Inspirational Reading

 Well, with multiple books to edit, re-read, and polish up for agents, not to mention coming up with material for Patreon, the ol' blog gets neglected.  Since there come long periods when I have nothing else to do but read, I thought I'd give space to some inspirational pieces of literature.

Golden Apples of the Sun, Ray Bradbury

What can you say about Bradbury?  His prose holds more imagery and metaphor than most poetry.  It's almost too good to start off with; an aspiring writer could get a complex!  "Golden" contains famous SF like "A Sound of Thunder" and "The Fog-Horn," but only a few stories are fantasy or SF.  Don't try to hem Bradbury in with labels and genres!

 

"Empire of the Ants," H. G. Wells

Had to look at a bit of Wells as a change from Bradbury.  There's a stretch of Bradbury-like prose in the description of the Amazon and the smallness of humanity compared to it.  The new species of intelligent ant is pretty formidable.  They should have taken over by the 1960s, according to H. G.

 

"The Snow-Women," Fritz Leiber

Leiber's back story for Fafhrd, the first tale of the first Nehwon book, Swords Against Deviltry.  A long, long story, over one hundred pages, with no chapter breaks, it's rather slow going until the last quarter.  The second volume, Swords Against Death, would probably be a better introduction to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

 

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thought I'd try a little classic poetry.  Creepy imagery of the Flying Dutchman-like curse of the sailor who didn't like albatrosses.  Some bits have become a little too familiar due to overexposure ("Water, water, everywhere . . .").  I didn't quite understand the need for the glosses (apparently by Coleridge himself), although I liked the references to Josephus and others to explain the type of "nature spirit" it was that the Mariner offended.

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And one full-fledged book review:

The Intruders

 

Pat Montandon

 

(New York, NY:  Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1975)

 

Pat Montandon was a local TV talk show hostess in San Francisco in the late sixties.  She became a professional “party thrower” to S.F.’s rich and famous (everyone from the Great Gildersleeve to Ted Kennedy), as typified by the title of her first book, How to Be a Party Girl.  Unfortunately, her life and career went into a spin after she threw an “astrology” party, and the reader is pulled along for the ride.

 

It seems a self-important Tarot reader was displeased with Pat’s supposed rudeness (she was busy greeting her important guests and forgot to bring him a drink).  Whereupon he grandiosely put a curse upon her and her house – a rather cold, old, empty place to begin with -- in front of dozens of San Francisco VIPs.  Her problems seemed to begin after this.

 

Montandon makes her case for something supernatural haunting her – she does list strange noises, music from nowhere, cold spots, and a sense of “presence”; her dog becomes so frightened of the house she has to give him away – but much of her book seems to be a record of simple bad luck.  Someone breaks in and steals jewelry, her car is hit on the bizarrely-curved street on which she parks, fires break out in odd places, and drug addicts and pushers move in upstairs.  Those seemed to me like normal big-city risks.  In these cynical times some of her other disasters seem rather tame:  She is supposed to be on Merv Griffin but gets bumped because the British model Twiggy takes too much time.  (“I felt myself retreating into the nightmare that had surrounded me for so long.”  Get over it!)  TV Guide advertises a televised appearance as “From Party Girl to Call Girl” (implying she was a prostitute; at least she sued them for $150,000).  After this a pimply-faced teenager calls her a hooker at a book-signing party (“I continued autographing books, but everything was a blur.  I could hardly see to write my name”).

 

So what makes the book interesting?  Well, there’s the man given the pseudonym “Earl Raymond”, an uninvited guest at the astrology party who dates Pat once or twice.  He devolves into the craziest SOB on earth during one date; I remembered him thirty years after reading The Intruders in high school.  Then there is the strange death of Mary Lou Ward, Pat’s secretary and best friend.  Much of the book is devoted to this tragic event, and we are given police and coroner’s reports, yet the more details we see, the murkier, stranger, and creepier her death becomes.

 

Reading it again after thirty years, another factor set in:  The book is almost a companion piece to Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac, though the infamous serial killer is never mentioned.  Names familiar from the Zodiac case pop up here, including Herb Caen’s and David Toschi’s – Detective Toschi is almost a “guest star” in The Intruders.

 

. . . So I read Intruders yet again, pretending that Zodiac was the cause of Ms. Montandon's problems:  the mysterious fires, the threatening and obscene calls, the break-ins . . . and damn if Pat’s “disasters” didn’t mesh well with the Zodiac timeline!

 

And the crazy boyfriend “Earl Raymond” becomes even more noticeable:  a large, heavyset man, he crashed the astrology party to begin with – paralleling the Darlene Ferrin painting party.  His attempted abduction of Pat Montandon across the Bay Bridge to “Squaw Valley, where he had a cabin” is uncomfortably like the Kathleen Johns abduction.  Just who was “Earl Raymond”?

 

Why would Zodiac zero in on Pat Montandon and her cold, dark haunted house in the first place?  Remember the astrology party that seemed to spark the curse?  “I planned to have a huge round panel hanging by the entrance, with the signs of the Zodiac on it.” (p. 27)  So Z was wandering down the street and saw the big zodiac on her door . . . naturally he had to wander on in . . . practically an invite.

 

Not mentioned in the book is yet another tie to Zodiac:  Ms. Montandon was married, apparently, for two or three days, to Melvin Belli, the attorney who received at least one letter and phone call from the killer.  As I understand it, Montandon and Belli happened to be in Japan at the same time; they got a little tipsy; Belli took our heroine to a strange Japanese ceremony; the next day he announced that it was a Japanese wedding, and that he and Pat were now man and wife.  I suspect there was a major ass-whuppin’ after this, and Belli insisted it was all a joke.  Were they married or weren’t they?  Inquiring minds want to know.

 

So here it is.  The Intruders is mostly a rambling memoir of a really crappy period in Pat Montandon’s life.  Interesting in its details of a minor celebrity’s career, creepy in parts but unconvincing as a tale of the paranormal, and interesting in retrospect as a kind of sidebar to the Zodiac mythos.  Worth a read, especially if you know anything about the Zodiac case. ***