Westerns and magic. The Gunfight at the OK Corral with a fantasy twist. Wyatt Earp as a sorcerer.
This was a fun book with cool characters. I’m constantly juggling several books at once and sometimes one book captures my attention and I read it exclusively until I’m done. Territory was one of those books.
It was also a finalist for some awards in 2008, so it’s not just me that thought it was pretty good.
On May 18th and 19th the Butte County Supervisors will have a meeting. At that meeting they will vote on how much money to give to the Butte County Library.
Right now the library has already lost Sunday and evening hours, the reference desk, new book purchases and most of the children’s story times (a favorite of my niece).
In July the library could lose:
All but two 6 hour days.
All but 5 staff members
book requests
community meeting room
interlibrary loan
many online databases
A library for a city of over 100,000 people that is only open twice a week for 6 hours each day? That is unbelievable.
Contact info for the Butte County Supervisors is here.
If you’re a local and give a crap about libraries, let em know.
This book got a lot of hype. General hype from everywhere and more personal hype on my message boards where Bloom gushed about it quite a bit.
I was a little late coming to read it and I think it suffered a bit from being overhyped to me. I was expecting something grander than this.
Not that it’s a bad book. I liked it plenty. It’s a fun read and I burned through it pretty fast.
One thing that sort of threw me off my feed while reading it was that the author seemed to go a little over board in name dropping odd things that the character was into in order to make him seem hip. At least that’s the way it seemed to me.
If I knew an intelligent teenager that liked to read I’d get em a copy of this book. It’s pretty good for adults too.
Anthologies like this are about the only place to find horror short stories these days, which is unfortunate because I think scary short stories are pretty awesome. The perfect length to read before turning off the light at night. And reading one right before bed is like dropping a little bit of mental lsd into your dreams.
Ellen Datlow has been doing the horror thing for a couple of decades now. She’s edited over 50 anthologies and won a ton of awards for doing so. The point is, if you are gonna pick somebody to take you by the hand and show you what’s good in horror short fiction these days, she’s the one you wanna pick.
This anthology doesn’t have a theme. It’s 20 stories that Datlow chose “to showcase the range of subjects imagined by a number of my favorite writers inside and outside the horror field”. When I looked through the contents I saw only half a dozen or so authors whose names were familiar to me.
The stories range all over the place. Laird Barron’s The Forest had a Lovecraftian vibe to it that was cool. Christopher Fowler’s The Uninvited is a freaky little story set in Hollywood that slowly sets it’s hook and on the last page jerks the line and had me doing a mental WTF! and rereading the story :) But that’s a good thing. John Grant’s Lives could totally be an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Mark Samuels’ Ghorla is some wierd ass shit and ends with an image you might not actually want in your head right before turning off the light for the night. But I liked it :) Joyce Carol Oates’ Face is the shortest story in the anthology I think and is pretty straightforward. P.D. Cacek’s The Keeper is a post WWII slice of life that is rather sad.
Paul Finch’s Bethany’s Wood planted some creepy images in my head, I could totally see some of these scenes in my head, like a movie. Lucius Shepard’s The Ease with Which We Freed the Beast had my favorite title. The story itself was good enough that I’m going to have to read it again a time or two, I think.
Simon Bestwick’s Hushabye is another straightforward horror story about a monster and a man trying to destroy it. Glen Hirshberg’s The Janus Tree is one of the longer stories in this book but it hooked me early and kept up a steady pressure throughout. An odd story with odd characters in a strange little town in Montana.
I don’t usually remember my dreams but sometimes I’ll be woken up by something while very deeply asleep and for a few minutes I’ll be totally disoriented as reality and my dream slowly seperate and my waking mind gathers up all the dream elements and puts them away. Jefferey Ford’s The Bedroom Light is like one of those dreams. While I’m reading it seems fairly normal but there is a part of my brain saying “Wait, wait, wait, this shit ain’t right man. This was all supposed to be put back in the dream closet when you woke up!” There isn’t really a lot to the story, it’s mostly a couple talking to each other about their lives, but their lives are tweaked in a fashion that I seem to recall from my own vague rememberances of my dreams.
I didn’t cover all the stories in the book above. Not all of them really appealed to me and some I didn’t know what to say that might not ruin the story if you decide to read them. But that is a good thing about a short story, you don’t have a huge investment in it. If you finish reading it and it didn’t really hit you, you’re not really out all that much time.
Another YA book. I must be regressing or something. Back in the 90’s Kathe Koja wrote several ‘horror’ novels that were pretty dark and disturbing (to me, anyways) and when I read that she was writing Young Adult novels I pretty much said “what the fuck?” and I wanted to try one of them. And when I saw the cover for this one I wanted to check it out even more.
