Come on down to the Improv Sock-Hop!

I do Improv. Have I mentioned this?

Nope. I never talk about Improv on here. Of course, lately, I don’t talk about a lot on here as my level of blog-neglect has shot up from inconsiderate to irresponsible.

Improv is great. I’ve been doing it for a year and a half now, and I love it. For those who don’t know, Improv is the art of making up the show as you go along. The most important rule is: “Yes and….” In other words: listen to your scene partners and be supportive. The goal is to build a great scene, not to be the star. It’s usually funny, but it doesn’t have to be. For some, Improv is a hobby. For others, it’s a lifestyle. It’s changed my life. It has made me a better writer, a more confident person, and it’s introduced me to a bunch of truly wonderful people.

(It’s also a theater chain, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Because we’re making it up as we go along, we never know what we’re going need, so we have to mime all the props. This is called object work, and sometimes object work defines the scene. For example, an improviser steps out onstage and starts miming making a pizza. Immediately, we know a pizza is being made onstage, but there are a bunch of ways the scene could go. Are we in a pizza parlor? Are we in somebody’s home? Is the scene going to be about two teenage girls who inherit their dead father’s Italian restaurant? Is it going to be about two aliens making pizza for the first time after a trip to Earth? The possibilities go on and on, and they’re all rooted in one improviser’s object work. Which brings us to a weird Improv phenomenon.

While talking with my boyfriend, who is also an improviser, he mentioned how he had started a scene by using a pencil tablet in lieu of a computer mouse. (Incidentally, he uses a pencil tablet in real life). In his mind, his character was on a computer, but to his scene partners, he was writing by hand. A minor misunderstanding, but it changes everything. We just went from an office building on the eve of the Financial Crisis, to Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence (or some such whatever).

This intrigued me. I thought about what would happen if I initiated a scene by drawing in the air with my finger. In my head, my character was using an iPad, but I knew that in the creative rush of building of scene, my fellow performers would most likely assume I was finger painting. Or a human Etch a Sketch. Or conducting an orchestra comprised entirely of ladybugs and fleas. Or anything but using an iPad. Maybe the iPad would occur to someone, but unless I initiated with, “I love this here iPad!” I don’t see it being a first choice.

(This entry has not been endorsed by Apple. If you’re reading this, Apple, please don’t have me killed.)

Improv is a constantly changing art form. It thrives on the culture around it. Shows are filled with topical details and references. And yet in some ways, Improv doesn’t have much regard for modern technology…or modern anything. Scenes often take place in arcades and ice cream parlors; places that, though they still exist, are hardly the social landmarks they were in the past. Again and again, we name our characters Jimmy and Sally, Billy and Susie; names you’re likelier to find in your parents’ yearbook than at the local bar. I’ve yet to see a scene that hinges on whether anybody has an Internet connection (though, to be fair, I’m sure it’s been done). Improv scenes seem to take place in a permanent limbo of non-specific time where our technological advancements, if they exist at all, are an afterthought.

(By the way, during the aforementioned conversation, my boyfriend referred to this phenomenon as “the Improv Sock-Hop.” Hence the subject line. I now feel compelled to send him royalties for something I am not being paid to write.)

I’m not saying technology has no place in Improv. In two recent shows, some of the biggest laughs of the night came from sudden, clever references to our digital friends. In one of these, after a running gag about two scientists making up increasingly ridiculous names for their fake gadgets, a third character suggested they just use an iPhone. In the other, a murder scene, one character stepped out of his post-crime panic to make a snide remark about his friend still using a flip phone. Anybody living in our digital society could (and did) appreciate the humor of those moments, but these were punchlines to bigger jokes. I’m not saying improvisers are Luddites, but what makes technology useful in the real world can make it boring in Improv.

Technology is everywhere; it’s instinctive. It informs our relationships and indulges our whims. In some ways, it has taken the place of imagination. Why stop and wonder about anything, when you essentially have all the information in the world at your fingertips? Technology exists to make our lives easier, to solve our problems, but it also robs us of uncertainty’s rich potential.  

