Horns, by Joe Hill

Horns is a page-turn­er.  Most nights the only rea­son I stopped read­ing was because I had to make a choice between find­ing out what comes next and being use­ful at work in the morning.

The sto­ry con­cerns one Ignatius “Ig” Per­rish, who wakes up one morn­ing after an ill-remem­bered night of drink­ing to dis­cov­er that he has grown horns overnight.  They look a bit like dev­il horns, and they hurt to touch.  He dis­cov­ers the horns seem to have giv­en him cer­tain pow­ers, too:  peo­ple can’t help but reveal their dark­est secrets to him, and they don’t seem to remem­ber talk­ing to him.

Ig’s girl­friend Mer­rin died about a year ago, a hor­rif­ic sex-mur­der; all the evi­dence seemed to point to Ig as the cul­prit, but he knows he did­n’t do it.  The evi­dence con­ve­nient­ly van­ished, and no one was ever con­vict­ed.  The towns­folk all assumed Ig’s rich par­ents bought off the jus­tice sys­tem to pro­tect the fam­i­ly name.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Horns, by Joe Hill”

Review: Black Bottle Man

Black Bottle Man

Black Bot­tle Man

Rem­brandt is ten years old when his life is turned upside-down.

It’s 1928, and the Great Depres­sion has yet to begin. Rem­brandt’s entire world is his extend­ed fam­i­ly, three house­holds of farm­ers who live very close to each oth­er, as farm hous­es go. He’s the only child in three fam­i­lies, and his aunts both want a child very badly.

So bad­ly, in fact, that they’ll cut a deal with the Dev­il to get what they want.

To save his aunts’ souls, Rem­brandt, his pa, and his uncle Thomp­son have to take to the road, nev­er stay­ing in any one place longer than twelve days. Because on the thir­teenth day, the Black Bot­tle Man will come for them…

* * *

This one took me by sur­prise; it built so steadi­ly, and so qui­et­ly, skip­ping from Rem­brandt’s youth to his 90-year-old dotage, that I did­n’t real­ize until the end just how much I had invest­ed in it. The cli­max caught me off guard with just how much emo­tion it wrung from me. Not many books have made me tear up. This one did­n’t, either, but man it was a near thing.

My only com­plaint would be that I found a few gram­mat­i­cal quib­bles, here and there, but on the whole this book is high­ly recommended.

Writ­ten by Craig Rus­sell, based on his radio play of the same name, Black Bot­tle Man is pub­lished by Great Plains Teen Fic­tion, an imprint of Great Plains Pub­li­ca­tions. My copy is signed because I went to the book launch at Pen­ny­wise Books here in Brandon.

Get it…
from the publisher
from Chapters/Indigo
from Amazon.com

This morning came awful early

When my wife’s alarm clock went off at 5:30 AM, she said to me, “When did you get in last night?”

Me: “3:30.”
Her: “Yeah. I woke up at 2:30, and you weren’t in yet. I thought, Those idiots*, and went back to sleep.”

Those idiots were me and my cow-ork­er Craig, and the rea­son we got in at 3:30 AM was that we went to the city to see Neil Gaiman last night.

A cou­ple photos:

Neil Gaiman in Winterpeg

Neil Gaiman's green scrawl

I’ll prob­a­by have more to say lat­er. Right now I have to get back to work.

____

* My wife would like it point­ed out that she called us dum­mies, not idiots.

Triple threat

I’m kind of a suck­er for cer­tain things:

  1. Images of galax­ies — I love the great whorls of stars that make up the vis­i­ble mass of the Universe
  2. The his­to­ry of sci­ence, espe­cial­ly physics and astronomy
  3. A clever title

So it was prob­a­bly inevitable that I’d check this book out of the library today:

I’ll let you know what I think when I’m done read­ing it.

A blast from the past

…in more ways than one.

When I was in Uni­ver­si­ty, there was a girl I knew that had a book called 10,000 Dreams Inter­pret­ed*. She point­ed one out to me, and it became my favourite dream ever:

To see a horse in human flesh, descend­ing on a ham­mock through the air, and as it nears your house is meta­mor­phosed into a man, and he approach­es your door and throws some­thing at you which seems to be rub­ber but turns into great bees, denotes mis­car­riage of hopes and use­less endeav­ors to regain lost valu­ables. To see ani­mals in human flesh, sig­ni­fies great advance­ment to the dream­er, and new friends will be made by mod­est wear­ing of well-earned hon­ors. If the human flesh appears dis­eased or freck­led, the mis­car­riage of well-laid plans is denoted.

source

Lit­tle did I know — until today — that that book was first pub­lished in 1901, and that dream’s been haunt­ing peo­ples’ minds ever since then.

____

* Or some­thing to that effect. Come on, this was 15+ years ago. Some­times I have a hard time remem­ber­ing where I put the cord­less phone ten min­utes ago.**

** Until it rings.

13 things I learned from books

But which books? See if you can guess… (Hint: They’re most­ly SF.)

  1. The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door sales­men, and no one knows why.
  2. Forc­ing grunts to swear at their supe­ri­or offi­cers is a stu­pid way to build morale.
  3. If every­thing is infi­nite­ly improb­a­ble, then every­thing is equal­ly probable.
  4. If the Fast Burn is itself tran­scen­dent, and unhap­py with the direc­tion of the channedring, it may attempt to hide the jumpoff birthinghel. Also: Hexa­po­dia is the key insight.
  5. Grey-green alien skin requires a lot of soap.
  6. Even miss­ing the index and mid­dle fin­gers of his right hand, Roland is a hell of a shot.
  7. Give praise to the day at evening, to a blade when tried, and to ice when over it.
  8. Anath­e­ma” looks like a girl’s name if you’ve nev­er read a dictionary.
  9. If your full name has twelve words in it, most peo­ple will for­give you if you go by “Phaethon”.
  10. If your full name is “Hiro Pro­tag­o­nist”, you can bet your par­ents had some kind of weird relationship.
  11. One does not out­run a sub­stance that explodes at 15,000 feet per sec­ond. Also, if you’re count­ing on the police to save you, best not to antag­o­nize them while you’re sit­ting on a bomb.
  12. Chuck” and “toss” are per­fect­ly valid instruc­tions in a cookbook.
  13. No mat­ter how inter­est­ing the many-uni­vers­es-bridged-by-jump-gates premise may be, I can only read a book with that many near-rape scenes once. And it was a rough slog at that.

These are all off the top of my head, by the way. And yes, some are repeats.

On my to-be-read pile

It just keeps grow­ing like a hydra. Here are the lat­est three books:

New books

Not pic­tured: The last Bar­ti­maeus nov­el; Rain­bows End by Vinge; a graph­ic nov­el about Louis Riel; an epic poem; The Bears’ Famous Inva­sion of Sici­ly; and a bunch I can’t even remem­ber right now.