I liked it. It’s not what I expected. For some reason I was thinking a YA novel would have more of a bunnies and butterflies vibe or something but this book is a bit more than that.
It’s a very short book. Basically about a young girl who feels misunderstood by everybody and volunteers at the local animal shelter where she bonds with a stray dog that is very feral and pretty much beyond hope and her attempts to save the dog from it’s fate.
I think this book is considered a YA book but I liked it. Basically this kid that just graduated from High School inherits his uncle’s farm and in the barn he finds a gate to another world. A world just like ours but without people (apparently) He gets a few of his buddies from school and they attempt to make a little money by going through the gate and doing some gold mining.
Not everything goes as smoothly as they would like though and adventures are had.
I don’t remember exactly when I decided I wanted an Australian Cattle Dog (aka Queensland Blue Heeler) but there are two things that I do remember influencing me greatly. The first was the movie The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2) in which Max has an ACD named ‘Dog’ that is his companion. I remember thinking how awesome that dog was when I saw the movie. Not only the way he acted, but his appearance. That was a good looking dog! The second thing that influenced me was walking through downtown Chico one day and there was a VW bus parked in front of a local eatery and as I was approaching I saw this hippy chick come out of the place and walk towards the van. As she did this dog, an ACD, that had been laying in front of the store jumped up and followed her. As she got to the van she motioned towards an open window and the dog jumped from the sidewalk into the van and I thought that was pretty damn cool.
So having an ACD started bubbling around in my head. One day I’d have one, I decided. I would scan the paper every once in a while looking for somebody selling ACD pups and one day, bam, there it was. Some dude in a small town near Chico had a litter of pups he was selling.
I called the number and he still had most of them available so I drove out to his home. When I arrived I saw the mother of the litter, which was his dog. As I was talking to the guy he picked up a tennis ball and threw it over the top of his house, into the front lawn and the mother dog took off like a rocket around the side of the house and came back a few minutes later with the ball. Awesome!
The dude told me he had didn’t have papers for the mother but she was purebred and the father had papers but the puppies didn’t. Not that I cared.
I looked over the pups and immediately took the red pups out of the equation. I wanted a blue. I picked one and the guy said that was the one he was keeping for himself. My second choice was Jake. I paid the guy 100 bucks and off we went. Jake was 8 weeks old.
I remember driving home with him in my old van. He laid on my leg, straddling it with his little puppy legs, and slept. I loved him by the time I got to the house.
He was a real handful growing up. I lived with my buddy Zilla at the time and his dog Roxy was a great friend to Jake. She was about a year older than him. They got into all kinds of trouble. He was worth it though. When he got a few months old we’d walk along this access road near our house and he’d run along like a little bear cub. It was about the cutest thing ever.
I remember taking him to the park when he was maybe 6 months old and throwing a tennis ball for him and he completely ignored it. Had no interest. I was pretty disappointed but several months later we were at the park and he found a tennis ball, picked it up, brought it to me and dropped it. I threw it and he brought it back and dropped it. No training. He just did it and he never stopped after that.
When he got older I used a frisbee sometimes and he was so good at that. He could leap like nobody’s business. I used to take him to an empty lot near a Safeway and throw his frisbee for him and pretty soon there would be a small crowd of people watching him and cheering. I think he really dug that shit.
Another time we were walking around the CSU Chico campus and suddenly this frisbee came flying out of nowhere and Jake took off, jumped way up into the air, snagged it and brought it back to me. I looked around and saw these three dudes walking towards me. They were playing frisbee golf through the campus and Jake had snagged one of their ‘balls’. They were cool about it though and thought it was funny too.
His frisbee days ended though, when I was house sitting at my parent’s house in the hills. He wasn’t allowed in the house, had to sleep on the back porch. One night I heard him going off on something, a raccoon or whatever, and he took off of the back porch and raced down the hill. The problem is that my parent’s house was built on a fairly steep hill and the back was terraced and I think he went banzai after that critter right off a terrace and fucked himself up. He could barely walk for quite a while after that. He got back up to the back porch but for a week he wouldn’t hardly move off of his sleeping pad, to the point of even peeing there. I took him to the vet but they couldn’t find anything really wrong with him (but they still charged me a shitload for looking) and eventually he mostly healed up, but he never had that athletic ability he had once. He didn’t jump into the air like he was climbing invisible steps.
For most of his life he was always at my side. I took him everywhere. In the summer I’d park at the far end of a parking lot just so I could get some shade. I could leave the windows down and he never jumped out, except when we were someplace he knew he was allowed inside. Like Dolly’s Comics. He was always welcome to come in there and one day I parked out front and told him to stay for some reason. I got out and as I opened the door to the store Jake went in. He knew he didn’t have to sit in the car at Dolly’s.
Once I went downtown to the bank. As I came out of the bank and went to get back into my car I saw that Jake wasn’t inside. He had jumped out for some reason. I looked around but didn’t see him. I was afraid to call him because the bank is downtown and there is quite a bit of traffic. If he heard me calling him he might run across a road and get hit. I started walking all over, looking for him. Nothing. I was really freaking out when suddenly I realized that I had left him at home. Doh.
I had to put him to sleep a few days before Christmas. 5 years ago? He was nearly 10 years old. He had cancer in his bladder and it had gotten to the point where he couldn’t control himself anymore and was peeing in the house a lot and blood was dripping from his penis. That moment when I was holding him and I felt him go limp was the worst moment of my life so far. I can’t even think about it now without starting to get fucked up.
WoW came out with a new expansion and I started playing that again which is why I haven’t been writing much here. I’m still alive though.
I’m gonna try to post more often. I have several book ‘reviews’ to catch up on, but WoW has cut in on my reading time too. And my dog walking time. And my ‘ getting out of the house’ time.
But hey, I’m not addicted to crack or anything, so that’s good, right?
I’ve been putting off reading this book for a while. My reasons are that McCarthy is one of those ‘literature’ type writers that sort of scare me off and because the book was supposed to be super bleak. The second part is true. This is one bleak book.
I love post-apocalyptic type stories so it was inevitable that I eventually got to this one. The cause of apocalypse is never mentioned in this book. It just starts off all fucked up and goes down hill from there. The story is about a man and his son, walking south, slowly starving and freezing and encountering the occasional cannibal.
It moves right along though. I zipped through the book pretty quick.
I recommend the book, but I’d wait till summer to read it. You’ll want some sunshine in your life after you’re done.
The book that the recent movie starring Viggo and Ed Harris. I had high hopes for the movie but it fell sort of flat to me for some reason. The same is true for the book. It wasn’t a bad book, it just didn’t really sink it’s claws into me. I didn’t experience that post-great book depression that I sometimes get.
I think I liked the book better than the movie though. That’s usually the case with me.
Westerns and magic. The Gunfight at the OK Corral with a fantasy twist. Wyatt Earp as a sorcerer.
This book got a lot of hype. General hype from everywhere and more personal hype on my message boards where Bloom gushed about it quite a bit.
Anthologies like this are about the only place to find horror short stories these days, which is unfortunate because I think scary short stories are pretty awesome. The perfect length to read before turning off the light at night. And reading one right before bed is like dropping a little bit of mental lsd into your dreams.
Another YA book. I must be regressing or something. Back in the 90’s Kathe Koja wrote several ‘horror’ novels that were pretty dark and disturbing (to me, anyways) and when I read that she was writing Young Adult novels I pretty much said “what the fuck?” and I wanted to try one of them. And when I saw the cover for this one I wanted to check it out even more.
I think this book is considered a YA book but I liked it. Basically this kid that just graduated from High School inherits his uncle’s farm and in the barn he finds a gate to another world. A world just like ours but without people (apparently) He gets a few of his buddies from school and they attempt to make a little money by going through the gate and doing some gold mining.
I don’t remember exactly when I decided I wanted an Australian Cattle Dog (aka Queensland Blue Heeler) but there are two things that I do remember influencing me greatly. The first was the movie The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2) in which Max has an ACD named ‘Dog’ that is his companion. I remember thinking how awesome that dog was when I saw the movie. Not only the way he acted, but his appearance. That was a good looking dog! The second thing that influenced me was walking through downtown Chico one day and there was a VW bus parked in front of a local eatery and as I was approaching I saw this hippy chick come out of the place and walk towards the van. As she did this dog, an ACD, that had been laying in front of the store jumped up and followed her. As she got to the van she motioned towards an open window and the dog jumped from the sidewalk into the van and I thought that was pretty damn cool.
I’ve been putting off reading this book for a while. My reasons are that McCarthy is one of those ‘literature’ type writers that sort of scare me off and because the book was supposed to be super bleak. The second part is true. This is one bleak book.
The book that the recent movie starring Viggo and Ed Harris. I had high hopes for the movie but it fell sort of flat to me for some reason. The same is true for the book. It wasn’t a bad book, it just didn’t really sink it’s claws into me. I didn’t experience that post-great book depression that I sometimes get.