Outlaws and In-laws Installment the 21-eth: Special Centering African-American Voices installment

Instead of the usual round-robin peeks into various short fiction anthologies, this time I'm only reading stories from Calling the Wind, an incredible selection of African-American fiction assembled by Clarence Majors.

Now is the Time by Cecil M. Brown: Jonah, a bookish aspiring standup comic, goes to the mansion of his friend and idol, a genius celebrity comic named Billy. Are they really friends? Sometimes they seem to have an equitability to their interactions, but Jonah's worshipfulness gives them more of a Boswell and Johnson vibe. That's a reference that Jonah would instantly get, and Billy wouldn't, but Jonah's thoughtful and academic approach to comedy hasn't served him well in his efforts to actually do professional standup; he's failing and he knows it, which is why he's come to the master. He needs to know how to tap into the real energy of great comedy.

Billy admires Jonah's book smarts, but has deeper insight into people, which is crucial to his success; he can figure out what makes the audience tick, and use that insight to work with them, bringing them around to hilarity. He's also a great mentor, guiding Jonah with compassion, clarity, and tough love. Billy's got his own problem, though, in the person of Tina, his beautiful white girlfriend who pitches a bratty tantrum that only goes further over the top as the story continues. Billy's balance and Tina's lunacy war away at one another as Jonah hunkers down; he's just here for affirmation and comedy tips, lady, don't yell at him! 

My only quibbles with this wonderfully engaging story are that the author, who may have taken himself as the model for Jonah, never gives us a persuasive glimpse of Billy's comedic power, and that he has a tendency to slip into redundancy, as though he fears he hasn't quite made his point, and needs to try again. Both Jonahlike tendencies. I'm quite fond of these characters.

Damballah by John Edgar Wideman: In the antebellum South, an enslaved man known as Orion is torn between his recollections of Africa and his life in the States. He's on a different wavelength from plantation culture, compelled by remembered words, beliefs, and practices, but everyone around him, whether white or black, mistakes his behavior for madness. A boy hears Orion invoke Damballah while catching fish, and is fascinated. He asks a Christianized enslaved woman about Damballah, and she punishes him for this pagan error. But the boy senses that the word has power that he needs. 

The hypocrisy and imperialism of the enslaver (who constantly flatters himself for being a great Christian, but also rapes women) perceives Orion's steadfastness as defiance, and cannot abide it. The murderous cruelty that results will be no surprise to anyone who's noticed history or the news, but the boy will retain the lessons of Damballah. It's a story of white supremacy being horribly cruel and murderous, but also a story of resistance, linked to cultural memory and defiance of colonialist culture. 

This story resonated with several others in this Calling the Wind, but I'd highlight its connections to The Ingrate, with an enslaver who thinks he's a wronged exemplar of righteousness, and The Education of Mingo, in which an enslaved man is caught between African and American frames of reference, with transgressive, liberatory, and catastrophic results.

Kiswana Browne by Gloria Naylor: Kiswana is a young woman out on her own for the first time, with a cheap apartment in a scruffy part of the city. Her wealthy and proud mother comes to give the place the white-glove treatment, and really tries to get her daughter to go back to being Melanie. Although this story is from the 80s, it replicates current tensions between liberals and the Left. Kiswana is all in for identity politics and uncompromising demands; her mom is an Obama style incrementalist. Naylor has sympathy and love for both of them, but comes down on Mom's side, regarding Kiswana as admirable but naive. Readers may judge for themselves. Anyway, while this might be the third story in a row to feature a woman as a killjoy, it's the first to suggest that the woman in question has a point, and the first to ace the Bechdel test.

"Recitatif" by Toni Morrison: Two girls, one black and one white, befriend one another in an orphanage. (While they're there, a woman who works in the kitchen falls... or was she pushed?) They go separate ways, but meet again at various stages of life. The white girl gets borne aloft on a cloud of white privilege, while the black girl has a more rigorous path. Things get contentious between the two women, as when they join opposite sides of a busing protest/counterprotest, and one of them keeps making signs that are nothing but sick burns on the other one; shades of online discourse. 

Eventually their ongoing reminiscences/arguments turn on the subject of that kitchen worker's fall, and a Rashomon/Marienbadian question about whether it was an accident or a crime; a crime in which one of the girls was implicated. Morrison doesn't go the perfectly respectable New Yorkerish route of leaving it entirely ambiguous, though; let's just say white people have a bad habit of recounting history in ways that sooth white people.

One fascinating irony; in the 60s the two former friends bump into each other at a truck stop, and the white lady doesn't want to be seen talking to the black lady, because she doesn't think race mixing is socially acceptable. Where are she and her white boyfriends going? To (allegedly) hang out with Jimi Hendrix. 

Morrison gives us a cutaway view of mid-century racial complexity that isn't entirely gloomy or sunny. The structure reminded me of Alice Munro, another legendary author who frequently uses core samples of a life to tell an expansive story in short form. Apparently this was Morrison's only published short story? It's a more plainspoken prose than some of her more mythopoetic books, and an all-too-timely take on the complexities of interracial friendships in the USA.

Girl by Jamaica Kinkaide: A flash fiction, this is mostly a quick survey of the kinds of advice a woman in the West Indies gives a girl. Lots of domestic wisdom, but also constant accusations regarding the girl's inherent "slut" nature, as well as some family planning tips  The girl is permitted two brief replies, neither of them the last word.

Chitterling by Henry Van Dyke: A rich white lady, who earns her money as a slumlord, takes a sad and shy black child under her wing and tries to Pygmalion some high culture into him. He's uncertain about all this, but the highfalutin' places she takes him are more pleasant than his crummy homelife (which is crummy in part because of the shabbiness of the building, which she owns). Will she instill in him an appreciation for opera and escargot? Does she actually like opera and escargot, or does she only endure them as lifestyle markers?

There's a lot happening here. There's a potent critique of well-meaning white attempts to uplift the less fortunate (all while maintaining and profiting from those ill fortunes). The woman's loneliness is a powerful factor in the cautious social dance between the two partners, and the cultural gulf between them ensures that this relationship can't last forever. 

In a brief coda, the narrator, who is the adult version of the boy, acknowledges that he has developed a taste for opera and escargot.

Jesus and Fat Tuesday by Colleen J. McElroy: A thoughtful third-shift orderly in a New Orleans hospital puts up with an ensemble of difficult companions. There's his Cajun coworker, who is friendly but dumb, full of bad schemes and soft bigotry. Then there's Maggie, a wayward drunk white woman, yearning for God, yearning for God to be kinder, yearning to share a bellyful of tales about the life that had led her, and would probably lead anyone, to delirium. Finally, a surprise appearance from the orderly's estranged sister, with bad news from home. Our protagonist is surrounded by sorrows, trying to help achieve some equilibrium without letting desperate people and hostile bigots drag him down.

The World of Rosie Polk by Ann Allen Shockley: Rosie and her little boy are part of a crew of migrant farm workers, traveling in the back of a mean man's truck from one farm to another, picking produce in the hot sun. They toil all day, live in crummy quarters, and the boss, who does the shopping, keeps tabs on how much the workers owe him. Guess what? No matter how much or how little you order from his grocery trips, you'll be in deep debt to him until you're dead. He's got it all worked out in his little notebook.

In other words, the crew members are, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

But on one job, which doesn't seem like it'll be any better than the others, there's a man living and working on the property who is strong and kind, and takes a liking to Rosie and her son. Will their makeshift romance lead to a happy ending, an escape from the cycle of toil and humiliation?

This story gave me flashbacks to temp jobs I had in my student summer days, grinding toil in the hot sun. Get me out! And get Rosie and her son out, too!

Mali is Very Dangerous by Reginald McKnight: This is a perfect companion piece to the story Lindsay and the Red City Blues by Joe Haldeman, reviewed here. Both are stories about a westerner in a culture shocking eastern land (Senegal, in this case) and following, against his better judgement, a shady tour guide/pimp/con man. This version is less lethal and arguably less xenophobic, but just as unsettling, with a punch line that I didn't see coming. The guide tries to sell the visitor a magical protection; is it for real? Hmm. Suspenseful and twisty. Stay home and read this story instead of going to dangerous places.

Tolkien Vs Lovecraft Vs New Weird, Round 6

You got your High Fantasy, written by people who take inspiration from Tolkien. You got your cosmic horror, written by people who take inspiration from Lovecraft. You got your weird fantasy, written by people who take inspiration from the Burroughs Brothers, Edgar Rice and William. As longtime friends of the blog know, I am weighing the merits of each subgenre by pitting stories from 3 anthologies against each other. Whee!

Jousting for Tolkien, we got John Brunner, whom I've never read before but is known for eco-disaster SF like Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, with In the Season of the Dressing of the Wells.

Ernest Peake (related to Mervyn?), a shell-shocked veteran of World War One, returns to Britain. One of the gentry, he moves to his Aunt's manor, which she runs with cruel, hypocritical religious mania. The locals are sweet working folk who blend a much gentler piety with pagan holdovers aplenty, and want to resurrect a lightly Christianized tradition: ceremonially placing crudely crafted but vigorously conceived narrative illustrations over the three wells in town, in honor of a never-named goddess of the waters. 

The idea of a spiritual Feminine hovers over the cruel Aunt, but also over Alice, the bold and lovely daughter of the vicar. She befriends our hero and helps him rediscover his artistic and heroic courage. The story is full of contrasting pairings: male and female; Christian and pagan; compassionate faith and judgmental religiosity; working class and nobility; fire and water. Many of these are resolved with syncretic open-mindedness, and Brunner's attentiveness to characterization creates a charming village where I'd be delighted to spend much more time.

Problem: The Bad Woman is old and fat and always mean. The Good Woman is young and beautiful and always kind. C'mon. 

Nevertheless, the protagonists are tantalizing characters. Maybe Ernest goes from traumatized veteran to romantically successful hero of the town
with Tinseltown implausibility, and Alice may be impossibly flawless (she's smart and thoughtful and beautiful and brave and supportive and...) but they think through all the issues before them in ways that allow Brunner to convey the value of thinking, and talking, through the ramifications of life's conflicts as fully as one can, prior to taking necessary action.

Oh by the way, this isn't a fantasy story, not really. Its engagement with paganism is fantasy adjacent, and it plays with syncretism in imaginatively engaged fashion, but nothing in it is outside the bounds of "mundane" reality. It's a celebration of reality's vibrancy, and an illustration of how to infuse life with meaning, even when one has been damaged by trauma. 

For Lovecraft, we have Fat Face by Michael Shea.

Oh man, I read this story when I was a teen. I was very not ready. It has lingered in the back of mind like a troubling dream since then. I'm glad I get to stare the dream down as an adult.

Patti is a Hollywood streetwalker, and has an inherent unstoppable optimism that compels her to  seek community in her environs. Her goodwill towards everyone masks the thin, circumstantial and commercial nature of the relationships she and her "community" of local businesspeople have with one another. But Patti's optimism doesn't entirely blind her to the scalding dangers of her job. Occasionally, she has uncanny visions of Bad Things that turn out to be prophetic. 

She has a friendly crush on an often-seen but never met businessman known on the street only as Fat Face. As Patti works her way closer and closer to Fat Face, upsetting things start happening around her. Is it the usual dangers of a streetwalker's life, or are there something darker happening?

Problem: the story revels in nasty hilarity over the girth and physical problems of various characters. Shea is as unkind to heavy and disabled people as Lovecraft is to anyone who isn't a goy ofay.

On the (considerable) positive side of the equation, Shea shows us the world around his sweet, tragic heroine with lustrous beauty that keeps the story from being a slog; there are absurd, even silly, touches that exacerbate a dread that grows like a fungus. This sweet-and-sour blend of tones leads to  a truly absurd climax; a sick melding of moronic silliness and ghastly tragedy that explains why my teenage self found it indistinguishable from a horrible dream. 

For The New Weird, we have The Braining of Mother Lamprey by Simon Ings.

A young wizard's apprentice tries to solve the titular murder, and uncovers a terrifying plot that presages today's hacking and surveillance threats. Of all the stories in the New Weird anthology that I've read so far, this is the first from an author with whom I was unfamiliar, and the story that was most comfortable with being genre fantasy, as distinct from fantastical literature. You got enough wizards, magic, and oracles for a Mercedes Lackey book. The prose is lush with sentences like "He stepped into the shade of an ornate iron-worked portico, and reached for the heavy brass knocker, fashioned in the shape of a human jawbone." That's genre fantasy to a fault.

Unlike some but not all popular fantasy, though, Ings soaks his tale in humor straight out of Zap Comics. Poop and vomit keep springing to life, and children are born feral, with biting fangs. 

Problem: a male character becomes magically infused with a feminine personality, and the contrast is played for hacky transphobic comedy. 

The climax turns on a man telling a woman to have weaponized sex with the villain. This is the second story I've reviewed for this blog with that distasteful premise (The first was Vengeance Is by Theodore Sturgeon), although this one at least gestures towards the traumatizing, inexcusable nature of such a thing. The tale has some lovely writing and imaginative touches throughout (oracles are permanently pregnant; the aging children inside their distended bodies whisper prophecies to them) that go some way toward making up for the groaner punchline, which SUUUUUUX.

Verdict! At last, the New Weird installment is my least favorite. I liked the other two tales so much that I'm puzzled as to which deserves the victory. Well, I love the complex dialectic and cozy mis en scene of Brunner's story, but it sets up a believably debilitating trauma only to have the hero shuck that PTSD like an old coat. I somewhat prefer the scalding, ironized yet heartfelt nightmare Shea gives us, so Fat Face wins the day. It's real gross and scary. Yay!

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.