Founding Kiss drummer Peter Criss has been promising to release a tell-all autobiography for decades, and now he’s finally done it. (Ironically, it comes a year later than fellow Kiss founder Ace Frehley’s No Regrets.) The question is whether what he has to tell illuminates anything about the early years of Kiss or his life after he quit the band in 1980.
Book review
Metal Monday: Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City
One of the virtues of Chuck Klosterman’s take on 1980s heavy metal in Fargo Rock City is that, once you’ve read it, you’ll never look at metal the same way again.
Born and raised in Wyndmere, N.D., Klosterman had already covered music for the Fargo Forum and the Akron Beacon Journal before writing it, and has since gone o to write for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post, as well as a number of bestselling books.
Werewolf Wednesday: David Wellington’s Frostbite
If revenge is a dish best served cold, then what better place for it than the Canadian North? In the bizarre landscape of the Arctic’s “drunken forest” and forsaken settlements such as Port Radium, David Wellington crafts an intriguing, original take on the werewolf mythos in Frostbite.
Wellington had already shown his taste for revamping classic monsters, in novels such as Vampire Zero and 13 Bullets. In Frostbite, he makes the rules for his lycanthropes all the more strict and frightening, while at the same time presenting a very human story.
Dennis Cooley tackles Dracula in Seeing Red
Vampires may have been out of favour in the monster-movie biz until recently, replaced by crazed teenager-killers, but in the literary realm they haven’t overstayed their welcome by a long shot, however many novels Anne Rice puts out. (This review was so obviously written before Twilight vastly expanded the readership for all things vampiric. — DJF) Dennis Cooley goes back to the grandaddy of them all, Dracula, for inspiration in Seeing Red.
Cooley’s various takes on the vampire mythos in general and Dracula in particular range from the intensely personal to the cunningly absurd.
Structural suspense in The Two Towers
One writing axiom is “keep your characters in trouble.” Another is “keep your reader guessing.” Budding fantasy writers — and, indeed, suspense writers — could learn a thing or two from The Two Towers, the middle part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
The action picks up with the Company of the Ring in disarray, seeking the Ringbearer, Frodo, as they are ambushed by orcs. (If you haven’t read Lord of the Rings, stop now; if you’ve only seen the movies, this discussion will make no sense — the movie and the book versions of The Two Towers have totally different structures, among other differences.)
All the reader knows from The Fellowship of the Ring is that Frodo has decided to go to Mordor alone, and Sam has gone with him; Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas know even less, as they variously fight the orcs and finally discover Boromir succumbing to his injuries, having failed to stop the orcs from abducting Merry and Pippin (which he doesn’t get a chance to tell them).
The total-nerd Tolkien reading plan
If you’ve never read Tolkien, you may be wondering where the ideal place is to start. Ironically, it’s not at the beginning.
Tolkien began working on the stories that would form the history and mythology of his Middle-earth while still a young man; he even worked on it sporadically as a soldier in the First World War. So those tales, eventually collected posthumously as The Silmarillion, are properly the beginning of the story of Middle-earth.
However, the first of the books to be published was The Hobbit, which is set in the Third Age of Tolkien’s world. (The Silmarillion, including the later portions which deal with Númenor, is mainly concerned with the First Age and Second Age, as well as the vast period before recorded history.)
