Strange Horizons, July 2002

by Strange Horizons

  Take “The Enthusiraptor,” for example. He's the typical hyperactive ninny who will “gush all over you / and before you know it, you'll be doing / whatever it is you're good at / for your company. For free. / ... And you won't enjoy it any more.” Recognize the type? It'll be immediately identifiable to any poet reading this who has been tapped to lend their creative writing skills to, say, write directions for the staff copy machine. In McLaughlin's world, the Enthusiraptor isn't just a moron—it has evil intent: it's “a vampire / eager to suck the fun / out of your life."

  While the poetic language I've been citing might not pack much of a punch, much of it does, and McLaughlin clearly uses poetry to unleash his creative unconscious, venting what are likely to be everyone's frustrations with go-nowhere work through comedic horror, throwing out madcap barbs with deadly accuracy. The rhyme, when it appears, is subtle and often slant ("The Finnickyfoofoo is very picky / about the work others do, / and always demands absolute / perfection"). But McLaughlin smartly represses any desire to refine the form of his grotesques or wax poetic in sonnets ... formal design would clearly inhibit his humorous insights.

  The genius of this book is in each monster's inventive title and modus operandi. You get character studies of self-explanatory monsters like “The Smiling Gladhander” and “The Waffler” side by side with the “Fumigorgon” (a health food freak with noxious breath) and “The Spittylicker” (a clerk who obsessively licks fingers when turning pages). And I won't be a “Blabberblort” and ruin the surprising nature of “The Normotron” or “The Potbellied Smirkleflab"—you'll just have to read this book and find out what they are on your own.

  Chances are, you already know them.

  I don't mean to sound like an Enthusiraptor, but I really mean it when I say you're going to love this little book. It's one of my favorite poetry chapbooks of the year so far. The premise is clever and the price is cheaper than, say, an espresso at Starbucks or a box of toner. The pocket-sized design is just right for slipping inside your blazer and tossing on the boardroom table before the big meeting. If they get the joke, the contents are certain to have your coworkers looking at themselves a little more closely, whether CEO or secretary. You'll want to pick up a dozen or so of these stocking stuffers to hand out at the office Christmas party. Just keep your eyes peeled for the ones who lick their fingers before they turn the cover.

  Chimes in the Unconscious: Quanta: Award-Winning Poems, by Bruce Boston

  Reviewed by Michael Arnzen

  7/8/02

  If you've never read Bruce Boston's poetry, I'd normally say “shame on you,” but instead I'll just look the other way and ask you to quietly purchase a copy of this book and read it quickly, before anyone else finds out. Because you need to read Bruce Boston, especially if you have any desire to be a SF poet. Boston has been defining the genre of speculative poetry for twenty years or more—and finally we have Quanta, a book that enumerates the core elements of that definition.

  Boston's Quanta is a collection of his award-winning poetry. Again, with emphasis: this entire collection is composed of award-winning poems. I cannot think of another writer in the genre who could fill a book of short pieces with award-winners, with the exception, perhaps, of Harlan Ellison. Indeed, Boston is something of a Harlan Ellison of poetry—a living legend, an outspoken proponent of literary quality, and an embodiment of a ‘60s aesthetic that combines wonder with a longing for future possibility.

  Reading through Boston's Quanta was for me something akin to poring over a photo album: I was nostalgically reliving my first experience with many of the poems (and relishing the poems I'd always wanted to read, but didn't have access to), remembering just how innocent I was before Boston blew my mind when I discovered him in the small press. And here he managed to do it all over again, knocking my well-worn socks off. You can't read Boston's Quanta without realizing that his work stands the test of time.

  In an opening comparison to Van Gogh's rendering of “Starry Night,” Andrew Joron's glowing introduction to the book praises Boston's “expressionistic” writing style, in which “words no longer function merely as record-keeping devices, but become a kind of darkly luminescent substance applied to the white surface of the page.” Boston accomplishes this through his emphasis not so much on what words mean, but how they sound and, consequently, ring the chimes we hang in our unconscious.

