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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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Date: 2005-12-01 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-01 04:21 pm (UTC)