The Passage

At the urging of a friend, recently I picked up and read Justin Cronin’s hot new novel of vampire apocalypse, The Passage. After I was done, I wrote him back with my thoughts. “You say you liked it,” he wrote back. “But you sure criticized it a lot.”

The Passage is one of those books that plays fast and loose with its storytelling predecessors, not even bothering to disguise its sources. It opens with a bunch of American tourists being attacked by bats in a remote corner of South America, like in some nineteen-fifties B-movie. Then it cuts to a section in which the U.S. Military, astonished by the regenerative powers the tourists develop after their attack, decide to militarize the virus; they inject it into twelve death row criminals—really the wisest choice for creating invincible killing machines in this kind of story, always—and one abandoned little girl. This part of the book is very much like every science fiction movie I’ve seen in the last twenty years in which the government is doing secret research, and a whole lot like Kate Bush’s song, “Experiment IV,” because you know it’s just going to go downhill from here.

And it does. In a section not so much similar to The Stand as directly cribbed from it, the virus escapes. The country is overrun; everyone dies. Everyone save 49 million vampires, that is, and a handful of survivors who resort to one last hope to keep the race alive.

Cut to a hundred years later. The possible last handful of human survivors has been living in a tiny colony in California, kept safe by arrays of blinding lights that keep the vampires at bay every night. The remaining men, women, and children are simple folk who know aught of the old ways, living from day to day, and from hand to mouth, in a simple existence, much like the people of The Village. Except they have some really highly-skilled engineers who know all about circuit boards and other stuff that surely comes in convenient later in the story. Actually, it’s more similar to the YA postapocalyptic novel The City of Ember, because bit by bit, the lights are going out, and soon will be gone forever. So naturally a group of intrepid and good-looking youths go venturing out into the vast wilderness that is now all that’s left of North America, to search for safety.

And this is where the novel turns into Logan’s Run, in which a bunch of naifs who’ve never before seen the world escape from their closed society and run into all kinds of weird stuff. There’s a Thunderdome, and a locomotive that the engineers who’ve never seen one before are miraculously able to fix, and creepy scenes in which the party enter and barely escape from a vampire-filled Las Vegas. There are Scrappy Military Men, and The Miracle Of Childbirth, and One Child to Save Them All, and because there weren’t enough unoriginal archetypes to fill out the book, not just a Wise Old Magic Negro Woman, but also a Saintly Psychic Wise Old Magic Negro African Nun.

The reason my friend recommended The Passage was that it’s got the stink of being a classy, literary vampire novel. Cronin has those MFA and literary award credentials that make it okay and even a little ironic for him to slum in genre fiction. One of my big problems with the book, though, is that the writing is often not very good. Not always. There will be lovely page after page in which he sucks you in, describing the sad, lonely landscape abandoned by people and left for ruin. Then he’ll write a few lines of dialogue and leave me astounded by how bad he is at it. After I read the book, I went back to see exactly what the proportion of types of prose was in The Passage. Cronin appears to write about twenty pages of internal monologue or description to every page of dialogue between characters, and with good reason. No one talks like any of his characters do. They’re all turgid and wooden the moment they open their mouths.

He’s not the most subtle of writers, either. In the Las Vegas sequence, which could have been one of the most creepy scenes in the book, he throws away and suspense about what will be happening by starting the scene with prose that runs pretty as follows:

“What is that awful smell?” asked Peter The Wimpy Hero, wishing his older, stronger brother were here, the older brother who had always taken care of him since the premature death of the father he had never known. Why did he wonder that, he wondered with a wondering thought? Was it perhaps because he felt he still had to prove himself? “I have never smelled anything like this awful smell during my idyllic but oh-so-sheltered days in the Colony.”

“By gosh, it is a giant pool of highly flammable methane,” said Alicia, the tough and reckless. Whipping around with the cat-like reflexes that she had learned at the knee of the old Colonel, she pointed her gun into the shadows, the darkling shadows that rippled and pulsed with inky malice. “Conveniently enough to blow up this entire deserted hotel! Imagine what could happen if someone were to throw a match into that murky morass, whether by accident or dire last resort!”

Peter gulped. “Golly, it sure is an awful smell. I sure do hope we do not have to resort to such drastic explosive measures to fend off vampires in three pages!”

Yeah. It’s pretty much like that in parts, all the way through.

Another thing I disliked about The Passage is that when the going gets intense, Cronin finds it easier to resort to flowery literary writing than to describe what’s actually going on. This left me confused after major plot points, because frankly, I couldn’t really figure out who was being attacked, who was dying, and who was dead after. Eventually I came up with a handy legend:

Pages of prose about red flowers blossoming on an pond of scarlet = A vampire is probably sucking someone’s blood.

Mystical prose about the winds whispering names and the trees stirring in response across a vast and empty world with but one question on its wooded lips = We haven’t driven home the little girl’s magical powers enough in recent chapters, so you’re getting a damned good dose.

Folksy southern dialect going nowhere = Must be talking about that Mentally Challenged Gentle Giant Black Magic Negro from The Green Mile again.

Pages upon pages about rats = Minor character about to be offed. Or mind-controlled. Or something.

Don’t even get me started about the book’s climax. The resolution was so silly, and so easy, and so improbable, that I was a little disappointed.

But here’s the thing: despite all my crabbing, and despite spending the entire time I read The Passage making mental notes about where I’d seen its elements before (and you have seen these elements before, ladies and gentlemen, every single one), it was really quite an exciting book. A page-turner. It’s hard to put down. He makes me want to read the other two books of the trilogy, just to see what happens.

It’s no easy feat to keep an audience engaged. To make a reader want more is the ultimate goal of any writer, literary or not. And even during the parts I was rolling my eyes, or smirking, or narrowing my gaze and thinking, oh, really?, there wasn’t a single page of The Passage in which I considered putting down the book and moving on to something else.

That is not in the least faint praise. It’s almost something of a recommendation, if you’re willing to take the book for what it is, and ignore the claims of Justin Cronin being the literary savior of the horror genre.

On Chloe

We had to have our cat Chloe put to sleep yesterday. She was deathly ill from complications relating to the virus that the cats passed around last week, that led to kidney complications.

Chloe was the crabbiest cat I’ve ever, ever had. She complained about everything. When we didn’t get up early enough in the morning, she would hop on the bed and glare. When she didn’t like her food, she would scowl and hang around, giving us the vulture’s death-gaze. If she thought you weren’t paying enough attention to her, she would walk up and let you know, loudly. She hated to have her claws clipped, she pretended to hate being brushed, she disliked the cold, she disliked the warmth. She didn’t like to be picked up, and she certainly didn’t tolerate being held on anyone’s lap. If I was upset, or crying, she had no qualms about marching over and telling me to shut the hell up.

When we adopted Fred, Chloe secretly enjoyed the new cat’s company (they played and slept together frequently), but she didn’t like admitting it. Like a teenaged girl with a bratty little sister, she’d growl and sneer every time Fred approached whenever Chloe was in one of her frequent moods. Sometimes we’d go to sleep at night—or more usually not—with Chloe sitting at the bottom of the mattress, growling in a low, warning tone when she’d see Fred ten feet away at the top of the stairs.

She was a high-maintenance cat. Sometimes I’d leave the house wearing more Chloe fur on my clothing than Chloe had on herself. Her coat was of the sort that, although allegedly non-clumping, turned into mats the moment one’s head was turned. From the time she was a kitten, Chloe refused to drink any water delivered in a mere cat dish. Oh, no. She insisted on nothing but the freshest running water from the tap. Whenever anyone approached a room with a faucet, whether it was the bathroom, or kitchen, or laundry room, she would be there, meowing at the top of her considerable lungs, demanding a drink. Or rather, demanding that you turn on the tap. Whether she actually drank from it was a question of her whim at the moment. She wanted you to turn on that tap so she’d have it as an option, damn it. Failing the tap, she would gladly imbibe from a human drinking glass. Even if the human was a visiting guest and didn’t particularly want her glass invaded by a milky-white cat’s snout.

Chloe was highly vain. She never heard the whirr of an electronic camera she didn’t like. The moment someone would pull one out, she’d pose in every shot. When our relator was taking photos of our house’s interior for the ad and web site, Chloe somehow managed to insinuate herself into almost every one, forcing the poor realtor to take most of them over so that it didn’t look like we lived in one of those cat person’s house on Hoarders. She knew she was beautiful, and would allow people to oooo and to ahhh over her—but not to touch her. That was going too far.

I will say that Chloe was the bravest cat I ever knew. When we adopted her, she promptly walked downstairs the first morning from the bedroom in which we’d locked her, the night before, slapped our two cats of the time, Sarah and Emma, and made it clear that if they messed around with her, she’d chop them into Tender Vittles. When she met our dog next door for the first time, she got so tired of his barking that she walked up to him, hauled off with a kitty fist, and punched him in the nose so that he ran away yelping. She was never afraid of the vacuum, or of visitors, or thunderstorms, or any of the things that send Fred and Sarah scampering under the beds. She met them all with scorn and disinterest and a sneer.

Despite the fact that she didn’t like to be picked up or cuddled, there were moments when Chloe could be very sweet. They always came at bedtime, when she’d curl up between us and purr loudly, or lie on my chest and rest her paws on my chin and lips so that I had no choice but to notice her, or when she’d butt the book I was reading out of my hands so that I’d have to pet her.

The last couple of days of her life, she’d been completely out of it. Her problems were so pronounced that she couldn’t walk, or breathe, or raise her head. I don’t think she knew where she was, most of the time. The vet had sent her home with us for a final night, when fluids and drugs didn’t seem to be working. And yesterday morning, when she curled up on the bed next to us in a ball and finally slept—really slept, not the labored half-sleep she’d been condemned to for a couple of days—it was something of a relief to have the old Chloe back again. Even if it was just for a few minutes. We lay there with her, and stroked her gently, and let her have the last bits of comfort we could give.

Chloe was the biggest pain in the ass. But she was our pain in the ass, and I loved her.

An Epidemic of Feline Proportions

Sarah is the oldest of our three cats. We adopted her shortly after moving into our first apartment together; she turned twenty last June. For a cat, that’s pretty damned old.

She’s been deaf for a couple of years now, our Sarah. She’s adjusted her life accordingly. If we’re out of the house, she’ll position herself somewhere—the kitchen counter, the dining room table—where’s it’s easy for her to see the back door open on our return. In the mornings, rather than listen for our steps on the upstairs floor or the creaking of the bed, she’ll sit directly outside the bedroom door, nose to the wood, so that there’s no way she’ll miss it opening, even if she’s asleep. Sarah’s a sweet old thing, and like most old folk, she lives a life centered around eating, trying to stay warm on even the hottest of days, and napping. For the last several months she’s been napping so silently and motionlessly that I’ve gotten into the habit of poking her when I walk by and asking, “You alive? All right then,” before moving on.

I thought this week, though, was going to be her last.

Two days before we left for Connecticut, Sarah started sneezing pretty constantly. I was worried enough when we left to ask our house sitter to keep an eye on her; he would search her out when he visited, poke her to make sure she was still among the living, and then report back to us. Chloe and Fred both started sneezing the day we left. When we came back home, last Thursday, we had a full-blown kitty epidemic on our hands.

Sarah was in particularly bad shape. The sitter told us she’d eaten every day up until Wednesday night; she hadn’t eaten a thing when we got home Thursday evening, and I couldn’t get her to express any interest in food either Friday or Saturday. Her eyes were streaming, her nose was dry, and her breathing was so stressed and dire that I could hear it several rooms away. She’d stopped grooming herself, which made me unconsciously start humming the “Smelly Cat” song from Friends every time I was near. When she walked, she tottered around on weak little legs. She completely lost her voice, and would let out pathetic, silent mews that you just know were meant to communicate her weak despair. I attempted to feed her warm chicken broth to keep her strength up, but it was too difficult for her to drink.

Saddest of all, instead of sprawling in her usual sleeping spots on the sofas and chairs, she holed up in dark, concealed places where she would attempt to sleep through her death rattle. I’d been steeling myself for her demise for months—she’s an unusually old cat, after all—but I knew this was the end. I tried to make the breathing easier by putting her in the bathroom with the shower running on hot, for the steam. She responded with silent meows and by curling up to sleep in the sink.

