THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE by Carson McCullers

We all know Carson McCullers better for her The Heart Is  A Lonely Hunter,  as well as Reflections In A Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding.   Her ‘southern Gothic’ style works are touching, and touch us in an odd way.  Maybe it is because, as Tessessee Williams once said, “Carson’s major theme: the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love.”

Her characters are the misfits and outcasts, those who are just a step or two too close to the quirky to be accepted by the general society in which they live.  They are the ones who live by the dictates of their heart, and soul, if they have one.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is a novella, and the book includes six other short stories.

It is about Miss Amelia, 6’2″, tough and hard and with an eye for the main chance, who lives alone above the general store she operates in a dreary town in Georgia, too far off the beaten track to be much of anything.  She had a ten day marriage to a bad boy turned good by his love and adoration for her, but after the wedding ceremony, she turned him out, refusing to have anything to do with him.  He went off and got himself in big trouble and ended up in the penitentiary,  and all was quiet until the hunchback Lymon, claiming to be a distant cousin of Amelia, strolled into town one day.  Amelia was instantly taken with him, and brought him into her house where he lived for a number of years, to the surprise and astonishment of the townspeople.

Cousin Lyman was a cheerful chatterer, and soon gradually turned the store into a cafe, the one bright spot in the otherwise dismal town.

When we first are introduced to the town, the cafe is closed, the building so ruined and ramshackle that it leaned rather frighteningly, so frighteningly that it wold appear ready to collapse in a heap at any moment, and from the upper window peered the face of Amelia.   What events transpired to bring the cafe and the town and Miss Amelia to this state makes up the story.

It is an examination of love in its various permutations;

Love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.

The value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.  In a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.

As always, her work lingers in your mind, niggling away in the corners.

 

THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION by Samuel R. Delany

I haven’t got the foggiest  as to where the recommendation for this book came from.  But boy, is it weird with a capital weird. The Einstein Intersection is a 1967 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1967 and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1968.

It is a bizarre commentary on the role mythology serves in our lives, and stars Lo Lobey and Kid Death, Lo Lobey possibly being representative of Orpheus.

Basically, the story, as I am able to tease apart the threads, is about  the planet which has been abandoned by humans many thousands of years ago, leaving only a highly radioactive core and some computer software which is still functioning.  The radioactivity would seem to be the reason for the abandonment.

The creatures now inhabiting the earth are all mutants of some form or another, with a range of functionality.  The worst at kept in kages in the villages, fed and cared for.  The functional ones earn the title Lo, or La for females, and Le for non gendered.   But even among the functional population are members who are ‘different’.  The irony font would be useful here to express my astonishment that anyone any different than the rest of this weird population would be noticeable.

Lo Lobey’s difference is that he can hear music in the head of others and can play it on his flute-y instrument which is the handle of his machete.  This of course, is the different difference from his feet which have finger and opposable thumbs, and thick scaly type skin.  So I think we can be forgiven if we are not astounded by the hearing music thing.

A mute female appears and he falls in love with her.  She mysteriously dies, and he goes on a quest to find and kill whatever killed her.  And that would be Kid Death, who seems to have supernatural powers.

OK, so there are battles with some huge monster thing, which he wins, and the herding of dragons thing,  and the whole oddly philosophical theme of difference and mythology.

Intersperses throughout are diary entries by a kind of author/human that make no sense, and all in all, I care not for this book.   Weird just isn’t my cup of strangeness.

 

A SON OF THE MIDDLE BORDER by Hamlin Garland

Hamlin Garland was hugely popular writer and speaker of the early 1900’s, although today you would be hard pressed to find anyone who has heard of him.   He was born in 1860, and wrote in the ‘realism’ school of fiction, depicting the difficult lives of the forward-moving pioneers, especially the lives of women.

His most popular books were his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border , written in 1917 at the age of 57,  followed by A Daughter of the Middle Border, written in 1921 and which won a Pulitzer Prize.

He was always outspoken about issues of politics, the pioneering life, and Henry George’ single tax movement.  In his later life, he became interested in psychic phenomenon and in his final  work, The Mystery of the Buried Crosses ,he tried to justify the veracity of mediumship.

His father, newly home to their Wisconsin farm from the Civil War, has the soul of an explorer and pioneer, and is not content to work his farm, but wants to go further afield as the ‘middle border’ moved westward, out of the green farming country to the plains, and further to the arid regions.

Garland says:

My boyhood was  spent in the midst of a charming landscape and during a certain heroic era of western settlement.   The men and women of that far time loom large i my thinking for they possessed not only the spirit of adventurers but the courage of warriors.

His story is not only the story of his life but the chronicle of the era of settlement between 1840 and 1914.

It is a beautifully written account of the difficulties of his boyhood and of farm life, which in his later years he refuses to prettify in poetic phrases.  It was tough, harsh, and especially hard on the women.  He lived through the era of the ‘prairie schooner’ to the coming of the railroads and the car.  He saw it as a time of the breakup of the family,

I now perceived the mournful side of American ‘enterprise’.  Sons were desertig their work-worn fathers, daughters were forgetting their tired mothers.  Families were everywhere breaking up.  Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships.  At times I visioned the Middle border as a colony of ants — which was an injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently futile and aimless striving.

Can any other country on earth surpass the United States in the ruthless broadcast dispersion of its families?

A wonderful story of farming, migration, and of a country that is growing up.

 

 

DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather

I had forgotten how much I like Willa Cather.  I never read this one in my younger years.  Somehow the title put me off for some reason.  Maybe because I am not Catholic.  But I came across a reminder of it recently, and decided to give it a go, and I am really glad I did.

It was written in 1927, and it was included on Time’s 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005, and Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, and was chosen by the Western Writers of America to be the 7th-best “Western Novel” of the 20th century.

This gentle story, almost plotless but filled with incidents and encounters, perhaps IS a Western novel, not so much in the cowboy vs Indians style, but because it is set in the West of 1858, in the territory of New Mexico, shortly after the Mexican American war.  It was truly the wild west, but surely not uninhabitated, populated as it was by Native American Indians of various nations, and by Mexicans,understandably since it was not very long ago part of Old Mexico.

It is about a young priest, Jean Latour, assigned as the new Bishop of the New Mexican territory, and his Vicar, Joseph Vaillant, both from the same seminary in France.  They had to travel from Sandusky, Ohio, to the newly created diocese of New Mexico.  At that time,  Cincinnati was the end of the railway line west, so Latour must travel by riverboat to the Gulf of Mexico, and and from there travel overland to New Mexico, a journey which takes an entire year.

In order to get his official papers for his separate diocese, he must then travel to the former Bishop who was elderly and living in Durango, Mexico.  A round trip of something like 4,000 miles over canyons, and deserts and many areas with no trails.  This whole business took months and months.

One thing the book did for me was bring home to me the hardship of travel in that time with no railroads, and poor to non-existent roads, and yet people traveled all the time.  Amazing.

The two men worked tirelessly to bring the Catholic religion back to the region.  When the first Spanish priests came in the 1500’s, they were finally beaten off by the native people, but the Mexicans took to the religion, and over the centuries with no clergy, it had become twisted into a version suitable to the people, and our two clerics now were determined to bring back the true church to the people.

In the book we meet Native Americans, Mexicans, mostly poor common people, we meet some of wealth and prosperity.  We meet corrupt Mexican priests,  and self-effacing clergy who lived in poverty in order to support the populace around them.

The Bishop is eventually made an Archbishop, and builds his dream cathedral in the capital of the Diocese, Santa Fe.  He had always felt he would return to France when he retired to live out his days in the company of family and scholars, but found he missed the open West, and returned to live in his small farm with its orchard.   His death is really anticlimatical,  because the book is not about drama but about the two lives well led by the two protagonists.

I often think I was born too late and should have been born in this period, in the West of the USA, but then I think, ‘Air conditioning.”  And I conclude that I am where I should be.

 

1491: NEW REVELATIONS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS by Chrles C. Mann

We are finally beginning to acknowledge the fact that Columbus did not ‘discover’ the New World.  He wasn’t the first here.  Nor were the Spanish the first invaders to set foot in South America and Central America.  Evidence is piling up that there were all kinds of civilizations all over the Americas, long before we ever thought there were.

In his book, Man argues that early civilizations had better control of their environment,  but then goes on to say that when a civilization overreaches the resources for its numbers, it dies out, citing the Maya.

He talks about the Neolithic Revolution, which is the invention of farming.  The historian Ronald Wright divides the human trajectory into two phases — everything before the Neolithic Revolution, and everything after it.  It began in the Middle east about 11,000 years ago.

A second Neolithic Revolution occurred in Mesoamerica, thought to be about 10,000 years ago.  Ancient seeds from cultivated squash were found in Ecuador, at the foot of the Andes.

I found this interesting.  He records that the ‘zero’ was discovered, invented, whatever you want to say, in India sometime in the first few centuries, AD.  In Europe, the zero did not appear until the 12th century AD.  In the Americas, there are Maya carvings from 357 AD, possibly before the Sanscrit.  There are monuments from before the birth of Christ that are inscribed with dates in a calendar system based on the existence of zero.

Another tidbit:  the Olmec, May and other mesoamerican societies did not use the wheel.  They had invented it, but only used it for children’s  toys.

He talks about the Clovis people of New Mexico.  This society was one of the first to be assessed using carbon dating. The culture first appeared between 13,500 and 12,900 years ago, which Mann said was “just after the only time period in which migration from Siberia seemed to have been possible.” Since that dating, archaeologists have found evidence indicating that Paleo-Indians were present in the Americas at even earlier dates.

All in all, a book filled with examples and facts and statements that really get you thinking and rethinking the whole ‘ancient civilization’ thing. You may not agree with all of it, and he may not be 100% right, but it is all fascinating, nonetheless.

 

KILL THE DEAD by Richard Kadrey

This was  serious book that is really funny, and clever, and a page turner.  It is classified as horror, (but it seems to be  horror that is not particularly horrible), fantasy/paranormal/urban fantasy and maybe a few other genres that I missed.

This is the sequel to Kadrey’s acclaimed Sandman Slim, and the folks in the know say that it is even better than the first book.  I believe the two have been made into a movie.  I am too lazy to go check.

The basic idea is Sandman Slim, James Stark to the initiated, is a Nephilim, which is a being who is half angel, half human.  His mother was a human, and he thinks his father is Lucifer.

After some events, he ends up fighting in the Arena in hell for a number of years.  All this happened in the first book, so I am a little unclear as to what exactly led to his descent, but he eventually ends up back on earth, working for the Golden Vigil, Heaven’s Pinkertons which is dedicated to eradicating vampires and other like creatures, and at the same time, he works for Lucifer, killing enemies of the Fallen Angel.

When he asks an angel ‘What use are you?’,  the angel tells him

“None.  We angels have outlived our time.  We’re superfluous.  But I thought you already knew that.”

The book is filled with all kinds of beings, elementals, golems, werefolk, vampires, angels, Lucifer himself, on earth because he has a movie contract, demons, pixies, and a crazy Czech Gypsy porn-star zombie killer.

Here’s some nifty info for you:

The Codex says that when Lucifer’s army was cast out of Heaven, one of the fallen didn’t make it all the way to Hell and landed in a valley on earth instead.  It was burned and broken, but humans still recognized it as an angel.  The local blue bloods sent their doctors to help it, but the angel was sick and bloated like a tick by then.  It attacked anyone who came near it.  All of those people ended up turning into zeds. [zombies].  Those zeds attacked their families and friends.  The ones they didn’t eat became zeds and attacked other people.  The people who lived in the hills saw that things were getting out of control, so they started fires and burned the whole valley.  They thought they’d gotten everything, but some of the zeds supposedly escaped into caves.  Mostly they stay underground, but every now and then one wanders out or gets summoned by a necromancer.  That’s it.  They all lived happily ever f**king after.  The end.”

So now you know where zombies came from.

Stark is an anti-hero’s anti-hero,  and he even has his own Wikipedia page.  He lives with a head.  No, not a druggie, a head, the bodiless Kasabian, who is thus afflicted due to crossing Lucifer in the first book.   This is a bit of a mystery story as Stark is drawn into a missing person scenario in the bizarro L.A where he lives.  At the same time, Lucifer assigns him the job of being his bodyguard.  Why would Lucifer need bodyguards?  He’s the Devil, for pete’s sake.  Well, because he has enemies — lots of them.  Oh, gee, I wonder why.

