Every art form has rules. Some forms, like the Elizabethan sonnet, specify the number and emphasis of beats in a line and lines in a verse. Other forms operate under dicta that (to borrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean script) function more like guidelines. I’m not sure how formalized the rules are in Revenge Stories but I can tell you one thing about Andrew Hilbert’s Death Thing. It has the elements of this genre down pat. A Recognizable Protagonist – Gilbert is one of life’s constant complainers, a fellow the rest of us have met and now try to avoid. He’s the self-satisfied old guy spouting opinions on every subject, and insults with every remark. If he’s your relative, you duck him at family gatherings and wonder on the way home why and how his wife stays in their marriage. Like many retirees, Gilbert has too much time on his hands and booze in his gut but the man does have a legitimate problem: vandals have been breaking into his car. Rather than keep his auto in the garage or take his valuables inside when he leaves, Gilbert opts to turn his car into a machine that will “teach”…
We like to scare ourselves with autumn stories. Whether the celebration is Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day, or Dia de Los Muertos, this is the season when we remember that life is chancy and death is real. Because these truths are frightening, most of us arrange our lives to minimize danger and invent spooky stories for fun. It took Sebastian Junger to remind us that some folks still earn a living doing hazardous work and watch the skies of October with fear. Those who live by and on the sea never forget that hurricanes arrive with the fall. The Perfect Storm is an account of a Halloween storm that landlubbers will never forget. Two dozen years have passed since a low-pressure system hit the remnants of Hurricane Grace and turned it into a sea-going cyclone. Three people outside watching the storm were swept away by the winds and two more died when their boat sank off Staten Island. A Coast-Guard helicopter crashed in the storm and one of the paratroopers was lost at sea but if you ask readers about that storm, they’ll tell you about the fishing ship, Andrea Gail. They may even remember the names of her crew,…
Our culture celebrates accomplished people, especially accomplished creative artists. This means many celebrities have more of a “fish-bowl” kind of existence than a personal life and they often require a small army of helpers to meet all of their personal and professional obligations. These Assistants can start out as an artist’s devoted fans or followers but their work and the trust of their employer gives them a view behind the curtain others don’t get to see: they know the artist on and off stage, see the creative person as well as his/her public persona. Whether that is an advantage or disadvantage is explored in Lynn Cullen’s novel, Twain’s End. The book is a fictionalization of a real drama that occurred during the last year of Samuel Clemens’s (aka Mark Twain’s) life. Over the previous decade, the person who managed his correspondence and everyday responsibilities was a woman named Isabel Lyon. The writer relied on his secretary so much that Clemens had given her a house close his own and a bedroom in his estate, Stormfield. When Miss Lyon married the writer’s business manager in 1909, Mr. Clemens attended their wedding but before the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, Clemens had…
Teachers tell us we have to study the classics in order to understand literary forms. For tragedy, we look at the works of Shakespeare and the Greeks; for comedy, we read Wilde and Shaw. Fantasy readers get acquainted with Tolkein and SF fans get a background of Verne, Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke before moving on to the contemporary writers. All of this sounds like a waste of time to the student who equates “classic” with “boring” and confuses “subversive literature” with subversive political groups. The truth is that stories earn the “classic” distinction when they are so brilliant and memorable that they are enjoyed and understood by generations of people, and the purpose of subversive fiction is to persuade readers to rethink their assumptions. Combine those two concepts and you’ll find Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. No “who-dun-it” has more twists in the tale. A bit of background for this classic “closed door” mystery, for anyone who needs it. The brilliant Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot is traveling from Istanbul to London on the fabulous Orient Express, a luxury passenger train service. On the morning after the train is stalled by a snow drift, the passenger berthed next…
Summer is complete again, for all intents and purposes, and school is back in session. People return to class schedules and assignments, semester projects and extracurricular activities and since school is such an important part of our lives, it’s not surprising that it serves as the setting for many books. However,no story captured the American teacher’s perspective of that universe quite like Up the Down Staircase. This “education of an educator” is more than fifty years old but in terms of what a teacher faces, it’s right on the mark. Most employees have one impossible party to please (retail clerks must please the customers; professional people must please their clients; government pleases itself.) but first-year teacher, Sylvia Barrett, is at the mercy of everyone: there’s the MIA Principal who pontificates via memo but wields the power to end her career; the petty tyrant in administration who dispense policies by the metric ton, supplies with an eye-dropper and no mercy whatsoever; the janitor who responds to every request for maintenance with the reply “nobody’s down here” and the students, all-knowing, all needy and mostly adverse to the concept of education. Sylvia’s opportunities to teach must be sandwiched between episodes of classroom umpiring…