Book Review: Frankenstein

At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.

Even if one hasn't read the book or seen any of the numerous film adaptations, it would be difficult to believe that anyone in Western Civilization had not at least heard about Frankenstein in some fashion. It is a classic tale already two centuries old that will live on for centuries to come.

If you haven't read the book, it bears little resemblance to the majority of films that were inspired by it. Most films devote significant screen time to portraying how the monster was created and how Frankenstein is thrilled with his creation. Frankenstein tries to educate it, make it more human, but the process is frustratingly difficult. Said creation then runs amok, much to Frankenstein's chagrin. The films are typically a warning about the dangers of science run amok.

But the book spends scant time on the monster's creation. We're given Frankenstein's motivations for reanimating the dead (grief over his mother's death) and his research into the matter—primarily reading ancient, discredited tomes—but no mention of where he got body parts or what process provided that spark to reanimate the flesh. It's just handwaved onward, not important. And then when the monster is created, Frankenstein rejects it outright. It is so hideous an abomination that he can't stand to be in the same room with it and drives it away.

Shelley attacks the canard that beauty is good and ugliness is evil. The monster is attacked by all who gaze upon it for no reason other than it is so hideous it must be evil. The monster secretly provides firewood and game for a poor family of seemingly kind people, but they attack it on sight. Later, after the monster learns how to speak (No, not "Fire bad!"), it engages with Frankenstein in debate, slinging purple prose in his face, lamenting how lonely it is because of its wretched existence. But Frankenstein can't get past the ugly and rejects the monster again and again.

Naturally, all of this rejection is too much for the monster. It resorts to committing evil deeds which only incense Frankenstein's animosity towards the monster. Ultimately, the monster feels that negative attention is better than no attention and torments its creator further.

Sure, Frankenstein blames himself for creating the monster. He hides this fact from people for years, all the while crying out to the stars about his woe and misery and longing to be with his love and his wonderful family. But ultimately, he never accepts the blame for his true crime: rejecting his creation upon its birth. Think of it this way: If a parent rejects his/her child all of that child's life, never shows that child love, what sort of person will that child grow up to be? The rest of us would think that parent was a lousy human being. Frankenstein is no different. But instead, Captain Walton, who meets Frankenstein while he's out in pursuit of the monster, showers such slavish admiration upon the man that I swear he was smitten by him, regardless of what Frankenstein told him that he'd done.

Frankenstein is the true monster here, not his hideous creation. I'll take the Hollywood version of Dr. Frankenstein. At least his twisted heart was in the right place.

3 stars

By the way, Young Frankenstein was the best of them all.

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Book Review: Pharoni

When the body of Harry Injurides - playwright, provocateur and bodybuilder - washes up on a beach, his friends are shocked, but not altogether surprised. But when they meet to mourn Harry, he shows up and says he's been resurrected.

Pharoni is the story of those friends. Tommy Pharoni tries to overcome his shock by writing about his friend's resurrection, and accidentally starts a religion. Roy Sudden starts a tech empire based on digital empathy and digital pain, drawing in billionaire investors, femme-fatale programmers, and tsunamis of capital. And, Roy's on-again, off-again girlfriend Maud works in secret to bring radical justice to the most neglected and abused corners of society.

As Tommy's religion grows, Roy and his backers try to take control of it. The battle, about more than doctrine, engulfs Tommy's marriage and threatens his life, leading to a conflict with strangely humane results that no one could predict.

Told in the first person, Pharoni has the feel of a memoir or a really long confession. Tommy Pharoni is a struggling screenplay writer who pays his bills and alimony by working a soulless marketing job. His closest friends were aspiring artists of different sorts in college. Now in their mid-thirties, they've set aside those aspirations to "adult" properly. All except for Harry, whose death opens the story. Harry struggled to fit into contemporary society, instead preferring to help the homeless while penning "words of wisdom" in his many notebooks. After his death and subsequent re-birth, those notebooks wound up in Tommy's possession. Ultimately, Tommy would collect them into a coherent manuscript and seek out a way to get them published.

