"Try."
"I—what do you mean?"
"Study the rules governing both of our worlds. La Hachette is a creature of air, water, fire, and earth. When she chopped through the portal on Derwentwater's edge, she changed the rules of all portals. They no longer work. They will not ever work until she returns to Earthlye."
"Impossible."
"But true. Your brother made a spiral briar out of me,” said Tordral, tapping her chest. “Now it is his turn to grow twisted."
"But you don't understand! Elves cannot have children without—without human lovers. If we perish, none will replace us."
"Earthlye will be the better for it. Meantime, La Hachette carries a score of Faerie's victims. Be nice to them, they may help you have babies."
The castellerine fought down the urge to be sick.
"Magic will vanish from Earthlye,” she said, her voice now ragged.
"So will elves,” replied Tordral. “Good riddance to both."
"You cannot beat our entire world."
"I already have."
The castellerine closed her eyes, took a deep breath—and accepted defeat. In that moment she swayed so alarmingly that her knight reached out to steady her.
"Very well, you have won. What do you want? Make your demands."
"I want all of you enchanted godlings to have a nightmare like your brother gave me,” said Tordral, smiling broadly. “You thought yourselves gods, and used us as toys. Think upon that whenever you feel yourself wronged."
The castellerine shivered as a sliver of icy guilt stabbed through her. She had to look away from Tordral.
So, the nightmare begins, she thought, staring across the water at the impossible, invincible La Hachette. She looked back to Tordral. Strange, now that it is too late I do feel compassion for you ... but then compassion always arrives too late.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: Books To Look For by Charles de Lint
Set This House in Order, by Matt Ruff, Harper Perennial, 2004, $14.95.
The problem with having limited reading time and column deadlines is that I often find that, if I'm not paying attention, some of the books I've set aside to read end up disappearing into the lower reaches of the “to be read” stack until they're finally lost and forgotten. This is because I'm usually reading the newer books for the column, so I rarely get to the older titles. But occasionally I'll pull out one of those forgotten books and then find myself regretting that I couldn't have read it in a more timely fashion so that I could discuss it in these pages.
But you know, a good book is a good book, and if it's still available ... well, I don't want to make a habit of this, but Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order (originally published by HarperCollins in 2003) is simply too good to ignore and deserves a few column inches even at this late a date.
It's the story of Andy Gage who has a house in his head. It's an imaginary house, but the hundred or so souls with whom he shares it are real. That's because Andy is a multiple personality. Brutalized by his stepfather as a little boy, Andy's soul broke into pieces; each personality that subsequently arose being individual from the other.
Like most multiples, Andy didn't know he was one. He just had these holes in his memory. He might be at his job, then the next thing he knows, it's hours later and he's sitting in some bar with no idea where he is, how he came to be there, or how he's going to get home.
When he understands what's happening to him, he tries working with various therapists to integrate the personalities. Nothing helps until he connects with someone with the radical idea that instead of trying to integrate the personalities, he should learn to work with them.
So we have Andy at the beginning of the book with the house in his head (the above's all backstory that we learn as we read along). He's sharing his body with the various personalities, all of them aware of each other. In fact, they can even “talk” to the dominant personality that's in control of the body.
It's all fascinating, especially delivered as it is in Matt Ruff's elegant prose, and the fact that he knows just how to capture all the different voices of the various characters.
Things get complicated when it turns out that Andy's new coworker Penny is also a multiple, something only some of her personalities understand. When those particular personalities ask Andy for help, he's reluctant, but eventually agrees, only to find the stability of his own fragile balance thrown off, and he finds he has to set his own house in order.
This is the sort of book for which the f/sf field exists. It's moving, dramatic, funny, and completely original, using the speculative strengths of the genre to tackle real world problems in a way that allows us to understand something with which most of us have no firsthand experience. How terrifying it would be to be in a situation such as the one in which Andy and Penny find themselves. And how much have we failed those supposedly under our protection when the actions that cause multiples to exist continue unabated? Not just in some other state or country. Sometimes it's just down the street, and we remain all unaware.
Now before I leave you to consider whether or not you want to try this book, let me assure you that as dark as some of the subject matter is, Ruff doesn't write with unrelenting gloom. You'll feel uplifted more than you might expect.
This is a gorgeous and important book from a writer who always challenges the norm, and inevitably does so with success.
* * * *
Raven, by Allison Van Diepen, Simon Pulse, 2009, $15.99.
I think I mentioned Allison Van Diepen in a previous column—an aside, really, because her books up to that point had been set squarely in the mainstream. But now she's ventured onto our turf and I can talk a bit more about her. And I'm happy to do so, because she's one of those rare storytellers that grabs you from the first page, yet layers her stories so that everything's not on the table from that opening. She understands pacing, her prose crackles with energy, and her dialogue rings true to the ear.
Like Stephenie Meyer, Van Diepen also brings a fresh point of view to f/sf, although in her case, she seems quite familiar with genre conventions. But happily, she's not a slave to them.
Van Diepen usually writes in gritty, contemporary settings. In this case, a lot of the book is set in a Brooklyn club where our first-person protagonist Nicole works as a waitress. It's also where she and her break dance crew, the Toprocks, have dance-offs against rival crews. Don't worry. The dance sections aren't long, but they're full of energy and you get what's happening without having to know much about break dancing, or needing to go watch a few episodes of So You Think You Can Dance to catch up on what's going on.
This is all background, however. For her first foray into fantasy, Van Diepen tackles the big theme of immortality.
Nicole's life is complicated enough. She's juggling school, dancing, and work, but that's better than being at home where the fact that her brother's a junkie living in flop houses and sucking money from their parents hangs like a pall over everything. As Nicole puts it, the house is “haunted by a ghost that isn't dead."
The bright point in Nicole's life is her best friend Zin. He's the leader of the Toprocks, and works at the club, and Nicole is totally in love with him, though he just sees her as a friend. But while he doesn't reciprocate her feelings the way she wishes he would, at least she has him in her life.
Then she finds out about the immortals, the Jiang Shi.
I don't want to get into their differences compared to other literary immortal characters because it would spoil too many surprises. But what I will say is that Van Diepen plays with all the preconceptions we might have for this sort of story, taking the plot in directions one wouldn't expect while still remaining true to the characters and why they would do what they do.
In the end the Jiang Shi pervade every part of Nicole's life—the club, Zin, the Toprocks, and even her brother—and it's up to her to find some way that her friends and family can survive.
I love the fact that in the righ
t hands, the hoariest tropes can still be made fresh again, and then turned on their ears. Raven is a terrific example of how to do it right.
* * * *
Heroes Volume Two, by Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2008, $29.99.
Like volume one (which we discussed back in the May 2008 installment of this column), the newest Heroes compilation was originally published online and features short strips telling the stories that took place before and in between the actual aired episodes of the television show.
Also, as in that first volume, the art ranges between serviceable and great; it's the stories that make it a worthwhile addition to your library. Or at least it would if you're a fan of the show. If you're not, the barrage of short-short pieces on such a wide variety of characters probably won't make much sense.
But for those of us who are fans, the book's a treasure trove of unexpected, surprising, and at times, moving glimpses into things that didn't make it onto the screen. We get the origin of the Haitian, Elle's first job for the Company, early assignments of the Horned-Rimmed Glasses guy, a solo adventure featuring Hiro's best friend Ando, the first manifestation of various characters’ powers, and all sorts of other tasty bits.
If it seems a bit pricey, you could always sample the most recent issue online at www.nbc.com/Heroes/novels/.
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.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: Books by James Sallis
The Wall of America, by Thomas M. Disch, Tachyon Publications, 2008, $14.95.
Tom is in the next room but one, calling out. He's working on his novelization of The Prisoner, and wants to read a paragraph to me. November light pushes through my bay window to lie quietly expiring on the floor. Down in the yard I see the mounds of leaves he raked together earlier, then abandoned. Deciding to leave the Selectric running, I go up and down the three stairs, through the narrow hallway, to his office.
Thomas M. Disch died, of suicide, this past Independence Day. Recent years had been hard ones for him, I gather: a sense of lost readership, considerable physical pain such that he became virtually housebound in his New York apartment, an ever-deepening depression following the death of his partner Charles Naylor. There at the end, Tom's bitterness, the ragged trailing edge of the ambition that so animated him, seems to have broken through, though still liberally seasoned with wit and self-deprecation.
Endings are seldom pretty. Tom knew that. He knew that not very much is pretty, in fact, once you scrape away the hype and patina.
Except the arts. Tom was a great patron not only of poetry and fiction but also of opera, music, painting, and sculpture. I don't think that he believed our arts would magically save us, but he was pretty damned sure they were our best bet, perhaps our only bet—even if they, like everything else in life, might well be taken with a sprinkling of salt, a dash of cynicism, and half a cup of good-natured fun.
Searching for words here (in silence, blink of the cursor having replacing the Selectric's hum), I remember our sitting on the porch in Milford discussing a change from “could” to “would” in one of his poems. I recall the growing list of HARD WORDS he kept over his typewriter for years and wonder if he ever got the chance to use them all. I remember him, Pam Zoline, and John Sladek trading nonce words back in London, “epithesis” being a favorite. And later, his childlike joy at the sound of the word “micturation,” his delight at our describing a lawn game to be played “with mallets and forethought."
And now we have Tom Disch's last collection, The Wall of America, nineteen stories published from 1981 to 2008 in venues ranging from original anthologies to Omni, Playboy, and The Hudson Review. Four, including the title story, first appeared here in F&SF.
It would prove all too easy to read these stories—imbued as they are with anomie, death, and disillusion—in light of Tom's suicide, as more than one post-7/4 commentator has done, some proceeding to “interpret” Tom's entire life and the very wellsprings of his creativity in such light. But let's leave Epimetheus looking through the want ads, and not hire him on as critic. True, Tom's work was always generously spiced with darkness—but also with comedy, high and low. In one late poem he envisions us running down the hill with arms waving as we shout “Death, Death, we're over here!” That's Tom—forever bidding for attention, forever poking at what hurts most, his beautiful, classic pas de deux capped with a quick tap step or pratfall.
