The Terror

Title: The Terror

Author: Dan Simmons
Pub Date: 2007
Genre: Historical Fiction/Psychological Horror
Nutshell: The crews of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, stranded in the Arctic wastes while searching for the Northwest Passage, are being hunted by something on the ice.

Oh my gosh, you guys, this book is LONG. I read it on the Kindle, so I didn't have a real good idea of the length, but one reviewer said the book won't kill you unless it falls on your head. That may be true. But the length may be part of the point of the book, since the characters in the book are stranded in the high Arctic for years. The seeming endlessness of the book echoes the endlessness of the days. But boy howdy is this a slog in parts.

But anyway. The tale is told from the points of view of various sailors aboard the two ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, who are on yet another expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage, which Great Britain seemed to be obsessed with in the 19th century. Something goes hopelessly awry and the ships get completely stuck in the solid pack ice of the high latitudes, and after a while it becomes apparent that something is hunting them. After that, it becomes a slow winding down unto eventual death between the ice, the unrelenting cold, starvation, the thing, mutinous sailors, and various forms of illness. 

The story is based on the historical ill-fated Franklin Expedition to the Arctic of 1845, from which there were no recorded survivors. Of course, Simmons takes some liberties with the plot to add the element of horror to the story and twists the ending to make it more interesting than the likely more factual result. And for all that it was so incredibly long and I do admit to skipping parts, I did keep going to the end. Volumes upon volumes of Patrick O'Brian have made me used to longer seagoing narratives than I might otherwise be accustomed to reading. The main narrator, Captain Francis Crozier, was a compelling enough character that I couldn't leave him completely behind, and some of the other sailors, namely Lieutenant Irving and Surgeon Goodsir, were also interesting enough to keep me slogging. The beast/terror on the ice is presented vaguely enough that it remains mysterious until the end, which was a good choice. And, in the end, the fact that I started reading this in the end of August in Kentucky, when the temperature is 90 degrees and the humidity is staggering was likely the best possible environment for hundreds of pages of ice and snow and subzero temperatures. 

I would hesitate before recommending this book to any but the heartiest readers, honestly. I read this on a recommendation for psychological horror, and it's definitely not one for obvious gore or anything, but it is a long walk to get to much of anything. If you're interested in naval fiction, it's not bad for that. In terms of bleakness, it's no worse in its way than O'Brian's Desolation Island or The Unknown Shore, just infinitely longer. If you're really into Arctic exploration, have at it. If you're into Inuit mythology, there's a bit for you here too. But otherwise, it's a very, very long book. 

Hollow City

Title: Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children

Author: Ransom Riggs
Pub Date: 2014
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Nutshell: The peculiar children of Miss Peregrine's loop struggle to help their injured headmistress while keeping safe from hollows

I read the first book in this series (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) about a year or so ago. It's an odd premise--a novel seemingly built around a series of photographs the author found, more or less. But the narrative itself is quite good and definitely draws you in, and the quirky pictures eventually take a back seat to the story.

This is the second novel, and you have to have read the first to really understand what's happening. Suffice it to say that Jacob and his peculiar friends have been ousted from their safe home and are on the run from forces that want them dead. This book is the story of their journey toward London in their search for help for their wounded headmistress, Miss Peregrine, and also to rescue the other kidnapped ymbrynes that hollows are keeping locked up. On the way, they will meet other peculiars and learn a great deal about what they're up against.

This is another engrossing tale and a very quick read. There aren't a lot of punches pulled here, so for all that it's YA, very young readers might be a bit overwhelmed. But I would have loved this series at about age 11 or 12. Adults will also find it most enjoyable.

The Devil Wears Prada

Title: The Devil Wears Prada
Author: Lauren Weisberger
Pub Date: 2003
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A young woman gets a job as a personal assistant for the diva editor of a fashion magazine

So, "chick lit." This is a difficult world for me, because while I should technically be a consumer (being a chick, and being a consumer of lit), I have a very hard time finding much in the genre that I can like very much. This book turned out to be not much of an exception to that. It was okay, but the further I got into it, the harder it was for me to stay with it or to like much of anybody in it.

So we have Andrea, fresh out of Brown University on some kind of Literature or English degree, who accidentally walks into a job working as the junior personal assistant to Miranda Priestly, the uber-bitch editor of the fictional Runway magazine. Andrea knows nothing about fashion, has no idea who Miranda is, and zero experience as an assistant of any sort, but quickly learns that her job is to be a sort of highly-comped servant to be misused and abused at all hours of the day and night by Priestly, a sort of caricature of a rich, out of touch society woman who has never been told no in her life loud enough to have heard it after reaching a certain level of power.

As her year of servitude drags on, Andrea begins to lose her friends and relationships to the all-consuming task of being Miranda's assistant. She cannot take personal calls. She cannot make plans, even on weekends. She must be available at all times, because she never knows if she will be summoned to a black tie event or a week in Paris. Her best friend becomes an alcoholic, her boyfriend grows distant, and yet Andrea continues to be Miranda's complaining lackey, because at the end of the year, she might be able to get in the door at The New Yorker, her dream job, at a much faster speed than trying to do it the old-fashioned way.

