Twilight Eyes

Twilight Eyes is a better than average Dean Koontz novel, but still not a very good book. I was sort intrigued at the outset--the writing is a little more solid than most Koontz books and initially he did a fair job of allowing us to see of the interior doubts of the main character. At first the narrator, referred to as Slim, does not seem reliable, which is very unusual for Koontz, as he usually deals only in characters that are purely good or purely evil (one of the reasons why his books are often so boring). Slim believes he can see "goblins" which take the form of people and walk among us. He has killed several people he believes are goblins, including braining his uncle with an ax. Of course, the reader is left with some doubt about Slim's ability to actually see goblins, as opposed to simply being crazy.

Well, Koontz doesn't let that go on for long. He establishes that goblins are real and Slim can see them, taking away the dramatic tension he started to build. The first half of the novel takes place mostly against the backdrop of a travelling carnival (the second carnival book I've read this year, after Water for Elephants). The first section is the strongest section; part two is slightly longer than part one, but feels like it was tacked on as an afterthought. Here we find out the stupid and uninteresting backstory of how the goblins came into being and we follow Slim and his girlfriend in their war against the goblins. Both Slim and his girlfriend have some kind psychic abilities, another crutch Koontz regularly uses to help his characters solve problems when he writes himself into a corner.

After early high hopes, this book is another disappointment from Koontz. Plagued by bad characterization, worse dialogue, and flaky plot. Not recommended for anyone.

Anarchism in practice

Lately I've been really fascinated by the idea that a lack of affordable oil is going to radically transform our economy, and by extension, the way our communities are organized, in the next decade or so. You can google "peak oil" to read a bunch of apocalyptic doomsday prophets, and I should say that I don't have any technical knowledge at all to guess at how many resources are actually left in the planet, but it doesn't take much imagination to think of how catastrophic the consequences of continually rises fuel prices can be. The war in Iraq may be only the opening salvo in a coming series of wars over resources; I think it is likely that oil rich countries are going to more and more start treating oil as leverage for obtaining their geopolitical goals, rather than simply an exportable material. And there will be very serious consequences in our individual lives--people are going to have to get small. By which I mean, communities are not going to be able to rely to stuff being shipped around nearly to the extent they now do. Much more food will have to be grown locally and travel will be severely restricted. The kind of enormous metropolitan cities that have become the norm over the last 150 years are going to be less tenable, faced with both the difficulty of providing enough resources for that number of people living in one place, and many of them also enduring the worst effects of the now inevitable global climate change, due to their proximity to coastlines--some of them will simply be underwater.

All of this is just a long way of saying that very shortly we are going to be facing some of the most serious challenges humanity has ever encountered. And there are going to have to be a lot of decisions about how we live in this new world--there may be some strong tendencies to step backward into autocratic rule, but there will also be opportunity to try to establish egalitarian and truly democratic societies. Which makes me think maybe now is the time to start brushing up on anarchist theory and practice. It may be possible that some anarchist principles could be useful in attempting to refashion our communities to meet the requirements that are going to be imposed in oil poor world, and work toward a society were individuals have meaningful autonomy to the extent possible and the means of production and major economic decisions are managed by some democratic process.

So I was pleased to read this book at this time. Anarchism has long been a sort of hobby-horse of mine, and I've enjoyed reading the texts of major anarchist thinkers. Beyond Chomsky's essay in American Power, I don't have much familiarity with anarchism as practiced in Spain duirng the short-lived revolution. This book gives some insight into how those societies tried to function, though there's not a lot of meat on the bones. And of course all the contributers, and the editor, are sympathizers and it's hard to say to what degree they permit themselves to be critical of the movement.

Maybe my whole radical impending societal change theory is pure bunk. It wouldn't be the first time I was wrong about something ("After the travesty of the 2000 elections, the American people will not stand for the continued existence of an undemocratic institution like the Electoral College"). Still, it's both frightening and exciting to think of the potential for creation of a better world than the one dominated by global capitalism. Though no revolutionaries are going to overthrow the government anytime soon (I hope, anyway), it is becoming increasingly clear that the the present state of affairs is unsustainable--certainly in the long term, but maybe also in the relatively short term.

Dave Barry

I read my first Dave Barry column back when I was probaby 13 or 14. I still remember that it contained some bit about how snakes were learning to move from toilet to toilet, which I thought was absolutely hilarious. As a middle and high schooler, I read quite a few of his books and generally enjoyed most of them a lot. Now that I'm somewhat older, I don't think Barry is quite the genius I used to, but I still find him surprising enough that I don't mind picking up one of his books once in a while. Dave Barry's Greatest Hits is from the late eighties, so the political jokes don't have too much resonance these days, but it's a fine time anyway. Actually, I've often wondered about Barry's politics--obviously as a non-political humorist, he's obligated to make jokes about figures in both political parties, but it's hard to determine if he's really got a dog in the fight. I sort of suspect he may be a closet Republican. Anyway, don't expect anything too deep (aside from a strangely moving column about the death of his father) and you won't be disappointed.

Acceptable Trash

As far as Koontz novels are concerned, The Servants of Twilight is not bad at all. It's about a bunch of religious fanatics that try to kill a kid they believe is the Antichrist. It has a decent amount of tension and is somewhat more ambiguous than most of his work. It doesn't escape Koontz's usual undercooked characterization and often stilted dialogue, but I wasn't totally sure how it was going to end after the first hundred pages, so that's a pretty big deal. Grading this against Koontz's past effort, it is better than most.

The alien and familiar world of Kerouac

This is the third book by Kerouac I have read, and without fail, they all have an unusual raw emotional gravity about them. This book is short burst of linguistic invention--supposedly written in only three days, and it reads as such. It weighs in at a little over 100 pages, but is full of love, disgust, drunkenness, excitment, and the peculiar next-day regret hangover. It does not match either On the Road or The Town and the City in terms of overall narrative power, but is a strangely compelling book after you adjust to Kerouac's fevered prose style. The Subterraneans is sometimes difficult to read--Kerouac can go for pages without paragraph or punctuation--but does become more manageable as the book nears conclusion.

There is some weakness in the portrayal of the supporting characters, and the novel is much more interested in painting vivid word-pictures that give the reader a sort of strobe-light impression of events than it is in any kind of serious character study. But if you are a Keraouc fan, you know what you are getting into here. And while I did find myself on the fence about whether I actually enjoyed the book as I worked through it, the ending was strong enough to pull over into the plus column. As a final note, it is humorous to take a look at the Kerouac reviews on Amazon and notice how the reviewers tend to take on Kerouac's writing style to a degree as they review his books--an amusing feature which I am afraid that I have succumbed to as well.

Lesser Known Dostoevsky

Who knew how many minor works Fyodor Dostoevsky has produced? I recently finished The Village of Stepanchikovo, also sometimes translated as The Friend of the Family. This is a short attempt at a comic novel that meets with middling success. The plot revolves around a rural household in thrall to a domineering pseudo-intellectual named Foma Fomich. Foma, though basically just a hanger-on, manipulates the entire family, including the uncle that is supposed to be in charge, into revering and bowing down to him. The plot turns on the arrival of a newphew to the estate who challenges Foma's supremacy.

Stepanchikovo is not a difficult read and I thought it was enjoyable, though not something that would be considered a classic. Dostoevsky is still finding his footing here, and though the novel is occasionally funny, it did not keep me in stitches by any means. Only for the dedicated Dostoevsky completist.

I review another bad novel

In this case, Darkfall by Dean Koontz. I had no idea what this book was about when I started it, and declined to read the synopsis so I could have the "joy" of nosing the plot out for myself. Well, I'll spoil it for you: it's about a voodoo practitioner that opens the gates of hell a bit and lets out some weird stuff that terrorizes the family of a policeman that is trying to catch said voodoo practitioner for his connection to some murders. Now, this sounds like exactly that kind of thing that I might get some guilty pleasure out of, but as is so often the case, Koontz is such a bad writer and inept at characterization and dialogue that I couldn't squeeze any enjoyment whatsoever out of the experience. The characterization of the bad guy in is awesomely stupid. That Koontz remains a bestselling author through decades of poor quality work is astounding.