Campbell Editorial - Book Reviews

On the Lighter Side

Being Raised by Hyenas is No Laughting Matter

I woke up this morning with two empty Scotch bottles on the floor and no one else in the room. The phone was ringing louder than usual.

"Hi," a voice gushed with more cheer than the law allows, "I'm Lucille, a crack literary agent out of New York City and I was wondering if..."

I pushed the red button on my phone and hung up while a recording made for me by Clint Eastwood in his Do You Feel Lucky persona informed Lucille that I don't respond to unsolicited queries from agents but remain ever hopeful that they will find clients on their own side of the tracks.

Pica, my ass-kicking teddy bear said, "that'll teach her a lesson."

"You got that right," I said, or imagined saying, just as my cell phone burst into song with its haunting "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" ring tones. This lovely music, which doesn't mix well with a Scotch hangover, gave to way my hard boiled reporter greeting:

"If you're a regular person calling for regular reasons, press 1.5

"If you're an irregular person, for Pete's sake, don't press anything.

"If you're Monique calling to thank me for last night, press 98.6."

"Hi," said Lucille, "this is Monique calling to thank you for last night."

"Were we drinking Scotch or Vodka before the gun went off shattering the Oscar I stole from Katherine Hepburn that night she got drunk while reprising her Tracy Samantha Lord Haven role behind the Wal-Mart?"

"Scotch."

"Right answer, wrong accent."

"You can't blame a girl for trying," she said.

"I often do," I snapped.

"I still want to make you a star. Now, about the book..."

"Being Raised by Hyenas is no Laughing Matter."

"I didn't know that," she said. "Most strange people are raised by wolves, or should it be reared, wolves rear people don't they, out in the woods and stuff?"

"Presumably."

"Stop being coy, Malcolm, a little bird told me you just finished the shocking sequel to They Shoot Agents, Don't They? and that for obvious reasons you needed a new agent."

"Why should that agent be you?" I asked.

"Experience," she said. "I was with Random House before they became random. So, tell me about the book. I know you want to."

I sighed loud enough for plenty of effect.

"I've moved from magical realism to subliminal realism in a chilling tale in which an innocent, potentially lame brained reader, leaves his or her normal life and becomes during a 376-page beach read, a child of hyenas."

"Oh, like the movie Total Recall where people hook up to machines and have vacations they didn't go on," she said.

"Yes."

"Hyenas, though, I imagine that must be quite frightening," she said. "How many people have been affected by the manuscript so far?"

"I'm the only one. It happened while I was writing the story."

"I want to read it."

When she said she wanted to read it, I pressed the SEND button and a copy of my novel showed up on her screen before she had time to light another cigarette.

"Call me back in a couple of hours," she growled.

"You shouldn't have done that," observed Pica from the top shelf after I showered and put on fresh clothes and poured breakfast into a tall glass.

"She was already a predator," I said. "I saw her name on the Editors and Predators list."

"I didn't know that," said Pica. "Humor me, though. Call her now and see if she's all right."

Her phone almost rang off the hook.

"I know it's you," she said, panting and slurring her words. "Look, you've got a good story here, worth 10 big ones at Harper, but that subliminal stuff isn't working."

"Why did it take you so long to answer the phone?"

"I was in the woods eating small animals and drinking foul-tasting water out of a ditch."

"Shucks," I said, "the manuscript didn't change you any."

Reflections of a Khmer Soul by Navy Phim Navy Phim was born in Cambodia in April 1975 as the insurgent forces of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge seized control of the country bringing to an end a brutal civil war against the US-backed government of Lon Nol. However, the brutalities did not end with the war’s end: two million Cambodians would die at the hands of the Khmer Rouge during the next 45 months through starvation, execution and torture.

Pol Pot proclaimed 1975 as Year Zero and began his “purification” of the country ridding it of city dwellers, capitalists, westerners, banks, stores, hospitals, churches and other purportedly unnecessary organizations, while forcing mass numbers of people into agrarian work camps. Those who did not survive the work and the torture, those who were often forced to dig their own shallow graves, ended up in what Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran called “the killing fields.”

Reflections of a Khmer Soul is a collection of stories, “snippets,” travels and contemplations representing Navy Phim’s inner and outer journey away from that Year Zero. Her outer journey began when her parents left Cambodia for Thailand for economic reasons in 1979. Swept up in a mass exodus of some 600,000 people, Phim’s life for the next four years was largely defined by refugee camps and the roads between them.

At six years of age, Phim helped the family earn a living in the camps by selling bread at a marketplace stall and nearby neighborhoods. “When I returned to Cambodia and saw young merchants touting their produces,” Phim writes, “I remembered my life as a peddler in the refugee camps and how much I hated walking around with my merchandize being afraid of meeting Thai soldiers.”

Finally, after a year in the Philippines in a refugee status, her family was sponsored to the United States, ultimately settling within the large Cambodian population of Long Beach, California.

This beautiful, well-written book also explores Phim’s inner journey, one concerned to a large degree with identity. She asks questions and tries to understand how and why Khmer could kill Khmer. Phim lives within the very long shadow of the Killing Fields and the near-requisite negative connotations for the word “Khmer.” While that shadow is real and persistent, Phim did not see, much less know about, the Killing Fields as a child in the late 1970s.

“To think of myself as a survivor of the Killing Fields is strange,” writes Phim. “I did not live through the Killing Fields per se, but I am trying to understand the pain, loss, dehumanization and post-traumatic syndrome that lingered in the minds of many survivors.”

Some people assume that because she was born in Cambodia, Phim is Khmer Rouge or that her parents were Khmer Rouge. It’s as though an entire people have become tainted in some way or held to be complicit in the actions of Pol Pot’s political party. Phim’s inner journey brings her to the realization that while she does not carry shame for being born when and where she was, “being Cambodian requires a lot of explanation.”

Phim’s journey took her back to Srok Khmer, the country of Khmer, the motherland, four times. She writes that the “kind of love, heartache, and pain I feel for Srok Khmer is deeply imbedded within my soul; these feelings are suffused with glorious memories and stories that are real, even if they are stories and distant memories that may not even be mine.”

Reflections of a Khmer Soul is a rich tapestry of memories, dreams and reflections of the tragic yet wondrous Srok Khmer into which Phim was born on Year Zero and the America where she grew up and makes her home. Phim’s soul is “poetically Khmer,” and this book shows us that she has found joy and hope and peace in that ultimate reality of her world.

Money and Manifesting, by Dyan Garris. If you've found little nor no success working with such concepts as the law of attraction as discussed in books like The Secret, there's a reason. As Garris explains in the compact, easy-to-read book, you're missing part of the story. Positive thinking and affirmations are not enough. You need to clear the energy flow through your chakras; it's easy and she explains how. And, perhaps more importantly, you need to see if you have "issues" with the very things you're trying to attract into your life. That is, if were brought up thinking it's bad to want money, then that notion may be lurking in your subsconscious mind blocking your efforts to manifest money in your life now. Both an enjoyable book and one with principles that work.

Unplugged: How to disconnect from the rat race, have an existential crisis, and find meaning and fulfillment. by Nancy Whitney Reiter. We Americans work more hours a week than our counterparts in other industrialized nations. Yet, while many of us have found our society's "official trappings of success" (title, income, cars, houses, stuff), many of us haven't truly found ourselves. Why not? Author Nancy Whitney-Reiter suggests that before we're even out of high school, we're being fast-tracked into careers that we then dutifully perform until we wake up one day and finally say, "Even though I appear to have it all, I'm not happy."

"Unplugged" asks us to question whether we're enjoying the "success" we have while being connected to the "consumption driven matrix." If our answer is "no," or even "maybe not," then this book is a smorgasbord of food for thought. Whitney-Reiter tells us the stories of others have temporarily gotten away from it all, including herself, and then provides practical advice and resources for unplugging and re-thinking our goals without losing our shirts or our sanity. Our planning includes attending to family, friends, career, debts, house and car, and prospective world wide volunteer opportunities and other travel options.

The author reminds us that unplugging is NOT a vacation trip: it's turning off the chaos of cell phones, WiFI, the hustle and bustle of work, and even grand-tour sight-seeing agendas and making time to ponder who we are and what we want. We must plan how we leave work, perhaps through a corporate sabbatical, and how we return to the world we know some 3-6 months later.

This well-written book provides you with the well-thought-out advice you need to begin your journey and return with a new lease on life.

Lottery, by Patricia Wood. The leading characters in "Lottery" are well drawn and very definitely three-dimensional. Early on, the author establishes an appropriate "tone" for her protagonist, Perry, that shows his thought patterns and rather naive and trusting view of the world without discounting him in anyway.

His grandmother (Gram) raises him right, and while doing so, teaches him a very street-wise view of the world that serves him well when his nasty relations show up later in the book. Gram and her wisdom "make" the book rather like grit serves as the foundation for a pearl.

Perry's trusted friends Keith and Cherry, though each has been "damaged" in some way, enlarge his world and treat him as an everyday person, just like anyone else, in spite of the fact that he is--as he says--a little slow. They look beyond his slowness long enough to find viable (and profitable) ideas they've never dreamt of.

The interaction of these characters as Perry matures makes this a compelling book because it's very easy to feel--as one reads--that he's seeing a true story unfold before his eyes.

Personally, I "feel" the truth of it, for it sends me back to my experience years ago as a unit manager at a center for the developmentally disabled. While most of our residents were retarded, I saw lives unfold. Perry Lucky Crandall's life in Wood's remarkable novel rings true, and when I say that I'm not just being smart--as Gram might suggest.

Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story, by Kim Powers. Powers has crossed the line by inserting the made-up actions, thoughts and conversations of a living author into a work of fiction. And instead of being lambasted for the unmitigated gaul of it by Publishers Weekly, the author is praised for thrusting a pulp fiction-style invasion of privacy into the very private world of Harper Lee because the author's fans "will welcome" it.

Hardly. If Harper Lee were less private, this matter might very well have already ended up in court.

Had Powers written about two fictional authors, or authors both long dead, this book might be worthy of praise. But of course, without the names "Capote" and "Lee" attached to it, there would be lower sales. Kim Powers knows how to write well in spite of the sagging end of this novel.

