Nightworld: A Repairman Jack/ Adversary Cycle Novel by F. Paul Wilson (2012): If you've seen the mostly godawful Michael Mann movie The Keep, then you've met the Anti-Christ of F. Paul Wilson's apocalyptic Repairman Jack/ Adversary Cycle. The novel was much better. But that was him, rassling Scott Glenn after escaping from centuries of imprisonment thanks to those damn Nazis. Scott Glenn played Glaiken, Rasalom's equally old nemesis.
Well, here we are now, after more than 30 years, with the end of the whole shebang. Nightworld is a major revision of an earlier novel of the same name, changed to increase Repairman Jack's role in the apocalypse, among other things.
The Earth's days get impossibly shorter, day by day. In a week or so, the sun will set for the last time. Massive pits begin opening up across the planet. When night falls, giant carnivorous insects pour from the pits. Worse, larger things soon follow. Volcanoes erupt. Earthquakes shake the planet. And it's all just a preview of life on Earth once the Otherness fully arrives and Rasalom emerges from his cocoon to preside over the fallen Earth.
And so a ragtag group of heroes must find and reassemble a thingie that might allow them to defeat Rasalom and drive away the Otherness. Rasalom draws power from fear and despair in his cocoon below Central Park. And his former followers discover that he never intended them to share in the power on the day after Doomsday.
Nightworld mostly satisfies, though the massive body count of the previous installment leaves sympathetic characters a bit light on the ground, and the gathering of items (or 'plot coupons') is a fantasy trope that, much-used, is also pretty much standard at this point in the genre. Still, things remain tense and compulsively readable right to the end. Recommended.
The Dark Before the End: A Repairman Jack Novel by F. Paul Wilson (2011): One of the good things about the Repairman Jack series (which overlaps with the accompanying Adversary Cycle) is that one can pick it up well into the overall narrative and nonetheless be engaged by the goings-on. Even so, this is really The Empire Strikes Back of the series: it doesn't exactly have an ending, it just ends.
The ragtag group that opposes Rasalom (aka the Adversary) seems to have found a way to stop the apocalypse from occurring. And they'd better. If Rasalom's millennia-long plans come to fruition, Earth will be overrun by an inimical reality called the Otherness. That is so not good.
The plot hangs together, though things do get a bit touchy towards the end of the novel, and a certain amount rests on a slight bit of the old Idiot Plot formula, in which people do a stupid thing. Wilson's major characters are likeable, which makes the fate of some of them a bit hard to take. Wilson's peculiar and distinctive mix of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and thriller fiction goes down smoothly. Action Cthulhu!
It might be fairer from a packaging standpoint to combine this novel and the following Nightworld into one text, though I don't think Wilson will do so. After 30 years and more than 20 novels, his work seems to finally be almost done. Though three Repairman Jack prequels are promised in the afterword, so who knows? Recommended, though really only if you've read at least a couple of the previous Repairman Jack novels.
Walk on the Wild Side: The Best Horror Stories of Karl Edward Wagner Volume 2 edited by Stephen Jones (2012): Centipede Press has done readers of horror and dark fantasy a tremendous service with the release of its two-volume collection of the late Karl Edward Wagner's best horror fiction. This is the weaker of the two volumes, collecting Wagner's shorter works with an emphasis on his late-life burst of often pornographic short stories.
Wagner started his writing life as a dynamo, both in horror and in heroic fantasy, much of the latter featuring his time-jaunting anti-hero Kane. He also worked on his own short-lived specialty press (Carcosa), wrote a licensed Conan novel (The Road of Kings), and took over editorship of DAW Books' excellent Year's Best Horror series in the early 1980's, a job he'd hold until his death in 1994.
Along the way, something happened. It involved the consumption of astounding amounts of alcohol and the growth of an intermittent writer's block that would persist from the late 1970's until his death. Trained as a psychiatrist, Wagner must have known something was going on. But what? We'll never entirely know, and the prose pieces in these two volumes by Wagner's friends suggest that he was ultimately a mystery to them as well.
We know that Wagner wrote at least one pornographic novel, and an awful lot of his late output collected here ranges into the territory of erotic horror (or 'horrotica!!!). I really wish he hadn't.
Gone for the most part is Wagner's marvelous sense of place and psychological depth, replaced with spurting penises in foaming hot tubs and more girl-on-girl action than normally found in a frat boy's hashish dream. There are a few gems here -- the creepy asylum story "Into Whose Hands" and the sad homage to The King in Yellow, "I've Come to Talk to You Again, are excellent, as is the punk-rock nightmare "Did They Get You To Trade?"
There are several stories across both volumes that deal with writers, writer's block, and writers either grown old or old before their time. How autobiographical these stories are is ultimately unknowable, but the cumulative effect certainly feels autobiographical. As an editor and a writer, here lies a fallen giant, an indispensable part of 1970's and 1980's horror, dark fantasy, and heroic fantasy. And if Karl Edward Wagner never became as great as he could have been -- well, the tragedy of his personal fall outweighs literary concerns. Recommended.
Occultation and Other Stories by Laird Barron (2010) containing the following: "Introduction" by Michael Shea; "The Forest", "Occultation", "The Lagerstatte", "Mysterium Tremendum", "Catch Hell", "Strappado", "The Broadsword", "-30-", "Six Six Six.": Barron really is a relatively new wonder in the horror world, an American writer who's been greeted with the sort of astonished critical praise I last remember being attached to a young John Varley in science fiction in the 1970's.
