I kinda wanted to let the last post marinate for a little while because...well, I put a lot of time into these things. And Dan hasn't responded. Or Steve (though he seems to have long ago lost interest in my blathering). But I didn't feel like waiting before sharing the sequel to book I really enjoyed reading, so here it goes -
Eastwood (No Direction Home book two)
No Direction Home book one was such a well-told story that I was anxious to read book two in the series, Eastwood, as soon as I finished book one, even if I was going to be reading it in eBook form (not a preference). The title, Eastwood, refers to the camp established by the splinter group of survivors led by Walter from book one. A good part of the story, but not all of it, follows the activities of the members of this fledgling community - and the new survivors they come into contact with.
Eastwood continues the story of the survivors in book one, introducing a few new characters, some of whom are actual humans while others are horrific animals in human shape. Fortunately, the despicable semi-humans are generally little more than rabid background characters. There are also a few characters from book one who - against all expectations - have essentially become good characters despite all early indications of their darker natures. I can't help but wonder if they will continue to be in the "good" camp, but for now they seem pretty stable.
The story progresses pretty nicely, with a couple of major characters, and a few non-major characters, being killed off - one of whom has a name that I expected to be ironically linked to the better-known character with the same name: Marcus Welby. Sadly, he wasn't linked in any way I could detect, so I'm not sure if that was intentional or not. Here's the action-packed excerpt that brings an end to the just-introduced character of Doc Welby...
As a man who'd seen plenty of combat during the first Gulf War, Granger had figured out pretty quickly which of the men would be any use to him in the heat of battle. He estimated that, out of the seventeen adult men, perhaps eight or nine would show true grit in a firefight. As for the fifteen women, other than for Mary Sadowski, it was hard for him to judge. Granger had never fought alongside women before. At some stage, perhaps sooner rather than later, he knew that might change.
His mind wandered back to the previous evening when Rollins had introduced him to the three new arrivals. Learning their story and briefly studying their demeanors, he reckoned they could be relied on in a tight situation, particularly the Irish couple. Colleen, the petite blonde woman, had a steely look in her eye. As for her husband, though barely intelligible with his thick Dublin brogue, he had the look of someone who had been around the block before, probably several times.
"Ned, where are we going to get supplies?" Marcus asked, breaking him away from his thoughts. "They're getting hard to find now. At the Home Depot in Chat yesterday, just about everything worth taking was gone."
"Don't worry, Bert's given me some places to check out," Granger told him. "After thirty years in construction, he's gotten to know just about every hardware store and builder's yard in the area."
"That's good. Hopefully we'll find everything we need."
They reached Sloans Gap Road. Granger steered the Nissan around a sharp bend. To either side of the road, dense pine forest grew almost all the way up to the asphalt. Straightening out the wheel, he picked up speed again.
Ahead, he spotted movement. Two men crouched on either end of a large sapling that had been dragged across the road. Both held rifles, pointing at the oncoming Nissan.
Granger jammed his foot on the brakes. "Ambush!" he yelled.
Welby immediately grabbed his rifle. He slid the selector switch off safety and poked the barrel out the window as the Nissan came to a stop a hundred yards before the tree.
About to reverse, Granger glanced in his rearview mirror. Behind him, two pickup trucks tore around the corner and screeched to a stop. In the truck bed, Harper and Meyer had seen them too. Squatting on their heels, they raised their rifles, aiming their sights toward the trucks.
Granger peered out through the windscreen, trying to gauge whether he could drive along the side of the road and squeeze past the felled sapling or not. The bandits had positioned it perfectly, though. There wasn't a hope in hell.
A fusillade of gunfire suddenly opened up from behind the tree line where several men had lain in wait. Granger barely had time to react when the front passenger window shattered. Instantly, blood sprayed across the windscreen and Welby keeled face forward onto the dashboard. Horrified, Granger saw that several rounds had caught him in head.
In the load bed, Joe Macey returned fired into the forest in short bursts. Hunkered down below the tailgate, Bob Harper started shooting at the two pickups parked on either side of the road.
There was no hope for Welby. He had died instantaneously. Granger snatched his radio from off the seat divider, then opened his door and jumped out onto the road.
Back at the bend, bandits spilled out of both vehicles, rifles in hand. Taking cover behind the tree line, they opened fire on the exposed Nissan. In the other direction, the men behind the sapling scattered into the forest, getting out of the line of fire from their own men.
Granger crouched behind his door and pulled out a Ruger P95 from his holster. He shouted up to Harper and Meyer in the truck bed. "Bob, Joe, get down here!" Currently, the driver's side of the truck provided the greatest shelter from the gunfire.
He jabbed the Talk button on his radio. "Bravo Two to base. Ambush on Sloans Gap Road!" he screamed into it. "There's at least ten of them. Repeat, ambush on Sloans Gap Road."
The Jonah character doesn't have as much "screen-time" in this book as he did the last, which was a slight disappointment for me. But he's still an ongoing character, so there's room for more Jonah fun in the sequel(s). At some point I wonder if we're going to get a full on George RR Martin scenario going with wholesale slaughter of major players. Only time will tell, I suppose.
As with book one, the story ends with a cliffhanger, Mason - the worst of the worst - is plotting against other book one survivors who are working to honestly establish a life in the post-apocalyptic landscape. It's hard to imagine a more loathsome character.
I only spotted a couple of grammatical errors/typos in the text, which is always nice in any Book (I've read too many that have been very poorly-edited/proofread). I'm really looking forward to the third book in the series which should be available soon. This book has moved to the top of my post-apocalyptic fiction reading list - above S.M. Stirling's Emberverse series, DW Ulsterman's Race Wars series, John Barnes Daybreak series, and even William Forstchen's After series (of these, the After series is probably the most similar to No Direction Home, replacing a super-virus with an EMP attack). Frank Herbert's The White Plague is an even closer comparison to the plotline of No Direction Home and, as I recall, I really enjoyed it as well (I haven't read it in many, many years - so I should probably go find it in the garage and give it another read one of these days).
And now...the long un-awaited conclusion to the tales of my vacation adventure!
After our film museum fun, we hit the road for Portland. The road to get back over to I-5 (no scenic route for the ride home) took us through the corner of Washington, so that was about as far into Washington as we got. We didn't spend much time in Portland, either. We did stop to eat at a Jersey Mikes, but the tent cities and homeless zombies wandering everywhere in Portland led us to change our plans of exploring Portland. We quickly jumped back on the road and drove south toward our last reservation in the thriving metropolis of Yreka, California (which, according to Google Maps, was a good five or six hour drive from Astoria).
As we drove, we realized that we were going to arrive in Yreka much earlier than we had planned and we didn't expect to find a single thing to do in Yreka, so we used the Internet to find anything to see on the way home. The wife found....a mall. Shocking.
We stopped at the Rogue Valley Mall in Medford, Oregon. It was, for the most part, as unexceptional a mall as you could imagine. But there's a reason I'm mentioning this mall - I acquired a memorable item here: a 45 record (single) from The Police with Wrapped Around Your Finger and a live version of Tea in the Sahara (both of which I already have on multiple CDs and even still have on cassette somewhere). What's funny is that I haven't had a record player in 30 years. It's going to go in a frame and hang on a wall...if I can find a wall to put it on. Realistically, it will probably go in a box in the garage with my framed Ghost in the Machine album.
We also had some Fro-Yo in the mall and the little woman bought some stuff at a department store. You know - all those things you can't do at home. We did manage to kill a couple of hours in the mall. Another nice plus to buying stuff in Oregon - there's no sales tax!
We arrived in Yreka as it was getting dark, which was what we'd planned. The town turned out to look a little more interesting as we made out way to the motel than we'd expected, so it might have actually been worth at least a little exploring, but we arrived too late and had a long drive the next day - so Yreka was nothing more than a sleep-over stop.
Our last day turned out to be a marathon drive from Yreka all the way home (initially, I'd planned to stop one more time and break the drive up into two five or six hour drives). We saw a few things that we would have definitely stopped for on the first leg of the trip, but didn't stop for any of them on the way home. The Mount Shasta area (mountain and town) and Lake Siskiyou were very scenic and well worth a stop...but we didn't.
The LA traffic was much less bad than we expected, so around 9 hours after we left, we arrived back home - ready to sleep in our own beds.
It feels like I left out about half of what I'd rambled on about the first time I wrote about the trips (before losing it due to not realizing TEXT data types in MySQL had surprising limited capacity). Maybe it will come to my damaged brain later...but probably not. I was going to share a whole bunch of bridge photos the wife took from within the car. Maybe I'll still do that one of these days. We'll see...
Speaking of record players
With my shiny new (very old, actually) record in hand, I was stoked when I saw a cool record player in an email from Costco. I did my due diligence and made sure it was really a good price (it was at least $50 cheaper than the next lowest price I could find anywhere online), checked reviews to make sure it was a decent-quality electronic device, and then ordered it.
It arrived last week and I quickly popped my new record on it. It included an adapter for 45 records, so that worked out. And I also re-discovered something I'd forgotten about records: there a WHOLE LOTTA noise when you play them. Hissing, popping...all kinds of wonderful distractions from the music. Some of that could be due to this record being over 20 years old. I'm planning to pick up a new record soon to see if that makes a difference.
In the meantime, the record player (also includes an AM/FM radio and USB port for USB input) is a lovely decoration in the living room. One drawback I've noticed - if you leave it plugged in, but essentially turned off, there's a constant hum/buzzing. I haven't done much troubleshooting to figure it out yet, so it might be an easy thing to fix. Who knows?
