I know. 1996. Why am I bothering to review a book this old, that’s attracted this much attention for this long? It isn’t as if I could present some new insight into the text that’s not already been illuminated by someone smarter and more eloquent. The book’s 16 years old. It’s all been done.

Or maybe it hasn’t. And if it has, maybe it doesn’t matter that it has. Maybe the important thing is to do it whether it’s been done before or not, especially when the passage of time makes a book more relevant rather than less.

Whatever.

Believe it or not, I hadn’t read Fight Club until a few weeks ago. How’s that possible for a bibliophile? I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s possible for a guy who lists Fight Club as one of his favorite films, either, but this is the same guy that considers Bringing Out the Dead to be his hands-down all-time favorite movie (and the king of all Scorsese films), but still didn’t get around to reading the book until over a decade later. So it would be an embarrassing truth to admit that upon first seeing each film, I didn’t know Chuck Palahniuk and Joe Connelly had written the original works from which the films were built.

You know, even though both have giant “Based on the novel by…” tags in the opening credits.

But anyway. Fight Club.

If you’ve never heard of the book and are unfamiliar with its premise, the story is about two guys who start a club where men meet in basements to beat each other up. One of them is a regular guy with a day job. He visits support groups for ailments he doesn’t have to help himself sleep. He likes filling his condo with Swedish furniture. The other guy is Tyler Durden. Tyler makes soap. Tyler pees in the soup at fancy restaurants and works as a projectionist so he can splice single frames of pornography into movie reels. There’s also a woman, of course, creating a dysfunctional love triangle, and more than a little male-centric ideological rhetoric, which at the very least forces you to think, and sometimes might even have you nodding your head emphatically.

And while I could obviously say a hell of a lot more, knowing more than that isn’t really necessary. It might even be detrimental.

I mean, okay, there are the requisite twists and turns. There’s swearing, sex, and violence.

There’s an ending.

What there isn’t is much chance to take a breath. From the opening lines of the book to the last lines that trail off like the echoes of gunshots, Fight Club moves at a constant deathwish pace. Nothing is wasted. While Palahniuk can generally be considered a minimalist, this is the holy grail. It reads like lightning and expresses itself with the vehemence of a Biblical text no matter how scant the excess verbiage.

A lot of novelists come out with worthy first books, but this is more than just a quick buzz, more than a series of crazy revelations, more than a lesson on social (in)equality. This is a book worth reading. The story itself is a gas-huffing fever dream, sure, but what makes it a must-have isn’t the fluff, the shock value, the stuff by which the novel earns its title. It isn’t the simple if-you-can-call-it-that love story. It isn’t even because the writing is impeccable—some of the writing works better in the movie than the book. In my estimation, Fight Club is worth owning because of the commentary on self-perception, cultural norms, and male (not just male) subjugation in modern American society. Because it doesn’t seem to recommend or deny, letting judgments form themselves of their own accord. You find out where your loyalties lie as you go. Tyler Durden gives voice to the discontent of generations, to the unspoken undercurrents of hostility and pent-up aggression that society itself has created, and as the stakes escalate and the twists unwind, the book lets you draw your own conclusions.

The Occupy movement? Okay, this doesn’t speak directly to that, but large-scale American discontent? Parallel lines, folks. And I’m sure a caffeine-blitzed college student somewhere is making that comparison into a thesis.

This is a book that makes you think, and it doesn’t force itself to become so transgressive that it ceases to be intelligent. If you can stomach a little violence and vulgarity, you’ll be better off for having read it. Go in expecting explicit content, but go in too expecting to learn just how well a book can put shocking imagery to real purpose. This is literature.

Fight Club was published by W. W. Norton in 1996. It is 208 pages long. The movie, starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter, was directed by David Fincher, a cult classic now in its own right. You can find the book and movie in almost any store that sells books and media.

Read more about Chuck at his website, chuckpalahniuk.net.

This isn’t a novel you’d call experimental, exactly, and the writing is occasionally a tad pedestrian, but it does try to do some creative things with its premise, and there is something unique and beautiful at the core, wrapped in the cold linens of a psychiatric hospital cot.

