Thursday, February 29, 2024

MISSING YOU by Harlan Coben

 Finished Tu 2/27/23

This is a hardback that I think Janny loaned to me. It might have been a Xmas gift. I had read the book before, but remembered little of it. 

Two Storylines:

1). A female detective is trying to find out who killed her cop dad and her first boyfriend seems connected. 

2). People are being 'catfished' and their bank accounts are cleaned out. 

The book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Eighteen years after her fiance dumped her, a New York City police detective runs into him again online, with results that make her head spin and leave several people dead.

Given a one-year subscription to YouAreJustMyType.com, Kat Donovan browses languidly through the photos of eligible men looking for love until she sees the face of Jeff Raynes. Although she’s not exactly carrying a torch for her ex, she can’t resist dropping him a line. His reactions are puzzling. First he doesn’t seem to remember her, then he greets her with warm affection, then he says they’d better not continue to be in touch. Jeff’s not the only one acting oddly. Brandon Phelps, a college student from Connecticut, comes all the way to New York to ask for Kat’s help in finding his missing mother, Dana. Even though he’s asked for Kat by name—how does he even know her name?—it’s obvious that he’s hiding something from the detective whose help he begs. And there’s more. When Kat goes to visit Monte Leburne, the dying contract killer who was convicted years ago of shooting her father, another NYPD detective, and the prison nurse puts Leburne into twilight sedation, he denies killing Henry Donovan. No matter where she turns, Kat can’t figure out what’s going on or whom she can trust. Jeff, who’s vanished once more? The unreliable Brandon Phelps? Her partner, Charles "Chaz" Faircloth, who’s convinced he’s God’s gift to Kat? Her father’s ex-partner, Capt. Thomas Stagger, who’s clearly not telling everything he knows about Donovan’s death? Her judo instructor, Aqua, a schizophrenic, homeless sometime transvestite? Her defensive mother, Hazel, who seems determined to protect Donovan’s reputation? Her own cherished memories of her father?

The setup is irresistible, the twists generously piled on and the climax suitably pulse-pounding, even though best-selling Coben (Six Years, 2013, etc.) is hard-pressed to tie all those complications together or produce a payoff that rises to their deliciously suspenseful levels."

THE CAPE COD LIGHTER by John O'Hara

 Finished Th 2/22/24

This is an ancient paperback that I had never read. I'm so glad I finally got to it because I really love this anthology. 

All of the stories are not plot driven and I really appreciate the change of pace. 

O'Hara covers most of the 20th century especially the 20's through the 60's. 

Gay characters are presented, but there really wasn't a vocabulary to describe them.

I am going to order 'BUTTERFIELD 8' and 'APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA' for my Kindle. 

From the collection's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Mostly short, but some longish, stories are introduced by O'Hara's back-of-my-hand reply to current fiction reviewing and its "spiteful condescension" and "abusive criticism" and his demand for more "speaking up...to the unimaginative... and dullards..." by fiction writers and readers. After this personally belligerent send off, word-weighing might seem to be in line. In the more than twenty inclusions however this author's ability to create characters and situations, in unpretentious words, is always evident while his knowledge of human flaws and failings in men and women and his inventories of the resulting tragedies, usually domestic, go deep. Grim he is, even in his humor; precise, too, with the shadings in relationships, of changes in them (Money); aware (The Bucket of Blood) of sensitivities where none might seem to exist; compassionate of a has-been (The First Day), of deviates (The Engineer and Jurge Dulrumple); and revealing (A Short Walk from the Station). Here although sex has its importance, set in his Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, homeplace and other areas, are good examples of O'Hara's work."

Friday, February 16, 2024

SHADOW FIRES by Dean Koontz

 This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I first finished at FitClub West on Th 10/6/94 and refinished on We 2/14/24.

This might be one of my favorites by Dean Koontz. It's just a pure adrenaline rush.

It deals with 'the dead coming back to life', but is not religious or supernatural. It concerns 'gene splicing' research that went awry.  

I was surprised to learn that Koontz released the book under a pen name- 'Leigh Nichols'.

From a review at GoodReads:

"A woman’s relief over the death of her husband gives way to mind-numbing terror in this shockingly suspenseful thriller.

Rachael’s request for a quick and clean divorce enraged her husband. She had never seen Eric so angry, so consumed by pure and terrifying hatred. Then, in the heat of the moment, Eric was struck down in a traffic accident. His death was instantaneous. Shocked and relieved, Rachael had nothing left to fear. Until Eric’s body disappeared from the morgue—and Rachael was stalked by someone who looked like her dead husband…"




Friday, February 9, 2024

SUNSET LIMITED by James Lee Burke

Finished Th 2/8/24

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I bought at West Branch on Fr 11/5/04.

{A Dave Robicheaux novel} 

Set in New Iberia, Louisiana and concerns a labor leader that was crucified and nailed to a barn many years previously. The crime comes back to haunt the community. 

Lots of unusual characters and the setting and weather is probably the major character of the novel. 

James Lee Burke is an excellent writer and his writing is a thing of beauty. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"After Burke’s Texas sabbatical in Cimarron Rose (1997), it’s back to the bayous with Dave Robicheaux, struggling as usual to right an old injustice while balancing the weight of the world on his back. Forty years after their labor-organizer father was crucified against a barn wall, Pulitzer photojournalist Megan Flynn and her filmmaker brother Cisco are back in New Iberia. Despite the sweeping changes in the South over the years, time seems to have stood still for most of the cast. Minor-league house thief Willie (Cool Breeze) Broussard and his jailer, Alex Guidry, are still at each other’s throats over Guidry’s “rescue” of Breeze’s late wife from Harpo Delahoussey, the brute who carried her out of Breeze’s house a generation ago. Harpo is long dead, but he’s been reincarnated in his nephew Harpo Scruggs, the ex-Angola gun bull who now hires out as a contract killer. Landed souse Lila Terrabonne is frozen in time by the sexual abuse she can neither name nor forget. So the news that Cisco Flynn’s been joined on location by his old orphanage buddy Swede Boxleiter, and that a Chinese drug triad, determined to stabilize its position before the British relinquish Hong Kong, is reaching down to New Iberia through New Orleans gangster Ricky (the Mouse) Scarlotti, does less to change the status quo than bring it to a boil. All of this will sound excruciatingly familiar to Burke’s legion of fans, and indeed the novel might have been cast out of the author’s stock company: There’s the brutish lawman, the seductive returning native daughter, the Hollywood poseurs, the big-city gangsters, the browbeaten black victims, the corrupt power-mongers—and, making his way through the middle of them all, thoughtful, hamstrung Dave, who doesn’t so much solve this case as watch it unfold in a series of slow-motion flashbacks. On the other hand, the characters’ buried secrets, floating just beneath the surface like so many hungry gators, remind you why reading even lesser Burke is like reading lesser Faulkner."

Sunday, February 4, 2024

THE MIND CAGE by A. E. von Vogt

To page 141 on Sa 2/3/24

"The classic novel of a man's battle to free his mind from another man's body"

How could this be 'classic'? That's such a crazy idea and a complete anomaly. 

The ideas were truly innovative, but the presentation was confusing & clunky. I should probably get to the end of this, but I won't lose any sleep. 

From the book's page on a blog:

{This page is probably better than the novel itself}

"The year is 2140, a little over twenty years after the Third Atomic War.  That devastating world-wide conflagration swept away existing political entities, and in their place arose a bewildering array of 1000 states.  The most powerful of these states is that ruled by Ivan Prokov, the man known as the Great Judge, and his government has been steadily conquering the smaller and weaker countries, ostensibly to create a one-world government which will render war impossible; in the current year only a hundred of the lesser nations survive.  The protagonist of The Mind Cage has played a leading role in the absorption of all those small countries; he is General David Marin, veteran of many battles and much intrigue, the head of the Great Judge's military forces, a diplomat and member of the ruling council.  For years he has been in command of the operations that have expanded the Great Judge's empire, and Marin is a master not only of military tactics and strategy but of exploiting divisions within nations, of empowering local pro-Great Judge rebels and fomenting revolutions that deliver states right into the Great Judge's hands.

