White Noise by Delillo part 2

In a nutshell I found White Noise to be a self-conscious satire with interesting observations but no deeper understanding. And an obsession with supermarkets.

            Jack teaches Hitler studies in a small college town on the edge of Iron City. He’s married to his fourth wife, Babette, and they live with their four children from various marriages. Babette reads tabloid papers to an old blind man and teaches classes in sitting, standing, and walking at the community center. 15 year old Heinrich is skeptical of everything (including whether it is currently raining or not) and is the sort of person who will constantly refresh Google news for the updated death toll in the latest disaster. 12 year old Denise is a miniature adult worried about the medication her mother may or may not be taking. 9 year old Steffie is Denise-lite. Lastly, young Wilder, who I could have sworn was 2 from the way he acts but online sources says is 6, never speaks and, to be quite blunt, comes across as retarded. The story is told from the 1^st person POV of Jack who, other than being kind of nebbish, has no personality. Ready to read 326 pages about these people?

            Jack goes about his daily existence until a tanker carrying the dangerous Nyodene D crashes near their town releasing a toxic cloud of chemicals. An evacuation is called for but during the escape Jack is forced to stop for gas, exposing himself for two minutes. (This was a point of difficulty for me because the way the event is described they’re outside the radius of the cloud.) He’s told that this exposure could prove to be a fatal problem at some point in the next thirty years. Then life goes back to normal.

            The rest of the book is more of the first part of the book, except there’s more anxiety about death. (This was in the pre-cloud part too. Jack and Babette like to argue about who would rather die first. The foreshadowing is less shadowing and more penciling in.) Jack discovers Babette has been keeping a secret from him and she manages to belittle his place in her life while loading her confession with an incredible amount of bathos. In the end Jack tries, in his ineffectual and bumbling way, to reassert control over his life, Wilder nearly gets himself flattened by rush hour traffic, and the whole thing fades off into the produce section.

Throughout, brand names are thrown around like invocations, dating the text even more. While looking at clouds at sunset we suddenly get the line, “Clorets, Velamints, Freedent.” Thank goodness for Wikipedia, purveyor of random information. While sleeping, one of Jack’s daughters breathes the words, “Toyota Celica.” I’ve never heard of that particular model but I’m sure their commercials were awesome. Random lines from the ever present TV and radio litter the text until they’re actually coming out of the mouth of a passerby, culminating in a torrent of nonsensical information from a drug-fried character at the end. Rather than being intrusive I liked how these lines remind the reader of the constant barrage of information and advertising that floods our lives. The naming of products out of context was less subtle and kind of silly.

            On the whole, this was a well written book. Events progressed nicely, plots points were wrapped up, and the descriptive passages were very good. His imagery of the toxic event, with the ever expanding cloud lit by helicopters and the refugees trudging along under the falling snow, was very evocative. The prose was generally readable and with only a few stutters flowed well.

            One final complaint: the dialogue was horrible. With few exceptions all characters had the same unrealistic speech patterns. Even a German accented woman eventually started monologing the same way as everyone else. It was like Don Delillo’s voice was coming out of multiple mouths, eventually giving me the creepy sensation that there were no individual characters at all but rather some sort of hive mind parroting the author’s internal thoughts. Like a master puppeteer having conversations with himself through proxies.

            This was a decent enough book but I don’t think it aged well and I couldn’t connect with it. Maybe if I had been more aware during the ‘80’s it would have more resonance with me. I’ll have to read Delillo’s more recent work to see how he’s changed.

*Clorets is apparently a type of gum now mainly available in stores in South America, the Middle East, and S.E. Asia. You can, of course, buy it on Amazon.

Velamints appear to be a mint. Surprisingly, they do not have a Wikipedia page. They do have their own Facebook page which informs all that they’re back.

Now I thought Freedent might be a dental adhesive but it is, in fact, a type of gum. It’s advertised as not sticking to dental appliances.

White Noise by Delillo part 1

I've read a number of books since I last posted but I'm going to focus on White Noise since it's been highly touted. This review is going to be too long. My thoughts about why I don't like the feel of the novel take up a good chunk of it so I'm going to split this in two. First post is on my personal thoughts about why Delillo's kind of a supercilious windbag and the second post will focus more on the book itself.

The blurb on the back of the cover of White Noise describes an everyman and his family jolted out of their complacent, consumerist existence by a man-made “airborne toxic event” which forces them to reevaluate their values and view of life. I started the book anticipating the journey of an average American family forced to abandon their comfortable way of life to flee a disaster of modern society’s own making. As they moved through a growing landscape of logos and brand names, stripped of the trappings of a sheltered civilization they would eventually confront the human frailties that consumer culture hides them from. Their familial ties would be strengthened by the ordeal and they would ultimately gain a deeper understanding of themselves and human nature. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Obviously I’ve never read Don Delillo before. So let’s deal with the story I got instead.

            I must make it clear that I am not a believer in the view of consumerism espoused by the book; that modern man hides behind shopping and the acquisition of things to deny the inevitability of death or that it makes people shallow and stupid. This is partly because I don’t believe that people have fundamentally changed in the last hundred years. For ages people who can afford it have been buying the latest fashion, carriages, furniture, food and drink, pets, servants, etc to boost their ego, flaunt their wealth, and compete with others. It’s just that now more people can afford to join this game what with higher purchasing power and cheaper products. I really don’t think it’s terrible to allow the less than wealthy the pleasure of options and nicer things. Brand names and marketing have obviously become more prolific but this really only seems to be a horrible thing is you believe the pursuit of money and goods is evil. Or, if you’re like Don Delillo and never learned the art of selective attention. Seriously, I contend that most of us had a disillusioning experience with marketing at some point during our childhood and came out of the experience a little wiser and more discerning. Advertising isn’t an all-consuming parasite leeching away at out vitality and intelligence but just a part of the landscape. Amusing, annoying, unavoidable, yes, but without real impact on who we are or how we live. This is apparently not what Delillo thought in 1984 when he wrote White Noise.

            I don’t know how to explain this novel other than to say that it’s very eighties and, to be honest, kind of mean. I admit I can get frustrated at how stupid people can be but, at heart, I find most people interesting and unique. Each person contains a secret world of experience, thoughts, feelings, fears, anxieties, crimes, loves, and hopes and they exist at the center of a web of connections leading outward in an ever-expanding tangle. Each person is a story and each story, if told well, has the capacity to be interesting. The people in White Noise are denied that delicate characterization that would have breathed life into the story and are, instead, caricatures, almost automatons. I know that was probably the point, to show the hollowing of self caused by rampant consumerism but in divesting them of individuality they become difficult for the reader to connect with. Plus, they’re boring.

Okay wow this is going to be long and also The Redbreast spoilers!

Omphalos: The centre, heart, or hub of a place, organization, sphere of activity, etc. From the OED.

Here is a word we don't see often enough. Or really at all.

So, I finished reading Life in the Cul-de-Sac. An introspective work with very well-realized characters. By that I mean, they thought like real people and not like characters in a book. They were very human. The book is composed of a series of chapters, each centering on a family member in a little side street in suburban Tokyo. The households are at different stages in life but they are all experiencing a disintegration, a lack of omphalos. Each person drifts in their own world, brushing lightly against each other. This lends the moments of real connection more weight, while the characters own thoughts keep the perspective just a little unfocused. I find this rather true to life. we are all of us thinking not just of the present but of the past and future and of events that we want or fear will happen and never will. People experience the same thing differently because of the associations and preconceptions we carry with us. It's also an interesting look at a change perceived in modern Japanese life in the '80's. I have no idea how relevant it is today but it's a good read.

And now, on to The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo. I'm going to paste the long, long summary I wrote after finishing it. Everything is laid out including the ending. Just as a warning.

So! The book starts off with an assassination attempt during a presidential visit to Norway and our main character, Harry Hole, shoots the man with the Uzi in the back! But it turns out to be just a secret service agent. So Harry is promoted because nobody wants the public to know just how much both sides goofed up. He discovers someone in Norway recently bought a smuggled in super rifle and he guesses it must be for use in an assassination. Oh, and he has a partner named Ellen who, due to his promotion is no longer his partner but she’s still totally his BFF. And then we start having flashbacks to WWII and some Norwegians fighting the Russians. And we have to keep track of these people because one of them is the one who bought the rifle from the neo-nazi (there are neo-nazis in this but don’t worry they don’t actually have anything to do with the plot). He’s going to kill someone. In the present I mean.

So five guys are there but one gets shot in the head and another runs to the Russians and the others get hit by a grenade although they all survive. One of them, who's identity is hidden by pronouns, (it’s Gudbrand) ends up in an Austrian hospital and falls in love with a nurse who gets blackmailed into marrying a doctor. Anyhow, back to the present. Someone is going to die and Harry kind of acts like a dick though he’s usually just boring and he does a lot of investigating. He figures out that he’s looking for a Norwegian man who fought on the Eastern front in WWII and there were only those five from the flashback left. Well, four. Daniel the super awesome soldier dies because his liquor bottle reflected too much light and a sniper got him. And he spends not nearly enough time trying to track down the one elusive member, Gudbrand. Okay he spends no time trying to track down the one element that’s in the wind and therefore is most suspicious. Harry, not Daniel, Daniel’s dead. It’s important to remember that because the perspective of the old man who bought the gun is very close to Daniel as is the soldier who fell in love with the nurse in Austria, and Gudbrand was Daniel's bestest friend. So…the real question is not who it is but where he is. I don’t know if we’re supposed to know that though.

Harry talks to Juul, a resistance fighter, who knows a lot about these old men. Then he meets a girl! And she’s the daughter of the guy who went over to the Russians, Sindre Faulke! And they both take to each other immediately which gets rid of the pesky and tiring need for character exploration. Oh and an ex-soldier named Dale is killed but we don’t care because at that point we have no idea who the fuck he is. Oh no! Ellen has discovered that her new partner, Waller, who is a racist sexist pig, is the neo-nazi gun-smuggling connection in the super rifle case! She’s completely floored! But she understands her role in this and immediately does everything she can to get murdered horribly while not leaving any clues that could point to what happened. This is so unfortunate because she has fallen in love for the first time in her life and was really happy.

So Harry starts drinking. And Rakel, the girl he likes, is very nice to him and eventually he stops drinking and starts investigating Ellen’s case. But Waaler is ahead of them the crafty bastard. He goes to Olsen, the neo-nazi he got to kill Ellen, and kills him while making it look like a shoot-out. He’s so smart. See this could have been avoided if he didn’t have his skinhead clients calling him on his personal cell phone and ordering highly illegal weapons but the mistake was so easy to clean up why bother paying for two phones. It only took two bodies. Olsen is hard to feel sorry for since he’s a murdering asshole but it’s unfortunate for him because he was thinking of turning his life around and becoming an electrician.

Oh no! Some asshat named Brandhaug that we’ve occasionally had chapters based around has decided that he has to “have” Rakel! So he blackmails her and sends Harry to Sweden. That totally parallels the thing that happened with the nurse in Austria in 1944, complete with references to Daniel and Bathsheba! Then Brandhaug gets killed by the old man with the super rifle and it’s all good again. Harry comes back to investigate that and starts talking to the old soldiers again and eventually goes to Austria where he learns about Gudbrand and the nurse and how Gudbrand murdered the doctor before fleeing the country. So he is still alive and psychotic and conceivably out there somewhere! And now Juul the resistance fighter's wife, who had originally been the fiancée of Daniel the super soldier, is kidnapped and executed with the super rifle. Harry thinks Oh my God Juul has MPD and when they get there he’s committed suicide. Phew! So that’s over.

But what’s this? There’s a photograph of Rakel’s mom and it’s the Austrian nurse from 1944! And she was married to Fauke! Who is actually Gudbrand! He’s the one with multiple personality disorder! Good Fucking Hell you have got to be kidding me what is this shit. MPD I don’t even…Except it’s more like voices of dead people in his head and suddenly he’s an expert marksman like his dead soldier friend Daniel. So Harry takes way too long to read the memoirs Gudbrand left in his apartment which means we have to read them too and because Harry is a dick and kind of short sighted he dismisses Weber the forensics guy, who helped him verify the Gudbrand/Faulke connection, even though Weber offered to call in reinforcements. But Harry, being the smart cookie that he is, decides to take the gun he requested from Weber and sit in the apartment carefully reading the memoirs. But oh shit! Gudbrand is going to enact a last execution for what he saw as the great betrayal of the Norwegian Eastern front soldiers! He’s going to kill the previous crown prince’s son! Who I assume is an adult I don’t know much about the Norwegian royal family! And it’s on this exact day, May 17, Liberation day at the parade that’s taking place right now! Boy, it would have been useful to have colleagues standing by or maybe to have his cell phone. Wait, he does have his cell phone he just used it.

But there’s no time! So he hops in his crappy old Escort and floors it going down the wrong lane with his hand on the horn and he scrapes alongside a train and he’s swerving and skidding and there is a group of children in his way so he quickly goes up onto the grass and drives to Palace Square. He flashes his badge and finds his new partner but wait! Because of a dead tree there’s a direct line of sight from the SAS hotel to the balcony. He runs around screaming “Fuck! Fuck!” a number of times so you know this is serious business that only he can deal with and he gets to the hotel and gets to the room Gudbrand is in, brandishing his gun along the way. And the old man is there and he’s very sad and dying of cancer and Harry talks him out of shooting by using the name of Gudbrand’s grandson, Oleg. Later Gudbrand dies in the hospital from his illness but nobody outside the security department knows what almost happened. Harry’s boss tells him that they have to keep the incident hush-hush and Harry gets all cynical about politics and has me wondering what’s wrong with the knobhead and whether he wants all of Norway to know that his girlfriend’s dad is a crazy, murdering asshole. And then Harry and Rakel and Oleg live happily ever after. Until the next book I’m sure.

I would make a humorous obscure reference but I'm too lazy

Tenterhook: One of the hooks or bent nails set in a close row along the upper and lower bar of a tenter, by which the edges of the cloth are firmly held. OED.

A good word to know. To be on tenterhooks is to be stretched or strained like cloth hanging from hooks.

I handled very old and not-so-old books today and printed many pieces of paper. And I am thoroughly sick of winter.

I finished reading Le Clezio's Onitsha and I'm sorry to say but I'm terribly underwhelmed. It's not that it's a bad book. The writing is fine and he follows through on the plot but overall it's incredibly superficial. The characters are practically cut-outs. He has taken an outline of a person and filled them with vague personality traits. Reading about his characters is like viewing a person painted with broad strokes in watercolor. You get an idea of what they might look like but you wouldn't recognize them on the street. You could argue that Fintan, Maou, and Geoffrey are not as important as the setting. The town Onitsha is the main character except that mainly you follow Fintan and his parents and you actually see next to nothing of the people who live around them. There is nothing in this book that shows you that here, there is a community here of folk living their lives under colonial rule and they are human. They bargain in the market, the play silly games, they quarrel and throw tantrums and fall in love. They dream. None of that is here. They are broad strokes; gently laughing women and faded warrior men with faces like African masks and superhuman expressions. That last part disturbed me. This book has a whiff of the "noble savage" genre about it with its proud race of people whose traditions go back to the days when their ancestors left Egypt, who see gods in everything and eat funny, exotic foods. The mute woman who shows up in town with nothing becomes the embodiment of the river goddess, of the black queen who left her homeland to found a new one. Yeah, no. She was much more interesting when she was just a wary, mute woman learning to make friends with Maou. Turning the African characters into nothing more than the last remnants of a displaced people denies them of ordinary human expression.

Another problem I had with the writing was the way it never let things truly develop. In the beginning Maou doesn't like Onitsha. Then we read about Fintan learning about how to fit in, then suddenly we're back with Maou and she loves the place. Show some change don't just say "oh yeah, this happened." Everything was a little disjointed like that. Geoffrey's obsession with the "black queen of Meroe" comes out of nowhere and just muddles everything up.

A few small things:

- The role Sabin Rodes plays in the town is never made clear but he has a surprising amount of power. Maou's dislike for him is never explained and the reveal about him at the end made no sense. I'm probably missing something but I care so little for all of these rather vague characters.

- I know the French had colonies in Africa so why did this French author decide to set his story (which is ostensibly about colonial rule although it's more a back drop than a theme) in an English one?

- The book goes on too long. It starts with the journey to Africa and it should have ended with the journey back, not gone on to show where they are twenty years down the line. The story was about their stay in a country vastly unfamiliar to them. The foreign-ness of their surroundings lends the book a dream-like quality that breaks abruptly with the description of Fintan's later life in England. It also becomes surprisingly maudlin. I spent about the last ten pages rolling my eyes.

Maybe the river was the main character. It rolls on throughout the story as a great changeable but ever present beast. It sleeps just under the surface of everything the characters do and think. However, it would still be nice if the people could engage my attention.

So that was tl;dr but I'm glad to get that down. I'm trying to read "literature" and I've discovered that just because an author has won an award doesn't mean he's particularly good. Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe Onitsha is one of his more mediocre books. At least he knows how to use quotation marks.

There is no title, I ate it

Boring day but that's alright. Good food today; I treated myself to a burger with jalapeños and hot sauce and there were home-made whoopie pies to celebrate a co-workers birthday.

Bandoline: "A gummy preparation for fixing hair." Can also be used as a verb. From OED.

I've never heard this used. I wonder if it's obsolete. Dictionary.com says it's "a mucilaginous preparation made from quince seeds and used for smoothing, glossing ,and waving the hair."

Other web hits seem to imply it's some sort of musical instrument but I wonder if people aren't just confusing it with something else.

Not much to say today. I finished When the Bough Breaks. I always forget how irritating Kellerman's books are. There's something aggressively bland about his main character. Alex is a psychologist and he's capable of drawing people out with his mad shrink skills but he kind of comes off as rather patronizing. I can't imagine his techniques working on real people unless they wanted to talk to begin with. I know the author is a psychologist but I can't help but feel he makes it a little easier for his character to allow him to show off and advance the plot. And then the rather bland character goes all Jack Bauer on the bad guy but fails when it comes to the actual rescue. In the end the police save the day, which is fine but for all his posturing it would have been nice if Alex had managed it alone. Also, dude, if you're in a car chase, dodging a guy on a motorcycle with a gun, put the brakes on sooner. He'll go right over your trunk and viola, problem solved. Well, the books aren't bad when gotten out of the library.

I watched the movie Pulse. A Japanese horror movie from the days of dial-up internet where a website shows...ghosts? There are red taped doors that lead to the Forbidden Room and there's not enough space for people and spirits and people merge with walls, leaving creepy shadows. Apocalypse! And it all ends on a boat. I think I missed something crucial to understanding the whole thing. Ah well.

I'm reading Le Clezio's Onitsha. Takes place in Africa in 1948. A boy named Fintan travels to Niger with his mother to meet up with her husband. I haven't quite figured out if he's Fintan's biological father or not. They've just arrived which is good because I was getting tired of them being on the boat. It's okay so far but the descriptions aren't very evocative. Everything seems a little flat. I don't know if it's the translation or what but maybe things will be more interesting when they get to their destination.

By the by, that's my sister up there reading to my cousin's daughter.

Zamyatin and Kellerman you know

This has been a tiring week. We got a call about our other house, the one my father inherited from his grandmother. Apparently a pipe burst due to a combination of unfortunate events and flooded the place with three feet of water, ruining the floors and ceilings and pulling cabinets away from walls. I'm not so much upset about the structure itself; if the insurance company actually does it's damn job we can get the money to rebuild. It's the stuff inside that's probably ruined that hurts.

My great-grandparents bought this house in 1952, the year it was built, as a retirement home. It's a five minute drive from the beach in a small, quiet town. This house became a repository for a lot of old family things, a number of them over 100 years old. My great-grandfather died in this house. My great-grandmother and my grandmother lived there until their deaths in 1980 (they died only a few months apart). I never met my grandparents, both were gone before I was born, but staying in this house on weekends and during the summer and winter vacations surrounded by their lives made me feel as if they were with me. My father would tell me stories about all of them when I would ask him about various books and photographs and other objects. With all these things probably destroyed it feels like they've died all over again. It's felt like grieving. And then I feel bad because there are so many others who are going through much worse and lost much more right now but I can't help it.

Anyway, the above picture is a rocking horse from that house. It was my father's. He used to play on it when he went to visit his grandparents. My sister and I played on it when we were little as well.

Eleemosynary:

a. Charitable, pertaining to alms.

b. Dependant on alms.

c. Done as an act of charity.

The OED makes it pretty clear that this word means just about anything to do with almsgiving from the donations to the institutions set up by donations to those receiving them.

I borrowed a copy of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin from a co-worker on Tuesday and finished it yesterday. It was written in 1921 in Soviet Russia at about the time when writers were beginning to be forced to write only in approved ways. We was not published there and Zamyatin was forced into exile several times during his life. It was finally published in Russia in 1988.

It's a story about a future time in which the One State controls just about every aspect of the people's lives. They live in a city surrounded by a glass wall to keep out the uncontrolled greenery of nature. In fact, just about everything is made of glass so no one can hide what they are doing. The only time they can lower shades over their rooms is when they have sex. Citizens have a Table of Hours that lays out what they should be doing at all times. They have two personal hours a day to read, write or redeem pink coupons for intercourse. They are assigned work, participate in farce elections for their Great Benefactor, chew each mouthful of food the regulation 50 times, and attend lectures that mock the disordered ways of the ancients and glorify the logical civilization that they live in.

The novel is the journal of number D-503, an engineer and mathematician working on a spaceship meant to bring the One State way of life to other planets. He is eventually seduced by I-330, a woman who is part of a revolutionary force trying to bring down the wall and break free of the state's oppressive control. It's a decent read. The story is more about the control of the One State (I think we can all guess who Zamyatin was talking about and what he was trying to say) and how a logical way of living implemented for the benefit of the majority crushes the will and individuality of the one. D-503 is diagnosed as ill, having developed a 'soul'. This causes him great anguish as he starts to distinguish the difference between himself as a complacent automaton living according to the rules and the individual he is becoming, one who has wants he can only satisfy by breaking those rules that formerly kept him happy and safe.

The writing is poetic which is a little problematic considering the writer is supposed to D-503, a person who admits he is no poet and has little imagination. He's not supposed to be very experienced at describing things and yet he does, quite beautifully. I think the novel would have been stronger if his writing had started out humdrum and eventually moved towards being luminous and fey. The "love" part of the story (which seems more like lust to me but so many writers get the two confused so pfft I guess) is not very original; his friendship with R and his companionship with his regular lover O is disrupted by the temptress I. D experiences confusion about what is happening to him and what he should do to resolve things one way or the other.

I have a few problems with the book but nothing majorly off-putting. Gendered roles and stereotypes seem to have persisted a thousand years into the future in this 'egalitarian' society but it was written in the late teens. I don't understand why a controlling state would allow its citizens to decide for themselves who they want to have sex with rather than just assigning them regular partners. It doesn't matter I suppose. It was a good read.

Now I'm finishing up Jonathan Kellerman's first Alex Delaware novel When the Bough Breaks. Like all of his books there is much that could have been edited out; scenes of the main character receiving directions to locations or phoning his girlfriend to tell her he has to make a short out of town trip. The reader doesn't need several paragraphs describing these rather boring phone conversations. The author can tell us in a couple of sentences that it happened. We don't need to know how to get to the university. "If you're coming from downtown take I-5 to 520 which turns into the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. Drive all the way across the bridge to the east shore, turn south at Fairweather and continue along the coastline." I'm not going to go there. There are many instances like this and all they serve to do is break up the narration. Nor do we need to listen to Robin and Alex debate about whether she should accompany him on his trip or not. Alex himself is a rather boring character and the amount of interest he attracts from women in this book and throughout the entire series has always baffled me. Robin's characterization bounces between needy and supportive depending on what will make Alex look best in any given scene. Characters are often portrayed by stereotypes. The entire book reads like a barely veiled diatribe at the way society as a whole treats children. And yet despite the many flaws of Kellerman's writing style and characterization I keep reading his books. What can I say? The man knows how to create interesting plots.

My favorite books and why you should like them

Rodomontade: Extravagant boasting or bragging; bravado; boastful or bombastic language.

This word comes to you from Perfume. It kind of makes me think of gardening tools.

Perfume actually had a number of words I wasn't certain about although I didn't get the chance to write them all down. Most had to do with fragrances unsurprisingly.

Civet: A substance used in fragrances. Yellow or brown, "unctuous", and harvested from glands located in the anal pouch of the African Civet cat.

I don't think I need to comment on that. And my mother wonders why I prefer body sprays. I'm fairly certain they don't contain unctuous secretions from a cat's anal pouch. Wait, I gotta go check.

Anyway let's move on. I have a long day tomorrow.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I loved this book. Fair warning; it takes time and energy to read. A young man, Johnny, has discovered a manuscript that examines a film about a house where odd things were happening. It's not entirely clear that the film ever existed although the manuscript contains many references and reads very convincingly. A photographer and his family moved into a house in rural Virginia where a door appears out of nowhere that leads into a vast, dark labyrinth. The film is about the photographer's family and the exploration of the exploration into the frightening black space. The manuscript analyzes the film and the people in it. Johnny decides to edit what he's found and his project seems to cause a descent into madness. There are footnotes on top of footnotes and the original manuscript is interspersed with Johnny's increasingly incoherent ramblings. It's an impressive exercise in writing tales within tales. I have a fondness for the surreal.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I think everyone has read this trilogy by now but I still want to mention it. I found this book, as well as the two following, very engrossing. If you want a conspiracy story this is far better than Dan Brown. Again though, you need to have patience. All three are thick books and there is material that could probably have been cut out or streamlined. However, there's something about Blomkvist and Salander I found very engaging. They're different from your more usual hero and heroine. Neither are really interested in conforming to other people's views but they're not in your face about being different. Blomkvist is a very earnest person who wants to see justice done but he does it his own way. Salander just wants to be left alone but she still has a surprising number of people she can count on who ultimately pull together to help her. The books are well-plotted and the ending is very satisfying.

Fudoki by Kij Johnson. I'm going to slip this one in there. This is a magical-realism story set in ancient Japan. It's more like a fairy tale or a myth and mimics the logic you usually find in such stories very well. A fudoki is explained as being a cat's tale, the story cat's pass on to one another down through generations accumulating moments from each life. The cat the story follows loses her family and home in an earthquake and thus loses her fudoki as well. She sets out to find a new place and a new fudoki. Along the way she turns into a woman, a huntress, and she meets and deals with many people and not-people along the way. This isn't always a nice book; she's a cat after all and even human she acts like a cat. The fairy tale mist this book seems to wrap itself in dampens the occasional violence. I enjoyed it a great deal.

I should be looking for a new job

Contumacy:

A. Perverse and obstinate resistance of or disobedience to authority; rebellious stubbornness.

B. An act or instance of wilful disobedience.

I finished Missing yesterday. Not the best book ever but still a good read. It's not really a mystery. Yes, there's a killer and it's a mystery who it is but that's not what the story is about. It's really about Sibylla and her journey out of obscurity and hopelessness. It's about the connection she's made with another human being for the first time in her life. It's the story of her fight for legitimacy. The chapters alternate between the present and the past with a few pages of religious rambling from the actual murderer thrown in for good measure. There is very little investigating. Leads are found right away and they always pan out. It's easy to pick out the important clues but the author doesn't make you wait too long for the character to figure them out. There's a dramatic showdown between Sibylla and the murderer. The whole thing was a bit depressing until the end but I found it worth it. I seem to be reading a lot of books like that lately. I need something more cheerful.

One thing it helps to know is that Sibylla is apparently the name of a fast food chain in Sweden. I had to look this up on Wikipedia because I couldn't understand why she hated her name so much.

I seem to be reading and now watching a lot of things with children being abused both physically and emotionally. How am I finding these things? I need a break. I watched the new The Karate Kid. Jaden Smith does a great job as the protagonist. Jackie Chan reminded me that he's a great dramatic actor. The fight scenes were very entertaining and the story was, well, the same as the original. Boy (Dre) moves to a new place where he meets a girl. Kung Fu kid takes a dislike to Dre and beats him up. Dre meets Mr. Han the maintenance man who teaches him Kung Fu. Dre wins the tournament (hope I didn't spoil the ending). Pretty predictable. However, the way they get there is still well worth watching. The relationship between Dre and Mr. Han is rewarding. There are several fairly emotional scenes and you really feel their weight. The bully is a terrifying little snot. Seriously, he looks like even if he couldn't hit you anymore he'd still attempt to gnaw on your leg. At the end it seems like Dre has learned more than just the physical aspects of the sport.

On the other hand I feel they could have pared it down by about twenty minutes especially from the beginning. It's hard enough watching a nice high school kid get the crap beat out of him but it's even more painful when the boy is only twelve. Still, I recommend it.

I don't even know what to say about the earthquake in Japan. The whole thing is heartbreaking and I hope that the reports about more than 1,000 people being dead are not true. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to have everything swept away, to have an entire town flooded and broken. Where I live there are basically no earthquakes. A little further north they occasionally have one that feels like a truck passing by. The ground is a solid thing to me. That picture in The Washington Post of the road literally split in two was awe-inspiring. Like those gigantic sinkholes that sometimes open up, it shows how fragile the terrain we walk on (or drive on) can be. The only good thing (if there can be a good thing) about the whole situation is that Japan is a developed country that has made massive preparations for just this sort of emergency. They've reinforced many larger buildings and they're not unused to earthquakes. This will not be another Haiti. My heart and prayers go out to the people of Japan and I hope that recovery will be relatively swift.

And now I will return to my (semi)regularly scheduled post.

Senescence: "The process or condition of growing old." From the OED.

I finished Perfume by Suskind last night. I stayed up late to do so. I hated it by the end. I was trying to be nice and give it the benefit of the doubt earlier but really? It was kind of boring and obnoxious. The writing was beautiful but the plot and the characters were rather uninteresting. There is very little dialogue in this book and as a result there is very little meaningful character interaction. The main character, Grenouille, is the only one that is fully developed. This would be fine but I found myself increasingly disliking him. I honestly couldn't tell if this was the author's intention or not. I did not find myself supporting Grenouille in his endeavors. I was wishing that he would fail. Admittedly this was because he was murdering young women but also because I had no vested interest in seeing him succeed. It was actually the opposite; I wanted him to be caught and punished.

There seems to be some sort of moralizing going on in the book. People are easily influenced by Grenouille's scents because their baser instincts come through in reaction to odors regardless of the civilized veneer they present to the world. Grenouille has no scent himself and is not affected by the perfumes he creates. I have several problems with this. One, I know we are all animals driven by base instincts that we counter-balance with higher feeling. There's little more irritating than being lectured by someone who thinks they've discovered some new truth when they haven't. Two, I just don't believe smells can have that much of an effect. You can't sneak by people just because you are wearing eau-de-wall-flower. People would still see and hear you. Sound is a very powerful force as well. Maybe Grenouille didn't rely much on sight but other people do. I won't even comment on the ridiculous nature of the final perfume. It was just plain stupid. Third, Grenouille is presented as having basically no human feeling (and believing himself to be above human instinct) and this is linked to his odorless state. One quibble; he does have human feeling. He smells a scent that sends his heart racing and he wants to possess it. He is obsessed with owning something that has great meaning to him. He wants it even as he knows that having means its eventual destruction. This is a very human trait. I could probably argue for others but this is getting too long already so I'll move on to a couple other annoyances in the book.

Beautiful virgin girls apparently smell the best of all. Oh good fucking hell. Really? You're going with that? You're going to compare the harvesting of their scent to harvesting flowers? Budding breasts and blossoms. Picking flowers to deflowering a virgin. Oh how clever. Suskind, your imagination knows no bounds, I'm sure.

There's more to be annoyed about but I'll stop there. Suffice to say that this is a surprisingly boring book with lovely, sensual prose and an abhorrent main character.

I'm still reading Life in the Cul-de-Sac and I'm also reading Missing by Karin Alvtegen. The idea of having a homeless woman as the main character is intriguing. She's on the edge of society and her life on the run (she's been falsely accused of murder) is exacerbated by her lack of funds and a support network. We'll see where this goes.

It's entirely possible that at some point I will write a short story

Callipygian: "Of, pertaining to, or having well-shaped or finely developed buttocks." From the OED.

You can't hear it but I'm snickering. There's a word for everything, isn't there.

Wedding was wonderful. Myself, my sister, and two of the other bridesmaids went to get our hair done in the morning and then had sushi for lunch. We lugged our stuff to the bridal room in the parish house and spent the next while getting ready and having our pictures taken. I laced my sister into her dress and she looked just gorgeous. The wedding ceremony was meaningful and sweet and the reception afterwards was full of good food and fun dancing. Several of us went to the hotel a few of the guests were staying at for another drink after everything was cleaned up. I had a grasshopper; one part creme de menthe, one part creme de cacao, one part half and half. A couple at the far end of the bar tried to get into a fight. There was a shoving match and the woman tried to slap the man but she was pretty plastered and just ending up smooshing her hand in his face. The bartenders broke them up fast and sent them on their way. But not before they were reminded to pay their tab.

The next day we had a brunch for out of town guests to say thanks and bye. We were all well-pleased with how smoothly everything went.

I finished Let the Right One in. I think, on the whole, I liked the book. It could sorely have used some editing, I really think Tommy's part could have been cut out somehow, but the ending was good and the characters were interesting. This is the sort of book you read while half-cringing though because you know that bad things are coming. But I'd read another book by this author.

I finished The Way Through Doors today. A circular story and most definitely not for everyone, it has a dream-like quality to it where things only make sense in a nonsensical sort of way. I occasionally like to read books that don't entirely make sense as long as it's on purpose. There is a common thread throughout the book; Selah Morse is looking for a woman with amnesia. He was taking care of her and now she's lost. One story bleeds into the next and comes back to Selah and then looks at an earlier story from another point of view and so on. It's wandering. I liked it.

Now I'm reading Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. I don't know how I feel about this one. It tells the story of Jean-Baptise Grenouille who was born in 18th century France and has an incredibly powerful sense of smell but is completely without any odor himself. So far it's recounted his life from birth through apprenticeship to adulthood. He has killed one person thus far but it has had little relevance to the story. I'm on page 153 and I keep waiting for that early murderous experience to have some impact on his life. I assume he'll kill again but so far it's been an exercise in writing a fictitious (magical-realism) biography. There is very little dialogue. Well...it's entertaining. I'll finish it and I'd even read something else by this author but I'm a little disappointed. I expected something a little more Jack the Ripper only with perfume than the roving of someone with an amazing olfactory apparatus.

Wine was good; forgive my rambling

Pyritic: Of or relating to pyrites; consisting of, containing, or resembling pyrites.

Well that's not interesting. I would have thought something to do with fire. Pyrite must be a type of rock. Hmm, yes. A stone or mineral that can be used to for striking fire. Let's see if OED has something better to suggest.

Nebsy: Prim, precise or Brusque, impudent, cheeky, ill-natured.

Something tells me I won't be using either of these words anytime soon.

Rehearsal went well. Our Priest is a pro. And very funny. Dinner afterward was great. The waiters kept filling the wine glasses up like they were water so it was hard to keep track of how much was drunk. Tomorrow is the big day.

Let the Right One in has gotten really gross. And weird. If there is a scene in your book where the walking undead is about to sodomize a prepubescent vampire, congratulations, because I never thought I would ever be able to write something like that in a review. The me up there feeding the ducks? Totally scandalized. The me now? Asks what do you write for an encore?

Oh. The thing that comes after, with the nursery rhyme and the stone trophy. Well, I'm just disgusted.

For those with strong stomachs and tolerance for rambling I still recommend the book. But get it out of the library.

One week to go

Talaria - Winged sandals, like those worn by Hermes.
According to the OED the word comes from the Latin tālāris which means, "things pertaining to the ankles." That's fairly specific.

My Great-grandmother is the young woman on the far right.

I have to get a hair-cut for my sister's wedding today, or at least soon. It's coming up fast. I also have to go to the library because I finished a number of books in the last couple of days.

The Swallows of Kabul was poetic, I'll give it that, and it fulfilled the author's intent to show the stark horror of the Taliban and radical Islam. However, I'm not sure it told a very good story. To go into a few of the problems I had with the story part of the book, (which should hold up on it's own, outside of the setting, description, and prose,) if Zunaira weren't so beautiful, would Atiq have had such a change of heart? He is seeing another woman as a human being for the first time in decades but does this extend to other, more common people? Would a less attractive woman have had such a profound effect on him? What if she had actually been guilty? He's been leading up to something but he still doesn't seem to have any sympathy for his dying wife. Atiq is the only character that is followed for the entire book but rather than being an active participant in the unfolding events he is only caught up in the actions of others. This sort of negates any change that comes over him. Or maybe that's the point although it doesn't really work for me. In the end nobody is really changed and the story just peters out. I felt like I read half a book. Also, where the hell did Zunaira go?

I also read DeKok and the Dead Harlequin by Baantjer and Silk by Alessandro Baricco. The DeKok book is a neat little mystery that kept me entertained. I knew that the one, obvious clue in the murdered man's past that the detectives overlooked was going to be the key to the crime and that bugged me a bit but otherwise it was a fun book.

Silk is incredibly short but is probably the most passionless lust-based almost romance ever committed to paper. The chapters are short; there are 65 in a 132 page book. Some are a couple of pages and some are no more than a few sentences. The characters are never developed, certain phrases are repeated over and over, and the whole thing is surprisingly emotionless. The only character who shows any real feeling is the main character's wife and she has a very small part. Herve is a buyer of silk eggs in mid-19th century France. During a silkworm epidemic his town sends him to Japan to illegally obtain eggs. Hara Kei is the man he negotiates with in Japan. Hara Kei has a mistress with "non-oriental eyes in the face of a girl." (This phrase is repeated several times.) Herve sees her maybe a grand total of five times on his four or so trips to Japan. Herve and the mistress never talk, never really meet, and never develop any real connection with each other and yet the author tries to present this as some almost-consuming romance. It's very strange. I get what Baricco is trying to do with the repetition of phrase; it's a short book and the phrases are a sort of short-hand for description in order to elicit emotion and set up atmosphere. However, that could also have been done with better writing. It wasn't a terrible book, I enjoyed reading it, but I'm glad I got it out of the library.

I read the DeKok book and Silk at work while posted at places where I was allowed to read and I wonder if I would have been as interested if I hadn't been just killing the time until five o'clock.

I'm giving up on Wizard's First Rule. The writing is juvenile and the set-up between good and evil too simplistic. The idea that righteous anger can be used as a force for good weirds me out a bit. There's no need for compassion on the side of the heroes because the bad guy and those who follow him are beyond redemption. I haven't been fond of characters with "designated hero" and "designated villain" status since I was a preteen. There are too many other books I'm interested in reading.

I like you but I don't want to hear about your plumbing problems

It really felt like the beginning of spring today and now they say it'll snow Tuesday. I'd say Nature needs to stop jerking us around but I don't want to make Her angry.

Today could have been frustrating, they keep giving me the same post at work, but I managed to cheer myself up by talking to the young woman who works in the cafe. She's very talkative and friendly.

I finished reading an Eyewitness travel guide on Bali & Lombok. I enjoy that series, along with the Insight guides and the Culture Shock series. They give information on people and customs that allow you to get an idea of the inhabitants and not just the architecture. Also, there are lots of pictures.

I also finished reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth. While, when you think about it, not a lot of stuff happens on the trek, Verne still makes it interesting and exciting. The narrative manages to convey that claustrophobic feeling of being practically entombed within in the depths, with miles and miles of heavy rock sitting heavily over your body. The despair Axel feels when lost carries over from the prose, giving you a taste of the desolation of being utterly alone in the dark so far from everything you are familiar with. You feel the fury of the storm and the wonders of things you've only read about in books coming to life before you. All of the scenes leave the reader realizing how small and fragile the characters are, how helpless against the implacable planet (practically a character itself) and that makes their determination to survive and continue that much more awesome. It's a great adventure.

I tried to watch a supernatural horror movie called deadline the other day. I got about an hour in and had to stop. Stuff was finally happening but it was so boring. There were too many coincidences. The main character lost a baby when her insanely jealous boyfriend tried to drown her in a tub and then she goes to a house for quiet to write her book and it just happens that the same situation had played out there? And who would leave a mentally fragile woman alone in a strange house the day her murderous boyfriend gets out of jail? When will scriptwriters learn that just showing a person talking a few pills from a prescription bottle doesn't mean they don't have to show those psychiatric disorders as well? Taking a couple of pills doesn't automatically equal batshit. Why doesn't my spell-checker recognize the word batshit? It's a perfectly good synonym for crazy-as-fuck. Anyway. It was more a supernatural domestic drama than it was a horror flick. Maybe it got better in the last half hour but honestly I was bored. I couldn't even be bothered to read a book while finishing it. That's pretty bad. You want better horror films? Try Session 9, Below, Paranormal Activity (the night scenes anyway), Dead End, Death Row (stupid but fun), Legend of Hell House, The Ring, The Orphanage, Ju-on 2, or the Evil Dead series. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is out on Netflix; that's next to watch. That was such a good series.

I've painted my nails silver because

Oh, today was a slow day. We had a couple of school tours and they were mostly well behaved, although the chaperones for the first group spent more time talking to each other than watching the kids. I am not your babysitter, people. And why does the spell-checker not like the plural form of chaperone? Wait, it doesn't even like the word in singular form! What's up with that? It keeps trying to correct it to 'chaperon'. Huh, looks like Wikipedia isn't even sure. I suppose I could go grab a print dictionary but I'm far too tired and lazy.

Well, I finished reading The Real Life of Sebastien Knight and can I say, awesome? Yes, I can. I think Nabokov is one of my new favorite authors along with Jane Austen and Batya Gur. Anyway, the whole book is written in first person by the half-brother of the titular character. Knight, who had been a moderately successful author, just died and his brother is trying to write a biography about him. He does this in a sort of looping, dream-like way, interspersed with stories of how he came by certain pieces of information, vignettes of people Knight knew, and passages from the books he wrote. The brother's reminiscences are almost hazy somehow; they are woven into the backdrop created by other people's recollections recounted second-hand. He has his rose-tinted glasses firmly in place during the majority of the book and it's easy at times to get sucked into viewing his brother as nostalgically as he does. We don't get a first-hand account of Knight until near the end of the book and when we do it's a little jarring. Finally we hear about him in someone else's words, someone not caught up in his intimate affairs, rather than getting them filtered through his brother. The ending reinforces the disconnected relationship between the two characters and the feeling that the portrait painted throughout the book has less to do with reality and more to do with a young man who misses his brother.

Now I'm reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne because I wanted an adventure story. Verne's books are filled with a kind of wide-eyed wonder at the natural and man-made phenomena that surrounds us and it's refreshing to read about the excitement that comes from discovery by people who really have a desire to know. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was like that as well. For the main character of Journey, Axel, it's more than just a physical trial; it's obviously a spiritual one as well. It is his own coming-of-age story. Once he's proven his ability to literally go to the depths with his uncle for their science and curiosity, he'll be worthy of marrying the girl he loves. Oh, and he also doesn't want to look like a big coward. That's a large part of why he went as well. Because once your sweetheart has said, "Wow, that sure sounds like fun. I'd totally go if society wasn't constantly telling me that as a woman I have all the endurance of a newborn babe. I bet I'd look wicked in climbing gear." you can't not go. And I bet she would look wicked, too.

Books and wedding preparations

Last fitting for my sister's wedding dress this morning and I practiced lacing it up. She looks beautiful in it. Then home to finish painting the table letters. She's got everything so well organized I said we should go into business together. I'd deal with the people and she could keep track of everything and we'd both deal with vendors. However dealing with the suppliers is not high on her list of things to do. People are obnoxious little bastards apparently; they try to squeeze money out of people getting married and they don't return calls or they don't deliver on time. Well, it can be a fall-back plan.

I'm reading Nabokov and Jules Verne. I'm also trying to read Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule and he does not come off favorably in comparison. Not saying he's bad, mind you, just saying his writing seems very childish after a chapter of The Real Life of Sebastien Knight. U is for Undertow is a little too low-key for me but it's not bad and I'm only half-way through. Gail Carriger's Soulless I ended up putting down after the first 134 pages. It was touted as being supernatural steampunk and while the supernatural is there the steampunk isn't. Oh, and it's actually a romance in disguise. The speech she uses is jarringly anachronistic ("Gee", says the Scottish 19th century werewolf? I don't think so) and for any character she picks one joke and then beats it to death. The main character has a social disadvantage because of her large nose and tan skin inherited from her dead, Italian father. But she has a smoking figure. The American is constantly disparaged by the heroine as being American uncouth. Her friend wears silly hats. And on and on. The mystery takes a back seat to the fact that the heroine and the werewolf are physically attracted to each other and after they make-out in a public street that aspect takes over. It's not all bad, she has an interesting take on werewolves and vampires and I liked the secondary werewolf character Professor Lyall but not enough to wade through self-absorbed people sucking face. So, back to the classics. I'm almost done with Sebastien Knight.

In which Saramago disappoints me

So I'm looking for surreal fiction to read and NoveList suggests Haruki Murakami, William S. Burroughs, and Jose Saramago. I read After Dark and that's a nice little tale and then I read Naked Lunch and that makes no sense but in a rather pleasant way and then I follow up with Blindness. I could deal with the writing style where paragraphs were pages long and the dialogue is separated by commas with no he said, she said and only capitalization to indicate a new speaker. I could plow through that obnoxiousness. However I couldn't ignore the rampant stupidity, the transparent and trite lesson equating loss of sight to loss of morality and the inability to "see" the humanity of others.

So a bunch of people struck by a "white blindness" are herded into the wing of an abandoned insane asylum to quarantine them from society while those that still see but have been exposed occupy the opposite wing, while the military runs the detention from the outside. One, I think it would have been much better if he'd cut out the role of the military and the group of contaminated but seeing detainees. That would have left him with only a civilization struck by an unknown illness and would have made his "moral" less muddled. If those who lost their "moral vision" were sunk into savagery and anarchy what was up with the military? You could argue that they were afraid but if they just followed their protocols they would be fine.

Which brings me to a point that bugs me. He ignores perfectly reasonable solutions to the problem in an attempt (I assume) to bring about a feeling of magical realism but he focuses too often on the nitty-gritty of living to allow complete suspension of disbelief. There's a focus on bodily functions, feces smeared floors, burying of corpses, festering wounds, and incredibly tedious descriptions of people attempting to orient themselves in their new environment while the narrator ponders weightily at you. The logistics of keeping several hundred unexpected prisoners is nit-picked over but nobody has a fucking bio-hazard suit? There are no quarantine areas with decontamination chambers? Nobody thinks to hire a few caretakers who are already blind and acclimated to keep order in the wings? The detainees are so incompetent that they are unable to organize them selves despite the disability? That's the first thing people do when they find themselves in strange situations. Well maybe that happened after page 108 because that's where I stopped. I said to myself "this author is trying to be dark and edgy. I bet there's an unnecessary and graphic rape ahead." So I checked the Amazon reviews and I must be psychic because apparently there is indeed a lovingly described gang rape scene. Joy. Don't be subtle, Saramago, why don't you tell us what you think of humanity. Anyway, I will continue on my quest for real surreal, experimental fiction.

In which I exorcise a dumb movie

Alright, so anything that bills “The tooth fairy” as the monster in a horror movie I would normally avoid because that’s just stupid but this one was given the tag “understated” and I thought cool, I’ll play a game or read while I watch. The first 30 minutes weren’t bad. This town of Darkness Falls (maybe it’s better than being from a place called Intercourse?) 100 something years ago had this old lady who gave gold coins to the town kids when they lost their last baby tooth. Then there was a fire and her face burned off and she couldn’t stand light anymore. So she became a recluse. These two kids disappear and the townspeople blamed her and they hanged her, apparently without a trial or you know, looking for the missing children. She cursed the town, saying she’d return every time a child lost their last baby tooth to kill them. So she kaks it and like, immediately the kids are found. Most embarrassing thing to happen in that town since they’d pilloried the milkman before discovering you couldn’t get milk from a bull. Live and learn, I suppose.

Modern times. This boy loses his last baby tooth. He looks like he’s in middle school already but I’ll run with it. At home he’s kinda nervous because of the stories told about what happens to kids on this day. If every person who loses all their baby teeth gets killed, wouldn’t there be no town anymore? Anyway, this girl comes in through his window and there’s an awkward/sweet scene where he asks her to the school dance and she kisses him. She sees the tooth, tells him to man up and puts it under his pillow and leaves. He goes to sleep. There’s a noise and here’s our introduction to the supernatural element of the story. He grabs a flashlight and shines it on a phantom of the opera mask attached to a collection of rags. It’s actually not a bad effect. The light drives her away and he runs for it. His mother gets up only to be dragged into her darkened bedroom to be brutally murdered because apparently the tooth fairy goes after anyone who sees her. Why? I don’t know, she’s just random that way as we see later on. The boy (maybe his name was Kyle? I’m gonna go with Kyle) hides in the bathroom with the lights on. Scary sounds, the ghost hovers outside the door but can’t go in.

Next day, the whole town watches as the police take Kyle in for murdering his mother. Which doesn’t make nearly enough sense. I would have assumed that she had surprised a burglar not that her pre-pubescent boy had gone crazy and slashed her to death with an unknown weapon that is no longer to be found. This is the first indication that maybe this movie might rather suck. The police mutter that everyone knew Kyle had “problems” though they never elaborate. The girl (Kate) and a couple other kids, look on in apathy.

Twelve years later and someone how everyone is about 30. Kate has turned into Emma Caulfield and she’s taken her 9 (!?) year-old brother Michael to the hospital because he’s terrified of the dark and can’t sleep longer than ten minutes at a time. The doctors tell her it’s because he’s a little boy and they’re like that. Okay.

