The Road. Indeed. It is a road, a journey, a trek through hell, but is both more and less than that. Less than that meaning: Cormac McCarthy presents bleak as no other writer can. While I was reading it, several times I thought that I’ll never again believe a writer who uses the word “hopeless” to describe the plight of their character. In The Road, there is nothing but hopelessness. Almost. Which leads to where I struggled with this novel.

Let me cut the suspense. I’m giving it 5/5 stars as Amazon let’s us grade books. I’d give it 6/5 if I could figure out how because there is much to praise here, though that is putting it too gently.

Warning! Warning! Warning!

Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!

But let me share why I had some problems with this story.

I have long avoided reading it though friends have encouraged me to. I only read it after reading McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is a far better novel in my view.

I’ve long avoided the novel because, well…the premise is that they are traveling down a road in a post apocalypse setting. One of the first things you learn as a combat soldier is you never take the road. In the military, these are called “natural lines of drift.” It’s a clever way to say “the route people will take”. If you have ever walked across fields that cows regularly frequent you will know what I mean. Cows find the easiest path and tread it over and over. If you want to kill a cow, just wait along one of these paths. Roads for humans are built to take the easiest path between two points. If you want to kill a human, just wait along a road.

This world of McCarthy’s is populated with “bad guys” who are almost invariably cannibals. This is because there is simply no food left, no living thing other than the last scraps of humanity preying on each other. They are often also on the road, or setting up ambushes along it. Several times during the story, the man and the boy avoid dying in such attacks. Too many times to my thinking.

But the road is needed as a literary device. The two main characters have to start somewhere and end somewhere else. It is both physical and metaphorical. So they travel the road for hundreds and hundreds of miles, miraculously, without getting hurt.

I was so taken with McCarthy’s writing after Blood Meridian, I decided to read The Road in spite of my doubts about traveling this road of theirs. So getting into the book, and starting down the road, the next issue I had was that they were pushing a shopping cart full of their meager belongings.

You may see homeless people pushing shopping carts under bridges or down a sidewalk. You don’t see people pushing shopping carts hundreds of miles over roads after a decade of neglect and (apparently) nuclear blasts. To his credit, McCarthy had his character’s wear out one, and often had to dig a path through sand or snow to keep the cart going. Doable? Maybe…for a while. But the doable part had another issue. It takes a lot of water and a lot of calories to keep pushing such a cart.

The Road‘s landscape — world — is depressingly bleak and gray; even the snow falls gray. Rivers are described as molten-looking sludge. For much of the book, I wondered where they were getting water clean enough to drink. Though they stumbled across a few forgotten caches of food and water from time to time, not until the last few pages did we actually see them getting water out of a creek, straining it to clean it. It was a weak throw to acknowledging how they were getting their water. But he did not share it until the end of the book because it mitigates the desolate, rotted Earth images of the earlier portion of the book. Maybe the streams are not quite so dirty.

Another problem I had with the book was how they were getting enough calories to keep their strenuous trek going (in freezing weather, no less). I’ve lived outside doing hard work for weeks at a time. You burn 3K calories a day…easily.

When the book starts, there is no explanation of how they came to have a cart full of supplies. No matter. But as they deplete them through the story, they invariably stumbled upon more food as they were about to starve to death. And it was food the rest of humanity had missed while they were starving to death. The man and the boy found it, which was all too convenient.

I also struggled with what event would kill all life on Earth other than humans? I don’t doubt there could be a nuclear exchange, or a devastating meteorite strike, or some other terrible event. But what puzzled me was that there is no life. Nothing. There were no rats, flys or cockroaches… These are forms of life that are amazingly resilient. But somehow there are humans wandering about but none of these little critters. Not a lot of humans, but enough that we run into one or two or a dirty gaggle once every twenty or thirty pages. But not a mouse in sight. Seemed odd.

Another moment that stopped me was the famous scene of the man and the boy stumbling upon a just-abandoned campsite where a baby was being roasted on a spit. This was shortly after they hid on the side of the road as three men wearing backpacks and a pregnant woman passed. The clear implication was that it was the woman’s baby over the fire. Horrific? Yes. But did it make any sense? If the woman had died, why not eat her? She would have been more substantial. If she had survived the child’s birth, would she really be able to run away from the camp site? I suppose she could have just been hiding nearby. And if the people had been hungry enough to eat a baby, why would they take the time to pick up their packs and run off without grabbing their dinner?

In short, it is hard to imagine a scenario that made any sense with this one. It felt like McCarthy was more interested in the sensational and horrific than he was in being realistic. This is in marked contrast to Blood Meridian, which is far more violent but seemed more logical to me.

There were a few other scenes — one even more horric and gut-twisting — that I found improbable, but it was the last that seemed completely implausible.

After hundreds of pages and hundreds of miles on the road, and after every single person they came across was a cannibal that wanted them for dinner, at the end, after the man dies, and the boy sits beside him for three days on the verge of dying, who walks up? A well-armed father with a good Christian wife and their two children who are about the same age as the boy.

The man has delivered his son into the hands of someone who will care for him and raise him in a safe environment, complete with similarly aged playmates. Or so is the implication.

Of course, there is no food and the Earth is incapable of growing anything. There are no animals, no living plants, nothing. Are we left to believe that the boy has been saved? Or will he live in misery and despair until one way or the other, he also falls?

This in turn leads to the novel’s strengths. Beyond the extraordinary writing and the stunningly bleak vision, beyond the smart way McCarthy never feels the need to explain why or how it all happened, he sets up unrelenting tension.

Arguably the core story is that the man — the father — does not have the courage to kill his son and then himself to escape their hell. Where is the wife? The boy’s mother? She killed herself, we discover, before the story opened. And when the story opens, the man has a pistol with — you guessed it — two bullets. So we know from the start he has not yet found the courage to kill them both, and not long after we start our trip down the road, the man has to use one bullet.

With only a single bullet left, his dilemma is even more profound: Should he use it to kill the boy in his sleep? Get it over with? If so, how would he kill himself? He could do it, but he no longer would have such a simple and easy means as a self-inflicted shot to the head after killing his son.

In short, he can’t bring himself to kill his child, the child he loves so dearly, the child that trusts him so totally, which is shown over and over through the story.

Thus the tension mounts as we see the man, coughing his lungs out, sick and wounded, starving, limping toward his own death. We are left wondering until the end if he has the guts to kill his child and save him from what will befall him when taken by the cannibals.

In the end, though McCarthy could horrify us, he could not kill the child, his child, so he created an ending that made no sense and was completely out of step with the rest of his dark vision.

All said, the book is brilliant and highly recommended. The writing is uniquely McCarthy’s and the vision and violence are also something few (if any) writers can match. I urge you to read The Road. Just don’t think it is going to be fun.

The post The Road: A Review of Cormac McCarthty’s classic appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

One of my goals this year was to read more indie/self-published novels. Part of my motivation was to study them to help me learn how to better write a book. My own novel is progressing, and I do read about the craft and some classic works of fiction. But sometimes it is good to look at the not so good to better understand what does and does not work. So far I’ve read seven novels and novellas. That is not a huge sample size, but it is big enough that I wanted to provide some summary thoughts. And these books are not randomly selected from Amazon. Let me explain….

The books I picked were already in a narrowly defined group. First, they are books that were being touted by their authors at a Goodreads Group Review Initiative, that I’ve written about before. So — at the risk of doing some speculating here — these are authors that are generally more conscientious and self-critical of their work and that are probably better writers than most indies.

Second, like any consumer, I checked the reviews before I bought and read any of these books. I looked at a lot more than just these seven. If the average review “score” was less than 3.5 “stars” or if I saw what looked like purchased reviews, I would not buy it.

These criteria don’t mean the books were best in class, but it does mean they were better than the average indie book. That said, a few observations:

For the most part, they are discernible stories with distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. And I found them all engaging in one way or another.

The downside was that on average (there were a couple exceptions) the editing was spotty. I’m not just talking about grammar issues (there were some of those) and typos (a few books had some), but more subtle things such as overuse of certain phrases (“Obviously,…”), repeated sentence structure, paragraphs that started with the same word, etc. These were not story killers, but they became distracting in a few of the stories.

My only other complaint about the group as a whole was that they lacked a rich, interwoven feel that smart use of foreshadowing, metaphors, and other traditional literary devices can give a text. The stories tended to be very linear and to the point, so to speak; they felt very contemporary and lacking the extra dimension you feel when you read a great book.

