Review: The Wages of Fear

I’m a long-time fan of the French film Le Salaire de la peur, a.k.a. The Wages of Fear, as well at its big-budget American remake, Sorcerer. Both tell essentially the same story of losers hired to drive trucks of nitroglycerin to extinguish an oil fire, and while the details differ greatly, the ultimate thematic point remains the same: the universe doesn’t … Read More

Review: Heart of Iron

  Ekaterina Sedia’s Heart of Iron is the latest from a novelist who embraces genre–in this case both steampunk and alternate history–but brings a full-on literary sensibility to them.  This, her fifth novel, posits a Russia where the 1825 Decembrist revolution succeeded (read about that history here) and the new emperor sets about modernizing Russia with a vengeance.  But people … Read More

Film review: “Dawn of the Dragonslayer”

First, a digression: the SyFy Channel, much like MTV before it, has done considerable damage to the very thing it first embraced. Now the phrase, “A SyFy Original Movie” elicits the same sort of laughter as Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and for the same reason: you hear it and you know you’re in for a bad movie. And SyFy is … Read More

Meg Coburn, the forgotten action heroine

I love action heroines.  I’ve even put one in my next Eddie LaCrosse novel, Wake of the Bloody Angel.  But my standards require, if not strict adherence, at least lip service to the laws of the natural world.  That negates the whole concept of the “ass-kicking sprite,” wherein a tiny female character suddenly has the ability to overpower people (usually … Read More

Review: Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine

Bruce Springsteen says his classic song “Born to Run” is about people looking for “connection.” The great crime novelist Andrew Vachss fills his stories with people forming “families of choice” to retain their humanity against the brutal outside world. And in the same vein, the heart of Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti shows how the bonds … Read More

Mamet’s Theatre: an extended whine

Recently I had the unmitigated pleasure of discovering Beginnings, playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote’s memoir of his years as a young man in the theater. It started me on a little run of books about American theatrical thought, such as an immense collection of Lee Strasberg lectures, and made me eager to see a live theatrical performance, something I haven’t done in … Read More

Survival of the Dead and how to keep a series interesting

Some background on me and George Romero’s zombies: I saw Night of the Living Dead one Saturday afternoon when I was in high school. The Memphis TV station, apparently thinking it was some innocuous old B&W horror movie, did not edit it. Forget the graphic intestine-eating: I’d never before seen a movie where the hero died such a pointless death. … Read More

Sailing through Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes

After my recent dire experience with The Island, Peter Benchley’s 1979 pirate adventure (see my post here), I was leery of another “best-selling” author tackling the same subject. I was doubly leery when that author was the late Michael Crichton, a writer whose brilliant and innovative ideas are invariably balanced by a nonexistent sense of pacing, characterization and style. And … Read More