"Hi there, Frank,” Dottie said, grabbing a handhold and supporting Warren by a bunched ruff behind his neck. “I know it's a terrible night, but I persuaded Warren that we might feel fresher if we took a walk.” Frank nodded. His mouth was dry. “Maybe you could help me with him?” she added, shoving Warren into Frank's half-surprised embrace.
"There you go, fella,” Frank heard himself mutter as he propped the withered creature against the bulkhead. “Why don't we take this off...?” Quickly, he removed Warren's black top, which slipped worn and warm and slightly greasy between his fingers, although it was the feel and sight of Warren beneath that really set his teeth on edge. The dead man muttered something and looked back toward Dottie with his usual puppy-dog longing, but made no discernable attempt to resist.
"Maybe this as well...."
The toupee felt even warmer and greasier.
"And this...."
Here came the sunglasses, hooked off what passed for ears and a nose. Frank had to judge every movement against the rising, falling waves. But, Jesus, the man was a mess.
"Looking a bit cold now, Mister Hastings...."
Frank shucked off his own blazer.
"So why don't we put on this?"
A few more maneuvers and Warren was wearing Frank's crew blazer. Frank almost forgot the crew dogtag until Dottie reminded him in a quick whisper. Even then, Warren in this new attire looked like nothing more than a particularly bald and anemic scarecrow, and Frank was wondering how this switch would ever convince anyone until he swung the weighed hatch open and was confronted by the sheer size and scale of the storm.
The deck was awash. Dottie hung back. Salt spray ignited the air. It was a miracle, really, that she'd been able to do as much as she had to help when you considered the deal this dead husk had forced on her. Now all she had to do was keep hold of his nylon top, toupee, and sunglasses. The sky shattered in grays and purples. For all his slips and struggles as he maneuvered Warren Hastings toward the Glorious Nomad's stern, Frank Onions felt like he was Odysseus sailing from Circe's island, or Jason with his Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. Soon, he would reach those warmly welcoming shores that Dottie had been promising him.
A few last staggers and he was clinging to the final rail, and still just about keeping hold of Warren, although they were both equally drenched and it was hard to distinguish between sea and sky out here. Then he felt the steel cliff-face of the Glorious Nomad's stern rising and straining until her screws were swirling above the waves, and it seemed for a long moment that the whole ship would simply carry on climbing until the ocean dragged her down. Frank skidded and nearly fell as he grabbed Warren's arms and tried to haul him over the rail.
"Stop squirming, you bastard!” Frank screamed into the wind even though Warren wasn't squirming at all. As the ship teetered and began to fall back, he tried to lift him again, and this time got some better kind of purchase. This, Frank thought, as he and Warren swayed like dancers over the stern's drop, was far closer to a dead man than he'd ever wanted to get, but for all the wet, gray skin, cavernous cheeks and birdcage chest, there was something about Warren Hastings in this stuttering light that didn't seem entirely dead. Something in the eyes, perhaps, now that they were stripped of their goggle sunglasses, or in the set of that mouth now that the powder and rouge had run. The guy had to have worked out what was happening, but there was still no sign of any resistance, nor any sense of fear. If anything, Frank thought as he finally managed to hook one hand under Warren's wet and empty armpit and the other under his even emptier crotch and gave the final quick heave that tipped him over the rail, that last look conveyed something like relief—perhaps even a sense of pity....
"Did it work? Are you okay?"
Already, Dottie had managed to clamber up the deck. Already, the curse of her imprinting was broken, and her arms were quickly around him. Roughly and wetly, they kissed.
"I love you, Frank,” she said, and her arms were strong and the ship's searchlights and alarms were blazing as she drew him behind a lifeboat into the lee of the storm and took out something silver from her sou'wester pocket that squirmed and uncurled like a living jewel.
"I love you."
She said it again, and kissed him harder as he felt a sharpness crawl across his neck.
"I love you."
She held him tighter than ever as pain flared inside his ear.
"I love you."
She said it again and again and again and again.
* * * *
Where has he not been? What has he not seen? He's looked down on an Earth so small that he could blot it out with his thumb, he's skysailed to the peak of Mount Everest. If there was a price to pay for all this glory, Frank Onions would willingly have paid it. Most glorious of all to him, though, eclipsing every moonrise and sunset, is his continuing joy at sharing Dottie's company. The money—even the incredible things that it can buy; the glass terraces, the submarine gardens, the refurbished Burmese palaces—is just the river, the coin, the obolus. To be with her, and to share his flesh and blood with her, is an experience that pales even the furthest heights of sexual ecstasy.
Days change. The living die and the dead live, but Frank's love for Dottie is unchanging. He has, once or twice, much as one might gaze in awe at bare footprints left across an ancient floor, looked back along the path that brought them together. He knows now that the real Warren Hastings married his beautiful sixth wife just a few months before he died, or perhaps simply disappeared, in circumstances that other times and cultures might have regarded as mysterious. Since then, and as before, Dottie has remained just as stunningly, agelessly beautiful. And she always has a companion whom she likes to term her husband. Sometimes, when the circumstances suit, she even calls him Warren. Frank has no need to ask Dottie why she chose death above life. He already understands perfectly. After all, why would anyone who had the money and the choice wait for old age and decrepitude before being resurrected? And what sacrifices and demands wouldn't they then make, to ensure that they remained eternally beautiful?
Dottie is Frank's world, his lodestone. He lives with and within her, and would sacrifice any organ or appendage or bodily fluid joyously. As for himself, he knows that he's no longer the well-kept specimen of a man who was first enraptured by her. Only last week on the glassy plains outside Paris, he gave up a good portion of his bone marrow to her, and a third regrown kidney. The effects of these and other donations, along with all the immunosuppressants he must continually take, leave him thin and weak and dizzy. His hair has long gone, he must wear sunglasses to protect his bleary eyes, and he shuffles hunched and crabways. He realizes that he's already starting to look like the creature he tossed over the stern of the Glorious Nomad, and that the wonders of the life he's now living cannot last forever.
In the circles in which they move, far removed from the Glorious Nomad's ruin-inspecting tribes of meekly departed middle executives, Frank and Dottie's relationship is seen as nothing unusual. As she once said to him in what now seems like a different existence, who knows or cares about what is legal nowadays? Sometimes, when the weakened husks like himself who accompany Dottie and her companions grow close to failing, they head off to live some lesser life for a few weeks, and enjoy the thrill of finding a fresh and willing replacement. They call it recrossing the Styx. It's a new kind of symbiosis, this imprinting, and it strikes Frank as a near-perfect relationship. It's only when the pain and weakness in his thinning bones sometimes get the worst of him, and he gazes around at the golden creatures who surround him, that he wonders who is really dead now, and who is living.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: BOOKS TO LOOK FOR by Charles de Lint
Buddha's Thunderbolt, by Jacob Asher Michael, A.V. Fistula Multimedia, 2009, $15.98.
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One of the best things about writing a column like this are the surprise books that can show up in your post office box. Books such as Buddha's Thunderbolt. Never he
ard of the author before. The cover isn't particularly appealing. But it's one of the most original and entertaining reads I've had in some time.
Its delightful conceit immediately piqued my interest: What if Merlin were actually a Buddhist monk prone to hallucinations, who was taken as a slave by the Huns and transported to Europe?
This is the Merlin we meet, living in fifth-century Wales, possibly being judged by a gathering of the world's various gods—unless their questions, brought to him by a shapeshifting Lady Gopi in various animal forms, are only a hallucination. In fact, that's one of the intriguing elements of the book. How much of what Merlin (who calls himself Merthen) experiences and remembers is actually real?
Readers familiar with Arthurian Matter will no doubt enjoy seeing all the familiar elements of the legend appear in entirely new forms, recognizable but meaning something completely different in their current context. We also get to travel through a fair amount of history, ranging from the Far East through Asia to Europe, and see it all in another light as well.
It's not a perfect book. It could have used a little more editing, just to tighten up the novel's occasional episodic feel, but that's a minor flaw and seems almost picayune considering how fresh and well written the book is on the whole.
You probably won't find Buddha's Thunderbolt at your local bookstore, but point your browser to www.lulu.com and you can get yourself a copy.
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My Fair Godmother, by Janette Rallison, Walker, 2009, $16.99.
* * * *
Janette Rallison pulls off a very cool thing at the beginning of her latest novel. We meet and sympathize with Jane Delano, smart and pretty, but always overshadowed by her more glamorous (in high school terms) younger sister Savannah. The younger sister shines so bright that Jane is usually relegated to the sidelines. And then, to make matters worse, Savannah gets an older boyfriend who just happens to be a boy that Jane's been pining over, but was too shy to approach.
So far so good, and not a whole lot different from other YA novels set in high school.
But then Jane steals her sister's boyfriend (to be fair, they realize that they're meant for one another), and the point of view shifts. Now we're rooting for the unsympathetic younger sister. This is a tricky thing to pull off successfully but Rallison does it without any apparent effort.
With all of that said, this is a fantasy novel, not a 90210 retread, so enter Savannah's fairy godmother, Chrysanthemum Everstar. Well, actually, she's only a fair godmother because she hasn't been doing very well at fairy godmother school. She's like Savannah in many ways, more focused on boys and shopping and socializing than her studies. When she appears and offers Savannah her three wishes, she's too busy thinking of a sale at the mall to pay attention to what Savannah is saying.
The next thing Savannah knows, she has been sent back in time, taking the place of Cinderella. Not Cinderella at the ball, mind you, but the one stuck doing all the dirty work in her stepmother's home with a couple of nasty stepsisters there just to make things more unpleasant.
I won't tell you much more about the plot. Let me just say that Rallison skewers more than one fairy tale. But while this is a humorous book, Savannah's problems are real, as are the dangers she, and, eventually, her friends, must face. My Fair Godmother is a light-hearted romp that makes us laugh, but it also has some serious points to make and we genuinely come to care for all of the characters.
In the end it turns out that this is a wonderful coming-of-age story, with fairy tales on the side.
