Revival: Speaking to My Soul

Oh dear. I adored this.

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

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

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

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

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

comic panels showing a zorse panicking then dying in the snow

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

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

The Wishing Cake: Adjusting Expectations

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cadaver: A Bittersweet Love Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just kidding. Totally in a zombie way.

I received my copy from netgalley.com.

Exit Kingdom by Alden Bell

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

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

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

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

Darth Vader and Son by Jeffrey Brown

Aww, you guys, this is so cute.

 Darth Vader and Sonis not particularly weighty – really more a series of punchlines and moments than a narrative – but got a gentle, almost wistful sensibility in with all the sight gags. Darth Vader, it turns out, has the same kind of distracted, lightly exasperated style of parenting that a lot of us Xers have fallen into. Because it also turns out that kids don’t get irony for a very long time – or ever, if some of the comments I see on reviews are an indication – and sometimes irony is the only defense against potty training.

Sometimes these little toilet reads or impulse books can feel mercenary or half-assed, like they were just slapped together for a buck. I don’t get that vibe here at all, though I could be bringing my love of Jeffrey Brown in from other books I’ve read of his. But no, I’ll go with it: this has the feel of care, and also the near earnestness of Brown’s humor. He’s not sarcastic or mean, but at the same time he stays out of treacle or overt sentiment. God, it’s just so adorable.

I’m totes getting this for my brother-in-law. Shhh, nobody tell him.

Review: Iced by Karen Marie Moning

I’ll give you the take-home before I write this review, because I might get bored and wander off: Dani O’Malley is the Scrappy Doo of the Feververse. Which makes her the Dawn Summers, Jar Jar Binks, or Wesley Crusher of this franchise, if you lack familiarity with the buzzkill that is Scrappy Doo. 

I wanted to give my read of Icedby Karen Marie Moning the most auspicious reading environment possible, so I waited until I was good and sick with a cold that has surely done something terrible and permanent to my lungs to start reading. I hated the crap out of the opening of Darkfeverwhen I read it in full health, and it was only after being softened up by illness that I was able to stop hating Moning’s writing tics and Mac’s voice long enough to get into the story. Darkfeverended up being a solid read for me, definitely not the best thing I’d ever read or anything, but interesting enough to hook me into reading book two. 

Which is when I went completely insane with TEH FEVER and spent some of the most enjoyable lost Sundays of my reading life freaking out about Mac and Barrons and the increasing stakes and deepening darkness of the Fever world. Moning’s got some stones in that series, pitching a full scale armageddon into the third (I think) book, raining death and destruction down on our little attack Barbie, building a complicated mythos, and kicking ass while chewing bubblegum.

Girl-pulp has never especially been my thing, but the Fever books had my number. I am not now, nor have I ever been, anything like MacKayla Lane – had I known her in high school, I would have written evil shit about her in my journal while sitting friendless in the library – but older me certainly appreciated her difficult transformations from helpless bobble-head to someone who managed to be both girlish and powerful. Plus, the Fever books managed to tackle issues of sexuality and trauma in a way I think girl-pulp is essentially attuned to, but usually cocks up because of wish fulfillment or chicken shitting out or something. 

Point being, I knew Dani from the Fever books. I knew how much she bugged the ever-loving fuck out of me. And I knew my shabby track record with book ones of series by Ms. Moning. (I see I have failed to mention that I tried to read the first of her Highlander books and fell asleep with the effort; reheated Outlanderwithout the historical research being the elevator pitch.) I knew I would do better to read this in an uncritical and infected frame of mind, which I duly did. Alas, friends, I think I would have had to have been a lot sicker to have enjoyed this book. Sicker being the operative word. 

Dani O’Malley is living in a post-fae-mageddon Dublin, a parentless street-kid fourteen who is simultaneously pretending to worldliness and younger than her years. Her voice is greatly toned down from her sections in the Fever books, which is fecking good news, because there is absolutely no way I could have taken 400+ pages of that. But it brings me to my first real problem: why in the sam hell do we have a protagonist in a romance series who is fourteen years old? 

