Dazed Bastard

The book section at work is a depressing heap of shit-laden shelves devoted to pushing mediocrity on those few poor souls still willing to pick up a book. But, with an hour lunch to burn and a great deal of boredom to contend with, I will often end up browsing for a few minutes. The odds of stumbling across something good are somewhere in the range of flying pigs and miracles, but boredom is a stubborn prick and an hour’s nap just leaves me crankier than usual. Sometimes though, the sky will part, an angelic chorus will sing from an employee’s cell phone, some asshole customer will throw a football for no more reason than they can, and despite the distraction, I will happen across something worth reading.

The Book Thief hit me square in the jaw with a decent bout of recognition. This book got a lot of praise when it was first released in 2006 and even more has trickled in over the years. As with most great books released around the time I graduated, I dutifully ignored it while gorging myself in the horrors of tie-in fantasy. It was only right that I made up for the oversight.

I sat in our store’s Subway trying to balance reading with ignoring the chaos of my front end and noticed, right off, that this book was doing its level best to dig its hooks into me and envelop me in the story. The prose style was certainly up for the challenge, but unfortunately for it, and myself, being screamed at for blowing off work to continue reading was an unwelcome prospect. With all of the blurbs and achievements on the covers, this book is practically wrapped in praise and at just under seventy pages in, I can already tell that every bit of it is deserved. It is shaping up to be a great read and, quite possibly, the perfect lead-in for Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s newest when it is released later this month.

There’s this book I want. You may have heard of it or, at least, the author:

Used to be, I could hop on over to The Book Depository and order a copy from the UK, the UK version, and have it on my doorstep in a matter of days. This is good for two reasons: 1) US covers have this awful tendency to be steaming piles of shit; and 2) The UK sometimes gets books a few weeks early. In this case, The Prisoner of Heaven is set to hit UK shelves in a few days and its cover is more in line with the other two hardcovers I already own. In contrast, the US copy is set to hit shelves closer to mid-July and has this weird cover that is nice but has fuck-all in common with the other two.

It is here:



Nice, yeah, but a few weeks late and not the one I want. So I head on over to The Book Depository, punch in the title, and find the US copy available for pre-order. The UK version is listed, but only as “Currently Unavailable”. Meanwhile, Amazon UK has it available for pre-order. I checked out a few other books when I was looking into this a month or so back and it was the same thing time and time again.

What is going on? Is this some sort of asshole change implemented by Amazon after buying them out? Are the publishers behind it? *sigh*

—-

And I figured it out, for any of you who have the same issue. Use a proxy.

I’ve been hitting up the Redbox machine at work for the last month or so, hoping to find something, anything that might pique my interest or prick my masochistic side. It has been a month or so of failure. There’s been nothing there that I am particularly interested in watching. The latest run’n’gun? The latest vaguely 300’ish movie involving Greek mythology? Nah, fuck that.

Chronicle has had my interesting firmly in its grasp since the first trailer, but since I rarely ever go to theaters, it has had to wait. I wasn’t even aware it was coming out any time soon. Now, several hours after having finished it, I wish I would have waited for it to hit cable.

Once I got through the slow beginning, with its concentration of misery and awkward narration, I started to warm up to the film. Popular Guy Steve showed up out of nowhere, interrupting Shy Guy Andrew’s weeping just long enough to lead him to a cave, where they join up with Wannabe Cool Matt and go exploring (and in Andrew’s case, whining). Eventually they encounter a glowing crystal thing that makes sounds and has wiggling tendrils. Things go wonky, camera goes dead, and another camera takes over sometime later after they pull their asses to safety and discover they have super powers.

This is where things start to take a turn for the enjoyable. Shy Guy Andrew starts coming out of his shell. The guys are playing with their powers and pushing themselves to see what they can and cannot do. Andrew seems to the best of the three, working his powers with a level of finesse that puts the others, especially his cousin, Wannabe Cool Mat, to shame. You can almost see the sign hanging over his head: “Pulling a Vader, Come at Me Cousin!” For now though, everything is fine and the film is fun.

Sort of. Have you ever been around high school kids and younger college kids? These people are, for the most part, fucking annoying. This translates well in Chronicle. Too well.

Then things take a turn. Andrew nearly kills some jackass in a 4x4 that’s riding Matt’s tail on the highway (a fantasy for most of us, probably) and everyone freaks out. “We have to have rules!” Wannabe Cool Matt shouts. “You can’t just make up rules!” replies Andrew. Popular Guy Steve, aspirations of politics grasped tightly in hand, just kind of waffles about. “So gonna fight!” can be seen flashing out the corner of your eye as this goes down.

Everyone makes up. Joy! Andrew becomes slightly popular and fucks that up in the span of a single night. Suddenly! Shy Guy Andrew becomes Whiny Prick Andrew. Popular Guy Steve becomes Smoking Corpse Steve. Wannabe Cool Matt becomes Committed Relationship Matt, which drops the subject on whether he is cool or not. Whiny Prick Andrew becomes Violent Sociopath Andrew.

Big surprise!

The movie has entered into a downward spiral that it will not recover from. It was interesting and entertaining, but from here on out it is a vaguely cool looking cliche. The underdog dukes it out against the more powerful foe… a fight telegraphed since the beginning of the film. It reminds me of several films, but the one that comes to mind first and foremost is another movie starring a bunch of “kids” with special powers: The Covenant. That movie was shit. Being reminded of it is not a good thing. (I could mention The Craft, which is a parallel for The Covenant, but fuck that, I like The Craft.)

Chronicle wasn’t necessarily bad. It was annoying and disappointing and too willing to stick with cliches, but it had its moments and was entertaining for a spell. It could have been better, should have been better, and changing one event would have managed it: Deep fry Matt, let Steve live.

Why? Steve, despite having only known Andrew for a little while, actually gives a shit about him. He does everything he can to help Andrew; he encourages him and talks to him and tries to raise his self-esteem. When Andrew is having his tantrum, the same tantrum that gets Steve killed, it is Steve that knows something is wrong and immediately finds Andrew in an attempt to help. Not Matt, Andrew’s cousin, who has known him his whole life and, when the time comes, either doesn’t know that Andrew needs help or ignores it, just like he ignored Steve’s calls before he flew off to his death.

And it is that, the whole deal with Matt being both a part of and apart from the group that takes away any poignancy from the end of the film. Matt has been standoffish towards his cousin throughout the whole film, even admits that before he got powers that he didn’t like him all that much, and now, at the end of the film, I am supposed to believe that he cares so much about cousin that he is willing to let him live, even help him escape, after hurting so many people, including nearly killing Matt’s girlfriend. Granted, there were drunken moments throughout the film where he says how much he is proud of and loves his cousin, but again… drunken. Matt’s killing blow doesn’t come across as being a particularly difficult decision (he’s been threatening it for half the movie) or act, even if meant to be both.

Had Steve been forced to fight Andrew and deal the death blow, there would have been a sense of sadness to it.

Oh well, whatever.

Last night, after the meltdown occurred on Fantasy Faction, curiosity drove me to Amazon, where I proceeded to read samples from most of the books the author had available. I only read a couple sentences, so you have no reason to fear for my health. What I noticed while reading these samples, aside from the terrible writing, was that almost all of the books began in the exact same way:

[Insert Name] verbed a noun somewhere.

I am talking the first sentence, here. All but three of the ten or so items (a mixture of books, novellas, and short fiction) I sampled began this way and those other three made sure the name was loud and clear before the end of the page—most often by the end of the first or second paragraph.

Today, on Westeros, there is a thread about reviewers and honesty going hot and heavy. In this thread, a recently self-published author complains about reviewers not taking risks on more self-published materials. What the hell, I figure, let’s take a look at what he has to offer.

:|

Oh, look… the first sentence involves [Insert Name] verbing a noun somewhere.

Back when I had aspirations of becoming an author, I could have sworn there was something about crafting a first sentence that grabs hold of the reader. Has that gone out of style since I stopped writing fiction? To find out, I decided to hit the shelves to see if, perhaps, I have just been overlooking this sort of thing in traditionally published books.

I surveyed thirty-three books from my collection and my results were:

Name Revealed In First Sentence: 7
Name Revealed In First Paragraph: 4
Name Revealed In Second Paragraph: 4
Name Revealed On First Page (in case it wasn’t caught by any of the above): 0

That means that eighteen of the books failed to mention the name of the author on the first page. Some of these, less than five, were written in first person, but even first person can find ways to name a character in the first few sentences.

Of those seven books that given the/a character’s name away, three I consider excellent—Angelmaker, Finch, and 2666—two are highly regarded by those who have read them—The Baron in the Trees and The Power and the Glory—and one I consider quite good—The Lies of Locke Lamora. One, which I won’t name, I couldn’t finish. As an interesting aside, Jeff VanderMeer, author of Finch, actually self-published City of Saints and Madmen before it was picked up by a traditional publisher. The story behind it is an interesting read.

Had I not gotten bored of the task, I wonder how a survey of my entire small collection would have turned out. As to the point of this exercise… I really didn’t have one besides wanting to see how many traditionally published books started in such a fashion. There were more than I thought there would be, to be honest, but not too many. One thing is for certain though, if you have more than ten books and all but a couple start in the same way… you need to come up with a new formula.