It’s that time of year again: I head off to NECon tomorrow morning on a flight that seemed like a good idea at the time but now I’m facing the reality of having to get up in time to make it. The good news is that it gets me to Providence at a decent time, with lots of the day left. The bad: getting up at 3:45 am.
I’m taking part in a Kaffeeklatsch on Friday at 11 am: The Year’s Best Reading, along with Jack Haringa, Barry Lee Dejasu, and Catherine Grant. I’ve got some fantastic suggestions to make this year—to those who aren’t off playing mini-golf, that is. I hope there’s tea…
I didn’t win the Thriller Award on Saturday evening. I’d asked F. Paul Wilson to accept on my behalf in the unlikely event I won, and he emailed me from the banquet to let me know that I hadn’t. He is sending me a copy of the program booklet from the event, so I’ll have that.
I posted a couple of book reviews over the past several days. The first was for Numero Zero by Umberto Eco, a book that he apparently abandoned back in the early 1990s but picked up again and completed recently. It’s a brief book: Amazon lists it at 208 pages, but my eGalley was even shorter than that. It has a few issues. Then I reviewed Last Words by Michael Koryta, who I met at NECon this time last year. Not for anyone who has claustrophobia issues. A lot of it takes place in caves. In the dark. Whoa. It’s the first book in a series, and the eGalley had the first chapter of the next book, too. Looking forward to that one.
We’ve been chugging along at Stephen King Revisited. I posted my essay about Danse Macabre: (What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror) and Rich’s essay is available, too. I have my essays for the next two books queued up.
I met briefly with editor Danel Olson a couple of nights ago when he delivered my contributor copies of The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film. It’s a massive book and I look forward to ploughing through it, perhaps on my flights tomorrow. So far I’ve read the introduction and the interview with the “Shining twins,” which is hilarious, as they’re now approaching fifty but still seem to complete each other’s thoughts and sentences. It’s interesting to hear about their experiences working on the film. The book has drawn some good publicity, including mentions in The Washington Post, Empire magazine and Independent Publisher review (links available here).
I discovered an overlooked BBC series from a while back that I binged through recently. It’s called Five Days and aired on HBO, too. The conceit is that each episode depicts one of five days during a crime investigation, but they aren’t contiguous. In the first (of two) series, the third day is the day of the 28-day review, for example, something I didn’t know existed until watching The Fall. Like Broadchurch, the series looks at the impact crime and criminal investigations have on the family of the victim, their friends and on the police as well. Lots of familiar actors appear, including Penelope Wilton and Bernard Hill from Doctor Who, David Oyelowo from Selma, Edward Woodward (The Equalizer), Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey), Janet McTeer from the short-lived Battle Creek (I didn’t realize she was British) and David Morrisey (the Governor from The Walking Dead). The time jumps don’t do the series a favor, and the second season, which aired three years after the first, has some elements that could have amounted to something but didn’t. For example, there’s a lot of fuss over the main character’s mother’s dementia, but in the final analysis it’s much ado about nothing. The accents in the second series are also challenging enough that I wished for closed captioning at times. Still, not bad stuff.
