The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (2006) by Steven Berlin Johnson: Engaging, sweeping examination of England's last major cholera outbreak in London's Broad Street neighbourhood near Soho in 1854, and how two men ensured that England would never suffer from a cholera outbreak again. Medical Doctor John Snow and Anglican curate Henry Whitehead, both of whom lived near the outbreak, would form a somewhat unlikely Dynamic Duo whose detective work and scientific acumen would convince the medical and civil authorities of London that cholera was a disease spread by contaminated water and not, as then-standard wisdom had it, by 'miasmic' gases.
Much of the book is marvelous and humane, explaining the rise of cholera to being one of the world's great killers over the course of the last 200 years. Along the way, The Ghost Map also delves into the development of epidemiology, safe sewer and water-supply systems, and the toxic Social Darwinism that helped blind Victorian England to the true cause of cholera in its cities. The book also offers a tour through London's underground economy of night-soil men and cat-meat men and coster-mongers and 'pure' collectors (pure was a euphemism for dog shit), and their roles in keeping the 'above-ground' world running.
You'll also visit the horrifying cess-pits and cesspools and streets of 1854 London. You'll discover why alcohol, tea, and coffee were all integral to the urbanization of the world. But mostly you'll deal with these two heroes of science and rationality, Snow and Whitehead, as they individually and then dually seek an answer to the Broad Street Outbreak.
Only in the last 20 pages or so does Johnson waver, as he suddenly takes the book so wide as to attempt to convince the reader that the world will be a better, more environmentally friendly place when everyone lives in cities (not suburbs -- cities proper). It feels like the beginning of a different book, one whose enthusiasm for urban living and disdain for rural living comes gushing straight out of its author and onto the page. All it really lacks is the line, "Since the beginning of time, man has longed to evacuate the countryside!".
But other than the writer's book-derailing, evangelical rant about the Great Goodness of Cities, The Ghost Map is terrific, informative, sad, and hopeful. Lift your glass of clean drinking water to Snow and Whitehead, who defeated an invisible enemy 30 years before humanity could reliably find cholera under a microscope. Highly recommended.
Inland Empire (2006): written and directed by David Lynch; starring Laura Dern (Nikki Grace/ Susan Blue), Jeremy Irons (Kingsley Stewart), Justin Theroux (Devon Berk/ Billy Side), Karolina Gruszka (Lost Girl), Grace Zabriskie (Visitor #1), and Harry Dean Stanton (Freddie):
A doomed Polish film adaptation of a creepy, true Polish folk tale inspires an American film directed by Brit Jeremy Irons and starring Laura Dern and Justin Theroux. Real-life events begin to mirror those in the adaptation which mirror those surrounding the original film which mirror those in the folk tale that was inspired by true events.
Also, dance numbers and a surprise cameo from Terry Crews!
Laura Dern's actress begins to be haunted almost immediately by strange characters, events, and an occasional loss of self. And by living out life as her character. Or is the character really a character or the ghost of a person doomed by a curse to relive the events of her death over and over until someone breaks the curse? Good question!
Inland Empire is a disturbing, dazzling descent into horror, madness, and parallel lives and worlds. However, you may have to consult its wikia page to figure out its plot. Or watch it several times.
Even then, this is Lynch prowling the borders between dream and narrative, nightmare and plot. Laura Dern is terrific in a role that requires a lot of heavy lifting in service of a character with more than one character. Cameos come and go. Grace Zabriskie shows up early and late to explain things and terrify Laura Dern's actress. Harry Dean Stanton has a recurring comic bit as a scam-artist assistant to director Jeremy Irons. Mary Steenburgen wanders through.
And there's the rabbits. Or people with rabbit heads. Surreal, menacing WTF mind games from David Lynch. I've come to the opinion that all of Lynch's work takes place in the same universe. Or multiverse. The monster here could just as well have strolled through Twin Peaks: The Return or Eraserhead. Or maybe it did! Highly recommended.
Sharp Objects (2006) by Gillian Flynn: Flynn's third novel Gone Girl got a lot of buzz when published and even more when adapted by David Fincher for the screen. Sharp Objects is Flynn's first novel, one she claims to have spent ten years writing.
Recently adapted for HBO, Sharp Objects is much in the line of Gone Girl and Flynn's second novel Dark Places insofar as it involves first-person narration from a woman with serious, partially unacknowledged mental problems.
Besides that, there's a murder mystery with a thuddingly obvious perpetrator(s) -- I guessed the murderer(s) from the back-cover copy. There's a whole lot of self-loathing, general loathing, body shame, misanthropy, and creepy small-towners. There are extremely dicey physical and emotional relations with young men and women, aberrant psychology on the level of a 1943 Batman comic book, and a narrative flirtation with that favourite of the 1990's, repressed-memory syndrome. Ten years of writing would put the genesis of Sharp Objects smack in the middle of that time when every other movie and TV show seemed to feature someone with repressed memories.
The narration keeps with the American first-person hard-boiled first codified by the crime fiction of the 1930's. Sharp Objects is lurid, improbable melodrama that brings to mind some of the first-person narratives of Jim Thompson, especially his crazy-ass Savage Night. In Thompson's world, men and women were equally capable of evil. Here, men tend to be near-saints or harmless nebbishes. Women, though... watch out for them. Am I right, guys?
Both glib and deeply unpleasant, Sharp Objects is a highly polished turd of a bestseller. The miniseries managed to bring that polish up to a blinding glow of fake intellectualism. The novel is almost mesmerizingly rancid in its ideology and character building. Reader, I hated it! Not recommended.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) by Max Brooks: Max Brooks is obsessed by zombies, especially those from the George Romero universe of zombies that first appeared in 1968's Night of the Living Dead: nearly mindless, man-eating, slow-moving hordes of the hungry dead. World War Z is a love letter to Night of the Living Dead, though Brooks' zombies have some attributes peculiar to his story.
The attribute specifically tailored to the tale of World War Z is that the virus that creates zombies (named 'Solanum') renders those zombies toxic to nearly every creature on Earth, from bacteria to vultures. Brooks thus avoids one of the problems with the idea of a zombie apocalypse: after about two weeks, the zombies should be defunct from wave after wave of attacks from every carrion eater on Earth from the microscopic level on up.
Other specific attributes include things that would later be familiar to watchers of The Walking Dead. The zombies don't swell their ranks with those buried dead who were not already infected with the zombie virus. Graveyards are relatively safe in Brooks' universe. His zombies don't digest their food. They're really, really dead. And they will eat any animal large enough for them to notice: they only PREFER humans.
Brooks has said that he got the idea for the format of World War Z from histories by Studs Terkel. Terkel's books told the stories of such events as World War Two (The Good War) by assembling first-hand accounts from people involved and then weaving them into topics arrayed within an overall arc. Brooks' frame narrator collects stories from survivors of the Great Zombie War, several years after the war is over. As World War Z seems to begin some time around 2010-2012, the frame narrative occurs somewhere around 2020.
Of course, the format of World War Z didn't originate with Terkel via Brooks. The documentary style has been with horror since its beginnings, whether in novels made up of letters and diary entries (Hello, Frankenstein!), novels that add newspaper articles to that mix (Dracula), stories that frame first-person narratives of the past within a present-day investigation ("The Colour Out Of Space"), movies that claim to be based on true events (The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre), or the now-ubiquitous variations on the found-footage movie made popular (though not originated) by the original Blair Witch Project. Brooks' addition to this long tradition is an admirable one, though, and generally pitch perfect.
Of course I have complaints. I still don't have the faintest idea of how a dead creature with no metabolism can walk around. I wouldn't quibble about this when the zombies are either supernatural in origin or at least not understood. Brooks' zombies, though, with their quasi-scientific backing, don't seem all that scientific when it comes to their locomotion. Or the fact that they don't all end up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or some other large hole given their tendency to flock together by the millions and tens of millions and walk mindlessly in straight lines. But that's another story. Don't bother with the movie. Highly recommended.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2006): This first novel from Kostova ignited a major bidding war among publishers back in 2005. I think that's because it bears a certain resemblance to the books of Dan Brown, only four times as long and with Dracula in it.
Honestly, that should be the blurb on the front cover: "Like Dan Brown, only four times as long and with Dracula in it!"
The Historian's what I'd call a horror novel for people who don't read horror novels. And that's not praise, as it also reads like a horror novel from someone who's never read a horror novel (with the possible exception of Bram Stoker's Dracula). Actual frights are few and far between.
Between those frights loom lengthy stretches of travelogue and food tour (food-o-logue?) as the novel slowly and deliberately takes us through Istanbul, France, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, England, Greece, and an unnamed city in America. Much landscape description, cultural tidbits, and assessments of local food and drink are to be had. If you've always wondered what would happen if Rick Steves fought vampires in every foreign country he visited, this may be the book for you.
The Dan Brown apparatus comes from the novel's quest for Dracula through information gleaned from various archives, libraries, churches, history books, local historians, and local legends. Dan Brown gave us a dashing symbolologist; Kostova gives us two dashing historians and a fetching, tough-minded anthropologist. And for about 900 pages, we follow Dracula's trail all over Europe.
And by Dracula, the novel means Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, the historical ruler of Wallachia upon whom Bram Stoker based his vampire character. Did he really become a vampire after his death in battle against the Turks in the late 15th century? Is he still up to vampiric shenanigans now? Where is he really buried?
Well, over the course of 900 pages, perhaps you'll find out. I started skimming much of the landscape description by about the midway point, primarily because there's so bloody much of it, but also because it pretty much is just landscape description: it doesn't attempt to summon up dread or horror. It's just there to take you on a little trip.
Kostova also sets up a mystery near the beginning that the book doesn't really address at any point until near the end, at which point the solution is tossed off as if unimportant. But in a novel in which we're told and shown again and again how clever everyone is, that mystery seems to be the first thing everyone should be addressing as it should affect the entire rationale of the search for Dracula. Don't worry. If you read the novel, you'll quickly figure out what I'm talking about -- and become increasingly frustrated by the novel's increasingly unbelievable skirting of a fundamental plot question.
In any case, just read Bram Stoker's Dracula. Or if you want revisionist Dracula material, Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series and Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series are excellent. If you want a tour through a huge swath of Eastern Europe -- not to mention a bed-and-breakfast in rural France and several historic spots in Istanbul -- you could do worse than this novel. Not recommended.
