America and environs – Page 11

Deck Z: Unsinkable. Undead

SPOILER ALERT: THE BOAT SINKS.

I was talking to a friend about these monster history things. It seems there are two broad classes of them, the classic mash-up (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies et al.) and the secret monster history, like Deck Z: The Titanic: Unsinkable. Undead. It wasn’t the issues of state’s rights as a stalking horse for slavery, it was vampires that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was fighting. I’ve pretty well sworn off the former, because if I love the book enough to read it again with some hastily graphed monster fight scenes, then I love it enough to get all huffy and snobby about liberties taken with tone, character and interpretation. (Don’t even get me started about the shit show that is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls; ugh.) And if I haven’t read the classic in question, there’s no way I’m going to screw up my (possible, eventual) read of it due to some monster b.s. But secret histories? Even dopey, pulpy ones? Sure, why not.

On the face of it, the Titanic disaster should marry well with the concept of zombies. There’s an Onion headline from Our Dumb Century that reads: World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg.

The Titanic disaster and its aftermath seem almost ridiculously fraught with issues of class warfare and technological hubris, a big floating microcosm which tore open and showed the ugly realities of class divisions. When you sort the dead by class, you see precisely how lethal it is to be poor. (See also, Hurricane Katrina, but in a much messier form, and adding in the always fun factor of race in America.) There’s all these great characters and tidbits from the sinking too – J. Bruce Ismay getting absolutely walloped by Congress in the weeks to come, the Unsinkable Molly Brown, the musicians playing their last concert on the deck, Guggenheim and other industrialists choosing the heroic but kinda silly-looking end in their smoking jackets, Capt. Smith going down with the ship, etc. etc.

Zombies are often about class and colonization as well. Or at least, the Modern Granddaddy of Zombies, George Romero, has gone that way a good deal, especially in latter day stuff like “Land of the Dead”. There’s always more have-nots than haves, and they are hungry. They will storm your moated enclave once they realize you are in it. Their appetites may be unnatural, but, hey, that’s consumerist culture for you. Add in the fact that ships are cramped floating disease-breeders, and you have a built in reason why the zombie outbreak was contained – they’re all that the bottom of the sea – Titanic and Zombies seems like a really good idea.

…which is all stuff I thought when I checked this out of the library last week, and is a good example of me letting my usual over-thinking set up unrealistic expectations for the pulp crap I read. Jesus H. Christ, Ceridwen, you are reading a book about zombies on the motherfucking Titanic. Chill the fuck out with your socio-metaphorical jibber-jabber. God. Suffice it to say, all the garbage I went on about about the metaphorics of zombies and the sinking of the Titanic was either non-existent or so lightly touched as to be just an artifact of the memeplexes of those things, and not, like, deliberate. Which is totally fine, and I’m not going to throw a big tantrum about not getting the things I unreasonably want.

A somewhat mad scientist type, a one Dr Weiss is sent to Manchuria to deal with an outbreak of plague that has a new alarming strain. In an ethically problematic move, he collects the Toxin from the brain of an infected shaman woman, at which point he figures out that the German (?) government wants to use that Toxin as bioweapon against the Russians (?). I don’t really know, and I admit my history is spotty. There’s a big chase involving an Agent who is maybe a Russian Jew working for the Germans or something – seriously, I just wasn’t paying that close of attention. He ends up on the Titanic running to America to set up a new mad science lair and find a cure for the plague. The Agent steals the Toxin, and then predictable zombification of the lower decks ensues. There is also a gender-switching moppet who is best not spoken of. Moppets, man, I hates them.

At which point the story becomes somewhat first person shooter, with Weiss, moppet, Capt Smith, and various redshirts leveling up through the decks of the ship. The secret history is a little stupid, in that it’s like, oh, but Ismay was still a skin-saving knob, but now it’s because of zombies and not just the regular imminent death he faced. Smith was giving confusing orders because he’d just battled his way through Deck Z for 24 hours, and was more concerned with keeping the zeds off the life-rafts than whatever other reasons he was being confusing. The zombie fighting stuff was passable, but not particularly interesting. At one point there’s a huge fan they have to stop and then crawl through, restarting it so that the zombies would all get chopped up, which seems like a great idea, but reads real flat. Plus, I just started laughing remembering the bit from Galaxy Quest about the stupid spinning fan that was in every episode.

My ears perked up when Weiss started droning on about plague, which I eventually figured out he meant Black Plague, and I have a somewhat unhealthy obsession with the Black Death. It ended up being one of those things that was annoying to me because I know too much about it, which I think is generally the death of this kind of fun. But, the incubation period! But, the survival rates! But, Jesus Christ, you are still reading a book about zombies on the Titanic; cut that out. My knowledge of the Titanic disaster is completely pop cultural, but I imagine to the knowledgeable, this would be annoying as hell. Like, I seriously googled if Captain Smith was ever in Afghanistan where he learned to be a swordmaster, and I’m thinking not. Shrug. I don’t care, but others may.

Oh, and one zombie nit-pick. For whatever reason – and I have my pet theories, believe me – zombies are almost never called zombies in zombie fiction. Walkers, biters, skels, zed-heads, Zack, the infected, ragers, phone-crazies, etc. Given that the term zombie, referring to the contagious undead and NOT a semi-golem in the thrall of a sorcerer, pretty much originates with Romero in 1969, everyone jumping to call these plague victims zombies is a little bullshit. I feel like vampyr would be a more historical appropriate term, because in the early part of the 20th century, vamps were still the yucky contagious undead and not romance heroes yet. And because Weiss is (probably) German. The zombie was still an individual monster.

Motherfucking TITANIC with ZOMBIES, Ceridwen. Shut your face.

So there.

Attachments: Chick-Lit for Nerds

The epistolary novel has been dead on arrival for a long time, maybe since even back in the day, but then my memory of anything by Samuel Richardson, force-read in intro classes in college, is hazy as hell. Even Austen, 200 years ago, rewrote “First Impressions”, an epistolary novel, into what would become Pride and Prejudice, and bless her heart for that. (Especially because I just recently read Austen’s Lady Susan, which was never re-written, and I could feel how the novel suffered from its epistolary format.) As a novel style, letter-writing hung on in Gothic longer, though I couldn’t exactly say why. Frankenstein, Dracula, and if my Internet search is to be believed, House of Leavesand The Historian are all epistolary, and slightly cheesy for it. It’s a weird way to have characters interact, maybe not a hundred years ago, but certainly now, and even a hundred years ago, letter-writing stories stripped out the narrator, who is the ace up the sleeve of any writer. Maybe. Don’t hold me to that statement.

Which is why it is fairly astonishing to find an epistolary novel written in this century (hell, even the last century) which works. Beth and Jennifer are both employees at a Midwestern newspaper, and friends; Lincoln is the man tasked with reading the emails flagged by whatever metric flags inter-office correspondence. In rom-com style, Lincoln reads the emails between these women, and becomes more and more smitten with the unmarried-but-attached Beth, while trying to cope with his life as it is: living with mom, hanging with his D&D crowd, being paid to be a voyeur. This is set right at the millennium shift, because even a decade later (now), such a scenario is unlikely. We all know what exact crap the work overlords are flagging or blocking, and get around such things using smartphones or off-work email. But I knew a sys-admin back in the day who had to read through a whole horrible romance with one of the company employees and a – for lack of a better phrase here – corporate spy from another company who was obviously using her for her corporate knowledge. My friend was so horrified and grossed out by reading this correspondence, which was both intimate and, knowing what he did about the other dude, totally Browning-esque in its damaged narrators. Which is a weird thing to say about real life, but art and life, etc.

Anyway, point being, I pretty much loved the ways Beth and Jennifer interacted in their little illicit emails. They are snappy are funny, maybe even snappier and funnier than is likely, but then I know and correspond with a lot of funny folk, so it really isn’t a stretch except for in narrative unity stylins, which is more than ok for me in a novel. Lincoln’s sections are not in epistolary form, which is good, and I generally appreciated the ways the other characters were, um, characterized. Like you do. He’s got this absolutely foul-mouthed friend who ends up being a rigid traditionalist in some ways, and I totally know that guy. I know the attachment parenting friend who plays D&D with the guys. I know a lot of these people. It’s possible I even am some of these people, but, like, less quick to the quip. That I feel that way at all is fantastic, given that I usually want to strangle rom-com people until their tongues loll out.

Which is probably the thing: this sort of careful, almost deliberately casual, snappy Gen-X rom-com is only going to work for certain types of folk. I mean, duh, any book at all out there is going to have its readership and not another – that’s presumably why we’re out here at all chattering about the books we read, trying to marry a book with its best audience – but I felt that decidedly here. While I know that this term is trouble, and I don’t want to get into a big fight about it, I feel like this is chick-lit for nerds, and as a nerd who has read the occasional chick-lit, hoorah. I’m too lazy to check if Bridget Jones’s Diarycounts as a epistolary novel – diary-form being somewhat more solipsistic, blahity blah – but Attachmentshit the same part of my brain that enjoyed that, in that it’s girly and fluffy while being smart and lightly allusive, and I appreciate the heck out of that.

I’m not going to say it’s perfect – the crisis and denouement are rushed and somewhat unbelievable, not crediting the real ethical problems of voyeuristic email-reading like maybe you should – but whatever. I’m still back on jazzed as hell that a novel that falls into the dreaded category of women’s fiction doesn’t fail the Bechdel test, and doesn’t fail it hard. Love is great and all, but I’m so happy to find female friends who talk in the way female friends do about all everything and whatever. If you’re in the likely readership for this book, you know what I mean.

Maus: My (Grand)father Bleeds History

Grandpa and I are standing by the wooden fence that holds my cousin’s horses. They aren’t skittish, but they stand just out of reach and flick their ears with watchfulness and flies. It’s full summer in Wisconsin, all grass and the scritch-scritch of insects in the grass. We talk about my cousin and her riding, about horses. I’ve always played city mouse to my country cousins, which is slightly fraught because my Grandpa is a man who has definite ideas about right living which center on small town life. He is second generation Danish from a small town in Iowa, and while he is fiercely progressive in much of his life philosophy, he retains a certain near-stoic near-asceticism which doesn’t mesh with my nuclear family’s outlook. I knew, even as a child, not to talk about certain things certain ways with Grandpa, how he would…maybe not misunderstand, but certainly not respect our city life. And our city life is the detached single-family suburban sprawl of Minneapolis, so city is certainly relative.

I’m not sure how we start talking about this, but we get onto the subject of SSRIs – drugs like Prozac which affect brain chemistry, which were, even when this conversation occurred, being prescribed like candy. Grandpa was a doctor in the Navy during the War, and then attached to the nascent Marines, the raiders who would go out on lethal missions onto the scads of tiny islands between Australia and Japan. He doctored for both battles of Guam and Guadalcanal, in addition to an unremembered number of conflicts spraying out into the Pacific Rim. He never much talked about the War, least not to me anyway, but I was a child and there was no place for those stories. We knew there was something wrong when the stories started, stories that had always been stoppered, for better or for worse, by my Grandma’s almost harsh pragmatism. My Grandma runs family mythology like knitting, the way she knits anyway, the quickness of her hands in sharp contrast with how bent and gnarled they are by long-term arthritis. “Chris,” she would say when he started in a vein she didn’t approve of, and then quick deflections into topics more tractable. When he could or did ignore her machinations, which are at Sun Tzu levels of mastery, it was an indication of a deeper wrongness. Senior dementia was in the process of erasing him year by year until he was somewhere near six in the year his mother died, at the piano she taught him to play before she left him. It stops my heart still to think of how much pain he still carried from her loss, ninety years later on the eve of his passing.

Here, I knew that the process was beginning, but not where it would take him. Next to the wooden stile that penned my cousin’s horses, we’re talking about Prozac, and about medicine and psychology and all of that. He’s been retired for a long time, over a decade, maybe more like two. I know he worked for years at a low income clinic after his retirement. Eventually he had to let his medical licence lapse because there is so much need out there that he kept getting sucked into the brutal hours of doctoring he had enjoyed his entire working life. I run the line about how pharmaceutics are not candy, and SSRIs are being used to treat grief like grief is unnatural. He agrees, in the sense that his view of psychology has always been based on will. He is a man of his generation, and getting over it is as getting over it does, and they did. Unless they didn’t.

I sure wish we had had something like that during the War though.

I was getting ready to ship out again. I had already done a tour in the South Pacific. The ship was in the process of filling up with soldiers, many of whom had not seen action, who were just out of basic training with their squeaky boots. But there were a number of soldiers who had seen combat, piling back onto a ship that would bring them back to that. One man snapped. He was in full gear, with a 70 lb bag on his back. He saluted – ten hut! (Here Grandpa snaps a salute.) And then walked off the edge of the ship into the water. Soldiers scrambled, throwing off their own gear and diving in to water to fish him out. He was screaming uncontrollably. They hauled him off to the brig because that was the only place they could contain his breakdown. His screams reverberated through the metal bones of the ship until someone knocked him out with phenobarbital, but he’d just start screaming again when he came to. All those young men just out of basic listened to the ship they were boarding scream. We had no real way to treat the injuries in the mind.

This isn’t the voice of my Grandpa. This is me trying to remember him as hard as I can, but it keeps slipping, and I am too much me to recreate him. If you could see me, I could recreate with my body which has some of his genetic tendencies the way he laughed and held his hands and hunched, but it wouldn’t be exactly right, two generations and a gender displaced from him, all those years displaced from the War, the years from this conversation, the years from his death. So much is gone. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck – I had never heard anything like this from him. I have the vague sense that there was someone else there, maybe a younger cousin, but it might have been me simply blown out of myself with shock. We would hear more war stories as the years wore on. My sister and I would collect them and show them to each other. Did you hear the one about the shelling on the beach? About running the wrong way during a retreat and almost ending up on the wrong side of the line? “Hey doc,” the rear guard said, “Where’re you going?” I wish, in a way, I’d tried more diligently to collect them, but I know it was an impossibility. He became so frail, and there’s no way Grandma would allow that line of questioning, even if I’d thought it was a good idea.

Which is why Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds Historytowers as a narrative about familial and historical traumas, about the way we talk to our parents and grandparents about the fucked up shit they had to endure out there in the ugly mess of history. Art Spiegelman and I are not real similar people; our parents and grandparents did not have the same experiences; we are not from the same places. Spiegelman’s parents, Polish Jews, survived Auschwitz. Maus is the strange lapping recounting of that survival, his dad on a exercise bike or fighting with his second wife, Art fighting hard against his father’s disapproval and the memory of his mother’s suicide. The story keeps folding on itself, Art drawing panels which his father sees and then comments on, this secondary conversation through the oblique public performance that keeps collapsing the narratives, rendering it all into this wash of the meaningful and unmeaningful acts that make up our familiar conversations. It puts me on a wooden fence with my Grandpa who had begun his long, slow erasure of memory to his death, and beyond. It’s bananas.

It’s so fiercely honest, not just the history, but the ways Art and his dad fail to connect at times. I loved my Grandpa, of course, but sometimes he was a difficult and rigid man, and the ways Spiegelman captures the affection, respect, and complete irritation with our loved ones was perfect for me. My Father Bleeds History is uncompleted, the elder Spiegelmans just committed to Auschwitz, and Art and his father just beginning to talk more openly about the comic Art is creating. Of course I’m reading the second part the second I get my hands on it.

Warm Bodies: Romeo and Juliet Across the Grave

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion is a chatty little first person narrative, welcoming the reader into the dreamy emo head-thoughts of a zombie called R. In terms of monster stories, the zombie is your least psychological of the beasts, tending to stand in for more large target ideas like consumerism or colonialism. So running a zombie narrator who waxes all Kerouac about how living with a bunch of Dead people who do nothing but ride escalators (hat tip Dawn of the Dead!) and form these little phony families based on nothing but a bunch of phony phoniness is pretty funny. I’m so alooooone even when I’m with (dead) people! I speak, but it all comes out in grunts! Nobody understands how I feeeeeeel! On one of his forays out to find living food, R eats the brains of a young man called Perry, who was in love with a girl called Julie. R, through the memories embedded in Perry’s delicious brain, learns the value of insta-love, semi-abducts Julie back to his love nest, does some eye-gazing with Julie, and generally behaves like your usual stalkerish romantic hero. Awww.

On the one hand, this is seriously funny and awesome. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again – so much so that people who know me are rightly sick of it – but vampires are high-functioning zombies. Which is why I have a pretty serious gross-out going with all the hot single ladies in UF/PNR having sex with all those cold, sparkly corpses. A romance between a zombie and a human, in theory anyway, lays bare how gross corpse-lovin’ is. But! Quipping aside, I get that vampires are different monsters, in that they are able to complete sentences and sparkle, so when Julie falls right for Mr Decomposing R, whose dialog consists mainly of ellipses and body consists of gray flesh that doesn’t have an eight pack, I’m like, hahaha, good one.

However, here’s my problem: I’m getting too old for this shit. Because, absolutely, obviously, and totally, this is a version of Romeo and Juliet, and I am a bitter, wasted crank when it comes to R&J adaptions. I believe fully, in the recesses of my black heart, that Romeo and Juliet are nitwits who must die to prove the situation is serious. They are a couple of bobble-heads kept apart only by familial feuding, because otherwise they are perfectly matched to one another; they are not the Socs vs. the Greasers at freaking all. They are the same race, same class, from the same town; they have similar ninny friends with the same ninny interests. There’s no real reason they’re kept apart, like, for example, R(omeo) eating Paris’s Perry’s brains and the brains of everyone Julie(t) has ever loved, including her mother. Romeo and Juliet are hormone-addled dorks who maybe don’t deserve to die, but it sure is nice when it happens, everyone all single-tear about how maybe forbidding the fruit made it a billion more times sexy to idiots. Romeo and Juliet aren’t admirable or commendable; they simply follow their groins to the logical conclusion, which is live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse. Bongos, bongos, youth culture, etc. Because if they didn’t die, they would have sold out just like the rest of us assholes riding our phony elevators. Hey, nonny nonny.

Mr Marion does a commendable job trying to make the Living and the Dead the same kind of dead-at-heart automata – you’re not living, you’re just not-dying! – but I’m just not buying it. Especially because he never really owns R’s zombie nature. R is forgiven for ~~Paris’s~~ Perry’s brain-eating something like 50 times in the novel, as early as page 50-ish, and I’m like, what? R is looking a lot like a certain kind of vegetarian vampire I can think of – a high-functioning wanker who is handed all kinds of pussy just for crying over some Sinatra or whatever. Which, speaking of Edward Cullen (I was), when you get right down to it, Jacob would be a much better Juliet to his Romeo, in that they are both from feuding clans with similar magical powers, the same hierarchical families. Only the class difference is a thing, and maybe the race if you consider Jacob to be really Native American and not some kind of long extended hysterical imagining of Native America. Which I don’t, or do, depending on whether my tortured grammar here makes him anything but a war-bonnet on a German-American kid with killer abs. I’m reasonable sure there’s scads of instances of Edward/Jacob slash fiction which corrects this problem – though I refuse to google – but I just get a little big sigh when I see yet another Manic Pixie Dream Girl redeem some brain-eating douchebag because she’s had a little tragedy mixed with a little art school. Awww. Bongos bongos. Hey ninny ninny.

So, now that I’ve gone into full-on freak out mode, I would like to pull back from the ledge and note that I had a good time reading this. Even though I rolled my eyes a lot – the R&J thing is one thing, but the whole thing about how parents and culture is Square, Man, and They’re Keeping Us Down – the prose hurtles along in its first person way. The opening is stronger than the ending, for me anyway. I liked the whole wordless interchange and difficulty of communication of the zombie community, making their silent and decontextual way through the detritus of civilization. I pretty much live for that stuff in fiction. But later, blah, stop making out with corpses. But I’m an old, bony, mortgage-having square who would head-shoot the crap out of some animated corpse my daughter brought home. I’m not even going to apologize for that.

And this is just more of an observation, but this was the n-th zombie novel I’ve read that treated the nomenclature for zombies like racially charged terms: I can’t believe she called me a corpse! On one hand I get it – zombies do have their roots in slave-uprising panic narratives, after all – but on the other hand, reads real cheap when you’re dealing with sexy romantic hero zombies and their manic pixie dream ladies. I’m all oppressed and stuff! Of course you are. :::pat pat pat::: Oh, and the edition I read had British spelling, which confused me no end. I had to google to make sure I wasn’t insane, and this was located somewhere in the contiguous 48. It is.