I did a quick check, because I’m anal that way, and I see a notable number of people have shelved this on their “young-adult” or “ya” shelves on Goodreads. Setting aside the fact that the author herself has stated this book is for grown-ups – authorial intent only goes so far with me, and for the thousands of teens that are going to read this book anyway, classifications be damned – for many folk, age of the protagonist is the defining characteristic of young adult literature. And Dani is this obnoxious spaz, literally hyperactive with her ability to move at superhuman speeds: the unkillable, unstoppable force of adolescence. All of her damaged narrator stuff could totally work as a young adult narrative, what with the whole coming to terms with both childhood and childlike cruelty and abuse angle, blahblah blah. 

But for me, it’s not so much the age of the protagonist as the sensibility of the writing, and I firmly believe that that sensibility is pretty well fucked in this book. It’s a pretty standard device of the romance novel to have the protagonist not understand her own desirability, running conversations where dude looks at her with eyes darkened with desire, and she cluelessly wonders, do I have something on my face? (Sookie fucking Stackhouse is the reigning champ of this, despite her alleged psychic powers.) That happens one billion times in this novel, sometimes from point of view sections from dude composing odes to the rigid cock Dani gives him. I’m sorry, what? Come again? No, wait, don’t, because that’s totally fucking gross. Fourteen years old.

It’s not that I don’t think 14 year olds don’t have sexualities. I kissed my first boy at 14, and listened to friends report much more, um, adult interactions at that age. It’s not that I even think that sex or cussing don’t have a place in young adult literature. But I do not like this 14 year old romance heroine in this world of pedophile sex clubs – she keeps thinking back on a club at Chester’s that she zoomed through where the working girls were all dressed in little girl costumes while the customers had their explicit way – a romance heroine who is chained up, stripped to her underpants which are described in detail; a romance heroine who at one point wakes up in a bed with a naked dead woman who was literally fucked to death; a romance heroine who, in an almost laughably cliche section, almost succumbs to hypothermia and must be gotten nude with not one but two dudes whose erections are described as they warm her back to life. This is not young adult content. This is adult content, and I find it alarming in the extreme that 1) I am to identify with Dani as a romance proxy and 2) I’m to find any of this sexy at all. 

I’m not going to entertain arguments that Dani is somehow older than her years because she’s had a traumatic childhood. Her sections are solidly first person, and my impression of her internal age is even younger than 14: the invincibility, the obsession with candy, her childish conceptualization of her relationships (hers with Dancer being the most ridiculous, imao). So an abused child can make herself dinner; that doesn’t mean she’s an adult. That means she’s surviving, and just barely. I’ve even seen apologia that posit that because in “traditional” cultures, women would be married with children at 14, this makes all the penis-rubbing on Dani okay. This makes my head explode with rage. This is an adult book for modern adult readers and that we should find all this sexualization of a character who by her own fucking admission doesn’t get what’s going on around her acceptable is fucking sick. Just, fuck, I hate that I’m even talking about this at all. 

Whether this book is young adult or not, it grosses me out that I’m thinking more about the state of the erect penises around Dani than I am about the very real fucking emotional trauma of her childhood and existence. She was kept in a cage as a child, for chrissakes, and it sicks me right out that I’m obviously supposed to be speculating more about which of the three – count them, three – dudes might finally slip her some dick than I am about how obviously fucked up she is as a person, as a child, and as a nascent woman. God. As either young adult or adult literature, that’s a major fail. And given how well Moning handled Mac’s grief for her sister, despite Barrons walking around like sex-on-a-stick for ages, it feels like a bigger fail. 

Now, that I’ve worked myself up to a froth, back to Scrappy Doo. I think I might have handled all of these pedobear stylins better if there were a story here I gave a shit about, something with emotional weight and teeth. Much as I love Scooby Doo, the reluctant dog detective angle here in Icedis both half-assed and boring: Dani’s trying to figure out how and why parts of Dublin are getting flash-frozen and then exploding. Nothing much happens with this for hundreds of pages, short of Dani coming up against some penises and trying to find candy bars. Mac bugged the shit out of me in Darkfever, but her quest for her sister’s killer felt like something emotionally real, while here it just felt like Dani yelling lemmee at ’em, I’ll splat ’em, but without direction, as this long, obnoxious avoidance of real traumas. 

