It is the story of a happy Captain of a sinking ship. It is the story of Chernobyl, afterwards. It is the story of provisional investigators, provisional policemen, provisional scientists who are provisionally accepted as the mad inhabitants of a zone officially uninhabited, in which no crime officially occurs. The mood is of a cocktail party on an asteroid hurtling toward earth. There we find Arkady, sullen, stubborn, singular, biting at radioactive pickles (“Crisp, tasty, and with a touch of strontium”) and asking questions.
Category: Funny & Fictional
From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz read by Stephen Lang
Read by Stephen Lang who is good doing liddle giwls and the monotones of the personal(it)y disordered but not wonderful
doing Barty who is (we guess) the hero. Unless the real hero is: the theory
of quantum mechanics as interpreted by Feynman and the possibility of understanding
that things are always all the ways things are and we only sense some of the ways things are … sometimes.
It is possible that this book was written for the Koontz children or by the Koontz children … because it is difficult
to conceive that this is all there is after the wicked genius of FALSE MEMORY and the Topcat cooldom of SEIZE THE NIGHT.
Or maybe we only read the book some of the ways it could have been read and not all of the ways for which we apologize. Not that we didnt grin or giggle or laugh, with fangs on, listening to Jacob and Edom small talk of big disasters, earthquakes, tycoons, hurricanes, canned
hams…. Listen:
…he bolted up from the sofa saying “Canned Hams” but at once he realized this made no sense. None. ZIP. So he searched desperately for something coherent to say. “Potatoes.” “Corn Chips.” Which was equally ridiculous. So Edam plunged across the living room as though he were falling off a ladder, struggling to explain himself as he went. “We’ve brought some. There are some. I’ll get some if you wouldn’t mind having some. We have boxes in the car…but I’ll bring them in. Boxes of …boxes. Well, not boxes of boxes. Of course not. Its boxes of stuff, you know… Stuff
we’ve brought in boxes.” Yanking open the front door, lurching aross the threshold onto the porch, he thought at last of the word he needed and he cried out over his shoulder “GROCERIES!!!” with triumph and relief…”
The Road to Ruin by Donald E. Westlake Read by William Dufris
‘…This grand vehicle was a color not seen in nature… metallic, shimmering kind of not-chartreuse, not-gold, not-silver, not-mauve with just a hint of not-maroon….’
Thinks Kelp, not-thinking, not-talking to himself in a kind of not-Bronx, not-Queens, not-Staten Island, in-your-front-lawn five-borough accent while looking for a car to steal in Long Term Parking at JFK. Specifically, a car with an MD plate, cause doctors know about cars you can survive.
This is a book for New Yorkers over 40 who remember Mayor Lindsay and the Bronx before Co-op city and Queens before Balkanization.
Be prepared to laugh unstoppably in the middle of supermarkets. While waiting in line for plywood, ready for the next hurricane. With a mouthful of anything beginning with the letter B.
WILLIAM DUFRIS doing 5 ex-cons planning the kidnapping-that would-go-wrong at bowling alley volume is gut-funny, rib-funny, crotch-funny. A book to be not-read, not-spoken but laughed out loud.
Remarkable.
Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon by Donna Andrews read by Bernadette Dunne
Geek gaming firm with mascots (wounded buzzard, psychopathic dog) sets up shop in small Western town but needs a Wendy to clean up and organize the Peter Pans. Enter Californian Meg Lanslow to clean up their books – and before she finds out whats going on everybody’s least favorite programmer is murdered…. Is it the shrink with a radio show who gives advice to lovesick husbands? Is it the nasty capitalist landlord? Is it one of the temps? Funny, witty and perfectly read by the singular voice of Bernadette Dunne.
Hope to Die by Lawrence Block
What a wonderful Upper West Side between Broadway and Central Park West in the 70s voice to listen to …. when you’re on a boat to Kabul or Talibaq. Close your eyes and you can see the doormen, the yellow taxis, the short, balding, murderous psychoanalysts, walking their dogs between appointments with depressive middle aged lawyers suffering from garden variety impotence.
It must be comforting for the patient, I said, to have a shrink who
can pull a gun on you if you start acting out…You’re on the verge of
this major breakthrough, really getting in touch with your anger, or remembering
what really happened when your uncle came into your bedroom that night,
and you look up from the couch, and there’s Dr. Nadler, and he’s pointing
a gun at you….
Nope. Theres nothing as insidious as a bald jewish shrink on the Upper West Side — except a bald Jewish shrink with an aphorism: What do you get? You get what you get.
THE GAME OF THIRTY by WILLIAM KOTZWINKLE ::FRANK MULLER:
Imagine Frank Muller doing CZ Sakall, the jowly, bespectacled, hysterical Hungarian who cannot stop wiping his spectacles, shaking his head and concocting scenarios of doom … “today… its going to happen today…” etc.
The stammering, anxious NYC diamond dealer calls Jimmy McShane, well heeled ex-cop and private dick, who bodyguards him, makes sure disaster doesn’t happen today, and strolls home. Home: to the walk-up on Christopher Street, to the old hag sitting on her heavy ovaries, to the next ex-girlfriend re-aligning his Chakras in the flat redecorated by his old ex-girlfriend, to the Zelda-esque client who asks him to find her pedophilic father’s killer. Hi, ho. Absolutely funny, absolutely cool, absolutely wonderful.
The Hunting Wind by Steve Hamilton read by Nick Sullivan
Wry, infinitely bored, softhearted ex-cop holes up in the Upper Peninsula, runs his snow plow up and down the block, and hangs out in a Scottish pub, drinking Canadian beer. Then trouble comes knocking at his door….
“You spend your whole life up here sitting in your cabin all by yourself. You don’t even have a television, for godsake. You’re so desperate for human contact you gotta come in here and make my life miserable…If a new face comes through that door and asks you for help you’re gonna do it … no matter what…. In fact one of these days an alien spaceship is gonna land out there in the parking lot and a couple of little green men are gonna come in here and ask you to help them… You know, take you back to their planet so you can help them ward off some other aliens who are trying to invade them or something. And of course you’ll just get your ass kicked again but it doesn’t matter because you’ll go. In two minutes you’ll be out that door and in that spaceship…”
ROUGH TREATMENT by JOHN HARVEY::JOHN WILKINSON
The voice is everything. Instead of the typical pomposity of a haughty OBE accent, spouting that mixture of bad faith, betrayal, and malice so characteristic of the displaced British upper class, we have a whisper, a tempered, middle brow tone telling a tale about a slightly fat slightly alcoholic Nottingham housewife who falls in love with the burglar who robs her house. The robbery is problematic. Gone is the stash of Coke her failed director-husband was holding for a slightly murderous slightly psychopathic drug thug. The housewife and the thief meet, fuck, and renegotiate the stolen goods. Inspector Charles Resnick, divorced, badly dressed, with bad table manners, figures it out — kind of — but still somehow does the wrong thing. BRILLIANT.
“Grabianski didn’t know…He felt about music what his partners felt about birds. Large ones and small ones. With music it was small ones and fast ones.”