Life Magazine are liars

I seem to recall saying something recently about having developed quite a tolerance for a new writer’s missteps if I think he has potential. There were a few lines about being a glutton for punishment too…… so, in that vein, let me talk a little about Kindle Unlimited.

I don’t trust any man who doesn’t read. Call it a prejudice, a bias, or whatever but when I hear people tell me they get all their information from YouTube or audio-books I’m immediately on guard. Writing is thinking, whereas speech is mostly rhetorical. You want to know the kind of people who ignore books and love speeches….. Jordan Peterson fans. Just look at the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syI_B8a5IV4

Okay, I couldn’t find a video I liked of Peterson. As Vox Day very capably demonstrated in his dozen Darkstream takedowns of The Crazy Christ, Jordan Peterson fans are completely retarded. They literally don’t even read the man’s books. So Vox read both 12 Rules For Life and Maps Of Meaning and immediately figured out that Peterson is a charlatan, not at all well-read outside of his clinical psychology specialism [1], obscurantist, and mentally ill. As he’d say this on his live Darkstream, JBP’s idiot followers would come on and prove they hadn’t read him.

Why? Because JBP fans are the lowest of losers and can’t read. They soak up his tosh because they lack the clarity of mind and mental focus that is built by spending years of your life reading books. They are only half-evolved.

JBP is an extreme case. You get the same retarded behaviour with Joe Rogan fans, Richard Spencer fans, and of course our little world of pick-up has the same retards following YouTube game guys who spout obvious nonsense and the retards lap it up. RSD are the worst for that. It’s no coincidence that none of these guys are writing books [2]. If you want to make the most of your mind, you must read.

I’ll be reading this soon

However, you probably shouldn’t start with Kindle Unlimited. It is notorious for the tripe on there. I’m lucky, however, because two genres I really enjoy are well-served. First, there is the WW2 memoir [3] popularised by Sven Hassel. Ten years ago I finished the fourteenth (and last) of his books and I was distraught – there were no more new books to read. So I went looking into his contemporaneous knock-off writers like Heinz Konsalik, Leo Kessler, and Wolf Kruger. Now that I’m on Kindle Unlimited I see that there’s a burgeoning sub-genre in WW2 Nazi memoirs of questionable historical integrity [4]

The other genre is hardboiled detective fiction. In this case, the quality is far higher because wily publishers are re-releasing entire series of previously-published, and often popular, paperbacks from the golden age of that genre. Thus all the Perry Masons are on there, as are the thirty Ed Noon books [5]. So now I have access to almost unlimited free books in my two favourite genres. Score.

Sadly, most of the modern stuff of KU is absolute tosh. Just have a look at the dross in the Fantasy and Sci-Fi sections on KU. If any readers know new writers doing genuinely good Conan-style fantasy or space marine / bad-ass Sci-Fi then let me know. And, God forbid, if you were to peruse into the Romance sub-sections…… holy shit!….

The kind of KU book I won’t be reading

One place KU has sadly disappointed me is with John Creasey, my favourite high-speed hack writer of detective fiction. I love his Inspector West and his The Toff tales. Those were written from about ten years into his career, when he’d already learned far more about his craft than any ponderous fiction writer will ever learn. None of those are on Kindle Unlimited [6]. Instead, the only Creasey on KU are his Department Z spy novels. All thirty of that long-running series are on there but…… two problems.

First, it was his very first series, written from his mid-twenties onward. That makes the books immature and badly written compared to his Inspector West stuff. If I want to read Creasey for free, I don’t get the best Creasey.

Second, I find it impossible to join a series mid-way through. I’m starting at the beginning or not at all. “But Nick, why not just start at book #20 when he’s a better writer?” No, that’s not how my mind works. I’d find it physically painful to know there were nineteen other books laying out the groundwork that I’d so carelessly skipped over. I’m thorough and I like to beat around the bushes before I assault the citadel.

So despite reading the hopelessly bad The Death Miser as #1 in the Department Z series I felt strangely compelled to go through the second, Redhead. Creasey had me entranced like a snake looking at a mongoose. Fortunately for me, the second book is a big step up from the first. It doesn’t get boring until halfway through. So, what’s it about?

It’s the 1930s and two cousins, both amateur boxing champs in England, are visiting NYC. Local newspapermen, #FakeNews, print a made-up interview with them where they appear to challenge the gangsters. Said gangsters waylay them on a country road and shoot up their car with tommyguns, but fail to injure them. The lads flee the US by boarding a steamer but, a little amped up at having to run, they pick a beef with a big strong youth on board. He’s a ginger. There’s a hot girl on board too, who gets herself into trouble.

What follows is lots of carefree derring-do as an American gang under the leadership of the shadowy ‘Redhead’ try to take control of a cache of loot hidden in the cellar of a country house defended by an English gang run by ‘Zoeman’. It’s all nonsense. The girl is kidnapped a couple of times and all the young men risk life and limb to rescue her even though she isn’t fucking any of them. It had make-it-up-as-you-go-along plotting and no-one ever does the sensible thing at any time. Many of the leaps in logic made by the main characters make no sense at all, betraying then-young Creasey’s immaturity.

For all that, even in this early book it was clear Creasey was a natural writer. For all its many flaws, it was readable. Most interesting to me was the originality of the tone. Remember this was written in 1933 so it was before James Bond. The set-up is very close to Ian Fleming‘s work, having a London-based ‘M’ character, a line of secret agents with numbered code-names, and then detective-style stories laced with murderous action as the agent tries to infiltrate, identify, and then take down a criminal mastermind at the head of an international organisation.

It’s all fantastical and doesn’t aim at the realism of a Mr Moto or Matt Helm story. The gangsters in Department Z stories all shoot with the accuracy of Empire stormtroopers.

The set-up has me intrigued as I know Creasy becomes good. The question is how quickly does he become good? Kindle Unlimited has set up an intriguing race against time in which Creasy’s free Department Z books need to improve quicker than my patience with them wears out.

Who will win? It’s like taking a laxative and an Immodium at the same time.

I wish RSD would take some

If you’re like to read a prolific author who started out a bit shit and soon became fantastically good, you might like to check out my product page here. It’s the best daygame material money can buy and way better than the tripe on YouTube [7]

[1] That wouldn’t be a bad thing, except his books are basically philosophy and mythology so you have to be well-read outside of his speciality, otherwise you’re faking it. Peterson hasn’t read the Western canon.
[2] Did any of them write a book? I can’t recall one but perhaps readers can fill me in. They certainly are predominantly working through the medium of video and speech.
[3] Or pretend-memoir, really. I don’t trust these things.
[4] It’s always Nazi tank-men. Never infantry or Luftwaffe, and never Japs, Brits, Yanks, or Reds.
[5] More on them in a later review.
[6] The bastards!
[7] Except Street Attraction. Alright there, Eddie? 🙂

If you choose books according to their covers…

I’m a pretty tolerant forgiving sort of person. Just the other day, Jimmy said to me, “Nick, you’re a pretty tolerant forgiving sort of person” [1]. There are few things in the world I’m as tolerant of as dopey adventure writers when I’m in the midst of a reading binge. It’s all about the abundance mentality and its ugly sister, the scarcity mentality.

Any good player knows about that. When you’re not getting laid, you can get thirsty for skirt. Sex is an appetite like any other, but unlike hunger or sleep it also carries a huge ego component that can make you crankier than an alley cat. Food doesn’t reject you when you’re jonesing for it, but women do. Thus falling into the ‘scarcity mentality’ – that you need a woman and any given lead is precious due to its scarcity – can quickly become a vicious circle of neediness begetting neediness.

Abundance mentality is the opposite, that once you’ve got lots of women in your life (or, more crucially, the optimism that the next set of women are just around the corner) you begin to behave differently. You can #WalkAway from neediness and dependence on skirt. The whole of your game tightens up, using roll-offs, terse messages, silences, and indifference like the four horsemen on the gaming apocalypse.

Game is Life and Life is Game.

No, not Game of Life, silly!

I find the same abundance/scarcity operates in respects to my free time. I sympathise with all you office-bound losers who are woken by alarms while it’s still dark outside, shuttle in to your worthless jobs on a train, then sit in a cubicle all day. When you finally clock out at 6pm you’ve got a tiny window of free time to get all your shit done. Frankly, I’m surprised you don’t just top yourselves. You have a scarcity mindset of for time. You need to prioritise. [2] Believe me, I’ve been there and I sympathise [3].

Something has to give. When I was in that situation I became very choosy over what I’d read. I might only read one book a month so if I’d read something as comically shit as The Satan Sleuth: Fallen Angel I’d have thought to myself, fucking hell I’m not wasting my time on Michael Avallone any more. It’s already a tough sell to read trashy paperbacks about The Punisher of satanists, so a single bad experience would turn me off.

I am, however, on a year-long reading binge. I have fucking tonnes of free time. Here’s my typical day:

• Wake up at 10am, hit snooze three times, get up at 10:30 and out of the apartment a half hour later.
• Sit in a big comfy wing-back chair in a cafe with my Kindle, sipping coffee and reading. Usually I’m fasting so I skip breakfast.
• Hit the gym around 1pm, shower, then back out for lunch around 3pm. Usually my Kindle is with me and I’m reading again. That’ll take me until 5pm when I’ll go for an hour’s walk.

Evenings tend to be varied, depending who is in town, and whether I want to keep cracking on with the book, or writing a book of my own, or hurtling through the latest video game to take my fancy [4]. The point, however, is I have almost unlimited free time. I can read four hours a day without even beginning to prioritise. It’s made me a glutton for punishment regarding books.

I have such an abundance mentality regarding time – and thus reading – that I’ll try almost any type of book. I want to sweep up any novel that interests me even if I know it’s a bit shit. That’s why I kept plugging on with Michael Avallone. I thought to myself, who the hell would write a trilogy of trash like The Satan Sleuth? After ten minutes of google, I had my answer: he’s the American John Creasy and described himself as ‘the fastest pen in the West’. Legend has it he wrote one novel in only a day and a half!

This is who

I’m glad I gave Avallone a second chance because he’s really grown on me. The second book The Satan Sleuth: The Werewolf Walks Tonight was decent. This third one Devil, Devil is also…. okay. I’ll tell you what I like about it.

You know how I have an abundance mentality for reading? Michael Avallone has it for writing. He was knocking out a book every week or two so he’d get a concept, run with it, and then move on to the next one. He clearly took pleasure in experimenting with genres and high concepts knowing full well if he made a mistake, he could just submit the manuscript and move on to the next challenge. Reading him is roughly analogous to talking to a man abundant in girls (or money, or fame, etc). He just doesn’t give a fuck. It blows through the prose like a refreshing sea breeze, a sense that he’s going to write whatever he wants and never second guess himself. His books hurtle forwards.

None of that ‘cross out a sentence and rewrite it until it’s perfect’ that dickheads like Dostoevsky or Shakespeare would do. Avallone gets shit done.

The story here is relevant to anyone who has followed #PizzaGate and the #SpiritCooking black masses and satanic rituals in NYC that seem to involve an awful lot of Left-wing celebrities and politicians. There’s a witch [5] living above Central Park who has cherry-picked a small group of satanists for her rituals, which include brutally murdering and decapitating young women. Cops think it’s a spree killer and are clueless (literally). So the Satan Sleuth comes in and quickly finds out the witch’s dayjob is at a high end fashion boutique. He attempts to infiltrate but things quickly go to shit.

Sold his soul to the devil and still wasn’t granted talent or a hot wife

It’s schlock. Don’t get me wrong: when I say I enjoyed it, I’m not pretending it’s at the level of classics like The Three Musketeers or A Deplorable Cad.

What don’t I like about it? Rarely have I seen a book so thin in content. There are very few scenes, no sub-plots, and it moves in a predictable straight line. Even for a slim book, Avallone is noticeably padding it out with superfluous paragraphs and descriptions. It would’ve worked better at half the length. I get the feeling he realised half-way through that he’d never write another Satan Sleuth book so he began phoning it in. Overall, a fun quick read with a very silly story.

Speaking of silly stories, why not check out my memoir series or even treat yourself to a big chunky packed-with-value textbook on how to pick up girls (though not how to decapitate them and leave the body parts in dusty cellars). See my product page here.

[1] I may have made that up, as an excuse to begin this review on a particular topic.
[2] So keeping up to date on rambling reviews of low-quality novels probably isn’t high on the list.
[3] Not really, but I like to at least pretend.
[4] Right now, that’s Valkyria Chronciles. Awesome.
[5] Had it been written now rather than in 1973, I’m sure she’d have looked like Marina Abramovich