The device bounces her around in time as she gathers vital information about how time travel works (she can’t undo something that’s already been done, and she can’t be in the same place as her past self) then meets with an illegal superweapons manufacturer and a mad scientist, thus setting the plan in motion. These encounters are drenched in Ellis’s trademark wit, particularly Black Widow’s back and forth with eccentric scientist Count Khronus, but still convey the tedium and frustration of having to wait for time to catch up with your ideas. To busy herself Natasha befriends the Count and his assistant/husband Kongo, and visits deceased colleagues.

As the time-shifting continues these scenes get shorter and punchier, and gradually we begin to see how every seemingly disparate encounter clicks together. By the time Natasha returns to the present all that’s left to do, for both hero and reader, is to stand back and enjoy the inevitable result. And the final bits of dialogue, as the revived Avengers attribute their survival to luck and coincidence, reveals that Widow’s machinations parallel Ellis’s own storytelling goals – the most skilled practitioners of their craft can make impossible complicated acts seem like happenstance.

All along this run Ellis has been matched with high-caliber artists, and Alex Maleev is no exception. He’s equally adept at both aspects of the story, from a stunning two-page spread of the opening battle scene that suggests the scale of just how poorly the mission has gone to the slight smirk Natasha wears when consulting with Khronus and her nonchalant posture in the issue’s final panel. The subtlety of those expressions makes Ellis’s wit feel germane to the story, more than just a writer’s attempt to seem clever.

And though colorist Nick Filardi is no slouch, I think Maleev’s pencils work even better in a bizarre two-page sequence that suddenly turns the action into a Steve Canyon-esque black and white newspaper strip. The sketchy, spare line work suits that format really well, no matter that I can’t see any good reason why it’s necessary for that sequence.

Ellis’s Secret Avengers run concludes in January, and when all is said and done it should make for a perfect trade paperback collection of tightly constructed stories. What’s ironic, then, is that these issues are ideally suited for the burgeoning digital market. As the big publishers push further into digital comics and the format gets new legs, I think we’ll see readers abandoning the trade collections that dominated publishing and sales models in the 2000s in favor of the kind of single-issue, “one and done” stories of the Silver and Bronze ages. New digital readers, who won’t be trained in the weekly or monthly buying habits of the fan who came up pre-tablet, might be less inclined to wait 30 days for the next installment of story that stretches out over six or seven issues. Instead, they might prefer issues like Secret Avengers #20, which can be read without any prior knowledge of the characters or universe, and which implies no lingering connections to subsequent stories. This wouldn’t be the first time Warren Ellis laid the groundwork for a trend the rest of the industry caught up with in three or four years.

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Solid Reads

Deadpool MAX-Mas Special #1

Deadpool MAX-Mas #1 rolls two things I love, David Lapham and Kyle Baker’s work on Deadpool and special Christmas-themed comics, into one extra-sized package. A twist on It’s A WonderfulLife, this issue has Hydra Bob lamenting that he wished he’d never been born (understandable, considering he’s been framed by the CIA as the worst terrorist in history.) Deadpool plays the “Clarence” role, but instead of going on an invisible journey through an alternate timeline, he simply fakes Bob’s death and lets his friend see what would actually happen if he’d died. The tour is split into three parts, each drawn by a different artist – Baker takes the second story, regular fill-in artist Shawn Crystal, who also drew Deadpool MAX II #3 this month, takes the third. But best of all is the first story, illustrated by Lapham himself. Since the conclusion of Young Liars we’ve had a lot of writing from David Lapham, but precious little art (a guest issue of DMZ, I think, is the only thing I recall) so it’s nice to see that clean, bold linework again. And while Lapham’s art isn’t as madcap or cartoony as Baker’s, he still manages the light yet deeply disturbing tone through precise detailing. Crystal’s art doesn’t quite hit those right notes of absurdity, but he’s no slouch, and you could ask for far less from a regular fill-in artist. Deadpool MAX II #3 takes a detour from the story of Bob and Wade’s run from the law and brings back a few characters from last year’s bachelor party issue. It’s fun, but this series always suffers when Lapham’s sense of humor gets the better of the plot. And having seen the highs this book is capable of (issue three, in particular) it’s easy to gloss over the lesser chapters.

Daredevil #7

While not exactly a “holiday special” Daredevil #7 does take place during a winter storm and includes a flashback to a Christmas party. The story finds Matt Murdoch chaperoning school trip for a dozen blind children, and having to rely on his radar senses when a bus crash strands the group in the woods during the aforementioned storm. In another writer’s hands this could easily come off as a cheesy, sentimental story about the hero being rescued by children. But Mark Waid’s script keeps the tone just dark and uncertain enough that the expected ending feels like relief rather than cliché. Daredevil’s internal narrative suggests the precariousness of both the physical situation, and the hero’s state of mind as he struggles to keep the children safe while every plan he makes fails. And artist Paolo Rivera contributes to that sense of danger in his layouts. Tight, small panels cramped with close-ups of faces and trees move suddenly into large, panoramic views of the grey and white nothingness that surrounds the troop. Coupled with the persistent snow effect from colorist Javier Rodriguez, the art gives this book a palpable, ominous chill.

I remember reading about the Elseworlds 100-Page Spectacular back when it was only an 80-Page Giant, at least a decade ago, if not longer – DC published the collection of alternate timeline stories, then immediately pulped it over concerns that an image of a baby Superman getting zapped in a microwave (and crawling away unscathed, mind you) from the Kyle Baker story, “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter” was inappropriate. The few copies that leaked out became collector’s items, and even though the Baker story was eventually published in a different collection it still retained that “forbidden tale” appeal. Now DC have reversed their position and quietly released the original issue, with an extra story of a Jewish Batman fighting the SS in Berlin by Paul Pope that’s predictably gorgeous and thoughtful. Pope’s story is far from the only highlight in this collection, however – Baker’s “Tom and Jerry”-inspired story of baby Superman and his babysitter is chaotic fun with a great punchline in the final panel, and Tom Peyer and Ariel Olivetti’s satire of the acclaimed mini-series Kingdom Come is full of sharp inside jokes for fans (or critics) of the original. Some of the other stories don’t quite hit, particularly an MTV-style documentary about Lex Luthor’s career as a rock producer, but for pure laughs nothing beats Mark Waid and Ty Templeton’s series of mock Silver Age covers, lightly parodying the “shocking twist” nature of many Elseworlds stories. I’m sure everything would’ve read better in the context of when it was written – when was the last time DC actually released an Elseworlds story – but it’s still worth checking out to see some peerless creators enjoying a rare bit of anarchic fun with classic characters.

Batman, Inc. - Leviathan Strikes! #1

My most anticipated December release was Batman, Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes! #1, the conclusion of the first volume of Grant Morrison’s Batman, Incorporated story that was beset by scheduling delays last year and put aside during the New 52 relaunch. Though the story’s momentum dissipated slightly over the four months since the last issue of Batman, Inc. was released I was still eager to return to Morrison’s dense, complicated Bat-world and read the payoff to the title’s central mystery. This extra-sized issue (that was kind of a theme this month) includes the story of Batgirl undercover in a prep school for girl assassins, drawn by Cameron Stewart, and Batman’s final confrontation with Doctor Daedalus, drawn by Chris Burnham. Both artists are in top form, but Burnham in particular shows off some effective layouts that translate a script dense with timeloops and dimension shifting into rational visuals. Throughout the finale Morrison ties together small bits of story from the previous eight issues, leading to a reveal of Leviathan’s identity that’s been effectively hidden in plain sight all along. As with the rest of Morrison’s Batman run, Leviathan Strikes! rewards subsequent readings, particularly after a refresher course of the previous issues of Batman, Inc. Unfortunately, we have to wait until May for the Morrison and Burnham’s next volume.

