Sharp Teeth: Domestic God and Dogs

Barlow takes the Homeric fire, tosses on a bunch of kerosene, toasts a couple of marshmallows until they bubble blackly, and then eats them with a grin. Then he throws on a couple of tires for good measure and leans back for a long, slow pull on a hip-flask. Man. I’ve been doing the sputtering flail whenever I try to describe Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow to people: it’s a free verse novel! about werewolves! an L.A.! Quit backing away like I’m a crazy person because I’m totally for serious and so is Barlow.

I’m the kind of dork who flips out when I read in one of the blurbs for this book that says it’s written in blank verse. Godamn it, blank verse has meter, my friends, and this does not. This is free verse. I’m also the kind of dork who has an opinion about free verse, generally, which goes something like this: free verse is for the lazy. No, no, calm down; I’m also enough of a dork to defend e. e. cummings with my dying breath for relying on other, cooler, more chthonic prosodic stylins. Sure, he’s kind of responsible for a bunch of lamers thinking it’s okay to just write crap all over the page and call it poetry, but that’s like blaming [some historical figure] for [later, sucky historical movements]. You know what I mean. (And I’m not talking about [Ayn Rand] and [Objectivism], for the record.)

The dorkiness will keep on coming when I try to relate my feelings about the Epic. I’m no Classics major; that train of inquiry more or less ended when a history prof in my freshman year gave the following question as a mid-term exam: Compare the Fall of Greece to the Fall of Rome. Um, does “fuck you” count as an answer? So, my relationship with the Epic begins with John Milton and then terminates in Alexander Pope. It’s been a while since I’ve sung this tune, but let’s see if I can hit the high notes: Milton translated the Epic into the vulgar language of English, and much like the translation of the bible into the vulgar language of English, both ended in a profoundly local sense of divinity and identity. Milton grappled with a Mediterranean God/form in his own tongue, and it changes that form, the God, and the tongue in ways that cannot be counted. 

Pope tootles along almost a century later, and knowing he couldn’t be Milton, broke his Epic musings into two things: he translates Homer’s epic into fucking heroic couplets, which is, like, the most insane thing ever, trust me, and then writes what he calls a “mock epic”:The Rape of the Lock. I don’t really know what to say about The Rape of the Lockother than it makes me seriously nuts on several levels. It’s goofy; it’s in absolutely more heroic couplets; it uses the word “rape” in an already (at the time) archaic sense that means “theft”. It’s been a while since I’ve hefted this tome, but I do know that a thousand proverbs in English come out of The Rape of the Lock. It’s catchy as hell. You can dance to it, even though it kind of pisses you off. So, your English prof would say at this time, the Epic is dead. Long live the Epic.

So. Then. Well. *cough cough* The epic didn’t really die there, and then English got itself transported to America and hit the Pacific ocean and sat down on the California coast and thought, “Oh, fuck, man”. There’s The Golden Gateby Vikram Seth which is a sort of prose poem/epic Tales of the City. Fantastic, and worth a looksee, seriously. It’s funny; it’s light; it’s written in the Onegin stanza which has a kind of loosey-goosey conversational style to it, despite being rhymed-and-metered. The opening: 

To make a start more swift than weighty 
Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon 
A time, say, circa 1980, […:]

Ha! Milton may have invoked the wrong muse when he began Paradise Lost, and Seth just sketched her briefly, but Sharp Teeth takes this a step farther. 

Let’s sing about the man there
at the breakfast table

No muse. Let’s just sing. Let’s just boogey it out on this California coast in the twisting idiom of supernatural Noir, which is both tired tired tired like the detritus of the American Dream and open open open like the frontier that ends at the Pacific ocean and breaks into the thousand ethnic neighborhoods. The epic at its heart cares and is concerned about God in its many guises; Sharp Teeth is no different. But since Pope elevated the silly to the profound, the epic in English can throw in the kitchen sink, and Barlow does, in spades. 

I say there are werewolves, but this isn’t the kind of genre fiction that gives a shit about silver bullets and the lame specifications of rule-bound supernaturalism. People become animals. They become these sleek, domestic beings because they are beaten until they change or they share the blood of another werewolf, or because they break with grief after an act of kindness shatters the darkness they have cultivated so closely. There’s a lot here about love, and kindness, about cruelty, about the prime mover and his ineffable indifference and old Wile E. Coyote who lopes into the grand creation and arranges a thousand coincidences that arrange themselves into the doofy haphazardness of our lives. 

I’m in love. I still won’t release my unease with free verse; that’s the fur on my hackles that I simply won’t shave off. This isn’t tight prose, but I like the shaggy dog of its looseness, which says things like:

The secret must stay
and – according to the scientists – 
the love will live.
The heart is quite comfortable with secrets.
After all, its home is a dark wet place
tucked in among all the other organs
who aren’t talking either. 

I’ve run off the end of the cliff. Love is the anvil that will hit me when I drop. Hail Muse. 

The Hidden Goddess: Second Verse, Same as the First!

Second verse, same as the first! 

Just kidding. 

Sort of. 

I liked the first of this series, The Native Star by M.K. Hobson, almost despite myself. The opening is rough, like a chainsaw working out the bite into the flesh of the log. But it finds its bite partway through the book in a way that treats American history with respect, even though I wish a little more of that history made it into the book. Or, you know, in a way that mattered. 

Second verse, same as the first. By which I mean, this epilogue starts with some seriously interesting stuff about Grant’s presidency and alt-history stuff about the sources for the American Civil War, and then, and then, well, nevermind all that! I’m not really complaining, I guess, because Hobson took some things about the first book that I really sparkled on and expanded them – like the effects of gender on the credomancy explained in the first book – the magic of belief – in the character of Miss Jesczenka. I almost wanted her to chuck Emily – our heroine from the first book – and focus on the spectacular Miss Jesczenka, who articulates an astonishingly personal and accurate ambivalence about the experience of being a woman in a misogynist society. Just, good Lord, she’s so awesome. 