And then she bounced back. Yesterday she was eating again. A couple of days of the steam treatment put her breathing back to normal. Her voice returned. She’s bright-eyed and vocal again, and sleeping on the chairs and cuddling up to us for comfort once more. The vet had given us antibiotics for the cat’s colds, yesterday but she scarcely seems to need it any longer. She’s gotten through, and is in the enviable state of watching the other cats suffer.

Fred isn’t happy to be sick, and doesn’t know what to make of it. She’s easy to deal with, however, because she simply does what I’d do in her situation—she crawls under some bedcovers, pulls them over her head, and sleeps all day.

Chloe, however, is miserable, and wants to world to know it. She walks around with a snot-covered nose that defies cleaning, meowing her discontent at the top of her voice and demanding I do something about it. Sometimes she’ll sit, sullen and cantankerous, glaring at us with contempt.

Today I gave them a bit of the steam treatment in the bathroom, because Chloe in particular was wheezing fairly badly. Fred hunkered on the counter and breathed the vapors like a good girl. What did Chloe do? Protest at the top of her voice the moment I closed the door, and then jumped into the half-full bathtub and began to wade around in it. Just because she is the biggest feline drama queen I’ve ever known.

All afternoon she’s been glaring at me, wet and miserable and refusing to lick herself dry. I think I’m supposed to gather from her offended and aggrieved staring that some reparation is supposed to be made.

Mostly I’m just ignoring her, and waiting for those antibiotics to kick in.

Housework

The last three weeks of my life have been something of a whirlwind. The only thing I've done, basically from sun up until I flopped into my bed at night, has been to work on getting our house in order and on the market. For the most part, that's meant doing every repair and renovation we've neglected over the entire life of the house.

The den ceiling came first. It was yikes, two years ago that we had damage from pouring rains leaking through the skylights there; it ran in little sluices down the skylight well and down the sloped ceiling toward the wall, leaving behind a large, torn pucker between the drywall and the tape between its joints. That I had to slice, remove, sand, mud, sand, mud again, prime, and paint.

The front garden, which I've always thought too large and unwieldy for a reluctant gardener—which is the best way I can describe myself—needed to be weeded for curb appeal. I mean, really weeded, not given the half-assed let's grab the knee-high ones and no one will notice the rest treatment. Then I had to do the same with the back garden, and the side gardens. I have a lot of gardens, apparently. One those were done, I had to tackle cleaning up the curious lot on the side of the garage. The previous owners used the area to store their trailers, to give an idea of its size. The current owners—that is, the Mont and I—have tended to use it as a place to store the sort of yard refuse that requires care and planning to dispose. Large branches, for example, or crumpled-up metal garbage cans. The branches had to be broken down and tied into bundles that the city would accept, and then I had to whack the weeds and miniature trees that had sprung up since the last time I'd ventured back there a couple of years ago.

The front lawn needed to be re-sodded, since it could have been used to stage a fake lunar landing. Then it needed to be watered. And watered. And watered some more, every day, and every evening.

The upstairs bathroom. Oh my god, the upstairs bathroom. Where do I even begin? When we moved into the house, on the first first day we took possession I walked upstairs into the bathroom and took in all the details I'd apparently missed during the couple of times I'd visited while house-hunting. I looked at the metallic silver wallpaper printed with fluffy clouds in an entirely different shade of metallic silver. I observed the Pepto-Bismol-pink countertop. And then I promptly broke down and wept. For a couple of years, the Mont and I laughingly called it 'The Disco Bathroom' and threatened to install a mirrorball, but in the end the only thing we could think of to do with it was to strip the wallpaper, paint everything a shade of blue that we hoped would pass as 'tropical,' and endure the astonished comments of visitors to the house who left the bathroom complaining about bleeding eyes from the countertop.

Plainly, none of this would do for selling the house.

I'd intended to re-laminate the counter myself. It didn't seem that difficult. The laminate was relatively cheap—cheaper than a completely new top, anyway—and it seemed like the kind of thing I could do without too much cursing. Attacking the counter meant removing the bathroom sink, however, and that proved impossible to do, as I found out after an hour spent with my head in a cupboard with a wrench in my hands and a flashlight between my teeth, swearing at the top of my lungs before finally I had myself a good cry. I came upon Plan C when we were visiting Home Depot for some paint for the walls. Apparently they make such a thing as laminate paint these days. I bought a little jar of it, had it tinted, and took it home. A few days and a lot of sweat later, I emerged from a bathroom that was not only a lovely shade of cream, but had a delft blue countertop that looked as if it had been extruded in that very color. I also installed a new medicine cabinet (we'd never had one, and were storing our boxes of pills in the hot water pipe access cupboard), and mirrors. The Mont caulked the bathtub, and I installed crown molding around the top of the room.

