Batman: No Man's Land

by Greg Rucka

(New York: Pocket Books, 2000)

Hardcover, 430 Pages, Fiction

“All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here. GOTHAM CITY: a dark, twisted reflection of urban America. Overcrowded, overbuilt, and overshadowed by a continuous air of menace, this gothic nightmare is a breeding ground for the depraved, the indifferent, and the criminally insane. It’s also the object of one man’s obsession. Forever scarred as a child from witnessing the brutal murder of his parents, Bruce Wayne has dedicated his life to protecting this city from its many predators, taking a form to inspire hope in the innocent … and fear in the guilty. He is the masked vigilante knows as the Batman. With Police Commissioner James Gordon, these two men have always fought to preserve law and order, side-by-side, struggling against a pervasive and relentless criminal element, working together to hold the line. Until now. Leveled by a massive earthquake that has left thousands dead and millions more wounded, Gotham City has been completely cut off from outside aid, transformed into a lawless battleground—a No Man’s Land—where the survivors are turning against one another, and where the city’s protectors are torn by a crisis that may consume them all.  Gotham now teeters at the edge of the abyss … and Batman is missing.”

So, after returning to school in 2005, spending four years getting my bachelor’s degree in literary studies, and then two very intense years getting my master’s in the same field … it has been a long time since I was able to read a book solely for the pleasure of it. Books have been read to be analyzed and written about, and I’ve made a pretty good “living” during my academic years doing this, and hope to parlay all of this into a PhD and eventually a career teaching English at a college or university somewhere. However, for the time being, I am between gigs (so to speak) and since I am unemployed, I have quite a bit of time on my hands. This is why I decided that it was time to retire Bryan’s Book Blog and start Reading Past My Bedtime, so that I could gain some perspective on reading and learn how to read and write about books in a non-academic way once again. There was a false start, but after some time (and a rebalancing of my medication and shedding some emotional baggage) I’ve decided to try it all again.

With books, though, it’s been harder to turn that off. I was originally intending to make the re-inaugural review of Stephen King’s most recent book 11/22/63. However, every time I started the book I only got a handful of pages into it, before I stalled and had to put it down. (I think I’ve been too traumatized and disappointed by King in the last decade (Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, Just After Sunset, Full Dark, No Stars, Under the Dome, Mile 81) that I was extremely reluctant to dive back into a Stephen King story. It was as if I had a mental block of some kind. So I tried to move on to a book I knew I liked, The Shining, but after doing so much academic work (and basing a number of papers, including a stalled thesis) on this story, I simply couldn’t turn off my analytical brain. So, I decided to pluck a book off of the library shelf that I wanted to read for a very very long time … well, at least for the past eight or ten years or so: Batman: No Man’s Land.

Beside trying to use this to jump-start relearning how to read for pleasure, my six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter are really in to Batman and so it felt like a good thing to read (if only to backfill my spotty knowledge of the BatMythos). So, imagine my surprise when what I found was a great book. I guess I expected to read a half-assed adaptation of the comic book run of the No Man’s Land storyline that was really lacking because it was missing the visual element of the comic books. However, as I said, this was not the case, in fact No Man’s Land is a great story and Rucka really sells it, though considering he was one of the writers on the No Man’s Land arc in the Batman comics, it comes as no surprise.

What I loved most about this book and in particular the story as it fits into the overall BatMythos is the way in which the characters of both James Gordon and Barbara Gordon (here in her Oracle guise) are extremely well rounded and very much humanized.  As two of the characters in the comics who are very much vested in Batman, his disappearance from at least the first third to half of the story pushes these two characters well beyond their comfort zone. Commissioner Gordon must begin to take back his city on his own, without the help of the Bat, based on his own not inconsiderable intelligence and ability as a police officer. That he fails at times and that Rucka allows him to be angry with himself and others and even lash out at times helps the Reader to see further into Gordon’s mind and his personality. It turns Gordon into the main protagonist, whereas it would otherwise be Batman. As for Barbara Gordon, her role as Oracle (a kind of Batgirl-cum-Big Brother (Sister?) after being paralyzed by the Joker) allows Rucka to tell stories that one might otherwise miss in the chaos and aftermath of the earthquake. As with her father, the disappearance of Batman allows Barbara Gordon to vent her own anger and frustration and her own humanity, especially since she is trapped in her apartment (given that she is confined to a wheelchair and the power is out in her building, so no elevator). In this way, Barbara Gordon becomes our all-seeing Narrator, standing in for yet another role that would normally be filled by Batman.

