Hey, kids! Welcome back to The Book Report. The Mythoi Book I: Birth Trade Paper-Back comes out this month (just in case you missed the official press release), and I strongly urge you to pick up a copy.

In a strange bit of cross-promotion, yours truly can be found acting in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedie of King Lear at Shakespeare Orange County this month. Of course, what that meant for me is for the past few weeks I’ve had to sit through the telling of this terrific, tragic tale just about every night, and so I needed something to read to lighten things up a bit.
What more appropriate way to do that than by giving Christopher Moore’s parody of King Lear, Fool (pub. 2009), a reread.

“A Fool and his money are soon popular“
For those unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s tragedy, allow me to recap:
The old King Lear of Britain is ready to retire and wants to pass along control of his kingdom to his heirs. In order to prevent future strife between the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall (each of whom are married Lear’s older daughters, Goneril and Regan), Lear decides to divide his kingdom into three parts, each portion going to a daughter. His trick, however, is that the size and value of each portion is determined by asking his daughters which of them loves him the most.
Goneril and Regan spew honey out of their mouths, but Lear’s youngest and favorite daughter, Cordelia, doesn’t play along. She says,

Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:

Lear, in his pride, does not take this response well. He disowns Cordelia and divides her portion between Cornwall and Albany and gives them the keys to the kingdom, though he shall still “retain the name of king”. It soon becomes clear, however, that the honey coming from the mouths of Goneril and Regan mask the vitriol in their hearts. Lear soon finds himself rejected by his older daughters, turned out into a storm with a fool, a possible madman, and a knight in disguise as his only company. His heartbreak tugs at his sanity as the storm tugs at his health.
Cordelia returns with an army, looking to set the wrong things right, and finds her father wandering feverish and delirious. In typical tragic form, by the end of the play practically everyone ends up dead, and those who survive cautioning,

“The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

“It is a fool’s prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.“
In Christopher Moore’s novel, the story of Lear is re-imagined, and told through the eyes of Lear’s Fool, named Pocket. The tale through Pocket’s eyes becomes what Publishers Weekly rightly calls “a buffet of tragedy, comedy, and medieval porn action.” Moore deviates from his source material a bit in order turn the tragedy into such a ribald comedy, changing the ending and borrowing heavily from a couple other Shakespeare plays in the process. But in addition to the utterly hilarious (and vulgar) wit coming from the fool, Moore cleverly imagines scenes to fill in certain gaps in Shakespeare’s play.
Too many details may spoil the fun (and there is a lot of fun to be had), but I will say the book worked wonderfully well at keeping me smiling by the end of each rehearsal. Shakespeare purists who don’t recognize parody as the sincerest form of flattery and people who don’t appreciate a good dick or fart joke will probably not enjoy the book that much. But for the rest of you, I encourage you to pick up the book and give it a read. It’s sure to tickle the whole way through, and I lost count of the moments when I burst out into audible laughter.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Howdy, kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.

Last week I gave a brief look at how Quantum Theory helped Michael Crichton come up with his time-travel adventure Timeline. This week I want to fall a little deeper into the rabbit hole, and return to an author I’ve blogged about previously: Neal Stephenson.

In the mid 1990s, engineer and inventor Danny Hills came up with the idea of building a 10,000 year clock as an icon to long term thinking. The clock came from an observation he had:

“When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.” (The added zero in front of 2000 is used to resolve the deca-millennium bug, to keep digital clocks from resetting to zero in a little less than 8,000 years)

Hills and Stephenson chatted about the clock at a conference, and Stephenson came up with the idea of a series of rotating cylinders (“or cooler yet, spheres…”) with an opening in each. Each cylinder/sphere would nest just within the next cylinder/sphere, and rotate at different speeds, such that the openings would line up to reveal whatever is at the center once every 10,000 years.
From this idea, Stephenson started thinking about his own millennial clock, and the seeds for his 2008 novel Anathem were planted.

The word “anathem” is a kind of mash-up of “anthem” and “anathema”, creating a word that means both words at the same time. The novel Anathem takes place on a world similar to earth in many ways. Readers will find many parallels with our own world, though it may take awhile to figure it out (such as realizing a “jeejah” is essentially a cell phone). The real heart of the novel takes place in the math.
But again, math has several different meanings in Anathem, and the heart of the novel takes place in each meaning of math. Arbre, the world Stephenson created, comes with several thousand years of history, and in that course of time, civilization fell and rebuilt itself three different times. One of the only constants to last through all three Great Sacks is a community of philosophical nuns and monks who live in a type of conceptual convent called (mashing up the two words and combining their meanings) a concent. The fraas and suurs (think friars and sisters) of the concent stay separated from the rest of the world, and just as a convent is designed to maintain the purity of belief, a concent is designed to maintain the purity of Knowledge. It’s quite an amazing and delicate system Stephenson writes, but for the purposes of this post I don’t want to delve in deeper into the workings of the concent. For a more complete list of Earth-Arbre correlations, go here.

The Quantum theories that Anathem delve into are fascinating. One recurring theme in the novel deals with time, and influenced heavily by Julian Barbour’s novel The End of Time (pub. 1999), which makes the argument that time is an illusion from a physicists standpoint, shaped only by how we perceive our memories of the past and our hopes for the future.
The multiverse gets dealt with in Anathem as well, with special influence from David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality (pub. 1997), who argues that the four main strands of science (quantum physics, evolution, computation, and knowledge) are not as unrelated as they appear.

One idea I found incredibly intriguing stems from Sir Roger Prenrose’s novel The Emperor’s New Mind (pub. 1989), where he makes the argument that the human brain is essentially a quantum computer. What it does is present a logical reason for some of the fantastical things that happen in the novel, putting a lot of science into science-fiction.
While I’m sure a lot of readers think that science is boring and more science in science-fiction takes the fun out of it, I could argue that it simply isn’t the case, but then we run into the problem of what is true for me isn’t true for everybody. I suppose that the best argument I can make is that just as epic high fantasy can be a more rewarding for some readers, but probably not all, epic high sci-fi will be a rich experience for some readers, but not all.
(And let me add that if you think that Twilight represents the pinnacle of vampire literature, you will probably find Anathem pretty boring.)

Anyway, give the book a read. I sincerely hope you’ll find it as entertaining and engrossing as I do.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Welcome back to The Book Report!

We’re gonna take an interesting journey today, kids. One that will hopefully entertain as well as get your learn on.

In 1989, NBC debuted a show that was a pleasant mixture of comedy, drama, science-fiction, and social-commentary. The show starred a captain of the Enterprise and a Cylon, ran for five seasons, and was titled Quantum Leap.

The name Quantum Leap comes from a branch of physics known as Quantum Physics. A Quantum Leap is a change of an electron from one quantum state to another, but in a way in which the change happens abruptly, rather than a gradual shift over time. Sound confusing?

Quantum Theory could be considered the ultimate bad-ass of mathematics. Scientists and mathematicians believe that quantum mechanics will enable supercomputers the size of a thumbnail, enable faster-than-light space travel, permit time-travel (or categorically prove its impossibility), and create a unified theory of everything.
A lot of books, mostly science-fiction, have explored most of what Quantum Theory tries to do, but in most of these books, the author lets the readers’ suspension of disbelief take care of the problem of explaining how these things work. Han Solo tells Chewie to “Punch, it!” and the Millennium Falcon leaps into hyperspace. How? Who cares, right? It’s freakin’ hyperspace!

In 1999, the late Michael Crichton penned a novel exploring how quantum theory might make time travel possible in his thrill-ride of a book Timeline. Some of you may remember the Richard Donner film version starring the always enjoyable Gerard Butler (and the always horrible Paul Walker). The film did a perfect job of keeping the action of Crichton’s novel while removing its brains. The plot of the book essentially followed the same basic formula Crichton used in his 1990 best-seller Jurassic Park: scientists utilize discoveries made in their field to make huge profits, until something goes horribly, horribly wrong.
In the case of Timeline, a team of historians and archaeologists go back to 14th Century France to rescue their father-figure professor who’s been trapped there. And then, of course, something goes horribly, horribly wrong.

The way Crichton explains it, time travel isn’t really jumping to different points in time at all. It’s jumping through different dimensions of the multiverse. Think parallel dimensions when I say multiverse. In 1956, Hugh Everett presented a thesis on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics, and by 1970 had the attention of a great number of quantum physicists. The idea behind it all is imagining a roll of a 6-sided dice. As soon as the dice leaves the hand, the universe must account for the possibility that the dice could land on any one of its six sides. In mathematical terms, what this means is that as the dice falls, each side of the dice exists in its own universe simultaneously. Only once the dice falls still does the proper universe assert itself. Or does it? Perhaps the other universes continue on with their own outcomes. What Crichton imagines, then, is visiting those alternate universes. The way time travel works is by visiting alternate universes that run slightly less than parallel, or on an alternate timeline, as it were.
The real tricky thing (as if it’s not already tricky enough) is that the only reason the group discovers their professor went back in time is because they unearthed his glasses at their dig site. So if they’re traveling to a different dimension, how is it they are able to affect the past of their own?
Don’t worry, Crichton doesn’t break his own rules. His answer is that a near-parallel universe sends their versions of the characters to our past, performing actions similar or the same as the main characters. This is not as unlikely as it sounds. If the multiverse contains an infinite number of possibilities, than the likelihood for any event to occur is highly probable.

If all of this sounds incredibly confusing, don’t worry. Crichton makes it all much more understandable, just like how he made genetics and chaos theory more understandable in Jurassic Park. One of his strengths is breaking the technically complex down to a layman’s understanding and then creating one hell of a read out of it.

So go pick up Timeline, give it a read, and then come back next week for when I talk about a book that puts Crichton’s grasp of Quantum Theory to shame.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Welcome back to the Book Report, kids!

So when I first started this series of posts about classic monsters, my intention wasn’t to cover all of them. Honestly, I was just curious about werewolf literature and the idea that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fit into the genre. Of course, that being done, I grew curious about the literary origins of other classic monsters, and then realized this could tie in to the Semantink property The Undergrounds, and I started including a pic of each monster in their Undergrounds uniform.
The only trouble is, because I wasn’t expecting to cover all the Undergrounds employees, I never posted a picture of the Wolfman in his post. So before I go any further:

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A Pain In the Neck
The most popular monster, in fiction and history and pop culture, without a doubt is the vampire. A seductive blend of evil and immortality, the horror of death by a vampire’s bite is offset by vague and not-so-vague promises of an eternal life free from facing the consequences of your actions. It’s understandable then, why so many people might find such a cursed life romantic.

One of the earliest recorded stories of vampirism comes from Croatia in the late 1600s. Locals claimed peasant Guire Grando returned from the dead, drank the blood of villagers, and sexually harassed his widow. Reports claimed that only by beheading the revenant could they stop him. Oddly enough, vampire hysteria swept through Europe in the 18th Century, during the Age of Enlightenment. Many corpses were staked to prevent their undead resurrection and trials for accusations of vampirism occurred. Some governments actually employed “specialists” who would hunt the creatures.
Vampires appeared in a few poetic pieces, but the first bit of prose fiction featuring a vampire was The Vampyre, written in 1819 by John Polidori. Polidori was Lord Gordon George Byron’s physician, and based the tale off a fragmentary piece Lord Bryon wrote during The Year Without a Summer, which also produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lord Ruthven, the vampire in Polidori’s novel, is based in part upon Lord Byron himself, and presents for the first time the vampire character as a charming, seductive aristocrat.
The story remained popular through the 19th Century, even as the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire increased the vampire monster’s reputation and popularity. The end of the 19th Century saw the release of the most popular and definitive vampire monster of all time: Dracula, published in 1897 and written by Bram Stoker.

Stoker’s novel was originally titled The Un-Dead, with the famous count’s name shown as Count Wampyr. While doing research of Romania, Stoker became fascinated with the story of Vlad III, also called Vlad the Impaler. Vlad’s father, Vlad II, became a member of The Order of the Dragon in 1431, and went by the name Vlad Dracul, or Vlad the Dragon. The bloody history of Vlad III fit right into Stoker’s story, and he changed the count’s name to the now immortal (pun intended) name of Dracula.

The novel was written as a series of letters from the main characters and interspersed with newspaper articles. This style of writing is called the epistolary form, and when done effectively can draw the reader in as they begin to forget (even if only through suspension of disbelief) that the letters were not really written by the people who signed them. The frame story of Frankenstein was written in the epistolary form, and the French novel Les Liasons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos is perhaps one of the more famous epistolary novels.

Stoker’s novel was popular, but did not become a best-seller until Hollywood adapted the story into various films, the most popular being the 1931 version starring Béla Lugosi and F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu. Hollywood has been especially kind to the Count, who has appeared as a major character in over 200 films (second only to Sherlock Holmes), and his popularity has inspired a huge number of authors to write their own vampire novels in a surprisingly vast number of genres. Anne Rice, of course, breathed new life (so to speak) into the vampire novel with her Vampire Chronicles. Christopher Moore made vampires hilarious with his trilogy of novels You Suck!, Blood-sucking Fiends, and Bite Me. Elizabeth Kostova created an eerie, historical mystery about Dracula titled The Historian. Loren D. Estleman pitted Dracula against Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count. Charlaine Harris wrote about vampires and other “supes” in The Sookie Stackhouse Mystery Novels, which you can see adapted to the small screen as True Blood. And of course, let’s not forget the story of a young girl who falls in love with a vampire — and the rabid fan base that follows: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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I would be most remiss if I did not also mention Dracula’s famous nemesis: Doctor Abraham Van Helsing.

Generally, wherever Dracula goes, Van Helsing follows, stake in hand. So it makes sense to have him show up in The Undergrounds.

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That concludes my examination of the classic monsters. Hope you enjoyed it!

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.

In 1816, a combination of low solar activity and a category 7 volcano created a cold spell through North America and Europe, resulting in what is now known as The Year Without a Summer (just as a reference, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that erupted in April 2010 was a category 4, Mount St. Helens was a category 5). Mary Shelley and her husband (at the time her lover) Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Lord Byron at his villa in Switzerland at Lake Geneva. Due to the cold, rainy weather there was not much opportunity for outdoor activities, so the group stayed in, discussing a range of topics including galvanism (the movement of dead or motionless tissue through an electric current), reanimation, and horror. Inspired by the conversation, Lord Bryon suggested everyone attempt to write their own horror stories one evening. Mary Shelley’s resultant work became the classic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

The misconception which occurs most often in the book, perhaps, is when people refer to the Monster as Frankenstein. The name of the doctor is Victor Frankenstein, but Shelley never named the Monster in the book. In fact, Shelley never called the Monster a monster, her characters did. She always referred to him as a Creature, and in other writings called him Adam, but thanks to Hollywood history, he is forever cast as the Monster (and as Frankenstein when people with no concept of literary history refer to him).
The secondary title, The Modern Prometheus, refers to the Greek titan Prometheus, who created humans from clay and gave them the gift of fire. It was a gift he later regretted after seeing how a gift of life and warmth could be turned towards such destructive uses. So, while the image of the Monster has been firmly etched into our history of classic monsters, given that the two titles of the book refer to the doctor we need to examine how the book works with the title character as the true monster. And the two titles give us clues on how to examine the book: first we must look at the doctor as a man, and secondly as a god.

