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.

Outlaws and Inlaws #19: Better Late than never? BEST Late FOREVER

I meant to stay timely with this series of short fiction anthology reviews, but life... got in the way. 


From Best American Short Stories:

Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver: Two men (one narrates, the other doesn't) are drying out together in a rehab house for alcoholism. As they swap stories it turns out that, surprise surprise, these guys have hurt a variety of women and children along the way. Some of the drama hinges on the ways the men do or don't attempt to repair these relationships, along with observations on the different people you meet in a detox facility (I could have read an entire second story about a would-be wheeler-dealer who treats the place like a business meet-and-greet). A startling betrayal rounds off the story, which is as hard-boiled as they come, without any guns or killings.

Janus by Ann Beattie: A realtor relies on a bowl to help her sell houses. It's an object of quiet beauty; not the sort of thing that announces its loveliness, but which adds grace and style wherever it is placed. Her relationship with the bowl seems like a small thing, at first, but over the course of 6 pages we learn that the bowl is a continuation of, or replacement for, a different relationship.

The fungibility of emotional energy from people to things or places is one of the most troubling themes in my life, and this story, which I've read several times now, is helping me confront that. Of course, it can be a good thing. A friend of mine once responded to a breakup by throwing himself into volunteerism, and was the point man in the construction of a ornamental garden. Years later, we saw photos of his former girlfriend from that breakup happily touring the garden, to which he replied "She has no idea the extent to which that garden is a monument to her." I think about that a lot.

Anyway, Beattie is one of the iconic New Yorker writers, and the legend of New Yorker stories is that the editor lops off the final paragraph to leave things ambiguous, but I like how this one ends with a completely effective O. Henry twist.


From Calling the Wind:

White Rat by Gayl Jones: A young African-American man, known as White Rat, looks white, and this genetic quirk scrambles his life. He kicks back against white people trying to claim him, but when his wife gives birth to a club-footed child, Rat takes out his frustrations with this situation by addressing wife and child in racist terms, as if he were an ofay after all. When he and his friends all get arrested, he's kept in a separate cell, and can't convince the cops that he's black. He uses drink to both relieve and exacerbate his problems.

Jones writes with sympathy for Rat and his family, but delights in peppering Rat's first-person narrative with comical malapropisms, until it's hard to know where fun ends and education shaming begins. Nonetheless, it's a vigorous example of vernacular prose.

Loimos by Edgar Nkose White: The title is apparently Greek for either a pestilence or a pestilential person. This story, told in epigrammatically descriptive first person, reads like a post-apocalyptic SF novel, and while there are dire hints that the nature of the plague ruining everything is a mysterious disease, racism and heroin are also implicated. The narrator unspools a grim account of making a life in the ghetto. Sex plays a large part, and be warned he's not exactly complementary to his multiple partners. He's sexist, although it's unclear whether the author is expressing his own poisoned view of women or is dramatizing the sexism that is a common expression of a low-expectations outlook. There's also a burst of antisemitism directed at merchants who leave town as soon as the business day is concluded. But none of this ugliness undermines the point, since the point is that ghetto life makes people twisted and dysfunctional. A slipstream story from before that term existed, this is a sorrowful and outraged view of life under urban racism that uses the expressive qualities of SF without knuckling under to genre plot troupes.


From Plays in One Act:

Linda Her by Harry Kondoleon: One of those "someone has a mid-life crisis/nervous breakdown and makes everybody else in her life miserable before doing something drastic" plays, and I don't mean this as a criticism. Carol is on vacation with her sleepy husband, clever daughter, and good-natured best friend. Over the course of about 15 minutes, Carol makes it clear that she feels trapped by mortality and banality, and wants out. She has no idea what she wants her life to be like, in part because, as she says to her husband, "Aren't you sick of me? I'm sick of me."

The other characters respond to this in a variety of plausible ways, but plausibility isn't gonna sooth Carol's anxiety. She probably needs medication, but the play ends with her bugging out, and the others trying to rewire their relationships to deal with this unexpected absence. Kondoleon doesn't put his thumb on the scales regarding where our sympathies should lie, which I appreciated. He gives us the latitude to consider each character's needs. 

I liked this play enough to look up the author, and found this terrific article which shed a lotta light on Kondoleon's influences and aesthetic (his Sylvia Plath fixation seems highly relevant, although there's a heaping helping of Tennessee Williams to it as well). Rest in peace, Harry.

Success by Arthur Kopit: Content warning: suicide. Let us turn from a sympathetic portrait of despair to a jokey one. Kopit occasionally writes plays that are pastiches of his peers (Bone-the-Fish is his variation on Mamet), which is odd given the infrequency of Kopit's output; why not deliver something more unique, if you're only going to emerge from your cave once or twice a decade? This short item is a despairing riff on Edward Albee's difficult, unloved The Man With Three Arms, in which a faded celebrity does a paid speech that goes bizarrely awry. In Kopit's version, the author of a popular and esteemed book has a complete meltdown and either commits, or hallucinates that he commits, suicide at a public reading. His meltdown is espresso-dark comedy, right up to the ending. One might hope that the author of Wings, a play that took dementia seriously, would handle suicide with similar consideration and restraint, but here Kopit's back in the daffy absurdist vein of his breakout Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You In the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad. Ending a story with a suicide is a conventional just-add-water way for short filmmakers etc. to bring borrowed gravitas to their cheap twist endings, and although Kopit's mournful setup/punchline is sharply crafted, it does feel a bit like he's defaulting to suicide because he couldn't come up with anything better.

While we're discussing Kopit: if you really want to cackle, seek out his last play, originally titled Y2K and later retitled BecauseHeCan. It's a clueless, unironic Reefer Madness take on a Dark Web Hacker who ruins a nice couple's life, and it's absurd in ways I don't think Kopit intended. An alarmist cautionary tale about technological dangers that Kopit doesn't really understand. Aficionados of camp (very much in the Sontagian vein of failed art) should track it down.


From Interzone:

The FLASH! Kid by Scott Bradfield: The son of an intolerable rich bigot and his forlorn, trashy wife amuses himself by harrying a stump full of termites, but he discovers a strange artifact in the core of the nest. Soon the boy is eating too much and bloating in a worrying fashion, while a shifty researcher tries to puzzle out what's happening.

Bradfield writes with comic panache, a bit like the comic SF collaborations of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and I'm a sucker for SF stories that explore puberty, disease, and aging through genre tropes (such as Alien, Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion...) but this one builds to a shaggy-dog rude joke of an ending that felt like a novelization of a Zap comic. The least rewarding story in this anthology so far, despite some pungent social satire.


 
From The Outlaw Bible:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: You may have read this in school, but at this point in his career Bradbury was bringing an elegance to his prose that SF mostly lacked, and it's worth revisiting his Sandburgian flow. The book-burners of the story are oddly gentle compared to real world tyrannies; Bradbury's firemen burn books while trying to spare people and things, although in this excerpt a book lover seizes the moral high ground by lighting a match and setting herself ablaze along with the books. A contemporary real life totalitarian regime would go ahead and burn people along with the books, then rely on spin doctors to justify everything they did.


The Lost by Jack Ketchum: The late Ketchum wrote horror stories that make me genuinely uncomfortable, because I'm never entirely sure where the author stood regarding the sadism of his villains and the sufferings of his protagonists. This harrowing excerpt of a novel inspired by a real life serial killer leads me to think he's on the victim's side... probably. He sticks with a victim's point of view, and builds sympathy for her even while seeming to revel in describing the most sickening cruelties. Ketchum knew what he liked.

Sales Pitch by Philip K. Dick: A robot barges in to a couples home and, in the course of doing a sales pitch for itself, smashes everything and terrorizes the humans with a level of dysfunctionality that was, like so much of Dick's writing, prescient. The disconnect between the banal sales pitch and the over-the-top slapstick of a towering robot crushing all your stuff is the core of the comic horror, and no one did comic horror quite like Dick; he was like Kafka with a black-and-white television. There's some dumb gender stuff (the woman's "breasts quiver(ed) with excitement...") but in Dick's nominal defense, he did a bunch of drugs, so some stupidity was bound to creep in.

The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker: an excerpt from the story that served as the source for Barker's brilliant movie Hellraiser. Fans of that film should check out the barmy prose version, which includes a bunch of elements that were left out of the film, or changed (the creature known to fans as Pinhead has a high feminine voice in the original, unlike the deep, menacing, masculine declamations of the film version). Unlike Ketchum, Barker makes a point of writing about horrors that cannot be imitated by halfwitted criminals, so, for example, his villains force their victims to have such acute sensitivity that they can smell everything really well. Horrible, when you think about it! And Barker makes you think about it.

Outlaws and Inlaws #18:Tales of Woe and Edgar Allen Poe

Shall we take a cook's tour of my latest reading? Oh yes, let's!

From Calling the Wind:

Soldiers by Ellease Southerland: A young man enlists for the Vietnam War so he can get that GI Bill and spare his mother the cost of college. She'd rather pay for college and be spared the loss of her son, but he's deaf to her tears. The tale is told in 4 pages of fragments, sometimes elegant, sometimes plainspoken, reflecting the young man's ability to code-switch (a teacher accuses him of plagiarizing a paper because it contains such advanced vocabulary, but the young man demonstrates that he knows the words, and shouldn't be evaluated purely on his casual conversational style).  He survives the war, but Southerland suggests how badly it's all going to work out for him. She gives us all the clues, and lets us figure out that his mother will die while he's away, and losing a hand is going to lead him into a morphine addiction. It's some of the deftest and loveliest storytelling I've enjoyed lately; as editor Charles Major dryly notes in Ms Southerland's bio note, "her satires and poems appear primarily in black periodicals."

Roselily by Alice Walker: A young African-American woman in a repressive small town marries a sophisticated Black Muslim guy from the big city, hoping he'll open her world up, but suspecting that he'll just replace one kind of repressiveness with another. I can't help wondering if Alan Moore read it once upon a time, because its clever framing device is reminiscent of the structuring gimmicks he would employ a decade later: each phrase from the "Speak now or forever hold your peace" portion of the marriage ceremony is paired with one of the bride's corresponding thoughts or memories in ironic juxtaposition. The tightness of the structure reinforces the bride's fear that she is bound, whichever way she goes in life, by gender and race in ways that will forever restrict her.

From Best American Short Stories:

Gesturing by John Updike: A marriage "consciously uncouples" so that both partners can spend more time with their lovers, but since they, with decades and children to their marriage's credit, know one another better than their lovers do, they tend to gravitate back to one another. We follow the man, who takes a lonely apartment overlooking a controversial new skyscraper that keeps dropping windowpanes. The man comes to think of the skyscraper as his lonely companion, a similarly promising yet disfunctional figure, and contemplates it often. Have you ever fixated upon some inanimate fixture of your life, and found layers of meaning and beauty in it that were part of some singular equation, you times the object of your contemplation? Updike renders just such a connection between the man and the building. His apartment's own windowpane is stable but has a nearly invisible message of love, "With this ring I thee wed," evidently scratched in the glass with a wedding ring by a previous tenant. It floats there tauntingly in the man's vision, flickering in and out of his awareness just as his relationships flicker in and out like uncertain candleflames.

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick: A woman and her two daughters, one of them a baby, are marched into a Nazi concentration camp. The 3 of them must share a shawl to keep warm. That shawl's going to be called upon to serve many aching needs. 

Nazi cruelty creates death and suffering even when it doesn't actively try to kill; terrible conditions are enough to ruin lives, and the threat of repressive violence prevents a mother from openly responding to a child's death. Everyone knows the death camps were monsterous and awful, but Ozick forces us to consider the particulars with vivid emotional immediacy and intensity. She writes with such terse beauty that we have some aesthetic cushioning, which makes it possible, and even desirable, to follow her woeful narrative to its conclusion.

From Plays in One Act: 

Prodigal Son by Garrison Keillor: The Prairie Home Companion auteur retells Jesus's parable of the young man who abandons his family for a life of dissolution, then returns, expecting to be treated as he deserves, but receiving loving forgiveness instead. Keillor's retelling employs a whimsical anachronistic style that will be instantly familiar to his fans, and in a surprising last move, ends the story with a hilarious tantrum from the virtuous brother who did everything right and received only token appreciation, compared to the prodigal's celebratory banquet. Still, this play is punctuated by some of the worst doggerel song lyrics ever published by an editor of Halprin's stature.

She Talks to Beethoven by Adrienne Kennedy: An African-American woman is in Ghana during a time of political unrest. Her husband has been kidnapped, and she's dealing with it by interacting with her imaginary friend, the composer Beethoven. She's fascinated by him and his work. This fits snugly into her multicultural artistic interests; like Countee Cullen, she's enriched by Europe without being Eurocentric. Her reimagining of Beethoven's life, and the friendship the two of them might have, is counterpointed by radio broadcasts about her husband's predicament, and performances of African poetry and music. It's a very rich stew, and I suspect it would be terribly challenging to pull off a production. There's lots of potentially deadly exposition, and transitions from one layer of reality to another. I'd love to see a richly imagined and finely controlled production, but keeping a dramatic energy coursing through it would be quite a hill to climb.

From Interzone:

The Cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe by Angela Carter: Carter's famous blend of Gothic Postmodernism puts Poe's mother in the spotlight, a position she would find familiar, since, according to this narrative essay, she was a traveling stage actor. Carter considers the effect that a theatrical mother might have had on Poe's understanding of women, love, and reality. The switch from person to performance; the costumes, wigs and greasepaint rewriting one's appearance; the nursing mother abruptly exiting, stage right.

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

Whoreson by Donald Goines: A streetwalker tutors her son, a teenage pimp aspirant, in the finer points of pimping. For example, never trust a woman, EVEN YOUR OWN MOM. Also, pimping your own mom has certain drawbacks. It can affect your social standing, and complicate familial relations. The story's written with a verve and directness that you will not find in this paragraph about it, so if you like stories about smart but woefully underprivileged people trying to make it on the street, you need to check out David Goines. I suspect some of the smarter gangsta rappers have highlighted copies of Goines' writing on their bookshelves. (He also wrote Never Die Alone, which I considered here.)

Shock Value by John Waters: The elder statesman of goony, cartoonish independent film spins (tall?) tales of his juvenile delinquency that will thrill anyone who has enjoyed his colorful, bratty movies. For someone like me this might as well be Conan the Barbarian-style wish-fulfillment adventure. The origins of The Filthiest People Alive start here!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers: A narrator returns to his home town of Chicago, "ghosts in pocket," haunted by the cold and the distant death of his parents and all the weirdness that scrubs up against you when you return to the old hometown after the distance of years. 

I've experienced something like that, since I returned to my hometown of Signal Mountain recently, for the first time in the 21st century, but it was a different experience because it was beautiful on the old hiking trail, and my parents are, thankfully, alive.

Anyway, since the protagonist's parents left their bodies to science, he imagines confronting the doctor who oversaw science's use of them, demanding to know, in a most unscientific way, what secrets the surgery unlocked. Grief and childhood memories and self-mockery and fantasies of self-aggrandizement ruin this guy's trip. Intense, long, lustrous sentences enact, as well as relate, the agonized obsessiveness that bedevils this guy.

Monkey Girl by Beth Lisick: a short excerpt about a young woman who grasps onto Chinese horoscopes to craft some focused identity for herself (year of the naughty Monkey) and her current (clever but gross, unreliable, invasive Rat) boyfriend. Her dissatisfaction (she prefers pretty much any other animal of the set) finds no solace in this superstitious solution, though. Bawdy and anxious.

Dogeaters by Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn: A boy is held hostage by his Uncle, who pimps the boy out and uses a guard dog to keep him in place while Uncle's away. Inch by inch, the boy tests an escape plan while, in unadorned, informational language, contemplating the boundaries of his imprisonment. Caution: although the dog doesn't get eaten (the title probably references some slur on the boy's (and author's) Philippine heritage) it meets a similarly grisly end. Doglover that one may be, though, the boy's horrible predicament makes this murder understandable, and it's unlikely that he'll lose many readers sympathy.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn: The children of a pair of circus owners beg for familiar family stories, and Mom and Dad are happy to oblige. The stories are horrifying tales of abuse, but presented as beloved tales that fill parents and children with delight. Dunn's cult novel encases the most grotesque body horror in equally grotesque sentimental narrative forms. It's an ironic attack on the misuses of storytelling to justify historical horrors, unless it's a plea for making do with the imperfect family one's got. Or both. Word on the street was that Tim Burton wanted to film it; he probably would have turned it into quaint circus kitsch with all its fangs pulled and replaced with artfully decayed, bent and broken joke teeth.

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft (Vs. The New Weird) Smackdown Supreme, Round #3

For those who came in late, this is a series in which we pit 2 leading lights of fantasy fiction against each other via their representatives in a pair of short story tribute anthologies. But a new challenger enters the ring, and it's The New Weird, edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer, an anthology celebrating fantasy which owes more to Mervyn Peake and British New Wave SF. Does this offer a more compelling vision of literary fantasy than do the shopworn legacies of JRR and HP?

Jousting for Tolkien, we have Robert Silverberg, with the story A Long Night's Vigil at the Temple.

In a distant time and place, the high priest of a temple questions his faith, but assumes that his religion (which centers around 3 gods who came to earth, then ascended back to the heavens) does people some good whether or not it's factual.

The temple is at least as ancient as the religion, and has buried floors that haven't been accessed in millennia. But one of the High Priest's cohorts (a custodian named Mericalis, resonant of America and miracles) discovers that would-be robbers have tried to tunnel into the temple's buried levels. Mericalis and the High Priest venture into these depths, and explore their way to a shocking discovery that you've probably already guessed. 

I'm all in for stories that explore the lost chambers of history in a simultaneously metaphorical and literal fashion, and Silverberg delivers it with the kind of suspenseful yet unhurried adventure that I've enjoyed ever since my first cave tour as a kid. His depiction of theological struggle is cogent but too close to contemporary therapy-speak for the setting. If you're going to propose a far-distant setting, then make it at least as unfamiliar as a trip to a country one's never visited. The priest could just as easily be a contemporary questioning Christian, and perhaps that's the point. 

He could also be a lifelong SF writer who doubts his legacy, a position Mr. Silverberg might understand.

The story ends with the priest discovering that his sense of mission as a clergyman is born anew from the discovery that his religion is built on a false narrative; with the founding myth upended, the faith's values become more essential, and the narrative can be rewritten to serve that end. This nicely complicates my rubric for twist endings: if I'd rather read a story which begins with the twist's premise, a twist ending story fails. O. Henry and Ambrose Beirce wrote famous examples of stories that pass this test; a lot of SF tales, given the genre's addiction to cheap twist endings, fail it. Long Night's Vigil occupies a nice in-between point: I though the twist of the priest's rekindled faith paid off, and I'd read a sequel that followed him from there.

Representing H. P. Lovecraft, we got Basil Copper with the story Shaft Number 247.

I've never heard of Mr. Copper, but apparently he published dozens of novels, a fact which should give any aspiring author hope; if he can make it, surely you can too.

Anyway, this story is set in an underground city that was built as a refuge for humanity, because the aboveground world is uninhabitable. 

OR IS IT?!?!?!

We aren't given any backstory; that's just how it is. But something may be trying to come in from above, or lure humans out.

All the characters are men, and like The Wind in the Willows, the story is so homosocial that it's ambiguously homosexual. Also, it seems to be a first draft; Copper's grammar is all over the place.

"He glanced incuriously at the man now, dapper and self-confident, his dark hair bent over the panel opposite, listening to Wainewright's handing-over report. Then he had adjusted the headphones and was sliding into the padded seat."

Which he is he? Is it the subject or the object who is dapper and self-confident? How does hair bend over a panel; is that supposed to mean that his dark-haired head is bending over the panel? Why do we switch from past tense to past perfect? Only Basil knows for sure.

Eventually I found myself giving in to the weird outsider art vibe of Copper's story, which, like much outsider art, is enigmatic in ways which may or may not be deliberate; the contours of the story may follow the contours of the author's reality tunnel in unplanned, uncrafted ways. The characters talk to each other, but have a near-autistic disconnect, and I can't tell if that's deliberate on the narrator's part, or an accidental byproduct. Copper's sloppy writing doesn't inspire much confidence that anything he does is deliberate or under his control. Nonetheless, the beguiling, almost psychedelic ending has an uncanny effect that I'm still puzzling over, weeks after reading it. 

The protagonist, inspired by a collegue's departure from this mysterious underground city, tries to escape. This turns into a fanciful, hallucinatory vision of heavenly delight, and the only appearance of femininity in the story, as a happy girl welcomes him to an Edenic paradise. But earlier in the story we've been given enough ominous yet uncertain hints about what may be happening outside to suggest that this vision is, indeed, only a hallucination, and perhaps a trap. Copper doesn't tip his hand, and an enigmatic quality hangs over the story, like a sphinx made out of old mittens.

And now, representing The New Weird, it's M. John Harrison with The Luck in the Head.

In this story, a man in a Gormenghastly city suffers from upsetting dreams and visions. A masked woman promises that he can be free of these visions... if he will assassinate Mammy Vooley, the peculiar leader of the city (who's not at all a grotesque amalgam of The Queen Mum and Maggie Thatcher. Not at all). 

I've read this story several times, and it never quite clicked with me. This time I fell in love with it, and the reason is that I read it in a noisy break room. With all the distractions, I was compelled to read each sentence again and again until I was sure I'd parsed it. That's the best way to handle Harrison, at least for me. On previous readings I'd been more casual about comprehending Harrison's willfully cryptic prose, which is no way to unlock the treasure within.

Harrison's approach differs from Silverberg's, who, in the tradition of popular writers, makes everything very clear and easily digestible. Not that Silverberg's work isn't sophisticated, but he doesn't want the reader to struggle with the basics of what's happening in his story. Harrison makes you work for every bit of comprehension; his prose tends toward the riddle, the koan. The total effect, though, conveys a story world that can't exist in the environment of straightforward prose; Harrison owes more to the modernist poets than to the fireside storytellers.

Harrison's peculiarities and ambiguities also differ from those of Copper, because it's abundantly clear that Harrison is in charge of his work, while Copper's work could very well be the product of an A.I. Although, in the photos I found online, Copper looks like Nabokov's stand-in, it's Harrison who is closer to the idiosyncratically precise and irritably demanding, yet magnificently rewarding, tradition of Nabokov.

The Verdict!

Like Copper, Harrison creates a peculiar, evasive, distant, enigmatic world which lingers. Like Silverberg, Harrison's Cleanth Brooksian urns are well wrought. Unlike Copper, Harrison doesn't write like a drunk teenager, and unlike Silverberg, Harrison tells a story about a far-distant land that actually feels foreign. Harrison's story also promises the most return on rereadings; Silverberg's story rolls out all its rewards on a first reading, and Basil's too clunky a craftsperson to make a return visit seem appetizing. For this reader, the choice is obvious.

If one insists on restricting the competition to the original binary terms, though, I believe that once again, Team Tolkien triumphs, on points rather than by a knockout. 

Next time I'll be reading stories by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Poppy Z. Brite, and Clive Barker, so anyone who's actually still reading this will wanna check that out.

Outlaws & Inlaws #17; TERF Nazis Must Die

Here at But Don't Try To Touch Me headquarters we have been overwhelmed by a variety of behind-the-scenes endeavors, but that hasn't stopped us from selecting a volume to take the place of Dangerous Visions, and that volume is Interzone, a collection of science fiction stories from a challenging British journal of the 80s. One story in, it's batting (with a cricket bat) a lot higher than Dangerous Visions did.

From Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

Diary of an Emotional Idiot by Maggie Estep: Our narrator, the receptionist at a S&M dungeon, tells us all about the desperate characters in her apartment building. There's a loudly foulmouthed single mom, yelling profanity at her equally foulmouthed kids; a forlorn stripper who can't believe the losers she dances for; a couple of speed freaks to class the place up; and a cheerful group of Japanese exchange students who enjoy the cavalcade of misbehavior as much as I do. Broke urban desperate crazy Americana. This is like candy to me. 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: Trigger warning for suicidal ideation.  Two women in a mental hospital try to bond over their common interest in suicide. Plath inspired generations of confessional writers, but she didn't merely spill her guts; she used her imagination to capture the strangeness of things. In this excerpt, the protagonist examines a succession of newspaper photographs, and David Lynch came inexorably to this reader's mind: "A dark, midnight picture of about a dozen moon-faced people in a wood. I thought the people at the end of the row looked queer and unusually short until I realized they were not people, but dogs."

Requiem For a Dream by Hubert Selby, Jr.: A TV obsessive named Sara Goldfarb gets invited to be a guest on a TV show. The sleazy pitchman who calls her up peddles a grotesque religion of fame, and Ms. Goldfarb's joy calls to mind the fervour for cheezy fame that fuels so much of our media now. One distinction is that Ms. Goldfarb never expected to gain such fame, while today the people who attend to the famous are often people who aspire, not always unrealistically, to join their ranks. Like the film version, it's as subtle as a fork in the eye, but there's some ambiguity about how much compassion the narrator has for poor Ms. Goldfarb, who gets mocked, but also inspires sorrowful sympathy.

 The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America by Michelle Tea: A young woman with abuse in her past and prostitution in her immediate future takes a respite in a desert town. She describes the double helix of beauty and threat which makes the desert landscape so tantalizing, yet so stable, an ironic oasis in her troubled life. A pensive, yet intense, saturated account of the rest one can find in between the bad passages of life.

In the City of Sleep by Wanda Coleman: During the Vietnam War, a woman gets a Dear Jane letter from her soldier fiance in which he admits to having a Vietnamese girlfriend, and "offers" his hometown sweetheart the freedom to find love elsewhere, since he doesn't want to be a "stumbling block" to her. The idea that their sweet love might be considered a stumbling block distresses her more than the infidelity does, and she takes refuge in sleeping all the time. When she does have to be awake, she processes and reprocesses the damaging assumptions her man unloaded in the letter; it's obvious that he was trying to let her down easy, but he was completely stupid about it (imagine!). As frail and becalmed as she may seem, there's the suggestion that her slumber and obsessive dissection of the letter are necessary bridges to the next phase of her life.

Complete by Patti Smith: Her 3rd brief appearance in this anthology. Smith remembers chafing against 50s Cold War culture, and finding meaning in the Dali Lama. Then Sri Lanka got conquered by China, and Smith was dumbfounded that no one around her seemed to care.

A Different Kind of Intimacy by Karen Finley: A familiarity with Finley's work is probably a prerequisite for reading this autobiographical statement. Finley was one of the National Endowment for the Arts grant recipients whose work so horrified Jesse Helms, and if you check out recordings of the work she was doing in the 80s, you'll understand why. Her monologues are like the Aristocrats joke played straight, with cruelty and sexual toxicity that might make William Burroughs leave the room. I've listened to about an hour of her performances from the time, and it left me wondering if she was... okay. In light of that, Different Kind of Intimacy is reassuring.  Finley presents herself as the product of a loving family that was troubled by racism (her mother was a mixed-race beauty, and her "exotic" appearance did her few favors in a white-bread town) and suicide. "My father's death gave me passion, an emotional indicator toward which to push the content of my work. It compelled me to take the unanswered grief, the terrible sadness that I lived with, and throw it at the world." Boy did it ever.

From Plays in One Act:

Am I Blue by Beth Henley: Henley is best known for her play Crimes of the Heart, but I am of the minority opinion that each of her plays is a treasure, and that she's sadly underappreciated. This one-act follows a sad frat boy (who's really not frat material, but doesn't know what kind of material he is) on a New Orleans "pleasure" trip, where an odd, whimsical, lonely girl shows up and takes charge of him. It might not have aged well given our collective impatience with Manic Pixy Dream Girl characters, but Henley's women don't exist only to help men; the girl's extroverted loneliness is a match for the boy's introverted loneliness; she tries to help them both. It's a bit like Tennessee Williams in a mellow, non-experimental mood, and has some wry observations about the weird gendered cultural expectations against which boys and girls must forever swim upstream.

Our Man in Madras by Gert Hofmann: A man in an office telephones a salesman in a troubled nation and tries to guide him through the process of maximizing profits in a war zone. The satire ain't subtle. Boss wants the salesman to keep on task even when dying from a direct hit. Some corporations certainly do try to stripmine us this completely, but they put enough layers between people to ensure that people don't have to enact such psychopathies directly. It's like they learned all the wrong lessons from the Milgram experiment; how to weaponize human willingness to passionlessly hurt one another in order to maximize profits. Same-day shipping available!

From Calling the Wind:


The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara: Bratty children from the projects just want to clown around and indulge themselves, but a sharp woman in their neighborhood insists that they gather with her for some summertime schooling. The kids rebel against nonrequired class time, so she takes them to the shops where the rich folk buy expensive treats. The kids learn, all right. 

The thesis is an awakening to economic inequality, but Bambara is a comic writer, and her brats are as vulgar and carnivalesque as any real brats you might have met or been. Their hard education in what it means to discover you're excluded from the upper echelons of prosperity squelches all that energy and vigor for easy pleasures; we are not assured that the childrens' bitter new knowledge will lead them to any happy ending.

The Story of a Scar by James Alan McPherson: In a doctor's waiting room, a man asks a woman intrusive questions about how she got that scar. She scolds him for his rudeness, but tells the story. It's a love triangle between her, a proud, bookish gentleman, and a sexy bad boy. Halfway through the story, the man in the waiting room thinks he's got it figured out, but she douses his priggish mansplaining and reveals something my younger self needed to understand; sometimes bad boys are good men, and sophisticates are easily wounded, and wounding, solipsists.

From Best American Short Stories:

Verona: A Young Woman Speaks by Harold Brodkey: A young woman remembers European family vacation in which her father tries to delight her with wonderful experiences. The narrator has a rhapsodic, romantic aesthetic, but clear-eyed observations on her parents' efforts to make everything be as enriching as possible Father is more attentive to his daughter than to his wife, and the wife's revenge, whether or not it is intended as such, is to forge a more meaningful relationship with the girl than the father can, by sharing the sublime with her. The sublime upstages the delightful; Brodkey's talespinning has elements of both.

A Silver Dish by Saul Bellow: We plunge into a nonlinear family history, rich with detail and incident. The center of the story's gravity is the relationship between a scuzzball con man and his son, who can't find his place between Dad's low-grade criminality and Mom's pious devotion to Christian righteousness. Dad tries to exploit his son's wholesome connections for selfish gain, while the son tries to keep everyone happy. Will father corrupt son? Will the son keep any, much less all, of his relationships going on a healthy basis? The telling unspools slowly, but Bellow creates a whole world of immigrant strategies for fitting in to a new homeland (including heartfelt religious conversion, and grifting).

From Interzone, Edited by John Clute, Colin Greenland and David Pringle: 

Oh Happy Day! by Geoff Ryman: Radical TERF antisex feminists have taken over the world, and they're herding almost everyone into death camps, said camps being attended by the gay male auxiliary. The story is entirely set in one of those camps, where an attractive new recruit, who may be dissembling about his sexuality, and is the only black man on the camp's staff, carefully makes the case that people matter more than inhumane Isms. 

Obviously this isn't a plausible scenario, and in the wrong hands would be a ludicrous anti-feminist/anti-gay screed. Ryman, who is far from anti-feminist or anti-gay, is wise in the ways of SF's ability to use outlandish premises to cast familiar subjects in fresh, revealing, light. He's also spent a lot of time in Cambodia, studying the way Pol Pot tried to remake the world at the expense of everyone and everything, which allows Ryman to render a human drama in a plausibly textured death camp setting. By imagining a world in which the priggish edge of '80s vanguard gender theory achieves absolute power, and corresponding absolute corruption, he critiques the defensive absolutism that can breed amongst the forsaken and burst out in ugly ways once the forsaken gain power. It's gripping and horrifying (Big trigger warnings for sexual abuse, murder, cruelty) but glitters with artful phrasing and keen-eyed characterization. An authentic Dangerous Vision, with Harlan Ellison nowhere in sight.

Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Smackdown Supreme, 2nd Round

Once more we try to ascertain which fan-favorite writer is greater, not by reading their work (too easy, too obvious!), but by reading tribute anthologies.

Playing for Lovecraft, we have Pickman's Modem by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

It's the 90s, internet access means dial-up, and the narrator notices that Howard Pickman, a lovably pugnacious and semi-literate message-board member, has acquired a newly sophisticated, if antiquarian, prose style. Pickman has a new modem of uncertain origin, and it appears to be rewriting his online interactions, casting Pickman in a more loquacious, but also foul-minded, mode. He's winning flame wars (is that phrase is still in use? This Gen X'er has no clue) with hair-raising insults that the narrator alludes to but, tastefully, does not detail. Just as Lovecraft shied away from describing the structuring terrors of his tales, Watt-Evans draws a curtain over the foulness which this modem's version of Grammerly imposes on Pickman's self-presentation.

The story makes me nostalgic for a time when this whole internet thing was thrillingly new and mysterious. People were just beginning to suspect the risks of being extremely online, and Watt-Evans uses fantasy to demonstrate the way the internet changes how we interact with the outside world.

On the other hand, having established this premise of a sinister internet agent twisting your words and presentation, the story's payoff is a bit flat. Pickman unplugs the modem but it continues to make calls to someone, then Pickman's last online posts are gibberish that will be familiar to anyone versed in Lovecraft, then Pickman was never seen again; stay off the internet, kids!

And in this corner, playing for Team Tolkien, Terry (Diskworld) Pratchett, gone too soon, presents Troll Bridge:

Cohen the barbarian, an elderly but still spry hero, guides his wisecracking horse to a bridge that may have a troll under it; the hero always wanted to prove his mettle against a troll, and is only just now getting around to it. It turns out that a family of trolls lives under this bridge, and the troll-man of the bridge-house is deeply honored to do battle against a hero of Cohen's stature. His wife, though, has other ideas. Her brothers have gotten out of traditional troll businesses and done very well for themselves in other lines of work that don't involve killing or dying; she wishes her husband would stop living in the past (the whole troll bridge thing is yesterday's papers) and make a proper living. Rather than battle, Cohen and the troll rhapsodize about heritage and keeping traditions alive. Class consciousness and elegiac Downton Abbey-style heritage nostalgia get an affectionate skewering, and all ends peacefully.

There's something very British about using fantasy races to address class, where an American would use them to talk about race. When I was in college I used to loiter in my English professors' offices and talk until they threw me out about how C. S. Lewis was totally right about everything (I no longer hold this view), and one of them inveighed against Lewis for racism. My professor believed that the Dufflepuds, a race of obsequiously dull-witted folk in Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader, were a colonialist caricature of native peoples. I believed, and still do, that they were a snobbish caricature of working-class Brits. 

ANYWAY! 

Both stories are comic in tone, and use fantastical tropes to engage real-world themes (the life-altering dangers of the internet, the fading of Britain's reassuring yet stifling class structure). Watt-Evan's story is charming, but the conclusion is more a petering out than an enrichment. Prachett's story has the witty dialogue for which he's renowned, but also has passages of pellucid beauty. As a romantic hymnist of the natural world, he has perhaps not received his due. And he digs into his theme with particular insight; Watt-Evans explores his subject in a more glancing fashion (as, admittedly, I do) but in his defense, his topic was brand new, while British culture has been processing the end of empire for generations, giving Prachett a head start.

Verdict: Watt-Evan's story is prescient, modestly, and he writes with a warm literacy and unforced comic sensibility that eludes most would-be comic fantastical writers. On the other hand, Pratchett's story was the first entry in the Tolkien Vs. Lovecraft Smackdown that filled me with admiration and gratitude. (There's a part of me that's horrified that I'm stooping to affective fallacy, but I think that gratitude is earned by the story's finely wrought wit and attention to life. Pratchett was no idle daydreamer, but he transmuted his awareness of life into finely wrought fantasy.)

Team Tolkien is 2-0. Team Lovecraft needs to get a rally going.