The Outsider, by Stephen King

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The Outsider starts out promising: a mysterious murder, conflicting evidence that points at a man being in two places at once, implications of some supernatural evil (the author name, Stephen King, should make that obvious going in) and a compelling main character, Detective Ralph Anderson, whose guilt over his actions drives him to make things right. We’re off to a great start.

Then Holly Gibney shows up, and everything goes to shit.

Where to start with her? Now granted, I have not read the Bill Hodges trilogy; if I had, my opinion might be different. But this silly, gimmick character comes in and hijacks a story that had been trucking along nice. I simply cannot think of a reason for her to be here other than a cheap tie-in to a book trilogy I haven’t read, and if Holly Gibney is featured heavily in it, believe me, that’s not going to change.

There’s no reason Ralph Anderson couldn’t have been the one to pursue the case to Dayton Ohio and tie everything together–in fact, it should have been him. His story is atoning for the wrongs he did to Terry Maitland’s family, not being enlightened by this second-rate Agent Mulder. There’s also the issue of introducing the supernatural; Holly Gibney quickly suggests the mythological creature El Cuco as the true murderer, and people for the most part just go along with it.

And here’s something that I hate to have to say: the HBO miniseries is better. It still has the book’s fatal flaw (i.e. Holly Gibney), but at least in the miniseries Terry Maitland’s widow rejects the El Cuco theory. In the book, she’s on board right away. Another win for the miniseries of the confrontation at the end. In the book, Holly Gibney delivers the fatal blow and has the lion’s share of the interaction with El Cuco. In the show, it’s Ralph Anderson, which just reinforces my first point: Ralph Anderson should have been the driving force of this story because he is a far more compelling character than Holly Gibney.

I’m a big Stephen King fan. He got me into writing, and I think he’s a great writer who crafts believable characters no matter what the literary types think, and that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. But do you know who this book reminds me of? Tom Clancy. I mean that in the sense that simply placing Stephen King’s name on a cover guarantees a spot on the bestseller list, so perhaps his give-a-crap levels are close to zero. And that’s a pity, because when Stephen King wants to knock it out of the park, he can hit a grand slam.

Christmas Shopping

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Laura Mathis faces the first Christmas after her teenage daughter was killed by a drunk driver. From The One-Percenter, a dark tale of revenge, forthcoming.

Laura avoided the Black Friday crowds by waiting a week. Stores still had deals, and she shopped wisely, picking between Target, Wal-Mart and even K-Mart for the lowest prices. She bought presents and spent the afternoon wrapping them. Only four, two for her, two for Paul.

Next up was the tree. It wasn’t the tree they’d used since Jessi was born. This one she nabbed on sale from K-Mart. An Imitation Tree, according to the box, lights already strung around the branches. She set it up in minutes and tossed the box by the backdoor. Paul was at group therapy. She forgave him for the plates. Maybe he had a point. But life moved on, that’s what Paul had to understand. He’d come around. If Christmas didn’t help, something else would.

Laura sat on the floor crosslegged like she did Christmas mornings when Jessi was small, telling her which presents to open and whether they came from Mommy and Daddy or Santa. Laura admired the tree. None of the ornaments from the old one: a card Jessi made in preschool, pictures of Jessi from ages 3 to 7, a picture she’d of herself in a rocketship, heading to the moon to visit the moon man. No train either. Every Christmas, Thomas the Engine circled the tree singing Christmas carols and Jessi liked to chase it.

Laura got up and grabbed the box and headed to the backyard. The shed lurked in the corner and the grass crunched under her shoes. Paul hated mowing but once a week each summer he pushed their little mower around the backyard, stomping through the backdoor sweaty and irritated.

She unlocked the shed and threw the doors open. Sixteen years’ worth of stuff. She set the Imitation Tree’s box at the edge and grabbed the doors. A thin rectangle of light slanted across boxes and piles of old stuff. Laura’s eyes followed it. When Jessi learned to talk she also learned to want. Three-year-old Jessi Mathis had trouble doing what she was told, no trouble telling them she wanted an Elmo doll or anything with Mickey Mouse on it.

A neighbor’s dog barked. A truck rumbled down the street.

Laura stepped inside the shed. Memories rose in the dark, each a siren’s call to nowhere. Jessi’s old stroller. Little pairs of shoes. Her heart ached as she held each pair and for each pair she remembered when and where she’d bought them. Here was the Sesame Street pair they found in the discount bin at Wal-Mart. Here was the pair Jessi always wore to the playground. This pair? She liked the green shells. Green was her favorite color. And the red pair? Those were the shoes she first velcroed on her own. She insisted

let me do it

and Laura’s days as Super-Mom began their fast decline. Laura told herself the story of each pair and once she let go of the last pair she was breathing heavy. She steadied herself on the lawnmower.

It’s done. There’s nothing else you can do. What are you going to do? What do you think Jessi’s thinking right now? Mom, you’re better than this. Tell yourself that and get up. No one’s going to help you.

Laura’s breathing settled. “Mom. You’re better than this.”

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The Boy with Blue Eyes – Opening

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The boy squats in the dust and the roadgrime tracked in on their shoes. He has his mother’s raven hair, eyes as blue as a fabled sea. They call the boy a mixed blood and he watches father, aging reminder of a faraway land he will never see, the room dark day or night. Eight years old. Already the boy understands much. He sees and he listens.

Father drinks. He speaks the common dialect poorly and when he isn’t drinking he takes the boy out and shows him the city. Cramped backstreet restaurants and shops, father’s memories strewn across a chaos of hammers and horns. Holding the boy’s hand at the city’s many lakes, distant cranes and buildings across the silver waters, skeletal sketches of New China halfbloom in the construction dust.

The haze floods the sky and swallows the sun. Read more “The Boy with Blue Eyes – Opening”

The Boy with Blue Eyes

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My new book is out, so I guess I’d better say something about it before my website gets hacked again.

The Boy with Blue Eyes is about a boy (with blue eyes) who goes on an adventure in a smoggy metropolis, the metropolis in this case being an unnamed Wuhan, where I spent three years in the late 2000’s. But it’s about more than that: the boy is half-American, half-Chinese, and he looks fully Chinese, minus a pair of striking blue eyes. He is the son of a jianbing cook and an alcoholic, failed writer who hasn’t been living in China legally for quite some time. His father drinks and spends his nights banging away on a typewriter, his mornings puking last night’s excess. His mother does her best to take care of them both, cooking jianbing for a living and yelling at her husband for being such a shitbird.

The plot kicks off after the boy’s father suffers a fatal stroke. Though the boy’s mother has warned him never to go out by himself (he has no hukou and can’t go to school), he heads out to find her, only to get carried away by the people sea. A run-in with the police leads to him being “rescued” by a man who also looks fully Chinese…minus a pair of striking blue eyes. From there they do work for a corrupt official, and the man might not be quite who he seems…

I told the story in an unconventional style, inspired in part by Requiem for a Dream and ee cummings. Other influences include Blood Meridian and Manhattan Transfer. I tried writing it in 2012, naming it Street Children in Wuhan and intending it as a very different story…the eight-year period has seen a lot of changes, and though I didn’t work on it constantly for eight years, I’ll claim I did–it makes the book seem better somehow, the product of years of grueling labor.

Every book is a labor of some kind–of love, of hate…and though you might find the style hard to follow, we can’t all be workshop drones, describing our characters’ hair color every time they speak and besides, this isn’t exactly Finnegan’s Wake.

Buy it here.

The Flock of Ba-Hui (And Other Stories)

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I got the review copy for this book back in December. I wrote the review in April and now I’m posting a shortened version of that bloated mess here, in October.

You can’t say I don’t finish what I start and here we have The Flock of Ba-Hui (And Other Stories), a translation of a series offbeat and original horror stories set in the Lovecraft universe by Chinese authors. I’ll admit I’ve never read anything by Lovecraft–my horror experience began with Goosebumps in elementary school, jumped to Edgar Allan Poe in junior high, and then pole-vaulted over Lovecraft all the way to The Stand. So I don’t have an opinion of Lovecraft’s work to influence what I think of Ba-Hui, and while if you spend two seconds googling Lovecraft you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn that a white man born in the 19th century harbored some racist leanings, it has nothing to do with this review.

Like I said, The Flock of Ba-Hui is a translation of a series of Lovecraftian stories. What makes these stories different is that they’re set in China, written by Oobmab, a fan who originally posted them on the Call of Cthulhu subforum on The Ring of Wonder (http://trow.cc), an online fantasy and gaming community. Doing the translating are Arthur Meursault and Akira, two dedicated Lovecraft fans themselves, who had the tall task of translating these stories while preserving the tone of the originals and making them understandable for Western audiences.

The four tales of horror range from the mountains of Sichuan province (the titular story, The Flock of Ba-Hui) to an ancient tower (Nadir) to the former German colony of Qingdao (Black Taisui, with a nod to Xu Fu, whose ultimate fate might’ve been as Jofuku in Japan to Tibet (The Ancient Tower). To help explain certain references to Western audiences, the translators have provided footnotes and a framing device linking all stories together, with a nice ending.

If you enjoy action-packed horror, look elsewhere. But if you like atmospheric slow burns, then you’ll have a great time with The Flock of Ba-Hui. For me, I can appreciate the atmosphere, as well as the dedication needed to translate these stories in the first place. I thought the titular story was the best, and I hope The Flock of Ba-Hui will provide an impetus to rescue other Chinese stories from obscurity. There’s much to be discovered, and we can’t let big publishing force-feed us the same boring, workshopped shit forever, right?

Check out The Flock of Ba-Hui, and get the paperback copy; leaving it out on your desk at work sparks some interesting conversations.