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Books Acquired
• Sideways, by Rex Pickett
• The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything, edited by Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir
• 300, by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
• Into the Fire, by Richard Laymon
• Invincible, Volume One: Family Matters, by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Bill Crabtree
• Invincible, Volume Two: Eight is Enough, by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, Ryan Ottley and Bill Crabtree
• Invincible, Volume Three: Perfect Strangers, by Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley, and Bill Crabtree
• Invincible, Volume Four: Head of the Class, by Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley, and Bill Crabtree
Books Read
• The Annotated Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Carroll; annotated by Martin Gardener
• Rage, by Richard Bachman
• Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
• Invincible, Volume One: Family Matters, by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Bill Crabtree
• The Long Walk, by Richard Bachman
• Invincible, Volume Two: Eight is Enough, by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, Ryan Ottley and Bill Crabtree
• Invincible, Volume Three: Perfect Strangers, by Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley, and Bill Crabtree
• Invincible, Volume Four: Head of the Class, by Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley, and Bill Crabtree
I’m on a Kirkman train and it’s never derailing.
Last year, my big graphic novel discoveries were Bill Willingham (who writes Fables) and Brian K.
Vaughan (who writes Ex Machina and Y: The Last Man). By the time January rolled around, I was afraid I’d tapped out the graphic novel market. 2006 had been my graphic novel Renaissance, and I was worried that I’d read too much, too fast. Somewhere in my voracious consumption, I started reading through The Walking Dead, a zombie comic by Robert Kirman that I really liked, but that didn’t seem to have the same resonance with me that stuff like Fables and Y had. Then this month, I decided to listen to everyone and pick up Volume One of Invincible. Within a week, I’d bought and read through Volume Four. I wanted resonance? Boy, did I get it.
It’s not as if the story of Invincible is anything new. Teenage kid with a superhero father attains superpowers of his own. If you’re a fan of comic books, you’ve heard variants of this tale over and over. But I’ve been reading superhero comics for over six years now, and from everything I’ve seen, Invincible is entirely unique.
Certainly it’s mostly the characters: entirely believable people given great dialogue and fascinating situations to react to. In a way, I’m reminded of stuff like Buffy and Deep Space Nine – a large, sprawling canvas of characters, each of which has a unique voice and outlook on the world. No one sounds the same, and no one is given short shrift. (At one point, something major happens to Mark, our hero. What stuck me, as both a reader and a writer, was how Kirkman didn’t forget how Mark’s mother would also react, and how she even has a little story of her own that’s completely removed from the main plot. It fascinated me and strengthened my love? addiction? to this book.)
The cool thing is, the characters aren’t where the genius stops. Plot twists I never expected literally made me gasp out loud. Subplots that both help the main plot and exist on their own merit abound, yet never confuse the story. And then there’s the rampant silliness. Oh, man. Naming each of the trades after a defunct sitcom (you’d better believe I picked up on the “Head of the Class” connection before I ever did background research) is just inspired lunacy. There’s a completely random satire of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the meta-jokes abound, including one about fill-in panels I laughed at for almost a full minute. If ever anyone wanted proof that I’m a giant geek, here it is.
In April, I plan on finishing off the existing trades, then jumping into the monthly book. Y: The Last Man is ending soon, and I need something to fill the gap. Invincible, I have no doubt, is going to do that soundly.
In addition to my late-in-the-month graphic novel explosion, I also managed to fit both prose and poetry into March. I find it bizarre that I’ve gone this long without reading The Hunting of the Snark. I’ve been a fan of Lewis Carroll ever since I was eleven, listening to my sister’s Sound Storybook of Alice in Wonderland. (You turned the page when you heard the Tinkerbell chimes. Boy howdy, was I a gay little kid.) With that as a jumping-off point, I ended up becoming a voracious Carroll reader. At twelve, I memorized “Jabberwocky” and “A Mouse’s Tale,” and at nineteen I read The Annotated Alice for the first time. I would never be so presumptuous to say that I’m a Carroll expert, let alone a scholar … but I’ve always prided myself on being a more in-depth reader of the Alice books than any person really had to be.
