Nutmeg News

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Coyotes. According to biologists who are doing a better job than the Connecticut DEP, western coyotes have successfully penetrated New England — and picked up wolf genes along the way, making them larger and more capable of dropping bigger prey. Meanwhile, the telephone poles in my town resemble those of Santa Carla in The Lost Boys, papered with “lost dog” fliers. Not all of them ran away or were hit by cars…

Easton raid. Daniel Tepfer at the Connecticut Post has a solid update on the fatal police raid four years ago this month. It’s such a thorough piece — compensating for the Post’s previously shallow reporting on the event — that I’m tempted to go through it line-by-line, but I’ll confine my remarks to “Chandra Parker,” the informant. If, like me, you’re obsessed with discovering the counter-narrative of what really happened that day, then she is the crux of the whole matter. Why did an obvious liar and drug addict willingly walk into a police station to rat and/or lie about Terebesi? One attorney involved in the case suggested to me that Terebesi had a habit of disobeying the first law of engaging prostitutes and this was her revenge (the shotgun shooting of the house less than two weeks earlier may have been related or evidence of similar bad judgment). From Tepfer’s rendition, it sounds like the officers who took her statement were confused by Parker/Pankov’s presence but Solomon seized upon it as the wedge he wanted. So was it serendipitous (for him) — or prearranged?

Radley Balko on the raid here. My story for the Fairfield County Weekly is no longer online, but I’ve written about it on the blog here.

Sunday sales. You won’t hear me say many good things about Governor “Tax” Malloy, yet I have to admit he accomplished something none of his predecessors could — albeit still in the name of taxes. Here’s a post from the co-owner of Mrs. Kuhl’s wine shop, who specifically entered the business so he could have a guaranteed Sunday off from work. I see his point but protectionism is protectionism; there was a time when all Connecticut shops were closed on Sundays, and nobody is nostalgic for that.

The Borribles

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The Borribles
Michael de Larrabeiti
Tor (214 pp, $6.99, July 2005)

While on patrol one night in London’s Battersea Park, Knocker and his buddy Lightfinger discover a Rumble trespassing on their home turf. The two Borribles quickly capture the Rumble and then —

Wait. What’s a Borrible? What’s a Rumble?

Borribles, in Michael de Larrabeiti’s razor-sharp novel, are “feral Peter Pans,” to cadge a phrase from the New York Times, pointy-eared children who never grow up:

Normal kids are turned into Borribles very slowly, almost without being aware of it; but one day they wake up and there it is. It doesn’t matter where they come from as long as they’ve had what is called a bad start. A child disappears and the word goes round that he was ‘unmanageable’; the chances are he’s off managing by himself. Sometimes it’s given out that a kid down the street has been put into care: the truth is that he’s been Borribled and is caring for himself someplace.

They are urchins gone elf, living in loose neighborhood tribes, squatting in abandoned buildings and shoplifting their food; they have no leaders or laws beyond a collection of proverbs (“Don’t get caught”), which they frequently cite in their arguments. Borribles are anarchist lawyers, “outcasts, but unlike most outcasts they enjoy themselves and wouldn’t be anything else.”

Their sworn enemies are the Rumbles, intelligent rodents resembling “a giant rat, a huge mole or a deformed rabbit” that walk on hind legs and even drive cars. The Rumbles dwell in a massive (and very posh) underground bunker in Rumbledom; a native Londoner might better recognize the area as Wimbledon Common. They’re also parodies of The Wombles, a series of children’s books, TV shows, and films which I’ve never read or seen.

The discovery of a Rumble rooting around in their territory incites suspicion of a Rumble invasion of Battersea and beyond. A Borrible council is quickly called, whereupon it’s decided each of the Borrible tribes of London will furnish a warrior to participate in the Great Rumble Hunt. The goal of this expedition: to infiltrate Rumbledom and assassinate the eight members of the Rumble High Command, thereby decapitating Rumble society. And, so that the Rumbles may have a sporting chance, the Borribles release the Rumble prisoner with a message for the High Command, explaining the entire plan.

Thus ends Chapter One.

Continue reading “The Borribles“ →

The Weird Western Front

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Hey nerds! Two of my weird Westerns are now available in new anthologies.

Befitting the theme, editor Eric Guignard assembled an international table of contents for Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations (Amazon | B&N). My favorites include Gitte Christensen’s future vision in which humanity has divided into voluntary yet contract-based subcultures (in this case, a group of ocean-exploring steampunks); and a very smooth ghost story by Joe Lansdale. Besides my own contribution (which Eric touted, “Out of the submissions I received, few struck me as unique and colorful”), there are a couple other weird Westerns in the book too. The publisher is staggering the release of e-pub editions but not by long, so if you prefer to read it on Kindle or Nook, you should only have to wait a few months.

Also out is Low Noon (Amazon | Kindle) from Science Fiction Trails editor David Riley. David mentioned being a fan of ghost stories and so I sent him an idea that had been simmering awhile. I like suspense, not horror; I refuse to watch contemporary horror films because of the sadism and gore, yet I love me some H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James, and decades later I’m still traumatized by The Changeling and The Fog and The Shining. One of the items on my weird-West checklist was to write a story about property rights in an abandoned mining town — and so it all came together in “Realgar.”

As always, thanks for reading my stuff, whether it’s here or somewhere on the trail.

Hands Off Your Neighbor’s Ass

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My friend Max Borders is running a Kickstarter fundraiser to launch his book Superwealth: Why We Should Stop Worrying About the Gap Between Rich and Poor:

If The New York Times can trot out billionaires with guilt complexes, maybe someone out there will listen to a middle-class guy with a well-considered, well-researched case for why we should:

1. Stop worrying about The Gap,
2. Understand the true nature of wealth and poverty,
3. Stop demonizing the wealthy,
4. Focus on how best to help the poor, and
5. Learn to celebrate wealth creation.

Max’s thesis is something I’ve echoed in my own arguments with folks worried the rich are growing richer and the poor allegedly poorer (I’m looking at you, Dad). If you understand wealth is not zero-sum and is therefore infinite, then there will always be persons who grow richer daily just as every moment Voyager 2 travels farther from our sun.

Now, if an individual uses his wealth to prevent others from rising to the same plane; if he and others conspire to raise costs of goods or services through monopolization or price-fixing or corporatism; if he invests unwisely only to be rescued from loss by public money — then that’s wrong and must be combated.

But wealth in and of itself is not evil. Camels-through-the-eyes-of-needles jealousy is Nietzsche’s slave morality, simple knee-jerk emotionalism that tars something bad merely because you don’t have it.

And, in fact, because wealth has no inherent moral value — what is steel compared to the hand that wields it? — it does just as much good as evil, if not more. For every Wall Street profiteer deriding his own clients as muppets there’s a Santa Claus handing out hundreds at a homeless shelter. As Max says, instead of fretting over the zeroes in the country club president’s savings, we should concentrate on how those on the other side of the tracks can add digits to their own accounts.

So please — give Max’s Kickstarter page a gander and consider supporting him.