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
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Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre by Algernon Blackwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent Most of the early 20th-century stories by Algernon Blackwood collected in Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967) don’t suit the title of the collection or the lurid red and black and blue demonic face on the cover. Two of the twenty-three stories, “The Damned” and “The Transfer,” do build intense macabre suspense, but they don’t traffic in crude horror, and the other stories explore the supernatural or divine that lies just behind surface reality ready to burst through to challenge our preconceived notions of the universe and human experience. A better title for the collection would be Tales of the Sublime and Transcendent. Or Tales of Life and the Epiphanic. The collection gives a varied sample of Blackwood’s many kinds of psychological, supernatural, metaphysical, and sublime stories. They occur in England, Canada, Europe, Arizona, Switzerland, and Egypt; in sublime mountains, harsh deserts, dense forests, pastoral countrysides, and crowded cities; in an old chateau, a country estate, a Cairene hotel, a sea-side bungalow, and an alpine inn; in the present and the past; in situations of romance, male-bonding, haunting, dreaming, and dying. And so on. The stories feature either sensitive and imaginative or obtuse and practical people who experience some awesome supernatural phenomena, for “Science does not exhaust the Universe.” By the way, both Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft wrote more-to-the-world-than-we-usually-see stories, but the former imagined a universal sublime life force behind the scenes, the latter a horrifying set of powerful and malevolent demonic aliens. Here is an annotated list of the stories. 1. Chinese Magic (1930): The conflict between Beauty and Reality, involving a bachelor psychologist, love at first sight, the allure of the orient, and the Perfume of the Garden of Happiness. 2. First Hate (1920): Just as animals instinctively and instantly know their dire enemies, so too do we humans. An unpleasant hunters’ story. 3. The Olive (1921): Italian olives, a mysterious girl, an erotic evening featuring fauns, nymphs, and Pan, and a desire to be altogether in life. 4. The Sacrifice (1914): Life is a Cecemony in the great temple of the world—if you can go mountain climbing during a time of crisis. 5. The Damned (1914): An increasingly suspenseful novella that demonstrates how the places lived in by strong-willed enough past people (especially the religiously intolerant) can influence (if not dominate) the present. 6. Wayfarers (1914): Time slips and eternally reincarnating lovers: “Have you so soon forgotten . . . when we knew together the perfume of the hanging Babylonian Gardens, or when the Hesperides were so soft, to us in the dawn of the world?” 7. The Sea Fit (1910): The Great Powers of Nature are still very much alive, and their appearance before us should not be a matter of terror but of triumphant singing. 8. The Attic (1912): A short, moving tale of a family (and cat) still grieving for the death of a beloved child, and of their haunted attic where a usurer hanged himself. 9. The Heath Fire (1912): An artist in Surrey, unlike most Englishmen, wants to embrace mystery, seeking in a burnt heath the “Soul of the Universe.” 10. The Return (1911): “The hierophantic, sacerdotal Power that had echoed down the world since Time began and dropped strange magic phrases into every poet’s heart” may touch even the most practical of middleclass businessmen. 11. The Transfer (1911): A governess recounts what happened when a successful vampiric uncle encountered a hungry patch of barren garden earth. 12. Clairvoyance (1912): A man who can hear but not see ghosts spends the night in a haunted room full of the ghosts of children in the house of a mismatched couple: the young wife is too sensitive and fertile, her old husband too obtuse and narrow. 13. The Golden Fly (1912): A devastated businessman observes the “lordly indifference of Nature,” so as to realize his “world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain. Outside it had no existence at all.” 14. Special Delivery (1912): When traveling in the mountains and staying in an inn, heed any warnings Nature might send your way. 15. The Destruction of Smith (1912): As a dying person may communicate with us in the moment of their death, so too may an entire town. An unlikeable “western” yarn. 16. The Tryst (1917): A complex psychological study of what happens to a person who works for fifteen years to become able to marry a sweetheart, with a horripilating climax. 17. The Wings of Horus (1914): The dangers of not having an outlet for one’s creative imagination, especially if one is a genius in Egypt under the influence of Horus. 18. Initiation (1917): The Beauty of nature transcends business, banks, and cities if you open yourself to it: “Fear slipped away, and elation took its place.” 19. A Desert Episode (1917): The desert outside Cairo is the perfect place to learn that through love, Life and Death are “unchanging partners” providing immortality. 20. Transition (1913): An ordinary man is bringing his ordinary family ordinary Christmas presents while remembering a play called Magic when a traffic accident provides him a moment of “hearty, genuine life at last.” 21. The Other Wing (1915): A brave, imaginative little boy has a real dream adventure in the closed wing of his family's mansion, and then decades later has cause to recall it. 22. By Water (1914): Vividly demonstrating what it's like to be lost in the Sahara and to drown there without knowing that one is drowning. 23. A Victim of Higher Space (1914): What happens when you become able to enter the 4th dimension without being able to control your coming or going? Better visit the Psychic Doctor John Silence for some advice and empathy. An unusually funny story. The Spring Books edition is well made (binding, pages, and print), but marred by jarring typos, at least one per story, whether the wrong words spelled correctly (e.g., the/that, tall/tell, if/it, etc.) or the right words spelled incorrectly (e.g., bpon/upon, dakrness/darkness, lefet/left, hitory/history, etc.). From the standpoint of contemporary mores, some of Blackwood’s stories have embarrassing elements of gender (e.g., twenty-five year old “girls” with “little” feet and hearts) and race (e.g., “Redskins, whatever they may feel, show little”), and he wasn’t at his best channeling Western pulps (e.g., “Ain’t it jest possible”), but given his era he open-mindedly viewed cultural, religious, scientific, and romantic matters, and his stories champion tolerance of different ways of understanding the divine or supernatural. And the stories here are mostly beautiful, thoughtful, powerful, and well-written fantastic literature. View all my reviews
