Book Review: Shallow Ends by David James Keaton

 

 

Shallow Ends by David James Keaton

 288 pages, Paperback
Expected publication: September 24, 2024 by Podium Publishing

 

Years ago, homey Anthony Trevino lent me The Last Projector by David James Keaton. It sounded good, and Anthony swore by it. I can’t explain it, but that book has been unread on my TBR pile in four apartments. Probably 8 years now. For the life of me why I have not read it is a mystery and at this point, I think I am just being stubborn.

I mean I read Head Cleaner his last novel, and Interviewed David on the podcast. That fucking book was one of my favorites of that year.  I even made it Dick-like Suggestion on the Dickheads podcast. So, think about it. I talked about Keaton’s weird SF VCR time travel novel on not one, but two podcasts. I also think of him every time a character in a movie takes a decompression shower, seriously once you notice it they are as pervasive as giant massive grave holes that magically happen in movies. Why do I think of DJK when a character stands in the shower and just thinks about their horrible situation? Because whenever he sees it in a movie or TV he posts a picture of it. I can’t unsee them because of him. That should serve as a reminder, of that book still sitting on the TBR.

The point is I have plenty of reminders and reasons to read The Last Projector and I have not. Then last month a package showed up on my porch. In the package mailed by David James Keaton there was a DVD for Innocent Blood.  A movie I saw in the theater that I used to call ‘European Vampire in Pittsburgh’. Get it? John Landis the director of American Werewolf in London directed it. It had the same horror comedy tone. They should’ve called the movie by that title. There was also a CD for the band Yes: The Yes Album. I was listening to the Misfits this morning. Now for the rest of this review, I will listen to that Yes album. I am not a Yes Fan, so this may become a commentary on Prog rock. I like Prog metal, so maybe I will like it.

Bye, bye Danzig and the boys. Here comes Yes.

The package also contained a novel by David James Keaton. Which I have read already despite not reading The Last Projector, and even though he sent me this hippie bullshit in the mail. Yes is the hippie bullshit to be clear. Shallow Ends is the novel.  In one way it is a throwback. In the Golden Age of Science Fiction, authors would break up novels and sell them as short stories, later compile them into what were called Fix-up novels.

As best I can tell Keaton took seven short stories that he published in various places and recycled them into this novel. You can call it smart or shroud because the common wisdom is that readers don’t want to buy short story collections. They want novels baby.  One long story with characters that grow and have character arcs over a complete book. So here is David James Keaton the author of seven published short stories and what does he do with them?  Publishers don’t want a collection.

So I am sure he turned on a hot shower let the water run on him and closed his eyes. As the steam rose cinematically around him in his moment of despair an idea!  I will put them together in one novel with a single story to tie them together.  (I can’t take anymore Yes, I might have to cleanse with Morbid Angel. Speaking of YES – Why didn’t Weird Al ever make “Donor of a Faulty Heart?”)

You maybe asking now? Who could make that work? The Answer is clearly the author of the Last Projector David James Keaton. This is a pretty solid act of writing, not everyone could take seven stories seemly slide them into one novel, thankfully the stories are thematically themed and stylistically suited for the task.

The story of the fire truck converted into a nightmarish party bus sets perfectly for Keaton's hilarious Clerks meets Twilight Zone vibe. Add a bit of Speed (the movie, not the other stuff) and you have all the ingredients for a fun read.  The party bus heads out of Louisville, where the novel starts on a lost highway, it won't stop, the poor bastards are afraid it will never stop.  As the characters try to figure out how they ended up in this hell the guilt brings up memories. The short stories!

Damn you for making me listen to YES hippie shit, but thank you for the novel Keaton! Some of the stories, like the shark one, are better than others but the story tying them together was fun. I laughed many times. I had fun with this book. Podcast interview is coming. It will be about Shallow Ends. Not The Last Projector.

Book Review: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 1 by Philip K Dick

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick 1: The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford
by Philip K. Dick, Steven Owen Godersky (Foreword), Roger Zelazny (Introduction)

 Format 432 pages, Paperback
Published January, 1990 by Citadel Twilight

 After six years of immersion, doing a podcast, writing a book about Philip K. Dick I was over due to read these early stories as a whole. But that is not how I have PKD short stories in the past. Volume two of the Collected stories is the second PKD I bought, in the early 90s, and that copy sits under this book on my shelf. Those stories were my first serious introduction to PKD, after that, I just read random stories usually not in collections. A story we covered for the podcast or for research.

 This gives me an excuse to talk about why I am reading this book. All of PKD’s short stories are collected in five volumes. They are collected in other forms, best of, Movie tie-ins, but to read the complete stories you need this volume. So Last year Keith Giles and I can up with a bold idea. Compile a Philip K. Dick encyclopedia. A Dickapedia. We couldn’t do this alone, knew we needed volunteers and cause for the book to benefit. Bringing back the Philip K. Dick Festival to California and giving it a budget to work with seemed the idea.

