Category: Uncategorized Page 19 of 21

(Reviewer’s note: this novella is one of the Finalists for a Bram Stoker this year.)

The Shallow End of the Pool

By Adam-Troy Castro

Adam Troy-Castro’s novella The Shallow End of the Pool is a slim volume (56 pages) published by Creeping Hemlock Press, a small publishing house whose anthology Corpse Blossoms was a Bram Stoker finalist in 2005. Husband and wife R.J. and Julia Sevin of Gretna, Louisiana were frustrated by the shortage of “generous-paying, atmospheric and bizarre short story anthologies” so they founded Creeping Hemlock Press.

The book is blurbed by Tom Piccirilli, (who, coincidentally, was one of the contributors to Corpse Blossoms.) Castro has been at this for a while, with nominations for a Hugo, a Nebula and a Stoker award, and it shows. His writing is compelling as he sketches the tale of a bitter divorced couple attempting to settle their long-simmering marital score, once and for all, using their now-grown offspring. The ex wife is referred to as “My Mom the Bitch” in the very first sentence, and that is where things went downhill, for me.

Don’t get me wrong: the story is well written.  I salute Adam Troy-Castro for the talent he obviously possesses, but this small volume had two problems:

1)      The plot is implausible because it is inconsistent with feminine human nature and

2)   This short novella needed to be proofread much more expertly before it was released to the public.

Let me recap the plot and explain my reservations, while expressing admiration for the writer’s descriptive prowess, which, for me, were undercut by the number of errors that should have been caught by the Creeping Hemlock Press proofreaders.

A couple who has had a nasty divorce bring their now teen-aged 16-year-old children, Ethan and Jenny, raised separately (the son by the mother; the daughter by the father) to an abandoned swimming pool in the desert, trap them there, and set them on each other like pit bulls, in a fight to the death to settle the bitterness between them, once and for all.

This is where my reservations with the logic of the piece reside. A man wrote it; the protagonist is female.  Girls can be cruel savages (I once had my nose broken during a fight between two 8^th grade girls), but the end of this novella (which I’m not going to reveal) flies in the face of the female’s nurturing instinct. It’s a man’s take on it, but Jenny’s actions do not seem representative (to me) of the average female.

Defenders will argue, therefore, that she is far from “average.” She’s not average, but she’s not inhuman, and women who are normal are about nurturing. So argue that she’s not “normal,” and I’ll give you that one, but I’m not budging on my next point, because it’s true, even if you don’t want to hear it.

The writing is accurately plugged by Blu Gillian  (Hellnotes) as “vivid.” I agree. As Blu put it, it will ‘bruise you, bloody you, and burn you like a hot Vegas day” (a nicely-turned phrase). But genre fiction is often scorned by the establishment and when there are errors of grammar/sentence structure/syntax that could and should have been fixed by those responsible, before publication, we empower the literati to put down horror/genre fiction and horror and genre writers, in general. It’s a never-ending battle. As Rodney Dangerfield said, “I don’t get no respect,” and careless, sloppy errors like the ones here are the reason why. There’s no reason that the story couldn’t have been just as ‘vivid” and yet have the careless errors fixed before the book went public. (If you’re reading this, R.J. and Julia, I’d like to offer my services in that area.)

Genre fiction is action-packed, interesting, worthy in its own right. It’s a vital force.  It’s pop culture. But it should still abide by the rules of conventional composition.  There shouldn’t be face-off(s) at the O.K. Corral like those that have occurred at awards ceremonies in recent years between genre writers and the serious establishment types, who persist in looking down their collective noses at genre stars.  As someone who values and has taught English composition at several levels for a very long time, while watching writing standards slowly sink in the west, I’m having some difficulty embracing the first page of a novella that starts out: “My Mom the Bitch lived in a desert fortress,” when Mom should be capitalized only if it stands in place of the woman’s name and never if a possessive pronoun (“my”) precedes it. In fact, the capital “B” on Bitch is not correct, if you want to get technical (and I realize that most of you do not).

Embrace all genres, but embrace the rules of standard educated English when you’re writing, no matter what you’re writing. Please don’t send hate mail, carping about the pickiness of these comments. First, walk a mile (or more) in my shoes, trying for decades to teach these rules to indifferent students who then go forth to write incorrectly.

But they aren’t professional writers, while Adam-Troy Castro is, and a good one, too, except for the dereliction to duty on the part of the trained eyes of those of us who try to pass the torch of proper usage, (even though the hand-off has been pretty shaky in recent years, and getting worse with every year that passes, it seems.) I exult in a book that is both this descriptive, has a great plot,  AND uses proper grammar correctly.

So call me old-fashioned and get it over with, but I’m not dropping that torch on the floor while it’s still lit. It might burn down the whole damned English language house, and I’ve done my best to keep that torch burning brightly at several colleges and elsewhere. And so have my mother, sister, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, going back uninterruptedly for 82 years (and, no, I don’t mean me, personally, but all of us, collectively).

So, what other things were “wrong” that cost this otherwise-vibrant book my vote for a Stoker? There were many errors, but here are 7 that leaped off the page, for starters:

Number One (p. 7) “between my brother and I” (It’s “between my brother and me”, object form, object of the preposition “between”).

Number Two (Page 12):  The sentence is missing  “the” before the word “section” in this part of the sentence (4^th line): “…I used a pair of wire cutters to peel a three-sided flap away from THE section over the steps….” (capitals, boldfacing, and underlining are mine, to indicate the MIA article).

Number Three (page 16, line 11): “He made the mistake of asking me to name the first thing I’d want for myself when WE were done,…” (capitals, boldfacing and italics mine, to indicate another MIA word, a pronoun, this time).

Number Four (page 5):  “I hadn’t ever worn the getup against it a similarly-hobbled opponent tasked to kill me, …” (Why is “it” in there?)

Number Five (page 29…and there were 8 other instances I’m not mentioning between page 16 and page 29):  “When I woke, (introductory dependent clause here, so it needs a comma) the sun had arrived, illuminating a sky that the wire above us sectioned into little diamonds.” [I would even check Webster’s to see if it should be “when I awakened,” but that’s just me.]

In that one sentence, the existence of vivid description (good) is hurt by the distraction of the missing grammar basics (bad).

Number Six (page 36):   (line 14) – “…presented to the sun that would soon be attacking both of us will all its considerable force.” (boldface and underlining mine, to demonstrate that nobody read this thing as carefully as I did before it was published, or they would have recognized that this word should be “with.”) These are careless errors which, if they came from unknown writers or freshman composition students, would probably cause the short story or novel to be ripped a new one, handed off to others to correct, or…(if a student in a high school or college class)…would lower the paper’s grade.

Number Seven (page 47, 3 errors in one 60-word paragraph, the 3^{rd line} on the page):  “Ethan because he knew what was happening and myself because a tidal wave of white agony had flowed down my back at the moment of impact.” (This error occurs again in the last line on page 54).  I’m not even mentioning the need to put a comma after “Ethan.” Okay. I lied. I mentioned it, and I’d have one after “happening,” too. But that’s just me…the old fuddy-duddy, the Dutch girl with her finger in the hole in the dike.

Okay. Enough. Hopefully, I’ve made my point (with fragments) and I won’t be attacked for trying (in vain, it seems today) to defend the established conventions of the English language.

Yes, there were great writers of the Hemingway/Fitzgerald caliber who had to have help, occasionally, from expert editors.

So, where were they on this one?

YouTube – Uncle Jay Explains: Year-end! 12-22-08

Be sure to check out Uncle Jay’s musical recap of the year just past.

Dark Whispers

Hey, Kids…check out the write-up for the novel “Out of Time” on the HWA (Horror Writers’ Association) official blog.

There was more to the write-up when I gave it to the Dark Whisperer poster, mainly about Michael McCarty’s Bram Stoker nominations and previous awards, but he did not post the entire article as I provided it. However, he was kind enough to post it very quickly, which is good during the holiday book buying season.
(Thanks, Vince!)

One of Santa’s elves stopped by our house the other night to drop off a toy for our geriatric cat, Kitty Kelley. She proceeded to spend the next two days camped out in the “cat house.”

Our larger (and younger) cat, Lucy, is too fat to fit inside, it seems, so Kitty Kelley has a place that is all her own. She would be fatter, too, if Lucy didn’t eat all her food.

Merry Christmas, cats, from Andy, the Christmas Elf!

Sunny Arizona (temperatures predicted in the 70’s until Thanksgiving) beckoned this morning, as we set off from Gallup to Flagstaff and then to Sedona on our tour of the Southwest, Route 66 and other interesting places that are hopefully warmer than the Midwest at this point in time. As established in a previous dispatch, we can now scratch Roswell, NM, from the list of interesting places, despite the fact that we drove hours out of our way to visit the alien museum there.

Most of the places mentioned on our Route 66 map didn’t have an address next to it that you could plug into our operating GPS system. Meteor City looked like we’d be driving quite a way out of our way to see a hole in the ground. (Can’t compare with the World’s Largest Ball of Twine!) I had a friend (Linda Henderson Hearn) who had a meteor in her backyard for years, so I was pretty blasé about driving out of our way to see this crater.

Therefore, we stuck to I40 until Flagstaff and then I selected one (of four) locations to try to GPS in, within Flagstaff, as a “tourist attraction.” The one I selected was known as the Museum Club. It wasn’t that I was that set on seeing the Museum Club; it was just that none of the other Route 66 era motels that were listed came up on the GPS, so the Museum Club it was, for lunch and a wonderful time. The place was great! I highly recommend it. I could easily have lost several hours in the dark fun place.

The bartender, Jane Bliss, is a treasure. She even was given a plaque recently, commemorating her 10 years behind the bar, which is a very dark, very picturesque old woody Route 66 place that has a lot of history surrounding it, ghosts, AND off-track betting!

Jane was only too happy to show me the tree that exists inside the club on the dance floor, which has quite a history. It seems that, in the old days, an African American was shot, hanged and burned from this very tree. (The bullet holes are still visible.) There it sits, right smack in the middle of the dance floor. No wonder the place is supposed to be haunted as hell! I went to the tree and whispered, “Barack Obama is President now!” I’d like to think that this poor allegedly innocent victim smiled somewhere in heaven.

I was told numerous stories about the various strange goings-on inside the Museum Club and strange they were! (You’ll have to wait for Volume II of “Ghostly Tales of Route 66” to hear them, though.) The girl placing pari-mutuel bets for the patrons told me some that were especially convincing. (Stay tuned and hang on to that idea).

From the Museum Club patrons, we learned that the haunted places to visit in Flagstaff were Monte Vista Hotel (this place is REALLY haunted!); lots of stories— the Weatherford Hotel, and the Riordan Mansion, reputedly the oldest house in Flagstaff. As we stopped by the Visitors’ Information Bureau, located inside the old train station, I learned from Justin Connors, the Native American visitors’ information representative, that the old train station itself is perhaps haunted by a brakeman who died there in an accident.

From Jane Bliss at the Museum Club, we were advised to take the scenic route (i.e. Oak Creek Canyon, the 89A exit off Highway 17) to Sedona, rather than the route the GPS would map for us. It was a twisting, turning drive through canyons lined with signs that urge you to “watch out for falling rocks” (some of the canyons actually have netting on the sides to prevent drivers from being hit by these falling rocks) and, also, some very futuristic homes that made me wonder if Frank Lloyd Wright designed them during his Arizona phase.

We eventually reached our destination: Sedona, Arizona, a lovely tourist town carved from the glories of the Grand Canyon, where our room tonight has a fireplace and is right off the pool. Tomorrow night, we dine at L’Auberge de Sedona, purportedly one of the cities’ nicer resorts, but one that was full up for the 2 nights we will be here.

A local Flagstaff newspaper “The Lumberjack,” put out by students at Northern Arizona University, had a front-age story entitled “Nationwide Protest Denounces Anti-gay Legislation” by Ashley Barela and, right next to it, a story by Jill Hallquist entitled “Homeless Shelters Packed in Winter” that detailed how the Sunshine Rescue Mission in Flagstaff just celebrated 51 years of community service in September and serves breakfast at 6:30 a.m., lunch at noon and dinner at 7 p.m. to the cities’ less fortunate homeless folk.

Palmer Williams, one of the Sunshine Rescue Mission’s three full-time coordinators, who has worked there for 7 years, said, “It’s very hard to be homeless in Flagstaff, especially in the winter time.” Somehow, I think that sentiment would go double for a colder climate, like Chicago or Minneapolis. [Maybe triple if you’re in Fargo, North Dakota or International Falls, Minnesota.]

The evening newscast announced that unemployment in Arizona has hit 6.1% with 30,000 people out of work and that Mesa, in particular, is gearing up to make “significant reductions” in staff. Chris Brady, the City administrator, says that 389 positions will be gone within the next 18 months, with measures like reducing the number of responding officers to an emergency medical call from 4 to 2. The city of Buckeye (AZ) is also experiencing a budget crisis, and figures about the nation’s young people (ages 25 to 35) indicate that, between 1985 and 2005, their income dropped 30% while their levels of debt rose by 44%. On the radio as I type this, I hear reports that 1 out of every 2 businesses in the U.S. is going to announce lay-offs this year, coming from the cheesy-sounding voice of that guy who sings stuff like Yanni-style music (John Tesh) and used to do Entertainment Tonight with Mary Hart.

On the bright side, one Arizona resident who has a shot at upping her income significantly is Janet Napolitano, the current Governor of the state (the 25^th Governor, but only the 3^rd female in Arizona history). She has been offered a position in the Obama Administration as Secretary of Homeland Security.

The 13-story Quixote Press book “Ghostly Tales of Route 66” is now available by going to Barnes & Noble.com or calling 1-800-571-2665.

The stories are set along Route 66 between Chicago and California and were researched by the authors, Connie (Corcoran) Wilson and Bram Stoker Finalist Michael McCarty.

The books cost $10. If you order from Quixote, be prepared to add $3.50 for postage and handling.

During December and January, at the River Music Experience in Davenport (IA), authors will be available to sell and autograph the book(s), and you will avoid all shipping charges. (Consult RME schedules for times of the “live” concert series.)

The video below, courtesy of Stacey Wilson (Connie’s daughter) is posted on YouTube, where it has become a viral phenomenon.

You should also check out www.outoftimethenovel.com for the latest 80,000 word offering from the dynamic duo.