It's not fully updated, but I don't think anyone would cry at it.

The spare bedroom had a patch of plaster on the walls that had been ruined eight or nine years ago before we'd had a new roof installed. I replastered and sanded the area, then painted that entire wall with a new accent color the shade of a Kraft caramel. The office ceiling had stains from the same event, so I primed those a hundred times and painted them.

I mopped the basement floor, and walls. I removed the alarm system electronic pad, since it no longer works, and sealed up the circuit box for the system. I sanded and painted the railing on the front porch, and pulled little grasses and weeds from the cracks in the driveway and the patio. I sprayed down the siding on the house and the garage to make it look clean, and washed all the windows.

And then I packed. Oh, how I packed. Our realtor had made the gentle suggestion that many people in the market for a house didn't care to enter a home in which every square space of wall was covered with bookcases and tall, hulking piles of books that looked as if they'd come straight out of the dustier stacks of the Hogwarts library. I took the hint, and spent day after day buying boxes from Home Depot (sixty-seven cents apiece for the small ones, in case anyone's looking for a bargain), filling them with my books, and then leaving them in the living room. Then the next day I'd go buy another twenty-five boxes and do it all over again. Then, once I was done with the books, I did the same thing with all our DVDs and CDs.

Finally the living room became unnavigable; we had to borrow a dolly from church in order to move everything into the garage, where it could be out of sight during the house showings. No lie—this was the single most painful part of the entire month, especially as we did it on one of the hottest days on record this summer.

The last part of the process was simply cleaning everything and staging the house to make it look half-civilized, before we could let anyone inside. In a hundred-year-old house, it's not easy to make everything look new. But at the very least, it can feign cleanliness.

Not until this last Sunday, when I bravely cut and fitted a new window to replace the one on the garage that's been broken for a decade, did I realize I'd come almost to the very end of the long list of tasks I'd begun assembling on the day I learned we were moving to Connecticut. The only thing remaining—painting the upstairs hall ceiling—was not something I intended to do on the eve of a whirlwind tour to my future home. It'll wait until I get home.

It's a shame that my list is done. All the work, the day-to-day tasks and the grim realities of trying to whip things into shape, kept me from worrying too much about other things. The little short-term goals gave me a roadmap to follow. It's easier to think about how to sand something smooth, or what color to paint a wall, than it is to wonder the whys and whens of selling the house, or packing, or the unknowns of the impending move. I was happier pretending to know what I needed to do next, rather than fretting about the formless shape of days to come.

New Book Cover Day

The best days are the days on which I'm presented with a new book cover. That is, when the book cover is as beautiful as this one:



I think it's my favorite of the trilogy. True, Petro looks a little like a lost Jonas brother, but check out the detailing on Emilia's uniform. And gosh, doesn't it look exciting?

Hacked!

My World of Warcraft account was hacked a few weeks ago. It’s not an experience I recommend.

I’ve always been pretty scrupulous about my account in the past. Although it’s true I hadn’t bought one of the authenticators—a little keychain device that supplies a unique code to accompany your login password that’s supposed to guarantee that the person who owns the account is the actual person signing in—nor downloaded the software authenticator for my phone. I wrongly assumed that because I never played the game on strangers’ computers, or took my laptop outside my home to play, that I’d be immune to people snitching my password.

I’d actually taken a break from the game for about a week, right before my account was hijacked. I hadn’t logged on for a solid eight days. Then I used Blizzard’s mobile armory application on my phone to sign out of a weekly raid—and that’s where I ran into trouble. I either used the application somewhere on the road using the cellular network, or else in a coffee shop where I’d been working. Bad move, either way. That night, at one in the morning, my email account received a notification that I’d requested a password change. At four in the morning, I got a notification that my account had been suspended for suspicious activity.

