Revival by Stephen King: A Terrible Sermon

I finished Revival last weekend and have thought about it since then, playing it over in my mind, trying to figure out where it went wrong. The novel is narrated by Jamie Morton (an unsympathetic heroin addict and guitar player in every cover band in the state of Maine from the 1970s until now), who was telling the story of his former pastor's fall from grace. Although the story is ostensibly about the pastor, Charlie Jacobs, we see very little of him, as the story takes place over a five-decade period in which Morton sees him for only the briefest of intervals. The story is really about Morton's self-indulgence, and, let's just say it, how he is a complete loser, lacking in anything resembling a redeeming quality. All because of Jacobs and the "Terrible Sermon."

There are spoilers ahead. That is the only warning I am giving, so if I haven't yet convinced you the novel isn't worth reading, you may want to stop.

Jacobs and Morton form a tight bond as soon as they meet. Jacobs is a little quirky, having a strange obsession with electricity, but nothing too bad. That is until he loses his wife and son in a horrible traffic accident. That's when he turns away from religion and delivers what becomes known in town as the "Terrible Sermon."

This plot point is where the book really begins to unravel for me. Jacobs, a person of great faith, turns away from God due to a horrible circumstance in his life. The cliche alarm is going off. This just didn't sit right with me. Yes, the loss of his child and wife is tragic, but this motivation is not a compelling one. It's cliche, and, frankly, it is an egregious simplification of how real people go about belief and non-belief and how they may at points in their lives drift from one view to another. But more than that, the way Jacobs goes about declaring his break with faith is, to me, not well done at all.

The "Terrible Sermon" isn't really that terrible. Jacobs likens religion to an insurance scheme, where you pay your premiums every month, but when you need to use it, you discover the insurance company doesn't even exist. Sure, maybe something like that would lead to a reprimand, a firing, or perhaps even get you run out of town with pitch forks and torches, but this "Terrible Sermon" destroys the religion of the community, as they never replaced Jacobs, and service attendance drops to literally nothing in the next few decades, leaving behind nothing but a boarded-up church. I don't think I need to say the worst thing about the "Terrible Sermon" is how the reader has to suspend disbelief quite a bit to accept that it was as "terrible" as King wants us to believe.

Jacobs comes off as a simpleton, yet we find out, based on what he is able to achieve with his electricity experiments later, he is far from a simpleton. It is clear he was never able to get over the loss of his family, which motivates his experiments with electricity. This motivation, the electricity, what exactly he is trying to do, all of it would have made for a far more compelling case for losing his faith. And, a "Terrible Sermon" that reveals what exactly he is doing and the "truths" he is hoping to uncover would have been a far more terrible "Terrible Sermon."

Heck, another spoiler warning for you. Here is the ending and what this whole shin-dig is about, along with an account of what I would've done differently.

Charlie Jacobs is trying to find out what's on the "other side." He devises an experiment with electricity, which he believes will bring a recently deceased person back to life long enough to describe the afterlife. He succeeds (sort of), but also gets a glimpse, as does Jamie, of this afterlife, which is far worse than the heaven he was envisioning. The afterlife resembles a dark, destroyed city inhabited by large ant creatures that enslave humanity for eternity. Imagine if this was his impetus for leaving his faith, such as "Do you guys really know what we are worshiping?! Ant creatures that just wait for us to die and enslave our souls!" Now, that's what I would call a "Terrible Sermon"!

Harvester: Ascension, Revision and Backstory

This June will see the official relaunch of Harvester: Ascension, a novel I have rewritten over the past six months.

The original version of this story was written between October of 2009 and August of 2010, with most of the writing completed in July of 2010. When it found its home with a publisher, I couldn't be happier, but much of the original message and intent were lost through the editing process, as the original editor on this piece had an entirely different vision than I of what it should be. This left me ultimately unhappy with that edition. It didn't at all resemble what I had wanted, so when the contract expired, I decided to rewrite it from scratch, and republish it under my own brand—Darkness Press.

Ultimately, Harvester: Ascension is a battle between a jealous and petty "god" and a loving one. Taking elements from our cultural mythology, including stories from both the Old and New Testaments, I portrayed one being, the villain, as more akin to the God of the Old Testament—with destruction of places and people, concerned more about being worshiped than forgiveness and love; while the protagonist is the God of the New Testament, the God of love who sacrifices Himself for His people--of course, this "god" in the novel is female. Before I get hammered too heavily on this point, I should point out that I have taken quite a few liberties in order to tell my story, so this portrayal is not intended to be 100% true to the source material, but more of an approximation.

The backstory in Harvester: Ascension is often referenced but never fully explored. This is because it is a story that will be told in the sequel, which I am now calling Harvester 2: The Creation. The Father, which is to represent the Highest Power, is the creator of the universe, but soon afterwards assigns his children--the two named in Harvester: Ascension are Torqa and Moria, but there are more than these two--to be guardians over the planets that are destined to bear life. One of the Father's commandments is to never allow themselves to be worshiped. Moria is the guardian of Earth, a goddess who sometimes refers to herself as Gaia, while Torqa is the guardian of a distant world known as Oraplax.

The inhabitants of Oraplax, a species called the Q'Thiel, were a war-torn, yet proud people, who eventually came together to solve their energy crises by building what they called The Harvester, which was a huge--about the size of the moon--orbiting station that collected energy directly from their sun, which they called Alsar. This Harvester was able to collect the radiation like a super solar panel, as well as being able to collect actual material from the star. What the Q'Thiel didn't intend was to infuse the mind of the machine with Torqa, their guardian, whose existence had only been known as a part of long-ago myth.

Over the next few centuries, many of the Q'Thiel forgot they themselves had built the large orbiting station and began worshiping it as a god. Torqa loved this worship, despite the Father's orders not to allow this to happen, and demanded more, eventually forcing the Q'Thiel into submission. Meanwhile, the scientists that worked aboard the Harvester knew exactly what it was, yet were surprised that it had somehow developed sentience, not realizing that the mind was infused with their planet's guardian. Fearing the mind was unstable, and the danger that posed, the scientists encoded the genetic information of all Oraplaxian species and stored them on the Harvester, creating a kind of Noah's Ark, which, later, Torqa aimed to take full advantage of to reintroduce the Q'Thiel race.

Eventually, Torqa grew tired and jealous of the Q'Thiel and used the Harvester's powers to destroy the entire solar system, which was an event it soon came to regret. When it found Earth untold eons later, it claimed Earth for it's own, choosing to eradicate all life on the planet and replace it with that from Oraplax.

This dichotomy of gods--what seems to be two different gods within the Judeo-Christian tradition--is something that has always interested me. I'm satisfied with this new version of the novel, and I am looking forward to completing the sequel.

End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by James Swanson

Last week I spoke a bit about new angles, featuring two books I had recently read that attempted to make something new out of something old. This week, I will be hitting on the same idea, but, unlike last week, this week's book, End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by James Swanson, doesn't quite succeed.


This week marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most horrific events in American history, the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I was born in 1982, 19 years after the assassination, so growing up, this was the singular event that "grown-ups" would talk about. What they were doing when they found out. My father, for instance, was in school--Kindergarten or first grade--and his teacher came in the room crying and informed the class what had just happened. Others have similar stories.

As we all know, conspiracy theories abound when it comes to the JFK assassination, although all the evidence points to the fact it happened in only one way--that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy and he acted alone. You can forgive the people in the days and weeks afterward for suspecting a conspiracy, because all the facts weren't commonly known, and the technology was relatively limited. The Warren Commission, whose findings have been sustained through many subsequent investigations, and whose central findings--Oswald did it and he acted alone--have been supported by all available evidence and all reexaminations of evidence using modern technology. So, I think it is safe to say unequivocally, Oswald did it and he acted alone in the same or simile scenario as described in the Warren Commission report. They got it right.

James Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-day Chase for John Wilkes Booth, has authored a book that is intended to tell the story of the events as they really happened, as almost a response to the conspiracy theorists. There is a problem with this approach. A few years back, in 2007, Vincent Bugliosi, who served as the prosecuting attorney in the televised mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (a trial which was conducted in 1986 as if it were a real trial with the real witnesses, real evidence, real law enforcement, real judges, a real jury, etc. etc. etc. and Oswald was found guilty...and the jury was asked to also consider the question of whether or not Oswald acted alone. They determined that he had) published a book called Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, which really is the last word on the official story. It is divided into two parts--Part 1 is titled "What Happened" while Part 2 is titled "What Didn't Happen." You can imagine part one deals with the facts, while part 2 rips apart all the conspiracy theories.

The first chapter of Part 1, titled "4 Days in November" creates a problem for James Swanson's attempt. This depiction is so detailed and so readable, as well as heavily sourced, there doesn't need to be another accounting of the events in themselves...because, overall, this is a fairly simple, open and shut case.

Vincent Bugliosi, in several interviews promoting his magnum opus, said of the JFK assassination: "...at its core, this is a very simple case, and remains a simple case to this very day. Within hours of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, virtually all of Dallas law enforcement knew that Oswald had killed Kennedy, and when they found out what an incredible kook he was, that he had acted alone." He goes on to say that it is the conspiracy literature that has made this a complex case, but not one of the conspiracy allegations are founded upon any evidence. This creates a problem for writers like James Swanson who want to tell the real story but, because this was a simple, quickly solved case often erroneously treated as a mystery, it is difficult to come up with a new way of telling it.

In my capstone history course at the University of Michigan, the first thing my advisor asked me about was how my paper, my research, my writing could uncover something new, or be a needed addition to the literature on the topic. This is a concept that is required of all writers of history.

Swanson makes what seems to me a couple of half-hearted attempts at a new angle, but ultimately falls back to the essentially simple and familiar story of a crazy communist with a rifle and delusions of grandeur taking aim at the president's motorcade as it passed his place of employment.

The first chapter shows Oswald attempting to take the life of right-wing extremist, retired general Edwin Walker. Swanson told this story as if it were a chapter in a novel. A novel featuring Oswald as the main character. To me, if he had kept with this approach, it would have been fresh, something a bit different, something to make it different enough from Bugliosi's work as to not be crushed by it. Unfortunately, he leaves this approach behind and makes it into a standard history of the events, that was well told, but not nearly as well done as Bugliosi.

The final chapter we see the events post-funeral from Jackie's perspective. This made me think that I would have liked to see more of that. Maybe the whole history of the event from Jackie's perspective, not just bits and pieces. Make this a kind of novelization, but from the perspective of Jackie Kennedy. That would have been fresh as well.

No, we see just these unique flourishes that read like they were put in there just to be able to say the book is different enough to warrant publication. Instead of making it different, however, it makes obvious the glaring problem with the book--it is just a rehash of what has come before and what has been done better.

As stated above, End of Days is ultimately a "response" book. Meaning it was written in response to the multitude of conspiracy theories out there. Sometimes I feel like historians and others who evaluate facts objectively feel compelled to write these books to say, "No, this is the way it happened" as a counter to the conspiracy-related garbage that's out there. At this point, I would advise that the conspiracy community should be ignored. Responding to them, even acknowledging the conspiracy theories, gives them a credibility they do not deserve.

So, is this a must-read? I would say it is a good, informative read, but I would instead recommend Vincent Bugliosi's work as the must-read account on JFK's assassination..

Looking for New Angles; Featuring Revolutionary Summer and Bloody Crimes

This week, I will be discussing the idea of using two or more unrelated topics/ideas to tell familiar stories in new ways or to develop original stories. I studied both American History and American Literature at the University of Michigan, two fields I find complimentary of each other. The true stories we tell—the histories—need to, in my opinion, follow the same rules as a novel. You need character, conflict, story, and a new, original angle.

Two books I will discuss briefly and endorse, both of which are history and present their otherwise familiar stories in new way are Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence by Joseph J. Ellis, and Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis by James L. Swanson.

While Revolutionary Summer is Joseph Ellis's latest release, published this past June, Bloody Crimes has been out for a couple of years, published in 2011, but I wanted to include it in a discussion with Revolutionary Summer because they do something similar, which is pertinent to this discussion, and, ironically, that is what makes them both unique.

