A Definitive Ranking of the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin

Note: I wrote this for the B&N SciFi & Fantasy blog in 2018 and it was one of my favorite pieces I wrote for them. They’ve inexplicably taken it down, so I’m putting it back up.

I’ve long referred to Ursula K. Le Guin my literary grandmother, a polestar of my understanding of fiction, fantasy, and the world itself. When I learned of her death earlier this year, I sat down and cried. Even though she passed at the respectable age of 88, I cried long, wracking tears. She is the writer I found at that specific age when I wasn’t so young that I barnacled and burnished her fiction with the obscuring mist of nostalgia, nor was I too weary and worldly to be above young adult books like A Wizard of Earthsea. Indeed, her work has kept me from succumbing to the fallacy that I will ever be too important to read books about that terrifying time between childhood and the adult world.

If you have read an Ursula K. Le Guin novel, likely it is A Wizard of Earthsea, or perhaps The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. But she wrote so many more books than those. She wasn’t as prolific as some science fiction and fantasy authors, but she filled a career of five decades with remarkable works that will long outlive her. Though weighing one book against another is always a personal process—and so many of Le Guin’s books are so, so personal to me—still I have endeavored below to place them in an order that makes a kind of emotional sense. It does to me, anyway. Hopefully to you too. Regardless, Le Guin’s body of work is a well that will sustain you, if you only drink from it. So drink. Drink long, and drink deep.

And so, from merely worthwhile to the most essential: a ranking of the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else
This slender young adult novel, written in 1976, doesn’t have anything wrong with it exactly, but it sure hasn’t aged well in the intervening 40-odd years. Owen Griffiths is a misunderstood teen—too smart, too weird, too short. He’s made peace with his differences, much to the chagrin and disappointment of his crushingly normal parents, and is working doggedly toward attending either Cal Tech or MIT. He’s going to get out of this town, this life, this normalcy. But he’s still a teenage boy, and when he strikes up a friendship, and then something more than friendship with his neighbor, Natalie Fields, he’s got to deal with the both completely usual and totally disordering effects of young love. Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is a very sweet novel, with some bright patches of keen observation. Unfortunately, it feels so dated now as to read like a period piece, something like the (pun so intended) menstrual belts in Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret? but without the more relatable aspects of that novel.

Rocannon’s World
I have a fair amount of affection for this, Le Guin’s first published novel, but even I can admit it’s a mess. It was written as a postscript to the short story, “Semley’s Necklace,” which detailed and dispatched a fairly simple SFnal scenario involving both first contact and the time dilation effects of interstellar travel. After the events of “Semley’s Necklace,” the Hainish ethnologist Rocannon returns to her planet, and meets no less than four sentient species in his quest. There are flying mounts who must look like lions with wings, bestial creatures who look like angels, people who live underground like trolls, medieval-ish societies, and so, so much more packed into this short novel. Like I said, a mess. But it’s here Le Guin coined the term ansible—a device capable of instantaneous communication across the galactic void—and introduced us to the Hainish, the far-ranging culture we encounter in many of her novels. The ansible will become the lynch pin in her Hainish books, one of her broadest and most important canvasses.

City of Illusions
Another early Hainish novel, City of Illusions is the third published in that series. Its main character is a descendant of the people of Planet of Exile, but generations hence, on an Earth (or Terra, if you will) taken over and controlled by an alien protagonist called the Shing. Falk wakes up with no memories in a small, rural community of occupied Terra. Through his questing, his memories of his other self, Agad Ramarren, are recovered, and his Falk-self subsumed, until both can come to an equilibrium. Like Rocannon’s World, City of Illusions is pretty messy, with philosophy of the mind wrestling with the precepts of Taoism in a classic dystopia. The Lathe of Heaven ended up exploring these themes much more adroitly. That said, the descriptions of an earth re-growing after an apocalypse in a distant past are beautiful in their strange way, a post-apocalyptic pastoral.

The Beginning Place
The Beginning Place is another early oddment, about two young people somewhere in that liminal period between childhood and adulthood. Irene Pannis and Hugh Rogers both have small, mean lives in an unnamed American city. Both begin escaping to idyllic Tembreabrezi, a Narnian fantasy land. Irene has been coming to Tembreabrezi long enough to learn the language and culture, and initially views Hugh as an interloper. When a sickness of fear strikes the simple folk of this other land, Hugh and Irene set out together on an old-fashioned quest to kill the beast, which stands in harsh contrast with the intractable problems of their real lives; if only rent could be slain like a dragon. Sometimes people read escapist fiction because they have something to escape from. Le Guin twists escapism and realism in The Beginning Place, which is an uncomfortable thing to do.

Planet of Exile
During my research, I learned that Planet of Exile was often published together in something called the tête-bêche format with a Thomas A. Disch novel. (Now that’s something you know!) Planet of Exile follows Terran settlers on a planet called Werel. Werel has an orbital period of 60 Earth years, which means its winter lasts something like 15 of our years. (George Martin, eat your heart out.) We’re introduced to our Terran colonists at the beginning of this long winter, as they try semi-successfully to integrate into the indigenous population. While both the Werelians and Terrans appear to be descendants of Hainish settlers, there’s been too much genetic deviation, and the two populations can’t intermingle successfully. Planet of Exile both critiques and props up the anthropological model of contact with indigenous people. Because of Le Guin’s upbringing as the child of famous anthropologists, this is a concern that resonates through much of her work.

The Telling
I feel like a jerk for listing so many of Le Guin’s Hainish novels in the bottom dozen of this list, but the Hainish novels constitute a huge part of her catalog, so maybe it’s just statistics. Despite the tenuous threads linking one Hainish novel to another, most of them feel standalone, and Le Guin never did much fuss with strict continuity. That said, The Telling feels apart from the the other Hainish novels, off in an eddy. Sutty, an Anglo-Indian Ekumen observer, is sent to the planet of Aka. Aka’s indigenous cultural expression is called the Telling, which, like the Tao or Confucianism, is a practice more than a religion, a folklore more than a mythology, but nevertheless deeply ingrained. The autocracy of Aka has outlawed the Telling, and Sutty dodges her government minder while trying to immerse herself in this forbidden lore.

Voices
Voices is the second novel in The Annals of the Western Shore, one of Le Guin’s young adult series. The novel follows Memer, who lives in the city Ansul. Ansul is an occupied city, and Memer herself is a “siege brat,” the daughter of an Ald soldier who raped her mother early in the Ald’s conquest of the city. Like all of the Western Shore novels, Voices takes on very serious issues, especially for a book ostensibly aimed at the young adult. (But then Le Guin never viewed writing for the young as a lesser form of writing, or watered down writing for adults.) Le Guin does not vilify the occupying Ald, nor romanticize the people of Ansul overmuch; this is not a simple tale of overlords and resistance written in black and white. She deals quite seriously with the conflict between a monotheistic society and a polytheistic one, and the inequities of a society both broken and built by violence. Still, there is something arm’s length about Voices. I feel like it is better considered than felt, more structural than emotional. Certainly, a reader with other predilections might sort this novel higher, but for me, I feel like the other novels in the series strike a better balance between heart and head.

The Word for World Is Forest
The Word for World Is Forest is the closest thing to a polemic Le Guin ever wrote. Written at the height of the Vietnam War, it is set on forest world of Athshe, which has been colonized by the resource-hungry Terra. (Terra is Earth; this is another Hainish novel.) The indigenous people of Athshe have been enslaved to help the Terrans deforest their world. Athsheans practice something like lucid dreaming, but on a collective scale: they all dream together. When the Athshean Selver’s wife is raped and murdered by a colonial commander named Davidson, he wakes up, in a sense, learning to resist the Terran conquerors, sometimes by violence. He tells Davidson at one point that Davidson has given him the gift of murder. (When James Cameron’s Avatar was released, the comparisons with The Word for World is Forest were inescapable.) In this novel, Le Guin’s anger is very close to the surface: for the cruelty of colonization, the pillaging of the natural world, the treatment of people as resources.

The Eye of the Heron
The Eye of the Heron follows the conflict between two groups of Terran settlers on an otherwise unpeopled world. One group is the descendants of a penal colony, and the other the children of pacifist political dissenters. The pacifists, who are largely farmers, are planning on starting another farming community further inland. The other group, who see themselves as the oligarchical rulers of the planet, are unwilling to let people they see as subject go. The Eye of the Heron feels very shocking because (spoiler) halfway through, the pacifists’ hero figure is dead in the street, killed by oligarchs. Le Guin wrote later about this death:

“While I was writing The Eye of the Heron in 1977, the hero insisted on destroying himself before the middle of the book. “Hey,” I said, “you can’t do that, you’re the hero. Where’s my book?” I stopped writing. The book had a woman in it, but I didn’t know how to write about women. […] It taught me that I didn’t have to write like an honorary man anymore, that I could write like a woman, and feel liberated in doing so.”

Le Guin is rightly lauded as a feminist writer who wrote sensitively about gender, but her career started way back when; her early novels were written back before women were invented (to use Le Guin’s own comic phrasing on the matter). The Eye of the Heron is a turning point for her, opening up the narrative possibilities of writing about the concerns of women. It also touches on themes, like the practice of non-violence, that will come to full fruition in her most influential works, novels like The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Searoad
Searoad is one of three short story collections I’ve included in this ranking, as I believe they constitute a novel-in-stories: shorter narratives tied so tightly thematically or geographically (or both) that they read like a novel. Like Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, which is an early exemplar of this form, Searoad takes place in a single locale: the fictional seaside town of Klatsand, Oregon. The stories largely focus on the lives of women in this tourist economy, and involve multiple generations of the town’s citizens over decades. Though Le Guin is primarily known as an SFF writer, Searoad is one of many of her fictions that defy that label. My favorite story here is about the proprietor of a run-down motel who naps in the unoccupied rooms, sleeping away the time she always means to use improving the property. Her inadvertent eavesdropping on a young man sobbing out an unknown grief in an adjoining room completely slayed me. This may give you an indication of how melancholic and glancing these stories are, focused so keenly on the everyday, but dreaming larger.

Powers
Even though Powers was awarded the Nebula (which is, along with the Hugo, one of the two most prestigious SFF awards in the States) for best novel in 2009, I don’t think it’s the best of the three novels in The Annals of the Western Shore. (That was a weird year for the Nebula; despite the establishment of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult novels two years prior, two of the six nominated works for best novel were young adult novels: Powers, and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.) Powers follows Gavir, a young man and slave who is trained to be teacher and tutor to the noble family who owns him. His upbringing is quiet and insulated, almost bucolic; his owners are “the good kind” (never mind that there is no good kind of slaver). It is only after the brutal murder of one of his fellow slaves that he understands the true parameters of his inequity. He escapes to a hard wandering in the wilderness. Powers tackles necessary and vital themes, and Le Guin is as the height of her powers as a wordsmith.

The Farthest Shore
The Farthest Shore is the third in the original trilogy of Earthsea novels Le Guin wrote, one after the other, in the late ’60s and early ’70s. They are all set on an archipelago of islands in a vast, uncharted sea, in a place with magic, dragons, and wizards. Each novel at least touches on the life of Ged, who becomes the arch-mage of all of Earthsea, though he’s not always the protagonist. Earthsea is a place with a word-magic, where if you can speak the true name of a thing, you can influence that thing. At the beginning of The Farthest Shore, there’s a malaise on Earthsea: not only is magic faltering, but even non-magical crafts are suddenly forgotten, even by the most adept. The archmage Ged leaves his seat of power on Roke Island, and travels with a minor prince, Arren, who came to Roke first to plead for his people in these devastating times. Magic in Earthsea is dying because a sorcerer has sought to kill death and become immortal. This throws off the entire equilibrium of islands, one Ged and the boy who will be king must reestablish. The Farthest Shore is a beautiful and fitting conclusion of the original Earthsea trilogy. It is also so, so sad.

Lavinia
Lavinia is something of an oddity in Le Guin’s career. It can’t rightly be called fantasy or science fiction. It’s not one of her Orsinian Tales either, set in a central European country of her own devising, but nevertheless in a recognizable European history. Lavinia is fairy tale, of sorts, but grounded in the prosaic; a story of a simple life lived in the margins of epic poetry and the national founding myth. Lavinia is the story of Aeneas’ second wife, a princess of Latinum, with whom he was prophesied to start an empire. In Virgil’s Aeneid, she doesn’t utter a word. In that lacuna, Le Guin tells the story of a devout daughter of her homeland, married off to a warlord. But Lavinia’s marriage to the scarred Aeneas, hero of the Trojan war, is strangely soft and tender, and so much more sweet for its brevity. I’m not ashamed to admit I burst into tears at the end of this novel, though I couldn’t tell you rightly why. There’s a slip there, in the end, from the lived life to the mythic, and so much is both lost and gained in that transmutation. Lavinia is a strange novel, to be sure, with a sense of day to day life that’s often missing from myth, even while it stretches its dark wings and soars into the mythopoeic.

Malafrena
Malafrena is the only novel-length narrative in Le Guin’s Orsinian stories, which take place in an invented central European country over the last century and a half. (The name of the country, Orsinia, is something of a joke: Le Guin’s first name, Ursula, means bear, and Orsinia takes its name from the same word roots; it is Le Guin’s own country.) Malafrena follows Itale Sorde from his bucolic beginnings on the eponymous lake Malafrena, out into revolutionary politics of the capital, and then back again to his humble beginnings. “True journey is return,” she wrote in contemporaneous journals. When the Library of America sought to publish Le Guin’s works—a serious literary honor—they began with her Orsinian stories, at her behest. To me, Malafrena feels old school, like an expert ventriloquism of late 19th Century and early Modernist novels, from its concerns to its historical situation. It’s good, but it’s not good in the ways Le Guin is good when she’s writing in the worlds she creates herself. It’s funny that a country she named for herself doesn’t feel quite like it’s written in her voice.

Gifts
Gifts is the first of The Annals of the Western Shore. The novel follows two young people, Gry and Orrec, who live in an insular and somewhat backward region, the kind of place where grudges are nursed for generations against neighbors. The family groups in the area also have hereditary powers, which are exulted. Orrec is blindfolded at the fairly late adolescent discovery of his gift, forced to live without his sight, due to his father’s insistence that his wild gift of “unmaking” is simply too lethal to allow. That this wild gift coincidentally aligns with his father’s petty concerns that Orrec has dangerous gifts (or is known to have dangerous gifts) is well more important than Orrec’s sight. Gry is the daughter of a neighboring hold with which Orrec’s family is often violently feuding; her gifts involve a communication with animals, one she refuses to use for hunting, to the irritation of her people. Orrec and Gry come of age in a small, mean, vituperative community, and struggle to live with gifts that seem like anything but. Their relationship is tense and sweet, both difficult and easy, and their rough world is richly drawn.

Four Ways to Forgiveness
Four Ways to Forgiveness is written as four interlinking novellas that concern the planets of Werel and Yeowe. (The planet that is the setting for Planet of Exile and City of Illusion is also called Werel, but they are not the same place; Le Guin simply forgot she’d already used the name in novels written decades previous.) The largest government on Werel, Voe Deo, practices a form of chattel slavery, even into an industrial revolution where the slaves become known as “assets”, leased out to the factories. Voe Deo also uses its slave population to colonize the otherwise uninhabited planet of Yeowe. The stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness largely center on the period when Yeowe began its fight for independence (and the larger abolition of slavery) and the period directly after, when the people of both Werel and Yeowe have to learn how to live without slavery. Though there’s something hopeful about these narratives—they are “ways to forgiveness” in the end—these are uneasy stories about deeply traumatized people. It’s a way to forgiveness, but not the end.

The Other Wind
The Other Wind is the last of the Earthsea stories. The first three, written altogether in the late ’60s and early ’70s, share a certain narrative unity. Le Guin returned to Earthsea in the 1990s with Tehanu, which she called, at the time, the “last book of Earthsea.” As it turns out, Earthsea wasn’t done with her, and she wrote two more books in the world: Tales from Earthsea, a collection of short stories that deepens the lore of the history of magic, and The Other Wind. The Other Wind comes to terms with and explodes a number of fantasy conventions. A simple man named Alder, who is adept at mending, is visited by his late wife in dream. She seeks to tear down the wall between the living and the dead in his dreams, but in ways that seem to alter his living life. He seeks out the former archmage, Ged, who poured out his power in The Farthest Shore, and is now just a man, and Lebannen, who is now king. Like most of the Earthsea stories, The Other Wind is story of a journey, both on the water, and into the self.

Guardian review written at the time of its publication said it best: “Gradually, in a masterpiece of chilling narration, the whole living world becomes unable to sleep. And to fix that, the world has to become like our own, to become like our un-magical selves: to grow up.” The Other Wind is a strange, sad, melancholic narrative about childhood’s end, and the exhilarating possibilities of death’s revival. It’s a young adult novel that drops the young, which hurts an exhilarates as much as that always does.

Changing Planes
Changing Planes is another novel-in-stories, where a collection of shorter stories feels like a novel. Changing Planes feels especially novel-esque because it’s a frame narrative, where an introductory story is told to set the stage for other stories that exist somehow within that framing device. (A widely known frame narrative, one that many of us encountered in middle school, is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the folk on a pilgrimage in 14th C. England tell each other stories.) The frame in Changing Planes is based on a pun in the story “Sita Dulip’s Method.” Sita discovers that the boredom, discomfort, and low grade anxiety produced by the forced inactivity when you’re changing planes (or otherwise stuck in waiting rooms) can cause a person to change planes of reality. A myriad of other worlds open up to the casual traveler. Some of the stories about these other worlds are in the vein of ethnographic studies; others are deeper dives into lives lived. Every world Le Guin details in this collection could easily be a stage for an entire novel, or series of novels. Instead, she gives us this this almost casually masterful collection of thought experiments and cool ideas, a waiting room that opens to a larger world of imagination.

Always Coming Home
It’s generally true that when an author writes about their hometown, what they end up saying has a strange, hard to define depth. Though Le Guin is strongly associated, as a writer, with the Pacific Northwest—she made her home both fictionally and in reality in the temperate rainforests of Oregon—she’s a California girl, born and raised. (Fun fact: Le Guin and Philip K. Dick both graduated from Berkeley high school in 1947, though they never interacted.) The setting of Always Coming Home is a California peopled by the peaceable Kesh, who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.” The first half follows Stone Telling, a daughter of a Kesh mother and a father from the more rigid, expansionist Dayao. The second half is the field journal of an ethnographer called Pandora who describes the culture of the Kesh through poems, stories, recipes, site maps, and even music. (Some early editions included a cassette tape of this music in a box set.) As befits the strange future/past tense of the novel, this California feels like a post-apocalyptic pastoral, taking place generations past modernity in a place aware of such a thing, but not beholden to it; modern America is just another set of folk stories.

Many years ago I had a conversation with a fellow Ursine devotee, and he called Always Coming Home her most deeply felt work. I was surprised by that at the time; this is not a novel one sinks into. I have since come to understand what he meant, and wholeheartedly agree. The sense of retrospective—the way both halves of the novel turn back to consider a childhood (in Stone Telling’s narrative) and the larger cultural milieu (in Pandora’s notes)—feels like Le Guin considering her own childhood using the cultural tools she learned during that childhood. Her parents were both well-regarded anthropologists, and there are strong similarities between the Kesh and the Native American myths and history recorded by her parents. Her childhood, and its Northern California setting, therefore exist in a half-place, something like a mythic past that that nonetheless tells tales of contemporary America. It is considered at something closer than arm’s length, and further than memoir. Always Coming Home doesn’t hew to anything like a traditional narrative structure; it is more like the cultural detritus we all haul with us out of our home towns, laid out with the most careful hand.

