Book Review: The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, by Laird Barron

5/5

I waited for The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All to be released for what seemed like years, and began devouring it immediately. Because Laird Barron is about the best thing going in the horror branch of the weird, it's no surprise that it gets my five glowing stars. Barron's prose just gets richer and his cthonic mythology more resonant with each publication.

I did find some surprises in this collection, but I want to do this book justice, so I'm starting my second read through now. Stay tuned. But if you can't wait . . . no fan of Barron, cosmic horror or the new weird will be disappointed by The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All.

Okay . . . one surprise? The gracefully and ominously and oh-so-Laird-Barron-y titled title story doesn't exist in its own collection, except as a throw-away reference to another, much maligned, quasi-fictional author's work in the book's satirical closer "More Dark." Yep. Barron's gone more than a bit gleefully postmodern here. I am officially weak in the knees.

Random Thought of the Day: Coming soon . . .

So I am both jonesing and apprehensive for  tonight's first season finale of True Detective. It's been a long time since I was so completely riveted by a television show. (Or is it taken in?) Will its weird fiction resonances, Rust Cohle's nihilistic speechifying, and the quasi-Lovecraftian spaghetti monster chasing girls through the trees add up to anything like satisfying coherence? Can it stick the landing? My thoughts tomorrow.

Semi-coincidentally, I've been making my way through Thomas Ligotti's 2010 Stoker-nominated philosophical history of pessimism, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I've started it half-a-dozen times, but this time it really grabbed me. (Maybe because now I'm hearing it in Rust's lazy drawl?) At any rate, for such a nihilistic piece of mental gymnastics, it's remarkably funny. Then again, my sense of humor appalls most nice people. Thoughts to come soonish, as it's not exactly a quick read. Good workout for the brain, though.

Finally, I've just finished Richard Gavin's 2012 story collection At Fear's Altar. I'd never read Gavin before -- I think I'd remember him. But with this collection, a little new-Lovecraftian but with eldritch twists all its own, Gavin has caught my attention. Full review to come.

Random Thought of the Day: The Wisdom of Rust Cohle

“Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. Be careful what you get good at.” 

- Rust Cohle,  True Detective

Book Review: The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, by John Langan

5/5

This book opens with one of the coolest stories I've read in awhile: the short, brutal, and, honestly, kind of hilarious "Kids." Within just a few paragraphs, Langan had me both howling with queasy laughter and wondering if he was plundering my mind for its deepest fears, and that's very much the way to my heart. (Other than through my chest, natch.)

The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies has been on my TBR list ever since it came out last spring. I can only say I wish I'd gotten to it sooner, because this collection is as close to perfect as it gets. There are no bad stories here, not even any "meh" ones. Just a series of really inventive tales, well told.

Of course I had favorites. But I had several. Besides "Kids," which I won't spoil by even hinting at its contents, there was also "Technicolor," a wild (and darkly genius) take on "The Masque of the Red Death," which may have inspired me to re-evaluate Poe. (I secretly find him awfully florid.) There are two new-Lovecraftian tales: "The Shallows," a slice-of-life story about a man and his mutant crab, going about their business in a world where the Old Ones now control reality; and the truly disturbing "City of the Dog," which takes as its inspiration H.P. Lovecraft's underused ghouls (think "Pickman's Model"), and turns Albany into a carnivorously haunted blot on the landscape. Finally, the closing, and longest, tale in the collection is "Mother of Stone," in which a bloody pre-historic rite is accidentally resurrected when a strange statue is unearthed at an otherwise homey Hudson Valley inn. Also, do not miss Langan's end notes (which illuminate several of the stories in unexpected ways), and Laird Barron's hilarious afterword. Final rave goes to Santiago Caruso for the gorgeous cover art. Let's look at it again:



Bottom line: The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies is an excellent collection, and is so very going on my best-of-2013 list . . . just a little late. If you like weird fiction with just a twist of dark humor, do not miss it. 

Book Review: Let the Old Dreams Die, by John Ajvide Lindqvist

4/5

Wow, this book took me a long time to read. Not in a bad way; it's just that Lindqvist's first collection of short stores, while beautifully written (and beautifully translated by Ebba Segerberg), is dense, with the majority of the dozen stories on the long side, some to good and others to not-so-great effect.

Fortunately, there were only two stories I simply didn't care for in Let the Old Dreams Die. One, "To Put My Arms Around You, to Music," Linqvist admits in his amusing afterword, nobody but the author himself likes. (So it's okay that my notes on this story consisted of "I don't get it.") The other, "Itsy-Bitsy," is short and sharp modern morality tale about a scheming paparazzo, but its moral is kind of ham-handed, and it's just not of the emotional complexity I've come to expect from Linqvist and his characters. (Ironically, considering what I just said about long stories, I think those two are the shortest in the book.)

Overall, though, the collection is top-notch, with stories dark, surreal and moving all at once. Favorites include: "The Border," in which a middle-aged woman slowly realizes she's something other than she'd always believed (avoiding spoilers here); "Eternal/Love," about a couple who discover how to manipulate Death; "A Village in the Sky," a new-Lovecraftian-tinged tale about an apartment building gone subtly wrong and getting wronger fast; and "Tindalos," a tour-de-force portrait of one woman's anxiety which somehow morphs into a giant monster movie. These last three especially have a cosmic horror vibe that I really loved.

