FSF, April 2008

by Spilogale Authors

  Koontz has a gift for characterization. I always care for the people in his books, though there's a downside to that as well, because the villains are also well-realized and I'm not as happy in their company. But to ignore the dark means you don't get to appreciate the light, and while Koontz is the master of the thriller, he's one of the few writers working today who invariably creates something positive out of all the darkness.

  For at the heart of this book lies a spiritual journey—not the self-centered spiritualism of contemporary self-help and the New Age, but one that connects to something bigger than ourselves, and in doing so, reaffirms our individual identity.

  It's all heady stuff for a contemporary thriller, but Koontz has never been one to tred familiar paths. His humor doesn't undermine the drama, the drama isn't melodramatic, and his respect for his characters—and through them, his readers—can be found on every page.

  The Darkest Evening of the Year will certainly be appreciated by Koontz's many loyal readers, but it will be particularly welcome to all of those who loved Watchers (1987), another of Koontz's books featuring a golden retriever in a pivotal role.

  * * * *

  Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer, Little, Brown, 2005, $17.99.

  New Moon, by Stephanie Meyer, Little, Brown, 2006, $17.99.

  Eclipse, by Stephanie Meyer, Little, Brown, 2007, $18.99.

  Back when the last Harry Potter book was coming out, I remember reading somewhere that the next most anticipated YA book after Rowling's final tome was Stephanie Meyer's third novel, Eclipse.

  Okay. I know our field is much bigger now than when I first started reading fantasy and science fiction (cue violins and old man's grumble). But while I can no longer read everything that's published, I'm usually at least aware of it—especially the titles that are selling in the plus millions. But Meyer's books were completely under my radar.

  Three books later, and some Googling about the author, and I'm no longer so much in the dark.

  First let me say that I'm totally outside the optimum demographic for these books. Meyer has gone on record as saying she doesn't write down to her teen audience (and she doesn't), but these books so faithfully relate the high drama of chaste, romantic high school love that their greatest appeal will be (and apparently is) to young women who are either in, or yearning to be in, a relationship similar to the one shared by our human protagonist Bella and her impossibly perfect vampire soul-mate Edward.

  There are pages (and pages) of pining and the viewing of the positive and negative aspects of this relationship from every conceivable angle. I'd say probably a third of each book is taken up with it. But if that were all, I wouldn't be discussing them here. Because what's interesting is how accomplished and inventive a writer Meyer is in the other two-thirds.

  A few spoilers are coming now—though none relating to the third and latest title.

  Isabella Swan's parents are separated. She's lived in Arizona for most of her life, basically taking care of her mother Renee who, though Renee means well, is a bit of a flake and doesn't have much luck with relationships. But then Renee finally does meet what appears to be the right man. He needs to go to Florida for a while and Renee would go with him except for Bella. So Bella makes the supreme sacrifice of leaving the sun and warmth of Phoenix to finish her high school and live with her father in Forks, Washington, where it's cold and damp and she doesn't know anyone.

  The weather's as bad as she expected it to be and she feels like she's on an alien planet. Everything's too green and there are no open spaces. Her father is taciturn and set in his ways (one of the reasons the free spirit that was Bella's mother left him). But while Bella doesn't expect to be happy, she's determined to make the best of the next couple of years.

  And then, as though presented to be the perfect distraction for her, in the lunch room of her first day at her new school, she is confronted with the mystery of the Cullens: Edward, Emmett, and Alice, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale, who live with the Cullens. They are standoffish from the rest of the school, but, as Bella notes, “so different, so similar ... all devastingly, inhumanly beautiful."

  Of course they're vampires, but it takes Bella a little longer to pick up on that than it does the reader—though to be fair to her, we're reading a book where we'll allow such a thing to be possible; she's living in the book, as it were, and just as we would if we were presented with the situation in our own lives, she keeps trying to find plausible explanations for things that simply can't be explained.

  She's most fascinated by Edward—the youngest of the five—and it turns out he feels the same, though to protect her from his own vampiric urges, as well as those of his family, there's a great deal of pushing away and keeping his distance before his own passion can't be denied.

  Ah, but the passion is all chaste kisses and long romantic conversations. It's rather fascinating that these two teens (or at least Bella—Edward's a few hundred years old) seem like characters from a Victorian novel, even though everything else in the book is very contemporary. This comes, no doubt, from Meyer's own Mormon upbringing. Growing up as an avowed “good girl” herself, Meyer writes teens who don't smoke or drink or have sex—mirroring the lives of Meyer's friends and her own teenage years.

  But that isn't necessarily unrealistic. A lot of contemporary YA fiction features outsiders, but I'd say that most kids don't live on the edge. They might like to read about the outsiders, they might even dream about their lives, but that doesn't mean they want to live them.

  If you're still with me, you might be wondering why I'm talking about these books in a column for a genre magazine that's ostensibly aimed at adults.

  Well, as I mentioned above, this sort of thing only occupies a portion of the book. Much more is taken up with some terrific tension-filled storylines (Meyer writes great action scenes) and the author's original take on vampires and werewolves. Here's an example:

  The Cullens live in Forks because there's so little sunlight, which means they can move comfortably under the ever-present cloud cover. But it's not because the sun will hurt or kill them. It's that the sun shows them in their true aspect, turning their skin into an almost diamond-bright burn that hurts to look upon.

  In the second book she introduces her werewolves, and they're just as intriguing, with their roots branching out into Native shamanistic legend and lore.

  If it's true as it says in interviews that Meyer has never seen a horror movie, and doesn't read horror books, then one can see where this utterly fresh take on hoary old tropes originates: it comes from the curiosity and imagination of someone to whom all of this is wonderfully bright and new. I'm not surprised that the books are marketed as mainstream YA books; it's because they're written that way. They don't have the baggage that comes from genre familiarity.

  And they're very well written. I'll admit to skipping over and/or speed reading the parts where Bella's pining (because really, once I know she is, I don't need to know about it for pages on end), but most of the time I was either fascinated by Meyer's take on supernatural elements, or caught up in the action and the story.

  And I have to say that I really liked, and came to care for, Bella and many of the other characters. Bella's a bit passive during the first two books, but I really appreciated the way Meyer had her grow and mature, learning to act, rather than simply react.

  So, do I recommend them to you? I'm not entirely sure. If you're a teenage girl, or can access the spirit of such inside yourself, you might find them as addictive as readers of all ages found the Harry Potter books.

  If you're not, or you can't, you should probably give them a pass.

  * * * *

  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]

  Books by James Sallis

  What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage?: James Branch Cabell in the Twenty-First Century, by Michael Swanwick, Temporary Culture, 2
007, $15.

  Collected Stories, by Marta Randall, Lulu.com, 2007, $19.50.

  And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life, by Nicola Griffith, Payseur & Schmidt, $75.

  * * * *

  "Small press” in this day and age may have gone the way of terms such as “noir” and “jazz,” straight downriver. University presses reviving older fiction or sliding new through the crack in the door, niche presses catering to genre, feminist, gay, libertarian, or just plain contrarian interests, presses that publish poetry by friends, presses specializing in collector's editions, presses that publish one book every three years, those that publish two or three a year, those that publish forty. What do we mean when we say small press?

  One thing for sure is that, whoever and whatever they are, when it comes to shaking the cage, taking chances, and just generally keeping our literature alive, small presses are doing much of the heavy lifting these days.

  As with any diaspora, of course, there will be ghettos, exclusion, class distinctions, stupidity, and silliness—right along with great cultural enrichment.

  So we're going small this time out, pilgrims. Three recent issues from small presses—micropresses, one might say—as varied in their nature as are the publications under review. Not a map to what's going on, by any means; but a few landmarks.

  * * * *

  Storytelling is a curious thing. The need for it seems hardwired into us and, just as arealist fiction—sf, fantasy, magic realism, surrealism—taps directly into a pool of archetypes deep within us, so do specific genres seem best adapted to telling certain stories.

  Similarly, some writers are chameleons, relating every manner of story in a variety of forms and voices, while others, for all their brilliance, appear to be telling versions of the same story over and over. Just as art doesn't really progress but develops by looping back, ceaselessly recodifying and reinventing itself, so do these writers proceed by emendation, by repetition and refinement, producing serial editions of one essential tale or a handful of tales that over the course of a career stack atop one another like the myriad leaves of paper tole.

  James Branch Cabell seems firmly in that camp. He is also one of those writers whose name you hear again and again yet quite likely have not read. Mark Twain had Cabell's Chivalry on his nightstand at the time of his death. James Blish once edited the journal of the Cabell Society; Heinlein described Stranger in a Strange Land as “a Cabellesque satire” and alluded to Cabell's Jurgen, a Comedy of Justice with his own Job, A Comedy of Justice.

  And yet ... Cabell goes unread.

  Why he goes unread is the point addressed in Michael Swanwick's fifty-one-page monograph, What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage?

  "There are, alas, an infinite number of ways for a writer to destroy himself,” Swanwick begins. “James Branch Cabell chose one of the more interesting. Standing at the helm of the single most successful literary career of any fantasist of the twentieth century, he drove the great ship of his reputation straight and unerringly onto the rocks.... This remarkable feat of self-obliteration was accomplished through diligence, hard work, and a perverse brilliance of timing on Cabell's part. His chief tool was a uniform edition of his works."

  Cabell was born in 1879 in Richmond, Virginia, to an affluent family, and lived most of his life there, retiring to Florida in his final years. Jurgen, which appeared in 1919, was the eighth of some fifty-two or so books. Prosecuted for obscenity, it became a bestseller, and secured Cabell's celebrity. Other major works that have endured in a kind of half-life include The SiIver Stallion, The Cream of the Jest, and Figures in the Earth.

  Swanwick's precis of the last might do as well for Jurgen—or for the majority of Cabell's work:

  "It follows the adventures of Manuel, a young pig-keeper who is told by his dying mother to ‘make a figure in the world,’ and so goes out adventuring, ceaselessly rising in rank, seducing women of high mythological status, and sculpting clay statues of himself."

  As might this: “In Something about Eve, the (again) Virginian writer Gerald Musgrave trades places with [a supernatural creature and] quickly decides that he is a god—the Fair-haired Hoo, Lord of the Third Truth—and, mounting the silver stallion Kalki, rides off in search of his kingdom in Antan."

  The shipwreck loomed in the early twenties with Cabell's decision to set his life's work in stone, revising both novels and nonfiction into a piece, first with the Kalki edition, then, with further revisions, notes, and special introductions, the Storisende Edition, all of it purportedly fragments of the world-encompassing Biography of Manuel. To this end, Cabell threw everything into his capacious eighteen-volume pot, back-fitting references to characters into novels written before those characters were created, annexing volumes of nonfiction and poetry as commentary on his fiction, even appending a thirty-four-page genealogy to show how all his characters (including those of the contemporary social satires) were related.

  "[M]uch of the biography is humbug,” Swanwick writes. Yet: “At his best, the man wrote very well indeed. Who among us dare claim more?"

  Cabell is a problematic author, and to all appearances was a difficult man, but for those interested in learning more about Cabell there can hardly be a better or more readable beginning than Swanwick's monograph.

  * * * *

  It's odd to realize that this is Marta Randall's first collection. True, she may be best known for novels such as Islands, A City in the North, Dangerous Games, and Those Who Favor Fire, but she has been publishing stories since at least 1972 in venues ranging from New Worlds to Universe, Omni, and Asimov's; three first appeared in this magazine.

  As one might suspect of stories written over a stretch of time, they're a mixed lot: ripping (or at least nicely torn) adventure yarns; psychological portraits; a postmodern fable; stories fundamentally hyperrealist, bolstered by accents and underlines of the futuristic or fantastic; even a ghost story rather in the style of John Collier. Reading through them often summoned memories of classic writers with whom I grew up, people like Leinster, Leiber, Cordwainer Smith, Sheckley. Yet for all their wading hip-deep in tradition, the stories remain distinctly hers.

  In no way do I mean to imply that Randall does not write beautifully—

  "The noise woke me. I lay in bed, listening to the bright sound of leaf on leaf. Another lapidary night, cracking leaves in the forest around the house. I thought dreamily of rising and walking into it, to fix the newly formed crystals before they shattered, perhaps to become crystalline myself. Instead, I burrowed deeper into the bedclothes, listening to the rising wind. In the morning shards of emerald lay on the deeper emerald of the grass, or pierced the faceted violets."

  —but this is not where the imprint lies, and Randall is not at heart a language writer. The distinctiveness of her stories lies in their angle of attack, in the way she sidles up to her stories—reminding us that style is forever less a matter of word choice and syntax than it is a reflection of the way the writer perceives his or her world.

  So for all their diversity, there's a quiet unity at work here.

  I've often suggested that the abiding theme of American literature is the uneasy truces drawn between the individual and society, that there's a cowboy or mountain man inside us all struggling to get out. In every story, Randall writes brilliantly and with great feeling of outsiders, of those well beyond the pale—solitary runners, outlaws, the marginalized and damaged, society's flotsam—and their search for community.

  When all the kids are good-looking and well-behaved it's hard to pick one from the brood, but of many outstanding stories here, a personal favorite is “Lázaro y Antonio,” which manages to play out a straightforward and deeply affecting story while holding close to its vest rather grand questions of identity and memory, personal loyalty, free enterprise, and urban decay. What I said about arealist fiction tapping directly into the pool of archetypes deep within us? This story comes up with bucketsful, one of those rare tales that throws its a
rms around worlds visible and unseen and whispers in our ear: Here is everything you need to know.

  Participation in the present, Gertrude Stein pointed out, is forever diluted by memory and anticipation. This story, many of Randall's in fact, scoops up all the could-have-beens and may-bes and delivers them to our current address.

  Randall knows that our lives are bright segments surrounded by blur. And that blur reigns.

  * * * *

  The box contains: A baby photo; a brief preface by Dorothy Allison; scratch-n-sniff cards of geraniums, the pub, and sandalwood; the collage poster of a stick-figure crucifixion; a small notebook of child's drawings; and five slender volumes: Limb of Satan, We Have Met the Alien, Dear Diary, Something New, and The Writer's Life. There is also, tucked into the fold, a CD of original music. The assemblage is titled And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, and is a limited edition of 450 signed and numbered box sets selling at $75.

  Opening the slipcase, I recalled certain publications from the fifties, packets of interviews, photos, drawings, reports. You were supposed to read through all these clues and solve the crime. Mystery novels for the home craftsman.

  The stuff of our lives is every bit as chaotic as our representations of them, whether in fiction, biography, or memoir, are ordered. We make art to make up for the randomness and incoherence—the blur—of our lives. To try for focus. It's all a tangled mess here on the front, new stuff arriving every hour and no place to put it, but in our dispatches home—because art is compulsive pattern-making—it finds order.

  Nicola Griffith's novels include Ammonite, Slow River, and the thrillers Stay and The Blue Place. “With fiction, I'm a structure fanatic, with a particular fondness for symmetry,” Griffith writes in her introduction. “This book is different. Memory doesn't work neatly, so I haven't tried to shoehorn these stories into a rigid architecture. Besides, the longer and more coherent—more novelistic, if you like—a memoir narrative is, the more the writer tends to bend the facts to fit the form.... But, of course, it's all connected, all me. So here I am. Rummage about. Enjoy."