Frankenstein
Dr. Victor Frankenstein was obsessed with the ideas of life and death. It stemmed from the death of his mother and a profound fascination, from an early age, with Natural Philosophy. Natural Philosophy was the precursor to modern science, attempting to explain mysteries previously confined only to magic, mysticism, and religion using mathematics, chemistry, and physics: Alchemy, for example. Natural philosophy and its younger, smarter brother Science (prior to the 19th century, “science” was another word for knowledge) seemed to offer all the secrets of the universe to young Victor, and he wanted to claim them all for his own. Literature abounds with stories of the magician seduced toward darker and deeper magic and his thirst for knowledge increased, and Victor was no different with his thirst: it stemmed from a selfish desire for mastery over everything.
In the first two chapters, Victor unabashedly places himself at the center of his families universe. When he was the only child, he relished the attention his family gave him, and after his parents adopted Elizabeth, he makes no qualms about claiming her for himself. Such self-centered greed and ambition places him on the precipice of tragedy in this story, just as in other tragedies like Macbeth and Oedipus Rex.
As a tragedy written in the early 19th century, the book stands practically alone. At the time, many popular tragedies of earlier eras had their endings rewritten to happy conclusions. German poet, novelist, playwright, statesman, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “The mere attempt to write tragedy might be my undoing.” It wasn’t until the end of the 19th Century that novels and plays manage to return to or reimagine the tragedy as an art form. Yet Shelley’s Frankenstein contains all the essential elements of good tragedy (um…“good” meaning “well written”) as the hero of the story essentially brings about his own destruction and the destruction of everything he loves.

Prometheus
The story of Prometheus is a tragedy of a different sort. After creating mankind out clay, Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the mere remains of burnt offerings from men after humans took the actual meat for themselves. In angry retribution, Zeus took the secret of fire away from men, but Prometheus stole it back and returned the secret as a gift to humans. For punishment, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, where an eagle would come and eat away his liver every day, since it would grow back overnight due to his immortality. It wasn’t until Hercules challenged the will of Zeus by killing the eagle removing his chains was Prometheus freed.
In parallel, Frankenstein imbues his creation with life, and is subsequently tortured for his gift. On the other hand, the monstrosity of it is that this god is repulsed by his creation. The horror aspect in this sense would be to imagine a world in which God hated the miracles he performed. Would his creations be justified, then, in rebelling against their Creator? An interesting philosophical dilemma, which brings weight and depth to this tragic horror novel.

Adaptations

Unlike other horror archetypes, Frankenstein’s Monster sees little re-imagining beyond spoofs. Which is not to say there aren’t plenty of stories about Scientist characters being tortured or hunted by their Creations, but in these stories, the Scientist nearly always is the sympathetic hero and the Creation monstrous and devilish. Frankenstein, however, works as the opposite and such stands practically alone as a horror novel of this type.

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Well, that’s it for this week.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey kids! Welcome back to the Book Report.

At the end of the 19th Century, an Egyptology craze swept through high-society. “Egyptomania” started initially as artifacts from Napoleon’s Egypt campaign were recovered and studied, and by the turn of the century it was very en vogue to be able to discuss things Egyptian.
This fascination naturally found its way into literature.

In 1827, probably the first mummy story hit the stands, titled The Mummy! Or a Tale of The Twenty-Second Century. It was written by Jane C. Loudon but published anonymously. In the tale, a hideous-looking mummy named Cheops is revived in the 22nd Century and wanders, much like Frankenstein’s Monster, through the world. Unlike the Monster, however, Cheops gives advice and political commentary to any who befriend him. Unlike most Victorian science fiction, Loudon created a vision of the future that was more than just her contemporary England but with some vague political changes. She took current ideas of technology and explored how they might have evolved in 300 years. She even predicted a kind of internet. The novel also gained notice as an early feminist novel, proposing that the women of the future would have more freedoms and even might wear trousers.
Ultimately, the novel worked as political satire and did little to influence the way mummies found their way into ranks of popular horror monsters.

