We’re deep in the throes of winter now with the mercury hugging the bottom of the temperature gauge and snow depth being measured in feet. Everyone I know is huddled up, snuggled down, wrapped in layers and beseeching God for a little Global Warming to thaw out the frozen ground. During these long, frozen nights a house almost becomes a living thing, cradling and caring for the creatures within. Our slippered feet scuffle across its floors and we sink into chairs by the fireside content, with our books and our layers, to let winter rage outdoors because it can’t touch us in here. Winter is the time to cherish your home. So this may not be the best night to read The House Next Door, the second novel by Anne Rivers Siddons. It’s a great story, set in Atlanta in the 1970’s and it’s the kind of book that will keep you wound up in its pages, but imaginative people may want to leave this till summer. During these months we need to believe we are safe when we’re home and the house in these pages is wicked. No one in the neighborhood wants to see the new house go up. …
Yes, it’s hearts and flowers day, the annual celebration of the “people in pairs” that make up a big segment of our civilization. Hey, I’m all for marriage. A good marriage becomes the third part of a romantic relationship and it nurtures the people in it as well as those around it. It brings out the best in the partners. But people are limited and, despite our prayers and best wishes, not every romance becomes a good marriage. Listen, if you go by Stephen King’s volume of that name, you may rethink Valentine’s Day altogether. If a good marriage is the base of the best of all worlds, you’ll find nothing but hell in the bad. The title tale is one of King’s famous “what if” thoughts that popped up during an article on BTK. You remember him? I do. I, and later my mother, lived in Wichita during the years that serial killer was free. His actions were terrible and one of the bad parts when they caught him was he looked so ordinary, which is part of King’s point. If monsters look and talk and dress pretty much like everyone else, how can the sane person pick one…
When you’re an English Major, you have to deal with Jane Austen. She’s one of the writers whose work you have to know before you graduate, like the medical students have to pass A&P. This can be a problem because readers love or they hate her books with a passion. There’s no middle ground. Granted, Mark Twain said an ideal library contains none of her stories but his heroes create their own destinies by ignoring the rules of their cultures. Miss Austen’s characters don’t have that luxury. They have to carve solutions to their problems out of a narrower field. Nevertheless, constraints don’t defeat Austen heroines, they enhance them. Difficulties turn Jane’s women into jewels. Pressure abounds in Pride and Prejudice. The Bennet daughters are all old enough to marry but there’s an unspoken demand that at least one of the girls marry a man with money. Mr. Bennet has no savings and his death would leave any dependent family homeless. The two older sisters know this although both would rather marry for love than a fortune. They also live in a world that runs on gossip and rumor and it’s hard to find the truth. Nevertheless, Elizabeth Bennet withstands…
Science fiction is just fiction with science. That was the argument the guys in my generation made in class when they compared the work of Hardy, Thackery or some other school-board sanctioned novelist to a story they preferred. Despite the teacher’s efforts to introduce us to the literary gems of previous centuries, these fellows found subtly in the characters of Ray Bradberry and ambiguity in the plots of Isaac Asimov. Remember, these were the guys who ran home from school each day to catch the last half of Star Trek and Twilight Zone reruns because VCRs, DVRs and streaming had not been invented. Nerds long before Comic-Con and Big Bang Theory gave them a sense of pride. I didn’t mind them (victims themselves, they tended to avoid picking on others) but on this point, I thought they were wrong. English instructors implied that Science Fiction stories were obsessed with machinery and sex and the writers couldn’t see beyond those fixations. I believed this until I read Podkayne of Mars. I learned, so help me, I learned. Podkayne of Mars is a turning point book in the career of Robert Anson Heinlein, one of the three deans of Science Fiction. Kid-lit…
Think about yarn for a moment. If you look at it under the microscope, you’ll see that it’s a series of fibrous strands that have been woven together so tightly they seem to fuse into a single cord. Little ends of the strands edge free from the cord and catch the light that shines on the weave. Story yarns are the same: a woven rope of characters, narrative and plot points pull the entire tale together while, here and there, a strand can catch the light. Some story yarns are so strong that other writers can spread out their elements, and then reweave them into another pattern that shows what you didn’t see before. Gregory Maguire did this with Wicked and Joan Aiken rewove Jane Austen’s Emma into her own Jane Fairfax. I love this technique but the one I love even more is when a writer pulls one of the glinting ends at the edge of a story and teases a whole new tale from that thread. T. K. Thorne did this in 2011 when she pulled the bright thread of a character from the book of Genesis and created a tale named Noah’s Wife. At last, the Lady…