I know everybody loves Richard Corben's work, and I find it interesting panel-to-panel, but he's the stiffest storyteller around and I don't think I've ever fallen into the story when he's done the illustrations. I'm always aware that I'm reading. And while I like old-fashioned cartooning, Jay Lynch's work just sort of annoys me.
The thing is, to some degree, comics are like movies. When you get as visual a writer as Ellison can be, it's very difficult for an artist or filmmaker to match the movie we've already got playing in our head. Because of that—because I know how these scenes should play out visually—this isn't my favorite collection of Ellison's work.
However, if you're jonsing for some Ellison, or just want to give his writing a try, I'd recommend you pick up the Tachyon reprint of Shatterday instead. It has a terrific Arthur Suydam cover and features a treasure trove of the author at his best: the title story, “Jefty Is Five,” “Django,” “All the Lies That Are My Life"....
The confrontational and shocking Ellison is always entertaining, but these stories open the reader up to the poet in the soul of this one-time “angry young man.” They are never sentimental, but they resonate with heart and sentiment, and when you reread them as I just have, you'll remember again why Harlan Ellison is considered one of America's best short story writers. Or if you're new to his work, you might well discover a new favorite author.
* * * *
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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Musing on Books by Michelle West
The Secret of Crickley Hall, by James Herbert, Pan Macmillan, 2007, $9.99.
Ilario: The Lion's Eye: The First History Book One, by Mary Gentle, 2007, Avon Eos, $14.95.
Ilario: The Stone Golem: The First History Book Two, by Mary Gentle, Avon Eos, 2007, $14.95.
The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, by Catherynne M. Valente, 2007, Bantam Spectra, $14.
* * * *
I've said before in these pages that I'm not really a horror reader. I don't really love roller coasters and things that make me queasy, and I particularly dislike gore. This makes me not ideally suited to read a lot of horror novels. Let me make clear that I don't think they're bad, and I don't turn my nose up at them—I'm just not part of the audience with which Horror in general finds itself at home.
But—you knew there was a “but” coming—I've always had a weakness for ghost stories. I'm not sure why; something about the attenuated cry of the long dead, something about the loss, and the possibility of justice, or at least the emergence of truth, strikes a chord in me. There's something ineluctably human about ghosts.
So I picked up the trade paperback of James Herbert's latest novel, The Secret of Crickley Hall, and the opening pages (well, beyond the prologue), drew me in.
Gabe and Eve Caleigh, along with their two daughters, have chosen to rent a large house in the small town of Hollow Bay, well away from their home in London. Gabe has a number of reasons for wanting to take a break from the city, but the most pressing, the most painful, are the memories it contains.
Almost one year ago, their son Cam went missing in a London park. Since then, Gabe and Eve have lived by the phone, waiting for word—from the police, from possible kidnappers, from anyone who might have seen their son. Their life has been put on hold—but they have two daughters, and children don't stand still; Gabe's aware that in some ways they've been absent from their home life since the moment Cam was discovered missing.
It's clear at the outset that the ghosts of Crickley Hall already pale in comparison to the things that haunt the Caleighs. Clear as well that until a body is discovered, hope is a brutality that endures, day in and day out, stretching and thinning but never quite breaking.
Even when faced with the evidence (ludicrous though it is to Gabe's mind) that supernatural forces do indeed exist at Crickley, that hope simmers. The locals are curious about Crickley, of course, and the information extant makes clear that, during a flood, several orphans, evacuated from London to the safety of Crickley, perished, as did the man who was in charge of the orphanage.
As the book unfolds, it becomes clear to Eve and Gabe (it's pretty clear to the reader from page one) that the children's deaths were not due to drowning. The couple is aware that something isn't right—the doors that they lock open themselves during the night, water appears on the floor when there's no rain and no obvious signs of leaking pipes. Herbert contrasts the mundane with the mystical, pulling the threads together so that the reader, in the end, is aware of all aspects of the tragedy and the insanity that lead to the haunting of Crickley.
