I didn’t think I liked horror fiction. In my teens, I didn’t want to watch Jason or Freddy Krueger slash their way through their teenage victims. I didn’t read Stephen King. That stuff freaked me out.
But, you say, that’s what horror is supposed to do, freak you out, give you a good scare. That’s the thing, back then, just hearing about Jason and his friends freaked me out. I was scared enough without seeing it on the screen or reading it on the page.
Some of that had to do with a religious upbringing and probably the Satanic Panic (brought about by my parent’s fears of Dungeons & Dragons) of the ’80s. Some of it had to do with a general dislike of jump scares in movies or even real life.
Even though I shed my religious upbringing, reading horror fiction wasn’t high on my list (horror movies still don’t rank high–that jump scare thing still gets me)–until now.
. . . Or Enjoy Great Characters and Great Writing
Now, I think I’ll spend more time reading horror fiction, especially after reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians and Bentley Little’s The Consultant.
I read Jones’ book after reading a couple of interviews with him about writing. I read Little’s novel after watching the Prime series starring Christoph Waltz as the delightfully sinister Regus Patoff.
In both the series and the novel, a software company in dire straits hires (in the series, the CEO kills himself; in the novel, the company loses a lucrative merger) Patoff as a consultant to do what consultants do in real life–“consolidate staff, streamline practices and procedure, [and do everything needed] in order to stay viable in today’s competitive marketplace.”
The novel is, as Little notes in his dedication, about the “horrors of the modern workplace.” It’s also about ordinary people like protagonist Craig Horne getting caught up in something extraordinary and seemingly beyond their control.
It’s the characters that are also the most engaging part of Jones’ novel. In it, four Native Americans, Lewis, Ricky, Gabe, and Cassidy come to regret an elk hunt on land reserved for tribal elders from a decade before the action of the novel takes place. During the hunt, the four men in a frenzy kill a large number of elk, including a mother with a live calf. They think the hunt is a bounty, one that could keep them fed all winter. But, they have to discard the meat when the law catches up to them.
Lewis, in particular, is well drawn. A decade after the hunt, he’s settled down, gotten married, and works at the local post office. He’s also the first of the group to discover he’s being stalked by a supernatural being, an elk woman that seems to represent both the mother elk and her calf.
Jones masterfully builds sympathy for the characters, focusing on their ordinary lives before tearing those lives apart. He also ends the story with a twist that seems unusual–I won’t spoil it here, because the novel, along with Little’s, is well worth the read.
Another year in reading has passed, and like last year, I kept track of the books I read. The year started out with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a superb memoir about grief, one I read after Didion died in December 2021. I followed that up with Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. We also lost Rice in December 2021. I ended the year reading Joe Lansdale’s Rusty Puppy, a Hap and Leonard mystery, and the SF classic The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.
I started this blog post at around 8 p.m. on a Wednesday. I try to write at the same time every weeknight, currently for about 30 minutes to an hour. It doesn’t always happen, but I try to make a habit of it.
If there is anybody who knows about making a habit of writing, it’s Stephen King. “I like to get ten pages a day,” he writes in “On Writing,” “which amounts to 2,000 words.” He also tries to write every day. By establishing this writing habit early on, King’s become one of the most prolific living writers on the planet.
Ten pages a day seems like a hefty amount, intimidating, really, especially if you were a writer just starting out. But, the king of horror goes on to say that 1,000 words a day, or about five pages, is an achievable goal for new writers—and you can even take a day off. I’ve tried reaching that five-pages-a-day-goal, probably after reading “On Writing” for the first time. It’s tough. Blank pages, blank Word documents are intimidating. Trying to sit still long enough to do it when you have the blank screen and no words coming is intimidating.
Of course, what’s intimidating you is fear. “Fear,” writes Richard Rhodes in another favorite book on writing “How To Write,” “stops more people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do?”
Similar questions or harsher ones probably cross your mind when you sit down to write, although Rhodes offers a good way to break the wall of writer’s block: “When fear is upon you, write for yourself. It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you do it regularly [habit, again]. Set aside an hour or a half-hour daily or as often as you can . . . .Forget spelling . . . . Forget punctuation if paying attention to it inhibits you—you can always add it later. . . . Don’t think about how you’re writing: write.”
It doesn’t really matter—especially at first—what you write, you just have to write, Rhodes notes, even if you’re just writing about a process.
I’ve spent a good part of my writing life trying to develop a consistent writing habit. One of the more difficult aspects of establishing a writing habit is working it around a full-time job, especially when that job involves writing. Working for newspapers made it even more difficult, given the erratic schedules I’ve followed. Shifting your mind from nonfiction to fiction can be difficult too, but I was able to do it.
Establishing a writing habit has many purposes. If you’re writing fiction, when you write regularly, it keeps you in the world you are creating. “Once I start work on a project,” King writes, “I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to ‘feel’ like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death.”
I think this can be said for nonfiction as well. An article or essay can grow stale, you can lose the narrative and the connection of one thought to the other. Even writing daily, you can get lost and essay too far from the original path.
Establishing a habit helps you tap into the flow of your imagination, into the unconscious mind without needing to wait for the Muse to whisper in your ear. The Muse, as King notes, is “a hard-headed guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. . . .Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making magic.”
But, you can also hurt yourself psychically if you’re too rigid about sticking to your habit. As Roy Peter Clark notes in his chapter about “On Writing” in “Murder Your Darlings,” a writing habit can be self-defeating, especially if you’ve set up some staggeringly impossible rate of productivity. “You do not have to exercise every day to gain maximum health benefit,” Clark writes. “In the same spirit, do not be discouraged by violating your self-imposed writing schedule.”
Clark’s right about this. You overwork yourself lifting weights, say, and you strain or tear a muscle, you’re not getting any benefit from the exercise. You keep working out, trying to work past the pain, and not heal, you hurt yourself worse. No pain, no gain is bullshit. No writing every day, no success is bullshit too. When you beat yourself up for not writing every day, or not getting in 2,000 words a day, you’re reacting to another form of fear, the authoritarian and demanding ego telling you, “You can’t really be a writer if you don’t write every day.” Listening to that voice can be as debilitating as not writing at all and never producing anything.
Still, at the same time, to be a writer, you must write. When you establish a writing habit, you’re working past fear, and becoming productive. You’re producing words, sentences, paragraphs, pages. Pages become articles, stories, and books. A page a day is a book a year, as Rhodes notes. If your intention is to become a professional writer, you have to produce, and then submit what you write. And that’s another fear you have to overcome—the fear of submitting what you write, the fear of being rejected, or maybe even the fear of being accepted.
I’ve set up my own walls when it comes to developing a career as a professional writer. Oh, I could establish a writing habit. Often, even with a full-time job, I could make time to write, but mostly what I would write—as far as fiction goes—were writing exercises from writing books. Not to say I didn’t learn anything. I did.
As an aside: No matter what kind of writing you do, if you want to challenge yourself, do the exercises in John Gardner’s book “The Art of Fiction.”
So, I wrote those exercises. I incorporated them in my writer’s toolbox. When I got my first newspaper job, I wove some of those skills I learned into my journalism. Using these tools certainly made me a better feature writer.
The thing is, I aspired to write fiction, and I was writing fiction when I wrote those exercises. I just wasn’t finishing anything. I wasn’t putting all those techniques together into a finished project. Or it took me months just to write a short story when I finally put it all together. I would revise and polish and polish and revise the same story. I might submit it once or twice to the big prominent magazines and journals like The New Yorker or The Paris Review, and once the story was rejected, I’d set it aside, and find a new book with more exercises.
Doing the exercises was a way to tell myself that I was dedicated to the art and craft of writing without really being productive. I was also learning—sometimes from the writing books—to disdain the notion of being a “professional writer,” while at the same time I craved being published. I craved a literary life, one in which I wasn’t really producing a whole lot of literature.
When I first read “On Writing,” I didn’t pay too much attention to King’s section on developing a career as a writer. I wish I had paid more attention to it. King’s composite writer, “Frank,” as his success grows, as he begins to publish more, he begins to think in terms of publishing as a business. He begins to see himself and presents himself as a professional writer. He takes as much care crafting letters to agents and publishers as he does crafting his stories. Those letters are like a resume, the first thing a potential employer usually sees of you.
Of course, in the 20 years since “On Writing” was published, publishing has changed drastically, especially as indie publishing has gained more and more respect. Still, King’s advice has value. You have to keep producing. You have to submit. You have to act as if you are a professional, whether you take a traditional route, an indie route, or become a hybrid.
And, writing is about more than publishing and producing and making lots of money. Writing is always about writing. “I have written,” King writes, “because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side—I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for the joy, you can do it forever.”
Writing’s something I hope to do forever because it gives me joy. I make a habit of it because I can travel through my imagination. I make a habit of it because it helps me think and is meaningful. Of course, making a great deal of dough from it wouldn’t hurt too much either.
Voice and narrative, according to Terry McDonell in The Accidental Life, supersede pretty much everything a piece of writing offers to make it good — even word count.
As a magazine editor, who edited Hunter Thompson and Jim Harrison, among others McDonell used word counts placed at the top of a manuscript page to “evaluate pacing or the lack of it in a piece.” Invariably, the writers he worked with would send features in either way over or way under the word count.
“None of this matters if the piece is good — and that’s determined by voice and narrative, not length.”
But, what is this elusive Roadrunner of a thing writers chase after called voice?
It’s the sum of every writing strategy you use to makes you sound like you on the page, according Roy Peter Clark. It’s the distinct word choices and punctuation and rhythms and everything else that gives plagiarists fits when they try to pass your writing off as their own.
“Voice is a word critics often use in discussing narrative,” writes Ursula LeGuin in Steering the Craft. “It’s always metaphorical, since what’s written is voiceless. Often it signifies the authenticity of the writing (writing in your own voice; catching the true voice of a kind person; and so on).”
Certain voices are very distinct, easy to recognize:
We ate the sandwiches and drank the Chablis and watched the country out of the window. The grain was just beginning to ripen and the fields were full of poppies. The pastureland was green, and there were fine trees, and sometimes big rivers and chateaux off in the trees.
That’s Hemingway, of course, from The Sun Also Rises. What’s always made Hemingway’s prose distinct to me was the repetition of “and”— the conjunction’s got rhythm.
What would just that first sentence sound like if punctuated with commas as we’re taught?
“We ate the sandwiches, drank the Chablis, and watched the country out of the window.”
It’s still vivid and descriptive, clearly the eye of a good writer giving us concrete details of a train ride, but something seems lost. Those “ands” make it Hemingway.
Another distinct word choice is “fine” referring to “trees”. It gives the trees an aesthetic quality. Hemingway does this often with words like “fine” and “good,” to the point of parody. In fact, parodists often throw in a lot of “fines” and “goods” in their parodies of his style.
Here’s another favorite voice of mine:
If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He’s friendly, goodlooking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools. He’s not afraid of commitment. He wants children — actually, he already has children and wants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun.
That’s Susan Orlean, from her feature “Show Dogs,” collected in The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup. With this lede, it’s the commas that give the sentences punch, when the sentences are long enough to warrant commas.
But, what makes it distinctive is its surprise and humor. “If I were a bitch” jumps at you, makes you want to read more. It takes you a moment to realize Orlean is talking about a dog, one that by the end of the paragraph, you’re in love with, too. The surprise of “bitch” in the first sentence is sweetened and softened with “He almost never drools.” There, if not before, you can hear Orlean’s smile, a bit of a “gotcha!”
The use of subjunctive in the first sentence also stands out. It seems like a useful strategy to get the reader inside your frame mind, and into the world of the piece, if not overused. Orlean opens her classic piece “The American Man, Age Ten” with the subjunctive as well:
“If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks.”
What an interesting twist at the end of the sentence, to go from speculating about marrying someone to marrying someone who wants to have matching superhero notebooks. We’ve gone from adult speculation about the world and right into the world of a 10-year-old boy in turn of a phrase.
Of course, by voice, some writers mean writing in a certain point-of-view, especially in fiction, when you’re telling a story from a character that isn’t you, or is just a shadow of you, even if you’re writing a roman `a clef.
Nonfiction writers use this kind of voice, too. Ian Frazier, for instance, parodies the language of a legal brief in his hilarious essay “Coyote v. Acme,” in which hapless cartoon character Wile E. Coyote sues the Acme Company, whose tricks and traps never trap the Roadrunner and leave Wile E. maimed, mangled, and otherwise bodily harmed.
My client, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, a resident of Arizona and contiguous states, does hereby bring suit for damages against the Acme Company, manufacturer and retail distributor of assorted merchandise, incorporated in Delaware and doing business in every state, district, and territory.
Sounds legit to me. That’s what voice does. It even gives a fake legal brief a sense of humor and makes it seem real.
So, work on your voice, until you can sing with authority and authenticity.
When I read Roy Peter Clark’sThe Art of X-ray Reading, I felt like a time-traveler whisked back to the 1990s and my graduate lit classes.
Heady days those were in which little cliques of long-haired twentysomethings gathered in musty classrooms, sat in hard-backed wood desks and talked about books, or texts, as some of the literary theorists we studied called them. We parsed out Faulkner to digest the South’s racism. We dug deep into Lawrence and Woolf to understand gender inequalities.
In X-Ray Reading Clark, too, digs deep into literary classics like The Great Gatsby and Lolita. His purpose isn’t to parse out racism or gender inequality or discover some theory hidden in the words, sentences and paragraphs of classic texts. His purpose is to show—not tell—us where writers “learn their best moves.”
Note the word “where.” Instead of “where,” most books on writing and rhetoric concentrate on the “how” of writing. Thousands of such books line bookstore shelves. Of the making of writing books, there seems no end. You can reach for Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, or Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language;” or you can reach way back to ancient Greece, to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in part an answer to Plato’s disparaging of the art of public speaking — or writing for that matter — in works like Gorgias and Phaedrus.
Of course, you can open up Plato’s dialogues and see how his spokesman — old barefoot gadfly Socrates — ironically uses elements of rhetoric to dismember rhetoric. You can see, for instance, how Socrates does it: he gins-up plenty of examples (examples, as you well know, make for good evidence in supporting your arguments) he begs for absolute definitions. In turn, too, you can see Socrates placing great value on good writing when he tells his friend Callicles in Phaedrus, “Anyone may see there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing. The disgrace comes when a man writes not well, but badly.”
Even Clark’s recent Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer is a how-to — one worth plucking from bookshelves to add to your writer’s toolkit. Clark’s no stranger to writing. A journalist and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, Clark’s written five books on writing and reading, including The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English and How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times.
Whichever writing book you reach for, undoubtedly you’ll gather gems of great value like “Show, don’t tell,” or “Use the active voice.” But, where did the writers who dug up such shiny treasures learn them?
Reading, of course.
Not just any sort of reading, as Clark says.
They learn them from a technique I call X-ray reading. They read for information or vicarious experience or pleasure, as we all do. But in their reading, they see something more. It’s as if they had a third eye or a pair of X-ray glasses like the ones advertised years ago in comic books.
This special vision allows them to see beneath the surface of the text. There they observe the machinery of making meaning, invisible to the rest of us. Through a form of reverse engineering, a good phrase used by scholar Steven Pinker, they see the moving parts, the strategies that create the effects we experience from the page — effects such as clarity, suspense, humor, epiphany, and pain. These working parts are then stored in the writer’s toolshed in boxes with names such as grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling, semantics, etymology, poetics, and that big box — rhetoric.
This kind of textual analysis is not new. In academia, it’s known as the New Criticism, its foundation close reading. Proponents of this critical style, like Cleanth Brooks, argued that only the text mattered. You understood a poem or work of prose only by peeling back every layer of the text, analyzing every word, letter, phrase, with no outside influence like historical context or god forbid the writer’s claimed intention (the intentional fallacy) to corrupt your analysis.
Francine Prose’s book from 2006 Reading Like a Writer is a fine example of this kind of reading, and like Clark, she shows how writers study writing peering closely at words and sentences, paragraphs and narration, character and dialogue, and details and gesture. Her book is primarily aimed at fiction writers.
Clark’s X-ray Reading delves into fiction, poetry and nonfiction, assessing the structure of Gatsby, the play of words on the tongue of Nabokov’s Lolita (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” It’s hard not hear that except in James Mason’s exquisite voice.), the meaning of the stopped clock in John Hershey’s classic nonfiction book on the dropping of the atomic bombs Hiroshima and breaking down the “cinematic slow-motion effect” of the opening passages of Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. It’s nice to see nonfiction included, if only to see that nonfiction’s prose doesn’t have to cross the pedestrian cross walk of AP style or go over the lip of the black holes (is that drill down into?) of academ-ese or business-ese and vanish in banality.
Clark also analyzes works of writers such as Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Joyce.
But, don’t worry if this all sounds like a boring literature class. Clark’s approach, as Tampa Bay Times reviewer Gregory McNamee notes, is “much more nuts and bolts than all that, and it seems just right: A beginning medical student learns anatomy through dissection down to the capillary level, and a beginning writer learns to conjure phrases such as Fitzgerald’s ‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ by understanding from the ground up how sound and meaning combine.”
