DARK SEEKER by K.W. Jeter

Finished Tu 2/25/25

This was one of my ancient paperbacks that I noticed on the shelf when I was reading 'BLADE RUNNER 2'  which was written by Jeter.

First finished Fr 5/30/08 and this was one of the last books that I read at work as the dispatcher. 

The novel concerns a group similar to The Manson Family. They were a gang of killers that 'linked' by taking a drug that allows users to 'blend with the night'. Mike Tyler was a member and he's trying to get back into the gang to find his son who might still be alive. It's kind of a let down because in the end, it was only a doll. I'm not sure what it all means, but it was a spooky read. 

From the internet:

"The story involves a group of researchers who dabble with an experimental drug, allowing them to mesh consciousnesses, with a view to applications in battlefield situations, where the formation of a gestalt-mind between combatants would be of practical value. However, the drug also releases the darkest, innermost tendencies of those taking it, pushing them towards acts of depravity and wanton destruction. The action takes place some years after the experiments, when the researchers are on heavily-regulated prophylactic chemical inhibitors and have been re-located, found ‘Not Guilty by reason of Insanity’, after a series of horrific murders which the drug – a discrete entity they refer to as ‘the Host’ - forced them to commit.

We follow Mike Tyler, living in Los Angeles with his nurse girlfriend Stephanie and her son Eddy, idly testing the boundaries of the limits which his medication places upon him, bridling against the regimen but seeing how far he can go without it. Things are dull but otherwise fine, until he receives a call from his former wife Linda who calls him to say that ‘Slide’ - an old criminal associate of theirs and part of the experiment from the research days – has taken their child Bryan away from her, the child that Mike thought was dead.

From here on, the pace is unrelenting as Mike tries to find his son, keeping at bay the semi-retired detective Kinross, who has a crusade against the researchers, and the cash-poor journalist Bedell, who squandered a mint made from his book about the experiment and its crimes, and who has a sample of the drug stashed in his house. On top of this, Mike has to balance his re-surfaced hysterical ex-wife and his new love and her child, whilst trawling through the wreckage of his past and his old – very damaged – associates to try and find the Host-addicted Slide, before something horrible happens to the son he thought he’d never see again."

OPEN HOUSE by Elizabeth Berg

 Finished Th 2/20/25

This is a hardback that Janny loaned to me. 

It's a 'Decorous Domestic Dramedy'. 

A woman in an unfufilling marriage is abandoned by her husband. She desperately wants him back and she takes in roomates to help keep her house and to fill the void in her life. In the end, her husband wants her back, but she decides she wants her 'new' life. 

The theme of 'roomates' seemed familiar and I think I've read this before, but it was well worth a second look.

From Kirkus Reviews:

"he eighth effortless novel from soft-pedaling specialist Berg (Until the Real Thing Comes Along, 1999, etc.) is an emotional slurpee/comedy featuring the newly separated mother of a near-teenaged son who finds the man of her dreams in spite of herself.

What's a woman to do after her husband of 20 years packs a bag and walks out? Take a page from Martha Stewart's book, apparently, by getting dressed to the nines, making an elegant breakfast, and then trying to make the kid go along with the charade. Unfortunately for Samantha Morrow, she isn't Martha Stewart, and her son Travis is unflinchingly frank. So Sam goes to Tiffany's and writes a $12,000 check for silver flatware instead, whereupon her husband, David, takes all the money out of their joint account, and she has to start renting out rooms. The first boarder to move in is the mother of her grocery store's cashier, a sweet, capable lady who comes complete with a devoted boyfriend—and the hulk named King who moved her in is a sweetie, too. So what if the woman snores and keeps Travis awake? He and Sam adjust, and everything would be fine if she didn't keep hoping David would come back. But he has the good life and a girlfriend, while she's started temping (on King's recommendation) and dating (at her mother's insistence), the latter with disastrous results. The little old lady marries her boyfriend, another renter proves clinically depressed, and Sam has trouble adjusting to the working life. Even a distress call to Martha Stewart's 800 number doesn't help. Then, when she least expects it, love is in the air.

Skillfully crafted, with a fluidity and snap that will delight Berg's fans but, when all is said and done, a distressingly familiar story."  

The heroine of the story is Samantha (Sam) and she has a miscarriage on the toilet. She wanted to bury the fetus but was unable to keep it on the spoon so she had to flush. That was an indelible image!!!

I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD: The Dirty Life And Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon

 Finished Mo 2/17/25

I bought this as an ebook on Kindle. It's a fantastic look at the life of a madman and the interviews were compiled by his ex-wife. She was one of the few people who had some kind of control over this wild & crazy singer/song writer. 

Warren told his adult son to get rid of his porn collection. The son thought he meant commercially bought adult films, but no. These were films that Warren had made with other women over the course of his life. 

When he was given the death sentence of lung cancer, he went back to drinking and drugging. Why not?

From 'A Greenman Review.com':

"The Warren Zevon who emerges from these pages is even more of an enigma than he would appear to be just from listening to his songs. And that’s saying a lot for a man who wrote songs that included “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” about a ghostly mercenary who takes revenge on those who double-crossed him; “Excitable Boy,” about a demented young serial killer; “Mohammed’s Radio,” about low-lifes in L.A.; and “My Shit’s Fucked Up” and “Life’ll Kill Ya” about the perils of facing one’s own mortality.

It should come as no surprise that Warren Zevon was one fucked-up dude. But the extent of his weirdness is, at times, staggering. It’s nearly impossible to even draw up a rough outline of his life, so multi-faceted and bizarre it was. The son of a reticent Mormon and an even more shadowy Jewish mobster, Zevon grew up in California in the ’50s and ’60s. He showed musical talent from the start, considered a career in classical piano, and spent some time in the California home of Igor Stravinsky. He was also a serious reader and writer, and seemed to know from an early age that he’d live or die as an artist.

He was on the fringes of the California folk-rock scene that included The Turtles, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne. He toured and played with The Everly Brothers. He early on discovered alcohol and drugs, and always used them to excess. There were many hard years in the early 1970s, when he and Crystal lived hand to mouth, in other people’s homes, and for a time in a Spanish resort town. But he continued to believe in himself and to work on his songcraft, and eventually had his first album produced by Jackson Browne. It was his second album, which included his most popular hit “Werewolves of London,” that made him the most money and brought him briefly to the public’s attention. It also increased his intake of intoxicants and began a long slide, or series of slides, that lasted until he finally got sober in the early 1980s. His career never recovered, though, his albums selling progressively fewer, until his final, The Wind, recorded as he was under a death sentence from lung cancer, which won several Grammys.

In addition to his substance abuse, Zevon was a sex addict and a self-diagnosed victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was constitutionally unable to be monogamous. He was for most of his life barely a presence in the lives of his two children (by different mothers). He was bizarrely superstitious. He abused those closest to him, personally and professionally. But he was also highly regarded by nearly everybody who knew him, most of whom seemed to have felt it was worth putting up with his flaws.

When writers like Stephen King, Carl Hiaasen and Gore Vidal, and musicians like David Crosby, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan all refer to the man as a genius, you have to take him seriously. He could be darkly hilarious and deeply sentimental, sometimes within the same breath. He saw through society’s facades and wrote songs about the dirty underbelly that were by turns wry, poignant and irreverent. He laughed in the face of death, and cried on the shoulders of former lovers.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead isn’t a perfect book. But it’s a compelling portrait of a difficult, multi-faceted, contradictory and deeply creative human being. Highly recommended."

LOOKING BACKWARD by Edward Bellamy

 Finished Su 2/9/25

This is one of my ancient paperbacks and it was a fantastic read. It's a crazy SciFi tale that was written in 1887 and is a profile of Socialism wrapped in a Time Travel tale.

From 'Happily Writing.com':

"To summarize the beginning, when a 19th century man named Julian West awakes to find himself in the 21st century under the care of a family in Boston, he begins to explore, question and discuss the changes he sees with the family members. The first and most obvious change he notices from an upper balcony of a three-story home is that the city is obviously now prosperous, full of fine houses, open squares filled with trees, statues and fountains, and public buildings of colossal size and architectural grandeur.

As he questions his host, he learns that the government now operates many locations of the exact same stores for people to obtain food and other consumables. They do not use money; instead, they use a “credit card”. The funds backing the credit card are provided by the government and are distributed equally to every citizen. Employment, then, is not the source of one’s income and buying power; it is each person’s contribution to the cogs of the wheel running an orderly society.

Some refer to this book as utopian, some call the principles in the book socialist or Marxist, many note that it was one of the most popular, important books of its day. According to SparticusEducational.com, the novel was highly successful and sold over 1,000,000 copies. It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.

As Bellamy’s biographer, Franklin Rosemont, has pointed out: “The social transformation described in Looking Backward has in turn transformed, or rather liberated, the human personality. In Bellamy’s vision of the year 2000, selfishness, greed, malice, insanity, hypocrisy, lying, apathy, the lust for power, the struggle for existence, and anxiety as to basic human needs are all things of the past.”

I knew the name Bellamy sounded familiar. The author was apparently the cousin of Francis Bellamy, famous for creation of the Pledge of Allegiance. You can find printed copies of Looking Backward 2000 – 1887 on Amazon, and free ebooks of Edward Ballamy’s book at Gutenberg.org."

HUNGER MAKES ME A MODERN GIRL by Carrie Brownstein

Refinished Th 2/6/25

This is a hardback that I got on Amazon in May of 2018 and I first finished Su 5/6/18. 

One of the better written Rock Profiles.

Her father came out as gay when she was out of the house and her mother was under treatment for anorexia Carrie's whole life. 

Interesting Observation: When she was 13 she saw her first rock show. One of her young friends exclaimed, 'I'd really like to fuck that guy!'. Carrie was thinking that she had no desire for 'that guy'. She wanted to BE 'that guy'. 

