What does it mean to be honest? Strictly speaking, someone who answers questions put to him without lying is being honest. However, there’s a reason why people who are sworn in before they testify in court are asked to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is possible to lie by omission.
Israel Pike considers himself an honest man. He’s been recently released from prison after serving fifteen years for committing murder, a charge he’s never denied. Hard to deny when the crime was committed in the presence of numerous witnesses, including his uncle, Sterling Pike, Salvation Point Island’s long-time (and thoroughly corrupt) sheriff, and the brother of the victim.
One might wonder why Israel returned to the coastal Maine island, known familiarly as SPI, upon his release. Everyone knows him there, including what he did. Everyone knows everyone else’s business on a small island. A fresh start in a new locale might have seemed a wiser choice, especially when, shortly after he returns to SPI, he stumbles upon a drifting yacht that contains seven dead men, including high-profile political figures. He immediately reports his discovery to authorities but, given his dark past, he becomes a person of interest. It doesn’t help that he has a connection, albeit tenuous, to one of the deceased. When questioned, he answers honestly, but it’s clear to readers he knows a lot more about the situation. He chooses to tell the truth…but not the whole truth.
An FBI agent named Jenn Salazar joins the investigation. She’s someone with whom Israel has history. In fact, she’s the reason he was released from prison early and why he’s back on SPI. Salazar has a connection to the island and it’s dark secrets, which will be revealed in due course. It’s tied to the mysterious woman twelve-year-old Lyman Rankin discovers hiding in one of the island’s numerous abandoned houses. Lyman, who uses this house as an occasional refuge from his abusive father, is surprised to find the injured young French woman, who is armed with a hatchet and has a supply of blood-soaked money. Lyman is resourceful and savvy, but also a victim who knows anything he does might set his father off again.
Sterling is determined to fit Israel up for the murders. Israel inherited his grandfather’s boat yard, much to his uncle’s chagrin. If he can get Israel behind bars again, Sterling stands a chance to take over the business, which he has always coveted. He already owns a significant fraction of the property on the island and is using it as a base of operations for his criminal enterprises.
A mysterious and resourceful man who claims to be a private detective offers Israel a chance to write the narrative of the crime in a way that will keep him out of trouble, even though Israel really is innocent. Koryta weaves together the multiple threads into a compelling tapestry of corruption and abuse, involving heinous crimes covered up by people in authority. He paints a compelling picture of the extreme version of rural life exemplified by coastal New England islands. As it turns out, people can keep huge secrets from each other in these cloistered settings, and it’s Israel’s goal—together with the few people he thinks he can trust—to expose the wrongdoings and destroy the long-running network of corruption operating on Salvation Point.
Months go by in the blink of an eye. I could blog more. I should blog more. And yet there never seems enough time. It’s not like I don’t have news to share—there’s always something going on that I might consider newsworthy. And yet. And yet.
Like the fact that the German edition of my latest book,Stephen King: Sein Werk, sein Leben, seine Inspiration, published earlier this month, has already gone into a second printing. I have frequently heard from German fans of King’s work that books about King are rarely translated into German. This edition was done by a Swiss publisher and it is apparently selling quite well. The Czech, Polish, Spanish and Hungarian editions also came out recently, with the Japanese translation pending. I have the eight editions currently available lined up on a shelf and they make a handsome set, it must be said. I find it interesting that certain publishers have decided to put the title one way on the spine and others go for the reverse.
Some recent short story publications:
“His Father’s Son” appeared in the July/August issue of EQMM.
My 2022 story “Death Sentence,” published in Black Cat Weekly #51 was one of the “Other Distinguished Mystery and Suspense” stories mentioned in the 2022 anthology The Best American Mystery and Suspense, edited by Jess Walter and Steph Cha.
My essay “Living in a Web of Mystery,” which appeared in the limited edition hardcover Reading Stephen King (2017) is becoming available again in a new value-priced trade paperback edition that will be out in November.
What else have I been working on lately? I turned in a draft of a short story to an anthology to which I was invited to submit. The anthology hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s really cool and I hope the editors like what I sent them. I currently have about a dozen other stories in submission, which is about the norm. I have a couple more I’d like to try to write before I turn my attention back to a novel I started a few months ago but have neglected in the interim. I’d also like to carve out some time to write a novella for Dissonant Harmonies II. Then, when I was working on an essay for a project that also hasn’t yet been announced, I stumbled upon a phrase that seems ideal as a short story title…all I have to do is figure out what the story is that goes with it!
We got our COVID shots on Friday afternoon, along with our flu shots. It was quite a mis-adventure. The closest pharmacy that had the Moderna vaccine was six miles away. That probably doesn’t sound far, but we’re used to going to the one that’s less than a mile away. We had a reservation for 4:15 pm but when we got there it seemed obvious that things weren’t going according to plan. There were a lot of people sitting around and standing around waiting. For some reason, my wife’s flu shot wasn’t in their system, so that required a lot of fussing around. Then, because of the unexpectedly high demand, they ran short of the Moderna vaccine and had to get more out of the fridge, which meant a long wait for it to come to room temperature. We finally got our shots done by 5:45.
It was a little difficult to sleep that night because both arms were sore at the injection sites, which made it hard to pick a side to sleep on. The flu shot arm recovered quickly, but the Moderna side remained quite sore all the following day. Now, about 36 hours after the shot, it’s only a little tender. My wife tends to react worse to these shots and felt achy most of yesterday.
We haven’t watched a lot of movies lately—mostly TV—but yesterday was a three-movie day as we lounged about in our post-vaccination malaise. First, I watched No One Will Save You on Hulu (my wife doesn’t care for scary movies). This one is an alien invasion film starring Kaitlyn Dever, who I first knew from Justified. She plays a young woman living alone in the family house, ostracized by her community for reasons. Then, one night, the aliens come and she has to fight for her life while some of her neighbors are possessed by X-Files-esque grays with awesome powers. The kind of aliens that Whitley Streiber wrote about. The film’s gimmick is that there is virtually no dialog, even in places where it would make sense for the character to say something, even to herself. I’m not sure that was necessary—the movie would have been just fine if people said things. Her character is feisty, ingenious and resilient. The ending has sparked some controversy and discussions—it took me a while to figure out exactly what it meant and whether or not I liked it. Ultimately, I think I do, but it sure does go in an oddball direction. All-in-all, definitely worth checking out.
Then we watched Moving On (also on Hulu) starring a virtually unrecognizable (to me, at least) Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Malcolm McDowell and Richard Roundtree. Fonda plays a woman who’s longtime friend has just passed away. At the viewing, she announces to the new widow that she’s going to kill him. She then tries to get her other friend (Tomlin) in on the plan. Tomlin, playing her usual pithy, sarcastic character, has most of the best lines. Roundtree plays Fonda’s first ex-husband. Of course, things don’t go as planned, and decades-old secrets are revealed. The humor is dark, but it’s always fun to see these legends on the screen.
Finally, we watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which was every bit as fun as I hoped it would be. I’d avoided most of the spoilers (except for the cameo at the very end). I absolutely did not recognize Antonio Banderas. At all. But I did pick out Boyd Holbrook from the new Justified series. Raiders of the Lost Ark was one of the first movies I purchased on VHS when it became available in late ’83. It cost something like $40, if I recall.
I took a one-month subscription to AMC+ which also got me Sundance/Now and access to a batch of interesting crime series, many of which I’d never heard of before. Dark Winds, based on the Tony Hillerman novels, was what got me there in the first place. A very good interpretation of his Leaphorn/Chee stories, set in the seventies. Glad to hear it’s been renewed. Then I stumbled on Wisting, a Finnish crime series that I quite liked. I knew about Des, starring David Tenant as a real-life serial killer, but this was the first time I got to see it. Also quite good. I found a couple of New Zealand crime series with multiple seasons: The Gulf, set on an island, and One Lane Bridge, which features a Maori cop who has special skills and a seemingly cursed bridge. The Light in the Hall is a good Welsh crime series about a decades-old murder, and The Cry, starring Jenna Colman, has plenty of twists and turns. I almost quit Deadloch after fifteen minutes because it was so crude and over-the-top, but I’m glad I stuck with it, as the characters grew on me and the story is well conceived.
I liked Hijack on Apple TV+ (hard to go wrong with Idris Elba). I rewatched season 1 of Yellowjackets as a preamble to the second season. It helped me eliminate a lot of my confusion about who was who in the different eras. Justified: City Primeval was a different creature from its predecessor and I think it suffered from the lack of those old, familiar faces, but I enjoyed it, and was amused to learn that the actress who played Raylan’s daughter was Olyphant’s daughter.
Currently watching: The Changeling on Apple TV+ and random episodes of early M*A*S*H.
Currently reading The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning by Peter J. Hotez and a forthcoming novel by Sarah Langan. Also reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin to my wife. Just finished Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie because the new Kenneth Branagh Poirot film is loosely based on it. Very loosely, it seems, based on the trailer. It’s not one of Christie’s finest, I have to say. It has an interesting germ of a story (a young girl announces to a large group of people that she once saw a murder, only she didn’t realize that’s what it was at the time. A few hours later, the girl is murdered) but it’s quite repetitive and Christie shoehorns in a lot of Greek mythology that seems forced. I do look forward to seeing A Haunting in Venice, though.
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There have been biographies written about fictional characters. In some instances, the biography is a novel that purports to recount the life of the subject, but in other cases, writers assemble the “known” facts about a fictional character and recast them into a pseduo-biography. Much rarer are autobiographies purportedly written by long-running series characters themselves.