Beezer by Brandon T. Snider
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Amusing, if a Little Damaged by Sitcom English The conceit of Brandon T. Snider’s Beezer (2019) is that Beezlebub, prince of demons and of hell (the Red Realm), so disappoints his father for lying around playing pranks or games instead of studying dark arts, cultivating supernatural powers, or desiring to destroy souls, that Lucifer banishes him to earth, where he wakes up as a newly adopted thirteen-year-old boy (called Beezer) in a quirky loving family comprised of mother Jessica Lewis and fellow adoptees eleven-year old Lucy and nine-year-old Dash, each of the three children being a different skin color. How will he fit into this multiracial “lovey dovey” family into group hugs and supporting and communicating with each other no matter what? Especially when Jessica is out of work, scrambling to get by, and receiving charity food. What will happen when Beezer goes to the mall or public library or meets kids from Lucy and Dash’s school? Will he ever be able to access his innate dark powers or open a portal leading back to the Red Realm? Will he ever get used to his human body, with its unfortunate needs and weaknesses? The best lines express Beezer’s perceptions of new experiences in his human earthbound body. He says things like, “Exiled to this backwater heaven-hole without powers,” “This human skin suit is so heavy,” and “Being human is so weird.” When hearing chirping birds, he says, “Quiet, you earth harpies.” When told about the mall, he says, “A meeting place where sad people buy things and eat slop in a court.” When trying to influence a worker to give him a red suit, he calls her, “Human saleswoman.” Such moments are one of the pleasures of the book. That said, it is geared too obviously for kids, with body humor aplenty--belches, farts, boogers, peeing, etc. As well as too much too speedy and righteous and definitive comeuppance for too obviously awful bullies. And the characters talk too much American sitcom English. Even before he is exiled to Earth, Beezer talks for some reason like a boy raised on American TV shows, saying things like, “What I’m telling you is that this place sucks” and “Get real,” and “Oh no no no no!” and “You’re the prince of fricking demons” etc. (This problem obtains with Disney movies like Moanna, Frozen, and Tangled, where the protagonist in a fantasy story with no narrative connection to America talks like they’ve been weaned on American sit com dialogue.) Furthermore, all the “We're here for you no matter what” and group hugs and deep breaths and express your feelings and be yourself can almost get cloying. Interestingly, some audible reviewers say the book is not for kids, and I have no idea what they mean. There’s no sex or graphic violence or swearing, so… Does the supposed problem for kids derive from the protagonist being the demon prince of hell and from the story featuring witchcraft, imps, goblins, demons, and hags, not to mention Lucifer himself? Why would those necessarily be bad things for kids to read about (or to listen to)? It must be a Christian thing? The story itself is all about finding one's own life-road in the context of a loving (multiracial) family (“Families come in all shapes and sizes”), about treating people with kindness and respect, and about getting outside your comfort zone to try new things. The only non-salubrious thing in it for kids I noticed was the sitcom American English! The concept is fun and there are funny moments and surprising developments (like Beezer’s “coming out” to the Lewises), and the voice acting by Fred Berman as Beezlebub, Janiece Abbott-Pratt as Lucy, and Margaret Ying Drake as Dash, is lively and smooth (once you get used to Berman’s overly dramatic flourishes as Beezer). The radio drama-like audiobook is entertaining and doesn’t overstay its welcome. I even want to listen to the sequel. View all my reviews
The Sandman: Act II by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Graphic Novels Are Still Better, But-- The Sandman Act II (2021) is Dirk Maggs’ audio adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels Season of Mists (issues 21-28, 1990-91), in which Dream tries to right a 10,000-years-old wrong done to a former lover and ends up becoming the reluctant new owner of Hell and A Game of You (issues 32-37, 1991-92), in which Barbie’s dream world begins merging with NYC, leading to some complications and adventures for her, her dream companions, and her real world neighbors. Both story arcs are moving, frightening, funny, imaginative, original, and unpredictable. Wanda is one of the first sympathetically depicted transgender characters in popular culture (though in the early 1990s Gaiman couldn’t get past biological gender as determining destiny). Before and after A Game of You come seven of the fine stand-alone short stories from Fables and Reflections (issues 29-31, 38-40, 50, 1991-93): “Thermidor”: Lady Johanna Constantine, Dream, the head of Orpheus, and Robspierre converge during the French Revolution’s Reign of Reason. “August”: Augustus Caesar does some pleasant slumming and some unpleasant reminiscing, while planning the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. “Three Septembers and a January”: Dream knows better than his siblings Despair, Delirium, and Desire what a failed entrepreneur in 19th century SF really wants. “The Hunt”: the virtues of staying with your own people in/from the old country pale for teenagers in contemporary New Jersey. “Soft Places”: young Marco Polo is lost in a desert where “the geographies of dream intrude upon the real” and meets Rusticello of Pisa--who is dreaming whom? “A Parliament of Rooks”: Cain, Abel, Eve, and a special baby enjoy a storytelling tea party. “Ramadan”: Haroun al Raschid wants to preserve Baghdad, the Heavenly City, the jewel of the Arabs, forever in dreams. The long story arcs and short stories are imaginative, funny, moving, and unpredictable and express important themes (e.g., we carry our own hell with us; we should accept people who are different from us; the world of the imagination is real). To adapt the graphic novels to a radio drama, voice actors, sound effects, and music are employed. The text is virtually identical to that of the graphic novels, the main differences being that some descriptive text, especially at the beginnings of scenes, has been added to compensate for the lack of pictures in the aural medium, as when Loki’s wife is said to be “thin to the point of emaciation” and the Perth beach on which Lucifer is reclining is described. Interestingly, some of the imagery in the audio adaptation is stronger than in the graphic novels, perhaps because of early 1990s censorship. For instance, the original picture of the total-body pierced demon of hell doesn’t reveal his pierced double penises, but Gaiman the narrator relishes relating that detail in the 2021 audiobook. Most of the voice acting is excellent: James McAvoy as dry, wry, and gloomy British Dream, Kat Dennings as perky punky American Death, Michael Sheen as jaded Lucifer, and the demons of hell, Cain and Abel, Barbie and her friends, and Eve. (I do wonder why the Aesir have Gaelic accents.) As for Gaiman as narrator, I like his manner and voice, BUT I did notice that he tends to pause oddly (almost distractingly) in places where no commas appear in the text: e.g., “since his father [pause] left the country,” “reading a tattered copy [pause] of The Scarlet Pimpernel,” and “The school [pause] is in the south of England.” There are plenty of effective sound effects: Thor smashing a boulder, Dream cutting off Lucifer’s wings, a mother bearing a baby, etc. But there is also plenty of overdone music, especially the Tim Burton movie-type synthesizer stuff that tries too hard to enhance moods and introduces each chapter. One of the most visually impressive features of the graphic novels that the audiobooks cannot approximate is the varied fonts and balloons for different characters: Desire’s erotic font, Dream’s gloomy black speech balloons, Lucifer’s elegant demonic font, the angels’ angelic cursive fonts, Delirium’s giddy colored speech bubbles and font, Matthew the Raven’s jagged caw-like font and balloons, Order’s computer font text, the “Arabic” calligraphy of “Ramadan,” and so on. Some other things are also more impressive visually than aurally, like the dramatic double page spread depicting the shattering of the Porpentine, with small figures dwarfed by a blinding blast of yellow aurora borealis and stars, or the page where a shooting star morphs into Morpheus’ eye close-up, and he’s there with Barbie et al in the Land. Some things are better left to the imagination than physically heard, as when in the original “Thermidor” the story and pictures potently evoke the strange power of Orpheus’ song, while in the audio version, we hear a Greek voice singing a timeless kind of song, but then in the conclusion it’s replaced by soaring (overdone) synth movie score music. The song in the graphic novel is more marvelous in my imagination than actually hearing it is. And *seeing* Wanda looking beautiful and natural and happy with a cheerful goth Death at the end of A Game of You moved me more than listening to the scene. A last example: all the sound effects and pseudo-Arabic music of “Ramadan” can’t approximate P. Craig Russell’s beautiful art in the graphic novel, and the ending shift to present day Gulf War ravaged Baghdad is more potent visually than aurally. All that said, imagining sublime or horrible things by hearing them described by excellent voice actors may be more affecting than seeing them depicted by mediocre graphic artists. The art quality in Season of Mists is not SO great, so some images of hell or of Dream’s castle, etc., don’t look awesome enough. Finally, both versions are excellent in their own ways. Dream’s incantatory words to unmake the Land are left to readers’ imaginations in the graphic novel, as Barbie says, “I don’t know what language the words were in, but it felt like I ought to have understood them—or rather that part of me did understand them, on some deep, buried level.” In the audio version Dream directly says, “Land, I unmake you.” It’s a powerful moment, but the graphic novel leaves more to our imagination aurally while providing much visually. As the audio version leaves more to our imagination visually while providing much aurally. Why not read the original graphic novels first and then listen to the audiobook adaptations if you want to hear a visual medium adapted into an aural one? View all my reviews
The Sandman by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Fine Adaptation, but the Graphic Novels Are Best For The Sandman (2020), Dirk Maggs adapts to an audio format Neil Gaiman’s first three Sandman graphic novel collections. I reread the graphic novels while listening to the audio version and renewed my appreciation of the former while being (mostly) pleasantly surprised by the latter. Preludes and Nocturnes (1991; issues 1-8 1988-89) introduces Dream, aka the Sandman or Morpheus, one of the Endless (his siblings are Death, Desire, Delirium, Despair, Destruction, and Destiny), anthropomorphized aspects of life predating all gods. In this first story arc Dream is mistakenly captured by a 20th-century black magician who wanted to capture Death, resulting in strange effects on mortals when Dream isn’t able to give people dreams. Dream manages to escape after seventy-two years of imprisonment and subsequently attempts to retrieve his powerful artifacts, including a trip to hell, an adventure with John Constantine, a duel with the horrible and pathetic Dr. Dee, and a neat conversation with his cheerful sister, Death. The Doll’s House (issues 9-16 1989-1990) continues the first story arc as Dream puts things back in order in his realm the Dreaming that had been messed up by his long absence, including dealing with a “dream vector” and four “major arcana” gone AWOL from the Dreaming and making mischief in our world. The arc begins with stories introducing Dream’s former lover Nada and his one (at first mortal) friend Hob, goes on to depict Rose Walker’s travel with her mother to England to meet her grandmother Unity, and then features a creepy serial killers’ convention (not unlike a comic book convention), an abused youth, and a moving superhero parody. Dream Country (issues 17-20, 1990) is a set of four standalone short stories: Calliope (an ambitious writer discovers that there are worse things than writer’s block), Façade (a former CIA operative tries to come to terms with being a “metamorph”), Dream of 1000 Cats (the dreams of our feline friends are revealed), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare’s troupe performs A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the King and Queen of Fairies and their court). Maggs includes about all of the elements from the plots of the graphic novels, while trying to approximate in an audio radio drama format the information and atmosphere evoked by artistic images and styles and layouts and so on. Their adaptation retains pretty much all the text from the graphic novels, much of it quite witty, cool, beautiful, or challenging, like: “Light drips from the ruby like drops of blood,” “It is never only a dream,” and “It was a dark and stormy nightmare.” The main text added by the audio adaptation is description to set the stage and characters’ appearances etc. For instance, an era marker is spoken each time Dream meets Hob a century later, whereas in the graphic novel each later era is conveyed by pictures of clothes and references in the dialogue (e.g., Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth, slavery). The audio adaptation adds sound effects, like Rose flying on a jet liner, Rose typing a letter, and the Corinthian eating eyeballs. It also adds music by James Hannegan—too much—grandiose synthesizer music to start and end chapters like Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton movie soundtracks on steroids. That said, when restrained during quiet and moving scenes, as in The Sound of Her Wings, the music is effective. The voice acting is mostly fine. Luckily, the moments when average actors try and fail to impersonate famous people like John Wayne are few. Most importantly, James McAvoy as Dream is perfect: lugubrious, intelligent, wry, condescending, and vulnerable. My first reaction to hearing American actress Kat Dennings doing Death was that she should be British like her brother! And they cut her line from the graphic novel mocking Dick Van Dyke’s atrocious British accent in Mary Poppins. But Dennings is finally appealing as the perky punky Death. Except for Calliope, the other major characters like John Constantine, Lucifer, various his demons, Lucien (Simon Vance!), Cain and Abel, Dr. Dee, etc., all sound great. There are things that the graphic novels do better or more impressively. For example: When the layout shifts from vertical to horizontal when Rose falls into a dream. When the art style suddenly changes to Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo. When Rose’s motley housemates dream in completely different art styles. When Dr. Dee is suddenly a small figure on a full blank white page. When Dream gets his purpose back in a ¾-page picture with gold behind his outflung arms. The audio drama cannot replicate the impact of such visual moments (made potent by form and color and layout and text in the graphic novel), even with voice acting, sound effects, and music. The audio version also cannot approximate the different colors of the speech balloons and the different fonts of their texts, like Dream’s black balloons, Lucifer’s ornate font, and Delirium’s multi-colored balloons and meandering fonts. Voice acting may try to simulate that kind of thing, but it is an example of something that comics can do uniquely well (but that most other comics don’t take enough advantage of). Dream of 1000 cats is a story that works best as a graphic novel, because it leaves up to our imaginations what talking cats would sound like, whereas voice actors are too obviously people, so the fantasy doesn’t work well in audio form. There are, to be sure, places where the audio adaptation is more impressive than the graphic novel, like the scene where Rose and her mother meet their grandmother/mother Unity. The fine voice acting and subtle and beautiful music make the scene more moving than when I read it in the graphic novel. Finally, I confirmed my suspicion that the graphic novel is superior as a medium for Gaiman’s story, and that the special strong points of the aural medium are not as impressive as those of the comics medium. But Dirk Maggs and co. did the best they could with translating it from one to the other, and I will listen to the future ones they produce. View all my reviews
Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “It can happen to you, too” Twelve-year-old Oskar is the class target for sadistic bullies. He’s incontinent and so for accidents keeps a pee sponge in his underwear, dreading its discovery by his tormentors. He’s also imaginative, embarking on vivid daydreams, often involving gory payback on the bullies. He keeps a murder case scrapbook, and muses about becoming a murderer himself in the future. He lives with his over-protective but permissive divorced mother (his father is an alcoholic). He lives by a forest in the Stockholm suburb Blackeberg, in a protective circle of apartment buildings. He has a kind of friend there, a sixteen-year-old closet juvenile delinquent called Tommy who steals and sells electronics goods and sniffs glue. And then new neighbors move in next door: Eli, a girl who seems to be about Oskar’s age, and a man who seems to be her father. She is strange, smelling so strongly of infection that Oskar has to breathe through his mouth when they talk in the playground area of the apartment