Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  This book has many fine qualities, not the least of which is its portrayal of the hellish emotional atmosphere of the Draft Riots; Mamatas cites as source Iver Bernstein's The New York City Draft Riots (1990) in his Acknowledgements, but his depiction accords with other historical accounts I have myself read and thus must be reckoned to be as historically accurate as any century-and-a-half-later depiction can ever hope to be. From the pages of Northern Gothic there drifts the stench of smoke and burning and blood and shit and piss and, most of all, fear – not just the fear of the hapless blacks who were hunted down, mutilated and slaughtered by the mobs but also, more centre-stage, the fear of the mobs themselves, particularized by Patten, that their own individual worlds were ending, that they would starve while the fatcats and the blacks prospered. I stress this historical veracity because it is unusual in the modern ghost story or horror story to find such an integrity: there is a story beyond the front-of-stage story, and Mamatas is not afraid to draw us into it.

  That aside, the real protagonist of this short novel is neither Patten nor Jenkins – Patten's polar opposite – but the city of New York itself, a city that is, then as now, robust with vitality precisely because it is also a melting pot of violence and tensions not just between races and communities but also, on an astonishingly widespread scale, between individuals. If a spark analogous to Lincoln's War Draft Act were offered to the tinder that is New York today, then there is every chance there'd be an outbreak of something all too terrifyingly like the Draft Riots as the city – personified by its inhabitants – responded in the only way she knows how. Seen in this context, the interaction between Patten and Jenkins is less of a timeslip, more a sort of Aristotelian identification between like and like.

  Despite its short span – Northern Gothic can't be more than about 25-30,000 words long – this story, with the fresh perspectives it skilfully offers on both a historical episode that is widely forgotten and on the nature of New York, delivers more of interest than many a novel five times as thick. The telling is absorbing; you will not feel short-changed through having read the book at a sitting, because reading at a sitting is what it demands.

  —Infinity Plus

  Windhaven

  by George R.R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle

  Bantam Spectra, 336 pages, hardback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1981

  The first two of the three linked novellas that make up this book were published (in slightly different form) in 1975 and 1980, respectively, in Analog; the third was added for the book's initial release in 1981. Martin and Tuttle have since gone on to achieve very high renown in two quite different areas of fantasy, so it may come as a surprise to some to discover not just that they collaborated but that they did so on what is ostensibly a science-fiction novel.

  In fact, it's a science fantasy. Although there are occasional references to the fact that the people of the world of Windhaven came here from another world (presumably Earth) and although the rudimentary technology at the heart of the tale relies on the hi-tech material that was salvaged from the light-sails of those original spacefarers, in every other respect Windhaven is a fantasyland and the novel reads as a fantasy, albeit one refreshingly stripped of such paraphernalia as magic, wizardry and elves.

  Windhaven has no significant landmasses, just islands strewn across the ocean. The winds are strong and incessant; the seas are dangerously stormy and populated by huge creatures called scyllas (for which read sea dragons). Communication between the islands is thus, for a culture that lacks radio, very difficult. Any sea journey is slow and dangerous. However, using the material from the light-sails, the people of Windhaven have learned to construct wings. Designated flyers use these wings to travel as messengers from one island to another.

  Because the supply of sail material – almost weightless yet virtually indestructible – is limited, and slowly reducing over time as the occasional flyer is lost, with wings, at sea, ownership of the wings is jealously guarded: the flyers have become a hereditary caste of their own, regarded as equals even by the islands' ruling Landsmen. Since time immemorial the wings have been passed down from each flyer to his or her first-born; on rare occasion childless flyers will adopt a child to inherit their wings.

  Maris is one such. Born of fisherfolk, she is adopted by the flyer Russ, who trains her in the art of flying, at which she proves to excel. However, some years after the adoption he and his wife unexpectedly give birth to a boy, Coll. Although Maris in due course takes over Russ's wings when he becomes too infirm to fly, the rules are clear: when Coll comes of age she must give up the wings to him, as Russ's genuine first-born, even though Coll detests flying and wants instead to become a wandering minstrel.

  The stupidity of this is evident to both Maris and Coll, and eventually they succeed in persuading the Council of Flyers that the rules must be changed, with flying academies being set up so that the land-bound may train in the art of flying and have the opportunity, at annual contests, to challenge born flyers for their wings.

  In the second novella we discover that, although the academies have been established, the scales are heavily weighted against their graduates. Maris heads the drive to alter this situation, in so doing bringing a further attitudinal change not just to the community of flyers but also in the culture as a whole. In the third novella she has become herself too old to fly, the consequences of an accident finally persuading her that indeed her future must be as a land-bound; she, her lover and her minstrel brother Coll challenge the might of a tyrannical Landsman and in so doing effect the profound cultural change of bringing Windhaven's land-bound and flyers closer together at last.

