Long Beach

My latest novel, Union Station, is set largely in the Los Angeles area and much of that is focussed in my hometown, Long Beach, California. 

It is a different version of our world. In this story magic is real, something that became apparent after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, when a fissure appeared between our world and another. This other world is now readily accessible via special trains at Union Station that run between Los Angeles and the capital of that world. 

The real Long Beach is a fascinating place, and I hope that comes through in the novel. Though for me, the Long Beach I grew up in is as magical and fantastic as the one in the book. I grew up in the 70s and 80s. If Stranger Things were shot in a southern California suburb instead of rural Indiana, it would be easy to see my friends and I in place of the kids in the show. 

I grew up in the same era as Stranger Things, the time of free range parenting, where parents would just send their kids loose on their bicycles out into the world. We didn’t encounter other dimensions, telekinetics, or demogorgons, but there was the sense of adventure, particularly in an era with no smart phones or internet to help us plan how to get places. Our parents were at work, we had to learn to read a Thomas Guide and map out how to do these things on our own. 

Growing up in Long Beach, I spent much of my time in libraries. I spent hours and hours each summer at the El Dorado Park branch of the public library, and when I could get there, significant time at the Main Library. Since my mother was working on her Mathematics degree and Teaching Credential, I also spent a lot of time at the Cal State University Long Beach library. Apparently my mother realized that all she had to do was put me in a place with a lot of books and she could save money on a babysitter. It could be a little bewildering to be twelve and have your mother put a doctoral dissertation on thermodynamics down in front of you to keep you quiet, but I’ve always liked reading, whether or not I’m in over my head on understanding the material. 

My love of reading continues to this day, and it’s part of why so much of Union Station is about books. The protagonist is a book collector and practices bibliomancy. The main plot involves him trying to find an impossible to find book, and he is often reflecting upon what he is reading or what books interest him. 

Back in the day Long Beach also had an excellent array of bookstores. Acres of Books was an immense used bookstore. It was a strange place to shop. Like many used bookstores, you couldn’t really go there looking for something specific, but would walk out with many more books than you’d planned on getting. There always seemed to be another turn between the stacks, another room or strange antechamber waiting to be excavated. When I first read the term “Non Euclidean Geometry” reading Lovecraft, I assumed it referred to the strange twists and turns in Acres of Books. Going there when I was a kid, it had that Indiana Jones like sense of mystery and adventure. Who knew if you’d find some lost tome? Or get knifed by a hobo? Or if the substance on the floor was biological in origin? It’s really difficult to describe just how big, and just how winding and bordered with teetering piles of books the place was. 

But my favorite all time book store, also in downtown Long Beach, was Richard Kyle. Richard Kyle Books was a science fiction specialty store. It not only had an excellent selection of science fiction and fantasy books, but since the owner made his regular income selling comics subscriptions, there were always the latest comic books as well. Most importantly the owner was always there to recommend books and authors, to advise the reader so that we’d learn about writers we hadn’t otherwise heard of. 

There are some signs that the future may have space for small, non-chain bookstores. Gatsbys is a solid used bookstore in Long Beach. I hold out hope that genre specific shops like a Richard Kyle might make a come back, but I imagine it’s prohibitively expensive as long a landlords keep up the “I’d rather rent out 2 of my 10 properties at exorbitant rent than rent all 10 at a reasonable amount” policy. 

But still, Long Beach, real or fictional, makes for a great story setting.