Attention, All Ye Great And Mighty NovelSnobs:

Let me begin with praise.

• I admire the fact that you made it all the way through Infinite Jest, including all 100+ pages of endnotes.
• I am humbled that you’ve read every last word of Ulysses. (I think I made it to maybe page 8 on one Bloomsday a decade-and-a-half ago)
• If reading were an Olympic sport, I would give you a medal for finishing Faulkner’s entire body of work. (By about the fifth “Caddy smelled like trees,” I was totally outta there.)
• I am in awe that you have read not only Gaddis but Pynchon and Vonnegut and Auster, and that in the near future, you intend to put an entire Garcia Marquez through a shredder, reassemble it with scotch tape, and devour it cover-to-cover in a masterful display of The Reader Authoring the Author.
• The fact that you can (and do) pepper conversations about what you’re reading with references to Lyotard and Derrida and Baudrillard? Totally hot. Especially to grad students. Who can occasionally be totally hot, too. So that probably works out for you.

But me? Li’l ol’ me? With a pale and faded little certificate showing that I completed a Master’s in English program sitting there in my bedroom, gathering dust on a bookshelf next to a bunch of Martin Amis novels (I know, I know…he’s so middlebrow…and that thing he did when he fixed his teeth? Who could take him seriously as a novelist after that?)?

I know I have a problem.

I know I’m just not on your level, up there reading in the Big Leagues with you.

I know you find the mere existence of books that I enjoy…an insult to your intelligence.

Oh, yes. You do. I’ve seen what you’ve got to say about the kinds of books I choose to read. I’ve seen it at Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, in the Comments section of Big Salon. Most recently about the first selection of the Open Salon Book Club, which I am in the process of devouring. (Slurp. Yummy.)

You drip contempt all over my literary taste the way Pollock dripped paint on canvas.

Or maybe the way one of the “sticks” in the novel I’m reading right now sloshes a human’s blood and viscera all over…well, everything.

You think I’m a moron.

And that what I’m reading right now is a travesty of "literature."

That’s nice.

I’m OK with that.

So I’m joining in the fun and reading The Passage, the inaugural selection of the Salon Book Club. When I sent an email to Kerry saying, “Sure, send me a book, even though I have no idea what it’s going to be,” I figured what the hell. It couldn’t suck too badly.

Well. It doesn’t, but some of its characters sure do.

Yeah, it’s got vampires in it. But they’re not cool teenybopper vampires. They’re also not stiff, spooky Eastern European vampires. They’re definitely not the pristine, elegant, mannered vampires of Anne Rice. (Although, yeah, I’ll cop to enjoying the first few Rice novels, too. Right up until Queen of the Damned. I hoped against hope the old Anne might return, but no. By the time of The Vampire Armand, I figure the editing house had had just about had enough of Anne too, because they apparently couldn’t even be bothered to hire her a copyeditor competent enough to change the word for the yellow part of an egg from “yoke” to “yolk” throughout the whole manuscript. Or a proofreader capable of flagging such a blatant error in bluelines. Yikes.)

Where was I?

Ah, yes. Vampires.

These vampires are scary. But not for the reasons you're probably thinking, as you sit there with your nose and lip curled in a disgusted sneer.

As any lover of overly simplified black-and-white dichotomies will tell you, there are two kinds of readers: Those who will sully their fingers touching the pages of a book with vampires, and those who will not. (There are also two other kinds of readers: those who call books “novels” and those who do not. In addition, there are those who will at consider a light, fun, fast read, and those who believe that reading a “novel” should require the intellectual equivalent of an IronMan event.)

I am, in short, a reader who is (despite the saint-patient attempts by professors to change me) inclined to enjoy light, fast, and fun over weighty and slogging and brain-melting. Inclined to read books, not novels. more than willing to dive right into a book with vampires.

I am also a reader who loves sci-fi, speculative fiction, apocalyptic visions, and an overall “humanity is so fucked” theme.

So for me, at least, at at 200 pages in, The Passage is turning out to a joy to read. It’s putting me in mind of a few of my favorite reads of all time, in fact, which is not easy to do.

One of those is The Stand, which I've noticed is popping up in reviews and blogs about The Passage enough that I don't need to mention it. Even though I just did. (Although I'm hoping it's mostly like the first half of The Stand, which was all death-and-disease-and-despair, and less like the second half, which was all good-and-evil-and-God-and-stuff.)

 

Allow me a moment to backtrack.

When I was in High School—way back in the multicolored, leg-warmer-rich days when a raven-haired Ronald Reagan was enthusiastically saber-rattling in the direction of the Soviet Union—I picked up a novel book in the library called Warday by Whitley Strieber and his real-life boyhood buddy, James Kunetka.

Strieber (for the benefit of those who only read foreign novels in their original language and are unfamiliar with American genre authors) was at the time a successful horror novelist who’d already churned out The Wolfen and The Howling, both of which Hollywood eventually took a liking to.

He’s also the writer who a few years later would pen Communion, a remarkably convincing book about his personal abduction by rectum-probing aliens. Now, I’m not suggesting that he went all James Frey with that series; I’m just saying that he and Kunetka thoroughly convinced me in Warday, for a few hundred pages, at least, that a world existed in which limited nuclear war had created an America that was a bifurcated dystopia, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same writer were capable of thoroughly convincing me that he’d been subjected to Close Colonoscopies of the Third Kind. He's so convincing, in fact, that I suspect he's absolutely convinced himself.

Anyway. I loved Warday.

Its use of a dual-voiced first-person narrative, coupled with an overflow of chillingly realized fictional government memos and documents, seared images and ideas into my impressionable little 16-year-old brain that still erupt from time to time. (Generally in dreams. But sometimes when I’m observing foreign policy. “Bring ‘em On” flashed me into Warday’s reality for a moment, for example.) An America bifurcated by thirty minutes of incredibly bad judgment, saddled with piles of useless remnants of electronics and machines that were permanently killed by EMP, populated with desperate citizens whose healthcare is rationed according to their radiation lifedoses.

Back then, we all thought it could happen. (It still could.)

The book haunted me.

A couple of years later, the same team co-authored Nature’s End, and this time the apocalypse was brought to you by environmental meltdown. The style was the same; the meltdown of human civilization was still the topic. But its visions of unchecked corporate power/corruption, charismatically evil demagogues, amd the natural havoc that these two writers created 25 years ago doesn’t seem so farfetched to me anymore anymore. In 2003 and again in 2007, as I stood under skies raining down ash with orange wildfires glowing on the mountains East of where I live, I couldn’t help flash back to terrifying scenes in Nature’s End that “recount” a devastating, Santa-Ana fueled inferno that destroys vast swathes of L.A and kills tens of thousands.

I love novels books that create new worlds in my brain that I can revisit from time to time.

So far, The Passage is building a world I’ll probably revisit on the inevitable day when a weaponized biological agent somehow escapes from its double-plus-escape-proof containment area and kicks off something unimaginably awful.

No, it’s not Great Literature. It will not be joining the Western Canon.

500 years from now, if there are human students, and if they’re still reading (rather than, say, receiving information uploads via info-neural ports or some other mechanism that doesn’t require teaching young humans a skill that takes roughly 12 years to perform adequately, and another lifetime to perfect), they will not be reading The Passage.

Guess what.

They won’t be reading Infinite Jest, either.

Or Pynchon.

Or Derrida, for that matter.

Tell ya what, Ye Great And Mighty NovelSnobs.

You read what you like.

I’ll read what I like.

We’ll get along just fine.

Please check your smug literary superiority complex at the door.

I'll get the wine.

We're going to need it when the vampires get here.