Year-End Blog Round-Up

I haven’t done one of these year-end blog posts before, but I’ve seen lots of others do them and they seem like fun.

Here are the top search terms that visitors have used to reach my blog:

making reading sexy
alternate book titles
tintin covers
doc savage horror in gold
harry potter comics
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tintin cover
doc savage covers
doc savage desert demons
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harry potter comics
choose your own adventure books
alternative book titles
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richard blade books
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Here are the most popular blog posts I’ve done thus far (my general home page gets the most hits by far, but people also seem drawn to particular posts):

Making reading sexy
Great “new” Doc Savage and Tintin Covers
Alternate book titles for the classics
New Doc Savage novels!
New interview with Doc Savage cover artist James Bama
Book Review: Invasion! Earth vs. the Aliens Trilogy by Robert Reginald
Review: Nick Carter #53: The Arab Plague
Harry Potter comics
Review: Rhialto the Marvellous by Jack Vance
Book Review: Allison Hewitt Is Trapped: A Zombie Novel by Madeleine Roux
Choose Your Own Adventure books analysis
Book Review: Masked, edited by Lou Anders
Tolkien literary criticism and new media
Book Review: Mugger Blood (The Destroyer #30) by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
Classic fantasy novel: The Ship That Sailed to Mars by William Timlin
Wildside Press coupon code
Cartographic analysis of maps in fantasy novels
Book review: The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger by Robin Moore
Rachel Bloom has finally met Ray Bradbury

So what do these results tell us? I’m not entirely sure, but several things are apparent:

1. My post regarding The Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society (link NSFW) was probably the single most popular blog post I’ve ever done, and has returned the most traffic to my blog of any site. Carry on, ladies! May your outdoor reading adventures continue into the New Year, especially when it gets a little warmer.
2. Readers absolutely love both Doc Savage and Tintin, and are frequently visiting in search of more. I think I will have to do some reviews of both series (two personal favorites) next year.
3. It’s never entirely clear to me what people will enjoy and what they won’t, and that’s ok. I write this blog almost entirely for myself. However, I love interacting with readers, and hope to encourage more of that in the new year (suggestions on how to do that are always welcome). Here’s hoping I have a bit more time for reading, reviewing, and blogging in 2012. Sorry my pace has slacked a bit this year, especially compared with 2010, but I’m teaching and finishing up my dissertation (cross your fingers for me in the spring) and sometimes I just don’t have it in me to post after I’ve finished all my work.

Hope the new year brings you many great books!

And just remember:

Modern science is catching up with occult tomes

Readers of weird fiction have long been told of rare, mystic tomes and grimoires that hold untold knowledge and Secrets Man Was Not Meant To Know. Some of the most famous examples include H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, penned by that most famous of mad Arabs, Abdul Alhazred; Robert W. Chambers’ infamous play that must not be performed, The King in Yellow; and the much more recent Navidson Record, described by Mark Z. Danielewski. Literary scholars call this technique “false documents,” but doesn’t that seem to take all the fun out of it? I think it’s a lot more fun to pretend these tomes are real. In any case, there are some real-life occult tomes that have bedeviled scholars for centuries. Perhaps the most famous is the vaunted Voynich Manuscript. The Voynich Manuscript, or as Yale’s archivists unimaginatively describe it “MS 408,” is written in an unknown language and appears to contain detailed botanical and pharmacological studies of more than 100 unknown species of plants, along with some astrological diagrams and lots of other mystical gobbledygook.

The Voynich Manuscript has now been scanned in, in its entirety, and made available to the browsing public, courtesy of Yale University. They have also had a detailed chemical analysis of the manuscript performed, though to this layman, it doesn’t appear that it sheds much light on the subject. The language used in the manuscript has thus far resisted the best efforts of cryptolinguists, but we can only hope that some day we will crack the code.

The Voynich Manuscript is not alone, of course, and another grimoire that had heretofore remained impenetrable is the Copiale Cipher. This was only made known in the West after it was discovered hidden in an East Berlin archive after the end of the Cold War. The Copiale Cipher, like its better-known counterpart, was clearly some kind of occult work, but it too was written in code. And unlike the Voynich Manuscript, the Copiale Cipher has now been cracked. As it turns out, the Copiale Cipher was the work of an old German secret society that appears to have been obsessed with eyeballs! You just can’t make this stuff up. See for yourself, the entire document has been decoded and translated into English. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was far easier to create mystic tomes that were undecipherable to the uninitiated in pre-modern eras.

Book Review: The Black Stiletto by Raymond Benson

In the past few decades we’ve seen a number of efforts to showcase what superheroes in the “Real World” might look like: of course there is Alan Moore’s pathbreaking WATCHMEN comic series (1986-87), along with the 2009 movie version; the long-running WILD CARDS series (1987-present); and the HEROES TV series (2006-10), among many others. For those of us who enjoy stories about superheroes, it’s always fun to imagine what our own world might be like if superheroes were “real.” Raymond Benson, one of the authors selected to write some additional James Bond novels after Ian Fleming’s death, has written THE BLACK STILETTO as his own entry in this sub-genre.

THE BLACK STILETTO is set during the late 1950s and follows the adventures of a small-town girl, Judy Cooper, who travels from a broken home to New York City and ultimately becomes the world’s first (and only) costumed vigilante/superhero. The book is told from three perspectives. The first are entries from Judy’s diary. Her voice in the diary entries is fairly convincing. Judy is a young, simple girl, without much education, and is new to the big city. She is a kind of naïf, and while that works for story purposes, her prose is not as engaging as a more sophisticated narrator’s might be. My only qualm about this kind of perspective is that it drains some of the immediacy of the action and excitement from the story as they are later retellings of things that happened to Judy, who later records them in her diary when safe back home. As we’re reading, we know that everything turns out fine for Judy, or else she wouldn’t be calmly writing about them. We gain a little reflection from Judy on why she did things and how she feels about them later, but I’m not sure that the trade-off is worth it. It’s an interesting narrative device in any case.

While Judy’s chapters are contemporaneous with her ‘50s adventures, the remaining two perspectives are from the present day. The first is Judy’s son Martin, who is a bit of a nebbish. We need Martin’s perspective to give us some context in the present-day because Judy is, sadly, no longer in a position where we can speak for herself: she is in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s. Judy worked under her secret identity for an undetermined period of time, then retired to a relatively normal life to raise her son, all without the public ever discovering who was behind the Black Stiletto’s mask. The final perspective, and the one with the fewest number of chapters, is Roberto Ranelli, a mafia hitman Judy tangled with early in her career. She was responsible for killing his twin brother (also a Mafioso) and putting him in prison. He gets out fifty years later and comes back for revenge. Roberto is a pretty twisted, evil guy, and provides some much-needed tension for the modern-day portion of the story. These chapters hold a real sense of menace that is missing from some of the other parts of the book, and this present-day plotline is wrapped-up nicely, if just a little unsatisfactorily. I was actually a little surprised that Judy’s granddaughter Gina didn’t end up kicking butt in the finale. I was pretty sure that Benson was setting Gina up to take up Judy’s crimefighting in the modern day, but that didn’t happen. Oh well, maybe in the sequel, as this seemed a lost opportunity.

I’d actually have liked to see Judy’s abilities played up a little more strongly, and hope that happens in the sequels. She has a number of minor abilities – enhanced speed, fighting prowess, strength, hearing and vision, healing abilities – none of which are superhuman per se, but they give her edges that the ordinary bad guys she encounters don’t have. Does she have actual super powers? Well, that’s never made clear. I’d say it’s strongly implied, but never spelled out.

I give this one 3.5 stars out of five. I really, really wanted to like this one. The premise is terrific and has lots of potential, but I was left wanting more. Much more. It ended being just a little clichéd and without much substance. This is fairly light action fodder, without a great deal of depth. I will watch for the sequel, as I understand that an entire series is eventually planned, but I do sincerely hope that the next installment is better – the next needs to be more engagingly written and faster paced.

Buy the book on Amazon

Review copyright 2011 J. Andrew Byers