Now, that’s a great ending!

One of my favorite movies of all time and favorite endings of a movie is No Country For Old Men. Probably because it’s based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy who happens to be one of my favorite authors of all time.

First of all, can’t believe it was 11 years ago already. I just had to go look up some deets and saw the release date: 2007. It feels like it was 5, maybe 6 years ago, 7 tops. But no. 11 years ago.  I had a completely different  life 11 years ago. Didn’t you?

Anyway, one of the reasons I liked the movie is a reason that became more important to me once I got past the age of around 35: most of the characters are *real adults.*

Okay, yeah, the title gives it away that at least a few *old men* will be in the story. But, still, when, exactly, did the trend start of casting young’uns for everything in movies? 23-year-olds with several advanced degrees and expertise in myriad subjects, world travelers who, before 30, built bridges in third-world countries, re-constructed dams, reverse-engineered alien spacecraft?

No Country for Old Men was one of the first times I realized that Josh Brolin was a pretty good actor. Check him out in True Grit and the more recent Sicario. All of the performances stand out in this movie, though, in my opinion, including the chilling and emotionless Chigurh, the laid-back subtlety of Woody Harrelson, and, of course, the beauty of Tommy Lee Jones’ restrained Midwestern angst.

Do you ever notice overwhelming music arrangements blasting your ears off during exciting movie moments? When Josh Brolin’s character is fleeing the sinister Chigurh at one point, engaged in a run and gun in the deserted streets of a sleeping town, there’s no sound but that of their labored breathing, and their footsteps, and, of course, gunfire, all of which amplified the fear and anxiety without a pounding soundtrack.

But to the ending, to the ending. It’s not even a real spoiler, ‘cause I’m not talking about the pivotal situations that happen before the actual ending. But Tommy Lee Jones, recounting two dreams he had about his father to his wife, describes being in the mountains and riding on horseback, as if they were back in olden times.

He says, “When he rode past, I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it – about the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold. And I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there. And then I woke up.”

Aside from the inherent poetry of the monologue, richly symbolic, I love everything about that scene: the light through the window, his expression, his unhurried delivery. It holds on Mr. Jones’ lined, sad face for a moment or two, then cuts to black.

There are some others. But I haven’t seen too many movies, before or after, with the balls to end that way.

 

 

 

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Apathy, Evolution and Idiocracy Walk Into A Bar…

So I was trying to read a book the other day that I had downloaded from the internet, but I had to stop because of the typos, homophones, run-on sentences and comma splices.

FYI, homophones are words that sound the same but are spelled differently: see, sea, peek, peak. And comma splices are commas used where a period should be.

And believe me, I only know this because it’s my job to know. But I actually had to look up the definition of comma splice AND homophone a few years ago because I had forgotten (never knew?) the technical names for: commas used as periods and words that sound the same but aren’t the same.

When I got into a discussion with someone about the increasing amount of errors going unchecked, especially in self-published books, but even in traditionally published content, she had to agree with me that, yeah, they’re there.

Oh, and one more thing.

Nobody seems to care!

Because when we both checked out the reviews this same book was getting on Goodreads, it was only receiving the highest of marks: 4s and 5s across the board!

Okay, I admit I may be a grammar junkie. I probably care more than most people. But I also know that everyone makes mistakes, including moi, of course. And I’m not so bad that I can’t look the other way when a book is sprinkled with typos and run-on sentences that aren’t getting in the way of the reading.

However, consider this: the thought process can be interrupted, by, bad punctuation two and wrong words that you can’t just blink aweigh. See? Wasn’t that annoying, those inappropriate commas? And the brain stutters: Two? Aweigh? Oh, too, away!

And then the rhythm, the reading spell is broken.

Here’s a scary thought. At work, where I do captioning for the hearing impaired, it is my literal job to spell and punctuate correctly.

In the past, captioning companies have always prided themselves on almost 100% accuracy. But lately, I’d say the past five years or so, because there are so many other little companies out there now underbidding prices, we apparently no longer have the actual time to be 100% accurate.

Just like the FDA permits certain levels of “contaminants” in hot dogs (no, don’t even think about what they are; don’t even go there!), many captioning companies now allow a certain percentage of typos, run-on sentences,  and other similar errors in order to “get the work out” at a faster rate. Special attention is paid to proper names, however, which must be accurately spelled. But that’s about it.