Lawrence Block has been writing about Matthew “Matt” Scudder for nearly half a century, starting with The Sins of the Fathers in 1976, through seventeen novels and a number of shorter works. His fictional story in the novels begins shortly after he quit his job as a NYPD detective. His marriage has failed, he’s a more-or-less functional alcoholic, he lives in a hotel and makes money as an unlicensed investigator. Over the course of the series, he evolves and ages. He gets sober, and his attendance at AA meetings while he continues to “help out friends” becomes a running subplot. He also occasionally reflects on incidents from his past life as a cop, but much about his early days remained unknown, until now.
Scudder knows about the novels that have been written about his cases, but he also knows they’re fictionalized. Fiction requires a certain structure and symmetry that real life rarely possesses. He’s also aware of some inconsistencies in his story from book to book—his birthday, for example, or whether a certain life-altering bullet was fired uphill or downhill. This book isn’t really meant to set the record straight. Although he establishes his real date of birth once and for all, he admits there are many things he doesn’t remember clearly. Time, alcohol and age have a way of blurring memories. The existing novels, though, speak for themselves for the most part, and he wastes little time revisiting those cases, except for a few momentous incidents.
Scudder is a self-aware writer. He knows he can write (he attributes his advancement with the NYPD in large part to his ability to write incident reports that record what happened in a way that makes readers feel present), but he’s not entirely sure why he’s writing this account and he questions whether anyone is going to want to read it. It feels like he has begrudgingly agreed to a classroom assignment; however, once he begins, he finds himself remembering or rediscovering things about his early days. He had an older brother, for example, who only lived briefly. Scudder never met him, but he knows that the loss of a child profoundly affected his parents. What comes as a revelation is how that loss also affected him, in ways he’s never before considered. His wife Elaine, who is reading what he writes, is astonished to find out about his brother. The fact he’s never mentioned him is revealing, she believes.
Authors sometimes create brief or detailed biographies of their characters before they begin to write about them, but this is no five-page summary of a life. Over the course of this 200+ page book, Block—via Scudder—dives deep into a character he probably knows better than any of his other fictional creations. It reveals much about Scudder’s relationship with his parents, how he ended up on the police force, how his career advanced and why he ultimately decided to give up his gold badge. He is open about how he fell in love with his first wife and how that marriage ultimately fell apart.
According to Block, the autobiography began after he received a request to write 4000 words about Scudder’s life. Once he started writing, the assignment grew and grew into this 65,000-word book, longer than any of the first three books in the series.
As to Scudder’s question about whether anyone will be interested in reading his account of the first 35 years of his life, the answer from this reader is a resounding yes!
It’s a rare thing for a book to take this reader completely by surprise, but Where I End does just that. It is an exquisitely beautiful, profoundly disturbing and frequently grotesque short novel that almost defies description.
Much of the opening section is taken up by describing the main character’s bafflingly complicated and arduous living circumstances. Nineteen-year-old Aoileann (pronounced “Eeeeel-in”) lives in a remote house on an Irish coastal island where she and her family are shunned by the other residents, who themselves are considered odd by mainlanders. The island itself is a strange and uncanny place, too rocky to inter the deceased, so the residents have come up with a monstrous burial routine. Aoileann’s cottage is at the end of the lane that leads to this grim location.
Aoileann and her grandmother’s waking hours are mostly taken up by caring for the thing in the bed, which turns out to be Aoileann’s mother, Aoibh. White forces readers to explore every terrible aspect of this disgusting creature and the daily ministrations required to care for it, which are laid out in explicit and grueling prose. The thing is bed-bound and incommunicative. At times it seems like a monstrously heavy burden and yet it is simultaneously fragile and emaciated. It must be fed and bathed like a baby, and its omnipresent sores carefully treated. All of this leaves little time for Aoileann to have a life, which is moot since no one on the island will even look at her let alone interact with her.
Aoileann’s island-born father now lives on the mainland, visiting the isolated cabin once a month, occasions that are celebrated but also the cause of additional burden on Aoileann and her grandmother, because the thing (and the cabin) must be made as presentable as possible to give her father the ability to pretend things aren’t as bad or as strange as they are.
As for the bed-thing, it is not as far gone as it appears. It is occasionally able to break free of its confinement, wandering abroad and inscribing arcane messages in the floorboards with an exposed finger bone. Aoileann transcribes and then erases these messages, trying to put together what her mother is attempting to convey about the reason why their family has been ostracized.
Suddenly, though, something upsets the status quo. Aoileann is a dedicated swimmer—which puts her further at odds with the other islanders, who consider swimming to be an affront to the gods of the seas—and on one of her outings she encounters first a baby crying and then the baby’s mother, Rachel, an artist from the mainland who doesn’t know that Aoileann is someone to avoid.
Rachel is a single mother who is trying to put together material for an exhibition intended to attract more tourists to the island. She’s burning the candle at both ends (attending to the constant needs of her newborn mirrors Aoibh’s demands on Aoileann) and welcomes Aoileann’s friendship and help with her baby, just as Aoileann is elated to have a social interaction with anyone other than her grandmother. Their first exchanges are stilted and awkward, but Aoileann gradually learns how to be around someone else. Her feelings toward Rachel grow quickly and intensely. She wants—needs—to be part of Rachel’s life.
This dark novel grows darker still, and the book becomes all the more disturbing because the language is so beautiful and poetic. Aoileann is self-educated (barely), but her thoughts are sophisticated and elevated…and terrible.
It’s been a while. Lots of water under the bridge in the past few months but, more importantly, lots of water in front of the beach house where we spent the last week. For nearly 20 years, my wife and I have been vacationing in a little community on the Gulf Coast called Surfside Beach. It’s down the coast from Galveston and is much quieter than that island city. Not nearly as many amenities, but we bring what we need and enjoy the peace and quiet.
This year we arrived on Memorial Day afternoon, which was a very busy time in Surfside Beach. It’s one of the few places I know where people are allowed to drive and park on the beach and on that Monday it was wall-to-wall cars. The day before had been so busy they had to close access to the beach completely. However, we didn’t need to get on the beach—our rental house faces the water with a dune between us and the gulf to provide some degree of privacy. (The dune was posted with a sign that said “Rattlesnake nesting area.” I think I’ll get one of those for our front lawn.) There’s a restaurant nearby that we patronized a few times, but the meals we cooked for ourselves were our favorites.
The strawberry moon on my birthday
We couldn’t have asked for better weather. It was in the low-80s most of the week, with low humidity and a near-constant breeze coming off the water, so we were able to sit outside most of the time. The house has two decks; the upper deck provides decent shade to the lower one, although we had to keep shifting position during the day to avoid the sun. (I apparently didn’t do a very good job of that, as I sunburned my shins, presumably from sunlight that crept between the board of the upper deck.) Also, there were no mosquitos, which were the bane of our previous trip to Surfside Beach. It only rained a couple of times, briefly, so, yeah, perfect. We celebrated my birthday on Friday and enjoyed the full “strawberry” moon on the weekend before packing it in to return to reality on Monday. I find the constant sound of the surf to be one of the most relaxing things on earth.
A traffic jam on the Gulf—ships waiting their turn to dock in Freeport.
Another of the unlauded joys of vacation rentals is finding books on the shelves that I might not ordinarily read. I read a total of six novels during the week, four of them books I discovered on the shelf. (For some reason, there are quite a number of Dutch translations in this house!) I did absolutely no writing, though. A total break.
However, that doesn’t mean things aren’t moving along on the writing front. My essay “Facing Reality” appeared this week on Something is Going to Happen from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in conjunction with the release of my story “His Father’s Son,” which will be in the July/August issue of EQMM, which goes on sale very soon. A couple of other recent short story publications:
I was also gratified to learn that Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences made the short list of the Locus Awards. The winner will be announced on June 24. I first read Locus magazine in about 1980. Back then, I would never have imagined that things I wrote would be reviewed in that august publication, so this nomination is very cool.
We’ve watched a number of documentaries recently: Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could See Me Now, Bowie: Moonage Dream and Never Surrender. The latter celebrates the 20th anniversary of the quasi-Star Trek film, Galaxy Quest. My wife had never seen that film, so we watched it first. It still holds up as one of the funniest science fiction movies ever, and the documentary is definitely worth checking out. In the feature film category, we enjoyed A Man Called Otto, Where the Crawdads Sing, Juniper, 80 for Brady and Tetris, the latter being a surprisingly excellent espionage film.
I enjoyed the second season of Perry Mason and am sad to hear it has been canceled. I binged through all four seasons of Succession. A difficult series in that every character is reprehensible, but it’s still compelling TV. I thought the final season of Barry lost its way a bit in the middle, but the ending was satisfying. Beef was weird, but I’m glad I watched it. We loved The Diplomat and can’t wait for the second season. I also fully enjoyed Rabbit Hole and The Night Agent, as well as Black Butterflies. Manifest wrapped up in a satisfying manner and it was good of Netflix to give it a second life after it was canceled after the second season. It’s a big mythology series with spiritual overtones that sometimes grated on me. The finale had shades of Lost (even a smoke monster!) but the resolution was different from that series. I liked Beyond Paradise, a slightly darker series than Death in Paradise. I’m currently in the middle of season 2 of From.
While we were in Surfside Beach, we did something we almost never do, which is turn on the TV. After flipping through a lot of dreck, we settled on MeTV and watched episodes of M*A*S*H, Andy Griffith, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and All in the Family. Only the latter didn’t really hold up all that well. Archie is a lot to take and the plot of one episode was so painfully awkward we stopped watching. We also found the 1941 move Man-Made Monster, starring Lon Chaney, Jr., on Svengoolie, which kept us entertained.
My wife thoroughly enjoyed Fairy Tale, so I followed that up with Billy Summers and Bag of Bones. I often cite “BoB” as one of my favorite King novels and this reread really brought that home to me again. It’s an amazingly complex and lovely novel. Then we read Forever Home by Graham Norton and are currently reading The Enigma of Garlic by Alexander McCall Smith. I also read King’s new one, Holly, and will probably read it again before I review it.
My vacation book binge included Where I End by Sophie White, Redemption by David Baldacci, Enemy of the State by Kyle Mills, The Sleeping Beauty Killer by Mary Higgins Clark & Alafair Burke, Where Are You Now? by Mary Higgins Clark and Becoming the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar. The middle four were “found” novels. I also finished Look Both Ways by Linwood Barclay and have his new one on deck.
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The house on Stable Row belies its name. Stability isn’t its hallmark. The original owner, Declan Barry, lived there with his wife, Joan, and two children, Killian and Sally, until Joan vanished one day over two decades ago, never to be heard from again. Naturally, people in the small Irish community of Ballytoor view Declan with some suspicion.
However, Carol Crottie, a divorcée with an adult child, thinks she’s found the second chapter in her life when she meets Declan. Sally is one of her students, so their paths cross regularly and Carol volunteers to tutor the girl. Everything is going fine until romantic feelings develop between Carol and Declan. None of the offspring—his or hers—are happy with this development.
Carol retires from teaching and moves into Stable Row but she and Declan are never married, owing to the complicated status of his original wife. Therefore, when Declan falls permanently ill, she has no legal standing and his kids can’t wait to sell the house from under her, forcing her to move back in with her elderly and financially independent parents. Her mother, Moira, is overbearing and her father, Dave, loves to tinker (with his industrial-sized coffee machine, primarily) and mend things. He decides to purchase the Stable Row house, his way of fixing Carol’s problem. However, upon reflection, Carol decides she doesn’t want to live there, so the Crotties prepare to flip the house.
Carol heard Declan say many times that he would never sell the house. While she and her mother and surveying the property to see what upgrades might be in order before putting it back on the market, they discover exactly why he was so adamant about holding on to it. However, he is no longer capable of explaining what happened or his part in it.
Thus begins a comedy of errors in which complicated choices are made in lieu of straightforward action. Moira Crottie has a plan to make sure Carol isn’t tarnished by past events in the Barry household, although it’s not necessarily a choice everyone would make. (There are a couple of instances in the book where people do inexplicable things to further the story.)
The novel is primarily about the matrix of relationships in this fictional small coastal community near Cork (which is also where Norton grew up). In light of certain developments, Carol is forced to re-evaluate the man with whom she intended to spend the rest of her life. Relegated to her family home, she also has the opportunity to re-explore her complicated relationship with her parents. She tries her best to connect (or re-connect) with Declan’s adult children, but they are having issues of their own, dealing with their father’s unexpected and rapid decline together with their feelings about their absentee mother. Sally lives a mostly solitary life, working in an elder care home, whereas Killian and his partner Colin are about to embark on a new life after they decide to have a child.
The book is full of twists and turns, as well as some witty and clever turns of phrase and high drama as the plan to conceal the secret of Stable Row leads to some real jeopardy, all presented in the inimitable style of a true Irish storyteller.
The Irish-American Southie region of Boston is already a powder keg awaiting a spark in the summer of 1974. The city is in the midst of a heat wave and the public school system is about to undergo court-ordered desegregation. There will be rallies protesting the latter that will no doubt explode into violent riots as tempers flare and racial tensions reach the boiling point.
This is the backdrop against which Lehane tells a more personal story. Mary Pat Fennesy is a single mother who has already lost one child—her son died from a drug overdose after he returned from the police action in Vietnam. Now, her 17-year-old daughter has gone missing after a night out with some questionable friends.
No one is willing to give Mary Pat a straight answer about what Jules was doing that night. The people she was supposed to be with provide conflicting stories. Someone says she went to Florida, which is enough for the police to dismiss her as a runaway. They have real crimes to solve and prevent.
On the same night Jules was last seen, a young Black man died under mysterious circumstances at a subway station in a white neighborhood. It’s tempting to write off his death as being drugs-related, but Mary Pat worked with his mother and doubts he was involved with drugs. It begins to look more and more like a broken-down car left him stranded outside of his safe zone and someone (or some group) decided to take action against him. That group may have included her daughter.
Mary Pat knows that nothing happens in the neighborhood that mob boss Marty Butler doesn’t know about, so she pleads for his help in locating Jules. He’s supposed to be the neighborhood protector, after all. Mary Pat has a short fuse, though, which makes Butler nervous that her relentless pursuit for information will draw unwanted attention to his illicit businesses. He tries to placate her, but she’s having none of it, turning into a determined vigilante who will stop at nothing to find the truth. The only police officer willing to help her tries to counsel patience, but Mary Pat is on fire…and soon the whole neighborhood might be, too.
Small Mercies could serve as a bookend to Mystic River. In that earlier book, it is a mobster who loses a daughter to crime and moves heaven and earth to find the culprit, making mistakes and missteps in his blind rage. Mary Pat doesn’t have appearances to keep up and has little to lose, so she is much more audacious than the characters in Mystic River were.
Mary Pat isn’t perfect—and neither was her daughter, Jules. Long-hidden racial biases emerge as the tension over integration comes to a head, and Mary Pat is as guilty of blind hatred as many of her neighbors. The book’s title is more ironic than literal—there has been very little mercy in Mary Pat’s life and she does not intend to grant mercy to those who have wronged her.
Three years ago this week, I grabbed my laptop and peripherals, important documents and a few personal objects and left my office at the corporate headquarters for the last time, turning my home office into a dual-purpose location. One computer and desk remained for my personal + writing work and a second, set at 90° to the first, became my new day-job workstation.
I haven’t been back since. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did return to pack up everything else in my office, especially my second “kangaroo” sit/stand desk adapter. And I have been back for a few in-person meetings, but no more than half a dozen times and all of those have been within the past year. I don’t miss working in a building in the least.
My wife has also been working from home full time, with the exception of a few meetings on campus, so we have established a nice pattern. We’re just down the hall from each other during the daytime, but have our own dedicated offices for work. We always have breakfast together. Occasionally lunch, too, and we always rendezvous for supper. “Every night is date night” became our running joke.
In the early years, all meals were made at home. During some periods when COVID seemed to be easing, we dined out, although mostly outdoors, which is still our preference. We perfected a number of recipes that became standards in our repertoire. Lots of experiments with homemade pizzas, for example. We did the occasional pickup order from nearby restaurants and experimented with Door Dash. Discovered the joy of ordering groceries online to be delivered to the car. Some of the pandemic rule changes in Texas even let us order drinks to go.
We traveled little. My car battery was the first to give up the ghost from disuse during the first year and, later, my wife’s car battery did the same. We rarely ventured more than a few miles from home, other than some trips to the airport to pick up visitors and a couple of trips to our favorite coastal destination last year. We’ve taken exactly one trip out of state, to visit our daughter and her family about a year ago. That was while the mask mandate was still in place, so we felt reasonably safe, although we wouldn’t say we exactly enjoyed flying, but that ship had sailed (to mix a metaphor) well before COVID.
We were very early adopters of the vaccine, thanks to my wife’s work. We got our first jab at the end of Feb 2021 and we’ve kept up with every booster ever since. Neither of us have caught the virus, to the best of our knowledge. Not yet, anyway. It’ll probably happen at some point, but we’re still being careful. Masks when grocery shopping. Dining outside when possible (the weather in 2023 has been like a roller coaster—I’ve switched between heat and A/C more times than I can count. After a couple of weeks in the eighties, we’re back down to overnight temps in the thirties and forties.
Time does sail on by, doesn’t it? I can’t believe this is my first blog entry of 2023. What have I seen lately? Our most recent film was Living, starring Bill Nighy, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as a civil servant who gets bad news and decides to make some changes in his life. It’s a remake of a Kurosawa movie. I also watched Luther: The Fallen Sun, which has a rather pell-mell plot with some gaps but even so-so Luther is great viewing. I also saw All Quiet on the Western Front, a brutal look at trench warfare from the German perspective. David K. Harbour was a hoot in We Have a Ghost, which was much better than I thought it would be based on the trailer. And I quite liked Don’t Worry Darling, which unfortunately suffered from some bad PR.
We loved, loved, loved the first season of Poker Face, and have been known to utter “bullshit” more frequently than in the past. It just kept getting better and better with each episode. I’ve also been binging Columbo and am now caught up to the episodes from the 1990s, which I remember less clearly than most of the earlier ones, ironically. I just discovered that two of those later shows were adaptations of Ed McBain novels. The one I saw recently, “No Time to Die,” is the most un-Columbo of all. Not a murder in sight and Columbo never meets the perp. We’ve been enjoying Dear Edward, which gives us lots to talk about concerning some unwise choices by many of the characters. I also binged through Enemi Public, a Belgian series about a serial killer who is paroled to a monastery in a small town. We’re enjoying the final season of Picard and the new season of Call the Midwife. I also really enjoyed The Last of Us, although I wasn’t at all familiar with the game. I’m also hanging in with the new Night Court, which is still finding its footing. Mostly funny, but occasionally not.
I was reading John Irving’s The Last Chairlift, but I put it aside (it’s 900-ish pages) to read And Then There Were None for the first time in ages (I wanted to study how she handled the book’s viewpoint for something I’m working on) and then decided to jump into Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. I’ll go back to the Irving at some point, but it is a bit of a slog. Another big book was The Deluge by Stephen Markley, which had some interesting characters and a lot of scary material about climate disasters. I’m reading Fairy Tale to my wife each evening—we have about 150 pages left to go.
