For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Entertaining (but maybe forgettable) Cat Lovers’ Fantasy “For He Can Creep” (2019) has a splendid concept for a “novelette”: write about Christopher Smart's cat Jeffrey trying to save the 18th-century poet's soul (and the world) from the devil's machinations while the poet is confined in an insane asylum. I love Smart's poem "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey" (part of his long poem Jubilate Agno [c. 1760]), so full it is of comical and sublime, realistic and spiritual observations about his feline asylum companion’s daily life. Like, For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. And like For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire. For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast. For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements. For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped. For he can tread to all the measures upon the music. For he can swim for life. For he can creep. And Siobhan Carroll writes a story suitable for an eccentric, 18th-century literati-illuminati like Christopher Smart, from the point of view of his cocky cat: "Nevertheless, the devil made a grave mistake when he annoyed Jeoffry. He will pay for his insolence." She also writes a cool devil, tricky and seductive and powerful and malevolent, but not a bad sport, in his way. Like this: "'Is anything truly ours?' The devil sighs and examines his claws. He is simultaneously a monstrous serpent, a mighty angel, and a handsome black cat with whiskers the color of starlight. The cat's whiskers are singed, the serpent's scales are scarred, and the angel's brow is heavy with an ancient grievance, and yet he is still beautiful, in his way. 'But more of this later. Jeoffry, I have come to converse with you. Will you not take a walk with me?'" The story soon has Jeoffry and friends (including a formidable "cat" called the Nighthunter Moppet) taking on Satan while the cat's earnest but rather clueless and ineffectual master works on a poem... It was a fun read! Cat lovers should love it! Poetry lovers, too--though I wish there'd been more of Smart's poetry or Carroll’s pastiche of it and less action. Perhaps the best part of the novelette is the title, which is the last line of Smart’s poem about Jeoffry. I also think that confirming that Smart is not insane (the devil IS out to get a poem out of him) leaves the story less ambiguous than I’d have liked. And I have to confess that I forgot reading the story until two months later (now) when Amazon suggested I write a review of it. The Kindle version was more than worth its cheap price (.95 cents). View all my reviews
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Alien: Out of the Shadows by Tim Lebbon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars Why? Well, why not? But then, Why? Why force Ellen Ripley into ANOTHER nightmarish alien encounter in between the first two movies (Alien and Aliens), an encounter that is a wee bit reminiscent of both? It’s a little creaky and cruel to do what writer Tim Lebbon and director Dirk Maggs and an ensemble cast of actors do to Ripley in Alien: Out of the Shadows (2016), an Audible Original Drama. This drama adapts Lebbon’s novel like a radio drama with sound effects and background music. And how things in Maggs’ 4.5-hour drama are arranged so that nothing that happens here can affect Ripley’s experience in Aliens increases the contrivance quotient. The drama is entertaining sf horror with solid characters and an anti-corporation ax to grind, so I want to answer my raised-eyebrow Why? with a whimsical, Why not? However, when I think of all they could have done without the constraining presence of Ripley, I start wondering again, Why? In the prologue (about the only calm part of the non-stop action drama) Ripley settles into the lifeboat shuttle Narcissus with cat Jones, dictating log messages to summarize the events of the first movie before going into hypersleep, hoping to be rescued in a year or so. Cut to the orbital mining space station Marion as its two drop ships (Samson and Delilah) return from a disastrous mission picking up miners from LB178, a planet their company has sent them to mine. It turns out that aliens have hitched a ride in Samson and Delilah and have been forcing unwanted “pregnancies” on the crew and miners in the appalling alien way. The drop ships crash into the Marion, seriously damaging it, killing its captain, and knocking it off orbit, so that in 90 days it will burn up in the atmosphere of the mining planet. After assuming command, Chief Engineer Chris Hooper has the crew seal off the Samson in a loading bay because it’s packed with aliens (the Delilah has been destroyed). Fast forward 77 days. Ripley’s Narcissus has docked on the mining orbital. Upon being woken, Ripley is shocked to learn 1) she’s been asleep for 37 years, 2) there are aliens shut up in a drop ship on the doomed orbital that’s “rescued” her, 3) the Marion is not 15 days from burning up in LB178’s atmosphere but two, and 4) Ash, the android who was so keen in the first movie to fulfill the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s Special Order 937 by bringing a “viable” “creature of interest” home with him no matter what, human crew expendable, has uploaded his “mind” to the Narcissus’ computer system. Ash couldn’t get into the Marion’s computer systems, could he? The only way out for the eight surviving crew members of the Marion (plus Ripley) would be to jam into the Narcissus and head for the solar system in hopes of being rescued. To make that happen, they’ll first have to clean the Samson free of however many aliens are lurking inside it (the plan being to catch the nine-foot critters in sturdy nylon cargo nets, watching out for their ten-foot spiked tails, talons, double jaws, and acid blood) and use the drop ship to make a hit and run trip down to the mining planet to get an energy cell for Narcissus (which is down to 10% juice). For weapons, Hoop, Ripley, et al have two acid guns, bolt firing flare guns, and plasma torches. Who knows how many aliens are down there waiting for more humans to “impregnate” with their toothy babies? The drama is that kind of time-ticking-improvise-your-way-out-of-(or-into)-hairy-situations horror suspense story. There is much violent mayhem, graphic sight and smell and sound, buck-up banter, desperate situations, and creepy alien sound effects. It’s well done. But there are contrivances, like the only usable energy cell for Ripley’s Narcissus being down on the mining planet, and—well, I won’t mention others to avoid spoiling the plot. Ash’s presence is neat: voiced by Rutger Hauer, the android is calm, creepy, and crazy. He gives regular “progress updates” to Weyland-Yutani, in which he reveals what he’s planning for Ripley and company, thus heightening suspense. Unfortunately, Ash repetitively summarizes the situation way too often, saying multiple times things like, “I no longer have a body, having uploaded my consciousness into the Narcisuss computer,” or “I am monitoring the helmet feeds of the landing party,” or “Ellen Ripley, who was the warrant officer on my former ship the Nostromo is here.” Maybe the drama was conceived in episodes, requiring Ash to bring listeners up to speed each time a section begins, but it makes for flabby storytelling. In addition to Hauer’s fine performance, the voice acting is all convincing, the Ripley actress Laurel Lefkow channeling Sigourney Weaver and Corey Johnson doing a natural-born laconic engineer leader in Hooper. It’s disappointing that apart from Ash the only negative character is the only British-English speaking character, Science Officer Snedden (?), who finds the aliens “beautiful” and “fascinating” and spends way too much time “recording” things alien, so we assume it’s only a matter of time before she learns her lesson the hard way. Why is such a character the only one with a British accent? Of course, the old Corporations-Are-Bad schtick is on full display here, and the big villain is Weyland-Yutani: “They want something they can sell over and over at an inflated price. Medicine. Or weapons.” There are vivid descriptions, as of the alien secretions that look like organic melted plastic. There are neat lines, like “A drunk with a gun on a spaceship. What could possibly go wrong?” There are, alas, too many corny lines: “You good?” “I’m Good.” Or “Stay sharp, people!” Or “Come on folks, saddle up and move out.” If people really say such things like in real life, I bet it’s cause they watched a lot of action movies and TV shows! There are plenty of f-word utterances (e.g., “WTF?”), but the line is drawn at mf, which is abbreviated “mother.” Finally, I’d recommend this only to diehard fans of the Alien movies in dire need of another Alien fix. View all my reviews
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sensual, Beautiful, Graphic Fairy Tale Horror The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angel Carter is a collection of ten vivid, sensual, beautiful, and brutal short stories inspired by classic fairy tale or horror motifs. The title story (at over 40 pages the longest work in the collection) is a lush, disturbing, and suspenseful Bluebeard tale, with a feminist slant and a detailed French fin-de-siecle setting. “I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum.” Then follow two retellings of the beauty and the beast motif, the straightforward and poignant adherence to the plot in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” set in contemporary London and the wonderful reversal of the plot in “The Tiger’s Bride” set in southern Italy. “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs.” The one comedy in the collection, “Puss-in-Boots,” is a bawdy memoir told by the pragmatic, randy, egotistical, raconteur cat, who, when not washing his privates or singing for rotten vegetables and assorted footwear, takes charge of a down and out cavalry officer in Bergamo. “I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygenic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone; I chose to remain silent. Love? What has my rakish master, for whom I’ve jumped through the window of every brothel in the city, besides haunting the virginal back garden of the convent and god knows what other goatish errands, to do with the tender passion?” “The Erl-King” is a densely poetic psychological story of the conflicting desires of the female narrator to yield her self to love a forest spirit/goblin given to keeping song birds in cages or to save her self by escaping from him in a weird ending switching from first to third person). “He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotted fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things. Even the homely wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow chanterelle with its fan-vaulting and faint scent of apricots, all spring up overnight like bubbles of earth, unsustained by nature, existing in a void. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he came alive from the desire of the woods.” “The Snow Child” is a two-page story, an incantatory, hallucinatory alternate “Snow White,” including necrophiliac rape and a rose that bites. “As soon as he completed her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked; she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her.” “The Lady of the House of Love” is an absorbing and unsettling vampiric “The Lady of Shallot.” “Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.” Three werewolf stories close the collection: “The Werewolf” (in which Little Red Riding Hood is no innocent and the werewolf, perhaps, no werewolf), “The Company of Wolves” (in which Little Red Riding Hood is no innocent and the marriage ceremony consists of picking and eating lice), and “Wolf-Alice” (in which a girl raised by wolves is taken from them and given into the careless care of a lycanthropic Duke). “Then her sensitive ears pricked at the sound of a step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kitchen, she encountered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable one in her absolute and verminous innocence.” The stories are about love and sexuality (especially female) and the pleasure, annihilation, or new life they may bring. To the extent that they are feminist tales, they depict female characters who refuse to become victims, as when Red Riding Hood, faced with the wolf who’s just eaten her grandmother, “burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.” Carter’s writing is lush, vivid, sensual, painterly, poetic, dense. At times it almost (but not quite) becomes too much, like overeating expensive bitter dark chocolate truffles. As they read alternate stories in the collection, Emilia Fox and Richard Armitage are both clear, intelligent, and sensitive. My only concern might be that Armitage camps it up a fair amount doing the r rolling feline narrator of Puss-in-Boots. Readers who like modern fairy tales, luscious writing, horror and romance, should like The Bloody Chamber. View all my reviews
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The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day” Victor LaValle’s award-winning novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) is an entertaining and scathing pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Rock” (1925), at once laying bare the invidious racism of the source story and out-Lovecrafting it. Lovecraft’s story depicts the “hellish revelation” experienced by Thomas F. Malone, a sensitive white 42-year-old NYC policeman who’s interested in folklore and hence drawn to Brooklyn’s Red Hook slum: “a babel of sound and filth” full of “spiritual putrescence” and “the blasphemies of an hundred dialects” and modern crimes as well as sins handed down from pre-Aryan and even pre-human fertility rites, all due to the mongrel hybrid nature of the legal and illegal immigrant denizens--blacks, Asians, Syrians, Italians, and their like--the worst of whom are some mongoloid devil-worshipers. The story climaxes beneath the streets of NYC in a vast basement under a dilapidated Red Hook tenement, wherein a Babylonian revel takes place featuring said immigrants, a black magic orgy, white child sacrifice, Lilith, hell’s organ, a foul resurrection, a police raid, and a passive eye witness (Malone, who wants to believe it was all a dream). LaValle’s reworking of that story highlights its racism. His novella is comprised of two parts, the first of which is told from the point of view of the 20-year-old African American hustler Charles Thomas “Tommy” Tester. Living in Harlem in 1924, Tommy knows that if he worked a typical job open to a black man he’d never earn much money and would be broken by hard, unprotected labor, like his slowly dying former bricklayer 41-year-old father. So Tommy plays the role of “the dazzling, down-and-out [negro] musician,” (even though he has no musical talent and knows only three songs) in neighborhoods where black performers are rare, thereby attracting white attention so as to be chosen for “arcane” courier work or similar jobs, earning more money in a night or two than his father could earn in a year or two. In the opening scene Tommy delivers an ominous yellow book (The Supreme Alphabet) to one Ma Att in Queens, minus the last page, which he’s had his illiterate father remove so as to render the compact tome useless for its infernal intended purpose. This flawed product will play a role later in the story. Tommy then is hired by an eccentric wealthy old white man named Robert Suydam to play at a party at his mansion in a few days. Suydam is being monitored by NYC police Detective Thomas F. Malone (tall and thin) and private detective Mr. Howard (short and wide), who tell Tommy to return to Harlem and stay there where he belongs. The story, in Lovecraftian spirit, will soon provide Tommy with some revelations into the true reality lurking beneath the everyday world, but will also make him confront the worst reality of racism. The scenes where Tommy takes the train into white neighborhoods like Queens and Flatbush are fascinating, darkly humorous, and horrible (without requiring cosmic Lovecraftian horror), as he’s constantly questioned by white conductors and passengers as to his destination, followed by white teens intent on beating him up, forced to play “the simple Negro” and to become “unremarkable, invisible, compliant” to avoid being lynched or arrested, and so on. The second part of the story shifts to the point of view of Detective Malone (the white protagonist of Lovecraft’s story) as the would be seeker after occult lore becomes ever more aware that something ominous is happening in Red Hook and is finally made to stop shutting his eyes (literally!) on the terrors lurking behind the veil of everyday reality. La Valle introduces into Lovecraft’s “story” an awful villain in Howard, a racist white ex-cop from Texas who acts and talks not unlike some of the more recent real-world white policemen who shoot unarmed black men to death and then say they feared for their lives. He also introduces Ma Att, a demonic female from Karnak who may possess an extraordinarily long body and tail. He writes more about Robert Suydam, making him the target of greedy relatives out to prove him insane so as to get at his wealth. He plays up the role of the raiding NYC police in the destruction of the tenements rented by Suydam in the climax. (Browning anti-aircraft machine guns!) He also adds a fair amount of graphic gore in the climax. (A straight-edge razor!) And he leaves out the rejuvenation, marriage, and temporary resurrection of Suydam. Finally, LaValle’s additions and subtractions and refocusings of Lovecraft’s story and his writing of his own story all work to pose an excellent question: if there are Great Old Ones who care nothing for humanity, wouldn’t they be preferable to the small-minded evil hostility of racists? To quote Tommy’s great line, “I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.” Indeed, one of the most impressive parts of the novella is the waking of the powerless Tommy Tester into the prodigious Black Tom. LaValle is especially good with irony and humor, e.g., “A negro walking through this white neighborhood at damn near midnight? He might as well be Satan strolling through Eden.” He can outwrite Lovecraft, as when you compare his description of Suydam’s hair (“his hair blew out wildly like a dandelion’s soft white blowball”) with HP’s (“unkempt white hair”). LaValle’s vivid depiction of Tommy’s first entrance into Suydam’s creepy mansion (bigger inside than out, floorboards splintered and parched, the winds of the present not blowing there, and an invisible something following him and kicking his guitar case) is more uncanny than anything in Lovecraft’s story. Kevin R. Free gives a great, savory and intelligent reading of the novella. Fans of Lovecraft uncomfortable with his racism should like LaValle’s story, as should people interested in the savory side of 1920s NYC, cosmic horror, and authentic depictions of the racism once rampant and still too present in America. View all my reviews
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars For the Man Who Has Every Creepy Thing Fifty-four-year-old dark rock star Judas “Jude” Coyne (real name Justin Cowzynski) hasn’t toured in three years and is on his umpteenth young Goth girlfriend he nicknames after their home states (the current one being a 23-year-old he calls Georgia) when he buys a ghost from a private online auction. Specifically, he buys the vintage “Sunday suit” the seller says her “spiritualist” stepfather Craddock James McDermott wanted to be buried in but wasn’t, leading him to haunt his bedroom. Jude’s extensive collection of “the grotesque and the bizarre,” much of it sent by his fans, ranges from the confession of a burned witch and a cookbook for cannibals to Aleister Crowley’s childhood chessboard and a “diseased” snuff film, but lacks a ghost, so he can’t resist buying one--without really believing in it. Joe Hill’s The Heart-Shaped Box (2007) being a horror novel, the ghost turns out to be real. When alive McDermott was a hypnotist/dowser, and his stepdaughter Jessica Price has ensnared Jude in an elaborate revenge plot because her little sister Anna-May McDermott (aka Florida) killed herself in depression after he dumped her. When the suit arrives in a heart-shaped box, the ghost starts haunting Jude, freaking out his beloved dogs Angus and Bon, giving Georgia an infected thumb wound, chilling the temperature of Jude’s sprawling Piecliff NY farmhouse, scaring off his personal assistant Danny, sending ominous emails, and malevolently manifesting himself to show off his pendulum hypnotizing razor and scribbled over eyes. Jude searches his occult books for solutions but can only find impractical things like washing in urine (and “he drew the line at water sports”). He doesn’t want to set the police on Jessica Price because he threatened her on the phone when she told him he’d die horribly and alone and because, being a self-made success, he doesn’t want to get help from anyone. At the start of the novel Jude is the prototypical self-centered isolated amoral rock star, but he comes to earn reader sympathy. He grew up in a household with a violently abusive father, Anna-May was subject to clinical depression before Jude met her, Craddock James McDermott is of a magnitude of evil far beyond Jude’s self-centered lazy morality, and Jude is capable of love and self-reflexion. Hill puts us convincingly in Jude’s head as he finds himself in a nightmarish trap, and we root for him to escape it while suspecting that he’s finally going to get his just deserts for, if nothing else, having “become a little too willing to take what he was offered, without wondering at the possible consequences.” Hill also develops Georgia and Anna-May into compelling characters in their own rights, which is one reason why the novel is a good, suspenseful, page-turningly creepy read; as the narrator says at one point, “horror was rooted in sympathy after all.” Hill writes original and evocative similes and is able to scare us and make us laugh at almost the same time. As in the following: --“The driver remained behind the wheel, peering down at him with the calm but intent expression of a doctor considering a new strain of Ebola through a microscope.” --“It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb.” --“Bon, always the shy one, gave Jude a worried, sidelong look, then lowered her head to the thin gruel of his vomit and covertly began to gobble it up.” --“If hell was anything, it was talk radio and family.” The reader of the audiobook, Stephan Lang, is excellent, his narrator sounding a bit like Vincent Price and his Jude a bit like Bronson Pinchot doing a deep voice. Unfortunately, the audiobook suffers from inappropriate techno music that intrudes to end or start scenes or chapters now and then (perhaps timed to start and end CD sides of the audiobook). Hill’s novel falls prey to some of the pitfalls of other fantasy and horror in that he doesn’t always follow the ground rules he sets up. For instance, dogs have souls and can become protective familiars for their human masters, but then during the climax it appears that pigs cannot be familiars. Similarly, at one point we learn from a gay teen who committed suicide rather than reveal his sexuality that souls have no gender, but later during an out of body experience souls are gendered male or female. And despite references to the likes of Trent Reznor, AC/DC, and Ozzy Osbourne, as well as to some of Jude’s hits, and even to a new song he composes in a motel, and despite several hints that music and singing may help with a hostile ghost, Jude doesn’t really sing or play that much in key encounters with Craddock. Finally, although it seems that “the only power he [the ghost] has over you is what you give him,” and that ghosts haunt minds rather than places, Hill makes Craddock a bit too powerful during an excrescent (though entertaining) scene in a Denny’s restaurant where he speaks through an old timer’s electric larynx and all the many customers can hear him, not just Jude and Georgia. As a result, I sometimes got the feeling that Hill is Doing-Whatever-He-Wants-for-Suspense rather than developing an organically and consistently convincing story. Hill’s writing is vivid, though, and the novel becomes an appealing, painful, romantic Southern Gothic buddy road trip into the characters’ pasts. Despite a climax that’s almost too absurdly action oriented, the novel has strong moments of horror, rapture, and sadness. Fans of horror and ghost stories should enjoy it. View all my reviews
Duma Key by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine” Stephen King’s Duma Key (2011) is an absorbing, ultimately disappointing novel about memory, artistic creation, family, friendship, and evil (and the something that’s “on the other side of the equation”). The first-person narrator is fifty-year-old Edgar Freemantle, who was a millionaire building contractor with a loving family until a crane crushed him inside his pick-up truck, taking his right arm and leaving him with serious trauma to his leg and brain. The latter caused him such frustrated rage when he couldn’t say the right words that he took it out violently on wife Pam. Acting on the advice of his anger management psychiatrist, Edgar relocates from Minnesota to Florida to try to do something he liked to do when younger, draw. The setting for his new life is a house he dubs Big Pink on Duma Key, a narrow island which is mysteriously undeveloped but for a handful of houses on the northern end. As Big Pink is perched overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, Edgar immediately begins drawing intense sunsets, the days “ending in glory.” The new setting and his new occupation seem to be healing him. But something’s funny. Edgar often feels