The Hat Rack

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five

2012-01-31T12:24:00.001-05:00

To be honest, I think we're rather past the point of introductions here, with this season's opener marking the seventy-ninth episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you've gotten this far, I think you're moving on, and I think you should be prepared for some SPOILERS, for there certainly are a few in this review. If you're new to my blog, here's a brief catch up, namely my views on the first, second, third, and fourth seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with the first season of Angel thrown in for good measure. All of that brings us here, to the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which, in marked contrast to the largely aimless and often lackluster fourth season, is focused, dominated by an overarching plot to perhaps the greatest extent of any season yet, and is also, I should mention, rather excellent.

So, the center of a good plot is a good villain, right? Well, evidently not. Now, I know I might be in the minority here. The Buffy enthusiasts in my viewing group were about as ecstatic at the entrance of Clare Kramer's Gloria (Glory, for short) as I've ever seen them. But Glory's just not that interesting. The problem isn't her backstory, mind you. She's the pure-evil god of an entire, demonic dimension, exiled to Earth and requiring a supernatural Key to get back. But all that's just in the background. Glory is fashionable, prissy, and really, really strong, but none of that force of arms translates into anywhere near as powerful a character as Spike or as brightly, dangerously charming as the Mayor. She just doesn't feel like much at all, an even less interesting (if rather smaller and slimmer) version of the hard-hitting and hard to drop Adam of the prior season. Fight scenes with her are devoid of any particularly interesting mechanics, and her own strength ends up playing against the interest of the fight, as we simply know that none of Buffy's punches or kicks will carry the day, leaving us just waiting for the trick our heroes use to get out alive.

Silly? Of course not!

Glory brings a host of characters with her, not only the aforementioned Key, but also a group of goblin-like henchmen that are always quite amusing and a force of knights dedicated to stopping her and destroying the Key. Those knights prove rather less amusing, and note that, when I say knights, I am not being in any way facetious: these fellows ride horses en masse down suburban streets, wearing chain mail and wielding swords. The spectacle's every bit as silly as it sounds. Where their numbers are coming from (who on earth would join such an order?), why they don't use any weapon developed since the tenth century, and what they hope to accomplish against a foe that is unfazed by their slashes and stabs are all good questions left unanswered. Thankfully, these renaissance fair runaways aren't all that prevalent outside of a few near-parody moments.

As I've just panned the villain and much of the supporting cast, you might be wondering why I started off speaking so highly of this plotline. The answer begins with the Key, made into human form by a few monk dudes we briefly see at the beginning. The result? When Buffy gets back from the busy slaying of the first episode, she's a sister sitting in her home, Michelle Trachtenberg's Dawn, and every character acts like they've known her all along. The episodes that follow exude WTFery in a fashion seldom, if ever, equaled in anything I've seen. Things get interesting, and Dawn more than a bewildering wrench in the works, before too long, as the other characters gradually realize what she is. All of that culminates in the absolutely fantastic Blood Ties, where Dawn herself learns that her life and memories are a lie, that she's scarcely weeks old, and that she's only debatably human. The episode is one of existential horror, of questions of who we are and what our purpose is, and is filled with beautiful and terrible moments. There are other Buffy episodes that are more exciting, for sure, but I think this might be the forty-four minutes that hit me the hardest in the show's entire run.

Tied with it is the season's ability to explore tragedy. Now, there's always been loss in Buffy before, but it's rarely been of a permanent variety, nor has it often been to those closest to our heroes. No longer. Behind the excitement, action, and drama of the season's first half or so lurks a persistent and oppressive sub plot, a tumor in Buffy's mother's head. And then, after all seems well, Joyce Summers dies a pointless, meaningless, and sudden death. The episode that follows, The Body, is another high water mark for the show, a creation that drags and staggers forward, lengthy and torturous as the characters, without anything to fight, are left with nothing but the utter emptiness that follows Joyce's transformation from human, from mother, to nothing but a still body. Despite the death they've seen and dealt, our protagonists are still human, are still young, and are still vulnerable.

Bye! Don't hurry back...

Through the season, Buffy's left trying to balance her shift to adulthood and her duties as a Slayer, two things that are obviously incompatible and only seem to grow more so. Of course, that's not exactly a new conflict; it's pretty much been the center of the character from the beginning, and some of the explorations of it here falls rather flat. When Buffy, anxious to figure out the true meaning of her position, does a rather fancy and far off ritual to speak to the First Slayer we saw running around during the last season's closer (Relentless), she's shocked when she's told that death is your gift. As, by this point, she's spent nearly a hundred episodes stabbing people with bits of sharpened wood, I'm not particularly sure why this is such a surprise, but anyway. Some things of interest do come out of this plotline, for it's the divide between her Slayer side and her regular life that causes Buffy to lose Riley. Though I – and, it seems, most Buffy fans – can't really claim to have ever loved the guy, he always did come off as kind and well intentioned, and his departure is well done.

Furthermore, Buffy's character arc grows immeasurably more powerful with the death of her mother. Sarah Michelle Geller is an adequate actor when playing a happy, excited, and carefree Buffy, but she's an absolutely magnificent one when Buffy is depressed, distraught, and otherwise emotionally destroyed. Besides the Body, the key episode of Buffy and Dawn's loss, and Buffy's maturity, seems to be Forever, where Dawn tries to, against all warnings and advice, resurrect Buffy's mother, and the two of them have to face the divide between what's comforting but ultimately damaging and what may be right but is also brutally difficult.

But none of those are the best arc of the season. No, that's Spike's. After being a badass of unquestionable and unmatchable style and strength in the second season and then faffing about for most of the next two, he suddenly decides to go from snazzy villain to fully fledged character. After an attempt early in the season to remove the chip that prevents him from harming any living thing, Spike essentially resigns himself to his existence. The details of his past are soon after explored in the episode Fool for Love, and, much as a flashback episode setting out to demystify a character seems like a good awful idea, the thing's a huge success. Along with it comes Spikes' realization of the terrifying truth: that he's been in love with Buffy for a damn long time. It's a revelation that could have felt hackneyed, but not with James Marsters behind the helm, bringing enough desperation, longing, and manic violence to the task to get just about anyone on his side. Though Buffy spurns him, he doesn't turn away, nearly dying for her in Intervention, and, though his love's disturbing as hell, it's also rather fantastic.

Due to the season's focused arc, the rest of the cast doesn't get as much of a chance to shine, but the exposure that they do get is meaningful and avoids the aimlessness of the last season. Giles is now the proprietor of the town's main magic shop, the Magic Box, and Anya soon gravitates over to help him. Xander's main episode here is The Replacement which, like the Zeppo, focuses on how he might seem to be the outsider, the regular guy in their group, even the bumbler, but shows that he's inner strength and ability to match the others. Tara, meanwhile, is integrated into the group after Family, where her oppressive and misogynistic father and family come to retrieve her from college, Willow, and all those around her. It's a great moment when the gang all steps up to defend her, though I do have to wonder how she, now without any sort of family support, intends to continue paying for college. (Actually, on that note, how exactly does Buffy expect to not starve to death, what with her utter lack of income?)

Quick! Look busy!

Though this is such a plot driven season, there are other items of interest. The alien threat in Listening to Fear is a byproduct of events in the mean plot, but is by no means in it, and while its extraterrestrial nature may be a bit silly, it does lead to some fantastically creepy scenes. Also of note is the Watchers Council's appearance in Checkpoint, where they try to regain control of Buffy and, not too surprisingly, fail. One of the main things I was left thinking about afterwards was what the hell the purpose of this organization is, as they are – as Buffy says – useless without her. Since there's only one Slayer at a time, why on earth do they need so many Watchers, what do the rest of them get up to all useless day, why do they have so much political power yet never seem to use it for anything important, and why on earth did all the other Watchers disrespect Giles, if he was the only one who was in any sense employed in doing something useful? But that's drifting from the point.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer's fifth season is one of the show's strongest. The character arcs are fantastic here, and, even if the villain herself isn't too awe inspiring at times, by the season's end, the tension's built up to an incredible point, and the climax is excellent. There are a few missteps here and there, but this season proves that Buffy is not a show stumbling on past its prime (much as aspects of the last might have suggested that very thing), but is rather still growing, still evolving, and still powerful.

Standout episodes: Blood Ties, The Body, Fool for Love

Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

2012-01-24T12:47:00.000-05:00

Vernor Vinge’s 1992 Hugo Award winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep opens as follows: How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails. (p. 1) From those sentences on, the novel’s one of tremendous scale, a playful book full of adventure and heart that is, one can never forget, a behemoth of nigh unimaginable proportions, a colossus as awe inspiring as the star-studded night sky it takes place in the depths of.

The idea central to the book is that there are Zones of Thought, that the galaxy and its physics are not uniform entities but are rather stratified by areas of different potential complexities and even natural laws. From the Slowness towards the galaxy’s core, where the Earth of our present lies entombed and where sophonts can only crawl across the stars, to the Beyond, a realm like the majority of our Science Fiction and filled with mingling races and faster than light travel, all the way to the Transcend, the place where the restraints of reality are so lax that those who’ve reached it become as Gods, impossible for us to conceive and capable of almost any feat. It’s an interesting set up, and Vinge is an author skilled enough, and a dreamer daring enough, to not shy from its complexities but rather to search out its implications.

So many authors of Science Fiction (and Fantasy) seem determined to attain the grandeur of celestial timescales and zeroes after their dates without either the ability or willingness to actually give that history life. Needless to say, that’s not at all the case here. Rather than give the Transcendent the easy gravity of immortality, Vinge delves deeper, into something simpler, stranger, and, once considered, infinitely more awesome. The Transcendent are so much greater than we are, and their conceptions of time and reality so different, that it’s rare they stay communicative for more than five or ten years. They lost interest, or grew into something different – or [they] really did die. (p. 72) Instead of a being eternally humanoid, they're brief, ephemeral, and infinitely vaster in that short span of time.

But it’s not just as the very top of his delectable and speculative layer cake that Vinge has imbued with life. Though the Zones themselves seem permanent, and though the evolution of life from Slowness to Beyond and even Transcendence if the race proves capable is well established, the actual details of Vinge’s world are ever in flux. Faced with the vastness of space and time, with the prospects of further advancement into the Transcend or the dangers of their neighbors, entire races frequently perish or ascend. As Vinge says, civilizations were transient and races faded… (p. 307) At one point, when faced with a beach so odd and beautiful that it might be unique, we’re told that, considering the immensity of space and the uncountable races that inhabit it and inhabited it, saying that something is unique is an extreme thing to say about anything in the Beyond. (p. 166) I can think of several excellent examples of Science Fiction concepts so excellent that they defined entire imagined cosmos in their tales’ reality and their readers’ imagination, but here is something different, an eminence of eternal change and possibility vaster than any one idea, no matter how strong.

To my puzzlement, Vinge's treatment of information seems often accused of being outdated and/or hopelessly retro. That’s bizarre to me. It’s true that the internet here is mostly composed of simple text based messages, just about identical to the emails of today, but the face of the thing’s irrelevant next to the structure and mindset of it, and there Vinge excels. His is a future concerned, above all else, with information, and it’s the pursuit of information that shapes its structure and its masters, that drives the very economy of the Beyond.

Of course, we don’t know all this at the novel’s beginning, and, fear not, despite the brilliance of the world building, A Fire Upon the Deep is anything but a slow or self-indulgently expository novel. In fact, the broad outlines of the plot are just about as standard as you can get. In the prologue, bumbling human explorers stumble upon an archive containing an ancient entity more powerful, and more malevolent, than they can imagine. I probably won’t be shocking anyone when I say that it escapes and that it starts wreaking havoc. Sequestered for so long in the archive with the perversion, though, was what just might be some means of combating it, and that means ends up marooned after a shipwreck on a medieval-level world populated by pack intelligences with the last two child survivors of the researcher’s last escape ship. Alternating with the children’s perspectives and those of the world’s natives is that of Ravna, a human woman from up in the Beyond who is at first key to monitoring, and then to trying to rescue, the trapped children and their cargo. The fun of it all is further accented by all manner of gleeful ingredients, from the amateur spy who reassures his companions by saying “Hey, don’t worry. I’ve read all about doing this sort of thing!” (p. 31), to Vinge’s pulpish habit of underlining entire sentences for emphasis, to his constant playing and subverting (or even simply subsuming) the tropes of the most excitable adventure stories, as when Ravna realizes upon meeting one particularly larger than life character that after a lifetime of reading romantic fiction, she’d run into her first hero. (p. 89)

Crucially, though, Vinge somehow manages to never cross the line between fast paced fun and shallow or thin tales with nothing to offer besides the whittling away of time. The key to that is, rather unsurprisingly, the depth and brevity of his world and its constant and mind-expanding games of scale. Both of those make themselves felt constantly and naturally through the most innocuous details or statements, like one character’s casual mention of “nonlinear reading” (p. 281) or another man of this far future’s saying that half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date back to the beginning of the human experience. (p. 487)

Another vital component of it all is the way that Vinge is able to suggest and even dive into genuinely alien minds. Chiefly on display are two creations, the pack based and technologically primitive Tines and the two Skroderiders that accompany Ravna on her mission to the Tines’ world. Of those two, it’s the Tines that fascinated me most, creatures whose very consciousness was the product of multiple distinct and independently sentient parts. Vinge explores the concept in all sorts of interesting ways with Flenser and Steel, Tines that have become a cross of megalomaniacal dictators and mad scientists, experimenting on their brethren and themselves to discover just what makes them them and just how a pack could be artificially created. Despite their profound strangeness, however, the Tines are relatable in their way, emotional, sympathetic, and even at times understandable. As one of the children with them observes of one of their conversations, the ideas were so alien, and yet the overtones of affection and humor were somehow very familiar. (p. 293)

It doesn’t hurt that the Tines’ world is so fascinating. It may be only a part of the whole, but Vinge, like China Miéville, has the unique ability to make his every throw away idea incredibly fascinating and his every sub plot seem fertile enough for a series. I, at least, know I’d gladly have read, loved, and considered great a Fantasy novel containing nothing but a smaller scale version of the Tines portion of this text. Their world has numerous interesting factions and characters, unexplored yet tempting horizons, is everywhere rich with the implications, from architecture to art, of a pack mind species. The fantasy plotline that takes place there reminded me a great deal of K.J. Parker’s Engineer trilogy with its focus on technology and the changes that it leads to, but here, of course, the characters have a cheat sheet, the two sides both struggling to invent from scratch the weapons and items that they know exist, leading to a world and a confrontation within it marked by huge gaps and leaps in ability and technology.

As enjoyable as the plot is, it still does seem small at first when glimpsed against the entirety of the Zones and the uncountable races that reside there. In fact, many sophonts take exactly that position in the first half or so of the novel, saying that there have always been such galactic catastrophes and that, really, it’s no big deal for any except those that get caught in them. The fact that the perversion then proves a danger to not just humanity and those near it but to all the Beyond serves to raise the stakes and immensity of the threat to critical levels, but does still leaves the individual seeming hopelessly outmatched as entire civilizations fall and die on the periphery, their fates only obliquely revealed through the shifting views of the Net.

Even that’s barely touching on the incredible effects of living near the Transcendent, knowing that there are beings infinitely superior to you, infinitely above you, capable – and, now, willing – to use sophonts as but their playthings. We’re all, as one character says, nothing but “happy automatons, running on trivial programs. […] [The Transcendent] could make devices like you and I.” (pp. 255-6) But the cast as a whole is not given into such fatalism. No, the message here is one of defiance and action, no matter how fleeting or seemingly hopeless, how short lived or even doomed. Our perspective in the prologue says it first: While we exist, when we exist, we should do what we can, (p. 3) but I think my favorite iteration of the sentiment comes later, when one of the novel’s most audacious, but ultimately weaker, characters says that he “will not be flotsam on the wave of the future.” (p. 450) (All of which is similar to another of Parker’s themes, the one best summed up by Basso’s declaration that Destiny is the enemy. (p. 203, The Folding Knife))

Despite all that, though, Vinge’s characters, and even his plots, are well overshadowed by his ideas. The excellence of each and every one of his humanoid and alien creations comes from their reactions and actions in their extraordinary and inventive situations, and the joys of his flashy plotting come from the way that it interacts with his cosmos. So, once just about all’s explained and understood, or at least as much as it ever will be in the novel’s pages (or ever could be by our Slow Zone minds?), a bit of the excitement leaves the affair, and the broad strokes of the novel’s ending aren’t too surprising, even if the particulars might be. Tied into that is the fact that we only get to viscerally feel the aspects of the climax that take place on the Tines world, a shame because it’s in terms of the larger galaxy that the unexpected aspects of the ending really hit. But, for all that, the ending’s still a damn fine one, a shade disappointing only for being merely very good at the end of such an exquisite work.

A Fire Upon the Deep is the epitome of what so much Science Fiction is trying to be, a gripping and exciting book filled to bursting and over the rim with interesting ideas that stretch out your mind, fill your head with wonder, and make you contemplate something profoundly other and infinitely vast. Here, at the tail end of this panegyric, I still feel like I may have understated just how much this novel hit me and just how much I liked it. So let me have one more sentence-length shot at conveying how I feel about it: A Fire Upon the Deep is absolutely brilliant. Now go read the book.

Haruki Murakami - 1Q84

2012-01-17T14:10:00.000-05:00

"And also," the driver said, facing the mirror, "please remember: things are not what they seem." (p. 9)

1Q84 is the Japanese novelist Haruku Murakami's third novel since 2000, though the word "novel" might be a tad misleading, as it's a trilogy in Japan. Fittingly enough for its three-in-one background, it's a brick of a book. Nonetheless, it's an easy and pleasurable read, Murakami's smooth and sonorous prose floating you through a narrative that, right up until you turn the last page, seems to make perfect sense. When you look back on it, however, all the easy associations you picked up as you read turn out to be rather hollow, the book's meaning something that has to be cobbled together from bits and pieces throughout its massive, lifelike sprawl.

An easy looking thematic starting point seems to be the reference in the title, the contrasts and, of course, similarities between Orwell's so-famous 1984 and this year of 1Q84, this world-with-a-question-mark, as Auomame puts it. But that association's too easy, and Murakami's true intent at once rises above that one-to-one correlation/interpretation and also sidesteps the comparison entirely. As one character says: Now, in the real year 1984, Big Brother is all too famous, and all too obvious. If Big Brother were to appear before us now, we'd point to him and say, 'Watch out! He's Big Brother!' There's no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours. Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don't you think? (p. 236) Those Little People are nothing near as concrete as Big Brother and his police force. No, the Little People are something nigh entirely ephemeral, a force of magic and thought that only touches the world, if it does at all, through implication and faith and the most subtle of maneuverings.

In the end, the comparison does, of course, seem valid to some extent, but the despotism shown here is not one of force or even of nation, but rather a despotism of thought and will, of past and intent and even of love. The Sakigake Cult is the clearest example of this. It takes the circuits out of [its member's] brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. […] It makes life a lot easier. You don't have to think about different things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve. (pp. 120-1) but while it might be the most obvious example of the intellectual and individual atrophy at the novel's core, it’s the least focused on. Sakigake is mostly a specter in the shadows, an example of how dominating the Little People's manipulations can become so that we may better see and fear them in the rest of the text.

[People] have to move with a purpose, (p. 29) we hear towards the novel's beginning, and it could be said that attempts to find that purpose and carry it through, no matter the circumstances or obstacles, dominate. And the greatest of all barriers seems to be one's birth. Both Auomame and Tengo had parents locked in narrow roles, and each had to escape those roles to try and become who they needed to be. More important than just escape, though, is reconciliation, or at least understanding, of the past. Much of Tengo's storyline is in fact his desire and need to understand his origins and father, to comprehend how half of the genes that made his existence possible could come from this narrow, uneducated man. (p. 176) But while Murakami's adept at Tengo's personal conflict, the ramifications of it do not, of course, end there. No, in 1Q84 the world seems made wholly of an endless battle of contrasting memories, (p. 293) and it seems that the effects and maybe even purpose of life might be the rewriting of those memories and the past.

Love is another thing central to 1Q84, but that's not to say that it's pure. No, the characters need love, but it's often what destroys them, a cruel jailor and torturer that feeds on their flaws and often leaves them destroyed. It's through love, here, or at least love's approximation, that true loneliness is reached, and Murakami proves devastatingly able to hammer those moments home: Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no trace of moisture. No life could take root there. Not even birds would fly over it. […]Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically – on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone. (pp. 368-9) That's where Auomame comes into her role as assassin. She, with few friends and fewer emotional attachments, has become an avenger of sorts, a slayer of those who abuse and destroy the object of their desires.

The one exception to the novel's two categories of emotionless and damaging is the idealized and intangible relationship between Tengo and Auomame, forged from just one moment of true contact many years ago and distinct by virtue of its improbability. Neither character will pollute it with their actions, will actively go out and find the other. If they are too meet again it must be by chance one day, like passing on the street, or getting on the same bus, (p. 190) for only flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken. (p. 374)

1Q84 is anything but a realist novel. Its flow is a surreal drift. Strict analysis flounders here, the orderly march of cause and effect left behind for a tale as humanly logical as it is absurd. Like After Dard, 1Q84 is not constructed from the oft-contemplated yet depthless impossible but instead from the subtly unthinkable. Murakami's otherworldly agents – his Little People – do not replace our reality but rather alter it. Murakami's is a Tokyo-born Middle Earth made of nothing but an empty sandbox and swings, a mercury-vapor lamp, emitting its sterile light, the spreading branches of a zelkova tree, a locked public toilet, a new six-story condo (only four units of which had lighted windows), a war notice board, a red vending machine with a Coca-Cola logo, an illegally parked old-model green Volkswagen golf, telephone poles and electric lines, and primary-color neon signs in the distance. The usual city noise, the usual lights. (p. 548)

One of the text's key fantastical components is that of dohta and maza (p. 685) and the relationship between them, object and shadow, reality and afterimage, character and alter ego. It's a relationship that characterizes much of the text, for 1Q84 is a story of layers and careful shading, numerous perspectives and recurrences, images and events appearing again and again in slightly altered forms and viewed through drastically different eyes. Even the language comes to play the game, with Murakami often using one word, such as aroused (p. 43/4), twice in the same scene, but in vastly different connotations, with the first nonetheless impacting how we view the second.

Murakami's prose is brilliant and engaging without ever being flashy or openly attention seeking. It's the little things that make it what it is and often the descriptions of the smallest things that stick in your mind the longest. Murakami is an absolute master of similes and metaphors, twisting mundane images into wonderful new configurations, like when a character must fasten [their] feelings to the earth – firmly, like attaching an anchor to a balloon. (p. 185) or like when we're told how Tengo's past lovers had come and gone, like vividly colored birds perching momentarily on a branch before flying off somewhere. (p. 360) Furthermore, Murakami's a supremely playful author, often mercilessly poking fun of his own creations with a wray wit: The large crown of his head formed and abnormally flat bald area with lopsided edges. It was reminiscent of a military heliport that had been made by cutting away the peak of a small, strategically important hill. (p. 330) Not even revelation and life changing events are above such jibes: At least once in his life [Tengo] had had the perfect erection, and the perfect orgasm. It was like the author of Gone With the Wind. Once you have achieved something so magnificent, you have to be content with it. (p. 727)

Despite all that, 1Q84 is a flawed novel, and a reviewer ever so slightly more concerned with snappy phrasing than accuracy might even say that those problems are half from excess and half from restraint. The first of those can, for the most part, be pinned down to the novel's aforementioned repetition. It's a technique that is, for the most part, effective, but, when used to the extent it is here, serves to further slow down and clog up the works. The repetition does give added insight, but it also serves to stifle any forward momentum the novel might otherwise have accumulated. This, and the novel's length, would both not be an issue if not for the fact that, put plainly, the book simply doesn't have enough significant events, at least not when one compares the number of those to the weight of its minutia and the sum of its page count. Though 1Q84 is more than twice the length of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it doesn't feel like it has any more content or depth, just like it's playing its melodies at half speed.

That's not to say, admittedly, that 1Q84 is never a tightly paced, gripping work, just that it almost never is. One of the novel's key set pieces is a long, long time building, but, when it comes in the midst of the second book, is composed of chapter after chapter of almost unbreakable tension, each word exquisitely backed by the weight of our expectations and by the omnipresent feel of imminent revelation. Alas, the novel never again reaches the magic of those chapters, and some of the later significant events actually serve to simply underscore the weightlessness of much of the narrative. The third book introduces a new viewpoint character, a private detective in the employ of Sakigake. His chapters are generally enjoyable, but the moment when he pieces together the connections between Tengo and Auomame is one of the novel's weakest. In the main thrust of the narrative, enraptured by Murakami's prose, the link between the two is delightful and even magical because of its slightness. When uncovered and explained in terms of the detective's supposed logic, however, the connection ends up viewed by the reader's regular, discerning gaze and the link is, when considered in that light, of course ridiculous.

The other contender for the much-coveted prize for the novel's weakest section comes when the reader is finally allowed to glimpse some of the text of Air Chrysalis, the book-within-a-book that first exposes the Little People and that, when rewritten by Tengo, goes on to win prizes and top bestseller lists. Everything from cap-i-tal-izum to peese and for-tress (p. 532) is rendered in the grating, garish, and juvenile manner of an adult doing his ham-handed best to cram a child's perspective down our throats. The main effect, besides conveying boundless immaturity, was making me wonder about the sanity of the judges and reading populace of this alternate reality Tokyo.

I would say that most of my criticisms of logic and pacing, though, wouldn't come as any surprise at all to Murakami. After the publication of Air Chrysalis, Tengo reads several of its reviews, one of which says that: As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author's intention, but many readers are likely to this lack of clarification as a sign of 'authorial laziness.' (p. 380) This confuses Tengo. He knows that, as a story, Air Chrysalis was fascinating to many people […]. What more did it have to do? (p. 381)

That, really, seems to sum up much of Murakami's philosophy in reading this work and the mindset that must be used to read it. Speaking of life, a character at one point thinks: The warmth and the pain came as a pair, and unless he accepted the pain, he wouldn't feel the warmth. It was a kind of trade-off. (p. 803) 1Q84 is a magical and sprawling work, one resplendent with depth, and also one loaded down with a number of flaws. It's a tapestry of dreams that might just be too delicate to be perfect without being ruined.

Publication v4

2012-01-13T21:12:00.000-05:00

Tell me straight, dear readers: are your lives too cheerful at the moment? Are you lacking the necessary depressing horror? Missing all dark flair? Desperately requiring a short, sweet, and disturbing shock to the system? Well, let me try and fix that. On February 16th, Eschatology Journal will be publishing my short story Strings.

Best Reads of 2011

2012-01-10T01:57:00.000-05:00

Largely, I think, due to reading so many magazines and so many parts of various books for classes, I read the fewest books in 2011 that I did in any year since I started keeping track in 2009. Still, I've ended up with the at least somewhat respectable total of one hundred and eight volumes conquered, and, needless to say, quite a few of those were rather excellent. And so the time has come for the eight best of them, presented in alphabetical order. We begin with…

Reviewed here.

The Wounded and the Slain isn't an exciting book. It's downbeat, instead, not to mention depressing, dejected and dispirited, filled with character and heart and written with a kind of rough poetry. Though there is a crime at the book's center, it's very much a crime with a small c, not a jumping off point to adventure but a tortured, haphazard, regrettable, and, above all, pointless thing. The descent into darkness thing is an inexorable crawl, not a glamorous leap. I don't think you could ever call this a pleasant book, but it's one that'll hit you hard, and it's a damn good one.

Reviewed here.

As stark as it is focused, as streamlined as it is jagged, Red Harvest embodies much of what interests me about the noir genre. Though wholly concerned with matters of justice, this is a compassionless novel, maybe even a(n intentionally) heartless one. Morality here is a brutal force, and the idea of right is relegated to strength and violence. But, in this nigh lawless place, even the lawman, the only one standing up for us, might be corrupt to the core. This is a fast novel, a fun novel, and a damn disturbing one.

Reviewed here.