So reductivism will not do. Tom was a complex man, complex in the same manner as his work: brilliant, silly, boasting, sly, tender, cruel, revealing, evasive.
The Wall of America is, all told, a wonderfully representative sampling of Tom's work in his many modes, tongue clucking away in some stories, firmly lodged acheek in others, giving way to the occasional ululation.
It was the general understanding that the world was falling apart in all directions. Bad things had happened and worse were on the way. Everyone understood that—the rich and the poor, old and young (although for the young it might be more dimly sensed, an intuition). But they also understood that there was nothing much anyone could do about it, and so you concentrated on having some fun while there was any left to have.
That's the start of it all, the opening of “The White Man,” set in a near-future Minneapolis collapsing in upon itself, a story inhabited by Somali refugees, Pentacostal preachers, shifty census takers, and (possibly) vampires.
"Ringtime” sounds the source and sequelae of artistic life. Experiences are recorded in toto by the artist (and thereby lost to him) for vicarious replay by others. This is mimesis taken to the last full stop, of course, calling into question the very idea of imitations of life, art as purloined experience, the cost to the artist of a lifetime of such work:
The fun past, the yummy past, the past one sings of on New Year's Eve—all that is unrecapturable, sold off in weekly and monthly lots. There is one entire year, my twenty-ninth, wiped from the slate of memory.... I began unwisely to live higher off the hog and, at the same time, to sample my own tapes.
Not surprisingly, the arts are central to many of the stories, from the long rimshot that is “Canned Goods” (selling art masterpieces with society and most of human life in shambles about seller and buyer) to “The First Annual Performance Art Festival at the Slaughter Rock Battlefield” with its cheery view of mass murder-cum-art. Here, from “The Wall of America,” is an artist on the verge of apostasy: “Now, as with a dream, he couldn't remember any of the details. The big insights, the droll anecdotes, the shy confidences of what he hoped he might be able to accomplish.” Here, just before the shopping spree of her life, a latter-day Scheherazade kept alive by her whorish stories and fed up with the whole process: “And then, with a sense that she was revenging the grievances of every hack writer who'd ever lived, she beheaded the Emir of Bassorah."
The writing life jumps to the headlines in others stories such as “The Abduction of Bunny Steiner, or, A Shameless Lie,” in which a failed heroic-fantasy writer gets hired to write an alien-abduction story about his fictive daughter, and “The Man Who Read a Book,” which grabs up a bargain lot of fish and flotsam in its net: writer's colonies, publishers, criminal rehabilitation, work-at-home scams, motivational seminars, arts grants, celebrity.
Having given us in “The Asian Shore” one of the finest stories of obsession ever written, Tom revisits the theme in “Voices of the Kill.” Others (the Scheherazade story, “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “Torah! Torah! Torah! Three Bible Tales for the Third Millennium") carry on Tom's longstanding love for recasting folk tales and myth.
The bitterest and funniest story here, “A Family of the Post-Apocalypse,” may be also the most representative.
It was cheaper living in the danger zone, which was why they'd settled there after everything went haywire. Dad and Mom and the three Big Babies. All this was after the Rapture and the Second Coming (which they never got to see), and the o
nly people left on Earth were the people who hadn't been saved.
So there in the suburbs life goes on pretty much as it had before—as it will—with Mom and Dad bickering as they watch the Antichrist's news bulletins on TV, with the septic tank getting ready to explode, with time stuttering into loops. Until the locusts arrive.
Big ones, and dressed, according to the prophecies, pretty much like the bikers in Mad Max, except that instead of riding Harleys their bikes were incorporated into their exoskeletons. It was the whirring of their huge wings that sounded like the revving of unmuffled engines.
Horror stories, fey comic tales, parables of the artistic life and of suburbia, biopsies of religion.... Pretty much everything we expect from Tom Disch. Any Disch collection, from Under Compulsion on, is a bazaar: strange sights and sounds, furtive movements at the edge of vision, funky old clothing and sparkling new magic tricks, damaged toys like those you had as a kid, plastic flowers alongside fine silk shawls—make an offer. And finally, as with Montaigne's essays, we read these stories (for all their craft and art) not so much to gain information about our world as to observe the play of an intellect across a subject.
It was quite an intellect, quite an extraordinary sensibility.
Breakfast at our hotel in Notting Hill Gate, Tom on his way in from Turkey to settle a while, my having recently moved to London. Tom has just published Camp Concentration in New Worlds, I've come to help edit the magazine. I remembered his stories from Cele Goldsmith's Amazing and Fantastic, read his first novel. A correspondence ensued, and it was his example, a living, working writer, that more than anything else convinced me to give it a try myself, that such might be possible.
He has brought something to read to me, possibly a bit of the unfinished novel The Pressures of Time, or some new beginning. In subsequent weeks one of his great stories, “The Asian Shore,” takes form before my eyes. He'll go away for a day or two, turn up at my flat in late afternoon with new pages.
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