Finally, I'm sure people are wondering about the advertised "sequel" stories to Handling the Undead -- "Final Processing" -- and Let the Right One In -- "Let the Old Dreams Die." So how are they? Harrowing and beautiful, in that order. "Final Processing" brings us up to date on the un-pretty status of the "re-living," and is a pretty grueling read. It's also bordering on novella-length, losing some of its punch along the way. But "Let the Old Dreams Die," which closes the book, is a beautiful love story about a couple who met while working on Oskar's "kidnapping." (She was a cop; he was the station worker who punched Oskar's train ticket the last time he was seen alive. They clicked in the interview room.) The case continues to be an ongoing hobby for the pair, though the trail has long ago gone cold. I won't say any more, but the final page of this story is a little miracle, and a perfect note on which to end. (Except you should also read Lindqvist's afterword, which is funny and self effacing, as well as lending some insight to his madness.)

The Number 121 to Pennsylvania & Others, by Kealan Patrick Burke

5/5

I am finding it hard to make time to review all the books I'm plowing
through lately, but The Number 121 to Pennsylvania and Others demands I make the time, for several good reasons.

I fully enjoyed every story in the collection, which is a rare thing. I've read several of Burke's books recently (Kin, and the whole Timmy Quinn series, review to come soon, I promise) and have yet to be disappointed; in fact I'd lay money that with his talent and his abundant output, he could be the "next big thing" in horror. With a nostalgic, sometimes elegiac, nuance that nods to Stephen King (especially in short form) and a deft treatment of the dark things lurking on the fraying fringes of normalcy that brings to mind John Connelly's Charlie Parker books, what's not to like? Also, Burke turns some lovely and evocative phrases: a graveside priest becomes "an oversized raven with a scabrous pink beak and a silver crown"; and a melancholy retiree watches "the sun die a phoenix death, bruising the clouds as it struggled to stay afloat." Maybe it's that Irish gift of palaver, but I'm hooked. The stories are so uniformly great I want
to write about them all, but that would ruin the fun, so I'll just mention a few that represent Burke's range.

On the black-comedy side, I loved "High on the Vine," a clever suburban retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, complete with disgruntled neighbors and paparazzi. And, as someone who went through the misery of quitting cigarettes fairly recently, I still have empathy for smokers, and snickered all the way through the nanny-state horror of "Prohibited," sort of like King's "Quitters, Inc." with a shot of post-911 paranoia.

As for the more traditional scare, Burke has an eerily evocative way with that helpless, paralyzing fear unique to childhood, the cold certainty that something is coming to get you -- and you can't do a thing about it -- which he uses to great effect in "Snowmen" and "Mr. Goodnight." And the tension-fueled, almost novella-length closer "Saturday Night at Eddie's," an excerpt from the novel Currency of Souls, made me buy the longer work immediately. Can't wait to dive in.

Finally, and this is big, there were two stories in this collection that are going to stay with me -- in fact, they horrified the absolute bejayzus out of me. I'm not an easy scare (but I keep trying), so that was a real treat. I would caution readers so very much not to take on the back-to-back brain-f**k that is "Empathy" and "Peekers" just before bed. I read "Empathy," an information age nightmare in the vein of "Ringu/The Ring," but rooted in an actual atrocity, and knew that shouldn't be the last thing on my mind before I slept. So I blithely continued on with the short, sharp and aggressively uncanny creepfest that is "Peekers," a story which makes me wish fervently that I lived in a wide-open warehouse space with no corners or doorjambs. (Alas, I live in a Victorian with many nooks, crannies and sliding pocket-doors just perfect for . . . peeking.) I stared at the space between my sliding doors until sleep finally carried me off. I felt like I was ten again, sleeping with the light on so nothing could get me. The following day I watched the short film made from that story (there's a link on Burke's author page here), hoping that if I saw it, it would somehow banish the lingering unease. No such luck.

So . . . well-played, Mr. Burke. You win, and so do your readers with this fine collection. Five solid stars.

Book Review: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012, ed. Paula Guran

4.5/5
Dark fiction editrix supreme Paula Guran has put together another huge, mostly excellent selection this year, with enough variety to please most tastes. Here you'll find everything from cowboys vs. vampires, to pitch-dark fairy-tale revisions, to zombie baseball. There's also a visit to Marie Laveau, a "Maltese Unicorn," a  non-zombie apocalypse (for a change), a sand dune that predicts death, and a wardrobe that contains the whole sea.

She's also managed to draw some very well-established names -- like Stephen King, Charles de Lint, Caitlin Kiernan and Joan Aiken -- to sit side-by-side with relatively new talents. Some of my favorites include:

A book-lover's nightmare set in a dystopian near-future San Francisco, Glen Hirshberg's "After-Words" introduces the crazed leader of a book-cult whose end-time plans rely on remarkably old-fashioned methods. Hirshberg, a fellow SF denizen, always captures the tiniest nuances of the city, right down to the smells, night sounds, and neighborhood weather (yes, in SF we have different weather in different neighborhoods). Since the world in this story is quite grim, the verisimilitude adds an extra dose of shiver for me.