It’s not even so much that I’m bagging on Emily – she is a fine main character, with her fish-out-of-water folksy ways – but I felt like the inevitable second book issues between Emily and her paramour, Dreadnought (oh, just barf on the names here, even though they are explained better in this outing) fell into a lot of lameness traps. Emily and Dreadnought (ugh) spend a lot of the first book sniping at each other in that antipathy-is-attraction way, while here, they are kept apart by a bunch of logistics and the occasional bullshit misunderstanding. Some of the misunderstandings were valid – Emily’s search for her birth parents, and the varying allegiances and mis-allegiances found and lost by her questings were spot on – but sometimes it was like, ZOMG IMMA MISUNDERSTAND SOMETHING I JUST WALKED IN ON THAT IS EASILY MISCONSTRUED. Bah. 

Emily and Dreadnought’s (ugh) relationship is never anything more that paint-by-numbers – right down to the argument-ending kisses he plants on her more than once – which, I would like to know if that has ever actually worked for a dude irl. I’m not sure why the wisdom is that lovers have to be kept apart in book two, but I’ve see it often enough for it to be a thing. Shame, really, because there were a number of developments that I could easily imagine Dreadnought (ugh) and Emily tackling together, because the implications had more than enough potential for conflict between them to arise – real conflicts, rather that logistical bumbling and iffy misunderstandings. The baddie here is so over the top she’s maybe hard to take seriously, but certain political situations were neat enough to keep me from focusing on the unreality of the bad guy’s motivations. 

It’s been a while, but I felt like the tone of this book was more consistent, and more consistently goofy than the first, though I do not mean that as a dig. A failing of the first book might be that that it expected me to take some very silly stuff seriously, while here there’s some very serious stuff that might have been treated more lightly than it should have been. The question of tone is a tricky one, one that I don’t have an easy answers for, though I get the difficulties of managing a story that is equal parts end-of-the-world, banter-y romance, and alt-history. That the tone is managed as well as it is is certainly something. 

The ending dot dot dots to a certain kind of romantic completeness, which both irritates and satisfies in equal measures. I went to look for the next book in this series – that’s how on the hook I am – and it looks as though the narrative of Emily and her Dreadnought (ugh) will be skipped over to writhe in the stories of their kids. Which, boo a little bit. Given the end, I would like to hear some stuff about how Dreadnought (ugh) deals with…some things, how he copes with losing something fairly vital to his personality. Love is the answer and all, but, as the narrative here says, it’s just a start. Too bad that’s all we get here.

Review: Walking Dead: Seed

(Spoilers for season two.)

Season three of AMC’s The Walking Dead started with what is beginning to be the show’s usual bang up premiere episode. Like the first and second season premieres, “Seed” uses action and set pieces to convey stakes in a spare, compact manner. The opening sequence right before the shrieking violins of the titles has minimal dialogue and no music, a silent evocation of how dire things have become. The members of the Rickocracy – I still haven’t quite forgiven the season two finale’s hammy “This is not a democracy!” speech, delivered in Lincoln’s questionable Southern dialect – are functioning now as a well-oiled (if somewhat oily) team. In the house, walkers down, into the cabinets, collapse on the floor. Season two was eventually a quagmire, despite the masterful zombie herd on the highway sequence it had as opener, so we’ll see if season three can keep up its game.

There are some auspicious changes to our less than merry Rickocrats though. Post-apocalyptic stories tend to have close to their little hearts a commentary about the construction of society, the nature of leadership and the led, an us versus us versus them. These are lifeboat situations writ large, and with teeth. When you get right down to it, the zombies (or walkers – which, why are they never called zombies?) are such formidable creatures because they have no individuality. There are no leaders, no orders, just an infinitely scalable motive-of-one: consume. Survivors survive by being more like them, not by wandering off individually after bickering about shit that doesn’t matter.

In the second season, Rick’s strange deference to Hershel’s insanity, though understandable to a degree because of what we know about Rick, and all that mooning around after undoubtedly zombified children didn’t make for the best of television. All those monologues looking out over the fields with Hershel’s watery, soulful eyes – what we need here is a walker attack. Wake up. But even when we got them, Hershel persisted in a leadership based on fantasy, and it got hard to respect Rick for respecting Hershel. It gets to be a problem when you’re rooting for the bad guy, Shane – though, of course, on some level you’re meant to. But it’s an even bigger problem when Shane’s often cogent critiques of how they were living were buried under a bunch of cartoon villainy.

Hershel, Shane and Rick were three different models of leadership, and it bugs me that Shane’s more reality-based model – he was right a thousand times about the group’s need to sac up and learn some real skills – was run to such ridiculously self-defeating nihilism. Hershel was there to act as counterpoint to Rick’s boy scouting; he clung to the old world so hard that he denied reality itself. Sure, it got most of his family killed and the farm overrun, but it’s not like those characters showed up with anything but bullseyes on them, so it was hard to care. I guess my real problem is in characterization, again and again, where Hershel seemed swathed in this Quaker Oats commercial aura, lending his absolutely indefensible position – this is not happening – a gravitas it didn’t deserve.

In “Seed”, Rick is obviously just holding it together, and the group is exhausted and beset. But they are finally a group, and despite a few questionable decisions, they are not behaving like idiots right and left. And the questionable decisions were obviously made to heighten spectacle, which I don’t really count as a bad thing. Sure, they probably should have just banged at the gates and poked zombies in the head with sticks to clear the yard – ammunition does not grow on trees – but the clearing scene with everyone, including last season’s deadweights (har har), taking down zombies was pretty thrilling, and showed us how much this group has changed. What happens to Hershel though, that was a questionable decision that could have been better played.

Though the finding and clearing of the prison didn’t have much of a narrative arc – in many ways, this felt like a part one – it was heartening to see the minimal dialogue be functional. (And to see T-Dog get any lines at all.) The problems tend to happen on Walking Dead when people open their mouths, with characters espousing positions willy nilly without regards to character. But here, the one monologue was grounded in the situation, working out a number of logical if unpleasant consequences of them all being infected. And it was delivered by Lori(!), whose sole motivation in the past has been “womens be crazy and inconsistent lol.”

There’s a good chance this season will mire in the same crappy characterization and bad dialogue, but this was an exciting beginning. I know that the showrunners have said that the show will not follow the plot of the comics, but given how The Governor played there, the potential for corny cartoon villainy is still very much present. Which would be a shame, really, because having Rick run up against a leader almost, but just not quite like him would be a much richer conflict. It would probably be less badass though, I admit, and the badassery of Walking Dead is certainly its strong point. Viva le Rickocracy.

And speaking of badass, more Michonne please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genre and The National Book Award

Laura Miller over on Salon wrote an interesting piece called “National Book Awards: Genre fiction dissed again” about the exclusion of genre fiction from the major book prizes, most notably this year’s big it book, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. My widdle ears always perk when people get talking about genre fiction, and how the barriers are maintained between genre fiction – which, by even the most conservative definition, constitutes the vast and overwhelming number of books produced not just today, but forever – and literary fiction. Looked at a certain way, literary fiction is this funny little enclosure, narrowly defined and aggressive in its narrowness. See, for example, a recent statement by the Booker prize head judge:

Referring to last year’s Man Booker chair Stella Rimington’s much-criticised focus on finding “readable” books for the prize’s shortlist, Stothard said that while “readability can be a very interesting thing, great art for the most part resists it to a degree”.

“If we make the main criteria good page-turning stories – if we prioritise unargued opinion over criticism – then I think literature will be harmed,” Stothard told the Independent. “Someone has to stand up for the role and the art of the critic, otherwise it will just be drowned – overwhelmed. And literature will be worse off.”

—“Books bloggers are harming literature, warns Booker prize head judge” The Guardian, 25 Sept 2012

Maybe this isn’t to my point exactly, in that Stothard is mostly bellyaching about readers writing wrong about his precious books and somehow harming them in the process, but I think it goes to showing how narrow the parameters for quality can be defined in the literary fiction awards game. Readability – which, I kinda hate that mushy adjective – is contradictive of quality. There’s this vaunted art that resists its reader. Stothard plays the stereotype of the anti-populist, abstruse, literary wanker that genre readers sometimes use as a straw man, but apparently the straw man has legs, just to conflate two cliches into a straw monster. You can just see him manning the battlements of his little enclave, worried that all this wrong thinking and reading might crack his narrow definitions. Jesus, man, put the monocle away. We’re not going to hurt your books with our pedestrian taste. Part of it makes me think, bah, let ’em have it. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of awards for the myriad of genre fictions. You can keep your battlements, and we’ll just continue on over here in the genre sections of the bookstore.

But what bugs me is the the National Book Prize has as its mission “to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America.” Which, explain again how once a book gets tagged with a Scarlet G, it is neither culturally valuable nor good writing? We’re losing the war on reading. Year after year the number of readers and the number of books they read decline. There’s a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is that reading must compete with plenty of other media. (Which I don’t count a bad thing, per se, and I don’t have a lot of patience with jeremiads about How Television Is Dumb when you’ve got Deadwood or The Wire or Breaking Bad out there blowing minds right and left.) But some of it is the sense, perpetuated by such fine fellows as Mr. Slothrop, that reading should be A Chore and No Fun. The inclusion of genre works into the literary fold can only be good for readers to expand their tastes and enhance their enjoyment. I’m guilty of hanging out in genre ghettos; it’s easy to beeline to the science fiction section of the bookstore and stay there.

However, one of the more profoundly eye-opening reading projects I’ve undertaken in the past few years has been attempting to get a handle on the romance novel. I may have embraced my love of genre early on with geek things like science fiction or fantasy, but I would not have nudged with a barge pole anything directed at the market of romance readers. There was the occasional break-out, such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, but that had a literary gloss – it’s an update of Pride and Prejudice! – that rendered it acceptable to read on the bus. (Also, I know Bridge isn’t strictly speaking a romance novel, but it does fall into the related category of chick-lit, which is mostly characterized by its female readership.) Setting aside the sticky business of taste, one of the reasons I eschewed the romance novel had to do with the same anti-populist notions about the genre of romance – if it is “readable” and “popular”, that is de facto an indicator of poor quality.

My romance reading project did not end in a wholesale embrace of the genre – I still have a lot of issues with the conventions and expectations in the genre as a whole – but the process of figuring out those conventions and expectations has been immensely rewarding to me as a reader. And I have found some fine novels, and loosened up immensely about what I will be seen reading, and what section of the bookstore I’ll be caught dead in. Harkening back to my skiffy roots, I get a good laugh about this flow chart detailing the geek hierachy:

[This link is too old, sorry]

This hierarchy could be writ large over the literary genres, starting with literary fiction, and then branching down to genres with their varying cultural currency, ending in turtles. But it’s turtles all the way down, man. All kinds of turtles can be assessed with regards to merit, whether they have detectives or spaceships or love triangles in them, and I’m not just talking about a vague “grade on a curve” metric that often is invoked when genre comes up. Good writing is good writing is good writing.

I really dug this line from Miller’s piece because I felt like it got at the ways that genre is often a definition NOT residing in the books themselves, but the community that self-identifies as the genre’s readership and therefore seeks to define that readership. “On the other side, aggrieved genre partisans feel justified in ignoring books they might otherwise enjoy simply because the people who like those books don’t respect the books that they like.” We read what we know, therefore we read who we know,  and we’ll barricade the genres against each other. And when anyone jumps the barriers we get uncomfortable. Much gnashing of teeth has gone in the sf community over Margaret Atwood’s assertions that she is not writing science fiction. Of course you are! Durr. But she was probably right in saying that she is not a science fiction writer, not active in the community process by which a genre defines itself. Genre is on some level also a marketing distinction, putting like with like, and the biggest fights seems to go down on the peripheries. Is The Road best shelved in science fiction, given its post-apocalyptic setting? Or does it reside with the rest on the McCarthy books in General Fiction? Probably the latter, McCarthy being known for what he is known.

I feel like I’m coming back around to arguing that it’s okay for literary prizes to ignore genre fiction, by allowing that writers can self-define what kind of writers they are, but that isn’t where I want to end up. Of course writers can say anything they like about what they think they are writing. But, when we’re talking about awarding prizes on the basis of the amorphous basis of “literary quality”, I simply do not cede the field to cultural gate-keepers and authorial intent. Prizes, by definition, come down from on high, but they are meant for readers. They are there to celebrate the best of literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing. Wait, haven’t I heard something like this before? Oh, of course I have – it’s the very mission of the National Book Award. We are at your gates. We mean you no harm. Let us in.

The Hobbit: The Nursery is Where It’s At

I’ve undertaken to read this to the boy; our first real book with chapters. Richard and I alternate reading at bedtime, so the experience is kind of fractured, but so far I’m loving it. I got to be trolls tonight. I do brilliant trolls. 

—–

When I was six, my dad, who was more the reader-at-nighter of my parents, endeavored to read The Hobbit to me. He got to the part about the giant spiders in Mirkwood, and I promptly lost my damn mind, and begged him to stop reading. He did. My room at the time was this odd room that couldn’t rightly be said to be on any floor of the house but its own: you reached the top of the stairs to the second floor, and then there was a door at the end of the long, Victorian hallway, then then another set of maybe five stairs to a small room with sloping ceilings, kind of like a dormer, but not. I couldn’t be called an arachnophobe, exactly, but I was regularly terrified by mosquitoes that would somehow get into the bedroom while I was sleeping, drink my blood, and then whine around me in the dark. The ceilings were dotted with the bug and blood marks when my dad would have to come in after I started screaming and hunt down the offending insects with a shoe. So boo on you, mosquitoes, and boo on giant spiders. 

When I was eight, he started again, and the intervening two years gave me the composure necessary to finish the tale. I loved it. I didn’t really go on a big rampage of reading fantasy at this point, although I did like the Lloyd Alexander stuff I found in the school library. But something about this story made me want to write it myself, and I set to telling the tale of some creature who never went on adventures until he did and then all manner of craziness ensued. I don’t know where any of this writing has gone, and in truth I don’t think I really want to see it, but I’m now stuck by the power of Tolkien’s writing to make other people want to write. I just recently finished reading Meditations on Middle-Earth: New Writing on the Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien by Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond E. Fei, and if there is any commonality to the stories of latter day fantasists, it’s that being readers of Tolkien made them writers. (I mean, shit yeah, writers are always readers first – duh – but I’m just going to go on record as saying that if an author claims never to read, then they aren’t an author, they’re a dumb word product generator/marketer, and no reader should ever encourage them. There’s enough crappy word-product coming out of people who actually give a tinker’s damn, bless them.) There’s something exceptional about Tolkien’s world that drives people to tell stories themselves, something weird and hind-brain, coiled up in our mystical and commonplace daily word usage that jumps from the dinner table anecdote to the broad, unending vistas of the otherworldly. Man, just thinking about it makes me all hot. 

I started reading this to my own son now that he is six. I fretted a bunch about the giant spiders, but of course it turns out that I am not him, or he is not me, and we don’t share the same fears. I’ve read The Hobbit maybe a half dozen times, or had it read to me, but I’ve never before been in the position to read it aloud to someone else. I thoroughly recommend having some babies for the purposes of reading stuff aloud to them. Barring that, as that could possibly be irresponsible and expensive, take a very patient lover and spend some time in a darkish room in your pajamas and really roll the tale out. (This stuff may not be sexy in the strictest sense, but literacy is hot however you slice it, and this is the kind of tale for the telling.) Be the freaking trolls, wield Sting while you shout attercop and slash down your arachnid foes, smoke and steam and lie like Smaug in the ruined halls, squeak and scheme and try to avert a battle of five armies, and fail, but fail in the honesty of smallness. The story rips along for the most part, a busy enough tale to keep the attention of distractable six year olds for maybe half the time. This may sound like I’m damning it with faint praise, but half is maybe the best for which a parent can hope.

This most recent reading has given me an appreciation for the role of the narrator in The Hobbit. The narrator’s often a tricky beast, capable of bringing down the entire narrative house of cards with his or her weird intrusions and extra-narrative knowledge. Who the hell are you, narrator? Stop that right now! But when done well, the narrator can be this sly commentary on the mechanics of plot and character. I’m thinking here of the narrator in Persuasion, whose voice rings with the authority and social barbarism that is everything the (very beloved, and almost idealized) main character is not. Narrators are often genderless, but the Persuasion narrator is almost a counterpoint to Anne’s hyper-femininity, not male exactly, but differently female. You see this when one of the Musgroves injures herself in the seaside town. The prose is simple, descriptive, a series of declarations. Anne within this narrative takes charge in the most feminine of ways, and manages to tell everyone what to do without ever using the imperative; indeed, I think even without finishing a sentence, but I don’t have the book in front of me. (I’m so far off topic, it’s awesome to behold. I’ll try to bring it back around.) The narrator details the domestic with her clear prose; the character is the domestic with her silence and demurrals. 

Tolkien’s not much interested in the questions of gender. Now that I’ve typed maybe the most insanely obvious statement I’ve ever written in a review, (gold star! high fives!) when I give it some thought, I realize that women in The Hobbit function as a sort of bracketing device. There’s some mention of Bilbo’s mother at the start, descended from the Old Took himself, and Bilbo has to confront the acquisitive Sackville-Bagginses when he gets home, but at its heart, The Hobbit is concerned with what happens when a quiet boy is thrust into the world of men. Bilbo is not child at the beginning, but he’s comfortable and domestic, puffing about getting seed cakes and dratting unwelcome visitors who mess up his kitchen. Throughout the tale, he pines for food and bed, and those lovely old standards of feminine affection, the pocket handkerchief. I don’t think anyone much uses those anymore, but my Grandfather did, and those worn and frayed squares of cloth, washed, folded and placed habitually in the pockets of his jackets by my Grandmother, are one of the few items I took from his belongings when he died. For me, and it’s possible that I’m an eccentric in this regard, the pocket handkerchief is an emblem of the quiet and commonplace intersections that take place between partners in traditional gender roles, and Grandpa’s hanky, and his love for Grandma, and her love back makes me all weeping and nostalgic for a social structure that I habitually scorn, wasn’t raised in, and have no interest in bringing back, even if such a project weren’t doomed to utter failure. 

The narrator in the Hobbit consistently situates the events of the story in a mythic past, while the story itself plays out a very different set of values than the a traditional heroic legend. The story begins more in the style of the anecdote, with its digressions and definitions, and only very slowly works into the mode of the fairy tale. The narrator defines hobbits, gossips a bit about Gandalf, Bilbo’s parents and house, and then a few pages in does the “once upon a time” thing: “By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was more green and less noise…” The dwarves – my spell check is insisting on dwarfs, but it can go screw itself – intrude on Bilbo’s peace, tell tales of gold and dragon slaying and other glorious pursuits, and it’s the tale that sent him puffing out the door. Bilbo, the most hobbitest of hobbits, which is by definition the most domestic, social and quiet of beings, gets swept off into the world of legends, and I think it’s totally fascinating that Bilbo here functions as a kind of reader-proxy. I sit in the most domestic of settings, as my father did, read out this tale of adventure to my children in the safety of their own bedrooms, and Bilbo’s constant whining and dratting undercuts the honor of war and the mythos of danger. The boy loves the wizards and dangers, but part of the fascination is born of fear, and Bilbo keeps reminding us that the fear is real, hungry and uncomfortable. 

This is where the narrator comes in. He – and I’m going to call the narrator a he, because it’s the only thing that makes sense – is the voice of the present, who simultaneously places this story in the mythic past and then confounds the story’s mythic status. There are lots of fairy tales and the like about plucky younger sons who make their ways through the world using luck and wit, and I think one could mistake Bilbo for one of these, he’s really much more of a Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo-style bungler and coward. I mean this in the best possible way. We all hate Fred, with his fearless masculinity, (or should, because c’mon, man) and Shaggy/Bilbo isn’t so much feminine as differently masculine, the kind of masculine that doesn’t sit upon hordes of gold with nothing to eat, but instead pines for a good meal and a hanky. The hanky ends up being the standard of femininity, carried with Bilbo on his journey, pined for in the dangerous world of men, their heroic wars, travels and squabbles. Bilbo carries idea of the handkerchief with him, trying to apply the less aggressive, less “heroic” modes of conflict resolution to the problems ahead of him. He sneaks, he burgles, he riddles: all the quiet activities of the clown, the the weakling, the sensitive boy, the Shag and Scoobs of the world. 

I realize now I have a hobby horse about Tolkien and his experience with WWI, but I’m going to get up and ride it anyway. The heroic tale of the national hero, whose ethnic identity is wound up with his goodness, managed to get his ass completely mowed down by the mechanism and mass-production of the world wars. There are no heroes in WWI, only silly and tragic figures like the Red Baron, who flew the symbol of the future of warfare using the outdated social models of the Romantic Past. Bilbo puts a face on the cannon fodder, and doesn’t so much speak to power as pick its pockets, get knocked in the head, and survive due to to love of comfort over the love of glory. Here is Bilbo’s response after being found, unconscious, at the end of the battle:

“Victory after all, I suppose!” he said, feeling his aching head. “Well, it seems a very gloomy business.” 

And again, after being led to the Thorin’s bedside, as Thorin lays dying he says to Bilbo:

“There is more good in you than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”

Then Bilbo turned away, and went by himself, and sat alone wrapped in a blanket, and whether you believe it or not, he wept until his eyes were red and his voice was hoarse.”

I’ll try not to go off about Tolkien’s directional metaphors; how the West is often synonymous with tradition, the conservative, the homey, even while it carries the implications of death and stagnation. The East is where you go to find your death and salvation, in Tolkien’s most Christian of terms, but it is not a path of ease and comfort. 

I was also struck, in this reading, by Tolkien’s fierce and loving descriptions of landscape. One of the reasons Middle Earth seems so real is that Tolkien conjures dirt and rock, tree and water in this incredibly solid way. I was lucky enough to be the one who read the section in which Smaug batters and destroys the rock ledge where Bilbo and the dwarves had been camped in their attempts to infiltrate the mountain, and the majesty and violence of that description really moved me. It made me think of the devastation of Europe, the earth itself laid low by the engines of war. The earth of Middle Earth is a love song and a eulogy to the lost landscape of Tolkien’s youth. He and many other young men were swept out the door on the path to glory and victory, and the dragons they slew ended up being the myth of progress and heroism. Tolkien was savvy enough to see that the heroic quest is almost coded within the language, and that rewriting such a thing requires not just a simple reversal, but a reordering of heroism. Thorin, by all rights, is the hero of the story; his is the will that sets the plot in motion, and his temper and anger are the hallmarks of heroes stretching back to Achilles. Bilbo is not an anti-hero, who simply turns his anger and his will against the things for which the hero stands, but something subtler and more cunning: the fool. Sure, nothing would ever get done with a Bilbo in charge, but let us hope and pray that our Thorins can have clown such as Bilbo there to remind them that a myth is more useful in the nursery than on the battlefield. 

Tolkien was famously irritated that fairy tales had been “relegated to the nursery”, but I humbly think he’s wrong, that the telling of such stories to boys who will become men is the first order of business for we mothers who pray and hope for world in which the test of manhood is not glory but some courage and some wisdom, blended in equal measure. 

A Short Rampage on Whitewashing Earthsea

It’s maybe a secondary sport of readers to both long for and bitch about the film adaption, like betting on the sidelines during a prize fight. Back when I worked retail, one of my co-workers and I would amuse ourselves for hours trying to cast a perfect Sandman film, although we always got hung up on who would direct, and who would play Death. 

