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AWESOME-tober-fest 2017: Heart Shaped Box (2007) – Joe Hill

Posted in books, Genres, ghosts, horror, monsters with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, Awesome-tober-fest 2017, Book Report, ghosts, Halloween, holiday, monsters on October 18, 2017 by Paxton

I’ve been a fan of Stephen King since before high school. So when I found out his son, Joe, was writing books, I was initially intrigued but ultimately never sought out the kid’s books. Then I randomly stumbled upon Horns. I forget how, but the synopsis intrigued me and I put it on my Amazon list making a mental note to check that book out when I get a chance. Then, in 2013, the Kindle book went on sale so I pulled the trigger and read it. And really enjoyed the book. So at that point, I’m wondering, what Joe Hill book should I read next?

Enter AWESOME-toberfest 2015. I was all set to do Ghosts as the theme and I was deciding between two Joe Hill books; the short story collection 20th Century Ghost and the novel Heart Shaped Box. However, things happen, things change, and I wind up doing invisible man that year instead. Flash forward to 2017. I’m really doing ghosts this time. So, I get a sample on my iPad of both books, read the samples and select, with much fanfare to no one but myself…Heart Shaped Box.

So, what is this book about? The quick elevator pitch is that aging rock star Jude Coyne likes to collect macabre things. Among other things he has a used hangman’s noose, a signed witch’s confession from the Salem Witch trials, and even a snuff film. And when his assistant stumbles across a haunted suit in an online auction, Jude decides on impulse to buy it and it to his collection. Yet when the suit arrives on his doorstep a few weeks later in a black, heart-shaped box, Jude finds that he’s going to get more than he bargained for.

Heart-Shaped Box was Hill’s first novel, published in 2007. It’s actually pretty good. Based on the two novels I’ve read, Hill really knows how to set up the atmosphere of his books’ worlds. Hill’s books exist in this darker, hyper real existence where crazy things can happen but it still feels 100% real. Like I can easily picture it and it feels like I’m in that world as well when I’m reading the book. Hill is also good at setting up his main characters. Jude, in this novel, isn’t the greatest guy. He’s an aging rockstar, he collects weird memorabilia, he sleeps with goth girls that are way too young for him. But by the end of the novel you see how the experiences in the book change him. He realizes that how he’s been acting is wrong. He sees the unhealthy patterns he’s following. We also learn a little about his past that brings his current behaviors into focus. So by the novel’s climax, the things Jude learns and the behaviors that are changed are earned.

What about the ghost aspects of the novel? Hill realizes his ghost very well. He is CREEPY. He has black scribbles over his eyes which somehow makes him more terrifying. You learn a little bit about the nature of the particular ghost haunting the suit, but it’s not really made clear if that applies to all ghosts. There are clearly some rules for the ghost in the book but you don’t know if the rules apply to all ghosts or just him.

I liked this book. I actually think I liked it more than Horns. And don’t get me wrong, I liked Horns. I really like what I’ve read of Hill’s books so far. They are dark and atmospheric. They have interesting characters that follow a good arch throughout. And the story concepts for his books so far have been interesting and different.

I happen to also have two of Hill’s newer books The Fireman and NOS4A2 which are absolutely going to get read sooner rather than later.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

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Dorothy Must Die Stories Volume 1 (2014) by Danielle Paige

Posted in books, Classic literature with tags Book Report, books, pop culture, reviews, Wizard of Oz on February 16, 2017 by Paxton

A week or two ago I reviewed Danielle Paige’s Dorothy Must Die. It’s the first in a series of books that take place several years after the original Wizard of Oz book by Frank Baum. It reimagines Oz as a place in serious peril where Dorothy has returned but she’s changed. She’s become obsessed with magic and has essentially usurped Ozma as the ruler and with the help of Glinda starts literally strip mining Oz for magic. It’s an interesting enough premise and the author really digs in and reuses characters from the books in very interesting ways that made me want to continue the journey into this Oz.

Aside from the main books in the series, Paige has written a series of novellas that act as prequels to the books. I went to my local library and I found the very first collection of novellas called Dorothy Must Die Stories Volume 1.