Improv is all about imagination. It’s all about relationships and listening and creativity, but all those things depend on the imagination of the participants. When I’m eating a hamburger onstage, I’m eating a hamburger. I can see it and taste it. Sometimes if I’m tagged out while I’m eating, I walk offstage still chewing. Maybe modern conveniences don’t always occur to us onstage, because they’re EVERYWHERE ELSE. They don’t stimulate the imagination. They’re boring to mime. They answer all of our questions for us, so what’s the point of asking? There’s plenty of time for texting, real or imaginary, back in the real world. You don’t want use a gadget in a scene because you’d rather be robbing a grave or battling a wizard…or eating a hamburger.

(Trust me. I make the best pretend hamburgers.)

Also as an improviser who was born in the 80’s and frequently performs with people who were born in the 80’s, I think that our reliance on arcades and ice cream parlors is rooted in nostalgia. Likewise, maybe gadgets don’t occur to us as much because we grew up without them, and as we all know, there are few combinations greater (and more productive) than imagination and nostalgia.

Why we keep naming each other Sally is anyone’s guess.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sword in the Stone isn't that good, but I love it anyway (and a few thoughts on Brave)

I saw Brave last week.

I was really excited about seeing Brave. It’s Pixar’s first movie with a female main character. It takes place in Scotland. The heroine has the most awesome hair I’ve ever seen (even prettier than Ariel’s). Also Disney blah blah blah…I’m a fan.

But I didn’t love Brave. In fact, if I’m being honest, I didn’t like it all that much. Especially not when you factor in my expectations. Usually, when I see a Disney or Pixar movie, I want to see it again as soon as it’s over. I saw Up in the theater THREE TIMES. I saw Tangled in 3-D, ridiculous price be damned. When Brave ended, it ended. I don’t have any desire to see it again. It had a lot of good qualities. It was visually stunning, occasionally funny, occasionally moving, the voice work was excellent, and again the HAIR, but it just didn’t grab me.

With the exception of one scene.

About halfway through the movie, the heroine Merida stumbles upon a witch. This witch lives in a cottage in the middle of the woods, is obsessed with wood-carving, and has a pet raven. She’s a crazy old lady with a crooked back and wild hair who makes vague references to the “Wicker Man festival.” She and Merida have an exchange, deals are made, et cetera. I don’t want to spoil anything so I won’t get too detailed, but I LOVED this character. I would have happily watched a whole movie about her, and when Merida first arrived at her house I got really excited because I thought I knew what was coming.

As a writer, I have a bad habit of making up the whole movie in my head before I see it or as I’m seeing it. Then when the movie doesn’t turn out to be the one I wrote, I get mad. When Merida met the witch, I wrote the rest of Brave in about 30 seconds. This was easy because it was “The Sword in the Stone with girls!” Imagine that shrieked in a voice only dogs can hear and you’ll be close to the sounds I made in my head.

I love The Sword in the Stone. I was obsessed with it as a kid, more so than any other Disney movie at the time. It’s one of those movies that indirectly rerouted the course of my life.

It’s a pretty well-known story, but I like summarizing things so…

The movie opens by telling us that long ago “when England was young” the king died without leaving an heir. Consequently, a sword stuck into a stone literally fell out of the sky with an inscription saying whoever can pull out the sword will be king. Nobody could, and England fell into chaos. Years later, a lonely abused orphan named Arthur stumbles into the cottage of the wizard Merlin who becomes his mentor. Thanks to Merlin’s guidance, Arthur manages to pull out the sword and becomes King Arthur.

Naturally, I knew Merida wasn’t going to pull a sword out of a stone (it is, after all, NO basis for a system of government), but I thought/hoped the witch would become her mentor, maybe teach her some witchcraft or a little Latin. But no. That wasn’t the movie I got, so I had to go home and watch The Sword in the Stone again. And then it occurred to me why Brave didn’t want to steal its plot.

The Sword in the Stone is not that good.  

It’s not the first time I’ve come to this conclusion. I come to it pretty much every time I watch it, but still. It always makes me sad because I used to love it SO MUCH.  I’m going to list the reasons why it’s not good because you care (obviously) and because it’s healthy.

-Most of the animators were on autopilot and it shows. The animation is terrible. Well, maybe not terrible, but it’s dull and sloppy. Hold it up next to Sleeping Beauty and you will feel physical pain.

- It barely follows the excellent book that inspired it.

- It has no plot. It just rambles along at a sluggish pace from one scene to the next.

- Arthur’s voice. The kid who played Arthur went through puberty while the movie was being made and his voice changed. Rather than rerecord the whole movie with a different actor, the director had his TWO sons fill in gaps here and there. It did not help at all. Three boys—all at various stages of puberty—voiced one character. And it’s really obvious.

-The ending is way too abrupt and…

-At the end of the day, it’s just kind of boring.

Yeah.

And yet, there are a lot of things about it I love: the Sherman Brothers songs, Archimedes the talking owl, the villain Madam Mim and her subsequent duel with Merlin. Oh, I love Madam Mim so much. Especially when you consider that in book, Madam Mim is 30, beautiful and basically a pedophile, but in the movie she’s a gleefully sadistic old hag. If the movie’s Madam Mim and Merlin had a baby, she would grow up to be the witch in Brave.  

Also two scenes in The Sword in the Stone give me chills literally every time I watch them. The opening song, which has no title and tells the story of the king’s death and how the sword appeared, is beautiful. It’s one of my favorite moments of any movie, especially at “IN LONDON TOWN.” I’ve cried just listening to it. The other is at the end when Arthur has to prove to everyone that he pulled out the sword by pulling it out again. He walks confidently to the stone, and as soon as he touches the sword, a light surrounds him and celestial music starts playing. He looks up and pulls out the sword with no trouble. Because HE’S the chosen one. There’s a reason that moment shows up in a lot of “Best of Disney” montages, even though the rest of the movie is lackluster. There’s something very satisfying about it.

Conveniently, some lovely person posted these two scenes together on YouTube.

The Sword in the Stone is my go-to example for why labels like “boys’ movies” and “girls’ movies” don’t mean a thing. There are four female characters and half of them are squirrels, but I didn’t care. It moved me in a very real way. I related to Arthur and when he becomes king at the end, his victory felt like possible. If fantasy is metaphor then the sword in the stone represents finding the inner strength you need to overcome whatever’s holding you back. That’s actually one way the movie improves on the book and even the legend itself. In the legend, Arthur is able to pull the sword out of the stone because (unbeknownst to him) he is the late king’s son, raised in secret by a foster family. In the movie, we never know why he’s the chosen one. He just is.

If you tell me The Sword in the Stone is dull and sloppily made, I won’t disagree, but I will be quick to say it still had a major positive impact on me. It got me into the Arthurian legend, which I eventually studied in college. I might not have read T. H. White without it and I definitely wouldn’t have read Le Morte d’Arthur. I might never have met my fairy godmother, Morgan le Fay (she’s so badass, she picked up witchcraft in a nunnery. How does that even HAPPEN?) It inspired most of what I wrote as a kid and still inspires my writing now. Even during other movies obviously. There are Disney films I LOVED as a kid that I can’t stand now (including one I’ll be writing about soon), but The Sword in the Stone is not one of them.

I’m sure there are a lot of kids who saw Brave and loved it. These kids were no doubt perfectly happy they saw the movie Pixar made and not some slapped-together ripoff about the witch and Merida and all their wacky adventures. Maybe some of these kids will continue to watch Brave as they grow up and eventually notice the weak story and undeveloped characters. However, they probably won’t care. Maybe, poisoned by nostalgia, they’ll love Brave unapologetically all their lives. I certainly wouldn’t blame them.

In Which the Blogger Celebrates Walpurgisnacht and Remembers Her Duties

Hello, Invisible (Probably Imaginary) Audience. Remember when I used to keep a blog? Well, I still do. Or rather I do again. To say I have been remiss does not begin to cover it, but I am back now with high hopes for the future. Hopefully I can win you back, romcom style. And what better night to start the wooing than Walpurgisnacht? April 30. Halloween in the springtime. The night when all the evil in the world roams free in search of innocent victims.  If you want a taste of some undead hijinks, here's A Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia, back when Disney could get away with showing a Black Mass in one of their movies. Not to mention naked harpies. You'll notice I'm not linking Ave Maria. You have to seek out your own spiritual salvation. Literature in action, pickles.

If you're not feeling the Mouse House (or if this scene still scares the bejeezies out of you...you can admit it), there's Todd Browning's Dracula which ALSO takes place on Walpurgisnacht, unfortunately for our antihero, Mr. Renfield. Dedicated real estate agent-turned-insane vampire slave Renfield ignores the advice of the locals and every scrap of common sense to keep a MIDNIGHT appointment with a certain nocturnal count. Dracula even tries to give him a hint with his not-at-all subtle "spider and fly" metaphor...to no avail. If horror movie victims knew they were horror movie victims there would be no horror movies. By the way, in Browning's film, Renfield seems to have traveled all the way to Transylvania from England to DELIVER A LEASE. Which just had to be done in person, I guess. What a shame he couldn't convince Jonathan Harker to go in his place.
Another day,another slice of self-indulgence. Welcome back. Here's hoping I can go about this with some semblance of regularity. Happy Walpurgisnacht. Don't give away your soul unless you get a really good price for it.

Three Flavors of Horror

Well, pickles, Halloween is here at last. What to do, what to say? I'm not dressed suitably for a human sacrifice and people keep saying I'm too old to trick-or-treat, so it's back to the ol' blog. Today is the last day of the celebrated Coffin Hop. I've met a bunch of wonderful authors (and their wonderful stories) along the way. Hopefully you have too. If you haven't, it's not too late. (And see the details of my contest below).

I know we should all be halfway to a sugar overdose by now, but before it gets too close to the witching hour (especially since I, in my infinite insanity, am doing NaNoWriMo this year) I want to take a moment to discuss my favorite flavors of horror.

Now some of you might be thinking, "How can horror have flavors? Horror is just horror; it isn't ice cream." That's where you're wrong, pickles (presuming that you were in fact thinking that). Horror IS like ice cream. It isn't just one giant all-consuming umbrella. It comes in flavors. Sit down to watch Psycho, The Company of Wolves and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you're in for three very different viewing experiences. And yet, all three of these movies are classified as horror.

Before we get started, allow me to explain what I mean by horror. Funnily enough, if you were to ask three different people to define horror, you would probably get three different answers. At it's most basic, it can be defined by "that which frightens us." But fear, like love, is very subjective. Different people are frightened by different things. With this subjectivity in mind, I'm going to define horror as "that which can frighten its audience, regardless of age or genre, by exploring a dark idea." And now my three favorite flavors.

1. The Spooky Supernatural: In short, ghosts. I love ghost stories. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is one of my favorite books, and the blueprint for how to write a truly ambiguous, psychologically agonizing ghost story. Suggestion, subtlety, and the mysteries of life and death are all at play here. They say the best horror tales are those in which the supernatural elements can be read literally and as a metaphor for real life horrors. Most people believe in ghosts to a certain extent (even if they think they don't), because everyone is haunted by the inevitabilty and omnipresence of death. To live is to accept the fact that we all die and that's what lies at the heart of ghost stories.

2. The Grim Reality: That which, unfortunately, can and does happen. At a very early age, I developed a morbid interest in true crime that continues to this day. As a kid, I used to stay up late to watch Investigative Reports with Bill Curtis on A&E. Once, when talking about the Zodiac killer (who I became acquainted with at the ripe old age of nine), I almost slipped and called him "my favorite serial killer." All I meant was that it's the case I find most interesting, but favorite was the only word that came to mind. I'm not the only one. Shows, movies and books about serial killers, both real and fictional, keep popping up like whack-a-moles on the boardwalk. Clearly, there's a demand. My only explanation for this is that this very real horror scares us so much we can't help but to desire to understand it. If we surround ourselves with it, we think we can protect ourselves against it.

3. The Childhood Nightmare: This is my favorite. If you were to ask me which movie scared me the most as a child, I would have to say Pinocchio. Disney's Pinocchio. It was a toss-up for awhile between Pinocchio and Dumbo, but in the end, I have to give it to Pinoke. I forget when I saw it the first time, but I was very young (five or six). I remember seeing the donkey transformation scene on the big screen. At the moment when Lampwick's hands turn into hooves, I was sure I was going to die. It wasn't make believe; it was really happening. Didn't anybody else hear him screaming? Not long after, I received a VHS of Pinocchio as a present. I put it in the attic without even taking the plastic off. Such was my fear of this movie. I'm 24now and I've seen a bunch of horror movies. The Exorcist didn't keep me up at night and I fell asleep during The Ring, but that scene still disturbs me. I own Pinocchio on DVD and it's one I watch a lot, but I usually mute it for those few awful minutes. It feels real to me. A lot of people have a movie like Pinocchio in their past. I know the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang did a number on a lot of kids. These scenes and characters harken back to the idea of the Boogeyman or the perennial monster in the closet, a fear that hits us in childhood and has the ability to render us children whenever it strikes, no matter how old we are. Pinocchio is not technically a horror movie, but it's relentlessly dark. None of the villains are captured; they're merely escaped. None of the donkeys turn back into boys. Hearing Lampwick call for his mother to no avail hits home every time I watch it and makes me feel like a kid again. Scary business, indeed.

Here is the scene if you're feeling brave.


Well, pickles, there's a Halloween feast for you. What kind of horror, if any, pushes your buttons? What childhood film scarred you for life? Leave it in the comments. Tomorrow I'm going to put the names of all Coffin Hop commenters into a hat and those three will get copies of Dark Moon Digest Presents Ghosts!, which coincidentally has a story by me in it. Happy Halloween and Happy Hopping to you Coffin Hoppers!

Welcome to Coffin Hop!!! or Ode to the Danse Macabre

Well, well, well. I have returned, pickles, to rescue this blog from the doldrums. I've let it languish, I know, but summer laziness has finally left me. Now that old autumnal drive has returned, fueled no doubt by a latent beginning-of-the-school-year spirit. And just in time for Halloween... the most wonderful time of the year.

But this Halloween isn't just any Halloween. This Halloween I am participating, along with many wonderful authors, in Coffin Hop!

(insert thunder clap)

Coffin Hop is an opportunity for you, the lovely reader, to meet nearly 100 horror writers via their blogs and websites. There will be contests! Even I will be having one. And where there are contests, there are prizes. Check back here for details through out the week. Peruse the list (here at http://www.coffinhop.blogspot.com/) and check out as many as you can. Like the forbidden room in Bluebeard's castle...you never know what you might find.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, which is strange because I was one of those kids who was scared of everything. Between my overactive imagination and the paranoia instilled in every child of the 80's (stranger danger! drugs! playing with matches!) it seemed there was plenty to be afraid of. Yet Halloween always acted as a surprising refuge from the fear. On Halloween, I was allowed to take part in that dark and shadowy world that so often held me in terror. I could dress myself up as a ghost or a witch or Wednesday Addams (one of my favorite costumes) and be someone--or something--that didn't have to be scared. On Halloween, the whole world plays make believe. We all revel in the nightmares that on every other day of the year have to be repressed.

A lot of people ask me why I write horror (especially the people who knew me as that nervous, easily frightened little girl). Why, they ask, do I keep writing stories about things I hope never to encounter in real life? Wouldn't it be much better for my mental health (and the mental health of my readers) to just write "happy things"? The reason why my stories so often favor the dark side is very similar to the reason why I love Halloween. When I play with the shadows, it makes me stronger.

There's a memory from my childhood that sums this idea up in a nutshell. When I was six years old, my elementary school music teacher decided to celebrate Halloween by showing the first grade a filmstrip of the Danse Macabre, Camille Saint-Saëns's classic piece about spirits who rise up from their graves to dance the night away as Death himself leads on the violin. Few movie viewing experiences in childhood frightened me as much as this. Keep in mind. This was a filmstrip. These were still images I was watching, not state-of-the-art animation, but it still scared me so much I couldn't move. Trapped in that dark auditorium, forced to watch skeletons and ghosts hang suspended in the painted night air as a wild violin soared in the background, I was sure all my nightmares had finally come to life in front of my eyes. Even after the music faded, after the lights came back on and the big white screen disappeared, it stayed with me. I knew it was just biding its time until that awful limbo between getting in bed and falling asleep when we would be alone together. It haunted me that night and for several nights after, until my next music class later that week.

Our teacher was out sick so a substitute came to our classroom...and when she came she brought a slide projector with her. No, I thought, staring at it, feeling the dread creep back in, it's impossible. How could this be happening again? Why did it keep following me? The substitute clearly didn't know what else to do with us, that's why. She did, however, add a pinch of novelty by asking for a volunteer to run the slide projector, a popular honor in the time of elementary school filmstrips. I don't think I meant to do it. Pure primal instinct took over. My hand shot in the air, and I was chosen. So now not only was I watching this still-frame nightmare again, but I had by own will, ruined any chance of closing my eyes. Now I had to pay attention. I had to watch. I was controlling the damn thing. And there's your answer to why I write horror.

There are a lot of real-world things to be scared of, like strangers invading your home or disturbed children doing horrible things for no reason, but I find if I write a fear down, I can control it. I enjoy being scared when I can control the situation, (and I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy scaring people in turn). Like dressing up for Halloween, horror forces us to confront the inexplicable, rather than deny it and repress it. If we're lucky, this can lead to a better understanding of ourselves and the world. And either way, it's often good scary fun.

The Danse Macabre has become one of my favorite pieces of music. In an exercise that seemed made for me, when I was 10, the same music teacher played it for us AGAIN without the filmstrip and told us all to write a story based on it what we saw in our heads. I lost that story, but I may be moved to rewrite it someday. This being the glorious age of the Internet, I've looked long and hard for that filmstrip, but I haven't had any luck yet. I distinctly remember Death as a skeleton in a pink vest. Apparently, the Danse Macabre is its own genre of filmstrip because there are a bunch on YouTube. This is NOT the one I watched (though there is funnily enough a skeleton wearing pink), but it will do for now. If you have any similar memories of being scarred by this or any other Danse Macabre filmstrip, be sure to leave it in the comments. Maybe one of you remembers the one I saw.

That's all for now, pickles. Welcome to Coffin Hop. Check out other authors and Happy Almost Halloween!

In Which the Blogger Indulges In Even More Shameless Plugging

Good news, pickles. I've been published again by the lovely people at Dark Moon Digest! My story "To Talk of Many Things" was selected to appear in their fourth issue which you can now buy on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.com

How cool is that cover?

I found out back in March, but wanted to wait until it was absolutely definite before I let off the fireworks. "To Talk of Many Things" takes its title from Lewis Carroll's famous poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Observe.

"'The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbage and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.'"

Carroll's poem may seem frought with Victorian whimsy and it is pretty darn whimsical, but make no mistake, the story that unfolds within it is pretty chilling. At least to me. If you don't agree, don't let that dissaude you from reading this next issue of Dark Moon Digest. I'm very tempted to write that it's sure to be a scream, but I can't without giggling.

While you're ordering Issue 4, you should also order any previous issues you don't have yet. Dark Moon Digest is amazing and I want them to thrive and keep on going for years. It's a hard world out there for the short story. It needs all the love it can get.

