books

Reading the Livejournal of the late science fiction author/poet/critic/children's story writer Thomas M. Disch, came across the nugget that he wrote a script for Disney, King of the Kalahari, which became The Lion King.
He says between the collusion/skullduggery of Disney and various agents he was screwed out of credit and royalties. The manuscript was offered for sale as a one-off original literary property at the time of the Livejournal. The seller, James Cummins, no longer offers it -- would be curious to know who has it and how much was paid.
Disch's book The Brave Little Toaster became a "cult," early CGI film that launched the careers of various Pixar hacks. (Haven't seen it.) He got credit for that one, at least.

A post a few weeks ago stated that Miracle Jones' novels Sharing and Shifting were available as free e-books. Shortly thereafter, the books were de-published (as in, taken down) and several people asked "What's up with that?"
It appears the first book, Sharing, will be available again in January 2015 from Instar Books, according to this catalog.

Instar's blurb has more up-to-date literary references than mine (Mieville and Morrison, not Dickens):

In the dead of night, six children are abducted from an orphanage by a fantastical flying creature -- one that appears to the children as a white unicorn whose horn has been replaced with a long black blade -- who brings them to a strange, seething desert that contains only a cathedral, a diner, and hypnotically shifting trees. There, they must learn to understand one another, or they must die.
Combining the hypermodern, surreal visions of China Mieville and Grant Morrison and the storytelling charge of Charles Dickens himself, Sharing -- the first installment in The Fold, the forthcoming seven-volume slipstream masterwork from underground legend Miracle Jones -- tells the story of what those children do there, whom they meet, and how -- and if -- they escape.

Have started reading Jim Thompson novels in earnest, after a false start many years back (not sure why I stopped reading). This Crime Time post has a good rundown on Thompson's life, and recommendations of what it considers the best books:

Nothing More Than Murder (1949)
The Killer Inside Me (1952)
Savage Night (1953)
A Swell-Looking Babe (1954)
A Hell Of A Woman (1954)
After Dark, My Sweet (1955)
Wildtown (1957)
The Getaway (1959)
The Grifters (1963)
Pop.1280 (1964)

Never had any interest in seeing the "iconic" film version of The Getaway -- Ali McGraw, yuck -- so was able to read the book without imagining Steve McQueen in the role of "Doc." It's an astounding work -- but to film the hard-boiled action scenes minus Thompson's under-the-radar left-wing subversion and the surreal ending is to gut the work. Make no mistake, this is one of the tightest, meanest critiques of the world Ayn Rand made.

Thompson's politics peek out more abruptly in a scene in Pop. 1280 where the town's early 20th Century small town sheriff "kids" a Pinkerton detective (changed to "Talkington" in the novel):

"So you're with the Talkington Agency," I said. "Why, god-dang if I ain't heard a lot about you people! Let's see now, you broke up that big railroad strike, didn't you?"
"That's right." He showed me the tooth again. "The railroad strike was one of our jobs."
"Now, by golly, that really took nerve," I said. "Them railroad workers throwin' chunks of coal at you an' splashin' you with water, and you fellas without nothin' to defend yourself with except shotguns and automatic rifles! Yes, sir, god-dang it, I really gotta hand it to you!"
"Now, just a moment, Sheriff!" His mouth came together like a buttonhole. "We have never -- "

This passage from Savage Night shows Thompson's skill at tossing off humorous one-liners:

I met Mr. Kendall, the other boarder, on the way down to dinner. He was a dignified, little old guy -- the kind who'd remain dignified if he got locked in a nickel toilet and had to crawl under the door.

Or this one, from the same book:

Ruth served breakfast to us, and the way she kept trying to catch my eye I had a notion to take it out and hand it to her.

Wrote earlier about the Texas-Brooklyn author Miracle Jones, who gets his words out there through the interwebs and despite the undeserved lack of a major publishing house (whatever those even are, anymore). Jones' e-books Sharing and Shifting (available as free downloads on Smashwords*) come highly recommended to the strong of heart and stomach. Was going to describe Sharing as "Chronicles of Narnia meets William Burroughs by way of Texas Chainsaw Massacre" but then it turns out to be laying groundwork for Shifting's urban psychic-cyberpunk thriller and by then most of the Pevensies have been killed off. There's far too much skanky and robust sex in these books for kids anyway. And "cyberpunk" doesn't quite nail it. Shifting more recalls cyberpunk forerunners such as Samuel Delany (on steroids) or Alfred Bester (on crack), or Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix yarns, with their body-mod cults in outer space.
Neither book is science fiction per se but Jones gives us plenty of genre tropes: parallel universes, mind and matter transfer, biology run amok. The narratives keep driving forward and Jones explains enough to keep you grounded. OK, we have a city in the brain folds of an enormous floating octopus, which moves from one reality to another, acquiring new immigrants and cultural minglings. In this gritty world of Blade-Runner-and-the-Star-Wars-bar shaped by unknown laws of physics, we have levels of psychic advancement called "folding": Sharing is telepathy, Shifting is telekinesis, Burning is pyrokinesis, Traveling is jumping between dimensions, and so on.
Sharing's coming of age novel centers on the character of Charlotte, who we follow from childhood to puberty through hardships that would make Job say you've got to be kidding. No plague of boils but she does have to cook several of her friends and serve them to the evil Unicorn-god-thing who is top dog in the little universe she inhabits.
Shifting's love story takes place on the aforementioned Octopus, named The General. There, Charlotte (who can Share) meets Ljubo (who can Share and Shift) and they mostly fight and bicker throughout the novel. But then the book is almost entirely fighting, as all hell breaks loose among various factions on, in, and outside of The General. We seriously need a third book, as Shifting ends in mid-war with the lovers parting but it's been almost three years since Shifting was published so we may have to write the rest in our heads.

The forward drive of the narratives stems in part from Jones' feverish imagination and sick humor. You keep reading because he keeps throwing new, disgusting creatures and situations at you, seducing you into wanting to know where this is going. In Sharing, the heroine doesn't just cook her friends for the evil unicorn but a variety of other life forms that he brings to her in bags, dead or semi-conscious, through a dimensional doorway. Was reading the following passage in a restaurant and had to look away from the e-reader momentarily because it started cracking me up:

Inside the sack was a giant maggot the size of a pony. According to Asfodel, the
maggot was only slightly psychic, and also stupid and brutal. Asfodel warned
Charlotte against Sharing with the creature, but she couldn’t help herself and as
the maggot flopped onto the kitchen floor like a gaffed fish, she eased into its
consciousness and tried to soothe it. The maggot fought harder, turning itself in
circles and banging into the cabinets, causing pots and pans to spill out all over the
floor.

Charlotte cut the connection as fast as she could, but not before the maggot
learned her name. The maggot didn’t have eyes. At one end it had a curved green
flange as sharp as a knife that groped and twisted as it searched for flesh. At the
other end, it had a tiny sphincter that bubbled and frothed like spilled beer.

“Chaaaaaaarrrrrlottttte,” the maggot whispered from the sphincter as it flopped
blindly around the kitchen, searching for her neck with the sharp flange.
“Chaaaaarrlottttte…”

Shifting is the better book but don't even try to read it without first learning the vocabulary and concepts in Sharing. Minus the first novel you wouldn't know, for example, that the "fairy" creatures Jones keeps mentioning are sentient, telepathic cockroaches, or what "shape trees" are. The opening chapters of Sharing are truly dark and unsettling, and create an emotional undertow that sloshes through both books like a bad childhood dream.

*Update: Sometime after this post Sharing and Shifting became unavailable as free e-books, and several people asked "What's up with that?" It appears Sharing, will be available again in January 2015 from Instar Books, according to this catalog. Instar also plans to e-publish the rest of the "Fold" series.

Update, 2017: Sharing and Shifting are both available from Instar Books. Instar says Burning, book 3 of The Fold series, is nearing completion.

I stopped reading Stephen King novels after The Tommyknockers and tossed out many of the paperbacks. I still like his writing, though, on re-reading, or when I encounter it in newspapers and magazines (he's become very respectable, and his Times overview of Raymond Carver a few years ago was something a grown-up, ex-genre novelist might have written). I also like some of the later movie adaptations, such as Dolores Claiborne, the novel for which is number 17 on Vulture's "Ranking All 64 Stephen King Novels." Here's where the books I still have on the shelf fell in the Vulture list:

IT (number 3)

The Shining (number 4)

Danse Macabre (number 10)

That's it for my collection -- not too shabby, Vulturewise.

Vulture gives a 63 out of 64 ranking for The Tommyknockers. I knew King had problems with alcohol, early on, but can't picture him as an '80s cokehead -- guess it happened. As Vulture puts it: "This tale of a Maine writer (you'll be seeing a lot of these) who accidentally comes across a piece of alien metal in her backyard and finds herself compelled to dig up the flying saucer that it's attached to was written at the height of King's addiction troubles. Writing with 'his heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding' (as he would later describe it), King filled his book with addicts and thinly veiled metaphors for what he was going through. Full of anger at himself and the eighties, The Tommyknockers is a white-hot mess. Anyone who remembers the deadly levitating Coke machine would agree."