Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen

Stormy Weather

by Carl Hiaasen

I began reading Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard about the same time and found them similar, perhaps products of the time period.  Both write about criminals and crime, but Carl Hiaasen's books are a good bit less violent and more plain fun. 

 
Sure, Elmore Leonard's books have been made into bigger movies, with a bigger budget I think, but I urge you to give Carl Hiaasen another look.  Stormy Weather is a favorite of mine.  It was the fourth book published by him back in 1995. 

 
Bonnie and Max Lamb are on their honeymoon in Florida when the news shows an inbound hurricane.  Max seems oddly excited about the weather to Bonnie and insists that they head south into the heart of the region that is being affected.

 
Edie Marsh has just given up on trying to bed, and then sue, a Kennedy heir.  She teams up with an old partner, Snapper, to fleece some people who have storm damage by pretending that a roof fell on her.  They pick the wrong person to try to con.

 
The absurd and the fantastic abound in Stormy Weather.  A one eyed man in a flowered shower cap has himself tied to a bridge before the storm hits by some young idiots out throwing empty beer cans in the wind.  He calls himself Skink and sees himself as an avenger of the wild in Florida.

 
Augustine is trying to chase down the wild monkeys and other illegally imported animals from his late uncle's wildlife farm after the storm when he meets Bonnie, whose husband Max has run off, chasing a monkey that stole his video camera.

 
Everyone seems a little storm addled in this wild ride and it makes for some fantastically fun reading.  If you haven't seen this one, give it a try.

 

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This is a novel written by two very well-known authors back in 1990 when Terry Pratchett was sort of kicking about and no one really knew who Neil Gaiman was yet.  The fact that it’s still in print tells you something.  They've both written a great deal since.  Pratchett is probably best known for his Discworld novels for adults but he's also written some wonderful ones for the middle grades and several other novels that have little to nothing to do with Discworld.  Gaiman is probably best known for his Sandman series but also Coraline and Anansi Boys.

Good Omens is a tongue in cheek book about the Apocalypse.  The dedication itself is rather interesting.  “The authors would like to join the demon Crowley in dedicating this book to the memory of G.K. Chesterton.  A man who knew what was going on.”   I first read a story by Chesterton, one of his Father Brown mysteries, when I was taking a detective fiction class in college.  I was immediately taken with his style and the character.  Apparently, Gaiman and Pratchett also appreciated him.

There is a large cast of characters including God and the voice of God, various angels and fallen angels, the four horsepersons of the apocalypse, humans, the antichrist and “a full chorus of Tibetans, Aliens, Americans, Atlanteans, and other rare and strange Creatures of the Last Days.” 

The book begins by asserting that any theories about when the world was created are incorrect, it having actually been created within a quarter of an hour of 9:00 am on Sunday the 21^st of October, 4004 B.C., which means that the Earth is a Libra.  Okay then.

The main problem of the story is that the Apocalypse is coming and, of course, someone has misplaced the antichrist, owing to a double switch by Satanist nuns.   “The babies looked similar both being small, blotchy, and looking sort of, though not really, like Winston Churchill.”

I don't want to say too much, though at over four hundred pages, I could probably say quite a bit and still not say too much, but I'll stop here just the same.  If you have someone on your gift giving list who enjoys fantasy novels, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are a fair bet, so why not start at the beginning and bring the two together?  I recommend this one.

Kitchen Privileges by Mary Higgins Clark

Kitchen Privileges
by Mary Higgins Clark

I've always found memoirs by fiction writers fascinating, even when I'm not a fan of their fiction work.  There's something about their powers of description and storytelling that have been honed through fiction writing which make their memoirs particularly engaging. 

Several years ago my sister gave me a copy of Kitchen Privileges by Mary Higgins Clark and I wasn't terribly interested because I didn't care for her mysteries, but I started reading the first few pages and was hooked.

Like most authors, Clark has led an interesting life in her own right.  (It seems most authors have held a variety of jobs in their life and draw on those varying experiences to put life into their writing.) 

Clark grew up during the Great Depression, a time when the neighborhood Good Humor man, felt lucky to lose his thumb and index finger up to the knuckle when the lid of the freezer smashed it because “it was a good accident... The company gave me forty-two dollars, and I was able to buy a winter coat for my wife.  She really needed one.”

Recollections of a huge extended family gathered around the table sharing stories and her Irish ancestry give the atmosphere.  She talks about being in love with her future husband (who lived on the next block) from age sixteen, though they wouldn't date for another five years.

Childhood asthma and frequently missed school taught Clark to be observant when she was home with her mother, hearing the stories as visitors came calling during the day.  A future writer couldn't help but be influenced by that kind of input.  Her father died when she was ten and her memories of him are warm and probably a little larger than life.  Her mother was unable to get a job so they rented rooms in their house.

