Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Since it's now Halloween and the western sky has gone amber here in middle America, the window is rapidly closing for horror-themed posts. I'd better get with it. Soon trick-or-treaters will be making their endless demands and I'll be too busy shoveling candy at them to do much else. Let us turn now from scary movies to scary books. I wonder: Is it easier to terrify someone with sound and light, or with the printed word? I hold with those who favor print -- properly done, a book can tap into the darkest reaches of individual imagination in a way no movie can. With the imagination thoroughly engaged, the reader becomes a participant in the tale, rather than an observer. Unfortunately, books are just as prone to cliche as movies are, and it takes a true master to banish disbelief and conjure terror with no more tools than the 26 letters of the alphabet and a few punctuation marks. It's an art, not a craft, and those who can do it are rightly revered. When I consider the ...

When's the last time you saw a truly frightening movie? For that matter, how many truly frightening movies can you name in, say, five minutes? Besides The Exorcist , I mean. I can think of maybe four offhand, seven or eight if I have another hour to think about it. So I'm always a bit skeptical during the Halloween season, when movie pundits start picking the scariest movies of all time, such as this top 25 list from Time's Richard Corliss. Demonstrating that 25 films may be about 15 too many, the list includes such fright-fests as Bambi ; the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead ; and the 50-second Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat , which, when shown in 1896, had certain members of the audience thinking the train on the screen might run them over. Now, these may have been all groundbreaking films in their own way, but scary they were not. It's facile to say that they don't make scary movies any more, but it's almost true. Since the mid-1960s, horror has not been tha...

Here at the Tilda Swinton Fan Club, we would be happy to see her in a Burger King commercial. But when she co-stars in a solid thriller like Michael Clayton -- well, let's just say we're orgasmic. No, scratch that. Delighted, that's the word. Well, quite pleased. Swinton's turn as the amoral, paranoid corporate lawyer -- who defeats her Arrid Extra Dry in the first 10 minutes of the film -- is sheer genius. She's definitely on the short list for best supporting actress; you read it here first. Swinton has this way of making her eyes opaque, like a shark, while the rest of her exudes acute desperation -- the kind you get when you're in over your head and need to make sure no living person ever finds out the things you'll do to stay afloat. George Clooney, in the title role, isn't bad either. He plays a "fixer," a corporate lawyer who no longer practices law, but cleans up the sort of messes that can crop up for any major U.S. agrochemical cor...

I always hate it when readers dream up qualities for fictional characters that are never alluded to in the books in which they appear. That is precisely why fan fiction is so unfailingly awful. But I really hate it when authors indulge in the same juvenile exercise. After all, if it were a trait germane to the character, why wasn't it in the book? And so we come to J.K. Rowling's startling announcement the other day that wise old Dumbledore, the bearded headmaster of Hogwart's, is gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Being gay, I mean. But isn't saying so a little like Mark Twain deciding in his dotage that Huck Finn and Jim were lovers? Or Charles Dickens revealing years later that Scrooge was suffering from Alzheimer's? Characters are precisely the sum of the words on the printed page. No one, not even the author, should come back later and revise them in an offhand remark. At the very least, it is a violation of the basic tenet of fiction writing...

I have temporarily gone off reading to mess around with a new camera I bought, a Canon G9. It comes with a time-lapse feature, enabling it to take a frame automatically every second, or every two seconds. As you can see, this feature will revolutionize the world as we know it; it enabled me to mow my front lawn in 1/60th the normal time. All I can say is, thank God for YouTube. Wunderbar! No? Well, soon I'll get back to the big stack o' books, which includes Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (did she really need the world "clean" in that sentence?) and Ken Follett's World Without End , a sort-of sequel to his excellent Pillars of the Earth , published way back in 1990. Also, The Coroner's Lunch , by Colin Cotterill, which has gotten pretty decent reviews.

Eventually, I will move on from this fascination with things French. But for now, I can't seem to stop. At the moment, I'm reading the excellent novel Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. This is a remarkable book for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is a historical novel written while the history was still in progress: the Nazi occupation of France starting in 1940. As the New York Times notes, it is likely the first work of fiction to be written about World War II. It is also among the best. Better reviewers than I have praised this book, and I won't attempt to pile on more superlatives. But the fact that Némirovsky wrote this without the luxury of historical hindsight makes it even more remarkable. The knowledge that she died at Auschwitz not long after makes it poignant beyond words. Maybe it's a trivial note, but having just been to Paris I was struck by Némirovsky's humane, incisive observations of how things unfold when civilizati...

While waiting for a new shipment of books to arrive, and while struggling with the dread of paying the fine that awaits at my local library, I had a look at the New York Times list of " The 10 Best Books of 2006 ." Yes, I'm aware that 2006 has been over for about 10 months now. Sue me. It's not like I'm getting a lot of blog ideas via e-mail. So in a sense, it's your fault. Also, I've got a day job too. At least I think I do; I'll have to phone them. Anyway, without clicking on the link, can you name even one of the best books of 2006, as decreed by the Times? Two? Five? How about who won the 2006 Super Bowl? I didn't think so. (It was the Pittsburgh Steelers.) Fame is so fleeting. On the books question, I named one, and it's no coincidence that it's the only book on the list that I've read: Mayflower , by Nathaniel Philbrick. I mean, it's no Learning to Sing , Clay Aiken's autobiography, but it ain't bad. It ain't fict...

Shoe leather: That's the way you solve cases. And so, 10 years later, 11 jurors spent the afternoon milling around in a Paris traffic tunnel where the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, intersected abruptly with a nondescript concrete pillar. No word on what they found, beyond some psychic vibe about who really iced the People's Princess. Maybe cigarette butts of a brand favored by Prince Phillip. Or the Queen's cell phone number scrawled inside a soggy Buckingham Palace matchbook. Diana, as you know, was murdered at the behest of the in-laws because of ... well, this where it gets really mysterious. Because this was a murder without credible motive, means or opportunity. A conspiracy that seemingly makes no sense. It's crazy, some would say. Yeah, I say: crazy like a fox. Crazy like Mr. Ed. It was a gutsy move, staging the hit in full view of the paparazzi. I'm still not sure how they pulled it off, making it look precisely like a Diana's drunken driver hit the ...

I don't know what the big deal is about the Louvre. They only have three things worth looking at. I'm kidding, of course. But to the thousands saluting the Winged Victory, Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo with their cell-phone cameras, the rest of the world's best-known museum might as well be an oversized Furniture Mart. To hell with Botticelli or Renoir; they're there to photograph the Big Three and then get their asses on over to the Eiffel Tower to stand at the end of a 90-minute line. As a gawking tourist myself, I'm familiar with the compulsion to see and record every landmark in the guidebook. But at the Louvre, the crowds milling around these particular pieces radiate the impatience and hunger of paparazzi -- how many blurry pictures will constitute proof of the visit? How many bizarre poses? Would that idiot in the cargo shorts please move a little to the left? These great works became famous because they were masterpieces; today they are just three more celebr...

Our trip to France was lovely, marred only by the near-lethal cold I managed to contract on the transatlantic flight back home. Better then than at the start of the trip, right? Today my throat feels as though I've been gargling battery acid, but the golden memories help mitigate the pain. As the saying goes, we'll always have Paris. We did all the things tourists usually do when they visit France, so I won't expound on them. Instead, here are a few impressions from a first-time visitor who doesn't speak the language. No doubt they'll seem hopelessly naive to veteran Francophiles, but it's my blog. On our first night in France, we were treated to dinner by representatives of the mayor's office of the city of Orleans. As it happened, it was the final night of the city's three-year-old river festival, culminating with a fireworks show. We stood with a crowd of about 80,000 and watched the pyrotechnics light up the night and the Loire River. It was a splend...