Dread anglerfish and other miscellany

A few years ago a friend gave me a copy of the July/August 2015 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with the thought that the first story, by a new-ish author, seemed like the sort of thing I would like. As frequently happens with this sort of thing, I intended to check it out in a timely manner, but the magazine soon got subsumed into the rest of my enormous TBR pile.

More recently, when I was Marie Kondo-ing said enormous TBR pile because what even is in there, I was somewhat surprised to pick up the magazine and see the name “Tamsyn Muir” on the cover, because oh shit, I know who that is now! And her stuff is exactly the sort of thing I like! So I sat down and read “The Deepwater Bride” and then put the magazine back in the TBR pile to finish later.

“Later” ended up mostly being “in the bath, recovering from the DSA convention” which it turns out is an excellent place to reread “The Deepwater Bride,” which is a very wet story involving sulphuric rains and mutant fish and dead sharks and that sort of thing. It excellently shows off Muir’s Monty Python-esque mastery of mixed-register humor and is somehow, oddly, very sweet.

The other stories in the magazine are also quite good — I don’t think there was a one of them I disliked, although some of them were more engaging than others — and there were a few other author names I recognized. The central story of the magazine was the novella Johnny Rev by Rachael Pollack, which I got more into than I expected given its “man is tormented by the gruesome loss of his wife and daughter” element. The only bits of the magazine that truly fell flat for me were some of the nonfiction pieces, which is probably unsurprising as they are six years out of date.

I’m not sure if I want to hang on to the whole magazine just to keep a hold of “The Deepwater Bride” for, Idunno, reading out loud to myself when I’m bored and want things that are fun to say, but since I can’t decide I will probably keep it for now.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of blood and gunpowder

I’m trying to make a habit of reading at least one pirate book per Maine trip (or at least one pirate book in Maine per summer), so when I was last up I started Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides, as I had already read a nonfiction book on my previous trip. In hindsight I’m very glad I read The Republic of Pirates first so it was fresh in my mind upon reading On Stranger Tides, which takes place in large part on and around New Providence Island right during the stretch of time that Woodes Rogers was re-taking the island and offering amnesties. Several historical characters make their appearance, in person or in name, including the hapless Stede Bonnett and the fearsome Ed Thatch, aka Blackbeard.

We’ve also got a bunch of fictional characters, obviously, the main one being our hero John Chandagnac, aka Jack Shandy, a swashbuckling puppeteer-turned-accountant-turned-pirate who is on a mission to get revenge on his shitty uncle until his plans are upset and he has to turn pirate and gets caught up in all this weird magic business. In addition to the title being the same as the title of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, this book has many elements that are very Pirates of the Caribbean-y, even though technically Disney didn’t option the book until after the first movie was out and it is the fourth movie that is nominally based on it. But there are noticeable elements of similarity between this book and the first movie, the big one probably being resurrected crews of ghostly/skeletal/zombified pirates magically crewing ships and freaking everybody out.

The book does a satisfying job of tying a bunch of seemingly disparate plot threads together and an even more satisfying job of just being absolutely swashbuckling as all get-out. The couple of sour notes it hit for me are some pretty blatant fatphobia in the character of the villain Leo Friend, who would be an excellently creepy villain if Powers didn’t spend so much time laboriously intertwining the fact that he’s fat with all the ways that he’s creepy (he is a Very Fucked Up Man), and a noticeable helping of horny straight dude nonsense that mostly is just not particularly my style but in some places does veer into a degree of sexism. There’s also about the level of awkward racial politics I’d expect from a story about white people and voodoo, although it could easily have been worse (it could also have been better).

Other than that it is wildly enjoyable. Jack Shandy is an absolutely shameless power fantasy action hero, using his childhood puppeteering skills to become a master swordsman and sailor in a matter of weeks; additionally, he is for some reason the only man on New Providence Island with cooking skills and said cooking skills are, conveniently, excellent even when cooking for large audiences, thus making him extremely popular. He’s always in the right place at the right time and picks up very helpful friends by accidentally committing a series of extremely clever escapes from whatever scrapes he’s in, including blowing up a Royal Navy man-o’-war. There are all kinds of fight scenes and creepy magic scenes and hidden identities and rum and general shenanigans. It’s very much what you want out of a pirate adventure.