My mind keeps going back to the book stuffed full of errors and the fact that people keep scoring it highly, regardless. And I looked in a lot of those reviews which don’t even mention the errors. I could understand a review that said it loved the story and the characters so much that even the spelling and grammar mistakes didn’t bother them that much.

But again: nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care!

In Idiocracy, the future is run by a population of morons. In fact, when Luke Wilson’s character Joe wakes up from being frozen, he discovers that the spoken language has… “deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, Valley girl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them.”

Although cheesy and cheap, Idiocracy has hilarious moments and great prescience about where our IQs are going.

But then again, hasn’t stuff like that always happened? My husband told me that when he’d wear sweater vests or listen to rock and roll in his childhood neighborhood of East New York, the complaint from African-Americans would often be that he was “acting white.”

And language is always changing, adapting, evolving… isn’t it? Maybe Idiocracy’s prediction is too dark and dire. Maybe the downward spiral of the written (and, like, you, like, know, spoken) language does not herald the end of anything.

Isn’t language spelling and punctuation arbitrary anyway something someone made up one day when vocalizations were translated into a group of sounds that were recognized and transferred into a symbol that everybody accepted as the stand-in for that sound and that’s how written language came about I mean so mabee thoze simballs r chanjing and all that uthur stuff lik peeryods and cahmuhs and cahmunly axceptd rools r chanjing too

Just like “The Force”, “bling”, “Big Brother”, “baby mama”, “ghost” (in the sense of abruptly cutting all communication with someone) “woo-woo” and very recently “nothing burger” and “fake news”, to name a few, have been added to the lexicon or become part of our daily consciousness, maybe abbreviations, cyber slang, and texting shorthand like IDK or AFK and C U later and Omg what R U doing 2day don’t spell the end.

The rise of white nationalism, a woman on the freeway putting her RV on “cruise control” and then going into the back to make a sandwich, the advice to “don’t believe what you see and hear”, the apparent need for public signs that say “Fire is hot” in front of a fire pit and “Do not breathe under water” in front of a large container of water (https://www.ranker.com/list/signs-that-humanity-is-devolving/nathandavidson), reality TV, kidnapping immigrant children and saying that’s okay, Meghan Markle’s dress size, people who fall off cliffs while taking selfies…all of these things aside, maybe the decline of language and communication is simply a natural evolution, leading to untold growth and creativity,  holistic, universal empathy, and ultimate sublime transcendence…

Mouth of Madness

Once, a long time ago, I had a really weird dream about alien abduction.

I was in a huge warehouse space with a large crowd of people. We were all being held there somehow. Not restrained. Just…kept inside the warehouse into which we’d been corralled and were waiting around for…something to happen.

Somehow I became aware that aliens were about to transport us out of there or do something else, and in fear, rage, and a sense of helplessness, I started yelling, “Are we gonna just stand here and let them do whatever they want? What are we doing?! Let’s get out of here!”

A stampede toward the door ensued, and then we were all running pell-mell down a hill while strange airships chased us in the air overhead.

I remember the dream vividly, which is odd, because I generally don’t recall my dreams at all, much less ones that I had almost a decade ago.

So what am I talking about? The fact that I’ve been abducted by aliens probably? Or I’ve witnessed some kind of alien activity and been brainwashed to forget it?

No! I’m talking about the fact that out of the feeling of helplessness, frustration, fear, and anger, I wrote a paranormal comedy called Day for Night wherein the protagonist turns to supernatural means in order to “fight” an alien threat. That came out in 2016. (Cover redesign pending!)

Now, two years later, I’ve finally finished the sequel. It’s not out yet. I still have to tweak it then send it to the publisher. Yeah, it’s light, yeah, it’s chick-lity, yeah, it’s comedy. But it’s mine! And it’s done!

And it did not take two years write. Oh, no. I had a wonderful case of writer’s block for well over a year that had me shackled and gagged in a dark basement until I finally made my heroic escape.

I had no time to write the sequel, actually. I basically wrote it one chapter at a time on any Saturday that I could manage it over many, many months. Anytime “real life” encroached and I missed a Saturday, a sense of loss and an ever-increasing panic would consume me as if I had lost my child at a carnival or I’d woken from a nap to find everyone in the world gone.

After all: not a vampire. Not gonna live forever.

And as far as the process of writing goes, it would be great if it was like floating in a rainbow, surrounded by ponies and fudge brownies and friendly dolphins.

