The Midnight Diner has been silent for a while–too long, in fact. That’s about to change.

Story decisions are now being made, edits worked on, things happening. One we have our final list of Diner 4 authors, we’ll post them here. Until then, I leave you with the full title of our fourth issue:

The Midnight Diner Volume 4: Wastelands Under the Sun.

Zombies will feast (and fast), desperate men will draw steel in the desert, souls will be lost (and found)–and, of course, everyone’s favorite Lovecraftian unspeakable abominations will return to prey upon the minds of the weak and marginalized.

Be excited.

–Robert S. Garbacz

Editor-in-Chief, The Midnight Diner

Pursuing Christ on the Fringe

 And it’s almost never done well, and as an award-winning crime writer, it’s making me want to write romance novels instead.

Look, I love anti-heroes.  We all know how I feel about The Shield’s Shane Vendrell and Justified’s Boyd Crowder.  I got mad love for Han Solo and Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel.  But there’s a major difference between an anti-hero and an asshole, and that difference is that an anti-hero has something redeeming about him. 

Husband. Father. Friend. And Baddest Cop You'll Ever Meet.

Let’s talk Vic Mackey.  In the first episode of The Shield, we see Vic at a BBQ with his friends.  His kids are playing in the pool.  Kenny Johnson isn’t wearing a shirt.  This is all very deliberate because Vic is going to do a very bad thing by the end of the episode, and if we’re going to sympathize with him, we need to see that he does it for a reason—to protect his family, his friends and the job he believes in.  Yes, he has his selfish reasons too, but those only add to the complexity of his character.  He is not a hollow badass, and that’s why we can follow him for seven seasons—because we are simultaneously fascinated and hoping to God someone catches him and brings him to justice for all his crimes.  It’s complex, and that’s what makes it good.

By contrast, Dexter Morgan kills people because he’s an angel of true justice.  He has a code and a compulsion, but those are secondary.  He kills bad people, and that’s fine with us.

I rejected any and all stories that glorified the Dexter-style torture of people, especially women, as an act of “revenge” for a supposed wrongdoing.  How on Earth am I supposed to sympathize with such a character, follow his actions and applaud for him in the end?  I can’t.  These revenge stories exist solely to appease the writer’s warped sense of justice, usually fueled by fear and inadequacy in a world that thrives on anonymity.  Dexter especially fuels our fantasy that we kill the bad people we read about in the news—rapists, murderers, child molesters—but who are we to judge bad and good?  There’s only one person who can do that, and He does a pretty good job in the end.  But luckily, for now, I’ve been charged with judging bad and good stories, a power I wield with great aplomb.

Also, Mickey Rourke is awesome

If you want to read a good, modern crime story, Frank Miller’s The Hard Goodbye is, at it’s absolute barest structure, a perfect example of crime fiction done right.  You’ve got the guns, the dames, the stylized violence in stark black and white, but at the heart of it, you have the story of Marv, a dumb lug of a criminal trying to do right the only way he knows how, which he admits isn’t even a very good way.  He knows he’s doing wrong and in the end, he suffers the consequences, but he does it for the woman he loves, and what you end up with is a beautiful, violent tragedy.

Because good crime fiction isn’t about the style.  It’s not about fedoras and guns and acts of violence committed solely for a thrill.  It’s about people—people affected by crime and by violence and how the react and how they feel and why they react and feel this way.  A good crime story has real characters, characters who breathe and sweat and fear and panic . . . not a whole bunch of slang designed to make it “feel” real.

You are not, nor will you ever be, Humphrey Bogart

So if you got a rejection letter from me, or if you’re writing a story you want to send, ask yourself—is this just my revenge fantasy?  Is this all style and no substance?  Who are these characters, and what’s really important to them?  How can I make them complex, and not just a string of words that sound sharp and sexy?  Because I’m tired of reading retreads of Max Payne and Boondock Saints.   Give me someone I want to invite into my home, even if he/she has blood on their hands.  Give me a character I can care about, a scenario I sympathize with, and for the love of Pete, no more fedoras!

