Clerks III: The Screenplay by Kevin Smith

 

(pb; 2022: screenplay)

 

From the back cover

“After suffering a massive heart attack, Randal enlists friends and fellow clerks Dante, Elias, Jay and Silent Bob to help him make a movie about life at the Quick Stop.

“This limited-edition version of the Clerks III screenplay was made for VIPs of The Convenience Tour—Fall 2022.”

 

Review

Clerks III, screenplay and 2022 film, made me laugh a lot and (almost) cry just as much—the latter, in an ultimately great way, because it meant that not only had Smith penned and directed one of his best films, maturity-wise, but he created a oeuvre- and mortality-acknowledging work that flows in a natural-feel pace, showing you can have characterization, humor and heart in equal, effective measure, one that doesn’t feel like it was a written in genre-unbalanced, ham-fisted and talking down to the audience manner. This is how you do it right, sans sappy b.s. scoring, too-cute puppies and players, while throwing in some Star Wars, rude humor and playful takes on religion.

If you like Smith’s overall Clerks and/or Jay and Silent Bob franchises, chances are you’ll find something to like about Clerk III, even if you’re put out by its underlying seriousness. Great work, worth owning.

Shards of Space by Robert Sheckley

 

(pb; 1962: science fiction story anthology)

 

Overall review

The stories in Shards range from excellent (“The Slow Season,” “Alone at Last”) to solid and entertaining (“Fool’s Mate,” “Subsistence Level”), showing Sheckley to an overall superb, timeless-in-his-themes-and-situations author, making this classic (in the best possible way) anthology one worth purchasing, and Sheckley a writer worth looking out for.

 

Review, story by story

“Prospector’s Special”: In Venus’s Scorpion Desert, a goldenstone miner (Morrison), seeking his fortune for himself and his wife—he hopes to buy and run an “ocean farm” with dolphins as well-treated employees—tracks a red and purple vein of goldenstone, hoping to achieve the titular special. As disasters pile up on him, he keeps on, despite others, via “’port” and phone, encouraging him to give up and return to civilization.

 

This is an excellent, humor-limned, offbeat and often surprising ticking-clock/relentlessly intense tale; it emotionally hooked me, had me rooting for Morrison as the story progressed. “Prospector’s” end is fun, bringing to the fore the humor previously took a backseat to the increasingly dire situation. Memorable, superb.

 

“The Girls and Nugent Miller”: A post-nuclear war man (Miller) unexpectedly encounters something he hasn’t seen the since the start of humanity’s wipeout: a group of living people, women! Unfortunately for the bull-headed Miller, they’re fierce, feminist females. Solid story, with a chilling, too-timely ending.

 

“Meeting of the Minds”: On “the island of Vuanu, southernmost of the Solomons, almost in the Louisade Archipelago,” a team of Spanish galleon treasure hunters attempt to fend off a Martian bug (a Quedak) intent on sharing a global mind-meld with them. Good, weird-situation story with a fun alien and a solid, relatively happy wrap-up.

 

“Potential”: An amnesiac wakes up alone on a seriously damaged spaceship flying through space. Why can’t he remember anything? And what is this mysterious mission that has the pre-programmed ship planet-hopping, searching for other humanoid life?

 

Fast-paced, tightly edited tale, this, with its well-timed reveals and disturbing, interesting ideas and finish.

 

“Fool’s Mate”: A long-standing stalemate between two warring enemies is broken, when the Earth-based humans’ President’s Executive (Richard Ellsner) decides to abandon the Configuration-Probability-Calculator’s [CPC] projected, chess-minded potential casualty reports, the reason for the stalemate: both sides are using the same reports. Solid, interesting story, with familiar but effective twist-of-sorts.

 

“Subsistence Level”: Solid story about a “pioneering” couple, Amelie and Dirk Bogren, move to a planetoid on the outskirts of society, largely due to Dirk’s restless nature and dislike of crowds, only to see their rough-life home become a popular destination.

 

“The Slow Season”: A financially struggling dressmaker (Slobod) is hired to sew dresses with inhuman, wildly varied measurements by a cryptic customer (Mr. Bellis). Succinct, excellent Twilight Zone-esque work, with a memorable story and ending. This is one of the best stories I’ve read in recent years.

 

“Alone at Last”: Another gem of a Twilight Zone-esque tale, this, where a man (Arwell), seeking near-absolute solitude, embarks on a journey toward a “dangerous” destination. It’s not difficult to see where “Alone” is headed but its specific details and tonal-shift finish make this super-short story stunning, excellent.

 

“Forever”: A scientist with a world-changing serum is hunted by menacing, metropolitan strangers while heading to a patent office to register his scientific discovery. Fun, smart, quirky adventure-work.

 

“The Sweeper of Loray”: Grim, sad tale about two astronauts (Professor Carver and his assistant, Fred)—opportunistic and imperialistic in their respective missions—studying and hoping to steal a “universal panacea” from peaceful, tribal aliens (the Lorayans), who don’t want to give it to them. Well-written, one of the darkest entries in this anthology.

 

“The Special Exhibit”: A mild-mannered ornithologist (Mr. Grant) shows his wife “of such heroic proportions and meager mentality” (Mrs. Grant) a scientific exhibit-experiment exclusively reserved for the happiness of museum employees and specialists. While it’s easy to spot where it’s likely going, “Special” is an immensely satisfying, darkly cheerful and waste-no-words work about coupledom and “a far more effective problem solver than marriage counseling.” Above-average, Twilight Zone-esque.

You Always Try to Kill Me in Your Dreams by Carlton Mellick III

 

(pb; 2023)

From the back cover

“Dreams shouldn’t kill you. If you die in a dream you should be fine in real life. But that’s not what Elias [Thompson] learns once he moves in with a girl named Roe who has the terrible habit of pulling people into her dreams with her whenever she falls asleep. Although she’s the nicest, coolest, most attractive woman Elias has ever known while she’s awake. Roe is a complete psychopath in her dreams. She will stop at nothing to kill anyone who finds their way into her subconscious worlds. But Elias has no choice but to survive her crazy dreams every night if he ever hopes to make it in a world that has been torn apart by a global pandemic and economic collapse.”

 

Review

Always, a relatively light entry in Mellick’s oeuvre, is pure delight, poking fun at Portland, Oregon, the author’s current city-of-residence while marking the social anxiety of the recent COVID-19 outbreak as well as the uncertainties, cruelty and fickleness of collegiate youth.

The characters are deftly sketched out, fleshed enough to ring as relatable and true, while the fast-moving, often funny and sometimes gory story, with its well-placed (and often quiet) twists redirecting the plot/action into new, distinctly Mellick territory, darkly hilarious with underlying seriousness and a multilayered, disturbing-or-comforting finish, depending on your mood. This is a great read if you’re looking to read a lighter-in-tone, later Mellick work, one of my favorite novellas by him.

Alien: Covenant -- Origins by Alan Dean Foster

 

(pb; 2017: book-only prequel to Alan Dean Foster’s 2017 movie tie-in novelization of Alien: Covenant)

 

From the back cover

“The Covenant mission is the most ambitious endeavor in the history of Weyland-Yutani. A ship bound for Origae-6, carrying two thousand colonists beyond the limits of known space, this is a make-or-break investment for the corporation—and for the future of mankind.

“Yet there are those who would die to stop the mission. As the colony ship hovers in Earth orbit, several violent events reveal a deadly conspiracy to sabotage the launch. While Captain Jacob Branson and his wife Daniels complete their preparations, security chief Daniel Lupé recruits the final key member of his team. Together they seek to stop the perpetrators before the ship and its passengers.

Review

This official prequel to the events of Alien: Covenant (2017; director: Ridley Scott) is a well-written but superfluous, fill-in-all-the-timeline-blanks work. Foster, a consistently solid-to-great author, penned a solid novella-length story with solid characters—a few of whom appear in Scott’s Alien: Covenant, e.g., Daniels, Tennessee and Lupé. Unfortunately, Covenant—Origins isn’t a novella, it’s a novel, with a story that feels lightweight, character and event-wise, compared to the bigger-in-scope Alien works, an entertaining but overlong trifle in a series studded with some excellent entries, cinema and book-wise.

I’d recommend Covenant—Origins if you’re a die-hard/completist fan of the Alien franchise, looking for story- and character expansions you won’t get in the films and other books. This is a worthwhile read, if you’re of those mindsets and keep your expectations of Covenant—Origin’s stakes relatively low, and enjoy sporadic bits of gunplay/action, corporate intrigue, roughshod revolutionaries (the Earthsavers), and don’t expect a lot of monsters (besides those clawed shadow-things in Duncan’s apoplectic nightmares).

All the Rage by F. Paul Wilson

 

(pb; 2000: fourth book in the Repairman Jack series)

From the back cover

“Can you imagine a new chemical compound, a non-addictive designer drug that heightens your assertiveness, opens the door to your primal self, giving you an edge wherever you compete, whether on the street or the football field, in a classroom or a boardroom? Wouldn’t you be tempted to try it. . . just once? What happens if it releases the uncontrollable rage and makes you a killer?”

 

Review

Wilson’s Rage is full-on-screenplay/nothing-left-to-the-imagination ambitious, a mostly excellent novel with its thoroughly explored characters (some annoying, e.g., the often shrill/emotional-flip-out Gia), memorably wild and well-foreshadowed situations, and story-centric callbacks to earlier Repairman Jack books. Fans of H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (or at least three of its cinematic adaptations) may especially enjoy Rage, which often references Jack’s fondness for it.

If I have any nits about Rage, it’s that some of its near-the-end scenes run a bit longer than necessary (almost to the point of ridiculousness, character motivation-wise) or the characters do or say dumb things. But this is a minor complaint for an otherwise superb work, one worth reading and owning, despite its several overlong end-chapters. Followed by Hosts (2001).