Monthly Archives: July 2024

The Epic of Dogtown

Don Winslow’s City on Fire has quotes from The Aeneid and The Iliad throughout. Those epics are about the siege of Troy, the original city on fire, so the quotes are apt. Winslow’s story is an epic as well, but his Troy is Providence, Rhode Island, the land of “I know a guy.” That’s an unexpected setting for an epic, but it works. Just substitute the ancient Greeks and Trojans for Italian and Irish mobsters in the 1980s. The Irish control the docks. The Italians control the trucks and almost everything else. The merchandise that falls off the boats and trucks supports both gangs and their respective rust belt neighborhoods. Each respects the other’s territory, meaning the Italians rarely venture into Dogtown, the name of the Irish section where slaughterhouses once attracted feral dogs.

A beautiful woman emerges from the sea on a hot summer day. Here’s our Helen, except her name is Pam, because it’s Providence. Danny Ryan knows immediately that she’s going to be trouble. “Women that beautiful usually are.” Just ask the Greeks and Trojans. Danny is in his late 20s, and his father-in-law runs the Irish gang. Danny is “faithful like a dog,” so he isn’t going to be the Paris in this story. That role is reserved for his brother-in-law, who steals Pam away from a high-ranking Italian mobster. Jokes are made at this mobster’s expense, and when “people start to disrespect you in one area of your life, it leaks into others.” The initial weapons are bats, but soon bullets fly and bodies fall. Danny moves up the chain of command. He’s never been tested like this before, and it’s going to take everything he has to get himself and his family out alive.

Mob stories make for great epics. They have all the requisites built in: violence, greed, lust, family, and loyalty. There’s just one problem. Our popular culture is rife with these stories, so it takes a talented writer to craft a captivating one that’s fresh. Fortunately, Winslow is such a writer.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor.

The Dangers of Being a Pretend Poet – Traveling Internationally

The dangers are legion, but when you travel internationally foreigners mess with your mind. The problem is, however, when you’re in their country, they technically aren’t foreigners.

Here’s an example, I was in an Athens bar, and I asked the bartender where the Acropolis is. He said, “Which one?” So I said, “Hey man, don’t mess with me, I’m American!“

Now, you can get away with that in Barcelona, because the Spaniards will just pull out a squirt gun and spray water on your shirt. But in Athens, the Greeks will pour Ouzo on your head and try to set you on fire, so I profusely apologized and then told him, “I’m Canadian.” That solved everything, and we spent the rest of the night mocking Americans.

By the way, acropolis doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. An acropolis is the highest hill in a city, so nearly every city in Greece has an acropolis.

Tengo Leche, International Affairs Editor

Frankenstein Meets The Children of the Hill

The cover of Jennifer McMahon’s The Children on the Hill includes a quote from a book promoter who proclaims, “This novel is an all-nighter!” That’s called marketing, my friends. You can tell because it ends with an exclamation. Having read that assessment, I was surprised to find I had no problem putting this novel down for a good night’s sleep. That happened on successive evenings until I finished the book.

Ms. McMahon is a fan of Frankenstein, and The Children on the Hill is her reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s classic set in contemporary times. She succeeds there but you shouldn’t wait for a string of movies culminating with The Bride of The Children on the Hill or The Children on the Hill Meet the Wolfman.

The story bounces between 1978 and 2019. In 1978, Vi is living with her brother and grandmother in Vermont. The grandmother is a doctor “famous or helping patients others couldn’t help.” These patients are “people who had done terrible things not because they were terrible people, but because they were sick.” One day Gran brings home a thirteen year old girl to live with them. She’s the same age as Vi, and they become “Sisters . . . not by blood, but by something else. Something deeper.”

The intense connection is related somehow to Gran’s work. That should be no big deal, but the girls learn sweet old Gran is into eugenics and believes the “survival and overall success of the species is dependent on those who are superior weeding out the weak and inferior.” This discovery sets off a chain of events leading to disaster. One sister disappears and the other goes to foster care.

In 2019, one sister is a self-described monster who is likely responsible for the disappearance of several teenage girls. The other sister has changed her name to Lizzy Shelley (with an intentional nod to Mary Shelley) and has (conveniently) become a monster hunter with a significant social media following. The monster initiates a cat and mouse game with Lizzy, and we all know what happens to the mouse in that game.

Lizzy loves monsters. Ms. McMahon does too, and she’s happy to get pedantic about it. “Here’s why the world needs monsters: Because they are us and we are them.” Huh? Assuming that’s true or intelligible, it doesn’t explain why the world needs monsters. She follows that incongruous statement with “We all have a little monster hiding inside us.” Now, that’s true and intelligible, but it isn’t new and insightful.

Of course, the sisters confront each other in a surprise ending that disrespects the reader. Up until this point, the novel was diverting. The ending, however, is abrupt and silly. The cat and mouse game was gratuitous, a mere plot device to enable Ms. McMahon to write a Frankenstein story. A simple phone call or a handful of texts between the sisters would have saved everyone a lot of time and highway miles.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

The 4th of July

A straw man riding a sacred cow
pulling a tethered scapegoat
arrived in a town named Trope
just when they were needed most.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief