The (Very Long) Preamble.

Inspired by the wonderfulness of Under The Dome, I decided to follow up with The Stand. Partly cos I vaguely remembered the TV version, more importantly I remembered thinking it was good despite having a typical Stephen King Devil stylee baddie, and partly because at the end of UTD there was a big 'if you liked that you'll love this' advert for The Stand. So - I took a chance.

Am I glad I did? Well - I don't think it was time wasted. I chomped through the book at a slightly lower pace than I took UTD certainly - couple of hundred pages tops a day, most days - but it was still a consistent and hefty progress. I just wouldn't have stuck with it if it didn't have......something. As with Under The Dome I kept a brief 'update' blog at http://faceofboe.tumblr.com as I read.

Things The Stand did have - tension, intrigue, readibility, some sympathetic characters, the 'oh fuck' factor and lots of scaryness.

Things The Stand didn't have - pace, logical narrative, enough sympathetic characters, a satisying resolution, humour. It also didn't have a sufficient focus on the actual, you know, Stand that was being made against the forces of evil in the form of Randall Flagg.

Had Stephen King called the book something like 'Survivors US style - scarier and more devilish' or 'The Plague and its Aftermath' or something like that it would have been a fairer representation of what the book was actually, you know, about. If we draw a veil over the fact that anyone who has seen survivors (either version) and is British has seen a better depiction of what a post plague society would probably be like here in the UK, we are still left with the problem of the stand itself. King spent so much time scaring the reader and the protagonists shitless over Flagg, that it seems very unsatisfying that the questers who make it to Vegas don't actually even get to make any sort of stand against him. Not that I wanted to read about Larry and Rslph being torn apart limb from limb obviously - but to have Flagg's power destroyed by Trashy and an A bomb after all that .......it just seems very flat.

I realise that maybe Stephen King's point was that just as for evil to flourish all it takes is for good men to do nothing, maybe for evil to be defeated all it takes is for them to do anything. If that was the case, then it wouldn't matter what they did so long as they set out for Vegas. They were prepared to do something, so that was all that matters? But I don't buy that. Trashy's actions were entirely independent of the people from the free zone. He did his thing because he was mad already. The seeds of Flagg's destruction were sown the minute he accepted Trashy into his society. And that had nothing to do with the acts of good men or women - it had nothing to do with the judge, or Dayna, or M-O-O-N spells Tom Cullen, or Glen or Ralph or Larry or Stu.

Ultimately, with a book that weighs in at over 1300 pages long, call me oldfashioned but I'd have thought a little more room could have been found in there to provide more focus on the actual, you know, Stand, rather than devoting so much time to the preamble. There's a limit to how much back story any narrative really needs. The Stand went way beyond that.

There were too many other loose ends, as well - what was going on with Leo/Joe? What was going on with the rest of the WORLD? Still - despite everything is was an enjoyable read. Just, you know, maybe 500 pages too long, and too broadly focussed. The Stand makes an interesting comparator for Under The Dome but I know which one I preferred.


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An Excellent Christmas Present

I don't even play the Bass that much. But as soon as I saw this one I just fell in love. And to be fair - it's hard to love a plastic Aulos or Yamaha bass. And it's easy to love a Pearwood Mollenhauer Bass. And I do - I love it to bits.

Strictly Disappointing. Again.

Every year it's the same. Except in 2006 when it was not the same. It was different. In a good way. But every other year (apart from 2006) since strictly started, the Wrong Person has won.

The particularly upsetting years for me were - well, actually, all of them. But if I had to pick the most outrageous travesties against justice and all that is right and good in the world, I'd go for 2005, when Zoe didn't win, and 2008 when Rachel was robbed.

And this year, to add to the role of shame, we have poor Ricky.

Once again, the whole family is gutted. Once again we are forced to confront the fact that apparently we are wildly out of step and sympathy with the Great British Public. We are outliers not in a good but in a bad way - excluded from vox populi. Again. And as in previous years, it's put a real downer on Xmas before it's properly begun.


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The Beginning of the End

Toby is Best

Just in case there was any doubt. This also just in:

Jack Rudolph can kill you with his thumbs
Captain Mental is, um, mental
Sawyer looks best without his shirt and is the hero (Jack is either the idiot or the baddie. You don't let kids die. You just don't)

Life In A Snowglobe

Stephen King's Under the Dome is the best book I've read in a very long time. What's that you say? Show my workings?

OK.

The book is massive. At 857 pages, in the hardback version, it weighs a ton. Yet, once I'd started reading it, I could not put it down. My arms, they wanted me to put it down. My back and shoulders wanted me to abandon it somewhere, preferably on the Eurostar. They certainly didn't want me carting it to Belgium and back, no way. My brain though, and my heart.........now, that's a different story.They would not let me put it down. I devoured it, I feasted on it, I ganneted it down in three sittings. Sitting one - 300 pages. Sitting two - 450 pages. sitting three, the rest. I really resented stopping reading on night two (at the 750 page mark) because the end was so close, the tension and the action had been ratcheted up well past the danger zone on the geiger counter and it seemed folly to stop - however as it was nearly 2am and I had to get up at 7am for an 8:30 meeting.......I really resented that meeting. I resented any time I spent away from the book, truth be told.And now it's finished I am utterly bereft.