  The assault on any form of caste system, however derived – through heredity, race or whatever – is a clear component of this book, but is never allowed to become dominant in the reader's mind. Rather, the three novellas are simply fine tales, imbued with the dream of flying. The character of Maris, who holds the three parts together, is a fairly riveting one, and there can be few readers who will not become completely involved in her fortunes and adventures. And there are some other fine pieces of characterization as well, most notably that of Val One-Wing, the first graduate of the academies to achieve such brilliance that – detest him and ostracize him though they might for his arrogance and his revolutionary ideas – the flyers have no choice but to accept he is qualified to be among their number. Take all these qualities together with the genuine exhilaration of some of the flight sequences (belying the rather tepid cover illustration) and you have a book that lacks anything that even looks like a dull moment, that is usually very absorbing, and that is often genuinely moving.

  Although the dust jacket is covered with quotes from the worthy saying how exquisitely beautifully the book is written, this is to overstate. Both Martin and Tuttle have always been good writers and both have in the two decades since become even better than that, especially Tuttle, but at the time when they wrote Windhaven they were still merely (merely!) at the "good" stage. There are one or two youthful clumsinesses on display here – minor elements which occasionally disrupt the flow – and it's surprising the two authors didn't take the chance to revise them for this reissue. Which is not at all to say that the book is in any way badly written: just that the text has its occasional ups and downs.

  But that hardly matters. The emotional power of the underlying idea, the excellence of the characterization and the strength of the three stories' flow – all go to make this a book much to be enjoyed.

  —Infinity Plus

  Come Fygures, Come Shadowes

  by Richard Matheson

  Gauntlet Press, 144 pages, hardback, 2003

  In his interesting afterword to this novel fragment, the author relates how it came into being. Many years ago, when his writing career was young – annoyingly, he gives not even an approximate date – he set out to write a very major novel on the theme of Spiritualism and mediumship, of which the current book is the first quarter or so. The full novel was
going to be long: Matheson reckons about 2000 pages – a quick calculation indicates he means 2000 pages of typescript, or some 600 printed pages. Of course, today this would be a healthy commercial length for a fantasy-related novel, to the point that if it came out a bit shorter the publisher would be increasing the font and margins to beef up the page count a bit; but, 'way back when, Matheson was told (he does not say by whom) that no publisher would contemplate such an enormous work. Accordingly Matheson abandoned the project, in essence stuffing into a drawer the one-quarter of it he'd already written.

  Today, of course, Matheson is regarded – rightly – as one of the Grand Old Masters of commercial speculative fiction, and Gauntlet are doing an admirable job of issuing various volumes of hitherto unpublished Mathesonana, such as the volumes of Twilight Zone scripts that my colleague Randy M. Dannenfelser has reviewed elsewhere on Infinity Plus; later this year they're releasing a trade paperback of The Collected Stories of Richard Matheson Volume I and Richard Matheson's The Kolchak Scripts.

  To judge by this quarter-novel, it's a tragedy Matheson no longer feels he has the creative juices, or whatever, to complete Come Fygures, Come Shadowes. The portion of the novel that we have here tells engrossingly of Claire, born and reared in Brooklyn, coming of age there in the late 1930s. She is the daughter of Spiritualist medium Morna, who, an nth-degree bitch on wheels, has managed to alienate virtually everyone else in the world of Spiritualism with the exception of a few loyal paying customers. Claire is in fact a much more powerful medium than Morna, but she has no desire to enter the profession – indeed, she does her best to ignore and rebuff the ever-encroaching presence of the spirit world. However, she is totally under the thumb of her ruthless, vicious mother, and is given no choice in the matter. Although her father – estranged from Morna – tries to intervene and save her, we see her slowly failing to save herself from being hauled by the greedy, sucking waves at the spirit-ocean's edge out towards the depths, where she must surely drown.

  Secondary characters in the tale include – aside from Claire's good-hearted, simple-souled, occasionally rather drunken father – her younger sister Vera (who, to put it politely, takes after her mother) and brother Ranald, a supportive lad but inhibited by his youth, for he is the youngest of the three. According to Matheson, the later parts of the book would indeed have seen Claire die because of the excessive demands made upon her by the spirits, Vera become a conniving charlatan medium, and Ranald finally the only member of the family to more or less get things right.

  As far as my knowledge extends, Matheson has done an admirable job of getting all the minutiae of the pre-WWII Spiritualist world right. I confess I'd expected to find discords between Matheson's fictionalized depiction of that milieu and the various histories of it I've read over the years, but in fact exactly the opposite was true: his account meshes so well with the historical accounts that I had to keep reminding myself that there had never been such a medium as Morna or Claire Nielsen, that this was indeed a fiction. Similarly, the descriptions of the practice of mediumship and the experience of spirit communication gelled precisely with accounts I've read by genuine (in the sense of sincere) mediums. This completely convincing setting is matched by exquisite storytelling: one is right there beside Claire as she suffers the terrors not only of the spirits, whom she regards (with justification, in her case) as parasites, but also, and even more so, of her vile, obsessively self-centred mother.

  I read this book in the form of an ARC, which was clearly labelled with the caveat that this was an uncorrected proof. I take it on trust that the Gauntlet proofreaders have done a thorough job, because the version read was generously littered with minor typographical errors.

