I’m one of over 10,000 people who downloaded Brian James Freeman’s novella, The Painted Darkness, which is being offered as a free eBook in advance of its Cemetery Dance publication. I finally got around to reading the book on my Kindle this morning. It wears many obvious King influences, from the dual, interwoven timeline of It (along with those rubber boots that made me think of poor Georgie Denborough) to “The Boogeyman” to the dangerous boiler from The Shining to the shifting perspective in a series of paintings that made me think of “The Road Virus Heads North” (an also an old Night Gallery episode starring Roddy McDowall. It’s a well-crafted, well-written story. I wonder if Brian wrote the two timelines independently and then wove them together or if he wrote the story as it is presented. The two parallel well, especially in scenes where both the younger and older character are exposed to extreme cold conditions. Check it out — it’s free and it’s entertaining!
At the end of the eBook, there are interviews and a round robin discussion of eBooks, as well as an interview with Ray Bradbury. I was intrigued to note that young Bradbury was interested in looking into the future, whereas modern-day, nearly 90-year-old Bradbury seems more interested in looking back into the past. He uses his TV to watch Turner Classic Movies only, he claims, and rails against every modern day invention from the radio onward.
I received good news about a short story–news that I won’t be able to share until later this year. It was to be published in an anthology, but then the anthology was canceled, but now it’s back on again. Yay!
We watched The Runaways last night, the biopic of the group that launched Joan Jett and Lita Ford. It stars Kristen Stewart as Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie, the young (“jailbait”) troubled girl who was plucked from a nightclub and made the band’s singer. I don’t recall the Runaways when they were big, but Joan Jett has certainly been a presence since her solo debut. I didn’t realize that one of the Runaways’ band members, though she left them early, went on to join the Bangles. Roger Ebert comments that the band’s experiences mirrored closely the movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which he wrote. The more I read about the early days of certain rock acts, the more I marvel at how they started out with people who had limited or rudimentary skills. It’s scary to realize how these young girls were sent out on the road with limited supervision to perform in front of potentially hostile audiences. If the story is to be believed, though, their manager anticipated the types of reactions they might get and prepared them. Watching Jett bat away projectiles like a baseball player without missing a beat was one of the movie’s best moments. I’ve never seen Stewart in a movie before, but I was impressed, and Fanning has the potential to be a great actress. I struggled to identify the little girl from Man on Fire and failed. And I totally didn’t recognize Tatum O’Neal as her absentee mother.
