The Last Picture Show

The Drive-In by Joe R. Lansdale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

With a new Hap & Leonard book out and the TV series based on their adventures coming soon it seems like Lansdale Fever is sweeping Goodreads these days. I blame Dan for infecting me with this particular strain of the virus.

I’d read the first two parts of The Drive-In saga way back in the ‘90s when I first discovered the Champion Mojo Storyteller, but I’d forgotten most of the story and never even gotten around to checking out the third installment. Then Dan spread his contagion all over the place, and I found myself rediscovering the gruesomeness of the Popcorn King all over again. Thanks a lot, Dan!

During the late ‘80s in Texas four young men head out to the local drive-in where they plan to spend the night watching a horror movie marathon. In the middle of their films a comet with a smile roars by, and the entire drive-in is suddenly surrounded by an inky darkness that dissolves anyone who tries to leave. With no other options the trapped patrons watch the movies over and over in an endless night as the food starts to run out. That’s when things get even weirder and more horrible.

This is a very short book, and that’s a good thing because I don’t think spinning the concept out much longer than 150 pages would actually work. (Although I’m sure Stephen King would have taken a 700 or 800 page swing at it if he would have thought of this idea first.) What really sells it is that Lansdale quickly provides the details that ground things in reality among the most mundane circumstances of people going to the movies before unleashing the batshit craziness. Then he uses the most terrible of creatures, human beings, to set the stage for the real horror show which becomes a gory supernatural B-movie spectacle.

Lansdale mainly uses two characters to represent different points of view. Our narrator Jack holds the desperately hopeful belief that there is some inherent goodness and meaning in humanity’s existence, but the counterpoint is his buddy Bob who operates under the basic assumptions that people are just bastard covered bastards with bastard filling and that believing in anything other than yourself is a waste of time. This is pretty much the same dynamic that defines the soft-hearted Hap and the pragmatic Leonard so you can almost see Jack and Bob as an early trial run at those two characters.

The part that really got to me this time was that period before things really go sideways when everyone is just stuck watching the movies over and over again while living off concession stand hotdogs and popcorn. While drive-ins were pretty much dead in my area by the time I was a teenager I’ve attended some movie marathons, and I think Lansdale really nailed that weird dreamy limbo state that sets in if you spend hour after hour staring at a screen in a theater as you shove popcorn or candy into your mouth.

Like most things Lansdale it’s got some funny stuff mixed in with some sharp edges that unsuspecting readers might cut themselves on. Overall, it’s weird and gory in ways that are different than most horror stories you’d read, but it’s also got an ugliness to it that definitely cuts into the fun factor you might expect from something this bizarre.

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Requiem For A Dentist

Doc by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I’m your huckleberry."
- Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone

I’m far the first person to bring up Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc in the movie when reviewing this book, but it’s hard to avoid the comparison other than just the obvious fact that they’re both stories about the same man. Much like Tombstone embraces the legend of a dying drunken dentist turned gambler with a talent and taste for gun fighting but also adds unexpected depths thanks in large part to Kilmer’s performance, the book speculates about the man behind the myth and creates a tragic figure with a lot of admirable qualities.

The book moves us briskly through the early part of John Henry Holliday’s life as the son of aristocratic Southerners before the Civil War to the promising young man who seems poised to make his mark as a talented dentist before being given a delayed death sentence from tuberculosis. Seeking to extend his life Holliday travels to Texas, and when dentistry can’t pay the bills his skill at poker does. That’s where Doc meets Kate, the lady who will be both his loyalest ally and greatest tormentor, and she convinces him to move to the Dodge City, Kansas, which is booming thanks to the cattle herds being driven up from Texas.

Doc becomes a local fixture in Dodge, meeting many people and making interesting new friends like Morgan Earp. When a young man is killed in a stable fire most of Dodge just thinks that it is a tragic accident, but Doc suspects there was something more sinister behind the man’s death, and this gives him something in common with Wyatt Earp who also has reasons to think foul play may have been involved. As Doc deals with his on-going illness and Kate’s tantrums, Wyatt tries to keep the peace and navigate Dodge’s murky political waters. A bond eventually forms between the two man with the stoic Wyatt being amazed at the intelligence and sheer force of will that the sickly dentist exhibits while Doc is impressed with the law man’s honesty and integrity.

One of the more interesting things about it is addressed in the author’s afterward in which Mary Doria Russell notes:

"When Homer sang of Troy and Virgil wrote of Carthage and Rome, no one expected a bright line to divide myth from history. Arriving at the end of historical fiction today, the modern reader is likely to wonder, 'How much of that was real?' In this case the answer is: not all of it but a lot more than you might think."

Russell goes on to explain what is fictional while laying out some of the things she drew on for the real, and it's obvious that she did a lot of homework to bring Doc and Dodge City to life. However, it's the bit about what modern readers expect in historical fiction that caught my attention because that's usually the first question I'll ask when finishing a book like this. Now I'm wondering if that's how I should approach stories where the myth has so overshadowed the real people and events that it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction. Especially in one where the players have alternately been idealized or demonized to suit the purposes of whoever was telling the story at the time.

Doc Holliday has been written about in histories and historical fictions as well as being portrayed on screen countless times, and he's been painted as a bloodthirsty scoundrel, a man of honor, a murderer, and a loyal friend, and sometimes he was all of these at once. When a character has been played by multiple famous actors and even appeared on an episode of classic Star Trek it gets hard to know what to think about the guy. Even a close study of the historical facts as we know them leaves a lot open to interpretation.

So how do we tell stories about a guy like Doc Holliday? As they said in another western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the truth becomes legend, print the legend."

That’s precisely what’s been done here with this fascinating account that is equal parts historical fiction, western, character study, and just an all-around well-written book that is so elegantly told that it might be called delicate despite its rough frontier setting. Doc is the focal point, of course, but the shifting viewpoint also puts us into the thoughts of most of the major characters, and by the time it’s all done you’ll understand exactly what who they are and want they want in this particular version of their story.

One oddity is that despite the main character being known as a gunfighter and taking place mostly in one of the wildest cow towns of the era is that this isn’t filled with shoot-em-up action in the same way that Tombstone is. It's closer to Lonesome Dove, and some of it feels like HBO’s Deadwood. In the end, this is good enough on its own to make even the obvious comparisons feel a bit lame, and I’ll be checking out it’s follow-up, Epitaph, in the near future.

This book definitely was my huckleberry.

Note: I rewrote parts of this review on 2/6/16 because some of the comments I got made me think I wasn't sufficiently clear in what I was trying to say about the difference between writing a history and a historical fiction, and I thought I was potentially misrepresenting what Mary Doria Russell wrote in her author's note. I've tried to clarify that by including her quote and expanding on my own thoughts on the matter.


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The Floodgates Open

Floodgate: A Novel by Johnny Shaw
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received an advance copy of this from NetGalley.

Auction City is the kind of town that would keep Gotham City from being ranked #1 on one of those Worst Places To Live In America lists. It’s a decaying cesspool of crime and corruption where an honest cop like Andy Destra gets framed, disgraced, and tossed off the police force after he digs a little too deeply into a case.

Unemployment doesn’t keep Andy from launching a personal investigation and crusade against the deputy chief who got him fired, but Andy’s obsession with looking into Auction City’s shady history has him teetering on the brink of being written off as a conspiracy theory whackadoo. When Andy sees a mysterious lady visiting the woman who raised him it sparks his curiosity and leads him to previously unsuspected layers of Auction City secrets that could get him killed.

I’ve been a big cheerleader for Johnny Shaw since I stumbled across his old Blood & Tacos* e-zines and had an ARC of his Dove Season dropped in my lap a few years back, and it’s been a genuine pleasure to keep up with his career since then. He’s got a knack of creating characters who are likable losers and putting them in hilariously violent situations with plenty of laugh out loud moments. Floodgate continues that trend with Andy being a goof who finds himself in over his head and confronted with a stream of increasingly outlandish characters and situations.

That works pretty well, but I had a few problems with this one. The story seems a bit slow coming out of the gate, and it takes a while to get up and running. Andy is also a problematic protagonist who is supposed to be an ex-cop who knows the score in Auction City, and yet he seems almost painfully naïve, and short-sighted at times. This whole story hinges on the idea that out of simple curiosity Andy starts chasing a trail despite being warned off in very scary ways and having his life threatened, and that just doesn’t seem like enough motivation for this.

In addition to that there’s also the contradiction that Andy is supposed to be the kind of guy who can patiently prowl old records and painstakingly build files on every nook and cranny of Auction City, yet he’s so impatient that he can’t sit on a stake-out for 20 minutes without getting bored and doing something he knows his stupid. Frankly, he comes across as kind of a dumb ass just running around with his hair on fire who then criticizes other for their lack of planning and research later in the book. (view spoiler)[Which is rich coming from the guy who started the whole mess by accidently killing a guy he confronted with a gun without thinking of what he’d do next. (hide spoiler)]

That kind of characterization has worked in other Shaw books when his leads are supposed to be rednecks and morons, but this kind of story seems to demand a smart, cynical, and capable hero. It seems improbable that Andy could have lasted for ten minutes in Auction City, let alone have once been a cop there. I know this is primarily a comedy, but it just didn’t seem like the kind of story where the main character could be that idiotic and impulsive.

Still, I loved the whole idea of this hellish city that makes Detroit seem like garden spot and the underlying history to the whole situation. There’s a cool concept at the heart of this that could be a fun series, and Shaw puts some very funny bits into the chaos that ensues. However, I had a hard time getting past the basic stupidity of Andy that drives the entire plot.

* - Full disclosure. I once contributed an unpaid review to Blood & Tacos.

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Jessica Jones Before Netflix

Jessica Jones: Alias, Vol. 1 by Brian Michael Bendis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A hard drinking private eye whose cases become explorations of the dark side of human nature is a character concept that has become a cliché of crime fiction. Ah, but what if the detective is a woman who used to be a superhero? Now you’ve really got my attention.

Jessica Jones used to go by the name of Jewel when she hung around with people like the Avengers, but despite super strength and the ability to fly (Sort of.) she never really felt like one of them and eventually hung up her spandex. But a gal’s gotta eat and booze cost money so she tries to earn a living by getting the dirt on cheating spouses or locating people who don’t want to be found. Despite her best efforts to leave her old life behind she gets a couple of cases that force her to deal with superheroes again when she accidently ends up with evidence of a famous costumed crime fighter's secret identity and looks for a missing Rick Jones who is an old buddy of the Hulk’s.

One of the more interesting aspects of a long running fictional setting like the Marvel universe is that it offers opportunities to explore different parts and ideas of it. We’ve seen superheroes by the dozen in this world, but with Jessica we get answers to interesting questions we haven’t thought to ask. What if everyone with powers isn’t cut out for wearing tights and punching bad guys? How do they deal with that realization? What do they do with their lives after that? How do you turn your back on abilities most people would love to have?

Long time comic readers or people who have watched the Netflix TV series know that there are some dark reasons behind Jessica’s choices, but we aren’t there yet in this volume. Fans of the show might be shocked that there’s no Killgrave here yet since he was the focus of most of the first season, but what we do get is this damaged woman navigating a world that feels completely beyond her while trying to do the right thing as best she can. That makes for a damn fine comic book.

My one complaint is that I’m not sure about the art. It seems muddy and all the people, including Jessica, come across as kind of ugly and distorted. That’s probably a deliberate choice to separate this from the more traditional look where everyone is gorgeous, and I’ve liked this style in other things I’ve read, especially Sean Phillips’ work in books like Criminal. However, there’s something about it that doesn’t set quite right with me. At least not yet.

Fair warning that even though Jessica is a Marvel character this is one of those comics that is not for kids or the easily offended. There's plenty of profanity, sex, and violence. You know, all the things that make life worth living!


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A Crisis of Confidence

The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time by Maria Konnikova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I was in my mid-teens I came home from school one day to find my father reading a letter.  He asked me to look at it, and it was a badly typed message full of misspellings that was  my first encounter with the Nigerian prince scam although I didn’t know it at the time.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s a scam,” I replied.

At that point he actually got irritated with me and started pointing out a bunch of reasons why it could be legitimate.  I was beyond shocked that the man who had constantly told me things like “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” and “If it’s too good to be true then it probably is.” would seriously be considering answering this letter.  If I, an idiot teenager, could see it was a fraud then why wouldn’t a pragmatic adult recognize that?  Eventually the letter got tossed in the trash without Dad sending the Nigerian prince any money.

Years later, when I was about twenty, I had a coworker approach me with a no-risk way to make some money.  He laid out a deal he’d gotten into where you kicked in cash and then convinced others to contribute which moved you up a ladder where you would eventually make like 10 times your original investment.

“That’s a pyramid scheme,” I said.  “It’s illegal, and it’ll blow up in someone’s face eventually.”

He got extremely angry, told me that I was turning down free money and went on to recruit a bunch of other people we worked with.  It was part of a trend that had swept the area, and inevitably a whole lot of people I worked with lost a bunch of cash.

I’ve puzzled over those two incidents a lot since then because I could never understand how I could see that these things were scams while others seemed eager and willing to throw their money into them.  I chalked it up to my inherent cynicism and being a fan of crime novels.  After reading this I have a much better understanding of why people fall for cons, and why they refuse to admit that they even are cons.  To be honest I’ve often patted myself on the back when reflecting about them.  See, I told myself, you’re much too smart to fall for that.

However, thanks to this book I now realize that I’ve also at least twice over the years fallen for a classic when I was approached on the street by women with small children who needed some help.  (“I’m so sorry to ask this, but I forgot my purse and I’m almost out of gas.  Is there any way you could possibly loan me….”)  And even though I had some slight misgivings at the time it was only while reading this that I realized that I had for sure been taken, and that like a lot of people I hadn’t learned my lesson after the first one.  Oops.  Well, at least my stupidity only amounts to about $20 while some suckers have lost much more than that and then went back for more.

That’s part of what makes this an interesting read.  When most of us hear about people getting swindled we usually think it’s just greed and stupidity on the part of the marks, and we have the smug satisfaction of knowing that we would surely never fall for such a thing. Maria Konnikova uses a variety of psychological studies to illustrate how that’s exactly what the victims thought, too.

She highlights how people are essentially hard wired to trust others, otherwise society would just be every person with their back against a wall with a knife in hand.  We also have the deep seated belief that each of us is special, we're surely owed a break and that we’re shrewd enough to make the most of it when it happens.  Combine that with the human tendency to refuse to admit mistakes, and it makes all of us potential rubes.

What makes this entertaining and not just informative is the deft way that Konnikova mixes fascinating true stories of cons to highlight the behaviors she’s discussing, and then she backs that up with the scientific research of the studies which often show startling tendencies.

For example, people usually decide that they're right about something and then cherry pick facts to support their beliefs.  This often leads to people digging in their heels in the face of overwhelming evidence so that they won’t even admit to being scammed.  The book highlights one man in New York around 1900 who ran a forerunner to the Ponzi scheme and was so successful that people were still lining up outside his office to give him money even after he had been exposed in the papers and had fled with the money.  In fact, even after he was arrested and convicted many remained convinced that he was legitimate and it was the newspapers who ruined the whole thing.  (Which also shows that blaming the media for bad news is a very old trick.)

All in all this is a fascinating account of not just the psychology of what makes people susceptible to cons, it’s also an excellent window into the weird ways our minds make us idiots.

Now, I’ve got a nice bridge in Brooklyn for sale if anyone is interested….

Moonwalking

Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza-pie...That’s amore!"

Dean Martin certainly sang how we see the the moon here on Earth. It’s a brilliant light in the night sky that is the symbol of romance as well as a tantalizing beacon of wonder and discovery that inspired one the greatest scientific and engineering achievements in human history. However, that’s looking at it from a distance. On closer examination it’s a lifeless hunk of rock in a vacuum that is irradiated constantly by the sun. And since people suck, when you send a bunch of us there it only gets worse.

