NBC's Dracula: Episode 6, Of Monsters & Men.

Amorphousness makes this episode interesting because after all the unfolding of motivations last show, we're totally engaged in trying to figure things out, even though it's not as hard hitting by comparison.

The introductory sunlit sequence's obviously a dream, which they should've tried harder to conceal, and doesn't make any developmental sense until Dracula's required to attend a meeting in a solarium later. This would be the second dream sequence intro, so writing them somewhere else in the later acts, keeping it more even in tone could play better, and having Myers pull from the dream performance into the real one until the realization that the sun's still not, and will probably never be, a reacquired comfort, might've been better.

By contrast, it's a drenching London rain that segues Mina into disrobing and getting Jonathan into bed with her, which elementally encapsulates their uncertain & soppy engagement. The next morning's pillow talk reinforces that with Jonathan pitching elopement, while Mina majorly calls him for the third time on his motivations for being with her, further proof that he's just not in tune with her, compared to her dance time with Alexander, or even her boho night with Lucy.

Jayne's designs on Alexander play themselves forward with her not-so-subtle girl-on-girl talk with Lucy, which had to be the best bit of interaction this episode, followed by heartbreaker Mina throwing Lucy out for finally confessing her more than sisterly feelings. Characterwise this breaking off could drive Lucy in any number of interesting directions: Make up with droll beard/boyfriend Alistair? Into the arms of deliciously promiscuous Lady Jayne (who perhaps is playing a long game to do so)? Pawned by the Order or catspawed by Dracula? Or maybe even finding the fortitude to still pursue Lucy and convert her to the girlside?

Tension peaks when Van Helsing's about to use his beautiful surgical steel hammer (Hello, NBC online giftshoppe?) on the back of Mina's head for sneaking into his secret lab and finding the inexplicable properties of Dracula's blood, but her humanity stays his hand as she reveals that her mother died of stomach cancer, and she nobly tells him, "I wish to cure death." It's like that moment in "The Fountain" where angry & mournful Hugh Jackman rails against a universal fundamental but can see that it's within his grasp to actually cure death as he similarly declares "Death is a disease, just like any other, and there's a cure. A cure. And I will find it." It may have been to Van Helsing's detriment to spare her as in this version the intellectually unstoppable Mina could figure out where that blood comes from and put it all together before anyone else does. If so, will the scientist in her win and join Dracula to pass out both clean wireless power and grant mankind immortality? (Or will the dead rat she injected with vampire blood escape out into the sewers and accidentally promulgate a plague of undeath the likes of which the world has never seen?!? Aieeeeeee!)

There's a notable match-on-action shot of a real horse being cut to a carousel horse. Also visually, a great electric crucifixion sequence where Alexander's strapped down to the lab apparatus, his heart dynamo defibrillated and his torso charged & jabbed with injection equipment, hearkening to the Spear of Longinus. The inversion's disturbing & grand, with new science given unholy concert to the ancient supernatural. So New Age!

[Master & Servant.] 

Costumewise, there's a callback to all the caped Draculas when Alexander arrives with his greatcoat collar popped up at the solarium, positing perhaps that Dracula may have done it more for unexpected sun protection rather than dramatic menace.

[Daring to touch the Voivode?!? Just kill that Lord Davenport already!] 

Finally we have a great reveal of how duplicitous Dracuxander really is by finding out he originally hired an actress to disinform Jonathan with General Shaw's financial kickbacks, betting on Harker's patriotism to leak it to the press and enjoying scolding Harker for it, and then tying it all up by killing the actress. Mastermind!

While "Of Monsters and Men" played on a less active level, with only three episodes left, the series is going to have to get really ugly really quickly for anyone to have a definitive victory by the end ... unless there's a second season, which ratings are leaving to be equally amorphous. If the show continues to explore roads untaken from the original narrative, use the grander cinematic techniques, and keep the acting stylish but sensible, we could only be so lucky.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

incorrect inquiries encouraged.

Voice is everything. Unimaginative reductivists argue that there are no original stories left to tell (which, as a writer, I do not believe), but it's the teller's interpretation which is unique and what makes those stories worth retelling. Within that half-falsity, what makes a Lemony Snicket book is his voice, the redundant, rephrasical, regretful narrator who paints his uncanny world in shades of woe & misfortune.

Second in Snicket's All The Wrong Questions series, When Did You See Her Last? finds our apprenticing secret society autobiographer cutting his teeth on a case of a kidnapped heiress, but in the ghost town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea all isn't as sadly simple as it seems.

Unlike Vonnegut (bleh!) or Robbins (meh!), it's Snicket who uses constantly deft verbal dexterity to reinforce character & narrative, as opposed to an author just showing off at the cost of those same storytelling factors he should be building. It's Lemony who's so wordsmith, and the grasp of language is what gives him an edge, showing that he has the mind enough to define his dilemmas even if he doesn't yet have a true handle on their motives or scope: "I was standing in front of a Dilemma. There are people in the world who care about automobiles, and there are people who couldn't care less, and there are people who are impressed by the Dilemma, and those people are everyone. The Dilemma is such a tremendous thing to look at that I stared at it for a good ten minutes before reminding myself that I should think of it as a clue to a mystery rather than as a wonder of modern engineering. It was one of the newer models, with a small, old-fashioned horn perched just outside of each front window, and a shiny crank on the side so you could roll down the roof if Stain'd-by-the-Sea ever offered pleasant weather, and it was the color of someone buying you an ice cream cone for no reason at all."