Recent and forthcoming short fiction publications:
It should come as no surprise that a book about global warming and catastrophic climate change would be called The Deluge. Indeed, over the course of the many years covered by Markley’s novel, there are several instances of weather-related inundation. However, the title actually refers to something else, a flood of a different kind, that won’t be revealed until late in the novel.
And it is a novel, although at times it reads like a future history, as if Markley is reporting on what happens, step by step, year after year, as the world’s climate barrels out of control toward a life-extinguishing event.
This is a big book, full of big ideas, necessitating a large cast of characters. Markley begins the novel in a structure that seems parallel to what Stephen King does in The Stand, a book that has clearly had an influence on him and which appears a number of times in a literary cameo. He introduces readers to the major players with whom they will be spending the next 900 pages and, for quite a while, it’s not clear how any of them will connect.
First, there’s geologist Tony Pietrus’s treatise on Monte Carlo simulations of clathrate hydrates, special molecules that can encapsulate other molecules (in this case, methane) under certain conditions (at the bottom of the ocean, for example). Previous species-destroying events occurred when the oceans warmed enough for these clathrates to regurgitate their guest molecules into the atmosphere, accelerating the increase in temperature. It’s gripping stuff…if you’re a geologist.
Next come a couple of characters who talk in detail about military bomb disposal techniques. Out of this conversation will come one of the more radical approaches to forcing authorities to sit up and take notice of the oncoming catastrophe. Then Markley introduces an actor who has a random encounter with a woman, both of whom will become important players in the events that follow. Then there’s Ashir “Ash” al-Hasan, the neurodivergent gay statistician who shifts from computing gambling odds to compiling probabilities about NBA games and ends up becoming a consultant and advisor to high-ranking officials; and Keeper, the impoverished, drug-addicted and disenfranchised man who becomes a patsy for a variety of forces. A Greg Stillson-like zealot emerges, attracting an enormous following due to his charisma and persuasiveness, polarizing the populace.
And, finally, there’s Kate Morris, known as Kate Chaos, who meets a young man named Matt who is working in a fishing camp in Wyoming after graduation while trying to find his footing as a writer. Kate is all in on anything that attracts her interest. She becomes a political/social activist through her organization A Fierce Blue Fire, which eventually becomes powerful enough to influence elections and coerce politicians into taking unpopular stands, with Matt and small inner circle at her side. Rounding out the impressive cast are passing references to such climate-related real-world personalities as Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection play a part in proceedings as well.
Dealing with such a large cast can be complicated, but Markley has devised some narrative tricks to help orient readers. Chapters featuring Keeper, for example, are told in second person, and those featuring Ash are epistles. Other chapters are in first person (Matt) or feature injected paragraphs that provide third-party insight into what is happening (Shane, the leader of a terrorist cell called 6Degrees, a reference to the anticipated increase in global temperature).
The book starts in the recent past (Obama era) and plows ahead to 2040, charting one climate crisis after another and the near-futile efforts made by both activists and terrorists to bring about real, meaningful change. Just when it seems like American politicians are about to enact painful but necessary legislation, petty bickering takes over from cooler heads and everyone needs to regroup. It is frustrating (but credible) to see how people are willing to cling to short-term power and influence in the face of the worst environmental crisis to face humanity. It doesn’t help that one of the smartest men in any room, Pietrus, is also a loose canon who regularly insults the very people they’re trying to win over, or that Ash’s white papers often include lengthy digressions about his personal life.
Kate is the novel’s pivotal figure, a polarizing woman who will go to any lengths to get legislation enacted to punish fossil fuel companies and other contributors to climate change. No other contemporary issue (political correctness, gender considerations, Black Lives Matters, equality) is important to her if the world is doomed. She’s willing to cross political aisles to negotiate with people whose fundamental philosophies are anathema to her if they’re willing to support climate-saving legislation. She becomes a popular figure until her other predilections (she is highly sexual and is occasionally caught in what might be considered compromising situations, except they aren’t to her) threaten to derail her political influence.
It’s not a cheerful or optimistic book—it is a dystopia set in times readers will recognize. Often, Markley appears to race to keep up with himself and the changing climate as one disaster after another jeopardizes the very existence of humanity. There are raging wildfires that consume entire cities and states (the Hollywood sign goes up in flames, as does most of the rest of California), hurricanes big enough to fill the Atlantic, inundations that destroy many coastal towns and cities and even some states. Crops fail, persistent heat waves kill legions, prices soar, stock exchanges crash, looting becomes commonplace and a terrorist group shifts from attacking infrastructure to people.
When political maneuvering proves ineffective, even the peaceful activists resort to drastic behavior, including an occupation of Washington, D.C. that brings the government and the country to a standstill. The eventual solution is a bitter pill for everyone to swallow and even it isn’t a guarantee that humanity can survive.
