The Yukon is a natural setting for horror. You don't need to add the supernatural to make the place scary. It's remote, it's dark, it's cold, there arThe Yukon is a natural setting for horror. You don't need to add the supernatural to make the place scary. It's remote, it's dark, it's cold, there are bears and wolves, and the natives don't like you.
Add the supernatural and you've got the makings for some pretty good horror if done right.
The Broken Places is okay, though it never quite achieved the necessary level of creep-you-out or jump-out-of-your-skin or shocking-twist to make it great horror. We get hints early on that the main protagonist, Ryne Burdette, has a creepy family history. His father and uncle used to bring him out to their family cabin in the Yukon for hunting trips, and Ryne saw and heard just enough to know there was some weird shit going on, though he was too young to put it together.
Now, Ryne and his two best friends Sean and Noah are going back to his family's cabin for a hunting trip, just ahead of a winter storm that's going to cut off almost all communication with the outside world. Right away they run into a weird, scary deer who just stands in front of their vehicle and won't be moved. This encounter is the first of many that goes terribly. The three of them end up trapped in the cabin facing nature that isn't acting natural, and local villagers who just need gills to resemble Innsmouth.
Interspersed with the unfolding horror story in the Yukon are flashbacks to each of the men's lives. Ryne, Sean, and Noah have all survived recent tragedies in their lives, so we get a bit of character development to develop some sympathy for each of them, but I actually found it a bit distracting, as only Ryne's story is immediately relevant, and the others were just a bit of extraneous background detail. Sean is a former pro baseball player whose dreams were shattered when a knee injury wrecked his leg. Noah survived almost being suffocated in a grain silo. Ryne's wife had a miscarriage, leading to the collapse of their marriage. They're all traumatized in different ways. Going out into the snowy tundra to shoot things is a very male way of bonding and trying to get over shit, but since this is a horror novel, you know it's not going to end well.
The supernatural ramps up pretty quickly, and although there are no direct Lovecraftian references, it's obvious this book was written in Lovecraft's shadow. The existential horror of a cold, uncaring universe filled with hostile entities who either don't care about humans or see us as food, the bleak setting, the creepy villagers, the horrors of the Old World cast against horrors imported from the New World, and the protagonists struggling against cosmic forces, would all fit right into his universe.
This was not a bad winter's read, but it just wasn't original or gripping enough to thrill me....more
I was introduced to Laird Barron by way of his horror fiction, which is top notch in both literary style and creepiness. A worthy heir to Lovecraft anI was introduced to Laird Barron by way of his horror fiction, which is top notch in both literary style and creepiness. A worthy heir to Lovecraft and Poe, who works the Alaskan wilderness and the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest like Stephen King works Maine, he has apparently decided that thrillers are where the money's at. Hence his new Isaiah Coleridge series, which is already up to three books though I am just getting started on it, having had this one on my TBR pile for a while.
Isaiah Coleridge seems to be built on the "big lug with a warm mushy center" archetype, but that warm mushy center is buried pretty deep, beneath a layer of callouses, scar tissue, and daddy issues. Coleridge is half-Maori and all killer. His dad was a high-ranking Air Force officer with connections all over, before he killed Isaiah's mother in an "accident," leaving Isaiah angry, angry, angry and just waiting for his chance to take vengeance against his old man. That's all backstory (which we get in snippets here and there throughout the book), but when we first meet him, he's working for the Alaskan Mob (yes, there's an Alaskan Mob) as a well-regarded leg breaker and skull crusher. He's an enforcer who cleans up messes.
He's on a boat with a Mob captain he's been sent to keep an eye on, who's brought some of the boys out to gun down a bunch of hapless walruses. Partly for their ivory, and partly because why not?
Turns out Coleridge can watch people die without flinching, but something snaps when this schmuck from Chicago decides to slaughter a bunch of dumb animals for no good reason. He karate chops the guy in the throat. End of the hunting trip, they all return without any walrus tusks. Except Coleridge just wrecked the singing career of a made man, and that has repercussions.
Thanks to his rep and his father's connections, he gets a stay of execution from the head boss in Alaska. Instead, he's put out to pasture — literally. He's sent to work at a horse farm in upstate New York, run by a nice couple who owes a few favors and has made their farm into something of a refuge for wayward mob killers, vets with PTSD, and other assorted ne'er do wells.
Coleridge is supposed to stay out of trouble, of course, but a teenage girl, a "troubled" kid who's the granddaughter of friends of the farm's owner, gets herself in deep with the local bad boys. Coleridge has a soft spot for her because she's mean to everyone but horses. When she disappears and the cops don't care (they're all crooked, and also, she's black), he starts an investigation of his own. Thus begins a bloody epic journey, like unto the labors of Hercules or the journey of Odysseus, an allusion I suspect Barron intended to suggest given how often Coleridge references the Greek classics.
Coleridge loves violence. He takes inhuman amounts of punishment in this book, and stares death in the face multiple times without blinking. He breaks many bones and sheds buckets of blood, stabbing and chopping and shooting his way through the grimy underworld of Newburgh, NY, encountering along the way Mohawk gangsters who like to get "traditional" with their enemies, Mafia captains, backwoods moonshiners, crooked cops, and equally crooked FBI agents.
Despite all this prodigious violence, Coleridge never seems like a superhuman, nor is he the brute killer he seems to be. He's very intelligent, even witty. The dialog Laird Barron writes is darkly humorous. Coleridge has got some issues with dear old dad, but mostly he's just one tough hombre with a soft spot for animals and dumb teenagers.
I loved it. It was refreshing to have a male protagonist who's a bonafide bad-ass but not a gary stu. The ending is not exactly happy, but Coleridge is still in one piece, and he's set himself up as something of a "fixer" (not quite a private detective, but definitely no longer a hitter for the Mob), with a whole slew of connections for the author to draw on in the next book.
Blood Standard is great piece of grimdarkly comic noir, and while I hope Laird Barron hasn't abandoned horror, I will definitely follow this series....more
This is a short narrative by an Alaskan native and actor, who heard about the tragic fate of another Alaskan Inuit who'd set out to make it big in HolThis is a short narrative by an Alaskan native and actor, who heard about the tragic fate of another Alaskan Inuit who'd set out to make it big in Hollywood. Teddy Kyle Smith had had some small success in the movie industry, but apparently alcohol and whatever other demons were haunting him drove him back to a violent manhunt in his home town. His mother died in suspicious circumstances, he fled into the wild, and after shooting a few people, was anticlimactically captured without a fight.
The harshness of Alaskan life, and in particular, the closed, impoverished, culturally colonized world of Alaskan natives, living in small villages where there is almost no law enforcement and no trust for the white man's government, is a brutal breeding ground for abuse of all kinds.
The author/narrator, James Donmek, tells us about all this and tells a powerful and sad story about Teddy Kyle Smith. But there aren't really any answers to be had: Smith was just another drunk, violent man who wound up in prison. So the tangent in which we learn that Smith told a wild tale after being arrested, and then right there in the courtroom, of encountering Iñukuns - a legendary elf-like race of hidden people supposedly still living out in the northern wastes - seems like a sideshow. Sure, it's spooky and I'm sure if you're alone in the Alaskan outback, it becomes easy to believe in Iñukuns. But the reality is that an entire tribe can't be living out there unseen in the modern world; Teddy Kyle Smith was either crazy or bullshitting. It did make a good story, but this is another true crime story where the setting and the details make it interesting, but the actual events are all too everyday....more
A bunch of vampires get the genius idea to go up to Barrow, Alaska, where the sun is about to set for 30 days. As the vampire ringleader says, "Why diA bunch of vampires get the genius idea to go up to Barrow, Alaska, where the sun is about to set for 30 days. As the vampire ringleader says, "Why did no one ever think of this before?" Well, it's a great idea for a short story, but hardly a basis for the entire series this has become. How many people are there to feed on in one small Alaskan town, after all?
This was a full-cast audio production which straightforwardly follows the plot of the graphic novel. Vampires descend on a town, kill everyone in sight, with many gory, gurgling, ripping sound effects, until hope manifests in the form of the sheriff determined to fight back. (I still found it pretty improbable, though.)...more
I never read White Fang as a kid, but I would have liked it. While Jack London wasn't writing primarily for children, it's very much a Boy's AdventureI never read White Fang as a kid, but I would have liked it. While Jack London wasn't writing primarily for children, it's very much a Boy's Adventure sort of novel, especially nowadays, when Alaska is no longer quite the unimaginable alien wilderness it was in London's day, and wolves are mostly consigned to lurking at the borders of civilization, and regarded more with pity (when not being exterminated) than fear. So the story of this half-dog, half-wolf who started out as an Indian sled dog and winds up the happy housepet of a judge in California reads as a quaint adventure from a bygone time.
White Fang tells the story of a wolf-dog born wild but eventually captured by an Alaskan Indian tribe and made to lead a sled. White Fang is the fiercest and most savage of his pack, and learns to fight and survive with greater cunning and skill than any of his kind. London imparts a great deal of willfulness and reasoning to White Fang that is probably more than could actually be attributed to a canine, but it reads almost believably, as if you're getting into the actual mind of this fierce, intelligent, savage creature who isn't quite a person and not quite fully sapient, but still has a definite personality and memories and motivations.
In many ways, White Fang is a Conan-like hero. He's a singular specimen of his kind, raised on hardship and brutality, genetically gifted, destined to become the most fearsome warrior in the land. He defeats dogs and wolves alike. He spends some time forced to become a fighting dog, at the hands of a particularly brutal white man, before he is taken by another white man who manages to earn his trust and loyalty and eventually (and improbably) bend him to domesticated life in sunny California.
White Fang's adventures are high-spirited and often bloody, but even when White Fang is being a real son-of-a-bitch, you're always rooting for the dog....more
Dread's Hand is a great name for a town out in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, Alaska. Whenever I read about some remote village with practically zero Dread's Hand is a great name for a town out in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, Alaska. Whenever I read about some remote village with practically zero amenities, employment, culture, or anything to do except get drunk and start eying your spouse's neck while fondling a butcher knife, I wonder what holds a place like that together. Obviously anyone with any intelligence or ambition in life or a desire to see something other than long, dark winters would leave, but enough people stay for the place to linger, a barely-populated dot on the map that occasionally makes national news when, say, an old coot wanders out of the woods and announces he's killed about a dozen people and left them buried all over the place.
Bone White is a murder mystery on the surface — when the friendly neighborhood serial killer surrenders to the police (he has to wait several hours for them to get up to Dread's Hand), the only thing he won't tell them is why he did it, or the names of the people he killed. But back in Baltimore Paul Gallo sees the news and since his identical twin brother happened to disappear up near Dread's Hand, Alaska, a year ago, naturally he sees this as the possibility of getting answers and/or closure. So he flies out to Alaska and drives up to Dread's Hand, asking questions, poking around, and getting treated like you'd expect an outsider poking around to be treated in a place like Dread's Hand.
That the locals are superstitious and soon there emerge campfire tales of Wendigo-like demons and madness, people going "Bone White" and having their souls stolen by the Devil out in the woods, is not surprising. Paul, of course, believes none of this, even as things do start going creepy and sideways. The novel teases with the hint of supernatural dealings for quite a while — this isn't a book that goes straight to the meat and the horror, but lets the reader guess. Is the author going to pull a Wendigo out of the woods, or will this be a mundane mass murder after all?
The Big Reveal was pulled off better than most novels of this sort, and I thought the author preserved the tension and creepiness and mystery almost to the end. If you like creepy thrillers set in remote places, that may or may not have supernatural elements in them, Bone White is quite satisfying....more
Wow! I don't know if I've ever actually read a Jack London story before. I suppose I must have in elementary school. But The Call of the Wild, a shortWow! I don't know if I've ever actually read a Jack London story before. I suppose I must have in elementary school. But The Call of the Wild, a short novel of 84 pages, is really an excellent adventure - simple, straightforward, but with crisp prose, rousing adventure, and who doesn't love a dog story? And no sentimental tail-wagging doggie here, but a metaphor for the ancient struggle between civilization and nature, the blessings and disadvantages of giving up our ancestral survival instincts and attunement to the natural world for the comforts of hearthfires and permanent shelter.
Buck, our furry protagonist, is half-Saint Bernard, half-German Shepard. He starts life as the lazy pet of a wealthy California judge, but during the Klondike gold rush of 1897, big dogs like Buck are in high demand as sled dogs, so he is kidnapped and sold up the coast to begin a new life. He soon learns the way of fang and club, as this formerly gentle giant proves to be a sort of Conan among canines. Not just in brute strength and capacity for violence, but also in cunning.
He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway. The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused. As the days went by, other dogs came, in crates and at the ends of ropes, some docilely, and some raging and roaring as he had come; and, one and all, he watched them pass under the dominion of the man in the red sweater. Again and again, as he looked at each brutal performance, the lesson was driven home to Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated. Of this last Buck was never guilty, though he did see beaten dogs that fawned upon the man, and wagged their tails, and licked his hand. Also he saw one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in the struggle for mastery.
Jack London made Buck a compelling protagonist — while the dogs are anthropomorphized just a little, depicted as having greater understanding and self-awareness than real dogs probably do, they do not speak, or behave in any other way unrealistically. (Well, towards the end, Buck becomes something of a super-dog, capable of heroic feats like pulling a thousand-pound sled and defeating black bears, wolverines, Indian tribes, and wolf packs by himself. But let's give Jack London some artistic license.) Buck's gradual awakening to his true primitive nature evolves from his understanding of men with clubs, to his fatal duel with a rival huskie, to his penultimate stage of life, at last, with a man he truly loves, and then his final trek into the wilderness.
This is a very masculine, adventuresome book and I can see why it's popular with kids, especially boys. Jack London clearly idealized the wilderness and the life of a primitive, though it may have contributed to his own early demise. In reality, of course, the life of a dog turned loose in the wild is likely to be brutal and short, but you can read The Call of the Wild and imagine Buck running free in the Alaskan Yukon, howling with his wolf-brothers.
It's a great little story, not all that deep, but it does resonate with clear and powerful themes, and Jack London's prose goes down surprisingly well....more
In 1992, a privileged twenty-two-year-old slacker white dude Tyler Durden-wannabe with a head full of Jack London, Tolstoy, and Thoreau gave away his In 1992, a privileged twenty-two-year-old slacker white dude Tyler Durden-wannabe with a head full of Jack London, Tolstoy, and Thoreau gave away his college fund and went on a walkabout beginning in California and ending in Alaska, where he died of starvation. And it was all basically to give the finger to his stupid parents dumb stupid parents what do they know I'll show them don't need no stupid parents....
Okay, that's kind of mean. But while he certainly didn't deserve to die, especially not a lingering death of starvation and (hypothesized by Krakauer) poisoning, it was hard to feel sorry for Chris McCandless, a young man who had pretty much been handed everything in his life and rejected it all to go prove he was a rugged individualist who didn't need no government or parents or nobody.
In fairness, he was just behaving like a typical young man. He was at the right age to be working out the tail-end of his youthful rebellion phase and asserting himself, and Krakauer himself makes the point that he was just reenacting for himself the ancient manhood trials that have been rites in most societies throughout history. McCandless decided to do it by hiking his unprepared ass into Alaska and living off the land, ignoring all the good advice he received from people who told him this was a bad idea.
That said, he actually did pretty well for himself, and as Krakauer retraces his life, his route, and how he met his end, the kid doesn't seem as dumb or unprepared as he's been made out to be. He wasn't really ready for the challenges he had taken on, but other people have managed to survive with less preparation and less equipment under equally harsh circumstances. Basically, McCandless made a few critical mistakes, any of which might have been survivable, but the cumulative effect probably doomed him.
Although McCandless's tale is interesting and sad, there isn't really that much to tell, so Krakauer pads out the book with stories about a few of the other people he met who had crossed paths with Chris while writing this biography - there are all kinds of interesting folks "living off the grid" or doing the perpetual road trip thing - and a few other Alaskan expeditions gone wrong. I enjoyed Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, which like Into the Wild linked a single incident to a much broader historical topic, but in this case, the incident and the topic, while interesting, didn't provide enough material for a longer book. A good read and compelling at times, but mostly you just end up shaking your head and feeling sorry for McCandless's family, and wondering if McCandless would have returned from his Alaskan adventure and settled down into a regular job and made peace with his folks, had he survived....more
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