David Dubrow

Author

Update 8-28-2020

by Leave a Comment

When I’m not writing and rewriting, I’m planning and outlining. When I’m doing none of those things, I’m glowering at nothing, willing the words to come. They rarely obey. So, things are more or less normal.

—

I’ve talked about author Joseph Hirsch in this space before, with my reviews of his disturbing science fiction novel Touch No One and his crime novel My Tired Shadow. He also contributed to Adam Howe’s anthology Wrestle Maniacs with a sort-of prequel story to My Tired Shadow.  He’s really quite a prolific writer, so don’t take this as an exhaustive listing, and he dabbles in everything from horror to drama to even romance. I envy his skills and output.

A more recent title of his is the sci-fi novella My Uncle’s New Eyes. It’s a taut, slow-burn thriller that keeps you seared to the page, and by the time you’ve read the last word, stick a fork in you: you’re done. A tale of lost memory, bizarre science, and shocking betrayal, it follows troubled teenager Michael when he’s sent to spend time with his uncle Jimmy “Grim Reaper” Reeves, a former boxer living in the desert with a beautiful, mysterious caretaker. Hirsch has a way of getting under your skin, making you feel everything his characters experience, and My Uncle’s New Eyes shows what a supremely skilled writer can do at the top of his game.

—

Season 3 of Dark, the German sci-fi show I talked a bit about here, wraps up the series in a way that’s minimally satisfying. SPOILERS FOLLOW. The Schrodinger’s Cat concept introduced in this season didn’t add anything valuable to the mythology, and the Origin Trio were too obviously shoehorned in as last-minute antagonists. Clausen’s subplot went nowhere. Eva cutting Martha’s face was silly and unnecessary. Noah, a child murderer, made a terrible hero. Where everything fell down for me was the end, which reflects the problem with most of today’s science fiction. There was nothing aspirational about it; the only way to fix things was for the characters to annihilate themselves. In a universe without God or an objective moral standard, all you have left is the amoral nihilism of pure science. Also, it was funny that they had to limit Mikkel’s appearance, due to the actor’s having grown ten inches between seasons. Kids.

One show I can wholeheartedly recommend is the Israeli series Shtisel, about a Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) family in Jerusalem. It does a good job of swimming in the dramedy realm, where the laughs are balanced by touching moments. Michael Aloni as Akiva makes you completely forget about his less sympathetic role as Himmler in When Heroes Fly. If I had a complaint, it’s that the show occasionally meanders in a less focused way, but with so many characters, it can’t be helped.

—

I’ve also done some writing for Romans One.

In this piece, I discussed despair:

Despair is where the Adversary lives. God, who is all good all the time, has a specific plan for you, and when you embrace despair, you deny God’s presence in your life. Despair represents the loss of faith, the false notion that you’re not equal to God’s plan for you. Obviously when something truly terrible happens like the loss of a spouse, parent, or child, despair is an easy pit to fall into. In the aftermath of a horrible assault, despair can seem like the only option. Despair is soul-crushing, and when you’ve truly experienced it, you remember that feeling for the rest of your life.

I also addressed the bromide of tolerance, arguing for less of it:

Too often, though, the reality is many college kids, fattened on a diet of Captain Planet as children, Howard Zinn as a teen, and Cornel West as a legal adult, are now working on a new college degree: screaming obscenities into a black cop’s face during a race riot. They think that’ll look good on a resume, and, sadly, in some quarters it just might.

Rather than pushing back early on, parents let it go. Rather than deciding enough was enough at the very beginning, they find themselves here.

And I offered the heretical notion that politics won’t save us:

If you want to change what’s going on instead of merely watching it, you have to focus on culture: art, media, education. This means doing more work on top of your 9 to 5. If you don’t like statue toppling, church defacing, and drugstore looting, you need to run for your local school board and win. You have to become a teacher who refuses to propagandize her students. You have to make movies. You have to write books. You have to paint pictures and put on plays and make music that elevates the values you hold dear.

—

I won’t sign off with “Stay safe,” because safety is overrated, and nothing important or good happens without some risk. Instead, I hope that whoever you are and whatever your circumstances, you’re having a great time and are with people you love.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Bits and Pieces 2/28/2020

by Leave a Comment

Between recent illness and attendant insomnia, I’ve found a bit more time over the last few months to take in media. My sleep loss is your gain when it comes to media reviews, so let’s hit it.

—

Memories of the Alhambra: I tried like hell to like this, but could only get through the first episode. It had some interesting ideas: a disappearing programmer, an immersive augmented reality game, the mingling of old-world Spain and modern technology. And yet it didn’t do it for me. Not sure why. Call it the one K-drama I didn’t like. I may try again in the future.

Save Me: I gave this a brief mention in my K-drama rundown on Hollywood in Toto, but it bears mentioning here. This is a very dark show, and goes places with the characters that I’ve never seen on other television programs. The plot involves a cult called The Mighty New Sky, and how it tries to take over a town in South Korea. It’s full of disturbing moments involving a nice family’s seduction and destruction, horrific betrayals, and bizarre rituals with a creepy cult leader. A bit too long, but full of unforgettable moments. The themes of friendship, familial love, and aging cynicism vs. youthful idealism really make this a show to watch.

Ultraviolet: A Polish crime show set in Lodz, focusing on a group of vigilantes solving both cold cases and new crimes using social media hacking, much to the chagrin of the local police department. The characters are likable, and there are some genuinely funny moments, but no surprises to speak of. The culprits tend to be rich industralists, Polish nationalists, and other such stock heavies. Still, it’s fun and fairly lighthearted. As good as any cop show you’ll see on American TV, though with similar social commentary.

Unit 42: A Belgian crime show, this one about a team of cops solving crimes that have a technological angle, like internet-connected pacemakers that explode and semi-autonomous vehicles chauffeuring corpses. A bit heavier than Ultraviolet, which gives it a more gripping style, but like Ultraviolet, there are no surprises. An alert viewer will figure out whodunit long before the cops do, which is a problem: the episodes often only make sense if you ignore the massive plot holes throughout. You will be entertained if you turn off your brain before watching.

—

I also read books, on occasion.

Salt: A World History: The title says it all. It’s a history of salt and its effect on various cultures throughout the world. A dry subject, naturally, that edifies and occasionally entertains. I like how it destroys myths about salt and explains its value to civilizations both ancient and current. Author Mark Kurlansky has books on other foodstuffs, including Cod and Milk. And Paper, if you are inclined to eat it. For my part, I’m full.

A History of the World in Six Glasses: Author Tom Standage provides a sweeping history of six world-changing beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola in a book that’s far more than the sum of its drinks. Who knew how important coffee was to The Enlightenment? What was the first beer made of, and how important was it to early man? The parts on Coke are a little more anemic compared to the section on tea, for example, but that’s more due to Coca-Cola’s place on the world stage than a weakness of the text. A lot of fun to read. Think of it as a history book for people who hate history books.

American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza: I’ve had a lifelong interest in baking bread, and when my wife got me a copy of Peter Reinhart’s book Artisan Breads Every Day more than ten years ago, it helped kick-start my bread making to the level I’d always wanted: artisan loaves with the big holes. While American Pie isn’t a new book, published in 2003, it’s nevertheless a terrific travelogue of Reinhart’s quest to find the best pizza in the world. What constitutes the perfect pizza and if he actually finds it will have to be read about in the text. Full of recipes for both dough and toppings, Reinhart promulgates the idea that the quality of any pizza starts with the crust: 80% of the grade, so to speak. So even a pizza with mediocre sauce can be saved by a great crust. Obviously, this is a cookbook in large part, so factor that into your buying decision. If you want to know how to make tasty pizza at home, from lean Neapolitan pies to the more substantial New Haven pizzas, this is the book you need. My only problem is the disappointing paucity of pictures. All that reading makes my lips hurt.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Book Review: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Leave a Comment

When Jaron Lanier’s book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now popped up on my Amazon feed, I had to have it. I’ve written extensively about the dangers and problems of social media, and I no longer look at Twitter or Facebook for a host of reasons. I have my site post to them, but I don’t look at the feed. In short, I had already formed my own arguments for deleting my social media accounts, so I figured it would be interesting to read what a Silicon Valley insider thought. And it always helps to backfill one’s already-assumed point of view with arguments in favor of it. Most of us do that anyway.

