2019 Notes
We Sold Our Souls
Notes:
A love letter to heavy metal, elegantly wound inside a legitimately creepy horror novel.
Kris Pulaski was the guitarist for Durt Wurk (with umlauts of course!) a power metal band that came close to breaking but never did. Now she works at a Best Western and is getting kicked out of her house. But when she discovers that the former lead singer of her band is about to stage a final tour with his new band Koffin, she decides to track down her old band mates, and figure out why they split up, why they never released their masterpiece album (a concept record about the Blind King who sits on the Black Iron Mountain and controls everything from the center of the world) and why she can’t remember anything about their last night of playing together. What she discovers is that, somehow, the Black Iron Mountain is real, and that she, her old band mates, and the whole world are in danger.
Grady Hendrix clearly loves metal–the book is littered with references to the grandmasters of Metal like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Slayer, as well as more obscure or avant garde groups like Viking metal stalwarts Bathory and current ambient metal explorers Wolves in the Throne Room. More than that, he loves the message of metal–that outsiders, losers, and weirdos can fight and win against all odds. And the hero, Kris Pulaski, is a loser at the beginning of the book, having fallen from the heights and has to claw her way to victory. There’s also some subtle but smart commentary about women in the (ostensibly but not really) male dominated genre of metal, and this opposition also powers Kris, and the other prominent women in this story.
Lest you think that this is like some Almost Famous clone, there is a legitimately scary plot that holds this together, with conspiracies, mind control, and corpse-like monsters that feed on your soul. Hendrix is a masterful horror storyteller and the book would have succeeded even without his rich, incentive and terrifying mythology. Whether you come for the horror or the Metal \m/ \m/ you’ll stay for the rest.
Cyclonopedia
Notes:
“Truly one of the strangest books I have ever finished.
I first heard of this book in Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s edited anthology ““The Weird””. A chapter from ““Cyclonopedia”” entitled ““The Dust Enforcer”” was excerpted, alongside more standard weird horror and sci-fi authors like Lovecraft, Blackwood, King, Oates, Gaiman and others. ““The Dust Enforcer”” was an outlier even among that eclectic group–a fictionalized essay about the demon Pazuzu and its links to oil, Mid-east war and conflict, and abstract philosophy.The book dramatically expands the scope and complexity of that chapter, into something that China Mieville (in a glowing jacket review) describes as ““post-genre horror””. Negarestini himself called it ““theoretical fiction”” and it is certainly blends academic scholarship, fiction, and philosophical prose.
The central framework of the book is that it is a compiled summary and analysis of the writings of a heretical Iranian Archaeologist named Hamid Parsani, who disappeared while investigating some unusual archaeological sites. The book opens with an epistolary introduction by a woman flying to Istanbul to meet a man she met online. She fails to meet him, but discovers a cache of writings that he may have left behind for her, and begins to read and annotate them. What follows is an extraordinarily complicated series of essays that link together archaeology, ancient history, contemporary oil politics, the War on Terror, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, philology, and Islamic thought. Summarizing the content of the essays is probably futily beside the point, but the gist is that the US War on Terror and contemporary oil wars more generally are symptoms of a much older and broader supernatural tension between occult forces inhabiting the depths of the earth and those inhabiting the sun. Various human groups and individuals throughout recorded (and unrecorded) history (up to the present conflict between the writ-large West and the Middle East) have embraced different aspects of this conflict, sometimes consciously, and sometimes unconciously, leaving behind an archaeological, linguistic, and written record of contact with such Outside forces.
For me, the closest analogy to a book like this would be Mark Danielewski’s ““House of Leaves””, another book which centers around a fictionalized essay. But while Danielewski’s post-modern novel is complicated and unusual, it maintains a genre focus on plot and characters, concepts that Negarestani dispenses with almost entirely. The author (is it Parsani or Negarestani?) writes in a highly abstract fashion, coining new terminology and then playing with and against such terms or their cognates, citing a wild panoply of real and fictional sources to justify arguments and facts, and including frequently near-inscrutable diagrams of philosophical concepts and ideas. Sources are footnoted (and you should read the footnotes as they actually explain quite a bit) and there is a glossary of terms at the end that is also somewhat expository, but the whole book itself ends up being dense and complex.
Such abstraction necessitates close and slow reading (at least for me) but Cyclonopedia is ultimately coherent and interesting, rewarding such a reading. And parts of it are legitimately creepy, especially the last chapter, which is much more historically written and describes the impacts of conspiratorial cults on ancient and modern societies. I won’t pretend that I ““got”” all of it, but it was definitely fascinating as a contemporary take on cosmic horror and as a bewildering and exciting genre exercise”
Landscapes
Notes:
I only knew John Berger by reputation. His book Ways of Seeing (and the accompanying BBC series) were the onramp of many of my friends and colleagues to Marxism and critical theory.
This book collects some of Berger’s essays on art, though that catch-all is rather loosely interpreted, given the broad tonal and thematic content herein. There are memoir-like reminiscences of his youth, essays on marxism in a post-soviet world, travelogues in palestine and Israel, and thoughts on Walter Benjamin and Rosa Luxembourg. These subjects seem perhaps unrelated to what we generally think of as ““art”” but it comes through in Berger’s insistence that we not lose sight of the aesthetic and emotional qualities of political struggle, and the ways in which we apprehend (and therefore understand) our political and social situation is conditioned by our relationship to art and aesthetics. Likewise, his fierce ethical compass shines through, especially his belief that art, as a social category, must be disentangled from property.
The essays I enjoyed the most included a deep dive into the revolutionary nature of cubism, and his thoughtful analysis of drawings as a medium and as a way of imperfectly capturing intangible experiences like memories. I also found myself nodding along reading his essay on the history of Museums, and thinking about whether they are redeemable, given their origins in propping up power. But I also liked several of political essays, including his thoughts on the fall of Berlin Wall, with its deeply humanistic though cautious championing of the collapse of Soviet-style communism. Likewise, his essay ““Ten Dispatches about Place”” in which he addresses the question of whether one can be a Marxist absent a living model of a socialist society.
This book was a great introduction to Berger, and I’m looking forward to reading more of this brilliant, ethical, and thoughtful scholar. "
Declare
Notes:
“A delightfully weird supernatural spy novel with loads of astonishing historical detail and flavor.
Andrew Hale is a lecturer at Cambridge in the 1960s. One day he gets a secret notification from an old handler at a top-secret intelligence agency, calling him back to finish an operation that he failed to finish in WW2. So far, so Le Carre. Except that the operation was the destruction of a colony of monsters/angels/djinni/beings living at the summit of Mt. Ararat in Turkey that the Soviet Union had been attempting to utilize for victory in the Cold War.
What follows is an outrageously complicated, exciting, and weird yarn that jumps back and forth through time and across space, following Andrew Hale as he learns about the great mystery undergirding the Cold War, as well as his own personal history which becomes more strange and mysterious as the rest of the novel expands. There are references to Lawrence of Arabia, Noah’s Ark, the mystical power of meteorites, code-breaking, and the Spanish Civil War. As Powers notes in his conclusion, almost every historical detail in the book is accurate, but contextualized within this supernatural conspiracy as though it actually happened.
I read Powers' earlier novel ““The Drawing of the Dark”” which was entertaining but hindered by somewhat anachronistic dialog for a Medieval epic, and not very well written. Declare is wonderfully emplotted and written, and manages to both take itself seriously and be delightfully fun.
Alt-America
Notes:
“A readable and thorough account of the history of the various strands of the far-right that have come to power under the Trump administration.
Neiwart traces the origins of the current right-wing apex of power to the patriot movement in the 1990s, and he documents how that movement shifted into the militia movement at the end of the 2000s. At the same time, he traces the origins of the ‘alt-right’ back to the re-branding of classical White supremacy (the KKK and various other neo-confederate cousins) in the 90s and 2000s. These movements came together in their shared sense of conspiratorial thinking, as well as their visceral opposition to the Obama presidency.
The book is detailed, with lots of direct quotes and first-hand accounts from reputable sources. There isn’t much analysis–it’s more of a journalistic (obviously) chronology rather than making any attempts at locating these movements within the broader cultural framework of American society. This made it interesting, but ultimately lacking for me. In other words, it documented the patriot movement’s growth and mainstreaming in the 1990s-2010s, but didn’t say what other factors led to that decade being the period in which it grew. In this regard, I find something like Corey Robin’s ““The Reactionary Mind”” much more useful to think about our current moment, with its focus on the historical arrangement of forces that lead conservatives in those moments to think the way they do.
Finally, the Afterword struck me as rather platitudinous. Neiwart calls for empathy, and listening to people different from you–all well and good. But he accepts the ““bubble”” idea of coastal urbanism while simultaneously accepting the (incorrect) idea that Trump’s support came primarily from working-class White people. He also relies a lot on psychological profiles of conservatives, which strikes me as incredibly creepy and maybe getting the cart before the horse on why people align themselves with far-right racist, paranoid, or gun-invested movements.
This book was definitely a useful resource for seeing the modern trajectory of the far-right, but it left me asking questions about the very history it described, and the solutions it offered felt bland and almost apolitical, despite the frightening political content that preceded them. "
Parable of the Sower
Notes:
A shockingly prescient novel about the survivors of the end of the world, and the necessary costs of survival.
Lauren Olamina is 17 and lives in a walled community near Los Angeles, sometime in the 2020s. The world in which she lives has been ravaged by climate catastrophe, wealth and political inequality, and widespread violence. In her journals (which form the text of the novel), she documents her life, and her growing belief in a philosophy/religion that she develops called Earthseed, that sees change as the most powerful force in the Universe. Due to her mother’s drug addiction, she is hyperempathic, which means that she feels the intense sensations (pain or pleasure) of other people in her proximity. Eventually, her community is overrun by invaders and she is forced to flee and build a new community with the other refugees she meets, and using some of her Earthseed insights as a guide.
Reading this book today, in our world, was really hard, but perhaps that’s because its so easy to look away from the overwhelming and seemingly insurmountable overlapping catastrophes we face. The fact that Butler wrote this book in 1993 reveals both her genius and foresight and our collective lack thereof.
But this is an Octavia Butler book, which means it is masterfully paced, and the characters she creates are both lived in and real, and also serve as thoughtful interlocuters of the complicated philosophical and ethical issues she lays out. One of the most salient of these is how to cope with change, a visceral and frightful question given the world she has laid out. And yet her ultimate answer is that we must survive however we can, and with as much kindness as possible to those around us, even if that kindness requires violence or danger. Such survival requires a recognition of the power of diversity in the communities that it births, and that we should welcome difference as a means of adapting to new challenges. This ethic permeates the entirety of Lauren’s journey.
My reading life is limited to a few minutes before collapsing into sleep each night, which meant that I spent a lot of time moving slowly through the frightening and horrific world that Butler prophecied. But ultimately, the book was hopeful, in its insistence that we can survive with kindness, and that this will create and re-create a community around us. This puts it at odds with other seemingly emancipatory dystopian fiction that either assumes a savior/hero, or sees a communities of resistence as a kind of autonomic response to oppression, without saying much about how such communities will cohere and evolve. The Subprimes, which I read earlier this year is funny and smart, but suffers from both of these problems.
I am in awe of Octavia Butler, as an author, a philosopher, and a social analyst. Onward!
Southern Gods
Notes:
“Lovecraftian neo-noir that combines Blues mythology, Southern gothic flourishes, and some horrific supernatural imagery.
Bull Ingram, a WWII vet, works in Memphis as muscle-for-hire in the late 40s and early 50s. He gets sent by a record executive (a not-so-veiled reference to Sam Phillips of Sun Records) to find a missing distributor lost in rural Arkansas and also track down a mysterious musician named Ramblin' John Hastur, whose music drives people to extremes of violence and insanity. Meanwhile, Sarah Rheinhart leaves her alcoholic husband and returns to her ancestral home in Arkansas with her daughter Franny, only to discover that her family’s history is intertwined with the same supernatural mystery that Bull is investigating.
The first two thirds of the book are really excellent, building the mystery of Rambin' John Hastur, and the Rheinhart family with equal zeal. Jacobs also clearly loves the Blues, and his evocations of juke joints and the ethereal quality of pre-war and post-war African-American music are quite rich. The mood and pace of these sections are bring the swampy heat of the South to life, and the supporting cast (particularly Sarah’s African-American childhood friend, Alice) is mostly well-developed and additive to the story. The last third to half of the book loses a bit of steam, for my taste. Once Bull and Sarah’s stories collide, the book becomes a lot more expositive and less focused on the atmosphere and mystery. This is my usual pet-peeve of Mythos-inspired novels–they give away the mythology and make it too understandable and comprehensible, usually in the service of completing an action arc. Thus, the appearance of a priest who is actually a demon-hunter, and who provides all of the backstory of Ramblin' John Hastur, makes the book a bit more ““by the numbers””. Plus, a literal Deus-ex-machina at the end wrapped the story up a little too neatly, though the shockingly violent conclusion certainly warranted some kind of resolution, imho.
In any case, this was certainly an entertaining and creative novel, melding together Lovecraftian horror with Southern noir. But for me, at least, it didn’t quite cash the check that it wrote. "
The Subprimes
Notes:
A dystopian satire, written a few years ago, whose closeness to (as well as divergence from) the world we are currently in makes it even more unsettling.
The Subprimes of the title are people whose credit scores are sub-prime (and folks with not that long memories will recall the use of this term in the finance market to describe the volatile loans that led us to the 2008 crash). In 21st century America, they are social pariahs, as every aspect of citizenship and daily life are governed by credit scores (housing, employment, education). Those whose scores are too low are forced into vagrancy, setting up temporary camps called Ryanvilles (named after former House Speaker, weightlifting enthusiast, and champion of government deregulation Paul Ryan). The book intertwines a number of storylines, including several Subprime families, a washed-up reporter whose son is enrolled in an increasingly regimented and privatized school system, the wife of a energy stock trader under indictment for securities fraud, and a mysterious woman of color who tries to build political and social alternatives to all of this.
Along the way there are hard-right evangelical megachurch pastor/politicians, ultra-wealthy energy families manipulating politics towards their own ends, environmental catastrophe (the book opens with Whales beaching themselves en masse, and periodically references unending prairie wildfires), double-speak regressive politics (e.g. ““the Clear Skies Act”” which mandates environmental deregulation), economic exploitation of marginalized people, and the militarization of everyday life.
The Subprimes highlights the danger and disorientation of our world with both incisive humor and abject terror. The book opens with a depressing depiction of a Ryanville that is later destroyed by a police raid, in a passage both horrifying and enraging. There are also some wonderful puns and wordplay to be found throughout–the wealthy sisters who own most of America’s energy concerns are named the ““Peppers””, presumably in references to the Koch (Coke) brothers.
This is a satire, which means its about ideas and abstractions, not characters and emotions. Most of the characters are pretty one-dimensional–the philandering stock-trader husband is astonishingly simple-minded for someone who scammed hundreds of people. Likewise, the mysterious revolutionary Sargham is almost literally divine, and the ending of the book casts a miraculous shadow over her political beliefs and hard organizing work. There were passages and sections that I found to be pretty abysmally written, and that let go of subtlety in favor of a rhetorical beating.
And the end of the book is somewhat upbeat, but in a way that felt literally miraculous and belies the complicated ecological, economic, and political problems that it outlined. It initially feels good to see powerless people stand up to the powerful, but offered little beyond that good feeling as to whether such a stand would be ultimately successful in any other narrative or historical moment.
All together, this was a harrowing read, given our current circumstances. It was definitely entertaining, especially in the ““spot the pseudonym”” sort of way, and it tells a story of triumph over evil. But I’m not sure that I actually enjoyed it, given how woodenly it was written, and given that the problems it sketches are all around us, frighteningly visible and visceral, I found its magical ending even more despairing.”
Paperbacks from hell
Notes:
A fun, quirky book that really shows off how odd and eccentric the horror genre became in the late 20th century.
I know Grady Hendrix from his wonderfully stylized novels Horrorstor and My Best Friend’s Exorcism. This book makes clear that Hendrix is a superb scholar in addition to an excellent novelist. The book charts the proliferation of horror paperback fiction in the 70s, 80s (and 90s), beginning largely with the explosive influence of the Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and ending with Silence of the Lambs. It is perhaps no accident that books made into movies form the bookends of this history, as part of Hendrix’s point is that the market exploded and then contracted relative to other changes in media.
I bought the book for the wonderful reproductions of the covers of these strange horror paperbacks, which I remember gracing the shelves of bookstores, truckstops, and friends bookshelves when I was growing up. Hendrix does a real service by focusing some attention on horror illustrators, many of whom were not credited on the books whose art they advertised and decorated.
Hendrix organizes the book by theme and subject matter, which gives him an opportunity to talk about the great social, political, and cultural changes that took place in the 70s and 80s–computerization, fear of atomic fallout, environmental activism, the Vietnam war, race and gender, etc… Hendrix’s non-fiction writing is as engaging as his fiction, and he really relishes diving into the bonkers plots that emerged from this exploding genre.
This was a fun book, and richly written by someone with a real love and passion for horror.
Life
Notes:
Exactly what you’d expect, which is a story filled with snark, attitude, sleaze, drugs, and rocknroll. It’s got everything you want from the store of the life of one of the 20th century’s great decadent artists–inside play by play of the making of the Stones records, bitchy sniping at Mick Jagger and the other Stones, stories of celebrity encounters and world travel, stories of drugs and sex.
The parts that really grabbed me were where Keith revealed what a student of the 20th century he’s been, even as he was making big parts of that history himself. He’s really quite a musicologist, and his discussions of the Blues, early rocknroll, R&B, and reggae are worth the sticker price alone. Plus, his discussions of the process of song writing are really rich and eye opening.
Come for the sleaze, stay for the insight!
Wildwood
Notes:
“A fun, creative YA fantasy that suffered only from a slow middle-section.
Pru lives in St. Johns, near Portland Oregon. One day while at the park with her 1 year old brother, Mac, she sees him carried away by a flock of ravens and taken to ““the Impassible Wilderness””, a huge forested park. When she heads inside, determined to rescue him, she discovers a fantastical kingdom of humans and animals and magic, with its complicated history and politics. Ultimately, she becomes caught up in this place, both in her attempts to rescue her brother, and in her discovery about her own life and purpose.
I have been looking for fun YA fantasy to read with my son. I figured this might be a bit beyond is 6 year old level, and so I listened to the Audiobook, which was pretty well-read by actress Amanda Plummer. The book is very well-written; Colin Meloy is clearly a talented prose writer, with poetic and rich turns of phrase. And the world he’s built is a fascinating one, filled with talking animals and sentient plants and a complicated political geography and history. I liked visiting Wildwood and enjoyed the people I met there.
It’s clear that Meloy loves the classics of children’s fantasy fiction–this fits well with Narnia, Prydane, the Hobbit etc… He’s written a book series pitched at that level of complexity and richness.
The book dragged a bit in its middle-third, as Pru wanders Wildwood and meets the various factions, groups, and people that inhabit it. I think the story would’ve been just as rich had some of the groups been more obliquely described or encountered. The ““Avian Principality”” for instance, is basically there for world-building exposition, and a late deus ex machina.
So, a well-written YA fantasy that could’ve been trimmed a bit. "
Being the Change
Notes:
“A really rich, practical guide to encourage social comprehension and awareness in children and teenagers.
This book is a guide pitched (to my eyes) primarily at Middle to High School Students. Its primary goal is to teach social comprehension or ““how we make meaning from and mediate our relationship with the world.”” Thus, it takes as its starting point that understanding our world and our place in it is of vital importance in education, as important as seemingly standard subjects like math, reading, science, etc… Additionally, the book is focuses on how to use student’s own experiences to create safe and enlightening conversations about social comprehension. It is not abstract, but immediate, and rooted in the idea that students should learn from their own experiences.
Despite this somewhat theoretical objective, the book is very practically organized. Each chapter is rooted in an activity or a set of activities, and Ahmed uses actual quotes from her extensive in-class practice to illustrate how they can work. I particularly liked the exercises on the Universe of Obligation, and Bias.
I don’t teach kids at this age, and would have to do some gymnastics to port these exercises into my own teaching at the college level, but reading the book has gotten me thinking about teaching social comprehension to my own children. Some of the exercises rely on students processing things on their own or with their peers, which is harder to emulate as a parent, but I have wondered about whether some of these practical ideas might be useful when I’m trying to talk to my kids about controversial, dangerous, or complicated subjects, or about their relationships with their schoomates and their communities.
All in all, a really eye opening book with a very practical focus, though unfortunately too little deployed in most American education. "
Hope in the Dark
Notes:
“A short, gorgeous love letter to political activism, even in the most depressing of times.
I first heard Solnit from her incisive and savage essay (and later a book) entitled ““Men Explain things to me.”” It was particularly eye-opening for me as someone who both thinks of himself as a feminist, and also is perfectly happy to regale people with his opinions (!)
This book was written in the mid 2000s, when the War on Terror and the War in Iraq were in full swing and without any signs of being checked. This is the darkness of the title and provides some of the anchoring for the exploration of points of hope that follow. Her primary goal in writing the book is to anchor action into moments that seem to be despairing. The short essays draw genealogies of progress from events that seemed at the moment small or inconsequential. As she says ““Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drop of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.”” For Solnit, the difference between progress and regress is a difference of human action ““wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many how hot, and what survives depends on whether we cat. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.””
This edition re-published in 2014 with some new reflective essays by Solnit, also provides some additional context for hope in the dark. Looking back, Solnit finds solace in the small actions that were taking place while she was writing the book–anti-war activism leading to the election of Obama, climate activism leading to pipelines being shut down and fracking being outlawed, LGBTQ activism leading to the legalization of gay marriage. She also concludes with an essay that speaks against cynicism and paralysis, and argues that both are symptoms of a social order that honors individual action and denigrates collective action.
This book is beautiful, in its writing, and in its message. "
The Hike
Notes:
“The story of a short journey that turns into a long journey, by turns funny, strange, sweet, and exciting.
Ben is on a business trip to the Poconos. He’s away from his wife and kids, and his hotel is boring, so he decides to go for a quick hike in the forest behind it. He ends up going someplace far stranger and unimaginable, and for far longer than he thought he would be hiking.
Like all journey-stories, this book is about fate and how our relationships with others and our world form the choices we make. Ben meets all manner of strange creatures (including giants, demons, ghosts, dog-faced killers, huge insects) and bizarre people (a 16th century conquistador, stranded out of time, and an irascible talking crab, among others) and these collisions change the choices that he makes while on the Path. And along the way, his memories of his wife and children are the distant light that keep him moving.
Lest I leave the impression that this is some dour, weighty book–Drew Magary is a really funny writer. If you know him, you know his hilarious contributions to Deadspin, and especially his LOL column ““Why your team sucks.”” And while the book isn’t exactly humorous, it is very funny in places, whether it’s the repartee between Ben and the cannibal giant who captures him, or his maddeningly funny/frustrating experiences early in the novel trying to get his iphone to work. Even when the book is more serious, Magary prose is fast and rich and his world-building and imaginative set-pieces are really striking.”
The Obama Inheritance
Notes:
“A wild ride with a really clever premise, and featuring some amazing tales.
It’s kind of all there in the title–this is a book in which writers of mystery, suspense, science fiction, and thrillers take, as a given, all of the conspiracies that were drummed up about President Obama, and turn them into a narrative. Given how feverish and bizarre many of these ideas were, it’s a rich mine to plumb. The pulp tradition looms large here, with spy thrillers, space-monsters, and action heroes making regular appearances.
As with all anthologies, the results are variable. Some of these stories were thrill-rides, others reveled in the horrific implications of their inspiration, and others used the opportunity to contemplate America as an idea and a lived experience, particularly around issues of race (perhaps not surprisingly, as most of the contributors are people of color). The stories that I liked the best took the feverish, almost psychedelic weirdness of the far-right’s swamp of Obama-hate and ran with it. Eric Beetner’s ““True Skin”” and L. Scott Jose’s ““Give me Your Free, Your Brave, Your Proud Masses Yearning to Conquer”” take on the idea of Obama as a lizard-person, with equal parts funny and disgusting results. Nisi Shawl’s ““Evens”” plays with the idea of clones and their implications for succession and term limits. Other stories draw on other mythologies and fold them into our current political situation–Star Trek for Adam Lance Garcia’s ““The continuing Mission”” and The Scarlet Pimpernel in Gary Phillips ““Thus Strikes the Black Pimpernel””. Still others are action-filled thrillers like ““Michelle in Hot Water”” by Kate Flora and ““Forked Tongue”” by Lise McLendon.
My favorite story is perhaps the strangest–““The Psalm of Bo”” by Christopher Chambers, framed as a gospel according to the Obama’s beloved water Spaniel, and recounting the story of how dogs inherit the Earth. It’s almost quiet and meditative, even as the story it depicts is absolutely bonkers and delightful.
It’s hard to escape the world we’re in, dangerous and spiteful as it is. But this anthology does the great work of confronting that world head-on. Maybe that’s the best approach–certainly it made for an entertaining read.”
Cold Hand in Mine
Notes:
“I heard of Aickman from John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, who described him as a literary influence during his tenure on the Podcast I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats. Darnielle spoke of Aickman as being a very subtle, suggestive writer of horror and strangeness, which sounded right up my alley.
The stories collected in ““Cold Hand in Mine”” are variable in their adherence to that mission, with some (The Hospice, The Clock Watcher) being almost inexplicable and others (Pages from a Young Girls Journal, The Same Dog) bringing more of a light touch to already familiar tales and themes.
The hardest part for me was that Aickman’s prose is very specific and very stylized, and the subtlety of his creepy imagery is easy to miss if you read quickly. Unfortunately, as a father to a new baby (as well as an already dynamic and engaged five year old) it’s hard to find time to read something slowly, and this collection took me far longer to read than I think it might otherwise have.
Still, several of the stories in here are absolute masterpieces–the Hospice, in particular is stunningly weird, to the point that it’s almost funny. ““Meeting Mr. Millar”” also has a great deal of humor mixed with the bizarre, as the narrator is an editor of pornographic fiction. "
Encyclopedia of Black Comics
Notes:
It’s a real treat to be able to read something about a subject you love and feel close to, and discover a whole other side to it that you never knew. This was definitely the case with The Encyclopedia of Black Comics, which (as with any book about race in America) held up a mirror to the world of comics and sequential art and provided an extended counter-narrative to the one I knew.
The real beating heart of this book is the amazing life-stories of the people who make up the biographical entries. Some of the most enlightening to me were:
- Orrin Cromwell Evans, who, with the publication of All-Negro Comics in 1947 became the first African-American publisher of comic books.
- Vernon E Grant, who helped introduce Manga to western audiences through his translations, after serving in the Vietnam war and living in Tokyo.
- Ollie Harrington, political cartoonist for many prominent African-American newspapers, for which he was eventually forced to leave the country for fear of his life and livelihood.
- Micheline Hess, an early colorist at Milestone comics who made the transition to web-comics and now writes amazing and gorgeous comics with Black female protagonists.
- Ariell Johnson, owner of Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse, the first (?) Black woman to own a comic store.
- Jackie Ormes, the first female African-American cartoonist who wrote some of the first positive representations of Black women in comics in the 1930s and 40s.
- Sanford Greene, who simultaneously drew Power Man and Iron Fist and also illustrated Hip-Hop album covers by MF Doom and other Hip-Hop artists.
This book has also given me lots of great comics to go and check out, and I’m glad to have such an evocative and informative springboard for new stuff to read. Huzzah Dr. Howard!
Viroconium
Notes:
“A classic of 3rd wave anti-fantasy that gradually evolves into something weirder and more wonderful, and makes me want to be a better writer.
I’ve read a few of Harrison’s books and stories–The Committed Men, Light, and a few shorter pieces. I’ve always been impressed with his prose, as well as his tone–a lingering sense of existential dread, sadness, and insanity that makes for harrowing but really engaging reading. ““Viroconium”” collects the novels and stories set in the eponymous city that Harrison created, but unlike other epic fantasy stories set in a shared space, Harrison used the city itself as a kind of metaphor for various concepts that he explores, including power, art, longing, and decay.
The first novel, the Pastel City, is perhaps the most straightforward epic fantasy. Its protagonist, the poet-knight tegeus-cromis, is called back to duty to help the Queen of Viroconium defend against an invading force from the north. Unlike most epic fantasy that roots its ideas in medieval Europe, Harrison takes as a starting point the idea that Viroconium is the last of an extensive series of technologically advanced cultures, which have died out but left pieces of their technology behind. This technology becomes the source of conflict, curiosity, tension, and artistry in the subsequent novels, and especially in the Pastel City, where both armies mobilize artifacts and machines that they barely understand.
A Storm of Wings, the second novel, may be my favorite, only because its so incredibly weird. It’s hard to explain, but it takes place after the events of Pastel City, during a period of Viroconium’s cultural and social collapse, and involves alien insect creatures, a doomed trip to the moon, and mutations and deaths caused by the warping of reality. It also features my favorite character in the series, Tomb the dwarf, an eccentric warrior and collector of ancient technology.
The Third Novel, In Viroconium, moves away from epic fantasy and is instead a story of artists living in the city, during a period in which it is beset by a mysterious plague. The story is more subtle and character-driven, but also gives Harrison the opportunity to broaden his own mythology, suggesting that Viroconium may be less a fixed place and more a series of metaphors taking the form of a city.
The remaining stories build on this idea, taking aspects of life in the city and the surrounding countryside and exploring how the characters of the novels are remembered or reconfigured by others. The only one of these I really enjoyed was ““Viroconium Knights””, about a doomed assassin who finds himself on the receiving end of the violence and scrutiny of the entire city.
The different setting of ““A Young Man’s Journey into Viroconium”” flipped the entire series on its head, and made it both a perfect ending and my favorite short story in the collection. Taking place in England in the 1990s, it tells the story of a man’s friendship with his eccentric neighbor, whose focus on strange events in the news or other bizarre symbols suggests that it is possible to enter Viroconium from a Cafe bathroom mirror in Huddersfield. At the same time, it also suggests that the costs or consequences of doing so may be dire for anyone who tries, or, more abstractly, that Viroconium is, in some way, altered and structured by the very people who are able to travel there.
So I enjoyed the plots of the novels and stories variably, but what never disappointed was Harrison’s prose, which is some of the most electric and rich I’ve ever read. There were passages whose poetic imagery I lingered over and relished, and he uses unusual and gorgeous metaphors in every paragraph that most writers would, I suspect, be deliriously happy to write once. And he also manages the amazing feat of making the world feel alive–he lingers on objects and clothing and buildings in ways that give you a sense of walking through streets and chatting with passersby.
So, Viroconium is not for everyone–it’s a bit too elliptical and abstract for people who like meat and potatoes sword and sorcery (in fact, my understanding it was largely written as a satire/commentary/criticism of that genre) and the plots are sometimes anti-climactic or put aside in favor of mood, metaphor and characterization. But I have thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Viroconium, nonetheless, and Harrison’s writing makes me want to work on my own. "
Astral Weeks
Notes:
A riveting psychogeographical tour around Boston in the late ’60s, using the creation of Van Morrison’s ethereal masterpiece (Astral Weeks) as a lens. Walsh starts with Van Morrison’s escape (from gangsters, from fame, from a crappy record contract) to Boston in 1968, where he began playing in the blooming but largely unheralded folk coffeehouse scene. From there he moves into the bizarre and wonderful world of late-60s Boston, a city with its own idiosyncratic arts culture that has largely been forgotten in the wake of San Francisco and New York’s respective hagiographies. But Walsh always come back to Astral Weeks, finding resonances with Morrison’s elliptical mysticism in Boston’s history of spiritualism, race politics, hippy cults, and as a counterpoint to the sterile commercialism of the music industry.
Plus, Walsh is a great writer, combining a journalists attention to detail and narrative with a poet/lyricists eye for gorgeous phrasing and evocation. Even if you don’t know Astral Weeks, or the wild collection of characters contained therein, this book is a love letter to a great American city, at a time of transition, told with an enthusiastic and poetic voice of someone who truly loves it.
The Falling Woman
Notes:
A really fascinating and complicated story, but where the prose kept pulling me out of enjoying it.
Elizabeth Butler is an archaeologist, working on a Mayan site in the Yucatan with a team from UC Berkeley. She is trying to reconstruct why the site was abandoned at the end of the Mayan period. But her added advantage is that she can see ghosts. The spirits of the dead are visible and audible to her, wherever she goes, and have been since she attempted suicide many years before. When her estranged daughter comes to visit the site and find some connection with her mother, the stories of these two women combine with that of a dead Mayan priestess who begins to communicate with Elizabeth about an upcoming and unstated danger. The cyclical Mayan calendar plays a big role in the story, with its complicated multiple scales of time, and linking of days with deities, affects and prophecy. It’s also clear that this is a book about how women try to manage socio-patriarchal expectations, and how attempts to do so can lead to disastrously violent consequences.
I wish I liked the book more than I did, but some clunky prose took me out of the subtly supernatural story of mothers and daughters. I mostly can’t put my finger on it, but but for a book that uses the Mayan calendar, ghosts, and archaeology to talk about the emotionally complex relationships between mothers and daughters, parts felt a little formulaic. I definitely blanched when Elizabeth opined that mental illness was just about societal non-conformity in a way that felt like a freshman year term paper.
