Tag Archives: Frankenstein

The Top Hundred Books to Read

by in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Every so often some version of this list bubbles up into my consciousness. Mostly it’s when I guiltily remind myself I’m way behind on my reading (my bookshelves can attest to that). So I did a web search and pulled up a bunch of these lists of the top hundred books you should read. The “you” in question is debatable, of course, as are the lists. There are tons and tons and tons, everyone from The New York Times to the BBC, PBS, booksellers and publishers of course, as well as more obscure sites like The Art of Manliness (glad to see that people are finally treating manliness as the art form that it is).

Here’s one site I found, a writer at Medium who compiled his list of the top hundred. Let’s see how I align with his list.

  1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Read it, loved it, recommend it, mainly for the technique of the unreliable narrator. Nick Carraway is a creep.
  2. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Tried it in college. I was too young for it. Didn’t make it very far.
  3. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Read this soon after I got out of the army. I liked it well enough, even though its antiestablishment, pre-hippie vibes were dated.
  4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Controversy be damned, this one should be higher up on this list.
  5. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien. Tried reading The Hobbit in high school. Hated it, so I never got to this one, and I never will. The movies were great.
  6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I recently tried reading this. It’s one of those books that is too well written. I couldn’t stomach a book about a pedophile. Despite the great writing, I will not finish it and I couldn’t recommend it.
  7. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. This book gets slagged a lot, and I get why, but I think it’s phenomenal. Salinger broke new ground with his storytelling and POV character style, a style that’s been imitated almost to death. But it’s great in its original incarnation. Also spawned one of my favorite lyrics by country artist Orville Peck: “You’re just another boy caught in the rye.”
  8. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. Read this book several years ago. It’s about a world and a time I know little about–interesting, fascinating, expertly written, and highly recommended.
  9. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Know the story, never read it, but I did write a story based off his Jabberwocky poem that got included in an anthology.
  10. Ulysses by James Joyce. A friend of mine who is a Joyce fanatic had me read this book chapter by chapter and discuss it with her over wine. Ulysses is a challenge, but he maps out the modern novel.
  11. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I think I might have read it in high school? Can’t remember, but this is one of those stories almost everyone knows, even if they’ve never read it.
  12. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Read it. Loved it. I can never forget that final scene. Also, one of my favorite songs, Rose of Sharyn by Killswitch Engage, shares the name with a character in this book.
  13. 1984 by George Orwell. Why read it when we’re living it? Just kidding.
  14. Jayne Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Never read it, though I did read Wuthering Heights by her sister Emily, and also Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, which is a strange and fun take on Bronte’s title character.
  15. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. I tried reading it in college. I kept falling asleep.
  16. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I read and loved Woolf’s mercifully briefer answer to Joyce’s Ulysses.
  17. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. Nope
  18. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Yes. And I loved it. Dystopic sci-fi at its finest.
  19. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Yes, years ago. Not something I’d usually pick up but well worth the read.
  20. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I don’t know her.
  21. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here’s the thing. I hate Garcia Marquez. Every time I read his writing I get depressed because I will never write anything half as good, this included.
  22. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I tried but it wasn’t for me. I think the main problem is that Austen, like Salinger, started a literary tradition that’s been done to death. I read Salinger early in my reading career. I tried reading Austen too late.
  23. Animal Farm by George Orwell. Yep, back in high school, and I still remember it vividly. Some things never change.
  24. Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. Working on it right now. Intense.
  25. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Not yet but it’s on my list.
  26. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Nope.
  27. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Yes. When I was ten. Way too young. Then again a few years ago. Classic.
  28. The Stranger by Albert Camus. Nope. I read The Plague though. Dark is an understatement.
  29. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Nope.
  30. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. No again.
  31. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Yes. She is one of the parents of modern horror. Great book.

If you’ve made it this far you get the point and I won’t go on until 100. It’s fun, though, to look back on what you’ve read and loved (or didn’t), and to add more books to your pile waiting to be read.

Someday…

Why I can’t read any new Stephen King

by in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

This isn’t an easy thing for me to write: I will never read a new Stephen King novel again.

I grew up on King. When I was a teenager I devoured his books: Carrie, Firestarter, Thinner, The Talisman, Eyes of the Dragon, Pet Sematary, It. He was (and still is) a fantastic storyteller. He creates characters who feel real and alive, and in his horror, he captures real fears we all have and relays them to us in ways that keeps us awake well past dark.

