Locus, August 2014

by Locus Publications

  Also familiar is Parker’s vaguely late medieval to 17th-century version of a Europe in which alchemy is a complex science (taught in an elite university called the Studium and involving various spells, ‘‘rooms,’’ forms, and voices), illuminating manuscripts is still a trade, ecclesiastical authority is giving way to (and sometimes turning into) merchant enterprises, the almost universal unit of currency is called the angel, and the common religion worships the Invincible Sun. As with Guy Gavriel Kay, Parker’s research is impressively thorough (as evidenced by three entertaining and informative essays on siege engines, swords, and armor), and the setting is just defamiliarized enough to provide room to move around, but unlike Kay, Parker makes little effort toward any specific one-to-one correlations with actual historical events. This world is more of a rhetorical construct than a fantasyland, and it provides some delicious opportunities to satirize academia (as the title Academic Exercises implies), politics, religion, militarism, and even art. Since Parker can be one of the funniest and most quotable of current fantasy writers (‘‘any human being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it’s not the work they’re supposed to be doing’’), this satirical approach might well appeal to Terry Pratchett readers as well.

  Parker’s two World Fantasy Award winners are in many ways the least characteristic pieces here. ‘‘A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’ concerns the rivalry between a modestly talented academic composer and his brilliant but murderous student, and will remind some readers of the Mozart-Salieri rivalry (as least as imagined in Peter Shaffer’s play). But its tone is closer to A Clockwork Orange in its exploration of the disconnect between moral character and genius. ‘‘Let Maps to Others’’ begins as another tale of rivalry, between two academics seeking a long-lost manuscript revealing the whereabouts of a mysterious island paradise, but segues into a more fantasy-like sea adventure spun off from the resolution of the first mystery.

  The rest of the stories focus more directly on the world of alchemy and adepts, although the best, ‘‘Purple & Black’’, eschews any direct fantasy in a long epistolary tale of an emperor who dispatches his unwilling friend and schoolmate to deal with a remote insurgency (which at first the friend can’t even find). The contrast between the inflated formal dispatches (written in purple) and the whining petulance of the actual letters, written in black, between the two friends, is hilarious, as each repeatedly proclaims his own incompetence – until the story takes a darker twist that could almost make it a classic of anti-war fiction for classroom use. A couple of the other stories offer tantalizing hints of the history and traditions of Parker’s world. We learn in ‘‘The Sun and I’’ that the religion of the Invincible Sun was founded ‘‘as a criminal conspiracy to cheat gullible people out of money,’’ though the story itself evolves into a clever corporate satire about the treacherous business of running a religion. In a number of stories, we find references to a legendary philosopher and alchemist named Saloninus, and in the final story, ‘‘Blue and Gold’’, we get Saloninus’s own account of his career as ‘‘the finest alchemist the world has ever known’’ – as well as a grifter and thief who inadvertently (or not) murders his wife while trying to concoct a potion for eternal youth. Artists also figure in other stories: a master icon painter in ‘‘One Little Room an Everywhere’’, who cheats by obtaining his paintings through alchemical spells and later discovers an unfortunate side effect of the practice, and a manuscript illuminator in ‘‘Illuminated’’, which features a rare female adept. There aren’t many women in Parker’s stories, and the two who show up most prominently are apprentices (the other appears in ‘‘A Room with a View’’ as a trainee of an adept sent on a humiliating mission to suss out possessed dogs). The closest thing to a horror story here is ‘‘A Rich, Full Week’’, involving an adept facing down reanimated corpses, and probably the closest to a traditional fantasy is ‘‘Amor Vincit Omnia’’, in which another adept investigates an untrained wizard who seems to have discovered a powerful ‘‘form’’ previously thought to be impossible. As in all the stories here – this is the only one with traditional third-person narration – the voice is clear, sardonic, disarmingly contemporary in its colloquialisms, and refreshingly unpretentious, like a deliberate effort to undermine the inflated and self-important rhetoric of much fantasy. And, as usual, the con men and grifters get away with shameless trickery, misdirection, and generally breaking all the rules, and yet they come out looking pretty good and perfectly respectable. As does Parker.

  •

  In last year’s London Falling, Paul Cornell introduced us to a team of London police investigators who inadvertently gained a kind of second sight that enabled them to perceive supernatural events and figures invisible to the rest of us, and as we might have suspected, this secret shadow-world of London turned out to be pretty grim. (It’s a convention of hidden-world fictions that the revealed world is crummier than our own, probably because it might be debilitating to read about a secret London full of happy people.) With The Severed Streets – a far better title, with a specific and meaningful source given in the text – he brings back the team: Detective Inspector Quill, the intelligence analyst Lisa Ross, and the cops Costain and Sefton, and confronts them with a series of murders even more bloody and violent than those in London Falling. But whereas that novel took place largely among the working classes of London, with English football as the central metaphor for the kinds of horrors that can be manifested through collective passions and anxieties, The Severed Streets takes us directly into the corridors of political and social power, with its initial victims including a member of Parliament and secretary of the Treasury and the police commissioner himself. Along the way, we meet a sinister media baron who suggests an even more venal version of Rupert Murdoch, a pair of criminal brothers named Keel who vaguely echo the Kray brothers, and a famous fantasy author who straddles both worlds, and who is not disguised at all (but who must think his role in the novel is a particularly tasty one).

  At first, the notion of a supernatural murderer who eviscerates rich white men – a point repeatedly underlined – hardly seems a strategy for striking terror, or even serious disapproval, in the hearts of readers. But Cornell plays his political cards shrewdly: the background for the murders is a growing series of public political demonstrations – including a threatened police strike – in which many participants wear ‘‘Toff masks’’ that seem clearly to invoke the Guy Fawkes masks popularized by Alan Moore. The idea is that the mostly innocuous demonstrators will be blamed for the murders, which are carried out in a style deliberately reminiscent of Jack the Ripper. Only those gifted (or cursed) with the Sight can perceive the brightly glowing presence that flows through the crowd unobserved, which can, well, push its way through barriers to commit the crimes, and which has a habit of leaving behind spatters of a silvery substance, like a botched welding job.

  As in the earlier novel, the investigators find evidence that these supernatural eruptions have roots deep in history, including an earlier unit called the Continuing Projects Team (Cornell has a gift for the opaque bureaucratic names of British government projects), a 4,000-year-old barrow beneath London, and a mysterious artifact known as the Bridge of Spikes, which is introduced early on with the narrative subtlety of Chekhov’s gun on the wall. The secret London, it turns out, is not simply a Google-glass version of enhanced perception, but an entire secret cosmology, complete with a Hell in which Ross’s unfortunate father is trapped and which one of the team members even visits for a bit. (Hell is catnip to horror writers, who are always trying to figure out ways to get the goodies while evading the theology, and Cornell’s version of Hell, revealed at the very end, is as ingenious as any I’ve seen this side of Sartre.) But while the narrative may spend a bit more time than it needs to in an endless scene in a secret nightclub-within-a-nightclub, and while a supernatural intervention may provide too-convenient clues to mysteries that the police-procedural investigation can’t quite handle, The Sever
ed Streets gains its real power from the not-always-likeable team of principals and the appalling sacrifices some of them make in the interests of preserving the cosmological balance and carrying out their sworn duty. Duty, of course, is a central element of police procedurals, but to see it take such a central role in a horror tale – and this is really quite a bit more of a horror story than London Falling – is rather refreshing. The Severed Streets, with its gloss of media and political satire that had been largely missing from London Falling, also is more substantial than that novel, but no less fun.