In 1869 Louisa May Alcott wrote Lost in a Pyramid: The Mummy’s Curse, which might be the first example of type of horror story we are looking for. In the story, a lost explorer burns a mummy for light, using the remains as a torch to get out of the tomb. He takes a gold box from the mummy as a souvenier, which contain strange seeds of an unknown plant. The explorer’s fiancee plants one of the seeds and wears the resulting flower on their wedding day. But the seeds carried with them the curse of the mummy, should anyone disturb its rest. The short story ends with the curse settling upon the young bride and the explorer ruing the day he ever disturbed the mummy.

The first story to depict a mummy as a reanimated monster was Lot No. 249, written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published in 1892, but the novel which had probably the most impact on every mummy movie ever made was The Jewel of Seven Stars, written by none other than Bram Stoker 1903. The book received a lot of criticism for its gruesome ending, so Stoker removed the last chapter and rewrote a happier ending in 1912. In 2008, Penguin Classics restored the original ending in its release, and included the revised ending as an appendix.

A great mummy story that I particularly enjoyed came out in 1989, written by Anne Rice. Titled The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned, the book did for mummies what her Vampire Chronicles did for blood-suckers: pulled them out of the gothic story-telling style into the modern era without sacrificing any of the emotional depth of these monsters, yet still able to display their monstrosities.
The story is set in 1914, and within an unusual tomb, archaeologist Lawrence Stratford discovers a mummy that left-behind notes claim is pharaoh Ramses II. The trouble is, the tomb was built in the first century B.C., and Ramses II supposedly died more than 1,000 years prior.

The ensuing story is full of blood and horror and hunger, but at its heart is a love story (much like Dracula). The novel also includes some great fictionalization of Egyptian politics, as well as an interesting take on the Cleopatra-Mark Antony-Julius Caesar love triangle.
It is a ripping good yarn, and though written to stand alone, Anne Rice allowed for sequels. At the end of the novel is the statement, “The adventures of Ramses the Damned shall continue.” Unfortunately (or not, I guess, depending on how you view religion), Anne Rice found a renewed faith in the Catholic Church and turned her writings away from the horror genre to focus on writing “only for the Lord”.
Perhaps someday she’ll be able to reconcile faith with fiction and return to the genre she (along with Stephen King) made so accessible to general readers, and give us a sequel.

That “wraps” up my Report on mummies this week.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey kids, welcome back to The Book Report.

In his 1981 non-fiction novel Danse Macabre, about the genre of horror and the different mediums it appears in, Stephen King mentions the three main archetypes of the Horror genre: Vampires, Werewolves, and The Thing Without a Name. Looking at it in a broader sense, you could say vampires represent the person or thing killing you that you know. The Thing Without a Name represents the thing killing you but you don’t know what it is. Werewolves represent the thing killing us that is ourselves.

The origin of werewolves in literature is fairly recent. There are stories of humans changing into wolves going back as far as the medieval romances, such as Marie de France’s Bisclavret written in the 12th Century. But the actual folklore behind werewolves is slightly different.
The word “werewolf” comes from the Old English “wer” — meaning man — and “wulf” — from which we get the modernized spelling of “wolf” but back then generally meant “beast”. The image of this “man-beast” did not really gain popularity until the gothic novels of the 19th Century. “Penny dreadfuls” — short, serialized horror stories (essentially 19th Century comic books without all the pictures) — popularized the werewolf figure with such serials as Hugues, the Wer-Wolf and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (along with Varny the Vampire for vampire stories).
The first full novels about werewolves came from the French, with Alexander Dumas’ 1857 work The Wolf-Leader (which was not translated into English until the early 1900s) and Erkmann-Chatrian’s 1869 work The Man-Wolf (translated to English in 1971).