The narrative centers around Billy Argo and his inability to deal with life and the loss of his sister Caroline. After a string of successes in amateur crime-solving as children, Billy and his sister are forced to grow up, which sees Billy going to college while Caroline, suddenly alone and seemingly without identity, succumbs to a depression that ends in suicide. Billy winds up in a mental ward filled with a colorful assortment of characters including fellow patients, an unstable nurse, and an aging nemesis who seems comically hell-bent on his destruction. A misfit brother and sister pair across the street and a variety of washed-up villains and former detectives round out the cast, though some of them don’t get as much of the spotlight as they deserve, ending up merely as cameos that provide glimpses of Billy’s former life as an investigator.

The book’s heroes are the kind you want to embrace that still feel oddly at arm’s length once you have; or perhaps the kind you don’t identify with the way you might hope to, making the moment they show up between your arms an even bigger surprise. Either way, it’s a dreamy ride that never feels quite like reality, and that never turns out to be a bad thing.

Despite being an amusing and colorful book, there’s a vein of darkness that Mr. Meno mines with dexterity from beginning to end. A few gimmicks exist to good effect, such as the decoder ring which you can cut out and build from the back flap to solve a few riddles, and a longer message scattered along the bottom of each page, but it’s the deadpan delivery strung round with the ornaments of its humor and pretty depression that makes the story sing.

There are only a few problems worth noting. Though diligence is rewarded, the early stages don’t move rapidly toward a concrete story, nor does every thread see a satisfactory resolution by the end. Several characters are left more or less abandoned, and a few mysteries with potential don’t develop into anything tangible. There is a sense that more could have been done, that the story could have had a multitude of interesting facets without that much extra work.

But these are minor problems, and not really what should be taken away from any review. The showcase here is Mr. Meno’s ability to bring his chosen elements together into a whole that is bittersweet without bitterness, sad without weight, dark without forcing the reader to squint. That alone is an accomplishment, and the worthwhile story with its many colorful memories, things that stick in your mind like faded photographs of better days, are memories worth keeping.

This is the first work by Mr. Meno that I’ve read. Instead of moving on to Hairstyles of the Damned, the only Meno novel you’re likely to find in a major chain bookstore with any regularity, I plan to next read his short story collection, Demons in the Spring.

The Boy Detective Fails was published by Punk Planet Books in 2006. It is 328 pages long and available only in paperback. If you pick up a copy and decide you don’t feel like dealing with all the message-decoding (which isn’t necessary to enjoy the book, for the record), you can find a list of the solutions available online here. Joe Meno’s official website can be found at www.joemeno.com.

Because of this, I decided I needed to go back and finish Demon’s Souls, the first game in the franchise. I’d gotten halfway through it when it first came out in North America in October of 2009, only to stop when life called me away. The games are in some ways very different from one another, and after some debate and discussion with friends and other fans of the game, I decided it was time to put my thoughts down on the digital page.

To start with, I’ll say that yes, ]Dark Souls is definitively a much better game. Coming from that and going backward has been hard. I didn’t have any complaints when I first played Demon’s Souls, so I’m not really leveling most of this as raw criticism, just comparison.

To look at the games, you wouldn’t find a wide gap right off. The controls are similar, the combat is similar, the design is similar, and so on throughout; but in getting down to playing Demon’s Souls again, I found I was much less impressed with how things were implemented. The controls, despite being more or less the same, feel looser, less reliable. I was more nervous about falling when traversing catwalks than ever I had been in Dark Souls. The combat too seems indistinguishable from that of the sequel at first, yet I felt like the dance wasn’t the same dance, like there was a layer of control and depth missing from what I’d experienced in Dark Souls. The hitboxes are a bit more finicky, the enemies don’t seem to have quite the same variety in movements and attacks, the animations are somewhat clunkier, the blocking feels less weighty.

The basic online components, conversely, seem more prominent. There are more bloodstains and ghosts in Demon’s Souls (recorded deaths and non-interactive afterimages of other players), making the game feel more populated, less lonely. Dark Souls uses these things much more sparingly, and the ghosts all appear in mere rags, looking underpowered and sickly, which does a lot to change the feel. I felt more powerful in Dark Souls in the sense that I felt I had a better handle on things, that my character was reliable and would respond exactly as I intended; yet psychologically I always felt weaker. In Demon’s Souls, the opposite is true. I feel stronger and more confident, yet I don’t feel my character is as reliable, and I die more often in what are generally less direful circumstances.

The graphics and art design also affect the psychological impact of the game. When I first booted up Dark Souls, I actually thought, “Man, I remember the first game looking better than this.” And when I booted up Demon’s Souls again, my first impression was, “Man, this really does look better than Dark Souls.” But observation has shown that the differences in the design, the display, and the environments of the games lead to some wildly different ends.

Demon’s Souls doesn’t use so many depth-of-field and similar effects, thus appearing a tad sharper, and it’s much darker, much more Gothic, which immediately renders the sunlit qualities of some of the Dark Souls environments with less contrast, making them more homogenous. The hub levels reflect this in extremis. While the Nexus of Demon’s Souls is a vaguely frightening, oddly comforting, strangely emotive place that begins to fill rapidly with people as the game progresses, Firelink Shrine of Dark Souls is… not. There’s nothing wrong with it, and it isn’t designed to be exactly the same hub as the Nexus (especially given that the former game is broken up into separate levels while the latter is an open, continuous world), but it feels impotent in direct comparison. It’s brighter, cheerier, with blue-tinted sunlight filtering through a great tree, stone crumbling around the walls of a nearby ruin. It isn’t the adamantine wonder that the Nexus is, crossed with those many statues, the disturbing upside-down iconography, the shifting magical runes that cross the walls in those wide circles.

Yet the people of Firelink Shrine are fewer, the sense of camaraderie less pronounced. The NPCs of Dark Souls have their own ambitions and come and go more frequently, leaving you to sit alone in the stark magical radiance of the bonfire. The Nexus is so visually fascinating and historically intriguing, the initial impression one must have of Dark Souls by comparison is one that’s more subdued.

This follows through with a lot of other areas. Demon’s Souls is, oddly enough given the title of the sequel, darker. It positively drips with dread and fear, with despair and madness. Dark Souls shares some similarities, but isn’t so Gothic, not so covered over in layers of blackness. This makes Demon’s Souls much more striking in a lot of ways, but also less real, more like a dream. The sequel has a dreamlike quality as well, but the sense of place is more profound. The open world and the less evil-feeling environs give you the sense that people could have lived there, that this was an ancient land of beauty where gods dwelt, long forgotten and covered over in ruin in the wake of a curse. The landscape of Demon’s Souls feels more like a giant prison, a place where nothing could ever live, where no one could ever escape, purely hostile and without the vestiges of living history that let it breathe any breath but malice. In this sense I think Demon’s Souls is more striking, yet the ongoing effect is weaker. Dark Souls has a subtlety that may at first glance feel like a step down, but it does more to build the world FromSoft wants you to inhabit.

So despite my early exclamations, Dark Souls is far and away the better-looking game. The models, animations, textures, and overall environments are more convincing. In the same way, Dark Souls is—for all the differences between it and its predecessor—far and away the better game. It is more strictly fair to the player, less frustrating, provides far more content and more variety while still being more challenging in the right ways. I’m still looking forward to spending a couple hours here and there trying to knock out the remaining challenges that await me in Demon’s Souls, but I can appreciate now how excellent a job FromSoft did building their sequel. And considering how good the first game has turned out to be, it’s no wonder that Dark Souls turned out to be one of my favorite games of all time.

LL: “So you’re a writer. What do you write?”

Me: “Fiction.”

LL: “What’s that?”

Me: “Uh… well, stories, you know. Novels and such.”

LL: *blank expression* ” … novels?”

I could detail any number of various disgusting and/or exasperating, inconvenient, or hypocritical mannerisms of hers, but the more I think on it, the more I wonder what the point would be. Sure, it would be funny, because a lot of her issues are—let’s just say “colorful”. But aside from satisfying my own desire for a little retribution, all it would do is drag down someone else’s character for the sake of my own pettiness.

So she’s a jerk. Aren’t we all? As an adherent to Christian principles I must acknowledge that I too am imperfect, and equally so. In the grand scheme of things, we’ve both been selfish. Maybe not regarding the same things, and maybe toward people of different positions in our lives, but selfishness is selfishness. Wrong is wrong. While many in our increasingly secular society choose to look at the Christian Bible as fiction, as something non-literal, even in the church it seems to have lost its identity, instead being used for semantics and political posturing rather than real philosophy. And it’s a shame that we’ve come to view it strictly on the basis of divine inspiration or secular refutation. Why is it we can respect the writings of Heidegger or Sartre or Nietzsche while rejecting the work of religious thinkers, of those prophets, disciples, and kings who were each of them philosophers?

But that’s another topic, and I’m in danger of going too far afield. My main point here is this: judgment in the Bible is a recurring theme, including the reservation of it for divine hands, and if there’s anything that both society and the modern church seem to have forgotten, it’s that we have all fallen short of perfection. As we Christians often quote, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We don’t have to agree with everything that others do, say, or believe, but that doesn’t mean we should be picketing events with messages of hate, militantly swinging the religious bat at whatever comes near us. I don’t propose we roll over and stop fighting for what we believe in, or that we stop discussing the truths and abundant worth of the Scriptures, only that we need to do it in a manner consistent with what our sacred text—our life-guide, the philosophical work of our earliest scholars and greatest teacher—teaches us about life. What good is it otherwise? There’s too much ego floating around, especially in this culture of mega-churches where the personalities, rich pastors and musicians, eclipse any chance one might have at seeing anything even resembling God.

So for me, here’s the rub: while I had a big fight with my landlady, feel entirely justified in my position, and really want to vindicate myself by detailing everything that happened (so everyone can see not only just how much this situation isn’t my fault, but also how much I’ve had to endure), I’m forced to acknowledge that this the wrong reaction. Being mistreated is only half of the equation, and while there’s likely nothing that will cause it to cease from rankling me entirely, forsaking retaliation has made the situation feel a lot less awful. If I use this space to deride someone, what does that say about my ability to learn from the experience? What does it say about my understanding of the significance of removing the plank from my own eye, casting the first stone, tying my tongue to a sense of responsibility? I could go on and on through the book of James, or into Solomon’s writings on wisdom and the folly of quick anger, of being argumentative—I am too often both. I began this by poking fun at my landlady for not knowing the definition of some common words, yet I myself seem to have forgotten the definition of decency as Christ taught it.

I don’t have to agree with the way I’ve been treated, nor say that I’m perfectly happy with the way things have been; but there’s a roof over my head. I was able to save the life of a beautiful stray dog who has since returned warmth and love to me. I’ve had the opportunity to help other people and animals in the community on several occasions, and have learned much about how others perceive and treat the lives that come in contact with their own. This particular situation hasn’t always been pleasant, but I’m a better person for it.

So instead of the rant I was so looking forward to, I’ll just say this: pick your roommates carefully, and your landlords even more so. Few things in daily life are more damaging to one’s mental/emotional climate than a home without peace, and few things frustrate one’s own attempts at peace so much as giving in to anger. “Being right”, in the end, is a pretty hollow victory unless you can be right by the merits of a worthy and charitable action. Whether you agree or disagree with treating the Christian Scriptures as a source of divine wisdom, I think we can all get behind the fundamental philosophy of James: “the seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”

Nobody, not even God, is going to guarantee you a frustration-free life, but in the search for peace, the best place to start looking is where you’ve helped to create it.

I guess this is somewhat common of late. I’ve heard a lot of stories about people 30 years and older going back to school, and have several friends who’ve done it. I just never expected to number myself among them.

See, I didn’t just hate school a little bit. I hated it with a vehemence bordering on religious fanaticism. This was partly because I wasn’t a high performer. I got good grades, generally speaking, but it was a lot of work for me to get there, and I wasn’t what you might call “motivated”. Unless you mean motivated to find literally anything to do that didn’t involve doing homework. And I don’t think I did any non-homework studying of any kind. Ever.

The flipside? I loved (and still love) to learn. I spent a lot of my free time learning about things that interested me, and have since studied any number of things on my own time, including Japanese—日本語の勉強が大好きだよ。—Japanese and Irish history, literature, and any number of writing disciplines. But these things are hard to squeeze in when you’ve got a busy schedule and full-time job that demands most of your time.

And that was the key. Realizing how much more learning meant to me compared to employment was an epiphany, and though trepidation has kept me from biting the bullet and deciding to go back to school in earnest, it’s been on my mind for a long time. When I was young, I wanted to be paid for time if I was going to have to spend it doing something I didn’t really want to be doing, but that was a ridiculous way of looking at it. The reality is that no matter how much you’re being paid, you’re always spending time; and with each day that goes by, you realize how little a dead-end office job is offering you. Sure, I could have spent my whole life at the job I had, and I could have promoted and made an excellent salary, but at what point does salary become less important than personal development? Than a life that matters to the one living it?

However it happened, and whatever small realizations led up to the big one, a germinating idea finally sprouted, and I’m again on the road to education.

Now let’s just hope I don’t crash and burn in the first semester. Remembering just how bad I am at math was… rather less than pleasant, and it looks like preparatory classes are likely in my future.

It’s been a long time, pre-algebra. Please be gentle.

What is it about people that varies so widely as to make living together as impossible as it seems to be? Even if you’ve got two generally nice, considerate people, giant gulfs in what the two consider the acceptable treatment of others seem to come up. Everyone seems to find a way to feel slighted about something, or like the other is encroaching on their territory. Even people of kindness-centered faiths who share core ideologies seem unable to agree on how those things should be expressed, what personal boundaries need to be respected, what considerations given.

Or is that just me? Do the rest of you find it easy enough to live with people? Admittedly, the lady I rent from would probably drive any reasonable person nuts. She complains if you leave a dish or speck of dust in the kitchen while being perfectly comfortable with leaving two sinkfuls of dishes unwashed for 3 days. She complains about the use of the washing machine, yet uses it as her own personal hamper, forcing you to remove whatever she’s let build up in it over the course of a week if you need to do laundry, and it usually smells… unpleasant. She demands the rent in cash, and every month asks for it anywhere from 1 to 7 days early for unknown reasons. Her brainless sausage of a dog is a “good boy” who amasses heaps of lavish praise for sleeping 16 hours a day, shitting on the floor, and barking incessantly at visitors to the house; and there are many, many visitors, most of whom are related to drug rehab programs, like to spend the night, and equal the landlady in raw volume and sense of “humor”.

Honestly, I’m not sure how much more of this I can take. Did I mention that my hardwood floor is caving in? In at least 3 places, yes—one of which has already begun to splinter.

So if anyone knows of a nice, cozy alley somewhere, preferably one with a coffee shop nearby where I can leech wifi and recharge the occasional electronic device, do let me know.

Thankfully, at some point I did finally get it figured out; so while I sometimes have trouble remembering what day of the week it currently is, what year it is, and how old I am, at least I can say with confidence: today is Mom’s birthday.

Though things have been rough over these last few years, I’ve been continually blessed in my life. I’ve known many great people, and been supported by most of them in one way or another. As undeserving as I have so often been, and as much as I have wasted opportunities and taken those great people for granted, God has still kept me afloat in these murky waters, and largely through the people I’ve been allowed to cling to. Chief among them is my mother.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a good relationship with their parents, or to have parents who go out of their way to be available to them. I was lucky on both counts. Martin O. Riser, my father, who has been dead now for the better part of a decade, made up for not always being available by being an exceptional person. He wasn’t just a good man, he was a paragon of inspiration. His life is in mine, and I will carry him in my heart until the day I die. And where his skills as a parent were lacking, my mother was always there to carry us, and she carried our family on more than a few occasions. She was and is an anchor to me in a world where I have always been adrift, and without her I have not the slightest doubt of where my own energies would have taken me. Perhaps I cannot be so blessed as to call myself a success based upon her many consolations and interventions in my life, but compared to what might have been, I am far less a failure.

So on this Monday, December 12th, I stop to offer thankfulness for my mother, without whose resourcefulness I would long ago have been gently lost in the folds of the earth. Here’s to you, Mom. Thanks for being a breeze when I needed to push on, an anchor when I needed to stop, and a lifeboat when each of my ships decided finally to sink. Happy birthday! I hope and pray that you’ll be there for the maiden voyages of my every new endeavor, and those of your daughter and your grandchildren, for many years to come.