Do I think some people are bit too serious about Earth Day? Why, yes! In fact, did you know that the guy who hosted the very first Earth Day event back in the 70′s, Ira Einhorn, murdered his girlfriend and then composted her body in his closet! Oh, wait. It must have been his OLD girlfriend. Ah, see? Naturally the old girlfriend needed to be recycled in order to make room for a new girlfriend. Now I get it…

Do I think we should live in the biggest trash heap we possibly can? No. Because anyone raised with half a brain tries to take good care of their things and surroundings. However, maybe you’re too young to remember, but those leading us now, the Woodstock generation, left a whole lot of brain material out baked between the cow-piles. Hence they have gone along with lunacy that is unnecessary and will make humans an endangered species.

But that’s for another time. I say that to merely make the point that being anti-Earth Day does NOT equal ‘pro-slob.’

I do have a question for those who are tickled pink each Earth Day. The ones who quake with joy at buying cloth grocery bags, the ones who buy a Prius because ‘they care more,’ or the women (this one is almost ALWAYS perpetrated by a female) who storm up to restaurant managers and demand that the one poor guy at the bar having a smoke put it out! You watch a show about Green Peace and think, “Yes, the elites need to rule, the hoi-poloi is lost without us…” If you get this excited about Earth Day and the Green movement in general, you are most likely ambiguous in your spiritual beliefs (at least so says the people who collect such data) or in one of those faiths that has embraced corporate salvation.

Never heard of it? You’ve heard of ‘Once saved always saved?’ Corporate salvation sounds like this: ‘Everyone with a dime more than me can’t get saved, so send me your money and I’ll send you to heaven…’ Social Justice.(Heh-heh…Until the nineties it was common to call that line of thinking ‘cult-like’ and maybe Janet Reno would come set you on fire, but now it’s far more acceptable!)

So finally, to my question. Green people : Do you have any idea how religious you sound?

I can’t look at your actions and say, “Yes, they ARE religious!” I’m not a mind reader, Kreskin or Karnac. I’m not even Judge Judy.  I can’t say I’m sure I know your intentions.  However,  here are some things to keep in mind. Religiosity does NOT have a denomination. It doesn’t even hang out solely in the Church. Religiosity might be better defined as the actions and attitudes one adopts to make themselves appear more in line with their accepted philosophy and with a secondary goal of appealing to those who hold the same ideals.

But, I guess the short version could be that religiosity centers around anything that you wish to live for other than God. Also known as, idolatry.

Many Christians don’t call it a religion anymore because while there is a great deal of religion in Christianity, there is no Christianity in religion. A lot of Jewish folks do something similar…(No they don’t call it Christianity!)…but Faith.

It’s the difference between button counting, in hopes God will like you, and having a personal relationship with Him. Because, really, what are you going to do to impress God? Memorize a million Bible verses? Give all your money to the poor and make sure everyone else does the same? Go to church and sing the loudest? Pray five times a day? Sure, knock yourself out. But that sound you hear is God yawning as He leans back waiting for a chance to blow your mind.

Aw, c’mon, God IS pretty old, maybe you could shut up and let Him do His thing, just this once, okay?

But we’re so arrogant. People have put the earth in place of God for centuries. Think of all the dumb things men have done to make the earth ‘like us.’ Like human sacrifice. It was considered logical in the ancient orient to toss babies in Moloch’s fire so the crops would grow. The Aztecs just knew that ripping a human apart for their earth god would also make everything grow. These days Green folk have kept humans from having homes, refused to defend human homes from fire, and have fought to keep America from having affordable gas prices by drilling here.  Yeah, sacrificing humans in some way shape or form seems to be a theme,  but it  doesn’t work.

Listen, if the plastic rings from every soda six-pack were picked up, birds would still die. If we quit driving cars, the ozone would still thin. You know what? If we detonated every single nuclear bomb on the planet we might end up killing ourselves, sure. But some of us will only die once, (it’s that whole ‘second death thing that should leave one concerned.) And anyway, life would be back…at some point, at some time, still varied and wonderful.  So understand that the earth doesn’t need you to fight for it because the God many of you Green folk don’t believe in designed it to take care of itself.  And it does.  Very well.

So go ahead, do your Green religion thing so we can all applaud how much more you ‘care’ than the next guy.  Let the world know that  without you recycling soda cans we’re doomed. But when you’re finished, get out of the way because the earth is going to need one hell of a barf bag.

