bloodygranuaile

In my “short story collections acquired at Readercon” selection that I have a copy of Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoths in Bloom. I like the Elizabeth Bear novels that I’ve read, although I also have a couple more novels of hers that are still on the TBR shelf through no fault of their own.

Shoggoths in Bloom has a mix of fantasy and sci-fi, and overall they’re all pretty good–some I liked better than others, obviously, but I don’t think I’d call any of them duds. We got a few stories set in larger worlds from her novels–there’s an Eternal Sky story, and a story from the POV of One-Eyed Jack, the genius of Las Vegas–and of course the titular “Shoggoths in Bloom” dips into the Lovecraftian mythos. There are twenty stories in this collection, which is challenging for me to review. The stories tend toward the serious; when there is humor, which is with reasonable frequency, it tends toward the dry. A few of the protagonists are cops/investigators/otherwise law-enforcement-adjacent of some kind; one is a sort of magical detective that has to work around the regular kind. This seems to be more for the ease of facilitation for mystery-solving plots than any particular ideological affiliation with cops on Bear’s part; even some of her cops are kind of down on cops. The more important thing is that the mysteries are good, solid short story mysteries with satisfying little twists at the end.

Overall, this is a good collection that might provide me with some extra impetus to also read one of the three unread novels by the author that are still on my shelf.

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!

After last year’s adventures in reading Capital Volume 1, which was very serious and dense and which broke down to still reading like 100 pages a month, I decided to take it easy with my yearlong read for 2023 and started working my way through a nice fancy-looking copy of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, the sort with gold-edged pages and a ribbon and whatnot.

Most of these stories are very short, some no more than a few sentences, and even the longest barely clock in at like ten pages. The book is not divided into sections or anything but the stories are clearly clustered by theme or version, so we kick off with a few different tellings of The Frog Prince, and then there are no more Frog Princes for the rest of the volume. I thought this was great because it made it easy to compare versions side-by-side, although from a strictly “reading for pleasure” perspective it gets a bit repetitive. You can tell the stories are all from in and around Germany because like 90% of the human characters with names are named Hans. Most of the characters don’t have names, though, being instead named by their station in life or species or something, thus saving us from too many Hanses. Some of the stories are structured like what we think of as normal fairy tale stories, with a beginning and a middle and an end that all follow from each other, and others are essentially just wild claims of random things happening. Some are religious or maybe sort of have a moral if you squint, and others do not have any discernible lessons or even themes. It’s a fascinating grab bag of talking animals, clever tailors, beautiful princesses, and whatnot. Overall I’m glad I read it despite the uneven quality of the actual content.

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!

I picked up Patricia A. McKillip’s short story collection Wonders of the Invisible World several Readercons ago, and, like too many of my Readercon purchases, it sat around for a while. Last May I almost purged it while I was packing my books up to move; I rescued it largely out of guilt when I got the news last May that McKillip had died. I’ve never read any of her novels. I’m glad I didn’t purge the book, though, and I was prodded to actually read it by a Goodreads update that a friend of mine was also reading it. If I get on it now I’ll have someone to talk about it with, said my brain, and I chucked it into my bag last weekend, and started reading it in the bath at my mother’s place.

I am, as I have mentioned before, not very good at reading short story collections, although I seem to be very good at buying them, and when I do read them I tend to enjoy them enough that I think Hey, I should read these more. Wonders of the Invisible World has been no exception–some of the stories are sad and some are humorous; many have the comfortable dreamlike feel of most good fantasy short stories, of a little glimpse of a big world that isn’t overexplained, or sometimes even explained at all.

A few of the stories feature nineteenth-century British artist types of the sort that make all their friends pose like mythological figures for hours while they paint them and talk about poetry and whether women have souls and goofy shit like that, and these I found probably the most charming, because I have a weak spot for the Romantics and their earnest Ren Faire nerd bullshit. One of them involves a woman artist riding a kelpie to get away from a pushy douchebag in their social circle (this one is particularly satisfying because the douchebag actually realizes what a dick he’s being and decides to shape up); another involves the myth of the Jack o’ Lantern/will o’ the wisp on the moors of somewhere-or-other. They both made me want to have another pre-Raphaelite party (I’d have to clean up my backyard first).

