Review: "Needs Must When the Devil Drives" by Rachel V. Olivier

Full disclosure: Rachel Olivier is a friend of mine and the copy editor of my upcoming novel, "The Rise of Ginny."  However, that doesn't mean she's not also supremely gifted as a writer as well.

First of all, the title.  It's a paraphrasing of a quote from Shakespeare's play, "All's Well That Ends Well" and refers to the kinds of things people do when they are desperate. Particularly appropriate for this novella.

Second of all, the subtitle. "An Apocalyptic Romance." Who has time for romance during the Apocalypse? Yes, this too is appropriate.

The main character, Kelly, is a bit of a sad sack who has been feeling sorry for herself and her current life situation.  She left her small town in Washington state to be an actress in Los Angeles but never made the splash she'd hoped.  When her mother needs a caretaker, Kelly promises herself it will only be temporary, that her move home will be just for her mother.  But instead, she stays a lot longer than she ever intended and even takes a local job.

Kelly is at a crossroads in her life: does she stay in her small hometown and acknowledge defeat in the acting world or does she plunge back into the movie scene and feel guilty about her mother's worsening condition?  She packs her dog Jake into her car and heads out on a camping trip to clear her head.  While she's out communing with nature, something very strange occurs but she doesn't realize how devastating it will turn out to be until she begins investigating the next day.

No cell phone service.  No electricity. No living humans.  Only the charred remains of people and animals and a weird black soot on everything.  She is determined to go back home and see her mother; on the way, she meets Dan, another survivor. Together, they travel back to her small town and fall in love along the way.

Most stories that deal with end times are grand epic things.  The characters are often heroic on a big scale and we have interaction with the thing or things that caused the end times to occur.  Not so with Olivier's novella.  Her Kelly is no action hero.  She is just an average person dealing with the aftermath of a major event, but in her own small way.  She doesn't join a traveling group of survivors, a la Stephen King's "The Stand."  She is all alone, thankful to meet Dan and to have her loyal dog with her. But it's all the stuff that she thinks about, the pettiness she feels from time to time, the guilt she suffers from, that makes this story truly enjoyable and relatable.

I love that Kelly worries about bad breath and drinking warm beer in the morning.  I love that she is snippy and tired and on edge.  I love that she is sometimes selfish and often squeamish.  And I love her voice.  She is not snarky or too self-deprecating. She is an imperfect human and she is all of us. She is how many of us would be during a situation like this.

Currently, I am writing a novella so it was a great time for me to read Rachel's new one, her third published.  A novella is not a long short story, nor is it a short novel.  It is its own art form.  Many famous literary figures wrote novellas, classics like John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" and Joseph Campbell's "Who Goes There?" Yet often novellas are treated like a novel's poor relations.  Writers themselves kind of say, "Oh, huh, this isn't big enough for a novel but I have more to say than in a short story."  Many reluctantly go forth with the novella and say, "Market, be damned."

"Needs Must..." is the perfect story for a novella. It is a personal tale with an apocalyptic backdrop, a very human story. Buy your copy at Sam's Dot! And to learn more about Rachel, check out her blog and follow her on Facebook. 

"I want to be Stephen King!"

Full disclosure: I love King's work and admire him tremendously. He is a writer's writer who loves reading, who writes every day, who walks the walk, as they say.

Photo: Reuters

Too many writers claim to want to be King when what they really want is his money and success.  Or they want to write like him.  They want his freedom and his fans. I'm not going to tell these writers they shouldn't want these things. People write for all kinds of reasons, although honestly, if they want a guarantee of money and fame, they should probably do something else.

When I say I want to be Stephen King, I mean I want to write with passion and to touch people the way he has. His work leaves a lasting impression on readers and that is what I would like to achieve. To attempt to write "like King," writing horror stories or thrillers or gore the way he does, can only lead to a mediocre interpretation of a master. And mediocrity is not an option.

King admonishes all wannabe writers to read as much as they can.  To him, that separates the wheat from the chaff.  If you can't manage to read regularly, how can you be a good writer? And honestly, why would you want to write if you don't like to read? I teach ballet because I love to dance. If I can't pass along that passion, why do it at all?

Murder Weather

I wrote this short story about a year or so ago when the weather was super hot and everything made me want to scream. Combined with my previous short, I Brake For Whales, I am definitely headed in a non-YA, non-chicklit way with my shorter work. It's easier to maintain that creepy feeling with short work, I find, perhaps because I usually get into humorous terrain when I start to write a longer story. The story I am working on now, however, is neither short nor humorous nor light. Hmmmm...

Murder Weather on Scribd

Reading while writing

I would venture to say most writers will acknowledge that they don't read when they are in the midst of a project. That is, they won't read something similar to what they're working on or in the same genre. But it seems like we are always in the middle of a project, aren't we? And when we aren't, we may be in a lull for another reason, like perhaps we're choreographing the ballet, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" so we don't even have the brainpower or time to get a book from the library or store.

When I recently returned to my WIP, a dystopian YA, it had been months since I'd read a book. I was consciously avoiding anything similar, which is incredibly hard because dystopian novels are ones I am particularly drawn to read. Some of my very favorites are Susan Beth Pfeffer's "Life As We Knew It" and Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games." Both of those books have sequels I'm dying to read but as I am in the middle of this book, I can't distract myself (or depress myself because, let's face it, those books are wonderful and if I can't get mine in shape like that, I'll be really unhappy) . But neither do I want to read any happy-go-lucky sunshine-y books. First of all, those books are not my cup of tea but second of all, I don't want to be taken out of a mood that might help me write.

So I guess I need to stay depressed.

Who else to turn to but Stephen King? In his book "On Writing," King reminds us that if we want to write, we must read. MUST. That's like, rule number one: Writers Must Read. You should never trust a writer who says he never reads. Bad writer, bad, bad writer. So I gave myself permission to read. In a used bookstore, I picked up a copy of "Duma Key," a novel of King's from a couple years back. I have on my home bookshelf some other unread King novels but "Duma Key" called to me from the store shelf and it was only a quarter.

It sat on my table for a week before I picked it up. And of course I couldn't put it down. King is a master storyteller, that goes without saying, and this book drew me in from the first page. Within a day or two I was already past the halfway mark. But beyond the enjoyment of the novel as a story, I was surprised to find the book had resonance in my writing. Not because it influenced my writing per se but it made me passionate about my story again. I had taken some time away from the manuscript for various reasons, not the least of which was the show I was working on, but also because I had started to lose my thread. I was wandering around picking at a sentence here and there but I couldn't fall back into it - and that's exactly what I wanted to do, what I needed to do.

I was stalled and King's book started the engine. This has been revelatory to me because I had steadfastly refused to read other people's work while writing my own - now I realize I can read to reignite my own passion.

My Favorite Banned Books: Carrie

This week, September 27-October 3, is Banned Books Week, a time to honor those authors and their books that have created waves of controversy among the selfish and simple-minded.

Who has the right to tell you what to read? No one. Except me. Put "Carrie" on your TBR list if you haven't already. And spread the word.


"Carrie" by Stephen King is frequently banned, not because of the violence or gore, but because of its anti-fundamentalism, its anti-Christianity. If there is a person alive who does not know this story from either the book itself or the movie with John Travolta, then he or she has been living in a cave - or surrounded by fundamentalist Christians.

I joke, I kid, I come from love.

Seriously, though, "Carrie" is a terrific exploration of what it's like to be a persecuted teen in high school. It's a revenge fantasy that satisfies a part of all of us that wants to get back at the people who hurt us, willfully or not - and remember, lots and lots of people died in this book, not simply the girls and boys who were mean to Carrie. Ultimately, the revenge is not sweet nor is it satisfactory, because, well...I can't spoil that for you, can I? Suffice to say, one certainly may want revenge and fantasize about how to get it but the outcome isn't nearly what you think it will be. Innocent people often lose, as do the people who seek revenge in the first place.

Sure, there's a lot to upset people in this book: teen sex, profanity, telekinetic powers...but it's just a fun book, nothing more. Sometimes a book is, you know, only a book, a story to be enjoyed. I love King's books for their shiver effect. His best make me a glutton for words - I just want more and more and more and I won't stop reading until I'm stuffed to the gills.

I don't hate Dan Brown

Darn it, this Parade magazine article humanized him! When I read "The Da Vinci Code" years ago (at the behest of my brother who insisted it was pure awesome), I did what any normal writer would do with it: I trashed the writing while praising the plot. It was the very definition of a page-turner, even more so than "Twilight." No matter how wooden the dialogue or trite the prose, I couldn't stop reading.

I learned a lot from Brown's book: keep chapters short, end chapters on mini-cliffhangers, go for the biggest, boldest plot ever. But this is not to say I liked it. I especially hated that such a poorly-written novel could become such a massive international bestseller. It didn't seem fair that Brown's book could catapult him into the stratosphere with such writing stars as Stephen King and Dean Koontz, both commercial writers who actually do know how to write. I didn't even want him to do well.

Now I do. I read that article and I...like Dan Brown. I respect that he works very hard. I appreciate that he is humble about his success. I love his skepticism, his female-centric spirituality, and that he does not, in fact, picture Tom Hanks when he writes about his character, Robert Langdon.

I always assumed I would read his new novel, "The Lost Symbol," but now, gosh darn it, as with other writers I like personally, I want Dan Brown to do well.

Influential books

Sometimes you read a book that so impresses you as both writer and reader that you hang your head in your hands and wail, "Why can't I write like this?"

Many of the classics do this for me - I feel particularly humbled by John Steinbeck and Edith Wharton - as do newer genre writers like Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. Then there are my contemporary favorites who never fail to amaze me: Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Berg, Michael Chabon, Alice Hoffman, and many, many more.

When I read YA, I read mostly for research: to see what's out there and why it's getting attention. But recently, I've been doing some pleasure YA reading that my friend Laura recommended. Number one on her list since I met her almost 2 years ago has been "War for the Oaks" by Emma Bull. It's urban fantasy about human-faerie interaction and a war and the rock music scene and really not my normal cup of tea.

I finally read it, finishing it this weekend, and I loved it. It's a book that all other books in the genre are based on. Having read a fair number of urban fantasy novels like it, I was gratified to read the original. Smart characters, clever dialogue, a plot that moves...and the romance wasn't abrupt or grating. No wonder so many authors were influenced by the book.

I have longed to write a novel that would be influential to other writers (heck, I'd love to write one that is influential to readers too!), something like Orwell's "1984" or Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." I haven't come up with anything so far that has the monumental scope either of those do but books like Emma Bull's renew my desire to find that one thing that will make my own work stand out.

Desert Island Books

You're shipwrecked.

You're on an extremely long vacation.

You're on LOST.

No internet. No phone. No iPod. No television or DVDs or even electricity. You're desperate for reading material. What do you hope the Universe will drop onto your lap?

Here is my dilemma: do I choose an author whose sheer prolificness (is that a word? maybe I should request a dictionary) means you have ample reading material for the length of your stay? Or do I choose books that I would gladly read over and over and over again?

Hmmm....

Can I have both?

No? Bummer. Okay, in the former category, I would definitely go for someone like Stephen King. Lots of books in lots of genres (well, okay, not that many genres but enough that I don't have a nightmare every night) that wil keep me occupied while I await rescue or death. While a writer like Isaac Asimov wrote something like 100+ novels, they're all s/f and I would need a break. King at least wrote some strictly literary material as well as nonfiction and some fantastic short stories.

In the latter category, I would choose a novel like Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," a novel I could read over and over again. I considered Eco's "Name of the Rose," which I also love, as well as Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" but Toole's work is especially poignant because he committed suicide and if I'm stuck on an island, I would want a book that spoke to the depth of a human condition while also being hilariously funny.

What about you? Any choices? Do you pick romance novels or graphic novels? Short stories or epics? Poetry? Haikus? A book of dirty limericks?