Steve Theme’s memoir, Asphalt Asylum: The Dark Roads to Light is a moving and thoughtful adventure story about a young man who leaves home to fight the darkness he sees growing in himself.As a 19-year-old in 1978, Steve struck out from Seattle, Washington, heading south on a hitchhiking journey that eventually took him to Key West, Florida, and back. He rides with a gangster, a mortician, a young Idaho farmer, an amazing variety of people, who carry him not only across seven thousand miles but … [Read more...]
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is a mystical portal where folk stories and mythology come pouring into our present literature. Everything from Norse (and other) mythologies (American Gods) to the land of nightmares (Coraline) flows through his rich imagination. In Anansi Boys he goes to the African spider-trickster for his source and brings him into a dysfunctional American and British family. "Fat" Charlie (he's not really fat, just soft around the edges, really) is living a fairly nice life in England, far … [Read more...]
Log’s Eye View
A week at the beach has been a good time for learning to create a zone for writing. In the psychological fantasy I'm working on, I find that the sound track is the David Lynch station on Pandora. Why David Lynch? What attracted me most to Twin Peaks was not the story, which was a series of loosely related events that didn't build in any direction. What gave the thin events texture and richness -- what continued to affect me after the credits -- was the soundtrack. Exploring the sources of that … [Read more...]
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
I've wanted to read Three Men in a Boat ever since I first read Connie Willis' funny time-travel novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is the subtitle of this book. Three Men in a Boat is an episodic journey of three men in flannel and boaters traveling up the Thames River in Victorian England. They sleep in the open air, wander off to town for roast mutton or something, and offer the occasional improving diversion into English history. It's a lightweight read, told in a droll style, and … [Read more...]
The Maze by Jason Bannon
In The Maze, a man’s near-death experience throws him into a psychological-spiritual-symbolic labyrinth that calls into question everything he’s been and whether it’s worth it to him to be something different. Jamie Burroughs is a man whose moral needle points to the yellow, “pretty good” region of the dial. He’s never killed anyone, he would argue, or robbed a bank, and the things he’s done wrong don’t hurt anybody. Until a beautiful former girlfriend shows up, presenting a new vision for how … [Read more...]