Highlander: the Series; An Evening at Joe's: Fiction by the cast and crew. Gillian
Horvath, ed. Berkley Boulevard Books: New York, 2000, paperback, 288 pages. Contributing
authors: Bill Panzer (preface), Gillian Horvath, Jim Byrnes, Laura Brennan, Peter
Hudson, Donna Lettow, Anthony De Longis, Roger Bellon, Don Anderson, Stan Kirsch, Ken
Gord, Valentine Pelka, F. Braun McAsh, Peter Wingfield, Dennis Berry and Darla Kershner.
Books like "An Evening at Joe's" make you hope that the Powers that Be might
actually have brain cells that are not connected directly to their finances. Such
books are, as the cliché goes, labours of love.
"An Evening at Joe's" begins with a preface by David Panzer, in which he sums
up his initial thoughts about the whole thing: "Great idea, but you'll never get
them to do it." Fortunately, the cast and crew in this book proved him wrong. Gillian
Horvath then introduces the idea of the book, for which she credits reading "Star Trek:
the New Voyages", two story anthologies which revolutionised Star Trek fandom during
the 1970s, and "Surprise", a story which Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhuru) wrote for the
second anthology. Horvath's idea was just as simple, but harder to execute--she decided
to get as many of the cast and crew as she could to write stories for a Highlander
anthology. With a few regrettable exclusions (Adrian Paul, Elizabeth Gracen and Marcus
Testori, for example), she succeeded.
The first story, also the first 'actor' story, comes from Jim Byrnes. "Letters
from Vietnam" looks at Joe Dawson just before he loses his legs and joins the Watchers.
Byrnes does not show us the innocent Joe remembered in "Glory Days", but instead
a Joe trapped in the nightmare of Vietnam, just realising that he might not get out alive.
Most poignant is that this Joe will soon find out, like the hero of the song "And
the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" that there might be "worse things than dying".
The second story, "Train from Bordeaux" by Gillian Horvath, is one of my three
favourites of the book. Here, Horvath fleshes out Methos' relationship with his brother
Horseman, Silas. She movingly fills in some background to a relationship that consisted, onscreen, mostly of subtext and the interactions between the two actors.
In "The Star of Athena", Laura Brennan gives us what is, regrettably, the only
Amanda story in the anthology. Though a pleasant enough caper (Amanda-lite) it tells
the reader nothing new about the character. Amanda is the Catwoman of Highlander.
She was the female Immortal character who recurred most often in the series, didn't grate
on the nerves (like most of the sixth season ladies) and didn't have to be rescued
every five minutes. It seems a shame that this is all we get of her. And no Rebecca,
either. Pity.
Peter Hudson's entry, "Words to the Highlander" and Stan Kirsch's story, "From
the Grave", both deal with dead characters speaking to the living. Kirsch has Richie
say all the things that he might have said to the people in his life, if he'd had
some more time in which to grow up. Hudson tries an odder turn. In his tale, his character,
the fanatical James Horton tries to ally with his old enemy, Duncan MacLeod, against
a far greater enemy, Ahriman. Talk about an unholy alliance.
"Pants", by Donna Lettow, really should have ended up in an episode. The concluding
image is unique, to say the least. The story also has probably the best line in the
book: "My, you are young." And having Joe be the one who has to explain Methos' Olympic logic to the other two Immortals is a priceless bit of irony. Those two really
do think alike.
"Consone's Diary" comes from another actor who played a villain, Anthony De Longis,
but it has a twist. As a swordmaster himself, De Longis expands on the remarkable
glimpses that the episode "Duende" gave us of the "Mysterious Circle". While De Longis does round out his one-dimensional character, Consone, he fails to make Consone
any more sympathetic than he was onscreen. Since the true hero of the story is the
"Circle", however, this hardly matters. Anyone with an interest in the history of
European martial arts will enjoy this.
"Down Towards the Outflow" by Roger Bellon, and "The Other Side of the Mirror"
by Dennis Berry with Darla Kershner, both deal with other realities. Neither of them
makes much sense. Bellon's story occurs several hundred years in the future, on a
planet engulfed in war. The heroine (an Immortal soldier) dies, experiencing a brief afterlife
before she revives. The story is very cyberpunk, full of cursing and sewage (hence
the title). If that's your sort of thing, then you'll like it. Berry and Kershner's story (which comes last in the book) is one very strange, Twilight Zone-style tale,
which makes about as much sense as the trial at the end of "Alice in Wonderland".
Still, it does provide the book with a surreal, final image of Adrian Paul disappearing
into the sunset like Mary Poppins while the show's theme song plays in the background.
"The Methos Chronicles part I" by Don Anderson makes some interesting speculations
about the Old Man's background (even if I've never bought the idea that somebody
who looked like Methos could come from either the Middle East or Africa). The advantage of having Methos originate in the Middle East, of course, is that one can involve
him in the origins of Mediterranean civilisation (not to mention the Watchers). Anderson
exploits these possibilities to the full, but his fudging of the details surrounding Methos' time with the Horsemen drains the story of any real tension. Like it or not,
a writer cannot ignore, or downplay, Death the Horsemen when dealing with this period
of Methos' story. It flattens the character.
