Last week was Spring Break here. We spent the weekend at our favorite getaway, Surfside Beach on the gulf coast. It’s a little under a hundred miles from us but a world away. We thought the beach might be busy, but it wasn’t, and on Sunday it was nearly empty. We don’t go to sit on the beach, because that leads to sunburns, but we enjoy leaving the balcony window open and listening to the surf crashing in, a constant sound that overwhelms just about everything. It’s always relaxing. The weather was fine: sunny days and cool evenings. Can’t beat that with a stick.
While we were away, my latest blog entry at Storytellers Unplugged went live. It’s called The Strangest Time, in which I talk about the weird period immediately before publication day. It gets weirder: Turns out I’m going to be in Tokyo on the day The Dark Tower Companion is published (April 2). Not exactly the best planning in the world, but these things happen.
I received contributor copies of Dead Reckonings #12 yesterday. I have two pieces in this issue. The first is a dual review (Peter Straub, The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine; Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale) and the other is a dialog with Hank Wagner about two Bradbury novels, Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. I’ve never done anything quite like that before, but it was fun. Hank and I go back a number of years and we see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but we also had different perspectives on these two books.
Got caught up on a number of TV shows from over the weekend. The Walking Dead was a wasted hour. Andrea decides to make her move but, by the end of the episode, she’s worse off than when she started. Her strategy was somewhat questionable. Of course the Governor knew where she was going, so all he had to do was go in that general direction and find her. Her one good move was the trick with the door near the end, which could have paid off, and might have been even better if she’d at least tried to steal the Governor’s truck. Rick, of course, thought he was seeing things again when Andrea showed up on the outskirts, only to be tackled at the eleventh hour. Kudos to Milton, though, for showing some guts. I presume he was the one who scorched the walkers, and I also presume the Governor knows. The sight of the burned walkers was one of the most graphic in the series, in my opinion. They take a licking and keep on ticking.
The Amazing Race wasn’t exactly action-packed, either, starting with the father/son team’s decision to drop out because of the father’s injury. From that point on it was pretty much clockwork, though it was fun watching the country singers get stumped by the chess puzzle.
Last night’s Castle was a horror-fest, predicated around a couple of people who seemed to have been scared to death after watching a horrific DVD that predicted their deaths. Sound familiar? That wasn’t the only horror movie trope thrown into the mix: they were all there, and duly noted by Castle, who was more than a little taken in by it all. Some good romantic moments between him and Beckett, and a cameo by Wes Craven who thought Castle was calling him in the middle of the night for advice because he’d been beaten at Texas Hold’em by Stephen King again.
I’d seen the promos for Bates Motel at the theater a couple of times and was suitably impressed. The first episode was promising. It’s beautifully shot and acted. The two leads are strong and there is the creepy undertone of the potential for a weird relationship between them. The body count was fairly low, but the suspense quotient was high, highlighted by a scene where the sheriff (Nestor Carbonell from Lost) uses the toilet next to the corpse of the motel’s former owner (played by the guy who was Dan Doherty on Deadwood), who has been unceremoniously crammed in the shower stall (of course). The kids at Norman’s school seem cool and accepting of him so far, but is that all a facade? And then there’s the strange book Norman found, which seems somehow connected to the unexpected and unexplained closing scene. I’ll be back next week, for sure.
