Bev Vincent

Last summer it was Styx and Foreigner. Last night it was Toto and Yes. Gradually I’m finally getting the chance to see in concert all the bands who I first discovered in high school or as a university undergrad, many of whom I still listen to this day or have recently rediscovered.

Styx fell off my radar for a long time until I stumbled upon their 2003 album Cyclorama, which is very good. That was when I learned that they’d brought on Lawrence Gowan as a singer-keyboardist, the guy I knew of as just Gowan, a well-known Canadian performer from the early 80s. I started filling in the gaps and then they came to the local concert pavilion last summer, along with Don Felder from the Eagles and Foreigner, who put on an impressive show, too. I’d seen Tommy Shaw before when he toured with the Damned Yankees back in the early 90s.

Similarly, I’d lost touch with Toto until something put them back on my radar again and I caught up. They have a new album out, Toto XIV, which is very good indeed. I’ve been looking forward to this concert for a few months, and I was surprised that they were the support act. Turns out it was almost a co-billing. Toto played from 7:30 until 9:00 and Yes played from 9:15 until 11:00 or so. Toto had the bigger stage presence, with two keyboard players (Paich and Porcaro), a percussionist in addition to a drummer, two backup singers, in addition to Steve Lukather, vocalist Joseph Williams and more. Lukather is amazing on the guitar, but I see he’s still “old-school”—plugged in. A roadie had to lurk behind him to make sure his guitar chord didn’t get tangled up. Yes was just five guys: drums, bass, keyboards, guitar and vocals.

I was surprised that the pavilion was in its small configuration for the concert: no lawn seats were sold. The Pavilion has 6500 reserved seats and can put another 10,000 people on the hill, and it routinely sells out the full capacity. For this show, it was all reserved seating. A rainstorm passed through in the mid-afternoon, so I was glad we wouldn’t be sitting on the hill, but as it turns out, no one was. They seemed to know in advance that this was a concert with somewhat limited appeal. It was certainly an enthusiastic audience, albeit a relatively small one.

I’m much less familiar with Yes’s music. I knew a few of their songs, but not most of them. I appreciate their musical talents (Steve Howe still has his guitar chops, Geoff Downes can still play his wall of keyboards with the best of them), but their songs don’t grab me the same way many other bands’ songs do. I have a hard time latching onto them. They meander and seem to be without structure in some cases. I guess that just comes from not having listened to them for decades, as I have with the other groups. The lead singer can reproduce Jon Anderson’s sound pretty well (I liked Anderson’s project with Vangelis from the 1980s), though he looked a little like a cross between a religious cult leader and Kid Rock. It was fun watching them (the bass player was impressive, though Chris Squire’s shadow hung over them literally and figuratively), but I just didn’t connect to the music in the same way. I was on my feet for much of Toto, but I sat back for Yes, mostly. I remember feeling much the same when I saw Emerson, Lake and Palmer many years ago: the musicians seemed to be offering a master class in music performance rather than putting on a show. But that’s just me. The English bloke sitting next to us was having the time of his life during Yes.

I think that leaves only Kansas as the one major band from my college years that I haven’t seen in concert.

My review of The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film just went live at Cemetery Dance Online.

We watched a couple of documentaries and a couple of films this weekend. First, we saw An Honest Liar, a documentary about James (“The Amazing”) Randi, the magician and escape artist who has been one of the leading crusaders against fraud, especially from people who claim to have magical or mystical powers. Uri Geller has been one of his lifelong nemeses.

I’d forgotten that Randi was born in Canada. He became a magician and illusionist at an early age, joining the circus instead of graduating from high school. However, he reached a decision point when he realized that he could use his skills for ill or for good. He’s taken on faith healers and psychics, and has posted $1 million of his own money to anyone who can prove psychic abilities. He executed elaborate cons to show that PSI research at reputable institutions was fundamentally flawed, and he coached the producers at the Tonight Show on how to set up Uri Geller’s demonstrations so they were guaranteed to fail. He then started following Geller on the talk show circuit to reproduce everything Geller had done the previous day to show that there was nothing magical about it. His credo is that magicians are the most honest people around: they’ll tell you they’re going to lie to you and fool you, and then they lie to you and fool you.

On a more personal level, the documentary revealed some surprises about his long-term relationship and a deception that was either perpetrated upon him or with his full cooperation for a quarter of a century. We’ve always liked Randi and his JREF organization’s goals. We came away from the documentary liking him even more. But, man, those eyebrows. They’re a ZIP code all their own.

Then we watched A Year in Champagne, which is a companion film to A Year in Burgandy, which we watched a few months ago. It examines the production of champagne wine in northeastern France by showing what goes on during a typical year at a variety of vineyards and companies. The year chosen happened to be a particularly gloomy one and it looked like the crop would be a complete failure, but season-end conditions improved enough so that, although the crop was small, it was very good. A fascinating look at the way champagne emerged as something associated with celebrations, and the people who’ve made it for centuries.

Yesterday we saw Ricki and the Flash, starring Meryl Streep as a woman who abandoned her family to pursue her dream of being a musician. A crisis emerges when her daughter’s husband divorces her and her ex-husband (Kevin Kline) is ill-equipped to manage her volatile emotions. So he puts in a call to Ricki (who the family knew as Linda) and asks her to come back to Indiana. This opens up all sorts of old wounds and issues. Ricki’s partner, in the band and off, is played by the most excellent Rick Springfield, who still has his guitar chops (and looks much better than he did in True Detective, see above) and delivered a surprisingly emotional performance as a sensitive guy trying to break down the borders of a somewhat closed-off woman. The script was by Diablo Cody, and it makes some very interesting (and, from my perspective, good) choices about what threads to follow and how to wrap them up. There’s no tidy bow at the end, but there is the possibility of further healing of broken bonds. It gave us a lot to talk about at the pub after the matinee. Good music, too, all performed by the actors and musicians.

Then, in the afternoon we watched an Australian film called Strangerland starring Nicole Kidman, Joseph Fiennes and Hugo Weaving. It’s set in a small, remote Australian town prone to dust storms. Kidman and Fiennes have moved there to get away from some family problem that occurred in their previous domicile. They have a 12- or 13-year old son who likes to go walkabout at night and a 15-year-old hypersexual daughter. There’s unexplained tension in the marriage that is exacerbated when the two kids go missing one night. Everything from everyone’s past comes out in the subsequent investigation, led by Weaving’s town sheriff. Strong performances, but things sort of meander without much explanation and the film has one of those dreaded “French movie” endings where the credits start rolling and you slap your forehead and say, “Oh, no!” An intriguing movie, but ultimately less than satisfying, although it’s got Nicole Kidman, and that’s always good.

I went to a book signing last night and came home smelling of smoke.

No, it didn’t turn into a book burning.

I first met Michael Koryta at Necon in 2014. We hit it off quickly and I found myself thinking that if he lived closer, he’d be the sort of guy I’d like to hang around with. A seriously smart guy, and very nice. He also happens to be a helluva writer.

I’d been introduced to his work by accident. I was using my computer-fu for my pals at Cemetery Dance, helping them extract the text from an obstinate pdf. All the running headers and footers and page numbers were giving them fits. So I took a crack at it and managed to come up with a solution to the problem. As it happened, the pdf was Koryta’s The Prophet. I figured, since I had the file, I’d load it onto my iPad and read it. I was majorly impressed.

Those Who Wish Me Dead was his 2014 novel, a full-out thriller set in Big Sky Country. Impressive. I managed to get an eGalley of his latest, Last Words, the beginning of a series, and was also impressed. I think I’d known he was coming to Houston on his book tour, but all of a sudden, on Monday, I realized it was going to be the following day, publication day for the new book. I sent him a DM on Twitter and said to give me a shout if he was bored yesterday afternoon. He had an interview to take care of, but in between that and his appearance at Murder By the Book, he had an hour or so, so I met up with him at the bar at his hotel, and then drove him over to the bookstore.

Following his own tradition with MBTB, he read from his next book instead of the current one. They’re parts of a series, and he originally decided to shift the second book from third person to first to indicate the growth and evolution of his character, Mark Novak. He was some 300 pages into the book when he realized it wasn’t working, so he went back to the beginning (oh, what a brave decision that was) and started over again in third person. However, before he made the choice, the decision had been made to include the first chapter as a teaser in the hardcover of Last Words, a fairly rare occurrence. Even rarer, now that the chapter is a lot different than it will be in Echoes, when it appears next year.

He asked me to stick around after the signing, so we went out to dinner. As a nod to being in Texas, I suggest barbecue. The original Goode Company Barbeque is only a few blocks from MBTB, and it was a good choice. By then it was nice enough that we could sit outdoors while we had our dinner and Texas beer (Lone Star for him, Shiner Bock for me). That’s where the smell of smoke came from—we were downwind from the kitchen, I guess. I could still smell it on my clothes this morning. A nice smell.

Anyhow, it was a pleasant evening. Had a great time chatting with Michael about everything under the sun. Took him back to his hotel, as he had to catch an early flight this morning for the next leg of his book tour.

We watched American Sniper on the weekend. It had been on my radar for a long time, just never got around to it before. I’m glad we saw it. I had a different impression about what happened to him after he came back after his last tour of duty. As good as the film was, I have to wonder how Eastwood and the producers and the studio executives and everyone else who sticks their collective noses into a movie allowed it to go out with that scene of the baby played by a plastic doll. Surely the scene could have been shot differently so it wasn’t so blatant. As long as it was breast feeding, it was hardly noticeable, but once Cooper’s character started waving it in front of the camera, it left no doubt that this was not a real baby, crying noises in the soundtrack notwithstanding.

We also watched a documentary on Netflix called The Search for General Tso. While nominally devoted to determining the origins of the ubiquitous dish, it also explored Chinese immigration into the US and the reasons why they scattered across the country after originally concentrating in San Francisco. It’s not a long film, a little over an hour, but it presented some interesting information about how American Chinese food evolved because the Chinese understood that they had to adapt the cuisine to the local palate, which gives rise to such weirdnesses as General Tso’s Alligator in Louisiana. They tracked down the originator of the dish, an aging Chinese man from Hunan Province who lived in Taiwan, who was flabbergasted and dismayed by the variations of his invention presented to him. A fun, light, entertaining program that will likely leave you with a sudden urge to head off to the local Chinese takeaway.

What’s a person to do when your spouse is out of town for the weekend and the daytime high temperatures are hovering around 102° with a heat index over 110°?

I had a plan and a backup plan. Fortunately, everything came together for the main plan because in hindsight i don’t think the backup plan would have worked out so well. I had this idea that I’d go down to the coast, where it would be 10-15° cooler, set up a canopy on the beach, bring along a cooler of beverages and a chair and write to the sound of the Gulf of Mexico’s constant waves. It was a romantic idea, but I don’t think it was that much cooler down there, and a few minutes out in the blanket of heat late on Saturday afternoon told me that it probably wouldn’t have been terribly productive time.

Instead, I went out to Trivia Night on Friday evening. The first time I’ve ever done that, and it was a lot of fun. Sponsored by a local organization that liaises between local businesses and schools. They organize the district science fair and mentoring programs, stuff like that. This was a fund raiser for their organization, the third year they’ve done it. There were some corporate teams, but I ended up sitting with five strangers. We sat at table 12 so when we were tasked with coming up with a team name, I suggested “The Dirty Dozen,” but since there were six of us, we modified it to “The Dirty Half Dozen.” There were eight rounds of ten questions and we did surprisingly well. We were the leaders at the midway point and ended up coming in second overall, losing out to the returning champions from last year. One of the rounds consisted of a baggie containing ten pieces of breakfast cereal that we had to identify. That was pretty clever, I thought.

Then on Saturday, the HPD ridealong I’d requested a couple of weeks ago came together. I had to be at the South Central station at 6:45 for roll call, so that meant getting up early. I was assigned, as requested, to a female officer, as I wanted to hear her perspective on the job. How her colleagues treated her, and how the public did. It was a fairly uneventful tour of duty—the officer kept looking for something interesting to show me, but the closest we came was a wellness check at a house where the resident hadn’t been heard from for four days. The front door was barred, so HFD was called in to pop the gate and then break down the door. Everyone expected to find a body inside, but the house was empty, so the resident will return home to a surprise. I learned all about the new street drug that is turning people into zombies and got the inside scoop on how cops handle certain kinds of routine situations. It’s been a decade since my last ridealong, so their tech has been upgraded a little in the interim. Cops have to be experts at distracted driving, as they’re always responding to messages on the computer, over the radio and on their phones, sometimes simultaneously. I think she was disappointed that it was a boring day, but I got a lot of material and we got to spend most of the time inside the air conditioned car!

Yesterday I watched a documentary called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, which tells the story of how a director’s vision for an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel went off the rails. The movie ended up being made, but with a new director (after Stanley spent months on the script and preproduction), but went through various cast changes and suffered from the presence of two demanding and cantankerous actors: Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. It was filmed in a remote section of a remote section of Australia—an hour through the rain forest from Cairns, which is way up on the northeast corner of the continent, near the barrier reef. I spent a week there on vacation, a little before this film was made, I believe, and it’s beautiful but a long way from everything, and prone to bad weather. The movie makes one wonder how on earth films ever get made. This was a case of giving a guy a ton of money and plopping him down in the rain forest and letting him hang himself. Fascinating stuff, even if you’ve never heard of Richard Stanley.

I also saw the last part of True Detectives. The show had big boots to fill, and for the most part it didn’t live up to the standards of the first season. The plot was as convoluted as hell, but that’s almost a noir tradition and in the final analysis did it really matter? There were the good guys (a bunch of broken, wounded men and women) and the bad guys (corrupt politicians, etc.) and the very bad guys (Russian and Mexican gangs) all bumping up against each other. It was Chandler-esque and Ross Macdonald-esque and Ellroy-esque all at the same time, which isn’t a boon to the intelligibility quotient, but all in all I thought it was worth while.

I stuck my toe into the Sense8 waters. I’m not sold on it yet, but I’ll watch the next episode to see where it’s going.

It’s been nearly two years since we saw the mercury rise past 100°F (37.8°C), but we’re making up for lost time. Triple digits day in and day out, with heat indices in the 108-109° range. Fortunately, I’m not outdoors very much, so I barely notice. The heat radiating from the (black) seat in my car actually feels kind of nice when I drive home at the end of the workday.

Cemetery Dance announced a couple of relevant things recently. First, the signed/limited edition of The Dark Tower Companion is almost done at the printer and should be shipping by the end of the month. Their eye-catching notices start off by saying, “Stephen King Says This Book Will Delight Dark Tower Fans!” Well, who can argue with that? This massive book is still available from CD for the bargain price of $60, and it has material (mostly pertaining to the Marvel graphic novels) not found in the NAL trade edition, which is also still available, by the way. The timing is decent given this week’s announcement that the Dark Tower movie will be in theaters in January 2017.

Then came the official announcement of the CD Select series, which consists of eBooks containing about four stories from a single author. Here’s the promo copy:

This new series invites some of our favorite authors to spotlight a sampling of their own short fiction: award-winners, stories they consider their best or that had the most impact on their career—or neglected favorites they feel deserve a second look.

Long-time fans will enjoy revisiting some classic tales. New readers will find this series a handy introduction to each author’s best work.