For all his prescience (Markley introduces some interesting virtual reality platforms, for example, and anticipates the recent rise in AI-generated content), his world of the 2030s is remarkably similar to our own. Even many of the product brands he mentions are from the 2020s. However, the amount of research and deep thought that went into this book (Markley says he’s been working on it for over a decade) is mightily impressive. It can be dense and overwhelming (certainly the book could have been streamlined in places), but it may serve its purpose, which is to put readers on notice. This is a work of fiction, but the things Markley details in our near future may well come to pass unless people make radical changes.
At the end of City on Fire, Danny Ryan was on the run from law enforcement and the Moretti crime family, the Rhode Island branch of the mafia. The former believe he killed one of their own, a corrupt FBI agent, and the latter think he made off with a cache of heroin. He takes with him his aging father and his infant son (as did Aeneas, the narrator of The Aeneid), along with a few loyal followers.
Danny actually did shoot FBI agent Jardine, arguably in self defense. As for the millions of dollars worth of heroin, Danny tossed that in the ocean, although few believe him. He and his ragtag gang go west, keeping their heads as low as possible. Danny has very limited resources and no experience raising a toddler. He needs money and he needs to find a way to keep people from wanting to kill him, including the FBI agent who was Jardine’s lover.
The solution to his problems is handed to him on a platter by another government agent. All he has to do is rob a cartel safe house containing untold millions and his legal and fiscal problems will go away. He can pay off any financial obligations the Morettis feel they’re owed and start a new life without constantly looking over his shoulder. Of course, the Mexican cartel won’t be happy about the robbery, but they won’t have any idea who hit them. At least that’s the plan.
Where’s young Ian, Danny’s son, during all this? Danny has, reluctantly, reconnected with his mother, Madeleine McKay, who abandoned him as a boy, leaving his alcoholic, neglectful father to raise him. Madeleine has leveraged her beauty and wiles into an empire of her own in Las Vegas. Little Ian soon has the run of the estate and she looks after the boy while Danny sorts things out.
The life of the idle rich isn’t for Danny, though. He wants to work. The solution to this dilemma comes via a couple of his goons. A former bartender at the Glocca Morra, a Providence pub where the Ryans planned their illegal activities, sold Hollywood producers a movie treatment about the events chronicled in City on Fire. The film has been fast-tracked and the troubled actress cast as Pam Davies, the Helen of Troy who inadvertently ignited the war between the Irish and Italian mobs, thinks this might be her Oscar-winning role. Two of Danny’s henchmen have weaseled their way into the production, first offering their services as consultants and then using their mob skills to leverage a bigger piece of the action. The producers approach Danny to rein his men in. Instead, he becomes directly involved in the production and with the leading lady. He also begins to clear the set of corrupt behavior he recognizes from his former life in Rhode Island. This section of the novel might remind readers of Elmore Leonard’s novel Get Shorty.
Although the gang in Los Angeles is a shadow of its former self, they resent an outsider muscling into their territory. Once again, Danny finds himself in trouble with the mob. His involvement with the movie’s star puts him in a situation reminiscent of choices his now-deceased brother-in-law Liam made that led to their problems back east. He’s smart enough to recognize this, but his solution to the crisis has an unexpected and unintended outcome. In the aftermath, Danny heads to Las Vegas, where he will, no doubt, experience further difficulties in the trilogy’s conclusion, City of Ashes.
As career criminals go, Danny is a pretty decent fellow. He wants to be a good father—better than his old man was, at least—and he’s ready to find love again after the tragic death of his wife. Despite his best intentions, he can’t manage to stay out of trouble, although he manages to find a way back out again each time.
One could argue that Danny rarely solves his own problems but is, rather, the regular benefactor of outside assistance. His estranged mother helped him when he was injured during the Providence gang war and facilitated the deal with the feds that got him free of legal problems. For their part, the feds helped make Danny financially independent. And, when things look dire during a mushroom-fuelled hallucination episode, he once again benefits from just-in-time help from an unexpected source.
Given that Winslow has been inspired by the Greek epics, these frequent deus ex machina episodes are, perhaps, to be expected.
His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Borderlands 5, Ice Cold, and The Blue Religion. Four of his stories were collected in When the Night Comes Down and another four in a CD Select eBook. His story "The Bank Job" won the Al Blanchard Award. "The Honey Trap" from Ice Cold was nominated for an ITW Thriller Award in 2015 and "Zombies on a Plane" was nominated for an Ignotus Award in 2020.
His non-fiction has appeared in diverse magazines, including The Poetry
Foundation, Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Screem, Pensacola
Magazine and Texas Gardener. He has been a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine since 2001 and is a former member of the Storytellers Unplugged blogging community. He also writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews. He has served as a judge for the Al Blanchard, Shirley Jackson and Edgar Awards.
His work has been translated into: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, HItalian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian
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