Black Gate

There’s nothing I love more than a good murder… but, before you summon the authorities, let me qualify that a bit. I love a fake murder, a fictional murder. I’ll follow Perry Mason, Lieutenant Columbo, and Jessica Fletcher anywhere.

The real thing, though? I have deeply conflicted feelings about books, movies, and especially television shows that deal with actual homicides, which puts me at odds with virtually the entire Entertainment Industrial Complex, with Prime and Netflix and all of the other streamers, because it seems like real murder is their bloody bread and butter; do any of them make anything other than true crime shows?

Immersing yourself in a fictional killing is one thing; I know that when the cameras stopped rolling, the victim got up from the floor, brushed himself off, and shared a smoke and a joke with Raymond Burr or Peter Falk. But an actual murder, where a real human being suffered and died? I don’t know — that just doesn’t seem like entertainment to me, but I’m clearly in the minority (even in my own house). I blame it all on Truman Capote and his 1966 smash bestseller (and the smash film version which followed a year later), In Cold Blood. Capote’s “nonfiction novel” has to be reckoned one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, as it virtually created the true crime genre that now dominates the media landscape to the tune of several billion dollars a year.

…

Read More Read More

As 2025 ended, I thought about the reading I would do in the new year ahead and decided that in 2026, I would place an emphasis on rereading. In fact, I vowed that I wouldn’t read a new book without first rereading an old one. A week before New Year’s I jotted down likely titles for this project, and one of the first I thought of is a book I last read a lifetime ago, in 1974 or 75, when I was in high school — Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Back then, I didn’t much like it.

This time, I set aside my half-century old initial reaction and approached the book with an open mind. So, how was it a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century? I still wouldn’t call it an entirely successful book, but at least now I’m better equipped to understand what Bradbury was doing and can more justly assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses.

You’re probably familiar with the novel’s premise, which is one of the most famous in science fiction. Sometime in the near future (the book was published in 1953, so we’re probably well past whatever date Bradbury had in mind), in an unnamed city, Guy Montag lives in his comfortable, suburban, technologically up-to-date house with his wife Millie. Millie spends most of her time… watching isn’t quite the right word… submitting, maybe, to the immersive, individually tailored programs that flash from three of their four living room walls, which can morph into gigantic television screens. Guy mostly just watches Millie; for some reason, the shows don’t entertain him. They just make him uneasy.

…

Read More Read More

Every October, I perform a ritual that I suspect many of you also observe — I grab a handful of books off the shelf and spend the Halloween month reading the scary stuff, always trying to get in a “classic” or two that I’ve missed along the way. Last year that classic was Christine, one of the “first-wave” Stephen King books that I had never gotten around to, and the novel reminded me why the man is so enduringly popular… and also why I don’t read him much anymore. I enjoyed Christine, but five hundred plus pages of dated pop culture references and slangy, apocalyptic adolescent angst is a heavy load for someone of my advanced age to carry.

I didn’t read any King this October, but my Halloween 2025 reading had a King connection nevertheless. In his chatty 1981 grab-bag horror survey Danse Macabre, King includes a list of approximately one hundred horror books that he considers important for the post-World War Two era he discusses. (He was born in 1947.) I incorporated many of King’s choices in my own megalomaniacal list of essential horror, fantasy, and science fiction books, and over the years I’ve sampled a fair number of his recommendations. I’ve found the Master’s lineup hit or miss; there have been whiffs like Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn (which I absolutely hated, and which I’m convinced he inserted strictly for literary cachet), home runs like Ramsey Campbell’s nightmarish The Doll Who Ate His Mother, and books that may not be masterpieces but are still solid successes, like another one I read last year, Bernard Taylor’s grim English ghost story, Sweetheart, Sweetheart.

This year the first October book I read came off of King’s list — The Auctioneer, Joan Samson’s 1975 novel of rural unease. King marked some of the books on his list with an asterisk as being “especially important”, and The Auctioneer is one of those.

…

Read More Read More