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Review of The Talisman for the #Talismanalong

Posted in books, pop culture, Stephen King with tags Book Report, books, Peter Straub, pop culture, reviews, Stephen King, Talismanalong on September 4, 2013 by Paxton

Talismanalong 2

Well, the Talismanalong I started with Trish at the beginning of August has ended. We’ve all read the book. We had some good discussion on Twitter under #Talismanalong about the book. It was a lot of fun, I enjoyed reading and talking about the book with the participants. It’s always fun to do these things especially with Trish, she’s just so much fun. And, she’s due for a tiny human to come out of her at any moment, so let’s all hope that goes well.

Now, though, I guess it’s time to talk about what I thought about the actual book.

Going in, I was not overly excited to read this book. I honestly had no idea what type of story to expect as I knew very little about the book other than the fact that it existed. I think I was also colored by my “meh-ness” about King’s The Stand. And the beginning of this book did NOT allay my fears. The first 80 pages or so are rough (ie boring as ballz). I was concerned that I may have made a huge mistake. Then we are introduced to Speedy and The Territories. And the story takes off.

This book reminds me a lot of The Stand. The long, epic journey. I said before that The Talisman is The Stand as written by Neil Gaiman. Speaking of Neil Gaiman, another book that this reminds me of is American Gods. One, central “evil” character that must be defeated. Long, epic journeys, climatic final battles. Many fantastical elements. Another book this reminds me of? Odysseus by Homer. A hero must fight trial after trial on a long journey to find his way home. So, yes, this is classic storytelling by two masters of genre storytelling.

Things I liked? I said this book reminds me of The Stand a little bit, but unlike The Stand, this book has a manageable cast of characters and a much more focused story line. I didn’t feel like I was drowning in characters and plot throughout reading the book. I also love the idea and execution of The Territories. I liked the hero Jack. I liked his companion Wolf. For the most part, I think Morgan Sloat is a good villain, but he’s surprisingly not that fully developed considering the length of the story. I also actually like the final confrontations and wrap ups in this book (unlike, oh, I don’t know, THE STAND).

What didn’t I like? Again, I hate to harp on this with King, but, the story is just too damn long. This book could have edited out at least 100 pages and not really lost anything. There is A LOT of naval gazing throughout the different parts of this book. Especially towards the end. While it’s more focused than The Stand, it still needed some judicious trimming. I found “story fatigue” setting in around page 550-600 (there were 770 pages in this book). Even though I liked the book, I was sort of ready for the final act and wrap up. It really felt like it took a week to read the last 150 pages or so. But to be fair, part of that is my inability to find time to read outside of work and on weekends. With a 2 year old and an 8 month old, reading at home is a rare occurrence.

So, overall, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. And that is a surprise to me. Will I read the sequel, Black House? A week ago, I was gung-ho to read it, yes. But now, I think I’ll eventually read it, but not anytime soon. Plus, the stuff I hear from people about the sequel is not exactly glowing. And I hear it has a thin connection to the Dark Tower series of which I am not a fan. So, we’ll see. But I can definitely recommend The Talisman as a good and interesting story, with good characters and a lot of imagination.

And now that I know I like this book, I definitely be reading Straub’s Shadowland sooner rather than later.

Thanks, Trish and everyone else for joining me on this Talismanalong. I had a lot of fun.

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Vintage Stephen King/Peter Straub interview from Fangoria magazine (1986)

Posted in books, Fangoria, magazine, nostalgia, Stephen King with tags books, Fangoria, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Talismanalong on August 21, 2013 by Paxton

So here I am, just past the half way point in my reading of the King/Straub fantasy epic, The Talisman. I’m going to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t totally looking forward to reading this book. I love King, but the book is kinda long and I kept flashing back to my reading of The Stand. And after the first 80 pages I just kept thinking, “I’ve made a horrible mistake.” But the book quickly started getting better and I’m much more comfortable now. I’m very much enjoying the book at the halfway point. It’s also getting me excited to read the sequel, Black House, as well as that Shadowland book I bought on a whim several months ago.

While trolling through my old Fangoria magazines, I found an article from The Bloody Best of Fangoria Vol 5. The Bloody Best was a compilation of previously published articles that Fangoria released at the end of each year. Essentially, it’s a reprint magazine. This particular volume was from 1986. The interview I’m sharing is with both King and Straub around the time of the release of the book. Like I said, the article was reprinted in 1986 for the compilation, but the article itself is from sometime in 1984.

You can click each of the images to see them BIGGER on Flickr.

For those that don’t want to read the article, there are a few interesting tidbits.

