Still > Recent Status Updates

As stunningly beautiful as the 1st time I read it. For instance:

“He left in ceaseless rain, the saddest that ever fell. He went by streets both steep and narrow and the rain fell all the way.

In that hour when tugboats call and call, like lovers who have lost their way”.

P. 237
“Up from the long grieving river they called, past track and tower and dock, to windows long darkened and doorways long locked; old beaux that had walked Perdido Street long ago, returning to mourn the names of girls they had loved. They had plenty to spend and all night for loving.

But the windows were darkened, the doors locked, and the only girls whose names they knew had no name now but dust.”

From learning the art of back-alley condom or “O-Daddies” manufacturing
our protagonist limps towards the sleazier side of Storyville.
Pimps & pandering.

“There was love behind the curtains and love behind the doors. Love in the squares and love along the curbs… Where every window framed some love bird framed in flight. Where every screen door was a cage. What had been Storyville was now an aviary.”

Dove Linkhorn teams up with a fallen pimp Algren describes as one who:
“… could bear his cross so mournfully, a sort of Kiwanis Christ in a Bing Crosby shirt, resigned to insult and injury without shred of larceny and incapable of imposing his woes on others.”

Life laughs at a former predator’s fall from grace.

Haven’t read a page of this outstanding SF crime-thriller in a week. Got a 100 year old mother-in-law who’s gotten hard for my father-in-law to handle. He’s 90. Can’t lift her easily.
So. With my wife it’s down to Manhattan to assist. It’s very hard to find acceptable nursing care. I do nothing but read & watch Trump’s “excursion” on BBC. 4 days a week.

Maybe I’ll finish this someday soon.

Read a few more pages in the parking lot of a grocery while my wife went in to pick up a couple of essentials.

Gets very bloody, violent.

I intend to finish this but… it’s like B. B. King said: the thrill is gone.

Keep putting this book down. Haven’t been reading anything but newspapers and related mainstream (I.e., non-Right leaning) news items) These are times a man must stand up and do the boogaloo, to paraphrase James Brown.

Reading this between trips down to Manhattan to tend to elderly in-laws (responsibility comes with aging parents) and in doctors’ waiting rooms.

Tom Waits for no one.

Compelling!

Suddenly very violent. Compelling and well written.

This is has been alternately engaging and as cold as Pluto. The techno jargon is such a drag; the plot device intriguing: in order to solve a crime, the chief investigator travels to “a future” - as all potential futures are accessible. Only once observed by a traveler, that future ceases to exist.

Trip my aged ass out!

First story was by Archie Goodwin with awesome artwork by Angelo Torres.
Got my issues confused back there.
Brilliant cover by Frazetta.

First story’s by the great. Archie Goodwin as were most of the stories published in Creepy & Eerie. Artwork bu Joe Orlando. Very different artwork from that of his earlier EC Comics period.

There’s a letter to the editor by a future Underground Comix legend Jay Lynch.

So far - absolutely brilliant. What a page turner!

Not much progress as I’ve started simultaneously reading another novel (SF/Crime) & rereading old Creepy & Eerie magazines from Warren Publishing I downloaded to read on an iPad Pro large screen (13”).

Thing about this novel… 1st read it when I was 14. The protagonist seemed like a noble bum riding the rails. 50 some odd years later he’s obviously just another asshole on life’s highway causing problems.

No way am I going to be finished with this anthology by the end of the year.
I’ll still be reading these stories as we enter the New Year. But I have to start a Nelson Algren novel I 1st read in junior high school.

Taking this anthology slow.
These interconnected stories are first-person narratives, each voiced by a character calling himself John.
They’re hardboiled tales involving bad cops, ex-cons, guys on the run, guys violating terms of their paroles, working “straight” gigs as loggers in Upstate New York.
Violence dogs them like a bad cough they can’t shake.
Amazing writer - a modern Steinbeck or Hemingway.

Don’t get why the author -Scott Wolven- isn’t being raved about across the reading universe.

Short stories of beautiful-losers, sentimentally unsentimental about real men and women, bent but square shooters, weathering quiet emotional breakdowns and tests of their soul’s resilience.

Criminals and ex-cons working blue collar gigs attempting to go straight.
As great as Wolven’s first collection of stories.

Lost a few days.

Had to do real life crap and set this down for a few.

I only realized today that the Errol Morris documentary film on Manson available on Netflix is related to this book with the author’s assistance.
Saw the documentary- can’t recall seeing any of this stuff covered.

Hard to put this down. Although the author ends too many sections with “?”.

So far, better than average true-crime reading.

So far it’s about a journalist who investigated the effects of the Manson orchestrated mayhem on the Hollywood film and music industries for Premiere Magazine in 1999. But one line here just kills me.

The author quotes a threat made by an alleged “connected” one time smuggler:
”Dead white men will pull your tongue out if you tell this…”
Straight outta James Hadley Chase.

Put down the Scott Wolven anthology to “temporarily” peruse a few pages of this very, very weird account of the Manson orchestrated massacres and the U.S. military’s use of mind control experiments with LSD.
I was immediately hooked after 20 pages accusing Vincent Bugliosi of fraud and of suborning perjury.

How do I know what page I’m on? Who’s counting?
Bought the Kindle edition.
Started this Monday.
The stories I’ve read have truly impressed me.
They’re almost Harlan Ellisonesque and faintly tinted by Charle Beaumont like depictions of human fallibility.
Truly moving speculative fiction occasionally involving situations with nonhuman entities or devices dealing with moral dilemmas caused by careless humans.

Had a family emergency. Hospital visit via ambulance for my wife at 3 in the morning.
Had to put the book down for 6 days. Rejoined -action in progress- last night.

This new one by Jason Bovberg is such a compelling read. Not a wasted line to be found. Super tight writing.

Jason ain’t no amateur. This is exciting stuff!