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

From Best American Short Stories:

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

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

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

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

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

From Plays in One Act:

Heatstroke by James Purdy: 

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

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

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

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

From Interzone:

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

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

From Calling the Wind: 

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

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

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

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

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

From Outlaw Bible of American Fiction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round 16!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outlaws & In-laws 23

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

From Plays in One Act:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Interzone:

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

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

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

From Calling the Wind:

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

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

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

From Best American Short Stories:

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

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

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature: 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round 11!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Installment 22 Outlaws and In-laws

Little by little, we're nibbling our way through a batch of anthologies.

From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:

Taxi Driver by Paul Schrader. Excerpted scenes from the screenplay for the legendary film reveal that it's rich in novelistic interior descriptions that all the "How to write a screenplay on your lunch break" books I read in Tarantino's 90s anathematized. More interestingly, it's a sharp look at gun fetishization. Travis Bickle at the gun range struggles to withstand the kick from the Colt he's using, "as if each recoil from the giant gun was a direct attack on his masculinity." Asked about his Vietnam service, he says "They'd never get me to go back. They'd have to shoot me first." Yet he's not walking a path of peace; he's planning to shoot rather than be shot. One slippery slope of gun preoccupation; seeing everything in terms of shoot or be shot. Just ask those fearful, racist "gun couple" twerps. 

Thieves' Market by A. I. Bezzerides: Early morning at the harbor, Nick, a weary truck driver waits for the banks to open so he can cash a check. Meantime, Tex, a sex worker he desires, keeps him company. She makes a sad but strong case that she's better off in this line of work than she was as a low-paid and sexually harassed office worker; as an independent businessperson she sets her own terms. If you've ever had to stay awake all night in a humble part of town, you'll feel that desperate buzz in your head, and that unwholesome film on your skin, all over again, reading this. Don't trust her, Nick!

Dark Passage by David Goodis: a guy goes to an underground cosmetic surgeon to get a new face. Once anesthetized, he dreams of circus acrobatics, and the dream has a perfect stunner of a punchline. I want to have lunch with the surgeon; I want him to say lines like "I have my own method. I perfected it twelve years ago. It's based on the idea of calling a spade a spade. I don't monkey around" while I enjoy a club sandwich.

Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow: a memoir. Jazz clarinetist Mezzrow laments the takeover of the jazz performance scene by mobsters. Having lived around it, instead of seeing daydream versions of it on the screen, he has zero sentimentality about organized crime, and makes it clear that the scene was a place of legitimate terror. He writes with a rich purple prose that's like salt-and-vinegar nuts; compulsive. "Nobody was safe in this funky jungle... they'd put their dirty grabbers on the one good thing left on earth, our music, and sucked it down into the mud with them."

Angels of Catastrophe by Peter Plate: Durrutti, a drug enthusiast with a serious police problem, tries to score a little something to take the edge off from a pair of gender-nonconforming entrepreneurs, then gets very much stoned and has what is probably a real conversation with an associate who casually confesses to helping kill a cop, the death of whom is causing Durrutti's most pressing issues. The so-called friend refuses to offer any help or advice in this matter, insisting on an every-man-for-himself rugged individualism that is of no earthly use. 

Once more I was intrigued by compellingly sketched side characters: the drug-dealing couple are a sympathetic, though unsentimentalized, trans pairing, struggling along and being the gruff goddesses they know themselves to be. Author Plate makes the cis mistake of being fixated on trans peoples' genitals, but seems to want to give affirming representation.

The Man With the Golden Arm: a peek into the mind of a guilty police captain. What's he guilty about? We don't find out in this excerpt, but "guilt like a dark bird perched forever near, so bald and wingless and cold and old, preening its dirty feathers with an obscene beak." Sounds bad! The captain is 100% committed to the carceral state, but has only just realized that, by his worldview, he deserves to be incarcerated. Perhaps one value of guilt-inducing religions is that they inoculate members against such late-in-the-day realizations. Of course you're just as bad as everyone else!

The Big Hunger by John Fante: Someone in town is filching laundry off the drying line, and the protagonist finds himself sneaking after his gun when he realizes the villain is filching his wife's underwear. This time what ensues isn't hard-boiled crime, but good clean humor, fit for the Saturday Evening Post. A pleasant change of pace that still manages some real suspense, but I'm not sure what landed it in a volume with Outlaw in the title. 

The Asphalt Jungle by W. R. Burnett: A cop browbeats, and beats, and terrifies, a (100% guilty) conspirator into rolling on his crew. It seems to help that they know each other, and have had a cordial relationship heretofore; makes the abuse more of a shock, and the mook more pliable. The cop is a bully, but he's in total control of himself, never giving in to any urge to brutalize for the sick joy of it; keeping his foe guessing and way off balance. 

The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss: A getaway driver prepares for a big dangerous robbery, then does that robbery. He customizes the car, and functions as part of a tight-knit team. It's a grungy thrill ride, and a celebration of criminals with work ethics.

From Plays in One Act:

Prelude and Liebstod by Terrance McNally: (Content warning: suicide) A brilliant orchestra conductor oversees a performance of a Wagner song. Most of the play is his internal monologue, with interjections from such observers and participants as his wife; the singer; an instrumentalist; and a lustful fan. The conductor is a manic perfectionist, seeking orgiastic extremes of pleasure through exquisitely realized musical performance, and sexual adventurism. He's loveless, cruel, narcissistic and disgusted with life's inability to fulfill his cravings. He drives his performers to do their best work, but he's planned for this night to be his final achievement. In the time-honored fashion of overwrought opera and uninspired student writing, it ends with a surprise suicide. As doltish as I find shocker suicide endings, the play is a remarkable construction, with sick humor transitioning into near-tragic pathos and back again. The conductor's erotic memories go so crazily far, and his hopeless decadence is so unsustainable, that he's fascinating, even if, like me, you find him repellant, a conclusion that is by no means forced by the play. McNally (recently dead of Covid, sadly) lets you evaluate this flawed figure and consider whether it isn't better to be an easily satisfied mediocrity.  

Camp Cataract, adapted by Joseph McPhillips from a story by Jane Bowles: Harriet, difficult and anxious, retreats from her quarrelsome home life to a resort campground, on her family's dime. One of her sisters, Sadie, is a clueless daydreamer who wants Harriet back home, not because Harriet makes anything nicer, but because Sadie's sense of the fitness of things demands that family all in one place. Harriet's frantic navel-gazing monologues go down real smooth with Beryl, an adoring butch server at the camp cafeteria. Beryl tries to run interference when Sadie violates strict orders and shows up at the camp, trying feebly to woo Harriet back home so normal life, more lovely in Sadie's dreams than in reality, can resume. Bowle's work reminds me of Edward Albee and John Waters, so if you're interested in bringing a particularly acerbic variety of that sensibility to your local stage, consider this representation of bewildered lesbian hopelessness.

Waking Woman by Cassandra Medley: An African-American woman pays a visit to a recently widowed neighbor, but instead of offering more than cursory comfort, immediately proceeds to deliver a lengthy monologue about a local teen girl who is pregnant out of wedlock, thanks in large part to the girl's Mom raising the child without sexual information. A fond tribute to the storytelling prowess and complex social observations of African-American women, Waking Women is also an angry critique of the way abstinence-only education denies the chaotic complexity of human sexual urges, and causes more problems (and out-of-turn pregnancies) than it prevents. Religious fundamentalism is contrasted with a less doctrinaire and more accepting Christian faith. It doesn't play like a speech, but like a normal person who can't wait to tell us about a family tragedy in a comic mode. I bet it can really sing in performance.

From Calling the Wind:

Her Mother's Prayers on Fire by Don Belton: A mid-century female song-and-dance crew is poised for mass success, but it all may be about to shatter. Their success is due in part to talent and hard work, but also to criminal connections. Lifelong friendships are under strain, as the lead singer takes up with the group's new mobster manager, to the terror of her cohorts. Belton captures the complex ebb and flow of old friends who have worked and played together, and emotionally supported each other, for their entire lives, yet find circumstances testing their unity. The story is a hard stare at the way people can blow their lives up for a bad whim, or a bad man. 

Wings of the Dove by Hal Bennett: A great woman of the civil rights struggle is very old, enthusiastic about Reagan, and suspected to be not long for the world. A white preacher who was once active in civil rights alongside her, but has drifted into the big white church ghetto, comes a'calling, and invites himself to a dinner or three, reveling in soul food that he hasn't enjoyed in decades. 

I once reviewed a story called Orphan and the Mob by Julian Gough, and Gough's advice to writers was "don't copy Henry James; copy The Simpsons." I think both James and the Simpsons are worth having in your toolkit, but Hal Bennett was doing Simpsons-esque comedy back when the cartoon was a time-filler on Tracey Ullman. Sardonic characters bounce off one another, critiquing one another's folly without violating a sense of community; a community that vibrates with the energy of mutually assured mockery. I'm particularly fond of a lovably pretentious would-be chronicler who slips his own hobbyhorses into the mouths of others. In his account, people interrupt themselves to denounce The Color Purple with suspect timing and vigor. By the end of the story, the grand old woman is vigorously alive, announcing that "I have decided not to die after all," and the white preacher is still slurping at his fried chicken in a way that grosses everybody out.

From Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century:

Meneseteung by Alice Munro: In a nineteenth century Canadian frontier town, a woman writes pleasant poetry and enjoys a tentative courtship with a respectable businessman who doesn't really understand the poetry thing, but can speak learnedly about salt mining. The gossipy yet restrained local newspaper plays Greek chorus. 

I'm intrigued by the structure, which Munro divides into 6 discrete chapters:

1. The narrator describes a volume of 19th century poetry, with a biographical sketch of the poet.

2. A description, based upon contemporary newspaper accounts, of the rough and dusty frontier town in which the heroine lived.

3. An (imagined?) account of the heroine's chaste and diffident courtship by an entrepreneur in salt.

4. We learn about the courser side of town, which abuts the heroine's house. A distressing confrontation, possibly a crime. The owner of the salt mine comes to provide a harsh resolution, and attempts to deepen his acquaintance of the distressed poet.

5. Under the influence of nerve tonic, our heroine skips church and has a succession of visions which, Munro tells us, she does not mistake for reality--and that henceforth she will not mistake anything for reality. She is inspired to imagine, and begin planning, a richer kind of poem, less of the feminine motives and polite ironies which delineated her earlier verse; more of salt and terror and tonic visions.

6. A return to reportage from primary sources; specifically, the obituary column of the town paper. Tauntingly, hauntingly, we never learn if the poet ever wrote another poem corresponding to her new vision; only that she became the town eccentric.

The narrator's slippage from dutiful researcher to imaginative psychological storyteller, and back again, is a cunning trick Munro has used in other historical fictions, including Friend of my Youth, the first Munro story I ever read, which I cherish. Munro reconstructs entire lives with concision and intuition. 

From Interzone: The First Anthology:

Kitemaster by Keith Roberts: We're in an alternate version of our world, one where the military sets guards along a frontier border so that the demons don't get in. The way they do this is, they fly up on big kite apparatus and keep watch. So we observe a kite launching in the middle of a scary night storm. Meanwhile, the guy who runs the base hosts an authority figure on an inspection tour. Base commander gets drunk and reveals that he thinks the demons don't exist, and the whole story about demons is a sick hoax to keep people yoked to an authoritarian government. The inspection guy uses a secret radio broadcast linkup with the kite to reveal to the skeptical commander the strange secret of what the kite pilots are really up to...

This story finds the poetry of precise group activity and difficult mechanical operation by simultaneously describing actions in detail, and leaving connections between things loose, so we're unclear on exactly what's unfolding, but we get a keen sense of the atmosphere. There's also psychological insight; the base supervisor may hold the whole system in contempt, but he takes rightful pride in the diligence and skill of his team. This bifurcated job awareness is one I've observed and shared among working stiffs. Workers who strive for excellence, even when only they will notice, are too good for the common run of mass employers.

