Books: Memorial By Bryan Washington (2020)

 

“Memorial centers on the relationship between Japanese American Mike and his Black boyfriend, Ben (short for Benson). Mike flies to Osaka to care for his terminally ill father, who abandoned his family when Mike was a boy. The timing of the father’s sickness couldn’t be worse: Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, is on her way from Tokyo to Houston to see him. Instead she’ll have to spend her visit with Ben, a stranger. After four years together, Mike and Ben’s relationship is already shaky, nearing the breaking point, and they will now have to figure out where they stand from opposite sides of the planet.”

Bryan Washington’s debut novel is very self-assured. It’s about race, nationality, sexual orientation, and family. I got a sense as a white reader, Washington was trying to not to pander to me, rather I would read this book about POC and just get a glimpse into a lives white readers never really, or want, to see. The first person narrative works so well here, with the first part focusing on Ben, the second on Mike, and finally the third on consequences of those first two parts. It’s clear that the readers loyalty is supposed to be on Ben, a charming middle-class adult who has is own family issues. But then the focus shifts to Mike, who's family dysfunction has made him the man he is, a bit of dick who wants to be self-assured but mostly comes off as lost. But you can’t help but feel sorry for him at times. His dad, Eiju, is a hoot, but also a bastard. Despite his ways, despite him still having issues with a gay son, he is never truly mean. Like many parents of gay children, I think Eiju is just bewildered.

It’s clear, though; Washington has a love for Houston (where the novel is based, as well as the writer) but seems more comfortable in Japan. So I think Japan wins out in many ways, especially in the description of food (another theme of Memorial). Mike is a cook at a Mexican restaurant, but makes a lot of the same stuff his mother made as he grew up for Ben (don't we all?). But Mitsuko teaches Ben a lot through Japanese food. She seems more supportive, in a sometimes opaque way, that Ben is good for her wayward son. Ben, however is never too sure where and what his feelings are for Mike -and that gets more complicated when a gentleman named Omar enters his life.

It’s a brutal and yet tender novel, an embarrassment of riches for the reader. I highly recommend this book.

Books: The Only Good Indians By Stephen Graham Jones (2020)

 

"Four Native American friends went hunting one night on land that was reserved for tribe elders. It was dark and snow had started falling, but they found a herd of elk at the bottom of a hill. Bullets rained. Large bodies dropped. One refused to die. Lewis, one of the men, had to work hard at killing the beast, shooting it more than once. After the mayhem, nine carcasses littered the ground, the snow falling steadily on them. The friends celebrated and began field dressing the elk — that meat would keep their freezers full all winter. But the animal Lewis struggled to kill was pregnant, the calf inside it still alive. Then they got caught by the law and had to throw away the meat. Almost a decade later, what happened that night still haunts them. Lewis is literally haunted, by something that appears as a woman holding an elk's head. It killed his dog. He has to destroy it before he becomes the next victim, but killing something you already killed once is hard.”

Not to sit on the fence here, but I found The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones to be a very complex tale that I liked and hated –sometimes at the same time. While it has a completely inventive characters and setting, and something unique in the horror genre we rarely see -Native American representation, I found the pacing to be glacial and Jones' prose something I never really grasped. At its core, though, it's ghost story of revenge, same as say Peter Straub’s 1980 masterpiece Ghost Story, which carried the same idea, but I never felt the book was creepy scary enough. Never felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There are some thrills, but the final set piece is silly and will look sillier if anyone adapts the book for TV or movie.

So I liked the book for being different, something a lot of reader’s sometime struggle with –trying untested writers. And would recommend it, but in the end, the books progress and the literary devices the author foists on said reader are distracting.

Later By Stephen King (2021)

 

While Hard Case Crime publisher claims they’re devoted to releasing and reprinting the best in hard-boiled crime fiction, it does seem strange they’ve published this horror tale from Stephen King (his third after 2005's The Colorado Kid and 2013's Joyland). But of course, it is Stephen King and that may be the only reason Hard Case Crime needs.

 “Jamie Conklin sees dead people. Not for very long—they fade away after a week or so—but during that time he can talk to them, ask them questions, and compel them to answer truthfully. His uncanny gift at first seems utterly unrelated to his mother Tia’s work as a literary agent, but the links become disturbingly clear when her star client, Regis Thomas, dies shortly after starting work on the newest entry in his bestselling Roanoke Saga, and Tia and her lover, NYPD Detective Liz Dutton, drive Jamie out to Cobblestone Cottage to encourage the late author to dictate an outline of his latest page-turner so that Tia, who’s fallen on hard times, can write it in his name instead of returning his advance and her cut. Now that she’s seen what Jamie can do, Liz takes it on herself to arrange an interview in which Jamie will ask Kenneth Therriault, a serial bomber who’s just killed himself, where he’s stowed his latest explosive device before it can explode posthumously. His post-mortem encounter with Therriault exacts a high price on Jamie, who now finds himself more haunted than ever, though he never gives up on the everyday experiences in which King roots all his nightmares.”

Once again, King delves into the world of magical kids with Later. But, as always, he’s able to bring a lot of depth and horror to this well-know road he’s traveled for nearly fifty years. But I think this works a lot because the lives these kids live are so ordinary, so everyday, that you can’t help but see these some of things truly happening to them. Here we get 22 year-old Jamie recounting his life that starts at six and the runs to about year 15. King loves kids as protagonists, I think, because it generates sympathy for someone who has no real control over their life and must depend on their parent(s). Plus, I think, when we were all kids, we wanted some darkness, some supernatural aspect to part of our everyday life. Of course, all of King’s supernaturally blessed (?) kids are a bit more adult than most (see Luke Ellis from King’s The Institute). And, again, everything is so ordinary.

Jamie is likable and as much as he narrates and claims he’s not like the kid in The Sixth Sense, you can’t help but think he is. Still, unlike the M. Night Shyamalan’s film, where the kids sees real ghost, Jamie just sees dead people who are seemly disinterested in the living.

There is crime here, but not in the traditional sense this publishing company produces. There is no femme fatales (as the cover tries to imply) or extraordinary villains here, just your average bad guy (and gals) who do horrible things in pursuant of their goals.

But I enjoyed this book, even if it’s not his best. It's still a treat. 

Books: A Gentleman in Moscow By Amor Towles (2016)

 

"A Gentleman in Moscow begins in 1922, when Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. The count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.”

 

A lot of this book seems a bit improbable, at times, which is not to say is a bad thing. It also can be dense with a bit too many historical observations of Russia and Moscow during the Stalin era, which at times, makes the book a bit busy and overcrowded. On the other hand, though, these passages seemly have little to do with the plot, so I often pondered if the tale could’ve worked if it was set in Paris, London, or even in Germany during the same period. Also, as one reviewer pointed out, this book is like Eloise, “if Eloise were set in a twee version of Stalinist Russia.”

 

There is a lot of impish humor here, as the Count tallies his days and nights in the Metropol with an assortment of people, including a moody chef and a French maître d’. The arrival of nine year-old Nina early in the book gives the Count many days of fun, as she is clever and most articulate. They, like his other friends, have several capers and this sort makes perpetual bachelor feel a sense of pride (though years later, when Nina has married, she returns to the hotel with some cautious, hidden worlds dealing with goings on against Stalin and asks the count to take care of her daughter Sofia for maybe a month or two. Obviously the reader can surmise that Nina won’t be coming back anytime soon). Then the Count must worry about people noticing he’s taking care of a 5-year-old girl.

 

Still, as the decades unfurl, the as Nina becomes an accomplished musician, the Count’s long-game continues on. Highlights include one of the capers where the Count, the chef, and the maître d' conspire to scrounge the ingredients for a perfect bouillabaisse from war-depleted Moscow. It takes three years, but when everything has been acquired, there is a mostly humorous set piece on how they try to keep this hidden from a sinister hotel waiter and a man known as the Bishop.

 

For those itching to get out now that spring and summer are around the corner along with the lifting of quarantine due to the COVID, they may not want to take the time to read this charming book due to its verbal density, but it’s rewarding in the end and just as much a valentine (as was Amor Towles Rules of Civility) to an era when books were a bit more complex and literary. Were words and kindness was the way of the world.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

 

A year or so ago, I acquired the soundtrack from SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by French composer Georges Delerue (1925-1992). While I was aware that Disney’s 1983 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic dark fantasy novel had a long and difficult road to the screen, I was not aware that they tossed out Delerue’s eerie score and replaced it with one done by James Horner (who only had six weeks to get it done).

 

Back in the early 80’s, Disney was attempting to make more mature, yet commercial films, along with their live action/animated films for kids and through their Buena Vista arm (a division not associated with kids films at this period) hired Jack Clayton (1921-1995), a British born director who was known for 1959’s ROOM AT THE TOP, the spooky 1961 film THE INNOCENTS, 1964’s THE PUMPKIN EATER, and 1967’s widely praised, but a failure at the box office, OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE, to make the film.

 

Known as a meticulous director, one who took on more unusual topics and spent significant time filming, the commercial failure OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE seemly prevented Clayton from helming another film until 1974’s Robert Redford led THE GREAT GATSBY, which while moderately successful commercially, it garnered mixed reviews.

 

But by the early 80’s, nearly recovered from a stroke he had in 1977, he and Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) reconnected after nearly two decades when producer Peter Douglas (son of Kirk) brought the project to him and sold it to Disney. SOMETHING WICKED has already had a long road to screen, starting with the original short-story written in 1948. Nearly a decade later, Bradbury created a 70-page film treatment that he brought to, of all people, Gene Kelly. While Kelly was impressed and wanted to helm the film, he could not raise the capital needed to make it. Eventually, Bradbury took the treatment and expanded the tale into what became the 1962 novel.

 

But the film version would have an even rougher road ahead. Bradbury wrote the script from his novel, but during production, Clayton brought in British writer John Moritmer (who did work on THE INNOCENTS, but is more famous for his RUMPOLE novels) for uncredited rewrite of the screenplay. This caused some obvious conflicts between them, as Clayton was making a dark thriller, returning to the themes he had explored before -the supernatural, and the exposure of children to evil and Bradbury and Disney seemly wanted something else.

 

After seeing Clayton’s cut, the studio found fault with a lot of it –the length, the pacing, the fact that it was not family friendly, which they viewed as meaning not “commercial.” While today reshoots are more common, back in day it was not so. Still Disney decided to delay the production for nearly a year and spent a reported $5 million on new scenes and new visual effects. While they shot the film between late September to December 1981, new sequences were done (via a new director) in late 1982 and early 1983. One was the spider sequence, and it’s very clear the two boys had grown significantly in a year. Deleted was a very early-effort CGI effect that opened the film, one that showed Dark's Carnival arriving in the town and magically unfolding itself into place -this sequence was covered in great detail in 1982 edition of Cinefantastique magazine. Another Clayton sequence that was removed featured a giant disembodied hand that reached into the boys' room and tried to grab them – this was deleted by the studio on the grounds that the mechanical effect was not realistic enough.

 

Despite the additional money for the reshoots, when it came to editing the film, Argyle Nelson, Jr was let go and assistant editor Barry Gordon was promoted to replace him (both were credited on screen, though). With new marching orders from the studio, Gordon was instructed to re-edit the film to make it less frightening and thus more commercial. Bradbury was also brought back to write some narration that helped clarify the story. Also kicked the curb was Delerue’s score, which Disney rejected as being “too dark”. Given only six weeks, James Horner was brought in to create a less scary and, again, a more commercial score. And while fine for the time, Horner’s take was mostly re-cues and variations on themes he had already did on Star Trek II and Battle Beyond the Stars.

 

Georges Deleue’s score remained hidden in the Disney vaults until 2011, when the studio gave rare permission to the French Universal label to issue 30 minutes of excerpts from the original 63 minutes of studio recordings. Finally, in 2015 the label Intrada was able to release the entire score on CD, which also included alternative cues and other source music totally over 75 minutes.

 

In the end, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES remains somewhat of a missed opportunity. Perhaps Jack Clayton was too cerebral, too much of an auteur of director for Disney, who even today remains somewhat conflicted on producing films for a mature audience, and keeps a close reign on its directors. Also, while Ray Bradbury’s tale featured kids, it was not a kids book. It was a tale of dark fantasy for adults who remembered their youths in a certain way, especially at the time of year when the Autumn People came.

 

While blame could be pointed at both Clayton and Disney, the tinkering the studio did to make a more commercial film perhaps doomed it at the box office, as it made only about $8 million on its $20 million budget. But it’s rare for a film with a troubled production history to connect to an audience, as they are generally seeing two visions of the same film made by two different groups of people.

 

The House of Mouse still holds the film rights and is open to remaking the film, but not much has happened since 2014 when it was announced writer Seth Grahame-Smith was scripting a much more faithful-to-the-source-material version.

 

Perhaps we could see a new version on Disney+ somewhere down the line, but I’m curious if Clayton’s original cut remains in the vaults of the studio in Burbank? It might be fun to see how he fully saw this tale.