Juan > Recent Status Updates

and there was a sign in the restroom that said “Employees Must Wash Hands.” I waited for nearly a half-hour. No employee showed up to wash my hands. Even when I tracked one down and insisted, they did it begrudgingly, and let’s just say, it was a less-than-thorough job.

in chapter 2, we're introduced to the Domino Lady, Ellen Patrick, raised by her widowed father in all ways athletic and intellectual, by her aunts in feminine and charm. As beautiful as she is a genius, she uses her skills to exact revenge against the gangsters who killed her Attorney General father.

I came across this book at a comic con where I bought it from the author CJ Henderson. Years later, I decided to actually read To Battle Beyond, it was on the top of the pile so I grabbed it. Featuring characters in the public domain: Inspector Legrasse from The Call of Cthulu, The Black Bat, a blind vigilante and The Domino Lady, a detective that wears a domino mask. Pulps were a simpler time.
So far, I am intrigued

The ceiling was coming down upon me, with a force which must grind me to a pulp. Then it flashed through my mind that the pain of my death would depend upon the position in which I met it. If I lay on my face the weight would come upon my spine, and I shuddered to think of that dreadful snap. Easier the other way, perhaps; and yet, had I the nerve to lie and look up at that deadly black shadow wavering down upon me?

“He heard Paz grunt. Then the pink, plump hand swung up into his view; the pink, plump hand now spattered with blood. In the manicured fingers dangled a little pouchlike object Eddie couldn’t identify at first. And then he did: it was [his] severed scrotum, with testicles still inside.”

Excerpt From
Lights Out
Peter Abrahams

Well, things took a turn for the worst.

“I’m going to melt,” Karen said. She stood up, leaving a sweaty imprint of her sex on the bench.”

Excerpt From
Lights Out
Peter Abrahams
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/ligh...
This material may be protected by copyright.

This is the writing I have to deal with. “He wanted to dance with Sookray, but more than that he wanted to dance.
Eddie and the woman went up on the battlements and danced. He forgot about Sookray.”

Closing in on the end of the first act. I went into this book somewhat blind. It was on Stephen King’s recommended reading list in On Writing, Peter Abrahams is one of his favorite writers. Having said that, I don’t know much more about this book. Is it a thriller, suspense, romance? So now at this point a plot is developing with the introduction of an adversary (?).

Spoilers ahead...Eddie sleeps with the boss’s girl; Eddie gets caught by the boss because no one locks their cabin doors, boss freaks out and gets in the Jeep and shoots at them with a rifle (in front of his investors and his wife is nearby), Eddie and the girl make an escape on the boat, boat gets pulled over by authorities and they find a lot of pot on the boat. So I guess this is why he goes to jail for 15 years.

Now we are in full flashback mode, for the last few chapters. Eddie dives into the pool and we’ve gone back 15 years prior to when he spent a summer in the Caribbean island. Is this going to turn into a bodice ripper?

Still on the first act so it’s a lot of flashbacks on Eddie as he wanders through his old hometown after getting out of prison.

I’m picturing Stone Cold Steve Austin as the protagonist, “He saw what everyone else must see: the shaven skull, the pale skin, and eyes they probably didn’t like the look of; superficially nice, but their expression was cold, wary, hostile.”

I picked up this book because Stephen King had listed it as a favorite on his reading list from In Writing. I can see why, the style is very much like his.

"All at once he grabbed at the wheel. Bourne smashed the barrel of his Makarov down on the back of his hand, and Suarez bellowed like a maddened bull. He snatched his hand away, cradling it with the other.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” he cried. “You’ve broken it!”"
I'm pretty sure the FARC commander would've been swearing in Spanish.

"To lose everything—your very life—was an unspeakable agony. He was wandering in an unknown land. The stars overhead were arrayed in unfamiliar constellations, and the sun never rose. He was alone, the impenetrable darkness ahead his sole companion.
The darkness, and, of course, the pain."
OMG, Jason get over it!!

put the square root of five hundred and thirty-nine point seven together with the cosine of twenty-six point four three two

Methinks this is a romance novel. I was under the impression it was a historical novel.

“OK,” said Richard, “I’ll be with you in about twenty minutes.” “Shall I leave the window open or would you like to try the door?” she said with a sniff.

seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists.