Dark World by Zak Bagans

I had a thousand questions, mostly of a physical nature. How could an ethereal being have physical properties? How could a dead person make sound and create force? Does she sleep? Is she bored? Is she mischievous? Does she know she's dead? How did she know my name? Does she know the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? I wanted to know if life is just rock, soil, air, water, and fire--or if there is more. Are there spiritual aspects that people ignore?

-Dark World 

I should begin this post by noting that I am a huge, unabashed fan of the show Ghost Adventures. In terms of television, there are few things I find more enjoyable than watching Zak, Nick, and Aaron stumble around in the dark, making me laugh and, moments later, capturing evidence that I find genuinely terrifying. That shadow moving through the background of last week's episode at Letchworth Village, for example, left me peeking at the screen from behind my hands. I really don't know what more one could ask for from a tv show.

Naturally, when I heard that lead investigator Zak Bagans had a book coming out, I was all in.  Especially being that it's October, it seemed like the perfect time for a spooky read. I was also hoping to learn a bit more about Zak, whom I really find so endearing and just plain likeable. Dark World does deliver on both these counts, but I was surprised to discover that it is primarily a book about the science of paranormal investigation.

I will be honest, the scientific angle is not a particularly compelling one for me. I appreciate that the Ghost Adventures crew uses a variety of equipment in order to try to document paranormal phenomena--it certainly has made for some very interesting television. But I don't really need these things to be explained. I like that there are things in this world that could be unknowable; I like a little mystery. However, I understand that if paranormal investigation were your profession, you would be motivated to gather data that would give you more credibility in the scientific community.

It's a tough row to hoe, and I do admire Zak's passion for this aspect of his work. Personally, I don't find it as interesting to read about as a behind-the-scenes account of what went down at Poveglia (I'm still curious about that experience) or a list of the weird stuff that's happened at Zak's home in Vegas. And one of my favorite parts of the book was his recounting of his early years, because it's interesting to see how exactly one does get into this line of work. When I was a teenager, I was a devoted fan of The X-Files, and I recall announcing at one point that I wanted to major in psychology and minor in parapsychology. Obviously that didn't happen, but I've never lost that interest in things weird and otherworldly.

I know it's easy to be skeptical about shows like Ghost Adventures.  I'm sure a lot of people watch and scoff, dismantling all of their evidence as tricks of the light, wishful thinking, and perhaps straight-out charlatanry. But I don't see how one could read Dark World and see Zak as anything but deeply earnest about documenting evidence of life after death. Maybe I'm gullible, but I can't imagine how Zak would dare fake anything, knowing how badly it could discredit his work. It might sound silly, but I really would be deeply disappointed if I discovered anything to the contrary.

I would welcome another Ghost Adventures book--perhaps an episode guide with commentary from all three guys? I'm not sure how many directions they could go in with books, but I appreciated that this one (written with Kelly Crigger) certainly did a good job of capturing Zak's voice. For now, though, I'm happy to just keep watching the show.

Up next: More spooky stuff! The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft.

In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff

What Joe did not know was that I had come here this past May in search of a quieter existence with fewer reminders of Hannah, a victim of last year's General Slocum steamship tragedy. I was not alone in my grief; nearly every family in my Lower East Side neighborhood had lost someone that awful day--June 15, 1904. For almost a full year following Hannah's death, she haunted me, particularly in cases where other young women met tragic, violent ends. I had planned to marry Hannah and build a life with her--but I had no desire to live with a ghost.

-In the Shadow of Gotham 

With that passage, narrator Simon Ziele lays out a fair chunk of the premise of In The Shadow of Gotham. Ziele, a detective, had hoped to escape those tragic young women after leaving the city for the small town of Dobson, New York. But homicide is not confined to the island of Manhattan, of course, and Ziele is soon brought in on a case just as brutal as any he handled in the city. Sarah Wingate, a graduate student in mathematics, is killed at her aunt's home, and the police are left with a horrifying crime scene and very little in the way of leads. That is until a Columbia University criminologist named Alistair Sinclair shows up and insists that he knows exactly who the killer is: the subject of his own research, a man named Michael Fromley. Unable to ignore the evidence Sinclair puts before him, Ziele sets off to track down Fromley, using both psychological research and good old-fashioned detective know-how to aid him along the way.

I enjoyed the setting of the novel, and Ziele was a likeable enough detective. I wouldn't say the mystery itself was particularly compelling--though, again, setting it at the turn of century in New York City helps a lot. I was more put off by a certain clunkiness in the exposition. On the whole, Pinkoff did a nice job of pacing the story, which kept me absorbed despite not being particularly captivated by the plot. So it was all the more glaring when characters' dialogue was suddenly laden with exposition so forced as to take me out of the story entirely. It's very similar to the problem I had with The Night Villa--I'm not quite sure why an author would think so little of her readers to believe that they wouldn't look up a reference they didn't understand. At the worst, they'd just move past it and perhaps not get the full import of what a character was saying, but I'd prefer taking that risk than having my characters reduced to speaking in completely unbelievable ways. I guess it turns out that that might be a particular pet peeve of mine--it just seems so easy to avoid.* I have the sequel to In the Shadow of Gotham sitting on my shelf, but I can't say I'm terribly inclined to pick it up at the moment.

Up next: Still catching up! Need to write up Dark World  by Zak Bagans.
 
*What makes this all the more annoying is that the General Slocum disaster--to which most of Pintoff's exposition refers--is not particularly obscure. In fact, it's one of the worst disasters in New York history. I'd certainly heard of it before, although that could be because I felt it important to read up on potentially haunted places in the vicinity of New York City. While I would not categorize it as common knowledge, I would think that the General Slocum would be familiar to a fair amount of readers inclined to read historical fiction, and the rest can easily look it up.

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

Lord Lefford frowned. "I saw that great hairy one today, the one who insisted that he must have two battleaxes, the heavy black steel ones with twin crescent blades."

"Shagga likes to kill with either hand," Tyrion said as a trencher of steaming pork was laid in front of him.

"He still had that wood-axe of his strapped to his back."

"Shagga is of the opinion that three axes are even better than two."

-A Game of Thrones 

First off, I've waited to two weeks to write this post, clearly a huge mistake just considering the scope of A Game of Thrones, which has enough characters to make Dickens look like a minimalist. But I'm not in possession of any wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey know-how, so I suppose I'll have to make do. Here goes.

Winter is coming. Not lovely, sit by the fire and enjoy a cup of cocoa while looking out on falling snow winter, but a far nastier sort. The sort of winter that might let all kinds of dread beasties out to play, creatures long believed to be stuff of legend. Winter--true winter, because it's already plenty cold up north--only comes every so often to the Seven Kingdoms, and in this case it's been nine long years since winter last fell. The longer the summer is, people know, the worse the winter--and in this case it's shaping up to be quite hellish indeed.

This is the point at which we meet our principal cast--quite a few of them, as I mentioned above. Chief among the players is Ned Stark, lord of the northern kingdom of Winterfell. Ned's chosen by his old friend, Robert Baratheon, the king, to serve as his most trusted advisor, and reluctantly--it's not a job you can really turn down--he heads south to a world of political intrigue.

But Ned is only one of eight characters whose viewpoint is presented in the novel. We also follow his wife, Catelyn, and four of his children--princess-in-training Sansa, rebellious Arya, young Bran, and his bastard son, Jon. Additionally, we spend time with Tyrion Lannister, the king's brother-in-law, a dwarf whose tongue gets him in trouble; and Daenerys Targaryen, daughter of the former king. It's a lot to keep track of at first, but once you've settled in to the rhythm of the novel (and have started remembering names), it's enjoyable to see the differing points of view. This is especially true of the last one hundred and fifty or so pages, at which point the book has built a tremendous momentum and a great deal of suspense can be wrung out of the limited information a character has and acts upon, compared with what we as omniscient readers know.

It took me a while to read this one, because it is rather long (800 densely packed pages in my mass market paperback edition) and it was a little slow before I got to know the characters. I did end up getting quite absorbed, though, and I would definitely be interested in the next book. I'm also very keen to see the HBO series, as I've sneaked a peek at the casting and it looks like they did an excellent job.

Up next: I'm terribly far behind, as I've already finished two other books. The first I need to come back and write about (hopefully soon) is The Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff.