Cat O'Nine Tales

I'm a little late getting this post up; I actually completed the last short story in Jeffrey Archer's Cat O'Nine Tales: And Other Stories back on Saturday.  But I've been very busy working around the house as well as working on transitioning to my next phase of life after retirement from the US Air Force.  Not as much time on the weekends as I hope for, but then there never has been.

I won't go into details of the stories in this collection because I've blurbed about them as I've completed them.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I like to read one short story between each novel.  This particular collection is by Jeffrey Archer, an author that is almost always a big hit for me and only occasionally misses, although it seems like his later works are suffering somewhat.  He is an interesting character in his own right, having been elected to English Parliament at the young age of 29.  He lost his first fortune as a victim of a fradulent investment scheme, and for a time was the owner of an art gallery.  In 1999 he ran for mayor of London but ultimately withdrew when it came to light that he was facing a charge of perjury from a case in 1987.  He was sentenced to four years in prison and it was from this time that he developed this book of short stories.  All of the stories pertain to real people who got into trouble with the law (or managed to avoid it) in one form or another.  Nine of the twelve stories were actually told to him by fellow prisoners while he was incarcerated and although Mr Archer clearly states that he embellished most of them somewhat, they are substantially true circumstances.

Mr Archer can flat-out tell a story.  He obviously uses events in his own rather colorful life to come up with ideas; he has written many stories concerning political intrigue, art collecting, etc.  A major theme of his, captured best in one of my favorite novels by any author, Kane and Able, deals with two people growing up in opposite worlds (rich-poor, famous-forgotten, etc) and how they come to interact.  Many times it's about how ordinary people rise to extraordinary positions, many times only to fall again.  Very often, his characters build elaborate schemes to foil the authorities.  It's fascinating to me to read stories written by Mr Archer even before the very same thing happened to him.  While he may haven fallen from grace in political circles, he continues to write extraordinary fiction, and always in a pleasant story-telling manner.  He is one of the few authors I've read who can consistently pull off a twist ending without making the reader feel like a fool.  I highly recommend you try his novels, especially Kane and Able, The President's Daughter, and As the Crow Flies.  And, of course, any of his short story collections are wonderful.

Nine Stories

J.D. Salinger's most famous work, undoubtedly is Catcher in the Rye.  I finally got around to reading that book, often considered among the very best of American literature, last year because, once again, my son had to read it for his high school AP literature course.  His class followed that up with a section on the short story form and used this book, Nine Stories, also by J.D Salinger, as one of their source texts.  So...in my usual fashion, I never like to have a book on my shelf that I haven't read so I decided to give these stories a try, reading them over the past couple of months.

I will say that I more or less "studied" The Catcher in the Rye as I read it, much like a student of literature would and my general feelings about it are not generally as good as most people's are.  It's not that it was a bad book and I can certainly appreciate Mr Salinger's writing skills.  It's just that I wasn't completely blown away.  Perhaps my expectations were too high going in.  So now when I approached this collection of nine short stories, I purposely set no expectations.  That wasn't difficult since I had never heard of this collection but nevertheless, I wanted to just read them as I would any other short story collection and try to enjoy each on it's own merit.

Overall, as in every other collection out there, I enjoyed some more than others.  Many are involved with the war, with soldiers who have recently returned and are trying to cope with what they saw.  Some have humerous aspects while some have downright horrific aspects.  Almost all of them had me scratching my head at some point and asking myself, "Where is he going with this?"  Ocassionally I was satisfied with the ending but more often than not the ending seemed to leave me hanging or send me scrambling back to the last page to see if I had inadvertantly skipped it.  Once again I appreciated his writing ability; he has a definite knack for letting you see a whole character with few words.  Somehow we understand a lot more about them than what is described for us.  I can see why a teacher would use this book as a tool for studying the short story form.  But having said that, I was reading for enjoyment, for entertainment, and while it was OK for that, I find myself preferring more plot-oriented stories.  The closest one of the bunch to that was the very last one, "Teddy" which was a very intriguing look at the nature of a young boy with an incredibly wise outlook on life and an eerily accurate ability to predict his own demise.

So if you like Salinger or classic short stories I would give this one a try but if you like a straight-forward beginning, middle, and end structural story you may want to skip these.

Skeleton Crew

Over the weekend I jumped the gun and decided to read the last short story of Stephen King's collection, Skeleton Crew. Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually read one short story between each of my other books but this time I made an exception.

Since I've already blurbed about each of the stories as I read them, and tucked those blurbs in at the end of the other blog entries, I won't go into much detail about the stories themselves. I will mention that the last story in the collection, The Reach, was absolutely fantastic and an excellent choice to round out the collection. It is about an old woman who has lived on a small island off the coast of Maine. She has never crossed over the reach to set foot on the mainland because she never saw a need to do so. She is plagued by what she is sure is stomach cancer though that hasn't been diagnosed and so she knows her time has come. The story becomes almost poetic as she takes a walk and meets aspiritions of several of her relatives and friends, including her husband, that have already passed on. Life is good after death, she learns, so what could have been a very horrifying story becomes a comforting tale. The prose is beautifully written as she accepts what is happening to her and she crosses a different "reach" and dies. I understand Stephen King himself once said during a Today show interview that The Reach would be the story he would like most to be remembered for because it is "The Maine he grew up in and the people he knows." Truly a different sort of story that has elements of horror but nonetheless leaves the reader with a warm feeling at the end.

The overall collection is simply superb. This is the 40th Stephen King book I've read and I still want more. In this collection we get to see King at his eerie best with such stories as The Monkey, Word Processor of the Gods, Gramma, and The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet. Hard core horror shines through in Survivor Type, Cain Rose Up, and of course we get the masterpiece novella, The Mist included in this overall collection as well. These stories demonstrate King's vast talent for story telling, not just delivering bloody, evil horror but also showing us real characters. I love the way that King can get into the characters so well that I recognize people from my own life who are exactly like that.

Almost all of these stories first appeared elsewhere, having been published in one magazine or another and many of them at a time in King's early career when he really needed a paycheck. Perhaps desperation produces truly quality output because there are lots of gems in this collection. Some of King's later works, after his rise to literary stardom, are not nearly so cutting edge and frequently are in need of more editing. But even in those cases, I enjoy reading it because it just hits home so well.

I think my next short story collection will be another section in Harlan Ellison's Essential Ellison. I've read a few sections already but I like to spread it out so I should be able to get in this next one during this year.

The Mist

As promised, I am making a seperate blog entry for The Mist by Stephen King. This is the first "short story" in his Skeleton Crew collection. It runs about 150 pages or so, making it a novella by definition. And of course there has been a movie adaptation recently released thus sparking a seperate publication of this story in a stand-alone book. I haven't seen the movie but may rent it now that I've read the story.

This story was among the best I've read by Stephen King (and I've read a lot of his work). Many people have said that Mr King occasionally runs long in his descriptions and can sometimes use a good editor. I don't always agree because I just love the way he writes so much that it's hard to get too much of it. Nevertheless, this story is quite the opposite. Some might think that it is simply an extended version of a short story, that he has done it again by padding the actual story to make it longer. I think just the opposite is the case...it is a very tightly woven story, if anything, a novel condensed down to the bare essentials. The characterization is superb; we get to know and understand the main characters in a remarkably short time. The actual time line of the story takes place over just a few days and we live every moment with them. The structure is a rather basic "bunch of people trapped in a single location with the horror element just waiting for them to come out." But the way in which he builds the horror is pure vintage King. Never too many details to bring the horror into focus and thus diminish the impact but rather crafting the unknown in such a way that the character's imaginations fill in the details and increase the horror that much further. I've never been one to love blatent splatter horror at the expense of true suspenseful horror and King does not disappoint. In fact there is no big discovery of just what the horror in the mist really is nor where it came from. Although we do get just enough of the "tentacle", "leathery wings", "horrid smell" stuff to put us in the proper mood.

My only disappointment comes with the brief sex scene in the middle. At the beginning of the story the protagonist is deeply in love with his wife and yet only 36 hours later, not knowing if she is still alive or not, he and another trapped victim have sexual intercourse. I think the point was that they both "needed something" at that point and the future looked bleak but I found it a bit of a stretch.

All in all a great start to this short story collection and I can't wait to get to more between my other novel reading. And speaking of that I've begun Dave Duncan's fantasy novel Paragon Lost, another in his "King's Blades" series.