While many of the short stories involve some element of magic being experienced by our protagonists in our world (or what seems like it), there are a few proper secondary world fantasies; these were a little longer and were probably my favorites of the ones that didn’t involve British pre-Raphaelites. “Knight of the Well” was a fun tale about a city with a magico-religious relationship to its water, which was threatened when the various water sprites and other nautical critters started acting up for reasons unbeknownst to the Water Mage, the Water Minister, and the sullen, lovestruck knight Sir Garner Slade. Garner is subjected to various indignities and shenanigans before the conflict is resolved, and it is very funny. I also enjoyed the little fairy story “Byndley,” about a wizard who had stolen something from the Fairy Queen and was having an arduous time attempting to return it.

These stories were all originally published between 1990 and about 2007 (the collection was released in 2012), and there’s a comforting familiarity to them even though I wasn’t previously familiar with McKillip as an author–they were written in a time that spans my formative years and so I guess will always feel the most “normal” to me, neither too old-fashioned nor too contemporary. The one thing where my sensibilities have changed enough that it kind of sticks out is the casual absence of queer people; other than that, this is just the kind of post-Angela Carter fairy-tale-influenced fantasy that I feel at home in, where the women have become people but nobody yet talks like Twitter has been invented. I should maybe check out her novels.

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.

I have, rather frustratingly, been doing a lot of partial books reading lately so it has been far too many weeks since I have been able to finish a book and write a review of it. It was due to this trend that I decided to pick up one of my many unread short story anthologies so that I at least wouldn’t be too frustrated trying to keep track of too many goings-on if for some reason this book was also interrupted before I finished it. Fortunately, I was able to polish off Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy in about four days, without having to read anything else in between except a few entries of Dracula Daily.

I believe I picked up this book in a Readercon dealers’ room a few years ago, and even if I don’t remember picking it up precisely it’s a good guess because I know I have lots of books that were picked up in fugue states in various Readercon dealers’ rooms over the years. The author list is about half names I recognize (many from their attendance at Readercon) and half I don’t. The anthology has 18 stories in it, which I will not be reviewing individually even though I feel like I should.

The stories vary wildly in mood and subject matter. Perhaps I’m dour and burnt out but I found that I seem to have somewhat gone off the fluffy, indulgent meta-fantasy type of stories a bit–both the Catherynne M. Valente story (an earlier version of The Glass Town Game) and the Theodora Goss story ended up not holding my interest quite as much as either of those authors’ other writings directly geared toward fans of nineteenth-century fiction have in the past. Probably my favorite story in the whole anthology was “Phosphorus” by Veronica Schanoes, an author I’d never heard of before, which is about a match worker dying of phossy jaw (the cancer you get when you ingest a lot of white phosphorus because you work at the match factory and have to eat lunch at your workstation) and the matchgirls’ strike of 1888. That one nearly made me cry.

Overall I think this was a really strong anthology–even the stories that personally gripped me less were pretty good, and they showcase a range of different approaches to writing fantasy about nineteenth century Britain.

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.

I first read Angela Carter’s classic short story collection The Bloody Chamber my freshman year in college, and I have been intending to reread it… well, pretty much ever since then, but especially since I went to see Kelly Link give a talk about it at Harvard Book Store to celebrate the release of the 75th anniversary edition (more properly the 75th birthday edition; the book was first published in 1979; it was Carter herself who would have been turning 75). The 75th anniversary/birthday edition is also very pretty, much nicer than the battered 1990 edition I had in college. It has nevertheless been sitting untouched on my shelf for a while until Gillian and I decided that we should have a special Halloween edition of the BSpec book club, where we would read The Bloody Chamber and follow it up with a viewing of The Company of Wolves.

