Campbell Editorial - Book Reviews

When Alex and her husband Roy move into an apartment in a middle class English neighborhood and meet their grumpy, greedy and potentially insane neighbors, Ben and Pat Guppy, it becomes abundantly clear before chapter one ends with “And with that the battle lines were drawn up,” that any sane person would begin considering murder as a viable alternative to long-term unpleasantness.

After all, in any aquarium of dazzling tropical fish, the guppy is background clutter at best. But, should the rather plain and unamazing fish go rogue—like Benjamin and Pat in the finite world of the apartment building—then when all else fails, stricter measures appear more reasonable than reasonable measures.

In the well-written and vastly humorous “The Wonderful Demise of Benjamin Arnold Guppy,” Ben and Pat are quite accustomed to ruling their environment. New tenants, such as Alex and Roy, are informed by the 70-year-old Benjamin Guppy on day one of his rules and expectations: bedtime (and quiet) begin at ten except on Sundays when they commence at nine, dinner is at five. It gets worse. The Guppy’s don’t like to hear music, water draining out of the bathtub, or toilets being flushed.

Alex, who tells this story, says of Benjamin Guppy on the first page: “He made no effort to conceal his dislike of us from the outset, his opinion being formed immediately that we were not his sort of people. I consider myself fortunate in that.”

The Guppy’s shenanigans, and the delightfully droll and deadpan way the novel unfolds, are reminiscent of the outlandish kinds of circumstances played out in the 1970s BBC sitcom “Fawlty Towers.” Benjamin and Pat are clearly a couple of rogue guppies, yet their outlandish activities, their low character and the absurdity of their endless fishy demands for money for fabricated damages to their flat appear to be unnoticed by everyone except Alex and Roy.

Will Alex kill Benjamin? She has cause. And while her cause is a funny one—from the reader’s perspective—it’s hard to imagine Benjamin and Pat being humorous in real life. The strength of the book is an understated humor that builds throughout the novel rather like a snowball rolling down a steep hill. While some of Benjamin’s and Pat’s abusive words and deeds become a bit repetitive, Gina Collia-Suzuki’s style and tone more than makes up for that.

“The Wonderful Demise of Benjamin Arnold Guppy” is good for a lot of laughs, some uncomfortable truths about the nature of ill-bred apartment dwellers, and—for philosophers—an opportunity to ponder just how long a couple of angel fish can possibly swim in the dark and dangerous currents of an environment with so little privacy and space, the walls might as well be made of glass.

Deborah J. Ledford’s “Snare,” book two of the Deputy Hawk/Inola Walela Thriller Series quickly entangles readers who believe young Katina Salvo’s broken past will remain long ago and far away. A popular California songwriter and recording star, Katina has never released photographs and videos or appeared in a live concert because she doesn’t want her fans to know what happened in Valentine, Nebraska on August 29, 1995 at 11:29 p.m.

After convincing her twenty-three-year-old Native American signing sensation she owes her fans a live concert, business manager Petra Sullivan hand-picks a small theater in North Carolina so Katina can debut in a nonthreatening environment.

However, before they leave for the Great Smoky Mountains, Katina discovers that Petra has been hiding threatening fan mail from her. Both overprotective and nurturing, Petra is the mother Katina was never allowed to have. Katina asks if the series of letters is coming from the father she wants to forget.

While Petra maintains the nasty letters are simply a nuisance downside of being famous, Katina is less certain, and wonders what else Petra has been keeping from her. The concert goes forward as scheduled because, as Petra tells Katina, “you can’t hide out forever.” Plus, Katina’s safety is a top priority through the efforts of the sheriff’s point man on the security detail, Deputy Steven Hawk. Hawk also appeared in Ledford’s stunning debut novel “Staccato” (Second Wind Publishing, 2009).

The concert appears to be a triumph until Katina is attacked by a shadowy man in the audience who escapes leaving few clues behind. Katina thinks she knows who it was. Hawk thinks he is responsible for the security lapse. Together, they plan to ensnare the perpetrator. Against the advice of Petra, Hawk’s girl friend and sheriff’s department colleague, Inola, and veteran officer Kenneth Stiles, they fly to the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico where Katina’s past lies hidden.