Also, Snicket delivers consistently great character names, like Ellington Feint, Moxie Mallahan, Dashiell Qwerty, aside from his own, reaching far outside the usual baby name books to make not just proper nouns but cultural associations.

While the pacing of this book is slightly faster with less lingering descriptions, we still get a few wonderfully hard nutshells via Snicket's implicative encapsulations: "The books and shelves seemed to be in the middle of an argument nobody was winning."

Art by still no-last-named Seth (but we now know he's Canadian, so that narrows it down[?]) trades its predominant blue for purple in the solid graphic style. Sort of warming up to its noir sensibilities by this second book.

[Yes, a fountain pen skyscraper featuring a keyhole breather nib!]

Presentations of vocabulary aside, there's a new device in this series: In the oblique references to other books which are never actually named, Snicket reveals not only literary suggestions, but his influences. Yet these references are also distractions from the real mystery ... if there actually is a real mystery. Kit Snicket, Lemony's sister, keeps getting mentioned as perilously on her own back in the city, and her's is the story untold, yet bookended by Seth's splash pages at the front and back of both installments so far. For those of you who have read A Series of Unfortunate Events, you know how things sort out for intrepid Kit, but we may get the chance to find out how she starts her journey there, and these hints could fill in her arc.

Snicket also waxes philosophical. Between the kids there's a commerce of help, knowledge, and trust. Snicket trades book recommendations for cab rides from a duo of young taxi drivers, the same for breakfasts from teen fry cook Jim Hix, ingenue fatale Ellington Feint trades assistance for Snicket's gallant but possibly misplaced help, reporter Moxie exchanges her local who's-who for Snicket's info toward her unpublished news stories. Snicket argues that all would be more egalitarian if seen through the leveling eyes of youth and run by children, that adults get compromised and give up, while children with their untarnished optimism do not: "'You said we could make our organization greater than ever, but only if we stopped listening to our instructors and found new ways to fix the world. It was quite the speech you gave, It almost got you thrown out for good.'" And with that suddenly Lemony may become responsible for an event that does change everything.

While not as fresh as Who Could That Be At This Hour?,  there are revelations and far-reaching implications that Snicket's liminal role as hesitant documentarian for ASOUE may be much more involved than we ever suspected. While Snicket's world's never played with the supernatural, one dares to think that with hidden cult-like fraternities, octopi, a strange idol, the decaying seaside town, and constant fear of the unknown, that something Lovecraftian might dare to rear its scaly head? We dare hope.

April 1st, 2014, sees the release of not a third installment, but a collection of mini-mysteries set in the ATWQ world, File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents.

[Or is it an April Fool's publishing joke? So suspect, Snicket!]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+. 

NBC's Dracula: Episode 3, Goblin Merchant Men.

The question we're faced with at this point is if we'd never seen, or read, or heard the Dracula story, would this show's writing stand on its own? Part of me thinks main players aren't developed or deep enough, but the other part doesn't care because like most viewers, I already can fill in the blanks. Yet the fact that we’re given pause to ask the question’s telling.

And biggest plot oversight episode three presents is why would The Order of the Dragon go through so much trouble to create a being that has supernatural strength & speed, far superior senses, and lives forever if he's just going to turn against them? Same with leaving Van Helsing alive after killing his family. Not as ruthless as a secret cabal that's endured for over a millenia should be. Rather careless, really. And it makes no clear sense other than to set up origins with matching revenge motives for our two antiheros. Writers, your red hands are caught in frame, unfortunately.

Conversely from those same writers, we've been gifted more interesting reimagings: The asylum is Dr. Murray's, Mina's father, not Dr. Seward's asylum, of which there is no Dr. Seward character to speak of. And the more I consider the likewise absence of Mr. Quincey Morris in this version, the more I wonder if making Dracula the Texan Alexander Grayson is kind of a Quincey analogue. Plus if there's no separate Morris, there's no Texan shoving a Bowie knife into Dracula’s chest at the end of the tale ... which means Dracula might yet win this time!

Jonathan Rhys Meyers apparently gets recast as Shirtless Joe, which gives the episode a whole lotta mancandy. Are the unnecessary tribal stripes bookending his elbow & upper sleeve dot patterns really JRM's ink? Either way, enjoy ladies.

Quite fun are the episode’s dominant Lucy & Mina montages & shared moments that sets them up as the best of besties. If (if, since we're not sticking to a direct novel adaptation) things go bad (good?) for Lucy in this telling, it'll hit that much harder. I call BS on the bohemian flaming sugar cube absinthe serving, but liked the tunnel vision and slo-mo dance scene with the twangy modern music, and Mina’s thick flowing curls as the green fairy has its way with her.

[Two orders of cheesecake, please.]

Laurent's secret sentencing by The Order of the Dragon could've been like the startling medieval punishment of the traitors in Anne Rice's Talamasca from Taltos, but the blocking on the gladius thrust was off, which undermined the execution for the viewer. As a partial consequence of this unbelievable element, when lover Daniel shoots himself and suicide note’s Grayson's involvement in both their deaths, we just don't care. We know Daniel's the least sucky fencer, and lost his true manlove, but whatevs. For want of the convincing Roman nail, this whole crux don't matter.

Thanks to clever Team Dracula for killing the seers! Not because they were any sort of threat, but because those two Grace Jones performance school dropouts couldn't act their way out of a paper bag, even making lousy corpses despite really great smashed face prosthesis. And seeing Van Helsing lay down the hammer shows what grim stuff he's made of.

Have discovered why my objection to the show’s oh-so-faux London holds water: It’s shot in Hungary. The studio fabricated street where Dracula picks up Mina, Harker’s new digs, and Mina resides, are all the same set, as carelessly revealed by a ground level 360-degree shot in the Mina & Jonathan let’s-get-married kiss. The directors save money but blow it by not taking the time to redress the set and use different camera setups to hide that fact. But the sweet thing about Hungary as a location is that I believe the cherry blossom tree courtyard is in Castle Corvin (yes, the same of Corvinus family fame from the medieval history involving Vlad Tepes, the Inconnu’s hidden home from VtM, and the Underworld franchise) which makes using this particular location seriously legendary and vampire epicentric.

American Grayson, just like the Transylvanian Count in some film versions, is the unacceptable outsider, intriguing to Victorian society as a curiosity, but never to be given full berth. Also stymied by this, our medically-minded Mina, who would become a female doctor in an age where most women only hope to marry successfully. Grayson’s foreign conventions (pretended & real) & technological progressiveness, challenges Victorian mores, just as Mina does, which in this version makes them a match to root even more for.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

a second marvel-ous norse saga.

Co-opted from Norse lore by writer Stan Lee & artist Jack Kirby in 1962, their comic book Thor was designed as an adversary for The Hulk, but in selecting such a richly backgrounded character their story's potential far outgrew a mere contest-of-strength rivalry with the moody green simpleton in purple stretch pants. And here we are, hundreds of issues and half a century later, treated to the doom-filled thunder of Marvel's second pantheon-based cinematic blockbuster "Thor: The Dark World".

With the withdrawal of Shakespearian first director Kenneth Branagh due to Disney's less-generous shooting timetable, the sequel's helmed by Alan Taylor (episodes of "Game of Thrones"/"Mad Men"/"The Sopranos"), but the main difference being instead of having hammerless Thor humbled among the down home people of enchanting small town New Mexico, we find ourselves on a eye-goggling tour of the multiverse with the fate of not just frost giant populated Jotunheim to consider, but all the Nine Worlds at stake from a long-thought dead re-awakened ancient enemy.

Best performance in the film goes to ... Iceland! Iceland's starkness & desolate beauty easily depicts another world (most recently done in "Prometheus"). From a Thor-centric standpoint, it's appropo to use the nation with the most Thor prefixed place names, and who therefore historically honoured Thor the most. Volcanic rock, ashen landscape, outcroppings sculpted from tectonic violence, dancing aurora borealis, and midnight sun, all work to distance the viewer from the idea of a soundstage or digital environment with Iceland's abundantly exotic amazingness.

Best cameo goes to ... London! (Sorry, loveable Stan Lee.) It's great to see Marvel leave Manhattan as its metropolis of choice and upscale to some well-known London location placement. St. Paul's Cathedral, The London Eye, Greenwich Naval College, Thames River, Charing Cross Station, The Gherkin, and more. Having heroes & villains duke it out to damage some of those precious sites gave "T:TDW" a risk & flinch factor that hits literature's most beloved home, and that's also effectively played for laughs without breaking the tension.

The multiversal itinerary continues with glimpses of some of the other Nine Worlds: a beginning action sequence in Vanaheim, a flashback to Svartalfheim, a later stop through Jotunheim, and alot more of the home of the gods, Asgard, the Realm Eternal. And it's all these settings that lend the film a grandeur & scope worthy of Jack Kirby's world-building legacy.

[Jane Foster, you big Midgardian tourist!]

With any smart sequel the good things are carried forward: knit-bundled intern Darcy Lewis' perfectly timed quips (oh-so-hawt Kat Dennings), awkwardly cute astrophysicist Jane Foster (originally a nurse), the gratuitous Chris Hemsworth beefcake moment, parascientific explications of mythology, trickster Loki trickin', oh-no-we-shouldn't-do-it Asgardian decisionmaking, Idris Elba (BBC's "Luther") as stalwart Heimdall, Odin's sweet massive golden throne Hlidskjalf, all reappear to give us the touchstones we've waited two years to see again.

The first film was rooted in a father-son-son story, because having your dad running the universe as ruler of the gods while you bide your time over millennia for his job is bound to make heirs competitive, but after the first flush of obvious anger is spent, the complexity borrowed from the original Eddaic characters comes into play in this second chapter. The story continues to explore fallout from the Thor/Loki brotherly dynamic explosion in "The Avengers" (an overly bombastic offering which should be edited down to the Thor/Loki bits [and the shawarma eating easter egg because who ever really bought such a poorly mismatched group as The Avengers getting stuck together]), and expands upon an idea that resembles "The Animatrix" (2003) short "Beyond".

