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I’m going to get this out of the way before Wednesday night

I liked The Battle of Five Armies.

No, it wasn't perfect, but even imperfect, I believe it's a better retelling than the original book (as I’ve said before).

And let's be honest: I don't want perfection in creative stuff – I want creative stuff – I want invention and experimentation and the unexpected.

I don't want The Hobbit copy-pasted onto a movie screen and, (thankfully) that's certainly not what Peter Jackson gave us.

  • He gave us love where Tolkien never thought to invest it.
  • He gave Legolas a reason to defy his father and ride to Rivendell in fifty years.
  • He gave the Arkenstone more meaning and more merit.
  • He gave Thorin's line more of the tragic doom that seems to haunt all dwarves, satisfying the expectations set up by the oh-so-dwarvish ending of Desolation of Smaug (something else I talked about already, at length).

I am happy with the movie for all those reasons and a hundred more that I can't list, because I haven't seen it yet, of course.

The things I've mentioned, I trust will be there.

Not hope, the way I hope the next Star Wars movie will be good.

Trust. Belief.

Because Jackson has absolutely earned it.

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Halloween Book Review/Recommendation: A Murder of Crows

It was we crows who took your daughter, in case you were wondering. She didn’t run away.

Here's the basic premise of Deanna Knippling's latest book – the crows have found a human girl who tells stories and, being somewhat… possessive of stories, carry the girl away to live with them.

But the girl is shocked to silence by the flurry of wings and talons and beaks and (let's be honest) bird shit, and won't talk – won't tell the stories that drew the crows to her in the first place.

Awk-ward, you might say. *

The solution to this problem is that the girl's new feathered foster family tell her the human stories they know: a way of priming the pump and reminding her who and what she is.

Those stories, and the interstitial moments with the girl and new and old family, form the bones of A Murder of Crows – as a fine a skeleton as you could want for Halloween.

Deanna had me hooked from that first, wonderful line, and the short stories were exactly what I wanted, this time of year, both in subject and length.

Are you in the same kind of mood? Need a little macabre for chilly autumn nights?

Allow me to make a recommendation…

A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre – Kindle edition by DeAnna Knippling. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre – Kindle edition by DeAnna Knippling. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre.