Some Books I Read

[lisa_goldstein]

All families have problems, but J. Michael Straczynski’s, in Becoming Superman, makes mine look like the Bobbsey Twins. His grandfather promised to marry his grandmother and then left Russia for the United States; their son, his father, was violent and sadistic; his mother struggled with depression and, Straczynski thinks, tried to kill him when he was a child. And the more he looks into the family history the worse it gets — but part of this autobiography is structured like a mystery, so I won’t give away the ending. With all of this it’s amazing that he didn’t end up either in jail or a mental hospital, let alone that he wrote comics and movies and TV series like Babylon 5 and Sense8. The book is both horrifying and astonishing, horrifying because of Straczynski’s childhood, and astonishing because he managed to overcome so much of it.

 

The reason he was able to do so, he says, is Superman, a role model he discovered early on and spent his life trying to emulate.* It’s enough to make you want to dig up Fredric Wertham, the man who said comic books were responsible for turning kids into criminals, and punch him in the face.

 

* And, of course, the sadistic father destroyed his comics collection.

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In T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones, Melissa, called Mouse, is asked by her father to clean out her grandmother’s house after the grandmother dies. It turns out that the grandmother was a hoarder — but it gets worse, because her second husband, Frederick Cotgrave, was involved with the supernatural.

 

Mouse has a great sense of humor, so the book is terrifically funny. But as she learns more about Cotgrave’s obsessions it turns horrific, and that’s always seemed a weird combination to me. It feels as if the jokes get in the way of the scary parts, and vice versa. I thought the same thing about the movie An American Werewolf in London — and that became a classic, so what do I know? So I guess I’d say that if you liked that movie, you will almost certainly enjoy this book. And in fact I ended up enjoying it too, in spite of the changes of tone.

 

And I loved the dog. Kingfisher clearly knows her dogs. Bongo’s hierarchy of interests are 1) food, 2) chasing things, and 3) his human. Anyone who’s ever lived with a dog can relate.