So Cold the River, by Michael Koryta

By | | ,
Comments Off on So Cold the River, by Michael Koryta

I read So Cold the River on Sunday, in a multi-part loafing session of epic proportions. The novel is a supernatural thriller by Michael Koryta, something Kelly had heard about and knew I’d probably enjoy.

So Cold the River is very much cut from the Peter Straub / Stephen King mold of a certain era. There’s a small town with a hint of magic to it, and some underlying but long-dormant evil. Then an outsider wakes it up, pissing it off in the process. (In some of these books, like It, there’s a variation, whereby the evil explodes every X number of years, like seventeen year cicadas But I digress).

Soon enough the outsider and the big supernatural bad are engaged in a freaky struggle for the whole ball of wax, by which I mean the lives of everyone in town who fails to reach minimum safe distance.

The heroic outsider in this case is a cinematographer, Eric Shaw, who fried a promising Hollywood career a couple years ago by breaking a famous director’s nose. Since then he’s been self-destructing as fast as he can: alienating his wife, refusing to work on anything meaningful and drinking more than he ought. Ooh, he’s a real bundle of joy, our Eric. He’s found one paying gig that suits his self-loathing: making souped-up funeral slide shows for well-off families who can’t operate Powerpoint. It is one of those vids–and the fact that he’s just a teeny bit psychic–that lands him a job doing a private biopic on a dying man, a patriarchal old tycoon who has never told his family the first thing about his past.

So Cold the River is good and spooky, and Koryta writes nice supple prose: It’s evocative but never overly busy, like this bit:

Past Bloomington to Bedford, and then the highway hooked and lost a lane in a town called Mitchell and began to dip and rise as it carved through the hills.

Carved. Good verb! And the cadence is just like a road trip.

The novel builds well almost to the end, and the answer to its central mystery–who is the old man whose family knew so little about him, and what is with his freaky bottle of eighty-year-old spring water?–is both creepy and satisfying. In terms of flaws… well, both Eric and his chief antagonist, the town redneck, have sidekicky friends who are far more interesting and (in Eric’s case) likeable than they are. And as things wind up to the piano-wire tautness of the necessary dangerous confrontation, the twists and turns get predictable. But these are minor complaints. So Cold the River is a well-crafted and engaging story, and it is an especially terrific example of a tale told with a foot in two eras–the digital now and the early, desperate, bootlegging days of the Great Depression.

Violent homophobia, TV style

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Violent homophobia, TV style

This week my Favorite thing Ever is gay marriage, by way of a ramble through Fame, Glee and the laugh-riot topic of gaybashing. It’s a bit of a weird essay, perhaps; I had mixed feelings about season two of Glee even before they embarked on a certain Kurt storyline.

Glee has so many great things going for it, and the events of “Furt” are very Toobworthy. I don’t care for very special episodes and one thing that’s good about this storyline is it isn’t some self-contained boo boo kiss. McKinley High has been bully heaven since the show hit the airwaves, and Kurt was always the target of choice for its scariest thuggizens. I like that nobody pretends that teachers or school boards or parents can fix the part of human nature that makes mean kids prowl around seeking out weak kids and selectively terrorizing those least likely to get support or sympathy.

This is also why I admire the It Gets Better videos that are popping up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds with such regularity; the soul-destroying abuse of queer kids in schools is on people’s minds and that is great, totally amazing.

My friend Jay Lake, as many of you know, has a stunningly honest and revealing blog about his life and, lately, about his battle with cancer. I admire Jay’s openness, but I don’t aspire to it. Oh, I’ll happily post images of every square inch of Vancouver or anywhere else I happen to go. I’ll tell you about writing, and reading, and teaching and other bits and pieces. But I conceive of and then discard a stunning number of posts that deal with the nuts and bolts of my day to day life, because I suspect a lot of it of being kinda dull, and because I am a fairly private person.

That said, I don’t have much use for closets or coyness. I’ve been always been out online, made it known that I’m proudly queer and genderqueer, and I’ve even occasionally made reference in my blog to having been gay-bashed in my teens. I do this because there’s a difference between privacy and pretense. While I almost never go looking for big conversations or comment streams full of virtual hugs, I’m not gonna lie to avoid ’em.


So, anyway. The part of the Glee episode “Furt,” the bit that poked my gaybash button, was the vivid depiction of one kid causing another to live in abject abject terror. Wow. That was so my life for awhile! Complete with the thing where you forget for a second, and let start feeling something other than fear, and WHAM!

I haven’t ever seen the mirror held up, on a TV show, with such clarity. There was heebie and jeebie, folks.

Then it passed, and instead I got to thinking about the yay of my marriage to Kelly, and that’s what led to this Favorite Thing Ever post. And next week I will spin back to the Eighties and watch Sam and Al get their gay on for TOR.COM when I rewatch “Running for Honor”.

After that, who knows? Though there’s probably a 75% chance that a photograph of a bird will be involved.

Last line blues

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Last line blues

I will often get to the very last sentence of a nonfiction piece and find myself stymied. It is as though I can hear the tone of the thing, the notes I want to hit, but am waiting on lyrics.

When this happens, it usually plays out like this: I’ll polish up the article. Then I will spend ten or twenty minutes rearranging the few sentences before the yet-to-be-written ending. This can be followed by a denial phase. Maybe now that I have prettied that up, I can just stop. Damn! No! What if I rearrange thusly?

Eventually I buckle down and just grind out an approximation of whatever it is I’m trying to say, and then buff that from nonsense into coherence. Sometimes I give myself an extra public pants kick by tweetin’ about how I got those last line blues again. This triggers many helpful* suggestions on Facebook (“Write THE END”). Other times I whine via email to Snuffy, and then try to have something before she gets back to me.

This syndrome doesn’t manifest quite the same way with fiction. If I am writing a story, I will often end a session mere paragraphs from the end. Somehow, that feels okay, like waiting for a first layer of paint to dry. There are even times when the end comes early, and just waits for me to ravel together the beginning-middle-crisis.

The current story, tentatively titled “Among the Silvering Herd” has been weirdly recalcitrant, though, my writerbrain refusing to choke up a last line… until today. I am so happy that I finally have it. I am not such a one as enjoys thrashing with the same 250 words for two frickin’ weeks.

____
*By which I mean “helpful.” As in, with air quotes.

Shock the birdie

By | | ,
Comments Off on Shock the birdie

It’s a three things make a post day: My latest Quantum Leap rewatch is on TOR.COM today; the episode is “Shock Theater,” and it wraps up my discussion of the overall QL arc, at least until we get to “Mirror Image” in a month or so. Right now, I’m easing my way through season four.

I had a glance at my Annual Books Read list today. I do this every November, conclude that I haven’t read nearly enough, and then pick up my reading socks for a couple months. Then, usually around February, I’m hit by a tidal wave of teaching and slide back into my usual reading pace.

As part of this process, I went to HyperGeek and read their 2009 and 2010 roundups of shiny new, uber-amazing graphic novels, and then requested a bunch of same from the public library. I expect the house to be full of four-color goodness in a matter of days. And probably a few things that strain the definition of ‘goodness.’ And maybe even one or two that I’ll wish I hadn’t even glanced at. Hopefully there will be no Pride of Baghdad moments. Don’t get me wrong… it is an amazing graphic novel. But I’m just not looking to cry that hard when I’m reading comics.

And, finally, a photo. I was doing the kibble run to the vet’s at Kingsway and Clark(ish) awhile ago and discovered Stellar Jay heaven on the route… on Fleming and 18th, to be precise. I’ve never seen so many of the jays in one place; there were flickers aplenty, too, and one varied thrush. Most of the images I got were just okay, but I like the jay/fence combo in this one. He’s sort of glamour shotty, don’t you think?

Stellar's Jay