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All Aboard! The Girl on the Train and Crime Fiction on the Coach
No crimes take place aboard a train in Paula Hawkins’ smash bestseller The Girl on the Train, unless you consider excessive drinking a crime (oddly enough, in many states in America, it would be, but I’ve got no clue about England, where the novel takes place). Even so, the locomotive plays a central role in the […]
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A Forgotten Masterpiece: Terry Davis’s “Vision Quest”
I recently finished for the second time Terry Davis’s short but stunning coming-of-age novel Vision Quest, originally published in 1979 and thankfully still in print today. Simple, elegant, laced with sly humor and unpretentious wisdom, I can think of few novels quite like it. Which is a bit of a surprise, really. If it were published […]
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The Man in the High Castle and Alternate Histories
In the 20th (and now the 21st) century, alternate history stories were a big hit. If considered a genre in its own right, there is actually a good deal of diversity within the field. But the most popular subsection of this peculiar fiction is surely the What If Germany Won World War II scenario. This […]
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The Joy of a Book Club for 2
Two years ago, after my mom read The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe, like many inspired Americans, we set out to form a tiny book club of two. We established only two rules: we would alternate book selections, and if one of us truly hated a book, we could say so […]
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Star Wars, Jurassic World and Borrowed Nostalgia
This has been, more than any year in recent memory, the year of Nostalgia. Yes, with a capital N. Given the enormous success Nostalgia has had this year, it deserves a little added respect. Steven Spielberg cashed in the Nostalgia chip this year, producing the record-breaking Jurassic World in a move that at first looked […]
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The Underrated Masterpiece: Stephen King’s “From a Buick 8”
Not that all of the horrors went unglimpsed. In the end, they glimpsed plenty. Any writer with a career as long and varied as Stephen King’s is going to have at least a couple novels that get overlooked. Some deservedly so. Others, however, get lost in the shuffle and never get a chance to shine. […]
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Murder by the Book: The Many Covers of Agatha Christie
I’ve been an Agatha Christie fan since I was a young boy. One of the primary reasons I was drawn to Christie’s novels was for the fantastic cover art, which easily snags the eye and fires up the imagination. In recent years, as part of our Book Club of Two, my mom and I have been […]
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Kaplow! Landing Punches in American Writing
Watching the movie Creed–the latest installment in the Rocky franchise–turned out better than I anticipated. Sylvester Stallone’s ongoing exploration of Philadelphia’s favorite son is a pretty uneven affair, going rather downhill after the first installment. Still, it has its fair share of excellent moments, and Creed is easily the best of the bunch since the 1976 Best Picture winner. Seeing […]
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The Forgotten Movies of Michael Crichton
Years after his death from cancer, Michael Crichton remains a force in American film-making. Jurassic World, inspired by Crichton’s novel, broke every opening-weekend box office record. HBO is releasing a TV series remake of Crichton’s classic Westworld, starring Ed Harris, Anthony Hopkins and Evan Rachel Wood. Crichton’s influence has been felt too in shows like House and Grey’s Anatomy, both […]
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Ian Fleming, Hugh Hefner, and the Spectre of American Manhood
In light of the newest James Bond installment, Spectre, hitting theaters last week (just in time for my birthday) I’ve been thinking a lot on Ian Fleming, the author of 14 Bond novels (though not, as it turns out, the author of the most 007 adventures—that distinction belongs to John Gardner, who wrote 16). It’s […]
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The Black Cat Moan 