Review: The Metrognome & Other Stories / Impact-20

The Metrognome & Other Stories by Alan Dean Foster
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The short story is flexible. You don't have to keep a plot aloft for long, so you can float some pretty thin ideas and see if they survive. Yet their brevity means that every word counts. That is, unless you're selling material to a sci-fi magazine, and you've got to stretch that idea over four thousand words... or maybe they pay by the word, and since you know some sneering editor is going to chop it down anyway, why not linger on your description of your gnome's beard and suspenders, and let him ramble awhile in his tough New Yorker dialect?

I suspect Alan Dean Foster may be a write-to-contract kind of guy. His Hollywood novelization credits are impressive to say the least - Star Wars (both A New Hope and Force Awakens), Star Trek (countless), Alien (one thru four), Terminator, etc. etc. - so I have no doubt he is a master of his craft, but these stories read flabby. I always imagined that any story published has survived the author's own vicious cull, and sits atop a pile of rejected ideas and aborted drafts. Now, I fear that in some cases, pretty much anything that's done may make the cut.

Impact-20 by William F. Nolan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Impact-20, on the other hand, is exactly what I would hope for from a sci-fi short story collection. Nolan puts on all sorts of different and entertaining voices, exploring fearlessly and in every direction, and the stories jump from horror to mystery to space to suburban mania. Above all, the stories are only as long as the plot demands - when there is an interesting concept to explore, Nolan explores it, but he never lets an idea get stale on the page. (The only thing I skipped was Ray Bradbury's introduction.) The writing is fresh, funny, and often absurd. Good stuff.

Review: The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is truly disgusting. I understand that work on a whaling ship was not clean or appetizing or lemon-scented. I also understand that by means of the revolting passages we are reminded that life on an 18th century Arctic whaler was about as far from the luxuries of civilization as one could get. (Unless, of course, something were to happen to one's ship...)
That being said, some passages were so riotously revolting that I couldn't take it seriously. It's the grossest book I've ever read, and it was an act of titanic restraint not to read aloud while my friends were eating.

On thirst:

"The deep cavity that remains [in the dead bear] is half-filled with a steaming pool of hot black liquid--blood, urine, bile. Sumner leans forward and starts to drink it, ladling it up quickly into his open mouth with both hands."

On incontinence:

"He stops, groans, then leans over and vomits out gobbets of half-digested seal meat onto the frozen snow beneath. He feels a sharp pain like a lance jabbing in his stomach and releases and involuntary squirt of shit into his trousers. [...] The sweat is frozen on his brow, and his beard is hard now with saliva and bile and fragments of tooth-ground meat."

On scavenging the blubber from a decomposing, bloated whale corpse:

"The blocks of blubber they slice and peel away are miscolored and gelatinous--much more brown than pink. Swung up onto the deck, they drip not blood, as usual, but some foul straw-colored coagulation like the unspeakable rectal oozings of a human corpse."

All that being said, there's a ripping yarn in here too. McGuire does an amazing job of bringing this salty, frigid world vividly to life. The elemental forces lend it an air of fable, as dark forces play out on these poor saps. If you can swallow these passages, there isn't much worse in there--and there's a whole lot better. Best read on an empty stomach!

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Review: American Tabloid

American Tabloid by James Ellroy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's terrifically brutal, bloody, and hard as nails. It's only after you've adjusted to the savagery on every page that you begin to see how brilliantly Ellroy creates - and destroys - his characters. There's Big Pete Bondurant, the goon who's losing his interest in mayhem. Cool, calm Kemper Boyd, the spy whose lust for penthouse suites is only outstripped by the tower of lies he's building. And Ward J. Littell, the rabid anti-Mob investigator with no brakes attached. They're all despicable, and yet at the same time I had to know where they'd end up.
As with any book about the web between the Mob, the CIA, the FBI, the invasion of Cuba, Howard Hughes, the Kennedys and JFK's assassination... it's dense. There are a zillion players, lies, conspiracies, and coverups, each one slimier than the last. For all it's complications, everything can be traced back to motive, demand, need. If you've ever finished a hard-boiled mystery and thought, "Geez, I wish that was more violent, cynical, complicated, action packed and political!" then this is the book for you.


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