So Dickapedia will have entries for all invented, planets, species, technologies, government agencies, and stuff like that. Each researcher who picks up a novel to research and write the entries on becomes the expert on that book. (not too late to get involved) but one of the jobs I volunteered for was reading the first volume of short stories and doing the entries for Dickapedia. So keep in mind I was reading this volume with this in mind.

As a PKD guy it is almost impossible for me to divorce his novels or stories from the events happening in his life when I know he was writing them. We joked on Dickheads (podcast) about having to known if a novel was written by happy married Phil, or angry divorced Phil. The stories in this collection were mostly written during a prolific era for short stories 1952. Phil had just married Kleo, second wife (longest marriage) and they had moved into the Franciso house.

Look that is me when David Gill took me to visit Berkeley at the Francisco House…

 

The first story Stability was written in around 1947, Phil’s senior year of high school. We few of the others Roog and Beyond Lies the Wub were from ’51 and likely written for Anthony Boucher’s $1 Thursday SF writing classes. (Went to that house as well and there is a plaque outside the house) At least one “Out in the Garden” appears to be a pre-Kleo story, maybe as early as 1950. Most of the stories however were written in 1952. NATO was just formed, Eisenhower was president, The Lakers were still in Minnesota, and Signing in the Rain was the best movie of the year.  

  So Now the actual collection. Stability the opener perfectly reflects senior year Phil. This is very Van Vogt-inspired story is about a future dystopia. I would go as far as to say much like his first novel, he is trying to capture a Van Vogt feel, if you have not read the Canadian Golden ager you probably would never notice. It is not just like his Stabilization as it is written in this story mirrors elements of the Games Machine in Null-A and Phil’s debut novel Solar Lottery.

I am not going to go through each story but it is valuable to read this early era in this collection because it is pretty close to the order he wrote them in and you can see his growth. His first professional sale Roog is a comically surreal story. The humor and pulp elements are there in his first story to see print Beyond Lies the Wub. Mostly a funny story it plays with perception and a dash of philosophical ethics. While The Gun and The Skull are both excellent 50s SF that have deeper meaning and show what Phil is capable of, they are not the stories that most feel like a step forward to me.

The Defenders was in Galaxy magazine and Horace Gold liked it enough to put it on the cover of the magazine. A decade later Phil would expand and reboot the idea as part of the soup that would become his excellent novel The Penultimate Truth. To me this short is the first real masterpiece of the book, and thus Phil’s budding young career. He fits a ton of ideas, concepts and messages into a piece that is also heavy with world-building.

The next story that felt like an evolution and step forward was Piper in the Woods. This story has a little pulp in the world-building but it was the first time where I felt like Phil was going weird, and didn’t care if the elements had scientific explanations. Of course, The Preserving Machine and the title story The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford are where he lets go of all Pulp pretext.  

All the stories come with a certain quality worth reading, some of the more fantasy ones I didn’t enjoy as much as the pulpy ones. The Variable Man, Phil’s first published novella shows what he could do. He had completed a novel at that point, maybe even writing the novella of Vulcan’s Hammer. Nonetheless, this is a great first attempt at writing longer SF.

Two of the stories would be rebooted in novels, Paycheck would become a Hollywood action movie, but why must you read this collection of work? This is the perfect view of the evolution of Philip K. Dick the science fiction writer. This is his first attempts at exploring the SF universe. So yeah. Collected Stories Volume 1. It is not just a must-have but an experience reading it in order.

Book Review: the Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank

 

 

The Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank     

272 pages, Hardcover
Published  October, 2023 by Harper

I tend not to write as long of reviews for the non-fiction stuff, but I really looked forward to this one. I have been behind and slow on reviews because I have a bunch of short story invites and have been hard at work on The Philip K. Dick Encyclopedia. Enough excuses.

Adam Frank is a regular on a few podcasts I enjoy including Into the Impossible, so I have enjoyed him talking about Aliens. It is nice to hear informed scientifically sound podcasts on the topic. I mean I love Coast to Coast, but I mostly roll my eyes at it.

This is a pretty short not overly academic book, it was designed to be readable, but written by a very smart academic that looks at all aspects of the topic. His sarcasm is mostly well-timed comic relief and got laughter out of me at the right moments.

I admit I was less interested in the UAP, UFO stuff as I find that topic mostly silly, that said I enjoy the parts of the book that talk about SETI, and enjoyed when Frank digs into just how different alien life could/would be. I enjoyed the talk of evolutionary differences. That was the most interesting stuff for me. For genre writers, there is lots of good stuff that can and should influence writers to make aliens that are solidly alien and not actors with forehead ridges like Star Trek in the 90s. I like Star Trek in the 90s but I think you know what I mean.

The history of SETI is very important in this book. Frank details how the search for alien life and our understanding of it evolved. I really wish I read this before writing my first contact novel, but it is not published yet. So maybe not too late. That should be the target audience of Science Fiction authors. We will get much from it.

This is a really good library checkout. If your library doesn’t have it, order it soon.