So, fun little bit of brains and mayhem, but someone less bitter and cranky, with fewer readerly hang-ups, will probably like this more. Some of us have to work to pay the mortgage, you little shits, and it can’t be all eye-gazing and magical cures for zombiism.

I got my copy from NetGalley.

The Zombie Night Before Christmas

Sure, we all hate monster mash-ups of the classics at this point. We’ve gotten jaded since the idea of the monster/classic mash-up first arrived on the scene with Pride and Prejudice and Zombieswith its great cover, hilarious study guide, and boring and dumb everything else. Our opinion faltered when we were confronted by a long string of cash-ins, from sea monsters to robots, hastily and messily stitched into anything and everything in the worst, most mercenary way. Fuck you marketing assholes for teasing us so. These books have always and ever been impulse gift books, the kind of thing squealed about after unwrapping – thank you for knowing I give a shit about classics and/or monsters – and then read on the toilet and dumped at the used bookstore.

However, The Zombie Night Before Christmas is a cut above your usual monster/classic mash-up. For one, being a pretty short little poem, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. I cannot imagine wading through Anna Kareninaa second time just for android bits, and the concept of changing the roach into cats in The Metamorphosissends me into a rage. But whatever many lines of couplets which might have been plagiarized anyway? Sure. The art is good – really very cromulent – and my only complaint here is that there could be more of it. There are several pages where the slightly tweaked lines stand sadly alone, and a page or two more of the funny, bloody art would be cool.

But the neatest part? So many of these mash-ups are just a half-assed pun – Android Karenina, Jane Slayre– more concerned with an attractive title and cover than creating anything but the most sopping of bullshit within the covers. But, according to the flap, “H. Parker Kelley was a curious child who wanted to know how Santa was able to bring gifts to children for hundreds of years without aging or dying.” Right before Netflix went down for the entirety of Christmas – I see how all you assholes have the day off, and are on the Netflix hard – my husband and I searched for Xmas movies. Being Netflix, much of what was available on streaming was Finnish horror films about Krampus, who, if you did not grow up Scandinavian, is like evil Santa, the stick to Saint Nicolas’ carrot.

An immortal semi-deity who can see when you’ve been naughty and nice is a scary ass thing, when you get right down to it, a sort of God-lite moral agent. While Coca-Cola, Disney, and the entire American mercantile machine has defanged the Victorian Santa who had no qualms about shoving naughty children into sacks and leaving switches in stockings, his scary, home-invasion sensibility still remains under the treacle and sugar plums. Which is why this book kinda rules. It rules more because it was a gift from someone who knows my proclivites, which maybe isn’t hard given all the shatting about zombies I do on the Internets, but the wrapped gift of one’s obsessions is a joy in any season. But even more so on Christmas Eve, the paper stripped to reveal the perfect book at the perfect moment.

Thank you, Stephanie. You rule.

Revival: Speaking to My Soul

Oh dear. I adored this.

One’s obsessions are hard to sort for their influence in affection. Revivalcertainly plays to some of my obsessions: the undead, the bleak midwinter Midwestern locale, the Gothic/Noir sensibility that relies on understatement more than worn tropes. Like in Raising Stony Mayhall, these are heartland zombies, flyover zombies, more concerned with the strange (dis)function of small, isolated communities than screaming bloodbaths. This blood creeps instead of splatters. I fairly loved both Revivaland Mayhall, but another should-be slam-dunk for me, Ashes, with its Wisconsin winter and plucky teens, didn’t work at all for me. The play out of one’s personal obsessions doesn’t always run to something that sinks into the skin.

My mother and I once had a conversation about hometowns, about how people talk about them, and how we take those conversations personally. She’d had a conversation with someone who said some flip disparaging things about her hometown. They were true things to say, as far as observations from outsiders go, but to say those things to the local… maybe this was badly done. I’ve been careful since then about what I say to people about where they grew up. However, I love what I feel like are rightful depictions of the people I grew up with, the land and landscape, blahity blah, &c. Which is maybe why I never cottoned to Ashes: the opening was Wisconsin enough for me, but the whole cult-town thing felt like it was from central casting, one of those fictional places that could be anywhere (but you know, ultimately nowhere). Which is fine, and certainly not every book has to adhere to my sense of regionalism and placement. But good lord, when it happens, I flip the hell right right. When you speak to me from where I’m from, in the idiom of my location, I’m going to lose my shit.

The undead in Revivalaren’t biters, to steal terminology from Mayhall. One day, the day of revival – and I think only on that day – all of the dead in a small area around Wausau, Wisconsin get back up. It’s not a lot of people – 23 I think the authorities know about – but then there are the undead who aren’t known to be undead – at least the one who’s a main character anyway. There are also…other things. While the perspective is not overly tight on any one character, it’s got that situated near-locality that only glances at the larger picture. This is the locality of trauma, relayed in conversations and status updates in the days and weeks after the event.