Gillian Horvath and Donna Lettow fill out the love story between Methos and Alexa
Bond (who appeared in "Timeless", only to die offscreen several months later) in
"Postcards from Alexa". A sequence of vignettes, "Postcards" is the longest tale
in the book, and probably the most popular with fans. I found it a mixed bag. Some entries
(like "The Man with No Name" and "Night in Geneva") are exciting and moving. Others
veer between domestic humour and soap opera, although the authors do keep things
interesting by not making either Methos or Alexa perfectly happy with each other all the
time. The vignettes often lack the edgy obsessiveness and brittle bitterness that
Peter Wingfield and Ocean Hellman brought to their roles onscreen, making the story
too sweet. Alexa, especially, comes across as a bit helpless--not how Hellman portrayed her.
Though I haven't heard it, I can see why fans liked Wingfield and Hellman's recent
reading of some of the vignettes so much. Their portrayals probably injected enough
bitter into the stories to balance out the sweet. On paper, the courtship between
Methos and Alexa in "Timeless" doesn't quite work, either. Onscreen, it rips your heart
out and stomps on it. Possibly, this is because the brilliant performances put one
uneasy question in the back of the viewer's mind: what if Alexa, like Claudia, had
kept saying 'no'?
"He Scores!" by Ken Gord rectifies a gross oversight--it finally sets a Highlander
story in Canada, where much of the series was filmed. A very funny tale, it makes
good use of some obscure Highlander (and real life) history, while finding the most
original way to take a rival Immortal's head that I've ever seen. Well, anything bad
that can happen in a hockey game usually does....
With "The Staircase", Valentine Pelka submits a sombre, remarkable story to the
anthology that has absolutely nothing to do with the Highlander universe (let alone
Pelka's infamous villain, Kronos), although Death does make an appearance. In fact,
he is the villain of the piece, and he is very real. The hero, a man dying of cancer,
embarks on an allegorical struggle for his life, embodied by the central image of
going up "the staircase". The story is full of surreal, hallucinatory images as 'Mr.
Morris' tries to find out what he is most afraid of, and what he is really fighting for.
F. Braun McAsh's "Death Shall Have No Dominion" is great fun. In it, McAsh's
character Hans Kirschner (the Immortal defeated by Byron in "The Modern Prometheus")
teams up with Vlad Tepes ("the Impaler"). Vlad, a real medieval, Eastern European
prince who disliked Turks so much that he murdered many thousands of them during his reign,
inspired Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. McAsh draws Kirschner so well that you'll wish
he'd whacked Byron, instead of the other way around. He tops off a fun ride with
an amusing Joe and Methos coda (the only one in the book, aside from "Pants") in which
the two Watchers speculate about Vlad's current whereabouts.
We come at last to my personal favourite of the anthology, Peter Wingfield's
entry, "A Time of Innocents" (and no, it's not because Methos is my favourite Highlander
character). While "The Staircase" is probably the best-written story in the anthology, "A Time of Innocents" (nice pun, by the way) is, hands down, the most controversial.
More to the point, it is also the most effective. It will stick in your head for
months, and maybe make you sleep with the lights on for a night or two. It's a simple
story, of the campfire type, simply told. Then again, no good horror story is ever
simple. In "Comes a Horseman", Methos tells MacLeod, "When mothers warned their children
that the monster would get them, that monster was me." In four ferocious pages, Wingfield tells you far more than you ever wanted to know about that monster, and the children
who feared him. "A Time of Innocents" embodies Stephen King's assertion that, in
all great horror stories, "death is when the monsters get you." While all of the
other actors (even Peter Hudson and Anthony De Longis, who played very hissable villains)
portray their characters as heroes, only Wingfield tells us that he was playing the
Bogeyman all along. And the Bogeyman is a walking dead thing, feeling neither anger,
nor joy, nor even hope. In the end, the mercy he commits come from his inability to
do anything else. He is what he is; he does what he does. There is no good or evil
in it.
Even the not-so-great aspects of the story (notably, the chaotic mix of complex
sentence fragments with blood and guts terminology, and the author sticking steel
weapons in the middle of the Bronze Age*) evoke a mad world of daylight horror. Everybody
dies fast and hard, says the storyteller, but some die faster and harder than others.
The most chilling facet of this short, not-so-simple story, though, is that here,
the Bogeyman is the hero. You've been warned.
* Reviewer's Note (4/23/04): Actually, I owe Mr. Wingfield an apology. After asking a few military tech historians (I got curious), I've since discovered that steel swords in the late Bronze Age (circa 600-800 BC, depending on where you were in Europe or the Near East) were not only possible, but in fact likely. People were forging iron back then, just not nearly as much as they were bronze. Since steel is iron combined with a whole lot of carbon at high temperatures, some of that iron (given a hot enough forge, etc.) would end up steel. Naturally, a steel sword would be a heck of an advantage in a world of bronze. So, if anybody had one of the things, it would be Death on a Horse. Being an historian myself, you'd think I'd have looked it up before I wrote the review...ah, well. Sorry about that. My bad.
Copyright: Paula R. Stiles, 2002, 2004
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