One fundamental rule of superhero comics is if there’s a single universe shared among two or more books, a crossover is inevitable, if for no other reason than to boost the sales of whichever book sells the least. It’s a testament to both Mark Waid’s storytelling instincts and Boom! Studios’s editorial stance, that Irredeemable and Incorruptible have gone this long (nearly three years for the former, two for the latter) without a major crossover (granted, Incorruptible began as a response to events in Irredeemable, and some characters have bled from one book into the other, but before this month’s “Redemption” arc, you never needed to read both titles to understand the basic story.) Waid uses the occasion to explore the origins of both evil Superman-analogue The Plutonian and his archenemy, the recently reformed ex-villain Max Damage. It turns out the characters share more than just mutual animosity, and Waid deftly embeds small, seemingly insignificant moments in Irredeemable that he then extrapolates into major plot points in Incorruptible. And because the issues alternate between the two characters Waid is able to maintain each book’s particular tone – dark, discomfiting irony in Irredeemable #32, and bittersweet sincerity in Incorruptible #25. Plus, in Incorruptible #25 we also get the secret origin of Charlie Hustle, which leads me to believe that either Waid knows other readers love the character as much as I do, or he’s reading this column and tailoring the story to suit my specific interests. Either way, I’m happy.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle #7

I typically reserve the space to talk about books I like, and express any negative critiques succinctly in the “One-Shots” section. But this month I must write at length about a book that’s fallen from rather lofty heights. I wish I could say otherwise, but Tales Designed to Thrizzle #7 was nowhere near as funny or inventive as the first five issues. New issues of Thrizzle have become a once-a-year event, so anticipation is always high for fans of the early issues and Kupperman’s webstrip for Fantagraphics.com, Up All Night. Issue #6 was uneven, but I hoped it was just a temporary setback and that Kupperman would be back in top form the following year. But outside of a strip about McArf the Crime Dog, who is forever on the lookout for scum, and some good gags in the “Quincy, M.D.” story, Thrizzle #7 feels, and looks, rushed. In the early issues Kupperman’s jokes defied you to figure out what was funny about, say, a character named Uncle Grandpa, or the ongoing culture war between Sex Blimps and Sex Holes. The humor was obscure but never random, and the gags didn’t build to punchlines so much as develop into bizarre worlds that then crashed into the orbits of other worlds. But now the jokes seem to stay at one level, substituting randomness for absurdity and leaning on cultural references to do the heavy lifting. Hopefully another year will find Kupperman inspired and engaged with comics as he once was.

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One-Shots

Action Comics #4 features the first big fight of the series, between Superman and what might be the new Metallo, but a lot of the action is shunted to the back-up feature, which makes for an odd but exciting reading experience.

I thought for sure the ending of last month’s All-Star Western was a kind of in medias res fade to black thing, but this month we get to see the gruesome results of Hex’s stand-off and the beginning of a new mystery that finds the bounty hunter teamed once again with Jeremiah Arkham.

In Animal Man#4 Jeff Lemire delves deeper into the background and mythology of the Red, and artist Travel Foreman tops himself with a chase sequence towards the end of the issue that somehow combines everything disturbing and horrible into one final image.

Aquaman #4 is a showcase for Ivan Reis, particularly the two or three splash panels set during Aquaman and Mera’s final confrontation with the trench dwellers, and the story ends on a sweet note – I’ll likely not return to Aquaman next month, and this is a good a stopping point as they come.

Coming off last month’s revelations, Scott Snyder takes us into the past in Batman #4, telling a poignant story about young Bruce Wayne’s first case that helps explain why he’s so blinded to the threat posed by the Court of Owls that he ends up walking right into a trap in the final panel.

Damian’s dalliance with the dark side of Batman’s mission grows deeper and more upsetting in Batman and Robin #4, and is made all the more convincing by the stoic, numb expression he wears, courtesy of artist Patrick Gleason (who is doing career-best work on this title.)

The first nine pages of Batwoman #4 is an object lesson in the immense potential of comics as a storytelling medium – in four elegantly structured double-page spreads (plus the first page, all by itself) J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman tell two different stories, one of passion and love, the other of naïvete and violence, that comment and enrich each other – the rest of the issue continues the sequence double-page spreads, and grapples with the aftermath of the opening scenes.

