Something from the Nightside

A coworker of mine, who happens to share very similar interests in books and entertainment, recommended that I read Simon R. Green's Nightside series. He even loaned me the first book: Something from the Nightside. Before I was halfway through that book, I had bought the first four books from Amazon.com.

The book is told in the first person by John Taylor, a private investigator in London. Taylor has an interesting background: he was born and raised in "the Nightside". As described on the back cover, the Nightside is a "square mile of Hell in the middle of the city, where it's always three AM. Where you can walk beside myths and drink with monsters. Where nothing is what it seems and everything is possible. A region that, although supposedly in the middle of London, actually appears to be larger than London itself." The description is not metaphorical. The Nightside, and other realms like it, are meeting points for people and beings of all time periods, worlds, and realities. It's visited by gods, demons, and everything in between. A person visiting the Nightside may find genuine miracles, or he may meet a grisly fate. Taylor left the Nightside several years ago and swore never to return. But now he has bills to pay and a wealthy woman in distress wants to hire him to find her runaway daughter.

Once in the Nightside, we find out several things about John Taylor. First, Taylor was effectively orphaned after his mother left and his father drank himself to death. Second, his father drank himself to death after finding out that his wife (Taylor's mother) wasn't actually human. Third, like many born in the Nightside, Taylor has a supernatural gift; he is able to find almost anything. Fourth, despite his kindness and loyalty, most Nightside residents are absolutely terrified of John Taylor. This last aspect remains a mystery throughout the book. I can only assume the author further elaborates the reasons for this in the sequels (the 10th book in the series was released just this year).

The book moves quickly and introduces a number of interesting secondary characters. By far, my favorite secondary character is Razor Eddie. Eddie was a high-priced assassin for hire until he had a strange experience. As described in the book:

"Something happened to him on the Street of the Gods, something he still won't talk about, and when he came back it was as something both more and less than human. Now he sleeps in doorways, lives on handouts and eats leftovers, and wanders where he will, living a life of violent penance for his earlier sins. His chosen victims tend to be the bad guys no-one else can touch. The ones who think they're protected from the consequences of their actions by money or power. They tend to end up being found dead in mysterious, upsetting ways. And that's Razor Eddie; an extremely disturbing agent for the good. The good didn't get a say in the matter."

John Taylor himself is an appealing protagonist: mysterious (despite the fact that he's the narrator), resourceful, and loyal to the point of ignoring his instincts of self preservation. The Nightside itself even takes on a character of its own, albeit a schizophrenic one. Now that I think about it, the nominal plot of the book (i.e., the search for the runaway) seems more like a reason to introduce the Nightside and its odd roster of characters. However, Green's Nightside is such a fascinating place that I look forward to reading the sequels.

Crazy Drivers

Because of a doctor's appointment later in the day, this past Thursday morning saw me driving to work rather than taking the bus. The road, which is a two lane highway through the Idaho High Desert, was slightly icy that morning while snow affected visibility. Of course, this slowed traffic down from the usual 65 mph to about 50 mph. Well, the more rational people slowed down to about 50 mph. Every few minutes some idiot who thought everyone else was going too slow would pull into the oncoming lane and zip by at almost 70 mph, leapfrogging in and out of spaces between cars. Of course this would happen after the driver had gotten tired of tailgating some slower driver for several minutes. Since us slower drivers were stretched out in lines about 1/2 of a mile long, these maniacs could travel for a couple miles before they could find a space to merge into. I hope that most of us recognize that this behavior isn't appropriate in the best of driving conditions, let alone on a dark, icy, snowy morning.

In the daylight you can often see the little white crosses that appear by the side of that highway, marking the place where a traffic accident had killed someone. Unfortunately, the ones who would most benefit from the lesson those crosses are intended to teach are too busy trying to pass someone who is driving at something approaching a safe speed. Most of these drivers are trying to get to work; why getting there a few minutes earlier is worth risking their lives and the lives of others is a mystery to me.

Another Great Old Movie

The wonders of Netflix continue. This time I saw a creepy little movie from 1962 called Carnival of Souls. The movie starts out with a young college student named Mary and her friends drag racing another car. When the two cars find themselves on a too-narrow bridge, the unfortunate young women end up going over the side. The authorities quickly start their search, but the river's flooding and muddy waters prevent them from finding the car. However, after about three hours Mary is found crawling out of the river, unable to remember how she escaped the car.

Wanting to leave the tragedy behind, Mary takes a job as an organist in a Salt Lake City church (oddly enough, given the setting, it's not an LDS church). While driving to Utah, she sees a cadaverous-looking man standing next to her window. This is especially creepy considering that she's driving along the highway, while he appears to be standing immediately next to the window. The man disappears only to reappear in the middle of the highway later on in the drive. Mary swerves to miss him, just to find that he's disappeared again.

Mary arrives in Salt Lake City and begins her organist job. Not only does she keep having odd and disturbing visions of the man, but she also finds herself inexplicably drawn to an abandoned carnival (the real-life Saltair Palace, which had been in disuse for several years by this point). During one particularly memorable scene, Mary drifts off into a spell while practicing the organ. She has a vision of the man and multiple couples (none of which appear to be alive) dancing at the carnival. During this spell, the church music she had been playing drifts into a sinister carnival theme. It's clear that the carnival-and the man-are calling to her.

I won't give away the rest of the plot except to say that the movie's twist ending appears to have been inspired by "The Hitch-Hiker"; an episode of  The Twilight Zone from 1960. However, the titular Hitch-hiker didn't seem remotely threatening except for the fact that the woman making the drive can't seem to avoid him; no matter how far she drives, he's always a short distance down the road, trying to thumb a ride. The man in Carnival of Souls is most definitely frightening; his pale skin, darkened eyes, and black suit suggest nothing so much as a reanimated corpse.

Just like with the other classic films I've mentioned on this blog, most modern viewers will find the movie's pacing slow. For those who enjoy older movies, or the occasional episode of The Twilight Zone, Carnival of Souls is definitely one to see.

They Left Me No Choice But To Eavesdrop

This past week I went to Pittsburgh for work-related training. It took two separate flights to get from here to there and three to get back. During the first flight of the return trip, I was treated to the continuation of an extended conversation between two young women that had started in the terminal.

Now, these two were five rows behind me. In an airliner, with its relatively high ambient noise and sound-absorbing furnishings, you should not be able to hear every single word in a conversation held five rows behind you. I know that I didn't care to hear their conversation, nor did the people around me. Yet, these two young women thought their conversation was so important, and were so oblivious to those around them, that they blissfully continued talking at such a high volume that people several rows away could hear every detail. The fact that it was a 6:00 AM flight and that most of us had been awake for at least two hours beforehand made it even more annoying.

I have to wonder; have people always been this self-centered and self-important, or is this behavior found mostly in younger generations? I could understand it if these were children and they didn't realize that an otherwise silent airplane at six in the morning is not the place to hold a loud conversation, but these two appeared to be in their twenties. Since I'm not of the disposition to shush a stranger, I didn't say anything and simply seethed over it. No one else said anything either, so I have to wonder if we were all suffering in silence or if I was the only one bothered by it. That may be the worst part of the whole incident; for all I know, no one else took notice of it and I'm just crazy.

Great Quotes: William F. Buckley, Jr.

I recently finished William F. Buckley, Jr.'s Up From Liberalism published in 1959. For those who may never have heard of Buckley; he was one of the most influential writers of the modern conservative movement.

The interesting thing about the book is that the political issues and liberal tactics Buckley described in 1959 are essentially the same as those found in 2009. Given the current health care bills in Congress, I had to laugh when Buckley discussed the issue of universal (i.e., socialized) health care in a 50 year-old book. Much of the book's focus was on how Americans didn't realize that financial freedom is a crucial component of liberty. Considering how many Americans seem ready to submit ever larger portions of their paychecks (and more often the paychecks of their fellow citizens) to support the Democrats' programs, it seems that 50 years later we still haven't gotten the message.

The saddest part is that, far from being an alarmist, Buckley underestimated how bad things would be in the future. His argument against programs such as Social Security are from a philosophical point of view, believing then that Social Security and other social programs would never become extensive enough to actually threaten the American economy. With social programs having run amok, and with the retirement of the Baby Boomers, we are far from the more ideal position in which Buckley's America found itself (a vigorous economy with a larger ratio of wage-earners to social program beneficiaries).

My favorite quote comes from the last page of the book:

"I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth."

Netflix: "Nosferatu" and "It! The Terror from Beyond Space"

Recently my wife signed us up for Netflix. Until then, we bought nearly all our movies rather than renting them. Well, that meant that a lot of movies that we weren't sure we wanted to buy got passed over. There were also a variety of TV shows we wanted to see from the beginning, but didn't want to invest in whole seasons if we didn't like them. Now that we've signed up for Netflix, my wife gets to watch those chick flicks that we aren't willing to buy. As for me, I get to take advantage of Netflix's enormous selection of movies to satisfy my eclectic taste in movies.

The first Netflix movie I watched was through their streaming service. It was the silent film Nosferatu (1922); a German film adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, except that the characters' names from the novel were changed to avoid copyright issues. The movie is relatively faithful to the first half of Stoker's book (except for the names, of course) while completely revising the end of the story. As much as I liked Tod Browning's more famous Dracula (1931) staring Bela Lugosi, Nosferatu was superior thanks to the use of actual castles and medieval villages rather than plywood sets, director Friedrich Murnau's genuinely creepy style, and Max Schreck's depiction of Count Orlok. Lugosi's slightly pale eastern European count isn't nearly as menacing as Schreck's vampire, whose pointed ears, inch-long claws, and mouth full of sharp teeth strongly indicate his inhuman status. Murnau's use of shadows to depict Orlok prior to his attacks (see the picture above) helps to enhance the effect. Caveat emptor: this is a silent film that runs about 80 minutes. In other words, unless you have an interest in old science fiction and horror movies, I would suggest you skip this film.

Last night I watched my first Netflix DVD: It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). In this film, a dangerous alien life form comes aboard a spaceship that landed to investigate another crashed ship. As the ship heads back to earth, the alien starts killing off the crew one by one. This movie is believed to be an uncredited inspiration for 1979's Alien. Although Alien is not a unabashed ripoff of It!, there are several interesting parallels. Both have scenes in which a crew member unexpectedly encounters the alien in an air shaft, both aliens will leave human victims alive for biological purposes (an unusual method of feeding in It! and egg-laying in Alien), both are sensitive to fire, and both are defeated in a similar manner.
It! is one of the better '50s sci-fi movies. It's not a classic like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) or Forbidden Planet (1956) (whose monster also has a creative way of killing its victims), and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) still features my favorite (non-Godzilla) monster, but the movie is genuinely entertaining. And the fact that the story foreshadows the plots of so many modern sci-fi/horror movies is of historical interest.

Monsters vs. Aliens

A few weeks ago we bought Monsters vs. Aliens on DVD. We hadn't seen it yet, but the trailers looked hilarious. Fortunately, the movie was not only as funny as the trailers made it out to be, but it was even more clever than I could have hoped.

What really made the movie for me was the number of homages to various sci-fi movies and cliches that they fit into it. And these homages weren't just limited to better known movies like Independence Day (which was mostly spoofed by perfectly recreating the force-field effect from that movie) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the famous five-note tune from that movie shows up). The movie also extensively spoofs classic sci-fi films that only nerds such as myself recognize. For example, in one scene a character grows to gigantic proportions and is subdued by the military, which injects her with a giant syringe of anesthesia. Before she passes out, she pulls out the syringe and throws it to the ground where it lands immediately at the feet of one of the soldiers. This is an homage to the Amazing Collosal Man [1957], in which the titular collosal man is also hit with a giant syringe. He also pulls it out and throws it to the ground, except the syringe impales a soldier rather than landing at his feet.

The monsters themselves are homages to classic '50s and '60s monsters: Bob (obviously "the Blob" [1958]), Dr. Cockroach ("The Fly" [1958]), The Missing Link (a more talkative version of "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" [1954]), Insectosaurus ("Mothra" [1961]), and Ginormica ("the Amazing Collosal Man" [1957]/"the 50 Foot Woman" [1958]). In at least one case, if you know the gimmick of the monster that's being spoofed (that is "Insectosaurs" as a "Mothra" analog) you can actually guess the nature of a certain surprise twist at the end of the movie. I thought the cleverest gag was the spoof of the old injured-ankle cliche, but with the male/female role reversed. I'm going to guess that about 5% or less of the movie's viewers got the joke.

Rarely am I pleasantly surprised by a movie; usually the best I can hope for is that my expectations are met. However, I enjoyed Monsters vs. Aliens much more than I expected I would. The best part is that the writers put in plenty of good stuff to entertain those who wouldn't recognize the movie references that I mentioned above. My kids, who aren't exactly classic sci-fi connoisseurs, loved the movie and have already watched it several times.