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

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

Round 7 (clang!). For Tolkien, it's Patricia A. McKillip with The Fellowship of the Dragon.

The Queen's harper/unworthy boyfriend has gone missing in a dragon's territory, so the Queen asks five childhood friends, each a tough, able woman, to bring him back. They must travel through a beautiful but  actively dangerous forest, and along the way the women face one sorcerous temptation after another. McKillip sets similar temptations for the reader; every page shines with gemlike sentences that lead one astray from the narrative, so inventive and lovely are they. My rule of thumb distinction between popular and literary fiction is that the former tries to plane every sentence so smooth that the reader glides easily to the next sentence, the next paragraph, never doubling back or pausing to ponder the meaning, or possible meanings, of a single strand of words. Literary fiction tends to require a more scrutinizing consideration of sentences as challenges; riddles and poems and koans embedded within the tapestry of the story. By this rule, McKillip is an unabashedly literary writer.

She is also an inventive and conscientious plotter, weaving fairy tale conceits and feminist friendship in a braid of antiquarian stylings and contemporary concerns. So far, this is my favorite story in this collection.

For Lovecraft, Kim Newman offers The Big Fish. I was aware that Newman writes fiction, but I knew him for his film criticism, generally centered on horror and arthouse film, two subsets with more overlap than is often supposed. He seems to have absorbed many lessons on vivid storytelling and fast-acting characterization from the flicker shows; The Big Fish is a gas.

During WWII, an LA detective is hired by a starlet to track down yet another crummy boyfriend. This one's a gangster who seems to have joined a cult. The cult will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lovecraft's Shadow Over Innsmouth, a tale about a town full of people who've bred with sea creatures, producing not beautiful mermaids but uncanny fish people. Lovecraft was writing about the alleged horrors of "miscegenation," because he was a racist twerp, but Newman begins his story with a sardonic denunciation of the USA's herding of Japanese-American people into camps (while letting Italian-American gangsters continue to strut around) that goes some way towards distancing Newman's story from Lovecraft's theme. For Newman, the horror that has imported itself from Innsmouth to LA is not intermarriage, but Dianetics. 

Newman writes a ripping yarn without over-relying on guys coming through the door with guns (though there is some of that). Also, he has the detective's subscription to legendary detective fiction magazine Black Mask get mixed up with equally legendary horror mag Weird Tales, in a cute acknowledgment of the genre-crossing going on in this story. Newman creates settings so vivid that the reader practically becomes an illustrator. I'll have to read more of Newman's fiction... after I read more McKillip.

For the New Weird, Kathe Koja offers The Neglected Garden.

Yet another lousy boyfriend tosses his girlfriend out, but she only goes so far as the backyard wire fence, where she ties herself to the broken rusty wire. She stays there, to the annoyance of the boyfriend, until she begins to change... the plant life merges with the catatonic woman, and she changes until she bears unexpected fruit.

I'm an old Swamp Thing enthusiast, so any story where people merge with plants has an allure for me. I'm also into anything where body horror becomes a means of emotional expression. This story nails the damage done by selfish men to the women who love them, and works as a revenge story that firewalls the woman from blame for the glorious horror which her wrath wreaks, in much the same was that BDSM submission fantasies permit the consideration of acts that one "mustn't" engage in.

VERDICT: Each of these stories is terrific, and I hate to pit them against each other in a cheap zero-sum game. But rules are rules. Here at But Don't Try To Touch Me, we take our responsibilities with the utmost seriousness.

I liked them all but I liked Fellowship Of the Dragon, with its animistic fairy tale setting and rambunctious ensemble, best, and since there is no distinction between my own personal preferences and Absolute Merit, Patricia A. McKillip wins Round 7 for the world's most famous philologist.

Is it already time for Round 8? Time flies in quarantine. 

For Tolkien, Harry Turtledove presents The Decoy Duck. Some (basically) Christian missionaries from (essentially) the Holy Roman Empire come to (more or less) Viking territory. The missionary's ace card is a handsome and devout young man who was abducted from this viking village as a child. His absolute devotion to his monotheistic faith fascinates the villagers and infuriates the chieftain, who permits the missionaries to live and do their thing more out of an inner core of decency than any desire to allow open discussion. The conflict between the chieftain and the missionary, both of whom are men of honor and virtue, is a conflict between two immiscible cultural value systems, and despite the mens' mutual, and earned, respect, something's gotta give, which means someone's gotta die. The conclusion feels inevitable, which does not lessen the tension that underlies the tale, and doesn't bring the tension to an end, since the conflict between the two men is by no means the final proxy war between two conflicting cultures.

I'm no expert, but Turtledove would probably make a formidable debater or lawyer; he crafts strong arguments for both sides of this conflict, and shows us the steps that might be taken to resolve the conflict; all that needs to happen is for someone to give up. There will be no brokering of a long-term accord. It's rather like a courtroom drama; compelling, but, with the exception of how things end, it never feels the way I want fantasy to feel; like a step into the unknown. I'm on the side of those who believe the jet fuel of fantasy is bold acts of imagination, but there's no room for such stuff in Turtledove's humane and carefully reasoned philosophical tale. What we get here is lucid, thoughtful historical fiction, and that's a good thing in its own way.

For Lovecraft, Joanna Russ writes I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket... But by God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph From Life!" The title is taken from the punchline of Lovecraft's story Pickman's Model, in which the big reveal is that an artist who paints monsters isn't indulging in flights of fancy, but is doing journalism. 

A kindhearted woman takes on the emotional labor of helping a young male coworker make an effort at romance with a bewitchingly glamorous woman. The young man needs help; he's socially clueless, discomfiting to everyone around him, helpless in matters of money or romance, yet arrogant (and foolish, thinking his passion for H. P. Lovecraft makes him superior to others). In short, he's me in the 90s, a fate I'd wish on no one. His compassionate coworker soon has cause to regret her offer to help the young man in his courtship, since he demands more and more of her time and attention. She doesn't quite understand his confused cries for help until it is much too late... The mysterious woman may be a localized expression of a cosmic power; perhaps she represents the temptation of cosmic horror literature to young people who can't quite hack it in the human sphere. People who opt out of life in favor of hikikomori consolations may be the true subject, here.

I've read enough vintage vampire stories to know that many of them are about dangerous lovers, in which the viewpoint character observes a friend being stolen away from their proper life by some wicked Other person. This is one of those, and it's fascinating in part because of Russ's reputation. Ask any midcentury SF fan or pro to describe Joanna Russ, and they'd say something like "bra-burning man-hater." That's certainly not the impression I get from this story. Compassion for the clumsy young man shines through,  even while diagnosing his shortcomings in clinical detail, and showing greater sympathy for the woman he ropes into holding his hand through his unwise courtship. It's left an open question whether or not the human race as a whole is better or worse off for the removal of unpleasant young men.

Speaking of people who seem to prefer tales of cosmic nihilism to life's more positive possibilities, The New Weird offers A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing, by Thomas Ligotti. A young man with a history of debilitating health problems is beguiled by the creepy muttering of his doctor... but did the doctor say anything? Was all that muttering coming out of the narrator's subconscious, and was it mere delusion that ascribed those words to the doctor? 

The young man finds his way to a town of strange folk parades and tight-lipped locals offering hostile hospitality. The conclusion is lavishly, yet icily, nasty. 

Ligotti takes the cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft and shears away the rubbery monsters and adventure tropes, which leaves stories of people having their minds shattered by direct perception of the dread hopelessness of existence. The first time I read one of his stories (in an anthology called 999) I was impressed. This is the 3rd or 4th I've read, and despite a surface narrative variety, a certain thematic sameness sets in. M. John Harrison also deals with enigmatic folk traditions that suggest something nasty beneath them, but where he leaves them as open signifiers, Ligotti weaponizes everything to the proving of his joyless point. He's the Jack Chick of cosmic nihilism, which is certainly a thing to behold.

VERDICT: Each of these stories is working to illustrate a philosophical conflict. Russ is the one who leaves the most play for ambiguity, and takes up the least of your time. She, and Lovecraft through her, get the laurel wreath for this round.

Round 9! For Tolkien, Nine Threads of Gold, by Andre Norton. Some kind of soldier-enforced tyranny is spreading terror throughout a fantasy kingdom, and a pack of children from various socioeconomic  backgrounds has taken refuge in an abandoned Hold. A sorcerous woman who grew up in the Hold makes her way back there, and becomes the children's caretaker. It soon becomes apparent that a malign magic threatens the Hold's inhabitants, and the woman must keep a careful watch over the children, while teaching them to work together for the good of all, and to settle differences in communal fashion, without sliding back into prejudices of their past lives.

It's a rich setup, and the Hold is full of hidden possibilities that the woman uncovers for the children. Norton has much to say about the challenges and rewards of raising children. Also, she uses em-dashes with defiant liberty.

I found it difficult to fully engage this story, but I think it's because I've never been responsible for children for more than a few hours, and I'd prefer to keep it that way. My own limited parameters are implicated in my muted reaction to this rapturously told and compassionate tale.

For Lovecraft (very much for him!) we have H. P. L. by Gahan Wilson. This story imagines Lovecraft having lived to an impressive old age and getting to enjoy the success which his stories achieved after his (in real life) early death. A young fan accepts an offer to visit Lovecraft (and his mysterious manservant), and a succession of startling discoveries follows. 

This story is quite fannish, and so eager to admire Lovecraft that it sidesteps the man's extravagant bigotries. I like to imagine (on the basis of a rueful late letter) that Lovecraft would have become more openminded and openhearted about human difference had he lived long enough, but this story takes things a bit too far in that direction, having Lovecraft speak out against xenophobia. It's a bit like the scene in the Annie musical that's a love letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt; had Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie, lived to see the show, he would have jumped onstage and decked the actor playing Roosevelt, so passionate was the cartoonist's hatred (often expressed in the comic strip) for that President's socialist ways. 

The ending of H. P. L. is even more goofily fannish, as the Forces of the Cosmos essentially lift Lovecraft bodily up to heaven in a Rapture of one. Cmon. Maybe it's going for camp, I dunno. Wilson does himself more favors when he permits some of his trademark macabre elements to pop up, as when the mysterious manservant laments his one-of-a-kind physical complaint...

For the New Weird, it's the genre's poster child, China Mieville, with Jack. Jack Half-A-Prayer was a legendary, flamboyant hero-of-the-people lawbreaker, and now that he's gone, the narrator wants you to know about the role said narrator played in helping Jack along the way. This is set in a world where criminals are punished with surreal surgeries and nonorganic grafts, and our carceral state (or Britain's) is implicated for the way we make felons carry their crimes for the rest of their lives. It's a smart satire, told in the guise of a penny dreadful filtered through a pub tale, and even though I guessed the punchline a page or two before the reveal, it was still satisfying, in the manner of a skillfully crafted joke with an implicating satirical point. Mieville comes off as a Leftist Roald Dahl, which is dandy, but I don't see much family resemblance to the more ambiguous worlds that the earlier tales in this anthology offer.

Verdict: I enjoyed Mieville's satirical cartoon most, but Norton's might be the richest, with its ensemble of diverse kids facing slippery magical enemies with the aid of a compassionate and wise volunteer caregiver. Still, as David Denby says, "trust pleasure," no matter how blinkered, solipsistic, or culturally overdetermined, so I'll take the easy way out and declare the New Weird the winner by a nose.

What a thrilling competition! Each of our three contestants won a round! Keep reading this blog for more pulse-pounding reviews of stories about monsters.