a painful stinging itch in his phantom right arm (the real appendage was burned in a hospital incinerator), and the only thing that relieves it is making pictures, but when he draws or paints it’s as if something takes over, until he’s unsure how much of his impressive art works are him and how much Something Else. And his works are disturbing. For one thing, they surrealistically impose shells and flora and ships onto the sunsets, and for another they may be predicting violent events. And when he starts painting a series of pictures in which a derelict ship of the dead is approached by a rowboating girl wearing the dresses his beloved daughter wore when she was a girl-- Luckily, Edgar makes new friends in Florida, like Wireman, a wise middle-aged ex-lawyer who takes care of Elizabeth Eastlake, the wealthy old woman who owns the northern end of Duma Key and the houses on it. In addition to sprinkling his speech with Spanish, pithy sayings (“the gospel according to Wireman”), and allusions to books, movies, and music (he’s “an artesian well of useless information”), Wireman is able to almost telepathically understand Edgar’s feelings. This wouldn’t be connected to the coin-sized scar on his temple, would it? Elizabeth is fading away into dementia, but in her clear moments she aesthetically arranges china figurines on a table, has Edgar read poetry to her, and says cryptic things like, “You won’t want to, but you must.” This wouldn’t be connected to the scar on her temple, would it? The relationship between Edgar, Wireman, and Elizabeth is interesting, funny, and moving. What has brought them together on Duma Key and for what purpose? The novel is full of King’s fine writing: Moving moments, as when Edgar remembers his daughters as little girls. Life wisdom, like “When memory takes its strongest hold, our own bodies become ghosts haunting us with the gestures of our younger selves.” Interesting insights into artistic creation, like the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious minds. Vivid, evocative descriptions, like this: “The thunderheads stacked up, huge flat boats, black on the bottom and bruised purple through the middle. Every now and then lightning would flash inside them, and then they looked like brains filled with bad ideas. The gulf lost its color and went dead.” Scary moments, like when Edgar tries to visit the south end of the island with his daughter or when twins (from The Shining?!) visit him. Many humorous lines (like “I’d never seen a heron that didn’t look like a Puritan elder thinking which witch to burn”) and scenes (like when Edgar and Wireman first meet). And many allusions to high culture (Shakespeare, Dickens, Dickenson, etc.) and popular culture (the Three Stooges, Pepe Le Pew, Peter Straub, etc.). This being a book about art, there are many references to modern painters, like Wyeth, Dali, and Hockney. (Sometimes I wondered how a building contractor could invoke Scooby Doo one moment and quote The Tempest the next--But the references are neat.) Finally, as I’ve found with others of his novels (like It), this one is most impressive before we learn what’s going on supernaturally. The more the nature of the ancient, malevolent force (gendered female here) is revealed, the more mystery and human agency decrease, and despite my believing in his main characters I often find King’s supernatural horror to be absurd and contrived. If a sentient evil power (“old when the children of Israel were grubbing in gardens in Egypt”) can make people far away murder people they have no reason to harm or suffer heart attacks or forget vital things, etc., then when she doesn't do something she could do, it all ends up feeling like King’s contrivance. Furthermore, if the evil is “not even close to human, something other, beyond human understanding,” human perfidy is diminished. In The Shining the supernatural evil force in the Overlook Hotel resonates with Jack Torrance’s inner alcoholic devil and doesn’t make Wendy and Danny do things against their natures. In Duma Key King tries to balance the supernatural evil force with something benign that has his heroes act on intuition to good effect, but then that diminishes human goodness and makes his book feel like a pseudo-Christian allegory. Thus, my favorite parts of the novel come in the first half, watching Edgar rehabilitate his body and mind, Edgar and Wireman hang out with Elizabeth, and Edgar discover his painting jones and related psychic ability. I also liked reading about artistic creation (a series of How to Draw a Picture vignettes reveal King’s advice to artists—and writers—like truth is in the details, be brave, and don’t quit). John Slattery reads the audiobook just right, with clarity and understanding without over doing it. Fans of It should like Duma Key, but I prefer Misery, The Shining, and Doctor Sleep. View all my reviews
Dangerous Women by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Uneven Anthology with too Few Dangerous Women In his introduction to Dangerous Women (2013), which he edited with George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois says that the “cross-genre anthology” will "showcase the supposedly weaker sex's capacity for magic, violence, and mayhem.” Hey, it sounds great, doesn’t it? But among the anthology’s 21 stories from various genres, including fantasy (ghost, magic, epic, etc.), science fiction (space opera, post apocalypse, superhero, etc.), and realism (crime, historical, and wrestling etc.), I found too few dangerous women protagonists and too much sexism. Here is an annotated list of the uneven stories. 1. “Some Desperado” by Joe Abercrombie (read by Stana Katic) A violent and suspenseful story about a “contrary” young woman on the run from her treacherous male bank-robbing accomplices. Replace the medievalesque fantasy weapons like bow and battle-axe with guns, and it’d be a hardboiled western. 2. “My Heart Is Either Broken” by Megan Abbott (read by Jake Weber) After their toddler daughter is kidnapped, a husband tries to remain loyal to his wife, while the media and police view her sexy outfits, bar dancing, and smiling with suspicion. A Gone Girl vibe but with only the husband’s view. 3. “Nora’s Song” by Cecelia Holland (read by Harriet Walter) Intense doings of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II seen from the point of view of Eleanor’s spunky little daughter. “I want to be a hero,” she says to her father, who replies, “God gave you the wrong stature.” A vivid story about the powerlessness of children, especially of girls. 4. “The Hands That Are Not There” by Melinda Snodgrass (read by Jonathan Frakes) This space opera sympathizes with people open to other species (i.e. races), but finally seems to validate the ugliest Trumpian prejudices. The protagonists are men, the antagonist a by-the-numbers femme fatale. 5. “Bombshells” by Jim Butcher (read by Emily Rankin) Wizardly apprentice Molly and two other “bombshells” crash a Chicago party hosted by mythological beings and get caught up in supernatural terrorism. The title is a sexist pun, the story a male fantasy of “smoking hot” women playing Charlie’s Angels, flaunting their “racks,” and saying, “I rock this dress!” 6. “Raisa Stepanova” by Carrie Vaughn (read by Inna Korobkina) A suspenseful story about a brave, capable woman who is a WW II Russian fighter pilot set on becoming an ace or dying trying. And she’s not sexualized as a “knockout” and has no romantic interest. 7. “Wrestling Jesus” by Joe R. Lansdale (read by Scott Brick) A Karate Kid, geriatric pro wrestling, and succubus story. It’s predictable, profane, and unconvincing, and the femme fatale antagonist is “a knockout,” “a girl,” and “that bitch.” 8. “Neighbors” by Megan Lindholm (read by Lee Meriwether) A potent story about a woman fearing dementia while her loving children want her in assisted living. After losing an old friend to the Tacoma fog, she starts feeling unmoored from time and (maybe) becomes able to access another world. 9. “I Know How to Pick ’Em” by Lawrence Block (read by Jake Weber) An unpleasant story in which an uber-hard-boiled narrator (6’5”, heavily muscled, and observant) works a twist on the old Body Heat scenario. 10. “Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell” by Brandon Sanderson (read by Claudia Black) A woman runs an inn in the Forest, whose deadly shades are attracted to fast movements, fire starting, and blood spilling. And she’s secretly a bounty hunter. Can she save her place and protect her daughter? 11. “A Queen in Exile” by Sharon Kay Penman (read by Harriet Walter) Constance, wife to cold King Heinrich, heir to the Holy Roman Empire, is enduring a cold German winter and missing her balmy southern Italy when her life path changes. Constance is strong but not dangerous. 12. “The Girl in the Mirror” by Lev Grossman (read by Sophie Turner) The leader of a female club in Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy plans a practical joke on a male student only to find herself in a “fucked up magical mystery tour.” A cool heroine, creepy scenes, vivid descriptions, and interesting magic. 13. “Second Arabesque, Very Slowly” by Nancy Kress (read by Janis Ian) After 99% of women became infertile, civilization collapsed, leaving male-dominated packs scavenging ruins like the Lincoln Center, where 64-year-old “Nurse” observes two young pack members discovering ballet: “There are worse ways to die than gazing at beauty.” 14. “City Lazarus” by Diana Rowland (read by Scott Brick) A corrupt police captain falls in love with a creole exotic dancer in a New Orleans that’s a “fucked up shell” because the Mississippi River has changed course. The best part of this hardboiled story is the river-abandoned city. 15. “Virgins” by Diana Gabaldon (read by Allan Scott-Douglas) Virgins in sex and killing, Scottish Highlanders Jamie Fraser and Ian Murray are working for a mercenary company in 1740 when they are assigned to escort a beautiful Jewess and a priceless Torah from Bordeaux to Paris. Ivanhoe’s Rebecca as a female “praying mantis”? 16. “Hell Hath No Fury” by Sherilynn Kenyon (read by Jenna Lamia) The sexist cliché alluded to by the title doesn’t fit the story, about a psychic young lady and her obtuse friends visiting a ghost town to film supernatural events and finding a curse, a ghost, an Indian philosophy hodgepodge, a didactic lesson, and an unconvincing ending. 17. “Name the Beast” by Sam Sykes (read by Claudia Black) An alien-human story with vivid imagery but too clever by half: events are out of chronological order, and it’s too hard to figure out who are the aliens, who the humans, and who the beast. 18. “Pronouncing Doom” by S.M. Stirling (read by Stana Katic) Oregon. Year Two after the machines stopped, fires burnt, and the plague killed, forcing the survivors to band together under warlords or Wiccan Highlander-esque clans (!), like the one led by folksinger Juniper Mackenzie, who must judge a conveniently unrepentant rapist. 19. “Caregivers” by Pat Cadigan (read by Janis Ian) The relationship between the 53-year-old Val and her younger sister Gloria gets complicated when Gloria starts volunteering at the rest home where the sisters’ mother is living. It’s a funny, moving, and finally unsettling story. 20. “Lies My Mother Told Me” by Caroline Spector (read by Maggi-Meg Reed) In the Wild Cards universe an alien virus has given some humans super powers (Aces) or grotesque mutations (Jokers) which various organizations try to exploit. I like the only LGBTQ characters in the anthology, but the entertaining story is weakened by the old author-can-do-anything-for-the-plot-with-super-powers syndrome. 21. “The Princess and the Queen” by George R. R. Martin (read by Iain Glen) A Westeros Grand Maester has written the “true” history of the Dance of the Dragons, a devastating civil war of succession fought by branches of House Targaryen and their dragons and supporters. Alas that the flaws of Queen Rhaenyra derive from her being a mother. The audiobook readers are fine, except for their tendency (apart from a few like Janis Ian) to overdo intense scenes. The pompous British accent and portentous manner of the woman who introduces authors and stories is irritating. Finally, there aren’t enough dangerous women in the stories. And those that do appear are too often femme fatales who do bad things to men or try to get men to do bad things. (Both editors are men.) Some stories are fine, but overall I regret the time I spent on this book. View all my reviews
