Comics Review -- "Daytripper" by Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba

Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba are twin brothers from Sao Paulo, Brazil, with more than 15 years of experience in comics. I wasn't familiar with their work until I picked up the two collected volumes of "The Umbrella Academy," written by Gerard Way. Their ability to depict hyperkinetic surrealism adds a lot to that gonzo superhero series. So I was intrigued when I received the non-superheroic "Daytripper, both written and illustrated by the brothers.

"Daytripper" is a much more somber affair. When we first meet Bras de Oliva Domingos, he's 32 years old, unenthusiastically composing obituaries for a daily newspaper. His stand-offish father is a revered and best-selling writer, and Bras finds it difficult living in the older man's shadow, especially since he wants to write a book of his own. On the way to a black-tie tribute to his father, Bras walks into the wrong bar and comes face-to-face with death in its most concrete form.

The subsequent chapters of "Daytripper" shuttle back and forth in time, presenting a day in Bras's life at 21, at 11, at 38. He falls in love for the first time, loses his best friend, awaits the birth of his son. But each time, the day ends with an unforeseen, often utterly capricious, tragedy.

I'm not sure I would have stuck with "Daytrippers" had I read it as a monthly pamphlet. Across ten issues, ending each chapter with a version of Bras's death begins to feel gimmicky by about Chapter Four. But as the clues begin to pile up, and Bras's continuing encounters with mortality hint of a possible resolution, the narrative becomes clearer and compelling.

"Daytripper" is a trippy, thoughtful piece of Latin-flavored magic realism, serious in intent, but joyous in its details. I'm hyped to see the next Umbrella Academy limited series, but this graphic volume was a welcome side-trip.

First SF Column of 2011 -- Walton, Rickert & Bear

Always happy to see my byline in The Chronicle or on SFGate.com. This one covers two novels and one story collection: "Among Others" by Jo Walton, "Hull Zero Three" by Greg Bear and "Holiday" by M. Rickert.

All three are worth seeking out, but the real stand-out is "Among Others." I am a big fan of Walton's alternate-World War II thrillers, but her new book is even better. If you love reading -- and reading science fiction and fantasy in particular -- it's a marvelous mix of fantasy and memoir that will remind you of how powerful fiction can be at the right time in your life.

Warren Zevon Should Be 64 Today, Goddamn It

Note: Warren Zevon's date of birth was 1/24/47. This post went up a day early. Stupid typing fingers. Carry on.

I'm not a big fan of Judd Apatow, and I'm no fan at all of Adam Sandler, but there's a moment in their movie "Funny People" that really moved me. It's when Ira Wright, played by Seth Rogen, is flipping through an iTunes playlist he's made for dissipated comedian George Simmons, played by Sandler. At this point of the movie, George believes he's terminally ill. The two are bantering back and forth, joking about the inappropriateness of Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" and a selection from "Dirty Dancing."

Then Warren Zevon's "Keep Me in Your Heart" comes up. And suddenly, nothing's funny any more, not in the face of that beautiful song written while Zevon was dying from mesothelioma, a kind of lung cancer he believed might have come from playing among the carpet remnants in his father's store when he was a child.

With no dialogue, Rogen and Sandler play the moment perfectly. Faced with Zevon's croaky baritone and poignant lyrics, they're overwhelmed by the song's urgency and with just a few glances convey how it cuts too close to the bone.

OK, boys, now you've got my respect.

I don't think there's a late 20th-century American rock singer/songwriter who speaks to me as deeply as Warren Zevon. He lived hard, screwed up, made a comeback, died too young and was always underrated. I've written about him before,  and I don't intend to get all "I bought 'Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School' on vinyl, man!" today.

But if you're unfamiliar with the man's work or know him only from the fun-but-overplayed "Werewolves of London," there's a huge catalogue of great songs by him, just waiting for your discovery. If you're a long-time fan, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Either way, check out some of the clips below.

Excitable Boy


Lawyers, Guns & Money


 Part #1 of Zevon's Last Appearance on Letterman


My Shit's Fucked Up


Keep Me in Your Heart

Books You Oughta Read -- "Set This House in Order"

I'm a sucker for a good story about multiple personality disorder. Or, as I've learned that it's now called, dissociative identity disorder.

The best non-fiction account on the subject that I've read is "When Rabbit Howls," by Truddi Chase and the Troops. The best depiction of the disorder in a comic book has to be in Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol" (whose super-heroine with MPD, Crazy Jane, really kindled my interest in the topic).

The best novel I've read about MPD/DID has to be "Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls," published by Matt Ruff in 2003. It's a marvelously constructed book: smart, heartfelt and full of surprises.

"Born" only two years before the story begins, Andy Gage is the alternate personality that deals with the outside world, with more than 100 other souls hidden away in the imaginary house he's constructed within his head. Through his workplace, he meets Penny Driver, another multiple, one who doesn't quite suspect that she has any alternate personalities. When some of her souls ask Andy for help, he finds himself vulnerable to his own long-suppressed secrets, ones that threaten to destroy the safe interior landscape he's built for himself.

It's hard to write about something as complicated and as emotionally fraught as DID, which usually has its origins in horrific childhood abuse. But Ruff manages to suggest the impact of Andy's and Penny's backstories without letting them become grotesque and exploitative when finally revealed. The novel's subtitle marks, I think, an important distinction. "Set This House in Order" is ultimately a hopeful book, one that overrides the seeming outlandishness of its premise and reveals something true about identity and love.

Ruff, by the way, is also the author of "Bad Monkeys," another twisty tale of identity, which I reviewed favorably in my Chronicle column back in 2007. If you haven't yet discovered him, you're missing out.

Review -- "Mr. Toppit" by Charles Elton

I have a soft spot for novels about adult children who have been screwed up by the artistic legacies of their famous fathers. Jonathan Carroll's "The Land of Laughs" is one of the best of that bunch, and I'm now enjoying "The Unwritten," the Vertigo Comics series written by Mike Carey.

So when I saw "Mr. Toppit" by Charles Elton, I figured it would be right up my alley. And it is, mostly. Although I can't recommend it without reservation, this first  novel does have its charms.

When semi-successful children's author Arthur Hayman is run over by a cement truck on a London street, the first person to offer him comfort is Laurie Clow, an awkward American tourist on a break from all the domestic drama back home. Before Arthur's family -- wife Martha and offspring Rachel and Luke -- have a chance to convene at the hospital or to even learn that Arthur has, in fact, passed away, Laurie has begun taking control of Hayman's posthumous career.

Largely through Laurie's manipulations, "The Hayseed Chronicles" become a multimedia phenomenon, inspiring new illustrated editions and a BBC miniseries. Of the Haymans, it is unstable Rachel who most enjoys the spotlight, while irritable Martha retreats from it completely. Luke, who shares his first name with the series' young protagonist, can most clearly see celebrity's alluring double edge.

Elton, a former literary agent, worked for the estate of A.A. Milne and knew well the story of Christopher Robin Milne, perhaps the ultimate ambivalent literary inspiration, who eventually grew tired of answering questions about Winnie the Pooh and that damned 100-Acre Wood. In Luke Hayman, Elton captures what it might feel like to be famous for nothing more than being the apparent namesake of a character beloved by children worldwide.

Unlike "The Land of Laughs" or "The Unwritten," there is no supernatural aspect to "Mr. Toppit." The eponymous character is a shadowy figure who haunts "The Hayseed Chronicles" without appearing until the last page of the fifth, final volume. And "Mr. Toppit" itself feels incomplete, somehow lacking the narrative cohesion that would make it succeed completely. Elton creates interesting characters and writes individual scenes with a sure hand, but "Mr. Toppit" ultimately measures as a near-miss.

Late to the Party -- 5 Neat Things I Only Recently Discovered

One problem of being a critic is that you can lose sight of interesting material that doesn't conform exactly to your expectations. There's so much stuff out there that it's often impossible to keep track of books, comics, movies or TV shows that are not right in front of you but that you would really enjoy if someone would simply push you in the right direction..

The folks at the AV Club offered their own take on this dilemma a little while ago, but I have my own selections and undoubtedly thought for this article idea first. Ahem..

Comics
The Umbrella Academy
I would normally be wary of any comic created and written by a rock star, since most such books would reek of "vanity project." But "The Umbrella Academy" by My Chemical Romance member Gerard Way, with art by Gabriel Ba and covers by James Jean, is actually pretty great.

Imagine the X-Men crossed with the Doom Patrol, add you've got some idea of what the Umbrella Academy is all about. There's time-travel, an approaching apocalypse, hit-men who dress as cartoon characters and a disbanded group of superheroes with a lot of excess emotional baggage. "The Umbrella Academy" has the weird whimsy of Grant Morrison at his most accessible but manages to remain true to its own hinky vision.
So far, there are only two collected volumes, "Apocalypse Suite" and "Dallas," though a third arc, "Hotel Oblivion," has been announced. I hope it comes to fruition soon.

Scalped

I've grown tired of bad-ass bald guys in Vertigo books, but the shaven-headed protagonist of Jason Aaron's "Scalped"  isn't a retread of Grant Morrison's King Mob or Warren Ellis's Spider Jerusalem.

Dashiell Bad Horse returns to South Dakota and starts working for Chief Lincoln Red Crow, the local crime boss obsessed with opening a new casino that will supposedly improve the lot of every Oglala Lakota on the rez. Turns out, though, that Bad Horse is working for the FBI, and his superiors aren't above blackmailing him into stepping outside the law for their own purposes.

This is American noir of the bleakest sort, and Aaron keeps everything off-balance by continually upping the stakes and revealing new depths to his characters. After a while, it's easy to lose track of who the good guys really are, but that's rather the point.

It's unclear how long Aaron plans to spin this story out, but there are six collections available and seventh due in February. You can read the first issue of the series here.

Hark! A Vagrant!

Kate Beaton's online comics are a marvel, and I can't recommend them highly enough. They're literate and silly, knowing and well constructed. Favorites to sample include "Wonder Woman," "Dude-Watching with the Brontes," The Great Gatsby," "Mystery Solving Teens," and, especially if you're a Bowdoin College grad, "Henson and Peary."

Beaton has started selling to Harper's and The New Yorker, and now she has a book deal with Drawn + Quarterly, which is the best news of the year so far. And don't ignore her Twitter stream, upon which she posts links to sketches that are more personal but just as amusing as her more polished offerings.

TV
Jekyll
Everybody thinks they can do a new twist on Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," but few adaptations add anything really fresh to the endeavor. Watch the cold opening of the 2007 BBC six-episode series written by Stephen Moffat and starring James Nesbitt, though, and I defy you not to want more.

The whole series is clever combination of  conspiracy thriller and horror with a comedic edge. The ending doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I guess they were hoping for a second series. "Jekyll" is hard to find at your local video store, but it's easily available through Netflix.



Music
Pomplamoose

Yeah, they're the cute, almost twee, couple in those Holiday Season Hyundai TV ads, but they've been around YouTube for a couple of years now. Good originals, clever covers, joyful videos and Nataly Dawn is freakin' adorable. And they've gathered more than 60,000 book donations for the Richmond School District, so don't be hatin' on them. Their covers of "Mr. Sandman" and "September" are especially good and worth checking out.

Gores Is Gone

I haven't read deeply into the body of work produced by Joe Gores, the Bay Area crime novelist who passed away this week. But I liked the few of his novels I did try. Oddly, I believe only one of them, "Contract Null and Void," was from his signature "Daniel Kearney Associates" (DKA Files) series.

Two stand-alones from the mid-90s have stuck with me, though, both of them clever tales of revenge. "Menaced Assassin" combines murder and paleontology, as a college professor seeks justice for his wife's killing. "Dead Man" also features a bereaved husband, one who rebuilds himself after the death of his wife and children to infiltrate the Mob as an accountant.

Although he won an Edgar for his first novel, "A Time of Predators" and wrote scripts for many detective TV shows, including "Kojak" and "Magnum PI," Gores is probably best known for his association with the quintessential hard-boiled detective, Sam Spade. In the Eighties, Gore wrote, "Hammett," in which the author of "The Glass Key" himself becomes embroiled in murder mystery. In 2009, he was authorized to pen a "prequel" to "The Maltese Falcon," "Spade & Archer."

Gores was a writer who understood the everyday realities of the private detective game but still managed to find deep wells of humor and suspense in it. His clear-eyed vision of the trade will be missed.

Ten Books I'm Looking forward to in 2011

There are always plenty of books out there that I would be happy to read, had I enough time and energy. But a handful of upcoming titles fill me with genuine anticipation, whether I'll have the chance to review them or not.

Started Early, Took My Dog -- Kate Atkinson
I'm already nearly a 100 pages into the latest by "Case Histories" and "When Will We Have Good News?" An impulsive purchase at a mall, the rescue of a small dog and a search for a client's natural parents lead to violence and other unforeseen complications. According to Atkinson, this is likely to be her last Jackson Brodie book for a few years, so enjoy him while you can.

A Drop of the Hard Stuff -- Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block is among the last of the great  crime fiction traditionalists, and he's returning to Matt Scudder after a long hiatus. This new entry in the series jumps back in time to when Scudder was still struggling with his alcoholism. That strategy worked well in "Before the Sacred Gin Mill Closes," so we'll see whether Block can construct another satisfying flashback.

Satori -- Don Winslow
You wouldn't think that Trevanian's "Shibumi" calls out for a follow-up after 30+ years, but Winslow, author of "California Fire and Life"  and "The Death and Life of Bobby Z," has decided to resurrect Nicolai Hel. Will Winslow be able to emulate Trevanian's tongue-in-cheek tone in the midst of all the super-assassin hugger-mugger? I'm certainly intrigued.

The Wise Man's Fear -- Patrick Rothfuss
Rothfuss's "The Name of the Wind" was one of the most intriguing fantasy debuts of the mid-2000s. Fans have been impatiently clamoring for more ever since, and finally a new installment is ready. Middle volumes are notoriously tricky, but Rothfuss managed to sidestep many of the high fantasy pitfalls with his first book, so perhaps he'll be able to beat the sophomore slump.

Flashback -- Dan Simmons
After three big historical novels, Simmons returns to science fiction with a near-future thriller. A new drug allows users to re-live their favorite moments from the past, and one ex-detective strives to break his addiction while investigating a murder. Simmons does "hardboiled" well, and this book might given him a welcome chance to stretch those muscles.

Fuzzy Nation -- John Scalzi
The author of "Zoe's Tale" channels H. Beam Piper, for reasons that aren't quite clear but which will undoubtedly prove amusing. Note: Ewoks and Fuzzies are not related.

Listener -- Warren Ellis
Few details are available about the second novel by the co-creator of "Planetary" and "Transmetropolitan." His first novel, "Crooked Little Vein," didn't quite live up to its promise, but Ellis knows his way around a

Other Kingdoms -- Richard Matheson
Matheson's recent output hasn't matched the standards of his early classics, but I keep hoping that he'll muster some more of the mojo that powered "Hell House" or "I Am Legend." This latest novel is set in England after World War I and involves fairies, witches and the like.

Embassytown -- China Mieville
Mieville is hit and miss for me. I lost patience with "The City and the City" but really enjoyed last summer's "Kraken." "Embassytown" promises more "New Weird" weirdness, so I'm eager to see what Mieville has come up with this time.

iZombie -- Chris Roberson with Michael Allred
I'm done buying monthly pamphlets, but I liked the sample first issue I received of this on-going Vertigo series. Allred's art is always awesome, and I trust Roberson to do something interesting with the overworked "The dead are back!" scenario. The first collection will be available later this spring.

Books You Oughta Read -- The Rat on Fire

When I travel, I often like to take along a book with some connection to my destination. Back in November, I was headed to Boston, so I read "The Rat on Fire" by George V. Higgins while I was shuttling between Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine.

If readers today remember Higgins at all, most know him for his first novel, 1972's "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," and the movie adaptation starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle. It's truly a great and game-changing crime novel – grimly honest, bleakly funny and eminently quotable. (My favorite line: "This life is hard, but it's harder if you're stupid.") In contrast to "The Godfather" with its sleek and confident Mafiosi, Eddie Coyle is an unlovable, small-time Irish mope who barely comprehends the forces he's set in motion against himself.

Before he became a novelist, Higgins was an attorney and a journalist. Some critics called "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" an overnight success. Higgins would reply, "That was one hell of a damned long night, lasting seventeen years..." He wrote 14 unpublished novels in those 17 years and eventually destroyed them all.

Dialogue was Higgins' forte, and he wasn't afraid to employ it in huge swathes of rhetoric that run for pages at a time. His 1981 novel "The Rat on Fire" is as good as example of this strategy as any of his books. The book runs a little over 200 pages in paperback, but I'd bet there's not more than 25 pages of descriptive narrative in the whole thing.

Lawyer/talent broker/slumlord Jerry Fein wants to get rid of the buildings he owns, because most of the tenants refuse to pay rent and keep damaging the apartments. The tenants won't pay rent, because the buildings are rotting away and full of rats. The only way to break this impasse might be to hire someone like arsonist Leo Procter, who isn't adverse to setting rodents on fire and sending them up through the walls to spread the flames. What Procter doesn't know is that agents from the attorney general's office have him under surveillance, hoping to catch the fire marshal Procter has been bribing.

Now that we're in the middle of another recession, "The Rat on Fire" seems more relevant than ever. Everyone in it – cops, crooks, politicians – worries that they don't have enough money and is convinced that the System is irredeemably broken. There are no good options anymore, and all you can do is tell stories about how unfair it all is.

Higgins's dialogue is often described as realistic, but it's really not. Nobody, short of Shakespearean actors, spouts the kinds of soliloquies that Higgins constructs. But Higgins knew exactly how Bostonians spoke in the Seventies and Eighties, and there's never a false note in his characters' diction and their references to local customs and landmarks.

 In 1999, Higgins died of a heart attack just short of his 60^th birthday, but he managed to publish 27 novels. As a Chronicle reviewer, I have covered only one novel by Higgins, "Sandra Nichols Found Dead." It was a good later work, but not great. But having read "The Rat on Fire," I'm looking forward to going back and discovering more of them.

2010: Look Back in Peevishness

What did I write in 2010? Not many blog posts, that's for damn sure. As far as book reviews went, I probably contributed one or two fewer to The Chronicle than usual.

Round-ups are supposed to appear every six weeks, but there were some extended gaps, due to a frequent lack of space on the newspaper's part and sometimes a lack of concentration on mine. Here are the titles covered the past year:

January 24 -- Peter Straub's "A Dark Matter"," "Things We Didn't See Coming" by Steven Amsterdam and "Northwest Passages" by Barbara Roden.

March 7 -- Dan Simmons' "Black Hills," "Horns" by Joe Hill, "The Extra" by Michael Shea and Kage Baker's "Not Less Than Gods."

April 25 -- "Expiration Date" By Duane Swierczynski, "Blockade Billy" by Stephen King, "Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror" edited by Ellen Datlow, and "Planetary: Spacetime Archaeology" by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday.

June 27 -- Christopher Farnsworth's "Blood Oath," "I Am Not a Serial Killer" by Dan Wells, "Stories" edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio

August 8 -- "The Loving Dead" by Amelia Beamer, "Kraken" by China Mieville and Matt Kindt's "Revolver."

October 3 -- "Shades of Milk and Honey" by Mary Robinette Kowal, Charles Yu's "How to Survive in a Science Fictional Universe" and "The Fuller Memorandum" by Charles Stross.

December 5 -- "Dreadnought" by Cherie Priest, "The Dead Path" by Stephen M. Irwin and Catherynne M. Valente's "The Habitation of the Blessed."

I summed everything up in a "Best of the Year" column, although I prefer to think of it as a "Notable Books I Happened to Read and Like" list.

I also wrote a handful stand-alone reviews for The Chronicle:

"Known to Evil" by Walter Mosley
"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest" by Stieg Larsson
"The Passage" by Justin Cronin
"Zero History" by William Gibson
 "Skippy Dies" by Paul Murray

What's up for 2011? I've almost finished reading the next batch of books for my January column, and I've got dibs on a stand-alone for Kate Atkinson's "Started Early, Took My Dog." I'm also going to make more of an effort this year to pitch to other markets. I'll let you know what happens.

Tharn

Tharn: Stupefied, distraught, hypnotized by fear. But can also, in certain contexts, mean "looking foolish," or again "heartbroken" or "forlorn." – Watership Down

Turning 50 didn't just kick my ass. It kicked my ass, hit it with a tire iron, dumped it into the trunk of a Chevy Impala, drove it out to the desert, made it get out and dig its own grave, then pulled a gun, grinned and said, "Hey, just screwin' wit' ya."

Maybe you could have deduced my midlife malaise from the utter lack of entries following my birthday in January. Wait, there was one, a rumination on the death of Kage Baker, one of my favorite writers, who died of a brain tumor in her mid-fifties. After that, I kind of threw in the towel, blogging-wise.

What was up? Well, the details don't really matter. Let's just say that I've worked nearly my entire adult life in an industry currently undergoing cataclysmic change. I've got aging parents and kids in college and high school. I've got gout and I've got a mortgage. Sometimes I feel like I've got plenty of nothing, but nothing is definitely not plenty for me.

It got to the point, almost exactly midway through the year, when I simply "went tharn," as Mr. Richard Adams might put it. Like a bunny caught in the headlights, I froze – creatively, emotionally and nearly physically. At least inside my own head, I couldn't move forward, and I definitely couldn't move backwards. I just stayed still and hoped that nothing would run me over or swoop down on me from a great height.

I started re-reading "Watership Down" this summer, partly spurred by Sawyer's fondness for it on "Lost" and partly because it was a book from a time when I pretty much only read for pleasure, when there were few deadlines, when I took the adventures of Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig at face value. I bought a used copy of the mass-market paperback, my preferred reading format, and reacquainted myself with the rabbits and their quest for a safe home.

Did you know that Richard Adams was 52 when "Watership Down" was published in 1972? He was civil servant for most of his private career and created the story as an entertainment for his daughters on long drives. The "Watership Down" manuscript was rejected by seven publishers before the small firm Rex Collings took it on, but it soon sold more than a million copies worldwide. It won the Carnegie Medal, and now its sales total more than 50 million copies.Adams went on to write "Shardik," "The Plague Dogs" and other well-regarded, best-selling books.

Adams turned 90 in May of 2010. He published a new story, "The Knife," just this year, in "Stories," edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.

I haven't quite finished "Watership Down" this second time around. I don't particularly feel like rushing it. I can pick it up and put it down without losing the thread of the tale. In a lot of ways, it's simple story, but it says some important things: about perseverance, about friendship, about self-reliance.

I've begun to feel a lot better since this summer, and I've started to write more. It wasn't just Richard Adams and "Watership Down" that gave me a renewed sense of perspective about myself and my career at age 50. There were definitely other, more important factors. But the novel helped, not only through the wisdom of its story but by the example of its author.

Novelists can start their careers after 50. They can publish into their 90s. The Black Rabbit won't ever stop chasing you, but you can still give it a run for its money.

Move. Run blindly, if you have to. But move.
Don't go tharn.

Kage Baker, 1952-2010

Kage Baker, short story writer and novelist, died today at age 57, far too young. I don't think it's hyperbole for me to say that, of all the science fiction and fantasy writers I reviewed during that awful decade from Jan. 1, 2000 to Dec. 31, 2009, Baker afforded me the greatest amount of unalloyed reading pleasure.

I tend not to get caught up in long-running sf/f series, like those by George R.R. Martin or Robert Jordan. As good as individual installments might be, most multi-volume sagas run out of steam or become so unwieldy with plot complications that it becomes a chore to keep up with them to the bitter end. Even Stephen King's "The Dark Tower," which amazed and delighted me for most of its 3,000 pages, wound up something less than I had imagined.

Not Baker's novels about The Company, though. She kept every damn promise she made in that first book, "In the Garden of Iden." She found a glorious new wrinkle in time-traveling immortal cyborgs, and she played fair with it across 10 volumes, adding complications and fresh faces with panache, but never betraying her premise or her characters or her readership. By the time she reached the final volume in the main sequence, "The Sons of Heaven," she had tied up all the loose ends and delivered a climax and denouement worthy of all the delicious build-up.

I came to The Company novels late, foolishly starting with "Mendoza in Hollywood." It didn't particularly grab me, so I'm glad I persevered with "The Graveyard Game." That did the trick, making me go back to the books I'd missed. From that point, I was hooked, and I eagerly awaited each new volume. None of them disappointed.

I saw Baker at the World Fantasy con in October. I'm not very out-going, and it often takes some real effort for me to introduce myself to a stranger. But I approached her and let her know how much I enjoy her work.

I'm glad I did. I had no idea her time with us would be so short. I'm just glad there will be a few more books and stories with her byline, starting with a new Company novel, "Not Less Than Gods," to be published by Tor in March.

If you haven't read any books by Kage Baker, start with "In the Garden of Iden" or the story collection, "Black Projects, White Knights." If you want just a small taste, Subterranean Press has posted a new story, "The Bohemian Astrobleme," online.

If you're already a fan, read Marty Halpern's lovely appreciation of her and her work.

A Superfluity of Neat Stuff

Somehow, I didn't expect the early months of 2010 to be filled with so many good books deserving my attention as a reviewer. In last week's column, I covered three recent science fiction/fantasy releases, including Peter Straub's "A Dark Matter," "Things We Didn't See Coming" by Steven Amsterdam and Barbara Roden's "Northwest Passages."

Straub's "A Dark Matter," scheduled to arrive in stores on Feb. 9, is the best of the bunch. A tricky tale of five high school friends revisiting a terrible event that occurred 40 years earlier, it's Straub's first novel since 2004's "In the Night Room," continuing his long string of literate and ambitious supernatural thrillers. You can watch book trailer/teaser above.

With that column behind me, I thought I would have a little breathing room, but that's not the case. February brings horror/fantasy novels by two heavy-hitters in the field, Owen Hill's "Horns" and Dan Simmons' "Black Hills." Not to mention two new books by Michael Shea: "The Extra" from Tor and "Copping Squid" from Perilous Press. Plus, "Blackout," the first half of Connie Willis's World War II time-travel epic, is due any day now and really ought to be considered. Charlie Huston's "Sleepless" occupies the borderlands between science fiction and crime, so it, too, is tempting to throw into the mix.

Finally, in March Tor will publish "Not Less Than Gods," Kage Baker's latest book about The Company. Baker is one of my favorite authors, and a new novel from her would normally be a cause for unalloyed celebration. She is, however, near the end of her struggle with cancer.

Which puts the problem of having too many good novels to read into perspective, doesn't it?

Arts & Culture Junk Direct Marketing Mail

Because I occasionally buy tickets for plays, concerts and other artsy things, I wind up on mailing lists and receive more direct mail marketing pieces than I can stand. I wrote this goofy little piece a few years back as a reaction to all those earnest, yet somehow annoying, solicitations.

For its 2009-2010 season, the Symphony of Greater California has gathered the most innovative artists in the West to perform an exhilarating repertoire of international classics and exciting new music. Under the baton of Music Director Seiji Tilson-Williams, the symphony and its guest artists will deliver an unparalleled musical experience for anyone willing to pony up 75 bucks per ticket.

The season is sponsored in part by the Pecksniff Charitable Trusts and HyperCorp. International -- "We Know What's Good for You"

September 10 through October 15
THE EVOLUTION OF MUSIC
Follow the progress of world music, from two wooden sticks struck together in a Paleolithic village to a Web page that plays an endless loop of "My Heart Will Go On." See how Darwinian theory applies to everything from the symphony orchestra to your local skiffle band. Discover how the wily and agile violin schemed its way to the top, while the slow-witted and awkward bassoon took a turn down an evolutionary dead-end. Witness a duel to the death between a harpsichord and a clavier. Program may be too intense for young children.

October 20 through November 15
THE GERMANIC GIANTS
A three-concert series, consisting of "Mostly Mozart," Basically Beethoven" and "Completely Weill."

November 26 through December 24
BABES IN ICELAND
Our Children's Holiday Program
Does the thought of sitting through yet another production of either "Peter and the Wolf" or "The Nutcracker" cause you to break into hives and uncontrollable muscular spasms? Then you're in luck this Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Solstice season! Based on Gunnar Gunnarson's 15th-Century, 34-volume epic poem, this 45-minute program brings Scandinavian folklore to life, complete with live reindeer, on-stage ice skating and freakishly huge marionettes of Glinka the Frost Witch and the evil ice dragon, Frigidaire. With a lively score by Bjorg Bjorgenson and the Umlaut Quartet, "Babes in Iceland" is sure to entertain privileged children for generations to come. Special guest Robin Williams will perform the part of Snorri, The Annoying Troll Who Weeps and Grins Simultaneously.

January 5 through February 20
MASTERS OF ATONAL MINIMALISM
An evening of no discernible harmonies or melodies, using as few notes as humanly possible. Highlights include Bromffman's "Amplified Dripping Faucet" and Chayefsky's "The Sensory Deprivation Blues."

Here are just a few of the rave reviews this program has garnered.
Minimalist Monthly: "This music is good."
Tortured Intellectual Weekly: "Never before has a white-noise generator been taken to such rhapsodic heights!"
Elmer Hobart, long-time subscriber: "For the love of God, kill me now!"

February 28. One Night Only.
TOM WAITS PERFORMS "THE RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN SONG BOOK"
America's favorite sandpaper-voiced troubadour interprets tunes from "Oklahoma," "The King & I" "South Pacific" and "Carousel." The highlight of the show comes when Waits dons a wimple to sing "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" from "The Sound of Music." Special guest Lou Reed provides a touching rendition of "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair."