It's almost too much information; every single person except daughter Cally has a point of view—including the medium that Eve consults in desperation—and every single point of view serves to explain elements of the past that might not be clear otherwise, some of which might have been stronger for the murkiness; it's as if the plot and every single thing that could possibly be relevant to it had to be laid out explicitly for the reader.
But having said that, I read it through to the end, and the end was perfect. Enough so that I sat down and read it again.
For me, Herbert is at his strongest when dealing with the profound terror of the simply mundane, and one particular scene between Gabe and a London police officer is strong enough that you instinctively close your eyes (which makes reading difficult) in order to give Gabe Caleigh a moment of privacy and respectful distance.
* * * *
Mary Gentle's alternate history is interesting not because it's an alternate history of Carthage—although that aspect of the novel is certainly one of its strengths. No, it's interesting because, against the vast panorama of intricate daily detail, her unlikely protagonist, the Ilario of the title, stands out.
Ilario is a freak by birth and position—the King's freak, to be precise. What makes him a freak? He's a natural hermaphrodite. A freak is not generally considered worthy of assassination, and when Ilario is almost killed by the one woman in the world he loves and trusts, he flees the safety of his position, having earned his freedom—and the necessary papers that prove he isn't chattel.
Hermaphrodites are tricky; Ilario is a he because he thinks of himself that way, bodily truth notwithstanding; it's not with the women that he most strongly identifies—and in this, he's a product of his culture. Gentle's work, given her protagonist, can't help but examine gender, identity, and gender-issues, but the examination arises out of the characters who are made, broken, or both, by their culture's expectations and limitations; there is one speech given toward the book's end, by Ilario's mother, Rosamunda, that is in equal parts ugly, true, and painful—and it never feels forced.
The first heady rush of freedom, mixed with Ilario's hopeful naiveté, conspire to rob him of said freedom; his ability to write secures him a place—as a slave—to Rehkmire', an educated, well-traveled and somewhat inscrutable man. Because he is once again a slave, the second assassination attempt is treated as a crime against his owner, which complicates the political landscape. This, for Ilario, becomes obvious much later; he has a measure of safety with his new owner, and his new owner doesn't seem to want a servile, silent slave; he wants a companion.
Ilario's journey takes him to an artist, for whom he serves briefly as an apprentice; he falls in love, he travels to Egypt, and in doing all these things—and more—he learns the limits of his own compassion, and how to stretch them, making, in the end, friends of enemies. I want to say more, but I don't want to spoil the book in any way, so I'll limit myself to this: Gentle's novel(s) cover a small span of time, but in that time, Gentle gives us the sense of a life, with all of its ironies, ugliness, and beauty, made slightly larger than life, but never larger than humanity.
This book reminded me of nothing so much as a Guy Gavriel Kay novel, and the unexpected ending was also perfect. I highly recommend it.
* * * *
Cathrynne Valente's The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice concludes the two-book The Orphan's Tales. I found I had to reread the first book (The Orphans Tales: In the Night Garden) in order to follow and appreciate the second fully, because the two books are halves of one long tapestry. You can make out the individual threads that comprise the almost-fairy tale stories, but if you pull them, you find that you unravel much more than a single knot.
We are returned to the Night Garden, and the strange orphan with ink upon her eyelids. We sit, as the young boy who has befriended her does, at her feet while she tells the tales that are written there—because the telling of each and every tale will possibly free her. Or perhaps that's how it began; it's become more, to both of the children, who live in isolation in their own ways—she, in the garden, living on scraps and forage, and he, in the glittering palace, in the harem, surrounded by people who aren't really aware of who he is, but are aware of what he will become. He is the heir.
I loved the end—the very end—of the last book, because it took the evil sister stereotype, which had worked so well at the book's beginning (although it had frayed toward the end), and turned it on its ear with so few words. It was an act of generosity, both to the character and to the reader, because it was unlooked for.
