Gray After Dark is a horror story about a jogger in the Frank Church Wilderness who is kidnapped by insane, Christian-y preppers. (#notallpreppers #notevenmostpreppers #actuallyprobablyjustoneortwo #notanyChristians #butstill)
The preppers are a father, Fred, (certifiable abuser) and grown son, Hamish, (brainwashed and cowed) who take advantage of female hikers to “tame” them and make them their “wives.” They don’t just prep like normal people, gardening, learning basic gun safety, having a backup generator, keeping chickens, etc. Instead, the live completely off the grid, in a shack way out in the middle of nowhere, and like the Ingalls family, they live on game and cornbread. They think they will be glad of all this when the SHTF.
But weirdly, Fred isn’t even that capable as a prepper. He will shoot a moose or deer and then just leave it. No real hunter would do that. He doesn’t bother to bathe himself, or allow the other members of his household to fulfill basic hygiene. For example, they have to sneak around behind his back in order to wash their hands before handling food supplies. Again, any capable off-gridder would know how important cleanliness is to avoid getting sick. And, of course, Fred also damages and endangers his own project by treating the two women in his household in a way that most capable hunters wouldn’t even treat their dogs. This is just part of his overall M.O. of shooting himself in the foot (metaphorically) by not having any control over his large collection of besetting sins. “He who loves his wife, loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28) is a Bible verse that Fred has apparently never come across.
The family has a shed on their property where they keep their food supplies: gobs of “white plastic gallon buckets.” (I assume Ihli means 5-gallon buckets or bigger, because gallon buckets are awfully small for storing bulk food supplies, but anyway.) In some of these buckets is flour. In others there are wheat berries. Where did these supplies come from? They must have been bought at some point, because Fred and Hamish clearly aren’t farmers. But that is never explained. Plastic food-storage buckets are designed to keep pests out, yet somehow, the flour has become infested with weevils. This is just one of a number of examples where the descriptions of the preppers’ lifestyle makes me scratch my head. To be fair, I have never survived off grid, so I don’t know enough about it to say that all this could not happen. (And bugs somehow made their way into plastic flour-storage bins when I lived in Indonesia.) But, I do get the vibe that Ihli is in the same boat as me when it comes to survival knowledge. Her conception of these particular preppers is that they live in ignorance and squalor.
As mentioned, Fred also does not appear to be a capable Christian cult leader (if that is what the book is going for). There are, indeed, horrific Christianity-adjacent cults where women are kept prisoner with a variety of brainwashing tactics, but these cults tend to use actual ceremonies, harangues, and Bible passages (though twisted). Fred is never shown reading anything (although he’s not stupid). “Mary,” the other woman in the household, reads the Bible to the new prisoner, but we are never told what passages. Again, the level of research seems to be “they’re violent and crazy, and also there’s a Bible.”
Besides being a horror/thriller, Gray After Dark is also a little bit of a love story. The chapters swing back and forth between the perspective of Miley and her ordeal with the preppers, and her dear friend, Olympics training partner, and not-quite-yet boyfriend, Brent. That’s right, in the manner of a romance novel. Brent is tracking Miley through the Frank Church Wilderness, which he compares to “looking for a lost watch in New York City.” He is really devoted to her, and his sweet strength provides a refreshing counterpoint to Fred and Hamish’s harsh weakness. The proportion is about two or three chapters of Miley to one of Brent.
And, though I’ve been somewhat hard on this book for its portrayal of the “Christian” preppers, it works really well as a thriller/love story. It isn’t really about Christian-adjacent prepping cults. Fred and Hamish are there to provide the horror and the threat. I’m willing to accept that people like this exist, albeit in small numbers (at least in the West), just as I’m willing to accept that large numbers of people become very animalistic in an EMP apocalypse or a zombie apocalypse, for the sake of the story. And that’s what Gray After Dark is … more of an “imagine this situation” type of story than an “all of society is like this” story of the kind we might expect from Margaret Atwood. It’s a page turner, and despite some minor hiccups I enjoyed it.
