Flaming Zepplins

Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal by Joe R. Lansdale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Flaming Zeppelins contains Zeppelins West and Flaming London by Joe Lansdale.

In that hazy time before Goodreads, I read both of these books. While I love Hap and Leonard, these were the crazy ass books that made me a Joe Lansdale fan. Thanks to the magic of getting older, I remember almost nothing about them so I need a refresher course before I read the concluding book in the trilogy, The Sky Done Ripped.

Zeppelins West is the tale of a rescue mission that went tits up, sending our heroes out of the frying pan and into the fire, as the cliche goes. Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill Cody's head in a jar try to save Frankenstein's Monster from the Japanese and wind up on the island of Doctor Momo.

Crude humor, witting lines, and violence abound as Lansdale hits a lot of Jules Verne and HG Welles high notes with spoofs of Doctor Moreau and Captain Nemo, with guest spots from the Tin Man and and a lot of other turn of the century literary characters. I forgot what a shit storm the second part of this novella is. The love affair between the Tin Man and SPOILER is my favorite part of the story.

Flaming London is what really happened when the Martians invaded London, with Mark Twain, Jules Verne, and Ned the Seal stranded on Misty Island for a while as the fabric of space and time unravels.

Mark Twain has hit rock bottom at the beginning of Flaming London, with only a dead monkey and two books to his name. He eventually teams up with Jules Verne and some old and new friends. Tears in the space time continuum abound as the heroes make a last stand in London, with Ned the Seal in tow. The Martians meet their end the old fashioned way, as they usually do.

Joe Lansdale isn't often mentioned as a steampunk author, probably because steampunk is all gears and goggles these days, but these are steampunk books as they were originally intended, throwbacks to the works of Jules Verne and HG Wells. Joe Lansdale might not be the father of steampunk but he's definitely steampunk's hilarious, foul mouthed uncle that isn't welcome at family gatherings. 4 out of 5 dead Martians.

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Dead Girl Blues

Dead Girl Blues by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 1968, Buddy got away with a horrible crime and went on the run. When will his past inevitably catch up with him?

A while back, Lawrence Block sent me a PDF of this, asking if I might be interested in reviewing it. When your favorite living crime writer sends you something, you read it ASAP. Since we have a toddler running around, constantly shoving things into his mouth and plowing into things head first, ASAP wound up taking longer than expected.

The old dog still has quite a few tricks left in him, it seems. This was a gripping read. While Buddy isn't a sympathetic character, having killed a woman, having sex with her still warm body, and going on the lam under an assumed name, you wind up understanding him and even liking him just a little bit.

Does one horrible crime make someone an evil monster, even decades after the fact? That's the question Lawrence Block is posing in this one. Buddy assumes the name of a kid that died years earlier and lives a normal, full life for decades, not exactly looking over his shoulder constantly but with an awareness that the check is going to need to be paid one of these days.

The thing about Buddy is that he's not like a Jim Thompson sociopath where he's just a drink and some cross words away from hacking up his family. He's got his urges under control and runs a hardware store. He has a wife and kids. Huh, I just realized Buddy's assumed name is John James Thompson.

As with all Lawrence Block books, he wields misdirection like an expect surgeon with a scalpel. He even mentions Chekov's Gun when Thompson's looking at his revolver! I thought his goose was cooked for sure a couple times before the ending.

Dead Girl Blues is one of the more powerful Lawrence Block books in recent years. If it's his swan song, it's a worthy one. 4.5 out of 5 stars.


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Too Sweet: Inside the Indie Wrestling Revolution

Too Sweet: Inside the Indie Wrestling Revolution by Keith Elliot Greenberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Too Sweet is Keith Elliot Greenberg's look at the rise of Independent Wrestling. Or is it?

After a hiatus of a few years, I started watching wrestling again in 2017, specifically independent wrestling. I've gone to more live shows in the last three years than the previous forty combined, all but one of those independent shows. When ECW press offered me an ARC of this, I jumped at it.

First off, I know the subtitle is "Inside the Indie Wrestling Revolution" but it should really be subtitled "All Roads Lead to AEW" or something of that nature. The book is geared toward telling about the All In pay per view and the resulting formation of AEW with other bits in between. Can I fault Keith Elliot Greenberg for not writing the book I was expecting to read?

A little, I guess. The book dedicates some pages to the formation of various bigger indie promotions from 2001 to present, like Ring of Honor, CZW, Chikara, Evolve, Pro Wrestling Guerilla, and the usual suspects, in addition to more material than one would expect about GCW, although that makes sense with the Janela-AEW connection.

Seriously, this is more about the paths various wrestlers took to AEW than anything else. Most of the material is based around Cody Rhodes, the Young Bucks, and the rest of the AEW crew. If it was REALLY about the rise of independent wrestling, it would have featured more than a mention of Homicide, Eddie Kingston, Low Ki, Bryan Danielson, and the other guys that kept the independent scene interesting when ECW folded.

If you're looking to read about the Rise of AEW, I'd give this a 5. If you're actually wanting to read about independent wrestling in the last twenty years, I'd give it a 3.

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Betty

Betty by Tiffany McDaniel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Betty is a brutal coming of age tale, the tale of a girl with a Cherokee father, a white mother, and a family with enough skeletons in its closet to populate a decent sized cemetery. Will Betty make it out of Breathed, Ohio, alive?

As Goodreaders may know, I was a tremendous fan of The Summer That Melted Everything, Tiffany McDaniel's debut novel, and did what I could to help get the word out. When this one was ready to go, I was all in.

While The Summer That Melted Everything was published first, Betty was actually written first, making it the most powerful first novel I've ever read. The fact that parts of it are based on Tiffany's mother's life make it even more powerful.

Much like TSTME, is a work packed with lyrical prose and gutshot plot twists. Much like the protagonists in a Flannery O'Connor book, the Carpenters are doomed from page one and the rest of us get to experience their fates like a forgotten dog dragged behind a station wagon.

After drifting for a while, Landon Carpenter and his brood settle down in a house with a checkered past, a past that is spotless compared to some of the things in the Carpenters' past and also in their future. Landon steers the family between the icebergs as best he can. Betty has the misfortune of growing up in rural Ohio as half Cherokee, dealing with the other girls as well as her family.

That's about all I want to say about the plot for fear of spoilage. There were at least five times where I had to set the book down in order to process some horror that befell Betty or her family. As my friend Easy E said, this is the best modern horror novel in years, even though it isn't marketed as such. Nightmare clowns and giant spiders pale compared to the very real horrors whispered about behind closed doors.

Betty is a brutal coming of age novel that made me physically worn out, a shotgun blast of a novel. Five out of five stars.

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