Anyway, one of the most quietly awesome things about A Wizard of Earthsea is that LeGuin made her fantasy characters have dark skin. I don’t like physical descriptions of characters, because it’s so often beside the point and superfluous. (See also: sex scenes.) I’m willing to hand out exceptions: I think it’s important we know that Jane Eyre is plain, and that Rochester has a big forehead. (Big forehead …ifyouknowwhatImean.) But one of the most rousing criticisms of fantasy as a genre, for me, is about how horribly lily-white the standards of beauty are, how white=good, and black=bad, and how racial purity is a sign of moral purity. Yucky, yucky, yucky. So, Le Guin slyly steps in and makes her characters not-white: Ged with his red-brown skin, Vetch with his black; no violet cat-eyes for the women, no blondes. There is no moral correlation between skin color and moral worth, no component of sexual purity tied to blonde hair. (As a natural blonde, I have a whole bitch about this, but I’ll silence myself for the moment.)

So, along comes the SyFy Channel adaption – and yes, it still hurts me to write SyFy and it always will – and they fuck all of this up. Danny Glover as Ogion was the only, only, only thing that was okay, but Danny Glover is so classy he rises above. They turned Ged into a petulant white boy; they took every lovely thing about Ged’s un-heroics and turned them into a sick parody of themselves. I said this earlier in a private message to a friend, but I’ll say it out loud: maybe it doesn’t matter what the skin color of fantasy characters are – it’s not like the fictional worlds view race in anything like the way new millennium Americans do – but if it really doesn’t matter, then why are they always white? Le Guin herself had some pointed things to say about the matter, and you should totally read them.

A Wizard of Earthsea: Islands in my Mind

[You can find a sound recording of me reading this review here.]

I’ve read this at least twice since I signed onto GoodReads, and I haven’t worked up the nerve to review it. I don’t review some of what I read, for a variety of reasons. There’s the things I abandon too fast to say I’ve even read them, like What Would Jane Austen Do?. (I’ll tell you what she’d do: she’d put her own eyes out with a damn spoon, that’s what.) There’s things I get out from the library thinking they are something else, like The Lover. (Just fyi, this was NOT the semi-autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras. No. Not that.) There’s stuff related to my work that’s just too boring, even to someone in the trades, to work up much energy about. (I’m not even going to link to anything, but you don’t care, trust me.)

I haven’t reviewed A Wizard of Earthsea because I love it too much. I can see its failings. There are long, boring sections about sailing. The plot skips around haphazardly with too many coincidences and overtly symbolic actions. But…but…but…even now I struggle to define why this story keeps me coming back, year after year, almost always keeping me up late into the the night, the house silent but for the noise of my sleeping family breathing, the tectonic hum of the furnace, the muffled chime of the clock marking out the hours and half hours as I read and read and read. Reading is a private art. Sometimes I cultivate its craft as a shield against strangers as I move from here to there: the bus, the coffeeshop, the plane. Sometimes I read as a ward against the crush of people I love, when I visit family and need a half hour of not-family-togetherness. Sometimes I read because inside books is a blossoming world that transmits from the author’s mind to mine, and Earthsea is this kind of book for me, almost always undertaken in those odd times where I tuck in the edges of my life: too late, too early, at the hem of things.

I first read this when I spent a semester abroad, in London. I lived on the fifth floor, which the British would call the fourth floor, of a dismal walk-up run by a Fellini-esque French family presided over by a hard-nosed woman who appeared to wear clothing constructed solely out of garbage bags. I wasn’t old – only 24 – but old for the program, and the reversion to eating Ramen noodles, drinking only fluids that were comprised of lager, and not working laid me low in some serious way. I don’t remember how this book found its way into my hands, but I do remember sitting at my “desk”, my legs up on the corner, reading and subconsciously trying to find the perfect teeter on the back two legs of the chair.

Earthsea is a world with magic, and this can mean several things if you read a lot of fantasy. It can mean that the author is lazy, and needs a supernatural force to work out disastrous plotting. Magic can be a technology in disguise, a proxy for physics. At its very best, magic is language itself, one of those meta mind-jobs that spins you around and makes you rethink everything you say, because every word is stone that is thrown, falls, or sits, inert and stone-like, in its stony way. Earthsea’s magic is word-magic, based on names. Each person has a use-name, something they are called familiarly, and then a true name, something guarded and secret, because a name is power. Each thing has its thingness exposed by a sound, a word, but this reification isn’t simple. There is no Platonic word of making or unmaking, just the endless babble of the way the word-drops coalesce into puddle, puddle into river, river into a sea. So Sparrowhawk stands in the water and he is given his real name, Ged, at the cusp of his adolescence, and I read these actions, and my chair fell down, clump, onto all four legs. Oh God, oh Ged, the power of that, a true name.

There’s nothing in the plot of Earthsea that hasn’t been done before: a boy, a talented boy raised in obscurity, grows into his inevitable power. This is the basis of bazillions of young adult fictions (and regular fictions too, I guess): the Harry Potters & Bella Swans of fiction standing in for our youthful sense of exceptionalism – we are marked from youth by the smell of our blood, the stigmata of parental love. There’s all kinds of things we can blame our inevitable crushing realization that we are as common as rain – bad educations, bad luck, bad environments – but really…truly?…we are as common as rain, falling inexorably on trajectories based on the gravity of our own characters. So often, the protagonists of these fictions battle an external, caricatured evil, which always bums me out, because evil is so much less fun than this, so much more prosaic and common as the rain we are. If the bad in myself could be battled hand-to-hand; if I could vanquish my failings with kung fu, my adolescence (and my adulthood, I guess) might have looked entirely different, with fewer hurt feelings for everyone involved. So Ged, in the logic of a world with magic, creates a shadow being because of his youthful need to show-off and be right. The shadow of talent is arrogance, which is maybe not a stunning revelation, but a revelation often absent from the education of fictive heroes. (And maybe not the real life kind either, right? A hero is someone who gets other people killed, just to quote Joss Whedon.)

Lots of folk I love think fantasy is dumb, and it’s because fantasy puts its underpants on the outside of its clothes and jumps around using the roll from the paper towels as a sword yelling “high YAH”! It makes the metaphors manifest, and sure, I’ll totally grant that sometimes this just tiring in how juvenile and simplistic it is. But…but….but…sometimes the cardboard blade cuts me open and my guts fall steaming onto the ground, and then I realize that I’m not the guts, but the steam. (My metaphors have gone a little insane again, and I’m sorry.) This time through I noticed that the sequence with the dragons, which by all rights should be the culmination of the action, where the hero enacts heroics worthy of song, is just a thing that Ged does to avoid doing the harder thing, which is coming to terms with his own assholery. So here, at half-point through the book, our protagonist does the thing for which he will be famous, and then the real story begins. The plot becomes picaresque, haphazard, undirected, with blind alleys and odd moments – the old couple Ged meets on the desolate spit of land , abandoned, without language, was especially haunting for me, for example – but I admit it’s unnecessary, as is much of this wandering. But…but…but…I love that Le Guin tells the story of un-heroics, of a metaphorical growing up that doesn’t involve crushing the skull of an orc or whatever to prove you’re a Man.

I kind of want to talk about the final meeting between Ged and his shadow, because this is the first reading for me that that confrontation made complete sense, but I don’t want to hit the spoiler box and I think I’ve already blathered enough. I’ll just say that I feel like maybe…maybe…when Ged and Vetch sail off the edges of the map, and find the shifting, almost immaterial sands where Ged and the not-Ged say their final words to one another, maybe that sand is the beach of my reality, and they sailed right out of Earthsea into my mind, wherever that is. Le Guin used word-magic to create a place I keep coming back to, watching the way the islands rear up out of a place of mostly water, balancing in an equilibrium of earth and sea, movement and stillness. And her word-shadows bump up against the beaches of my mind laid squishingly over the water, and this makes me inside out, with my skin on the inside, transformed by words that find the true name of me.

Heart of Steel: I Love This Series Despite the First Book

Heart of Steel takes place in the same world as The Iron Duke, a profoundly alternate history where the Mongolian Golden Horde, using superior technology, slowly devastated Europe in the 1500s, and enjoyed several hundred years of complete control. In roughly 1800 – and this date is important – the titular Iron Duke of the first book broke the Horde’s technological enslavement of England. As befits a steampunk novel, much of this technology is patently ridiculous – nanotechnology, megolodons, gene splicing, chainsaw arms, &c – but this is engaged with the proper amount of hand-waving and acceptance. Brook does not make the mistake of trying to detail the history of this alternate history/technology too closely, but instead throws her efforts into creating a complex world of believable politics and motivations. Gee whiz.

I say the date is important, because even though this is steampunk, this is not your daddy’s usual Victorian gaslight playset. The referents are all solidly Regency/Georgian, from the name “Iron Duke” – this was Wellington, the man who routed Napoleon at Waterloo – or the sugar boycotts, which were bound up in Regency abolitionist movements. The sugar boycotts are mirrored here explicitly in a distrust of sugar – this was how the Horde deployed their controlling nanotech into the blood of the conquered – but also in a series of arguments about consumer choices and allegiances between the two sides of the American hot/cold war going on about slavery, though it is coded in terms like indenture. Honestly, I could go on and on about all the really cool shit Brook does encoding history, and the complicated ways one’s allegiances are never perfect, but a series of compromises between lesser evils and expedience.

Which brings me to a thing about genre, which is pretty much per usual for me. This is solidly marketed and sold as a romance novel, and that’s not wrong. Yasmeen is a mercenary captain of an airship with cat eyes and hot pants, and she is being pursued by one Archimedes Fox, a man whose exploits as a daredevil are written up as penny dreadfuls (sorry, I know this is an anachronistic term) by his sister. Unlike the central couple in The Iron Duke, this relationship is much less dominance/submission, almost chaste in its reserve. Archimedes decision to fall in love with Yasmeen and his strange justifications for his reserve (which don’t seem in keeping with his character) are part and parcel with the doled out endless frustration/final cure of the format. But, unlike The Iron Duke, the relationship doesn’t devolve into a 50 page sex interlude that profoundly fucks up the narrative. And look, I like sex interludes, especially when they move the emotional plot forward, something I think Brook normally excels at.

But back to genre. This is the smartest steampunk alt history I’ve encountered in a long, long time. With another cover and a different publisher, nerds would be all over this like corsets on cosplayers. Just to be clear, I don’t think nerds are somehow better than the romance reading audience that this is sold to, or that nerds and romance readers don’t overlap. While I struggled with it for a long time, mostly due to internalized sexism, I’m a romance reader myself, primarily in the genre confines I read in generally: scifi romance, paranormals, some historicals. But as a nerd, I think this would be something my people who haven’t embraced the romance genre would enjoy. I’ve bitched before about how genre as a marketing tool divides readerships in ways I think is unhelpful, and this is a shining example of that. And, especially because steampunk is so full of godamn shite. Here’s my digression. My husband loves him the steampunk. I’m probably going to misrepresent his feelings, and that’s okay because he’s almost never online to contradict me.

Anyway, back in the day we both read some of the formative novels in the genre, stuff like The Difference Engine or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Difference Engine has bloody brilliant ideas, wrapped in a fish-wrapper of boring. The technology is pushed just that much, leading to some interesting stuff about how the Victorians constructed criminality and the class system. Unfortunately, the rest of it was feh…zzzzz. League is more beholden to the pulp fictions of the Victorian era, a series of literary hat-tips that ramp to a statement about colonialism and the hero in that mode. To get to the misrepresentation, my husband has this big thing about the feel of technology, some sort of Ruskin-esque reappropriation of mass produced goods towards the individual purpose. I feel a little eye-rolly about a lot of this stuff, because I feel like much of steampunk cosplay is just as rigid as any other folk costume. You can tick off the elements: goggles, corset, walking stick, hat. It’s just another anti-establishment genre that establishes itself with a dress code and not an ethos.

But, when I’m not being a cranky bitch, I love this stuff. I love the interplay between consumerism and identity, and the ways steampunk, when it’s not busy playing dress-up, can get to the beginnings of industrialism and rough the origin, make it weird, lay it bare. I want all steampunk novels to be this smart, but then I also want them to be fun, and it’s a tricky line to walk, I think. Steampunk’s readership is a divided readership, and not even half of it is to my taste. The navigation between the pleasures of spectacle and those of considered alt history are at odds; this is an old argument about world-building versus character. I said there is some hand-waving here about exact origins of this world, but it’s nothing like the hand-waving in something like Soulless, where the alt-history takes a backseat to more pulpy concerns like killer umbrellas and werewolves. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy Soulless, I’m just noting its pleasures do not come from a richly realized alt history that will make you think. It’s the difference between costume for its own sake, and costume as disguise, and that’s what keeps me coming back to the genre, often stupid as it is.

So. I don’t know. I thought this split the difference between spectacle and consideration in a freaking fantastic way, even if I pretty much don’t give a shit about whether our lovers ever come to their inevitable perfection, because you know they will. I’m a certain kind of reader, a picky, nerdish sort, the kind of reader who was happy I had to hit google a half a dozen times to write this review to make sure I was getting my dates right. I’m Team Frak Yeah the way the world here is laid out. I think this book is much less pulpy than the cover might imply. Or possibly pulpy in just the right ways: zombies! airships! pirates! without sacrificing coherence for romantic union. The ending is rushed, I admit, and sometimes the world is confusing simply because there is so much going on, but I will take those problems happily. Brook kicks some serious nerd ass in this book, and I’m waiting for the next.

Pete, Drinker of Blood, Part 1

Sometimes I get the impression the universe is messing with me. A couple months ago, I was invited to a group which has as its mandate reading serialized novels – like Dickens or wait, holy cats, Madame Bovary was serialized? (so sayeth wiki) – in the manner they were originally published and consumed. I did my thing where I joined, lurked a bit, thought about serial fiction for a while, and then decided the whole thing was too much like work for me. Now, I’m not calling you weird, Serial Reading Cats, I just lack the patience to read a million page Dickens novel, let alone to take 4987 weeks to get through one. (I know. I am a total philistine when it comes to Dickens, and I’m very sorry for it.) (And I know you’re reading other stuff too.) 

But I think the exercise of trying to experience a completed work of art as originally experienced is worthy, if maybe a little doomed. My main experience with serial fiction is television, of course. (Comics are another heavily serialized contemporary form, but I almost always come at them well after the serial arc has been completed.) Though this is changing as the Internets and on-demand media fracture viewerships and toss a barrage of media at us so we’re always bound to miss a continuing series as it unfolds, some of my funnest watching experiences have happened in ongoing serial television. The X-Files was a Friday night destination for me, as was Star Trek, Buffy, BSG, and a bunch of other stuff that will only make me look even more nerdy than I have already freely admitted to. Half of the joy was the addictive buzz of turning down the lights, watching like a maniac, and then squealing like an idiot when the drama was enacted and then set up for the next week. There’s no cheating there. I’ve certainly gulped down series after the fact – Deadwood, Carnivale, even re-watches of Buffy or Firefly (whose on-air experience was seriously screwed in the first place, airing out of order) – but there’s something very different about consuming something that is understood to be finished (if not completed) as it happens versus after the fact. That the wait isn’t really enforced, that the conversation doesn’t have the same unknowing…

Dangit, it sounds like I’m totally bagging this group, and I’m not – I’m just bloviating out loud. The joys of consuming serial art while it’s being produced are social, on another level – these were fictions being consumed by other people too, and the week before the next fix would be punctuated by conversations with other viewers, chopping it up, predicting, nerding out, complaining. That group could function that way for those involved, and that is the beauty of the Internet. (The AVClub’s TV Club does some interesting articles as its critics re-watch series television.) My main serial television right now is Walking Dead, and it’s almost a sport for me to bitch about everyone and everything on that show – good lawd, the dialogue! the “characters”! – only to tune in the next week to see if Walking Dead can pull off another sublime action sequence in among all the godamn stupid whining. And then they do! And then I bitch and praise to everyone who will listen. I didn’t even watch much Sopranos, but I’ve gone to the homes of the HBO’d to eat junk food and watch along with the screaming fans, because it was totally fun. 

So, anyway, how the world is messing with me: Scott S. Phillips – who is a friend, in interests of full disclosure – sent me this opening bit of a serial novel he’s just put out. I spent some time checking for cameras, because, seriously, that’s creepy that I’d been thinking about the serial format in contemporary media, and then bang! Here it is. And, based on somewhat limited research by moi, it seems like the serial novel is having a comeback in teh age of teh Internet. It makes sense: bit-sized bits that are easily and cheaply downloadable, which can function as their own advertisement, or let you know without a full commitment that you don’t want any more of that. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, and then watching that basket, the writer can sell some eggs and keep laying. And then you can scramble them and…forget it, this metaphor officially does not work. You dig what I’m saying though, right? 

Pete, Drinker of Blood begins the story of the titular Pete, a sad-sack vampire who is schlubbing his way through a less than glamorous LA. The principles are established: Pete, the bartender he’s smitten with, and the badass vamp who is likely the antagonist of this story. The pace is good: bang! slowly revealing character and world-building, then bang! I’m admittedly biased, but I love the way Phillips tells stories, the way he turns idiom halfway so it’s surprising, the tragicomic defeatism of his main character. Pete’s obviously not in with the cool crowd, the Anne Riceian dudes in leather pants, who frequent a bar call the Emoglobin (hee!). He’s like a rat-eating Angel, before he got cool again and found Buffy, only he’s never ever been cool in the first place. There’s uneaten hamburgers and classic rock, and an interlude with a tiny model windshield. I guess I don’t want to say more for fear of spoilers, which is a little silly because it’s not like I can spoil something that isn’t even completed. But, you know. 

And now the long wait until next month…