DMD Stories 1

This book contains the first three prequel novellas; No Place Like Oz, The Witch Must Burn and The Wizard Returns. I didn’t really know anything other than the titles going into these but I was intrigued. Mostly by The Wizard Returns since that character is very cagey in Dorothy Must Die so I was very interested to hear how The Wizard got back to this particular Oz and what his agenda may be.

The first novella, No Place Like Oz, is very Dorothy-centric. It’s also the longest one by about 100 pages. It picks up with Dorothy a few years after her original return to Kansas from Oz. It’s her sixteenth birthday party. We see that Dorothy is sort of unhappy as many people think she’s crazy with her ramblings about a fairy magic land with talking lions and people made of tin. Even some of her friends don’t believe her. Plus, Dorothy is finding out that life on the farm in rural Kansas is not as exciting as it was in Oz. Once you’ve encountered magic, nothing else can really live up to it. So we see this Dorothy, who’s become a little bitter because no one believes her about Oz, even her friends. Plus she sort of enjoyed the fame that her disappearance caused in Kansas and once that started to fade she began resenting her life there. After her birthday party ends embarrassingly bad, Dorothy shuts herself up into her room and opens a mysterious gift to find a pair of red, high heeled ruby shoes. She puts them on, clicks them together just as Aunt Em and Uncle Henry walk into her room and transports all three of them to Oz.

This is the gist of the story. Dorothy is back in Oz, this time with Em and Henry. She meets Ozma and reunites with her old friends. And being back in Oz, instead of making her happier, starts to enhance some of her feelings. You see her obsession with magic really take hold. It’s a really good story. I feel like Paige made the reason that Dorothy sort of turns bad believable. It’s not a 180 with no explanation. It makes a bit of sense. And you get to see the setup for Dorothy as we find her in Dorothy Must Die.

The next story, The Witch Must Burn, is told from the point of view of Jellia Jamb, the head house maid in the Emerald City. She plays a fairly big (and ultimately important) part in Dorothy Must Die. And Jellia’s story here is really a vessel to tell the story of Glinda and her possible future plans for Oz. You also get to see a bit of just how horrible Dorothy has become, but it all leads to Glinda “borrowing” Jellia from Dorothy and what happens to Jellia because of this. I was not expecting this story but it was a good read.

Like I said, the third and final story is really the one I was most interested in. The Wizard Returns starts off with the Wizard leaving Dorothy at the end of the original Wizard of Oz. The hot air balloon he’s in crashes and we see him land in the very same poppy field that Dorothy was trapped in. Fast forward twenty five years and The Wizard is awoken and he has no memory of himself or his past actions. This particular story started off a bit slow, but the back half really saved it. You still don’t really 100% know The Wizard’s agenda by the end, but you know what happened to him before the events in Dorothy Must Die.

All three of these stories are honestly good and do a great job of setting up the world we see in Dorothy Must Die. However, I thought my favorite story was going to be The Wizard Returns, but honestly, I think it turns out being No Place Like Oz. I’m glad I read this collection. There is another set of prequel novellas that take place after this. They are about Dorothy’s friends; Heart of Tin, The Straw King and Ruler of Beasts. However, I’ll probably get the full sequel novel The Wicked Will Rise and read it before delving back into these prequel novellas.

I guess the ultimate question with these prequel novellas is, should you read them before or after you’ve read Dorothy Must Die. It could go either way but I’d recommend reading them after DMD. They fill in the world of the books and I feel like you may want the basis of the full novel first before the novellas. But I think if you did the prequels first and then DMD, it would honestly still work.

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I return to an alternate Oz with Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

Posted in books, Classic literature with tags Book Report, Wizard of Oz on February 3, 2017 by Paxton

From time to time I’ll read stuff that isn’t part of the established “Oz canon”, but is directly inspired by Baum’s Oz works or it takes Oz and re-interprets it in an alternate way. The 1985 movie Return to Oz would be an example of this. Or Gregory Maguire’s Wicked series. Whenever I read this stuff I’ll try to throw a review up to add to my ever growing Oz review archives.

Recently, after watching Return to Oz for the Cult Film Club podcast and reading its novelization, I decided I was ready to try another “alternate Oz” story so I pulled the trigger on a book I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about; Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige.

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I wasn’t for sure what to expect from this book when I started to read. Was it a reboot of Wizard of Oz? A sequel? A sidequel? I had no clue. So I loaded it on my iPad and hoped for the best.

It starts off a little slow. Amy lives in Kansas. Her father left her and her mom. The mom has become an addict. Life is not good. And we sort of get beat over the head with this for the first 75-80 pages. Amy’s life sucks. I get it. This early building of character angst for Amy is sort of tiring and why I no longer read as many YA books as I used to. That being said, the fun begins when the freak tornado hits and Amy wakes up in Oz.

What this book turns out to be is a sequel to The Wizard of Oz. I’d like to definitively say it’s a sequel to the book or the movie, but, like Return to Oz, they sort of hedge their bets and use iconography from both. Mainly, of course, it’s the damn slippers. But Paige is a little bit more ambiguous about the slippers. She mentions that Dorothy wore silver slippers, however there are statues in Munchkinland featuring Dorothy in ruby slippers and when we finally meet her, Dorothy is wearing ruby slippers. She never takes them off actually. But it’s honestly a minor thing, there’s a lot more going on than the slippers.

The biggest strength of this book’s story is the world building. The events in this book seem to take place many years after the original Oz book/movie. From context clues in the story it seems like events in the first two Baum Oz books (Wizard of Oz, Marvelous Land of Oz) happen as normal. It’s Dorothy’s return in the third book (Ozma of Oz) that events seem to “take a turn”. Many years before the events in this book, Dorothy returned to Oz from Kansas and Ozma made her a princess. Those events basically happened in the Baum books, but over the years Dorothy sort of becomes obsessed with magic. This obsession changes Dorothy’s behavior. It makes her more erratic. And with this change, her closes friends, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman and the Lion sort of change with her. Dorothy supplants Ozma as the ruler of Oz and conscripts Glinda to enslave the Munchkins to start mining Oz for magic. Oz’s magic lies deep within its land so everyone is busy strip mining Oz and hoarding magic for Dorothy. And like I said, Dorothy’s friends sort of follow her lead. Scarecrow becomes obsessed with getting smarter. He starts experimenting on Oz citizens like a mad scientist. Studying their brains and creating weird monster hybrids. The Tin Man is in love with Dorothy and becomes the captain of her guard. The Lion goes savage and starts just indiscriminately eating people and drinking in their fear. It’s a very interesting idea that the gifts bestowed upon Dorothy’s friends (brains, heart, courage) are the very thing that are driving them mad. It can be dark and frightening, but I’m enjoying the world that Paige is building up.

Wanted: Dorothy

So Amy shows up in the middle of all of this. We slowly learn all the backstory stuff I just talked about. Amy is put in a dungeon by Dorothy but is saved by The Revolutionary Order of the Wicked. The Order is a group of the witches of Oz that have banned together to stop Dorothy’s tyrannical rule. They include Gert, the former Good Witch of the North. Glamora, the twin sister of Glinda. And Mombi, the witch that originally secretly held Ozma in captivity from that second Oz book. The Order trains Amy to go undercover in Dorothy’s court in the Emerald City in order to get close to her and hopefully assassinate her and allow Oz to once again be free.

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Year End Book Report: The Best Books I Read in 2016

Posted in Batman, books, comic books, movies, pop culture, Star Wars with tags Apple, Billy the Kid, Book Report, books, classic literature, Harry Potter, Marvel Comics, reviews, Star Wars, Year End Books on January 12, 2017 by Paxton

Here I go, writing another one of these year end round up articles that I’m shocked to be writing every year. 2017. CRAZY. What a ride 2016 was. Hopefully 2017 will give us a bit of a break.

This past year was an interesting year for my book/comics list. After so many years of logging my books and comics reading via Google Spreadsheet, I actually converted my logs over to an online data tool called Airtable. It’s similar to Access in that it is a relational database but the user entry interface is very simple to create and similar to Excel. Plus being able to link specific information between tables really helps in cross referencing and spelling. You have no idea how many times I misspelled author names throughout my logs.

Here’s what my book log looks like now on Airtable. I’ve converted all my logs back to when I first started in 2007.

The blue colored fields in the screenshot are actually linked to another table. I was able to also create the Rating field on the right with different color coded ratings to make it easy at a glance to see what is going to make my year end list and what isn’t. Plus, Airtable makes all of this data entry even easier with a nice app for my iPhone or iPad that makes it easy to log entries on the go. Google Sheets had one as well but Airtable’s works better.

