Round 7 (clang!). For Tolkien, it's Patricia A. McKillip with The Fellowship of the Dragon.
The Queen's harper/unworthy boyfriend has gone missing in a dragon's territory, so the Queen asks five childhood friends, each a tough, able woman, to bring him back. They must travel through a beautiful but actively dangerous forest, and along the way the women face one sorcerous temptation after another. McKillip sets similar temptations for the reader; every page shines with gemlike sentences that lead one astray from the narrative, so inventive and lovely are they. My rule of thumb distinction between popular and literary fiction is that the former tries to plane every sentence so smooth that the reader glides easily to the next sentence, the next paragraph, never doubling back or pausing to ponder the meaning, or possible meanings, of a single strand of words. Literary fiction tends to require a more scrutinizing consideration of sentences as challenges; riddles and poems and koans embedded within the tapestry of the story. By this rule, McKillip is an unabashedly literary writer.
She is also an inventive and conscientious plotter, weaving fairy tale conceits and feminist friendship in a braid of antiquarian stylings and contemporary concerns. So far, this is my favorite story in this collection.
For Lovecraft, Kim Newman offers The Big Fish. I was aware that Newman writes fiction, but I knew him for his film criticism, generally centered on horror and arthouse film, two subsets with more overlap than is often supposed. He seems to have absorbed many lessons on vivid storytelling and fast-acting characterization from the flicker shows; The Big Fish is a gas.
During WWII, an LA detective is hired by a starlet to track down yet another crummy boyfriend. This one's a gangster who seems to have joined a cult. The cult will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth, a tale about a town full of people who've bred with sea creatures, producing not beautiful mermaids but uncanny fish people. Lovecraft was writing about the alleged horrors of "miscegenation," because he was a racist twerp, but Newman begins his story with a sardonic denunciation of the USA's herding of Japanese-American people into camps (while letting Italian-American gangsters continue to strut around) that goes some way towards distancing Newman's story from Lovecraft's theme. For Newman, the horror that has imported itself from Innsmouth to LA is not intermarriage, but Dianetics.
Newman writes a ripping yarn without over-relying on guys coming through the door with guns (though there is some of that). Also, he has the detective's subscription to legendary detective fiction magazine Black Mask get mixed up with equally legendary horror mag Weird Tales, in a cute acknowledgment of the genre-crossing going on in this story. Newman creates settings so vivid that the reader practically becomes an illustrator. I'll have to read more of Newman's fiction... after I read more McKillip.
For the New Weird, Kathe Koja offers The Neglected Garden.
Yet another lousy boyfriend tosses his girlfriend out, but she only goes so far as the backyard wire fence, where she ties herself to the broken rusty wire. She stays there, to the annoyance of the boyfriend, until she begins to change... the plant life merges with the catatonic woman, and she changes until she bears unexpected fruit.
I'm an old Swamp Thing enthusiast, so any story where people merge with plants has an allure for me. I'm also into anything where body horror becomes a means of emotional expression. This story nails the damage done by selfish men to the women who love them, and works as a revenge story that firewalls the woman from blame for the glorious horror which her wrath wreaks, in much the same was that BDSM submission fantasies permit the consideration of acts that one "mustn't" engage in.
VERDICT: Each of these stories is terrific, and I hate to pit them against each other in a cheap zero-sum game. But rules are rules. Here at But Don't Try To Touch Me, we take our responsibilities with the utmost seriousness.
I liked them all but I liked Fellowship Of the Dragon, with its animistic fairy tale setting and rambunctious ensemble, best, and since there is no distinction between my own personal preferences and Absolute Merit, Patricia A. McKillip wins Round 7 for the world's most famous philologist.
Is it already time for Round 8? Time flies in quarantine.
For Tolkien, Harry Turtledove presents The Decoy Duck. Some (basically) Christian missionaries from (essentially) the Holy Roman Empire come to (more or less) Viking territory. The missionary's ace card is a handsome and devout young man who was abducted from this viking village as a child. His absolute devotion to his monotheistic faith fascinates the villagers and infuriates the chieftain, who permits the missionaries to live and do their thing more out of an inner core of decency than any desire to allow open discussion. The conflict between the chieftain and the missionary, both of whom are men of honor and virtue, is a conflict between two immiscible cultural value systems, and despite the mens' mutual, and earned, respect, something's gotta give, which means someone's gotta die. The conclusion feels inevitable, which does not lessen the tension that underlies the tale, and doesn't bring the tension to an end, since the conflict between the two men is by no means the final proxy war between two conflicting cultures.
I'm no expert, but Turtledove would probably make a formidable debater or lawyer; he crafts strong arguments for both sides of this conflict, and shows us the steps that might be taken to resolve the conflict; all that needs to happen is for someone to give up. There will be no brokering of a long-term accord. It's rather like a courtroom drama; compelling, but, with the exception of how things end, it never feels the way I want fantasy to feel; like a step into the unknown. I'm on the side of those who believe the jet fuel of fantasy is bold acts of imagination, but there's no room for such stuff in Turtledove's humane and carefully reasoned philosophical tale. What we get here is lucid, thoughtful historical fiction, and that's a good thing in its own way.
For Lovecraft, Joanna Russ writes I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket... But by God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph From Life!" The title is taken from the punchline of Lovecraft's story Pickman's Model, in which the big reveal is that an artist who paints monsters isn't indulging in flights of fancy, but is doing journalism.
A kindhearted woman takes on the emotional labor of helping a young male coworker make an effort at romance with a bewitchingly glamorous woman. The young man needs help; he's socially clueless, discomfiting to everyone around him, helpless in matters of money or romance, yet arrogant (and foolish, thinking his passion for H. P. Lovecraft makes him superior to others). In short, he's me in the 90s, a fate I'd wish on no one. His compassionate coworker soon has cause to regret her offer to help the young man in his courtship, since he demands more and more of her time and attention. She doesn't quite understand his confused cries for help until it is much too late... The mysterious woman may be a localized expression of a cosmic power; perhaps she represents the temptation of cosmic horror literature to young people who can't quite hack it in the human sphere. People who opt out of life in favor of hikikomori consolations may be the true subject, here.
I've read enough vintage vampire stories to know that many of them are about dangerous lovers, in which the viewpoint character observes a friend being stolen away from their proper life by some wicked Other person. This is one of those, and it's fascinating in part because of Russ's reputation. Ask any midcentury SF fan or pro to describe Joanna Russ, and they'd say something like "bra-burning man-hater." That's certainly not the impression I get from this story. Compassion for the clumsy young man shines through, even while diagnosing his shortcomings in clinical detail, and showing greater sympathy for the woman he ropes into holding his hand through his unwise courtship. It's left an open question whether or not the human race as a whole is better or worse off for the removal of unpleasant young men.
Speaking of people who seem to prefer tales of cosmic nihilism to life's more positive possibilities, The New Weird offers A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing, by Thomas Ligotti. A young man with a history of debilitating health problems is beguiled by the creepy muttering of his doctor... but did the doctor say anything? Was all that muttering coming out of the narrator's subconscious, and was it mere delusion that ascribed those words to the doctor?
The young man finds his way to a town of strange folk parades and tight-lipped locals offering hostile hospitality. The conclusion is lavishly, yet icily, nasty.
Ligotti takes the cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft and shears away the rubbery monsters and adventure tropes, which leaves stories of people having their minds shattered by direct perception of the dread hopelessness of existence. The first time I read one of his stories (in an anthology called 999) I was impressed. This is the 3rd or 4th I've read, and despite a surface narrative variety, a certain thematic sameness sets in. M. John Harrison also deals with enigmatic folk traditions that suggest something nasty beneath them, but where he leaves them as open signifiers, Ligotti weaponizes everything to the proving of his joyless point. He's the Jack Chick of cosmic nihilism, which is certainly a thing to behold.
VERDICT: Each of these stories is working to illustrate a philosophical conflict. Russ is the one who leaves the most play for ambiguity, and takes up the least of your time. She, and Lovecraft through her, get the laurel wreath for this round.
Round 9! For Tolkien, Nine Threads of Gold, by Andre Norton. Some kind of soldier-enforced tyranny is spreading terror throughout a fantasy kingdom, and a pack of children from various socioeconomic backgrounds has taken refuge in an abandoned Hold. A sorcerous woman who grew up in the Hold makes her way back there, and becomes the children's caretaker. It soon becomes apparent that a malign magic threatens the Hold's inhabitants, and the woman must keep a careful watch over the children, while teaching them to work together for the good of all, and to settle differences in communal fashion, without sliding back into prejudices of their past lives.
It's a rich setup, and the Hold is full of hidden possibilities that the woman uncovers for the children. Norton has much to say about the challenges and rewards of raising children. Also, she uses em-dashes with defiant liberty.
I found it difficult to fully engage this story, but I think it's because I've never been responsible for children for more than a few hours, and I'd prefer to keep it that way. My own limited parameters are implicated in my muted reaction to this rapturously told and compassionate tale.
For Lovecraft (very much for him!) we have H. P. L. by Gahan Wilson. This story imagines Lovecraft having lived to an impressive old age and getting to enjoy the success which his stories achieved after his (in real life) early death. A young fan accepts an offer to visit Lovecraft (and his mysterious manservant), and a succession of startling discoveries follows.
This story is quite fannish, and so eager to admire Lovecraft that it sidesteps the man's extravagant bigotries. I like to imagine (on the basis of a rueful late letter) that Lovecraft would have become more openminded and openhearted about human difference had he lived long enough, but this story takes things a bit too far in that direction, having Lovecraft speak out against xenophobia. It's a bit like the scene in the Annie musical that's a love letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt; had Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie, lived to see the show, he would have jumped onstage and decked the actor playing Roosevelt, so passionate was the cartoonist's hatred (often expressed in the comic strip) for that President's socialist ways.
The ending of H. P. L. is even more goofily fannish, as the Forces of the Cosmos essentially lift Lovecraft bodily up to heaven in a Rapture of one. Cmon. Maybe it's going for camp, I dunno. Wilson does himself more favors when he permits some of his trademark macabre elements to pop up, as when the mysterious manservant laments his one-of-a-kind physical complaint...
For the New Weird, it's the genre's poster child, China Mieville, with Jack. Jack Half-A-Prayer was a legendary, flamboyant hero-of-the-people lawbreaker, and now that he's gone, the narrator wants you to know about the role said narrator played in helping Jack along the way. This is set in a world where criminals are punished with surreal surgeries and nonorganic grafts, and our carceral state (or Britain's) is implicated for the way we make felons carry their crimes for the rest of their lives. It's a smart satire, told in the guise of a penny dreadful filtered through a pub tale, and even though I guessed the punchline a page or two before the reveal, it was still satisfying, in the manner of a skillfully crafted joke with an implicating satirical point. Mieville comes off as a Leftist Roald Dahl, which is dandy, but I don't see much family resemblance to the more ambiguous worlds that the earlier tales in this anthology offer.
Verdict: I enjoyed Mieville's satirical cartoon most, but Norton's might be the richest, with its ensemble of diverse kids facing slippery magical enemies with the aid of a compassionate and wise volunteer caregiver. Still, as David Denby says, "trust pleasure," no matter how blinkered, solipsistic, or culturally overdetermined, so I'll take the easy way out and declare the New Weird the winner by a nose.
What a thrilling competition! Each of our three contestants won a round! Keep reading this blog for more pulse-pounding reviews of stories about monsters.