Joe R. Lansdale's "The Bleeding Shadow" has a Lovecraft-on-the-bayou vibe. Callow bluesman Tootie makes an unwise trade at Cross Roads Records: in exchange for a drop of his blood, he gets a platter full of unearthly music that, when he plays it, bequeaths him equally unearthly musical skills. Unfortunately, it also opens a doorway for those pesky things that should not be. (And if you like this story, I'd highly recommend picking up John Horner Jacobs' awesome novel Southern Gods.)
Yoon Ha Lee's "Conservation of Shadows" re-visions the ancient myth of Innana's journey to the Underworld as a MMORPG dungeon-like challenge, complete with mazes and inventory slots. I'd never read Lee's work before, but the juxtaposition of an eons-old tale with a futuristic gamescape makes for a memorable story, and Lee's language is beautiful and poetic.

"The Lake" by (the mellifluously-named) Tannarive Due, delivers a sneaky yet genteel brutality with the story of Abbie LaFleur, a Bostonian transplant to the deep south . . . where she really takes to her new environment.

And Laura Anne Gilman's "Crossroads" puts a quick and clever new spin on the standard deal with the devil.

I could go through the whole book like this. I am such a sucker for the short form, and Guran's choices are almost always top-notch: out of 33 stories, only one or two are a little meh, and that's probably just down to personal taste. (In fact, I'm not even gushing about other favorites -- Maureen McHugh's emotionally savage "After the Apocalypse," Elizabeth Hand's eerie "Near Zennor," and Tim Powers' clever and creepy "A Journey of Only Two Paces" -- because I have or plan to write about them in separate reviews of their authors' own collections.)

Verdict: if you like horror, and you like short stories, put this 2012 collection on your holiday wish list -- it's a real treat.

Book Review: Southern Gods, by John Horner Jacobs

    5/5 

1950s, the deep south. Hardboiled noir meets the Memphis blues and eldritch Lovecraftian horror. If any of those words ring your bell (or induce skittering waves of nauseous-yet-pleasurable horror), you must read Southern Gods right now.

Get ready to welcome the Old Ones to the bayou, when elusive blues player Ramblin' John Hastur releases a record that curdles the soul and calls to those that wait in the gulfs between the stars. Enter Bull, a damaged private dick in search of an A&R man gone missing while trying to sign Ramblin' John, and Sarah, an attractive lady with a gruesome family secret and an occult library to die for (who among us doesn't want a peek at the illustrated Necronomicon?), and you'll get an idea of what's in play in John Horner Jacobs' mind-blowing debut novel.

Needless to say, if that first paragraph is gibberish to you, or if appalling violence and obscene ancient rituals put you off your feed, please don't read this book. (There's also a smattering of sex, including a monumentally repulsive scene involving a kind of group possession, as well as lots of smoking, drinking and playing the blues, which you probably won't care for either, you prude.)

On the other hand, if you appreciate tight, literate prose seasoned with a great deal of thoroughly ooky splatter, look no further. Southern Gods made my Best of 2011 list: Horner brings a complicated era vividly to life and at the same time adds an original, dark, and swampy-foetid breath of air to the Lovecraft-inspired new weird.

You have been warned.

Book Review: Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link

4.5/5

I love that Kelly Link has made a career out of the short form; it's risky and it's brave, and it's the fabulous and fleeting opposite of the trilogy epidemic* rampant in today's fantasy and paranormal genres.

The stories in  in Magic for Beginners are also fabulous and fleeting, some ethereal and full of dream logic, others quirky and postmodern. I'd have given it a full five stars, but there were two stories ("The Cannon" and "Catskin") that didn't really work for me, perhaps because I find that Link is better when she's injecting magic, melancholy  and her odd brand of whimsy into the everyday, rather than writing entirely in the more dreamlike fairytale vein. I won't dwell, because the rest of the stories are so wonderful I'm half-convinced I must be wrong about those two.  (Also, how great are Shelley Jackson's adorably creepy illustrations? I love the updated Leonardo which graces the cover.)

Most of the stories in Magic for Beginners are about average people in very peculiar situations. "The Hortlak" introduces us to Eric, a young man who works at the All-Night Convenience, an "experiment in retail" on the edge of "Zomburbia." Batu, Eric's co-worker, wants to discover what zombies like to buy, in hopes of creating a whole new market. Unfortunately the zombies, while not dangerous, can't seem to grasp anything more complex than the barter system, and bring in "shiny things, broken things . . . empty soda bottles, handfuls of leaves, sticky dirt and dirty sticks," to trade.  In "Some Zombie Contingency Plans," we meet yet another young man; this one steals art, thinks about zombies, crashes parties, and loves to talk to  strangers about their . . . zombie contingency plans. (There are no actual zombies in this story, but there is this great line: "Art is for people who are not worried about zombies." Think about it.)

It's not all about zombies, though. The titular story is (in part, anyway) about obsessive teenage fans of an ephemeral cult TV show called "The Library," which has "no regular schedule, no credits, and sometimes not even dialogue." In "The Great Divorce" we meet Alan and Lavvie -- he's alive, and she's dead, and they are negotiating their divorce with the help of a medium.

My favorites of all are "The Faery Handbag" and "Stone Animals." In the former, a young woman named Genevieve recounts the tale of a missing family heirloom: her Grandmother Zofia's "huge, black, and kind of hairy" handbag, which contains an entire town, a savage beast, her grandfather Rustan (he comes out to visit with Zofia every decade or so), and finally, Genevieve's own boyfriend, Jake. "Stone Animals" upends the classic haunted house story when a family moves into a beautiful old house, only to find that their things -- soap, flatware, the television, the cat, and their youngest child -- have become haunted. There is also a plague of rabbits on their front lawn. I can't begin to tell you what the ending of the story signifies,but oddly, that's perfectly okay. Expected, even.

Some of Link's stories circle back upon themselves with a self-referential postmodern glee (the closing story "Lull" in particular); other times they come untethered and float (or run, or drive) away. But at the center there is always a hint of darkness, of things lost, loneliness, the self-consciousness of the outsider or the obsessive. It's Link's potent mixture of cleverness, whimsy and pathos that makes her stories not only odd, but oddly moving.


* Not that there's anything wrong with a big, juicy trilogy -- or even more, say ASoIaF. It just seems these days it's expected that every book written need be the first in a series. Sometimes one book is the exact perfect number of books.

Book Review: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, by Laird Barron

4/5

I kind of went at Laird Barron’s oeuvre backwards. Though I had previously read the short stories “Old Virginia,” and “The Broadsword,” in “new-Lovecraftian" anthologies, I picked up his excellent new novel The Croning before fully exploring either of his story collections (the other being Occultation and Other Stories). Of course I fell madly in fascinated disgust, and had to immediately devour everything he had in print. So I started at the beginning, with The Imago Sequence.

To read this set of stories, which range over a period of about six years just after the turn of the millennium, is to watch Barron’s uniquely horrific talent slowly unfold. Though quasi-Lovecraftian at times, Barron really has his own voice – in TIS  themes are introduced which will  eventually coalesce into a truly original mythology.

Heavily masculine and vaguely noir, most of the pieces in TIS feature a manly, tough-guy protagonist: an aging spook; a white-collar spy; a Pinkerton man; a crippled wrestler; the adventurer scion of a wealthy and privileged family. Fellow weird-fiction writer Brett J. Talley said of Barron that he “writes like Hemingway might have if he weren’t so boring.” That’s a perfect blurb if ever I saw one.

In Laird Barron’s horrorshow, however, these men are more often victims than heroes: we watch in disbelief as the kind of men who have never learned how to lose are broken down, turned inside-out, chewed up in the maw of a world become uncanny. Incidentally, gaping maws, too, are a thematic preoccupation of Barron’s. His is a cthonic, subterranean horror, lurking in the damp, hot darkness of mouths and caves, and in the primitive lizard-brain, unleashed by drugs or driven to insanity.

Standout stories in the collection are “Old Virginia,” the tale of a CIA agent nearing the end of his career assigned oversight on a very special MK-ULTRA project; “Procession of the Black Sloth,” a fevered nightmare set in an ex-pat community in Hong Kong; and “Hallucigenia,” about a man who has it all, but can’t avoid the slide into horror and madness after his young wife discovers something unspeakable in an abandoned barn. The title story, about a series of legendary and unpleasant photographs, is something of a sly nod to “Pickman's Model,” but also sets the stage for Barron's own developing mythos.

Be forewarned: these stories are not pleasant, and should leave you uneasy. There are no happy endings in Laird Barron's world, only variations on death and madness.

Book Review: Occultation and other Stories, by Laird Barron

 4.5/5

Barron’s second book of short stories absolutely delivers on the promise of his debut volume,  The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, and is in fact an even more accomplished and various collection, one in which his writerly scope, symbols, thematic preoccupations and chilling mythos all find room to grow. It's also deeply, deeply disturbing.

In my review of TIS I noted that, in keeping with the noir vibe of the collection, most of Barron’s protagonists were “tough-guy” types. Occultation, in contrast, offers a number of stories which prominently feature women, and the female voices and tragedies feel true . . . make what you will of the fact that each one is batshit insane. (Hell, most of Barron’s characters end up that way, or worse, regardless of gender.) Here, we meet Danni, a recent widow with an intermittent fugue state and a persistent urge to rejoin her dead husband in “The Lagerstatte”; in the Machen-esque “Catch Hell,” grieving mother Katherine and her anthropologist husband visit The Black Ram, an inn with an unsavory history and a reputation for black magic, to which they have come to enact an unspeakable ritual. (Sidenote: I've just run across another fantastic story featuring The Black Ram -- “Blackwood's Baby,” in  The Best Horror of the Year (Vol. 4). I enjoy watching worldbuilding in progress and love the way Barron is populating his with referents that appear across several works.)

Barron shows a real flair for the dialogue of couples, the petty jibes and secret histories they share lurking just beneath the surface. In the title story two lovers in a motel room speculate about a seriously freaky spot on the wall while passing a bottle; in “--30--” (which feels like an hommage to “Who Goes There?”), two naturalists, former lovers, are thrown together in isolation on a three-month wilderness project. Their repartee is barbed, quick and clever, until strange things start happening and the discovery of an ancient artifact tips them over into insanity and fatal paranoia.

Barron’s developing mythos also gains steam in Occultation. From the heartbreaking first story, “The Forest,” in which we meet the mysterious Dr. Toshi Ryoko, who seems to have a line on the horrors in store for the human race, to “Mysterium Tremendum,” in which Barron's cthonic cult  sprouts a text of its own – The Black Guide, a rare guidebook through the more unpleasant nether regions of Washington State. Following its lead, a group of weekend outdoorsmen stumble into a special kind of hell, one which contains revenants from their own troubled histories.

My favorite in the collection is the masterful haunted house story “The Broadsword.” This was the one that made me leave the lights on. Set in a Victorian apartment building which has seen better days, this is where we finally learn the name of the horror haunting Barron’s mythic landscape: the "children of Old Leech" have come out to play, and you will not forget them anytime soon. And once you have met, they will not forget you, either. Prepare to see a good deal more of them.

Book Review: Martyrs & Monsters, by Robert Dunbar

 4.5/5

I devoured Robert Dunbar’s excellent Martyrs & Monsters almost entirely at one sitting. A collection of short works, the stories in this book are so various in tone and style that it almost felt as if I were reading an anthology of tales by many different authors. Okay, that’s not entirely true, as some of the stories are intended to expand upon or follow others, but the scope is truly impressive. Ranging from simply melancholy to outright tragic, from splatterpunk to whimsy, the primary commonalities are a graceful economy of language and an uncanny insight into the deepest and strangest parts of the human animal.

The absolute standout of Martyrs & Monsters would have to be the creepily lyrical “Mal de Mer,” which reminded me, weirdly, of both Ramsay Campbell’s incredibly disturbing “The Voice of the Beach” and the heartbreaking The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Strange bedfellows, indeed, but this story of repression and release, desire, disappointment, fear and compulsion, contains perhaps my favorite lines in the book, ones which immediately reveal the soul of the protagonist: “In her younger years . . . her essential lack of warmth had discouraged colleagues from bonding with her. It had that effect on most people. Yet she believed herself not to be entirely lacking in empathy, only in its myriad pitying applications and ubiquitous expressions, which she considered both squalid and pointless.” (Maybe this just reminds me a little bit of me.)

On the other hand, the punchy gross-out of “Saturday Night Fights” is all rock & roll, splatterpunk and 50s B-movie, rolled together in one juicy and satisfying package. You’ve got to love a story that begins “By the time the two of them woke up, their friends had already met with disgusting deaths. But then they both slept pretty late that day.” And the monster? Personal phobias notwithstanding, just ew.

“Gray Soil” and “Red Soil,” two of the linking stories, are told in simple, almost mythic language. Together, they uncover the blood-soaked history of a desolate place – the first a story of a mother’s brutal sacrifice, the second a tale of unchecked appetites, human and otherwise, and again of hard choices made for the sake of loved ones.

Other favorites include “The Folly,” a southern gothic almost-spoof which involves an eccentric family, Bigfoot, and a house shaped like an alligator; “High Rise,” the story of a nymphomaniac ghost and her victim(s); and “Killing Billie’s Boys,” an oddball tale of warring witches and their rent-boy catspaws.

And, despite my going on, that’s fewer than half of the stories in Martyrs & Monsters, each one unique and haunting. Half a star off for my only complaint (and it’s not that dire), the sometimes distracting typos, of which there were many. Possibly this is just a side-effect of the e-book format, and almost certainly out of the author’s hands, but it’s the kind of thing that can break the spell of an otherwise compelling narrative. At any rate, I look forward to reading more from Robert Dunbar, a truly literary fabulist.

Book Review: The Place Called Dagon, by Herbert S. Gorman

 4/5

This great little weird novel was recently rescued from obscurity by publishing house Lovecraft's Library. According to Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, HPL mentions having read The Place Called Dagon in his letters (1928) and also in Supernatural Horror in Literature. Though he called it "purile" at the time, there is much academic speculation that TPCD may have influenced classics such as "The Dunwich Horror" and "Dreams in the Witch House," and perhaps fear of comparison even played a part in HPL's reluctance to release "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward." Conversely, it is almost certain Gorman had never heard of Lovecraft -- the name "Dagon" wasn't original to HPL's 1917 short story -- and just happened to stray into the weird for this one novel. (Gorman wrote several, though he is now mostly forgotten).

Despite its anomalous state, TPCD actually sits quite proudly in the weird tradition, somewhere between Blackwood and Lovecraft: in some ways it recalls Blackwood's classic tale "Ancient Sorceries," but instead of time-haunted Europe, is set instead in HPL's eldritch and inbred New England.

(Mild spoilers follow.)

Gorman's hero, a young doctor who has assumed a practice in an out-of-the-way Massachusetts valley, soon begins to suspect ancient and evil secrets persist beneath the hard, practical veneer of the town of Marlborough. Lo and behold, it seems the locals are in fact descended from survivors of the Salem witch-cult, and strange rites are being resurrected in the dark woods. The cast contains some pretty stock weird figures, including an arrogant arcane scholar, his disturbingly alluring wife, and a dour and malevolent preacher. Sometimes assisting the determined doctor in his search for the truth: Marlborough's now housebound former doctor -- a reticent (and mildly alcoholic) adviser on town matters; a beautiful and friendless orphan ingenue; and a stolid local farmer who is both kinder and cannier than he appears.

It's Gorman's rather modern writing which prevents TPCD from being "just" another forgettable pulp horror novel -- certainly, he's less long-winded than Blackwood and less purple than Lovecraft. His lyrical descriptions of atmosphere and landscape and keen insights into human motivation keep the tale interesting, and his candid take on female sexuality seems quite progressive for 1927. TPCD is a quick and enjoyable read, and deserving of being resurrected into the pantheon of the good weird. Four solid stars.

Book Review: Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville

 5/5

I can't believe how long it took me to pick up a book by China Mieville, and now I can't shut up about about him. Perdido Street Station is stellar and wholly original, truly literary weird fiction from a writer determined to subvert the reigning sci-fi/fantasy cliches. (In fact, Mieville is notorious for having referred to Tolkien as "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature.") Nevertheless, Perdido Street Station is, like LotR, essentially an epic quest tale, in which a mismatched group of everyday people must face overwhelming odds to rid their world of a menace so great -- and seriously unsettling -- it might mean the end of civilization as they know it. But that's where the similarities to "traditional" fantasy end.

 I know several otherwise perfectly sane and intelligent people who refuse to read Mieville on the grounds that he is "too hard" (as in "I'm not in grad school anymore, so fiction shouldn't hurt my head," hard). And to be sure, his postmodern political education credentials and ginormous vocabulary are intimidating; but Mieville is his (our? whatever.) generation's reigning master of the weird, and his strange and lyrical mastery of the English language is currently unparalleled in the genre.

Like a sci-fi Rushdie or Dickens, Mieville revels in detail and lush descriptive language, and his city of New Crobuzon -- with its vile slums and peculiar brothels, political machinations and crime networks, artists and renegade scientists, "xenian" races, sentient constructs and horrific "Re-made" underclass -- reflects world-building on such a massively detailed scale that by the time you've finished you feel as if you could navigate its strange, seething streets yourself. On a few occasions, especially as the many narrative threads start coming together and the nail-biting climax approaches, these dense descriptive passages feel as if they are bogging down the tale, but their intrinsic beauty and alien horror are well worth the time spent in detour.

As a sidenote, Perdido Street Station is the first of three books set in the world of Bas-Lag. The second, The Scar, is not really dependent on having read the first, but The Iron Council (review coming soon) really is. Read them all, and I guarantee you will never forget Bas-Lag.

Book review: The Scar, by China Mieville

5/5

The Scar is the second book set in China Mieville’s enormous and species-diverse world of Bas-Lag, and while it might help for readers to be familiar with its predecessor Perdido Street Station, it's not strictly necessary, as this is not strictly a sequel. It's enough to know that as the story opens our protagonist, linguist Bellis Coldwine, is fleeing her beloved city of New Crobuzan (the setting for PSS) in fear for her life. Unfortunately, Bellis has a tangential connection to the awful events that make up the narrative of PSS, and her friends and acquaintances have started disappearing in the resulting government investigation. Determined not to meet the same fate, Bellis hastily books passage working as a translator on the Terpsichoria, a ship bound for the distant colony of Nova Esperium. There she hopes to wait out the trouble, and eventually return home.

As her journey gets underway, Bellis – chilly by nature and in mourning for her lost life – remains aloof from her fellow passengers, though she acerbically records shipboard goings-on in a long, journal-like letter she means to send back to New Crobuzon at her first chance. Growing restless in the long, dull days at sea, Bellis finally strikes up a guarded friendship with Johannes Tearfly, a naturalist and fellow academic whose primary interests are in “megafauna” and exotic underwater life. She also grows curious about the hold full of "Remade" prisoners, intended to be used as labor in the new colony. (The Remade are the lowest class in New Crobuzan: usually criminals, whose punishment includes the forcible addition or alteration of body parts. These might be organic – beaks, claws, feathers, tentacles, extra human bits; or mechanical – legs replaced by steam-engine powered treads, arms replaced with tools useful in factories. The punishment generally fits the crime in some perverse way, and the possibilities are endless. In a world occupied by a multiplicity of "xenian" races, the Remade are among Mieville's darkest and most fascinating creations. But I digress.)

It's not long before Bellis is pressed into earning her passage, serving as translator in highly volatile and secret talks with New Crobuzon allies the Cray, who seem to have misplaced something large, top-secret and essential to government interests. There is clearly more going on aboard the Terpsichoria than meets the eye. When Silas Fennec, a mysterious passenger with enough clout to commandeer the ship, announces they must return to New Crobuzon immediately, Bellis is both alarmed and relieved.

And then pirates attack. Really. Just when the novel is building up a good head of espionage steam . . . pirates? Please don't let the narrative hard-left throw you – there will be many more – because now the action really begins.

Led by the mysterious and deadly swordsman Uther Doul, the pirates board the Terpsichoria and summarily execute the officers and most of the crew. The passengers, cargo and ship are then claimed for the legendary floating pirate city of Armada. (Another of Mieville's better conceits, Armada is a fully-functioning city-state, built from an endless array of ships captured over centuries, intricately refitted and lashed together. It is quite literally legendary, since the pirates of Armada leave nothing behind when they attack, and no one taken to their city has ever been allowed to leave.) The press-ganged Bellis understands her chances of getting home are now next to none.

But Bellis finds that Armada is not the lawless place she imagined: all the passengers, including the newly-freed Remade, are offered jobs and places to live. The political climate, while contentious, is relatively stable and egalitarian, consisting of several independent “ridings” in loose confederation, all overseen by a pair of mysterious leaders called The Lovers. In spite of her despair, Bellis begins working as a librarian in Armada's huge pilfered collection, and quietly getting to know her new home. But when a strange and important manuscript is discovered in the library, Bellis draws the uncomfortable attention of both Silas Fennec and Uther Doul – who serves as right hand to The Lovers. Drawn into their political machinations, her fate becomes inexorably bound with that of Armada itself.

I have given short shrift to some important aspects of this book – for example the moving subplot of Remade prisoner Tanner Sack, who finds his freedom and a modicum of redemption in his new maritime home; or the fascinating Uther Doul and his deadly quantum magic-fueled “Possibility Sword.” But to say any more (and there is so much more!) would be to deprive potential readers of the pleasure of discovering the myriad of strange beings and weird twists The Scar delivers before reaching its stunning climax.
Perhaps the most astounding thing about The Scar – a novel drawing on traditions as varied as the sea-shanty and “big-fish” yarn, political thriller, quantum theory and existential horror, and influences as disparate as Lovecraft, Borges and Melville – is that all the twists, turns and wildly complex narrative threads actually add up to something truly satisfying. Mieville not only builds a world so real you can see (and possibly smell) it when you close your eyes, he also sticks the landing like a gold medalist. The more China Mieville I read, the more in awe of his disturbing and fruitful mind I become. At this moment, I’m convinced The Scar is his best work – though I have no doubt he’ll surprise me again.

Book Review: Horns, by Joe Hill

 5/5

I love it when fiction slips the bonds of genre expectations and becomes something altogether more than what you bargained for. Joe Hill's debut novel Heart-Shaped Box was a tautly-written horror story, but if you've read his collection 20th Century Ghosts, you know he's also more than capable of work that's whimsical rather than than frightening, sometimes intensely disturbing, but frequently touching . . . and dare I say literary?

After having finished it -- in less than 24 hours, thanks to the propulsive narrative -- I can safely assert that Horns is not a horror novel, though it's certainly horrifying in places. It's an odd, funny, dreadful, compelling and deeply romantic story about average young people whose lives are touched by the violent and surreal.

Ig Parrish, Horns's metaphorically and literally demonized protagonist, will no doubt offend some irony-challenged readers with his (often hilarious) musings on God and the Devil -- "The Fire Sermon" is a philosophical and comedic gem -- but Ig's main concerns -- love, cruelty, revenge, and the ethical complexities of simply being human -- are universal to good literature. Hill's touch is sure, both with comedy and pathos, and the deftly woven narrative realizes his characters believably from the tumultuous desires of adolescence to the sharp wounds of adult responsibility. The ending may be slightly problematic for some (I'll need another read to be sure what I feel), but "Horns" is much more than the sum of its parts.

I won't summarize the plot here -- but I will say where Horns  fits into my literary pantheon. Touchstones would include Christopher Moore (though Hill is less giddily comic), Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses  (darkly absurd, hilariously offensive magic realism . . . and of course the horns problem), Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife   (genre-upending, wrenchingly real love story), and, for better or worse, Stephen King's classic story of adolescent innocence and experience, "The Body."

Joe Hill is one of the most promising writers working today -- in any genre -- and I hope he continues to defy expectations with every new piece.

Book Review: Embassytown, by China Mieville

5/5
On one hand, I wish I could convince everyone I know that Mieville is the best science/weird fiction writer working today; on the other I'm kind of gleeful to have encountered his alien genius before he really does become the next big thing (at least among smartypants nerds). He is a writer always testing the boundaries of genre, and Embassytown is likely the most “literary” book he’s written so far . . . though perhaps not the most immediately accessible. Prepare for a novel that both blows your mind and gives it an excellent workout.

You know you're entering heady territory when a novel's epigram is a quote from Walter Benjamin: “The word must communicate something (other than itself).” (Although it might equally be another, quite different, quote: “Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.” I'll let you work that one out as you read the book.)

In Embassytown, Mieville continues to showcase his deft world-building skills on the planet Arieka, a crucial node in the interstellar shipping lanes. Here, human colonists coexist in a state of mutual disconnection with a culture so physically and intellectually alien from our own that communication is nearly impossible, only achieved by a select few “Ambassadors,” genetically altered and rigorously trained for the task. Though the main thrust of the narrative is a tale of political intrigue, be aware that a significant amount of time is spent pondering the brain-bursting concepts of linguistic and semiotic construction. For example: the native Ariekei are unable to communicate or conceive of anything but that which is is literally true – they are incapable of a lie, and must construct elaborate, surreal tableaux in order to formulate even simple similes or metaphors. (Our protagonist, Avice Benner Cho, is herself a simile, having as a child participated in the creation of the unpleasantly loaded phrase "the girl who ate what was given her.") But what might change for the Ariekei -- and us -- when a communication breakthrough occurs?

In Embassytown, Mieville has mostly jettisoned his tendency to revel in the minutia of the grotesque, as he does in the Bas-Lag novels. Instead he works in simple, elegant prose to consider and illustrate evolution and destabilization of the ways in which thinking beings communicate -- constructing meaning (and misunderstanding) from sounds and other signifiers, and constructing civilizations from those meanings. (Now that sentence gave me flashbacks to grad school . . .) With his latest book, Mieville once again defies genre expectations, raising the bar for thoughtful, challenging science fiction.

Book Review: The Croning, by Laird Barron

5/5

The Croning is a perfectly horrible book, and I mean that in high compliment.

