Tag Archives: fiction

About THE INN…

My book THE INN now has 4 reviews (three of which have text), all 5-star ratings.  J. Michael Major, author of ONE MAN’S CASTLE, had this to say about it:

Talk about the band trip from hell! Young and beautiful student teacher Kimberly Bouton rides along with the high school band from Minnesota to Alabama. But one of the stops along the way is an inn where creepy things have started to occur. Miss Bouton and other band members wake up sore and with headaches. Is someone at the inn abusing the women in their sleep? Dyson cleverly weaves a great tale with events in the news that quickly escalate out of control. Filled with twists and turns, you won’t want to put this one down!

(Check out his book, for a good serial killer book that focuses on some interesting issues!)

Another reader identified as “Anne” posted this about the book:

Really enjoyed this short but scary read. Extremely well-written — and difficult to put down. The characters were compelling, and the suspense was thrilling. A perfect story for a night by the fire.

It was nice to hear that a reader thought it was extremely well-written. I try…

And finally, Steven M. Moore, author of too many books to count, including his latest, FAMILY AFFAIRS, wrote this about it on his blog:

Scott Dyson, author (Deadlock Press, 2015).  Is this the longest story I’ve read by Mr. Dyson?  It’s a novella, and there’s a lot of horror, mystery, suspense, and thrills in these few pages.  I loved it, and It’s not a genre I often read (the horror part).  No zombies, vampires, or werewolves (thank God!), just one seemingly ordinary human being doing horrible things to other human beings.  Some scenes reminded me of Hayton’s novel Breathe and Release reviewed here and that real life atrocity with the three girls in Ohio.

The band director, his student teacher (a woman not much older than the students), and the band are on a road trip.  They plan to perform and then spend a day at a nearby amusement park, crashing two nights in the inn.  I can’t say much more without writing spoilers, but I will send out a warning: if you were a member of a high school band, any nostalgia might fly out the window as your read this.  Or, some readers might say, “This is a lot more exciting than our band trips were.”  Mr. Dyson’s writing is fresh and original.  Fans of the genre will enjoy this one. (Rating?  How would you rate the TV show Dexter?)

So there are three very positive reviews of THE INN.  Thanks to those reviewers for taking the time to read and review it!

Here’s another from Mit Sandru, author of the VLAD vampire series and TIME HOLE, among others:

This is another fine novel written by Scott Dyson. While reading I had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading a Stephen King or Dean Koontz horror novel, but and equally well written book by Scott.

I love it! I’ve been compared to King and Koontz! Two of the best ever, in my opinion!

I thought I’d toss some stuff up here about the background of writing THE INN.  I flew through it; the story seemed to write itself.  I went back and added in the material about St. Louis and the store where my main character purchases the flute pendant after the first draft was completed.  I tried to give a little more depth to the parent-chaperones, who were barely mentioned in the first draft.  And I fleshed out a few of the students a bit more in the narrative, making them more than just names that passed by in the story.

The idea to write it came after I finished a book called TEXT MESSAGE by William Malmborg.  In that book, Malmborg describes a college student who loses her younger sister at the mall, and then begins receiving text messages from her sister’s phone telling her to do embarrassing things (mostly of a sexual nature) or bad things will happen to the sister.  When the girl refuses, the bad guy (girl?) texts a photo of the sister with a finger cut off.  So the girl follows instructions to the letter, and…well, it goes on from there.

I thought, after reading it, that I could probably write something similar, and started thinking about storylines.  I thought of a motel or an inn (instead of a school or a mall) where bad things happen, and then I flashed back to a recurring concern I have when I’m in a motel room — that somehow they have surveillance cameras in the rooms.  I mean, how would you know unless you start tearing the room apart?

It so happened that band trips came to mind, and I combined the two things — a band trip to a motel with something of that nature in some of the rooms.  I recalled certain things about my own band trips as a high school student, and about more current band trips and how they are organized, and out came the story.

It ended up being something around 37,000 words, give or take.  After about six months of polishing, getting input from my beta reader, and repolishing, I finally came up with an idea for the cover.  I searched out images that would fit what I was picturing, and I think what I came up with is pretty close to my original idea.

It hasn’t sold well…two copies in October and eleven copies in September, at least at Amazon.com (not sure about the other Amazons in the UK or other countries), but it’s been getting some KU page reads — over a thousand last month and over five hundred so far this month.  My shorter novella THE CAVE (about 25,000 words) has been read in KU a few times as well, although it has only sold one copy in two months.

So that’s the long story behind THE INN.  I’m currently working on a long version of ODD MAN OUT, and am polishing a couple of other things that are done.

Looking forward to getting some more things out.  Till then, try one of my other books!  They’re still all only $0.99, which is a huge bargain.  (THE INN is going to go up to $1.99 soon…)

Oh, and do yourself a service and read FAMILY AFFAIRS, TIME HOLE, and ONE MAN’S CASTLE.  All three are excellent books!

*****

 

A weekend of writing, playing and Cubs!

I tend to write this blog as conversationally as I can — like I’m talking to a friend.  So even though I’m probably not talking to too many people (I really don’t know how many visitors I get because I’ve never set up that JetPack thing) I figured I’ll continue in this style and drop a quick note about my weekend.

Every year a group of friends heads up to northern Wisconsin for a weekend of playing music and enjoying the water (if it’s warm) and the colors (if it’s late enough and conditions are favorable) and eating and drinking and just relaxing.  This past weekend was that weekend, and I went up there for the first time in about 4 years.  Besides playing (I do keyboards, guitar and a bit of drums) I took some time to write.  Sometimes I even got in a couple of hours of writing in the day.

I got in enough writing that I actually finished a YA/MG novel I started with my son a long time ago.  As I reread, I note places that need to be filled in, but I haven’t even started with that.  I’m just trying to get a sense of whether the story holds together.

It’s interesting that two of the projects I’ve finished are two of my longest projects and both started in my son’s imagination — not in my own imagination.  I honestly think that his imagination is a lot better than mine.  Whenever I hit a snag, I’d ask him where it was going.  He’d sometimes come up with something so out-there and off-course that I’d veto it.  But usually he’d give me a sense of what he saw happening and it would work.  He’ll be getting co-writing credits on both of these, though, due to the nature of some of my horror, I may use a different name for this stuff.  It’s a complete departure from the horror I write.  Not sure I want any overlap on readership.  I won’t keep either a secret.  The pen-name will have a menu header up at the top, I think, and I’ll post something every time I add a page to it, but I’ll try to keep them as separate as I can.

Oh, and we watched a Cubs loss and a Cubs victory over the St. Louis Cardinals.  After two more victories at home, we’ve vanquished the Cards and we’re in the NLCS for the first time since 2003, and that was the first time in history that we’d been in that position.  Can’t wait to see if Back To The Future 2 was accurate in its prediction!

*****

THE INN is live!

I finally did it!  THE INN, my 37,000 word horror/suspense/thriller, is live on Amazon!

Take a look at the cover:

The Inn Cover 4

Here’s the blurb from Amazon:

BAND TRIP TO PERIL…

The Jackson High School Band and student director Kimberly Bouton are making their biennial journey to a music festival in the deep South for fun and educational opportunities. Kim expects to deal with hormonal teenagers, a severe lack of sleep, and long boring bus rides, but the roadside inn where the band stays on their visit hides a sinister secret – and it translates to unimagined horrors for students and teachers alike…

Check into THE INN, where the guests are the entertainment…

It’s not for everyone.  It’s horror (nothing extreme, but people die and such, like in most horror), and it’s the realistic type of horror, not the supernatural type.  But please take a look if you are so inclined.

!!!!!

*****

More Mini-reviews…

Finished up three books last week.  Two were ebooks by Edward W. Robertson, who writes the BREAKERS series.  The first was BLACKOUT, the final book of the eight-book BREAKERS series.  If you’re not familiar with the Breakers world, it is a post-apocalyptic tale where two things happen to end civilization as we know it:  a viral disease that claims around 99% of all people (like in King’s THE STAND, which Robertson admits to using as his inspiration in this series) and then an alien invasion.  Turns out, the aliens, huge crab-like beings, sent the viral plague to Earth, and they figured they’d wipe out all of humanity with it, but when they come to claim the empty planet, they find plenty of humans willing to fight them and their advanced technology.  BLACKOUT, as the final book, occurs as people are trying to rebuild some sort of civilization and society, only to discover that a second “mother ship’ of alien “Swimmers” has arrived.

I found it to be a satisfying conclusion to the series and one that followed logically from everything that happened before.  The people who I’ve gotten to know over seven books all seem consistent with the character that they’ve exhibited throughout the saga.  The aliens became a bit more knowable, and it set up another series in the same universe, but set many years in the future.  The other series is called the REBEL STARS series, and the first book of this saga, titled REBEL, is the other ebook I read.

I grabbed REBEL as part of a promotional “box set” with ten “galactic tales”, titled STARS AND EMPIRE.  (None of the other titles have really grabbed me much, so REBEL is the only one I’ve read, and it may continue to be the only one…)  So anyway, in REBEL, a crew of space asteroid miners is working on an asteroid when they make a discovery — an ice-bound alien ship.  Seems that this is a Swimmer spaceship, and these humans are the descendants of those people who dealt with the Swimmers when they first attacked Earth.  As they excavate the vessel, they are attacked and everyone except for one is killed.  Their discovery, which they had tried to keep secret, is stolen…and when someone gives the survivor a chance to recover it and also to get revenge on the murderers of her crewmates, she jumps at it.

It was a solid SF tale that made me want to read further in the series.  I think Edward W. Robertson is an excellent storyteller, and even if one didn’t care for post-apocalyptic tales, this REBEL STARS entry can be enjoyed as a straightforward SF novel.  (As an aside, I read another book by Robertson called THE ROAR OF THE SPHERES . which also dealt with colonization of our solar system, though that one was more focused on AI’s. The book has been renamed and re-edited, but I’m not sure what the new one is called.  (ETA:  The author informed me that the book is now called TITANS.)  It was also a very good SF book.)

And, speaking of Stephen King, I tackled REVIVAL, which is his second newest (FINDERS KEEPERS is his newest at the moment) novel.  I hadn’t heard great things about this novel, but I have to say I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

It’s a bit of a slow starter.  When our hero, Jamie Morton, meets his “fifth business”, pastor Charles Jacobs, he’s only six.  And there’s a lot of backstory that King gives us in his usual colloquial style, about Reverend Jacobs’ fascination with electricity (the “secret” electricity, he calls it) and then the death of his lovely wife and young child and his subsequent loss of faith.  And of course, there’s Jamie’s backstory, his youth, his high school years, his discovery of the guitar and of rock and roll music, the love of his young life, Astrid, and his subsequent loss of his own faith and his separation from Astrid as they graduate from high school.

Jump forward a bunch of years and Jamie is a lifer in the music industry, being good enough to play professionally but not really quite good enough to be a star or in an A-list band.  He’s tooling around playing gigs at small venues, roadhouses and state fairs, and he’s doing a lot of drugs.  Mainlining heroin, in fact.  He’s reached bottom when he encounters Reverend Jacobs at the Oklahoma State Fair, where the former religious man is using his electrical inventions to take people’s photographs and do something … interesting … with them.  He takes Jamie in and uses his electricity to cure Jamie of his addictions.  He also hooks Jamie up with a job in Colorado, as a studio musician and recording engineer.  Jamie owes him big-time.

A third encounter with Pastor Danny (as Jacobs is now calling himself) occurs, as he and his boss (who also owes Jacobs) go to a tent-revival where he is performing genuine healings using the electricity, although he covers it in religious jargon and is clearly making a lot of coin doing so.

King masterfully weaves everything together at the end, and I didn’t care how implausible it was by then, because I just wanted to know how Jamie ended up.  I was satisfied with the conclusion; like Robertson’s Breakers series I described above, it seemed fair and logical with what happened in the book up until then.  King tends to be a bit wordy, but I like the way he uses language to bring characters and setting to life, and allows one to glimpse the inner workings of his characters’ brains.  The ending was about what I expected once I got past the steampunk vibe the book was putting out (with electricity being the main focus), but the journey, for me, was worth it, as it usually is with King’s books.

I’m onto Hugh Howey’s THE HURRICANE and King’s FINDERS KEEPERS (ebook and hardcover), and will probably post something on both of them when I finish them.

*****

Update on THE INN:  I decided that I’d better not use the cover image I was going to use because I’m not sure about the rights and permissions of it, so that is what’s holding up the release at this moment.  I made a different cover, but I’m not sure about it either.  So…I’ll post something when I finalize the new cover.

*****

Mini Reviews

After I finished GARDEN OF BEASTS, I read two more books, and I wanted to make a few comments on each.  I sort of read them simultaneously, so I’ll start with the one I just finished and move on to the other after that.

The first was THE BRIDE COLLECTOR by Ted Dekker.  We’ve all read this book before, in some form.  It was a serial killer thriller featuring an FBI team hunting a killer who is kidnapping beautiful women and killing them by draining their blood through their heels, then posing them by hanging them off of dowel pegs placed in the wall and gluing their shoulders to said wall.  As usual, there is a bit of discussion of forensic evidence and a lot of talk where the investigators discuss the killings and try to come up with a profile of the killer.

It wasn’t great, but it was good, and kept me reading.  Actually, toward the end, I really wanted to know what was going to happen, not so much because I was into the solution to the crime but because of the characters.  They were the most interesting thing about the book.  Dekker’s FBI guy, Brad Raines, is a troubled man who is, apparently from the reaction of all the women he encounters, really really really good looking.  (Yeah, I used three “really’s” there to emphasize the point because Dekker really emphasizes it.)   His psychologist/teammate Nikki Holder is also really really really beautiful, and they have a connection, and maybe even some sparks are going to fly between them.  But they never get started too much, because the evidence points to a private mental health facility called CWI (Center for Wellness and Intelligence), where high-IQ mental health patients live and receive treatment.  There they meet Paradise Founder, a young woman who has some issues, and her little clique of savants.

Those characters are the most interesting in the whole book, in my opinion.  They’re quirky and original, and I liked reading about them.  In fact, I’d love a whole book about them.  Brad Raines, who is sometimes referred to as “Rain Man”, finds that he has some things in common with the individuals housed in CWI, in that he’s a bit of a mental case himself with plenty of issues, and he’s quite obsessive/compulsive when it comes to his investigations.

Dekker took a few risks with the way the story played out, and I have to admit that there was a point where I was almost sort of put off by what happened.  But overall, it was a fairly typical serial-killer thriller novel, with the plus that it had some non-stock characters who added a lot to the narrative, in my humble opinion.

***

The second book I want to write a little bit about is one called NIGHTMARE CHILD, by Ed Gorman writing as Daniel Ransom.  This one was a fairly stock horror novel as well.  In it, a young 9-year-old girl is murdered by her sister and her sister’s husband (for her inheritance), and they get away with it.  That sounds like a typical thriller, right?  But then little Jenny, the dead 9-year-old, comes back.  She first encounters her neighbor, who she always called “Aunt Diane” and who lost her husband and is childless, though not because she doesn’t want or can’t have children.  Then Jenny returns to her sister’s house, where things begin to get strange.  (As if having a girl return from the dead isn’t strange enough.)  Diane is inclined to believe that the sister and brother-in-law are abusing the little girl, but is that the case?

This one is a well-written and well-constructed horror novel, and I wouldn’t expect less from Ed Gorman.  Everything I’ve read by him in the past has always been really engrossing.  This one is good, but I dont know…maybe I expected more when I saw that Ed Gorman wrote it.  One problem is with the ebook formatting.  There are chapter breaks, but within chapters the sections where point of view shifts and they aren’t separated in any way; they just run into each other.  After I got used to it, I was able to immediately figure out that there should have been a break in a specific place, but at first it threw me and pulled me out of the story as I struggled to figure out who was where and who they were interacting with.

All in all, it was a good read, worth the $2.99 I spent on it in the Kindle store, but not up there with the best of the genre, or even with the best of Ed Gorman.

My four cents (two for each book)…

*****

Review – GARDEN OF BEASTS by Jeffery Deaver

I purchased this novel in hardcover when it came out, at Sam’s Club (the reason I know is because it still had the sticker on it)  probably circa 2004, and then I shelved it and never read it.  Why not?  Well, I have to say that I’m not a big historical fiction reader, and when I re-read the blurb on the dust cover, it just never grabbed me, never made me want to pick it up next.  There was always something that grabbed me a bit more.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot on my Kindle, but I still have stacks of hardcover books I’ve picked up off of the bargain tables at various bookstores, especially Barnes and Noble.  Recently I’ve been making a bit of an effort to clear some of those that have been staring at me the longest, and this one jumped out at me.  I’d read something on Steven M. Moore’s blog praising the novel, and I thought, “That one has been sitting there a long time…why not give it a try?”

I’m very glad I did.  GARDEN OF BEASTS:  A Novel of Berlin 1936 was a first-rate thriller with world class villains — the Nazis.  Hitler, Goering, and Himmler (among others) all make appearances as American “button man” Paul Schumann agrees to go to Berlin with the Olympic team in order to hit, not Hitler, not Himmler or Goering or Goebbels, but a fictional character (I think) named Reinhard Ernst.

This Ernst fellow seems to be a different sort than those others, a more rational man who is motivated by a love for his country, not a blind adherence to the politics of hate and racism.  But he is the “architect” of the German military buildup, and the Americans feel that he needs to be eliminated, and in a public manner.  Schumann is dispatched to kill him in return for having his record expunged and being paid a large cash sum, which will allow him to “go straight”.

Once there, however, things are not as simple as they are laid out.  Ernst, involved in a project called the Waltham Study, has to outmaneuver Goering, the air minister, and deal with family issues as Schumann stalks him through Berlin.  Schumann and his contact collect the information and the weapons that he will need to carry out his assignment, and meets up with a German con man named Webber and the manager of his boarding house, Kathe Richter.  Oh, and along the way, he falls in love — with Ms. Richter.

Plenty of intrigue and misdirection follow as Schumann tries to finish his job and get back to the United States.  The ending was satisfying and somewhat unexpected.  I only wish I had not waited over ten years to read it.  What other treasues are waiting for me among those stacks?

*****

Watch this blog for announcements about my next novella, a 37000 word work I call THE INN.  It will be available on Amazon for Kindle by the end of the week.

*****

Fiction and Non-fiction

I finished two books yesterday.  (I didn’t start either of them yesterday; the non-fiction title I started a couple months ago, in fact.)  The fiction title was Invasion by Johnny B. Truant and Sean Platt.  It is an alien invasion story, and this one starts with a family in New York trying to get to their bunker near Vail, Colorado.  When people learn that some sort of alien spaceships are approaching Earth, society begins to break down and the trip across the country becomes a very dangerous thing indeed.

It, like all of the Realm and Sands guys’ titles, was a fast, decent read.  I received the book for free for becoming a member of their mailing list/newsletter.  (I have the second to read, also.)  There are important themes tossed into the mix, but I never felt that any of them were handled in more than a superficial manner.  The characters are interesting but we don’t really learn that much about them, partly because there are five of them (Meyer, Piper, Trevor, Lila and Lila’s boyfriend Raj) traveling from New York, and another (Meyer’s ex-wife Heather) coming from Los Angeles.  The point of views shift too often to really get a great feel for any one of them.

I will be reading the second (Contact) sometime relatively soon, but it will have to grab me a bit more than this one did for me to continue reading on in the series.

The second book was called Rosewater, and it is the book that the Jon Stewart film was based upon.   It was written by Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-born Canadian journalist for Newsweek who was reporting on the second election of Ahmadinijad (I’m sure I mangled the spelling but you know who I mean) when the Iranian young voters felt that the election was stolen from the rightful winner.  Bahari was jailed and this book is the story of his imprisonment and his treatment while in Evin, a well-known political prison in Iran.

The book was a depressing read, even though you know that Bahari survived the ordeal.  His despair comes through in the narrative, as does the cruelty and callousness of his jailers and torturers, especially the one that Bahari refers to as Rosewater (because of the scent he wears every day — that is how Bahari recognizes him at first).  I kept putting it down, because frankly, I didn’t need more things depressing me than I already had.  But I’m relieved to have finished it.  It shines a bit of light on the Iranian theocracy and its strong-man tactics to control its populace, and I think it is important that people read it and understand more about the majority of Iranians, and also about Islam as it is believed by the vast majority (in Iran and in other parts of the world as well) and how it is used as a tool for brainwashing and control.  I didn’t see the movie, and probably won’t, so I can’t comment if Stewart’s adaptation is faithful to Bahari’s narrative or if he goes his own way (politically or dramatically) in the film.

So I’m going to tackle one from the TBR pile, and start Jeffrey Deaver’s Garden of Beasts today.  If it doesn’t depress me too much, I’ll plow through it and move on to something else, maybe Kellerman’s Killer or King’s Revival.

*****

FLASHBACK by Dan Simmons

My first exposure to Dan Simmons’ novels came through the horror genre — Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night were two excellent novels that seemed, to me, to be very original takes on themes found in the genre.  I followed those readings with his work in a different genre — science fiction — by reading his works Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion.  Those reads blew me away, and I kept going, reading more SF, horror and mystery.  Everything was enjoyable.

When I saw that Simmons had written a dystopian novel titled Flashback, I had to give it a try.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the blurb told me that the United States is in a state of collapse and that 85% of its population are using a strange drug called Flashback, which allows them to enter a dream-like state where they can relive moments of their lives of their choosing.  That sounds like a pretty cool premise to start with.  Follow that with a former police officer, Nick Bottom, who lost his job after the death of his wife, and has now lost his son as well because of his addiction to this drug.

Nick is hired by a Japanese businessman who is serving as one of the US Government’s “Advisors” to investigate the murder of his son.  It’s a crime that Nick investigated as a police officer, and he knows that nothing much is going to happen, but he figures he can milk it for a good payday, which will assure him of a supply of his drug.  But there’s more going on, and Nick actually does make progress; actually is motivated to solve the crime.

The story is about Nick’s investigation and discoveries, as the world around him is revealed to him (with more clarity for him) and to us readers (for the first time).  There is a value in considering this potential future as Simmons foresees it.  So much politics is there, so much of the rhetoric we are hearing today is extrapolated forward to come up with the pessimistic future that is depicted here.  Do I see it happening?  Not at all.  But I think it’s worth considering so that we can think about the worst case scenarios as depicted by the Tea Party and conservatives every day today.

So what did I really like about this book?  Well, it’s a good story.  The trouble comes from being too close to events referred to in this book as sorts of “trigger events” and seeing them from a different perspective.  The book looks back at Obama’s elections, the federal debt, entitlements, the lack of military response, the way the administration is dealing with Iran, etc etc, and depicts them as the first steps in becoming the society that the book describes.  I look at those same things and don’t see things the same.  I look at Simmons’ depiction of Islam and Arabs and Iranians (notice I separate the two — Iranians are not Arabs, racially) and see fear primarily informing the story’s (and I’m assuming, HIS) view of them.  I look at his depiction of Israelis as victims who have no responsibility for their own fate in this story, and I find myself disagreeing.

In the context of this story, of this world, however, these things all work really well.   They set the table for an engrossing tale where the Japanese are looked at as a stable and sensible race with the proper goals — except for maybe it’s not exactly as it looks.  I liked the idea of a “g bear” kinetic energy weapon fired from satellites in space.  (The weapon’s name is a nod to the SF writer who imagined such a weapon.)  I liked the way drones are incorporated into the story.  I also thought that some of the video technology was imaginative and plausible.

