Bev Vincent

The Leftovers (HBO) begins where most speculative fiction ends. Once the characters in a horror novel defeat the Big Bad, the story wraps up quickly. You don’t often get to spend time with them to see the lasting impact of the experience.

The events of October 14 that are so integral to the story are long over before the show starts. What was behind the sudden departure of 2% of the planet’s population at that remarkable instant in time? The show will never answer that question, because that’s not what it’s about. The characters might seek the answer, but they won’t find it.

The big picture question of The Leftovers is: how do individuals and society respond in the face of something inexplicable. The departure isn’t apocalyptic. Society isn’t decimated and, for the most part, can continue to function as before. Most people know someone who departed, or know someone who knows someone. If you worked in a company with a hundred employees, a couple might have vanished, but business can continue, with a few adjustments. If you worked in a company with ten employees, maybe no one vanished that day.

Owing to the vagaries of randomness, though, there can be clusters. Nora Durst lost her husband and both of her children that day. She was in the kitchen making breakfast and they were at the table in the adjoining room. One minute they were there; the next, they weren’t. It’s easy to take the event personally when something like that happens.

Then there’s a place like Jardine, TX, the only town where absolutely no one vanished. Again, random chance can explain this apparent aberration, but the residents choose to see it as a sign that they’re special. People flock to the town to drink the water or see if there’s something about the town that can help protect them if the departure happens again. Residents keep doing the same thing they were doing on October 14, like superstitious athletes warding off bad luck.

A lot of people are concerned with identifying the commonality among the departed. The government sets up a questionnaire to look for trends. Did everyone who vanished have blood type B-, for example? The questionnaire is far-ranging, because no one has a clue. It probably wasn’t a Biblical rapture, because some of the people who vanished weren’t very nice, and some of those who remained behind are. One minister makes it his mission to demonstrate that fact. A lot of people are invested in lending some meaning to the incident. Others are equally determined to show that it had no meaning, and neither does life in general. People go crazy. They commit suicide. They abandon their families and join cults. Some of them realize the inefficacy of the cults and attempt to rejoin their families.

For most people, though, life goes on. Society continues to function. But everyone is a little bit less confident. The ground feels less solid, as if it might disappear from underfoot without warning. There’s no denying the departures. It’s not like vampires in a small town that are ultimately defeated. As the Season 2 opening credits demonstrate so well, there are a lot of gaps that can’t be filled or explained. It happened. Now people have to deal with it, each in his or her own way. It’s one of those moments everyone has a story about. Where were you when everyone vanished?

The show doesn’t exactly have a through-line. There’s no goal. No problem to be solved each season. It’s all about the characters. Many of the episodes are more-or-less stand-alones, although dependent upon our understanding of the featured characters. It’s a rich world peopled by characters of every type imaginable. The show allows viewers to come to conclusions and doesn’t spoon-feed every detail. What exactly was the first fifteen minutes of the first episode of Season 2 about? How did it relate to the rest of the show? You’re free to draw your own conclusions. There is no answer.

There are no answers.

Some people might question our choice of reading material before we went on a seven-day cruise. Not long before we departed, we finished reading Simple Courage by Frank Delaney, an account of the Flying Enterprise, which was hit by two rogue waves in the North Atlantic in late 1951. The first one “broke” the ship and the second one knocked her into a 60° list. Little wonder my wife was humming “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” while we drove to the Port of Houston for our cruise to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary.

Little did we know: on the first full day at sea, the program listed a book club. The title on offer was Dead Wake, which sounded like a murder mystery, so we checked it out. Turns out it’s a non-fiction book by Erik Larson about the last voyage (and, ultimately, the sinking) of the Lusitania. Inspired choice to pass out on a cruise ship. However, we really enjoyed it: it presented the historical context (and you know, I’m all about the historical context!), the personalities aboard the ship, the political situation at the time—as well as Woodrow Wilson’s personal anguish—and it also presented the point of view of the captain of the U-20 whose torpedo brought down the mighty ship, thanks to his log book. Being on a cruise ship allowed us to compare and contrast the experience in 2015 to that in 1915. I’ve never read Larson before, but I plan to tackle some of his other books. Maybe we’ll read Isaac’s Storm (about the 1900 Galveston hurricane) during our next hurricane. I emailed him when we got back to find out if he knew that his book was being featured on a cruise ship, but he said that neither he nor his publicist were responsible, and he seemed greatly amused.

We splurged and got a suite at the back of the ship, with a balcony. The room was comparable to what you’d get at an extended-stay motel, with a bedroom, living room (divided by a pull-curtain), bathroom with separate spa tub and shower area, and a sink, mini-fridge area. Also a DVD player and two TVs, one facing in each direction, which were surplus to requirements. We received a lot of special perqs throughout the cruise as suite residents, which made us feel pampered.

The main feature for us was the balcony. It was about ⅓ the width of the ship, big enough for two deck chairs side by side and a small round table that could seat four. We spent a lot of time on the balcony, watching the Gulf and the Caribbean roll out behind us. There was an overhang, so we were only rarely in direct sun, which meant we didn’t have to ration our time for fear of sun burn. Except when we were in port, it was never too hot to sit out there, nor too cool. We even took a couple of our meals out there. Did I mention we loved the balcony? So much so that we decided not to go on any shore excursions (Grand Cayman, Costa Maya and Cozumel). We preferred to stay on board, taking advantage of the lower census of passengers.

It was also a good perspective from which to watch the docking and departing process. Seeing these great ships almost parallel parking, backing up, going sideways, it’s quite impressive. In Costa Maya, we left at 7:30 PM, when it was dark and drizzling. A couple of workers on the wharf were waiting for the ropes to slacken so they could pull them off the bollards. They were in yellow rain slickers and one guy was dancing to pass the time. We could just barely hear him whistling “La Cucaracha.” My wife is a world-class whistler, so she whistled the song back at him. We were four or five decks above the waterline, so maybe fifty feet up, but he heard us all the same, and we had a little back and forth with them. They were all alone on the wharf. It was a fun little moment.

We partook of some of the entertainment options, but we didn’t darken the doorways of the casino (not our thing) nor any of the shops. A lot of the on-board activities are thinly disguised infomercials, so we tended to steer clear of those, too. Lots of music, which was nice. Great dining options. I’m amazed I didn’t put on any weight, because we ate multi-course meals and had desserts galore, which we don’t often do. We ended up sharing tables with total strangers on a few occasions, but we always enjoyed the encounters. A lot of our fellow travelers were multiple-repeat cruisers, having logged tens of trips. One couple goes on a cruise every other week. The record-holder on this cruise was a man who’d spent something like 1400 days on cruises, or four solid years at sea.

Given that this wasn’t a holiday week, there weren’t so many younger people and we were at the younger edge of the median range, I’d say. For some reason, I also noticed a lot of the older men had pony tails. We met up with one interesting “couple” (I won’t say why they were interesting or why I put “couple” in quotes, because that would spoil things) at the bar one afternoon and I came away from the encounter with a great idea for a short story.

In addition to Dead Wake, which I read to my wife, I finished two novels (Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin and The Crossing by Michael Connelly), one novella (The Grownup by Gillian Flynn) and most of a third novel (Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith, aka JK Rowling). I did no writing at all, even though I’d planned to proof a novella. We were completely off the grid for the seven days we were away. We didn’t even bring our cell phones on board. No phone, texts or emails, no internet, no TV. I turned on our set a couple of times to get to the channel that showed our location and flew past any of the news channels along the way.

Someone insisted on telling us about the terror attacks in Paris on Friday evening, but if we hadn’t happened to sit next to them while waiting for dinner, we wouldn’t have heard about it at all. (My association with the Bataclan comes from the Supertramp album Paris. During a break between songs, John Anthony Helliwell marvels at the size of the crowd at this concert and he remembers back to the group’s first show in the city, which had about eight people in the audience—at the Bataclan concert hall.)

While we were away, my historical context essay about Different Seasons went live: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, as well as Rich’s essay about his recollections of the book then and now.

I was also delighted to learn that my story “Opposite Sides” was one of the finalists in the IV Edition of the Flash Fiction Competition César Egido Serrano, Museum of Words. There were 35,609 stories from 149 countries, so to be one of 18 Americans to make it to the final 250 or so out of that mass of submissions, as selected by 20 creative writing professors, is an honor indeed.

This has been a busy week at Stephen King Revisited. A couple of days ago, my Historical Context essay about The Gunslinger went up: Five Easy Pieces. Then Rich Chizmar posted his reminiscences about the book. Finally, today, my Guest Essay about the first Dark Tower book went live: Stephen King crossed the desert and I followed.

I also posted a review of Christopher Golden’s excellent new horror novel, Dead Ringers, at Onyx Reviews yesterday.

I completed a long interview for a magazine appearance early next year in which I was asked some fascinating questions. It ran long (I guess I ran long!) so it might not all get published in that venue and the interviewer is exploring alternate venues for any parts that might get edited out. There’s a chance that a new short story might run with the interview, too, but that remains to be seen.

With season 2 of The Returned under way, I introduced my wife to the first season of the French series last night and we’ll stack up the second season for later. It’s a genuinely creepy show, especially the little boy Victor, beautifully filmed in idyllic surroundings. I also like the fact that the French speakers enunciate very clearly, so I can pick up a lot of the dialog, which can be at times subtly different from the subtitles. I’m pretty sure that character didn’t just say, “Get lost.”

We’re keeping up with The Blacklist and Doctor Who, and we’re eagerly awaiting the return of The Americans, which I hope will be back in January or February. Last weekend, we watched Back In Time, the Back to the Future documentary, which was interesting for a while but then it got tedious when it focused so much on some of the obsessed fans. It had its moments, but it wasn’t nearly as good as some of the other documentaries we’ve seen lately. Possibly because I wasn’t all that into Back to the Future. I saw each of the movies once, and that’s it.

My wife was away for the weekend, so I decided to catch up on a few movies that I knew wouldn’t interest her while doing my best to stay dry. The remnants of the Pacific hurricane known as Patricia crossed into the Gulf of Mexico, bringing with it an impressive amount of rain. The most recent total I saw for our community was something like 5.7″ between Saturday morning and yesterday afternoon. Parts of downtown Houston got as much as 10″. There was some localized flooding, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Everything was pretty dry before this batch of rain came.

On Friday night, I saw Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak. This film has a few genuine scares, but it is mostly a Gothic movie that revels in atmosphere and setting. It’s about a young woman who marries a mysterious man and moves to England to live with him at his isolated and crumbling estate. The ceiling in the main entrance hall has collapsed, and a constant stream of stuff falls through it: leaves, petals, snow. It’s a magical and captivating concept. The young woman has prior experience with ghosts, and her new home has more than its fair share of them. They are depicted in an innovative manner: crawling specters that look like they are composed of the humans’ circulatory systems, with things (blood?) streaming off them at the edges in wisps and swirls. The whole thing is visually impressive, worth seeing on the big screen. Stick around for at least the first section of the credits for more of these fantastic visuals. Oh, it’s also a very stabby movie.

On Saturday morning, I saw Sicario, which is a good follow-up to the Netflix series Narcos, where I first heard that word, which is defined as “hit man” in the context of this movie. Emily Blunt is an FBI agent who volunteers to attach herself to a task force led by Josh Brolin whose intent is to do some major damage to Mexican drug lords operating near the US border. Also on the team is a mysterious figure played by Benecio del Toro (unrelated to Guillermo), a man with some odd quirks and a way of speaking in philosophical metaphors. Blunt’s character is highly motivated because her team was damaged by a booby trap, and she’s coming to understand that the normal ways of doing things simply aren’t effective. She’s the audience’s avatar, the person to whom the film is explained, and there’s a lot more going on than she at first realizes, which places her in some difficult situations. It’s all very impressive and disturbing because it seems real and realistic. Possibly one of Blunt’s best-ever performances, and del Toro is terrific.

By the time I left that matinee showing, the rain had started, so I hunkered down at home for the rest of the weekend. Yesterday I finally got around to seeing Chappie, which was not at all what I was expecting. William Gibson has been talking about the movie a lot on Twitter (very favorably). I thought it was going to be something like Short Circuit, and the trailers I saw in the distant past didn’t give me any sense of its South African setting or its “hip hop” sensibility. It stars Dev Patel (from the Marigold Hotel movies) as the inventor of robotic police, one of which he implants with consciousness. However, this robot is stolen by a bunch of criminals played by members of a rap/rave group called Die Antwoord. They give surprisingly effective performances as they “pervert” this sentient robot, implanting their particular South African accents and jargon onto it and convincing it to do things that are against its fundamental programming. Lurking in the wings is Hugh Jackman, who has built a prototype of a much more expensive robot that the company won’t give him the green light to test. The movie got a critical drubbing, and only middling audience response, but it’s really quite good. Funny and sad. A little maudlin toward the end, and a tad tidy, but it’s well worth the journey, especially since I got a coupon to see it free OnDemand.

I love it when I think I’ve run out of time to start writing in the morning because I’m busy doing other things and I still manage to get 1000 words done. My goal for this novel is a conservative 5000 words per week. More if I can get ’em, but that pace would be satisfactory.

My essay The Halloween Tree is now up at the blog formerly know as Not Now…Mommy’s Reading, rebranded for October (to acknowledge its takeover by a motley crew of horror writers) as Not Now…Mommy’s Screaming. There’s also a contest where you can win a trade paperback copy of The Dark Tower Companion, so check it out, and also the other entries from my compatriots in horror.

My most recent essay for Stephen King Revisited is online this week, too. It’s called Can You See Me Running? and it details the historical context behind the publication of The Running Man, the last of the paperback original books published as Richard Bachman.

I was also interviewed recently for Ficção Terror, a Brazilian blog about horror movies and books. The interview is now available in both Portuguese and in English, so you can read it in the language of your choosing.

I finished the first season of Fortitude this weekend. An impressive original series set in a remote Arctic island, population 700-something. Mostly miners and people who support the mining town (inn keepers, shopkeepers, cops). It’s in the permafrost, a place where it is illegal to die because there’s no place to bury anyone. It starts with a killing and a discovery, and things go very, very badly from there. A lot of people break the law by dying. The local governor (played by Sofie Gråbøl from the Danish original of The Killing) wants to build a hotel in the glacier, but she comes to realize that perhaps a bigger morgue is what’s called for. The story flirts with science fiction and it is definitely horrific at times, but all somewhat credible. A good cast, including Stanley Tucci as a DI in from London to supervise some investigations and Michael Gambon as an aging photographer battling cancer. Filming of Season 2 is underway in Iceland and I can’t wait to see where they take the story.

We saw The Martian yesterday. A very good science-driven space opera about a guy struggling to survive under the worst imaginable conditions: lots of potatoes but no ketchup. A strong ensemble cast, and an intriguing and captivating plot. No aliens or star wars, just the kinds of things a space program has to deal with: the unforgiving nature of space. Damon is the Jimmy Stewart of our time. Always pretty much the same character, but a calm, reassuring force within a film. The audience avatar. The guy we trust to get us home. If I have an issue with the movie at all, it’s that it downplayed the passage of time and the psychological stresses that must cause. The people on Earth were under enormous pressure to produce solutions in an insanely short period of time, but the people in space had to deal with a ton of tedium, and it would have been nice to see that acknowledged a bit more. Tedium and disco. What a combination. Actually, the choice of disco songs was so on the nose at times it was hilarious. Hot Stuff when he’s carting around the radioactive material, the obligatory David Bowie space song, Waterloo by Abba when defeat seems at hand and Donna Summer’s triumphant anthem over the closing parts. All in a all, a well conceived and executed adventure tale. But I expect Damon’s character never wants fries with that again.

There are probably weirder TV shows in current production than The Leftovers, but I’m hard pressed to think of one. For the first 10 minutes of last night’s season 2 premiere, I kept wondering if maybe I’d stumbled into the wrong show by accident. And then another show started, and it wasn’t until very late in the game that we see some familiar faces. Talk about a way to build suspense, though. Have a “psychic” character tell someone else that something bad is going to happen, then watch the second guy stick his hand in a garbage disposal. There’s definitely some weird stuff going on in Miracle, TX. Reminds me a bit of “The End of the Whole Mess” and the waters that prolong life. I get the impression that miracles aren’t all that welcome in Miracle. And what was the deal with the pie? And the cricket? So many questions.

My biggest question about The Affair is the timeline. When does the jail stuff happen with respect to everything else. Much later than the brunt of the episode? So I gather. I’m always intrigued by the way the show recreates certain scenes from different characters’ points of view. Even the clothing is different at times, but definitely the tone and specifics of, for example, the mediation meeting. Totally different. And that had to be one of the most awkward sex scenes I’ve ever seen. Lots of buzz on the ‘net today about the full frontal shot, brief and blurry though it was, but nary a whisper about all the nudity on The Leftovers.

I found it odd that I hadn’t heard there was a sitcom starring Patrick Stewart. Then, when I discovered it was on Starz, I began to have my doubts. But my wife’s coworker thought it was a scream, so we gave Blunt Talk a shot this weekend. We made it through three 30-minute episodes, but that’s it for us. It is regrettably unfunny. Blunt is despicable from the opening moments of the show, and he gets no better. There were a few funny moments over the ninety-minute span, but on the whole it’s a waste of talent.

CSI went out with a few bangs. Fifteen years is a pretty good run and they gave us the “riding off into the sunset” finale that put a nice ribbon on the series. I never cottoned to the spin-offs, not even the one remaining that will now benefit from Ted Danson’s migration, but I always had a soft spot for Gris and the gang.

Even though I’m from Canada, and I remember well when 2112 was released (I was in grade 9), and they’ve been a constant background presence during my life, I can’t say I’m a huge Rush fan. I like a handful of their songs, and I’m okay with a bunch more, but I’ve never had any desire to see them in concert, even though I had ample opportunity to do so over the years. I actually like Max Webster, their perennial opening band, better. However, Netflix is now streaming the 2010 documentary Behind the Lighted Stage, so we checked it out yesterday. Major props to the dudes from Ontario—they seem to be one of the healthiest (mentally) rock groups in existence. Granted, a 100-minute synopsis of a 40-year career can’t delve into everything, but if there was ever any acrimony or dissension within the group, you figure you’d see some hint of it. But they just did the job and continued to improve themselves and, despite a lack of respect from the critical establishment, kept on keeping on. There’s is an interesting trajectory—how they were pulled from obscurity in Cleveland because “Working Man” tapped into the city’s ethos at the time and how they stood up to the record company and pretty much everyone by refusing to kowtow to their demands and choosing to go out on their own terms, if 2112 had been a failure. How they tried out different things over the years and regrouped when some of the experimentation didn’t quite work out. How they managed to preserve long-term family relationships and how the other two members of the band refused to consider replacing Peart when he went off the grid for a few years following some personal tragedies. Good, solid blokes, all round. Quirky as hell, but they have my respect. And they finally made it onto the cover of Rolling Stone this year.

So it goes like this: We see Yes. I start listening to old Yes albums. That leads me back to Buggles, who I loved in the 1980s. You know, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Good keyboards. So I wonder what else Geoff Downes has done. Yes, I know he was in Asia, but what else? That leads me to New Dance Orchestra, which is electronica with a strong disco/dance influence. The new album features vocals by Anne-Marie Helder. Reminds me of Sarah Brightman. Research her a bit and discover she does lead vocals for a Welsh group called Panic Room. Find a couple of tracks on YouTube. I like. And thus is a new group discovered by me. I read that the band was formed out of a previous endeavor called Karnataka, which I’ve also never heard. So maybe there’s something else to check out. I like finding new music.

I haven’t said much about this, but since it seems to be moving right along, I guess it’s safe to say that I’ve finally started working on that novel I’ve been thinking about for lo these many months and years. I’m doing it longhand, as I did with the novella I wrote earlier this year, and since September 9 I’ve completed over fifty handwritten pages. I have no idea if all of it will make it into the book once it’s finished, because some of it involves feeling around for the right direction and figuring out for myself what it’s really all about, but I think I’m well on my way. I’m not going to make any promises, even to myself, as to when I hope to get the first draft finished, but it would be nice to think I could get a lot of it done before the leap year begins.

I finished the Netflix original Narcos last night. Open for a second season, which I’d watch. The first season manages to turn the narrating character into a bit of a jerk by the end, but at least he’s not Walter White. Just a guy tainted by the things he has to deal with and do to get his job done.

This morning, while exercising I decided to go back to House of Cards, Season 3, which we’d abandoned after a few episodes. I didn’t mind it, but my wife got bored with it. We’re going to try out a comedy series called Blunt Talk that stars Patrick Stewart this weekend. I’m also watching a series called Fortitude that has Michael Gambon, Sofie Gråbøl, Christopher Eccleston and Stanley Tucci. It’s set on a remote northern island (filmed in Iceland) where it is unlawful for anyone to die or be buried.

Skype is down all over the world. I guess we broke it during our hour-long videoconference with our daughter in Japan last night! It’s the first time we called since she moved to Okinawa. It was a little like that episode of The Big Bang Theory where Raj shows his family around. Technology is pretty cool, though, except when it breaks down.

I posted a couple of book reviews over the weekend: Dexter is Dead by Jeff Lindsay and Zer0es by Chuck Wendig.

We finished Season 4 of Longmire on Friday night. The switch to Netflix was a positive change, with longer episodes, a more natural structure (no commercial breaks), and a good mix between episode-specific plot and multi-episode arcs. I was glad they resolved the situation that launched the season within a few episodes rather than drag it out, even though its tentacles reached all the way to the end of the season. Episode 3 was intense. I also like that the relationship between Walt and Mathias, the tribal police chief, has evolved from purely antagonistic to at least a working kinship. And it was also an interesting development that Henry should go from stopping Walt from acting like a vigilante in the first episode to embracing that persona later in the season. The relation between Vic and Walt is much more credible than in the novels, I think. Complicated, but not cliched. Ally Walker is a good addition to the show, and I suppose the outcome of the cliff-hanger will depend upon her availability, should the show be renewed. All in all: well done, Netflix.

I’m not the world’s biggest Rolling Stones fan. I like some of their stuff and I loathe some of it (I’m looking at you, Emotional Rescue). I have a collection of their greatest hits, but I don’t think I’ve ever bought an album. Still, the new documentary about Keith Richards, Under the Influence, just out on Netflix, looked intriguing. There’s always been something about the way he plays, that kind of shruggy, counter-tempo thing he does, that has intrigued me. The documentary started out as a promo video for his new solo album and expanded into a 90-minute film. Given its genesis, it doesn’t delve into any of the conflicts or troubles from the past, other than a brief statement by Richards that he referred to his relationship with Jagger in the later 1980s as World War III. It’s all about the music that has influenced him over the years, from Muddy Waters to reggae, and how he got to meet and play with some of the musicians who influenced the Stones. It has some nice historical footage and Richards is in good form, laughing giddily half the time, between puffs on his cigarette.