The First Book of Classical Horror Stories

Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.
 -William Congreve, The Mourning Bride
 
And so it does. But it also has less pleasant capacities, darker magic to unsettle, to depress, to terrify. It is that sort of music that's performed in DF Lewis' latest anthology, The First Book of Classical Horror Stories. As with The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies from the same editor, this is an intriguing, often remarkably effective set of stories, let down only by unpolished prose and imperfect structural decisions from a few of the contributors. However, this new volume is heavier than its predecessor on truly well-crafted work, and lighter on grating failures. The highs are also higher, and the lows aren't lower, making The First Book of Classical Horror Stories an easy anthology to recommend to admirers of subtle and surreal horror.

Things begin a little awkwardly with Rachel Kendall's "Chamber Music" and Andrew Hook's "The Universe at Gun Point," both of which are solid concepts imperfectly executed. Kendall's style lacks the command of diction necessary to allow her disturbingly evocative vision of a comatose giant on a hillside to achieve its fullest power. Hook, on the other hand, finds the right voice for his account of a musician's unusual source of inspiration, but the imagery and narrative arc are too insubstantial for the whole to have much impact; one is aware and appreciative of the story's intentions, but almost clinically so. Neither of these opening tales is bad, but there's a definite sense of reach exceeding grasp.

A run of more successful stories follows. D. P. Watt's "Vertep" is arguably more puppet horror than classical music horror, but either way it's a good one. Initially its narrator's flat affect is a mixed blessing, making the prose seem crude rather than simple, but as this tale of obsession builds toward its unexpectedly blatant climax, that bluntness becomes appropriately disturbing, a mark of insanity that strikes an appropriate balance between terror and a terrible humor. Admirers of Thomas Ligotti's later work are particularly advised to check out this story.

Given the theme of his collection A Pallid Wave on Shores of Night, it comes as little surprise that Adam S. Cantwell contributes a story to this anthology, and given the excellence of that collection, it comes as little surprise that "Beyond Two Rivers: A Symphonic Poem" is one of the anthology's triumphs. A great conductor has traveled to a Middle Eastern nation to lead its Philharmonic, but why, in the aftermath of a botched performance, is he waking up in a pitch-black rehearsal hall where the only sound he can hear is music? The Maestro's desperate search for answers in that darkened space is a fine exercise in gradual horror, but the real meat of the story is its flashbacks, in which the opulence and the despair of this dictatorship, and the Maestro's own psychological and moral weakness, are deftly sketched, creating a weighty counterpoint to the immediate terror. Cantwell has a gift, quite valuable in subtle horror, for crafting language that communicates its elegance without verbal pyrotechnics, simply by never striking (forgive the over-apt metaphor) a false note.

In "Anamnesis in Extremis" Dominy Clements uses the historical fact of the suicide of Gustav Mahler's brother Otto as the basis for a tale of fatal music. The prose is, given the narrator's formality and the seriousness with which he approaches the philosophy of music, competent, but it's only in the final two paragraphs that it becomes truly, er, musical. Lawrence Conquest's "Reverie" is a short, sharp, grim story about grief and the power of music to set a mood, with lean, poetic prose that is as powerful a mood-setter as the music it describes. Nicole Cushing's "The Fourteenth" takes its inspiration from Shostakovich's symphony on death, and considers grief in a manner entirely different from but as effective as that of the Conquest story, with a series of odd, almost comical encounters that nonetheless capture the deranged pathos of loss.

Like "Chamber Music," Stephen Bacon's "The Ivory Teat" isn't written with quite the skill necessary to make its images of urban isolation, awkwardness, and despair resonate, though the story nonetheless has a lurid charm. There's no charm at all in "Human Resources," easily the anthology's worst entry. The element of classical music is awkwardly joined to a framework of corporate horror, which could itself be interesting were it not for Karim Ghahwagi's torturously flabby prose, which makes becoming involved in the story so difficult that its underdeveloped narrative is especially unsatisfying.

Things take a turn toward the positive again with "Winter's Traces" by John Howard. It's not really a horror story, though there is one creepy notion at work, but a melancholy reflection on a frustrated artist and his peculiar life, and on the disappearance of cultural forms. Holly Day's "Excerpted" is more traditionally horrific, and works well on that level, although there's nothing especially surprising about what happens when the protagonist goes too far in performing the strangely dissonant alterations to classical compositions that he discovered in a convent library. Colin Insole's "The Appassionata Variations," like his story for The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, conjures up a world of Gothic cruelty, but the prose here is much stronger, creating an atmosphere of decadent corruption that is, in and of itself, sufficient reason to recommend the story to audiences who value such things.

To this point the stories have aided the construction of a review by falling into runs of better and worse. In the last third of the collection, though, the patterns fall apart. Tony Lovell's "The Holes" is another surreal piece that doesn't quite make its strangeness meaningful, while Daniel Mills' "De Profundis" is a brilliant cosmic horror story of deepening obsession that returns to the motif of music's power to alter the world in upsetting ways. "Boris' Aria" by M. Sullivan could be a great little piece of comic horror, but in its present form it doesn't take full advantage of its potential, whether because it wasn't conceived as horror or because its author doesn't have the requisite stylistic chops. S. D. Tullis' "Strings" suffers from a couple unfortunate comparisons, one of which I'll get into below, and one of which comes from the use of quotes from finer stylists at the beginning and end of the style, which can only serve as reminders that Tullis' own prose lacks their natural rhythms. Carmen Tudor's "Grace Notes" is another traditional horror notion, somewhat hampered by imperfect prose. Mark Valentine's "Without Instruments" is a delightful example of his aesthetic, esoteric fiction, which whether supernatural or not has a marvelous transporting effect not unlike that described in this story, which can be seen as a sort of companion or contrast to his "The Atelier at Iasi." In "Songs for Dead Children," Aliya Whiteley takes on the bleakness of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, and says something powerful about the price of truly understanding tragic art. And the collection ends with Rhys Hughes offering his usual dark brand of whimsy in the one-page, one-joke, fairly satisfying "The Trilling Seasons."

Readers familiar with the table of contents for The First Book of Classical Horror Stories will have noticed that I've left one story out of this perhaps overly exhaustive rundown. I was about to type a one-sentence review of Sarah O'Scalaidhe's "He Had Lived for Music," but it would have been essentially the same as several other one-sentence reviews: "prose doesn't quite do justice to" etc. The deeper problem, for O'Scalaidhe's story and several others, is that, despite differences in setting and style, many of the contributing writers are trading on similar basic notions, often to do with the power, either emotional or literal, of music. "Strings," for example, isn't really a bad story, but both "De Profundis" and "Anamnesis in Extremis" have done basically the same thing at a higher skill level. Sameness is often an issue in theme anthologies; here, given the mediocrity of some of the contributions, it means that they slip rapidly from the mind. (Badness is often more memorable than adequacy; I'm certainly not going to forget "Human Resources," but I had already lost track of "The Ivory Teat" in the week between finishing the book and writing this review.) To an extent, this works in the anthology's favor, since only the good stories contribute to the reader's impression of it. And there are a lot of good stories, and only the one real clunker, which means that as anthologies go, The First Book of Classical Horror Stories is quite strong. Will there be a Second Book of....? I don't know, and I don't know whether the concept of classical horror is strong enough to support a series. But for one volume, it works out reasonably well.

The publisher supplied a review copy of this book.

On the World Fantasy Award Nominees for Best Novel

A few weeks ago, when the World Fantasy award nominations were announced, I looked at the list of Best Novel contenders and thought, "Hey, I've read three of those, and I just downloaded a fourth from the Kindle Library. Why not read the fifth too, and have an informed opinion on one category of one major award?" So here we are.

The nominees are:

•  Those Across the River, Christopher Buehlman (Ace)
•  11/22/63, Stephen King (Scribner; Hodder & Stoughton as 11.22.63)
•  A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin (Bantam; Harper Voyager UK)
•  Osama, Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)
•  Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
 
Three of those were selected by this year's award judges (John Berlyne, James P. Blaylock, Stephen Gallagher, Mary Kay Kare, and Jacques Post), while two were the top vote-getters among the convention members. I think it's pretty obvious that the Buehlman and the Tidhar are judge selections. It's tempting to suggest that the Walton is the third and that the two bestselling doorstoppers are the member selections, but I'm not sure of that. The Walton just won the Hugo, so it has plenty of support among convention-goers, for reasons that we'll (unfortunately) be getting to. I don't know that the judges would have added the Martin, especially since they're also giving him a Life Achievement Award this year, but I suppose they might have picked the King. It hardly matters, anyway.

So which one of these would I vote for, if I were on the jury? The Tidhar, I suppose. My main reaction is that it's a pretty weak slate of nominees. I can think of quite a few novels from last year that are more deserving, and not because they're masterpieces; they just lack the glaring flaws of four of these five nominees, and are more ambitious and innovative than a different four of the five. Yes, these nominees include a novel whose craft is consistently elegant and a novel whose content is appropriately contemporary, but they aren't the same novel. So which are which? Let's go down the list in order.

I reviewed Those Across the River exactly a year ago, and my opinion hasn't changed much in hindsight. It's a well-written novel in the sense that its prose isn't awkward or workmanlike, a standard not all of the nominees can equal, but it's not a masterpiece of style either, and the plot covers familiar territory for rural horror. I'm not sure its treatment of race is ideal; like John Farris' All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, it invokes black revenge on white cruelty in ways that can be troubling. Suggestive and explicit horror are carefully balanced, and the ambiguous ending is powerful, but these aren't enough for the novel to transcend its ultimately conventional nature. This is Buehlman's debut fiction, and as such it's impressive; I wish the World Fantasy Award had a first novel category, so his accomplishment could be acknowledged without suggesting that it's one of the best novels of the year, which it isn't.

I didn't review 11/22/63. I think Stephen King could have written a good changing-the-past story. And I think he could have written a good historical novel about Lee Harvey Oswald. And I think he could have written a good sentimental novel about a late 1950s smalltown romance... no, scratch that. I think he could written a competent sentimental novel about a late 1950s smalltown romance, because books like that tend not to be good. You see where I'm going with this, anyway. The trouble with changing-the-past stories is that there are only two types: the one where you can't change the past, and the one where you can but you shouldn't. There's still some pleasure to be had in a clever execution of each, and King uses his particular narrative mechanics to construct a great suspense sequence at the climax, but let's not confuse that with great writing.

The bigger problem with 11/22/63 is that by the time King actually gets around to playing out his time-travel premise, you've already read 900 pages of two other books, the endessly good-natured, achingly derivative smalltown romance, and that Lee Harvey Oswald novel, in which his mother is one of King's usual shrieking-harpy moms, much like Eddie Kaspbrak's. And speaking of It, there's also a long interlude in which the narrator tests the time-travel mechanism via a trip to 1950s Derry, and if you think characters from It won't have a charming-but-gratuitous cameo, you haven't read enough King. The Derry interlude isn't terrible in and of itself-- King, whose prose over the years has become, if not more graceful than at least less graceless, writes about the shadow over the city rather well given the flatness of his style-- but it, and all the other sidelines, make the novel so long that the resolution of the central narrative feel like an afterthought. It's simply not interesting or inventive enough to be worth all that wait. I liked the book-- to one degree or another I liked all five nominees-- but none of the four or five better books trapped inside it pokes far enough out for it to be award-worthy.

I reviewed A Dance with Dragons, but you shouldn't read what I wrote about it. Really, don't click there. It's an utterly fannish response that barely mentions, and severely understates the depth of, the novel's flaws. I'm not as down on A Song of Ice and Fire as some in fandom. I still think it's virtually the only doorstopper fantasy series that can be taken seriously in terms of complex characterization and remotely credible storytelling, and that its attempt to offer the pleasures of a certain kind of fantasy in a story that also reflects on what real life in such a milieu would be like is laudable. The enthusiasm that radiates from that review (seriously, don't read it) is still there.

But the thing is, A Song of Ice and Fire just won't stop growing. If Martin had delivered the story he envisioned when he sold the series, the last book would have been released twelve years ago. Instead, as we all know, three books became four six seven and counting, and the gaps between them keep getting longer. A Dance with Dragons is 420,00 words long, and it's still only 50% of a proper novel. This is an improvement over A Feast for Crows, which was 40% of same, but still. In the half of the overall story it focuses on, A Dance with Dragons builds toward two major events, and then stops right before either one happens. That's just bad structure, and I don't care that putting the actual ending in would have made the book too long to bind. I love the trivial world-building with which the series is loaded, but not when it prevents a book from reaching an actual conclusion.

The more pertinent issue is that the endless ballooning of the plot has dragged Martin's themes out so long that they lose what originality they had. One of the series' major concerns is with the difficult nature of leadership, the possibility that good, well-intentioned men-- heroes-- may not be good leaders. Over the first four books of the series we've seen, oh, three or four leaderships styles of major characters prove ineffective or disastrous. So when A Dance with Dragons offers two more, the response is not, "What a thoughtful commentary on issues fantasy typically ignores," but "Yes, yes, it's tough, we get it already!" If you dig deeper into the text there are more complex topics to be debated-- I read niggling debates on Westeros.org as much as anyone-- but still, the depth of thematic content is out of proportion to the breadth of pagecount.

And the other consequence of the series' physical and chronological explosion is that it's now been 16 years since A Game of Thrones was published. Its grim, gritty approach to fantasy was fresh then. It isn't now. Newer fantasy series, from authors who tend to lack Martin's skill, have made that sort of thing common as paint. I'd rather see award nominations go to writers who are doing new and unexpected things now than to those who did them in 1996. The fact that Martin is receiving a lifetime achievement award the same year A Dance with Dragons is a best novel nominee is unfortunately telling.

Speaking of "new and unexpected things," we've come to the novel I guess I would want to win. I'm hesitant because Osama isn't actually a very good novel. It's a promising idea, and it could have made a brilliant novella, but at novel length it's a frequently tedious slog through dreamlike interludes that add nothing to plot, theme, or character, and aren't stylish enough to be interesting simply as exercises in language. Anyone who would ever read a book like Osama is going to work out the ending well before the halfway point, and while I suspect Tidhar realizes that, he doesn't offer anything else to hold the reader's attention. There are some neat passages-- one in an abandoned subway, another at a convention-- but many others, evidently striving for a surreal variation on the modes of the detective novel, fall flat.

This isn't really a novel about terrorism in a deep thematic sense, which is just as well, since its observations on the phenomenon aren't much beyond what reasonably intelligent readers will already be familiar with. But writing about terrorism and the power of the idea of Osama bin Laden is at least something modern fantasy writers ought to be doing, rather than rehearsing the cliches of epic fantasy, rural horror, and time travel. I really do wish Tidhar had shaped this material into a novella, because that version would have been bursting with powerful images, and its ideas would have seemed more than sufficient given its wordcount. The novel is something I'm glad I read, and it's the only one of the five nominees that I think actually deserves a nomination, but in a better year it certainly wouldn't be the book I hoped to see win.

Among Others won the Hugo the other night. It's already won the Nebula, so if it gets the World Fantasy Award (which I think is a real possibility, especially if it was one of the three judge selections) it will, I believe, be the first work of fiction ever to win all three awards. I find this mildly distressing, not so much because Among Others is a bad book as because the things that are good about it-- its forbidding, ominous take on magic, some promising secondary characters, an eye for the atmosphere of its Welsh landscape-- are shoved aside by the author in favor of what people like about it: a long, plotless meditation on how awesome it is to be an SFF fan and how awesome everybody else in fandom is. Walton does this with just enough subtlety that I was able, while reading the book and deluding myself that plot and character development were going to arrive eventually, to imagine that there was some distance between the teenage narration and the adult writer shaping it.  But I'm no longer certain that's the case, and I certainly don't believe that the people who have been supporting the book are focused on anything like that.

No, I'm afraid they're more likely to enjoy the embarrassing moments, like when the narrator congratulates herself on being superior to her classmates, who only care about sports and the house cup while she cares about deep things, like the fiction of Robert Heinlein. Or when she thinks, "The handsome boy I met at the local SF book club could never like me, because I'm not pretty," only to find out that he does and she is. Considering what it is, Among Others is well-executed, and it captures the charming and less-charming aspects of a teenaged fan's voice whether or not it realizes that the latter exist. But there's so much that exists to no evident purpose-- that scene with her father, the stuff about her paternal aunts, the thing with Wim and his ex-girlfriend-- unless it's to distract from the thinness of the central love letter to fandom. There may also be a hint at unreliable narration, but this, like everything else, is more gesture than serious attempt. In the final analysis the book is what it looks like: a list of books read and precocious but shallow reflections on them. It might be fun to live, and if you're in the right mood it's fun to read, but it's not a great novel.

I'm not surprised when some Hugo and Nebula winners turn out to be unexceptional; whether the people voting on them are fans or writers (to the extent that those are distinct groups), various group dynamics are bound to come into play that will influence what wins. I was the opposite of shocked that the combination of Neil Gaiman and Doctor Who won the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) Hugo this year, even though a few funny lines, a bunch of fanservice, and another one-dimensional sexy chick for the Doctor to banter with and then cry over are hardly the stuff of great drama, even by the standards of contemporary genre television. But I had hoped an award where nominee selection is split between fans and a jury would produce a better slate. The Tidhar, in addition to being the best of the lot, is also something ordinary members might not have heard of, but otherwise the jury selections are hard to distinguish from the fan picks, aesthetically speaking, and that's a shame. But that's the nice thing about juried or part-juried awards: the makeup of the jury changes every year, so you can hope for better things in the future, rather than the usual fan favorites racking up further hard-to-justify nominations. If you're looking for an optimistic conclusion to this post, that's the best I can do.

Quick Thoughts on Three Ash-Tree Press E-Books (and a Related Title)

I knew it had been a long time since I'd updated, but three months? Ouch. It's not that I haven't been reading stuff I'd like to review. I wish I'd had time to write about several books: George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois' cross-genre anthology Songs of Love and Death (remarkably consistent in its mediocrity, with perhaps two stories actually worth reading), Kim Newman's The Bloody Red Baron (entertaining at first but runs out of energy, and undermines its own theme; the new novella in the Titan Books edition is lightweight but amusing), William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (a few masterpieces, but over-reliant on certain structures and devices), Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl (a further evolution of her extraordinary talent, with a powerful climax), Terry Dowling's Clowns at Midnight (a baffling novel made up of elements from bad horror films, saved from utter ridiculousness only by Dowling's inherent skill), and R. B. Russell's Bloody Baudelaire (a fascinating exercise in eerie ambiguity, though I'm not sure the ending works). Yes, I wish I could write more than a parenthetical sentence about each.

But I lack free time lately, what I do get I'd rather spend reading than reviewing, and what I do spend reviewing is usually on books I've committed to by accepting a review copy. I still have a few of those pending, including a ridiculously late review of Ellen Datlow's latest annual best-of, and a rather late review of Ennis Drake's 28 Teeth of Rage. But this isn't either of those reviews. I've already written one full review today, for an Amazon Vine title (remember that you can read all my Amazon reviews here), and that will suffice. Instead, here are capsule reviews of some e-books I've read lately.

A big part of the reason I bought a Kindle is the recent commitment of small supernatural fiction publishers like Tartarus Press and Ash-Tree Press to releasing some of their titles in electronic form. Ash-Tree in particular is to be commended for the substantial range of titles it has made available in less than a year, including much highly-regarded work that was out of print and only available at high prices. Buying all six volumes of Ash-Tree's collected H. R. Wakefield in hardcover might cost close to $1,000; the six e-books are available for a mere $41.94. Even for an in-print title, the e-book is still about 1/10 of the total cost of the hardcover. For readers on a budget, or uncertain they like a given author enough to want a classy hardcover, e-books are an invaluable option. I've only bought a few Ash-Tree titles so far, but as soon as I clear my backlog of unread horror fiction, I'll be picking up more. Here, in the meantime, are those reviews.

Steve Duffy, The Night Comes On: A collection of M. R. James pastiches. Generally James pastiche is as miserable an experience as Lovecraft pastiche-- if it isn't quite as groan-inducing, that's only because James' reserved style is less inherently risky than Lovecraft's febrile histrionics. What makes Duffy's work enjoyable is that he has a natural command of the Jamesian narrative voice, so that the sentences flow naturally rather than clunking along. He's especially good at the sort of light social comedy with which James leavened his terrors. The language here is, despite the storytelling mode, slightly more formal and long-winded than in James himself, which can become somewhat tiresome, and only occasionally do the key horrific images match James' best, but fans of the antiquarian ghost story will find themselves better-served by this collection than by almost any they might select. Notable stories include "Off the Tracks," a railway horror story that's one of four newly added to the collection for this electronic edition, and "Running Dogs," which is, despite the lack of traditional antiquarian elements, the collection's finest; Ellen Datlow included it in the horror half of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. With story notes by the author.

A. F. Kidd, Summoning Knells and Other Inventions: more Jamesian stories, though these are less direct stylistic homages, and a great many of them have to do with bell-ringing. There are 47 stories here (a third non-Jamesian), and as you might expect they tend not to be very substantial, in the literal or the aesthetic sense of the word. The gradually-constructed sense of terror of which James was a master is not much present here-- the structures are simple-- and the bell-ringing stories in particular, with their specialized vocabulary, tend to blur together in the mind. But as subtle, ghostly horror goes, Kidd is very good: her Jamesian imagery is even better than Duffy's. And there are surprises like "Great Emmanuel," whose terror is surprisingly mythic and awe-inspiring for so short a story. The non-Jamesian pieces add a pleasing variety to the collection (possibly they ought to have been mixed in among the rest) but are not enormously accomplished in and of themselves.

Chet Williamson, Figures in Rain: Not Jamesian. Well, there are one or two stories that owe some debt to James, including "Ex-Library," in which the key image from "Oh, Whistle..." plays an important role. But there are also debts to Lovecraft, to Poe, to Rod Serling... variety is the watchword here, as Joe Lansdale's introduction notes. The stories are arranged chronologically, so things begin a little roughly with competent but uninspired stories like "Offices" and "A Lover's Alibi." Soon, though, come weightier stories like "Prometheus's Ghost," which has a thoroughly creepy spirit, an unexpectedly clever solution to the problem it represents, and a bleak yet moving conclusion. Or "The Music of the Dark Time," in which Williamson manages the difficult task of writing a supernatural story about the Holocaust that doesn't feel manipulative or inappropriate. He's good at varying his style according to the demands of the story, whether it's the refined/uptight Poe-style narrator of the amusing "His Two Wives," the surreal recollections of "The House of Fear," or the journalistic parody of "A Collector of Magic." A few stories don't have much going on or their twists fall flat, but all are well-crafted, and as a whole the collection is a fine overview of a significant talent in contemporary horror. Story notes by the author.

John Whitbourn, Binscombe Tales: The Complete Series: This isn't an Ash-Tree e-book, but the stories included were first collected in two Ash-Tree volumes (which also featured one story and an extensive afterword not available in the e-book) and I just read it, so I'm mentioning it here. These weird stories about a village in southeastern England are appealing, to the extent that they are, not so much for the concepts, which are pretty basic-- a few different parallel words, a few haunted objects, a general Twilight Zone air-- as for the charm of the linking elements, a new resident named Mr. Oakley, a pub called the Argyll, and the enigmatic Mr. Disvan, who is often forced to explain to the confused Oakley the peculiar features of Binscombe life. A few good jokes are mixed in, but as with a traditional sitcom it's not so much a matter of sheer skill as of the pleasures of formula. Not all readers will find these stories worth the effort, but if read slowly, so that the overall sameness becomes a virtue rather than a flaw, they can be fun.

And that's that. I hope it won't be another three months before the next post, but no promises.

The Croning

When a writer known and acclaimed for his short fiction releases a first novel, there's a temptation to frame one's response in terms of the writer's command of the "new" form: is she as good at the novel as she is at the short story? The different lengths place different demands on a writer's skill, and devices that work in short fiction may fall flat in long. Some writers are undeniably good at one and not at the other. The trouble with applying this framework to a debut is that there's only the one novel to go by. A single awkward story would not demonstrate a loss of command, and a single awkward novel doesn't demonstrate its absence. You may gather from this lead-in that I didn't find The Croning, the first novel by Laird Barron, fully successful. It takes a while to get going, and doesn't take full advantage of the various types of added complexity that its length allows. But Barron's stylistic virtues-- charged, ironic dialogue, imagery that is cosmically remote yet viscerally disturbing, and an atmospheric world that mixes noir, espionage, and horror-- are intact, and the last quarter of the novel is a tour de force of Lovecraftian cosmicism.

After an opening chapter that blends fantasy and horror in an unusual retelling of a well-known fairy tale, The Croning is the story of Don Miller, a generally mild-mannered geologist, and the rather rowdier and more dangerous existence to which he is intermittently exposed by virtue of his marriage to Michelle Mock, an anthropologist whose interest in hollow earth theories and in the eccentricities of her very old family hasn't prevented her from becoming well-respected and an associate of certain movers and shakers. Different chapters show us Don in youth (a trip to Mexico during which his wife disappears and his efforts to find her lead to one of a few odd lacunae in his memory) and middle age (an unconventional wake and a dangerous excursion in the Pacific Northwest), but the major narrative takes place in the present day, when he's an elderly man, forgetful but, despite his wife's secretive behavior and other quirks, generally content. Until strange things begin to happen...

Which takes a while. The non-linear structure allows for some striking early scenes, but the novel is about half over before any real urgency develops, and some of that material (particularly in the present day chapters) could easily be removed without any loss to plot, character, or atmospheric effect. Because of the way the relationship between Don and Michelle becomes important to the resolution, these chapters might have been used to develop their characterization, making it clear what holds them together as a couple despite certain evident differences in temperament. But there isn't anything like that, and the connection between the two remains thinly drawn, a variation on the femme fatale and the poor schlub who gets caught up in her wake. There's nothing wrong with that-- it's a valid horror trope-- but in a novel a bit more depth in the dynamic would be welcome.

The flip side of the inessential material earlier in the novel is a sense that later events don't provide the tying-together of threads that makes for a fully-satisfying resolution. Barron puts a lot of characters and settings in play, blending different varieties of dark fiction to suggest a dark world of elite decadence, government and scientific intrigue, and malevolent or coldly indifferent alien forces. (The dark sarcasm and depraved indifference with which characters allude to these powers, part of Barron's debt to the cynicism of noir, gives his dialogue its distinctive appeal.) Part of the point of a milieu like this is that it remains allusive only (and alert readers will catch references to other Barron fiction), but the degree to which the climax of The Croning incorporates what has come before is underwhelming, more appropriate perhaps to a novella than a novel. On the other hand, the element that had seemed least relevant comes back with a vengeance, adding a human dimension to the epic terror of the ending.

And that terror is substantial. From time to time I find aspects of Barron's prose awkward, but on the whole he is a master of language that combines the cold awareness of universal vastness and human insignificance that characterizes cosmic horror with cruder details calculated to create visceral discomfort.

Then he was asleep again and dreaming of Michelle. She stood naked and smiling before the entrance of a cave. Strange, bony hands emerged from the shadows and caressed her, drew her into the cave. The moon flared.

The Man in the Moon turned his misshapen head, beamed green cheese eyes upon Don's cocooned form. The Man in the Moon said, It feels good, my boy. A black swarm of insects poured from his chasm mouth, took wing and scattered into the icy void of limitless space.

 Or:

--the capsule revolved and the Earth slewed below the rim of infinite night and someone's water bottle floated toward the nose of the shuttle, someone's belt, an alabaster string of lower intestine, a wristwatch, the crucifix and rosary end over end. The Lieutenant vomited inside his helmet; window plates turned black as empty sockets and bloody light seeped from somewhere deep within the ticking heart of melted circuitry. One of the others babbled through the headset and beneath that a discordant tone, an animal growling, wires sputtering, a train wreck, an avalanche and who was shrieking, who--

As fine as those passages are for those of us who like this sort of thing, there are some in the final chapter that are even better. And the chapters leading up to that, in which two expeditions in different time periods come to sinister ends, create powerful narrative momentum that make the book difficult to put down. If the beginning and middle were as tightly constructed and disturbing as the end, The Croning would be a modern masterpiece of horror. As it is, it's still a fine novel, easily recommended to admirers of Barron's short fiction, and certainly worth consideration by any reader of hard-edged contemporary horror.

The publisher supplied an electronic review copy of this book.

Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

The latest release under the Contemporary Fiction banner at Tartarus Press is Black Horse and Other Strange Stories, the debut collection by American writer Jason A. Wyckoff. Not only is this Wyckoff's first collection, it's also his first-ever appearance in print. Reading the early work of a new writer is typically an exciting yet anxious experience for a reviewer, because there's no existing baseline for comparison: one is offering a judgment, however tentative, on an entire career. There are, generally speaking, three possible responses to debut fiction. It might be so underwhelming that one doubts the writer will ever produce great work; at the other extreme, it might be so powerful that one heralds it as great work in and of itself. Or more commonly it might occupy the middle ground often labeled "promising," in which the author isn't doing great things yet but demonstrates the potential to do so. It is in that thoroughly respectable territory that Black Horse lands. Wyckoff's prose has its drawbacks and not of all of the ideas he explores have found their ideal forms, but the range of his imagination and his particular command of eerie, psychologically-fraught supernaturalism make him decidedly a writer to watch.

Although Wyckoff's style is admirably developed and natural considering his lack of previous publication history, there is nonetheless a slightly stiff quality to much of his language, an echo perhaps of the formal feel of the classical supernatural fiction on which his work often represents a modern spin. Precisely because his characters are modern, the description of their thoughts and actions in this manner sometimes creates a distancing effect, and in any case the language doesn't flow as naturally, or with quite the desired distinctiveness of voice, as when used by the best adherents of such style. An extended quotation may demonstrate what I'm getting at:

Either because of the chasm of their years, or because he had less shared history with Martin than his father and grandfather, Jesse was less affected by the degradation of the old man, and was, ironically, able to suffer his presence more easily. Because of this, Jesse was assailed more frequently with the strange, taunting fragments about the treasure that everyone else dismissed as the fantasies of dementia. But, though there was nothing in the specifics of the telling that could be considered convincing, there was a perspicacious earnestness pervasive in Martin's comments that led Jesse to believe some truth was trying to claw out from behind the incipient madness. Jesse thought that if there were a treasure, then Martin's dismay at his weakened memory may have prompted him to reveal its existence, just as the meanness corroding his personality caused him to hold back its location--the result being exactly as witnessed: a series of indistinct teases dropped among knowing or suspicious looks.

That's from "Hair and Nails," for which the formal tone is a particularly odd fit, as it's a direct, faintly ironic supernatural revenge story with a (by traditional standards) gruesome climax. In other tales it feels more logical, but there are still places where a loosening of the vocabulary and sentence structure ("perspicacious earnestness pervasive") would enhance Wyckoff's stories. (On a more trivial note, it would also help to use character names less often: once a paragraph is about sufficient, and reading "Joe... Joe... Joe... Joe..." and similar disrupts the reading experience. A small concern, yes, but in fiction as dependent on mood as this, small concerns can have large effects.)

When the stories of Black Horse are themselves less than satisfying, it's generally not because the concepts involved are inherently flawed, but because they haven't been used to their fullest effect. The opening story, "The Highwall Horror" (available as a PDF preview here), is a case in point. The elements are more traditional than is usually the case with Wyckoff: an unexpected disruption in something mundane (in this case, a cubicle wall) reveals a world inhabited by monstrous creatures (insects) with which the protagonist is in danger of becoming obsessed. All promising in the abstract, but the story draws to too abrupt a conclusion before any of these features have been used to their fullest effect. There's something to the idea of leaving things unsaid, but in this case the result feels jagged rather than subtle. In the title story, on the other hand, there is rather too much (wonderfully suggestive) build-up toward a resolution that turns out to be more mechanical and (as the supernatural goes) straightforward than the story deserves. It has both a good beginning and a good ending, but they don't quite mesh.

"The Trucker's Story," which comes come to being a brilliant story of inexplicable dislocation, stumbles when the ending makes a certain thematic point too explicit. The reasons for this artistic decision seem clear (and this reviewer admittedly wouldn't have grasped what was being gotten at otherwise), but it's still something of a letdown. The only story that seems in need of thorough reconsideration rather than reshaping is "The Bells, Then the Birds," in which a folk music enthusiast pursues a song about a spurned woman's ghostly legacy. Again, traditional stuff, but there's a pleasure in the form, and the story starts strongly with the logical development of the protagonist's research. Once he reaches the town behind the story, however, there's only one way for events to develop, and there are no unexpectedly powerful images or turns of phrase to elevate the expected denouement.

From the descriptions of stories like "The Highwall Horror" and "The Bells, Then the Birds," one might imagine Black Horse to be a collection narrow and familiar in its scope. In fact one of the best things about the volume is its variety. From the satiric fantasy of "A Civil Complaint" to the short, sharp, melancholy ghostliness of "The Walk Home," from the surreal urban horror of "An Uneven Hand" to the unexpected conclusion of the wonderfully odd "A Willow Cat in Meadowlark" and the postmodern vampire of "A Matter of Mirrors," there are enough different forms of the supernatural to make for a rich collection, and to demonstrate the versatility of Wyckoff's mind. The settings and characters are equally diverse-- architects, archaeologists, farmers, undertakers-- but always described with well-chosen details that have the feel of reality. One gets the sense that these sixteen stories are only the beginning of the long revelation of Jason Wyckoff's talent.

The finest stories in Black Horse are often laden with a disturbing ambiguity, as though they might almost fit together if one just knew a little more; there is something of Robert Aickman about the overall effect. Such is the case with "The Night of His Sister's Engagement," in which a late-night boat trip leads to a pair of strange encounters that could, barely, be explained away, perhaps, but which also have mythic resonance; and with "The Mauve Blot," in which escape from a stressful marriage brings its own dangers to a harried wife and mother whose inherited house contains an unusual blur of light. "Knott's Letter," on the other hand, is reminiscent of Lovecraft, not because of any alien entities with unpronounceable names, but because its account of a search for Sasquatch cemeteries has the formality, the meticulous detail, and the febrile awareness of impending doom that characterizes some of his finest work. In this case the unusual manner of the prose works in the story's favor, adding an odd pathos to the narrator's awkward attempt to write an apologetic explanation to the family of a lost friend. Then there's "Panorama," in which the masterpiece of a missing painter is dense with loosely-connected, evocative images, almost impossibly so. This story, in which the description of the panorama's elements becomes hypnotically compelling both for the character and the reader, is perhaps the finest and most distinctive in Black Horse. It's not the sort of thing to be read at night as one prepares for sleep, when certain mental barriers fall and notions of reality become malleable.

The description of a debut collection as "promising" might seem to be damning with faint praise, a tacit suggestion that readers wait for a later, better book before laying their money down. With regard to Black Horse and Other Strange Stories, this is certainly not the case. Jason Wyckoff may not yet be a great writer of supernatural fiction, but he is already a good one, and sometimes very good. Readers in search of further indirect yet intense horror are especially encouraged to give this collection due consideration, but any reader who collects limited editions in the field will likely find at least one intriguing tale to reward their purchase.