The book has gore, battles, magic, funny lines, sad lines, and a likable guy going about his daily business of killing things.  Just another day in L.A.

I loved it!

 

 

SPIDER TRAP by Barry Maitland

I have been working my way through Maitland’s Brock and Kolla series.  OK, ‘working’ is surely not the right word.  ‘Reading’ would be better.  Reading my way through the series.  I have really been enjoying this series and still have four more to go.  Goodie.

This book’s basic theme was about the Jamaican immigrants of the 80’s to London and other parts of England.  They were called Yardies, and a number of them escaped horrible conditions in Jamaica and were able to create much better lives for themselves.  Others found a more criminal way to survive, bringing in drugs, and setting up criminal headquarters in some areas.

In this book, two teenage girls are found in an abandoned building, shot through the head, execution-style.  Meanwhile, a schoolboy, looking down from his nearby classroom can see into a vacant railroad field which is totally secured and in accessible behind Cockpit Lane, a poor and largely black area of inner south London, watching a couple of foxes.  He determines to get into that yard and see what he can find.  What he finds is a human jawbone, triggering a police investigation which then reveals the skeletal remains of three bodies.

Brock and Kolla’s investigation leads to the Roach family, local crime lords going back to that time decades ago, and Spider Roach is the head nasty.  His sons today seem to operate legitimate businesses today,  but is that only on the surface?

Kathy meets up again with Special Branches operative Tom, who starts to work on the case with them.  Their main lead is a local Member who immigrated from Jamaica in his teens and has gone on to be a prominent citizen.

I found this book just a little bit less enjoyable than the others, because perhaps it concerned crimes decades old, the two teen girls were drug-using problem people who were always in trouble, and had no family to be pushing for their deaths to be solved.  It was a lot more political in the workings of the various law enforcement departments, perhaps a little less personal.  Nevertheless, it was still a great detective story.

Now on to the next, Bright Air.

 

INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES CORNELL

This smiling gentleman is a guy who knows more than any one individual has a right to know about steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk, and a bunch of other punks, too.  He is Charles Cornell, author of the Dragonfly series, a dieselpunk look at WWII with a lady principle character.  I just gotta love this man!   I read Dragonfly Part 1: To Hell and Back, and talked about it here.

I had been reading a couple of steampunk books to get the feel for the genre when I came across this dieselpunk book, and had to ask myself what the kibble was dieselpunk?   I had a brief chat or two with with the Boss about this, and thought you, my Gentle Readers, would like to know more about these genres as well, so, well, I camped on his doorstep until he agreed to talk with me about steampunk, dieselpunk, Retrofuturistic Fiction and other stuff fiction-related, as well as where he fits into all this.

MARTI:  Charles,  I have recently gotten interested in the steampunk genre of fiction. As I understand it, steampunk stories are set in the Victorian era, but incorporate elements of steam power technology. Seems to be lots of gears and cogs and brass and octopuses (octopi?) and goggles and stuff in the illustrations. Would you consider this genre a ‘fabulist’ type of genre?
CHARLES: All genre fiction is based on the concept of the hero’s journey and what lessons the hero learns along the way. Punk fiction is more than just re-telling the same fables dressed up in different gear. Yes, the gears, cogs, brass, etc. are the ‘aesthetics’ of steampunk fiction and to those who follow it, appear to be compulsory elements. But I look at these simply as devices like stage props in a playhouse. If it’s a dark story, the backdrop is black and hung with cobwebs. A Shakespearean farce has characters in frilly exaggerated clothing. Steampunk has octopi. Who knew?

At the very heart of the new punk fiction sub-genres like steampunk and dieselpunk is a concept called ‘retro-futurism’. Retro-futurism differentiates these sub-genres from mainstream fantasy, science fiction or alternative history. Retro-futurism allows the writer to meld various elements of sci-fi and fantasy together, often blended within an alternative set of historical events or set in a different era with different social outlooks.

The Oxford Dictionary defines retro-futurism as the use of a style or aesthetic considered futuristic in an earlier era. My personal definition of retro-futurism is ‘an expression of creativity that either (1) projects the future as those in a past time period might have seen it or (2) is set in a future world that conveys the vibe of a bygone era’.

