This nice novella is a 90 page sledgehammer of murder, dismemberment, cannibalism, pedophilia, and worse set against a lurid backdrop of the Golden Age of Piracy. James Havoc’s vision of the 17th century is an interesting place to live in, to say the least. Nearly every paragraph has something that will cause bile to crawl up your throat.
Needless to say, story is far from Havoc’s number one priority here. A young man called Misson (his background is somewhat unexplained. Havoc often leaves tantalising “here there be dragons” blank patches in the plot) is involved in a mutiny on the high seas, with an insane monk called Carriacole (who considers himself “the shit of Christ”) installing Misson as the new captain. The crew renounces all ties to God and Government, and set forth as free men. Havoc riffs on the idea that pirates were anarchists hundreds of years before their time, men who tried to solve their problems not by learning new concepts, but by purging their minds of concepts already there.
The newly-made pirates cut a swathe of destruction across the main, destroying slaving ships, whaling vessels, and everything else they consider an affront against liberty. Real life pirates such as Billy the Kid and the revolting Thomas Tew weave in and out of the story. Eventually, Misson and friends establish a stronghold on the island of Madagascar, hoping for a pirate paradise that will never be. A tribe of cannibals called the Mohilians has marked them for death. Worse, corruption and decadence begins eating at the pirate community from within.
Things take on an interesting allegorical edge at this point. Beneath the gore and human debris, White Skull is the story of what happens when men throw off the chains of society…and then find that those chains were the only things keeping them tethered to sanity. As the pirate paradise grows increasingly vile and repugnant, Havoc sketches Misson’s growing fatalism at what is happening around him. And soon we realise that even Misson’s soul is rotting away, perhaps even faster than the others.
Havoc’s writing is florid and colorful. You will wish that he wasn’t so talented at describing disgusting things. The story doesn’t move, it gallops, and the big finale is extremely satisfying. But what will stay with you longest are Havoc’s subtexts about humanity and inhumanity. They are the most disturbing parts of White Skull, and competition is fierce.
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I am a huge Arnold nuthugger and the criteria for a good Arnold Schwarzenegger Book are easily met in my eyes. Disjointed ramblings about fulfilling your dreams, punctuated with pictures of the Oak lifting weights, and I’m sold. Regardless, this book didn’t fully meet my expectations.
The Education of a Bodybuilder starts off with Arnold’s life story, which (at that point in time) meant going from being a teen in Barely-on-the-Map Austria to the world’s most successful bodybuilder. He talks about his motivation for getting into bodybuilding, how he reacted to success and failure, and even his relationship with girls in high school. You’d feel like a creep asking some of this stuff in an interview, but here he lays it all on the table.
Sometimes it’s sanitary enough to be untrustworthy (apparently, Arnold’s dad was never anything more than a police chief), although you’ll be happy to know there’s lots of dirt. A interesting part deals with how a gym owner tried to seduce him. You can see how some of these things affected him (such as how he turned his back on his religion, and disappointed his parents), despite all the success he had later in life. In all, fascinating and it really puts you inside the man’s head.
…But that’s only half the book. The second half is a generic “How to get big muscles fast” manual that isn’t half as interesting as the bio. If you’re an experienced lifter you’ll find nothing new here. If you’re a novice, you’ll find far better and more up-to-date info on the internet. The writing and presentation is downright sloppy, and sometimes there are actual factual errors. In one part, he says that if you weigh 150 pounds, doing a push-up is as good as bench pressing a 150 pound barbell. Earlier in the book he talks about an exercise called “the Arnold Press” and says he’ll explain what it is later in the book. The Arnold Press is never mentioned again. In another section he emphasises that you must do calf-raises with a lot of weight, but in the accompanying picture he’s doing calf-raises with only four plates. This kind of stuff really sends the wrong impression.
Otherwise, it suffers from vagueness. He talks constantly about “tuning” and “tightening up” your body. What does that mean? Bigger muscles? Less fat? He talks about the power of the mind and how to have the will of a champion, and while that’s useful, I think new bodybuilders would be helped more by an explanation of macronutrient ratios and correct posture and form. And needless to say, all of his training advice must be viewed in light of the fact that he’s a steroid user with really good genetics.
So I guess you can treat this like an album with a few bonus tracks on the end. Read the bio. Do whatever you want with the training advice.
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OK, no matter which abysmal places this animal-themed series went AFTERWARDS, the first Redwall title was an awesome read. All the elements of a classic children’s tale are out in force. It’s occasional silliness is acceptable because we haven’t read it long enough for it to become unbearable. For the most part it’s fresh, interesting, and exciting. The hero isn’t a wise-cracking hombre who can tie two rats into a knot while stirring a martini with his spare paw. He’s a frightened and vulnerable mouse, and often it seems like he won’t make it.
Brian Jacques was supposed to have written this as a one-off book to keep some blind kids entertained. It’s amazing how we can sometimes put in the performance of a lifetime when we’re not even trying, but I digress. Matthias is a mouse raised at Redwall Abbey, a sanctuary of sorts for peace-loving animals. But a horse-drawn cart containing hundreds of fierce warrior rats has landed nearby, and strife seems inevitable. The Redwallers would prefer to go on growing flowers and singing songs for the rest of their days, but alas, they wake up to the harsh reality that sometimes war is the only way forward. It’s not a grave idealogical contradiction to cuddle a friendly puppy while kicking its littermate as it chews your ankle.
Amidst all this is Matthias, who is trying to find his place and identity in the escalating conflict. He believes he has been chosen for some great destiny. Assisting him are a menagerie of friendly mice and other animals, such as the wise mouse Methuselah and the mighty badger Constance, whom I believe is based on Jacques’ grandmother. Constance frequently comes close to stealing the show. Every time she appears your ears perk up, because you know you’re about to be entertained.
What makes this book so much better than the other ones? Well, I think it’s because Brian Jacques didn’t have much of a game-plan. That sounds weird, but frankly, he tried to push a format on the later books (which was noticeable starting from Mossflower and became really irritating starting from The Pearls of Lutra) that didn’t really work so well. You know, it’s like he felt that evil must be balanced by good at all times, so every bloodthirsty battle scene must be countered by a scene of the characters having a feast or a party or doing something sentimental, even if it adds nothing to the plot. With Redwall, he’s still building his bridges and mapping out the terrain. He doesn’t know what he’s doing at this stage of the game, and the result is a book that feels much more spontaneous and “alive”, because he hasn’t yet had the chance to bog it down with pretentiousness.
The action builds and builds (the sequence involving the sparrows was my favorite), and Jacques juggles characters and situations like a pro. There’s a lot of subplots that intertwine in all sorts of rewarding ways, but they’re all resolved by the time the climax rolls around. The final section of the book is Matthias vs the rats, no side-tracks or distractions.
The book has its share of irritations and nitpicks (the rats are infuriatingly incompetent, to the point where they don’t seem like a legitimate threat to Redwall at all), but they are overturned by the sheer triumph of the book’s story. Get this one, and maybe the next three or four. Redwall doesn’t stay good for long, so enjoy it while it lasts.
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This book is like episode 93 of the Simpsons, where Bart gets hired as Krusty the Klown’s personal assistant. He hears a janitor grumbling about how terrible showbusiness is, and Krusty says “don’t listen to him, kid! This is the place where dreams are made! Now go clean out my toilet!”
I was pretty hyped up for this book when it came out. A chance for Brian Jacques to put a bullet through the skull of his decrepit and aging Redwall series, and start out fresh with a new series…it sounded like a dream.
The first section of this book is great. Maybe it trowels on the melodrama a bit thick (the star is a poor, abused, disabled orphan), but we don’t get 30-page descriptions of food, so score one for the good guys! It’s about a 17th-century era boy who stows away on a ship along with a stray dog, and the journey that ends with that ship becoming the legendary Flying Dutchman. This is some of the best material Brian Jacques has ever written, and it compares well with the first Redwall book. The action is fast and furious, the atmosphere is unrelentingly tense, and even the characters are pretty good. Captain Vanderdecken was a real surprise, how he brutally kills several members of his crew but shows occasionally kindness to Ned. This rudimentary character depth is as foreign to Brian Jacques as Klingon. The Flying Dutchman ends up cursed by God, but Ned and his dog are saved because they were the only two innocent people on board. They are given supernatural long life and are sent into the world to do good deeds.
You should probably put the book down now, because you’re up for toilet duty and the last man forgot to flush. Brian Jacques immediately forgets all the cool stuff he had written so far and turns the book into a horrible Hardy Boys adventure mystery.
