Review: Forever And Five Days

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Forever And Five Days

Fitting the “lurid true crime” genre exactly, Forever and Five Days tells the story of female lovers and serial killers Gwen Graham and Cathy Wood, nurses aides at a Grand Rapids care home who murdered several patients. The story of a questionably run facility filled with dispirited elderly people, the description of Alpine Manor would be creepy even if there were no murders.

The saga of Graham and Wood is yet more proof that serial killers are not Lex Luthor evil geniuses. The two made so many unsuccessful attacks that their prospective victims openly claimed people were trying to kill them, only avoiding suspicion as long as they did because many old people were delirious.

While it has the weaknesses of the sensationalist true crime book, this also has the strengths. If you like historical stories of serial killers, I’d recommend this.

Operation Causeway

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Operation Causeway was a proposed plan by the US military in World War II to land on Taiwan. It would have been a massive high risk, high cost, and high reward operation. In actual history, Causeway was shelved in favor of landing in Luzon.

The initial landing sites for Causeway would be in the south.

The Causeway documents are useful not just as an alternate historical reference, but also as a general guide to what a large amphibious invasion of Taiwan would entail (something that, for some mysterious reason, has remained relevant postwar).

A Thousand Words: Scanners

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Scanners

The 1981 David Cronenberg film Scanners, about people with psychic powers, is a perfect movie to review in October. It’s also an underappreciated movie. See, it has Cronenberg’s trademark twisted body horror done in a way that’s suspenseful and not overexaggerated. It also manages to be excellently paced and creepy.

However, most people only know Scanners for the scene where a man’s head explodes. While that is well-done, there’s so much more to the movie than that. It’s well worth a watch.

The Bullpups

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First, a description of what a “bullpup” rifle is: The firing chamber/action/magazine is located behind the trigger instead of in front of it. There have been numerous bullpup designs, and they came into a fad in the 1980s. Of course, this brought up the biggest issue with them.

Basically, it’s easy to make a bullpup simply by flipping around a conventional rifle. However, that doesn’t make for a good bullpup the way a ground-up design does. However again, rifles are such a small part of (especially high-intensity) war that the decision to make a big investment in them is not made lightly. However however again, the impetus for bullpups was basically “they need to be short so they can fit in vehicles more easily”, with performance being less of a concern.

Of course, shorter-barreled conventional rifles took most of the wind out of the bullpup’s sails. But they continue to be used. They just haven’t dominated.

Review: The Hunger Games

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The Hunger Games

Ok, so after I read Battle Royale, I knew I couldn’t just not read the other famous “teenagers in a death game” book. So despite not being in the demographic, despite having little interest in it when it first came out, and despite so much else, I read through Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.

What’s interesting is that it’s flawed in the exact opposite way of Battle Royale. That was too broad, focusing on the adventures of countless doomed students away from the main characters. This is too narrow, focused entirely on a first-person narrative from protagonist Katniss.

Especially because, to be frank, she comes across as a dullard. The kind of person who’d be bland trailer trash in anything but the post-apocalyptic semi-sci fi setting she’s written in. I’ve long thought that first person is one of the hardest perspectives to write action novels in, and this did not exactly convince me otherwise.

I don’t want to be too hard on this, since I’m obviously not really the target audience. It’s written well for what it is, but it’s an orange read by someone who likes apples.

Review: Kill Shot

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Kill Shot

Every so often, I dip back into the Mack Bolan pool, with Kill Shot being my latest attempt. And I always come back to the realization that most of the Gold Eagle ones aren’t worth checking out when so many other, better cheap thrillers exist. And this was no exception.

Not only does Kill Shot do nothing to separate itself from the “Twinkies of literature” pack, but it’s worse than the norm due to its setup. As a “SuperBolan”, it’s longer than the normal throwaway Executioners. However, length does not equal substance or any other advantage in this case.

Even readers of action thrillers can do a lot better than Zombie Bolans like this.

The Boss Baby Effect

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There’s an internet meme I think is surprisingly profound. This is the “Boss Baby” meme:

I’ve seen the “Boss Baby Vibes” effect in many an insular fandom. It seemed annoying, until I realized that I had fallen for it too with my initial reviews of Fuldapocalyptic fiction. Reading Red Storm Rising and third-tier knockoffs of that first had massively skewed my perception of that subgenre in particular and cheap thrillers in general.

So now I can sympathize with people who are just comparing what they see to what they know.

Review: Battle Royale

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Battle Royale

Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale is a classic horror novel about high school students being thrown onto an island by a totalitarian government and forced to kill each other until only one is left. I knew I had to read it. Although I think the timing is off. After this, the similar Hunger Games (whose author believably said that the similarities were a coincidence), and an entire popular genre of “one shall survive” video games like Fortnite and PUBG, it’s not as out-there as it would have been at the time.

One area that did not slow the gory book down is the translation, which is at the very least sufficient. The writing style, regardless of language, conveys the action very well.

However, the book is still kind of flawed. And I’d argue that there’s two main reasons. The first is that the setting is so dark that it’s hard to care about anyone, since even if their class had avoided “The Program” in the first place, it would be unlikely that they’d come to a happy end in such a ruthless state. The second is that the book is just too long for its premise.

It has the substance of a fairly short cheap thriller, which it still is in spite of its pretensions-which are a little too prominent. I had to groan at the main characters suddenly dipping into “As you know, Bob…” setting exposition at the worst possible moments. Not the book’s finest hour. Anyway, there’s a good 200 page novel there, but it’s 600 pages. And the bulk of those pages consist of kills that probably should have happened offscreen, so we could focus on the real protagonists.

That being said, I’m still glad I read this book. But it’s very much a “mean 51%”. And that’s fine!

Review: Lavi

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Lavi

Engineer John Golan decides to tell the story of the IAI Lavi fighter in the book of the same name. It’s a very frustrating, “mean 51%” book. First, the good part. The aeronautical engineering stuff (which takes up an understandably large portion of the book) is well done (if over my head mostly). Likewise, the story of its development and cancellation, with tumult and controversy in both America and Israel, is also well told.

The problem comes from the slant of the book. In terms of bias towards the Lavi, Golan feels the same way about it as Arrian did about Alexander the Great. It’s understandable for an engineer to feel that way: The Lavi being a clean-sheet design meant that there was more it could with less size in the strike role than the adapted F-16. But this also leads to tunnel vision and avoiding the context. Which is that an expensive toy may not have been the best option overall for a country with a reduced conventional threat and in an economic collapse at the time (inflation in Israel was reaching near-Weimar levels).

There are also a few “brown M&Ms” (oversights that raise some eyebrows for me). Golan speaks of the Osirak raid as “setting Saddam’s nuclear program back a decade” (if anything, it accelerated it), and takes the 10-1 kill rate in the Korean War at face value. More annoyingly, it falls too much for the “Pentagon Reformer” arguments.

Finally, relying on fighter pilots gave me the exact opposite thought than Golan intended. His impression of the Yom Kippur War veteran pilots leaning so hard on the Lavi was that of pragmatists who’d been through the worst of war. My impression was of them (understandably) wanting a gold-plated plane while not being able to see the forest for the trees. As Bill James put it “The trees really are not, when you think about it, in a very good position to evaluate the issue.” It gets to the point where you probably wouldn’t know from this book alone that the Bekaa Valley air battle was the squash it was with the “worse” aircraft.

Still, this is an interesting book on an interesting plane. For aviation enthusiasts, it’s well worth a read.

Review: Funland

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Funland

Horror legend Richard Laymon’s Funland is a tale of terror at an amusement park. Or at least it supposedly is. What it actually is is a story of a war between crazed hobos known as “trolls” and a gang of teenage delinquents fighting them. Oh, and love triangles.

The only real “horror action” occurs very late in the book. Other than that, it’s just a conflict between groups of totally unsympathetic people. That the small spurts of action are indeed good is what makes this a slightly better horror novel than the last one I reviewed. But only slightly.

Would it really hurt to have people who you can actually support? Even conventional horror story victims would be better than the waves of creeps and vigilantes that we got.