The Electric Mayhem: Gunpowder
Column, Review | Brian | April 14, 2009 at 10:46 amThe Coldest Mile by Tom Piccirilli
The Coldest Mile is one hell of an entertaining crime novel. It does lose just a little of it’s impact since we already know the world and these characters but still delivers a solid story that I HAD to finish once I started it.
Those who are already familiar with Chase and Jonah will appreciate the pick up from where the action last left off and for those who aren’t familiar with these characters go out now and grab the paperbacks. That’s right, paperbacks. So even in these economically stressful times you can and should empty the change jar for these books.
While reading The Coldest Mile some thought was scratching in the back of my brain. In a genre built on the backs of long running series and stand alones it took me a little while to figure it out but The Coldest Mile feels very much like a middle book of a trilogy. This makes sense to me because I don’t think these characters, and their dynamics, could support a long running series.
I like Chase and I found myself thinking about him for awhile after The Cold Spot and again after The Coldest Mile. Jonah seems to be cut from a Parker mold and seems to have an amorality that mostly surrounds him but Chase isn’t like him despite being raised by him, simply because he cares and feels beholden to those whom he loves. It’s this sense of obligation that underscores the dramatic tug o’ war as Chase struggles to find firm ground and do the right thing.
Bob Dylan once wrote “Forget the dead you’ve left behind, they will not follow you” but these words, for Chase, just aren’t true.
The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay
To be honest we’ve seen better stories about characters with medical conditions including: perfect memory (Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and Jorge Luis Borges’ Funes the Memorious); short term memory loss (Gene Wolfe’s Solider of the Mist, the movie Memento); schizophrenia (John Wray’s Lowboy); multiple personality disorder (Matt Ruff’s Set This House in Order); tourettes
syndrome (Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn) and Paul Tremblay’s The Little Sleep, in this company just doesn’t hold up.
The difference lies in the amount of the reader’s immersion into the condition. The best examples find a way to immerse the reader in to the condition so that it can be experienced first hand. This hands on experience makes it all the more real. The Little Sleep fails to successfully (even adequately) place the reader in the shoes of Mark. We are told all of these things about his personality as a result of his condition but we never experience any of them. Just to look at one example: we are told more then once that Mark has a slow speech delivery due to his injury. Yet the book is filled with snappy, snarky dialogue and patter that flies at the reader at a pretty healthy pace. It was hard for me to believe in the speech impediment the way that the dialogue was presented. There didn’t even seem to be any frustration from other characters even in tense or tight situations. I can live with the fact that Mark isn’t likeable but don’t call him one thing and present him as another.
The Little Sleep is a damned interesting (and at times frustrating) book that ultimately isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is.
The Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliot
It was with great trepidation that I read The Pilo Family Circus because, you see, well, I hate clowns. There I said it. I first heard about The Pilo Family Circus a couple of years ago but found it to be a difficult book to obtain here in the U.S. 
When I found out that Underland was going to be publishing it here it quickly became a release I was looking forward to.
And it didn’t disappoint.
It straddles that great fuzzy dark fantasy/horror line in creating a fully functional fantasy world where horrific things happen. But there is a sense of humor and restraint at play here they keeps the whole affair from descending into the gruesome. Those who held notions as a child of running away with the circus would be well served to read this.
The Pilo Family Circus is a well written, imaginative, engaging and original story.
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I agree, Pilo Family Circus is well worth the read.
I do have narcolepsy and I have “walked a mile” in Mark’s shoes. I absolutely disagree with your assessment of the book as not adequately relating the experience of narcolepsy. Mark G. is not on medication and the severity of symptoms are on the extreme end of the spectrum, but in relating Marks’ thoughts and experiences the author does captures many esoteric nuances of the experience of narcolepsy, As narcolepsy is an “invisable” disease, most people don’t really understand how pervasive the symptoms are-how the symptoms alter your perception of events, time and may at times blur the boundaries between what is experienced when awake, and what was experienced in sleep. An example I really appreciated was when the author described the way the half sleeps, and naps and REM symptoms can make time estimation challenging. He describes it as each time Mark wakes, it is like a new day, so things that may have occurred recently are remembered as if a lot more time (sleep cycles) have passed. The character deals with daily, even hourly frustrations due to the general cognitive fog, not being able to trust his own memory and even not being able to drive. Many of these situtions are presented as humorous, but you are always laughing with Mark not at him. After 8 years with the disease, he would have had to adapt somehow and Mark adapted by accepting most of it stride. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get to him sometimes like when Mark talks about feeling that his disease isn’t taken seriously and that he is “the punch line in a joke”. Mark also describes the loses experienced by a narcoleptic. I tend to be a look-on-the-bright side and present a positive face person. But it was deeply touching to see the loses listed in print-acknowledged. I paused in my reading and thought about all the people who would read the book and perhaps, along with reading an interesting and fun little detective novel, also gain a little deeper understanding of the experience of narcolepsy.
P.S. I found the characters of Mark and his mother, Ellen, very likeable-even inspiring in their own just play the hand that was dealt way.
And the stuff about speech impediment… Mark’s slow speech was never discribed as an impediment that resulted from the accident. The author just started that he talked slow. The fatigue felt by a narcoleptic is discribed as what it would feel if someone were to be kept awake for 48 hours straight. That tired anyone would talk a bit slow. When Mark was being snappy with the dialogue in stressful situations, that was when he was dreaming.