Ned and his dog end up in a turn of the century English village that is about to be demolished by some stereotypical rich candy-ass, and with the aid of some plucky village youngsters they must discover the secret behind…something. This was the part where I basically stopped caring. The transition from an awesome high-seas adventure to a cosy little Fantastic Five mystery jaunt was so underwhelming and disappointing that it caused me to
All of Brian Jacques familiar Redwallisms emerge here too. There’s stupid villains (here, schoolyard bullies) who are somehow the terror of the village despite the fact that they can’t find their ass with both hands, there’s the brave and principled heroes who do nothing wrong and are consequently as interesting to read about as the items on Brian Jacques’ grocery list, there’s the inevitable scene where the main character faces the villain, looks him in the eyes, and the villain is forced to look away because the intensity of his stare, the long and pointless descriptions of food…do I have to go on? We’ve been reading this crap across a score of Redwall books, and believe me, it’s not any more interesting when the characters are human.
It’s not that the story is bad so much as that he set us up to expect so much more. Why couldn’t the entire damn book be like the first part? The Redwall books were always like this. A few amazing scenes, and the rest of the book might as well have been written by a different person.
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Something you need to know about me is that if it says Harry Potter on the cover, I AM THERE. I’m the biggest fan of the books. If you haven’t read them (either out of ignorance or rebellion), you really should check them out. Be careful around Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, though. It was written at a stage when “here be dragons” still littered JK Rowling’s storytelling maps, and it’s a bit more child oriented than the rest.
Harry Potter is a 10 year old kid who, unknown to himself, is a wizard. He ekes out a fairly shitty existence with the Dursley family. They say his biological parents died in a motorcycle accident, but of course it was something far more sinister than that. He uses his magical powers on occasion, always in uncontrollable outbursts (they seem to be like the wizard version of wet dreams), and therefore when a giant called Hagrid shows up and tells him that he is to begin enrolment at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he is only moderately awestruck.
Later books (starting at Book 3) channel Lord of the Rings. This first one is more derived from Roald Dahl. There’s everything here: a quirky and likeable cast of characters, a plot that is propelled forward by one zany MacGuffin after another, and (another noticeable Dahl trait) funny but disturbing depictions of child abuse. The story gets grim at times, but the lighthearted atmosphere remains.
The only problem with this book is that characterisation is a bit one dimensional. The Dursleys are your typical Cruel Parents, Snape is the Cruel Teacher, even Harry has a damned time separating himself from Frodo Baggins, Rand Al’thor, etc. There’s not much attempt at subtlety and nuance. Later books would get better at this and eventually moral ambiguity would be the center of the series’ ethical outlook. But not here. Everyone’s personality can be summed up like stats on a D&D character.
I don’t want to undersell JK Rowling, though. She is a great writer. She shares Stephen King’s talent for funny and evocative metaphors, and sometimes I reread parts of the book just to enjoy the language. There’s not a boring page in the book, even the dull scenes are packed with funny moments, character building, world building, [x] building. You can see JK Rowling laying the groundwork for later books like a builder laying bearers and joists for a house. It’s brave, considering she didn’t know there would be an audience for Philosopher’s Stone.
Forget romance, and pain, and Harry wondering whether his heroes are really so great. Forget all that crap. This first book is about fun. Harry would have to grow up some day, but for now…it’s party time!
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It takes skill to write a story you enjoy reading. It takes perhaps even more skill to write a story you don’t enjoy reading but persist with anyway. The first story in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series is difficult and confusing in places, but you keep reading because you have a feeling it’s eventually going to deliver. And it does, said delivery being book 2, “The Drawing of the Three.”
We meet Roland, a lone traveller who is pursuing his lifelong enemy, The Man in Black. We learn that Roland is a gunslinger, a cross between a Wild West lawman and a medieval knight, and that he is the last defender of the free world. His kingdom is gone, but he is chasing The Man in Black to discover the location of the Dark Tower, a gigantic pylon of energy that supports all the worlds in the universe. Roland believes that the Dark Tower is in jeopardy, and that if it fell all would be lost.
Why he even bothers saving the Dark Tower is beyond me, since the world seems have gone into the shitter anyway. Roland’s Middle Earth is mostly a deserted, empty place, populated by mutants and demons. He encounters a town that has been taken over by a crazy preacher, and he must kill many people there before continuing his journey. Technology seems to have regressed to that of the turn-of-the-century Wild West, although from time to time he encounters relics from a technological past (such as an abandoned shopping mall). Roland reminisces about his idyllic childhood in the green land of Gilead, and hopes that life will once again be like that someday. These themes are developed more in the later books, but they start here.