* * * *
Another Science Fiction, by Megan Prelinger, Blast Books, 2010. $29.95.
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I'm no expert in sf art. But while I don't know all the artists by name, I have a general knowledge that runs from the pulps through the wonderful pop art of the sixties and early seventies to the highly realistic cover art we see today.
That said, Another Science Fiction came as a complete surprise to me. Flipping through it, I didn't recognize any of the art. I didn't have any context for it, though I was reminded of the illustrations in Popular Mechanics magazines from the sixties, or some of those British New Wave titles.
Intrigued, I sat down to read the text and quickly understood the book's subtitle: “Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962."
What Megan Prelinger has collected here is space-oriented advertising art from the relevant time period. World War II was over, but we had the Cold War. The Russians had just put the first satellite Sputnik I into space. NASA was formed out of the smaller National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. The Space Race was on, cueing in a new push into space-related scientific and engineering research.
This new industry had its own trade journals, complete with advertising pertinent to it. And that's what fills Another Science Fiction's pages. The art has its roots in sf hardware, but it's filtered through the lens of advertising firms. And it's utterly fascinating.
If you have any interest in sf art—particularly as it relates to spacecraft and gadgetry—this book is a must-have. The closest touchstone I can offer up are the covers of jazz albums from the same time period, or those British New Wave books I mentioned earlier. It's mechanical and beatnik all at the same time.
A visual feast, yes, but also an informative one when it comes to Prelinger's text. I can't remember the last time I've run across an art book as interesting and innovative as this.
* * * *
Conan the Barbarian, by Robert E. Howard, Prion Books, 2009, $29.95.
* * * *
There are so many different editions of Robert E. Howard's books available to readers these days (particularly those in the Conan series) that you'd almost think the material has gone into public domain. I don't think it has, but it still begs the question about which edition to get.
The bottom line is the stories, of course. So long as they're the original, unabridged ones—in other words, stories that haven't been diluted by other authors making posthumous additions as was often done in the seventies and eighties—then you're good to go.
If you've never actually read this material, you might be wondering why you should read a bunch of stories that are around seventy-five years old and reprinted from the pulps. Let me put it in this context. You can read current high fantasy, but isn't it more interesting to have at least read Tolkien, considering how he basically invented it?
(An aside: I don't mean Tolkien invented fantasy writing; that's been around forever. I'm speaking more of the multi-volume quest fantasy, and even his responsibility for that was a bit of an accident. He wrote one really long book; his publishers split it up into three volumes, thus creating the fantasy trilogy.)
Having read The Lord of the Rings, you can then see how strong a shadow Tolkien has cast over the field.
Robert E. Howard is similar in that he created the genre known as sword and sorcery, or heroic fantasy. His world-building was as detailed as Tolkien's. The difference is that Howard's work is more down-to-earth. Tolkien's stories grew out of his interest in language, folktales, and mythology. Howard was also interested in folktales and mythology, but he spiced his stories up with swashbuckling adventure and Lovecraftian horror.
But more than anything, Howard was the consummate storyteller. What he might have lacked in authorial skills he more than made up for with the power of his storytelling. He wasn't a bad writer by any means; it's just that first and foremost, he seemed to be more interested in moving the plot forward.
There's a reason that the Conan stories are almost always in print in one version or another. Try any one in this collection and you'll know why. They're engaging, exciting, and they tap into that trope we all enjoy so much: the one man prevailing against the many.
So the real question when a book like this appears in the stores is whether a new edition is worth your money.
The answer to that depends on whether you're new to Howard and want to give him a try, or if you're a compulsive collector. The casual reader familiar with his work probab
ly has everything he or she needs. But if you've never tried Howard before, this is an excellent and comprehensive collection. And if you're a collector....
Well, I like the accompanying publicity flyer where the book's described as “both handsomely packaged and lightweight.” For a fat book, it does weigh less than much shorter books, which makes it easier to hold for long periods of reading. It has a coated cover, which probably makes it a little more durable.
But the cover and interior black and white illustrations are by John Ridgway, and he's no Roy Krenkel. To be honest, the illustrations remind me of art from the fanzines of the eighties, so I'd lift an eyebrow at the “handsomely packaged” part of the description.
Still, here's what's important: the book has all the original Conan stories collected together in one volume. Also included is Howard's “The Hyborean Age” essay which, if you're new to Howard, I'd come back to after I'd read a few stories. It's interesting, but a bit dry coming into it cold. Lastly, there's a short but good introductory essay by series editor Rod Green.
Bottom line? It's a good solid collection that would make an excellent reading copy or an introduction to Howard's work.
* * * *
Lost Worlds, by John Howe, Kingfisher, 2009, $22.99.
* * * *
Every few years it seems we get a new atlas and/or travelogue of imaginary lands. This time out the guide for our exploration of these otherworlds is fantasy artist John Howe.
Because he's an artist, it's no surprise that the book is art-heavy. There are two-page spreads and spot art everywhere, in different media: watercolor, pencil, and even photographs (where the imaginary land shares a history with places of antiquity such as Pompeii or Babylon).
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