As Tommy is a screenwriter, the format of the story periodically shifts into screenplay mode. This works particularly well for conversations as it affords opportunity to get to know the other characters through their dialogue rather than relying on Tommy's narrative. I wouldn't say Tommy is an unreliable narrator, but he does limit what we can learn about what's going on elsewhere with other characters. References to things that have been written elsewhere and NDAs force the reader to fill in the gaps.

After Harry's resurrection, the lives of Tommy and his friends change as described in the blurb, but there's so much more. The group of friends find themselves splattered by the seven deadly sins, fitting for a story where a religion is founded upon the philosophical musings of a character that has died and miraculously resurrected days later. At least Christianity didn't get partnered with a health and wellness brand. The corrupting influence of millions and billions of dollars seeps its way into their lives and rots them from within. What is friendship worth? Can you put a dollar amount on it?

If there's one overarching theme that I can take away from this tale, it's that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Keeping this spoiler free, I'll say that Tommy started out as a character that I could connect with to someone I didn't want anything to do with. But I stuck with him because act two opens with:

This is where I get unrelatable, maybe even unlikable. As the writer of failed screenplays, I know what a mortal sin unlikability can be.

That gave me hope for him in act three. But Tommy is far from the only person to be corrupted by power. It's everyone up to the very end of the story. And the only characters whose souls are left intact are those who never possess it.

Colin Dodds has crafted an excellent morality play with vivid characters. Pharoni offers modern day parallels to the founding of Christianity, right down to the Christmas star, but in an age of unbridled capitalism. If you're old enough, with all of the life experience that implies, it forces you to take a look at this fellowship of friends and how they sacrificed art and friendship for wealth and power and check to make sure that this isn't a mirror of your own life.

4 stars

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Book Review: Freeze Frame Revolution

How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code—and unavoidable casualties.

Earth is dying, yet civilization has access to some amazing technology—almost de rigueur for Watts. In this case, the Eriophora, an asteroid turned generation starship of sorts, has been tasked with building jumpgates throughout the galaxy in hopes that humans, or their successors, will be able to make use of them and spread through the galaxy. While a noble cause, the UN doesn't expect everyday people to stick with the mission (Successive generations could rebel, arguing that they weren't given a choice and are forced to be slaves to someone else's dream). Instead, the crew of 30,000 are genetically engineered with the traits that make them perfectly suited for the never-ending job. Even so, the UN doesn't wholly trust them either. A limited AI (a full-powered AI would probably wind up just as unreliable as humans after a while) with less than half the synapses of a human brain (referred to by the crew as "Chimp") runs most of the operations, waking small groups of humans from cryosleep to lend a helping hand when Chimp stumbles across a problem that requires good old fashioned human ingenuity.

Tens of millions of years have passed. A hostile encounter shortly after the completion of a build triggers doubts about the mission. Chimp's abilities seem lacking, possibly degrading, and a grim discovery made by some of the crew sparks talk of rebellion. But as the book blurb points out, planning a mutiny against an all-seeing AI, even a limited one, over the span of millennia—while hopping in an out of the freezer—is a staggeringly difficult task. But plan they do.

The story is told from the POV of Sunday Ahzmundin. Sunday's backstory, along with that of the mission, is told in the short story, "Hotshot," which I strongly recommend that interested parties read first. Honestly, it should've been included with this book for those reasons. Watts makes the effort to properly develop her character there instead of here. Watts is amazing at grabbing cutting edge scientific ideas and mashing them together for some incredible world-building, but his protagonists (this is my third Watts' novel) are very similar. They've all had something done to them to set them apart, render them outsiders. Lenie (Starfish) is a sexual abuse survivor who undergoes an operation to enable her to run away and work on the ocean floor. Siri (Blindsight) suffered from epileptic seizures so he had an hemispherectomy that rendered him emotionally detached from humanity. Makes for a solid candidate to go on a first contact mission in the farthest reaches of the solar system. Sunday was genetically engineered to want to leave Earth behind with an insatiable galactic wanderlust.

Eventually the rebels make their move and stuff happens. I won't spoil the ending, but it felt unresolved. There are a couple more short stories, and Watts admitted on his blog that he was working on a sequel, so there's that. Despite the ending, I enjoyed this more than either Starfish or Blindsight, so I'm holding out hope that Watts gets around to writing a proper sequel.

4.5 stars

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Book Review: Heir to the Empire

Five years ago, the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Death Star, defeated Darth Vader and the Emperor, and drove the remnants of the old Imperial Starfleet to a distant corner of the galaxy. Princess Leia and Han Solo are married and expecting twins. And Luke Skywalker has become the first in a long-awaited line of Jedi Knights.

But thousands of light-years away, the last of the Emperor's warlords, Grand Admiral Thrawn, has taken command of the shattered Imperial fleet, readied it for war, and pointed it at the fragile heart of the New Republic. For this dark warrior has made a vital discovery that could destroy everything the courageous men and women of the Rebel Alliance fought so hard to build.

I remember when this first came out. The glow from the original Star Wars trilogy had faded, but the franchise still had its rabid fans. As much as I loved the films, I didn't cross over into super-fan territory. I was content with story as it was and willing to let it go. So why am I reading it now? My son, a big Star Wars fan himself (at least before Disney got a hold of the franchise), bought me the (original) Thrawn trilogy for Christmas. How could I say no?

Zahn has had a long and prolific career penning stories set in the Star Wars universe. This was his first. I feel like he was somewhat handcuffed in how he handled the known characters from the films. They came across as flat, dull. Their quips seemed borrowed from the films. I didn't get the feeling that their characters grew.

Where Zahn excelled was with the new characters. Joruus C'baoth was an egotistical bore. Mara Jade's hatred for Luke was insufferable. Fortunately, we find out why she hates him so much near the end of the novel. Talon Karrde was a shrewd smuggler caught between the fledgling Republic and the remnants of the Empire. I grew to like him. Captain Pellaeon had my sympathies despite playing for the bad guys. He had the unenviable task of reporting to the sharpest tactician in the Empire. He knew that he was mentally outmatched by his boss, and constantly had to prove his competence to the man lest he find himself staring down the wrong end of a blaster. And Grand Admiral Thrawn was the sharpest tack in the galaxy. Someone on Goodreads compared him to Sherlock Holmes, and I cannot disagree. One of the finest villains that's ever been written for Star Wars.

I didn't get a proper sense of the internal strife among the Republic's ruling council, so I was caught off guard at the end. The peril that our intrepid heroes faced didn't seem too perilous, and yet they struggled. There was a climactic battle at the end of the novel that was entertaining, but it was far too early in the trilogy to be epic. Still, I was entertained, and I will be continuing with the series.

3.5 stars

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Book Review: House of Leaves

Johnny Truant gets a call in the middle of the night from his friend Lude. Apparently, this weird old guy (Zampanò) died in his apartment building, and the landlord left the door unlocked for Goodwill to come and clean the place out the next morning. Johnny heads over and the two of them find this manuscript in a trunk. The manuscript is an analysis of a documentary, The Navidson Record. Skimming through it, Johnny notices that it is annotated with footnotes referencing other people who have either analyzed the film or interviewed the people who took part in it. The film concerns a house that is larger on the inside than the outside. Curious, Johnny takes it home with him.

What the reader holds in her hands is that manuscript with all of Zampanò's narration and analysis of the important aspects of the The Navidson Record; analysis of said film by others, including quotes and footnotes (Yes, footnotes); and Johnny's commentary on said notes plus tales of his experiences with the book and its negative impact on his life.

It's clear from the introduction that Johnny is going to be an unreliable narrator. It then becomes the task of the reader to decide what's real and what's the result of what appears to be schizophrenia. Considering Johnny and Lude seem to be characters out of a Bukowski novel (appropriately enough, even living in L.A.), the lines are easily blurred.

For me, it was all about the house. Any time the narrative strayed from that, my interest dropped. Johnny's story wasn't compelling. Zampanò's analysis with all of its quotes and references wasn't compelling. Dozens of pages of two sentences, two words, or even one word. Upside down text. Mirrored text. Footnotes of whole lists of every named architect, architectural style, and inventory of everything you can find in a HomeDepot smacks of OCD. None of that was compelling. I'll give Danielewski points for his ambitious experiment, but its obsession with documentation as a means of drawing attention to a descent into madness was tiresome for me.