The book is dreamy and trippy, and can be hard to follow. Nobody has a direct conversation. They talk in stilted and elliptical phrases that sound like they’ve been passed around a Chinese Whispers circle one too many times. King plays tricks with the narrative (the first couple of scenes play out in reverse chronological order), and you get the sense that time and space are decaying in Roland’s world, along with technology. There’s a definite vibe of “man, all this obscurity and symbolism will TOTALLY impress my friends at the book club!” going on (seriously, King admits as much in the foreword to the revised addition), but I don’t mind that too much. The plot is simple. Just a guy chasing another guy.
In its final pages, the book unexpectedly sticks in the knife and twists, as Roland must make a horrible sacrifice to catch up with the Man in Black. It’s described in mute, understated terms, but it is the most powerful part of the book. The characters in The Gunslinger have never been made overly sympathetic, and yet suddenly, somehow, I cared about them as if they were real.
This is a book you read to absorb its vibes. The Gunslinger is very different to later books in the series, almost shockingly different. But in its own way, it’s great.
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The background is that during the 30s, a pop culture trend started where civilians would take the law into their own hands, dressing up in costume and fighting crime. Now in the 80s, with nuclear apocalypse looming, the trend is winding down. The Nite Owl has hung up his costume forever. Dr Manhattan and The Comedian work for the government. The only vigilante still active is a fairly insane sociopath called Rorschach, who openly flouts the law in his quest to bring ultra-brutal justice to the streets.
It’s hard to explain why Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic graphic novel works, and equally hard to describe just how well it works. All of its problems seem tiny next to its monumental achievements. It’s like a juggler who somehow manages to keep ten balls in the air at once. Would you care if he drops one at some point? This book does so many things, and so many of them are brilliant.
What things? The dark, gloomy atmosphere. The premise sounds like a springboard for all sorts of wacky hijinks, and there’s a bit of that, I guess, but we are soon made to realise that these characters live in a world that teeters on the brink, and that no vigilante is able to change things. The incredibly detailed world, for another. Sprinkled throughout the book are samples from autobiographies, magazine articles, et cetera, all building up the illusion of a world where masked crimefighters are a reality, and these are just as fascinating as the main story.
The story really goes nowhere fast. A former vigilante called Edward Blake is found dead, and a hunt for his killer is soon underway. The plot takes its sweet time, going along many detours and tangents…and there’s nothing wrong with this! That aspect is probably my favorite part of Watchmen, how it rambles all over the place but still keeps the reader locked into place. Yes, by all means let’s stop the story so we can explore the background of some insignificant character! Yes, you can certainly include a film review from some movie Laurie Jupiter’s mother was in! I can’t wait to read it!
I am seriously not being sarcastic here.
By the end of the book, I was persuaded that they could have printed the Nite Owl’s grocery list and made it interesting. This is a stirring testament to the ideal that any approach to storytelling can work, it all comes down to execution, tone, and character.
Speaking of characters, all of Watchmen’s cast is detailed and colorful, although Rorschach does tend to steal the show at times. Note that I didn’t say “realistic” in the last sentence, because I can’t imagine anyone like Adrian Veidt or Walter Kovacs existing. That’s always been a weakness of the medium. Because of the need to save space, characters have their personalities exaggerated and intensified. Still, Watchmen’s characters are great, and even the minor players like Sam Hollis are well fleshed out and interesting.
Stepping back from the trees and examining the forest, you can find numerous small unbelievabilities and inconsistencies with Watchmen. You’ve gotta love Rorschach’s method of conducting investigations. He walks into bars and beats random people up until they tell him what he wants. The graphic novel also seems to cheat a bit with Dr Manhattan’s powers. Sometimes he’s an all-powerful god, other times he’s just a regular superhero like Superman (why did he need to fight the Vietnam war at all? Couldn’t he have just waved his hand and caused every communist in Southeast Asia to die?).
But right now we’re discussing whether this is a 99% comic or a 98% comic. Watchmen rules your ass like Mistress Helga. Buy it now, retard!
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It’s stupid to try and analyse an author’s writing process. That’s a closed door to us readers, and we can only study the results. Nevertheless, I think Stephen King went quite a way wrong while writing Rose Madder. It’s like he started writing a thriller, and then decided halfway through that he’d like it to become a fantasy novel.
It’s nice and readable. The pace doesn’t drag (except for one overtly fantasy-oriented section in the middle which took forever to get through). But it’s not one of King’s best. The shift in plot structure and tone is so abrupt it feels like someone hacked and spliced together two different books with sticky tape.
