Captain’s Log — 8/17/24

Talking 'bout books, movies, and I only have one Old Man Yells at Cloud moment.

Today has been a good day. My sister, brother-in-law, and favorite niece Dunnie came to visit. We had a leisurely brunch on the little patio at DK Diner. It was muggy but not unpleasant for late summer. Afterwards, bro-in-law and I took in a showing of ALIEN: ROMULUS at the Drexel.

My plans for the rest of the day are to write this thing and start Anna Marie Tendler’s book, MEN HAVE CALLED HER CRAZY. I suspect it will also be a good evening.

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Stephen Harrison, my old comrade from the SLATE Future Tense mines, published his first novel this week: THE EDITORS. I had the chance to read it a few months back and it’s a lot of fun, especially if, like me, you have an affinity for techno-thrillers and spend at least half an hour a day looking shit up on Wikipedia.

I also contributed a blurb for it. The snippet that made it in is at the bottom page:

Clearly, the best and most important was saved for last.

Here’s the full blurb:

Wikipedia is a resource I use daily to look up whatever random question has just hurtled into my brain. Yet rarely do I give any thought to the people behind the curtain, those who spend untold hours contributing to and updating the site’s vast knowledge base, let alone the politicking and court intrigue that must surely go on behind the scenes. If this also sounds like you, then you’re in luck — Stephen Harrison and his rousing novel THE EDITORS are here for us.

Set during the onset of the Covid pandemic, THE EDITORS introduces us to a core cast of dedicated “Infopedia” editors scattered across the globe — plus Morgan, an intrepid journalist trying her best. Morgan and her new allies quickly become locked in a race against time to thwart bad actors from infecting their beloved online encyclopedia with distorted and bogus information about the mysterious and deadly virus taking root. Harrison offers multiple captivating perspectives but no easy answers. File this one under: compelling, thoughtful, and fun.

I’d like to read another novel by Stephen, so help me out and go buy a copy of THE EDITORS (Amazon / Bookshop).

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Reading

A new novel by Cherie Priest is always something to celebrate. To wit: THE DROWNING HOUSE, a supernatural-horror mystery featuring a mysterious “housewreck” that washes up on the seashore of a small island in the PNW, ghosts, old magicks, and a graphic designer and realtor in way over their heads. I enjoyed it mightily.

Priest is probably best known for her steampunk novel BONESHAKER, but my favorite books of hers have a similar feel to THE DROWNING HOUSE. They typically involve someone trying to reawaken old gods and have a chewy, gothic horror flavor running through them. Two of them — MAPLECROFT, about Lizzie Borden fending off the same malevolent entities that consumed her parents, and FATHOM, a confluence of witches, old gods, and religious cults in southern Florida — are on my reread list.

Watching

As mentioned earlier: ALIEN: ROMULUS. While nothing groundbreaking, it’s exactly what one would hope for from an ALIEN film, and it is executed very well. Definitely the third best in the franchise (after the first two, of course).

My only complaint is that, like with a lot of Hollywood films, the dialogue is incredibly hard to understand. Much of that unintelligibility is due to a trend in modern sound mixing choices (thank you Christopher Nolan), a trend that needs to be stabbed to death, its head cut off, and interred in the freshly poured parking lot for the new Chick-fil-A, post-haste. But in ALIEN: ROMULUS’s case, a lot of the main cast have Cockney accents, which, to be clear, is totally fine — my difficulty is that the combined effect is like watching a Marvel movie where Iron Man and Cap are making quips and shouting orders with mouths full of marbles.

I love seeing movies in the theater, but when I do: man, am I often wistful for my beloved subtitles.

Listening

It’s predominantly been a Chappell Roan summer, with some episodes of HARDCORE HISTORY interspersed on longer drives. It’s been fucking great.