Review: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

I've found that the very best stories usually hook me with the first paragraph.  Sure, some books start slow then pick up steam (or not), but I've rarely seen a book start strong and then go downhill.  So I'm always delighted when I find a book whose first lines make me want to keep reading: I just know that there is a good story to follow.

Such was the case with the first book in Jonathan Howard's Johannes Cabal series, which I recently bought on a whim because I liked the cover.  And, fortunately, as soon as I read the first paragraph I was reasonably sure that I had not misjudged the book by its cover:

Walpurgisnacht, the Hexennacht.  The last night in April.  The night of witches, when evil walks abroad.

It was short, it was sweet, and it set the tone for the rest of the book.  This is the story of Johannes Cabal, a thoroughly callous and self-centered scientist who has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the secrets of necromancy.  Now he wants it back.  Cabal journeys to hell to barter with Lucifer and makes the following wager: he has one year to consign one-hundred souls to damnation or lose his own for eternity.  Satan doesn't send Johannes away empty-handed, however: he lends him a long-abandoned carnival train to help him on his quest.  Cabal, an anti-social introvert, considers the prospect of running a carnival more of an ironic punishment than a boon.  One sympathizes.  Imagine the character of Sheldon Cooper, from T.V.'s Big Bang Theory (or me) forced to rely on personal charm to seduce unwary patrons into signing away their souls and you will have a good idea of just how out of his depth Cabal is.  Satan doesn't like to make these wagers easy, otherwise everybody will be wanting one.

This book was inspired by Ray Bradbury's classic, Something Wicked This Way Comes, when Howard wondered where an evil carnival would come from.  In Johannes Cabal the Necromancer he sets out to answer this question.  The story is cleverly and eloquently written and is laced with sardonic wit that is likely to appeal to fans of British comedies such Black Adder.  Indeed, were this book ever adapted to the screen, I can't imagine anyone better than Hugh Laurie to play the title role.  Cabal is an unapologetic misanthrope who is more than willing to sacrifice anyone, even his own brother, Horst, to achieve his goals and who won't hesitate to kill anyone who stands in his way.  Yet we are allowed, on occasion, to catch ephemeral glimpses of the good man locked deep within who gives us hope that despite Cabal's rapid moral deterioration, redemption might not yet be beyond his grasp.

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer may not be to everyone's taste, but if you have a love of the macabre and an off-colour sense of humour that makes normal people stare aghast, then it might just be for you.

Cover Stories

I've been thinking a lot about book covers lately.  They are the first and often the only chance of getting a prospective reader to stop browsing long enough to check out the blurb and maybe the first page, and decide whether they want to lay down their cash and keep reading.  We've been told since childhood that we shouldn't judge books by their covers, nor people by their appearances because beauty is only skin deep.  Yet we do it all the same.  How many wonderful books go unnoticed and unread, languishing behind an uninspired cover?  How often have you been tricked into picking up a vapid, shallow, badly written book because of a striking cover and discovered that you've been tricked into wasting both your time and your money by another pretty face?  A striking cover is no promise of quality, just as a person's attractiveness is no measure of their character.  But without a good cover it's unlikely that many people will ever discover your book's merits.

So what separates the good covers from the bad?  I think there are a couple of factors that may contribute to an effective cover: one is an implied narrative, another is layout.  Cover illustrations often tell a story in their own right; preferably one that pertains to that which lies within.  It isn't absolutely necessary for cover art to tell a story, but if it does it should be an honest and accurate one - some covers are disingenuous and promise one thing but deliver another.  I recall being often disappointed, in my youth, by publishers in the 1970's who all too often pulled this bait-and-switch tactic to sell paperbacks.  In those days all a publisher had to do was slap a Frazetta painting on a book and it would sell.  I should know - I'm the one who bought them.

Contrary to the implication of this cover on the Ace edition of Edgar Rice Burrough's The Cave Girl, there are no spear-wielding, sabre-tooth-tiger-taming, fur bikini-wearing amazon women in it.  It's actually the story of a gentleman who was shipwrecked on an island and who discovers a young woman who was similarly stranded as a child.  They have some adventures after which he takes her back to civilization and marries her.  The Frazetta cover version looks more exciting though, doesn't it?

Here's the cover of the Pinnacle edition that hits a little closer to the mark:

Which of these two editions would you be more inclined to buy?  Yeah, the publishers at Ace thought so, too, and they were undoubtedly right.  The question, though is whether you want trick readers into buying a book once, or to deliver what you promise and cultivate a loyal fan.

***

The cover of The Man in the Iron Mask depicted below is an example of a poor choice in cover illustration, not because the painting is bad (although it is drab and not especially eye-catching), but because it has absolutely nothing to do with the story.  Philippe was incarcerated in the Bastille, not the crumbling ruins of a tower in the remote countryside.  I have a feeling that this illustration might have been stock art that Signet had on file, and that they decided it was close enough to save them the cost of commissioning art specifically for the book.  Of course, since The Man in the Iron Mask is a classic it doesn't really need a flashy cover to sell it.  Indeed, I bought this book despite the cover, not because of it; I was at the book store specifically looking for The Man in the Iron Mask.    Most books don't have this level of fame going for them, and I have to wonder how many more people might have bought this book if it had a better cover design to catch their eye.

Irrelevant Cover

On the other side of coin there are books whose covers are so appealing that I'm predisposed to buying them before I've even read the blurb to find out what they're about.  Mind you, a well-designed cover should give you a good idea of what the book is about before you even pick it up.

Here's a book I bought last week solely because of its cover:

It was the layout of the book more than the actual illustration that grabbed my attention.  This book makes an excellent argument for self-publishers to hire a professional cover designer instead of trying to make the cover themselves.  The cover alone translated into a sale.

Here's another book I bought about a year and half ago based solely on its cover:

I never get tired of looking at the illustration of this book; not only is it very clever, it communicates a great deal of information about the book.  This is probably one of the best cover illustrations I've ever seen in terms of its aesthetic appeal and implied narrative.

I'm very pleased to say that both of these books lived up to the promise made by their covers: excellent stories that were every bit as much fun to read as their covers suggested.  So sometimes I guess you really can judge a book by its cover.

I hadn't really thought very deeply about what makes an effective cover when I was forced to design one for Libram Mysterium; my ruminations have been subsequent to the book's publication.  When I did the cover I was rushed and behind schedule and trying to juggle too many irons at once.  Nonetheless I'm quite pleased with how it turned out and somehow, by intuition, I managed to produce a cover that is visually striking and is faithfully suggestive of the types of stories that the reader will find within.  Of course I was very fortunate to have Christopher Conklin as the artist.  He not only drew all of the interior illustrations, but also made the cover painting on very short notice.  One of the truly groovy things about working with Chris was his ability to take just a few lines of description and produce a picture that was exactly what I wanted.  I'd tried to keep my instructions minimal and somewhat vague in order to give him creative space, but he nailed the image I had in my mind's eye every single time.

In any event I feel more confident that I understand the elements that make for a great book cover for the next time I design one.  Acquiring the technical skill to pull it off is another matter...

Fourty Years of Rubik's Cube

Believe it or not, this week marks the fourtieth anniversary of the invention of  Erno Rubik's famous puzzle cube, originally known as the Magic Cube, that has vexed millions of people to the brink of insanity.

I should know: I've been trying unsuccessfully to solve it for thirty-four years.  I received my Rubik's Cube (shown below) as a gift back in 1980, just when the cube was becoming popular, and it has been a constant fixture on my desktop ever since.  The very same cube sits beside my keyboard today and I still pick it up and fiddle with it every day.  The most common reaction that I get when people discover that I'm still working on the thing is why I don't just look up the solution.  Cheat books were very popular in the '80's and I'm sure that nowadays the solution is just a Google search away.  But solving the puzzle isn't really the point of the cube - not to me, anyway.

The cube is not just a puzzle, it's an aid to concentration that I play with whenever I'm stuck on a problem, and as I twist and turn the rows and columns on the cube to line up the colours, the tumblers in my brain click into place.  This same cube has gotten me through high school, a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a Ph.D.  It has seen me through algebra homework, English essays, term papers, and study sessions.  I've played with it while working out taxonomic conundrums, plot twists, and character development.  Whenever I'm stuck and in need of mental distraction my cube is ready at hand to provide it - my trusty weapon in the never-ending war against writer's block.  A magic cube, indeed.

I have a feeling that if I ever did solve the cube, it would no longer have the power to amuse and distract me. My talisman would just be another puzzle solved then forgotten, tossed aside and never played with again.  And that would be a shame.

"This is my Rubik's Cube.  There are many like it, but this one is mine."

Constructing a Platform - It's Not Just for Hangmen Anymore

I've been insanely busy formatting Libram Mysterium for various print and electronic formats and it is now available in print at Amazon, in electronic format at Amazon Kindle store at Smashwords, and in print and PDF at DriveThru Fiction.  In fact I've been spending so much time fussing with the book that I haven't made any time to do any actual writing of my own - including blog posts.  But my mid-year resolution is to change that and try to get onto my next story as well as making active blog posts.

Of course now that I have a book to promote I have to spend a lot more time marketing it, and that involves getting more actively involved in social media, like I need to spend even more time on Facebook instead of getting any writing done.  At least now I can justify it: I'm not procrastinating, I'm building my platform!  Honestly though, I'm not sure how people manage it.  Between writing blog posts, updating Facebook and LinkedIn a big chunk of my writing day gets claimed before I've even started.  And, as of today, I've bitten the bullet and joined Twitter.  I've been avoiding this for years since it's always seemed like the height of egotism to think that anyone would be interested in my tweets.  But they tell me that it's an essential tool in the writer's platform.  And by 'they' I mean all the various people whose opinions about book marketing I've read on the internets.  When has the internet ever been wrong?

So if you have any interest at all to bearing witness as my head explodes from social media overload you can find me on Facebook , Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.  And because I have Pulp Mill Press to promote I've got a Pulp Mill Press blog, Google+ and Facebook page for that, too.

The old expression, 'hoist by your own petard' dates back to the sixteenth century and it means to be blown up by your own bomb, referring to petards that were used to breach castles exploding prematurely, killing the man placing it.  You can see the parallel?  I may end up hanging myself from my own platform.

Hissing and Squawking, and Damned Lazy Writing

It's been far too long since my last post, but I have a good excuse: I've teamed up with three colleagues from the old-school-gaming community to found a new publishing company, Pulp Mill Press, and as of July 1st we've been open to submissions for our first fiction anthology, Libram Mysterium (click the Pulp Mill Press icon on the sidebar to visit our site and read the submission guidelines).

I've been so busy reading submissions that I've barely had any time to do any writing, myself, especially since we are in the throes of July, and the excessive heat and humidity demand that I not turn the computer on for more than a few minutes at a time so as not to melt in my non-air-conditioned home.

In the aftermath of the cold-front that preceded last night's rain storm, I have a few cool hours this morning before we are back in the sauna, so I thought I'd devote some time to discussing a few of my pet writing peeves.  Normally, I would consider this to be opinionated self-indulgence, but since I'm now wearing an editor's hat it's only fair to share my dislikes; the kinds of writing habits that may not be objectively wrong, but that annoy me to the point of turning me off a story. In fact I'll cite examples from well-known authors, whose stories I probably would have rejected had their manuscripts been sent to me.

