The cardinal sin of genre fiction, surely, must be to be simultaneously frivolous AND boring. This is fairly frivolous high fantasy nonsense (I don't The cardinal sin of genre fiction, surely, must be to be simultaneously frivolous AND boring. This is fairly frivolous high fantasy nonsense (I don't know where Goodreads got its blurb, but describing Elric as a "Goth Superman" is hilarious...and not totally off the mark), BUT it's never boring. Moorcock is as brisk and imaginative as ever, and even hints at minor non-frivolities like the fate of fading empire and the layered nature of reality. He wrote so many novels (this was one of at least 20 between 1970 and 75) that surely none could have commanded too much individual attention, but he's never just filling pages like some of his contemporaries. The prose is crisp and bright throughout, and the images memorable. Curious, also, how this may intertwine with the bits of Moorcock's Eternal Champion meta-narrative strung throughout concurrent work like The Knight of Swords and The Final Programme....more
I've never been particularly a Stephen King fan despite his being extremely local to me. I grew up one town over from the tiny rural tract in Maine whI've never been particularly a Stephen King fan despite his being extremely local to me. I grew up one town over from the tiny rural tract in Maine where he attended elementary school (Durham, where my great great grandmother's brother started a cult and eventually mismanaged his flock into a manslaughter charge) and two towns over from where he graduated from High School (Lisbon Falls...where Maine's first mass shooter's body was finally found two days ago...). I've hiked along the river referenced to locate Salem's Lot, and looked for minerals along the railroad tracks that supposedly inspired Stand by Me. Several favorite films are adapted from his work. But the couple of his novels I actually read in the 90s left me a little underwhelmed, and I haven't really sought them out.
But I've always heard this early collection of stories praised and last October when I was seeking something blatantly seasonal to read on the subway in costume en route to a Halloween party, I turned this up, in marvelous demon-eye-hand mass market edition, and it seemed about right. This year, I've finished the last few stories, and I'm pleasantly surprised with the whole. There's a powerful mundanity here -- King's characters are working guys just trying to get through another mill shift under an uncaring boss or to stave off the anxiety of facing a high school class. They're economically but crisply characterized, and he doesn't waste a lot of words getting them into nightmarish scenarios. When he's trying to be especially weird or surprising, something in the imagination falls a little flat, and many stories turn out to be about what you expect (and fear), but some work precisely because they unabashedly, unrestrainedly chase out their premises to the end (The Children of the Corn!), and sometimes the most believably ordinary end up having the most power (The Bogeyman, chilling as a veiled story of domestic violence). There's a Lovecraft homage, a demonic laundry wringer, killer cars, believable familial despairs. None really outstay their welcome. There's probably a reason so many of these became source material for entire films. Maybe I'm due to go poking around for cursed ruins in the woods off near the Royal River again....more
For what seemed like it was going to be typical space adventure stuff about treasure hunters firing off to hazardous ends of the universe in discovereFor what seemed like it was going to be typical space adventure stuff about treasure hunters firing off to hazardous ends of the universe in discovered craft from a vanished civilization, this goes deep into the deathly alienness of space (minor Roadside Picnic shadings), notably rampant dystopian hypercapitalism, supporting collage-narrative though ephemera, and one of those terrible relationships that somehow managed to make me care and feel for the characters against all odds. The space adventure bits are actually more framing to the psychoanalytics of guilt, remorse, and denial, and even if those weren't handled all that gracefully AND they're all mediated by an obvious asshole, I still was weirdly caught up and wanted things to turn out much better for at least one of them....more
All these Kosinskis are a bit amoral, but this one really leans into that discomfort to least meaningful ends. It's also seemingly most autobiographicAll these Kosinskis are a bit amoral, but this one really leans into that discomfort to least meaningful ends. It's also seemingly most autobiographical and most a narrative grab-bag, like someone telling you anecdotes from their life at a party, half of which are clearly made up, and many others that you hope are. Vexing then, a little self-involved, uncomfortable, dipping into fantasies of eros and power and retribution, but for all of that nothing if not consistently compelling. Literate, literary trash of a sort. And one of the better possible placements of a "Foxy Lady" novelty t-shirt. To be clear, his games with the space between autobiography and novel are an asset; he's neither simply novelizing his life, nor passing off grotesqueries as personal experience to trick anyone. Where Kosinki succeeds it is in assessing his times through a lens simultaneously personal and nightmarish. The amorality of his avatars is situated within the larger traumas and travesties of a very messed up 20th century, as they must be. But he has done all of this rather more purposefully elsewhere.
I suppose plastering Kosinski's face on both the front and back covers of this particular edition of his novels makes sense given his toying with autobiography, though did his face really sell mass-market paperbacks? Yet these were bestsellers in their time.
A higher two stars, I can't really give it three but it's notable in some way....more
Don't be fooled by the tendency of Goodreads to jam everything into series strict chronologies, this was actually Octavia Butler's first novel set in Don't be fooled by the tendency of Goodreads to jam everything into series strict chronologies, this was actually Octavia Butler's first novel set in this distant-future Earth, and actually her first published novel of any kind. As such, it's very much a sci-fi adventure, dealing with telepaths warring for power in a feudal, post-collapse society. Where she distinguishes herself is in the strength of the characters, particularly fiercely independent healer Amber. And in the world-shading that reveal underlying concerns not fully addressed here. Remaining independent is a challenge in a society structured around a telepathic gentry who own their non-telepathic ("mute") servants and peasants, and much of the novel is concerned with the abuses of power that come with the mindset of such a tiered cast system. Her very next novel, Kindred, would take this on much more directly by looking not at our future, but at America's recent past. Here though, these are more world details than overt subject, leading to an especial dissonance when we realize that the mutated "clayarks" which attack anyone not under some lord's protection, are not monsters, but also people, just people viewed as completely sub-human and expendable by everyone else in the novel, hero or villain alike, the clear danger of living in a society where moral questions seem to have been swept aside by the exigencies of power and survival....more
I associate Joy Williams partly with her ear for idiosyncratic dialogue, but that kicked into full gear a little later. Here, in her 1973 first novel,I associate Joy Williams partly with her ear for idiosyncratic dialogue, but that kicked into full gear a little later. Here, in her 1973 first novel, the story accrues not so much through the interactions of its characters as through a slow sedimentation of details: bits of setting and scenery, vivid sensoria, snatches of overheard words, fragmentary memories impinging on the present moment. In fact Williams spends so much of the story's length circling back through time to piece together how her protagonist got here that it scarcely moves forward at all. Which is somewhat fitting, as Kate is at a point of stasis, waiting out a pregnancy that doesn't seem to have been intended, slipping in and out of college classes she barely attends anymore, adrift on the heavy heat of Florida's panhandle Gulf Coast, disconnected from her past and her future and her own life.
This inertia, this lack of present might have run against my preference for immediacy if the whole story didn't feel not so much retrospective as instantaneous and simultaneous. All details are weighed down by the others that connect them in an inescapable web. Each moment contains every moment. And all that may be occurs, when it does, in a flash of devastation from which nothing may be altered or escapes.
State of Grace is a pervasive stifling mood in which nothing and everything transpires, and the most critical events slide off the page and disappear. Borderline southern gothic, borderline horror, but instead of genre something disconcerting and nebulous of its own....more
A woman receives notice that her father hasn't been seen for some time and journeys with three friends back to the house she grew up, a cabin secludedA woman receives notice that her father hasn't been seen for some time and journeys with three friends back to the house she grew up, a cabin secluded away from any road or neighbors on the back side of nowhere, up a long lake in the Canadian wilderness. Left without clear leads on what happened or what they should be looking for, inter- and intra-personal faultlines begin to appear. As concrete natural detail of place and action are supplanted by untidy interior monologues caught in a period of rapid change. The protagonists are avatars 0f shifting times, protests movements and gender politics, and Atwood deploys her mysterious plot hooks to tease out the doubts and contradictions of the moment. In the jaded post-68 period, political action has given way to posturing (one of the visitors constantly denounces the colonialist/imperialist Americans without any awareness that as a white urban Canadian he is equally the interloper in these forests), and the sexual revolution was proving only to increase the freedom of those already most free. Bleak and uncanny, but in ways that careful target conflicted reality rather than the genre tropes glancingly referenced. Atwood traces a constellation of imperial-patriarchal-antienvironmental forces two years before the formation of Ecofeminism, and with an ambiguous internally-compromised complexity that belies some of the categorical simplicity that that movement would pick up later. (Bearing out some of those themes, my 1972 paperback edition is covered by male reviewers applauding it as an excellent novel for a woman, comparing it to Plath (the only other woman writer they could think of?), etc.) but of course, Atwood's just a great writer period. This was her second novel, published the same year as her broad study of Canadian literature Survival, and already she was at the forefront....more
Just sixteen years after the apocalyptic WWII phantasmagoria of his debut The Painted Bird, where all humanity seems to teeter on its bleakest impulseJust sixteen years after the apocalyptic WWII phantasmagoria of his debut The Painted Bird, where all humanity seems to teeter on its bleakest impulses, Jerzy Kosinski, perhaps tempered by time and success in America, produced Passion Play, an episodic saga of an itinerant solo polo player and his conquests on and off the polo field. My copy is the mass market paperback edition, and it looks like complete trash.
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Protagonist Fabian roams America in his VanHome (never a "mobile home", is there a difference?), engages in one-on-one polo duels, drifts between echelons of society he's never at home in, and scours the pages of riding magazines for profiles on very young women to target for seduction. He's a predator, but also the archetypal lonely romantic hero, and the two strike a very uneasy relationship. All Kozinski's novels (I suspect, I've only read three) chart courses across landscapes of moral uncertainty (the bizarre essay stuck at the end, seemingly to justify and contextualize the novel in Kosinski's life, describes them as "morally challenging"), but this is less starkly nightmarish than The Painted Bird, without the deliberately honed ambiguity of the compromised narrators in Steps. Instead, it borders pure male gaze erotica. Yet he's also at pains to situate all of this within an Amercian landscape explicitly marred by slavery and genocide. The holocaust echoes through a scene where ranchers massacre a vast herd of wild horses just to reduce competition for resources with their own cattle. The world of show horses with perfect gaits is a product of terrible cruelties towards the animals they vaunt. Beneath the main narrative threads, everything is wrong, but recognizing this can't fix those threads. Part of Kosinski's game is to let readers assume that the protagonist is purely autobiographical, to invest this proxy with parts of his being and thoughts, but then to force the reader to question these identifications. But how much is a provocation and how much is a defense?
In all of this, though, Kosinski startled me with one part of his treatment of gender. There's a transwoman character, never misgendered, and if she's an underdeveloped object of male gaze, it's exactly the same male gaze as that to which every other women in the novel is subjected. When a cis-het businessman wonders if his attraction for a transgender woman means he's homosexual, the protagonist sanguinely remarks that gender lacked even a clear legal definition, so why should it possibly make a difference personally? It's not the most nuanced treatment, but it's surprising for 1979...and as Kosinski shows considerably less confusion about gender identity than that awful Ricky Gervais Netflix show bit decades later, now seems like a great time to change my avatar after 15 years on here. Farewell androgynous new wave Ricky Gervais. Have, instead, some ruins shaped like an owl.
I think this tends not to be a favorite Moorcock series, and it's not hard to see why, since it forgoes adventure narrative for a sort of weird ethnogI think this tends not to be a favorite Moorcock series, and it's not hard to see why, since it forgoes adventure narrative for a sort of weird ethnographic comedy of manners about the expiring cultural scene at the end of Earth (and perhaps the Universe), when humanity has accomplished nearly all it set out to and become bored with it, left immortal and all-controlling to invent new affectations in order to pass the time. The pacing is weird, the story gaining focus mostly in odd character interactions (mainly catalyzed by the appearance of a time traveler from 19th century England), and that works just fine for me, since sometimes Moorcock's "exciting" plot mechanics can become a little rote. I'd hazard that this is roughly Moorcock as satirist, but it's mostly of a dry earnest satire where the major arc remains more important (yet soundly absurd) than the incidentals it explores. Blatantly conceived of as a trilogy, this all feels like possibly little more than set up, but it's hard to feel any real urgency about getting to it anyway....more
A minor-key telepathy novel that really only concerns itself with its most human elements -- an attempt to come to terms with the inevitability of decA minor-key telepathy novel that really only concerns itself with its most human elements -- an attempt to come to terms with the inevitability of decline and death, an attempt to come to terms with having outlived one's early promise and discovered one's own mediocrity. The novel elegantly shifts forwards and back to patch in a never boring life-portrait, steeped in loss, isolation, and sadness, his "gift" never able to make him happy in the least. It's very of its time in places (the character's unthinking sexisms and racisms) but a unique and memorable story told with erudition and poetry....more
Youth, love, and loss in late-60s Japan, gaining all its magic from cinematic intercuts, non-diegetic images, and shifts in style to capture emotionalYouth, love, and loss in late-60s Japan, gaining all its magic from cinematic intercuts, non-diegetic images, and shifts in style to capture emotional nuance. As anyone else observes, more in line with contemporary film work from the Art Theater Guild (Matsumoto, Terayama, et al) than with other manga of the era, besides perhaps the other works with which this shared the pages of Garo, the classic alt manga....more
Years ago, a coalition of anarchists broke off to form their own nation on the moon, built on the principles of ultimate individual freedom and mutualYears ago, a coalition of anarchists broke off to form their own nation on the moon, built on the principles of ultimate individual freedom and mutual aid as sustaining necessity. 160 years later, the colony survives, functions. Now, a physicist -- anarchist true believer but trapped by the walls of parochialism, power, and fear that creep into all human society -- travels back to the world from which they came, but at what cost?