March 1 through April 15
CORPORATE BRANDING TOONAPALOOZA
You hear them on the radio, on TV, at the movies, even through your computer speakers. They're the songs that have been co-opted by giant, faceless corporations to promote their products, services and Orwellian ideologies. Now these tunes have been woven into a musical tapestry that will set your toes tapping and put your mind in a free-spending groove. Selections include "Rhapsody in the Public Domain," "Fanfare for the Common Consumer," "Sixties and Seventies Sell-Outs" and "The Music from That Volkswagen Commercial Where Everything's Moving to the Beat of the Windshield Wipers."

Tickets for all concerts may be purchased at the box office, online or through an antiquated and vaguely frightening voice-mail system. Subscribers will eventually be harassed with dinner-time telephone solicitations, while one-time ticket buyers will be left to contemplate their cheapness in ominous silence.

RIP Robert B. Parker

I was saddened to learn of the sudden death of Robert B. Parker, author of "The Godwulf Manuscript" and 37 other mysteries featuring the Boston PI known only as Spenser. For a long while, Parker was one of my very favorite mystery novelists and, even if I haven't pick up a new book by him in nearly a decade, I still have a lot of respect for him and his prodigious output.

I started reading Parker in my late teens, probably around the time of "The Judas Goat." Part of his appeal for me lay in the fact that he was a "local boy," that he wrote about Boston, a city only an hour away from my hometown. But there was plenty else to appreciate about those early books -- their wit, the pared-down prose, the way Parker worked in, and reacted against, the traditions laid down by Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Like two other literary New Englanders hitting their stride at that time, Stephen King and Gregory Mcdonald of "Fletch" fame, he was demonstrating that old forms of pop lit could be given fresh, interesting spins.

The first dozen Spensers are the best, and a few -- "Mortal Stakes," "Looking for Rachel Wallace," "Early Autumn" -- rank with the best crime novels of the 70s and 80s. "A Catskill Eagle" in1985 seemed to me to be a turning point, the book where the conversational byplay started to turn into shtick, where Hawk and Susan and the supporting cast grew more predictable, where Parker seemed to give in to the temptation to set his word processor on Cruise Control and just let the new installments roll out.

I continued to read new Spenser books as they became available, and some of them were enjoyable. I have vivid memories of parts of "God Save the Child," "Ceremony" and other early entries, but I don't think, however, that I can recall any individual scene from any novel post-"Taming a Seahorse." After "Potshot," I gave up. I could deal with the increasingly insufferable Susan Silverman, put up with the recycled plots, but it was Spenser's damn dog Pearl that finally did me in. The magic was gone, but I didn't particularly mind.

But I'm sorry he's left us. The reports indicate that he died at his desk, and that's as fitting a conclusion to such a durable and distinguished career as I can imagine.

Lots of others are weighing in with tributes. Check "Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind" for a thorough round-up.

5 Writing Lessons from H.P. Lovecraft

Another reprint, a bit more tongue-in-cheek than the previous.

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Howard Phillips Lovecraft is now regarded as one of the pre-eminent figures of twentieth century horror literature. Born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, he wrote some of the genre’s most influential stories and novellas, including “The Call of Cthulhu,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Dunwich Horror.” His vision of a hostile universe, in which humanity survives at the whim of terrible Elder Gods, still holds considerable power 70 years after his death from intestinal cancer.

Here are five writing lessons I’ve learned from H.P. Lovecraft:

1. Be polite to editors.

In March, 1923, Chicago publisher J.C. Henneberger and editor Edwin F. Baird inaugurated “Weird Tales,” a pulp magazine devoted to horror fiction. Lovecraft submitted a stack of material with a cover letter almost guaranteed to alienate its recipient:

“If the tale cannot be printed as it is written, down to the very last semicolon and comma, it must gracefully accept rejection. Excision by editors is probably the one reason why no living American author has any real prose style…”

To his credit, Baird didn’t tell Lovecraft to take a flying leap. Despite his bizarre sense of salesmanship, Lovecraft sold five stories to “Weird Tales” with that submission.

Kids, don’t try this at home…

2. Sometimes tone and mood are the most important elements of a story.

I defy anyone to read “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” my favorite Lovecraft tale, and not be creeped out by it. The prose is clunky, the characters stereotypical, the premise queasily racist. But Lovecraft puts you right in the middle of that haunted, decaying seaport and makes you believe that hideously devolved fish-men are going to rise up from the depths if you don’t watch out.

Although frequently overwritten and often repetitive, Lovecraft’s stories are unique in their ability to convey a sense of cosmic horror, that the universe is inhabited by beings whose enormity could crush the human mind. And that’s a good thing.

3. You really ought to learn how to write realistic dialogue.

Lovecraft’s attempts at dialogue are sometimes laughable. It’s almost certain that no one has ever spoken like Zadok Allen, “the half-crazed liquorish nonagenarian” who tells tales of old Innsmouth. A tiny sample:

“Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had ‘em ages afore, but lost track o’ the upper world arter a time. What they done to the victims it ain’t fer me to say, an’ I guess Obed wan’t none too sharp abaout askin.”

Lovecraft admitted that he didn’t much like people below his perceived social class. As he wrote in a letter, “I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them.” In addition to being morally repugnant, this attitude prevented him from creating dialogue with any kind of verisimilitude to actual human speech.

4. A solid social network is crucial.

Although reclusive by nature, Lovecraft maintained elaborate correspondences with mentors and protégés alike, including Robert E. “Conan the Barbarian” Howard, Robert “Psycho” Bloch and Fritz “Fafhrd and Gray Mouser” Leiber. During his career, Lovecraft wrote more than 100,000 letters. Think of what he might have accomplished with Twitter.

5. You never know how you’ll be viewed by posterity.

It’s likely that Lovecraft held no hope at the time of his death that his work would be remembered by a general readership. But his friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei formed Arkham House and published “The Outsider and Others” in hardcover in 1939. Other editions followed, and eventually Lovecraft’s work was reprinted in paperback and circulated around the globe. Many of the modern masters of horror, from Stephen King and Peter Straub to Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell, have paid homage to him, and the Cthulhu Mythos continues to inspire novels, comics, movies and plush figures.

Is This Your Homework, Larry?

I saw "A Serious Man" over the weekend, did not enjoy it as much as I thought I would, but am still mulling over its implications. Here, however, is a reprint dealing with a Coen Brothers film that I unreservedly admire.

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In the wake of the Oscars and the multiple achievements of “No Country for Old Men,” I’ve been thinking about the Coen Brothers a lot lately. Especially about what good writers they are. They do all kinds of things with dialogue and structure and symbolism that really shouldn’t work, but because they’re really good literary craftsmen, they pull them off with aplomb.

Over at Ken Levine’s blog, screenwriter Bob “Back to the Future” Gale instigated a brouhaha with a post about all the perceived lapses in logic in “No Country.” Some of the nitpicks I can agree with, but I think Gale is really misreading the movie. “No Country” only looks like a conventional cat-and-mouse thriller. Worrying about why Anton Chigurh chooses to carry around that cattle gun is like wondering why the eponymous protagonist of “Barton Fink” isn’t at all concerned about the inferno raging in the hallway outside his hotel room at that movie’s climax. There are bigger issues at hand.

If I had to choose a favorite Coen Brothers movie, I think I’d have to select “The Big Lewbowski.” For me, it delivers the highest ratio of laughs to lines of most movies I can recall. It’s a film that truly improves with each viewing.

I recently picked up “I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski and What-Have-You,” a book by the guys who organize LebowskiFest. It contains interviews with members of the cast, bits of trivia, a glossary of Lebowski-speak. It gets a little repetitive, but like the Dude himself, its heart is in the right place.

The best part of the book, however, speaks to why the Coens are such smart writers and where they find their inspiration. The authors investigate the origins of one of the movie’s signature sequences, when Walter (John Goodman) and the Dude (Jeff Bridges) interrogate Larry, a silent junior high school student, about a piece of homework found in the Dude’s car, which had been stolen and recently recovered. I can’t do justice to it in summary, but the scene starts in a suburban living room containing a man in an iron lung and ends with Walter destroying a sports car with a tire iron while screaming, “This is what happens when you f* a stranger in the a*!!!!” (Or as the censored version on Comedy Central would have it, “This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!!!”)

It’s hilarious. Trust me.

What’s great, though, is that this scene is based on a true incident, at least according to “I’m a Lebowski…” Twenty-odd years ago, USC film professor Peter Exline had his car stolen, got it back and found some fast food wrappers and a kid’s homework assignment in it. He and a friend, private detective “Big” Lew Abernathy, tracked the kid down, visited him at home one night and tried to get him to confess. Just like in the movie. There was even an old man confined to a hospital bed in the living room, the boy’s father, elderly screenwriter Everett Freeman, author of “Larceny, Inc.” and “The Glass Bottom Boat.”

The Coens heard this story from Exline and, without telling him, vowed to use it someday in a movie.

The ultimate kicker is that the authors of “I’m a Lebowski…” contacted the “real Little Larry,” who was not a joy-riding delinquent and did not learn what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps. And as they report, “…until we called, he had no idea that the day in his living room when two strange men arrived with his homework in a baggie had been a pivotal inspiration for ‘The Big Lebowski.’” The interview with 32-year-old Jaik Freeman proves to be one of the book’s highlights.

I don’t know why this convoluted anecdote told from multiple perspectives tickles me so. I guess I just like the sheer improbability of it, the way the most absurd aspects of real life can be transmuted into — wait for it — art. With the Coens, there’s no use looking for logic, because what you’ll find in its place is a whole lot more interesting.

5 Writing Lessons Learned from Donald Westlake

I wrote this a few years ago for a blog that died a-borning. I'm re-printing it here as part of an effort to tidy up the various facets of my online presence, and also because Westlake has been on my mind recently. He passed away unexpectedly on New Year's 2009.

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Donald Westlake, screenwriter of “The Grifters, author of “The Hot Rock,” “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” and many other novels, is one of my favorite thriller writers. Pick up any of his books at random, and you can learn something valuable from it, as well as be guaranteed hours of first-rate entertainment.

Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Westlake also writes about no-nonsense thief Parker. The character has appeared, always with a different name, in a handful of movies, some of them good (”Point Blank”) and some of them not (”Slayground”). There are currently 23 Parker novels, and many of them epitomize what their author does best. They’re fast, lean, gripping and darkly, darkly funny.

Here are five lessons I’ve learned from Westlake/Stark:

1. Choose a strong title.
   Some of the early Parker novels have titles so terse that they don’t really stick in the memory: “The Score,” “The Outfit,” “The Seventh,” “The Hunter.” I have trouble keeping track of them in my head. But after a 24-year break from writing about Parker, Stark brought him back in “Comeback.” Which was followed by “Backflash.” Followed by “Flashfire,” “Firebreak” and “Breakout.” The titles are down to one word, but they’re evocative and the progression from one to the next is clever without being distracting.
2. Waste no time getting the story started.
   In the early books, the first sentence always started with “When…”
   When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. He heard the plop of a silencer behind him as he rolled, and the bullet punched the pillow where his head had been. — “The Outfit”
   When he didn’t get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in. – “The Split”Even without that gimmick, the openings are always active and compelling.

   Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and a packet of explosive in the other. — “Slayground”

   These aren’t books that begin with long ruminations about the weather. There’s action on the very first page.

3. Understand structure.
   Many of the Parker books are organized around a four-part structure. The first two parts are from Parker’s perspective. The third offers multiple viewpoints of a critical plot turn. The final portion wraps things up, again from inside Parker’s head.It’s a particularly effective technique. The third-person limited perspective keeps everything focused and leaves little room for extraneous business. The late-in-the-game breakout from the protagonist’s perspective allows the author to ramp up the suspense by dramatising conflicts that Parker can’t foresee.
4. Don’t be afraid to change your style. Westlake has said that he once grew frustrated with a draft in which Parker kept losing the thing he was trying to steal. Rather than bull his way through a book that wasn’t working, Westlake decided to turn it into a comedy, thereby creating his long-running character John Dortmunder, who first appeared in “The Hot Rock.”
5. If you don’t work to avoid obsolescence, you may wind up having to kill someone to keep working. Although not published with the Stark pen-name, “The Axe” is one of the bleakest novels Westlake has ever written. The tale of a middle-aged middle-manager who strikes back against downsizing by killing off his competitors, “The Ax” is cautionary tale for anyone who has become too complacent about their job security.

5 Trilogies Worth Re-reading

The short days and cold nights put me in the mood for longer, more involved storytelling. I just finished Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Played with Fire," the middle volume of the Milllennium Trilogy, bookended by "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and the forthcoming "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest." (Larsson planned 10 volumes in the thriller saga but died after turning in only the first three.)

These books are clever and absorbing, with a dynamic female protagonist. But I doubt I'll ever want to re-read them, no matter how good the final book turns out to be. Their clumsy translations, eye-glazing info dumps and the ridiculousness of the male protagonist's irresistibility to the opposite sex are likely to prevent me from picking up the books for a second go-round.

There are some trilogies, however, that, at various intervals, spur me to re-read up to 2,000 pages. I've made it through three of the following multiple times, and the other two are on my One of These Days, Soon list. Only one is an out-and-out fantasy, and it's not very well known, even within the genre.

1. The Quest for Karla by John Le Carre
These may be the best three espionage novels of the last quarter of the 2oth century. (The first volume was published in 1974, but close enough.) I could read again and again "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," the story of George Smiley's search for the Russian mole within British intelligence. "The Honourable Schoolboy" takes an entirely different tack and takes some getting used to, but it has its deep pleasures, especially the scenes in Asia. The overly talky "Smiley's People" is in some way the least successful of the three, but it does bring everything to an extremely fitting, and moving, end.




2. Game, Set, Match by Len Deighton
Deighton made his name with the "unnamed spy/Harry Palmer" books, beginning with "The Ipcress File" in 1962. As good as those swinging-Sixties novels are, I believe they are eclipsed by "Berlin Game," "Mexico Set" and "London Match," from the Reagan-era Cold War. Old Berlin hand Bernard Samson is pulled away from his desk job and back into the field when Brahms Four, one of his informants on the other side of the Wall, wants out. Samson's investigation brings to light the presence of, what do you know?, another mole. Only this time the betrayal is intensely personal for Bernard.

Deighton takes a cheekier, more working class attitude toward the spy novel than does Le Carre. He's also more slippery in his narrative. Samson is not a reliable narrator, over-confident in his own talents and too quick to dismiss his blue-blooded superiors.

These books constitute the first of three trilogies, the other two being "Spy Hook, Line and Sinker" and "Faith, Hope and Charity." The sequence, published well past the dismantling of the Soviet Union, runs out of steam before the end, but all of the books have their interesting bits, and there's a huge reversal in "Spy Line."

3. The Blue Rose Sequence by Peter Straub
Straub didn't intend for "Koko" and "Mystery" to be part of a trilogy, not until he dreamed up "The Throat" and saw how the third book could swallow the other two whole.

"Koko" follows a group of Vietnam veterans as they discover that one of their former platoon-mates has become a serial killer, hunting journalists who have written about a massacre that occurred in a village called Ia Thuc. "Mystery" is set on a Caribbean island and in the Midwest, where a young man nearly killed in a car accident investigates two sets of murders. In "The Throat," Tim Underhill, the secret hero of "Koko," reveals his connection to the characters in "Mystery" and then solves, once and for all, what have come to be known as the Blue Rose murders.

You can read an extended interview with Straub that I conducted during his tour for "The Throat." In it, he discusses the origins of the books and of the short stories that are peripheral to them.

4. The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
I haven't read "Fifth Business," in nearly 25 years, so perhaps it's time to go to the garage and dig it out, along with "The Manticore" and "World of Wonders."

A boy throws a rock-filled snowball at this friend/rival. The friend ducks, and the missile strikes a pregnant woman, causing her to give birth prematurely. Out from that simple set of actions spirals a saga that comes to span decades and continents, touching on subjects as diverse as Jungian psychoanalysis and stage magic.

Davies -- journalist, academic, playwright -- was particular fond of three-book sequences. Also of interest are the Salterton Trilogy and the Cornish Trilogy.



5. The Chronicle of the King's Tramp by Tom DeHaven
DeHaven is the author of a trilogy about the history of comics, consisting of "Funny Papers," "Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies" and "Dugan Under Ground," of which I've read only the middle volume. (It stands well enough on its own.)

"Walker of Worlds," "The End of Everything Man" and "The Last Human" make up DeHaven's other trilogy, an out-and-out multiversal fantasy that rivals Zelazny at his best. I'm not sure I can begin to give a decent summary of it. It features sentient dogs, evil monks, mud monsters, homeless savants and whole bunch of weird stuff. It's a kick from start to finish.

The Posthumous Crichton

Michael Crichton, author of "The Andromeda Strain" and "Jurassic Park," died of cancer last year, but there's a new novel out with his name on it. "Pirate Latitudes" was apparently found in his files as a completed manuscript. Indeed, it doesn't read like something patched together from notes, drafts and narrative stitching provided by some after-the-fact collaborator. It's creepiness factor is therefore pretty low.

It actually feels like a throw-back to some of Crichton's early work, either the potboilers penned under the John Lange byline or the historical novels published under his own name, including "The Great Train Robbery" and "Eaters of the Dead." It's a pirate novel, all right, but not an ironic pirate novel. There's no outrightly fantastic element in it, as in Gene Wolfe's recent "Pirate Freedom." What you expect is pretty much what you get.

"Pirate Latitudes" is entertaining, though, and that opinion is reflected in my review of the novel in this week's Sunday Chronicle. And, as a bonus, here's a link to the appreciation of Crichton I wrote for The Chronicle at the time of death.