Revolutionary Summer's claim to relevance is that it takes what is happening on the battlefield and what is happening in congress during the summer of 1776 and combines them into one story, where what is happening on the battlefield is directly influenced by what is happening in congress and vice versa. Joseph Ellis contends--and I have no reason to doubt this based on my own review of the literature--that the war and the politics, what happened on the battlefield and what happened in congress, are often related as completely separate events, seemingly having nothing to do with each other. Ellis argues this approach misses the mark.

One specific example is the devastating Battle of New York, in which the Continental Army was almost completely wiped out. It was only because of William Howe's (the commander in chief of the British forces) desire to receive an American surrender rather than destroying the American army completed was George Washington able to find an opportunity to escape. This devastating battle, and Howe's motivations, led to Howe attempting to negotiate (whether he had the authority to or not is debatable) a peace settlement with no further bloodshed (on the battlefield anyway), with honor intact. These "negotiations" were discussed in congress and a delegation was sent to more or less tell Howe to go to hell (of course, that is an oversimplification of what happened, but for our purposes here, it's close enough).

In other words, events on the battlefield affected events in congress. These are two parts of the same story that only makes sense told as one.

Likewise, with Bloody Crimes, which starts with the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital, with Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, on the run. This is April 1, 1865, near the end of the Civil War. Then on April 15, with the death of Abraham Lincoln, we see the autopsy, funeral arrangements, the death pageant, which involved Lincoln's decomposing body traveling the route he took in 1861, only in reverse, on his journey from Springfield to Washington, DC. He would be heading home to where he would be entombed in Springfield. Also on this journey was his son Willie, who had died in 1862. They would be entombed together.

Lincoln's death, coinciding with the fall of the confederacy, put Davis and the South in a bad position. The South specifically because the new president Andrew Johnson would be far less lenient, compassionate to the traitors than Lincoln promised to be. And, more pertinent to our story here, although Jefferson Davis had nothing to do with Lincoln's death, no one knew that for sure at the time, and in fact were convinced he ordered the assassination, which put a price on his head. Lincoln had implied that he didn't care if Jefferson Davis was ever caught as he fled the confederate capital...but after Lincoln's murder, and the possibility that Davis was involved, there was a strong desire not only to catch him, but to see him hang.

These two books got me thinking about my own approach to storytelling. Authors are often asked where they get their ideas. For me, a simple answer would be "a brief moment of inspiration combined with a lot of thought." A more complex answer would explain what I mean by "a brief moment of inspiration." My novels--from Harvester: Ascension to An Inner Darkness, 9111 Sharp Road, Children of Time, and my current work-in-progress All I Want in Life... were conceived in a moment where, in a moment of clarity, I saw the before unseen connection between two or more unrelated ideas.

Harvester: Ascension was born out of two ideas.... The rise of the Tea Party as a result of the American people's rejection of the conservative agenda in the 2008 election. The Tea Party, for those unfamiliar, is a political off-shoot of the most conservative wing of the Republican Party that believes all economic regulation is bad, but all in-the-bedroom regulation is good. In other words, anarchy in the streets, but heavy regulations in your pants.

With a modern-day anarchist group trying to hammer away at our nation's guarantees, we see grid-lock that has never been seen before. Although I developed the story for Harvester: Ascension in 2009, I think recent events are relevant because they played out just as was predicted. We recently saw a government shutdown, caused, championed, and hosted by one of these congressional Tea Party members, a man by the name of Ted Cruz, who abused his power in congress to bring the government to its knees, attempting to destroy it from the inside if he didn't get his way.

Harvester: Ascension largely deals with a possibility of a situation like this but combined with a more traditional alien invasion story. In a way, Independence Day meets the Tea Party. In Harvester: Ascension we see Speaker of the House Cameron McDonald all but take over the U.S. government during a crisis.

An Inner Darkness and its sequel A Light in the Dark dealt with a combined idea of tradition vs independent thought and good vs evil, in which neither were clearly defined. The tradition was, paradoxically, independent thought, but the recent life had become more conservative, while the villain is all but rejected by his followers because they don't believe him to be as truly evil as he should be or as they are.

I suppose through all of this, through the discussion of a couple of historical narratives, a discussion of my own novels, and other thoughts, I want to say that it really is hard to find a truly novel idea on its own. American independence has been chronicled countless times, as well as Lincoln's death and Jefferson Davis's life. The novelty comes in the execution and the way you think about it and what ideas work together to create something new out of something old. So take from that what you will.

