For adult readers, The Host is definitely the place to start with her books.
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Elfland, by Freda Warrington, Tor Books, 2009, no price listed yet.
Freda Warrington's new novel is another fat book, but unlike Meyers, she's very familiar with the conventions of the genre. In Elfland, she presents a world in which the fairies of folk lore—she calls them Aetherials—live alongside us as though they are human, only we don't know it. Ho-hum, you might think, and in lesser hands you might be right.
Magical beings living hidden alongside us has pretty much become its own subgenre. They might be fairies, or vampires, or werewolves, but the books usually boil down to a familiar template: human discovers the secret, is drawn to or repulsed by the magical beings, his or her life is put into turmoil.
Warrington avoids this by having the points of view come from the Aetherials. She doesn't so much focus on conflict between the races—though some aspect of that is still present—as she does the complicated relationships of the Aetherials themselves, in particular, the Fox and Wilder families who live in the small English village of Cloudcroft.
Lawrence Wilder is a rich jeweler, and the Gatekeeper to the inner realms of Elfland that the Aetherials need to visit on a regular basis to maintain the magical elements of their life-force. His wife Ginny has left him. His one son Jon is a drug addict, for all that he looks like he stepped from a Pre-Raphaelite painting; the other is Sam, who's always in trouble.
Down the hill from their stately, if somewhat rundown, Stonegate Manor, is the cottage of the Foxes: Auberon, the local Aetherial community's voice of calm reason; his wife Jessica who used to sing in a folk-rock band; oldest son Matthew who does everything he can to deny his Aetherial heritage; daughter Rose, enamored with the natural world and the handsome Jon who doesn't even know she exists; and lastly the younger son Lucas who tends to tag along with either or both of his older siblings.
Elfland takes place over a decade or so, opening when Lawrence has to close the Gates because of a danger he says will come through and destroy them all. What's unclear is if the danger is to Lawrence himself, who is carrying all sorts of hidden demons, or the Aetherials in general. All the community knows is that the Gates are closed to them, and they're outraged.
The book starts slowly, but as we come to know the two families, along with their human and Aetherial friends, we are drawn into their lives and relationships, and what begins as a somewhat pastoral novel set in this small English village becomes a real page-turner and a very magical book.
It helps that the principal viewpoint character is Rose. She's a terrific character in her own right—warm, earthy, coming of age in a time when her community is changing drastically. But because of her connections to the other characters, it makes it easier for the reader to keep track of the large cast and make sense of their complicated relationships with one another.
I said at the outset that this sort of hidden-race-among-us storyline is becoming rather commonplace in our genre, but Warrington makes it her own, and even the most jaded fantasy reader will quickly fall under the spell of her characters and the warm, intimate voice Warrington uses to tell us their stories.
Highly recommended.
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In the Small, by Michael Hague, Little, Brown, 2008, $12.99.
In Odd We Trust, by Queenie Chan & Dean Koontz, Del Rey, 2008, $10.95.
Regular readers of this column could be forgiven for thinking that this reviewer considers any graphic novel a superior accomplishment. But if I've given that impression, it's only because I tend to concentrate on what I think are the better examples. To give a little perspective, here are a couple that didn't work as well for me.
I've enjoyed Michael Hague's illustrative work in the past and the concept of this new book of his (one day every human being is shrunk to under six inches tall) is terrific. The plot's fine, too, and Hague manages to capture both the gruesome and the charming aspects of this change. With six inch tall pilots and drivers, airborne planes crash, as do cars, buses, trains—not a pretty situation. Getting down from the top floor of an office building is a real challenge. As is simply finding something to wear.
The problem is that for such an accomplished artist, Hague's artwork here is really not very good. It's stiff, the figures often have awkward proportions, and much of it's just plain ugly. When you combine that with the terribly stilted dialogue, you don't end up with a pleasant reading experience. If it weren't for his name on the project, I would have thought this was the work of a first time author/artist, still learning his craft. Strange.
Perhaps it can all be explained by the sticker on the cover that reads: “Soon to be a major motion picture!” Maybe this is just a sketch of the final project, a tease that will look and sound much better in another medium.
The Koontz book—the story is a prequel to the first Odd Thomas novel—has none of those problems. It moves quickly, with plenty of Koontz's humor, and it's fun to visit again with some of the characters who are no longer in the prose book series.
The problem for me is that the art is in the Japanese Manga style. While I don't dislike that style in principle, here I found it too hard to keep track of the characters because they all have a somewhat similar look, especially the male characters. But I'm sure other readers—especially those familiar with this style of art—won't have the same problem. And unlike In the Small, the dialogue feels completely natural.
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Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.
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Department: Books by James Sallis
The Resurrectionist, by Jack O'Connell, Algonquin Books, 2008, $24.95.
Other Voices, by Andrew Humphrey, Elastic Press (U.K.), 2008, 5.99 pounds.
We old guys, I find, tend to spend a lot of time talking about tradition. Recently Joe Lansdale and I were in Italy together for a week, trodding along down the narrow streets of Piacenza comparing notes on how so many of the early great writers, people like Kornbluth and Kuttner, never got their due. We talked a lot, too, about how science fiction has shaped the way we see the world.
Jack O'Connell's another with a profound respect for older writers, along with an interest in their lives, their work, the wellsprings of their creativity. We're talking insatiable curiosity here, question after question, photocopies of correspondence or of articles from obscure magazines, boxes of musty paperbacks in the attic. What was it like, O'Connell always wants to know, writing pulp, being part of that world—or of the New Wave in the sixties? Want to talk about some fairly obscure writer, say Gil Brewer? Better make a pot of coffee, then, ‘cause you'll be there for hours.
O'Connell's first novel, Box Nine, centers around a designer drug named Lingo that speeds up language and perception to such full tilt that the world about one begins to dissolve. Wireless jump-starts with the murder of an activist priest and gets into gear with renegade federal agents, ballroom-champion midgets, and pirate-like radio jammers whose complex subculture both reflects and ridicules the decayed American dream. Built about a quest for suppressed movie footage, The Skin Palace tracks an artist's descent into an underbelly world of half-mad geniuses, new-world messiahs, and blind pornographers. Word Made Flesh (reviewed here upon publication) offers up, in the writer's own words, “a grotesque romance about genocide, language, doubt, obsession, worms, epidermis, and sanctuary.” See the entire population of Maisel wiped out by a huge tree shredder! See child artists kept in veal pens and forced to produce graphic novels! See the second annual immigrant death match!
And now, fellow travelers, we have The Resurrectionist, the latest (five years in the making!) of Jack O'Connell's trademark amalgam of the shabbiest and most puissant elements from science fiction, crime novels, westerns, horror tales, thrillers. The setting, again, is Quinsigamond, a city constructed of the world's crawlspaces and alleyways a
nd populated by humankind's leftovers.
American genre fiction, American fiction as a whole, in fact, has more in common with the romance than with the novel proper, the latter concerned with the individual in society, the former more often with the individual set against society. And because of this, even in conservative writers, even with the machineries of genre expression grinding predictably away, quite often something wild, something nihilistic and untamable, keeps breaking onto the page. It is this that Jack O'Connell so treasures, I think, in his admiration of pulp and early genre writers. And it is certainly what he's forever reaching for in his own work.
In The Skin Palace, filmmaker Hugo Schick wants “the very synapses of the human brain to be accessible as my own editing board, the ultimate Moviola.... More images, faster images, all the time.... And, finally, I want a way of editing any and all of this goulash together—life image, dream image, movie image...."
Which sounds a lot like O'Connell's working method.
In The Resurrectionist we begin reading the story of a child in a coma and the pharmacist father who has taken a job with the progressive, if unorthodox, clinic that will be assuming his son's care. It's a spooky enough place, and the father's initial encounters with staff are, well, a bit off.