Were the novel perfect in its prose and construction, the abomination of this work would be even greater for more would read it and more would praise it, thinking, I suppose, that we have a right to peer through the windows--fictional or otherwise--of living people simply because doing so will help us understand them better.

The Frugal Book Promoter, by Carolyn Howard-Johnson. When I was sitting in the back row of my high school English class, my teacher old Mrs. Smith (not her real name) told me that a famous publisher would spend $1000000000000 making my book a bestseller. After graduation, I learned that she didn't know what she was talking about.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson does know what she's talking about. "The Frugal Book Promoter" has so many ideas, tips, resources and defining moments that reading it all in one sitting is simply too overpowering. Howard-Johnson begins with a list of stuff you better not do and marches like a conquering hero through 38 chapters of things you should do. At the end of the book, you not only have a heavy toolkit of techniques, you have a PR mindset from contact lists to writers conferences to contracts to book signings. Since your publisher probably won't make you a star, this frugal, do-able, practical approach will show you how to do it yourself.

March, by Geraldine Brooks. Brooks did a tremendous amount of research to make this novel fit into the facts of the Civil War and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Mr. March plays a minor role in Alcott's classic story, but Brooks turns him into a full-fledged character whose idealism makes it difficult to minister to the troops in his charge as an army chaplain. The novel is strong, but it could have been much better.

See my full review on Associated Content.

Keith Rowley has studied Magick and Qabalah for thirty years. During this same time frame, I have studied Eastern Philosophy, Huna and Mystic Kabbalah. I very much enjoyed reading the book, in part to see where our studies overlapped but also to see where Rowley draws the fragile boundary line between the world of our inner journeys and the stuff of good occult fiction.

Author Keith Rowley wastes no time playing the first of many Hitchcockian cards in this masterpiece of occult literary fiction. On page one, svelte, blonde, thirty-eight-year-old Sue Williams is window shopping on a beautiful sunny day. On page two, a man with “unfathomable eyes of naked darkness” and a cold smile envelopes her thoughts with his thoughts before maneuvering her into a waiting taxi.

Later, she tells her husband Bill she was mugged. Her blackmailer has pictures of what really happened, threatens to expose her if she talks, and is soon demanding a greater act of betrayal. So here it begins: an everyday couple is thrust into a dangerous and incomprehensible arena of lies, twisted loyalties and occult schemes with world-changing consequences.

Neither Bill nor Sue has ever heard of Aaron Steen, much less his quest for the Aquarius Key which he seeks via the misuse of rituals from the world of ceremonial Magick. (The “k” in the word “Magick” differentiates its rituals from the mere tricks and slight of hand of stage magic.) Neither of them knows that Bill’s brother Peter has been deeply involved in Qabalistic theory and rituals for years. And finally, when they first learn of such Magick, they don’t believe it’s real.

Rowley writes well and moves the plot forward by unfolding the story through the viewpoints of Bill, Sue, Peter, Steen and the other principals. His language has a fine snap, crackle and pop to it and is well suited to the fast-moving sequences of “every day reality,” the terrifying descriptions of rituals and to the mind-bending images found on higher planes of existence.

Readers of The Da Vinci Code will remember that author Dan Brown used a fair amount of space in his novel having knowledgeable characters inform others—and simultaneously the reader—about the secrets of the Holy Grail. Keith Rowley uses the same technique: characters who are well-versed in the cosmology of the Tree of Life, the principles of the Hermetic Qabalah, the Thelema philosophy and the associated ways and means of ritual Magick also utilize a lot of similar “instructional time” throughout The Aquarius Key.

The challenge for both Brown and Rowley is that while some (perhaps most) of this information will be over their readers’ heads and/or outside their readers’ belief systems, the plots of the novels don’t make sense without it. The extent to which readers of The Aquarius Key view theories of Magick as exciting material that enhances the plot or as tedious detail that delays the action may well depend of their frames of reference.

Readers who love hair-raising occult thrillers will enjoy The Aquarius Key with only minimal study of the philosophical passages. However, students of astrology, tarot, alchemy, mystical Kabbalah, and related paths will find that Rowley’s decision to explain the Magick as the plot unfolds makes the novel a much richer book.

In her book The Mystical Qabalah, adept Dion Fortune wrote that each symbol on the Tree of Life represents a cosmic force and that we establish a union with that force through our concentration upon the symbol, resulting in a “tremendous access of energy to the individual soul.”

Aaron Steen and his compatriots know well the pathways and forces hidden away upon the Tree of Life from all the Bills and Sues of the world, and how through personal will and the rituals of Magick to wrest from them sufficient energy to do great and horrible things.

Rowley’s highly imaginative plot and exceptional prose have, to the potential delight of Alfred Hitchcock—who surely reads The Aquarius Key from beyond the grave—extracted Bill and Sue Williams from their safe, sunny world and placed them without mercy into a much darker landscape. And as for you, dear reader, your roller coaster ride through the dangerous landscape of the novel will be accompanied by the realization that that you have more in common with the pawns in this cosmic game than with its masters.