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Racism, Consumerism, Alienation, and Fantasy Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black (2018) is a collection of 12 short stories about race, consumerism, and alienation. Most of the stories are told by first-person narrators, most of whom are male. The cleanly written stories range in genre from magical realism (or urban fantasy) to sf dystopia and in mood from horror to humor and from outrage to acceptance. Here follows a brief, annotated list of the stories. “The Finkelstein 5” is an excoriating satire of the racism directed at African Americans, especially in the arena of “justice.” Here a white man has been acquitted after chainsaw massacring five African American kids because his lawyer successfully argued that he was acting in all-American self-defense. In that context, the protagonist Emmanuel defiantly raises his “blackness index” (monitoring how black you are on a scale of 1 to 10) by donning baggy pants and a backwards cap. Will he join a violent resistance? “Things My Mother Said” is a vignette about the protagonist and his supportive and hard-working and wise mother. “The Era” takes place in a future in which devastating wars have led to a backlash against “dishonest” emotions and empathy and in which people pay to have their kids genetically “optimized,” although sometimes mistakes cause “shoelookers.” The narrator, Ben, who is ostracized because he wasn’t optimized, speaks a great line without any irony of his own (though we sure sense the author’s behind him): “I do bad at school because sometimes I think when I should be learning.” “Lark Street” is a moving and funny nightmare in which the narrator is visited in the middle of the night by his girlfriend’s aborted twin fetuses. Adjei-Brenyah writes vivid descriptions of the twins’ webbed fingers and toes, transparent skin, tiny bodies coated with blood, and lively personalities. At one point the male twin tells the narrator, “I think I have more balls than you, and I’m still a trimester away from genitalia.” “The Hospital Where” is an allegory of the struggle to become a successful writer, including the morality involved in mining people for story material. The narrator takes his father to the hospital, where he recounts his bargain made with the Twelve Tongued God to enable him to become a successful “winner” of a writer and decides to inform all the patients that they’re healthy and should go home. “Zimmer Land” satirizes contemporary American culture via a theme park for adults (for now) where they can pay to (supposedly) explore problem solving and justice. Patrons pay to enter modules like Terrorist on the Train or, the most popular one, Cassidy Lane, which involves cul-de-sac home defense with extreme prejudice against a loitering black man. The title story satirizes American consumerism by turning Black Friday hysteria into a zombie-mall scenario worthy of George Romero. The ace salesman narrator works in a store besieged by biting, clawing, moaning, hissing, and growling people ravenous for their desired purchases. After having been bitten by a customer, the narrator became able to speak Black Friday and so to understand that, for instance, a howl means, “I won’t be alone with this. They’ll like me now.” “The Lion & the Spider” concerns the high school senior narrator and his relationship with his apparently ne’er-do-well father who told the guy and his sisters great stories about Anansi the African spider trickster god when they were little, but who has seemingly abandoned his family, forcing the narrator to start working in a Home Improvement center unloading delivery trucks. “Light Spitter” is a fantasy exploring the psychology of outcasts. After the narrator is murdered in her university library by an alienated student, the rest of the story depicts the interactions of the odd couple, the victim on her way to becoming an angel and her killer on his way to becoming something else. “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing” features the salesman from “Friday Black,” here explaining (in a less exaggerated satire) his successful salesman techniques as he recounts trying to sell some coats to a white family. The story reveals why he’s only the 10th ranked salesman for the chain in the country, while his female co-worker is the 7th. It’s a funny story but goes on a bit too long. “In Retail” is another satire set in the same mall as “Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Coat,” but this time it’s the narration of IceKing’s rival salesperson telling us how, “Even in nothing jobs like this, you need to think of ways you might really be helping somebody. Or you could end up a Lucy,” a worker who recently jumped to her death. “Through the Flash” depicts a neighborhood caught in an apparently eternal time loop after the Flash, a big bomb, annihilated everyone, making them eternally recycle through time, constantly being killed and “reset” by the bomb. As they repeatedly go through the Flash, they gain abilities, like the 14-year-old girl narrator’s super strength and speed and her brother’s super brain capacity. When the story begins, she has decided to become a New Me who wants to make everyone to feel “supreme and infinite” after she has been “the Knife Queen” into torturing everyone in her community in ever more creative ways. The story is matter-of-fact in its depiction of the cruelty of children, but ends with an odd transcendence. The two audiobook readers, Corey Allen (reading the male narrators) and Carra Patterson (reading the female ones) have appealing voices and read the stories with intelligence, empathy, and clarity. Adjei-Brenyah’s stories are full of satire, humor, horror, and love. I’d like fewer first-person narrators and less present tense narration and more narrative variety. But it is an impressive first collection (though I don’t think I’ll be re-reading it soon). View all my reviews
The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars "How could such things be?" Brian McNaughton's World Fantasy Award-winning collection of mordant epic horror tales, The Throne of Bones (1997), is set in a world of decadent cities like Crotalorn (home of the Dreamers’ Hill necropolis), Sythiphore (home of piscine eroticists), and Fandragord (home of evil) where aristocrats, scholars, cultists, poets, prostitutes, barbarians, necromancers, the undead, ghouls, and the like pursue love, art, life, and death. The stories read like a meld of Clark Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, and Tannith Lee, all informed by McNaughton's voice and vision. If McNaughton’s work is macabre, with graphic sex and violence aplenty, it is also funny, delighting in the human comedy, especially via dramatic irony (e.g., when a mob thinks they’re rescuing a child from a ghoul), and in the well-turned phrase or the piquant word (e.g., "This apparently caused him to miss a fire or massacre or other popular diversion, for when he