Clint Jones > Recent Status Updates

So purple! Tires spinning in mud. Not enjoying this one

No traction. Neutrality reigns: did their cohort commit the murder? Shrug. Do you believe him? Shrug. Do you like the guy? Only so far. Should we try to prove (meaning find out) if Orrie’s innocent. Let’s finish laying odds and then decide. Weird and dull.

… just finished chapter 24 (of 28). Too bad it wasn’t the first chapter. Like popcorn or snow, a lot of nothing accumulates.

Not typical for Chandler: feels like waiting at a bus stop, trying to be interested in traffic.

The first 1/4 is about preparing to leave on an ocean voyage.

The plot advances by a maddening process of recursive summary. The only thing moving forward so far is prince Bifalt’s entourage through an unmapped, vague geography

No fun.

Long exposition, telling not showing.

Everyone ever mentioned has a name even though only a fraction of them will likely be significant to the plot.

Also the puma, P-22 was based on fact
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/puma...

The title story is based on an actual event:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death...

So many examples! Especially sports icons. Enough to make it unrelatable

“Viriconium is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to “make real.” You can’t read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else” —M John Harrison

https://fantasticmetropolis.com/i/vir...

…. Though I am pleased to have waited until ereaders were around to help me with this vast, cryptic but juicy virtuoso vocabulary: swarf-eaters

There’s a special tension about rereading a favorite book. The pleasure is there for the taking, but in the back of your mind you know it might be the last time!

Switched translations deep into chapter 3. Lowe-Porter got me that far but when I found out about Woods, I figured why cling to the awkwardness?

Ref https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernis...

1920-30: Theory of Relativity (1905) becomes widely known by the public

1912-1924: The Magic Mountain (1924) was developed and published

A path is always longer the first time we traverse it

Early Ellroy. Unique voice, but nothing close to what’s in store.

Signature 80s serial killer worship. Gruesome, borderline horror along the lines of Silence of the Lambs.

Plot is cliche, killer’s ‘surprise’ identity has been done many times before. Ellroy telegraphs the solution halfway through. Leaves the spotlight on the characters instead, which is done well, but not yet up to his more mature standards

A very wooden start. Little showing, plenty of telling. Seemed a little like 2001, until about the 1/3 mark, when it livened up a bit. Then it became more like The Thing, or the later Prometheus movies

Mieville inspires the moniker “poetic horror”:

Down inside the hill, a second hill: a mound of trash and corpses decaying in layers and coated in hill dust in the dark. At its top, like a triumphant climber, my mother, looking sightlessly up at me with soap in her eyes.

Loving it so far. Humor is amped up, providing the framework (“I got enough misery in my life without adding religion to it”)

This one has a more traditional framework. A poisoning at a party, a list of suspects… Filler chapters with little plot advancement. What did Fritz serve for breakfast. No memorable quips yet.

Ornate

A bit tired of hitting “Ned Beaumont” speed bumps. Haven’t been this annoyed with character name repetition since Roooobert Laaaangden

Callous portrayed scene of a calmly accepted mass rape

Re: Bobok, check out Wikipedia.
“Bobok” is a nonsensical word used by one of the dead. The story highlights many of the themes Dostoyevsky developed in his famous works. He uses Ancient Greek Menippean satire used to attack mental attitudes instead of specific individuals

Though he drove with care his body was completely relaxed and his mind was at rest

“The engine roared like a beast and Doctor Faustaff chanted mindlessly to its rhythm”

“you must never tell a lie, for to do so shows that you are afraid of the person to whom you tell it, and I want you to be afraid of nobody”

“I want a vast empty heaven to laugh into for several eternities.”