2020 Book Notes
##The Devil and the Dark Water
Notes:
A genuinely delightful mystery that manages to be simultaneously creepy, engaging, and fun.
The year is 1634. The Saardam is one of 7 ships bound from the Dutch colony of Batavia back to Amsterdam. On board are the governor general of the colony, his wife, daughter, and mistress, a colorful and bloodthirsty crew of sailors and soldiers, and a Sherlock Holmes-like detective named Samuel Pipps and his assistant, the gigantic mercenary Arent Hayes. Pipps is chained and stored in the hold for initially unknown crimes, and Hayes is tasked with figuring out why, just prior to boarding, a doomed leper warns the entire party that the ship is cursed and will be taken by the devil.
It gets weirder, more interesting, and more fun from there. There are mysterious, multi-generational conspiracies, miraculous inventions, murder, and a devil swimming in the waters around the ship (or is it?) waiting to drown them all.
Turton writes an afterward in which he asks for forgiveness for some historical inaccuracies, but for something this fun, who cares?
I had a great old time on every page, and the only thing that could get me to put it down was Christmas-season exhaustion.
##Mr Shivers
Notes:
“A gorgeously written thriller about cycles of violence and history, and how we become what we hate.
Loosely set in the Great Depression, Mr. Shivers follows Connelly, a man who is pursuing Mr. Shivers across the ravaged West for some initially unstated crime. Along the way, he meets a crew of people who are likewise seeking the mysterious ““gray man”” for reasons mostly unknown. They ride the rails, sleep in Hoovervilles, and encounter increasingly strange and bizarre people and places that lead Connelly to question whether he’s even chasing a man at all. Ultimately, the story is about how violence begets more violence, and vengeance is not a return journey.
I had read ““City of Stairs”” by Bennett and enjoyed it, but was genuinely taken by the rich and poetic prose of this book which added to the magic and mystery of the story. Sometimes this is in the service of extremely gruesome violence, but other times on thoughtful meditations on landscape, ethics, emotions or just propulsive and elegant phrasing. "
##The Human Alchemy
Notes:
“Stylish, literary dark fantasy (maybe?) that focuses on the inner lives and rationalizations of its characters.
Michael Griffin is drawing on a Lovecraft-inspired tradition that foreground’s Lovecraft’s occasional philosophical asides by his characters. Thomas Ligotti is part of this lineage, as are people like Matt Cardin and John Langan. There are long passages of inner monologue in these stories, where characters think through their lives, their circumstances, and their beliefs. Sometimes I found this engaging and immersive, and other times I just wanted to get on with the story.
Griffin’s prose is robust and poetic but without being overblown. He’s not a minimalist horror writer like Laird Barron, but he’s also not filling his passages with five-dollar words like Lovecraft–you won’t find ““Gibbous”” or ““cyclopean”” anywhere in these stories.
The stories themselves veer from fairly conventional supernatural horror (““Firedancing”” or ““Delirium Sings at the Maelstrom Window”") to more dreamlike, Kafka or Schulz-esque fantasies like ““The Slipping of Stones””, and everything in between. In many cases, horror or fantastical elements are simply part of the scenery and lifeworld’s of these solipsistic, philosophical characters. The centerpiece of the collection is a long, segmented short novella called ““An Ideal Retreat”” about a woman who visits an isolated family getaway home to check up on a relative, only to discover that the house itself seems to be both magically fulfilling her every want or expectation and also hides something menacing or alarming. Ultimately, the story touches on issues of the suppression of women’s desires, patriarchy and sexism, and the role of material things and spaces in organizing such desires–the supernatural content provides a vantage point for this.
Houses and architecture pop up in multiple stories as key elements, and it’s clear that Griffin enjoy’s lingering on architectural and material details–the windows to the unknown in ““Delirium Sings…"”, the multiple levels of the eccentric home in ““Firedancing””, the elaborate gothic rooms of the castle in ““The Human Alchemy””, etc… This certainly draws on a long-tradition in horror of finding malevolence in the mundane aspects of the world, and especially everyday material objects.
The line one draws between ““literary”” and ““genre”” fiction is of course, subject to all kinds of cultural and personal biases. I didn’t find much terror in these stories, personally, but still found myself enjoying the rich imaginative landscape that Griffin sketches. Likewise, I sometimes found the characters continued exploration of their own motivations to be distracting, but maybe that says more about me and what I want from fiction than the Griffin’s ability to highlight his characters' sense of themselves in service of the stories.
All in all though, this is really smart stuff, richly and poetically written, but hard to pin down into the easy camps of genre.”
##The Broken Hours
Notes:
“Lovecraft revisionism is really in vogue right now, whether it’s tackling his racism (e.g Ruff’s Lovecraft Country and Lavalle’s The Ballad of Black Tom) or skewering his subsequent fandom (e.g. Mamatas' I am Providence). Another route, taken here by Baker, has been to use Lovecraft’s life as a source of literary inspiration–this is also the road taken by Alan Moore’s comic ““Providence.”” But whereas for Moore, Lovecraft’s life becomes an opportunity to ruminate outward about art, history, and storytelling, Baker’s story moves inward, and fixates on issues of class, mental illness, and the extent to which we are locked into the roles we’re given in life.
The narrator, Arthur Crandle, takes a job as a personal assistant to a reclusive author in the mid 1930s, who he eventually discovers is an ailing HP Lovecraft, living alone in a decaying house in Providence, Rhode Island. The house itself (at 66 Prospect street) is a dark and disturbing place from the get-go, with remnants of previous familial occupants, rotting food, and piles of papers which it is Crandle’s job to type and edit. Additionally, Crandle begins to suspect that something malevolent or supernatural is present in the house, appearing as hallucinatory visions of a child, lights or shadows in his supposedly locked room, and a more general feeling of darkness and dread in various places. Ultimately, his life and Lovecraft’s collide as he tries to both answer mysterious questions he develops about the author and his family, while also fulfilling the duties an errands demanded of him by the man himself.
Such errands, and other journeys, enliven 1930s -era Providence which, like the best landscapes in Lovecraft’s own fiction, become characters unto themselves. Many real places (the John Hay Library, Butler Hospital for the Insane, the Lovecraft family’s ancestral home on Angell street, etc…) make Lovecraft’s Providence into a kind of dark map for Crandle, in which he keeps getting lost as he tries to do a job for an increasingly erratic and reclusive employer. But they also take the reader on a journey through a place in crisis, as the Great Depression has transformed the city into a home for people just trying to get by as the world they thought they knew collapses around them. This is personified most explicitly in the character of Flossie, a tenant living downstairs from Crandle and Lovecraft who is trying to break out of the roles assigned to her as a woman and a Jew in increasingly desperate ways. She’s also a wonderfully rich character and her every appearance in the novel was a delight.
The book is ultimately about how we try (and frequently fail) to break from the roles assigned us at birth, or by social rank, or by familial obligation, and the stories that we tell ourselves to justify that failure. But it’s also an astonishingly creepy novel, full of ghostly figures, malevolent forces, paranoia and menace. It’s really an astonishing achievement to write a character driven historical novel about Providence in the Great Depression that is simultaneously a moody and terrifying piece of supernatural horror.
Beyond all that, the book is gorgeously written, with subtle lyricism and propulsive pacing. I couldn’t put it down, and I’d recommend it to anyone who loves Lovecraft, or great, character-driven horror in general.”
##I am Providence
Notes:
“A satire of fandom and conventions, an extended essay on Lovecraft as an author and cultural influence, a murder mystery, and a ghost story.
The story is told from two perspectives, both of whom are writers. Colleen Danzig comes to the ““Summer Tentacular”” in Providence, RI, a long-standing literary convention dedicated to HP Lovecraft. There she meets the other narrator, Panos Panossian, a contrarian author of mixed-genre fiction and the first murder victim. Panossian continues his narration from beyond the grave, recounting his life, his experience with the colorful and ridiculous members of the Lovecraft fan community, and his thoughts on Lovecraft. Meanwhile, Danzig (there are plenty of great Misfits jokes scattered throughout) spends most of her time trying to understand both the astonishingly narrow and mean-spirited social politics of the convention and solving the mystery of who killed Panossian as well as another convention-goer. And the whole mystery centers around a book, bound in human skin, and the people who want it enough to kill for it.
The story is largely a satire of the micro-politics of niche fandom, and as such, some readers who are looking for a proper weird tale may not find this to be to their taste. But the book is funny (laugh out loud, in some cases) and occasionally as creepy as anything in the Lovecraftian tradition. And the weirdness is inhabited by the strange and unusual people for whom an annual Lovecraft convention forms the axis around which their world turns. Plus, Mamatas has some interesting thoughts about Lovecraft as an author and as a cultural force that are worth the price of admission. "
##Rad Dad
Notes:
“A genuinely thoughtful collection of diverse (in every sense) advice for raising children as a father.
I appreciated a few things about this, over other ““dad guides”” that I’ve had the please (and often displeasure) to read. The first was the focus on political consciousness in parenting many of the contributors are activists, or members of historically marginalized communities. All of them are conscious of the degree to which masculinity and patriarchy structure fatherhood and childhood. The politics is left-leaning, but not preachy or didactic. Instead, there’s a genuine attempt to wrestle with and live out the contradictions of what it means to be a father in a society that says fathers must look like the traditional (and suspect) image of the 1950s patriarch, whether you in fact look like that or not.
The second builds from the first, and sits in the insistence that fatherhood is ultimately improvisational, not in the sense of every action being completely new, but in the sense of being a thing to be worked out using the tools you have, or against the tools you were given by your parents. This was comforting, in a lot of ways, because everyone is trying to do better than what they were given with parenthood, and everyone feels themselves failing in some degree, either when measured against an idealized politics, or just in the daily working out of trying to be a good parent. It made me feel in solidarity with other parents, part of the same struggle.
The third is that parenting can galvanize one’s politics and materially ground them in ways that are transformative. Many authors spoke of the ways having kids brought home the necessity of political action around childcare, healthcare, environmental activism, and educational activism. The mundane truism that ““having kids changes you”” can mean a lot of things, and the contributors here frequently suggest that it made them more engaged in their politics, if sometimes less able to act on that engagement.
Not every essay was riveting or illuminating, but all of them were well written, and by equal turns funny, sad, or brilliant. A great book for dads, or any parent trying to figure out how to raise kids and save the world. "
##We who are about to
Notes:
An astonishing and unflinching work of feminist anti-science fiction.
The unnamed narrator is part of a crew of 8 passengers on a space ship (five women and three men) who crash on a habitable but barren planet with little likelihood of rescue. The male passengers decide that they are all going to try and colonize this planet, despite having no real skills or tools, while the narrator remains ambivalent, and though she is perhaps the most knowledgeable about how to survive remains distant from the project. But they get more and more insistent, to the point of stating that the women will need to be impregnated so that they can build this new society. Some of the women are fine with this, but the narrator rebels and violence ensues. The second half of the book is more impressionistic, as the narrator thinks back on her former life as an activist; the life she was fleeing on the spaceship, and how the choices she made or didn’t make spurred her belief that dying on the planet is a better choice than living with the rules and conventions of the civilization she was fleeing (and that the remaining passengers were trying to recreate).
There are so many books about a group of rugged survivors trying to make a life after catastrophe, going back to Robinson Crusoe, and certainly a lot of science fiction shares this conceit. But Russ reveals the patriarchal trappings of a lot of this work, and the ways in which, even when someplace entirely new, people will recreate old dynamics of power. The first half of the book documents the narrators growing understanding of this, and her eventual decision to intervene.
But the second half puts that decision and its consequences in relief, with the narrator relecting back on her life, meditating on what it means to live a life full of significance, and what things are worth dying for. It’s less science fiction and more stream-of-consciousness memoir, which certainly will disappoint some readers–the book was panned by sci-fi reviewers when it was first published. But I found this section just as gripping as the opening, and there were moments of revelation amidst the remembrance.
Overall, it’s an astonishing text, written in a witty, thoughtful voice, and reframing a major genre trope in a harsh and philosophical light. The prose is quite florid and beautiful, and there is strong moral spine despite some seemingly nihilistic actions and ideas presented therein.
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