Barron works in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, but he brings to the cosmic tradition of horror his own muscular, cloachal, sadomasochistic vision of evil. Many of his stories take place on an Earth much like ours, only behind the walls lurk the horrifying emissaries and representatives of the Children of Old Leech.
There's much that's Cthulhian about Old Leech, a world-ravaging god-monster whose followers have a pronounced fondness for torturing and eating children. But many of Barron's stories center around the horror of metamorphosis -- the Children want some humans to become them and share in their terrible ecstasies. There aren't many heroes in Barron's stories, but there are a lot of victims, and a lot of normal people doing the best they can when faced with evil of sublime and abyssal gravity.
Barron also makes some truly bizarre forays into more traditional supernatural tropes here, but they're as distinctive as the tales set in the world of Old Leech. He's got the fearlessness and the distinctiveness of a truly great writer, and his horrors aren't quite like anything I've read before. And trust me, I've read a lot of horror. Highly recommended.
J. Edgar: written by Dustin Lance Black; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Leonardo Di Caprio (J. Edgar Hoover), Armie Hammer (Clyde Tolson), Judi Dench (Annie Hoover) and Naomi Watts (Helen Gandy) (2011): There's a good movie locked up inside this movie. That movie would be a period piece about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and its status as the first great event of the Celebrity Age. When J. Edgar focuses on that story, as told by J. Edgar Hoover, things are good, albeit historically inaccurate.
Unfortunately, we're also stuck with the increasingly exhausting frame tale, in which Hoover recounts the early history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to a succession of FBI agents over the course of a decade. Leonardo Di Caprio is fine as Hoover, but the longer we stay in the frame tale, the more we see how astonishingly lousy is the age make-up on Di Caprio and Armie Hammer (The Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, and Hoover's longtime companion Clyde Tolson here).
Seriously. This movie has the most jarringly bad age make-up I've seen in years. That the movie apparently takes place in an alternate universe in which men and women age at vastly different rates doesn't help things -- Naomi Watts gets a few wrinkles added over the course of 30 years while Hoover turns into the Grinch.
But it's Hammer's make-up that steals the show. Because the Hammer of the late 1960's doesn't really look human -- he looks like one of the alien lizard people from Alien Nation. It's ridiculous. The tedium of the frame tale (which really takes up half the movie and thus doesn't really constitute a frame) gets force-multiplied by the inaccuracies that even a cursory glance through Wikepedia (or a passing knowledge of American history) will reveal.
In the end, this is something of a disappointment, especially after the excellence of Eastwood's last period drama, The Changeling. As if to hide as much of the awful make-up as possible, Eastwood keeps the lights low for long stretches of the movie. It's a game try. Not recommended.
Tower Heist: written by Ted Griffin, Jeff Nathanson, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage; directed by Brett Ratner; starring Ben Stiller (Kovaks), Eddie Murphy (Slide), Casey Affleck (Charlie), Alan Alda (Arthur Shaw), Matthew Broderick (Mr. Fitzhugh), Tea Leoni (Special Agent Claire Denham), and Gabourey Sidibe (Odessa) (2011): Mildly amusing heist comedy which seems to have undergone so many rewrites that they forgot to include an actual ending. Seriously. It's as if they left the final reel out of the movie.
The major setpiece involves shenanigans with a car, a penthouse, and a bunch of guys trying to lower said car from one floor to another. It's actually pretty funny. There are other sparks throughout, most of them supplied by Matthew Broderick. Ben Stiller gets to play someone who isn't a jittery nebbish for once, and that's also a plus. Stiller's romantic subplot goes nowhere -- victim of that lost final reel, perhaps. Eddie Murphy riffs on his old Trading Places persona, to only intermittent comic effect.
It's a Brett Ratner movie. One really can't expect too much, and it's at least better than X-Men: The Last Stand. And Alan Alda is surprisingly evil as a Bernie Madoff-like investment banker. Lightly recommended.
The Iron Lady: written by Abi Morgan; directed by Phyllida Lloyd; starring Meryl Streep (Margaret Thatcher), Jim Broadbent (Denis Thatcher), and Alexandra Roach (Young Margaret Thatcher) (2011): If Harold Pinter had suffered grievious brain damage just prior to writing a biopic of Margaret Thatcher, this might have been the result.
This isn't a movie concerned with history -- it's a movie concerned with Meryl Streep acting up a storm as an increasingly dementia-addled Margaret Thatcher decades after the end of her stint as Prime Minister of Great Britain. A real person with a debilitating illness? No wonder Streep won the Oscar for Best Actress!
The movie's frame story dominates everything. Demented Margaret Thatcher interacts with the hallucination of her dead husband, who is perhaps the most annoying hallucination in screen history. We jump back and forth in time, visiting Thatcher's early days in politics (when she's played by Alexandra Roach) leading up to the point at which she turned into Meryl Streep.
Then Meryl Streep takes over. The movie is about as concerned with history as one would expect something from the director of Mamma Mia! to be. The Falkland Islands war is won by British gumption, saving Thatcher's political career and making Great Britain an economic power again. Then the poll tax (never, I believe, named as such in his dishistoricized movie) brings Thatcher down, but really she may just be suffering from early onset dementia. Or something. I don't fucking know.
In the end, the ghost of Denis (Phantom Denis, I guess) goes back into the UFO from Close Encounters of a Third Kind, leaving Margaret to finish cleaning the dishes. Streep, having chewed enough scenery to guarantee an Oscar, is then elevated to the pantheon of Greatest Actresses Ever. A Mamma Mia!/Margaret Thatcher crossover looms tantalizingly in the distance. Not recommended.