It wasn’t so long ago that I watched horrified while a friend in Bryn Mawr, a neighborhood just on the edge of downtown here in Minneapolis, watched the bloody unfolding of the workplace shooting from split blinds, updating on facebook as it happened. It was awful, and it got worse last week with the school shooting in Connecticut. I stood in the snow waiting to get my kids that day – they the same ages as those gunned down – and the other mom whom I chatter with daily and I couldn’t meet each other’s eyes or we would lose it. “It feels like 9/11,” she said. Yeah, I thought, it does. I’m just as trapped miles from where it happened with my imagination running wild. All those classes letting out, their bodies whole and un-riddled with bullets.

Civic trauma is local, even when it happens a thousand miles away. The area around Wausau in this book is quarantined, for lack of a better word: CDC roadblocks set up, for fear that this revival might be contagious; local police working through the usual round of domestic disturbances and drunk drivers, while also trying to manage the suspicion of the motivations of the dead. One woman, an elderly revival, pulls her magically regrowing teeth out with a pliers because if she didn’t, her false teeth won’t fit. Shudder. Shudder, shudder. And shudder some more with how her story plays out. The time scale shifts and moves, not with strict linearity, but the bright hardness of events that matter. There’s the thin edge of how the larger world is sorting the local traumas, but it’s just a thin thought, a moment in the larger smallness of how life plays out, the cabin fever of trauma.

There are points when this civic/personal trauma is maybe cut too obviously in the book, like when the CDC doctor dude – a man whose parents are strict Muslims – notes the parallels between the suspicion for the revived with the suspicion for the Islamic – but it still worked. Especially given his half-out-loud conversation with a near-girlfriend back east, who can tell he’s started smoking again by the quality of his voice, the deepening of utterance in the wake of some fucked up shit. The way no one ever says straight out what they mean, or what is going on between them, this is the left-out communication of my people, my landscape. Mum recently joked about reading Main Street and wondering why no one ever said what they meant, but she’s not a Midwesterner like I have grown to be. Not-saying is the language I understand.

So, the only complaint I have about this story is that I want MOAR and I want it NOW. This is pretty much the perfect package of my Midwestern cold and avoidance made inevitable and bloody and strange. This is all my obsessions made manifest, their closed mouths saying as much as blood in the snow. Uff da.

The Wishing Cake: Adjusting Expectations

I am probably being overly generous with my starrage – three stars on Goodreads – as I adore what Ellen Meister has done with the Dorothy Parker page on facebook. Seems a weird thing to say (or do), but I follow a number of dead authors on social media. I follow some live ones too, but they tend to be overly chatty for my tastes, and the dead aren’t so much interested in getting you to buy their books. Some of the goodness of the Parker page has to do with Parker’s twitter-ready style; were she alive today, she would have burned up social media.

“Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common.”

“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”

“This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.”

“Ducking for apples — change one letter and it’s the story of my life.”

Indeed.

But Meister is to be credited with really fabulous curation of Parker’s jabs and epigrams, along with the occasional longer form bit. Writing such as:

I think I knew first what side I was on when I was about five years old, at which time nobody was safe from buffaloes. It was in a brownstone house in New York, and there was a blizzard, and my rich aunt—a horrible woman then and now—had come to visit. I remember going to the window and seeing the street with the men shovelling snow; their hands were purple on their shovels, and their feet were wrapped with burlap. And my aunt, looking over my shoulder, said, “Now isn’t it nice there’s this blizzard. All those men have work.” And I knew then that it was not nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them when it was fair.

Which I had never seen, while Parker’s more epigrammatic cut-downs are more ambient and recognizable. Apparently, Meister has written a novel inspired? influenced? by Parker called Farewell, Dorothy Parker, and in the run up to publication early next year, she offered this little story for free. I bit.

I still think I want to read the Parker novel, because the writing on a technical level was good, and I think given a subject she obviously knows a good deal about, Meister might actually say something in the novel. The Wishing Cakewas far too slight, with too many moving parts and not enough finish. (Ugh, what is that previous sentence about? You suck at the epigrammatic cut-down, Ceridwen.) In a vaguely It’s a Wonderful Life style scenario, a Brooklyn baker is given wishing powder. She wishes herself a man, and then poof! She’s a man. Some things ensue with her shitheel of a boss.

It’s far too easy to spoil the plot of a story this short, so I’m left being unable to complain about…certain things. The gender change is treated really bathetically, with a failed pissing scene rolling into beers with a dude that made me cringe for the characterization of dudes. The various asides about language use between the sexes weren’t bad, but overall the treatment seemed rom-comedy-esque. To phrase it poorly yet again; God. I didn’t get the deal with the older couple, or their fish/deity, and certain characters were set up too well as shitsnacks for me to believe the 26-page redemption. Altogether, I wish there were more story here, which is occasionally a good thing to want, but not so when the lacunae crater motivation and catharsis.

Really though, I suspect my problem might be one of being a genre reader in my little cranky, black heart. A gender change in a science fiction or spec fic story is going to be treated a certain way, maybe not always seriously, but with a sense to the larger ramifications. (Whether I agree with the larger ramifications is entirely a separate issue, of course.) In pop fiction, you end up with more nut shots and worn observations about the genders, with a little gay-panic romance thrown in for fun. You know, like Just One of the Guysor Mrs. Doubtfire or Tootsie. Which, blah. I pretty much hate that shit forever. But! I get that this is mostly my feminist hang-ups talking, and cheesy topicality seems to play for people who are not crank nerd feminists. Well, I seem to have found my epigrammatic bitch-face after all.