* King and Straub can no longer remember who wrote what. And the parts you think are King probably aren’t because they each tried to put tricks in the story and use each other’s style to fool their readers.
* Universal bought the movie rights to the book in 1984 and Spielberg was attached to direct. Even going as far as having a script commissioned. Obviously, nothing came of that.
* At this point in time, George Romero was set to direct a film adaptation of The Stand right after he finished filming Day of the Dead. King had written the script and whittled it down to a 2.5 hour movie and says in the article that “everything is in there”. But I’m not sure how that’s even possible.
* After The Talisman, Straub is mostly done with supernatural horror. He wants to focus on more crime and mystery. Which is what he does. His next three books are his famed Blue Rose Trilogy (Koko, Mystery, The Throat).

I mentioned Straub’s next few books after The Talisman above. Conversely, the next published book for Stephen King after The Talisman was Thinner, but that was originally under the Richard Bachman alias. The next KING book was the short story collection, Skeleton Crew. Which is one of my very favorite King books. But Thinner is rather good as well.

It seems like this article just ends. I guess the interview is concluded in the next issue. A bit disappointing as I wanted them to discuss any ideas for the sequel we wouldn’t see for like 20 years.

Another thing I thought before reading up on The Talisman was that King and Straub hated each other. That they started off as friends but the writing of the book drove a wedge into that friendship. That’s why it took so long to get a sequel. However, that’s clearly not the case at all. These guys were friends for years before The Talisman and they’ve been friends ever since. Interesting the ideas you overhear other people say that have no basis in reality.

So yes, I’m enjoying the book and I’d recommend it to anyone that is curious and already a fan of either author. However, since this is just the halfway point, there is still plenty of time for this book to go completely “off the rails”.

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Talisman Readalong Kickoff!!

Posted in books, Stephen King with tags books, Stephen King, Talismanalong on August 1, 2013 by Paxton

I was looking at the calendar the other day and I noticed that I posted my review of Stephen King’s The Stand almost 1 year ago today. August 7, 2013. I had actually finished the book about a month before on July 9, 2013. It was nice to finally fill that hole in my King bibliography. I have several other holes I hope to fill before long (I encourage you to run with every joke that comes to mind in connection with that last sentence. I would.).

Anyway, I’m a big fan of Stephen King and I’ve read much of the man’s bibliography. However, there are still several King books I’d like to get off my internal “King reading list”; ‘Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, On Writing, The Running Man, The Talisman.

I was talking to my good friend Trish (who I did the Stand readalong with) and she’s been really digging King lately as well. She just finished readalongs for It, Under the Dome and The Shining. I told her about the outstanding King books I feel I still need to read and she said she’d do The Talisman with me. How awesome is that? Even after all her goings on (she actually gives birth to a tiny human sometime around Labor Day) she still agrees to read this book with me. That’s why I love Trish.

So anyway, the result of all this is that Trish and I are doing a readalong for The Talisman. I’m pretty excited about it. I hope this book is good. I know I like Stephen King, but I’ve never read any of Peter Straub’s books. However, in anticipation, I bought a Peter Straub novel I’ve had my eye on for a while called Shadowland.

Even if The Talisman is terrible, I’ll probably read Shadowland anyway. Then I’ll know for sure if it was King or Straub that killed the book.

The Talisman readalong officially starts today, August 1, but I finished my previous book early so I started reading it on Tuesday. I’m not very far in but I definitely have some thoughts forming. I’ll be tweeting those thoughts under #Talismanalong. So join me, won’t you?

I have a few articles planned during the readalong including an old ass magazine interview with King and Straub as well as some half way point check ins and the like. It should be fun. So grab your copy and get started. And jump over to Trish’s site and tell her you’ll be joining us.

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Superman Week 2013: BB Hiller’s Superman IV novelization (1987)

Posted in books, comic books, movies, Superman with tags Book Report, books, comic books, DC Comics, Movie Novelizations, pop culture, reviews, Superman, Superman Week on June 20, 2013 by Paxton

So the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, made it’s theatrical debut on Friday. To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to do another Superman Week. I convinced CT over at Nerd Lunch and Robert over at To The Escape Hatch to join along. So leap in a single bound over to those wonderful blogs and see what Superman content they are offering up this week.

Continuing Superman Week 2013 with another look at one of the Superman novelizations. Here’s a review of the Superman IV movie novelization from 1987. And yes, I’m pretty sure I hate this weird cover.

Supes 4 novel

The book is written by B.B. Hiller who is a veteran of movie novelizations. This guy has penned novelizations for Little Monsters (the one with Howie Mandell and Fred Savage), Ghostbusters II, Big, ALL of the 90s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies and ALL of the Karate Kid movies. So this guy has been around…so to speak. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at these things, Hiller didn’t adapt any of the other Superman movies. Only this one. The last one. And, ostensibly, the worst one. However, to be perfectly honest, I’m a fan of this last Superman movie. Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely f**king terrible but I love it anyway. And I wanted to see if the book makes an attempt at explaining ANY of the crazy ass insanity that goes down in the movie. A quick check of the page count (144) tells me that, no, this probably won’t explain a g**damn thing. But I decided to try it anyway.

The verdict? It’s actually not that bad. Somehow, the ridiculous story on the page comes across better than it does on the big screen. However, there are several added scenes and subplots that help explain some of the ridiculousness. Just so you know, about 45 minutes of footage was removed from Superman IV including an entire subplot about a first failed attempt by Lex to create a Nuclear Man.

Continue reading →

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Superman Week 2013: William Kotzwinkle’s Superman III novelization (1983)

Posted in books, movies, pop culture, Superman with tags Book Report, books, comic books, DC Comics, Movie Novelizations, movies, pop culture, reviews, Superman, Superman Week on June 19, 2013 by Paxton

It’s Day 3 of Superman Week. I convinced CT over at Nerd Lunch and Robert over at To The Escape Hatch to join along. So leap in a single bound over to those wonderful blogs and see what Superman content they are offering up this week.

For Superman Week in 2006 (“celebrating” Superman Returns), I reviewed all of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. So, for the release of this new Superman movie, I thought I’d go back and read the novelizations to two of those same movies. There weren’t novelizations of the first two Reeve Superman movies most likely due to a clause in screenwriter Mario Puzo’s contract that forbade anyone other than him from writing the novelizations. But for whatever reason, Puzo never got around to writing the books. So Warner Books only released novelizations for the second two movies. I looked forward to reading these novelizations because I love the two Superman sequels in a retarded sort of way and I wanted to see if there was any more awesomely insane weirdness in the books.

So, today, let’s take a look at the novelization to Superman III.

Written by William Kotzwinkle, the guy who also wrote the ET novelization. The overall structure of the movie story is intact in the novelization. The biggest difference with the book is that Kotzwinkle adds a sh*t ton of internal dialogue by nearly every character, but mostly Superman/Clark and Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor). Many of the internal monologues are weird and in the case of Superman/Clark, completely against character. A lot of Clark’s internalized conversations are him saying how he could fly someone he doesn’t like to the moon and leave them there. You know, stuff like, “If only you knew I was Superman…” or “If I could, I would <fill in the blank with some super powered vengeance>”. I’m fairly certain these are supposed to setup the evil Superman later in the book, but I wasn’t buying it. It was against everything you think about Clark and Superman.

And as for Gus Gorman. Ugh. I didn’t really like Pryor’s character in the movie. Pryor did good with what he was given, but the character was dumb. This guy who can’t hold a steady job discovers that he’s some idiot savant when it comes to “computers”. What? And it’s even worse in the book. It’s made more clear in the novel that Gus literally has no idea what he’s doing or how he’s doing it. It’s like all of his computer skills are some sort of super power he can only barely control. Pryor makes the character somewhat likeable, but you don’t have that luxury in the novel. And it’s painfully clear that Pryor ad-libbed many of his lines in the movie because in the book, the dialogue for Gus might be some of the worst written crap I’ve ever read. Filled with weird late 70s-early 80s colloquialisms that make no sense. Pryor must have agreed because in the movie, he gets the same information across but in a better way.

As for the villains, the characters of Ross and Vera Webster and Lorelei aren’t much better in this novel than they were in the movie. Their back stories are fleshed out a little. We get that Vera is fiercely protective of her brother and craves his approval in everything she does. There are even a few flashbacks to their childhood. Lorelei, is still mostly one dimensional. A poor man’s Miss Tessmacher. She’s pretty and the book expands a bit more on the fact that Lorelei is actually smarter than everyone thinks she is. But it’s honestly to no further end.

Unfortunately, there’s no extra story to the evil Superman stuff. I was hoping we’d get more scenes, but we really don’t. Although, the book does say that Superman’s suit turns fully black and his eyes glow green. THAT is pretty awesome and I wish the movie would have taken it the whole way.

I’m Superman. BITCHES.

The book’s climax is essentially the same. Not really much to add. No further explanation about how Gus came up with the Super Computer idea. It’s essentially taken from drawings on napkins to fully realized in the cave. Who developed the AI software the computer runs on? Gus? He acts like he’d never seen the computer before when he walks into the cave after riding the donkey down the mountain. Don’t you think he would have supervised the entire construction? When the computer shoots the “correct” Kryptonite ray at Supes, how does the computer synthesize the .052% of unknown in the chemical makeup? It’s UNKNOWN to humans. Stuff like this needed a better explanation.

I was very disappointed with this book. I love movie novelizations and it’s rare that I don’t actually enjoy one. Especially if I like the movie. I didn’t like this and I can’t recommend it.

If you want a peak into the Superman III movie that could have been, take a glance at this unused Ilya Salkind story treatment. Prepare for appearances by Supergirl, Brainiac and Mr Mxzyptlk. It’s weird, but I think it could have been spectacular.