I had the deer-in-the-headlight look yesterday. There is a lot going on, only some of which is mine to talk about and I will just have to leave it at that.
A splendid Friday evening lead directly to a mildly dissociative mental state Saturday morning, so when I was finished thrashing through the morning traffic and building a PowerPoint pitch out of the pictures to share, I was about done.
Kamil the Polish Life guard opened the pool gate a little before ten- but the sun was not over the pool and I decided to hold off on the swim until the sun started to warm the boundary layer. Accordingly, I found myself with some charging issues on the iPod in the water-tight case and reading the action-paced end to the latest trash novel of the summer.
Larry Correia’s fifth novel in the Monster Hunter series is called “Nemesis,” and continues the race to the climactic show-down over whether humans or unspeakable evil will rule the world. It is composed of nonsensical magical violent fluff, but grand fun if you like stalwart heroes, tough women and all sorts of gunfire directed at vile creatures from The Void.
Larry plays against type deftly in prose that veers between goofy and side-splittingly funny. The current story-line features (spoiler alert!) a continuing love affair between two werewolves. He gives a point-of-view hero in each book from the ensemble cast of characters, and the protagonist of this one is Agent Franks of the U.S. Monster Control Bureau. One name, like Beyoncé.
This isn’t a real subtle story. Franks is a man of many parts— from other people, that is. That’s right: he is Frankenstein’s Monster. The Agent is 300 years old, in this incarnation six foot five and all muscle. He’s nearly indestructible. Plus he’s animated by a powerful alchemical substance and inhabited by a super‑intelligent spirit more ancient than humanity itself.
Good thing he’s on the side of the US Government, though there is some controversy about which side the USG is actually on.
Franks has a contract with Dr. Benjamin Franklin stipulating that he will protect the Republic from all supernatural creatures in exchange for the USG not trying to make any additional stitch-together tailor-made soldiers.
I won’t spoil the details, but there is a rogue element of the Special Task Force Uniforn (STFU) that is doing exactly that. As the blurb says, “Now all bets are off, and Hell hath no fury like a monster betrayed.”
(The legendary Eddie Constantine. Photo Wikipedia).
The entire story reads with a break-neck pace like the hot kiss at the end of a wet kiss- H.P. Lovecraft meets Eddie Constantine, all the way.
As the legendary French movie actor would say, sipping a single malt Scotch and confronting certain death: “Smooth.”
Anyway, I lurched to the end of Nemesis right around the time the iPod was fully charged so I could listen to “Radio Lab” on NPR while paddling around, which is always kind of surreal, and got my hour of cardio out of the way.
I know what I should have done. I should have grabbed my go-bag and headed to the farm straightaway. But I was chilled from the hour in the pool, and the sun was warm, and the pool was so mesmerizing in its attraction, and finally, as my trunks dried, I decided to read for a while longer.
Having completed the Monster Hunters series (Nemesis was just released this month so it is going to be a long drought before the next jolt of supernatural action) I looked at the library in the iPad. There was another horror novel I thought would go perfectly after Nemesis:
This one is ranked at Number 3 on the Amazon best-seller list, and I like good pot-boiling exposes as much as the next guy. By contrast, Secretary Clintons much-trumpeted biography “Hard Choices” is at Number 34. The Secretary does reach the top spot in the “women’s studies” and “gender” categories on Amazon.
One of the contentions in Klein’s book is that Secretary Clinton made no decisions during her time at State, hard or otherwise, since no foreign policy development was actually done at Foggy Bottom- it came from the White House and no other inputs were solicited.
There is a bunch of other stuff, too, allegedly right from the horses mouth, but if I had to distill it, this is a struggle between unearthly beings for the very earth on which we live.
Or at least the Democratic Party. I am troubled by the Klien does business, since all alleged quotes are unsourced, and they simmer with electricity (and profanity). I suppose, if true, no one in their right mind would tell the stories they do in this book without the (justified) fear of retaliation. I don’t know how to evaluate the un-sourced and incendiary direct quotes, which could, of course, be manufactured from whole cloth like Agent Franks.
Bill and Hillary are depicted in a generally favorable light, sort of like the Monster Control Bureau, while the Administration is more akin to the STFU. I don’t know. It was a hypnotic read, and I was done before the sun really got all the way down.
I took another plunge to close out the afternoon and began to think about what to cook for dinner. Obviously I was not going to get to Croftburn Farms market to procure local food, and made some decisions. One of them was to not read anything more about politics. I decided to go back to fantasy where it is safe. I am thinking about what is next. I considered Laurel K. Hamilton’s “Guilty Pleasures,” but my eye was caught by Kim Harrison’s “Dead Witch Walking.”
I liked the cover better. I’m a guy, right, and the image featured no one in politics I am aware of. I will let you know which of the books about monsters reads the best at poolside. Kim is on the New York Times best seller list, I think under “politics.”
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303