aaand it continues!

[verbminx]

Not sure how much I can say about this here publicly. But let's go.

I've mentioned lately that Tom and I are both having runs of almost comically bad luck. Bad timing, disappointment, misfortune, you name it. But none of it has been earthshattering, nobody has died or anything: it doesn't negatively impact the status quo or quality of life for either of us, it's only been disappointments related to our ambitions. I got sick and couldn't work, he didn't get a job he was up for, we have to postpone moving, etc. So... we're just shaking our heads and waiting for it to pass.

The latest thing came today. Tom was set to do a graphic novel for Oni, which was to be written by Andy Greenwald, who wrote a book on the emo scene called Nothing Feels Good and who has a novel coming out called Miss Misery. The proposal and the first 15 pages of script for The Satellite Heart have been kicking around the house for a while, and T. was waiting for more script so that he could get to work. Alas, Andy kind of overcommitted himself or something and is not going to be able to get the script done any time in the near future, so the project is shelved, probably permanently.

On the upside, Oni has another project they want to offer Tom; we'll see what happens with that.

I spent most of today with a terrible headache. We will blame PMS. Tylenol and tea helped. My mom bought me a copy of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which came out last week. It's a first novel and Kostova got a huge advance, so it's already kind of infamous, but I read an excerpt I liked and a couple of great reviews. In tone the excerpt reminds me more of The Secret History and The Alienist than The DaVinci Code (crap! total crap!) - so I'm cautiously excited. They say this is "the book that will make Dracula scary again." Oh, and it's 40% off at Borders.

Comments

[aranel.livejournal.com]

If it's like The Secret History, I'm in! On the other hand, I'm very not into vampires. Let me know what you think of it when you get a chance.

I hope things start to go better for you.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

I'm about 100pp in so far, and it's great. It's a very academic mystery/thriller, and it's well-written, even sometimes very quotable. Here's some of what's going on so far, but I will not tell you exact mechanics, so it will still be interesting if you try to read it.

At this point in the book, a 16-yr-old girl who is the daughter of an American diplomat in Europe - they live in Amsterdam - has found a weird little book and a packet of letters half-hidden in her father's library. She asks him about it, and he reluctantly tells her the story, but only when they travel (the reasons for this become apparent, I think).

When he was in grad school studying history, a small antique book featuring only a woodcut of a ferocious dragon, labelled DRAKULYA, kept appearing in his study carrel. He eventually went to ask his thesis advisor about it. The advisor (Rossi) told him (Paul) that a similar thing had happened to him when he was younger, that he had decided to research it, and that it had led to some weird happenings in Istanbul, after which he'd decided to drop the topic. Rossi then handed him an envelope of info (clearly the papers Paul's daughter has found later on), and disappeared under mysterious, possibly violent circumstances.

In reading the papers, Paul found out that Rossi was NOT telling him the whole story of what had happened, and that it's a lot creepier and more involved than the weird happenings in Istanbul. Rossi had begun to deeply research the life, death, and burial of Vlad Tepes, and it seemed that such research drew "someone"'s attention, that speaking of Vlad could summon this person, that he would attack people around the researcher as a warning, etc. But for various reasons Paul decided to pursue this research, and that pursuit forms the main body of the story.

Meanwhile, his daughter begins to do some research of her own, with similar results: someone helps her, and something happens to him. And she begins to notice that, while Paul tells her parts of the story every time they take a trip from their home in Amsterdam (often to Slovenia, but sometimes to France or Italy), someone is probably watching them.

I don't think the idea is vampirism per se, in terms of the Anne Rice of it all, the romanticism that infused her books and also Coppola's Dracula movie, but more "What would happen if Vlad Tepes, someone like Stalin or Hitler, found a way to live forever?" - which seems to be exactly what is going on. So far I love how astute Kostova is about this kind of topical obsession... how research topics can gnaw at you. What each of the characters seem to go through in this respect - especially Paul's daughter, who starts lying to him so that she can do university library research after school - seemed so familiar and perfectly stated to me. I wouldn't be surprised if Kostova was drawing on her own feelings about researching Tepes, since she's clearly found just about everything there is to find.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

Hm. The whole research obsession thing sounds just like A.S. Byatt's Persuasion, which is amazing (just read it last week for the first time). I might have to try this, even though I'm not generally into horror.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

Possession? Well, maybe a little like that, but not as lighthearted or romantic... the tone of the writing is really different and much more similar to the other books I mentioned. Anyway Possession was mostly Byatt's experiment with writing in a ton of different voices, so the point of it was not so much the story but the ventriloquism (a major reason why I didn't like the film version). The Historian only has a handful of voices, and they all know each other in some way and are all academic, so there isn't much reason for any of them to be extremely dissimilar.

At the point I've reached in the book, there is now an actual vampire of sorts, but he's a creepy little stalker who isn't in any way motivated by his "thirst."

[defensor.livejournal.com]

ok, I've got a question. do you know of any type of search engine or database that tracks a character's appearances? I got a book back in the early to mid 90's that I can't remember the title of. it had dracula in it as a minor character, and I've exhausted trying to find this book by keywords of what I remember from the plot. so, if there's some type of compendium marking every time a character like dracula is used that would be of immense help. I doubt there is such a thing, but I feel if there is, you would know of it.

[leokitty.livejournal.com]

was it maybe a marvel book when they did the rise of the midnight sons "horror" stuff?

[defensor.livejournal.com]

no, not a comic book. but rise of the midnight sons sounds interesting. was it a story arc or book on its own?

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

no i wouldn't! leo might tho. (she posted below. she used to work at a big comic shop in NYC and she knows a lot more about mainstream comics than I do, most of the stuff i read is alternative.) i do have some comic from the early 90s that i think is spider man vs dracula, but no idea where it is, and i don't think i ever read it. (stocking stuffer.)

i would actually look up dracula fandom pages. there might be something similar to phantomoftheopera.info (which tracks, like, as many tv shows and movies and novels even remotely associated as possible), only for dracula? there might also be comics boards where you could ask - comicbookresources.com, for example.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

Wait a minute, you didn't say it was a comic book. Yeah, what I said about looking at Dracula fan sites would probably be most helpful, tho i don't know if there IS one like poto.info.

the only book i can think of off the top of my head is maybe "the list of seven" by mark frost, which just came out again in paperback. but i don't even recall if it had dracula in it, just a bunch of evil corrupt people trying to control the world in a demonic conspiracy, with sherlock holmes working to thwart them!

i was pretty into vampires in the very early 90s... if you can describe more of what you remember of the plot i might even be able to tell you what it is.

[defensor.livejournal.com]

it was a paperback novel I got at the local supermarket. it was between 92-95. that store had quite a run of getting really interesting paperbacks in. they got the hot blood series, and a lot of other horror anthologies. there was one called tomorrow bites about futuristic werewolf stories, and it had a story in it about this online role playing game that is a blueprint for the world of warcrafts and everquests out there now. it was really cool.
anyway, about this novel. the plot is there's a guy who doesn't like the sunlight. he gets a job as a late night dj and one night he gets attacked by supernatural beings. he has to go on the run and he gets introduced into an Underworld type world. it turns out he's a kind of hybrid, like blade, where he's half vampire. all the strengths, none of the weaknesses, etc. he remembers back to something he'd blocked out, where he came upon dracula, who'd been attacked and was too weak to attack the guy, so he hypnotized him into giving him a transfusion. and that gave the guy the vampiric powers.
it was a decent little novel. it probably only had a paperback run. it had a lot of dumb punny humor in it, like the author couldn't decide if he really wanted to take the material seriously or not.
ring any gothic steeple bells?

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

alas, no.

try vampire fan sites and newsgroups. someone who collects vamp novels would probably know.

