Doyle's Blood

"Blood", written by Roddy Doyle, is the first story in the new Stories anthology.  [Side Note: As enchanting as Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is, this anthology just keeps calling to me.  I think I'm going to alternate between reading a couple chapters of the novel with a story or two in the anthology]  It's a bizarre little tale, with its protagonist dreaming up initially a fairly plausible reason for wanting to drink blood -- anemia -- to just doing it because he wants to. 

I think the most interesting part of the tale is the repeated notion that the man who wants to drink blood -- or bite necks or have sex with most things -- is normal.  It ends with a twist that does make you think "...and then what happened?" as per Gaiman's introduction, my only hope is that with each of these stories, there is some sense of conclusion rather than ambiguous endings.

Summer Reading List

As I'm currently working my way through Carlos Ruiz Zafon's excellent The Shadow of the Wind, I've also been starting a pile of interesting new books to start tackling.  The one that keeps calling me is the new anthology, Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio; I've read the introduction, "Just Four Words" by Gaiman, and it's fairly enticing.  Also sitting on the pile is Justin Cronin's The Passage (although I'm probably going to read his previous novels, Mary & O'Neil and The Summer Guest, first), Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, and finally set down to read Joe Hill's Horns.  I'm also eagerly anticipating China Mieville's new book, which I'm sure he titled just so he could say, "I'm going to realease the Kraken."

New King

I got the trade edition of Stephen King's new novella, Blockade Billy, yesterday (still waiting on the limited edition hardcover to arrive) and read the entire thing in maybe an hour.  The title story is only about 80 pages and the bonus short story, "Morality", only runs another forty or so.  There's no supernatural element to either of the stories, although to me that's not a deal breaker.

You may ask why I bothered to buy both, well, I preordered the limited edition before the announcement of the trade edition because I wanted the novella, and then ordered the trade edition because I wanted the bonus short story.  After having read it, I think I may have just stuck with the limited edition (I'm looking forward to reading it again, with the illustrations), but I don't necessarily feel any regret over purchasing the book twice in different formats.  I've done the same thing for previous Stephen King works (like purchasing the hardcover editions of the first four Dark Tower novels, getting the Pocket Books editions of Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, and Pet Sematary for the new introductions, the illustrated edition of Salem's Lot, both the individual serialised Green Mile and the hardcover collection, the new edition of Danse Macabre, and the pop-up version of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), so I guess it kind of comes down to a collector mentality.

Anyway, with regard to the content, "Blockade Billy" was a good read.  It's not particularly deep, and there's nothing all too shocking, but it's an entertaining story, well told.  I like the backdrop of old school baseball and King does a good job of fleshing it out.  "Morality", on the other hand, isn't bad, although I think I could have waited for it to be collected at a later date with more stories.  It hinges on the main character doing a morally reprehensible act for someone else, but when it comes down to it, the act could have been so much worse.  Maybe it just shows you where my morals happen to be, but it didn't seem to be the thing that would cause the overall moral decay of the character to the extremes presented.

Personally, I think a variation of the idea -- basically living a "good" life but doing a "bad" act in order to choose between the two; leading to the argument between Aristotelian and Modern ethics -- was done much better in Brian Bolland's contribution to Batman: Black & White.

Today's Transcendental Thought

I picked up the From the Borderlands anthology yesterday, mainly for the Bentley Little short story -- I'm starting to wonder these days if he can write something new without "The" in the title -- and the new Stephen King "novella" contained therein, but was pleasantly surprised by the very first story and the only one I've read thus far, Rami Temporalis by Gary Braunbeck. It's good. Damn good even.

Basically, it's a little tale about one of those people who manage to get approached by just about everyone on the face of the planet. The person who gets singled out by the homeless man asking for change, who sits and listens to the sad and depressed woman telling her life story and those of her cats, and more importantly why it happens.