Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought these books and a couple of other Conan/Robert E. Howard paperbacks last summer in Berryville, Arkansas, and as I just watched the films in July, I thought I would pick them up. I am spending a lot of reading time this year on paperbacks, so why change now?

These books differ from some movie novelizations in that the authors were already steeped in the Conan mythos as they’d written original Conan short stories and/or novels in decades before the movies appeared. So you get a lot of depth in the books that you don’t get in a lot of cases where the novelizinator works quickly from a script.

I summarized the plots of Conan the Barbarian in the movie post thus:

In Conan the Barbarian, young Conan sees his father and mother killed before him when a raiding party strikes their undefended village, and he is taken as a slave. He grows up, becomes strong from his labor, and then ends up as a gladiator traveling with Mongol-types, still a slave, until he is released. He flees to a dead area where he finds Mako playing a sorcerer of questionable ability and seeks his revenge on the leader of the band who killed his family and razed his village, Thulsa Doom played by James Earl Jones. Of course, the man is now the leader of a spreading cult of snake-handlers. Oh, and Sandahl Bergman plays Valeria, a fighter-thief that Conan loves.

It’s as good of a read as the movie is a good movie, if that makes sense–it reads like a standalone novel, not something that simply recaptures the film so you can remember it. And it does not include photos from the movie. Perhaps the intent was to make this a backlist book that outlasted the movie.

I described the plot of this film also in that movie post:

In Conan the Destroyer, Conan is given a quest to escort the virgin niece, played by Olivia d’Abo, of a queen who is destined to restore the horn of a sleeping god. So Conan and a thief start off with the girl and her bodyguard, played by Wilt Chamberlain. They rescue Mako and a female warrior, played by Grace Jones, from a hostile tribe and they go do some sidequests and then the main quest and discover they’ve been played, and the queen is going to sacrifice the virgin to resurrect the god. So Conan has to slay the tall bodyguard and then the resurrected god.

Actually, in the case of this book, it’s a good thing that I just watched the film as this first printing has an erratum in the binding. After page 256, when Conan and his party are storming the castle, the frontspiece, title page, and the first 31 pages of the book appear again instead of the climactic showdown and end matter. I would think this might be collectible, but, c’mon, man, collecting, paperbacks, errata, and all that are so 20th century. You can find copies of this book on Ebay for $10 without mention of the errata (well, perhaps that means not all of the first printing was botched). However, if I find another copy in the wild, I might have to pick it up if it finishes the story, and perhaps I will read it again–or just the end of it. Time will tell if I count that as a complete book–but I sure counted this one as a whole book.

I shall probably delve into those other Conan paperbacks by and by–and I have already started one of the Diagnosis: Murder paperbacks I picked up on that trip.

I got this book at a book signing last month whereupon I got not only a copy for me but also for my horse-loving aunt who lives with my grandmother in Wisconsin. As I have finally gotten around to finishing a letter to my grandmother and mailing the book, I thought I would delve into it just so I can say I’ve read it if it comes up in a Facebook conversation.

Which is kind of funny: The copy of the book I sent to Wisconsin lie upon the table for a couple of weeks until I sent the letter, and now my copy has rested upon the table for several days since I read it and before I wrote this report on it, and it’s a large book, consuming a lot of real estate on the desk. So with this report, I’ll be able to clear a little space.

At any rate, it is what you would expect: some text about the photographer’s introduction to the wild horse herds while camping over a decade ago. Shannon County apparently supports four herds, but the herds are not very big–ten or so horses roughly–so they’re not like herds of buffalo from horizon to horizon. They very in levels of shyness, which means there are more from the Shawnee Creek herd than the Broadfoot, Rocky Creek, or Round Spring herds. The photographer has caught them in a variety of seasons, dispositions, and poses, from running across a river to emerging from a fogbank.

So it’s a cool book, not a long read, but an interesting look into the places nearby which are still a bit wild. As I mentioned, well, probably explained to my grandmother, I pass through Shannon County not far from these herds when I drive to Poplar Bluff. The book gives the history of the herds and the attempts to preserve them as well as the photographer’s story–the book raised money for the organization founded to protect them–and one of the headlines reproduced is from the front page of The Current Local, a paper out of Van Buren which was one of the first of my adopted hometown newpapers to which I subscribed.

