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| Monday, March 1, 2021 09:53 AM |
| For Amazonians Only |
 by Fëanor |
Exciting news! Amazon invited me to a private beta for self-publishing hardcover books, so both my books are now available on Amazon in hardcover format! Their hardcover format is a bit different from the Barnes & Noble format. Barnes & Noble prints the cover illustration on a paper jacket that wraps around the book. Amazon does what they call case laminate hardcover, which means the cover illustration is applied directly to the cover itself, and there is no jacket.
Anyway, here are the links! Thanks for looking.
Tree and Beast
Sea and Sword |
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| Thursday, July 25, 2019 07:57 PM |
| On the Viewer - Unemployment Cinema |
 by Fëanor |
A benefit of being unemployed: I watched four (4) movies today. And most of them were good!
Shazam! - This was great. A ton of fun, with a moving character arc, and a wonderful message. Also, funny! Always nice to see an actually really good movie from DC that isn't unrelentingly grimdark.
Hellboy (2019) - This was disappointing. Some cool ideas, a few cool moments, but poor writing and execution. Usually I love Ian McShane, but I hated him in this for some reason. His character was just poorly written I think. There was also an undercurrent of misogyny that grossed me out.
Alita: Battle Angel - I didn't expect much out of this one. A post-apocalyptic sci-fi action thriller with lots of cyborgs and a CG main character with weird bug eyes. But I actually really enjoyed it. Cool effects and action, and an engaging story. Not the most imaginative plot, but I liked it anyway.
Master Z: Ip Man Legacy - I'd been craving a bad-ass, old school, period martial arts film, and this was that film. So great. Jin Zhang! Dave Bautista! Michelle Yeoh! And even a cameo from Tony Jaa! Fantastic fighting, and a good story with a character arc and everything. Man, I really need to watch more martial arts movies. |
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| Friday, July 5, 2019 06:34 PM |
| Book Report - Middlemarch |
| by Fëanor |
I really enjoyed Middlemarch. A tragicomedy of the human experience. A romantic drama that's often laugh-out-loud funny, with many wonderfully realized portraits of very memorable, very real characters.
My favorite character: Mrs. Cadwallader. She's hilarious. I wish there'd been more of her. Most likable character: Caleb Garth. Runner-up: Mr. Farebrother. Both just really nice, decent guys. Most unlikable character: Rosamond Vincy. John Raffles is also awful, but ugh, Rosamond just drove me nuts.
Fred Vincy is kind of a self-absorbed ass, and, as everyone agrees (even Fred!), Mary Garth (who is awesome) could have done so much better than him, but they end up happy together, so it's all good. I also really enjoyed Celia and Mr. Brooke (up to a point, of course, only up to a point, as he would say), and of course I was happy to see Dorothea and Will end up together in the end.
Looks like there was a well-received BBC miniseries adaptation in 1994, so I'll have to check that out some time. |
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| Wednesday, May 4, 2016 12:59 PM |
| Book Report - Lovecraft Country |
| by Fëanor |
This audio book I just listened to was so great I thought I'd swipe the mothballs off the old blog to write it up.
The popularity of weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft only seems to increase as the years go by. But so does scrutiny of his racist politics and beliefs, which were so often given such lurid life in his writing. One of the things Lovecraft found most horrifying, for instance, was miscegenation. For many years a bust of Lovecraft was presented to the winner of the World Fantasy Award, but just last year the bust was retired due to Lovecraft's history of racism.
I love Lovecraft's work, but had of course always been deeply uncomfortable with his racism. I hadn't heard of a modern interpretation of Lovecraft's horror universe that dealt in any meaningful way with this topic - until I read about Matt Ruff's novel Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft Country not only deals with the topic, but makes it its central theme. The book's purpose, in fact, is to wrest ownership of Lovecraft's universe away from its racist beginnings and place it firmly in the hands of people of color. (I'm a little disappointed, therefore, to have discovered after the fact that the author, Matt Ruff, is white. It seems like this story was for a person of color to tell. But there you are.)