Like Red Harvest, The Ammonite Violin is disturbing and raw, but here those qualities don't come from bare language, harsh violence, and a lack of emotion but rather from a series of stories that are almost unutterably rich in their composition, filled with overwhelming and enveloping language and positively overflowing with feeling. The longing shown here is the kind of calculated, unbearable, and revelatory longing that might come gushing forth from an excised heart with all the force of the heavy, dark blood that comes with it.

Grimscribe is horror extraordinaire Thomas Ligotti's second collection, and it takes place wholly within nightmare, on the edge of utter dementia itself. Its stories toy with that border, giving glimpses and tantalizing, horrifying hints, leaping across for brief moments where sanity howls before falling back. Amidst it all are several of Ligotti's best tales, including Nethescurial, an insidious and Lovecraftian beast of a tale that can actually be read for free (albeit with an annoying formatting issue or two) here. In my personal rankings, Grimscribe is roughly tied with the author's Songs of aDead Dreamer and Teatro Grottesco for the overall prize of his best work. Suffice to say, this is a brilliant collection.

Reviewed here.

I knew I'd like Sandkings going in, maybe even knew I'd love it, but I didn't know how much. The Stone City is a Science Fiction Weird Tale in every sense of the word, and an absolutely brilliant one at that, fiction that probes the limits of human understanding and strangeness with as much skill as Lovecraft himself brought to the table. This isn't, though, a collection with one centerpiece. Every tale here is filled with breathtaking images and audacity, entire worlds and some of the best characterization you'll ever come across. I know a lot of readers view Martin's older works as a now-done sideshow compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, but doing so is a dire mistake.

Reviewed here.

Embassytown is the rare Science Fiction novel that is not only alien in its choice of colors and its number of tentacles. The aliens shown here are convincingly inhuman, but it's the aspects of language that Miéville uses them to explore that are stranger and more intriguing still. Those concepts are explored in full, taking the humans in the narrative to and past the breaking point, twisting and shattering and reinventing every aspect of their world. Miéville's as skilled as any with coming up with brilliant and challenging ideas, has the ability to ride them for all they're worth, and the talent to present the whole with his fantastic prose. Though it's very different from his early work, Embassytown is no less excellent.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion builds a vivid, colorful, and fascinating world and populates it with larger than life, well explored, and somehow believable characters. I think it says a lot about the novel that I chiefly remember two scenes, one the thrilling, grand, and inventive climax and the other an unimportant scene where the main character eats some rather unpleasant food in a diner. Try as I might, I can't decide which of those I liked best, or which felt more real, and, amazingly enough, the two fit so well into the same narrative that, looking back, they really don't seem all that different in importance at all.

Review to come.

A Fire Upon the Deep operates on a scale so much vaster than what can be easily conceived that the reader's practically pummeled with awe as they turn the pages, and turn them they will. The central plot of A Fire Upon the Deep is a gripping adventure story that takes place amidst an unimaginably complex and fascinating universe, a story filled with grand ideas and with a cast made up in large part of some of the best made and most convincing aliens I've ever seen. A Fire Upon the Deep isn't only one of my favorite books of this year: it's one of my favorite Science Fiction novels ever and even one of my favorite novels.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

Though it also had its fair share of excellence, 2011 packed in more than a few disappointing novels: Boneshaker, If You Could See Me Now, and even the legendary Frankenstein among them. But the latter two had some good ideas, if a fumbled execution, and even Boneshaker was more formless mush than actively bad. Only Wicked Things managed to truly and genuinely piss me off, not because it hadn't met my expectations (though, needless to say, it hadn't) but because it was simply an awful book, one that rambled about aimlessly, setting up numerous hints and clues, and then oh-so-cleverly keeled over dead before resolving anything. Ha ha. Wicked Things tries to be a stylish, plot-based read, but the ending reveal leaves it a thriller that forgot to thrill, a horror novel whose only real horror moment is a and unsubstantiated cheap shot, a novel whose characters are stick figures then jerked out of their unremarkable paths, and a book with nigh no redeeming features.

The Dummy and Bards and Sages

2012-01-06T15:21:00.000-05:00

My short horror story The Dummy is now available in the newest issue of Bards and Sages Quarterly (print/kindle), and my name seems to be on the cover. The story's a compassionate, bright, and hopeful tale, about... Well, no. It's dark and disturbing. But hopefully quite enjoyable nonetheless. To either whet your appetite or put you off forever, here's the first paragraph:

The dummy was a work in progress, a Michael to torment and a Michael to love. It was an impromptu sculpture, a masterpiece of longing made from paint and wood, hand carved jewels for eyes and ivory for nails, and blood from a pin for its heart. Fleya spent thirty-three hours mastering every drift of hair, but the face was an abstraction, a swirl of paint and indentations. The dummy was half dream to look upon, and it was snow-cold to the touch.

Best Releases of 2011

2012-01-03T14:22:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, Strange Horizons put up their Year in Review post, with my own paragraph-long thoughts among those offered. Head on over and take a look. Once you're done, though, keep reading, because the discussion's not yet over. See, at the time of writing the Strange Horizons piece, my computer was down and seemingly dead (thankfully, it recovered soon after). As a result, I didn't have access to my list of books read and so, rather unsurprisingly, forgot the dates of a few notable releases, most importantly Daniel Kraus' Rotters, a YA horror novel about grave robbing that one me over in short order due to the fantastic descriptions of that so-sordid crime and the depiction of the novel's main character. And then there are all the series books, few of which I mentioned. Both White Luck Warrior and The Crippled God were quite good. The latter maybe even excellent, even if it wasn't my personal favorite Malazan volume. Both, though, lost their places on the list because they were too tied up with the preceding (and, in the case of the former, to come) novels for me to really judge them on their own merits. Finally, there's certainly the matter of Historical Lovecraft, the anthology that came out midway through the year bearing my very first published story.

My post with overall best reads for the year will come out next week.

For those interested, the full list of newly released books I read is as follows:

Joe Abercrombie – The Heroes
Daniel Abraham – The Dragon's Path
R. Scott Bakker – The White Luck Warrior
James S. A. Corey – Leviathan Wakes
Steven Erikson – The Crippled God
Daniel Kraus – Rotters
Mark Lawrence – Prince of Thorns
George R.R. Martin – A Dance with Dragons
Robert McCammon – The Hunter from the Woods
Haruki Murakami – 1Q84
Adam Nevill – The Ritual
K.J. Parker – The Hammer
Patrick Rothfuss – The Wise Man's Fear
Brandon Sanderson – The Alloy of Law
Sam Sykes – Black Halo
Catherynne M. Valente – Deathless
Historical Lovecraft

Christopher Hitchens - God is Not Great

2011-12-27T13:58:00.000-05:00

Let’s get this out of the way right at the beginning: the argument at the center of God is Not Great is not a subtle one or a moderate one, not something with which accords can be reached or with which peace can be made. Hitchens doesn’t set out to fire an opening salvo but to deliver a complete strike and a killing blow. In his own words, his goal is to prove that the usefulness of religion is in the past, and that its foundational books are transparent fables, and that it is a man-made imposition, and that it has been an enemy of science and inquiry, and that it has subsisted largely on lies and fears, and been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide, racism, and tyranny. (p. 229)

Unsurprisingly, that grand lack of subtlety where the problems start setting in. Far, far too many of Hitchens’ arguments fall into the same trap. After fiery but rational openings, they leap farther, into wild and unsupportable overstatement, leaving their strengths and weight far behind. The first example of this the reader’s to experience is right on the cover. The volume’s title, God is Not Great, is a suitable one, exemplifying Hitchens’ desire to show the evils perpetuated by the divine. And then, those buying the book in America are treated to its ghastly subtitle: How Religion Poisons Everything, a claim so hyperbolic as to be near parody. (Those in the

, I should point out, do get the far superior The Case Against God on the front of their book.)

Christopher Hitchens argues through specific tales and events rather than through abstractions. Many of these tales come from his personal experience, many sections and assertions open with In northern Uganda in late 2005, I sat in a center for the rehabilitation of kidnapped and enslaved children… (p. 188) or I once joined these potential adepts and acolytes (p. 195) and the like. Hitchens lived an incredibly worldly life, experiencing far more than most ever could or will. Despite that, these arguments backed by anecdote are all unable to, by themselves, carry the day.

This can be most clearly seen, I think, in the book’s second chapter, Religion Kills. The majority of its page count is devoted to an answer Hitchens gave to Dennis Prager, a religious broadcaster, when asked, if a large group of men approached him at night in a strange city, if he would feel safer were they “just coming from a prayer meeting.” (p. 18) In response, Hitchens discusses experiences that he had in – to stay within the letter ‘B’ (ibid) - Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad and why, in those situations, he felt “immediately threatened” by that “group of men […] coming from a religious observance.” (ibid) Each of those six experiences is interesting, well presented, and thought provoking.

All of that’s enough to justify Hitchens’ flippant answer – “No,” (p. 28) needless to say – to Prager’s question, and, considering the breath of Hitchens’ answer and knowledge and depending on how much the reader finds his or herself swayed by his arguments, might even be enough to somewhat justify his claiming that religion is “an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred, with members of each group talking of the other in precisely the tones of the bigot.” But to go from there to the chapter title that Religion Kills is simply silly and would require a broadening of the argument not even attempted in the chapter’s pages. It’s well proven here that religion can kill (or as he puts it at one point, faith and worship can make people behave very badly indeed. (p. 242)), but is there anyone who would even challenge such a truism?

Hitchens’ style of attack is excellent for laying to waste certain aspects of religion, for assailing sects and leaders, for showing the dangers and flaws of faith. But it proves ineffective for taking down the edifice of religion as a whole, and Hitchens even seems aware that it's ill suited to the task and unfair if used for it: I do not say that if I catch a Buddhist priest stealing all the offerings left by the simple folk at his temple, Buddhism is therefore discredited. (p. 185) But he makes that very error time and time again. The chapter There is no “Eastern” Solution, to give but one example, begins with a discrediting of a “celebrated guru” (p. 195) known as Bhagwan. Hitchens’ claim here is that these religions are centered on a distrust of and abandonment of the intellect, and he illustrates the dangers of this by showing how Bhagwan fleeces his followers and abuses them horribly. But this is no more a discrediting of all gurus than the presenting of one guru who does not steal and rape would be a validation of all of them.

This death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind of assault on religion is also one badly damaged by factual errors. When discussing religion’s insanities, Hitchens tells us that Orthodox Jews conduct congress by means of a hole in the sheet. (p. 54) That’s outright false and utterly unsubstantiated, and its presence amidst a list of other, equally appalling acts of the faithful, serves to make the reader question the whole thing. All the rest certainly sounds convincing, but, after all, if I didn’t happen to have Orthodox relatives, would I know the above falsity to be just that? Mind you, I don’t think that Hitchens has penned a volume of lies, not at all. Rather, I think that Hitchens, in his drive to stick every injustice he could find on faith, let a few inane rumors sneak right through his critical faculties and research skills and land on page fifty-four of an otherwise fine work. Nonetheless, its presence there is a damning one that makes it just that much harder to trust every other line and example in the volume.

But let's zoom out and move away from the particulars for a moment. A problem, maybe even the problem, with this whole How Religion Poisons Everything subtitle and thesis – and a large part of the reason why such an overstated subtitle/thesis is so laughable – is the good that religion rather undeniably does in the world. This is where, in my opinion, Hitchens falls the hardest, looking out from his view of religion and, based on its so-hostile tenants, then trying to claim that just about every good thing religion’s ever done is nothing but the faithful inadvertently acting on essentially secular/humanistic principles. He acknowledges that “charity and relief work” might “appeal to tenderhearted believers,” but claims those things to be wholly consequences of “modernist and the Enlightenment.” (p. 192) But that’s absurd, seeing as charity was a fundamental part of the Christian church all the way back to Roman times.

Things get more egregious still when it comes to the poaching of individual believers and their accomplishments, particularly Martin Luther King, Jr: At no point did Dr. King […] even hint that those who injured and reviled him were to be threatened with any revenge or punishment, in this world or the next, save the consequences of their own brute selfishness and stupidity. All things that I, and I suspect most, would agree with, and perhaps, one might think, a reason for Hitchens to soften and acknowledge that some good can come from men of deep faith. Not at all, as it turns out. Instead, he, from this, concludes that King was, in no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, […] a Christian. (p. 176) It’s of course easy, Mr. Hitchens, to make the case that religion has had no good practitioners when you swoop in and claim that all goodly and godly men were not in fact godly.

So after all that criticism, I suspect my long time readers (if I’ve any left after all this and if I ever had any and if those I hypothetically do have ever thought I was particularly good at all this criticism stuff) are quite convinced I’m about to reach my conclusion, my dismissal of Hitchens’ overwrought, overstated, and too narrowly (and sometimes too unfairly) argued attack on religion. Not at all, as it turns out.

God is Not Great is a luxury car with the misfortune of having a maker convinced that it can fly and who, as a result, enters it into all sorts of competitions designed for helicopters and airplanes. This book is never going to sway a believer, prove the nonexistence of God, prove the malevolence of all believers, or disprove all the good things religion’s ever done. Truth be told, despite its own proclamations and subtitle, it’s not really designed for even attempting such a thing, and its few tries are rather weak, though admittedly quite impassioned. No, the roads this finely made automobile was meant to drive were more earthly ones, focused on the fallacies and flaws and weak humanity inherent in the practice of the religions and their leaders that it discusses.

Maybe the key part of all this is Hitchens’ prose. His might be the most fiery, caustic, dancing, biting and clawing writing that I’ve ever read, remorseless and witty, calculated to sting and cut, and fiercely intelligent. This is the kind of writing that will run roughshod over all boundaries, is near guaranteed (maybe even designed?) to cause offense, and is also prone to overshooting its mark on occasion, but the destructiveness is an integral part of its splendor: We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness. (p. 7) Countless times when reading I found myself laughing out loud, caught somewhere between the venom of the words and the ludicrousness of the actions described.

I’m tempted to go on like that for ages, but I’ll refrain. Similarly, I’ll avoid a recounting of all of Hitchens’ arguments. Such a thing might have proved interesting, but, on the points where we broadly agree, it’s no doubt better to let the author speak for himself than to rewrite his text here. Suffice to say, though, Hitchens on the warpath is a sight well worth seeing, and one that spits out immeasurable fascinating thoughts amidst its bile.

The final thing I want to discuss is Hitchens’ treatment of humanism, his alternative to religion. Taking refuge in the middle of all Hitchens’ anger are moments of joy and awe that are just as much a part of the whole, a reverence and respect for science and the natural world. Though Hitchens doesn’t outline what he thinks is needed in place of religion, he does give hints as to its character – and, of course, he defends it against religion’s counterattacks.

In the chapter An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch “Case” Against Secularism, Hitchens deals with one of the most pervasive arguments I’ve seen against atheism, namely the bringing out of its own tyrants and the discussion of the crimes of “secular and atheist regimes.” (p. 229) Some of the section is given to specific and factual linkings between religion and fascism and its crimes, and it’s quite successful at a fair bit of that, but the more interesting part, for me, was the discussion of totalitarianism in general. Hitchens says that totalitarianism – as exemplified by, say, the reverence towards the communist ruling party – should not be viewed as the opposite of religion but rather as, essentially, another form of it. Towards this end, Hitchens provides a very interesting quotation from George Orwell’s The Prevention of Literature: A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. (p. 232)

It’s a very interesting and well done section, and convincing in its way, but I can’t help but feel that Hitchens is here missing, or at least slightly dodging, the point. When most people say religion, they do not mean simply fundamentalism of any sort, and saying that the proper antithesis of secularists like Hitchens is not religion but all forms of dogmatic belief seems going too far. Hitchens may – and, of course, does – favor and encourage questioning and inquiry rather than dogma, but that doesn’t change the fact that atheists as a group are not defined by this questioning but rather by their lack of belief in god. Throwing all of the uncritical atheists back to the other side and saying they’re not wanted feels too much like (to use an example pertinent to this blog’s general focus) a literature professor pulling out all the good Science Fiction stories, pointing to the (almost by definition rubbish) remainder, and saying that, see, it’s a worthless genre after all.

It’s only in the tale end of the section that Hitchens gets to what is, in my eyes, the real reason that comparisons to Hitler, Stalin, and other monsters are not a real refutation of atheism. Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize, he says. But it can apologize for them, and also correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any unalterable system of belief. (p. 250) It’s true that Stalin and his ilk were atheists, but they are not in any way revered or held up as paragons of unalterable virtue in the way that the biblical prophets by definition are.

When all’s said and done, God is Not Great is a fascinating read that’s sure to provoke a reaction out of you. I think this is a work as dominated by its flaws as its successes, and it’s not one that I can wholly endorse or agree with. It is, nonetheless, an interesting and impassioned one, put together by an erudite author skilled with a pen. Hitchens is absolutely brilliant with specifics, and it's well worth it for the interested, in my eyes, to read this for those delectable and wrathful examples and expositions, even if some of the overall conclusions may not be nearly as roped in as one would like.

Publication: Twitter Story on Nanoism

2011-12-20T02:18:00.000-05:00

I wonder if anyone remembers the Twitter Stories I mentioned a few months back. But even those of you who caught that post, and read the two published pieces (one of which can still be read here), did not hear the whole story. See, there was a third piece. I wrote it at the same time as the others, sent it off, and... waited.

Well, no, that's not quite right. As it was so short, I didn't really include it on my normal story spreadsheet. In fact, I kind of forgot all about it. Which made it all the more surprising when, just a few days ago, I received an email from Nanoism telling me that they'd accepted it and, oh, by the way, were publishing it that day. Not exactly bad news. And, since I'm a firm believer in spreading such good tidings (or something like that), I figured I'd give you a link. If you've any interest, come check out my latest (very, very, very short) story here.

Angel: Season One

2011-12-13T20:07:00.000-05:00

At the close of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's third season, Angel, everyone's favorite vampire with a soul, left Sunnydale to start a new life (and, it seems, show) in Los Angeles. After drifting about and punching some vampires in an aimless, albeit satisfying fashion, he's approached by Doyle, who, with a direct line to the "powers that be," ends up being able to point Angel at those most in need of aid. Before long, Cordelia wanders back into the picture, the three of them have christened and set up Angel Investigations (We Help the Helpless), and the show's off and running.

Though both Buffy and Angel take place in the same world, and though there are a fair few overlaps, Angel differentiates itself from Buffy quickly and surely. First off, the tone here is totally different, dark, urban, and adult, rather than the high school (well, now, college) metaphors and snarky humor that make up much of Buffy. There's still humor here, of course – it's a Joss Whedon show, after all – but it's less prevalent. Less standout hilarious lines is, of course, a sad thing, but the show's atmosphere makes up for it.

The biggest difference between the two, though, is the lead character and, tied with that, their reasons for fighting. Now, each does pit an abnormally powerful individual against the forces of darkness and all that, but Buffy does so in a fashion similar to a super hero concept. She's light, they're dark, she kills them. Angel, however, is noir to the bone, and the show loves to play with the clichés of the genre, right down to the broke white knight detective against the world. Central to that is the fact that Angel is not like Buffy, cast as a savior by fate. Rather, he fights because he chooses to, and, though he's multiple opportunities to step away, to join the system and gain its power or even to be happy and free, he refuses to stop.

The greatest moments of heroism and character in the show, though, come from those around Angel. For the season's first half, the stage is often stolen by Glenn Quinn's Doyle, and it's his climax in Hero that is by far the most powerful and most affecting of the show's heroic moments. Coming soon after his departure is Alexis Denisof's Wesley Wyndam-Price. Now, I know I was rather hard on Wesley in my review of Buffy's third season, where he acted as an amusing but redundant stickler for the rules, but things are a whole different ball game here, and his determination, knowledge, vulnerability, and occasional incompetence are all damn effective.

Of course, while the standard noir hero is just one man fighting impossible odds, he is also intrinsically not just any man. The very fact that he alone refuses to go along with the system serves to differentiate him, making him – whether he be Hammett's Continental Op, Chandler's Marlowe, or any other detective you care to name – something fundamentally separate from those he's fighting for. In Angel, though, our private detective is not the same as those around him save for his determination. Angel is a vampire, as much a creature of supernatural strength and unnatural night as those he slays. For the most part, the show manages to either slide by this or, when it does bring it into the spotlight, play it as a wrathful avenger, a monster kills monsters type deal along the lines of, say, Dan Wells' recent I Am Not a Serial Killer.

At times, though, things are handled far less deftly, namely in the episodes She and War Zone. Angel – who, besides being inhuman, is a rich white man who, despite resolutely failing to charge the vast majority of his clients and having no other apparent source of income, lives in spacious quarters and drives a snazzy car – approaches, in one, oppressed women and, in the other, poor black children forced into a gang to survive the vampires attacking them. Each time, those in the group, at first, and rather reasonably, doubt Angel's ability to help them. And, each time, Angel proves that he can help anyone and everyone, regardless of their problem or situation, boiling the prejudices and difficulties against the groups into handily punchable opponents. The episodes aren't awful, but they both feel oversimplified and leave Angel a white knight with armor so bright and pure that it ends up defying belief, ironically making what could have been the show's grittiest episode (War Zone) into one of its most uncomplicated and superheroesque.

Most episodes, though, fair far better, thriving on the show's darker atmosphere and more adult tone. Many, like I Fall to Pieces and I've Got You Under My Skin, are genuinely creepy, even terrifying, to an extent that I can't remember anything on Buffy being. Others, like the Ring, are simpler but no less effective, while some – such as Eternity and the absolutely stunning Somnambulist – create incredible character arcs and portrayals in just forty minutes.

All of that's not even mentioning Five by Five and Sanctuary, the season's two Faith episodes, taking place immediately after Faith flees from Buffy. These two are made entirely of the rare moments when absolutely everything comes together, humor and tension and terror and more, to make something astounding. Faith, by this point, is utterly insane and utterly deadly, and her every moment is fantastic, but it's the conflicting reactions of Angel and Wesley that make the arc. Angel, the do gooder with the past of atrocities, can let no one go, can never acknowledge that there is a point after which redemption is impossible. Wesley, meanwhile, was brought up under the harsh and specific rules of the Watchers Council, and even that's before what Faith does to him in Five by Five.

From those and other episodes, much of Angel's worldview can be seen here. For him, it's never too late to turn around and redeem oneself – but, at the same time, there's no one harder than those who choose not to. Late in the season, in Blind Date, a member of Wolfram and Hart finds himself beset by moral qualms and wonders whether he should step away from the organization. Angel, after listening to him attempt to whitewash his own actions, shows damn little sympathy:

Lindsey: [We were] dirt poor. No shoes, no toilet, six of us kids in one room. And come flu season it was down to four. I was seven when they took the house. They just came right in and took it. And my daddy's being nice, you know? Joking with the bastards while he signs the deed. So yeah, we had a choice. You got stepped on or you got to stepping. And I swore to myself that I was not gonna be the guy standing there with a stupid grin on my face while my life got dribbled out.

Angel, after pretending to fall asleep: I'm sorry, I nodded off. Did you get to the part where you're evil? (Blind Date)

The organization that Lindsey works for there, the guys in suits that make up the system that Angel and the down and out must fight, are the season's big bad, or would be if the show ever really got around to the supposed center of its plot. The majority of those fantastic one episode arcs build to nothing and, though the shadowy law firm of Wolfram and Heart recurs in the shadows and in an increasingly adversarial way, we never get a glimpse of who they are or what they're trying to do. By the season's end, Wolfram and Heart have decided that Angel's their foe because he's interfering with their operations, but it's not possible to get even the faintest idea of just what he's interfering with or just what they'd be doing if he wasn't around.

In addition, as Wolfram and Hart's made up entirely of humans, with a security system that seems primarily made up of hope that they won't be attacked, it's difficult to see why Angel doesn't just burn the place to the ground. He's even shown to break in with nigh no trouble multiple times, but doesn't bother to destroy his foes, because… huh. Not particularly sure on that one. Besides which, Wolfram and Hart has the same thing. Yeah, they send the occasional super powered hitman after Angel towards the season's close, but why they don't do so with, say, a dozen at once, or why they don't go after those squishy mortals who like to help Angel, is hard to say. Not to mention that their final plan – bringing back a throwaway vampire from Buffy's first season that, yeah, maybe have sired Angel but never did anything interesting or important – is not quite making me quake with terror yet.

But while Wolfram and Hart still need to be explored in far greater depth, the show's got time and seasons yet, and what's here in season one is, for the most part, fantastic. The dark, urban atmosphere that Whedon and co have here birthed is oppressive and gripping, the characters at once flawed and larger than life, the plots at once complex and satisfying. All in all, Angel seems a more than worthy spin off to Buffy.

Standouts: Five by Five, Sanctuary, Somnambulist, Blind Date, Hero

K.J. Parker - The Hammer

2011-12-07T09:54:00.000-05:00

You can have justice, or you can keep the peace. Can't have both. (p. 379)

Though I can hardly call myself an expert in Parker's work, I have read The Folding Knife and the Engineer Trilogy, and the similarities between The Hammer and the latter of those two are unmistakable. Some of those are superficial, like how we've here, as we had there, a scene involving the urgent construction of some strange tool to save a man's life. But that pales compared to the rather larger similarity of a world, one filled with conflict but set in its ways, disrupted forever by a single freethinking man that fled the established order, outthought everyone else, started a factory, revolutionized the economy and technology of all those around him, had an ulterior motive, and changed everything.

Now, a similarity that gargantuan's a bit hard to overlook, but alright, fine. It was a great concept the first time, and I trust Parker as an author. Surely, she could make it work again, and surely she wouldn't shoot for the exact same payoff. Well, she didn't. But that's where the book's more serious problem lies. The Engineer Trilogy showed its hero of sorts undertaking a huge task, but that was just the beginning. Momentous as the factory was, it was the path to something much greater. Using a comparatively simple mechanism, the main character shifted the entire world and did something that, though tragic, was unmistakably incredible, grand, and all sorts of words like that. The Hammer, alas, plays out in rather the opposite fashion. Our factory builder, Gignomai met'Oc, does have an ulterior motive, but rather than being earth shaking, that motive's far, far smaller than what he seems poised to do. The novel's earthshaking rhetoric and epic build were all just smoke and mirrors. Amusingly enough, all that large scale stuff does end up happening, after our personal payoff, and it does so off screen and without any real fuss.

It's something like if you went to a great stage magician's show, and she took to the stage with a school bus behind her, and she gave a long speech about how she's going to lift the bus into the air with the power of her mind, then reshape it into a statue, or what have you. Then she takes a spoon out of her pocket, bends that, and wanders off. The spoon bending was all well and good, and might have been quite impressive in other circumstances, but it's rather hard to not feel more than a tad disappointed after all the buildup it got. Then, as you're walking to your car, the magician stops by and, in a section entitled Five Years Later, tells you that she actually did all that was promised, only she did it after the lights were out and everybody'd left. She briefly alludes to how interesting it might've been to see if only she'd let you, though, so there's that.

Why is this such a problem? After all, in her aforementioned stand alone, The Folding Knife, Parker plays out the drama of one man's life on a grand stage. What makes that not work here, though, is that, unlike in The Folding Knife, the characters are not only unsympathetic but also unreletable. Some are cold and distant, others are only presented to us in that way, but we can grow close to none of them. That's not necessarily a problem in an epic, but it certainly is in a personal story about one man's obsessions. Like Vaatzes, Gignomai interacts with people as if they're objects, as if he's a "scientist" and the world's but a culture for him to fool around with and bend to his will, life just an "experiment" for him to manipulate to his satisfaction (p. 217). That could work for a man unfeelingly shaping nations, but when his goal is a familial one, I, at least, felt little more than the vague disappointment that comes when a great power is used for some minor end.

Of course, Gignomai's not the novel's only character. He is, though, the only one with any mystery to him. Through the entire novel, I can only think of one genuinely and emotionally human moment, and it takes place very near the end, though I won't say exactly what it is to avoid spoiling the text for those who've yet to read it. That one moment struck me, added untold depths to the character who expressed it, and made me, for a few brief moments, really feel the human consequences of Gignomai's actions. If the rest of the book had been like that, it would've been heartbreaking and immeasurably more powerful. But the rest of the characters, besides Gignomai and that one other flash, are concepts given flesh and blood, walking playthings for Gignomai to shape as he chooses. Amusingly enough, many of them are even aware of this. The town's shopkeep and mayor even begins to think of himself as a "properly greedy man" (p. 300) before all that long. The explanation for this could, I suppose, be that Parker's only capable of writing obvious characters unless, as she does with Gignomai, she simply hides everything about them, but I don't think that's true. After all, though it focused on much of the same themes as The Hammer, the Engineer Trilogy had several complex and fascinating personalities, and The Folding Knife had its riveting star, Basso. Leaving that out, though, I really can't say why most of the characters here fall so flat.

The distance is reinforced by the prose, though there is still a huge amount of Parker's always stunning irreverence towards traditions, loyalty, and life itself: [He] had no idea how to kill a man with his bare hands. It turned out to be one of those things you can pick up as you go along. (p. 342)

But when you laugh – and laugh, I think, you will – you're not laughing with the characters, even if they made a joke. You're laughing at how much more than them you know, even if it's not much, and at how terrible things are and will grow, and at how deserving they are or are not for the fate that you know that's coming.

Even when Parker relates her character's thoughts directly, the prose is still distant. We come to see these people, and we come to understand them, but we never really come to sympathize with them. Midway through the text, we see that Gignomai looked up so fast he banged the top of his head on a cross-beam. He felt a strong pulse in his scalp, and something wet dribbled down over his forehead. (p. 279) We see the physical and emotional effects of the story in every detail, we know why Gignomai hit his head and what happened afterwards and that blood dribbled down, but we see all this through a lense, and the detail that's never mentioned is whether this hurt, and we're certainly never made to wince alongside him.

This is, I realize, a really negative review. I should, likely, qualify it a bit. I didn't hate The Hammer. I even enjoyed reading just about every minute of it, loved the writing, was intrigued for most of it, and finished it in two days. But the book's ending was more a whimper than a bang, and the fact that, for all its interesting aspects, it was building up to nothing, rather trashed my fond memories of most of the experience. This isn't the kind of book where you cheer for the hero, and, because there's never a tenth of the way credible opponent, it's also not the kind where you wonder for even a moment if that hero's going to win. In the end, the The Hammer's the kind of book that's experienced through a lense or a microscope, with the reader not at all a part of the action and along just to see how things turn out, and, well, they don't really turn out at all, at least not on stage in any of the ways we might've been tempted to see.

George R.R. Martin - Tuf Voyaging

2011-11-29T13:45:00.001-05:00

The plague star twinkles but little, shines down upon the land with a clear bright light. This is wrong, I told Janeel once; a plague star ought to be red. It ought to glower, to drape itself with scarlet radiance, to whisper into the night hints of fire and of blood. This clear white purity, what has that to do with plague? That was in the first days, when our charter ship had just set us down to open our proud little trade complex, set us down and then moved on. In that time the plague star was but one of fifty first-magnitude stars in these alien skies, hard even to pick out. In that time we smiled at it, at the superstitions of these primitives, these backward brutes who thought sickness came from the sky. (p. 14-5)

Tuf Voyaging opens with a planet bound glimpse of the orbiting Ark, a ship of the long lost Ecological Engineering Corps that, now abandoned, rains plagues down upon the surface of a ruined world. Our focus soon shifts upwards, as Haviland Tuf, the Tuf of our title, gains control of the ship and its near unlimited power. Though composed of eight distinct short stories, this is a collection with a strong arc, and it's one of power, responsibility, maybe even divinity, and – let's not forget – more inventiveness and wit than your average author can dream of.

The first and longest tale, The Plague Star, brings us to that celestial doom bringer and forces us to cower, antlike, before its mass. Like almost all of the collection's pieces, we are relegated to a somewhat distant view of Tuf, but here we don't see him as a titan come with benevolence or malevolence but rather as a man, a down on his luck trader hired to be the most expendable part of a crew made of near nothing but, hired to take them all to a prize so vast they'd all gain wealth beyond comprehension if they could secure it. Of course, as soon as Tuf's Cornucopia of Excellent Goods at Low Prices ferries their crew of retired soldiers, bodyguards, cybertechs, and career criminals to the colossal Ark, things fall right to hell. The Plague Star shows every character gunning for every other, a free for all filled with violence, cleverness, and trickery amidst the echoing corridors and dormant cloning tanks. Before long, a handy tide of delightful monsters and plagues have joined the fracas. Yeah, it's clear from the get go who's going to be relaxing on the bridge at the end of all the shooting, but that doesn't detract one bit from the mayhem. This's a rather different tale from the collection's others, focused more on action than theme, and it's likely the most fun, even if not the best.

From then on, with Tuf in firm (and sometimes not so firm) possession of the Ark, the collection becomes the story of his change (or, depending on your interpretation, lack thereof). In each of the tales to come, Tuf is presented with a seemingly impossible ecological problem and must find the solution. This is where, in my opinion, some of Martin's most colorful creations can be found. Handed the life-generating powers of the Ark, with the limitations and to some extent necessary realism of long form work removed, Martin lets his imagination fly here, presenting us with a variety stunning sights and ideas. In Guardians, for instance, we see a war between horrors beneath the sea and those in the seedships vast cloning vats: To hunt the drifting fire-balloons [Tuf] brought forth countless fliers: lashtail mantas, bright red razorwings, flocks of scorn, semi-aquatic howlers, and a terrible pale blue thing – half-plant and half-animal – that drifted with the wind and lurked inside clouds like a living, hungry spiderweb. Tuf called it the-weed-that-weeps-and-whispers. (p. 235)

The height of all that, though, is likely A Beast for Norn, which readers of Dreamsongs have experienced in slightly different form (along with, actually, the also just mentioned tale Guardians). A Beast for Norn has Tuf visiting a planet famed for its gladiatorial combat, each of its great houses pitting its monsters against the next. That, of course, is a situation just waiting for a man with a titanic vessel filled with all the great beasts of the ages, and so it proves, Martin somehow managing to balance a stylish and moral tale with exhibiting a menagerie resplendent with potential and sheer fun.

Tuf's genesis, Martin reveals in Dreamsongs, was an attempt to generate a proper series, one centered on a "larger than life" (p. 563, Dreamsongs) character who "the readers would enjoy following story after story." (p. 562, ibid) To say that he succeeded is an understatement of the kind that Tuf himself might find rather excessive. Tuf is a vegetarian and a pacifist, the possessor of untold power and unmatchable physical strength besides, a fussy and fastidious man, as obsessed with formality as he is irreverent towards the customs of others. He's implacable and huge and hairless; his only sentimental attachment is his cats – named Dax, Suspicion, Doubt, Hostility, Ingratidue, and Foolishnes to commemorate the rude treatment he receives at his various ports of call – and he often extols the virtues of the feline to any and all who will listen (or, of course, that must listen). And none of that's yet touching on his fantastically dry wit. At one point, a military officer tells him that his seedship is "impossible," for "the EEC was wiped out a thousand years ago, along with the Federal Empire. None of their seedships remain." Tuf's response, in all its wry glory: "How distressing […] Here I sit in an illusion. No doubt, now that you have told me my ship does not exist, I shall sink right through it and plunge into your atmosphere, where I shall burn up as I fall." (p. 206)

But there's a troubling, thought-provoking, and nigh unforgettable core beneath all the collection's levity. As things proceed, a truth soon becomes clear. It is not enough, and is not even possible, to simply solve the environmental symptoms of the problems that Tuf encounters. No, he can liberate the men he finds from the consequences of their mistakes, but he knows that, as he departs, they will make those mistakes again. And so Tuf changes again, and he begins to alter the men themselves.

The center of the collection's arc is the trio of tales set on S'uthlam, a world beset by overpopulation and long ago exceeded resources. The first time, Tuf tries to save them with simple technology. But, as he is shown again and again, there is no possible solution that is merely technological. So Tuf, witnessing a universe filled with problems, and aware that he has the ability to solve them, steps in to fix them. It's something he must do, he argues, no matter how much the people of that world wish him not to. Failure to decide, because you lack the right, is itself a decision, (p. 438) he says. Tuf remakes the worlds around him to match his own ideas of progress.

The dilemma of right and intervention is an interesting one, but the true blow from all this comes from the reader's own realization. Each of the collection's tales is an escalation from that preceding it, both in moral complexity and in the scale of Tuf's intervention. And while I'm sure the exact point each reader begins to feel queasy will vary, that moment of revelation will come, and it's that revelation – the realization that the reader has been blithely supporting this remaking, unconsidering and as unable to see beyond Tuf's exterior as the characters – that gives such awful power to Tuf's debatably megalomaniacal declaration to the man named Moses in the second to last story, Mana from Heaven:

"I was born human, and lived as such for long years, Moses. Yet then I found the Ark and I have ceased to be a man. The powers I may wield are vaster than those of many gods that humans have worshipped. There is not a man I meet but I could take his life. There is not a world I pause on that I could not waste utterly, or remake as I choose. I am the Lord God, or as much of one as either of you is likely to encounter.

"It is a great fortune or you that I am kind and benevolent and merciful, and too frequently bored. You are counters to me, nothing more – pieces and players in a game with which I have whiled away a few weeks." (p. 382)

Tuf Voyaging is the story of a man turning into a god, though whether it's a benevolent or malevolent diety he becomes is a question best left to each individual reader. This is not a collection that can be enjoyed in the same way as some of Martin's other work, like his landmark A Song of Ice and Fire. Reading, you don't sympathize with Tuf and, really, there's never any doubt at all about whether he'll succeed. This is, nonetheless, an excellent read well worth the attention of any of Martin's fans or any Science Fiction, a narrative of spectacle and humor with enough depth to comfortably envelop Tuf's vast ship.

[Note: all page numbers from the Meisha Merlin limited hardcover edition]

Robert McCammon - The Wolf's Hour and The Hunter from the Woods

2011-11-25T10:22:00.001-05:00

My review of Robert McCammon's two Michael Gallatin novels, The Wolf's Hour and The Hunter from the Woods, is now up at Strange Horizons here.

This Week's Review...

2011-11-22T00:52:00.001-05:00

This week's review will be coming on Friday, when Strange Horizons posts my review of Robert McCammon's two Michael Gallatin works, The Wolf's Hour and the Hunter from the Woods.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Four

2011-11-15T13:09:00.001-05:00

If you'll allow me to paint with a broad brush, I'd characterize Buffy the Vampire Slayer's evolution something like this: after the interesting but flawed first season, the second was a tightly plotted and gripping endeavor, where a relentless plot, driven by a brilliant villain, was underscored and aided by moments of character revelation. The next and third season, meanwhile, was less plot focused, instead allowing the characters, and their interaction and growth, to shape the story. When the main story gets started it's lackluster, but even that's nothing compared to how it takes nearly half the season to jerk into its sorry excuse for motion. The first nine episodes, and a fair few later ones, are concentrated filler, devoid of real character or plot growth, farce only made somewhat passable by witty dialogue. [A warning: SPOILERS follow.]

Looking back, I think the pattern for season openers is rather clear, now: Buffy is in a bad place psychologically, and, by the episode's end, she's pretty much reverted to normal. This worked brilliantly in Anne, the opener of last season, but is, here, rather less successful. In The Freshman, she needs to adjust to college life and the freedom that it offers after being beaten up by a big, bad, super scary collegiate vampire. Once she decides, eh, it'll still probably die if she stakes it, she's good to go, and we're off. Ish.

Character growth?

One of the biggest, or at least earliest, changes between this and earlier seasons is the setting. Buffy and pals have now graduated high school, and, as the first episode – The Freshman – shows us, they're now off to college. But Buffy never becomes a show about college in the way that it used to be a show about high school. Classes are rarely shown, little of the campus is particularly interacted with, and nigh no attempts are made to really bring the overall place to life. About all this, Spike at one point says: You know how it is with kids. They go off to college, they grow apart. Way of the world. This is, of course, a dark thing that must be fought against and all, but, really, it's quite true. Deprived of the established location and feel of its prior sets – both due to moving on in the world and to them having been blown to hell at the end of Graduation Day – the show feels in some ways without a center, something certainly exacerbated by Xander and Giles, neither of which are attending the school, the latter for obvious reasons. They spend the season trying to prove their continuing relevance and largely failing. Giles drinks, is amusing, and is superfluous; Xander goes from odd job to odd job, hangs out with Anya, and develops no life at all outside of his old friends who have, as he notes, rather left him behind.

Willow, meanwhile, has by far the most, and maybe even the only wholly, effective long term arc of the season. For the first time since season two, Oz must face the consequences of his lycanthropy, but things, expressed through his growing fascination for both the wild and for fellow werewolf Veruca (Paige Moss)), aren't so easy to solve this time. Without ever breaking his trademark stoicism, Oz realizes he's no longer able to so easily continue being the man he once was with the beast inside him raging, and he departs. Soon after, Amber Benson's Tara comes into the picture, a witch on or beyond Willow's level. More importantly, the chemistry between the two is fantastic. All of which sets up one of the season's most tragic, yet perfectly understandable moments: when Oz returns, later, and finds that, though he's managed to reclaim who he once was, everyone else has moved on.

Profundity?

Most Buffy episodes, and all of the best, straddle the line between humor and drama, making us laugh and also making us care. Most of season four's earlier episodes, on the other hand, fall right off the line and land smack in comedy, earning some fair laughs but possessing nigh no staying power. Beer Bad, in which we learn that alcohol of all varieties turns men in to cavemen, is likely the clearest example of this. It's also not the only one to try the moralizing game, and it's not the only one to fail. Pangs is about the rise of a Native American spirit determined to avenge the wrongs done to his people. The episode focuses on the morality of even opposing such a force. As Willow says: Thanksgiving isn't a-about blending of two cultures. It's about one culture wiping out another! And then they make animated specials about the part where... w-with the maize and th-the big, big belt buckles. They don't show you the next scene, where... where all the bison die, and Squanto takes a musketball in the stomach! (Pangs) All well stated and all, and I'm certainly not going to say the Native Americans deserved smallpox or anything like that, but equating a battle against the spirit with the trail of tears is absolutely idiotic. Want to know the difference? It's rather simple. The Native American in question here is dead. There is no longer a peaceful reconciliation. This is not a question of how to treat a people, but rather of whether it's the duty of all Sunnydale citizens to die at the hands of a corpse for crimes committed by their distant ancestors. Forgive me if I'm not all that conflicted.

As usual, there are some magic-focused episodes, and, as usual, they're amusing as hell and have the aftereffect of making everything a damn sight and a half less believable and consistent for episodes uncountable to come. Something Blue's here the main example of this, though Superstar certainly fits the archetype. Something Blue shows Willow accidentally wreaking havoc with a spell gone wrong. But, while the idea of Buffy and Spike getting married is a damn amusing one, this episode faces the same problem as a lot of the show's more magic focused episodes, namely that it entirely breaks… well, everything. If Willow can cast a spell to make her every whim reality, why've the gang yet to resurrect their foreign allies, slay their enemies, and wished for boatfuls of cash to boot?

The main plot of season four has a ton of potential, at least on paper. It addresses one of the aspects of Buffy I've always found lacking, namely the rest of the world's reaction to the whole vampire thing. Well, here, the government gets in on the game with the Initiative, a force of commandos posing as college students (…because) that capture and experiment on vampires and the night's other assorted beasties. The organization's two aspects are summed up in two characters (each of which ends up passing that torch along, but more on that in a bit). First there's Marc Blucas' Riley Finn, a soldier who exemplifies the dependable soldier archetype, determined to do good and sure he's doing it. Then there's everyone's favorite mad scientist, anything to get the job done figure, here Lindsay Crouse's Maggie Walsh, played cool and disapproving throughout.

Buffy, of course, comes in contact with the Initiative (or, well, she does after spending half a season doing nothing much), and she does so through Riley, who she begins to date, not knowing his penchant for night time camo and morning pushups. The drama here seems obvious… which is part of why it's so disappointing when it doesn't bother to show up. The Initiative's initial reaction to her being a Slayer is essentially "Oh, huh. That's odd," which is shortly followed by Maggie's decision that killing her would clearly be a good idea. So, alright, we skipped a few steps and most of the subtlety, but we're at least heading interesting places, right? Things are no longer as simple as demons bad, people good, and Buffy might have to face the implications of…

Moral complexity?

Oh, wait, never mind. That's not how it happens at all. Actually, Maggie Walsh is quickly bumped off by the fruits of her mad science, George Hertzberg's Adam, who is a Frankenstein/Prometheus character desirous of understanding and transcending the boundaries of mortality. He's not a bad character, even if he is a familiar one, and his detached musings do make a decent combination with his strength, but he's a simple character and turns it all into a simple situation. In the past, Whedon's proven a master of twisting the situation so that he can approach complex themes through simple metaphors, but here, having Adam signify everything that's bad about the Initiative in a nicely killable and demonic form deprives the set up of all its interesting parts. With its dangerous element gone, the Initiative – now sans Riley, who's been forced to question everything he's held dear in the one somewhat effective part of all this – bumbles around, irrelevant except when it wanders into the way of someone more important.

One of the side effects of all this is Spike, who's captured by the Initiative towards the beginning of the season. He escapes, but not before they put a chip in his head, and he finds himself suddenly unable to harm any living thing. The initial scenes of this are hilarious, with Spike attacking Willow, finding himself unable to bite her, and her then consoling him for a moment (You're being too hard on yourself. Why don't we wait a half an hour and try again? (The Initiative)) before bashing him on the head. All the same, it really does seem for much of the season that his character and magnetism might've been broken in the shift to impotence. He spends his time hanging around in Giles' house and then Xander's basement, doing nothing much at all, and the revelation that he can still hurt demons, though it seems placed to allow him to really join the good guys' side, doesn't end up amounting to much. It's only at the end, when Spike joins into an alliance with Adam, that he gets his agency and drive back, and his scenes again feel like they've a purpose. I love Spike, he's my favorite character by far on the show, but I hope that, if he's going to be staying around long term, he's given more to do in future seasons than wander about in Xander's cast off clothing.

In the end, Buffy defeats Adam, the Initiative is disbanded because demons are too dangerous to try and harness (because everyone knows the government usually gives up on incredible power just because it's dangerous), and things're just about restored. The main plot, though not awful once it gets going, is never that great. Like all the way back in season one, it's the side stories and one offs that here hold the power, chief among them Hush. The idea of a television episode, let alone one of such a wit-driven show as Buffy, being silent save for music for most of its length is a rather iffy one, on paper. In practice, though, it's one of the strongest episodes of the entire show. The villains, the calm and sophisticated looking Gentlemen and their horrifically demented helpers, are fantastic, and, here, the inability to scream heightens the terror immeasurably, casting every space, no matter how wide or populated, as the site of a claustrophobic nightmare.

It's not the only excellent episode, though. Where the Wild Things Are also successfully builds tension, atmosphere, and drama, something perhaps aided by how, with Buffy and Riley (ahem) occupied, the show needs to turn to its other elements. For character moments, though, Faith's two episode return is impossible to top. Over its course, as Buffy and Faith find their places quite literally switched, the two are forced to, to some extent, come to terms with the other. It's a concept that could have devolved into melodrama, but the excellent dialogue (humorous and anything but), tension, and Buffy's anger make it anything but. These episodes are fast moving and hard hitting, resplendent with all the energy, terror, and raw pain that made Faith's demise at the end of the prior season so unforgettable.

Season four's not awful, but it's certainly nowhere near the standards set by its predecessors. The main plot is slow to develop and only adequate when it does, and the side stories often fail spectacularly, leaving us with a show that often feels like it's coasting on its past success and only able to reach higher through its (excellent) dialogue. And then come episodes like the ones just described, and suddenly everything's back in place, and the quality level's as high or higher than it's ever been. Here's to hoping Whedon and co can, next time, keep those highs and, just maybe, find a main plot with a touch more spark…

STANDOUTS: Hush, This Year's Girl/Who Are You?, Where the Wild Things Are

Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

2011-11-08T12:31:00.001-05:00

After a prologue in which our child protagonist skinny dips in a quarry with his cousin love, and in which the two vow to meet again come twenty years to the day, If You Could See Me Now opens with its first person narrator, a now-aged Miles Teagarden, returning to the rural town of his youth. For him, the past is not done with. No, to him the past is something that inescapable and desirable, something that could, would, should be repeated indefinitely, that it was the breathing life in the heart of the present (p. 49). As the novel progresses, and as the date of Miles' promised meeting with Allison, his love, nears, he finds himself drawing deeper into a past more complex, horrible, and inviting than he could have imagined, a past that still colors the fabric of Arden and the surrounding farmland and decides the way that every man, woman, and child of the area views his return.

And oh, oh how I wish I could end this review's opening there, keep it as a discussion of intrigue and inevitability that carries the implicit promise of brilliant fulfillment. I was really looking forward to this book after all the things I'd heard of Straub, and the opening pages did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm. Alas, what followed did a more than ample job of that. This is a novel devoid of emotional impact due to a series of bizarre developments and stylistic choices, and it's also a novel that seems determined to, by the time the last page's turned, have undermined and shattered every one of its thematic conceits. A warning before we begin: there will be SPOILERS.

The center of our tale and its problems is, of course, Miles Teagarden. Miles is a narrator as detached as they come. Near the beginning, he mentions that he has "olfactory hallucinations" (p. 20). He smells things that are not there, a visceral reaction with no rational reason. Swap emotions for smells, and that's not a bad description of the reading of this novel, except that, where Miles says his hallucinations (which never play a major role in the plot) are "disquieting and unsettling," (p. 20) their effect on the reader is more one of disassociation. It's not that Miles never explains his actions, and it's not that he never shows emotion. No, he does quite a bit of both of those. It's just that there's a profound disconnect between the two. The decisions that Miles mentally agonizes about seem to have almost no resemblance to what he does, and his reactions to events seem to vary between disproportionately extreme and utterly muted.

We never come to have the slightest understanding of Miles as a person. He comes from a big name university back east, but we receive no glimpse of it. He is writing on D.H. Lawrence, but thinks about Lawrence maybe one or two times in the entire novel. Before long, he's abandoned that project, and instead spends his days writing… something, it's never really revealed what, but he certainly goes and does whatever it is a lot. Besides that, he hangs out with various people and does various bewildering things like pretending to shop lift and, for reasons undecipherable, ripping up paperback books in a bar. Okay. By their very nature, the actions here are building to nothing, and Miles is such a distant character, and one so devoid of sympathetic traits, that there's little reason to care about his odds if they were.

A large part of this is that we're not clued in to major swathes of the motivations that Miles does have. Some measure of the town's hate can be explained by Miles' outsider status in a time fresh after a murder, but the personal animosity and hatred he receives – the pastor delivers an entire sermon against him personally – beggars belief. Indeed, hints soon start to accumulate about Miles' past, references to dark deeds and the terrible outcome of his cousinly swim out at the quarry that we glimpsed the beginning of. Then there are the statements that are littered through the narrative, first person accounts given by the townspeople to the police of Miles' actions, and the way that each of these differs so strongly from the way that Miles himself depicts those events. The final revealer comes not long after, when Miles takes the letters he's been mysterious letters he's been receiving, tied to dear Allison, to his old buddy (or so he thinks) the Police Chief, and the Chief says that the addresses are done in his handwriting.

Alright then, right there, case closed. Fellow readers of horror, say it with me, as we've seen it so many times: Miles is insane. Clearly, we've trespassed into the territory of unreliable narrators, here, and our protagonist is either lying or utterly clueless about what's going on. From there, it's not a far leap to get to the source of all the townspeople's hatred, of Miles' longing, of the disparate clues littered about the narrative. Allison is dead, likely ever since that night at the quarry, and it seems our boy Miles had something to do with it. All this is put on the table a short while later, a reveal just before the second part begins, albeit a reveal explicitly stated on the back cover, because evidently nothing entices people to read a novel quite like giving them the twist.

So, our supernatural cards on the table, things turn into a waiting game as the 21^st approaches. Straub's primary method of building otherworldly tension relies on dreams and the like, which might be fine, except that the sense of evil never leaves them, never crosses over the clearly marked line and into the main text. Yes, there're moments of terror, even one or two when Miles' eyes aren't shut, but they're all kept well away from the main scenes, and there're warning signs a plenty as they approach. Much like how the monster isn't scary if it agrees to go away at a particular time, these scenes do little to contribute to an overall feeling of dread.

The whole thing is built up as love, love gone sick and perverted and twisted, a real life reenacting of the tragedy of Duane's "dream house," ineptly built to fit his love and left empty and broken forever. But for all this to work, the reader would have to care for Allison, would have to feel the strength of the narrator's bond with her as well as it's darkness, and, like how there's little reason to feel such fear, there's no reason at all for the reader to love Allison. She's never glimpsed again outside of the prologue, and the characters of the novel ,save the narrator seem to have almost totally forgotten her. She wasn't some avatar of kindness, and, though we're told she was a spirit of freedom, our only evidence of that is that she had sex with a variety of men that included her teacher. And here we are, two decades later, and the narrator's never been able to truly love anyone else.

Anyway, on the mundane level of the town of Arden, tensions continue to grow. Miles manages to discover the events of that night at the quarry, and who Allison's real killers and rapists were, namely Duane and the Police Chief. He responds to this revelation with sulking, they with limp anger. Meanwhile, as a third girl of Allison's rough age has gone missing, the town is in an uproar. Though there's the matter of his absolution for Allison's death, and a red herring or two, the reader's prime suspect is (or, at least, mine was) Miles. After all, his actions are still bizarre, and surely some kind of madness must lie behind his coming to meet a dead girl, his bizarre actions throughout the novel, and the detached and irrational way in which he speaks and acts.

But… no. Actually, the returning dead girl is – brace yourself – evil! And Miles realizes this with rather little fanfare, just mute acceptance. After wondering whether to just wander away for a bit, Miles decides to go to the quarry on the night of her return, though there's no better reason given than that it would be "where it would end." (p. 302) He sits through the night, and it looks for a second like he really might be mad, like he might be "stranded alone in only the human world," (p. 308) and faced with the knowledge that he did kill those kids. But wait! Nevermind, there's our climax, just running a bit behind schedule, and, after the ghost kills those who killed her twenty years ago, he gets to blow her up with some gasoline and run out of a burning house. Day saved.

If You Could See Me Now seems to be setting itself up as a story of tortured love, about how we can never escape our pasts. That's a story that, here, is crippled by the fact that we're never given a reason to care about that past. Even the concept falls down and collapses when Miles does glibly overcome his past and burns his old love to hell in a nice action movie finish, before driving off into the sunset, his every action having apparently been normal, his questions answered, and his revenge gotten without him having to dirty his hands. I know this is a damn well regarded novel, but I can't for the life of me see why, and I can't think of a single aspect that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

H.P. Lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

2011-11-01T20:43:00.000-04:00

In his life, H.P. Lovecraft wrote only three novel length works, the second of which was The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Lovecraft thought the tale poor, calling it, in a letter to Barlow, a cumbering, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism (p. 389), and he never made any attempts to publish it. In the time since, however, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward has come to be considered a more than worthy addition to Lovecraft's body of works. This is a human story, one where characters and their aims dominate the stage, and, perhaps stemming from that, this may be Lovecraft's most plot focused work. [Two brief notes before we begin: First, SPOILERs will follow. Second, all page numbers come from the Penguin Classics edition of The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories unless otherwise noted.]

Though things generally do progress in a chronological manner, the power of the plot does not come from a traditional escalation of events and tensions but rather through successive revelations. Frequently, the importance of events cannot be discerned until well after their passage, and, in the novel's first half, our protagonist, dear Charles Ward, is himself attempting to unravel the dark past surrounding his ancestor, Joseph Curwen. In addition to that, not only is the reader trying to piece together facts, and not only is the character, but the narrator, too, is writing with an outsider's eye, combining numerous sources to try and comprehend the true happenings of the tale with varying degrees of success.

The downsides of such a style can be felt strongly in the opening. After the intriguing first section, we switch to a view of Ward's youth that is filled in endless historical details, near no tension, and that does, alas, serve to justify a bit of Lovecraft's dismissal of the work. But, soon after, disquiet seeps into the narrative, something that only serves to grow, often exponentially, as Ward's probing turns from the innocuous past and to its darkest aspects. When, in the story's final chapters, we do finally understand the tale's core and events surge forward, the scholarly detail and multiplicity of sources from which it's been compiled, lend the text an air of powerful authenticity, leaving the reader not feeling like they've been told of great and dark happenings but that, through their own insight and research, they've discovered those happenings themselves.

One result of this is Lovecraft's prose throughout the story. Lovecraft's style can be, perhaps, said to consist of two interlocking parts. First, there's the scholarly side, something superficially aided by his intentionally archaic spellings and diction but really coming forth in his approach to detail, in how many of his stories start with what could serve as the openings to essays, and in the erudition he always displays. Then there's his penchant for climax and even hysteria, the moments of startling eloquence where his words seem as grand and immortal as the farthest reaches of whatever he's describing, as well as, alas, his oft parodied excesses.

While both of those are, to some extent, present in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it's by far the former that predominates. With only a few exceptions, the majority of the text's first, say, two thirds, are devoid of stylistic flourishes, and those that are there, interestingly, are often of a more positive or beautiful nature, brief reprieves from the darkness that, depending on the mindset of the soul seeing them, may or may not be perceived: That he said nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its luring skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads and alleys whose mystic convolutions and sudden vistas alternately beckon and surprise, was taken by his parents as a good index of the degree to which his new interests had engrossed his mind. (p. 141) It's only far later that Lovecraft's writing takes on any of its sometimes-donned oppressive weight, layering and filling the sections spent in the bowels of Curwen's home with, at once, a sense of dark majesty and of nigh irresistible claustrophobia.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward has, I think, some of Lovecraft's strongest work with character. Now, mind you, I don't mean that in a third person limited point of view, follow them around and know their lives sense. What I do mean, though, is that, as we accumulate and acquire facts that allow us to understand the characters' actions, we begin to see the characters themselves. In large part precisely because of how little of his inner workings are ever shown, Charles Ward becomes a tragic figure, his passions and light wholly subsumed into the darkness brought on by Curwen's influence. The other figures, too, receive depth through the narrator's assembly of their story's, but the most interesting aspect is the contrast between Curwen and Ward.

As the novel progresses, and as Ward loses more and more of his humanity, we see several letters, written in a dense and anachronistic style, between Curwen and his confederates, not a one of them any longer mortal in the traditional sense. And the fascinating thing is that, in marked contrast to Ward's obsession, these letters are, in places, positively warm, showing evidence of a genuine friendship amidst the deepest darkness: I rejoice you are again at Salem, Curwen writes, and hope I may see you not longe hence. I have a goode Stallion, and am think'g of get'g a Coach, there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in Providence already, tho' ye Roades are bad. If you are dispos'd to Travel, doe not pass me bye. (p. 130)

On the surface, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward seems to fit snugly within the mythos and their thematic implications that Lovecraft is so (justly) famous for. To sum things up in the briefest manner possible, the mainstay of Lovecraft's fiction focuses on man's place in the universe, and how that place is wholly insignificant, irrelevant, ephemeral, and so on and so forth. The Call of Cthulhu, to pick what's likely his best known work, or The Colour out of Space, to pick what's likely my favorite of the lot, both focus on man coming to terms with the wider world and being brushed aside, trampled, and ignored, surviving only because forces greater than he don't care enough to extinguish him any more than we'd wage a global war against ants.

Here, the surface details do seem to match up. Not only does this happen to be the first place where the recurring Mythos entity Yog Sothoth is mentioned, the tale's horror comes from a man venturing beyond the spheres of mortal and sane life and even past time (p. 203). In fact, in its focus on the dark sides of science and progress, the story serves to illustrate the so-famous opening paragraph to Call of the Cthulhu: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (p. 355, H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction)

But The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a human story in a way that the majority of the Mythos' centerpiece tales are not. Of course, this is not the only instance where the great beyond has its human familiars, or even its dark sorcerers, but Jospeh Curwen and his associates are different from the crazed cultists of the Call of the Cthulhu, the degenerate Whatley of the Dunwich Horror, or whoever else you care to name. Curwen, see, is in control. He ventures "beyond the spheres," yes, and does things no mortal ever could, but he himself is the architect, and his aims are, in their twisted way, human ones. It's not interdimensional monstrosities that he creates from his essential saltes (p. 90) but rather the titan thinkers of all ages (p. 186), and, though his aims may alter all civilization, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe (p. 186), their acts in doing so are driven by humans with their ends also being comprehensible in nature, even if their means are not. This is not a tale of man discovering the entity greater than itself that will destroy us, but rather of man discovering powers beyond what can be conceived and destroying itself.

Of course, this interpretation can be contested, especially with regards to the recurring warning throughout the text to never call up Any that you cannot put downe. (p. 190) And Curwen, after all, is, it's implied, killed the first time by a creature that he lost control of. But I think the fact that any control at all was possible, no matter that he lost it in the end, show this to be an exceptional case in Lovecraft's Mythos. After all, can you imagine a man, no matter his ultimate fate, slapping a saddle on the back of Cthulhu or, for any time at all, directing a shoggoth?

All that, though, is not to say that there is not a free and supernatural agent in the text, for there is, but – and here's the amazing thing – it's actually a force for good, and one called, one must not forget, more by a well-meaning character's bumbling than by dark designs. The rising of the entity, that which was therein inhum'd (p. 190), that Willet accidentally calls to life forms a damn excellent climactic moment, but its implications are far greater than just that. It's this man, whose identity can never be confirmed (though that does nothing to diminish the fun of speculating i), that strikes the greatest blows against the unnatural practices of Curwen and his cohorts, a man capable of wielding stronger weapons (p. 195) than the simply mortal. That benevolent and supernatural force, and the happy(ish) ending it brings, are certainly anomalies in Lovecraft's so-strictly amoral Mythos.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a fascinating and, once it gets going, gripping novel that's far greater than Lovecraft himself thought. I don't think I'd recommend it as an entry point for the man's work – there are far more immediately enthralling tales, and it'd likely be best to understand the core of Lovecraft's Mythos before venturing to their outskirts – but this is nonetheless a necessary read for anyone looking for a complete understanding of Lovecraft's writings, Mythos, and thoughts.It's damn difficult to find meaning in a world where life can be created and dissolved by the mad, where the laws of society and nature are just playthings for the powerful. And yet, with the text's close, the men perpetrating the evil, if not the ability for the evil itself, have been destroyed, and the evidence of their actions undone. True, Ward has fallen victim to his tragic need to know and understand, and those around him will never be the same, but the world does go on. Maybe, if we stay huddled in our corners and never stray too far, it'll stay that way.

The Metamorphosis of Jane Doe

2011-10-31T18:01:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, the website hosting my second published story, Linger Fiction, ceased lingering. As I've always thought I should have a sample of my fiction writing here on this blog, I've decided to post it, and Halloween seems as good a day as any and better than many. So, enjoy...

Jane went because she hated herself, hated her life.

"Change," she told herself in the vacant lobby, past the empty elevator shaft, and onto the stairs. "Change," said as she pressed on a door with a hole where the knob should have been.

The room beyond was a studio apartment with linoleum floors and bare walls, all weakly illuminated by an electric lamp on its side. The odor was an olfactory hallucination, a rank impossibility in such a building: an all too real antiseptic – nauseating in its intensity – covering a natural aroma, a smell like entrails and sweat, dirt and hard sun.

"Change," whispered to herself, a prayer and a talisman.

A figure was hunched over in the far corner, beating his fingers on the ground, claws clacking on the tiles. "In or out," he said, breathing out lazy rings of smoke. "Come or go."

"I heard you can change me."

He wheezed and laughed. "A predator, right? Something with claws and guts, something that doesn't back down?" He threw his cigarette, and it rolled to a stop by her leg, smoking impotent on the ground.

He stopped laughing. "I'm always fucking right," he said. His head was surrounded by distant gold, a dull halo in the shadows.

Jane's head was swimming. "I don't want to be me anymore," she said, thinking of John.

He stood up and tottered over to her, features flat and furred. "It will all be okay," he said, grip too tight on her arm. "Might want to shut your eyes."

"Will it hurt?" she asked.

"Change isn't easy. Never as simple as you think it'll be." Then he was fumbling with something in the darkness, and the needle was sliding into her flesh. "And you never know what you're going to get."

He shoved her down, and she landed on her hands and knees. The antiseptic stench was parting, now, gates coming wide to reveal what was beyond. She felt lost, felt found, felt like her body was made of dripping cement.

"It's not like that," he said. "Not visiting some guy and telling him what you want to be."

Her eyes were wide open but she couldn't move. Her limbs were loose and weighted, her flesh flowing like a silt-filled tide.

"No one else can make you assertive," he said, then he dropped to all fours beside her, circling her with a natural gait that made a mockery of her crude writhing. His eyes shined in the dark.

Her nails dropped away, but prey's hooves came instead of hunter's claws. He was straddling her now, his too-large jaws just above her tender throat.

"All others can do," he said, "is hunt you down."

Jane Doe, prey to the end, didn't struggle beneath him.

Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

2011-10-25T16:47:00.000-04:00

I've often heard that Stephen King's as good a writer of short stories as he is of novels, or – from some – that he's even better in that form, but my one experience with the man's short fiction, Everything's Eventual, did anything but confirm that opinion. Still, Everything's Eventual collected stories written relatively late in the man's career, and, as I've now said many times on this blog, all of the man's later works have failed to live up to his earlier, in my opinion. So we come to Skeleton Crew, the second collection from the man that many consider the greatest of all horror writers, and the man that – if the bibliography in this very volume's to be believed – is not only the bestselling horror author but the best selling author of all time. Does the collection live up to the man's reputation? Yes and no, really. Almost everything here's at least enjoyable, but there are two or three or more limpers for every homerun. But, of course, those homeruns sure can fly.

One of the things that I found most interesting in the collection is that many – though certainly not all – of the stories here are of a very different kind of horror from what King generally writes. For a while now I've divided horror into two general groups: stories where the horror comes from the characters/humanity, such as the majority of King's work (The Shining, Pet Semetary, etc), and then stories where the horror comes from the unknowable world around the characters, Weird Fiction ala Lovecraft. Many stories here fall into that latter category, The Mist foremost among them. The Mist is, of course, the highest profile story here, initially released in the horror superstar anthology Dark Forces and, more recently, made into a movie and, as a result, released as a brief standalone volume (though why that would improve on the collection I've no idea). The reasons for the story's success and prevalence are damn easy to see: put simply, The Mist is one of King's best tales.

As always, King proves himself an incredible writer of people. Our narrator, David, and his wife and son are forced to huddle away from a ferocious summer storm. As they do, King humanizes each of them with quirks of diction and action, as well as the touching and believable ways that they interact with one another. Later, King extends that to the story's secondary characters, often establishing entire personalities with only a line or two, like when the narrator explains that he didn't care for Bud Brown, who seemed to fancy himself the Charles de Gaulle of the supermarket world (p. 51) or one of the descriptions of Mrs. Carmody: The easiest [person] to pick out was Mrs. Carmody in her blazing-yellow pantsuit. She looked like an advertisement for yellow fever. (p. 54)

The story proper gets started as a mist begins to approach from a nonsensical direction, a mist so dense that nothing can be glimpsed from within. As it comes, David and his son are, along with much of the town's population, in the only nearby supermarket, and it's there that they're trapped, for strange and horrible creatures walk the mist, monstrosities made up of tentacles and monolithic size that have turned the mist-drowned world into an alien hell unimaginable. The mist is change inescapable and catastrophic, and the heart of the story is the way that the ensemble cast reacts. Some collapse in despair, others refuse to believe what they be, blind themselves with regulations and routine, or try and escape their situation by fixating on an increasingly malevolent god.

Amidst all this, though, King refuses to give in to defeatism. His writing is dark, often and in this case punishingly so, but he still will not let go of the worth he sees in humanity. Carrying the fire was a very big deal for him, the narrator writes of his son. It helped him forget about being afraid. (p. 28) And it does more than that; by the end, the characters are, for all that they know, alone, and it's only their will that keeps them and all going. But King's optimism is not a blind one, and his triumphs are never easy or certain. I know that I've very often criticized the man's endings, but the ambiguous final scene of The Mist is absolutely perfect, filled at once with hope and horror in equal measures.

If The Mist challenges King's optimism, Survivor Type does its best to hack it off with a buzz saw. This is a story of human determination, and, while reading, it's almost impossible to not think that, sometimes, it goes too far. But, as the narrator says, the only mortal sin is giving up. (p. 423) As we begin, the narrator's trapped on an island, alone and with no food. His fate seems sealed, but he disagrees and will always disagree. The center of the story soon becomes this question: How much shock-trauma can the patient stand? (p. 407) And the answer: How badly does the patient want to live? (p. 407) Well, our narrator wants to live very badly indeed, and, as the tale progresses, is forced to cut off and eat his own limbs to survive. This is a sickening story, that I won't deny, but it's written so compellingly, and with an undercurrent of the most perverted idealism, that it's impossible to ever look away. I won't be forgetting this one for a while, and I dare say you won't be either.

Beachworld, The Raft, and The Monkey are also tales of man facing an inevitable fate in an uncaring world. The first two are both extremely enjoyable, but The Monkey proves more perplexing. Essentially, the ending destroys the metaphor the story's built on. We begin as the main character sees his sons playing with a windup monkey toy that he had in his childhood. His reaction, one of abject terror, confuses them. The monkey, as we found out, dominated his youth as it clanged its cymbals together to signal each death around him. Now it's returned, and he sees it as tragedy returning to savage his idyllic life. Now, it must be stressed that the monkey itself does not kill its victims; it's not some cheap monster movie villain. No, the monkey merely clangs as they die from seemingly unrelated means. The monkey, it seems, is death, its shadow over each and every tragedy in the narrator's life. And yet, at the story's end, the protagonist succeeds in throwing the monkey into a lake, and the monkey – which has, for the entire story, been built up as a personification of death itself – is gone for good this time. […] The monkey would not be back to draw a shadow over Dennis's life or Petey's. (p. 195) So the narrator just killed death? Huh?

Of the other types of tales present, the most forgettable are generally the shortest and most violent. Here There Be Tygers is a quick story whose only event of note is the teacher being slaughtered by a tiger, but Cain Rose Up takes the cake in this category, a brief but bloody piece in which a student massacres his classmates. These certainly contain horror, but they don't make us care, and, without that, the horror's just spectacle. Most, however, are better than that, even if a fair few are competent horror like Word Processor of the Gods that show up, have a decent time, and then fade away without leaving much of an impression.

A few of the stories here distinguish themselves more in the manner of their telling than in the events told, primarily Mrs. Todd's Shortcut, The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands, and The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet. By far the most successful is the last of those just listed. The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is a conversation between an editor, an agent, a writer, and the writer's wife, and it focuses on a story of insanity that the editor received. Of course, the editor – and King behind him – admits that the one thing the American reading public doesn't need foisted upon them is another story about Going Mad Stylishly in America […] But this story was funny. I mean, it was really hilarious. (p. 500) And so it is. The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is absurd, simply told, and damn fun to read.

Alas, the other two frame-focused don't work nearly as well. The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands is a genteel story too proper in its telling to allow much humor beyond a polite nod and too vague and insubstantial to be particularly affecting. Mrs. Todd's Shortcut, on the other hand, is an interesting but far from exceptional tale about driving off the map and the addictions and dangers therein. In both cases, the cumbersome nature of their back and forth telling delays what satisfaction there is long past the point of sustainability, drowning their already meager cores with verbiage that's adequately written but does little or nothing to excite.

But I'm just getting lost in the details and the negatives. Those stories I've just pointed out and criticized? There are flaws in all of 'em, flaws – a tendency to excess, sentimentalism, and/or what have you – but you know what else? They're (almost) all still involving tales, and you can bet that goes double for those I didn't critique and triple for those I praised. King can make you care with a line, can pen a character like almost no one else, can draw you in with irrelevancies and keep you there with quirks and mannerisms and realities like nobody else. It's great when King generates dread thick enough for you to drown in, when he makes you laugh, and when he pens the human race's condition and downfall in a hundred page novella. But all of that's superfluous to his real charm, and, even in his weakest tales, even as King's pacing and construction and themes fall down and fall away, it's still damn hard to look away from the page and from the character's that he's so excellently birthed from nothing at all.

Skeleton Crew is like Stephen King's career in miniature. It's got a huge amount of work, all of which makes you care, almost all of which is decent,, with the occasional burst of brilliance so radiant it justifies every unnecessary word in the pieces that surround it. This is, without a doubt, worth purchasing for The Mist, and I can promise that you'll have a good time with just about all the rest, even if damn few of them will still be kicking around in your skull two weeks later at the least expected moments.

Standouts: The Mist, Survivor Type, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet

Mark Lawrence - Prince of Thorns

2011-10-18T17:35:00.000-04:00

Prince Honorous Jorg is one part ~~lovable~~ bloodthirsty rogue and one part prince cruelly deprived of his throne. It's an interesting combination, a genuinely unsympathetic character as the protagonist and seeker of such a high position, and so, of course, one's first thoughts most likely go to the potential failings, or, more accurately, ways to negate the unsympathetic part. This would not, after all, be the first Epic Fantasy to give us an antihero with a long list of whitewashed crimes and a resume of pure and justified badassery. But the first half or so of Prince of Thorns does not fall into that trap. No, this is not a stand up and cheer tale prettied up with a sheen of grime. Lawrence is quick to show that Jorg's brand of darkness is not skin deep. By the second paragraph, innocents are dead, and our faces are shoved into the aftermath:

The town square ran red. Blood in the gutters, blood on the flagstones, blood in the fountain. The corpses posed as corpses do. Some comical, reaching for the sky with missing fingers, some peaceful, coiled about their wounds. Flies rose above the wounded as they struggled. This way and that, some blind, some sly, all betrayed by their buzzing entourage. (p. 1)

That's not the only such moment, far from it. No, Lawrence takes his concept, and he runs with it. but the problem with all this is that, while it's dark, and while it's vivid, and while it's gory, and while the first person narrator has a quite enjoyable mixture of arrogance and imagery and humor, there's no reason to care. I don't, of course, mean just in the first few pages, because we're just meeting our cast then, and it makes far more sense to introduce our pillagers with pillaging than with knitting. But the depth doesn't come. These are murderers, and we see them murder and wisecrack, but we don't see an inch deeper into any of them from the moment we see them first nab a ring to their first grinning rape scene to their deaths. Between some of the chapters, Lawrence gives us one sentence descriptors for some of them, and they're all things like: Knife work is a dirty business, yet Brother Grumlow is always clean. (p. 59) An amusingly written fun fact, sure, but insubstantial; you could change the names of just about all the brothers and nothing'd change about their new personas besides size. As for the brother's ultimate goals, Jorg is quick to point out that they're not just aimless butchers. Echoing the marketing quote mentioned a ways up, he scoffs when a soon-to-be-dead innocent says that he's fifteen:

Fifteen! I'd hardly be fifteen and rousting villages.

By the time fifteen came around, I'd be King! (p. 4)

But that's, as far as one can tell from the opening dozens of pages, utter tosh. Jorg talks big, but he takes no strides in that direction at all. The opening chapters of the novel consist of Jorg wandering to and fro and killing people, at one point scaring away a ghost with the empty time where my memory won't go (21), lurid violence described and committed for the sake of lurid violence. Through it all, it must be mentioned that this is no more a realistic picture than the unblemished farmer-to-be-king, just with blacker than black instead of whiter than white.

Interspersed with all this are flashback chapters to the death of Jorg's royal mother and brother, to Jorg's recovery and discussions with his tutor, and to Jorg's eventual flight from his castle, in pursuit of vengeance. The scenes of initial murder are well done, but it's the second of those two groups that, surprisingly enough, proved the most effective for me. The discussions of world and philosophy first of all provide our first delicious clues that this is not a standard fantasy world but rather a post apocalyptic one and then, more importantly, provide an excellent juxtaposition for the demonstration of Jorg's ruthless views in action that we get in the present day chapters.

Even here, though, there are problems, aspects of Lawrence's world that seem done for dramatic effect and thematic thrust but which niggle badly as the novel proceeds. The greatest of these, and the source for many of the novel's oddities, is the court world of Ancrath. Basically, in the royal world of Lawrence, people are irrelevant as more than chips upon the game board. This makes perfect sense, but it's taken to simply silly extremes, because, for some reason, the royals themselves are not considered important. After Jorg is wounded, his tutor says that the king will visit, to which Jorg thinks: I knew my father would not waste time on me whilst it seemed I would die. I knew he would see me when seeing me served some end. (p. 27) Until it would serve some end? The near dead man's the heir to the throne, god damn it! The prince is most certainly a matter of state. This is, however, soon surpassed in terms of insane negligence when the nation that, in a surprise attack, killed the king's wife and attempted for both of his sons (getting one) is forgiven in exchange for the rights to the Cathun River, three thousand ducats, and five Araby Stallions. (p. 57) At this point, things aren't so much insane as inane. Count Renar nearly wipes out the royal line, the king shrugs and gets a river.

All this leads to the most puzzling aspect of the novel, namely why, exactly, Jorg is doing the whole bloody bandit thing in the first place. We witness his departure from the castle, breaking a gang of violent marauders out of the dungeons and then joining them in their flight, but nowhere do we get an explanation for it that makes any sense. In the scene, the choice is presented as one between the calm pragmatism of the tutor and Jorg's need for vengeance. But that's utter nonsense. Jorg wants to be king? Well, congratulations, my boy, you're already in line for the god damn throne. You want vengeance on another sovereign nation? Well, the way to do that is not you, an unnamed black "Nuban" (seriously, he never receives a tag that I saw besides his nation of origin), and two dozen outlaws. It's through your father's armies, which you will come to own and command in but a handful of years. He's not doing this to be his father's enemy, mind you. He's not staging a coup. No, he's, though afraid of his father, even aiding his interests. By riding around like a blood-splattered fucking Robin Hood.

So, anyway, this rather unsubstantiated premise is heading somewhere, though not quite building. What's the difference? Well, in one, tension steadily rises as events ramp up towards the next event. In the other, we simply stumble about till the next step pops out at us. I'll give you the paragraph in which Jorg decides to head home and kickstart the plot, and you tell me which it is:

I shouldn't have been turning for home, picking up my old ways, and thinking once more about vengeance upon the Count of Renar. That's what instinct told me. But today instinct spoke with an old and dry voice and I no longer trusted it. I wanted to go home, perhaps because it felt as though something else required that I did not. I wanted to go home and if Hell rose up to stop me, it would make me desire it the more. (p. 89)

Jorg gets home, learns that his dad's got a sorcerer and a new wife, demonstrates what he's learned on the road, and is tasked to prove his worth (or, as near all hope, die in the attempt) by, essentially single handedly, taking over the impregnable castle for another contender to the empire's throne for which all these kings and counts are fighting. And so it is that we enter a totally different book, or, at the least, the polished gem version of the first half's first draft.

In Gelleth, just about every aspect of the book's opening returns, albeit immeasurably stronger. The post apocalyptic world's no longer a king's road with some philosophers strapped on for color. No, we're now trawling fallout zones and dealing with mutations, hatching dastardly plots with just as dastardly remnants. Instead of aimless meandering based on instinct-but-not-instinct-because-instinct-can't-be-trusted, we've a master plan twisty and tricky enough to inspire a good bit of awe. And as for Jorg, well, that's where the biggest changes of all come from. What felt like empty bluster before the king and mere douchebaggery against unarmed peasants comes across as fantastically daring, perhaps even sadistically heroic, against the red haired people of Gelleth.

How do you defeat a nation with but a handful of men? How can you survive at a task you were meant to die carrying out? How can you win a war with more factions than you've subjects, break a cycle of violence, end a struggle that's began decades before your birth? Well, near the novel's opening, Jorg gives us some answers: The way to break the cycle is to kill every single one of the bastards that fucked you over […]. Every last one of them. Kill them all. Kill their mothers, kill their brothers, kill their children, kill their dog. (p. 64-5) Such bloodthirsty words meet bloodthirsty actions, Jorg stepping outside rules and expectations both with a move drenched in low cunning and at once so deplorable, so callous, and so fantastic that my jaw dropped.

Let's zoom out before I've given the whole blow by blow. The novel, thankfully, does not return to the aimlessness of its opening, though it doesn't ever quite reach the peak of Gelleth's annihilation. Still, things build to a martial climax and worldly revelation, one executed quite powerfully and also rather expected (or perhaps I should say fittingly inevitable), seeing the worthlessness of men in this grand war: the land is not in the hands of who it seems to be, the great players are themselves but pawns, and the dark and magical powers behind the scenes are ruthless and uncaring about the men that die in their stead. Amidst all this, there are a few turns of phrase that're right out of vintage Lovecraft, in near praise of a certain Cthulhu and man's ignorance:

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most part, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us. (p. 266)

All of this, however, comes, depending on your perspective, either too early or too late. Any fantasy reader of recent years can, of course, tell me the other work in which scheming sorcerers bend patriotic nations to their whim. I'm speaking, of course, about Joe Abercrombie, [and know that SPOILERS for First Law trilogy are to follow] where the revelation that the causes the protagonists battle for are lies and that the protagonists themselves are horrible people is the capstone of his trilogy. To me, the difference between that end game revelation of futility is what differentiates that trilogy from Abercrombie's Best Served Cold and The Heroes, both of which had the same near-nihilistic edge without getting any of the investment of the opening's hope, fraudulent as such light might have been.

In the comparison there, Prince of Thrones falls into the second category. (Here let me pause for just a second and, in order to avoid any repetitions of a certain relatively-recent internet kerfuffle, state that the comparison is between Prince of Thorns and Abercrombie's books, not Mark Lawrence and Abercrombie's books; here, the reading habits of the author matter not at all.) Prince of Thorns paints a fabulously bleak world, in which hope seems lost and triumph impossible within the boundaries of morality, but these dark thematic points are dulled badly by following the purposeless violence of the novel's opening. While that killing does make sense, viewed within the novel as a whole, it's effect is not to indoctrinate the reader but rather desensitize and distance them, leaving them seeing not their world as a dark place but rather this dank and unpleasant creation as one, but, thankfully, as one that – thanks to the superficial but omnipresent and ocean-deep layer of blood everywhere – can be handily differentiated and separated from our own.

Ultimately, Prince of Thorns is a novel built around an interesting concept, written in an enjoyable manner, and more than capable of both shocking and intriguing. Alas, it's also a novel that shoots itself in the foot rather badly right outside the starting gate. Lawrence's final creation is fascinating enough that I may return for the hopefully more cohesive sequel, but too flawed for me to be able to say that Prince of Thorns really works.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Three

2011-10-11T13:21:00.001-04:00

Buffy: World is what it is. We fight, we die. Wishing doesn't change that.
Giles: I have to believe in a better world.
Buffy: Go ahead. I have to live in this one.

At the end of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, our titular vampire slayer's beaten and scarred and gone. Her lover's dead by her hands, her city's been ravaged, her ties severed, she's wanted by the police and expelled from her skill and fleeing the deaths and injuries and torture that have set upon her circle of friends and allies. In the closing moment of the last episode, she leaves Sunnydale behind.

With the opening episode of season three – the fantastic Anne – we find her entirely adrift in the big city, waiting tables under an assumed name, having turned her back on her destiny and her life and those around her. She's not the only one. Los Angeles seems a city composed entirely of the apathetic and the alone, those that fled their responsibilities and their lives and found that they had nothing left. Kids come here, a representative for the Family Home says, and they got nothing to go home to, and... this ends up being the last stop for a lot of them. The disillusioned and the destroyed wander the streets here, and they are quite literally no one.

And so it is that Buffy descends into hell, for, as a slave driving demon tells her, What is Hell, but the total absence of hope? The substance, the tactile proof of despair? Of course, this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, rather than a Ligotti tale, and so our heroine is not about to be permanently defeated by depression, be it in emotional or demonic form. The fight scene that acts as the episode's climax may not be as spectacular as the chilling first half, but it, and the set up before, were are still enough to make the most composed viewer want to stand up and cheer. The episode's final blow, however, comes later, for our final shots are of Buffy returning home and of her mother opening the door to greet her.

By the end of the season's third episode, the status quo so shattered at the second season's end is essentially back in place, the awkwardness of returns and departures now buried. What is not so easily repaired, however, are the lasting effects, small mannerisms and flashes of character that never go away and never cease to inform the show's present. The way that Buffy's mother can't help but ask, again and again, if Buffy is once again departing.

But, of course, season three does not merely rest on its laurels once its players are back into position. Like season two, season three has a villain, and an overarching plot, that gives the arc shape while the characters evolve. Here, however, the balance is radically different. Structurally, the season can be largely divided into two parts, and, in the first, there's almost no greater conflict at all, simply Buffy and her allies dealing with struggles as they arise and, above all, facing the consequences of their own actions, present and prior. [Oh, and note: this review contains SPOILERS for near all episodes discussed.]

The problem that arises from this is essentially one of excess. In the last season, the moments of dramatic character change and upheaval, the times when the battle between good and evil was drastically rearranged by an event unforeseeable and revelatory, were the highlights. Here, though, the battle for good and evil takes a back seat, or perhaps slips out the trunk, and those moments of character change are all there is, which can, after episodes concentrated in such a fashion, render the illumination rendered less effective than it should be. But, I stress, this isn't a problem of a weak element. Far from it. Put simply, many of these episodes (though obviously not all) are excellent.

The primary tool used here by Whedon and co is one of contrast, either introducing new characters or developing radical new situations to show their characters in new lights. And what those contrasts almost invariably show us is responsibility. Season two focused on acting in impossible situations, on how it's our actions, not our circumstances, that make us who we are. Season three shows us the consequences of those actions, and no move – no matter how justified or triumphant – is devoid of repercussions.

Nowhere is this theme more evident than with Angel – and yes, I know what you're thinking, fellow first time viewer (if you exist – oftentimes I feel the only one in the hemisphere that's not yet seen all seven seasons), Angel does return. My first thoughts upon this were something along the lines of: worst cop out ever. Thankfully, however, Whedon doesn't simply pop Angel into his old situations after a six line explanation about his death and move on. No, Angel returns as more beast than man, and, when he regains his sanity, it's something that feels earned, not something given by authorial decree. More important still, however, is the fact that Angel does not ever reintegrate himself among Buffy's allies in the way he once was. Giles still distrusts him – a tad sore over that whole torture issue – Xander's still doubtful, and Buffy knows that they can never again grow as close as they were.

All that, however, is merely the set up for the crisis at the heart of his character, which shows itself beautifully in Amends. For Angel is back for a reason, and he does not know what that reason is. What he does know is that the brutality of his past is returning to him, inescapable, and, in the episode, it's revealed that his savior is no force for good but rather the unsnappily titled First Evil. Despite that rather uninspired moniker, the creature's what it says on the tin, namely an evil that predates man and all else, a dark deity of sorts. And it is using Angel for its purposes. Desperate, he takes the only way out that he can think, but, as far as Buffy's concerned, that's just playing into defeat's hand, for there's never an excuse to simply give up, no situation in which you can lay the blame on the world and walk away. It's always up to you: You're weak. Everybody is. Everybody fails. Maybe this evil did bring you back, but if it did, it's because it needs you. And that means that you can hurt it. Angel, you have the power to do real good, to make amends. But if you die now, then all that you ever were was a monster. (Amends)

The next episode, Gingerbread, is another of the show's greatest and raising an entire host of fascinating questions that cut to the show's core. It shows the people around Buffy, the much-murdered residents of Sunnydale, rising together to, for once, try and take their lives into their own hands. And it shows how, due to their inexperience and the faultiness of their leadership, they simply make things worse in every possible way. It shows the reactions of the often off screen elder generation to the show's events. And, most interestingly of all, it shows how Buffy, despite having now spent years fighting evil, and having saved the world again and again, is no closer to victory than ever. Is victory even possible? If not, is there a point in fighting? To that last, a Buffy quote from the prior episode might reveal some further things about her character: Strong is fighting! It's hard, and it's painful, and it's every day. It's what we have to do. (Amends) At its end, Gingerbread does as many Buffy episodes do, and the issues, once raised, stand aside so that the big bad may be sufficiently pulped. While the climax is great fun, I found myself still thinking about the moral questions raised well into the next few dramas and wondering how Buffy could ever sufficiently answer most of them without the easy out of a villain to maul.

Xander, Willow, Oz, and Cordelia spend much of the season involved in the messy business of life. The relationships of the last season – Xander and Cordelia, Willow and Oz – continue at first, and there's a damn fair bit of hilarious dialogue, but it is, of course, when things go to hell that it becomes interesting. Xander and Willow, see, soon discover that their oh-so-innocent friendship may be developing less oh-so-innocent aspects. And, as they each face death alone, they end up going for one last big smooch. Of course, in a quite successful instance of it's-not-deus-ex-machina-if-it's-bad, Oz and Cordelia walk in right at that moment, leaving our two good friends left to deal with the slight problem of a betrayal that's very much in their alley. What makes the whole thing work, besides the show's near mystical skill at managing to make us both laugh and care, is that there are no easy answers here, and the problem's refreshingly devoid of blameless misunderstandings or easily straightened out ruffed feelings. When Willow and Oz get back together, their relationship's deeper for its strife. And, when Xander and Cordelia don't, it's damn hard to blame Cordelia in any way.

Cordelia's rage at the whole thing leads us to The Wish, where a demon grants good old Cordy her wish that Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale. Surprise, surprise, that turned out to not be such a good idea, and, in the course of the devastation to follow, we run into the vampire equivalents of Willow and Xander, which are evil, rampaging, and quite together, to the fury of Cordelia. The whole episode is damn fun and ends in the kind of bloodbath that's hilarious for how many lines it crosses and how many unkillable characters meet their abrupt ends. That evil Willow appears again some time later in Doppelgangland, sliding into Willow's life and sticking out like a leather-clad thumb, forcing non-vampire Willow to take the spotlight and take on some of the characteristics of her foe in order to defeat her.

Xander, too, gets one very focused episode, though his has less fangs. The Zeppo shows Xander alone, the one member of Buffy's Scooby gang at this point that's not either a member of a mystical cult or possessing of mystical powers, against a foe less grandiose than the end of the world, but still quite deadly: namely disillusioned (and dead) youths with a bomb, no morals, and a desire to fuck some stuff up. Here it's made clear that it's force of will and morality that make a hero in Whedon's world, not strength, though the latter certainly doesn't hurt. (Incidentally, this was one of several moments I had while watching the show where I wondered how on earth they got away with a show about violence done on school grounds to teenagers. Then I realized all this was the year of Columbine, and my jaw dropped…)

But let's circle back to The Wish for a second. It, like the preceding season's Halloween, is an episode where, as you could probably tell from my prior description, everything's changed in an instant, only to be changed back later, with both transformations occurring by magic. It works, for the most part, by being damn fun and takes advantage of its quasi-cannon status to end in a delicious bloodbath that's so great for its unexpected nature. But it's not the only such magic-changes-everything (for lack of a catchier title) episode in this season. The other, Band Candy, is far less successful, and is an example of a tendency that Buffy occasionally develops, namely that where the humor totally sabotages plot, believability, and character. As a result of some magic band candy, the town's entire adult population seems to go insane, devolving into… *gasp!* teenagers! Between that and Oz's soon-coming comment (They're teenagers. It's a sobering mirror to look into, huh?) one gets the sense that this is supposed to fall somewhere between profound and hilarious. Alas, neither quite comes off. See, the adults are not so much teenagers as simpering and giggly mental defectives, and, while the physical comedy of their every twitch might lead to a chuckle or two, the overall effect is so profoundly silly (it got that one, at least) that I'll admit Snyder's character in particular never recovered its gravitas. Other such problematic episodes can be found (Homecoming, for instance), but are thankfully not the majority.

In this season, the exploration of Giles's character is focused entirely on how he relates to Buffy. This works very well for the first half of the show, culminating in Helpless, where he finally breaks free of the Watcher's Councils far off and uncaring diktats and aids Buffy. This earns him their ire, something quite in keeping with the season's overall theme. Alas, this is where things get rather less fascinating. Giles is fired and nominally replaced by a new Watcher, Wesley. This all, of course, might have been more shocking if the new Watcher shtick hadn't already been played earlier in this very season in Revelations, but anyway. When we were first introduced to Giles all the way back in season one, he came off as a pedant, but, in the course of the show, we grew to realize the strength of the man behind the regulations. Wesley, on the other hand, is just a pedant. Vampire Willow had a brief but memorable stay, and Faith (soon to be discussed in full) makes us reevaluate large aspects of Buffy's character, but anyone who hadn't already grasped that Giles was more than the rules by the time Wesley showed up is likely of subhuman intelligence. All this might lead to some drastic change if Giles didn't stay around, essentially making Wesley just an additional and highly superfluous part of the group, basically just an annoying voice at conferences to be silenced by a clever jab or two.

But, of course, the season's center is the slayer, and the true soul of season three is Eliza Dushku's Faith, a second slayer who comes to Sunnydale, and a character as opposite from Buffy as can be. Now, this isn't the second time that Buffy's been met by another slayer. Kendra came in season two, first called forth during Buffy's brief death in the first season's Prophecy Girl. Kendra did everything by the book, while Buffy – quite literally – had never heard of the book, Kendra had no life at all outside her slaying, and so forth. But while the differences between the two were clear, they were also skin deep. Faith, summoned by Kendra's death in Becoming, is nothing like that.

Like Buffy, Faith has a loose interpretation of the rules, a general disregard for precise and arbitrary authority, and a perpetually rebellious spirit – along with, one must not forget, a witty sense of humor. But, for Buffy, these things function as a relief, as a temporary escape from the duty that she knows she must never forget and a reason for that duty. That's not Faith at all. Faith is a slayer, and that's all she is, a woman defined entirely by confrontation and rebellion. The triumphs and tribulations of the job have come to dominate every aspect of her personality. Violence is her work and her relaxation. For her, the fight against evil has become more important than the reasons for the fight. In fact, she's forgotten those reasons entirely. The mortals around her have no purposes besides exploitation and cheap, meaningless sex.

So we come to the season's second half. Here, the character growth and plotting merge, leading to a succession of some of the show's absolute strongest episodes focusing upon Faith. In Bad Girls, while on a desperate demon-stopping mission with Buffy, Faith kills a man. Throughout Bad Girls and its follow up, Consequences, Faith is forced to face the realities of what she did, and she, unwilling and unable to accept the guilt, forces herself to believe it does not matter, that she, as a slayer, is entitled to anything – anything at all – that she needs in her fight:

Faith: What if he was? You're still not seeing the big picture, B. Something made us different. We're warriors. We're built to kill.

Buffy: To kill demons! But it does not mean that we get to pass judgment on people like we're better than everybody else!

Faith: We are better. (Consequences)

As Buffy and her allies turn on Faith, rejecting her logic, Faith realizes that, for her, the fight trumps the cause. And so it is that Faith comes to Harry Groener's Mayor Wilkins, the season's villain. Wilkins is a tidy, germaphobic, punctual, and warm hearted monster, a source of endless homey cheer and dark plans. The relationship that he develops with Faith is replete with a paternal love, a gift giving and forgiving tyranny that's twisted and fun and beautiful to watch. Throughout, no matter how dark her deeds, it's the flickers of unacknowledged and unallowed remorse that plague her and make her so fascinating to watch.

In the fight against Faith, Buffy and her allies have a major disadvantage. Essentially, that they're not batshit insane:

Giles: Faith has you at a disadvantage, Buffy.
Buffy: Cause I'm not crazy, or cause I don't kill people?
Giles: Both, actually.

But, as the fight continues and the stakes rise, that changes, and both Angel and Buffy flirt with the darkness they oppose. In Enemies, Angel goes undercover, pretending to be the turned Angelus and pretending to both join the Mayor and betray Buffy. The mission's a success, and he and Buffy learn what they meant to about both Faith and the mayor's plans, but, all the same, their actions take a great toll on their relationship. That, however, is nothing compared to what comes in the finale, the two part Graduation Day. As Angel lies poisoned and wounded, Buffy turns away from the Watcher's Council, and away from her morality, and sets out to find Faith and kill Faith in a last ditch effort to save her lover. As with her and Angel last season, Whedon doesn't allow her the easy way out, doesn't let his heroine simply kill a monster. No, after their confrontation and battle, we're shown a final scene with Faith, and it's on her human side that we turn away from her. The actual final confrontation with the Mayor – a bit silly, perhaps, but the show's damn well earned its upswing climax by that point – is enjoyable, but nothing compared to the turmoil that was the double episode's middle.

The third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer presents some of the series' finest moments, and radically advances the arcs of most of its characters, though it, over all, doesn't quite have the cohesion of the second season. Still, the occasional weak episodes are more than made up for by the general excellence of the rest. As it stands here, Buffy is a show both hilarious and involving, dark and bright and full of heart. It's also a show whose fourth season I'm about to go watch…

STANDOUTS: Anne, The Zeppo, Graduation Day, Gingerbread, Amends

Reading in June

2011-10-04T19:17:00.001-04:00

I haven't since July posted one of my supposedly monthly reading recaps, with the books being discussed being from way back in May, and, while they're far from the blog's centerpiece as far as content/insight go, I do miss them a tad. Wandering about the delightfully cluttered "Hat Rack" section of my hard drive I noticed I'd actually written a summary of my reading in June but never posted it, so I decided it was high time for a jump back to the halcyon days of summer, the distant days of June...

Leviathan Wakes, the creation of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, is a Science Fiction novel manages to be a gripping mixture of Space Opera awe and a horror-derived, maybe even noirish, sense of claustrophobia. In the midst of all that, the book's fast paced, fun, and stars two excellently portrayed characters.

I'll admit to some measure of disappointment with The Blonde on the Street Corner. This is the third novel of Goodis's I've read – coming after The Wounded and theSlain and Black Friday – and both of those were downbeat tales of the low and the lonely, each depressive and captivating in its way. The Blonde on the Street Corner has the majority of the formula down. Our protagonists are deadbeats in the depression, bumming off their families with no prospects whatsoever. So the theme's there, and Goodis's prose is dotted with the same flares of poetic sorrow that I've come to expect. But what's missing is anything to grab the reader. This is a book that simply meanders along, but, unlike The Wounded and the Slain, we're never really presented with a reason to care. Though this certainly isn't a bad read, it's nowhere near the level that Goodis is capable of operating on.

The Hour of the Dragon is the only full length novel of Conan the Barbarian that Robert E. Howard ever penned. It's filled with all the hallmarks that are associated with the character – or, perhaps I should stress, those hallmarks that come from the creator's tales and not the lobotomized cinematic or otherwise later versions. This story is filled with adventure, intrigue, and tension, and though Howard manages to drag Conan through almost every aspect of his former life – pirate and thief and so on – it never feels like a rehash or like there's an author up above the pages dragging the characters this way and that without giving them any say. As for the writing, it's Howard's usual, which is to say that it's equal parts painfully exuberant excess and vivid mastery. If you're a fan of the character, this is a necessary read.

The full version of Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz's screenplay Crampton – the earlier, abridged, and derivative version of which I read earlier this year – is a fascinating read for any Ligotti fan. The expected themes – the ephemeral and illusory nature of the world, the hollowness of all existence, and so forth – are present, but the author's hypnotic prose is absent, replaced by tightly written dialogue, bits of banter, and even expletives. Crampton moves at a fast and enjoyable clip, and the finishing anticlimax is powerfully done, but I still do have to say that, overall, the depressive and vivid ecstasy that Ligotti's writing normally brings is, by necessity, absent here. This is an interesting item to be sure, but it's most certainly just for the diehard collector, and not just because of the forbidding price tag.

George R.R. Martin's as adept at short stories as he is at doorstopper epics, and almost every one of the tales in this collection shows his mastery of the form. Reviewed here.

Fevre Dream, Martin's novel of Vampires and steamboats, has lost nothing with time, and it wasn't diminished on reread either. This is a novel rich in characterization and atmosphere, something not to be missed by any fan of Martin's work. Reviewed here.

In many ways, All the Pretty Horses is an inversion of the author's landmark Blood Meridian. John Grady Cole, our protagonist here, is a romantic and a dreamer trespassing on the brutal and unforgiving Wild West that McCarthy's become so justly famous for, and the results are at once heart breaking and even, at times, beautiful. Though I can't say that this novel's as revelatory as Blood Meridian, it's still an excellent read.

The third collection of horror writer Reggie Oliver, Masques of Satan is a volume of subtle ghost stories woven into theater backdrops. My reaction to Oliver is very similar to my reaction to the M.R. James stories I've read, and I mean that both in the positive ways that Oliver's adherents cite and also in the negatives that those Weird Tales-devotees would most certainly not agree to. Like James, Oliver writes in a formal but inviting style, and his words draw you in and make you feel like a part of the conversation. Also like James, his mastery of his subject area is obvious from every word he speaks, but – due to the aforementioned welcoming tone – the knowledge imparted is interesting rather than onerous. Oliver's ghosts, however, are – like James – the least interesting parts of his stories by far, little twists of the supernatural that aren't particularly memorable in and of themselves. I enjoyed this collection a fair bit, but I'd hesitate to recommend it at the forty or fifty dollars you're likely to find it for, and I certainly was not enamored enough with the stories here to spend the several hundred needed to read the author's first and second collections.

I'll admit it: I'm just bewildered here. Boneshaker was a forgettable read packed with problems and a few good ideas that weren't even taken advantage of. How, again, did this ever get near a Hugo? Reviewed here.

The Weaving Knight

2011-10-01T11:16:00.001-04:00

So, some of you may have noticed this new addition to my Essential Reading list a few weeks back, but, for those of you who didn't, I figure it's about time for you all to head over to The Weaving Knight, a blog run by my close friend Travis Knight. Travis's currently over at Oswego University, wrapping up his majors in Creative Writing and Education. When he's not busy with the minor workload all that entails, he writes excellent fiction, including a short story soon to be appear in Revelations, a magazine of post apocalyptic fiction. Over at The Weaving Knight, meanwhile, Travis writes reviews of fantasy and all else, and they're filled with engaging writing, humor, and a damn nice chunk of insight. Oh, and windmills. Don't forget the windmills.

Roland Topor - The Tenant

2011-09-27T12:09:00.002-04:00

Written in 1964 in French, Roland Topor's The Tenant is a mundane and horrific example of the most depressive strains of horror. As the novel opens, Trelkovsky learns of an apartment just vacated by a suicide. Nominally in order to pay his respects, and really to ascertain if she'll die so he can move in, he visits her in the hospital. Semi-conscious at best, the former tenant opens one eye to see a friend and Trelkovsky, and she responds with an "unbreakable scream." (p. 20) At the time, neither Trelkovsky nor the reader can understand her terror. By the end of the book, both will know all too well, for Topor's world is one where all of humanity is at once utterly absurd and grotesquely terrifying, and there is no escape.

I came to The Tenant, as a fair few others no doubt did, because of Thomas Ligotti. In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Ligotti discusses Topor as both an outsider and as an exemplar of the "anti-idealist position." (p. 195, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) As far as those goals go, Topor does not disappoint, and it's easy to see why Ligotti – and the man's fans – found the novel so captivating. That being said, my Ligottian expectations were not perfectly accurate. It's true that, in the end, Topor's bleak vision is one comparable to Ligotti's, but his method of achieving that darkness is quite different.

Topor's writing is clear and rational throughout, conveying description and action in a carefully controlled fashion. This is a novel filled with both insanity and the most caustic of humors, but the organized nature of the prose proves a stabilizing bulwark against both. Like all the best of the hapless, Trelkovsky is unaware that his life is a source of bleak amusement, and, as for the madness, it's the logical way it's shown that makes this such a harrowing read. Topor describes the impossible, but he does so with such a straight face that, even in the midst of the climax's melodrama, you may take a few lines to catch the absurdity.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Topor and Ligotti, however, is that The Tenant is a fundamentally interpersonal story, one focused almost entirely on each man's relationship to both his friend's and his neighbors. Moments of eroticism, too, pervade the text. All of those however, proves hollow, sex a goal not for its own ends but for what it averts: And little by little, in the presence of swooning women and writhing flesh, the image of death became less clear, faded into the distance, and eventually vanished completely, like a vampire at the first light of dawn. (p. 27) Friendship, too, is, by the end of the novel, a tool to avoid loneliness rather than a boon on its own. Trelkovsky's interactions with his old pals is forced and unbearably awkward, and his romance with Stella is worse, a mixture of self deception and disgusting detachment sewn together by a talismanic fixation on her breasts and body.

Trelkovsky spends much of the novel studying those neighbors, spying into the building's toilet with a set of binoculars from his apartment window, and therein comes the second authorial comparison that I want to make. While the theme of The Tenant might be pure Ligotti, the execution is more similar to Cornell Woolrich's It Had to be Murder, which may nowadays be better known by the film adaptations by Alfred Hitchcock (entitled Rear Window, which the story itself now often seems to goes as in anthologies) and the more recent Disturbia. Like Trelkovsky, Woolrich's main character is a people watcher, spying on the inhabitants of the apartment building across the way with a set of binoculars and, eventually, he catches a murder by observing the subtle signs of nervousness he displays. That story's greatest quotation, too, applies just as well to both tales: The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free. (p. 2, It Had to be Murder)

Both Woolrich and Topor believe that people reveal themselves with their habits and traits. Furthermore, I'd argue that both show that to break those traits is to transgress, to reveal your true self. That, however, is where the two stories diverge sharply. It Had to be Murder is a Crime story, and, as such, is exceedingly rational in its approach to the world. When the main character is cut off from the outside world, he remains connected to it in any way he can, but the villain reacts differently and abnormally. By deviating from the common path – a path that the protagonist, the other characters, the author, and the reader are all assumed to be adherents to – the antagonist gives himself away as a criminal. In Topor's tale, on the other hand, the common path is all there is. Underneath that, we humans are nothing. We're but a set of traits, but – as Ligotti might put it – puppets stumbling about their routines with no mind or soul underneath our felt skin, and we're only here because we delude ourselves into thinking that we are, as dear Trelkovsky realizes after passing street after street of grotesque humanity:

Martians – they were all Martians. But they were ashamed of it, and so they tried to conceal it. They had determined, once and for all, that their monstrous disproportions were, in reality, true proportion, and their inconceivable ugliness was beauty. They were strangers on this planet, but they refused to admit it. They played at being perfectly at home. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in a shop window. He was no different. Identical, exactly the same likeness as that of the monsters. He belonged to their species, but for some unknown reason he had been banished from their company. They had no confidence in him. All they wanted from him was obedience to their incongruous rules and their ridiculous laws. Ridiculous only to him, because he could never fathom their intricacy and their subtlety. (pp. 97-8)

In Topor's world, humanity is omnipresent and oppressive, a corrupting force that can't be stopped. By knocking on his walls, they leave him a frightened animal cowering alone on his bed. They strip him of his personality and friends, turn him into a shut in too tamed to raise the slightest dispute. For dozens of pages, Trelkovsky tries to escape them by surrender, tries to turn into the perfect tenant. But they never stop. At some point, he begins to wonder if it's not simple malice that's driving them: The Bastards! What the hell do they want – for everyone to just roll over and play dead! And even that probably wouldn't be enough! (p. 95) But that's not it either, as Ligotti points out when discussing the book and that passage in the aforementioned Conspiracy Against the Human Race: [Trelkovsky] is more right than he knows. Because what they wants is for everyone to roll over and play them. (p. 198, Conspiracy…)

That, right there, is the core of The Tenant. This is a book, in the end, about the influence that we have on each other. So, Woolrich's solidly insider story written for insider readers, acts almost as proof of Topor's. Here, the herd of humanity demands compliance and will achieve that end at all costs, forcing the outsider into whatever role it must to maintain the illusion of a sane society and a sane world, casting – as Woolrich's narrator does – the deviant unacceptable, a criminal, an enemy of all society. Trelkovsky, occupying the same apartment as the former tenant, finds the world pushing him into her role, and he can't refuse.

In The Tenant, the only reality is the purely physical. As such, when Trelkovsky's apartment is burglarized by his neighbors, causing him to lose his pictures and mementos of his childhood, he realizes that he "no longer had a past." (p. 64) Later, when he dons a dress in a fit of submissive dementia, he realizes that: It was a picture of a woman he saw in the mirror now. Trelkovsky was astounded. It was no more difficult than this to create a woman? (p. 121) Stripped of what he has, what is Trelkovsky now? What was there that was uniquely his, that made him an individual? What was there that differentiated him from everyone else. What was his label, his point of reference? What made him think: this is me, or, that's not really me? He sought the answers in vain, and was forced to admit at last that he didn't know. (p. 128) When those around him take the old physical hallmarks of his life away, Trelkovsky ceases to exist.

But, you're no doubt thinking, such a conspiracy is ludicrous. What would his neighbors gain from forcing him into a dead woman's life? What advantage could they possibly achieve by pushing for his suicide? When it comes to those questions, Topor plays a fine game. To outright write such a conspiracy, devoid of the supernatural or any other mollifying factors, would be to immediately distance the reader via the unlikeness of the whole affair. Instead, Trelkovsky is clearly insane, and so the conspiracy is at first easily dismissible and more. The novel seems an exploration of dementia. And then, at the height of Trelkovsky's madness, proof piles up. Conversations become inexplicable, and the actions of those around him go from absurd to malevolent. But no conclusions can be drawn, for our narrator is, alas, quite far round the bend. So, as the neighbors cavort in an obscene parody of a circus beneath Trelkovsky's window, the reader can retain his suspension of belief while, of course, anticipating the final blow. But that anticipation renders the result no less effective, for, in the superb final scene – the only one in the book to directly show the supernatural – we finally see undeniable proof that Trelkovsky's mania was real. And it is far too late.

All that praise having been dispensed, and Topor's (sadly deceased) head having no doubt swelled to its full capacity, it's time to turn to the book's main flaw: the pacing. Now, condemnation here is difficult. As I discussed in the above paragraph, the normalcy at the beginning is absolutely necessary for the insanity at the end. That being said, the first two thirds of the book pass at a pace that can best be described as an amusing but near eventless crawl. Topor's dry, dry wit prevents the reader from ever growing genuinely bored, but little momentum is acquired until the reader's halfway through. I don't think it's a coincidence that the vast, vast majority of my memories of the book – and I only read it the morning of this writing – came from the final third, and so I was at least thirty or forty pages too early each and every time I went to search for a particular quotation.

Still, the Tenant is a labyrinthine and disquieting exploration of interaction and madness, with the ultimate conclusion that the two may not be all that far off. Though not the flawless gem that Ligotti's or Lovecraft's finest tales are, this is still one of the bleakest novels I've read. Beginning and ending on the same interminable note, The Tenant is a novel likely to haunt the back of your mind for weeks, coloring your every conversation. Upon finishing, you may cast about for what makes you you. And, if Topor's to be believed, that search will be at once brief and endless, fruitless and hopeless…

[A final word of caution: as I've no doubt made clear, Thomas Ligotti's analyses of the story in The Conspiracy Against the Human race is fantastic, and is – I believe – published in similar form in the introduction to the Centipde Press edition of the novel (which I, alas, do not own). That being said, his analysis of the story is filled with spoilers and reveals the end. While this is far from a twist based story, I would still advise reading the novel before the analysis.]

Linger Fiction

2011-09-26T15:39:00.000-04:00

Linger Fiction has, it seems, stopped lingering, a damn shame because they published a damn huge number of damn good flash tales. Of course, among their archives lurked (lingered?) my very own The Metamorphosis of Jane Doe, a story that is once again homeless. Alas. I've not totally made up my mind about what to do with the story yet, though I am considering posting it here as a once-published writing sample for anyone curious.

Thomas Tessier - Wicked Things

2011-09-20T00:57:00.001-04:00

Thomas Tessier's Wicked Things opens with insurance investigator Jack Carlson learning he's to go to the town of Winship to investigate a run of accidental deaths. When there, he soon discovers that things are not as they seem. Alas, exactly what they are like is never quite revealed. I'd say that this review has SPOILERs, but, to be honest, that would be implying that Wicked Things has a coherent plot to spoil. This is a generic horror novel set apart only by its numerous, numerous shortcomings.

To put it nicely, Wicked Things does not have too fast pacing or too slow; it has no pacing at all. To convey the utter aimlessness of this book, perhaps I should try and convey some of what happens. The first half of this slim novel (two hundred and forty-three pages total) quite literally consists of Jack faffing about. First, he attempts to speak to the man at the center of the claims, who appears nervous. Then he calls Jack and asks for a meeting the next day. Aha, this seems like where the case will be solved! Well, no, first Jack has to wander off and have sex with the secretary, though not without first acknowledging that: It was not a good idea to mess around with any woman connected with a case you're working. (p. 55) It's forgivable though; something, after all, has to happen around page fifty. After that, it's understandable to think the plot would get moving. Not quite. Instead, Jack investigates a few of the claims on their own and discovers… nothing. He goes to the prior established meeting, only to discover his contact killed, along with the woman he slept with. The killings tell him nothing. Left with no clues, Jack decides the best idea is more leadless investigation, none of which turns anything up.

To be fair to the novel, Tessier does have a decent detective voice going, one with enough dry remarks to keep it entertaining, but it never goes anywhere. Jack is a blank slate, characterized only by the occasional reference to prior loves that go utterly unsubstantiated. The only thing that stops him from becoming a full blown enigma is how damn boring he becomes once the reader understands that he's defined by nothing but a case there's no obvious reason for him to be personally invested in at all. Even the seasoned ring of his descriptions of prior cases soon seems hollow as the reader realizes that Jack is inept at discovering anything at all, though it's admittedly uncertain whether that's through his own limitations or more due to authorial roadblocks.

What I hope you're getting from all this is the complete lack of momentum displayed by this book. Quite literally, Jack Carlson causes none of the events of Wicked Things. Instead, things (of the nominally wicked variety) simply happen to him. His investigations reveal nothing; his interrogations are busts, one and all; his sources uncover nothing. Not only that, there is – as I said before – no reason for Jack to insist on staying the case once his boss urges him to pull out. Five pages from the end, Jack realizes that "Part of [him] wanted to Winship and the whole ungodly mess behind." (p. 238) Five pages from the end, the main character can only half bring himself to care and still can't think of a rational reason to remain. And the reader, despite Tessier's attempts at being both shocking and horrifying, can't either.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Throughout the first section, what Tessier's trying to do is clear. Winship, when first glimpsed, is paradise, and we're supposed to gradually realize the darkness within, something set up as early as the second chapter: It was the kind of area some people would call God's country, but they could have it. I see a pretty lake, and I can also see the big, ugly, old snapping turtle hiding beneath the surface, ready to bite off a chunk of my big toe. (p. 16) And so forth, snake in the Garden of Eden, and all that. The problem – well, one of many – is that Tessier is incapable of making us realize anything gradually. No, Tessier proves incapable of any levels of tension between climactic and flaccid. Jack is either strolling along confident or seeing a murderer in every bush. The town isn't so much sinister as segregated, with nice picket fences over here and a sin strip that would make large cities like Boston and Philly downright jealous (p. 204-5) over there. The insurance claims look completely and utterly believable, and then the owner shows up with some pals and rifles (fear not, though, reader! The situation's defused without anything so fascinating as backwoods murder). Put simply, we never see an idyllic community's dark heart; we just alternate between seeing the idyllic community and Hell itself.

As for the supernatural in the book, that's even worse. Mostly, we've got strange flashes, auroras, mysteries with the ground, and, above all, strange little children. But Tessier's style, reasonably assured as it is for interpersonal interactions and the dialogue that forms much of the book, falls horribly short when called upon to create any sort of atmosphere at all. No, the changes in tone that are supposed to feel disorienting and awe inspiring instead come off as befuddled and poorly lit slapstick. Of these, the worst is the aforementioned children, who supposedly sing perpetual and ethereal choirs but never rise above the image of elementary school kids wearing ghostly sheets. When they manage to beat up our tough guy detective protagonist, one doesn't conclude that they're super strong, just that, for a private eye, Jack Carlson has the bulk of a kindergartener.

The novel's second half, kicked off by the murder of Jack's initial love interest and the potentially scheming insurance agent, seeks to monopolize on the groundwork laid in the first half. This might have worked better if any groundwork had, in fact, been laid. As is, when a secondary character starts rambling about how every single official in Winship – even the churches. Especially the churches. (p. 117) – are "like the Nazis, man," (p. 117) she doesn't so much come across as prophetic as she does unhinged. So how does Jack investigate all these people and even the churches? Why, by bumbling around accomplishing nothing and waiting for someone to hand the information to him, of course! I shouldn't give the impression that he's totally inactive, though. Jack does, after all, find a second girl to have sex with, this time an exotic dancer named Kelly who calls him daddy and gets wet when he talks.

And then we come the climax, which – as mentioned previously – doesn't have five pages build up. So, who turns out to be behind everything? How does the supernatural fit in? What does the mysterious Order of Saint Michael got to do with Winship? Well, the novel's last line sums it up pretty well: Paranoids are the only people who get it. (p. 243) As it turns out, every single person in the entire fucking town was evil, and every single one of them has nothing better to do than to ensnare Jack Carlson in the most convoluted web ever seen in inane fiction.

Now, I don't have an inherent problem with Everyone Dies style endings. In fact, in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I've even written one such story. But the difference is that, first, mine was ten, rather than two hundred and forty-three pages long and that, secondly, it was not simply a standard story with the protagonist failing rather than succeeding at the end.

But no, that's not quite being fair to Tessier. This is not a standard man v. world story where the man loses. No, freed from the burdens of having to have it all tie together at the end, Tessier shows us a monumentally inept example of horror and detective fiction, where the reveal – they're all evil!!!!! – serves to do nothing but piss all over every single piece of character motivation previously established. If Jenny was evil, why did she tell him about the Order of Saint Michael in the first place? Why do people disappear? What do the tikes in white have to do with anything? Why didn't the townspeople, if it had no problems with murder, kill Jack Carlson days ago? Or when he's alone with them, as he is on dozens of occasions? How does such a small town have such a huge sin strip, anyway? Why are they in this whole conspiracy? Why does none of this make sense? And, above all, why should I fucking care? The final revelation that nothing makes sense leaves us with an utterly pointless and senseless story that spent its time not on showing the irrational nature of the world, or on conveying the author's most extreme and/or darkest visions, but rather on setting up threads that limped to nowhere and keeled over as they got there.

Also featured in this volume is the novella Scramburg, USA, an unrelated tale of small town justice that shares many of the main attraction's faults. We begin with local hotshot Howie Hackett out of town. Howie, incensed, sneaks back in to wreak some havoc with his friends. At this point I should point out that Howie's idea of vengeance has a lot in common with most peoples' ideas of domestic terrorism; he and his friends blow up cars and throw bombs at buildings. A town cop, determined to impress the newspaper mogul so he can win office as the biggest badass cop in town (and to not be outdone in the category of being complete psychotic), rounds up a fellow Vet, and they proceed to torture and execute Howie and his pals.

The characters are sketches, but much of Scramburg does prove entertaining in a slasher-esque, stuff blowing up kind of way, the allegory's not bad, and it's refreshing, after the main novel, to read something with at least the pretences of a fast pace. But there's one fatal flaw in the heart of Scramburg: the reader can never, even for a moment, fail to see Tessier's hand guiding everything towards the largest blast. Perhaps a part of this is that the novel's divided into neat sections, each of which focuses on one side and shows not a single setback for them until Tessier decides he's exhausted their possibilities for mayhem and switches to someone else in turn maiming/slaughtering the first group. But whatever the reason, not a single action here feels organic. How does Howie think terrorism's going to help him, exactly? Why do his relatively normal friends go along with this plan? Why, if the cop is trying to gain publicity, does he quietly kill Howie rather than arresting him? Why do Howie and his pals come back as ghosts to kill their killers, when the story up until then has had not the slightest hint of the supernatural? As far as I can tell, the answer to most of those questions is to attain the maximum amount of blood, and it certainly is attained, even if Tessier has to skimp on believability and common sense to get it.

On the cover of Wicked Things, there's a quote from The Washington Post saying that Tessier is one of horror fiction's best kept secrets. Some of you dear readers might have once noticed a similar quote adorning Thomas Ligotti's The Nightmare Factory, namely that Ligotti was the best kept secret in horror fiction. I know, I know, I bring Ligotti up all the time, and I really should stop. But I'm not the one who made the comparison here, now am I? The idea that Tessier is in the same league as Ligotti is, frankly, laughable. Tessier's brand of horror is the epitome of fun and mindless, but it fails even at that. I'll admit that I find the plot of Wicked Things, boiled down to its essence – private eye enters an evil town, is utterly overwhelmed and killed – rather amusing, in a sarcastically macabre kind of way. Tessier, however, fumbles every single aspect of the book's execution, ending with a product both nonsensical and actionless, aimless and devoid of spectacle. Let me put it like this: Wicked Things is rubbish. Don't read it.

China Miéville - Embassytown

2011-09-13T11:34:00.000-04:00

Embassytown (2011) is a novel about language and Language. In the midst of an alien city, surrounded by alien air, the citizens of Embassytown must communicate with the bizarre Areikei. The surface and biological strangeness of the Areikei, however, is nothing compared to their strangeness of thought. The Areikei, see, do not have symbolic language. To them, what they say is, and what is not cannot be said. In order to even gain such rhetorical tools as similes, the comparisons must be acted out so that they might be used. This is how our narrator, Avice, is introduced to them: she is quite literally made into a simile, transformed into a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time. (p. 26) Into this purity of language and Language and thought comes humanity, and we bring with us the concept of lying – and, with it, the collapse of the Areikei world.

The core of Embassytown's success is that the Language of the Areikei is not a glittering substitute for morality or some other more familiar concept. Language here defines thought and is not only the foundational difference that lends the Areikei their tremendous otherness but also the core of every aspect of Miéville's world building. Furthermore, such themes appears again and again in the novel, reinforced through different moments of epiphany, where consciousness is shifted not through gradual learning but through changes in thought and societal norms. Such layers even enter into the reality and construction of the overall universe. Here, the "real" is a manifestation of the immer, which spaceships slip into in order to travel across vast distances. The way the two relate is, of course, in the manner of thought and speech: "The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on." (p. 31)

In addition to language, the novel focuses on manners of ruling and, especially, on colonialism. The change in Areikei thought, after all, was brought on from afar. The people of Embassytown, too, are ruled from outside, a situation that could perhaps be compared to American colonists wreaking havoc among the native populations while also squabbling with their far off backers. Much of the novel's politics play through off stage, as befits a book with an outsider main character, but the intrigue manages nonetheless to be believable and interesting once revealed. Through all this, Miéville marks the colony's change with deft shifts in language. At first, Embassytown is an aristocracy, but later it evolves into a nercocracy of language (p. 247) and, later still, even an explorocracy (p. 345). Those in power are, of course, revealed to be far less benevolent than they appear, and the cracks hinted at in the narrator's childhood are thrown wide before the story's close. After one such blackening of the colony's leadership, Avice is forced to reevaluate all those she's known for her whole life: I stared at MagDa. I liked them, I admired them. They'd known about this. (p. 216)

Miéville's approach to responsibility is not as black and white as that quote may imply, however. As lying destroys the Areikei civilization, and the very minds of its inhabitants, a group dedicates themselves to the preservation of the next generation by keeping them safe from ever hearing such a pervasive thing. Their means, of course, are the death of all the humans on the planet. Though it's hard to sully their aims or dedication, the people of Embassytown cannot accept the Areikei coming to kill us for sins we'd committed, if at all, without intent. (p. 278) The final part of that is the most important one. In the final portion of the novel, the end often does come to justify the means, at least when the problem presented is one so colossal. Many of the actions of Avice and her companions could be seen as questionable, including their willingness to let earlier injustices continue while they focus on larger and more immediate problems. When it comes to the ultimate issues of responsibility and to where the blame for the catastrophe's of the tale fall, Miéville's content to let the reader draw their own conclusions. The central questions of the novel – the morality of language, lies, and authority – are presented from different sides (language is the continuation of coercion by other means squaring off against [language is] cooperation), and the only hint Miéville gives about the validity of either side is that they weren't as contradictory as they sounded. (p. 316)

Embassytown is often a punishingly hard read, especially in its opening. The scenes and information shown there are all vital later, but their order often feels almost intentionally difficult to parse. As Avice says of her memory, she recalls episodes very well, but episodes, not a timeline. The most relevant times, the definitional ones. The rest of it's disorganized in my head, and mostly I don't mind. (p. 23) As such, the novel is, until catastrophe lends it order, a menagerie of events arrayed by impact and the vaguest of chronologies. True to its first person narration, Avice rarely explains that which a resident of the town would not need to know. Concepts are taken for granted and definitions often given in initially meaningless in world jargon. This method, though confusing at first, leads to massive payoffs before long. Complex concepts like Ambassadors are not revealed through lifeless exposition but rather through actions and the reader's increasing immersion into Embassytown's society. When the rules we've observed are later violated, our immediate reaction is not to spot an inconsistency in parameters we've been handed but rather the kind of shock that comes from having trusted rules that feel lived through break down. Though challenging, the novel's packed with revelations and rich with implications.

After the work-heavy beginning sections, Miéville refrains from introducing many more elements but rather concentrates on those already established. As such, though the novel's pace is always slow, the second and third acts are far easier reads. There's never a surfeit of external action, but Miéville's ideas are fascinating enough to draw the reader in. Like the author's previous works, Embassytown is loaded with so many good throw away ideas that its leftovers could populate another dozen inventive Science Fiction extravaganzas. Nothing about the world depicted here is static. The most innocuous of details are given consequences and imaginative, dizzyingly strange results, such as the fact that the human city exists in the planet's only area of (manufactured) believable air: Outside, gulls sounded. They veered, headed constantly for the sea they glimpsed kilometers away, were turned back constantly by sculpted winds and aeoli breath. It was very rare that any broke out into the proper local air, and died. (pp. 119-20)

Strangely enough for a novel told entirely in the first person, and one with such a distinctive and admirable voice, our narrator, Avice, is one of the least interesting and important aspects of the book. In fact, characters as a whole takes a back seat here. This is very much a book of ideas, and the people in it are well defined but always peripheral. At no time does our interest come out of a love of anyone presented, and many of Embassytown's officials and the novel's side characters are defined far more by their roles than their personalities. All that being said, Miéville's characterizations are powerful, if often quiet in their construction. Our cast is made up of those who are sympathetic but not without their flaws and petty arrogances, people able to at once devote their lives to their ideals and also change themselves not out of grand declarations and missions but simply because they're "bored." (p. 38)

That surplus of fallible reality defines the romances of the novel as well. Seemingly star crossed lovers soon discover they've little physical chemistry and fairly quickly gave up on sex. (p. 38) Other relationships get even less of a yearning description. Potential attraction between Avice and another character are merely implied by a never unsubstantiated reference of "some prurience." (p. 204) Despite all of that, however, there is a faint romanticism to Avice's narration – perhaps even to Miéville himself, back on the other side of the page – as is always evident in her later dealings with CalVin and her ruminations about a fraternity of those who once loved [her], or still did? (p. 242) Such a thing is like as not more a product of Avice's occasionally quite arrogant mind than of the other characters', but the existence of such ruminations in and of itself is significant.

Miéville's prose is, as expected, filled with the immense vocabulary that it's somewhat infamous for, but his reputation as a stylist does not rest solely on his obscure diction. The writing here differs sharply from that in Perdido Street Station (2000) or The Scar (2002), glimpses supplied for atmosphere as opposed to a baroque concentration of detail, but is no less effective and often stunning in its flow and power: I could say it was depressing, that party, like a walk through purgatory, we at the end of the world rutting into oblivion and drugging ourselves idiot to autogenerated rhythms and a hammer of lights through smoke. Perhaps to those participating it was joyful. (p. 189) Outside of such fantastic paragraphs, the novel is littered with clever combinations and concepts, such as the aforementioned narcocracy (p. 247) and the description, as Embassytown falls apart, of the ruling class as suicide pioneers (p. 218).

Such flourishes never, it must be noted, reach the point of arrogance, and Miéville's able to write hiddledy-piggledy (p. 255) and have it fit the tone as much as he's able to do the same by titling the first section a Proem. Such mixes of erudition and knowing, genre-savvy winks are common here. Examples include references to vampires (p. 320) in the midst of one of the novel's most important chapters and comparisons to zombie movies (Protagonists were in an edifice full of products, and sicker enemies than before relentlessly came for them. (p. 220)). As the conclusion begins, Miéville combines revolutionary fervor and his jokester tendencies, coming up with what's perhaps the most amusing line in the whole affair: "I don't want to be a simile anymore," our narrator says. "I want to be a metaphor." (p. 296)

China Miéville's early work won its fame in part because of its combination of gripping, pulp fun and highly literate intelligence. That grouping seemed abandoned with the man's last two novels, The City and the City (which felt like all the latter) and Kraken (seemingly all the former). Embassytown does not return to that earlier blend. Though certainly strange and often mind bending, this is a book far removed from the monsters and chases that characterized much of, say, Perdido Street Station. But, though it's in a different style, Miéville here shows a level of mastery equal to or, perhaps even greater than, those seminal, movement-defining novels. This is a novel about language and Language, written with a love of language (and Language?) that is the perfect example of Science Fiction as the genre of ideas, a novel powerful enough that, for the time the reader's turning the pages and beyond, the world looks like a genuinely different place. Highly recommended.

Interview: Thomas Ligotti

2011-09-06T16:39:00.000-04:00

Thomas Ligotti is the author of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, Noctuary, My Work is Not Yet Done, Teatro Grottesco, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and others. He has won the International Horror Guild Award, multiple Bram Stoker awards, and has been nominated for several World Fantasy Awards. Often considered a successor to Poe and Lovecraft, Ligotti's developed an incredibly dedicated following on fan sites like Thomas Ligotti Online and The Art of Grimscribe. On a personal level, I can think of no living author who's had a greater impact on the way that I think and perceive the world. The results of our conversation are as follows…

1. The Subterranean Press reissues are definitive editions of Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, and the forthcoming Noctuary are, we're told, the "revised, definitive edition[s]." So, of course, the question must come: what's different? Was there a specific element you looked for with your changes, an intended change of focus, or were they more focused on strengthening the effects already present? Would it, perhaps, even be possible for you to quote some later-altered line and its newer counterpart, and state the reason for the changes therein?

One thing I did not do is deliberately seek out changes. Of course there would be errors that needed corrections and phrases that needed to be polished. But I didn’t look to shorten or lengthen the stories or any part of them, or to make my prose leaner or more baroque, or to in any way alter the tone of a given story. I just read the books carefully from start to finish and keep on the lookout for additions and deletions that would enhance each story, at least to my mind. The following paragraph was chosen at random and illustrates typical revisions I made throughout Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. It’s the penultimate paragraph of “The Last Feast of Harlequin.”

At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner realm of awful purity and emptiness. I remember those invisible moments when in disguise I drifted through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around me: untouchable. But in instantly I recoil at this grotesque nostalgia, for I realize what is happening and what I do not want to be true, though Thoss proclaimed it was. I recall his command to those others as I lay helplessly prone in the tunnel. They could have apprehended me, but Thoss, my old master called them back. His voice echoed throughout that cavern, and it now reverberates within my own psychic chambers.

At certain times I could almost dissolve entirely into this inner realm of purity and emptiness, the paradise of the unborn. I remember how I was momentarily overtaken by a feeling I had never known when in disguise I drifted through the streets of Mirocaw, untouched by the drunken, noisy forms around me: untouchable. I was the feeling that I had been liberated from the weight of life. But I recoil at this seductive nostalgia, for it mocks my existence as mere foolery, a bright clown’s mask behind which I sought to hide my darkness. I realize what is happening and what I do not want to be true, though Thoss proclaimed it was. I recall his command to those as I lay helplessly prone in the tunnel. They could have apprehended me, but Thoss, my old master, called them back. His voice echoed throughout that cavern, and it now reverberates with the psychic chambers of my memory.

It would be a lengthy process for me to point out every change and why I made it. One thing I particularly like is the sentence that includes the added phrase “the weight of life.” I feel that it bolsters and encapsulates the theme of the story in four words. I’ll leave it to the reader to consider other additions and deletions, and to judge whether they improve this passage. In several stories throughout the two books—including “Flowers of the Abyss” and “Eye of the Link”—I sat back at some early stage of revision and thought, “What is this story really about?” These cases might involve the addition and deletion of whole pages to focus the original intent of the story.

2. Revising these stories must have involved countless rereads of them. How did it feel to revisit in your older work in that fashion? If you were to articulate one major way your writing's changed or evolved in the time since Songs of a Dead Dreamer, what would it be?

Well, since I’ve revised only my first two collections, I can’t say that I’ve seen that much change in the stories gathered in these books. If anything, I would have to say that with Grimscribe I started to venture further into more symbolic narratives and landscapes while still keeping them leashed to typical “reality” of the horror tale. I should point out that “The Last Dream of Harlequin” and “The Dreaming in Nortown” were written before the stories in my first collection.

3. Your work is complex and thematically rich, the stories well suited to sprout a variety of different interpretations on TLO and elsewhere. Amidst all that, do you have any stories that you feel have been continually misunderstood? Also, has there ever been a theory (or theories) so strange that you couldn't at all understand how they drew that from your words?

I’ve read only formal reviews and essays on my stories, and I can’t say that any of them have veered toward readings that I didn’t intend for the most part.

4. You write fiction about the darkness of the world, and yet so many have gained great pleasure from your works, myself included. How can you reconcile this? Is there something wrong with enjoying such dark fiction, some sort of suicidal mechanism that makes the rare defective organism enjoy being told of its inadequacies?

Your question implies that there is an ideal human against whom those who read dark fiction may be compared. But there is no such organism. All human beings are randomly generated, arbitrarily conditioned units. What we would call “defects” in a given individual is probably best measured by characteristics relevant to its fitness to survive and reproduce. Everything else has to do with psychological or sociological conventions and peculiarities. By the broad conventions of modern Western civilization, reading dark fiction is a form of escapist diversion like any other. (Getting bored yet?) In this sense, it might be considered one of many survival mechanisms we employ to burn off the cognitive excess endemic to our species. We think too much, and thinking is the destroyer of what we need to live. And what we need are irrational, immediate pleasures or an unreasoning prospect of the same. Nothing of great importance in our lives—what we consider makes them worth living—is rational. This includes pleasurable emotions and sensations derived from a variety of sources, such as sex without reproductive purpose, mountain climbing, and rock and roll. Without these and other irrational enjoyments, life is not worth living for human beings. You could even add to the previous list irrational activities that are not usually considered hedonistic: devoting ourselves to the well-being of others from whose survival we seem to have nothing to gain; prayer or meditation intended to release us from an egoistic, survivalist way of life; reproducing more human beings for the continuance of a race that cannot be proved to be worth continuing, and so on. All these irrational actions are of the conventional sort, and their purpose of which is not often questioned.

As for psychological or sociological peculiarities, reading dark fiction to burn off the cognitive excess endemic to our species is frequently viewed as a perverse pastime that is especially irrational and practiced with enthusiasm by only a small cadre of human beings. Although it does serve a survival need as an escapist from of diversion like any other, it does so in a roundabout manner that on its face is indefensible and at a deeper level is a negation of what makes life worth living. From the perspective of survival and reproduction, reading dark fiction is a degenerate indulgence that revels in what is against human life. Aside from the common self-satisfying pleasures that we believe make existence worth the trouble, there are other pleasures that are uncommon in their satisfactions. They are unhealthy and sometimes are demonstrably the pursuit of those who have been randomly generated by a corrupted line of genetics or arbitrarily conditioned by traumatic experiences or detrimental environments. People who tend to the use of alcohol or illegal drugs must have some reason for engaging in such self-destructive habits, notwithstanding that these reasons cannot be pinpointed with exactitude. Ultimately, however, their principal reason is analogous to that of more healthy individuals: to experience the pleasurable emotions and sensations that make life worth living over and against those and emotions and sensations which put in question the worth of life—physical or mental illness (either due to genetics, traumas, or pernicious environmental conditions), tragic events that cast a shadow over an individual’s existence, a general lack of existential satisfactions, and other types of awful experience.

Even if the genetics, traumas, and environments that drive us to alcohol, drugs, or dark fiction are not obvious, they may nevertheless be in play all the same. What makes nightmares? More to the point, what make an individual dwell with a morbid excitement over his nightmares? And what makes someone wish to convey their nightmares in artistic form for the excited consumption of others with a taste for some of the most sick and morbid productions of the human brain? There are those who yearn for the days of carnival freak shows, to lay their eyes on the rare and repulsive beings nature is capable of sprouting forth. While such individuals may not wish to visit hospitals where such aberrations are given birth many times per day in this world, they shiver with delight to read of them on the page or see them on the screen. Like addicts of the emotions and sensations granted to us by nature’s bounty or a pharmaceutical laboratory, fanatics of dark fiction must have what they must have, because their lives would be deprived without it and their bodies and minds would tremble with craving for depraved imaginings. Thus, in my opinion, if your life—or some portion of your life—depends on the consumption of fiction founded on the darkness of the world for it to be worth living, then there is definitely something wrong with you both as a conventional and a peculiar being.

When I was a child reading horror comic books, I was told by my parents that a priest was coming to visit our house. Immediately, I gathered up my horror comics and him them under the cushion of one of the living room sofas. When the priest entered the house, he was invited by my parents to sit down. Of course, he sat upon the cushion of the sofa beneath which I had hid my horror comics. I was terrified because I believed he knew what I had hidden there. I was a very religious child, and I felt intensely that reading those horror comics was a sin. I’m not exaggerating this anecdote in the least. I felt it was diabolical for me to be enjoying horror comics for the same reason that you asked me if it was irreconcilable to take pleasure in reading dark fiction and wallowing in the darkness of the world—because it is diabolical and irreconcilable. Years later, when I had started writing horror fiction, I asked one of my co-workers who was a born-again Christian if he thought that I was doing something sinful. He was someone I considered a work-friend and had conversely with honesty on a variety of subjects. He said he didn’t think that writing horror fiction was sinful. Later, he wrote a book on the conservative thinker Russell Kirk, who wrote what I would describe as moral horror stories. Maybe my work-friend didn’t think that writing horror fiction was sinful because he was thinking of moral horror fiction, which is mostly the kind of horror fiction that is written. The point is that even when I was in my twenties, and an atheist, I still wondered if enjoying horror fiction was sinful—sinful and wrong. Sometime later in life I had ceased to care whether reading or writing horror fiction was wrong. I had read all kinds of literature that was considered sick and evil, and I loved it because it was sick and evil. I loved it because it was against the human race and its values. Perhaps that’s why other readers of horror fiction—or at least certain kinds of horror fiction—get pleasure from it. They can answer only for themselves. You have my confession.

5. The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein is clearly a very different work than the most of your stories, seemingly a homage in large part. What were your intentions when writing it?

I didn’t have any intentions of writing a book of “rewrites” of classic horror fiction and films when I wrote the first piece in Agonizing Resurrection. In the early eighties, I was asked to contribute a short piece to a one-off fanzine with the title and theme of “Animality.” I wasn’t sure what the editor wanted, nor what “anamality” might imply. After thinking a while, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau occurred to me as a narrative that could be described as focusing on the idea of anamality. In the novel, Dr. Moreau’s mission was to turn animals not only into human beings, but into human beings of an ideal rationality (if you read the book). In my version, however, the manwolf’s behavior is wholly irrational by its display of courtly sentimentality when he kneels with loving devotion before Moreau’s female assistant (an extra character introduced for my purposes). This is not what Moreau had in mind at all, and once again he has failed. “Now the creature,” as I write in the introduction to The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, “will require further adjustments in order to nudge its nature closer to that untainted rationality that Moreau values above all else.” He wanted to make men, not silly sops—brutes on the make that will as likely tear out their fellow creatures’ throats as they are to beg pathetically for what they want. Such a gesture implies the capacity for a range of actions endemic to human beings what it meant to be human, something that did not include the courtly sentimentality that the manwolf displays. Moreau’s House of Pain was intended to torture animals into becoming human, to mutilate and brainwash them into the kind of heartless because that Wells portrayed Moreau as exemplifying.

Now, my wont has never been to produce short, stand-alone pieces. Even my so-called poetry collections are cyclical and follow connective theme of some sort. So naturally I wanted to write more pieces along the same lines as “Moreau.” First, I did two more rewrites of horror narratives that featured other scientists—Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll—and thus had a short series of tales with like characters. I also had a theme that was common the series. In my early horror stories, I seldom produced any works that turned on romantic or strongly emotional relationships between people. (Examples include “Les Fleurs” and “Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech.”) At some point I made a conscious decision not to include this element that was so common to horror, and especially Gothic literature. It just seemed irrelevant to what I was trying to do as a writer, which was to portray a wholly nightmarish existence. This was the essence of my experience of being alive, and everything else seemed of little or no import. However, it so happened that around the time I was asked to contribute a work of short prose on the theme of animality to a one-off fanzine I was again ready to write about romantic or strongly emotional relationships, and to use them to express the most excruciatingly painful scenarios I could conceive that were based on such relationships. This was how I expected The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein to be perceived by readers, although I’m not sure it was. Nevertheless, the first person to read the entire book, believe it or not, described it as an “apotheosis of pain.” Bingo.

Titling the first section of the book Three Scientists, I proceeded to write other sections of a like nature, taking my characters and narratives from famous works of horror fiction and films and giving each of them a twist that I thought made them more appalling than the originals. Some of the sections contained pieces of my own devising. These were stylistically and thematically similar to the pieces based on the Wolfman and Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera and the Phantom of the Wax Museum, etc. These were not intended to be homages to the works featuring these characters but extensions or mutations of them linked by a common
subject. Ultimately, the book was an entirely fortuitous project, if I may be generous to myself.

6. The majority of your fiction is not only out of print but scarce, with the rarer works regularly commanding prices well beyond a hundred dollars. How do you feel about the exclusivity that brings, and the cost that any potential fan must pay before reading your work? Are there any authors that you collect in such a manner (by which I mean the hunting down of rare and costly volumes, or the obsessing over particular editions)?

I’ve never been a book collector, but I’ve always found that I had enough money to spend on the books I’ve wanted. I feel bad that readers of my books have to pay high prices for some of my books. I wish my books had more readers and brought in more money. Just because the cost of my books if high doesn’t mean that I make a lot of money from them. In my experience, the more a book cost is in inverse ratio to how much an author makes on the book. Authors receive a certain number of copies of their books from a publisher. Sometimes I make more money selling these books than I do from the advance I received for the book itself. On the other hand, having a pricey book released means that it will be of a higher production quality and will probably be around longer than an author whose book was published in a print run of five thousand copies.

7. A major tenet of the brand of antinatalism you discuss in Conspiracy is that most men are unaware of the horrors around them, that they are deluded in their faiths and securities. But, if asked, the devout Christian would answer that those without Christ are deluded, and the happy atheist would confirm that answer with different words along with the Jew, the Muslim, and anyone of any other faith that you cared to ask. How can you be sure that antinatalism is not just another delusion, that the rationality of depression and/or ego-death is not just another false enlightenment?

I don’t think that a Christian or a believer in any religion is less aware of the horrors around than an atheist. Ask Blaise Pascal. They may be less aware, but it’s not a major tenet of antinatalism that they are or that they are specifically because they believe in Jesus. If I believed in God, I think I would go mad with the horror that the universe is some kind of moral laboratory. Fortunately, no one can prove that God exists, not even God. Whatever wonders He performs for us could be attributed to an advanced life form, even if it tries to pass itself off as one or another of the gods portrayed in religious scriptures. But that advanced life form would have a time of it impersonating all gods at the same time. If he did, then we would be in the same position of factional belief we are in now. Of course, an advanced life form might be able to do anything it wanted. Then we would have to decide whether we are all being fooled into believing in multiple gods or an advanced life form that can impersonate multiple gods.

Antinatalism is based on the principle that suffering of whatever kind or degree should not be caused or perpetuated, and that human existence necessarily entails suffering that we can neither escape nor justify, least of all by experiencing pleasures. Thus, the only way to end all suffering would be to cease producing beings who suffer. In the abstract, I hold to that principle and believe that those who do not hold to it are simply of a different mindset. In everyday life, I live for the most part as a deluded individual except when I sit down and recall what I believe in principle. Writing Conspiracy against the Human Race was the same kind of drug for me as believing in Jesus is for some people. If it hadn’t been, then I wouldn’t have written it. I say as much in the book. As for ego-death, we don’t know what it is or how it happens. Personally I believe that ego-death is a neurological condition that by many accounts mimics what has been called “enlightenment” among those who are concerned with this phenomenon. I also believe with Thomas Metzinger and many other philosophers that ego-life is an illusion. Now, whatever one believes or does not believe, as I wrote in Conspiracy, is an opinion. I quote a lot of antinatalists in my books, but I don’t think that I argue that if someone isn’t an antinatalist they are immoral or knowingly perpetuate pain in the word. To quote from Conspiracy: “Opinion: There are no praiseworthy incentives to reproduce.” I can’t prove that there are not praiseworthy incentives to reproduce. If someone has an opinion that there is a praiseworthy reason to reproduce, I’d love to hear it. For years I’ve queried parents or women who are pregnant if they could offer a reason for having children that was based on the good of the child and not on the good of the breeders and their society. I do try to contrive perspectives from which this opinion may appear sound, which is why I subtitled my book “A Contrivance of Horror.” And I do say that no one can prove either that life is desirable or undesirable. And no one can. Most people think that they can prove that reproduction is praiseworthy and that life is by nature desirable. But their opinions don’t stand up to scrutiny. They absolutely can’t prove that their opinion proves mine to be wrong. This is not a problem for me, because I will never contribute to the produce of a child whose life may, by conventional opinion, not be worth living. I won’t ever have to imagine the pain of that child or experience pain for having produced it. I can be sure of this. But no prospective parent can be sure that they won’t be responsible for the making of a child with such a fate. No one can say what vicissitudes may cause a life to become not worth living. Parents may or may not blame themselves for producing a life that in the worst way becomes not worth living. But they can always take comfort in the fact that it was not their intention for their offspring to end up having such a life. However, we can at this point in time prevent children from coming into the world with defects that would almost surely—or sometimes surely—make their lives not worth living. I’m not speaking of birth defects of all types. I’m speaking of defects that, barring any beliefs that would preclude abortion for fear of hellfire, would cause few but radical pro-lifers to disallow the parents from exercising the abortive option. So while no one can prove that there is any praiseworthy incentive to reproduce, there are cases in which most would agree there are praiseworthy, or at least not blameworthy, incentives not to reproduce. This fact is not definite proof that antinatalism is the correct stance to take, but it’s not just an opinion either.

8. If the majority of people are existing in a fashion that they consider better than not existing, if they would answer that Life is Alright, how can it be stated that Life is Not Alright for the entirety of the human race?

This question is rather difficult to sort out. It’s certainly possible, subjectively, for an individual to feel that “it’s good to be alive,” but that doesn’t mean that it was always good to be alive for that individual or that it will always be good to be alive for that individual. I know that it’s possible for some number of people not to have a “good day” for practically their entire lives. It’s also possible for some number of people to never have a “bad day” for practically their entire lives. But it’s pretty futile to get into calculating how many people have never had a good day or a bad day, and by this means conclude whether or not being alive is all right. The whole proposition is so hypothetical that it’s not worth giving a moment’s regard. To my mind, it’s also rather crass and unfeeling to propose that as long as a majority of people exist in such a fashion that they consider it better to exist than not to exist, it can be said that life is all right for the entirety of the human race—that the minority counts for nothing in this useless calculation. Furthermore, those in the majority at one time may find themselves in the minority at another. At the end of any given generation, it would be possible for almost everyone to occupy a place in the majority as well as the minority. Then you would be back to where you started. And where you started is where we are now and have always been, not to speculate that it is where we will always be. The pronouncement of the majority with respect to the value of live is the one that rules. Antinatalists must be insane. My children will not be one of those people who never have a good day for practically their entire lives. My children will be in the majority, if there really is a majority and not just a deluded consensus.

9. While I agree that the minority shouldn't be discounted, can it really be counted equally with the majority with regards to a subjective question (which, without the consideration of some kind of god or objective truth, that of life's worth seems to be)? Regardless of the malleability of the borders and the frequency of migrations between the two, if the larger of the two camps would argue that Life is Alright, can the negative be said to be true in any sense greater than the personal?

In Conspiracy I anticipated your question. On page 44, I wrote that one of the arguments used (by the majority) against the reason that pessimists believe certain things is their “intractable wrongheadedness, a charge that pessimists could turn against optimists if the argumentum ad populumwere not the world’s favorite fallacy.” That is, pessimism must be wrong because, even though it is an outlook that has lived for thousands of years and articulated in the most sophisticated terms, the majority denies its precepts. You’ve applied the same fallacy to antinatalism that others have applied to pessimism. You’ve also entertained the idea that holding to the question of antinatalism versus pro-natalism is a subjective matter. It’s hard to see how antinatalism could be any more subjective than many other, quite reputable, philosophical questions (determinism versus free will, for instance) just because neither side has proved its case, which by its nature may be not be subject to proof. Despite the fact that neither anti- nor pronatalists can prove their positions, pro-natalists have to live with the possibility that they might be wrong. That is a heavy burden to carry, and a heavier burden to pass on to subsequent generations. Antinatalists don’t have a similar burden. When action is taken on their side and a child is not born, no harm is done. No one has to suffer and die. If the whole species chose extinction, the situation would be the same, because extinction is our fate. Someday it won’t matter if anyone lived or died. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t presently doomed to live in a world where people suffer and die. Personally, I’m afraid of suffering and afraid of dying. I’m also afraid of witnessing the suffering and death of those who are close to me. And no doubt I project these fears on those around me and those to come, which makes it impossible for me to understand why everyone isn’t an antinatalist, just as I have to assume pronatalists can’t understand why everyone isn’t like them. In an essay on David Benatar’s antinatalist book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, the Finnish philosopher, Sami PihlstrÖm (Metaphilosophy, Volume 40, Number 5, October 2009 , pp. 656-670), argued that whether or not life is worth living is a question that is intolerable and should never be discussed. I hope things don’t come to that.

10. It's one thing to argue, as you do in Conspiracy, that the joys of life are, essentially, delusions and escape mechanisms, but it's another to argue that that invalidates those joys. Even if our art is created solely to allow us to forget the darkness around us, why would that make the resulting joys less true?

Maybe I let my fingers slip across my keyboard at some time during the writing of Conspiracy, but I don’t recall arguing that joys are delusions. Here’s a quote from p. 43: “Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence is basically undesirable. I you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply ‘Of course,' before returning to their ecstasy.” Just because a given joy (such as reading dark fiction) is an escape mechanism doesn’t mean it’s invalidated or untrue, whatever those words may mean in this context. But the very fact that we can legitimately refer to joy as an “escape mechanism” doesn’t say much for joy.

Metzinger's Being No One

11. For me – and, I suspect, for others – the section of Conspiracy that was most powerful was on determinism. One of its most memorable parts was your mentioning of a saying by Metzinger, namely: Can one really believe in determinism without going insane? In the light of those words – and your arguments surrounding them and quotation of them – do you believe in determinism? If so, how can you reconcile that with daily life?

I don’t argue that determinism is true in Conspiracy. To do so would be futile. I do discuss the subject because it’s related to other matters in the book, especially the reality or unreality of the “self.” Whether our thoughts and behavior are determined or free is of no consequence if, as Metzinger argues, no selves exist or have ever existed and there is nothing that can be determine or free. I think the question of the self is far more interesting because scientists are getting closer to being able to test how our perception of ourselves, other people, and the world in general are formed. My own opinion regarding the issue of determinism versus free will is that it has no practical import in our lives. Either of these positions, or any of their many combinations and variations, function more as philosophical doctrines in which one believes than can actually experience in a definitive way. If I stop and concentrate on how I perceive other people, I have to say that they seem to me like robots in their behavior and their being. This is definitely the case when I see people on TV who are accused of murder. I never blame them or hold them morally responsible for their actions. It seems stupid to do so if you look at the situation with a cold eye. Surely such a radical act must have had radical causes, some of which seem obvious and others of which seem unknowable. This perception is more difficult when it comes to considering someone closer to you in your life. I’ll look at someone I believe I know very well and think: ”Who is that? What makes them act the way they do and not some other way? What’s going on inside them, if anything?” That can be upsetting. People who are getting divorced have been known to say about their ex-beloved, “I thought I knew (him or her), but I couldn’t have been more mistaken about (him or her).” Supposedly we extrapolate from our experience of ourselves and transfer that experience to other people, and that this gives you the sense that they’re like you—that you can read their minds in some way. While it may seem to work that way, it really can’t. When I turn from other people to myself, I can’t say much more about how I work. I can never know what my next thought is going to be—how it forms or where it comes from, so to speak. I absolutely don’t feel that I’m choosing my thoughts. They just come one after another depending on the circumstances of the past and present, some of which I could name but most of which I can’t. It’s the same with my behavior. In everyday life, none of this matters because we don’t think deeply about it on an hourly basis. I have impulses to do things, but I don’t know how those impulses formed or why they make me do a particular thing and not some other thing. Whether we’re puppets or real human beings, whatever the latter may be, we go on thinking and acting in certain ways because we’re moved to do by certain forces we’re not aware of. You could argue with this perception, but it’s my perception and the whole thing would come down to I say, you say. To me, determinism just seems common sense, but I couldn’t tell you why it does. Since it’s so ferociously opposed by most philosophers and lay persons, it must be a disturbing idea that they don’t want to be true. I can understand that. Even if determinism seems like common sense to me, it does seem to be a component of this world of horror we live in. And just by discussing it in Conspiracy, although not arguing for it, it was my intention to arouse a sense of the uncanny in my readers. When I’m writing for an audience, people don’t seem like robots to me. I’m not sure they seem like anything. In the end, I suppose the best thing is not to think about it.

12. Is antinatalism a philosophy or a lifestyle? By this I mean that, if the sane Christian attempts heaven and the sane Buddhist enlightenment, why do antinatalists not work towards their own paradise, their own nonexistence? Furthermore, how can antinatalists (and, for these purposes, determinists along the lines of those quoted and studied in Conspiracy) profess love or even have children? Do these things make them hypocrites or human? If life is a hell, and nonexistence a heaven, then are things like murder acceptable to the antinatalist? If it is better to not live, then, are murderers and even the perpetuators of genocide not doing good deeds?

I think that the antinatalist counterpart of the Christian’s heaven (Buddhist enlightenment actually is a type of antinatalism in a superficial sense) would be to reduce this world to a place where no one was ever born. Obviously, this is not sane idea. (I’ll leave it to others to decide the sanity of believing in heaven or enlightenment.) As for love or the desire to have children, these are powerful impulses in most people and not possible to override under normal circumstances. Galen Strawson, one of the most deterministic determinists, was asked a version of this question in an interview. He answered that in his everyday life, he was just like anybody else. David Hume said the same thing. This answer makes no rational sense, but neither do love or the desire to have children. They are nature’s way of keeping the species going until something happens and we cease existing, an eventuality that will certainly come about and has almost come about a number of times in the past. As for antinatalists, falling in love has nothing to do with their principles. Some antinatalists have had children before they became antinatalists. From what I’ve read, they love their children as most parent do but regret having reproduced. An antinatalist who does not have children would cease to be an antinatalist if they willfully and knowingly reproduced. Not all people who do not reproduce are antinatalists, although some of them do not reproduce for similar reasons as antinatalists. Nonexistence isn’t anything, so it would have nothing to do with antinatalism. The desire not exist would be a tenet of pessimism, and some antinatalists are pessimists. But pessimism isn’t required for antinatalism. A pessimist believes that being alive is not all right, and even if it occasionally seems all right, this is an illusion. As Cioran wrote, “Pleasure prepares pain.” Antinaltalists don’t necessarily think that life is hell, they just think that it necessarily involves such suffering that anyone would be better off not having been born. Interestingly, those who believe that life is worth living often begin making their case by pointing out the goodness of ice cream. If you’re not diabetic, lactose intolerant, obese, or have any number of other ailments, ice cream is indeed very good. Given the link made between antinatalism and murder or genocide, I hope that the replies I’ve given to this question demonstrate that no such link exists. An antinatalist may have a passion for murder and genocide, but this is by no means an element of antinatalism. Murder and genocide are two phenomena that antinatlists would offer as reasons for why it would be better never to have been born. I hope the logic of this statement is evident.

13. Let's end on a happy note. What's the most enjoyable thing you did this week?

I watched Little Murders, an old favorite of mine.

Thank you once again for doing this interview, Mr. Ligotti.

Dashiell Hammett - The Continental Op

2011-09-02T09:53:00.000-04:00

Then I turned on all the lights in the room, lighted a cigarette (we all like to pose a little now and then), and sat down on the bed to await my capture. (p. 111)

Though Sam Spade, famous for his starring role in the Maltese Falcon, might have a higher profile, it's the Continental Op that narrated the lion's share of Dashiell Hammett's fiction, including Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and the bulk of the man's short fiction. Containing seven stories written between 1924 and 1930, the The Continental Op collection from Black Lizard is filled with tales that perfectly show one of the genre's best on his home turf.

Mystery – the hodgepodge bookstore section for mysteries, crime, and thrillers, that is – is at its heart a rational genre. To boil the genre down to a single glib sentence, the genre is the solving of puzzles. At the opening of the story, the detective, and the reader, is confronted with a situation that makes no sense. Then, like the Scooby gang demasking another supernatural ghost to find a middle aged man, the detective makes sense of the clues and replaces impossibility with a logical procession of events. Any in genre story by Poe, Doyle, or any of their authorial descendants, begins with a series of incomprehensible clues and ends with motive, miscreant, and method all neatly tied up and – if the author's good at what they do – no disappointing coincidences or absurdities remaining.

Dashiell Hammett's stories do not function like that at all, though the Continental Op does indeed go through his own process of investigation. Hammett's aim is not the puzzle but rather the implications of the puzzle, and his stories are not riddles that can be satisfactorily deduced by even the most skilled reader-sleuth hybrid. Hammett's mysteries are mysteries of people and society, not of circumstance, and the Op learns far more by sheer force of will and his own dogged determination than he does from any brilliant analysis of clues.

This is perhaps best exemplified by the collection's first story, The Tenth Clew (available for free here). The Op and the local police find themselves confronted with a murder and a surfeit of clues – or, as I suppose I must, clews. Instead of following the trail to the bloody end, however, the Op disregards all of them and focuses on the man behind them, hunting the personality rather than the evidence. For Hammett, the deduction is, at best, a sideshow, and not only is the reader almost never given all the pieces before the reveal, they're also almost never even shown the Op's process of discovery.

But those are but surface differences. No, the true difference between the genre of mysteries and the writings of Dashiell Hammett is what Steven Marcus discusses in his fantastic introduction. As I said about, mystery is inherently a rational genre. But Hammett is inherently not a rational writer. Like all detectives, the Op reveals the lies of common sense and criminals for what they are, but the truth he uncovers is just as illogical as his foes' deception. Hammett's stories are all but made out of defied expectations, and his revelations are filled with people who are not who they claim to be, crimes committed for reasons incomprehensible, random bursts of violence, and coincidences and hapless fate so twisted as to be delicious. As Marcus says:

Yet what happens in Hammett is that what is revealed as "reality" is a still further fiction-making activity – in the first place in the Op's, and behind that yet another, the consciousness present in many of the Op stories and all the novels that Dashiell Hammett, the writer, is continually doing the same thing as the Op and all the other characters in the fiction he is creating. That is to say, he is making a fiction (in writing) in the real world; and this fiction, like the real world itself, is coherent but not necessarily rational. What one both begins and ends with, then, is a story, a narrative, a coherent yet questionable account of the world. (p. XXI)

For Hammett, the world as we see it is a very flimsy thing, a construction easily sidestepped by both the intending and the oblivious. Identity, for him, is a passing thing, a garb easily donned and discarded. As one captured villain says of their slipping through the cracks: Then I took an apartment on Ashubry Avenue under [an assumed name], and I was an altogether different person. (p. 169, The Girl with the Silver Eyes) (name removed for the sake of spoilers)

Perhaps the Continental Op is a bulwark of justice in such an immoral world, but the Op himself doesn't seem so much moral as amoral, a nameless everyman in appearance and intellect notable only for his force of will. The Continental Op does not share the ambiguity that adorns Sam Spade throughout the Maltese Falcon, but he is also as far as cry from Chandler's Philip Marlowe as he is from Sherlock Holmes. Like in Red Harvest, the Op doesn't care about methods so long as he gets the job done, and his idea of the job is often a far cry from that of his employer's.

In The Golden Horseshoe, we see that the Op's goals are not that of the law, but rather of justice. Providing he can see justice done, the Op doesn't care what story he has to feed the law. In The Main Death, the Op goes one step further. In case too convoluted to ever be won at trial, he takes the law into his own hands, regains the victim's property with force, and buries the facts under a happy outcome. In The Farewell Murders, he reveals that his idea of justice doesn't even extend to seeing the good prosper – he just needs to see the wicked suffer. The Op responds to the continued misfortune and even tragedy of his employer without even a sympathetic word, and he weathers years and false ends all so that, at the end, he can see the guilty hanged.

The Op's justice is a harsh one, and, to him, the guilty deserve no rights at all. When he tells the story of a former cop, Duran, it's clear where his sympathies lie: He used to be captain of detectives in one of the larger Middle Western cities. Once he tried too hard to get a confession out of a safe-ripper, and killed him. The newspapers didn't like Duran. They used that accident to howl him out of his job. (p. 190) I don't believe it's a coincidence that five of the seven stories ends with the following emotionless sentiment: They hanged him. (p. 319)

We've established by now that the thrill of a Hammett story is not the solving of the mystery, but we haven't yet looked into where precisely the thrill is to be found. The answer comes from the prose and the hardboiled, unsentimental, and unflinching interaction of the Op and the world around him. Hammett's writing is clear, terse, and able to both convey volumes of style while simultaneously revealing almost no emotion at all. In the midst of this, the Op often further reinforces his detachment with instances of wit so dry and caustic they're liable to start forest fires: The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she'd do it again, so I surrendered. (p. 57)

Among other things, Hammett has a gift for pegging characters in only a few lines and in picking out the one detail that makes them memorable. Alas, while he refrains from over indulging in pointless back stories, he loves to drown the telling and significant details he's created in oceans of white noise and minutia: Age about 30; height about five feet ten; slender, weight about 140; medium complexion; brown hair, suit, and shoes and a gray overcoat. (p. 252) I suppose that, if the infamous police report style of description is to ever find a home it would be here, in a novel about a private detective, but that doesn’t change the fact that such a storm of details leaves the reader with far less, not far more, of a picture than they would otherwise have had. And lest you think that example unique, here's another from the same page: [he was] about five eight inches tall, would weight about a hundred and seventy pounds, had brown hair and eyes, a dark complexion, a flat, broad face with his cheekbones, and wore a blue suit, gray hat, tan overcoat, black shoes, and a pear-shaped pearl tie-pin. (p. 252)

The newest of these stories is eight decades old, and it's true that their levels of gore and profanity feel tame to a modern audience. Their core, however, feels anything but. Hammett's grasp of atmosphere and pace is excellent here, and his ability to build tension is unmatched. After a classic Hammett moment of false perceptions, The House on Turk Street becomes a deadly game of cat and mouse in an unlit house. Other stories, too, are prone to sudden escalations that lead to scenes of violence that are either so brief as to be downright blunt as well as merciless or long, drawn out passages of waiting for the flash of gunfire to give away the enemy. Both styles of action work incredibly well, and each is stronger for the downbeat forced calm that surrounds it.

The Continental Op is a collection of stories that will make your pulse pound. It's also a collection of stories that contain surprising amounts of depth and even revelation. This is an essential read for anyone interested in Dashiell Hammett, noir, mystery in general, or even just good fiction.

The Model

2011-08-30T12:31:00.000-04:00

Because great news comes in twos, my twitter story The Model is now up free at Trapeze. Check it out, it's brief and rather cheery. Or, at least, one of those.

[Note: since this fell on a Tuesday, this week's review will be posted on Friday.]

Publication v3

2011-08-29T21:24:00.000-04:00

My story The Dummy will be appearing in Bards and Sages Quarterly come January.

George R.R. Martin - Fevre Dream

2011-08-23T08:22:00.000-04:00

Released in 1982, Fevre Dream is George R.R. Martin's third novel. While much of his early work is Science Fiction, this is a historical Horror novel, one as concerned with steamboats upon the Mississippi as it is with the vampires it contains, and one that proves as adept at conveying the majesty of 19^th century America as A Game of Thrones was at showing us a certain pseudo-medieval world. Yes, this is a vampire story, but it is anything but a shallow imitation of 'Salem's Lot or any of the genre's other classics.

Like all of Martin's work, Fevre Dream is a story of characters. Abner Marsh is a large and honest man, someone slow but bright, the ugliest man on the river (p. 11) and one of its biggest dreamers. He's a steamboatman through and through and has served in every position up tom and most certainly including, captain, but he's now lost just about everything save sympathy due to crushing ice and cruel fate. Abner is a gruff character not much given to warmth or gentleness, but he's a good man that refuses to bow down to circumstance.

Into the picture comes Joshua York, a suave man of indeterminate age, strange hours, and stranger companions. He has a proposition for Captain Marsh: York will supply the money for a steamboat if Marsh is willing to captain it for him. And if Marsh is willing to never, ever question the peculiarities of him or his companions. So their partnership begins, with Marsh kept in the dark. Of course, as any reader of horror worth their salt should be able to guess within a page of their meeting, Joshua's more than he seems. But that does not mean that the novel soon devolves into empty chase scenes. No, Joshua and Abner's relationship is far more complex than that. The chemistry, and eventual friendship, between the two is breathtaking, even while it has to grow around the holes in their knowledge and the mistrust that they can't help but feel.

Damon Julian and Sour Billy Tipton complete our list of characters, and their relationship could not be more different. Julian is the most powerful living vampire, and perhaps the eldest, while Sour Billy is the human he uses to do his bidding. Their relationship is one of greed, with each intending to exploit the other for all that they are worth, and each interacting with others entirely through fear.

The conflict between York and Julian is the central thread of the novel, but far from its only focus. Martin's pace here is slow, drifting down the course of the story and seeing all there is to see rather than sprinting through. The first half of the book, in fact, is almost devoid of direct conflict, instead focusing on setting the scene and building the atmosphere. Martin is able to characterize with only a handful of sentences, and his descriptions are rich and stately, filling the pages with a world over a century old that fills as vivid as the reader's own:

Even empty of carpeting, mirrors, and furniture, the long cabin had a splendor to it. they walked down it slowly, in silence, and in the moving light of the lantern bits of its stately beauty suddenly took form from the darkness, only to vanish again behind them: The high arched ceiling with its curved beams, curved and painted with detail as fine as fairy lace. Long rows of slim columns flanking the stateroom doors, trimmed with delicate fluting. The black marble bar with its thick veins of color. The oily sheen of dark wood. The double row of chandeliers, each with four great crystal globes hanging from a spiderweb of wrought iron, wanting only oil and a flame and all those mirrors to wake the whole saloon to glorious, glittering light. (pp. 32-3)

That splendor, however, can be deceptive. Numerous characters are enamored with beauty, and good is closely aligned with the creation of beauty. And yet beauty is what so often leads to evil, what draws both vampires and thieves. Darkness, too, frequently lurks behind beauty, and the splendor of the Fevre Dream and the river towns it passes through is soon tainted by what lurks underneath: "This city – the heat, the bright colors, the smells, the slaves – it is very alive, this New Orleans, but inside I think it is rotten with sickness." (p. 130) In that way, the majesty of the novel's opening is subverted as its core turns out to be rotted and sick. Great works are built on the backs of slaves, noble characters may be filled with evil, and the beauty of Julian and the ugliness of Marsh provide no indicator of the man beneath the skin.