And yet, in all this time, I have never once even begun The Hunting of the Snark. (This is a lot like last month, when, for the first time, I picked up Poe’s detective stories. I tend to read deeply as opposed to widely, with the obvious exception of Stephen King. In his case, I do both.) In many ways, I’m glad I waited.
Annotation is a tricky business, especially if you’re reading something for the first time. You don’t want the facts surrounding the story to get in the way of the story itself. I got around this by reading each chapter – or, as Carroll calls it, each “Fit” – straight through first, then going back and getting all the background. It was, for lack of a less grandiose word, illuminating.
The thing is, with the Alice books, I’d been reading and re-reading for some time, bringing my own concepts and impressions to the work before I ever found out the “real” dirt. With Snark, I was getting both at the same time. It was fascinating. Carroll’s got a weird way with language, but it never distracts from the narrative … or the funny. Honestly, I’m a thirty-one year old American guy reading a poem from Victorian-era England, and I’m cracking up over some of the stuff Carroll pulls. He makes math jokes funny. And there’s this whole thing about an ocean map being far easier to read if it’s completely blank, without “conventional signs” to get in the way.
Not only that, but the poem has a certain increasingly dark tone that you might not necessarily pick up on the first time, at least not until the entirely disturbing finish. It’s interesting – Alice in Wonderland, when I read it now, seems light and airy and whimsical, and entirely episodic. Through the Looking-Glass, starting with “Jabberwocky,” seems more cohesive, and a lot darker by comparison. The Hunting of the Snark tells a very direct story using its clever puns and repetitions, and it is the darkest of them all. I’m almost afraid to read Sylvie and Bruno now.
It’s a little remarkable that the poem as a story completely holds up on its own – you don’t need the annotation if you don’t want it. But to know why Carroll wrote certain things as he wrote them, to understand what “bathing-machines” were and what they meant to society back then, to see how the public reacted to this startlingly disturbing work after the relatively breezy Alice novels … that’s the kind of stuff that gets me going. In general, I don’t need to know what makes a book tick; that it does tick is enough. But for Carroll, I’m always a little glad for a guide.
On the other hand, I’m entirely thankful I didn’t know anything about Slaughterhouse-Five going into it. My friend Harry tells me that almost half the people who start it never finish it. They find it just too hard to follow, he says. If I’d known that going in, I might have gotten bogged down in the bounce-about non-linear structure of the whole thing, and not have been able to find the story at all. As it stands, I entered the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut with blind eyes, and I’m glad I did it. Slaughterhouse-Five is a terrific book, and serves as a springboard for me to discover an entirely new writer. There are few joys in life as pure as that.
The interesting thing about Slaughterhouse-Five is that I still don’t get it … and yet that doesn’t detract from my love of it one iota. Billy Pilgrim, our hero, has become “unstuck in time.” He bounces around time as effortlessly as most of us go to sleep, and there seems to be absolutely no reason for it. One of the times/places he keeps revisiting is Dresden, before, during, and after the firebombing of the city by American fighter pilots during World War Two. The bombing was real and Vonnegut was there; one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is that Vonnegut himself becomes a cameo character a few times during Billy Pilgrim’s story. At one point, in the aftermath of the bombing, the viewpoint shifts from Pilgrim to an unnamed prisoner of war in the background. “That was I,” Vonnegut writes. “That was me. That was the author of this book.” For a moment, the science-fiction elements (of both Billy’s time travel and the bizarre abduction by aliens called Tralfamadorians) take a backseat to the chilling seriousness of what Vonnegut is trying to say. By putting himself there, we not only connect to Pilgrim, the fiction, but also to Vonnegut, the reality. It makes the horrors and fictionalization of war a little harder to dismiss.
Throughout the book, I wondered if the sci-fi elements were allegorical or “real.” That Vonnegut himself is, at his essence, a science fiction writer (something I didn’t know until I did some research on him after I’d read his novel) complicates that matter. A stuffy, old-school literary part of me worries that by bringing in genre elements, the “literary worth” of the story is somehow compromised. But then I realize two things: that I’ve been rallying against that type of genre-bastardization my whole life, and that without the more fantastic elements, Slaughterhouse-Five would be nowhere near as powerful. I’m ready for Mother Night.
And finally: with the upcoming release of Blaze, a very old Stephen King novel he’s releasing under the Richard Bachman name, I’m going back and re-reading all the Bachman books in order. This past month, I delved into Rage and The Long Walk, and what can I tell you?
When I was thirteen, I read Rage for the first time and was astounded at how real it seemed. It captured the way I was thinking at the time, the anger toward my parents and toward my classmates, my ambivalence toward school. Back then, tragedies like Columbine High School were almost unheard-of. Now, of course, things are different. In the advent of numerous school shootings – some shooters with a copy of Rage found in their lockers – King has decided to take the book out of publication. It’s a shame, in a way, but also understandable. As King states, at one level, it’s a how-to book about killing your teacher. I’d be a little jittery if it was my book out there.
Reading with thirty-one-year-old eyes, Rage is a little different. It’s simpler than I remember it being, and I agree with King – some of the motivations and characterizations are painfully Freudian. Our hero is a guy named Charlie Decker, whose violent reactions to all authority seem to stem out of a mutual hatered for his father. Rage doesn’t go so far as to blame everything that happens on Charlie’s Dad (there are some subtle hints throughout the book that Charlie’s sort of off to begin with, and his father – and to a lesser extent, his mother – are merely accelerants), but things get more muddy when the students he holds hostage start blaming their parents, too. In a way, you can view it as a sort of Stockholm Syndrome: Charlie’s excuse for his lunatic behavior lies in that direction, so why not let all problems, for everyone, lie in that direction. Reading Rage as an adult, it seems less revolutionary and more an above-average character study that seems to say more about the author’s state of mind at the time than anything else. It’s good, but not great.
The Long Walk, the second Bachman novel, represents a quantum leap forward in King’s writing. The premise itself is chilling: one hundred boys, of their own volition, walking a marathon for the ultimate Prize. The Prize seems to be anything the winner wants for the rest of his life. I say “seems to be,” because the characters themselves seem less than clear on the subject. In between the start of the Long Walk and the Prize: death, and lots of it.
Each Walker is afforded three Warnings; if you fall below four miles an hour, you are warned. If you interfere with another Walker’s progress, you are warned. You do not get a fourth warning; instead, you get shot to death.
We see all this through the eyes of Ray Garraty (number 47, which should have been a tip-off to Bachman readers; 1947 is the year King was born), who – against his better judgement – makes friends along the Walk. This inevitably makes it harder: it’s one thing to watch people you’re competing against being killed, it’s another to watch your friends being killed. Death lingers over every page of this novel, death and the concept of The Crowd. Like Ray Bradbury did (in an entirely different way) in Fahrenheit 451, King presages the advent of reality television and the love/hate dichotomy of celebrity culture. The Crowd loves it when the Walkers win, but they love it even more when they lose. They love it even more when there’s blood.
In a lot of ways, The Long Walk might be the scariest book King ever wrote. It’s shocking and violent and has a lot of interesting things to say about the type of society that would watch people die, and cheer for it. I have never escaped a read of The Long Walk without a nightmare; the only nightmares I ever have involve Bachman books.
But it’s worth it. It’s worth it because the story is chilling and effective, because the characters are far more believable and real, and because witnessing the evolution of a writer has rarely been more satisfying. Next month: Roadwork and The Running Man. I can’t wait.
Comments
Oh, but I don't care. How I love them!
It performs every month like this? Because damn.
Every issue of Invincible more than forgives Kirkman his lackluster Ultimate X-Men run.
I read that Vonnegut when I was around 19 and really liked it at the time. I think I was very into the "things happen and make no sense" of it because it matched life.