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

January 2, 2012 in Book, Short stories by Emera | No comments

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 successful and 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 figure and 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”

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

December 9, 2011 in Book, Graphic novels & comics by Emera | No comments

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 hung up on what I dismissed at the time as “unoriginal” plot elements. (Evil Nazis and Rasputin, I’m looking at you – but I’ve since admitted that “originality” is not per se an indicator of creative success.) 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 unexpectedly emotive interactions. 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

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The Man With the Golden Torc, by Simon R. Green (2008) E

September 6, 2011 in Book by Emera | No comments

Date read: 9.2.11
Book from: Borrowed from my cousin
Reviewer: Emera

“The name’s Bond. Shaman Bond. Actually, that’s just my cover. I’m Eddie Drood. But when your job includes a license to kick supernatural arse on a regular basis, you find your laughs where you can. For centuries, my family has been the secret guardian of humanity, all that stands between all of you and all of the really nasty things that go bump in the night. As a Drood field agent I wore the golden torc, I killed monsters, and I protected the world. I loved my job. Right up to the point when my own family declared me rogue for no reason, and I was forced to go on the run. Now the only people who can help me prove my innocence are the people I used to consider my enemies.

I’m Shaman Bond, very secret agent. And I’m going to prove to everyone that no one does it better than me.”

More junk food, sorry. Harry Dresden in London, basically, only not half as zippy or funny (and I’m pretty easily amused when it comes to dork humor). Most of Green’s one-liners sink without a trace, and the book feels brutally repetitive only a few chapters in. The main character solves most conflicts by punching buildings or people (while wearing his magical golden armor of invulnerability and superstrength) or activating one of an array of ridiculously overpowered gadgets. (Look, we get that James Bond had absurd gadgetry, but his gadgetry stayed fun and quirky because it was generally small in size and effect, and one-use-only. Exploding pen =/= watch that can be repeatedly used to turn back time.)

Green thrusts settings and concepts and characters under our noses and then yanks them back again so fast that we hardly have the time to get a sense of  their flavor. I enjoy the Dresden Files in large part because I love and want to explore the Dresdenverse; there’s no Droodverse, just a series of sets being frantically swapped out. And to add to the list of things that get old, fast: Drood’s backup/love interest, the wild witch Molly Metcalf, seems to be capable of expressing disappointment only by pouting, and delight by clapping her hands and squealing. Really?

Still, I enjoyed the introductions to a few lesser-known bits of British-Isles folklore – a throwaway reference had me looking up Joan the Wad, Cornish pixie queen, for example – and a few of Green’s own creations, like Girl Flower, a Welsh elemental made of “rose petals and owls’ claws,” and the Blue Fairy, a dissolute half-elf with the ability to go fishing in other dimensions. And a few moments of the climax felt actually impressive, rather than just loud and boom-y, so I closed the book feeling halfway entertained.

Go to:
Simon R. Green: bio and works reviewed

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The Way of Shadows, by Brent Weeks (2008) E

August 27, 2011 in Book, Novels by Emera | No comments

Date read: 8.20.11
Book from: Borrowed from my cousin
Reviewer: Emera

For Durzo Blint, assassination is an art – and he is the city’s most accomplished artist.

For Azoth, survival is precarious. Something you never take for granted. As a guild rat, he’s grown up in the slums, and learned to judge people quickly – and to take risks. Risks like apprenticing himself to Durzo Blint.

But to be accepted, Azoth must turn his back on his old life and embrace a new identity and name. As Kylar Stern, he must learn to navigate the assassins’ world of dangerous politics and strange magics – and cultivate a flair for death.

Wall-to-wall epic darque fantasy cheesefest, aww yeah. This came to me in a booky care package from my cousin, along with its sequels in the Night Angel trilogy. I would probably have enjoyed the whole thing when I was about twelve (I say that without – okay, with only a little bit of judgment; I welcome strategic doses of darque cheese in my life), but being shorter on reading time these days, I just skimmed the first volume for flavor.

Moody antihero with traumatic past and an even more traumatized yet brave love interest, check. Nomenclature liberally peppered with apostrophes and accent marks, check. Hard-bitten mentor, training montages, sadistic antagonists, and sundry scenes of carnage interleaved with swells of sentimental glurge, check. (I couldn’t get this particular glurge-bit out of my head after stumbling upon a bedroom scene: “Curve yielded to curve with the sweetness that inspired art.”)

The clumsy sentimentality and generally cliché-packed prose are what set me skimming after only a page or three, but on the plus side, the earnestness wasn’t entirely unappealing, there’s at least one non-white protagonist, and the female characters were written with sensitivity and fair doses of badassery. I’d still stick to Robin Hobb for my epic-assassin-y needs, though.

Go to:
Brent Weeks: bio and works reviewed
Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb (1995): review by Emera

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20th Century Ghosts, by Joe Hill (2005) E

April 11, 2011 in Book, Short stories by Emera | 1 comment

Date read: 3.21.11
Book from: Library
Reviewer: Emera

20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill’s first collection of short fiction, hit that unfortunate balance of being intriguing enough to keep me reading, but not-quite-excellent enough that I couldn’t shake the sense that my reading time would be better invested elsewhere.

In terms of style and subject matter, Ghosts will probably appeal to fans of Isaac Marion, Clive Barker, or Neil Gaiman’s short fiction. There’s a Kafka tribute (“You Will Hear the Locust Sing”); a superhero accessory that becomes an object of contention between two brothers (“The Cape”); a vampire-hunting family in upheaval (“Abraham’s Boys”); and, of course, numerous variations on ghosts and the undead, whose literalness is frequently up for interpretation. The “zombies” in “Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead,” for example, are former high-school sweethearts who reunite as gore-caked extras on the set of a George Romero film.

Hill’s tone is measured, melancholy, and spiked with black humor. His work is more homespun in texture than Gaiman’s silky irony, but shares that quirked, wry feeling, the “c’est la vie” shrug – not entirely resigned – at the varieties of disappointment, dysfunction, and violence visited on his protagonists. While his investigations of this emotional territory are mostly predictable, the empathy and sensitivity behind his writing are appealing.

Where Hill falls short is in his tendency to explicate his own themes and subtexts (”He killed him first – because he loved him”). Occasionally this works, to deadpan-creepy or wry effect. Mostly it just made me want to tell the narrator to stop talking and let me read by myself*. Similarly, visual motifs are sometimes elaborated to the point of belaborment. Finney, the teen protagonist of “The Black Phone,” feels unaccountably sickened and fearful when he sees a cluster of black balloons emerge from the car trunk of a grotesque man struggling with groceries. Later, following a terrifying abduction sequence, the narrator informs us: “Finney was one of the black balloons now. There was no one to pull him back, no  way to turn himself around. He was sailing away from everything he knew, into a future that stretched open before him, as vast and alien as the winter sky.” Do we really need to be told that much, that explicitly?

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White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi (2009) E

March 5, 2011 in Book by Emera | 4 comments

Date read: 1.10.11
Book from: University library
Reviewer: Emera

Snow White meets haunted-house melodrama meets quasi-vampire story with a decided hint of “Carmilla,” by the author of The Icarus Girl? Count me in. White is for Witching is the story of a family, and a house, distorted by the loss of a mother and a hidden history of trauma, xenophobia, and insanity. Miranda Silver blames herself for her mother’s death, and struggles with pica, a disorder that compels her to eat chalk and plastic. (I thought it might well be a pun on the “consumptive” heroine, in addition to hinting at Miri’s eventual realization of even worse appetites, and reflecting the novel’s motifs of misdirected desire and destruction from the inside out.) Her twin brother Eliot and bottled-up father Luc are too paralyzed by their own obsessions and griefs to do more than watch Miri on her slow course to destruction. In short, every character is an emotional closed circuit, furiously retracing the same neuroses without outlet or resolution. This includes, of course, the possessive and apparently sentient house, which has born witness to several generations of tortured Silver women.

For the first half of the book, I read with mostly detached fascination. Everyone is so icily clever and dysfunctional that I couldn’t really care about them, and as in The Icarus Girl, Oyeyemi’s prose sometimes verges on mannered. Paragraphs drift into prose-poetic fragments, and overlapping phrases signal transitions between narrating characters; I found the latter a particularly heavy-handed stylistic device. Similarly, many of the haunted-house tableaux – Miri’s waking dreams of streets lined with “pale people,” for example – are presented with an arranged, glassy nightmarishness, an alienating hyper-aestheticization. What saved the book for me from feeling (if you’ll forgive the pun) too lifeless was Oyeyemi’s dense layering of Gothic and folkloric tropes.

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The Folk Keeper, by Franny Billingsley (1999) E

December 21, 2010 in Book, Novels by Emera | 3 comments

Date read: 12.19.10
Book from: Public library
Reviewer: Emera

book folkkeeper

“Here in the cellar, I control the Folk. Here, I’m queen of the world.”

The Folk Keeper is much darker and stranger than I expected based on the title and cover art alone – which is awesome, since that’s the way I prefer it. Corinna Stonewall is a proud, vengeful orphan girl who by wit and trickery earned the position of Folk Keeper. In subterranean dark, she appeases the anger of the vicious, cave-dwelling Folk – described as “mostly wet mouth and teeth.” Summoned by a dying lord to be Folk Keeper of his island estate, where the Folk are particularly voracious and mysteries abound, Corinna sets about uncovering any secrets that might give her more power, whether over the Folk or the estate’s various inhabitants. At the same time, it comes clear that she must begin to come to terms with her own secrets: her unknown parentage, her odd powers and desires.

Billingsley’s angular, vivid prose is an absolute pleasure, full of sharp dialogue, intriguing detail, and unsettling, obliquely beautiful imagery; she’s one of the most successful stylists I’ve encountered in recent years. If you have any familiarity with Celtic folklore, the key to Corinna’s secrets is pretty obvious, but Billingsley puts a number of creative spins on this and other traditional elements within the novel. Some are more convincingly organic than others, but all are beautifully described. And Corinna’s friendship with Finian, the estate’s eccentric, ship-loving heir, is genuinely endearing, with his good heart and gentle quips countering and eventually thawing her chilly Machiavellian pragmatism. I would gladly welcome a sequel just to read more of their [ADORABLE] exchanges. (<— ill-concealed fangirling, exhibit A.)

The only point on which I was less happy: the last few pages seemed overburdened by their obvious instructive agenda and labored symbolism, which cost the narrative some of its earlier leanness and fluidity.

Nonetheless, The Folk Keeper is destined to become part of my permanent collection, and likely the subject of numerous re-reads. Fans of traditional fairy lore, Patricia McKillip, Holly Black, or Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard, go forth and read! In the meantime, I’ll be eagerly anticipating Billingsley’s next YA novel, which is apparently slated for spring 2011…

Go to:
Franny Billingsley: bio and works reviewed
Author’s Note for The Folk Keeper

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The Book of the Damned, by Tanith Lee (1988) E

December 4, 2010 in Book, Novels, Short stories by Emera | 5 comments

Date read: 11.1.07; reread once or twice since
Book from: Library originally; now personal collection
Reviewer: Emera

(There is nothing about this cover that does not amuse and please me. Consider it an honorary Bad Book Cover Friday?)

Tanith Lee’s The Secret Books of Paradys are among the most exquisitely aestheticized and unabashedly Gothic works I’ve ever read, which means of course that I’m obsessed with them. The series is set in a parallel-universe version of Paris, known variously as Paradys, Paradis, Par Dis, and Paradise. (Lee has also written a more recent series about a para-Venice, The Secret Books of Venus, though I’ve yet to read them.) Each of the four volumes comprises interweaving, thematically unified stories. The books stand alone well, though they’re seeded with references to a few recurring elements within the universe – locations, names, a certain poet – and the fourth volume has a climactic finality to it. Each of the books is further themed by color (see what I mean about aestheticized?), frequently embodied in significant pieces of jewelry and, in The Book of the Damned, stained-glass windows. (Always makes me think of “The Masque of the Red Death.”)

The Book of the Damned takes as its themes sexual transgression and ambiguities of sex, gender, and identity, considered in three novellas. The first, “Stained with Crimson,” follows an ill-fated poet, Andre St. Jean, on a journey of sexual obsession in 19th-century Paradys. St. Jean is given a ruby scarab ring by a dying man on the hills of the Temple Church; soon after, he is introduced to the ring’s owner, the ineffably unobtainable Antonina von Aaron. Cue a game of predator and prey in which role reversals are linked with a cycle of death, rebirth, and sex changes. Oh yes, and vampires. I mean, obviously. This is perhaps my favorite out of all the Paradys tales, both for its sentimental associations, as it launched my Tanith Lee obsession, and for its no-holds-barred Gothstravaganza, ladled out in the most sonorous, decadent, purple-saturated language imaginable. Further layers of allegorical imagery incorporate Greek mythology (a Pan symbol, a trip down a deathly river) and the elements, the latter perhaps complementing the book’s primary-color triad.

“Malice in Saffron,” though little less wrought and hectic, takes a much grimmer turn. As with many of Lee’s works, its events are incited by sexual violence and abuse of women. The protagonist, Jehanine, is assaulted by her stepfather and rejected by her beloved brother. After fleeing the countryside, she finds shelter within a nunnery in medieval Paradys, but by night transforms herself into capricious, murderous Jehan, who roams the backstreets of Paradys with a gang of thieves. Like many of Lee’s vengeful heroines, Jehanine nears the brink of being consumed by her own desire for destruction, but ultimately finds peace and redemption. Jehanine, I suspect, is a distant Paradysian extrapolation of Joan of Arc/Jeanne d’Arc; her story also heavily references Cathar beliefs.

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Night Watch, by Sergei Lukyanenko (1998) E

October 19, 2010 in Book, Novels by Emera | 3 comments

Date read: (incomplete) 10.17.10
Book from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

Adapted from the back cover:

“Set in contemporary Moscow, where shapeshifters, vampires, and streets-sorcerers linger in the shadows, Night Watch is the first book in an epic saga chronicling the eternal war of the ‘Others,’ an ancient race of humans with supernatural powers who must swear allegiance to either the Dark or the Light. The agents of Light – the Night Watch – oversee nocturnal activity, while the agents of Dark keep watch over the day. For a thousand years both sides have maintained a precarious balance of power, but an ancient prophecy has decreed that a supreme Other will one day emerge, threatening to tip the scales. Now, that day has arrived. When a mid-level Night Watch agent named Anton stumbles upon a cursed young woman – an uninitiated Other with magnificent potential – both sides prepare for a battle that could lay waste to the entire city, possibly the world.”

I grabbed this off of Kakaner’s shelf at some point, having heard that the movie adaptations of the series were good, and being a bit of a sucker for urban-fantasy romps (as evidenced by my shameless obsession with the Dresden Files). I sampled two chapters before deciding to give the rest a miss. What I read seemed a bit silly and mostly predictable; I didn’t feel particularly intrigued by the characters or the world-building, especially given the obvious moral binary. Andrew Bromfield’s translation reads fluently, so I’m going to assume that any faults lie with the original text: namely, abuse of ellipses and exclamation points (”This was real power! With real perseverance!” “Damn!” “Faster!” “A female voice!”) and a general atmosphere of cheesy, humorless melodrama. Characters growl in anger, angst about unquenchable blood thirst, and so on.

Also, not the fault of the book itself, but still hilarious – a further excerpt from the back-cover summary: “With language that throbs like darkly humorous hard-rock lyrics about blood and power, freedom and responsibility…” – That is some quite specific throbbing.

Go to:
Sergei Lukyanenko: bio and works reviewed

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Deerskin, Robin McKinley (1993) K

September 1, 2010 in Book, Novels by kakaner | 2 comments

Date Read: 09.01.2010
Book From: Dearest Emera
Reviewer: Kakaner

Summary

(Shamelessly stolen from Emera’s review– if it ain’t broke, why rewrite it?)
Princess Lissla Lissar lives quietly and invisibly in the shadows of her father and mother, who are worshiped by the people, and whose love for each other is all-consuming. When Lissar’s mother mysteriously wastes away, she forces her husband to swear that he will not remarry unless he finds a woman as beautiful as she was. This promise comes back to haunt the kingdom when Lissar, becoming a woman herself, attracts her father’s attention for the first time. Driven from the kingdom by an unendurable ordeal, Lissar escapes with her only friend, her dog Ash, and struggles to survive and reclaim her sense of self.

Review

The beginning of Deerskin was eye opening. As I started reading McKinley, who I haven’t picked up since Sunshine several years ago, I realized there was so much to her writing and storybuilding that I had not been able to fully appreciate before. Deerskin began with a delicate yet urgent account of Lissar’s childhood leading up to her escape from the kingdom. In my opinion, the gem of the novel was here– the elegant and insightful conveyance of the uncrossable distance that can form between a child and her parents, and the stunningly eerie account of the relationship between Lissar and her father. It has certainly been done before– stories in which royal children are neglected emotionally by the majesties– but none have devoted the same care as McKinley did here. The brilliance was the realization that something so little as lack of acknowledgment combined with an initial reverence for one’s parents can slowly ferment for years until it is replaced by fear. Here, I thought the execution was splendid and something that served to set this retelling apart from others.

Next, I apprehensively followed Lissar as she fled her kingdom and sought a bitter refuge in the wilderness, waiting to be impressed by Lissar’s independence, resourcefulness, and elegance in the face of hardships (as is to be expected of fairy-tale-retelling-heroines). This was the case, more or less, but as the story progressed, I was assaulted with pages of visions, repetitive daily monotony, more suffering than one reader can handle, ellipsis abuse e10, and a blind race to the resolution.

And may I interject here, did the climax really happen?  [not-really-spoiler-alert] Did she really honestly just pour forth a fountain of blood from her vagina, leaving a stain in the wood that was to be studied and used as an oracle for generations thereafter? I entirely understand what McKinley was striving for, and yes even though Deerskin is regarded as the Moonwoman, there are other ways to tie together “moon” and “woman” and “dark” and “fantasy”. I would expect a male author to commit such a transgression.

To be fair, I could chalk up my dissatisfaction with the second half to the fact that I simply have much more in common with a shy, black-haired, independent, voracious reader of a child than a lady who traipses through winterlands with a large dog in tow. Despite everything, Deerskin was still one of the most exciting fantasy novels I’ve read in a long time, and it is a dark fantasy novel that places great care in maintaining and exploring the different forms of love in all relationships.

Go to:

Robin McKinley: bio and works reviewed
Deerskin (1993)  [E]

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