Book | The Black Letters

The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, by Kage Baker (2009) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 4.1.12
Book from: Personal collection, via Subterranean Press.

(N.B. The Women of Nell Gwynne’s is out of print, and has since been republished as Scarlet Spy.)

“In any other neighborhood, perhaps, there would have been some uncouth speculation about the inordinate number of females under one roof. The lady of the house by Birdcage Walk, however, retained her reputation for spotless respectability, largely because no gentlemen visitors were ever seen arriving or departing the premise, at any hour of the day or night whatsoever.

Gentlemen were unseen because they never went to the house near Birdcage Walk. They went instead to a certain private establishment known as Nell Gwynne’s …

Now and again, in the hushed and circumspect atmosphere of the Athenaeum (or the Carlton Club, or the Traveller’s Club) someone might imbibe enough port to wonder aloud just what it took to get an invitation from Mrs. Corvey.

The answer, though quite simple, was never guessed.

One had to know secrets.”

The Women of Nell Gwynne’s is a breezily entertaining steampunk spy-thriller novella, serving up fast-paced intrigue, witticisms, and gadgetry, with the occasional amusing period detour into e.g. the niceties of Victorian cake decoration. There’s a modicum of social commentary, too, on the precarity of being a woman in a man’s world: the Women of Nell Gwynne’s are societal cast-offs, disgraced former gentlewomen (and one former workhouse girl) offered recourse as courtesan-intelligencers. Their sponsors are the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, a mysterious organization of spies and inventors that eventually gives rise to the Company, the subject of numerous of Baker’s other works (which I’ve never read). Here, members of Nell Gwynne’s are dispatched to investigate the disappearance of a Society member on assignment at the country manor of a secretive aristocrat, who appears to have developed a taste of his own for invention.

Most of the Women are charming sketches, like the three cheeky Misses Devere and the cross-dressing Herbert/ina, who has “the appearance of a cupid-faced lad fresh from a public school whereat a number of outré vices were practiced.” (Predictably, I was enamored with the latter.) The only psychological interior to which we have access is that of Lady Beatrice, the Scarlet Spy. Lady Beatrice is a survivor of abduction and rape during the disastrous first Anglo-Afghan War, who returns to England only to be promptly disowned by her family. Her relationship with herself – her horrific past, her mechanically unstoppable will to survive, the wary distance she keeps from herself as a physical being – is the story’s most compelling element. While The Women of Nell Gwynne’s didn’t have me hankering to dive into the entirety of the Company series, I am curious to read the further Nell Gwynne’s novelette The Bohemian Astrobleme, to see whether Lady Beatrice is further developed as a character.

Edit to add: Reading about the life of the actual Nell Gwynne, a 17th-century brothel girl turned celebrated comedienne turned royal mistress, is a must. Amazing woman.

Go to:

Kage Baker: bio and works reviewed
Subterranean Press: Kage Baker’s Scarlet Spy

Vampire Stories by Women: Venus, Outfangthief, So Runs the World…

Reviewer: Emera
Dates read: The very end of December 2011
Read from: Vampire Stories by Women, ed. by Stephen Jones (2001).

“Venus Rising on Water” (1991), by Tanith Lee:

“Like long hair, the weeds grew down the façades of the city, over shutters and leaden doors, into the pale green silk of the lagoon. Ten hundred ancient mansions crumbled. Sometimes a flight of birds was exhaled from their crowded mass, or a thread of smoke was drawn up into the sky. Day long a mist bloomed on the water, out of which distant towers rose like snakes of deadly gold. Once in every month a boat passed, carving the lagoon that had seemed thickened beyond movement. Far less often, here and there, a shutter cracked open and the weed hair broke, a stream of plaster fell like a blue ray. Then, some faint face peered out, probably eclipsed by a mask. It was a place of veils. Visitors were occasional…”

Tanith Lee, you’re my favorite. Lee frames this story as a “clash between the future and the past” – I read it as something approaching cosmic horror, although here the cosmic is actually subsumed by more domestic monsters. Either way, Lee writes a humanity under threat.

A plucky girl reporter with the wonderfully foolishly exuberant name of Jonquil Hare goes exploring in a decaying future Venice, haunted by white rats, holograms of inhabitants past, and an ancient astronomer’s painting of a blue-skinned woman. (Lunar/aquatic blue-green, blue-yellow is the story’s sickly, unearthly color theme.) This not being the comfortingly rational universe of Tintin or Holmes, the irrational and unearthly win out, resoundingly declaring both their supremacy over and indifference to humanity. Jonquil is left in a destabilized reality. Sexual unease and gender ambiguity amplify the sense of murkiness, clammy fever dreams.

—–

Another excellent name: Gala Blau’s 2001 “Outfangthief” takes its title from a Middle English term meaning “the right of a lord to pursue a thief outside the lord’s own jurisdiction.” This is the first splatterpunk – horror driven by extremity of violence, physical violence as emotional climax – I’ve read in a long while, and the effect does seem dated to me now. The villain’s cartoonish perversion takes away from the tragedy of the protagonist: a mother on the run from debts, who sees her teenage daughter drifting, and eventually, taken away from her.

Still, I was taken with Blau’s smoky, dire prose (“…Laura’s hand was splayed against the window, spreading mist from the star her fingers made. She was watching the obliteration of her view intently”) and Gothily surreal vampires (“The women were hunched on the back fence, regarding her with owlish eyes. They didn’t speak. Maybe they couldn’t”). I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of her work.

—-

I saved Caitlín Kiernan‘s “So Runs the World Away” (2001) for nearly last because, as with Lee, I admire and enjoy just about every one of her works. “So Runs…” introduces us to Dead Girl and Bobby, whom I first met (achronologically) in the collection Alabaster. As in “Les Fleurs Empoisonnées” in that collection, cruel, eccentric, clannish undead who dabble in taxidermy make an appearance; the emotional center is the kernel of less-dysfunctional family formed by Dead Girl and Bobby, and Dead Girl’s subaqueous stream-of-consciousness as she fumbles to distinguish her memories from those of her victims.

“And at the muddy bottom of the Seekonk River, in the lee of the Henderson Bridge, Dead Girl’s eyelids flutter as she stirs uneasily, frightening fish, fighting sleep and her dreams. But the night is still hours away, waiting on the far side of the scalding day, and so she holds Bobby tighter and he sighs and makes a small, lost sound that the river snatches and drags away towards the sea.”

The story ultimately hinges on Dead Girl’s choice to separate herself, and her chosen family: to cut them loose from paralyzing and toxic influences. Ultimately, she declares herself distinct, individual (though not solitary), and therefore valuable. Like many of Kiernan’s stories, then, “So Runs…” can be read as being about the negotiation of an abusive relationship.

– E

Go to:

Tanith Lee: bio and works reviewed
Caitlín R. Kiernan: bio and works reviewed

Anya’s Ghost, by Vera Brosgol (2011) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 11.24.11
Book from: Personal collection

“Of all the things Anya expected to find at the bottom of an old well, a new friend was not one of them. Especially not a new friend who’s been dead for a century. Falling down a well is bad enough, but Anya’s normal life might actually be worse. She’s embarrassed by her immigrant family, self-conscious about her body, and she’s pretty much given up on fitting in at school.

Anya really could use a friend – even a ghost. But her new BFF isn’t kidding about the “Forever” part . . .”

Great characters, great dialogue, fabulous art. Brosgol’s style is elastic and rounded, equally ideal for conveying weightless movement and solid figures; the same could be said of her writing.

The resolutions to Anya’s emotional and social conflicts head towards conventional teen-movie territory, but Brosgol has such a light touch (her sharply contemporary dialogue often comes in handy) that none of the “wholesome realization! reconciliation and mutual understanding!” moments feel too heavy or forced. The climax, in particular, surprises by deliberately backing off of a too-easy, emotionally violent “conclusion.” I love how honest Anya comes to be about her own shortcomings. I’m also rather in love with her acerbic, squinty, spiky-skinny best friend Siobhan:

Siobhan
Siobhan, Exhibit A.

I found the comic a clear-eyed exploration of how so much of what makes teen girls unhappy – social pressure, body image, embarrassing family, lack of perspective – can come close to making some into little monsters of selfishness, and how they/we (been there, not so long ago) can come to back away from that brink. All in all: Anya’s Ghost is funny, scary, sad, and beautifully drawn.

(I first found Brosgol’s work, by the way, through the Draw This Dress Tumblr she shares with Emily Carroll, where the two post their lively illustrations of historical and sometimes not-so-historical fashion. Anya actually models a Victorian bathing suit in one post!)

Go to:
Vera Brosgol: bio and works reviewed

White Cat, by Holly Black (2010) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 2011.10.16
Book from: Personal collection

Cassel Sharpe is the only non-magical member of a family of curse workers, in a world where magic is illegal and hence “worker” families constitute the magical equivalent of the mafia. Despite his disappointing failure to inherit curse-working powers, Cassel somehow managed to murder his childhood friend and love, Lila – though why he can’t remember. Add in life-threatening bouts of nightmares and sleepwalking, a dysfunctional crime family, and the beginnings of an elaborate conspiracy, and Cassel’s attempts at passing himself off as a normal kid seem like they might be over for good.

I read White Cat in one sitting after accidentally meeting Holly Black at a book festival and picking up a copy from her. This is addictive stuff: magical con artists and Russian mobsters; family melodrama; a hard-driving, twisty-turny plot; a mouthy, self-deprecating protagonist with likably grounded sidekicks. I must give a particular hurrah for there being a male Asian-American character: Sam Yu, Cassel’s roommate, a theater geek whose vehicle of choice is a converted hearse.

Black’s prose is a lot sharper and cleaner than I remember it being in her Modern Faerie trilogy, which I sorta-loved for its heroines, but mostly remember as a swill of angst. Cassel angsts plenty, too (I admit to skimming some of the whinier passages), but there are moments – particularly the ending – where his emotional experience deepens into real, wrenching anguish. That, and plenty of sharp detail – the world-building, Cassel’s slickly laid out cons, characters who convince you of their reality – kept me invested. I can’t wait to see where the series goes from here. Let this stand as a reminder to myself to pick up Red Glove whenever I find the chance.

Go to:
Holly Black: bio and works reviewed

Vampire Stories by Women: “Turkish Delight,” “Prince of Flowers”

Reviewer: Emera
Dates read: The very end of December 2011
Read from: Vampire Stories by Women, ed. by Stephen Jones (2001). (I’ll be putting together an index post for this collection once I’m done reviewing the stories I found the most interesting.)

Roberta Lannes says in the introduction to her short story, “Turkish Delight” (2001),that the most interesting element of the vampiric repertoire to her is the seduction. The vampiric “granddad” in this story seduces by shaping himself to fill a lack; his eventual victim is Andrew, a gentle-hearted boy who lives in claustrophobically close quarters with his aunt and controlling, abusive mother, and dreams of finding his absent father’s family. (Enter the vampire…) Lannes does an excellent job of drawing the web of tensions and hidden desires at work in Andrew’s household, with its additional layer of vampiric subtext in how Andrew’s mother uses him as fuel for her pettish rages. Unfortunately, the end of the story loses emotional focus, once a slew of more conventionally “genre” elements are introduced (luxurious mansion full of vampire victims, etc.), and the narration seems to drift out of contact with Andrew’s experience. (It’s hard to imagine a 10-year-old boy thinking that “everything the old man said was full of vagaries and obfuscation.”) Still, Lannes’ story is often moving in its examination of deception and manipulation.

—

Stupid admission: I often confuse Elizabeth Hand with Elizabeth Bear. Same with Gene Wolfe and Gary Wolfe. That said – Elizabeth HAND’s “Prince of Flowers” (1988) starts with some absolutely gorgeous evocations of the vasty, esoteric innards of Washington D.C.’s Natural History Museum:

“Her favorite was Paleontology, an annex where the air smelled damp and clean, as though beneath the marble floors tricked hidden water, undiscovered caves, mammoth bones to match those stored above…

The Anthropology Department was in the most remote corner of the museum; its proximity to the boiler room made it warmer than the Natural Sciences wing, the air redolent of spice woods and exotic unguents used to polish arrowheads and axe-shafts. The ceiling reared so high overhead that the rickety lamps swayed slightly in drafts that Helen longed to feel. The constant subtle motion of the lamps sent flickering waves of light across the floor. Raised arms of Balinese statues seemed to undulate, and points of light winked behind the empty eyeholes of feathered masks.”

The prose continues to be gorgeous, but “Prince of Flowers” (the eponymous resident vampire is a beautiful Balinese puppet that Helen steals from the museum) unfortunately runs along monster-movie lines, and so lacks thematic or emotional resonance, outside of the unease conjured by the increasingly sinisterly lush descriptions.

Still, considering that this was Hand’s first published story, I’m definitely going to make a point of looking for more of her work. I’ve also read a couple of her reviews for F&SF, and found them a pleasure to read – thoughtful and wide-ranging.

Go to:
Stephen Jones: bio and works reviewed
Vampire Stories by Women: “Rampling Gate,” “Miss Massingberd”

Vampire Stories by Women: “Rampling Gate,” “Miss Massingberd”

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 12.25.2011
Read from: Vampire Stories by Women, ed. by Stephen Jones (2001)

Inevitable disclaimer: I was obsessed with the first three books of Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (and her two historical-fiction novels) in high school; haven’t read her since then. Also, this summary/review is spoilery.

“The Master of Rampling Gate” (1984), Rice’s only vampire short story, reads like an adolescent vampire’s dreams of an adolescent girl’s dreams of him (Twilight inverted?) – it’s a sentimental Gothic confection spun mostly of lissome sensuality and wish-fulfillment. Rice’s prose flows creamily (I use that word because I can’t help but remember Anthony Blanche’s indictment of Charles’ jungle paintings in Brideshead Revisited: “It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers…”), but there’s troublingly little depth to it. Maybe she was taking a break from the unrelenting moral horror that the VC protagonists wrangle with?

Young, idly wealthy Julie and Richard arrive in the country estate of Rampling Gate, having been commanded by their late father to tear it down “stone by stone,” but instead find themselves seduced by its quiet luxury and meditative, timeless solitude. A few gasps and midnight encounters later, Julie learns that the true master of Rampling is a mopy, beautiful vampire who dates to the Middle Ages and likes reading her fiction. (It must be true love!)

There’s a horrifying flashback to the plague years to explain why Rampling Gate, and the vampire, must remain – they serve as monument to the plague-devastated village that once stood there – but the story reverts so quickly to the couple’s delighted honeymoon-planning that the plague episode ends up reading as an ornament to the tragedy of the eternally lonely vampire, rather than a reflection on human misery and the awfulness of history.

The whole thing is especially creepy because Rice keeps on insisting that the chief attribute of both Julie and the vampire is their innocence, even when he’s lovingly showing her visions of them feasting together upon ladies in red-wallpapered bordellos – because she has to become his vampire mistress, natch. Hooray for eternally prolonged adolescence!

—–

Tina Rath’s “Miss Massingberd and the Vampire” (1986) is a crisply written, very Britishly humorous little story. As in the other story that I’ve read of Rath’s, “A Trick of the Dark” (review in this post), the vampire offers sensual escape from a buttoned-up life, here that of a schoolmistress whose evening encounter in a churchyard tweaks her life slightly out of the polite course of things. It’s a story that, like Miss Massingberd, seems to be smiling to itself.

Go to:
Stephen Jones: bio and works reviewed
Anne Rice: bio and works reviewed
Tina Rath: bio and works reviewed

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, ed. by Angela Carter (1986) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 6.8.11
Book from: Personal collection

An ironic title: Carter’s take on “waywardness” and “wickedness” is far more subtle, of course. The women in this anthology – all written by women – are canny, worldly, self-directed. They are leery of others’ plans for them, and quietly attentive to their own desires – which is not to say that they are selfish, necessarily*, though they run the gamut when it comes to moral fiber. The mother in Elizabeth Jolley’s “The Last Crop” cheerfully cons a kindly doctor when she decides that she’d really rather keep and cultivate her inherited land after all. The women and girls in Jane Bowles’ “A Guatemalan Idyll” are capable of disturbingly calculated callousness – the youngest, Lilina, “[chooses] her toys according to the amount of power or responsibility she thought they would give her in the eyes of others.” The particular toy she considers in this story, a pet snake, ends up beheaded due to her (deliberate?) carelessness; Lilina’s only comment is, “Look how small her head is. She must have been a very small snake.”

(In a wonderfully horrible play with point of view, Bowles half-distracts us from the impending violence in this scene by shifting the perspective to another character just long enough for the snake’s death to occur in the interim. [The other character, a boy, is meanwhile observing that he dislikes Lilina “probably because he suspected intuitively that she was a person who could fall over and over again into the same pile of broken glass and scream just as loudly the last time as the first.”] The aggregation of such effects in this story left me strangely unsettled, and, like the visiting traveler who eventually “escapes” from the Guatemalan women, feeling like I’d awoken from a fever dream.)

I’ve gotten way off track – there’s so much to talk about in each story. Carter’s own point about the morality of these women, questionable or otherwise, is that the range represented is a normal one. The women here are well-characterized individuals, flawed and proud individuals of varying ages and desires and backgrounds, rather than one-note femmes fatales or whores or shrews. They frequently “act out” simply by resisting, by hunkering down and continuing to dig out their own paths. The protagonist of Ama Ata Aidoo’s “The Plums,” a Ghanaian student named Sissie who is touring in Europe, looks askance at the advances of a lonely German housewife, and in the end sloughs her off and keeps traveling. Throughout the story, she registers an ironic combination of pity and quiet contempt for the German woman and for whiteness in general, reflecting that “it must be a pretty dangerous matter, being white. It made you awfully exposed, rendered you terribly vulnerable. Like being born without your skin or something.” (The German woman’s son and husband are both named Adolf, it’s worth noting.) By contrast, Sissie goes through the story shielded, observing and untouched, sometimes even cruel, behind her armor of self-respect.

Continue reading Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, ed. by Angela Carter (1986) E

Legends of the Mouse Guard, by David Petersen and others (2004) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 10.17.11
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner

Legends of the Mouse Guard features thirteen Mouse Guard tales by a broad spectrum of guest artists and authors. Cute, fun, mostly not really worth reading except for a few outstanding cases of either extremely beautiful art, great visual storytelling, or occasionally both. Highlights for me:

Jeremy Bastian’s “The Battle of the Hawk’s Mouse and the Fox’s Mouse:” Mindblowingly detailed faux-etchings in colors of faded heraldry.
Ted Naifeh’s “A Bargain in the Dark:” The storytelling could have been sharper, but Naifeh’s ink-heavy, swoopingly angular style (which I’d seen before via his collaborations with Caitlín Kiernan and Holly Black) stands out here from the more traditional illustrations in most of the rest of the collection. And they couldn’t be more perfectly suited to Darkheather’s subterranean vaults, where his story of a wary alliance between a mouse and a bat takes place .
Gene Ha & Lowell Francis’ “Worley and the Mink:” Possibly my all-around favorite, for the combination of good humor, rich art and excellent action sequences. A tubby, bespectacled banker-mouse outwits both a tribe of hostile mice and a voracious mink.
Guy Davis’ wry & wordless “The Critic,” in which a warrior takes too much inspiration from an artist’s rendering of derring-do.
The sweeping tundra scenes of Karl Kerschl’s “Bowen’s Tale” (also wordless), which wonderfully convey the immensity and severe beauty of the arctic from a mouse-sized perspective.

Petersen provides the framing story, of customers at an inn competing in a tale-telling contest to cancel their bar tabs, the totally epic cover of horn-blowing mice (my favorite Mouse Guard cover so far), and some equally epic spreads of other legendary mouse exploits, which appear in-universe as paintings on the inn’s walls.

Go to:
David Petersen: bio and works reviewed
Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, by David Petersen, review by Emera
Mouse Guard: Winter 1152, by David Petersen, review by Emera

Hellboy, Vol. 1, by Mike Mignola (1994) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 12.1.11 (re-read; originally read circa 2006)
Book from: Personal collection

Hellboy, Volume 1: Seed of Destruction
Art by Mike Mignola, script by John Byrne

“When strangeness threatens to engulf the world, a strange man will come to save it. Sent to investigate a mystery with supernatural overtones, Hellboy discovers the secrets of his own origins, and his link to the Nazi occultists who promised Hitler a final solution in the form of a demonic avatar.”

It’s alllll about the broody menace. I was not too impressed by my first read of Hellboy‘s first volume, five years back, having gotten idiotically hung up on what I dismissed at the time as “unoriginal” plot elements. (Hello, 2006 Emera, paying tribute to pulp favorites is the point…) This time I just sat back and let the consummately pulp-noir atmosphere swallow me up, to much better effect.

After all, there’s so much to enjoy about Hellboy. The storytelling, even if often predictable, is crisp and fast-paced, cannoning the reader from a glimpse at Hellboy’s WWII origins into a present-day case featuring frog demons, an Arctic expedition gone awry, and a cursed family. The dialogue and exposition (vol. 1 is kinda exposition-heavy) are loaded with menace and portent, the action sequences are so beautifully composed as to look balletic (even when they mostly involve Hellboy punching demons), and now let’s talk about how much I love Mike Mignola’s art.

LOOOOVE. I love the way that he builds his compositions mostly out of shadows and looming statuary, frequently in suggestive poses (when Hellboy first manifests in a churchyard, the two angels carved in relief in the background seem to make gestures of threat and aversion); I love the way his craggy, massive, mostly stone-faced figures lend themselves to expressions of unexpected tenderness and piercing emotional simplicity. One of my (many) favorite single panels in this volume is the one below, in which Hellboy attempts to comfort his adoptive father, the aged paranormal investigator Trevor Bruttenholm:

This volume includes generous art extras: early sketches of Hellboy, the two mini promotional stories in which he first appeared, and an excellent gallery of guest art. I should note though that the trade paperback edition has terrible binding – the cover cracked away from the glue on the spine after I’d been reading for about 45 minutes. So, definitely not worth it unless you happen to find it on sale.

That aside, Hellboy is eerie, tightly written, and features an intriguing cast and Lovecraftian/Revelations-inflected apocalyptic mythos. (The chapter headings have scenes from Revelations as their backgrounds: the seven-headed beast, the Four Horsemen, etc. Again, LOOOOVE.) This time around, I’m going to have to follow the series to its finish; I’d love to get to know Hellboy and his teammates better.

Go to:
Mike Mignola: bio and works reviewed
B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth & Other Stories, by Mike Mignola, review by Emera

Bone Vol. 1, by Jeff Smith (1993) E

Reviewer: Emera
Date read: 11.23.11
Book from: Personal collection

Bone: Out from Boneville Bone, Volume 1: Out From Boneville

“After being run out of Boneville, the three Bone cousins – trusty Fone Bone, grasping Phoney Bone, and obliviously cheerful Smiley Bone – are separated and lost in a vast, uncharted desert. One by one, they find their way into a deep, forested valley filled with wonderful and terrifying creatures. Eventually, the cousins are reunited at a farmstead run by tough, cow-racing Gran’ma Ben and her spirited granddaughter, Thorn. But little do the Bones know, there are dark forces conspiring against them and their adventures are only just beginning…”

Late to the bandwagon as usual! I’d wanted to read the ever-popular Bone saga for years, and was lucky enough to find a slightly battered copy for half-off while comic-shopping recently. The first volume instantly brought me back to reading Asterix comics on the couch in second grade: Smith’s old-school art is fluidly expressive and filled with gentle slapstick and visual gags. (A recurring one: whenever he’s overcome by his crush on Thorn, Fone Bone’s mouth crumples up into a scribbled line, and he litters the area with trails of pink hearts.) It’s just comforting to read, sweet, funny, and expertly paced – a good old-fashioned adventure to enjoy on a sunny afternoon.

While I don’t feel too driven by the storyline yet (seems like war with the carrion-eating rat creatures lies ahead), I do love the oddness of the world: the way the seasons arrive with comically accelerated timing in the valley, talking katydid Ted and his giant cousin, the introduction of comics and paper currency (the latter with less success) to the valley inhabitants by the Bones. What exactly is the relationship between the valley and the external world, and what, really, are the Bones? I’m eager to see what comes along, especially if it involves more Gran’ma Ben thonking rat creatures.

And my favorite sequence of art: the evolution of Thorn’s facial expressions and hand gestures on this page (click for a close-up of the whole page).

Go to:
Jeff Smith: bio and works reviewed