Digging Out

I haven’t been blogging or much of anything else for what’s apparently been weeks.  I got some coding done on the various sites on Black-Ring.net (except Philly G/I, which wound up being an epic failure), but the rest of life has been rather stagnant.  I blame this on being buried deep within some fictional worlds, ensnared like a prisoner in gods, heavens, and the profound disappointment in the 60s.

I think I mentioned on here or Twitter that Mur Lafferty released all her writing for free a little while back, so I’ve been using her Afterlife series as something of a palate cleanser.  The series isn’t especially long, and I’d like to prolong my stay in that universe as much as possible.  For a while there, I switched between the third in the series on my Fire and the paperback I was reading until, at the delicious point of no return, the hooks of the paperback’s story dug in.

The paperback in question is King’s Hearts In Atlantis.  My wife saw me eyeing it at a thrift store, grabbing it out of my hand and saying, “I’ll buy it for you.  C’mon, it’s only a dollar.”  (What can I say?  I’ve growing to be a frugal young man.)  I’m somewhat obsessed about the Dark Tower series, and now that it’s completed, I’m slowly making my way through the secondary stories that touch upon Roland’s universe.  No matter how boring I find the beginning of a story, my mind perks up at the first mention of the Crimson King or low men.

The odd thing is that the book is really a collection of loosely connected short stories with only the first having anything to do with the Tower.  But somewhere between the feverish hunts for the bitch and the meticulous design of Willie Shearman’s begging, the barbs of King’s attack on the flower generation sunk in and dragged me along to the end.  And, just like most stories, I hated when it came to an end…and hated the end.  I know it’s supposed to be melancholic, but it seemed to be too far close to the happy side of melancholia.

But leave it to King to write a fairly realistic story with just a touch of metaphysics.  No grand wizards having battles that devastate the surrounding cities.  Just some random oddness that affect a handful of people, who go about the rest of their lives wondering if what they saw really happened.  Sound familiar…