Or maybe I’m just getting old that I’m relating to local books more acutely these days, especially the ones related to local history (see also Buff Lamb: Lion of the Ozarks). I’ve lived at Nogglestead for 13 years, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, and the experience of having lived somewhere for a while might be altering my perception of time and my place in the world. Or perhaps I’ve had too much coffee today.

As I mentioned when I spoke of the audiobook version of Pure Drivel, I had already picked up another Steve Martin work. This book is that work–I picked it up in between short stories in a collection that the kittens suggested by knocking it off of the shelves, but I was not powering through the collection in one go. This book, though, I read in a couple of nights even though it is longer than Shopgirl.

It is basically a memoir of the early parts of his career, from his teenaged years when he worked at Disneyland and Knotts’ Berry Farm learning magic, standup comedy, and whanot through his taking his show on the road and kind of trailblazing a new wacky style of comedy and then through his movie successes of the 1980s, although he only touches on that. He doesn’t get much into his personal life except to say that he had a rocky relationship with his father when he was younger, and it does not go a lot into his later relationships. It’s definitely through the lens of the standup work and how it evolved and how it went from fulfilling to feeling like he was just playing the role of Steve Martin in his larger arena tours after his career took off.

It’s an interesting read both as a time capsule of being a young man who wants to embark on an entertainment career as well as a glimpse into being young a couple of decades before I was young. And it’s written with Martin’s characteristic intelligence and grace with a touch of self-effacement that endears the writer to the reader.

So worth looking for more, although Martin has only written a handful of books in his time.

This was the second book suggested to me by the kittens who were sequestered in my office for a time, and they suggested books for me to read by knocking them off of my to-read bookshelves. But they might as well have knocked this book into their cat litter, for I did not like it very much, and I am no longer taking recommendations from the kittens.

The front cover bills it as Twenty Two All-Original Tales of Lust and Obsession. Given that it’s headlined by Stephen King, I thought it would be a horror collection, but really, it’s a more crime fiction with a lot of wetwork and a bunch of sex (deviancy is a plus to the editors). It’s not horror but horrific. Many of the stories try to get into the minds of the insane, who then have deviant sex and murder people.

It took me a while to get through the book, reading several others in between the stories. Because many of the stories were very similar. Breaking it up kept it a little fresher.

And as this book is from 1995, it does contain the two baddest words in the universe: Trump and, you know, the other one. Which could be used in print in living memory as a marker that whomever spoke it was backward and not a good person. But no more.

Well, make this my year of completing sets, or at least groups of books that I have. I mean, I finished all of the books in the Executioner series that I own; I finished the set of James Blish Star Trek books I had on my to-read shelves; I finished the Doubleday children’s books I’d picked up, perhaps for my children but never shared with them. Since I only had three books in the six-book Ashton Ford series, why not?

Okay, so I did not know what to expect when I read the first in the series, Ashes to Ashes, in 2018. And when I read Life to Life in October, I thought maybe the series had an arc it was completing–after all, in it, Ashton impregnated a televangelist while she was in jail and they were getting it on in the astral plane, so I expected something to come of that. Maybe in the fifth book, but not here.

In this book, Ashton follows an unidentified flying object into the hills above town and discovers a nude woman. It’s an acquaintance of his, an actress of some reknown, and he helps her. He discovers that she’s involved with what might be some extraterrestrials and might be an alien.

So basically, that’s the schtick of the books: a pedestrian suspense plot with an overlay of woo-woo. In this case, it’s an alien civilization advanced of ours, monitoring ours and hoping to have us rejoin them in the future, but right now, it’s dolphins (the original heirs to this world), rebirth, and UFOs.

We get pages of Ashton thinking these things through again. Whereas Mack Bolan sometimes would go a couple of paragraphs or a page or so into philospophy or morals; however, in these books, Pendleton gives Ashton a lot of room to muse on the paranormal, and it detracts from the mundane plot or even the woo-woo.

You know, when reading these books, I cannot help compare them to the later Heinlein, where he turned toward free love and whatnot. Both Pendleton and Heinlein were Navy men in World War II, and their books took a different tone when they got older and as they faced their own mortality. I should like to say my books might take a similar turn, but I don’t have a body of work from my youth the mark any differences as I age.

At any rate, I can understand why this series did not go very far. It’s a little wordy, and Pendleton does not balance or blend the woo-woo with the normal plots very smoothly. But perhaps he pioneered the way, a bit, for modern urban fantasy. He certainly didn’t hinder it.