Research your topic
One of the quickest ways to turn me off a story is when an author has not bothered to research the topic he or she is writing about.  Verisimilitude is the key to suspension of disbelief and once mine is shattered I feel little desire to continue reading.  One recent example is from the novel, Kraken by China Mieville.  The protagonist, Billy, is putatively a curator of invertebrates at the Natural History Museum, but Mieville apparently didn't bother to find out what a curator is or does.  Instead, Billy's job appears to be that of a low-level collections technician and his sole responsibility is preparing specimens for the wet collection.  When one of the specimens he prepared, the giant squid Architeuthis dux, is stolen from the museum by a cult of squid worshippers Billy is drawn into the investigation.  Normally, this is the sort of story that would excite me greatly:  how could a book that combines cultists, alien gods, invertebrates and museums possibly go wrong?  It goes wrong if you don't bother to learn anything about museums or curators and then set your story in a museum and make your protagonist a curator.  There is really no excuse for this level of sloppiness.  Mieville lives in London and could easily have arranged to meet with a zoology curator at the Natural History Museum and gotten a first-hand look at the world he was planning to write about.  At the very least a Google search would have explained the difference between curator and preparator.

It can be argued that the very few readers care about such distinctions, and that only someone like me, with a background in museums and specialty in marine invertebrates would even notice the discrepancy. But I did notice and after that I could no longer trust anything Mieville had to say.  If he took so little care with his main character what other mistakes has he made?  When you're writing speculative fiction it is very important that you help your reader buy into your premise and accept the changes that you are making to the understood nature of reality.  You do this by getting your facts straight and building a covenant of trust with your reader.  Mieville didn't do this and I made it about half-way through Kraken before giving up and tossing it aside.

Two for the price of one
If some is good more is better, right?  Well, that may be true of sex and chocolate, but not if you're writing a story.  One of the mantras of writing that I firmly believe is 'never use two words when one will do.'  Brevity is the soul of clarity, and it is the masterful writer who can express a thought eloquently and concisely.  Over-writing is often a sign of a limited vocabulary, and it is usually possible reduce the number of words in your sentence while improving clarity and description by judicious word choice.

Consider the following two sentences: He moved quietly down the hall and He crept down the hall.  Here, crept is not only more concise than moved quietly, it is more evocative as well.  There's your real two-for-one bargain.  Don't suck your readers into a morass of overblown prose.  Look for opportunities to trim the fat; not only will you improve the pace of your story, you will make it easier to read.

He said, she said
Another peeve of mine is when writers insist on getting creative with dialogue attributives.  The only attributive you ever need (if, indeed, you need one at all) is 'said.'

"Dialogue attributives should be unobtrusive," said Sean.

 Too many writers, especially beginning ones, mistakenly believe that 'said' is boring and that they need to dress their dialogue up with a variety of colourful and descriptive verbs, so we see attributives like: 'he hissed;' 'he chuckled;' 'he squawked;' 'he growled,' etc.  You see these all the time in stories, but when have you ever heard someone literally hiss or growl their words?  Never.  If they did, they'd be unintelligible.  Unless your characters are barnyard animals, avoid such attributives.

'Said' is not boring, it's invisible.  The reader will not even notice it, but will subconsciously register it to keep track of who is speaking.  You can use 'said' in every single line of dialogue and it will not be monotonous; your reader should be focusing on the dialogue, itself, not the attributive.  If you want to convey the emotional state of the speaker you should do so through dialogue and the character's actions, not by clumsy attributives.  The only other attributives that are acceptable are those that people actually use when speaking: 'he yelled;' she whispered, etc.  Using more colourful verbs pulls your reader out of the story and that is exactly what we want to avoid.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Cormac McCarthy, has taken this argument to extremes by eliminating all attributives (and even quotation marks) from his dialogue.  This can make it difficult to tell who speaking if more than two characters are involved in conversation, but it does quite succinctly make the point that no one ever needs to howl their words.

Awkward Adverbs
Many authors exacerbate their clumsy attributives with awkwardly-constructed adverbs.  I'm pointing my finger directly at Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling who, in addition to being an internationally best-selling author, is also the architect of some of the worst dialogue I've ever read.  You probably have one or more of the Harry Potter novels on your bookshelf so check it out for yourself:  no one ever just says anything in these books; they hiss exasperatedly.  Rowling is addicted to adverbs and seems compelled to create them by adding -ly to any given word, no matter how clumsy and inappropriate.  If you've ever read a Harry Potter novel to your child, you've probably cursed her tongue-tripping word choices and this is an excellent example of why it's important for an author to read his or her work aloud during proof reading.  Clumsy passages become painfully obvious when your tongue is forced to make good on them.

Adverbs should be used with care in all cases but especially when supporting a dialogue attributive, where they are commonly employed to lazily convey the speaker's emotional state.  If you can't convey emotion through dialogue or body language you need to sharpen your powers of description, not resort to constructing adverbs.

A fellow-writer that I often correspond with is so strongly opposed to adverbs he doesn't use them at all and admonishes anyone who does so in his critiques.  Though I sometimes tease him for his zeal and accuse him of embarking on a one-man-crusade against the suffix '-ly,' he does have a point.  Certain adverbs are okay: if you would use it in speech you can use it in writing.  "The man was strangely silent." "He moved quickly and quietly."  These are examples of perfectly good adverbs.

"It's getting late," Bob yawned, tiredly.  'Tiredly' is teetering on the edge of awkwardness though it's still acceptable.  'Exhaustedly' is not, and anyone who says 'fatiguedly' should be strung up and flogged (I'm looking at you, Rowling).

A better way of presenting this would be: Bob stretched and yawned.  "It's getting late," he said.  The reader knows from Bob's actions that he's tired and we haven't encumbered his dialogue.  But wait!  Haven't I just used nine words in the latter sentence, when only six words were used in the former?  Yes, but in this case I believe it is worth the extra words to show the readers that Bob is tired instead of telling them.

So, there's the list of some of my biggest peeves in writing.  Feel free to ignore them if you will: many writers more successful than me do.  But keep in mind that they were successful despite their bad writing habits, not because of them, and you do yourself no favours by emulating their mistakes.  Especially if I'm the one to whom you're submitting your story.

Is Television the New Silver Screen?

Having grown up in the 1970's, I developed a strong disinterest in television at an early age.  Endless reruns of The Brady Bunch or The Love Boat were not much of an incentive to sit in front of our family's small black-and-white television when I could be doing more interesting things.  Even after we got cable, I was disappointed to find that all those extra channels played the exact same shows I already didn't want to watch.

So for most of my life, the rule was that if I wanted to watch something good I went to the movies, and television was reserved as a special form of torment for when I was too sick or bored to do anything more than lay on the couch, respiring and metabolizing.

This is a paradigm that seems to be reversing itself in recent years.  It's been a long time since a movie has truly impressed me, and few have entertained me enough to warrant the price of admission.  On the other hand, there has been a growing number of outstanding television shows that, unlike those of my youth, are well-written, well-acted, and have high production values.  This trend started over a decade ago, when HBO launched The Sopranos, which was so successful, that the network fed its viewer's growing appetite for high quality television shows with historical dramas like Rome, and Deadwood.  HBO isn't the only network to realize the value of quality programming, and AMC has produced some truly outstanding series over the past few years such as Breaking Bad, and more recently, The Walking Dead, both of which have been extremely popular.

One of the most exciting developments in this recent trend towards high quality television is HBO's series A Game of Thrones, adapted from George R. R. Martin's fantasy series, A Song of Fire and Ice.  This series format has allowed, for the first time ever, a high fidelity adaptation of a series of novels that remains faithful to the story and its characters.  Martin, himself, is an executive producer of the show, and has written some of the episodes.  Likewise, AMC's The Walking Dead employs Robert Kirkman, creator of the graphic novel series from which the show was adapted, as one of the executive producers.

Thus, there has been a refreshing commitment to treating adapted works with the respect they are due, and consulting with the original authors to ensure that their vision is faithfully created on the screen.  This is something that has happened infrequently in Hollywood adaptations - typically, when authors sell movies rights they lose any say in how those movies will be made and it often appears as though the writers, directors, and producers of the movie never bothered to even read the source material, let alone faithfully adapt it.  One of the difficulties in adapting a novel or, worse still, series of novels to the big screen is that the story must be told within the two to three hour time frame of a movie and it can be awfully difficult to develop characters and tell a novel-length story in that time.  A lot of plot ends up on the cutting room floor.

Television, however is the ideal medium for the visual adaptation of novels. a single book can be portrayed faithfully in about ten episodes, which is far beyond the means of a movie, but well within the scope of a mini-series presented in the course of a single season.  So, it looks as though after more than eighty years television is finally hitting its stride.

Movies however, seem to be in a decaying orbit.  Hollywood has been attempting to draw us into movie theaters with the siren call of technological innovation, filming everything in "3-D" with a veritable orgy of CGI effects.  Mostly at the expense of an actual story.

Indeed, Hollywood appears to be tapped for ideas and is doing its damndest to ignore the fact.  Instead, they're sticking their collective fingers in their ears and singing "la, la, la, I can't hear you!" while remaking movie versions of every crappy '70's T.V. show that I didn't want to watch when it was in syndication, or looking for the next hot property to licence.  But here's the thing: no amount of CGI is going to make me want to watch "Knight Rider, the Motion Picture," and I'm pretty sure that nobody in their right mind wants to see The Brady Bunch in 3-D.  Meanwhile we are treated to an endless array of lacklustre adaptations of popular works of fiction: tepid shades of cinematic Jason Bournes, Jack Reachers, John Carters, and Bilbo Bagginses limp across the screen dressed up in such flashy special effects that, hopefully, the audience won't notice.  There is much buzz about the impending release of Ender's Game, an adaptation of the science fiction classic by Orson Scott Card but, past performance being the best predictor of future behaviour, I have very little cause for optimism.

It doesn't have to be this way, though.  Television has finally found itself, and movie producers need to break out of this self-destructive cycle of laziness and rediscover their roots.  Movies need to go back to what it is they do best: telling stories written specifically to be told in a visual format in a two hour time span.  In other words, film makers need to stop adapting literary works, or incestuously plagiarizing themselves and focus on producing movies based on original screen plays.

Perhaps the age of the silver screen is over: modern home entertainment systems have made movie theaters largely obsolete, and by obsessively making movies that are intended to reverse this trend, Hollywood is looking to go down with a sinking ship.  But it doesn't have to be this way.  If they reinvent movies as a relevant story-telling medium and embrace the reality of how people watch them we could see the beginning of a new age in cinema.

Cthulhu Among Us

Okay, we all knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some scientist or other would eventually delve too deeply into the mysteries of nature and pull back the veil covering mighty Cthulhu.  It has finally happened, and the Great Old One is a whopping 10 microns in size.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have recently described two new genera of symbiotic protists found living in the gut of termites and have named them after two creatures from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos: Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque.  

Cthulhu macrofasciculumque

Cthulhu is, of course, Lovecraft's iconic monster, from his classic 1926 short story, The Call of Cthulhu, while the lesser known Cthylla, daughter of Cthulhu, is a creation of author Brian Lumley, and is first mentioned in his 1975 novel, The Transition of Titus Crow.

While the real-life Cthulhu may not be as intimidating as the colossal monstrosity that slumbers in the sunken city of R'lyeh it is a testiment to the pervasive influence of Lovecraft in contemporary society.  While the author died in poverty and relative obscurity his stories influenced later generations of writers so that his creations have now been embraced by popular culture.

If you wish to read the full description of Cthulhu and Cthylla the article, published in the journal PLOS ONE (though, I'm suspicious of any journal so sloppy as to capitalize both the genus and species names in the binomen): Cthulhu Macrofasciculumque n. g., n. sp. and Cthylla Microfasciculumque n. g., n. sp., a Newly Identified Lineage of Parabasalian Termite Symbionts