Author: Daniel Sherrier
Title: “Rip: Vol 1: Choices After Death”
Publication: Sherrierbooks: 2013, near Richmond, VA; ISBN
978-1494237226 226 pages, paper
Amazon link is here.
Daniel Sherrier is a fiction writer living in central
Virginia, more or less near Richmond, perhaps.
That’s where sci-fi director Richard Kelly (“The Box”, “Southland
Tales”, “Donnie Darko” comes from – well, actually the Tidewater area familiar
to me). It seems that both geography, cultural background and content would
give Sherrier and Kelly a reason to collaborate. Let me add the aside, the last story in my
new “Do Ask, Do Tell III” book (Feb. 27, 2014), called “The Ocelot the Way He
Is” is set in Virginia, more or less the Piedmont, near the foothills of the
Blue Ridge. There are stories that the
CIA has major secret facilities not only at Langley, but in Tidewater (“The
Shop”), and south of Charlottesville in a house near IS 29 (the town is Faber,
as in Courtney Brown’s “Cosmic Voyage: A
Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth”, Dutton, 1994).
Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. The book itself comprises
four “novellas” (“Touch”, “Alone”, “The Crazy Line”, and “Point B”. There is an “interlude” which is a short
story called “Strength”, involving a wild eagle (no relation to my own
“ocelot”). Each novella has several
“Acts” and sometimes a “teaser”.
Now, this structure for the book suggests a television
mini-series, of course, structured tightly to fit into television with commercial
breaks. I presume Mr. Sherrier has
fashioned teleplays from this material.
But the concept is interesting in another sense. The novelettes and intervening story are
connected, with the same characters, more or less like a complete novel in parts, yet they can stand alone. I experimented with this idea in a novel in
the 1980’s, and I’ll be covering that effort soon on my Wordpress “Bill’s Media
Reviews” blog. Calling the middle short
story (more or less like a middle section in a musical composition) an
“interlude” is interesting. My 1969 mammoth novel manuscript “The Proles”
calls its Chapter 4, where I recount my own experience in Army Basic Combat
Training, and “Interlude”, because of what precedes and then follows it. I’ll come back to that soon in this other
blog.
Now for novel itself.
Rip Cooper is a late-teen bookworm and introvert, having grown up in a
small Piedmont (I presume) town (There is no Sidwick county, but there is a
Sedgwick county in Kansas and Colorado), apparently in a possibly haunted
house. Already I think of the movie
“Beautiful Creatures” with the young teen hero Ethan Wate played by Alden
Ehrenreich (Movies blog, Feb. 19, 2013).
Rip’s personality is rather like Ethan’s. (I knew a chess player, almost a master,
named Rip Smith back in the 1960’s.) Rip
gets challenged to prove he isn’t a candyass by showing he can stand up to
ghosts. He probably has been too close
to Fort Eustis (Tidewater Virginia, Richard Kelly country again). He works as a professional photographer, and
has the gift of seeing and hearing ghosts that don’t show up in photo negatives
(or in cell phone photos for that matter).
Now, taking pictures of people in public – in places like bars and
discos – is usually legal, but getting troubling because of tagging and
Facebook and the like. Ghosts don’t have
that problem, or online reputation sundering.
There’s an issue here of the science of life after
death. It seems that some people get
half a second chance (rather like a half-pawn advantage in chess) by being
ghosts for a while, before their eternal fate is decided. And somehow some people become angels, but
not all ghosts and not all angels are good people. In fact, that’s the reason for being a ghost
for a while.
During the last year of my own mother’s life, one of her
caregivers believed in ghosts as part of a spiritual process, and claimed to
have heard my later father in the house.
I do hear sounds at night. Are the animals, floorboards settling, or
something else.
So Rip becomes ghost killer, not quite following the script
of “Ghostbusters”. When ghosts get shot,
thrown off buildings or hit by cars, they don’t show the same damage from
mechanics that real people do.
Rip does form a tag team, particularly with his ex-best-friend’s
ex- girl-friend. Interesting things
happen. Ghosts can be dyslexic it seems,
catching the ire of English teachers.
And they may have powers, being able to teleport the way Clark Kent in
Smallville does.
I’m reminded, of course, of Peter Straub’s mammoth 1979 novel
“Ghost Story,” in which the protagonist, Donald Wanderlay, and cohorts
rediscover a supernatural sin of drowning a woman in the trunk of a car to
cover up a crime. That sets off all
kinds of supernatural creatures and the story of the girl, Alma Mobley as one
name, becomes a memorable middle section of the book. That became a film from Universal
and director John Irvin in 1981, and I saw it, but the film seems miniature
compared to the book.
Daniel Sherrier also has a book “Earths In Space, Vol. 1:
Where Are the Little Green Men?” The
idea seems to be that there are other planets populated with people. That would require spawning of life through
meteorites traveling between solar systems. (I think of the character A-lan in
Dan Fry’s “To Men of Earth”.) If you
ever had seen a non-ghost with powers (like Clark Kent’s), then you’ve seen an extraterrestrial
(not an alien) and proof of pan-spermia.
Maybe I have. Maybe we are all
extraterrestrials.
I reviewed the book from a complimentary sample.
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