Wayward Pines is fucking nuts. Lets start there. I picked up the first book based on the minimal amount of detail I had heard about the Fox show being developed from the trilogy of books by Blake Crouch. There are enough books about odd quirky small towns to fill a football stadium but Wayward, the first book, quickly set itself apart by slowly promising and providing plenty of reasons to keep reading. By the time I reached the last page, I was clamoring for the next book, frantically searching online hoping to find confirmation that it could be found on the shelves of my local library (or any library within 20 miles). Some books are so good that you want to start back on page one the second you finish in hopes of recapturing, even fleetingly, the way you felt poring over those words the first time. These books are not like that, but what they are are page-turners in the best way. They give you enough what-the-fuck moments and cliff-hangers to want to keep going while not being too cliche-ridden or hokey. Crouch is not a Pulitzer Prize-caliber writer but he's a great genre writer, he knows his influences but has enough of an original voice to hold his own. The plot moves forward at a brisk pace, and our protagonist Ethan Burke learns more and more about his predicament and the fate that has befallen him and the town of Wayward Pines. I think I audibly said "What the fuck?!" a number of times throughout the three books which I think is a good sign.
M. Night Shyamalan serves as a producer and the director of the first episode of the Fox adaptation entitled, understandably, Wayward Pines. Chad Hodge, a jack-of-all-trades writer bouncing around Hollywood, read the first book and like me, couldn't put it down and was dying to find out more. He wrote a treatment on spec and presented the project with Shyamalan attached and Fox agreed to produce it as a 10 episode limited series, the vogue method of presenting prestige television these days. What was notable about the whole process and the saga of Wayward Pines was that Crouch and Hodge became good friends and worked so closely that as Crouch was working on the second and third books of his trilogy, he would read Hodge's scripts and see things he liked and ask if he could put them in his books. Fast forward to now and what they've created is a series that, while not quite on the level of other event series like True Detective or as popular as another Fox show Empire, is original and mysterious and curious and fun and delightfully ridiculous. A few notable things about the show include the fact that each episode picks up exactly where the previous one left off, there is no time jump, no presuming what happened or having to spend twenty minutes of exposition while characters react after the fact. It works as pure fan service and gives answers exactly where you want them. Speaking of, the show did something that is pretty rare even in the era of limited series with closed endings, it gave the answers in episode five, with five episodes still to come. If this were a traditional network show, the simultaneous reveal that Ethan and his son Ben were exposed to would have been the cliffhanger ending on the season finale of a 13 or 16 or 22 episode season, with 6 months to wait until finding out more. It's refreshing to have a show get right to the good stuff and know exactly how and when they're going to end it. What ultimately doomed Lost, in the eyes of a lot of fans, was the fact that they had to keep going. There were a lot of questions and mysteries that the writers proposed and then figured out the answers to at a later point. In the meantime, they had to write a lot of filler and became, for lack of a better term, lost along the way. If you started Wayward Pines, you will know everything in 10 hours.
The show shares some DNA with fellow odd and delightful classics like The X-Files and perhaps most notably, both in setting and title, with Twin Peaks. In fact, Crouch, in an afterword in the first book, writes of his love and admiration of the seminal show and how it very clearly inspired what he put into his books. However, Wayward Pines seems to be having trouble escaping the shadow of Twin Peaks, as a cottage industry of internet blog posts and articles comparing, contrasting and discussing the show in relation to its thematic predecessor have popped up. Anyone not coming into Pines with preconceived notions about the show will see pretty quickly that it is not Twin Peaks 2.0 and isn't trying to be. I'd say it's more in line with Shyamalan's other films than Lynch's show, the fact that it's set in a wooded small town in the Pacific Northwest clouding people's judgement and making it too easy to compare one with the other. According to Hodge, they did a little something different with the ending to their show so I'm hoping that there is still some mystery left in Wayward Pines for me.
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In other news, I read a few good non-Wayward Pines books lately including The Revenant, by Michael Punke, a novel based on the true life mountain man and trapper Hugh Glass who, while on an expedition with his company in the Rockies in the early 1800's, was attacked by a grizzly bear and left for dead by the two companions tasked by his company to stay with him and see that he is given a proper burial. The two men leave him and take his kit and gun presuming he will die at any moment. However, Glass survives and proceeds to crawl, literally, toward his two targets with a single burning desire fueling his progress, inch by inch: revenge. Leonardo Dicaprio will play Glass in an upcoming film directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inaritu. I also picked up a more conventional nonfiction telling of the Glass story entitled Here Lies Hugh Glass by Jon T. Coleman which also serves as a fascinating history of America's expansion westward and the men who worked to make it happen. Somewhat related to that theme, one of my new favorite comics is Manifest Destiny written by Chris Dingess which chronicles the Lewis & Clark expedition and the many odd and unknown creatures they find in the new lands to the west, including walking dead infected by plants and giant man-eating minotaur. As a fun little side note, a character who shows up in both the fictional Manifest Destiny story and the true Hugh Glass story is Toussaint Charbonneau, husband of Sacagawea. I read Manifest Destiny as part of my Image Comics catch-up before Image Expo next month, which includes catching up on the trades of Southern Bastards, Saga, Black Science, East Of West, The Fade-Out, Lazarus, Outcast, Sex Criminals, Five Ghosts, Pretty Deadly, Zero and Fatale, among others. I also finally got around to the newest Erik Larson book Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by a German submarine. Larson is a master at weaving intricate historical detail and dialogue with the stories of two men and the legacies they left behind, as he did previously in one of my favorite books The Devil In The White City about the serial killer H.H. Holmes and the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.
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