Novella November: Plague Of Hollywood Locusts

"I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her. "It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want. If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

At one point in my life I wanted to be an actress.

Yeah, when have you not heard that line? But seriously, I wanted to be one because of what I naively thought it represented --- you know --- fame, wealth, glamour, prestige, insta-acceptance, the chance to act with Benicio Del Toro (sorry, I love me some Benicio Del Toro). I even did theater for three years in high school just to see if I had what it takes to become a true thespian. Within a few years of being an understudy-turned-sound-director-turned-make-up-artist, I realized that just because my mother calls me a "drama queen" doesn’t make me an actress cause the fact stands that I'm a terrible actress. Truly terrible. Trust me, I'm someone who thrives better behind the scenes, not front and center.

For this, to some extent, I envied the stage kids, the kids who could cry on cue and who sung show tunes with colorful gusto at the drop of a fedora. These kids, my classmates, were going to be ACTORS, maybe not famous ones, but they were excelling at my girlhood fantasy to be a bronze Meryl Streep. Still, I think I admired them more for how they had the same teeth-grinding spirit I now have about writing. No matter what happened, they were never going to stop acting, never going to extinguish their dreams no matter how many bit parts, failed auditions, and false hopes they encountered. They held out hope that one day all the struggle and sweat would be worth it.

But what happens when reality sets in? When those bit parts never transpire? When your dream is deferred and denied over and over again into a webbed net of jaded insanity?

You get The Day of the Locust.

Novella November: The Love Child

"A love-child, the phrase had surged up from her inner consciousness, and she spoke it without realizing what it implied. It just did express what Clarissa truly was to her---the creation of the love of all her being. It was the truth, and in face of the truth she knew that no one could take the child away. She had saved her."

Being an only child led me to manifest Jasmine. She was a bit older than me, smarter, cooler, owned a pink Corvette, and had luxurious glitter dusted hair that she dragged across the floor. I told anyone who'd listen that Jasmine (yes, she was named after Aladdin's main squeeze) was my sister. My parents played along. They poured extra Kool-Aid for her, set a placemat at our table for her, made sure she was buckled up in the backseat --- for my benefit they entertained this second "daughter".

After some time Jasmine started to become an issue, this when I began to talk about her outside of the comforts of home. Jasmine never went to school with me (she was older and cooler remember?), but I blabbed about her enough to where she became known to my teacher. Little did I know that I had successfully convinced her of Jasmine's existence so much so that when my parents came to a PTA meeting (yes, my parents actually went to those) my teacher asked about Jasmine's whereabouts and was greeted with my parents' quizzical stares.

Jasmine is no more, as all the "imaginary friends" I have now are characters in stories that I have hibernating in unfinished word docs, but it's a little funny that what made Jasmine more "alive" was not me just believing in her existence, but that I kept her in the confides of home, and once she became realized outside of that, poof! she was gone. Gone because she wasn't just exclusive to me anymore. I had messed up giving her away. Reality had intruded the fantasy. In short, I grew up.

To create a person out of thin air, give them shape and identity and then be able to convince others of such a creation requires an intimacy that is challenging to explain. Of course psychoanalysts, child experts whathaveyou have tried to link the appearance of an imaginary friend to a child having a social "problem", and since only children are sheltered little monsters who bray at the moon at midnight every third Thursday, we are classified as having such a "problem." (I'm kidding) True, I created Jasmine's existence due to a desire to have siblings, but it also was an inkling of the storytelling life I would quasi-live one day, and the wild imagination that I continue to have all so I can keep a little fantasy in my reality.

Maybe that's why I was drawn to this odd little novella as The Love Child actually delves into that weird, sorta Frankenstein-equse way we 'create' individuals in our adolescent, and how they somehow translate towards our adulthood. The Love Child delves a little further as it asks the question: what would happen if you conjured up your imaginary friend as an adult? If you're Agatha Bodenham, you'd play along, that is, till such a creation begins to consume you greatly...

Novella November: Seasons Change

"Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness toward terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions."

"An ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic" is how Stephen King described the novella in the afterword of this collection, and of course he of all authors would say that.

King laughs in the face of the 'slim novel' as even his leaner efforts seem to feel wide, and wander around in their labyrinths longer than the norm. It's why I wondered if placing this book among the miscellany of novellas I read and revisited for this monthly series was a bit fair. Different Seasons is a whopper at 600+ pages, as it contains not one little novel, but four B-I-G novels. The stories pack a punch, and have in a way, outgrown the spines they've been sewn in as three of the four novels have all gone on to become feature films, two of them  (Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption and The Body) now considered to be classics and some of King's best adaptations set to celluloid.

Different Seasons itself is also considered to be his best collected work of shorts and novellas for this reason, and I concur. For a time I thought Night Shift had that title on lock, but nah, Different Seasons yanks that crown off of its head, as he doles out some of his finest writing and introduces us to some of his most enduring characters in this collection.

Released in 1982, Different Seasons was considered "un-publishable" at the time due the four tales detouring away from the horror genre that made King serious coin, and it's true, this collection is devoid of supernatural elements, but there are things present that are tangible to terrify and evoke shivers. King excels at putting a lens on humanity (and inhumanity), making humans being as monstrous as we are capable to be, and this collection knows no different. The "monsters" in Different Seasons, whether it be the occupants in a looming maximum penitentiary, a former Nazi war criminal and his psychopathic adolescent tormentor, or four young boys who come face to face with death, do roam, and roam a range that only King himself could concoct.