Though the book is short I tried to read it slowly, or at least as slowly as I can ever read things, taking at least a short break between each story to enjoy its particular flavor before jumping into the next one. This was occasionally challenging as some of the stories are only two or three pages long; I was also sometimes reading them while other people in the room were watching Premier League soccer highlights at top volume. Nevertheless, it was an experience, and I think I did get more out of it reading it a second time--and as an older, hopefully somewhat wiser person--than I did at 18.

Though the tones of each story vary, overall the collection has a very strong lush Gothic vibe; certain words crop up multiple times--amniotic, tintinnabulation, corruption--that make the whole thing earthy in a way that I feel like a lot of other authors shoot for and wind up at sticky instead. Some bits of it are funny; most of it is creepy. My personal favorites are the modern (for the time) retelling of Bluebeard, the titular story, which as far as I am concerned is about how rich people are sociopaths, and the classic vampire story The Lady of the House of Love, which is just the kind of slow-moving, falling-down, purplish-ly written story that you feel you ought to read aloud to somebody else at Halloween.

Overall, excellent reading for spooky season or any season at all.

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.

I said I was going to read everything Tamsyn Muir has ever written this year and I meant it, but also I can’t find my copy of The Deepwater Bride right now, so instead I popped on over to Tor.com and scrounged up the hilariously titled Locked Tomb short story The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex. This one concerns the academic adventures of Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus when they are thirteen years old, although thirteen-year-olds with a remarkable ability to keep a straight face when confronted with a historical figure named “Doctor Sex.”

The basic plotline here is a short mystery about a study that has been sealed for 460 years and yet, when it is finally opened, it contains--among much 460-year old academic detritus--a pair of skeleton hands that are unambiguously between 200 and 210 years old, no more, no less. Our bright young teen must therefore do some detectiving, which they do, and it is all very satisfying.

There are also lots of little tidbits and references dropped in about other things that happen in the world of the Locked Tomb, including some correspondence from Dulcinea Septimus, some tantalizing hints about the Resurrection, and a few jokes at the expense of other houses. There are also many excellent jokes about academic bureaucracy.

Overall, a very good, if brief, read. Now I will go back to trying to find my copy of The Deepwater Bride and whinging piteously until Alecto the Ninth is published.

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.

The Skull is a story of a highly skilled felon in a dystopian future who goes back in time to kill a guy who founded a mysterious and inexcusably peace-oriented religion, with only the man’s skull for identification. You can see the twist coming from pretty early on in the story but it is still very entertaining getting there. I’m pretty sure Dick intended for the audience to be able to guess the twist because there is some Laying It On Real Thick in what then becomes the dramatic irony department.

Beyond the Door is an odd and charming little story about a cranky midcentury suburban man who buys his wife a cuckoo clock, which sounds nice, but it really isn’t, because the man isn’t very nice. The cuckoo clock can apparently tell that this guy is a jerk and never behaves properly around him. Things escalate in a claustrophobic midcentury suburban way until it all ends in hilarious wooden hand-carved Swiss tragedy.

These were both good short, darkly humorous bathtub reads and I could certainly have read them a lot earlier.

I don’t generally count short stories as “books” in counting up books I’ve read, but Goodreads lists Seanan McGuire’s Juice Like Wounds as Wayward Children book 4.5, and therefore it counts for my current purposes, which are namely “not failing this year’s Goodreads challenge.”

Juice Like Wounds is the adventure that the narrative skipped over in In An Absent Dream, where Lundy and Moon and the previously always-offstage Mockery fight the Wasp Queen, winning at the cost of Mockery’s life. This, it turns out, was not an adventure that found them, but one that they sought out deliberately in the hopes of being heroes, and in the Market that sort of behavior is going to come with a price.

The story has some interesting reflections on fairness and some people’s inability to perceive anything other than their own superiority as “fair,” but overall I think I liked the novella’s choice to skip it and focus on everything before and after and around it instead. It is a fun and sad little side quest, though, and I’m glad I didn’t skip it.

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.

Anyway, I more recently picked up a copy of Brite’s short story collection Wormwood, and figured this October would be a good time to read it, even though it is not technically a vampire novel and I am running out of time to read my annual October vampire novel. But Brite is most famous for his vampire novels, so I feel like it sort of counts.

