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HAF Book Club: June poll and discussion

Started by Sandra Craft, May 18, 2020, 10:27:48 AM

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Sandra Craft

The Final Solution: a story of detection, by Michael Chabon.  Retired to the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year old man, rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man.  Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot.  (131 pages)

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson.  An incurable plague has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures who are determined to destroy the last living man on Earth. (162 pages)

Mrs. Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls.  In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research.  (111 pages)

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.  A boldly imagined future in which no hope remains, but in which a father and his young son are sustained by love.  (241 pages)

The Reporter, by Scott Sigler.  The Reporter follows Yolanda Davenport, a reporter for Galaxy Sports Magazine, as she searches for the truth about Ju Tweedy's involvement with the murder of Grace McDermott - the incident that drove Ju to join the Ionath Krakens. The Reporter takes place between week three and week six of the 2684 Galactic Football League season, the season that encompasses The All-Pro.  (138 pages)

Tselane, by J. Louw Van Wijk.  Tselane -- young, beautiful and popular with her isolated South African mountain tribe -- is about to bear her first child, while her husband, Khama, goes away to work in the white men's mines.  When the tribe's young chief seeks magic from the old medicine man to cure his wife's childlessness, Tselane is chosen to be the victim of the ritual murder necessary to make the magic work.  (211 pages)

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.  After a swine flu pandemic kills most of the world's population, a young woman struggles to survive and help rebuild civilization. (333 pages)

Under the Skin, by Michel Faber
An extraterrestrial is sent to Earth by a rich corporation on her planet to kidnap unwary hitchhikers. She drugs them and delivers them to her compatriots, who mutilate and fatten her victims so that they can be turned into meat, a very expensive delicacy on the aliens' barren homeworld. (311 pages)

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks.  A novel based on the history of the small Derbyshire village of Eyam that, when beset by the plague in 1666, quarantined itself in order to prevent the disease from spreading further.  (304 pages)

Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Icarus

Sandy, your list of choices ............appears to be about macabre stuff,   Whooo! I chose the least of horrors on the list.
You have, as usual, gotten my attention and I have begun to wonder about the tastes with which we are so smitten . 

This is not a criticism. You are my highly respected librarian and I appreciate your efforts and continual contributions.

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Icarus on May 19, 2020, 06:20:32 AM
Sandy, your list of choices ............appears to be about macabre stuff,   Whooo! I chose the least of horrors on the list.
You have, as usual, gotten my attention and I have begun to wonder about the tastes with which we are so smitten . 

This is not a criticism. You are my highly respected librarian and I appreciate your efforts and continual contributions.

Most of the new ones are from the special plague reading month.  Davin suggested they be put on the regular list and, considering how long this current plague is likely to run, I thought it was a good idea.  Some real classics in there.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Sandra Craft

From my Facebook review:

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson.  I have to lead off by admitting that I simply don't like this writer.  I think I may find him even more tedious and irritating than Anne Rice or George R. R. Martin.  But even if not he's right in the top three with them.

The plot itself is an interesting one, and I'm sure everybody knows it -- a plague of some kind has swept over the Earth, turning everyone but one man into things that answer the description of vampires. 

They're not vampires in the strictly traditional sense, but have enough similarities that Robert Neville, the survivor, figures earlier forms of this plague must have caused the vampire legend. 

When he isn't drinking himself into a stupor, Neville spends the 3 years he survives alone reading various medical books and performing experiments with equipment he scrounges from the empty cities around him.  He's looking for a cure, but I'm not sure how he's supposed to be able to do this since nothing in the story establishes him as having any medical knowledge or training, certainly not the kind needed to do this level of research.  In fact, I got the impression he used to be an mechanical engineer.  At least the Will Smith movie, when it strayed from the original story, strayed in the right direction by making Neville a scientist whose specialty was viral research. 

Anyway, eventually Neville comes a cropper, undone by a new species of mutants who, tho blood-drinkers are neither dead nor mindless and want him out of the way because he keeps killing the infected indiscriminately.  Leading Neville, moments before his death, to reflect that he is the original monster of this new society -- that he is the legend.

Like I wrote above, I think the plot is interesting but I have a problem with the execution.  Matheson makes the story go on and on and on, retreading the same ground what feels like a dozen times.

I think I can understand what Matheson was doing -- trying to give the reader a gut-level understanding of the unstructured sameness of Neville's life, its unchanging mix of daily boredom and horror.

Unfortunately, Matheson wasn't a good enough writer to make that work -- a better writer could have easily made this novella half the length and still said everything that needed saying.  I just kept wanting to skip the story entirely, but couldn't because it's this months book club selection. 

There are also a number of other, much shorter stories in this collection, most of which suffered from the same flaws as I Am Legend, but there was one that surprised me by being entirely enjoyable.  It's called The Funeral, and concerns a funeral director with the absurd name of Morton Silkline, and the unexpected new trajectory his professional life is set on when he's visited by a very thin, very pale and sharp-toothed gentleman who wishes to arrange an expensive funeral -- for himself.

It seems Mr. Asper, the new client, was very dissatisfied with the cheap funeral given him years ago by his cheese-paring relatives and has decided to correct that now by giving himself the sort of extravagant send off he always wanted.   