It's rare that a horror story actually scares me these days (and more's the pity), but Barron's first novel is wrong in all the right ways, leaving behind a caul of unease, and a wicked dose of the cosmic heebie-jeebies. (I'm thrilled to admit that when I finished it last night, I left the lights on.) Also? Un-put-downable. The Croning sustains the poisonous adrenaline level of one of Barron's short stories over almost 250 pages; once you open the cover you are done for. But the faint-of-heart be warned: this is a seriously dark and unpleasant ride, with a sucking black hole where some might prefer redemptive resolution.

With each tautly descriptive and hallucinogenic page, the dread level ratchets up another notch, for both the reader and our "hero" Don Miller. Don, a  former  geologist and cave-expert now in his early 80s, has recently come to suspect that his notoriously unreliable memory is finally going for good. As Don settles into uneasy retirement in his wife's ancestral family home in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, he reviews his apparently charmed life: moderate wealth, adventurous travel, family and a 50-plus-year marriage with love of his life,the still-vivacious -- and still-successful -- archaeologist Michelle Mock.

But there is something wrong. Don feels a creeping dread about the house and the Mock family's mysterious history, as well as Michelle's long absences, unreliable itineraries, and violent mood swings. Now, Don's fears begin to coalesce into a pattern of nagging inconsistencies and memory-repression so terrifying as to indeed resemble dementia. This challenging timeline structure leaps back and forth across more than half a century of Don's life, methodically revealing the horrors that have been conspiratorially hidden from him until now, and unveiling the truly nightmarish source of Don's dis-ease -- his brushes with a cthonic cult that has flourished from before the dawn of time, and demands unimaginable sacrifice from its chosen acolytes.

In The Croning, Barron has fleshed out the rumors of "Old Leech" and his minions, who have appeared in certain of his short stories, creating an ancient and bloodthirsty mythology of Lovecraftian scale, but with a stench of cosmic horror that is entirely his own. It's sick, but I want more.

Book Review: The Town that Forgot How to Breathe, by Kenneth J. Harvey

 4.5/5

The Town that Forgot How to Breathe was a book I impulsively chose by its cover (and I've seen several reviews that started the same way). Though I had never heard of it, I'm very glad I did, because this strangely charming and incredibly eerie book -- part horror story, part eco-parable, all magically weird -- got under my skin with its vivid imagery and unusual setting.

Formerly a rich fishing ground, the tiny Newfoundland village of Bareneed's maritime industry has collapsed from overfishing, and the town and its inhabitants are slipping into a depression both economic and existential. But something strange is afoot in Bareneed: when several locals fall ill with an unrecognizable breathing disorder (viral? hysterical? fatal?), and perfectly-preserved dead bodies start washing up on the rocky shore, that's only the tip of the iceberg that eventually draws ghosts, sea monsters and military intervention into one -- mostly quite effective -- tall tale.

Harvey constructs TTTFHTB around a rotating set of POV characters, among them a local doctor and a police officer, both capable but out of their depth; a beatific little old lady who knows more than she's letting on; a man-child whose painted apocalyptic visions are coming to pass; and a "townie" fisheries officer with roots in Bareneed, who takes a summer-rental with his eight-year-old daughter. It's a large cast of characters for a small town, but Harvey gives them each a unique voice and perspective on the mysteries unfolding around them.

Only one of the many narrative threads falls short of its initial promise, which left me wondering if it might have been better left out -- but that same thread also offers up some of the most chilling and atmospheric scenes in the novel, so I'll let that shortcoming slide. I have seen very mixed reviews  -- I expect you either like this sort of fiction, or you don't. I'm giving TTTFHTB 4.5 enthusiastic stars. If Stephen King's creepy, insular Maine towns appeal, if you loved the myth and magic of "The X-Files," if you enjoy a dank whiff of Lovecraftian horror, or if you've ever dreamed of seeing a mermaid, this book should be right in your wheelhouse.

Book Review: After the Apocalypse, by Maureen F. McHugh

 5/5

After the Apocalypse as a title is a bit misleading -- evoking as it does zombies (there are only a few), nuclear winter, or some "Mad Max" scenario -- and yet it's also quite perfect. Because, like Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, Maureen F. McHugh's thoughtful  collection of stories is really about how we, just us normal people, get up and get on with it after the unthinkable has occurred.

At heart, these are intimate tales about people and their strange new  lives: keeping family safe, finding work, finding food, losing their homes, their minds and their innocence. While some common genre tropes appear (a government "zombie reserve" that doubles as a fight-or-die penal colony; an unstoppable strain of avian flu that takes its sweet, relentless time to turn a human brain to mush; disparate strangers inexplicably drawn to converge in a particular place), the apocalypses -- yes, the plural form is required -- in these stories are equally the result of problems already on our doorsteps: natural disasters; overburdened and failing urban infrastructures; economic meltdowns; and machines that might just be smarter than we are.

With clean, evocative prose, a killer eye for detail, and a sympathetic, humorous (but never indulgent) view into the human condition, McHugh has crafted a work of speculative fiction about what humanity might stand to lose -- or just maybe gain -- when we are faced with the burdens of the end times already rearing their ugly heads. Her characters are not always kind, not always moral. But they are astute, funny and absolutely believable. (And as a bonus, one wears the coolest t-shirt ever: "If You're Really a Goth, Where Were You When We Sacked Rome?")