The Great Judge's society is organized under an ideology that "combines group living with free enterprise."  One of van Vogt's narrative strategies is keeping us readers in the dark and then successively springing new information on us; sometimes we share Marin's surprise as he learns something new about his associates or the history of the Great Judge's carefully crafted authoritarian society, but other times van Vogt casually informs us of things that are common knowledge in Marin's world but which have been kept from us, forcing us to revaluate our view of what is going on and what kind of people the characters are and why they are doing what they do.

So, when we first hear the phrase "the group-free-enterprise idea" we have little notion of what this means, but as the novel progresses additional puzzle pieces fall into place and we get a picture of this strange and terrible society, in which the traditional family, purportedly for feminist and eugenic reasons, is being stamped out and replaced with a system in which only the thirty percent of men who can excel in athletic competitions ("the mating games") have the right to procreative sex, and fathers never again see their mates or their children, who are raised partly by their mothers and partly during periods of mandatory attendance in government facilities.

The capital city of the Great Judge's empire is an symmetrical ultramodern series of blocks, each block an outer ring of skyscrapers surrounding a green park, designed to contain a nuclear blast within it should another atomic war erupt.  Each block is home to a self-contained "Group" with its own little ruling council.  Beyond this model of urban efficiency and beauty sprawl the smoky suburbs where reside and toil this society's working class, the mutants who are forbidden, on pain of death, from leaving their reservations.  Reflecting the novel's themes of hidden pasts, unknown origins and mysterious identities, the mutants bear physical resemblance to more primitive lifeforms, like scaly skin or animal life faces, and have dream-like racial memories of prehistoric life.  The mutants have a reputation for violence and treachery, but the Great Judge himself lives among them in a mansion in these suburbs, with a personal bodyguard and staff of servants made up entirely of mutants. 

One source of interest and tension in the narrative is the fact that Marin is a loyal supporter of the Great Judge and his policies and goals; Marin has no compunction about murdering and torturing people for the government and van Vogt describes the revolutionary changes wrought and the atrocious crimes committed by the Great Judge's government in a way that is matter of fact rather than a condemnatory or broadly satirical, while at the same time providing plenty of examples of the corruption and hypocrisy of the ruling council and of human nature recoiling at the way the Great Judge's social policy destroys what mid-century English language readers would consider ordinary family life.  Rather than telling readers what to think or simply endorsing their preconceived ideas, van Vogt seems to be challenging readers to consider how many of their traditional liberties they would be willing to sacrifice in return for a guarantee of safety from international war in a nuclear-armed world.

The plot of The Mind Cage follows the many twists and turns in Marin's life over the course of a week as events unfold that shake the Great Judge's empire to its core, revealing its true origins and nature and introducing a radical paradigm shift.  The ball gets rolling when leading scientist Wade Trask, whose inventions have been very useful to the government and Marin's campaigns of conquest in particular, has been found to have uttered seditious statements and is sentenced to death.  (One of the first things we learn about the Great Judge's society is that there is no respect for free speech!)  When Marin counsels leniency. he arouses the suspicions of the Great Judge and his colleagues on the ruling council.  And when he goes to see Trask to give him the bad news, Trask pulls a fast one on Marin, using his latest, secret invention to swap bodies with the general.  Now it is Marin who has only a week to live!

All citizens of the Great Judge's empire have a "pain circuit" imbedded in their flesh.  At the security service's HQ is a transmitter so the secret police can just dial up your circuit and inflict upon you a pain that will gradually increase/  Convicted political criminals like Trask are free to move about the city to say their good-byes and settle their affairs for one week (in fact, Trask's Group leaders send over a prostitute to comfort him in his last days), but after that week, if a condemned man hasn't shown up to the executioner as scheduled, the pain will start and get steadily worse.  So Marin, in Trask's body, only has a week to sort things out.

For most of the novel's 245 pages Marin is running to and fro, living out both his own life (a high-tech disguise allows Trask's body to pass for Marin's) and Trask's life (after Trask in Marin's body gets temporarily incapacitated.)  He pursues his own duties as leader of the Great Judge's diplomatic and military efforts to take over the Kingdom of Jorgia (the successor state to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia and the birthplace of the Great Judge, I suppose van Vogt urging us to think of the Great Judge as Stalin) and in his off-time tries to figure out how to get back in his own body or at least avoid execution.  In the process he learns about the rumored supercomputer known as "the Brain" that may or may not have been destroyed during the Third Atomic War, a machine which, if it indeed survived the war, may be the Great Judge's harried enemy, hiding in the vast fallout shelters beneath the city, or actually the grey eminence behind the Great Judge and the true architect and ruler of his totalitarian empire.  

What with all the body-switching, disguises, people alienated from their origins or concealing their origins, people under the control of others and people pretending to serve one master but in fact serving another, a major theme of The Mind Cage is identity and the roles we play--how we present ourselves to others, what place we have in our community and whether we choose to embrace that role, sullenly inhabit it, or rebel against it.  All the characters are inauthentic in one or more ways--deceiving others, deceived by others, stifling their true feelings--and are denied the opportunity, by the government or by themselves, to be themselves or even know who they really are.

I liked the way van Vogt handled all the themes I've been talking about, and there are lots of high tech devices and weird images and wacky theories (for example, we again find van Vogt expounding alternative theories about poor eyesight, as we saw in "The Chronicler" AKA "Siege of the Unseen" AKA "Three Eyes of Evil") that I found entertaining.  So I am giving The Mind Cage a thumbs up.  But I have to warn you normies out there that The Mind Cage has many of the characteristics of van Vogt's body of work, and perhaps of classic SF in general, that people find off-putting.  The meat of the book is ideas, not characters you can identify with or even like, values you can comfortably endorse, emotional catharsis or skillful wordsmithing; the plot can be confusing, and the protagonist resolves it via trickery and technology.  There is lots of psychology stuff and several action scenes, but it is all related in a detached, clinical, bland fashion, not in a way that will move or thrill a reader.  The Mind Cage is not for everybody, but if you are a van Vogt fan, as I am, this is a decent one."                   


 

Thursday, February 1, 2024

MAO II by Don Delillo

 Refinished We 1/31/24

I didn't see the flyleaf until today and noticed that I finished the book on Mo 10/11/21. I didn't remember a thing.

What I wrote back in 2021:

"Might make a good movie, but the book was not too impressive. Some nice scnes and ideas, but lacked a complelling story.

- Couple are caretakers of an important writer

-Like J.D. Salinger, famous for being reclusive."

A link to an explanation of the book that's really comprehensive:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-r-mao.html

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"With a formidable body of work behind him, DeLillo has earned the reflexive musings of this heady portrait of an obsessed and reclusive writer—a novelist haunted by the corruptions of an image-dominated world, and hunted by those who deny him the eloquence of silence. Two early books have brought Bill Gray both Salinger-like acclaim and enough royalties to live as obscurely as Pynchon, which he does in upstate New York, with a younger assistant named Scott, an alter-ego who attends to all his worldly needs, and maintains the massive Gray archive, including the much rewritten work-in-progress. Unsure whether to publish again, Gray derides to give the world an image instead and poses for a Swedish photographer named Brita, whom Scott escorts to Gray's hideaway with all the caution of visiting an elusive terrorist. And that's the point. Gray has retreated into silence as a way of creating "force" and "myth," but only the terrorist has the real power these days, the ability to shape and influence events, "to make raids on the human consciousness." When the news satisfies our need for narrative, the terrorist becomes the most important player, and the artist has one other choice besides retreat: He can, like Warhol, feed our addiction to imagery. Or so Gray contends. But events conspire to draw him into the real world of terror when a planned public reading in London—in support of a hostage in Lebanon—unravels into a murkier plot, propelled by Gray himself. With a deadly liver ailment, he sets off for Beirut, the "millennial image mill." But instead of affecting history in some small way, he manages to disappear in an image of total anonymity. Back home, Scott maintains the status quo with the help of his spacey girlfriend Karen, a former Moonie who understands that messianism is the key to survival, that the crowd is the engendering trope of our time. DeLillo's edgy characters speak "the uninventable poetry, inside the pain, of what people say"; his talking heads murmur the mysteries of our age. For all its "cool gloom," his latest novel stands in denial of Gray's doom-drenched semiotics: it's a luminous book, full of anger deflected into irony, with moments of hard-earned transcendence."