Thursday, January 18, 2007
Serial Killers
I just found out via Wonderland that Robert Jordan is deathly ill. If that means anything to you, cheers. His fans are worried that he will pass away before he finishes the epic Wheel of Time series.
Book 8, The Path of Daggers
I don’t want to suffer like I did for the Earth’s Children (Clan of the Cave Bear) series’, despairing in the length of time it took Jean M. Auel to finally write that last lame book after The Plains of Passage, which I had waited so long for, and then it left me hanging, until the last one came out… The Shelters of Stone.
I read Clan of the Cave Bear in fifth grade, and was an adult when The Shelters of Stone came out. I just had to read it for closure, despite knowing exactly what it was: “Jean Auel’s fifth novel about Ayla, the Cro-Magnon cavewoman raised by Neanderthals… the biggest comeback bestseller in Amazon.com history.”
To be honest, I’m not even sure how to talk about it.
This series is the reason why at Christmas time, I was thinking to myself, mistletoe can be used to induce abortion AND act as a poison in a slightly larger dose. Who needs these thoughts? Ask my mom about homemade “stone throwers” and “no more fires in the house or you’re grounded!” Don’t ask about the “wrap” I made from what had once been a perfectly fine rabbit fur coat. I was too young and impressionable to be reading this stuff, just like my fifth grade teacher said. At the time I thought she said it because of the 6pt font, when really she was hoping I would stop before I got to the rape scene.
In junior high I transitioned to Stephen King, and then to Anne Rice. It’s not that I didn’t read anything “real” or good. I was probably the only one in my English/Cultural Studies AP class to actually read Michener’s The Source
By college I had a problem with the cracktacular epic pulp, and so did a lot of my friends. They’d turn me on to the best stuff, so to speak. The reader forms a strong emotional tie to the world (requiring maps in the index, and a glossary in the appendix), the characters (more charts), and the writer (someone who probably has an awesome mustache, or wears one color exclusively).
Sometimes I miss my enthusiastic love for writers that are incredibly prolific, or have the generosity to write novels that are just so incredibly long, but I’ve been burned by those types before. Just when you really get comfortable in the relationship, the writer checks out on you and you can tell there’s a ghost writer, or they’re off doing research. Research on how awesome it is to be rich finally, one can only assume.
It used to be the Deathlands series. The title still makes me drool a little. The books were set 100 years after the nuclear ... you get the idea. Mutants. Barons. Secret government matter transport devices. New slang! All the best frackin’ series have their own slang. And then I read everything else. James Axler just kept them coming. I mean look at those publication years. Juicy, delicious, gummy brain candy.
I kept reading when I could tell they were ghost written or had the heavy lifting done by someone else. I would writhe about sleepless and pining, when it took too long for the next one to come out, and the X Files was not enough. What ultimately killed it was the repetition, ironically. Five pages into a new book I’d find myself asking “Why don’t they just avoid the ‘ville and not have to get into a situation when they’re only gonna have to kill their way out?”
I truly wanted, just one time, for them to find an abandoned log cabin where everyone could eat corn on the cob. The same old character descriptions were giving me blisters, walking in those same blue cowboy boots Krysty had worn for 9, 834 pages.
Dangerously close to writing fan fic, I stopped cold turkey.
It was a painful thing, to yank myself free of those pulp series time killers. It wasn’t embarrassment so much as realizing I wasn’t reading the books I really wanted to read. I wasn’t looking for anything new, learning, thinking. I have to keep up a steady diet of brain exercise and stay off the junk. Last night, I finished Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
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