Diabolical Plots – Page 32 – From Inspiration to Ink…

BOOK REVIEW: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

written by David Steffen

The Road is a post-apocalyptic survival novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf (which also inspired a 2009 movie adaptation by the same name).

A man and his son travel across the wasteland that had been the United States of America after a major (but largely unexplained in the text) catastrophe that left almost everything dead. They are following a road traveling toward the south where they believe they will find sanctuary. Subsisting on scrounged food supplies from pantries of empty homes, and avoiding other survivors who might wish them harm, they don’t know if they will find enough food to make it to their destination, or how they will survive the coming winter, or whether the sanctuary they are hoping for actually exists.

This novel, as you might expect, is bleak as hell. They and other survivors they come across are all people who’ve managed to survive for years and years after the end of almost all life on the planet, and so have made tough decisions to survive. While the man and his son have stuck to certain moral choices, many of those who still survive have not, and running into others is frequently a dangerous encounter. I found the book very compelling, despite the characters not being named, and the very sparse (and often repetitive) dialog in the book was a strong element of that, there’s not much to talk about, and much of it is the man answering the same questions or try to tell the boy what he needs to hear, and about how their relationship changes over the course of the book. The boy has never known a pre-apocalyptic world, so his father’s stories about the time before are like a fairy tale, compelling but imaginary. A solid post-apocalyptic book telling a deeply compelling and emotional story about trying to survive and trying to help your surviving family however you can, while still trying to make moral choices.

(When I picked the book up, I could have sworn it was a very old book that was published before I was born that everyone talks about, but it turns out I had it mixed up in my mind with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a completely unrelated book, apart from them both being about road trips in some sense)

BOOK REVIEW: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

written by David Steffen

The Time Traveler’s Wife is a 2003 time travel romance book written by Audrey Neffenegger, about a man afflicted with a condition that causes him to time-travel more-or-less randomly and the woman he marries. The book was very popular and inspired a 2009 movie adaptation of the same name, previously reviewed here.

Henry has experienced the time-traveling condition since he was a child. When he travels, only his body is transported, so he does not take along his clothes, wallet, or any other possessions. He learned from a very early age to be ruthlessly pragmatic as a way to survive, because if you get dumped with no clothes and no resources into random locations you’re always against steep odds of getting arrested or starving or whatever else. He has a more or less central timeline that is the trunk from which all of his time travel branches, so he has some normal continuity, but at seemingly random intervals he will travel for seemingly random amounts of time to seemingly random places.

He spends much of his life just trying to survive and get by, until he runs into Clare in his main timeline (when he is in his 30s and she in her 20s) and she tells him that she’s known him since she was a grade schooler and that they’re going to get married in the future. He hasn’t experienced this yet, but early in her life he gave her a list of the times when he would appear in the grove outside her family’s house so that she could remember to bring food and clothes out to him.

Their romance after that is very complicated, as at any given point they are in different parts of their relationship, just as with this initial meeting where she has known him for most of her life and he’s just met her. He then proceeds to meet her as a child and eventually meet her when it was the first time for her. It’s a story of marriage, the obstacles to finding happiness together and what we do to fight for it, and in many ways is about being in different parts of a relationship at the same time, which I think can be true of real relationships that have no time travel involved.

As with the best speculative stories, this one explores real territory with a speculative lens for emphasis. The characters are very different but compelling (with a plus that I didn’t have to watch Eric Bana’s acting for the book, but the minus that I didn’t get to watch Rachel McAdams’s acting). I thought the book as a whole was reasonably well done.

One of the big hangups I had about the book, not being able to tell where in the timeline this fit in, was resolved in the book by section headings that gave the date and the age of both characters. Time is always somewhat confusing at the best of times, but this made it a lot easier to just go with it than I found the book to be.

I also thought it was interesting how Neffenegger chose to follow the continuity thematically rather than necessarily chronologically for either character in particular. For a series of chapters it may follow Clare chronologically through a particular set of years to explore themes of her childhood, then follow him chronologically from his point of a view for a while to show how he ended up there, then switch to something else. Because of the caption headings this was reasonably seamless and I probably only really thought about it because I was thinking about the writing process.

The big thing that makes the book harder to recommend is that for much of the first quarter or so of the book, 30-something Henry is interacting with grade-schooler Clare and I found that whole section of the book deeply creepy and troubling. By that time, he already knows that he will marry her someday when she’s older, and he depends on her for food and clothing on these visits where he would otherwise have to steal and forage like his other time travel jumps. So, it makes sense from a character motivation perspective. But at the same time, it’s hard to avoid the interpretation that he is grooming her during this period. If you removed the time travel element and you had a thirty-something man hanging around a grade-schooler without her parent’s knowledge while mentally preparing himself to marry her, that would be a story about a predator. There are reasons to think that’s not where this was going, but I found it really hard to shake myself off of that interpretation, so throughout this whole section I really just wanted it to be over and get to the part where they’re both consenting adults (even thought that was also somewhat colored by her having been groomed by him for so long that she’s bound to have feelings for him). I’m not sure that was supposed to be creepy or disturbing, but for me it absolutely was, and it makes the book hard to recommend as a result, though overall I thought it was pretty good.

BOOK REVIEW: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

written by David Steffen

American Gods is a contemporary fantasy/mythology novel by Neil Gaiman, published in 2001. I’ve heard the book highly recommended by many readers, and in 2017 Starz started airing a TV series adaptation, so I decided I needed to find out what it was all about.

