tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80739483046251819072024-02-26T12:35:25.502-05:00The Stars at NoondayBooks, TV shows, video games, politics, what have you.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.comBlogger186125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-14365854388652912622017-12-31T23:59:00.000-05:002018-01-02T16:59:40.075-05:00Books read, 2017I didn't read very much prose in 2017. Comic books bear a lot of the responsibility. The Nintendo Switch is to blame as well. And finding and moving into a new apartment in the final third of the year didn't make things any easier. But I got back on track in December, and I expect that will continue into the New Year.<br />
<b> </b><br />
Asterisks mean I was rereading something. So I only read 16 new books this year. On the plus side, only four books I spent money on in 2017 remain unfinished (and two of those are the third and fourth volumes of Caro on LBJ-- I'm still working on the third right now), so from a standpoint of financial prudence it was a pretty good year.<br />
<br />
<b>January</b><br />
1. Dan Chaon, <i>Ill Will</i><br />
2. Lemony Snicket, <i>The Bad Beginning: Rare Edition</i>*<br />
3. Lemony Snicket, <i>The Reptile Room</i>*<br />
4. Sue Grafton, <i>H is for Homicide</i><br />
5. Lemony Snicket, <i>The Wide Window</i>*<br />
6. Lemony Snicket, <i>The Miserable Mill</i>*<br />
7. Lemony Snicket, <i>The Austere Academy</i>*<br />
8. Lemony Snicket, <i>The Ersatz Elevator</i>*<br />
9. Lemony Snicket, <i>The Vile Village</i>*<br />
<br />
<b>February</b><br />
1. Reggie Oliver, <i>Holidays from Hell</i><br />
2. Sue Grafton, <i>I is for Innocent</i><br />
3. Georgette Heyer, <i>The Nonesuch</i><br />
4. Sue Grafton, <i>J is for Judgment</i><br />
5. Thomas Ligotti, <i>Songs of a Dead Dreamer</i>*<br />
<i><br /></i>
<b>March</b><br />
1. Joan Didion, <i>South and West: From a Notebook</i><br />
2. Joan Didion, <i>Blue Nights</i>*<br />
3. Joan Didion, <i>The Year of Magical Thinking</i>* <br />
4.<i> </i>Joan Didion, <i>Where I Was From</i>*<br />
5. Joan Didion, <i>Political Fictions</i>*<br />
6. Salvatore Pane, <i>Mega Man 3</i><br />
7. Jarett Kobek, <i>Soft and Cuddly</i><br />
<br />
<b>April</b><br />
1. Joan Didion<i>, After Henry*</i><br />
2. Joan Didion, <i>Miami</i>*<br />
3. Joan Didion, <i>Salvador</i>*<br />
4. David Sedaris, <i>Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002</i><br />
<br />
<b>May</b><br />
1. Joan Didion, <i>The White Album</i>*<br />
2. Joan Didion, <i>Slouching Towards Bethlehem</i>*<br />
3. Robert Caro, <i>The Path to Power</i> <br />
<br />
<b>June</b><br />
1. Robert Caro, <i>Means of Ascent</i><br />
<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>July</b><br />
1. Alexa Ray Correia, <i>Kingdom Hearts II</i><br />
<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>August</b><br />
1. Zoe Heller, <i>Notes on a Scandal</i>*<br />
<br />
<b>September</b><br />
[none]<br />
<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>October</b><br />
[none]<br />
<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>November</b><br />
[none]<br />
<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>December</b><br />
1. Philip Pullman, <i>La Belle Sauvage</i> <br />
2. Matthew Sullivan, <i>Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore</i><b> </b><br />
3. Caitlin R. Kiernan, <i>The Red Tree</i>*<br />
4. Georgette Heyer, <i>Arabella</i><br />
5. Charles Dickens, <i>A Christmas Carol</i>*<br />
<b> </b>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-77722039574887464472016-12-31T23:59:00.000-05:002017-01-02T12:13:03.594-05:00Books and magazines read, 2016I read 67 books in 2016. That's got to be the lowest count in years. And a lot of them were short. I don't know why the beginning of the year was so light, but the last few months were lost to my new iPad. I've read a lot of comics on Marvel Unlimited lately, but I'm too lazy to work out a way to list them here. I did list a few trade editions.<br />
<br />
A little under half of the books I read this year were written by women, which is better than I've done in the past. <b> </b><br />
<br />
An asterisk means I was rereading.<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>January </b><br />
1. Augusten Burroughs, <i>Lust & Wonder</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 12)<br />
2. Lyndsay Faye, <i>Jane Steele</i><br />
3. Jean Stein, <i>West of Eden: An American Place</i><br />
4. Dorothy Dunnett, <i>The Disorderly Knights</i><br />
5. Jo Walton, <i>Tooth and Claw</i>
<i> </i>
<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>February</b><br />
1. Dorothy Dunnett, <i>Pawn in Frankincense</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 13)
<i> </i>
<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>March</b><br />
1. Graham Swift, <i>Mothering Sunday</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 14) <b> </b><br />
2. Thomas Piketty, <i>Why Save the Bankers?</i><br />
3. Anne Tyler, <i>Vinegar Girl</i>
<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>April</b>
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 15)<br />
1. Ken Baumann, <i>EarthBound</i>
<b> </b>
<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>May</b><br />
1. Michael P. Williams, <i>Chrono Trigger</i><br />
2. Anna Anthropy, <i>ZZT</i><br />
3. Michael Kimball, <i>Galaga</i><br />
4. Darius Kazemi, <i>Jagged Alliance 2</i><br />
5. <i> </i>Jon Irwin, <i>Super Mario Bros. 2</i><br />
6. Gabe Durham (editor), <i>Continue?: The Boss Fight Books Anthology</i><br />
7. Gabe Durham, <i>Bible Adventures</i><br />
8. Matt Bell, <i>Baldur's Gate II</i><br />
9. Ashly and Anthony Burch, <i>Metal Gear Solid</i><br />
10. Nick Suttner, <i>Shadow of the Colossus</i><br />
11. <i>See the Elephant</i>, Issue Two
<i> </i><br />
12. Sherman Alexie, <i>The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven</i>
<i> </i><br />
<br />
<b>June</b><br />
1. Anne Perry, <i>Callander Square</i><br />
2. Laurie Halse Anderson, <i>Chains</i><br />
3. Simon Kurt Unsworth, <i>The Devil's Detective</i><br />
4. Laurie Halse Anderson, <i>Forge</i><br />
5. Gemma Files, <i>We Will All Go Down Together</i><br />
6. Eleanor Arnason, <i>Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens</i><b> </b>
<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>July</b><br />
1. J. K. Rowling, <i>Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone</i>*<br />
2. Alyse Knorr, <i>Super Mario Bros. 3</i><br />
3. Blake J. Harris, <i>Console Wars </i><br />
4. Reggie Oliver, <i>Masques of Satan</i>*<br />
5. Harper Lee, <i>To Kill A Mockingbird</i>*<br />
6. Harper Lee, <i>Go Set A Watchman</i><br />
7. Lois Lowry, <i>The Giver</i>*<br />
8. Sarah Langan, <i>The Missing</i><br />
9. J. R. R. Tolkien, <i>Roverandom</i><br />
10. Dorothy Dunnett, <i>The Ringed Castle</i><br />
11. Reggie Oliver, <i>The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini*</i><br />
12. J. K. Rowling, <i>Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets</i>*<br />
13. Reggie Oliver, <i>The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler</i>*<br />
14. Reggie Oliver, <i>Madder Mysteries</i>*<br />
<br />
<b>August</b><br />
1. Reggie Oliver, <i>Mrs. Midnight</i>*<br />
2.<b> </b>E. L. Doctorow, <i>Collected Stories</i><br />
3. Reggie Oliver, <i>Flowers of the Sea</i>*<br />
4. Lois Lowry, <i>Gathering Blue</i>*<br />
5. Lois Lowry, <i>Messenger</i>*<br />
6. Billy Collins, <i>The Rain in Portugal</i><br />
7. Jack Thorne, <i>Harry Potter and the Cursed Child</i><br />
8. J. K. Rowling, <i>Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban*</i><br />
9. J. K. Rowling, <i>Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*</i><br />
10. J. K. Rowling, <i>Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix* </i><br />
11. J. K. Rowling, <i>Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince</i>*<br />
12. J. K. Rowling, <i>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</i>*<br />
13. Lois Lowry, <i>Looking Back: A Book of Memories</i><br />
<br />
<i> </i>
<b>September</b><br />
1. Matt Bell, <i>A Tree or a Person or a Wall </i><br />
2. Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, <i>Mostly Void, Partially Stars</i><br />
3. Rick Remender and Matteo Scalera, <i>Black Science: The Beginner's Guide to Entropy</i><br />
4. Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, <i>The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe</i><b> </b><br />
5. Stan Sakai, <i>Usagi Yojimbo Saga, Volume 1</i><br />
6. Neil Gaiman and J. H. Williams III, <i>Sandman: Overture</i><br />
7. Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris, <i>Ex Machina</i> <i> </i> <br />
<i> </i>
<i> </i>
<b> </b>
<i> </i><br />
<b>October</b><br />
1. Lois Lowry, <i>Son</i>*<br />
<br />
<b>November</b><br />
1. Sue Grafton, <i>G is for Gumshoe</i>*<br />
2. Gemma Files, <i>Experimental Film</i><br />
<br />
<i> </i><br />
<b>December</b><br />
1. George Saunders, <i>Lincoln in the Bardo</i><br />
2. Andrew Michael Hurley, <i>The Loney</i><br />
<i> </i>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-4755959407356235152016-12-26T13:24:00.001-05:002016-12-26T13:24:04.494-05:00The Diary of River Song, Series 2Sometimes it's good to give in to temptation. There's an argument that pairing River Song with the classic Doctors is an obvious, fan-pleasing thing for Big Finish to do. But you know, River Song is a grandiose, goofy, wish-fulfillment action-hero character, so why not go with that and have some fun? The eighth Doctor's appearance in the first boxset was charming, but limited by the need to keep the continuity of their "first" meeting in "Silence in the Library" intact. For the second series, Big Finish has taken a route that allows her to have a much more substantial interaction with the Doctor. Or rather the Doctor<i>s</i>, since both Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy are in this one, as River as two of her husbands get caught up in a strange temporal crisis that threatens (of course) the existence of planet Earth.<br />
<br />
Things kick off in Guy Adams' "The Unknown." River has joined an expedition investigating a mysterious planet that has appeared in Earth's solar system. But things are going wrong. The crew's memories are fuzzy. Their tempers are flaring. They can't seem to get where they're going. And the stars are disappearing. The only hope may be the stowaway who appeared in the engine room: a funny little Scottish man.<br />
<br />
"The Unknown" is a solid start to the set. As will be the case throughout, its strength is less in plot than in atmosphere and character interaction. River and the seventh Doctor make a nice team, though I don't think Adams' script creates as lively an interplay as it might, and even when he's giving a basically good performance Sylv apparently has to make some weird choices. This isn't exactly a horror story, but there's a definite eerieness to what the characters are experiencing, and the sound design brings that across without trying too hard to be spooky. I really liked this story on first listen; if I'm struggling to find ways to praise it now that's because the set only gets better from here.<br />
<br />
The sole Doctor-free story in this box is "Five Twenty Nine," by John Dorney. Earth is doomed, and River doesn't know why. All she knows is that every spot on the planet is falling silent when its local time switches from 5:28 to 5:29. If she can keep herself ahead of that wave long enough, she might find a solution, and save the lives of the people she's just met. But this may the one problem River Song can't solve.<br />
<br />
As character drama this is probably the best story in the set. It doesn't break any new ground, but like "Signs" from the first series, it puts River's determination front and center to good effect. Alex Kingston is as great as ever, and the guest cast give performances that elevate what are basically stock characters. Robert Pugh and Ann Bell are effective as a middle-aged couple, and Salome Haertel is... interesting as their synthetic daughter. I'm not sure whether Haertel is giving an excellent performance as a robot with a flat affect, or a wooden performance as a lifelike robot. The fact that the actress is Alex Kingston's daughter and has no previous experience suggests one answer. In any case, it works in the context of the play. For all that the world is in peril, there's a quiet realism to this one that gives the ending the needed resonance.<br />
<br />
James Goss, who wrote the standout story of the first series, returns in "World Enough and Time." River has discovered that a corporation called Golden Futures has a major role in the mystery she's working to unravel, so she's taken a temporary job there to get to the bottom of things. It's easy to be sidetracked, though, when the managing director turns out to be surprisingly lovable, for a man with a bombastic personality and absolutely terrible fashion sense.<br />
<br />
Yes, it's the sixth Doctor this time, and he and River have an unexpectedly wonderful chemistry. Colin Baker doesn't often get to play romance, and he does a fine job of it here, as his Doctor finds this new employee quite charming indeed. In contrast to the sexually charged (often tiresomely so) banter between River and the eleventh Doctor, there's a delicacy to what unfolds here that feels perfect for the character. It's not all flirtation, though: there's an evil regime to topple, and as is fitting in her series River takes the lead, discovering that the Doctor is not as in control of his own investigation as he might believe. If there's a downside to this story, it's that some of the humor around Golden Futures falls flat. Based on this story and "Harvest of the Sycorax," Goss is on-the-nose and behind-the-times as a satirist. The corporate culture jokes here are nothing you haven't heard before, to say nothing of a takeoff on the Microsoft Office assistant Clippy that is about fifteen years behind topical. But the story gets the important stuff so right that I can hardly mark it down over a few moldy gags.<br />
<br />
Everything comes together in "The Eye of the Storm" by Matt Fitton. As the Great Storm of 1703 approaches, a far more dangerous spacetime crisis is forming. River, the sixth Doctor, and the seventh Doctor, are all on the scene, but are they the solution, or the problem? And what do ordinary Londoners Isaac George and Sarah Dean have to do with it?<br />
<br />
This has the feel of a finale from the new series: hectic, handwavey plotting, with an emotional throughline that's supposed to tie everything together. I'm not sure it succeeds at that. The characters involved are guests rather than regulars, and thinly-drawn ones at that. But the actors do what they can, and the sound design of the climactic scene is absolutely top-notch. Anyhow, there's a lot to enjoy on the way to that moment. Each of the three leads is convinced that only he or she can stop the crisis, and their efforts to push each other out of the way are pretty funny. River was collegial with these Doctors in the earlier stories, but now the competition among them is just as enjoyable. The reason I said that I'm not sure Guy Adams gets as much out of Seven and River as he could is that Fitton has a lot more fun with them, and of course Colin Baker could have an entertaining argument with a sock drawer, never mind Alex Kingston. We also get a nice taste of the cross-Doctor squabbling that's half the fun of such stories, and it's even rooted in intelligent observations about how their characters differ.<br />
<br />
When I realized that the Doctor was going to be in three out of the four stories in this set I worried that he would crowd River out of her own series. But that doesn't happen. The odd imprisonment aside, she's very much the one in control, as she would have to be given her responsibility to the Doctor's future and the stability of his timeline. I know some listeners will feel that the pleasure of having her meet past Doctors properly is offset by the forgetfulness that has to follow, but I think that misses the point: we remember, and more importantly so does River. However much she might want to, she can never have the genuine, open relationship she does with the later versions. The coda to this set, in which she does what she has to do, is quite moving, and fits these fleeting encounters into the larger melancholy of her relationship with the Doctor. (There's also a very funny moment that's great for the characters involved.) The knowledge that this isn't a well Big Finish can go back to again and again makes this series all the more powerful. We'll always have the Great Storm of 1703.<br />
<br />
I'm really impressed at what Big Finish has done with River Song. I wasn't her biggest fan during her TV appearances. She was great in "Silence in the Library," but during the Smith era River was too much one of Steven Moffat's sexy quip generators and not enough an actual human being. The Diary of River Song strikes a better balance. She hasn't lost the edginess (or the sex appeal), but she also has the vulnerability and the warmth you need if you're going to be a sympathetic protagonist. Which is to say, she finally feels like someone the Doctor could actually love. Perhaps that's why I don't mind how often he's popping up in her series. I hope he's not in the next box set as much as he's in this one-- you gotta give a girl a little time on her own-- but I wouldn't him making another one-off appearance. She has yet to beguile Tom Baker and Peter Davison, after all. And if series two is anything to go by, such meetings would fully realize their potential.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-38975940352807302972016-09-20T14:47:00.004-04:002016-09-20T14:47:29.903-04:00James and Lovecraft: TravelersWe're a little outside normal territory in this installment, as M. R. James takes us to Denmark and H. P. Lovecraft to the American West. The difference is that James had actually been to Viborg when he wrote about it, while Lovecraft, though he traveled more widely than his reclusive reputation would suggest, pretty much stuck to the Eastern Seaboard. Also, "Number 13" is a good story, and "The Transition of Juan Romero" is not.<br />
<br />
"Number 13" is another example of how unusual a writer James, sometimes assumed to be a traditionalist, actually was. Haunted rooms are a dime a dozen, but the <i>ghost </i>of a room is something else again. And he makes it quite unsettling, to a point where the arm that comes clawing out of the door, far from being necessary, actually feels like a cheap device,irrelevant to the overall shape of the story. One of the guys on the M. R. James Podcast felt that "The Mezzotint" was weak because there was no overt threat to the present day characters, and sketched out what he thought was an improved ending where it all turns out to be the usual revenge bollocks. For me, these stories are effective <i>because</i> they're creepy despite containing nothing more than a changing photograph and dancing in the next room.<br />
<br />
The opening paragraph of the story is a small masterpiece of Jamesian style. We go from the gentle description of Viborg's natural charms, to the brutal details of Erik Glipping's murder, to the ironic (and metafictional) self-deprecation of "But I am not writing a guide-book." And then, in the middle of the story, there is that very weird scrap of light poetry, as the shadowy dancer in the next becomes not ominous but amusing. And then back to ominous again, when the singing starts. The way James balances humor and horror is really quite something. It's interesting that the protagonist of the story is the narrator's cousin; there's usually more distance than that between the Jamesian protagonist and the Jamesian narrative voice, so that no emotional response is required. It's not surprising, then, that there is little evidence of personal warmth in the narrator's account: the cousin is "Anderson" and even "Mr Anderson" throughout.<br />
<br />
One small point worth noting is the dialogue of the archivist, Herr Scavenius. Its mild syntactic quirks are a subtle reflection of his status as a non-native speaker whose English mostly comes out of books. Herr Kristensen, an innkeeper with occasional English guests, who therefore has more chance to practice the spoken language, sounds more natural. This is a level of nuance that James does not extend to English characters of the working class, and that Lovecraft does not extend to much of anyone. Which brings us, I suppose, to Juan Romero.<br />
<br />
It's not actually a terrible story. It certainly doesn't belong in the "Early Tales" holding pen with actual early tales like "The Alchemist" and "The Beast in the Cave" and embarrassing racist, nativist tosh like "The Street." Don't get me wrong: the story <i>is</i> racist. "A large herd of unkempt Mexicans" is one of its politer moments. But it's not tosh, except in the sense that all Lovecraft is tosh. Lovecraft himself declined to publish it, but he <i>did</i> publish "The Street," so what the hell did he know?<br />
<br />
The Western setting is a strange one for Lovecraft, who loved his gambrel-roofed New England. A couple of his revisions have Western settings drawn from the drafts and concepts supplied by his clients, but I think this is the only time a story purely by Lovecraft is set in the West. And with a British protagonist too, one who had been a soldier in India. Very jet-setting for Lovecraft, though both the West and British India are of course settings for pulpy (and racist) entertainments of different sorts. Consider the first two Sherlock Holmes novels, which trade between them on the perceived exoticism of both. <i>A Study in Scarlet</i> presents Mormon Utah as a sinister frontier cult, while <i>The Sign of the Four</i> deals with exactly the same sort of shady ex-military Englishmen as the present story.<br />
<br />
The plot of "Juan Romero" is underdeveloped, but there's nothing wrong with it. S. T. Joshi faults the ending for being too vague, as he often does with early Lovecraft, but I think it leaves just enough ambiguity to be unsettling rather than uninteresting. For me, as for Thomas Ligotti, the formless horrors of "minor" Lovecraft are better than the cosmic aliens of the more innovative and more famous works. This, like "Dagon," is a story that you can see evolving into something significant if Lovecraft had revised and expanded it a little later in his career. As it is, it's just another quasi-juvenile curiosity. And racist. Did I mention it's pretty racist?Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-41918169837448866202016-09-20T11:03:00.002-04:002016-09-20T11:04:20.449-04:00Doctor Who: Classic Doctors, New MonstersA common criticism of the Russell T Davies era of <i>Doctor Who</i> as it aired was that it wasn't coming up with any good recurring monsters. I think that's true... so far as it goes. There <i>aren't</i> any good recurring monsters in that era, because the show wasn't trying to create any. It went instead for the splashy thrill of having something new almost every week, and using standards like the Daleks and the Cybermen when it wanted an old enemy. Which is perfectly acceptable practice, but makes things awkward for Big Finish's latest New Series boxset, which throws the 20th-century Doctors up against monsters created for the RTD era. Most of these aren't monsters designed with multiple appearances in mind, which has interesting consequences for the boxset, both good and bad.<br />
<br />
We begin with a monster that, whatever the original intention, has become recurring: the Weeping Angels. <i>Fallen Angels</i> is basically a remake of "Blink," but with the fifth Doctor instead of the tenth Doctor, and Michelangelo instead of Sally Sparrow. Which sounds goofily high-concept, but in the broad strokes it's reasonably successful. There's some neat stuff to do with how these Angels wound up on Earth and how they're achieving their ends. The problem is that the Weeping Angels don't work on audio. The first scene is effective, but that's about atmosphere and the over-the-top villain (with an over-the-top Italian accent to match), not about the Angels. Later on, when we're supposed to be terrified that they're closing in, the repeated use of the "It moved!" sound effect from "Blink," divorced from any visual experience, becomes amusing rather than menacing. You could play a drinking game.<br />
<br />
The other issue is that the story takes too many of its cues, large and small (and some spoilery), from "Blink." There's only so much you can do with the Weeping Angels without changing the rules, as Steven Moffat did when he brought them back to TV, but this story is too content to say, "Did you like 'Blink'? Well, here's a version set in the Italian Renaissance!" The fifth Doctor reuses a tenth Doctor catchphrase at one point, and there's even an embarrassingly nudge-nudge-wink-wink callback to That Line. Come on, writers: if you're going to invoke That Line, at least extend the joke. Don't just turn to the audience and say. "Remember that joke? That was a funny one, eh?"<br />
<br />
Whatever its limitations of concept, <i>Fallen Angels </i>is well-executed. The script speeds along as a one-hour <i>Doctor Who</i> story must. Peter Davison is on fine form here, bantering with one-off companion Gabby Finch, who can't quite believe that she's been transported from 2015 to 1511. Diane Morgan's performance as Gabby is the high point of a guest cast in which Matthew Kelly also does solid work as Michelangelo, playing the script's stock "temperamental artist" bits without turning him into a caricature rather than a character. The characterization of Michelangelo is a good synecdoche of <i>Fallen Angels'</i> shortcomings, actually: it takes an established trope and simply invokes it in a particular context, rather than adding the little twists that would be necessary to give it new life.<br />
<br />
If the Weeping Angels only seemed suited to star in one type of story, the next monster is an even tougher sell: it was barely the star of its one meaningful television appearance. But <i>Judoon in Chains</i> takes that into account and pushes the boat out, evolving the Judoon in an effective way that's difficult to discuss without spoilers. This is probably the story from this box that has the most dramatic potential. The trouble is, it's a tale of two halves that don't quite mesh, and the interesting half isn't the one the story's ultimately built around.<br />
<br />
The main plot is a standard <i>Doctor Who</i> story about a corrupt space corporation that is soon sorry it ever crossed paths with the Doctor. It's fine, though the villain is one-dimensional and not especially menacing, and the final confrontation is thus kind of flat. In the middle of the story, though, is an interlude where the Doctor and the amnesiac Captain Kybo of the Judoon are trapped in a Victorian circus, and befriend Thomasina Thumb, charmingly played by Kiruna Stamell. There's what I can only call a gentleness to this material, a quietly sentimental focus on character as Kybo becomes something more than the average, and I wish the audio had stayed with it, rather than dumping it in favor of the usual stuff. You could actually strip the space corruption element away entirely and tell a different, perhaps more tragic version of this story. Ah, well. What we got is more than good enough.<br />
<br />
The Sycorax are another monster that wouldn't have seemed worthy of a return: they're scary looking and all, but they exist only to be shut down by the Doctor without a second thought. He even explains why they're not much of a threat. But <i>Harvest of the Sycorax</i> finds a way to make them dangerous again. This is probably the closest the boxset comes to an old-fashioned <i>Doctor Who</i> monster story, with an invasion and a base under threat. It's also the overall funniest story, despite having a tired and tiresome satirical context.<br />
<br />
The society the Sycorax are invading is so over-medicated that people have personal computerized assistants who can prescribe something for the least twitch of emotion. This might have felt novel in, say, 2007, when "Gridlock" showed us mood patches, but nowadays all you can see is the glibness of it. I don't think overmedication is enough of a problem to deserve this kind of satire. There are instances of it, to be sure, but I suspect that when many people (not necessarily including writer James Goss) complain about the phenomenon, there's an implication that most of those on mood medication don't need it, which is an unfair and actively damaging attitude.<br />
<br />
Anyway. Whatever the problems with the concept, the script uses it to good comic effect, as the assistant programs chime in at the worst possible moment. Sylvester McCoy is also pretty funny here, giving a restrained performance that works within rather than against the rhythms of the script. And Nisha Nayar, who was very good in the small role of the Female Programmer in "Bad Wolf" and "The Parting of the Ways," is equally good in the larger role of quasi-companion Zanzibar Hashtag (did I mention the satire here wasn't subtle?). After a wonderfully prickly introduction in which he's quietly irritable and she's thoroughly on edge, they get up to some good old-fashioned seventh Doctor scheming. As with the rest of the stories in the box thus far, there's nothing especially surprising here on the level of plot, but it's well-made and there's a zip to it that elevates it above standard fare.<br />
<br />
The box closes out with an eighth Doctor story set in the Time War and featuring the new Sontarans. I have to admit that I've always found the Sontarans tiresome. Alien races obsessed with honor are dime-a-dozen in science fiction, and they're almost always one-note and boring. They're not necessarily interesting as a species here either, but excellent performances by Christopher Ryan and Dan Starkey keep them entertaining as a standard lone warrior revenge story plays out. (The Sontar-Ha chant is still awful, though.) The shifting alliances among that lone warrior, the Doctor, and the quasi-companion make for a story that's talky, but in a good way, as everyone is telling the truth, though not always for the right reasons. The Time War is used effectively here, kept offscreen yet shown to be devastating in its consequences. This bodes well for the eighth Doctor Time War boxset that's coming next year.<br />
<br />
When the first Classic Doctors, New Monsters set was announced, I thought, "Really? That's what they picked for monsters?" Then I ran through the available options in my head and added, "Well, I suppose they took the best they could get." But having heard the set, I have to commend the writers on mostly finding interesting ways to revisit monsters who were conceived as one-offs, and weren't necessarily that exciting in those initial appearances. The biggest thing that works in the set's favor, though, is the single disc story format.<br />
<br />
There's a reason most drama nowadays is done at this length: it allows enough plot complication for stories to become involving, but not so much that they bog down, and requires strict economy of characterization. Big Finish really ought to do more in this format for classic Doctors who aren't Paul McGann or Tom Baker. It's still called the Main Range, but it's hard to deny that these days the urgency at BF is elsewhere. It's nice to see the stalwarts that are Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy get to take part in an energetic, attention-grabbing release like this. I'm very much looking forward to a new set of classic monsters in the next boxset, including the just-announced Racnoss. Like the Sycorax, they're basically a panto villain on TV, but I hope they'll become something more in Big Finish's capable hands.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-77587670702871133792016-09-14T09:57:00.001-04:002016-09-14T09:57:09.181-04:00Doctor Who: The Cradle of the SnakeIf you asked me to explain why I think single-disc stories are the way forward for Big Finish, I'd point to <a href="https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-cradle-of-the-snake-304"><i>The Cradle of the Snake</i></a>. Not because there's anything horribly wrong with it, but because its flaws would be much less noticeable at shorter length. The return of the Mara written by Marc Platt ought to be an instant classic, but it uses its ideas so sparsely that all the thematic layering and character potential drain away, leaving a standard <i>Doctor Who</i> runaround.<br />
<br />
The Mara is still in Tegan's head. The Doctor is worried, and so are Turlough and the much older Nyssa who, at least in this story, never acts a whit different than she always did. The Doctor takes steps to remove the Mara, and if you are the world's biggest chump you will believe for a few minutes that he succeeded. If you are not the world's biggest chump, you will immediately know what the Part One cliffhanger will be, and what the first bit of potential the story's going to waste will be.<br />
<br />
Peter Davison is very good at playing the Mara-riddled Doctor throughout the story, but there's little sense of the kind of chaos a man of his intellect might be able to sow. His plan is an obvious use of the situation he finds, and while there's one small moment where he plays a couple his companions against each other, it <i>is</i> only one moment, and it comes to nothing in how the plot unfolds. Eventually the Mara gets ahold of Nyssa, and Sarah Sutton is great at giving her a patronizing hauteur, but in the long run it has nothing to do with anything. The Mara is only in her so she'll have something to be doing while Tegan and Turlough save the day.<br />
<br />
Save the day, I should note, by doing something very like what was done in a previous Mara story, but without any psychological subtext: it's just a literal [SPOILER]. There's an attempt at mystical atmosphere via a one-note spiritual wise man, but his wisdom isn't moored to anything specific that the story might be about. This script knows the words of a Mara story, but not the music. There's also what the cover copy calls an "infotainment impresario," who I guess is a satire of celebrity presenters or telethons, or something, but this amounts to a couple good jokes that aren't really taken anywhere.<br />
<br />
I can't help contrasting this with <i>Fallen Angels</i>, the fifth Doctor story from the first Classic Doctors, New Monsters box, which I also listened to recently (and will eventually review, I hope). That story doesn't really work either, also because it doesn't know how to build on its source material, but it's much more entertaining, because it's allowed to get in and out in 55 minutes rather than hanging around for almost twice that long. It doesn't spend its middle 50% treading water, which makes the thinness of its concepts less obvious, and the jokes hang together rather than hanging separately. <i>The Cradle of the Snake</i> is never noticeably padded, but all it actually does is combine different characters in various ways, repeating pieces of information as they move from one group to another. It feels like an exercise in filling out the season, which is just not what the Mara deserves, to say nothing of the audience.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-14502328902244815432016-09-14T08:54:00.002-04:002016-09-14T08:54:53.089-04:00Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles: The Perpetual Bond/The Cold Equations/The First WaveJean Marsh is awesome. Did you know that? You should; it's a scientific fact. Anyway, a semi-recent thing in which she was awesome was a trilogy of <i>Companion Chronicles </i>audios written by Simon Guerrier, in which she played Sara Kingdom from that really long 60s Dalek story. I reviewed two of them for <a href="http://unreality-sf.net/">Unreality SF,</a> which used to have a lot of tie-in reviewers and now has the very prolific Steve Mollmann. I'm not going to link to those reviews, because I'm sure they're pretty bad, unlike this review, which is going to be almost as awesome as Jean Marsh. Who is, by the way, not actually in the audios I'm going to be reviewing here. They are by Simon Guerrier, though, and they focus on another neglected companion of the first Doctor: Steven Taylor.<br />
<br />
Indeed, the first of this trilogy picks up after Sara Kingdom's death at the end of "The Daleks' Master Plan," with Steven and the Doctor shocked and mournful in a way they never got to be onscreen. Classic <i>Doctor Who</i> was not very good at letting characters respond to trauma (one recalls Tegan saying "Auntie Vanessa" exactly once, and Nyssa looking a bit mournful for fifteen seconds after her planet blows up), so it's good that <i>The Perpetual Bond</i>, and indeed this whole trilogy, can make all the deaths from that epic battle with the Daleks feel like they meant something. It's not that these adventures are all doom and gloom, but there's a melancholy to them that would have been out of place in the action-serial goofiness of season three.<br />
<br />
Steven and the Doctor land back in the 1960s, in Totter's Lane in fact, and, on their way to visit Ian and Barbara they get embroiled in an alien scheme involving the stock exchange. The storyline is not enormously interesting, to be honest; if you're in the Companion Chronicles for elaborate and surprising plots, you're going to be disappointed a good percentage of the time. Atmosphere and character are the high points of the range, and that's where <i>The Perpetual Bond</i> delivers. There's a nice 1960s men-of-business vibe to the setting, and Steven, who is from the far future, has a charmingly offbeat angle on all of it.<br />
<br />
Then there's Oliver Harper, a young trader whose time as a companion is one of the thrulines for this trilogy. Tom Allen plays Oliver with a youthful charm that feels period-appropriate without descending into caricature, and makes for a nice contrast with the weary, battle-worn Doctor and Steven. Oliver has a secret that is not revealed in this story but is also not very difficult to guess if you think about the time period and the ways a modern drama might comment on it. It's not much more than a narrative question mark in this first story, anyway.<br />
<br />
<i>The Perpetual Bond</i> by itself is a slightly above-average Companion Chronicle, not a patch on the Sara Kingdom stories. It's in the follow-up, <i>The Cold Equations</i>, that things really begin to cook... or freeze. Again, the plot is not the point. All you need to know is that there's a space station in Earth orbit in the far future, and that Oliver's first trip in the TARDIS takes a pretty grim turn. What's interesting about this story is the way it turns its predecessor on its head: again it's about aliens and their business dealings, but here we have Oliver providing a charming perspective on Steven's milieu, rather than the other way around. Steven's time as a fighter pilot is vital to how things develop here, using the character's origins and history in a way that didn't often happen for classic companions. The logistics of space travel matter here, which allows Steven to play the hero in a subtler fashion than he did onscreen.<br />
<br />
The centerpiece of this story is a long conversation between Steven and Oliver aboard a chunk of the station that's rapidly losing oxygen. They think they're dying, and Steven convinces Oliver to reveal his secret. I have mixed feelings about this secret. It seems to have been done with good intentions but with little sense of how to make it fit into the main matter of the trilogy, which is disappointing given how well Steven's characterization is integrated. But this scene, taken in isolation, is perfect. Steven's reaction is not one he would have had in other circumstances, but it allows the script to avoid some obvious and over-earnest beats that might otherwise have been felt necessary and cut to the emotional truth. The sound design and the performances really sell the idea that these characters are dying, even though you know they're not.<br />
<br />
<i>The Cold Equations</i> is probably the strongest link in the trilogy, but <i>The First Wave</i> comes pretty close. It's another space-based story with a largely inconsequential plot. I just listened to it last night, and I've already forgotten a lot of the details. It has Vardans in it, if you like those. What makes it brilliant is how it ties together a lot of the trilogy's themes, about mortality and the value of struggling onward rather than giving up or running away. Steven and Oliver think the Doctor is dead, and for once a misunderstanding like this isn't milked for cheap sentiment or dramatic irony. The cliffhanger to Part One does something very unusual in <i>Doctor Who</i> that slots right into the key themes. And the last scene of the story is a gorgeous emotional grace note that really sells a plot development that might otherwise feel rushed and less meaningful than it wants to be.<br />
<br />
Someone once observed that characterization reached such a low point around season three of <i>Doctor Who</i> that the show seemed to hold the companions in outright contempt. Minimal personality, immediate abandonment of personal history, Dodo not getting a departure scene, that kind of thing. This trilogy goes a long way to correcting that by building stories around Steven's stated background and extrapolating an emotional arc from the serials he's in. Peter Purves does a great job of selling it all. The fact that he's much older than he was in 1966 lets him tap into the melancholy wisdom the character has taken on by the end of <i>The First Wave</i>. They also help him give a decent performance as the first Doctor. It's not an especially proficient <i>impression </i>on a technical level, but it's enormously entertaining, conveying a gleeful good nature that contrasts nicely with the devious scheming that the Doctor gets up to at a couple points in the trilogy.<br />
<br />
What's hardest to capture about the success of these stories is how they fit together in a lot of small ways, in points of theme and tone and characterization that are all the more effective for not being hammered home. It feels elegant in a way that's a far cry from "The Daleks' Master Plan," which looks like the kind of sci-fi melodrama they would have torn apart on <i>Mystery Science Theater 3000</i>. Guerrier achieved the same thing with Sara Kingdom in his trilogy about her; he's clearly the go-to guy for building on the late Hartnell era. Which is why I'm looking forward to another trilogy of his Companion Chronicles, which also focused on Steven Taylor, using a frame story involving his life after the Doctor. I know just enough about how it plays out to be thoroughly tantalized. I'm sure there'll be a review here in a couple weeks, full of similar outsize praise for tie-in audio dramas. But seriously, if you both love 1960s <i>Doctor Who</i> and are aware of its limitations, you want to give these stories a listen.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-79348169886146706032016-09-07T11:53:00.003-04:002016-09-07T11:53:49.673-04:00James and Lovecraft: ClassyH. P. Lovecraft was a consummate bigot. So much is known. What is insufficiently understood is that he was not merely a racist and a xenophobe. To put it bluntly, he hated "inferior" white people just about as much as he hated everyone who wasn't white. His letters to Robert E. Howard, which among many better things are a sickening record of what happens when two bigots find common cause and really get going, are full of a need to classify different white ethnic groups by how close they come to the Anglo-Saxon pinnacle. And, like another American original known by his initials, H. L. Mencken, he was a firm believer in good and bad stock within an ethnicity. Which brings us to "Beyond the Wall of Sleep."<br />
<br />
This is a better story technically than what has preceded it, and a good example of what I was talking about when I said it wasn't the style but the quality that I objected to in "The Tomb." Yes, the narrator of this story is incredibly pompous, and yes, his word choice and diction are a little unlikely in the early 20th century, but the flow of the language is much more natural than before: it's a difficult style but not a bad one. And the narrative is well-paced, with evocative hints of Slater's dream-world that are, if anything, better than the whole that is subsequently revealed. This is the first time that Lovecraft manages the gradual revelation of the supernatural that's so central to his modern reputation.<br />
<br />
There is, as the guys in The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast point out,
a kind of poignancy in this concept: the communion between two
intellects trapped in frail and insufficient human forms. One thinks of
Lovecraft, who at this time had few if any in-person friends but was
already a great correspondent and a member of the amateur journalism
movement, reaching out and communing as the narrator and Slater's
inhabitant do. Reductive psychobiography is grating, but Lovecraft by
his own account often felt like a man out of his own time. <br />
<br />
But of course what draws your attention is the narrator's unbelievable contempt for Joe Slater. I would list all his insulting turns of phrase, but I don't have that kind of time. Here's a flavor of it: "strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock... who correspond exactly to the decadent element of 'white trash' in the South." We get scarcely a sentence in reference to Slater without some demeaning adjective: "debased," "filthy," "inferior," "pitiful," and so on. In a modern story this arrogance would be part of a character study of the narrator, whose own mental state would be called into question. There's no such complexity in "Beyond the Wall of Sleep": we're simply meant to take the narrator's self-regard at face value.<br />
<br />
People like to talk about "separating the man from the work" when they deign to address bigotry in classic artists, but this story is as good an indicator as any of how facile that notion is. A person's worldview is not a series of discrete ideologies; it all blends together. The sense of isolation and discontent that powers many of Lovecraft's tales is inextricably bound up with his idea of himself as "unmixed English gentry" and therefore superior to virtually everyone else on the planet. There is of course something inherently defensive about that idea, the claiming of racial superiority to distract from questions of individual merit. The way "The Outsider" reverses this dynamic, making its protagonist the only monster in a world of normal people, suggests certain dualities in Lovecraft's self-conception. But we're drifting toward psychobiography again.<br />
<br />
Issues of class superiority also pop up in "The Ash-Tree," an odder story than I had remembered. The guys in The M. R. James Podcast have a bit of a debate about what's happening and why. The problem, I think, is not a lack of explanations but an abundance of possible ones. The strangeness begins in the account of Mrs Mothersole's trial. James does a fair amount of throat-clearing about whether witch trials were entirely an irrational phenomenon, or if there might have been some real witches. This is obviously to do with the tension between his awareness as an intelligent observer that witch trials were horrifying nonsense, and his need as a ghost story writer to have an actual witch. But this hemming and hawing sets an ambiguous tone that will remain throughout the story.<br />
<br />
James then goes out of his way to tell us that Mrs Mothersole is "rather better off and in a more influential position" than most accused witches. I imagine this is said to make clear that the kind of social anxieties and power dynamics visible in actual witch trials were not a factor here. And yet you have to wonder about Sir Matthew's evidence. I don't mean that he might be lying; it's perfectly obvious that he's not. But you do wonder about the implications of that night when he went right up to Mrs Mothersole's door and, finding her not obviously engaged in witchcraft, "had no good explanation to offer of his visit." I don't quite believe that James is alluding to more gossipy interpretations that might be placed on these events, but it does niggle. Nor can I quite escape the impression that the description of Sir Matthew's response to the whole affair, with the capper "as any reasonable man must have done," has an air of irony about it, of protesting too much. But perhaps I'm only projecting.<br />
<br />
Certainly we're never really invited to sympathize with Sir Matthew, or with Sir Richard. It's easier to feel bad for the cat at the end of the story than for either of the two humans. The immediate follow-up to "they found their master dead and black" is not anything mournful but a brisk "So much you have guessed." (I love that line, by the way. For the way it casually tugs at suspension of disbelief, and for its knowing wink at readers who might have thought they'd outsmarted the writer by guessing his plot twist. <i>The Simpsons</i> once described marriage as "a beautiful thing, but also a constant battle for moral superiority." So too is the reader/writer relationship, with each trying to get one up on the other.) And all we see Sir Richard do is ignore the sensible advice of his social inferiors to form an immediate friendship with a stranger based on ancient family ties.<br />
<br />
All this is coincidence, probably. The value of the folk wisdom of the lower classes is a trope in supernatural stories, and James was hardly any kind of revolutionary. But what is on the surface a superficial revenge yarn keeps spinning off questions, if only because James keeps piling up ominous indicators and coincidences without ever stringing them together into a full explanation. Why do Mrs Mothersole and her spiders strike when they do? Were they stirred up by the removal of Mrs Mothersole's grave (not that she was in there)? Were they waiting for a Crome visit, to enhance the overall narrative synchronicity? Could they only get into the room that's right next to the ash-tree (and if so, how were they "rattl[ing] about his window" in the other bedroom)? Never mind. This <i>is</i> a yarn, and while James' stories are in some ways deeper than they appear, we're not going to recover a secret plot underneath the obvious one.<br />
<br />
Other stray observations: <br />
<br />
This is the first story to show off James' great capacity to mimic period prose. The excerpt from Crome's papers is quite something. <br />
<br />
The end of the first paragraph is interesting. Are we to imagine that the actual M. R. James wanted a house like that? He seemed pretty happy at Eton and King's. Or is this simply a picturesque notion, to lull the reader before GIANT HAIRY SPIDERS start poking their limbs in?<br />
<br />
I also find myself wondering if Mrs Mothersole's sort-of curse (which implies that she has pretty specific visions of the future) is a conscious echo of Sarah Good's "God will give you blood to drink," or if gallows curses from witches were common enough that James had some other source in mind. Good's reputed words were, of course, an inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne in <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>.<br />
<br />
I think that's all this time. Next up are "Number 13" and "The Transition of Juan Romero." The latter is a story so dire Arkham House stuck in it an "Early Tales" section at the end of its minor Lovecraft collection <i>Dagon and Other Macabre Tales</i>, alongside "The Street," easily the worst story Lovecraft ever wrote, even though neither is actually all that early. So, um, fortunately "Number 13" is pretty good as I recall.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-35782117376393295092016-09-07T10:01:00.002-04:002016-09-07T10:01:15.623-04:00A Tree or a Person or a WallIt's rare that you can describe literary fiction as "not for the faint
of heart," but <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tree-Person-Wall-Stories/dp/1616955236/">Matt Bell's new collection</a> will test your resolve. Bell's
two novels, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1616953721/ref=cm_cr_asin_lnk">In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RRT3068/ref=cm_cr_asin_lnk">Scrapper</a>,
are harrowing explorations of human failings and yearnings, but their
endings have a bittersweet quality that balances the bleak intensity.
There are stories here that follow that pattern, but there are also some
that lead the reader not out of but deeper into the darkness. And even
the ones that end hopefully will take you on an uncomfortable journey to
get there. It's not just that Bell is working with disturbing thematic
material. His style is also psychologically intense, its poetic rhythms
drawing the reader into a kind of aesthetic fever that, like a literal
fever, can be exhausting. Moving in and out of that experience seventeen
times, once for each story in this collection, was daunting enough that
it took me a month to read the whole thing, even though Bell is one of
my favorite contemporary authors.<br /><br />But readers who brave these
woods will be amply rewarded. The themes and motifs that drove Bell's
novels-- the anxieties of parenthood, the terrible resilience of the
human psyche, cycles of abuse and the way they blur the line between
predator and victim-- are present here, explored with a tighter focus
than the novel form allows. The title story is reminiscent of certain
aspects of Scrapper, but with the eerie surrealism of In the House. One
of Bell's gifts is a capacity to balance those surreal elements with
naturalistic ones in a way that uses the unreal to reinforce the raw
emotions of the reality. "Doll Parts" follows a young girl's
psychological journey in the aftermath of her brother's disappearance.
It's ~almost~ a naturalistic story, but the few unlikely elements and
the style, which reflects the fractured yet emotionally coherent logic
of a grieving child, give it a mythic quality.<br /><br />Bell returns
frequently to children threatened, damaged, destroyed. "Dredge" is
another cycle-of-trauma story that manages to be physically as well as
mentally upsetting, while "Wolf Parts" revitalizes the increasingly
played-out genre of the reimagined fairy tale by telling the story in
dozens of different ways that revitalize the underlying motifs of family
relations, victimization, sexual awakening, and hard-won survival. In
"The Stations," Bell invokes again the threat of kidnapping and abuse,
but in a way that shines light instead on the more common pain of unmet
needs within the family. And then there's the novella "Cataclysm Baby,"
which the writer Karen Russell describes in a blurb as "a baby name book
for the apocalypse." These twenty-six vignettes explore parental fears
and hopes through an array of worlds that are as twisted and dreamlike
as the people who inhabit them. The conceit may hamper the project
slightly-- some of the vignettes are better than others-- but on the
whole it's an extraordinary piece of work.<br /><br />The collection ends as
it began, with a child in peril. But this time the threat is not from
outside but from within: terminal illness. You could bring "A Long Walk
with Only Chalk to Mark the Way" down to a familiar metaphor-- hospital
as labyrinth-- but that would do an injustice to its portrait of a
father coping with unimaginable loss by telling himself a story that
will take him down through the labyrinth, and then up and out again. The
ending is at once tragic and beautiful in a way that perfectly
encapsulates Bell's work.<br /><br />Throughout the collection Bell jumps
genres with gleeful abandon. "The Receiving Tower" is a kind of science
fiction, a meditation on memory, identity, and perseverance that would
be the most disturbing story in many collections but for Bell is only
moderately troubling. "Inheritance" is on the line between science
fiction and fantasy, and is one of the few stories in the collection I'm
not sure works. Its concept is equal to anything else Bell has come up
with, but the metaphors don't strike the heart as they do elsewhere,
perhaps because the characters' psychology doesn't feel as central. I
had similar issues with "The Migration," a
near-future-but-also-present-day story (Scrapper also belongs to this
highly hyphenated genre) that addresses some of our most pressing
contemporary problems. This is a stylistic triumph, but it works mostly
on the level of group rather than individual psychology, which makes its
explanations feel facile even when they're basically accurate.<br /><br />In
addition to the various forms of science fiction and fantasy, Bell also
offers a pair of very strange historical fictions. I got all the way
through "His Last Great Gift" without ever imagining that its
protagonist was real: he seemed too perfect an encapsulation of
overlapping American ideologies of the 19th century. It was only when I
got to "The Collectors" and realized it was about the Collyer brothers
that I thought, "Well, they were all too real, so maybe..." "His Last
Great Gift" is a well-crafted and evocative story, but "The
Collectors"... well, if ever there was a writer to do justice to the
Collyer brothers Matt Bell has to be it. Their story is inherently
unsettling, and Bell cuts right to the heart of it. At first I dreaded
reading this story, afraid that I was going to be dragged through their
tragedy once more with no fresh insights to show for it, but Bell finds
something new, by taking a hard look not at the brothers, but at us.<br /><br />A
Tree or a Person or a Wall is a collection of remarkable stylistic and
thematic unity. Bell's language is sometimes more intense and sometimes
less so, but its rhythms are constant, as are the topics with which he
is most deeply concerned. For some readers this will be limiting, will
make the book feel claustrophobic. To my mind, however, the great range
of settings and genres, the slide up and down the realism-surrealism
scale, produces something that is better called resonant than
repetitive. It echoes itself to create a larger music. Make no mistake:
by the standards of literary fiction as commodity, the bestselling
novels that bloodlessly reproduce upper middle class dysfunction, Matt
Bell is a difficult writer. He looks at the traumas of the family
through a different lens, he tugs at threads some would prefer to leave
hanging. But what he does with those threads once they're pulled loose
is extraordinary. This is one of the best books of the year, and well
worth any effort it demands of you as a reader.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-31607079469920262922016-09-04T10:20:00.002-04:002016-09-04T10:20:37.720-04:00James and Lovecraft: "The Mezzotint" and "Polaris"Here's a thing M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft have in common: editors fiddling around with their paragraphing. It happened to Lovecraft in the 1930s, when pulp editors cut down his long paragraphs to fit the expectations of a pulp audience. James was spared until just a few years ago, when the great horror anthologist Stephen Jones chose to muck about with paragraphing and punctuation for his edition of the complete James, <i>Curious Warnings</i>.<br />
<br />
Jones justified this meddling in an editor's note that jumps rather wildly among explanations. It starts off by calling James "not much of a stylist," then tries to soften this blow with the patronizing correction, "Well, he <i>was</i> a stylist -- but he wrote in a unique style that was very much all his own." (One can't help wondering what James would have made of being edited posthumously by someone who could put into print a sentence of such thudding redundancy.) Then there's some waffle about changing languages, with the implication that kids these days can't read long paragraphs anymore and chopping James up into the rhythms of an action thriller is the only way to get him read. This would be easier to believe if James weren't still in print in many other editions containing his original versions, a fact to which Jones alludes in an "if you don't like what I've done, go and read them!" aside.<br />
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We're also told that because James initially wrote these stories to be read aloud and "more than likely" never edited them for their formal publication, they had probably "never really been properly edited before." Anything is possible, but I think Jones is confusing James' habitual modest and lighthearted self-presentation with actual indifference. Certainly James was involved in editing his first collection; he wrote in a letter to his father about the interesting prospect of correcting proofs of something so different from his academic work.<br />
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But to be frank I doubt Jones cares all that much about James' level of editorial involvement or about what modern audiences will put up with. He plainly thinks he is improving James' work. "No longer are his wit, erudition or pleasing terrors lost amongst pages and pages of unbroken print, complicated sentences and protracted paragraphs." I can only reply that I don't think those things were ever lost. Millions of people had been finding them for over a century before Jones entered the picture. Yes, there are some very long paragraphs in James that could be split without much loss. But I don't believe anyone can look at the extent of Jones' changes and feel that they are in line with James' style. Paragraphs of two or three sentences create a rhythm very different from the restrained gradualism of the antiquarian ghost story. Writers use paragraph breaks to control the flow of the narrative; they don't and shouldn't stop every fifty words or so in case someone's attention is flagging.<br />
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You may wonder why I'm banging on about this in a blog post that's supposed to be about "The Mezzotint." Well, first of all I had to get it off my chest. Jones is a first-rate editor of contemporary horror fiction, but his approach to <i>Curious Warnings</i> ruined, from the perspective of the fusty James enthusiast, the only mass-market edition to include the fragments and the children's novel <i>The Five Jars</i>. (That <i>Curious Warnings</i> is already out of print and traditional editions of James are not is one of the ironies of the situation.)<br />
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And I don't think it's fair to suggest James was indifferent to things like paragraphing. In places, perhaps, but there are other places where he is plainly using paragraph breaks to create specific effects. In "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" you have, following the very long paragraph describing the sacristan's home and the book itself, the one-sentence paragraph " 'If monsieur will turn on to the end,' he said." A short, sharp hint that something ominous is coming. There's an even better example in (yes, finally) "The Mezzotint." Setting the sentence "Williams had not noticed it before" off as its own paragraph draws the reader up, letting her know that this is no mere inattention but a plot point, a hint of the supernatural, something to send that first delicate shiver up the spine.<br />
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So is there anything good about "The Mezzotint" besides those six words? Sure. I'm not quite sure why it used to be my favorite, but the evolution of the engraving is a model of how a James story unfurls its supernatural presence. And the use of the present-day observers to tell the story of the ghostly kidnapping reflect James's careful manipulation of narrative distance. His stories are told at a remove. They happened to a friend of a friend, or were unearthed in old papers. The narrator is not personally implicated, and can describe characters and places with an ironic detachment, and without the profuse descriptions of confusion and terror that a first-person narrator would provide. To place the kidnapping of the Francis heir by Gawdy's ghost in the foreground would be a bit gruesome even for James, who softened the horror of the murdered children in "Lost Hearts" by making them such malevolent spirits. In fact this is a pretty light story all things considered; the nature of the frame narrative means there's no real climax, no "<i>crumpled linen</i>" or "odious writhings of a wasp."<br />
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This is the first story to really feature James' gentle satire of academics. It's amusing, especially the bits about golf. I suppose I should mention Mr Filcher, the servant who is, even more than Mrs Bunch, James' first full-on working class character or caricature. James is sometimes called a master of dialect, but I have to say he may over-egging the pudding here. Every quirk of language in isolation is no doubt accurate, but I doubt they often came as thick and fast as they do in Filcher's speech. Yes, this is exaggeration for comic effect, but James can make dons funny in a subtler, less condescending way.<br />
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Speaking of transitions, I don't have one to lead us toward "Polaris." According to S. T. Joshi, this is "a quiet little triumph of prose-poetry, its incantatory rhythm and delicate pathos sustaining it in spite of its brevity." I have the greatest respect for Joshi, but, you know, come <i>on</i>. I don't think Lovecraft ever wrote anything that featured "delicate pathos," and the heavy-handed mournfulness of this story is certainly not it.<br />
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I can see what Lovecraft was going for with the repetition of names and phrases, but the effect doesn't quite come off, although the last line makes for a pleasingly bleak final image. It doesn't help that he has no gift for fantasy nomenclature. Robert E. Howard and Lord Dunsany (who was not, despite what you might think, an influence on this story; Lovecraft hadn't read him yet) could put together evocative names that suggested an, and were often borrowed or tweaked from the actual, ancient world, but here we have stuff like Zobna and Kadiphonek that sounds silly in its own right and doesn't feel like it comes from any single invented language.<br />
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Lovecraft racism watch: the Inutos are "squat, hellish, yellow fiends" who "knew not the scruples of honour." They turn out to be the ancestors of the Inuit, or as Lovecraft calls them, using an old-fashioned spelling I've always loved, the Esquimaux.<br />
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I feel like I'm giving James a lot more space than Lovecraft in these posts, but then, as I've said before, James' early stories are his best, most representative work, while Lovecraft's are part of a great casting-about for style and substance. "Polaris," like "Dagon," is a story that could stand to be longer, to show the narrator's discovery and exploration of Olathoe in direct narration, so that the city's wonders are more clear and the loss of it resonates properly. And also like "Dagon," this is a story that's mostly interesting as a foreshadowing of what would come: in that case of the "Cthulhu Mythos," in this case of the "Dream Cycle." Neither of those things really exists as such, hence the scare quotes, but they do reflect certain broad currents in Lovecraft's work. "Polaris" points the way toward a lot of stories that, while not well regarded or widely discussed, are among my favorites in the Lovecraft canon. I hope I'll find more to say about them.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-78916347989853292016-09-01T11:46:00.004-04:002022-06-30T12:22:59.293-04:00James and Lovecraft: "Lost Hearts" and "Dagon"In his introduction to the anthology <i>Ghosts and Marvels</i>, M. R. James discussed the elements of a successful ghost story. His preference for a a placid atmosphere slowly disturbed and a setting only slightly remote are well-known; what interests me today is a more equivocal piece of advice slipped in between those two recommendations. "It is not amiss sometimes to leave a loophole for a natural explanation; but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable." I'm not sure James really does this himself, unless we take "not quite practicable" as a form of ironic understatement, but he comes as close as possible in today's story, "Lost Hearts." Lovecraft's "Dagon" is also technically susceptible to a natural explanation, but again, not a convincing one.<br />
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I said <a href="http://noondaystars.blogspot.com/2016/08/james-and-lovecraft-first-stories.html">yesterday</a> that "Lost Hearts" had never been a favorite of mine. Actually it was the first James story I ever read. When I was young I had a copy of a children's horror anthology with the admirably direct title <i>Ghosts</i>, which brought together a bunch of public domain classics in an oversize volume with a handsome binding and very nice artwork by Walt Sturrock. The story didn't particularly catch my attention at the time, but I must have read it, because I remember associating Stephen's vision of the ghost in the disused bathroom with an abandoned bathroom in my grandparents' house. It wasn't much like the bathroom in the story-- just an old toilet-- but it was at the top of the relatively narrow and dark stairs. Was I slightly scared of it before I read the story? I don't know. I was also nervous around the bathroom in my aunt's apartment, which for some reason was up a half-flight of stairs that turned a corner, so it was out of sight in the darkness. The bathroom in the mobile home where I grew up wasn't scary, though I did have dreams where I would go in there and be addressed by a godlike voice that was, I think, assigning me tasks at which I was always found wanting. I was an odd child. What were we talking about?<br />
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Oh, right, "Lost Hearts." I really liked it this time around. It's a fairly traditional story by Jamesian standards, one of the few where the hostile presence is definitely the ghost of a person rather than a demon or unclassifiable spirit. It also has a revenge motif, which is part of why it used to leave me cold. I find the ghost story of revenge unsatisfying because it muddies the darkly numinous with petty human life, leaving a moralizing taste that's antithetical to genuine eerieness. To be truly scary, a haunting must be <i>unfair</i>. James' typical protagonist may be over-curious, greedy, a little
pompous, but these are not failings that warrant having a demon set on
you. Murderers and thieves, on the other hand, deserve what they get. And so one can never really feel implicated in a revenge story. James suggested in the preface to one of his collections that he wanted to make the reader say, "If I'm not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!" But most of us are in no danger of inadvertently becoming Mr Karswell, George Martin, or Mr Abney.<br />
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(Well, perhaps "no danger" is putting it too strongly. I can't remember who remarked that James' scholarly protagonists exist along a sliding scale that runs from the impetuous curiosity of Parkins or Paxton toward the likes of Karswell and Mr Humphreys' uncle. Certainly the quote from Mr Abney's papers, with its arrogant, pedantic description of horrors-- "the libellous phrase employed by the author of the <i>Clementine Recognitions</i>," "to employ a word repugnant in the highest degree to my feelings"-- are a viciously ironic commentary on scholarly self-regard and single-mindedness.)<br />
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The reason "Lost Hearts" works anyway is that its protagonist is not Mr Abney but Stephen Elliott, who has certainly done nothing to deserve what he gets. It is easy, reading this story through the lens of other tales of ghostly revenge, to imagine that the spirits of Giovanni and Phoebe have come back to save Stephen from Mr Abney's dark design. But, as C. E. Ward observes in his essay "A Haunting Presence," on closer reading that doesn't make much sense. The boy's "appearance of menace and of unappeasable hunger and longing," and his attack on Stephen's door and nightdress, make it clear that he doesn't care whose blood he draws. While Mr Abney ends up the physical victim, the mere encounter with such creatures, and the discovery of his cousin's ruthless cruelty, will surely take a psychological toll on Stephen himself. The title may have a more than literal meaning. (Readers interested in a similar story that foregrounds those psychological effects should seek out Reggie Oliver's novella "A Child's Problem," which has several echoes of "Lost Hearts" that I'm sure aren't accidental.)<br />
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If James inverts the revenge story by focusing not on the deserving victim but on an object of collateral damage, he inverts the traditional ghost by giving it a more forceful physical presence. Vengeful ghosts tend to get what they want by indirect means, as befits a shade. They scare people to death, manipulate them into falling off buildings or jumping into rivers. They force crimes into the light, as in "Martin's Close," the most genuinely traditional story James ever wrote. Perhaps they manage to do some actual violence of a delicately unspecified type. What they don't do is use "fearfully long," translucent nails to leave "a terrible lacerated wound, exposing the heart." Giovanni is more a monstrous presence than a classically ghostly one.<br />
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Another way "Lost Hearts" successfully diverges from James' usual approach is in its emphasis on the atmosphere of the surrounding landscape. James doesn't do much with nature; his hauntings take place indoors, or in outdoor settings where the focus is on the ghost and not the world through which it moves. But here we have the "pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an evening in early autumn" with which the story opens, and then by contrast the "windy, noisy day, which filled the house and the gardens with a restless impression," the "strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers," of the fateful night of March 24th. It's all so subtly done that isolated quotes can't capture the overall sense of a countryside in ceaseless, mournful motion.<br />
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James himself didn't particularly like this story. It isn't clear why. All we know is that he didn't think it was worth including in his first collection, saying breezily "I don't care much about it." It was used anyway to pad out the volume. Was it too conventional for him? Too bleak? I'm sorely tempted to speculate, but I'll resist projecting anything onto the author.<br />
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Then there's "Dagon." Did I say yesterday that there was a long, tortuous evolution from the likes of "The Tomb" to the recognizably Lovecraftian story? Well, never mind that, because here is the Lovecraftian distilled into six pages. Monstrous creature mistaken for a god? Check. Horrible knowledge that has destroyed the protagonist's mind? Check. Scientific rather than supernatural framing? Check. Sense of humanity's puniness within the cosmos? Check. All that's really missing is the slow, deliberate unfolding of plot that would come in the longer stories. It's positively staggering that, having laid out his innovations in miniature here, Lovecraft would go nearly a decade before producing another story so obviously his own.<br />
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I think I had a little less fun with "Dagon" than with "The Tomb." It's the same almost-but-not-quite issue James had with "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book." "The Tomb" is derivative, lurid hokum, but it knows exactly how to <i>be</i> derivative, lurid hokum, and "Dagon" doesn't know how to be innovative science fiction/horror.<br />
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For one, thing it's too short. This means it lacks the accumulation of scientific, geographic, or anthropological detail that contributes so much to the major works: imagine what the Lovecraft of the early 1930s might have done with that "unprecedented volcanic upheaval." The 1917 Lovecraft just tells us "It was gross-- lots of fish parts," and then moves on. There's no time either for the gradual revelation that builds anticipation. In a longer story "they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion to their scenic background" would be a sly hint coming well ahead of the climactic discovery, but here it's all of one paragraph later that the narrator discovers how correct those proportions are.<br />
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Let's talk about the narrator. His diction, while not so tangled as the conscious antiquarianism of Jervas Dudley in "The Tomb," is not really credible for a supercargo in about 1914. (That is, when "the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation." Stay classy, Howard.) In his Lovecraft biography S. T. Joshi draws a distinction between "<i>density</i> of idiom" and "<i>archaism</i> of idiom." (Am I alone in thinking that "archaism of idiom" is right up there with "agenbite of inwit" as far as the poetry of five-dollar words goes?) That's useful up to a point, but bits like "Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery" are not merely dense. Later work like <i>At the Mountains of Madness</i> manages density without that whiff of archaism, but here Poe has not been completely shaken off.<br />
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The ending is also limp. Obviously the narrator is hallucinating, although the prospect of Dagon squeezing its orcine bulk into a hotel hallway and knocking on the door is pretty amusing. (This opens the possibility that the whole thing has been a hallucination; there's that loophole I mentioned so many paragraphs ago.) But it's a pretty lame hallucination compared to the narrator's earlier prolixity. It distracts from rather than complementing the vision that immediately precedes it, of the nameless sea-things rising to dispossess a ravaged humanity. The transition at the end of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" has always been too rapid for my liking, but it's much better handled than this.<br />
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And again, all that notwithstanding I did get a kick out of this one. There's stylistic excess here, but I like the chill simplicity of "...and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then." Right from the start Lovecraft liked him some slimy, decaying, pulpy (in both senses of the word) horrors. He punctured the largely psychological melancholy of Poe with the literary and metaphorical visceral, much as James tore open the delicacy of the Victorian ghost story with Giovanni's long fingernails.<br />
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That's all today, I hope. Next up are "The Mezzotint," once my favorite James story, and "Polaris," which, um, is definitely a thing that exists. Until then, don't visit your cousin when it's past your bedtime, and if some Germans capture you, maybe just stay on the sea-raider with them.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-21224503370625637642016-08-31T20:47:00.001-04:002016-08-31T20:47:38.440-04:00James and Lovecraft: First StoriesI bought an iPad recently, and because of that I've started listening to a bunch of different podcasts. (Yes, I know there are other ways than the misery that is iTunes to get podcasts. But this is the one that's convenient enough to overcome my laziness about tracking, downloading, and listening to things.) Two of them are <a href="http://hppodcraft.com/">The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast</a> and <a href="http://www.mrjamespodcast.com/">The M. R. James Podcast</a>, which pretty much do what they say on the tin. Each episode focuses on a particular work, though the Lovecraft podcast has long since exhausted him and moved and to other weird writers (and a subscription model), and the James podcast seems headed that way. Both podcasts are fun. The early episodes at least are more casual, jokey, and um, less fully informed than those who emulate the subjects' pedantry might prefer, but after all, these are podcasts, not symposia.<br />
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Anyway, I've decided to reread the stories as the podcasts cover them, and blog about them until the impulse fails (i.e. after I hit publish on this post). Both podcasts begin with their authors' first mature work. The most obvious difference between "The Tomb" and "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" is that the latter shows an author whose style is already fully-formed and essentially at its finest, while the former is both minor and derivative. Lovecraft famously wrote in 1929 that he had created "Poe pieces" and "Dunsany pieces" but had never managed any "Lovecraft pieces." Certainly "The Tomb" is a Poe piece, and not even a terribly good one.<br />
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I don't think I've mentioned here that I'm not exactly a Lovecraft fan anymore. I admire some aspects of his work technically-- the mastery of narrative structure, the cosmic pessimism-- but it's been a while since I've been able to take a lot of pleasure from it. It's the style on a sentence-by-sentence level that I can't relate to these days. Not the lugubriousness, the antiquated diction, but the fact that Lovecraft does them badly. For all his 18th-century affectations, he can't write a 19th-century pastiche. He has a tin ear for the kind of Gothic rhythm that Poe understood instinctively.<br />
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Poe piles up febrile adjectives, nouns, and the odd adverb the way Lovecraft does. In the first paragraph of "The Fall of the House of Usher" alone you have dull, dark, soundless, oppressively, singularly dreary, melancholy, insufferable gloom, sternest, desolate, terrible, bleak, vacant, rank, decayed, utter depression, bitter, hideous, iciness, sinking, sickening, unredeemed dreariness... look, I'm only halfway through the paragraph, can I stop now? I'm not going to claim this isn't excessive, teetering on the edge of ridiculousness, but I still think it works. Poe isn't aping a past diction that is different from his own natural mode; he's writing contemporary language in an elevated poetic style. A phrase like "an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart" is as indicative of the intended effect as "the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn."<br />
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In "The Tomb" Lovecraft makes the mistake that many of his own imitators have made: assuming that the best way to do homage is to soak every sentence in the past master's language, failing to recognize that sometimes verbal gymnastics detract from atmosphere rather than enhancing it. There's nothing wrong with describing mundane actions and plot points in simple language. Take a phrase like "the unexpected genealogical discovery that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly extinct family of the Hydes." Genealogical is superfluous, and "possessed a link" is stilted. "Maternal ancestry" is passable, but what on earth would be wrong with say, "the unexpected discovery that I was descended, upon my mother's side, from the supposedly extinct" etc? That's closer to how an actual 19th-century writer might have put it.<br />
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And yet I have to say I enjoyed "The Tomb" a lot more than I expected to. As is so often the case with Lovecraft, the style recedes when the plot has drawn you in. Looking back at Poe gives you a greater appreciation of how close Lovecraft comes to successfully emulating him. It's a sign of authentic talent, as the almost-there clunkiness of Ramsey Campbell's Lovecraft pastiches was a foreshadowing of <i>his</i> brilliance. And, while the manner is undoubtedly Poe, the details-- the bookish, reclusive narrator, the obsession with ancestry and the historical past, the sense of a terrible beauty in the natural world, the hints of graveyard grue-- show that Lovecraft's preoccupations were already in place in his first mature work.<br />
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"Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" is a better story than "The Tomb," and yet I got less pleasure out of this reading of it. That's partly down to simple familarity: I still enjoy James, so I've reread his canon more recently than Lovecraft's, though not all <i>that</i> recently. The other thing is that "The Tomb" is far enough from Lovecraft's distinctive mode that I approached it without expectation. "Scrap-Book," by contrast, is so close to first-rate James that its minor imperfections are all the more evident.<br />
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And they are minor, though given the delicate balance of a ghost story small blemishes can stand out. I don't remember who pointed out that "Good God! a hand like the hand in that picture!" is a terrible piece of dialogue at the worst possible point in the story for such a failure, but they were quite right. And the descriptions of the demon, both there and earlier, are overlong. The Jamesian haunting works by quick impressions-- "<i>crumpled linen</i>"-- rather than by this accumulation of almost zoological detail. How much more effective "It was drawn from the life" would be if it followed a much shorter description, one that made you feel the narrator actually despaired of conveying the image's effect in words. (I had never noticed before the echo of the "drawn from the life" line in "Pickman's Model." As likely to be coincidence as homage, but one wonders.)<br />
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The humor is slightly off as well. "I had no notion they came so dear," is in context really quite funny, but "an unbearably henpecked husband" and "a more formidable persecutor even than a termagant wife" are rather less subtly expressed than James' other forays into sexist humor. This isn't just about nitpicking. James' stories work by creating a placid atmosphere into which horrors insinuate themselves, almost gently at first, then with greater and greater force. Bland social comedy is part of that placidity, and "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" doesn't spend enough time generating the normal world before dispelling it. We're introduced to the sacristan's unease at the end of the first paragraph. The sense of exquisite progression that marks James' best work is absent.<br />
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And yet this is, indisputably, James. Not only the surface elements (the over-curious scholar, the casual erudition, the "ghost" that is actually a demon), but also and more significantly the sense of how to write what would come to be called a Jamesian story, is immediately evident. There's none of the long evolution, through homage and past traditional supernaturalism, of what would come to be called the Lovecraftian. That doesn't make James a better writer, obviously. This is a case where the destination does actually matter more than the journey. And the downside of emerging fully-formed is that you have nowhere to go but down. I have a great fondness for "A Vignette," but that's more for its apparent autobiographical elements than for its artistic merit. There won't be a "Last Stories" post in this series, both because I'll have given up and because I'll run out of James before I run out of Lovecraft, but the contrast between "A Vignette" and "The Haunter of the Dark" would be much less kind to James than the contrast between the current stories is to Lovecraft. (Yes, I know, "In the Walls of Eryx" and "The Night Ocean." Never mind.)<br />
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So that's the beginning. Next will be "Lost Hearts," never a favorite of mine, and "Dagon," of which I remember very little. Until then, don't buy any old books that are going too cheap, and stay away from locked but ajar tombs.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00658333212894698339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-82982538753576839862015-12-31T23:59:00.000-05:002016-01-05T10:13:14.504-05:00Books and magazines read, 2015This is my reading list for 2015. An asterisk means I was re-reading a book rather than reading it for the first time.<br />
<b> </b><br />
Once again I didn't read as many books by women as I'd intended to, just 31 out of 86. 86 is a sharp decline from last year's 132, but in April I bought a PlayStation 4 and in September I got a smart phone, so the surprising thing is that the count isn't lower.<br />
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I've added quick notes at the end of each month on certain books from the first half of the year. A lot of these books were review copies; you can read my reviews on Amazon <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A15ANBKUY4JSPD/">here</a>.<br />
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<b>January</b><br />
1. Lani Guinier, <i>The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America</i><br />
2. Laurie R. King, <i>The Moor</i><br />
3. David Mitchell, <i>Cloud Atlas</i><br />
4. Laurie R. King, <i>O Jerusalem</i><br />
5. Sharma Shields, <i>The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac</i><br />
6. Laurie R. King, <i>Justice Hall</i><br />
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The Mary Russell novels aren't exactly any good, but they're very readable, and there's a certain fascination in how staggeringly implausible a character Mary is, how obviously she's a hybrid of a plausible apprentice for Sherlock Holmes and an author surrogate for Laurie R. King. Frankly, the books would be more plausible and more enjoyable if King dropped the Holmes baggage and wrote about a globe-trotting theologian.<br />
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I can't say I was blown away by <i>Cloud Atlas</i>. The nested narratives are appealing, yes, and Mitchell writes competently in a variety of styles. But he's not quite breathtaking in any of them, and the narratives don't connect or illuminate each other except in incidental or trivial ways. I'm sympathetic to the larger humanist message, but the play with genre conventions means that none of the characters feel grounded enough to make that message more than a platitude. This is snobbish to say, but if they can make a blockbuster movie that fully captures what's going on in your novel, it's probably not a work of great profundity.<br />
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<b>February</b><br />
1. Peter Carey, <i>Amnesia</i><br />
2. Judith Claire Mitchell, <i>A Reunion of Ghosts</i><br />
3. Kirker Butler, <i>Pretty Ugly</i><br />
4. Dave Barry, <i>Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster)</i><br />
5. K. J. Parker, <i>Academic Exercises</i><br />
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K. J. Parker really is rather good, and the short stories are an accessible introduction to his sensibility. "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong" is a small masterpiece of ironies and moral turnabouts, which are Parker's specialty; under a broad sense of humor (he also writes comic fantasy under his real name, Tom Holt), he has as cynical a view of human nature as any writer of "grimdark."<i> </i><br />
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<i></i><br />
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<b>March</b><br />
1. Daniel Handler, <i>We Are Pirates</i><br />
2. Anne Tyler, <i>A Spool of Blue Thread</i><br />
3. Paolo Bacigalupi, <i>The Water Knife</i><br />
4. Neal Stephenson, <i>Seveneves</i><br />
5. Kerry Howley, <i>Thrown</i><br />
6. David Gates, <i>A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me</i><br />
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I love Daniel Handler's work in general, both under his own name and as Lemony Snicket, but <i>We Are Pirates</i> didn't work for me. One of its narrative strands felt like a generic male-inadequacy narrative, for which I have limited patience, and the other went to dark and unusual places but then fizzled out in a weirdly pat resolution.<br />
<br />
<i>Thrown</i> is a very amusing piece of "creative nonfiction" that simultaneously satirizes and expands the academic study of violent sports, and also offers an insightful and melancholy portrait of the mysterious isolation of driven athletes.<br />
<br />
<b>April</b><br />
1. Brian W. Aldiss, <i>Finches of Mars</i><br />
2. Chris Beckett, <i>Mother of Eden</i><br />
3. K. J. Parker, <i>Sharps</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords </i>(Parts 1-3)<br />
4. Emily St. John Mandel, <i>Station Eleven</i><br />
5. P. D. James, <i>The Children of Men</i><br />
6. Ben H. Winters, <i>World of Trouble</i><br />
<br />
I was on a dystopian kick at the end of April, apparently. <i>Station Eleven</i> is a lovely and sad novel, Shakespearean in more ways than one, layered with coincidence and irony, tragedy and rebirth. Not perhaps a work of great thematic complexity, but it's one of those case where the execution gives it great emotional impact all the same.<br />
<i> </i><br />
I don't know quite what to say about <i>The Children of Men</i>. Honestly, my clearest recollection is of how pointless and distracting the shifts between first-person and third-person narration were. The concept is compelling, and the first half gets the melancholy of a defeated world quite right, but it peters out into a chase narrative that's well-executed but meaningless.<br />
<br />
<i>World of Trouble</i> is a great conclusion to a great trilogy. They're all tightly-constructed, but only the first in the series really worked as a mystery; the real subject of the series is the portrait of the stages of grief of a doomed planet, and of a man whose need for order persists even in the face of something that will shatter all theories of meaning.<br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<b>May</b><br />
1. Sue Grafton, <i>E is for Evidence*</i><br />
2. Orson Scott Card, <i>Ender's Game</i>*<br />
3. Stephen King, <i>Revival</i><br />
4. Laurie Penny, <i>Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords </i>(Part 4)<br />
5. Jesse Ball, <i>A Cure for Suicide</i><br />
6. Mary Rickert, <i>The Memory Garden</i><br />
7. Juan Gabriel Vasquez, <i>Lovers on All Saints' Day</i><br />
8. Karen Joy Fowler, <i>Black Glass</i><br />
9. Lyndsay Faye, <i>Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson</i><br />
10. Stephen and Joyce Singular, <i>The Spiral Notebook: The Aurora Theater Shooter and the Epidemic of Mass Violence Committed by American Youth</i><br />
11. Sophie Jaff, <i>Love is Red</i><br />
<br />
The Karen Joy Fowler collection is seriously good stuff, and will surprise those who only know her from more accessible and straightforward work like <i>The Jane Austen Book Club</i> and <i>We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves</i>.<i> </i><br />
<br />
<b>June</b><br />
1. Robert Aickman, <i>The Strangers and Other Writings</i><br />
2. George Orwell, <i>All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 5)<i> </i><br />
3. Thomas Mallon, <i>Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years</i><br />
4. Susan Sontag, <i>Illness as Metaphor </i>and <i>AIDS and its Metaphors</i><br />
5. Ta-Nehisi Coates, <i>Between the World and Me</i><br />
6. Edwidge Danticat, <i>Untwine</i><br />
7. Ann Leckie, <i>Ancillary Sword</i><br />
<br />
The Mallon novel is great, cynical and gossipy yet never cheap, researched but never dry. I have no idea if it's accurate or realistic or whatever other label, but regardless of how well it captures Washington, it expresses something real about how people<i> </i>can be vastly yet casually self-centered.<br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<b>July</b><br />
1. Thomas Mallon, <i>Watergate</i><br />
<i>-.</i> K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords </i>(Part 6)<br />
2. Gregory Maguire, <i>After Alice</i><br />
3. Joe Abercrombie, <i>Half the World</i><br />
4. Joe Abercrombie,<i> Half a War</i><br />
5. Neal Stephenson, <i>Quicksilver</i>*<br />
6. Susanna Clarke, <i>Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell</i>*<br />
7. Lucius Shepard, <i>The Dragon Griaule</i><br />
<br />
Shepard's stories about the Dragon Griaule are extraordinary metaphors for obsession, or fate, or social control, or all three. Either way they're peerless examples of a kind of psychologically dense, atmospheric weird fiction.<i> </i><br />
<br />
<i> </i><br />
<b>August</b><br />
1. Geraldine Brooks, <i>The Secret Chord</i><br />
2. Harry Turtledove, <i>We Install and Other Stories</i><br />
3. Robin Hobb, <i>Fool's Quest</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 7) <br />
4. Lauren Redniss, <i>Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future</i><br />
5. Helen Phillips, <i>The Beautiful Bureaucrat</i><br />
<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>September</b><br />
1. Linda Nagata, <i>The Red: The Trials</i><br />
2. <i>See the Elephant</i>, Issue One<br />
3. Clifford D. Simak, <i>I am Crying All Inside and Other Stories</i><br />
4. William Boyd, <i>Sweet Caress</i><br />
5. Patrick Modiano, <i>So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood</i><br />
6. Sue Grafton, <i>F is for Fugitive</i>*<br />
7. Matt Bell, <i>Scrapper</i><br />
8. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 8)<br />
9. K. J. Parker, <i>Colours in the Steel</i><br />
10. Deanna Raybourn, <i>Silent on the Moor</i><br />
11. John Banville, <i>The Blue Guitar</i><br />
12. Tessa Hadley, <i>The Past</i><br />
<br />
<i> </i><br />
<b>October</b><br />
1. <b> </b>Patrick Ness, <i>The Rest of Us Just Live Here</i><br />
2. Umberto Eco, <i>Numero Zero</i><br />
3. Tom Hart, <i>Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir</i><br />
4. Ann Leckie, <i>Ancillary Mercy</i><br />
5. Colum McCann, <i>Thirteen Ways of Looking</i><br />
6. William H. Gass, <i>Eyes: Novellas and Stories</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 9) <br />
7. David Mitchell, <i>Slade House</i><br />
8. Robert Jackson Bennett, <i>City of Stairs</i><br />
9. Robert Galbraith, <i>The Cuckoo's Calling</i><br />
10. Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, <i>Welcome to Night Vale</i><br />
<br />
<b>November</b> <br />
1. Patrick Ness, <i>More Than This </i><br />
2. Robert Jackson Bennett, <i>City of Blades</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 10) <br />
3. Judd Apatow, <i>Sick in the Head: Conversations about Life and Comedy</i><br />
4. Daniel Handler, <i>The Basic Eight</i>*<br />
<br />
<b>December</b><br />
1. China Mieville, <i>This Census-Taker</i><br />
2. D. G. Hilton, <i>Biddy Debeau Rides for His Life</i><br />
3. Louise Penny, <i>Still Life</i><br />
4. Paul Kalanithi, <i>When Breath Becomes Air</i><br />
-. K. J. Parker, <i>The Two of Swords</i> (Part 11)<br />
5. Anne Perry, <i>The Cater Street Hangman</i><br />
6. John Donvan and Caren Zucker, <i>In a Different Key: The Story of Autism</i><br />
7. Peter Dickinson, <i>The Yellow Room Conspiracy </i><br />
<i> </i><br />
<b> </b><br />
<i> </i>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-67522833200449825052015-12-21T22:24:00.000-05:002015-12-21T22:24:04.979-05:00The "I don't have to have a topic" show: Bloodborne editionI couldn't come up with a real topic for a post today, and I spent so much time tonight playing <i>Bloodborne</i> that I don't have the energy to write a real one anyway. So here is a description of what I did in <i>Bloodborne</i> tonight.<br />
<br />
I started off at the Nightmare Church lamp in the expansion, because I took a few first shots at Ludwig last night. What a miserable fight that is: the size of a giant boss and the speed of a hunter. His combos keep killing me before I can do anything. Eventually I'll have to learn some actual strategies, but for tonight I put that aside in favor of stuff from the main game.<br />
<br />
I had gotten to the area before Mergo's Wet Nurse and hadn't really expected to fight it any time soon, since I still have the expansion and some miscellaneous collecting and grinding to do before I want to be forced into New Game +, and I figured once I started the final chain of bosses I'd decide to finish despite that. But then I found out they'd added the Blood Rock to the Insight shop, and I really wanted to +10 my Holy Blade. I used the one you find in the Nightmare of Mensis to +10 my Saw Cleaver, because it had been my main weapon for most of the game and I'm fond of it, but at my current level the Holy Blade is objectively a better option. And you can only buy Blood Rocks with Insight after you defeat the Wet Nurse, so the choice was clear.<br />
<br />
I was talking about the game with a friend at work today and he told me it was an easy fight. I thought, <i>Well, maybe for you</i>, because I tend not to do well with giant enemies. But no, he was right: it's surprisingly easy. I have no idea why the official guide lists it as an S-ranked fight. Those melee combos are vicious, but it's so slow that getting behind it and hacking like mad is no problem. I died once because I tried to attack while the clone was out instead of just dodging (and because I still had my triple-stacked Moon runes on instead of the defense and HP boosters I use on bosses), but the next time it went down without much trouble. It only even used Nightmare Veil once. Which makes sense, as something that blinds you more than it does your enemy is a terrible attack. I almost felt bad for it watching it flail around halfway across the room.<br />
<br />
So after the fight I went directly to the Insight Shop, bought the Blood Rock, and perfected my Holy Blade. Then I used all my collected Coldblood items to augment the 72,000 echoes you get from the Wet Nurse, and leveled up three times to reach Level 100. (Yes, I am kind of overleveled. I like it that way.) For a long time I was doing a very balanced physical build, with equal amounts of Vitality, Endurance, and Strength, moderate Skill, and low Bloodtinge and Arcane. But the more I used the Holy Blade, the more helpful extra Skill became, and lately I've started thinking it might be nice to use the Threaded Cane in New Game +. So I've started boosting Skill as well. Right now my Vitality, Endurance, and Skill are around 30, while my Strength is 36. Bloodtinge and Arcane are all the way down at 11. I keep wanting to add some, but by now it's like, what's the point?<br />
<br />
Then I approached Gehrman, in theory just to watch the cutscene and get a sense of how he moves. But I was able to do so much damage with each combo that I thought, <i>Maybe I could win this tonight</i>, and in fact I did just that on my third try, the first in which I took him past phase one. It was a close thing, though: I had no vials and about 20% HP when he took the final hit. In some ways, the first phase was actually the hardest for me: it's tough to gauge when he's using that hook maneuver, and those combos are brutal. When he pulled out the gun I thought, <i>I'm doomed</i>. But while I got hit a lot (I don't know how to dodge bullet spreads in this game), it never did much damage or delayed me while I was close enough for him to attack. And his forward rolls kept putting him in an ideal position for me to get off a nice combo. The third phase was brutal: I never worked out how to dodge the midair attack, so if he'd used that after I ran out of vials I would have died. But at the end he stuck to basic melee attacks, and while he staggered me twice I had just enough time to dodge away before he could hit me with a visceral. Also, I just kept hitting him while he built up that area of effect attack, not even bothering to dodge, and while I took a lot of damage that way, I could heal and he couldn't.<br />
<br />
So Gehrman died, and I quit out immediately before the Moon Presence could kill me and take my Echoes. Which turned out not to exist. I didn't realize the game withheld the ones Gehrman drops until you kill the Moon Presence, although it makes a lot of sense. I didn't try the Moon Presence at all, because I definitely don't want to get caught up in fighting it, win, and wind up in New Game + before I'm ready to be there.<br />
<br />
I did some other, less interesting stuff tonight, including checking out how boring it was to grind for Blood Stone Chunks using the Scourge Beasts in the Upper Cathedral Ward (answer: very). But this post is already long enough, and of no interest to most of you anyway. So I think I'll just call it a night.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-26129806582600401782015-12-20T21:35:00.001-05:002015-12-20T21:35:53.724-05:00Wunderkind(a)<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/business/theranos-founder-faces-a-test-of-technology-and-reputation.html">This <i>New York Times</i> article</a> about Theranos is interesting in a couple ways. For one thing, it's an example of how to write journalism that is scrupulously neutral in sentence-by-sentence wording and yet obviously slanted in total effect. The narrative has turned against Theranos, so even "objective" outlets will have their thumb on the scale. But the fact that the narrative was ever in favor of Theranos says a lot about our fascination with the idea of the wunderkind, and about how someone can be seen as an innovative genius while reaping the benefits of a life of privilege. The wealthy are evidently so eager to get behind the next Steve Jobs/Bill Gates/Mark Zuckerberg that they'll back any bright kid with an eye-catching idea... and the connections to get their attention in the first place.<br />
<br />
There's no denying that Elizabeth Holmes is intelligent (although the markers of intelligence in our society are not entirely separate from social and financial privilege either). But there's something very contemporary about the idea that a person with a bright scientific idea should immediately become the CEO of a company built around that idea. It suggests the extent to which high finance has little connection to reality. <a href="http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003326.html">Money isn't real</a> to begin with, and amounts in the millions and billions are especially unreal; for those with the right connections, they're self-generating, feeding on air as chameleons were once thought to. It's taken over a decade for it to be noticed that Theranos doesn't actually <i>do</i> much of anything.<br />
<br />
Holmes might yet surprise us all and produce results to match the image. Or she might turn out to be in over her turtleneck. Either way, the idea that because she had a sharp scientific mind she should run a major business reflects the common delusion that intelligence is infinitely transmutable. It's the same notion that puts Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker in the public eye, pontificating on subjects about which they know nothing because they happen to be very good in certain highly-specialized areas. But scientific specialists don't automatically make good public intellectuals, and it seems that they don't make good CEOs either.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-64303359232701116592015-12-19T21:40:00.000-05:002015-12-19T21:40:03.374-05:00"Go see a Star War."I haven't seen <i>The Force Awakens</i>, but I have thoughts about it.<br />
<br />
No, actually, they're not about the new movie, but about <i>Star Wars</i> as a whole and what, exactly, it's good for. One of the common criticisms of <i>The Force Awakens</i> is that it's basically a pastiche of <i>A New Hope</i>. (See <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/18/10543196/star-wars-the-force-awakens-a-new-hope-nostalgia">this article</a> for a detailed explanation; no explicit spoilers, but I wouldn't read it if you want to be totally surprised going in.) And I definitely get where that argument is coming from. But at the same time: what else is <i>Star Wars</i> going to do?<br />
<br />
Everybody hates the prequels. I didn't love them myself, although with the exception of <i>Attack of the Clones</i> I didn't think they were especially bad as that sort of thing goes. Their biggest sin was not making people feel like twelve-year-olds again, a sin the plot of <i>The Force Awakens</i> is aggressively, not to say cynically, trying not to commit. But when I try to think about why I didn't particularly like the prequels, I realize that it's because they were trying so hard to feel like part of an epic, carefully-realized science fiction universe, with fake science and details of planetary government and masses of stormtroopers. And that's not really what the original films were about. They were a fairy tale in a futuristic universe. Their world-building existed on the level of magical vistas, grimy taverns, and giant monsters. They even took place when and where all fairy tales do, long ago and far away.<br />
<br />
The problem is that the fairy tale structure doesn't really lend itself to extension. Once you hit "happily ever after," the fairy tale is over; when you've bowed, you leave the crowd. And George Lucas' explanation after the prequels for why he wasn't going to make a sequel trilogy still rings true: the first six episodes feel like a complete story, the rise and fall of the Empire, and the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. Of course you can do other things with the surviving characters, but how do you maintain the feel of the original trilogy without doing what <i>The Force Awakens</i> does and remaking it with some elements reorganized? I'm sure there's a way, and there's hope that the remaining episodes of this trilogy will show it. But even apart from the financial benefits of playing it safe, there are reasons the people who made this movie did what they did.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-74164304224651464332015-12-18T18:31:00.002-05:002015-12-18T18:31:39.426-05:00On Martin ShkreliObviously the arrest for securities fraud of Martin Shkreli, whose company raised the price of an AIDS drug from $13.50 per pill to $750, has an air of poetic justice about it. But there are a couple ways in which that air is misleading. It's not so much a matter of karma as of one kind of ugly behavior leading to another. Corporate fraud is not simply something that accompanies corporate greed; it's an inextricable part of the process. High finance deals in amounts of money so large they have no real meaning, which makes for a system that's easy to game in a variety of ways. There is no sense in which any drug is worth $750 per pill, and forcing hospitals to pay that much is no less fraudulent in essence than the Ponzi scheme Shkreli allegedly set up at two of his previous corporations. It's simply an acceptable fraud.<br />
<br />
And here's the thing: Shkreli made headlines not because he's a big part of these problems but because he isn't. The Daraprim hike was an eye-catching story, but it's not as if Shkreli invented inflated medical pricing. His quote about "charging Toyota prices for an Aston Martin" was callous-- we're not talking about cars but about lives. And yet that attitude toward healthcare is an inevitable result of leaving so much of it to private enterprise. And while $11 million, the amount of the alleged fraud, is big money by my standards and probably by yours, in the world of high finance it's a drop in the bucket. The people who should be arrested for playing games with others' money won't be, because they're too big to jail. Shkreli's arrest is a sideshow, something that will create the impression that the government is tough on corporate fraud without actually inconveniencing anyone who might be a big donor in an upcoming election. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies will continue to charge inflated amounts for drugs, and much of that cost will be borne by taxpayers. A system in which governments buy vital services but have limited control over their prices may not seem to make sense, but for the people who profit from it, the logic is all too clear.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-85228127349274388782015-12-17T13:26:00.000-05:002015-12-17T13:26:25.451-05:00The Cater Street HangmanThis is the first book in Anne Perry's long-running Thomas Pitt series, but it was conceived as a standalone novel, which is a key aspect of its unusual tone. The detective and eventual series protagonist is at best a secondary character. The focus instead is on the Ellisons, who live in a neighborhood where a serial killer is targeting young women. The detective element is played down; there's much emphasis on how impossible it is to investigate this kind of insanity-driven violence with the tools available in the late 19th century. Possible suspects are gradually eliminated by the absence of opportunity, but <i>The Cater Street Hangman</i> is not so much a murder mystery as an exploration of the effects of proximity to murder on a late Victorian family. On those terms it's an enjoyable if slow-paced novel.<br />
<br />
The brutal fact of violent crime is bound to shatter the hypocrisy and secrecy on which the patriarchal order of the Victorian household was based. The Ellisons are forced to confront the possibility that one of them might be a murderous lunatic. This acceptance of the ugly side of life forces to the surface several smaller secrets and buried conflicts, leaving the family raw... and yet, perhaps, better off than they were before. Perry does a fine job of elaborating the constricted emotional lives of Victorians, and in particular of Victorian women, without reducing any of the characters to caricature. The father is no demanding ogre but an ordinary man raised with deeply sexist and authoritarian expectations. Even the sharp-tongued grandmother, something of a stock figure in contemporary 19th-century stories, is not without her pitiable side, though the austere and arrogant vicar remains one-dimensional.<br />
<br />
The emphasis on emotional nuance and on slow-building despair mean that this is not an especially lively novel for those who don't enjoy simmering interpersonal tension as much as I do. But Perry's simple yet graceful prose sustains it, as does a comic subplot involving one daughter's pursuit of a marriage proposal from a rakish gentleman. Indeed, this is as much an unconventional romance novel as an unconventional murder mystery. That very difficulty of classification is part of the charm of <i>The Cater Street Hangman</i>, which offers the pleasures of period mystery, period romance, and period drama without becoming too bound by the formulas of any. Whether further volumes in the series will maintain this unique character I can't say, but on its own terms this is a surprisingly taut and engaging novel.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-35902853216908518642015-12-16T13:13:00.002-05:002015-12-16T13:13:36.707-05:00Telltale's Game of Thrones, Until Dawn, and the Illusion of ChoiceIn theory, the option to replay with different decisions is a big part of the appeal of choice-based, story-driven video games. In practice, though, you're better off not replaying, because to do so is to discover how little your choices actually matter. There are solid practical reasons for this; a full branching narrative, rather than dozens of inconsequential dialogue choices, would greatly increase the size of the game. Even two or three genuinely major choices would have a balloon effect as permutations increase. But there's an argument to be made that such an approach-- few and meaningful decisions-- would be more satisfying in the long run.<br />
<br />
I don't have much patience for <i>Game of Thrones</i> as a TV series. It's done a remarkably consistent job of adapting what's dull and pedestrian about George R. R. Martin's novels and omitting what's atypical and, by the standards of mass market fiction, interesting. So I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Telltale's video game in the setting. At first it seemed to be doing a better job than the TV show of avoiding unnecessary "look how grim and edgy this is" scenes, though that was less true during the later episodes. And the major choices felt very dramatic in the moment, even when you could see in the immediate aftermath how the game was designed to discount some of your decisions. It was only with the ending that you realized how little anything you did mattered.<br />
<br />
To some extent this is tied up with the ways in which the ending fails as a narrative resolution regardless of the matter of choice. Whatever its reputation, <i>Game of Thrones</i> isn't an endless slog through misery for all the likable characters. Some of them suffer devastating reversals and permanent losses, yes, but so do the villains and the ambiguous protagonists. The individual novels and season, whatever their other flaws, strike a good balance between "down" and "up" moments. Telltale's story, on the other hand, has a serious shortage of ups, and eschews any kind of resolution in favor of more cliffhangers per capita than <i>A Dance with Dragons</i>. It doesn't matter how well you marshaled your resources at Ironrath or played the game in King's Landing; you're going to get basically the same results, a setup for a season two that, for reasons of branching complexity, probably won't even focus on these characters. There are some very effective individual sequences in that final episode, but the overall effect is a serious anti-climax.<br />
<br />
For most of its length, I thought that <i>Until Dawn</i> was doing a better job than the Telltale games of making your choices actually matter. The sales model certainly ought to have made that easier: releasing the whole game at once allows the designers to make the flow of choices organic, rather than be obligated to squeeze six into every episode for those buying the game piecemeal. And let's face it: controlling who lives and who dies in a horror movie scenario has obvious appeal. The existence of missable collectibles provides another incentive to replay. And the butterfly effect system, which shows cause-and-effect of choices in a direct, constantly-updating manner, puts your sense of your influence front and center. But it still is only a <i>sense</i> of your influence.<br />
<br />
You control who lives and who dies, yes, but the basic story is the same no matter who's alive and who's dead. And when you investigate how and where significant branching occurs, you realize how often it involves only the immediate lead-up to a death. There are a couple cases where it's more complicated than that, but they're the exception rather than the rule. And those cases don't change large portions of the gameplay; they involve an isolated choice in, say, episode three, and an isolated result in episode seven. So you can end up doing a lot of replaying for a relatively small tweak to the end result. And since the gameplay consists of navigating stiff, slow-moving characters down a series of linear corridors and completing viciously-timed QTEs, replaying generally feels like a chore.<br />
<br />
My point here isn't that these are bad games. I enjoyed both of them, <i>Until Dawn</i> a bit more than <i>Game of Thrones</i> because horror is more my thing and because the overall production values are higher. But I do wonder if it's a mistake to bombard the player with choices that produce ten seconds' worth of minor difference. These eat up production time that might be better spent creating meaningfully different results based on a smaller number of decisions. Four or five endings that take the characters to radically different places would be far more likely to encourage replays than hundreds of permutations of the same basic denouement. Too often, branching in video games is like when a DVD's special features promise an alternate ending, and deliver the original ending with a couple different camera angles. That's nice if you're really enthusiastic about the property in question, but it leaves the rest of us wanting more.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-17631012838885408802015-12-16T11:08:00.005-05:002015-12-16T11:08:57.555-05:00Hello and goodbyeObviously I don't have much to say about horror/weird/experimental/[your self-conscious label here] fiction anymore. I don't read much of it, and I'm rarely inspired to blog about what I do read. So I'm dropping the idea of this as a themed blog, and just writing about whatever I happen to be thinking about on a given day. Because the other side of this change of pace is that I do mean to blog every day, although I imagine the posts will be much more substantial on my days off work. I've also changed the design of the blog, because white text/black background is both less appropriate for a general-interest blog and less appealing to me than it used to be.<br />
<br />
So all change, basically. But maybe this will be an actual blog, rather than the web equivalent of a biannual newsletter.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-72269364251152845092015-06-05T18:14:00.005-04:002015-06-05T18:14:41.151-04:00The Strangers and Other WritingsI've thought for a while now that one of the great desiderata in the analysis of supernatural fiction is a biographical-critical study of Robert Aickman. Of course there are his autobiographies (as yet, alas, unread by me), and there's been a fair amount of quality analysis of his superficially baffling stories, but many aspects of the man's life and thought remain obscure, and as those who knew him best grow older, it seems more and more likely that they'll remain so. That's not the worst thing in the world-- with a writer like Aickman, the notion even offers a fitting irony-- but it is a shame. Happily for Aickman devotees, Tartarus Press has recently offered the next best thing to a full analysis: a collection of unpublished and uncollected work by Aickman, both fiction and non-fiction, accompanied by a documentary on his life and work. <i>The Strangers and Other Writings</i> is, like Tartarus's Sarban miscellany <i><a href="http://noondaystars.blogspot.com/2011/06/discovery-of-heretics-unseen-writings.html">Discovery of Heretics</a></i>, interesting not so much for the intrinsic merit of the included writing (though in both cases some of its is very fine) as for what it reveals about its author. It scarcely needs saying that no reader seriously interested in Aickman should miss their chance to own this collection.<br />
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The fiction will likely be of more interest to most readers, and it is, to my mind, more consistently rewarding than the non-fiction, even though a higher percentage of the former is early work. Five of the seven stories unquestionably date from the late 1930s and early 1940s, before Aickman took to the allusive, psychologically suggestive strange stories for which he is best known. Most of these are horror stories of one type or another, and certain elements of both plot and atmosphere are recognizably Aickmanesque, but the overall impression is of a writer casting around for his voice. "The Case of Wallingford's Tiger" is a bit of a conte cruel, not dissimilar in plot to something Roald Dahl might have written a couple decades later, but told in a style that tries for compressed comic effect and instead comes off clotted and off-putting. The same is true of "A Disciple of Plato," a sort of historical romance and the longest of these early stories, though still quite short by Aickman's usual standard. There's a kind of comedy that works by describing simple situations in delicate or elaborate language, amusing with its verbosity and covering over the familiarity of its tropes; but in inexpert hands the approach becomes tedious, and the young Aickman was far from a master. Ill-executed attempts at cleverness are uniquely vexing. The concept of the story is not without interest, and there are flashes of competent writing, but this was clearly not Aickman's forte.<br />
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More rewarding are the other three early stories. "The Whistler" is, I think, accomplished enough that it would be a well-regarded if minor story even apart from the Aickman connection. It's a kind of intensely stylized psychological horror that's miles away from what Aickman would do later (in fact it reminds me of some other author or work in particular, but I can't at the moment think just who or what), but the disjointed, unsettling stream-of-consciousness is quite well achieved. It could stand to be fleshed out a little further, but it more than any of the other early works it has merit in its own right. "The Coffin House" feels like a precis of a full Robert Aickman story-- travelers, a mysterious residence, social unease with eerie overtones, and a horrible revelation, all within six pages-- though the psychological intricacy has been traded off for luridness of plot (and an ending that is far from ambiguous). "The Flying Anglo-Dutchman" has a lighter tone than most Aickman, social comedy rather than social unease, though its setting and subject matter are more familiar.<br />
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The last two stories in the fiction section are of later vintage. The title story is listed as "date unknown," but an internal reference appears to set its terminus a quo as 1955 at the earliest, and more probably 1960,* so it belongs with Aickman's more mature work. And it is, in fact, recognizably a strange story, though the narration has more of a casual, comic touch than is usual in mature Aickman, where the humor is of a more brittle variety. Certainly the interplay of high culture, sex, and death is classically Aickmanesque. Readers who admire the fiction but don't care much about the writer or his development should still consider buying the collection for this story alone. It lacks, perhaps, the air of sophistication and polish of stories that he prepared for publication, but make no mistake: this is fully-fledged Aickman, and as such inimitably atmospheric.<br />
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The fiction ends with "The Fully-Conducted Tour," written for radio broadcast in 1976 and published in Tartarus' journal <i>Wormwood</i> several years ago. Even more recognizably Aickman than "The Strangers," it is nonetheless less satisfying. Sometimes very short Aickman stories work quite well ("The Cicerones" comes to mind), but at other times they feel underdeveloped, and that's especially the case here, though an echo, or a ghost, of the full effect can still be felt.<br />
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The non-fiction, which makes up more than half of the volume, can be difficult going. There are essays we read for insights into the subjects discussed, and there are essays we read insights into the one doing the discussing. Aickman's are the latter. There are good points here and there, but his was not, I think, a mind well-equipped for subtle commentary on many topics; his convictions were too wide and too deeply felt. At times, as when he pronounces that "every time you buy a washing machine or a motor car instead of a Shakespeare or a guitar you bring [Orwell's] <i>1984</i> nearer," he sounds like a tedious if erudite old crank. But it's fascinating to see him responding to the high and low culture of his day, from <i>Animal Farm</i> to <i>Gentleman's Agreement</i>, from Delius to Russell Kirk. And there are moments of genuine pleasure: his evisceration of the high-minded stiltedness of major American films, his rambling verbal tour of the river Avon, and "Some Notes on Delius," which may or may not have anything to say about Delius (I wouldn't know) but which certainly illuminates Aickman's aesthetic sensibilities as well as anything he ever wrote. The section is rounded out by excerpts from Aickman's writing for the bulletin of the Inland Waterways Association, which certainly capture his zeal for the organization's ends. There are also a couple poems.<br />
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The accompanying 53-minute documentary, <i>Robert Aickman, Author of Strange Tales</i>, provides a solid overview of the life and work. The visual presentation isn't flashy, but it more than gets the job done; brief clips from film and TV adaptations provide a balance to talking heads and static images. Personal friends Jean Richardson and Heather and Graham Smith provide insight into Aickman the man, while writers Jeremy Dyson and Reggie Oliver talk about the impact of his writing. Dyson is charming and enthusiastic, Oliver thoughtful and insightful. I suppose neither really has much to say that will surprise those already well-acquainted with Aickman, but then that level of discussion is outside the remit of a project like this. The most tantalizing part of the documentary is clips from audio recordings of Aickman reading his own stories. While he was not by any means a natural reader, there's something fascinating about his delivery, and one can only hope that eventually these recordings will be available in their own right.<br />
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In the past few years Tartarus Press has done Aickman readers a great service by bringing out virtually all of his writings in handsome, durable, comparatively inexpensive editions. <i>The Strangers</i> is the capstone to that achievement. Someday, perhaps, we will have that full-length study of Aickman I dream of. If it <i>is</i> ever to be written, the work collected in <i>The Strangers </i>will doubtless prove invaluable. As a "behind-the-scenes" look at the evolution of a writer and a quasi-philosopher, this volume could hardly be bettered.<br />
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*<i>Unless, that is, there's another song with the lyric "Where have all the young men gone?" than the US folk song written in the earlier year and not widely performed or recorded until the later one. </i>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-11894064989169677802015-01-06T12:36:00.001-05:002015-01-06T12:36:54.253-05:002014 reading notes, with some annual favoritesI had two goals for my reading in 2014: to read more books by women, and to make my reading feel less like work and more like pleasure by backing off from my obsession with "getting through" so many titles in a week, year, month, etc. I succeeded on both counts, though in the former case not as well as I originally hoped. Of 132 books read in 2014 (down from 159 in 2013), 70 were by women (up from 63 in 2013). That's both a minor increase in raw totals and a decent proportional one, but as I originally planned to read mostly books by women in 2014, it does seem I got a bit sidetracked.<div>
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Rather than picking an arbitrary number or schedule of best books for the year, I'm going to mention a few titles I especially liked, with a focus on those I think could use some extra attention: I really liked the Alice Munro stories I read this year, for example, but I hardly think anyone needs further recommendation of her work.</div>
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<b>Melanie Lamaga</b>, <i>The Evolution of Reptilian Handbags and Other Stories</i>. This collection, <a href="http://noondaystars.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-evolution-of-reptilian-handbags-and.html">which I reviewed in February</a>, belongs to the same general class of literary fantasy as work by Kelly Link, Karen Russell, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, and Alissa Nutting, but like all those writers Lamaga has a voice of her own that makes classification of dubious value. Lamaga's surrealism is at it best less superficially whimsical than that of the above-mentioned writers: she cuts right to the heart of the issues with which they're all concerned. Hers is a magic perhaps less structurally audacious, but no less perfectly stylized and haunting.</div>
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<b>Mary Gentle</b>, <i>Ash: A Secret History</i>. This mammoth novel is something I would recommend to readers of <i>A Song of Ice and Fire</i> who enjoy that series not for its elaborate fictional world or its violent plot twists but for its exploration of gender issues, its resemblance to historical fiction, and its air of subtle yet eerie magic. To say too much about the plot is to spoil its gradual unfurling; to identify the book's ultimate genre would be a major revelation, although there's no harm in saying that it manages at once to suggest fantasy, science fiction, and alternate history. The plot isn't superficially twisty, but the revelations are very well-paced in both the main narrative and a contemporary frame story to keep the reader involved for all 500,000+ words. The ending isn't quite as impressive as what has preceded it-- as is so often the case, explanations are less satisfying than mysteries, and the final moments of the main plot have an air of anti-climax-- but the total effect is not to be missed.</div>
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<b>Violet Kupersmith</b>, <i>The Frangipani Hotel</i>. This collection of literary ghost stories, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R235DV7HNWK2F">which I reviewed on Amazon in March</a>, does something not many writers can by satisfying both as "pure" literary fiction and as a set of spine-tinglers. Like the best ghost stories-- I think of Glen Hirshberg, and in a slightly different vein of Robert Aickman and Reggie Oliver-- they're suffused with a profound melancholy that perfectly complements the icy terror of the ghosts themselves, and they offer many angles through which to consider Vietnam, the United States, and the tangle of their shared history.</div>
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<b>Jacob Bacharach</b>, <i>The Bend of the World</i>. This first novel, <a href="http://noondaystars.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-bend-of-world.html">which I reviewed in May</a>, is a sharp, fast-paced, and funny variation on the contemporary coming-of-age motif. Or something like that. Really, I just typed that, and I don't know what it quite means, except that I liked the book. It's the kind of language you find in blurbs, creating the appearance of specificity because a big thumbs-up sign would give the game away. My review may be better, though I remember writing it in the kind of white heat of impressed-ness that usually produces something deeply embarrassing in hindsight. Anyway, read <i>The Bend of the World</i>.</div>
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<b>Alissa Nutting</b>, <i>Tampa</i>. You may notice that my very favorite books tend to be those which are very funny but also very dark, so it's no surprise I admired this laugh-out-loud hilarious account of a sociopathic woman's seduction of a teenage student. It's not a funny subject, and that's why the book has to be funny: confronting what Celeste Price is and what she does without humor would make for an unbearably unpleasant experience. The real triumph of <i>Tampa</i>, though, is that it explores its subject fully without descending into one of the many types of banality that threaten: narrative (no unlikely or melodramatic plot twists), thematic (no finger-wagging about how bad Celeste is, as if we needed to be told), or psychological (no contrived explanation for why Celeste behaves the way she does). It just looks honestly at what teacher/student affairs entail, and the way our society fails to grasp their meaning when facile assumptions about gender get in the way.</div>
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<b>Jo Walton</b>, <i>Farthing</i>/<i>Ha'penny</i>/<i>Half a Crown</i> and <b>Ian R. MacLeod</b>, <i>The Summer Isles</i>. These two alternate history dealing with fascism in mid-century Britain make for an interesting set of contrasts. Walton's Small Change trilogy, modeled on classic British detective fiction, is extraordinarily compelling, turning the light social comedy of such novels on its head by setting it against the backdrop of a Britain increasingly tied to, and turning into, Nazi Germany. MacLeod's novel, in which an Allied defeat in World War I sees Britain descend into depression, fascism, and antisemitism, has a subdued but haunting air of tragedy, and is perhaps the more insightful about how fascism and other authoritarian movements build up their popular appeal.</div>
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<b>Edward St Aubyn</b>, <i>Never Mind</i>/<i>Bad News</i>/<i>Some Hope</i>/<i>Mother's Milk</i>/<i>At Last</i>. These five short novels are linked by Patrick Melrose, a fictionalized version of their author, and by their darkly witty account of monstrous selfishness among the British upper classes. St Aubyn is quite good at conveying the horrors of being trapped inside one's own dysfunctional mind without also reproducing its tedium, and he makes even the most horrifying figures (like the father who sexually abused him) comprehensible without softening or excusing their behavior. The finest of the novels are <i>Never Mind</i> and <i>Mother's Milk</i>, both of which offer particularly excellent descriptions of a child's mentality without unnecessary dumbing-down of language or insight. Perhaps the weakest is <i>Bad News</i>, in which Patrick's drug-fueled response to his father's death is insufficiently balanced by exploration of other characters. Much coverage of the Melrose novels has inevitably focused on their autobiographical elements, but it is precisely in their escape from the tyranny of the self that they are most rewarding.</div>
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<b>Cixin Liu</b>, <i>The Three-Body Problem</i>. This is the first novel by China's most prominent science-fiction writer to be translated into English, and while the translation either reproduces or introduces an awkward note in the prose, the blending of eerie sense-of-wonder sci-fi concepts with an exploration of the psychological consequences of repression makes it a must-read for those interested in seeing greater diversity in SF publications. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R2YLTRDHF21B6B/">I reviewed the book on Amazon in October.</a></div>
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<b>Nicholas Bourbaki</b>, <i>If</i>. This novel, <a href="http://noondaystars.blogspot.com/2014/12/if-novel.html">which I reviewed just a couple weeks ago</a>, uses the form of children's choose-your-path novels to explore how the choices of an upper-middle-class young American can and cannot change his destiny and personality. The gimmick helps to make the book compelling reading, as does Bourbaki's gift for psychologically intense experimental prose, but what makes it memorable is its insight into how people can change and yet stay profoundly the same.</div>
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So that was 2014. I have no particular reading goals for 2015, though I do want to keep rough parity between books by men and books by women, and make more of an effort to explore SFF and related work by non-white, non-Western writers.</div>
Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-17354021354707689972014-12-31T23:59:00.000-05:002015-01-04T16:28:55.166-05:00Books read, 2014<b>January</b><br />
1. Stephen King, <i>Doctor Sleep</i><br />
2. Terry Pratchett, <i>Snuff</i><br />
3. Stephen King, <i>The Shining</i><br />
4. Lorrie Moore, <i>Bark </i><br />
5. Jeffrey Ford, <i>The Physiognomy</i><br />
6. David R. George III, <i>Revelation and Dust </i><br />
7. Kim Newman, <i>Johnny Alucard: Anno Dracula 1976-1991</i><br />
8. Steve Rasnic Tem, <i>Onion Songs</i><br />
9. Armistead Maupin, <i>Tales of the City</i><br />
10. Jams Tiptree, Jr., <i>Brightness Falls from the Air </i><br />
11. James Tiptree, Jr., <i>The Starry Rift</i><br />
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<i> </i><br />
<b>February</b><br />
1. David Sedaris, <i>Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls</i><br />
2. Octavia Butler, <i>Kindred</i><br />
3. Altariel, <i>A Game of Chess</i> <b> </b><br />
4. Melanie Lamaga, <i>The Evolution of Reptilian Handbags and Other Stories</i><br />
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<b> </b><br />
<b>March</b><br />
1. Roxane Gay, <i>An Untamed State</i><br />
2. <i></i>Mary Gentle, <i>Ash: A Secret History</i><br />
3. <i></i>Violet Kupersmith, <i>The Frangipani Hotel</i><br />
4. <i></i>Jennifer DuBois, <i>Cartwheel</i><br />
5. Lauren Owen, <i>The Quick</i><br />
<br />
<b> </b><br />
<b>April</b><br />
1. Polly Courtney, <i>Feral Youth</i><br />
2. <i></i>Sarah Langan, <i>The Keeper</i><br />
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<b> </b><br />
<b>May</b><br />
1. Jacob Bacharach, <i>The Bend of the World</i><br />
2. <i></i>Rainbow Rowell, <i>Landline</i><br />
3. Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, <i>The Fall of the Kings</i><br />
4. <i></i>Joe<b></b> Abercrombie, <i>Half a King</i><br />
5. Georgette Heyer, <i>Frederica</i><br />
6. Dorothy Dunnett, <i>Queen's Play</i><br />
7. Leah Hager Cohen, <i>No Book But the World</i><br />
8. Kevin Birmingham, <i>The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's </i>Ulysses<br />
9. Graham Joyce, <i>The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit</i><br />
10. <i></i>J. R. R. Tolkien, <i>Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary</i><br />
11. Robin Hobb, <i>Fool's Assassin</i><br />
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<b>June</b><br />
1. Matt Taibbi, <i>The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap</i><b> </b><br />
2. Theodore Sturgeon, <i>Some of Your Blood</i><br />
3. Samuel R. Delany, <i>Tales of Nevèrÿon</i><br />
4. Julie Schumacher, <i>Dear Committee Members</i><br />
5. Bel Kaufman, <i>Love, Etc.</i><br />
6. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, <i>From Hell</i>*<br />
7. P. D. James, <i>Cover Her Face</i><br />
8. Laline Paull, <i>The Bees</i><br />
9. Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore, <i>The </i>From Hell <i>Companion</i><br />
10. Sarah Waters, <i>The Paying Guests</i><br />
11. Chris Beckett, <i>Dark Eden</i><br />
12. J. R. R. Tolkien, <i>The Monsters and the Critics: and Other Essays</i><br />
13. Philip Sugden, <i>The Complete History of Jack the Ripper </i><br />
14. Daniel Levine, <i>Hyde</i><br />
15. Thomas Ligotti, <i>The Spectral Link </i><br />
16. Matt Cardin (editor), <i>Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti </i><br />
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<b>July</b><br />
1. Nick Mamatas, <i>Love is the Law</i><br />
2. Deanna Raybourn, <i>Silent in the Grave</i><br />
3. Alissa Nutting, <i>Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls</i><br />
4. Pat Barker, <i>The Eye in the Door</i><br />
5. Pat Barker, <i>The Ghost Road</i><br />
6. Alison Lurie, <i>Foreign Affairs</i><br />
7. Reggie Oliver, <i>Virtue in Danger </i><br />
8. Jeffrey Ford, <i>Memoranda</i><br />
9. Alissa Nutting, <i>Tampa</i><br />
10. Brendan Connell, <i>The Galaxy Club</i><br />
11. Philip K. Dick, <i>The Crack in Space</i><br />
12. Shirley Jackson, <i>We Have Always Lived in the Castle</i><br />
13. Shirley Jackson, <i>Other Stories and Sketches</i> (from the Library of America volume)<br />
14. Ann Leckie, <i>Ancillary Justice</i><br />
15. Georgette Heyer, <i>Venetia</i><br />
16. Michael Marshall, <i>The Lonely Dead</i><br />
17. Genevieve Valentine, <i>Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti</i><br />
18. Brendan Connell, <i>Miss Homicide Plays the Flute</i><br />
19. Georgette Heyer, <i>Footsteps in the Dark</i><br />
20. Grady Hendrix, <i>Horrorstor</i><br />
21. Deanna Raybourn, <i>Silent in the Sanctuary</i><br />
22. Jo Walton, <i>Farthing</i><br />
23. Ian R. MacLeod, <i>The Summer Isles</i><br />
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<b>August</b><br />
1. John Joseph Adams (editor), <i>The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</i><br />
2. Caitlin R. Kiernan, <i>Daughter of Hounds</i><br />
3. Kage Baker, <i>Gods and Pawns</i><br />
4. Ian R. MacLeod, <i>Journeys</i><br />
5. Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, <i>Sorcery and Cecelia</i><br />
6. Sherman Alexie, <i>Flight</i><br />
7. Sherman Alexie, <i>War Dances</i><br />
8. Sue Grafton, <i>"D" is for Deadbeat</i>*<br />
9. Jo Walton, <i>Ha'penny</i><br />
10. Jo Walton, <i>Half a Crown</i><br />
11. Georgette Heyer, <i>The Corinthian</i><br />
12. Edward St Aubyn, <i>Never Mind</i><br />
13. Kage Baker, <i>In the Garden of Iden</i>*<br />
14. Edward St Aubyn, <i>Bad News</i><br />
15. Edward St Aubyn, <i>Some Hope</i><br />
16. Kage Baker, <i>Sky Coyote</i>*<br />
17. Kage Baker, <i>Mendoza in Hollywood</i>*<br />
18. Kage Baker, <i>The Graveyard Game</i>*<br />
19. Kage Baker, <i>Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers</i>*<br />
20. Kage Baker, <i>The Life of the World to Come</i>*<br />
21. Kage Baker, <i>The Children of the Company</i>*<br />
22. Kage Baker, <i>The Machine's Child</i>*<br />
23. Kage Baker, <i>The Sons of Heaven</i>*<br />
24. Kage Baker, <i>In the Company of Thieves</i><br />
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<b>September</b><br />
1. Angela Pneuman, <i>Lay It on My Heart</i><br />
2. Edward St Aubyn, <i>Mother's Milk</i><br />
3. Edward St Aubyn, <i>At Last</i><br />
4. Charlotte Mosley (editor), <i>The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters</i><br />
5. Martin Amis, <i>The Zone of Interest</i><br />
6. Ha Jin, <i>A Map of Betrayal</i><br />
7. Matteo Pericoli et al, <i>Windows on the World</i><br />
8. Avi Steinberg, <i>The Lost Book of Mormon</i><br />
9. Jonathan Carroll, <i>Bathing the Lion</i><br />
10. William Gibson, <i>The Peripheral</i><br />
11. Kim Newman, <i>An English Ghost Story</i><br />
12. Michel Faber, <i>The Book of Strange New Things</i><br />
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<b>October</b><br />
1. Karen Armstrong, <i>Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence</i><br />
2. Jane Smiley, <i>Some Luck</i><br />
3. Maeve Binchy, <i>Maeve's Times: Selected Writings from the </i>Irish Times<br />
4. Jill Lepore, <i>The Secret History of Wonder Woman</i><br />
5. Deanna Raybourn, <i>City of Jasmine</i><br />
6. Chuck Palahniuk, <i>Beautiful You</i><br />
7. Gregg Herken, <i>The Georgetown Set</i><br />
8. Cixin Liu, <i>The Three-Body Problem</i><br />
9. Alice Munro, <i>Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014</i><br />
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<b>November</b><br />
1. Laurie R. King, <i>Dreaming Spies</i><br />
2. Joan Didion, <i>Salvador</i>*<br />
3. Joan Didion, <i>Miami</i>*<br />
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<b>December</b><br />
1. Jose Saramago, <i>Skylight</i><br />
2. Matt Karlov, <i>The Unbound Man</i><br />
3. Nicholas Bourbaki, <i>If</i><br />
4. Joan Didion, <i>Where I Was From</i>*<br />
5. Laurie R. King, <i>The Beekeeper's Apprentice</i><br />
6. Arthur Conan Doyle, <i>A Study in Scarlet</i>*<br />
7. Laurie R. King, <i>A Monstrous Regiment of Women</i><br />
8. Arthur Conan Doyle, <i>The Sign of the Four*</i><br />
9. Laurie R. King, <i>A Letter of Mary</i><br />
10. Kelly Link, <i>Get in Trouble</i><br />
11. Jon Ronson, <i>So You've Been Publicly Shamed</i><br />
12. Arthur Conan Doyle, <i>The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</i><br />
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* indicates rereading<br />
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<i> </i>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-15035118110526503912014-12-22T09:38:00.001-05:002014-12-22T09:38:22.510-05:00If: a novel<i>The author supplied a review copy of this book.</i><br />
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The best that can come of ambitious literature adopting the forms of popular fiction is work that combines the sheer narrative appeal of the latter with the subtle thoughtfulness of the former. Such a novel is If, by a writer working under the playful pseudonym <a href="https://againstthelogicians.wordpress.com/">Nicholas Bourbaki</a>. The horizons of American fiction these days are so narrow that the phrase "experimental novel" doesn't mean much, but the format of If is certainly unusual: it's one of those choose-your-own-fate books, where you're given options at the foot of a page and turn to a different section based on what choice you make. But you, the second-person protagonist, aren't facing robots in a futuristic wasteland or escaping from a haunted amusement park: you're just growing up, in middle-class northern California around the end of the twentieth century. Your decisions are about sex and love, education and employment. Some are large, some are small, but they all have unexpected, and unintended, consequences.<br />
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This sounds like a gimmick, but it's actually essential to one of the novel's thematic concerns: what the author described in a recent interview as "how contingent our lives are, but also how some parts of our identities are stubbornly resistant to change." And If succeeds in no small part because the protagonist does indeed have a consistent identity despite his wildly varying choices. "You" might wind up a homeless drug addict, a pillar of the community, or something even stranger, but certain traits will endure: insecurity, passion for grand ideologies, perhaps an over-reliance on mild-altering substances. There's something tragically likable about you, even though you can be a real jerk a lot of the time. You want, like everybody else, to be happy, and you associate happiness with freedom. But pursuing freedom tends to leave you unhappy.<br />
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And make no mistake, "you" will be unhappy for much of this book. Most pick-a-path titles have obvious good and bad endings; If doesn't break down that easily, but let's just say there aren't many turns of the page that will give "you" a deep sense of personal fulfillment. In that sense, If is rather a bleak meditation on the consequences of the unstructured pursuit of happiness. But it's subtle about that. A lesser writer would make much of the fact that doing the right thing can lead to a bad ending; Bourbaki takes that for granted, and has a less mechanistic sense than many writers of the way we are and aren't shaped by our decisions. The way the protagonist's life evolves acknowledges the seeming randomness of existence without denying the possibility that art can still illuminate meaning in that chaos.<br />
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This makes the book sound like heavy going, and for readers expecting the adult equivalent of Prisoner of the Ant People I expect it will be. Some of the protagonist's fates slip from straightforwardly realist contemporary fiction into more stylized and unsettling forms; he's artful about unleashing it, but Bourbaki has a real gift for intense, psychologically suggestive experimental prose. And yet for readers accustomed to long sentences, prose poetry, and highly fractured stream of consciousness, this novel will be the farthest thing from difficult: it will be a genuine page-turner. I myself picked it up to skim the first few pages, and wound up reading long into the night, impelled by the same curiosity about the consequences of a choice that draws children to the famous gamebooks, and by the psychological acuity of Bourbaki's characterization. The next day I couldn't wait to go on my lunch break and continue following the protagonist's forking paths. If is a novel that manages to be experimental yet accessible, compelling yet quietly intricate, and it deserves to be read by a much wider audience.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8073948304625181907.post-82913569539794813762014-12-04T10:41:00.000-05:002014-12-04T10:41:39.413-05:00The Unbound Man<i>The author supplied a review copy of this book.</i><br />
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The continent of Kal Arna was once dominated by the great empire of the Valdori. Now only ruins and fragments remain of that greatness. But even fragments can be dangerous. There is a mysterious urn. Arandras Kanthesi has it, but is interested in it only for the clue it might provide to the identity of the man who murdered his wife. Clade Alsere wants it, for the help it might offer in his escape from the god who dominates his existence. Eilwen Nasareen knows nothing of it, but will soon become caught up in events surrounding it, events that threaten to ruin her life with the Woodtraders Guild and reveal her most terrible secret. As scholars, sorcerers, and merchants struggle for power, these three lives will intersect, and their shared desperation for freedom will have terrible consequences.<br />
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If the premise of Matt Karlov's first novel sounds broadly familiar, that isn't misleading: this is a novel very much in the tradition of contemporary epic fantasy with a gritty edge. But familiar doesn't have to mean derivative, and <i>The Unbound Man</i> manages the difficult feat of fitting into a subgenre without being trapped by it. The key to this, I think, is that Karlov's protagonists are less aggressively amoral than in some of the epics that label-loving readers have called "grimdark." Fantasy was dominated by heroes and then by anti-heroes, but Karlov's characters are neither: they're ordinary people, struggling to balance their desires and their morality. They do bad things, they justify them, but they're aware of the weakness of their justifications. This makes their moral struggles easier to relate to than those of murderous queens and sadistic knights, though the thematic points being made are not dissimilar. Karlov is interested in the line between appropriate and inappropriate moral certainty, in the way the perception of oneself as righteous can lead to just as much destructive behavior as conscious cowardice. That's not to say, though, that the book declines into facile moral relativism. The three protagonists of <i>The Undying Man</i> are drawn with empathy (and even in the world of gritty epic fantasy it's striking to find a novel lacking an out-and-out human villain), but their dramas are weighty precisely because it matters whether or not they're doing the right thing.<br />
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If there's a downside to Karlov's themes and characterization, it's lack of subtlety. The reader is constantly being told what the characters' emotional states mean, even when it's obvious from their current and previous behavior. At one point a character has a thematically-charged dream, and the text notes, "The dream's meaning was plain enough." Indeed... but the text goes on to explain it anyway. These explanations can feel especially grating because the characters' moral and emotional dilemmas are basically unchanging throughout the book, so that their implications would be obvious even with no hand-holding, let alone a constant stream of it. The climactic action in particular feels bogged down with on-the-nose statements of points that were already implicit. But the thematic resolutions are satisfying enough that they work despite being overplayed.<br />
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The themes are perhaps the strongest aspect of <i>The Unbound Man</i>, but no aspect of it is less than competently done. The prose is clear and readable, with diction that is only occasionally too contemporary for a pre-modern fantasy setting. The world-building is rich in detail, concerned largely with the daily life of the two major cities in which the novel takes place, but also suggesting a wider world that will likely come into focus in the two remaining volumes of the trilogy. Karlov's world-building is less atmospheric than that of the very best fantasy writers, less likely to produce a vivid mental picture or a sense of wonder, but it's enough to make the setting feel real and weighty. The magic system strikes what seems to me a good balance between "mysterious and inexplicable" and "so detailed it belongs in a role-playing game."<br />
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The plot is, it must be said, a slow-building one even by epic fantasy standards. The mysteries of the characters' backstories make the opening sections compelling, as readers begin to puzzle out how it all fits together, but once the general outline is clear, it takes a while for the action to kick into high gear. Part of the novel's emphasis on realistic characters rather than heroes is that the stakes are not at first enormously high, and the intrigues are less complicated than they might otherwise be. It's only in the last third of the novel, as the plotlines directly intersect and long-held plans are enacted, that events take on the usual feel of epic fantasy. But there's enough going on throughout to satisfy readers who don't demand superficial action every step of the way. And the denouement is both a satisfying resolution of this novel's conflicts and the beginning of a larger story that promises to extend this one's themes in intriguing and emotionally resonant ways. I'm certainly looking forward to the next book, and I suspect that, once they've experienced <i>The Unbound Man</i>, many other readers will be too. This is a fine debut novel from a writer with a great sense of how to use the tropes of epic fantasy in thoughtful and entertaining ways.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0