  But that's merely a sidenote. The real trouble with the book that exists is this: We don't have the remaining three-quarters of the novel. The portion that we do have shows Matheson writing at his very best – I cannot remember having read anything by him that is written as well as this – but at its end there is no conclusion: we're left with what's as near as dammit a cliff-hanger. As noted, it's a tragedy Matheson doesn't feel able to pick up the reins again and write the remainder of his tale. Although in general one disapproves of the practice of secondary authors being brought in to complete unfinished works from the original writer's notes, perhaps there is actually a case to be made for it here, because the full version of Come Fygures, Come Shadowes could well stand as the novel of Spiritualism – the fictional record of a time and an environment when at least a sizeable minority, and quite probably a majority, of Americans believed in the possibility of making contact with their dead loved ones through the agency of a medium.

  In the meantime, what we have is a thoroughly absorbing fragment. There are definitely rewards to be gained from reading it, because it's an example of a good writer writing out of his skin – any novelist, bar none, would be proud of this work – but obviously they're not the rewards one would expect from a completed novel.

  —Infinity Plus

  Noir: Three Novels of Suspense

  by Richard Matheson, introduction by Matthew R. Bradley

  Forge, 384 pages, paperback, 2005

  The three short crime novels collected in this volume were originally published early in Richard Matheson's career, when he was writing almost exclusively for the paperback pulps. He had already established himself in the fantastic genres with short stories like "Born of Man and Woman" (1950) and "Third from the Sun" (1950), but when it came to novels his initial taste was for crime. And thus we have Someone is Bleeding (1953), Fury on Sunday (1953) and the somewhat later and slicker Ride the Nightmare (1959).

  In Someone is Bleeding, young Dave picks up or is picked up by pretty widow Peggy on the beach, and falls almost obsessively in love with her. Yet she already has a man obsessively in love with her, the crooked lawyer and psychopath Jim Vaughan, whose "chauffeur" Steig is a ruthless hitman graduated from the Chicago mobs. The exact relationship between Peggy and Vaughan is for much of the novel a mystery to Dave, and indeed to us: is she in love with Vaughan and merely toying with Dave, or is it simply that Vaughan has her under a blackmailing thumb? As it soon emerges and as the murdered bodies begin to pile up, Peggy has a tragic past which has made her sexually frigid and in which she was either a victim of circumstances or a crazed killer, depending upon which version Dave is currently being told.

  Matheson does a marvellous job of juggling all these uncertainties in a novel that genuinely grips despite its prose at times being somewhat bumpy. A particularly white-knuckle sequence is that in which Steig chases Dave with the intent of "eliminating" him.

  The other two novels are conceptually simpler, being more suspensers than mysteries. In Fury on Sunday Vincent, who hit the heights as a concert pianist before being locked up in an institution for the criminally insane, ruthlessly murders a guard and escapes, intent on avenging himself on those in his earlier life whom he reckons destroyed him. What gives this novel its genuine strength is its portrayal of the various characters Vincent manages to bring together, and the relations between them: tarty Jane and Stan, the older husband whom she loathes and to whom she is habitually unfaithful; Ruth, the woman toward whom Vincent nurtures an idealistic but insane love, and her regular-guy husband Bob. In a manner remarkable for its time, the novel confronts Vincent's sexually tormented past so that, even while his homicidal mania chills us, we also have a strong sympathy for him.

  In Ride the Nightmare, Chris and Helen Martin seem to have an untroubled life with their daughter Connie – not a cloud on the horizon – but then within minutes everything changes as figures begin to appear from a past of which Chris has told Helen nothing. Before they know it, the Martins are indeed riding a nightmare, there being seemingly no possible outcome but the deaths of all three as they vie with a pair of ruthless gangsters. What makes the mayhem all the more frightening is that the crime in Chris's past, while genuine enough, is trivial beside the consequences it's now having. Ride the Nightmare lacks the
psychological depth of the other two novels, but that's no demerit in this instance, for the purpose of the novel is sheerly to thrill – which it does.

  Matheson's noirs stand up well against those of other, better-known exponents of the genre such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, and certainly this book is well worth your discovering.

  —Crescent Blues

  Picoverse

  by Robert A. Metzger

  Ace, 389 pages, hardback, 2002

  At InfinityPlus we maintain a rigorously egalitarian policy in our book reviews. Books from small presses – and even self-published books – are given exactly the same treatment as those from the larger and better-established houses. In theory at least, it doesn't matter if your book is from Bantam or iUniverse: it has the same chance of being reviewed, and will be expected to conform to the same standards.

  This has one obvious disbenefit so far as the reviewers are concerned: all too often we have to plough through garbage. But that is far outweighed by the benefits of the policy, most particularly that, with surprising frequency, we come across marvellous books that otherwise we'd never have read – indeed, that otherwise would never have impinged upon our consciousness at all. To give a measure of this, this reviewer discovered that his slate of five titles he listed on his Hugo Nomination form as his personal choice for Best Novel of 2001 contained two books from print-on-demand houses.