What I was doing when the lights went out

A couple of years ago, I wrote a story called “What David Was Doing When the Lights Went Out” for the Who Died in Here? anthology. The story was inspired by the massive power outage in the Northeastern US and was one that I was quite pleased with, especially for the way it turned out.

Last night, we were graced with our own local blackout, and it made me realize how quickly things could go badly wrong. I got home from work at the usual time and was reading (Michael Connelly, The Closers) when the power suddenly dropped. Didn’t go out all the way, we went into a fifteen to twenty minute brownout period. The lightbulbs glowed and major electrical equipment (A/C, fridge, TV) cycled on and off. I quickly turned off anything that seemed vulnerable to surges and settled in to wait for things to return to normal. After a bit, I went outside to see if it was widespread, and discovered that it was.

Turns out it extended to seven counties, and originated with some downed power lines that caused an emergency shutdown at an Entergy station that cascaded into an overall bad situation, including a small fire at the Entergy station. We were without power for about four hours — my daughter and I watched an old movie (Hitchcock, The Lady Vanishes) on one of those portable DVD player gadgets, one I got for free with the purchase of my new car.

I got to thinking — if this goes on for any length of time, what happens? No A/C and it’s 95-100 degrees outside. Our telephones all require electricity these days (portable, FAX machine, whatever) and our cell phones will drain eventually. The gas station pumps needed power, so no gas, and my car was riding on the E. How long before the food in the fridge starts going bad? What happens when the flashlight batteries give out? How prepared are we, really, for something big? I think it would take very little to topple our comfortable lives. Remove electricity from the equation and extrapolate.

I finished Jonathan Kellerman’s new book Rage the other day, and I think that’s it for him. I used to enjoy his books, but I’ve been increasingly frustrated with them of late and this only reinforced that feeling, at least as far as the Alex Delaware character goes. The writer seems very ambivalent toward Alex’s love interests — he usually sends them on errands so that they won’t be around to interfere with Alex’s obsessive interest in crimes. The plot in this one was messy and predictable and the resolution ultimately unsatisfactory. Alex and Milo spent a big part of the book sitting around brainstorming ideas, making some fairly big leaps of logic which led them inevitably in the right direction. Kellerman may be relinquished to the “I’ll wait for the paperback” list for now, which is bad because I don’t buy many paperbacks.

On the other side of the coin, I recently read Caitlín R. Kiernan’s To Charles Fort, With Love, a collection of disturbing short stories due out soon from Subterranean Press, and I am entranced by her writing. She’s a poet (literally — she writes poetry, but also metaphorically) and does some intriguing things with the word “and” that are hard to explain without quoting directly. Ramsey Campbell alludes to this in his afterword, in which he refers to some of her sentences which start out as sentences but end up being incomplete, having discovered that they’ve already accomplished everything they set out to do.

Some of the stories have been published before, but I hadn’t read any of them, so the entire collection was a real treat to me. Some of the stories are loosely connected, and some contain ideas that developed in some of Kiernan’s novels. Strange things happen in some of them, but this is mostly quiet horror, the horror of things slightly out of focus and without explanation. Pick this one up when it comes up. You won’t regret it.

For the July issue of Accent Review, I will be reviewing Captain Alatriste (Arturo Perez-Reverte), Saturday (Ian McEwan) and We’re All in This Together (Owen King). I’ll also have an interview with Owen King in that issue.

Obligatory plug for our new blog:

Take 30 authors, editors, and booksellers in the horror and dark fantasy genres. Give them a virtual home with plenty of room to write. Tell them you want informative, interesting posts about the writing life, the publishing business, and their work in general. Turn them loose on the world and what do you get?

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My posts will take place on the 17th of each month. Check it out!