Books books books

There were a bunch of other things that I wanted to put in the last entry, but none of them really fit on a post that's about a human tragedy. I write horror, but there's a difference between written horror and real life.

Despite having lived here for nearly a decade, I'm not really familiar with downtown Houston. Like most large cities, it has alternating one way streets, whole sections of city blocks that are set at forty-five degree angles to the rest of the area, and spots that have been under construction since Nixon was in the White House. If you don't know where you're going, you better make sure you have plenty of time to get there and you better not mind taking the scenic route.

Because I didn't want to walk in to some judge's courtroom an hour late with no better excuse than, 'Sorry, yer honor. I got lost in traffic,' I made a couple of practice runs on the weekend before I was supposed to show up. With my able wife playing co-pilot, we followed a set of left-right directions from Google maps and discovered that getting there wasn't as hard as it could have been. We did end up driving around a bit, and one of the places we passed was a business called ¼ Price Books. On the weekends, both of us are in the mood to explore bookstores, so we took a look. They've got a really eclectic mix of everything from old and new science fiction, books on politics, and books in foreign languages. The owner was a nice guy with a sense of humor that he doesn’t mind inflicting on passers-by, and the front door was propped open to let in fresh air.

One of the books I picked up was Demon Seed, by Dean Koontz. I get annoyed with Koontz sometimes, mainly because he comes up with fantastic stories, but them populates them with the exact same sensitive tough guys and smart, strong women. I saw the movie ages ago, and loved it, so I figured I may as well see what they changed from the book. Oh boy did they change some things. It's not just that the focus of the book is between the woman and the computer. Except for a few minor characters, the woman and the computer are the only ones we ever see. Also, the woman is a lot more complicated than we see in the movie, and a hell of a lot more so than the ladies Koontz would later write. When I checked the book's listing on Wikipedia, I discovered that Koontz wrote it in 1973, then in 1997 rewrote it and re-released it. From the one-paragraph synopsis, it seems that the one I picked is the original, and that the rewrite pulls out a lot of the really disturbing elements. The computer seems to get neutered in more than one manner.

That's a pity. I may at some point pick up the newer version, but I'm not looking forward to it. Reading Koontz' entry about the book on his website, he says that one of the things he changed was that he added a dry sense of humor to the story, because his readers appreciated his humor in his other books. Note: Item number 85 on my time-traveling checklist is to go back to the early seventies, convince Dean Koontz to write me a dozen novels that contain complex characters and not a damn bit of humor, and then brainwash him to forget all about the books so he can't rewrite them. It's just me personally, but I like that kind of story. I remember the fragile, beautiful creation that the child is revealed to be at the end of the movie, and when I read the description in the book, I got a cold chill. That thing was Lovecraft minus his inhibitions as filtered through silicon.

Speaking of books, I'm recording here my feeling about a book that I'm not quite halfway done with. I picked up 'We need to talk about Kevin' for my Kindle a while back, and I want to get my feelings down now and see how they compare to when I finish.

I really, really want to be done with this thing. Reading it is like slogging through hip deep mud with razorblades mixed into it. It isn't that it's not well-written. The writing is fantastic, but the main character is such a selfish, self-centered twit that I want to reach into the story and smack her. No one else in it is much better, either. A peek at Lionel Shriver's Wikipedia page claims that she prefers to create characters that are 'hard to love.' If this book is an indication, that's a bit of an understatement. The novel is about a mother whose son has gone on a spree-killing, and how she deals with that fact. But her own negative traits are getting in the way of the story, and the boy himself is simply too evil. He's one of those black and white characters that just aren't human enough to connect with, and (in my opinion) we need to connect with everyone in a story, especially the villain. The hero makes the choices that we like to think we would make under stressful circumstances, and the villain makes the one we're afraid we would make and then regret when it's too late. In this book, the protagonist and all the other 'normal people' are simply weak and shallow, and a few of their characteristics seem to be there simply because the plot couldn't advance without them.

That's how I feel now. I'll compare my thoughts when I'm done.

Still reading, still writing.

