VOYAGE OF CONQUEST

What does Alias Hook have in common with the books of Sarah J. Maas, Marissa Meyer and Neil Gaiman? They're all featured this week in an article in the glossy showbiz mag, Entertainment Weekly!

Yes, Captain Hook's voyage of conquest through pop culture continues. The occasion for the EW story is the return of the insanely popular TV series, Once Upon A Time, this Sunday night, for its fifth season.

To celebrate this event, EW writer Megan Lewis selected eight books, contemporary novels in the retold classic fairy tale genre, that should appeal to fans of various characters on the show. And since Guess Who is the most popular character on the show, Alias Hook ranks numero uno on the list!

I could not be more thrilled to share these column inches with so many other talented scribes. Not to mention being linked up with such a popular show.

Okay, I've had my issues with OUAT over the years. But I have to give the show credit for helping to redeem Hook from the ranks of pure villainy. According to readers on my Goodreads pages, lots of people picked up Alias Hook because they were envisioning Colin O'Donoghue in the role!

Anyway, my Amazon numbers spiked overnight!

Read the whole article here.

MORE DUELING HOOKS

Hey kids, what time is it? Ten points to Gryffindor if you said it's time for Captain Hook!

Sure, James M Barrie's enduring pirate captain may be 110 years old (or more, if you subscribe to my version of the character in Alias Hook, where he's been frozen in time—at age 43—since 1724). But the time has never been more right for the witty, sardonic old rogue, who's enjoying something of a mini-Renaissance right this minute.

Over on TV's Once Upon A Time, we have the handsome young leather-clad incarnation of the character played for a couple of seasons now by Colin O'Donoghue. It seems like this Captain Hook (aka Killian Jones) was brought in at the beginning of the second season chiefly as a villainous adversary to Robert Carlyle's Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold character.

But viewer response to the sexy Irishman was so positive, this Hook has since been promoted to the role of principal love interest to the show's nominal heroine, Emma Swan. But Emma's love interests have an unfortunate way of ending up dead—remember the handsome sheriff who had his traitor's heart squished (literally) by the evil queen? Remember Pinocchio?—which may be why Emma's been so standoffish.

Still, last night, with calamity looming (calamity is always looming in this show), Killian/Hook got another chance to plant a big smooch on Emma. That gurgling sound you may have heard was millions of women all over America melting over their remotes.

Meanwhile, Hook is coming back to the big screen in a big way in next summer's Pan. The movie won't be out for seven more months, but official studio portraits of the main characters were released this week.

No doubt inspired by the popularity of the OUaT character, the producers went with a younger vibe for their Hook, as played by Garrett Hedlund. In what purports to be an origin story of Peter Pan,  the boy Peter is whisked off to the Neverland, where he falls in with the notorious pirate, Blackbeard—one of whose crewmembers is the youthful James Hook. Apparently, the two of them team up to save Neverland from their lunatic boss. (Played by Hugh Jackman, from whom I'm expecting plenty of  scenery-chomping brio!)

I'm not sure what time period—if any—the movie is meant to be set in. That flintlock Hedlund is grasping looks appropriate to the Blackbeard era, although not so his clothing or his haircut. Doesn't he seem a tad neatly coifed for a pirate?

As I mentioned in a previous post, J. M. Barrie says in his novel, Peter And Wendy, that James Hook once sailed with Blackbeard, so I suppose the storyline isn't all that far-fetched. It's Hook becoming allies with that infernal boy I may not be able to swallow; but I suppose it's all in the telling.

And then, this Thursday (Dec 4), batten down the hatches for Peter Pan Live, an in-studio production of the venerable stage musical to be broadcast live to a TV screen near you.  And speaking of venerable, the intrepid Christopher Walken—iconoclast that he is—is going against the youth-vibe trend to bring seasoned menace to the role of Captain Hook.

A veteran hoofer from way back (remember him tap-dancing on the bar in Pennies From Heaven?), Walken also promises to bring a bit of the ol' soft-shoe to the deck of Hook's ship. (It's a musical, remember?)

I can't say that any of these gentlemen are exactly my vision of James Hook. But I'll be cheering them all on, thrilled that the good captain continues to, er, carve out a place for himself in popular culture!

DUELING HOOKS

Hugh Jackman, rehearsing for Pan

If only this was Hugh Jackman  in swordfighting rehearsals for Alias Hook! But sadly not. If you read my post on Crossbones, you'll recall that Jackman is playing arch-villain Blackbeard in a new live-action Peter Pan movie, Pan, in production as we speak, to come out from Warner Bros. next summer.

People are finally starting to realize that Captain Hook is everybody's favorite character in the Peter Pan universe. Seriously, who else besides J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, could ever think of that bratty, heartless eternal boy as the hero? These days, we know better.

(Over on Disney's Once Upon A Time, Hook is practically the star of the whole show thanks in no small part to sexy Colin O' Donoghue in the role. But then, Disney is notorious for graverobbing its own past successes in the fairy tale realm to accommodate changing tastes. Just look at Maleficent.)

Colin O'Donoghue, Once Upon At Time

But in the upcoming Pan, it looks like the only way they can think to make a good guy out of Hook is to team him up with Pan against an even more dastardly villain—Blackbeard.

This is not an entirely unprecedented idea. Barrie tells us that James Hook was once "Blackbeard's bosun." So it's not too much of a stretch to imagine the two of them running amok in the Neverland together.

In the Pan version, the boy Peter (to be played by newcomer Levi Miller) is an orphan whisked off to Neverland. He meets James Hook as a young man in Blackbeard's crew, and they become shipmates and allies.

Garrett Hedlund is cast as Hook, most recently seen as Dean Moriarty (the Neal Cassady figure) in On The Road, and John Goodman's mysterious driver in Inside Llewyn Davies. It'll be interesting to see if he can ditch that modern hipster vibe to play Hook.

Apparently, Peter and Hook will be friends at the start of the story. But the badder Blackbeard gets (one assumes), the closer they come to an epic rift as each one has to choose what side he's on. 

Garrett Hedlund: hipster Hook?

I'm not sure if making James Hook the buddy—or even mentor—of little Peter is the best use of such a witty, sardonic, and complex character. And as to the whole idea of Hook as one of Blackbeard's crew? Well, the James Hook in my novel laughs at the crack-brained notion that, rumors aside, he would ever actually sail with Blackbeard —who was a well-known lunatic! Just sayin'...

So, not the way I would (or did) tell the story, but it's good to know Captain Hook and Peter Pan are still going strong in pop culture!

(Notice I'm not even going to mention the upcoming Peter Pan Live TV project, due in December. That's another post...)

Hey, maybe Hugh is playing Blackbeard (instead of Hook) because he's saving himself for the lead in Alias Hook! Well, a girl can dream, can't she...

HOOK-WINKED

Okay, I love Captain Hook so much I wrote a novel about him. (Alias Hook, coming soon to a bookstore near you.) But tossing the character into the chaotic mosh pit that the TV series Once Upon A Time has become hasn't done nearly enough to improve the gene pool in terms of story.

The Irish actor playing him, Colin O'Donoghue, is sexy enough. (Although if you've read your Barrie, you know that Mr. Smee, the bosun, is the Irishman; Hook is pure Etonian-bred English.) O'Donoghue would likely rise to the occasion if the writers gave him anything interesting to do.

But, no. After one brief episode that took place at least partially aboard ship, now Hook is landlocked on the Island of Lost Toys, or wherever it is where half the cast is segregated this season, wandering around with the rest of the superfluous characters—Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, Snow White, Lancelot (Lancelot? I thought these were fairy tale characters)—in search of a plot.

And—most egregiously of all—last week they introduced the Frankenstein monster, in the person (at least, the cadaver) of Regina's lost, reanimated stableboy lover. It must have been some kind of Halloween thing; the reanimation sequence was even in black-and-white, performed by a doctor called "Whale." (But if you want a truly clever homage to the classic James Whale movie, go see Frankenweenie).

The weirdest thing about the Hook subplot (and I use the term "plot" in the loosest possible sense) was the backstory establishing his enmity with Robert Carlyle's Mr. Gold. Each is responsible for depriving the other of the woman he loved, which suggests a tedious and prolonged grudge match of vengeance between the two of them if Hook ever gets out of Purgatory. And just so we get the point, Mr. Gold, in his sorcerous Dark Lord persona, is the one who cuts off Hook's hand, equating him in the storyline with—yes—the Crocodile.  (They even call him "Crocodile" in the episode.)

Carlyle remains the best (possibly only) reason to watch the show. But, seriously, give a guy a break! They've already got him playing Rumplestiltskin, the Dark Lord, Beast (in the Beauty and the Beast subplot), and now the Crocodile. How long can he be expected to carry the show all by himself? Talk about the hardest-working man in showbiz!