[defensor.livejournal.com]

success! it's a book called One Foot in the Grave by william mark williamson.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

where did you find it?

[defensor.livejournal.com]

thru a web site devoted to vampire books. it had a listing for the sequel to that book, but the title caught my eye. I knew it was a punnish type thing.
http://users.net1plus.com/vyrdolak/genfic1.htm

I'm going to go to b&n tomorrow on lunch and see if they have it. if not, it's off to ebayland for me, or a trek up the used amazon.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

try abebooks.com if you can't find it in those places, tho amazon will probably do just as well. if it's a minor pulp novel, it's probably out of print by now.

[defensor.livejournal.com]

oh, and da vinci is crap. not as crappily crapific as some of its more active detractors make it out to be. but I think it suffers mainly from people overpraising it to begin with. I'll commend him on his research, but his style and plot choices are atrocious.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

The thing is, the research is mostly Holy Blood, Holy Grail - one book! Then some art history and a few other things, but I think I could have accomplished most of his research myself with about a month of full-time work. =/

It's mainly his style that bugs me. The man cannot write his way out of a paper bag, and still managed the BEST-SELLING NOVEL OF LIKE ALL TIME.

We hates the tricksy Dan Brown.
But we'll still be interested in Kryptos no matter whatses!

[defensor.livejournal.com]

yeah, I read holy blood holy grail a long long time ago. I don't like it too much. it's interesting, but a very long stretch. you have to accept a lot of stuff on faith for the very foundations of their argument, and then they build wildly on it, so much so that to accept a conclusion way on down the line you have to remember it's built way back in the beginning on a speculation anyway. their book on the dead sea scrolls is very good tho. and also the messianic legacy. I found that quite compelling, except for the dumb shit at the end about the world needing a new king.

[leokitty.livejournal.com]

if you guys ever want to commiserate about what a pain trying to have a career in comics is, chris has plenty of stories. ;p

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

sold around 800 copies of No Dead Time = didn't earn out its advance = didn't make any money on top of the advance = money for supplies came out of the advance, taking almost half of it = tom made like $1/hr for his work on it. ARGH.

I just want Tom to find a day job with more stable hours than Kinko's. Even that wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't been given his current awful schedule and if they didn't like to send him home (IE not pay him) whenever there wasn't much to do. Can't budget that way, it's as bad as being a temp.

I also - and he knows this - really hate the crunch time on the comics zine that he and his buddies put out. The thing is that after everyone does their pieces, he also does layout and stuff... and since they take until the last possible moment to submit their work, the week or so before one has to be out (always before a con) I don't see him, he breaks plans, blah blah blah. Drives me up the wall. But anyway.

[jenny-dreadful.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've been eyeing The Historian at work! I'm glad to hear that it's good!

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

It is, but I have further stuff to say about it over on minxbot in the next few days. I think she makes some structural mistakes that kind of cool the book's excitement and menace, but that's just the kind of book it is. It really ISN'T horror or a "vampire novel" - it's an academic thriller with occasional moments of intense unease, in which a vampire or two happen to feature, with no romanticism. People are bitten because the vampire wants to control them, not because they are so delectable and he is so hungry/thirsty. Dracula is never attractive to any of the characters: he is monstrous, imposing, repellent, and mysterious. And he is very much an unvarnished Vlad Tepes, not Bela Lugosi.

Anyway, yes, it's still good, but I'll be working up a full review in the next few days. I think the first half is five-star and the second half is four-star. A lot of this has to do with much of the book being set in Communist eastern Europe in the mid-1950s: to find out what they need to know, the characters have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy, and this sometimes makes things drag. Another issue is that most of what they do is go from one archive or professor to another, to get the information they need.

I have to say that if you read it, DO NOT READ AHEAD AT ALL. Sometimes in suspense novels I'll read the end just to see where things are going and how they're getting there; in this case, doing so spoils a lot of what Kostova is trying to do, structurally. So just don't. :)