needs more demons? no.

It’s a marvelous little book, providing a brief, but insightful look at baseball’s oddest pitch from a variety of perspectives: how to throw it, how to hit it, how to catch it, how to call it, among others. Clark’s writing is lucid and accessible; Phil Clark’s line drawings are illuminating and useful; several great pitchers are typically enigmatic and epigrammatic. I learned a lot.

needs more demons? the knuckleball is demon enough.

I don’t know how any nerd could not love the knuckleball, or, as I prefer to call it, the “chaos pitch.” It’s thrown — at the velocity of a cheetah, mind you — with almost no rotation. Its path to, and hopefully over, the plate is determined, as much as anything else, by the eddies formed by the ball’s stitches* as it shoves its way through the air.

And to me, the knuckleball is emblematic of baseball’s appeal. As much as fans love to describe the game with statistics, the game is interesting because statistics can’t accurately predict what happens next. And nothing embodies that like the knuckleball. As the pitch leaves Wake’s hand** he has scarcely a better idea of its trajectory than anyone else.

No one personifies the knuckleball for me like Tim Wakefield, perhaps the last of baseball’s greats to throw the pitch. As I’ve learned about the game over the past 8 years or so, he’s been the constant inconstant: sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible — often both in the same game, or even the same frame. I dearly love to see him win, but I admire him most in the grim losses where he grinds through out after painful out, sabotaging his stats and saving the bullpen’s arms. There’s an equanimity to him in these innings, a grace and lack of ego that seems very rare in professional sports. Then again, it’s awe-inspiring to see a guy pitch one of the best games of his career in his forties.

Massarotti’s book*** opens with some historical context on the knuckleball, outlining the careers of pitchers whose careers ended before I became a fan of the game, and describing the pitch in relation to the rest of baseball’s arsenal. Then he dives into Wake’s career, wich mirrors many of his games: improbable comebacks against long odds, devastating setbacks. Longtime Boston Herald writer Massarotti offers some interesting insights throughout. His analysis of what it costs a team for a pitcher to record each out uses some suspect math, but still makes a convincing case that Wake has been quite a bargain for the Sox. It’s also fascinating to see well-documented history through Wake-colored-glasses; Schilling’s bloody sock performance in game 6 of the 2004 ALCS is a mere aside, primarily relevant to the state of the rotation and how many days of rest Wakefield has going into the World Series.

The book is marred by some copy editing gaffes, with a score going from 5-0 to 4-1 to 5-2 in the 2003 ALCS perhaps the worst. And it’s written as if Wake’s career was effectively over in 2010, with no opportunity to contribute significantly to the 2011 season. That’s not quite how it worked out, but of course, most folks had written him off in 1994, too.

needs more demons? Despite some flaws I found it both entertaining and illuminating.

* or, in baseball parlance, “the stitches of the ball.”
** i.e., “the hand of Wake”
*** Massarotti and Wakefield confusing refer to themselves as author and writer, a fallacy I won’t perpetuate. The book is written in the third person; Wake’s voice is present as an interview subject.

You? Who the hell are you? That’s what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I’m the guy talking. Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are.

and a little later:

Not because I’m Danny or he’s me or any of that shit — this is all just stuff a guy told me.

Danny’s story is a really terrific updated gothic spook story, precisely the sort of tale that John Harwood spins so effectively. The narrator’s story is something quite different: realistic and gritty. I found both equally compelling.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

Kill Me’s nameless, rich, extreme-sport-loving, narrator doesn’t want to be left a vegetable by an accident. He doesn’t even want to live with undiminished mental capacity if circumstances render him unable to live life to the fullest. He learns of a business venture — the narrator refers to them as the “Death Angels” — that provides a service to sufficiently wealthy clients. You sign up, they monitor you continually, and when your quality of life falls below a pre-determined threshold, they will snuff at your life, doing their best to make it look like an accident. The catch is, if you enter into an agreement with the Death Angels when you are of sound body and mind, they take any inclination to re-negotiate or abrogate the contract as an indication of mental unsoundness. There’s no backing out.

I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that this doesn’t go as well as planned.

White’s narrator provides a wealth of carefully-observed physical detail, presumably intended to counteract the book’s credibility problems. He also really likes to hear himself talk, and is convinced of his own profundity:

It was the kind of mindless financial foreplay that Adam would
have walked out of, the kind of meeting that if I had any guts I
would have walked out of. The suits ran out of ideas long before
they ran out of words, so I was ready for them to shut their
mouths long before they finally shut their briefcases. I hustled
out of the building and slunk down into the subway with about a
million other people and stuffed myself into a croweded car on the
Lexington Avenue line heading to Midtown. I could have taken a cab
or arranged for a Town Car or limo to go uptown, but despite my
whining I liked the crush of life in the tunnels below the city,
especially during rush hour.

I couldn’t tell if White wanted the reader to like the narrator despite his arrogance, or didn’t really care. I found the narrator largely credible — I haven’t met many, if any, people with quite as many millions as he’s got, but I’ve certainly met a few who aspire to have that much wealth, and act much as he does — but not compelling, nor particularly pleasant. I was interested enough to keep reading, but not emotionally invested.

I did struggle with suspension of disbelief throughout the book. The Death Angels seemed improbably well-resourced, so much so that I almost wanted them to be given a sci-fi-ish rationale (They’re from the future! It’s a secret CIA training program!) . The narrator often seems much better at cloak & dagger stuff than I would expect from a corporate executive, but misses some obvious tricks when the plot requires him to be blindsided.

I don’t want to give away any surprises, but will mention two things. It’s obvious that a book like this will have some twists. For a while I thought the twist might be that the Death Angels never actually killed anybody — that they used the threat of death to restore their members’ will to live. So first, if this is the sort of twist you’d prefer, this may not be the book for you. Second, I was frustrated through much of the novel with the narrators’ refusal to to contemplate the moral compass of people who would choose to work for the Death Angels — but if White’s narrator doesn’t think about this, at least White himself does.

needs more demons? Perhaps just not my thing.

It was ten minutes till five on a Thursday. Donna and Lee’s office was on the twenty-first floor. It had a bay window facing south, and just before five every evening, Donna and Lee stood at this window and looked at the sunlight on the rivers. Lee, who was a lesbian, loved the East River best. Donna loved the Hudson.

One of the problems I’ve had in writing about Carroll’s books is that they’re excessively trivialized by reducing them to capsule descriptions: they wind up sounding silly. But they don’t feel silly while I’m reading them; they’re often deeply affecting, even when they contain outlandish events. I can’t explain it clearly, but the supernatural and surreal elements of Carroll’s fiction seem to obey an internal logic that gives them resonance. It doesn’t matter whether this logic is obvious to the reader or not; its presence is felt nonetheless.

I didn’t get this sense from Schickler’s work; the fantastic elements, as when a lonely young man stumbles upon a strange figure surrounded by gem stones in the basement of a sex shop, seem awkward and unconvincing. If it sounds a bit silly, I thought it was. This particular event propels the narrative and is close to the book’s thematic heart, but it doesn’t make any sense, nor does it make nonsense in a way I found compelling.

A further peeve: several of Schickler’s characters are high-powered attorneys, whom he writes about it in a way that suggests strongly to me that he’s never met one.

Needs More Demons? I dunno, but it needs more something.

I found it rather unintentionally hilarious. It’s certainly not fair to fault a work of speculative fiction from another generation (this one was written in 1964) for failing to anticipate developments like personal computing and the Internet. Nonetheless, it’s hard to read with a straight face a scene in which a guy has to compute square roots with his slide rule, or in which the closest analogue to a database search requires flying to a planet where you can look things up.

It might likewise seem unfair to criticize Vance for the reflexive, unexamined sexism of his work, but not all of his contemporaries exhibit that deficiency. James H. Schmitz, for instance, in the 1950s and ’60s portrayed a similar interstellar cosmopolitan society which happened to include several tough, smart female characters. He didn’t even make a big to-do over his female characters’ toughness or smartness; his male characters accepted female equality as a natural state of affairs. (Many of Schmitz’s stories have recently been reprinted in several hefty anthologies from Baen books. I loved these tales when I was a teenager, and I was delighted at how unembarrassing they were to return to as an adult.)

One clear similarity Vance shares with Hughes is both writer’s frequent — even excessive — use of the passive voice to evoke a general air of sophistication. Vance winds up evincing the stiltedness of 19th prose without much of its grace or music; Hughes (whom I think deserves roughly half of the hype he seems to have) fares a little better with the device, mostly because he can write dialogue that’s not patently ludicrous.

Once you subtract the spaceships and rayguns, The Killing Machine is basically a cops and robbers story. Ubervillain Kokor Hekkus (one of the titular “Demon Princes,” and one of the two titular “Killing Machines” — the other is the pictured giant mechanical 36-legged arthropod, which for some obscure reason is referred to as a “mobile fort”) is engineering a rash of kidnappings to raise a vast sum of money (for frankly absurd purposes). Keith Gersen is the grudge-bearing, rule-ignoring bounty hunter who’s sworn to bring Hekkus down.
The financial focus of the plot leads to gripping scenes like this:

“We had best consider the matter of recompense,” said Gersen. “Here I speak for Mr. Patch, of course. He wants the full sum of the original contract, plus the cost of modifications and the normal percentage of profit.”
Otwal considered a moment. “Minus, of course, those developmental funds already advanced. SVU 427,685, I believe to be the sum.”
Patch began to sputter. Otwal could not restrain a faint smile.
“There have been additional expenses,” said Gersen. “To a total of SVU 437,685. This must be included in the total reckoning.”

and this:

Half an hour later, Patch called the area Branch of the Bank of Rigel, inserted his account tab into the credit card slot. Yes, he was told, the sum of SVU 1,181,490 had been deposited to his acount.
“In that case,” said Patch, “please open an account in the name of Keith Gersen — ” he spelled the name ” — and deposit to this account the sum of SVU 500,000.”
The transaction was performed, both Patch and Gersen affixing signatures and thumbprints to tabs. Patch then turned to Gersen. “You will now write me a receipt, and destroy the partnership agreement.”

and (as the novel’s sole female character pays her own ransom to an institution that brokers payment between kidnappers and their extortees), this:

“There is another matter,” said the clerk. He adressed Aluzs Iphigenia. “Since you are acting the peculiar capacity of your own sponsor, the money, minus our 12 1/2 percent fee, is yours.”
Alusz Iphigenia stared at him apparently without comprehension.
“I suggest,” said Gersen, “that you prepare a bank draft, so that she need not carry around so much negiotiable currency.”
There was a flurry of consultation, a shrugging of the shoulders, a flutter of hands; finally the bank draft was drawn upon the Planetary Bank of Sasani at Sagbad, in the sum of SVU 8,749,993,581: ten billion minus 12 1/2 percent, minus charges of SVU 6,419 for special AA accommodation.
Gersen scrutinized the document with suspicion. “Presumably this is a valid draft? You have funds to cover?”

This book is available from me through Bookmooch, if you’re interested.

Needs More Demons? Has a “Demon Prince,” but needs fewer details of financial transactions.

(I suggest, dear reader, that you pause here to allow your heart rate to settle before activating the clicker on your computator to access the remainder of this (or any other) informational repository. I must inform you that I can not be held responsible for any consequences that could arise from your failure to heed this warning.)
continued…