Fevre Dream, at first, seems a specimen of character driven horror, focusing on the personal struggle between Joshua York and Damon Julian and the darkness that comes from within men. But, as time passes, it soon becomes clear that the conflict is not between those within our brightly lit steamboat and those against another but rather our brightly lit steamboat against the entirety of the darkness without and within: "I thought him evil at first, a dark king leading his people into ruin, but watching him…he is ruined already, hollow, empty. He feasts on the lives of your people because he has no life of his own, not even a name that is truly his. Once I wondered what he thought of, alone, all those days and nights in darkness. I know now that he does not think at all. Perhaps he dreams. If so, I think he dreams of death, an ending. He dwells in that black empty cabin as if it were a tomb, stirring form it only at the scent of blood." (p. 291)

Even as he draws horror from the same wells as Lovecraft and his cohorts, however, Martin's conclusions are vastly different from the cosmic pessimism of the Weird Tales originators. For Martin the unassailable power of darkness is plain, but that does not give you an excuse to surrender. Here, virtue can only be found among the choices we make when faced with inevitabilities: "Choice, you said," he volunteered finally. "That's the difference between good and evil." (p. 178) And so, despite the ephemeral length of their lives, and the vanishingly small nature of their chances, Martin's characters become romantic heroes.

Good choices alone, however, are not enough. Time and time again, Joshua faces Julian in battle, and he loses each time, because Julian is unconstrained by conscience and Joshua is not: Joshua had drugged his own beast, had tamed it to his will, so he had only humanity to face the beast that lived in Julian. And humanity was not enough. He could not hope to win. (p. 354) Intentions are not enough to earn triumphs in Martin's world. To achieve something beyond empty heroics, Martin's characters must, to some extent, embrace the very barbarity that they fight, and, therein, comes the almost insurmountable challenge of drawing the line between strength to fight evil and becoming evil oneself.

Throughout, Joshua York is defined by defying the status quo. For millennia, vampires have simply fed. Driven by their need to kill – the red thirst – they ignored morality and took what they required. York does not see them as evil in that period. As he says, Without choice, there can be no good nor evil. (p. 177) But now York has found a cure, a way to banish the red thirst without the need to revel in murder and blood. Only now can he condemn his fellow vampires, those that choose not to abandon their old ways. As such, it is fitting that his greatest foe, Damon Julian, is no longer a prisoner of his thirst. The too-human need to do harm proved ephemeral in him, and, like Joshua, he is no longer bound by it. Yet he still chooses to do harm.

Martin, of course, extends the metaphor to encompass humanity as well. York was born around the time of the French Revolution, when superstitious peasants executed his father while he and two servants escaped. The father, far too much a creature of the night to believe in anything more damning than amorality, does not blame the peasants who come for him: "They cannot help themselves. The red thirst is on this nation, and only blood will sate it. It is the bane of us all," (p. 154) words later used to describe the Civil War that explodes in the background of the narrative. York rejects that idea, claiming that humans are under no compulsion from the thirst; only an evil nature made [them] do as [they] did. (p. 171)

So, from all of this, Martin's point seems to be that we are not good or bad because of our circumstances but because of our choices and that, no matter the odds, we must not allow ourselves to be swept up by evil. Alright, that all makes sense, and it's a message that's well conveyed – except, that is, when Joshua goes and muddies everything up. Traditionally, vampires sort their hierarchy and prove their dominance with a contest of wills, with the loser subjugated to the winner forever, or, at least, until a stronger vampire comes along. Joshua prefers not to use this method, instead attempting to allow his followers a choice. This most certainly fits with his character. After all, vampires would hardly have become a force for good if they only ceased murdering due to being strong armed into the decision. When they choose to defy Joshua, however, he is not above challenging and defeating them. That, too, fits well with the novel's themes: when the right path cannot be achieved by intentions alone, force must be used to ensure that evil does not triumph.

These mechanics become troublesome, however, when Damon Julian enters the picture. First, Joshua attempts to sway him with words, and then with strength. Both times he fails. Joshua, of course, does not surrender. Though he is outmatched, he battles Julian again and again and refuses to give into Julian's immoral way of life (death?). And yet, when it comes to Julian's other followers, Joshua expects nothing of the kind. There comes a point when Abner decides that he will attack the vampires by day with armed men and explosives. Instead of agreeing to the destruction of an evil he cannot vanquish, Joshua says that, if he must, he will fight beside his fellow vampires, because they are not truly evil, for [Julian] controls them. (p. 302)

But is that any excuse at all? After all, the truly evil Damon Julians of the world are rare. Yes, men do instigate great atrocities, but the vast majority of the damage is done by those neither good or evil that simply follow orders, those – to put it as Martin might – swept away by the red thirst that cannot help themselves. (p. 154) Those French peasants so long ago were not scheming masterminds. To say that those carrying out the works of evil men are not only not in the wrong but also deserving of protection is bizarre, a seeming direct contradiction of Joshua's earlier (and later) refusal to accept circumstance as an excuse for evil.

Despite that one inconsistency, however, the buildup of ideas and tension in Fevre Dream is almost flawlessly executed, the world of the novel steadily and inevitably darkening as the characters' dreams fade out of sight and as their nightmares take the stage. The book's middle is a succession of climaxes, followed by the laxly paced and decades-spanning Fevre Years section. On my first read, some years ago, I thought this to be the novel's main weakness. Now I'm more conflicted. This is a great character moment, as well as a thematic one, but it's undeniable that it comes at the expense of much of the prior chapters' tormenting tension. The climax that comes after the lull, however, is anything but an iffy proposition, featuring a fantastic literalization of Joshua and Julian's battle of wills and of their moral philosophies while, around them, the other vampires awake as night dawns.

When it comes to setting and pacing, Fevre Dream might seem an anomaly of sorts in Martin's catalog, but it's linked to the man's other work by the themes it explores and the fantastic quality of its execution. The book's epilogue takes place decades later, in a graveyard overlooking the Mississippi River as the river rolls on and on, as it has rolled for thousands of years. (p. 361) Our characters have departed, the changes that they wrought have been forgotten by almost all, and the very world that they lived in has faded. But we can still see that they made a difference. I've read Dracula, 'Salem's Lot, and more, and I don't think that we've ever, or will ever, see a vampire novel that can equal Fevre Dream.

[Note: all page numbers from the numbered Subterranean edition]

On Silence

2011-08-19T20:28:00.001-04:00

You've probably noticed by now that things have been a bit quieter here than usual, especially on the non-reviews front. Well, I've noticed it too, and I apologize - alas, things aren't likely to get better soon. I dislike using this blog as a soapbox for the minutia of my life, but it's probably worthwhile to mention that I've just relocated to Ohio and that just about every element of my life is in flux at the moment and will, without a doubt, not settle down in its old position. Amidst all this, I do know a few things, and one of them is that I've no intention of letting the Rack wither away. I've come to love the ability to post my thoughts here more than a bit, and that's not even mentioning those of you who comment. So, the Rack shall live, but my amount of free time will likely be diminished a fair bit. Reviews will be coming every Tuesday, and I'll be making an attempt to keep the rest of the week as unbearably worthwhile as possible, but know that the last carries no promises.

After all that, I feel like I should end with a bit of more uplifting news. While I won't say who the author is, for fear things fall through, I will disclose that I've got an interview coming with someone so awesome that I've been agonizing over every word of the questions for weeks now. The interview won't be ready for some time, I don't think, but trust me - it will be worth the wait.

Adam Nevill - The Ritual

2011-08-16T16:32:00.000-04:00

After debuting in 2004 with the limited edition of Banquet for the Damned, and the novel's subsequent mass market release, Nevill cemented his name just last year with Apartment 16. The book was remarkable not only for being so unabashedly horror in a time when the genre, outside of a duo of giant names, seemed more straightjacket than style in terms of sales potential, but also for the coverage the novel received both in general review venues and in countless blogs, horror and otherwise. Between those two books, and their success, it doesn't seem silly at all to call Nevill, along with his contemporary Joe Hill, the biggest author in horror to debut this side of the millennial divide. The man's new book, 2011's The Ritual, is, like everything in the man's catalog, an exploration of a different sub genre of horror. This time we've got, as Mr. Nevill himself put it in our interview, a "Great Outdoors" novel, and – for a time – it seems poised to not only live up to its two predecessors but far surpass them. Alas, it does neither.

We begin with layers of isolation. Luke, a rebel and loner well into middle age, meets up with his three college buddies for a reunion camping trip through the virgin forests of northern Sweden. But those dear friends of his youth have all changed, matured, and left him behind. Now, together with them again, he finds himself lonely in their midst:

He had been so excited about hanging out with them all again and looked forward to it for the six months following Hutch's wedding, when the idea was first mooted. But the trip had been so wretched because he recognized so little of the others now. Which made him wonder if he had ever really known them at all. Fifteen years was a long time, but part of him had still clung to the notion that they were his best friends.

But he was truly on his own out here. They had nothing in common any more. (p. 24)

But, of course, the isolation is not merely an interpersonal one. Luke and his friends are far from the world, utterly cut off and off the trail in the midst of virgin forest. Into this comes an ancient monstrosity, a manifestation of the forest bent on slaughtering the unprepared modern men that wandered into its depths. The two conflicts feed off one another, with the attempted escape that dominates the first half of the book not so much a flight as a war of attrition, and the conflicts of personality established prior becoming deadly hindrances that must be overcome.

It's as the hunt continues that Nevill's characterization really shines through. We see everything from Luke's perspective and so, at the book's start, his companions seem nothing but belligerent, Phil and Dom as believable middle aged men, but more homogenous archetypes than living, breathing people. The friendlier, and more competent in the outdoors, Hutch, too, seems spineless in the way that he refuses to take a side. As the book progresses, however, the intricacies of each of them become clear in their growing desperation. Without anything so laborious as flashbacks or extended reminiscences, Nevill manages to demonstrate the bond between the friends with nicknames, reliance, and confessions.

Though it's the devilish chase that's paramount now, it soon becomes clear that each of their catastrophes started long before they first set foot in the woods that brought them to a head. Phil and Dom – outwardly wealthy, successful, and happily married – are each on the verge of economic disaster and are both stuck in empty, loveless marriages. Both Phil and Dom reached for happiness, thought they'd found it, and now find themselves struggling to stay afloat in the world at large and upon their blistered feet in the present. Only Luke seems to have gotten what he sought from college on, but the independence he craved has a bitter cost. Luke's at home here, in this struggle of life and death, but he's nothing else: ability with no hope for a better life. As he says, It's the other world I can't cope with. I'm hopeless in it. (p. 201) Of our fourth character, Hutch, his interesting opening does not lead to as much development as the other two, in part due to his relatively early move to off screen. There are hints, given by the others, that maybe Hutch's middle of the road, integrated but not opulent, lifestyle led him to contentment where their path's failed – but, of course, those views were from the outside, and, by the time of those statements, Nevill's already shown us many times how flawed such views can be.

Through all of this, Nevill writes with clear, utilitarian prose that effectively conveys matters of characterization and action. Every once in a while, though, he unleashes a few paragraphs of flawless writing that's somehow as conversationally delivered as it is evocative:

And what is that hanging from the tree line? Stretched between the black fringe of the wood like washing blown from a line and caught in the high tiers of forlorn branch and limb, something flutters. They could be shirts, holed and ragged. Discarded things with torn sleeves. There of them, matched with three sets of frayed leggings, thin as long johns arranged below. And all stained with rust.

Skins. Stripped from dead things. Peeled off and flung upwards to hang like pennants, about the place you sought refuge in. (p. 142)

Of course, The Ritual is far from the only Great Outdoors horror story. One of the earliest examples, and certainly a classic one, is Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (1907), where characters canoeing enter a bizarre and otherworldly reason untouched by man. But "The Willows" was a short story, and so closer parallels, at least in terms of structure, might be found in Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) and Dan Simmons's The Terror (2007). In The Ritual, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and The Terror, we have characters in extreme environments (the woods, the woods again, and the arctic, respectively), and in each the environment is personified in a supernatural menace.

More importantly, each shifts from its central conflict of Man vs. Nature (and supernatural beasty) when it comes time for the climax. The reasons for this are pretty clear: in texts so made of inevitability as these, there's no possible climax with the players already introduced but the protagonist's demise. This might be fine in a short story, but it would be a rather downbeat climax for an exercise stretching into the hundreds of pages. In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, King solves the problem by introducing an outside party, a hunter, to deal with the monster and rescue the narrator. Achieving the same aims with a tad less dues ex machina, Simmons broadens his novel by the introduction and expansion of the Inuit mythology only hinted at in the rest of the narrative.

So how does Nevill solve this problem? As it turns out, not well. At the halfway mark, Luke reaches the dwelling of a group of black metal musicians, the band Blood Frenzy, eager to summon the beast in the name of Odin, great Wotan who mutters in our blood. (p. 283) Now, the problem is not that the group is unconvincingly depicted. Anyone who's ever interacted with the rather one track members of the modern black metal scene (or, as they'd no doubt put it, kvlt), will feel they know each of these characters. There's even an obligatory declaration of "Poseurs!" at the mention of Dimmu Borgir. (p. 268) No, what the fatal flaw in this solution is rests in the soul of this quote:

Though something notable was missing now. But what was it? From inside him, there had been a removal or a raising of something like a weight. A something that had driven him, wasted him, spent him, left him witless, big-eyed and alight with panic for so long.

Fear.

Fear. The choking of it. The flinching and the paralysis. The relentless expectation of its cold jolt. Fear had finally gone from him. (p. 245)

Luke feels no fear for a moment there, and, though danger soon returns for him, it does not for the reader. The spell breaks in the divide between parts one and two, and the novel goes from a momentous death march resplendent with isolation and death to an excruciating wait in a house of inanities. A large part of this is due to the members of Blood Frenzy. Believably portrayed they might be, but scary they are not. They're, as Luke himself observes, pathetic. They are, as he tells them, a cliché. (p. 345)

These delusional teenagers are not harbingers of a grand revolution but rather misfits, and even if they might be dangerous with a knife, they're a damn poor substitute for the supernatural terror that dominated the novel's first half. While that terror wanders aimlessly outside, Luke spends near two-hundred tension destroying pages with the band members, listening to their doomed (full of shit (p. 323)) plans and their shallow posturing, and the fact that it's meant to be as ludicrous as it is does nothing to redeem the section. The climax, when it comes, should be devastating. It's the moment when the characters of the novel succumb to the bestiality between them and leave all veneer of civilization behind, a conclusion drenched in blood and desperation. There Luke tells his foes: "Mercy is a privilege out here. Not a right." (p. 381) Such a statement should shock us, and the developments mere pages later should terrify. But after so many pages of nothing, even drastic character evolutions and the beast's return can mean little, and the novel that began on so thunderous a note ends with an agonizingly drawn out whimper.

The Ritual, it must be stressed, is not without its strengths. Here are two hundred pages so fantastic that they are not only Nevill's best but, perhaps, some of the best ever penned in the genre. Nevill's grasp of characters and tension has never been greater than here, and he uses all of those skills in the first half. But the face painted drudgery of the second half's overlong refuge destroys all that, a noose well positioned to strangle the beginning's brilliance. In the end, this is a novel too flawed to retain its power.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Two

2011-08-09T19:09:00.000-04:00

Giles: You mean life?
Buffy: Yeah. Does it get easy?
Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles: Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar. (Lie to Me)

The first season of Buffy boasted a mixture of imaginative storylines and tired plots, a group of characters that varied between fascinating and shallow, and special effects that were generally rather cringe worthy. The second season of Buffy, on the other hand, fixes almost every problem that marred the first. A warning before we continue, though: this review will include SPOILERs for most episodes discussed.

After all that improvement-trumpeting introduction, I'd like to say that the second season explodes out of the gate. Alas, it does not. The opening episode – When She Was Bad – seems hell bent on milking the first season's weakest aspects for all they're worth. Cheesy vampires come up with a plan to resurrect a defeated and cheesy looking villain, and the world quakes (I suppose). Buffy, newly returned from a summer vacation while all the vampires too took a break, is traumatized by the Master's death, and those around her theorize that, because of that, she's decided she has to be invincible. This would all be a lot more effective if, in the end, Buffy didn't turn out to be essentially invincible and defeat all the vampires single handedly, save for the Annointed One who scurries off to enact more dastardly schemes. Yawn.

In fact, the season doesn't really kick off until the third episode, where things go from overblown to exemplary with all the speed of a jet engine. So what changes? Spike. Played by James Marsters, Spike is a relatively young and sadistic vampire that comes to Sunnydale to wreak havoc and find a place for his injured vampiric paramour, Juliet Landau's Drussilla, to recover. Spike is like nothing that's appeared before in the show, a vampire draped in sarcasm and irreverence, as exemplified by his scorn for his fellow vampires: If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock. (School Hard) But Spike isn't just a witty monster. No, Marsters imbues the character with so much charisma that the viewer can't help but love him, and he grows more complex yet when one factors in his humanizing relationship with Drusilla. Soulless demons the two might be, but they clearly love each other all the same. As for Drusilla, Landau's portrayal of her is excellent, at once vulnerable and creepy, demented but somehow understandable. At the end of the third episode, Spike slaughters the Anointed One and takes over his lair, and the change couldn't be a more welcome one.

Much of the main plot is developed through the season's three two part episodes. The first, What's My Line, brings the main portion of Spike's storyline to a climax. In order to revive Drusilla to full health, Spike kidnaps Angel and plans to sacrifice him to her. To keep Buffy off his back while he does this, he evokes the Order of Taraka, a cult of deadly assassins. The double episode is filled with genuinely creepy moments and numerous instances of often surprising character growth, for Xander and Cordelia in particular. At the episode's conclusion, Drusilla is restored, Angel wounded, and Spike crippled. It's a mark of Marsters charisma that, even after being confined to a wheelchair, Spike still manages to steal every scene he's in.

The second group, Surprise and Innocence, contains a turning point for the season even more significant than the crippling of Spike. To celebrate Drusilla's birthday, she and Spike prepare to summon the Judge, a demon designed to cleanse the earth of humanity. The really interesting part, however, doesn't come until the very end of the first episode. After Angel and Buffy make love, the Gypsy curse mentioned in the first season causes Angel to lose his soul, turning him to Spike and Drusilla – and against Buffy and her allies.

Finally, Becoming parts one and two wrap up the season with a mixture of epic action and excellent character moments. Angel attempts to bring to life a world ending demon as Buffy and co attempt to restore his soul. In the middle of all of this, Spike has a change of heart and, after episode after episode of quarrelling with Angel, switches sides, saying to Buffy: We like to talk big, vampires do. 'I'm going to destroy the world.' That's just tough guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. You've got... dog racing, Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here. But then someone comes along with a vision. With a real passion for destruction. Angel could pull it off. Goodbye, Piccadilly. Farewell, Leicester Bloody Square. You know what I'm saying? (Becoming, Part Two) Of course, all that might make more sense if he hadn't summoned the Judge half a season earlier, but the twist is still fascinating, and further goes to show how different Spike is from your average vampire. Most of the climax is what you'd expect, but the exception is Angel's restoration moments before Buffy must kill him, an emotional high that's likely to leave any viewer more than a tad shellshocked.

It's in Becoming that the core of Whedon's beliefs, and the show's thematic heart, come clear. As things reach their bleakest, a demon from the sidelines tells Buffy: Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are. You'll see what I mean. (Becoming, Part One) Buffy isn't a hero because she was chosen – through no fault or desire of her own – to be the Slayer. She's instead a hero because of how she acts as a Slayer, and because of the decisions that she makes once the inevitabilities of her life have played themselves out.

As is no doubt obvious from the outlines of just those three (double) episodes, Whedon is utterly unafraid to shake up the framework he's set up, and it's from that that the show's best moments come from. It's no longer a fair assumption that all good characters are safe, and the season's evolutions are often impossible to predict. Spike, audience stealing bastard that he is, is crippled, and Angel, love interest and major character, becomes an antagonist and then dies. The uncertainty that soon sets in rapidly becomes one of the show's greatest strengths.

The side stories in season two are almost universally at the high level set by season one's best episodes. As before, the various beasties that Buffy encounters are each metaphors for an aspect of her teenage life. Reptile Boy, for instance, shows us a group of frat boys that feed female sacrifices to their god – a giant snake that lives in their basement. Go Fish deals with a swim team that takes steroids. Before long, the members are themselves turning into monstrous aquatic creatures. These storylines are well executed, but the best part of them is often their connections to the rest of the show. Lie to Me, for instance, focuses on a group of humans who've discovered the existence of vampires – and have decided to worship them. The members of the cult are expertly depicted, coming off at once as desperate, deluded, and almost understandable, and the conclusion is – like everything featuring Spike – fantastic. That being said, Whedon's attempt to add a measure of moral ambiguity by making the human villain suffer from a terminal illness falls rather flat. No, Whedon, atrocities cannot be forgiven due to one's nearness to death. Still, the episode's excellent throughout. Others, such as Halloween, Bad Eggs, and Killed by Death include the vampires in more tangential rolls, but the blurring of side and main plots serves to keep the stakes high and the world believable.

That being said, the world does have the occasional gap in troubling moment above and beyond everyone in Sunnydale's herculean ability to forget mass murder within the hour of the blood drying. Principal Snyder is as enjoyable as ever in his quest to remove the 'pal' part of his job description, but the knowing discussions he has about the vampiric problem in episodes like School Hard and Becoming raise some awkward questions. First, if Snyder's aware enough of vampires to have a "usual story" in School Hard, why did he attempt to flee right into their clutches mere moments before? And, more importantly, why is he so hellbent on tormenting the Slayer in his midst if he knows the importance of her job? Furthermore, while the area around the Hellmouth is a fairly coherent place, the rest of the world is a bit sketchier. When Spike decides to evoke the aforementioned Order of Taraka to kill Buffy, one of his henchmen asks if that isn't "overkill." Excuse me? If there's one Slayer, who's the most dangerous thing since the sun for anyone of vampiric persuasion, why on earth wouldn't they slay her as quickly and surely as possible every time?

Finally, in the episode Halloween, Buffy attempts to reconcile Angel's relationship with her to his past and decides she must be lacking in comparison with the noblewomen he no doubt lusted after in his youthful days. Well, alright, that doesn't seem too likely, but Buffy's a teenaged girl who's never met a Victorian noblewoman, so the emotions works. When Angel hears of this, however, his answer is: I hated the girls back then. Especially the noble women. […]They were just incredibly dull. Simpering morons, the lot of them. (Halloween) I appreciate the sentiment, Angel, but the idea of the nobody human Angel's shown as in Becoming's flashback ever considering noblewomen as romantic partners is a tad jarring to anybody who views the past as anything but an extended high school dance. Still, the first of my two complaints stem more from a lock of information than outright flaws, and the third is hardly major.

The show's villains are not the only recurring minor characters. A problem for me in the first season was that, aside from the show's core cast, the rest of the school essentially consisted of blank bystanders who could be counted on to be either one shot villains, dead, or both by the end of their introductory episode. It still holds true that any new character is a beasty until proven innocent, but the greater length of the season allows the writers to often show us characters and items a fair while before they grow important. The greatest example of this is Seth Green's Oz, the guitarist who begins to date Willow midway through the season. Long before the two know each other, however, the character makes appearances, and, when it's time for him to join the main characters and especially step into the spotlight for the episode Phases, he's well established and sympathetic.

Any viewer quickly comes to understand the general structure of almost any episode: there's a menace, Buffy punches the menace, the menace either flees or dies. A large part of what makes the formula work so well is the impact all of this has on Buffy's character. Her arc is still primarily concerned with her attempts to balance being a normal girl and the slayer, but the brutality of the latter has now come to affect the former, and Buffy herself has to face the consequences of the violence she uses. That leads us to Ted, the hands down best episode of the season (and the show so far). Instead of focusing on one bogey or another, Ted builds a compelling story out of Buffy's personal life. Her mother – played by Kristine Sutherland – has a boyfriend, and the two have grown close. The newcomer, Ted, wins over all of Buffy's friends, but Buffy can't get over her dislike.

As the episode progresses, Ted threatens Buffy with greater and greater punishments. What makes this so effective, especially in contrast, is that these are emotional highs achieved without any more than powerful writing. As Ted continues to harass Buffy, he eventually discovers her diary – and more than a few mentions of slaughtering creatures of the night – and says that he'll have her committed if she ever dares interfere with him. So Buffy reacts as she does throughout the season: with violence. She kills Ted, but the cheery climax of slaughtering a vampire does not follow. Instead, Buffy is ostracized and under suspicion, and she's forced to deal with the consequences of murder. Of course, this is where Whedon's fantastic ability to have his cake and eat it too comes in. After he's extracted everything he can from Ted's death, he has Ted return as a monster, exonerating Buffy from that particular transgression but very much retaining the lesson that she is capable of such things. Oh, and as if all that wasn't fantastic enough, the episode's detective and martial climaxes are some of the season's best, too.

The other main dimension of Buffy's arc is her relationship with Angel. For the most part, Sarah Michelle Geller and David Boreanaz manage to make their interactions fairly believable, if never quite heartwarming, though there is certainly the odd and painful appearance of melodrama: Angel, when I look into the future, all I see is you! All I want is you. (Bad Eggs) To be fair, one gets the sense that the over the top nature of much of her relationship with Angel is intended, as a reflection of most teenage romances. Later developments in the season, however, rely heavily on their love being true, not just a temporary fling, so the parts played for excess or laughs feel odd when located near the more touching scenes. Oddly enough, it's in the scenes where Angel's an antagonist that their former relationship is the most believable. The villainous Angel works well both due to actor David Boreanaz's skills and because he does, after all, have motivation to engage in the kind of psychological, cat and mouse battle that all of the show's antagonists have engaged in to a greater or lesser degree. For him, the roundabout methods of attack make perfect sense, and episodes like Passion and I Only Have Eyes for You do an excellent job conveying a love gone horribly wrong.

The season one character that changes the most here might be Cordelia. Before, she was a hilariously over the top school bully with the occasional glimpses of personality. Over the course of the second season, however, she becomes a character on par with the others, develops a believable relationship with Xander, and most certainly manages to maintain her core bitchiness. Giles, also, grows considerably in this season, as evidence of his darker past comes to light, first in the episode Halloween and then, later, in The Dark Ages. Though the modern incarnation of everyone's favorite Watcher is still a stark white, it's quite fascinating to see him wrestling with the consequences of his own actions. His love interest, Jenny Calendar, also becomes a far more interesting character than she was before, and the way that their relationship changes between episodes is always believable and interesting. By the time of the episodes in which she comes to the fore – Surprise/Innocence and Passion – Jenny's got as much agency and mystery as any of the show's main characters.

At the season's end, Spike's left, Drusilla's gone, Angel's dead, Jenny's been killed, and a wanted Buffy has fled Sunnydale after being kicked out of her mother's home. Perhaps the biggest change, however, is my appreciation for the show. I'll be watching season three as soon as I finish this review – not because of promises that it will get better, or because I feel obligated as a reviewer, or because I'm out to pass the time – but because I genuinely care about every one of the show's characters.

And… done. Time to get out those DVDs...

Standouts: Ted; What's my Line?; Passion; Becoming; Lie to Me