It’s a refreshing approach for a book on writing and reading. And, if anything, reading this book proves a great guide to reading in a way that makes books even more alive than usual. Which seems is a secondary purpose of Clark’s:
“One purpose of this book is to nudge you into reading some of the best literature ever written…Read. Enjoy. X-Ray. Write.”
Doing some self-directed training at work made me think about our current controversy over alternative facts. And that, in turn, made me think about an insight from fictional detective Harry Bosch in the novel The Black Iceby Michael Connelly. As Bosch pieces together the clues to a cop’s murder, he recalls something he was told early in his career: you can have all the facts you want, but facts mean nothing without figuring out the glue holding them together.
That’s a great insight on Bosch/Connelly’s part (Connelly was an L.A. Times crime reporter before turning to fiction). What is the glue that holds the facts together? If you investigate deeper, you piece together the meaning, the truth.
Of course, we all have deep convictions we often hold onto no matter the contrary evidence. We are all also guilty of reacting to contrary evidence by clinging even stronger to our convictions. Or we cherry-pick stuff that supports our convictions.
But, what if we dig deeper? Will we find the facts and their truths are as flimsily held together by edible Elmer’s paste as a kindergartener’s art project? Or will we discover a solid bond held together with Krazy Glue?
I love questions like this. It’s one of the reasons I love fiction and believe fiction is truthier than nonfiction. Of course, it’s usually also much more entertaining. And that’s a fact!
Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s The Pursuit of Perfection: And How It Harms Writers (WMG Writer’s Guide) (Volume 3) is one of the best — though brief at 46 pages — writing advice books I’ve read in some time (click either on the link or cover image to purchase at Amazon.). It’s especially valuable to those of us who are perfectionists, either by nature or training or a mix of the two. (I think most of us get a little of both along the way. Or perhaps the training reinforces the nature?) It’s also a nice introduction to thinking about writing in terms of a business pursuit as much as an art or craft.
The business side of writing is an area I’ve only recently begun to explore, so I won’t at this point talk too much about trying to tackle the business side of freelance writing. That area is regrettably one I’ve cast aside for far too long and have much to learn.
On the nature side of things, I think some of my perfectionistic tendencies might be rooted in psychological fears about money learned at an early age and reinforced in later life by negative experience and accepting some myths about writing, myths Rusch explores in the book. I wonder how many of you have had similar backgrounds when dealing with money and business education?
What I want to concentrate on in this review are some of the myths Rusch brings up. In particular, myths from the world of the MFA in creative writing. Now, I sheepishly admit there’s a bit of me — the ego protecting me — still touchy about not getting into an MFA program when I entered graduate school eons ago, so I tend to get a bit giddy about critiques of MFA programs in general. But, for me, I saw the MFA as a route to becoming a fiction writer — as a way other than publishing that validated my fiction as valuable. Isn’t either Stephen King or George Orwell who says writers write to get published because a publication is a validation of existence?
While I didn’t get into my school’s MFA program, I did get into its graduate program in English — barely. At least I would be around the MFAs, right? Maybe I could absorb some of those writers’ wisdom? (Of course, there are other reasons I went to grad school: I was deeply afraid of engaging with the real world. Fear is always a constant bugaboo, isn’t it?).
So, here is one paragraph from Rusch’s book that dug into my brain like a hungry worm:
Creative writing, so far as I can tell, is the only degree a student can get that doesn’t offer any study of how to make a career as a professional who makes her living at the craft described in the title of the degree. In fact, in most universities, creative writers are told from day one that they cannot make a living at their chosen profession.
And that’s just bullshit.
What hit me so much about this passage was that it seemed outside of being a scholar and teaching (whether in secondary schools or at colleges or universities) there was nothing offered of how my English degree could help me make a living. It wasn’t until I consulted a school counseling service for other issues that I even thought I could be an editor. Still, I had no idea how to go about becoming an editor. And for that matter, an editor of what?
Scholarship seemed to be for scholarship’s sake as getting a creative writing degree seemed to be for the sake of producing more MFAs. On the other hand, the journalism department at the other end of campus taught their students to be journalists. You learned how to get internships at a paper or radio or TV station. You learned marketable job skills.
There was also a sense in grad school that a career of some sort, that pursuing a profession was something of a betrayal of art or politics or even self. Now, this was the ’90s and I know now there are classes in editing, and degrees offered in technical and professional writing. So, things are changing. Maybe? But how many people are getting their MFAs just to get them?
Anyhow, this isn’t to disparage my graduate school experience: I learned great research skills, I read a lot of literary works that I had missed or avoided in my reading life and my critical thinking skills are stronger than say the average bear.
But, I’ve had to struggle with the cannot make a living at writing thing for a long time — about two decades. I would write stories and take two or three months and polish them to perfection then submit them to one or two usually non-paying literary journals or magazines, get them rejected and pretty much give up on them. I still go through this. I’ve brought my perfectionism to my journalism and to my fiction writing still.
It’s something I work through and hope to overcome. Some of it’s rooted in fear, which I think is part of the perfectionist’s nature. But, Reading Rusch’s book has helped even with that part of me, giving me a different way of thinking.
So, when I received my copy of D.L. Young’s debut novel, Soledad, it was right around the time the U.K. took leave of the European Union.
After that vote, there were some half-serious memes on social media calling for Texas’ exit from the U.S. As ridiculous as that sounds, as yahoo-ish as that sounds, there are not a few here in the state who wouldn’t relish the chance to revive in their minds the glory days of the Republic of Texas. There is/was, for instance, the notorious Republic of Texas movement in the 1990s, led by the now imprisoned Richard Lance McLaren, which claimed, among other grievances, the U.S. illegally annexed Texas in 1845.
Historically, Texas, as early as September 1836, just a few months after becoming a republic, sought annexation, but the Van Buren Administration wasn’t keen on it, fearing, in part, war with Mexico. The U.S.’s westward expansion, and fears of British expansion and economic growth, prompted President John Tyler to promote Texas annexation in 1844, although that push, with much U.S. prompting, didn’t pass until 1845.
In the 90s, Secession appealed to a certain element rife with conspiracy and government hatred, in particular after the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco.
“The idea of nationhood appealed to many Texans,” Joe Nick Patoski wrote for Texas Monthly, while covering the McLaren standoff, “and a movement was born.”
Most in the area of McLaren’s property at Davis Mountain Resort, Patoski reports, didn’t like McLaren much. Some offered to shoot him themselves if the DPS didn’t, others planned margarita parties if and when he was pronounced dead.
McLaren’s supporters, however, echoed his rhetoric, including a street preacher, W.N. Otwell, as Patoski reports, who said, “‘He’s the one who’s done the research,’ [Otwell] said. ‘We’re here because we’re interested in this, because we believe the New World Order has trampled our constitutional rights. It’s the Antichrist and the mark of the beast.’”
McLaren was and is still imprisoned in Amarillo, after a 1997 standoff with the Texas Department of Public Safety. In that standoff, two hostages were taken on McLaren’s property at the Davis Mountains Resort.
This strand of apocalyptic thinking is all too common among the ahistorical Secessionist types — with its nascent Tea-Party rhetoric too chillingly trumpeted in the rhetoric of Donald Trump and his followers, and its a strand of thinking Young carries forward in speculative excellence with his Soledad.
Young’s is a dystopian vision, a hellish republic divided against itself; it’s a what if of what Texas could be if these Secessionists succeeded, and an extended metaphor of what I fear the U.S. could become should the trumpeters take the stage this November.
Ostensibly, the novel tells the story of a “reader” Soledad Paz, a slave, whose drug-enhanced psychic abilities allow her to inform the brigand-businessman Flaco Guzman whether those who would do business with him are lying to him. Liars, of course, get shot in the head and their bodies dumped in the West Texas desert, a “meal for coyotes and vultures, like all the others who try to pull one over on the great and powerful Guzman.”
But the novel takes us beyond the already balkanizing republic, beyond a Mad-Max-esque adventure — spoiler alert: Soledad escapes into a wilderness of hate — and like Soledad herself, stares at our collective souls, sees things we can’t even see ourselves because we’re too blind or too wrapped up in rhetoric to see.
For me, the most chilling section of the novel is the set piece in Waco, when Soledad and those who have helped her escape Guzman, get captured by Christian fundamentalists who make current Islamic terrorists look like black-pajamaed Boy Scouts, “the thousands of well-armed zealots who don’t like strangers” and “have a special hate for outsiders, anyone who’s not a baptized, Bible-carrying, true believing Fundie.”
