Boston Book Bums

Monday: In our review, we peg a dodgy translation and some scattered editing with weighing down the French thriller The Beast of the Camargue.

Tuesday: A well rounded gaggle of news was featured in BIR, followed by a series of four new book releases that caught the eye of the team.

Wednesday: What happens if Gossip Girl and Ghost Whisperer collided in book form? You’d get Three Quarters Dead, reviewed by the team on Wednesday.

Thursday: A really interesting series of news nuggets from around the book world were assembled for BIR. We also went way back to profile one of the earliest Gothic fiction works, Vathek.

Friday: With Halloween two days away, we tried a different kind of book review, this one a novelization of The Omen, an epically scary horror flick.

Next Week: We review Simon Winchester’s newest work, Atlantic, followed by reviews of The Mermaid’s Pendant and Dennis Lehane’s most recent book, Moonlight Mile. We’re also rolling out two more BIRs, a fresh batch of JaknJill books; as well as an Author 411 on LeAnn Neal Reilly.

Back in 1976, as the wave of apocolyptic fervor struck movie goers and readers throughout America, some creative folks decided to conjur a tale of a young Anti-Christ. They came up with The Omen.

In swift and smart bit of marketing David Seltzer’s The Omen was in effect a serialization of the 1976 movie. As it was released before the major theatrical release, it followed the screenplay very closely, while adding layers and different details not seen in the film.

The Omen follows the birth of the Anti-Christ and his clandestine placement into the bossom of a rising American political family, the Thornes. Photogenic, rich and powerful Jeremy and Katherine Thorne find happiness with their well behaved, but oddly growing young son.

We know who he is, no spoilers here, Damian is the Anti-Christ and you wait and watch he and his minions rise to power. Their goal, corruption and defilement of humanity.

Like the movie, The Omen has those odd and prophetic deaths, with some punchy grotesque images. No long exposition, just brief gross moments which vividly portray this abomination on Earth.

One of the B3 crew cannot watch or read religio-horror, finding it deeply disturbing and yes, horrific. God versus the Devil, Satan manipulating man, the profound, millenia spanning evils is enough Judeo-Christian back story to make any story too much to take.

This is a minimalist book, a pre-adaption of a screenplay, so do not expect deep emotional exploration of Thorn, his wife or even the legion of Satanists dancing in the shadows. The Omen was written to pave the way for one of moviedoms scariest movies, so you know that even if it matches the script word for word, it’s one hell of a scary story.

Simple. Straight forward. Creepy.

The Omen by David Seltzer was purchased for review by the Boston Book Bums

Today the popular horror genre has been defanged by hunky vampires, fallen bad boy angels and often gender offensive gore fiction. They walk around in leather, sulk and do little biting, killing or mayhem making. Never the less, the horror genre is alive in well, kept there by some stalwarts of the industry. Sure horror may not be everyone’s cup of literary tea, but it is a valuable and antique part of the fiction pantheon.

We all know about the legends King, Lovecraft, Stoker, Shelley and Poe. Yet as we hurdle towards All Hallows Eve, we wanted to illuminate readers to an old work of horror, considered one of the earliest examples of Gothic fiction- Vathek.

As Orientalism captured European imaginations, ways to render in print the grandeur and mysteries of the East, even if they were more often than not wrong, ill informed or bigoted and based on creative reinterpretations of regional myths, become solidified in works like 1001 Nights. However, in the late 18th century, a work was translated from French(reportedly from Arabic) to English would set a standard for Gothic fiction and serve as inspiration for generations to come.

Vathek is a fictionalized version of a 9th century Abbasid Caliph, who renounces his faith in a bid to gain supernatural powers. The story starts with the ruthless leader buying some engraved swords from a strange merchant. Unable to translate them after the seller disappears, he finds one man who can translate them.

Yet the next day, the inscription changes. Maddened by this, Vathek finds himself propelled in one strange direction after another. Encountering the old merchant once again, but hounded by unquenchable thirst, murderous mandates and haunted by strange demons, Vathek is caught up in a  unyielding chaos that pits him against the largest forces of evil known to man, Iblis or Shaytan, the devil.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote (with some language unacceptable to modern readers) of Beckford’s Vathek, “Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under arabesque domes.“

Western readers today, especially those in North American, are comfortable with Euro-centric retellings of folktales or derivatives of Greco-Roman mythology in fiction. Yet some of the earliest fantasy and even horror used what we know today as the Middle East as its stage of honor.

So while Vathek is not nearly as well known as Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster, it deserves to be right there at the top of Gothic Fiction.