This is LeGuin's most lucid and developed novel of socio-political philosophy. Her ideas are clear, but never unsubtle or thoughtless. What at first seems like a simple allegory of east and west in the cold war breaks up under increasingly fine-grained analysis: our anarchist nation is truly that, while its opposing world contains both capitalist and socialist societies, both equally constrained by rigid systems of government and property, both archisms. Instead, I'm reminded of the Situationist view that Communism, in upholding the same old systems of ownership, was simply State Capitalism. Here, then, LeGuin explores what is rarely taken seriously: the theoretical alternative proposed in the protests of May 1968 or various Year 01 scenarios (it is not accidental that '68, the year 168 that is, is a significant year here too), a legitimate bid for a de-centralized, propertyless society. LeGuin is not naive enough to suggest that such a thing is easy or immune to human problems, but she never paints it as undesirable or an unworthy target. Moreover, her most idealistic characters reflect early-Soviet radical Yvegeny Zamyatin's disillusionment with the rigidity of the new communist state in the 1920s: "There is no final revolution." I'm also reminded on my encounters with real anarchists, who in refutation of the obsessive personal property rights of nominally similar Libertarians, are often found in much more communal settings.
This may not be as brightly inventive or thrilling as the Lathe of Heaven or The Left Hand of Darkness, but it is thoughtful, wise, and even moral, in a way that so few novels are.
Someone likened this to Perec's encyclopedia apartment complex, but Disch's exploration of the near future of urban life really is closer-tethered, toSomeone likened this to Perec's encyclopedia apartment complex, but Disch's exploration of the near future of urban life really is closer-tethered, to one exceptional / not-so-exceptional family. A 21st-century Glass family, I say, ever seeking without finding. The opening stories form a series of fine-honed relatively stand-alone sociologies -- population, civics, work, leisure -- but the core is the title piece, an oulipan prism winding along three axis with an exceptional precision rarely seen in ostensible genre fiction, human as it is formal....more
Writing-wise, this is far from Ballard's best, but somehow the mundanity of his general descriptive tone and lifeless characters just makes the slide Writing-wise, this is far from Ballard's best, but somehow the mundanity of his general descriptive tone and lifeless characters just makes the slide from stifling middle class domestic order to utter chaos that much smoother. Not to say that were were not a series of perfectly surreal set pieces strung throughout this, but that the whole thing unfolds with a weird offhanded naturalness. If you suspect the worst from the start, when you get it, it just seems normal. Society is always waiting to fall apart. You can seal yourselves away from everything but yourselves. It Came From Within....more
At last! I've read this in French, and reviewed with modest translations attempts here, but I'm so looking forward to re-reading a proper translation.At last! I've read this in French, and reviewed with modest translations attempts here, but I'm so looking forward to re-reading a proper translation. It's really great, somewhat a body horror, completely Topor in the best ways....more
Given how little I like Asimov's 'serious' fiction, it should surprise no one that I'm pretty unmoved by his ostensibly sexy limericks. As a gift, theGiven how little I like Asimov's 'serious' fiction, it should surprise no one that I'm pretty unmoved by his ostensibly sexy limericks. As a gift, there's much to be said for the weird leering-apple-and-bubble-font first paperback edition, less to be said for the poetry, the humor of which doesn't age especially well (obviously), and which fails to benefit from all the musings and annotations on the origins of each which run longer than the poems themselves. I wonder what a feminist inversion of this dubious art form might look like. Does such exist?...more
Nothing I can write about Tiger Tateishi's paintings is a spot on just looking at them. And these tiny scans can't do a bit of justice.
[image] [image] [Nothing I can write about Tiger Tateishi's paintings is a spot on just looking at them. And these tiny scans can't do a bit of justice.
Intermittently involving, usually when a storyline is given more time and space (the surreal voyage of "Things Happen", the historical-mythic claustroIntermittently involving, usually when a storyline is given more time and space (the surreal voyage of "Things Happen", the historical-mythic claustrophobia of the opener), but many of these compressed supernatural fables run towards the forgettable. From an Argentine fantasist who name checks Silvina Ocampo in the second selection, it's a bit underwhelming. And has to go back to the library before I can finish anyway -- oh well, this seems to be a sign to just switch back to exploring Patricia Eakins completely perfect stories in The Hungry Girls and Other Stories instead. Perhaps I'll return to Gallardo when she doesn't have to compete with Eakins for my attention. Nothing would fair so well against her, admittedly....more
A tersely fragmented experimental political thriller from the disillusioned wreckage of 60s radicalism, roving from Cuba to the NYC underground, to thA tersely fragmented experimental political thriller from the disillusioned wreckage of 60s radicalism, roving from Cuba to the NYC underground, to the wilds of Canada. This is a novel about what is left after ideals collapse and one is left to sort out a life amidst the nagging memory of past hopes. Recast, of course, as an adventure road novel in search of a lost daughter. Its disintegrating form makes it hard, thematically, to hang onto by the end, but that's precisely why I already feel that I need to re-read it. As a long-vanished Fiction Collective publication of 1979, this just renews my assurance that that whole catalog is worth running down....more
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