What do you think? Do you like thrillers? Love stories? Apocalyptic? Wilderness survival? Have you ever gotten bugs in your flour?
During the month of October, I like to post about scary things. I guess this book qualifies.
Through a comical series of events, I found myself drafting a contemporary romance novel. I don’t read much in the genre, but I thought it might be a smart idea to try. And where better to start than here, a romance that features a pair of young writers, working on a romance novel together, and every time they write a trope into their novel, it happens in their lives?
I mean, that’s kind of clever.
Also, like a suspiciously large number of contemporary novels out there, this one offers an inside glimpse of the publishing industry. That’s a double-edged sword, of course. I can’t help but be interested in what the industry is like (at least in Okie’s experience), just as I can’t help but be intimidated and repelled by it when I find out.
Anyway.
Tropes, in case you didn’t know, are also known as cliches, things that frequently happen in any given genre. There are so many tropes that, if you have written any fiction at all, I guarantee you have used a few, with or without meaning to. This is not a bad thing. Some tropes, like “not enough beds,” are super contrived, but others have become tropes because they represent common and powerful human experiences. For example, the fact that Absent Father is a trope doesn’t make the experience any less painful for the person experiencing it.
The strength of this book is that the premise allows the author to use a great many common tropes without flinching.
My feelings about this book are deeply mixed, and I’m going to express them in the manner of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof: “On the one hand … but on the other hand …” There will be some spoilers here.
A pro is that the book takes place in and around New York City.
A con is that this means both the main characters are New Yorkers.
A pro is that both MCs are sweet, likeable people.
A con is that they are both hoes.
A pro is that the story is truly emotional.
A con is that several of the emotional turning points are expressed in pages-long sex scenes.
Another con is that these scenes take place before the characters are truly in love.
Con: not to mention married.
A pro is that the tragic backstory is revealed, little by little, in flashbacks.
A con is that, after a ton of foreshadowing and minimal revelation, there are a bunch of this-changes-everything twists packed into the last few pages. (Wait … is that a trope, too?)
(Spoiler): a pro is the truly unexpected appearance of the Meddlesome Ghost trope right near the end.
Con: (at least, it’s a con to me): Though in retrospect, there were clues about the ghost thing, the atmosphere of the story in no way prepared me for it. I feel this was a missed opportunity to get some chills out of this story. But perhaps this is how ghosts are handled in romances.
I must rant a little bit more about the hoe problem. Katie, the heroine, is presented as sweet, someone who “loves big” even when she has been hurt. She is “bright,” in the sense that her virtue causes a glow that is perceptible to the senses. (She also wears face and body glitter.) She has suffered, but she is not hardened and bitter. And yet, when we first meet her, she is sleeping with a guy she does not even consider her boyfriend, simply because she is a young, successful writer living in NYC and she wants to “have a fun summer.” I’m sorry, but this is really clunky psychology. If you are sleeping around just for fun, you are doing serious mental damage to yourself and to everyone around you.
In fact, both the main characters are presented like this. They are Broken in Some Way (as per the trope), but their brokenness is neither the cause of, nor exacerbated by, their promiscuous behavior. This seems to be a blind spot on the author’s part. It’s not true to life, and it throws off the emotional tone of the book. Rant over.
O.K., I’ll just say it. Douglas Wilson is a great theologian/expositional preacher, he seems to be a highly competent counselor, and he is an excellent polemical writer. He is not an excellent novelist.
He is just an okay novelist. I will explain.
Ride, Sally, Ride was published in 2020, which means it was being written in the 20-teens, pre-Covid and pre-George Floyd riots (though not pre-Ferguson and a lot of other riots). It is set in the late 2030s, in a somewhat dystopian setting.
A Little Bit of Orwell
In this setting, the United States is not officially fragmented, but almost. On the Left Coast and the East Coast, you have blue states, which is what we Americans call politically leftist states, with increasingly draconian laws outlawing hate speech and enforcing the rainbow. In the middle of the country, you have red states, which is what we Americans call politically conservative states, also known as “free states.” The free states have been able to survive economically, despite not having access to the East and West Coasts, because they have really developed their natural gas, oil, and grain production, and they still have the Mississippi River. They are able to ship their products down this and out into the Gulf of Mexico (as I still call it). So, in Ride Sally, these United States are not quite separate “states” (read: countries) yet, but they are in the middle of a slo-mo breakup.
Wilson didn’t foresee the Covid debacle, but his characters make frequent references to “the Troubles of 2024,” which seem to have been widespread unrest leading to widespread legal changes.
Most of the action in Ride Sally takes place in Colorado. It (but not Wyoming) is part of the blue, Diversity Gestapo bloc that also includes Washington, Oregon, and California. Americans will recognize this as plausible. Not only have gay marriage, polyamory, and porn been legalized and widely promoted in these states, but so has the sale of “sex bots.” You can order them online for a few thousand dollars, and they can be programmed to say whatever you want.
A Little Bit of Old Testament
Our hero, Ace (short for Asahel) is a twentysomething living with his parents while he attends university. His parents are Christians, but they are sort of cowardly and compromised, as is their church, which is the only reason they have been able to go on living in Colorado. Ace, on the other hand, has been reading Puritan theology (outlawed as hate speech) on the dark web, and has grown into a fine young man. Their last name is Hartwick.
As our story opens, the Hartwicks have a new neighbor. Their new neighbor has a wife, “Sally.” Sally is a sex bot.
The new neighbor introduces Sally as if it were a real person. The Hartwicks are maneuvered into inviting the “couple” over for dinner, at which the neighbor speaks to the bot as if it were a person and eats off its plate to make it appear that Sally has finished her meal. It’s creepy, though it could have been creepier if this were a horror story, which it’s not.
The next day, neighbor asks Ace to go “look in on Sally” while neighbor goes to pick up a package (which turns out to be another bot). He tells Ace this would be “the right thing” to do. Ace, also determined to do the right thing, but in a different way, goes over to the neighbor’s house and sees Sally posed seductively, in an obvious setup. He helpfully puts a t-shirt on the doll, takes it over to the recycling center where he works, and crushes it in the trash compactor. All of this takes place in the first chapter. The rest of the book deals with Ace being put on trial for the “murder” of the neighbor’s “wife.”
And a Little Bit of Wodehouse
The trial unfolds through a series of zany, madcap events. There are slimy lawyers. There are conniving governors. There are riots, conversions, and assassination attempts. There is a refugee from an Amish community. There are crossed wires and mixed signals galore.
Many of the plot points turn on one of the Team Sanity characters causing mayhem at strategic moments. Example: a slimy lawyer is about to hold a press conference where he will trot out a false accusation of rape against Ace from a would-be influencer who knew him slightly in high school. The press conference is totally derailed when another woman, watching in the crowd, yells out, “Then why did you molest me, Dwight?” as soon he says “believe all women.”
In short, this book, besides being a dystopia, also sort of wants to be a P.G. Wodehouse comic adventure.
So, Douglas Wilson, you have tried to combine 1984 with P.G. Wodehouse, with a little bit of Stepping Heavenward. How did it go?
This reader’s verdict is that it was mixed. The absurdity of the Diversity Gestapo laws certainly do lend themselves to Wodehouse-like hijinks on the part of Team Sanity. When the establishment has no category for objective truth, this creates a quite a few loopholes. For example, at one point Ace’s defense attorney makes a motion that the jury have at least three sex bots on it. They cannot be programmed to vote guilty or innocent, of course, as that would constitute jury tampering. This is a stroke of brilliance worthy of Jeeves near the end of one of the Jeeves and Bertie books.
However, one of the things that makes the Jeeves and Bertie books so fun is that the stakes are always so low. Will Bertie’s uncle to get to purchase the coveted antique that he’s had his eye on? Will Anatole, Bertie’s aunt’s temperamental but genius cook, quit, leaving the family without good food to eat? Will Bertie be forced to marry the soppy and naive Madeline Bassett, or will she end up with the man who really loves her, i.e. Augustus Fink-Nottle? Whenever Bertie or one of his friends are in danger of being jailed, it’s not for murder, it’s for something like “stealing a policeman’s helmet.”
The stakes are a lot higher in Ride, Sally, Ride, which makes things a little less funny. Yes, it is possible to write about life-or-death situations in a comedy, but we must not be seriously concerned that disaster will befall the protagonists. Whereas in a dystopia, we should. Furthermore, the stakes in Ride, Sally don’t only involve whether Ace will be unjustly jailed by the state of Colorado. There are quite a number of potentially heartbreaking, messed-up family situations also on the line. These are resolved, in this book, in the same way that interpersonal misunderstandings are resolved in a Bertie and Jeeves novel, which is just frankly weird. It gives the reader the feeling, as Bertie would say, “that you get when you step on the top step and it isn’t there.” If we were reading 1984, we would not expect Wilson and Julia to hash out their mutual betrayal in one heart-to-heart talk.
Douglas Wilson Can’t Write Dialogue
I’m sorry, but he just can’t. His narrative is brilliant. It’s funny, satirical, and extremely quotable. He does sometimes get a little bit lost in the satire at the expense of moving the story, which is not something that usually happens with Wodehouse. He also sometimes neglects to inform the reader, at the beginning of a scene, where this scene is taking place, or what the protagonists look like. For example, we have to wait until the end of the book to find out that the defense lawyer’s wife is a ginger with hazel eyes, tall, and with a full figure. It would have been nice to know that the first time we met her. But this is a flaw for which I have criticized many other authors.
But anyway, back to the dialogue. It stinks. All of the characters talk, to greater or lesser extents, just like the narrative voice. The only exceptions are the woke characters, when they are spouting boilerplate woke stuff. They do that pretty well. And, I’m not saying the dialogue is consistently bad. There are certainly moments when a character says something, and it sounds like a real American person talking. The last line, for example, is great. But for the most part, the characters speak in sentences that are way too complete and way too complex. They sound like they were composed, not blurted. And this is true even in moments of great emotion. When they do get off a funny, half the time it’s British sounding, like the original P.G. Wodehouse.
Look, Bertie is a British character, so he can sound British, even when he is being a dip. But if you want to write an American dip, they should sound like one. Ace’s false accuser is portrayed as being not very bright … but you wouldn’t know it from her speech patterns. Another character, Sarah, left her Amish community just about a month ago, but she says to another woman, “You, my dear, are gorgeous.” Amish people don’t say stuff like that. This is not difficult. I mean, it would not have been difficult to research just a little bit. Go talk to an Amish person, or even just a Mennonite, or even just somebody with German heritage, and take a few notes on their speech patterns.
But that wasn’t Wilson’s priority. He has a lot of irons in the fire, and my impression is that he wasn’t trying to write a book with good dialogue. He wanted to write a rip-roaring satire with a quick-paced plot, and he did. He probably wasn’t going for Great Literature. (And to be fair, P.G. Wodehouse is Great Literature, in his own special way. So maybe it’s not fair to expect Wilson to write fiction as well as Wodehouse.)
Perhaps this inconsistent-dialogue thing would not bother some readers, but in addition to writing fiction, I read a lot of it, and as for this reader, it drove me crazy. I did finish the book, but that problem nearly ruined it for me.
Characters. Should. Talk. Like. Real. People! The end.
The Stepford Wives, and some Spoilers
Brian pointed out in the comments that creepy-sexbot-as-horror-story has been much better done by the original Stepford Wives. He is right. In fact, these two pieces of literature (?) are using the same trope to critique two different things. The Stepford Wives was asserting that having a middle-class, two-parent family living in suburbia is dehumanizing to women, and Ride Sally is asserting the same thing, but about the every-kind-of-sexual-desire-is-sacred value system.
Although Ride Sally is a worse-written book, I think it makes a better case. Here are some spoilers. Near the end of the book, it turns out that Neighbor is a serial sex-bot buyer. Every few months, he finds something that his “wife” has done wrong. He then destroys her and replaces her, because she was a “bad wife.” From this point of view, it becomes clear why Neighbor set up Ace to avail himself of Neighbor’s “wife.” He was also setting up Sally. He had already ordered another “wife,” and his plan was to come home, find Sally “committing adultery,” and get rid of her.
To be honest, I find this portrayal more realistic than in Stepford, where the “wives” live with their husbands for years, just like a regular wife. Men who do not have their impulses directed to something godly, the kind of men who would buy a sexbot, are unlikely to be content with the same Sally year after year. Because what they want is not really a wife.
At one point in Wilson’s novel, a researcher reveals that the sexbot companies keep data about all the units they sell. The average bot has been used a total of only three times. I know this is fiction, but that fictional stat rings depressingly true. Because whatever users are doing with a bot, it cannot be called having sex. That requires two actual people. So users are bound be disappointed.
The psychology is solid. But the development and execution of all these different plotlines is lacking. It’s a shame. It makes me wish that someone else had written this book.
Like anybody who has ever encountered it, I have “issues” with the story of Jason and Medea.
In case you missed it, he sails off on the Argo to get the Golden Fleece. She is a witch, daughter of the king of Colchis, descendent of Helios, the sun god. Struck by Eros with an inordinate crush on Jason, she helps him accomplish all the tasks necessary to get the fleece and escape alive. He takes her with him on the Argo, and they crash around Greece, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Eventually, he throws her over for a younger model, a native Greek gal who is daughter of the king of Corinth. Medea takes a bloody and spectacular revenge, which I won’t spoil (look it up).
I first heard all this from my ninth-grade Lit teacher. She presented it in a very feminist way, but to be fair, this particular story sort of begs for that. I remember, in university, arguing rather incoherently with a male classmate about who was the real villain in this story. Later, when I was home schooling and read a simplified version of the legend to my kids, we decided we didn’t like the story, and we didn’t like Jason or Medea either, and they were both horrible people and they deserved each other.
So, hopefully, this book will be the nadir of my year of reading Greco-fiction: facing the story of Jason and Medea square on, by reading an entire novel about them.
The reason I liked the title of this novel is that it sounded like a phrase taken directly from the Greek — and so it was. The author, Natalie Haynes, has really done her homework.
Euripides’ Medea was the first Greek tragedy I saw performed, and it was the first or second play I read in Greek. … I wrote my dissertation on the heroics of infanticide in Euripides (I don’t have children, before you think about composing your sternly worded letter). … I’ve been reading and thinking about this play for the best part of thirty years, and I have probably seen it performed twenty-five times … I decided that the thing I needed to do [before writing the novel] was translate the Euripides, longhand. This is–in case you are wondering–weapons-grade procrastination. It took me a few weeks …
Haynes, in the Afterword, pp. 359 – 360
Haynes’ treatment of this story has been called feminist. And O.K. … sort of? But it’s not “feminist” in the sense of someone who understands the literature poorly who then reacts against the ancient heroic-age value system and sets out to undermine it. It is, rather, the work of someone who has marinated themselves in the ancient heroic-age mileu, which inherently presented a very broken relationship between men and women (especially husbands and wives). This story, and also the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, bring a lot of tension with them and almost demand that you take what might be called a “feminist” perspective, at least in part, unless you want to take a very simplified view of the whole thing and not really analyze it much at all.
It’s not just me saying this. Apparently, everyone has been arguing about Medea for … well, ever since she came to their attention.
Diodorious Siculus says that the reason we have so many contradictory versions of her story is because tragic poets are drawn to talking about marvels. It’s also worth mentioning that any character who prompts different versions of their story is one who was popular in antiquity. If you want to read more about Medea, I spent many happy hours with “Medea,” a collection of essays edited by James J. Clauss …
ibid, pp. 365 – 366
Apparently, my and my children’s feeling that the whole story is regrettable is echoed by the Nurse of Jason and Medea’s two sons. Here is her opening monologue to the play (translated by Haynes):
If only the Argos had sunk to the bottom of the sea rather than winging its way towards the land of Colchis … For then my mistress Medea would not have sailed to the towers of Iolcus, stricken with love for Jason … and she wouldn’t live here, in Corinth, with her husband and children, pleasing the citizens to whose land she came in flight, helping Jason in everything. That is the greatest help: whenever a wife doesn’t disagree with her husband. But now, everything is hostile .. For Jason–betraying his own children and my mistress–is sharing his bed with royalty … Medea is wretched, dishonored like this. She cries out about the oaths he swore to her .. I’m afraid she is planning something. She’s a strange woman. No one starts a fight with her and takes an easy victory.
ibid, pp. 272 – 273
Successive phrases from this speech are used as chapter headings for the first 3/4 of the book.
I give this book 3 out of 4 stars. (Or 4 out of 5, take your pick.) The research, storytelling and psychology are spectacular. It gets tenser and more tragic towards the end. It is, of course, very hard to read, because this is a tragedy. The hardest parts to read, for me, were the parts where the Nurse speaks to the children. Even though it’s set in the ancient world, this is fundamentally a story about a home that gets broken when the children are very small. That’s hard to bear.
The one missing star? I needed more description.
This book consists almost entirely in monologues by the different characters (except for Jason), punctuated occasionally by dialogue. I guess that makes sense for a novel that is a re-telling of a play. But if I’m going to read a book set in the ancient Mediterranean, which includes a tour of the cities of Iolcus, Colchis, Aeaea (Circe’s island), and Corinth, not to mention the Aegean, Adriatic, and Black Seas, I want more than little hints and scraps about what these places look, sound, and smell like. I want to see the terrain, the buildings, and the clothes people wear. Haynes gives us almost none of that. We only get a little bit of description when it is directly relevant to a plot point, like the Symplegades (giant clashing rocks), or the golden dress that Medea gifts to Glauke. This is where Haynes falls short of Renault, who describes buildings, clothing, and artifacts in detail.
Also, there is almost zero description of how the people look. That’s important to me.
As for Jason, we are only told that he is “good-looking” until he meets Medea, when we find out that he has dark, curly hair and golden skin. This means that we have to go through the Argo’s entire outbound journey making up our own mental image of Jason, and then modify it when we find out what is canon in the novel. In the case of Jason, that may be intentional. Part of his characterization is that he is a chameleon, able to be the figure that people want in order to get what he wants; or, as Haynes puts it, “a blank space where a man ought to be.”
But there are plenty of other characters that Haynes could describe when we first meet them, and she doesn’t. What do the Colchians look like? They are “not Greek.” Do they look Asian? Or is Medea made of gold, like the children of Helios in the novel Circe? What do the different Argonauts look like? The Tutor? The Nurse? Haynes does a better job describing the various goddesses, women, nymphs, and the golden ram whose lives are also busted up by this story … but still, I could use more.
Gentle reader, you have survived the harrowing journey of the Argo with me. What horrible ancient Greek story should we read about next?
Doug Wilson’s blog post about AI. Wilson I trust because of the volumes of material that he’s written and I’ve read.
I won’t add much to what they have to say. It’s going to be a busy week, for reasons that will be revealed tomorrow. However, I know that most of you won’t listen to the podcast, and only a small number will read the article, so I will summarize the salient parts of each in a sentence or two.
Boreing makes the point that every new technology comes with the fears and negative effects front-loaded, and the benefits arrive in the medium to long term, as we figure out where it fits in human society and how to limit its harms. He further points out that no new technology has ever delivered on any promises made on its behalf to create “less work.” New tech always creates more work: new industries, but also lots of new things that can be done by people who see the potential.
Wilson, too, points out that lazy folks will try to use AI as a way to avoid work, whereas the diligent and the geniuses will see vast new fields of work open up to them. He adds the obvious (but often overlooked) point that a “workless” utopia would actually be a dystopia.
In short, both men sensibly point out that AI is not going to change human nature. Humans do human things no matter how much tech they have. And we were designed to work.
