Out, in #25

Past time for another dip into these anthologies.

From Plays in One Act:

The Cuban Swimmer by Milcha Sanchez-Scott. A young Cuban-American girl participates in a competition to swim across the Pacific Ocean, while her family paces her in a boat, shouting encouragement and advice through a megaphone while bickering and loving one another. Condescending broadcast professionals provide a supercilious chorus. The girl runs into all kinds of problems; oil slicks, exhaustion. But she can't get out of the water or she's disqualified.

I'd love to see a successful production of this; it would take some technical imagination, since we have a boat, the water level, and the ocean floor to create onstage. 

The play ends with a miracle. Art is one place in which we can have miracles.

Excerpts from Slave of the Camera by Sam Shepard. An actor working on a movie in New Mexico tells us in gripping monologue about difficult men: his frustrated father, a racist rando in a truck stop restroom, and a friend who seems to have some version of a good life figured out (a life which includes a polycule, dumb but pleasing hobbies, and weaving the flax of film appreciation into the gold of life appreciation). Each of these guys emerges so distinctly you can practically tell them apart by smell. Each is an object lesson. It's hard to be human; and at best, one in three figures out how to do it.

The Pleasure of Detachment by Perry Souchuk. An unseen narrator says stuff like "The difference between anxiety and desire is that desire is influential," and "The audience's rehearsal is life outside the play." Meanwhile, a woman straps herself into a bed and, while casually flirting with an awkward young man, muses about the way her moment-to-moment observations flow into the running stream of her thought process. This reminds me of Albee's abstract non-crowdpleasers like Box, and of Peter Greenaway's films, employing narrative content to abstract purpose. A chamber drama for connoisseurs.

The Boundary by Tom Stoppard and Clive Exton. Like a tiresome Monty Python sketch, but drier. Two dictionary editors find that their office has been broken into (or so it seems) and their files are all out of order. Words and their definitions have been scrambled. Meanwhile, each of them becomes convinced that the other has murdered Brenda, their troublesome collaborator with whom they've had a long-running romantic triangle. In the end, it turns out Brenda is alive, but of all the indignities that have befallen their lexicographic enterprise, her compulsive malapropisms have done the most damage.

Perhaps it's because I'm put out with Stoppard for joining J. K. Rowling's League of Celebrity Transphobes, but I found this a trivial exercise in cleverness. Stoppard's best work is clever but rich with human compassion. This was the husk of cleverness, all dried up.

Placebo by Andrew Vachss. A maintenance man helps a frightened boy in his building by inventing a light box  that will drive away imagined monsters. Then the man figures out that the boy's therapist is a child abuser, and makes another device which he will use to kill the therapist. I recall reading a comic book adaptation of this, illustrated by Klaus Janson, a former artist for The Punisher, a similar exercise in revenge porn.

From Best American Short Stories:

Proper Library by Carolyn Ferrell. A dazzlingly multifaceted story following a young man's day in and out of school and home. He's black, he's gay. He cherishes his siblings and his adoring, concerned mother. He values learning, but it's unclear whether his attainment can match his ambition. He's tempted by lust for a school-skipping "bad boy," and tormented by homophobes (the life-warping effects of bullying become clear; there's no shaking it off when it's a continuous erosion, from any direction, at any time). He's loaded down with other peoples' responsibilities, because everyone knows he cares too much to leave a need untended, except perhaps his own needs. He narrates his story in an awkward but sensitive argot. "I am in silent love with a loud body." 

Birthmates by Gish Jen. A salesman in a dying branch of office computer tech has booked into the wrong hotel for a sales conference. He's Asian-American, and the kind of go-getter who's leveraged his boss's slurs into a promotional opportunity instead of a lawsuit. His optimistic ambition motivates him to trundle into an unforeseen variety of humiliations and challenges. Along the way, we learn that his marriage has ended, and he still can't wrap his mind around why. If at first you don't succeed to have a baby, try, try again, right? Why did she have to get bogged down in grief instead of popping back up? Loser mindset. Makes no sense.

He enjoys a possible career breakthrough at the conference, but business success is a provisional victory in a world of tiered injustices. The final sentence reveals just how much horror, sorrow, and implacable injustice he is struggling to deny.

From Calling the Wind:

Willie Bea and Jaybird by Tina McElroy. Willie Bea is a friendly, spirited working class woman who is pitied by her peers, because baby hasn't got back. In a demographic that prizes a voluptuous posterior, Willie Bea just isn't marriage material. And yet, she manages to draw a handsome, responsible, charming husband. Oh, they love each other. But Willie Bea makes the classic mistake of bragging to her best friend (whose rump is up to code) about what a tender lover her husband is. It's a simple story, but it traces the melancholy of the unbeautiful and the joys of working people with attentive compassion. 

Screen Memory by Michelle Cliff. A mixed-race movie star is drying out in a hospital, and recalling her past. She was raised by her grandmother, a domineering black supremacist who never stopped judging everything and everyone, and judging harshly. The careful process of finding freedoms and encouragement from better mentors takes our heroine, step by caution step, to show business. The story is told in precise vignettes, hallucinatory scrambled fragments, snatches of song, plot summaries for ludicrous movies. It's the kind of thing that could easily collapse in a muddle, but Michelle Cliff maintains clarity, gentle wit, and a subtle narrative tension, while layering emotional richness and density of incident. Magnificent storytelling. 

From The Outlaw Bible:

On the Yard by Malcolm Braly. We spend a rainy afternoon in the prison yard with three provisional friends, as they try to do under-the-counter business and while away the time. At nine pages, this is a  generous excerpt for this book, and I'm grateful; time spent with these mean, frustrated men is time productively spent. Our central figure, Chilly Willy, is really smart; too smart to let that fact be known. His observations on the sociopolitics of prison life are acute, unsparing. His shrewdness makes one hope he gets out of prison and puts his talents to some better use than crime.

Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. An anguished, keening, problematic aria on the subject of Black manhood brought low. Enslavement and emasculation are woven together in a lamentation of unmanning. Cleaver's pitying contempt for the enslaved and subjugated resembles Kanye West's similarly unhinged rhetoric on the same subject. Still, Cleaver calls Black men and women to aspire to, and labor for, a better world, a right world, where Black people are able to live at their full potency. He demeans his ancestors, marring his cry for a virtuous struggle. It's hard to address the enormity of slavery's crimes while maintaining focus, but victim-blaming only compounds the problem.

In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott. Abbott sketches the soul-ruining experience of solitary confinement. It's horrifying, but I'm not sure he manages to say anything that will change many minds. The kind of reactionary who approves of solitary will probably read an account of such hellish punishment and think, "good."

Sketches by Ken Kesey.  An evidently nonfiction account of working at a hospital. The seeds of his most famous book are here, as Kesey becomes fascinated by patients' harrowed faces, while developing a distrust for nurses.

Life In Prison by Stanley "Tookie" Williams: Williams describes the claustrophobia, loneliness and helplessness of imprisonment in ways that make it sound like my concept of Hell; unable to move or to secure one's own safety. Cool, lucid, no theatrical rhetoric, and none needed. My theoretical pro-incarceration reactionary might find this account more stimulating to one's fellow feeling.

Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce: Remember in the movie when Luke wins a grotesque, disturbing egg-eating contest? Here, it's full meals getting wolfed down, culminating in stewed prunes when everything else in the mess hall has disappeared. We also learn how Luke earns his nickname. Told in a cheerful, yarn spinning fashion, this, like Orange is the New Black, is almost too much fun. You may find yourself wishing you were in prison with these robust characters.

The Family by Ed Sanders: an account of how Charles Manson trolled mystical, occult, self-help and sci-fi books for ideas; not in search of a finer, truer way to live, but for sound bites and sales techniques he could use for snowing the suckers. Today he'd be studying crypto and Qanon, and with the internet he could win over the desperate and weak-minded all over the world. 

Short Eyes by Miguel Piñero: An excerpt from a play in which Clark, a child molester (a.k.a. Short Eyes), tries to explain his compulsions and actions to Juan, a patient, quiet fellow prisoner. Clark doesn't try to perfume his deeds the way that old self-romanticizer Humbert Humbert did, and at the end of his distressing account of serial abuse he pleads with Juan to try to understand him. Juan retorts "If I wasn't trying to, I would have killed you... stone dead, punk..."

The excerpt is forwarded by Marvin Felix Camillo, who worked with convicts in Sing Sing (of which Piñero was one) to develop original theatre. Camillo contextualizes the creation of the play and the production, and rightfully insists that Piñero was not merely an efficient transcriber of prison life, but an artist who transmuted his prison experience into insightful works of imagination and craft.

The Sexual Outlaw by John Rechy: Rechy, who wrote the first excerpt in this book, an excerpt that dazzled me, returns to tell us about the street-hustling life, the ebb and flow of hustlers and johns, the myths about the trade (often created by lying cops and amplified by credulous media) and the twisty möbius strip of self-loathing and gay pride that ripples all through the scene; what lures young men to this trade, and what paths they take when they leave.

Hardcore From the Heart by Annie Sprinkle. Performance artist Sprinkle synopsizes the endless struggle, or dance, between eroticism, art, and the law. Her mystical enthusiasm for sexual performance and practice runs afoul of the cops, again and again, climaxing in a love affair with a defense attorney; a sensible synthesis.

Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg: If one must have a swingin' Sixties spoof of ribald literature I suppose it might as well be as witty as this.   A grotesque lover seems to wish Candy (as in Candide) ill, but her light touch keeps her out of trouble. She's clean until she's filthy, and then she's very filthy indeed. Candy's best-known progeny might be Little Annie Fanny; I'm fonder of Phoebe Zeitgeist.

Period by Dennis Cooper. Not to be confused with fellow literary troublemaker Robert Coover, Cooper writes pellucidly about alluring boys who get into terrible trouble. The boys in this all-too-brief excerpt rob a jewelry store. It's not certain whether their bigger problem is legal peril or their desire for one another. "There shouldn't have been anyone in the world that important. It killed him." In a Cooper novel, it probably will kill him, directly or indirectly.

City of Night by John Rechy: Hello again, Rechy! This time he tells us the (fictional?) story of a young lady who associates with male hustlers; dating them, rooming with them, and getting very angry with them, an anger that seems to well up from some subterranean resentment. Her story takes a surprising but logical twist, and then our hero is left alone again, dodging the violent street gang known as the LAPD, and fearing that his life will end up, and possibly end, on skid row.

Shirts & Skin by Tim Miller: Miller (or a fictional protagonist; it's not contextualized in this excerpt) relies on safe sex practices as a basic survival tactic. He's a gay man in the 90s who's torn between irrepressible desire for men and utter dread of the disease. He navigates sex with an HIV-positive lover with pragmatic caution and a wealth of tenderness. I understand this differently now that I'm trying to negotiate fear of a different disease in a careful but safe fashion. How else to be life-affirming, but to live life and protect it simultaneously?

From Interzone: 

What Cindy Saw by John Shirley. Cindy is a little girl who suffers from the conviction that the world of our perceptions is a facade, which she calls "the shell," over the real truth of life. She pokes around and discovers a secret underground environment from which all aboveground behavior is controlled.  This subterranean realm is a secularized gnostic metaphor, yet is worked out in particularized physical and practical details. Also, Ambrose Bierce and Phillip Dick are down there, playing cards, which might be putting too fine a point on it, but certainly signals that we are in a realm of signs and portents.

Finally, Cindy takes charge of the world, or at least the part of it that concerns her, and turns out to be much worse for everybody than the systems that used to run everything. Her individual liberation from gnostic controls is not the happy ending most phildickian narrative presents. 

The Object of the Attack by J. G. Ballard: a beloved astronaut is on track to become a right-wing totalitarian President of the United States, and a mysterious young mental patient is using outlandish, ritualistic tactics to bring about the astronaut's assassination. The case involves art, symbolism, illusions, and a collision between a powerless nobody and the most powerful people on earth. As is often the case with Ballard, the plot refuses to model reality. Stagecraft as reality manipulation wouldn't really allow people to achieve the ends these characters are pursuing, but they do allow Ballard to imagine the motivations and ideas that provide the field of struggle for ambitious people and those who would stop them. The astronaut starts a pseudo-Christian religion and produces Hollywood entertainments, while the assassin works with obscure landscape art and physical illusions to reengage the world for which the opponents struggle; he also uses jerry-rigged flying machinery to defeat a grounded aeronaut from above. The detective on the case, tasked with tracking down the assassin and foiling his schemes, decides to allow the young man to take his best shot. We needed this spirit in 2016; we may need it in 2024. 

Something Coming Through by Cherry Wilder: Mr. Wheeler is in "a strange city" on a mission to free his stepdaughter and her activist lover from political imprisonment before they are executed on inflated charges. The boredom of diplomatic efforts, the polite absurdity, the outbursts of manic fervor create a Kafkaesque impression of hopelessness, but there's a factor slowly working in Mr. Wheeler's favor: toxins in local building materials, which inspire hallucinations and euphoria; seeming spiritual visions that reshape the officials' perspective on the case. Swallows, commonplace birds in the area, take on great spiritual import. At the end of the story the prisoners are freed, but local children kill a swallow for sport. In short, don't expect systemic change; compassion wins this round, but pointless cruelty still controls the board.

The next installment of this series will be the last. Phew!

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird final rounds

(The series starts here)

Let's review the final entries!

Round 17! For Tolkien, it's Down the River Road with Gregory Benford. We're in a world that's a long tubular cavern, a wide endless tunnel with gravity pulling toward the cave walls, with a river running down the tunnel and land to either side. If you go upstream, you also go back in time, while going downstream is going forward in time. Most travel goes downstream because that's easier, but it's possible to hustle your way upstream if you've got the motivation and the moxie. Our protagonist is a young man seeking his missing father, but he's got to go through a whole Bildungsroman first. The conceit of going backwards or forwards in time by going up or down stream seems to be irrelevant to the story as it rolls along, so pondering its likely significance, in the context of a tale about a boy seeking his mysterious missing father, helped me guess the fantastical twist ending. A famous Wordsworth quotation concerning fatherhood is relevant.

This is probably the best old-school Twain-and-Faulkner-worshiping bildungsroman ever set entirely in a tunnel where the flow of a river closely tracks the flow of time. 

For Lovecraft, it's On the Slab by Harlan Ellison. A rock concert promoter obtains the body of a giant, and puts it on display. It's more than an evolutionary oddity, though; something about it brings the promoter a comfort he's never known, so much so that he takes to sleeping near it in the display hall where it lies in commercialized estate. 

The big reveal is that it's Prometheus, and he's a comforting presence because he dared defy the gods and sacrificed himself for humanity. Almost the opposite of Lovecraftian. Anyway, a professional showbiz promoter is a good protagonist for Ellison to write, since he was a self-promoter as much as he was anything.

The New Weird gives us The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines by Alistair Rennie. If you were worried that the New Weird might not be metal AF, Rennie is here to settle those concerns. This story is overflowing with characters right out of of a fantastical fighting game, and they pursue one another across pixelated backdrops before enacting gory conflict upon one another's powerfully brutalized and brutalizing bodies. Pro wrestling splatterpunk with cheerful, punchy prose that does Harlan Ellison several times better, simply by eschewing the sugar-glaze of sentimentality that drenched Ellison's faux hard-boiled fantasies. Surface pleasures abound, if you've the stomach for it, not to mention the unspooled entrails impaled on a cruelly twisted dagger blade for it.

It's a choice between the faux-depth of microwaved Modernism or the Warholian real shallowness of Pomo brattishness (or Ellison if one insists). I'm a sucker for sham Faulkner, but Rennie is delivering a Nietzschean vision that makes more sense of the Trump era's zero sum cruelty. Here's hoping the Cyber Ninjas (whose website is unnervingly inept, boding poorly for the detail-oriented nature of their Arizona audit) end up as happily as most of the characters in Rennie's round-winning entertainment.

Round 18! 

Tolkien is represented by Judith Tarr, with Death and the Lady. A medieval village has been depopulated of men by conscription into a fruitless war, so industrious women labor in the fields while tending to children. The village borders a wood that everyone knows not to venture too deeply into, what with the Fay and all, but a woman emerges from that wood on a desperate journey away from one man and towards another. She's get to stay in the village for a time, though, where she becomes part fo the community whether she likes it or not. Then the man she's fleeing comes to visit...

Tarr has many issues on her mind: gender roles and relations; the responisibilites of child-rearing and community; romances claims and costs. She manages the mighty task of using her concerns to propel the story, rather than stopping for lecture breaks, and I'm frankly in awe of her craft. The large and small decisions her characters make, and the logical and emotional motivations that energize their decisions, are much of the story, and the human insight Tarr never lets the period detail and the fantastical elements overshadow the recognizable people at the heart of the story.

Lovecraft's final offering is 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai by Roger Zelazny. A woman named Mari travels through contemporary Japan with a selection of Hokusai reproductions, each of them portraying Mt. Fuji from different standpoints. Traveling on foot, she visits the approximate spot from which each portrait was painted, and contemplates an array of literary, cultural, and historical references that bind together into a net of allusions. It's a lovely piece of fictionalized, and fiction-besotted, travel writing which demonstrates that an engagement with the world around you and an engagement with literature can be braided together, creating a mental landscape of great richness.

Also, there's something terrible and secret going on, which she's trying to both evade and prevent from overtaking the world. The scary story could easily be separated from all the travel writing and mini-essays on literature; shorn of everything that isn't central to a woman's attempt to prevent her ex-husband from enslaving the world, it's a straightforward, sturdy, but adorably quaint 80s SF adventure. The travel writing, as well, would be diverting without the pulp adventure nestled deep within its folds. Together, however, they blend like nitrogen and glycerin.  By hiding the pulpy aspects of the story, letting us glimpse it through the gaps in the carefully crafted "reality," the story gave me a chilling sensation of occult existential threat like few stories manage. It is in this that the tale is most akin to Lovecraft's best work.

The New Weird's final effort is a collective effort, in which Paul Di Filippo writes a first chapter as a sort of pilot episode, and a clutch of other authors contribute a chapter each. There's a final chapter, but it isn't in the book.

The story is set in a pseudo-Indian city during a massive religious festival. A man from a rival city comes to participate in a mysterious plot to do... what, exactly? Even he doesn't know, but he's pretty sure it's something good, from his society's perspective, and something bad, from the local perspective. There's a lot going on, though, and each chapter gives us a glimpse of activity that broadens the world of the story and may or may not cohere into a satisfying conclusion. Di Filippo sets up an array of characters and factions, in a vivid city with fantastical beasts and religions for the other writers to play with.

Cat Rambo contributes a chapter in which a mysterious woman is observed doing increasingly mysterious things. It's a dandy standalone story; a sense of wonder, unreality made manifest.

Sarah Monette gives us a confrontation between a detective who's not quite lost in a thicket of cover stories, and hybrid animals that haven't integrated the personalities of their component entities. Brief, zesty, frightening.

Danial Abraham follows a pious and wealthy businessman whose faith (devoted to a mindless insect god, and demanding motiveless mindlessness from its followers) would seem to preclude conspiring and colluding for gain and vengeance; yet that is precisely what this fellow does. A cunning examination of unruffled religious hypocrisy, and its uses for the greedy class.

Felix Gilman centers on a useless cop holding down headquarters and refusing to stick his neck out, no matter what mysterious dangers show up just outside the door. He reads a doltish pulp magazine about a fascistic but highly active cop which fails to spur him to action; only to lull him into grouchy indolence. Ironies and fantastic adventures cunningly undercut one another.

Hal Duncan shows us a boy auditioning for a celebrated boys' choir in which expressions of musical purity cover over a cesspit of pederasty, and how seamlessly the boys are groomed. It's agonizing, and enriched by a detailed investigation of musical processes and corrupt leadership processes, but lacks that crucial element: bold acts of the imagination. Perhaps, on the limited evidence of this short narrative, Mr. Duncan should explore the possibilities of more realistic social fiction.

Conrad Williams brings things back to the protagonists of the first installment, the man from another city, and a woman who rescued him from dangerous beasts. Adventure ensues, as she tries to lead him to safety, only to be ambushed by (essentially) ninjas, before a shocking terrorist attack (doubtless meant to evoke 9/11, still, at the time of publication, quite fresh in the memory).

The final installment, by Paul Di Filippo, is not bound in the book, but presented as a PDF on the publisher's website. Or at least, it was. I had to dig around with archive.org to find a version of the website that offered this concluding chapter, and having read it, I can see why no one thought it was worth printing or keeping around. It ties story threads together with the facile cunning of a skilled improv comic, but reminds me of the guy in Parade's End who preens himself on his ability to write a sonnet on any subject in five minutes. Loose ends get stapled together, than a monster shows up, the guy from another city switches sides, he beats the monster and the hypocritical villain, and gets the girl. Straight out of a movie you saw in a hotel room and then promptly forgot. 

VERDICT: Judith Tarr brings the final round home for Team Tolkien.

Oh brother, let's do the final scoring now! I considered giving New Weird a handicap to balance the fact that it wasn't represented for the first couple of rounds, but decided that I'm sufficiently biased in favor of M. John Harrison et al to leave things unbalanced.

And having tabulated the score, I find that New Weird required no handicap, for it wins in a blowout, 10 points against Tolkien and Lovecraft, who tied 4-4.

At last, the world has an answer. Tolkien and Lovecraft are equally meritorious and equally deficient, while the New Weird smokes them both. You can't argue with the facts.

I'd like to close by acknowledging Emma Bull's story Silver and Gold as my favorite story that didn't win its round, so one might conclude that Tolkien does in fact outshine Lovecraft by a whisker. Thank you and good night.

I don't Remember Why I Called This "Outlaws & Inlaws" (#24)

From Best American Short Stories:

I Want to Live! by Thom Jones: Mrs. Wilson is a grandmother with cancer. The narrator stays right in her thoughts, and we follow her sharp-witted battle against despair. She roils with the agonies and indignities of the sick body, then develops something resembling a religious conversion upon dipping into Schopenhauer. Family appears in a succession of walk-on roles, and a childhood memory of a rambunctious rooster arises from the swamp of memory to serve as her final vision of the life force doing its thing in the teeth of death's increasingly immanent inevitability. 

All this might sound like a dreadful slog, but the struggle between Mrs. Wilson's failing body and unfailing mind provides a literary liveliness. It reminds me of a discussion an old friend and I had about the contrast between reggae's upbeat music and often acerbic lyrics; my first awareness that the manner and the matter of a work of art could contrast in a way that makes engagement with that matter aesthetically invigorating.

In the Gloaming by Alice Elliot Dark: A handsome young man named Laird is dying of an unspecified ailment (apparently the TV movie adaptation names the culprit: AIDS) and living in his parents' comfy house, lovingly tended by his lonely mom and entirely avoided by his workaholic, emotionally sealed father. The story is told from the perspective of Janet, the mother, as she comes to realize that Laird is the true love of her life. The two develop a warm, cheerful, communicative closeness that blossoms in the evening, in the gloaming.

As his condition declines, these conversational sessions fade, to Janet's despair. Memories of Laird seem to become piquant post-mortem memorials even while he's still alive. After the young man's death, an emotional fault line cracks open; devastating. 

Dark tells the story plainly, with thoughtful, humorous but unshowy dialogue, and maintains a tone like a pellucid evening.

From Plays in One Act:

Heatstroke by James Purdy: 

In a tropical setting, a woman named Lily turns to eccentric Doctor Douglas for help with her chronic pain. His advice is startlingly impertinent, but she stays with him, because they have a common bond; they are both murderers, on the lam for their crimes of passion in the States. His prescription offers at least short-term respite for both of them.

If you think the trouble with Tennessee Williams is that he didn't go bonkers enough, James Purdy is here to help. Intense passions and barmy dialogue coruscate like lightning across the stage. Pain and shame alchemically transmuted into camp gold.

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Part II by Jonathan Reynolds. Australia, 1938: Lord and Lady Murdoch hope to win a spot for one of their sons at Eton or Harrow. Miss Fairchilderdern will evaluate the boys for admission, but it doesn't look good; she hates Australians. Two of the three sons shine at poetic recitation and interpretation, but little Rupert is a complete wash. Then, in a sudden, mystical overflow of theatrical magic, little Rupert's true talents emerge; talent for vicious, filthy, contemptuous bile with a lot of razzle-dazzle and populist appeal. 

Since we can't put Rupert Murdoch in the stocks and pelt him with feces until he looks like a cheap, wailing candy bar, we'll have to mount productions of this play, instead, as the next best way to express the salvageable populace's loathing for him and his ilk.

From Interzone:

On the Deck of the Flying Bomb by David Redd: An enormous flying military vessel heads toward its target, for the vehicle is a bomb, and will explode upon arrival. The captain is merely a figurehead, with no authority whatsoever. Strict discipline and incompetence coexist, as no one aboard questions the nature of the assignment--after all, the ship is loaded with lifeboats--and no one has any true responsibility. But inside one of the lifeboats, a stowaway hides. His purpose is obscure, but he isn't a saboteur or enemy agent; he just wants to understand what's happening, and plans to escape in the lifeboat at an opportune time.

In the curt, unstressed finale, our protagonist discovers that the lifeboats don't work, were never intended to work, and everyone on both sides will die in the ashes of this suicide mission. The parallels to nuclear armament are never less than clear. 

From Calling the Wind: 

Top of the Game by John McCluskey, Jr.: Clarence "Thunderin'" Hurd, a professional basketball player, is about to break the late Alvin Tolbert's record as all-time American Basketball Federation scorer, but Hurd has the jitters and in game after game, he can't... quite... make... those crucial final shots. But this isn't his story; we only meet him in passing. It's the story of Roberta and Alvin Jr., the wife and son of the Alvin  Tolbert, as they get escorted to game after game, and interviewed for various sports shows and segments. They hope that this pageant will end soon so they can go back to their regular lives. They're running out of patience with these proceedings, but the league implores them to keep showing up and doing interviews, so...

Their memories of the husband and father who set the record are centered less on sports than on who he was in their lives. One overfamiliar version of this story would rip the lid off of what a scumbag the beloved athlete was, and play with the contrast between the man in public and the man at home, but McCluskey isn't writing prestige-cable melodrama. The family's high estimation of Tolbert has little to do with his accomplishment in the court, and much to do with his excellence as a family man. 

The tensions in the story aren't about anyone being a villain; everyone is friendly and good-hearted, but mother and son don't relish the obligation to go to game after game, interspersed with the interview circuit. They want to get back to their ordinary lives. Excellent quarantine reading.

Going to Meet Aaron by Richard Perry: A disillusioned young man decides that peaceful protest isn't enough after living through the Mississippi Burning murders, and decides that terrorism is called for; strike back, make the white supremacist establishment afraid. He heads to a meeting with his co-conspirator, and remembers fragmentary events that have helped lead him here. 

Our protagonist lives in an uneasy balance. He's devoted to the cause of civil rights; but he's also motivated by regret over an interracial romance he bungled. He knows his plan (blow up a bank) won't accomplish anything for the cause; it's an immoral moral act, but having committed to it, he won't back out. On his way to the deed, he buys a frozen treat from an older black man, who lays out a challenge to the very idea that meaningful change is possible. Tangled convictions collide with the futility of human endeavor.

From Outlaw Bible of American Fiction:

The Way It Has to Be by Breece D'J Pancake: A scruffy young couple is in conflict, because the guy wants to go murder another guy, because revenge. She would prefer he didn't. One of the many problems with revenge is that people who want it are insufferable and inconsiderate. Everybody suffers because this guy can't let things lie. Dusty small town roadside America is the setting, and Pancake captures it like a polaroid. Will our heroine break away from this useless man or will he shoot her for even considering it? Westerns and noir all distill down to a few taut, rich pages..

American Skin by Don De Grazia: Three disgruntled military recruits discuss the possibility of going permanently AWOL. Two of them are skinheads, and one is a libertarian college boy who dropped out and enlisted as a whimsical prank, and now wants to split just as soon as he browbeats the other guys into being Objectivists. They resist, correctly, and one of them notices a picture in a student newspaper from the college boy's former Alma Mater. It's a picture of a pretty girl, and suddenly our observant hero knows exactly why he's going AWOL; to find that girl.

This story captures the dissolute, improvisational combativeness of young male bull sessions; with freeze-dried talking points hastily thawed out, and ad-libbed retorts that may or may not force one's adversary to rethink their assumptions. But some people respond more to beauty than ideas.

The Ceremony by Weldon Kees: Some workers are digging a foundation when they discover that they're digging in a First Nation burial ground, so they stop, appalled at the thought o violating these ancient graves. The supervisor yells at them until they do exactly what they didn't want to, and they make a joke of it; a self-aware, ironical joke which reveals just how easily they sacrifice their qualms, and their respect for their predecessors, to the contrived urgencies of capitalism. It's a valid point, but this satirical setup/punchline won't entice me back for a second reading.

Terminal Lounge by John Sayles: We spend a little time in the bar at a train station, listening to the regulars describing their lives of quiet desperation. A womanizer breaks it off with one of his squeezes on the grounds that he's getting married. A struggling salesman ruminates on the injustice of trying to make a living and a legacy when one is judged, not by one's life, but by one's most recent profits. Demotic barroom philosophizing that never seems bored or listless; powerful urgencies fuel the discourse. 

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird rounds 13 thru 16

The question of our times remains unanswered: is Tolkien better than Lovecraft? Or is the New Weird better than both? 

Round 13! Karen Harber's Up the Side of the Air weighs in on behalf of Tolkien, with the story of a girl who gets apprenticed to an aging wizard, despite neither of them being very happy with the arrangement. Things work out the way every story about an old grump having to take care of a child works out, but along the way the girl stumbles across a magical secret not even the wizard knows, and then the wizard fights a sorcery duel and desperately needs his apprentice's (cheating) help. In the end, she saves the day by reusing a spell she got wrong in a new context where the mistake changes from a bug to a feature. The story also addresses basic sexism, arguing that females can be of use to males; very Booker T. Washington "cast down your bucket where you are" logic.

It's not bad, but it colored within familiar lines. 

What about Lovecraft's champion for this round, acclaimed blackpill pusher Thomas Ligotti? His entry, The Last Feast of Harlequin, presents a cinema-ready spin on the old investigator-in-a-small-town-discovers-uncanny-horrors story.

An anthropologist learns about a mysterious clown festival and a related unsolved murder in a small town, and thinks "I gotta investigate that." Lovecraft was a fan of anthropology (although I doubt a person with his low threshold for non-WASPs could have cut it in the field) and anthropologists, like detectives, have license to enter alien territory in search of hidden truths, so it makes sense to build a horror tale around an anthropologist. While I have no idea what a proper anthropologist would make of the protagonist's choices, Ligotti does portray the hero thinking about cultural investigation in a serious fashion, and realizing things I wouldn't have picked up on. For example, there are two sets of clowns... one set is a fig leaf of a response by upstanding citizens of the community to the second set; a desperate distraction from an unfaceable secret. It's a smart spin on the Wicker Man style "The whole community's in on the conspiracy" story. This time the whole community knows, but most of them dread it, and refuse to acknowledge the dire truth.

I wrote about another Ligotti story, A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing, earlier in this series, and I didn't much like the one. I found it too evangelical, too overt in its peddling of Ligotti's nihilism. This story is rather similar, but it avoids overt messaging in at least two ways. Firstly, it allows narrative to work on its own terms, offering an engrossing story instead of a symbolist parade.

The second way requires some explanation. One question I think is worth asking about any horror story is: who's getting libeled? Texas Chainsaw Massacre libels poor rural workers. The Exorcist libels wayward teens and promiscuous youth culture, along with the mentally ill and the addicted (horror is multivalent, even in its libels). Lovecraft's own The Call of Cthulhu libels everybody who isn't white, since it claims that BIPOC people are hiding a god from the ofays. 

In Last Feast of Harlequin, Ligotti plays a witty trick: he libels himself. Nihilists are to blame. 

For the New Weird, K. J. Bishop offers The Art of Dying. A trio of celebrity adventurers in the urban imaginary struggle not against an assailant, but with the performative insistence by one of the crew that she, Mona, is sick to the point of death, a one-woman Munchausen-by-proxy that becomes a quartet, as she, her companions, and an intrusive young gossip columnist travel through town, seeking the right place to lie down for the last time. Spoiler: an obvious sacrificial lamb is selected to die in her place. While I doubt that Bishop is a Trump worshiper, the resolution of the story works in a way that will make sense to anyone with a MAGA cap.

The story reminded me of New Weird charter member M. John Harrison's novel In Viriconium, which also involves a sick socialite gradually giving up the ghost while her companions shamble around a grotesque city and try to aid her. Bishop may not take the sentence-by-sentence risks of the observationally acrobatic Harrison, but she keeps things darkly ambiguous; her loyalties are not obvious.

Verdict: I enjoyed Ligotti's gothic detective story most. Harber's mildly feminist wizard story felt like an overlong wikipedia synopsis of itself. I've read Bishop's story twice now and still can't make my mind up about it. Something about its climactic cruelty leaves me queasy, and while the story's ability to stir troubled ambiguities may be a mark of its power, I'm going to give the win to Team Lovecraft.

Round 14 begins with The Naga by Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn. If you've read many myths and fairy tales, you've encountered stories of humans who find romance with a supernatural figure, and the troubles that rise from such forbidden pairings. This is one such, as a rather useless ruler marries a gorgeous woman who claims to be the human form of a shapeshifting creature known as a naga. She won't reveal her true appearance to him, but they agree that they will meet every night without fail, with death as the price of failure to abide by this vow. I thought I could see where this was going. I was wrong.

Enriched by her love, the ruler becomes a more compassionate and helpful ruler, but you can't please everyone, and a violent rebel faction creates very real danger for the ruler and his bride. The climax was an operatically emotional sequence that made me gasp, and almost brought me to tears. I am rarely so moved by prose. I don't trust emotional response as testimony to artistic merit; after all, in 2020 it doesn't take a lot to inspire a big rush of emotion. Still, I think my reaction had more than a little to do with Beagle's storytelling skill, and insight into love. 

For Lovecraft, it's James P. Blaylock, with The Shadow on the Doorstep. An enthusiast for aquariums and exotic fish relates how he keeps visiting squalid, short-lived aquarium stores that might be run by the same person... and might be up to something uncanny. There are, so far as I can tell, no overtly supernatural or horrific elements in this story; only suggestions and suspicions. Has our storyteller stumbled onto the fringes of a secret outpost of Innsmouth, Lovecraft's harbor town of human-fish hybrids, or is he pizzagating a respectable, if rundown, business? The recurring owner of these businesses is an asian man, or different asian men whom the narrator can't tell apart, so yellow peril is an ugly factor. 

I've read and enjoyed a novel by Blaylock (The Last Coin) which was an unabashed supernatural adventure in a whimsical contemporary mold;  nothing in that treat of a novel prepared me for the diffuse melancholy of this submersion. If it weren't encased in a volume with a creepy monster on the cover, it would be possible to read this story and never realize that anything Lovecraftian was being invoked. A keenly observed tour of grubby business ventures, for those (like me) who are charmed by such things, and a tantalizing dance on the edge of paranoia.

The New Weird shows up with At Reparata, by Jeffery Ford. Reparata is a palace founded by a wealthy eccentric, who has set himself up as ruler over a court peopled with derelicts whom the king adopted and ennobled. They've found that being gifted with titles and responsibilities which cater to their aspirations transfigures them into their best selves, and the community thrives, until the sad day when the Queen dies and the ruler sinks into misery. Through magic, his misery is siphoned from him in the form of an enormous mothlike creature, which flies about devouring almost everything. The obvious point, that one must learn to live with grief, since it cannot be removed, is detailed with deft storytelling, but more importantly, Ford depicts the role of the community in helping one to deal with grief. This is an unusual story for this anthology, in that it ends with optimism, community, and love.

Verdict: Wow, this is a competitive round. Beagle's Naga struck with the most force, Blaylock's Shadow crept quite stealthily, yet in the end, I find Ford's Reparata to be a revelation. It offers a vision of damaged people creating a working community, and working together through love and compassion; it's a vision that never feels false or cloying. It's a model of fantasy literature that suggests ways forward for society, and I for one feel the need for such.

Round 15: Mike Resnick tries to do right by Tolkien with Revolt of the Sugar Plum Fairies. A batch of tiny fairies arrives in a normal guy's modern home, vowing to take revenge on Walt Disney for misrepresenting them in Fantasia. The guy directs them to Tinseltown, and they leave. Then they return, having gone Hollywood. 

Resnick spins jokey dialogue as if auditioning for a staff position on a 60s sitcom, and if you really like 60s sitcoms, you might enjoy this silly jape.

For Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe brings Lord of the Land. Another anthropologist, this time interviewing a family of hill folk. One of them tells the anthropologist an enchanting tale of weirdness, but the earnest young scholar picks up on subtle social cues amongst the family that suggest the tale is a diversion, or a warning. There's something unhealthy in the family dynamic, and this stranger is about to face it if he doesn't skedaddle.

"Compassion" isn't the watermark of most stories that end up in Lovecraft tribute anthologies, but Wolfe is a warm exception to that rule, and as in much great horror of the late 20th century, he bends scare-story tropes to acknowledge the hidden wounds of family abuse.

The New Weird offers Letters from Tainaron by Leena Krohn. These epistles come to us from a traveler exploring the mores of a land where people's physical forms are in flux. The local culture is thick with secrets, taboos and folkways that are not for general distribution. It's all expressed in Calvinoesque slivers; traces of Barthes and Kafka are also evident, but Krohn's focus on metamorphosis goes further back, to an Ovid who is less concerned with love and desire than with the natural processes of life cycles, and how aging and death are absorbed into the roles we play in one another' lives.

Verdict: Given a choice between hillbilly horror or arty EuroFantastique, I am stymied, but this isn't a balanced consideration of differing but equal merits; it's a Smackdown, and the winner of this Smackdown Round is the New Weird, because each of its vignettes felt new-made yet deeply rooted, and also probably because I'm conflicted about Appalachian stuff, as a product of the American South, while I'm unconflicted in my enthusiasm for chilly European fantastic literature.

Round 16!

In order to make the count round out correctly, Tolkien gets a twofer of tales set in elusive medieval dream realms. The first: Winter's King by Jane Yolen. After a troubled birth, a boy relies on caretakers who can't connect to the child; he is either a changing or autistic, depending on how you look at it (and I believe Yolen is building the story around the doubling of these perspectives). Finally, the child either dies of exposure or goes to meet the Elves of Winter for whom he is a figure of destiny. Yolen creates a double helix of tragedy and fulfillment, allowing the boy to be a simultaneous misfit and king. Irony and sincerity, sorrow and fulfillment, vie for control of the story, and the reader is the final judge.

Also for Tolkien, Gotterdammerung by Barry N. Malzberg. a party of adventurers petitions a wizard for help finding a lost magical ring. As in Tolkien, the ring has great power and carries heavy consequences. The wizard's principled refusal, and the adventurer's confusion, make it clear that this won't be a day of heroic triumph. But then things twist, and twist agin. Duplicity upon duplicity turns this into a cunning and rather noirish tale.

Both of these are brief and dense, like my favorite poems.

Lovecraft's champion is the remarkable Ramsey Campbell, with The Faces at Pine Dunes, about a family traveling around Britain in a camper, looking for the right community in which to settle. The parents have a grotesquely horrid marriage; their young adult son wants to break free from them, but his employment history hasn't panned out, so he's financially dependent on these loveless, toxic people. They settle in a town with a witchy forest, and the young man soon finds an okay job and a great girlfriend. He also begins to realize that his parents have deeper secrets than he could have guessed, and that they didn't come to this town by happenstance. 

Rosemary's Baby and Young Goodman Brown are in the mix of this story, which follows a Lovecraftian structure as the hero explores secrets rooted in eerie locations and twisted people. Horrifying reveals. Big monsters. Bad family dynamics taken to an occult extreme. Campbell may be unmatched among contemporary horror writers for his ability to set the scene. He describes locations with such fluid evocation that I can practically feel the damp, and his psychological acuity is a match for any number of New Yorker approved writers. 

The New Weird responds with The Ride of the Gabbleratchet by Steph Swainston. In this story, excerpted from a longer work, a trio of heroines teleport themselves from one world to another, fleeing an equally mobile enemy, The Gabbleratchet, which is essentially a zombified variant of the Wild Hunt. Swainston describes creatures like the Gabbleratchet with verve and vividness, but for me the shifting, whimsy-indulging tone caused the story to stall out quite a bit. I'm not one to insist on narrative momentum for its own sake, but indulgences need to pay off one way or another. In one world they meet Doggerel Dogs, who live up, or down, to their name. The payoff of Doggerel Dogs is that there are Doggerel Dogs.

I'm not including them in this Smackdown, but the New Weird volume includes several essays about the subgenre, in one of which Swainston declares that "Elves were the first against the wall when the revolution came." This reader would gladly do a prisoner exchange; take back your doggerel dogs, and return the elves. Not that I'm a reactionary, but if the revolution is this close to being a direct-to-video Phantom Tollbooth sequel, I'm not interested.

Tolkein's reps are strong, but Lovecraft wins this round, by virtue of locations so foggy they practically dampened my clothes, and characters I'd skirt around down at pub. The big finish has an infodump quality, but loads on horror after family horror enough to bind bad parents with cosmic nihilism in ways that make far too much sense.

Next time is the last time for this series. Take good care til then!

Outlaws & In-laws 23

I anticipate that this reading project will be concluded before journalists start writing about "Biden's first 100 days" if I can pick up the pace. 

From Plays in One Act:

The Last Yankee by Arthur Miller: Two men in a waiting room at a psychiatric hospital; their wives are patients. One of the men, with the confidence of the well-to-do, forces a subtly judgmental conversation with the more taciturn guy, the titular last Yankee (so called because of his blue blood ancestry, though he's a proud working class carpenter rather than an aristo). Finally, the last Yankee loses his temper and speaks his mind. Then he apologizes. After all, with his wife in the hospital, he's been a bit on edge... 

It's not about theatrical fireworks; the author of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman wants a surface of restraint laid over increasingly agitated class tensions. The play monochromatic by design. Can you ask people to leave the house and pay money to see two uneasy aging white men be restrained at each other? I am an uneasy aging white man, and I'm not eager to have such tasteful representation.

Tone Clusters by Joyce Carol Oates: A young man who is credibly accused of murdering a girl; his parents furiously insist upon their son's innocence. This is presented in the form of a jarringly formalist interview; the unseen interviewer shifts bewilderingly from Voice-of-God pronouncements on broad themes to direct questioning, all of which is accompanied by journalistic imagery on various screens surrounding the luckless parents. Oates' relish for the thrillingly distressing details of men murdering women gets an extended workout. 

This is the first of two plays to include notes on the acting style. The parents' dialogue is written in a tremblingly sincere fashion, yet Oates instructs "The actors must conceive of themselves as elements in a dramatic structure, not as 'human characters' wishing to establish rapport with an audience." Further instructions insist that the entire production need not provide an emotional connection between the distressing narrative and the production itself. Doubtless in any production the story will exert its gravitational pull on the audience's attention, which allows the cast to employ a wide range of alienation devices. Perhaps many texts could be produced in such a fashion, running narrative and production on separate tracks (Grotowski's Poor Theatre made a mission of it), but this text is designed for that. Oates' play could probably work with a more traditional presentation, though, because the subject is gripping; parents in denial of their child's (likely) crime.

A Bond Honored by John Osborne:"The acting style is hard to discover or describe... it must be extremely violent, pent-up, toppling on and over the edge of animal howlings and primitive rage. At the same time, it should have an easy, modern naturalness, even in the most extravagant or absurd moments."

This play, adapted from a play by one Lope de Vega (with which I have no familiarity) is an outlandish tale of a relentlessly confrontational, cruel, dangerous man who is piteously in love with his sister. His sister casts him out of her life, and he ends up in Moorish lands living as a nominally Islamic person. He's still the same wayward scumbag,  yet his hollowness starts to eat at him, and he has a confrontation with a mysterious shepherd who offers him a way out....

This play is wildly insensitive, and as intense as a welding torch. All the characters seem, at first, to be clearly defined types, yet as they constantly renegotiate their standing in life they reveal facets and possibilities that challenge the steady-state idea of personality. Beyond the power struggles, some of the characters consistently try to make life better for those around them, and they are rewarded accordingly. As with Marlowe's Faustus, this is a morality play in which the strong implication is that some people are truly lost souls, and cannot be saved.

From Interzone:

The Monroe Doctrine by Neil Ferguson: In the wake of Reagan's presidency, this author imagines Marilyn Monroe in the Oval Office; not the real, insecure and drug distorted Monroe, but a silver-screen dream of the wise fool who incandesces every room she enters, and wins people over with endless charm. It's a story where things flow; connections are loose, but Monroe's allure cuts through the haze and binds things. It's a dream of an end to confrontational politics, and a flip-side version of Trump's meat headed belief that his own larger-than-life personality is the key to solving intractable problems.

Angel Baby by Rachel Pollack: A high school girl has an overwhelming, traumatizing encounter with an angel, a masculine figure that tears the skein of reality and refocuses her life. She anticipates his return, and believes she must be ready for him... but how? There's no instruction manual for such a thing. Her waiting isn't at all passive; she's constantly seeking a companion to help her in this secret spiritual practice, and clues about what she should do to prepare for the angel's return. 

I'm reminded of Susan Sontag's journals, in which she laments the difficulty of finding companions who don't disappoint her with intellectual laziness. The story also recalls M. John Harrison's numinous story A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium: a rethink of all those fantasy tales in which someone from our world discovers a passage to a magical land. In Harrison's version of the trope, a small coterie of misfits tries to Qanon its way to a fantastical land which can allegedly be reached through hidden portals in modern London. Though they scramble to find, or to understand, those portals, they are immersed in modern quotidian life, seeking some barely accessible and poorly understood transcendence. Pollack is more merciful to her protagonist; the clue is in the title. 

From Calling the Wind:

Zazoo by Larry Duplechan: Zazoo, an adolescent "sissy," and his disapproving younger brother visit some family in the country, chief among them a cousin who is a budding man's man, strong and outdoorsy, a hunter, tough yet warm and compassionate. Zazoo is utterly smitten, and will endure the dirty outdoors, the indignity of exercise, the nausea of animal slaughter, and his brother's scorn, if it means he can bask in his cousin's masculine glory. The country setting is vivid, and renders Zazoo's loathings and yearnings equally vivid. Zazoo's brother idealizes and aspires to their cousin's easy masculinity, yet misses the easy acceptance, shading into grace, that the cousin offers to both the brothers. 

The climax of the story is an frank erotic encounter that could theoretically get someone in trouble, given the youth of the boys involved, but it plays not as pornography, but an expression of the cousin's easy nobility; a generous gift from one for whom everything comes easy, to one for whom everything comes hard. 

Guess Who's Coming to Seder by Trey Ellis: A dialogue in which the situation is revealed gradually, and elliptically; the reader is advised to keep notes on the cast of characters. A young Jewish woman is dating a young black man, and their families are meeting for Seder. Most of the adults in the room are on their best behavior, but the very oldest and the very youngest compete to see who can be the most hilariously terrible. The oldest lady wins that competition, having a lifetime's supply of prejudices and grievances to draw upon, as well as bratty petulance to match anything the kids throw at her. Embarrassment all around, and we see just how difficult it will be to merge these families... yet it's not hopeless, and one senses that Ellis is chuckling, if ruefully. At the end, a late arrival dovetails near-perfectly with the Seder ceremony; the latecoming boyfriend arrives in the role of Elijah and the day is saved.

From Best American Short Stories:

You're Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore: A female history professor in a midwestern liberal arts college (Called Hillsdale-Versailles, a brilliant summation of the simultaneous grand aspirations and regional ordinariness that pervade small colleges) can't quite get her social/dating life together. Every boyfriend seems cool at first but lets her down hard, and her students can't understand her awkward whimsies (singing "Getting to Know You" in its entirety on the first day of class, for example). Her best friend is her sister in New York, but even that relationship has troubling riptides. Eventually our hapless heroine ends up at one of her sister's parties, getting set up with another absurdly unsuitable guy. 

This is a story full of jokes, and also about jokes; the ways we try, and fail, to use humor for its theoretical purpose: to communicate and connect. Moore is much funnier and more entertaining than most of the would-be funny genre writers whom I've been enduring in my other little blog series, yet her story is saturated with melancholy. Her heroine's jokes are witty, but don't land; she's trying to communicate with people who aren't wired to receive her signals. Instead of lightening awkward social situations, her jokes just make them weirder. At the climax, she embodies Freud's famous assertion that jokes express real aggression. "It was just a joke."

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature: 

Dogs of God by Pinckney Benedict: Three truckers decend a sharp, long incline. One of them starts to slide. It gets hairy, then it gets scary. On the evidence of this excerpt, I dare say Pinckney Benedict teaches the reader as much about trucking as Melville does whaling. Also, the excerpt ends with a nice conflict over nervous smiles, and how easily our social cues, and interpretations of same, can go awry. I recently lost an uncle who hd been a trucker. He once told me he'd seen terrible things on the road, "but you drive fifty miles on, drive a hundred miles, and try to forget it." I wonder if he ever read Benedict.

Escape From Houdini Mountain by Pleasant Gehman: A brief excerpt, wickedly describing and deriding a blowsy down-at-heels woman. Purposefully mean, yet subtly appreciative. A möbius strip blending mockery and identification. Layered and forceful.

The Car by Harry Crews: A reminiscence about cars, the relationships that happened in and around the cars, the devoted labor that went into the cars (including more coats of paint than I would have imagined were necessary), ending with an explanation for the narrator's loss of faith in the transcendence of cars.

 

I find Crews hypnotic; he has a knack for perfect details, and prose that renders everything in a conversational yet extraordinary fashion.

Drugstore Cowboy by James Fogle: A trio of drug-addled thieves have accidentally killed somebody. In the wake of this disaster, their relationships get reshuffled, with ramifications for business, friendship, and romance. Being good, or bad, at crime is like being good, or bad, at any other employment. 

This Outlaw Shit by Waylon Jennings: Jennings shares anecdotes about country music as lived from outside the Nashville Sound. I like best his subtle interrogation of historical outlaws, whom he deems contemptible thugs, and "outlaws." I like least his ungentlemanly kissing and telling.

Love All the People by Bill Hicks: Like a lot of snotty Gen X white boys, I adored Hicks, and have only come to understand how problematic a fave he is after seeing my Twitter timeline overflow with Millennials itemizing his sins, most of which can be tracked back to his hurt feelings cloaked in flamboyant nihilism. Tell you what; I'll give up my Hicks when ya'll give up your favorite transphobic writer (you know the one.) 

Actually, reading transcriptions of Hicks' ranting, without the benefit of his snarling Texas voice, leaves me wondering why I thought so highly of him. Lashing out the way he does seems like a strong move, when one is weak; explains why so many weak and frightened people take Trump's childish tough-guy pretending seriously. But in these excerpts, Hicks lays into unworthy targets. Fantasizing about doing violence to dull pop singers isn't exactly punching up, no matter how unavoidable their tunes are.

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird Smackdown rounds 10 thru 12, Amirite?

Pull up a chair, won't you? We've got to decide which branch of fantasy fiction has borne the sweetest fruit, and we can't do it without you, dear reader.

Round 10! Charles De Lint steps up for Tolkien, with a vignette titled The Conjure Man. I dunno if Neil Gaiman was singlehandedly responsible for the 90s trope of unhoused people being represented as majickal Wise Ones guiding seekers to fantastical truths, but he popularized it, and here's Charles de Lint taking it out for a spin. The young female protagonist meets a Shaman of the Street who doesn't seem to have any pressing problems, other than that someone cut down a big beautiful tree to which he liked to whisper stories. The wisdom he has to offer the heroine, and the reader, is "You guys... trees! and stories! amirite?" So she plants a tree and tells it stories and gets a thumbs-up from the happy-go-lucky unhoused guy. Fin.

"Magical guru shaman" may be an improvement on the other models genre fiction has for unhoused people, like "Scary zombie," but while it might humanize them a bit, it doesn't do a good job of addressing real needs for real people, or even suggesting that we should. Beyond that, this story is an endorsement of trees and stories. I, too, value trees and stories.

Lovecraft is represented, or at least referenced, by Bruce Sterling, with a story called The Unthinkable. Two diplomats, one Russian, one American, relax together after the end of the Soviet Union, and ponder what the future holds for humankind. But this is an alternate Earth where magic takes the place of technology, in the same manner that dinosaurs replace electricity in The Flintstones. The Russian guy lives in a Baba Yaga hut, and the fridge has a tiny frost imp keeping things cool. The punch line unites Lovecraft's nihilistic cosmology with the atom bomb in a way that brings home, for me, the existential threat of nuclear weapons like nothing else I've read or seen.

It's very similar to the story The Dragon of Tollin by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, which appeared earlier in this Smackdown, but I prefer Sterling's rendition of the "Monster symbolizes nukes" notion for two reasons:

1. It's concise. Scarborough belabors her point like an unsilenceable drunk cornering you at a party; Sterling compresses his into a phrase, and lets you figure out the ramifications.

2. Presenting nukes as a dragon makes it seem manageable. Presenting nukes as gods of utter doom reframes it nicely, challenging blasé assumptions about our ability to manage the problem.

Okay, on to the New Weird, with Jeffrey Thomas and his story Immolation.

In a future where engineered and enslaved homunculi (called cultures) do jobs in extreme conditions that human bodies can't withstand, a culture named Magnesium Jones goes rogue, and gets caught up in an altercation between the bosses and the unions. Unions hate the homunculi for the same reason real world unions aren't fans of automation; they "take" peoples' jobs. There are racial implications here as well; the union views the cultures as machines, rather than fellow workers trapped in second-class citizen status.

Thomas doesn't presume to resolve these issues; instead, he sketches the complexity of race and labor struggles in a story that, beneath the science-fantasy element, is a noir. And a mighty tasty noir, at that. Thomas describes things with a concise vividness that recalls pulp writers from Raymond Chandler to Jack Vance. It's tough; it's bright.

So who wins this round? Not poor sleepwalking Team Tolkien. Team Lovecraft comes forth with a thoughtful wit that Lovecraft himself could never manage, and leverages Lovecraft to wake this reader up to the total nature of the nuclear threat. Thomas turns in a thrilling crime story that never speechifies, but reveals the ways power maintains itself by turning demographics against one another. Lets give it to The New Weird.

Round 11!

Tolkien might be surprised to be represented by Dennis L. McKiernan, whose claim to fame is that he tried to get the Tolkien estate to approve his Lord of the Rings fan fiction as an authorized sequel, and they told him to buzz off. They made the right call, if his story Halfling House is representative. The eponymous House is an inn for small faerie folk; it travels through space, in magical and random fashion, just like the TARDIS in Dr Who. I'm an easy mark for cozy domiciles that are also fantastical conveyances, especially with an ensemble cast, but this story is overstuffed with jokes. Lots of jokes. Oh, those jokes. The story's almost 30 pages long. It should be about 8.

Anyhow, the fair folk wind up trying to rescue a pair of their number from enslavement in an opium den, a mimeograph of Sax Rohmer's discarded drafts. Not content with lazy racism against Asian people, McKiernan sweetens the pot with some doltish victim-blaming of drug addicts. "I raged against the sheer stupidity of anyone who would get addicted to anything, whether it be narcotics or illusion or drink or pipeweed or anything." Thanks for the considered social commentary. Also, there's a female character whose personality is to take offense at things the male protagonist says (because girls, amirite?), and then to be all flirty and kissy face with him (because male writers, amirite?). After 30 pages of this crapola, I was raging against the sheer stupidity of the author. Seriously, they couldn't get Guy Gavriel Kay?

Team Lovecraft rolls out one of its pride and joys, T. E. D. Klein, with a story warningly titled Black Man With a Horn.

An elderly, forgotten pulp writer meets a frightened missionary on the run from an isolated (fictional) Malaysian tribe called the Tcho-Tcho. The Tcho-Tcho is associated with a murderous monster that looks human, with black skin and a large protrusion from its face. In an elegant and knowing reworking of The Call of Cthulhu's complex plot, the protagonist stumbles across research materials that suggest this monster situation runs deep, and is more than a legend. There's a surface narrative in the world we know, and a submerged narrative of monstrosity. It's a bit like mystery structure, except where a mystery ends with the apollonian folding together of two layers (the mystery seen from without, and the true nature of the situation), this story threatens to have one layer pierce the other, the same threatened trauma that one finds in Lovecraft.  

Another thing one finds in Lovecraft is dumb reactionary racism, and this is another tradition Klein seems proud to follow. I've written about Klein and how he is, on the evidence of his fiction, a straight-up racist, but I hoped this story would show him reconsidering his lethally white supremacist views. Nope. His defenders will try to pass it off as an unreliable narrator situation, but with an unreliable narrator, the author shows us the light shining through the narrator's tattered thinking. Poe lets us know that the narrator of The Telltale Heart is indeed mad; Nabokov shows us that the ceaselessly self-justifying Humbert Humbert's paraphilia and misanthropy ruin the lives of people around him. But Klein only ever shows black people as, at best, creepy and unsettling. 

Another possible defense of Klein; in both this story and the one I've reviewed before, Children of the Kingdom, black people are a bit of a red herring; initially presented as the cause of the threat, while the actual problem is a nonhuman monster. Trouble is, Klein seems fully committed to the idea that black people are little more than a social ill. The reveal isn't that black people are maligned in error, but that they're not the problem... this time. He utterly denies the common humanity of black people.

Klein doesn't seem to write anymore. I've read two stories by him, and it seems that's about a quarter of his total fictional output. I've checked out a few interviews with him to see if he's got anything more or better to say on the subject of race, but none of his oddly fawning interviewers dare, or care, to raise the subject, even though it's a big part of his fiction. In a recent episode of a podcast called Eating the Fantastic, the host asks Klein what kind of periodical he'd like to edit, and Klein answers that he'd favor a politically incorrect right-wing magazine. Stay blocked, Klein.

For the New Weird we have The Lizard of Ooze, by Jay Lake. the title had me worried; visions of Xanth danced in my head, and I don't need that. The story's better than Piers Anthony's jejune japery, but I don't want to damn it with such faint praise. It's a romp that puts a sprightly spin on sword & sorcery fooferall.

This is a vision of contemporary America, but dotted with cities hanging on risers from the interior of great pits, rather like cliff dwellings. Once such city is Ooze, and it reveres a giant magical lizard which lives at the bottom of the pit. Our hero, a sort of ninja cop who guards order in Ooze, guides an odd messenger to the bottom of the pit. It's an adventure, with an exciting fight scene at the bottom, and some vivid, if silly, worldbuilding, fit for an antic computer game. A bowl of ice cream.

Verdict: Tolkien's representative doesn't pass muster, at all, at all. Lovecraft's is almost great, a master class in structuring a persuasive uncanny tale, and prose so schooled in what they used to call slick writing that horror fans think Klein's a master prosesmith, but I'm disqualifying this entry for racism of such pitch and intensity that I can't in good conscience factor it out. That leaves Lake, who tells a diverting tale without being an overt racist and therefor triumphs over his competition.

Round 12, which happily is more competitive than the last!

For Tolkien, Emma Bull with Silver or Gold. Alder Owl, the village witch, goes on a quest to rescue a missing prince. Moon Very Thin, her youthful assistant, remains behind to help tend to needs around the village, such as birthing cattle. Every night, Moon uses a scrying spell to determine if Owl is well or not. Soon, Owl is not, and Moon is compelled to leave her village in search of her beloved mentor. Soon, she is drawn into the search for that lost Prince. Along the way she must discover the answer to a running debate she had with Owl; should the four elements of earth, air, fire & water be honored and invoked in separate magics, as is traditional, or treated as aspects of one holistic totality, as Moon intuits?

I tried to read Emma Bull's beloved first novel, War For the Oaks, once, and while I greatly admired her vivid descriptions and propulsive narrative, the story indulged daydreams that I had insufficient patience for ("Oh no, two hot elf boys are fighting over their love for me! Whatever shall I do? At least our band rawks"). I can't hate, but I couldn't quite make it to the end. It seems she got the raw Mary Sueishness out of her system, though; Silver or Gold is a mature work, circling around familial loss and community building while saving the daydream fulfillment for the very end (a prince marries a village witch? Really? Okay sure fine.) It's the kind of psychologically focused, eventful journey through dense wilderness and magnificent palaces that this fantasy fan eats with a spoon.  

Lovecraft gives us Love's Eldritch Ichor by Esther M. Friesner. A romance publishing company has acquired a promising first-time novelist, but this publisher is a chiseling operation that wants to exploit and underpay.  The young woman's editor, who's comically cowardly and cowed by the domineering lead editor, falls in love with his charge, and tries to make everyone happy. It can't be done, of course, since "mercilessly exploit this woman's labor" and "Protect this woman from exploitation" are irreconcilable. Happily, the novelist has other, more powerful allies in her family, who are a Lovecraftian riff on the Munsters.

Get ready for more jokes! Jokes, jokes, jokes. Freisner's better at them than is McKiernan, but then, so are you, dear reader. She aspires to do a Warner Brothers style cartoonishness, every human (or monster) behavior carried to extravagant exaggeration. It's a tough thing to pull off in prose, and while for this reader the results are hit and miss, Freisner gets within hailing distance of Tex Avery and P. G. Wodehouse. 

The New Weird offers Watson's Boy by Brian Evenson. A young man lives with his parents in a hermetically sealed, windowless, exitless labyrinth of hallways and rooms and locked doors. There are keys in many of the rooms, along with other, more obviously useless things. The boy explores the structure, collecting keys. He wears a suit of hooks upon which he hangs the keys; we are told on the first page that one day the weight of the accumulating keys will surely break his back. 

The family's basic needs are all provided for, but no one else is to be found in the structure, and none of the keys seem to match any of the doors. Still, there's more to explore, although it is endlessly repetitive, like an 80s electronic game. Mother is an unspeaking invalid, defined largely by her frailty. Father drifts about, not doing much of anything, but trying to offer his son some elliptical guidance, all of which is either too tentative or too doltish to be of any help to a boy with an autistic focus on key collection and door attempting. 

I was reminded of austere European art writers from Beckett, to Klossowski, to the Oulipo writers. In other words, fantasy fan catnip, amirite? The structure of the environment and the structure of the story mirror one another, and recall Gormenghast, although that dire palace was technically open to the outside world, and full of surface variety; it was the stagnant culture that rendered it hopeless. In Watson's Boy, the family is literally trapped, with only a vestigial sense that escape is possible. Will they find escape? Will the boy's back be broken by his compulsive accumulation of seemingly useless keys? The story uses ambiguous tension and subtle narrative variety to keep one reading through a seemingly monotonous situation, until a conclusion that is both surprising and logical. 

Verdict: Team Tolkien finally gets its act together; I want more of Emma Bull, who offers hope for new growth, while Evenson shows us a situation in which new growth will be too misdirected to bear fruit.  Between the two of them, they offer powerful glimpses of the most hopeful and most hopeless aspects of life. In between, we have jokes about Lovecraftian gods having to share a hotel room.

Well! The New Weird certainly handled itself best across the board. Emma Bull shone while her fellow Tolkien types bumbled and bored. Team Lovecraft was sometimes powerful, sometimes cheesy, and sometimes racist, just like Lovecraft himself. By the way there's gonna be 6 more rounds of this, and then we'll know for sure what kind of fantasy literature is THE BEST. Can't wait.