I’m a sucker for superheroes and as for the dark side of super-powers and origin tales — mmm, tasty. Who Can Save us Now? delivers a whole lot of awesome wrapped up in one book. Featuring 22 short stories from some very talented writers and some very cool illustrations, this book is a pleasure to read.

The short stories are so strong precisely because they are short stories. Let’s face it – any long contemplation of superheroes and superpowers soon begins to produce questions which threaten to wash the whole suspension of disbelief right away – how does Superman shave? Isn’t Batman being a big crybaby by not learning to deal with his parents’ murder? How come the Hulk’s pants never rip off? In the age of GPS and CCTV can we believe no one has figured out where Batman lives? Hmm … he always comes from the south end of the city …

Who Can Save Us Now hands us small delicious morsels, each unique and strange and I guarantee after each story you’ll be sitting there thinking about what ifs and making up your own superpowers.

The Stories

We meet the support group for superheroes with useless powers in David Yoo’s The Somewhat Super. A guy who never has to go to the toilet as a superpower!

Roe #5 by Richard Dooling is dark and unnerving in its glimpse of a superhero made by man (and probably something coming up once we get that genetic engineering business sorted).

Some stories, like The Rememberer by J. Robert Lennon and Bad Karma Girl Wins at Bingo by Kelly Braffet edge into familiar I-can-almost-guess-what-the-story-is-about-from-the-title-and-I’m-pretty-much-right territory. They’re still enjoyable but in the sense of the least-best in a superb collection.

The story I liked the least was The Meerkat by one of the editors – Owen King (son of horror novelist Stephen King). I think Owen King’s talent may lie in putting together story collections, rather than writing stories.

I loved Girl Reporter by Stephanie Harrell – a sort of alternate Superman and Lois Lane tale told from Lois’ viewpoint (clearly it is them, without a name ever being mentioned).

A sample:

One night I said to him, “I want to fuck in a sweaty boxing gym.”

There’s nothing like the smell of iron and decades of male sweat to make a gal wet for a pounding. So he took me to Silverado’s Gym after hours, in one of the warehouses down by the docks. We broke into the weight room. I stripped and lay myself out on the blue vinyl mat. I could see my reflection in the mirrored wall, amidst row of barbells and weight machines. I was pliant and powerful.

“All right, stud. Ditch the suit.”

He started to tug at his boots.

“First the cape,” I said.

How I got Who Can Save us Now? Brand-new Superheroes and their Amazing (short) stories: A Borders bookshop in Kuala Lumpur near the end of August 2008 (cost $62.90 ringitt). One of the shopping days on overseas holiday and I was dying for something to read. It leapt off the shelf, stomped through my mind and left me wishing the standard superheroes we know today were more nuanced.

The upcoming Watchmen movie (based on the graphic novel), Heroes, the movie Unbreakable, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Iron Man and this book all form part of the post-Superhero movement which is a reaction to the Superman-style stories of the past. No one accepts that Superman or superheroes are all amazing all the time.

Ok, I haven’t delved too deeply into the selection of stories in this book because they are short stories and discussing them is very close to telling them.  It is a great collection that is much deeper, richer, funnier, scarier and awesome than the title suggests.

Buy Who Can Save us Now from Amazon or hit up the library (although our libraries here rarely seem to get good short stories collections in).

I tried to find some cool Superheroes links but then came across some big stupid story about Stan Lee creating “the World’s first GAY superhero”.  Really, he’s about to make the World’s first gay superhero?

Happy reading,

Mat

put your ear to the mown grass and you will hear sobbing

–

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Four American college students (Eli, Ned, Timothy, Oliver) travel deep into the harsh desert of Arizona to undergo the trials presented by the Keepers of the Skulls. If they succeed then eternal life is theirs.

Of course, such a gift comes with a steep price: two of the four must be sacrificed … one by murder, one by suicide …

Ah … brilliant.

When Eli, a young Jewish scholar with a gift for languages, discovers an ancient manuscript (the Book of Skulls) hinting at the secret of everlasting life, he is soon enamoured with the idea of finding the immortals described within. He connects a strange compound in the Arizona desert with the cult and convinces three friends to set off on a road trip to find them.

Ned, the flaming homosexual, goes along because it is all a big joke. Timothy, the rich kid travels because he is interested in adventure – and what is more interesting than travelling with a Jew, a Queer and a Farm Boy? Oliver, the farm boy pulling himself up the cultural ladder travels because he wants to believe immortality can be his.

