The other type of location featured in The Skylark, and the dominating motif of A Dark Matter, is the meeting place. While the lair is a site of unremitting violence and evil, the meeting place is where quasi-magus Spender Mallon and his acolytes encounter new dimensions of experience beyond anyone’s ability to categorize. They are part of, as Underhill says of his near-death experience, “a realm where darkness and light inhabited the same dazzling space” (Night Room 15).
Straub’s earlier works do present moments of pure transcendence, including the psychic union that defeats the supernatural villain in Floating Dragon, Tom Flanagan’s literally magical act of self-acceptance and transformation in Shadowland, and moments I have referred to as “the everyday sublime” in Koko and elsewhere. Often, such moments are linked to music, especially in Mr. X and The Throat. However, these moments are either tied to a kind of supernaturalism that seems unrelated to the reader’s world (generally in the earlier works, though also in Mr. X) or, if they are glimpsed in and through our ordinary world, they are fleeting and highly subjective.
In A Dark Matter, our world repeatedly rips open or gives way to allow contact with another kind of reality; these moments are presented as transpersonal but seem more compatible with the real world. The secret space here, the meeting place, is characterized by an encounter with transcendence. During the rehearsal of a magical ritual, Hootie perceives something “small, white, and agonized, not a scarf” fly by:
Around it ... the landscape had bulged.... the tormented white scarflike thing had been in flight from whatever had caused the world to ripple and bulge.... The wretched thing had flown through, it had escaped into this world. (85)
During the ritual itself, each person perceives something different, but each is changed permanently by the encounter; one is killed and one disappears into the seams between worlds.
The central image in The Skylark (and A Dark Matter) is an ecstatic flight by the Eel’s soul, freed from her body by the ritual. In a series of nested boxes, she experiences moments in the lives of everyone else in the ritual, including their perceptions of creatures described by Cornelius Agrippa, madly rioting figures that are indifferent or hostile (358–61). Then, inside Keith Hayward’s soul, she encounters a demon (363–76) and boards a bus that leads to a stairway, which she climbs to an ultimate experience (380–86):
Assailed by both love and terror, an unbearable combination, the seventeen-year-old Eel, who had been weeping uncontrollably, cradled her head on her forearms, urinated into her blue jeans, and wept some more.... To the extent that she could think at all, she thought, So the Great Mystery and the Final Secret is that we cannot tolerate the Great Mystery and Final Secret. (386)
While others in the ritual experience a surfeit of meaning—especially Hootie and the Eel—the title of A Dark Matter comes from a haunting encounter by Jason Boatman, in which he steals a boat on the shores of Lake Michigan and then endures a world gradually stripped of all reality (288–309), another kind of meeting place.
In The Skylark and its two daughter works, the transformation of the cave or grave into the lair is easier to understand. It is in part a move back to horror, unmitigated by the theme of recovery that works through the Blue Rose stories; it presents an examination of extreme violence and violation from the point of view of the eager perpetrator instead of the victim who may heal from the trauma or may grow up to pass it on. Yet, paradoxically, that focus on the perpetrator stretches Straub’s themes of acceptance and sympathy if, like the Eel, we readers can endure the unendurable and embrace the intolerable.
It is harder to understand the movement from the cave or grave, or even the labyrinth, to the meeting place and its transhuman reality. Certainly, as Straub stated in an interview with Locus in 1994, “At moments of terrible terror and extremity, one can experience a sort of clarity” (4). However, The Skylark shows that Straub reconsidered an earlier statement in that interview, that a novelist “cannot write about transcendence” and must sneak up on it slantwise through such extremity and through the experience of “healing” that comes “later” (4). In 2009, talking to Cemetery Dance magazine, Straub stated that rather than an “escape,” horror is “more about engagement.... it’s about discovering one’s ability to feel in certain ways, and deepening and widening one’s emotional experience by that means” (Clasen 40). Though The Skylark definitely provides a full supper of horrors, the trope of the meeting place shows that the deepening and widening of emotions need not depend on horror, although they never can be fully separated, either.
The meeting places in both In the Night Room and A Dark Matter are guarded by ambiguous beings who may intend to keep people away, or to urge them forward, or just to observe any result. In the Night Room depicts a terrifying, serene angel that is first sighted by Tim Underhill on a Manhattan street (52–53) and that later allows Tim and Willy to enter Kalendar’s house, or perhaps even ushers them in (315). Willy tells Tim that Kalendar’s spirit is “afraid of” the angel (317); indeed, Kalendar says of the angel outside, “And tell that blasted thing out there to leave me alone” (322). Mallon and his followers encounter what Mallon calls “dogs,” humanoid figures so frightening that seeing one causes Hootie to stumble in “terror” (Dark Matter 62–63). During the ritual, another follower, named Don, sees one of these figures looking at him with “pity and contempt” (124).
Perhaps a necessary part of the meeting place, these austere and frightening guardians resonate in many ways. Immortal, transhuman beings naturally remind us of our limitations. Evil is a threat to us in one way, by calling us down to what we can be but resist being, and ultimate good—what Charles Williams calls “terrible good”—is a threat in another, calling us up to what we want to be but can never reach. The guardians also clearly represent the ineffable nature of the experience. As the Eel realizes after an evanescent moment of ultimate meaning in A Dark Matter, “you did what you could with the little bit you managed to keep” (380). From yet another perspective, in Straub’s fiction all transcendence comes in and through the imagination, and the guardians represent the fact that imagination is both boon and bane. In any event, the proper incarnation of the imagination by the process of art, Straub reminds us, is always hard work.
Examination of this one trope, then, leads us through many themes in Straub’s work, provides some implications regarding period and transitions in his career thus far, and leaves us with interesting questions regarding where his fiction will go next. The split publication of A Dark Matter and A Special Place may suggest that Straub’s writing has finally broken boundaries between supernatural and mimetic fiction, in a single work, in a way that his emphasis on subjective perception and his love of metafiction allow artistically, but may be too challenging for commercial labels. Or not. What will happen next to Straub’s use of the trope of the secret place is, perhaps even to Straub, still a secret.
Bernadette Lynn Bosky lives in her own hidden space in Yonkers, New York.
Works Cited
Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. June 1, 2008.
Clasen, Mathias. “A Conversation with Peter Straub.” Cemetery Dance #61, 2009.
King, Stephen and Peter Straub. Black House: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2001.
“Peter Straub: The Path of Extremity.” Locus v. 32, n. 1, January 1994.
Straub, Peter, Michael Easton, and Jon Bolton. The Green Woman. New York: DC Comics/Vertigo, 2010.
Straub, Peter. A Dark Matter: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
——. “The Ghost Village.” Magic Terror: 7 Tales. New York: Random House, 2000.
——. In the Night Room. New York: Random House, 2004.
——. “The Juniper Tree.” Houses Without Doors. New York: Dutton, 1990.
——. Koko. New York: Dutton, 1988.
——. lost boy, lost girl. New York: Random House, 2003.
——. The Skylark: A
Novel. Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2010.
——. A Special Place: The Heart of A Dark Matter. Baltimore, Maryland: Borderlands Press, 2009.
——. The Throat. New York: Dutton, 1993.
Bravo by Greg Rucka
reviewed by Alec Austin
New York: Mulholland Books, 2014; $26.00 hc; 291 pages
It’s San Diego Comic Con in 2001, and Greg Rucka has all but accused me of buying the ARC of Critical Space that I’m holding via eBay. Off-balance and fighting against my stutter, I manage to explain that I got it from my godmother, who’s an assistant manager at Cody’s Books, and mumble something about admiring his novels and his comics work. Rucka’s anger subsides, and his gracious inscription includes the phrase, “This is a dark ride.”
It’s true. It’s dark as hell. I loved it.
