Can anyone truly know the law? So many crime novels are predicated on police ignoring conflicts of interest that you'd think they'd never heard of recusing themselves. The Scholar, Dervla McTiernan's second Cormac Reilly outing, appears to take the procedure out of the procedural, but it's not a bad novel for that.
Time is a harsh mistress. At the time of On Writing's publication, Stephen King was 26 years into his career, and a year out from his near fatal car accident. Nearly twenty years and approximately 29 books later, it is hard to conceive that On Writing almost didn't happen, and that King was going to retire. Perhaps it was the cry of Constant Readers who thought that they would never know what would become of Roland and his Ka-tet; perhaps King himself could not resist the call of the Beam. On Writing heralded the return of the King, and Constant Readers remain grateful to this day.
People who dismiss the idea of literature, both modern and classic, tend to view it as variants on a single story: a middle-aged man grappling with the perceived failures of his life seeks solace in the arms of a much younger woman. This is often further reduced to a professor and student dynamic. In Stay Up With Hugo Best, Erin Somers flips the script with the concept "what if that alleged classic literary had its script flipped: the exact same story from the perspective of the womanâ€. The thing is that it's exactly the same. A woman ineffectually tries to save a boring but overly wealthy man from himself. Without finesse or an actual point of difference, Stay Up With Hugo Best doesn't work.
Karen M. McManus' second novel is an evolution of her craft. One Of Us Is Lying was a hooky little high school mystery that couldn't quite grasp the concept of unreliable narrators, but Two Can Keep A Secret is a small town extravaganza that ticks a lot of boxes. If you tick the right boxes in the right ways, it doesn't matter if they're clichés. This is a genre based around the right material done well.
You don't have to always follow your heroes through the gates of Hell. If Indiana Jones asks you to step into the Temple of Doom with him, you say "no thank you, Mister Jones. Call me when you're looking for the cup of a carpenter, I want something a bit less imperialist.†This is a laboured metaphor already, but it turns out that Danse Macabre, Stephen King's first non-fiction effort,is full of them. And "heh heh†asides. And blatant errors — Peter Pan and the "Wild Boysâ€, "Anarchy for the U.K.†— that have not been corrected in thirty years of reprints.
It's not a case of don't meet your heroes, but rather a case of "the past is a different country, you weren't born yet, and nothing in this book means anything to youâ€. Danse Macabre does not hold up to a modern reader, dealing as it does with works that have largely been obscured by time, none of which have endured like the output of its author. Scrappy, and written with a giant chip on its shoulder, Danse Macabre is a curio.
Stephen King is in a constant state of adaptation renaissance. For this reader and viewer’s money, Pet Sematary 1989 was a slavishly faithful adaptation of the novel, keeping all of the content but missing out on the soul. You can safely say this 30 years after the event, but the child actors weren’t up to much, either. (And Dale Midkiff barely got any work again)
Pet Sematary 2019 is a different beast entirely. It has the bones of the story right, and it changes things up. An esteemed colleague postulated that when it makes these changes for its climax, Pet Sematary becomes “just a horror movie.” A pet theory around these parts is that King’s works often lose much in the translation from page to screen due to the novels’ inherent interiority of character.
Despite all of that, Pet Sematary is a fair shake at some of King’s more challenging and troubling thematic work. The changes make Pet Sematary more enjoyable than its literary counterpart because we lose the intense nihilism of the original incarnation. The misery may have been the point, but this new movies shows that sometimes you want a bit of an undead sting instead.
Who amongst us has not been burned by a DC Extended Universe movie? Since Man of Steel, it’s been a bit of a bust. They haven’t all been bad, but it’s rare that you can recommend a DC movie without reservation.
Shazam! is that movie. Finally returning to the superhero wellspring of found families (even Bruce Wayne has an entire menagerie of Batkids and Batcousins, a fact that most movies forget), Shazam! is family friendly, it’s funny, and it has Mark Strong in it, and as we all know, Mark Strong is game for anything.
The Expanse is back. It may have been delayed four months, but four months is as nothing when you realise that fifty years of story time have passed since Leviathan Wakes was published in 2011. Tiamat's Wrath is the second entry in the third and theoretically final trilogy in the series, but it is not a bridge, it's a ramp: everything is dialled up to eleven in anticipation of book nine, and things are ready to explode. Tiamat's Wrath takes the reader on a wild, crushing journey, and is sure to upset devoted followers for all the right reasons.
If the measure of a movie is how much you think about it afterwards, Us is the finest film of 2019. It’s the sort of movie that rewards repeat viewing, because it is packed with details that you’re guaranteed not to pick up on the first time around.
The following review isn’t entirely accurate: it claims that Us is largely humourless. This was written through the haze of the sheer anxiety and panic that a first run through can provoke in someone (ie me) trying to grasp exactly what is happening. It’s pretty funny at times, and not just because it has Tim Heidecker in it.
More than that, Us is a painstakingly constructed film that contains elements of horror, but realistically it’s a complete experience, drawing from many different sources to become a cohesive and disturbing hole. You can take it at face value, but to give it even a little thought, you’ll be chewing on it for a long time thereafter.
James Patterson entertained with Killer Chef, a novella about people showing up mysteriously dead at New Orleans restaurants, and the one chef/policeman who has the dual knowledge bases to crack the case. This time, Patterson teams up with a different co-writer, Max Dilallo, switches to first person narration, and flattens his characters and setting into an unfocused terror plot.
