Monday, Monday

 I have become quite fond of LOVE ON THE SPECTRUM, a reality show about people with autism trying to find love. All of them seem to have been raised to be very polite. Maybe things like manners are easier to teach than how to have a conversation. Anyway, you can't help but root for them. And their parents. 

Also watching ROOSTER, HACKS, MARGO'S GOT MONEY TROUBLES, and a show on PBS with people in the UK trying to find their parents (or children). Most of them were adopted during the time when those records were hidden. 

Reading SHE READ TO US IN THE AFTERNOON, Kathleen Hill and some short stories by James Lee Burke. 

The weather is still unpredictable.

How are things there?  

Went to an art show at Cranbrook. Cranbrook is a school, art museum and lovely grounds. We all find it hard to identify with installation art, which students mostly seem attracted to.  I know photography brought representational art to a crossroads but looking at a table full of broken pottery does not do much for me. Or the recreation of a sixties living room. 

FFB-NO RETURN ADDRESS, Anca Vlasopolos

 

Anca is a good friend of mine, but I didn't know her well when I read this wonderful, sad, intelligent book. It recounts her flight from post-war communist Romania, to France, to Belgium, and finally the U.S. It tells about the persecution and death of her father in that communist period too. It is an honest account of the good and bad she and her mother found in the Detroit area. This is an excellent text on how to write memoir. And how to tell the story beautifully even when the events are not. 

Short Story Wednesday: "No Pain Whatsoever" Richard Yates from HIGH INFIDELITY

A friend had this anthology in duplicate and gave me a copy. I don't remember seeing it before but it's from the nineties. Richard Yates was a favorite writer of mine, but I don't remember this story. Lots of the nineties most popular writers are included: Russo, Atwood, Updike, Banks, et. 
It takes place at a TB hospital. Do they exist anymore? A woman is visiting her husband who seems to have been there for a long time and through many surgeries. A friend has driven her there and she is having an affair with another passenger. This must happen often when your spouse is at a place like this for years. She has brought her husband some magazines, which he is anxious to read. She breaks down after her visit but then her lover cheers her up. What an odd story. 

George Kelley 

Jerry House 

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK 

Todd Mason 

Monday, Monday

I went to see THE CHRISTOPHERS and could barely make out a word. I thought it was my hearing but at the end of the screening, a man rose and asked if anyone else had trouble hearing the dialog. So I guess it was not just me. Is it likely the film itself or the theater's equipment. This is not the first time this has happened. 

We still have had barely a day without rain. 

Watching HACKS, MARGO's GOT MONEY TROUBLES, THE STORE (Wiseman doc about Neiman Marcus.

About to start a new book, but what? 

What about you?  

El Dorado Drive Wins the LA Book Prize in Mystery-Thriller

 

                                                                Congrats, Megan

FFB: THE FOG, James Herbert

 

reviewed by Ed Gorman, the author of TICKET TO RIDE, THE MIDNIGHT ROOM and many other fine books. 

 

The Fog, James Herbert

Just after Stephen King created the horror industry back in the Seventies U.S. publishers began importing British writers who walked the same streets as the master. One of those was Brit superstar James Herbert. While he never quite found the audience he deserved over here, a number of his novels have stayed with me long after the more successful imports have faded completely from my memory.

My favorite Herbert is titled The Fog and it continues the long and heralded tradition of the British disaster novel. Sometimes the disaster is an alien invasion as with H.G. Wells and sometimes the disaster is unworldly seeming yet of our world as with the great John Wyndham.

In Herbert's novel a yellow fog begins moving across England causing much of the population to go insane and begin committing atrocities on family, friends and anyone else they can get their hands on. Even animals go insane; pets become killers. A group of scientists in a bunker race to learn why one of them is immune to the effects fog.

What raises this story to the level of a classic is not just the shock effects--Herbert can jolt the most jaded of readers--but the portraits he draws of his people. He cuts across all ages and all classes. Unlike most Big Bestsellers he makes us care about them and in so doing he gives the reader the race-against-the-clock story with the scientists and the anxiety of seeing real people face their fates.

Centipede Press has just issued a collector's edition of the novel complete with a beautiful cover homage to the U.S. paperback edition and a long, fine introduction by horror legend Ramsey Campbell.

Thought it's a lengthy novel, I read this new edition in two sittings. It's a thriller that truly belongs on the same shelf as H.G. Wells, the early catastrophe novels of J.G. Ballard and the classic work of the late John Wyndham.