Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

THE TERROR by Dan Simmons

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Dan Simmons’s THE TERROR is a sprawling, ambitious, well-researched, immersive, supernatural horror epic set in the Arctic.

In the 1840s, two British exploring ships probe the Arctic seas, searching for the Northwest Passage that promised a shorter trade route to China and India. After both ships wind up icebound in the harsh winter, the expected summer thaw does not occur. And after a native is accidentally killed on the ice, a deadly, malevolent entity in the form of a giant polar bear begins picking off the terrified crews. The expeditionary force’s captain leads his men on foot in a desperate flight across the ice.

What a brutal book. The entity is very cool, but in the end, fairly unnecessary to the real horror, which was starvation, scurvy, disease, the back-breaking labor of man-hauling heavy sledges across pack ice, and the terrible, terrible cold. In some parts, the constant difficulties of the hostile environment make for suffocating reading. Otherwise, I liked the characters and what drove them, the historical touches, the desperate fight to survive. While THE TERROR is a supernatural horror story, it’s really a survival horror story in its cold heart, a story about good and flawed men fighting to survive to the last sad gasp.

I read the book after watching the TV adaptation, and enjoyed both, though there are some significant differences. The show played the survival horror very well, particularly the idea of Englishmen struggling to do their duty until all notions of honor, country, and morality disintegrate in the face of disease, starvation, and lost hope. The book, meanwhile, did a far better job with the creature, including its explanation, and Captain Crozier’s fate. If you like the basic story, I’d recommend both.

My only criticism of the book is it’s fairly sprawling, and I found myself skimming in quite a few places. Overall, however, THE TERROR is quite a powerful tale both as historical fiction, supernatural horror, and survival horror.

THE NORTH WATER by Ian McGuire

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Ian McGuire’s THE NORTH WATER reads a little like Cormac McCarthy, a little like Joseph Conrad, to provide a unique and brutal tale about whaling in the 1800s and the illusion of morality.

The story centers on two men: Henry Drax, a harpooner about to sail with THE VOLUNTEER, a whaling ship, and Patrick Sumner, a disgraced Army surgeon fresh from the Indian Mutiny and looking to escape civilization a while by joining the expedition. Drax lives in the moment and does what he likes, an amoral man committing immoral acts. Sumner means well and believes in humanity’s innate goodness and potential, but is continually suffering the consequences of the ill machinations of men claiming to have good on their side.

The story is simple: THE VOLUNTEER ventures into the Arctic and finds disaster, putting Drax and Sumner on a collision course. The writing is extraordinary, a spare, compelling prose that turns pages, brings the past to life, and elevates the mundane brutality to something like myth. The moral of the story is also simple, revealed in Sumner’s decision to bend morality’s elastic quality to his own benefit and survival, pushed to the point of giving up his illusions.

The tale concludes with less of a bang than one would expect given the long setup, but overall, it’s a powerful ride. I greatly enjoyed it as historical fiction and for its compelling storytelling and themes.

CHERNOBYL (2019)

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The HBO series CHERNOBYL (2019) is without a doubt one of the most gripping and powerful dramas I’ve ever watched on TV. Intelligent, poignant, and horrific, this miniseries provides a fictionalized dramatization of an actual nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which came close to devastating an entire continent.

The show gets very quickly to the accident, which is horrifying itself because we, the viewers, know how dangerous radiation is and that there was a catastrophic explosion exposing the core to open air, while some of the characters don’t, either through ignorance or willfully ignoring the truth. The show frequently revisits this horror as we learn of the incompetence, lies, and brutality of the system that contributed to the accident while covering it up, and as various characters learn they have very little time left before they die a painful death.

As news of the disaster works its way up the Soviet bureaucracy, Valery Legasov (the fantastic Jared Harris giving the usual master class on acting), a nuclear scientist, is brought in to help Boris Scherbina (the always solid Stellan Skarsgård), a bureaucrat tasked with fixing the mess while safeguarding the interests of the State. At first, they hate each other, but a respect forms as Boris comes to understand the severity of the situation and that nothing else matters other than solving it.

The problem is eventually solved for the most part, but it’s only through the heroism of thousands of workers, soldiers, and scientists who flock to Chernobyl to help. These are truly shining moments among the horror and bureaucratic stupidity, where average people sacrifice themselves and/or tell the State to go to hell. Either because what needs doing is too important, or because they’ve been exposed to radiation and know they’re already dead. The show ends on this odd and poignant juxtaposition between disgust with human stupidity and hope in human heroism and compassion, combined with condemnation of the lies that go hand in hand with national exceptionalism.

Overall, CHERNOBYL is powerful, gripping, smart, interesting–a brilliant example of TV done right.

THE TERROR (2018)

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Based on the novel by Dan Simmons, THE TERROR, which originally aired on AMC and I caught on Amazon Prime, offers a horror take on Captain Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1845–1848. Driven by strong characters and a powerful cast, the show brilliantly combines a supernatural monster element with actual historical events rendered with rich accuracy and realism.

The show begins with two British warships, which have been converted into the most technologically advanced exploring vessels of the age. Their mission is to explore the Arctic in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, which would offer a dramatically shorter trade route between the United Kingdom and China. Leading the expedition are Captain Crozier of the TERROR (Jared Harris, rapidly becoming one of my favorite actors), Captain Franklin (the great Ciaran Hinds) of the EREBUS, and Franklin’s second, Commander Fitzjames (the solid Tobias Menzies). We also get to know many other crew members, all of them distinct and likeable or detestable.

Franklin is out for glory and rashly commits the ships to a route that freezes up and leaves the ships icebound, against the advice of Crozier, who is the more practical of the two but also haunted by his failings to the point of struggling with a drinking problem. Things are bad enough as the crew is forced to winter in the Arctic, but after a local native is killed, a strange creature appears and begins hunting them one by one.

The real horror element isn’t the creature, however, but the cold, the refusal of the ice to thaw, the deteriorating rations, and the resulting madness and starvation that slowly tears the crew apart and turns them from honor- and duty-bound Englishmen into savages. Fear in all its guises is on full display in this show, as the men continually face an impossible and steadily worsening situation and struggle to maintain duty and compassion. The result is powerful, heartbreaking drama.

In short, the show is brilliant. While it decisively concluded as a miniseries, based on its popularity, its makers are turning it into an anthology show, with the second season set in a Japanese internment camp during WW2. I highly recommend it.

THE BIG SHORT (2015)

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Based on the book by Michael Lewis, THE BIG SHORT (2015) brings together solid direction, a stellar cast, and a powerful script to tell the story of the 2008 housing crisis that nearly crashed the world economy. The story focuses on several investors–a socially awkward doctor who reads numbers so well he can predict market trends, a rogue investor group led by a misanthrope, and two brilliant young investors looking for a big trade that will get them a seat at the big boys’ table–as they predict the crash and seek to cash in on it.

This is a complicated topic made simple through good storytelling. Basically, mortgages were aggregated as new investment products with high rates of return. As time went on, higher-risk loans were packaged with them, then very risky loans. Over time, few knew what was even in these products, which kept getting AAA credit ratings by agencies under financial pressure to do so. Then spinoff products began to arise around these products, resulting in say $10 billion becoming $100 billion, without anything justifying it other than the illusion there was value there. The SEC did nothing about it because they were underfunded, and the people who worked there wanted lucrative jobs when they got out of government. When higher-rate clauses in a wave of adjustable rate mortgages began to kick in in 2007, massive defaults cracked the system, which led to its unwinding and crash while revealing just how rotten and corrupt the entire market was.

The investors who saw this coming were modern-day Cassandras. As nobody has ever shorted the housing market, the banks create products just for them, thinking they’re crazy and that they’re making easy money. As everybody had a vested interest in keeping the illusion of stability going, the market kept rising and the AAA ratings held, even as the default rate kept rising. Finally, the system broke, big banks and investment firms were going down or in trouble, and millions of people lost everything. Not the banks, though, which got their bailouts, paid out huge bonuses to their executives, and years later went right back to the same highly risky investment products that got us into that mess.

THE BIG SHORT is a terrific movie that respects the intelligence of its audience, is cynical rather than preachy, and functions as a dark comedy about how the global economy nearly imploded out of sheer greed and willful ignorance. One thing is certain: If somebody can make a buck making a mistake and pass off its consequences to the public, they will do it again and again, and even romanticize the mistake as being brilliant and brave.

BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION (2015)

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black panthers

BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION (2015) is the first documentary to take a deep look at one of the most influential Black political movements of the Twentieth Century–the Black Panther Party. The film is based on archival footage and interviews with 50 people, including former members, FBI informants, police officers, and others. Watching it, I was amazed at what they achieved, the opportunities they wasted, and the level of government oppression directed at them.

The Black Panther Party formed in California in response to de facto segregation and police brutality. Citing open carry laws, they began arming themselves and shadowing police officers and otherwise patrolling neighborhoods. In response, the State of California and then Governor Ronald Reagan passed legislation to make open carry illegal, with support of the NRA. When Black Panthers showed up in Sacramento during debate on the bill with weapons to make a point, many people were amazed at their audacity, and a national then international movement was born.

From the beginning, the Black Panthers held to a 10-point manifesto. They wanted economic opportunity, decent housing, education, jobs, freedom, a jury by their peers, the release of prisoners, exemption from the draft, and justice. They started child nutrition and other welfare programs in their communities. Their look–black leather jackets, sunglasses, berets, and a gun–influenced fashion, became a Black Power symbol, and helped drive the “Black is beautiful” movement. Despite the male urban guerilla image, the majority of members were women.

The party’s political activity quickly drew the attention of Herbert Hoover, the authoritarian director of the FBI, who focused COINTELPRO activities on destroying the party. Party leaders were subjected to constant harassment, arrest, surveillance, informants, and misinformation designed to create rifts in the leadership. While the open, head-on repression was brutal, it was the more subtle tactics such as sowing dissension that destroyed the party in the end, along with poor leadership in lack of direction. Some of Hoover’s paranoia was earned–the BPP constantly postured and openly called for armed revolution against the United States government. Hoover was particularly paranoid about a “black messiah” figure who would unite Blacks with liberal Whites and start a major political movement, which led to the police assassination of Fred Hampton. The FBI’s tactics were straight up police state stuff, brutal and un-Constitutional.

In the end, the viewer is left to decide if the party served its ideals or got sidetracked in posturing, but either way, it is certain that the Black Panther Party had a profound effect on a new political and cultural awakening for African-Americans in the ’60s.