In the second volume, in the world outside of the Night Garden, said sister, Dinarzad, is engaged to one of many suitors. She of course has no choice or say in her future husband, and she takes solace from her stolen hints of an orphan's tale. Not for Dinarzad the open and naïve befriending of a strange, fey girl, but in the life she's led, that's not a possibility.
But she's heard the stories that the girl tells the boy, and in her own way, she clings to them, and she offers what help she can, quietly and firmly.
The book is broken into two story cycles; in this it maintains the structure of the first novel. But while the first deals with all manner of strangeness, wending its slow way to the birth of a child in an extremely unexpected place, the second shifts completely—because in the second half of the book, and in the last of the four cycles, the girl is no longer the sage and active teller of the tales her eyes horde—because the last of the tales are ones she could not read on her own eyes; the sentences break and cross over the lids, and she cannot, on her own, make sense of the narrative.
So the boy, her audience, becomes a participant in the last act in a much more obvious way: she asks him to tell her the stories, and while he's fretful and certain he will do a bad job, he does begin to read, and to offer to her what she herself can't see. As a metaphor about friendship and interdependence, it's brilliant.
And as the stories at last draw to a close, as the threads of the whole are finally woven into whole cloth, the stories end, and the Orphan and her heir are left looking out at a world that we won't see—but can, thanks to Valente's work, imagine.
Valente's language is lovely, her imagery evocative, and she can make even the ugliest and strangest things seem briefly luminescent. But her fairy tales, while they have the cool precision of Angela Carter's, have as well some visceral blood and bone, some messiness that speaks of a reality that is not dissected and viewed through a microscope—and given the framing device and the structure of her story-within-a-story-within-a-story, this is impressive.
And yes, as in the first book, it's the unlooked for moments of kindness that almost break the heart. This is not, in any sense of the word, a traditional narrative structure ... but I loved it.
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The Overseer By Albert E. Cowdrey
A historian by trade, Albert Cowdrey often writes stories with some historical perspective to them—readers might, for instance, recall his story “The Revivalist” from our March 2006 issue. His new story is a dark tale of life in the Deep South during the Nineteenth Century. Life was anything but easy in those days....
Though appropriately rundown, Nicholas Lerner's big house on Exposition Boulevard in uptown New Orleans was not haunted. The same could not be said of its owner.
That spring morning in 1903 the old man was getting ready for the day. Or rather, Morse was making him ready.
"So, Mr. Nick,” murmured the valet, applying shaving soap to his employer's face with an ivory-handled brush, “are you writing a book?"
Damn him, thought Lerner. He knows I detest conversation with a razor at my throat.
"My memoirs,” he muttered. “A few jottings only. Waiting to die is such a bore, I write to pass the time."
Was that the real reason he'd become a late-blooming scribbler—mere boredom? Most of his life had been devoted to hiding the truth, not revealing it. And yet now....
"I think you must be writing secrets,” smiled Morse, piloting the blade beneath his left ear. “The way you lock your papers in the safe at night."
"I lock them up,” Lerner snapped, getting soap in his mouth, “because they are private."
And had better remain so, he thought wryly. The other memorabilia in his small safe—an ancient, rusted Colt revolver; a bill from a Natchez midwife; a forty-year-old spelling book; a faded telegram saying RELIABLE MAN WILL MEET YOU RR LANDING STOP—would mean nothing to any living person.
Then why should he write the story out, give evidence against himself? It seemed to make no sense. And yet, having started, somehow he couldn't stop.
Humming an old ballad called “Among My Souvenirs,” he pondered the problem but reached no conclusion. He closed his eyes and dozed, only to wake suddenly when Morse asked, “Who is Monsieur Felix?"
Lerner heard his own voice quaver as he replied, “Someone I ... knew, long ago. Where did you hear of him?"
"Last night, after you took your medicine, you spoke his name over and over in your sleep."
