First Lines of Margaret Atwood's "Old Babes in the Wood"

 "Nell came home one day just before dinnertime and found the front door open. The car was gone. There was a trail of blood splotches on the steps, and once she was inside the house, she followed it along the hall carpet and into the kitchen. There was a knife on the cutting board, one of Tig's favorites, Japanese steel, very sharp--and beside it, a blood-stained carrot, one end severed. Their daughter, nine at the time, was nowhere to be found." 

- Margaret Atwood, "First Aid" from the Old Babes in the Wood collection.

Another collection of sharp Atwood short stories. Like all such books some stories hit and others don't, but most of these are quite good - filled with smart descriptions and insightful observations. Atwood's always been conscious of mortality but her age and her husband's recent demise have inevitably caused death's shadow to loom larger over many of these stories, giving them a melancholy air.

Review of "The Best American SciFi and Fantasy 2022"

The "Best Science Fiction and Fantasy" anthologies are always a good source of interesting tales. All of the stories in the 2022 version (edited by Rebecca Roanhorse) are high-quality - there wasn't one story that didn't seem like it was best in class. But like any collection of stories from multiple authors, some worked for me, and some didn't. Here are the ones that I can't stop thinking about:

1. Meg Elison, The Pizza Boy. Pizza delivery... in space! A blue-collar captain struggles to make and deliver pizzas in a future of bureaucracy and scarcity. When will he find enough mushrooms? Unexpected twist at the end.

2. Aimee Ogden. The Cold Calculations. A response to Tom Godwin's famous The Cold Equations, but 100% angrier and with an ingenious - but seriously ugly - solution to the problem.

3. Nalo Hopkinson, Broad Dutty Water: a Sunken Story. Wonderfully inventive story of a woman whose collection of impromptu bio-implants take her to a place she never expected. An unpredictable tale that's also memorable for its post-glacier melt setting.

4. Sam J. Miller. Let All the Children Boogie. Two misfit teens explore alternative music and gender identity while trying to decipher the messages from a mysterious voice that interrupts their favorite radio station. Sympathetic and moving.

5. Kelly Link. Skindler's Veil. A long story about a college kid who ends up house sitting for Death. Or some form of demi-god. Doesn't matter: I classic dose of that wonderful Link magic. Looking forward to digging into her latest collection White Cat, Black Dog.

6. Peng Shepherd. The Future Library. An imaging of what would happen if the real Future Library fell prey to climate change politics. A sad, moving fantasy.

7. Catherynne M. Valente. L'Esprit de L'Escalier. What if Orpheus had succeeded in bringing Eurydice back from the underworld? Valente's irreverent take imagines the scene as a failed marriage between an egomanic and a zombie. Extremely entertaining.

8. Rich Larson. Tripping Though Time. A waiter serves drinks to time-traveling tourists who gawk at famous historical natural disasters. The class consciousness in this one reminded me of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black collection.

9. Maria Dong. The Frankly Impossible Weight of Han. Stick with this one through the overtly meta comments as the structure of the tale reveals itself. Wonderfully moving mix of scifi, folklore, and religion.

First Lines of Richard Butner's "The Adventurists"

 "On the ferry to the island, I saw a man dressed as a jester. His image flased into view in my side mirror as I sat there half-dozing behind the steering wheel. It was midday as we chugged along across the sound, and the sun glared off of the smattering of pickups and SUVs and vans on the deck. For a second, I thought I had dreamed him."

Richard Butner, The Adventurists

 

First Lines of Kevin Lucia's "Liminal Spaces"

 "I'm sitting, crisscross-applesauce, in the deepest part of the deepest end of the Twin Oaks Community swimming pool, but down here, I may as well be sitting on Mars. My eyes are closed, have been closed, for about five minutes."

- from "Written in Water," by Robert Ford, the first story in Liminal Spaces: An Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction edited by Kevin Lucia.

Lucia writes that this anthology offers takes on "dark specultative stories about the in-between. ... Neither here nor there. Strange stories about poeple and places lost in a shadowy, hazy middle-ground." Thus these are tales a person or a place with a dark- often occult - secret, and the fun comes from the journey of discovering that secret. I enjoyed it but like with most collections there mixed results based on your personal taste. For example, Jessica McHugh's "Back to One" and Chad Lutzke's "Womb with a View" were too grotesque for me. But most were quite entertaining. My highlights were "The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own," Gwendolyn Kiste's take on the Black Dahlia; "Mirror, Mirror" Joshua Palmatier's fantasy offering; "O Adelin," Michael Wehunt's Lovecraftian post-apocalyptic tale; and the twisted logic of Norman Prentiss' "Cabinet People." 

First Lines of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's "Friday Black"

 "Fela, the headless girl, walked towards Emmanuel. Her neck jagged with red savagery. She was silent, but he could feel her waiting for him to do something, anything." 

- Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black, the story "The Finkelstein 5"

A powerful collection of near-future stories that feel like they honestly extrapolate current trends to their logical conclusions. My favorites so far are "The Finkelstein 5" which shows one possible outlet for minority anger after years and years of blatant injustice; "Friday Black" a picture of a consumerist dystopia from the point of view of a sales clerk, and "Zimmer Land" with powerful questions of the implications of virtual outlets for immoral urges. Most of these go over the top - in a good way.

Book Review: "The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories" (ed. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer)

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is an impressive accomplishment. I've tried to write this review a number of times and nothing I do is capturing my experience of reading it's 1000+ pages. So let me just write some words.

The VanderMeers compiled the best "weird" stories over the last century. By weird, we're not talking horror - although that is often an element in these stories. Weird here often means surreal and bizarre, but can also be tender and moving. To me, the common element is often an element of surprise, not from jump scares but from a joyful examination of an impeccable internal logic. Exploring the strange takes one many, many forms, and all of them are included here: From the different worlds in Michel Bernanos' surreal "The Other Side of the Mountain" to SciFi dystopias (perhaps best represented in Craig Padawer's "Meat Garden"), to lots and lots of strange creatures (Lovecraft's classic "Dunwich Horror" but also "Margaret st. Clair's "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles").

The first portion of the book (its arranged chronologically) is almost quaint in it's pre-ironic story telling. There's a good slice of surrealism, a lot of monsters, and a good amount of gothic tales. 

As the book progresses, the stories get more brutal - or more tender. The older I get, the less appeal gore and horror have for me, but Daniel Abraham's masterful "Flat Diane" plays horror wonderfully with parental guilt and the "Flat Stanley books (and killer lines like "The best trick Hell has to play against its inmates is to whisper to them that this - this now - is the bottom. Nothing can be worse than this. And then to pull the floor away.") The tender - yet often creepy - is represented by two tales I can't stop thinking about: Martin Simpson's moving domestic ghost tale "Last Rites and Resurrections" and the slow burn of child fantasies gone sour in Micaela Morrissette's "The Familiars." 

There are also stories here that, to me, are undisputed masterpieces. These include:

• Michael Chabon's "The God of Dark Laughter". Brilliant combination of the paranoid with the weird, told with an impeccable literary voice.
• Jorge Luis Borges's examination of infinity in "The Aleph"
• Kafka's brilliant "In the Penal Colony"
• Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "The Hell Screen." Which turned me on to Akutagawa's brilliance (Jay Rubin's translation of this fantastical tale is the better version IMO).
  
• James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Terrible Things to Rats” 

Not every tale in the book was good, but then again, that's the greatest part about these collections. If you don't like one, wait a moment and the next one comes along. There were so many good stories in The Weird you won't be waiting long!

First Lines of Joanna Russ' "The Zanzibar Cat"

Katy drives like a maniac; we must have been doing over 120 km/hr on those turns. She's good, though, extremely good, and I've seen her take the whole car apart and put it together again in a day."

- Joanna Russ, from "When it Changed", the first story in the collection The Zanzibar Cat.

I fell in love with Russ when I encountered her amazing story "The Dirty Little Girl" in The Hidden Side of the Moon. It's a mesmerizing story, compelling and deeply weird at the same time, and I can't stop going back to it. A few stories in, The Zanzibar Cat is not of that quality (yet?) but is still entertaining.

Book Review: Margaret Atwood's "The Heart Goes Last"

Margaret Atwood has great ideas, including the premise of The Heart Goes Last: people desperately struggle to survive in a depressed society so much that they’ll voluntarily join Positron – a society where they are free to live in luxury. But there’s a catch. You live in comfort for six months of the year, but for the other six months you labor in prison. You share a house with other people you never see but you know are there (their belongings are stored in lockers in the garage). Of course, things get complicated rather quickly - it’s a tale of the dystopia behind a utopia. This being Atwood, we also get these powerful internal monologs that so deftly reveal the dramatic mental narratives and mythologies that we all build up in our heads.