And now for something unrelated to the Vacation adventure...Emeli's new site!
I mentioned a few posts back that I was working on a web site to showcase my amazingly talented daughter's artistic abilities. The site is live, though still a little bit of a work-in-progress: EmmaMaridith.com.
And speaking of Emeli's creativity, here's the card Emeli made me for Father's Day. Emeli is so amazingly creative, thoughtful, and sweet. And best of all, she's a fan of Pirates (not just the movies, but in general).
Emeli's creativity blows my mind.
I've read a bunch of books I want to talk about and have some other non-book rants chambered and ready to go, but I think this is probably enough for today. Maybe I'll share the rest in a couple of days...
A noteworthy eBook before I return to my vacation ranting
No Direction Home
I mentioned a Mike Sheridan eBook I'd read and enjoyed last year, Winter's Edge. Winter's Edge is a post-apocalyptic novel set deep into the post-apocalypse. This week I finished reading another Mike Sheridan eBook, No Direction Home, and I'm happy to report that I enjoyed this story every bit as much as Winter's Edge, and probably even more because it wasn't set in a fictional, no matter how likely or real-feeling, future, but the scary-enough present.
The characters are fairly well-developed, the prose flows well, and the editor did a good job. There were a few clumsy passages here and there, but it is, overall, a well-written book - something that's pretty hit-and-miss with many eBooks I've read.
There's another semi-apocalyptic eBook story, Race Wars by DW Ulsterman that I mentioned a while back which is similar in many ways to No Direction Home, but the underlying premise for the horrific events in each story is completely different so don't be dissuaded from reading No Direction Home if you've read Race Wars (which is an on-going story that I've lost some interest in because of its odd a-few-chapters-at-a-time release schedule). Premise-wise, this story is also very similar to The Last ship TV series, though No Direction Home is told from the perspective of civilian survivors, not those in the military who are relatively safely isolated from the diseased population centers.
No Direction Home follows several groups of people (this is the primary similarity to Race Wars), ranging from wide-eyed and innocent to vicious and horrible, as they deal with an Ebola-on-steroids illness labelled "vPox" that wipes out most of the population of the United States. We're left unsure of just how badly the rest of the world has been affected by the quickly-spreading illness, though a few of the characters are European visitors to the U.S. (Jonah, probably my favorite character, seems a more authentic version of my mental image of Mad Sweeney than we're getting in the American Gods adaptations). Our protagonists are a handful of the tiny percentage of immune people in the population who are not affected by the illness. Similar to The Walking Dead and One Second After (mentioned briefly last year), the events in this story take place in the southern U.S./southeast U.S. states. No Direction Home is very much like the later seasons of The Walking Dead, where zombies have almost become an afterthought and it's just survivor on survivor crime in a world full of stuff, ripe for the taking (another common theme in The Walking Dead). We see the best and the worst in people who find themselves in a world without rules or any grown-ups who will tell them no.
Here's a passage with my favorite character not long after the world falls apart...
Jonah and Colleen walked north up Kirkman Road. They were on their way back to the Sun Ray after spending the past hour in the Publix supermarket. Each wheeled a large trolley in front of them, laden with the provisions they would need for their journey.
Many of the stores they passed had been looted, though most still looked to have plenty of stock left inside. It indicated to Jonah just how few survivors there must be. Earlier, he'd glimpsed a few of them scurrying across the deserted streets. Most appeared to be on their own, a few in pairs. Some wore surgical masks, who Colleen surmised mightn't be immune to the disease but rather had barricaded themselves in their homes to avoid it.
On the way to the supermarket, however, he'd spotted a group of four men that had turned down a side street and disappeared from view. Something about the way they'd strutted down the middle of the road made him wary. Jonah could recognize a skanger a mile away, and he was thankful that, with their backs to him and Colleen, they hadn't spotted the couple. Colleen was right. Tomorrow, their top priority would be to get to a gun shop and arm themselves. In the meantime, in his shopping cart was a baseball bat he'd grabbed from a sports store along the way. A Louisville Slugger, the label said. Sounded good to him.
"Another thing, love," he said, their trolleys rattling noisily down the street. "When we leave town, let's head north. I want to get someplace where I'm not sweating like a pig twenty-four hours a day. Agreed?"
Sadly, the story ends before much has happened beyond bringing all the divergent groups together into a common location in Tennessee. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Eastwood (which we are treated to a brief taste of at the end of No Direction Home). There's also a excised chapter available for free from the author, which provides background on vPox - along with another post-apocalyptic novel, Outzone Raider - which I haven't read (the excised chapter or Outzone Raider).
Warning: There is a fair bit of profanity in this book - the thugs communicate as thugs do - and a light dusting of sexual content, though nothing graphic. This isn't really a book for children, though I'm sure teens with an interest in post-apocalyptic survival would enjoy it.