Even when Batman finally does reemerge and begins to take back Gotham City, this does not push the Gordons to the second tier. James Gordon still stays the chief protagonist (after all it is his city that he is fighting for, and he has the biggest stake in it) and Barbara Gordon fully takes up the role of Oracle once more and it is her knowledge that continues to drive the action, and once the whole Bat Family is reunited with Tim Drake/Robin and Dick Grayson/Nightwing returning, and Cassandra Cain taking up the mantle of Batgirl and even Huntress being brought into the fold, the action really does drive to a rather climactic and sobering conclusion. Add to the mix some of the best villains in Batman’s Rogue Gallery, including Two-Face, The Penguin, assassin David Cain, Bane, and the Joker and Harley Quinn (who was brought into the DC comics canon from the Batman animated cartoon in this story arc) as well as Superman heavies Lex Luthor and Mercy Graves (who also made the jump from the animated Superman cartoon to the DC comic book canon in this story arc) and it really makes for one hell of a story. My favorite scenes … the ones where Batman menaces Lex Luthor; absolute gold!

All of this aside, if I did have one complaint about the book it is actually two things. First and foremost, while the story as a whole works, and while the various points of the plot are all necessary given that the story arc in the comics ran across nine months in nearly 100 issues spanning sixteen different titles … a 430 page novel doesn’t really cover it all, and a lot of it—especially in the middle—feels rushed (I’m looking at you Bane and David Cain plot points). In the end, though, Rucka does make up for it by finishing with one of the most intense and emotional climaxes I have ever read (though I think it hit me especially hard being a husband and a father). My one other “complaint” is that No Man’s Land is not a good gateway story into the Batman Universe. Not that it is meant to be or even should be, but as one of the only novel adaptations of the Batman comic books, it stands as an entryway whether or not it wants to be, but if these are the only real faults that I can find in this book, then it’s got a lot more going for it than it has against it.

Mile 81

by Stephen King

(New York: Scribner, 2011)

eBook, 80 Pages, 213 KB, Short Fiction

At Mile 81 on the Maine Turnpike is a boarded up rest stop on a highway in Maine.  It's a place where high school kids drink and get into the kind of trouble high school kids have always gotten into.  It's the place where Pete Simmons goes when his older brother, who's supposed to be looking out for him, heads off to the gravel pit to play "paratroopers over the side."  Pete, armed only with the magnifying glass he got for his tenth birthday, finds a discarded bottle of vodka in the boarded up burger shack and drinks enough to pass out.  Not much later, a mud-covered station wagon (which is strange because there hadn't been any rain in New England for over a week) veers into the Mile 81 rest area, ignoring the sign that says "closed, no services."  The driver's door opens but nobody gets out.  Doug Clayton, an insurance man from Bangor, is driving his Prius to a conference in Portland. On the backseat are his briefcase and suitcase and in the passenger bucket is a King James Bible, what Doug calls "the ultimate insurance manual," but it isn't going to save Doug when he decides to be the Good Samaritan and help the guy in the broken down wagon. He pulls up behind it, puts on his four-ways, and then notices that the wagon has no plates.  Ten minutes later, Julianne Vernon, pulling a horse trailer, spots the Prius and the wagon, and pulls over. Julianne finds Doug Clayton's cracked cell phone near the wagon door — and gets too close herself. By the time Pete Simmons wakes up from his vodka nap, there are a half a dozen cars at the Mile 81 rest stop. Two kids — Rachel and Blake Lussier — and one horse named Deedee are the only living left. Unless you maybe count the wagon…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … I feel like I am in an abusive relationship with Stephen King.  Things started out so good when we first met.  His stories were scary and interesting and funny and engrossing (sometimes with an emphasis on the grossing part).  We had fun together, stayed up late together, went everywhere together: Castle Rock, Derry, two winters in Colorado, ‘salem’s Lot…

Then, things started to get a little—strained.  We stopped going to the same old places.  Castle Rock was gone, Derry just didn’t have the same shine, Colorado was out of the question … we started visiting places like Dark Score Lake, Little Tall Island … the Midwest.  Nevada.  It just wasn’t the same anymore.  He became needlessly violent, he treated me like I wasn’t smart enough anymore, he beat me over the head with his morals.  So I left.

