The Mystery of 1492

I finished the book of mystery stories, which was quite good, though I didn't really enjoy reading those stories that featured a lot of low-life criminal types. Ah, well. Such is the milieu of crime fiction.

I'm on to non-fiction now with a book about 1492 called Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors, by James Reston Jr. The author focuses on what he considers a pivotal year in world history, one that changed everything and set the stage for the conflicts we're now seeing in the Middle East. It looks to be interesting and is so far very well written.

The Hill Holes

Having finally finished Joe Hill's Nosferatu, I'm afraid I'm rather disappointed. The plot was simple enough to begin with--the good guys had to stop the bad guys who were preying on children and killing adults--but there were so many non-plausible events that the story became pretty ridiculous and annoying by the end. Spoiler alert here! There were many logic holes, I'm afraid. One in particular was the blowing up of Christmasland, the place where all the kidnapped kids were taken, which would have made sense except that Christmasland didn't exist in real terms--it was a place in the mind. How can you blow up a place in the mind? Makes no sense.

And then the children who were being held in Christmasland appeared as real children after the place had been blown up. That too would have made sense (if you accept that such a thing could occur) except that the children had been kidnapped over many years' time, and many would not still have been children by then. In fact, some would have been quite elderly. This logic gap was not dealt with either.

Many of the children were helping the bad guys kill people. But where were they when they weren't with the bad guys? If Christmasland wasn't a real place, where did they live? Also, there was the idea that the Christmas angels that hung on the enormous tree in a real place held the souls of all the children and when the good guys smashed the angels, the children's souls were released and they could stop feeling murderous.  But . . . oh, never mind. I just didn't get this whole idea and it's because the writer did not make it clear.

Joe Hill should really stick to a simpler plot structure so that whatever we need to believe in will be easy to believe in. I don't recommend this book, I'm afraid, and I'm going to be skeptical about future novels by Stephen King's son. It's early in his career--he shouldn't be getting lazy yet, but that seems to be what happened with this book.

Mysteries Native and Imported

I've been slowly working my way through the Best American Mystery Stories 2010 lately, and I must say it's pretty good. The stories are more on the side of literary than pulp, which is fine, though the mysteries are not true mysteries for the most part, at least not in the classical sense of whodunits. They are about crime, but get into the mysteries of the criminal mind or behavior rather than unraveling what happened.

I've also started a more conventional narrative from Stephen King's son, Joe Hill, who has followed in his father's footsteps writing supernatural/horror fiction. Nosferatu (NOS4A2) is a library book, so I'm cheating a little reading a book that isn't diminishing my book collection. Oh, well. It's a pretty good story, if a little bit wordy (Hill's like his father in that way, too).