bloodygranuaile

Despite my best intentions to keep my book-buying under control, I bought a lot of books at used bookstores when Sam and I went to Philly in May. One of the books I bought was a battered mass-market paperback copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners, because I’ve heard that’s a good place to start before tackling Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

In a departure from my usual mania for place- and time-appropriate thematic reading, I read Dubliners on two beautiful sunny days by the lakeside in rural New Hampshire, about as far from the gray, rainy, poverty-stricken Dublin of Joyce’s stories as you can get. But I was in the mood for something sort of depressing and literary so I think it was a good choice anyway.

Dubliners is a series of short stories set, unsurprisingly, in Dublin, in the pre-revolutionary period in which Joyce grew up. The book was first published two years before the Easter Rising, when Ireland appeared to be quite firmly under British control, although the Celtic Revival was going on in some quarters. None of the people depicted are particularly wealthy, though some seem fairly comfortable. Others are less so. Some are young, and some are old; some male and some female; some deeply pious and others irreligious. Many of them are very indecisive–the general tone here is not that of a city full of people who are good at protagonist-ing. Given how little action there is, it seems like it ought to be bad, and certainly there is a reason that young writers attempting to be inspired by James Joyce turn out such pretentious unreadable slop compared to young writers who are at least attempting to rip off more action-oriented writers. But Joyce’s eye for the subtleties of human psychology, especially very repressed human psychology, and his careful choices in language–deeply Irish and never florid–make it all work. All in all it is very specific; Joyce is not here going for “relatable” or “universal”/“timeless” themes–the sense of place is very strong. Even The Dead, which is a great deal about the way those who have passed on continue to influence the living–certainly a universal and timeless enough theme–is so tied in with the specifics of the Celtic Revival, the relationship between Dublin and the West of Ireland, the specific cultural changes going on in the early 20th century in Irish society, and weird Catholic stuff that Protestants apparently Just Don’t Get, that a fair amount of it would probably be utterly incomprehensible to anyone not at least a little bit familiar with early 20th century Ireland (I keep finding myself having to look stuff up every time I read Irish literature and I have been doing this for a while now).

On some level it almost feels disrespectful to try to review Joyce. This man was doing Literature. I have always had trouble with the Modernists and that’s on me, so what could I have to say about Joyce that hasn’t already been said by a million people, many of whom are probably a lot better with Modernism than I am? Nevertheless, I review every book I read, and I certainly had thoughts and feelings while reading this one, which I should attempt to pin down. Most of the feelings were sad, because this is largely a book about people with very constrained lives. Some of the stories are about people with remarkably constrained lives even within the bounds of middle-class respectability in early 20th century Dublin, and that’s saying something. But the sadness was good; it wasn’t sentimental and exquisitely drawn.

At my very first Readercon, I bought the at-the-time recently published Bone Swans: Stories by C.S.E. Cooney, a very charming and extraverted woman I met at a hotel room party. I liked Cooney very much and I also like reading short stories very much when I actually do it, and yet I am really, really bad at getting around to reading all the short story collections I buy at Readercon. So for this year’s Readercon I put it in the Bag of Shame, as a reminder to not buy any more damn short story collections until I read the ones I have.

I didn’t get much reading done this Readercon but I did opt for Bone Swans when I did dig into the Bag of Shame, and it took me approximately the whole convention to get through these five short-ish stories (novelettes, maybe?). And, about as I expected, I am kicking myself for not reading it a lot sooner, like as soon as I bought it.

All the stories in this collection are sort of mythic and fairy-tale-y, but there the resemblance to each other ends. They’re all quite different in tone and language. Two of them are recognizable as fairy tale retellings–The Bone Swans of Amandale being a Pied Piper story, and How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One being a romantic retelling of Rumpelstiltskin–and if the other three are based on existing stories I did not recognize them. My favorite was probably The Big Bah-Ha, which is about a bunch of children navigating a world that’s killed off all the grown-ups and then an amusement-park-themed afterlife that’s been corrupted. If this story reminds me of anything already existing it’s probably Spirited Away, although that comparison possibly does a bit of a disservice to how gory and grungy the world of The Big Bah-Ha is.

Overall, this collection is… well, it’s exactly the type of thing I come to Readercon to discover! What took me so fucking long!

This year’s Readercon I picked up an uncorrected proof of Elizabeth Hand’s short story collection Errantry: Strange Stories, for free, and therefore not in violation of my policy not to buy any more short story collections until I read the ones I have. On the urging of a friend I then actually read in record time for my Readercon acquisitions.

The stories in this volume are mostly surreal little hidden-world type stories, tales of normal people in what is ostensibly our world stumbling upon something uncanny. The rural and exurban landscapes of New England feature prominently in many of them, making it a better choice than I had realized to read while squirreled away in a lakeside camp in the woods in Maine, but there are also ones that take place elsewhere, in cities or in Europe or, in exactly one instance, in a fantastical world intimated to be some kind of post-apocalyptic Earth.

Most of the viewpoint characters are aggressively ordinary-by-litfic-conventions everymen–middle-aged sad sacks with drinking problems, largely, although a few are approaching elderly, and one or two don’t have drinking problems–which I do have to admit works pretty well for the types of stories being told here. The first and longest story, the novella The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, sees a former museum security guard catching up with his old colleagues during a downswing in his life and finding himself and his teenage son part of an inexplicable project. Probably the best story in the whole thing is Near Zennor, about a American man’s uncanny trip to Cornwall to follow up on a small mystery from his dead wife’s early teens that he found in her stuff. Some of the stories fell a little flat, but those were mostly the very short ones. I got a real kick out of The Return of the Fire Witch, the only foray into not-hidden-world fantasy of the bunch, which was funny and full of a sort of whimsical Mervyn Peake-like tangle of archaic and off-kilter vocabulary.

Overall this was a good short story collection, and Elizabeth Hand has been added to my list of authors whose novels I should check out one of these days!

February feels meant I brought out a nice fancily bound Peebles Classic Library copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Other Stories. I had read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was first discovering Gothic literature, nearly 20 years ago now, but hadn’t reread it since. Also this copy was much nicer than the battered paperback I picked up at Chatham Booksellers in 2004 or so, which I will be donating to Goodwill or an LFL or something as soon as I remember (probably the LFL by the House of the Seven Gables; that seems appropriate somehow).

Jekyll and Hyde is very nineteenth-century in some ways, with its actual protagonist being a stolid sort of lawyer who is not the titular character (but is the first person introduced), and who serves as our guide to the mystery largely through the 19th-century ideas about being lawyerly, which apparently means a) they are trustworthy, rational men, and therefore creditable narrators when mysterious otherworldly stuff shows up, b) they are meticulous and wield the Power of Document Review, and c) they don’t have large personalities, therefore letting the larger personalities of the other folks in the story lead the show. This is very different from the way lawyers tend to be portrayed in modern fiction, which tends to favor court lawyers who are good at speechifying in front of judges and being Machiavellian. Here, Mr. Utterson (a name that has not made its way into the popular consciousness) is a quiet estate lawyer who is old school chums with some doctor types, including the very respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose will he holds on file. Dr. Utterson is perturbed when, upon a walk with his cousin, he learns about a nasty little wretch of a man named Edward Hyde, whom the respectable Jekyll has recently changed his will to name his sole heir and benefactor in the case of any mysterious disappearances. Utterson does not wish to be nosy, and frankly isn’t, but he keeps his ears peeled and does a little bit of networking among his little good-old-boy’s network, over the course of the novella calling upon his cousin Mr. Enfield, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Jekyll’s manservant Poole, and Dr. Lanyon, an old mutual school chum of theirs who is also now a doctor but has had a falling out with Dr. Jekyll over what to Utterson just sounds like Incomprehensible Doctor Stuff that they really ought to be reasonable and not ruin their friendship over. What Dr. Utterson finds out you probably already know, but that doesn’t make reading the story any less rewarding, in my opinion–I still wanted to see how Dr. Utterson specifically got to the end, since I had utterly (lol) forgotten he existed in the 20 years since the last time I read this story.

In terms of themes ‘n’ shit, I know that this story is well known to be about the duality of man and the dangers of indulging your shadow side/the bad one of the two wolves inside you/whatever, but it wasn’t until reading it again that I got hit in the face with the extremely unsubtle allegory about addiction. Like, honestly: A respectable doctor creates and takes some strange drugs to get away from himself and indulge his wild side and escape the strictures of morality–understandable enough–except then he starts spending increasing amount of time as Hyde and spends all his Jekyll time pretty much just waiting until he can get away and have Hyde time. His Hyde side gets stronger to the point where he starts turning into Hyde not on purpose and has to start taking the drugs to turn back into Jekyll; the whole situation continues to escalate into a messy spiral, scaring the shit out of all the people in Jekyll’s life until he hits rock bottom and does the only thing he can think of to get Hyde out of the picture permanently. It is certainly enough to make me wonder if Stevenson had anybody in his life that he lost to an addiction that turned them into a whole different person, although a little bit of Googling is turning up that it seems more likely to have been inspired by a friend of his who turned out to be a serial killer.

The stories in this volume that are not Jekyll and Hyde are clearly lesser-known for a reason, but overall I still found them really interesting reads and sometimes even quite good stories. There are a few portrayals of non-white folks that have, shall we say, aged poorly, especially as some of these are very Scottish stories and feature the old belief in the Devil appearing in the form of “a black man.” When a “black man” in the Devil and when one is some poor African bloke with the misfortune to find himself in nineteenth-century Scotland is usually pretty clear and, in fact, the confusion in terminology seems almost played for laughs. Uncomfortable invocations of blackness aside, both stories where this appears are delightful in most of the rest of their use of language, which features a lot of absolutely jaw-cracking phonetically rendered Scots dialect. The Merry Men is told by a young gentleman who narrates normally, but as the story concerns his relatives on an isolated stretch of shoreline in extremely rural Scotland, most of the other characters, namely his religious zealot of an uncle, are the types who keep using words like “muckle.” Thrawn Janet is a deliciously classic ghost story that, apart from a few opening paragraphs in plain English to set the stage, is told by “the older folk” of the parish, recounting the events of “fifty years syne” and in addition to the specifically Scots vocabulary, has all of the accent written out (“awfu’” for “awful,” classic eye-dialect stuff) until the whole story looks like it sounds like it’s being read from the bottom of a pond. Me being me, I loved this, but I think it’d be pretty difficult to read if ye nae ken a wee bit o’ Scots.

Most of the stories in this collection lean a bit toward the horror/gothic end; this set of short stories seems picked to have been “other stories by the author of Jekyll and Hyde” pretty specifically, and not necessarily “other stories by the author of Treasure Island,” for example. We’ve got a story from the point of view of a serial killer; a story about a man who goes to recuperate from some sort of illness in a decadent Spanish mansion belonging to the inbred last dregs of a once-great but evil family; a somewhat goofy French morality tale that is nonetheless mostly about bourgeois hypocrisy (this one does feature some treasure-hunting, to be fair); another somewhat depressing morality tale about a guy who stoically talks himself out of ever going anywhere or doing anything with his life except quietly carry on the family business; and as previously mentioned, ghost story Thrawn Janet and the rural gothic The Merry Men.

Overall I found this to be a great little collection of stories, and I’m really glad to have revisited Jekyll and Hyde.

Well, so much for reading all the books I’ve borrowed from other people before the move–I had very little time or focus to read, so I’ve only just finished up N.K. Jemisin’s book of short stories How Long ‘Til Black Future Month?, which I had borrowed from my housemate and had intended to finish and return before I moved out of the house.

There are a lot of short stories in this anthology, like more than twenty, and some of them are very short and some of them are a bit meatier. I tended to like the longer ones better, and I especially preferred the ones that got turned into novels–”Stone Hunger,” the precursor to the Broken Earth trilogy, and “The Narcomancer,” which takes place in the universe of the Dreamblood duology. I also am pretty sure I liked the stories in the second half of the collection better than the ones in the first half, and I can’t tell if that’s because they put the better stories near the end of the collection (an odd choice, if so) or if I’m maybe in a better mood/easier to please/less stressed and cranky than I was when I was trying to squeeze in bits of reading around packing and all sorts of stressful moving stuff. But I also genuinely bounced off the very first story in the collection pretty hard, a second-person piece taking aim at a centrist worldview I don’t have in an incredibly condescending tone that I can’t imagine would annoy me much less if it were correct about the things “you” (the reader, i.e. I) thought. It’s only uphill from there, though, and there’s a lot of really fun worldbuilding–magical restaurants, a New York where probability has gotten all fucked up, an accidentally all-women’s outpost in space–and I think at a more normal time in my life I would have sailed right through the whole thing in a week or less.

I do not have the brain to really deep dive into what I thought about each of the 22 stories in here. I barely had the brain to read the thing. I am still dealing with a certain amount of moving/homebuying chores to do (I got a library card today, woo) and trying to explore my new hometown in the nice weather and being very slammed at work because the tech editing team is understaffed and I was out of the office for a week. The books I am packing to go to Maine next week are all going to be fluffy and dumb. The girlfriend and I have started watching First Kill on Netflix and that’s about the level of serious appreciation of craft I am currently capable of.

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.

 A while back a friend of mine gifted me a small book containing two of Philip K. Dick’s short stories, The Skull and Beyond the Door. I have read a couple of Dick’s novels and while I do not consider myself a particularly dedicated fan, I enjoyed them and I wrote a paper on one of them in college. 

For some reason, even though baby bat me read a lot of Anne Rice and a lot of other weird vampire nonsense, I never got around to checking out the other big name in disturbing and sexually explicit New Orleans-based horror with vampires in, Poppy Z. Brite. Possibly Anne Rice was just Enough and I didn’t need any more of that very specific brand of wacky at the time. Possibly there are just too many vampires books for me to read them all.