Novella November: The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life"

Dead Poets Society. To Sir with Love. Lean On Me. Stand & Deliver. Mona Lisa Smile --- Miss Jean Brodie tosses a floral scarf across her shoulders and scoffs at those narratives about teachers who inspire and want their students to succeed. Inspire students? Pish posh. Urge students to succeed? Sure you jest!

Jean Brodie uses the classroom as her own stage. She is the star of a show called "Miss Jean Brodie in Her Prime" and she wants everybody to understand that being in one’s prime is the "crème de la crème".

Miss Brodie is a teacher at a Scottish girls' school during the 1930s. She is charming, self-assured, well-read, well-traveled, and an arresting storyteller with a swell of opinions on just about, well, everything.

She's also full of shit. So full of it.

Sure, she's got wit and sass. Sure, she's a raconteur of an unconventional sort, but she's also manipulative and a narcissist. She's also a Fascist. Truly. She stans for Mussolini and Francisco Franco. If she was around today she’d follow them on Twitter, write annoying think pieces on her Tumblr, and set up a GoFundMe in order to gather donations to help Mussolini 'improve' Italy. Aside from her love of Fascist dictators, her self-absorbed foolishness makes her quite dangerous, unfit to even be an orator of any kind, but there she is, her Roman nose held high in the air, teaching at a girls' school, "putting old heads on young shoulders".

It's also a shame that she has her admirers. Six impressionable students named Sandy, Mary, Eunice, Rose, Monica, and Jenny who are dubbed "the Brodie set". The girls hang onto Brodie's every word, idolizing her to points of extreme influence. They eat, sleep, and live Brodie. Two of them even write fan fiction about Miss Brodie (and as a bonus Spark provides every cringing word of it!).

In the book we follow the girls as they age and Miss Brodie being ever present in their lives and never wavering in encouraging a cult of personality between her 'set'. Brodie is so invested in these girls that she goes so far as to spin fantasy lives for them, "predicting" how they will end up (one girl is to be known for her "sex", though at 13 she’s giggling about sex) Yet, Miss Brodie doesn't realize that her idea to put "old heads on young shoulders" is soon to backfire, because as the girls mature and become more fully-formed individuals, the glow around Brodie begins to dull, with one member of the Brodie brood falling into disdain for her once beloved mentor, betraying her in the end.

Novella November: Breakfast Of Fancy Fakery With Holly Golighty

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell", Holly advised him. "You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get."

I must be in the minority, but as much as I adore me some Audrey Hepburn, I never warmed to her role as Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards' 1961 cinema classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's. I truly disliked the movie when I first saw it, and when I tried watching it again about a year ago, I still felt cold towards it. The iconic and stylish fashions Audrey sported throughout was the only thing that kept my eyes on it, and can we just say that Mickey Rooney in "yellow face" is about the most offensive on-screen performance next to well… Flex Alexander slapping chalk and wet baby powder on his face to portray Michael Jackson? (Yes, that was an actual thing that some people spent money on, recorded, and foisted upon human eyes…welcome to your future nightmares...)

So why read the source material for a film I have such an aversion too? Because books are always often better than the movie (duh) and Truman Capote is one hell of a writer (double duh). He is. He's a natural born storyteller who during his reign possessed the sassiest tongue from the South, and if he was alive today would have the shadiest Twitter log ever. His prose is so delightful and dagger-sharp, and tinged with just the right balance of purple. It's more so lavender and plum --- the relatives of purple --- to where you're whisked into word wonderment while reading, but never do you feel like you're suffocating on adjectives the whole time. He’s also a master at autopsying his characters right down to the atom. Holly Golightly would just be some insufferable white girl in someone’s inexperienced hands, but in Capote's she’s a "wild thing", untamable and feral, with dimensions that rival the facets on the diamonds she longs for from Tiffany's window displays.

Most consider In Cold Blood as Capote's masterpiece, but I don't know, as much as it is the godfather of true crime novels, I enjoyed reading Breakfast At Tiffany's a lot more and found it lingering in my mind longer. Of course, these two tales are incomparable. One is written as fiction, the other as fact; one is set in the rural Midwest, the other in the bustle of New York City. Night and day these stories are, but both books are about desperate, lost people who make poor choices over and over, because they don’t know another way and don’t care to find the exit sign, even when its glowing red in their face.

Novella November: The Shape of Mrs. Caliban

"You are too frightened. It spoils your enjoyment." / "Larry, you're all I've got"

Let's get this out of the way...

Mrs. Caliban was The Shape of Water before The Shape of Water. And yes, it too is about a woman who gets her freak on with a sea creature.

Oh, and you thought Guillermo Del Toro's Academy Award-winning film (and it's book accompaniment) was wholly original?* Surely you jest...

Now whether Del Toro was inspired by Rachel Ingalls' slim novel from 1982 is up for debate (Del Toro has stated that he was inspired by the romantic undertones in the creature feature classic Creature From The Black Lagoon), but it's not hard to detect that something was cribbed, as both posses strikingly similar threads of DNA whereas a lonely woman, stifled silent by her oppressive environment finds solace and personal freedom through loving an equally misunderstood sea monster. Both too also blur the lines of normal and abnormal (or how we define such...), but Mrs. Caliban, for me, detours into something deeper. Much deeper.