Gooder Than Hell!

I’ve talked before about my love for Michael Moorcock, so I squealed with delight upon a recent visit to Half-Price Books when I stumbled upon this gem of a paperback, a title I’d never heard of called “The Time of the Hawklords.”

A little digging reveals that the primary author was Michael Butterworth, and Moorcock’s involvement was “negligible.” Still, I’m fired up about it. Listen to this description from the back cover and try not to squeal yourself:

From a ruined London on a burnt-0ut Earth, the Hawkwind group beams out its last, defiant concert. The Children of the Sun, the tattered remnants of the Hippies, gather to listen. But when the music ends, withdrawal symptoms begin – a dreadful, retching illness only the Hawkwind sound can allay.

This new malady may be more than debilitated mankind can withstand. Desperately the rock group begins research: first, with the few electronic instruments miraculously still intact; then with a book whose existence is an even greater miracle – an ancient magical tome, The Saga of Doremi Fasol Latido, whose prophecies seem to be coming true.

THAT IS SO BADASS! I can’t wait to start reading this.

For a lot of people who are roughly my age – which is to say, late thirties – there is a haunting memory of a television show about children in a very bleak place, and an unbelievable act of cruelty that some of them commit. A story about a world where the sun only shines in the sky for one hour every nine years – and about a young girl who is locked in a closet by jealous peers during that precious hour. Ringing any emotional bells? Read the rest of this entry »

The wonderful creation of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Agent Pendergast is equal parts Indiana Jones, Fox Mulder and Sherlock Holmes. He is tall, lean and pale; his hair is blonde to the point of almost-whiteness; he dresses in the finest clothes, talks like a gentleman, drives a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, and sips the finest wines.

He does all of this while solving hideous and convoluted crimes, which often touch on the realm of the supernatural. As literary detectives go, they don’t get much gooder than hell than Pendergast.

I’m currently enjoying The Wheel of Darkness, which just came out in paperback; as it opens, the incredibly reclusive monks of a Tibetan monastery implore Pendergast to help retrieve a missing artifact (it’s a task, of course, that only he can do).

If you’re new to the series, be sure to start with the trilogy of Brimstone, Dance of Death and The Book of the Dead, all of which deal with Pendergast’s evil-genius-brother, Diogenes. I’m telling you, this is some of the most fun I’ve ever had reading fiction.

Today it’s hard to swing a dead vampire cowboy without hitting some post-modern, self-aware “mature audience” comic book, and in many ways Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing gets both the credit and the blame for that. And while the adult comic market has, to my mind, become too steeped in its own cuteness and “look how edgy we are!” narcissism, this book ages extremely well.

Moore took a character that was drenched in camp and reinvented him as a true tortured soul, more human than many of the human beings that made his life a walking hell.

This book kicks off a very long story arc, one that is still one of the stand-out reads in illustrated fiction.

Australian writer Reilly takes the page-turner to a ridiculously fun new level, straining the boundaries of logic and requiring more suspension of disbelief than an Indiana Jones movie. This is a world where trains leap into the air following an explosion and land again perfectly on the tracks, where people address each other by code names in secret meeting rooms in Dubai. It’s a crazy amount of fun, and reads like a video game but without all the button-mashing.

The big deal with Reilly, evidently, is that his first book was self-published. The new one is called “The 6 Sacred Stones,” and it was decidedly not self-published.

One of the quintessential New Yorkers turns the detective genre on its ear with this collection of three short novels that are kinda related, kinda not. All of them bend around and reference one another at some point; Auster himself appears at times, and clues continually point toward answers that may not exist.

To the reader looking for a plays-fair mystery with clues and solutions and conventional structure, these books will not only be a disappointment but a frustration – and anyone marketing these titles as “detective stories” only adds to that frustration.

Rather, these are meditations on self and identity, told through the structure and voice of a detective novel. It’s a brilliant stroke, taking a potentially ponderous and high-concept set of ideas and relating them through very familiar structures. This is a great introduction to Auster, whose entire body of work is fascinating – let me strongly recommend “The Music of Chance” as stop number two on your exploration of his fiction, if this volume turns you on.