Unfortunately, the book only ends with the break up of SLEATER-KINNEY. Her move into acting might make an even more interesting book. 

From The Guardian:

"Her father did not come out as a gay man until very late in life; her mother developed a case of anorexia severe enough for hospitalization. She has had her own struggles with depression and one very frightening breakdown whose elements you’re best to read about in the book itself. (There is a story about her pets in this book that you should probably not read in a public place.)

But Brownstein’s way of telling those stories is from a rather intellectualized, even aestheticized, distance. Much of her mother’s disease, for example, is summed up in the single image of a beach photograph that shows “bags of white pus forming on her sternum”. It’s an image that proves difficult to forget once you have read it, one that cuts into you. It is also one which has a way of instantly transporting you to the depths of her mother’s suffering without seeming maudlin.

This “yearning” side of Brownstein, the sad part – “I continually made a ritual of emptiness,” she admits – does not correlate so well with her current public image. Certainly there is little of the laconic, laid back satire of Portlandia in this book. There is also little of the somewhat glamorous image she’s come to cut, the polish and the finesse.

But even more importantly, for cultural history purposes, there is also little of what most people who are only casual observers of the Riot Grrrl “scene” have come to expect of it. Moments of visceral anger are rarely dramatized as such, just reported matter-of-factly; feminism is mentioned but more often analyzed from a distance. Brownstein explains that in fact the politics could get toxic, refers even to a sort of public-shaming process that might sound familiar." 

BLADE RUNNER 2 by K.W. Jeter

 This is one of my paperbacks that I bought at the main branch in March of 2004.

Finished Su 2/2/25- The last novel that I read at seventy-five years old.

The writing is not to the 'weirdness level' of a PK Dick novel, but it's still somewhat compelling. 

The basic premise is, Who is a replicant and who is real?

 From Kirkus Reveiws:

"Ridley Scott's 1982 film noir, Blade Runner, was based on a Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Now, Jeter, Dick's prot‚g‚, attempts a sequel tying in both the book and the movie. Blade Runner Rick Deckard has fled the city with his dying beloved, the replicant Rachael. He's visited by Sarah Tyrell, now boss of the world's largest corporation--and, disconcertingly, the original from whom Rachael was replicated. Sarah commissions Deckard to search for a sixth replicant whose records were somehow mysteriously erased. Ominously, someone has murdered Deckard's old Blade Runner boss. And yet another Blade Runner, Dave Holden (shot in the early stages of the movie), has been snatched from the hospital, fitted with artificial heart and lungs, and persuaded to track down Deckard. Whodunthis? Why, Roy Batty, the original of the replicant (played by Rutger Hauer) that gave Deckard (Harrison Ford) such a tough time! So develops a glum, dull guess-who's-the-replicant sequence, ending in the destruction of the Tyrell corporation (Sarah's goal all along) and the escape of Deckard and Rachael (or so he thinks) aboard a starship. Long-winded and aimless, with neither the gloomy brilliance of Scott nor the unsettling psychological qualms of Dick."

FINNEGAN'S WEEK by Joseph Wambaugh

 This is one of my paperbacks that I first finished in December of 2015 and refinished on Mo 1/27/25.

 From Kirkus Reviews:

"After a so-so show in Fugitive Nights (1991), Wambaugh returns nearly in top form with a very funny suspenser about toxic waste. Finbar Finnegan, a San Diego police detective and sometime actor, has a midlife crisis at 45, his existence having been dominated by three sisters while growing up and by three ex-wives as an adult. His theme song is "Someone to Watch Over Me"—he needs a mommy/wife, has sworn off marriage, but finds himself tied ticklingly to two female detectives at once, both of whom see him as romantically interesting despite immense shortcomings: happy, cheerful, pistol-packing Petty Officer "Ba-a-d Dog" Bobbie Ann Doggett, 28, an investigator for the Navy who's looking for 2,000 boots hijacked from a warehouse; and District Attorney's Investigator Nell Salter, 43, once divorced, and looking for a stolen truck filled with supertoxic waste. The truck actually was "stolen" by its tow drivers—porky meth-head Shelby Pate and his Mexican sidekick, Abel Durazo, who lifted the boots while picking up drums of toxic waste at a naval station, took them to a fence in Tijuana, then pretended their truck was stolen while they ate lunch. The truck, however, gets sold to a Mexican pottery maker, who repaints uses it to deliver pots to San Diego. During all this, the waste drums still on the truck spill horrible Guthion over two kids, killing one of them. In their investigation, the three San Diego law folk wind up in weirdest Tijuana for some surreal surveillance duty—and have a punchy pair of drunk scenes that show Wambaugh at his cleverest in the sexy, gin-soaked Nick & Nora Department. Smart, crunchy dialogue—too topical, yes, but for now quite witty enough."

I was surprised that there were so many jokes and funny observations in the novel. "...like getting a circumcision with only a Bud Light for anesthesia".

The perfect 'Beach Read'.....