Month: April 2002

I finished Dean Koontz’s novel Watchers yesterday. This is the first Koontz novel I’ve read, and he seems to have a definite grasp on how to manipulate emotions in the reader so as to heighten the suspense. His characters are well-drawn; the central two — Travis and Nora — are people we care about, and thus as they move into situations of increasing danger our involvement in the story grows.

The plot could be described, very loosely, as “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial meets The X-Files“. It is not purely a horror novel, nor is it science fiction; it is really an interstitial work that contains elements of both. While hiking in the woods, Travis encounters a golden retriever that seems to be fleeing….something. Travis helps the dog (and the dog helps Travis, a reciprocity that really fuels the novel) and the two escape whatever is in the woods. The book is really a series of escapes and pursuits, with Travis and the dog rescuing Nora from a sexual assailant, all three fleeing the something in the woods, the something in the woods fleeing the NSA agents assigned to find it, and everyone being unaware of the psychotic hit-man who is tracking everyone. Add to all this government labs that are dabbling in things they shouldn’t, peripheral Mafia involvement, and even a dash of Soviet intrigue (apparently the book is set pre-1989), and you have quite the potboiler.

The book’s main flaws are that the love story between Travis and Nora take over, relegating a lot of the interesting side action to secondary importance. Also, the book’s ending comes as a bit of a let-down; the confrontation that one expects between all of the story’s participants is over surprisingly quickly (and, quite frankly, I expected matters to be settled rather differently — one shouldn’t put down a book like this and immediately say to oneself, “It should have ended this way….”). These faults aside, Watchers is an impressive page-turner.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Noblemen and their servants playing chess — Miniature, Al Andalus, 13th century.

I don’t have any information about this image other than the title. I selected it because it reminded me of one of my favorite books, The Lions of Al-Rassan by the brilliant Canadian fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay. (See the permanent link at left for more on Kay.) The book is set in a fantasy realm based on medieval Espana during the period when the Moors were pushed out of their main European stronghold, and it is a magnificent and heartbreaking novel.

When the Lion at his pleasure comes

To the watering place to drink, ah see!

See the lesser beasts of Al-Rassan

Scatter like blown leaves in autumn,

Like air-borne seedlings in the spring,

Like grey clouds that part to let the first star

Of the god shine down upon the earth.



-Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan

(The picture links to a site of historical artworks.)

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Political books II: Jeff Greenfield’s Oh Waiter! One Order of Crow! is a highly entertaining read about a political event that seems so incredibly distant now: the disputed election of 2000. I actually read this book last fall, immediately after the attacks — a bit of timing that made the book’s subject matter seem shallower, less consequential, than perhaps it should. Greenfield’s book is a description of how all of our election day systems came crashing to a halt on November 7, 2000 — the media included. I remember sitting up until three o’clock that morning, watching Tim Russert scrawling electoral scenarios on a greaseboard; I remember all the machinations in Florida with all the hypocrisy on both sides; and most of all I remember a dull fall campaign that year between (as Greenfield puts it) “a candidate who spoke English to us as if it were our second language and a candidate who spoke English as if it were his second language.” Political junkies should definitely read this one.

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I just finished reading Joe Klein’s book The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. The book is billed as an important work of political history, being the primary chronicle of Clinton’s eight years in the White House, but in reality it is neither. It is a slight volume — barely 220 pages of primary material — and many topics are glossed over. The book is really an expansion of several magazine articles Klein wrote (primarily for The New Yorker) about the Clinton Administration, and it reads as such — not a whole lot of corroboration, little rigorous journalism, a lot of breezy narrative. Still, the book serves a purpose well: it at least provides the outlines, in broad strokes, of the 42nd President. Klein’s take is that Clinton is a man of extraordinary gifts and talents who, while accomplishing a great deal, never was able to really mold his achievements into greatness and who allowed his own personal failings to nearly derail him completely. Klein tells us a lot about the President, but ultimately the book still leaves Clinton as a somewhat foggy figure. A criticism that dogged Clinton from the time he entered the 1992 Presidential campaign is that one never could be sure just what he really believed, and after reading Klein’s book that charge still stands as fairly accurate. (Particularly frightening is the fact Klein cites that the Clinton Administration spent more on polling than every previous administration combined. Many conservatives used to complain that Clinton governed by the public opinion poll, a charge that was not entirely without merit.) Those interested in the political history of the 1990s will find a good starting point here; but the truly definitive work on that decade is still in the offing.

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The Buffalo Bills had a superb draft this year, grabbing a likely superstar for their long-underachieving offensive line in Mike Williams as their headliner. They also helped themselves in a number of other positions, but the biggest splash was their trade for former Patriots star quarterback Drew Bledsoe. When I heard of the trade rumors last week, I was ambivalent; for all the movement the Bills have made this offseason (they will go into the 2002 season much improved, on paper, over the 2001 edition), they are still in my estimation a year or two away from being truly competitive at a high level. It seemed odd to me for them to try to land a star quarterback who is in the final three years of a long-term contract — precisely the years which are the most expensive, because that is how NFL teams structure their contracts these days. (The idea being, of course, to unload the player or get him to renegotiate before the team actually finds itself in the position of having to pay those huge dollars on the back end of the contracts.) Also, Bledsoe comes to the team having suffered a fairly serious injury last year (delivered by Jets mercenary-LB Mo Lewis, of course), making his acquisition at least slightly nerve-wracking. But the Bledsoe deal is done, and he’s the quarterback, so of course I will now root strongly for his success here. (For the record, my take on the mercifully-completed Rob Johnson-Doug Flutie saga is this: They both stunk.)

(The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me — my inner Oliver Stone, if you will — wonders just how much connection exists between the Bills’ desire to get the Bledsoe trade done and the fact that the initial five-year leases of the four-year old “club seats” at Ralph Wilson Stadium are due to expire at the end of next year. News of the Bledsoe deal brought about the spike in Bills season-ticket orders that the team brass were no doubt praying for.)

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Gregg Easterbrook, the former writer of Slate‘s “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column, has apparently gone to ESPN. He has written a typically excellent article about the recently-completed NFL Draft. Read it here.

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Anyone who thinks that comics are a lightweight medium, best left to adolescent tales of absurdly-muscular heroes battling mutants or giant robots bent on destroying Earth or bald archvillains, need only look to Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned by Judd Winick to have that belief shattered. Winick, of course, first entered the public eye as a cast member on the third season of MTV’s The Real World. This was the season set in San Francisco, and while it is mostly remembered for the fireworks involving that horrid roommate Puck, this book instead focuses on the friendship that developed between Winick and roommate Pedro Zamora, who already had AIDS during the show’s filming and died from that disease’s complications a short time after filming.

Winick writes about how, being a “bed-wetting liberal”, he tried to put a brave face on the fact that he would be living with a person who was HIV-positive; and yet, when the time came he was still fearful of the prospect: “When I thought of living with someone who had HIV, I envisioned living with the AIDS virus walking around on two legs.” This frank admission contains the theme of Winick’s book: how he confronted those fears, dealt with those all-too-common stereotypes, and at the same time formed a deep and rewarding friendship. The book is not a collection of Real World anecdotes (although there are some of those), so those looking for an extension of the show’s voyeuristic qualities will be disappointed. Winick’s story begins before the show (and, he wisely informs us, so does Pedro’s) and the story of their friendship goes on after the show was over — and even well after Pedro Zamora’s death. Pedro and Me is funny, sad, and moving. It is a testament to the potential of comics as a medium.

(Judd Winick is currently a writer and artist for DC Comics.)

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At long, long last the Buffalo Bills have addressed the one area that has been their glaring weakness ever since the Super Bowl years ended: their offensive line. In today’s NFL Draft, the Bills selected the gigantic Mike Williams (OT, University of Texas, 21 yrs old, 6′ 5″, 375 lbs) with the fourth pick overall. Williams should step right in and finally give the Bills someone who can block consistently, ending a frustrating pattern of rotating inadequate 4th-through-7th rounders that have been the mainstay of the Bills’ line since Wil Wolford and Howard Ballard left. The Bills have made no effort to seriously upgrade their offensive line since 1994, when they selected Ruben Brown, despite their consistently disappointing running game and the alarming number of sacks given up each year (although this number dropped during Doug Flutie’s two years as the starting QB, mainly because of his elusiveness and willingness to scramble). Of course, any draft pick can go belly up (Ryan Leaf, anyone?) but for now the Bills have done what they’ve needed to do. Now, hopefully they’ll stop trying to get Drew Bledsoe and instead pick up a decent QB prospect in the second or third round; they also need to address a thin defensive line.

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I have added two new permanent links: Alibris (a site for buying all those wonderful rare and out-of-print books that can’t be found on Amazon), and Ralan.com (a very impressive site that lists just about every current market for SF, Fantasy, and Horror writing, along with rates and submission guidelines).

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Click here to hear a remembrance of recently-deceased SF author (and Grand Master) Damon Knight, broadcast yesterday on NPR’s show All Things Considered.

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