Terminal

My review of Brian Keene’s Terminal will be posted at Insidious Reflections at the end of the month. I’d been wanting to review this book since Brian handed it to me at World Horror and I carried it with me to breakfast in Manhattan and got egg stains all over it because I didn’t want to put it down when my food came. But it seems like everyone and his grand-uncle had already signed up to review it for the usual suspects, so I bemoaned the fact that I was all reviewed up and had no place to go. Paul Danda, Insidious Reflections’ senior editor saw my post and offered to buy the review from me — which meant I had to sit down and write it, which was a ton o’fun. Check it out when it goes online.

We watched Donnie Darko the other night, and I have absolutely no idea what the movie was about. But I liked it, liked the slack-jawed grin that Donnie got on his face every time Frank told him to do something, the way he found strength to express controversial but subtly popular opinions at perhaps inopportune times, his relationship with Gretchen, the way his father tried unsuccessfully to hide a grin every time Donnie got caught doing something naughty… I just wish I understood what the filmmaker was trying to convey. Watching the movie was a cool trip, in no way unenjoyable, but ultimately baffling.

I’m finishing up reading Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of my favorite authors. This is an older book, originally published in Spanish a decade ago, but appearing in English for the first time just now. It’s part of a series of books that feature the eponymous character, set in Spain in the 18th century, during the time of the Virgin Queen, Philip IV, the Spanish Inquisition, and toward the end of Spain’s glory days. Alatriste was once a war hero, but after being seriously wounded he earns a living as a “hired sword,” killing or threatening or scaring people. It’s a fun book, without the weight, import or complexity of Perez-Reverte’s other books.

Next up will be The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco, another of my favorites. I’ve read all of his fiction, starting with The Name of the Rose. He’s a complex writer. His prose is dense, his stories elaborate and twisty — not everyone’s favorite. Eco is a professor of semiotics in Bologna, Italy, and sometimes I get the feel he’s just playing with his readers, trying to see how audacious he can be, but his texts are challenging and I feel rewarded when I get to the end of one of his books. He’s never achieved the same level of popular accessibility that he did with Rose, but maybe he doesn’t want to. The premise of Queen Loana is interesting, vaguely reminiscent of the Drew Barrymore film 50 First Dates. A sixty-ish Milanese antiquarian bookseller nicknamed Yambo suffers a stroke and loses his memory of everything but the words he has read: poems, scenes from novels, miscellaneous quotations. I’m looking forward to cracking the cover.