Link Tweak: Goats Eat Moths

This is an updating of the link for my flash fiction "Goats Eat Moths" which appeared in Issue 1 of Lightning Flash Magazine.

Goats Eat Moths A flash horror about a curious shutter-bug who loves taking photographs inside abandoned houses.

Twit-lit! It's all the rage so get on board!

One of my tweetie sized poems will be included in the new anthology edited by Joanne Merriman and due in December. 140 and Counting will feature over 100 twitter sized poems by over 100 authors. The anthology will be available for the twitter sized price of 5 dollars. You can ensure your copy by preordering at the Kickstarter page to order: 140 and Counting So do yourself a treat and order! :)

Book Review: The Spy Edition

The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception by H Keith Melton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


In terms of entertainment, the very lengthy introduction in this book is better than the declassified MKULTRA era manuscript it headlines. Many interesting details about the CIA during the MKULTRA years are discussed, including strange ones, such as the CIA use of prostitutes to lure Johns into motel rooms under surveillence so agents could record the Johns' reaction to various mind altering drugs like LSD. The introduction alone is a must-read for any spy, CIA, or conspiracy geek. Although, a short internet search on the subject of MKULTRA would reveal a far more sinister, and disturbing look into the CIA than this book would ever hint at.

That's the main trouble with this book. I didn't think it could be at all possible to sanitize and neuter the very idea of the MKULTRA project, which included disturbing studies of brainwashing on unwilling and unwitting subjects, some experimented on in mental hospitals, and taken from their own families. This book has done just that. By touting the glaring "declassfied" badge on its front cover, and breathlessly declaring how the manuscript within was one of the very few to escape the massive destruction of documents that almost erased the MKULTRA project, one is drawn easily into reading it with a racing pulse and shaking hands.

The declassified manuscript is a how-to manual commissioned by the CIA from a successful and well written magician named John Mullholland. In sterile courier font, and as clearly as it possibly can, it painstakingly covers various sleight of hand tricks an undercover agent can do to pass along notes, steal small objects, and drug unsuspecting enemies drinks. They're pretty fun ideas for a party trick nowadays, or a pretty terrifying how-to manual on how to slip a gal a roofie. There is even a special section for the ladies! A giggle or two was spent on reading the passages Mullholland pens, almost apologetic in noting that a female agent can probably go undetected easier than a man because a man won't expect much from a woman anyway. At least try to tackle those passages with a bit of humor and you should get through it.

All in all, I found this an enjoyable read, not particularly a great read, and I was very disappointed in having such a bland payoff for all the hype. I am a sucker for books that reflect the flavor of their times, however, and in fact, this was not much of a different read than say, a good manners manual from the 1930's.



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Black Narcissus

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A group of nuns, led by stubborn Irish born Sister Clodagh are assigned to a remote estate in the Himalayas to start a convent, run a school, and an infirmary for the local villagers. It's a monumental task that Sister Clodagh feels tentatively up to, and one already abandoned by priests who failed at a similar endeavor. All the basic elements for plot tension are here, personality clashes between the nuns, culture shock, loss of faith, and the ever needling presence of the only white man in the area, a handsome alcoholic handyman named Mr. Dean.

The book succeeds the most in the searingly realistic portrayals of the women and their differences. They are sworn to a life of chastity and poverty before God, but they are after all, just women. Godden writes with a keen eye, and you feel the frustrations and elations of each of these women as they fail and succeed at the various impossible tasks set before them. Mr. Dean is also a well written character, a classic charming drunk who despises the very presence of these women in his world, while at the same time startling with his concern and respect for them.

The vivid descriptions of the flowers, mountains, the sky, the weather, the smells and food, are very well done and the estate and the country do indeed become their own character, a cruel and beautiful creature that nurses the natives to her breast just as surely as she wears the nuns down one by one.

My biggest complaint about the book, although considering the context of the time it was written perhaps it was unavoidable, is that the natives in the novel are painted over with one brown brush that stamps each and every one of them with the phrase "ignorant savage". The nuns either condescend to them, adopting them like little pets, or they despise them as formless creatures. At one point, a character surprises herself when she realizes that she can start telling them apart. Even Mr. Dean, the character who can speak their language and is basically living with them day in and out, brushes them aside as overgrown children that should be treated as such.