The protagonist of the book, Shadow, is released from prison three days early when his wife Laura and best friend die in a car accident, and he learns had been having an affair with each other. He had gotten through his time in prison largely by looking forward to reuniting with her, and his job prospects after his release had depended on his best friend’s business.

Bereaved and bereft of all of his hopes for the future, with no good prospects for worth and nothing to look forward to, he is offered employment by a strange man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. Mr. Wednesday is a con man, and takes on Shadow as a bodyguard. Shadow is skeptical at first, but in the face of his options finding work as a recent ex-con, he takes the job.

Soon he is drawn into a strange war between ancient and new mythologies. The gods of the old world, a version of them transported here by the belief of immigrants who traveled here to the United States, are weak and dying from the waning beliefs of the people who brought them here. Meanwhile, new gods are rising up, not of the traditional sort, gods of technology and change. A cold war has been building for quite some time, and it’s about to come to a head.

I had trouble getting into this book. Much of the book is spent with Shadow spending time in random hotels or apartments by himself, waiting for Mr. Wednesday to come back again. And while much of the purpose of the seemingly unimportant events of these “waiting around” times becomes clear later, it didn’t make it quicker or more interesting to read at the time. In addition, it’s almost two hundred pages into the book before the mythology plot comes to the forefront–until that point it’s just Shadow hanging about with odd people with quesitonable motivations. The mythology plot is what drew me to the book, so it was frustrating to wait so long to really get into it.

I found Shadow hard to relate to in particular, which made it especially difficult to keep going with the book. I empathized with the depths of his despair when he was released early because of tragedy but many of the decisions he makes in the book make no sense whatsoever to me. Taking the job with Mr. Wednesday, I get in itself, because he was very short on options at the time for being able to make a living in his post-conviction life. But throughout much of the rest of it, he would make a decision that would just leave me scratching my head, and this is for major decisions that the entire plot is built on, so I couldn’t just ignore the oddity, the entire book depended on them.

There were some elements near the very end that helped justify some of the long periods of not much happening, which helped some in retrospect.

This book was not for me. I’d like to talk with some of the people who recommended it so highly and see what it was they got out of the book, because I am curious to hear another perspective. I might consider trying out the TV show at some point because I feel like the premise is very promising, maybe I’ll enjoy a different adaptation of the story.

TV REVIEW: Chuck Season 5

written by David Steffen

Chuck was an action spy action/drama/comedy show, starring Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), who started as a down-on-his-luck geek working at the BuyMore fixing computers, when he ended up with a supercomputer with government secrets downloaded into his brain, as he has been used as an intelligence asset. And later in the series he got an upgrade to the software that also gave him various physical skills like martial arts. Season 5 was only 13 episodes and aired from October 2011 through January 2012.

The end of Season 4 and the beginning of Season 5 return to the shows roots, but with a twist, as Chuck, Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski), and Casey (Adam Baldwin) use money they’ve earned to buy the Buy More and continue to use it as a base for their freelance spy organization Carmichael Industries. But, at the end of the last season, a set of programmable sunglasses that was meant to upload a new copy of the Interact computer into Chuck’s brain was instead worn by Morgan (Joshua Gomez), so Morgan now has the knowledge of a government supercomputer and extra physical capabilities of the Intersect, so he is the new focal point of their organization and Chuck is now acting as his handler (like Sarah used to do for him in the early seasons).

This final season of the show was a roller-coaster ride, where they tried new things that they hadn’t done in any of the previous seasons (Morgan as the Intersect being just the first!) and I got the impression while watching that the writers were told to build in multiple big finales throughout these episodes in case they got cancelled earlier than that (and maybe there were more finales written for later that never aired). As a result, on top of the individual episode arcs, and the overall season arc, there were also couple-of-episodes arcs throughout the season, and things that seemed like they had the shape of an overall season arc would very suddenly end.

I was sad to see the show end, and there are things about the final season that I wish had been done differently, but it was good to finally see how they wrapped up the show’s portrayal of the Chuck and Sarah story.

If you’ve watched previous stories, you really should watch it, to see how it all turns out.

DP FICTION #53B: “Lies of the Desert Fathers” by Stewart Moore

The Abbot’s eyes stared up at the ceiling. The reflections of blue-robed angels flew across his gray irises. Not much blood had spattered on his face. His chest was another story. The stains had finally stopped spreading from the rents in his brown wool robe. I noticed a smear near the hem of my long skirt where I stood too close.

Revulsion erupted in my throat and I clamped my hands over my mouth. I could feel the dampness of the blood on my leg. I fought the urge to tear the bottom of the skirt off. I needed to stay calm. If I panicked, all was lost.

On the Abbot’s shaven scalp, the lights of his implanted sanctifications still blinked, attempting to change the thought patterns of a dead brain. One finger slowly twitched. The motor cortex must be getting extra juice. I focused on that. A simple, physical issue in the neurological wiring. I could fix that. I slowed my thinking around that problem.

For some reason, the Abbot’s other hand held a saw. That problem I couldn’t solve right now.

Light from the overturned lamp shone on the wall behind the Abbot’s desk. There Saint Dymphna’s painted neck stretched out to meet her father’s sword in frozen, ecstatic martyrdom. I locked eyes with her, my hot breath seething through my fingers. She could be calm. I could be calm.

A shadow moved across Dymphna’s face. I almost turned and fled, but it was only a tarantula crawling inside the fallen lampshade. It hurried out across the wooden floor, so new the room still smelled of varnish in the dull evening heat.

The spider investigated the bloody chisel. Finally, it decided against crawling over the blade. It ran toward the monk in the shadows by the door. He stood so still, all I could see of him was his multicolored winking sanctifications, forming a halo around his head.

I smiled shakily, my gorge still in my throat. “Come here, please, Beta.”

Uriel Beta stepped forward shyly. He was a young man with a scar down his right cheek. His scalp and face were clean-shaven. What a change he made from when I first met him in prison, with lank dark hair and vomit-encrusted stubble.

Now, his hands were sticky with drying blood. I had found him desperately performing CPR on the Abbot.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Beta’s eyes went blank for a second as a blue light between his eyes flickered quickly. That implant stimulated his anterior cingulate cortex. His pupils contracted again. “…I’m Uriel Beta, a brother in the Order of Saint Dymphna.”

“Who am I?”

Again the momentary blankness. I couldn’t reduce the processing time for his sanctifications any further. That was why he had to be here, in the Order’s tightly sealed compound. He wouldn’t last a minute back on the streets, where his old friends, his victims and the police would all be waiting for him.

“…You’re Doctor Abigail Wainwright.”

“Good. Now lie to me, Beta.”

“…I can’t.”

“Try.”

Beta’s mouth worked, forming the beginnings of words, only for his sanctifications to start blinking more rapidly. Intracranial magnetic stimulation pulsed through his anterior cingulate cortex. Sociopaths have low activity in that region. Finally he let out a shuddering breath.

“…I can’t, Doctor Abigail. …The words won’t stay in my head. …It’s like they’re written in sand, and the wind… it blows the sand away, and what’s left is written in stone, and it’s the truth.”

“Excellent. Now: did you do this?”

Beta stared down at the Abbot, and at his scarlet hands. He knelt down, heedless of the blood on his robe. He looked up at me, tears in his eyes. A yellow light on his forehead faded on and off, stimulating his orbitofrontal cortex, giving him sympathy for the dead man he couldn’t feel on his own.

“…No,” he said at last. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. But we have to find out who did this. I’m going to have to call the police pretty soon, and if we can’t give them the murderer, they’ll have to investigate. That means asking questions, and you know how the police already feel about this place. They might even try to force you to leave.”

Beta’s lights flickered. “…Yes. I understand. …We’re all very grateful to you, Doctor Abigail.”

I remembered how Beta had been when I met him: a monster seeking only his own immediate gratification. I set my jaw.

I looked over the monitors in the corner of the Abbot’s office. The lone guard was still in the booth at the entrance to the compound, oblivious. There were no guards inside the Order. We didn’t need any: no one wanted to get out. Besides, guards would have brought their own agendas, their own ideas of regulation and punishment, inside this place, and that would ruin the delicate work I performed here.

The rest of the monitors showed empty rooms and halls, but I knew where everyone was. It was nine o’clock: time for compline, the last service of the day. I held out my hand. “Come with me, Beta.” He took my hand and stood. I didn’t mind the blood. What kind of neurosurgeon would I be if I did? I took him over to the sink where the Abbot got water for blessing, and washed our hands.

Beta scrubbed at his fingernails as his tears ran down the drain. “…He was a great man. …You and he together made me whole. …You were like my mother and father.”

I squeezed Beta’s shoulder. “I know.”

We left the Abbot’s office, and I locked the door behind us. In the hallway, the ceiling lights reflected in the dark lacquered floors, as if we were hopping on stepping-stones in a frozen river. The adobe walls slowly released the day’s heat. The air was close, and sweat beaded on my forehead.

From up ahead came the chanting of the gathered monks. I recognized the canticle at once: the “Dies Irae,” “The Day of Wrath.” I mostly knew it from funeral services. An ill-omened thing to have come up in the lectionary for today. I saw Beta’s pupils dilate, and I knew it wasn’t just the dim light. I’d given all the brothers an implant in their anterior insula cortex. It gave them an experience of being one with each other when they worshipped together: a reward for their commitment to communal life. Now the music was taking hold of Beta. I gripped his arm.

“Uriel Beta, I need you to stay with me now. You’re the only one here who can’t lie to me.”

Beta looked at me with a slowly fading smile. He shook his head hard. “…I’ll try.” We continued down the hall. The chanting grew louder. Beta, struggling with the music, fighting its insistent communion with his brothers, started a whispered conversation to try to stay present with me.

“…Why didn’t you make it so we all can’t lie to you?”

I laughed quietly. “I’m good, but I’m not that good. All psychopaths need stimulation of the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices. That just reverses the particular manifestation of their disability. There are many ways to be a psychopath. You were a compulsive liar; now you compulsively tell the truth.”

“…But do I deserve any credit for that, theologically speaking?”

“That’s not for us to decide. You’re not hurting anyone anymore, and that’s the important thing.”

I remembered the photos of his victims, and shuddered. I was acutely aware of being alone with him, but I knew I was safe. Turning off the brothers’ sex drives had been the easiest operation. A simple matter of cutting off that pathway between the amygdala and the hypothalamus. I had to, or we’d never get anything done.

Beta and I emerged into the back of the candlelit chapel. Darkness filled the circular stained-glass window, giving just hints of deep reds and blues. On the woven altar covering, flowers with lush green leaves bloomed in the desert.

Without the Abbot, the brothers still knew the rites. The slow chant of the song went on and on. The harmonies were rough: I could work no magic with musical talent. But the joy they felt as they sang, or droned, or howled, hummed through the floor. Beta trembled. I put my hand on his shoulder. He smiled beatifically.