The best part of the book was how she painted the slow evolution of the stories and self-deceptions of Stan and Charmaine, a Positron couple. Atwood shows how they are their own worst enemy. Given a ticket into what they think is a perfect world, Stan and Charmaine immediately start to subvert it, allowing the boredom and lust of their inner narratives to drive them to betray not only their socially confined borders – but also each other. The first half of the book Atwood masterfully shows us the deep power of social norms and how sexual fetishes – fuel for excitingly illicit transgressions – can be used for both freedom and entrapment. (Ying and Yang!) A scarily vivid picture emerges of a totalitarian world where the couple, isolated from each other, become pawns in shadowy conspiracies that are stranger than they ever could have imagined.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t last. About halfway through, the plot devolves into absurdity, with (even more) convoluted conspiracies, brainwashing, and inexplicable coincidences. Once Stan [spoiler alert!] escaped Positron disguised as Elvis, I decided the book had become a parody and blissfully enjoyed it as such. That’s Atwood’s prerogative, although I found myself wanting a more serious engagement with bionic sex fetishes, Pavolian sexual conditioning, and economic desperation used as a profit machine. She started THGL as a short story, and perhaps it should have stayed as such, for while the start of the novel is riveting, and I enjoyed it overall, the entire experience wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been.

Maybe that's What Falling in Love Means

“I realize we can never predict when these few special moments occur, she says, how if we hadn't met, I wouldn't be standing on a bridge watching a fire, and how there are certain people – not that many – who enter one’s life with the power to make these moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means, the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.”

- Stewart Dybek, from the excellent “Paper Lantern,” collected in The Best American Short Stories 1996.
I listened to it via an excellent New Yorker fiction podcast, as read by ZZ Packer.

Related Posts:

Review: The New Yorker Fiction Podcasts

Thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft

Any fan of horror fiction has heard of H.P. Lovecraft. It’s hard to overstate how much Lovecraft towers over modern horror writing – many authors like Stephen King sing his praises. It was this continued exposure to his name that led me to sample his writing. And you can do so for free! His fiction has passed out of copyright so people like CthulhuChick have provided his stories specifically designed for your e-reader of choice. (I love the internet.) And my first impression is that there’s a good reason for his reputation – he’s a compelling, original author that created insanely detailed worlds that, at times, are genuinely creepy. The liked the five (long) stories I read, although I felt that they all suffered from the same flaws that keep me from unequivably praising the man:

• Pacing. My god is the man long winded. I understand that writing was different back in the day and that authors liked to give things room to breathe, but his relaxed pacing is tough going in the internet age. 
• Words. All of the stories I read dealt with monsters or events that were so fantastic that they became sublime.  So how do you describe the indescribable? You overuse the words that are available to you - reading Lovecraft is like reading a thesaurus for “extraordinary” or “incredible.”
• Antiquated sensibility. Lovecraft quite obviously belonged to or longed for a bygone time when the world was divided into unrefined and refined people (the latter having servants and resources to travel the world and have sitting rooms and the free time to ponder architecture). This mindset is also foreign to the (my?) modern sensibility and also generates some quite offensive language about minorities.
• Unpronouncable names. I love the names he gives his monster menagerie but seriously, how do you say them? Can you pronounce “Cthulhu?” “Yog-sothoth”?

Regardless of the above, it’s speaks to the power of his writing that despite these significant flaws the stories are so good. My favorites were The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Mountains of Madness” and portions of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” IMO, “The Call of Cthulhu” is the place to start – it’s a short story that condenses what’s attractive about Lovecraft into a relatively taught package. On the other hand, “The Mountains of Madness”, despite its many moments of genius, suffers from its novella length and logical inconsistencies (to pick one: entire chapters are dedicated to a history of the monsters that our explorers apparently discerned in mere hours by examining wall etchings via flashlight. Brother, please.) It’s his endings that I liked the best. For example, once you get past the mind-numbing detail in the first sections of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” you get a riveting section where an explorer navigates the spooky tunnels underneath an old section of Providence RI.

Most people agree that there’s a sharp division in the horror genre – once Lovecraft came along, horror was simply different. And you can see this when you read him. Before Lovecraft, horror was mainly focused on danger to body or soul – things that would either kill you or would damn your soul to hell. Lovecraft depicts a world in which mankind is insignificant in the extreme, and the protagonists not only have a hard time grasping the cosmic nature of the beasts and plots raging around them but also the implication that these ageless monsters render us insignificant. I’m not sure what sparked this sensibility – a reaction to the World Wars or modern scientific discoveries – but the horror that defines human capabilities as insignificant in an indifferent universe is easily the most powerful aspect of his work.

Bonus video: Check out this (unembeddable) creepy video by Prins Preben inspired by Lovecraft.

