Author: Brian J. Noggle

One of the 1000+ page books I’m working on this year to which I constantly refer is the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. Man, I hit “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and bog down every time, which is why I have not ever read that story before and why I keep putting the volume of Lovecraft down. So in the interreadnum, I picked up this book by Frank Belknap Long because I know he’s associated with Lovecraft, it even has the title like something Lovecraft would have written.

The story is about two scientists and their significant others in Mexico, both of whom encounter a strange beast that arises from the Earth, and suddenly they’re transported to an icy plain. They have to learn to deal with their predicament.

And they do, wordily.

The writing style is the worst of Lovecraft, with a lot of verbiage that throws the pacing off. Working against Long, he writes in the contemporary lingo so the discourse lacks some of the delicious archaism that works in Lovecraft, and some of that wordiness lies in philosophical chit-chat that’s preposterously placed. For example, when one couple comes to their senses on a frozen plain, they talk about whether it would be okay to kill the stranger in the distance for his clothing if he turned violent and did not want to help strangers. They discussed this for several minutes before realizing that they were, in fact, dressed for the Mexican jungle on a frozen plain.

So it’s a short book, more akin to the juvie science fiction work of the 1950s than to actual Lovecraftian horror. The scientists team up, a little woman acts intemperately and gets kidnapped by the large-footed natives of the region, the scientists follow the trail and end up in an arena scene, and suddenly they are back to their own times. They speculate on the titular monster, who does not make an appearance after triggering their transport to the past, and the end. The monster is only the catalyst that leads to their ice age adventure, as it were. Which, I guess, is a bit Lovecraftian; it would not be otherwise if it were answered, bested, or understood.

So it’s a quick little read, probably interesting if you’re interested in a cross between juvie sci fi and Lovecraft that’s unbalanced toward the juvie sci-fi. It’s short enough for a one- or two-day read, too, but it does not lend itself well to continuing “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

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This book is really just one book. It’s got a flip cover, where you look at the front and it’s the Polish side and you look at the back and it’s the Italian side. The pages with the corresponding ethnic jokes align with the cover, so halfway through the book, you get to flip it and start the other side. For the record, I only counted this as one book in my annual list.

Ah, me. Ethnic jokes. I remember when I was a child, during the era when this book was in print and, apparently, selling, hearing them. So I bought this collection this year, and it awaited the middle of the football season.

But the humor? Not really funny. I mean, it’s not that I’m offended (you can get the same joke without the offense by swapping out Italian and Polack with dunce or Goofus or whatever). It’s that the jokes just don’t move me. Of course, most joke books leave me cold (see also here, here, here, here, here. Why not add here? That just doesn’t make any sense.).

Which isn’t to say I won’t keep getting them and flipping through them. Because there might be a talking dog joke somewhere that I have not yet heard.

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This book comes from that great Star Trek dark age, a dark age that was about to lift: The time between the original series end and the motion pictures. I’ve remarked on that dark age before, but I can’t help but notice that we’re about to embark on another one, what with the last series ending in 2005 (that’s seven years already, old man) and the motion pictures probably thinning.

At any rate, this book collects a number of quotes from the original series categorized around a number of topics, from War and Peace to Love to Life and Death. Each section of quotes has a little intro pre-interpreting and hagiographatating the quotes for you, and there are many black and white stills from the series to hold you until the next time the show airs on a UHF station on Saturday afternoon. Or you can scrape together enough money to see them on the big screen. Your 1979 self probably cannot conceive of an 18-year span of television with new Star Trek every week (sorta) nor, probably, the end of manned space exploration. But how time will surprise you.

A cool bit of Star Trekiana. Something to browse during football. You probably won’t see much along the lines of this in print for the latter series, but that’s what the Internet (kinda imagined, but not acutely in 1979).

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This book stems from what seems like the early days of decks. Maybe it marks a shift in my socioeconomic movement in the middle class, but I don’t remember many decks before the middle 1980s. Patios, sure, but not wood structures above it all. Well, some of the mobile homes in Siesta Manor Mobile Home Park had, instead of a simple set of steps leading to the doors, a couple of square feet with railing around them and storage underneath. Were these decks?

I digress. This book is a picture book for people who are thinking of renovating their yards at the end of the Reagan administration. It talks about considerations with construction, landscaping, and whatnot. It includes a couple of lightweight step-by-step guides. It’s not a guide to how to do the things within, like building a deck or a patio or a shed or installing outdoor lighting, but the guide provides high-level design considerations, photos, material choices, and such and just enough how-to information that you can get a bit of an inkling of what you might be getting into if you decide to do it yourself.

In addition to the deck revolution, the publishing industry might have moved away from books of this stripe–less detailed than your average Sunset book–and into more detailed how-to sorts of things, leaving the magazine market to the design inspiration ideas. Or maybe I don’t know because those books haven’t made their ways to the book fairs yet.

At any rate, a quick enough browse, but no source of inspiration for Nogglestead. Yet.

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Sure, read a Parker book earlier this year and another one this year, and suddenly I fancy myself some sort of Parker expert, capable of passing judgment on Parker books and the series or making sweeping statements about it. But it’s my blog, and I’m going to anyway.

This Parker seems a little less cold-blooded than the old ones.

The earlier book I read, The Handle, was published in the 1960s, and the series started then and ran until 1974. After that, it lay fallow until resuming in 1997, 25 years later, around the time the film Payback went into production. In the big screen film treatment, Parker has a relationship with a woman (not just a woman, but a woman who looks like Maria Bello), so maybe this book plays off of that, since Parker has a woman in it, too. Of course, I’ve read two Parker books from 36 years apart. Maybe at some point in the earlier novels he began his change and I’m late to the party.

At any rate, Parker gets stiffed in a job and tracks down the guys who took his money as seed money for a heist. This one takes place in Florida, so it brought to mind some of the John D. MacDonald work along with the Carl Hiaasen and the other Florida partisans. It occurs to me that Florida, as a location, matches LA, San Francisco, and New York City as far as the place that is consistently presented as a sort of character. Stark gets this one mostly right, although he talks about West Palm Beach as a lesser light than Palm Beach, and from what I remember in my visits, West Palm is kinda nice, too, relative to everything else. But I might be mistaken.

I almost started the second paragraph in a row with “At any rate….”, but I’m going to break that off. The book doesn’t hang together as a whole very well–some parts are episodic and detached from the main plot a bit, and Stark shifts viewpoints a bit to no great meaning to the story. He was dashing these books off against his other prodigious output. It’s still good enough reading. I’ll continue to keep my eye out for cheap Stark books.

Oh, and apparently this book has been turned into a Jason Statham movie, Parker, scheduled for release in January. Perhaps I’ll go see that. The fact that the film has the name Parker in it might indicate that sequels will be forthcoming. Donald Westlake (Richard Stark) had allowed film treatments of the books, but only if they changed the names unless they were going to make a film series. The fact that the movie is named Parker might mean sequels, or it just might be because Westlake passed away and his heirs are not so demanding.

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This book is a 1979 young adult novelization of the Bill Murray film. It’s quite mindbending, when you think about it. In 1979, Scholastic was publishing 91-page-long novelizations of screwball comedies. A couple decades later, Scholastic would publish weighty young adult fantasy novels that got translated into major motion pictures. A mind bender, huh? An who owns the copyright to the novelization of Meatballs? Haliburton Films. Well, probably not that Haliburton. More likely it’s related to Haliburton, Ontario. But that’s neither here nor there.

So what’s the book like? The movie, maybe. I haven’t seen the film yet. It’s a screwball comedy, with young men trying to attract members of the opposite sex and with a camp of lessers pitted against a camp of athletes and well-to-do. There are a couple set pieces and an uplifting plot of a young boy being taught how to be a better person by the whacky camp counselor portrayed by Bill Murray.

As a book, it’s a collection of disjointed scenes with little continuity between them. In a movie, which I suspect in the matter matches the novelization after a fashion, this works better with the visual comedy and such. But in a book, it’s very juxtaposed to the point of just being juxt.

So take that for what it’s worth. It’s not a bad read, I suppose, if you’re thirteen years old in 1982 and your parents have coughed up a buck and a half for the book club order and you don’t have cable or a Betamax to watch the actual movie (which was a real condition in 1982, and it explains why books like this exist). But the book holds up less well than the film, probably.

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