Her mother was unstinting in her praise of Clark's writing from an early age, making her recite poems to guests and telling them she would be a great writer one day.  She admonishes others to be as encouraging to young people.  “When a child comes to you wanting to share something he or she has written or sketched, be generous with your praise.  If it's a written piece, don't talk about the spelling or the penmanship, look for the creativity and applaud it.  The flame of inspiration needs to be encouraged.  Put a glass around that small candle and protect it from discouragement or ridicule.”

All of this is just the beginning of her story, told in the first twenty pages.  I highly recommend this book for the personal story and the history.  As I looked it over again to write this review, I felt myself drawn in all over again.  It would also make a fine gift for a writer, as it did for me.

Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage

Today's Story Musing entry is guest written by Maryalice Little of the Southeast Steuben County Library.

Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage

by Stephanie C. Hamel

The one thing that does not abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

   ----Harper Lee

What would you do if you were offered a large sum of money to allow hydro-fracking for natural gas on your recreational property, a sum significant enough that it could ease your own financial burden and appease your husband by easing some of his wage-earning stress, in a geographical area with a long history of mining and at a time when there was little, if any, public concern over possible environmental damage?

As described by the author, this “true story, written first in diary form and from notes taken during telephone conversations, reflects a developing knowledge of the natural gas industry and the legalities associated with land ownership and gas leasing.” 

Stephanie Hamel and her husband had bought her family’s “summer camp,” an old farm near Wellsboro, PA.  At the time, she and her husband lived 200 miles away, and the additional physical and financial demands of the property sometimes seemed burdensome, especially when she was finishing her PhD thesis and later staying home to raise their two young sons.  Still, they spent long weekends continuing to slowly repair and renovate the buildings as Stephanie’s father and brother had done before her. 

Late in August 2008, Stephanie’s peaceful balance tilted.  The family’s plan for an extended end-of-summer visit to the farm had to be cut short when Stephanie opened some previously-disregarded mail only to discover that her son’s school was to begin earlier than the previous year.  As the day ended, darkness was slow to descend as bright lights remained focused on a neighbor’s property, where the clanging noise of well-drilling had begun.  She recalled the ground-shaking, rumbling trucks passing their house the day before, spewing diesel fumes while transporting large pieces of equipment. The industrial noise of heavy grinding continued through the night.

The following day, Stephanie’s husband was called to return to their permanent home due to an unexpected work need.  He called her late that night to tell her that he had arrived home safely and to share the news that they had received a letter from a natural gas company offering a five year lease of the farm property with a $130,000 signing bonus to potentially drill 5,000 feet into the shale below. 

With degrees in chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, and human exposure assessment and with a deep emotional attachment to the farm, and the added immediacy of her peaceful haven having been disrupted by a neighboring drilling operation in full swing, Stephanie’s response was vehemently negative.  But she reluctantly agreed to consult with their local attorney to see about the potential ramifications.  And so the fracking of the marriage begins.

Over the next nine months, Stephanie speaks with many people within and without the gas drilling industry and discovers that her decision making becomes even more complicated by the idea that a drilling company could drill down and then sideways from a neighboring property to obtain the gas from her property without her permission or  any compensation.  So why not just take the money while it was being offered, her husband argued?

I found the book to be an interesting read, as this is a very controversial and divisive issue in our own community.  Following Stephanie’s exploration of her options and the potential impacts on her family and to the environment helped me to understand views that are different from my own.  

Fortunately, my husband and I are in agreement about this issue, having been approached several times about signing a gas lease of our own property.   We have experienced the compromise of privacy that occurs with the presence of a pre-existing natural gas pipeline cutting across our property that hunters and four-wheelers erroneously consider to be public access.  

We have also experienced the impact of the installation of a construction disposal site, against the wishes of most of the neighboring land owners, that is one property away from ours: the influx of tractor trailers on an old dirt road at all times of the day and night, crawling uphill at a snail’s pace when heavily loaded and whizzing downhill when empty; then the welcomed widening and paving of the same road only to realize that it was still not usable for us because of the regularly occurring flat tires caused by cast-off debris left in the road.   Consequently, we now travel a different bumpy, dirt road to get to town.  But we accept that as a trade-off for the opportunity to live in my husband’s family home in what was, for many years, a place of predictable quiet and fresh, hilltop air.

I suspect that similar direct or collateral impacts pervade the fracking process.  All of these challenges beg bigger questions. Is it acceptable - and acceptable to whom, and in whose backyard - to allow the harvesting of non-renewable natural resources with or without monetary compensation to a landowner and with the risk of potential long-term damage to the greater environment?  Is it acceptable to favor (what appears to me to be) short-term gain over potential long-term loss?  But if the short term gain went directly to me, with the opportunity for favorable impact to the quality of certain parts of my life, would I answer these questions differently?  I would like to think not, but I admit to the presence of temptation.

Consider traveling the journey with Stephanie Hamel and find out what conclusion she drew and the impact of this fracking experience on her marriage.

Maryalice K. Little