These are the kind of people who weave the divine into every detail of history, much like the McLaren bunch, much like the conservative evangelicals blowing their shofars for Trump or Cruz and lamenting the loss of God in their fantasy Christian nation. The uber-patriots wrapped in flags, an AR-15 in one hand and a Bible in the other. They spew the wrath of God, rather than the Sermon on the Mount. They shout down opposition and claim persecution at the slightest slight.
In the novel, this group commits one of the most chilling atrocities, one we’ve seen or heard about, the kind of thing we associate with Islamic terrorists: a woman buried up to her neck and stoned to death for being a heathen (a Catholic in this case). Young depicts this stoning with ferocious detail, as if it’s something he actually witnessed.
One fortunate thing about Young’s dystopic vision, is that as Margaret Atwood has noted, “[W]ithin each dystopia [is] a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over.”
Of course, as Atwood says, in each utopia there is a concealed dystopia, and perhaps Soledad will, instead, reach for some sensible middle ground, and not try to make things perfect, only better.
Usually, I try not to read a book that’s in the middle of a series before I’ve read all the books before it, but with Cherie Priest’sThe Inexplicables, I made an exception. (It’s the fourth volume in her so far five-volume Clockwork Century series.) I was lured in by the cover, the intriguing portrait of a punkish redhead wearing a gas mask (yes, I bought a book for its cover). I also was lured by the back-cover synopsis. How could a book about narcotics, toxic walled cities, undead and other monsters be bad?
And, I wasn’t wrong. Sometimes you can judge a book by it’s cover. The Inexplicables delivers everything it claims in its cover synopsis: a rousing adventure in altered 1880s toxic, walled Seattle, a place where walking dead rotters roam the streets, the opiate sap is a fix for its residents and something inexplicable and hairy chases after young orphans. Or at least one orphan, Rector “Wreck’em” Sherman, the drug-addled redhead who seeks his fortune and maybe his next fix within the walled city.
His leap into adulthood includes an encounter with a monster, known in the beginning, as The Inexplicable, an oversized humanoid creature on the loose inside the city walls. In Rector’s quest to find his way in this bizarre world, he hooks up with an even stranger cast that includes an Indian princess and an airship crew.
For much of the book, the adventure hinges on Rector and gang trying to find The Inexplicable. They are interrupted in a secondary task, trying to stop a band of outsiders from blowing up the city. To me, this subplot tends to take over and the search for the monster takes a disappointing side quest. I wanted to know more about the creature, once it’s discovered
Still, it’s a fun read, and a nice introduction not only to Priest, but for me to steampunk, an SF genre I had mostly avoided, other than admiring steampunkish costumes at cons. Priest uses a lush, vivid prose to make this world come to life and I’m looking forward to working my way back to the first novel in the series, Boneshaker. She also manages to work in references to previous books in the series without distractions. A nice technique for those writing series.
In this near-future thriller, John Scalzi blends his fast-paced science fiction with suspense to yield a vivid world in which a portion of the human population is locked inside itself as a result of an insidious disease, known as Haden’s syndrome.
Technology has advanced enough — primarily through research for a disease cure — those who suffer with the disease can live virtually by integrating their consciousness into other willing (mostly) human “Integrators” or hooking into androids known as “threeps” (yes, it is an allusion to that android).
Newly minted FBI agent Chris Shane (a Haden’s victim) partners with veteran Leslie Vann and the two wind up investigating Haden-related murder, following a suspect who might have been integrated with a Haden. The investigation is pretty standard, or as standard as the world Scalzi presents, given the murder suspect lives inside another human being, but only temporarily.
While transferring human conscious is a standard SF trope — one that Scalzi explores in his Old Man’s War series as well — Scalzi does a bang-up job making the technology plausible, especially a consciousness transfer into an android. With the novel, like all good SF, or all good fiction for that matter, Scalzi puts forth the questions of “What is human? What is it to be human?” Are the threeps human? They only seem to come to life when a human consciousness occupies them. Are you fully human if you allow another consciousness to temporarily possess your mind?
Although not quite as mindbending as his Hugo-winning Redshirts, Lock In supplies you with a good mystery story wrapped in the questions of future technologies.
— Todd
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Voice and narrative, according to Terry McDonell in 
Exile on Ninth Street 