THE GIRL WHO CHASED THE MOON: A Review

Sarah Addison Allen has written three quirky small town Southern novels that mix gentle realism with magical fantasy. Her first book, Garden Spells, was a charming novel that set her template, which she followed to perfection in her second novel, The Sugar Queen.

Her most recent novel, The Girl Who Chased The Moon (which debuts at #10 on the New York Times list next week), has also been created out of the same blueprint and is also a winning fluffy concoction Here is what each book has in common:

• a small North Carolina town
• a couple of disjointed female characters with tragedy in their past
• a cast of quirky characters - some of whom seem to possess otherworldly abilities that center around food

In The Moon, after her mother's death, Emily Benedict came to Mullaby, NC hoping to solve some riddles surrounding her mother's life. Why did her mother suddenly and mysteriously leave town and why did she never mention any of her family? Emily is shocked to discover her grandfather is a gentle giant (literally, he is eight feet tall) and that the wallpaper in her mother's room changes patterns. Then there is the nightly mysterious light that appears in their backyard which her grandfather shoos away. Across the street a lonely woman named Julia bakes cakes which has a way of attracting a certain man who lives in town. Through a magical summer Emily discovers that in Mullaby riddles and mysteries seem to be a way of life.

Allen has the ability of balancing the precarious nature of this story realism versus enchanting magic. By this time, in her third book, she seems to have perfected it. The Moon is a short novel (around 65,000 words) but if it was any longer part of the charm would evaporate. It is much like Abraham Lincoln's comment about his legs - this novel is as long as it should be, long enough to get to the end of the story.

However, I am hoping that Allen soon moves away from this template. I'm sure her publisher is clamoring for more and more of the same because publishers have become infected with a Hollywood mentality - they only want what has sold before. I have no doubt Allen is capable of producing several more books from this template. But at the risk of becoming Dorthea Benton Frank.

Frank wrote one entertaining novel, her first - Sullivan's Island. Every book that followed Sullivan's Island has been a weaker knock-off until currently Frank is writing what amounts to a parody of her first success, embarrassing and pointless. Sarah Addison Allen may be approaching that abyss, but she has several things in her favor.

First of all, Allen is a much better writer than Frank, who at best is chatty and sappy. Allen has a real gift of developing characters and situations. Since she is a young woman, I can see a long literary career for Allen, somewhat like Maeve Binchy has created ... yes, Allen has that sort of talent. Here's hoping that Allen soon moves past this magical food realism story line and into meatier (pun intended) and more involved stories. I, for one, will be anxious to read them.

BIBLIO SAYS: Highly recommended.

Companion read: Choclat by Joanne Harris

JULIET, NAKED: A Review

I've always had trouble reading Nick Hornby novels. They sound like great ideas, and they usually are turned into good movies, but when you get within the pages something always seems to be flat. I'm happy to report with Juliet, Naked Hornby is in perfect form. The description of the book sounds fascinating, and by page 90 I was wondering what the hell happened.

In a dreary seaside English town Annie lives with Duncan. For fifteen years they have been together, an almost platonic domestic relationship of equal convenience and comfort. Duncan is obsessed with a Springsteen/Dylanesque American singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe who mysteriously dropped out of sight twenty years ago. Duncan is active in a small (very small) Internet community of Crowe fanatics who endlessly discuss Crowe's music and life and speculate about where he is and what he is doing. Duncan has spent most of his adult life dissecting every word and note and sound from Crowe's masterpiece, Juliet, an angst-filled passionate collection of songs. Halfway during the Juliet tour, Crowe canceled the rest of the tour dates and disappeared. And for twenty years, silence.

Then, suddenly, Crowe's record company releases Juliet, Naked - an acoustic, stripped down version of the classic LP. Annie writes a negative review of the Naked version and posts it on the Internet. Imagine her surprise when Tucker Crowe himself replies and they begin an Internet relationship - two lonely people looking for more than what they've got.

The book is a jumbled collection of scenes, with random characters popping up and the resolution is ... well, abrupt. Like this review.

BIBLIO SAYS: Wait for the movie.

THE PROFESSIONAL: A Review & Parker eulogy

Robert B. Parker, who died in January 18, 2010, used to write one of the best private eye / detective series featuring Boston gumshoe Spenser. Unfortunately the good Spenser books stopped about fifteen years before Parker died. And the latest, The Professional, is no exception. What happened to the Spenser series has to qualify as one of the greatest literary drops in modern fiction (if you ignore Norman Mailer.)

When Spenser premiered in 1973 (The Godwulf Manuscript) it was standard P.I. fare - wise cracking detective who used to be former cop, you know the drill. Starting with the second novel, God Save the Child, you could see that Parker and Spenser were atypical. Spenser is hired to find a missing teenage boy, Kevin, but when he understands why the kid ran away (a family that was, at best, ambivalent) Spenser creates an unusual solution. That set the stage for the next dozen Spenser novels - he is often less concerned with solving a crime than seeing that some kind of justice served, be it criminal, emotional or both. Spenser has his own code and he often makes seat-of-the-pants decisions about what is right and wrong.

Unfortunately, God Save The Child also introduced a character, Susan Silverman, who was to become the ultimate downfall of the series. Silverman is the school counselor and during the course of the novel, she and Spenser work together to salvage Kevin and his family. Through the next series of books Susan becomes a minor recurring character (she goes to Harvard and gets her Ph.D) and slowly she and Spenser become a committed couple, culminating in A Catskill Eagle (1985.)

But leading up to Eagle, Parker and Spenser re-defined modern crime fiction in those ten novels. We get to meet a black hired gun/enforcer named Hawk who becomes an uneasy collaborator with Spenser. Hawk is the darker side of Spenser's character, the flip side of the same coin. Hawk is one of the all-time great characters in modern crime fiction - flippant, sarcastic, brilliantly observant and a stone cold killer. Whenever Hawk is on-stage, the Spenser books take a sharp turn toward greatness. Gradually, Spenser and Hawk realize their ethics code is similar, separated by a small gray area. Tracing the development of their relationship through violence, humor and ruminations on good and evil, is one of the joys of the early Spenser novels.

But all that changed in A Catskill Eagle, a disturbing book. In an effort to find herself (oh god!) Susan feels she must separate from Spenser and moves to the West Coast. Then, Spenser receives an enigmatic letter from Susan that she is in trouble. Her lover is a powerful, possessive man whose father is an illegal weapons manufacturer. Susan is being held in the family compound. Hawk and Spenser race to her rescue which results in the men being hired by the U.S. government as contract killers. Susan needs to find her self but instead, gets involved with a control freak and needs Spenser to save her. What a brilliant woman! The Spenser series goes downhill quickly after this book.

In his quest to re-define the genre, Parker pushed the envelope too much and by the mid-1990s, the books had become self-parody. As Spenser and Susan become more intimately intertwined each Spenser book is little more than a exercise in sophomoric psychobabble. A typical novel goes like this: Spenser gets hired for a case; at the end of each day of collecting information and bashing heads, he and Susan will discuss what he has uncovered and analyze his feelings. "How did you feel when you were beating shit out of the hoodlum?" Susan will ask. "I felt like shit," Spenser will answer. "Why do you think you felt like shit while you beating the shit out of him?" Susan will brilliantly ask. So much for the prestige of a Harvard degree!

And then, there's Pearl the Wonder dog, the annoying pooch that Susan and Spenser share custody of. Reading a Spenser book became a sado-masochistic experience ... like listening to Genesis after Peter Gabriel left - you know how good it used to be and now you're stuck with this drivel!

The Professional is just the most recent Spenser exercise in self-parody (and almost the last unless the estate goes the V.C. Andrews route - God help us). The story is more flimsy than a wet Kleenex. Susan and Spenser's so-called sexy repartee does not even reach the level of a middle-of-the-road TV sitcom. Hawk appears in the book because that is now his role in the Spenser books - give Spenser advise on his current case, drop some witty observations and flirt with whatever woman happens to be in the scene. Hawk has become nothing more than window dressing. What a shame!

You may be asking ... why the hell do you keep reading these books? Good question. Answer is: I'm still hoping that Parker has that last great Spenser book in him. Same reason I listened to Genesis for a while in 1980s until they did that Michelob commercial which convinced me it was never going to happen. Same with Parker's death. There will never be another great Spenser novel, but we do have the first eleven still in print.

BIBLIO SAYS: Ignore The Professional.

Instead, go read the first eleven Spenser novels, and enjoy: (my favorites in red)
The Godwulf Manuscipt, God Save The Child, Mortal Stakes, Promised Land, The Judas Goat, Looking For Rachel Wallace, Early Autumn, A Savage Place, The Widening Gyre, Valediction.

A TWISTED LADDER: A Review

With all the advance praise and recommendations from writers I love (F. Paul Wilson) imagine my dismay when I discovered this book is nothing more than a torrid mess.

• college-freshman level writing
• abrupt narrative changes
• southern gothic soap opera cliques

And for everyone on Amazon declaring that this book is "original and daring" you obviously need to read more. Check out Dan Simmons' Carrion Comfort or go watch the movie The Skeleton Key. Or better yet, go check out the 1948 novel by Josephine Pinckney called Great Mischief; it deals with another Southern city, Charleston, and a deal with the devil without resorting to Hollywood cliques and southern stereotypes.

Rhodi Hawk works too hard to create the southern atmosphere. Everything in this book seems forced, nothing is believable and often not very precise. Can we please have a novel about New Orleans that DOES NOT trot out the black voodoo queen? THAT would very original.

BIBLIO SAYS: Pass it by.

BONESHAKER: A Review

First of all, I enjoyed reading Boneshaker. Most of my complaints have nothing to do with the author or the story. More on that in a moment.

Boneshaker takes place in an alternate Seattle of the 1880s which includes zombies, gas masks, airships, pirates and an American Civil War that has lasted almost 20 years.

Briar Wilkes survived the zombie takeover that claimed most of Seattle. A rift in the earth released a noxious gas that killed thousands of people, and several days after their death, they arose and began to attack and feed upon the living. Seattle built a 200 foot high walled around most of downtown Seattle which imprisons the undead zombies. Briar has dedicated her life to providing for her teenage son Zeke in a very bleak life outside the wall. She works 15-hour days cleaning the air to make it less dangerous to breath.

But one day Zeke vanishes over the wall into the zombie-infested center of Seattle in an attempt to clear the family name. Zeke's father, and Briar's husband, may have created the disaster that destroyed Seattle, that ripped open the earth in which the noxious gas escape which created the undead zombies. Briar takes matters into her own hands, follows her son over the wall and confronts the horrific conditions inside. Along the way she starts to make peace with the demons of her past in the process. Briar is every inch a mother, but flawed, too. She reminds me of the character Ripley (from the Alien films) as she finds strength in surprising places and soldiers on, in spite of the mounting fear and horrors that surround her.

My complaints about this book have to do with the publisher, Tor. What genius decided to print the book in a faint brown type that made it a chore to struggle to read? The book industry is struggling in this economic age, so why would a publisher purposefully make the book difficult to read? Hopefully, someone at TOR will re-format the book when it goes into another printing.

BIBLIO SAYS: Recommended ... if you like to squint.

AN OLD CAPTIVITY: A Review

More than just an ordinary plane trip, first published in 1940, this novel is still a stand-out! Don Ross is hired to fly an ageing Oxford professor, Lockwood, to Greenland to prove an archeological theory - that around 1000 AD the Celts had explored and settled Greenland, leaving ruins. The first half of the book is pure Shute, painstakingly following Ross as he purchases an aeroplane and supplies for the trip. He lectures the professor on the rigors of the undertaking and tries to shed light on the harsh reality awaiting. Shute, an engineer, always has a great way of explaining technical details that are both interesting and simple for the layman to understand. We follow Ross as he quietly goes about the sheer overwhelming amount of preparation with determination and the classic British "stiff upper lip."
Accompanying Don and Lockwood is the professor's frumpish daughter, Alix, who is in fear for her father's health and mistrust's Don, thinking him out to bilk her father and rich uncle, who is funding the expedition. As they make the journey - England to Scotland, Scotland to Iceland, etc... - enduring simple hardships and delays, professor and daughter realize their initial idea of this being merely a simple journey was mistaken; their lives and safety are completely in Don's hands, who works himself eighteen hours a day ... becoming frail and weak.
Then, as the expedition reaches its destination, Don falls into a semi-coma of fatigue - and this is where Shute's not-so-modern sensibility shines through. Over halfway through the book, the simple adventure tale of survival becomes an almost metaphysical exploration of love, reincarnation and time travel, done with such a slight and clever hand that the reader barely is aware of what has happened.
Such is the genius of Nevil Shute. He has long been one of my favorite writers. I have also long trumpeted the fact that he is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Even though in style he is very old-fashioned, he was always on the cutting edge of ideas. Many of his novels explore scientific theory that later was proved correct. A decade after this novel, archeologists began to excavate ruins in Greenland proving settlements more than a 1000 years old.

A slyly brilliant book. Part adventure, part romance, part mystical .... all Shute.


BIBLIO SAYS: Highly recommended!
Suggested other reading: In The Wet by Nevil Shute. Another metaphysical adventure story set in Australia's outback.

THE DEVIL'S PUNCHBOWL: A Review

Greg Iles is always dependable and The Devil's Punchbowl does not disappoint. It's another atmospheric thriller set in Natchez, Mississippi that explores on the creeping corruption from the riverboat casinos; a southern town becomes victim to the overwhelming torrent of money flooding in from the gambling, and becomes victim to a dark underworld of depravity. Mayor Penn Cage, a former prosecuting attorney (also featured in the previous novels, The Quiet Game and Turning Angel) finds his family in danger when he discovers one too many secrets.

Let me say this up front: I like Greg Iles' novels. I've read most of them and enjoyed them ... but not as much as much I could have. Let me explain. Iles has a very annoying habit in most of his novels: HE WRITES IN PRESENT TENSE!

I have never read a novel that has been improved by switching from the more traditional past tense ("Joe walked into the room and said, "Stop, or I'll shoot.") to the more annoying and less clear present tense ("Joe walks into the room and says, "Stop, or I'll shoot.") If you're like most readers, as you read your mind changes the prose from present to past tense. As a writer you are doing something you should NEVER do - giving the reader a reason to stop!

When I'm browsing books and I see a novel written in present tense, I put the book back on the shelf and move on. There are very few writers that I will give the benefit of that doubt, and Iles is one. I have read several of his books written in the more traditional method and know that he is a good and entertaining writer ... one whose books would warrant re-reading ... except for one annoying thing.

Come on, Mr. Iles, you're a better writer. Drop the look-at-me-writing-in-the- present-tense-I-can-be-modern attitude and just write good books - in past tense. Your public will thank you.

BIBLIO SAYS: Recommended ... with reservations.

MR. SHIVERS: A Review

This is a darkly creepy dust storm of a book, part Stephen King and part John Steinbeck -if Steinbeck lost most of his talent. It starts as a revenge story rooted in the harsh reality of the Dust Bowl days, and transforms into a heavy-handed examination of myth.
 

Marcus Connelly is a good man who begins a desperate trek through the ruins of 1930s American heartland on the trail of his child's murderer. As he tracks the elusive fiend the hobos call Mr. Shivers, Connelly discovers that he's not the only person whose life the killer has ruined. Connelly gathers around him a group of like-minded desperate lost souls, with each member of the group of vagabonds loosely based on some mythic figure in the literary past. As the Dust Bowl refugees pursue Shivers through a bleak and hopeless world, they gradually realize that he is the embodiment of an elemental force of destruction, and begin sacrificing their own humanity for the sake of vengeance.

The book starts off as slow as a locomotive climbing a mountain, and never reaches the top. However, for the most part Mr. Shivers is tightly written with a great economical style almost as sparse as the landscape, even though some of the symbolism is a bit forced. I'm not surprised to discover the author is a recent university graduate. His professors probably taught him that as a "serious" author, you must have literary pretensions.


BIBLIO SAYS: Recommended, with some reservations.

A DARK MATTER: A Review

If Stephen King is the Louis L'Amour of horror writers, then Peter Straub is the Henry James. King is the master of blue collar gruesome and Straub is expert in urbane psychological terror. When Straub is good, he is VERY good (Ghost Story, Mystery). When he's bad, he usually interesting (The Hellfire Club, The Throat). But with his new novel, A Dark Matter, Straub is not even interesting, he's almost incoherent.

First, the story: one evening in 1966 (damn, the 60s!) in Madison, Wisconsin, a group of students follow their guru into a meadow and perform some mysterious (and forbidden, of course) ritual. Eight people go into the meadow, six return. One body is left behind munched beyond recognition, and the second body just vanishes into the great netherworld. The leader, Spencer Mallon, is one of the phony Jim Morrison types who spout New Age nonsense to a group of wide-eyed innocent kids; he sleeps with the girls, mooches food, booze and drugs from the group - a typical 60s intellectual hack. After the "incident", he skips town, leaving the surviving kids to deal with the fallout. One goes insane, others become criminals, one becomes a writer (imagine that!) but all have deep emotional trauma that follows them into their middle years.

Through the annoying use of what critics and collegiate types like to call a Roshomon-style narrative (the same story told from different viewpoints) Straub assaults the reader with paragraphs of dense prose which any community college English 101 instructor would have slashed with red ink: "Too wordy! Be concise!"

By page 100 the reader is forced to read a fictional version of the event (by the author character) and within two pages we realize why it has remained unpublished - it's awful. So take heed and avoid this mishmash of supernatural silliness. The last thing you need is to spend time in the overrated hazy past of the 60s with a self-centered guru-on-the-make and a group of easily-fooled kids.

BILBIO SAYS: Stay away!
Alternate read: Ghost Story, by Peter Straub, a classic, and creepy horror novel.