The twin hallmarks of Greg Rucka’s work are an uncompromising, well-grounded depiction of violence and its consequences, and a deep compassion that can flare into rage. This is particularly evident in his novels, from the loathing of corporations lying about their products’ health risks that permeates Smoker to his brutal depiction of human trafficking in Walking Dead. Nobody writes about gunplay and tactics as well as Rucka. Of those who come close, very few have politics that could be described as humane while Rucka’s villains are tobacco companies, antiabortion terrorists, and plutocrats setting up false-flag attacks on American soil.
Bravo, direct sequel to Alpha (2012), is not science fiction. While Alpha takes place in an imaginary equivalent of Disneyland, its alternate history stops there. Both Alpha and Bravo are firmly embedded in the genre discourse of the thriller rather than sf. This is not to say that thrillers do not blur into sf and vice-versa—Harris’s Fatherland, Stephenson’s Zodiac, and nearly anything by Michael Crichton immediately spring to mind—but Alpha and Bravo essentially have no speculative elements even when compared to works like Greg Bear’s Quantico or Tobias Buckell’s Hurricane Fever.
What Alpha and Bravo have in common with sf are rigorous attention to detail, their use of exposition, and shifts between realism and hyper-realism. These commonalities are sufficient for their successes (and failures) to be understood using the critical lenses that we use for sf.
Alpha’s plot is a variation on Die Hard: a group of terrorists infiltrate a major American theme park (Wilsonville, a transparent stand-in for Disneyland), and a rock-jawed hero must stop them while also saving his family, who are being held hostage. But Rucka’s execution takes this formula and turns it inside out. Master Sergeant Jad Bell, Alpha’s protagonist, isn’t John McClane, able to take down a building full of terrorists single-handedly—while he leads a team of special forces operators, he (and they) are distinctly mortal. Jad’s daughter, Athena, is deaf but far from passive; both her handicap and her ability to read lips and body language are handled deftly and have an impact on the action. And instead of being a greed-driven caricature, the primary antagonist in Alpha, Gabriel Fuller, is depicted in a sympathetic light, especially once his girlfriend is taken hostage alongside Jad’s daughter and ex-wife. Rucka’s strengths are employed to their fullest in Alpha, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Other readers and critics have praised Bravo for not reprising Alpha’s narrative. Opening days after the events of Alpha, it traces the consequences of the failed terrorist attack as Jad and his team storm a villa in Uzbekistan to capture Vosil Tohir, the Uzbek middleman who set up the events of Alpha on behalf of a shadowy mastermind known only as the Architect. In capturing Tohir, they also capture Chief Warrant Officer Petra Nessuno, a deep cover operative spying on Tohir for another group in Special Operations Command.
Bravo extends Alpha’s themes of duplicity and dual identities beyond Nessuno to include Brock, the general in charge of her section of SOCOM—who helped orchestrate the plot against Wilsonville—and Jordan Webber-Hayden, the agent of the Architect with whom Brock is sexually involved (and who is obsessed with the man who groomed her to be his instrument). This plotline is less successful than Gabriel Fuller’s in Alpha because the folie à deux between Jordan and the Architect is problematic on several levels; a major plot point involving Jordan holding people hostage to ensure Tohir’s death doesn’t really work as written, given what all special operators would know about hostage situations.
As a thriller, Bravo keeps the reader’s attention from the first page to the last without flagging. Its well-choreographed action sequences are as brutal as those in Alpha, and the sequences involving Athena are just as solidly handled. But its problems are threefold. First, Bravo’s POV proliferation (there are six nonthrowaway POVs, compared to four in Alpha) is symptomatic of the book’s wavering focus. What begins as a race to uncover the identity of the Architect before he silences Tohir turns into a race to prevent a devastating second terrorist strike, which turns into the Architect bartering away the details of the terrorist strike and the identity of his financial backers in exchange for Jordan’s life and freedom. (His freedom, in turn, is ensured by the CIA, who intend to turn him and his network to their own ends.)
In the heat of reading, this all works fairly well, but once I was finished, I had the queasy feeling that the book I’d been promised and the book I’d just read were not the same book. Bravo is a book full of trailing threads; of motivations that are not quite grounded enough and shadowy masterminds taking on their opponents personally instead of through catspaws. The parallels between Nessuno and Jordan never quite cohere into anything more than what they are on the surface, and unlike the end of Alpha, it’s not at all clear what comes next.
There is also a shift in Bravo’s level of realism that occurs roughly halfway through the book, once Jordan and the Architect begin to take action personally, a shift that parallels the shift from the first half of Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises to the second. In the first half of Rises, the Gotham City Police Department uses cover, tactics, and muzzle discipline when engaging Bane’s minions. By the concluding brawl, they rush down the street as a screaming mob, all thought of tactical advantage eradicated in favor of naked catharsis.
While Bravo never descends to that level—Rucka knows better than that—the escalation that comes as the Architect becomes personally involved in saving Jordan pushes the book further and further from the grounded experience of Alpha where commanders and masterminds stayed far away from the killing. The second half of Bravo reads like the sequel to a book where Tohir’s impossible promise of a helicopter coming to save Gabriel from Wilsonville at the end of Alpha turned out to be true.
This probably reads as a harsher condemnation of Bravo than it’s meant to be. The trouble with Bravo is that Alpha was so brilliantly executed that anything short of its sequel firing on all cylinders—plot, characterization, action, realism—was going to come off as a disappointment. Bravo is a more ambitious book than Alpha in several regards; the depiction of Nessuno struggling with the aftermath of her infiltration is gripping, and Rucka never stoops to fridging* Jad’s relatives to motivate him (Hurricane Fever, I’m looking at you). While Alpha hits the mark, Bravo doesn’t, and close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Alec Austin lives in Los Angeles.
[*“Fridging” refers to the “Women in Refrigerators” story cliché identified by Gail Simone in 1999. It refers broadly to killing characters purely as a motivation for the (action) hero to have an excuse to unleash violence on the perpetrators. The eponym is a 1994 Green Lantern comic where the hero’s girlfriend, introduced only a few issues earlier, is found murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. It’s a term of, unfortunately, wide applicability across a range of genres.—the eds.]
The Madonna and the Starship by James Morrow
reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer
San Francisco: Tachyon Press, 2014; $14.95 tpb; 180 pages
Morrow’s latest comedy is by his standards rather lightweight, closer to Shambling Towards Hiroshima than The Last Witchfinder, but it is still, a
s is to be expected, a work of wit and substance, quite entertaining of itself and intriguing for the possible shifts (or further developments) it shows in Morrow’s attitudes toward religion. He is, after all, the author who once described the earthly life and martyrdom of Jesus Christ’s kid sister Julie (in Only Begotten Daughter, 1990) and then put God himself on trial for crimes against humanity (Blameless in Abaddon, 1996). You might say Morrow has made a career out of blasphemy. He has been called America’s Salman Rushdie.
But he is not so simple a writer as that. Like any good satirist, he knows that the next step is to turn his previous premise on its head.
The Madonna and the Starship is set in New York in 1953. We meet young Kurt Jastrow, TV writer and occasional actor, who is responsible for a Captain Video–type kiddie space opera. He is, on the side, a science fiction writer of some note, who writes for Andromeda (very transparently Galaxy) edited by the agoraphobic but brilliant Saul Silver (Horace Gold). Names are dropped, thinly disguised. Two writers who help Jastrow save the world at the end are obviously Philip Klass (William Tenn) and Theodore Sturgeon. All the other sf magazines mentioned are real ones. (So, was there really a nymphomaniac receptionist at Planet Stories?) Our hero has not exactly achieved literary respectability, but he’s doing well enough until he suddenly receives a message that he is to be awarded the Zorningorg Prize by two giant blue lobsters from the planet Qualimosa in the Procyon system. It seems that his TV persona, Uncle Wonder (who performs a science experiment at the end of every episode of Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers), has been taken by the aliens as an apostle of rationality and scientific learning. The Qualimosans regard themselves as Logical Positivists. They have no use for anything that cannot be verified: no mysticism, no religion, no superstition. But, disturbingly, when asked about ethics, they reply, “What are ethics?”
Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 313 - 2014-09 Page 4