The table of contents for Chilling Tales 2, edited by Micheal Kelly, was announced this weekend:
- In Libitina’s House by Camille Alexa
- Gingerbread People by Colleen Anderson
- Meteor Lake by Kevin Cockle
- Homebody by Gemma Files
- Snowglobes by Lisa L Hannett
- The Dog’s Paw by Derek Künsken
- The Flowers of Katrina by Claude Lalumière
- Goldmine by Daniel LeMoal
- The Salamander’s Waltz by Catherine MacLeod
- Weary, Bone Deep by Michael Matheson
- The Windemere by Susie Moloney
- Black Hen A La Ford by David Nickle
- Day Pass by Ian Rogers
- Fiddleheads by Douglas Smith
- Dwelling on the Past by Simon Strantzas
- Heart of Darkness by Edo van Belkom
- Fishfly Season by Halli Villegas
- Road Rage by Bev Vincent
- Crossroads Blues by Robert J. Wiersema
- Honesty by Rio Youers
I finished Edge of Dark Waters by Joe R. Lansdale last night. Review forthcoming. I also got around to updating Onyx Reviews with my latest review for Victims by Jonathan Kellerman. Not sure what I’m going to pick up next. I want to read the new McCammon but I’m going to be traveling on Wednesday and Thursday so I’ll probably go with something that’s already on my iPad to cut down on the weight of my carry-on. I’m heading to Atlanta to the red carpet premiere of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, which should be fun.
We had a movie weekend. First, we went out to the theater on Saturday afternoon to see Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. It star Emily Blunt, Ewen McGregor and Kristin Scott Thomas. Blunt works for an investment company that handles a Yemeni sheik who wants to build a salmon river in his homeland so he can indulge one of his favorite pastimes. McGregor is a civil servant who thinks the idea is totally daft, and Thomas is the Prime Minister’s press agent who is looking for a feel-good story out of the Middle East and champions this project. It’s a funny part for Thomas, mostly played for laughs. The complications are: Blunt’s boyfriend of six weeks has just been deployed to Afghanistan and goes MIA. McGregor’s wife has accepted a long posting in Geneva, thus is similarly MIA. Some of the other tribal leaders in the Yemen see this as the first step in bringing Western influences into their country, something they don’t want. It’s a charming film. With fish.
Then we watched The Iron Lady. I was in England during some of the Thatcher reign. In fact, one day I was walking through London, a little off the beaten path, when a motorcade went past—I noticed the American flags on the front of the limos and later discovered it was President Reagan on his way to a summit with Maggie. Thatcher’s adviser in the chemistry department at Oxford is someone I’ve met, the Nobel Laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, whose politics were on the opposite end of the spectrum from Thatcher’s. She was known to muse in later years that if she had been a better adviser, maybe Thatcher would have become a crystallographer and stayed out of politics. The movie uses Thatcher’s decline as the entrance point into her story. Her memories come and go—at times she thinks she’s still the Prime Minster. Streep is very good—mostly invisible in the character—but the movie didn’t win me over to Thatcher’s side. Sure, she had a tough time as the first female leader of the UK, but she was a little too much “my way or the highway” for my liking and I’m not convinced that her solutions to some of the country’s economic issues at the time were the best ones.
Then, last night, we watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close about a young boy whose father (Tom Hanks) died on 9/11. The boy has some Asperger’s-like symptoms but is mostly functional and highly intelligent. A year after the event, he finds a key hidden in a vase in his father’s closet. The envelope it’s in says only “Black,” so he decides to hunt down every person named Black in the five boroughs to figure out what the key is for, believing it to be another adventure that his father wanted him to take. The kid’s a little bit hard to take at times. He’s abrasive and self-involved and rude (and carries a tambourine that he rattles whenever he’s nervous, which is most of the time). Sandra Bullock plays his seemingly absentee mother in a relatively small part that has a nice resolution. Max Von Sydow plays a mysterious “renter” who stays with the boy’s grandmother across the street. He’s mute and has the words Yes and No written on his palms so he can quickly answer simple questions. He has a charming glimmer in his eye and a bounce in his step at times—he’s the best thing about the film. The boy enlists his help in the search for the right Black. There is a credibility gap, though: it’s impossible to imagine anyone allowing a 12-year-old to wander the city day and night the way he does. The old man’s identity is no great mystery, though his backstory receives short shrift. John Goodman has a slight role as the building doorman who exchanges good-natured insults with the boy. I wanted to like the movie more than I did (the actor who plays the boy was discovered after winning kid’s week on Jeopardy and acquitted himself well in a demanding role), but the story was too incredible and the approach too emotionally manipulative.