Huh, with all the earthquake activity as of late, maybe she’s winding up…

Jeff Chapman

Jeff Chapman comments on Colin McKay Miller’s “The Ocean Thief” and asks him a few questions about the story.

What would happen if the ocean’s vanished? What would we do with all that sand? What would become of fishermen? Look no further than Colin McKay Miller’s “The Ocean Thief” (The Midnight Diner, Volume 3). In Miller’s tale, a man somehow puts all the oceans into a book. No one knows who he is or how he did it, because no one was watching when he did it. Miller’s story reads like an allegory with a tone somewhere between a fairy tale and an essay salted with bits of understated humor.

Naval forces disbanded. Fishermen went back to being men. The desert of the ocean was a popular vacation spot until people realized they didn’t need any more deserts (p. 71).

As expected, people learn to muddle through with much less water, but the Ocean Thief–the name he assumes via popular usage–remains a mystery. Some think he’s God. Some think he’s stupid. No one can tell where he is from. He speaks many languages but all with a foreign accent. He travels a great deal but no one can explain how he gets around. He refuses to answer any questions, preferring to sit on park benches and “read” the book of seemingly blank pages containing the oceans. The evidence seems to point to God, but the story’s ending suggests otherwise.

Miller’s story is baffling after the first read. The story asks many questions but does not provide ready answers. Is the man with the book really a thief? Who owns the oceans? Will the oceans disappear if we don’t take care of them? Can mankind persevere through any catastrophe? More details float to the surface with each reading, but like the Ocean Thief, the answers remain elusive.

Colin kindly answered a few questions about  “The Ocean Thief.”

JC: The tone of this piece reminds me of Herman Hesse’s fairy tale “The City.” Did you have any literary models in mind when writing “The Ocean Thief”?

CMM: While many books have influenced my writing—Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live, A.L. Kennedy’s Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, and The Bible (seriously, people have been trying to recreate the power of those stories forever)—influences that I’ve been trying to bury deeper so that they’re not so overt, one of the things I like about “The Ocean Thief” is that it doesn’t read like what I usually write, and thus feels fairly uninfluenced. Never read Hermann Hesse though; I’ll have to look him up.

JC: What inspired the idea of capturing the ocean in a book?

CMM: Here’s an uninspiring answer for you: For some odd reason, I just plucked the title out of nothing—“The Man Who Put the Ocean in a Book”—and wrote the story off what that would actually look like if it happened in the world tomorrow. Then those cruel, cruel editors at The Midnight Diner wanted something shorter, punchier, and since they were kind enough to publish me, “The Ocean Thief” seemed like a fair concession.

I actually discussed this very story in an interview a couple of years back: http://craigwallwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-with-colin-mckay-miller.html

JC: You record the Ocean Thief’s interaction with two other characters, a German strongman and a small American girl. What is the symbolism behind those two characters and incidents?

CMM: About halfway through the piece, I realized that it would come across as allegory, so I figured I better actually put some meaning in there. It’s one thing if people read into things, but if you intentionally place no meaning into what looks like it should have meaning, well, that just seems like cheating to me.

The young, American girl covers a couple of angles: You could argue an American sense of entitlement, but more than that, as a young girl who is invited to dip her arm in the ocean book—not being forceful, not really earning it—it’s more about the heart of the man who put the ocean in the book. As for the German strongman who likes to pull great things with his teeth, I just love that character. His full story, “Queasy,” appears in Sideshow Fables #1. In “The Ocean Thief,” he serves as the antithesis to the young, American girl. With his brute strength, it appears as though he could take the book, but it’s the young, powerless girl who is invited in instead.

JC: The lingering mystery is the Ocean Thief’s identity. He has some superhuman abilities but dies a strange death. How do you hope readers will interpret him?

CMM: Oh no’s, spoiler alert! Why don’t you just tell everyone about Vader’s family while you’re at it?

