By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Jan. 20, 2022
Martin Scorsese’s 2011 feature, Hugo, is based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a 2007 illustrated novel written and drawn by Brian Selznick. The movie (and book, from what I can tell) romanticizes the real-life story of a historical French figure whose identity I won’t reveal so as to avoid spoilers.
The title character is an orphan, age roughly 10, who lives in and maintains the clockworks at a busy Parisian train station sometime after what Americans now call World War I. From his father, who died in a museum fire some years back, Hugo (Asa Butterfield) inherited some knowledge of machinery and a person-shaped clockwork figure, or automaton, in need of repair. From his uncle Claude, who disappeared into the bottom of a bottle of alcohol, Hugo inherited a dingy, long-forgotten apartment in the station attic and an intimate knowledge of the station’s hideaways and secret passages. Those things, a small notebook documenting the automaton’s mechanisms, a pair of short pants and a dirty but still rather twee sweater are about all young Cabret has to his name. He survives by pinching food, tools and toys from passengers, shopkeepers and employees at the station.
An attempt to purloin a plaything from a toy seller whom we’ll come to know as Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) leads to the confiscation of Hugo’s notebook. He trails the toy seller to the older man’s home and attempts to persuade his adoptive daughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), to save the notebook. This connection plunges the two youngsters into a partnership that leads to unexpected discoveries about Isabelle’s Papa Georges and Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory).
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com June 21, 2021
Project Hail Mary, published last month, is the third book from Andy Weir, who turned his blog about a stranded astronaut into the hit novel The Martian. I haven’t read Weir’s second outing, Artemis, a thriller set on the moon, but I found Project Hail Mary to be a worthy successor that expands on the elements that made The Martian so intriguing.
The first line of the novel is “What’s two plus two?,” which is put to the newly awoken narrator by a computer. Our protagonist, who is suffering from memory loss, eventually turns out to be a former junior-high-school science teacher from San Francisco who’s charged with a very hazardous and extremely urgent mission.
Project Hail Mary revolves around an astronomer’s discovery of unusual radiation. These emissions are being produced by a microscopic alien organism dubbed Astrophage, which has numerous amazing properties. The book unfurls as a series of scientific challenges that menace either the narrator’s survival or that of individuals whom he holds dear. The story is like a version of The Martian with enhanced stakes, a key difference being that in the earlier book the only person whose life was at stake was the protagonist’s.
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com May 15, 2021
Stephen King’s first three novels were each adapted for movies or television in fairly short order. Carrie was published in 1974 and filmed by Brian De Palma two years later. ’Salem’s Lot hit bookstores in 1975 and debuted as a two-part CBS miniseries directed by Tobe Hooper in 1979. The Shining appeared in print in ’77 and arrived in theaters in a Stanley Kubrick adaptation in 1980.
The Kubrick film was initially dissed by critics but came to be regarded as a horror masterpiece. The author himself harbors a grudge against Kubrick’s adaptation, which changed the story and characters in ways King found (and continues to find) distasteful. I think it’s fair to say that the Kubrick movie is great while being a very different beast from the book. It’s also worth noting that some elements of the novel — notably the animated animals in the hedge maze — might have been difficult to pull off convincingly given the filmmaking technology of the time.
This is a roundabout way of saying that King’s 2013 novel, Doctor Sleep, is a sequel to The Shining, by which I mean King’s book, not the movie. Most of the action is set in the 21st century, culminating around the year of publication. The story finds an adult Dan Torrance, known as young Danny in the earlier book, confronting his demons in a small New Hampshire town. But he finds himself drawn into a conflict with an itinerant group known that preys on children. The group is called the True Knot, and it feeds upon the same supernatural “shining” that Torrance exhibited in his own youth.
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com March 16, 2021
Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, the 2014 post-apocalyptic drama Station Eleven, revolved around Arthur Leander. The famous actor’s fatal on-stage heart attack was followed hours later by the utter collapse of global society, ravaged by a deadly quick-moving flu. Mandel’s fifth book, The Glass Hotel, published a year ago this month, is tied together by Jonathan Alkaitis, the charming investment banker who’s successfully run a Ponzi scheme over multiple decades. The discovery of his malfeasance isn’t quite as catastrophic as the pandemic in Station Eleven, but it remakes hundreds of lives, including those of Alkaitis’s clients, his faux wife and even his faux wife’s half-brother.
Mandel jumps from character to character. Readers are treated to visits with Alkaitis, a genteel thief whose mental health deteriorates after his arrest; Olivia, a client and former artist who once painted a portrait of Alkaitis’s long-dead older brother; Walter, the night manager of the titular glass hotel, which is situated on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, and which is owned by Alkaitis; Leon, a retired shipping executive who lost all his entire savings after being persuaded to invest in Alkaitis’s fund during a visit to the hotel; and “the office chorus,” a collective of the handful of employees who knew, or at least had very little excuse not to know, that the investment fund was crooked.
But the narrative is mostly concerned with the misadventures of Vincent. She grew up near the hotel, becomes a bartender there and meets Alkaitis there; later, she agrees to pose as his second wife. Most of the action takes place between 1994 and late 2018 — like Station Eleven, this book jumps around in time — but there’s a visit to the late 1950s, when Olivia briefly meets a very young Alkaitis at a gallery opening in Greenwich Village. This isn’t the only occasion when the characters’ lives intersect in surprising ways.
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com July 17, 2020
It’s hard to think of a movie that delivers as big a concentration of sheer 1980s-ness as The Running Man, the 1987 action-adventure flick.
The star is Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose first three big movie roles were as the title characters in Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer and The Terminator (both 1984). He was probably the biggest star of the 1980s, going on to make Predator (’87), The Running Man and Twins (’88) as part of a hot streak that lasted well into the mid-1990s.
The movie is based on a Stephen King novel published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym. The Internet Movie Database lists 15 feature films released from 1980 through 1989 that were either written by King or based on one of his stories or novels. The only two earlier filmed works with King connections were adaptations in 1976 (Carrie, the movie directed by Brian de Palma) and 1979 (Salem’s Lot, a two-part TV movie directed by Tobe Hooper).
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Oct. 14, 2019
It was with no small interest that I began reading The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Stephen King’s 2015 short story collection. His 1978 anthology, Night Shift, gave me chills when I first read it back in the… well, a long time ago. And I found that it held up just fine when I reread the volume earlier this year.
Unfortunately, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is a bit of a mixed bag when compared with its predecessor. There are some definite hits here, but also some big whiffs.
By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 23, 2019
Look, Stephen King obviously doesn’t need my help to sell more copies of his books — even though, as I recently established, he isn’t the best-selling modern fiction author of all (or even just of modern) times. But still…
I recently reread Night Shift, a 1978 anthology of King stories that I probably first read back in the ’80s. I’m happy to report that I enjoyed it as much as I did the first time round. Some of the passages that chilled me back then gave me the same shivers of horror more than two decades later.
The book contains 20 stories, which by my count directly inspired an eye-popping six movies: Children of the Corn, Maximum Overdrive (infamously known as King’s only directorial outing, based on the story “Trucks”), Graveyard Shift, The Mangler, Sometimes They Come Back and The Lawnmower Man (although this film was so loosely based on King’s story that he successfully sued to have his writing credit de-emphasized).
By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 21, 2019
The other day, I wondered who was the most successful author of all time. So I did what people do in 2019: I consulted Wikipedia.
As of mid-March 2019, a regularly updated Wikipedia list of books sold ranked Stephen King as the 22nd most successful fiction author. The American horror scribe rises to 16th by excluding writers working in a language other than English — by name, Belgian mystery writer Georges Simenon, Japanese manga artists Eiichiro Oda and Akira Toriyama, Spanish romance author Corin Tellado, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. And by removing five children’s and young-adult writers — Brits Enid Blyton, J.K. Rowling and Gilbert Patten and Americans Dr. Seuss and R.L. Stine — King rises to 11th place.
Now, you might protest that this is cheating. After all, not all of Rowling’s books have been aimed at youngsters — see The Casual Vacancy and her trio of mysteries written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Moreover, there’s some debate over whether the Harry Potter series, which of course brought Rowling fame and fortune, is properly categorized as children’s literature. My qualms about classification extend to Stine, Blyton and Patten, with whose work I have zero familiarity. But who’s writing this post — me or you?
By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 13, 2014
McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories is a 2004 anthology edited by Michael Chabon with a notable bent toward horror-tinged tales of the supernatural. The book’s stories, all original, are penned by an impressive list of authors, but I found their quality to be a bit uneven.
Margaret Atwood contributes the first story, “Lusus Naturae,” narrated by a deformed young woman whose family fakes her death in order to mitigate their shame in her existence. (The title is a Latin phrase for “freak of nature.”) The tale is short, and its plot relatively unimaginative, but it generates sympathy for the shunned protagonist. Atwood also strikes an enjoyable sardonic note in the final paragraph.
“What You Do Not Know You Want,” by David Mitchell, is a mystery with supernatural elements. The narrator, a memorabilia dealer, is visiting Hawaii in order to locate the dagger his partner had acquired just before killing himself. The protagonist is disaffected — he’s engaged to be married but notably unenthusiastic about his fiancée. The story’s tone is naturalistic, but it ends with a disturbing otherworldly killing.
“Vivian Relf” is a curious short offering by Jonathan Lethem about a man who meets a woman a few times. Nothing happens between them, even though their lives seem to be intertwined in mysterious, indefinable ways.
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