Overall, though, they were engaging and generally enjoyable. Below I’ve posted all the reviews (with their typos ) so you don’t have to dig them up on Amazon and see what I said about each. I gave “star” grades of between 3 and 5 stars, with an average of 3.9 “stars”.

Below I’ve posted all the reviews so you don’t have to dig them up on Amazon and see what I said about each.

Iron William

4.0 our of 5 stars. A Fun Adventure

Michael Gardner’s “Iron William” is a fun, swashbuckling romp.

___________________________________________

Fearsome Creatures

3.0 out of 5 stars

Creative and nicely drawn — and very dangerous — environments, 11 May 2016

I’ve long enjoyed HP Lovecraft and related writers of horror fiction, especially when slanted toward or overtly science fiction, so I looked forward to reading Fearsome Creatures by David B. Ross. There was much to like here: The writing was quite good, and the environments and “creatures” were all thoughtfully and creatively presented.

As others have noted, this short book is divided into four stories, of which the first is by far the longest. Though I won’t provide any spoilers, I will say that the though the first story’s characters were carefully and thoughtfully drawn as unique (almost too much time was spent on the various background of each), the other three stories were noticeably lacking in characterization.

One consistent aspect of all was that the “creatures” are not driven by malicious intent. Ross is arguably realistic in how he creates and then presents how creatures from different environments could be lethal – gruesomely so – to humans. Though I applaud this somewhat naturalistic approach, it also limits the emotional drama.

Overall, though I think it well written and immensely creative at times, I can’t give it more than 3 stars because I never found it particularly engaging, which the frequent POV shifts contributed to.

________________________________________

Leaving Traces: Between Time and the Stars (Serial Time Travel Romance)

4.0 out of 5 stars

Innovative and finely crafted tale of time travel, 25 April 2016

Moreland’s “Leaving Traces: Between Time and the Stars” is an innovate and carefully crafted work of imagination. It seems to be a relatively fresh take on “time” travel, though the experiences of the subject cover much more than time. As I read it, I was reminded more than a few times of the work of HP Lovecraft, so I was not surprised to see a reference to Edgar Allen Poe in the text given that Lovecraft studied Poe and considered him one of the great writers. As I read, I was also reminded of another, much more obscure text: the story told on the cover of the 1974 Genesis double-album, “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.” Much like the works of Poe and Lovecraft, the story on the album cover is a fantastic (and at times horrific) voyage into the timeless and impossible.

And this leads to my one quibble with the story. As with Poe and Lovecraft (though that is great company to keep), whenever a writer attempts to present the unimaginable, the prose can become abstract and vague. At times, I was unable to comprehend the essence of some scenes when the descriptions became too fantastic. There were some, of course, that were clear (and bizarre), but too often I struggled.

The story does have a definitive beginning, middle, and end, and there is more danger than it first seems. The short length made it difficult to get too deeply engaged with the main character, but as her sense of peril increased through the story, it kept me engaged.

Certainly an innovative and engaging read as a new twist on an old idea.

________________________________________

The Queen and the Dagger: A Book of Theo novella

4.0 out of 5 stars

A well-written and nicely paced story of palace intrigue, 18 Feb. 2016

Melainie Anseley’s “The Queen and The Dagger” is an engaging novella of a young woman’s coming of age in trying times and in a palace thick with familial intrigue (no surprise, given the title), albeit a family of rabbits. It is an engaging cast of characters, each with unique aspects and motivations. Together they provide variety and surprises as the main character, Indigo, struggles to navigate the hand she is dealt as she hopes to ascend to the throne.

I found the text nicely formatted and the story well-written and nicely paced. The writing was concise and fresh: “The next day Indigo rose with the sun, knowing sleep was impossible. A strengthening wind had already scraped the sky to a clean, hardened blue.”

The story is set in a rich and detailed universe. Clearly the author has carefully developed and imagined the setting. And the loyalties and betrayals make sense as the story progresses. Indigo matures and learns as her perceptions of herself and her role evolve through the story.

Though the story could have been a simple coming of age/wronged princess finds her way, it is more complex than that as Indigo struggles with conflicting desires. I won’t spoil the ending, but what she thinks she wants when she starts and where she winds up are not exactly the same thing.

The volume of characters and their unique names put me off a bit, and several times I suspected that I would have enjoyed the story more if it were told with people rather than animals (though it would have been much less unique). But those are minor complaints about a well-written and fun story that will keep you engaged and guessing about the ending.
________________________________________

The Panchatantra Retold: Part 3 – Kakolukiyam

5.0 out of 5 stars

A well written and engaging collection of interwoven folk stories from India, 2 Feb. 2016

I found this short book delightful and well prepared.

The book – nicely illustrated by the author – is a retelling of some of ancient India’s oral folklore. As the author explains: “In the Sanskrit language…the Panchatantra is a collection of witty and entertaining folk-tales from Ancient India, involving both humans and anthropomorphic animals that are meant to represent certain types of humans.” She explains the story by noting that “Each section begins with a main tale or frame story, in which one character begins narrating a new tale to another character to prove his/her point, and the listener then takes his/her turn to begin yet another tale to make his/her point. The stories thus develop from one another and are interwoven together. This was a common practice of story-telling in Ancient India.”

I am a writer and well-read, and I’ve lived in Asia and traveled in India, but I make no pretense of understanding the social or literary impact or importance of these folk stories. From a purely entertainment perspective – as a reader – I can say these are well told, well presented and very engaging. The book is not long; it only took me about an hour or so to read. And the drawing, though simplistic, nicely illustrate the main characters and dramatic situations.

It is certainly not your typical American fare, but it is well written and an engaging departure. …the owls and crows have a score to settle!

Recommended
________________________________________

Under A Blood Moon (The Alex Hayden Chronicles Book 1)

3.0 out of 5 stars

An urban vampire romp, 25 Jan. 2016

Occasionally I like to read outside my normal genres, so when given the opportunity to read and share an honest review of Under A Blood Moon (The Alex Hayden Chronicles Book 1), by Michael Andrews, I looked forward to the chance to do so.

This is what I would call a paranormal, urban, vampire, action-adventure story. The main character is a century-old vampire in a 14-year old’s body. And without giving away any spoilers, the story progresses through an almost police detective mystery to a climactic final confrontation.

The story seems to heavily leverage readers’ expectations for such stories, which is fine, and most genre fiction does. But there is also a lot of vampire lore and “world building” to explain many aspects of why things are the way they are, and which vampire has done which other vampire wrong, etc. I found it a bit tedious.

Though I thought the main character mildly engaging and unique, for the most part, the plot seemed predictable. Several of the secondary characters were also interesting, but the bad guys were mostly bad and wanted to take over the world. And several times the plot was propelled forward by highly improbable events and coincidences…of course it is a book about vampires, so I guess that is okay. I did struggle with the poor editing. I’m a writer, too, so maybe I hold other writers to higher standards. In any event, there are too many gaffs to give the book more than 3 stars.

In sum, if you are into such things, it is probably an enjoyable romp. For readers who are not already primed for such stories, I suspect you will struggle to finish this one.
________________________________________

Hospital Hill: A Novel

4.0 out of 5 stars

Rich prose, a complex main character, and strong sense of atmosphere, 14 Jan. 2016

When I came across Anderson’s Hospital Hill, I could not resist. My parents were both clinical psychologists who worked with institutionalized patients. And as a child, I grew up across the street from an abandoned hospital that we used to sneak into and wander on stormy nights. Seemed like perfect prerequisites for enjoying this novel.

The writing was exquisite. Anderson’s ability to cast rich prose was impressive. There were many sentences that were fresh while remaining clear and simple.

A second strength was the presentation and development of her main character. This was a complex, multi-faceted figure with internal and external motivations that logically drove the story forward.

Additionally, between the thoughtful writing and the author’s clear understanding of the physical aspects of the primary setting, the novel has a very strong sense of atmosphere, very much like you are there in the story.

The two strikes against the novel, and why I won’t give it 5 stars, is what I consider a highly improbable sequence of events over the last fourth of the novel, and a surprising number of typos and other gaffs. In the first instance, though, I won’t spoil the story, it felt like a story that had flowed very logically and coherently suddenly veered to the improbable and fantastic enabled by the most improbable coincidences and unlikely accomplishments.

On the second count, there were a distracting number of simple typos that repeatedly tripped me up and knocked me out of the story. A few hours in the hands of a rigorous copy editor could really polish the writing into a gem.

In sum, four stars on the strength of the writing. Rich and engaging. I’m sure as Anderson continues to write, her storytelling will only get stronger.

The post Indie Book Reviews (And Learning How to Write a Book?) appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....