Until next week...when I will discussion James L. Swanson's latest release, among other things.

Doctor Sleep: Psychic Children and the Dark Tower series

Doctor Sleep, the unexpected (until Stephen King announced plans in 2009 to write it, anyway) sequel to The Shining. It became one of the most highly anticipated books of the year, especially after it's 8 or 9 month delay. So does it meet the expectations?

Now, I could state the obvious and mention how writing a sequel to a beloved masterpiece is walking a thin line between danger and insanity, but that has been noted by too many bloggers and reviewers to count. I could say there is no way he could top what he accomplished with his story about a haunted hotel, about the struggles involving alcoholism, about being a child who is much too bright and too inquisitive for his years, and a woman who desperately wants to save her family from a ticking time bomb of a husband. The Overlook Hotel so adequately served to give the characters the isolation they needed to face their demons and, in the case of Jack Torrance, be destroyed by them. The Shining was far from a perfect novel. Most notably, for me anyway, were the pacing issues, but it got the job done, and there has been nothing but nostalgia growing over this work in the past 30-some years since its publication, combined with many fans conflating scenes from the Stanley Kubrick movie with the book, scenes that became iconic in their own right. For example, "Heeeeerrrrreeeee'ssssssss Johnny!" is the movie, not the book. Jack swinging an ax around is the movie, not the book; in the book Jack has a roque mallet. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is the movie, not the book. The hedge maze is the movie, not the book; the book features moving topiary animals. Jack freezing to death and shown as being part of the hotel history is the movie, not the book. In the book the hotel burns to the ground, Jack along with it.

So, Stephen King wrote a sequel to a book that has grown in our collective consciousness into something that it never was, so the curious thing is how could its sequel possibly live up to expectations?

I've been a Stephen King fan almost since I could read. The first of his novels I read was Pet Sematary, followed by It, then Cujo. But it wasn't until I hit upon the Dark Tower series did I fully understand what his creative work was all about. This was in the early 1990s. The only Dark Tower proper novels (I refer to Dark Towers 1-7 as Dark Tower proper because most of King's books are part of the Dark Tower series in some fashion) out were the first three. But I could see the connections between the stories developing.

But when The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass was released in 1997, it became very clear that all of King's novels were one long work, with the Dark Tower tying them together into a single comprehensive story.

With that said, the answer concerning Doctor Sleep comes from being familiar with Stephen King's work as a whole.

The basic premise of Doctor Sleep is that a tightly knit group of vampires called the True Knot are scouring the country for children who have the psychic power Dick Hallorann called "the Shining." Instead of blood, these vampires feast on what they call "steam," which is the substance released from these special children when they die. Throughout the bulk of Doctor Sleep's story, the True Knot are perilously low on steam and, as a result, are susceptible to illness and death.

The leader of the True Knot, a horrid woman known as Rose the Hat, discovers the presence of a very powerful source of "steam," a girl named Abra Stone, who has a "shine" brighter than they have ever seen. If they can just find her and harvest her "steam," it will solve their problems for the foreseeable future.

So that's the basic concept. The Shining dealt with a similar idea. The ghosts of the Overlook Hotel wanted to harvest Danny Torrance's powers for their own benefit, but if that was the last time we saw this same plot in a Stephen King novel, I wouldn't comment further, but it isn't.

We have actually seen this exact story at least twice before—in Black House and The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla.

Black House (a Dark Tower tie-in novel and "sequel" to The Talisman) is about a demon kidnapping a boy with a gift remarkably similar to "the Shining" in order to use what must be his "steam" to feed the psychic abilities of "the breakers," psychics (with another version of "the Shining," I assume) enslaved to "break" the beams holding the Dark Tower in place. Wolves of the Calla tells the story of the same creatures from Black House stealing kids with psychic powers from a town called Calla Bryn Sturgis for the same reasons.

