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Karl’s turn of fortune is basically foundational paranoia. Robinson torpedoes his current job and the Head Porter despises him so much that he takes Karl to what is basically a dungeon in order to dress him down, further complicating any reunion with Therese and his effects, and he takes the cab unwisely with Robinson, only to be further waylaid when a policeman takes interest in the scene that the cabbie makes.

In a painful moment, after practically thriving as a lift boy at the Hotel Occidental, Karl loses his job because one of the two jerks that had been fleecing him on the way to the hotel shows up fantastically drunk so that Karl has to leave his post in order to remove him from view of the guests. I really hate it because he was getting comfortable and enjoying his time with Therese, the typist.

Karl allows himself to be talked into visiting one of his uncle’s friends, clearly against the will of his uncle. This works out poorly for him—partly because he has a horrible time and his friend’s daughter, Klara, beats the shit out of him using jiu-jitsu, but mostly because this is used by his uncle the senator as a pretense to break with Karl entirely, abandoning him to the wiles of America.

I was expecting something a little more absurd than what I’ve read so far but the way in which Karl quickly takes to the stoker and then is found by his uncle is a little out of the ordinary. Karl has a very naive idea of how the audience with the captain was going to play out, but he’s a seventeen year old German immigrant. He quickly acclimates to English under his uncle, the senator.

Ooooh I was right about Pilar not being the daughter and Farr not being a Farr but not i suppose the current truth of Farr’s identity

At this point Poirot is clearly alluding to the murderer being one of Lee’s bastard sons who he jabbered about. I strongly suspect Sugden but Farr is the other potential killer. Other possibilities:
1) Pilar is not actually Jennifer’s daughter
2) Harry is actually a bastard son who has assumed his identity
3) I’m such a Hastings and it’s actually, idk, Hilda.

the thing is that you can grasp at some of the secrets that the family is holding back, but right now who did what and when is mostly conjecture. Pilar lied about dancing with Farr, or Farr lied about not dancing with her. Who is lying and why? The references to the scream suggest that someone butchered an actual pig in order to get all the blood. The quotations imply David and Lydia acting a part.

Oh no!! They found a body!!

It seems as though the murder scene has been staged. I’m sure that Simeon died some time before the screaming. The bit with the butler taking stock of what the family is doing during the afternoon is a great way to set the scene for the reader and sew doubt. Like, is it REALLY David playing the “Dead March” when he’s preferred Mendelssohn?

Christie always leads into the anatomy of a murder. It’s pretty clear that the wicked old patriarch, who has gathered all of his family together for Christmas, is gonna die. Thus this spread of potential killers and motives. We even get an inkling of who the South African chap is with the remark about Simeon ruining a man who had crossed him. All that’s left is to crowbar Poirot into the whole mess!

“Shoofly”

An executive is being stood up for a meeting and is distracted, annoyed, and then enraged by the presence of a fly, completely wrecking his office in an attempt to kill it, and putting his own health at risk.

I like Matheson’s prose but it’s so exhausting to experience this parade of comically enraged men. There isn’t a thing that happens where they aren’t ready to pull their own head off.

“Duel”

Mann is a traveling salesman who passes a big stinky truck on the highway in the California hills. Said big stinky truck initiates a lethal conflict, fueled by road rage, that drives both vehicles to their limits. Vehicular antagonism still is a pretty widespread phenomenon. A cell phone could maybe change the tone of the story but given the isolated road it happens on, maybe not so much.

“Button, Button”

A couple gets a mysterious box followed by a mysterious proposal. Press the button and someone you don’t know dies, and you receive 50,000 dollars. Arthur, the husband, is very principled and refuses to consider the offer. Norma, the wife, slowly rationalizes taking it up. Not just for herself, you see, but for the joy the money will bring to their marriage.

“By Appointment Only”

Speaking of Needful Things, the customer in this story’s last name is Pangborn! This is a classic twist-paced story where a husband and wife, barber and manicurist, keep a business by appointment only. As it turns out, the wife is practicing voodoo—it’s revealed toward the end that she’s Haitian—and they are running a scam with what I assume is a chiropractor.

“The Distributor”

Imagine Needful Things except it’s one normal but heartless man working alone in order to destabilize a basically happy suburban neighborhood and with none of the levity of the human struggle against evil. Some of Theodore’s tactics include blackmail, race-baiting, murdering pets, and straight up misinformation, as well as crank calls that dial up the stress of the targets.

“Mantage”

Owen Crowley speculates with his fiancée that movies gloss over a lot of important things in life. Then, well, he wishes that he could skip the ten years it took to be a successful writer. From that point on, Owen’s life becomes a movie; he exists within the montage, cannonballing through life’s major moments until the inevitable end.

“The Holiday Man”

David has a job that he doesn’t like. On his day, he goes up to his office and then takes the psychic blowback of every death that occurs over the day, experiencing each one of them and then documenting them so that they have accurate death statistics. David’s time is, unfortunately, the holidays, which I assume is why he logs so many traffic accidents on July 4th.

“The Test”

In the future, they passed a law where the elderly have to take aptitude tests every five years. If you don’t pass, then the government gives you a grace window before lethal injection. Les is trying to help his 80 year old father study for the test, but his wife wants to be done with supporting the old man, as it’s a strain on their resources.

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”

John Lithgow in The Twilight Zone movie is seared into my brain for this one. Matheson has his fun, here. Whether the gremlin is real or not is up for argument. Either way, Wilson is cracking up and has brought a gun onto an airplane, ostensibly for protection but with a secret purpose: suicide. Metaphorically, the ensuing conflict is against his self-sabotage.

“The Incredible Shrinking Man”

A pretty good action-adventure-horror. Scott is kind of a miserable character but he turns the corner toward the end, finally doing what he should have done. This character turn happens in flashbacks at the same time that he decides to fight the spider, which is a great way to pace the story. The ending is kind of a cop-out, but not a “everything is back to normal!” one.

Carey isn’t a likable character; he damns himself to sate his ego in the short term time and time again. These fifty pages include a long segment where he, 21 inches tall, lusts after his daughter’s babysitter while he’s locked in the cellar to keep her from discovering the secret that, really, horrifies himself, because the only thing that really matters to Scott is Scott.

This book is sort of a parable on male fragility. Scott wants Louise to acknowledge the inevitable end of his shrinking because he wants her to be empathetic. As far as it applies to him, though, he refuses to do anything different and then melts down whenever he runs into the inevitable hardship. The other part is a meditation on the nature of living when you know that you must die.

Scott Carey is shrinking 1/7 of an inch a day. The story is composed of segments where he is struggling to survive during the final week in his cellar, in a perilous country ruled by a hunting black widow spider, split up by segments where him and his family is suffering from how is shrinking state, uh, belittles him in other ways. Carey isn’t a great role model in how he reacts but he’s entirely understandable.

Letitia corrupted; the general’s bride wins concessions for the church but then becomes so replete with the general’s power that her distant family exploits it, the churches exploit it, and the people come to hate her, so her and their son are assassinated by a pack of wild dogs, and he finds himself exploited by a man who has taken the desire for vengeance and twisted the power around himself.

The fourth segment details the death of the general’s mother, resulting in—ultimately—nothing less than the obliteration of all faiths except the cult of his mother, a way of covering up for the initial exploitation of her death, dovetailed with his “one love” Leticia Nazareno, a nun who he sends out—with all the other clergy—naked, only to trigger her abduction and imprisonment in his mansion.

The next section introduced Manuela Sánchez, a poor but beautiful girl who finds herself the target of the General’s befuddled amors, and starts to develop the horrified thought patterns of the people who he makes direct contact with, whose lives are forever altered by the godlike power that surrounds him, and so Manuela is rescued through a divine intercession during a total eclipse.

This book isn’t slow but it’s exhausting. Each section is a single paragraph of stream of consciousness remembrances, the first one detailing the General’s “second” death and recounting the “first”, that of his double, and how he came to have a double and how the double had come to die and how dissatisfied he was when he saw just how the nation would react to his own passing.

I was expecting the villain twist—the story laid it out pretty clear early on—and it’s a pretty tidy way of plotting. Obviously they needed some kind of talisman to protect them from the Dark while they traveled, and the explanation has that sort of mystic, sympathetic magic that this series delights in.

The trials of the Lost Land and its doom is hauntingly beautiful. There is a certain poignancy in Gwion’s efforts. The Lost Land is in stasis because of the ban on the crystal sword, but fulfilling its purpose—obtaining the sword—will result in its inevitable destruction. The novel’s out is magically Vonnegut—that all things continue to exist in time, as the Old Ones perceive that it is not linear.

I enjoy this book at the most when it is moving through metaphysical and faith tale-like spaces and The Lost Land has been nothing but. I’m surprised to see The Rider again but it’s only fitting as he was banished to the Ends of the Earth. Will and Bran make for a fun duo, but I’m wondering how the Drews fit into the rest of this, especially with how Jane had been feeling.

this book is AWESOME

the conflict with the lake monster and Bran exercising his power is great. the mashing of the times with the three “off the track” is, uh, all about ancient conflicts bleeding into the present, as the blood feud explains the bad blood in book four. It also echoes the story of the pirate in book three, though there it was more an echo of the walker from book two.