April, come she will . . .

Michael  Butterworth
offers us
Excerpts from

My Servant the Wind:
A Diary of the New Wave

May 30th 2030

He is netting only fragments. In frustration he tries harder, becoming more confident with each attempt. Once 'arrived' here, he even attempts to 'think back' to pre-atomic conditions, like I spend so much of my time doing in reality now. Clawed from the future, these pieces eerily correspond to my present-day reveries - when he, the wind, allows me them.

[Non-Textual Insertion: My typing skills have declined so much that I needed about an hour to copy the above excerpt through typing it, which is why I don't quote as much as I used to, though I enjoy the excerpt, which tells me that it's from the future, and that bit of information problematizes the chronology somewhat for me, as I'd thought that the past [1971] was, in effect, our present, and that we were receiving fragments from the future [2030]. {Update: In the light of day, I'm not sure what I meant last night, except perhaps that 2030 seems not to be a mere fragment from the future.} Things also to know: The entries fall into Column A or Column B, which also happen to overlap, spatially, though not in the same space at the same time. The 'story' is a post-apocalyptic one, and though it jumps back and forth in time, from before and after the apocalypse, the reader soon adjusts and follows through. Highly recommended reading.]

Review of Vitasta Raina's Novella: Writer’s Block

Amazon Books

Vitasta Raina, urban planner and architect, lives and works in Mumbai, India, where she composed her novella, Writer's Block. The pun on block as "impediment" and block as "city unit" is intentional, and writers living in the block might or might not experience writer's block. Some do, some don't, but for the most part, the writers living there seem sufficiently ruly and productive.

But the city Chalet and its residents, the so-called charlatans, are about to undergo a crisis.

However, I don't want to reveal many plot spoilers. I will therefore offer a few thoughts. The story covers about 64 pages and focuses on the lives of eight writers, who are called "CAST," and distributes them across eight chapters (8x8=64), the last of which is titled, "While the Credits Roll," as if the novella were a motion picture. The first seven chapters are identified as "epiphanies," which would make them divinely inspired insights, and the subtitles read like a continuous poem of free verse style with occasional rhyme, as here on the first page:

I am if I choose to be
But I have no choice
In these million years of evolution
I have finally lost my voice (page 1)

The chapters are prose of native speaker quality, the sentences often of complex length, but nevertheless concise and clear. For example, here is a sentence describing a model of the city:

"Representing a city that in the last decadal cycle of the City Census estimated almost sixty percent of the inhabitants as parasite slum dwellers, the model displayed high rise residential estates, office complexes, shopping arcades, golf courses and a meandering network of transit corridors, flyovers and flyunders connecting the ends, the edges, the fringes and the cores of Chalet." (page 9)

The model is of an idealized Chalet, and mickle are the ways this city could be represented, extremes of poverty and riches, of asceticism and gluttony, of good and bad, of weak and strong, a list that could go on and on.

But the electricity abruptly stops working, and so does everything else, most significantly, the elevators. At that severe inconvenience, Chalet is turned upside down, literally, as the rich pour into the streets and the poor ricochet up to the penthouses. Still, life goes on, for most of the writers, who are stuck in the middle, neither rich nor poor, and Chalet goes on as well. This is all along expected as one reads this slender volume, but the details make for the difference, and for the unexpected.

Five Stars out of Five!

The Bland Leading the Bland

Trouble Maker

I think that this would make a great title for a novel: The Bland Leading the Bland. Taking to heart Paglia's provocative characterization of American universities, I should give the novel a college setting, as has often been done but can perhaps be bettered if given the old college try.

A Brief Line or Two on Knausgaard . . .

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Wikipedia

The writer Garth Risk Hallberg - in a NYT review ("Pathways to Perception," September 23-24) of Karl Ove Knausgaard's Autumn - informs us that in the six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle:

Knausgaard's abandonment of literary conceit is itself a literary conceit . . .

But then adds:

. . . albeit one of a higher order.

The review of Autumn is also mostly positive, and this entire blogpost would make more sense if I could provide a link to the review, but there seems to be no online version . . .

Glen David Gold: Carter Beats The Devil

Amazon Books

I recently read the above book, first published in 2001 but unnoticed by me as my attention was on a different diabolical scheme. The story is loosely based on the career of the magician Charles Joseph Carter (1874–1936) and is a "historical mystery thriller," as Wikipedia too helpfully points out (since I could have figured that out myself).

I'd give it five stars, for the twists in the tale repeatedly surprised me through the literary equivalent of a magician's misdirection. Wondering if any other readers had noticed this (and hoping none had so that I could write an article on it), I Google-searched and found that hundreds had preceded me . . .

So much for me thinking I'm peculiarly insightful. But I won't give away any plot spoilers since I wouldn't want any, either . . . so you'll likely be utterly astonished when hordes of extraterrestrial aliens invade the earth through an intergalactic wormhole and the Devil steps forth as champion of all mankind! I'd certainly be astonished at such a twist in the plot unless somebody were to let the cat out of the bag as a plot spoiler!

Oops . . . sorry about that.

Free Speech returns?

Stepford Students No More?

Google Images

Writing for The Spectator (October 8, 2016), Brendan O'Neill informs us that "Students are fighting back against the PC creed" . . . in Britain, anyway:

Something dramatic is happening on campuses. Two years ago, in this magazine, I wrote about the rise of the Stepford Students. These are the student leaders who might look and sound rad - all dyed hair and blather about 'intersectionality' — but who are really just officious meddlers in the lives of others. Whether they're banning sombreros because they're offensive to Latinos or No Platforming right wingers and off message feminists, these student officials strangle debate, and have tried to turn campuses from hotbeds of social and intellectual interaction into starched 'safe spaces' . . . . Now, however, a counter Stepford rebellion is stirring. Students are sick of being patronised, so they are shooting down this PC creed. They aren't hurling Molotov cocktails or staging sit ins, as students of old did - they're setting up free speech societies, boycotting patronising lifestyle lectures . . .

Good! May this trend continue - and spread to the States! Incidentally, the expression "Stepford Students" comes as a wordplay on "Stepford Wives," the title of Ira Levin's 1972 satirical thriller about rule-bound, conformist, robotic wives in an 'idyllic' neighborhood.

"Maestro, Marguerite, morphine: The last years in the life of Mikhail Bulgakov"

PubMed

Thanks to Kevin Kim, the great Big Hominid himself, I've received an abstract I can safely say I'd never have come across on my own:

"Maestro, Marguerite, morphine: The last years in the life of Mikhail Bulgakov"

The study was undertaken by G. Zilberstein, U. Maor, E. Baskin, and P. G. Righetti. Here's their "Abstract":

The manuscript pages of the final draft of Master i Margarita, the masterpiece by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the last four years of his life (1936-1940), have been treated with a mixture of chromatographic beads, namely a strong cation exchanger and a C8 resin. Potential substances captured by the beads, after harvesting them, were eluted with a mixture of isopropyl alcohol, dichloromethane and ammonium hydroxide and the eluate subjected to GC-MS analysis in order to detect the presence, if any, of drugs, due to the fact that the writer suffered intense pains caused by an inherited nephrotic syndrome. Indeed all the pages under investigation (a total of ten, taken at random among 127 foils) contained traces of morphine, from as little as 5 up to 100ng/cm2. In addition to the intact drug, we could detect one of its metabolites, namely 6-O-acetyl morphine. The significance of these findings in terms of a possible improvement of the novel and in terms of drug use (or abuse) in the modern world is discussed and evaluated.

In other words, here are the drugs he took, he took them for pain associated with kidney problems, and the drugs' painkilling properties may have enabled his final four-year work on improving the manuscript. There's also the biological significance:

The extraction of metabolites/proteins from the surface of the original manuscript pages of Bulgakov masterpiece Master i Margarita has permitted to monitor his health state and intake of medicaments over the last four years of his life. We have ascertained that: (1) he was assuming large doses of morphine as pain killers; (2) he was affected by a nephrotic syndrome, since we could identify three proteins known as biomarkers of this pathology. The double extraction procedure here reported could open up a novel field of investigation of (relatively) ancient manuscripts for metabolome/proteome analysis on the health status of the writer/artist.

And here are the key words:

6-O-acetyl morphine; Bulgakov manuscript; Chromatographic resins; Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry; Master i Margarita; Morphine

How interesting this "novel field of investigation"! How clever the novel pun!

Another Student's Gratitude . . .

Professor Hodges Reads from Novella

English Lounge Literary Event

Photo by Chung Yun-jo

Some time back toward the onset of this semester, a DIS student came to see me in the English Lounge to give me a gift along with a note of thanks:

I would like to express my sincere gratitude for everything you have done for me over the last semester.

First of all, thank you for being such a wonderful professor in World History class. At the beginning of the semester, I was really worried about writing the research paper and I (and my teammates) struggled while writing it. But we could successfully finish the paper as you kindly gave advice every time I visited you in you office hours and even on the days when you did not have office hours.

Also, thank you so much for taking your time to look at some of the papers that I wrote for College English class. I would not have been able to correct or even notice all the grammar mistakes I had made without your help. (And I would have received a terrible score.)

Finally, thank you for sharing your poems, book, and your personal stories. To be honest, I did not expect to have this close interaction with professors in university.

I am so glad to have taken your class and to be listed as one of your "unforgettable . . . . and intelligent students."

Thank you once again.

The poems this student refers to are a couple that I recited in my class on World History, in which I also mentioned my book The Bottomless Bottle of Beer - and I think I told in class of how I met my wife on a train in Germany . . . so this student must have asked more questions about me and my interests when she came to my office hours in the EEC . . .

Another poetic allusion in David Mitchell's Bone Clocks

Rare Iceland Forest
Google Images

Here's another literary allusion that Mitchell works into his own literary work:

HALFWAY ALONG OUR JOURNEY to life's end I found myself astray in a dark wood. This fork in the path, these slender birches, that mossy boulder tilted upwards, like a troll's head . . .

Most readers will recognize the allusion, so I won't insult anybody's intelligence by spelling it out, because - "Damn anything new to everyone!" - you ought to know already . . .

Losing My Religion - The Novel is Dead?

Kate Atkinson
Books, the Universe, and Everything

The essayist and novelist Tom Perrotta reviews Kate Atkinson's recent novel, A God in Ruins (NYT, May 4, 2015), and observes a decline in belief among some writers that the novel can survive late modern skepticism:

In recent years, a number of talented novelists have experienced a sudden and alarming loss of faith in their chosen literary form. David Shields thinks most novels are boring and disconnected from reality. Nicole Krauss is "sick of plot and characters and scenes and climax and resolution." Rachel Cusk has decided that conventional fiction is "fake and embarrassing." Karl Ove Knausgaard goes even further, dismissing the entire enterprise: "Fictional writing has no value."

Ms. Atkinson is not one of these apostates from the faith. Neither is Perrotta. Nor am I. One just needs to have a story to tell. The story doesn't even have to be new or original. My Bottomless Bottle of Beer story isn't new. Or original. But it's not a novel, of course, merely a novella . . .

As an undergraduate young man casting about for what to do next, I listened to one of my instructors observe that one really needs a pate full of arrogance to think that anybody would be interested in reading some story or other that we might happen to write. I did not agree. One merely needs to grow up in a storytelling culture. The listeners are already there, always ready and waiting for a narrative performance.

But I put aside storytelling in an earnest effort to learn more of the world first and signed on in this adventure called life by boarding the ship called "History," itself a form of storytelling.

Now an old man advising young men am I, and I say: Don't fear to tell stories. An audience is out there . . . waiting . . .

Mark James Russell: Young-hee and the Pullocho

Young-hee and the Pullocho

Amazon Books

I received an email invitation yesterday to a book-launching. The invite was from Mark James Russell, an acquaintance of my Expat Living days, if I recall correctly, back when I wrote columns for The Korea Herald:

So, at long, long last, my first novel, Young-hee and the Pullocho is out. Yay. I'm celebrating my first foray into fiction with a party, and you're invited - to Mudaeruk, a very cool bar in the Hongdae/Sangsu neighborhood.

We'll have some free food and beer (and you can always order wine and other things, too). I just ask that you please buy a copy of the book - it's just 10,000 won, cheap - and try to leave a short comment on Amazon, Kyobo Books or some other online bookstore.

Of course, feel free to bring along husbands/wives, friends, or anyone who might be interested . . .

That last line left the impression that this might be an open invitation, but upon checking with Mark, I discovered my error - the invite was to me - so I've corrected my earlier post, deleting the details of date and time:

Tuttle

launches

YOUNG-HEE

and the

PULLOCHO

by
Mark James Russell

at

Mudaeruk

Tuttle labels the book a YA (Young Adult), but Amazon says for grades 4 - 6. Amazon allows a peek inside, so you can read some to get a taste for the genre and appropriate age.

And don't forget my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer . . .

Another positive review for The Bottomless Bottle of Beer!

Amazon Books

Another good review of The Bottomless Bottle of Beer has appeared on the Amazon site:

Temptation and the decision making process are part of our everyday lives. How we decide to choose from right and wrong is what defines us, as an individual, spouse, and a member of society.

The Bottomless Bottle of Beer (BBB) is a rich story that follows a man who is trying to kick his drinking habits, but decides to have just one last beer. In his quest to find that one last heavenly beer, he finds himself in a dark hidden bar that will ultimately test his strength. Mr. Em, the proprietor of the bar has much darker intentions than just serving a simple bottle of beer. The connection in the early chapters to Genesis Chapter 3 is remarkable, which paves the narrative for the rest of the story, how to overcome the sin of making a deal with an unscrupulous “being”, and conquer temptation.

Dr. Hodges brilliantly takes the reader through the struggles of the protagonist, and the steps to regain control of his life, with his wife and a suspicious attorney, Daniel Webster. The pure beauty of this novella lies within the didactic humor of Dr. Hodges' storytelling, historical knowledge, and linguistic talent.

This novella is highly recommended.

Many thanks for the positive review. I hope readers will also spread the word . . .

Shannon Hodges: The Lonely Void

Amazon Books

I've just finished reading my brother Shan's recent novel and enjoyed it for its great hook and its surprising ending. As with his previous mystery novel, City of Shadows, the plot is complex and presents many characters - you might want to write down their names as you read - but the story is nonetheless a page-turner. Here's one reason why:

They . . . threw him onto a medical table strapping him down tightly. They stretched a cloth tightly across his face. He was unsure what was happening when suddenly water was poured down his mouth. He had always read water boarding simulated drowning and now had firsthand knowledge of the torture method's accurate simulation. He felt himself slipping, gagging, taking in water and it was absolute torture. Just as he felt the life force was about to leave his body, his tormentors stopped. (Shannon Hodges, The Lonely Void, New Generation Publishing, 2014, page 471)

They may have stopped, but I read on . . . and so, I think, will you as you follow counselor Bob Gifford along the paths of his two parallel, but star-crossed, noneuclidean careers.

Not knowing precisely how waterboarding works, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the above description, but from this description, I know that what is depicted would be torture for me to endure.

Strange things in a new book . . .

Amazon

I've just finished reading Michel Faber's recent novel about interstellar mission work (yes, sharing Christ with space aliens), and it's outstanding, though not perfect - I'd say 4.5 stars out of 5 on the Amazon ranking (though the readership gives 4).

I was relieved that the story didn't take a Heart-of-Darkness turn, though I feared for a while that it might - and maybe it will, if Faber writes a sequel.

I did think there were a couple of implausible coincidences in the story - you know, the coincidence that gets a character out of trouble. Unless I misread . . .

By the way, Faber gives credit in his Acknowledgements to the people who worked at Marvel Comics, and his reference to the 1960s and 1970s means that he and I were reading the same comics at the same time, more or less:

I would like also to express my appreciation for the team of writers, pencilers and inkers who worked at Marvel Comics during the 1960s and 1970s, giving me such enjoyment as a child and ever since. All the surnames in The Book of Strange New Things are based on theirs, sometimes slightly altered or disguised, sometimes not.

Faber says more, but what am I, your secretary?! Go read the book for yourself!

"Writers aspire to be more than storytellers" - Michael Schmidt

Amazon

Research Professor Su-kyung Hwang of Chung-Ang University has asked me to present a paper at an upcoming conference:

[We will] have the international conference on the 12th and 13th of December. The big theme of the conference is going to be "STORYTELLING" and I'll let you know further details when I have them. We welcome various research topics related to storytelling and most of the time schedule thirty minutes for each presentation (twenty minutes to deliver the paper, and ten minutes for open discussion) although it has not been fixed yet. We hope that you can come and present a paper for us.

I'm certainly happy to try to get something worked up, and I came upon an interesting remark just yesterday Michael Schmidt's literary critical magnum opus, The Novel: A Biography:

Writers aspire to be more than storytellers: they play with and against the rules. The "reality" of fiction is unlike the reality of linear narrative and unlike the complex intersecting realities of daily life . . . . Art entails artifice, and in form a novel must be true to itself, an instance of itself, its first artistic purpose. Its consistency, its coherence within the conventions it proposes and within which it operates, are paramount. (Schmidt, The Novel, page 814)

Perhaps I can work up something on that . . .

Michael Schmidt on the Mystery of Reading

Michael Schmidt

Random House

Early in Michael Schmidt's new work, The Novel: A Biography, he portrays reading as a mystery:

A novel is a kind of rabbit hole. It led Gorky's Nastiah into all-absorbing emotion, the Victorian schoolboy into adventure, and a young Mexican into an imaginary, heroic Europe. Novel reading begins in a paradoxical double action of escape and engagement; reading conventional novels takes readers from where they are to realms that are shaped, with beginnings, middles, and ends. Taste changes over time: Our developing habit requires increasingly subtle stimuli and satisfactions -- a hunger for experience transformed, that transformation being the writer's aim.

Schmidt doesn't use the term "mystery," but that's what "rabbit hole" implies, for Lewis Carroll's use of a rabbit hole led Alice and her readers to a wonderland where they were trapped in an escape. As for Gorky, he is well known still, but the novelist who led the Victorian schoolboy into adventure was the now-neglected G. A. Henty, and the "young Mexican" led by some novelist "into an imaginary, heroic Europe" was none other than the author of The Novel: A Biography.

So far, so good . . .

Michael Schmidt: The Novel: A Biography

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Order from Amazon

I'm going to read a very long work on literary criticism. I try, of course, to keep abreast of lit-crit theory, and I encounter it often in much of my editing work, but this 1200-page book by Michael Schmidt differs from that sort of literary criticism, or so says Jim Higgins in his review, "Michael Schmidt's 'The Novel: A Biography' captures life, history, connections of literature" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 18, 2014):

In the book's distinguishing feature, Schmidt taps the opinions of novelists about each other, rather than leaning on professional critics a la Harold Bloom (only cited once in this gigantic volume). The likes of Woolf, Ford Madox Ford and Jonathan Lethem offer insight and argument alongside Schmidt. "The most penetrating insights into Cervantes are those of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, of Stendhal and Flaubert and Turgenev, Dickens and Faulkner and Hunter S. Thompson; not only what they say about 'Don Quixote,' but how they incorporate the sad knight and his sidekick into their own imagination," Schmidt writes.

This sounds like the sort of lit-crit book I've been reading for, and if it is the one, I'll keep you posted.

A Few Words on Resurrection: A Zombie Novel, by Michael J. Totten

Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

Google Images

I don't read horror fiction for the simple fact that it terrifies me due to my vivid imagination, so I was faced with a dilemma when Michael Totten announced the publication of his very own 'zombie' novel, for I've been reading his journalism several years now, and I like his writing on the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, various places where the West dwindles and ends.

Totten's zombie novel is the same sort of story -- as I discovered when I finally manned up and read the thing -- the end of Western Civilization, world civilization, for that matter, and the emergence of barbarism in the form of zombies who spread like a plague and attack like jihadis hyped up on angel dust, for they create nothing, preserve nothing, and destroy everything, whether through intent or inadvertence, as a hardy crew of human survivors see from a sailboat they've manned in an attempt to find safety by sailing to an island:

They couldn't see Seattle yet. Vashon Island stood in the way. They'd have to clear that before they could see the big city. The glow on the clouds above the city, though, was clearly visible above the dark hills in the distance.

But the power wasn't on. The glow was flickering. And the color was off. It wasn't yellow or white. It was orange.

"That's not city light we're looking at," Hughes said.

And that wasn't a cloud over the city. It was a column of smoke the size of a mountain. (p. 177)

With the breakdown of civilization, everything goes to hell. Seattle is experiencing a firestorm, and zombies are undoubtedly frying to a crisp (not that that's a bad thing). But nature, in all its dreadful mystery, goes on:

The Olympic Peninsula produced the only true temperate rain forest on earth. Not even the other lush forests of Washington and Oregon are like the forests in the Olympics. Everything's wet all the time. Baby trees grow from the sides of fallen dead trees, sucking nutrients from their predecessors like cannibals. Curtains of moss the size of houses hang from the canopy . . . . [in a forest of] midnight . . . darkness . . . . [without] even stars[,] . . . . [a] world . . . shrouded in pitch . . . . [and thick with] hungry, 350-pound [creatures] . . . just waiting . . . [to tear] to pieces by claws and by teeth. (p. 38-39)

Totten's point, in part, is that the zombies are as natural as those cannibalizing 'Baby trees' and those lurking hungry teeth, and that if you're going to survive the collapse of civilization, you've got to recognize that nature isn't always benign. Neither are people. This is the collapse of civilization . . .

Totten's novel is genuinely a page-turner, something I rarely experience, and the novel is not so much horror fiction as it is post-apocalyptic fiction. I recommend it as a good read and an interesting 'thought-experiment' as to what happens when civilization collapses.

POTENTIAL PLOT SPOILER!

The story did leave me with a few puzzles. Here was a brow-wrinkler for me: One character suffers two month's amnesia, yet turns out to have been ill for merely three days, whereas another character who falls ill for three days has trouble recalling only those three days. Odd.

PLOT SPOILER OVER!

Anyway, while everybody wants to write a novel, Totten has written a good one!

Post-Apocalyptic Miltonic Times?

"Snowman wakes before dawn"
By Jason Courtney

I'm still reading Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake, in which Snowman, so-called because of his whiteness and sensitivity to the sun, recalls his pre-apocalyptic lover in his post-apocalyptic time, and imagines her saying:

Paradice is lost, but you have a Paradice within you, happier far. (Oryx and Crake, 362)

Snowman imagines this because all he has left of her are memories and fantasies, though he is not happier, but sadder by far, so these words are questionable. This line, however, recalls Milton's line (587) in a passage of Paradise Lost 12.581-587:

. . . onely add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,
Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,
By name to come call'd Charitie, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A Paradise within thee, happier farr.

That's also questionable, I suppose, but what isn't? There's another direct allusion in Oryx and Crake to Milton's epic poem, one I noted mentally, thinking I would remember, but I now can't recall what it was! Perhaps some reader can jog my memory. Speaking of drawing upon Milton, I do so in my novella several times, as here:

I fixed my gaze on the drink, reflecting that this proffered taste hadn't come quite so freely as I had initially anticipated, but to obtain an entire bottle for a few drops of blood was surely a good bargain and therefore a wise choice. So thinking, I reached across the table in that moment and plucked the oddly heavy bottle from where it invitingly sat. Intent now wholly on a taste and regarding nothing else, I poured the big glass full to the brim with the heavy, dark beer and took a sip. It had the kind of flavor that one could describe as full-bodied, but there was also a possible hint, strangely enough, of something eldritch and gamey . . . something redolent of goat. Maybe satyrical? Was that even a word? And where had I picked up "eldritch"? I sipped again. No, no gamey taste at all. I had been in error. The flavor was delightful, as if the brewed barley had come from a perfect garden of earthly delights. Whether the bottle was truly so good, or merely fancied as such due to my thirst, I now drank greedily, without restraint, knowing not the drinking depth of that bottle, which easily filled the glass a second time full, again to the brim with the dark, strong beer. Downing it all, I poured another, and another, and another. Satiate at length and heightened with the alcohol, jocund and boon, feeling as though all of nature were as trembling with intoxication as myself, I thought, "Ah, virtuous drink, I now know, what I earlier held in obscure infamy, defaming at a glance Shoggoth's Old Peculiar, to be a blessing in disguise, for experience is the best teacher of wisdom in this, as in all things."

Homework for my readers: Identify my Miltonic sources, and other sources, for that matter. Not that anybody is interested . . .

Carter Kaplan: Amazing Amazon Review of My Novella

A third review has appeared on my novella's Amazon site. Titled "Brilliant... and somewhat frightening," this one is by Carter Kaplan, who awards five stars and says, in his inimitable way:

Horace Jeffery Hodges' novella "The Bottomless Bottle of Beer" is many things: an entertaining fantasy and a romping good read, a post-postmodern meditation on contemporary culture, an excursion through the art of literary allusion (the use of Russian literature is particularly notable and ingenious), and a sophisticated (and seamless) philosophical examination of the complex interrelationships among legal philosophy, linguistics, theology, and the phenomenon of ethical choice. This latter is for me the most intriguing and the most frightening aspect of the story. Hodges very successfully argues that moral choice lies at the center of the problem of the human condition, and he drives home his point -- without metaphysics and without moralizing -- that our situation in the Cosmos is precarious indeed; and that recent progressive claims for the transformation of society and the human race through a postmodern revolution in consciousness are premature, naive, self-deluding, and very possibly self-destructive. But this is not to say that the story suffers from didacticism or a burden of turbid ethical arguments. The story is delightfully playful and entertaining. Hodges offers a richly-conceived world that is precisely (and superbly) rendered through plot, character and word-play. Fluent, canny and electric, Hodges is an expert story teller: here is a streaming fountain of amazing and poignant images that are haunted by astonishing and challenging ideas. Set in a world that is familiar but also slyly, vaguely and then suddenly fantastic, "The Bottomless Bottle of Beer" is suggestive of H.P. Lovecraft (who is subtlety alluded to in the story) in his arch and ironic mode. There is an odd darkness here, but rising up from beneath that darkness there is a humor that is as startling as it is amusing. Highly recommended.

I'm beginning to see a pattern to these reviews -- their authors are a lot smarter than I am, for they see more in my story than I realized was there! They're also all friends of mine, which might predispose them toward favorable reviews, but I don't think they'd be quite so favorable if they didn't mean what they say.

But I know I'm sure sometime to get some reviewers who don't like the story . . .