Given the last scene (which is far too spoiler to detail), maybe that’s what Moning is going for – a narrative calculated to show the avoidance mechanisms of trauma – but, if that is true, she’s done a helluva job pissing me off and screwing around before she gets to that in the next book. I’m not saying that ending was a cliffhanger – certainly not the kind of cliffhanger I grudgingly expect from KMM – but it does have the televisual omigod that has you sitting with your thumb up your ass until next week’s episode. (Or, you know, not with the thumb.) I resented the shit out of the cliffhangers in the Fever books because I gave a damn, but here I’m solidly in fuck it, who cares territory. I’m not reading that next book short of miraculous reviews from people I trust, and even if it is miraculous, Icedis disastrous enough for me to warn away everyone but the most avid Fever fan or lover of Scrappy Doo. And to the latter: what is wrong with you? 

And, as a final bitch-move, my alternate cover: 

a pedobear peeking out from broken glass with the Iced: a Dani O'Malley novel written over it

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Yesterday, I had a birthday party for my Christmas-born daughter. She received an embarrassment of princess accouterments:  crowns, jewels, plastic sparkle shoes, dolls, et&c and whathaveyou. Last week, when I picked her up from my dad’s house, she and my step-mom, Chris, were snuggled together on the couch, watching Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”. It was the end of the movie when I came in, right before the transformation, and Chris put up her hand, apologized, and said she couldn’t talk until the inevitable magic had been transacted. We watched: monster into man, teapot into Angela Lansbury. Chris flicked her fingers under her eyes in the way that means “I’m not crying” but she was. One of the girl’s gifts yesterday was a Belle doll. Another was a sparkle pony with a hair brush. The girl took the brush from the horse and combed the princess’s hair. After work today, I took out the over-sized Disney Princess activity book we received yesterday. We found the page with Belle and the Beast, and first thing, she blacked out all the eyes. This may sound creepy, and it is I guess, but this is the first thing most kids her age will do. I took down this book and began reading.

An antidote, but not exactly. The Bloody Chamberis the kind of collection that gets described as a “feminist reimagining”, which is accurate on some levels, but I think can imply that Carter is enacting a series of simple reversals: women as aggressors, boys locked in towers. There are reversals, but not the ones you expect or for which you have prepared. They have a sameness to them that doesn’t lend to the gulping down I did, yet again, but it works, in its own way. I started with the stories that deal with Beauty & her Beast, as they were foremost on my mind: “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”. This is not a collection that is a novel in disguise; they are short stories whole and complete. This is more like an album, in a sense that will most likely be lost sometime soon: a collection of pieces that riff on a theme. The Lyon tale is almost traditional in its telling: the father, the rose, the pact with the beast, the forgetting and return, the transformation that has you flicking your eyes with all of the wish-fulfillment, bright and romantic. But then comes “The Tiger Bride”, which inverts a central metaphor disturbingly, rising to a climax that made all of my hair stand on end. I don’t mean this metaphorically – even knowing the end, which I did, my body responded with the uncanny mammalian reaction that can mean several things at once: fear, pleasure, pain. Ah. Oh God. I am covered in fur.

There’s something hot-house about the prose. It’s fragile, breakable, spun from glass. It’s intentionally unreal, like Rappaccini’s Daughter who was raised on poison; beautiful, deadly. These are not stories that aspire to airless heroic beauty – although you many gasp from the lace and blood and satin – they also have a earthy, almost obscene sensibility. “The Snow Child” is a dagger of a tale, epigrammatic. It strips the fairy tale down to its Oedipal basics, almost strips out the story from the story, and you’re left with blood on snow and a rended black wing.

I think one of the failures of many modern fairy tales is that they take place in la-la land, long ago and far away, in the faux-medieval forest. With notable exceptions, such as “The Werewolf”, Carter’s stories occur in identifiable times and places. “The Lady of the House of Love” – simply one of my favorite short stories EVER – interrogates Progress and Rationalism & investigates horror in the age of the machine gun. In the year before the first world war, a young Englishman – a rational virgin – peddles into a Romanian town filled with ghosts and the last, inbred vampire daughter of Nosferatu. About his bicycle:

“To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion…Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to its bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?” (p97)

Maybe you can see where this is going. The vampire speaks to personal, domestic fears, and how those fears intersect with larger, societal moralities. (Ftw, Stephenie Meyer.) The vampire is also the symbol of the aristocracy: inbred, parasitic, but with a strange intimacy. The boy rides in on his bicycle, and only sees the vampire in the most rational terms: what wonders a sanatorium will do! And the boy, well-meaning, blind, & sweet as he is, doesn’t realize that his bike is the symbol of the devastation to come, that the greatest force for democracy has been the machine gun. We ceased to fear the aristocrat when we realized he could only kill us one at a time, family by family; we could kill each other so much faster and more efficiently once decadent individualism was subsumed into a machine. The vampire may be inhuman, but inhumanity has finer gradations like anything else, and the trenches are a scarier monster altogether, or scary precisely because they aren’t a monster.

There’s more going on in this story, much more, but that’s what I’ve got for now. I mentioned one of Carter’s wolf stories, three of which end the book. A scant two pages long, “The Werewolf” is a mastery of narrative voice: Carter creates a place, then she relates a folklore, then she tells a story in that folklore. The story is about girls and crones, the old woman stripped and stoned to death, the young woman who prospers from a folklore that will turn her out once she crosses the dangerous boundary into age. “The Company of Wolves” doesn’t work as well as the other two. Carter falls into lecturing for the first half, but by the end has worked into glorious perversity: Grandma’s bones wrapped in her own clothes, her hair unburned in the fireplace layered over with the girl’s discarded, burning clothes, the girl and the wolf in a house surrounded by baying wolves, consummating and consuming. In the 80s, Neil Jordan & Angela Carter turned these wolf stories into a movie, which is a fiasco, but a really compelling fiasco. Cheesy sets, a poorly done framing device, almost perversely miscast: Angela Lansbury (again!) is the wrong kind of old woman for Carter’s tales; Stephen Rea is cool, but he makes a really shitty huntsman/wolf. But I can see why they did it; Carter’s stories have a concreteness to them, a vision.

As often as these stories get soaked in bleach by Disney and repackaged for sale, the fairy tales themselves have an essential danger that can’t be scrubbed out. You can wash the blood off the floor, but it catches inevitably in the drain. (As a side-note, I think this is why Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog” doesn’t work & mostly bored my kids: they strayed waaaaaay too far from the central motifs. No spoiled princess, no pact that ends with the girl having to share her bed with a reptile, no violence integral to the story – in many versions, the frog becomes a man after the girl has thrown him against the wall in disgust and anger. There was violence in the Disney movie, but it was parenthetical, and banter is a poor substitute for real conflict.) Fairy tales also get re-purposed by children, with no parental intervention: Beauty’s eyes blacked out, doll and beast submitting to the same brushing. Carter’s stories aren’t definitive, but then no fairy story is, related from mouth to mouth, like a kiss or contagion, the kind of thing thing that raises the hair on your arms even while you snuggle in the intimacy of motherhood. Sweet dreams, kids.

Addendum:

As much as I like the new Penguin editions with their flash art on the cover, listed above, I am positively freaking out about the Folio Society’s new illustrated edition of The Bloody Chamber. Christmas is coming up again; think of me.

Review: Walking Dead: Made to Suffer

Every night I lock up my house. This isn’t particularly interesting. Despite certain fictional assurances that the Midwest is a place where you can leave your doors unlocked at night, I know for a fact that if your diligence wanes, someone might just walk into your house. In my case, it was many moons ago when my husband and I inadvertently left the door to our apartment unlocked ere we went to bed. We’d gotten sloppy; we lived in a relatively small apartment building with what looked like a good security system, and I’ve never been good at paranoia. So I woke up that night in a near panic because I knew I had not dreamed the sound of someone in our living room. I called the cops, and considered the angles out of the sliding window unit while my husband ventured into the dark unknown of our living room.

The cops frisked my husband as he shot out of the apartment, spelling his name and telling them his wife was still inside. I was back against the door, low to the ground, like someone might shoot through the shitboard that made up the material of the doors. I know I watch too much tv. They coaxed me out eventually; I can admit I’m a coward. We stood with some cops in our incredibly messy living room for a while – we were in the process of boxing our possessions so we could move into our house – and the cops kept shining their flashlights onto disheveled piles of our stuff and asking if the mess was normal. It was embarrassing. At some point we all realized there was someone else in the room, someone asleep under the laundry I’d washed and folded and left on the back of the couch. The cops shone a flashlight on an exposed arm and asked us several times, “Is this yours?” I still remember the odd phrasing.

I ended up back in the bathroom, I think all the way into the shower, while the cops woke and then sat on and cuffed an extravagantly drunk young man. He was naked but for a pair of socks and a baseball cap. After the cops fetched a truly scratchy looking baby blue cop blanket and swaddled him in it, they coaxed me back out of the bathroom to see if I knew him. I didn’t. He was just some kid who had three too many Long Island Teas at Liquor Lyle’s, pissed himself, doffed his clothes, and then went looking for the first open door. Ours was the first open door. We were diligent for a long while, but I know since then I’ve gotten lax again a few several times. We have a biggish dog, and I figure if someone really wants in, they’ll probably get in.

I’m really glad we don’t have walking cannibal corpses in the neighborhood though, boy howdy, because I figure most burglars are going to go for the tv and not try to eat my face off. Which is what brings this long winded anecdote to the the mid season finale of Walking Dead, Made to Suffer. This season the writers have been working the whole security state post-9/11 panic angle really hard, made obnoxiously manifest in The Governor’s use of the term “terrorist” in his final speech. I had a strangely fruitful conversation with a stranger on the Internet last week, where we talked about subtext of this season, how it seems on the face of it the writers are bagging democracy, from the “this is not a democracy” speech, down to the dark Mayberry of Woodbury with its soft spoken despot with democratical-sounding titles. Our hero is a grief-broken lunatic whose leadership style seems more chain of command than consensus. When he’s around to lead, anyway, and not howling through the prison making unilateral decisions about who lives and dies – though poorly – and talking to ghosts on the phone.

What are we to make of this? Of course, the Governor is eeevil, or at the very least, batshit insane, what with his heads in a tank and zombie daughter in the closet. The part when Michonne came to exact her vengeance was a strange sequence, because I found myself totally crushed by The Gov’s reaction to her killing his child. Yes, yes, she’s a zombie and all that, but Morissey was so stricken, so visibly destroyed by the loss that I really questioned Michonne’s motivations there. That was a bitch move. Andrea’s convenient arrival really showed the lack of backstory between the two women – I don’t think the writers can even imagine what those two might have talked about, they being women and all – and what should have come off as a tense interpersonal moment ended up being scene mechanics.

But back to the security state thing. Woodbury’s leadership seems hell-bent on insulating their town from what has happened, what having happened being the zombie apocalypse. They’re locking their doors against the naked drunks, but they are wide open for the canny burglar who wants to eat their faces off. Every single time we took off our damn shoes while going through the airport security this Thanksgiving, my kids asked me, why are we doing this? And my answer was that one time, there was this damned idiot who thought he could blow up a plane with a shoe. (Jesus Christ, Austen Powers called.) My country is busy rending people and throwing them into the screaming pits – which, good call with the name there, gov; shoulda gone with something like “School of the Americas” – and what we’re getting for our trouble is a bunch of Michonnes. Not to draw too hard of an analogy or anything.

Anyway, teetering metaphors aside, Made to Suffer was very much in the mode of this season so far, which is go go go go. Tyreese was introduced – who was Rick’s lieutenant in the comics – necessitating the death of the other black male character, T-Dog…I mean, whatever his name was who replaced T-Dog. I swear to God, I joked to my husband that that would happen the second Tyreese was on screen, and good golly, am I tired of how lame the writers are. Romanov-mustache dude turns out to be a pedobear and short hair doesn’t mean you’re a lesbian. But man, am I Team Tyreese at the moment. He’s, like, the only person who has ever behaved in a rational manner – letting the bitten woman come along so her living partner can work through what happened, not throwing a fit and glowering when tiny badass, Carl, locks them up until they can be vetted.

Michonne had an actual moment of emotion there when Rick almost tosses her out of the group, I think the first time I’ve seen that woman do anything but scowl. Glenn and Maggie, I heart the hell out of those two and their towering badassery. and I also appreciate that Glenn drops the knowledge immediately that Merle is with the Gov, given how much hiding the football they’ve been doing with him. Internet speculation has it that Merle is being planted as a mole in the Rickocrats when Merle and Daryl eventually escape from their predicament, but I’m not discounting how pissed the Gov is about Merle lying about Michonne being dead.

Well, anyway, I think a lot of this episode was rushed, and I’m somewhat unimpressed with the big battle stuff in Woodbury – why is that people can head-shoot zombies right and left, and can’t hit the side of a barn when living folk turn up – and I sprained my eyeballs eye-rolling at all the terrorist talk in the final Governor speech. Speaking of the side of the metaphorical barn, good god. Individual performances continue to impress, like Morrissey and Maggie and Glenn, even though sometimes I think the caliber of the performance might even undercut whatever bullshit point the writers were going for. Often my favorite moment in series are the ones where nothing happens and people just talk about stuff, which has been thin on the ground this season. We need more people being people before we can cower about how they have become monsters.

In the Shadow of No Towers: The Personal is the Political

Somewhere on the shelf where I store all the family photo albums, the high school year books, a stuffing of letters and other ephemera, is a copy of the New Yorker published on September 24, 2001. I find it whenever I’m digging around looking for some artifact of my family’s life, and never know what to do with it but slip it back into the jumble. I can’t throw it out.

It came in the mail nearly two weeks late, the entire publishing machine run to an absolute standstill as we wept in our living rooms in front of a 24 hours news cycle that broke to gossip and conjecture, half watched while we called and called and called, hoping this time I would get through to my sister who I last heard right after the first plane on the lower east side and before the second. Marco. Polo. I wrote emails on emails to this person and that, forwarded messages, called moms. Pete was supposed to be in the station just below the towers that day, but due to a series of choices and accidents, was 15 minutes late. My sister walked out on the Brooklyn Bridge as the ash fell. Some of her Jewish co-workers, upon seeing the buildings fall, fell to the floor screaming. It’s happening again. Oh no no no.

[the famous cover of the first post-9/11 New Yorker, which was black on black with an image of the towers. The black of the towers was different from the the black of the background only by a shiny film]

Art Spiegelman created this image. He’s been affecting my long slow digestion of that event from before I even knew he was. The first of the periodicals coming in was the beginning of the return to normalcy – that most American of coinage, put forth first by the President Warren G. Harding, an embarrassing failure who had the good sense to die in office. I was hungry in those days for something with editing, something not just reiteration and conjecture, and that first New Yorker was a sign we might be able to start doing something other than crying and freaking out. And speaking of tears, the periodical I was really waiting for was The Onion, which, as you may already know, is a satirical humor site. What could possibly be funny in all of this? After a quick google so I could write this review, I scrolled through the edition I read first and only two weeks after 9/11. Irony wasn’t dead, but it was crying its eyes out.

[How have we spent the last two weeks?
1. Crying
2. Staring at hands.
3. Feeling guilty about renting video.
4. Calling loved one.
5. Thinking about donating blood.
6. Watching TV for nine hours, finally getting up, going to the corner store for Cheez Doodles, eating Cheez Doodles, realizing Cheez Doodles aren’t helping, throwing Cheez Doodles away.]

In the Shadow of No Towerswas written in the weeks and months after 9/11, not so much a critical examination as a reaction in the wobbling search for meaning in the first normalcy after that event. Spiegelman is best known for his graphic novel Maus, which, if you’ve only read one graphic novel, this is probably the one. I read it at 15 or 16, probably because it was assigned in class, but maybe because it was ambient at the time. Maustells the story of the Holocaust in the medium of the paneled comic, but what I remember most is the the ways Spiegelman wrote himself into the narrative, worried about his father and mother, Holocaust survivors, their stories and feelings, the audacity of telling a story as serious as the Holocaust in a format called comics.

I’ve lost much of the story in the intervening decades – godamn it, decades – but I know it’s brilliant, using both the latent didacticism and implicit spectacle of the comics medium to both instruct and – and I am aware how loaded this word is – entertain. Little Artie drawing himself as a mouse, at the knee of his father who then speech balloons a narrative so awful that it makes irony cry. The political cartoon is a longstanding form – hundreds of years – but it was mostly a single panel – a caricature, a punchline – not a moving vaudeville of the brutal slap-stick of how the political intersects with the personal. To make the political cartoon move, that’s a stroke of genius.

I mention Maus because it’s probably not possible to come at In the Shadow of No Towerswithout knowing who Art Spiegelman is and what he has written. This is Art Spiegelman’s story of 9/11, raw and only barely filtered. He deliberately echoes Mausat points, his cartoons of himself morphing into the mouse-self of his story of the Holocaust. That Spiegelman is a Jew, and the child of Holocaust survivors himself is a vital part of how he reacts to this event. My father always said the smell of the smoke in the camps was indescribable. Now I understand what he meant. That he is a New Yorker is another; the revelation that he is not a rootless cosmopolitan, like he always fancied himself to be. He’d learned to keep his bags packed from his parents, but in the event, he realized he had more invested than he thought in that most cityest of cities. I understand now why some Jews did not leave leave Berlin, even after Kristallnacht. 

I read it today on the couch while my daughter played Barbies and bugged me. “That book is for kids,” she said, gesturing to the over-large board book format.

“No,” I said. “It really isn’t.”

“If it has pictures, it’s for kids,” she retorted, decisively. Five is a very certain age.

The sparse panels of this sparse book were intended to be a weekly output, but the ways of trauma and its aftermath would not run on a timetable. Weeks would pass, and Spielgelman would smoke a thousand cigarettes and watch a thousand hours of the news cycle and the images and their attendant words would be unwritten. Nothing runs linearly in this book, it’s just or essentially a series of narrative snapshots, the kind that are absolutely and completely impossible years after the event. There’s a moment somewhere where he talks about reading Philip K. Dick in the aftermath, and I totally felt what he was about, the feeling I had of alternate history at the time. This cannot be so. When Spiegelman would write himself as the mouse character from Maus, this doubly, triply third person, even while the I is all over this book, I don’t even have a verb to contain this clause.

This book ends more in gesture than in conclusion, a final essay on the comic form as developed in the days when Hearst and Pulitzer went after each other in the Sunday Special. It made sense to me how this ended in backward-looking cataloging of the form, made so uneasy by all these events we humans keep enacting on one another. I’ve been waffling on how to assign a star rating – certainly, this isn’t perfect by any stretch, but as an imperfect reflection of a time that has been digested down to a sleek narrative that we’re not going to talk about – it’s perfect. It’s perfect because it’s so decidedly personal, the kind of personal that gets where it is coming from, and has no idea where it’s going.

On 9/11/01 time stopped. On 9/12/01 clocks began to tick again. But everyone knew it was the ticking of a giant time bomb

The other shoe has yet to drop.

Light by M. John Harrison

Now this is one of the weirdest ass books I’ve read in a long while. This is not a criticism, just an observation. It’s really defying me to encapsulate the story and themes in 50 words or less, but I’ll try to give it a whirl. Three different plots lines follow three different people in three different times. This is not really accurate either: two of these time periods are the same, or overlap, and one of these people is not really a person anymore, but a sentient space ship working on the purpose for a weirdass alien artifact. The contemporary story follows a serial killer who is working on quantum computing. The third follows a man who has just been dumped out of a tank and is running about in something approximating a Noir plot, but with lots of cyberpunkery as ornament. 

This book made me have a couple revelations about genre, and for that I thank it. I don’t generally enjoy super hard science fiction because it’s really weird and schematic. The authors tend to get their duuuuuude on about concepts, and then they forget about good writing and character and all that. I’m up for this occasionally, as I have humanities-type person aversion to reading about science, so I enjoy hard sf for the narrative wrapper that it puts around scientific thought. I’d rather eat glass than read something written non-fictionally about the Technological Singularity (c.f. Kurtzweil, et al.) but it’s cool as a bit of play in a story. (Also, I know, please don’t freak out, that the TS is more bullshit and masturbation than *actual* scientific thought. It was just the first thing I thought of that I would rather see in fiction than in a treatise or similar.)

Anyway, I think it might be time for a massive digression. I recently watched a pretty fascinating conversation go down on Goodreads between a romance novelist and a reader who doesn’t generally read romance. The author spent a lot of time explaining where she was coming from in terms of the characters, how she was trying to say something about sex addiction within the confines of the romance genre. This got me thinking, why did she confine herself to the romance genre? She talked about the editing process, how her publisher edited pretty hard, and how some things got lost in the mix. Why not try to publish something that would break out of the romance ghetto? 

I’m going to answer my own questions in true asshole fashion. She wrote a romance because that’s the genre she enjoys. I read Light because a friend of mine, who is also an sf nerd, gave this to me for my birthday, and he must have thought I’d enjoy this. And I did. The language is totally killer, slick with a sort of cyberpunky Noir damage, but with these quick sketches which nail character in short, hard strokes. I hadn’t really seen the relationship between Noir and cyberpunk before I read this; the way both tend to rely on hard-luck and the image of the Street; the chase and the mystery; the beauty of the flickering neon and ugly marketing of a gutter-level view on things. 

The code parlors, the tattoo parlors – all run by one-eyed poets sixty years old, loaded on Carmody Rose bourbon – the store-front tailor operations and chop joints, their tiny show windows stuffed with animated designs like postage stamps or campaign badges from imaginary wars or bags of innocent-coloured candy, were already crowded with customers; while from the corporate enclaves terraced above the Corniche, men and women in designer clothes sauntered confidently towards the harbour restaurants, lifting their heads in anticipation of Earth cuisine, harbour lights on the wine-dark seas, then a late-night trip to Moneytown – wealth creators, prosperity makers, a little too good for it all by all their own account, yet mysteriously energised by everything cheap and tasteless. Voices rose. Laughter rose above them.

But then the real heart of this story has to do with sex, and it’s totally uncomfortable and tricky as hell within a genre that doesn’t really lend itself to that. I love science fiction like the brother I never had, but space opera, cyberpunk, doesn’t generally have much to say about early childhood trauma, internalized body issues, sexual abuse. Or if it does, it says it in ways that are stupid and juvenile. (Sorry, science fiction. *arm punch* You know I love you.) Why did Harrison choose to write about this in this genre? Who the fuck knows? But probably because this is a genre he enjoys, and he clearly has fun in it & knows the idiom like a fever dream. 

SPOILERS BELOW

So my mention of the technological singularity in the first part of the review wasn’t a total accident, although my equation it with scientific thought mostly was. Harrison brushed up against the singularity in the almost god-like Shrander, and in the ways that bodies are replaced and renewed, put on ice, cloned, proxied, etc. Science is often a collection of data, but those data are put into narrative by scientific thought and theories; the hypothesis is a story looking for causality. Sometimes I think all the ridiculous “theorizing” that goes on about the singularity – how it is already here, how it will make human life perfect or something, is this strange narrative that says more about our discomfort with our bodies than anything. Harrison kind of rips this apart. Seria Mau becomes disembodied because of childhood sexual abuse, but taking the body away doesn’t take away her trauma. She keeps murdering her human cargo – sorry for this bad phrase, but it kind of works – because they keep having sex. The narrative, fractured though it is, drives her to heal her own fractures and get her body back. Her brother twinks out in a tank, living in stories that play for him in the cliched idiom of the Noir plot, and his non-seeing is part of his not-seeing in childhood, not understanding what was happening to the sister he loves.

END SPOILERS

I guess I’ll just say one last thing, not under cover of spoiler  This book does not make a lot of sense in the end, in terms of plot-lines, and lots of reviews seem to grumble and imply that you need multiple reads to dig it all. Maybe. But I think it’s pretty cool how the symbols just sort of rolled together like the patterns on dice, and didn’t slip-knot into a hard conclusion, but into the impression of a conclusion, the bones held in the hand for the next hard throw. Inside the hand is bones too. Ah.