Silkline at first thinks Asper is joking, but soon becomes unhappily convinced he's not and since Asper has ordered the best of everything, money no object, Silkline goes along with it.  The funeral service itself has a few bumps when some of Aspers' unusual friends become rowdy but in all Asper is very pleased with Silkline's services and pays him in full (with some extra for damages) with a big bag of gold coins.

The change in trajectory comes a week later, and I'm just going to quote the end of the story here:

"Morton Silkline looked up as something entered his office. 

He would have chosen to leap back screaming and vanish in the flowered pattern of the wallpaper but he was too petrified. Once more gape-mouthed, he stared at the huge, tentacled, ocher-dripping shapelessness that weaved and swayed before him.

'A friend,' it said politely, 'recommended you to me.'

Silkline sat bug-eyed for a lengthy moment but then his twitching hand accidentally touched the gold again.  And he found strength.

'You've come,' he said, breathing through his mouth, 'to the right place -- uh . . . sir.  Pomps -- '  He swallowed mightily and braced himself, 'for all circumstances.'

He reached for his pen, blowing away the yellow-green smoke which was beginning to obscure the office. 

'Name of deceased?' he asked, businesslike."

If only all the stories had been written that crisply!
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

I finished this last night. It was a short book, but I kept it to ten days because I wanted to use the extra time to play some video games, and because the book is tough to read through.

My synopsis, is that Robert Neville (and you won't forget it because his full name is used a few times on every single page of the book), is apparently a lone survivor of a plague that turns people into vampire/zombies. He spends his days drinking his life away and surviving, until he decides that instead of simply surviving, he wants to find a cure and fix everything. So he goes and gets a bunch of books and his life changes from drinking his life away to drinking and pouring through science books and doing experiments.

Then he finds a dog, rescues it and it dies. Then he sees a woman and proceeds to chase her down, attack her, and drag her back to his place. To be fair though, she wasn't answering his questions as fast as and the way he wanted her to.

Anyway, turns out that the woman was a vampire that was part of a group that developed a pill that kept the vampire germ at bay and stopped them from turning into mindless zombies. Also, it turns out that this group wants to kill both surviving humans who are immune as well as the vampires that are more like mindless zombies. Robert ends up being the last uninfected human and thinks that makes him the monster to these new vampire people who are going around killing anyone not like them. So he kills himself and thinks he's now legend. Makes sense I guess.



I liked a lot in the story, but I didn't like all the redundancy. I suppose it was an attempt to get the reader into the mind and experience of the character, but for me, it brought me out. Robert made hardly any progress at all in any way since the start of the book. I suppose he figured out that it was a germ that caused it and found different ways the germ could spread, but I mean I think anyone could have found all that basic stuff out if they stopped drinking for a few hours and thought about it.

Even though not much had been revealed about the world and the vampire germ and much at all, there were some pretty gaping problems and holes in the plot and story. Getting into them is a bit of a twisting rabbit hole though and I don't think it's that interesting to get into.

This is one of those stories where it's a ride and nothing of meaning happens. I don't have a problem specifically with those kinds of stories, but since I didn't enjoy the ride itself and that's all that really mattered in this book, I did not like it that much.

So the story is alright with some interesting things to think about, but the execution, in my opinion, did not work for me. I agree with Sandra that the same story could have been done better in a shorter book.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

xSilverPhinx

Hmm...guess I'll scratch that off my to-read list. :chin:
I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


Sandra Craft

Quote from: xSilverPhinx on June 20, 2020, 01:17:53 AM
Hmm...guess I'll scratch that off my to-read list. :chin:

It might be worth reading just because it's considered a classic of its kind.  Personally, I've never thought Matheson much of a writer, even as a hack writer, but he has turned out some good short stories.  Tom62 mentioned "Nightmare at 20,000 feet" as one he likes, and I'll be hunting that up.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Davin on June 19, 2020, 05:53:51 PM
I liked a lot in the story, but I didn't like all the redundancy.

I'm not sure that, even without the redundancy, I'd have liked this story much.  Something about Matheson as a writer just rubs me the wrong way, and I'm not sure it isn't just one of those personal things.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Davin

Quote from: Sandra Craft on June 20, 2020, 02:45:05 AM
Quote from: Davin on June 19, 2020, 05:53:51 PM
I liked a lot in the story, but I didn't like all the redundancy.

I'm not sure that, even without the redundancy, I'd have liked this story much.  Something about Matheson as a writer just rubs me the wrong way, and I'm not sure it isn't just one of those personal things.
I didn't remember reading another Matheson book. I looked through my book list just to make sure and found that I read What Dreams May Come. I liked the movie. In this case, I think the movie was a million times better than the book. I suppose that's how I feel about all of Matheson's books that were turned into movies. No matter how bad the movies are.

There is a move called "I am Omega" starring Mark Dascascos, an actor I like from my taste for good bad movies. If you thought what was missing from the story was a main character using sweet martial arts moves to kick the shit out of the vampire/zombies, then this movie is for you. Also, it's better than the book.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

Sandra Craft

Quote from: Davin on June 22, 2020, 04:10:10 PM
There is a move called "I am Omega" starring Mark Dascascos, an actor I like from my taste for good bad movies. If you thought what was missing from the story was a main character using sweet martial arts moves to kick the shit out of the vampire/zombies, then this movie is for you. Also, it's better than the book.

:rofl:  I think what I need most from the book is for someone other than Matheson to have written it!
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany