Bimbos of the Death Sun ...

... with apologies to Sharyn McCrumb.  (Updated below)

I hope she will forgive my use of the title of one of her novels, as this post will concern itself with same.  I used it because I think a good title should be a "grabber", and if that one doesn't qualify, then I'm damned if I can figure what would.

My previous post, on the pending demise of Borders Books, was announced by email to various friends and acquaintances, one of whom used "Reply to all" to comment, suggesting that E-books helped to do them in.

This prompted another "Reply to all" from the Goddess Bloggess Foxfier ( Head Noises ) mentioning other ways in which Borders may have brought this down upon themselves and also noting...

E-books probably didn't help, nor the way that I couldn't find a single book I wanted in the nearest big store, but could find a lot of over-priced toys. (What I went in for: Kipling's collected poetry, the Just So Stories, some of Tolkien's essays, a fantasy paperback that wasn't a freaking supernatural romance with a Buffy-bimbo on the cover, some book under $10 for a friend's five year old.) Contrast with the used book store on the way back, where I came out with a stack that I actually needed a bag for. (Although I still haven't found the Kipling or Tolkien.)     (Emphasis mine)

So, from the part that I emphasized, I'm guessing she probably wont  be scouring the book stores in search of ...

 

But, Foxfier:  assuming you haven't already come across it, it really is  worth hunting up and reading, as is its sequel "Zombies of the Gene Pool".

This is a fun murder mystery set at a fantasy con and, upon finishing it, my first thought was, "Did Harlan Ellison write this under one of his many pseudonyms?"

Nope!  It turns out that Sharyn McCrumb is not  one of Harlan's incarnations, but is a real live person, best known for her "Ballad" series of novels (set in Appalachia; only two of which have "Ballad" in their titles).  The only one of this series I've read is "Ghost Riders".

Why is that the only one I've read?

Well, LIFE has this hilarious way of intruding sometimes, and boy did it ever this time!  When I finished it, the intrusion was a very long and painful period of unemployment.  Trust me, something like that will distract you.

In this post I was going to say that the writing style I saw in "Riders" reminded me a bit of Flannery O'Conner (if you are interested in a truly southern horror story, starting out funny and then shifting to horrific, not as an unexpected "gut punch" but as a dawning realization and dread  of coming doom, check out O'Conner's "A Good Man is Hard to Find".  It is bone-chilling, in the inevitability of what's to come.).

But a re-reading of both "Riders" and O'Conner's "A Good Man" shows that McCrumb's style is lighter and more romantic;  I'm overdue to get back to her work.  Until Foxfier reminded me with that "bimbo" reference in her email, I'd forgotten that I still had it.

Ironically I read somewhere that the author who may be the spiritual heir to O'Conner is James Lee Burke with his Detective Dave Robicheaux novels.  The irony part is that "Ghost Riders" concerns Civil War re-enactors who's activities on old battlefields may be re-invoking the spirits of those who originally fought there (in the spirit of a line from Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."), and one of Burke's novels ("In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead") covers very similar ground.

So, there really is  a tenuous connection between McCrumb and O'Conner; just not in a way I would have ever imagined.

So, I need to get re-acquainted with Sharyn McCrumb's work.  And, if you've never read her, give her a try.  I don't think you'll be disappointed.

I hope that she and Harlan Ellison (if he ever hears about this) will forgive me for initially wondering if they were one and the same.  I'll be very surprised if they don't know each other.

Doing a recalculation of a series of assumptions made by Robert A. Heinlein in the mid seventies;  of the roughly 300 million people living in the U.S., probably fewer than a thousand make a full-time living from free-lance writing. Thus, the community is small and probably most of them know of  most of the others, and a rather large percentage probably are closely acquainted.

Finally, one of those that endorsed "Bimbos"  was author Robert Silverberg, known  as a close friend of Harlan Ellison.  As for the possibility that he never brought her to Ellison's attention -- as the robot from "Lost in Space" would have put it ...
   "That does not compute!"

Update - 27 Jul 2011 - Sharyn McCrumb (to whom I sent an FYI about this post) sent to me an email, which she graciously allowed me to include here, stating ...

... And yes, I met Harlan Ellison at the awards banquet in New York at which we both won awards. It turns out that people had been inundating him with copies of the book, because everybody recognized him, and everybody thought they'd be the only person sending him a book. Perhaps because I was eight months pregnant at the time, he did not beat me to death with his trophy.

Anyhow, that was many years ago. I grew up, and I assure you that I am not a mystery writer, and Ghost Riders and all my later works are serious literary novels on which people write masters theses, so you were wide of the mark with both Flannery O'Conner and James Lee Burke. I belong in the parish with Lee Smith, James Dickey, Charles Frazier, Ron Rash-- Southern lit., but mountain rather than deep South-- or with the magic realism writers, such as John Nichols. (See biographical summary below),
 http://www.amazon.com/Race-Storytellers-Essays-Ballad-McCrumb/dp/0865548935


Thanks for the memories from 1988. When I wrote that book, a young actor named Tom Hanks was starring in a network sit-com called "Bosom Buddies" (in drag.) For precisely the same reasons, neither Tom nor I are ever going back.

All best wishes,

Sharyn McCrumb

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So, I stand corrected.

(Although, on the other hand, what would she know?

I'm flashing back to the only Rodney Dangerfield movie I've ever watched: "Back to School", from the mid-eighties. In it, to provide moral support to his son, he enrolls in the same college. Being a rich, obnoxious jerk who can solve most of his problems with money (before later growing up a bit and getting serious), he hires people to handle his college assignments.

When assigned to write a report on author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., he picks up the phone. The next scene shows him responding to a knock on the door, which he opens, revealing Kurt Vonnegut himself reporting for duty.

This sets up a punch-line for when, during a later argument with his teacher (Sally Kellerman) over his attitude and way of doing things, she ends the discussion with a parting shot, "By the way. Whoever you paid to write that report doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!"  :-)

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