The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sensual, Beautiful, Graphic Fairy Tale Horror The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angel Carter is a collection of ten vivid, sensual, beautiful, and brutal short stories inspired by classic fairy tale or horror motifs. The title story (at over 40 pages the longest work in the collection) is a lush, disturbing, and suspenseful Bluebeard tale, with a feminist slant and a detailed French fin-de-siecle setting. “I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum.” Then follow two retellings of the beauty and the beast motif, the straightforward and poignant adherence to the plot in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” set in contemporary London and the wonderful reversal of the plot in “The Tiger’s Bride” set in southern Italy. “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs.” The one comedy in the collection, “Puss-in-Boots,” is a bawdy memoir told by the pragmatic, randy, egotistical, raconteur cat, who, when not washing his privates or singing for rotten vegetables and assorted footwear, takes charge of a down and out cavalry officer in Bergamo. “I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygenic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone; I chose to remain silent. Love? What has my rakish master, for whom I’ve jumped through the window of every brothel in the city, besides haunting the virginal back garden of the convent and god knows what other goatish errands, to do with the tender passion?” “The Erl-King” is a densely poetic psychological story of the conflicting desires of the female narrator to yield her self to love a forest spirit/goblin given to keeping song birds in cages or to save her self by escaping from him in a weird ending switching from first to third person). “He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotted fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things. Even the homely wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow chanterelle with its fan-vaulting and faint scent of apricots, all spring up overnight like bubbles of earth, unsustained by nature, existing in a void. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he came alive from the desire of the woods.” “The Snow Child” is a two-page story, an incantatory, hallucinatory alternate “Snow White,” including necrophiliac rape and a rose that bites. “As soon as he completed her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked; she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her.” “The Lady of the House of Love” is an absorbing and unsettling vampiric “The Lady of Shallot.” “Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.” Three werewolf stories close the collection: “The Werewolf” (in which Little Red Riding Hood is no innocent and the werewolf, perhaps, no werewolf), “The Company of Wolves” (in which Little Red Riding Hood is no innocent and the marriage ceremony consists of picking and eating lice), and “Wolf-Alice” (in which a girl raised by wolves is taken from them and given into the careless care of a lycanthropic Duke). “Then her sensitive ears pricked at the sound of a step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kitchen, she encountered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable one in her absolute and verminous innocence.” The stories are about love and sexuality (especially female) and the pleasure, annihilation, or new life they may bring. To the extent that they are feminist tales, they depict female characters who refuse to become victims, as when Red Riding Hood, faced with the wolf who’s just eaten her grandmother, “burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.” Carter’s writing is lush, vivid, sensual, painterly, poetic, dense. At times it almost (but not quite) becomes too much, like overeating expensive bitter dark chocolate truffles. As they read alternate stories in the collection, Emilia Fox and Richard Armitage are both clear, intelligent, and sensitive. My only concern might be that Armitage camps it up a fair amount doing the r rolling feline narrator of Puss-in-Boots. Readers who like modern fairy tales, luscious writing, horror and romance, should like The Bloody Chamber. View all my reviews
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The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day” Victor LaValle’s award-winning novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) is an entertaining and scathing pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Rock” (1925), at once laying bare the invidious racism of the source story and out-Lovecrafting it. Lovecraft’s story depicts the “hellish revelation” experienced by Thomas F. Malone, a sensitive white 42-year-old NYC policeman who’s interested in folklore and hence drawn to Brooklyn’s Red Hook slum: “a babel of sound and filth” full of “spiritual putrescence” and “the blasphemies of an hundred dialects” and modern crimes as well as sins handed down from pre-Aryan and even pre-human fertility rites, all due to the mongrel hybrid nature of the legal and illegal immigrant denizens--blacks, Asians, Syrians, Italians, and their like--the worst of whom are some mongoloid devil-worshipers. The story climaxes beneath the streets of NYC in a vast basement under a dilapidated Red Hook tenement, wherein a Babylonian revel takes place featuring said immigrants, a black magic orgy, white child sacrifice, Lilith, hell’s organ, a foul resurrection, a police raid, and a passive eye witness (Malone, who wants to believe it was all a dream). LaValle’s reworking of that story highlights its racism. His novella is comprised of two parts, the first of which is told from the point of view of the 20-year-old African American hustler Charles Thomas “Tommy” Tester. Living in Harlem in 1924, Tommy knows that if he worked a typical job open to a black man he’d never earn much money and would be broken by hard, unprotected labor, like his slowly dying former bricklayer 41-year-old father. So Tommy plays the role of “the dazzling, down-and-out [negro] musician,” (even though he has no musical talent and knows only three songs) in neighborhoods where black performers are rare, thereby attracting white attention so as to be chosen for “arcane” courier work or similar jobs, earning more money in a night or two than his father could earn in a year or two. In the opening scene Tommy delivers an ominous yellow book (The Supreme Alphabet) to one Ma Att in Queens, minus the last page, which he’s had his illiterate father remove so as to render the compact tome useless for its infernal intended purpose. This flawed product will play a role later in the story. Tommy then is hired by an eccentric wealthy old white man named Robert Suydam to play at a party at his mansion in a few days. Suydam is being monitored by NYC police Detective Thomas F. Malone (tall and thin) and private detective Mr. Howard (short and wide), who tell Tommy to return to Harlem and stay there where he belongs. The story, in Lovecraftian spirit, will soon provide Tommy with some revelations into the true reality lurking beneath the everyday world, but will also make him confront the worst reality of racism. The scenes where Tommy takes the train into white neighborhoods like Queens and Flatbush are fascinating, darkly humorous, and horrible (without requiring cosmic Lovecraftian horror), as he’s constantly questioned by white conductors and passengers as to his destination, followed by white teens intent on beating him up, forced to play “the simple Negro” and to become “unremarkable, invisible, compliant” to avoid being lynched or arrested, and so on. The second part of the story shifts to the point of view of Detective Malone (the white protagonist of Lovecraft’s story) as the would be seeker after occult lore becomes ever more aware that something ominous is happening in Red Hook and is finally made to stop shutting his eyes (literally!) on the terrors lurking behind the veil of everyday reality. La Valle introduces into Lovecraft’s “story” an awful villain in Howard, a racist white ex-cop from Texas who acts and talks not unlike some of the more recent real-world white policemen who shoot unarmed black men to death and then say they feared for their lives. He also introduces Ma Att, a demonic female from Karnak who may possess an extraordinarily long body and tail. He writes more about Robert Suydam, making him the target of greedy relatives out to prove him insane so as to get at his wealth. He plays up the role of the raiding NYC police in the destruction of the tenements rented by Suydam in the climax. (Browning anti-aircraft machine guns!) He also adds a fair amount of graphic gore in the climax. (A straight-edge razor!) And he leaves out the rejuvenation, marriage, and temporary resurrection of Suydam. Finally, LaValle’s additions and subtractions and refocusings of Lovecraft’s story and his writing of his own story all work to pose an excellent question: if there are Great Old Ones who care nothing for humanity, wouldn’t they be preferable to the small-minded evil hostility of racists? To quote Tommy’s great line, “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.” Indeed, one of the most impressive parts of the novella is the waking of the powerless Tommy Tester into the prodigious Black Tom. LaValle is especially good with irony and humor, e.g., “A negro walking through this white neighborhood at damn near midnight? He might as well be Satan strolling through Eden.” He can outwrite Lovecraft, as when you compare his description of Suydam’s hair (“his hair blew out wildly like a dandelion’s soft white blowball”) with HP’s (“unkempt white hair”). LaValle’s vivid depiction of Tommy’s first entrance into Suydam’s creepy mansion (bigger inside than out, floorboards splintered and parched, the winds of the present not blowing there, and an invisible something following him and kicking his guitar case) is more uncanny than anything in Lovecraft’s story. Kevin R. Free gives a great, savory and intelligent reading of the novella. Fans of Lovecraft uncomfortable with his racism should like LaValle’s story, as should people interested in the savory side of 1920s NYC, cosmic horror, and authentic depictions of the racism once rampant and still too present in America. View all my reviews
Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The dollar is my master, but I ain’t no slave" Joe King Oliver, the black narrator of Down the River Unto the Sea (2018), the first novel in Walter Mosley’s new hardboiled detective fiction series, begins his story by telling us how he came to be exiled from the police department eleven years ago: he was sent out on a routine auto theft arrest mission wherein he was induced to have sex with a young white lady who then accused him of rape. Vile powerful people orchestrated the scheme to prevent Joe from making what would otherwise have been the biggest heroin bust in NYC history. The charges against Joe were mysteriously dropped, but not until he’d spent about 90 days in Rikers Island Prison (most in solitary confinement), leaving him permanently scarred in body and spirit and costing him his marriage. Luckily, his best friend from the police force, Sergeant Gladstone Palmer, helped Joe start the King Detective Service, which he is now running with the help of his beloved seventeen-year-old daughter Aja-Denise. (Mosley is not writing a black Veronica Mars, as AD is only his secretary and Joe is too protective of her to ever let her actually work any cases.) After musing on his past to bring us up to speed on his character and situation, Joe goes out on his present case (trailing a popular Republican politician to find dirt on him) and then is presented with two new cases: the first would involve investigating whoever set him up eleven years ago, while the second would involve trying to prove that an African American political journalist and social knight errant called A Free Man didn’t murder two on-duty white policemen. Joe must think carefully before taking either case, for investigating them would antagonize dangerous powerful people who’d rather bury the past and or the truth, putting at risk his business and life and forcing him to become a new person. Needless to say, soon Joe is running around NYC (Brooklyn, the Bronx, the Village, Coney Island, Staten Island, Central Park, Wall Street, Brooklyn Bridge, Port Authority Bus Station, etc.), following leads in a variety of settings ranging from the wealthy and exclusive to the dirty and dangerous, questioning a variety of people ranging from the corpulent and grotesque to the young and beautiful, from the white to the black, and from the pleasant to the antagonistic. Joe also encounters a fair amount of racism, from the relatively benign (a white receptionist at his grandmother’s retirement home not believing that his grandmother could be a resident and not a worker there) to the positively bellicose (a white thug calling him the n word and trying to get him to fight for supposedly stealing his girlfriend). Instead of his spunky daughter, assisting Joe in his investigations is his “satanic sidekick” Melquarth Frost, a white ex-super con genius sociopath with seemingly unlimited financial and mental resources. Joe is a fine private investigator first-person narrator for a hardboiled detective story. He has many of the traditional traits, being a single ex-cop with a weakness for women, a sturdy moral code, the ability to bend the rules for a good cause, a proficiency for violence without sadism, the capacity to drink large quantities of hard liquor, a brainy brain (good at playing chess and go), and a wide range of literary experience (regularly referring to authors like Hesse and works like All Quiet on the Western Front). I suppose the main fresh thing about him is that he’s African American, hardboiled black PIs still being rare. And that he’s been traumatized by his stint in prison. And that he has a surrogate big brother slash father relationship with Melquarth Frost. Unfortunately, Mosley also overuses the seemingly omnipotent Melquarth Frost, making things a bit too easy for Joe. Mosley also writes some cliché hardboiled lines, like “You’re twelve miles of bad road” and “Let me see that other paw and it better be empty.” Some lines are a little coy, like “Sometimes I liked to pretend that I was a detective out of a book.” And he maybe overuses the writerly trick of having first person narrators not let us know what they’re planning till after their plan gets set in motion. But he does do plenty of fine writing, whether neat similes (e.g., “Willa departed, and for a while I was alone and at peace the way a soldier during World War I was at peace in the trenches waiting for the next attack, the final flu, or maybe mustard gas seeping over the edge of a trench that might be his grave”), cool life wisdom (“The magnetism between young lovers, even when they’re old, is the gravity of the soul, undeniable, unquestionable, and, sooner or later, unwanted”), cynical American culture (“I secretly cheered for my country, where over and over again the almighty dollar proved its superiority”), and racial insights (“America was changing at a snail’s pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once”). Dion Graham is a solid reader of the audiobook, dexterously shifting between Joe’s narration and the voices of the various characters he meets (as young as AD’s 17-year-old voice and as old as Joe’s grandmother, as white as Gladstone Palmer and as black as Joe). But perhaps his reading of Joe’s narration often falls into an up and down repetitive rhythm that is not as dynamic as it might be. I found this story (set today and so featuring iPads, email, cloud storage, and disposable non-traceable phones etc.) a little too contemporary and prefer Mosley’s post-World War II Los Angeles Devil in a Blue Dress Easy Rawlings novel. When I read Mosley again, it will probably be a Rawlings story. People who like well-written contemporary hardboiled detective stories, especially those set in NYC and or featuring race (it’s “Dedicated to Malcolm, Medgar, and Martin”), should like Mosley’s novel. View all my reviews
The White Rose by Glen Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Croaker in Love? It’s desperate times for the much-reduced mercenary company in Glen Cook’s third Black Company novel, The White Rose (1985). The company and Croaker, their historian and our narrator, are hiding out from the Lady and her Taken wizards and armies in the Plain of Fear, a region where trees walk, menhirs talk, whales fly, change storms terrify, and Old Father Tree stands with his leaves tinkling like wind chimes. There in their subterranean hideout the Hole, the brothers in arms process information about the enemy and protect their leader, the deaf mute twenty-something Darling, who also presumably happens to be the White Rose, the reincarnation of the heroine who, 400 years earlier, defeated the Dominator and the Lady and imprisoned them and their Taken wizards in the Barrowland. Several decades before the present of the story, a wizard called Bomanz awakened the Lady to learn from her, only to be used by the sorceress to escape her imprisonment and found a new empire, one that through the first two books of the Annals of the Black Company the company had been serving, till circumstance forced them to defect and champion the White Rose. When a menhir cryptically says, “Strangers are on the Plain, Croaker,” things start heating up. The Lady is sending her Taken wizards and their armies to stamp out the company and the White Rose once and for all. Even with Darling’s magic nullifying nature, can the puny company and their bizarre Plain of Fear allies stop the Lady’s armies? Meanwhile, someone is sending Croaker manuscripts depicting Bomanz’s attempts to contact the Lady while posing as a quirky antiquarian artifact hunter. It’s clear that Bomanz knows the Dominator and the Lady and their Taken wizards are evil and powerful and best left undisturbed, and he is no Resurrectionist trying to bring the Dominator back into the world, but he wants the Lady to illuminate ancient mysteries, which would make him a mighty, wealthy, and famous mage and finally satisfy his nagging wife Jasmine. He is also capable of musing about what it says about human nature that although the White Rose’s burial place is long forgotten and unsought for, there are numerous customers wanting to buy artifacts from the evil empire. In a great scene Bomanz plays a game of multi-player checkers/backgammon with his family, using magic to cheat on the dice rolls while considering his final attempt to contact the Lady. The man sending Croaker the Bomanz manuscripts turns out to be a mysterious limping veteran named Corbie who has shown up near the Barrowland to do odd jobs for the Eternal Guard watching the evil wizards’ tombs by day and to renovate the abandoned Bomanz house by night. Just who is Corbie and what is he up to? Apart from a nearly absurd air battle featuring weaponized flying carpets and giant windwhales, this novel brings to a satisfying conclusion the first set of three black company books, while further developing the interesting relationship between Croaker, “an old, tired man,” and the Lady. For years his company brothers have been teasing Croaker re his “girlfriend,” the superhuman scary arch-villainess, while he has been translating ancient documents in a futile attempt to find her true name and trying to come to terms with his sense that the Lady still might have some light or humanity inside her. We also find out more about Raven (who apparently died in a bathing accident at the end of the second novel), his background, and his relationship with Darling. The novel has plenty of Cook’s spare military prose and ironic humor: “The still desert air had a lenselike quality. The riders seemed frozen in time, moving without drawing closer. We took turns counting. I could not get the same number twice running.” “A breath of a breeze whined in the coral, stirred the leaves of Old Man Father Tree. They tinkled off one another with the song of wind chimes. To the north, the glimmer of change lightning limned the horizon like the far clash of warring gods.” “Menhirs have the most malevolent laughs this side of fairy stories.” Fans of well-written, hardboiled military fantasy with a touch of romance should like this novel, but should (of course) start with the first one, The Black Company (1984). View all my reviews
Emma: An Audible Original Drama by Anna Lea
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Fine Adaptation Marred by Music This Audible Original full-cast recording of Anna Lea’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s romantic comedy of manners Emma (1816) captures the original story’s spirit and retains much of its content and style. But the sound effects and music! (Music and sound design by Stephen Jones.) Carriage wheels roll, horses snort, birds twitter, rain patters, fires crackle, silverware clinks, pianofortes plink, and so on, all quite audibly. The most excrescent sound effect is a loud clock ticking during conversations indoors when the fire and silverware are at rest. Actually, for the most part the sound effects are OK (to this listener), because they aren’t repeated by the narration (which redundancy harms the “illuminated production” audiobook of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, wherein the narrator will say, for example, “The door opened” and we hear a door opening). The Hollywoodish Austenesque music, however, is another matter, being irritatingly intrusive from the start, coming at the ends or beginnings of every scene, running over and through too much of Emma Thompson’s fine narration, and detracting from rather than enhancing the listening experience. That’s a pity, because the adaptation of the novel and the reading of the professional actor readers are fine. The story concerns the education by experience of Emma Woodhouse, a wealthy (30,000 pounds!) 21-year-old lady who is intelligent, pretty, accomplished, funny, and high-spirited, and is running her family house and feeble-minded, self-centered, and hypochondriac father, with whom she lives. Her sister has married and left home. Emma claims to wish never to marry and says she’ll be content with her status and responsibility in taking care of her father and home and nieces and nephews and so on. Emma is spoiled, snobbish, egotistical, meddling, envious, and has too high a regard for her perception and sensitivity. Hence her need to be improved by adversity, which she doesn’t suspect but we eagerly await: Austen’s irony is one of the pleasures of the novel. The adversity will come about due to Emma’s misguided efforts to play cupid and anti-cupid, depending on whom she thinks ought or ought not to marry whom. The characters include the innocent and low status Harriet Smith (who is an unknown person’s “natural” child), the flirtatious and higher status Frank Churchill (who is the step-son of Emma’s childhood governess), the accomplished Jane Fairfax (whom Emma has always envied and hence disliked and distanced), the gentlemanly Mr. Knightley (a friend of Emma’s and her father sixteen years her senior), the eligible and superficial Mr. Elton (the neighborhood vicar), and so on. One bonus of this audible adaptation by Anna Lea is its reduction of many of Miss Bates’ lines. I still remember reading the original novel in book form years ago, when I became quite impatient with Miss Bates’ appearances in the story and soon took to skipping her interminable speeches, because Jane Austen was too good at conveying at great length and in exhaustive detail their irritating air-headed prattling quality. I believe that every important element of the full novel’s plot has been retained (even Emma’s appalling put down of “poor Miss Bates” at one point). And the adaptation keeps many of Austen’s wonderfully delicious lines, like this from the narrator: “The lady had been so easily impressed, so sweetly disposed, had, in short, to use a most intelligible phrase, been so ready to have him that vanity and prudence were equally contented.” It also retains the antique, genteel savor of her characters’ dialogues, like this from Jane Fairfax: “I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mrs. Elton. I am obliged to anybody who feels for me, but I am quite serious in wishing nothing to be done until the summer.” I often got the feeling that Austen’s comfortably well-off characters never actually DO anything or actually TALK about anything. They visit each other and have tea and attend dinner and dance parties and go on excursions exploring each other’s gardens and share carriages and gossip, and so on, but. . . Sure, getting married is an important part of life, but it seems to be all the characters are concerned about (that and what kind of family people come from and how much money they’re worth). After reading just before Emma Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is so full of interesting ideas about science, politics, economics, society, time, space, work, and, yes, love, Austen’s novel seems a little frilly. Furthermore, I got the sense that in the novel much of Emma’s class-conscious snobbery isn’t a flaw requiring change so much as Austen’s own feeling. Lines like “They [the Coles] were a very good sort of people, but they were of no origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel,” make my skin crawl a bit, as does the final development of the relationship between Emma and Harriet despite my telling myself, “Hey, Austen lived in a different era!” Anyway, so as long as you don’t mind a radio play type experience (including sound effects and music) and a story about half as long as, say, the Naxos unabridged recording read by the superb Juliet Stevenson (16.5 hours), this audiobook adaptation would be entertaining and worthwhile (especially if you could get it for free as an audible member!). View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
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