But writing, when you’re even able to write, is like being in the mouth of madness: never satisfied, never good, never complete, never right, never ready, never strong, never worthy. Until the poles switch, and before it switches back to dull and wrong and rough and cheesy, it’s worthy and strong and ready and right and bold and fine and good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ART IMITATES LIFE PREDICTS FUTURE

It’s strange to think that when “The Handmaid’s Tale” came out in the ‘80s, it seemed like a fantastical story, far away from reality. Sure, anything is possible. After all, who would have thought anyone would be capable of the cruel horrors of chattel slavery? And yet, that’s how this country was built.

But to go as far as a theocratic far right takeover of the country resulting in the legalized kidnapping and rape of women, legalized torture and murder of anyone not deemed “fit” for Gilead, the new society? Come on! It’s the stuff of nightmares, nothing more! Right?

When White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was compared at the Press Correspondents dinner to Aunt Lydia, the fanatical mistress of the Red Center in charge of indoctrinating the Handmaids, she didn’t even crack a smile.

You want to say come on, Sarah, lighten up! But how can you say that to someone who, for example, said:

“The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence.”

— PolitiFact National on Wednesday, July 5th, 2017

 I’m sorry–say what now?

It’s a little scary that her father’s a Christian minister and she’s a Christian but she stands there day after day reading her script and vomiting out gibberish like the above deluded fantasy. Because that’s exactly what the folk are like who take over America in “Handmaid’s Tale.” All you hear are people spewing their God stuff all over the place–Blessed day. May the Lord open. Under His eye—while they continue to kidnap, rape, torture and murder everyone around them.

Hey, folks, the Orange One is bad. But don’t forget who’s waiting in the shadows like a white-haired Nosferati to step in the minute D.T. takes a fall: Mike Pence. Remember him? Remember the guy who can’t be alone in a room with a woman who isn’t his wife?

What in the name of God does that even mean? I shudder to think! But I shudder even more to think of someone like HIM running the country, the quiet future Gileadean in the background who’s probably been writing up his secret manifesto for The New America since day one in the White House.

Another sign that “Handmaid’s Tale” is eerily timely now: Remember the guy that gunned down a bunch of people in Santa Barbara? What about the more recent guy in Toronto who ran a crowd of pedestrians over with his van? Santa Barbara guy didn’t call himself what’s known as an “incel,” but he did admit to failure in attracting women and did spew a lot of hatred  toward them because of it.

The guy in Toronto, however, DID label himself an incel. Here’s the definition:

Incels are members of an online subculture^[1][2] who define themselves as being unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one and are therefore forced into involuntary celibacy.

As one article in Vox says, many of these men are just sad and lonely, suffering from extreme social anxiety or deep depression.

But many incels have a much more sinister, and specific, worldview — one that the Southern Poverty Law Center sees as part of a dangerous trend toward male radicalization online. These incels post obsessively about so-called “Chads,” meaning sexually successful and attractive men, and “Stacys,” attractive, promiscuous women who sleep with the Chads. Both are positioned as unattainable.

It’s this embrace of helplessness, of their certainty of their own sexual doom, that makes the more extreme incel communities so dangerous. They see the world through the lens of entitlement: They are owed sex but cannot have it because women are shallow. This manifests in a deep and profound hatred for women as a group, which shows up on a very brief scan of some of the more extreme incel communities.

Ben Marx in TheStranger says this about feminism’s impact on men:

The thing that I do not see anyone pointing out is that there has been a change in social norms in the last 50 years that have impacted our mating habits. Many millennials think that it is always sexual harassment to compliment a woman on her looks or even to buy a woman a drink. How can a relationship even get off the ground when men are inhibited from saying or doing these things even places such as a singles bar? So, I think that feminism can be blamed to a degree. Because it has changed the rules of the game to the point where some men do not know what the right move is anymore.

I completely agree with Mr. Marx on the detours feminism has taken, especially recently. What are men supposed to do? Feminism has mutated into something beyond the concepts of equal pay and stay-at-home-dads. Men are simply not allowed to act like men anymore. And I’m not saying sure, go ahead, pat me on the ass whenever you want. But I AM saying it’s okay to pull my chair out. It’s okay to say my dress is pretty. And unless a woman’s been pumping HEAVY iron in the gym and is REALLY strong, it’s okay for men to mostly be firemen. That’s okay with me. I don’t take offense to things that make sense.

And not to undermine the pain and suffering of women who have endured and survived terrible situations where #metoo is concerned, I do think a lot of the public melee surrounding all the “sins” of men, past and present, has been a gigantic witch hunt. Al Franken? Come on! Not saying he was right. Just saying…think of all the shit you’ve done in your life. How innocent are you? Franken wasn’t even in politics when most of that crap happened!