The novel is set in America in 1954, and is told as a series of short stories, each an episode in a larger, over-arching story, each with a different narrator, with the final chapter bringing all the narrators and stories together in an exciting climax. All the narrators are members of, or close friends with, the Turner family. The novel opens with the story of Atticus Turner, a young black man still trying to find his place in American society after returning from serving in the Korean War. He receives an odd letter from his estranged father, Montrose, about a secret birthright that he's entitled to, and he decides to head home to Chicago to see what it's all about.
If you're expecting magic and monsters in the first few pages, you'll be disappointed. Ruff takes his time getting to that, first introducing you to the surreal insanity and horror that is the Jim Crow South. On his way home, Atticus is assaulted, harassed, and stolen from by a policeman for the crime of being black. As the story goes on, and incidents like this are repeated again and again, we come to realize that threats to your life and property from white men with power are just a part of everyday life for black people in America. And yes, sure, we should all already know that. But being a white guy, I need constant reminders, and Ruff forces you to really examine and internalize what it must be like to live like that: in constant fear, in constant danger of death, with little or no recourse to the law, the whole world against you, hating you and suspecting you on sight.
And that's just the baseline of horror in Atticus' world! As his story progresses, things get even more dangerous, and way more weird. A mysterious, untouchable, silver car with tinted windows seems to follow him everywhere as his search for his father takes him through a maze-like forest - where unseen things lurk in the shadows - to a tiny, insular town called Ardham. Ardham isn't Lovecraft's Arkham - not quite - but it is in "Lovecraft Country" (New England). And it is the home of a Manor House on a hill, where the Braithwhite family lives, leaders of a sect of a secret cult called The Order of the Ancient Dawn.
I won't tell you any more about the plot, because experiencing it for yourself will be fun as hell. But it includes intrigue, theft, espionage, double-dealing, murder, magic, devil dolls, ghosts, potions, curses, body-switching, and man-eating aliens. And still, even among all this weirdness and horror, we never lose sight of the novel's real focus: the real-life horror of being black in America. So not only is it a rollicking read - a brilliant, thrilling, enthralling, bone-chilling story - it's also a very important and powerful book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. |
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| Saturday, February 14, 2015 05:12 PM |
| Book Report - The Shadow Police series |
 by Fëanor |
So far, Paul Cornell's Shadow Police series consists of two books - London Falling and Severed Streets - but I'm hoping there are many more to come because I love these stories, the characters, and the world they inhabit.
The series is an interesting combination of genres: police procedural and supernatural horror/fantasy. Although, Cornell takes his time introducing the supernatural aspects in the first book, so for the first few chapters you might think you're reading a standard cop novel. London Falling follows the story of Detective Inspector Quill; his boss, detective superintendent Lofthouse; his two undercover agents, Costain and Sefton; and analyst Ross, as they attempt to take down drug lord Rob Toshack. There are only hints that something deeper and stranger is going on - until they get Toshack into an interrogation room. Then everything blows up, rather literally. Faced with something inexplicable, the odd little team of investigators soldiers on, following a lead that takes them to a creepy house owned by a strange old woman who just might be a serial killer. And that's when things get even weirder. Quill, Sefton, Costain, and Ross all acquire (via a process that remains mysterious) a gift or a curse called the Sight, a brand new sense that makes them aware of the horrifying supernatural forces that lie underneath the London they thought they knew, and that plunges them into a world and a war that they are completely unprepared for.
The first book sees our team facing off against a powerful and ancient witch. In the second they must deal with the return of Jack the Ripper. Behind the individual evils they face in each case, they discover a larger evil, quietly seizing control of London and its forces and bending them to his will: a mysterious, silent, smiling man who may be the devil himself.
Besides the thrilling, suspenseful stories, the books are filled with fascinating characters, relationships, and magical concepts. Each of the members of the team has their own strengths, complexities, and ways of dealing with the insanity. Quill stubbornly continues to apply standard police techniques and procedure even to the most awful horrors of hell (his uncover of the true identity of the Ripper is a great moment that throws a big wrench into all the crazy conspiracy theories). Ross turns everything into graphs and spreadsheets and charts. Costain was the bad boy cop who got a little too deep into his undercover role as a gangster. When he comes to believe he's destined for hell, he tries to clean up his act, but it's just another role he's playing, another mask he's trying to wear. (In the second book a bit of a thing develops between the character who analyzes everything to death and the character who's nothing but layers of artifice, leading to one of the more complex relationships I've ever read.) Sefton, meanwhile, throws himself completely into the world of the Sight, trying to become the team's expert in, for lack of a better word, magic.
The way magic and the power of London works, however, is something that has to be learned slowly and carefully, with a lot of really dangerous trial and error. The team are beginners in this world and they blunder into it like blindfolded babies toddling into a minefield. We get to learn along with them, and it's a fascinating ride. Cornell has created a complex world with many mysteries, and even by the end of the second book there's the strong feeling that we've only scratched the surface. It's not a frustrating feeling, though - it's thrilling knowing there's so much more to come.
Cornell also has a very dark, very odd sense of humor that often caught me by surprise. I didn't expect so much of the first book to be about football, or for our heroes to be texted by Hell, and then call it back later and tell it off. Some of the ghosts and ghouls they see so regularly that they wave at them on their way to work. When a real world celebrity made an appearance in the second book, I expected it to just be an amusing cameo, but then that character became an integral part of the story.
The books are also often deeply disturbing. There are images and events in here that will stick with you for a long time. It's great stuff.
These are real page turners, too. I burned my way through the second book too fast, in fact. I don't how long the wait will be for the third, but however long it ends up being, I'll stick it out. I want back in that world. |
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| Friday, February 13, 2015 05:42 AM |
| (Last updated on Friday, February 13, 2015 05:45 AM) | | Book Report - The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black |
 by Fëanor |
E. B. Hudspeth's The Resurrectionist is a horror novel in an unusual format. It's split into two parts. The first is a biography of Dr. Spencer Black, who lived during the late 19th and early 20th century. The second is a document supposedly written and illustrated by Black, with editorial commentary throughout. The whole is written as non-fiction, as if Black was a real person. The first section even includes quotes from various primary sources - letters, manuscripts, newspaper articles, etc.
Black starts out a promising and brilliant surgeon, but his choice of specialty - deformities and mutations - is frowned upon as a waste of his skills, and his studies, the theories he develops, and the wild rage with which he defends them make him less and less popular with the establishment until he is finally forced out completely and decides to take his theories and work on the road as a traveling circus or freak show. His controversial theory is that mutations and deformities in modern people and animals are actually nature's way of harkening back to other, ancestral forms of life. So, for instance, a person born without arms is just a failed attempt at a throwback to a time when people had wings instead of arms. He is utterly convinced of the truth of his theory, and so determined to find proof for it that he begins, horribly, to manufacture his own hideous hybrid creatures.
There's the suggestion that perhaps Black isn't entirely mistaken, or at least that he's been able to create some actual living, functioning hybrids, but the narrator remains unconvinced, and there isn't enough in the text to do more than vaguely creep out the reader.
I've always enjoyed the technique of creating story through letters and journal entries. It's a great way to build drama and horror. The most effective part of Bram Stoker's Dracula is the series of journal entries from the doomed ship. This book fails to take full advantage of the trope, however. There are definitely effective sequences, such as the description of the scene that occurs when Black brings his family out to his shed to show off the hideous progress he's made in his work. And I enjoy the matter-of-fact tone and the effective parody of a real biography. But Black's theories are never convincing or particularly frightening. The book comes close to achieving something really atmospheric and disturbing but doesn't quite make it.
Part of the problem might be the entirely disbelieving narrator. H.P. Lovecraft was fond of using educated, skeptical narrators, and having them only come to believe in the horror long after the reader was already convinced, thus making the horror that much more convincing, and the narrator's fall that much more dramatic. The problem here is that the narrator is never convinced, which just makes it harder for us to believe or to be really scared.
The second part of the book is a series of detailed illustrations of the anatomy of various mythological beasts (which, according to Black, are not mythological at all, but entirely real), accompanied by explanations of the beasts' behavior. The art is quite good, the drawings scientific looking, but if you're hoping for some continuation here of the story in the first part of the book, or some more deliciously creepy horror, you'll be disappointed. It's an oddly dull way to finish out the book. Scattering these drawings throughout the biographical portion of the book might have worked better. As it is, any sense of building horror that was created in the first part of the book just sort of peters out here.
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. As it is, it's still rather entertaining, with some wonderful ideas and some effective sequences. It's just disappointing to feel like it could have been so much more. |
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| Monday, January 5, 2015 11:40 AM |
| Book Report - Perdido Street Station |
| by Fëanor |
I said in my review of The City and the City that I'd be seeking out more of China Miéville's work, and I finally got around to doing so. I'd heard a lot about Perdido Street Station, so it seemed the obvious next step.
After I got a dozen or so chapters in and realized there were still some 40 chapters left, I nearly gave up on the book. This is because the novel's world and its characters are aggressively unpleasant. Miéville seems to be deliberately attempting to turn the reader away. He opens with a first-person description of his setting (the sprawling city-state of New Crobuzon on the planet Bas-Lag) from the perspective of someone who thinks of it as a filthy, awful hell - and it's hard to disagree! Miéville follows this up by switching over to third-person (the main perspective of the novel; only the short introductions to each major section are in first-person) and giving us a pretty disgusting introduction to our main character. We meet rogue scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin (I know) lying naked and fat in bed and picking bugs off himself. His girlfriend, Lin, is an artist who has a normal human body, but a head that is a giant beetle. She's a member of one of a number of alien species in the book, the khepri. She and Isaac eat a gross breakfast and have gross sex and Isaac reiterates his despicable desire to keep their relationship secret and just ugh.
But! I'm here to tell you, it does get better, though it takes quite a while. Part of the problem is that the story doesn't take on its shape and the plot doesn't start driving forward until quite a ways into the book. The perspective just wanders about and you meet various people and learn various odd details about New Crobuzon. Miéville's world is big and complicated, with steampunk technology and various schools of magic, or thaumaturgy, and he takes his time introducing you to its ins and outs. Some of the ideas he throws in (like the Torque) apparently just because he thinks they're cool, as they don't end up having anything to do with the story.
Eventually Isaac meets Yagharek who, besides being the first-person narrator from the beginning of the novel, is a wingless birdman from a race called the garuda. He wants his flight back, and commissions Isaac to give it to him. Isaac takes on the job, and eventually realizes he can tie it in with the subject he's most passionate about: crisis energy. It's Isaac's research into flight, and his not entirely legal requisition of various flying animals and insects as subjects for study, that finally kicks off the real action of the book. And it wasn't really until then - when the first Slake-Moth finally appeared - that I became really interested in the book. (And even then I didn't feel fully committed to finishing it until the scene where we meet the Ambassador of Hell. Because that scene is amazing.)
Miéville's thematic preoccupations are well stated by one of his own characters, the monstrous crime lord Mr. Motley. Motley, besides being a brutal drug dealer, is also an art lover, and commissions a sculpture from Lin. His interest, he tells her, is in nexus; the meeting points of opposites; borders and liminal spaces. He himself is such a thing: a hideous collection of eyes and mouths and appendages, as if a pile of creatures had been smashed together into one. And the great train station that sits at the center of New Crobuzon, and that gives the book its title, is another such thing: the meeting place of all the rail lines in the city, the way to all ways, the beating heart of everything. Many of our main characters also embody the meeting of opposites - living paradoxes. A flying man who cannot fly, banished by his own people. A beetle that is a woman, who rejects her own culture and people, who uses traditional art styles to create non-traditional works. Later we meet Constructed Intelligence, dead tools that somehow think and live - the undead, the living non-living. The Slake-Moths are the meeting of beauty and terror, of dream and waking, monsters that eat dreams and shit nightmares. And then there's crisis energy itself, sustained by paradox, by almost-not-being, by truths that are false.
Miéville had similar preoccupations in The City and the City, but here he delves into them in more detail. As it happens, I'm fascinated by the same themes, and Perdido Street Station is packed full of other interesting ideas and weird, fascinating creations. Miéville builds a big, bold, hideous world which, though ugly, ends up being pretty hard to look away from. It helps that the story he tells, once he finally gets around to telling it, is a thrilling one, and that his main characters grow and change and become more sympathetic as we get to know them better.
It looks like this is only the first book set on the planet of Bas-Lag, so I'll have to seek out the others eventually. I'm not done with Miéville yet. |
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| Thursday, December 18, 2014 03:39 PM |
| Book Report - The Underland Chronicles |
| by Fëanor |
Most folks know Suzanne Collins from the Hunger Games books, but she also wrote a series of YA fantasy novels called The Underland Chronicles. I finished "reading" it (I actually listened to the audio books) quite a while ago, but I never got around to writing about it until now.
The main character of the books is a poor kid named Gregor whose father has mysteriously disappeared. One day, he and his baby sister tumble down a hole into a strange land under the Earth inhabited not only by a race of pale humans who haven't seen the sun in generations, but also by multiple species of gigantic, intelligent animals - rats, spiders, cockroaches, bats, ants. At first Gregor is focused on getting himself and his sister home as quickly as possible, but he quickly discovers that will not be as easy as he hopes. The Underland, it turns out, is a dangerous place with some pretty complex politics. The various creatures that live there are extremely dangerous and live in an almost constant state of war with each other. Plus, the founder of the human community in the Underland was a visionary who wrote a whole room full of prophecies, and Gregor seems to fit the characteristics of a person called The Warrior who looms large in said prophecies. And finally - and most tantalizing of all for Gregor - this place might just be where his father disappeared to.
A nobody from nowhere stumbling into a magic land and finding out he's a famous warrior out of prophecy might sound pretty darn familiar. But Collins doesn't stick to the well-trodden paths. The humans present themselves as the good guys and the rats as the bad guys, but Gregor quickly realizes things are more complicated than that, and spends most of the series wrestling with those complexities. When he's offered the sword of legend, he refuses it. When he's sent off to vanquish the most evil rat of all, he finds he cannot do it. He falls in love with the beautiful princess, but realizes he can't stay with her. And those prophecies that seem to guide everyone's lives in the Underland may just be a bunch of nonsense.
The Underland Chronicles gets into some pretty deep territory - loss, fear of death, the horrors of war. It even includes an allegory of the Holocaust. But at the heart of it all is the realization that all living things are worthy of respect; that there's almost always a solution that does not involve violence if we work hard enough to find it; and that it's possible that maybe, some day, our children or our children's children will live in a world without war.
On one level, The Underland Chronicles are a fun and engaging fantasy adventure, but on a deeper level, they are a tough, unflinching examination of the worst and the best of humanity; a reminder that life is hard, that nothing is black and white, but there are things worth hanging around for. It's quite lovely. |
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| Monday, September 29, 2014 10:33 AM |
| (Last updated on Monday, September 29, 2014 10:36 AM) | | Book Report - Horrorstör |
| by Fëanor |
If you took a quick glance at the cover of Grady Hendrix's new horror novel, you could easily mistake it for the latest Ikea catalog. It's about the same size, the text is written in the same font, and the photo is of the same kind of clean room and simple, stylish, modern furniture you always see in the Swedish superstore, labeled with the same foreign names and reasonable prices. But if you look a bit closer, you'll see a mouthless, pupiless face staring out from the picture frame on the wall, and dark silhouettes of hands pressed against the nearby frames, as if something is trying to get out. The back cover is the same picture, but now obviously transformed into a horrific, decaying torture prison, cracked and rotting, infested with rats, hung with hooks and chains, blood-stained hands reaching out at you.
Setting a horror novel in an Ikea knock-off and designing the book to look like an Ikea catalog (complete with blue and white maps, seductive product descriptions, and fake ads full of brain-numbingly meaningless slogans and buzzwords) is a brilliant premise. There is, after all, something inherently creepy about the sameness of each Ikea; about Ikea's windowless, labyrinthine interior, with its confusing shortcuts and secret passageways, in which we've all gotten briefly lost; about its faux rooms in which no one lives, but which have been carefully furnished with cardboard televisions and false doors all the same. Hendrix takes full advantage of our familiarity and unease with this setting, executing skillfully on his premise.
The book opens by introducing us simultaneously to our protagonist, the perpetually down-on-her-luck, one-step-away-from-bankruptcy-and-disaster Amy, and her hated workplace, Orsk, which promises "a better life for the everyone." Amy has few hopes or dreams, except to be transferred away from this particular Orsk and its irritating deputy store manager, Basil, a passionate Orsk zealot who has had it in for her from her first day on the job. All she has to do is make it through one more shift, and she'll be out. But strange things are happening at this Orsk. For some reason, it's just not meeting its sales projections. And merchandise keeps turning up broken in the morning, or covered in mysterious, stinking waste. Corporate is on its way down to investigate, but before they get there, Basil is determined to have the mystery cleared up and everything ship-shape. He singles out Amy and her beloved-by-all coworker Ruth Anne for a special mission: stay in the store overnight with him to catch the intruder that's causing the trouble, and hopefully remove him/her with a minimum of fuss. It's the last thing Amy wants to do, but she desperately needs Basil's approval for her transfer to go through successfully, not to mention the double overtime he's offering to make her rent. And after all, it's just one night, right?
Right?
Horrorstör is a quick, fun, creepy read that is made doubly entertaining by the brilliant design by Andie Reid and wonderful illustrations by Michael Rogalski. It's alternately funny, clever, and deeply disturbing. I particularly like the little touches and references - that the passageway that customers are meant to follow through the store is called the Bright and Shining Path; that the store sells bunk beds called Magog, a name associated with the Biblical apocalypse (I wonder how many of the furniture names are similar allusions that I didn't recognize); that the fact that Orsk's most popular closet is maddeningly difficult to assemble and constantly falls apart ends up being an important plot point. In one surreal sequence, Amy and a friend find themselves traveling in circles in the store's eerily warped geography, unable to trust their senses to find their way, and ultimately forced to rely instead on the view through a video camera's lens.
But I won't give away any more of the book's surprises. You should check this out for yourself. The ending gives the suggestion that a sequel might be in the offing, and I hope that's the case. I'd love to visit Planet Baby!
(By the way, here's the book trailer for Horrorstör, if you're into that kind of thing.) |
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| Wednesday, June 11, 2014 10:34 AM |
| Book Report - William Shakespeare's The Jedi Doth Return |
| by Fëanor |
Author Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars trilogy comes to a close with this third entry, The Jedi Doth Return. It is perhaps too close an adaptation of the film, since I found it, like the original, to be the least interesting episode in the trilogy. But it's still entertaining and still worth a read for fans of either Star Wars or Shakespeare.
The book takes its time getting going, but some early highlights include the Max Rebo Band's song about how good it is to be a gangster, and the Rancor Keeper's moving lament after the violent death of his beast at the hands of Luke Skywalker.
Doescher had more difficult linguistic puzzles to solve in this book, but I'm less pleased with the way he handled them this time. The first problem is all the Huttese dialog spoken in Jabba's Palace. His solution is to simply transcribe it exactly as it's spoken in the film with no changes, which was a bit disappointing to me. I was also disappointed by his solution to the problem of the Ewok dialog. The idea of making every piece of Ewok speech a small poem is a good one, but composing the poems by mixing the dialog from the film with an embarrassing and childish pidgin English is... not.
There are plenty of moments of humor and brilliance, however. I enjoy Luke's awkward conversation with Obi-Wan's spirit on Dagobah, and Obi-Wan's aside about midi-chlorians. And as usual there are some great scenes featuring Imperial grunts, such as the boastful speech by a Biker Scout which ends in him crashing into a tree, and the hilarious conversation between two guards, one of whom worries about the possibility of the Rebels doing... exactly what they are doing.
Also as in the previous volumes, there are some really interesting soliloquies and asides that explore the inner life of the characters in more detail than the films ever do, and cleverly nudge at the fourth wall that separates us from the play. In the films, Luke and Leia never really get a chance to talk much about the fact that they are brother and sister, and how uncomfortable that is given their previous dalliances with romance. Also, Princess Leia never really deals (aloud, at least) with the fact that Darth Vader is her father. Here those gaps are filled in in dramatic fashion. Leia also takes the time to muse on the courage and fortitude of her Ewok allies, and the strange fate that has drawn them together. The Emperor gives us a manifesto on the primal importance of power. Wedge contemplates his part in all the major moments of the Rebellion's fight, and points out that he's been an observer of these great events, just as we have been, even while he's also acted in them. R2-D2 helps us visualize the battle of the Rebels and Ewoks against the Imperial troops on Endor by narrating it for us. And Darth Vader has a number of speeches that reveal the conflict and turmoil inside him, conflict that centers around and emanates from his discoveries of the existence of his son and, later, his daughter.
Some other highlights include the Shakespearean redesign of Admiral Ackbar's famous line ("Fie, 'tis a trap!") and Lando of Calrissian's rousing and very Shakespearean speech to rally the troops before they fly into the bowels of the second Death Star, in which he gives prominence to the theme of redemption that runs through all the various storylines of the play:
And finally, the third result of this
Great Death Star's fall shall be the rising up
Of all whose pasts conceal some awful guilt,
Some aspect of their lives that brings regret.
...
In this battle we fight not
To merely terminate an enemy—
Full many of us rebels seek the bliss,
The balm and healing of redemption's touch.
So let it be, my noble comrades all:
Fight now for the Rebellion, fight for all
Who dwell within our galaxy, and fight
Most ardently, indeed, for your own souls.
Thus shall we raise those who by Empire's might
Have died, and forth from their celestial graves
Shall they ascend and with a rebel's voice
Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war!
Of course the central moment of redemption in the story is Vader's, and his transformation back into Anakin Skywalker, Luke's true father. As in the film, that moment is the most moving of the play, and Doescher plays up the drama and humanity of it without making it melodramatic.
Even though this entry is not my favorite in the series, the trilogy as a whole has been highly entertaining, and I would love to see it actually performed live on a stage. Even though this is clearly the end of this particular series of books, our Fool and narrator R2-D2 gives us some hope of a continuation in his final soliloquy, wherein he hints at some future story yet to be told. I have to admit I'm not quite sure what he's referring to. It doesn't sound like he's talking about the Prequels, as one might expect, as he mentions the Rebels and the Empire, neither of which existed during the timeline of those films. Maybe a Shakespearean adaptation of the forthcoming Episode VII? Or of one or more of the books set in the Extended Universe? I'm not sure, but I'll keep my eyes open for it! |
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Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
