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Aww, Beauty reveals to her tormentor and ravisher the secret of her video recording - at the very end. That's what I mean by Koontz being able to play with us. It can actually be frustrating, this turning our expectations and emotions into a pretzel. And the only thing you get out of it is being whisked past a few hours of dealing with oneself and one's life, though this is the point and its value, too.
It can make one feel regretful about spending so much of one's life on pulp and this addiction. If only I could feel more interested in the history, which might be still an avoidance of one's own real life, but at least it is substantive and edifying, though this is undercut by the fact that Monk's teflon brain cannot really build anything out of it - in one ear, out the other, so to speak.
There is the thought of going for the higher-brow fiction, such as Joyce Carol Oates' "Rape: A Love Story." It is fiction, it is fun, and it is substantively artful. Even the Nina Zero series is richer. Maybe one can experiment more boldly with trying out substantive fiction, undestanding that it still has to have that page-turning fun about it, such that Charles Dickens is not likely to work, as a particular example, which is a very tricky balancing act. Tom Wolfe's "I am Charlotte Simmons" is an example of a novel that satisfies that test. One can always have the more pulpy stuff on hand when a particular experiment fails.
(A couple of other examples of novels that pass this delicate and tough balancing test are "The Kite Runner" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." These are works that don't merely manipulate our emotions and wow us with their sensationalism. They bring out aspects of our reality in a way that makes us marvel over the wondrousness of our life and world. It is a lot harder to find these, and it is a matter of subjective taste. Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" is another example.)
Meanwhile, the ready adjustment is to spend an extra session with the history at the expense of the pulp, so that the works of a Koontz can retain more of its potency and black magic. An addict always has to recalibrate the dosage in order to retain the edge of his drug. This holds for pop fiction, too.
xXx
Aww, Beauty reveals to her tormentor and ravisher the secret of her video recording - at the very end. That's what I mean by Koontz being able to play with us. It can actually be frustrating, this turning our expectations and emotions into a pretzel. And the only thing you get out of it is being whisked past a few hours of dealing with oneself and one's life, though this is the point and its value, too.
It can make one feel regretful about spending so much of one's life on pulp and this addiction. If only I could feel more interested in the history, which might be still an avoidance of one's own real life, but at least it is substantive and edifying, though this is undercut by the fact that Monk's teflon brain cannot really build anything out of it - in one ear, out the other, so to speak.
There is the thought of going for the higher-brow fiction, such as Joyce Carol Oates' "Rape: A Love Story." It is fiction, it is fun, and it is substantively artful. Even the Nina Zero series is richer. Maybe one can experiment more boldly with trying out substantive fiction, undestanding that it still has to have that page-turning fun about it, such that Charles Dickens is not likely to work, as a particular example, which is a very tricky balancing act. Tom Wolfe's "I am Charlotte Simmons" is an example of a novel that satisfies that test. One can always have the more pulpy stuff on hand when a particular experiment fails.
(A couple of other examples of novels that pass this delicate and tough balancing test are "The Kite Runner" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." These are works that don't merely manipulate our emotions and wow us with their sensationalism. They bring out aspects of our reality in a way that makes us marvel over the wondrousness of our life and world. It is a lot harder to find these, and it is a matter of subjective taste. Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" is another example.)
Meanwhile, the ready adjustment is to spend an extra session with the history at the expense of the pulp, so that the works of a Koontz can retain more of its potency and black magic. An addict always has to recalibrate the dosage in order to retain the edge of his drug. This holds for pop fiction, too.