Regardless of all this, though, the incels obviously aren’t owed anything by either the women they’re unable to attract or the government that they think should be providing them with wives. Yeah. Not kidding. They believe it. And, coincidentally, the focus of a recent episode in “Handmaid” was young girls being married off to men they’d never met before.

Who cares? you might say. It’s a fringe group, don’t worry. But, man, do they sound like the creators of Gilead in “Handmaid’s Tale.” All it takes is for a sentiment to exist: that’s enough. Then a fringe becomes a crowd becomes a philosophy becomes a following becomes a movement becomes a belief becomes Gilead. Becomes “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Not possible? This is America? Too many “good” people, “smart” people outnumber those full of hate? Well, I gotta tell you. I’ve heard that before. So don’t sleep too easy. I won’t.

 

CATS, CHRISTOPHER WALKEN & KARMA

Karma: destiny or fate, following as effect from cause.

I find karma very confusing. Simply put, it’s supposed to be a cause and effect thing. The masters paint it as a pool of water, and if you toss in a tiny pebble, you get tiny ripples back. If you heave in a brick…well, you can imagine. Big splash, big noise, big waves…

That makes sense to me. I guess we’re supposed to live our lives only tossing in pebbles whenever possible, in order to keep the resulting ripples down, and probably throwing in nothing at all is even better.

Although you may need to maybe hurl a brick or slab of concrete in once in a while as a humanitarian gesture, because pebbles won’t do it.

Like I’d say Richard Painter’s lobbing pretty big boulders into the pool all the time as he shouts his outrage to the stars regarding the insane clown posse that’s taken over the White House these days.

Because sometimes silence or indifference or inaction equals death.

On a smaller scale, here’s a few things that happened to me recently.

They’re tiny but left a semi-large question mark in their wake.

Incident number one:

We’re always really careful when getting in and out of our car. My husband and I hate when dings show up in our doors or somewhere along the side of the car, and we’re very careful not to do it to other people.

So one day when parked in a public garage on a slight incline, I opened the door, it started to slip, due to gravity, from my fingers, and I lurched after it, my fingers stretching. In a movie it would be that typical scene where important papers fall and one begins kiting away in the wind, and you’re running after it and reaching for it but it’s always yanked away, just out of your reach.

Or even worse, the opening scene of “It”, when the paper boat sweeps down into the gutter and the kid’s on his knees in the rain peering into that dark hole. And, no, he doesn’t reach into the storm drain to try to get it, but he’s leaning precariously forward, staring into that blackness when It suddenly appears, evil incarnate, heralding the end of his life.

And that’s what kind of happened to me.

Except there was no paper boat, no rain, no monster. And I didn’t get yanked into a storm drain.

No, instead–car door slipping, fingers reaching, reaching, close-up of fingertips swiping at the handle but missing by millimeters…and then bang! It thumped into the car next to me.

Exactly at the same time that It emerged from the darkness. Rounding the back of the car.

Or, in actuality, not a murderous alien monster but simply a woman.

She rounded the car just as my car door thumped into hers, and that was all she saw. Only that. Not the valiant effort beforehand. Only the epic fail afterwards.

As I yanked the door back, too late, and then also saw the woman a second later, I said something like, “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” and was rewarded with, along with a super-loud, deafening silence, the nastiest look I think I’ve ever received in my life.

Nastier than the stuff the people in the back of the train were forced to eat every day in “Snow Piercer.”

Nastier than the looks Melania gives Donald as she walks past him from her seat on the other side of Air Force One because there’s no way she can stand being in the same space with him.

If I went around banging doors willy-nilly and not giving two craps about other people and their cars, finally being caught in the act and getting a look like a loaded gun from someone would make sense, right?

Incident number two:

I ride my bike to work. It’s not very far, so don’t be impressed. I’d love to say I lived at the beach and rode to the Valley every day, but that would not only be absurd, it would be impossible. As it is, it’s just a few blocks.

But I DO ride on the sidewalk as often as I can, because I’ve had too many “close calls” in traffic, so it’s just not worth it to share the road with cars.

When I get to parts of the sidewalk where people are actually walking (most sidewalks in L.A. are deserted, you understand, because everyone’s in their car, trying to run over pedestrians and bike riders) I always slow way down, often just stopping entirely to let them pass, or just ride behind them slowly until I have room to get by.

So the other day as I’m riding slowly by the bus stop, a petite woman holding the handle of a small suitcase on wheels turned around and screamed at me at the top of her lungs, “NO BICYCLES ON THE SIDEWALK!”

She screamed this so loudly right in my ear as I passed that my immediate instinct was to leap off the bike and wallop her in the stomach. Then after that yell, “WHAT?”

You know, similar to that old joke about L.A. cops who empty their entire gun into someone and then yell, “Freeze!” afterwards.

If I hadn’t recognized seconds after the screaming started that she was probably homeless and mentally ill, I think there might have been an undignified cat fight at the bus stop that afternoon.

I know these are small examples, but I don’t get it.

Am I not tossing tiny pebbles into the pond?

What’s with these tsunamis coming back at me?

The answer may lie with Christopher Walken, one of my favorite actors, who had this to say about cats:

“I like cats a lot. I’ve always liked cats. They’re great company. When they eat, they always leave a little bit at the bottom of the bowl. A dog will polish the bowl, but a cat always leaves a little bit. It’s like an offering.”

Have cats—and, indirectly, Christopher Walken—stumbled across the middle way? Have enthusiasm, but don’t overdo it. Be conscientious, but self-flagellation is so Middle Ages. Dogs are great, but they get over-excited. Existence is ineffable. Leave a little behind you for the hungry ghosts.

Thank you, Mr. Walken.

 

THEY LIVE! (In Short Stories First)

I’m fascinated by the idea sometimes of writing a short story that gets made into a movie. Imagine working on something for a couple of weeks, a month max. You’re pretty happy with it. A magazine accepts it for publication. Then one thing leads to another and eventually you’re sitting in Mann’s Chinese Theater one […]

via They Live! (in short stories first) — Laughter Over Tears

The Past is Prologue

Found a home for my short story “Terminator Too.”

http://www.fictionontheweb.co.uk/

Lots of good stories in this zine, for those so inclined…

 

Writing: The Art of War

Laughter Over Tears

A Tale of Two Cities is apropos to what I want to say here. At least the first line, that is.

I think some of the best advice and worst advice my parents ever gave me was to say, “Keep one foot on the ground and one in the clouds.”

This was after they realized that my special interest in life was writing. Meaning that I wanted to be a writer. Which, I guess, must have been almost the same as me saying I wanted to ride bulls in the rodeo or apply to Clown College.

Gasp. Oh, God. Oh, no. We have one of those kids. Not Michael J. Fox from “Family Ties,” the savvy young Republican. The other kind. She’s going to suffer. She’s going to die a horrible death. Look at Poe. Look at John O’Brien. Look at Sylvia Plath.

No–wait a minute. Poe didn’t kill himself…

View original post 496 more words

Unrepentant

Time travel. Romance. They go together like Bogie and Bacall, thunder and lightning, mashed potatoes and gravy.

It’s a guilty pleasure of mine. And I’ve read quite a few. But then one day I stopped reading them. Because I was sick of them.

Something deep inside began to balk against the knight or highlander or king’s soldier or Earl’s wide shoulders and strong thighs and muscles for days living on a 6’ frame.

How good was nutrition back then? Not very! Did they have kale? An overabundance of quinoa?

Why is the heroine always 25 with amazing green eyes or amazing blue eyes while the male has piercing blue eyes or piercing gray eyes or piercing gold eyes?

How does the heroine get away with showing her cell phone to people and not getting burned at the stake, like, immediately afterwards?

I’d like to write an anti-romance time travel novel.

Instead of reading about a 22-year-old with pert breasts and amazing blue eyes, I want to hear about the 45-year-old who’s really stiff ‘cause she quit yoga recently due to a rotator cuff tear.

This woman will not touch a necklace, a ring, a locket, drive her car into a fog, fall and hit her head, open a box, put on a scarf, and end up in the 1200s.

She will be a scientist/inventor, build a time machine, and be transported to the 1200s by accident after a test run.

This woman will not get a ride on a horse with a man in a kilt and, while attempting to get more comfortable, snuggle her bottom into his groin, inadvertently turning him on.

She will be a bodybuilder. A 45-year-old bodybuilder with a rotator cuff tear. And she will not fit on the horse. With him on it too.

She will NOT go back to England or Scotland or Ireland and begin to understand Old English or Middle French because of having conveniently studied it in college.

She will not understand what anybody’s saying. Ever.

Which will cause a lot of problems and almost get her killed. Or at least probably jailed. Until they decide to hang her. Especially after everybody realizes she’s a woman and not a man (because she’s a bodybuilder).

But someone sympathetic to her situation and, of course, intrigued by her, will, at the last minute, keep her from the pyre.

At least she will have the sense not to pull her cell phone out and show it to anybody.

As for him, her romantic counterpart, I’ll have her go back to Shaka Zulu’s time maybe. Shaka Zulu actually WAS 6’2” back in the 1800s.

The creator of a revolutionary warfare style, he unfortunately became unbalanced after mother died, demanding a certain amount of mourning, and evidently murdered 7,000 people he deemed insufficiently grief-stricken. He was assassinated by his half-brothers.

Perhaps my muscle-bound scientist could travel to 1800s Africa and influence Shaka away from being such a mama’s boy.

Xiahou Dun—General Who Calms the Waves. Who wouldn’t want to get to know someone with a name like this? Can you imagine bringing him home to meet the folks, saying, “Mom, Dad, this is General Who Calms the Waves. You can call him General WCW.”

220 AD, serving under warlord Cao Cao in the late Eastern Han dynasty, Dun was a soldier who enjoyed the arts on the side and had scholars tutor him, led a frugal life and used his excess wealth to help the needy.

My heroine’s modern sensibilities and, of course, humanitarian outlook would certainly inflame this guy’s primal instincts, wouldn’t they?

Raja Raja Chola was one of the greatest sovereigns of 10^th and 11^th century South India, a valiant conqueror, empire builder, quixotic yet grounded administrator, and patron of arts and letters. Nickname: Raja Raja the Great.

Folks, meet Raja Raja the Great and (let’s say) Monica Raja Raja the Great. After a whirlwind of electrifying turmoil and emotional warring between her and Raja, he would eventually accept her as his Principle Assistant and First Wife and Equal Partner.

I don’t know. My story would probably bomb. Badly.

But I know one thing.

When given the chance to return to her own time, my heroine wouldn’t think twice.

Love is grand and all that, but who in their right mind would really choose to remain in a time where a splinter in your finger could easily become a raging infection that Neosporin would have taken care of in two seconds back in the 21^st century?

Although my heroine, Monica, would no doubt hightail it out of there the first chance she got, she would also probably do her damndest to talk her guy into coming into the future with her. She would help him adjust, help him get a job. They would work it out somehow.

And although I may rail against all the usual elements of time travel romance, pooh-poohing perfect beauty and a selfless willingness to abandon all that’s familiar for “someone who finally ‘gets’ them”, somewhere deep down, I understand and I forgive them.

Because I still remain, in my heart of hearts, an incurable romantic, a sentimental ideologue. A fool, a stooge, a sucker. An unrepentant lover of love.

 

 

Joe Vampire, by MJ Gardner

“Joe Vampire,” MJ Gardner’s sequel to “Evelyn’s Journal,” offers a well-paced, straight-forward and often humorous look into the pros and cons of being undead.  As the relationship between Joe and Evelyn deepens, it simultaneously grows more complicated. And while Joe seems to be on the road to recovery, it also feels precarious somehow, like we’re nervously watching an inexperienced tightrope walker make his way over a yawning chasm.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to see Evelyn becoming “more” vampiric in nature, like in the way she seduces and steals blood from Joe’s roommate and friend Carter without giving it a second thought that he’s his roommate and friend. We’re also introduced to older, more dangerous vampires and finally learn the answers to some ongoing mysteries.

Above all, though, Evelyn and Joe’s existence together is like a long-distance relationship, and one wonders if it will last. Her undead state becomes a point of contention, so he’s constantly seeking the warmth of live human flesh, flaunting his promiscuity with both sexes, a familiar pattern from his past.

As the discord between them becomes unbearable, Joe falls headfirst off the wagon, in more ways than one. And although the ending is gloomy and somewhat ambiguous, it also accurately depicts how someone like Joe, an ex-addict with a crappy past but a good heart, would be tormented by angst and indecision when thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Yeah, yeah: vampires, vampires, vampires. It reminds me of the scene in “Robocop” when Boddicker comes into the room saying, “Guns, guns, guns,” like, “been there, done that.” But there’s a vulnerability to Gardner’s writing that pulls one in, and she addresses topics that one generally doesn’t find in vampire fiction like race, interracial relationships, and gender fluidity, all of which are handled with sensitivity and add new dimensions to an otherwise worked-over undead genre.

Hopefully, maybe…we’ll see what happens to Evelyn and Joe in another book….hint, hint!