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Some people say I’m too prone to romanticizing the past. And they’re right; I am. I wasn’t always this way; I used to look at the past much more critically back in the good old days.

I was thinking about this because this is where I normally say something like, C. Litka writes books that are a throwback to a better era of literature. But maybe that’s not true. After all, he wrote them in this era, so they are, ipso facto, of this era. And if they are of this era, why not say so? Nothing could possibly be more satisfactory!

Still, if anyone else is writing stuff like this right now, I don’t know who it is. The Darval-Mers Dossier is actually a story-within-a-story; it is one of the Red Wine Agency detective stories, alluded to in Litka’s recent Chateau Clare and Glencrow Summer, in a world which is slowly losing the advanced technology on which it depends.

In this setting, we meet Redinal Hu, who is not really a detective yet, but only a messenger. A mysterious client gives him a message to deliver to a wealthy young-man-about-town, that states simply, “If you care for her, stop seeing her.” Redinal has no idea what this means or who the “her” in the case may be, but he delivers it all the same. And then, as always happens in stories, one thing leads to another.

Compared to some of Litka’s other books, the story is actually a bit darker and more hard-boiled. But these are relative terms; as is customarily the case in Litka’s books, people are (mostly) pleasant and any violence is threatened rather than overt. Nowhere is this more plainly shown than in Litka’s rendering of the traditional Big Scene of the mystery novel, where the detective has all the players gathered in the drawing room. The way he does it is quite clever, and I bet Agatha Christie fans in particular will get a kick out of it.

So, by Litka standards, this is a gritty, fast-paced thriller. By modern standards, it is a cozy mystery. But which is it really, in absolute terms?

Haha, trick question! There are no absolute terms when it comes to this sort of thing. If there were, that would imply rules of writing, and we all know where that discussion goes. No, the fact is Litka’s books are sui generis, and that’s what makes them so wonderful.  If they sometimes recall elements of writers like Wodehouse and the pulp mystery writers of yesteryear, well, they also have some themes which seem much more modern. I love Wodehouse, but I can’t recall any story of his that makes you think about the changing role of technology in our lives.

If you’ve already read some Litka books, I doubt you need me to convince you to try this one. But maybe you haven’t read any yet. If so, you might pick this one up, because it fits more easily into a familiar genre than some of his others do. If you’re in the mood for a pleasant mystery to read on a summer vacation, then this may be just the ticket.

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Chuck Litka recommends this book. And he’s a tough grader, so when he gives something an “A”, I pay attention. Not to mention that this series is compared to works by Wodehouse, Austen, and the like. So, even though it is more well known than what I normally read, I decided to give it a try.

The story is told in the form of diary entries by the young woman named in the title. She has moved to a cramped garret at a place called Lapis Lazuli House, which she technically owns, but which is managed by her guardian Mr. Archibald Flat. The mutual detestation between them forms the core conflict of the book, but there are other little subplots, like Ms. Lion’s attempts to read Paradise Lost, her aunt’s plans for her social future, a local vicar with a gift for oratory, and so on.

And then there is The Roman. Probably my favorite aspect of the story is the mysterious ghost of a Roman soldier who is rumored to appear from time. He is not seen much, but we hear reports of him occasionally. Why is he there? What does he want? Does he even really exist? It’s these kind of little mysteries that make a book fun for me. Chuck has talked about this at some length in this post, which I highly encourage you to read. It was actually this post that motivated me to give the Emma M. Lion books a try; I love the use of “negative space” like this. The best parts of a story are the ones the readers have to work out for themselves.

Which reminds me, I should talk about the setting of the story a bit. It appears to be Victorian England, but there are certain fantastic or magical elements to it that make it not quite straight-up historical fiction. For example, the neighborhood Ms. Lion lives in has a peculiar reputation for objects simply vanishing and reappearing somewhere else later. Why? We know not. Again, the empty space that we fill with our imaginations.

This is catnip to me. I don’t want to know everything about a setting. I don’t want to know everybody’s origin story. I like to have some unexplained things to ponder.

But what really makes it fun is the writing. It’s not quite Wodehouse, but what is? It is clever, witty, and, with a few minor exceptions, plausible as writing from the 19th century. (The exceptions are things like, I think she would probably refer to the famous scientist as “Mr. Darwin” rather than just “Darwin.” And I can’t recall ever seeing Victorians use the word “gifted” to mean giving someone a gift.)

In summary, Chuck was entirely right about this book, and I am glad I read it. Any fan of classic English literature should read it. And even if your tastes run more towards the modern, it’s still enjoyable. It manages to keep the stately pace of an older novel while still having enough going on that readers accustomed to the speed of modern books won’t lose interest. It’s a gem.

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What do you think of when you think of Lynda Carter and music? I bet you either think of her performance as the lounge singer in Fallout 4, or else “All the world is counting on you / And the power you possess…”

But near the end of her time as the Princess of Paradise Island, she released her first album, Portrait, which I have listened to many times. (Unlike my friend Mark Paxson, I have never really gotten used to using Spotify, so I have no precise stats on how many times I’ve listened to it. But it’s a lot.)

Now, I might as well get this out of the way up front: I don’t consider this a great album. To explain my usual criteria: I like songs that have interesting lyrics, evoke strong moods, and tell a coherent story. Warren Zevon, Leonard Cohen, and Richard Thompson are my go-to artists for that sort of thing. For a specific example, see the last album that I wrote about at length, Zevon’s Transverse City. That was a heavy concept album, pulsing and growling with ominous themes of a dystopian cyberpunk future, narrated with acid wit.

You’ll find none of that on Portrait, which is pretty much one ephemeral, bubblegummily sweet and unmemorable pop love song after another. On the other hand, I think we can all agree the cover art is much easier on the eyes than the garish neon punk horror of Transverse City:

But, if the album is such a thoroughgoing exercise in banality, why am I writing a blog post about it? Well, to be honest with you, I’m trying to solve a mystery. Namely, since it’s so trite and unremarkable, how come I have listened to it so much?

There’s no denying that Ms. Carter’s voice is very pleasant. But there are plenty of female singers whose voices I enjoy: Sheena Easton, Feist, Bonnie Tyler—but I have never listened to an entire album by any of them. And for beauty of voice combined with intelligence of lyrics, give me Pamela Field or Julia Goss singing Gilbert & Sullivan over any of them. And yet…!

Why is this album the one I listen to, on repeat, of a rainy evening, while sipping my tea and looking out over the sea, waiting for my lost love to return? (Okay, I made that last part up. I sometimes confuse old episodes of Pokémon with my own memories.)

There is actually one original song on the album which I feel rises above the level of generic pop ballad: “Tumbledown Love,” which takes some care with the imagery and the atmosphere and, I think, flows back and forth between different moods. It’s sad, and it’s sweet… but I never knew it complete, because to be quite honest, I can’t manage to make out all the words.

Speaking of Billy Joel, probably my least-favorite track on this album is the cover “She’s Always a Woman.” I don’t like the original, and changing the refrain to “she’s only a woman like me” makes no sense at all. At least it is musically pleasant.

If “Tumbledown” is the best track and “Always a Woman” the worst, then we can safely say this album has a low variance. In fact, if you told me the title of one track at random other than the two previously mentioned, it would take me a minute to think of which song it was. They all sort of blend together. And not in the way that the songs on Transverse City all touch on a certain theme, but in a mushy, slurry way, consistent with the original meaning of the word “pablum.”

That sounds negative, but I don’t mean it as such. Like Reginald Bunthorne’s groupies, I say, “nonsense, yes, perhaps – but oh, what precious nonsense!” Trust me, I have heard songs that are truly insufferably saccharine. Even some of my favorite artists have been guilty of these. And when I come across such a song, I simply do not listen to it. I have not quite so thoroughly transformed into Ignatius J. Reilly that I purposely seek out art that I hate.

But, good news! I think I’ve figured out the appeal of this album for me. The answer was foreshadowed in the first paragraph, when I alluded to Lynda Carter’s appearance in Fallout as a lounge singer in an apocalyptic wasteland. I realize I listen to Portrait in the same frame of mind: coming in from the desolation of the wider world, I seek refuge in listening to the pleasantly forgettable strains of her songs. It is probably not a coincidence that I often pair listening to Portrait with distant artillery ambience videos. I find this strangely soothing; as if I’m in an officer’s bar, not actually at the front, but still aware that it’s out there.

Or something. I dunno; it’s a guess. Give it a try yourself and make up your own mind. There are certainly much worse things you could listen to.

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What’s your favorite genre of book? Some people like thrillers, some prefer romance. I know people who love a good cozy mystery and others who enjoy bleak horror. Some are sworn to a specific genre, like high fantasy or sci-fi, others would rather take in a good old slice-of-life narrative from that vast and varied garden of delights broadly dubbed “literary fiction.” Others may still take pleasure in the boy-wizards and sparkling vampire literature of their youth. Well—there is no judgment here.

What’s my favorite genre of book? How nice of you to ask! (You did ask, didn’t you? Of course you did!) Personally, while I have enjoyed books of many and sundry types, I would have to say that my favorite is the kind of book that has multiple layers of meaning to it which must peeled back slowly, like a really thick onion, until at last the different dimensions of the story leave me with a blurred sense of the line between fiction and reality itself.

Of course, it’s hard to fit all that on a sign in Barnes & Noble, so I generally find works of my favorite genre quite by accident. And so much the better; the unexpected nature of finding one makes it more fun.

I am glad to report that the book we discuss today is just such a tale! It is actually a book-within-a-book. It’s best if I start from the inside and work my way out, so we’ll begin by examining the inner book, which is a pulp sci-fi adventure set in a post-apocalyptic world infested by mutants, the result of a great nuclear war.

Into this dystopia steps Feric Jaggar, a man driven by a desire to save non-contaminated humanity from annihilation by the mutant hordes and the monstrous telepathic creatures controlling them, the “Dominators” or “Doms” for short; monstrous, deceptive beings from the evil empire of Zind.

Jaggar relentlessly works his way into the leadership of the human-controlled country of Heldon, most dramatically by winning the right to wield the “Steel Commander”, a fabled ancient weapon only worthy of the greatest of men according to legend. Like Mjölnir, in other words. He wins control of it during a fiery initiation rite into a motorcycle gang known as the Black Avengers. After his victory, Jaggar changes their name and sweeps to control of Heldon, winning the respect of all true humans and the fear of the mutants in the process.

Once in command of the human nation, he quickly raises an army and mounts a furious attack on the Empire of Zind, himself at the helm, fighting tremendous battles against innumerable hordes of monsters.

The battle scenes in this book are bound to be polarizing. Some may find them tedious and repetitive. Personally, I thought they were enjoyable in a campy sort of way. The prose is absurdly overwrought, and probably sets the record for most uses of the word “protoplasm” in a work of fiction. However, it’s also nothing that won’t feel familiar to a regular reader of Lovecraft. HPL rarely wrote extended battle scenes, but if he had, they would read like this.

Jaggar’s quest sends him hurtling from one cataclysmic battle to the next, each time proclaiming, in gloriously hyperbolic terms, how this one is really the great, finally struggle for the future of the universe. Okay, now that’s done with. Oh, but wait! Seriously, now, this one is the big one. Really, no kidding, this is for all the marbles…

It’s so over-the-top it’s almost funny, and indeed, on its own, it works as a fast-paced, violent sci-fi epic. If this appeals to you, I encourage you to stop reading this review right now and go pick up the book. You can come back after you’ve finished reading it. Get the Kindle version, because it automatically skips the introduction, which is an excellent thing. Much like listeners in the 1930s missed the intro to Orson Welles’ adaptation of War of the Worlds, and thought they were hearing a live news report of an alien invasion, this is one where it’s best to get the full context later.

From this point forward, I’m going to assume you have either read the book or are never going to, so from here on out spoilers will abound. Think carefully before proceeding.

To begin with, the book-within-the-book is titled “Lord of the Swastika.” Also, the cover above is the one for the Kindle edition. I opted to use it instead of the more colorful, but also more shocking, paperback edition or the appropriately pulpy first edition as seen on Wikipedia. (There are many different covers; this one is probably the best.)

You see, the framing device for this story is that it’s an alternate universe in which, after briefly dabbling in politics, Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, and made a career as a sci-fi pulp novelist and illustrator, with “Lord of the Swastika” being his most popular book.

I left out some important details in my plot summary above. The motorcycle gang Jaggar takes over is renamed the “Sons of the Swastika,” or “SS” for short. They wear black uniforms with red swastika armbands, hold torchlight parades, and chant “Hail Jaggar!” at every opportunity.

Also, except for the ending, the entire career of Jaggar is beat-for-beat a thinly-veiled retelling of Hitler’s actual biography, from his elimination of the old gang leader once he’s outlived his usefulness to invading the Zind empire to seize their oil fields.

Of course, in this alternative history, none of that actually happened, and Hitler was just another eccentric writer alongside Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Robert Heinlein, and perhaps most pointedly, L. Ron Hubbard.

This is brought home in the afterword, by fictional critic “Homer Whipple,” who proceeds to deconstruct “Lord of the Swastika,” and in so doing reveals more facts about this alternate world, most significantly that, by 1959, the Soviet Union has conquered most of the planet except for the USA and Japan.

Whipple harshly critiques the novel’s poor writing and ridiculously simplistic characters, before turning to a Freudian analysis of the imagery the author chose, as well as adding a few words about what this suggests about the man’s psyche. This Hitler, he ultimately concludes, was a deeply disturbed individual, and it’s lucky that he only channeled his unhealthy desires and fixations into his fiction. Whipple figuratively shakes his head at the idea of such a psychologically abnormal man actually leading a political movement.

Okay, so… what exactly are we to make of all this? We’ve got our book-within-the-book, we’ve got the (apparently dystopian) “real” world, and a fictional literary critic telling us why the book we just read is not very good and in fact kind of disturbing. What does it all add up to?

Well, let’s back up yet another level in this weird metafictional matryoshka, and think about what the actual author, Norman Spinrad, was trying to do here.

To some degree of course, it’s a satire of Nazism. But that’s not really the main goal. After all, mocking Hitler in, say, 1936 took a lot of courage; mocking him in 1972 took rather less. No, Spinrad is after something else.

I think he had in mind two targets: the first is pulp science-fiction generally. With relative ease, he spins a perfectly serviceable sci-fi yarn that also happens to function as Nazi propaganda. Which has to be disquieting to any fan of sci-fi. Some of the messianic speeches Feric Jaggar gives feel not too far off from stuff Paul Atreides says in Dune . (Somewhere in there I’m sure there’s a line about Paul’s awakening race consciousness. I remember thinking it odd at the time.)

Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not saying Dune is veiled Nazi propaganda. If you go beyond the first book, that series is itself also clearly intended as a criticism of messianic political movements. At the same time, almost everyone who goes beyond the first Dune book agrees that the subsequent books are boring and weird, whereas the first (and most Nazi-ish, or at least fascistic) one is a rollicking adventure. Is this more than just a coincidence?

Well… not when we remember that history did not start in the 1930s. The deficiencies in our system of historical education have led several generations to forget this fact, but in reality, the Nazi movement, despite its overall reactionary character, was in certain respects unusually modern in its technique.

By that, I mean they liked to use what Peggy Noonan once called “political bullshit about narratives.” (Every time someone says “narrative” in a political context, I think of this quote.) The idea of a legendary hero on a quest to save the nation is obviously way older than Nazism. The Nazi propaganda department was extremely adept at casting Hitler into this role, but the role had been written in the minds of the population literally millennia before. Again, the Kwisatz Haderach vibes!

Basically, Nazi propaganda and popular sci-fi were both drawing from the same well of ancient folkloric patterns encoded deeply in human memory to craft their respective stories. So, don’t worry too much that liking old school sci-fi adventure means you are secretly a Nazi. Just be careful about joining any cult-like political movements. I have developed this one weird trick to make sure I don’t do that on accident, which is to never join anything. Cultists hate me!

Speaking of cults, this brings me to Spinrad’s second target, which is much more speculative on my part, but I think I’ve got a sound case.

I mentioned above that the fictionalized Hitler of this book would have been a contemporary of L. Ron Hubbard, who, in addition to founding the Church of Scientology, was a pulp sci-fi author, and achieved some notable success with his fiction.

Spinrad, who in other works criticized Scientology in much less veiled terms, seems here to be suggesting that a man who achieved cult success as an author of sci-fi might be able to start another, much more dangerous movement. Beware of eccentric sci-fi authors, The Iron Dream implies; you never know what else they might be capable of doing.

Of course, this subtle satirical intent was almost certainly lost on most readers, especially in the pre-internet days. As sometimes happens with satirical works, here the author may have succeeded too well in imitating his intended target, to the point where it actually serves the very goal it is supposed to be undermining. As in, some neo-Nazi groups actually endorsed The Iron Dream, despite Spinrad’s best efforts to prevent this misreading. Let this be a caution to all writers who try to get cute and insert subtle messages into their texts; sometimes the readers are just gonna read it how they want to read it.

Most people read a book once, get a vague idea of the gist, and then move on. It takes a special kind of nutcase to, for example, spend almost 2,000 words analyzing the hidden depths and meanings of a book from more than 50 years ago. But hey, that’s why we have to “let a hundred flowers bloom,” right?

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April 30th is an interesting date. On that date in 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States. In 1945, Hitler killed himself. And because of the Washington thing, it is also a significant date in the game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. But I digress.

It is also a date of major pagan religious significance. And here, I cannot do better than to quote H.P. Lovecraft’s immortal line on the subject:

May Eve was Walpurgis Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham[…]

Thanks, Lovecraft. If not for that second sentence, I would have never figured out that it was a bad time!

But, as usual, the Lovecraftian take is exceptionally dark and pessimistic. As the Linda Raedisch, the author of the book at hand explains, Walpurgis Night is basically just Halloween in April.

Although, not quite. After all, it’s about celebrating the coming of spring, with all the warmth and fertility that implies. While Halloween is about bracing for winter, Walpurgis Night is all about ensuring health for the warm part of the year.

But nevertheless, witches and other supernatural creatures are very much mixed up in the lore of this holiday, and Ms. Raedisch’s book introduces us to a number of the strange beings, both good and bad, that populate the stories surrounding it.

She also presents a number of do-it-yourself crafts, recipes, and art projects based on a Walpurgian theme. That’s right, just like the Better Days Books Vintage Halloween Reader, this is a How-To book. In case you were worried Walpurgis Night had gotten too commercial, and wanted to celebrate in a more traditional way this year, this book will give you plenty of ideas. Or if, like me, you’re just interested in archaic folklore for its own sake, Raedisch’s light and often witty commentary provides an excellent overview of what Walpurgis Night is all about, its origins, related legends, and so on.

My only complaint about the book is the Kindle formatting, which is not terrible, but is slightly wonky in places. I think it was originally a pdf, possibly in order to make use of the vaguely ominous font, but it really just makes it harder to read than it needed to be.

Apart from this minor gripe, this book is an excellent intro for anyone looking for something to tide them over until October 31st rolls around once more.

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“When they’re offered to the world in merry guise / Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will. / For he who’d make his fellow creatures wise / Should always gild the philosophic pill.” –W.S. Gilbert. The Yeomen of the Guard, Act I. 1888.

The title is a lie. This isn’t just a review of Zachary Shatzer’s new book, The Beach Wizard and the Easy Mind. This makes the third entry in the Beach Wizard chronicles, and while I have no idea if Mr. Shatzer plans to continue the series or keep it as a trilogy, this seems like as good a time as any for a big picture retrospective

That said, since this is the newest entry in the series, it requires an in-depth recap. In this episode, the town of Benford Beach is overrun by a gang of rude and obnoxious mermaids. This is the sort of problem that the Beach Wizard was born to solve, under normal circumstances. But, as luck would have it, the Beach Wizard’s mind is controlled by a mysterious bug which makes him calm, detached, and indifferent. Not bad things, necessarily; but when they cause a man to neglect his duties as the magical guardian of his home, they become a problem.

There is also a subplot involving a bar in the sewer run by a wandering adventurer, and a new character known as the “hobo professor.” He quickly became one of my favorites.

Naturally, the story is resolved after plenty of hijinks and appearances by the many zany characters who populate Benford Beach. Though, I must confess a smidge of disappointment at the absence of Warren Grumley and Deputy Mayor Swivelson, two of my favorites from earlier installments. On the other hand, Mayor Smacks features heavily in the story, which is always a plus.

Bottom line: if you enjoyed the first two books, you will like this one. But probably if you read the first two books, you don’t need me to tell you that. So what do you need me to tell you?

I guess the main thing I would like to convey, about both this book and the series as a whole, is that the general wackiness of Shatzer’s style is not the main appeal for me. That’s not to say I mind it; I enjoy the whimsical touches. But they aren’t the main attraction.

Now, it’s probably the case that are some readers who will just never be able to get into Shatzer’s oeuvre due to the zaniness quotient. Obviously, if you demand complete realism in your fiction, a story featuring things like reanimated pirates and extremely intelligent blue lobsters probably isn’t going to be for you.

But I think the majority of readers are in more of a middle ground. They don’t demand complete realism, but they aren’t going to automatically like anything just because it’s silly and off-the-wall. I consider myself to be in this category: I don’t mind surreal humor, as long as it’s done well. Which, I contend, Shatzer’s almost always is.

If your first reaction to the madcap universe of Shatzerism is negative, I would echo Harrison Ford’s rejoinder to Mark Hamill when he asked about continuity in Star Wars: “Hey, kid, it ain’t that kind of story.” Some stories are that kind of story, and when they have completely mood-ruining goofiness break out, I am the first to decry it. Not everything can be a cavalcade of silliness.

At the same time, even when something is a cavalcade of silliness, that also doesn’t mean it can’t show a few glimpses of something deeper beneath the surface. (Anyone who doubts this should check out the work of that Gilbert fellow quoted above.)

Shatzer’s writing often has layers to it. You don’t exactly have to be a Straussian to see that Dog Wearing a Bowler Hat can be read as more than just a funny story about a silly painting. (Though it works as such.) The Beach Wizard Chronicles are less obviously allegorical, but they too have layers. There is more of real human nature in these books than in some supposedly “gritty” novels that I have read.

What makes the Beach Wizard stories so good is not their whimsical humor, but the way important philosophical concepts are woven into them. This book, for example, is about how to deal with the worries of life without letting them either consume you or, even worse, becoming numb to them.

The Beach Wizard is a stoic, through and through. He deals with the unpleasant realities of the world, accepts them, and then gets along with his day. He’s not perfect, and he doesn’t pretend to be.

There are moments of sincere emotion in every book in the series, and it’s to Shatzer’s credit that he never undercuts or shies away from them. It’s his essential good-heartedness, more than the humor itself, that makes Benford Beach such a pleasant place to come back to again and again. Like Wodehouse, Shatzer has created a world filled with basically pleasant and likable people. Even the ostensible villains, like the mermaids in this volume, aren’t truly evil; merely rowdy and disrespectful.

And this is what I admire most about Shatzer: almost nobody else, with the exception of Chuck Litka, writes stories like that these days. I’m not saying that everyone should. Everyone should write what they want to write. But it’s pretty cool when what people want to write also happens to be something that almost nobody else is writing. (This, by the way, is why the concept of “comps” in publishing is so toxic.)

The point is, I strongly encourage you to try this series, even if you don’t regularly read this sort of thing. I don’t think anyone regularly reads this sort of thing, because there isn’t enough of “this sort of thing” for anyone to read it regularly. Maybe you’ll hate it, but then again, maybe you won’t. You never know unless you try, and besides, the best way to keep from having your choices curated for you entirely by marketing algorithms is to occasionally do something so weird the algorithm can’t account for it. Remember, “you are not a number!”

Well, I have gone on long enough. I haven’t done Shatzer’s work justice, but oh well; a critic never can really say the right things about the good books. What makes them good is unique to them; a singular quality which can be appreciated one and only one way: by reading them.

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This is a noir mystery with some supernatural elements. The genre the author gives for it is “decopunk”. Well, what’s not to like about that?

It features a colorful cast of characters, and a plot involving a MacGuffin in the form of a typewriter case and an identical case filled with cursed dominos. It’s a good story. But as with Raymond Chandler’s tales, it’s not so much the story that’s the big draw here; it’s the writing.

Here’s how it begins:

This is that thing most hated and feared, the thing they tell you to skip, like the opening minutes of a meeting. It is the thing everyone says to cut—Cut it off like Cinderella’s poor stepsister cut off her heel to fit in the shoe (once you are a queen you won’t have to walk anymore). This, my dear readers, is The Prologue. 

The whole book is narrated like that, with a voice that occasionally calls out the fictional nature of the story itself, down to describing which beat of the plot we are about to encounter.

Now, this style of narration is currently out of fashion. Which is naturally why I liked it so much. The author wasn’t afraid to use a voice that felt right, current fashions be damned.  The richness of the prose made the story feel fresh, much more so than if exactly the same plot had developed with a different narrative style. I like a story that’s not afraid to give a knowing wink to the audience.

There’s nary a sentence that feels like it was lazily tossed in to move the action along. Every word is deliberately chosen to evoke exactly what the author wanted. It is a work of exquisite craftsmanship.

With that said, the book as whole seems like it is merely a prologue to a much larger story. Which, since this the first installment in a series, is only fitting. It’s an excellent introduction to an offbeat setting with equally unusual characters.  Most importantly, it feels like it was written as a labor of love, and a desire to tell a unique tale. In a world of spin-offs, reboots, and sequels, this is a quality that is most welcome. Highly recommended.

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This is a Napoleonic-era seafaring yarn about a teenage boy, Max, serving as a powder monkey aboard a British man-of-war. Young Max is still finding his way when the ship is wrecked during a battle with a French vessel, and he is washed away in a fierce storm.

He awakens on an island, where he forages for food, and eventually finds another shipwreck survivor, an older French boy named Dash, who has been blinded by his injuries. The remainder of the story depicts how the relationship between the two evolves as they struggle to survive on the island.

I enjoyed this concept very much. It was a bit like a Napoleonic version of Hell in the Pacific. War, as Clausewitz said, is politics by other means. So what happens when politics, and war, and indeed all other constructs which comprise society fall away, and what is left is two men (boys in this case) alone, unconstrained by anything except the need to survive?

A compelling question, and one that no doubt has as many answers as there are kinds of people in the world. Kjeldsen’s answer is a hopeful, if rather bittersweet one. The Pup and the Pianist is a short story, but it contains some heavy ideas, vivid descriptions, and plenty of drama. I could write a longer review, but to do so I would have to spoil several key elements in the story, so instead I invite you to read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

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“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.”

–Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“Everyone got famous. / Everyone got rich. / Everyone went off the rails / And ended in the ditch.”

–Warren Zevon, “Ourselves to Know.”

Don’t close the window just because this book is about football!

I know, I know; most of you care not a whit about our strange, violent American pastime. The names “Tom Brady” and “Bill Belichick” probably mean nothing to most of my readers. Well, in a way, I envy you.

But football is still America’s game, like it or not, and the story of the New England Patriots dynasty is one of its epics. And mark this well: it is about more than just football. The story it tells is part of the story of the early 21st-century United States, and there are lessons to be gleaned from it that extend far beyond the field. That’s why I wanted to review this book, and why I think even non-football fans should read it.

At the same time… there will still be quite a lot of talk about football here. So, I have highlighted in bold the parts that contain more general information, of interest to the laity. So you can skip over the parts about whether a short pass to Faulk on 4th-and-2 was the best call, if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you.

The book begins at the end, with New England losing to the Tennessee Titans (coached by once and future Patriot, Mike Vrabel) in the 2019-20 playoffs. It then flashes back to the very beginning, when Tom Brady was just another high school kid with dreams of making getting to play for a top college, and when Belichick was an assistant coach for the famously harsh Bill Parcells.

Basically, Belichick and Brady both had massive amounts of resentment over perceived wrongs–Brady because he couldn’t even be named the full-time starting QB for one of the lesser Big Ten schools, Belichick because Parcells treated him badly, and also probably because he coached the Browns. Coaching the Browns would be enough to turn any man to evil, I suppose.

Anyway, these two psychopaths found their way to New England, a historically poor franchise, and in the autumn of 2001—a pivotal time in the history of the United States—Brady became the starting quarterback and the Patriots upset the heavily-favored Rams in the Super Bowl.

It’s hard to remember now, but at the time, they were America’s darlings: with the country united in a spirit of patriotism (also hard to remember now) the fact that the plucky all-American kid could come out of nowhere to lead a team literally called “the Patriots” to an improbable victory was just too much. It was like a Disney movie out there.

Wickersham recounts how Brady, the kid-next-door, started receiving calls from actresses and models and celebrities, and generally fêted by the power elite. It was a classic rags-to-riches story.

Naturally, Brady and Belichick wanted to do it all again. And they did, two years later, winning another championship after a 14-2 season that began with a 31-0 loss to the Buffalo Bills. (Just wanted to get that in there.) And then they won another the next year. And by this point, everyone was pretty much sick of them.

Wickersham notes how, en route to building their dynasty, the Patriots, and more specifically Belichick’s defense, actually changed the way football is played. After a playoff game in which they defeated the Indianapolis Colts by physically dominating their receivers, the league altered the rules to essentially make this type of hard-hitting pass defense illegal.

Naturally, the Patriots also took advantage of the new rules a few years later, creating what was to that point the greatest passing offense in NFL history in 2007.

While I may not like them, I would still contend that the ’07 Patriots are in fact the greatest team in NFL history, or at least, the greatest team of the salary cap era. I don’t care that they lost the Super Bowl on a fluke play; they had an absolutely insane offense and a wily, tough defense coached by the best defensive coach of the era. I still can picture them annihilating my hapless Bills on Sunday Night Football that year.

In any case, Super Bowl XLII is where the first phase of the Patriots dynasty ends. If we want to talk in world-historical Spengler/Toynbee-esque terms, this is the part where the nascent culture has flourished into a full-blown civilization. “The Patriot Way” was now well-established.

Of course, as Wickersham is quick to note, few within the Patriots organization ever uttered the words “Patriot Way” or “culture.” The best line I ever read on this was, “Belichick doesn’t believe in ‘culture.’ He believes in ruthlessness.”  (Another good line from this book: Belichick “‘doesn’t hold grudges,'” someone says. ‘He holds death.'”)

What I would argue “The Patriot Way” is actually describing is asabiyya, as defined by the historian Ibn Khaldun:

[Khaldun] explains that ruling houses tend to emerge on the peripheries of existing empires and use the much stronger asabiyya present in their areas to their advantage, in order to bring about a change in leadership. This implies that the new rulers are at first considered ‘barbarians’ in comparison to the previous ones. 

And indeed, the rise of the Patriots is a prime example of the rise of such a “ruling house.” The old guard of the NFL was annoyed at the rise of these newcomers. The great Don Shula himself repeatedly expressed his antipathy to Belichick, whom he believed to be a cheater. Which he is, but, as this book explains in some detail, basically everyone in the NFL is constantly trying to cheat everyone else at all times. Yes, I know; who would have thought that some of the most competitive alpha males in the world, with millions of dollars as well as prestige at stake, would try to cheat one another? Possibly in a different era, that prized honor and integrity more highly, this would not be tolerated. But we are not in such an era.

And speaking of eras, the Patriots now transitioned to the second phase of their time in the sun, a run during which they would have consistent success, but not quite be able to crack the very pinnacle of the sport.

To some extent, I think the Patriots got away from what made them successful in the early 2000s, which was strong defense. From 2007 – 2013, their strength was unquestionably Brady’s offenses, which were consistently effective in the regular season yet somehow always seemed to fail when they were most needed. I mean, good lord, 17 points against a mediocre Giants team? And let us not forget that Brady gave the Giants 2 points with a stupid safety on the first play of the game. Personally, I think it’s funny that the greatest player of his era, and the most successful player in the history of the Super Bowl, also made one of the dumbest plays in the history of same.

Still, every year the Patriots were a threat to win at all, and always owned the AFC East and my (still) hapless Bills. But that was not enough for the ruthlessly competitive Belichick, and nor was it enough for Brady, who, despite having a supermodel wife and young children, continued to be obsessively dedicated to his craft. Honestly, if the rewards weren’t so spectacular, you’d say someone this absurdly devoted to a mere sport has a mental health issue.

I’m not blaming Brady. Our society has, in a way, failed him. It would be better, I think, if society incentivized intensely-driven and competitive young men to prove themselves as statesmen, explorers, warriors, diplomats, and so forth. Had he lived in the 1950s, Tom Brady might have pushed himself with the same fanaticism to excel as a soldier or an astronaut, instead of merely flinging a ball for our amusement. Still, here we are.

(I’m less bothered by Belichick’s dedication to the sport, simply because Belichick is an old man, “and the vices of peace are the vices of old men” etc.)

Speaking of the vices of old men, it’s time to discuss the third character in the triumvirate on the cover: Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots and noted illegal brothel enjoyer.

Kraft took over the struggling franchise in the early ’90s. The first three coaches to work for him are all Hall-of-Famers: Bill Parcells, Pete Carroll, and Belichick. Which of course is the job of a good owner: to hire good people, then sit back and let them succeed. Kraft did well at this part.

To get even more esoteric than this review is already, it is interesting to me to observe the parallels in the Belichick/Brady/Kraft dynamic with the Victorian comic opera partnership of Gilbert/Sullivan/D’Oyly Carte. (If this seems incongruous, remember that ultimately both football and comic opera are forms of entertainment.) Belichick is an obvious analogue to Gilbert, the irascible, sometimes tyrannical director; overseeing his show with meticulous attention to detail. Brady is Sullivan, a master of his art continually believing himself to be under-appreciated no matter how many accolades come his way. And Kraft is Carte; the businessman desperately working to manage the egos of these two mad geniuses in order to keep the gravy train rolling. In the end, of course, Carte couldn’t, and neither could Kraft.

If there is anything in cyclical theories of history, then it would seem there is an entropic process to which empires, comic opera companies, and football teams alike are subject. Namely, that their prosperity ultimately destroys them, as the ambition for a larger share of the credit divides the very elites who originally powered the success of the organization.

But I’m getting slightly ahead of the story: the Patriots had two of their best seasons in 2014 and 2016, both capped off with victories in two of the most memorable Super Bowl games ever played. These victories cemented their status as the greatest dynasty in NFL history, and Brady and Belichick as the best of their era at their respective roles. To Patriots fans, it was euphoria. To fans of all other 31 teams, it was like a never-ending nightmare, an Ugg boot, stamping on a human face—forever!

Ah, but the brightest light casts the darkest shadow! When you are at the top, there is nowhere to go but down! And any other cliché you care to use. The very fact of the Patriots success now set the stage for their eventual collapse. Wickersham documents how Belichick’s joyless discipline, Brady’s paranoid resentment of backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, and Kraft’s failures to reconcile the two men, made the 2017 season a particularly grim slog. It is a testament to the Patriots’ success that the fact that they made a Super Bowl again that year feels like an afterthought.

Something happened in 2017 to permanently damage the relationship between Belichick and Brady; something that not even another championship a year later could patch up.  Most Patriots fans, spoiled brats that they are, will tell you 2018 is the team’s worst Super Bowl win. (If you are fan of a team which has never won a Super Bowl, you can’t help but feel a sense of schadenfreude about what happened next.)

And so we come back to where the book began: that game against the Titans in the playoffs, with a terrible sense of ending in the air. It’s not often that the word “elegiac” can be applied to a football game, but it fits this one, particularly this play, in which Brady connected with veteran tight end Ben Watson. A combined 34 years of NFL experience allowed them to improvise when the play broke down… but it was negated by a penalty. This is the way the Patriots dynasty ended; not with a bang, but an ineligible man downfield, exploitation of obscure loopholes in the timing rules, and a botched “Stanford band” play. As of this writing, it is the last playoff game played at Gillette Stadium.

The book briefly covers Brady’s escape to Tampa Bay, where he built a team of superstars that won him a 7th title and elevated him above Belichick in the minds of most football fans. The fact that Belichick’s Brady-less teams struggled to achieve even mediocrity further hammers home the point: it was Brady, not Belichick, who was responsible for the Patriots multi-decade run of success. Not that fans don’t continue to debate it even now.

But this “debate” ultimately misses the point: everyone knows it is players, not systems, that win games. The greatest football coach in the universe will not win consistently if he does not have players who can execute his schemes. A great coach gets the most out of his players. His success or failure depends, ultimately, on what the players’ ceiling for “most” is.

There was a very telling incident last season, when Baker Mayfield, Brady’s successor as quarterback of the Buccaneers, talked about how “everybody was pretty stressed out” during the time of TB12, and how Mayfield saw himself as bringing “the joy back to football.”

Brady responded: “I thought stressful was not having Super Bowl rings… There was a mindset of a champion that I took to work every day. This wasn’t day care. If I wanted to have fun, I was gonna go to Disneyland with my kids.”

Indeed, Brady so relentlessly pushed himself that he didn’t even go to Disneyland with his kids all that much, and there is some reason to think that his borderline pathological pursuit of greatness destroyed his marriage. But there can be no doubt Brady’s obsession with constantly improving himself and his teammates made him the perfect man to execute Belichick’s scheme. I don’t like to put too much stock in generational stereotypes, but it may be that Brady, with his classic Gen X nose-to-the-grindstone, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, was just a better fit for the quasi-military mindset Belichick demanded, contrasted with the more laid-back attitude often attributed to the millennials who followed him. (I am a millennial, so I can say it: neither Brady nor Belichick would be the sort of guys to take kindly to participation trophies.)

This is where Wickersham’s chronicle ends, and as a rise-and-fall story–well, it ain’t Barry Lyndon, but it ain’t bad. But something is missing. It’s not Wickersham’s fault. His publication deadline prevented him including the last chapter of the saga, which I feel is necessary to complete the story of the Patriots Dynasty.

At the start of the 2023 season, on a rainy, windy day in Foxboro, the Patriots played the Philadelphia Eagles. The now-retired Tom Brady was the guest of honor, and was named the inaugural “Keeper of the Light” at the newly-renovated Gillette Stadium lighthouse.

As with many another empire, we can learn so much about a place and a people from their architecture. (It’s best if you can imagine the word spoken in the accent of Lord Kenneth Clark: “ar-KEY-tek-sure.”) The Gillette Stadium lighthouse tells the story of the New England Patriots in two simple images. Here is the original lighthouse as it looked from 2002 until 2023, during almost the entire run of New England’s success.

Sleek and spare, more a concept or suggestion of a lighthouse than a full-scale replica, without any unnecessary ornament. A pure column of light; Spartan maximization of efficiency. A turn-of-the-millennium expression of power and energy, just like the great Patriots teams of the era.

And here is its 2023 replacement: an unimaginative, gray, boxy, brutalist beast, squatting low over the field like a miserly ogre. Bigger? Yes. Better? Not by a long shot. It is emblematic of an organization whose vital energy is spent. Whatever fire Brady, Belichick, and Kraft had stolen from the gridiron gods long since burned out. Watching an oddly gaunt Brady standing atop this monstrosity, as the team he once led to glory fumbled its way to an ugly loss, I couldn’t help but think of Shelley’s classic lines:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Oh, well. “For one brief, shining moment” and all that. As Patriots receiver Julian Edelman prophesied, while in the thick of the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history: “It’s gonna be one helluva story.”

by on

Before we begin, I want to point out that this book, which is a science-fiction romance/adventure story, was published in 2014, a full five years before the Star Wars movie that started with the line “The dead speak!” In case you wanted further evidence that the indie book scene has fresher ideas than multi-billion dollar entertainment franchises.

But, as anyone who has read Lorinda Taylor’s The Man Who Found Birds Among the Stars series may be anticipating, this is far more Trek than Wars. It has a federation of intelligent life forms, all of whom work together in a peaceful spirit of friendly collaboration. At the center of the search for intelligent life is Asc. Kaitrin Oliva, a skilled linguistic anthropologist, or should I say, xeno-linguist.

When another exploration team brings back a huge, mortally wounded termite, Asc. Oliva attempts to communicate with it, and records the sounds it makes before it dies. From this, she is eventually able to work out the basics of the termite language, and so a return expedition is soon planned, led by the handsome but enigmatic Prof. Griffen Gwidian.

Prof. Gwidian has a good deal of the Byronic hero about him; cultured and aristocratic, moody and secretive about his past, he and Kaitrin embark upon a tumultuous relationship, to which much the expedition preparation is a backdrop. Interwoven with the romance of the human characters is a palace intrigue drama among the alien termites. These sections are handled almost like a play, complete with stage directions. I liked these parts best of all.

The book features plenty of world-building, including a detailed history of how Earth got to be in the shape it’s in by the 30th century. It’s an optimistic take, again very much in the vein of Roddenberry’s hopeful vision of the future. Of course, even in Taylor’s history of the intervening hundreds of years, humanity has to go through a few rough patches.

But the bulk of the story centers on Gwidian and Oliva’s stormy romance, and in that regard it feels like a more old-fashioned book. Almost like something a Brontë might have written. In the context of the high-tech, spacefaring setting, it was nice to have something so familiar to keep things grounded.

In short, lovers of both sci-fi and romance will find something to enjoy in this book. Taylor’s obvious appreciation for language helps bring both the human and non-human characters together. The only caveat is that, like The Man Who Found Birds Among the Stars, this book ends on a cliffhanger that makes reading the next book in the series an absolute must to see how things play out. So, if you read this one, know that you’ll be wanting to pick up the second one as soon as you finish.