George R.R. Martin - Tuf Voyaging

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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