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.

Books: We Are All Completely Fine By Daryl Gregory (2014)

 

"Harrison is the Monster Detective, a storybook hero. Now he’s in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time not sleeping. Stan became a minor celebrity after being partially eaten by cannibals. Barbara is haunted by the messages carved upon her bones. Greta may or may not be a mass-murdering arsonist. And for some reason, Martin never takes off his sunglasses. Unsurprisingly, no one believes their horrific tales until they are sought out by psychotherapist Dr. Jan Sayer. What happens when these likely-insane outcasts join a support group? Together they must discover which monsters they face are within and which are lurking in plain sight."

As I mentioned in my Harrison Squared review, I discovered while reading it, author Daryl Gregory had written We Are All Completely Fine novelette released a year before H2. Set some twenty years after the YA title, this short novel only hints at Harrison’s previous life as some sort of monster hunter. He recollects some stuff to the group in this tale –but some are bit different here than in Harrison Squared- and that his “adventures” inspired a series of YA horror novels called Jamison Squared.

This is a much more complicated story than H2, darker, more violent and gory. While it’s clear that Gregory will continue with at least two more adventures featuring the young Harrison, this novelette is either an open-ended epilogue or, once finished telling Harrison’s younger days, the beginning of something different.

I’m unsure if Gregory intended this to be a short story from the get go, a first attempt to see if a full length novel could support his idea –and maybe take on Stephen King is some subtle way, ala a interconnected universe- or Harrison Harrison’s voice took over his thoughts and so he needed to address that story first before moving on. I mean, there are a lot of good ideas here, some half-baked, some nicely fleshed out, but we’ll see if he intends to follow through.

Still, as I read Daryl Gregory, the more I love his work, his style, his attempt to blend horror and humor.

Books: A Likely Story By Donald E. Westlake (1984)

 

"Supporting one and a half families is not the ideal situation for a man who makes his living as a writer --unless he comes up with a book so certain to be a bestseller that he doesn't have to worry about money ever again. (Or maybe Mary will find a fella of her own who can start contributing to the support). So Tom's surefire bestseller, The Christmas Book is begun, and Tom's troubles begin. His editor quits, Ginger doesn't want to get married, Mary won't give him a divorce, his new editor announces she's pregnant (and quits), the woman in an iron lung enters his life, and a third editor begins work on the book. Then things really get complicated."

A Likely Story is not a Donald E. Westlake crime novel, more of a skewering of the publishing industry. Tom is a freelance writer who is in need of easy money and believes a book about Christmas will sell itself. Who hates Christmas? But the road to the holidays is not as simple as it seems, as Tom is forced through several editors (according to David Bratman, who runs the site: Donald E. Westlake: an annotated bibliography, one of them “is based on the unsatisfactory editor Westlake had for the first edition of Kahawa”). So our narrator must constantly juggle this problem with issues of a personal nature, mainly his ex-wife who wants him back, a jealous girlfriend and a mistress, who happens to one of the after mentioned editors.

Not surprisingly, this is a very meta-novel, as Westlake takes the publishing industry to task --“Publishing is the only industry of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don’t know how to do their jobs.”

“I don’t know how to sell this, they complain, frowning as though it’s your fault. I don’t know how to package this. I don’t know what the market is for this book. I don’t know how we’re going to draw attention to this. In most other occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job.”

It also pairs well with Westlake’s take on the murder mystery genre in A Travesty, the novelette length tale that appeared in Double Feature book I read last month, if only because Westlake is great at these genre conventions. It’s a fun book, told in diary form, it’s also a light bedroom farce the studios used to put out in the late 1960s, early 70s. It’s certainly flawed in some respects, but it still had some laugh out loud moments.

Books: Harrison Squared By Daryl Gregory (2015)

 

"Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who’s been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished.  One of the “sensitives” who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school. On Harrison’s first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Dwellers, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother."

 

Harrison Squared is fun little tale from author Daryl Gregory, who is able to vacillate easily between adult horror/supernatural (and offbeat family dynamics in Spoonbenders) tales rooted in early horror writers, to this YA title that carries some of the same themes, but presented in a less frightening way. Still, it’s basically Lovecraft’s Cthulhu meets a modern-day Scooby gang. Harrison is deft sixteen year-old, who must deal with the town of Dunnsworth, its often creepy adults (and sometime creepy kids), and the kidnapping of his mother.

 

Gregory has an affinity for witty dialogue and it shines here, as he creates some wonderfully fun characters (I enjoyed Aunt Selena a lot). And while this book (which does hint at further adventures to come) is not that original –I mean, clearly Daryl Gregory took all his teenage passions and dumped them into this book- he is able to keep the balance between horror, humor and things we’ve seen before going through to the end.

 

I also discovered after finishing this book that Harrison was featured in a previous short novel (or novella, I guess) released a year before Harrison Squared. We Are All Completely Fine is about physiologist Dr. Jan Sayer, who gathers survivors of supernatural violence. One of those people it turns out to be Harrison, who is in his mid-thirties and spends most of his time popping pills and not sleeping. He apparently was, at one time, a monster hunter.

 

I’ll need to track this one down to see how much backstory is revealed about Harrison. While it shouldn’t bother me, knowing that Harrison is alive twenty-years after this book, it means that if Daryl Gregory continues from this book, any danger he puts Harrison in is lessened by the fact he is alive at 35.

Books: The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz (2019)

 

“You shouldn’t be here. It’s too late . . . “

"These, heard over the phone, were the last recorded words of successful celebrity-divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, found bludgeoned to death in his bachelor pad with a bottle of wine—a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, to be precise. Odd, considering he didn’t drink. Why this bottle? And why those words? And why was a three-digit number painted on the wall by the killer? And, most importantly, which of the man’s many, many enemies did the deed? Baffled, the police are forced to bring in Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, the author Anthony, who’s really getting rather good at this murder investigation business. But as Hawthorne takes on the case with characteristic relish, it becomes clear that he, too, has secrets to hide. As our reluctant narrator becomes ever more embroiled in the case, he realizes that these secrets must be exposed—even at the risk of death."

While a fairly well paced whodunit, I’m still sort of put-off by author Anthony Horowitz putting himself as a character in his own book. As I wrote about in the first book in this series, The Word is Murder, I find it a distracting element. Again, he puts himself in a position of looking like an idiot.

As all books in this genre, The Sentence is Death has many twists and turns, a few red herrings, and everyone with a motive for murder. Daniel Hawthorne, the ex-cop that Horowitz’s hyper-reality version of himself tags along with, remains somewhat of an unlikable character. His sexism, his homophobia appears to be justified and accepted, if only because he’s “brilliant” detective. He, and fellow cops Cara Grunshaw and DC Mills, are awful people, but not in a creative, realistic way; they’re awful because the story requires them to be terrible human beings (I mean, why are Mills and Grunshaw so hostile –there’s never a reason given). We also get a few drips and drabs of Hawthorne’s personal life, but in the end, they don’t add up to anything. I know the British writers have a tendency to put unlikable hero’s front and center because it makes them flawed individuals, but it also has a tendency to make them look like two-dimensional cartoon characters if not done right. And at times all three detectives come off as jerks, with –again- no reason given for their personal flaws. So they grate on ones nerves –which a reader should not be put through.

While Horowitz’s creates a large puzzle here, a lot of felt unnecessary and seemed designed to make the book longer than it should. It makes me wonder if I’ll read a third book in this series, but who knows?