But I never really did.  He kept a little part of me with him.  A little part of my heart.  He would whisper into it saying things like That was just a phase, I’m over it now.  Come, see what I can do.  Want to go to the ends of the world and back?  We can.  Want to see how literary and metafictional I can get?  Come with me.  And, like a fool, I did.  I went.  Some of it was good, most of it wasn’t.  Sometimes we tried to recapture our old spark and did the same old things in the same old places, but really, the gloss was off the relationship.

But now I was hooked.  I kept coming back.  I was entirely co-dependent.  He said he had changed, that it could be like old times, but it wasn’t.  I kept getting my heart broken, kept getting hurt, and then thanking him for doing it.  I couldn’t stop.  I kept trying to believe he had changed, believing it would be different this time, but…

So, I thought maybe I would just take it one step at a time.  Start off with baby steps again.  A series of quick rendez-vous.  That worked for a time.  Not all of those get-togethers were fun.  Only about three or four were, to be totally honest, but they allowed him to wedge his way in to my life again and entice me into a long term relationship.

And here I am.  Reading Mile 81.  Another quick tryst (at only 80 pages long) between King and I, and it was just as unsatisfying as some of the others have been, especially those in Just After Sunset.  There is nothing particularly exciting about this story, rather it seems as if King is simply rehashing his stories—again—and in the end, Mile 81 is simply an amalgamation of Christine and From a Buick 8 with a healthy dose of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby thrown in for good measure.  The resulting mash is a story that is unsatisfying and riddled with characters that are not very believable, especially 10-year-old Pete Simmons who is the most world-weary and wise pre-teen I have ever met and functions more as a deus ex machina than a main character/hero.

My emotions regarding this book (novella?) (short story?) are so over the map that I’m not even sure I can articulate how disappointing this entry is.  And the worst part of it?  I read it.  I read it because it was written by Stephen King and I am desperately trying to recapture the spark of our relationship.  Even worse than this?  I’ll pick up 11/22/63 even though the MacGuffin of this book (available November 8, 2011) is a time-travelling English teacher who, through the magic of an enchanted diner storeroom (yes, you read that right), heads back to 1963 IN ORDER TO STOP THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION.  No really (and if it sounds more than a tad familiar, that’s because—minus the time travel—it is).  That’s what this one is going to be about (there is a teaser at the end of Mile for 11/22/63).  Will I read it?  Damn me, but yes I will.  Why?  Because I hope it will be better than Just After Sunset, Duma Key, Lisey’s Story and Mile 81, and a host of others that have been disappointments.

A History of Horror

by Winston Wheeler Dixon

(Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2010)

eBook, 224 Pages, 3993 KB, Nonfiction

Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination.  A History of Horror, with rare stills from classic films, is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre.  Chronologically examining over fifty horror films from key periods, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of legendary characters and explores how the genre fits into the Hollywood studio system and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time.

Now, I have read a lot on horror, and not just recreationally.   I have done a lot of serious academic reading, studying and writing on the horror genre both in literature and in film.  In fact, I’ve pretty much made an academic career for myself writing about horror.  Believe it or not, it is viable academically.  (It even got to the point where I was known as “the Horror Guy” among both my cohort and the department.)  Amongst my rummaging in the academic discourse surrounding the horror film, I have come across the writings of Professor Winston Wheeler Dixon more than once, so when I discovered that he had a book length study of the horror genre, I knew I needed to read it.  I probably should have known better…

In my past readings, I have taken issue with some of the points in Dixon’s articles, but that is part of academic discourse, you don’t always agree with what you have read, in fact, that is usually a good jumping off point for your own writing.  Yet, in A History of Horror, Dixon seems to be missing the forest for the trees in his “overview” of the horror genre.  While the book does a good job of covering the history of the genre from its beginnings to the current era (or at least current as of the writing) there is a distinct tone of dismissal hiding amongst Dixon’s writing when he begins a discussion of the era of New Horror (more or less 1968 to the present).

The bulk of Dixon’s book focuses mostly on the pre-Night of the Living Dead era (Romero’s film being a universally-recognized turning point in the genre) and does so with a distinct air of nostalgia; a why aren’t films as good as they used to be wistfulness.  There is a distinct feeling of fondness for the Universal monsters (as well as a clear sense of despair that they, to paraphrase Dixon, were reduced to broad burlesque players in films like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (which, for the record, I like!) and even a tone of respect for the Hammer films of the 50s and 60s.  However, his tone shifts once he reaches the 70s and the directors behind the New Horror.

George A. Romero and his Dead films barely get two paragraphs.  Wes Craven is dismissed as a sequel generating hack.  Tobe Hooper is written off as a sensationalist and one-hit wonder.  Only John Carpenter gets more than two cents of Dixon’s time, and Halloween is given its due, but as with all of these men who changed the face of the horror film, Dixon spends more time dwelling on their failures than on their successes.  By lamenting the change that occurred in horror including the increase in violence, the lack of origins—for the most part—of the monsters/killers, and an emphasis on nihilism, and wondering why the films of the late 60s and 70s (and beyond) could not be more like those of the 30s, 40s and 50s, Dixon misses the point.

There was a significant shift in the American cultural landscape, socially, politically and aesthetically.  With the omnipresent threat of nuclear war, the social despair and unrest caused by the seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam as well as a distrust of political leadership in the wake of Watergate America was changing.  Add to these the Civil Rights Movement, Second-Wave Feminism, as well as growing unemployment, a perceived assault on “manhood,” and an energy crisis America and Americans (as well as the rest of the world) would (and could) not be content with the horror film in its classic form where good wins and  the monster/threat is vanquished in the end.  Yes, there are films that still follow that formula in the post-1968 era (in fact they are among the most formulaic films produced by Hollywood) but the directors that changed the face of the genre embraced the shift in the American landscape and it was reflected in their films.

Dixon, to my mind, compounds his error by first addressing the very real fact that the events of September 11, 2001 created a shift in the horror genre (much in the way that Vietnam did) but then discusses films that really have nothing to do with this change.  While I realize that in the last 40 years or so the horror film has become transnational in nature and Japan, France, Italy, Spain and Korea are creating some very interesting and provocative films Dixon all but ignores the fact that American horror experienced another shift as well.  Sure the slasher genre is still there, each one trying to be more explicit than the last, but other films such as 30 Days of Night, The Hamiltons, and especially The Strangers are investigating questions of identity, the sanctity of the home as well as family and the self in a post-9/11 landscape.  Instead Dixon chooses to focus on those films that, in his mind, are derivative and serve no purpose other than to spawn sequels and generate money for the studios.  This is a short-sighted view at best and only serves to strengthen Dixon’s erroneous proposition that horror films “aren’t what they used to be” and that they should revert to the classical storytelling that was embraced in the 30s and 40s in a petitio principii fashion.

In the end, for the casual viewer of the horror film there are better books out there that chronicle the history of horror and discuss its impact on the cultural landscape (add to this the fact that Dixon gets some basic plot points of some modern films wrong, most notably the identity of the killer in the first Friday the 13^th film … seriously, how do you mess that one up?).  I would recommend, just off the top of my head, Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (very accessible and readable), Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film (academic in tone, but a fascinating read) Steffan Hantke’s anthology American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (an insightful and broad overview of the genre) and Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (a fascinating and accessible read that better lays out the transitional period in horror between about 1968 to 1979).  Dixon’s book, while occasionally interesting and insightful, is just too one-sided for me to recommend unconditionally.  Get it at the library if you must, but don’t shell out money for it.