The Damned Lies Project

Will Barbee is a reporter dispatched to cover the return of one of his former college professor’s return from the east where they were on an archaeological expedition for two years.  There he meets the alluring April Bell, a new rival reporter who both draws him to her and scares him.  Fresh off the plane, the professor begins a speech about how the box they retrieved carries the most important discovery to mankind.  He begins to talk about a darkness that has plagued mankind for millennia.  He tells of the emergence of an antichrist-like figure known as “The Child of Night” and how his discoveries of what’s in the box are vital to mankind’s survival.

Halfway through the speech, the professor dies suddenly.  While most think it a heart attack, Barbee discovers that April strangled a kitten ritualistically during the speech and somehow knows that this is related to the professor’s death.  Despite that, he asks her out to dinner and starts a strange journey into darkness.  During the day he worries about his friends, the other members of the expedition who are dying one by one.  At night, he has strange dreams where he is brought into a world of dark witchcraft and lycanthropy, where his actions are related to the bad things happening.  Are they just dreams?  What is in the box?  Who is the Child of Night? Read the rest of this entry »

This is the story of Jesus.  You may think, wait, don’t we have one of those already?  Isn’t it the most purchased and read book in the world?  Isn’t it on Oprah’s book club?  All true, but this one is different.  Rather than the typical gospels, this is the story of Jesus (Joshua, actually, since Jesus was his Greek name) as told by Levi, also known as Biff, Christ’s friend from childhood until his death. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m doing something a little different this week.  Instead of reviewing a book, I’m going to review a video game.  However, as you’ll see, this one isn’t as big a stretch as you’d think, since this game is Alan Wake by Remedy Entertainment.

Alan Wake, the titular protagonist, is a mystery writer known for the famous Alex Casey series of books.  But Alan has been unable to write anything since he killed off Casey in his last book The Sudden Stop two years ago.  He knows the name of his next book is Departure, but he has been unable to write it.  As a vacation, his wife takes him to the rural forest town of Bright Falls in the Pacific Northwest.  There they settle into a cabin on the lake.  His wife reveals that she brought him to Bright Falls to get him to write again.  They have a fight and he walks out.  As he idles outside, the power to the cabin is cut and he hears his wife scream.  He runs back in to find her and…

Alan wakes up a week later behind the wheel of a crashed car, dangling precariously off a cliff edge.  He can’t remember the last week.  He tries to find his way through the forest to find help, but he finds himself pursued by darkness.  He is attacked by people possessed by this darkness wielding axes who he can only defeat in the light.  Along the way he finds the pages from the manuscript of his novel, Departure, which he doesn’t recall writing.  But the story the pages are telling is his story.  Sometimes they tell what has happened; other times they describe what is going to happen.

In many ways, the game is a great homage to Stephen King.  The game beings by a quote from King and along the way, there are many other elements referencing King.  It never descends into true fan worship, remaining its own story of Alan’s quest to find out what is going on and rescue his missing wife.

The game itself is an attempt to mimic two different genres: books and television.  Its intended pacing is that of a television show.  It is told in six episodes.  At the end of each episode there’s a piece of licensed music (Bowie, Nick Cave, etc) and the declaration “End of Episode X”.  The beginning of the next episode starts with “Previously on Alan Wake” and shows meaningful clips of experiences relevant to the new episode, just like a well done television show.

The book aspirations pervade the game, starting from the fact that Wake is a famous author.  But the most significant contribution is the manuscript pages.  Each page is full written and voiced.  These serve to expand the experience.  Some pages give descriptions of what side characters are doing off camera.  Other times they serve as back story for events that have just occurred.  In the best cases, they are an interesting form of foreshadowing.  Sometimes they depict events from future episodes.  Other times, they describe something soon to happen.  For example, in one early chapter Alan is fumbling through the darkness, besieged by darkness-possessed axe murderers.  With a flashlight and revolver, he has been holding his own against them, though with difficulty.  Then he finds a page talking about a weary Alan Wake fumbling through the darkness, almost at the end of the journey who hears the noise of a chainsaw.  This serves to increase the tension.  At some point you realize Alan will have to deal with a chainsaw-wielding maniac, but you don’t know when and where.  When you finally hear the buzzing sound of that chainsaw, the event is charged up so much more than if you had just heard it for the first time.

The basic game mechanics have Alan using a flashlight controlled by the left analog stick.  Holding down left trigger will cause this to focus on an enemy, but drain the battery.  At zero the battery either needs to be replaced or the player will need to wait for it to slowly refill.  All the enemies are covered in darkness.  Until that darkness is burned off them, they cannot be harmed in any way.  For most of the game, the only way to do so is the flashlight, becoming crucial to Wake’s arsenal, especially when being attacked by multiple enemies.

The other trigger controls Alan’s guns, which range from a trusty revolver to shotguns, hunting rifles, and flare guns.  There’s never enough ammunition for a guns blazing approach, so players must use it conservatively.  In addition, once empty, Alan must take a few moments to reload.  This can be interrupted by firing early, so players make the choice between reloading all bullets or loading one and quickly firing.

The light mechanic also works with environmental items.  Some generators can be turned on, creating spotlights which help burn darkness off enemies.  Alan can drop flares which temporarily cause enemies to reel backwards and retreat.  In addition, the game’s checkpoints are safe havens, spotlights of strong light where Alan heals and no enemy may enter.

The pacing of the game is either good or bad, depending on the level you want to judge it from.  While it is divided into a few episodes, they dramatically differ in length.  The first few episodes range from about forty-five minutes to an hour of playtime, which feels reasonable for an “episode” of a television show.  Later episodes increase dramatically, up to two hours.  What’s particularly weird with those is that those episodes have a clear break and stopping point halfway through, which the creators seemed to ignore.  This makes episodes sometimes feel even more doubly long than if they were just twice the time.  Players can of course save after any checkpoint, but there’s something that feels right in playing an episode in one sitting.  In addition, some stretches of travelling feel longer than they should.  While the gameplay never starts to feel boring or stale, there are a few instances where the player has been travelling a long time and are almost at the end, and it makes Alan fall or otherwise have to take a long wraparound path.  While the gameplay set pieces in these areas are fine, it did make me roll my eyes in frustration, since they did not add to the story or experience.

The story is kept fresh by Wake’s frequent narration of the circumstances or his worries.  The voice acting is very well done, including side characters.  Periodically through the game a radio can be turned on, and players can listen to the folksy radio host talk to local personalities.  There are certain sequences that can be viewed on the televisions within the game.  These are a surreal element, as each of these sequences were filmed with live action actors and then inserted in the game.  The dubbing is never correct, sometimes to just jarring effect, other times to an intended surreal effect where the live action actor stares, mouth not moving, but the voice is overdubbed.

Unfortunately for PC and Playstation owners, this game is only on the Xbox 360.  As a Microsoft-funded game, it will never be on Playstation, but unfortunately, the PC plans have been cancelled.  The sales of the game were moderate and no sequel has yet been announced.  There is an ending, but there clearly could be more, a second season, if there was a chance.  There’s two pieces of downloadable content, The Signal and The Writer, but reviews indicate these expand the experience but do not further the story much.

Overall, Alan Wake is an excellent game, especially for those looking for a cinematic or story-oriented experience.  Between the manuscript pages, narration, radio, and television elements, there’s an interesting narrative you don’t see in many games.  The game is neither overly creepy and strange like a Silent Hill, nor a watered down thriller experience.  It keeps a great balance between gameplay, never becoming too mired in cinematics, nor overflowing with gameplay sections, making players wonder what happened to the story.  Once you start, you will become engrossed in the game, wanting to know the fate of Alan and how it finally will end.

I have to admit that I have a certain love for how Jonathan Carroll writes.  Somehow his mix of plot, memory, stories, and everyday magic just soothes an inner need in me like seeing someone wrote a story just like a favorite half-remembered dream of your own or finding a painting/shoe/outfit/song/etc that you would do if you only had the talent in that genre.  There’s an experiential quality that is so magical that I enjoy even more than others of that nature, such as Rushdie and Marquez.

Why did I mention those two in particular?  It’s because they’re both magical realists.  Carroll is never officially called that, but there are plenty to suggest he is.  If his stories were set in third world countries focusing on natives and underprivileged, he would be immediately assigned that title.  But his stories are about New York, Los Angeles, and Vienna.  He writes about artists, writers, architects, and filmmakers.  Yet taking those away, the world he writes about, the experiences he writes about, and the everyday magic he writes about is just the same as any magical realist.

Outside the Dog Museum is different than every other Carroll novel I have read in that it does not start with a love story that starts in the first page or two and resolves by the first thirty.  At the start of the story, Harry Radcliffe is ping-ponging between two women, intimate and distant with both.  Harry is a genius architect and world famous.  He also has just recovered from a nervous breakdown unlike any other.  Rather than going a frantic, nervous mad, he started focusing on strange, small objects, making his own city out of odds and ends. Read the rest of this entry »

The titular mandalas of The 37^th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw are not the type you might be familiar with.  A mandala is typically a circular design of a spiritual nature, such as the power field of a Buddha or a spiritual maze which brings self-realization.  The mandalas of this book are not those.  They are circular images that suck in the attention, with sharp edges and the suggestion of rows of eyes, perhaps mouths, maybe even sharp teeth…  They are not associated with Buddhas nor do they promote self-actualization; far from it.

However, New Age author Derek Crowe would suggest they do.  He has put out his third book, The Mandala Rites with the depictions of thirty-seven mandalas and rituals for each of them.  For each mandala, he has written positive New-Agey explanations.  Why?  Derek is both a charlatan and a skeptic.  He doesn’t believe in any of the New Age.  He thinks it’s all bullshit and everyone who believes are gullible fools.  His plan is to make it famous as a New Age author, then later in life reveal he’s a fraud in yet another book.

The mandalas, however, are not his.  He claims that a spirit medium, Mrs. A, revealed them to him in a hypnotic trance.  While hypnotism is the one real skill Derek has and believes in, there was no Mrs.  A.  No, years before he met a magician named Elias Mooney.  Though they had a falling out, Derek took with him the thirty-seven mandalas depicted on something very, very disturbing.  Still unconvinced of the mandala’s real and chilling existence, Derek put out his own book, changing Mooney’s gloomy descriptions to ones of peace and love. Read the rest of this entry »

Shade’s Children by Garth Nix is a YA scifi novel occurring in a dark future.  Fifteen years ago “the Change” happened, and all humans above the age of fourteen disappeared.  The children were ushered into dormitories where they are raised until their fourteenth birthday.  On this fourteenth birthday, they are taken to the Meat Factory where they are harvested to become the brains for a variety of creatures used by the Overlords.  The Overlords war amongst each other on the empty Earth in a number of heavily codified territorial battles.

Not all children meet this unhappy fate, however.  Some manage to destroy the tracker chips inside them and escape.  Whether they do this by their wits or their power varies from child to child.  Most children have developed Change Powers, strange psychic powers that have only started appearing since that catastrophic event.  Sometimes these powers are useful, sometimes they do nothing to stop the child from being harvested. Read the rest of this entry »

Sharon Shinn’s novel Archangel takes place on the planet Samaria, a world colonized by humans.  People are separated into two types: regular humans and a very small ruling class of angels, modified to have real wings and be able to fly great distances.  The angels have one other duty, they can sing to Jovah and bring down rain, winds, floods, and lightning.

Rulership of the planet is in the care of the archangel, a position which rotates every twenty years.  Each year the Archangel and his wife, the angelica, must sing a mass to Jovah called the Gloria.  Failure to do so will start a chain of events which will lead to Jovah destroying the planet. Read the rest of this entry »

Felix Castor is an exorcist.  He is no Catholic priest, arcane sorcerer, necromancer, or eastern shaman.  He does not use arcane rituals, the power of God, indiscernible incantations, or psychic powers.  He is just someone who found from a very early age that he could see ghosts, something he couldn’t avoid.  He uses a tin whistle to exorcise ghosts, using the sound and melody to draw them out.

The Devil You Know is the first novel following Felix Castor.  For years he has not practiced his powers of exorcism, after one experience in the past where his mistake hurt an old friend.  This friend, possessed by a demon and incarcerated in a sanatorium, sends Felix a message at the beginning of this novel, warning him his next case will end in his death.  Felix balks, saying he’s out of that business, but a financial crisis of his friend and landlady Pen has him taking a case to help keep her from losing her house. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t be fooled.  The Knife of Never Letting Go is a science fiction novel masquerading as a young adult novel.  The basic setup and major world events are something you’d see in an older era of science fiction, something of a Philip Dick or an early Ursula K. Leguin.  Twenty years ago, Earth settlers came to a new planet.  While Earth-like, there were strange differences on this new world like pseudo-psychic abilities, talking animals, and of course an inevitable war with the native aliens.

This all would make it almost vintage science fiction, however, it is still a young adult novel.  Instead of focusing the story on the obvious movers & shakers such as town leaders, heroic men, or wise women, the story focuses on two children that are thirteen years old.  Also unlike vintage scifi, the story moves and rolls with the zest and readability of YA fiction, making this far more smooth and an enjoyable ride than most of the adult scifi of similar themes. Read the rest of this entry »

It is hard not to think of A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin as an urban fantasy version of Kill Bill.  This happens to be a very good thing. Read the rest of this entry »