The real problem with the book for me is in the characterization. Maybe it's because I have never lived in New York. I'm Kentucky born and raised, and we don't understand or exactly trust Yankees in general and New Yorkers in particular. Maybe it's because I am a grizzled and weathered 35 instead of a young and naive 22. But I cannot believe that anyone behaves in the ways that either Miranda or Andrea behave. The rest of the supporting cast is fine, but the main two are just complete aliens for me. I didn't see the movie, and I'm sure that Meryl Streep managed to make the role of Miranda divine in that way of hers, but in the book, she's just horrendous without mitigation. There is one moment in Paris when she is almost human, but you almost by that point get the idea that she might just be a sociopath by that point, grooming her victim. Or maybe she's just trapped in an echo chamber of her own making, and Andrea just has a martyr complex. Either way, I cannot really like either one of them. Andrea's incessant whining and yet continuous running and fetching gets old quickly, and Miranda's complete inhumanity just start to grate. I would tell both of them to get a grip inside of five minutes.

This was an easy enough read, I suppose. Certainly not mentally taxing. But probably I won't hang on to it. Maybe I'll catch the movie some time and see what Meryl does with the part. 

Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales

Title: Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales
Author: Kenneth Hite
Pub Date: 2008
Genre: Literary criticism
Nutshell: A Lovecraft scholar takes us through the writer's collection of stories

Obviously, there's a certain barrier to entry with this book. If you haven't already read Lovecraft's works, you're probably going to want to either before or as you're reading Ken Hite's book, because otherwise there's not much purpose to the exercise. This is a companion piece and not a standalone work. 

However, if you, as I, are a Lovecraft nerd, or even just a Ken Hite fan, this is worth the 8 bucks you'll pay for it on Kindle (it is totally out of print). I came to Lovecraft in my 20s, after a thorough affair with Poe, and then discovered Hite through the completely excellent and yet manifestly silly H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (hppodcraft.com: all the Lovecraft stuff in the history is free--it is now a subscription model with one free episode a month as they're going through stories mentioned in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature"). I also heard Hite speak last year at GenCon in Indianapolis, and the man clearly knows his stuff, and a lot of it.

Hite is the rare author that still makes me consult a dictionary every few pages. The Kindle format is great for that, since you can just long press on a word and off you go. For me to have to look up a word is pretty rare, but he definitely does not hold back on the vocab. He is an unabashed fan of Lovecraft, and while he and I do not always agree on what we like, there is enough here to be interesting ephemera to the original stories. Probably only for a true fan, though. You have to have already fallen into the wormhole. If you don't like Lovecraft and don't really care, then this isn't for you. Otherwise, this is an interesting and cheap and well-written companion piece from a guy who obviously knows quite a bit.

The Bridges of Madison County

Title: The Bridges of Madison County
Author: Robert James Waller
Pub Date: 1992
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A photographer and an Iowa housewife engage in a passionate and brief affair in the summer of 1965.

At one time, this book would have fallen into what I call "housewife porn." And in a way, I suppose it still does. There are certainly elements of romance to it that appeal to a woman--especially a woman with responsibilities who might find herself a bit bored with normal life. But reading it now (for the first time--I saw the movie years ago and liked it fine. I'll watch about anything Meryl Streep does, and I thought the cinematography was lovely), this is much more a story for and by an older man than any kind of narrative meant for a woman, whatever its audience ended up being. 

I'm not going to go all feminist critique up in here. I'm pretty far out of school for that (thank goodness). But, for all this is ostensibly a narrative told about and ultimately by a woman, this is very much about a man. It reeks of it, especially after a certain point.

I don't think I'm going to be giving much away, here. The movie was huge, and the book is hardly coy about what ultimately happens. It's a very short read (took me maybe two hours all told), so you're going to know what happens fairly quickly, even if you somehow don't already. Francesca Johnson, age 45, lives on an Iowa farm with her husband and two children. One summer afternoon while her family is away at the Iowa State Fair showing a steer that got way more attention than she did, she meets photographer Robert Kincaid, age 52, who is in Iowa taking photos of covered bridges. Kincaid is everything her husband is not--complex where he is simple, thoughtful where he is careless, poetic where he is dull. And lo, they fall in the sort of love that only ever really happens in fiction, where they cannot separate themselves from the other and they become some other thing entirely. 

Let it not be said that I am not a romantic, for indeed I most certainly am. I found the love of my life at the age of 30 and I am still with him five years later, still every bit as much in love with him now as I was then, and we are gloriously happy together. I left behind more than a few obligations and responsibilities to be with him, because I had to. To not be with him was quite frankly not an option. And non, je ne regrette rien. So don't tell me about certainty and love, Robert James Waller. I know quite a bit. But if my love, this man, ever spouts off something like, "I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea," I would probably ask if he had maybe had some kind of drug interaction. If he said it during sex, I would honestly fear an aneurysm. Because people--and I don't care how old you are or how many places you've been--people do not talk like that outside their own heads unless they've ingested enough substances that I don't think sex would be on the table at that point. 

But this guy, Robert Kincaid, is the last of a dying breed. He's a shaman. He's a wanderer. He's -- as soon as they start having sex, any narrative drive Francesca had in the book ceases and everything shifts over to him and his bizarre cowboy fantasies about being on the dead end of an evolutionary chain. It's not until he leaves that it returns to her. It's very odd, for all it's supposed to be from her journals. 

And in the end, this book isn't about Francesca. She is merely the necessary object to be acted upon and against and through in order for him, Robert Kincaid, to have his experience. It could have been anyone, it happened to be her. Anything interesting about her as a person sort of vanishes in the middle of the book and never exactly comes back. It's frustrating. This isn't as much housewife porn as it is exceptionalist old guy porn, in a way. It's inoffensive, to be sure. The writing is lovely, and the setting is evocative. It's a very fast read, and you could certainly do worse for yourself on a lazy afternoon. But it left a weird taste in my mouth all the same.