It's come as a bit of a shock to me. I have never read any Stephen King before, although I did read and enjoy The Long Walk when I was a teenager, and I love the film of The Shawshank Redemption. But, you know, horror - not my bag. Not my bag at all. Demonic devil worshipping yukky horror? So not my bag. And that is what I have always assumed is the Stephen King territory. But Carlton Cuse and then the Zap2it Lost guy both recommended it online and opined that Lost fans would love it. So I took a chance. It was on special at Waterstones, the only downside appeared to be the massive heft of the book. And possible bad dreams. It was a Good Call. Under the Dome is not in any way a 'Horror' book. Horrible things happen, yes. Scary things. But they are caused by SPACE aliens and bad people, so I can cope with that. Well within my comfort zone.

There is certainly a tangible Losty vibe throughout the book, and the show gets two name-checks. Which is amusing. In this case, the people who are Lost aren't marooned on a mysterious island but rather marooned in their small Maine township by the sudden materialisation of a Dome - dome shaped, invisible physical barrier, which is impermeable (except, to a certain extent (not enough) by air, light and sound and which may be a forcefield or similar. Their peril comes secondarily from the physical effects of the Dome and of being cut off from the rest of the world, and primarily from the Big Cheese super criminal baddy who runs the town. Well, I say runs - that implies some sort of efficiency and effectiveness. Which isn't actually the case and leads to hundreds of deaths. The individual and group dynamics of the Dome dwellers, the poor people marooned in a Snowglobe which is more like a heat globe, really, are very reminiscent of the way things have developed with the Losties and The Others in Lost. The bravery and cowardice, the leadership and submission, the deviousness and desperation and the urgency of the need to just ESCAPE - it's all there. In a (very) good way.

Under the Dome is a tour de force of world building - to me, an English person, small town America is just as alien as Mars, yet King makes the locale, and the protagonists (who are numerous - to allow for the very very many deaths and still keep the A listers alive at the end) totally real, to me.There certainly is a very horrific element - Big Jim Rennie and his son, Junior, have a family sideline in serial killing (jointly and severally) and some of the deaths, both caused by them and by other incidents (Dome related or Rennie madness related) are very squicky. But mainly, they're just deaths. Only a few are actually upsetting for any reason other than that any death is upsetting. Hmmm. Only a few? Have I bought into a violent horror scenario completely and lost my perspective and sense of what = upsetting? Well....maybe. But I don't think so. Had the A listers died I would have been distraught. I was very upset at a couple of deaths near the final denouement but ultimately they weren't main cast. They were the equivalent of a guest feature buying the farm and to be honest, it was obvious their purpose in the narrative was to die.

Aside from Losty, the book has elements of The Poseidon Adventure (a film I'm not fond of), Die Hard (a film I adore), and countless Base Under Siege Doctor Who stories (although the aliens aren't in any way besieging the town - they are just watching the shenanigans for amusement. They can't really be blamed for The Evil the (some) Men Do when under pressure). It also reminded me very much of the Stanford Prison experiment - particularly once half the ne'er do wells and troubled youth of the town get deputised into the 'police force' (in reality big Jim Rennie's private army of thugs and rapists). The horror lies in the lengths people will go to to accrue power, and the lengths they will go to to preserve it, in the face of all sanity, not the squickyness of the deaths.

The Dome really is a superb book - what they used to call a Rattling Good Read. I wish very much that I hadn't already finished it - I don't want it to be done with. It is though. :( I think it will have some good re-read potential, in a year or so. But I'm not wild about waiting that long. Oh well. I'll try The Stand next - and count the days till Losty is back on our screens.

Hot! Hot! Hot!

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone........

In fact, I did always appreciate our combi boiler and the hot water that came gushing out of the taps whenever I wanted it. I grew up in a flat with a tiny hot water tank. Not enough for even one warm bath. So I've always apreciated unlimited hot water, oh yes. I have however been surprised by how bereft I have been since our boiler packed in 5 days ago. I'm the sort of person who likes a minimum of one scaldingly hot bath a day. In an ideal world I'd have two or three such events. The strain of foregoing any hot bath at all since last Thursday is incredible. And I'm here to tell you that a 'hot' shower (yeah, about as hot as a baboon with the squits) is no substitute for a proper hot bath.

With no end in sight to my enforced deprivation, I'm going to retreat into the comforting madness of gillworld and imagine my perfect bath......

Hot. Very very hot. So hot it hurts to get in - so you just take the burn off with a quick blast of cold then jump in before your skin has time to realise what's going on........ Now you're cooking. The perfect bath will ve full to the brim, and the bubbles (for there must be bubbles) will be provided by a Lush Anamanapondo bubble bar. To hand will be a nice cold can of diet coke, and a good book - perhaps Hexwood. The radio will be on, and Dizzy Gillespie will be playing. It will be dark outside, maybe windy or rainy. Or both. But the bath will be hot and soothing and it will provide a perfect sanctuary from the woes of the world.

Till the kids come in and start chucking bubbles at each other, obviously......


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