Musings from Brian J. Noggle

After reading Cabal, I thought maybe I’d knock out a couple of the 80s-era horror books I have around. I have a couple from John Saul, so I picked up this one. Who knew that it might actually be the next in alphabetical order?

At any rate, the plot is that a nuclear family moves to a small company town in the Rockies when the father gets a promotion at the tech company he works for. They find the town idyllic, but it’s controlled almost top-down by the tech company. The local football team has boys that are bigger and meaner than other nearby schools, and it’s because the local “sports” clinic, funded by the tech company, is conducting experimental treatments on the boys. It makes them bigger and stronger, but sometimes makes them feral. Of course, the gentle son of our nuclear family decides abruptly that he wants to become stronger and so he falls under the influence of the doctor running the clinic. When some of the mothers of the affected children start wondering if their children are in danger, the tech company and the fathers align to protect the program and the company.

So it’s got a children in danger theme to it that seems fairly common to the genre, and it has helpless wives who lack the power to get their children out of danger. It reminded me a lot of The Stepford Wives in that regard. It got under my skin a bit–I cannot imagine any of my mother’s sisters or my mother dealing with the issues as the mothers in this book do. And they all lack a support network outside the town, so nobody calls a sister or friend for a sanity check. Stephen King’s books often featured isolated locations, but it doesn’t seem forced. Here, it is.

The book ends very quickly with a burst of violence; it was sudden that I thought right before it that it was leading up to a cliffhanger or a sequel. But no, a little bloodshed and not a complete set of revenge which might have left room for a sequel.

I did flag a bunch of things in this book:

• Some anachronisms. Or the opposite of anachronisms: things that would seem to belong to a future era, more like the present, than 1989.
  

  They’d gone first to the software section, where a group of top programmers, all of them casually dressed, were working at computer terminals or whispering quickly to each other in strange programming language that Blake had never been able to comprehend. “We have an Artificial Intelligence unit working here,” Jerry said in reply to Blake’s inquisitive glance. “We’re far ahead of the guys in Palo Alto and Berkeley, but of course they don’t know it. In fact, as far as they know, we’re only working on a new operating system to compete with Microsoft.

  Aside from the locations or writing an operating system, that could be cut from a novel from today.

• The family moves to a house on Telluride Drive. One story behind the name of Telluride, Colorado, is that it’s from To Hell you ride. Or at least that’s what Michelle Malkin told me.
   
• Observe this barbarity, the worst in the book:
  

  “In a few minutes, honey,” she told the little girl. “How’d you like to take care of the steaks for me?”

  Kelly’s eyes glittered with pleasure, and she instantly picked up the large fork from the counter by the grill and stabbed experimentally at one of the thick T-bones that were just barely beginning to brown. “Is it time to turn them?”

  “Every four minutes,” Sharon replied, glancing at the meat and deciding she had at least fifteen minutes in which to talk with her son.

  Oh, the humanity!

• Recovering from a beating at the hands of a nearly feral football player, the undersized lad says:
  

  Mark winced with almost every motion, but when he finally made it, he forced himself to grin at the nurse. “See? Nothing to it. I could run a ten-K if I had to.”

  It’s presented 10K these days, and it’s about an hour of running at a six-mile-per-hour pace. Which is easier for kids.

• It must have seemed quite cutting edge at the time:
  

  “May I help you, Mrs. Tanner?”

  Sharon frowned, then glanced instinctively at the girl’s lapel, searching for the identification badge that all TarrenTech employees wore.

  The girl wore none.

  The girl’s smile broadened as she realized Sharon’s dilemma. “I’m Sandy Davis,” she said. “And you don’t know me. The security system did a photo comparison on you, so I knew who you were even before you came into the building.”

  But now we just assume it, ainna?

• Marty Ames opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out the .38-caliber pistol he’d started keeping there when he first realized that some of the boys might become dangerous.

  You know, I would have gone with a larger caliber.

• Speaking of isolated:
  

  For the first time that morning she was able to think about the funeral without crying. She didn’t know whether it had been like other funerals, because she’d never been to one before. There hadn’t been very many people there, and it hadn’t taken very long, and as she sat in the front pew of the little church, listening to a man she’d never seen before talking about her family–and she knew he’d never even met her family, so how could he talk about them?–she tried to convince herself that it really was her father and mother and brother in the three coffins lined up in front of the altar.

  Notice there’s no other family members nor a church support network. Artificial isolation that really sticks out.

So ultimately, the book really didn’t work for me. I’m not a great fan of the genre, and this book hasn’t made me want to read another any time soon.

In thinking about this book and John Saul’s sort-of ubiquity–you could see his books available back in the day, and they were prevalent at book sales a couple years ago–made me wonder how the collapse of book clubs altered book buying. Book club editions were a staple of the book sales for a long time. I think we might have seen that bubble burst as members of my parents’ generation have downsized their libraries. What am I talking about? Even I don’t know.

Speaking of beach vacations, I dived right into this book after buying it last week in Branson. I felt a little like I was betraying Branson by reading about another vacation destination while vacationing in Missouri. But that didn’t stop me from reading the book.

It collects newspaper columns by Art Stevens who was (is?) a part-time resident of Sanibel Island, splitting time with New Jersey, where he made enough in six months to afford a spot on the island. Although this book dates from 1992, Stevens’ column continues to this day.

It takes on topics such as tourists, alligators, and development on the island. It’s Florida stuff, the kind of thing you find in Barry or Hiassen (and treated more seriously in John D. MacDonald books). As I started the book, perhaps I expected too much of the author; perhaps he suffered in comparison to Barry, who is about the only humor columnist that has made me laugh out loud.

However, some of the columns amused me. So the humor is akin to Mike Royko when he was doing his outlandish pieces.

So worth the read if you’re into Sanibelernalia.

Clive Barker was all that in the late 1980s. He had a couple of movies out, including Hellraiser and, um, what’s that other one?

Well, this book collects a novella and several short stories. The novella, “Cabal”, talks about the Nightbreed. Ah, there it is!

At any rate, this book has on the outside edge of my to-read shelves since I cleaned up my library (::cough, cough:: three years ago). I read Barker’s Books of Blood (I, but that was before they needed Roman numerals) in 1994, and I’ve picked up a couple of his books here and there because every once and again, I think I’ll read some horror and maybe write some (which tends to come out more like H.P. Lovecraft than Stephen King or one of the modern Urban Fantasy people).

At any rate, this book contains:

• “Cabal”, in which a mentally unhealthy individual is convinced he’s committed horrible murders, so he tries to go to a remote Canadian town where monsters are welcomed. Once there, he finds that he is not the monster he thought he was, but there are monsters in this world–human and otherwise.
• “The Life of Death”, wherein a lonely woman becomes enamored with the thought of the dead and becomes a killer inadvertently and meets Death, although not in the way she expected.
• “How Spoilers Bleed”, wherein some adventurers acquire land rights in the jungle and try to displace a native tribe only to fall under a curse.
• “Twilight at the Towers”, wherein an espionage agent discovers he’s not just human, and that he has more in common with others of his kind than his handlers.
• “The Last Illusion”, wherein an investigator with experience (not pleasant) with the occult is called to help protect the body of a magician from dark forces.

I mean, they’re okay stories, a bit gory as expected and with a touch of S&M (graphic at times) that spawned more than one Goth in the 1990s.

So perhaps I’ll read a couple more of these 1980s horror books that I’ve accummulated over the years. Back then, horror books (as with so many other books) were thinner, running 200 or 250 pages (this volume is 338, but broken over multiple stories, it seemed shorter), and horror books must have been fairly popular in book clubs, as you can see bunches of them available at book sales. For a little while, yet. I have to wonder if they’ll all disappear soon as the baby boomers finish downsizing and if another burst of availability will occur when the readers of Generation X start downsizing.

I don’t know where or when I bought this book; it cannot have been too long ago as it’s a book of recent vintage and it was not buried in my to-read shelves. I picked it up to read because I might be going to an event where Malkin is speaking this autumn, and I wanted to be able to say I read one of her books.

At any rate, this book is not a political polemic as one might expect from a political commentator. Although the book piggybacks off of an Obama quote (“You didn’t build that.”), the book focuses on a number of what Malkin calls “tinkerpreneurs”: inventors whose innovations changed our lives, sometimes in ways that seemed small but had big impact. She looks at Carrier and Lyle (air conditioning), the Roebling family (steel cables and suspension bridges), Libbey and Owen (glass), and others. The book looks at how many of them had humble origins (and by humble, I mean nineteenth century origins, which meant they went to work, often in manufacturing, and then improved upon the things they did every day through mehanical automation). No eight year degrees in inventing for them.

So it was an inspiring book. One of my stretch goals for my life is to get a patent for something. Unfortunately, I’ve ended up working in computers, where patents and innovation are squirrelly instead of actually working for a living. So it’s made me want to tinker (where other books make me want to write more).

I just need to clear some space in my garage to get going.

I rescued this book from a box of outgoing books that my beautiful wife was winnowing from her collection (from time to time, she gets rid of books, a concept that is very foreign to me). I grabbed it because it looks like something I would browse during a football game.

However, I browsed it after reading How To Read A Poem as sort of a palate cleanser.

This compact book was probably designed to be a humorous little gift for the cat lover you know (the one you always give cat-themed things because that’s her gift schtick). Undoubtedly, my wife got this for similar reasons.

But the book really isn’t that amusing. It’s one or two sentences or sentiment per page from your cat’s point of view, but nothing really insightful and not much that’s really clever. So I was disappointed with it, but I’m happy to not have browsed it during a football game as I’d like my forthcoming disappointment with the 2019-2020 Packers to be unalloyed.

Now I’ll put it on my read shelves, from whence my children will poach it, love it, and likely destroy it as they have Bad Cat.