complex. She has huge black eyes, matted hair, and a complexion of smooth polished wood. She only comes out at night, doesn’t mind the freezing Swedish October, sees in the dark, can’t remember her birthday, and sometimes talks like a grownup. Of course, pretty much from the start of Let the Right One In (2004), also called Let Me In, author John Ajvide Lindqvist lets us know that the “girl” is a hundreds of years old vampire and that her “father” Hakan is her Renfield, an ex-teacher painfully attracted to boys and a reluctant killer for his “beloved,” hanging up the bodies of his victims so as to catch their blood and transport it to Eli (who needs fresh blood to “live”) in return for her agreeing to say she loves him or to let him sleep beside her all night, and so on. What will Hakan do about her growing friendship with the clueless Oskar? The book is populated with “All these pathetic lonely people in a world without beauty”: abused and abusing fatherless kids shoplifting and stealing and bullying and daydreaming; divorced, lonely, alcoholic, eccentric adults meeting at a Chinese restaurant and fantasizing about going to the Canary Islands. Even the policeman Staffan who’s dating delinquent Tommy’s mother keeps his oddly clean and well-appointed home filled with his collection of barometers and weather telling doodads, Christian artifacts, and shooting trophies. And then there’s Oskar and Eli, an odd couple that becomes odder and more interesting together as the novel progresses. Lindqvist convincingly gets into all of his characters’ heads (including a bully and a squirrel), and he alternates among their various points of view and trials and tribulations in such a way as to make this reader spellbound with morbid fascination. I think it can only end horribly, but I want to find out how long it will take for Oskar to learn what Eli really is and then to see what will happen after that, or to see how long the repressed and desiring Hakan will restrain himself from doing something to keep Eli for himself or from acting on his intense desire for her, or to see Oskar’s bullies receive some righteous comeuppance. Whatever happens, and a lot does over a short period of narrative time, maybe just a few weeks at the end of October and the start of November, it will be an odd combination of unexpected, painful, moving, and funny. The novel takes place in 1981, and there are many popular culture references and details suitable for that year that would be familiar to American readers of a certain vintage: Stephen King’s Firestarter, Goosebumps books, KISS, Muppet movie, Dallas soap opera, Star Wars, Rubik’s Cube, Sony Walkman, Atari game set, etc. At the same time, there are plenty of Swedish touches, like unease about immigrants taking advantage of the social system, cold autumns, certain kinds of sweets, names, book titles, music group names, ice skating in autumn, anxiety over a grounded Russian nuclear submarine, etc. Finally, Lindqvist does what many writers of vampire stories do: pick and choose which elements of traditional vampires to retain or modify to make his story interesting or his plot work. He retains the hostility of the sun to vampires and their need to drink blood and their superhuman strength and agility and speed and their virtual immortality and especially their need to be invited into a victim’s home. It’s meant to represent how dangerous it is to let anyone in to our lives, probably (“Let a person in and he hurts you,” muses a character in a non-vampire context), but if the infection is a parasitical life form attached to our heart and thinking its own thoughts and making the hosts drink blood etc., why would it need to have victims invite the hosts in? It works thematically for the novel (although many of the people who hurt other people in the book sure aren’t invited in), but it also seems like more picking and choosing from among the vampire traditions, along with the stake through the heart and fire or prolonged sun exposure being the only ways to kill them. Lindqvist does not add too much to the genre, apart from his sharp focus on how awfully kids are treated by adults (the account of how Eli became a vampire is particularly horrible) and on the degree to which Eli is a child or a monster or something else. I think that if the book were set in a more familiar place like America, it would not have been as compelling. As it was, I was absorbed by Eli and Oskar’s relationship in the gritty but exotic Sweden depicted. It is no utopia. Early on there’s a neat exchange by Eli and Hakan that exemplifies where the novel is potent: “You only love me to the extent I help you stay alive.” (Hakan) “Yes. Isn't that what love is?” (Eli) View all my reviews
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Witty Moral Story about Decadence Artist Basil Hallward is hosting his cynical, charismatic, and wealthy young Oxford U friend Lord Henry Wotton, smoker of “heavy opium-tainted cigarette[s]” and opiner of provocative paradoxical epigrams, and they’re talking about Basil’s recent painting of an incredibly handsome young man, Dorian Gray, an Adonis or a Narcissus. Basil doesn’t want to show the painting cause he’s put too much of himself in it. Henry misunderstands and laughs, as Basil doesn’t look anything like the painting. Basil explains: Dorian Gray has transformed and inspired all his art, so he’s painting better than ever before Dorian became his friend. He does not want Henry to meet Dorian for fear that Henry will ruin him with his amoral philosophies. Dorian of course immediately calls, and he and Lord Henry hit it off, Dorian falling under the spell of the Lord’s mellifluous, insidious banter. Henry embarks on a “strange panegyric on youth, [a] terrible warning of its brevity,” concluding that while the plants and trees will reborn each season, Dorian’s youth will last three more years, with the result that, when Basil finishes his latest portrait of Dorian, his masterpiece, Dorian loathes it, because it will never age while he will. He petulantly declaims that he’d give anything—even his soul—to reverse that process. Basil gives him the painting, and the ways in which Dorian’s desperate prayer comes true and with what costs to Dorian and the people he touches provide the matter of Wilde’s famous morality play. Wilde targets, among other things, the decadence of the British upper crust (whose members occupy themselves with “the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing”) and the eternal nature of beautiful art and the transient nature of life—and the moral costs of trying to reverse that relationship. Although Wilde’s famous Preface says things like, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things,” “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” “No artist has ethical sympathies,” and “All art is quite useless,” his novel is intensely moral and ethical and hence useful (it reads as if written by a decadent, European Nathaniel Hawthorne). It is also of course witty, appalling, and beautiful. The artist who paints the wonderful portrait, Basil, plays the conscience of the conscienceless Dorian. Basil sees too much good in his friends, believing, for instance, that although Lord Henry may say amoral things, he never does anything bad, and that Dorian is full of innate goodness. Basil’s fate is one of the most painful parts of the novel. Another is the touching and ironic experience of Sibyl Vane, a teenaged Shakespearean actress who plays the roles of Juliet et al with inspired genius—until she falls in love with Dorian in real life. My focus flagged during the long chapter where Dorian decadently indulges in various arts (perfumes, jewels, tapestries, etc.), and I thought his complete lack of outward change for over a decade should be more noticed by his aging friends, but throughout Lord Henry is so witty and so vile and Dorian so inhuman and human and Wilde’s writing so beautiful and convincing that I did enjoy rereading the novel, even though I knew how it would end. The psychological realism by which even Dorian’s attempt to turn good fails to improve his portrait because, after all, it’s only another vanity of his, is prime. The novel has interesting questions to ask about art. Is its goal to reveal the beautiful? Is it possible to live one’s life as a work of art? Is performing a role as real as living it? Can art reveal the human soul? And though it’s less than H. G. Wells, Wilde even engages in some social class criticism. Lord Henry, who would sacrifice anyone for an epigram, has memorable lines, like-- --“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” --“The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.” --“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.” --“A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he doesn't love her.” --“All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is criminal.” Simon Prebble gives his usual appealing and understanding reading of the book. No simpering for female characters, no great change of voice for any characters, but perfect emotional inflections for each scene. However, I was not sorry when The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) ended. View all my reviews
Alien III by William Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Diverting, but Dated (and Ripley Is a Non-Factor) The Audible original drama Alien III (2019) is Dirk Magg’s adaptation and direction of William Gibson's 1987 sequel to the second Alien movie, Aliens (1986). In addition to being about as long as a movie (2+ hours), the Audible drama features a full cast of voice actors, including Michael Biehn as Hicks and Lance Henriksen as Bishop from the 1986 movie and Laurel Lefkow reprising her channeling of Sigourney Weaver from the Audible drama Alien: Out from the Shadows. Like an old school radio drama, Alien III features sound effects for footsteps, tools, doors, human and alien screams, coughs, and the like, and is enhanced by atmospheric and exciting music. The drama begins with a brief summary of the events in Alien (1979) featuring Ripley, Ash, and company and then a brief depiction of the climax of the second movie with Newt, Hicks, Bishop, Ripley, and the alien Queen. It's always good to hear Ripley growl, “Get away from her you bitch!” The main new action begins when the shuttle ship Sulaco (with Newt, Hicks, Ripley, and Bishop aboard in cryo-suspension) enters the outer space territory of the UPP (Union of Progressive Peoples) and is captured and boarded, with the alien that’s been lurking inside Bishop popping out and doing its face clamp thing. Thus begins a chain of events whereby the alien xenomorph is (of course) foolishly viewed as a potentially useful biological weapon, proves a wee bit more independent and formidable than anticipated, starts impregnating mortal hosts in the good old alien way, and is soon wreaking havoc in a previously clean and more or less self-contained space environment (an “anchor point station”). There are conflicts between assholish Weyland-Yutani corporation weapons division soldiers and cool corporation eco tech scientists, between corporation interests and the UPP (a Cold War esque “commie” culture whose people are “comrades”), and, of course, between aliens and humans. There are unusable elevators but eight levels of space station to descend, alien mucus and slime and nests and cocoons and ambushes and pointy tails, plot-helpful touches like a lack of necessary weaponry and working technology, and suspenseful time count downs. There are plenty of lines like, “What the f*ck was that?” and “Oh dear God” “Holy shit!” not to mention the dread, “I have to go back and get my research.” There are some neat developments (new to me anyway) regarding alien DNA and reproductive systems, and the alien-human hybrids are cool. If you are a fan of the Alien franchise, this would scratch your itch, but. . . With the Cold War relationship between corporation states and the UPP, it does feel dated, like the story from before the fall of the Berlin Wall that it is. Worse, Ripley is woefully underused (spending almost the entire time in cryo or drugged coma and playing no active role in the plot). Newt doesn’t get to do enough. On the plus side, Hicks and Bishop are “on screen” for most of the drama and Biehn and Henrikson are good to listen to--if you’ve seen Aliens, you’ll feel that you are watching Hicks and Bishop. It is diverting! But not much more. View all my reviews
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Diné Monsters, Holy Ones, Clan Powers, and Romance No! Please--not ANOTHER first-person present tense laconic super special young female narrator heroic adventure story! If writers these days would write in the past tense and or third person, I could handle almost everything else, but… The Hunger Games (2008), Divergent (2011), Dread Nation (2018), The Map of Salt and Stars (2018)… That was my first reaction to starting Trail of Lightning (2018) by Rebecca Roanhorse. Especially when she starts her story in the midst of a full-on action scene: “The monster has been here. I can smell him.” Two things enabled me to persevere: the monster-slaying heroine Maggie Hoskie is Diné (Navajo), and the writing is mostly tight and fast-paced and often gut-punching or chortle-inducing. The Diné angle enables Roanhorse to insert interesting historical, cultural, supernatural, and linguistic details, like the following: Maggie loading her shotgun with “shells full of corn pollen and obsidian shot, both sacred to the Diné”; her K’aahanaanii Living Arrow Clan and Honaghaahnii Walks Around Clan powers from her parents heightening her strength and senses and speed and temporarily turning her into a superhuman killer in moments of need; her calling white people bilagaanas; her showering with yucca soap and rationed water brought by truck; her living near Narbona Pass, named for a Diné chief who was killed by the US army in 1847 while trying to sign a peace treaty; her references to things like the Long Walk, when the Diné were force marched away from their homes in 1864; and her former mentor/lover Neizghani being an immortal, the Monsterslayer of legend, the lightning sword bearing son of two Holy People, Changing Woman and the Sun. With the help of hataalii (Holy Ones), who have stepped out of dreams, legends, and songs, Maggie’s people managed to quickly construct four giant magical, sacred walls (east white shell, south turquoise, west abalone, north obsidian), which have protected them from the chaos of the outside world: the Big Water flooding that killed two billion people worldwide, submerged the entire Midwest, made a new coastline from San Antonio to Sioux Falls, and ended the USA; ensuing energy wars and race wars; oil companies, Feds, prospectors, and multinational corporation armies all doing their greedy things. Unfortunately, it also means that the Diné of Dinétah are locked in behind their walls with a variety of monsters. The novel begins with Maggie tracking a new kind of monster (a tse naayee made of flesh, wood or stone, and a sacred artifact) who’s taken a twelve-year-old girl from her house and carried her up a mountain. The suspenseful sequence introduces us to Maggie’s world and to her abilities (knives and guns, temporary turbocharging clan super powers and senses, etc.), her personality (tough, solitary, anti-social, trauma-scarred, evil-tainted), her monster hunting career (paid in trade items and feared and ostracized for her best efforts), and her 1972 Chevy 4x4 cherry red truck (running on whisky--talk about hardboiled!). Wanting to find out about that monster leads her to consult with her surrogate grandfather Tah, a saintly medicine man monster expert, which in turns leads to Tah foisting his Big Medicine, healer/weather worker, sweet-talking, too-handsome and natty grandson Kai on an unwilling Maggie. The odd-couple partners (she’s taller than Kai and rougher and tougher and more laconic, and while she can become a “living arrow” superhuman killer, he’s a man of peace super healer) go on the road to track down the witch who’s making the appalling new monsters. But, yikes, another special mortal young lady with an uber-cool immortal love interest complicated by the introduction of a handsome and clan-power endowed “Big Magic” healer and weather worker with “preternatural charisma”!? Holy Diné YA Love Triangle?! The novel is very much in the vein of mutant-monster-hero triad stories like X-men, where we’re pretty sure the super-powered protagonist is a hero despite other people and maybe she herself suspecting her of being a monster. Roanhorse also writes the short sentences and short cliff-hanger chapters de rigueur for YA fiction today. And she also writes some corny overly hardboiled lines, like “Trauma, scars, that’s what I’m good at,” and “But I’m no hero. I’m more of a last resort, a scorched-earth policy. I’m the person you hire when the heroes have already come home in body bags.” Is there enough Diné matter to make up for the otherwise typical monster hunting/slaying matter (and the first-person present tense narration)? For that matter, according to Wikipedia, the novel has been criticized “for misrepresenting Navajo teachings and spirituality.” No expert, I have no idea how accurate the novel is in its cultural background. To my mind, it presents a mostly positive female Native American heroine in Maggie and does make Diné culture seem cool. But I don’t care for what Roanhorse does with the Holy People of the Diné, like the trickster god Coyote, the immortal hero Neizghani, or a cat goddess (?) called Mose: they are all extremely unappealing and pettily human in their supposedly immortally derived separation from humanity (what they call “the five fingers”). Though there is plenty of graphic violence with fists, knees, guns, knives, flamethrowers, and supernatural weapons like lightning blades, there is no sex. Audiobook reader Tanis Parenteau is capable, but I didn’t care for her Holy People voices or manners (that may be down to Roanhorse’s writing of those characters, though). People who like Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation or who are interested in a Native American hardboiled yet sensitive female protagonist driving around kicking monster ass would probably like the book. Will I go on and read the sequel? Hmm... View all my reviews
