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Dec. 1st, 2005 03:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
uberreinigerMel got back safe and sound. It was like she never left. I enjoyed the time I had by myself to write and to think, but I am very glad not to be alone anymore. She starts her new job at the library today and I think good things are going to happen for us soon. All the mania which was plaguing me this past week has receded greatly.
I am busily reading Stephen Dobyns's novel The Church of Dead Girls. Calling it a murder mystery would be doing it a disservice. It's more like a character study of a small community and what begins to happen to it when the lurking threat of a serial killer is introduced. It's taking me places in my head better left unvisited. Which to my sick way of thinking, is the mark of a very good novel. It's largely because I relate to it so well, having grown up in a small town filled with similar characters, similar relationships, even similar architecture. And the fact that my community, like all towns within spitting distance of Wichita, KS., felt the cold shadow of serial killer Denis Rader, a.k.a. BTK enhances the novel's impact as well. The tone of the story, told through the eyes of a narrator within the community, doesn't try to be cold or ugly, but it's so unflinching and objective in its view of the events that it feels that way just the same. It's like an episode of City Confidential only with the late Paul Winfield's laid back, ruefully ironic narration cut out and replaced with a county coroner's blase, matter-of-fact autopsy report with occasion shrieks of grinding metal and wails of the damned going on in the background.
Anyway, I know no one cares about what I'm reading, but I really don't have that much else to say unless you want to hear about my own writing, which I'm still aching to talk about, but that particular bit of navel gazing takes a lot of potential energy to get started.
I'm also having oodles and oodles of religious thoughts and insights again. But since that rarely ends well for anyone I think I'll save it for another time. Meanwhile, back to the spooky fiction.
I am busily reading Stephen Dobyns's novel The Church of Dead Girls. Calling it a murder mystery would be doing it a disservice. It's more like a character study of a small community and what begins to happen to it when the lurking threat of a serial killer is introduced. It's taking me places in my head better left unvisited. Which to my sick way of thinking, is the mark of a very good novel. It's largely because I relate to it so well, having grown up in a small town filled with similar characters, similar relationships, even similar architecture. And the fact that my community, like all towns within spitting distance of Wichita, KS., felt the cold shadow of serial killer Denis Rader, a.k.a. BTK enhances the novel's impact as well. The tone of the story, told through the eyes of a narrator within the community, doesn't try to be cold or ugly, but it's so unflinching and objective in its view of the events that it feels that way just the same. It's like an episode of City Confidential only with the late Paul Winfield's laid back, ruefully ironic narration cut out and replaced with a county coroner's blase, matter-of-fact autopsy report with occasion shrieks of grinding metal and wails of the damned going on in the background.
Anyway, I know no one cares about what I'm reading, but I really don't have that much else to say unless you want to hear about my own writing, which I'm still aching to talk about, but that particular bit of navel gazing takes a lot of potential energy to get started.
I'm also having oodles and oodles of religious thoughts and insights again. But since that rarely ends well for anyone I think I'll save it for another time. Meanwhile, back to the spooky fiction.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 09:54 pm (UTC)Oh, and if you get it, pick up 'Haunted' by Poe. Even if you don't like her music (it -is- a good disc for that style), it's a companion piece to HoL. Her brother wrote the book, she wrote the album, both involve their father (a famous avant-garde filmmaker) dying and their discovery of recorded messages he left for them. This all makes sense once you hear/read it. The story itself is the story of a man who finds a manuscript that analyzes a movie that doesn't exist about a house with a hallway that shouldn't exist.
Again, this makes much more sense when you read it.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-02 06:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-02 06:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 01:37 pm (UTC)Give lots of welcome back hugs to Mel from me, and good luck in her new job
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Date: 2005-12-01 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 03:46 pm (UTC)Cause Donnie has been doing the same thing.
Woo, Donnie loves talking in third person.
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Date: 2005-12-01 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-02 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-02 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-02 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-02 06:17 am (UTC)