Book Review: Love is a Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski

Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Don't bring a whore, I'll only fall in love with her."

The verse appears more than once in Charles Bukowski's set of poems, "Love is a Dog From Hell." The majority of the poems are devoted to the various muses of his life, lovers and exes, some of them overlapping. Each one of these women is studied, catalogued, screwed, licked, tickled, and nailed into this shadowbox of poems like spread eagled Monarch specimens, not a single detail or secret concealed.

The human condition in this volume is showcased not as spiritual, but as animal, where base urges and bodily distresses are discussed with uncensored aplomb. Masturbation, defecation, oral sex, the desire to hear a lover urinate, all get devoted verses, mirroring the poem in which he fondly remembers a poetry reading in which vomiting seemed the thing to do, but no one else seems to understand that.

In true Bukowski fashion, pretty rhymes are dispensed with and he goes straight to slashing open a vein and pouring whiskey over it. This is a man who can't quite understand how he is getting scores of women to roll around on his bed, but he ain't gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, and he sure as hell is gonna go charging in like a bull.

He freely discusses his own insecurities in poems where he describes his openly listed phone number and the calls he takes from strangers just to feel a connection. He even betrays sparks of softness in a poem written for his ex-wife, or one written for his daughter. There's an eerie sweetness to his poem "an almost made up poem" which chronicles the affection he had for a young aspiring poet he never meets. "I probably would have been unfair to you..." he writes of their unconsummated love as if her untimely demise is far more merciful than eventual heartbreak in each other's arms.

Reading these poems made me feel as if Bukowski had wrapped his arm around my waist and pressed me onto a chair and locked the door, and with the revelation of each passing poem I felt less and less inclined to escape.

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Book Review: Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead

Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stonewall Jackson is dead.

It's 1863 Civil War America and a mother with a premonition pulls her son, Robey, from bed in the pre-dawn hours and gives him one command, go to the battlefields and bring your father home. Without Jackson, the Confederacy is lost, and the war is just as good as over.

Jarring immediacy, and sleepy eyed confusion are perfectly handled in the prose that opens the novel, and it pulls one into the worry and wonder at having a great and terrible task suddenly thrust upon them. Fourteen year old Robey is sent from the farm with sparse supplies, a double-sided blue and gray jacket, the family horse, and a stern warning from his mother about survival, when to kill, and never to trust a stranger on any circumstance.

At this point you know Robey's journey is going to touch upon and break every one of his mother's admonitions.

A kind acquaintence swaps out Robey's exhuasted horse for a the loan of a magnificent coal black Hanoverian stallion. This is where the novel differs greatly from other similar tales featuring title animal characters. The black horse is not anthromorphized, or otherwise blessed with such precious importance that it steals the novel from Robey. The horse becomes more spirit guide then protagonist as he shelters the tender boy, carries him tirelessly, and comforts him. When the horse is stolen from Robey after the boy disobeys his mother's first warning about strangers, the coal black horse becomes something to fight for.

Yes, Robey is on a journey to find his father, but before he can, he must first suffer and struggle on a quest to reclaim his horse. The horse becomes a symbol for the strength and manhood Robey must first attain before he's truly prepared to face the quest for his father.

The novel's imagery becomes stark, brutal, apocalyptic even, as Robey's journey takes him. Even at its quiet moments there's a pervading eerie beauty both in prose and in proceedings. The sight of a horse's skeleton intertwined with foliage, the meeting of a man dressed as a woman, tending geese, and so covered in lice his flesh shimmers, are so fantastic as to make one think of fairy tale or Greek myth.

The Gettysburg battlefield serves as the centerpiece for the novel, a meeting place of fate and enemies. Robey meets once compassionate townspeople who have become mercenary, defends dying wounded men from being eaten alive by wild pigs, and witnesses the eternal hunger of those who loot the dead. There is no glittering heroism here, there is no romance in war.

The scenes are increasingly ghoulish, graphic violence, vivid descriptions of the rotting dead, and a brutal rape are witnessed by Robey. The rape and the quest for the horse both become important side plots in shaping Robey's future, just as surely as the search for his father does.

This book is swiftly read, and held my heart from beginning to end. Robey's journey changes him steadily and it is with something akin to sisterly pride I felt in watching this boy grow to a man in his journey through hell on Earth over a time spanning less than a year.

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A peerie bit a writing news!

I have a tiny haiku included in the anthology 140 and Counting, edited by Joanne Merriam. It is available for $4.99 and worth the buy. If you have a kindle or the free kindle for desktop app, then by all means snag yourself a copy. :) My short and deadly, "The Sadness Will Last Forever" appeared in issue 100 of Short, Fast, and Deadly. You can read it for free on the site or buy the print edition for $6.00.

Book Review: New Beginnings by Rebecca Emin

New Beginnings by Rebecca Emin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the most pressing issues epidemic amongst our young ones today is bullying. Granted, kids left to their own devices will often pull towards a pecking order war like a pen of puppies dragging each other by the ears, but the trend in bullying these days has gone far beyond that. Tales of bullied children as young as eleven or twelve committing suicide over bullying are become so commonplace that headlines are losing their ability to shock us.

Now is a perfect times for fiction and film to deal with the issue, and Rebecca Emin's novel, "New Beginnings" confronts the issue gently, and thoroughly.

Sam Hendry is the eleven year old protagonist of this children's novel, and the premise is a familiar one: a young girl leaving her old life and arriving at a new school only to meet on her very first day a bully who takes an instant dislike to her. The bully in question is a fellow classmate of Sam's, a girl named Molly who begins by first taunting Sam, and then progressing to snide physical assaults. Sam endures this privately, fearfully, dreading each Monday morning when the new week would begin and a new day of dealing with Molly's baseless hatred.

Emin writes Sam's point of view without melodrama. Sam suffers, and bad things happen, but the book is not punctured at any point by acts of violence or trauma or operatic self pity so great that a reader feels as if it's unrealistic. Any young reader suffering a similar situation could easily identify with Sam as she goes about her day, making a small group of friends, hiding the bullying from her parents, yearning to get her own computer, and singing her heart out to her favorite CD's.

No magical fixes to her problems are offered, the lessons Sam learns in the story are lessons easily applied by any of the potential young readers of this book. Helpful solutions are introduced in the story, and are quite crucially applied as the levels of Molly's bullying begins to escalate to actual physical injury for Sam. The danger is real, but not so much as to make any of the young readers faint of heart.

There are many nice things in this story, Sam's ambitions to sing, her first crush, a surprising first kiss, all written with bright optimism and tenderness. For everything bad that happens to someone, there are still things to strive for, it's a comforting message and one very accessible to the reader.

If I have any snags with this story it would only be of the nitpicky nature, there is a bit of name brand dropping, and as a matter of personal taste I've never cared for that in a story. I also would have liked to have seen a bit more insight into Molly's motivations--but this story wasn't about her, it didn't need to be. In the end it's Sam Hendry's story, and a sweetly told one it is.

I was touched by it on a personal level with memories of being a shy kid at school, and of the daily anxiety associated with various worries. It's a very genuine story told by a very good writer, and a good one for any young reader to have in their library.




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Book Review: Double Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

Double Dexter by Jeff Lindsay
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Double Dexter" is the latest Jeff Lindsay novel chronicling the escapades of everyone's favorite serial killer hunting serial killer, Dexter. I must admit, I have never before read a Dexter novel, nor have I seen the popular television series based upon these books, so perhaps "Double Dexter" was not the best place to begin. The opening paragraph, heavy with self importance and adjectives, grated on my nerves as anything pregnant with unnecessary description could. The entire first third of the novel, which followed Dexter in the midst of carving up a pedophile and being spotted by a stranger, to obsessing over his wife's cooking, and convincing himself he is not human as he moons over his toddler daughter, moved very slowly for me. This is where anyone already familiar with the series would probably have no problem, as they would already need no introduction to the various characters surrounding Dexter, and their importance to his life.

As Dexter putters around his life of domestic bliss, and deals with office politics in the police station, I was able to gather bits of information about the supporting characters, a brother who is also a serial killer, a sister on The Force who also knows about Dexter's habits, a badly maimed co-worker with a vendetta to bring Dexter, I began to wish I was reading one of those other books, where something interesting actually happens. We're told about a serial killer who is literally hammering police officers to death, and we're told that Dexter murders a pedophile who had it coming at the opening of the book, but there really is no vivid description--for anyone who is a gore fan, nor is there any real insight into the proceedings or killers other than the mere statement that something has happened, or something is happening.

The only real insight the book offered was Dexter's repetitive assertion that he is a sociopathic reptile incapable of human love or feeling on what felt like every page, and in response to every human flinch around him. I felt like shaking the book and yelling, "OK I get it! You're a psycho WHO CAN'T FEEL EXCEPT YOU TOTALLY CAN CAUSE YOU'RE SO OBVIOUSLY IN LOVE WITH YOUR BABY OMG IRONY!!!!!"

Dexter begins to receive a series of emails on his work computer from the very man who had witnessed him at his dark deeds in the novel's opener. The cat and mouse game ensues. This leads Dexter to a place he is not comfortable with--uncertainty, worry, and an overall dulling of his senses. Dexter's preoccupation leads to sloppiness in his home and work life, and to a series of unfortunate events that really makes him seem foolish in the face of his budding adversary.

The novel sparked for me at this point. Dark humor and suspense mix as Dexter tries to juggle his domestic responsibilities alongside that of his work, and the dark urges that lead him to hunt, kill, and dismember. Dexter's two step-children factor largely into the story at this point, and are quite feisty little buggers to boot. The plot moves swiftly to a very satisfactory finish done in by a bit of overkill.

This is a book I can see being a good read to pass an afternoon, or a plane ride, but I can't imagine ever reading this specific volume again. Although, the swiftly moving middle to end of the novel did pique my interest in Dexter the character, and in all of the previous events in his life that were alluded to in the novel. So I will be checking out previous volumes in this series. In the meantime, I really hope whatever Jeff Lindsay has planned for the next volume goes a lot better.

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Book Review: Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud

Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud by Bruce Duffy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The tumultous relationship between the legendary French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine takes a surprising backset in this biographical novel that is ultimately the fictionalized portait of the embittered battlefield that is the bond between mother and son. The Rimbaud/Verlaine relationship would seem like the obvious centerpiece for this novel, and indeed it does crackle the pages with chilling power when it is covered. It is not to Rimbaud and Verlaine we are first introduced to in this novel; it is to Rimbaud's mother as she supervises the exhumation of two of her dead children--her daughter Vitalie, and the famous Arthur Rimbaud. When preference is given to Arthur's corpse over that of Vitalie's, Madame Rimbaud is horrified.

From here we see the history of Madame Rimbaud's life, motherless, sexually abused by her father, abandoned by her drunken brothers, and abandoned by her drunken husband. All of these factors form to create an ascerbic, controlling woman who relies only on her own cunning business intelligence, and the obedience of her bullied children to get by in life. When the teenaged Arthur breaks from her stifling grip, she cuts herself emotionally from him, forevermore seeing him as the failed, useless male, that her father and brothers represented to her.

From there we learn of Paul Verlaine's naive, pregnant, teenaged wife, and of Verlaine's eccentric and forgiving mother who also keeps the preserved fetuses of his miscarried siblings in glass jars. The inner lives, and social plight of these women, trapped in a world where a good beating from a husband is considered commendable is starkly portrayed. By the time Rimbaud's and Verlaine's romance is portrayed, all of their destructive lusting seems like so much selfish pining on the part of two talented momma's boys from opposite ends of the spectrum. This fuels the novel's main flaw, creating a tedious read for anyone not sympathetic to two talented men who seem to have no shortage of self pity even as they scorn and phsyically harm the women in their lives.

The novel's prose is intoxicating at times, however, with scenes taking us through the pathetic horror of a veal calf goring its tongue on a nail out of boredom, to blisteing high adventure, and passionate eroticism on the African desert. The first sexual encounter between Rimbaud and Verlaine punctures the page with florid passion, wrestling, and finishing with the breathless abandon even seasoned romance writers strive for. The unflinching departure from romance that this novel takes forces one to examine further the works of Rimbaud and Verlaine, and the lives, and relationships formed and destroyed to fuel the creation of their poetic masterpieces. It forces one to look at the faces of the women scarred by the creation of these works, and then one is left to wonder at the human price of high art.

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Book Review: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"There is not a single Eastern religion, where an immaculate virgin does not...bring forth a god into this world. And the Christians, displaying no originality whatsoever, followed the same pattern when they created their Jesus, who in fact, never existed at all."

These are the words of Berlioz to Bezdomny in the opening paragraphs of Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita". It's deceptively simple, words of cold rationalism that could begin any number of novels or textbooks set to showcase the the superiority of atheism, and to point out the ridiculousness of faith. And indeed it seems that way at the start, as Berlioz is meeting Bezdomny in a public park to discuss his displeasure at Bezdomny's draft of an anti-religous poem commissioned to be written on Jesus Christ. Bezdomny has treated Jesus as a real historical, albeit humanly flawed figure, in the poem, and Berlioz is determined to set the record straight--there was never any Jesus.

Enter Satan.

Now one would expect Satan to be someone reasonably satisfied with a 1920's Soviet Russia that does not believe in or accept anyone believing in God. The lack of belief deprives not only God of attentions, however, but it deprives Satan as well. Now, what could possibly happen to a city of Athiests when Satan pays a visit?

Regardless of one's personal beliefs about religion and reason there is a wicked glee one takes in the havoc wreaked upon the steadfastly reasonable and orderly 1920's Moscow. Apartments are trashed, a theater in disarray, the insane asylum begins to fill up, as the devil in the guise of a dark stranger named Woland, and his minions--a demon, a naked witch, and Behemoth, (quite possibly the coolest feline character in literary history) march through town. Surreal imagery, shocking sudden violence, biting satire, and even slapstick, fill these portions of the novel, never slowing down, never letting you go.

This isn't the only storyline, however, we are introduced to the tender romance between the title characters. The broken, addle-brained Master and the fiercely devoted Margarita who fears not even the furthest depths of Hell if it would bring her lover back to her. We are also dropped into Bulgakov's novel within a novel, a stark, frank take upon the death of Jesus Christ and the torment of Pontius Pilate.

This is a novel that left me breathless and shaky upon the finish. My mind reeled with the philisophical and spiritual debate tangled in the words, and I found myself laughing at some of the more comic imagery in it. What an iconic novel, what a delight to read, I heartily recommend everyone to enrich their lives and pick up a copy of The Master and Margarita today!

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