Tehanu
The three original Earthsea novels are the kind of young adult stories at which fantasy literature excels, set in a pre-industrial place where people have all the trouble of growing up, without all the ornament of modern life to molder and grow dated as the fiction ages. Two decades later, Le Guin returned to Earthsea, and found it changed, as she had changed as a writer. Tehanu finds Tenar, the once child priestess from The Tombs of Atuan, now living a quiet life as a solitary grandmother on Gont, the childhood home of the archmage Ged. Tenar has taken in the child Therru, who was sexually assaulted and nearly burned to death by her father and the vagabond band she was born into. Therru is treated as bad luck and bad omen: the lore of Gont maintains that the damaged deserve their bad luck; that is how they came to be damaged. Worse, bad luck can be catching.

Tenar and Therru travel to see the wizard Ogion on his deathbed, and there intersect with Ged, once archmage, who has poured his power out to seal the breach between life and death in The Farthest Shore. Ged and Tenar renew their acquaintance, which was begun so, so long ago, and deepens to something more. Ged is deeply traumatized by the loss of his powers, and Tenar gives him room to grieve. All of the principle characters of Tehanu are hurt in some way, struggling to rebuild lives that have been burnt to ashes. The ending, where Tenar, Ged, and the child Therru must confront the violence that has so changed their lives, is exultant: a beautiful, burning awaking of Therru’s true nature. Tehanu doesn’t feel much like a young adult novel—it’s too grim, and too violent in places—but its earnest, heartfelt, and soaring portraiture of a burned child coming into her fiery power feels like a necessary tale for both the young and the old.

The Left Hand of Darkness
Published first in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness was a stunning novel at the time. Genly Ai, an envoy for a loose galactic confederation called the Ekumen, is sent to the icy planet of Gethen as something between an ambassador and an anthropologist. The people on Gethen are ambisexual: at their times of sexual fertility, their bodies shift to one sex or the other, but otherwise they have no fixed sex. They are unique in the known worlds in this way. Genly Ai’s primary relationship is with Estraven, the prime minister of the constitutional monarchy of Karhide, the country that Genly is embedded within. Interstellar travel and the concept of extra-Gethenian humans seem unbelievable to the Gethenians; Genly is seen as either a slightly mad curiosity or a dangerous disruption. Due to to Genly’s Terran ideas of masculinity, his distrust of Estraven’s mercurial sexuality, and his misunderstanding of the cultural practice of shifgrethor (which is something like a code of conduct more instinctual than codified), his sojourn in Karhide is near-disastrous. Estraven makes very real sacrifices for Genly in their halting, political, and personal relationship, one colored by both the conflict of empires and the simple mis/understanding of two people. Ultimately, the other envoys from the Ekumen kept in stasis above the planet are allowed to awaken and speak for the Ekumen’s goals.

In the intervening decades, aspects of The Left Hand of Darkness have become antiquated or essentialist—Le Guin herself first somewhat defensively justified her use of the default pronoun “he” for all Gethenians, but later acknowledged that “he” need not be the default. Overall, the ways the novel grounds itself in character study keeps it from being a period piece, read for its important contribution to SFF, and not because it’s a relatable novel. When the members of the Ekumenical team touch down on Gethen, their binary sexuality seems so remarkable to Genly, who has spend the whole novel struggling with Gethenian ambisexuality. Le Guin does such a good job of immersing you (and Genly) in fluid sexuality of the Gethenians that the intrusion, at the end, of people who embody a sexual binary seems truly strange.

The Dispossessed
Le Guin’s Hainish novels are all bound together by a specific technology (a plot device, if you will): the ansible, an invention that allows instantaneous communication across interstellar distance. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia tells the story of the ansible’s invention, by the physicist Shevek. The novel also, as its subtitle indicates, takes on the interactions of various political systems. The setting is the planet Urras and its colonized moon, Anarres. The people of Annares are anarcho-syndicalist dissenters from one of the countries of Urras, having colonized the moon two centuries previous. They are largely perceived as naive dreamers by the various political factions and countries of their planet of origin, which is belied by the incredibly harsh conditions on Anarres. You have to be tough to survive life on the colonized moon.

In chapters that shift back and forth in time, the novel follows Shevek through his childhood and education on Anarres. When he runs afoul of political dogma in his scientific work on Anarres, Shevek travels to a university on Urras to further his study. His experience of the traditionalist, capitalist society he encounters on Urras is tragicomic at times—there’s a depiction of a faculty party where Shevek is several leagues out of his depth which would not be out of place in a campus novel. Although the university on Urras allows him to complete his General Temporal Theory (which provides the theoretical framework for the invention of the ansible) the political structure and society of Urras is repellent to Shevek. The novel is a story in ironies and dialectics: the scientist who could only be produced by this society, but could only complete his life’s work in that. The interactions between the various countries, societies, factions, and parties of the populations on Urras and Anarres are a direct refutation of the skiffy trope of The Planet of Hats, where fictional worlds resolve to the most simplistic economies; I find it difficult to encapsulate all the political maneuvering in the story of Shevek’s great invention. But The Dispossessed is also the story of a single person. Like The Left Hand of Darkness, the focus on the personal grounds a novel of ideas into bedrock.

The Lathe of Heaven
The Lathe of Heaven tells the story of George Orr, a young man who is plagued by what he calls “effective dreams,” or dreams that change the nature of reality itself to conform to the dreamscape. George is the only one who is aware of these changes. He’s remanded to the psychiatrist and sleep researcher William Haber, due to his abuse of drugs to try to stave off the effective dreams. Haber begins tinkering with Orr’s effective dreams, trying to improve reality through his manipulations of Orr’s dreamscape. This results in escalating dystopias. When Haber pushes Orr to dream of a solution to world overpopulation, a plague kills billions. When he tries for a world without racial strife, everyone turns grey, and Orr’s social worker, friend, and sometimes paramour, Heather, who is biracial, ceases to exist. Like a series of wishes in folklore, each effective dream seeks to solve the problem of the last wish, but then creates another.

The Lathe of Heaven is a beautifully written novel, an almost perfect example of Le Guin’s compact and insightful prose. She never much went in for poetic prose or the extended metaphor —her observations tend to be grounded very closely in material culture. The Lathe of Heaven opens with the metaphor of a jellyfish: “Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.” This image pops up again and again, a metaphor for her conception of the Tao, for the tides of dream, for the eddies of history. (The name of the novel was taken from a line by Taoist writer Chuang Tzu, though, amusingly, Le Guin discovered later that this expression is a mistranslation.) The intensity of the relationships in The Lathe of Heaven—George and Haber and Heather in almost claustrophobic proximity, set against the changing canvass of history—and the beauty of the language Le Guin uses to tell their stories set this novel apart.

A Wizard of Earthsea / The Tombs of Atuan
I’m going to cheat and place both A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequel, The Tombs of Atuan, as Le Guin’s best. A Wizard of Earthsea is regularly (and rightly) called out as one of Le Guin’s most important and influential novels; less so The Tombs of Atuan. But I feel like, considered together, the two books form a vital dialectic, a duology that is greater than each individual novel. A Wizard of Earthsea tells the story of a boy’s growing up, an almost perfect iteration of the Western fantasy monomyth slash bildugsroman. This sort of story—one of a boy growing into a man—is a mainstay of fantasy literature (sometimes frustratingly so). Le Guin tells it so sharply, with such an important twist, that alone it would be her best.

“The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.”

So begins A Wizard of Earthsea, a slender young adult novel with a most common theme: a talented boy’s journey to becoming a great man. The talented boy in this telling is Sparrowhawk, born in obscurity on Gont, an island on a archipelago known for wizards and pirates and not much else. The magic of Earthsea is word-magic, a language of making and unmaking that can be learned by people, but is native to the dragons of the world. (Dragons can lie in this true language; humans can’t.) During his education on Roke Island, Sparrowhawk attempts forbidden magic (like many matriculating heroes, Sparrowhawk is something of an arrogant jerk) which backfires, conjuring a gebbeth, a shadow creature that is tied to Sparrowhawk. The archmage gives up his life to repel the shadow, and Sparrowhawk is scarred and grievously injured.

Nonetheless, Sparrowhawk, whose true name in the language of magic is Ged, eventually receives his wizard’s staff, takes a position as wizard on a neighboring island, and does battle (largely through language) with the dragons of Pendor. These are the events that will make him famous, the things he will be remembered for in song. But the shadow still haunts him, and Ged leaves his posting in order to either find or escape his shadow. At this point, the novel becomes a picaresque, traveling almost haphazardly through the waters and island of the archipelago of Earthsea. In the end, Ged and his dear friend Vetch sail clear off the map, onto shifting near-material sands, and he and his shadow name one another. Like the confrontation with the dragon, Ged’s final conflict with his shadow isn’t one of brute strength or some blinkered concept of “goodness,” but one of balance and equilibrium, of empathy and understanding. I name you; I know you.

Le Guin’s simple tale of matriculation stands out in its simplicity. She packs in a wizard’s mean upbringing, his boarding school days, his exhilarating successes and embarrassing failures, into a novel that never feels rushed, even while it tells a tightly constructed tale. And the twist: Le Guin reveals, after the getting-to-know-yous of Ged’s important life, that he has black skin. In fact, most of the people of the archipelago range from red-brown to blue-black. Early covers elide this important detail; even a miniseries produced in 2004 got it horribly wrong, much to Le Guin’s irritation. Maybe it doesn’t matter what the skin color of fantasy characters is, but if it really doesn’t matter, then why are they always white?

The Tombs of Atuan is set in the Kargish empire, where people indeed have white skin. Though part of the larger archipelago of Earthsea, the Kargs set themselves apart from the Hardic people (who are Ged’s people.) Where the rest of Earthsea hews to something like a Taoist appreciation of balance in magic, the Kargs are beholden to the Old Powers. Their society is based on a theocracy of squabbling god-kings. Tenar is taken as a young child to be a priestess of one of these Old Powers, in a cloister built on a labyrinth. She’s referred to as Arha, the Eaten One, and is raised in a suffocating convent peopled by women and eunuchs as a god-child (or goddess-child), the reincarnation of the previous Eaten One. Her experience is one of frustrating enclosure, hemmed in by the parameters of duty and expectation, in addition the the physical constraints of her isolated cloister; there’s literally nowhere to go.

She finds freedom, ironically, in exploring the undertomb, the underground labyrinth, a place only she, as Arha, may enter. It is there she finds Sparrowhawk, the archmage Ged, injured and diminished by the effects of the Old Powers. He’s come to retrieve (or steal) an artifact, but he’s failed and failing. Ged’s intrusion into Arha’s structured and bounded life is a shock; he puts everything about her life into question. They enact a series of conversations in the dark of the undertomb, conversations which feel dangerous to Arha.

While A Wizard of Earthsea gives us an almost comforting coming of age story, The Tombs of Atuan sails right off the map, giving us a monomyth scrambled by the vital and necessary aspects of race and gender. Ged is a surprise to Arha; The Tombs of Atuan is a surprise to the reader. A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan function as a dialectic, as call and response about gender and power, race and culture. They are beautiful, careful books that tell essential stories in Le Guin’s quick, clear prose, and are filled with the themes most vital to her storytelling. They are everything I love best about the writer I love best.

What is your favorite Ursula K. Le Guin novel?

Young Adult Anthology: Grim

I received my copy from NetGalley.com and Harlequin Teen. Thanks.

Because I might as well use my minor in folklore for something, I’ll begin my review of Grim, a collection of young adult short stories, with a little bit of pedantry about the fairy tale. Broadly speaking, there’s two kinds of fairy tale: the Märchen, which are orally transmitted folk tales with no specific origin and wide variation, and the literary fairy tales, which are written by a single person. Some of the distinction can be a little mushy, like with the large and glorious oral and literary history of the Arthurian legend, which has a lot of switch-backs and cross-pollination between literary and oral history.

Sometimes it’s less so, like when you’re dealing with the works of Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Perrault, or Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, who wrote The Snow Queen, Puss in Boots, and Beauty & The Beast, respectively (and among other things.) Though these stories use traditional folkloric motifs, they were written stories, often designed for court or salon readerships, like de Villeneuve, or children, like Andersen and Perrault. Andersen hat-tipped Dickens in The Little Match Girl, and was hat-tipped in turn by C.S. Lewis in the character of the Snow Queen in Narnia. (And this second has become her most famous incarnation. The Turkish Delight, I’m given to understand, was Lewis’s doing.) The tales are more part of a literary tradition than an oral one.

It really shows in something like Perrault’s Puss in Boots, which is a pretty classic clever servant story (like Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro which got him in such hot water). Certainly Perrault is using some clever cat folklores – which lends some dissonance when the the immoral Puss is used to prop the moral of industry and sticktoitiveness – but the boots, the gormless third son, the instructive tone are new, literary elements. The essential amorality of the folk motifs makes the whole thing kinda funny though, no matter how many admonishments of industry are included.

Our booted feline friend was part of some of the earliest editions of what eventually became Mother Goose, an editorial invention for publishing instructive tales for children in the growing middle class in England, set alongside other sanitized (and anglicized) Märchen. Amusingly, concern-trolling has been around since the invention of children’s literature. Observe (from the wikis):

The renowned illustrator of Dickens’ novels and stories, George Cruikshank, was shocked that parents would allow their children to read “Puss in Boots” and declared: “As it stood the tale was a succession of successful falsehoods—a clever lesson in lying!—a system of imposture rewarded with the greatest worldly advantages.”

Perrault shines a folk tale into something suitable for children, but certain things will not out.

Folk tales are often violent, sexual and political. The frog is transforms into a prince not because the princess kisses him, but because she throws him against the wall. Cinderella’s sisters cut their feet to fit the slipper, and are caught out because of dripping blood. Sleeping Beauty awakens from her slumber when she gives birth to twins, because the prince was charming enough to rape her while unconscious. So.many.people get their eyes pecked out by birds. Folk tales are often not about imparting morals, but about exploring sometimes gruesome economic, political, familial and sexual imbalances through the metaphorical. Folk tales aren’t didactic or instructive, in the strictest sense, while literary stories often are, especially when they are aimed at children.

And if it looks like I’m bagging oral folklore, I’m not. Folk tales like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, Lady Gregory (a firm friend of W.B. Yeats) or Andrew Lang (who was also a Homeric scholar) were, often, very much not for children, and can have unnerving elements of horror and the macabre. A lot of these cats had very specific 18th and 19th Century ideas about “the folk” as “noble savages” or specific nationalist agendas. (I’m looking at you, Yeats.) There’s fairly good evidence that even the Grimms, who prided themselves on their impartial collection and transmission, mucked about with the stories they were collecting for whatever purposes. The whole relationship between the oral and literary traditions is pretty complex stuff, well more complex that my opening paragraph implies.

Jesus, my head has really come to a point here. My purpose, if I can find it, was really to talk about the ways the fairy story has been used in oral and literary traditions, and it’s interesting to see these young adult iterations published by Harlequin Teen in the larger tradition of packaging some seriously wicked shit to impart morals to children. There are still a lot of plucky kids, though they seem to have shifted gender from the the lucky son to the Strong Female Protagonist. Love is the answer more often than I remember from Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books or Grimm’s Tales, where marriages often occurred between people just because girls are a prize for lucky boys. Several of the stories here push back at that notion. There’s also more revenge than I remember. Because so many of the oral folk tales are not terribly psychological – young Hans left one day to make his fortune, etc, with no real bother about his internal state – few historical folk tales have the requisite psyche to really pull a gotcha at the end. You can with a short story though; good.

Anyway, at this point I should probably get into the individual stories.

“The Key” by Rachel Hawkins. I liked the writing on this – the main character is one of those world-weary teens I find charming – but it’s not a story so much as a situation. I find this often with writers who are primarily novelists dabbling in the short story form. They write prologues to larger fictions, and then bite them off.

“Figment” by Jeri Smith-Ready. This was one where my general crank level was too high, because there’s really nothing wrong with the story, but it still grated me a little. The characters are drawn with a steady hand, and overall its cute and playful with just enough drama that it’s not too lightweight. I just didn’t like this specific treatment of Puss in Boots, mechanically speaking, because turning that immoral schemer into a plush toy that just wants to be loved just seems wrong.

“The Twelfth Girl” by Malinda Lo. Dark and class conscious take on the Twelve Dancing Princesses with a wonderfully pyrrhic ending. Very good.

“The Raven Princess” by Jon Skovron. The recounting of the Grimm version of the princess who was transformed into a raven and then won by a plucky young man hews close to the original, but does manage to provide a fresh angle and perspective. It felt a little message-y at points – and that’s how you behave like a good person! – but the story does have a kind heart.

“Thinner than Water” by Saundra Mitchell. Resounding props for taking on Donkeyskin or Catskin in a young adult short story. There are a whole bunch of related folk tales about kings attempting (or succeeding) in marrying their daughters and how the girls trick their way out, but the central horror of incest and sexual assault is serious shit. Mitchell’s story vividly relates the way the girl is isolated and made complicit in her abuse, and doesn’t flinch. Maybe you get out, but you probably won’t get out clean, and you’re not the only one.

“Before the Rose Bloomed: A Retelling of the Snow Queen” by Ellen Hopkins. Reeeally straightforward retelling which isn’t bad, but also doesn’t add anything. Felt plodding.

“Beast/Beast” by Tessa Gratton. Very claustrophobic take on the Beauty & the Beast story, with one of the more interesting beasts I’ve seen in while. He’s like a golem sewn out of all manner of animals and plants and…stuff. The writing is very good, and while I’m troubled by certain things, they’re mostly the sorts of things I’m always troubled by in Beauty & the Beast stories. I’m still turning over that ending; a good sign.

“The Brothers Piggett” by Julie Kagawa. Men are pigs! hahaha. But seriously, this had just a brutal snap to it, which surprised me from a retelling of the Three Little Pigs. No girl is a reward for a boy when he acts like a decent person, and he doesn’t get to act like an indecent person when she is not rewarded to him. Well played.

“Untethered” by Sonia Gensler. The Little Shroud, itself, is somewhat inert and stubby, so a story based on it suffers from that brevity. This slid perspectives in a cool way, but it felt a little stagy to me. Well drawn relationships though.

“Better” by Shaun David Hutchinson. The Pied Piper of Hamelin…in space! I kid, I kid. I’m a sucker for generation ships and clone golems though, and the scifi setting was just aces. A nasty little piece of work, and while I’m rooting for our heroes, I’m also terrified of them.

“Light It Up” by Kimberly Derting. This retelling of Hansel & Gretel felt like it didn’t do enough work updating the premise to the present day – it was too literal – but it was fine, I guess. But cannibalism is hilarious, no matter how you slice it. (Get it?? Hahaha, I kill me.)

“Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tongue” by Christine Johnson. Again, the fairy tale motif needed to be better updated, and I think the attempt at a reversal was botched a little, though it might just be my weariness with the idea that “sometimes a curse can be a blessing!” The central part about how some parents should not be honored because they’re terrible parents is totally legit though.

“Real Boy” by Claudia Gray. Robot love story! There was something very old school Asimov about this – the rules! – but it functioned as a self-contained world, which is a nice bit of parallelism. It almost would have been better if we didn’t see the reveal at the end.

“Skin Trade” by Myra McEntire. Yeah, I don’t know. I can see where this was going, I just think it didn’t get there. Plus it was just lurid. I like lurid, even lurid for its own ends, but this felt forced. And again, not enough thought went into the update.

“Beauty and the Chad” by Sarah Rees Brennan. I really appreciate the light-hearted anachronism and general goofing, I just think I’m too damn old for this story. The beast in this retelling is a frat-bro, and frat-bros are the very worst for me. I completely recognize this is my own hang up, and frat-bros notwithstanding, this story was cute and funny, the sentient furniture especially.

“The Pink” by Amanda Hocking. Another reeaaallly straightforward retelling with very little heat or danger. The names were way dumb too.

“Sell Out” by Jackson Pearce. The premise was updated well, and I think it had more friction than a lot of the more straightforward retellings, but it also just didn’t do it for me. Age, again, may be a factor, as I bristle about the term “sell out” used by children who have zero idea. I’d like to see the sequel when the hammer falls, kiddo, because fall it will. (Somebody top off mommy’s drink; she’s being a crank again.)

In sum, a perfectly cromulent little collection, with nothing that overwowed me – “Beast/Beast” and “Thinner Than Water” came close – but also very few straight up failures. I have a couple of these writers pinned as interesting, and I’ll be sure to scoop something up next it comes to my attention. There are also a couple who have now been solidly cemented as not to my taste. Though I’m loathe to pretend I can predict what a teenager might think of this, I imagine someone less old and cranky will cotton to some of these stories better than I. Good job, demographics.

 

 

The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic

I picked up David Merkner’s debut collection, The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic, solely on the basis of the title. “Hey,” I said to myself, “I’m a Scandamerican domestic!” I mean, whatever that’s supposed to mean, because, as far as I’m aware, Scandamerican isn’t a recognized word, and using domestic as a noun is a little off-label. Or you can use the term domestic as a noun, to mean a servant (domestic staff) or a fight between family members (a domestic dispute), but it rings weird in the title, like a stutter or something bitten off. As it turns off, my lame close reading of the title is a pretty accurate encapsulation of the book for me, this uncoined yet immediately recognizable term rubbing up against the non-normative and ambiguous servitude and dispute of Midwestern domestic life. The whole thing was alarmingly close to home and disturbingly kinked, and I felt a little like, Jesus, man, shut the fuck up about our business in front of guests. Uff da.

I didn’t love this collection, but probably more because I felt an itchy, too tight familiarity with it than anything, a sweater washed and then blocked wrong. The stories themselves have an almost prosaic surrealism, where shit that could never happens happens not because the events violate the rules of physics, necessarily, but because they violate other less conspicuous but nevertheless ironclad rules of social reality. I almost don’t want to give examples because each time I tried to with my husband, I turned into this “and then, and then, and then” idiot, laying out inexplicably related events, then back-tracking and trying to tie up the connectives which just made it worse. A man tries to make out with his mother’s pot-bellied pig after murdering her brother by accident. A couple tries to paint their house which ends up being this slippery metaphor. A man slits a dog’s throat at a funeral. Which is all somehow funny in ways that I can’t explain, don’t really think is funny, but am nevertheless laughing at. And I’m not laughing haha, I’m laughing fucked. I’m laughing grief. This may be more me than it.

I thought a fair amount of the term “magical realism” while I read, wondering, as I do, about genre and what a mess it is. I’ve gotten my back up about the use of the term magical realism in the past, because I’m a nerd, and I end up thinking, bitch, that’s just a nationalist fantasy novel. And all fantasy novels are nationalism fantasy novels, from Twilight’s Volturi Catholic panic down to there won’t be a Shire, Pippin. The term seems too specific to a certain era of South American fiction, and used only on North American writers when they don’t want to get genre cooties on their weirdness. But Scandamericans would be magical realism if the Midwest had such a thing. (The Midwest doesn’t have old money or history either, being one of the problems of the Midwest, but the kind of problem that eliminates some and creates others.) It’s not fantasy fantasy, but more weirdly personal; a private life of the domestic wars.

Maybe the less coherent observation I’m groping for is that Scandamericans runs its harsh (sur)realisms in collection because we can’t even bring ourselves to novel length. We have to run at our fantastic, coded history in collected short fictions because we aren’t even a nation, but an interstitial accident of geography and inertia. We’re not even the conquest of useless but something worse and therefore more comic. We shouldn’t even be here, and what we have to cling to, as a people, is our anecdotal longevity in a place not actually made for people. (My bitterness with the Midwest right now may have more to do with the punishing cold I’ve been stuck in for the last forever, no end in sight.) I thought of Winesburg, Ohio a fair amount, and the ways MFA programs in the Midwest push the shit out of that (or did in the Jurassic Age when I was in college), and the ways the stories in Scandamericans triangulated a specific kind of person – a dude, maybe kids, a wife, a house in the Madison suburbs – instead of a place.

And speaking of MFAs, this collection has the the shine of the MFA all over it, that rock tumbler which grits prose in a way that often embeds itself in my nails. This is good MFA writing to me though, the kind that moves from rough to shine, and the endings positively fucking gleam. I don’t know why I’m being a bitch about craft – but I am, don’t mistake me – because this is some well written stuff, the kind of thing that winds and then strangles. It’s good. For whatever reason (and this phrase means “for reasons I know but won’t divulge”) the subject of Freud’s concept of the narcissism of small differences kept coming up this holiday season in my conversations. Talking to my brother and his newly minted fiance and casually calling him a hipster and watching that tightening in his eyes. I don’t care about hipsterism, because I’m the wrong gender, age, and BMI to give a shit about that. But he’s not, and I used the term, and it probably bugged him. Sorry. That was this book, Merkner to me.

The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic hit me in the narcissism of small differences, in that place of close but not quite close enough. I can see see his truth because I hate it like I hate all things close to my truth but just across the kitchen table. I kind of hate this book because I get it. I kind of love it for the same reason. Not all of the short stories work, but the ones that hit me hit me in the face. The one about the couple painting their house hit me right in my profession as a house painter, all the notes I leave on a kitchen table over the course of a painting project turned over and written back. I feel priest-like in the things I see in my clients’ homes – in the sense that I see them but can’t relate them because it would be a violation – but I see them. I see them and keep silent. I don’t snoop, but I don’t have to. We wear it all on our sleeves but then tuck them hard into pockets. The connectives of course are surreal.

I got the violence in the story of the funeral, my cousin and I holding onto the back of one another’s necks, forehead to forehead, while he laid the most immaculate guilt trip on me like fine fucking china.  He wanted me to go to the second funeral, the one to be attended by people I despise. I resisted and drove home, and everyone in the car fell asleep. I watched the landscape go past like the only person who could, and later got the story of it, the second funeral. I would have murdered at that event, slit the throat of a dog in the back bedroom, and then I would have passed it off just the like the protagonist of the short story, the way you can pass off the murder of a dog in the back bedroom. You can pass off anything in the right social situation, stand like a mask and joke. It’s not funny haha but funny apocalypse. It’s funny Revelations according to Hans.

And although it looks like I’m dogging on this collection, I’m really not. There’s a story about a man who goes with his daughter down into a mine in “the only mountain in Wisconsin” – mountains being something the Midwest doesn’t have either – and sees a vision of her as an adult. Sounds lame when I relate it, but that last image, the daughter waving silently from a rock like a siren, and the daughter waving back just scrambled me. The candlelight vigil in another, all of the people turning away from the woman in whose name they are there. I can relate my irritations easier than I can my affections, because the affections are so fragile and inexplicable. The old saw about familiarity and contempt.

Fuck, I don’t know. The best and most true thing I can say about this collection is that it hit me where I live in ways that I usually only find in sex writing by the French or narratives of the zombie apocalypse.  (Make with that what you will.) I’d like to see Merkner do something long form, because he fairly kicks the shit out of the short form (except for the microfictions, but then me and microfiction are not friends, so it might just be me.) It was kinda perfect to read a short story or two in the middle of the holiday shitshow, parceling out this deranged comedy of the domestics after living through the same. Well done, me. Perfect timing.

You Can’t Take the Con from Me: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats

I am of the opinion that Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy is perfect summer vacation reading. Even though those books are bloated by all kinds of Coke drinking, logistical chicanery, and wangst, the pages absolutely rip along, like finding a google hole of related self-important blog posts by a group of people who you kind of can’t stand, but also adore and want to have a drink with. I didn’t really track this while I was reading them, as I was too caught up rolling my eyes at the world mechanics – seriously, who is growing food or packing, shipping and delivering all the godamn stuff you assholes are ordering on the Internet – but Grant (possibly slyly) really captures the bullshit teapot tempest feel of the blogosphere. Only two privileged white kids who live with their parents can save us all! But, gosh, it was a lot of fun to read, and perfect for long summer evenings on the back porch. 

So I finished them up last summer, and in the last week of this summer, I discovered there are a bunch of enovellas set in the Newsflesh world. Sign me right up, gin and tonic in hand. San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats feels a little like Hugo-bait (which I see worked, because this was nominated for the Hugo in the novella category for 2013). The Hugo is the more fannish of the sff awards, as it is decided by the participants in World Con, not SFWA or or other more trade-y organizations. Whether that sentence made any sense to you is probably a good indicator of whether this novella will work for you, as Browncoats is aimed pretty solidly at the nerd demographic. A novella about a zombie outbreak at a nerd con being voted on by nerd con participants is a good bet for the win. But hey, I’m a nerd and con goer, also for the win. 

But my nerdery aside, I think Browncoats minimized the things that bug me about the Newsflesh world: the tech-babble and less-than-punchy aphoristic intros and extros, the self-aggrandizement of douches, the shaky social architecture. The novella read much more like a lost chapter from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, with the whingeing, bloggerly interjections of the After the End Times staff kept to a minimum, and the wide ranging events of the Comic Con outbreak related though multiple perspectives and points of view. My favorite of the End Times staff, Mahir, has gone to interview the last known survivor of Comic Con 2014 thirty years later, and the proceedings have that same Studs Terkel retrospective sensibility which both dampens the immediate arm-wheeling and tinges everything with sadness – two things the Newsflesh world could use more of, imao. 

Con kid Lorelei goes off to sulk in her hotel while her parents set up the Firefly fan booth. A young woman is rescued by a Jedi when a zombie panel attacks. A blind woman and her dog get stuck in the booth. A starlet for a time-travel cop show – “My TV Guide interview was six paragraphs about my boobs and how they fit into my suit” – is abandoned by her handler with newlywed fans. There’s a lot of geek hat-tips to Who or the “fake geek girl” thing or – obviously – the Whedonverse, while pulling off a pretty good outbreak in a locked room scenario. 

Per usual with Newsflesh, I have some serious questions about Kellis-Amberlee, the disease that causes the zombiism, and why the zombies seem to hold off for a period other than narrative convenience and if they’re actually dead and stuff, but that’s not really no nevermind. One of the things I like about Grant’s novels is that the zombies are actually called zombies, not some coy new term. That a convention center full of geeks would leap to the term and start trying to hash out the “rules” for the outbreak based on fiction, even if they get it wrong, felt refreshing. Too often characters in fiction seem never to have heard of zombies, despite the zombie’s half-century of existence in its modern mobbing guise. 

So, my read of this was a perfect storm of situation and personality, aimed solidly at my demographic, fixing some broken things for me, and, ah, the drone of cicadas. It’s probably also the only of the novellas I’ve read so far that I might even recommend to people who haven’t read the trilogy, because as an episodic back story piece, you don’t really have to get into the whole thing. Fed is an alternate ending on Feed, and as such, is a major spoiler, and How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea occurs after the Newsflesh events, and is stupid. I haven’t read Countdown, but I will, Oscar, I will. It’s like 90 degrees and the first day of school, and for sure I can get it in before the leaves turn and the first homework is assigned. Allons-y! Rise up while you can!

Love & Zombies by Eric Shapiro

Love & Zombies by Eric Shapiro is one of those things I haven’t known what to say about because experience isn’t reflection. I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not sure I can say anything smart about it. I blew through a bunch of novellas all in row, which made me have a whole thing about what makes a good novella versus a novel or a short story, but then I waited too long to write any of those thoughts down. But let’s see if I can recreate some of it. 

First off, the novella is a funny beast, occupying an odd middle distance. Novellas can fail in a lot of ways: not concise enough, meaning they should have been cut to a short story, or taking on too much, meaning they should be a novel. (And the latter might not actually be true, because some of my most hated books were expanded from short stories and/or novellas.) I feel like this book fell into the latter category, in that there was a lot going on, but expanding this scenario would only weaken it, while the specific aims of the story needed a little more time. The most successful novellas I’ve read often occur in already established worlds, so the exposition is just gestural, and then we can go from there. It was the exposition stuff that didn’t work so great for me here, so. 

Love & Zombies starts with a very satisfying first person voice: self-effacing while self-aggrandizing, and just freaking funny. The way he introduces you to the other characters – a girlfriend, an asshole best friend – was really grand, with a lapping, anecdotal quality I enjoyed. Turns out the asshole friend wants to pull some ill-conceived and unethical job for a cuss-ton of money, and our protagonist goes along with it for pretty stupid and illogical reasons. Which was okay by me, because I’ve certainly done stupid things for stupid friends, and I’ve probably stupidly entreated friends to do stupid things for me, and sometimes they’ve even gone along with it. Childhood friends especially, because even though we were just friends because of proximity, when you think about it, nostalgia plays its ugly hand.

The set up is very pulpy, and therefore pretty bananas. Main character dude is feeling emasculated because his hot girlfriend is possibly too GGG, and he’s not feeling worthy of her. This kind of amazing perfect gf for an admitted loser could piss me off, but our MC actually acknowledges that his feeling are dumb, and doesn’t put his crap on her. The stupid, unethical thing in this case is to drive out into the Nevada desert from California, find a zombie, and then squire her to Las Vegas, which is where everything, in pulp style, goes even more pear-shaped. 

Oh, did I mention there were zombies? This being one of the things that didn’t work so great for me in this novella. Apparently there have been zombie outbreaks all over the flyover states, but places like southern California have heretofore been untouched by the zombie plague. Which, fine; maybe my irritation with this set up is that I live in a flyover state full of zombies, so this sort of coastal insouciance about the zombie plague reads a little lame. I think it works in the whole personal metaphors of the main character, so it’s fine, but it doesn’t work on a nuts-and-bolts nerd world-building level. I guess I’m just saying that the world doesn’t make any sense, except as a personal metaphor, which is why this both works and doesn’t as a novella. You can’t expand it, but you can’t contract it either. 

I’ll just say: I liked the voice on this thing a lot. The main character is right: I may not like him, but I love his girlfriend, or maybe I just like how he talks about his girlfriend. (Which is another thing: as much as he talks about the girlfriend, I didn’t feel like I got enough screen-time from her to really dig her, except as a construct of the protagonist. Which is also fine, on some levels, because it’s about him thinking about her and not her. Just, it would have been nice to get a third act snap where you see what he says about her from a slightly different vantage, which would be her vantage. First person though, whatever.) 

I liked the near-zombie girl and the throats she rips out half-pretending to zombification. I also liked a lot of choices made by the protagonist, because while nostalgia may be sweet, his friend was a huge asshole. I’m not enamored of the tie-up, which read too cutesy perfect for me. Maybe the average novella should end with blood on the floor, because we don’t have the investment in your usual novelistic HEA. Maybe. It’s possible I’m bloodthirsty in my needs. 

Two of the novellas I read in my novella week were DarkFuse titles: this and Worm by Tim Curran. Worm was decidedly more about gross pulp thrills, while this was more voice-driven, with a chatting, hipster douchebag protagonist and his admittedly stupid problems. You could almost smoosh them up into a single hot novel, something with killer voice and killer kills. I kind of did that by reading them back to back, which I would recommend. The nice thing about novellas is you can put them down in a sitting, much like a zombie. Love, however, takes more than a headshot to vanquish. A worthy take-home, all told. 

Thank you,NetGalley, for the ARC. 

Unforeseen: Journey Through Rust and Ruin by Sarah Bartsch

I swear by all that is holy that I’m going to figure out how to punch the Goodreads search engine right in the freaking neck. Twice. Hard.

Why, you ask? (Or maybe you don’t, but uncaring bystanders are next on my list when my blood is up.)

Let me explain. 

It all started a couple years ago when my husband dragged me to Bubonicon so we could see his boyfriend and hang out with other nerds. Being a somewhat reticent girl – don’t let my shouting online fool you; I am naturally a homebody and an introvert – I was maybe not all that jazzed about this in the abstract. But it was pretty much like coming home, because nerds (or more importantly, bookish, writerly nerds) are my people. One of those people I met was Sarah, and she is absolutely one of my favorites. 

So, it was with some trepidation I picked up her novella, Unforeseen: Journey Through Rust and Ruin, because I know what a horrible bitch I am in reviews sometimes. And she knows that too, which makes this whole process a little awkward. Mostly I just don’t write reviews for friends’ books that I dislike – truth is beauty and all that, but we all gotta live on this globe, and friends are better than any critique. But – phew! – I honestly liked this. 

Miyako is a samurai-daughter in an alt-Japan, c. 1915. My Japanese history is a little furry, but it seems that the reforms instituted in the Meiji Restoration never happened, and samurai continued on into the run-up to the first world war, but spreading out to the gentry and merchant classes in a way your more daimyo types wouldn’t have particularly liked. Miyako is one of these: trained into a system of honor and warfare, but not exactly comfortable there because of her class and gender. This Japan, not unlike the real 1915 Japan, is isolated from Western technology, but worried about the war brewing. She is sent on a mission into one of the semi-magical portals managed by the military to scavenge technology from whatever she finds on the other side. 

She walks through the glowing door into a world of scorched air and bandits, a dome city and automata. Which, oorah. This is deeply fun stuff, the kind of play through harsh, alien environments by competent but still uncomfortable girls that turns my crank as a reader. Miyako blusters her way through an environment alien to her sensibility, managing to keep from goggling at cars and trains and showers, but just barely. I want to ride on one of those, she thinks, again, and again, about all the wonders that this more modern, but still alternate Japanese city provides. Which is why I love science fiction, when you get down to it: the barely held-down freak-out about all the very cool things we can imagine and then walk through, as readers. Miyako supplies wonder to even the terrible things in the harsh world she ends up in.

But here’s my problem: two alternate history Japans are a lot of alternate history Japans to manage in a novella. So I did some googling, and it turns out that Unforeseen is one of a number of shared world novel/las, which start with Gateway to Rust and Ruin. From the Empires of Steam and Rust website:

It is 1915, but not the one you know.

In Europe, the old empires stand on the brink of war, and war zeppelins darken the skies. In the East, China has spread its influence as far as the South American Coast, and may soon come into conflict with America, which has annexed Mexico, and is looking further south. But the plans of the great powers may all soon come to naught, for something new has come into the world.

On every continent, in every nation, holes have appeared, in the sky, in the ground, in the water, that seem to lead to another world. Some are no more than pin-pricks in reality. Some could swallow a battleship whole. Some seem to provide an instant conduit from place to place. A man entering one in Zurich might well come out another in the wilds of the Canadian Rockies an instant later. Others have no exit, and those who enter them are never seen again.

All are leaking.

Some emit strange gasses. Others birth weird animals and insects. Still others alter the environment around them in subtle, unsettling ways, and may eventually change the whole world.

Which, cool. I’m all in. I find the whole idea of shared world writing – where different authors bring their craft to a world with specific parameters – totally worthy. It’s such a friendly, personable way of writing fiction; a call and response between people who are often congenital introverts. But I would have really appreciated this introduction to the Steam & Rust world when I began reading Sarah’s story as some sort of preface or introduction. I am absolutely willing to sort all this stuff out on my own as a reader, and I did, but I admit my default is laziness.

So, you’re welcome, Steam & Rust readers. I went in and tried to make an Empires of Steam and Rust series on Goodreads, so you could see in in one place all of the shared world novel/las, but I ran into the absolute freaking shittiness of the Goodreads search function. Even though I was able to add three of the fictions, for some reasons Goodreads couldn’t cough up Revolution of Air and Rusteven though I can find the damn novella on a google search and it looks like Summers even did a godamn Goodreads giveaway. Double-you the actual fuck here? Why can’t Goodreads even see this novel? Rarrrrrrrrr, and then the throat punch.

Miyako makes her way through her adventure in her own alternate history with wit and some badass sword skills, learning the way the young often do that her world is more complex and crappy than she thought. Here’s my next criticism, and it’s the best one: I want more about her. Having established not one alt-Japan but two, and a set of characters and even a robot I admire, I would kill to see how this all plays out and what happens next. More, please, Sarah. <3

Corsets & Clockwork: 13 Steampunk Romances

I went up to the cabin with the best of intentions: a backpack full of books and the will to read them. But, what ended up happening was playing Munchkin, chatting about the local land scandal, and making and eating a lot of food. A very wonderful week, all told, despite the godamn half foot of snow that fell quite prettily down on all and sundry in freaking April, but not a week in which I clapped eyes on much reading. When I did eventually sit down to read, I did hack a bit on my assigned reading, but mostly I slunk off to Corsets & Clockwork: 13 Steampunk Romances.

Short stories do much better as distracted reading, and Corsets & Clockwork was the only short story collection in the backpack. I had grabbed it in a mad library rush, but also because I’ve been arguing with the hubby about the state of steampunk these days. I don’t think I’d care much about the genre in a vacuum, but my man has a huge chubby for the entire concept. He doesn’t read so much these days, but I do, so I keep reading and reporting back. I see a decided shift in steampunk towards more romantic sensibilities, which is an interesting shift from the early days of very dudey stuff like Alan Moore and William Gibson. Some of this I think is sartorial: steampunk is very much about how things look, and about ornamenting fetish objects. Which is not to say that the sartorial is always feminine, just that romance, as a genre, deals with the body in a way that many genres do not. The clothes make the genre.

I think one problem with this collection is that short form romances can be extremely weak: setting up and knocking down lovers and their impediments so fast that both the lovers and the impediments are given short shrift. There’s a reason it’s usually a romance novel, because there’s enough room to do the character work necessary to both detail and resolve whatever the conflict is. I think maybe the most common short form romance is the epilogue, and I, for one, cannot stand romance epilogues, even for characters I love. There’s often no snap to anything that happens, it’s just: look at how happy everyone is and also here are our preternaturally perfect children. After scanning over some reviews, I see that my feelings are out of step with many romance readers. Fair warning, I guess.

“Rude Mechanicals” by Lesley Livingston. Despite some goofy names that made me wince – Agamemnon, Quint, Kingfisher for crying out loud – the story of a mechanical girl who acts as Juliet in a shabby Shakespearean troupe to both comic and tragic ends made me smile. Romeo & Juliet is often disastrously misinterpreted, as far as I can tell, run in such a way that those teenaged idiots are somehow noble, when what they are is irrational in a completely different way from their irrational parents. Nobody gets to win, even posthumously, because there is no posthumous win. Anyway, my cranking aside, this was funny and clever and hit who can separate the dancer from the dance in a way I appreciated.

“The Cannibal Fiend of Rotherhithe” by Frewin Jones. This story is where I’m most out of step with other readers, because I hit several reviews that called this one bad, and I would absolutely, without a doubt call it the stand-out of the collection. Frankly, if I hadn’t hit something this bloody weird this early in my reading, I may not have even finished the collection. Beautifully sly narrative voice, fairy tale echoes which are Grimm not Disney, and a half-footed nearly incomplete ending that says more with a gesture than a statement. A rough, horrible fisherman on the Scottish coast captures a mermaid in his nets. The narrator demures as to logistics – one of the many times when the narrator points out something awful and then lets you try to sort it out, horribly – but the fisherman gets the mermaid with child. She dies in childbirth and is discarded, leaving the fisherman to raise a girl with sticky skin and shark’s teeth. She’s a monster with a monstrous upbringing, and her brutal reactions to the brutal world out there – the one that pretends not to smile with shark’s teeth – are raw and ugly and perfect. Even monsters deserve love, even while both the monster and the love are terrifying. I would absolutely seek out more of this writer’s work, in a heartbeat.

“Wild Magic” by Ann Aguirre. Fine, I guess, but somewhat perfunctory, ending in and some day I shall be the queen of all I survey! in a way that makes me tired, which is kind of disappointing because I usually love Aguirre. A young girl who is the daughter of the ruling class, but, like, gifted with magical powers which are frowned upon – yawn – falls in love with Oliver Twist, even though he might, like, have an agenda. Felt like a preface to a larger work, ending just as the actual conflicts might begin, and in that way, is something of a failure as a short fiction. Not bad, but not interesting.

“Deadwood” by Michael Scott. I liked this up until the ending, which has one of those last minute reveals where the main characters turn out to be actual, historical figures. I’m not even kidding when I say I rolled my eyes and humphed when the main characters introduced themselves with their real names – oh my god, that was the worst. All I’m saying is that you have a short story named the same as this show:

then you should try a little fucking harder, cocksucker. I get that Deadwood is an actual historical place, and that David Milch did not invent it, but this Deadwood is nowhere near as interesting as either the historical Deadwood or the HBO series. That said, before the humphing and eye-rolling – seriously, why the fuck would [redacted] and [redacted] ever be hanging out together? let alone smooching? – the whole post-Civil War company town thing was workable, and the characterizations fun. There are many a fiction I wish ended earlier than they did, and this gets to be one. Ta da!

“Code of Blood” by Dru Pagliassotti. I skipped this one after a couple of pages. I know my track record with stories of the ingenue daughters of the ruling class and their tired rebellions via fucking the staff. (See, for example, “Wild Magic”, above.)

“The Clockwork Corset” by Adrienne Kress. Yet another daughter of the ruling class fucking the staff, but I was charmed by said aristocratic daughter joining the army and trying to pass as a boy for much of the proceedings. The passing-as-a-boy trope is an odd thing in fiction, usually requiring the girl to be both more and less dumb than she is. The ending here is…maybe not unsatisfying, but it doesn’t make work of all the potentials.

“The Airship Gemini” by Jaclyn Dolamore. Fascinating premise in a locked room environment which needs to be a longer fiction. “The Airship Gemini” doesn’t exactly work – there are too many lacunae – but I so seriously want it to, and the ways it doesn’t work are still compelling. A set of conjoined twins, just regular physical freaks – work as a show on a dirigible for magical folk – vampires, werewolves, etc – because freak is freak, but not all freak is the same. A self-serving doctor seeks to separate the girls, throwing the girls into crisis. I loved that the girls have no interest in separation – their connection is fact not deformity – and I loved their relationship with The Lizard Man. I thought the crisis and denouement was confused, but there’s a lot of here here.

“Under Amber Skies” by Maria V. Snyder. I actively hated this story. Set in a steampunky Poland just after the Nazi occupation, it managed to get high and mighty about resisting the Nazis because resisting Nazis might interfere with the romantic bullshit of some teenage girl. Zosia’s father is a mad scientist who has been building farm equipment & kitchen implements when the Nazis take over. Everyone assumes he’s begun making war machines for Poland to be used in the war effort, but he’s been missing for a couple months. Then Nazis try to take Zosia in for questioning. She escapes, and then the story turns into how Zosia’s Polish nationalist mother is evil, and Zosia’s dad would never make war machines despite the fact that we’re dealing with actual Nazis here, and apparently resisting Nazis is evil because war is bad and everyone should be a lover and not a fighter and war is wrong double plus times.

What the actual fuck? I am of the opinion that most writers should avoid Nazis in their fiction unless they are willing and able to take on the most Godwin of all genocides, but here it’s an actual disaster. I get how love is dreamy and wonderful and all, but this kind of judgmental bullshit about how resisting Nazis is wrong because of love, man makes me want to die. This story is stupid and childish and takes the easy way out in situations which are forever and decidedly less than easy. Uuuurrrgh.

“King of the Greenlight City” by Tessa Gratton. Starts out in a very traditional romance vein, where the principles meet cute and discover their magical powers and whatnot, and then builds to a third act OMIGOD which is pretty freaking hilariously subversive. We two are as one…ahahahaha. Sad. 🙁

“The Emperor’s Man” by Tiffany Trent. Yet another daughter of the ruling class banging the help – someone who actually has an academic placement should write a paper about this phenomenon – but better than my dismissive opening would imply. This is one of those coded histories, with a transported London in a magical setting. I feel like with a lot of these stories there is way too much going on in the weird department. Mixing werewolves, manticores, hard science, alternate history, and clockwork is way, way too much in a story 60 pages long or less, but this was cute and it functioned as a story. The only thing that made me itch was the way science was equated with mysticism. Just because something is an epistemology, does not mean all epistemologies are equivalent.

“Chickie Hill’s Badass Ride” by Dia Reeves. Snappy dialogue and narrative voice in a setting not usually seen in steampunkery. No one writes in the segregated American South, and if they do, they sure as shit don’t write almost light-hearted romps about Black children being stolen by tentacled monsters who are easily mistaken for the Klan. I’m not entirely sure this story works, but full freaking points for a story where the casual fun belies a sharper message.

“The Vast Machinery of Dreams” by Caitlin Kittredge. Omg, another good one. I couldn’t even say what happened here, exactly, but the way the total freaking weirdness is held with a hard hard and doled out to the reader in snippets is masterful. A young boy with dreams both nightmarish and juvenile meets a girl who might be a monster, and Lovecraftian hijinks ensue. This is what happened; this isn’t what happened. ZOMG.

“Tick, Tick, Boom” by Kiersten White. Yet another daughter of the ruler class banging the help. Seriously, what is up with this? There is so much of this in this collection, and I am beginning seriously to wonder why it is that our romance lady avatars are all these high-born chickies who are discomforted by their status, and alleviate that discomfort by kissing the low-born? Why am I even talking in terms like this? Low-born? The fuck? I don’t even mean to be attacking this specific story, because it’s fine or whatever, despite the fact I saw the twist coming in the first page, and I don’t think it actually said anything at all. And it deals with political violence in a way I think is deeply lame. Har har, I blew up some people because I don’t like my daddy!

Woo boy, I must be cranky tonight, given how bitchy I’m being. Still though, what is going on here? Maybe it’s just the steampunk genre, and its hazy Victoriana written by (mostly) Americans who have zero clue about how the British class system works, and romanticize it. It’s yet another godamn Lady Diana plate. Yerch. Maybe I’ll come back with a coda some day, but for now I’m just feeling itchy and irritated that the one excellent story about a girl with shark’s teeth tricked me into the rest of this mess. Fine enough reading for the cabin, but back in the everyday I’m feeling much less charitable. Sorry.

Gothic Short Fiction: Top 5

We arrived at the cabin yesterday, and have been doing the slow, unloosening unwind of food and fire-ful conversation. Time out from one’s life is a strange, interstitial moment, sitting in a kitchen with my mother and my husband and arguing about literature and the state of the weather and the price of beans. Mum and I started in about Gothic fiction, because we have that in common. She taught a class in Gothic fiction way back when, using primary The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. I read it along with her  at the time because I’m easy and I like books and I like short fiction. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales ended up being one of the very best multi-author short story collections I’ve ever encountered. From the editorial choices to the brilliant fucking introduction, Chris Baldick knows whassup. (But, sadly, we made fun of his name a little because baldick.)

So we started arguing the top five Gothic short fictions, and Mum ended up with the following list:

“Jordan’s End” by Ellen Glasgow

A doctor goes to a remote, decaying Virginia farmhouse to treat the head of the family who is suffering from a hereditary disease. The doctor quickly realizes that not only the man, but his wife, aunts, and sons are all caught in a web woven of madness and death. Doom everywhere.

“The Gospel According to Mark” by Jorges Luis Borges

A student from Buenos Aires goes to visit his bumpkin cousin on a remote estancia during Lent, which is fall in the Southern hemisphere. To pass the time, he starts reading the Gospel of Mark to the degenerate, illiterate servants–which turns out to be a huge mistake.

“The Vampire of Kaldenstein” by Frederick Cowles

In the late 1930s, a clueless Brit takes a bicycle tour to a remote part of Germany, fails to heed the locals’ warning–to comic results. Don’t go to the castle, you idjit!

The Lady of the House of Love” by Angela Carter

A sad, young vampire waits in darkness in her ancestral castle for her true love to come to her. Many men and boys do, but wind up as blood donors. Another British bicyclist, this time a soldier o leave during WWI, shows up and spends the night with her. Will his blood be shed there or on the battlefields of France?

The Horla” by Guy DeMaupassant

Oh my god! Hysterical first person narrator wigs out when he thinks an invisible Brazilian chupachbra is haunting him. He grows crazier with every passing day until he finally decides to do something about his unseen tormentor.

Like the joke about lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, this is a good start. But my list would look a little different. I would add “The Bloody Countess” by Alejandra Pizarnik, which is so completely dirty and perverse and freaks me out with its semi-academic tone married to some seriously fucked up content. Elizabeth Bathory, man. The husband brought up Poe, because obvs, and we decided that “The Fall of the House of Usher” was the best of his Gothics. A young man comes to visit his friend and the friend’s tragic twin sister in their remote, crumbling estate.

In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates self-absorbed teenager Connie has all these fantasies about boyfriends, and when Arnold Friend pulls his red convertible into the driveway of her family home when her family is away at a barbeque, she gets a boyFriend from hell.

And then, of course, the patron saint of Southern Gothic, Flannery O’Connor with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find“. A Georgia couple, their bratty children and a grandma who fancies herself a Southern aristocrat, embark on a road trip. The grandmother’s insistence on seeing a plantation (that she later realizes is “gone with the wind”) ends with their rolling the family car on a dusty rural road.  Enter the Misfit, an escaped convict, and his sidekicks.

So, given this collection of freaking excellent stories, I think you could probably say something about the shape of the Gothic. An outsider comes into an often rural location. He (or occasionally she) might be a painful doofus. The rot of the inbred rural location might spread, or it might be a counterpoint to the mechanized horror of the industrial center. Monsters have faces; machine guns do not. Gothic more than other longstanding genres has a lot of female writers, and that makes sense to me: the creeping dread, the lack of agency, the limited locales. Women haven’t have the most control over our lives, historically speaking.
List:
Autumn setting
Remote, isolated location
Night, darkness
Enclosed spaces
Decaying houses, castles
Hereditary insanity, illness
Twins (doppelganger)
Madness
Grotesque body shapes
Inbreeding
Storms, floods, extreme cold or heat

So it was fun to talk lists, and the weird convergences – bicycles, apparently? – and I look forward to more food and talk and half-napping here on the North Shore.

The Horla by Guy de Maupassant

Neatly masterful short story which suffers for the contemporary reader from being too influential. Lovecraft was all over the first person descent into madness narrative like Chthulu on New England port towns, though of course he saw it here first. Nevertheless, the sheer whackadoo poetry of our unnamed narrator’s grappling with an unsubstantial succubus/doppelganger manages to hit tons of the tropes of Gothic fiction with a concision not usually seen: colonial panic, tortured aristos, unease with science/Modernism, weltering claustrophobia. 

Our apparently indolent narrator starts his diary – oh, yeah, it’s one of those – nattering on about trees and walks in the park. He sees a pretty white ship sail past the house. Isn’t that a pretty ship? I’m sure this won’t be important later. He starts suffering from insomnia and the vague sense that he is being watched, which he alleviates briefly by going on vacation a lot. But the visitations escalate, resulting in some really freaky descriptions of sleep paralysis. Yeesh. There’s an interlude of a woman being hypnotized as a parlor game which is milked for a full-blown freak out about human agency (especially the way it is intercut with some other revelations). 

By the end, our narrator is in exclamation point mode, his prose downright Old Testament in its panic. I would be willing to bet there are deliberate echoes of Job all over the place, but my Sunday schooling is rusty. The final attempt by the narrator to confine and destroy the Horla – as he has come to name this creature – tips horrifying in the extreme when – this is for serious a spoiler, but this clocks at maybe 20 pages, so the spoiler is more conceptual than anything –> when you realize this lunatic has burnt down his house with all the servants screaming to death within because of a creature not even he can see. Then he decides to kill himself. Tada!

Anyway, a neat little story, not partially because of the way it breathlessly drags you along with the madness, and then ever so subtly checks that madness. Oh my God! as the narrator yells dozens of times. Maybe we’re the monsters!

Oh, and I found this on Google books – excellent! But then it turned out that it was in French – bogus! So I found an English translation online here. You’re welcome.

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories

I am coming down with something bad. I could feel the cement hardening in the cracks in my skull all day, and now my brain is both solid and lacy with an underwater stupidity. I had started reading some trash fiction this morning, as usually illness sends me crawling to comforting junk, but it didn’t suit this time. It turned out my misery wanted miserable company, which made There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya more or less the perfect companion. 

Sometimes short stories can be really constructed things, like a spring-loaded trap that snaps down hard on form or concept or what have you. These short stories are instead morbid and wry anecdotes, told with a sort of uniformity of structure, in a uniformity of locales. Which isn’t exactly true: when I could tell the time period, these stories ranged around from just post-War Soviet state to the now Russian Republic grumbling about New Russians. But poor, miserable, drunken, bureaucratic assholes are a time-transcendent fixture, as are the drear cabbage-redolent apartments and disconnective, though central, family structures. At a point, the whole collection started feeling like an extended rake joke, and I kept stepping and stepping on the tines that would aim the handle straight for my cement-filled head. Whether this will work for other readers is, as usual, up in the air, and it’s possible my single-sitting reading of this work helped my sense of the dark humor. 

One of the best set of classes I ever took was a Russian Literature and History two-fer in high school, and we decided to stage a reading of The Cherry Orchard. We didn’t know much about it, and the teacher (in a very interesting and, ultimately, rewarding choice) didn’t read up on The Cherry Orchard‘s very long history on the stage; she was not directing our impressions. It’s a pretty dire story, in terms of plotting, a family broken up and sold off, dashed hopes, dissolution. And we couldn’t stop laughing as we read, not at all. It got to be a pain in the ass because we couldn’t even get our scenes completed as the giggling took up from on to the other like an infection. Then we would all wonder, why the hell are we laughing at this? Though there are elements of farce, The Cherry Orchardisn’t unserious in its treatment of its characters, not running them as some kind of broad parody. 

Turns out, Chekhov intended it as a comedy, but its tragic aspects are inescapable. The laughter it provokes is uncomfortable, the burst of laughter after a startle. Many folk smarter and better’n me at theatre history have droned on about this at length, so let’s have an end to that and get back to Petrushevskaya, who manages to hit a Soviet version of the Chekhovian tragicomedy in a blur of miserable similarity. And who manages to do it turning Tolstoy’s famous aphorism on its head: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” “Here, this is what happened,” so many of these stories start, and then not quite tragic but nonetheless inconsequential lives continue inconsequentially until they end, or the narrative does. 

The whole business reminded me of the Grandma Dory’s ironic anecdotes of her childhood, her Bestamore locked in by a stroke for the last 20 years of her life, left minded by teenage granddaughters who had better business to attend to. Bestamore had a tendency to push herself out of wherever she was propped, rolling down hills and gurgling in a way my Grandma would imitate. I guess she was trying to say something, Grandma would shrug with an old woman’s shoulders, laughing past her childish cruelties. Grandma’s lessons are always subtle. Petrushevskaya has an almost dismissively reductive narrative voice – “There once lived a girl who was beloved by her mother but no one else. The girl was used to it and didn’t get too upset” – but the opening dismissals are almost always belied by strange, glancing connections and the fact that she is focusing on these dismissed lives at all. 

I often try, when I’m writing up collected short stories, to sort them individually: this one, this theme; this other, its voice. I’m not going to do that here because I think this functions best as an album, in the old school records-slotted-in-a-cardboard-box sense, but also in the sense of family album, all those nameless and half-remembered ancestors, sitting in a row of schoolchildren or dapper in their military swag or holding armfuls of children destined to die before the age of five. Here are the stories of unremembered lives lived in squabbled over apartments and stupid jobs. Amen.

a line of people in a black and white photo in front of building, one of which is my great-grandfather (though I don't know which) on the eve of his running from Lithuania during the Revolution
One of these men is my great-grandfather, on the eve of the Revolution which will send him out of Lithuania. I don’t know which one.

I received my copy from Netgalley.com