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A guy I know published a book that came in about 650 pages. It did alright. Got good reviews, but didn’t sell. So his agent told him to break it up into two volumes of about 300 pages each and sell it as two books in a series. Why? Because no one today will read a book over 350 pages or so.

Really?

I am quite suspicious of industry experts who make such universal declarations based on polling and focus groups and online forms. Those sources of information are rather suspect because they are limited to the kinds of people who are willing to be polled or participate in focus groups or fill out online forms. You know, people with agendas. Not saying everyone who does this has an agenda, but there are documented things like the Barnum effect and Confirmation Bias and the uncertainty principle. Well, okay, the uncertainty principle doesn’t really apply here, but you get my meaning. So  what does apply? 

Common sense.

I mean, would you rather have the entire story in one volume available for your perusal, or two different volumes published at two different times? At twice the cost. And for those who think a big book is too unwieldy to carry around, I don’t think it adds any weight to your Kindle.

Personally, I love big books, 650-3000 pages and all. If you’re going to read, then read. And here’s some big ‘uns worth reading, in no particular order:

10. Dune, by Frank Herbert. Yeah, yeah, done to death, this one, by TV and movies and hype. Personally I like the Kyle McLaughlin version. Sting wearing a Speedo and wielding a knife while screaming “I will kill him!” is not an image you can easily erase. So a lot of people know the story without reading the book and this is a crime. Yes, the book is hard going, needing a glossary for all of the weird words Herbert invented (Gom jabbar? WTH?) but that’s part of the fun.

9. Shogun, by James Clavell. Another giant novel murdered by mini-series, although a ‘purt good mini with Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune and pillowing, which I will leave for you to discover. The novel is a fictional account, told through the eyes of a shipwrecked English sailor, of the imperial struggles between two dynasties of medieval Japan, the Toranaga and the Ishido clans. It is loosely based on the true story of how the Tokugawa shogunate came to be. Quite loosely. But the court intrigues make Machiavelli look like a choir boy.

8. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. It is rare for me to make a list on which Neal Stephenson doesn’t appear and this is one of his best. A world governed by a monastic community discovers that aliens are orbiting their planet, throwing quite the monkey wrench into their ascetic, technology-adverse, lifestyle. World and universe building by a master of both.

7. Gardens of the Moon, by Steve Erickson. Although this barely qualifies at 650 or so pages, it is an outstanding read, dark and scary and sorcerous and a world you simply don’t want to be a part of. The first of the Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series, it is, in my opinion, the best of them, which is usually the case for first books of series. Right, Gentlemen Bastards?

6. The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. Okay, yeah, Tom Wolfe is one of those elite writers you’re supposed to hold a slightly dismissive attitude towards because his books are so wry and on the nose but this one is magnificent, a downright funny examination of politics and celebrity and the fake reality both inhabit. Sherman McCoy, a Master of the Universe, is undone when he accidentally runs over a would-be mugger while tooling around in his luxury vehicle with his mistress. The ensuing hue and cry was satire in the 80s. Today, it’s documentary.

5. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. A deadpan look at an England where matter-of-fact magicians assist in the Napoleonic Wars and attempt to bring back the old powers, triggering a confrontation with the fairy world. Tinker Bell is not your friend.

4. Lucifer’s Hammer, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. One of the best post-apoc novels to date, a comet strikes the earth, triggering worldwide volcanoes and earthquakes and a nuclear strike because, hey, use ‘em or lose ‘em. Best get that compound prepped and ready.

3. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Oh, c’mon, it’s Gaiman so that’s recommendation enough and you’ve seen the HBO series so you know the story, the twilight of the gods, so to speak. Odin recruits a felon to assist him in an upcoming war with the new gods. What more do you need to know? 

2. Centennial, by James Michener. Yes, I know, you’re not supposed to like Michener because he is so formulaic and his characters are one dimensional and he’s a bit of a propagandist. But this story is epic, covering an area of Colorado that, after 130 million years or so, turns into the Old West town of Centennial. Getting there is half the fun. And it was a pretty good mini series, too.

1. The Parsifal Mosaic, by Robert Ludlum. Before there was Bourne, there was Havelock. This is vintage Ludlum with more assassinations and back stabbing and twists and utter craziness that you can shake a silencer at. Take notes because, hoo boy, there’s a lot of people in this. Michael Havelock, a State department agent, witnesses the murder of his partner and lover, who turns out to be a KGB spy. He quits intel work and is out minding his own business one day when he runs into his not-quite-dead ex-lover and partner. Then the fun begins.  

So, turn off that silly Netflix and settle in for the long haul.

Back in the days when we had three channels on TV, we had three reading genres: fiction, non-fiction, science fiction. Yep, that was pretty much it. Fiction covered serious, well-written adult novels that ranged from the classics to contemporaries like Shirley Grau’s The Keepers of the House and even HG Wells War of the Worlds because that was a classic and classic literature was fiction that you read for educational and/or appreciation/snobbishness purposes because we  all knew what a classic was without having to have some professor define it. RoT: if it was published before WW1, it was a classic, regardless of the content.

Science fiction was silly, not for the serious minded; it appealed more to teenage boys than anyone. Just take a look at the offerings back then: Have Space Suit, Will Travel; Marooned on Mars; The Caves of Steel, the kinds of things nerdy, social outcast 13-year-old boys with taped-together horn rims read because they’d never be on the football team or own a jalopy.  That didn’t mean it was kids literature. That was a separate category of mostly fiction designed to teach kids moral and civilized manners of behavior, like The Happy Hollisters or the Nancy Drew series. BEMs, FTL drive, humbug humans struggling against the forces of the universe, that was just too  far out for a real adult to read. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, there were many adult scifi fans and scifi writers back then. I’m just giving you the general zeitgeist, from memory. Sue me.

So, how many reading genres are there today?

A lot. A whole lot.

And I’m not going to list them because I don’t think I have enough characters left but, randomly, there‘s Genetic Engineering Science Fiction, First Contact Science Fiction, Contemporary Christian Romance, Western and Frontier Christian Romance, Dystopian Fiction, Friendship Fiction, Women’s Friendship Fiction, on and on, world without end, amen.

What the deuce?

It looks very much like we want to read very specific things these days. We’ve got a wheelhouse and we are staying in it. If I only want to read Women’s Friendship Dystopian Christan Fiction, then by God, that’s all I’m looking for. And, believe it or not, if you put that category into the Amazon search box, you will get suggestions.

Is this a bad thing? Well, dunno. At least people are reading, which is always an encouragement because, good Lord, have you seen what’s on TV or at the movies these days? But I’m wondering if we are specifying ourselves out of some dang good books.

See, in the days BA (Before Amazon), you went to the library, the bookstore, or the bookmobile to scratch your reading itch. And fiction was all one section, listed alphabetically, and it held everything from Blatty to Michener. If you wanted the new stuff, you went to the McNaughton’s shelf. So how did we know if a book was worth it?

Simple. You pulled it off the shelf, looked at the cover, read the blurb, read a few pages, and if the story appealed to you, checked it out. We selected books based on their content.

Not their category.

At least, so far. Not the top ten horror or fantasy or scifi novels, although all three categories are  represented herein, but books that I still remember, still think about, still reference days or even decades after reading them. Without further ado:

10. The Forgotten Door, by Alexander Key. Jon, a child from another world, falls through a portal and ends up on Earth, where he endures the fear and suspicion of a prejudiced town.

I read this when I was 13 or 14, when a lot of very bad things were happening in my life, and the last scene of this book still haunts me. I wanted to step through that hidden door and live in Jon’s world. It was so much better than this one. Still is. I have not read it since then and, no doubt, if I did so, would find it quaint and simplistic and…juvenile. But it gave me hope and a longing that I still indulge.

9. Knee Deep in Thunder, by Sheila Moon. Maris and a motley gang of bugs- yes, bugs- go on a quest to save a magical land from an evil force.

Another book I read at 13 or 14 in the midst of all those bad things happening and the last scene of this book- where Jetsam disappears down the beach- has also stayed with me but not out of hope or longing, no. Out of loss. That everything you love will be lost, eventually. Which, of course, is not Moon’s intent or message but is the one I derived. The beauty of books: you can find your own meaning.

8. The Winds of War, by Herman Wouk. A sweeping family saga of WW2. 

Yes, I know, not one book but two, the second one being War and Remembrance, and a pretty good TV miniseries to boot, and I have yet to find another WW2 story that so well captures  the massive shock and upheaval of that conflict. Everything and everyone in this book changes, and not always for the best. The scene at the Auschwitz gas chambers is one of the most chilling and revolting ever written.

7. Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner. One night, 90% of the world’s population simply vanishes. Forty years later, the surviving 10% are still trying to cope.

This is a scifi novel that leans post-apocalyptic, so I differentiate it from the next book on the list which is pure scifi and leaves me enough wiggle room to declare this one and the next one as the two best scifi books I ever read. Roessner never explains what happened, and I freakin’ love that. Deal with it and move on.

6. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. A Jesuit priest makes first contact with a race of aliens located near Alpha Centauri.

This is a mind blowing story about faith and cultures and what happens when two completely incompatible groups meet, without realizing they are incompatible until it is too late. One of the most successful depictions of a completely alien species that I’ve read. And the sequel, Children of God, ain’t no slouch, neither.

5. The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson. An epic sweeping gargantuan and overwhelming world striding mess of a story that covers Europe from the time of the English Civil War through the Glorious Revolution.

As told by a boatload of characters, from Sir Isaac Newton to Half-Cocked Jack (who gained the appellation through a rather unfortunate accident), this is history made palatable. And gripping. And, yes, I know, trilogy, not novel. But once you start with Quicksilver, you’ll become so immersed in this crazy story that you’ll swear it was just one novel. One really big novel, so pack a lunch.

4. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. A couple of aging cattlemen decide to move their ranch from Texas to Montana.

Yes, the miniseries was epic, but doesn’t hold a candle to the novel, which belongs to the Dying West genre: increasingly irrelevant cowboys take a stand for a rapidly fading way of life. This one, though, gilds no lilies, and the casual brutality of the frontier will make you glad you live in modern times.

3. Sometimes a Great Notion. In post-Korean War America, an estranged son returns to his home at the request of his half brother to help the family break a logging strike.

This, and the next entry, are the two Great American novels, at least so far. While everyone knows Ken Kesey from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this one is far superior, a mesmerizing tale of a completely dysfunctional family who is forced to pull together in the face of a town’s hostility. The Stampers are defying a lumber strike by delivering wood to the local mill, earning the enmity of neighbors and union organizers, and each other. Not an easy read because Kesey took the James Joyce approach here and there and you’ll get viewpoint changes sometimes within the same sentence, but worth your time and effort. 

2. East of Eden. A retelling of Cain and Abel, with two sets of brothers a generation apart reprising the roles.

This is post-Civil War America in its broad, mad rush to become itself. A generational saga that begins with probably the most awful father you’ll find outside of a Faulkner novel, the first set of brothers, Charles and Adam, fight that father and each other in an effort to break free and establish themselves. Adam ends up in the Salinas Valley and marries probably the most evil character you’ll find outside of a Stoker novel, leading to the next set of brothers, Caleb and Aron, and their subsequent tragedy. Talk about the three generational curse… 

1. Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut. An engineer leads a revolt against a dystopian society.

You know Vonnegut was going to creep into one of my lists somewhere sometime because the guy is just unique, in a category by himself, like Jack Vance. Everyone thinks Slaughterhouse-5 is his opus but, no, it’s this one, which is more of a straight up story than his later, delightfully absurd,  novels, such as Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. There is still a lot of delightfully absurd writing in this novel, especially when Vonnegut is describing the noises that machines make. In a dystopia run by corporations, where corporate life is all, the individual can only exist within prescribed corporate rules and approval. Break the rules, you are dismissed, or worse, never promoted, but at least that’s better than being in the Army or the Reclamation and Recovery corps, the only two options for anyone not an engineer or manager. This was written in 1952. Yikes.

Note that I left out The Martian Chronicles and The Crystal Cave and Alas Babylon. Ten is ten. I guess I need to start another list, say, the Best Ten Books I Ever Read Besides the Other Ten. We’ll see.

July 1st, get Frank Vaughn Killed by his Mom and Southern Gothic for free on Smashwords. Go here: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/dkrauss

And, while you’re at it, pre-order Looking for Don, which is the last of the Frank Vaughn trilogy, and which comes out July 7.

From the 60s through the 90s, America.

If you’ve read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, then this is the follow-up novel you expected…except it’s not. John Perry, the hero of the first novel, is barely mentioned; indeed, he is nothing but an offhand remark in one or two places. It’s like an author trying to link up books with a throwaway line or character, say some ghost child named Frank Vaughn or something.

So don’t expect the continuing saga of a favored character you remember from the first novel, but do expect the continuing saga of the world built during that first novel. This is a galaxy of odd alien races all bent on conquering- and, in some cases, eating- other alien races, including us humans. Apparently, we taste like chicken. So we chickens are always coming up with some innovative tech or method to keep us off the dinner plate, like warp drives and space pods and more-or-less cloned soldiers (’cause they’re not really clones but users of dead bodies), complete with an installed BrainPal allowing them to bypass the decades of growing up and maturing and skill development that a naturally born human has to go through before they are combat ready.

Brainpal?

Think of it as distance learning on dilithium crystals.

I thought the Old Man’s War concept was great: take the brains and experience of old people and meld it with superstrong rebuilt bodies to create the Colonial Defense Force. Imagine, a bunch of crotchety old farts running around the galaxy with advanced weaponry and the reflexes and strength of their teenage years and, well, we’d simply rule. I don’t know what happened to that concept in this follow-on novel but it is shrifted. I guess the available supply of crotchety old farts would rather sit around in their wheelchairs watching reruns of Space 1999 or something. The clone brigades now take on the heavy lifting. Bit disappointing. I was looking forward to being 18 years old again with a plasma rifle in the 40 watt range and 60 years of accumulated attitude.

Oh well.

As yarns go, this is a pretty good one. Jared Dirac, a newly decanted BrainPal soldier, is fitted with an extra conscience, that of traitor Charles Boutin, in an effort to find out (a) what exactly did Boutin give to our alien enemies and (b) why did he do that? This make Dirac’s already stressful birth even more stressful by adding the memories and motivations of a traitor and actually it makes this story far more interesting than a Clone Wars rehash. For one thing, you get to see a comparison between a fully developed conscience and a newly emerged one…even if the fully developed one is about as superficial as one can get. When you find out Boutin’s reason for betraying the entire human race to a coalition of cockroaches and BEMs your first reaction will probably be, “Really? Dude, get a grip.”

Overall, this is a space shoot-em-up with fun weapons and tactics that miraculously appear in the supply chain at just the right moment because that always happens…okay, yes, suspend much belief, but if you know that going in, you’ll probably enjoy this.

With or without a Brainpal.

The other day I ran across a video in which some guy listed the ten best horror novels of all time and well, no, no they weren’t. Over half them were more properly classified as scifi or thrillers, not horror. I mean, c’mon!

In the guy’s defense, horror has been ill defined and most books thus categorized are so because (a) some authority said they were or (b) there is a generalized consensus to that effect. 

Don’t listen to these people.

Horror is pretty much viewed as anything that scares you, which is a category so broad as to make it meaningless. I mean, poison ivy scares me but unless it becomes self-aware and starts chasing me around the yard (hmm, story idea, write it down…) it’s not horror. Serial killers are not horror, either, although they can be horrifying. Neither are tyrannical oppressive governments a la Catching Fire or Starting a Fire or whatever that thing is, nor bleak post-apocalyptic landscapes like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, although it comes close.

Scaring you is only part of the formula; there are at least two other elements necessary before it is true horror. First, some supernatural influence, preferably associated with some religious concept of good and evil. The supernatural doesn’t have to be an actual supernatural force, but an adherence, a belief, a dedication to it. That’s why Red Dragon is horror while Silence of the Lambs isn’t; it’s a thriller. And second, a sense of helplessness in the face of forces too powerful for mortals to comprehend, much less resist.

In other words, ghosts, monsters, witches, cults, entities, demons, and all their acolytes. Everything else is either scifi, fantasy, thrillers, or crime. 

You can see already how my definition violates the norms. Alien and Aliens are considered horror movies, but they’re actually scifi. Scary scifi, to be sure, but scaring you is not sufficient criteria. The aliens are science based, not supernatural, and there’s no sense of helplessness against them, just the need to find the proper weapon. Hannibal Lecter is a criminal, not a monster, although that’s an apt one word description of his sociopathology. And elves and dwarves and hobbits and dragons are part of a world-building exercise, although there’s plenty of supernatural things like wizards and Balrogs running around in those books. You expect dragons and Balrogs in that world, though, so it’s not a sense of helplessness that overwhelms the hobbits but the need to deal with what used to be a distant problem. 

The sense of helplessness is key. When normalcy is confronted by something out of ken, then normal human responses are rendered ineffective, and the human has to look beyond his usual resources for a solution. Hannibal Lector can be shot, but what do you do about Dracula? Need a cross and garlic, which is just silly in the human  world. But unless you do that, you are helpless before the Lord of the Vampires.

So, given the above criteria and without further ado, the best 10 horror novels of all time:

10. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Stoker’s compilation of old wives and folk tales in the person of Count Dracula, an evil creature bent on slaughter and domination, remains the classic horror novel, probably the first true horror novel although there are preceding candidates, such as Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. But Dracula is light years beyond those. Stoker pulls no punches. The Count is evil and malevolent and has no redeeming value and there is no compromise  and he is darn near impossible to kill, at least by human methods. Stoker introduced the time honored horror trope of the Unexpected Expert. Jonathan Harker and Mina and the rest of the gang are helpless before Count Dracula’s onslaught until Van Helsing shows up. One of the best aspects of this novel is the aftermath: no one remains untouched, no one remains unscarred, which is the nature of evil. It corrupts everyone it touches.

9. At the Mountains of Madness, H. P. Lovecraft. Alright, okay, not an actual novel, a story collection, with only the title story long enough to be considered a novella. But, these stories form the core of the Cthulhu Mythos, one of the most terrifying alternate realities in literature, with its Old Ones and sacrifices and Dunwich Horrors and distorted, malevolent gods bent on eating us. Lovecraft almost single handedly created the dark forces genre, and King and Connolly and Straub owe him. Was he a racist? Oh, distressingly so. Was his prose turgid and stiff? You betcha. But his descriptions of the horrors lurking in the dark will curl your hair. 

8. The Exorcist. The movie was scary as crap and ushered in the entire demons-are-gonna-get-ya flicks of the 70s, like The Amityville Horror and The Omen, but those all missed the novel’s larger point: our souls are battlegrounds for ancient powers. An unbelieving world dismisses these powers as quaint relics of a superstitious age, at its peril.

7. The Dead Zone. I have railed about Stephen King in other places and most of his usual suspects, like It and Pet Sematary, are not on this list because, well, they’ve got problems, but this one deserves a spot. Uncle Ben’s adage that with great power goes great responsibility is the core of this novel. When an accident gives Johnny Smith the ability to tell the future by merely grasping someone’s hand, he decides to use this power for the betterment of mankind. With terrible results. 

6. Red Dragon. My only entry of the serial killer/slasher type novels which I generally categorize as thrillers because this serial killer, dubbed the Tooth Fairy, is doing all his butchering so he may transform into something else, William Blake’s painting called Red Dragon. Take a look at it above: that ain’t Smaug, that’s the devil, and while there are no actual supernatural elements in this book, the Tooth Fairy’s enthusiastic dedication makes up for that lack. This book introduces a minor character named Hannibal Lecter, who isn’t as interesting as the Tooth Fairy. This is a much better novel than Silence of the Lambs, which ain’t no slouch of a novel, either.

5. Salem’s Lot. This King novel, in my opinion, is sheer genius, as close to genius, anyway, that the King can reach. His vampire is the traditional Stoker kind, not something cool and glittery and angst-ridden, and is pretty terrifying in a Nosferatu kind of way. Worse, though, is the monster’s familiar, Straker, who, ever since the 1979 TV series, I always picture as James Mason. It’s quite something that you’re actually more terrified of the human servant than it’s evil master.

4. The Other. One could easily make the argument that this does not meet my criteria because there’s no clear supernatural element here. Holland and Niles seem like your typical creepy thirteen year old twins, but are they actually twins? Are they actually alive? Who knows? That uncertainty gives this extraordinarily well written novel an air of constant dread.

3. The Returned. More eerie than frightening, this is one of the most unnerving zombie novels written. Well, technically not zombies but revenants…except we don’t know how the dead were raised and there could be some voodoo involved so, benefit of the doubt. The zombies don’t want to eat our brains, they just want to resume lives so rudely interrupted by death some years, even decades before. And the non-dead aren’t too happy with this. Half the time this novel is a moral tale of acceptance, and/or a metaphor for prejudice, but dead people coming back and asking for their old jobs and houses back may be a bridge too far for even the most tolerant among us. Especially when no one has any idea why this is happening.

2. NOS4A2. Apples not falling far from trees here, and it is so good that Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son, completely understands the nature of horror, more so, I believe, than his Dad does. At least, recently. This is a scary, scary book of a monster/ghoul/vampire whatever keeping himself young by corrupting the souls of children. Yes, there’s some oddness, such as the telekinetic/teleportation powers of the heroine, Victoria McQueen, but all forgivable because Hill weaves it all so well.

1. Nightworld. This is absolutely the most hair-raising novel I have ever read. There are scenes that made me gasp out loud. Maybe I’m a sucker for end-of-the-world gotterdammerung apocalyptic divine judgment novels…are there really that many of those?…but this remains for me the best horror novel ever. That may come as some surprise because Wilson is kind of scattershot. He tried to create a series around a character named Repairman Jack but it didn’t really go anywhere. Nightworld is a Repairman Jack story, the last of what Wilson loosely called The Adversary cycle. You probably know the first book, The Keep, which was made into a fairly decent movie, but it and the other Adversary novels don’t really seem connected to each other. Until you get to this one. Which will blow you away.