Wormwood does not actually have any vampire stories in it at all, which surprised me a little, but it does have plenty of ghosts and zombies and other monsters and some general unexplained supernatural shenanigans, plus at least one instance of what appears to just be very bad drugs and not anything supernatural at all.

Another thing the book does not really have any of is female characters; there are a number of vessels for assorted horror-y happenings concerning the female reproductive system, but none of them have anything I would consider characterization, and half of them are already corpses or statues or whatnot by the time they appear on the page. The closest thing to a female character is probably Rosalie from The Sixth Sentinel, which for a brief shining moment I thought was going to be a story about an asexual goth, but which is instead, structurally, an abstinence-only story (albeit much better than any of the horror stories that actual evangelicals can cook up)--don’t have teen sex or your daddy will shoot your boyfriend and go to jail, and you’ll get pregnant, be forced to have an abortion, run away to an abusive relationship, and wind up an alcoholic stripper in a shabby one-bedroom in New Orleans until you’re murdered by a horny ghost! It’s actually a very good story; I found it quite funny. Anyway, while a lack of female characters defined in any way outside of sexual body horror is a longstanding problem in the horror genre, I’m not one of those people who finds that type of horror inherently misogynistic, because reproduction actually is terrifying! It’s just the character writing that sucks. The horror bits are fantastic.

The character writing is very good for all of the gay dudes that populate most of the stories and is, uh, deeply obnoxious for the straight dudes who are the viewpoint characters in a handful of them, which I cannot necessarily say is bad character writing. Short story characters aren’t always the most deeply drawn and it can be tough to both get a sense of the characters themselves and have whoever is viewpoint-ing remain cipher-y enough to make a nice easy vehicle for the story in just a couple of pages. Some of the stories take the easy route, where the narrator is the most normal person in this particular band of junkie goth musicians or whatever and is largely observing everyone, such as in A Georgia Story; in other, more impressive stories--the ones that have become more famous, I gather--the narrator is also completely batshit, like Howard in His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood (although I do relate to the feeling of doing something that is supposed to be terribly exciting and being like “That’s it? We’re having fun now?” and this is why I rarely go to concerts), or The Sixth Sentinel’s aforementioned horny ghost.

Most of these stories were written in the late eighties or the nineties and there is often something very nineties about them, which in some cases makes them more creepy, although in other cases the language is a bit dated. They have a bit of that late-twentieth-century ennui about them sometimes, with characters who have fallen through the cracks of the end-of-history prosperity but who still seem to have plenty of time to wander aimlessly around the ungentrified squalor of cheap, rundown cities. Most of them take place in New Orleans but there is one very memorable story that takes place in New York city, which opens with a viscerally terrifying account of getting lost in the Port Authority, which is simultaneously actually hilarious given the overwrought, otherworldly language used. Like, damn, someone really fucking hates the Port Authority, and I do not blame them at all. (On the other hand, the story that takes place in Calcutta mostly just highlights the fact that we did not have sensitivity readers in 1991.) There’s also a lot of stuff that’s a bit cliche for early Goth media--lots of humorously unimpressed references to Goths, lots of characters who are struggling artists and musicians with substance abuse issues, lots of extremely gross-sounding cocktails--but it’s fun, the Classic Goth Author vibes come through real strong.

Anyway, do you like fucked-up gross shit and think it is extremely funny? Do you want to be both disturbed and amused at the same time this Halloween? Then I have got a short story collection for you!

I read another short story anthology! That's like, two in a year, which is pretty good for me. It does however leave me in the awkward position of having to write a review for a short story anthology, a type of review-writing that I detest and am bad at, even by the rambling standards of my book-reviewing habits.

The collection I read was Holly Black's The Poison Eaters and Other Stories, which I selected because it's a collection of Holly Black stories, duh. The stories within it are very much everything I like about Holly Black, mostly full of teenagers getting into various kinds of supernatural trouble, often via first getting into regular mundane trouble like running away from home or getting drunk and trying to break into abandoned school buildings.

There is a short story called The Coldest Girl in Coldtown which obviously takes place in the same world as the book of the same title but has different characters and a different plot although with a similar ending; it's clearly an early draft of the idea that would become the full novel. Going Ironside is a short story that takes place in the Tithe universe, featuring Rath Roiben Rye and Cornelius, mostly. A lot of the stories are the sort of modern urban fantasy that Black is known for, but there are a couple of more fairy-tale-type secondary world fables in here as well, such as The Dog King, about werewolves, and The Poison Eaters, a fairy tale about a trio of Rappaccini's Daughter-esque poisonous sisters. Some of the stories are funny; most of them are creepy and/or haunting; the best ones are both.

While this collection was published several years ago and I think Holly Black has grown as a writer since her first books (which is what one would hope, I suppose), I think this collection still really showcases why she's become such a popular and important voice in teen fantasy. The stories are creepy, funny, heartwarming, relatable, and lushly written, often cute without being twee, and channeling the feeling that there's more weird shit in the world than we know.

So not a lot of great stuff has been happening since the election, but a brief moment of relief arrived yesterday in the form of a brand-new shiny Shadowshaper novella from Daniel José Older, which only cost $0.99 on Kindle. I promptly cancelled my evening plans to bug out about stuff on Twitter and bought Ghost Girl in the Corner. I then had a lovely evening with Tee and Iz and three glasses of boxed wine and it was the best I’ve felt in three weeks.

Anyway, as for the novella itself: Most of the most-beloved characters from Shadowshaper are here, but the main action surrounds Tee and Izzy, with a big helping of Uncle Neville. The mischief all starts when Tee sees the ghost of a teenage girl in the basement where she’s taken over Manny’s local newspaper after he died in the last book. Tee has acquired some sort of community journalism grant and has a small crew of intrepid teenage reporters, including a white girl from Staten Island whose grandma is the creepy old lady with the creepy dolls from one of the short stories in Salsa Nocturna. There is also a dude who writes about sports, but when he’s first introduced he says “I write about esports” and I thought he meant eSports like competitive video gaming and then got all confused when he was covering local baseball games and not, like, CS:GO tournaments, but no, it’s just that Older writes out people’s accents and I am a huge fucking nerd.

Anyway, the local baseball games are important because, while Tee is trying to figure out who the ghost in the corner is and simultaneously screwing up her relationship with Izzy, one of the local teams’ star players mysteriously disappears. The cops are, predictably, zero help. The ghost girl in the corner, on the other hand, is, as are the giant printing press and Uncle Neville. How do all these things fit together? You can find out for $0.99.

While the plot is very heavy, the characters are delightful. The dialogue is witty and vivid, which will be surprising to no one who has read anything else by Older or heard him speak at a convention or reading. The social commentary is sharp and incisive—mean, yes, but insightful and hilarious with an eye for detail, like Jane Austen except about modern urban Latinx communities instead of 18th century English countryside gentry nonsense. (If you’re thinking “So not like Jane Austen at all, then,” let me know and I will gladly subject you to three hours of rambling about social satire and economics.) It's also full of fun little references to things, from Older's other work (I mentioned the creepy dolls lady above) to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There is also a brief but very timely and satisfying instance of straight-up Nazi fighting.

Overall, it is a wonderful and much-needed morsel of awesomeness to tide people over until Shadowhouse Fall comes out.

A book club I am theoretically still in read Tove Janssen's The Summer Book, and my library copy got in the day after the book club met. Great timing, library. Anyway, I was curious about it, and it was short, so I read it.

Tove Janssen is best known for her books about the Moomins, a family of adorable little troll creatures. I was big on the Moomins when I was little. I still adore them; I bought a copy of Finn Family Moomintroll in Swedish when I was in Stockholm, which meant that at one point I had three copies of Finn Family Moomintroll.

The Summer Book is all about humans but there's a distinct similarity of style, and hints of the same sense of humor, although The Summer Book is overall much less whimsical. Janssen apparently wrote it in a period of deep grief over the death of her mother, although this is not explicitly covered at any point in the book.

The main character is a little girl called Sophia, and the other main character is her grandmother, who lives on a tiny remote island way out in the Gulf of Finland, where Sophia and her father spend their summers. The book is structured like a bunch of unrelated vignettes, so while I'm fairly certain all the stories are supposed to take place in the same summer, it's not 100% clear that that's really the case.

The book overall does not have a plot, and some of the vignettes sort of do and some of them sort of don't. I'm not usually huge on litfic that has no plot, but these are just charming and melancholy enough to pull it off. They are often sort of wild and sad and mundane all at the same time, and they illustrate a lot about being very young and about being very old, with everyone in the middle sort of off in the distance being distracted by doing things, which is probably about right. There is a blink-and-you-miss it reference to the fact that Sophia and her father are here at her grandmother's house this summer because her mother recently died, which lends some extra weight to some of the volatile conversations Sophia has with her grandmother about God and angels and other sorts of Big Questions that Sophia is too young to understand and the grandmother is too old to pretend to.

Sophia is very much a young child in all the most awkward and embarrassing and real ways that you forget about when you grow up unless any of it turns into stories that your family torments you with for years, but reading this book brings some of it back. (I'm specifically thinking of The Phase Where You Can't Handle Small Animal Death, which I used to think was just me, but apparently if it's not everybody it's at least not just me.) It's pretty annoying to read, but that is not a criticism. I haven't been old yet so I can't be embarrassed by the grandmother; I think she's pretty awesome, actually.

The book is very short, only 150 pages, and while I'm sure there are many things to be said about it, I sort of feel like if I try to say too many of them it will ruin it. It's a very quiet, subtle sort of book and I do not tend to have quiet or subtle opinions/analyses.

So I was vaguely intending on only reading nonfiction from now through March but then I discovered the Bloodsucking Feminists podcast and realized I'd never read John Polidori's The Vampyre: A Tale, so of course then I went and read The Vampyre. After listening to the episode about it, because that's how I roll. (That is not how I prefer to roll but sometimes I mess up.)

The Vampyre is best known for being one of the entries in the famous horror story contest between Polidori, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It... didn't win. Frankenstein won, in the process basically inventing science fiction generally and the cyborg story in particular. The Vampyre is also a pretty genre-kicking-off piece of work, being one of the earliest or possibly the earliest instances of vampire prose fiction in the English language, but if you read it you will understand why Frankenstein is generally considered the winner, even with Percy Shelley's terrible copy edits.

That said, it was a pretty valuable read, I think. It's short, so despite its flaws and the extremely eighteenth-century nature of those flaws, it's not too much of a slog (unlike, say, the thousand-plus-page Varney the Vampire, which I have been avoiding reading for at least two years now).

The story itself is fairly simple. A good-natured but flighty young dandy named Aubrey is introduced into society and befriends the aristocratic Lord Ruthven, who is a cold brooding sort but very handsome, and who only hangs out with the most virtuous of women. Aubrey and Ruthven go on a trip through Europe, which was a tradition for well-born young men at the time, and during the trip Aubrey notices that the virtuous young women Aubrey hangs out with all have their reputations ruined by the time they skip town. Ruthven also gambles a lot, and while Ruthven doesn't necessarily always win, the people he's playing with all manage to lose, and to exhibit horrendous bankroll management while they're at it. Aubrey eventually grows disgusted with the trail of fallen women and busto family men with hungry children that his friend is leaving in their wake, and bounces to Greece by himself, where he develops a flirtation with an "unspoilt" (this is a term with a large number of very specific meanings when applied to young maidens in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Brit lit) young Greek maiden, who tries to warn him about vampires. But he thinks she is just being adorably quaint and superstitious, so he goes to look at some ancient ruins or something and has to walk back home through the woods in the dark, where he finds a fancy knife and also the dead body of his Greek girlfriend, who has clearly died of being bitten in the neck. Ruthven shows back up and they keep traveling together, then Ruthven is shot by bandits and dies, but first he makes Aubrey promise not to tell anyone anything about what a terrible person he is for a year and a day. Aubrey agrees, and the dead Ruthven's body mysteriously disappears.

Aubrey goes back to England where it's time for him to bring his sister out into society. At one of these society parties he espies Lord Ruthven, apparently no longer dead, and he can't say anything because he is a Man Of His Word and also he is apparently hallucinating Ruthven in his head saying "Don't you dare," which oddly is a thing that happens in the second Twilight book nearly two hundred years later. Aubrey runs away and has a fit, and spends the next several months descending further into the depths of fever, incoherence, and unspecified trauma-induced mental illness. As he gets closer to the deadline where he can finally tell people how terrible Ruthven is, he starts to feel better, and someone tells him that his sister is going to marry the Earl of Marsden, and he's happy for like ten seconds until he finds out that the Earl of Marsden is, of course, Lord Ruthven. Instead of being able to say anything, he has a stroke and his sister marries Ruthven and is promptly et, THE END. Seriously, that's the story. The vampire wins.

The storyline is entertaining enough, I suppose, but the real joy of The Vampyre lies in its epically poor pacing, wobbling unevenly through long atmospheric scenes with actual details and quotations and stuff, and passages that read more like the author's outline or synopsis for a scene rather than a scene itself. And it tends to be all the most important, exciting bits of the story that are rushed through like this, with vague, telling-not-showing sorts of descriptions that add two centuries' worth of dust on top of what are apparently some pretty action-packed chase scenes and intense histrionics. It has an amusingly Plan Nine from Outer Space-y feel to it, sometimes, with a palpable amateur earnestness that renders the clumsy wordcraft endearing.

This story, obviously, is of enormous historical importance to the development of the vampire story generally and the rise of the Byronic anti-hero character archetype in particular, and it also provides a good amount of fodder for discussion of at least two of the four pillars of British Romanticism Fuckery that my British Romanticism class focused on (race, class, gender, and imperialism--in this case, mostly gender and class, although you could have a good time deconstructing the portrayal of the Greeks a bit). For a much more thorough look into the weird gender politics of the story in particular, I strongly recommend checking out the relevant episode of Bloodsucking Feminists.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: podcasts

I picked up Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners at last year’s Readercon because Readercon always makes me have good intentions to read more short fiction. Then I got it signed at the Monstrous Affections event in October, which gave me even more good intentions to read it. Then I decided to do the Women in Genre Fiction challenge this year, which seems to have finally been the critical mass of good intentions needed to motivate me to actually pick the book up and read it, when the exact thing happened that I was expecting to happen, which is that I began kicking myself for not reading it earlier.

Magic for Beginners is weird. It’s fantasy, but the sort of fantasy that also skirts the borders of literary fiction and of magical realism and of translations of really old stories that sound weird to a modern audience because they use a different kind of story logic than we’re quite used to. There’s nine stories in the compilation and none of them are boring. The collection sort of eases you into the weird by starting off with The Faery Handbag, which uses a lot of traditional elements of well-known fairy tales from a variety of traditions, and weaves it into a new and increasingly unsettling fairy tale. After that, the stories are full of recognizable elements like ghosts and zombies but they don’t work the way you’re used to them working and they’re not in quite the sorts of stories you’re used to seeing them in. The zombies, for example, don’t seem to be taking over the world or spreading or eating people or really causing much mayhem at all—certainly not a zombie apocalypse—they just keep showing up at an all-night convenience store and not buying anything. The real creepy element in that story is the pajamas.

Any one individual story could probably yield several really fun literary criticism papers, even the ones about people’s marriages falling apart. One of the ones about a marriage falling apart is also about a haunted house, although it’s not haunted by ghosts; it’s haunted by bunnies. Another story about a marriage falling apart is an alien invasion story with lots of cloning. I personally prefer The Faery Handbag, and the one about the ghost television show, and—well, any of the ones where the main character is too young to be in a falling-apart marriage. That’s on me as a reader, though. That I did like all nine of the stories no matter how much about marriage they were is a pretty impressive feat of writing by Kelly Link. There’s quite a lot to say about any one of these stories, but I feel like I might have to be in conversation with someone else who’s also read them in order to tease out what it is exactly I have to say. There’s a lot of seemingly random, dreamlike stuff going on in all these pieces that I’m pretty sure are metaphor or analogues or catalysts or something like that for all the issues of regular life, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what they are. It’s not as obvious as it usually is. Like, the zombies aren’t mindlessly eating everybody in a thinly-veiled metaphor for inescapable consumerism and the insatiable demands of a growth-based capitalist economy. The zombies are the creatures that don’t buy anything at the convenience store. So what are they and what are we supposed to do with them? I’m going to have to think about it.

Current Mood: snow madness

I picked up Daniel José Older’s Salsa Nocturna pretty much the second I put down Half-Resurrection Blues, although I probably should have picked it up earlier, considering it was published a few years ago and I bought it in July. But I am a philistine and am terrible about actually reading short story collections, which is dumb, because I often enjoy them when I do pick them up.

One thing that is particularly fun in this short story collection is that they are all connected: They all take place in the same universe—indeed, the same Brooklyn—as Half-Resurrection Blues, and feature a lot of the same characters. A bunch of the stories are from Carlos’ point of view; others are from the POV of other supernatural-affiliated characters, most of whom know Carlos and get all mixed up in his plans of trying to sabotage whatever nasty power-grubbing nonsense the Council of the Dead is up to.

While the Council gets up to quite a bit of nasty nonsense, including an attempted hostile takeover of a neighborhood in Manhattan that had been outside of its jurisdiction, not all the stories in the collection involve the CoD. Some involve various other malevolent ghosts, sorcery-wielding miscreants, and other weird shit. There’s a great one about creepy possessed vintage porcelain dolls, although Carlos has to go and continually be such a dude and keeps referring to them as American Girl dolls even though they clearly can’t be. There is also one about the ghost of a giant woolly mammoth, and that’s possibly the least weird story in there.

There’s a good balance of creepy and funny in this selection, with pretty much all of the stories being creepy and some of them being funnier than others depending on who’s in them: Any time Carlos’ ghost cop partner Riley shows up trying to be macho it’s going to be goofy sort of funny; whereas CiCi’s stories have a warmer, more subtle sort of humor, in an indulgent-grandma kind of way. (Like the old people IMing bit, which is… old people IMing. IT’S ADORABLE.) Carlos on the occasions when he’s being a total dork continues to be the most fun, in my opinion.

Unrelated to the content, but a thing which I nevertheless have opinions about: This book is published by Crossed Genres, a funky small press here in MA, which is awesome. They also decided to use straight quotes instead of smart quotes for the whole book and really compressed ellipses, which is less awesome. I feel bad bagging on a small press for things like this but I really hate straight quotes in print.

ANYWAY. Do you like ghosts? This book has all the ghosts. Ghost elephants. Ghost bureaucrats. Ghost shit-stirring Black magicians from the 1800s (I think 1800s?). A ghost bus driver with a ghost bus. This book is only like 150 pages but it’s got a whole shadow universe of New York in it full of weirdo ghosts doing weirdo ghost things, and it’s great.

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Entries tagged with short story

Springtime for shoggoths

The weird and whimsical world of novelettes

Clever and stupid Hanses, Toms Thumb, and other friends

Stories that are indeed strange

I never truly found my way out of the wood

Victorian lawyers to the rescue... again

Neo-Victorian magic in short form

A month of reading black futures

Now you are at the place of annihilation

Dread anglerfish and other miscellany

Bring me a stack of red forms

Show me your skulls

In which there is a side-quest

Don't they call us snappy antique dressers Goth now, Quinn?

Fairies and unicorns and vampires, oh my

A nice little story about journalism and murder

A lonely rock in the sea

It's been a while since I read a good vampire story

Selling Mountain Dew to zombies

More ghost noir!