I quite enjoyed Blackhawks #4 – the first story arc resolves well, and the characters feel more defined and unique four issues in – but I can’t imagine how much better this book will be next month when CAFU takes over art duties.

The bubbly mullet that Captain Atom grows after his meeting with the military goes awry in Captain Atom #4 is sort of odd, but otherwise the art was gorgeous as ever, and the story continues to meander.

Anyone still avoiding Catwoman because of the furor about the first issue should pick up issue four, as writer Judd Winick has eased back from the sensationalism and turned in an affecting character study of Selina Kyle – however, the new villain introduced in this issue is pretty lame.

Demon Knights #4 explores the origin of the Shining Knight, with lush art for the flashback/dream sequence provided by Michael Choi, and drops two very interesting hints about the future of the series, one of which I might be overanalyzing – if I’m not, then the eventual reveal will be mind-blowing.

The Flash #4 was the first mediocre issue of the series – Francis Manapul’s art is gorgeous as usual, but the story stalls almost completely in favor of exposition that doesn’t feel entirely necessary.

Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E #4 ended big and crazy, as I hoped it would, with more giant monsters and a last minute escape, plus a nice character moment to conclude the arc and present me with a nice jumping off point.

Geoff Johns uses separate imprisonment as an occasion for strong character moments in Green Lantern #4, giving Hal a chance to prove to himself that he loves Carol, and forcing Sinestro to literally confront his past and justify his actions.

John Constantine’s guest appearance in I, Vampire #4 feels like a ploy for readers, and it’s certainly a detour from a story that was just beginning to move in an interesting direction.

The team finally comes together in Justice League #4, and the first appearance of Darkseid in the new DC universe is suitably destructive and intense, but as the months roll on it seems like writer Geoff Johns is attempting to fuse the epic scale of Grant Morrison’s JLA with the humor and levity of the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League title – what’s more, he’s actually pulling it off.

Severed #5 takes a step back from the visceral scares of last month’s issue, but maintains an edge-of-your-seat tension the entire time as Jack begins to understand just how strange and dangerous Mr. Fisher really is.

James Robinson dips into the mythology of the Arrerente, indigenous peoples of central Australia, in The Shade #3, and uses it to spin an elaborate puzzle that the Shade must solve with his head and heart, rather than his fists.

Writer Brian Azzarello negotiates the needs of four different plotlines in Spaceman #3, helping put Orson’s plan, or lack thereof, into context and fleshing out characters that he’s likely to come in conflict with in the next few issues.

Stormwatch #4 ties the story together neatly, and showcases each member of the team as they put the alien threat down, and the cliffhanger ending raises the hope that next month’s issue will delve into the broader purpose of Stormwatch and it’s place in the DCU.

Our own Nico Vreeland was not fond of Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Torro’s vampire novel The Strain, and I wasn’t dazzled by the first issue of its comic book adaptation – Mike Huddleston is one of my new favorite artists, but his work here feels muted compared to Butcher Baker, the Righteous Maker or even The Homeland Directive.

Marco Rudy fills in for regular artist Yanick Paquette on Swamp Thing #4, but proves to be just as adept at unique layouts and horrific imagery; particularly impressive is one full-page panel that highlights the difference in Alec and Abby’s natures.

T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2 is packed with exposition, but it’s executed well by both guest artist Jerry Ordway and series artist Wes Craig, whose heavily shaded, dramatic inking sells the tragedy of the cliffhanger ending.

I had high hopes for Dynamite’s Voltron #1, but even the haze of nostalgia for my youth isn’t enough to make this issue a satisfying read – I’m all for altering the concept to suit modern storytelling needs (and god knows the cartoon’s major weakness was story) but Brandon Thomas’s script discards all the bits that made Voltron fun in the first place.

Much of the action in Wonder Woman #4 takes place at a metal concert as Wonder Woman enjoys the music and processes the recent revelations about her parentage – I’m fairly certain that’s a first in the character’s published history, and a further indication of just unique vision writer Brian Azzarrello has for this title.

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Looking Ahead to January

The conclusion of Warren Ellis’s Secret Avengers, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Fatale, and the long-awaited return of Bulletproof Coffin!