Ajax Penumbra 1969 doesn’t necessarily achieve the same sense of wonder that was contained in Sloan’s original novel, but there is still magic within these digital pages. The story of how Penumbra came to San Francisco and first discovered the 24-hour bookstore, then under different ownership, is a nice way to revisit a few of the characters Sloan first introduced us to last year. It was a pleasure to see Penumbra and Corvina in different times than that which they find themselves in during our present day, in a San Francisco amid the waning days of the Summer of Love and the modern city being constructed above and below.

Since Google cannot be a part of this story (though there is a nice knowing wink to its future creation here), Sloan has to focus on other aspects within the world of books. There is more classic research here, searching through archives and libraries, than in the previous novel. Whereas that book was more a classic mystery centered on the bookstore itself, here Sloan is able to tell a story of a treasure hunt. The narrative will bring a smile to the face to people that have lost themselves browsing the stacks of a library or a bookstore, as what better treasure is there to find than an antique tome lost to the ages?

The other joy is how in Ajax Penumbra 1969 Sloan is able to include the building blocks of where the digital focus of the novel come from. A character here is at the forefront of the coming computer age, and the pieces of the story that touch on that industry in its infancy further bridge the connection between the two works. It’s also amazing when reading those sections to not only see how far the world of computers has come, but how much foresight those within that world had of what the future would hold. The inclusion also gives further insight into some of the parts of Penumbra’s character in the novel without giving anything away.

Which leads to the question that accompanies all prequels: which story should be read first? Here, as with so many others, the better route to take is to read Ajax Penumbra 1969 after you’ve experienced the novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. There isn’t anything within this release that will spoil the plot of the novel, but part of the magic of 24-Hour Bookstore is how the reader is introduced to the titular establishment in the modern day. To have this piece be your first encounter of the bookstore will take some of the wonder away from the novel, which would be a shame. So go read that wonderful book and then come back to Ajax Penumbra 1969. It’ll feel like visiting with some old friends when they weren’t so old. The magic will still be there. After all, it is a 24-bookstore.

-Todd Natti

@toddnatti

Ajax Penumbra 1969 is available now through iTunes, Amazon, and other digital sources. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is also available through digital sources and as a paperback in bookstores everywhere. Including mysterious ones of the 24-hour variety.

After reading the sequel, Doctor Sleep, I am still not sure if it was necessary, but am glad that King took the time to revisit Danny Torrance 36 years after his fateful winter with his parents and the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel. The novel’s prologue, taking place only a few years after the events of The Shining, brought a smile to my face. I realized that while I may not have been wondering what happened after that book, I was glad to know. Very glad. If you’re a fan of that novel, you will be too. But it must be noted that Doctor Sleep is a sequel to King’s book, not the Kubrick film. If you enter the world of this sequel without reading the 1977 novel, you will be confused at parts, and a lot within these pages relies on what happened during King’s original vision of what happened at the Overlook. Besides, there’s a reason why that book is among those included Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Should Read Before You Die. It has to be read. When you’re done and you come back to Doctor Sleep, you’ll be happy you took the time.

Does this mean that this book is without its problems? No, of course not. Not everything in Doctor Sleep works perfectly. After the initial prologue section, “Lockbox,” there is some pretty clunky character introduction. You can feel King’s prose wanting us to be afraid of the group known as the True Knot, but they do not compare to other evils King has put on the page. During the novel’s first half, any section that doesn’t directly deal with Danny Torrance can be a little rough at times and can read like they are there only to fill pages. However, by the time the novel reaches its center, or its “hub,” and the stories of Danny, the True Knot, and a little girl named Abra, who has a Shining all her own, start coming together, there is a much better sense of unity and Doctor Sleep powers through it’s latter half with all narrative strength fueling the fire.

Save for the few early concerns, Doctor Sleep is further evidence that America’s greatest living storyteller is at the height of his abilities. King has the knack of being able to capture what readers, Constant or otherwise, want to happen. He has always been strongest at capturing the mundane nature of every day life before some force of nature, whether ghosts, monsters, or time itself, comes to ruin the day. It’s those moments that make Constant Readers smile and laugh out loud at facing something evil, because we know somewhere in the back of our minds that such moments will not last.

Doctor Sleep builds to that old story King has returned to again and again: battle between good and evil. Fitting for a novel very centered on the notion of wheels and how the past comes back around. The showdown within Doctor Sleep is on a level that we haven’t seen since It or The Stand, the latter being King’s quintessential tale of light versus dark. What comes before that moment, the few narrative missteps or certain plot developments (one in particular) that will even give Constant Readers pause, are forgivable because he still has the natural ability ensnare the reader in the story, to lose ourselves in his language.

Literary critic Alan Bloom once qualified King as being the modern day author of what were once known as “penny dreadfuls.” That may have been so at one time, but King has consistently worked on cementing his literary legacy. And, after all, penny dreadfuls sold quite a lot of copy, didn’t they? And on a personal note, as a Constant Reader and an English Academic, I’d rather have King’s prose in the hands of the masses than anyone else.

In the end, Doctor Sleep gets my recommendation. It may play upon our nostalgia for The Shining, both as one of the seminal works of fiction in the last fifty years and as a piece of our culture, and read at times like modern King using his own authorial shining to contact the ghost of the horror writer whose books made him more than a household name, but it’s still a great read. Yes, it’s more horror than some of his recent work, but at the same time it’s not. I don’t think King can write that those old terror stories anymore. We’ve evolved too much as a culture with him as a central part and he’s evolved too much as a writer. Is that to say that Doctor Sleep isn’t a read that won’t have you flipping the pages until the end? No, it’s not. King may have lost some of his bite as a horror writer (he’s always excelled at writing about the horror that people do to one another or that of the world in general than ghouls or goblins or even to ourselves, as his recent novels Under the Dome, 11/22/63, and Joyland have shown), but he has only improved as a storyteller.

Does Doctor Sleep have its faults? Sure. Will you love every minute you get to spend with Dan Torrance and Abra? Yes. Will you relish in the fact that you didn’t know that you wanted more of the world of The Shining after almost four decades? Without a doubt.

In the Author’s Note (not to worry, no spoilers here), King writes: “I enjoyed finding Danny Torrance again and following his adventures. I hope you did, too. If that’s the case, Constant Reader, we’re all good.”

Yes, Uncle Stevie, I’d say we are indeed.

-Todd Natti

@toddnatti

Doctor Sleep is available now from Scribner.

It’s a brilliant gimmick that caused The Shining Girls to be one of the hit books of the summer. Beukes, a South African novelist, brings us the tale of Harper Curtis, a Depression-era drifter with a penchant for violence that comes across The House, this novel’s version of a time machine, that allows him to traverse 20^th century Chicago snuffing out women with potential to change the world, or, as the novel puts it, ones that “shine.” Among them is Kirby Mazrachi, who survives his attack and begins to search for the killer who isn’t confined to one particular time.

Written in a style that will bring to mind 2003’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, with each chapter heading stating which part of the century the book is taking place, the central concept of the novel felt like a slight variation on a story we already know, enough to make it feel original. The circular narrative, which has a meticulously plotted time-jumping structure, could be likened to the time travel film Primer, in that one would need to create a diagram to follow how each of the stories intersect and when. Characters that begin the story as corpses are alive later in the novel, and the concept of deterministic loops that we are bound to hangs heavy over the narrative. Beukes’s version of time travel follows the law that you cannot change the past because everything that can happen has already happened. For instance, one cannot go back in time to kill Hitler because if you could, it would have already happened, and this sentence would make reference to another genocidal ruler because no one would remember a mediocre Austrian artist from the early 20^th Century. It may sound complicated, but it’s not, it just appears to be.

Likewise The Shining Girls is a novel that appears to be complex but isn’t. For a novel with time travel at its core, it is remarkably linear. In a scene where Harper travels to the future to dispose of a corpse in a dumpster he discovers there is already a body in it of another character he has recently met that he will murder later in the narrative. A deeper narrative would ask the question of whether or not that later murder has to happen—if the loop can be broken—but Harper, having given himself to the whims of The House, doesn’t attempt to or even seem to care to. He goes where and when The House wants him to kill the women who “shine.” There are attempts from Beukes to deepen Harper as a character, but he never comes across as more than a stock serial killer from any other narrative. Likewise, the girls of the title, while given backstories in the chapters we meet them before their gruesome demise, are no deeper. Only Kirby gets fleshed out as a character but still remains thin as the paper she exists on.

The other glaring problem with The Shining Girls, as opposed to something like Joe Hill’s NOS4A2, which also dealt with a girl escaping a supernatural serial killer and attempting to stop him, is Beukes’s novel falls apart upon further examination. The author has stated in interviews that she did not want to explain the nature of The House and its ability to let Harper jump through time but a little explanation or even postulation from characters, however pseudoscientific or even fantastic, is necessary. It’s no spoiler to say that when The Shining Girls reaches its climax after 300+ pages of build-up it just ends like a summer blockbuster after the big action scene. And like those summer blockbusters, The Shining Girls is something that wants to convince you it is more than it is. Unfortunately, no matter how much it wants to be, the novel isn’t anything more than the same old serial killer narrative our culture loves so much trussed up with a flashy gimmick.

