→ April 10, 2010
→ By

Firefly Rain.

Richard Dansky has been a reader of mine since not long after I joined ESPN and started the dish, even interviewing me about two years ago on his own web site. He’s one of the premier writers for videogames, writing for Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy Splinter Cell games while also dabbling in horror and fantasy; you can read more about his work on his official site. In addition to a shared love of baseball, Richard and I have a reasonable overlap in our reading interests, including hard-boiled detective novels, so he sent me a copy of his first novel, recently out in paperback, Firefly Rain.

The novel centers on Jacob Logan, the prodigal son of North Carolina parents who returns home after their deaths to deal with the mundane details around the family house, now his, in the tiny town of Maryfield. The community is populated with your standard assortment of local characters, although Dansky keeps their number manageable and all are well drawn, especially Carl, the cantankerous neighbor who’s been keeping an eye on the house for Jacob for several years, and Reverend Trotter, the laid-back clergyman who dispenses common-sense advice without florid phrasing or excessive sermonizing.

Not long after Jacob arrives, however, weird things begin happening – his car disappears, items move around the house on their own, windows won’t close until they’re damn good and ready, and the phenomenon of fireflies refusing to fly on to the Logan property. When the weirdness escalates to a blackout, an attack by an insane dog, and worse, Jacob summons help in the form of a friend from Boston to try and help him piece together whether this is a series of crimes or a full-on haunting.

Richard described the novel to me up front as a ghost story, but I think that undersells the book. A ghost story, to me, revolves around the ghosts – you read to be scared or spooked or maybe even freaked – whereas Firefly Rain has a good story that may or may not involve ghosts. I’d compare it to Agatha Christie’s novels – yes, her Poirot and Miss Marple books were mysteries, but they’re compelling stories that you can read and enjoy on their own merits without trying to solve the puzzle (which is good, since I never get those right anyway). And Richard’s book does have an element of mystery to it, with a few clues left lying around if you care to try to decipher it, although I preferred in this case to let the story carry me along.

The best aspect of the novel is that Jacob makes few bad choices – the way he loses his cell phone might be the only one you could call “truly dumb” – and as the narrator Jacob dissects his own thinking, you can buy into some of his questionable moves, rather than seeing them as plot conveniences to keep the story moving. Even the lost cell phone ended up of marginal importance at best. I did find some of the folksier dialogue a little dissonant, but I’ve spent no time in rural North or South Carolina and can’t credibly discuss its authenticity or lack thereof. I also thought the cover text didn’t sell the book that well – it concentrates on the ghost aspect instead of the story aspect, which explores a pretty basic theme about the responsibilities of a child to his parents, both in life and after their deaths. I’ll cheerfully admit to bias here, as I’ve always enjoyed chatting with Richard, but I wouldn’t recommend a book I didn’t like just because I knew the author (in fact, I’d just pretend I’d never read it), and Firefly Rain is worth your time.

Next up: I’ve finished Michael Davis’ marvelous Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street and am now working through an early collection of Dame Christie’s stories, published under the title Poirot Investigates, after which I’ve got Richard Russo’s Mohawk lined up.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 15, 2009
→ By

Stupid Love.

I’ve mentioned this before, but country singer Mindy Smith is actually a former classmate of mine – from second grade on through high school. I’d lost touch with her after we graduated but we reconnected a year or two ago when I found about her music career and contacted her manager, who sent me a copy of her newest album, Stupid Love, which came out earlier this week.

This isn’t ordinarily my style of music, but I did really enjoy the album beyond just being supportive of an old friend. The album runs about half-and-half between upbeat, folky-alternative songs and mournful ballads, with the former making more of an impression after my first listen than the latter, which required a few more spins for me. The first single, “Highs and Lows,” and the opening track, “What Went Wrong,” both would fit on an alternative rock station’s playlist; “Highs and Lows” sounds a bit like a lost David Gray track, while “What Went Wrong” is more power-pop along the lines of Jellyfish or the Primitives with a folk influence. The album’s closer, “Take a Holiday,” will probably pop up on half a dozen soundtracks over the next few years – it’s a closing-credits kind of song with a shuffling beat and a repeated lyrical gimmick of rhetorical questions asked by someone who’s hit a rut and can’t quite get out. The ballads are more of a mixed bag; the duet “True Love of Mine” has (non-cheesy) wedding song written all over it (and lo and behold, her duet partner Daniel Tashian sounds a lot like … David Gray!), and “Love Lost” does a great job of showcasing Smith’s sharp, smoky voice, but “Disappointed” feels underproduced and harsh and the ship metaphor in “Telescope” seemed a bit hackneyed to me.

The best part about this album, at least at the moment, is that you can download the whole thing for $3.99 at amazon.com. I doubt that’s the permanent price, but the discount has Stupid Love #2 on amazon’s mp3 album charts. I’m not sure how much of my audience is into this kind of music – anything from straight country to Sarah McLachlan – but I’ll offer a cheerfully biased recommendation that you give Stupid Love a shot.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , ,
→ August 7, 2009
→ By

The Magicians.

First blog post from the Area Code games is up on the Draft Blog. Second one is filed and should appear on Friday morning. I’ll also be on the telecast of the Under Armour Game on ESPNU on Saturday, making a few short appearances from the stands or the dugout if we can work out the logistics.

Friend of the dish Lev Grossman came to my attention because of his work (with Richard Lacayo) on the TIME 100, and when I asked them to do a Q&A for the dish about that ranking, Lev asked if I’d be interested in reading his upcoming book, The Magicians, which comes out in hardcover on Tuesday. I knocked off the book on my flight to California on Tuesday – all but 20 pages, to be exact, although I finished the book before I got to my rental car – and absolutely recommend it. (And no, I wouldn’t recommend it solely because Lev’s a Friend of the dish. It’s legitimately awesome.)

The Magicians will inevitably be called a grown-up rejoinder to Harry Potter, and Grossman does borrow from Rowling’s works while alluding to other giants of the fantasy genre, from Narnia to Middle Earth to Faerûn. The central character, Quentin, is a young, very bright, heartsick loner in present-day Brooklyn who dreams of a world like that in his favorite series of books, about a magical world called Fillory which is accessed through a grandfather clock in the house of a British family. Quentin is a skilled magician in the real-world sense of card tricks and disappearing nickels, but eventually discovers that the magic of spells and incantations is real and enrolls at a college for magicians that bears a few resemblances to Hogwarts. Unlike the innocent teenagers of Harry Potter’s world, however, Quentin and his classmates drink, smoke, swear, and screw, although I think they do more drinking than the other three things combined, and eventually embark on a sort of kill-the-big-foozle quest that defies their (and the reader’s) expectations.

Grossman manages to straddle the line between straight storycraft and outright parody brilliantly. One can read The Magicians as a retelling of the Potter myth with older kids, greater tragedies, and more complex interactions between characters, as well as several cliche-mocking twists in the final hundred-odd pages that skewer not just Rowling’s work but the standard plot devices of fantasy and science fiction. (There’s also a great shot across Rowling’s bow in defense of American magic.) Yet never does the book descend to the superficial, sneering tone that pure parody often has, as The Magicians‘ story stands strongly on its own, built around a complex, brooding central character, and an accelerating plot that grows from school-aged dramas involving crushes and difficult exams to life-and-death struggles in another world. He adds depth to two of the main characters with glimpses into their dysfunctional family lives, and ties up just about every loose plot strand or seemingly incongruous event as the novel speeds to a too-early finish – and the final two pages seemed word-perfect to me both as I read them and as I replayed them for hours after reading.

I do have minor quibbles with the book – there’s a “why do bad things happen to good people” discussion that seemed cursory and labored, and the way Quentin discovers a friend of his is gay was a little out of place and didn’t end up tying into anything else in the book. There is also one major event near the novel’s end that was like a slug to the chest to read, although I could see it as a counterpoint to Rowling, who largely skipped that sort of tragedy in Deathly Hallows (justifiably, given her audience). Grossman is also a big fan of the sentence fragment – “But still.” appeared at least twice – although I think that will only annoy the sliver of you who are as hardcore about grammar as I am.

Where The Magicians succeeds most is in Grossman’s creation of an immersive world within his book, and then a world within that world for his characters. Fforde, Rowling, and Murakami all have that ability to draw me into the pages of a book so that finishing the work is akin to waking from a pleasant dream. Grossman has achieved that same feat here.

Next up: Why not follow this with another book from the TIME 100? Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,