While Stephen King has confirmed many of his books are part of the Dark Tower series ('Salem's Lot, The Stand, The Talisman, It, The Eyes of the Dragon, Insomnia, Rose Madder, Desperation, The Regulators, Bag of Bones, Black House, From a Buick 8, Hearts in Atlantis (specifically the novella "Low Men in Yellow Coats," among several others), he never, to my knowledge, included The Shining in that list, although I always suspected it had to fit in there somehow, and Doctor Sleep is a way for King to do that, but based on my reading of it, Doctor Sleep never directly touches on the Dark Tower, although all the elements are there in an unrealized fashion, which is, in my opinion, either a failure of the imagination or a catering to those who are only familiar with The Shining and no other King works.

So how does Doctor Sleep work as a sequel? It works fine enough, but as I've been dancing around in this post, such a question misses the mark. The real question readers should be asking is how does it function in the scope of the rest of his work. Unfortunately, for me, it comes too close to the edge of Dark Tower territory without actually crossing over, leaving a huge narrative hole that could have elevated this story from simply an entertaining rehash to an important read.

Man of Steel Review (Spoilers aplenty)

I don't write many movie reviews, but I felt compelled to do one here because of the darker tone Man of Steel takes. I like dark. Dark is what I write, where I live. So what is my take on the newer, darker Superman?

Note: Because this is a movie, and comparing books (or in this case, comic books) to movies is apples and oranges, I will not reference the written source material, but only comment on other live action versions.

Image courtesy of: http://d1fgn7wex1bhjn.cloudfront.net/assets/tarantulaV2/article_images/1360670074_ManOfSteelWallpaper30.jpg

This is without a doubt the best movie version of Superman. But, full disclosure, I never cared for the previous attempts at bringing Superman to the big screen. Superman 1 and 2, although enjoyable movies in themselves, were aimed at children. Therefore, they didn't hold my interest for long. Superman 3 was a Richard Pryor comedy thinly disguised as a Superman movie, one in which Superman is delegated to a supporting role. Superman 4 was a propaganda piece about nuclear weapons, and Superman Returns (Superman 5) bizarrely sought to continue the Richard Donner franchise twenty years after its previous film was dead on arrival.

Superman Returns deserves a special kind of criticism here. That movie did one thing right. It pretended that Superman 3 and 4 never happened. Other than that, it was complete garbage. First, any Superman movie seeking to continue the Richard Donner franchise twenty years after the previous movie (actually twenty-five years after because it pretends 3 and 4 never happened), while acting as if only a few years went by, is a questionable move at best. So, Superman leaves Earth after the events of Superman 2 to find Krypton and comes back to Earth a few years later, only to find that technology has advanced twenty-five years--everyone has a cell phone and phone booths are few and far between--while the people have only aged five years or so. Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

In addition to that, it came out in 2006, at the height of Smallville's popularity. A logical Superman movie at the time would have been a Smallville-related film. Smallville was a good series that went overly long. What should have been five seasons went for ten, and 2006 was when it was in it's fifth season. A smart move would have been to complete the television series that season and put out a Smallville movie in which Tom Welling's Clark Kent finally donned the blue suit and cape. Barring that, they should have abandoned any Superman film ideas until Smallville was off television. Two different Superman TV/film franchises running simultaneously, having nothing to do with each other, is the epitome of stupid. At least the Smallville producers knew such a thing would be a bad idea. They had the sense to abandon plans to include Batman in their series after Batman Begins came out in 2005 for this reason.

Now, Man of Steel...

What did I think of it as a movie in itself? The darker tone is definitely appealing, and I loved the scenes taking place on Krypton. I thought some of it was a little rushed, however, like they were trying to a fit a lot into a short timeframe. In fact, every part of the movie that was about story and character had that feeling, while the action scenes (like the battle with the Kryptonians in Smallville and Superman vs Zod in Metropolis) were over the top and drawn out, taking up two or maybe three times the amount of screen time as they should have. Drawn-out action scenes are forgivable if it is clear the story needed padding, but this one didn't. This had the story, but the most compelling parts of that story were cut short to make room for the special effects extravaganza, which was disappointing. This left the relationship between Lois and Clark only half realized and the fatherly wisdom from Jonathan Kent to come off as hackneyed at best.

With that aside, I have one very serious criticism, and this is related to the all-out action sequences. The fight in Smallville where they demolish the entire town in the process, as well as the fight in Metropolis where Superman willingly fights within the city limits, causing billions of dollars in destruction and, more importantly, what has to be the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent bystanders really hurts the idea that Superman holds human life sacred. At the end, when Superman is preventing Zod from frying those four (I think it was four) people with his heat vision, resulting in Superman having to kill him (and crying in anguish for being forced to kill), I kept thinking "I don't believe this. You had to have killed so many innocent people during the fight, but this has you screaming?"

Juxtapose the battle scenes I referred to with the scene in which Jonathon Kent is killed. A tornado appears in front of them, causing untold destruction. Clark watches as it wipes his adoptive father off the face of the Earth. Whatever destruction this tornado caused, it was nothing compared to the destructive force of the Kryptonians, and Superman just let it happen. He let them determine the rules and theater of engagement. A logical plot point, and this would have been able to add to Superman's character while providing action, would have been to have Superman working to take over those rules and change the theater. Instead, we got a destructive slugfest that, in my opinion, does not fit with the character and what he supposedly believes in.

With that aside, I loved the new take on Clark Kent. Christopher Reeve played Clark Kent as a bumbling fool, making Clark the disguise while Superman was who he really was; Dean Cain (in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) played Clark Kent straight while Superman was the disguise; Tom Welling's "The Blur" (a precursor to Superman) was an icon while his Clark Kent was the real person. Man of Steel seems to take it somewhere in between. He is both Clark Kent and Superman, one and the same, just doing what he can to avoid alerting the world of the presence of an alien life form. By the end of the movie, when he decides to try to live a normal life but in a way where he can be in the thick of trouble without causing suspicion--i.e. as a news reporter--he finally adopts the glasses, but I never got the impression that he was trying to change who he was, just trying to be a normal person when he isn't flying about, almost no different from how differently someone behaves while they are on the job or not.

Another vast improvement in this film above all other incarnations is that Lois Lane knows from the start that Clark Kent is Superman. You don't have to suspend your disbelief that this Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter is so stupid that she can't see that her partner is also the Man of Steel. Good job on that one. It's about time that storyline was scrapped. When Clark lands the job at the Daily Planet at the end, I got the impression that Lois, in future films in this franchise, will do more to hide the fact that Clark and Superman are one and the same than those glasses do. This makes a little more sense.

An additional thing this movie did well was making the fact that Clark is an alien more realized. You see in detail the world he came from, the culture, and the problems his people suffered. Clark is the first natural birth in generations on Krypton. Everyone else in the previous 100 years was artificially bred to serve a specific purpose in life. Zod, for instance, was bred to ensure the safety of Kryptonians, no matter what the cost, a fact that led to his crazed coup attempt on Krypton and his determination to conquer Earth to build a new Krypton. Clark, being naturally bred, has a more complex character, more compassion, and is not single-minded like other Kryptonians, making him the ideal person to preserve all that was worth preserving from that civilization.

Overall, despite the problems, I loved this movie. I am glad to finally have a movie version of Superman that is worth watching. I would give this 3 out of 4 stars.

Children of Time

May 15, 2013 will see the release of my new novel Children of Time. Part exploration of meta-fiction, part dark and dirty fantasy horror, part heart warming (or heart wrenching) love story. Whatever you're looking for in a novel, you'll find it here.

 

 

 

 

 

Shawna McCullough is enjoying a quiet evening with a book when her six-year-old daughter, Alexis, awakens and talks of dreaming about her own death, describing it in vivid detail. They fall asleep next to each other, but when Shawna wakes up just after midnight, instead of her daughter, she discovers a strange man in her bed. She also now has two daughters, neither of them Alexis, and she’s nine months pregnant.

 

This is only the beginning of the strangeness as she discovers the man is just as confused as she is. He is Mark LaValley, a police officer who claims to have been killed in this same house years earlier while answering a domestic dispute between her and her husband, a dispute that led to his death. Except in this reality, he is no longer a police officer but a substitute teacher.

 

It isn’t long before Shawna and Mark realize they have been entrusted with guarding “the children of time,” as a demon known as Zuriz Falcon, who has been exiled to another realm, sends his henchman to kidnap the girls, including the one she’s pregnant with. Only with the powers of these three “children” and that of a collection of unique books can Falcon be released from the dark realm to unleash his evil upon the world.