Why Danielewski chose to go this convoluted route rather than telling a straightforward story about the house that the Navidsons lived in is beyond me. Was he successful in generating buzz about his work and compelling people to buy it? Absolutely. It could've been a solid selling haunted house story with elements of myth and cosmicism, but he went further down the proverbial rabbit hole and added extra layers of meta-analyis and tangential 90s fictionalized memoir. And he was successful, so good for him. But I suspect that this over the top experiment may have generated blowback in terms of building a long term audience of readers. On Goodreads right now, this book has 150,000 ratings for an average score of 4.07. That's excellent. But his next most populous book has 5,600 ratings, a 96% drop.

It may just be coincidence, but I'm wondering if Danielewski heard Soundgarden's "Room a Thousand Years Wide" and decided to include it among his fictional footnotes. Why? Well, there's a footnote attributed to a "Chris Thayil". Kim Thayil wrote the lyrics for the song, which appears on the Badmotorfinger album in 1991, during the time Danielewski wrote the book. "Chris Thayil" could be an amalgam of Chris Cornell and Kim Thayil. If that sounds crazy, then House of Leaves isn't for you because that is the sort of thing that permeates this book.

3 stars

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Book Review: The Theatre of Shadows

Six months have passed since the events of The Silver Mask. Over the winter months, Vasini was plagued by Gareth Miller, the Winter Fayre Killer, who murdered 17 people before he was captured by Lieutenant David Locke. The city now waits for Miller to be hanged. But when Miller escapes gaol, ready to terrorise Vasini's streets once more, Locke must hunt the murderer again to stop him from claiming more lives.

As Miller flees into Vasini's streets, Joseph Bastin, ambassador to Vasini for the city-state of Laège, is assassinated in a brothel. With the threat of political repercussions for the death, it is up to Dr. Marcus Fox, newly appointed Commandant of Police, to find the ambassador's killer.

Fox's investigation soon leads to a suspect, someone who has been investigating links between the Laège embassy and the worship of the dead deities - his ally, Dr. Elizabeth Reid.

Now, Elizabeth and her friend, Catherine, must act quickly to clear her name before she is found by someone who doesn't believe her claims of innocence and she's forced to dance the hangman's jig.

This is the sequel to The Silver Mask, a terrific "flintlock and alchemy" novel. Unfortunately, The Theatre of Shadows wasn't as enjoyable for me due to the plot style and pacing. The story read more like a police procedural set in the 1700s, which isn't the sort of thing—regardless of time period—that I read. Investigating the ambassador's murder provided enough intrigue, but the serial killer plotline kept getting in the way, hogging the spotlight. Maybe the serial killer was fully developed in The Winter Fayre, a novella contained in The Divided River that preceded this novel, but here he's rather one-dimensional. He's always two steps ahead of the Inspectorate and the watchmen (police), rendering them seemingly incompetent as he murders people with impunity. It went on for far too long for me. It took roughly three-fifths of the novel before any sort of clue was given as to why the serial killer plotline even existed, and it wasn't resolved until much later.

The main characters from The Silver Mask—Fox, Locke, Elizabeth, and Catherine—are here. While fully developed before, they weren't neglected here. Fox and Locke are in pursuit of the ambassador's assassin and the serial killer. Elizabeth and Catherine spend their time searching for clues to clear Elizabeth's name of killing the ambassador. Ellingsen gives us each main character's POV—as well as those of a few key minor characters—as they investigate, thus enriching the depth of each one.

Ellingsen doesn't spend as much time world-building here as he did in The Silver Mask, but what he provides is top-notch. The city of Vasini feels authentic with Ellingsen's descriptions of the sights and scents of everyday life.

Ultimately, the protagonists' relentless pursuit of clues paid off. Ellingsen corraled the plot into a climax that resolved the current crises of random murder and calculated assassination. It was an effective ending, and so I feel better about the book as a whole. But for me, it was probably a hundred pages too long. However, I remain optimistic that the next installment in this series will have more intrigue and less procedure.

3 stars

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The Pros and Cons of the Publishing Industry

I stumbled across this over at the Independent Publishing Magazine. Guest blogger Andrew Deen outlined the pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing. Thorough yet succinct, it's a must read for every writer about to embark on the road to publishing their work. But if you're not a writer and you've wondered what's involved in publishing, then it's worth checking out.

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