11 March 2024

Books: A Graveyard for Lunatics By Ray Bradbury (1990)

“Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery—and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.”

As with Death is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics is the second of three noir mystery tales Ray Bradbury wrote that sort of features a fictionalized version of the author himself as the unnamed narrator. The novel is set in 1954, when the narrator is a writer working at a Hollywood motion picture studio. The setting and themes of the novel are inspired by Bradbury's experiences working on several films during this period, including It Came from Outer Space, King of Kings, and even Something Wicked This Way Comes. The fictional Maximus Pictures shares a back wall with an adjoining cemetery, as Paramount Studios really does with Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and most of the story takes place in those two locations. Two of the novel's characters, stop motion animator Roy Holdstrom and autocratic director Fritz Wong, were based on Bradbury's friends Ray Harryhausen and Fritz Lang/James Wong Howe. Another character, the shy, blond-haired autograph collector Clarence, may be an alternate autobiographical portrait of Bradbury, who as a teenager waited outside Hollywood studios for glimpses of movie stars.

It’s a weird book, more so than previous one. Its plot slowly unwinds and only really gets interesting (and noir-like) during the last third of the book. But Bradbury writes with more enthusiasm and love for Old Hollywood than most writers of his time or those writing today. His prose, his innate ability to craft metaphors and similes, remains his true gift to us readers. He remains forever one of the more odder writers of Dark Fantasy – with a mind that forever remembers his youth, and who ventured from his home in Waukegan, Illinois, on the windy shores of Lake Michigan, and came to Hollywood to show them his talent.

03 March 2024

Books: Death is a Lonely Business By Ray Bradbury (1985)

I’m back after nearly a month of being sick and not wanting to do anything but watch TV and cough like an old engine trying to pretend they’ve not thrown a piston.

“Toiling away amid the looming palm trees and decaying bungalows, a struggling young writer (who bears a resemblance to the author) spins fantastic stories from his fertile imagination upon his clacking typewriter. Trying not to miss his girlfriend (away studying in Mexico), the nameless writer steadily crafts his literary effort--until strange things begin happening around him. Starting with a series of peculiar phone calls, the writer then finds clumps of seaweed on his doorstep. But as the incidents escalate, his friends fall victim to a series of mysterious "accidents"--some of them fatal. Aided by Elmo Crumley, a savvy, street-smart detective, and a reclusive actress of yesteryear with an intense hunger for life, the wordsmith sets out to find the connection between the bizarre events, and in doing so, uncovers the truth about his own creative abilities.”

Like authors who would come after him, authors who were influenced by him, Ray Bradbury’s Death is a Lonely Business –his contribution to the noir genre- is a tale of remembrance of an earlier life, when things were horrible yet hopeful. Set in and around 1949 Venice California, our unnamed hero is an overweight, clumsy, near sighted writer who bears a great resemblance to the writer himself (there are frequent allusions to stories he has published).  

The book is filled colorful characters –some, at times, bordering on the preposterous- but the enjoyment of Bradbury comes from the surreal, like the city of Venice sitting between two worlds, one of reality where the city of Los Angeles Parks and Recreation obvious distaste for Venice's honky-tonk atmosphere and wanted the area dismantled, and one where the old Pier and surrounding canals held dark, fantastical secrets. You also get a sense that Bradbury found the weirdness of the people more interesting -they are loved by him because they are themselves. So the old, the discarded, the friendless seem more enduring to him (again something like writers Peter Straub and Stephen King picked up on).

It is a little too slow getting started, but it remains classic Bradbury, even if it was written much later in his life. It’s still a great tale from a master wordsmith.

04 February 2024

Books: Childhood's End By Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

 

“The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city—intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands: unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. With little rebellion, humankind agreed, and a golden age began. But at what cost? With the advent of peace, man ceases to strive for creative greatness, and a malaise settles over the human race. To those who resist, it becomes evident that the Overlords have an agenda of their own. As civilization approaches the crossroads, will the Overlords spell the end for humankind . . . or the beginning?”

I made a few attempts over the decades to read this book –but it’s probably close to 30 + years since my last attempt.

The themes of a peaceful alien invasion of Earth by these mysterious Overlords, is an interesting take on the genre, and while their arrival begins decades of apparent utopia, under the indirect alien rule, the cost of it is our human identity and culture. I can see why a lot of science fiction shows –like Star Trek- lifted some ideas Clarke came up with, even while he would further use this novels subject of transcendent evolution in his later work, in particular 2001: A Space Odyssey and their sequels.

It also goes against every other sci-fi novel of the era, where humans are forbidden to leave Earth because the there is really nothing there for them – but death, I guess. But there seems to be a lot of symbolism here, both philosophical and religious –not sure I clearly got them. Also, while dubbed the Overlords, the aliens see themselves more as Guardians of Earth, which should’ve been the first clue as to where the tale was going.

I was further intrigued by the utopian ideals postulated here, where robotics and computers are advanced to the point that humans are only need to work about twenty hours a week. This enabled people to continue their education (sometimes going back several times just to learn something new),  develop new hobbies and skills, if only because ”The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.”

Now that I could get into. Like a lot of hard sci-fi of the era, it’s a bit dry, but I found I enjoyed the novel, even if Clarke’s vision of mid-twenty-first century America sort of resembled 1950s America.

29 January 2024

Books: Backtrack By Joseph Hansen (1982)

"Did handsome, charming Eric Tarr, small-time actor, really kill himself? He left behind a lot of wreckage broken promises, broken hearts, broken lives. Backtracking through his father's past, young Alan, another of the betrayed, begins to see how many men and women might have been bitter enough to murder Eric Tarr. By the time Alan learns the truth, it becomes his own personal tragedy and, both legs in casts, he waits helpless in a storm-shaken deserted house on the beach for his father's killer to find and kill him too.”

While published in 1982, Backtrack feels like more like a tale set in the 1950s, with reminders of Hansen’s scathing look at Hollywood, Los Angeles, and gay life. Like his Dave Brandsetter tales, young Alan Tarr is smarter than everyone else when he decides to venture to Los Angeles for his father’s funeral –a father that left him and his mother at 6 months and never returned. It’s a nebulous reason, but for Alan, he needs to find some tangible reason to get there. But Alan arrives to late (a misadventure involving hitchhiking -a very 60’s and 70s thing- and a boy-ish looking girl named Gus prevents it. But soon, after talking to a few people, including the cops, Alan becomes convinced his father’s death was more than it seemed, and Alan ventures around the dark underbelly of Los Angeles to find a truth –one he’s disgusted to learn, but none the less seems attracted to as well.

There are some memorable characters here, fully realized, with Hansen’s patent prose style of not letting words go to waste. These books may be short, but there are not many writers who can evoke mood and setting with without filler –so every word does count. But like a few of his Brandstetter tales, the plot is a bit over the top, and melodramatic for no good reason, along with a few characters that flip-flop on their sexuality like they’re turning on a light switch.

Like a lot of books of this genre, it also comes off as dated and I sometimes cringed at causal racist and homophobic language. I understand this was what Hansen grew up with, but it’s also a reminder that while he can laser focus his eye on the lurid aspect of Hollywood, he could not give up the internal homophobia he might’ve had (after all, he was gay, but was married to a woman –who was a lesbian- from 1943 until her death in 1994. They also had a child).

In the end, it was a page turner. But your mileage will vary.