In the future the moon has been opened for business and after a couple of generations it’s now developed into a feudal state where the five families (a/k/a the Five Dragons) who control some it’s most profitable businesses reign supreme under the watchful eye of the Lunar Development Corporation. The Corta Hélio company mines helium-3 for Earth’s energy needs, but the founder and matriarch Andriana Corta is elderly and ill. She fears that her children will fight for control once she dies, and their most bitter rival seems to have made an assassination attempt on one of the family that could turn into open warfare.

It took me a while to warm up to this story, but eventually it did grab my attention thanks to its well thought out sci-fi elements as well as detailed ideas about how a human society would function in that environment. I was particularly intrigued by the notion that their are no laws on the moon, only negotiations where everything is controlled by contracts with a court system dedicated to parsing the fine print, and where a duel might be used to settle a dispute.

Another interesting aspect is that since oxygen and water are the most precious of commodities that everyone is charged for every breath and every drop of water. So having a contract that allows you to pay for these things is very important, and unemployment could turn into an extended death sentence. Everything from the health effects of living in low gravity, the future version of the internet, fashion trends, sexuality, and the best way to make a cocktail are brought up ways that show that McDonald put a great amount of thought into this story.

The one piece I felt short changed on was a sub-plot that involved one character being a ‘wolf’ who seemingly gains extra intellectual and physical prowess when the Earth is in certain positions. Obviously, this is meant to be a kind of reverse werewolf thing, but it really seems to come out of left field and is never as fully explained as most of the other details.

The story has invited comparisons to other works like Game of Thrones, Dune, and The Godfather and you can certainly see elements of all of those and more in this, but the one that really caught my eye was in an interview that McDonald did where he cited the old TV show Dallas as one of his main inspirations. That makes a lot of sense because for big chunks of this I was thinking that it felt like a soap opera with a big wealthy family fighting each other and outsiders, and like a soap opera you’ll find yourself rooting for and against various characters.

So that’s what this is: Dallas on the moon, and just as Dallas once captivated the country with its ‘Who shot JR?’ cliffhanger McDonald tries a similar thing here by not wrapping anything up and leaving the reader with multiple storylines hanging. That’s not a fatal flaw, especially since this is supposedly going to be just a two-book story. (Although the sheer number of characters suggest that McDonald may be hoping for a TV deal of his own.) Still, it’s irksome to read all of this and end in such an open ended way.

I’ll call it three stars for now while reserving the right to adjust once I read the second part.

On a side note, isn’t it weird when you get through a whole book and don’t realize you read something else by the author? I got all the way through this one without realizing that I had also read his Brasyl.

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Bye-Bye

The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you’ve been conned or robbed out of something by a shady character then Travis McGee will try to get it back for half the value of what was taken. And if you’re a woman he’ll more than likely bang you in the process. No extra charge.

Cathy Kerr is a single mom whose father had hidden something valuable he brought back from serving in the military overseas before being sent to prison. After he dies in jail a pyschopath named Junior Allen shows up and manages to locate and steal the goods. While trying to pick up Junior’s trail McGee finds himself reluctantly cast as the savior and caregiver of Lois, a woman that Junior brutally assaulted and dominated to the point that she was total wreck in the aftermath.

This first novel in the series sets the tone with MacDonald doing some sharp writing that works as both crime story and social commentary with Travis quietly rebelling against the consumerist and conformist culture he despises. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty dated in a way that lets McGee function as both a womanizing sexist and the white knight there to defend damsels in distress. [It’s a particularly eye rolling piece of business when Travis’s scheme gets Lois killed. As usual, MacDonald writes it that McGee gets to have his cake and eat it too by engaging in a pity party that lets him play the wounded hero, and yet it’s sexual healing from Cathy Kerr that ultimately heals and redeems him. So Lois essentially just functioned as a noirish regret for Travis to have but ultimately redeemed from. Tough luck, Lois! (hide spoiler)]

It’s dated, but there’s still good stuff here. I’m looking forward to the planned movie version of this because he could still be a great character if he gets modernized a bit. Hopefully, Christian Bale can do for Travis McGee what Daniel Craig has done for James Bond.

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