Book Review: Sidney Williams' 'Night Brothers'

Exemplary Horror Thriller (5 stars)

Night Brothers - A Vampire Novel is a chilling blend of straight-up occult horror with the pacing and excitement of an action thriller. The pace accelerates smoothly and in the story’s latter stages moves to its climax at breakneck speed. Alison and Travis have settled down to manage a small-town newspaper when mysterious and lethal animal attacks start occurring. Parallel with that we are shown Navarra’s occult practice, controlling animals to attack residents as cover for her taking their blood to continue her life-in-death. In the story’s middle she takes an interest in Alison, and this unfolds in a superbly controlled manner redolent of such spiritual horror as Henry James' Turn of the Screw. 

Most impressive was the detail and backstory given for all the characters, even relatively minor ones. It’s done with deft and swift economy, never impeding story flow. I realized as I read this how much more powerful mystery and action in any genre become when the reader is given a fuller picture of each character. Thus do character motivation, desire, regrets, preferences, fears, and all the panoply of human emotions percolate in the background as the action unfolds. That said, the story has a multiple protagonist, an ensemble of characters who work together opposing the antagonist, Navarra, and those retainers she gathers about her. Usually I prefer a single heroic protagonist, but this approach works well here.

The story exhibits a rare blend of physical horror, the psychological horror of Navarra’s selective control of minds, and the spiritual horror of her origins, especially in the lengths she’s gone to over the centuries to maintain her line.

Book Review: Jeffrey Goff's 'Hope 239'

Brave New Home in the Hope System (4 stars)

Hope 239 is a SF space resettlement story with a difference. A 15-mile long ship from Earth arrives in the Hope system after a centuries-long journey, not to transplant their civilization but to plant the seeds of a new series of human settlements (Neolothic-era) on different Hope system planets.

The plot is satisfyingly intricate, akin to the traditional Chinese boxes, one within another in a series. The residents of the one hundred Neolithic village units on board ship have no knowledge of the ship they’re on, its crew, or the command oval officers who ostensibly manage it; even the command oval, while having the most knowledge, are ultimately kept in the dark by ship’s computer about vast parts of the ship. Each ‘box’ is unaware of many of the other boxes. Records of the past are regularly deleted, and mission plans for the future after the resettlement are unknown. The reader however sees most of these levels (or boxes) operating within their narrow cells as laid down by the mission’s originators centuries earlier. This is one of the best story setups I’ve seen. 

Nor are characters neglected in the story. The command oval officers are well-drawn, detailed, and their motives complex but clear; the crew less so; and the few villagers we meet even less so. Thus the story’s characters are presented in a manner that reflects the different levels of knowledge in the story. Moreover the protagonist is an ensemble of several characters at different levels, each curious and seeking the knowledge withheld from them. The antagonist is those now-absent originators of the ship and its resettlement mission. 

'Hope 239' is a clever, well-told story about the dangers of control, regardless of the benign motives involved. I look forward to a sequel to this fine addition to the genre.

Book Review: P. A. Ruddock's 'Not What You Thought?'

A Good Helping of Story Twists (4 stars)

Not What You Thought? and Other Surprises  Note that proceeds from the sale of this diverse collection of short stories  support a charity for homeless ex-servicemen. The stories here all have a 'not-what-you-thought' twist ending. Most genres are represented – SF, war, romance, horror, adventure, spiritual, magic realism, and more. 

In my experience what often makes short stories compelling is they are analogous to the precise, contained, Act 1 ‘Inciting Incident’ scene in a novel. That is the scene where a hero encounters a life-changing problem that he spends the rest of the story trying to come to terms with. Many of the stories here are good examples of this. In each story one or two characters are introduced in the context of a problem; they proceed on a short path to a reckoning of one sort or another; and the twist is a re-framing that removes or resolves the original problem, and points to others, larger and very different. Thus such contain the seed, the core dilemma a protagonist would face in a novel-length treatment of the story idea. I especially enjoyed the twist most of these stories end with. For me the twist means the depicted events have two unambiguous meanings: the flow that events would have taken without the twist, and the actual flow they will take as a result of it. These stories crack open a world just long enough for a quick glimpse at a critical moment in the hero’s life. The reader fills in the rest, the implied story. 

I won’t comment here on specific stories except to say I admired how self-contained and compressed they are. I particularly enjoyed ‘Call of Duty’, ‘First Impression’, ‘Temptation’, ‘A Good Man,’ ‘The Spectre’, and ‘Lottery Loser’. This collection won’t disappoint fans of the short story genre. 

Live the Scene As You Write It

No tears in the writer, 

no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

ROBERT FROST

goodread: Robert Frost quotes

Slip Into a Dream

"We read five words on the first page of a really good novel

and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page;we begin to see images... We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we are sitting in... We recreate, with minor changes the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again."

JOHN GARDNER

goodreads: On Becoming a Novelist

Story Arc: All Is Lost (2013)

Director: J. C. Chandor

Writers: J. C. Chandor

Star Rating: 4.4

Early Action / Background

The hero of the story is nameless, and the director refers to him as ‘Our Man’. His implied earlier life as perhaps a difficult husband, father, or friend, or all three, is obliquely revealed. He apologizes to listeners – family and friends – for unnamed mistakes (a Voiceover narration). The calm, silent ocean is shown as he speaks, indifferent to his words. We see that he faces his imminent demise, and he’s dispiritedly getting his affairs in order. A caption appears, “8 Days Earlier”. The movie will tell the story of how he came to such a pass. This opening is almost too lean, too devoid of emotion, yet it expresses well Our Man’s emotional and physical exhaustion, inertia.

In momentum terms note that to tell such a story will require a series of down-moves punctuated by shallow, brief up-turns. The risk is that if Our Man falls too far too fast, it will strain credibility. On the other hand if his fall is too slow, mild, and repetitive, it will lose our interest. 

Theme

The important elements of the protagonist’s world that have predominance include: 1) he sees himself as self-reliant and a problem-solver, 2) he’s mildly estranged from the world, 3) he never gives up, 4) he respects and works with the power of nature. Note how the five problems challenge these elements of Our Man’s world.

Act 1

A Wounded Ship

Inciting Incident

Problem: Our Man wakes in his sailboat cabin and steps down into several inches of water. A gaping hole has appeared in the hull of his vessel, the Virginia Jean (VJ), at the waterline starboard aft. Water will pour in when he banks to starboard. He further discovers the damage is from a collision with a shipping container, still floating alongside his boat. Boxes of running shoes have spilled out of a damaged corner of the container’s door. His singlehanded cruise on this 39’ Cal sloop has been irrevocably interrupted.

Decision: He sets to work sealing the hole by jury-rigging a fiberglass patch. He scavenges wood from the boat to serve as a plug beneath the fiberglass resin strips.

Turning Point 1

Problem: Two days later. A night storm rapidly overtakes the VJ and he sets and locks his course into the wind, and rides it out below in the cabin. He wakes and steps down into more water, higher this time – the seal has ruptured. The storm escalates.

Decision: (commits to the story) He sails close to the wind on a port tack and off the wind on a starboard tack, so the re-opened hole is not submerged. He sails on through the storm. Our Man is committing here, he clearly understands what is at stake, that his repair job failed, that the Virginia Jean may sink during this far worse weather. He must get back to shore, or be rescued, or die.

Act 2A

Virginia Jean Sinks

He wakes from a fitful sleep close to the companionway, and decides the boat cannot be saved. Bringing out the inflatable dinghy, he tosses it out, watches it inflate, and brings over gear he’ll need. He settles down inside the sealed pod of the dinghy, still tied to his sailboat’s stern.

Midpoint

Problem: He sleeps, wakes, and watches his one friend out here, Virginia Jean, now riding much lower in the water. She sinks, as Our Man watches.

Decision: He takes out a map and starts on new plans.

Before this Midpoint it was him and the VJ struggling to survive in the ocean. After this point it is him, now truly alone.

Act 2B

Fire

He consults the map again, and marks in a course to an Indian Ocean shipping route, seeking rescue. Time passes.

Turning Point 2

Problem: A freight ship appears on the horizon.

Decision: He sets off a flare and waves a towel overhead, but the enormous ship churns past, oblivious of his small vessel. Later, it happens again, a second ship appears, it too passes him by.

Act 3

Surrender

He wakes at night to the chill of water – again. He discovers a torn seam in the synthetic dinghy, and can see no way of sealing it. A third ship appears.

Crisis Problem

Making a last desperate effort, he cuts open the empty water container and starts a small signal fire in the makeshift fire-barrel. He feeds the fire, stands up, and waves frantically at the passing ship. He turns to see the fire spreading across the dinghy. It suddenly rises up, out of control.

Crisis Decision (commits to the ending)

He pauses a moment, then dives into the ocean to escape being consumed by the fire. He’s committing here to the end that is now upon him, to the outcome his actions and fate have brought about. There is nothing left he can do, his acceptance is complete. For this commitment to come through, his decision must embrace the totality of what’s happened, and respond to that.

Crisis Climax

Treading water, he watches as his second vessel is lost to him. The center of the raft entirely burns away. He finally yields – all is truly lost. He takes a last breath, stops treading water, and starts gliding gently down.

Slow Curtain

We don’t expect him now to survive. It is the eighth day since the collision. As he descends into the ink-black depths, he looks up and sees the still-burning outer ring of the dinghy, a radiant halo far above. It grows smaller as he steadily sinks. His form is becoming indistinguishable with the surrounding darkness. As he turns away another light appears far above, near the fiery ring. A fluorescent spotlight is approaching the burning dinghy. It seems so removed, so far away, silent, unreal. With effort he kicks and starts swimming upwards. Rising from almost total darkness he approaches the dual lights. He finally breaks surface … into a blinding radiance. FADE TO WHITE.

Story Arc and Desire

In Our Man’s Act 1 TP1 decision after a second storm undoes his repair of the hole in the hull he sails off-the-wind to avoid being flooded. In his Act 3 Crisis decision he dives into the ocean from the burning dinghy and watches as it’s consumed, knowing he can’t fight much longer. The story arc from TP1 to Crisis reveals that all means of survival have been lost. The story arc change is one of ruin of all such means. 

The middle Acts are used to show stages in the ruin. First he loses the means of sailing to port himself when his boat sinks (Act 2A); then twice he fails to be rescued by others when he can’t catch the attention of passing ships (2B).

Our Man’s desire throughout is to survive, and as stated above his goals serve that: sailing to port and seeking rescue in the shipping lane using flares and then an open fire. His final action is to swim down to his death, not waiting for it passively on the ocean’s surface. The stakes get worse as each goal goes unmet.

When he sees his death is imminent desire falls away. He stopped treading water, let himself sink a few feet, and then jackknifed and started swimming down. I’ve noticed this in many films in recent years; often desire seems to be transmuted in a story’s closing moments, as though the protagonist goes beyond what he could not attain. Nor is it a mode of cognitive dissonance.

Story Momentum

Our Man’s primary goal is to survive. In Act 1 his subsidiary goal is to repair his boat enough to sail to the nearest harbor; in Act 2A (after the boat sinks) it’s to row his dinghy into a shipping lane to be rescued.

What’s at stake if Our Man can’t reach his main or subsidiary goals is clear – he would drown. If this risk outcome was ambiguous, story speed would stagnate. It isn’t, and our interest increases. Momentum direction is four Acts down (things get steadily worse for him), with an up for his rescue at the end. This overall momentum direction fits his dire situation.

Act 1

DOWN: The VJ is leaking through a hole at the water-line, he jury-rigs a seal, a storm undoes his repair.

Up (TP1): He sails to ensure the hole stays above the water-line.

Act 2A

DOWN: Despite his best efforts the VJ sinks.

Up (Midpoint): He transfers supplies to the dinghy, and makes new plans.

Act 2B

DOWN: The shipping lane is far away for the dinghy. He sails on.

Up (TP2): He arrives in the shipping lane, sets off flares, two ships pass by.

Act 3

DOWN: In the midst of his out-of-control signal fire he dives into the ocean, waits, and then lets himself sink.

Up: Rescue arrives.

The writer can consider momentum as the direction and tempo of the plot points, where direction refers to whether a scene makes life better (up) or worse (down) for the protagonist. Planning momentum in this way it does help visualize the sweep of action in the story, among other benefits. The most common patterns are “W”, “V”, or a prolonged down diagonal (for dark dramas, and horror).

Each down-move in the story is serious and life-threatening. Each effort he makes, each up-turn, solves the immediate problem, until the next, more severe down-move overwhelms his counter-measure. This continues until the boat is lost (Midpoint). Hope returns as he makes his way into the shipping lane. Then the down-move resumes.

As described here, such escalating misfortune should appear implausible, and our sympathy for Our Man should recede – but that doesn’t happen. The author carefully makes each new negative event serious enough, but one that Our Man is able to solve, just barely. He won’t give up, until there’s literally nothing left he can do.

It’s structurally similar to a horror story – a long series of steep down-moves intercut with brief rallies, with the final, surprising up-turn of his apparent rescue.

Conclusion

The ending is the ultimate payoff for witnessing the fascinating, painful lengths Our Man must go in his struggle to survive. To observe his desperate last-ditch efforts, and then to share in his final surrender, is a harrowing moment. We glide down with him, feeling the ocean’s darkness wrapping itself around, and then watch, far above, the fading fiery halo of his dinghy. His surrender, his final yielding to the end after struggling in vain for eight long days, is deeply moving. Is Our Man’s rescue perhaps too good to be true, a hallucination of rescue and survival? He swims up and breaks surface, and in the closing FADE TO WHITE loses consciousness. It may be a merciful hallucination moments before death, or perhaps he really is rescued. The satisfying ambiguity is perfectly balanced.