Power is an intriguing element. We see how other people waste or misappropriate it, but somehow assume we’d be different if we had that same power. Gangbangers love “Scarface,” but a lot of their admiration seems to miss the fact that Tony Montana dies when the power he’s wielded for so long is seized by other men wanting to be on top. Likewise, many people think that if they won the lottery, they wouldn’t go broke or that their problems would all disappear, yet I constantly come across interviews with broken down, strife-riddled lottery winners who assumed they’d be different, too. So if you’re powerful enough to put the ocean in a book, you should be able to control every angle, yet we’ve seen throughout history that people can’t handle the power they take.

In Judges 9, Abimelech was a dude who killed all his brothers so that he could be king, yet it was only a few years before people followed his example to do whatever they wanted, too. “Scarface” ends with Tony Montana’s sister cursing him and shooting him in the leg; Judges 9 ends with Abimelech forcefully trying to hold onto his power, only to have a woman smash his skull with a grain-grinding stone dropped from a tower (not even a weapon from someone equipped to fight). And “The Ocean Thief”? Well, it ended how I wanted it to end. I think the man who put the ocean in a book is a more favorable character than Tony Montana or Abimelech, but he (obviously or maybe not so obviously) couldn’t wield the power he took.

***

Jeff Chapman writes fairy tales, fantasy, and ghost stories and hearing the expression “just a fairy tale” rankles him. His works have appeared in various anthologies and magazines. He lives with his wife and children in a house with more books than bookshelf space. To learn more, stop by his blog at http://jeffchapmanwriter.blogspot.com/.

Matthew Quinn Martin

I’m ‘ma show you what they dysfunction is
They need some nickel-plated acupuncturists
Vile and vulturous
Let’s get tumultuous
And bring a multitude
To where their luncheon is

“Somewhere in the World it’s Midnight” – Street Sweeper Social Club

Lately, I’ve noticed a real rage for Dystopian fiction (especially in the YA market)…heck, at my agency alone they recently placed novels from two different writers––both for massive advances. Now, Dystopian fiction is nothing new; its been a fairly constant fixture on the literary landscape since even before St. John penned the Book of Revelation. Even so, I’ve never been a big fan…that said, however, I recently read a story that absolutely terrified me.

...something like this?

It talked of an America where it somehow became possible for the governor of a state to order the dissolution of whatever town he deemed in dire enough financial trouble, and to appoint a crony of his choosing with unilateral powers to fire local elected officials, break town contracts, seize and sell assets belonging to that town, eliminate any or all services–even to go so far as to dissolve entire cities, towns or school districts without opposition from the citizens of that area. Imagine that…an America where with the stroke of a gubernatorial pen, all the assets of your town could be taken, the schools ordered shut, the hospitals boarded up, the mayor and city council fired, the parkland seized and given to corporations…just imagine…

Scary, huh? And where did I read this? In one of those YA books practically flying off the shelf?

No…I read it in the news.

Where is this America? If you live in Michigan…then you already know the answer to that. There, Gov. Snyder (the new “Tricky Dick”) has not only enacted this legislation but is using it. There is a small city there called Benton Harbor. True the financial situation there is quite dire (the average annual income is about 10K)…and if these “emergency powers” were being used to help the population there, then one could argue that these terribly undemocratic means would be justified by humanitarian ends.

They aren’t.

Instead, they will be used to help push through a massive, taxpayer-subsidized project that would provide housing and amusements for the wealthy. This isn’t just a hunk of land––Jean Klock Park is a very special place, a gift from John Nellis Klock and his wife Carrie who bought the land fronting Lake Michigan and gave it to City of BentonHarbor in 1917 . In a 1932 memoir, Mr. Klock described the reason for the gift.

“There is little joy in piling up money that you do not need, and so the majority of my earnings have been spent in providing beaches, parks, churches and schools. Our first major gift was Jean Klock Park, a half mile of Lake Michigan frontage, which was given to the city of Benton Harbor. I say “our” for my wife was very anxious to give this park to the city in memory of our little child. Her untimely death made possible the giving to other children the share of our earnings which belonged to her, but which she could not use.”

This is the America you live in (if you live in America)…one that can seize your rights because it deems it “fiscally” necessary (you can almost hear it…” Two pounds of wheat for a penny, and thrice two pounds of barley for a penny, and see thou hurt not the wine and the oil”)….so here’s my challenge: Write something “dsytopian”…but use this as the launch pad––and when you are done, send it in…I know I can’t wait to read it.