  •

  I’m not entirely sure when the meme of collective first-person plural titles got started, but by now you could pretty much compile them into a rather mordant short-short: David Marusek’s ‘‘We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy’’, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and now Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine, to which we might append E. Lockhart’s recent We Were Liars, just by way of putting all those other cheery groups in their place. That irony, of course, is implicit in the earlier titles, and is particularly apt for Gregory’s new short novel, which concerns a therapy group for victims of horror stories: an elderly wheelchair-bound man who was the sole survivor of a Sawney Beane-like family of Arkansas cannibals; a well-dressed woman whose flesh had been peeled back so that a psycho called the Scrimshander could carve designs on her exposed bones; a severely withdrawn young woman raised by a cult who incised cryptic symbols all over her skin; a young black man addicted to an RPG zombie game through his omnipresent smart glasses, which he thinks reveal to him actual hidden monsters; and a semi-famous former boy detective whose monster-hunting adventures in a town called Dunnsmouth became the basis of a series of YA books. That town name, a portmanteau of Lovecraft’s most famous villages, is an unsubtle clue that Gregory wants to invoke some of the materials of classic horror fiction, but Gregory isn’t a horror writer. He doesn’t try very hard to make us feel the terror of extreme experience, but he’s very interested in the pain of the aftermath, and particularly in the dynamics of trauma and the sense of isolation in the victims.

  This has consistently been one of the trademarks of Gregory’s deeply humane fiction, whether he’s dealing with possession (Pandemonium), zombies (Raising Stony Mayhall) or drug-induced psychosis (Afterparty). Even the grotesque mutations of The Devil’s Alphabet were family, and a kind of family emerges from We Are All Completely Fine as well. Stan, the cannibal victim whose eaten limbs have been replaced by prosthetics, is a kind of cranky uncle impatient with Martin’s defiant refusal to take off his high-tech frames, while the cult survivor Greta is a withdrawn kid sister and Harrison the monster detective tries along with Barbara the Scrimshander victim to maintain a more cordial level of discourse like civilized parents. But the putative parent figure turns out to be Jan, the psychotherapist who has brought the group together, and who has a few secrets of her own (which, though foreshadowed, I didn’t see coming at all).

  As the narrative progresses from the growing tensions during the therapy session – all narrated in that first person plural – to third-person glimpses of the home life and backstories of the various patients, the various hidden connections among the group become apparent, and an actual supernatural threat emerges that will require each member to make use of his or her particular strengths. This is where Gregory’s measured restraint emerges as one of the novel’s strongest virtues. The idea of a group of seemingly disparate individuals pooling their resources to face down an archaic terror is a well-worn convention of horror tales – think of Stephen King’s It or even Stoker’s Dracula – but Gregory eschews the sort of setpieces that could easily have made this novel five times as long, and that might disappoint some readers expecting a more conventional horror novel. But Gregory is interested more in empathy than revulsion, more in accommodation than heroics, and more in the victim than the monster. The result is his most tightly constructed and compulsively readable novel to date, and a small gem of what we might call post-horror horror.

  •

  There is inevitably a sense of delight mixed with apprehension when an unpublished manuscript by a major writer is brought to light. For one thing, you have to wonder if the author would have approved – but if we followed that logic too earnestly, we’d hardly have any Kafka at all. Then there’s the question of whether it really helps the author’s reputation – Heinlein’s stultifying For Us, the Living didn’t do anyone any good except for devoted Heinlein scholars, many of whom might have become less devoted after reading it. So when Merrilee Heifetz, Octavia Butler’s agent and executor, uncovered the two stories now published by Open Road as Unexpected Stories (Heifetz details the discovery in a brief afterword), the temptation is to celebrate them simply because they exist. Butler published so little short fiction during her lifetime – just over a half-dozen stories, three of which (‘‘Speech Sounds’’, ‘‘Bloodchild’’, ‘‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’’) became classics – that almost anything new will seem a treasure. On the other hand, these are stories from fairly early in her career – one submitted for Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions and the other ‘‘submitted a very few times in the early seventies’’ – so it’s hardly reasonable to expect the more distilled language and pacing of her later work.

  The good news is that the stories are well worth reading, and not just by Butler scholars. The fact that Butler did submit the stories tells us that at some point she regarded them as finished work, and there seem to be good reasons why they were never published even in her one slim collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. The novella ‘‘A Necessary Being’’ provides the backstory for one of the characters in Survivor, the novel that Butler famously disowned as her ‘‘Star Trek novel’’ because of the casually unlikely ways that human refugees/explorers interacted with alien species. Butler apparently didn’t want to remind anyone of that novel, but since the humans don’t show up at all here, it’s hardly necessary to have read Survivor (which most people, including me, haven’t). The story’s most problematical aspect is the depiction of a humanoid society in which caste is determined by the color of one’s fur (blue being the highest), and in which that fur changes colors or even glows according to different emotional states. Apart from the temptation to visualize such characters as electrified Muppets, this would seem to be a setup for a fairly obvious allegory of race relations, but that’s not the way it plays out (a bit of a trickster, Butler never opted for the obvious; remember how most readers saw an analogue of slavery in ‘‘Bloodchild’’, while Butler insisted it was her male pregnancy story). Instead, what we get is a complex and ultimately moving tale of power and responsibility, as the Hao of the Rohnkohn tribe – ‘‘Haos’’ are the specially talented blue ones, prized for their powers and leadership skills – has been unable to provide an heir for her people, and must decide whether to kidnap, disable, and essentially imprison a younger male Hao from a visiting tribe, while remembering the fate of her own father. (The younger male Hao is the one who shows up later in Survivor.)

  The shorter tale, ‘‘Childfinder’’ (submitted to Last Dangerous Visions), does address racial tensions, and in a fairly direct way. It shares something of the ‘‘chosen one’’ plot of ‘‘A Necessary Being’’, in that the narrator’s particular talent is to find children with pre-telepathic powers and train them to develop those powers before they atrophy from disuse. In the shabby ghetto where she lives, she’s been training a young girl by having her read a children’s biography of Harriet Tubman, but when a visitor from the organization of telepaths from which she’s recently resigned appears, the real tensions become clear. Telepaths as a despised minority have been a staple of SF at least since Van Vogt’s Slan, but Butler brings this metaphor to the surface in a quiet manner that likely would have seemed groundbreaking had the story appeared in the 1970s when it was written. It still packs a punch, and the documentary-style extracts that frame the tale at the beginning and the end suggest
an even darker scenario, verging on genocide. While ‘‘Childfinder’’ is the better of the two stories here, both offer us a heartbreaking glimpse of what we’ve lost.

  –Gary K. Wolfe

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: FAREN MILLER

  Acceptance, Jeff VanderMeer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 978-0-374-10411-5, $15.00, 350pp, tp) September 2014.

  Fool’s Assassin, Robin Hobb (Del Rey 978-0-553-39242-5, $28.00, 672pp, hc) August 2014.

  The Bees, Laline Paull (HarperCollins ECCO 978-0-06-233115-1, $25.99, 340pp, hc) May 2014.

  Invisible Beasts, Sharona Muir (Bellevue Literary Press 978-1-934137-80-2, $14.95, 254pp, tp) July 2014. [Order from Bellevue Literary Press, NYU School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue OBV-A612, New York NY 10016; ].

  Like the July column, this one seemed to coalesce around a theme after I read a final work, Sharona Muir’s Invisible Beasts (officially subtitled ‘‘Tales of the Animals That Go Unseen Among Us’’, though the publisher describes it as ‘‘Aesop’s Fables for the Age of Extinction’’). Since the insight Muir provoked with her linked stories is more general than Sheila Finch’s discussions of tropes in myth and imaginative fiction, I’ll finish rather than start there – aside from noting that this unconventional bestiary alerted me to the ways authors and some characters in the novels (even ongoing epics) try to comprehend natural, supernatural, or alien life forms, rather than rushing out to quash them with grand heroics.