In “Snare,” Ledford brings her readers a novel of contrasts: Katina’s horrible childhood vs. a successful recording career, people who can be trusted vs. those who follow their own agendas, Native American beliefs vs. mainstream spiritual viewpoints, and the lush beauty western North Carolina vs. the stark beauty of central New Mexico. “Snare” has been nominated for a Hillerman Sky Award, an honor presented to the mystery that best captures the landscape of the Southwest.

While “Snare” does not quite match the bone-chilling punch of “Staccato,” it excels in other ways with deeper character development, a realistic presentation of Native American society and beliefs, and the role of family and friends in the choices one makes. By no means legato, “Snare” provides an ever-tightening story with a realistic, satisfying and unpredictable conclusion

Satire

PureSouthBooks Issues 'Cleaned Up' Harriet Tubman Biography

Junction City, January 6, 2011--"By the end of this year, kids in our schools will once again know what a great lady Harriet Tubman was," Boone Doggel announced to hyperventilating PTO officers at the 2011 Epiphany Breakfast in the cafeteria of PS33 this morning.

Editor in Chief of PureSouthBooks, Doggel used the PTO's bully pulpit to expound on the "cleaned up," but "still definitive" Harriet Tubman biography From Slavery to Freedom by Cane Molasses. The new edition, to be called From Bad Jobs to Freedom will have all instances of the word "slavery" changed to "bad jobs" to make the book more palatable for students and teachers in today's revisionist history classes.

"The 'S' word has virtually disappeared from our lexicon except in out of date history texts and biographies that were written before new sensitivities were infused into our school systems and work places," said Doggel. "At PureSouthBooks, we believe accessibility is more important than quibbling over a few synonyms that have been keeping books out of school libraries."

Molasses, who sold the rights to From Slavery to Freedom to PureSouthBooks predecessor company Earl & Warren, Ltd. 25 years ago, told reporters after the PTO meeting he had been encouraged to keep his mouth shut the next time he "had an urge" to use the "S" word in public.

"After bad jobbing away for years to do right by Harriet Tubman," said Molasses, "I'm saddened by the fact that we're bleaching out the stains of the past so nobody has to look at them any more."

Doggel, who claims Molasses' viewpoint is out of sync with the times, said that his company's "careful mutilation" of the text is not an attempt to whitewash the past.

"We're always going to remember the sins of the fathers," he said. "It's simply a matter of how you express them in the 21st century.”

History teacher Bill Smith welcomes the addition of PureSouthBooks to the PS33 library because the company's list emphasizes the special needs of modern K-12 students.

"Today's kids understand the concept of a bad job," said Smith. "But they tense up whenever they hear the word 'slavery' because, frankly, they're either frightened of it or ignorant of it. Back in the day when it was still okay to call these students 'retarded,' we didn't know how much damage the truth was doing to our kids. Now we know that it won't make them free."

A white paper produced by the Junction City Educational Association gives PureSouthBooks, the Junction City PTO and the Junction City School Board black marks for their "squeaky clean" approach to courses dealing with civil rights, minority literature and Black history.

According to the white paper, Junction City's school children no longer know the difference between "shit and Shinola."

For more of satirical news, pick up a copy of "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire" and (by all means, read it.)

Evenings on Dark Island by Rhett DeVane and Larry Rock

What do the rich and famous, a Florida swamp, an expensive upscale spa, a rat-faced dog, state-of-the-art galas, NASCAR, pot, an inner garden of rare hybrid plants and vampires have in common?

The standard answer is nothing.

But in Evenings on Dark Island authors Rhett DeVane and Larry Rock have turned the highly improbable into a hilarious and tastefully bloody neck biter that’s quite something.

Vincent Bedsloe, who has party planning in blood that’s not altogether his, is the flamboyant, details-oriented master of an exclusive spa set in the middle of an isolated Florida island where the rich and spoiled come to be drained of their income–and perhaps a bit more–while they are ramped up into an ecstatic level of health and fitness.

Bedsloe, who ponders over the emotions of his guests–emotions he no longer has–often retreats into an inner sanctum where he watches old movies and gets his kicks by debunking the silly vampire lore flowing out of Hollywood like blood from a burst artery.

Vincent is a kind-hearted vampire who cares about his human guests. Even his NASCAR-crazed, white trash vampire mechanic Jimmy Rob has an occasional redeeming thought: “He led her to the far, shadowy corner of the bar, behind a thick hedge. Kissed her again. Nibbled her neck. Bit down and drank until he felt her knees buckle. He pulled back abruptly. No need to kill the gal. She’d had a hard enough life.”

The only somewhat normal person in the book is DEA agent Reanita Geneva Register who has been inserted into the mix by the Feds at great expense to prove the obscure island is a haven for drug smugglers. Posing as a rich heiress, Register not only feels naked without her gun but a little nonplussed by her ability to enjoy the island’s pleasures.

The tight-lipped Dark Island staff are notoriously loyal to their employer and, with the annual Blue Blood Ball benefit for the American Hemophiliac Association fast approaching, much too busy to be easily questioned about the strange boats passing in the night.

The authors advertise Evenings on Dark Island as a fang-in-tooth spoof of the vampire genre. And what a spoof it is. This book is not only inventive and well crafted, but it’s filled with the kinds of one-liners and puns that will even wake the undead.

The plot, characters and setting work to perfection without blood, gore and body counts. While the spa at Dark Island may not be the transfusion you need for your physical health and well being in real life, DeVane’s and Rock’s collaboration has a high-clotting factor as well as the kinds of hijinks that will have you laughing all the way to the blood bank.

“Yet when she comes to earth she comes to seek for that without which her beauty will be forever cold, cold and chill as the surge of the salt, salt sea.” — Mary MacGregor in her telling of “Undine.”

Samantha Hunt’s dark, yet often whimsical, 2004 novel “The Seas” draws on the classic mythology of mermaids and mortals. The alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1521) theorized that Ondines were elemental water nymphs. According to legends, Ondines (or Undines) had no souls unless they married mortal men. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué drew upon these legends in his highly popular German novel “Undine” (1811) as did Hans Christian Anderson in his classic “The Little Mermaid” (1837).

In “The Seas,” a nineteen-year-old protagonist whose name we never know is convinced to a certainty that she is a mermaid because her father told her so before he disappeared at sea years ago. She falls in love with a shell-shocked veteran almost twice her age who drinks and hides from his war experiences. Jude, however, is the only person in this despairing, northern coastal fishing and tourist town who cares for her. Like everyone else in town, Jude and the prospective mermaid are trapped in a life where alcoholism, boredom and a bit of fishing are the primary pursuits.

As the prologue explains, “If you were to try to leave, people who have known you since the day you were born would recognize your car and see you leaving. They would wonder where you were going and they would wave with two fingers off the steering wheel, a wave that might seem like a stop sign or a warning to someone trying to forget this very small town. It would be much easier to stay.”

She has few social skills, is viewed as deeply disturbed, if not retarded, by everyone else in town including her own mother who waits, and will probably always be waiting, for the return of her husband. Our young protagonist, who narrates her own story and–it appears–believes that we (as readers) are understanding and humane enough to be taken into her confidence, knows the mermaid legends. She fears her love will end up killing Jude.

“The Seas” is awash with water, with bleak satire and bleaker images. The writing is lyrical and precise, blending reality and fable in a way that blurs the littoral zone where the sea and the land meet, where reality and fairytale collide, where sanity and obsession become twisted together. If “The Seas” has failings–other than being darker than we can bear–it’s the occasional overly robust presentation of the author’s and/or the main character’s anti-war and society-without-pity themes.

Our narrator wants to return to the sea. Perhaps she does. Perhaps she dies. Perhaps she loses the last vestiges of her cold and chill sanity in exchange for all that she loves.