I stopped reading him for several years — no real reason, except that there are so many other books out there. Then about five years ago I picked up The Dark Tower. Wow. It floored me. The Dark Tower was King at his best — wild, madcap, bursting with imagination, and populated with characters who seemed as real as you or me. Roland Deschain, the gunslinger and hero of the seven book Dark Tower series, is one of my all-time favorite characters. The seven books of the Dark Tower series weren’t perfect. There was way too much fat. And partway through the series he introduces a character named Stephen King, a writer of horror movies. This was his only major misstep in the whole series; it nearly broke the illusion for me. But I was able to overlook this. Even the ending, controversial to some, was brilliant to me.

Then I made the mistake of reading Under the Dome, his book about a town that’s mysteriously trapped beneath an impenetrable dome, and I realized a few things:

–I’m tired of reading about small-town Maine. The characters in Under the Dome were way too similar to those in his earlier books.

–King’s world is black and white. I like gray.

–King’s writing is devoid of all hope.

That last part is crucial. First, let me be clear: King’s talent and skill are undeniable, and his work ethic is something we should all emulate. But when I write, I must come from a place of hope. Even in the darkest stories I write, there exists a thread of hope, no matter how thin. In Under the Dome, there really was none. The basic message was this: the world sucks, people suck, and ultimately we’re all powerless. I trudged through the 1000 plus pages, hoping for at least a stellar ending, but the ending I got was one of the worst I’ve ever read. It wasn’t even good enough for a bad Twilight Zone episode. It was arbitrary and it made me regret wasting my time.

And now I just finished his latest, Revival. Where do I begin?

First, the good. King is a master of a unique premise, or, at least a premise that would have seemed obvious, but for some reason wasn’t. For this book, he infuses horror into the well-worn cliche of the faith healer. You would think it’s been done to death, but I can’t think of another case. And he works in clever homages to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the cold horror of HP Lovecraft.

But first you have to sift through the boring life of one Jamie Morton, who is well meaning enough, but nothing more than a way for King to relay the glories of his small town baby boomer generation. I grew up in the shadow of the baby boomer generation. Never again do I want to hear about how cool or special their lives and culture were. Thank God for that skill known as skimming pages.

Jamie aside, King gives us Pastor Charles Jacobs. In Jacobs we have someone who is much more compelling — a man of God who loses all faith when his wife and son die in a horrific accident. King deftly describes the accident, sparing none of the gore. And he paints a brilliant picture of a man shattered.

Unfortunately it’s told through the bland eyes of Jamie, whose motivations are never quite clear or understandable. There’s an attraction between him and Jacobs, something that keeps them coming back to each other over the years, but it’s never explained. We’re just expected to go along until the bleak, bitter end.

And what an end it was. The world of Revival is one of utter horror, with no hope of escape. In the end, Jacobs and Jamie glimpse the afterlife, and its a hellish afterlife awaiting every man, woman and child. I’m not a psychologist, but I’m guessing Stephen King hates religion. I’d bet he doesn’t even believe in God. Fair enough. A belief in God is by no means a prerequisite for a good and happy life. But what King gives us is an inversion of God and religion. Not only is there no purpose to life, but we are insignificant, and will suffer cruelly no matter what we do.

Revival, similar to Under the Dome, is a book about being utterly powerless. It is a book that contains not a single shred of hope. In fact, hope is systematically killed off until nothing but despair remains.

Revival left me feeling pretty low. Yes, I know it’s JUST A BOOK. But one of the reasons we read books, watch TV, go to the movies, listen to music, etc, is to feel transformed. We’re looking for something to feed our souls, to make us feel alive, to affirm the beauty and goodness of life. King’s Dark Tower series did this for me. But these last two books — Under the Dome and now Revival — did the opposite. All they did was bring me lower.

Stephen King is a wildly talented and successful writer. I can’t speak for his state of mind (I wouldn’t presume to do so) but I hope he’s not living in a place of darkness. I’ve loved being a part of his literary word, but it’s time for me to let him go.

Fiction and fear

by in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What are you most afraid of? Spiders? Dogs? Death? Loneliness?

Chances are, whatever your fear is, it’s been dramatized. Horror stories are about laying bare our fears. Think of some of the most notable horror stories and at their root you can find a fear.

jaws_dts_hires–Bram Stoker’s Dracula is about the fear of sex and sexuality, a direct reflection of the repressed Victorian era

–Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise have both been interpreted as a fear of becoming a parent

—Jaws is not only about a fear of sharks, but it touches on a primal fear of our vulnerability to deadly creatures that lurk in the deep

One thing that always frightened me is mental illness, especially the kind that leads to delusions. I know this type of mental illness has a physiological underpinning, but it still disturbs me on a core level. I incorporated my own fear into my new novella, House of Flies.

House of Flies

The plot: 19-year-old Alec Pearson, recently orphaned, lives in a huge house and has all the money he could need. Then he starts seeing flies. These aren’t ordinary flies; they carry with them dark visions. He tries to fight the flies but he fears he’s losing his mind. Finally he takes a drastic step to rid himself of the madness around him.

I used a common horror trope—insects, specifically flies—as a way to dramatize Alec’s plight. Insects creep most people out, so it’s a built in special effect. The whole point of the story, though, was to discover how suppressing emotions—grief in this instance—can push you to the brink of madness.

Writers are lucky. We have a vehicle to explore our fears, examine them, and work through them in a way that not only benefits us, but hopefully entertain others. If you have the chance, check out House of Flies.

Fictional faces brought to “life”

by in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One artist is translating writers’ descriptions of their fictional characters. The results are jarring.

For me, half the fun in reading a book is imagining it in my mind’s eye. Sometimes I get a clear image of the characters; other times the image is hazy as the action takes control. Either way, I’m engaged in creating this world in my own imagination with the blueprint that the writer provided.

Brian Joseph Davis has taken some of the best known — beloved and infamous — literary characters and created sketches of them using law-enforcement composite sketch software. He’s compiled the sketches, and the original descriptions, on his website The Composites.

Take Mr. Wednesday, one of the major characters in Neil Gaiman’s classic novel American Gods.

As described by Gaiman:

“Shadow looked at the man in the seat next to him…He grinned a huge grin with no warmth in it at all…His hair was a reddish gray; his beard, little more than stubble, was grayish red. A craggy, square face with pale gray eyes…The man’s craggy smile did not change…There was something strange about his eyes, Shadow thought. One of them was a darker gray than the other…humorless grin…Wednesday’s glass eye… He was almost Shadow’s height, and Shadow was a big man.”

And as visualized by Davis?

Image

That’s not how I pictured Mr. Wednesday in my head. To me he was older, craggier, beefier.

There’s more on Davis’ website. Here’s Marla Singer, from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, as Palahniuk describes her:

“My power animal is Marla…Black hair and pillowy French lips. Faker. Italian dark leather sofa lips…Marla stares up at me. Her eyes are brown. Her earlobes pucker around earring holes, no earrings…She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up…Marla never has any fat of her own, and her mom figures that familial collagen would be better than Marla ever having to use the cheap cow kind…Short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses…Her black hair whipping my face…The color of Marla’s brown eyes is like an animal that’s been heated in a furnace and dropped into cold water. They call that vulcanized or galvanized or tempered.”

And here’s Davis’ image.

Image

My favorite of Davis’ images is the one that captures a different view of a classic character. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley describes the monster as:

“Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing… but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”

And here he is:

Image

With all the Hollywood depictions of the Monster as monstrous, it’s easy to forget that he was not created to be hideous.

As a reader and a writer, I’m not a fan of over-description. In my book The Last Conquistador, I tried to be sparse but concise in my descriptions of the characters. For instance, the protagonist Randy describes his wayward girlfriend Lise as “solid and shapely, like the kid sister of a truck stop waitress.” I wanted to seed a broad image in the reader’s mind.

In Always Mine, Danny, the young hero, meets the stepfather of Tina, the mysterious girl next door that he has a crush on. How do I describe Bob? Using just a few key images:

“He shook Danny’s hand rough and hard. He was meaty with a walrus mustache, and he glared as if Danny harbored bad intentions for his daughter.”

While I prefer the less is more approach, after browsing through Davis’ website and comparing the writers’ words with the sketches produced, I have a greater appreciation for those writers who are meticulous in crafting their characters. It’s fascinating to see how writers shape the worlds we create in our minds.