A taste of real life

So Monday morning I got up about three hours earlier than I normally do, dressed up like I was on my way to a funeral, and braved downtown traffic to show up for jury duty. Due to a succession of disqualifying factors like the Corps, school, and then having a child to take care of, I have never served on a jury. The closest I came was shortly after I divorced and while I was still living in Dumas. I got a summons, made arrangements to be off of work, and showed up at the courthouse to do my civic duty. I was herded into a small room with a bunch of other people, and waited. Just before noon we were called into the courtroom, where the local prosecutor announced to the judge that the state was ready to proceed with four cases, and that the defendants in all four cases had decided not to show up. Her honor issued warrants for all four idiots, and thanked us for showing up before telling us we were dismissed. I ended up going in to work.

This time it was a little different. I was due at eight AM, but not trusting the downtown traffic I got up at six, bumped into the walls a few times, and then drank a large Coke while zipping along the road and trying to remember which streets I was supposed to turn on. I waited to go through a metal detector, found the room where I was supposed to wait in, and waited. Some numbers were called, and people were pulled out in groups of sixty-five. Eventually, my number was up.

We walked along an underground tunnel, passing through what I guessed were anti-flood doors or something that they close if there's a threat, (whenever I saw them I heard a storm trooper's voice in my head yelling, 'Close the blast doors!') and coming into the courthouse itself. We had to go up the elevators in groups of fifteen, and I got to use my infamous question, “Okay, who here has seen that movie by M. Night Shyamalan titled 'Devil?'” It wasn't an encouraging sign that no one knew what I was talking about, but when I explained that it involved a bunch of people trapped in an elevator I at least got a desperate yell of, “Don't even!!”

We were all given new numbers, lined up against the wall, and the bailiff explained that in a little while the judge would call us in and probably talk to us for about an hour, then turn us loose for lunch. He suggested we take some time and get to know our 'new friends' in the group. When we got in, the judge introduced himself, and thanked us for showing up when we got our summons. Maybe I'm a bit idealistic, but it did make a difference to me for someone to admit that a lot of folks just phone in a phony excuse.

He, the prosecutor, and the defense attorneys asked us, as a group and singly, whether we thought we could be impartial. The case was an old one, and the charge was murder. The questions were as specific as they could be without giving away any real details. Because the charge was murder, would we still presume innocence? Would we have a problem imposing the maximum sentence, or the minimum? One man asked why the death penalty wasn't on the table, and the attorney explained that in Texas the death penalty is reserved for what is called capital murder, which means murder committed during some other crime. Some people admitted that they couldn't see giving a person only five years for murder, even in the hypothetical case of someone raping that person's child, while others said they couldn't sentence a person to what would amount to life in prison no matter what the crime. One poor woman was in there with us having just been carjacked and getting a gun put to her head the night before.

There were about sixty-five of us, and the judge said that the first thirteen of us that weren't removed from the pool by one side or the other would be placed on the jury, and that the others would get to go home. As my number was fifty-nine, I was pretty doubtful I would end up serving. When the judge asked us to sit and be patient for as bit while he and the attorneys conferred, a few others in the jury pool were called up to talk to them. When they started calling numbers off, we realized very quickly that the spread was a lot wider than we had imagined, The entire first row of about fourteen people were jumped over, and I don't think that there were less than five people between any of the ones picked. The last number called was sixty-three. I don't know which side called to strike me from the list, or why. On my form I put my job down as Selector/Writer, and when given the opportunity I asked a technical question, about whether those who got chosen were going to have the full range of five to ninety-nine years to choose from or if the judge or anyone else could set a different minimum or maximum. I guess someone didn't like something I said.

I came home, exhausted and hungry. It had been a really long day, and the only place close enough to go out for lunch had been a Quizno's across the street with less than tasty food and a lot of people hanging around outside of it that would make really good characters for some of my books. It's taken the last couple of days to get back into my schedule.

Today when I got home, I checked Yahoo news like I usually do. Under the local section, I recognized the name of the man who had been sitting with his defense attorneys that day while we all waited around to find out which of us were going to end up judging him. The ones that were chosen ended up giving him life in prison.

Rocket Science

So I'm rewriting 'In the Dark,' which is science fiction. This compels me to dust off my interest in all things sciencey. A while back I heard about this weird new form of propulsion that someone is experimenting with. It seems that a LOT of a rocket's power is used to get up off the ground and into space. Those bloody huge tanks that were attached to the space shuttle? They were dropped off after it got into orbit, because their job was done. So someone a lot smarter than me got the bright idea to leave all of that stuff on the ground, and just use the power itself to get the spaceship up where it belongs. They fire a laser at the bottom of the craft, which is shaped like a parabolic dish, and that burns the air inside the dish into plasma. If I'm interpreting the information correctly, they use a pulsed laser, getting individual mini-explosions that 'pop' the craft up like a machine gun. Take a look at them here: http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/

I found a video of one of their tests, and damn that thing took off. They were using a test craft about the size of a cantaloupe, and it shot into the air like so many of the experiments that I've seen on Mythbusters. Then I started to imagine what something ten times as powerful could do with a ship that was already in space, away from things like gravity and atmosphere. I didn't know what I might do with that thought, but later on I got this idea about a guy who is a cop in another solar system. Bingo.

I got 'Waste Not' sent out for a vengeance-themed anthology, and submitted 'Trolls' for another one about rediscovering fantasy. I'm also still looking for someplace to send my newer, leaner version of 'Roaming.'

By the way, if you ever hope to have another productive moment in your life, do not take a look at the Internet Anagram Server. (http://wordsmith.org/anagram/) It lets you punch in a word or string of words, and it spits out every single possible combination of the letters that could possibly exist. Before I ran away screaming, I tried it with my own name, and one of the results was, 'He pens Pepto.' Not sure if that will enhance my writer's mystique or not.

Still writing.

Why 'The Haunting' isn't scary

As I'm making the notes for this, I'm watching the 1999 remake of 'The Haunting.' The old version is one of my favorite films, and it never fails to deliver a large helping of cold chills. When I first saw the teaser trailer for this new one, which gave absolutely no real hint about the film, I held my breath. In a little, secret room in my head, I whispered, 'Please don't suck. Please don't suck.'

I re-watch this newer version every once in a while, probably more often than I watch the original. I look forward to watching it, but I usually end up doing something else (like writing this) at the same time. Part of the reason the film gets under my skin the way it does, is because it doesn't suck. It misses. It aims in the right direction, and then for some god-damn reason decides to fire ninety degrees off target.

If you haven't seen the original or read the novel by Shirley Jackson, go do that. You won't forgive yourself if you don't, and I won't forgive you either.

Done? So nothing that I say is going to be a spoiler? Good.

There's this house, and it's haunted. There are ghosts, and that's where the problems with this incarnation of the story start. We see the ghosts. They're right there. The first ghost we see is a cute child, and it's more touching than scary. The character who sees it isn't scared at all, and neither are we. Before that, we see our first blatant clue that spooks are here. A tightening screw pulls a wire in a harpsichord tight enough to snap, and it happens right in front of us.

In the behind the scenes feature, someone, (one of the producers, I think) invokes a key truth about horror movies: Less is more. We need room in between the bits we see on screen for our imagination to flow into, so we can let ourselves be scared. But in this movie, we don't get less. We get more and more and more. On top of that, what we get isn't scary. The effects are magical instead of horrifying. We have majestic stone gryphons, magic carpets, and a villain who we see in both his painting and his ghost as a massive, towering giant. These are the currency of myths, not hauntings. After watching it again this time, it hit me what the CGI effects remind me of – The Harry Potter movies. If someone took a print of this films, changed the title to 'The Knights of Hill House,' and edited the dialogue at the beginning to take out the horror element, you would end up with a movie that was a lot more consistent.

So how would we go the other way? If we popped back in time, locked the director in a closet, then called all the actors and crew over to announce we were making a few changes, how would we make 'The Haunting' a genuinely ghostly movie? Well, as long as I'm armchair-quarterbacking, I'd draw most of my inspiration from (surprise) the book and the original film, which wisely deviated very little from Ms. Jackson's story. There would be a bit more emphasis on the house itself, as opposed to a single all-powerful ghost. We would see a few more of Hill House's previous owners come to disturbing ends. We could still let our actors display bits of heroism, because that's part of how we come to like them. But it wouldn't be game-changing heroism. One of the themes of good horror is how little our strengths and abilities do against the unseen forces that haunt us.

Hopefully I'll get my chance to play out on the field soon, instead of just second guessing the people already out there. I have an idea for a haunted house story that I started some time back. Sadly, I think I've lost what I had earlier written.

So I'll write it again.