Kyle is living a huge industrial looking apartment and I am very jealous. What sort of job does he have? He’s been drawing the tooth fairy over and over again and taping it to his wall and he never leaves home without a duffle bag full of flashlights. If he ever leaves the light, the tooth fairy will get him because she never abandons her prey. He also takes a ton of pills. Kate calls him because she wants to know how he got over his fear of the dark. He hasn’t but since she actually wasted her time tracking him down after not bothering for twelve years he may as well come see her brother anyway.

He arrives at the hospital and she sort of implies that the same thing that happened to Kyle has happened to Michael (you know, losing their last baby tooth, which you’d think she would’ve gone through at some point) and she asks him to help. He talks to Michael who has also been drawing pictures of the tooth fairy. These things only ever seem to happen to people with artistic skills. Michael asks if things get better when you grow up and Kyle lies his ass off.

Kyle is all about rekindling the flame that was budding when he and Kate were in elementary school but that hope is dashed when Larry shows up. We know he’s one of the kids from the police scene twelve years ago because both actors wear glasses. He’s a lawyer and he’s possibly in some relationship with Kate. Anyway they hug and Kyle looks bummed so I guess? Kate stays at the hospital and Larry insists he and Kyle go out to dinner to catch up.

Here I was expecting, like, a restaurant or a diner, or even an IHOP but instead we get what appears to be a biker bar. Dark wood, beer signs and a pool table. Larry offers to get them both a beer but Kyle doesn’t drink because of the truckload of pills he downs every few hours. So Larry, in the movie’s attempt at humor, gets him a light beer. He also informs the redneck denizens at the bar of who’s finally come back to town and one plaid clad fellow takes serious offense. He immediately starts harassing Kyle, trying to pick a fight. Because he knew Kyle’s mother…because they… it affected him…he…? No, I don’t know. Kyle leaves and Larry can’t be bothered because those two beers aren’t going to drink themselves.

Out in the woods (!?) Kyle gets attacked by Mr. Plaid who has either built up twelve years of seething hatred over the death of someone else’s mother or just really, really wants to wrestle. Kyle loses his flashlight and they end up in the dark. The tooth fairy attacks…the redneck. So he gets slaughtered. Larry has gotten off his lazy backside and…called the police? Who actually come out in full force because there’s nothing better to do on a Thursday night but break up a possible scuffle. They’re running through the woods and Larry has dead redneck drop on him. So Kyle gets arrested because it’s exactly the way his mother died twelve years ago.

Okay, the first half hour of the movie wasn’t bad but this has progressively been getting stupider.

Kyle is in the local jail. Back at the hospital, Michael gets attacked by the tooth fairy again and Kate finds him cowering in the showing with his arms cut up. The doctor tells Kate that lack of sleep has caused her brother to experience a minor psychotic break and that if something isn’t done he will only get worse. Fortunately they have an effective cure. Sensory deprivation. In order to force him to confront his fears and recognize them as harmless. I shit you not. They want to put a nine-year-old boy who is afraid of the dark in a sensory deprivation tank. It’s not like that will push him further over the edge or cause a major psychotic break or allow a monster to rip his face off. No, it will show him that he’s being foolish. I just...Right. Kate agrees.

Larry bails Kyle out of jail after having cleaned himself of dead guy and takes him to a gun store where Kyle buys every flashlight in the place and possibly steals a gun. They start driving off and Kyle, in a fit of bad writing, becomes convinced that someone is going to force Michael into the dark and wants to head back to the hospital. Larry is having none of it so Kyle pulls the gun on him. Larry hits the brakes hard and Kyle goes through the windshield because being a tortured main character who never catches a break means not wearing your seat belt. He’s fine, of course. Larry, however, gets grabbed by the tooth fairy, who, like a cat with a mouse, plays with him for a bit before finally offing him. Kyle takes the chance to get in the car and drive off.

Back at the hospital Michael is just about to go into sensory deprivation, which looks an awful lot like an MRI machine, when Kyle shows up and yells at Kate to stop them. She does, deciding to believe the crazy person she hasn’t seen since he was a kid and was accused of killing his mother over her brother’s doctors. Actually in this case I think I would too. Suddenly the police, who must have some sort of radar to inform them anytime someone in their jurisdiction drops dead, shows up to arrest Kyle for murdering Larry. He goes back to jail.

The police officers refuse to believe that an escaped denizen from hell is after Kyle (imagine that). A storm rolls in, lightening flashing, thunder booming and the lights in the whole town go out. The lighthouse beam dies. (Oh yeah, there’s a lighthouse.) The police station gets attacked. Or I should say, everyone in the police station, except Kyle the intended prey, gets attacked. Finally it’s only Kyle and one cop left and the cop finally believes that maybe Kyle was right about the evil spirit that everyone in the town knew about from tales and has been killing kids for over a century.

Hospital. Kate and Michael run around, Kyle shows up and they and two nurses and a doctor regroup in a corridor. The doctor says the emergency generator will give them light for another couple of minutes. I’m sorry but I call bullshit. It’s an emergency generator for a hospital for crying out loud. They’re made so people on respirators and such don’t die during power outages. Why does this one only last a few minutes? And where are all the other people? Did the tooth fairy kill everyone in the building before coming after the two she really wants? Anyway, much running around while the characters try to be dramatic about staying in small patches of light and making really stupid decisions. Unsurprisingly, the three hospital workers get picked off. That’s really all they were there for, to provide the monster with fodder other than the main characters. The cop manages to break through the brick wall of the hospital with his SUV and Kate, Michael, and Kyle pile in.

Okay, this next part is deeply stupid. They decide to make for the lighthouse so they can fill it with fuel and turn it on. The tooth fairy attacks and they badly fight her off with heavy-duty flashlights that manage to break easier than most eggs. There is much screaming while I think to myself, “Why don’t you just turn the interior lights on? And then you could drive until you find a town that still has power and sit in the parking lot of one of those strip malls where the lights are always on.” For that matter, why aren’t the flashes of lightening driving her away? Why does she kill some people immediately and others she swings around like some sort of demented carnival ride? Why didn’t Kyle, years ago, lure her into a room with him and then turn on the lights? Never mind.

They make it to the lighthouse where everyone continues to demonstrate their complete inability to hold onto important life-saving objects for longer than ten seconds. They fill the generator and start up the light. Of course it goes out because there is a leak in the fuel line. The cop tries to fix it and dies. Kyle tries to fix it and manages to set the floor on fire. Yay, light! But no, not enough? Jeezit. He needs to flip a switch which should not have been so hard to reach. This lighthouse was built to fend off mildly retarded terrorists or something. Michael, being small, is able to get at the switch after much bother. The resulting flood of light annoys the tooth fairy but she still manages to grab Kyle. She hauls him up into the air where they struggle and Kyle pulls off her mask exposing her sensitive burned face with an, “I can see you, Bitch!” I am regretting this being one of those movies where the main characters survive. The tooth fairy dies. Again. The three sit in the light, leaning against each other, happy to have survived the supernatural and their own monumental ineptness.

Last scene. A boy who has just lost a tooth puts it under his pillow. The movie tries to fake us out but it’s only his mom who exchanges the tooth with a quarter while kissing him good night. The End.