Neutron Star Fred

My younger cat, Fred, is not so imposing to look at. She’s not one of those cats that can swagger into the room and raise eyebrows with her sheer bulk. Nor is she one of those particularly muscular felines that gives the impression of wearing the tabby equivalent of football shoulder pads. No, she’s really an unassuming cat of ordinary proportions. Quite compact, actually. On the tiny side.

But holy crap. What Fred doesn’t have in volume, she makes up in mass. She’s not fat. She’s dense. Fred is the freakin’ neutron star of cats. A teaspoon of Fred weighs more than all of the solar system’s inner planetary system together.

She’s not a delicate cat, either. She doesn’t pad softly into a room; she chooses a spot from the floor above or below, gives herself a good running start, and then thunders through the house until she skids to stop in front of me, leaving visible smoking skid marks where her paws have been. Nights, she won’t simply hop onto the bed to sleep with me. She’ll wait until the moment I’ve completely gone underneath and am breathing slowly and heavily, and then she’ll pound up the stairs, catapult herself up into a broad arc, then land so heavily on the mattress that she throws me, the sheets, and the pillows high into the air—giving me a minor heart attack in the process.

Fred’s a sweetheart. But Jesus, is she ever heavy.

Lately she’s been extra-snuggly at night, forsaking her usual spot at the foot of the bed for the warmer climes in the curves of my body. True to form, though, she doesn’t inch up and nestle in a spot next to my slumbering chest, or sweetly nestle in the nook created by the back of my legs. No, she announces her intention by standing, shuffling up to my face and staring in it, tickling it with her whiskers until I groggily awake and pet her. And then she’ll stalk over to the place immediately next to my body at which she intends to sleep, pause, and topple over, throwing her entire considerable weight on that one spot.

Seriously, it’s like being in the wrong place when someone tips a cow. I’ve got actual bruises.

It’s still mostly cool enough in Michigan that she seeks me out for warmth during the daytime. It’s comforting to have a cat on my lap while I’m working, and she’s a fairly considerate lapmate who will either slumber quietly or lay still while she watches the squirrels through the back door of the den. After a while, though, the pressure of her body will start to put my arm to sleep. “Fred,” I’ll say. “I kind of need you to move.”

At the sound of her name, she’ll up up at me, squinch her eyes, and chirrup. She still has a little kitten voice, a high-pitched, girlish way of mewing that turn the hardest heart into marshmallow. “Sweetie,” I’ll tell her. “Please move.”

Again, she’ll meow sweetly, and lay her head upon my forearm. “I can’t feel my fingers,” I’ll complain, and she’ll roll onto her back and invite me to blow on her furry tummy. Or, if I attempt to shift her onto the blanket next to me, she’ll let out a series of squeaky protests so pathetic and sad that recordings of them would prompt the ASPCA to write me up on charges of animal cruelty.

She’s not a kitten anymore, though. And I need to feel the nerve endings in my fingertips, thank you.

The Sweet Smell of Addiction

I’d like to talk for a moment about candles. Ordinary, everyday candles. Because right now, I hate ‘em.

Yes, I know the candle has a noble history and that countless generations of honeybees have given up their wax so that civilization may progress to a higher plane. Yes, I’m aware that the exalted candle was burning brightly while Shakespeare quilled his greatest tragedies, and that it was candles that kept hope alive during the darkest nights of the black plague.

Whatever.

Why am I so waxophobic, you wonder? Why am I advocating candlemaker-bashing? Well, it’s because someone in this house—not I—apparently has a bad candle habit, and it’s slipped unnoticed until now.

While our house was up for sale, the one thing I kept hearing from people who had no idea of what to say about about selling a house but wanted to indicate that they were savvy watchers of HGTV was, “Oh, bake some cookies before each showing!” Well, people. I don’t really care what you’ve heard on your curbside appeal shows. When your house is up on the market for almost eight months, there are only so many cookies one can bake. Seriously. I had forty-five showings during the month of March. Do I really need to bake four dozen batches of cookies?

Do I look like a Keebler elf?

“Oh,” they’d say, when I would balk. “You don’t have to bake an entire batch. Just buy some of that pre-cut cookie dough and bake one or two!” No, people. One or two cookies doesn’t even make enough of a smell to cover up the scent of a hamster pellet. You go out and buy some pre-cut cookie dough and put it . . . well, I’m too much of a gentleman to tell you what to do with it.

But you know. I got the general message. Prospective buyers like to walk into a clean-smelling house. I might not want to bake dozens of batches of cookies (and don’t tell me I could merely throw them out. That’s insanity. Do you know how many starving Africans my parents told me there are?), but I don’t want to walk into a house reeking of kitty litter and last night’s stir-fried curry noodles, either.

So I compromised. It occurred to me that over the years, my husband has picked up a scented candle or two. Well. We’re not able to pass a candle store without stopping in, really. Yankee Candle franchises tend to get really excited when they see him approaching. Like a connoisseur, he’ll investigate the new scents and delicately sniff, then consider, and then pronounce his verdict like a wine critic. “Earthy, with a citrus zest.” Or, “The resemblance of this waxen version of candy corn lies mainly in its appearance, yet not in its too-heavy overtones of vanilla without the leavening of dairy.” Something like that. Then, clutching his purchases beneath his arms, we’ll finally be able to exit the joint.

At some point during the eight months, I thought to myself, “Hey, candles are smelly. How about instead of baking, I light a few of those suckers?” We’ve always kept our candles in an inaccessible cupboard behind the baby grand, but I managed to wrench open one of the drawers and pull out a couple—a buttercream-scented pillar for the first floor and a cinnamon-scented jar for the basement, where there’s less air circulation. A couple of hours before each showing, I’d light the candles, let them release their scents, and then right before I left during the showings, I’d cap the candles and disappear, confident in a sweet-smelling house.

Well, it must’ve worked. After months and months, the house finally sold a couple of weeks ago. The buyers intend to close on June 1; we’re supposed to be out of here within a few days after that. My last couple of weeks have been a flurry of meeting with moving companies and trying to clean out the crap that I don’t particularly want to take with us—like old electronics boxes, or books I no longer want, or the odd little drawers of ephemera that I don’t want to be paying a moving company vast amounts of dollars an hour to pack for me.

And then I got to the candle cupboard.

It would seem, to put it mildly, that my husband might have more of a problem than I thought. He’s concealed it well, these many years. The real addicts always do. I’m not even sure he’s aware he has a problem.

Yet, when I opened those two drawers and pulled ajar the doors to the cupboard, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of scented wax tumbled out. It honestly was a bit like a Looney Tunes short in which Elmer Fudd opens Bugs Bunny’s closest and is instantly crushed by its contents. Complete with whistling tweety birds around my cracked cranium.

And oh my god, the smell. Between the vanillas and the cranberries and the fresh pines and the sweet fruits and the almond mocha bean clean linen pineapple cilantro pomegranate mango madness, my nostrils shorted out. Basically it smelled like Lisa Frank had cut a really enormous fart in there.

That wasn’t the full extent of it. There were boxes and boxes of candlesticks. It would seem as if every time we went to a post-Christmas sale or pre-school sale at Eddie Bauer or Ikea or Bed Bath & Beyond, my other half would see candles on sale and think them a good deal. “Oh,” he’d say. “Look at these boxes of twenty-four white candlesticks! Only five dollars! Let’s buy four of them!” Then he’d toss them into the cupboard and not think about them again. Do that several times a year for the thirteen years we’ve been living here, and folks, that’s a hell of a lot of candles.

Obviously, I could throw away the three candles out of that enormous stash that had actually been used. I could probably with a clear conscience get rid of the ones that had yellowed, or had gone lop-sided from melting in the summer heat. But that still left an awful lot of freakin’ candles. Since then I’ve been giving them away to whomever will take them. Hey, friends—thanks for driving me to karaoke! Let me leave you some candles in your back seat as a token of my appreciation! Hey, other friend! Listen, are you interested in taking some of my spare liquor off my hands before my move? I’ll throw in some candles! Listen, neighbors—have you thought about your lighting contingency plans in case of worldwide dystopia?

Once I’m reunited with my husband, however, something has to be done. I’m having a candle intervention. I’m sending him to whatever is the candle addict’s equivalent of the Betty Ford Clinic. Yankee Candle might take a heavy hit in their next quarter’s earnings, but I can live with that.

Game for Cats

On my iPad I downloaded an app called ‘Game for Cats’, a couple of weeks ago on whim. Game for Cats has two separate levels—one free, one costing a buck. The free game simulates a large, fuzzy-edged laser pointer against a dark background. The pointer travels on and off the screen, sometimes pausing and gyrating slightly, as if waiting for the cat to attack. It varies speed, stops completely, and vanishes for unpredictable amounts of time. When the cat reaches out to catch the light, it dissipates with a soft, satisfying ‘bweep.’ And the cat scores a hundred points. That’s it. No boss levels. Just your cat’s dirty paw, your expensive iPad, and a rapid succession of slaps and bweeps.

The level that costs a dollar is vastly superior, my cats tell me (on the ‘select a level’ screen, it’s the only one they’ll go for, these days); it involves an animated mouse with a long, twitchy tale and beady eyes scampering across a cheese-colored screen. Sometimes it’ll peek out from the edges, and then dash to the other side. Once in a while it’ll linger in the screen’s center, doing whatever it is that mice do in their spare time, as if it thinks it’s unobserved.

The cats go freakin’ nuts over the mouse. Sarah, the cat that’s going on twenty-one, will rouse from her hard life of eating and sleeping on the heater vent to slap at the screen over and over, causing the mouse to scamper and squeak every time she scores. She’s the current household high score holder—over 20,000 in a single game—because she’s so determined to slap that little squeaker into submission before exhausting herself into another geriatric catnap.

Fred, on the other hand, is more crafty with the game. She seems to think the iPad is some kind of cage for the mouse; she’ll spend her time trying to reach under the device in order to get at it from the inside. Or she’ll attempt to use her nose and paws to turn the iPad onto its glass front, in order to tip out its contents. She’s also much more creative in her play. When I put the iPad onto the floor in the office while I work, in order to keep her from bugging me, she’ll sit on the desk for a while and watch the mouse from above—and then suddenly she’ll throw all thirteen considerable pounds of herself at the screen in a terrifying death pounce. Lately her favorite strategy has been to use her nose to nudge the pad over to where the office door lies open, and then to line it up so that its lip is perfectly parallel to the door’s edge (it’s eerie, how anal she is about that). Then she’ll tiptoe excitedly around to the other side of the door and bat at the mouse from underneath it.

I feel a little guilty about fobbing off Game for Cats on my pets when I’m too busy (or lazy) to get out their toys and give them some exercise. It feels a little bit like giving my young a couple of jelly doughnuts and a big box of McNuggets and muttering, “Go play with yer video games and get out of my hair, y'damn kids!” Though I can’t understand the hours of amusement they’ve both had with the thing, so far.

The worst side effect, though? They both regard the iPad as theirs. I can’t read in bed at night without Fred interposing herself between my face and the glowing screen to look for mice. When I lent the iPad to one of my friends the other day, Fred jealously hopped onto his shoulder then walked down his chest and attempted to push the iPad out of his hands.

Worse still, Fred seems to think that any flat-screen device is a potential mouse cage. I can’t answer a phone call without her running over to push the phone away from my ear. It was bad enough that she already checked her email and played World of Warcraft without me; now she sits behind my computer screen and hangs her head over the top, cocking her head so she can check for rodents. I have to hide the iPad itself when I’m not using it, because otherwise I’m likely to find it flipped over and nudged beneath a cabinet or a door. I’d even posted a video on Facebook last week of the cats alternating scoring points with the game; the sound of the slapping and squeaking will bring Fred running from the house’s most remote reaches, ears twitching and whiskers a-quiver.

Game for Cats. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s the smartest dollar I’ve ever spent, or whether the decision means I’ll have to buy the cats an Apple device of their very own.

The True and Fantastic Story of the Amazing Pepe

In the late autumn I was sitting in my den working, on a very cold, crisp afternoon. When I looked up and out of the sliding glass doors at the back of the house, I saw Fred sitting outside.

Now, I panicked immediately, because to the best of my knowledge, my cat Fred was doing what she does almost every day during the nine cold months of Michigan’s weather year—she climbs under the flannel sheets and blankets of my bed at nine in the morning, bakes herself to a toasty finish, and emerges at dinnertime, yawning. I’d gone out earlier in the afternoon, however, so it occurred to me that the little imp could’ve slipped out. Like I said, it was a frigid afternoon, and the thought of Fred out there in the cold, for hours, threw me into a panic.

My heart pounding somewhere in the vicinity of my adam’s apple, I leapt up and opened the door. The cat strolled in quite calmly, tail lifted and flicking the last half-inch, and rubbed against my leg, grateful. Then it walked over to the kitchen and proceeded to start eating the dry food. I cooed and petted its cold fur and told it how sorry I was and how I’d never, ever make the same mistake and let it out by accident ever, ever. . . .

And it was only at that point I realized the cat wasn’t Fred.

Oh, they looked the same. Both are standard-issue tabbies with pretty much the same markings. Both were roughly the same size. Fred’s coloring was a little more brown where this cat’s was gray, however, and the cat making itself home by rolling around on the kitchen carpet and settling down in front of the air duct for a nap didn’t have Fred’s heft, shall we tactfully say. Fred’s a small cat, but she’s surprisingly heavy. Dense, even. She’s like some kind of Time Lord cat, bigger and infinitely heavier on the inside than the out. This cat was a lot lighter. It was obviously fed regularly, though it didn’t seem to be minding the snack it had from my bowls.

Even Sarah couldn’t tell the impostor from the real thing. She took one look at the strange cat, shrugged, and went back to licking herself.

Anyway, I did the only thing that a normal person would do in such a situation. I took a photo of me hugging the strange cat and sent it to the Mont in a text message and told him I was adopting it.

As I expected, he went ballistic. I could practically hear him explode, all the way from Connecticut. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT CAT? YOU CANNOT KEEP THAT CAT!! WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT!!! DID YOU FEED THAT CAT!!!! DON’T FEED THAT CAT!!!!!

I had already long shooed the cat out and told it to return home by the time I sent a text message back. I’ve named him Pepe, I confabulated. You’ll like him when you visit.

When the Mont called (seconds later), I confessed that I was only teasing about adopting Pepe. The fact that I admitted to my prank while giggling wildly, however, only convinced him that I was fibbing about fibbing, and that I really did have a third cat sleeping under the roof with me. It probably didn’t help that I would take photos of Fred doing her usual stuff around the house and message them to him with captions like, Pepe learned where the litter box is pretty quickly, or Look how Pepe likes to drink from the toilet!

I figured that Pepe had to belong to one of the neighbors—he was obviously too well-kept to be a stray. Besides, he visited the house at pretty much the same time in the afternoons. That told me that someone was letting him out on a routine, and that he was simply making the rounds before returning back home for the coldest and darkest hours of the day. Sarah continued to assume that Pepe was Fred; Fred would growl at Pepe through the protection of the glass doors, but if I brought the cat in for a quick cuddle, she’d quickly lose interest and go back to the rough work of snoozing beneath the blankets.

By the time the Mont came home for the holiday, the weather had gotten so cold that I’d not seen Pepe for a couple of weeks. In my way of thinking, that was a good thing. I’m always distressed when I see house cats out in the dead of winter. The scene that followed, though, went a little something like this: The Mont walked into the house and dropped his bags. We embraced. Sarah meowed and demanded to be fed. Fred walked into the room, brushed up against him, and allowed herself to be petted. It was a happy family reunion.

“Where’s Pepe?” the Mont asked, half-joking, half suspicious.

“Honey,” I said, laughing in a way that was meant to imply how silly he was to take seriously any of my pranks.

Then I looked at the back door. A little tabby was peeking in.

It was a gift from God. Who am I to reject such comedy manna? “Well hey, Pepe!” I cooed, walking over to the sliding glass doors and opening them. Once I’d slid back the screen, Pepe trotted in, tail high and whiskers twitching. He rubbed against me, nodded at the other two cats in passing, ignored the Month, and then helped himself to the Friskies.

Well. The scene that followed was pretty much like the first text message exchange. WHERE DID THAT CAT COME FROM? DOES HE LIVE HERE?? HAVE YOU BEEN FEEDING THAT CAT??? DID YOU NOT HEAR ME SAY THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT????

Honestly, there were fewer decibels when Lucy smuggled home a giant cheese in Ricky’s tuba.

Eventually, when I stopped snickering, I picked up Pepe and put him out, assuring The Mont that the cat did not live there, that I hadn’t seen the cat in two weeks, and that it was mere wild coincidence that it should show up thirty seconds after his arrival home and demand to be let in. Honestly. Coincidence. That’s all it was. Jeez, calm down.

Eventually he did. “Come on,” I told him, once his face was no longer the shade of a cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop. “Let’s take your stuff upstairs.”

Once we were upstairs and the bags had been thrown in the spare bedroom, we flopped down on our bed to relax and talk. I asked how his trip had been. He told me about the route he’d taken. We’d barely started talking when we heard a faint thud, followed by a faint meow.

I sat up. “Fred must be trying to attack Pepe through the glass door,” I said. But no, the sound wasn’t quite that. We heard another meow.

Then, like actors in a classic screwball flick, we both turned our heads slowly, simultaneously, to the window behind the bed. There was Pepe, staring at us through the second-story window. Not only staring at us. Pepe was affixed to the screen with all four paws and all his claws, legs sprawled in all four directions, looking all the world like one of those Garfield stuffed animals with suction cups on his feet, affixed to a car window.

Now, I’m not sure how Pepe managed to climb up on the den roof and make his way to that exact window. I’m still uncertain how he even knew we’d be on the other side. What I do know is that the look of utter disbelief on The Mont’s face at that moment is something I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life. “Well hey, Pepe!” I said brightly again, as if he attached himself to the second story window all the time. “Ready to come in again?”

The Mont watched, slack-jawed, as I opened the window and pulled up the screen. Pepe stepped over the sill and through the slats of the headboard as if we did that kind of thing all the time. Then he curled up on the blanket, squinched shut his eyes with affection, and purred.

I’m still slightly deaf in my left ear from the yelling that followed. Jeez. Honestly. It’s not like I paid the darn cat to do that. I don’t have the money for such comedy gold.

The Nascenza Conspiracy

Seven or eight years ago, I finished the manuscript of a book I called The Horns of Cassaforte. It was a young adult novel set in a fantasy world somewhat similar to renaissance Venice, where the families of ordinary craftsmen not only produced objects blessed with everyday magics, but played a major part in the country’s governance. The book grew in part out of the 9/11 tragedy, and partly out of my depression over the political landscape of the country at the time. I wanted to explore how the most ordinary person—Risa Divetri, seen by everyone as good for nothing— might react to a country that was being hijacked by political extremists striking at its most basic foundations.

Heavy stuff for a light fantasy novel, I know. When I finished writing, I knew I wanted to explore those themes even further, in two sequels. I didn’t really have any more notion of those novels in my head than the premises in their titles. The second book in the series I was thinking of as The Pirates of Cassaforte, in which an actor’s troupe would be stranded on a desert isle by pirates. The third was Pilgrims of Cassaforte, and would deal with a small group of citizens on a religious journey waylaid by terrorists.

The Horns of Cassaforte became The Glass Maker’s Daughter, of course. And The Pirates of Cassaforte finally found realization in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. And now Pilgrims of Cassaforte is seeing the light of day as The Nascenza Conspiracy, which is available this week from Flux.

The Nascenza Conspiracy has as its protagonist Risa Divetri’s younger brother, Petro. As Risa has grown into a national hero, celebrated and feared in equal measure, Petro has been walled away in the insula—a boarding school of sorts for the country’s leading families. His sister’s notoriety has guaranteed that Petro has led anything but a typical student’s life, though. Either he’s scrutinized by his instructors for traces of her talents, scorned for being anything less than extraordinary, fawned upon for his connections, or beaten up for sticking out. For someone who simply wants to fade into the background until he’s ready to find his own path, it’s uncomfortable to have such a famous relative.

When the insula’s elder decides to send him on a religious pilgrimage to the holy site of Nascenza, Petro leaps at the chance to be out of the spotlight. And when his best friend comes up with a practical joke to swap identities, Petro is happy to leave behind the name of Divetri and become an ordinary citizen for a few blessed days.

The scheme goes awry in a remote village populated with political extremists, however. Petro’s friend is kidnapped, his bodyguards are killed, and he’s left seemingly alone in a countryside populated with murderers and traitors. When he determines to rescue his friend, he finds himself embroiled in a plot that threatens Cassaforte’s throne like no other before.

I know! Risa’s little brother, all grown up and stuff!

One of The Nascenza Conspiracy’s major themes has to do with the ways that political groups will use the tactics of fearmongering and internal terror in order to get their way. It’s a theme that grew directly out of the take-no-prisoners approach to political campaigning that I’d seen during the 2008 election and the aftermath in the years following. It seemed then as if anyone with a desire to invalidate Obama’s presidency used whatever means they could to spread fear about the inevitable dangers of an African-American president—logical or not. To me it seemed like living in absolute insanity—and I drew upon it for the book. Petro’s treading dangerous ground with a party of extremists willing to do anything, and sacrifice anyone, in the name of political insanity, simply because they weren’t able to get their own way. If only real life could be settled with as much satisfaction as a fantasy novel, eh?

Oh, but the book’s real draw? Two teenaged boys making nut jokes for an entire page and a half. You won’t want to miss that.

The Nascenza Conspiracy is available from Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com, or check to see if your local independent bookstore has it in stock or will order it for you. You can also buy it for your Kindle.

If you read the book and enjoy it, won't you consider putting your review for it on the usual sites?

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.