The Sandman: Act III by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well-Produced, But the Graphic Novels Are Better Sandman Act III is the third Sandman graphic novels adaptation “dramatized and directed for audio by Dirk Maggs.” It is comprised of the stories found in the graphic novel trade paperbacks Brief Lives (1994) and World’s End (1995), plus a few stand-alones. Episode 1, The Song of Orpheus (1991?), integrates into the Sandman opus the tragic myth of the sublime singer and his newlywed newly dead wife Eurydice, casting Orpheus as the son of Morpheus (Dream) and Calliope. The production provides Orpheus’ song, including lyrics and synthesizer music, but I’d prefer to hear it in my imagination in the graphic novel than in my ears in this audio adaptation. That said, the art in the graphic novel is so coarse and ugly that this may be a case when overall the audio version is aesthetically better. 3 stars In Episode 2, Fear of Falling (1992), a Broadway playwright is about to give up on the production of his play in rehearsal when he dreams that Dream gives him another option for his nightmares. It’s short and fine. 3 stars In Episode 3, The Flowers of Romance (1998), an aging, out of place, sad satyr asks a last boon of Desire. 3 stars Episodes 4-12 comprise the main part of Act III in the story arc of Brief Lives (1994), depicting Dream/Morpheus’ development as the gloomy Endless one quests with his unstable little sister Delirium for their jovial AWOL big brother Destruction (“He abandoned his responsibilities”), accompanied by the strange and sudden deaths of a few immortal humans. As the plot inevitably leads him to a devastating reunion with his son, Dream more than once protests too much that he hasn’t changed. The 5-star graphic novel Brief Lives has strange, beautiful, wonderful art and is an example of the original being better than any audio (or even video) version could be. There are pages with mesmerizing layout, color, and form, like the sequence where Dream enters Delirium’s realm, with collaged photographs superimposed on a painted and crayoned background lacking usual panel frames of reference, and like the giant two-page spread showing the small, faint characters walking outside at night with sublime stars above. There are neat visual touches like Delirium’s changing hairdos and Dream’s increasingly attenuated and elongated form as the tragedy unfolds, and the clever strategy of giving the speech balloons of the different characters distinctive colors and fonts to suit their personalities and moods, such that Delirium’s are a riot of color and scribbled letters, Dream’s black with gothicky white font, Bast’s faux-Egyptian “hieroglyphic,” and so on. This can’t be approximated in an audible or movie format. It is only possible in comics. 4 stars In Episode 13, How They Met Themselves (1999), Dante Gabriel Rosetti, his sick wife, and a young masochistic Algernon Swinburne meet Desire on a train, leading to an exploration of what happens if you meet yourself: True love? Death? It’s a neat short story. 4 stars The last six episodes are the stand-alones from World’s End (1995), framed by a reality storm stranding travelers from various worlds and times in an inn, where some of them tell stories. My favorites are “The Golden Boy,” about Prez Rickard, a small-town clock repairer who becomes the youngest and best president in the history of an alternate America, ever rebuffing the attempts of Boss Smiley to “help” him, and especially “Cerements,” about the Necropolis Latharge and the different customs of different cultures for dealing with dead bodies and some visits to a creepy catacombs. “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Cluracan’s Tale,” and “Hob’s Leviathan” are OK, and “World’s Ends” climaxes in a sublime funeral procession for… 4 stars I thought in rereading the graphic novels while listening to the audio adaptation that Sandman and its world are pretty white. An African American chauffeur called Ruby isn’t treated very well by the story. Dream and most characters are also pretty heterosexual, though Desire—like Wanda, Foxglove, and Hazel from A Game of You in the Act II adaptation—are welcome exceptions or ambiguities. (By the way, the “it” and “its” that refer to Delirium in the graphic novel are changed in the audio adaptation to “they” and “their” etc.) Most every word from the original comics (and graphic novel collections) is retained for the audio adaptation, for which the author-narrator Neil Gaiman reads extra descriptions of things like settings and characters depicted by the art in the original. Like a radio drama, the audio adaptation also adds music and sound effects and a full cast of voice actors, most of whom are excellent, especially James McAvoy (Dream), David Harewood (Destruction), and Justin Vivian Bond (Desire). The adaptation rearranges some of the graphic novel issues (especially the stand-alone ones) to make a more coherent overall story. At times the audio version gets everything just right, as with the terrifying chanting of the Bacchante as they approach Orpheus and the subtle and lovely synth music in the background when in Brief Lives Dream returns to his castle after meeting his son, and the total effect is quite moving. However. There are also times when the music becomes too dramatic. I never appreciated the grandiose synthesizer movie type music starting each episode. Barnabas barking now and then before or after he speaks (English) is distracting (as if we’d forget he is a dog). And Gaiman’s tendency to too often too pregnantly pause when the punctuation or rhythm of the prose doesn’t call for any pausing started wearing on me. Like this: Orpheus (pause) is sitting (pause) on a rock. Night has fallen (pause) over the castle of Dream. Lizzy (pause) leaning on the mantel, gazes (pause) at the picture. As a result, I found myself feeling relieved during the six World’s End episodes when voice actors narrated the framed stories instead of Gaiman. After listening to the first three Sandman adaptations and rereading the graphic novels with them, I believe that the original graphic novels are the ideal medium for Gaiman’s story, that the art, layouts, colors, varied fonts, colored speech balloons, etc. are all more impactful (on this reader) than listening to the sound effects and music and talented voice actors and charismatic Gaiman. View all my reviews
0 Comments
The Return by Walter de la Mare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Standing face to face with the unknown” What a weird story is Walter de la Mare’s The Return (1910)! Stolid English gentleman Arthur Lawford is convalescing from a recent illness when, full of melancholy and ennui he wanders into small, old Witherstone churchyard to read the gravestones there. One stone set apart from the others in the unmarked grave area grabs his attention because it's from the 18th century and belongs to a Huguenot “stranger” called Nicholas Sabathier who took his own life. When he bends down to examine the gravestone and tries to put his fingers into the large crack running down the middle, he's filled with dismay and weariness, feels “the target of cold and hostile scrutiny,” and perhaps loses consciousness. But then he finds himself elatedly trotting home feeling quite healthy after having been so sick. Back in his bedroom, he feels alert like a night creature fearing danger and then looks in the mirror and sees a stranger’s face looking back at him! The novel then minutely details Arthur’s desperate attempts to find out what’s happened to him and to come to terms with it and to convince his wife that he’s himself while trying to avoid being seen by their maid or friends, who, of course, would believe he’s a stranger, etc. Or is he simply suffering from illness and nerves and imagining the change in his face? What should he do? Reading through a big medical book sure doesn’t solve his dilemma. He contemplates suicide. Luckily, he has allies in his horrible predicament, like the family friend old vicar Bethany, who takes it on faith (with the support of some answers to questions that only he and Arthur would know) that it’s Arthur behind the stranger’s mask, and an odd brother and sister who live away from society next to the churchyard and some constantly flowing water and suggest supernatural explanations (after all, as the brother tells Arthur, “It's only the impossible that's credible whatever credible means”). What resonates with Arthur is being told that he’s suffering from a complete transmogrification due to some intrusion or enchantment, that anything outlandish and bizarre is a godsend in this rather stodgy life, and that after all the “ghost” who tried to possess him mostly failed and could only replace his face. In the usual ghost story of possession, a spirit inhabits a victim’s body, but de la Mare imagines the body of a spirit inhabiting a victim’s soul, so to speak. That is, Arthur, despite some possible assaults on his personality and insertions of foreign memories, remains essentially himself, though indeed given his traumatic experience, he does not remain his pre-possession boring, conventional, unimaginative self, who led a “meaningless,” half-dead life. His love for his trusty and trusting fifteen-year-old daughter Alice deepens, but his view of his practical wife Sheila, too concerned with what their community will think and half believing that some sin of Arthur has called this calamity down on him, does not improve. Although it gets a little talky now and then, the novel has lots of great writing-- *numinous descriptions, like “…out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of some other world.” *vivid similes, like “His companion’s face was still smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone.” *neat lines on human nature and life, like “Are we the prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures or the creators of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust?” But what will practical people like Sheila’s cynical, practical, toadlike friend Danton (who says things like, “Servants must have the same wonderful instinct as dogs and children”) do? Will he really try to have Arthur committed to an asylum so he can’t do any mischief to anyone? Or if he’s looking back more like his original self, will they let the matter drop? Will Sheila and Arthur salvage their relationship? Will he visit the unconventional, cool brother and sister team again? Has he really ejected Sabathier in spirit AND body or only in spirit? Was he ever really possessed by the Frenchman’s face? What DOES it all mean? The novel strongly conveys how contingent are our relationships with other people and our own identities, how deeply based they are upon our faces as people (including ourselves) get used to them over time, and how the scientific/realistic view is unable to deal with certain experiences in life, and how convention and protocol and face etc. are stodgy and stultifying, and how common kindness and love and care and concern may ground us. And how mysterious life is and how magical the world: “It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness were only really appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.” American audiobook reader Stefan Rudnicki is his usual professional, deep and rich voiced self here, though he kind of assumes a slight British accent for this British novel about a British gentleman. My favorite book by de la Mare is his sublime (and superficially very different) children’s book The Three Mulla Mulgars (1919), but The Return is strange and absorbing. Readers who like Henry James and Algernon Blackwood should read it. View all my reviews
Gallant by V.E. Schwab
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “The stuff of fairy tales or something darker” Fourteen-year-old Olivia attends and lives in Merilance School for Independent Girls, “an asylum for the young and the feral and the fortuneless. The orphaned and unwanted.” The matrons of the school try to give the girls a “practical” education to help them survive in a society that doesn’t want them. Olivia has taught herself her most useful skills: drawing and picking locks. Partly because she is the only mute in the school and has a bad temper (when angered, she’s capable of breaking things and throttling foes), Olivia is friendless, feared by the other girls and disciplined by the matrons. She is a sensitive girl; in fact, she’s the only person in the school who can see ghouls (ghosts), which does raise the question (for a while) as to whether they are real or products of her imagination, whether she can see them because she has heightened sensitivity to them or is suffering from mental delusion. Olivia’s prized possession is her mother’s cryptic journal, written to her father, whose untimely death while her mother was pregnant with her apparently drove her mother mad. The last page of the journal is addressed to Olivia and says, “You'll be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant.” Thus, it is with happiness and dread that Olivia learns that her uncle has located her after long searching and has written a letter summoning her “home” to Gallant. The bulk of V. E. Schwab's Gallant then features a rambling old mansion, a family curse or duty, a hostile cousin (“I am the last Prior!”), a pair of kind mixed-race lover-caretakers, a lot of melancholy ghouls (ghosts), an intricate clockwork sculpture featuring a replica of Gallant and a kind of shadow replica of it, a big garden invaded by creepy gray weeds and punctuated by a disturbing ruined wall with an ominous iron door, and a malevolent white-eyed “Master” from the other side of the wall. Despite the fraught secret history, unpleasant cousin Matthew, and her new scary dreams, Olivia desperately wants to have found a true home at last. The story is, then, a Gothic YA horror mystery, as Olivia gradually learns the deal behind her parents, her family, Gallant, and so on. Perhaps Schwab gets a bit too much into YA short sentence/paragraph/chapter cliffhanger page turning mode as the novel progresses. It belongs to the current stylistic trend of much young adult fiction (it’s even narrated in the present tense, though blessedly not first person). And I wish the clock-house sculpture did something integral to the story instead of just looking cool. And as is usual with horror stories and mysteries, this one is more interesting before we find out what’s going on and what kind of evil monster Olivia must contend with. If in her orphanhood and unique sensitivity, intelligence, and isolation Olivia seems like a typical YA heroine, the book does interesting things with dreams and death and ghosts and communication, her muteness is affecting, and it’s nice that there is no romance angle for her. And Schwab is a good enough writer of vivid and tight enough prose to make us care for the girl and so to feel great suspense on her behalf. And there is lots of neat writing in the novel. Neat creepy fantasy: “Not a ghost, exactly, just a bit of tattered cloth, a handful of teeth, and a single, sleepy eye floating in the dark. It moves like a silverfish at the edge of Olivia’s sight, darting away every time she looks. But if she stays very still and keeps her gaze ahead, it might grow a cheekbone, a throat. It might drift closer, might blink and smile and sigh against her, weightless as a shadow.” Vivid similes: “Something wriggles inside her then, half terror and half thrill. Like when you take the stairs too fast and almost slip. The moment when you catch yourself and look down at what could have happened, some disaster narrowly escaped.” Neat descriptions: “… the raspberries bursting brightly in her mouth.” “They [some drawings] are strange, even beautiful, organic things that shift and curl across the page, slowly resolving into shapes. Here is a hand. Here is a hall. Here is a man, the shadows twisting at his feet. Here is a flower. Here is a skull. Here is a door flung open onto—what? Or who? Or Where?” I am thankful that Schwab apparently wrote this as a compact stand-alone novel and not as the first in yet another trilogy or longer series, and I will probably read another book by her, although I'm not eager to embark on one of her young adult fantasy trilogies. View all my reviews
The Between by Tananarive Due
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An African American Family Horror Novel Thirty-eight-year-old Hilton James is productive and caring, giving back to his community by effectively running Miami New Day, a hospital for recovering addicts. His beloved wife Dede has just been elected the first African American judge in Dade County, and they have two cute and intelligent children, Kaya and Jamil. But all is not well. Dede has started receiving ugly racist death threats, and Hilton has started having vivid nightmares he can’t remember but that make him wake up screaming and sweaty and reluctant to sleep. Still more. Weird daily life discontinuities start popping up, as when, for instance, Hilton realizes that although the Dolphins were beating the Colts 14-0 at halftime, they ended up losing while scoring only thirteen points, or as when a doctor in his hospital brings him some patient forms to fill out that Hilton knows he just filled out. Is Hilton suffering from a sleep disorder? Or becoming schizophrenic? Or being haunted by ghosts? Or slipping between his real world and other alternate realities? Or being persecuted by a white racist military-veteran who starts taking over his dreams? Can Hilton’s psychiatrist friend Dr. Raoul A. Puerta help him, or is his approach too scientific and by the (consensus reality) book for what ails him? Tanarive Due’s The Between (1995) hooks us from the intense prologue depicting key events from Hilton’s boyhood: “Hilton was seven when his grandmother died, and it was a bad time. But it was worse when she died again.” The main action of the novel in the present alternates past tense waking action chapters with present tense nightmare ones. As the vivid and horrifying nightmares start leaking into or informing the waking action, and as Hilton continues to be unable to remember anything from them upon waking, Due creates a powerful ironic suspense—which unfortunately also makes Hilton’s inability to remember his dreams begin to feel contrived and frustrating. The novel kinda reads like a Stephen King story, starting out slow in terms of the supernatural and building up verisimilitude with very human characters and situations so we’ll get more scared when the scary supernatural stuff really gets going. Because Hilton and his family feel so real and appealing, the novel becomes increasingly painful as he becomes increasingly unable to control his nightmares, and his waking behavior at work and at home starts distressing his staff and family. (Perhaps because the nightmare chapters start hinting at what’s happening to Hilton, I started losing patience with his obtuse if not stupid behavior in the waking world.) As in many Stephen King novels, the supernatural is scarier in this one before we learn what’s going on with it. And after all, as is also often the case with Stephen King, the real horror is family horror—when family members change strangely or hurt us or seem like to die, etc. The audiobook version—capably read by Kevin Kenerly—features an interesting 2021 preface by Due, about how she got started writing speculative fiction as a black woman, how she published her first story—this novel—how she was inspired to write what she knew and not to pretend to understand things she didn’t know by Hurricane Andrew (1992), her mother (interest in monsters), Stephen King (horror), Anne Rice (unwitting advice), Gloria Naylor (Mama Day), and how back in 1995 she thought at first that maybe having a white racist villain wouldn’t wear well after civil rights activists like her parents had apparently achieved what they’d set out to achieve—only to watch the Oklahoma bombing, the election of Trump, the January 6 insurrection, and so on. I did like this early African American horror novel, especially things like White or Black Jesuses, the dark mocha complexion of Dede and the red-clay brown of Hilton’s, and the racism still alive and well in America) and will read more books by Due. View all my reviews
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Innocents Abroad in an Apocalyptic Appalachia (?) Hiding out in some derelict cabin in some mountainous swampy woods (maybe Appalachia?) in some time (late 19th or early 20th century?), siblings Culla and Rinthy Holme (an ironic family name for the homeless pair) become young, unready parents of their (!?) baby. Culla can’t accept “the chap,” “a beet-colored creature that looked to him like a skinned squirrel,” and takes it from the labor-drained mother (his teenaged sister!) and abandons it in the woods and tells her it died. A nosy (saintly?) “gnomic” itinerant tinker (who mule-like pulls his own wagon and but for cocoa sells everything, including books with “sorry illustrations” of “grotesquely coital couples”) follows Culla’s tracks, rescues (steals?) the baby and brings it to some town to find a nurse for it. When Rinthy discovers that the baby didn’t die and looks at her brother, he panics and runs away, and Rinthy sets off looking for her baby by hunting the tinker. Outer Dark (1968) then depicts the siblings’ contrasting odysseys—Culla escaping, Rinthy searching—through “a landscape of the damned,” where sunlight is “an agony” and the dark more distressing than the dark of blindness: “The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.” This novel is almost reminiscent of McCarthy’s later The Road (2006), though that book’s father and son team is more poignant than Rinthy and Culla, who are not exactly traveling together. The ignorant, innocent siblings wander through insular, shabby towns and past ramshackle, isolated dwellings set in a beautiful and hostile natural world, encountering an assortment of grotesque denizens, from families to solitary widows and widowers. While people mostly are kind and helpful to Rinthy, they are often suspicious of and hostile to Culla, blaming him for any local crime or catastrophe. Indeed, one of the men Culla meets in his peregrinations tells him, “I don't believe you're no bad feller and no lucky feller neither.” It is interesting how calamity and mayhem accompany Culla without his fully being aware of it. Woven here and there through those parallel road trips are the murderous travels of three demonic figures, comprised of a philosophical bearded man and his two acolytes, one mute and one mentally challenged. With casual efficiency and atrocious good humor, they kill anyone they meet. Are they following or leading Culla and or Rinthy? McCarthy wouldn’t have either or both siblings run into the three demons, would he? And while we’re asking, will Rinthy ever find her baby or Culla Rinthy? Did the tinker manage to find a good home for the newborn “chap”? Will the baby redeem the fallen world? It's impressive how McCarthy gets us to root for the (probably) incestuous brother and sister, homeless orphans without anything of their own in the world. Perhaps Rinthy is superior to Culla because she at least wants something—her baby—and ever retains a natural, sacred grace despite (or because of) her bare feet, threadbare raiment, and lactating aching breasts: “She gave him a little curtsying nod, ragged, shoeless, deferential, and halfderanged, and yet moving in an almost palpable amnion of propriety.” The novel is vintage Cormac McCarthy: uneducated and ignorant but intelligent and articulate people engage in laconic, demotic, almost poetic conversations; work and craft are carefully depicted; apocalyptic natural settings stun the mind’s eye; amoral killers operate for opaque purposes; unpredictable and awful violence suddenly erupts; godless biblical similes compare people to lone acolytes, trembling penitents, witless paracletes, ruinous prophets, disciples of darkness, gospel miscreants, crippled marionettes, the morbidly tranquil drowned, spiders hanging in the darkness of a well; and everything combines to evoke a feeling of impending doom. He writes grand set piece scenes of catastrophe and terror, like a ferry crossing a raging river at night or some men driving a vast polychrome tide of hogs along a bluff or Culla finding the wrong campfire or even Rinthy modestly seeing a doctor. Ed Sala is a great reader for McCarthy, because his gravelly voice convincingly handles the long sentences and difficult words and dialect-inflected dialogue and evokes the ominous significance of it all. If you like McCarthy’s overwrought, bleak, and beautiful writing, you would like this novel. It might traumatize people who have had babies or wanted babies. It might disturb pious Christians who believe that God knows what he’s doing and has us act according to His divine plan and who believe that preachers are efficacious and sinners pernicious. Despite its awful things, I found reading this novel to be a strange pleasure: “Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen and near mute with dew. On their chairs in such immobility, these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.” View all my reviews
Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Tale of Two Families—and Revenge—in 1882 NYC On one side are the Shanks, living in a pair of adjoining houses on West Houston Street in the Black Triangle, a notoriously sordid and crime-ridden neighborhood in NYC. Led by 5’3” 200-pound Black Lena Shanks, an illiterate, one-eared German immigrant widow, ex-con, and fence, the Shanks, comprised of Lena’s daughters Louisa and Daisy and her twin grandkids Rob and Ella, are all involved in the family businesses: providing (usually safe) illegal abortions, running a pawn shop as a front, and fencing stolen goods brought by women (Lena refusing to do business with men). Included among the Shanks is Maggie, a refined octoroon prostitute who receives only gifts of jewels and clothes for her services and is married to Lena’s brother (currently being held in Sing Sing). On the other side are the Stallworths, living in well-appointed manses in tony Gramercy Park and Washington Square. The Stallworths are comprised of the patriarch grandfather Judge James Stallworth, his son the Presbyterian Pastor Edward Stallworth, his two children Helen (a deeply religious young lady who abhors New Year’s Day as a pagan festival) and Benjamin (a mentally weak young man with small ears and an egg-shaped head, too gormless to be a true black sheep), the Judge’s daughter Marian Phair and her husband, the up and coming lawyer Duncan Phair, and their two little kids Edwin and Edith. The paths of the two families were set on a collision course when, near the end of the civil war, Judge Stallworth sentenced Lena’s husband to death for arson and Lena to seven years in prison on Blackwell’s Island for pickpocketing. She’s forgotten neither his cold blue eyes nor his merciless judgments. In addition to those characters, we have supporting players like the Sapphic Pugilist Charlotta Keego, who tattoos on her body the jewels she cannot wear in the ring; the prostitute Weeping Mary, who is good at crying and at posing as an Irish nursemaid to rich kids; and the veiled widow Mrs. General Taunton, who brings succor to the sick and impoverished in the Black Triangle and staffs her house completely with mutilated or handicapped servants because her husband was a one-legged man before he died in a Civil War battle. As the Stallworths target the Black Triangle and the Shanks in their campaign against vice in NYC as a means to advance their political and social ambitions, they have no idea that they’re provoking a dish best served cold. As the Shanks receive blow after blow against their members and livelihoods and lives, we have no idea how they’ll survive, let alone eat a dish best served cold. Our sympathies are with the Shanks because, although criminals, they are spunky and female-oriented rogues (Lena helping poor women in trouble, Daisy helping her abortion clients), while the ostentatiously law-abiding Stallworths, are, apart from Helen and the little kids, arrogant, entitled, cruel, smarmy, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing thugs. Throughout, McDowell’s depiction of late 19th-century NYC is vivid and appalling. I like little touches like how people refer to the abortionists as “angel makers.” The political motivation of the Stallworth clan is interesting: a fanatical drive to bring down the Tammany Hall democratic political system dominating the city. The themes on gender seem a bit ahead of the novel’s time of publication (1980). One reason Judge Stallworth is so inveterately hostile to the Shanks is that they are a family of criminal women. One reason Helen’s father is so unable to listen to her desire to alleviate crime by alleviating poverty is because she’s a young lady. The women fighters are probably same-sex partners, though McDowell sketches their relationships with a light touch. There are plenty of neat lines, some ironic, some straight, like, “No city has a shorter memory than New York,” or “There was something distasteful about victims,” or “Moral turpitude in a high place was at least as interesting as corruption in a low one, and there was no one could not feel satisfaction at the overthrow of a hypocrite, especially one of standing and influence.” Audiobook reader R. C. Bray is capable and appealing, though his style is pretty monotone. Gilded Needles is an entertaining novel! It is also at times violent, with some graphic scenes, which break out unexpectedly and take the story in unforeseen directions, but the violence is more appalling than gratuitous. I am impressed by how different the book is from McDowell’s The Elementals, and I will read other books by him. View all my reviews
Sabella, or The Blood Stone by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Martian Chronicle for Adults When I was a teenager, I was in love with Tanith Lee. Her fantasy and sf were plentiful, unpredictable, cruel, scary, sexy! To see how my crush has held up, I’ve taken up my old yellow-paged, yellow-spined DAW paperbacks, rereading some like Kill the Dead (1980) or reading some for the first time, like Sabella: Or the Bloodstone (1980). Sabella is vintage Tanith Lee: a compact, potent brew of gender, sex, death, guilt, pleasure, pain, symbolism, surrealism, and religion, all written in a style that is terse and poetic, elliptical and overwrought: e.g., “It [a church] had an austere whitewashed frame, through which had been stabbed great wounds of windows, like sliced pomegranates, green angelica and blue ink.” The novel takes place in the future on Novo Mars, where certain aspects of our culture appear in a distorted mirror, like an evangelical Reformed Church; Mara the mother of Jesus; “Anice (or is it Alicia)” falling into a “hare’s warren”; self-driving cars; drugs like hashish cigarettes and “mescadrine”; Sin City-like conurbations with bars, “girl-houses,” hyper-markets, and 3-V cinemats, etc. The plot gets going when a charismatic and persistent stalker called Sand Vincent forces himself into the life of the first-person narrator Sabella Quey—a vampire—when she flies to her aunt’s funeral, receives a poisonous inheritance, and then returns to her home, where she’s been living away from cities and keeping a low profile among Martian desert “wolves.” As she tells her story, Sabella recounts how she came to be a vampire after her first menstruation when, disturbed by her body, she took refuge in a quarry tunnel (“which may have been a metaphor for the vagina”), where she found (by chance?) a mysterious “bloodstone” that she made into a pendant that made her a vampire. Her first experience drinking male blood came during a date rape that climaxed in the death of her partner. After that bloody start, she learned how to somewhat restrain her impulses so as to usually avoid killing her partners, how to dump them so they wouldn’t continue to pester her, how to drink deer blood mixed with fruit juice as a (less fulfilling) alternative to human, etc. Throughout her sexual vampiric encounters, the line between victim and victimizer has often been blurry; she has been raped more than once, and, in the case of Sand, there is more to him than meets the eye (which is one reason Sabella tries to discourage him). And I won’t mention Sand’s hot, masculine big brother Jace who shows up asking pointed questions, calling Sabella things like Jezebella, and bulldozing her basement. This being a Tanith Lee book, there is sex, violence, dreamlike scenes, sudden escapes, new identities, provocative dialogue, stunning revelations, fear or acceptance of the other, and intense description (e.g., “His skin smooth and marvelous, his loins blossomed into a single hard fierce flame”). The novel adopts some elements of the vampire tradition (super speed and strength and charisma, vulnerability to sunlight, craving for blood, relation of blood drinking to sex) while rejecting others (inability to cast a shadow or reflection, crucifix phobia, Dr. Van Helsing, turning new vampires). I liked reading the play-like novel, an early example of the sympathetic vampire, though I didn’t enjoy it, as the characters are not so appealing: e.g., “I'm the masochist you supposed me to be. Because I want you to hurt me for what I do to you, I want to expiate my sins with your blows ringing on my flesh.” That said, once I started the novel, I sure couldn’t stop reading it, for it evokes a strange and visceral mood. It minds me of a Ray Bradbury Martian Chronicles story for adults: the question of indigenous vs. colonist Martians, the metaphoric use of sf motifs, the lack of scientific explanations or technological underpinnings, the poetic language, the nightmarish quality. I feel a little more critical of Lee after this one, but I’m still in love with her. What next: Don’t Bite the Sun or Death’s Master?? View all my reviews
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars When Racism More Pernicious than Lovecraftian Horror In Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) the eight stories make a composite novel about the African American Turner and Berry families and their friends as they encounter the malign Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn, an organization of white natural philosophers (call them wizards or alchemists at your peril) scattered across the USA in big cities like Chicago and tiny towns like Ardham (not Arkham!). The Turners et al have to deal especially with the descendants of the Order’s 18th-century founder, Titus Braithwhite, namely the amoral mad occult scientist Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb (pretty “likeable for a white guy” but may be the devil incarnate). Each story features a different point of view protagonist and a different supernatural challenge. Initially bemused by the supernatural, the characters quickly accept it and try to deal with it. After all, they have grown up in Jim Crow America, always having to be very careful around white people, whose natural dangers have prepared them for the supernatural ones. Here is an annotated list of the stories: The novella “Lovecraft Country” reveals to Atticus Turner, a 22-year-old African American Korean war vet, the existence in 1954 Jim Crow America of weird things like those he’s read of in H. P. Lovecraft stories: a mysterious silver car, an unseen powerful noisy thing in the woods, a community of serfs living around a manor house, an occult cult of natural philosophers, and a portentous ritual. But maybe the scariest and most dangerous things are everyday white people like racist policemen. In addition to Atticus, the story features his wise uncle George Turner (publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide!), his feisty childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, and his spicy father Montrose. 4 stars. After Letitia buys the very haunted Winthrop House in a white neighborhood in Chicago in “Dreams of the Which House,” she then stubbornly attempts to get the white ghost if not the neighborhood to accept her (You don’t want to play poker? How about chess?). This real estate deal can’t have some connection with Caleb Braithwaite, can it? 4 stars. “Abdullah’s Book” concerns a notebook of back wages (plus interest) owed a family slave ancestor, Caleb Braithwaite, a scary and comedic Chicago Museum of Natural History heist of an occult Book of Names attempted by some members of the Prince Hall Freemasons (including George, Montrose, Atticus, and a small and eager dentist), and a surprising and almost satisfying conclusion. 4 stars In “Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe,” Hippolyta, “a giantess and a negress” and a scout for husband George’s The Safe Negro Travel Guide, as well as an amateur astronomer, visits Warlock Hill in Wisconsin to check out the observatory of the somewhat deceased Order of the Ancient Dawn member Hiram Winthrop and finds herself looking through a telescope at another world and then having to decide whether or not to jump through a “doorway” into it. Some strange, sublime sf: “She steadied herself and turned around, to find Ida staring at her from several feet and thrillions of miles away.” 4 stars In “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” Letitia’s sister Ruby (an accepting and deferring doormat) comes in for some serious temptation by learning firsthand how much easier her life would be white. Is the mysterious and creepily clean-cut Caleb Braithwhite “the devil”? Or just “a man who knows what he wants and how to get it?” The story is my least favorite, partly because I can’t believe pious Ruby would do what she does in it. 3 stars “The Narrow House” is devastating. Caleb B makes another offer that can’t be refused, sending Montrose and Atticus to find Hiram Winthrop’s son Henry Winthrop, who ran away to be with a black maid, with whom he had a son of his own, so they can retrieve some potent books from the guy. This story highlights “the horror, the most awful thing, to have a child the world wants to destroy it to know you’re helpless to help him” in the context of racism and the horrifying Tulsa Massacre. 4 stars To get intelligence on his mother, in “Horace and the Devil Doll” the Chicago branch of the Order targets Horace, the sweet, creative, imaginative, and asthmatic twelve-year-old son of Hippolyta and George Berry. It features a nasty spittle curse and a creepy pygmy African witchdoctor devil doll. Can Caleb B help? At what cost? 3.5 stars 8. The Mark of Cain This story depicts the climactic showdown between rival members of the Order of the Ancient Dawn from Chicago and Ardham trying to wipe each other out, with Atticus as the prize, without reckoning on the formidable interference of the Turner and Berry and Dandridge families plus a few of their friends. I found it a bit over the top, unconvincing, and convenient. 3 stars The audiobook reader Kevin Kennerly does a fine job without over-dramatizing his voice for kids or women or old people or white or black people. He understands the story and reads it with enough enthusiasm and intelligence to enhance it. I enjoyed the book: it’s scary, funny, moving, and exciting. Ruff writes a straight-forward page turning story with teeth and heart. I like the references to Barsoom, Bradbury, and Lovecraft et al. (“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though.”) I got a kick out of Horace’s homemade comics about Orithyia Blue (inspired by his mother). I like the main characters and their relationships. The descriptions are vivid, the plots tight, and the dialogue often funny, especially via Montrose, like when he nails John Carter for being a Confederate officer or says things like, “You want me to go to Philadelphia and pick up the trail with my special Negro powers?” I like (painfully) the touches about racism in the US, which was worse in pre-Civil Rights era USA (e.g., in 1921 and the Tulsa massacre, which shaped the Turner and Berry families, and in 1954, when the story takes place, and, for example, black realtors couldn’t join the national realtor association) and which Ruff (as a white guy) has researched and thought and felt and imagined a lot about, and which also tell us a lot about how it’d feel to be a person of color today, because although things are better now, they are definitely not fair or equal either. By the way, in its depiction of a world in which the supernatural horrors are not worse than the discriminatory dangers the characters of color face in the USA, it resembles Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation books, though Ireland, unlike Ruff, is African American, and she’s writing supernatural alternate history while he writes supernatural historical fiction. And Victor la Valle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is more Lovecraftian in spirit than Ruff's novel. View all my reviews
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Necromancers and Cavaliers in an SF Mystery Romance “In the Myriadic Year of Our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the Kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (2019) starts with the 86th attempt 18-year-old Gideon has made to escape from the House of the Ninth: Keepers of the Locked Tomb, House of the Sewn Tongue, the Black Vestals, where reanimated skeleton servants outnumber the living, who paint their faces like skulls, use soap made from human fat, eat snow leaks, and do without weather or sunlight. Gideon’s life as an indentured servant in the decayed necromantic House (“high on ancient shitty treasures but low on liquid assets”) buried in “the darkest hole of the darkest planet and the darkest part of the system” has been boring and gloomy and lonely. When Gideon’s anonymous mother dropped in, dropped Gideon, and died, all 200 children of the Ninth then present quickly succumbed to some virus that somehow spared Gideon and her lone enemy-playmate-mistress Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, Heir to the Ninth House. Well, no wonder Gideon wants to abscond to join the army! This time she’ll surely succeed, won’t she? Alas, 17-year-old Harrowhark foils Gideon’s attempt at the last second to inflict maximum pain on her long-time whipping girl, whom she then informs must become her cavalier, her sworn swordswoman/companion of the “one flesh, one end” variety, which means that she has to take a crash course in manners and fencing (after growing up fighting with a two-handed longsword) and paint her face skull white, all in order to enter with Harrowhark an unprecedented competition to be held at the First House among the top necromancer adepts and their cavaliers from the Second to the Ninth Houses. The winner is to become Lyctor, “an undying necromantic saint” and disciple to the Emperor. If Harrowhark wins, she’ll ostensibly set Gideon free from the Ninth House. Gideon decides to play along. After Gideon and Harrow arrive at Canaan House, the beautiful, dilapidated, labyrinthine site of the competition, the novel speeds up, as they meet a variety of strange and savory “people,” including the priest-host Teacher and the competition: the Second House’s martial discipline pair, the Third’s twin adepts (one gorgeous, one wan) and snide cavalier, the Fourth’s naïve and jumpy fourteen-year-old boy and girl, the Fifth’s hospitable middle-aged couple, the Sixth’s ultra-cool library-medicine experts, the Seventh’s dying adept and hulking cavalier, and the Eighth’s puritanical young uncle adept and stolid old nephew cavalier. Except for being advised not to open locked doors, the competition has no guidelines or rules. Muir does employ rules for her magic system, based on Thanergy (death energy) and Thalergy (life energy), which enable Bone, Flesh, and Spirit magics. One neat touch is that because the void of space has no life and hence no death, travel between planets is risky for necromancers, because they can’t do their usual stuff then. Another neat touch is Harrowhark’s ability to conjure up skeletons from bone fragments: “From as little as a buried femur, a hidden tibia, skeletons formed for Harrow in perfect wholeness, and as Gideon neared their mistress, a tidal wave of reanimated bones crested down on her.” Although the novel at first looks like a standard YA story about an unappreciated and unloved orphan who is super talented and Destined for Big Things, albeit set in an necromantic solar system, it morphs into an And Then There Were None murder mystery and a Hunger Games last one standing challenge and even a cracked romance. And in the end Muir bracingly feels no need to fulfill reader expectations. I enjoyed reading this book because I cared about the characters and wanted to find out what would happen and who would survive and who was the villain and why. I especially loved the hostile odd-couple relationship between Gideon (“Griddle” or “Nav” to Harrowhark) and Harrowhark (Harrow or “my crepuscular queen” to Gideon). They are contrasting and complementing frenemies whose banter is amusing and whose backgrounds reveal unexpected depths. Harrow is a brilliant, stick-like, unhealthy (sweating blood and passing out when overdoing the necromancy), adept heir, Gideon a muscular, physical (“thinking with her arms”), instinctive, cavalier orphan. Can they get in formation to win let alone survive the competition? Or will they just act all “Touch me again, and I’ll kill you” and “I hate it when you act like a butt-touched nun”? Lots of exciting violent action: blades, bone constructs, duels, boss fights, and the like. The climax is full scale and the resolution surprising and moving. And it’s well written—I found myself constantly cracking up and jotting down great figures of speech or lines or descriptions, like-- Similes: “Crux advanced like a glacier with an agenda.” “So with extreme reluctance, as of an animal not wanting to take medicine, Gideon tilted her face up to get painted.” “… eyes glittering like beetles beneath the veil, mouth puckered up like a cat's asshole.” “Harrow slithered more deeply underneath the covers like a bad black snake...” “Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost.” Lines: “Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.” “She wouldn't have passed muster with a glaucomic nun in a room with the lights shot out.” Dialogue “Your vow of silence is variable, Ninth.” “I'm variably penitent.” Description: “It was just simply suddenly there, like a nightmare, a squatting vertiginous hulk, a nonsense of bones feathering into long spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily, trailing jellyfish stingers made-up of millions and millions of teeth, all set into each other like a jigsaw. It shivered its stingers, then stiffened all of them at once with a sound like a cracking whip. There was so much of it.” The boss fight goes on a little too long. And it is improbable that with their 10,000-year history, including lots of scientific and necromantic research and interplanetary (at least) space travel and space shuttles, they’d no longer use guns. But it was a great read, a little like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), but with compelling characters, amusing conversations, and moving revelations, and I’m looking forward to the second book. Especially as it’s read by the splendid Moira Quirk. View all my reviews
The Scrolls of Sin by David Rose
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Necromancers, Ghouls, Thieves, Writers, Revenge, Sex, and Violence The Scrolls of Sin (2021) by David Rose is a set of gritty, graphic, grotesque, unpredictable, dark fantasy stories in the vein of Brian McNaughton’s splendid Throne of Bones. Rose’s six short stories and two novellas are set in a world of rival and mutually antagonistic cultures possessing magic and medieval technology. The narratives share characters and situations and plot lines, coalescing into a composite novel that paints a morbidly fascinating portrait of a fallen fantasy world with echoes of our own (e.g., religion, politics, corruption, class, education, crime and punishment, popular writing, war). The stories explore love, hate, revenge, greed, violence, sex, and power. They rarely end happily or feature protagonists who are paragons of virtue. Rose’s necromancers, students, scribes, prostitutes, soldiers, writers, conquerors, thieves, morticians, body snatchers, and ghouls are neither wholly abominable nor very admirable. A necromancer utters what may seem to be the credo of the book: “Do as you will. For inside Good’s gilded halls, hide, my son, the scrolls of sin.” Rose’s characters, however, tend to (finally) get what they deserve. And despite often feeling soiled by their exploits, I wanted to continue reading and cared what happens to the immoral people. Rose’s ironic, outre, and funny sense of humor runs throughout. His writing is muscular and tight and features big words and bad words and potent figures of speech, like “Toadly’s tower wasn’t so much a tower, more a farmer’s silo, complete with thatched rotting top, giving the whole thing the appearance of a giant’s refracting phallus that had caught Thina’s Poxy.” He writes some neat descriptions of fantasy elements, like “The statue, a hand itself, was made of pure lapis lazuli. The size of your average man’s, strains of gold feathered and swirled in the deep blue of its outstretched fingers. In its palm, three faces made a row. The outer two left trails at its base near the wrist, thus completing a long-agreed-upon murmur that they resembled haunted tadpoles. And these both seemed poised to circle the central visage; caught in an eternal, devilish sneer.” He imagines some remarkable names: for people and ghouls (e.g., Arcus Zevon, Somyellia Ordrid, Propagord Phern, Conabitt Lotgard, Aricow Amphilliod, Dandana Nix, Gorial and Ghila), countries and cities (e.g., Orisula, Azad, Nilghorde, Pelliul), and streets and districts (e.g., Do-Gooder’s Row, Burnt Beetle Lane, the Morgeltine, Laugher’s Lot) However, there are typos, and sometimes the writing gets ungrammatical (e.g., “Toadly was laying on the table”) or awkward (“Fire has seemed to have forgotten you the craft”). At times I was yanked out of the stories by pondering things like, shouldn't “You don’t look like a tradesmen” be “tradesman”? Or by rereading particular sentences, not to savor them but to figure out what they mean. The stories often barge across the gross-out boundary (e.g., “Irion had personally prepped the body, bathing it in a preserving oil that wreaked [sic] of amniotic fluid and semen”). But Rose has a big imagination and a big ambition to do something different with the traditional epic fantasy genre beyond depicting struggles between good and evil. He can construct an intricate plot, as in his composite novella “Revenge,” comprised of eight short story chapters, an involved chain of events that almost lost me but never bored me. His set piece scenes are often entertainingly imaginative in their over-the-top Grand Guignol invention. Here is an annotated list of the stories: “Black Magic Summer”: In a world of grim conflict, never trust your sadistic, imbecilic, necromantic twin. “The Leaf of the Palm”: What does a boy really want, home or adventure? Vibes of Conan in Zamboula and Solomon Kane in Africa crossed with The Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone. “Arigol and the Parilgotheum”: The dangers of writers (“fictionalists”) getting inspiration for their stories from firsthand experience, especially of a subterranean sort involving ghouls. “A Conqueror’s Tale”: Even heroic leaders can’t control the stories that grow up about them after they die. “Revenge”: a novella comprised of eight short stories demonstrating that revenge is a dish best served necromantically: I: The Final Meeting: A slimy treaty with a necromancer patriarch who promises revenge. II: The Mortician’s Tale Part One: A hulking mortician called Smeasil recounts his youth: a whoring father, a necromancer prostitute, a beloved black sheep, and an interest in dissection. III: Maecidion: The contested will of His Virulence (a dread necromancer), a reanimated skeleton, a possessed dead baby, a tricky imp, and a grossly hidden and revealed lapis lazuli hand of power—and more—all ending perfectly. IV: The Mortician’s Tale Part Two: Smeasil recounts living with his prostitute lover while grave robbing and opium smoking with a dinky thief pal Snier. V: The Municpal Dungeon: Snier is in prison when rumors of a necromancer paying a visit start spreading, the moral being, Don’t go to prison, whether as inmate or guard. VI: All Malevolent Masquerade: A Halloween-esque costume party attended by Smeasil’s prostitute girlfriend. VII: The Mortician’s Tale Part Three: Venereal disease, necrophilia, patricide, grave digging, specimen taking, and opium smoking lead to a new career path for Smeasil. VIII: Snier’s Tale: Revenge is liable to end up entangling unexpected victims (like orphaned former rent boys now thieves posing as butlers). “Bosgaard and Bella”: A star-crossed romance featuring rival body snatchers, rival ghouls, a cemetery heist, and a morbid but touching resolution via identity and flesh. “The Archer and Adaline”: A veteran addicted to sex becomes the bodyguard/pet of a businesswoman who likes to send caravans into a desert renowned for its ghouls. “A Hero, Emerged”: a nifty novella tying up “Revenge” and “The Archer and Adaline” in a stained bow: a necromancer father and disappointing son; a hungry, curious, and clever ghoul; a former grave robber and mortician now cemetery master and wannabe writer; his cute, pure, and very unsqueamish little daughter; and a surprisingly good priest in hiding. If you like dark fantasy with plenty of sex and violence (and ghouls), The Scrolls of Sin should scratch your itch. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University