This is, on the whole, a great relief to me. It is good to hear that the scary new thing is not going to change human nature. Granted, human nature isn’t great, but we already knew that, and all attempts to completely remake it always seem to get rid of the only parts worth saving.
Still, I’m not a total AI-o-phile, unlike, say, our friend Ben Shapiro. That’s because I’m a writer and a visual artist. My thinking is still developing on this, but as of spring 2026 here’s where I’m at.
Everyone senses that stories and art (including music) are the sort of things that ought to be made by people and nothing else. Unfortunately, it’s possible that AI will get good enough at “making” these things, that it will be impossible to detect it. You want a gritty, soulful story with human flaws? It will give you a gritty, soulful story with human flaws. It will get rid of the overly vivid colors and unrealistic smoothness in its paintings. It has already produced a country song by a hard-livin’ male voice about overcoming working-class obstacles.
When this happens, it’s like debasing the currency, but with stories and music and art. These things are much more valuable than currency. That’s bad.
From the creators’ side, everyone’s work will become suspect. This is already starting to happen.
From the consumer side, I am possibly even more upset. I DO NOT like it when I look closely at what appears to be a model wearing colorful European folk clothing, and realize that it’s an AI approximation of same. But at least, I can still realize it. I REALLY won’t like it when I have no way of knowing whether the “human” culture I’m imbibing is actually human culture.
About a week ago, I spent the day at a nice, large public library in a nearby city that was holding an event called Authorpalooza.
The hope: library patrons would flock to the event, discover local authors, and buy their books.
The reality: It was mostly authors talking to each other about the writing life, looking at and sometimes buying each other’s books.
Still fun, though.
Here’s my book table. I sold exactly one book. In the background, you can see authors talking to each other.
Genres represented included sci-fi, witchy cat books, LDS time-travel historical fiction, Christian YA fantasy, thriller set in a morgue (really!), thrillers set around Indian reservations, practical self-help for authors, and different genres of romance (spicy, comic, cozy, etc.).
This one author’s name was Marla Melior.
Me (suave as always): Did you know your name means “better” in Latin?
Her: Yes! In fact, I have a podcast called Melior on Mondays.
Here is my table neighbor (also happened to be the keynote speaker), signing the only book I bought, which was one of hers.
She has written in a number of genres, including … the genre I am focusing on this year, Greco-fiction! Her book, The Curse of King Midas, blends the historical Midas (a king living in Phrygia in the late 700s BC), with the Midas of legend. I believe there are even gods involved. And there’s a map! No wonder I was undone.
… in all those parts there is no rite in the year that moves and holds the people like the death of the King. So solemn is the day, he said, that if anyone who watches has grief or fear or trouble of his own, it is all purged out of him by pity and terror; he comes away calmed, and falls into a sleep.
Gardy was essentially convicted the day he was arrested, and his trial is only a formality. The dumb and desperate cops trumped up the charges and fabricated the evidence. The prosecutor knows this but has no spine and is up for reelection next year. The judge is asleep. The jurors are basically nice, simple people, wide-eyed at the process and ever so anxious to believe the lies their proud authorities are producing on the witness stand.
-from Rogue Lawyer, 2016, by a very lazy version of John Grisham
I’m thinking of having a little contest. Who can find a paragraph crammed with the greatest number of offensive, lazy cliches? This is my submission. This is only the second half of the paragraph, but even if I had included the first two sentences, I still think you’d be hard-pressed to find another piece of writing where not a single word is wasted on any original thought.
In summary, the typical educated Roman of this age was orderly, conservative, loyal, sober, reverent, tenacious, severe, practical. He enjoyed discipline, and would have no nonsense about liberty. He distrusted individuality and genius. He had none of the charm, vivacity, and unstable fluency of the Attic Greek. He admired character and will as the Greek admired freedom and intellect; and organization was his forte. He lacked imagination, even to make a mythology of his own. He could with some effort love beauty, but he could seldom create it. He had no use for pure science, and was suspicious of philosophy as a devilish dissolvent of ancient beliefs and ways. He could not, for the life of him, understand Plato, or Archimedes, or Christ. He could only rule the world.
