Books: Wicked Stepmother by Axel Young (1983)

“Seducing a proper Bostonian was easy. Making him die of a heart attack a week after the wedding was hardly any trouble at all. Now she has money, social status, everything she has cunningly schemed to get since she was a poor little girl. Everything except the Brookline mansion and the multi-million dollar trust fund left to the three children. But what wicked stepmother couldn't get rid of three children? Jonathan, too smart for his own good and suspicious about his father's death, has to be the first to go. Then there's pretty, spoiled Verity, hooked on cocaine and perpetually drunk - who'd ask any questions if she died suddenly? And clever Cassandra, just out of college and beginning a career as a literary editor, will simply have to get over being dead.” 

Much of Wicked Stepmother plays out like parody of early trashy Jackie Collins tales of the uber rich and their personal problems about how they can stay rich and what they’re willing to do make sure the money never dries up. Written by Michael McDowell in collaboration with Dennis Schuetz, it’s lacks the depth and breadth of Blood Rubies, but I think that’s the point. It’s supposed to by campy fun and neither writer disappoints. It’s a fast paced thriller, populated with characters that you either love, or love to hate. It has sex, drugs and rock and roll. It has money, power and real estate. It’s like Dynasty only classier. 

It does come up short of being perfect, and everyone seems a bit blissfully ignorant about what is going on here, and then there’s a 20 bedroom house of unbelievable coincidence that begins to pile, which no one seems to gleam onto (the deaths don’t seem to pique the interests of the police), but the wry humor and social satire is makes up for some of it. But the naivety of the siblings is pretty staggering.

 

Books: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023)

“The Barnes family are in trouble. Until recently, they ran the biggest business in town, now they’re teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – and that’s just the start of their problems. Dickie and Imelda’s marriage is hanging by a thread; straight-A student Cass is careening off the rails; PJ is hopelessly in debt to the school bully. Meanwhile the ghosts of old mistakes are rising out of the past to meet them, but everyone’s too wrapped up in the present to see the danger looming.”

 

While I do enjoy books about dysfunctional families, and sometimes-sad ones at that, but when I’m committing myself to a long book (which I’m increasingly divesting from as I grow older), I’m also looking for a bit of happiness within this 650 page tale. It’s there, but it comes more reflectively from each of the characters past. And in the present, set around the global 2008 recession, future happiness seems not be forthcoming in anyone’s life.

 

All of Barnes family has some issues and all seem impossible to fix. Still, they’re all identifiable problems. We have Dickie’s hidden past that rather explains his current problems (and despite his sort unlikableness, he is, for me, gets more interesting as the book progresses). His wife Imelda, who was expected to marry Dickie’s younger (and more popular) brother Frank until his tragic death, who then deals with her marriage with Dickie by shopping (and who has a sort of puppy-love for Maurice, the boys very successful father who upped and moved to Portugal).  Cass, the straight A student who wants to escape her dull small town life for Dublin with her friend Elaine (who she might have a crush on), and PJ the preteen schoolboy who is a slave of his mobile phone and playing games, and who seems a bit lost.

 

A few things in this overlong book bother me, mostly in the way Cass treats her parents. While both Cass and PJ are millennials, and both Dickie and Imelda seem to be not fully invested in their kids, but I’ve grown weary of the smart-mouth kids. It’s funny on TV and movies, and I guess, this novel, but It makes me glad I never had kids (my own mother might disagree with the fact that all my siblings and I waited until we were grown adults to take my Mom to task).

 

In the end, while I had some tribulations of whether to finish this brick of novel (it sometimes went on and on and on), but I was curious how this would all end. Good or bad, though, writer Paul Murray keeps the ending ambiguous. 

Books: Blood Rubies by Axel Young (1982)

"It would bring bad luck, they said. But she split her pair of ruby earrings and gave one to each of her beautiful twin babies. Within hours she was burned to death in a fire. The twins lived. Katherine is raised by a poor, childless couple. Katherine was shy and withdrawn, except in her love for the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. It’s there she finds respite from her parents arguing, their disdain, their often black heartedness of their adopted daughter. So in her heart, Katherine had found God. In her father’s heart, they found a butcher knife. Meanwhile, Andrea grew up with all that money could buy. She was pretty and popular and went to the best schools. Her parents loved her dearly, and gladly did anything to please her. But what made Andrea happy would make them dead. In the dark of sleep, Katherine and Andrea had terrible dreams of being the other. Until the hand of evil that guided their waking lives brought them face to face with each other... and the crossed fate of horror awaiting them both." 

Blood Rubies is less a horror tale and more a psychological thriller, a melodrama that resembles the late 70s or early 80s TV miniseries that would’ve probably starred some daytime soap actress in a dual role, making her prime time debut. I also read somewhere that this book (and 1983’s Wicked Stepmother) by Axel Young –who were, of course, Michael McDowell and Dennis Schuetz- was parodying the trashy novels of Sidney Sheldon others of who wrote tales of this ilk during that period. McDowell considered him to be a commercial writer, focusing on making the impossible feel inevitable. He believed in creating accessible, fast-paced narratives designed to be bought, read, and enjoyed immediately rather than writing for the ages, often blending intense gore with mundane, with atmospheric Southern life. I think it’s unfair description (but artists never see their true geniuses), because yes, he was prolific, but everything he did was pretty original and often a bit ballsy. 

So Blood Rubies is a fun book, dark and unpredictable. It does have what I found consistent in his works, a lot of pious, delusional, and short-tempered women and men, as well.

While the writers create what seemly rings true (I’m a lapsed Catholic, most of the rituals have been purged away) Katherine’s involvement with becoming a nun gets a bit much, lots of details about getting into a nunnery and it drags for a while. But what works is both authors get inside Katherine’s head and highlights her disconnect from her desire to be a nun and things she must do to get away from her parents at any cost. 

In the second half we have the other twin, one Andrea LoPonti and her well-to-do family. They too are devoutly Catholic but there the similarity ends. As Andrea grows up and moves into her college years, we get a look at the dark underbelly of suburban life near the city of Boston. Here the authors give us a harsh look into the 1970s singles’ bar scene before the onslaught of AIDS. Andrea and her BFF Marsha take a deep dive into both casual sex and drugs with little or no remorse. It’s their goal to worldly, and that means doing dangerous things through the city of Boston, as well as Europe. But things go awry when Andrea becomes involved with the leather-clad bad-boy Jack, and all too soon, she becomes worldly in ways that sets up a tragic and (rather) abrupt ending for her and Katherine. 

In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of my coming of age in the late 70s and early 80s, when my fascination with books took hold. Where I started with novels like Flowers in the Attic and segued into other horror novels like the works of Stephen King and John Saul. I probably read them way to early, but those books, and this book, set me on the course I am today. There is so much out there, you know? 

And it kills me knowing I’ll never get to everything.

Books: The Day of the Jackal By Frederick Forsyth (1971)

“The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man. One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.” 

While the book follows a fictional assassin hired to kill President Charles de Gaulle, it looks inspired by multiple attempts  on de Gaulle’s life. As portrayed in the book, the would-be killers are from the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète (OAS), a far-right paramilitary group determined to prevent Algeria from gaining independence from France. The OAS was no harmless group of disgruntled citizens. Many were battle-hardened former French military officers who had fought in the Algerian War. For them, Algeria wasn’t just another piece of French real estate. It was a part of France itself. Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, is mentioned in the opening pages of the book, was a real person, a French Air Force lieutenant colonel and avid supporter of the OAS, who led one of the plots. The plan was simple. Ambush de Gaulle’s car on a quiet suburban road outside Paris and kill him in a hail of bullets. While De Gaulle survived the attack, Bastien-Thiry was  arrested, tried, and executed for his attempt on the president’s life. In fact, he was the last person to face a firing squad in France for a political crime. So Forsyth’s fictional tale, he seemly drew heavily on the real-life motivations of the OAS and the real history of the time period (I could also not fail to recognize other aspect is the book: it’s set between the fall of 1962 into 1963 and one can’t also draw parallels the Kennedy assassination in November of 1963). 

It’s a well researched novel, I’ll give Forsyth that. It’s basically a historical novel that uses real people and incidents and wraps a police procedural around it. The first half is extremely detailed on how our unnamed assassin sets his plan. At times, it gets bogged down in too much detail, but this is a book released fifty years ago when attentions spans were longer. Today, a novel like this would’ve trimmed a good deal to make the pacing faster, even though then, as today, we all know how the book will end (see more below). It’s a technically and proficient tale, despite some gaps in logic – mostly being that out all the intelligence this man has, his ability to change course when needed, he failed to understand that human error. One thing he discounted was the one thing that got all the worlds police involved in finding him.

To note, the book has interesting origins. Forsyth wrote it in less than six weeks –the first two months of 1970- but had difficulty getting anyone to accept his unsolicited novel. Four publishing houses rejected it between February and September because their editors believed a fictional account of the OAS hiring a British assassin in 1963 to kill Charles de Gaulle would not be commercially successful, given the fact that he had never been shot and, when the book was written, de Gaulle was in fact still alive and retired from public life (de Gaulle would die in November of 1970). A small print run was finally ordered and the book was released in June 1971. Though never formally reviewed, the book found it success through word of mouth and this got the interest of the American publisher Viking, who released the book in late summer 1971. A film version followed in 1973 to great success. A reimaged modern version of the book was adapted for TV via British Sky TV and the American streamer Peacock. Its first 10-episode season was released in 2024. A second season is tentative for late 2026 release.

Books: Meanwhile, Back at the Front by Gene L. Coon (1961)

“Men are essential to fighting wars and the Marine Corps has thouhjfully gathered 24,000 of them in a limited area in Korea. Ben Hedges is the head of the Public Information Office, hosting journalists covering the war. They prefer to do it in the company of many, along with many bottles of booze. Meanwhile, one of Hedges's staff, Sgt. Riley, has had inspiration of his own: because there are 24,000 Marines in Korea, whom are always on the move - so what they need most of all is a mobile whorehouse.” 

Long before Richard Hooker wrote MASH, his seminal 1968 novel about the Korean War, writer Gene L. Coon gave us Meanwhile, Back at the Front, a sort of semi-autobiographical tale of his time reporting during the Korean War (he would write one more novel set in Korea, The Short End of the Stick, released in 1964. It became one of the earliest publications to discuss the drug problems of the bored occupation troops and how commanders dealt with them). 

The book really is well written (a talent Coon would foray into a TV writing career after the war, see below) and sometimes very funny. However, there’s a reason this book has been out of print for decades, as it has no universal appeal. War novels have their fans, but tales set around WWII with some sort of hook that will get a young reader today to sit and read will be out shined by this book. And maybe there are other reasons, as well, why Hollywood has all but ignored this time period, (with the exception of MASH) if only because it was seen less a heroic, end of the world conflict and more an ideological battle led by politicians. As well, there is a lot of misogyny and blatant, in your face racism that the MASH TV series never covered. 

As a writer for TV, though, is where he'll be more remembered. By 1956, Coon became involved in scripting teleplays for popular Western and action television shows of the era, including Dragnet (1951), Wagon Train (1957), Maverick (1957), The Wild Wild West (1966) and Bonanza (1959). At Universal in the early 1960s, he turned McHale's Navy (1962) from a one-hour drama into a successful 30-minute sitcom. Together with the writer Les Colodny, Coon floated the idea for The Munsters (1964), as a satirical take on The Donna Reed Show (1958). Coon was also known as one of the fastest writers in Hollywood at the time, often rewriting a script for shooting overnight or over a weekend. 

This speed and dry sense of humor may have helped him get his job working on Star Trek. Brought in around the middle of season one, when Gene Roddenberry was facing exhaustion and the NBC censors, Coon became instrumental in bringing humor to the show, as he’s credited for seeing the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate thus creating the “bickersonesque" disagreements between Spock and McCoy than fans grew to love, as well some the most signature aspects of Star Trek: the United Federation of Planets, Starfleet Command, Photon Torpedoes, Khan Noonien Singh, Zefarm Cochrane and the Klingons. Sadly, much of it, if not all of it, is credited to Roddenberry himself. While personal issues with Roddenberry forced him to leave midway through season two, he did contribute four scripts for the third season under the pseudonym of Lee Cronin, as he was by then under contract to Universal Studios (where he mentored the prolific Glen A. Larson).

Books: When We Were Real By Daryl Gregory (2025)

“JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for one last a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier—right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach. Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each of them on the tour for their own reasons. There’s a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of horny octogenarians living each day like it’s their last, and a professor on the run from leather-clad sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last—a Tunnel outside of time, a zero gravity Geyser, the compound of motivational-speaking avatar—with everyone barreling toward the tour’s iconic final stop Ghost City, where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await.” 

As I’ve read the books of Daryl Gregory, you can’t escape the notion that he has one of the most incredible imagination \s you’ll find in speculative fiction. This enables him to write deftly in many different genres, which now includes this confusing, yet quirky, weird, and funny book When We Were Real. 

The idea we live in a simulation is not new (it reminded me Deep Thought from Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), but here is becomes the starting off point to this novel. Here it's been revealed that our world is a simulation, and people have had seven years to adjust to that fact. To prove it, the Simulators (who or whatever they are) have populated the world with a variety of 'Impossibles', objects which defy all normal laws of physics, such as The Frozen Tornado, the Zipper, the Hollow Flock, the Geysers of Mystery, Ghost City. 

Most of the book plays out like your basic road trip story, a trope used in almost every piece genre out there. Once you get through the first chapter—where majority of the characters were introduced all at once- the book settles down and each main character (who are assigned a label, i.e. THE INFLUENCER, THE REALISTS, and THE REALISTS SON) and some of the other characters throughout the book, gets a nicely developed.

It’s a bit overlong (mostly because it’s long list of characters), but Gregory does give the reader something to ponder about philosophical views on life and death. It’s also full of Gregory’s brand of wittiness (for some reason I found his comment on a women’s period, something akin to a “40-year home loan”, laugh out loud funny). Still, like his other books, beyond the sometimes biting humor, jokes, and silliness, there are a lot of emotional elements as well.