Review: The New Yorker Fiction Podcasts

On a whim, I started downloading the free New Yorker Fiction Podcasts available from the iTunes store. I was skeptical at first because my impressions of New Yorker fiction have always been somewhat negative; my impression was that they were always too impressed with themselves or too urban (read: about NYC) to consistently appeal to someone living outside of the big apple. And there are certainly some stories like this here: James McCourt’s depiction of a cinematic femme fatale in “Avenged” was to my eye overwritten and boring. But I have to eat some crow here: I was completely mistaken. Most of the stories are not only really entertaining, but cover a wide range of fiction: you can hear stories from such notables as Jamaica Kincaid, Denis Johnson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Monroe, James Salter, Roberto Bolaño, and Donald Bartheleme. I’ve also been introduced to some writers that I had never heard of before: two of Stephanie Vaughn’s excellent tales about a military family stationed in Fort Niagara and - my favorite one so far - Stewart Dybek's hypnotic Russian-doll of a story called "Paper Lantern."

The podcasts are hosted by the fiction editor of the New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, who sets the scene by introducing and interviewing  the narrator for a few minutes before (s)he reads any story of their choosing from The New Yorker archives. After the presentation then the two of them discuss and analyze the story. For non-professional narrators, the stories are almost always engaging, and their insights into the stories both thoughtful and enlightening. My favorite reader so far is either Salman Rushdie’s pitch-perfect take on Donald Barthelme’s “Consider the Bodyguard,” a difficult tale composed entirely of questions, or Orhan Pamuk’s rich Slavic baritone narration of Vladimir Nabokov’s “My Russian Education.” Some of the parings don't seem to match at first, like Allegra Goodman's bubbly voice reading the very-male narration of John Updike's "A&P" or Anne Enright's thick Irish brogue presenting  John Cheever's very American "The Swimmer," but in both cases the narrator won me over in the end. I'm not sure why this is - it might be that since the narrators are all authors themselves, their love of the words carries over into the recording. All I know is that I've been really enjoying them and plan on checking out the entire series. Next up: David Means reading Raymond Carver's "Chef's House."

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

The New Horror in Short Stories

...I was beat. Arguing with the children, a trip to the dentist, then endless shopping for invisible things--toilet paper, glue, salt. Things no one ever knows are there until they're gone and are then needed desperately. An invisible day where you exhaust yourself running around, doing thankless errands that are necessary but meaningless: the housewife's oxymoron.

- Jonathan Carroll, "The Sadness of Detail", page 207 of Poe's Children.

Poe's Children is a compilation of what editor Peter Straub labels the "New Horror" - authors that strive to escape the ghettos of typical horror fiction in favor of "literature" (or at least genre mixing). Like all short story anthologies, not all of the stories are successful, even if they all are variations of a theme. So far, the ones that  work for me are the ones that provoke a visceral reaction - either of horror, disgust, or wonder. To me, that's what horror as a genre is all about - lifting you out of he mundane world Carroll describes so aptly above. For example, Kelly Link's “Louise’s Ghost” is a story that's certainly interesting and has a fun conceit - the entire story is about two women both named Louise so it's difficult to tell who is doing or saying what for a while - but it didn't present any wow moments to me (unlike the other stories she presented in Stranger Things Happen). No, the strongest stories here either shock like Dan Chaon's “The Bees” (a truly disturbing tale of supernatural redemption) or present a situation to you in an entirely new way like Carroll's story or Elizabeth Hand's “Cleopatra Brimstone” (the best story i've read in 2001, hands down).

Still only halfway through the book, but so far it's half hits, half misses. A pretty good showing in my book. Hey, hitting .500 would win you the batting title and $250 million dollars, so Straub did something right!

Cross Posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox

Defending the Short Story

Yesterday, Joel wrote about his dislike for stand-alone short stories, and as the two of us have discussed before, we’ll have to agree to disagree about this. To me, the best short stories are like Tapas to the full-meal of the novel. When done well, they present one of several things:

- A completely focused mood piece. Think of some of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, capturing what it feels like to have your first girlfriend break up with you, or to be stuck with insomnia thinking about death. Other examples: Stephen King’s most excellent stories in Skeleton Crew and Night Shift.
- Pondering an idea. Perhaps done best in SciFi, these short stories present an interesting idea and the consequences of that idea. Philip K Dick was the best at this; he’d present an interesting idea that might not hold up over the course of a novel and explore it in a short story. (Note that both Total Recall and Minority Report were adapted from PKD short stories, not novels.)
- Experimenting with form, voice, etc. Authors just fucking around to see what works.

In short, I see a short story as a more informal, concentrated taste of story telling. Potentially containing the possibility of something that could be explored further, but not necessarily. (Of course, I've always been attracted to flaws more that perfection - I wrote a bit about this over here.)

I also think that there are authors that are better at novels and those that are better at short stories (and the rare few, like Stephen King, that are good at both). For instance, I love Haruki Murakami, but (after the quake excepted) his short stories are awful - he needs the space of the novel to present his themes and wandering narrators. I wonder if Ondaatje is one of this authors whose writing favors the novelistic form?

(Cross Posted at Reading, Running & Red Sox)