-Todd Natti  ]]> http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/shininggirlsreview/feed/ 0 http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/paperdreamsreview/ http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/paperdreamsreview/#comments Mon, 09 Sep 2013 18:01:34 +0000 DigitalAmericana http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/?p=1597 “I consider [magazines] such easy vehicles of knowledge, more happily calculated than any other, to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.” –George Washington

Writers that come out of writing programs know the delights and perils of literary magazines. They see them not only as a gateway into larger publications but also as a validation that the work they do is worth something at all. It brings to mind what Stephen King wrote in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft when he said that the way to know one is a writer is by paying a bill with the proceeds received from a story being published a literary magazine. It is a thought echoed in a short piece by T.C. Boyle, “Meat and Potatoes,” wherein the author describes his first experience being published and how much beer could be bought with the money. It’s a fascinating insight into a successful author’s induction into the literary world and is accompanied by numerous other insights in the book Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine, compiled and edited by Travis Kurowski, who is no stranger to the literary world. He teaches creative writing and publishing at York College of Pennsylvania and was a founding editor of Luna Park as well as the author of the Literary MagNet column in Poets and Writers.

Paper Dreams isn’t simply full of insights into how well-known authors got started publishing, it is an in-depth look at both the history and the culture of literary magazines in our nation. The pieces collected by Kurowski detail the murky history of lit magazines and how the form’s beginnings cannot be pinned down to one exact moment in time, as well as thoughts from editors and authors on the evolution and importance of journals today. Kurowski’s own definition of what a literary magazine is sets the tone for what the book will be dealing with: “A literary magazine is a text object intended to be published at some regularity under the same name and primarily focused on the distribution of literary text, though often also interested in popular culture, politics, and art.” It’s a fine definition and within those words is perhaps the reason why literary magazines are on the rise today. The digital age has given the creators of magazines the ability to put out a product for much cheaper than in the past. While print publications still hold most of the prestige that writers seek, the digital form of literary magazines has been more accepted by the writing community as a valid form of publication. It’s a beautiful thing to consider: literary magazines are the place young writers go in search for that first publication and the vast uptick in magazines available to submit to allows for a greater chance for that first acceptance letter. It also allows editors who may not have had the chance to work at a print magazine to seek out writing that they feel should be validated in one form or another. One of the first pieces in the collection, “Reasons for Creating a New Literary Magazine” by Jill Allyn Rosser, opens with this brilliant line on why to found a new mag: “There probably hasn’t been a new one created in the past six-and-a-half days.” Since her piece comes from 2008, that amount of time is probably even shorter now.

It brings up a thought that Roxane Gay addresses in her piece “Too Many of Us, Too Much Noise” where she explores the inundation of the market and AWP book fairs of print and online magazines and offers some grim but honest (I suspect some in the literary world would say “defeatist”) assessment of the problems facing literary magazines. One quote struck me in particular: “Are literary magazines selling something people (beyond writers) don’t want?” She suggests that this may be so, but with so many aspiring writers there will always be a form of support for magazines. She continues: “Saying writers are the only audience for literary magazines is like saying people who like to swim and go to the beach are the only market for bathing suits.” The stories in literary magazines are meant for everyone, not just those in the hallowed halls of literature.

Not to sound hyperbolic, but I loved Paper Dreams. The pieces Kurowski has included offer a history of a form of publication, its role in literature’s development in America over the last hundred years, insights from writers on literary magazines in the past and the present, as well as brief suggestions on what the process of creating a literary magazine or getting published in one is like. This book was to me what reality television must be like for the masses: it gave me what I was hoping it would, which as a reviewer, is often a hard thing to do. That being said, is this book accessible to everyone? That’s hard to say. It’s more an academic read than a popular read, happy to exist in the realm of the literary peoples of the world, who (I cannot stress this enough) should immediately seek out a copy. Could it have reached a more general audience? Sure, but it would have lost something. And there is the thought that plagued the back of my mind while reading Paper Dreams and returning to the thought from Roxane Gay above: can literary magazines ever be fully accepted by those outside literary circles? Maybe not, but that being said, with the enthusiastic and insular world that literary magazines exist in, maybe it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is the work is out there for those that seek them out, and that may be, as Paper Dreams demonstrates, more than enough.

-Todd Natti Paper Dreams is currently available from Atticus Books. ]]> http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/paperdreamsreview/feed/ 0