Words & Deeds
In this wide world of incredible variety, many of us are guilty of a fascination with screen or written violence. Some folks relish the outlaw life, live it. Saturday night NYC sheriffs busted an illegal Bronx fight club held at a warehouse. At least 203 people were watching and participating. Drugs and booze were consumed. Two handguns were confiscated. No one was wearing a mask, and social distancing was ignored. There were ten arrests.
Another day, another vaccine.
If the Georgia senate races are decided by mail-in ballots, no one should be surprised if the Dems win both seats.
I’ve never seen the TV show The Mandalorian. One of its stars, Gina Carano, is catching heat for this tweet: “BREAKING NEWS: DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT LEADERS NOW RECOMMENDS WE ALL WEAR BLINDFOLDS ALONG WITH MASKS SO WE CAN’T SEE WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON.” Kudos despite the grammatical error.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson still fascinates more than a hundred years after its publication. Its screen adaptations are a staple of TV channels, and the phrase Jekyll and Hyde is part of the English lexicon. It has spawned many imitations, The Incredible Hulk jumping to mind. I did not know that there is a sequel, co-written by prolific sci-fi/fantasy author Andre Norton (female) and Robert Bloch, who gave the world Psycho. Published in 1994, it is the story of an impoverished Canadian woman, alone in the world since the death of her father, who accompanies a child to London and learns she is heir to the Jekyll estate. Electricity is not yet universal. Murders occur. Has Hyde risen from the grave? This is more mystery than horror. The resolution does not disappoint. In fact, it is very clever. Unfortunately, the narrative is slowed by too much attention devoted to the Salvation Army’s struggle against its detractors, although those in its orbit are crucial to the plot. Perhaps it was padding a page count, only 248 in the Tor paperback edition. The prose and dialogue are challenging, cockney in frequent use. I suspect the authors wished to capture the language of a work that would have been written back then. It would appeal most to those who prefer an old fashion read to modern works that inject a thrill in each chapter. When it finally gets going, it is entertaining. Six users at Amazon have rated The Jekyll Legacy, forging to a consensus of 4.2 on a scale of five. I’ll go with three. Although the nature of good and evil is not explored in detail, I admire novels that speculate about duality and the mystery of what lies beneath the exterior of human beings. Andre Norton has scores of titles in her name and two pseudonyms. She has only three listed at IMDb, all pertaining to her novel The Beastmaster. She is a recipient of the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. There is an annual award in her name for young adult novels. She passed away at 93 in 2005. Bloch passed at 77 in ’94. He too has had scores of novels and short stories published, as well as four works of non-fiction. He used eight pseudonyms. There are 52 titles under his name at IMDb. He wrote three episodes of the original Star Trek, 17 of the two Hitchcock incarnations and ten of Thriller - curiously, none of The Twilight Zone but one of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. Among his many honors are a Hugo Award for Best Short Story and an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Here are the authors:
My thanks to the woman who bought Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by John Krakauer, the first and third installments of The Pendragon fantasy series by D.J. McHale (didn’t have the second) and Primary Colors, the roman a` clef about the Clintons by Anonymous, who turned out to be Joe Klein; and to those who combined to buy seven books in Russian; and to the gentleman who purchased non-fiction on bar-hopping, the title of which escapes me. It had been among the inventory for a year if not two or more. That type of sale is infinitely more satisfying than any besides my own books.
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