On his blog Plot to Punctuation, freelance editor Jason Black talks about the three words that will stop your story's momentum faster than a concrete wall halts a speeding semi. Excerpt:
This morning I asked Twitter what the three worst words in fiction are. I got answers like suddenly, something happened, tall, dark, and handsome, ... and my favorite of those submitted, only a dream.
Those are good answers. I mean really, I would hope an author can be more specific about what happened than "something," and when it does happen, I certainly hope it doesn't turn out to be a dream. But for my money, the three worst words in fiction are:
Zombies have a pretty immovable place in the genre equation: "The living dead" almost always equals "horror." Sure, one can find exceptions. For several years, Hollywood has cut visceral bloodletting with comedy in films such as Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. But Max Brooks, son of actor Mel Brooks, takes the zombie story in an entirely different direction with his debut novel, World War Z. How? He makes it into speculative fiction.
There was a lot about the report that the United Nations Postwar Commission didn't like. Oh, the charts and graphs and statistics were fine. But the Commission's chairman thought the personal stories from the war's survivors was "not what this report is about. We need facts and figures, unclouded by the human factor." The human factor, though, is exactly what the report's author wants to preserve. He yearns for people to hear the firsthand accounts of encountering Patient Zero in Chongqing, China, and the spectacularly failed military stand against the horde in Yonkers, New York, and how a single civilian hatched a strategy to save mankind in the Drakensberg mountain range of South Africa. Yes, the report's author wants you to grasp the human factor behind World War Z -- the great zombie war.
One of the things that makes Z succeed is how Brooks' structures it. He divvies up each chapter into a series of chronologically and thematically linked interviews and monologues from survivors in every part of the globe. Notably, he takes pains to keep the narrative from growing disjointed, and much of Z reads like a collection of linked short stories akin to, say, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. An Iranian teenager committed to jihad must come to terms with the fact that the only nation willing and able to shelter him is Israel. A downed American pilot gets talked through a hazardous trek in a zombie-infested swamp by a mysterious voice coming in over her radio. A disgraced Japanese gardener blinded by the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima becomes an almost mythic figure by felling scores of the infected alone in the woods. But Brooks is interested in more than just individuals; he teases out geopolitical implications, asking, "What would happen if the nations faced an exponentially growing threat that couldn't be countered by ordinary means?" His answers are intriguing. China, the origin of the outbreak, sees its population decimated, and its government fragment under rebellion. The United States relocates its capital to Hawaii, forming a bipartisan ruling coalition. Pakistan ignites a nuclear exchange, although with an ill-prepared Iran rather than the expected India. However, not all of Brooks' vignettes excel. He portrays a pre-war America as being laughably beholden to corporate interests, and a Russian Orthodox priest's transformation into a pistol-wielding death dealer taps into stale religious stereotypes. For the most part, though, Z engages in some fascinatingly splattery speculation.
Ari Dolan's bus arrived twenty minutes late. At work, his boss awarded Tanya the Burke account. Home again, he found his AC dead. He ground his teeth, murmuring invectives.
Mercifully, he didn't see the testers beside him. Their horror -- or beauty? -- could break minds.
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Over at CriminalElement.com, Max Allan Collins (The Million-Dollar Wound) provides a very detailed history of hardboiled. Excerpt:
You don’t see the term "hardboiled" much any more. "Noir" has supplanted it, co-opted from the French film critics who intended it for the American crime films made during and shortly after World War II. Those critics had co-opted the term from Serie Noire, the black-covered paperbacks from publisher Gallimard that reprinted the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane.
Hardboiled, as early as twenty years ago, became a dirty word in publishing. Cozy mysteries were outselling hardboiled, and likely still are. So the appropriation of "noir" was a hipper, more elegant-sounding way to rebrand the tough stuff.
Read the whole thing. Collins deftly digs to the root of hardboiled’s family tree, pulling up not only familiar names such as Hammett and Chandler, but lesser known authors and some of the periodicals that spawned the subgenre. Unfortunately, he only devotes a small space to the differences between hardboiled and noir, writing, "Many noir writers, in a trend beginning in the ’80s and ’90s, do depart from what I would view as hardboiled. An emotional aspect dismissed as sentimental has been banished for a more paranoid, harsher world view." I would argue that’s only half the story. Sure, lots of noir is bleakly nihilistic, but some imbue it with a moral sense more akin to classical tragedy. Consider The Square, for example. Quibbles aside, though, this article is well worth your time if you’re the least interested in crime fiction.
Note: This post contains spoilers of a very splattery sort. Consider yourself forewarned.
According to Box Office Mojo, the hardboiled thriller Drive took in $35 million in the United States. Not a bad number for a film with a $15 million budget. But when you consider the movie featured powerhouse talent such as Ryan Gosling (The Notebook), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) and Ron Perlman (Hellboy), that number looks pretty puny. Such underperformance made crime writer Patti Abbott wonder just what it was that turned audiences off to Drive. "Did word of mouth hurt it?"” she asked on her blog. "It did a third of its business opening weekend." Myself, I didn't see the movie until last week because I'd heard it was a little violent and my wife doesn't enjoy that sort of thing. So I let it creep up the Netflix queue and watched it over a few days' worth of treadmill time.
And I now know exactly why more people didn't snap up tickets in the theater.
It's not because of the story, which contains plenty of drama, action and romance. A getaway driver who doubles as a Hollywood stuntman falls for his next door neighbor but gets targeted by organized crime when her ex-con husband is released from jail. Neither is it because of the style. Newton Sigel's cinematography fairly pops off the screen, beautifully detailed and cunningly shot. No, I'm certain people shied away from Drive because of the aforementioned violence.
Having once reviewed movies for a living, I'm not terribly sensitive to simulated barbarity. I watched Cabin Fever and A History of Violence without wincing. But Drive shifts from sedately paced drama into outright butchery with such speed that I imagine it left many theatregoers with whiplash. A point-blank shotgun blast literally blows Christina Hendricks' brains out of her head. Blood spurts from Bryan's Cranston's slit radial artery after a run-in with a razor-wielding baddie. Gosling dishes out more pain than he takes, stabbing an assassin through the chest with a curtain rod, stamping another's head until his cranium collapses and pounding a thug's hands with a claw hammer. (Later that particular bad guy gets a piece of flatware shoved in his eye and his throat gouged with a butcher knife.)
Now, let's not wring our hands too much over director Nicolas Winding Refn's squishy setpieces. Artistic freedom's a fine thing, and Refn has every right to make his movies as grisly as he'd like them to be. In fact, that's exactly what he's done, from the gritty Pusher trilogy to the grimy Valhalla Rising. But let's not forget the other half of the equation: Audiences are equally free to not watch. No matter how fine Drive's story, no matter how striking its shots or compelling its leads, many will find it hard to recommend given its explicit content. I know I sure do.
Myra looked up from the toilet she was scrubbing. "So the conference was good."
Will pulled off his green mirrored shades. "Totally life-changing. The motivational session was called 'Slaying Your Dragons.'"
"Hmmm." Myra squirted bleach into the bowl.
The dandruff on Will's dark shirt looked almost scaly. "See, we have to kill what stands between us and success."
"Dragons."
"Right." He lit a cigarette. "I think mine's selflessness. I need to pursue my dreams." He flicked ash on the freshly mopped floor. "Hey, you should find out what your dragon is."
Myra stared. "Yeah. Sure. Wonder what it could be."
Note: Friday's Forgotten Books is hosted this week at Sweet Freedom, the blog of genre fan, cinephile and jazz lover Todd Mason. Todd has published numerous stories, poems and non-fiction pieces in markets such as The Progressive and Tomorrow Speculative Fiction. Log on to discover old, obscure and unfairly overlooked titles.
Truth be told, sometimes I hesitate to pick up forgotten books. While the persistent presence of schlocky authors atop the bestseller lists squashes the idea that the market always sorts wheat from chaff, many books disappear for good reason. How does one find the worthwhile ones, though? I usually resort to personal recommendations. That's exactly how I ended up reading Keith Laumer's 1970 SF thriller The House in November. While browsing through a delightfully unorganized used-book store, a stranger and I started talking about Orson Scott Card. In short order, he pressed a copy of November into my hands and said, "You should read this. It's old and weird and good." So I did.
Jeff Mallory has woken to a world he no longer understands. Before rising from his bed, he believed himself to be a married man with three children who runs his own engineering firm in the small town of Beatrice, Nebraska. But his wife tells him that he has only two children. That church near their house? It never existed. And he also doesn't work in engineering. No, he works just like everyone else in the Star Tower. Mallory has no idea what she's talking about or why his neighbors troop about like zombies. But most disturbing is his realization that three months have vanished like a dream. He tries to escape Beatrice and succeeds after a nasty scrape with beings that appear look like spongy facsimiles of people. Aliens, perhaps? But why would they be in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska? He doesn't know, nor does he understand how everyone on the outskirts of Beatrice could believe that the town is occupied not by extraterrestrials, but by Communist invaders.
Laumer does a number of things really well. First, he pens cracking good fight scenes. Forget generic superhero protagonists who shrug off storms of hot lead. Mallory gets battered, beaten and bruised with every hostile encounter, managing to survive only through smarts and good fortune. Second, Laumer manages to keep you guessing about the central conflict for a long time. Have aliens really landed? Or did Communist forces unleash advanced weaponry in a sneak attack? Is Satan stalking the earth with demonic armies in tow? Could the entire thing be the result of Mallory's damaged psyche, a kind of waking fever dream brought on by sublimated trauma? Any of the options seem plausible -- at least until you hit the two-thirds mark. Then Laumer launches into an overly expository section that feels ham-handed compared to what went before it. Though the conclusion aims for thrills, the novel never entirely recovers. November starts off hot, but cools far too quickly.
On his blog Plot to Punctuation, freelance editor Jason Black talks about the three words that will stop your story's momentum faster than a concrete wall halts a speeding semi. Excerpt:
