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 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.

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird Rounds 7, 8, & 9

Start here if you need a grounding in what I'm up to with this series. 

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.

Outlaws and In-laws #20: COVID-19 Edition

Since I'm not doing anything, why don't I get back to these short fiction anthologies?

From Best American Short Stories:

The Way We Live Now by Susan Sontag: An unnamed man has contracted an unnamed disease (which is clearly AIDS). His friends are the ensemble of the piece, and they are given an equal emphasis, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's all-over painting approach, which gave equal emphasis to each color in the painting. The friends' disparate efforts to surround the protagonist with love and support, while monitoring his health and healthcare, are shot through with friendship factions and personal neuroses around health and death. The detached narrator's reportage of intimate and anguished conversations is oddly reminiscent of group texts and chatrooms, though the story predates them both.

There's a brief discussion of sick peoples' right to be mean and unreasonable that perhaps grows from Sontag's own struggle with cancer, years earlier. I've read some of her published journals, and she became unusually misanthropic and harsh during a struggle with cancer, then mellowed out (for Sontag) once she was healthy again. 

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien: I've read this story 3 times now, and it never runs dry. The dialectic of the story is straightforward enough; a young Lieutenant in the middle of the Vietnam War is divided between his duty to the soldiers he leads, and his daydreamy yearning for some girl back home who just wants to be friends. The story shifts back and forth in time, and lets us know right away that at some point a soldier in the troop gets killed. The fact of the soldier's death is repeated like a drumbeat, a steady rhythm that replaces narrative uncertainty with destiny. O'Brien, like Sontag, has a warm (neither overheated nor icy) emotional temperature, and a controlled, Apollonian approach to narration. O'Brien is more prone to allusive loose ends; for example, the young Lieutenant's immediate response to his soldier getting shot and killed is to call in an air strike to level the nearby village. This is mentioned and forgotten. It's left to the reader to ponder the proportionality of this response.

As the title suggests, the story constantly itemizes things the soldiers carry, whether physical equipment or emotional baggage. This could be banal and cloying, but O'Brien cannily varies the frames of reference, building up an overwhelming sense of multiple, constant burdens, and how overwhelming they become in the aggregate.

From Calling the Wind:

The Education of Mingo by Charles Johnson: A country farmer named Moses buys a slave, a young man named Mingo. Moses doesn't really need a worker; he's just lonely, and wants a friend, or a son. He trys to mold Mingo as a son, but, in the traumatic removal from his African cultural setting, Mingo has become a blank slate, all too sensitive to his owner's real (as opposed to stated) views and values. Mingo becomes a lethal expression of Moses' id, and as neighbors start dying, Moses needs to decide what to do. 

Much is made of Mingo's intellectual subjugation to Moses, in ways that I'd find objectionable if it came from a white author, but Johnson drops subtle hints that Mingo's enactments of Moses' malevolent will may actually be a canny, willful rebellion. 

Anyway, Johnson gives good hillbilly, and inhabits 19th century white people with persuasive texture and insight.


Skat by Clarence Major: The editor of this extraordinary book offers an enigmatic short tale about a mixed-race couple taking a ride to Manhattan with a garrulous taxi driver. The story begins with some mystifying faux-exposition suggesting a whole world of unsettling backstory for the couple. Then the driver starts warning his passengers about the dangers of Manhattan, where bizarre superstitions and voodoo enslavement hold sway over everyone; at least, to hear him tell it. His account of widespread malevolence and superstition is checked and mated, however, when the African-American man of the couple offers a morsel of conspiratorial terror which he, apparently, believes to be true. Ordinary people terrifying each other by playing Can You Top This? with chilling conspiracy theories; Majors published this in 1979, well before the dawn of the internet as we know it today.

The significance of the title is never addressed. Scat singing, in which nonsense talk becomes musical pleasure? The nonsense the men of the story speak may well be a kind of musical entertainment. And, as they compete to spread dark rumors of Brooklyn and Manhattan, there's an element of fecal territory marking. 

From Outlaw Bible: 

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs: In this excerpt, a young man in a socialist country receives a summons to see Dr. Benway, a recurring Burroughs villain whom I can only ever imagine as Jack Palance, thanks to Cronenburg's cinematic tribute to the novel. Though Benway will only dance around the core of the situation, the young man is suspected of homosexuality, and subject to subtly degrading tests, with constant assurance that nothing is actually wrong. The way homophobia, even in nominally "accepting" cultures, undermines people is heightened by hallucinatory events which are revealed to be something more than one person's subjective reaction... Burroughs was brilliant at milking horror for comedy and vice versa, and at identifying the dislocations and irreality that burden outsiders in the postindustrial age.

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z Brite: A young man has a grotesque hallucinatory experience; the sink taps flow with blood and sperm, and his face is covered with lesions that grow as he stares at the bathroom mirror. Look, if you want a subtle evocation of AIDS, go read that Susan Sontag story. Brite, a writer of unimpeachable Goth credentials (see also) touches on the Romantic adoration for illness and death, then dismisses it with an angry insistence that untimely death not be sugar-coated.

The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon: a nebbish of a politician goes far with the help of his wife, a fixer who isn't above poisoning people and planting false stories to get her husband's career going in the right direction. She's a Borgia for the mid-Twentieth Century, and Condon's gleeful satirical voice leaves me wondering why he didn't just go after McCarthy directly, instead of inventing a wicked witch of a wife to lavish his wit upon. I suppose the point was to make McCarthy look even weaker by portraying him as dependent upon a woman's scheming. Since this sneering sexism led to a marvelous role for Angela Lansbury, I'll let it pass.

The Grifters by Jim Thompson: Lilly is one of Bo's most trusted employees but she's miscalculated, and now he's going to punish her. He's a hotheaded gangster, but she knows how to handle dangerous men. Their relationship shuttles from hot to cool, dangerous to protective, malevolent to respectful, lunatic to professional, and back. She's tough, and she can handle what he throws at her, but in the end we see the traumatized toll it all takes. Thompson respects Lilly, and shows her to be worthy of our sympathy.

The Big Kill by Mickey Spillane: A very different approach to strong criminal women, as Spillane gives us a concentrated dose of femme fatale with all the nuances, such as sympathetic qualities, filed off. Raymond Chandler took Dashiell Hammett's tough, poetic detective fiction and explored its humanistic potentialities (though often in a bigoted fashion) while Spillane made a fortune by jettisoning those thoughtful qualities and retaining only the concise violence and formalized intensity. What he sets out to do, he does very well. I've been reading pop novels lately, as a library volunteer who's curious about the books people check out, and I gotta say, a lot of best selling authors make Spillane look like Flaubert. He doesn't try to get away with as many shoddy shortcuts as the average pop writer.

From Plays in One Act:

Medusa's Tale by Carol S. Lashof: (Content warning: rape) A radio play, in dialogue and sound effects. Lashof gives voice to Medusa, letting her tell her own story. I don't know the source material well enough to evaluate how much Lashof found in classic literature and how much she invented, but the result of her labor is a tale of patriarchal cruelty. Poseidon rapes a young woman named Medusa in Athena's temple, and everybody blames the victim, even Athena, a warrior Goddess whom you might expect to stand up for violated young women. Medusa's paralyzing gaze isn't a weapon, it's a curse, a punishment for... well, for being raped. 

While the thematics illustrate contemporary feminist theory, the dialogue has a timeless stateliness and wit. I want more.

Can Can by Romulus Linney: North Carolina's pride brings us two stories of desperate romance. In one, a soldier on leave in France finds blissful, idealized (yet particularized and distinct) romance with a smart French girl. In the other story, a young bride-to-be from the moneyed set finds herself in love with a hard-living hillbilly woman. Neither story has anything to do with the other, except for a similar trajectory; Linney braids them together, and presents them simply. The four characters face us and tell their interlocked stories. While both stories come to sorrowful conclusions, the play ends with all four participants joyfully affirming that their romances were more than worth the sadness at the end.

A Life With No Joy In it by David Mamet: A man in his 50s and a woman in her 30s drink tea and converse; we are dropped into the middle of a conversation with no context. As he rants about the awfulness of postmodern art (a recurring Mamet bugaboo) and she rants about the awfulness of women's writing (another one) it becomes evident that they are reuniting. Family? Lovers? I'm not sure, but they've been reunited by a funeral, and the grief is giving them cause to contemplate the value of the lives they've been living, when they aren't railing against the rottenness of everyone around them. As polemical as it may be, though, Mamet allows the characters to exist as people, rather than functioning merely as mouthpieces, and as in his brilliantly evasive play Oleanna, different viewers will have differing opinions about these characters and their bitter judgements.

Chicks by Grace McKeaney: A kindergarten teacher loves her students dearly, but hungers for adult companionship. She decants all her thoughts and feelings, no matter how inappropriate, onto her charges (played, whether they like it or not, by the audience). It's a brilliantly funny and energetic portrayal of high-functioning loneliness, and a one-woman show that enlists the audience into becoming the supporting cast. McKeaney went on to write for Roseanne and St. Elsewhere. Today, Wikipedia is considering deleting her entry because she isn't notable. Clearly the route to notability isn't paved with brilliant theatre about lonely kindergarten teachers.

From Interzone:

After-Image by Malcolm Edwards: Nuclear war has began, but in one neighborhood of London the unleashing of all that destructive power has caused a strange, paradoxical event: the resident nuclear explosion is frozen in time, and with the right PPE, you can stroll partway into it and explore it as a location in space, rather than an event in time. This opportunity to examine the stages of nuclear destruction is a fine subject for an SF story, but Edwards ups the ante by making the protagonists engaging. One is anxiously contemplative and passive, while the other is an eccentric man of action who enlists his uneasy neighbor into an adventure. Yes, it's Gandalf and Bilbo, Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, except we don't get to follow them on an extended picaresque journey, because the explosion becomes kinetic again and kills everyone.

The story clarified, for this American, the particular frustration that superpowers threatening to destroy all life on earth present for people who aren't stakeholders in the superpowers but are stakeholders, however modestly, in life on earth.

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Vs. New Weird, Rounds 4 & 5

Start here:

Just because I haven't been producing timely posts about fantasy and horror fiction doesn't mean that I don't think about fantasy and horror fiction every day of my life, but I fear the core question of "who's strongest: the Lord of the Rings guy, the Cthulhu guy, or fantasy writers who also maybe read a little Virginia Woolf from time to time?" remains unanswered. Let's see if we can make some headway on that.

For round 4 of this smackdown, Tolkien's proxy, courtesy of the tribute anthology After the King, is Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, with the story The Dragon of Tollin. 

In a world divided into the North and the South, the Southern lands are concerned because they haven't heard from the North in a while. No trading ships, nothing. How could such a thing be? Nothing could possibly have gone wrong, because as everyone knows, the North has a giant tame dragon providing for its security. So the South sends a winged emissary to investigate; the emissary finds that all the North has been burned. Gee, why didn't the dragon protect it from whatever attacked? Soon, the emissary finds a fresh dragon egg, offering the promise of a new dragon to guard the South; then he finds the last survivor of the catastrophe, who happens to be the old dragon's trainer. The trainer tells the tale of how he found and trained the old dragon; how the dragon's power brought heat, light, and protection to the whole land; and how things went wrong.

On a first reading I found this story frustrating, despite Scarborough's charming descriptions of her magical kingdoms, because it seemed like she was employing all the usual twist-ending apparatus to build up to a big reveal that you've surely already guessed. Of course the guard dragon was the force that destroyed the North. On a second reading, I concluded that the author probably intended us to guess that from the start; the real reveal is that the King of the North pretty much allowed it to happen, because he indulged nuclear power/the military-industrial complex/the fossil fuel industry the dragon's growing appetite. A further reveal is that the emissary from the North just doesn't get it; he still wants to take the dragon egg back home, because he's convinced that his people can handle it more responsibly than did the North. Scarborough indicts politicians who endanger us all by building our societies around uncontrollably dangerous powers, but the critique is nestled within a lustrous fantasy world, presented with subdued wit and a prose style redolent of literary fairy tales, making the story more than a screed.

Representing H. P. Lovecraft, Poppy Z. Brite brings us His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood.

Two decadent young men in Louisiana gorge themselves on wicked pleasures (and Bride wishes she could see the look on your face when you read the nasty things she describes them doing) but can't seem to find pleasures rarified enough to overcome their ennui, until they get into graverobbing and make a private museum of the intriguing artifacts they pilfer from burial places. Eventually they swipe a voodoo artifact from a legendary voodoo priest. Then they go clubbing, and meet an enticing stranger they just gotta take home with them...

This story doesn't turn on unexpected plot twists, since stories about robbing a voodoo priest's grave can only turn out one way, but on being as scandalously Goth as possible. Brite's prose is a deep purple velvet pillow designed exclusively to bear sick thrills to a jaded audience. I doubt Lovecraft would have been comfortable with it, since the point of his stories is that everything is nasty and too much to bear and what is sex anyway.

For the New Weird, Clive Barker brings us his much-anthologized In the Hills, the Cities.

A young gay couple takes a road trip through Yugoslavia (it's the 80s). They fight all the way. Judd is a ranting political/historical obsessive; Mick thinks all that political narrative is deadly dull, preferring to revel in the beauty of European art while ignoring the cultural specificity from which it sprang. The only thing that binds them together is lust.

Then they stumble into a secretive rivalry between two ancient villages that threatens both men's understanding of the world. 

Barker takes his time describing the outrageous secret in the hills (and might have given it all a rethink if he'd known just how cruel the immanent future of Yugoslavia was destined to be), but he manages, by withholding crucial information for a good while, to help us believe in something that is frankly impossible. Giants, sport rivalries, folk traditions, even mecha anime wind together in a fashion that only a cunning storyteller could present as plausible. It's pretty amazing.

Rather like Midsommar, the film that I saw on the 4th of July and much preferred to fireworks, this story ends with one of the protagonists submerging into the folkways of an exotic backwoods European culture, and the other getting trampled. Collectivism and dreaminess lead to unity, fulfillment, and an end to loneliness; individualism and hardheadedness lead down to death. And yet the latter option has a valid critique of the former. Confusing, in summary, but quite clear in Barker's telling. If you've been assuming that Barker is just a gruesome schlockmeister, this story will change your mind.

Also, the final paragraph is weirdly soothing to me. Don't read it out of context to try and understand what I mean.

VERDICT?

Thus: Each story is charming enough to cushion the diagrammatic nature of their dialectics. Scarborough's critique of Big Power suggests that only conscientious individual action can save us from the worshipers of power (though it's becoming evident to me that collective action will be vital to that cause). Brite's loving depiction of appetite indulgence suggests that for the tragically hip, there is no cure but to drown in toxic temptation. Barker suggests that humanity's addiction to self-destructive rivalries has no cure, but that we need to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and rivalries may be our only option. Roll Tide!

 
Um, I liked the Barker best. It was certainly the least predictable and (though my spoiler avoidance makes it hard to make the case for this) the most multivalent. As far as the original Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft rivalry goes, I think this round might be a draw between two worthy but minor contenders.

Let's have Round 5 to make up for lost time.

For Tolkien, we have Poul and Karen Anderson with Faith.

So trolls build a creepy and impregnable fortress near a village, and abduct children. At first the troll invaders seem like a MAGA fantasy of evil immigrants stealing our way of life, but then the action shifts to inside the fortress and they start to seem more like ICE agents imprisoning kids and spinning bogus narratives about how it's for the kids' own good. The kids yearn to grow big enough to be released; the trolls only release children who've grown nice and tall and plump and meaty, whereupon the lucky urchin is led into a secret room, there's a big feast, and that kid is never seen again.

The Andersons are dab hands at atmospheric, clear and engrossing storytelling, and they bring all that to bear in a story that blends real sweetness and real nastiness in a marvelous update of unsanitized old fairy tales. The kids act like real children, with petty jealousies and earnest good intentions jostling around inside their noggins, along with yearnings that can't be fulfilled in captivity. The ending acknowledges trauma and plausible heroism, which genre fiction sometimes skirts around in pursuit of more blusterous thrills. 

(I've written about fantasy & SF mainstay Poul Anderson here.)

Lovecraft's representative is onetime North Carolina poet laureate, Fred Chappell, with The Adder.

Unlike the other tale of Chappell's that I've written about (Dagon, a depressive BDSM tone poem with fleeting Lovecraft references), this story is cheerful, comic, and concerned with conventional storytelling imperatives like suspense. The narrator and his chummy Uncle are rare book dealers (their affectionate relationship adds a lot of sunshine to the tone, very much in contrast to Lovecraft's paranoia), and they have to handle a copy of that wicked occult book, the Necronomicon, with particular care. It turns out that you can't stack the Necronomicon with other books, or it will start to warp the text of those books, polluting not only the particular copies it touches, but all editions, worldwide. Chappell has fun detourning Milton's poetry many different ways; the story is as much an essay on modern poetic prankster play as it is a suspense story about how they'll try to restore Milton's text. Chappell mixes highbrow formalism and middle-lowbrow genre fun. 

The New Weird gives us Crossing Into Cambodia by Michael "the Elric Guy" Moorcock.

This story (dedicated to Isaac Babel) is set in an alternate version of our world where Russian Cassock Calvary are fighting their way through Cambodia as part of a Vietnam war, with the dubious assistance of a functionary from Moscow who narrates in precise, distanced language that grows cautiously poetic as it struggles to articulate the overwhelming nature of war. 

Put a big content warning on this story for abuses of all kinds. It's demonstrated that in times of extreme duress, people will do anything to survive. This is presented in a calm, Apollonian fashion, but the content punches through the glassy style and insists that we consider the horror and desperation that flows through human history; this may be an imaginary story as to its particulars, but it's built from the brick and mortar of demonstrable human depravity. Everyone they meet knuckles under, and the Cossacks have strict codes of honor that don't prevent them from doing terrible things to innocent people; quite the opposite. They rape women and slaughter men, not because they want to, but because it's just the done thing in war, and they must keep up the standards. Horrible.

The story ends with a confrontation between barbarian courage and modern technological innovations in mass murder, as the Cossacks charge into the wake of a mushroom cloud, refusing to believe the wimpish pleadings of the narrator, and all his Poindextering about "radiation" and whatever. Old-fashioned warmongering and newfangled nuking collide, but not before uncounted villagers have been violated.

Yet Moorcock's background as a spinner of thrilling fantasy adventure stories enlivens multiple set pieces, as the Cossacks ford a river and journey through war-ripped deserts and jungles. Moorcock brings out the beauty of the landscape and the fascination of unfamiliar lands and sensations. This runs the risk of making war seem a grand adventure, but his unflinching gaze upon atrocity after atrocity saves the story from such moral folly. 

What of the VERDICT?!

All are fine. Moorcock's nasty slice of proto-New Weird hit me the hardest. It uses the craft chops of pulpy adventure narrative to rub our noses in the moral sepsis of war. It's full of surprises, unexpected beauty, and even more unexpected monstrosity. 

But by the terms of the original Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft setup, I'm inclined to take the Anderson's tale of babes in the bad woods over Chappell's lark about poetic parody; perhaps it's because I've always loved Babes in the Woods stories, or perhaps it's because I subscribe to Poetry magazine, which is so full of twisty nasty parodic poetry that Chappell's version seems like the training wheels version.  

So far science demonstrates that the New Weird wins every throw against the acolytes of Tolkien and Lovecraft. But there's more to come, and the trad brands of fantasy will have many opportunities to catch up.