Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Genre Character of the Week: Alex White


Today I finally caught up to author Richard Matheson; to be fair, I’m just talking about the novels, not the short stories, screenplays or other writings, and even then there are still a few tittles I could not track down for a reasonable amount of money (much as I love the writing, I’m not paying more than $50 for a paperback of The Night Stalker).  His latest book, Other Kingdoms focuses on the events which happened to a World War I soldier in England after he is injured in the war.  The protagonist, and this week’s genre character,Alex White.
 
The story is told from the point of view of 82-year-old horror author Arthur Black, creator of a series of horror books called Midnight.  Born Alexander White, he tells the reader the story of an event which occurred to you just after he finished serving as a soldier in WWI due to injury.  The story is one of his first loves, to two very different women while living in a small town called Gatford.
 
Although I wasn’t a fan of the author commenting on the structure of his book while writing it (commenting on nice turns of phrase or unacceptable word usage depending), it did a great job of conveying the feel of life and love at that young age (the main character is 18 at the time of the events in the story), and although more than a little whiney at times, he did come across as an honest look at a young man in extreme situations.
 
Having now caught up, I’m moving into another genre (which is tricky, as Matheson has written in Crime, Fantasy, Horror, Western, Non-Fiction and straight literature), but for me right now I’m jumping over to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, and then perhaps to something a little more Fantasy-based.

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