The 35th Precinct

After a bit of poking about on the Internet, it seems that while Linux works well on most desktops, it's a bit fussier on laptops. Bummer. I'd wanted a Linux laptop to help stave off the legions of viruses that lurk in cyberspace, but if there are going to be massive hardware compatibility issues, then mayhap it would be best to simply quarantine the laptop from the Internet altogether and just transfer fic written thereon to the desktop via flash drive. Dell supposedly offers Linux-based laptops, but I've heard horror stories about their product quality and poor customer service and am not keen on giving anyone my financial information over a demonstrably vulnerable Windows system. So, the search for safer computing continues.

After much ballyhooing by the local media about a fearsome winter storm that could kill us all and necessitate the stealing of food and hoarding of gas cause power outages and treacherous road conditions, it...snowed for ten minutes. The power flickered intermittently, but that was it. There was no deluge or monster snow drifts that sealed us inside and threatened us with starvation until we started having Donner party daydreams. I wound up watching TV all night and reading, while Roomie chatted with his gaggle of RPing buddies. That so many newscasters insist on making mountains out of meteorological molehills is ridiculous and irresponsible. When a true emergency presents itself, people are going to ignore it because they've been desensitized by so much gross exaggeration.

I'm reading Ramsey Campbell's The Overnight, a story that borrows liberally in concept from Stephen King's short story, "The Mist." Outside the Fenny Meadows bookstore, there are terrors in the mist. It's a creepy, unsettling yarn, to be sure, but the British syntax is driving me crazy. Campbell is far more reserved in his use of commas than his writerly brethren; maybe he finds it irksome to interrupt his train of thought long enough to tap the appropriate key, or perhaps the British have different rules concerning the proper deployment of commas. In any case, he omits commas between adjectives and dependent and independent clauses, and my American brain often blunders through the string of words in a state of panicky befuddlement as it tries to decide just where it should pause to connect the proper couplings. It's rather frustrating, and so I read no more than a chapter a night, lest my brain overheat.

Do other British writers do this as well, or is Ramsey Campbell simply too fattened by his years of well-deserved accolades to bother with commas any longer?

( Numbe3rs 513: Dead Girl--Minor SPOILERS )

I keep meaning to get my rant on about Bentley Little, writer and Stephen King protege, but I never do because I get sidetracked or am too tired to organize my thoughts. I wasted most of today watching Car Crash TV, AKA SpikeTV, so extensive thoughts on Mr. Little will have to wait. But I think I can muster a few sentences of opinion. Or maybe not since I just gave opinion an extra syllable. Oh, well, it's LJ, not grad school, so here goes.

Bentley Little writes very good short stories. He wrote one, "The Washingtonians", that is, simply put, fucking awesome. Every time I think of George Washington now, I think, not of Our Founding Father, but of Little's Washington, a very bad man with wooden teeth. Good for tearing flesh from bone...

But Bentley Little is a shitty novelist. He starts out with a bang, but his limitations become readily apparent at the one-hundred page point, and it's all downhill from there. Much has been made of his "folksy, King-like characterization and narrative," but this is bunk. His characters are paper dolls who never behave believably at any point, and whose emotional motives never ring true.

King's characters are 3-D people behaving as people ought; Little's are Fisher Price people--empty inside so that they can be grossly and unskillfully manipulated by someone whose mental and emotional development arrested at sixteen.

And his narrative...oh, holy criminy. The man loves his plotlines, and I sympathize here because I, too, get caught up in grandiose plots and multi-faceted backstories. Thing is, I finish my backstories, even if the story is nine thousand pages. I don't introduce them and then leave them dangling when the story is finished. It's important to make that distinction because I am guilty of leaving stories unfinished, most notably Summon the Lambs to Slaughter. But when I begin a story, I do so with the intention of introducing only those elements, characters, and plot points which will prove important to the story or overall universe later.

Not so with Little, who has a hardon for dangling names and past events in front of readers with no intention of ever resolving them. In the book I suffered through read, Death Instinct, there are no fewer than three major backstories that are never resolved. One is verisimilitude; three is lazy writing. When you spend two-thirds of a book referencing the heroine's sexual hangups and her crazy brother who may or may not have molested her, you have to resolve it, however obliquely. In the words of Little's mentor, Mr. King, eventually, you have to give the reader some steak to go along with the sizzle, especially when the sizzle carries with it not the enticing aroma of a juicy porterhouse, but the acrid, landfill reek of a burning, second-tread tire. Little is excellent at beginning stories, but he's rubbish at finishing them. He sketches the people and the places but neglects to color and shade the finer details.

In short, he writes discount airport reading, and not very well. Too bad it only took me six Little books to figure it out. Still, I got "The Washingtonians" out of it.

If only Ramsey Campbell were readily available in the U.S., especially "The Companion", a short, and "The Doll Who Ate His Mother". Actually, any Ramsey would be fabulous.