  Indeed, this very modus operandi may be at work in the somewhat self-reflexive poem, “The Nightmare Collector"—winner of the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award in 1987. This poem generates a creepy effect by using second person. The reader is put in the position of an innocent sleeper, visited by a dark stranger wearing a mysterious dark coat: “From the endless slashes / in his voluminous greatcoat / you can feel the heat / of captured bodies / invade your rumpled bed / with delirium and fever; / you can smell a brassy sediment of tears. You can hear the pulse / and thump of unborn shadows, / a dense hysteric fugue.” These sounds conjure the very nightmare that the visitor hopes to gather into his dark “greatcoat."

  This is just one brilliant example of Boston's dark vision in the collection, and there are plenty of others—ranging from the dark fantasy of “Return to the Mutant Rain Forest” (another Rhysling winner, this time co-written with Robert Frazier) to the charmingly dark humor poem, “Old Robots are the Worst” (which won the Asimov's Reader's Award).

  One of my favorites in Quanta is “Confessions of the Body Thief,” which successfully compresses a novel-sized premise into a long poem of 143 lines. “Body Thief” is about a soul who hops from body to body, living another person's life over and over, but “like a raindrop on a window / that reflects the room beyond / can never find a passage / through the surface of the pane.” The poem manages to capture a speculative concept, rend the magical into a tragic and all-too-human viewpoint, and even sneak in a little metafictional poke at what it is that readers, too, do.

  Quanta's range is remarkable. Because it spans so much time, it can take snapshots of recurring motifs in Boston's prodigiously varied work. For example, Quanta contains two poems each from his series of “Spacer” astronaut poems and his series of “Accursed Wives” poems. The latter series was so popular with readers that Boston himself admits in the introduction to “Curse of the Shapeshifter's Wife” that he had “painted himself into a corner” by writing so many of them. (To wit: 35 poems and 5 short stories, all collected in his book, The Complete Accursed Wives (recently released as an e-book on fictionwise.com)). Here we get not only the Shapeshifter's Wife but also “The Curse of the SF Writer's Wife,” who goes to extreme measures in her desire to stop her husband from—literally—taking risky flights with his imagination every time she turns her back.

  Altogether, the book collects 12 poems, each introduced individually by the author, who either explains the history of the poem, or his intention within it. Rounding out the 60+ page book is a bibliography of all Boston's writing and a short autobiographical essay, “The Making of a Speculative Poet.” In the latter, the author insightfully discusses the differences between “science fiction poetry” and “speculative poetry,” then attempts to explain what his poetry is about. Here, surprisingly, words fail him, so he ends simply, urging the reader to read the poems themselves. And he's right: there are plenty of lessons within Quanta. I urge you to learn them.

  A collectible, necessary volume. Buy it before it's sold out.

  * * * *

  Michael A. Arnzen teaches the writing and study of popular fiction at Seton Hill University. His horror reviews have appeared recently in The New York Review of Science Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, and Paradoxa. Arnzen's novel, Grave Markings, was the recipient of both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Critics Guild Award in 1995. He invites readers to visit his home page and e-poetry experiment.

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  Sucked into a Whirlpool of Horror: The Spiraling Madness of Junji Ito's Uzumaki

  Review
ed by Laura Blackwell

  7/15/02

  From a distance, the seaside Japanese town of Kurôzu-cho looks peaceful and idyllic. Ferns sway gently on the verdant mountainside, the ocean laps gently at the black lighthouse, and Dragonfly Pond sits serenely at the town's center. But closing in, the reader realizes that something darker lies at the heart of Kurôzu-cho—something beneath the sudden dust devils, the mysterious whirlpools, the inescapable convergence of the winding streets. A malevolent spiral contaminates Kurôzu-cho, churning dark thoughts within its inhabitants and goading them to the self-destruction that ends in the spiraling smoke from cremation fires. Junji Ito's first two Uzumaki graphic novels draw readers into the disquieting tale of Kurôzu-cho, infecting them with a heightened awareness of spirals and a case of the chills that may last for days.

  Narrator Kirie Goshima lives contentedly in Kurôzu-cho, blind to its sinister element. Less of a protagonist than a witness to the horrors that befall those under the spiral's supernatural influence, the quiet teenager realizes something is amiss when she spies her boyfriend's father, Mr. Saito, staring avidly at an empty snail shell. Her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, attends school in a neighboring town—a daily escape which affords him the detachment to see how the spiral has infected his hometown and his family.

  The first storyline, “The Spiral Obsession,” details Mr. Saito's deadly fascination with any spiral—whether a coil of wire or a special type of fish cake—and Mrs. Saito's resulting violent spiral-phobia. Kirie listens skeptically to Shuichi's theories about the wrongness of Kurôzu-cho, but withholds judgment until his father declines into a housebound wreck and his mother flees reality into an aversion so strong that she takes scissors to her own body in an effort to rid it of spirals. As Mr. Saito tells Kirie's father, “They're everywhere once you look for them."

  Some chapters from each of these two volumes stand alone as separate stories, similar in character to the best of The X-Files's monster-of-the-week episodes. The spiral exploits the characters’ flaws in bizarre ways, often altering them physically as well as mentally. “The Firing Effect” and “Twisted Souls” show the heavy toll the spiral's flattery and perversion exact from characters who otherwise might behave perfectly normally. Ito goes particularly hard on feminine vanity in two just-desserts stories: in “The Scar,” a vain, cold-hearted beauty's crescent-shaped scar twists itself into a disfiguring spiral, and in “Medusa,” an attention-craving girl's hair takes on a life of its own. “The Snail” takes the reader to school with a new slant on the relationship between bully and victim. Despite its often-episodic nature, Uzumaki maintains continuity from tale to tale, building intensity from one to the next.

  In the second volume, many stories veer away from the odd comfort of comeuppance stories to show the spiral's increasingly larger-scale, more violent, and less selective seductions. The circle widens to encompass anyone and everyone, and innocents dragged into the vortex suffer deeply. In “The Black Lighthouse,” characters guilty of nothing worse than foolishness pay with their lives when they investigate the abandoned beacon's hypnotic light source. Characters trying to save Kirie from the threats of “The Umbilical Cord” and “The Storm” die merely because the spiral ensnares them. These events leave an indelible mark on Kirie; with Shuichi as her only ally, she must resist the evil she sees around her even as others call her a liar. The spiral cannot twist her spirit, but it stalks and menaces her.

  None of these stories, however psychological, goes without grotesque images or eerie supernatural twists. In context, a mollusk or a hairstyle can induce shudders as easily as a trickle of blood or a rotting corpse. Ito spares nothing and no one; small children, kindly craftsmen, and glowingly pregnant women stand as much chance of serving as conduits of evil as becoming its victims. Of the twelve chapters in these volumes, a few border on camp, but only the gimmicky (if tragic) “Jack-in-the-Box” falls flat.

  Ito's exquisite black-and-white pen work, with its elaborate backgrounds and realistic figures, represents Kurôzu-cho as just south of normal—until he pulls out the stops with searingly disturbing images of the spiral's influence. Ito employs creative and memorable visions to show the spiral's erosive effects on the landscape, the little details of life, and the human mind and body. In the first volume, he accomplishes this with minimal gore, but the horrific events of the second volume—particularly “Jack-in-the-Box” and the one-two punch of “Mosquitoes” and “The Umbilical Cord"—require blood. He chronicles the unsettling sights through Kirie's wide-open eyes—each lower eyelash lovingly drawn, creating a dewy, innocent effect—as she watches Shuichi waste into hollow-eyed gauntness. When the events of the second volume chip away at Kirie, it's wrenching to see her trusting eyes bloodshot and to watch her sweet face take on the tension of painful secrets.

  For both volumes, Viz takes the welcome step of reproducing the beautifully painted first four pages in full color, setting the tone of uneasiness in dark reds, unhealthy greens, and sinister purples. The second volume raises the bar further with an embossed cover and spine. A lighthearted cartoon featuring Ito poking fun at Uzumaki's concept (and at himself) closes each volume.

  Ito lists his influences as “God of Horror Manga” Kazuo Umezu (who lent his name to the award Ito won for Tomie in 1987), Hell Baby manga creator Hideshi Hino, science-fiction/experimental novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui, and American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Uzumaki is that rare work that captures the style of Lovecraft's horror, gradually unveiling the grotesqueries underlying everyday life, without pilfering its distinctive content, or calling everything in sight “Cyclopean” or “squamous."

  “Spiral” to some translators and “Vortex” to others, Uzumaki inspired the 2000 live-action Japanese movie of the same name, which spurred positive buzz on the art house circuit, but has not yet been released to home video. The Uzumaki graphic novel, currently serialized in Pulp magazine, will conclude in Volume 3, scheduled for an October 2002 release. The final collection will include one story not published in Pulp.

  Lovely despite its moments of looking-glass distortion, Lovecraftian with nary an “eldritch,” Uzumaki shows a town in which the inhabitants become wound around the points of their own greatest weakness. The townspeople's all-too-common and all-too-human failings, warped and mutating out of control, at first keep the evil that befalls them from seeming random or gratuitous. But like a piece of fabric with a few tiny holes, Kurôzu-Cho is rent from weak point to weak point, unraveling until it seems it will fall to shreds. Although some of these vivid stories read as cautionary tales, and some read as straight-up horror, Uzumaki infects the reader with nothing worse than a case of the chills and the desire to read more.

  * * * *

  Laura Blackwell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she writes reviews and short fiction. Preparing this review has given her an irrational fascination with cinnamon rolls. Her previous work for Strange Horizons can be found in our archives.

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  Robert Sawyer's Hominids: It's Not Your Father's Cavemen Story

  Reviewed by John Teehan

  7/22/02

  The Neanderthal brain was most positively and definitely not smaller than our own; indeed, and this is a rather bitter pill, it appears to have been perhaps a little larger."—William Howells, Harvard, Mankind So Far

  Hard science fiction has lately been enjoying a renaissance. As sciences from genetics to quantum physics continue to move forward in great leaps, a genre that once seemed passé is becoming timely. We're finding a number of novels that use recent breakthroughs in science to bring issues to the forefront that are simply too close-to-home now to be ignored. Robert Sawyer's latest novel, Hominids (Tor, 2002) exemplifies this by braving such stormy matters as privacy, religion, and the origins of man. It begins with the discovery of a Neanderthal in our midst.

  Deep within the Canadian nickel mine that plays host to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, an inexplicable explosion occurs, and scientists disc
over a man floating unconscious within a sealed tank of heavy water. How did he get there? The scientists open the tank to save the man before he drowns and discover that the intruder is stranger than they expected. Aside from being unusually large and muscular, he is covered with a fine down of hair, has heavily-ridged eyebrows, a receding jaw line, broad nose, and ... according to all outwardly visible evidence, appears to be a Neanderthal!

  Enter Mary Vaughan, a geneticist, who confirms to the astonished scientists that this man, who arrived so mysteriously, wearing strange clothes and an unidentifiable biotech implant in his arm, is indeed a Neanderthal—a species of hominid thought to have died out over 17,000 years ago.

  With the help of the biotech device, a type of highly personal computer, communication is established, and we're introduced to Ponter Bonditt, Neanderthal and theoretical quantum physicist. This is not a man who has ever lived in a cave or relied upon stone axes to get along. It's eventually decided that Ponter could only have come from a parallel dimension in which homo neanderthalis survived rather than homo sapiens, and created a peaceful, technologically advanced civilization.

  Immediately, media and governments around the world express great interest in Ponter. What could easily turn into a feeding frenzy of network personalities and “men in black” scenarios is quashed, thankfully, as the Canadian neutrino lab where Ponter was discovered takes responsibility, and the scientists work to shelter and protect their Neanderthal guest. This also provides them with the enviable opportunity of learning more about Ponter, his world, and how he got here.

  Running parallel to Ponter's story are a series of events occurring in the Neanderthal dimension. Deep within an abandoned underground nickel mine located in the exact same location on Earth as the Sudbury site, Ponter's research and life-partner Adikor Huld cannot explain why their experiment in quantum computing resulted in Ponter's mysterious disappearance and his replacement by a small flood of heavy water. Before he can get very far into his investigation, Adikor finds himself under investigation and brought to trial for murder—Ponter Bonditt's murder.