Bear and His Daughter, by Robert Stone (1997) E

Date read: 2.13.10
Book from: Personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

Bear and His Daughter is a collection of enormously depressing short stories about unhappy people with unhappy pasts and, frequently, drug dependencies. There’s a washed-up poet in Mexico trying to escape his need for the validation of his strung-out friends as they hustle him up the side of a volcano on a putative spiritual quest (“Porque no Tiene, Porque le Falta”); two war veterans struggling with fear and confusion (“Absence of Mercy” and “Helping”); a trepidatious drug-runner (“Under the Pitons”); a hippie mom who has an unnerving encounter with a dolphin at an aquarium (“Aquarius Obscured”); and a widowed woman who channels her grief and anger into macabre nighttime undertakings on behalf of the anti-abortion movement (“Miserere”). Oh, and another washed-up poet, a relapsed alcoholic taking a cross-country trip that draws him closer and closer to his estranged daughter, an erratic, poetical junkie and park ranger who spins myths about the caves where she gives tours (“Bear and His Daughter”).

All told, there’s a lot of rage and fear and aimlessness and rejection of meaning or acceptance of the lack thereof, and the stories end in senseless fistfights on subway platforms or gunshots or suicides or drowning or people otherwise hurting themselves and others. BUT for all that, I did enjoy (…not quite the right word) reading it. Stone delineates his characters’ psychology with finesse, and I was a little in awe of his prose: it’s incredibly lean and stripped-down, with descriptions, particularly of landscapes and seascapes, that are piercingly vivid in their concision. There’s a kind of architectural purity to his writing, coupled with an intense attention to details of setting and sensation.

Continue reading Bear and His Daughter, by Robert Stone (1997) E

BBCF: Relationships II

[Sorry for the lateness – apparently I specialize in redefining “Friday.”]

Oh small presses, sometimes (frequently) I just don’t know what you were thinking. So far I’ve tried to stay away from small-small-press covers because they do what they do under so many constraints, but sometimes – yeah, I just really don’t know what they were thinking. According to the publisher, this is “a collection of seven stories about relationships, loving and passionate, thought-provoking and inspiring. Some verge into the familiar Anthony territory of fantasy and science fiction, where others focus on the eroticism of contemporary life, proving that love has many facets.”

Piers Anthony - Relationships II

Apparently one of love’s facets is reenactment of bondage scenarios with Parcheesi gamepieces after a few hits of acid…?

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Bad Book Covers Friday Archive
BBCF: Birth of the Firebringer
BBCF: The Saga of Recluce
BBCF: Moonsinger’s Friends
BBCF: The Alphabet Mysteries

BBCF: Birth of the Firebringer

Foreign-language editions of fantasy novels tend to be particularly fertile grounds for weird book covers. And man, I love many a Scandinavian illustrator, but their covers also tend to be the loopiest among European editions that I’ve seen. Here’s the Danish paperback cover of Meredith Ann Pierce’s Birth of the Firebringer (which is the first book in a childhood-favorite trilogy, so this is another case in which I can vouch for the cover being accurate in its details, yet not… shall we say, entirely representative of the book as a whole):

Meredith Ann Pierce - Birth of the Firebringer, second Danish edition

50% cute, 50% acid-trip unhinged. I don’t think I want to be friends with these unicorns – they look like they’d shake me down for my lunch money, then threaten to cut me if I told.

Yet at the same time, I kind of want a t-shirt with them on it.

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Bad Book Covers Friday Archive
BBCF: The Saga of Recluce
BBCF: Moonsinger’s Friends
BBCF: The Alphabet Mysteries
BBCF: Diamond Star

BBCF: The Saga of Recluce

Apologies for actually missing Friday – it’s been a long week. To make up for it, for this week’s Bad Book Cover Friday, I’m covering (har [?]) a series that Kakaner has been begging me to do pretty much since the beginning – L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s The Saga of Recluce.

These covers actually work the best without much commentary, so prepare for some scrolling –

L. E. Modesitt - Mage-Guard of Hamor

Continue reading BBCF: The Saga of Recluce

“Brief Candle,” by Jason K. Chapman (2009) E

Date read: 11.15.09
Read from: Clarkesworld #38
Reviewer: Emera

Jason Chapman’s “Brief Candle” is a clever, winning tale of an unpreposessing sanitation robot onboard an imperiled ship. In an AI-fueled homage to Flowers for Algernon (down to the name of the protagonist), the robot finds himself taking on much more responsibility than, literally, he could have ever imagined. It’s a breezily entertaining story, with a quick, crisp narrative that revels in the meticulously imagined details that it unfolds.

Some of the humor was a bit too cute and obvious to work for me, and by the same token, the efficacy of the ending may depend on your willingness to have your heartstrings tugged; I felt a little resistant to the overt emotional appeal, but possibly I’m just being curmudgeonly. After all, I do tend to smile whenever I think of this story – it’s hard to be a grump about something so warm and fun.

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Jason K. Chapman

Quizzed

Stealing yet another fun quiz-meme from Maureen…!

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?
Various children’s books – stuff like Tommy dePaola’s books, and The Weaver’s Horse, of which there are apparently NO cover images available online. Agggh! Did anyone else read that book, though?

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?

Currently, I’m supposed to be finishing Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring, but I don’t actually have it with me; I’ve been sneaking rereads of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber instead. Last read was Robert Stone’s Bear and his Daughter. Next read… not sure. Possibly Peter Beagle’s The Innkeeper’s Song.

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?
Usually I love books that everyone else hates.

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?

Ummm. Moby-Dick would be one of the major ones.

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?”

What does that even mean? All the books I know want to be read NOW. :P

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?
I used to occasionally read the last page halfway through the book (or read half the book out of order, really) when I couldn’t bear the suspense, but NO MORE. Partly because I no longer read as many epics… inevitably there are points at which your attention flags during those, and you just want to see if something better is coming up, so you mine for snippets of telling conversation or hints of pivotal scenes. The impulse to spoiler oneself just ends in tears and rankling sensations, though.

Continue reading Quizzed

“Her Mother’s Ghosts,” by Theodora Goss (2008) E

Date read: 11.6.09
Read from: Clarkesworld #23
Reviewer: Emera

Theodora Goss’ “Her Mother’s Ghosts,” recommended to me an age ago by Maureen, is a brief, achingly beautiful meditation on family and heritage. The language is simple, rhythmical, and carefully chosen, and the strength and purity of the emotion that it evokes hit me particularly hard since… okay, for personal reasons that I don’t feel like talking about in detail (massive backpedaling there). Suffice it to say that this was one of those stories that I had to read twice for it to really click, but when it did – ow. hurty (but in a good and thoughtful-making way).

I love the feel of the descriptions, too – they feel like late-afternoon sunlight on a chilly day, or one of the story’s faded watercolors.

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Theodora Goss

BBCF: Moonsinger’s Friends

Not gonna lie, this one makes me smile at the same time that it makes me wince. Some things are so awesomely dated that you can’t help but love them.

Moonsinger's Friends - In Honor of Andre Norton, ed. Susan Schwartz

Rainbows. Stumpy-necked hippocampi. Mermaids riding stumpy-necked hippocampi while double rainbows explode from their backs. What could be better, or worse, or more likely to make you want to ingest something involving funfetti? Something to consider the next time you’re surveying (sadly rainbow-free) covers at the bookstore.

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Bad Book Covers Friday Archive
BBCF: The Alphabet Mysteries
BBCF: Diamond Star
BBCF: The God Engines
BBCF: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

“Descending,” by Thomas M. Disch (1964) E

Date read: 2.17.10
Read from: The now-defunct scifi.com, or listen online at MindWebs
Reviewer: Emera

I originally found “Descending” through Ellen Datlow’s wonderful online selection of classic sci-fi short fiction, and was aggrieved to discover that with the passing of the original scifi.com, it’s now only available online with the help of the Wayback Machine. But to get on with the real thing –

I’ve always been vaguely leery of escalators (where are those steps really going, when they sink into one another at the bottom? – I had a childhood fear that my feet would get sucked in with them if I didn’t step off quickly enough); Thomas M. Disch’s “Descending” has ensured that I’ll never trust one again. “Descent” begins with an unrepentant debtor’s delinquent spree in a department store, and ends in a state of perfect horror. It’s pleasingly precise and surprisingly rich in its details both of setting and character, packing a huge amount of atmosphere and subtlety into just about 4000 words, and the humor is wicked and ominous. Great stuff – I’ll have to look up more of Disch’s work.

John Schoffstall provides a wonderful reading and historical contextualization of the story here – also brief and rich – and Matthew Cheney at The Mumpsimus follows up with a quick consideration of how the story works as a piece of short fiction here.

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Thomas M. Disch

BBCF: The Alphabet Mysteries

For this week’s Bad Book Cover Friday, we have the covers of Sue Grafton’s alphabet mystery series, a.k.a. the Kinsey Millhone novels. Kakaner referred me to these for the purposes of BBCF, and ever since then I can’t stop seeing them in used book sale piles everywhere.

Sue Grafton - C is for Corpse

Deeply mediocre, in a “we had no budget so we gave our cover designs to a 6th grader with Word Art pretensions” kind of way. Simplicity has its advantages in terms of recognizability, of course – as evidenced by my inability to not see these everywhere now – but. well. You could try to make it look a little less like you spent 5 minutes in Photoshop per cover doing these.

Also, on first look, the juxtaposition of the title and the cover blurb on the above cover made me think that “refreshing heroine” referred to the titular corpse. Did this happen to anyone else?

A couple more under the cut…

Continue reading BBCF: The Alphabet Mysteries