The publisher supplied a review copy of this book.

The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners

This is one of two long-delayed anthologies finally released by Cemetery Dance Publications in early 2012. The other, The Century's Best Horror Fiction, had been in the works for upwards of a decade, but The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners has it beat by a few years. The introduction by Joe R. Lansdale is copyright 1998, and although it actually seems to have been updated or entirely rewritten since then, that's probably a decent ballpark figure for the anthology's beginnings. In any case the included stories span only 1987-1996, the first ten years during which the awards were given. Fifteen years' worth of more recent winners are unrepresented. This gives the anthology something of the feel of a time capsule, as Lansdale acknowledges in his introduction. "These stories have been on the shelf for a long time, and as they still seem fresh and progressive, it speaks to the nature of their continued prominence. They age well, and they will continue to do so." But that only invites questions: do they seem fresh and progressive? have they aged well? My answer, anyway, is a mixed one.

The tone of Lansdale's introduction reflects a confidence in, if not awards processes in general, then the process of the Stoker in particular as producing winners that are in fact good stories. Based on what's included here, I can't disagree; all of these stories are good. But how many are especially good, so good that even with hindsight they stand as clear contenders for such distinction? Maybe I'm just picky or out of touch with contemporary opinion on quality horror, but by a generous count I would label only half the stories here notably ambitious, intelligent, or skillful. Some of them seem to reflect not great or even moderate artistic success, but other processes by which work wins awards.

Before looking at the stories themselves, it might help to note that the thirteen tales included here are not all the winners for shorter fiction between 1987 and 1996. Because there were two (and in one year three) short fiction categories, and because of occasional ties, there are in fact 25 stories that fit the criteria for this anthology. The volume is silent on what the selection process was, but one aspect seems obvious: the exclusion of additional stories by multiple winners. Within the ten year span, David Morrell and Harlan Ellison won twice each, and Nancy Holder and Joe R. Lansdale three times apiece; each is represented by only one story. (Morrell, Ellison, and Lansdale also had two additional nominations apiece; Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon, not included in the anthology, also won twice each, and Simmons had two further nominations.) Without casting doubt on the talent of any of these writers, none of whose work I'm very familiar with, I might argue that a rather narrow range of nominator reading explains this as least as well as consistent brilliance on their part.

But this is a review of a particular anthology, not of the Stoker process, except insofar as that process might explain why certain stories fall short of what one might hope for in an award winner. Take Robert Bloch's "The Scent of Vinegar," the first entry in the table of contents. A bad story? Not really. It uses a Malaysian variation on the vampire myth so weirdly effective that (questions of cultural appropriation aside) I'm surprised it isn't more popular. An abandoned house of prostitution from 1940s Hollywood provides both a spooky setting and a touch of the glamorous past. The pace and the prose and all that sort of thing are fine. But: a gaping plot hole is ignored to produce the desired ending. The treatment of Asian characters is, ah, not optimal-- there's a reference to one's "slant-eyed stare." And the story suffers a serious lack of originality: its only striking idea is lifted wholesale from existing myth, and there's nothing much in it that couldn't have appeared in a pulp horror story written at the beginning of the author's career sixty years earlier. There's something to be said for really good work in a vintage style, but "The Scent of Vinegar" just isn't that good.

So why did it win an award? Well, questions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity aside, it's probably not insignificant that in the 1990s Bloch, correspondent of Lovecraft and author of Psycho and much other well-regarded work, was a grand old man of the horror genre, or that his death in September 1994 made "The Scent of Vinegar" his first posthumous story. I don't mean any criticism of the Stoker voters when I suggest that this win has something of a gold watch feel. In 1995 that was no bad thing; in 2012, for an anthology whose stories are supposed to seem fresh and progressive, it's a bit of a letdown.

On the other hand, David B. Silva's "The Calling" is as relevant and genuinely, honestly upsetting now as it was in 1990. At first it seems only (only?) to be a grim portrait of the powerlessness, despair, and anger of a mother and son facing her terminal cancer, and on that level it succeeds by insight into the specific humiliations of such illness and by a flatness of prose that avoids any hint of sentimentality or other emotional manipulation. Then the ending, a final powerful image that's gruesome but not crude, transforms the story into the best kind of supernatural metaphor: the type that's both forceful as metaphor and disturbing as horror.

With "Chatting with Anubis," we come to another story by a major name in the genre, Harlan Ellison. But I'm not as inclined to credit this story's success to voting for the author as I was with Bloch. Although it's not an especially substantial piece of work, and the great secret toward which it builds is not as shocking as it might once have been, the story is extremely well-crafted to achieve a mythic quality by the careful deployment of superficially-simple prose and almost random detail that nonetheless resonates. Here, since we're at one of those moments where I feel ill-qualified to describe the effect, have a quote:

When the core drilling was halted at a depth of exactly 804.5 meters, one half mile down, Amy Guiterman and I conspired to grab Immortality by the throat and shake it till it noticed us.

My name is Wang Zicai. Ordinarily, the family name Wang-- which is pronounced with the "a" in father, almost as if it were Wong-- means 'king." In my case, it means something else; it means "rushing headlong." How appropriate. Don't tell me clairvoyance doesn't run in my family... Zicai means "suicide." Half a mile down, beneath the blank Sahara, in a hidden valley that holds cupped in its eternal serenity the lake of the Oasis of Siwa, I and a young woman equally as young and reckless as myself, Amy Guiterman of New York City, conspired to do a thing that would certainly cause our disgrace, if not our separate deaths.  (ellipsis in original)

Next we come to "The Pear-Shaped Man," by George R. R. Martin. As with most of Martin's fiction across all genres, the style is what one might politely call competent; the opening passage is actually rather atmospheric in its way. There's no sense of thematic ambition. The structure is eminently traditional: a woman moves into a new home, is menaced by a frightening stranger, becomes obsessed with the threat he poses, is ignored or dismissed when she tries to warn of the threat. What sets the story apart, and makes it at least defensible as superior work in the genre, is the nature of the stranger: not a suave gentleman who might turn out to be vampire or ghost or serial killer, but an overweight, solitary, socially awkward guy, the kind who lives alone in a small, dirty apartment and seems to subsist on junk food. Martin does an admirable job of making such a lifestyle menacing as well as pathetic, so that the classical structure becomes newly involving, and if you can accept a story in which the weird outsider really is as awful as the bright young go-getters find him, this is a solidly impressive piece of work.

Joe R. Lansdale's "The Night They Missed The Horror Show" is one of three stories from this anthology that also appears in The Century's Best Horror Fiction, so I've read it twice in the past few weeks. It also appears in the second volume of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, so I'll be reading it again when I get around to working through my unread volumes of that series. That's a lot of praise for a story to earn, and it's not difficult to see why. The rendering of an ordinary southern night that descends into a nightmare of racism and casual brutality is memorable and disturbing, and the portrayal of the hate-filled, frustrated mindset that drives such behavior is credible. In spite of all that, I wasn't greatly impressed by "The Night They Missed the Horror Show." The amount of grotesque behavior that piles up in a short span of time is so overwhelming that it becomes difficult to take seriously, verging on the ridiculous, and I don't see much deep insight into any aspect of the situation. Does a horror story have to be deeply insightful? Of course not, but if it isn't it runs the risk of becoming a simple exercise in the unpleasant, and for me that's all this one is.

I've been thinking lately that a major problem with contemporary psychological horror is that much of it lacks the detailed and convincing representation of its psychological aspects that's necessary to make it about psychological dysfunction in a real sense, rather than a portrayal of dysfunction for upsetting effect. What made "The Calling" work were specific moments that captured the anguish of the situation and communicated the reason for the narrator's profound despair; what makes a few other stories in the anthology fall flat is that they lack such authenticity. Nancy Holder's "Lady Madonna" is a case in point. It's clear that the combination of certain external forces and personal instability are meant to have driven the protagonist to the extreme form of protectiveness that the story describes, but she's more a collection of delusions than a credible human being, and the ultimate atmosphere of the story is of Gothic excess. Reasonably well-executed Gothic excess-- the first-person narration is clean and not in and of itself unrealistic, and the central idea is upsetting-- but still.

"The Box" by Jack Ketchum is another story also in The Century's Best Horror Fiction and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. And again, I'm afraid it didn't do very much for me. I appreciate its attempt at subtlety, but in this case I think the attempt backfires, producing a story so lacking in stylistic, atmospheric, or narrative excitement that it rests entirely on one's degree of engagement with the harrowing tragedy it inflicts on its protagonist after his son takes a peek inside a box containing a stranger's Christmas present. That tragedy is enough to generate some sympathy, but despite some suggestion of a deep sense of solitude the protagonist isn't developed enough to make his senseless plight feel more compelling than manipulative. I feel bad for him, in the way I'd feel bad if I heard about a similar event on the news, but nothing more.

Elizabeth Massie's "Stephen" is the third story that also appeared in The Century's Best Horror Fiction. And in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Oh, and this one was also in Stephen Jones' Best New Horror for that year. And it got a World Fantasy Award nomination. After all that, could I possibly give it a negative review? Maybe, but in this case I don't have to; after three readings (including that volume of Best New Horror) I'm conflicted enough not to be wholly positive or negative. The story certainly pushes buttons simply by its subject matter: a victim of extreme physical and sexual violence whose work as a therapist among seriously disabled patients at a rehab center brings her own issues to the forefront. This provocative situation is the basis for a reflection on how bodily and emotional damage affect the eternal need for and fear of human contact. What leaves me uneasy about the story despite this profound ambition is that same fear that the topic isn't being handled with an appropriate depth of insight. Obviously it's not my place as a man who was never a victim of physical or sexual violence to comment on the authenticity of such a story, but none of the characters are examined in enough detail to make me confident that their suffering is being explored rather than exploited. But it's a richer, more humane story than (say) "Lady Madonna," enough so that I can't reject it entirely. Maybe after yet another reading I'll have a better idea where I stand.

Thomas Ligotti is often praised, sometimes by me, for the philosophical content and dreamlike quality of his fiction, but what most struck me on rereading "The Red Tower" was its disturbing imagery and the paranoid tone of its narration. Ligotti is as adept at visceral discomfort ("a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs... many of them evidencing an advanced stage of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch") and disordered, unsettling narration ("I hear them talk of it every day of my life... Then the voices grow quiet until I can barely hear them as they attempt to communicate with me in choking scraps of post-nightmare trauma"), and on top of that this story functions as a pessimistic commentary on the horror and absurdity of conscious existence. That sort of layered achievement is what makes for a truly superior story, and it's why "The Red Tower," though not a particular favorite of mine, is a thoroughly deserving award winner.

Alan Rodgers' "The Boy Who Came Back From the Dead," the sort of story for which the phrase "does what it says on the tin" was made, is an odd one. It seems to be reaching for a reserved, resonant melancholy, but there's a plot element that jars pretty badly against that tone, and there isn't much to feel melancholy about, beyond the not-groundbreaking observation that coming back from the dead might not be the great pleasure you'd hope for. The prose has a direct, childlike quality that's appropriate to the young protagonist and makes his situation more involving, but overall this is another story for the good-but-not-great category.

Jack Cady's "The Night We Buried Road Dog" is the longest story in the anthology, and also the best. In addition to the Stoker, it won the Nebula and a couple lesser known genre awards, and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and a Hugo. That a ghost story should do so well in competitions more strongly associated with science fiction and fantasy is a sign of the power of this novella. Perhaps it tries a little too hard to evoke the pathos of the solitary lives of its protagonists, men of the great open spaces in the American West whose cars and dog are the most important thing in their lives, for whom lonely driving is a peculiar pleasure. But Cady is enough of a stylist, his prose authentically simple and lean yet wistfully evocative, that it works, even for a reader who's cynical about the type of person he's describing. The capturing of a way of life is so gradual that the ghostly quality is subdued, but when it emerges it makes a basic trope of ghost lore eerie and subtly moving. Another story that does enough things well to be an obvious award contender, and all by itself goes a long way toward making this anthology worth reading.

It is perhaps unfair to describe the plot of a stylized horror story in blunt language-- anything can be made to sound ridiculous that way-- but sometimes the temptation is irresistible, so here we are: P. D. Cacek's "Metalica" is about a woman who gets pelvic exams for kicks. There's a psychological aspect to her behavior, but the story is less about that than about explicit descriptions (it originally appeared in an erotic horror anthology) that certainly succeed in getting under one's skin. This is another case where emotional disturbance feels used for visceral effect, and while that's not always a bad thing, the erotic tone of the prose makes this story unsettling in all the wrong ways.

The anthology concludes with "Orange is for Anguish, Blue is for Insanity" by David Morrell, in which a young art student discovers the secret behind an avant-garde artist's unusual work. Will that secret claim him as it did previous enthusiasts? Well, obviously. This fits comfortably into the tradition of horror stories about over-curious scholars, and while the ultimate explanation has unusual qualities and the ending introduces a metaphorical/psychological element that isn't original either but is carried off with real intensity, following along as the story develops along expected lines wasn't a whole lot of fun for me.

Which doesn't mean that many readers won't enjoy it. From a certain perspective I've been too hard on this anthology. Taken as a set of stories, rather than as award winners about which high expectations are reasonable, it's above average. All the stories are at least solid on a technical level; none are out-and-out boring. Pick a horror anthology at random and the odds are pretty good that neither of those things will be true. The range of styles and subgenres here is also inviting. The book production is nice: no author biographies or story notes, but there's an illustration for each story by Glenn Chadbourne. Chadbourne's style isn't invariably appropriate for these stories, but his work is always accomplished and atmospheric, and adds to the polish and appeal of the volume. As a sampling of professional horror stories from the late 80s and early 90s, this anthology is easily recommended, and although not everything has aged well, most readers will find at least a couple stories they can thoroughly enjoy.

How to Be Better

Updated November 2014: While I stand by the basic messages of this post about diversity and listening to criticism, its rhetoric is no longer part of how I would approach those issues. More importantly, recent developments have made it clear that the author of Requires Only That You Hate, also known in fandom circles as Winterfox and in professional SFF as the writer Benjanun Sriduangkaew, is a deeply unpleasant and manipulative personality whose interest in social justice, whether real or feigned, comes second to a vicious pleasure in attacking those she perceives as enemies.  The evidence for this is now publicly available; I just wanted to make it clear that I'm aware of it, and that I no longer endorse this individual on any level.

This post is a little outside the usual subject matter of the blog, but I think it's important.

A request for readers of this blog who are white, or male, or heterosexual, which I think includes most (but not necessarily all) who find their way here on a regular basis. Read this. Then read the posts it links to, both on that blog and elsewhere. Then read, or at least skim, other posts on Requires Only That You Hate. Try to find something that offends or upsets you. Unless you read only horror and no science fiction or fantasy, I doubt it will take very long.

So, my straight/white/male reader, what might you be thinking after all that reading? Here's one possibility. It's what I (a gay white man) have thought in the past when confronted with similar perspectives. "Well, I certainly support feminism/anti-racism/LGBT rights. And there are definitely some pieces of fantasy/science fiction/horror that show various biases or get into problematic territory. Bakker's defensiveness might be going a little too far. But this acrackedmoon is too extreme/too political/too blind to nuance/too angry. I can't take her seriously."

That sounds like a reasonable enough attitude, right? After all, we all decide every day whether particular opinions are worth our attention. We can't read every word of commentary from every perspective. And surely, just by the law of averages, there have to be anti-racists/feminists/GLBT activists somewhere who aren't worth taking seriously. Right?

Well.

Next, read this. What are you thinking now? Perhaps something similar? Maybe Sady Doyle goes on the list of feminists too die-hard to be taken seriously. Or are you beginning to see the problem?

Issues of representation and social justice tend to reach the mainstream of Internet genre fandom only when authors or other "important" bloggers respond negatively to being called out. Their responses get noticed, and much discussion and drama ensues. Now, let me be clear: although my opinion doesn't matter all that much, for reasons I'll get to, I think that's a good thing. These issues need to be discussed by any means necessary. But because such discussions only intermittently draw the attention of straight/white/male fans not already immersed in social justice debates, it's easy for those fans to see a sequence of individual critics, and reject them one by one without engaging the larger question of their own relationship to social justice commentary.

That question, simply put, is this: How can straight/white/men justify our claim to care about the concerns of oppressed groups while ignoring or dismissing any criticism coming from members of those groups that doesn't immediately strike us as valid? And the answer, simply put, is We can't.

*     *     *

One of the things acrackedmoon deals with in the post linked above is the white male fear of being labeled sexist or racist. As far as I can tell, that fear springs from an embarrassing inability to grasp the simple fact that saying, doing, or writing something sexist or racist is not an irremediable blot on one's soul. You don't become Theodore Bilbo by making a single mistake; that's a natural consequence of living in a world full of different kinds of privilege and bigotry. acrackedmoon was not suggesting that R. Scott Bakker is a monster in human form, that he secretly or subconsciously hates women, or that the only solution is for all decent-minded folk to gather pitchforks and torches and storm his castle. She was saying that she, as a woman and a feminist, found his response to criticisms regarding misogyny in his works severely lacking in several ways. Yes, she said it bluntly and mockingly. So what? Critics are not obligated to be nice. If you don't want your ideas and feelings abused, don't share them. Otherwise, accept that not everyone is going to like you and go from there.

Once straight/white/men have decided that the rhetoric or ideology of a particular blogger is over-the-top, we often perceive over-the-top demands as well, even when they plainly don't exist. For some reason discussions of racism and sexism in given books tend to generate unjustified fears of censorship, as though anyone is calling for authors to stop writing or for their works to be destroyed. This feeds the fear of admitting to, acknowledging the mere possibility of, racism or sexism; the white men in question seem to think that the only possible follow-up to such an admission would be to unplug their laptops and vow to write no more. Again, no.

Here's what we need to do, as white/straight/men confronting claims of bigotry against groups of which we're not members, in works we've written or works we like: acknowledge the validity of the interpretation. Even if you're not versed in the academic language on which it draws, accept that that language exists for very good reasons. The little voice that says "But it isn't, but it doesn't..."? Tell that voice to shut up. Part of being open-minded is accepting that you might not be right, even when it really, really feels like you are. You know how, when a friend expresses a firm dislike of some author you really admire, you don't spend the next six months trying to convince that friend he's wrong? Instead, you say "OK," and try to accept that his reading experiences have shaped different criteria by which your favorite author sucks. Maybe you secretly tell yourself that he's wrong and foolish and blind, but I really hope not, and in any case you only say that secretly. You don't throw it in his face. Well, when it comes to sexism, racism, and homophobia, the issues are more important but the principle is the same.

Women, people of color, and non-heterosexuals know more about bigotry than you, white/straight/men. They just do. They know it by bitter personal experience, and by the informed study that often follows such experience. They know more in the same way that Ph.D's in a given field know more than excitable amateurs with a little reading and some crazy theories. Yes, you can construct some wild hypothetical in which the Ph.D's are wrong and the crackpot is right, but if you're deciding that the crackpot is brilliant every single time, something is wrong with your intellectual system. It's ridiculous to regard oneself as open-minded if one constantly rejects the uncomfortable but well-informed radical argument over the safe, deeply ignorant status quo.

The thing about acknowledging the validity of such criticism is that it's not only, and even not primarily, about you. It's about respecting the right of women/POC/LGBT people to be uncomfortable with how they are portrayed (or not portrayed) in fiction, and to voice that discomfort. It's about not seeming (and even if this isn't what's intended, it's how such behavior comes across) more interested in shutting down criticism of something you like than in allowing all members of those groups to contribute to and shape the movements that act on their behalf. It's about not privileging your own progressive self-image above the concerns of those you profess to care about. Feminism belongs to women, anti-racism to POC, and so on. That doesn't mean that straight/white/male allies can't contribute to those movements; it does mean that we need to allow them to be what they are: spaces where, in contrast to the wider society and virtually every sub-culture, the beliefs, needs, and desires of oppressed groups come first. That includes all members of those groups, not just the ones who tell you what you want to hear. (Oh, and that perspective you have, the one you're worried won't be aired if your white/male/straight voice isn't heard? There's a woman, or a person of color, or a lesbian who shares it. Minority discourses are richer than the individual blogs you come across during the latest cycle of drama. They don't need you. Sometimes it's all right to say nothing at all.)

And here's the good news: not only does such an acknowledgement make you a better, more genuinely progressive person, it's also the only thing you have to do. (If you're the writer of the work in question, you might also want to apologize for any frustration or offense you caused, even if you didn't mean to cause any. That's just good manners.) Despite the grim daydreams some white men indulge, you won't be ordered to drop your books onto a pyre and watch them burn. You won't be asked to stop reading them or stop enjoying them, or pledge your absolute agreement with every word of every criticism. What you can do, when reading or writing such works in the future, is remember those criticisms and ask yourself how to avoid perpetuating hurtful ideas while still liking what you like. Or, as another blogger, whose comments are both briefer and sharper than mine, put it, "The best defence is to forget about defence. Just listen and think about it and try to be better."