For a closer look at the thematic struggle of the evil within us, I want to look at Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 “werewolf” novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

In late 1885, Stevenson’s wife woke him from a nap because of cries of horror coming from him in the midst of his dream. Upon waking, he asked his wife, “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” He went on to use the images from that dream to explore the interplay of good and evil and the idea of human duality in the characters of Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde.

The book was an immediate success. Within a year of publication, stage adaptations of the story began to appear in Boston and London. Not including stage and radio plays of the story, over 120 film adaptations of the story have been made, though none of them remained faithful to the source material. The strange duo also appeared in comic book form, in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

If you managed somehow to never have heard of the story, I apologize for the spoilers. Most film adaptions cast Jekyll and Hyde with the same actor and shoot the story from the doctor’s (and his creation’s) viewpoint. This completely destroys the mystery of the novel, however.
The plot of the story follows Mr. Utterson, a lawyer, and he tries to discover what strange connection the diabolical Edward Hyde has with his friend, the elderly Dr. Jekyll. Of course, given the popularity of the story, there’s no mystery to the story anymore, but the novella uses anticipation to fine effect to build tension.
The story is barely 100 pages, and the first twenty are spent discussing Mr. Hyde and the effect he has on people before we ever meet him. And it is not until after we meet Mr. Hyde that we meet Dr. Jekyll.

Because, for most readers today, the story isn’t a mystery, the interesting parts of the story to examine deal precisely the psychological attractiveness of human duality that make most werewolf stories so interesting. An interesting thing to keep in mind is this story came out about fifteen years before Freud’s books on psychoanalysis.

So, on the next full moon, give the book a read (or re-read). It’s one of Stevenson’s most popular stories for a reason.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Howdy folks! Welcome back to The Book Report.

For a little over 30 posts now, I’ve been tossing around my opinions on what you should be reading to make your lives more like mine.

In the brief interests of fairness (and also because I’m super freakin’ busy this week) I’d like to know what book or books you think I should read and/or review.
So go ahead and flood that comment box and my favorite recommendation will get its own Report.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Howdy, kids. Welcome back to The Book Report.

This week, I want to talk briefly about a genre of books that some snobby readers might feel as being too juvenile: comic books. More specifically, the graphic novel. Here at Semantink the publishers have been doing their best to promote the hell out of the Mythoi: Birth graphic novel, and while Ben’s Comicopea takes a look at comics and the comic industry in a very knowledgeable way, I thought I’d address the issue for people who don’t read comics because they “only read serious books” (or some other smarmy, elitist comment).
So what I thought I’d do is recommend three graphic novels in three different genres that I own and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to people.

1. The Psychological Thriller

As the only graphic novel appearing on Time Magazine’s “Top 100 Novels of all time” (since 1923), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen is truly a feat of literary genius. Drawing its title from Roman poet and satirist Juvenal’s question “Who watches the watchmen?” the initial premise of the story is a look at what superheroes would be like in real life. Of course, in order to support such a premise, the book also needs a close examination of what type of person might feel the need to put on a costume and fight crime. Watchmen certainly does not shy away from its obligations. As the story unfolds and the single murder of a costumed crime-fighter begins to have global ramifications, Moore and Gibbons deconstruct the concept of the superhuman from two angles: the people who need to be heroes and the people who need others to be heroic. Gripping, gritty, and at times very disturbing, after its completed run in 1987, Watchmen changed the way authors wrote heroes and also the way people read them.

2. The Action/Adventure

Okay, at first glance, a trio of pin-up models in sexy action poses may not look like “literature”, but roll with me here for a second. For more than fifty years the James Bond/Jack Ryan/Jason Bourne (what’s with the J names?) spy thrillers have made their way onto many a book shelf in houses all over the world. The basic premise of Danger Girl is exactly the same, except where in those spy novels the “Bond Girl” is little more than a sexy female for the hero to save, these girls are kicking ass all over the place. And, yes, looking incredible while they do. Right from page one this book burns at full throttle, and the action doesn’t let up one bit.
Equal parts James Bond, Indiana Jones, and a generous helping of curves, the Danger Girls are intelligent, independent, and incredibly sexy. But then, everyone in this comic is sexy from the main heroes and villains to the background characters. It’s what creators J. Scott Campbell and Andy Hartnell do. They could make Quazimodo look sexy. Plus, the comic has got enough puns to satisfy even the most rabid punster.

3. The Romantic Thriller

One of the reasons I don’t like the Twilight series might be because of this book. At one point in Meyer’s series, the main character’s love leaves her, and so she shuts down emotionally for six months. Of course, given the lack of individuality and vapid helplessness of the main character, that sort of shut down makes sense. But if there is a book that shows more rage, heartache, and longing at the loss of a loved one than The Crow, I haven’t read it. The story was inspired by a news report of a couple who was murdered for a $20 engagement ring, and written as a way for the author to deal with his own loss. In 1978, author James O’Barr’s fiancee was killed by a drunk driver, and while I’m not saying someone who’s never felt that kind of loss couldn’t write that book, I think you can see every bit of the pain, rage, and heartbreak from that loss show up in every drop of ink.
The book is incredibly violent, but there is a sense of heart-wrenching poetry in each bullet, each blood spatter. The kind of emotional depth that Twilight never even scratches the surface of.

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That’s it for me this week, folks. You can catch pretty decent (even excellent) movie adaptations of Watchmen and The Crow, and there’s been talk of a Danger Girl movie for years (though there is a Playstation video game adaptation) for those who are curious about other media formats for these books.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Howdy, kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.

A couple weeks ago I did a three part study focusing on three candidates in the Shakespeare authorship question. Today, I’d like to write about a great thrill-ride of a book that features the authorship issue as one of its plot points. The book is Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell.

The title comes from a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do live after them; The Good is oft interred with their bones.” The book is pretty standard thriller fare, actually. It’s starts with a death of a Person-With-A-Secret. A friend of the PWAS (the hero of the novel) gets a clue about that secret, and before you can spell conpiracy…conspriacy…conspiracy, the hero is off on a wild hunt for more clues, eluding the machinations of a deranged killer in the process. The book doesn’t deviate from the formula any more or less than The Da Vinci Code (or any of the other Dan Brown novels) did, so what helps these sorts of books stand out is the content of the Secrets.

The secrets covered in Interred With Their Bones deal with the three big mysteries of Shakespeare: 1) Did someone other than Shakespeare write the plays? 2) Who was the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth of Shakespeare’s Sonnets? 3) What happened to Cardenio?

The History of Cardenio is one of Shakespeare’s lost plays (along with Love’s Labours Won), known to have been performed by the King’s Men in 1613. Most scholars speculate that the play was based around the character of Cardenio in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. There are no (that we know about) surviving manuscripts of the play, unfortunately, and finding a copy of the play could very well be the literary equivalent of archeologists digging up the city of Troy in the mid 1800s.

But the question that begs to be asked is, “Are these secrets worth killing someone over?“
A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required when reading Interred With Their Bones, but then, I suppose a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required when reading any novel. Like The Da Vinci Code, the heroine visits many real places and deals with real questions that have plagued Shakespearean scholars for more than a hundred years. The facts help lend a certain amount of credence to the rest of the book, and as long as you don’t look to carefully and just hang on for the ride, Interred With Their Bones will take you on a wild roller-coaster of a thriller and may just help you learn a little more about one of the best authors of the English Language at the same time.

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A short post from me today, folks. Hope you’re not too disappointed. I also hope all of you have pre-ordered a copy of the Mythoi: Birth graphic novel by now.
Have a fun (and safe) Independence day this weekend!

Until next time…
Still paddlin’ the old knew.
_-Akatzen-_