So that’s all the behind the scenes stuff. I had a better year for novels. I was able to pick 5 this year. Again, comics were booming and I had a tough time paring down to 5. But I did it.

So, without further ado, here’s the list!

Books

The Old Man and the Sea (1952) – Ernest Hemingway – I don’t read classics as often as I used to. I really need to remedy that. There are two reasons why I read this. #1, it was featured in the movie The Equalizer starring Denzel Washington as a book he’s reading. #2, Steph checked it out from the library with a bunch of other books and I, on a whim, picked it up to read. It’s actually really good. I quite enjoyed it. I’m probably not going to pick up any other Hemingway, but I’ll definitely try to read more classic lit this coming year. I’ve been wanting to re-read Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, so maybe I can get that done.

Steve Jobs (2011) – Walter Isaacson – I’ve now read two of Isaacson’s famous biographies and let me say that I’m hooked. Back in 2014 I read his biography of Benjamin Franklin and it nearly made my year end best of list. This one about Apple founder Steve Jobs actually cracks the list. It’s not only a great portrait of a complicated man, but it’s also a great look at the beginnings of our technological age we live in now. I would love for Isaacson to tackle Bill Gates in a full book, but I’m not sure that’ll happen. Isaacson did write a book called The Innovators that really digs into the people who created the computer and the Internet; going as far back as Alan Turing and jumping forward to people like Larry Page and Bill Gates. That will probably be next on my Isaacson reading list and the closest I’ll get to a full Gates biography by him.

Star Wars: Catalyst – A Rogue One Novel (2016) – James Luceno – The “New Canon” of Star Wars books since Disney has taken over has been very…hit or miss. Since those books started in Fall 2014, only one has made my year end list. And honestly, I think that one novel (Star Wars: Tarkin), also written by James Luceno, would work perfectly as a side-quel to this book. This is the written prequel to the movie Rogue One and it’s pretty great. It digs deep into the relationship between Galen Erso and Director Krennic. It also explores a bit more the rivalry between Krennic and Tarkin all while adding in backstory to how the Death Star was built and how it works and what they use to power the planet killing laser. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Magic Kingdom for Sale–Sold! (Landover series Book 1) (1986) – Terry Brooks – I talked about this book earlier in my High Fantasy Month article back in March. It’s a different setup for a fantasy series and I really enjoyed it. I had bought the collection of the first three books in the series, but I’ve not delved into the second book yet. However, it’s on the plan for this year.

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A review of Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901) by L Frank Baum

Posted in books, Frank Baum, reviews with tags Baumalong, book, Book Report, Frank Baum, pop culture, reviews on December 8, 2016 by Paxton

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Baum review, so let’s do this.

The illustrator of the first Oz book was WW Denslow. If you recall, he illustrated only the very first Oz book before John Neill took over in book two and illustrated over 30 Oz books in his career. Denslow and Baum had a falling out in 1902 over royalties from the first Wizard of Oz musical. However, before that happened, Denslow had also illustrated Baum’s books By the Candelabra Glare, Father Goose: His Book and another children’s fantasy story called Dot and Tot of Merryland.

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Dot and Tot of Merryland was published in 1901, the very next year after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz although it was actually written around the same time. As I mentioned, the book is a children’s fantasy book written in the same style as Wizard. Child protagonists visit a magical fairy land and must find their way back home when they become trapped there.

Yes, that sounds awfully familiar but it’s Baum style, it’s straight up in his wheelhouse. He managed to make this concept work for like four or five of his Oz books, so I’m not too worried he’ll make it work here.

dot-and-tot3

The story begins with Dot who is a bit of a sickly child. She’s sent to live in her father’s palatial mansion in the outskirts of town. While there she has the run of the estate. She starts playing with the gardener’s little boy, Tot. They are having a picnic out by the stream that runs through the back yard and they are swept away in a rowboat which takes them through a tunnel in the mountains where they emerge in a fairy land called Merryland. They meet a crazy cast of characters including a guy with long whiskers called the “Watchdog” that oversees the entrance to Merryland and they meet the ruler of the land who is a walking, talking wax doll. Dot and Tot are adopted by the queen and go with her to tour the seven valleys of Merryland.

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