Counting Beta and omitting the Abbot, there should have been twenty-two monks in the chapel. It only took a moment to know that one was missing. All I could see was the back of their shaved heads, each blinking with its own constellation. That was enough: I knew each of their implants better than I knew their faces. I had spent hours placing each one. There were Uriel Alpha and Gamma; there were the Raphaels, all six Gabriels, the Michaels…

My breath died inside me. Cold rose up my back despite the heat. I squeezed Beta’s shoulder hard, and he looked at me hazily. “Sariel,” I whispered. “It’s Sariel.”

Beta’s eyes widened. I pulled him back into the shadows. “He must be somewhere where he can’t hear the service, and can hide from the cameras,” I said. “Where?”

Beta thought a moment. “…The library. The special collection. There’s one corner the camera can’t see. We all know about it.”

“Let’s go.” We retreated from the chapel, back into the dark hallways.

Sariel. Our celebrity: Samuel Hutchens, the one serial killer I’d attempted to sanctify so far. Once I controlled his temporal lobe epilepsy, the rest had seemed fairly straightforward. I’d named him for the angel who taught humans about the moon. It matched the cyclical course of his murders.

Beta slowly opened the big oak door that led to the library. It creaked the tiniest bit. I prayed that only we heard it. Inside, green glass lampshades cast a watery light with pools of white on the ceiling. Books encased the walls. The shadows of shelves collected darkness. They gave off the odor of heat and paper.

I took off my shoes. We tiptoed along the shelves to the end of the row where the books about the Old Testament joined those of the New. The door to the special collection stood closed. On the floor lay a copy of the Lives of the Desert Fathers. Very slowly, I slid it out of our way with my foot.

Beta took hold of the door handle and looked back at me. I nodded. He gritted his teeth and threw it open.

Sariel stood in the corner, his nose in a book. He was a short, stocky, middle-aged man. His head was encrusted with sanctifications, like a phosphorescent reef. He looked up at us. His eyes gleamed in the dim light.

“Doctor,” he said softly. “You’re here late.” His accent was aristocratic Southern: Savannah, I knew, from his records. He sat down at the reading table.

“Why aren’t you at compline, Sariel?” I asked.

“I’m finding greater enlightenment here.” He closed the volume and turned it so I could see the cover. Neurocybernetic Behavior Modification. My first book.

“What’s that doing here?” I asked.

“The Abbot thought it was important that we know what we are.” Sariel ran his finger along the crevices of the brain on my book’s cover.

I sat down carefully across from him. “And what are you?”

“Spiritual beings, freed from the thorns of the flesh. Human as human was meant to be, human as in the Garden of Eden, free to praise God eternally until senescence. At which point we will resume the practice in heaven.”

I smiled. “That’s what you’re meant to be. You’re supposed to be better than the rest of us.”

“That’s what the Abbot thought, at least.” He looked at me from under heavy lids.

“Sariel… Have you seen the Abbot today?”

“No,” he whispered, his finger still moving over the convoluted lines. “Not personally, I mean. I saw him at worship this afternoon. And at noon. And this morning.”

“Then why aren’t you there now?”

“Because I’m tired!” he shouted. He picked up the book and slammed it back down. “I’m tired of feeling one with the universe whenever we sing a minor fifth. We’re slaves to your damned brain-machines, and I have had enough.” He reached down into his lap and brought up a tool. My whole body tensed. It was a vise grip. He set it gently on the table. “Eating and f-f-f… mating.” He spat out the word with the force of the interdicted vulgarity. “That’s what it is to be human. So how human do you think I feel, Doctor?”

“Where did you get that?” I asked, stalling for time.

“The workshop. You wanted us to be productive, after all. Idle hands, and so on. You were so sure of your work, that we wouldn’t use the tools to hurt each other. And you were right, of course. I couldn’t hurt another person now, even if I could want to.”

“Then what are you going to do with it?” My voice felt strangled in my throat.

Sariel’s fingers walked over his sanctifications like the legs of a pale spider. “I believe I know now what each one of these things does. This one, for instance—” He tapped a tiny box with a blue light on the left side of his head. “—This one regulates the communication between my amygdala and hypothalamus, so I can’t feel sexual excitation. This has been a particularly painful loss for me.”

He picked up the vise grip and closed it on that box. I stood up. “Jesus, don’t do that, Hutchens!”

He stood too. “Don’t come closer, either of you. I know what will happen. It’s like a fishhook: it does more damage coming out than going in. But it doesn’t matter, since I’m already dead to everything important in life. I’ll give you this, Doctor: you made the death penalty look good.”

He ripped the sanctification out of his head. Most of the implant tore off inside his skull, but the wire came out crusted with pinkish-gray neocortical flesh. Blood pulsed down his scalp. His right arm instantly flopped down at his side. He had torn straight through his motor cortex. He looked down at the useless limb.

Sariel grinned. “If your hand offend thee, cut it off.” His voice was thick.

“Beta, stop him!” I shouted. But when I looked back at him, Beta was shaking. His eyes rolled back into his head. He collapsed against the table and flopped onto the floor. His sanctifications scraped against the hardwood. I turned him on his side. His breathing was ragged but clear.

“And if your eye offend thee, pluck it out,” Sariel said. He gripped another sanctification and ripped it out, destroying Broca’s area, the center of grammar. “Interesting. Is. Feeling. You. Good. To me. Look. Feel… normal, almost.” He giggled, and ripped out another and another. Twitches writhed under his skin, contorting his face. His good hand trembled, so he had trouble getting at a sanctification at the back of his head. When he pulled it out, his right eye blinked furiously.