• What do convicts like to check out from prison libraries? (via The Guardian)
• Asimov’s books at WVU (via West Virginia Public broadcasting)
• In Big Sky country a library has created a digital literary map of Montana, literally and it is very cool (via The Missoulian)
• Powell’s Books has bought 7,000 books from Ann Rice’s personal collection (via Portland Biz Journal)
• What’s Philly’s ”One Book”  (via Philadelphia Inquirer)
• Social network for bookworms! Yes please (via Hindustan Times)
• When soldiers return home, a group of kids think they might enjoy a good book. And this is a cool idea (via Bristol Press)
• Freakiest book of all time? (via Washington Post)

Dangerous to Know by Tasha Alexander: A little mystery, a little history, all taking place in the French countryside, this sounds like a good curl-up and read on a cool Saturday afternoon novel.

First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph Ellis: We  have a pop culture fascination with John and Abigail Adams, just like everyone else glued to their seat watching HBO’s John Adams.  The fascination only increased after spending time at the Adams homestead in Quincy, MA this summer. We’re looking forward to learning more about this couple.

Life by Keith Richards: Yeah we know this is going to be ALL over the place this week, but after seeing Keith on Sunday Morning, we were suddenly intrigued by his life story that we thought we knew. A gentleman farmer in Connecticut? Who knew.

The Hammersteins by Oscar Andrew Hammerstein: You know their tunes. Now get to the know Broadway’s most famous musical family. A dynasty in grease paint and footlights.

• A round-up of the International Authors Festival in Canada (via The Star)
• In Turkey, a secular nation, a publisher’s choosing a book with erotic content will land him in court (via  Hurriyet)
• A controversial book is vanishing from shelves in Mumbai (via Mumbai Mirror)
• According to the Hartford Courant, e-books will lower the quality of books (via Hartford Courant)
• When historical epic author Bernard Cornwell travels to Rio, he is a rock star (via Guardian)
• Seattle Times reviews a book focusing on a 19th century serial killer (via Seattle Times)

Commandant Michel de Palma is your prototypical tough detective.  He is aware of his mortality as star detective for the Marseilles crime squad, but is practically fearless when facing potentially deadly situation. This creates an interesting lead for Xavier Marie Bonnot’s The Beast of the Camargue.

De Palma is called by the wife of a German expat to investigate her husband’s disappearance, who the affluent betrothed believes is murdered not vanished on a flight of fancy. However, the industrialists disappearance is not what makes the book jacket blurb even though its the primary thrust of the first few chapters. A mutilated body at the feet of a mythic Provencal monster is what catches readers.

Of course, the missing German, mutilated body and mythic beast all tie back in, but they do so in a way that is clunky and apparently no fault of Bonnot, possibly the translator.

The Beast of the Camargue falters because of some stilted and clunky translation. With the rise of the Scandinavian policiers and Spanish thrillers, translations of the non-literature type have increased in quality. However, with The Beast, the translation creates some extremely awkward sentences and phrases that make little sense outside their native tongue. It is enough to degrade the over all quality of the book.

Bonnot wrestles post-Occupation French life, financial intrigues and even some slight of hand occult elements to give some false flags to the plot’s direction. The creature which fascinates locals and even the German expat is the Tarasque, a hybrid lion headed dragon, turtle and six legged bear. With its bared fangs and deep integration into local folklore, Bonnot uses the beast for some effective misdirection. Or is it real?

The Beast heavily utilizes French judicial and police acronyms, potentially losing less aware readers to the layers of Gallic law enforcement. The action, when it does rise, is a little awkward but interesting. Gun play out of the hands of U.S. writers can come across as odd and disconnected from the flow of action.

The Beast of the Camargue is an intriguing thriller, striving for a Provencal Hound of the Baskervilles, but falls short due to an unfortunate translation and clunky plot assemblage.

The Beast of the Camargue by Xavier Marie Bonnot was purchased for review by the Boston Book Bums

Monday: What happens when you put a group of marauding vampires on the Eastern Front of the Napoleonic Wars? You get Jasper Kent’s Twelve, which we reviewed on Monday.

Tuesday: Of course, we rounded up a bunch of odd and international bookish news for BIR. We also gathered four books for Jack and Jill too.

Wednesday: While the subject may scare some off, C.J. Chivers The Gun just might be the definitive popular history of the AK-47, the prolific and world shaping automatic rifle from the former Soviet Union.

Thursday: The spring 2011 Harvard Press catalog dropped this week and we found a few non-fiction works that piqued our interest. And if its Thursday, then it means another round of BIR.

Friday: Much respected and oft beloved author Michael Cunningham’s newest book, By Nightfall, was reviewed by the B3 team. Check out our thoughts from yesterday.