All it took was three hours for them to wreak total havoc with my accounts. My World of Warcraft characters are basically spread over two different servers, but all the wealth and time were concentrated on Perenolde. There the hacker managed to liquidate everything not only in eight different characters’ banks and inventories, but cleaned out the bank of my guild as well—or at least the tabs available to me. Most of my toons carried between four to seven thousand gold apiece; one of them had an artifact that regularly sells on the auction house for more than ten thousand gold.

When I finally was able to log in, every single one of my characters was naked. My action bars were screwed up—every single one of my toons had spells removed so that the hackers could substitute macros to make their liquidation go more quickly. My hunter’s pets had been released into the wild, never to be retrieved again. Every emblem and badge I’d earned through daily dungeons was gone. Some of my characters had been removed from my guild; three of them had been transferred onto other servers, and one to another account entirely.

All in the space of three hours. It was depressing.

I got it all back, of course. Blizzard after two weeks sent me via in-game mail all the items that had been taken from me, down to the last copper and badge (though my hunter never got his pets back). Moving those items back into my inventory took an hour or even more per character, though, and while I waited I found the Blizzard support crew incredibly unhelpful and in one case even rude. I’m still not completely cleaned up.

The only up side to the whole debacle is that in the end, I made in-game money off of it. The account got shut down while one of my characters, apparently chosen to be the liquidator, was posting all kinds of stuff in the auction house. His bags were stuffed with epic jewels, enchanting materials, cooking spices, and other salable stuff. After the ordeal I’d been through, I had no compunction whatsoever in auctioning it off and pocketing the three thousand gold I made. Additionally, a few of my characters cashed in some honor tokens to add some new accessories to their outfits, and my main druid cashed in the rest of the honor points to buy four mounts.

Small consolation, really, but I take what I can.

I have an authenticator now, by the way. I highly advocate it.

The murse

When I traveled to Toronto last week, I wanted to keep my travel footprint light. Instead of lugging around my laptop and its heavy cords and chargers, I thought I’d simply take my iPad. It has a tendency to rattle around my briefcase like a dried pea in a coconut shell, however, so I purchased a new carrier for it. A messenger bag.

Now, buying the thing, I was painfully aware that I was venturing into dangerous territory. Treacherous territory, in fact. Because while a briefcase is a manly enough accessory, a messenger bag—depending upon the make and the material—comes awfully close to being, well. A lady’s purse. A masculine lady’s purse, to be sure. A man-bag. A murse.

But my messenger bag, though a hairy-chested shade of khaki green and trimmed with leather in a bronco-buckin’ shade of brown, seemed closer to a grizzled old mail pouch carried by some smelly ‘baccy-chawin’ extra in a John Wayne western than something coveted by the Sex and the City cast, so I thought that perhaps I could get away with it. I do have a beard, after all.

My masculinity managed to deflect most of the man-purse comments from my traveling companions on the trip up. Then, when we got to the city, I thought to myself that handy as the bag had been for transporting my electronics and passports on the train, it would be a heck of a lot handier to put everything I’d need for the day in its pockets during the vacation itself. So I loaded it up with my baseball cap, sunglasses and case, camera, and phone. Then, for good measure, I threw in my sunscreen, a tin of mints, a little cloth for cleaning my phone and camera, and some headphones. And some Canadian change. And my subway pass.

It was when I was out on the street with my messenger bag hanging down my back, companionably flapping against me in a manly, manly way when I walked, that I realized I’d succumbed. I was carrying a purse. And what’s more, I didn’t care.

Toronto has an ordinance in which merchants now charge for carrying bags. So instead of paying, I would suggest that my travel companions put their purchases in my bag. “Stick it in my purse,” I said at one point, opening the mouth wide in a kitchen store. “Yes,” I said to several astonished, wide-mouthed friends. “I said purse. It’s a purse. I don’t give a darn. I love my purse. I love carrying a purse. So put your things in my purse and shut up about it.”

It’s telling that toward the end of our trip, when my little group walked into a department store with a display of luggage and bags, the others instantly started flocking over to the messenger bags and running their hands over them with little coos of pleasure.

So yes. I’m at peace with my purse. Shades of testosterone green and armpit-hair brown it may be, and a man-bag or a murse you may call it, but it’s a purse. I will carry it without shame.