I”ll point to some reviews of this book that focus more on the politics:

Amazing Stories Review

Science Fiction World Review

Goodreads Reviews

SF Signal Review 

Some of them are pretty negative; they cannot seem to separate the politics from the novel.  I found that I was able to do that, and I found FLASHBACK to be a pretty good dystopian story.  Dan Simmons set out to write a dystopian piece, and he did so from his own perspective.  I thought it worked.

*****

Who’s my competition?

Chuck Wendig wrote a blog article called “100 Random Storytelling Thoughts and Tips” in which he lists…you guessed it…one hundred thoughts on how to write a good story, or make the story you are writing better.

One struck me as I read it, not because it had anything to do with writing.  Here it is:

35. There’s always something else for the reader to be doing. You are not competing against other writers or other books, but you are competing against the infinity of options open to your audience: games, toys, social media, sex, sex toys, sex games, corn murder, bee wrangling, monkey punching, gambling, sex gambling, exotic drugs created from household cleaners, falcon training, sex falcon training. Treat your reader as exalted. They have given you money and time. Do not punish them for their choice.

Yeah, Chuck’s writing style in his blog is a little…silly at times.  Remember, this is written for his audience.  Not mine, or not just anyone.  But his point seems to be one we forget often.  Other books are not our competition.  Choices for entertainment other than reading books ARE our competition.  All of our competition.  If you write, you are in competition with all the things Chuck listed.  (Okay, probably not those things.  But certainly we’re in competition with Netflix, with Wii and X-box and PS4, with computer games and websites, with someone’s smartphone or iPad, or any number of other things.)

The point is that reading good books is something we writers all want to do (or we wouldn’t be writing) and something we writers want all of our readers doing.  If today that good book is by me, great!  Better than great!  But if today you’re reading something by another writer of horror, or mystery or SF/Fantasy or thrillers, and it’s a good story, that’s great too!  (Just not as great as if you were reading that good book by ME!)

When I read a good book, it triggers something in me…I usually want to read MORE good books, MORE good stories, of the sort I just read, maybe, but maybe something else…the important point, and the relevant point, is that it is a good story and I want MORE!  So I’m thrilled to tell someone about a great book I’ve read, an interesting and/or thought-provoking story, an inspirational tale.  I find those often in SF stories, in thrillers, and even in horror, which I believe focuses so much on the characters and the settings, which are two things I love to see come alive.

No, as a writer, I’m not in competition with other writers.  We all have the same self-interested goal of promoting reading in others, and so much the better if it is in readers who love the kinds of stories that we tell.

Why did this hit home with me?  Because I’ve been sitting at home reading Flashback by Dan Simmons, and my kids are on YouTube watching videos about games that they play.  Meanwhile there are good books just laying there that I thought they wanted to read.  But they aren’t.  I’d prefer they read, but they’re old enough to take my strong suggestion that they read instead of watching  (and my criticism of the stupidity of watching videos about video games) and chuck it out the window.  They work very hard during their school year (dare I say harder than I work at my job?) and right now they’re both working hard, with long days, in band camps.  So they can ultimately do what they want with their limited leisure time, at least to a degree.  But it doesn’t stop me from being dismayed.

Orson Scott Card, David Price, and and dozens, no, hundreds, of authors are in competition with YouTube for their leisure time.  They’re not in competition with me as an indie author, or with each other as traditional published authors.

We all need to do what we can to promote reading, and we shouldn’t worry about whether we’re in competition with each other.  Because we’re not.  No way.

*****

 

Two SF Novels: MORE THAN HUMAN and TIME HOLE

I read two hard SF novels back-to-back, which is something I haven’t done in a while.  (Read two hard SF novels in a row, that is…)  The first was TIME HOLE by Mit Sandru.  (I received this book as a gift!)  The second was MORE THAN HUMAN:  THE MENSA CONTAGION by Steven M. Moore.  (I received this book as a gift as well!)  The books have similarities, although they tell very different stories in terms of subject matter and scope.

TIME HOLE tells the story of an odd discovery on the Moon, where international teams are working at mining and exploratory operations.  A piece of equipment breaks down and a pair of generalists, DeeDee and Arno, are sent to drive the new equipment to the outpost.  On their way they encounter a large crater…but this crater isn’t made by a meteor impact, and it had not been noted before along this road.

When Arno falls in, DeeDee uses the truck’s winch to pull both of them back to safety, and they make a startling discovery.  They aren’t on the same moon that they were on a few minutes ago.  Or, perhaps it’s the same moon, but where in time are they?  Things are much different.

This short novella (47 pages, according to Amazon**) read a little longer than this.  It told a lot of story in those pages, and I came to really care about the two main characters as they tried to get back to their own reality, then find themselves “out of phase” and basically invisible as they return to their base and solve a mystery of what caused the huge time hole on the Moon.

(** ETA:  The author pointed out that it is 119 pages, not 47, and now Amazon reflects this length.  I thought that it seemed a lot longer than 47 pages and was wondering why Amazon said it, but I took them at their word when I looked…)

This is smart science fiction, that requires the reader to think as he reads, and that works around some more advanced scientific concepts.  I enjoyed it quite a lot, and if I have a criticism, it is that the first chapter seemed a little dry, too expository perhaps.  Once the characters are introduced, the story kicks into a higher gear and it became a very good read. The writing is very good, and it was a clean ebook, few errors in terms of things to be caught by a proofreader.  (I don’t really remember seeing any.)  I liked the cover, too.  Intriguing image.

The second book, MORE THAN HUMAN: THE MENSA CONTAGION, promised to be really good and right in my wheelhouse in terms of describing an apocalyptic-type event (disease, one of the standard cataclysms that affect humanity in that sort of book).  But It became a lot more than that.  It became a far-reaching “history” ala Dr. Asimov and his FOUNDATION/EMPIRE future history.

In this story, a meteroid strikes Earth in South Africa, and it carries something with it:  a virus.  It is quickly determined that the virus is a.) bioengineered, and b.) deliberately aimed at Earth.  The story starts with an airline cleaning crew finding a dead body with green sludge oozing from his orifices.  The CDC and the government quickly act to lock down the passengers and crew and anyone associated with the plane, but of course, it’s not enough and the virus gets out.  Others die before the virus mutates — again and again — into something more benign and even beneficial, perhaps.

The virus wakes up the world to the possibility that there is something more out there — and the second part of the book deals with man’s colonization of Mars as a response to a perceived threat by aliens who would target the planet with a virus, even if the virus is meant as a gift.  The third part of the book deals with the discovery of the aliens’ ship found in the vicinity of Saturn, and the resulting recurrent xenophobia brought on by humanity’s first contact with life from somewhere other than Earth.

A lot of packed into the 231 pages of Moore’s novel, which begins to read like a series of short vignettes rather than a continuous story; this style is made necessary by the many jumps in time between significant events.  I was reminded of Heinlein stories as far as the flow and pacing of this story.  With its cast of hundreds (it seemed; I really didn’t count them), this was a novel with an incredibly broad scope and a quite optimistic, if realistic, take on the future of humanity.

As always, this is a well-written and well constructed SF tale, again with a pretty clean job of copyediting and formatting.  Steven M. Moore has something like twenty novels out there, and while I can’t rank this as his best, it’s right up there.  (As an aside — when you’ve read a lot by a particular author, you can’t help “grading” them against their own output, or at least I can’t.  For example, when I read a Stephen King novel, I often think it’s only a “B” effort, but that’s because I’m judging it against King’s best works and not against “all” books.  If that same book had been written by a different, new  (to me) author, I might give it an “A”, if that makes sense.  I think I’m doing that with Steve Moore’s works now.  There have been several that I’ve liked so much that other good stories might suffer a bit in comparison to those.)

In conclusion, I’d say that these are both worthwhile reads for anyone who likes their SF to be of the “hard” variety.  I’d grade them both as “A”.

Happy reading!

*****