P.S. Dark Moon Digest interviewed me for their website back in March. It's very exciting, my very first author interview. Not to mention utterly surreal. Here it is if you feel like a looksie. http://www.lastwritesdmd.com/?p=400

"Put Your Shovel in the Ground, Matthew..." : A Look at The Cleanup by Sean Doolittle

"Worth couldn't get over the looks people gave him." --The Cleanup, Sean Doolittle

Alright. Listen up, pickles because I'm only going to say this once and I know you were all waiting with baited breath. I no longer live in New Jersey. I live in the big city now. Hence things have been very chaotic for me lately. I've had to learn to live at a faster pace. Consequently, I fell into a reading rut. A reading rut refers to an uncomfortably long period of time when every book I read fails to do anything for me--often to the point where I can't even finish them. Happily, every reading rut eventually comes to an end with a book that grips me from the first page, burrows into my mind and heart and more often than not becomes a favorite. For this latest reading rut, that book was Sean Doolittle's The Cleanup.

The Cleanup introduces us to Matthew Worth, an Omaha police officer who's having a terrible year. The latest in a long line of cops, he has the best intentions, but he's not happy and therefore not that good at the job. His wife has left him for a homicide detective and as a result of punching said detective (a superior officer), he's been put on probation: assigned to the graveyard shift of a local convenience store. The only bright spot in all this is his friendship with the checkout girl, nursing school student Gwen Mullen, whom he's slowly falling for. Gwen Mullen has her share of problems too, namely a troubled past and an abusive boyfriend. When her boyfriend goes too far one night, Gwen fights back and kills him. With no one else to turn to, she asks Matthew for help. Hence...The Cleanup.

The Cleanup proves the maxim that the power of a good book lies more in how the story is told than the story itself. This isn't a story that's never been seen before. Of course, Matthew risks his career (and eventually his life) to help Gwen. Of course, the boyfriend turns out to be involved in shady dealings. Of course, the shady powers-that-be go looking for answers when the boyfriend goes missing. Yes, I guessed all this would happen and yes, it all does, but this just made the book more enjoyable for me. It was fun to see Doolittle take what could have been a formulaic premise and truly make it his own with wonderful characters and great writing. All this leads to a truly unpredictable (and very poignant) ending that's all the more rewarding for everything that comes before it.

As someone who struggles with juggling a large cast of characters, I was very impressed with how Doolittle navigated through his universe and its inhabitants. The pacing is just right, giving you enough time with each set of characters and each setting, and then moving along before too much is revealed. I couldn't put this book down. One highlight for me was the dialogue. You want realistic dialogue in a book, but truth be told, realistic dialogue can be pretty boring, filled with superfluous "ums" and "likes" that die on the page. Luckily, there are authors who know how to create dialogue that feels realistic but without any of the dull stuff. Doolittle is one of these authors. His dialogue is so sharp and vivid, I could hear the characters' voices (I'd like to think that was Doolittle's doing and not the result of some latent insanity). Short, brisk sentences blast us with emotion and wit, shifting between laugh out loud humor and heartwrenching honesty.

I won't spoil much about the characters because it's best to meet them on your own, but I will say this. I'm trying really hard to break my habit of developing crushes on fictional men, but I couldn't help it here. I love Matt Worth. I prefer my heroes flawed, and he's so beautifully flawed. He's like a broken down knight-in-shining-armor, more of a Balin than a Lancelot: a painfully good guy, beaten down by bad luck and human error, but still desperate to do the right thing. I was on his side from the get go, which just made the ride that followed even more thrilling.

Well, I think I've gone on long enough about this great book. Go out and get yourself a copy. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

P.S. The title of this entry comes from Melissa McClelland's song "Go Down Matthew" off her album "Thumbelina's One Night Stand" (possibly my favorite album title ever). I've come to associate the song with The Cleanup (even if the stories don't exactly match up) so I threw it in. Here's a video of the song in case you're interested.