A Keeper Indeed
Sarah Langan's first novel, The Keeper, was more than a great horror debut--it set a bar that sorely seems to be missing in most contemporary fiction, much less horror fiction. Though he can't play a part in a movie without hamming it up, Stephen King's downright understated and realistic on the page. His strength as a writer stems largely from how well he seems to know people and the way his surrealism stays so firmly anchored in the world we know. Langan has this same pitch perfect ear, with a voice and vision comparable to King but distinctly valuable.

H.G. Well's famously said something like 9/10ths of fantastic writing must be rooted in a strict adherence to reality. I think that has more than a little to do with why the best horror writers manage to create realities that feel more genuine than most, ahem, respectable fiction. I know this teacher at the heart of the novel, a woman even her aesthetically disabled physician recognizes as beautiful but who only sees herself in terms of the gap between her teeth, her lisp, and her abandonment by the two most important men in her life.

And then there's the young Romeo and Juliet of the story, Maddie and Enrique. They are not romanticized as perfect kids, but they aren't ridiculed either. They are fumbling innocents from opposite sides of the tracks discovering sex one awkward step at a time. They are sweet, and they are selfish; they are real.

That's what makes the horror of this story so shattering. Figuratively and literally, Langan has mutated the monster that all but destroyed the working class town Bedford in her first novel and delivered it as a viral contagion on the more affluent neighboring community, Corpus Christi. And this second trip to the apocalypse is, if anything, a darker ride.

For one thing, it's scarier. The Keeper holds a dear place in my heart for the beauty of its vision. But it was more of a ghost story, with that genre's tendency to find hope in a reckoning with the past. The Missing doesn't offer hope, at least not an unqualified hope. The reader takes heart in the fact that people make it to the end of the book, and in the sometimes very small ways they hang onto their humanity against insurmountable odds.

Time after time, sympathetic characters have to face down all but unimaginable horrors, dealing with the predators that have come under the control of this virus. They're as sick as those folks dying off in the first two hundred pages of The Stand, but they're also dangerous--they don't talk right, they don't walk right, they don't move right, and they somehow think as one and know their victim's darkest secrets and fears. Most horror has a couple of good chills that stand out--Langan keeps them coming fast and furious without such moments losing their power.

The scariest thing of all may be just how good she is.

My earlier review of The Keeper:

http://takeemastheycome.blogspot.com/2006_10_15_archive.html

Happy Birthday to You!

Martin Luther King, Man of History

By Nelson Peery

A person becomes a historical figure by bringing to a crisis the personal qualities needed for its successful resolution. What was the crisis and what were the qualities that propelled Martin Luther King Jr. to the level of a historic figure?

Following the Civil War, industry's need for cheap cotton turned the South into an agricultural reserve of the North. The totality of Southern legal and extra-legal force was brought to bear to force the freed slaves back onto the plantations to work as tenant farmers. There they lived on the level of the peasants of India. Under those conditions, no amount of struggle by the African Americans could break the iron grip of segregation which kept them in poverty and semi-slavery.

The late 1940s and the early 1950s were years marked by a critical crisis in race relations in this country. The simultaneous move of industry to the South and the mechanization of Southern agriculture were an economic revolution.

That economic revolution attacked the base of the nation's race relations and created a social revolution. Replaced by more efficient means of production, the blacks were driven into the segregated sections of towns and cities. There they formed a cohesive mass and gained a sense of strength and common purpose. Struggles against segregation began breaking out across the country.

The Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56 was the most advanced, determined and united effort of this period. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was brought into the leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott to stabilize the right wing of the leadership. These leaders believed they had to conduct the boycott in a manner acceptable to the liberal whites who, up to that time, had always dominated the African American struggle for freedom.

King's potential for political growth was shown from the start. By the time of his untimely death on April 4, 1968, before his 40th birthday, King had risen to the point of endorsing the reconstruction of America on a co-operative basis. He had come out in opposition to the Vietnam war. He had spoken out strongly in defense of colonial and oppressed peoples everywhere.

King brought the necessary qualities of humility, bravery, self- sacrifice and vision to the movement. He entered the struggle when it was disunited and organizationally and politically impotent. By the time of King's death, the movement held the political balance of power in the country and was united in its vision and its purpose. Thus, King rose above his fellow leaders and became a man of history.

Nelson Peery is the author of Black Fire, Black Radical and The Future Is Up To Us.

This article originated in the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition), Vol. 22 No. 3 / January 16, 1995; P.O. Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654


Martin Luther King on War—

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92-r05TH9qs

SNCC Freedom Singers Today—

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn7MOR1zpgw

Verdict on the Stewart Colbert strategy?

Force majeure ax falls at ABC Studios

Nearly two dozen writer deals terminated

By JOSEF ADALIAN

The force majeure ax has swung at ABC Studios, which today notified nearly two dozen writers and non-writing producers that it was terminating their overall deals as a result of the strike.
While all the major studios had previously suspended deals for their scribes, the ABC Studios action reps the biggest move yet by a major to cut ties to talent.

"The ongoing strike has had a significant detrimental impact on development and production so we are forced to make the difficult decision to release a number of talented, respected individuals from their development deals," ABC Studios said in a statement late Friday.
Among the talent cut loose: Gabe Sachs & Jeff Judah ("What About Brian"), Nina Wass & Gene Stein ("Less than Perfect"), Bill Callahan ("Scrubs"), Larry Charles ("Curb Your Enthusiasm"), Sean Bailey ("Project Greenlight") and the team of Joshua Sternin and Jeffrey Ventimilia ("That 70s Show," "Surviving Christmas"). "Private Practice" thesp Taye Diggs, who had a production deal at ABC Studios, has also had that pact terminated.

Agents were still notifying clients of Disney's action, and more names are expected to leak out over the weekend. In addition, industry insiders said Warner Bros. TV was also preparing to make some cuts to its roster--though nothing as dramatic as ABC Studios' action.

Dragons and Other Everyday Monsters

(Wyrds and Wyrms)

“Nothing we advised could convince
the Prince we loved, our land’s guardian,
not to vex the custodian of the gold,
let [the dragon] lie where he was long accustomed,
lurk there under the earth until the end of the world.
[Instead, our Prince] held to his high destiny. The hoard is lay bare”

Beowulf, 3079—3084

“A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.”

3150—3156


They’re a bit of a supergroup really. Innovative director Bob Zemeckis (Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, Polar Express), novelist/screenwriter Neil Gaiman (Stardust, Coraline, American Gods) and screenwriter Roger Avary (Tarentino’s opening trifecta) couldn’t help but make an interesting movie. They’ve done a helluva lot more than that.

From the opening scenes that use 3D to establish the terrible isolation of King Hrothgar’s mead hall and drive home the horror of an inescapable reaping, this new Beowulf redefines the moviegoers’ experience with sensations as primal as those felt by prehistoric children gathered around a cave painting. It doesn’t hurt that the scene of the attack is cast in an unearthly flickering will-o’-the-wisp that accompanies the demon Grendel. And those scenes of Grendel savagely attacking Hrothgar’s people in the mead hall make more complete sense of 3D filmmaking than anything I’ve ever experienced before. The movie theater becomes a living, breathing diorama with the ability to transport viewers into an awful little box, in an awful wilderness in some shadowy corner of the dark ages.

Of course, we can thank that anonymous poet from the end of the first millennium for the vision behind this experience. What’s particularly wonderful about this new version of Beowulf is the way it takes great liberties with a thousand year old poem and manages to remain true to its purpose and effect. Zemeckis apparently told Gaiman and Avary that the didn’t want the entire cast of characters to change midway through the movie the way it would in the poem when Beowulf returns to rule his own kingdom, and, as is the challenge of art, solving that logistical problem became the key to making the story more focused and provocative for a modern audience.

In order to allow Beowulf to remain and inherit Hrothgar’s kingdom, the screenwriters [this has got to be Gaiman’s particular mythic genius at work] turned an episodic hero tale (with many extended anecdotes of evil and reckoning) into a single unified tragedy. The sins of the fathers that serve as a context for the stories in the original poem become the secret sins that link Hrothgar and his successor Beowulf. The result is a story with such great economy and depth it deserves recognition as a classic in its own right that still manages to preserve the integrity of the ancient poem. The poem is the story as it was handed down in song; the movie is all that excitement and glamour plus the behind the scenes story of flawed humans making a go of it as best they can.

The Beowulf in the movie reminds me of a story my mother told me about an encounter between Burt Reynolds and Spencer Tracy (so, if it’s not true, take it up with my mother). Apparently, as a young actor, Reynolds used to follow Tracy around backlots until the older actor told him one day to come on up and walk with him. When Reynolds asked his advice about acting, Tracy said something like, “Acting’s easy. Life is hard.” Ray Winstone’s Beowulf might say this about being the greatest hero of his age—“Slaying dragons is easy; being a good man is hard.”

It’s funny that I find myself writing about Beowulf today because what I read of it in high school I misremembered, and it took seeing this movie to make me seek out the 2000 Seamus Heaney translation and rediscover the original poem. Though I have an affection for the fantastic, my love of swords and sorcery doesn’t extend much beyond what Tolkien did in his trilogy and what Peter Jackson did even better in his movies. As far as fantasy goes, more to my taste in many ways was the movie I most eagerly anticipated and which could hardly live up to the beauty of the source material, The Golden Compass. So, it’s funny that I’m writing about Beowulf today because it’s not what might be generally considered my thing, on one level, but also because I haven’t written a real blog in over three months. Oh, I’ve put some links up and tried to use my blog to alert people to things I thought were important, but I haven’t been particularly inspired to write anything for it in a long while. Even a month ago, I wouldn’t have imagined Beowulf would have been the thing that got me going.

But then the last three months have been full of surprises. On September 22, I had a heart attack, and my blissfully ignorant assumption that I was as healthy as any other 44 year old plodding the earth vanished forever. Worse than that, my wife of 2 years and my 16 year old daughter no longer get to live with such blissful assumptions either.

My reckoning with heart disease has led me to a lot of reflection and a little less writing over all, though I’ve been more motivated than ever to finish the novel I’m working on, and I did put a lot of energy into an article about Springsteen’s new album of reckoning, which has been speaking pretty forcefully to my need to come to grips with my new reality. [If you are interested, you can order that newsletter at http://www.rockrap.com/; the article is called “Your Own Worst Enemy.”]

So, why do I find myself writing my first new blog on January 1st, 2008 about a 1000 year old poem made into a 3D movie that most of the world is probably not taking very seriously? Well, because it speaks to me and where I am right now, and I never would have guessed that, but that’s why I call the page “Take ‘Em As They Come.”

Beowulf transports me to someplace I could never be, contemplating someone with superhuman physical condition fighting supernatural forces, and it’s entertaining as hell in the process. But it’s also moving and resonant because it’s not just about that, it’s about all of life. It’s about the dragons we have to slay every day and the dragons we don’t even know are laying in wait. It’s about knowing they’re out there, and as Beowulf says, “For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end,” and, yet, the challenge is to hold to our high destiny.

One of the great things about the poem in its final scenes is that it even allows that Beowulf needs help in his final battle, and Beowulf’s surviving brother in arms emphasizes that everyone is part of the larger fight. Though some aspects of the vision may seem dated, they take very little to translate into rich allegory for our times. The repeated theme in the poem of grieving, keening mothers and fathers becomes one of the most striking scenes in the movie, the death scene between Grendel and his mother. No one's hands are clean in that world or this one, and nothing is guaranteed, but our only choice is to keep on fighting and live life as we know we should. At the end of an era, facing a Christian god he neither knew or understood, Beowulf’s heroism comes in his struggle to remain true to his ideals. He dies in battle, and in both poem and movie, the story looks to grow darker before it sees light, but that's not what matters. With Beowulf as with us, what matters, as always, is how we choose to face whatever monster blocks our path.