That's chapter one. Then suddenly in chapter two we've fallen through cracks into the tale of a troop of circus freaks.
"They came from the city of Maisel in the heart of Old Bohemia, land of pogroms and demonology. They became a family in the most binding way of all, through a shared and pitiless suffering. [...] What does it mean to be a freak? For the Goldfaden Freaks it meant, for a time, a brief period in the beginning, that they were stars."
Soon thereafter comes a character named Spider and—ready for it?—the biker gang to which he belongs.
"Run by Buzz Cote, a burly veteran of the crank wars, the Abominations were classic renegades. Unaffiliated and proud of it, they swooped into towns like a plague, announcing their presence but never their agenda. Coming to Quinsigamond out of Phoenix, they found their way to the Harmony as if it were the ancestral home. [...] With any luck they'd be pulling out of the city in another week or two but Buzz knew, from experience, you don't rely on luck."
So he's about to send the boys out on a little joyride.
People in comas, families at ragged ends. A scientist with unbridled ambition. Dark, forbidding clinic. Fatos the mule-faced boy, Aziz the human torso, Nadja the lobster girl, Durga the fat lady, Jeta the skeleton, Milena the hermaphrodite, Antoinette the pinhead, Marcel and Vasco the Siamese twins, Kitty the dwarf, and Chick the chicken boy all wandering about doing their best to survive in whatever world it is that they inhabit. And a gang of bikers with mysterious agendas led by Buzz and—as in time we discover—a nurse who works at the clinic.
All this, yet we never get more than a step or two away from the heart of the story, which is about a father's loss and knowingly hopeless love for the son who once loved to read the Limbo Comics from which the tale of the freaks is taken.
The Resurrectionist is a brilliant, wild, heartfelt novel. It seems, like all of O'Connell's work, at once to bear tribute to its predecessors and to come out of nowhere, a stew whose various lumps, gristles, fillers, and spices have long since cooked down to a single, amazing richness.
O'Connell's books are one of a kind—again and again. From its very inception science fiction has been blessed with an extraordinary wealth of great original talents. Jack O'Connell is, with Tim Powers, Gene Wolfe, and a handful of others working today, securely among them.
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Dreams, great novels, dialogue with those we love, the way we live our lives: it's all about stories.
And I find myself remembering those conversations with Joe, how science fiction has framed the way we think, the very way we see our world.
As mentioned in my last column, this magazine in the fifties became a vanguard for the blending of the details of mundane, everyday life with fantasy. When Jack O'Connell works to make his fantasy worlds more real than the one encompassing you as you read, he honors and extends that tradition.
Andrew Humphrey does something similar. Several of the thirteen stories in Other Voices are not science fiction, others have minor though seminal arealist elements, but all are informed, as are Joe's and mine, by a particular bend in the light, by a sense of estrangement—of looking on from afar—that seems basically a science-fictional perspective.
Here is a man whose wild talent is taking away grief, and who coldly goes about making a living from it:
"Then she became soft, pliant, folded against him. And he felt the usual slow warmth and tasted something dark and bitter at the back of his throat. She murmured, ‘My God, my God,’ into his chest and he held her, stroked the top of her head, and felt something tender, something close to love. Even though he charged for this and although he didn't actually give a shit, Carter was suddenly imbued with a tainted, accidental sense of virtue."
He stands there, a hundred and fifty euros richer, tainted with virtue, amidst a city in chaos, in a future U.K. come apart at every seam and perhaps all the more affecting for its being so sparely adumbrated.
In stories with little or no fantastic element, much the same sensibility manifests. Troughton in the title story can feel time distort and fold in on itself, catching him in its creases. So haunted is he by his alcoholic father that, though a professed non-drinker, he stinks of booze and by midmorning runs with sweat, “swollen, amber colored drops, they'd ooze between the hairs of his arms and smell and taste of whiskey.” Like many of Humphrey's characters, he is in a dissolved or dissolving relationship that seems to be cascading out to take down the whole of his world with it.
In this and in other stories we can never quite discern (as the characters cannot) what is real, what imagined. In “Dogfight,” Spitfires and Messerschmitts hammer at one another above the heads of an estranged father and son, mirroring dogfights in which the father's abusive grandfather may have participated, or which he may have made up. Are the planes real? Imagined?
"The howl of the engine became a scream. The horizon was all Messerschmitt. When it was almost on us I said, ‘It can't hurt us, Danny.'
"He moved closer still. Flank to flank, we faced it together."
In “Three Days” an abducted girl returns home. The parents have no notion where she has been. Has she in fact returned? Has she undergone some mysterious transformation? Or has she, or her memory, somehow become for them an avatar of things not changing?
"Ginny feels warm and smells of vanilla. She always smells of vanilla. Her weight always feels exactly the same on my lap, too, has for months and months. I squeeze her waist and she turns towards me. I do the usual check: hair, teeth, nails. None have grown since the day she disappeared. Which is odd, I suppose, but Beth and I don't mention it."
Then, just when you think you may be on firm realist ground, or at least have the shore firmly in sight, Humphrey throws a curveball like “Mimic,” a perfect little science fiction fable playing off the changes of such as Budrys's Who? and Campbell's “Who Goes There?"
"The man who could be my identical twin sits on the edge of a metal-framed bed in an isolation cell that's deep in the recesses of a secret bunker, which itself is buried beneath an abandoned Second World War airfield, somewhere in Norfolk."
My personal favorite here has to be “Think of a Number,” a nice little tale of the child whose father pimped him out to pedophiles then dumped him when he became too old, and of the recovering pedophile, an assassin, who takes him on as ward and apprentice. This is a story that, even on fourth reading, I find at once profoundly disturbing yet reassuring, a story for which my admiration is boundless: its quiet refusal to be, from line to line and sentence to sentence, what we expect; the uneasiness it creates without bending towards the sensational or sentimental; our unwitting identification with the characters; the story's restraint and many silences; the simple reach of it.
Humphrey has published a previous collection, Open the Box, and, more or less simultaneously with Other Voices, a novel, Allison. Neither of these, like Other Voices, appears to have been published or to be easily available in the U.S. Both will shortly be here on my shelves.
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Short Story: Falling Angel by Eugene Mirabelli
Around these parts, Gene Mirabelli is known for his literary stories about the history of science, including “The Only Known Jump Across Time” (Sept. 2003) and “The Woman in Schrödinger's Wave Equations” (Aug. 2005). His most recent book, The Goddess in Love with a Horse (and What Happened Next), incorporates “Only Known Jump” in it. You can find that story reprinted on our Website this month.
His new story for us is something of a departure—it's just as good, but be warned: this one probably isn't appropriate to share with younger readers.
This happened in August, 1967, an August so hot that asphalt melted in the streets and seven of the trees along the river burst into flame. The air was boiling in his apartment, so Brendan had propped open the skylight and was lying naked on his back on the bare floor, one hand under his head and the other on his sweaty privates, ashamed of himself because he had jerked off a while ago and felt like doing it again. He was staring up at the square of blue sky as if from the bottom of the sea when a body as naked as his own floated ten feet above the skylight, thrashing and clawing and choking—then it stopped thrashing and sank very gently headfirst with the legs floating out behind, a swimmer whose lungs had filled with water, and came to rest with a white cheek flat against the skylight, the mouth wide open and the eyes like blue quartz. Brendan lay there trying to puzzle out what had happened. Abruptly he pulled up a chair and stood on it, reached out through the open skylight to grapple a leg and hauled the body down feetfirst into his arms, himself crashing sideways onto the floor under the sudden weight. He got up and—What can I say? This was a bare-assed young woman, maybe eighteen years old, with a wingspread of over twelve feet.
FSF, December 2008 Page 5