It’s about a married women who has endured 14 years of beatings and degradations at the hands of an insane cop, and eventually decides to run away, taking nothing but his credit card. She finds a new home at a woman’s shelter called Daughters and Sisters, and it seems her nightmare is finally over. But her murderous husband is out looking for her, and will stop at nothing to get her back.
Then we get to the introduction of some weird fantasy elements, and this is where the book becomes a bit disjointed. She buys a painting that seems to change every time she turns her back, and eventually she is drawn into a strange world within the painting. To be honest, all of this stuff seems rather disconnected and out of place. Maybe it was an idea King had that he didn’t think was strong enough to carry a whole novel.
I’m not so happy with the idea, but there are still plenty of moments that remind us of why King is THE horror writer. The deranged, loopy ramblings inside the husband’s head as he tries to track her down are very disturbing and effective. Rosie McClendon is a very likeable main character, and she displays King’s talent at putting the reader in the shoes of someone a million miles removed from themselves and feeling like they’ve always lived there.
Still, the annoyingly obscure fantasy scenes drag the book down. There are seriously twenty or thirty books by this author I enjoyed more than Rose Madder. It won’t kill you if you read it, just save reading it until after you’ve read Carrie, Misery, The Stand, Gerald’s Game, the second Dark Tower book, et cetera, et cetera. You’ll have more perspective that way.
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This story blew me away with its subtle readability. Even though it encompasses a few days on death row and lasts a few hundred pages, by the end of it you’ll feel like you’ve read a huge epic.
Many books pump themselves up like movie trailers until they almost have “THIS IS A GREAT BOOK” written across the pages. The Green Mile is not nearly so insecure. The writing is folksy and mild, and the story presents itself in such unpretentious fashion that I was surprised by how fascinating it is. Paul Edgecombe is a prison guard in Depression-era Mississippi, working on death row and trying to hold on to his job against a connected asshole on the guard team who makes his life a misery. Prisoners enter and leave death row like ocean currents, “The Prez”, a man who pushed his crippled father out a window, Eduard Delacroix, a mild-mannered Frenchman who burned to death six people, and “Wild Bill” Wharton, a lunatic who tries to kill virtually everyone he sees.
Then comes John Coffee, a black man who was convicted for murder under very questionable circumstances. Just as you’re getting settled in for a retelling of To Kill a Mockingbird, the plot suddenly gets much more interesting. You see, even though John Coffee, intelligence-wise, is equal to a small child, he has an incredible gift of healing that makes him a living legend on death row, and prompts Paul Edgecombe to take the biggest risk of his life.
Yes, the supernatural plays a part in this story, but it exists just as another prop. It never gets carried away and doesn’t influence the story beyond a very small part. Far more wondrous are things like Mr Jingles, a small white mouse who befriends the murdering Frenchman and comforts him to the very last.
Apparently the book was published as a serial novel in six parts before being collected into the edition I have here. I don’t know how heavily it was edited for the collected version, but the way it flows (with each of the six parts prefaced by one of Paul’s memoirs which explains the events in the last part) is, for the most part, very natural and unobtrusive. There’s an epilogue involving Mr Jingles that I’m not sold on, but the author admits he added it as a request from his wife so I guess it’s not part of the story proper.
This books stands among the formidable collection of Stephen King’s classics, and I enjoyed it like hell. It’s not really horror, but, you know, Stephen King actually does well outside of horror. If you liked Hearts of Atlantis, get ready for something ten times better.
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Lots of fast and furious action comes courtesy of 27 year old writer Matthew Reilly in his first military thriller novel: Ice Station.
The book stars heroic US marine Shane Schofield, as he fights for control of an Antarctic research station where a metal object has been discovered in a 100 million year old layer of ice.
The first 60-100 or so pages function like a prologue, then the ass-kicking starts. This is one of those books that adopts an action movie approach to things, throwing fight scene after fight scene at you in the good old Die Hard fashion.
It’s pretty silly, but very entertaining. Reilly has a snappy, hard-edged writing style that goes well with the action. Some guys (like Stephen King) let the language obstruct the flow of the plot sometimes, but there’s none of that here.
The book plays hard and fast with the laws of physics. There’s a scene late in the book that involves a plane and an iceberg that I doubt like hell would happen. It’s also established at one point that Schofield has broken a rib, yet he still displays ninja-like fighting abilities. What the hell, it’s all in good fun.
Recommended for Die Hard fans. It’s a counterintuitive idea that you’d write books for the sort of people who normally watch movies, but it seems to be working for Mr Reilly so far.
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