The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Lisbeth Salander is the girl and she steals private information, she’s a 90-pound anorexic looking hacker. One of many descriptions of this loony lady:

"A black T-shirt with a picture on it of E.T. with fangs, and the words I AM ALSO AN ALIEN. She had on a black skirt that was frayed at the hem, a worn-out black, mid-length leather jacket, rivet belt, heavy Doc Marten boots, and horizontally striped, green-and-red knee socks. She had put on make-up in a colour scheme that indicated she might be colour blind. In other words, she was exceptionally decked out."

The main story is of an investigative financial reporter that has been convicted of libel (I hate that word). His goal is revenge and understanding, but he can’t get that until he solves a 40 year-old murder/disappearance mystery. Salander helps him in last half, but she has her own story to tell.

She is really fucking nuts, but a sympathetic character that you love and wish you could pick her up, put her in your pocket, and take care of her. But she doesn’t need or want you. Which makes you want to help her more.

I read this for my Mom. It’s a page-turner after about 65 pages of set up. I’m surprised it is so popular considering the slow start. I loved the Swedish towns and supreme frigidness of the climate and characters. The proper nouns are fun to fumble through pronouncing. I’m not really saying you should go out and read this though. It’s pulp, with intrigue. Mystery novels are a hard sell for me, the last mystery I read was Motherless Brooklyn and as much as I suggest you read Lethem, Larsson is Swedish and I’m not. I hate being monolingual more and more with each translated book I read.

From a Buick 8 by Stephen King

I don't have a whole lot to say about From a Buick 8. The book opens in the present day, but the story really begins years earlier, when a Buick is abandoned at a little gas station in the middle of nowhere, owing to the driver going to the bathroom and never coming back. It looks, in most ways, like a normal car, but there are a few things off about it. One side has more windows than the other, and somehow it's completely spotless. It doesn't even appear to have an engine. The police, including Ennis Rafferty who narrates most of the book, tow the car back to the station and put it in storage. Strange things start happening almost immediately: eerie midday lightshows, unidentifiable objects and creatures emerging from the trunk, and so on. Eventually, it becomes evident that the Buick isn't really a car at all, but some sort of dimensional gateway.

Eventually people start dying, of course, but that's where Buick gets interesting. Although Rafferty implies most of the officers believe that the various tragedies visited on the station are because of the car, the story never ties things up so neatly. Nothing really occurs, besides possibly the final scene, that couldn't have happened in the exact same way minus the car. An officer disappears, one is hit and killed by a semi, one's marriage begins dissolving. In the heat of things, it seems reasonable to assume that these things came with the title of the “car”, but it's also defensible that the car serves as a MacGuffin, a plot device to allow King to tell the story he really wants to, one about people. People with misplaced priorities, people who can't live in the present, people who make bad decisions. The various narrators mostly sound like people who've been through life and learned nothing from it. They take turns blaming the car for every bad thing that's happened in the last twenty years, none them considering that the real problem might lie not with the car, but with them.

In that sense, Buick actually has more in common with King's non-supernatural stories like The Body than with Christine. Human wickedness is all we conclusively see. The supernatural evil, such as it is, is never explained. No one ever steps through to the other dimension and confronts the makers of the Buick. There are no otherworldly messengers warning of imminent doom. Even the climax is understated, with victory arriving more by the passage of time than by any particular move on the part of the officers. That said, Buick is interesting and thought-provoking without being particularly good. If you like King, especially late-era rambly King, you'll probably like this. If you're not a fan or you've never read anything of his, start somewhere else.

Red by Jack Ketchum

Major Spoilers Follow.

Perhaps best-known for the bleak semi-true crime story The Girl Net Door, Jack Ketchum has a reputation for being an extreme horror novelist. I picked up Red to see if his reputation was deserved and, while his other books are probably more extreme, Red was more of a morality tale than anything.

Avery Ludlow is a sixty-seven year-old widower who's had a tough life. His wife Mary and youngest son Tim are dead, gruesomely killed by his eldest, Billy in a fit of drunken rage. He runs an old general store that barely sustains him, but besides the store has nothing in his life except Red, an old dog who has himself seen better days. One morning while out fishing, three boys approach him, demanding his money. When he has nothing to give them, they shoot and kill Red just to be cruel, and walk off laughing. The rest of the book has Ludlow following the boys and trying to extract first an apology and then, when that fails, justice.

Because of Ketchum's reputation, I thought I knew where the story was headed from the outset. Old man with nothing to lose takes bloody and over-the-top revenge on the family who wronged him. I spent the middle section of the book watching Ludlow stymied at every turn, and waiting for the moment when his fuse finally disappeared inside his cherry bomb, but the moment doesn't come. While Ludlow does eventually take more drastic measures than, say, I did when my dog was poisoned by next door neighbor, he never picks off the family members one at a time, never tortures the maid, never burns down McCormack's house. The slow burn in this story is even slower, and even when pushed into more extreme action in the finale, Ludlow feels reads like a man possessed. His actions and reactions seem realistic and even, in context, slightly understated for a man in his position.

Of course, the story does end in bloody recompense for the boys and their family, and justice is served, but none of it comes directly by Ludlow's hand. That's where the morality of the story lies: The family is eventually undone, not by Ludlow's machinations, but by their own greed, paranoia, and bloodlust. Blood begets blood, or something like that. Red was a taut, pulpy little thriller, and I just wish I'd read it before I nailed my neighbor's cat to her barn door.

Doom: Knee Deep in the Dead by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

If you think this video would make a good novel, you should definitely read Doom: Knee Deep in the Dead.

The Homing by Jeffrey Campbell

I couldn't find a thing about this book anywhere online, and I can't find my copy of the book to get the author's name off of (edit: found it). Even this cover image is my rough Photoshopped approximation of the cover. I guess that means The Homing is either a lost classic or a piece of junk better off forgotten.

I bought this book (at Goodwill, .69) for two reasons. 1) The premise, a small town in upstate New York being taken over by a malevolent hospital, sounded interesting in a pulpy, cheap kind of way. 2) The name of the town is Chilton. An inside joke for the loyal 50Bers.

So, a retired cop, Darryl, visits his estranged daughter, Claire, in Chilton. They are estranged because she left college and a promising career as a doctor to marry a man (Phil), and move to Chilton to be his loyal housewife. Ever since the move, Claire hasn't seemed quite like herself. Darryl's first night in Claire and Phil's house is one of the only genuinely creepy bits in the whole novel, but it does manage to create an atmosphere where nothing is overtly wrong but nothing is quite right either.

Unfortunately, the book can't quite decide what it wants to be, so it jumps from atmospheric pulp to weak-sauce thriller to weird old-people romance to government conspiracy and back again over and over and over. By the time it ends (with Darryl being brainwashed into a permanent citizen of Chilton, for those interested), it's kind of numbing and really dull.

Also, the hospital mentioned in the back of the book? Two, three pages, max. I don't even remember what it was for. I would say making the fake cover was more fun than the book.

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen

"This is how I'm guessing it started. They were hanging out at the house in the islands, Jimmy and his bride. She probably walked into his studio and caught just enough of the track to know it was better than anything she had in the can. She asked her husband to play it again and he probably said, “No, it's not ready.” Then she batted her eyes and stroked his neck and asked if he'd give her the song, and he said, “Sorry babe. This one's mine.” Time went by and Cleo's label was hounding her and she kept nagging Jimmy for the cut. She probably flirted and teased and begged and cried and threw a hissy, but he wouldn't budge. And when it became plain to Cleo that her husband was keeping 'Shipwrecked Heart' for himself, she decided to kill him. And what little she remembered of the song, she sang at his funeral. Touching."

I'm having a little trouble reading prestigious books so far this year. I picked up Basket Case at Goodwill for 69 cents mostly because it was in good shape and because I'd often heard Hiaasen compared to Dave Barry, one of my favorite humorists. I went into this book expecting something like a Terry Pratchett book with mystery instead of magic. Instead, I ended up with a halfway decent murder mystery that had no distinguishing characteristics.

There is, however, an easy way to determine if you'll find Basket Case more entertaining than I did. Ask yourself these three questions:

1. Do I find the band name “Jimmy and the Slut Puppies” even faintly amusing?

2. Does the idea of a man being bludgeoned nearly to death with a frozen lizard make me smile?

3. Is the ability to solve a mystery within the first two chapters a quality I look for in my whodunits?

If you answered “no” to all three of these questions, Basket Case might not be the book for you. I'd give a summary, but really, if you've ever read a mystery novel, you could probably outline it yourself, especially since most of it is contained in the excerpt at the top of this review. Overly formulaic and underly amusing, Basket Case will hopefully be the worst book I read this year.

Oh, and here's a list of things I'm officially tired of now: Random namedropping, especially of bands; incredibly unlikely romances between obviously incompatible and cardboard characters; witty banter that's not funny; ancient obituary writers who won't die; and that's all.