Key words here are ‘expression’ and ‘creativity’ because retro-futurism is not confined to just fiction. Steampunk in particular is a whole sub-culture of art, design, fashion and costume play. In the case of steampunk, the bygone era involved is the Victorian through the Edwardian periods. For dieselpunk, it is the 1920s to 1940s. Atompunk is the 1950s and early 60s.
MARTI:   You label your book, Dragonfly, a dieselpunk story. So I would assume it has anachronistic diesel elements where they did not historically exist. Is that correct?
CHARLES:  Carrying on from the general definition of punk fiction, here is my specific definition of dieselpunk:

‘The retro-futuristic themes and aesthetics reflecting the politics, society, culture and technology from the 1920s to 1940s, expressed in creative form in order to project to others the future as those in this past era might have seen it, or to convey to others how this era’s vibe would look like in a future imaginary world’.

Dieselpunk is not just restricted to novels. There are some fantastic artists out there. I commissioned a digital artist to create the retro-futuristic aircraft in DragonFly. These are some of the elements of the story that did not historically exist but could have been imagined as possible if you were someone in the 1930s or 1940s looking into the future.

Historical ‘what-ifs’ also play a big role in DragonFly to ‘set the stage’ or as I call it ‘re-imagine’ the future through the eyes of someone in the past. In the alternative World War Two of DragonFly, there are many ‘what-ifs’ sprinkled throughout the novel. The biggest ones are: (1) what if women were recruited to be combat pilots?… and (2) what if the technological advances of the Nazis – weapons like jet powered planes and rockets that appeared too late at the end of the real WW2 – had been put to use a lot earlier in the conflict? How would the course of history been altered by either of these changes?
MARTI:  Why did you choose dieselpunk over steampunk for the story structure? What draws you to these genres?
CHARLES:  In general, I prefer writing dieselpunk over steampunk because I have a greater personal interest in the time period from the 1920s to the 1940s, a period of great social and political change whose after-effects can still be felt today, unlike Victorian attitudes and technology that have been made somewhat obsolete and occupy a more nostalgic niche.

I have a particular interest in the history of the rise of fascism as I think there are many lessons that still apply. George Orwell’s dystopian novel, ‘1984’ is one of my all-time favorites. It’s not to say that a steampunk novel is not already in my idea box, because it is. But my plan is to take some unique spins with the genre. I don’t like following the herd by creating variations to stories that have, by the most part, already been written in other genres. That would just be adding the props without the proper script. I prefer the ‘big bang theory’ approach to make something unique. Stay tuned.

Back to dieselpunk. Perhaps the biggest influence in writing DragonFly was my family’s involvement in WW2. I’m British born and both my father and mother served in the Royal Air Force during the war. I grew up with their stories and reminiscences. My mother was 16 during the Blitz in 1940 and two years later, at the age of 18, joined the Women’s RAF and became a ‘grease monkey’, an aircraft mechanic. She could take apart a Spitfire engine and put it back together again by herself. But women were not allowed in combat roles. So her story inspired me to re-imagine a squadron of female RAF pilots in fantastic aircraft defending Britain from an invasion that in the real history of WW2 never happened.

What else draws me to write dieselpunk? It offers incredible degrees of freedom for a writer’s creativity. The sci-fi elements in DragonFly involve my creations of alternative chemistry and physics (quadra-hydrogen) and there are fantasy elements where I weave the occult, wizards and paranormal events into the plot lines. The opportunity to act as a ‘world-builder’, as if I was actually in that era looking into the future, is very exciting. I can redefine the entire history of World War Two: its technology, its society, its battles and ultimately the outcome. I have some exciting departures planned for the sequel, ‘Spies in Manhattan’ set in a dieselpunk New York.
MARTI:  My research (such as it was) suggests that steampunk got its start from Jules Verne. Where did dieselpunk come from? And what would you say would be the defining images for dieselpunk, as the goggles and brass, leather and cogs are for steampunk?

