It’s October, one of my favorite months for stories, even though most October stories have a tie to the supernatural. So it only seems right to start off with a story by one of the writers most associated with scary stories: Stephen King. At its essence, marriage is a closed corporation. It’s a private entity with its own personality and the principals own all the stock. Sure, often children are born to a marriage and spouses share parts of their lives with others but these people are beneficiaries, not stockholders; if children leave and friends fall away, the corporation continues unless death or divorce intervene, keeping secrets known only to the principals. At least that’s the premise of Lisey’s Story. And those untold secrets are what makes a marriage powerful, even when one of the principals dies. Lisey Landon is still learning about the strength of her marriage years after her husband, Scott, died. Scott was a successful novelist and the public face of their marriage. His passing left her with a sizable amount of cash, a barn full of books, and some very insensitive academic types that believe their knowledge of Scott Landon’s work gives them superior rights…
In my first iteration as a college student, I had trouble choosing between English and Theatre as a major. (We theatre geeks spell the subject with the British “re” instead of “er”. It shows our snobbish devotion to British plays.) During every semester, almost every week, I’d wrestle with the issue: was my primary devotion to the stage or to books? It turns out I lack the temperament necessary for a theatrical life. I like regular hours, daylight, and sleeping at home instead of a green room. What I do like is reading plays. In their dormant form, plays look the like every other book; reading them takes a slightly different set of skills. With the publication of Rowling/Tiffany/Thorne play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, those differences have become apparent to a wider audience. Just remember, novels and plays are different ways of seeing a story. In a novel, the author controls the story world and lyrically shows the reader what he/she needs to see. The description may be confined to a few, sparse details (like Hemmingway’s) or may roll into long, lush paragraphs. These parts are where the narrator’s voice soars before dropping back to the dialogue of the…
No one does the end of summer quite like the South. The prairie states may be wilting under the furnace-blast of the sun, California may actually be on fire, (It seems to burn up every year) but for the last word in late summer misery, look below the Mason-Dixon line. Here, the outdoors is a cauldron of heat and humidity sufficient to make snakes seek the comfort of air conditioning and lacquer the porch with mold. It’s impossible to sleep when the air-conditioning fails, and HVAC repairmen are worth their weight in gold (a rate reflected in their bills). But the thing is, Southerners don’t complain about the heat. In an interesting way, they relish it. It’s one of the things that makes this place so distinctive and it certainly fuels our art. The endless, draining summers stew the atmosphere of Southern literature so tragedies and harsh truths emerge. Before August ends, pick up at one or two more tales about the South and enjoy the benefits of an omnipresent, overwhelming Summer. Always In August was one of my mother’s books and the title says it all. There’s the usual ” ‘ole Southern family” with the “ole family place” (a…
I hate what’s happened to the word “awesome”. For the last 10 years, reality shows and commentators abused this adjective until they reduced it to an on-air cliche. It’s not fair and it’s not right. “Did you see so-and-so’s new Jeep?” “Yeah, it’s awesome.” “Sidney’s so awesome doing her little tap dance. You should see her kick up her legs!” It doesn’t matter whether we’re discussing the Olympics, sugarless pudding or Donald Trump, everything is described as awesome when most of the time…it isn’t. And that cheapens the word for those who wield such power that we gaze at them with a respect bordering on reverence. The power that can end or alter the course of your life, like early friendships and late summer storms. Either of these is an agent of incredible force; combined, the effect is explosive. That is one of the ideas behind Anne Rivers Siddon’s novel, Outer Banks. On the surface, it’s a reunion of four middle-aged women who went to college together as girls but, it’s also a hymn to the power of our very first friendships. The older women all carry a patina of achievement, loss, and experience but in each other, they also…
My sister, the educator, was grousing this week about an interesting blog post (sorry to say, not one of mine) on the question of whether Middle Grade and Young Adult books have gotten too “dark” for their target audience. The post’s author made an eloquent argument to justify the current “serious” themes but Sis’s response was “There has to be a happy [book], every now and then. Well, that surprised me because my sister dear has never shied away from kids’ books with dramatic stories and tragic elements. She’s the one who turned me on to Harry Potter and The Graveyard Book (great stories that both start out with murders) and as a teenager, she devoured every Judy Blume YA story-with-a-taboo as soon as it came out. So I had to ask: “What’s the problem? You like dark.” “Of course I do” she said. “But every story pushed at kids right now right now is all about dark issues. It’s dystopias and addiction and depression and death. Every once in a while, people need to laugh too, you know?” “Well, yeah” I replied. “But didn’t the books you loved best as a kid usually bring on the tears?” (I wasn’t ready to concede.)…