Something shocking my students told me. A review of Vile Affections

Here's what my students told me that was shocking. Several of them said they skip long paragraphs, skip descriptions, and go straight to the dialogue. And these were creative writing students! We writers work long and hard to craft the descriptions and some readers skip over it. Talk about a horror story!

Last summer I watched a webinar where four fantasy authors talked about how they write fight scenes. One said she was a ballet dancer and choreographed her fight scenes. Another said she watched Youtube fight scenes and copied them. One said she never wrote fight scenes because her readers said they skipped them. What! So she said she just wrote, "They fought," and was done with it.

I recently read Vile Affections, thanks to Netgalley. It has pages and pages with no white space. The language was artistic and the stories were about (duh) vile and dangerous relationships, but I fear some readers would skip the flood of descriptions. You're not that kind of reader though, right. Right? If so, the review of Vile Affections follows.  Lots of vampires in it.  Nice cover, too. The book, not the review.

 Vile Affections has some of the most beautiful language I've read in a long time. Whether objects or scenery is vile or lovely, the descriptions are detailed and vivid.

When I first opened the book and saw that there were pages and pages of prose with no break, no white space, I thought reading it might be a slog. I was wrong though.  The stories, even with the large amount of description, were interesting and reasonably quick to read. 

Many of the stories had the same type of subject: dreams, a person telling a story to another, the fear of drowning, water, water, and more water in most, but they didn't seem to repeat themselves.

If you're a reader who skips long paragraphs this might not be for you. If you love gorgeous language you'll find much to enjoy in Vile Affections.

Do You Believe in Magic? Can David Copperfield Fly? (yes) Can I? (probably not) David Copperfield's History of Magic

 It would be great fun to be a magician, except they sometimes get killed during the show. Other jobs are lethal and not near as much fun as magic. If you want to conjure up some rabbits out of your hat, or a burning cigarette out of your mouth (ouch) David Copperfield's History of Magic lets you stand on the shoulders of giants, figuratively. It's hard to stand on the shoulders of dead magicians, unless your form of magic is necromancy. 

Written in an easy-to-follow, friendly way, David Copperfield's History of Magic feels like Copperfield is walking you through his museum while he tells stories about the history of magic.

Interesting info on the magician innovators and stars throughout the decades, including the engineering and technology they created to work their magic. Lots of colorful photos of old costumes, posters, books on magic, and magician's props including a guillotine, circular saw, and Houdini's death-defying water box. Copperfield includes two famous female magicians--always glad when historians remember the ladies.

Copperfield doesn't give any secrets away, but he does tell about the classic books that the magicians wrote to teach magic and slight-of-hand tricks. If a reader really really wanted to learn magic and card tricks, Copperfield sends them in the right direction. The book includes extensive notes on research.

Thanks to Netgalley for allowing me to read and review an eARC of this nonfiction book.

The Story of My Writing Life

 

Review: Something More Than Night Movies! Monsters! Noir! More!

  

I enjoyed so many things about this book. I'm a big fan of old movies, very old movies, so I enjoyed the references to the actors, directors, producers, and films of the 1930's. Of course, the plot is ludicrous but the humor and the history make it all fun. Well, yeah, there's violence and gore. That's the point of most horror. If the writer makes it clever, that's extra points in my book.


If the reader is not  a  buff of black and white movies,  he or  she might not  be  familiar with  lots of the characters.  pursue some oldies this Halloween,  Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy  (Karloff's Mummy) and scare yourself back  to the Thirties.  Okay, they're not that scary, but you'll  know what's going on in the book. It will be good for you, as your mother (or mummy) might say.


The afterword is interesting, too. It gives some history of the writer, Raymond Chandler, the actor Boris Karloff,  and  old Hollywood.  Monsters, movies, and lots of electricity zapped through people. What more could you ask for?

Fill up your spare, empty aquarium that sits there doing nothing. The drought is coming! Revue of Dry

 I read a lot of horror and most of them don't disturb me. Dry gave me nightmares. The weird thing was that the nightmares weren't about lack of water or fires, but about traffic jams. Shows you what gives me the willies.

Monsters don't scare me. Things that can really happen, and the crazy things people do when disaster happens, are what frighten me. Though Dry was published three years ago, we've seen way too much of this recently. The panicked buying leaving store shelves bare. The horrible wild fires in California. The empty lakes and rivers. Fortunately, the plucky teens and a few compassionate older folks balance out the adults who act like jerks or become downright criminal.

Dry is a scary story but not a depressing book. Well, maybe a little depressing. It certainly is exciting and full of action. Now excuse me while I go fill up my entire pickup truck with bottled water.