He was now blind on that side. I slipped around the table that way.

“Where… Go?” Sariel choked. He searched to his left, but like many people with damage to their left occipital lobe, he ignored his right completely. He brought his shaking hand to the center of his forehead, trying to get a grip on the winking red light there.

I grabbed the vise. It came easily from his loose fingers. I threw it away. He howled. Blood streamed down his face. His arms flailed out blindly. I grabbed my book off the table, a heavy tome full of illustrations. I swung it at the back of Sariel’s skull. I had to hit him three times, ruining more sanctifications as well as the book’s cover, before he fell down and lay shivering.

Beta moaned and tried to sit up. I knelt down and supported him. He looked around blearily under the table and saw Sariel’s bleeding head. Beta smiled weakly, then threw up. I moved to block his view of Sariel, and slowly he recovered. “…Not much good, was I?”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I turned up the activity in your mirror neurons to give you more empathy. Empathizing with that was just too much.”

“…I think I’m okay now.” I helped him stand up.

“Can you stay here and watch him?” I asked. “Make sure he doesn’t hurt himself any more?”

“…Yes. Are you going to call the police?”

“No.” I patted Beta’s arm. “It’ll be all right. I want to see if I can can save Sariel.” I sighed. There probably wasn’t much left of Sariel to save. I had worked so hard on him. “I’ll be right back.”

I left the library, retrieving my shoes as I did so, and headed for the Abbot’s office. I had to make sure it was undisturbed for the police. Soft chanting still drifted down the halls. The unity of the sound made it all worthwhile.

I passed by a small shrine for Saint Dymphna in the hallway. A single votive candle flickered under her portrait: a young, pretty, red-haired girl. The patron saint of the mentally ill. I wondered who had lit the candle. I thought of the men in the chapel, brains malformed at birth, who had never had a chance to choose the good at all. I freed them from that. I made it possible for God to save them. I opened the doors of Heaven.

Saint Dymphna’s ghost of a smile was not really reassuring. Neither was the crimson line across her throat.

I stalked down the hall. The brain is a physical system, I told myself, running over the old arguments in preparation for dealing with the police. A human brain is run by chemicals and electricity. You can measure it, alter it, even hold it in your hand. For God to change the flow of electricity in these men’s brains would have required a miracle, a bona-fide miracle, no less than splitting the Red Sea. And God doesn’t work that way anymore. Just read the news.

I reached the Abbot’s door and unlocked it. All I knew was, I saw sickness. I’m a doctor. So I healed it. What else was I supposed to do?

I walked around the desk. Two pools of sticky blood marked where the Abbot’s body and the knife had been.

I looked up. Uriel Beta stood in the doorway. Behind him, the other monks filled the hall. They sang quietly. I had mistaken volume for distance.

Beta’s left hand held something the size of a large rock. When he stepped forward I could see what it was.

“Uriel Beta, what are you doing with that drill?”

Beta looked down at his empty right hand. “…I’m not holding any drill, Doctor.”

“You can’t lie to me, Beta. I know you can’t.”

“…I’m not lying, Doctor. You did your work very well. See?” He waved his right hand languidly at me. “Nothing.”

“What about your other hand?”

“This?” He looked down at his left hand. It stayed very still. The knuckles were white, except the one on the trigger. “…This isn’t my hand. This is God’s hand. I don’t have any control over it.”

“Jesus. Beta, you have alien-hand syndrome. I should have known it was a possibility, it’s associated with disorders of the anterior cingulate. I stimulated that region to help your empathy, but I must have overloaded something somehow. I can fix it, Beta, I swear I can, but you have to give me the drill.”

The tarantula scurried in front of him. He knelt down.

“God doesn’t want you to take this,” he said softly. He triggered the drill and stabbed it through the spider’s body and into the floor. He never took his eyes off me as he did it. “But don’t worry. He doesn’t want to kill you either. Not like the Abbot. The Abbot wanted to saw off God’s arm.” He pulled the drill out of the floor and stood. “God only wants you to know the happiness we feel.” I realized he wasn’t pausing before he spoke. He believed what he said absolutely.

I saw blinking lights in another monk’s hand. It took me a moment to realize they were Sariel’s bloody sanctifications.

Beta’s left hand tested the drill. It whirred loudly. He stepped forward. There was nowhere for me to go. For the first time I really saw the window bars from this side.

“He’s going to sanctify you, Doctor,” Uriel Beta said as the other monks surrounded me. They grabbed me and pulled me to the floor, singing the whole time.

“You’re going to see what we see. What you gave us.” Beta knelt down over me. “Thank you, Doctor. We all thank you so much.”

I heard a sound. I couldn’t tell whether it was me screaming, or the drill. I looked up at the shaved heads all around. A cloud of blinking lights surrounded me, pulsing in complex rhythms. I knew each blink and flicker.

They were all working perfectly.

Author’s Note: “Lies of the Desert Fathers” was born out of research in the hard doctrine of original sin, that no human can achieve godliness unaided. But who knows what helps towards saintliness might be available after 50 more years of technology?

Stewart Moore began his peripatetic career by graduating college with a degree in theater, following which he directed a production of his play Henry and Beckyin New York City. Later, he earned a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible at Yale. His researches there led to the publication of his first book, Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt (Brill, 2014). Turning from nonfiction to short fiction, he has been published in anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow (The Beastly Bride, 2010) and Paula Guran (Halloween, 2011). He has also been published in the magazine Mysterion (2018). He lives in New Jersey with his wife, daughter and an odd number of cats.

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TV Review: Eerie Indiana (1991-1992)

written by David Steffen

Eerie, Indiana was a 19-episode episodic young adult SF/Fantasy show that aired on NBC in the 1991-1992 television season. It was followed in spring 1998 with a 15-episode spinoff Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension on Fox Kids (which I’ll touch on briefly but is not the focus of this review). I watched it recently for free on the Roku Channel which I could access without any streaming subscriptions on my Roku streaming device.

Marshall Teller (Omri Katz) and his family recently moved from New Jersey to the odd small town of Eerie, Indiana. Maybe because of his outsider perspective, he seems to be almost the only one to notice that Eerie has a lot of weird things happening that no one can explain and most people don’t even seem to notice, and he declares that it’s the center of weirdness for the whole universe. Because no one believes him, he is determined to investigate and document every weird thing he finds. He makes best friends with a younger boy named Simon (Justin Shenkarow) and in each episode they investigate some new weird thing they’ve come across. There is some continuity that grows as the series goes on, especially in the development of secondary characters, but it is largely episodic, each episode stands relatively well on its own.

The very first episode sets the tone for the level of weirdness. In that episode, Marshall’s mother (Mary-Margaret Humes) buys some Tupperware-like food preservation containers that can keep food fresh for an extraordinary period of time. But as the episode goes on, Marshall and Simon learn that there are also person-sized containers that the saleswoman uses every night on her family and they haven’t aged in decades. It’s that kind of weirdness with a fun sense of humor that made the show what it was.

I particularly like the secondary cast member, known at first as “the boy with white hair” (Jason Marsden), a troublemaking but charismatic older boy living on his own. My greatest disappointment that the show didn’t run longer is that I was interested to see where his storyline would go, it seemed like they had some ideas in the works for him.

This family show is fun for all ages–some of the dialog and plotlines and delivery of linesare a bit simple at times, probably aimed for a younger audience in general, but the weird and novel premises like the one above make it surprising and fun for everyone.

In 1998, Fox ran a 15-episode spinoff series called Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension which as the title suggests is in an alternate universe from the original series. There is a small and poorly-executed link with the original series in the form of a distorted video message from the original Marshall and Simon explaining the situation, but of course since the original actors for Marshall and Simon are too old at this point they just reused some footage from the original and distorted it enough so that they could record new voices over it. In this other dimension, instead of Marshall Teller, the lead is Mitchell Taylor (Bill Switzer), and instead of Simon Holmes the other kid is Stanley Hope (Daniel Clark). And Mitchell’s family and everyone is all sort of the same as Marshall’s but sort of not. I found this made the reboot very hard to get into because I kept comparing the original to this one and finding it lacking. I think the show would’ve had a better chance if it had either brought back the original cast and just had them older, or if they had just completely started from scratch with completely new characters, this sort of half-continuation made it hard to watch and we gave up after a couple episodes.

So, I would recommend the original 19-episode series for fans of the weird, but probably not the 15-episode reboot.

TV REVIEW: Stranger Things Season 2

written by David Steffen

Stranger Things is a speculative horror/mystery show with an ensemble cast. Following the success of Season 1 on Netflix, 9-episode Season 2 launched in October 2017, and the third season is scheduled for July 2019. I reviewed Season 1 here.

Season 2 takes place more than a year after the events of season 1 and in the meantime things have apparently returned to (mostly) normal after Will Byer’s (Noah Schnapp) odd disappearance and reappearance–only a handful of people know the truth, that the local government agency disguised as the power company opened a hole to another dimension (the “Upside Down”) that let a vicious dimension-hopping monster (the “Demigorgon”) into our dimension, who abducted Will into its own dimension, and killed several others before it was killed itself with the telekinetic powers of a girl called Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) who was herself a result of experiments by the power company.

As seen in the prologue of the last episode of Season 1, Will is not free of the Upside Down yet. He is no longer physically there, but he has been having periodic episodes where he seems to move back and forth between our world and the Upside Down. His mother Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and their friend Police Chief John Hopper (David Harbour) have been taking Will to therapists employed by the power company to treat what they think is post-traumatic stress disorder, but the visions seem so real it’s hard to tell if they could have some reality to them. Will’s friends Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) want to help him however they can but they don’t know what’s wrong.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the boys, their friend Eleven is still alive and living in secret with Chief Hopper, kept a secret to keep her safe from the Power Company.

The second season was very good, if not good as the high bar set by season 1 (second book, season, in a series is always the hardest because you don’t have the novelty and mystery of the first), there is much of the same mystery and action and emotion that made the first season great, but with a new adversary to face off against. I highly recommend it, and I’m looking forward to watching season 3!

TV REVIEW: Stranger Things Season 1

written by David Steffen

Stranger Things is a speculative horror/mystery show with an ensemble cast, whose 8-episode first season launched in 2016, and the third season is upcoming in July 2019.

The show begins in the year 1983, with four friends playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons at Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) house. When it’s time to go home, the other three boy’s Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), and Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) head for home on their bikes in the dark. The next day everyone realizes that Will is missing. About the same time, another kid, a girl with buzz-cut hair (Millie Bobby Brown) that no one has ever seen before, appears around town. The boys and others search for Will and as they investigate they find more and more signs that this is no ordinary disappearance, but someone seems determined to convince them that it is. Will’s mother Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), distraught over the disappearance of her son, tries to convince Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) of some of the hard-to-believe details of the case.

It’s hard to describe much more of the plot of the series without giving away major plot things that will be more fun to experience yourself. I only saw this recently on DVD as the new season approaches, and it was SO MUCH fun to binge watch. The writing and cast are great, the special effects are solid, I love to root for the kids, and against the villains, though I think the young girl is my favorite character.

It’s no wonder this show has been such a hit, I would highly recommend it, and I’m looking forward to the new season.

DP FICTION #53A: “Little Empire of Lakelore” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires

All the world followed pretty much the same guidelines for international trade and travel. That’s a very big gloss, but let’s say it was true. And it was, for the most part.

There was however, one exception. It was Little Empire of Lakelore. Little Empire of Lakelore had to be qualified by the word little, because simply calling it the Empire of Lakelore would be a misnomer. You see, there was nothing imperial about Lakelore itself, except for its air of superiority, which was manufactured much like the actual air itself. The air had to be manufactured and pumped out, and it wasn’t too costly to do so, given the marginal cost of opening a few more factories for that purpose.

Lakelore once was a small nation that sprung from a lake. It did not literally jump out of the lake. Rather, the resources that the lake provided helped stir a willing population into convening and interacting. Water, isn’t it a great facilitator of sociality? Like all liquids, especially alcohol? Now, if the lake was made of alcohol… wait I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Lakelore was once a beautiful paradise, as is every long lost lore of an industrial hellhole. Its pristine waters grew dark with sludge. Its birds and trees became coated with dust and fell into the abyss that once was the lake. And yet, with the industrial advances, industry also cleared some of this sludge and smog, so in the end, it was rather so-so dirty.

All the world around Lakelore was more enraptured by the possibilities that the digital upheaval had brought with it. Suddenly, media was everywhere. Everyone was posting pictures, commenting on this or other, taking videos of anything their eyes happen to fall on in the course of the day. Just as Lakelore itself had been saturated with pollution, so were the digital networks deluged with the clutter of everyday nonsensical detritus.

Lyon of Lakelore was against this. He was not Prince Lakelore for nothing, after all.

One morning, when reading a print version describing a select few of the digital hogwash that washed itself onto his breakfast plate, he folded that derivative of a newspaper (which though derived from content online, itself had a derivative digital version) and said to his father, “Father,” — (for he always addressed his Father as Father and not Dad, as royals do not make such a petty mistake) —”Father, I disapprove.”

“Of what son?” Lord Titanius of Lakelore bellowed. He was small of stature but his voice bellowed as if he was constructed mainly of bass organ pipes.

“Of all this,” he said, fanning his hand over the paper.

“What about it?” said Lord Titanius.

“It’s drivel. Insulting to be considered news,” said Lyon.

“Then what shall we have done? Shall we ban it?” said Lord Titanius.

“Yes, perhaps we shall,” said Lyon.

“That would be my decision not yours. Let me ponder over such a course of action,” said the lord.

He continued chewing his sausage, the juicy bits flying everywhere, and even hitting the wet nurse who was across the palace way.

Once he swallowed the sausage he said, “Okay, I thought about it, son. You made some good points. We will ban it.”

“Decreer,” Lord Titanius hollered out. “Decreer, decree this drivel banned.”

Decreer lowered his head, blew a horn to get everyone in the empire’s attention. Since the empire stretched for a good a few feet outside the palace grounds, one of the furthest farmers living in that empire who could only see into the royal courtyard and not into the rest of the palace, stretched his ears to hear.

“I decree this drivel banned,” said the Decreer.

That one farmer with his outstretched ears did not know what this meant, so he continued to move his hoe against a pretty pathetically barren lot.

“And look, Father,” continued Lyon, immediately after the decree.

“What is it?” said Lord Titanius now, a bit peeved. He had already accomplished so much in a day and was wondering why his son persisted on pestering him past his first sausage consumption.

“Why, Father, look at these photos,” said Lyon. He picked up the paper.

“Didn’t I just ban that?” said the lord.

“Yes, but bear with me here. Give me a one-minute pardon, as we will strike this off the record that I had mentioned this at all. But, look at these faces. These are random printings of people’s faces from around the world.”

“And what about them?” said the lord, careful not to look to carefully, as he did not want to be subject to the punishment of his own ban.

“Well, they’re looking straight at us,” said Lyon.

Lord Titanius managed a glance. “Yes, well, they are profile photos.”

And Lyon sneered. “But can you believe the insolence? They look straight at us as if they have no shame.”

Lord Titanius found himself nodding in agreement. “Yes, that is rather impudent, I must say.”

“Let’s have these banned, too,” said Lyon.

Two bannings, in one day? Isn’t that a bit too much work? thought Lord Titanius. He believed in work-life balance.

“Fine, fine,” the lord grumbled. He was not yet 3/4 into his second sausage, when the decree was made.

The not-so-faraway furtherest-away farmer put again his hoe yet again to strain to hear the message. When it was over, he continued his meaningless labor that would prove to provide little if any fruit. (But, he was producing vegetables, so it was okay.)

How will people then apply for visas? thought Lord Titanius. He said the same sentence aloud without further consideration. That’s how his brain worked, as an appendage attached directly to his mouth.

“Let’s have the photographer executed?” said Lyon.

“For what?” asked Lord Titanius.

“Why? He takes pictures of these folks facing us directly, like we’re some objects of their gaze,” said Lyon. “Obviously.”

“That’s insolence, son. Take back your ‘obviously’ statement,” said Lord Titanius.

“Let it be known that I take back the word ‘obviously,'” Lyon mumbled, quite used to this retraction.

“What will you have him do?” asked the lord.

“Why, be executed. Then we’ll have someone as photographer who will take photographs so the person in the photograph must look up at us,” said Lyon.

“Look up…?” said the lord.

“Yes, tilt their head up in reverence to us,” said Lyon.

“But such photographs won’t be accepted in any other region in the world,” said the lord. “How will our men travel?”

“They don’t travel anyway, Father,” said Lyon.

“Oh. Quite right,” said Lord Titanius.

“Yes, because if we even lose one man, our economy will collapse, just like our lungs ten years ago,” said Lyon.

“Well, good thing we built those factories, all in the palace,” said the lord.

“Yes, they were very compact. Just like those compact trash cans,” said Lyon. He pointed at one now, that was smoking. “Oh wait, that’s a factory, not a trash can,” Lyon said, correcting himself.

The lord used this distraction as an opportunity to not decree an execution of the photographer, because just as Lyon said, one man gone would spell disaster for their empire’s precarious economy. But, he did later send a messenger to tell the photographer to only take photos where the subject is looking up at the camera.

“But how about if they show their friends their photos? Then they are simply revering the person looking at their photo, which is only but a friend, and not royalty,” said the photographer.

“Insolence! Just do as I say!” said the messenger who had been running back and forth between the lord and photographer, passing the message to the photographer in short bursts of bellow, just as he was ordered.

It had not occurred to the lord, nor Lyon, that a different perspective and social standing could be achieved, simply having someone who is not them look at the photo. It never occurred that they were not the doer-of-the-looking-at-the-photos action.

The photographer sent the messenger to tell the lord that he needed a ladder for this purpose of taking photos from above since he was approximately the same height as the lord himself.

It was ironic, the photographer thought, because if the lord saw these people, most men would tower over him and so it would make more sense to have visitors, should there be any, take photos down-up, as in up their nostrils rather than from top-down of their foreheads. But, then again, logic itself had been decreed banned ten days ago, only to be reinstated two days ago for logical reasons, then banned again yesterday. The photographer cleared his head of these thoughts. He wasn’t sure if they were logical or not, since he now lacked reason to make such a judgment.

Then he realized all his photos were blurry anyway, because of the smog, though not nearly as opaque as a decade back. Those were the years of the black curtain, which was really indicating the air level, rather than political situation. The photographer used to literally lift the air, like a curtain, just a peek so he could point his camera and shoot at his subject.

The next appointment he had for photographing on his list was Lord Titanius himself, who did not like his previous photo. He was not a self-serving lord; it was only that the picture did not flatter him. Of course this kind of narcissism was banned, but who is to call it narcissistic?

When the photographer climbed up the ladder to be taller than the lord, that was mistake number one. Mistake number two was taking a photo of the lord reverently looking upward, so that he would always remain the subject to someone else who was above him who was looking at the photo. The third was that the photographer had been decreed executed, or so he thought he had overheard from halfway across the empire, so what was he doing taking pictures?

The photographer brought up these points to the lord, who was standing next to him, but they needed the intermediary of the messenger to repeat it back and forth between them because it would be unseemly if they talked directly. But then the photographer struck these comments off the record since he technically had no logic. “Let’s just drop this photo in the black abyss of the lake and call it even, okay, Lord Titanius?” said the photographer.

Secretly, they agreed on this. “This will be our little secret,” said the lord, staring at his photo. He was rather fond of this photo with his shiny forehead and long nose which though predominant was made altogether even more prominent — and it was mostly all he saw in his photo, since it was taken from above.

Instead he pocketed the photo, and let the photographer drop the negative into the black abyss, where it came out the other side positive. (And who keeps negatives anyway? Like people ever make prints from them! Or even know what it means nowadays!)

The Lord decided he would avoid Lyon for the rest of the day.

I should decree no more decrees, he thought, but then he was too tired for any further decrees.

Please just let me have some rest, he thought.

Too bad rest was banned three days ago, he remembered bitterly. He bit into his next sausage and washed it down with bitters.

Oh that’s why I’m so bitter, he thought, looking at his whiskey glass, remembering it was there. He twirled the glass until the ice clinked and took another drink.

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Besides Diabolical Plots, her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Mithila Review, LONTAR, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, Deep Signal, Battling in All Her Finery, and Broad Knowledge. She can be found on her website daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com and on Twitter @spireswriter.

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TV REVIEW: Chuck Season 4

written by David Steffen

In this season, Chuck and his partners Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) and Casey (Adam Baldwin) face a new adversary in Alexei Volkoff (Timothy Dalton), a criminal mastermind who is still working with Chuck’s mother who he hasn’t seen since he was a child. Everything changes while remaining the same as the CIA takes over the Buy More and converts it into an official base, and builds out new areas that even Chuck and his partners don’t have access to.

While Season Three had started out shaky but got stronger, Season Four is reasonably solid throughout, new situations, expanding on Chuck’s physical abilities, and taking new steps in the relationship between Chuck and Sarah. The Buy More continues to offer the comic relief while also tying into the CIA plots, while also changing as the managerial structure changes and now Morgan (Joshua Gomez) is in on Chuck’s secret so manages to involve himself more and more. At the same, it’s hard not to miss the early seasons of the show where Chuck was clever but flighty and not physically adept. But the show has changed into something different, even if the first couple of season were special in their own way.

Well worth watching!