Genre Character of the Week: Bode Locke

A few months ago while listening to the Scotch & Comics podcast, I was introduced to Joe Hill’s Locke & Key. The story, following the Locke family after a terrible incident involving the murder of the husband/father, involved the family relocating to the family home in Lovecraft, MA, and the mystery they discover there. Although all the characters are incredibly well conceived and fleshed out, my personal favourite is the youngest of the three children, Bode Locke.

Bode is the archetypal little-kid character often found throughout horror and dark fantasy stories, and although there is a lot going on with his older two siblings as they explore their new home, Locke House, it is Bode who begins to find the secrets of the home, including the thing in the Well house and a strange key which opens a door that sends the keyholder on quite a journey.

What I like best about Bode is that for all the horror that has gone on in his life (the death of his father was extremely traumatic, read the series to find out more), he sees the house, the key and his new life exciting. Things that would terrify the normal person (me included) are simply considered “COOL!” by Bode. Let me tell you, that little kid is pretty amazing.

If you haven’t checked out this series yet and are in any way a fan of dark fantasy and horror, you are really missing out.

Book Review: Ride the Nightmare

For the last few months my author of choice has been Richard Matheson. In the past I've worked my way through Michael Crichton, Pierre Berton, Terry Pratchett and a few others, simply working my way from oldest to newest, a book a month.

Although I was most familiar with Matheson in his horror and dark fantasy work (I Am Legend, Hell House, The Shrinking Man), he worked in all sorts of genres, and just a Elmore Leonard started out in Westerns before moving to the crime novels he was later famous for, Matheson began writing crime novels and thrillers. So far I've read Fury on Sunday, Someone Is Bleeding, and Woman; all of which were novels involving a relatively terrifying evening or few evenings in the lives of relatively normal people (although Woman has a decidedly Twilight Zone feel to it).

Ride the nightmare follows a married couple and their young child over the course of about 24 hours and involves mistaken identity, escaped criminals and a lot of punch for a novel that is only about 120 pages. If you've read a lot of crime novels the twists may not be too surprising to you, but the feel throughout the book is really great, the tension just builds and builds and the stakes get higher and higher.

I read the story in a collection called Noir, which contains three of Matheson's early books, and honestly, it was a lot of fun. Next up for me is actually a war novel called The Beardless Warriors, but as that is my February Matheson book, it'll have to wait.

Things I've Noticed: Clearing out the PVR can be pretty exciting

So over the last couple weeks my wife and I have been deciding between our current cable/phone/internet provider and the competition. Both sides have put up a pretty good reason to either switch or stay, and in the end our choice works best for our needs (I hope), but an interesting side-project in all this is that we have been working for the last two weeks to empty our PVR.

The Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is in some ways like a VCR, but unlike the older machine, which could be programed to tape television at a certian tie, the PVR can be programmed to tape shows or complete series at any time they air. Like a show featuring Australian crime-fighting teenaged mermaids? Annoyed that it only airs at 2:15am? No problem, the PVR will tape that series until you have dozens and dozens of episodes backlogged on your system, stopping you from watching your current prime-time favourites!

Okay, so there are some bugs, but what the heck, all new technology needs to be better understood by the users so that they can access it more effectively.

Our PVR lists a percentage of total space used (rather than number of programs) and over the last two weeks we went from 89% to 5% (last nights episode of Eastenders and The Finder). Over the course of this week I've learned a lot things.

1) Some shows work better if you watch them in a smaller period of time, AMC's Hell on Wheels (10 episodes) was a pretty fun show to watch at two episodes a night, but I think it may have lost something for me if I simly watched it weekly.

2) High Definition (HD) shows take up a lot of space, and unless the show is visually striking (mostly Special Effects heavy shows) the need to see it in HD isn't really that great.

3) You (well, I) feel a great sense of accomplishment when I get the PVR down to zero, like I've defeated a boss in a video game.

Bookmonkey vs. PVR

BOOKMONKEY WINS!!!

Genre Character of the Week: Samuel Vimes

One of my favourite times of the year is in January, when I go looking through all my lists to figure out which new books by my favourite authors are due out over the next year. In 2011 I had a list of six books I was looking forward to above all others, all of which except two ended up as reviews on my blog (the first missing title was Dead Reckoning, by Charlaine Harris, but as it was book 11 of an ongoing series, I couldn’t figure out how to review it without giving away massive spoilers). The final book was Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, featuring my favourite character in his Discworld stories, Samuel Vimes.

A few years ago I reviewed Matthew Scott’s Thraxas, a novel which paired the hard-boiled detective novel with a fantasy setting. In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, the author has satirized and parodied so many types of stories with his own fantasy world I wouldn’t know where to begin (but I suppose if you want to, you should start with The Colour of Magic, which parodies everything from classic fantasy to tourism and even Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser), but for me my personal favourite novels are his cop stories, which he calls his City Watch novels (including, Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Thud!, and Snuff) and a major part of this is the captain of the city watch, Samuel Vimes.

Now, a huge part of what I like about Sam is his growth throughout the series of books he features in, and like one of my favourite SF Genre characters, Miles Vorkosigan, Sam does an awful lot over the course of these stories. But looking back at his character in his first book,Guards! Guards!, Sam comes across as a good cop, trying to balance his own views about the importance of law and order with his experience in leading the city watch of Ankh Morpork, a wretched hive of scum and villainy if there ever was one.

In the end, he’s a decent guy trying to do his best in a less than great situation, something we can all aspire to.

Book Review: The Five

It’s not a secret that Robert McCammon is one of my favourite authors. Whether he’s scaring me with novels like Mine, or Stinger, giving me a sense of wonder with a story like Boy’s Life, or simply looking at history from a different (and sometimes fantastic) point of view like the Matthew Corbett novels or The Wolf’s Hour, I know when I pick up a new McCammon novel, I’m in for some fine storytelling.

The Five might be my favourite book of 2011.

It’s a little hard to tell right now, as I just finished it this morning, but the story, which follows a rock and roll band called The Five on a nightmarish road trip through America creeped me out, made me feel sympathy for all of its characters (even the bad guys) and did the amazing trick of being a book about music that had me feeling the way I do when I hear great bands play. The band felt real to me, in fact, overall I can’t think of any character’s who came out as two-dimensional in the story. It was really great, in both the big thrill and quiet character development moments.

In the end, the book does an amazing job of being a dark fantasy novel about rock and roll that shows the transcendent power of music.

Seriously, a great read.

Thing I've noticed: Sometimes I need to weed my television

One of the most underrated jobs in the library field is that of weeding, that is the process of removing books and other materials to make space for new ones. I think the reason for this is that at the most basic levels of library work, we kind of want to be archivists – we want to acquire new materials and never let go of old ones, because what if someday we need that title? What if some future student, or kid or just a regular reader comes into our building looking for a title and when they don’t find it they decide to leave and spend the rest of their days complaining about how useless the library is?

Here’s the thing, weeding is necessary to make space. Sometimes books are ridiculously simple to weed (computer manuals, legal texts, etc.), but eventually you need to make the hard choices and decide which books you own need to go and which need to stay.

Last week my wife and I decided to weed our viewing habits.

First off, a little context, most nights we watch about three hours of television (not including commercials, which we usually skip past); a show with our kids and then a couple hours for ourselves. Depending these are current shows, TV shows on DVD or sometimes movies, depending on our mood and the fact that we now use a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) means that we aren’t locked into any specific time to watch any show (the concept is called Timeshifting in Communications Studies and a great example of it is to think back to your viewing habits before you had a VCR if you are my age and realize that a lot of what you watched came down to what was on, rather than what you wanted to watch).

There are three good times a year to do some TV series weeding, these being late August, early January and late May – or if you will the times when current series are about to begin or end.

We try to have a one-to-one trade policy. If there is a new series coming out (such as Alcatraz) we look at the length of the show (1 hour) and try to find a comparable show we are already watching that maybe we have been losing interest in (such as Persons of Interest) this way we keep our evenings free for other stuff and can be reasonable sure that the series we watch are actually the series we want to watch. Sometimes we’ll continue to tape a show for a few weeks until we decide whether or not we’ll want to go back (for example we just started taping 30 Rock, so Whitney is currently on notice – we’ll tape both for the next two weeks, but then a choice will be made).

I know this may seem like over thinking our viewing habits, but considering that I enjoy watching television, why shouldn’t I take a little time out of my life to make sure I’m enjoying it the best I can?

Genre Character of the Week: The Duke De Richleau

Okay folks, we’re going old-school this week with one of my favourite characters from the Hammer Horror films of the ‘60s, The Duke De Richeleau (pictured left) from the 1968 film,The Devil Rides Out, as played by Christopher Lee.

In the film, the Duke is called to the south of England to visit the son of a friend and upon his arrival discovers that young Simon may be involved with Satanists. The young man’s home has all the trappings of Satanism, and as the Duke is something of an expert in the field, he and a small group spend the rest of the film attempting to save their young friend and stop this evil group as well as the Devil himself.

Here’s what I love about the character; he is an expert in Satanism and the occult. There isn’t really any backstory given for why he is so well versed in such a strange area of study, but his calm and steady demeanor allow him to put up a great fight against the ultimate evil. Christopher Lee (who scared me as Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy in earlier Hammer Horror Films) plays the good guy in this film and honestly he’s pretty great.

Add to that the fact that the screenplay was written by one of my favourite authors, Richard Matheson, and that the story was based on a book by Dennis Wheatley (British a writer of thrillers and occult novels from the 1930s through the 1970s) and that this was actually the second of eleven novels focusing on the Duke and I’ve got to say, the film is a treat and I’m really looking forward to checking out these other novels.