emerged in the evening, the street outside his house pullulated with quidnuncs"). His stories are moral, for his anti-heroes receive fitting fates, and honest, for his people face biting truths, as when a ghoul hears from a corpse she's eaten, "I knew life and love and happiness. Now I shall know peace. Will you ever say such things?" McNaughton’s rich style ranges from romantic beauty (e.g., "Her hair was the color of rain when the sun shines") to gruesome horror (e.g., “The fabric of the real world had parted as easily as an old corpse’s shroud, dropping him into an unknown abyss, and he screamed like one falling as he thrust himself from the reeking heap in his bed"). He writes evocative names (e.g., Vomikron, Asteriel, and Crondard), quotable lines (e.g., “the gods love to bestow useless gifts"), choice similes (e.g., "his unruly mind frisked toward that filth like a puppy”), and vivid descriptions (e.g., “Beyond the Vendren palace, a full third of the sky was gripped by an electrical cataclysm. Dragons of flame writhed among three cloudy continents, whipped above them, exploded behind them. Not a whisper of thunder reached him, and a deformed moon drowsed overhead, but the breeze scurried this way and that in timid confusion”). Wayne June is the ideal reader for the audiobook, wielding his resonant voice with perfect pace, emphasis, and clarity. His ghouls sound like growling dogs and rasping metal, and he does prime laughs, from a necromancer’s “steam kettle” to an aristocrat’s “eructations of a clogged drain.” Here is an annotated list of the stories: 1. Ringard and Dendra "Botany is no field for the squeamish." Featuring a wood carver with an affinity for trees, a free-spirited aristocratic daughter, an amoral botanical wizard, and a brutal religious cult, the story is appalling and moving. 2. The Throne of Bones "I want to be a ghoul, don't you?" The six linked short stories of this novella relate Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Ghouls* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). Like his undead, McNaughton's ghouls exaggerate human qualities: beneath our human veneer lurks a ghoul. 2a. Lord Glyphtard’s Tale "As a child, I was told not to gather souvenirs from the cemetery." This story has it all: cannibalism, rape, necrophilia, inter-species sex, graphic violence (from mutilation to dismemberment), and an apt climax and resolution. 2b. The Lecher of the Apothogem “He would fuck the ghoul that tried to eat his corpse.” An “artist” of dramatic “masterpieces” of rape and torture finally gets to test a popular aphorism in an ironic, fitting fashion. 2c. The Ghoul’s Child "His hair was yellower than her eyes, his eyes bluer than her vestigial lips." Gluttoria the ghouless dotes on her baby, while the King of Ghouls schemes to get rid of him. The story is full of point of view tricks (e.g., a woman waking up), dramatic irony (e.g., a fastidious pornographic poet finding love), funny touches (e.g., the child preferring liver to strawberries), and poignant moments (e.g., Gluttoria worshipping the sun). 2d The Scholar's Tale "I began to entertain doubts about the wisdom of this adventure." The unlikely Campbellian hero of this scary comedy is "old, fat, and slovenly" Dr. Porfat, a professor of “ghoulology” who experiences outré escapades involving an imbecilic Prince, a creepy Lady, a necromancer and his ward, a talking skull, and a pornographic manuscript. 2e How Zara Lost Her Way in the Graveyard "This is not my mother!" he screamed. "This is a woman!" A half-ghoul, half-human lad’s reunion with his “mother”; revelations about the pornographic poet Chalcedor; a reminder to be careful lest what you consume subsumes you; a romance between a resurrected whore and a missing scholar. 2f The Tale of the Zaxoin Siblings "And I surely was no ghoul." A bawdy comedy of manners turns into a tragedy of identity as a beautiful lady appeals to “Dr. Porfat” to save her repugnant brother from becoming a ghoul. 3. The Vendren Worm "My trade is in that foulest of wares, truth." The public, who conflate first person narrators with authors, believe that a "gentle and forgiving" writer of horror fantasy has murdered his wife (twice!) and sired a son on a corpse. (McNaughton often writes artists and writers as sardonic self-portraits) The comedy turns to horror as the writer learns about a family worm. 4. Meryphillia "In the presence of wonder . . . spite was impossible." A ghouless longs to experience human love that her ghoul lover seems ill-equipped to provide, leading to an amazing finale recalling O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi." 5. Reunion in Cephalune “Death grants no immunity from sunburn.” This morbidly hilarious romantic comedy sets the paths of a necrophilac necromancer, a versifying pit-fighter, and an innocent newlywed to meet at the gateway between the worlds of the living and the dead. The resolution is exquisite. 6. The Art of Tiphytsorn Glocque "I'll teach you not to fuchsia my Art, you browns!" It’s difficult to cause a stir in Sythiphore, but the title character does so, not by purportedly killing his fishmonger father with poisoned fish eggs, but by pursuing his body decoration "Art" with too much avant-garde fervor. 7. A Scholar from Sythiphore “Like all men, only more so, the Giants were swine." A skeptical "antiquarian" graverobber greedy for “the coins traditionally placed on the eyes of corpses" receives a deserved revelation. 8. Vendriel and Vendreela "Lord Vendriel had descended to the crypt to bid farewell, in that wicked man's singular way, to his beloved mother." To create a wife "who would be both incrorruptible and uncritical,” Vendriel the Good applies his necromancy to robbing the best features of beautiful people, artistic masterpieces, and a perfect spring day. The climax is slimy and meet. 9. The Retrograde Sorceror "Vendriel the Good believed that he had heard everything." A fairy tale reading concubine, an illiterate childcatcher, and a jaded necromancer-king go off to see the wizard, an immortal, reclusive, and soul-eating Archimage. 10. The Return of Liron Wolfbaiter “Things are not what they seem lately.” With panache an aging Conan-esque mercenary slash amateur philosopher on the run runs into a vengeful aristocratic girl, an uncanny inn, a sardonic Lord, an enthusiastic boarhound, a "philanthropist" necromancer-king, and a dead dreaming poet. 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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