Each Cemetery Dance Select mini-collection includes an exclusive Afterword where the author explains the reasoning behind each selection, and provides insights into the writing of each story.

Check out their webpage for a list of the authors from the “first wave,” which includes me. The eBooks are available from all of the usual online vendors.

I finally bit the bullet and deleted Under the Dome from the DVR. I almost did it at the end of Season 2, but I decided to give the show another chance to redeem itself. The two-hour premiere was a train wreck. Still, I watched one more episode because it promised to “answer all the questions.” I wasn’t impressed.

I am still digging Mr. Robot, though. “Was that what you wanted to hear?” Eliot says to his therapist after admitting to creeping her, and just about everyone else in his life. She was stunned, to put it mildly. And then there was that bit on the roof. I kept waiting for her to get up, gasping, but no.

My latest essay at Stephen King Revisited is now online. It’s called A brick heaved through a window, and it’s the history behind Cujo. The title comes from a comment King once made about the way he wanted the book to impact people.

I received word from the good folks at Cemetery Dance today that their limited edition of The Dark Tower Companion is almost done at the printer and will begin shipping in late August. Can’t wait to see this one. I signed a galley at NECON, the first time I’d seen one, in fact. All of my proofing on it for them was done with pdfs.

I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10 yesterday. I was very cavalier about it. I didn’t do a special documents backup (I have a dedicated terrabyte drive that constantly backs things up for me). I set the upgrade going and left for work after I clicked all the approval buttons that needed clicking, trusting that it would all happen without me needing to be present. And it did. Nary a hitch, and the interface and computing experience is only slightly different than before. It seems a little slicker and faster. I’ve discovered one program to date that no longer works, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. Support for it had ended years ago, and the complaint the program made when I tried to launch it was “This program requires Internet Explorer 6 to run,” so that gives an indication of its vintage. I was able to migrate the data from it to a newer, supported program, so nothing was lost. I worried that my manuscript submission tracker wouldn’t work, but it started up without a problem. It’s almost like having a new computer. Almost.

We saw Mr. Holmes on Friday evening. It stars Sir Ian McKellan as a 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes, retired to the coast of England, keeping bees and battling the onset of dementia. Laura Linney is his housekeeper. She has a young son who is always trying to get Holmes to “do his thing,” where he tells someone where they’ve been based on observation.

Holmes is struggling to remember his final case, the one that caused him to walk away from his lifelong profession. He knows it must have gone terribly wrong, but Watson’s account of it is benign. He begins to write it down, with the young boy as an eager audience, and bit by bit it comes back to him. He’s also just back from a trip to Japan where he acquired some Hiroshima herbs that are supposed to improve his memory.

It’s a charming, slow-paced film that doles out its secrets reluctantly. There are few whiz-bang feats of observation, but Holmes hasn’t completely lost that faculty. However, he does learn a lesson about the perils of telling the truth and the benefits of the benign lie. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, and the little boy is a real charmer, going toe-to-toe and head-to-head with the great detective and the illustrious actor who plays him. The aging process is very well done (we see Holmes in flashback some 30 years earlier), and there’s always a glint in McKellan’s eye. Nicely done.

We also finally found time to watch the two-hour finale of Battlestar Galactica. It was mostly satisfactory, though there were a few things that were hard to swallow. I didn’t mind that Starbuck’s nature wasn’t explained. I decided for myself that post-Earth she was an angel, like Baltar and Caprica’s companions, one that was visible to everyone who needed to see her, which was apparently everyone. I thought the decision to eschew all technology at the new planet was a little glibly handled. A plot necessity that should have involved more angst and discussion instead of being simply accepted by everyone. Adama’s decision was mystifying. We both thought he was going to crash the raptor into a mountain or something, but instead he simply went into isolation. To what end? And I could have totally done without the 150,000 years in the future bit that locked the story into a specific timeframe that causes no end of logical issues. Still, it was a great show while it lasted, and we’re going to move on to Caprica next.