More Twisted

I've broken one of my own rules today. Normally I read a short story after every full length book I read. Followers of this blog may remember that I used to never really like short stories. They always seemed...well... short. I like to get into my reading and not have it end 5-10 minutes after the story starts. But since I hadn't read too much short fiction I decided I wasn't being fair so I set up the 'one short story for every regular book' rule. And it's worked. I now have a deep appreciation for a well-tuned short story. I sometimes wonder if I should do the same thing for poetry because I really don't care for that either.

So what happened for me to break my own rule you ask? Well, next week is Spring Break week around here and so my family and I will be embarking on a rather long road trip to the NW where my son plans to visit potential college campuses. (If anybody has opinions, feel free to share them with me). Consequently, I didn't want to begin another book just a couple of days before the trip commences. And since I had only two short stories left in the More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II by Jeffrey Deaver I decided to wrap up that volume. So there you have it, a one time only stretching of the rules.

The last two stories in the collection were good ones. "Ninety-eight Point Six" was a more typical twisted story. I knew right from the beginning who the twist would revolve around (the one that seemed the most innocent). However, the how of it was a nice surprise. The final entry in the collection, "A Nice Place to Visit" was a bit of a departure from the other stories. It was much darker and more brutal than the other stories. Perhaps that is why this was selected for the final piece of the book. The twists kept coming in this one, almost too many because it became a bit difficult to follow. I did enjoy it though and was very happy with the conclusion.

So overall the second half of the book really saved this collection. At this point I would definitely read more of Mr Deaver's short stories. I'm not so sure about his longer works with his signature character Lincoln Rhymes. It's not because I don't think I would enjoy them but rather because I already have a lot of authors in the thriller genre with on-going series...I can't keep up as it is. But who knows? I've been known to impulse buy occasionally. Just yesterday, in fact, I was at the library to return my audio book and I purchased two more Louis L'Amour books from the library's fund-raising store. Can't ever have too many of those. The price was right but that means two more books on my to-be-read list. I am "down" to only 305 books now that I own but haven't read. Sigh...

I'm not yet sure which collection of short stories I will pick up next. I have a classic Stephen King that I'm considering or I may choose a collection of Aboriginal legends and myths that I picked up in Australia years ago. Also there is a similar collection of Native American legends I could choose...or...well, we'll see. And of course I get to pick what to take with me on the trip that starts Friday. The only one I know for sure will be Wilbur Smith's The Seventh Scroll, a sequel to River God that I raved about at the beginning of the year. Picking them out is half the fun!

See you when I return from the trip and start blogging about all I've read.

Short Stories

Every time I finish reading a novel I will read a short story. I began this process about 8 years ago because I found myself never reading any short stories at all. It's not that I mind reading them but I dislike reading many short stories in a row. So...in order to actually read some, particularly those collections that I already had sitting on my shelf, I started this process. Right now I am reading Jeffery Deaver's More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II. I picked up this volume during my family's Alaskan Cruise this past year. We had on-board coupons to use for merchandise and I used most of mine to pick out a few books from their very limited supply. I've wanted to try Jeffery Deaver for quite some time but have been so focused on whittling down my large "to-be-read" pile that I just haven't acquired any of his works.

The cover marketing on this book emphasizes the twists that Mr Deaver is famous for. That may be true but so far (I've finished 3 stories to this point) they have been a bit more predicatable than I was expecting. I enjoyed the second story, "The Commuter" quite a bit, releashing the protagonist's falling victim to his own arrogance. But I could see that coming from the beginning. The "twist" was more about how it would happen than the fact that it did happen. I think I was expecting a bit more Jeffery Archer style stories perhaps. The third story, "The Westphalian Ring" was a pretty good read but (**SPOILER ALERT**) I disliked the way Sherlock Holmes was presented at the end. Yes, I also get perturbed from time to time when Sherlock picks out all of the clues by cursory examination and concludes "facts" that could have led him in an altogether different direction. I think Deaver is making fun of this here but somehow it violates a cardinal rule of published fiction: Don't mess with other author's characters by making them look stupid, particularly such well-loved classic characters as Sherlock Holmes.

Right now it's on to the the third "Repairman Jack" novel, Conspiracies. So far it's great!