So, anyway, I will adjust my expectations of Farewell, Dorothy Parkeraccordingly, which is probably a good effect of reading this story. I will continue to love Meister’s work on the Dorothy Parker page, because she’s very good there. I find the ability or failure of writers to work within various media pretty interesting – I like John Scalzi a ton more as a blogger than a novelist, but I pretty much want to murder his Twitter feed – and Meister might be more like Parker – memorable in the shortest form, and forgettable at the long. Which is again a bitchy thing to say, and I’m sorry. I might be a bang-up review writer and a failure at every other thing I set to paper, so at least there’s that.

Cadaver: A Bittersweet Love Story

This may sound meaner than I intend, but the macabre sweetness of Cadaver: A Bittersweet Love Storyby Jonah Ansell made me like it despite the egregious poetry. For example lines such as:

LET IT GO!
Bequeath to me
The organ that was meant for she

Should be strangled with piano wire. I get you’re going for the rhyme word there, what with the she, and I know that English is a rhyme-poor language and all that noise, but it’s her. The organ that was meant for her. Don’t sacrifice grammar for the rhyme, or you sacrifice sense for artifice. That is a direct object, and while we don’t do a lot of case-changes in English, we do them with personal pronouns, and…I’m sorry. I get that my head is coming to a point here, and that this sort of thing will not bother many people. I am, as the kids say, just saying. (I don’t even know if kids say that anymore. Off my lawn.)

So, now that I’ve begun by flipping out about prosody and grammar, here is why I still liked this odd little book. First, this story was written for a brother for his sister on her first day in med school dissecting cadavers. That’s adorable, and also creepy. I love eavesdropping art – or maybe I just love the idea of it – art that was created by this one person for this other person, and then somehow, it ends up out in the world, and we get to pretend we know something about the artist and the audience of one. It might be that all or most art is eavesdropping art, everyone writing to that audience they imagine, which doesn’t, ultimately, include me but in the abstract, and I listen in behind my book. I like that idea. I like that I thought that while reading this.

The sister-character with her too-large square glasses and fearful little face cuts open the chest of her first cadaver. (Random aside: while I was taking Russian, I learned there are classes of nouns that are animate, and ones that are inanimate; this only become important when conjugating certain nouns or something? Living things are, obviously, animate. But there are – at least – two words for dead body in Russian, one of which is animate, and one that is inanimate. (Sub-aside: we were reading that Akhmatova poem about the true love who washes up on the beach of the Black Sea, which is why we were talking about this at all. His dead body was the animate kind of corpse, but not, like, in a zombie way.) Point being, we had this long conversation about what the English equivalent would be, and corpse we decided was the animate, andcarrion the inanimate. Cadaver, now that was a trickier case. Obviously inanimate, on one level, used at is almost always in medical or scientific contexts to strip the body and its attendant death of personality. But on another level, there’s this sense of industry and learning in this term, the vessel for occult and revealed knowledge or something.)

Once the sister-character pulls out the cadaver’s heart, he gets up off the table – but not, like, in a zombie way – and begs to road-trip to see his wife one last time. The road trip with cadaver parts were my favorite, him in his ass-showing medical smock, her at the wheel of a big American convertible. The prosody even tightened up long enough for me to stop hating it every second of my life, and there’s a quatrain or two I thought were honestly funny. Then he meets his wife and…well, the rest here is spoilers.

comic panel showing an old man and a child in a car, the child is driving. They both look very excited

The price of admission was probably paid by a link at the end of the book that took me to the short film version of this story, along with a password. The cadaver is voiced by Christopher Lloyd, for chrissakes! One point twenty one gigawatts! The doggerel sounds better coming from voice actors and not my internal Minnesota accent, and some of the switch-backs and reveals work better in moving pictures than still. I suspect the film came first, putting this book in the same category as The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, where the book is more of an artifact of a film than a full-blown work. (Not that I have a problem with that. It is, as the kids say, what it is. Get off my lawn.) Interestingly, or maybe only interesting to me, but I can think of many more books made into film than the other way around, stuff like Lost Thing by Shaun Tan. I pretty much want to eat everything that man does with a spoon, though. But not, like, in a zombie way.

Just kidding. Totally in a zombie way.

I received my copy from netgalley.com.

Exit Kingdom by Alden Bell

Even though I knew full well that a sequel to The Reapers Are the Angels was bound and determined to disappoint a mite, I freaked out anyway and ordered a copy from England. America, why you no publish Exit Kingdom? I fairly loved Reapers, with its blurry genre lines and metaphysical America, a long toothpick poling the detritus in our bloody civic teeth. I can see why some readers wouldn’t cotton to it: the heavy allusiveness and almost overt symbolism, the dialect, the stripped punctuation, the zombies. But I loved Temple. I loved her fierce orphan pragmatism, a child of the apocalypse more easy with wastelands and the dead than nail-bitten civilization and the living. She was all squinting prairie hardness and kudzu tenacity.

Exit Kingdomis less sequel and more companion novel, a recounting by Moses Todd five years after the events in Reapers of five years before the same. Moses Todd may have been an anchor to the events of Reapers, but he was not the center, and his centrality here is uneasy and reactive. There’s another girl, the Vestal Amata, whose central mystery did not resonate with me, whose femininity and changeability seemed the kind of thing a man would understand about a woman’s nature, but no woman would ever feel inside herself, about herself. That’s fine, on some level: this is a man’s story of a woman, and not her own. People are told in many ways.

Moses and Abraham Todd are moving aimlessly through the American wasteland. Abraham isn’t right, a predatory monster, and Moses with his unspoken code plays brother’s keeper. They are given charge of a woman, the Vestal Amata, who has a strange thrall on the unquiet dead. The dead are blind to her and her movements. Though there is no section like the hillfolk sequence in Reapers that I actively disliked, the conflicts and personalities here felt more forced throughout, more schematic. The landscape, and especially the dead themselves, that I found even more strong than in the previous novel: Moses’s hands on the bellies of airplanes in a rusting hangar; the eyes of a dead man slowly blinking under ice; the dry bones trying to stand in the desert aridity.

So, if you enjoyed The Reapers Are the Angels, you will likely enjoy this, but in a worn way, in a way that tries to recapture a dream slipped out like a fish. Now that I write that, I remember with a painful clarity the nightmares I had from this book last night – a nightmare far out of scale from the near placid and resigned tone of this book. There were children – a school room – and so much blood from biting as the infection spread from child to child. Today’s events in Connecticut – I cannot stop crying. I dream nightmares that come true. Oh, America, I fear and grieve for you so much. Moses Todd does too, and that part we can agree on.

Review: The Road Goes Ever On in a Slightly Depressing Manner

I’m not sure there’s much I can say about The Road by Cormac McCarthy that hasn’t already been said, given that I’m the last person on earth to finally read this book. (Thankfully, I’m not the last person on earth.) I gave it a try two years ago, but got something like 10 pages in before I flipped out. I was still nursing a babe at the time, and the ash, the dread, the Child made me physically hurt. I am not being metaphorical. I’m alternately gobsmacked by and resentful of how masterfully McCarthy played this one: gobsmacked because lord, this man can write and resentful because I don’t like being played.

This reads like an inverted landscape picture. You know, the kind of film that is about sweeping aerial shots and slowly panning vistas, the ones where the human drama plays out in grand tension with the callous beauty of Nature and her almost casual marriage to that old Greek grumpus, Fate? Brokeback Mountain is a landscape picture, and it has a similar claustrophobic sense despite the unpeopled grandiosity of the titular mountain. Here we don’t have all the bleating savagery of nature as our landscape, but its opposite: a gray sun, everything still and inexplicably dead but not fecund in rottenness, even the microbes that inevitably break us down gone still and cold. The night that the man and his boy spend in a wood that succumbs to its fragility and falls down, crashing almost without an echo; the years-old apples hidden in the straw-like grass, still edible; the soft slosh of an iodine-scented sea stripped of its sea-like glory: these visions I found incredibly, page-turningly effective.

While I admit that much of this feels intentional, I found the relationship between the father and son seriously problematic. Maybe this is my own hang-up. I bitch not about the stripped down punctuation and the almost childish and-then-and-then of the description; this was something akin to poetry. However, the simplicity of the world-view espoused by the father: the bad guys and good guys, this rankled a bit. I find it…improbable that a boy raised in this kind of environment would be so trusting, so willing to part with precious resources. Something about the scene from the past where the clocks all stop at 1:27 and the man begins to fill the bath with water, not because he needs a bath, but because he knows, instinctively, that this is the end of the world makes me wonder. The way his wife spits out her tiredness with living, vanishing into the ash almost without comment, is this all in his mind? Is this world a sick vision he’s foisted upon his son? Does that make this vision better or worse?

A million years ago, when I went to Sunday school and read the bible, I was always puzzled by Cain’s going out into the world after the murder of his brother, his mark a brand to let others know of his crime. Where do these other people come from? Whither Seth’s wife? There’s something of that here. Cain and Abel’s story is the first landscape picture, the first small, intense family drama to play out in an empty world. For them, the emptiness was the glory of unrealized potential, potential rendered ironic by the pettiness of human suffering. Cain’s story ends in shame, the mark of God’s forgiveness doubling as hopelessness.

This zippers that story backwards and inside out: the world has gone hopeless, useless, the end of it all and not the beginning, but with a human love and potential that renders the landscape ironic. The child’s last prayers to God the Father, I’m not sure what to think about this. Is this hackneyed or brilliant? There’s a lot of fictions that I wished ended 20 minutes before they did, before the problematic epilogue or whatnot: “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, Crime and Punishment, etc. With this, I’m not sure about where my squeamishness is coming from. Do I expect and find comfort in harder lessons, even while the hardness presses indentations in my psyche? Do I hope for hopelessness? Maybe. Depictions of the end of the world are funny things, personal, societal, drawing out our quiet, familial, almost religious expectations of the people around us and writing them large and burning. The Road draws this story in ash, and while I wish this affected me more, it didn’t, even while I bow to McCarthy’s considerable skill.