I put up a few book review recently. A mixed bag of the very good and the less-so:

• The Murderer’s Daughter by Jonathan Kellerman
• The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
• Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
• Last Words by Michael Koryta
• Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami

There’s been a lot of bashing of True Detective, Season 2, but I’m glad to be sticking with it. I think there are only two more episodes and it looks like the rubber is starting to hit the road. Also, a fascinating beginning to the “tooth fairy” (Red Dragon) storyline on Hannibal. It is interesting to come to this point after having experienced the entire history between Jack and Walt and Hannibal. I’ve also picked up Mr. Robot and Humans, both of which are off to good beginnings, though I like the former a bit more than the latter. One thing I’ve grown to appreciate about British television shows is their casual multi-ethnicity. Characters are black or Asian or whatever, and nothing is made of the fact. They simply are. The android who is brought into the family home in Humans is Asian, but the only controversy is that one was purchased at all, not its appearance. Wayward Pines lived up to its name, going wayward in its final episode. It was always one of those on-the-fence shows for me, but even if it is miraculously resurrected for another season, I’m done with it.

I can’t believe that it’s been a week since I set out for NECON. Where does the time go? I had to get up really (really) early for my flight last Thursday, but the good thing about that was that I arrived in Providence shortly after noon and I got to the convention center in the early afternoon. People gradually filtered in over the course of the next several hours.

Usually a very large group of us went out to dinner at Jacky’s Galaxie, but this year we were just a group of five, which made it more intimate. You could actually talk to everyone there instead of just those people in your immediate proximity. And the servers weren’t overwhelmed by us. It was nice. We followed that with the obligatory trip to 1776 for provisions. Thursday evening was spent in the courtyard talking with old friends and new ones. It was surprisingly cool—I didn’t take a jacket with me.

Friday morning I was supposed to go on an outing to see some of Lovecraft’s papers, but my one panel duty ended up being at the same time, so I had to skip that excursion, which sounded like it was amazing. I had a kaffeeklatsch where four of us, moderated by Jack Haringa, made recommendations from all the books we’d read over the past year.

Although there are panels and interviews, all of which are interesting and worthwhile, and some business gets transacted, a big part of NECON is just talking to people. In the courtyard, in the lobby, in the (new) lounge, in the dealer room, outside the front door, over meals. The con is capped at 200 people and I would guess that at least 120 of those consist of people who go year in and year out, so there are a lot of familiar faces. It’s a little bit like homecoming or a family reunion. I probably talk more during those four days than I do during an ordinary month.

One place I did a lot of talking was when I was interviewed by Brian Keene and Dave Thomas for The Horror Show with Brian Keene podcast. The segment, which starts out with an interview with Paul G. Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts, which most people are already calling the book of the year, goes live tonight. It was a wide-ranging interview, one of the most in-depth I’ve ever done on audio, and it was all the more fun because it was live, in the lounge at NECON with people wandering through and, occasionally, interrupting.

While I may talk more than I normally do at NECON, I sleep a lot less. I stayed up past midnight three nights in a row, which is way outside my normal routine. Plus, I had to get up at 4 am on Sunday to drive back to Providence and catch my early morning flight. The weekend always slips away far too fast, leaving us with a new memories, new laughs (especially from the legendary NECON roast) and new friends and acquaintances. There’s no other con like it.

Over the weekend, I heard about some good TV shows to check out. I’ve already sampled Mr. Robot and I’m digging it. The main character is a depressed hacker who’s hooked on morphine. He works for a cybersecurity company whose biggest client is an “evil” corporation. He comes to the attention of a small group of hacktivists and has an on-again/off-again courtship with them. The leader is played by Christian Slater in one of his best performances in recent memory. The main character, Eliot, is a bit of a zombie, quirky as all get out, but he’s not completely alienated from society. He has friends and a girlfriend and pets. He also uses his skills to bring bad guys to justice, a kind of digilante (which is also the title of an unpublished short story of mine). I’m digging it so far.

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.