(no subject)

So I realized recently that in some forty years of being a fan of Anne McCaffrey*, I had somehow never read The Kilternan Legacy.  This was mostly because I’d never actually seen a copy; like Ring of Fear† and The Mark of Merlin‡, I had to order it specially. 

It’s like The Lady/The Carradyne Touch more than any of her other non-SF/F novels, but considerably less evolved.  It does have some very interesting characters, especially both sets of twins; it wavers on the brink of feminism all the way through, and then throws it all out the window at almost the last page with a really ugly few lines about how...sometimes...beating one’s wife is a good thing.  I mean, what the everloving fuck, Lady Anne? 

However, much as I did enjoy most of the book, the endpapers are almost as interesting.  I picked up a first edition from 1975 (honestly, I’m surprised it made it out of one printing) and it has ads in the back for other books from Dell§.  Including Marathon Man, “Soon to be a major motion picture from Paramount”, and Eagle in the Sky, “Not since THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT has there come along such a powerful novel of passion, plunging violence and triumphant love!” [sic] (Never heard of it.) 

There’s also a list of bestsellers, of whose authors I mostly have heard, if not all the titles (I had no idea Mae West wrote fiction, but that’s on me).  The list of nonfiction sounds very insignificant...except for one. 

I am now aware of the book James Dean, The Mutant King. 

Apparently it’s a cult classic; never having had any interest in James Dean, I was not aware of the book. 

But that title.  I can’t imagine picking that one up and being anything but disappointed that it’s not, in fact, a novel.  Because, come on.  Nothing about the man’s life can possibly be as interesting as the possibilities presented for a raring story about a former movie actor turned post-apocalyptic tyrant, leading his army of twisted A-bomb survivors in a rampage of conquest across a war-torn landscape!  

Oh, right, it’s 1975.  Better throw in something about population density and ecological collapse while we’re at it...❣   

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*Yes, there’s a lot of issues with her writing.  Trust me, I know. 

†Ring of Fear dates from when she was writing Gothic novels, and apparently this one was supposed to be soft-core porn?  o_O  Let’s just say I do not recommend it.  At all. 

‡The Mark of Merlin, on the other hand, is a surprising amount of fun for a murder mystery.  It’ll still break your heart, though. 

§This is even more fun with books dating from the 1920s or earlier.  There are pages and pages of other books from the publisher, and you won’t have heard of any of them.  Insert profound remarks on the ephemerality of art in this modern age, etc. 

❣Don’t start.  I still own a copy of The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog.  Complete with a chapter on holograms and a recipe for making chocolate-chip earthworm cookies.