Blue-Footed Musings

Horns by Joe Hill
Grade: A

Horns was a Kindle Daily Deal on a day when I was actively using my Kindle for the first time. I had recently read the Wikipedia article on Joe Hill, though I don’t recall exactly why. I was probably led there while doing some research on Stephen King (his dad). In any event, since I’m a fan of Stephen King, I was naturally curious about his son’s writing. I thought $1.99 might be a small price to pay in the name of curiosity and the exploration of the Kindle’s potential (my opinion of that device and the e-reading experience to come soon, I hope). I downloaded a sample of the book.

IGNATIUS MARTIN PERRISH SPENT the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby protuberances. He was so ill—wet-eyed and weak—he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.

But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise, and for the second time in twelve hours he pissed on his feet.

The bit about pissing on his feet, that cracked me up. After reading just this part of the sample, I went ahead and bought the book.

I have to say, though, that it’s not a funny story. It is, at least at the beginning, unrelentingly disheartening. As Ignatius soon learns, his horns come with certain demonic powers, one of which is that anyone looking at him feels compelled to confess their deepest, darkest secrets, including their real thoughts about Ignatius himself. One by one, the people in Ignatius’s life—his current girlfriend, his priest, the police, his family members—tell him what they really think of him. And with each person he encounters, you think, “Please, let this one be kind!” But most of them believe he raped and killed his former girlfriend, who was found dead in the woods a year ago, and they haven’t forgiven him for the crime or for getting away with it. With his life in shambles and no one to turn to, the only thing left for him to do is to explore his new powers and maybe find out the truth about what happened to her.

Hill has the same talent as his father for honest storytelling and really getting into people’s heads. Horns was engrossing. It was not a happy story, but it had what I would call a happy ending, all the more precious for the horrors that came before. I recommend it to those who can stomach violence and vulgarity in their reading, and who don’t mind a rather dark view of organized religion.

I found my folder of story ideas as I was cleaning my office last week. I was shocked by the number of unfinished drafts in there, including several fairly well-written chapters of a romance novel. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Continue reading →

I bought a set of Nancy Drew books a few years ago. I started reading them, but they weren’t as exciting as I had remembered. I got bored after the first few and moved on to other things.

It wasn’t until I read the first book of the series (The Secret of the Old Clock) again that I realized something was off. I was reading it for research purposes. I needed a list of words to describe Nancy and her life, and accuracy was important. When I saw her car described in the book as a  “convertible,” I was surprised, because I remember it being a “roadster.”

I guess I knew in the back of my mind that the stories had been altered in recent editions, but silly me, I had assumed only minor changes (to remove any elements that might seem elitist, racist, or confusingly outdated to modern audiences). I didn’t realized how massive the changes were until I compared a copyright-1930 edition of my favorite Nancy Drew mystery (#2, The Hidden Staircase) to the text from a 2001 printing. It’s not just a little update. It’s a total rewrite.

Here are the stats for the two versions.

Copyright: 1930
Page count: 206
Chapter count: 25
First paragraph: “I DECLARE, I don’t know what makes me so nervous this afternoon! I have the strangest feeling—just as though something were about to happen.”

Copyright: 1987, 1959, 1930 (2001 printing)
Page count: 182
Chapter count: 20
First paragraph: NANCY DREW began peeling off her garden gloves as she ran up the porch steps and into the hall to answer the ringing telephone. She picked it up and said, “Hello!”

I decided to read both books so that I could properly compare them. I finished the original and am now working on the new version. What I’m finding is that some details have been inexplicably changed. For example, in the original version the house is called The Mansion and it is described this way:

With its two large turrets at the front, the Turnbull residence was not unlike a ruined castle.

It was a large, massive structure, built of white stone which, with the passing of the decades, had blackened and crumbled. Undoubtedly, in years gone by it had deserved the title of “mansion,” but now it could boast little of its old glory. With the ebb of the Turnbull fortune, the house had fallen into decay.

As Nancy drove up the winding driveway she could not help but notice the ghostlike shadows which the trees, swaying in the breeze, cast on the stone walls. A feeling of uneasiness came over her, a sensation which she was at a loss to explain.

“There’s something creepy about the place,” she thought.

In the new version it is called Twin Elms and described this way:

Presently the old Colonial home come into view. Helen said it has been built in 1785 and had been given its name because of the two elm trees which stood at opposite ends of the long building. They had grown to be giants and their foliage was beautiful. The mansion was of red brick and nearly all the walls were covered with ivy. There was a ten-foot porch with tall white pillars at the huge front door.

It’s charming!” Nancy commented as she pulled up to the porch. . . .

“The mansion certainly doesn’t look spooky from the outside,” Nancy commented.

These changes make no sense to me. The story is a mystery set in a haunted house. We’re supposed to be apprehensive. We need to feel that Nancy is in danger. In the old version, we do (or, at least, I do). In the new version, the opening paragraph is not nearly as interesting. In the approach to the “haunted” house, it feels like Nancy is merely going on a vacation.

So I’m disappointed by the 2001 editions that I bought. I’m not even sure I’ll keep them. I am far more interested in reading the original versions. It looks like, in the case of the Nancy Drew stories, older is better.

I just finished reading the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. The first five of the books were rereads. The sixth and seventh were new to me. I wish I had the mental energy to review the books properly, but I don’t. So I’m just going to say a little bit about each and then move on to other things.

The first book of the series, The Eyre Affair, is the best (Grade: A+, click here for a post that includes the opening sentence). This book introduces us to Thursday Next and her wacky family, and the most interesting, funny alternate reality. It is a reality in which dodos have been brought back from extinction, literature and art are treated with the same fanaticism as sports, and time travel is an everyday part of life. I could go on and on about how much I love this book and Fforde’s sense of humor. Suffice it to say, they’re awesome.

The second book, Lost in a Good Book (Grade: A-), introduces us to BookWorld, the place where fictional characters live and act out the scenes from their respective books. Thursday Next has the rare ability to read herself into this world and there she joins Jurisfiction, which is basically the BookWorld police. I have to constantly remind myself that BookWorld is a part of Thursday’s universe, not mine, and so it doesn’t have to meet the same standards of believability. That usually works, but sometimes not, which is why this book gets a lower grade than the first.

The third book, The Well of Lost Plots (Grade: B), takes place in BookWorld, where Thursday Next is hiding out from all the people who want to kill her, but she still has many problems to deal with, including an enemy’s attempt to erase her memories. The title is sort of ironic because the plot of the book gets lost among all the details of Fforde’s world-building. He must have spent a great deal of time figuring out the inner workings of BookWorld. Those details were undoubtedly necessary to have in mind while writing the story, but IMHO only about half of them should have made it into the book, which is why I gave The Well of Lost Plots the lowest grade of the series.

The fourth book, Something Rotten (Grade: A), is my second favorite of the series. It makes having finished the previous book worthwhile. In this sequel, Thursday Next fights to get her husband back and save the world in yet another very humorous way, all while taking care of her child, Friday.

The fifth book, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, is pretty good, too (Grade: A, click here to see what I said about it before).

The sixth book, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Grade: B+), takes place mostly in BookWorld. The real Thursday is missing,  and the written (i.e., fictional version of) Thursday goes looking for her. Puns abound, sometimes glaringly. What I find oddest and most jarring about this book, though, is that the layout of BookWorld, explained in the previous book of the series, is completely rearranged in this one.

The seventh book, The Woman Who Died a Lot (Grade: A-), takes place in the Thursday’s real world, not BookWorld. This is, I think, one of the funniest books of the series, but only if you consider a world-smiting god to be a humorous subject (I do!). I don’t own this book, but I liked it enough that I’ll probably buy it when the price goes down.