Blogging Challenge: Lessons I Learned from a Book Character

Right, so, the usual: Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. (If you're just joining up, swing by their homepage and add your response to the current post each Wednesday.)

This week's prompt is Lessons I Learned from a Book Character.

"Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you." It's the opening line to Clive Barker's Cabal, which was (perhaps unfortunately) made into the movie (and accompanying comic, which was how I found it) Nightbreed. Nightbreed suffered from the studio's attempt to edit it into a traditional horror movie, and from some amazingly bad marketing. (Among other things, the movie posters they shipped out were the wrong ones.) Cabal was... something else, and late-teen me found a home in it. And the lesson in the book (and to some extent the movie) is that the premise of that opening line is both true... and very false.

In my first couple of years of college, I was... kind of a mess, socially and emotionally. Grimjack, while sometimes dark, was heavy with themes of friendship and loyalty. ("Friends are family. Family we choose.") Reading that comic may very well have saved my life.

And a few years after that I would discover Spider Robinson's Callahan's Place books. It's more a series of short stories that grew into a series of books (the first stories were printed in Analog Magazine back in the day), but between the puns and the weirdness and the occasional alien, there's an explicit message: pain shared is diminished, joy shared is increased.

...And that's what I've got so far. If I think of anything else, I'll come back and add it.