"The Heroic Honk Mahfah!" Retitled!!!!! Internet Agog!!!!!

Howdy, y'all.

Well, as promised, I've started blogging over at the new site.  My first post just went up.  It's a comic column, and since I've retired my "Honk Mahfah" persona, that means the former title for my comics-roundup posts needed a retitling.

So, "The Heroic Honk Mahfah!" shall now and forever more be known as "Bryant Has Issues."  This is simultaneously lame AND accurate, but it makes me chuckles, and frankly, it's my own chuckles I'm in this gig for, so mission accomplished.

The post can be found here: http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/2012/07/bryant-has-issues-12.html

Do us a favor and stop by and have a look?  And while you're there, I'd be more than happy to field any comments you might have about the new blog's title, design, and so forth.  I feel pretty good about it, but if you'd like to slap me around a bit and call me various insulting names, I can take the punishment.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you over at the new place soon.  We've got carpet and indoor plumbing and everything!

There Are Other Blogs Than These

It's a good news/bad news type of day here at Ramblings Of A Honk Mahfah.

 

First, the bad news: I am bringing this blog to an end.

 

The good news...?  Well, I'm going to give you several moments to recover your composure, marked by a series of photos illustrating how my cats took the news.

Duncan Idaho wept silently

Action Jackson fainted

When he regained consciousness, Action Jackson consoled Duncan Idaho

Action Jackson tried bargaining, which didn't work

Action Jackson tried threatening, which also didn't work

Scarlett Johansson tried pleading

Juanita Sheridan staged an Occupy PC protest; (heh-heh, I use my laptop for blogging, dumbass!)

Don King only wanted to know what was for dinner

Boy, cats is stuipid.

 

The good news is this: I'm simply relocating to a new blog, under a new title.  It's called The Truth Inside The Lie.  Sounds like a conspiracy-theory site, but it's actually a reference to one of King's better bits of wisdom, which hails from the dedication page in It.  Paraphrased a bit, it reads "Fiction is the truth inside the lie."  That quotation has stuck with me for over twenty years now, and when I was mentally casting around for a title for the new version of my blog, that came to mind quickly.

 

Feel free to go check it out.  There's nothing there yet, but eventually, I'm going to import some of my posts from this blog (and from at least one other) over there, and in most respects it will be the same type thing as what I'm doing now.

 

So, you may be asking, why the change?

 

Other Worlds Than These: A Review of "Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished" (Revised and Expanded Edition) [by Rocky Wood]

I may have mentioned this elsewhere at some point, but it bears repeating: I am a big fan of the book Stephen King: The Art of Darkness.  I bought that biography/compendium/critical analysis (written by Douglas E. Winter) in paperback in, oh, 1990 or so, when my then-newfound Kingmania had reached its apex.  And I tore through that sucker just as greedily as I had torn through most of the books written by King himself.

There are a lot of captivating ideas in that book, but here are two sentences that really captivated me:

"During his sophomore year" [of college] "he completed another novel, Sword in the Darkness.  Heavily indebted to the 'Harrison High' novels of sometime horror novelist John Farris" [...] "this lengthy tale of a race riot at an urban high school was rejected an even dozen times on Publishers' Row."

WHA...?!?

You mean (I thought incredulously) there is a Stephen King novel that NEVER EVEN GOT PUBLISHED?!?  HOW CAN THAT BE?!?

Then, a few pages later, Winter drops the bombshell that there was a second such unpublished novel, Blaze.  It didn't take a whole hell of a lot to blow my sixteen-year-old mind, and this double-barrel blast of info certainly did the trick.

Not too much longer after that, I read George Beahm's excellent book The Stephen King Companion, and holy fuckin' shit, THAT book had plot summaries for both Blaze and Sword in the Darkness.  PLUS info about yet another unpublished novel, The Aftermath!

Well, ever since those long-gone days of yesteryear, I have been greatly intrigued by the idea that somewhere out there, in boxes in a library, there existed whole novels by Stephen King that practically nobody had ever read.  I have always felt a curious mixture of elation and frustration over that fact: frustration for the obvious reason that I would probably never get to read those books, and elation because ... well, it's hard to put the reason for the elation into words.  The closest I can come to it is to compare it to the idea that there will be certain birthday presents we will almost certainly never get to unwrap; yeah, it sucks because we'll never know what's inside, but on the other hand, it means there will always be birthday presents with our name on them.

Most of you probably think that's a crazy way of thinking, but I'd bet at least a few of you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyways, let's fast forward to 1998, when Stephen J. Spignesi released an entire book devoted to the subject of obscure King works.  Titled The Lost Work of Stephen King, this tome detailed all sort of King works that many fans had never heard of, including not merely those famously unpublished novels, but also published works that were not widely available, but which could be tracked down, if one were inclined to devote the resources to do so.  It was a great resource for King fans who wanted to dig a little bit deeper than the bibliography listed inside the front jackets of some of the books.

Then, in 2005, along came Rocky Wood's Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished.  It immediately became the definitive work on the subject, and has remained so ever since.

You may be wondering why I felt it necessary to deliver such a lengthy lead-in.  I'll tell you why: because, as someone who has now been a Stephen King fan -- and a devoted one, at that -- for over half of his life, a book like this one is an absolute treasure trove.  I feel sometimes as though blogging about my love for King's work (and for some of the side-roads it has taken me down) is a way of time-traveling and having conversations with myself: it's the next-best-thing to having 2012 Bryant and 1990 Bryant in a room together, chatting.  The two of us are having that conversation right now; we have it every time I pick up a book like Uncollected, Unpublished, and let me tell you: 1990 Bryant thinks Rocky Wood's book is one of the best motherfucking things he has ever seen.

2012 Bryant thinks it's pretty fucking nifty, too.  Let him tell you why.

Canon

Let's talk canon.

Properly speaking, when it comes to literature or the arts, "canon" refers to a body of individual works which have been verified, or commonly accepted, as the works of a specific author. In other words, Stephen King's canon consists of all works -- written and otherwise -- which are known to be the direct product of his own craft, either solo or in collaboration with someone else.

If you're talking canon within certain subsets of popular culture, the word "canon" often takes on different meanings, especially when applied to a multimedia storytelling franchise that lacks a singular author.  Example: Star Trek.  Star Trek exists primarily as a group of television series and feature films, but there have also been a near-avalanche of original novels, comic books, semi-official fan films, and the like over the decades.  In that case, determining what is and isn't canon means deciding, essentially, which stories count and which do not.

Those are treacherous waters, and if you don't believe me, all you need to do is buy a ticket to a sci-fi convention, find a room where people are talking about Star Trek or Doctor Who or superhero comics, and then start asking random people what they don't count as canon.  Before long, you'll be into nerd-dom so deep that you may never find your way out again.  So on second thought, maybe you should just take my word for it and skip the cons.  Unless you enjoy that type of thing, in which case, maybe I'll see you there.

 You've probably already figured out for yourself the fact that with the work of a single author, the canon issue becomes vastly less complicated than it is with a franchise property.  However, don't be fooled: there are still grey areas, and there are still questions to be answered before figuring out what does and what does not belong when it comes to the canon of Stephen King.

Worst to Best: Stephen King Movies

I love making worst-to-best lists.  Sometimes I think that I ought to find new things to be interested in, just so I could make a list devoted to deciding what was the crappiest example of it.  Then I think that would be silly, and don't do it, but I reserve the right to change my mind at a moment's notice.  So if you someday see my name on a blog somewhere listing off the entire history of grape soda, from the worst example to the best, don't be surprised.

stolen from http://sodas.findthebest.com/l/84/Grapico

For the record, I am not insinuating that Grapico is the worst grape soda.  What foolishness THAT would be.

Let's not worry about grape soda right now, though.  Let's worry about the episode of Mad Men I just watched: Roger took acid, Peggy gave a stranger a handjob in a movie theatre, and Don thought Megan had been killed.  It was awesome.  Let's worry about Stephen King movies.

Whoa, what just happened there...?  I feel like I was talking and got interrupted somehow.

Let's move past it and find out what my pick for Worst Stephen King Movie ever is.

It's...

What About the Movie, Mahfah?: "Ghost Story" [1981]

Having recently reviewed Peter Straub's Ghost Story, it seems only fair that I do what I typically do, which is have a look at the movie version.  And I'm nothing if not fair.  Please do not take this as an indication that I would be happy to receive a jury summons, though; I ain't got time for that sort of thing.

No, instead (apparently), I need that oh-so-valuable time for thoroughly mediocre movies, such as The Amazing Spider-Man (which I finished watching about an hour ago and am still bitter about; maybe you'll hear more about that in the next issue of "The Heroic Honk Mahfah" later this week [that, friends, is what we call a "guarantease"]).

You can add Ghost Story to that list, too, because while I probably -- probably, mind you -- wouldn't go so far as to say it's a bad movie, the absolute best I would be willing to say is that it is mediocre.

A Brief Review: "Ghost Story" [by Peter Straub]

"In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature than he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant." -- Ghost Story, p. 198

At the heart of Ghost Story is the simple (yet, ultimately, horrifying) idea that the world around us may be a very different one from the world we think we live in.  We may not know what we think we know; we may not be who we think we are; we may not love what we think we love; we may not fear what we think we fear.

If that strikes you as a pretentious way to begin a review ... well, my lawyer seems to be advising me to plead the fifth on that topic, so I can't confirm your suspicions.  However, I can tell you that if the above paragraph frustrates and annoys you in any way, it's entirely possible that the novel we're here to discuss -- Peter Straub's Ghost Story -- might well have the same effect.  I'd hesitate to call it "pretentious," because that word implies a sham of some sort, pretension toward meaning that is not actually there; so, let's instead say that Ghost Story is a novel that is very deliberately fraught with meaning, and that it isn't shy about letting you know it, or about challenging you to rise to its level.  (Assuming you are not already there; you may well be, but as for this reviewer, who spends more time than he ought playing Plants Vs. Zombies and eating bbq potato chips, he tends to need to take the elevator up a few levels when dealing with material of this type.)

A Brief Review: "Baal" [by Robert R. McCammon]

When I discovered Stephen King in the summer of 1990, I quickly became obsessed by the man's work.  I eagerly bought and read all of his books I could get my hands on.  When I'd done so, I then re-read them all, and next began looking around for something similar.  I have very fond memories of spending a lot of time in a used bookstore called The Book Rack, which is where I got most of my King books.  So when it came time to try to find similar books, The Book Rack was my first stop.  Looking around those shelves, I found Peter Straub (whose work already interested me, thanks to The Talisman), and to Dean Koontz, and to Clive Barker, amongst others.

However, of all the other writers who I turned to as methadone in the lack of new heroin from Stephen King himself, I enjoyed Robert R. McCammon the most.

Some of this, undoubtedly, had to do with the fact that (as I learned) he was an Alabama native who had gone to school at the University of Alabama, in my hometown of Tuscaloosa.  That was only part of it, though; I also felt then that McCammon was simply the most imaginative of the authors I adopted while looking to supplement my King fixation.

I bought all of McCammon's books, and read all of them, from the epic Swan Song to the only slightly less epic The Wolf's Hour to the superb Boy's Life.  McCammon published a dozen novels plus a collection of short stories between 1978 and 1992, but after Gone South -- published in '92, the year I graduated from high school and began attending the same college McCammon attended -- he stopped publishing for a full decade.

During that decade, I sorta just mentally lost track of his works.  My devotion to King never wavered in all that time, but I stopped reading Straub and Barker simply because other interests crowded them out; as for Koontz and some of the others, I lost all interest and got rid of my collections of their books.

I kept all of my McCammon books, though, and in and of itself, that is meaningful; I went through a lot of phases in terms of what books I collected, and at various points between then and now I have found it necessary to undertake great purges, divesting myself of all of my Star Trek novels, or all of my Star Wars novels, or all of my (mostly never-read) classics.  A serious Heinlein phase came and went, and so forth.

But I never got rid of a single one of my Robert McCammon books.  Not one of 'em.  They got packed away in boxes, and never made it onto shelves, and never got re-read ... but they survived each move where other books did not; I never gave even the slightest thought to dumping my McCammon.  It was almost as if I knew I'd be returning to them someday.

And here someday is.

Since I'm already revisiting the works of Peter Straub, I thought it might be acceptable to revisit some of those other authors whose work I was led to by King.  So you will see reviews of Clive Barker pop up here, and reviews of the novels of Tabitha King (which I've always wanted to read but never have) ... and reviews of McCammon's work as well.  The main reason is simply because I feel like rereading them, and since my discovery of his work is inextricably linked -- in my mind, if nowhere else -- with my discovery of Stephen King, it seems like fair game for this blog.

Let's get started with a look at McCammon's debut novel, 1978's Baal.

A Brief Review: "If You Could See Me Now" [by Peter Straub]

The last time I reviewed a Peter Straub novel, it was Julia, his first foray into the horror genre (and also, essentially, the beginning of his career).  Prior to that, Straub had written two dramas, Marriages and Under Venus, the latter of which was not actually published until 1984 but was written over a decade earlier.  I reviewed those novels as well, and my assessments ran something like this: Marriages was simply not very good; Under Venus, unpublished though it may have been at the time, is a decent book, a definite improvement over Marriages; and Julia represented a vast leap in quality over Under Venus.

In 1977, Straub followed up the successful Julia with If You Could See Me Now, another Gothic horror story, and the writer took yet another significant leap in talent.  Have you ever watched one of those time-lapse videos of a house being constructed?  You begin with an empty field or something (Marriages), and then suddenly there is a flurry of activity, and you've got a wooden frame (Under Venus).  Next thing you know, workers moving at the speed of light have put up walls and a roof and windows and given the whole thing a coat of paint, and bam!, you've got a house (Julia).  In this hypothetical scenario, the video doesn't stop: instead, you realize that the workers were only building a guest house, and the next thing you know, there's a mansion standingbehind it.

At the risk of straining my metaphor, If You Could See Me Now isn't quite a mansion -- the mansion was his next novel, Ghost Story -- but it's certainly a quantum leap from Julia.  For a bit of context, 1977 was the year Stephen King was experiencing his own quantum leap forward with The Shining, and while If You Could See Me Now is maybe not in the same league with that masterpiece, I can definitely say that I loved it.

That Road Must Go Somewhere: A Review of "Heart-Shaped Box"

I've been campaigning -- proselytizing, even -- for the works of Joe Hill ever since I started reading them last year.  Nobody'll ever get elected to anything with ME as their campaign manager, but since I'm an unpaid intern, I just do what I can.

Well, I lost control of that metaphor pretty quickly, so let's knock the bullshit off and get down to business.

This is a great novel.  Not a surprise; everything I've read by Hill has been great, and this novel -- his first -- did not disappoint.