What I'm Reading: Complete Peanuts, 1987-88

The Complete Peanuts is a noble project to publish every strip of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, from its inception in 1951 to its final panel in 2000.  It's a gargantuan undertaking, and a new volume covering two years is issued every six months.  The project actually finished recently with volume 26, but I'm a little behind and have only reached 1987-88. I've reviewed five previous volumes of the Complete Peanuts: the 1977-78 volume here, the 1979-80 volume here, the 1981-82 volume here, 1983-84 volume here, and the 1985-86 volume here.

Marcie learns what it's like

This volume continues following the strip during its gentle decline into old age. The first half of the book has surprisingly few long story arcs, but plenty of the dull strips about Snoopy's brother Spike, who lives in the desert near Needles, CA, and doesn't do a whole lot. I don't object to the occasional strip with him, but does he have to come back so often? How many cactus jokes can Schulz give us? In the second half of the book we get a few longer arcs, including one where Snoopy heard a rumor that the summer Olympics have been moved to Needles and decides to go visit his brother to help him sell souvenirs. Of course, the Olympics did not really move from the actual location that year (Seoul, South Korea), and Snoopy soon returns home.

There a couple more interesting arcs. One is when Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty decide to trade their useless right fielders: Marcie and Lucy. So convinced is she that Marcie is the worst baseball player on the planet, Peppermint Patty throws in a pizza with the deal, only to discover that nope, Lucy's even worse. Too late, Charlie Brown already ate the pizza! But even so, they do decide to trade back.

In another story arc, Sally volunteers to write the Christmas play for her school, only to write a part for Geronimo instead of Gabriel. When she corrects her mistake in the script, the kid who was going to play Geronimo feels cheated, but the argument is moot when the school board cancels the play altogether for being controversial. Schulz doesn't spell it out, but I suppose the controversy is putting on a religious play in a public school. In any case, Sally's relieved because now she doesn't have to deal with the Geronimo kid.

There's also a new character who's fairly delightful (although I think she was actually introduced in the last volume), Lydia. Lydia sits behind Linus in class and he has fallen in love with her, a condition she uses to continually bedevil him. At first she refuses to tell him her actual name, going through Sarah, Melissa, and so on. (But wouldn't Linus know her real name from the teacher calling roll at the beginning of the day? Never mind.) Whenever Linus asks her if she wants to do something with him, she asks if he isn't too old for her. Later, they exchange addresses for sending each other Christmas cards, only Lydia gives Linus the wrong address and his card is returned. She's out-Christmased him! Of course all this drives Linus crazy, but when Lucy asks why he bothers to have anything to do with her, he admits that he finds her fascinating.

This is actually a little livelier than the last volume, and I noticed a number of strips where Schulz puts in a level of effort on the art we haven't seen in a while. Still, it doesn't approach the great strips from the Peanuts heyday from the mid-1950s to the early 70s. This one is more for completists then general Peanuts fans.

Scary Movies: Aliens

What am I doing reviewing a scary movie the week before Christmas? Well, every Saturday night, the  members of my family alternate picking a movie for everyone to watch, and my son's choice this past week was Aliens. (I reviewed Alien a few months ago here.) No, we didn't let my daughter watch, and my wife sat this one out too. So it was father-son bonding.

Though this is the sequel to Alien, it has quite a different flavor than the first movie. The first was directed by Ridley Scott and was about a monster loose on a spaceship--essentially a haunted house in space. This movie, however, was directed by action master James Cameron and operates as an action-horror film, full of guns and soldiers and aliens getting blasted. (I speculated here that 1982's The Thing was the first entry in the action-horror sub-genre.)

It follows Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, the sole human survivor of the first movie, who has returned to human civilization. She finds a job as a loader operator on an industrial work site but suffers from nightmares that keep her from sleeping and finds it hard to relate to others. A big corporation has recently planted a small human colony on the planet where she and her crew encountered the alien in the first movie, disbelieving her warnings that malevolent aliens live in an abandoned spacecraft there. When the Corporation loses contact with the colony, they start to think she might have known what she was talking about.

Despite misgivings, she  accompanies a contingent of space marines to the planet to investigate. Not surprisingly, they find on arrival that the colony has been taken over by the aliens, with all humans apparently killed, their bodies used to incubate baby aliens. A battle between the marines and the aliens ensues in the depths of the aliens' breeding chamber, and the stakes rise even further when Ripley discovers a seven-year-old girl still alive, named Newt, who has managed to survive for months in the ductwork beneath the colony's buildings. Ripley, Newt, and the few remaining space marines must escape the aliens and meet a ship that is returning to take them from the planet's surface, but will not be able to stay long if they are not there on time.

ALIENS (1986)

Story/Plot/Characters--Pretty good acting by horror movie standards and a well thought-out plot. Cardboard characters though, and with a whole platoon of marines, there are a lot of them to keep track of, with little to differentiate them. Though most are killed off early, we still know next to nothing even about the ones who last most of the movie. (2.5 points)
Special Effects--Like the first movie, the effects in Aliens are masterful and spectacular. Spaceships, slavering aliens, abandoned industrial buildings, and planetary surfaces are rendered completely believable. I actually wished at some points the movie would slow down and give viewers a chance to enjoy some of the beautiful scenes. (2 points)
Scariness--Like The Thing, the very nature of the movie as a hybrid between action and horror undermines much of the scariness. Scenes that would be chilling in other movies simply turn into shoot-outs. Some tense parts, but my son spent very little time hiding on the stairs, as is his wont with scary scenes. (.5 points)
Atmosphere/Freakiness--Definitely some atmosphere in the abandoned buildings of the colony and the alien biology is disgusting and freaky. But again, as with The Thing, the fast action pacing undermines the atmosphere to an extent. (1.5 points)
Total=6.5 points

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Here's the master list of horror movies I've rated so far. (Click the title for a link to a review of the movie.)

Excellent
Alien (1979)=10 points
Day of the Dead (1978)=9.5 points
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)=8.5 points
Frankenstein (1931)=8 points
King Kong (1933)=8 points
Village of the Damned (1960)=8 points
Night of the Living Dead (1968)=7.5 points
Jaws (1975)=7 points
Pretty Good
Witch: A New England Folktale (2015)=6.5 points
Aliens (1986)=6.5 points
Carnival of Souls (1962)=6.5 points
Night Creatures (1962)=6.5 points
Phantom of the Opera (1962)=6.5 points
The Thing (1982)=6 points
Okay
The House on Haunted Hill (1959)=5 points
Gremlins (1984)=5 points
Lady Frankenstein (1971)=4.5 points
Man-Thing (2005)=4 points
Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)=3.5 points
Avoid
The Wolf Man (1941)=3 points
The Last Man on Earth (1964)=2 points

What I'm Reading: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

My wife read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children when it came out in 2011 and thought I'd like it. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to it on my reading stack until now. Apparently it was released as a movie a couple months ago; I'm not sure what kind of reviews it's gotten. I liked the book well enough, but had some reservations.

Before I get to the book, I have to describe how the author, Ransom Riggs, conceived of it. He started collecting weird old black and white photographs at flea markets--things like children floating in the air, or young women in elaborate mourning clothes, or a man covered in bees. Some of them must have resulted from photographic tricks, others simply begged the question why somebody would take such a picture. At some point, he started wondering if he could make a story out of them, and the idea for his first novel was born. The photos are, in fact, scattered throughout the novel, and act as an interesting complement to the writing.

The book is about a teen-ager named Jacob whose grandfather has always told him wondrous stories about his childhood in an orphanage on an island off the English coast where kids with bizarre powers lived separate from the rest of society. When his grandfather is killed by a monster that only he seems to have seen, Jacob is sent to a psychiatrist who recommends to his parents that Jacob should go to the island, where he can work out some of his mental issues. At summer break, his dad, an amateur ornithologist who himself wants to spend a few weeks on the island searching for a rare bird, takes Jacob. It's probably no surprise that Jacob discovers his grandfather's stories were not just made up....

It's actually quite a beautifully odd story, and the photos add something to the atmosphere. But they also take something away. When I read a book, I like to use my imagination, and I didn't need the pictures of the children. In fact, I rather came to resent the way the pictures dictated how I should picture the story in my head. I have to conclude that their use was a gimmick, and Riggs would have been better served using them simply as inspiration, and letting his story speak for itself. (Of course, he would have foregone a certain amount of publicity that's accompanied the use of the photos in his book, but that's a different matter.)

Another problem is that Riggs is clearly a writer who doesn't necessarily plan things out all the way, but just starts writing and sees where the story takes him. And that's great--that's the kind of writer I am, and I feel it lets characters breathe, and lets the story take turns that never would occur otherwise. But I do think there are one or two places in this book where Riggs writes himself into a corner and can only get out of it with plot twists that feel contrived. (I made a similar point about the Amber novels here, although in that case I felt the loose plotting worked a lot better.)

Nevertheless this was a fun and unusual novel, and quite easy to read despite some of its surrealistic touches. Any adult fan of fantasy literature would probably enjoy it.