"Then I must have seen him in a dream."
Shrewd comment. Morse knew that the opium he obtained for the old man caused intense dreams, and would ask no more questions.
Without further comment he burnished his employer's face with a hot towel, combed his hair, and neatly pinned up his empty left sleeve. He removed the sheet that protected Lerner's costly, old-fashioned Prince Albert suit from spatter, and bore all the shaving gear through the door to the adjoining den and out into the hall. Remotely, Lerner heard Morse's voice—now raised imperiously—issuing orders to the housemaid and the cook.
Good boy! thought Lerner, checking his image in a long, dusky pier glass. Make ‘em jump!
He was rubbing his smooth upper lip to make sure no bristles had been left, when suddenly he leaned forward, staring. Then, with startling energy, his one big hand whirled his chair around.
Of course nobody was standing behind him. A trick of his old eyes and the brown shadows of his bed chamber with its single door, its barred and ever-darkened window. Or maybe a result of talking about Monsieur Felix, whom he would always associate with mirrors, fog, winter darkness, summertime mirages—with anything, bright or dark, that deceived the eye.
"Ah, you devil,” he muttered, “I'll exorcise you with my pen. Then burn both you and the damned manuscript!"
Maybe that was the point of his scribbling—to rid himself of the creature once and for all. Smiling grimly, he trundled into his den.
* * * *
Like its owner, his safe was an antique, the combination lock encircled with worn red letters instead of numbers. He dialed a five-letter word—perdu, meaning lost, a word with many meanings as applied to its contents. He jerked open the heavy door, drew out a pack of cream-laid writing paper and carried it to his old writing desk, a burled walnut monster honeycombed with secret compartments.
On the wall above, his dead wife smiled from a pastel portrait. Elmira as she'd been when young—conventionally pretty, not knowing yet that her short life would be devoted mainly to bearing stillborn children. On her lap she held their first boy, the only one born alive, but who, less than a month after the artist finished the picture, had suffocated in his crib, in the mysterious way of small children
.
Bereft, surrounded by servants who did everything for her, idle, dissatisfied, Elmira had died a little too. Her husband had granted her everything she wanted except entry into his head and heart.
"Why don't you trust me?” she'd asked him a thousand times, and he'd always answered, “My dear, I trust you as I do no other human being."
She'd never quite found the handle of that reply. Morse's father and mother would have understood the irony—the fact that he really trusted no one—but of course they were dead too.
They saw into my soul, Lerner thought, but it didn't save them, either one.
He shrugged, dismissing Elmira and all the other ghosts. Time to introduce the Overseer into his story. But first he wanted to sharpen his unreliable memory by rereading what he'd written so far. He drew the papers closer to his nose and flicked on a new lamp with a glaring Edison bulb that had recently replaced the old, dim, comfortable gaslight. Squinting balefully at his own spidery, old-fashioned handwriting, he began to read.
* * * *
CHAPTER THE FIRST
Wherein I Gain, Then Lose, My Personal Eden
As I look back upon the scenes of a stormy life, filled with strange adventures and haunted by a stranger spirit, I am astonished to reflect how humble, peaceable and commonplace were my origins.
My ancestors were poor German peasants, who in 1720 fled the incessant wars of Europe and found refuge on Louisiana's Côte des Allemands, or German coast, near the village of Nouvelle Orléans. Their descendants migrated northward to the Red River country, still farming the land but, like the good Americans they had become, acquiring slaves to assist their labors.
Here in 1843 I was born into the lost world that people of our new-minted Twentieth Century call the Old South. The term annoys me, for to us who lived then ‘twas neither old nor new, but simply the world—our world. I first saw light on a plantation called Mon Repos, a few miles from the village of Red River Landing, and there spent my boyhood with Papa and Cousin Rose. Our servants were three adult slaves and a son born to one of them, whom Papa had named Royal, according to the crude humor of those times, which delighted in giving pompous names to Negroes.
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