Snakes by Patricia Damery

"I can't imagine leaving a door open without a screen," she said. "Anything could come in. Anything!" You and I both know what she meant.

I see it smooth its way through the door, tongue darting in and out. Where would a snake go? Would it coil between the refrigerator door and wall where I stuff paper sacks? Would it find the cabinet door under the sink ajar and crawl into the empty space behind the garbage? . . . Or would it find its way to my bed? I picture myself pushing my bare feet and legs against fresh sheets, slipping toward sleep, when I brush a cool body with my foot, I raise the sheet to see it patterned there. I hear myself screeming, hysterically calling for the men to come out of the fields. Come, there is a snake in my bed, in the basement, in the yard. Come get the snake.

Snakes, by Patricia Damery (Farming Soul, 2010) is a beautifully written novel about a woman coming to terms with family continuity as small farms are packed up and sold off at auctions to those who will never know who once lived there and made of them enduring homes.

Angela leaves the Midwestern farm her family has worked for generations because the roads and fields and traditions are, in spite of their deep values, confining to her coming-of-a-age soul. She attends college in California, receives a degree in biology, becomes a teacher, marries, and has a family. When teaching proves to be an unsatisfactory career, she focuses on her new and all-consuming avocation of weaving.

Snakes is a poetic meditation about the intertwined cycles of life and farming. It is also an evolving letter of love from Angela to her recently deceased father about life as it was, mundane and unexpected daily events, and, of course, the snakes. Snakes and the cycles of life are constant images throughout the book; snakes in the corn crib, snakes in the garden, snakes in the kitchen. We fear snakes, yet we also see them as protectors of the land and as symbols of the natural stages of everlasting life.

For Angela to come to terms with herself and the disintegration of families and farms, she must come to terms with snakes. Her weavings become her medium and her message, the storyboard of her life as it was and as it is, all the memories, dreams and reflections of a nurturing mother claiming her authentic role within the natural order of children and husbands, kitchens and bedrooms, warm tidal pools and freshly ploughed fields, and gardens where snakes live amongst the flowers.

kiDNApped by Rick Chesler

Down here an hour already. Where is the damn thing?

Dave Turner took another giant underwater leap as he considered the question. A puff of dand billowed from the impact his foot made as it landed on the seabed. A trail of similar disturbances marked his path for about a hundred feet behind him, the limit of his visibility. He still wasn't used to the heavy boots, but he managed to avoid falling face first onto the sandy bottom by extending the metal detector in his right arm

Three months after wealthy biotechnology company CEO William Archer is lost at sea or kidnapped off his research yacht in the warm waters of the Hawaiian Islands in Rick Chesler’s inventive thriller “kiDNApped,” Special Agent Tara Shores faces a very cold case.

She also faces the uncertainties of three civilians intruding into an investigation. Was Dave Turner really looking for a wedding ring on the ocean floor when his dive boat was stolen and his employer was murdered? What can Archer’s son and daughter from the mainland possibly contribute just two days before the court declares their father legally dead?

Shores, a veteran agent who first appeared in “Wired Kingdom” (2010), is about to stamp the case file “INDETERMINATE” because there are no leads and no ransom demands. While Archer’s son Lance wants to drink beer and chase girls until he can collect his inheritance, his sister Kristen wants Dave to return to the ocean floor on the off chance his interrupted search is related to her father’s disappearance.

When their dive attracts unwanted attention, Shores and her disparate crew are suddenly in the line of fire. Kristen wonders if her genius father encrypted a call for help in the DNA of ocean bacteria. Shores wonders how she can possibly babysit civilians who are more likely to get in the way and/or get killed than anything else.

Rick Chesler has written a breathtaking tropical adventure that combines a cutting-edge technology search for clues with a madcap, island-to-island race against bad guys that would put a smile on the face of any James Bond aficionado.

Agent Shores definitely needs a new rubber stamp for her case file: HAZARDOUS TO MY HEALTH.