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Are there any questions?" Holy patriarchal Christian dystopia! After killing Congress and the President, suspending the Constitution, and taking over bank accounts and the media, etc., in the mid-1980s a group of Christian fundamentalists founded the Republic of Gilead in the USA, applying a skewed interpretation of the Bible so as to deprive people of the freedom to do what they want so as to give them freedom from crime and violence. And to put women in their place. Atop the hierarchy are elite middle-aged men, Commanders of the Faithful. Angels of the Apocalypse (soldiers) fight wars on the borders of the state, while Eyes (secret police) hunt heretics like Quakers and Catholics. Then there are Guardians, chauffeurs and police and so on. Below all them are women, trapped in Gilead and confined to specific functions and colors: Commander’s Wives in blue (married in mass arranged weddings), Aunts in brown (sadistic and smarmy trainers), Marthas in green (cooks and servants), and then Handmaids in red (surrogate mothers). At the bottom are the Econowives of the poor, women who fulfill all functions at once. Romantic love is verboten, and sex is for procreation. The 4th of July is no longer observed, while Labor Day celebrates giving birth. The Children of Ham are relocated to reservations, while Jews convert or emigrate to Israel. Whales and wild fish are extinct. Generic prayers ordered by Wives on “Compuphones” are printed on paper (“Soul Scrolls”) and then recycled before anyone can read them. Do they reach God? The Handmaids have a nigh impossible duty: to get pregnant by the Commanders whose Wives are “barren.” (Of course, men are never sterile!) Furthermore, due to pollution, only one in four babies is viable. If the Handmaids fail in three different households, they are sent as “unwomen” to “colonies,” there to perform toxic waste cleanup. No artificial insemination in Gilead—everything is done “naturally” as inspired by a passage in Genesis, the aggrieved Wives lying face up on the bottom, the compliant Handmaids lying face down on the Wives, and the dutiful Commanders working away from atop the pile. About the only Handmaids to get pregnant do so illicitly via the doctors who give them monthly examinations or the Guards who work in their households. Handmaids are forbidden to read or write. They have tattooed ID numbers. They are loathed by Wives, conditioned by Aunts, resented by Marthas, patronized by Commanders, and ogled by Guards. The narrator of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a 33-year old Handmaid who’s called Offred (Commander Fred’s possession) and who never tells us her pre-Gilead name. Offred recounts entering a new Commander’s house across the river from Boston to get pregnant by him. This is her last chance to succeed. Into her present tense account—occurring in the first years of Gilead—she weaves past tense memories, including some from before Gilead (of her feisty feminist mother, her vibrant best friend from university Moira, and her rather generic husband Luke), and some from after Gilead (of the authorities separating her from her work, husband, and daughter and training her to be a Handmaid). Whether or not such a warped Christian fascist state could happen in the USA, Offred’s present and past narratives make a compelling picture of post- and pre-Gilead life. This is largely because Offred is observant, intelligent, sensitive, and creative. She has a poetic turn of mind and phrase, an eye and an ear for the vivid detail and the impressive metaphor, like “Hatred fills my mouth like spit” and “His skin unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.” She likes to explore the different meanings of words like compose, story, and job: “I wait, for the household to assemble. Household: that is what we are. The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a ship. Hollow.” Offred has a motivation to tell her story in the present tense. She wants to keep Moira and Luke alive, changing “was” to “is” when she slips up, and she is trying to remain absolutely aware in her present to avoid losing herself in her past, when she could live and love more freely. She is telling us her story to make us (“you”) real. “I tell, therefore you are.” The literary quality of Offred’s narration highlights the waste that Gilead makes of women like her but also that the USA made of women like her (her pre-Gilead work was transferring physical books to disks), which then makes us think about such things in our own society now. Indeed, Atwood doesn’t gloss over the gender inequalities and dangers for girls and women before the advent of her dystopia. Although Offred was freer and happier in the old days (our days), America before the Republic of Gilead was no utopia for women, who were often victims of male condescension, pornography, and violence. Offred’s tale is followed by “Historical Notes” taken in 2195 at a Symposium of the Gileadian Research Association, when the Republic of Gilead is a quaint historical field for scholars, like a professor who speaks about problems of authentication with The Handmaid’s Tale manuscript. The world 200 years later has survived Gilead, and fish are back, and male and female scholars seem equal, but the professor makes sexist jokes denigrating women, tells his audience not to censure but understand Gilead, and is after all a man interpreting a woman’s words and life and determining their authenticity. Will there ever be true equality between the sexes? Offred is no action-movie heroine. She says at one point, “It’s truly amazing what people can get used to.” At another, “I am a wimp.” She is honest: “It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.” Despite (or because of?) all that, the novel is suspenseful because of the dangers of her daily life in Gilead. At any moment anyone can betray or destroy her. Readers who like dystopia stories in which protagonists bring down totalitarian states ala The Hunger Games may not enjoy Atwood’s novel, which is closer to bleak dystopias like 1984 (though perhaps Atwood’s ambiguity makes her novel more hopeful than Orwell’s). Her novel is moving and provocative, ending “Are there any questions?” Reading the audiobook, Claire Danes sounds like Offred recording her own words on tapes. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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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 ...
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