CHARLES:  Dieselpunk has its origins in the pulp fiction and comics of the 1930s and 40s. There are some terrific examples of retro-futuristic ‘crime noir’ dieselpunk for example. The defining images here would be the hard-boiled private detective with the requisite fedoras, trench coats, machine guns and gangster lingo, set in a futuristic Gotham of dark alleyways and shady nightclubs. But with androids. Find Bard Constantine’s ‘Troubleshooter’ series on Amazon to sample this kind of retro-crime sci-fi. (www.amazon.com/Troubleshooter-Red-Eyed-Killer-Bard-Constantine-ebook/dp/B00AAQ8K06/)

Art Deco defined this era’s architecture. It was the dawn of the metropolis, of aviation and the Jazz Age, of radio and mass communications. Substitute stainless steel and chrome for brass; add a bit of bakelite, some vacuum tubes and tons of concrete; mix in forests of skyscrapers in big impersonal cities; festoon the sky-high halls with the flags and emblems of totalitarian regimes; shake, and you have the perfect dieselpunk cocktail!

Two iconic movies of this genre, ‘The Rocketeer’ and ‘Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow’ capture this visual aesthetic perfectly.
MARTI:  Can I ask you a personal question? (Don’t you love it when people say that — just as if they might not actually ask it.) This whole writer gig. When did it start for you? And do you find it easy, or something you have to work at to get your story down on paper…. or on computer, as it were?

CHARLES;  Since I can ever remember, I have had this duality about my interests and my artistic and scientific sides have had this quiet running battle for decades. When I was younger I showed a talent for creative writing but my interest in chemistry moved me towards a degree in metallurgy. After fifteen years pursuing a technical career path in the automotive industry, I left technology behind in favor of general management and completed an MBA with a specialty in Finance. It was during my MBA classes – where I had to write essay style papers for nearly every class – that I re-discovered the creative writing talent that had its roots in my youth. Now I am able to combine all of my experiences and place it on ‘paper’. My first published novel, Tiger Paw draws from my experiences in the business world as an FBI agent hunts an assassin murdering Wall St millionaires.

I started writing seriously in 2003, although I have written as part of my business career for over 35 years. Writing is a craft and every time you write, you learn something new about your voice and improve your technique. I started writing in the thriller and espionage genre but I believe I have now found my niche in science fiction. That’s what attracted me to dieselpunk – an almost free expression creativity to blend elements of science fiction and fantasy together. I enjoy adding touches of the macabre – the supernatural, paranormal and the occult – to my work and that is evident in my thriller, Tiger Paw as well as in my science fiction adventure, DragonFly.

I think an aspiring author needs two things. First is an overriding passion to communicate something of meaning beyond your usual boundaries and to people beyond your immediate circle. Why are you writing? What is the purpose? Second is an appreciation that authorship is a craft and an art form, and that an apprenticeship needs to be served. To master creative writing you need to make a commitment to continuous improvement. There are no short cuts. I’ve been writing seriously for over ten years. I’ve written entire novels that I now classify as my ‘practice’ novels even though I didn’t know they were at the time. Even after ten years, I’m learning new things daily about the craft and about the publishing business. And what I’ve also learned, after taking a few unplanned sabbaticals, is that I simply must write. I cannot stop writing. Something would be missing in my life if I did.

Creating a novel is a process that starts with idea formulation and research, and progresses with an increasing devotion to plain old hard work. Right now, I have six or eight novels in my mental pipeline in four different series in multiple genres. Any one of these I could start writing tomorrow if the fancy took me. In addition, I have five or six short fiction works in mind (up to novella length). I’m thinking up new storylines with new sets of characters every day. So you can imagine that since I’m not yet a full-time author, my biggest problem is time management. My goal is to see all of these in ‘print’. But it may take me the next ten years to do it.
MARTI:   Do you want your stories to have any kind of deeper message, or underlying theme? Or are they stories just for the fun of being stories?

CHARLES:  I think there’s a difference between a genre writer and a literary writer. A genre writer has to be mindful that on the surface, genre fiction is basically a form of entertainment. If you write thrillers, you have to thrill. If you write sci-fi, you have to world build and be fantastic. If you write romance, you have to titillate, etc. You get the idea. But this can cause many writers to churn out copious volumes of prose under a general formula like a proverbial production line. Some genre authors like James Patterson have so many storylines that he has to hire ghost writers to actually do the hard work. He just acts as an editor of his branded fiction. I’m not made like that. At least I hope it never comes to that. That’s not why I started writing. Although come to think of it, it’s probably very lucrative. Oh, well.

Definitely, I plan to write fiction that entertains. I understand the first rule of genre writing: give the readers what they want. But I like to think of this as just the top layer or the outer skin of the onion. In my fiction, the next layer below this is a layer of information. What can I give the reader that has added value? Can I transport them to faraway places? Confront them with new cultures and ideas? Maybe I can influence them to seek more information beyond my novels or to travel and experience the people and settings for themselves? In my thriller, Tiger Paw for example, I have settings all across the USA from Wyoming to Washington and I explore the meanings of Hinduism and Eastern mysticism in the context of the mind of a serial killer. I did extensive research and used real life locations that suited the plot.

And that leads to the deeper layers in my fiction. The hidden meanings. The over-riding themes. They are definitely tucked behind the veil of entertainment and wrapped in the folds of information. In Tiger Paw, the theme was… how much wealth is enough? At what dire cost, to individuals and to society, will the divide between the 1% and 99% become too wide? What price will someone pay to sell their soul to the Devil? And who will collect?

In DragonFly, I explore the emotions of the turbulent era of the 1940s when a world war engulfed the entire planet in darkness; a time when, for both the military and civilians alike, tomorrow may be your last day, so you’d better make the most of it. I contrast the romantic notions of patriotism with the reality of a war whose outcome was an all-or-nothing struggle for the survival of good versus evil. What did the soldiers feel on D-Day or when they hit the sands of Iwo Jima? What was it like when Paris was liberated and suddenly the victors were the vanquished? These are the meanings I’m trying to capture beneath the surface of my prose. It was a big war. I’ve still got a long way to go to cover this immense ground in my subsequent books in the series.
MARTI:   What is your favorite length: story, novella, full-length novel?

CHARLES:  Wow, I never really thought about it. I think writing a short story is actually more difficult than you think it should be. In a novel, you have the time to develop the characters and the setting. You can build suspense over chapters, create twists and turns that take you on a different route to the end point. In a short story or even a novella, you have to draw in the reader immediately and establish your protagonist and their personality from the get go, within paragraphs or even the first few sentences, and then propel them on their way without much hesitation. The premise must be engaging. The character’s plight immediately sympathetic. And the goal compelling. So all in all, I guess I prefer the full length novel. It might be a long slog to get everything on ‘paper’ but it’s not a sprint. I feel exhausted just writing this!
MARTI:   Can you tell us what you are currently working on?
CHARLES:  ‘DragonFly’ is Book One in the series, ‘Missions of the DragonFly Squadron’. Book Two, the sequel, ‘Spies in Manhattan’ is being written now, very different from Book One. Less action, more intrigue, like a sci-fi thriller and a full right turn in the historical timeline of the war, events that throw the lever of my World War Two into another gear entirely. Cities become more ‘punkish’. The politics of war becomes more complicated. Some new top secret technology delays the atomic age and puts a Cold War future on hold indefinitely.

There will also be two series of companion short fiction, ‘DragonFly: Behind Enemy Lines’ and ‘DragonFly: Tales of Magic and Mystery’.

The first of these stories has been published. ‘Die Fabrik/The Factory’ is a sci-fi horror story that is an eye-witness account from inside the Nazis’ Blutskrieger factory. These short stories and novellas will give further insight into the characters and world of DragonFly. I will likely publish two more short stories before the second full novel is out.

I also plan to write a novella which is a break in the war that is set in a time between Books One & Two. It will be in Morocco where Veronica and her best friend, Busbee are on leave. It will be a romantic suspense, kind of my take on ‘Casablanca’ with a dieselpunk twist, shaken not stirred.

I also want to write some short stories to explore the life of the Druid wizard, Affodill. So these would be classed in the fantasy genre. There will be a murder mystery. And more sci-fi horror stories with new characters on the Nazi side. I do have a lot of stuff to write! But it’s all very vivid. I know exactly where I’m going with all this. I feel excited I can explore different genres and facets within my dieselpunk world through the medium of these companion pieces of shorter fiction and novellas.

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See, I told you he is a veritable fount of information.   He has a lovely website at www.CharlesACornell.com where you can check out more about his books and even sign up to follow him as he talks about the books and about writing and oh, I don’t know what else.  Mowing his grass?   He is also on the ubiquitous Facebook at www.Facebook.com/CharlesACornell

Great stuff, and I urge you to give Dragonfly a try.   It’s a big wide genre world out there, Dear Ones.  Spread yourself around a bit.  And here’s a nifty pic of Dragonfly for you.  How cool is that!

 

 

ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and deservedly so.  It is such a beautiful work, and uses a fascinating method of luring us into the West of  the late 1800s and the early 1900s.

The narrator is a fairly well-known history professor, now retired, and now fighting a battle of some kind of degenerating bone disease, which is never given a name, but which has caused a severe freezing of his skeletal styructure, leading to a leg amputation, and he is confined to a motorized wheelchair.  He cannot stand, and requires daily help getting him into a hot bath to relieve the pain, and being put to bed.

He is in gentle conflict with his son Rodman over the amount of perceived independence he has.   He has moved alone to his grandmother’s house out in the boonies where he intends to write a novel based on the life of his grandmother, who lived to be 91. It covers about two decades before the turn of the twentieth century, when she meets a young man at a gathering in the Concord area of Massachussetts, where Transcendentalism, academia, and gentility are her life.  She is acquainted with many of the big names of the day.  In spite of the difference in their class,  she remains friends with him, a mining engineer, even as he travels West to ply his trade.  At some point, he returns and they marry.  He leaves again to prepare a home in the mining town where he is employed.  After five years, he sends for her to join him.   There, as she makes her life following him from one rough camp or town to another, we see the conflict between the wilderness of the west and its inhabitants, and the gentility of the East, with its culture, education and learning.

Gentility is inherited through the female line like hemophilia, and is all but incurable.

It is a story about marriage, theirs, together through trials and difficult times, through the drowning death of their youngest daughter, through infidelity and danger.  While the grandson, our narrator, has a marriage that disintegrated when his wife, shortly after learning of his growing disability, announced she was leaving him for another man.

The book weaves the past deftly through the present,  the Old west with the new,  ancestors with the youth of toay (the today of 1970), seeking that comfortable ‘angle of repose’, a technical term which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling when piled, and as he says to the young woman helping him with transcribing his tapes,

…it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down.  I suppose it is;

The book asks what it is that keeps a family together,  and what tears them apart, what disturbs that 30 degree angle of repose.

 

 

NO TRACE by Barry Maitland

Another fascinating mystery by Australian writer Barry Maitland.  This is the eighth in the series featuring DCI Brock and DS Kathy Kolla as they battle crime and criminals in modern day London.

As with the others in the series, this book has a central theme, and it is art, modern vs. traditional,  and the question of just what makes something art.

Brock and Kolla are working on two cases of kidnapping of preschool girls when they get a call about a third.   This is the young daughter, 5 years old, of a famous artist.  He is a widower raising her alone, against the wishes of his in-laws who do not like him.  After his wife committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, he created a spectacular series of paintings based on his emotions of the event.   When his daughter goes missing, he begins to create another series of banners, one for each day she is missing.  Sheesh.  Talk about self-involved.  No wonder the in-laws don’t like him.

He lives on a square which houses several other artists, and an upscale art gallery which offers free room and board to struggling, promising artists.  It features strange artwork such as the sculptures of dead bodies and dead body parts by one artist, the very large scale models of naked cherubs, disturbingly lifelike, of another.   The one traditional old-school artist living and working on the square has great disdain for the new stuff.  He believes that

the young artists in the square didn’t have an original thought between them, that everything was a reference to something else.

Also living on the square is Batty Betty.  Gently mad,  Betty drifts in and out of lucidity, claiming to know secrets, and talks about a monster.

Then Betty is found hanged in the basement of a construction project on the square, another artist is found hanged, and the father of the missing child is found with his throat slashed.

There is a great deal of reference to 18th century painter Henry Fuseli.  He was a prolific artist, producing some 200 paintings and over 800 other designs and etchings.  Here are two of his works mentioned in the book.  The first, The Nightmare,  is what the artist  in the book based his popular series on.  The second, Thor battering the Midgard Serpent, was Fuseli’s diploma work for the Royal Academy, accepted 1790.