Other changes include the role of dashing Fandral being recast from Josh Dallas to Zachary Levi due to Dallas' obligations to "Once Upon a Time", energy & modern-style projectile weapons getting put up against the Asgardians' melee ones, an odd underused cameo from character actress Alice Krige (The Borg Queen from "ST: First Contact") as healing goddess Eir, and also underused Tony Curran (Marcus Corvinus of "Underworld: Evolution") as Odin's father Bor.

By contrast Rene Russo as Frigga gets a much longer turn as more than a foil for Anthony Hopkins' Odin and delivers a divine performance.

"T:TDW" presents some of the most striking design work, most notably an illuminated book whose designs animate on the pages themselves (with "The Secret of Kells" style but cooler since it's on a live action prop, or bearing resemblance to the limited but potent storytelling technique in a Marvel motion comic, such as "Thor & Loki: Blood Brothers" [which is in itself a really, really awesome Loki setpiece story]).

[Or like The Diamond Age's "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"!]

And there's the floating Jelling knotwork chandeliers which rotate & glow in Asgard that were totally golden, beautiful, and made you wish you could decorate with them.

Hearkening back to some 1960s film intros & outros, there were gorgeously painted end credits, meant to remind us that all of this visual richness originally came from a tradition of 1960s illustration.

Best of all "T:TDW" continues to fill in Marvel's mythological blanks in the Asgardian storyline, while still leaving some open for a definite trilogy in the making. Hail to the Hammer for "Thor 3"!

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+. 

you aren't asking the right questions.

Pedantic. Indulgent. Self-referential.

And for those you who still think from the above I'm going to bash Lemony Snicket's latest series "All the Wrong Questions", think again. No, these are the exact qualities we've missed since the conclusion of "A Series Of Unfortunate Events" ended with its 13th (really 15th if we include the Autobiography & companion Beatrice Letters) book from 2006.

A very gradual first in a quartet prequel, our Mr. Snicket begins by relating his field apprenticeship at a mere 13 years old for an unnamed secret society and his subsequent unwilling involvement in a Maltese Falcon style noir. And since Who Could That Be At This Hour's a prequel, one doesn't have to have read ASOUE to join in on the mystery. As with most noir, we start with the water well above our heads in the deep end of the pool, everything being totally suspect as it most likely isn't what it seems, and you spend the time playing catch up and treading the rising level of danger along with our protagonist. Like ASOUE's 13 chapters per book, this volume ticks its tale off with that identical unlucky structure.

The same great voice & style of Mr Snicket, full of zingers & payoffs, plus the seemingly truthful obtuseness of the world and his stymied frustration at seeing it all too clearly while no one else around him does, contextualizes our baffled onrush into the maw of unseen dark doings. (Yes, my Gothics, this one's so for you.) It's the classic children's lit & young adult (which usually means "dumbed down mediocrity for the passably literate", but which instead here means "a gameful sophistication at play") backdrop trope of the incompetent adults versus the emotionally perceptive youths. That dichotomy isn't just used but made painfully self-aware in our narrator to win our empathy as readers, and recalls the ancient child in us all.

With great similes like "hands as soft as old lettuce" or "hair so black it made the night look pale", one imagines Snicket's pen dancing from line to skillful line in poetic gran jetes of associative thought.

A constant earmark of the ASOUE was presenting the vocab, and it's present here:

"'What does kowtowing mean?'

'To behave in an obsequious manner.'

'I could play this game all night, Mr. Snicket. What does obsequious mean?'"

Or, more reflexively:

"He's a terrible man. He's despicable. He's loathsome, a word here which means terrible and despicable."

(Lexical boomerang to yo' face!)

[Ooh, bats & hair ribbons! You know you like them!]

Brett Helquist's art is absent, instead using black & white solids paneled with blue by Seth (no last name? Tres mystérieux!). While Seth has great graphic design sensibilities that remind one of Jaime Hernandez' work, one misses the pairing with Helquist's more line driven tension, which takes some cues from Edward Gorey. But that's apples & oranges, fruits here which aren't really fruits but mild discomfort at an unanticipated change.

[Hemlock Tearoom! You kill me, Snicket! *drinkee drinkee* *erk!*]

The legitimate critique of Mr. Snicket's offerings is that the plot never wraps up completely, that even if we were asking all the right questions, he wouldn't provide all the answers, right or otherwise. We suspect that even he doesn't have them, that the voice and flavour of his characters and environs are more mood and anxiety driven than clearly causal or sensibly linear, and if the story's final destination were to deliver complete solutions those facts might ultimately undermine any emotional resolution the climax delivers. Still, that really does leave one wanting. (Yes, I wrote a more angsty than thankful letter to our author, a.k.a. Daniel Handler, enumerating my many inquiries when I'd finished the 2,000+ pages [!] of ASOUE, but maybe I wasn't asking the right questions ... .) Perhaps, like life, it isn't ever meant to give up all its infinite mysteries. (Or he's totally mucking about at our expense? 'Fess up, Snicket!)

[The second ATWQ installment, When Did You See Her Last?, came out October 2013, and I'm sticking it in my shopping cart right now.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+. 

dividing The Twelve.

Society embraces different monsters as it needs them.

Romero's cinematic commentaries on self-devouring brainless consumer culture aside, our financial dead end post-2008 GFC finds people on some level longing for the zombie apocalypse to nullify personal debt and shed the mundanity of their lives for a more videogame/comicbook survival scenario.

I still vote vampire party though, since I'm a Lost Boy of Rice's 1980s.

We know in our hearts that zombies are too stupid to take over (yes, even if they were able to run), so it's a safe dark fantasy for society's tasty little rotten brains to enjoyably scare themselves with.

But with vampires, or zombies, or any monster, it's what would you do in the face of the threat. As readers/viewers we constantly play that game, either being underwhelmed by what dolts the characters are (i.e. many of Stephen King's Mainers), in agreement with, or at best, surprised & astounded by their monster coping adaptations, and Justin Cronin's The Twelve delivers the survival scenario in deadliest spades, never insulting us with simpletons but gifting us people who can deal not only with an irreparably fractured nation but with a harder version of humanity.

[Mas Gothic UK cover.]

A sequel to 2010's runaway bestseller The Passage, the setting/voice/tone's 99% existential survivalism. The world doesn't give a fuck & it'll turn on your irrelevant sense of self-importance like an angry dog the moment you even think about looking in the mirror too long. And when your reflection does bare teeth, it unfolds like a slow motion nightmare where the dread of inevitable disaster is coming, the description stretching taut until the final whiplash moment of consequence. Hive-minded insectlike vampires über alles, with rather unhappy & small enclaves of dispossessed humanity just sustaining, and never really able to honestly hope in the face of abject terror.

Opposed to that existentialism, the other 1% hints at an unstated intuitive connective tissue that happens in life's exceptional moments: "At the wheel of the Redbird, Danny Chayes was experiencing, for the first time in his life, an emotion that could only be described as a magnificent wholeness of self. It was as if he had lived all of his twenty-six years within an artificially narrow bandwidth of his potential personhood, only to have the scales fall abruptly from his eyes." As with magick/seiðr, or active meditation, there's perceptive empowerment, transcendental, but not in the dwarfing in the face of nature way, more in the Kabbalistic godding way, as if the desperate times evoke & evolve in us exceptional self-measures, as per Colin Wilson's thesis in The Occult.

Cronin comes dangerously close with mentally disabled Chayes & victim/victimizer Lawrence Grey to King's Trashcan Man, using the trope of the ancient child/Boo Radley figure, and moreso in this sequel are there moments where one compares with The Stand, and some structure of Yvonne Navarro's far lesser known Afterage (1993). While this book wouldn't have been buildable without King's diseased decimating whimper end scenario from 1978, Cronin surpasses that ploddingly slow gathering with intelligent characters, breathtaking fear, and far grimmer circumstances. The absence of humanity and decay are prevalent in both.

In the face of apocalypse all the mundane details that daily living leave gain sweetly tragic gravity: "They backtracked into the heart of the little town. All the lights were out, the streets empty. They came to the school, a modern-looking structure set back from the road at the edge of the fields. A marquee-style sign at the edge of the parking area read, in bold letters: GO LIONS! HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!" America, R.I.P. School's out forever, indeed.

As a first installment The Passage completely shocks us with a new scenario and unguessable progression throughout, but The Twelve shows us different aspects of the aftermath and what gets cobbled together in greater swaths than its predecessor. One could probably get away with not reading The Passage and just read The Twelve as Cronin goes back to the outbreak and sets up the vampire dominant situation again, but you'd be compelled to go back and read The Passage too.

One moment where Cronin does totally cheese out though is at a stadium. We're told that something really, really, really³ bad's happened there, but we never actually get to see it. Implication's far from enough in this instance, and whether the author thought he might alienate his audience, or felt that he might be playing too much horror too early in the story, I'm unsure of, but the lack of delivery at that moment was sharply, sharply, sharply³ unsatisfying.

Far outnumbering that are the many, many, many³ moments of solid writing & craft, such as this "waiting" paragraph that's so pure gold: "He waited for orders; he waited for chow; he waited for the latrine. He waited for the weather to break, and when it didn't, he waited some more. Orders, weapons, supplies, news -- all were things he waited for. For days and weeks and sometimes even months he waited, as if his time on earth had been consecrated to the very act of waiting, as if he were a man-sized waiting machine."
"He was waiting now." Ha!

Also smart stylewise, Cronin slips effortlessly at the right moments into King Jamesian language to heighten the sense of circumstance & climax. We are reading an account of the apocalypse, like the Book of Revelation, or a doom-poem Ragnarok, our future itself set down for us to gawp at, and at certain junctures Homeric epithets get prefixed & suffixed to names, and destinies are nailed to flesh, and made heroic or tragic. Plus the inverted parallel between the original apostles that spread the word & miracle, and the 12 original vampires of the title suits this choice.

Cronin may be an NFL fan since the end sequence resembles a football game, but more like the Mesoamerican ballgame, the stakes are life & death, and results possibly world altering. The main antagonists are built up in both novels, but here we still don't get enough exploration of them before that climax, which in a third person book like this could've been presented, but wasn't. In contrast of the Ricean literary innovation of personalizing the vampire that we've gotten to unlive vicariously though, there isn't too much given here on our fanged overlords, but I suspect that may await us in the third book.

And the rules for Cronin's insectoid vampires are both familiar & shudderingly different. Remember the first time you read Mark Rein·Hagen's adaptations for VtM? There's something of that in here, a rooting of the Underworld franchise's science with preternatural manifestations of Stokerian ideas, which give us something fresh to consider in a subgenre rife with imitation.

The Passage Trilogy completes with 2015's The City of Mirrors. I'm hoping for a far future narrative jump. You've taken us so far afield Mr. Cronin, into the glimmering midnight that tests our ability to endure as a species, and makes us wonder if we each have what it takes inside to live until tomorrow.

[enter The Passage.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

welcome to The Diamond Age.

Flipping through pages depicting an elegant techno-Victorian society set as a jewel in the crown of a juxtopian east coast China, I wondered exactly why I'd waited 18 years to read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

Presented as 21st Century post-nationalistic collapse cyberpunk (and later firmly retroclaimed by steampunk), the novel opens with a bodymodded & teched out street criminal (à la William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy characters), but the narrative quickly disposes of him as an illustration that this story's subversion's going to be far more intellectual.

To coin perhaps an even more divisive sectarian subgenre label, it's innovatively nanopunk, as technology takes control of matter at the molecular level. Better than the food generators in Star Trek's 24th century, Stephenson has matter compilers that build preset comestibles & household items, eliminating daily needs. The challenging question here is when basic needs & the necessity for work is solved, what do people begin to live for & what purpose does society serve? In a word: Culture. Which then makes the luxurious manifestations of that culture the ascendant form of societal credibility. 

With a world where one's cultural affiliation determines your role, the paradigms of East vs West and how their differences have an ugly history of disconnection in the shadow of Western Imperialism, and how that culture is passed to subsequent generations, becomes crucial. Enter "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", the book within the book. While books have always been the ultimate cultural vessels, this particular compilation's a fully interactive (or "ractive" in the novel's parlance) smartpaper text flash-style visual fairytale custom tailored to molecularly bond neurologically with its young recipient, and adapt its lessons to the desires & immediate emotional/physical requirements of the owner. Plus the fairytale, thanks to some of the grim circumstances of the future, is in a ruthlessly Grimmsian vein. All that and it reads out loud, too. Where this unique book ends up is wherein hangs the tale.

In deliberate contrast to the clipped noirtech codelines of cyberpunk, Stephenson's writing style's elegant, every so often paved with subtly beautiful words like gallimaufry, alamodality, callipygous, velleity, farrago, artifex, phyle. (So concinnus!) If Dickens wrote science fiction now, this would be it, replete with his semi-passive comments on class systems accepted for good or ill, but particular to oriental/occidental cultures. While these aren't necessarily critiques, more setpiece observations of differences, it does make you think about status quo, racial bias, and ethnic nurture, and uses these factors as forces in the plot.

Just as Stephenson turned an idea into a virus in the kinetic Snow Crash (1992) and brought memetics to a wider audience, here he implies that the web is an unknowing & unconscious coalescence of data from all who use it to form a greater dynamic & reactive pattern, that the internet itself is an input device that may at some point generate a great answer, or idea, or innovation that will advance the human condition and technology beyond current imagining.

And in a finer point, Stephenson discusses theatre as a metaphor & literal tool for transmission of data between biological entities. The observer effects the observed, and visa-versa. The idea that narrative/stories/myths not only entertain but gift us with lessons/knowledge/perspective in a programming fashion, and by adding live immersive roleplaying aspects & cooperative nanosites into the mix, the audience is not only unseated but stars in its own group composite play.

[A vampire's nanosite gathering sustenance during the day before heading back to its tech savvy master's lair?]

The plus side of my waiting 18 years to read this lands it amidst some of the concepts Stephenson extrapolated on happening, which makes its provocative imaginings now even more relevant: nanotechnology being applied to communications and medicine, the very beginning of multimedia interactive books as apps on tablets for kids, China's revisions of its forced labour manufactories, the encryption processes for data, the idea of virtual currency (i.e. Bitcoin) being able to evade taxes, and especially Ray Kurzweil endeavouring to map the mind, something that will require a printer-style molecular matter compiler by the time he's done. Maybe we can then use the singularity to literally copy people into finely crafted talking smartbooks. (Shut it, blathering Melville! I'm listening to Verne, okay?)

With its concepts so high it nears abstraction, The Diamond Age is an ambitious gem worth cutting into for the wealth of conceits & facets it shines & inspires with.

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Addenda from 10/13/2013: 

Only later do I find out that The Diamond Age is a very loose sequel to Stephenson's Snow Crash (but they each stand very much on its own with only one side character crossing forward, having marked differences in tone), and even attached to the rather irreverent prequel short story "The Great Simoleon Caper", but their world is contiguous.

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Further Addenda from 7/9/2018:

Twenty-three years after it's publication, _The Diamond Age_ is still being actively discussed. Attended the Tucson Steampunk Society's July 2018 Book Club meeting, which was livecast here. I arrive fashionably late at 44:35, asked to introduce myself shortly after at 45:12, waggle my first edition hardback at 46:40, declare my love of the Primer at 47:25, make wishful commentary about the matter compilers at 54:05, and my nanopunk neologism springboards post-cyberpunk conversation from 56:30 for quite a good while. The conversation will continue until our own Diamond Age arrives, probably sooner than you think.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

are you Ready, Player One?

The '80s were the last macrocultural zeitgeist.

After that it all fragments with the media's pronounced non-objective political divisiveness and the internet making endless forum & chat room for every myopic splinter interest, as we went from one shared page where everyone wondered about the same things: whether Coke or Pepsi was better, if Prince or Michael Jackson reigned supreme, what exactly's up with those Goth kids, or when the nukes would drop and justify our unassailable doomsday existentialism. After the web's technological expansion there was no way to keep track of it all, nor at that point would anyone want or even need to.

As such the 1980s will always be relevant.

Which brings us to Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One", an unapologetic 374-page lovesong to the last true pop cultural monolith that is the 1980s.

[Sweet foreign language Tron-inspired cover!]

Sack up, gunter*: Say Bill Gates or Steve Jobs dies/died, themselves competitive ego-products of 1980s greed-is-good corporate raider materialism, and instead of leaving their tech-legacies to friends or family or shareholders, decided to posthumously announce an internet-based contest within the virtual reality network they'd created, allowing the winner not only their personal fortunes of nigh-bottomless billions, but executive ownership of the whole internet itself. Essentially that's the high stakes plot of this near future 2041 cyberpunk modern masterwork.

Unlike most cyberpunk however, instead of grasping forward, Cline's virtual world frames its goggle-net in the rear-view mirror of Tom Cruise's Porsche 928, or Michael J Fox's DeLorean DMC-12: the 1980s context that not only sets our world's watershed reference points for the last agreed upon books, movies, music, and videogames, but the very same earmarks become possibly important clues for the greatest treasure hunt ever devised by a man who grew up in the '80s who was enamoured of all its facets. The conceit sounds like a writer's cop-out, but if you think about it of course we as users would want proverbial lightsabers, or sling a second-gen phaser from our spandexed space-uni hip, smoke the street comp in that unattainable Vector, sport a fierce "Lost Boys" jacket, or rad awesome big teased hair from "Square Pegs". They would pick these, and Cline takes us into the most bitchin' shopping mall of our collective media past with credit cards at the ready, going "Oh yeah! I sooooo wanted that!"

And I can't get over this book. It's so nerd geek gamer retro-wonderful, and payloads John Hughes teen brat pack films, half-remembered TV shows, nascent hacker empowerment ethos, kaiju cinema, classic Star Wars, Saturday morning cartoons, New Wave, Synthpop, hair metal, 8-bit, Radio Shack hardware and so much more into an intellectual atomic bomb signifier that completely levels the irrelevant house of "postmodernism"'s cards into the valueless joke it really is. All the things we have affection for become invaluable, and everything in its way is a miracle we can share, celebrate with each other, and, even more importantly, can be the things we can grow ourselves from, and inspire us to transcend.

Of course there's villainy ex machina and, as with any contest, loopholes & hacks to be had, so Cline builds the tension up, and the seemingly impossible search pulls his world's contestants, and the readers with them, in, trying just as hard to figure out where the clues are hidden.

Good sci-fi tends to be prescient in that egg/chicken, causal/predictive way. Just look at Verne (submarines), Dick (cloning), and Gibson (cyberspace). As we browse right now, convergence technology's busy combining networks down to smaller numbers with more features, whether that's Sony's liberal PS4 over Microsoft's over-regulated Xbox One next-gen consoles, sync service focused Windows 8.1, or multi-app A.I. driven smartphones, all vying to be the preferred user device. It's not too far off to imagine that the world wide web, the cloud, mobile networks, online gaming and video conferencing could also umbrella into one single shared virtual user interface. Recently Cline went and tried out the Oculus VR, deeming their device the looking glass step into his book's OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), the novel's world changing virtual reality.

Cline reveres the tools of technology and the things it can manifest, but indulges in a couple small humanizing moments to remind us not to lose ourselves socially & psychologically within the artifice (albeit pretty hollowly by comparison to the digital grandeur of the brilliant technostalgic world he posits, but point taken). And at the end Cline asks if we are ready to play on this newfound virtual grid where anything is possible, and if so, by whose rules? Will it be by an authority that will limit those possibilities, or by our independent selves with our shared media heritage & no limits save the potential of our imaginations? Either way, Cline's vision is coming. Are you Ready, Player One?

[*Gunter: Easter Egg Hunter]

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

I am comforted by Mozart's ridiculous laugh.

If we've ever met you know I have what's been always referred to as "the laugh". There's no way you didn't notice it and you probably asked someone who knows me better about it, or even had the courage or diplomacy or tactlessness to ask me directly. I probably said that I wasn't sure, the laugh was just something I did, and I sighed or showed some discomfort or ire at being reminded to get you to stop asking.

And though it's been there as far back as anyone can recall, the laugh has managed to defy too much scrutiny or explanation. After the first couple decades of my life I just accepted it and tried not to think too much about it.

It just is.

But recently someone classified the laugh as "a powerful force".

Given the past, I'd never considered it as such. For all the teasing, imitations, belittlement, and mockery throughout the years to this night from an attribute I don't even hear. When I speak it slips in undetected, slithering into the space after sentences to become my aural earmark and verbal signature.

Teachers accused me of speech impediment, sympathetic classmates wrote it off as a "nervous" laugh, but those conclusions were never right.
And since I'm unaware of it perhaps there's a cognitive reason, a loop or neural detour whereby to finish certain statements it must process with the laugh as its punctuation.

Many times the laugh's been a social litmus test with the immature, unintelligent, bullying, shallow, and asinine who cannot see past such an eccentricity, quickly weeding themselves out of my social circle. Others have even liked me all the more for it, that the oddity is charming in the way you like a six-toed cat or a dog with one folded ear, an irregularity to be accepted as part of the whole -- a thing winning but aberrant, and somehow still seeming wrong.

I had to hear myself on tape when I was 12 to finally catch the laugh, and when I did at the time I found it no wonder some thought me a freak.

There are far worse burdens in this world than an involuntary laugh. In the other direction, many ladies have said that it should be recorded and sold as a foley at great profit.

Yet to come to know my laughter a force, this subconscious exhalation of breath that I gift those about me with, there's a mystery inside that, and yes, a power within that is solely mine to own. It accents near everything I say, colouring my meanings with humour or joy or irony or celebration, an amplification of statement that no one else I've ever met possesses.

Myriads everyday pay for piercings or tattoos to make themselves feel special. I have my laugh, unremovable and uncoverable. It is a force I'll fucking bludgeon you with, the truncheon that'll grind salted injury into the insult. Or better, I can touch you with it, a caress after words that will be all the more significant because they were delivered with laughter.

I am Guillermo, the laughing boy, and that laugh you hear is mine.

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Addenda from 10/17/2013 at 2:10am

... and then Lil' Miss actually said, "Oh Mr. G, your miraculous laugh alone could cure HIV, restart the Federal Government, and end world hunger, all at the same time!"


Yes, really. So blushworthy, so measurelessly sweet, it makes me want to make out with her forever.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

thank you, shoes.

In 1993, I spotted you in a Brit catalogue and you became the lust object of my footwear dreams. A month later I stayed up all night just to giddily order you by phone and enjoy hearing some shopgal's sweet London accent while blowing all my Yule money. It wasn't until you arrived that I realized just how wonderfully odd you were: Shelly's uppers sewn to Docs lasts & soles, the whorled punch patterns wingtipped over steeltoes, and still somehow you were a dress oxford. I would never see your like, no matter how far I traveled.

Together we danced the night away with the ladies, postured & owned in doorways & on streetcorners; you saved my toes nigh countless times, guarded my heels from zealous power walkers, outlasted your retailer's last corporate handoff that eliminated men's shoes altogether, lost a lung to nail that gave you a characteristic wheeze, endured the oven beeswax because you so knew it was for your own good, got minked, polished, scuffed, and polished again until you were parade worthy. I look at you and see the path of the last 20 years of my life, and I see the one set of footprints, and I know it was you that carried me across the desert sands, and that when I shoegazed it was your style that lent me reassurance to look up again and take another step forward.

And you've given me all your steps. Cracked, creased, split, irreparably fissured, and worn through. Even five years ago the cobbler's daughter I dated said that was it, but I wasn't ready to hear it and just bought thicker socks. Thought about plotting you in the backyard, or setting you alight into the pond like a viking at sea for having heroically fallen in the warmarch of time and distance. Instead, together, we'll go to the park on Tuesday with your laces tied, and I'll launch you as hard & as high into the heavens as I can. At the top of your last graceful arc, you'll poetically bolo around a tree branch, and birds will wonder at their luck at being able to nest in you, and squirrels can safely store acorns in your protective toes during your well earned view of the world from on high. Such an ascension is the best I can think of to give you, my handsome pair of Shelly's. Thank you for everything.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

a life cast in John Hughes.

There's that montage in Pretty in Pink where Andie/Duckie/Blaine are sitting by the phone soon after the physically decisive hay-rolling horse stable date, it's raining outside like the world's trying to drown itself, and New Order's Elegia creeps its way in & builds into an inexorable throb as the next day at school comes to cast its harsh light on the emotional shortfall.

That's exactly where I'm at right now.

Surprise. Joy. Frustration. Disappointment.
I can hear myself counseling a friend not so long ago that we were better men for holding onto our romantic ideals, that they imbue our souls with worth & value, that they represent an undefeatable hope that we will one fine day find that girl, that our desires will be met & exceeded with passion & comfort, and it will all be achingly transcendent.

"What about prom?"

All I want to do right now is listen to The Smiths, nurse a three finger tumbler of scotch while hucking cards into a bin, ride my BMX until I collapse in unthinking fugue, or go beat the crap out of something. And to seriously back whatever kickstarter or tech stock that's working on gynobots.

Yet I also want to believe I'm still right, to hang onto my 1980s optimism and teen drama motion picture ending.

I watched two friends of mine at work not look at each other today. They'd talked about moving away together, about taking trips to far cities & deep wildernesses, worked on merging dreams, and helped each other through some of their past damages. But they broke up last night, showing up so bitter and unhappy, just standing there 20 feet from each other, unable to escape, unable to look. It killed me to watch it, though it might've been for the best and beyond repair, the selfishness outweighing their willingness to understand & accept the other. It was so uncomfortable & ugly. But they aren't me, nor are they she.

"No! What about prom?"

A girl I'd had a crush on since my freshman year asked me to senior prom. She asked me. Because it happened once, I have to believe it could happen again.

It just feels so, so, so, very, very, very, hard right now.

Fuck.

Fucking happen already.

[Andie, I feel you. I would've called because I still believe in you. I wish upon your star.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.