The Moonshine War

The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bootlegger Son Martin has 150 barrels of whiskey his dad made stashed away somewhere and his old war buddy, Frank Long, now a crooked prohibition agent, has his sights set on them. Will Son cave in under the pressure and hand over the whiskey or will he put Long and his cronies into the ground?

Reading an Elmore Leonard book is like bullshitting with an old friend on their front porch. In this case, it would be whiskey we'd be drinking instead of a couple frosty beers.

Rural Kentucky in the 1930's is far from Elmore Leonard's usual haunts but after watching several seasons of Justified, I figured he could handle it. I was right.

The Moonshine War plays out like a lot of Elmore Leonard books. The promise of violence keeps building until the glorious shitstorm at the end. Frank Long trying to strongarm Son Martin out of his valuable whiskey is more of the same. It went a little differently than I thought it would near the end, which is always a plus for me.

The country dialog is very well done and drives the plot forward. Like in most Leonard books, Son Martin is just a little slicker than Frank Long and the others.

Son reminds me of Raylan Givens a bit of Raylan was running moonshine instead of being a US Marshall. He's a conflicted character, his young wife dying from the flu while he was in the army leaving him somewhat directionless. He's got a bit of that Givens inner rage going as well. When his neighbors started turning on him when he wouldn't roll over for Long and the others, I knew the violence was coming. The Moonshine War actually feels like a western more than anything else.

Any gripes? Not a one besides wanting to read more about Son Martin. 3.5 stars.



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Faster Gun

Faster Gun by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Doc Holliday and some ladies investigate some mysterious wreckage in the desert near Tombstone...

I saw this was one of the nominees for the Locus award for best short stories. Since it was free on Tor.Com, I figured I'd give it a read.

Since it's a short story, there isn't a lot I can say without giving away the best bits. All you need to know is that Doc Holliday is the main character and there are time traveling magic-using ladies and a wrecked alien ship in it. Oh, and it's a damn good story.

On a side note, will I ever be able to picture Doc Holliday looking like someone other than Val Kilmer?

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The Big Blowdown

The Big Blowdown by George Pelecanos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Joe Recevo and Pete Karras were friends since they were kids, until their boss decided he didn't like Pete and had him badly beaten, giving him a crippling knee injury. Three years later, their lives will soon intersect when their old boss decides he wants Nick Stefanos, Karras' employer at a diner, to start paying him protection. Who will be left standing after the Big Blowdown?

Here we are. Another great book by George Pelecanos, the first in his DC Quartet. In the Big Blowdown, Pelecanos paints a picture of life in DC, with two vets, Karras and Recevo, as the main characters, taking them from their teens to their thirties. As with Pelecanos' other books, the Washington DC setting is a character unto itself.

The crime elements in this one aren't as pronounced as in the previous three Pelecanos book I've read, the Nick Stefanos trilogy, Nick being the grandson of the Nick in this book. The crime elements stick to the sidelines for most of the book, namely Florek looking for his missing sister and the hooker murders. Everything comes together at the end, just in time for the Big Blowdown.

Much like Nick Stefanos in his trilogy, Pete Karras is a conflicted character, not really sure how to act with his family. Or his mistress, for that matter. I think it's partly because of his experiences in World War II and partly from his upbringing. It sure goes a long way toward explaining why Dimitri Karras acts the way he does in King Suckerman, the next book in the DC Quartet.

Reading this right after reading the Stefanos trilogy, it's amazing to see what direction Pelecanos' writing was going, from a hardboiled style to a more literary one.

Four stars. I will continue to preach the Pelecanos Gospel.

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The Merkabah Writer - A Few Questions More

Way back in June 2011, I interviewed Edward Erdelac, author of the Merkabah Rider series.  Now that the series has come to it's conclusion, I've posed a few more questions to the Merkabah Writer himself.


How much forward planning did you do for the Merkabah Rider series? Once Upon a Time in the Weird West seems like you had a clear picture of how the end was going to shape up even in the first book.
I think I figured out the ending about midway through writing the second book. The character progressions almost wrote themselves. There was one last minute change. Belden was supposed to die at the end of book three, but I decided I liked his secular interactions with the Rider and Kabede, and it made sense to have him there at the end.

Were there any Westerns in particular that inspired Once Upon a Time in the Weird West? 
Definitely the titular Once Upon A Time In The West had an impact. I think I got the idea for the train's inaugural run as a central event from that. Blue Moon Fugate probably came from Henry Fonda's character a little bit too, as well as a character in Richard Matheson's Journal Of The Gun Years. There is a scene in the cantina when the mariachis are playing, I had characters from maybe half a dozen different westerns and movies that had an influence on the series pop up in the background.

Was there a reason you decided to ride solo and publish through Createspace for the final volume in the series?
I wasn't really happy with the quality control of the publisher. Things I had caught in editing kept making it through to the final product as well as plenty I missed. The second book, I edited almost entirely myself because the guy they assigned me just flaked. I also wanted to regain all the rights to the series. The first book's contract expires next year, and then the other two in subsequent years. I didn't want to tie up the rights to the last installment with a brand new contract. I don't know that I will self publish again if I can help it, but a couple different authors I really respected suggested I go that route if I wanted to finish the series without waiting three years for the other contracts to expire, so I gave it a shot. I ran it through two editors besides myself, so hopefully it turned out alright. It was originally supposed to have eight interior illustrations but the artist pulled out on me the month before it was due.

Any plans for a return to the Merkabah Rider universe?
I've thought about writing prequels that have been alluded to in the series - the Rider's war years with Belden, his adventure with Misquamacus which is plotted out and could probably make a novel or novella, and his first meeting with the Rev. Mr. Goodworks, but I'm not in a rush. I was approached by somebody about pitching a modern day version of Merkabah Rider to a major publisher and I came up with a way to pick up the story in the same universe with different characters (mostly - some of the immortal characters might return) in the present, but I probably won't write that unless they go for it.

What's next for Edward Erdelac?
I've got a very very dark themed western novel called Coyote's Trail coming out from Comet Press in July. It's about an Apache kid who survives a massacre and enlists the aide of a Mexican prostitute to lure out the soldiers responsible and kill them en flagrante delicto. Kind've a psycho-sexual revenge story, almost noire-ish, with no fantasy elements. I'm finishing up a novel set in World War II involving the Holocaust and Frankenstein. A couple other short story projects, and I'll be in three different Mythos-themed books this year. Nothing else really definite yet.

NOS4A2

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Victoria McQueen was young, she had a unique gift: she could summon an old covered bridge that would take her wherever she wanted to go. After an encounter with Charles Manx, a Rolls Royce Wraith-driving kidnapper with a similar ability, her life is torn to pieces. Twelve years later, Charles Manx comes looking for the girl that got away and not even death is an obstacle...

First off, I think the title, NOS4A2 (Nosferatu, get it?), while clever, is very misleading since Manx isn't a vampire. Fortunately, that's the only complaint I have about this awesome book.

The lead, Victoria McQueen, is a broken woman whose life is thrown into further chaos when Charles Manx thrusts himself back into it. She rises to the occasion and does what any mother would do when her son is kidnapped: kick ass and take names!

Charles Manx, the villain, is like an even creepier version of Willy Wonka, abducting Children and taking them to another world, Christmasland, where it's Christmas every day and the children become feral little monsters. His Wraith is a pretty chilling car, with its inescapable back seat and mind of its own. I couldn't wait for Manx to get what was coming to him.

The supporting cast is also well drawn. Victoria's baby-daddy Lou, son Bruce Wayne, FBI agent Hutt, and Bing are all fairly memorable characters. I loved Maggie Leigh and hated to see her go out the way she did.

There were some Easter eggs in the text, references to It, The Stand, The Shawshank Redemption, and my favorite, the tie in to the Dark Tower when Manx mentions the doors to Mid-World. Heck, Derry is mentioned so I think it's safe to assume Hill's stories are part of the King-verse and thus the Dark Tower.

This was my first Joe Hill book and it won't be the last. While he writes like his father, he doesn't seem to have many of his father's bad habits. His prose reminds me of Stephen King from back when he was still in touch with his Richard Matheson/John D. MacDonald roots: chilling, evocative, and not long-winded or over-written. Even the fates of the characters reminded me of King from his heyday.

Five stars. That is all.

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Merkabah Rider: Once Upon a Time in the Weird West

Merkabah Rider: Once Upon a Time in the Weird West by Edward M. Erdelac
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

With a bullet lodged near his heart and the Hour of the Incursion just days away, the Rider and his small group of stalwart friends do everything in their power to stop Adon from rousing the Old Ones and ending existence. But whose side will Lucifer take in the conflict? And which of the Rider's friends is fated to betray him...?

Here we are, the ultimate volume in the best weird western series since the big daddy, The Dark Tower. Erdelac pulls out all the stops in this one. We are treated to such wonders as a steampunk cyborg created with Yithian technology, shoggoths, a scientist with an alien mind, an angel from another universe, and a golem made of pieces of dead gunfighters. Couple this with the Rider dying of a bullet wound, a sigil-covered train, and the manure hitting the windmill on every page and you have one book that is impossible to put down.

All the seeds Erdelac planted in the previous three volumes are finally bearing squamous, cyclopean fruit. Unlike the previous three volumes, this one is a single story, not a series of linked stories. It's the biggest book in the series by a hundred pages. Any doubts I had that Erdelac could weave a novel length tale have been put to rest.

Faustus Montague, Kabede, Dick Belden, The Reverend Mr. Goodworks, and Yates made worthy allies for the Rider on his final journey. As with the previous volumes, Erdelac does a fantastic job tying together elements from Christianity, Judaism, and the Cthulhu mythos.

The ending of the saga was all I could hope for. All the big payoffs were there, from the true nature of the onager, the tzadikim and the Tzohar to the final conflict between The Rider and Adon. I'd say it was the best volume of the series.

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The Shining

The Shining by Stephen King
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance takes a job as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, bringing his family with him. But can even his son Danny's special gift, The Shining, stop him from going mad and butchering his family like other caretakers before him?

Yes, I'm several decades late to the party in reading this but after reading Joe Hill's NOS4A2, I had to read my first non-Dark Tower Stephen King book in years to see how the old man did horror back in the day. I'm not sure this was such a good idea.

This book isn't very long but felt like it took a few ice ages for anything to happen. Sure, there were some creepy parts, most of them involving Jack or Danny and the Overlook's ghosts. I think if I hadn't seen the movie first, the book would have been much more enjoyable for me.

I think the advantage the movie has over the book is that a third of the time isn't spent delving into Jack Torrance's past. In the movie, we know he's balanced precariously on the razor's edge of madness the first instant we see him and no one in their right mind would want to spend any length of time locked up with him. In the book, we witness the downhill slide for hundreds of pages. The biggest advantage the book has over the movie: the mom is hot and not played by Shelley Duvall.

That's all I have to say about that.



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