What starts as a bit of a joke, a harmless college student trip of drugs, fucking and hedonism on the way from New England to a desert compound in Arizona soon turns serious. The building adorned with skulls is actually there. The monks living within appear to be ageless. They will accept the four as a group willing to undergo the various trials on the path to immortality.

The manuscript was true.

Perhaps.

The monks within the compound give them a warning: they apply as a unit of four. Until the trial is complete, none may leave or the lives of the others will be forfeit.

Hey sure, that sounds ok. After all, it kind of a big joke anyway right?

The writing style

The text switches effortlessly between four first-person narratives, each chapter headed simply with the character’s name, picking up the thread of the story and pulling us along. The inner monologues spin out eloquent dissertations mixed with base thoughts about fucking and racial and social stereotypes.

Each boy represents on the surface one prime driving force. Eli is Jewish. Ned, a homosexual. Timothy, the rich kid. Oliver, the sporty jock farm boy. As we travel with them, this rather basic setup is transformed as we are privy to their inner thoughts.

Questions explored

Here is a familiar mythos: You can travel to a remote location to learn mysteries from monks carrying on the legacy of an ancient society. If you exercise in a certain way, eat in a certain way, meditate in a certain way you may enter into these hidden mysteries and be transformed.

This is why we have monks up in caves and other various holy men at a distance from society: distance is mystery. Lack of access is mystery. Quiet and non-explanation is mystery. All these mysteries must mean they have knowledge of a giant mystery!

The characters consider this point at various times: how do you know whether these monks are full of shit or not? To claim incredible knowledge is how religions seek to establish dominion and control over people unwilling to undertake the harsh rituals to attain this incredible knowledge.

The monks, fraters, reveal information throughout the long days and weeks of the trial. Hints of ancient societies and an eternal cult from the beginnings of time. Various mythologies are woven together and through each character we pick up pieces of the whole story.

If this sounds a little too deep …

Sophie Monk is not a monk

There is plenty of sex. PLENTY OF SEX. Hot girls out in the world and at the compound with the monks. Ok? So don’t worry.

A psychological mindfuck

Although this story appears on the surface to be about the pursuit of eternal life and the cost of such a pursuit, it is also a close examination of human behaviour within set rules. The monks have set the rules and Eli, Ned, Timothy and Oliver decide for a time to play within those rules. Sure, one of the rules is that one person must kill himself and another must be killed but that can be put out of mind for a while. In this way, the death of two of the boys is put into comparison with our own eventual deaths. If you were to think about it all the time then you’d be paralysed. If you don’t think about it at all then you risk death by not being aware of it.

If you read the book thinking about cult indoctrination then it is a simply terrifying piece of work. It starts off harmless – a few exercises, a bit of meditation – but then slowly slides away from playtime towards murder and death. The rituals soon become habits and then take on deeper meaning, although they deserve none. The people involved in the rituals believe they achieve something which then pulls them further along.

That’s a key word there: believe. Through the rituals and instruction, the four characters start to believe to various degrees that they really can attain eternal life and that the cost of two lives is correct. As their belief in the promise offered by the fraters increases so does the tension between them. One must be murdered. One must commit suicide. They are stuck in a compound and know that two of them will die.

On the front cover it proclaims itself as a thriller fantasy but I think that was only because Robert Silverberg is most well-known for writing science-fiction and fantasy and this book really is neither. Sure, the elements of eternal life are a little fantastical but the realness of the world makes it believable.

I’ve read the Book of Skulls multiple times over my life (I think the first time was when I was sixteen) and read it probably every two years or so now. It’s an amazing story with an underlying tension that doesn’t let up. The moment you discover that two must die so two may live … mmmm tension.

How I got The Book of Skulls

No idea. It has $4 written in pencil on the first page so some second-hand shop I suppose.

It’s still in print and there are copies floating around second-hand bookshops (perhaps for $4).

Happy reading,

Mat

–

our diabolical machines fell in love

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Fight Club is one of the incredibly few book-to-movie adaptations where both are awesome, yet still significantly different in plot. Their endings are different (in a big way). Events are different. However, you can watch the movie and read the book and easily like both. There is none of that … oh but they changed it!

For those who seen the movie, the book contains the same unknown narrator speaking the sentences which were lifted verbatim and transposed into Ed Norton’s voice. I am Joe’s Prostate. I am Joe’s Complete Lack of Surprise. Short statements are peppered throughout Fight Club and as you read, they pile up in your mind, slowly pushing on the barriers society and yourself have built up.

Crazy thoughts slip in.  Why am I going to work at this dead-end job? Did our hunter-gather ancestors think we’d end up like this? Why not break society down?

In short, Fight Club will mess with your mind.

Fight Club is a perfect miracle of author and topic.

Fight Club is violent and mocking and honest.

Fight Club is dark and twisted and … right.

I am Joe’s Envy.

It is precisely because it is so right and so accurate in hitting its targets (mindless consumerism, the sublimation of violent urges, the transformation of men into pale imitations of their fathers, etc) that it is truly a great book. The fundamental assumptions of society are held up and found to be hollow and see-through and once we begin to accept Tyler Durden’s ideas we can’t help but be pulled even further into the story.

What Fight Club is about

The unknown narrator of Fight Club hates his life, hates his job as a product recall specialist for a car company, hates the consumerist nesting instinct that has saturated through his life and expresses the sentiments many in our modern world do:

You buy furniture. You tell yourself this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple of years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.

Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

His life changes when he meets Tyler Durden, a charismatic madman who lives an anti-consumerist lifestyle, opposes capitalism, the social structure and pop culture. Together they form an underground fight club as a method of extreme therapy and other men begin to join them. Fight Club spreads and Tyler begins to use it to encourage acts of rebellion and destruction across the country. Eventually this grows into Project Mayhem – focussing on nothing less than the destruction of society itself.

Why guys love Fight Club

I admit I (and other men around the world if you look up Fight Club) find the idea of fighting and destruction attractive. Who hasn’t smashed something and been happy about it? When a fire is burning we throw wood in to keep it going but a lot of it is the desire to see something burn. Fight Club really captures the very male desire for destruction and chaos and shows a storyworld where, yes you can escape from your asshole of a boss, yes you can destroy a credit card company, and yes you can free yourself from all your possessions and be strong and independent again.

If you love Fight Club buy … none other of Chuck Palahniuk’s books

After I read it, I was desperate to read his other books (Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Haunted, Choke, Diary, Stranger than Fiction, Rant, Snuff) and went out and bought Choke, Diary, Invisible Monsters and Stranger than Fiction all in the one go.

What a mistake that was.

Fight Club is an incredible once-off one hit-wonder. Those other books which I struggled to get through (I don’t think I finished any of them because they bored me) play in the same area as Fight Club but are pale and washed out in comparison. I actually gave most them of away (except for Stranger than Fiction, so that will come up in the future review).

How I got Fight Club: Melbourne central Myer bookshop, before the movie came out.

Chuck Palahniuk’s website

Buy Fight Club from Amazon, or buy the Fight Club DVD if you don’t feel like reading. Of course, if you don’t feel like reading, what the hell are you doing here?

Happy reading,

Mat

–

your pause before answering was your answer

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Not what you think ...

The title is suggestive, yes? You’re probably thinking hot girls and sex stories that start “I always thought being a postman was boring until the day I delivered a package to University student dorm …”

Yeah, no.

Back when the old Hef with his absurdly young girlfriends was young Hugh Hefner and he was launching Playboy (first issue 1953) he wanted to create a publication that “would reflect a masculine (though not hairy-chested) zest for all of life” and would be “urban and urbane (not jaded or blasé), sophisticated (not effete), candidly frisky (not sniggering or risqué).”

Good fiction was apparently part of this sophisticated magazine.

You know what I think? Good fiction was part of the sophisticated magazine but it had nothing to do with appealing to a certain “urbane man” or anything like that. Hef knew that he couldn’t get away with a whole magazine of naked girls and so he had to put something next to them. It was a ruse, a trick to confuse his critics.

I can imagine it:

“He’s got naked girls in the magazines!”

“Yes, but he prints literature from the greatest writers of our time next to them. It’s art not porn.”

“Do we protest it or not? Argh – morality fighting with free-thinking art appreciating part of brain. Zzzzap. (brain short circuit).”

I don’t care if it was a trick because Playboy really did print the short fiction of some of the greatest writers of our time. Recognise any of these names?

Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Richard Matheson (I am Legend), Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House), John Updike (Rabbit), Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song), Joseph Heller (Catch 22).

The Playboy Book of Short Stories contains more authors than I’ve listed here. Alice K. Turner (the editor) selected one story from each year Playboy had been published and in the course of doing so has created the best collection of short stories I’ve ever read.

Selected brilliance

The trouble with talking about short stories, as I’ve written before, is that they are so short that talking about them is sometimes telling them. I won’t tell them here, I promise.

Richard Matheson: A Flourish of Strumpets

Published in 1956, this story blew my mind. How could someone back in 1956 think like this? The story is hot … very hot and wickedly funny. It is short and fast and if you think people back in the 1950s were conservative just forget it.

Some descriptions:

The second one came that night; a black-root blonde, slit-skirted and sweatered to within an inch of her breathing life.

*

The next night it was a perky brunette with a blouse front slashed to forever.

*

It was a raven-haired, limp-lidded vamp that night. On her outfit spangles moved and glittered at strategic points.

*

That night it was a redhead sheathed in a green knit dress that hugged all that was voluminous and there was much of that.

Gabriel Garcia Marques: The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World

Along with The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (not in this collection), The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World is one of the best short stories ever written. That it was originally written in Spanish and reads perfectly in English is a marvel in itself. This story made me want to learn Spanish simply so I could read the original version. If you do nothing else with your life, I urge you to hunt down this story – on the web, in the real world, read it standing up in a bookshop, wherever you can. Every line of it is a miracle. FIND IT AND READ IT NOW.

Vladimir Nabokov: The Dashing Fellow

A married man seduces a married woman – how dark and devious and shocking can it possibly be? Way dark. Way devious. Way way way shocking. No woman should ever read this story for they will never trust a man again. No man should read it because he will instantly feel bad and regretful for every sneaky thing he has ever done (and all men have done sneaky things, guaranteed). To read this story is to be filled with the desire to apologise for every male who has ever lived. It is a stunning piece of work, a jewel of perfection.

609 pages, no waiting

In any collection of short stories you’ll love some, like some and skip over or outright hate some. There are stories in this collection that I had a hard time reading but it wasn’t because the stories themselves were bad. The structure of writing, how stories are told, the phrasings and so on change over time and I am reader living in 2009 – some fifty years after a few of these stories were written. The mental fit I need to digest these stories can take a little adjustment. It’s like attempting to read Pride and Prejudice after reading a book written this year – it’s a bit of a jolt.

How I got The Playboy Book of Short Stories: Salvation Army store in Camberwell, Melbourne. I cannot believe someone gave this away because it is an amazing collection. I’ve looked around for it online but it is out of print and you can only pick it up on eBay or in other second-hand places. I suspect changing the title (removing that Playboy) would have kept this book in print (as in, I was embarrassed to be seen reading it and often hid the cover).

(Oh yeah, for those who were actually looking for Playboy stuff … enjoy the totally non-book related images.)

Happy reading,

Mat

–

i may be grey and featureless but i’ve got this glowing heart

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What is with the black and white? Urgh.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYhfpOLOzts

She does eventually get to the review

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NacXZJEH_s

Buy this book before the meteorite comes and wipes us all out!

Good Omens is one of those books that once you start reading it you are suddenly struck down with the fear of “what if I had died before reading this?”

It is simply so good it is possible it could alter the fabric of space and time and if you’re not careful, thoughts from you now might travel back in time, distract you and you’ll die in some bizarre milk-related accident.

Good Omens tells the story of Adam, a 12-year-old boy destined for a starring role in the Apocalypse if various demons and angels have anything to do with it. Of course, the angels and demons (Aziraphale & Crowley) have spent so long on Earth doing their respective jobs that maybe they don’t want the Apocalypse right at this moment.

Add in the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a book containing the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nice the Witch, a Witch-finder, A Painted Jezebel, some Satanic Nuns of the Chattering Order of St Beryl and, as the book says, a full chorus of Tibetans, Aliens, Americans, Atlanteans and other Rare and Strange Creatures of the Last Days … you get the idea. It’s crazy and fun and brilliant all wrapped together with the kind of Englishness of comedy that, well, only the English can write.

For those who are Pratchett fans, you’ll recognise the style and the humour (and some of the ideas he has repeated in future novels). For Gaiman fans … hmm … I’m honestly not sure. I’ve read some Sandman graphic novels and Coraline but I get the feeling Pratchett’s style overwhelmed Gaiman’s a little. Not that it matters – both of them are amazing writers and Good Omens is perfection.

A sample:

“The only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge and green and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves. This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister, spraying the leaves and talking to the plants. He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it an excellent idea. Although, talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did.

What he did was put the fear of God into them.
More precisely, the fear of Crowley.
In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn’t look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. ‘Say goodbye to your friend,’ he’d say to them. ‘He just couldn’t cut it…’
Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat.
The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

If you can’t buy Good Omens go to the library and borrow it right now before the end of the world comes.

How I got Good Omens: Mine is a second-hand copy so I’m presuming a second-hand shop. I first read it when I was twelve and my mum borrowed it from the Horsham library. It can be hard to find second-hand (Pratchett books usually are because people keep them).

Websites:

Sir Terry Pratchett

Neil Gaiman website and journal

Happy reading,

Mat

what if you are allergic to panda and don’t know it?

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