The housekeeper, Ayah, is well written, a flinty, no-nonsense native woman who begrudginly welcomes the nuns to the estate and becomes the balance between the two cultures. The other non-white characters Kanchi and General Dilip are both written as ditzy, shallow, spoiled youths who do nothing more than infuriate and confound the nuns.

There's a lot to be said for the restraint in this novel. Any modern hand with these basic plot elements could have easily written something filled with sudden violence and graphic sex, or bent over low to create a steamy bodice ripper. There is sensuality in this novel, there is erotic longing, jealousy, violence, but everything happens in its own time and without gratuitousness.

I do recommend this read to anyone wanting to peek into a world one wouldn't otherwise have known existed.



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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Fiendishly clever read!



This novel, by the author of the mother of all mash-up novels, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", really takes history for a gothic spin with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.



With surpisingly meticulous care for historical detail, Mr. Grahame-Smith has presented a biographical portrait of Abraham Lincoln, sometimes in his own words, that reads almost like a highschool history textbook. In many ways it's a book report on one of America's most beloved presidents told through an all night cram session laced with too much junk food, energy drinks, and with a particularly bloody Hammer Films production screaming in the background.



Abraham Lincoln the character, comes out every much as honest, and hard working as the Abe Lincoln we know and love, the novel tracing his life through childhood (when he loses his mother to a vampire) and to that tragic night at Fords Theater (where there are also vampires.) Any Lincoln enthusiast will find a lot to snicker about seeing familiar faces, and places turned upside down and ripped at the seams with a gothic rewrite. Any horror fan will be thoroughly satiated by the buckets of blood and limbs that splatter and roll across the pages. (Well we can't let Mr. Lincoln's famous axe-wielding prowess go to waste now can we?)



The vampires in this novel are not the romantic, dazzling, self hating boy toys that have become the trend these days, but are the narcissistic, cruel, black eyed blood-suckers of the sort Christoper Lee made famous. They are creatures we root to see hunted down and slain.



It is quite easy to get caught up in the blood hunt in this novel as well. For the backdrop is the slave-holding South of pre-Civil War America, an America where vampires rule the Antebellum plantations and farm slaves as cattle. There are moments of cruelty against slaves so shocking that it pours salt in the wound of America's history, hammering into the casual reader who would rather not think deeply about that time just how repugnant and unforgivable a crime slavery was.



And that's what really makes this novel rock. The politics and events leading up to the civil war, from the effete slave owners who rationalize the dehumanizing of an entire race, to the South Carolina congressman who beat his abolitionist rival near to death as congress was coming to session, are clearly laid out. The frustrations of the war, a loss at Bull Run, McClellan's unwillingness to move, are not glossed over, and the addition of an army of vampire Confederates perhaps makes us understand a little the fear actual Union soldiers felt upon hearing the Rebel Yell.



I also enjoyed Grahame-Smith's sensitive portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln. Too often Mary is treated as a clownish stereotype, something to be pitied and despised just as Edward Stanton did when he pulled her from the body of her dying husband. Here she is portrayed as the clever, vivacious young girl that first caught Abraham Lincoln's eye, and her descent into crippling depression is shown with surprising tenderness.



Apparently the movie rights for this book have been sold, a film to be produces by Tim Burton. It certainly is a story ripe for the big screen, and as long as Johnny Depp is not cast as Lincoln (all apologies to Mr. Depp who is brilliant), I think this could turn out quite good. In the meantime, don't hesitate to get your hands on this book, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I!



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Driftless by David Rhodes

Driftless by David Rhodes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This novel is really a collection of short stories about a group of people living in a rural Wisconsin town called "Words". One of the major characters, and to me, one of the most likeable, is a farmer named July Montgomery who lives a lonely life after tragedy took his wife from him, but he fills that gap by becoming something of a touchstone to his neighbors. Apparently, this character has appeared in the author's previous books, written decades ago, quite acclaimed and, I'm afraid I haven't read those.

The backdrop of this book is a dying town, it is the Wisconsin weather--sulky summer heat or bitter blizzards, it is the idea of nature awakening, ready to take back the land from the inhabitants, a lone mountain lion prowling the area. The story begins slowly enough, a sighting of the mountain lion, the humdrum existances of a woman pastor, spinster sisters living as caregiver and cripple, married farmers who are living stale on their dairy farm, an alcoholic singer yearning for someone to notice her music.

In fact, the book began so slowly that I couldn't stop yawning. I had that weird feeling I sometimes get when watching a very well done independant film, kind of bored but also still wondering where these characters are going to end up. The dialogue got a bit stilted and clunky at times, the prose could overflow excessively in describing a moment, fervantly hammering at you that a character was FEELING something and we all had to FEEL it with them. At moments like those I felt as if someone was talking louder and louder in my face in an effort to get me to understand their foreign tongue.

The characters, however, unfolded quite nicely, blossoming with their own stories that were quite far-fetched at times, stretching all sorts of believability and bringing a sense of magic and miracle to a dusty old piece of Americana. Some characters experience magical solutions to their problems, fall into a nest of new ones, and other characters suffer tragedy or misfortune. There are clashes with big corporations, militia groups, there are dogfights, miracles, children in danger, family secrets, all events that intertwine the characters around each other, creating a fraying rope to dangle in the center of Words, Wisconsin.

I did thoroughly enjoy this novel by the end of it and was glad that I was patient enough to stick with it. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to cut their teeth in it.



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"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


One of the most exhilirating books I've ever read!

The NPR blurb on the cover compares it to "To Kill a Mockingbird", and even the book itself mentions it by name several times throughout, so you already know where this one is reaching. These, are not the same books, of course, and although both are about the unjust, and oftentimes violent line drawn between whites and blacks in the Old South, neither of them will ever provide any new information to the African Americans who suffered from slavery to Jim Crow, but they will always be an eye opener to everyone else. If the initial message of "To Kill a Mockingbird" has long since been taken for granted by scores of teenagers and college students who enjoy it as required reading, sitting safe within the confines of "this is a time no longer with us", "The Help" certainly has a chance to grab them by the wrist and pull them off the beach chair they're lounging in. It is one of those books that screams "wake up call", and successfully does so without falling into the trap of gratuitous violence, cartoonish stereotypes, and race-baiting.

The novel centers on the lives of three women in 1960's Jackson, Mississippi, two Housekeepers-Aibilene and Minny, and on Skeeter Phelan, the gangly socialite, fresh from college and itching to make her mark on the literary world rather than submit to her mother's dreams of husband hunting and babies. Aibilene and Minny are written as three dimensional women, they are tired, and not always long suffering, working for white families their entire lives and about at the breaking point with the cold dismissal, and sometimes outright cruelty they've endured from employers.

Aibilene's specialty is raising white children, babies she calls her own, babies that invariably break her heart when they realize and accept the line between white and black, but she can never stop herself from loving them.

Minny is a vibrant, fierce woman, she has noisy children and an abusive alcoholic husband waiting for her at home, and a chronic inability to keep her temper when aggravated by any one of the white employers she's been fired from.

Aibilene and Minny have a mutual enemy, Skeeter Phelan's best friend, an obsessively controlling tyrant named Hilly Holbrook.

The entire novel is a galaxy circling Hilly Holbrook, a woman so controlling, racist, and vile that the fact she's a genuinely loving, and nurturing mother is obscenely disarming. Hilly is the social leader, she runs card clubs, ladies clubs, and collects money for starving children in Africa while gleefully tormenting the lives of the "nigra maids" of Jackson, Mississippi. She is so obviously brutal, but yet, one recognizes in her so clearly the voice, and person of that ONE member of every group that everyone inexplicably tolerates.

Why do we put up with, and crave the approval of people like Hilly Holbrook? The novel's white lead, Skeeter Phelan is very, very slow to come to any realization of this question, so much so, that it does become frustating she would persist in calling this woman her best friend.

The backdrop weaves in references to Martin Luther King, The Freedom Riders, the Kennedy Administration, and throughout the entire story lies the ever present threat of what would happen to the three main characters should their ultimate collaboration on an explosive tell-all about white and black relations in Jackson, Mississippi become exposed.

You will find yourself worrying alongside these women, jumping when they do at suspicious knocks on the doors and cars in the driveway, laughing alongside them whenever the little things in life like baking a caramel cake or potty training a toddler go well, or even pumping your fist at times.

Highly engrossing, well written, fast paced and without even one page of lag, "The Help" is definately one of THE books of the year.



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