As it was, Lanier’s book was, for the most part, a disappointment.

The writing style is folksy and conversational, which works fine for the subject matter. And I hadn’t considered some of the arguments Lanier put forth. However, there’s a strong political slant to the book that not only undercuts Lanier’s own arguments, but calls into question his analytical faculties in a way that makes the content questionable.

Lanier is obviously a progressive out of the Silicon Valley mold, which doesn’t disqualify him from writing any sort of book, but he refuses to accept responsibility for the progressive political slant of the social media companies he rails against. He claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, “Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.” The political right has always been the recipient of the vast majority of account deletions, shadowbanning, and social media deplatforming. The people who run these social media companies not only foster far-left political environments in their respective workplaces, they enforce their bizarre version of ethics on their users through Terms of Service that change wherever the political winds blow. When tweeting “Learn to code” to a left-wing journalist is a bannable offense, but calling a conservative person a Nazi is not, that’s a political issue. That’s bias.

The problem with the book is that Lanier can’t afford to admit that the left is culpable for turning social media into a disgusting sewer, because it would require him to turn the force of his analysis on himself, his cohorts, and the culture he helped shape, and who wants to dive into all that ugliness without a hazmat suit? The right shares some of the blame for the hostile social media culture we’ve developed, but when all the bannings and deplatformings go one way and not the other, it’s obvious that the people in charge enforce the rules selectively, to the detriment of social media in general.

When Lanier calls Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who famously claimed that the world would end in twelve years, an “optimistic young politician,” it’s a questionable claim, no matter how you feel about AOC’s politics. When he spends paragraphs boosting Black Lives Matter and attacking Trump for tweeting, it suggests that he has an axe to grind that goes way past the advice of deleting one’s social media accounts. What’s good for Lanier isn’t, perhaps, what’s good for you, particularly if you don’t share his fringe worldview.

In addition, the redundancy of some of the arguments he makes suggests that the number ten was selected for its aesthetic qualities, not because he had ten solid reasons. There’s quite a bit of argument overlap.

Reading Ten Arguments was very much like trying to eat lunch in a nice restaurant, but the waiter is overly attentive and suffers from horrible body odor. If Lanier’s progressive politics, born of unthinking Silicon Valley progressivism, don’t bother you, then you’ll appreciate the book more than I did.

Ultimately, all you need is one argument for deleting your social media accounts, and you probably know what it is already. Do you need a book to tell you what’s good for you?

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Book Review Resurrection: Sweet Tooth

by Leave a Comment

Some time ago I wrote a review of R.M. Huffman’s Sweet Tooth series for the now-defunct horror website The Slaughtered Bird. As Halloween is coming up, and the stories are too good to miss for this time of year, I am republishing this review here.

—

R.M. Huffman deftly straddles the line of horror and humor in his Sweet Tooth series of short stories about Dr. Pierce, a vampire psychiatrist who faces challenges both medical and supernatural in his practice. Huffman is himself a practicing physician, and his knowledge of the human body’s foibles adds credibility to Pierce’s internal dialogue and actions. While clever and lighthearted, the Sweet Tooth stories tackle heavier issues at times, with varying results.

The title story, Sweet Tooth, introduces us to Pierce in a very droll fashion: he’s crept into a local hospital on Halloween night to feed on the glucose-laden blood of diabetic patients. It’s how he gets his sugar rush, you see. Pierce is himself a throwback to the vampires of Stoker’s tale: he doesn’t cast a reflection, can’t stand crosses, is repulsed by garlic. No sparkling here.

The scope widens a bit with Lord of the Pies, where Pierce has to contend with a most unusual antagonist brought into his clinic for psychiatric care. Here we learn that Pierce is far from the only supernatural creature in the world, and that even vampire doctors have to work on Thanksgiving.

In A Very Christmas Sweet Tooth, Pierce shows us the vague beginnings of a conscience; or, perhaps, just a desire to see a case through to the bitter end.

The Heartstaker story brings us to Valentine’s Day, when even vampires and werewolves get lonely. Can a cold-blooded, undead immortal like Pierce fall in love?

With Easter comes the story Raise the Dad, which finds Pierce hiding in his crypt: “Imagine how you might feel about Halloween if the decorations and costumes were real. Crosses. So many crosses.” Even in seclusion there’s no rest for the wicked, and Pierce has an unwelcome visitor that unearths not just the unquiet dead, but unresolved personal issues as well.

The anthology ends with Rebirthday Boy, where we find Pierce celebrating both Independence Day and his (fake) birthday: you have to maintain a façade of mortality when you deal with humans, after all. This neatly wraps up the various story threads from the previous Sweet Tooth tales and sets up for a new chapter in Pierce’s (un)life.

In Sweet Tooth Omnibus, we get a year in the life of a vampire who’s anything but an ordinary bloodsucker. Amoral, anti-heroic, and yet a physician who helps both the living and undead. A fun anthology told in a unique voice: definitely worth a midnight read.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Why Meadow Died: A Review

by Leave a Comment

While you’ve most likely heard of the February 14, 2018 Parkland school shooting, where a deranged man murdered 17 students and faculty (and wounded 17 others) at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, you’re probably not aware of the entirely preventable chain of events that led up to it. If just one person with any authority had done one thing properly, this horror could have been avoided. I know this because I read Andrew Pollack and Max Eden’s Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies that Created the Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students. 

Outside of this book, it’s impossible to fully describe how everything went so wrong, from the disgustingly negligent school board to the terrible policies that provided cover for murderer Nikolas Cruz (referred to by criminal case number 18-1958 in the book). The Broward County school district administrators, as worthless a collection of reprobates as you’ll ever read about, were focused on a social justice platform that minimized academics and safety in favor of feel-good progressivism, and children were murdered as a result. This was not only a failure of the public education system, but of law enforcement and local government, showing exactly what happens when politicians are given free rein without accountability. This quote from the book encapsulates the social justice agenda perfectly:

Arielle later lamented to us that school administrators “would freak out if somebody called me a dyke or something, but they didn’t care when [18-1958] threatened to kill my friends.”

Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was murdered while trying to save another, younger girl, spares no one in his search for answers, and his agony leaps off the page. This take-no-prisoners approach includes some hard truths about David Hogg, who became an anti-gun activist and celebrity because he attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD). In the aftermath of the shooting, Pollack and some of the other MSD parents worked hard to get Richard Mendelson, best friend of shooting victim Aaron Feis, elected to the Broward County school board. By then, David Hogg had achieved some notoriety, and it would have helped Mendelson’s campaign to get a Tweet or some kind of endorsement from Hogg. This is what happened:

Hunter [Meadow’s brother] insisted that David [Hogg] at least get on the phone with Rich Mendelson.

David practically shouted at Hunter, “I’ve met with your candidate three times!”

“No, David,” Hunter said. “You met Ryan Petty, who lost his daughter Alaina. We’re talking about Rich Mendelson, who lost his best friend Aaron. Have you been following any of this?”

Hogg doesn’t come off well, and for good reason.

The police screwed up. The school screwed up. The administrators screwed up. Everyone screwed up in the worst ways possible at all times. Whenever there was an opportunity to do one thing right, everyone involved took the opposite approach. It’s maddening to read about (and incalculably worse to experience).

Why Meadow Died isn’t about guns. It’s about an appalling level of corruption that, if left unchecked, will completely corrode an already ailing public education system. It’s bitter, searing, frustrating, and one of the most important books you’ll ever read.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Book Review Resurrection: The Scarlet Gospels

by 2 Comments

I wrote for a horror website called Ginger Nuts of Horror until the site’s proprietor, Jim McLeod, kicked me off the site and called me, a Jewish man, a Nazi for expressing my political opinions in my own virtual space. Because I had the temerity to call him out on it, he instituted a purge, deleting all of the articles I’d written for Ginger Nuts of Horror. The following review of Clive Barker’s novel The Scarlet Gospels is one of the articles he deleted.

 

The problem with raising the bar is that you always have to reach higher just to maintain. Any substantive discussion of the horror genre must include Clive Barker: he’s shaped dark fiction in a way few writers have the skill or imagination to accomplish. We all have favorite authors, some of whom take familiar tropes in surprising directions or amaze us with their power of description. They’re great, but they aren’t Barker, a man who isn’t just in a class by himself, but created a new classification to be the master of. On his worst day, he’s still fantastic.

So what happened with The Scarlet Gospels?

There’s no need to reiterate plot synopses or discuss the novel’s importance to the horror genre. This piece is more a post-mortem than a standard review, so if you haven’t read it yet, I would suggest that you do so right away. Further on, there will be spoilers. Despite its flaws, The Scarlet Gospels is an amazing read, and I found myself drawing it out, rereading some passages and taking breaks to savor the experience. You don’t do that with a book you hate.

Nevertheless, The Scarlet Gospels fell short. We’re used to something visionary from Barker, something that will paint a new picture of grotesquerie in the mind’s eye, frame it, and hang it in a place of honor. What we got instead was a pencil sketch.

The novel’s greatest flaw is its inherent sloppiness. This is a book Barker wanted to be done with so he could move on to something else. Despite the shattering events in the novel, from describing the death of a beloved horror icon to the literal destruction of Hell, there’s no feeling of the epic, no sense that what’s happening has import beyond the limited perspective of the characters. The ending is abrupt and anticlimactic, providing us with glimpses of majesty but no resolution. Is this the first in a new series? Will there be a Second Gospels? If not, do we really need to know that pizza is Lucifer’s favorite food?

—

Pinhead Problems

The novel’s main antagonist, Pinhead, was always going to be a massively difficult character to pull off. Everyone comes to The Scarlet Gospels with a series of preconceptions, even those who aren’t Barker fans, precisely because of Pinhead’s looming presence in the horror genre. For some time, Doug Bradley’s scarified, nail-studded face was horror. In literature, however, he was a cipher: a minor character in The Hellbound Heart. What we expect from Pinhead must necessarily be an amalgam of Doug Bradley’s performances in a series of movies Barker himself had little to do with (aside from the first), and some comic book appearances. With that in mind, Pinhead is still Barker’s demon to kick around, and what the Hell Priest does or doesn’t do is up to Barker, not us. You can’t write a character by committee.

Pinhead’s fate was not unexpected: defeat by Lucifer, humiliation, and disintegration. Barker himself said, “One of the things I’m trying to do in the story with D’Amour and Pinhead is, I actually want to kind of make Pinhead feel fucked. I want people to make fools of him as he breathes his last and with no hope of resurrection. No sequels. I swear the way he’s going – I have plotted this – the way he’s going is so total, is so complete that the most optimistic film producer in Hollywood could never dream of resurrecting him!” Fair enough, but at the end, he very much resembled Kuttner Dowd from Imajica. Dowd, Imajica’s antagonist, had been defeated, almost killed (thrown into the well beneath The Pivot and then mashed by chunks of The Pivot when it disintegrated). Despite terrible injuries, Dowd was able to recover long enough to cause more grief before a true death by killing Oscar. Compare this to Pinhead’s end: after Pinhead’s maiming at the hands of Lucifer, he was still able to rape and murder Norma, as well as blind D’amour. Note also how blindness is used as a theme in both Imajica and The Scarlet Gospels: Quaisoir blinded by rebels, D’amour blinded by Pinhead. Pinhead’s mission on Earth to steal magic is also reminiscent of Imajica’s Tabula Rasa organization. It can be argued that these similarities of theme and character are part of Barker’s inimitable style, but not convincingly so: they’re retreads. We’ve seen them before.

—

Damned D’amour

D’amour’s treatment in the novel was colorless. He could have been any tattooed detective: hard-drinking, hard-boiled, on hard times. While the flashback with the Masturbating Demon was interesting, it didn’t provide us with any insight as to D’amour’s character. His relationship with Norma felt forced: we simply had to assume their love for each other, without any build-up. Their closeness was just a spur to get him to travel to Hell. Amazingly, not one of the events of Everville were referred to in any meaningful way whatsoever.  I thought that the Iad Ouroboros were scratching at the shores of Quiddity, ready to body surf to Earth. What happened to them? Is D’amour’s fate now to mirror that of Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Ghost Whisperer?

—

Is This Hell?

Hell, as depicted in the novel, had little to do with the Hell we’re familiar with. Where were the sinners? Did they all just live in Fike’s Trench? In which case, what happens to them when they die in Hell? Hell has mansions and temples and a Monastery of the Cenobitical Order, but without the underlying purpose of punishing sinners, Hell in The Scarlet Gospels may as well have been the back streets of Yzordderrex or The Fugue. It’s a fascinating place, full of dark wonder and bizarre architecture, but it isn’t Hell. Barker redefined it into something unrecognizable. If Pinhead’s job as a Hell Priest isn’t to punish sinners, then what is his job? Where does the Cenobitical Order fall in the infernal hierarchy? The Unconsumed, one of Hell’s leaders, says to Pinhead, “A Cenobite is to work within the system. You seem content to work outside that system.” What system isn’t he working in? Without knowing this, Pinhead’s ouster lacked narrative punch.

—

Damn You Christian Hypocrites

If there is one central theme running throughout The Scarlet Gospels, it’s explicitly anti-Christian. Every time Christianity is mentioned, it’s linked to hypocrisy, abuse, and evil. Carston Goode, the ghost who brought both Norma and D’amour into the events of the story, was one such hypocrite. Despite “a deep-seated faith in the generosity of the Lord his God,” Goode is a sorcerer with a secret life of sexual deviance.

D’amour himself is a survivor of childhood rape at the hands of classmates at St. Dominic’s All Boys Catholic School, where “The Fathers all had their favorite” boys to molest (for his part, D’amour “had more kick in him than any of the Fathers were willing to handle.”). Despite how awful this must have been, D’amour’s childhood sexual abuse simply received a couple of throwaway paragraphs in service of telling us that D’amour abhors the smell of old books.  Was that really the best way to explain why D’amour hates that old book smell, or was Barker simply falling back on the hackneyed theme of Catholic pederasty?

After the Harrowers’ escape from Hell, they are picked up by the Reverend Kutchaver, who rails at them when he learns that Dale and Caz are gay: “’I have watched damned sodomites like you.’ He pointed at Caz. ‘And you’—now at Dale—‘driven by demons whose faces were foul beyond words.’” Unable to bear the presence of the Harrowers, Kutchaver abandons the car, shouting obscenities in a most unreverend manner.  Another anti-Christian scene: tiresome, clichéd, and overdone.

Lucifer’s destruction of Hell is itself a gigantic “fuck you” to God, and the angels are depicted as idiotic buffoons, easily dispatched. God, one presumes, is as absentee in Heaven as Lucifer had been in Hell; in any event, He seems to have taken little notice of the events of the novel. This is where the sloppiness of The Scarlet Gospels cheapens the climax: with a Hell that’s unrecognizable as Hell and a suicidal Lucifer as the unwilling, uncaring landlord, why should Hell’s destruction carry any meaning whatsoever? Why should we care about what Lucifer does as Alice Morrow’s boy toy? Lucifer’s fate echoes our own: we’re left at sea, lacking closure.

Regardless of your personal feelings about Christianity, isn’t the theme of Christian hypocrisy just a little bit tiresome already? Outside of the Christian fiction genre, wouldn’t it be nice to find a devout Christian in fiction who isn’t a homophobe and/or a sinful hypocrite? The default inclusion of the theme of Christian hypocrisy strikes me as unnecessary at best, or a sop at worst to readers of a certain mindset. (I should probably point out here that I’m not a Christian, nor have I ever been. My criticism is born out of an appreciation of quality, not offense at content.)

—

There are other minor examples of sloppiness: the contradictory description of the Unconsumed, where in one sentence it says, “his body was now blackened by heat,” and a few sentences down, it says, “Yet somehow, the rest of him—his skin, flesh, and bone—was unaffected by the volcanic heat in which he sat,”; the strangeness of everyone expecting that Lana, a lesbian, and D’amour would come together romantically at some point; and how Pinhead was able to go on a magician-killing spree without being summoned by a Lemarchand Box; but my point here isn’t to utterly trash the novel. I understand that as fans it’s very hard for our expectations to be met, and that disappointment is often as much a function of reader angst as the writer’s efforts. The Scarlet Gospels is a good book. I liked it.

I just think it could’ve been better. It should have.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail