Spellwright [Cover Art]

The French cover is in. And popular opinion has it that it's hideous. Wert even went so far as to experience physical pain upon seeing it. But is it really so bad? Let's take a look:

It is, simply put, hideous. Enough said, and I'll try to remember to post something less ugly tomorrow so you don't have to stare at it directly when you come here next.

Felix Gilman - Gears of the City

This is how a city is built. Bit by bit it all locks tight together. When the lights come back the visual world will force itself on him; in the dark he can build the city himself, from these familiar fragments. He closes his eyes tight.

Listen: this is how a city is built from music.

There is something missing in it. (p. 14)

Gears of the City is the sequel to Felix Gilman’s debut, Thunderer. Thunderer was a book of distinctive prose and a vividly rendered (though somewhat incomprehensible) city, but it was let down by a looseness of pace and plot. Gears of the City exacerbates both of those flaws…and yet it is an absolutely excellent read. This is a book made by the prose. I'm not sure that it's possible to ever understand Gears of the City without reading it, so I will, when I can, try and let the characters and the world speak for themselves.

This story is both grander and smaller than Thunderer, more focused on the central mysteries of the world and yet filled with fascinating characters and their problems small and large. The city shapes whatever is within its boundaries and makes telling any normal story in its setting impossible. These characters are not ordinary people. Even the most mundane of them is larger than life, monolithic in their eccentricities, more brilliantly overblown actors on stage than anyone you would ever meet in your street, like a cast entirely populated by the electrifying and enigmatic stars of other stories:

My name is Brace-Bel, and a byword for evil. Here, now, in these last days, my reputation is still young; a poisoned seed yet to grow. My time, like yours, was many centuries ago, and far away, and I am forgotten. Like you I am a man out of time. Once I was before my time; now I am behind it. But if all time in the city is one time – as I believe that it is – and down some strange turn of hidden streets we may wander into years thought lost to us and find the long-dead still living and breathing and fucking into existence generations paradoxically unborn in one place and gone to dust in another – well then there still exist places where mothers warn their children to behave or Brace-Bel will take them; where preachers bellow against Brace-Bellism; where gutter-witches invoke those potent syllables Brace and Bel against their enemies to make maidens sterile and young men mad. (p. 114)

In the same way that the day to day struggles of Ruth and Marta, sisters in a ruined district who are struggling to survive, is elevated to the level of heroics, the central mysteries of Gilman’s world are equal parts unapproachable and human. The Mountain itself, the central aspect of Gilman’s world, the loadstone that bears the entire weight of the city, is never understood, and the reader can never do more than gape at it. At the same time, those who search for it are flawed beyond belief, twisted by their desires and, in turn, twisting the world around them:

There were theories – in the laboratories in Zubiri they spoke of the Mountain as a singularity, a weight around which the possibilities of the city revolved. In the bloody war shrines of the Red Moon city, they said that the Mountain was the home of the cruel Gods of the city, the one unconquerable place in the world, the ultimate challenge. In Huiringa, and Slew, and on Crabbe’s Lake, they said that the city was built by the Gods, that it blazed and sparked with their energies, and the Mountain was the black cold slag-heap of the wastes the great work left behind – but Crabbe’s Lake and Slew and Huiringa were Ages of heavy industry, and that was just how they saw the world. In Pyx they thought the Mountain was the graveyard were Gods went to die.


In the bars where the madmen and seers who’d Broken Through gathered, the rumor was that it was a kind of machine – the maker and unmake of the city. The engine of time and possibility. The prison, the fountain of Gods. The most coveted weapon in the world. St. Loup sometimes said it was a palace, and smiled his handsome smile over the prospect of its harems and it’s women. Abra-Melin and Ashmole believed it was a kind of vast alchemical crucial. One by one those madmen got greedy, went looking for the way up, and never came back… (p. 207-208)

The intersection between the bizarre realistic, or at least semi realistic, is where the majority of Gears of the City lies. There is one revelation near the end that’s a tad hard to swallow at first, but Gilman succeeds overall in grounding the fantastic in the mundane and the other way around. His characters generally fall on one side or the other of the divide, frequently either trying to disregard the city around them or ignore its details, but both approaches often lead to problems for their practitioners.

In my review of Thunderer, I talked about how the city of Ararat felt elusive and impossible to ever really grasp. The city of Ararat is, here, covered in grime and darkness, and it looms above and below us as it surrounds us. Everything here is strange, even grotesque. This city is unknowable, but it is beautifully unknowable, immense and incalculable to such an extent that its streets are oppressive with the surrounding buildings’ weight. Every once in a while, there is a moment where the city or the characters seem to be about to classify themselves, but they never quite do. 

So there’s atmosphere and setting and characters and all that, but where’s the plot? Well, the plot of Gears of the City is wholly a result of the characters and setting. There are plot driven and character driven books, and this falls so far to the latter end of the spectrum that (short of a uselessly broad summary: characters try and reach the mountain, say) it’s incredibly difficult to actually say what the plot of the book is. The progression of events is so organic that it generates all the messiness that a half dozen characters all striving in different directions would be apt to make.

This can occasionally lead to moments where our expectations turn out to be horribly, sometimes even annoyingly, off. After the prologue, which deals with Arjun at the height of his powers and in the middle of his search, the second chapter at Ruth and Marta’s shop feels like a brief detour, and that impression is confirmed when Arjun wanders off again to continue his quest (though he’s no longer so sure what his quest actually is). But then what’s this, he’s turning around? Yup, turns out Ruth and Marta are actually the center of the plot, or close to it. Similar moments occur at several points, leaving us with a narrative where it’s hard, sometimes, to tell if you’re in the climax, the buildup, or just drifting on a tangent.

Which isn’t to imply that Gears of the City is a confusing work. Every aspect of the tale makes perfect sense, if you simply follow Gilman through each of the steps in order. This is very much a work that must be allowed to wash over you. You have to let the prose and characters take you where they want to take you and show you what they want to show you; any attempt to wrest control away from them will just end up with bewilderment.

Between Gears of the City and The Halfmade World, it is no longer an adequate description to say that Felix Gilman is one of the most promising new authors in fantasy. Felix Gilman is not only the best new author of the last several years, but also one of the most unique and engrossing authors within genre, regardless of timeframe. If your tastes tend toward the weird and bizarre, there is no reason to not be reading Felix Gilman.

Justin Cronin - The Passage

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere – the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years – she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte. (p. 1)

The Passage is probably, at least in terms of marketing and publisher pushes, the biggest release of the year, a book covered in at least some form on almost every blog, one of the few speculative fiction books to, at least to some extent, break out of the genre crowd and infiltrate society at large. Does it deserve its accolades? In part.

Let’s get this out there right away: Cronin can write, and he can do character very, very well. In many ways, he reminds me of Stephen King, and I don’t just mean the Stand’s apocalyptic setting. Stephen King, especially in The Shining, has a habit of revealing characterization by circling the same points, but getting closer in each time. Cronin does the same thing here.

The first section of The Passage is where the main comparisons with The Stand come from, and it’s easy to see why. That being said, Cronin’s apocalypse is far vaguer than King’s and never deviates from expectations. The world is fucked up in every single way imaginable, and Cronin does a good job implying the changes without ever going into full scale infodump mode (Like the characters taking a detour to avoid the Federal Industrial District of New Orleans (p. 65)), but we’re never really presented with a situation that couldn’t be happening fifteen minutes from now.

The focus is not on the actual end of the world, in this section, but on the period leading up to it. There are genetically engineered super hero stories everywhere you look, vampirism being the super power in question here, and I think everyone has already seen the scene where the vampires break out in a dozen science fiction and horror stories already. Cronin does little to distinguish the actual events of their escape – the security procedures are, though outwardly capable, pretty much an in joke to anyone who’s ever read a horror novel – but instead makes us care through his characters.

Wolgast is an FBI agent with marital problems and moral qualms. When asked to bring six year old Amy to the secret research facility, he realizes he can no longer go through with what he’s doing and decides to save her life. Carter is a murderer promised one last chance in exchange for being made a human (soon to be vampiric) guinea pig. Grey and his coworkers are prior sex offenders, drugged to the eyeballs and working as manual labor as the vampires work their way into their minds. None of these threads are particularly original, and the reader can always either see the end of a plot thread ahead of time or take comfort in the fact that the few remaining unknowns will be swept away by what is known (apocalypse and all that entails). Still, Cronin’s gift is making you care, in circling around and around and establishing a scene well enough that, even if you know where it’s going to end, you’re still entranced.

By any objective measure, The Passage is filled with extraneous sections. The book opens with Amy’s mother and travels through teenage pregnancy, murder, and the eventual abandonment of the baby before the character falls off the face of Cronin’s earth, and that scene is far from unique in that regard. Yes, it could be argued that such a thing is filler, wholly unneeded, but, on the contrary, I think those passages are the soul of the book. The first part of The Passage is not a story of what happened to the world (we know already), nor of how it got that way (we can guess) but rather of the people swept along, and the time Cronin spends again and again on the most minor of characters is what gives potency to his earth shaking events.

After the end of everything, and a few transition segments, we enter the world that we are going to be spending our time in. The Colony is a far more inventive setting than the military base of the opening, and though aspects feel too outlandish at times, the overall set up is quite clever and the characters that populate it fascinating. Moving through similar structures as he did in the first part of the novel, but on a whole different scale, Cronin introduces us to the denizens of the Colony in a circuitous manner, gradually bringing in more and more perspectives as he ups the complexity of life in the small, isolated world. Though the transition to a whole new cast is at first difficult, Cronin’s construction of immensely understandable people living bizarre lives is effective at grabbing and holding our sympathies.

At the colony’s heart is the knowledge is the knowledge that they were all that is left in the world, but they don’t reveal this knowledge right away. Instead, in an attempt to allow their children to experience a carefree and blissful childhood, all knowledge of the end is kept secret from their kids, who dwell and play safely in the Sanctuary. Then, as they come of age, they’re told: a miniature apocalypse that scars every one of them and repeats itself again and again with each member of the society.

The Sanctuary is only one of the places in the novel where the bond between parent and child is explored. Cronin’s said that the inspiration for The Passage was his daughter, and that shows in the text. From Amy and Wolgast (and Wolgast’s short lived natural child) to Amy and her biological mother, Mausami and her father, the concept of the Sanctuary, and Babcock and his followers, Cronin approaches the concepts of parenthood and progeny from a dozen different angles, a variation of moving apart and responsibility that characterizes many of the relationships within the text.

It’s common knowledge that, the second you see its monster, it stops being so scary. There are exceptions, but, as a general rule of thumb, if you’re gunning down monsters, it’s not a pure horror story but, at best, a horror/action hybrid. When you show that the monsters can die, we stop being so frightened. If it can happen once, it can happen again. Cronin knows this. The opening’s scientific study of the vampires reveals a bizarre litany of capabilities, but no true understanding. The apocalypse is the world falling away off screen. The opening sections of The Colony show banks of spotlights looking into the dark and watchers waiting for an unseen foe. When a character steps outside for the briefest of seconds, just a footfall outside of the lighted cordon, the reader is terrified. Virals (Cronin’s name for vampires) are everywhere, unstoppable, and the reader knows that, any second now, they’re going to get you.

But, when the virals are actually seen, they don’t live up to their horrifying reputation. They’re action movie enemies, quick and strong but able to be put down by a shot to their sweet spot, each named character being able to take on, on average, ten or fifteen of them. The virals sudden lack of potency is a symptom of a deeper problem. Cronin’s set ups are immaculate, deep, vivid things. When he moves away from the set up into action, though, the novel loses its prodigious feeling, the text loses its weaving complexity, the characters become bellowing warriors rather than gradually illuminated enigmas.

Now, that’s not to say that Cronin is bad at plot motion. He’s not, but he’s not great at it either, and the payoff is never the match of the set up. When the vampires break free and ravage the military base, it’s a scene of blood splattered walls and distant screams that’s enjoyable but never the equal of the gravitas that was summoned during the testing. The road trip is well done for the most part, but its sheer length leeches the power of any one stop. Haven is creepy and powerful, but the cartoonish climax deprives the scene of much of its power. Etc.

Simply put, there’s a massive discrepancy between how Cronin makes you feel about his world and the actual facts of the world. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when an author can make their setting feel dangerous, empty, or whatever it is they’re going for. There are few things better. But, as counterexamples and one in a million shots pile up, it becomes increasingly clear that the virals are not the unstoppable force they seemed to be, that it is perfectly possible to move about safely at night, that technology and civilization are not destroyed (because it’s hard to walk ten steps without bumping into a fuel depot or abandoned military base), that the world is not empty (because it’s hard to properly get yourselves locked in with no way out without bumping into some coincidentally travelling force of other survivors), and so on.

Finally, the sheer size of the novel plays against it. There are scenes that are perfectly fine scenes that are unaffecting for the simple reason that we’ve seen them, or at least something comparable, before. In this very novel. By the tenth close call, it’s difficult to think the protagonists are actually in danger, though that perception may not be accurate; Cronin is rather even handed with his deaths.

The Passage has been billed as a monumental work, and, as such, has been compared to everyone under the sun, providing they’ve included some sort of desolate roadway in their work. I feel the need to address some of the hype surrounding this novel. Now, I’m not talking about the quality here; that’s a personal call, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. What I am talking about are the comparisons.

The first author often cited is Stephen King, and I think that’s a rather fair way to understand The Passage. Beyond the similarities I’ve already spoken of, both authors use the mundane in order to suck us into the world, illuminating strange situations with minutia and colloquialisms, such as (in Cronin’s work): It’d been almost two years since Carter had been off H-wing – H for “Hellhole,” H for “hit my black ass with that stick some more,” H for “Hey, Mama, I’m off to see Jesus any day now...” (p. 28-29)

In fact, Cronin continues those everyday comparisons long after the character’s have no idea what it is they’re seeing, and those quasi-understood glimpses of the past world are some of the best moments of the novel: At half-day we stopped to rest by an outcrop of boulders and saw, scraped into the rocks, “Darren loves Lexier 4Ever” and “Green River SHS ’16, PIRATES KICK ASS!!!” The first part everybody understood but nobody knew what to make of the rest. It makes me feel a little sad. I can’t say why, maybe it was just that the words had been there so long with no one to read them. (p. 619)

Of course, there are several differences between the two authors. Though their methods of set up are similar, King is the better at building tension, able to tug on his carefully established strands without unraveling them (which is, likely, countered by King’s utter inability with endings, but that’s a discussion for another review). That being said, Cronin is by far the more literary of the two, and his prose sometimes approaches a poetic beauty that is wholly beyond King’s writing:

When all time ended, and the world had lost its memory, and the man that he was had receded from view like a ship sailing away, rounding the blade of the earth with his old life locked in its hold; and when the gyring stars gazed down upon nothing, and the moon in its arc no longer remembered his name, and all that remained was the great sea of hunger on which he floated forever – still, inside him, in the deepest place, was this: one year. The mountain and the turning seasons, and Amy. Amy and the Year of Zero. (p. 211)

The second most prevalent comparison is to McCarthy’s The Road, a work famed for its minimalist beauty and oppressive bleakness. At eight hundred pages hardback, I think it’s pretty damn clear that the Passage is in a different timezone from minimalism and can most certainly not see any hints of sparsity from its porch.

There’s a single section where Wolgast and Amy are primarily alone and attempting to survive, and I guess you could argue that the day to day post-apocalypse scenarios share elements, and that’s true, but McCarthy’s vision involves emptiness, the struggle for food, desperate violence, and nothing else. Cronin’s brief burst of hard hitting emptiness is sandwiched between a CIA agent shooting an RPG at a vampire and a bunch of guards shooting crossbows to hit “sweet spots” at two hundred meters. Not exactly The Road, in either feel or technique, even if Cronin does occasionally break up his denser prose with the odd spate of fragmented brevity:

Above him he saw the deep, velvety blackness of the night sky, and stars, hundreds and hundreds of stars, and some of them were falling.

He thought: falling stars. He thought: Amy. He thought: Keys. (p. 206)

Looking back, this review is filled with far more negative than positive. It’s true that The Passage failed to live up to my expectations, both those set by its hype and its own build ups, but that’s not to imply that it’s a bad work. The Passage is a solid book with moments of real greatness, and, as the first of a trilogy, Cronin has ample time to develop those hints into something spectacular. This isn’t a masterpiece, but, if you’re looking for a good post apocalyptic read, it’s almost guaranteed to satisfy anyone with reasonable expectations.

The Hat Rack Turns One! (Not)

So, for those of you who have the date marked on your calendars, it’s the Rack’s birthday today, which means you get a long, sentimental, and introspective post. Only, it’s only sort of the Rack’s birthday. But not really. I did my first post on the eighth, but I’m sort of embarrassed about it. Of the two reviews I posted that day, one’s okay (looking back) and one’s unrepentant shit, but that’s not really the point. Look at the timeline, back there. Two months, four posts, three of which were on the first day. Wow. Not very impressive. I’ll celebrate a year of blogging when I get to the anniversary of me taking this thing seriously.

You can have your narcissistic reminisce post then. You can wait, can’t you?

Neil Gaiman - American Gods

"This paper,” said Natalie, “has one of those articles in it. ‘Is America Changing’?”

“Well, is it?”

“They don’t know. They say that maybe it is, but they don’t know how, and they don’t know why, and maybe it isn’t happening at all.” (p. 575)

In American Gods, traditions linger and refuse to fade, gods are spawned by the handed-down thoughts of immigrants, and belief and reality are one and the same thing. This is a novel about the soul of America, and the heart of the modern world, with maybe just a tad of how our past shaped us, all told through a cast of characters that’s as offbeat and well developed as it is numerous.

Gaiman’s themes here are weighty, and they could drag off and drown your average narrative with their importance. Gaiman doesn’t even try to fight this; he lets the book be tossed to and fro, gyrating wildly and leaping off into tangents in order to explore part after part of his post-mythology mythos. As such, though the story is interesting on its own, and the character’s usually well drawn, this is more a novel about America and its synthesis than it is about anything else.

The gods were brought here by the immigrants (the Irish leprechaun upon ships during the days of famine; the pixies and their ilk from English prisoners; Odin from exploratory and bloodthirsty Viking longboats; the Egyptian pantheon of Anubis, Thoth, Horus, Bast settling in New Egypt; Anansi from – well, you get the idea) but things have changed, and, in the process of acclimatization, the believers became American, and the gods were cut loose. Now, as time moves on, their belief and traditions are fading fast towards zero, and the old deities are desperate to not simply drop out of existence.

Now, in this new world, the actual facets of the gods’ being are no longer important, the funeral director gods of death are as on the verge as a New York City djinn, and all that still matters is where they came from and whether they still exist at all:

“I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blonde, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think is gray. And you look at us, you would not know what was light and who was dark.” (p. 79)

Simplification is not the only change brought on by the passage of years. The majority of Gods in the book fall into one of two pathways. The first try – in vain? – to recreate the glory days, always striving to remember. The world, however, has moved on, and their attempts frequently become depressingly comical, as they try to assert their dominance over a world that has forgotten them, such as Eoster, trying to claim that she’s still beloved due to the name of the holiday. In many cases, being the American incarnation of these gods, they don’t even have a period of power to look back upon, such as Czernobog who cannot even contemplate his days as a dark god anymore and is able to do nothing else but dream about his years in a slaughterhouse.

The other potential path is a darker one still, and it is one that we are introduced to at the end of the very first chapter: the perversion of everything that the god once held holy. The Queen of Sheba has become a prostitute. Even that, however, is not far enough. In a twisted incarnation of her need for belief, she forcers her forces her lovers to worship her and sexually devours them for sustenance. Her words hold true for her and for the array of similarly striving gods we glimpse in the narrative: There is nothing holy in [my] profession. Not anymore. (p. 373)

But is the decline of the gods really such a bad thing? In one part of the story, we see a funeral home run by the Egyptian gods of death. They provide a more personal touch, a send off by something with more of a soul than the mechanical filling of orders provided by a big funeral company. In another subplot, we get to see a community still run and safeguarded by a supernatural being. The community’s exterior is enticing and gleaming, which hides the sacrifice needed to maintain it.

Is such a thing worth it for a more ordered world? Has our modern world of machines and computers destroyed wonder and human contact? It’s impossible to truly a question like that, and Gaiman doesn’t. American Gods is not a narrative of answers, but rather a tapestry of questions. You will never get a definitive answer of how the gods interact with mortals; you will never know whether the old gods were right to fight for their survival; you will never know whether the gods will one day be gone completely. But you don’t need to know. In American Gods, Gaiman asks the questions, and I think that every reader will have their own answers.

The sprawling nature of the themes, and the narration’s tendency to leap after them wherever they may go, leads to an incredibly meandering text. Our main character Shadow, who is roped into the conflict as the assistant to Mr. Wednesday only hours after leaving prison. While it seems, at first, that the two are working towards a definite goal, Shadow is soon sent off to location after location without any discernible rhyme or reason.

Further complicating matters - if you’re a fan of anything even approaching linier plots - are the interludes, taken from the modern incarnation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. These stories feature brand new characters, often separated from the main narrative by spans of decades, living their lives and either interacting with or contributing to the nature of the various scattered American deities.

Somehow, Gaiman pulls all of this off. The trick is, I think, his intuitive grasp of character. He only need mention a name and spout a few lines of dialogue and, poof, a fully grown man appears on the stage. Each interlude feels complete enough to form its own text, and each adds to the main narrative in immeasurable ways.

And yet, this grasp of character is not applied to one character. Shadow, whose eyes we spend the vast majority of the book looking out of, is told:

“You’re not dead,” she said. “But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either. Not really.”
[…]
“I love you,” she said dispassionately. “You’re my puppy. But […] You’re like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world.” She frowned. “Even when we were together. I love being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I’d go into a room and I wouldn’t think there was anybody in there. And I’d turn the lights on, or I’d turn the lights off, and I’d realize that you were in there, sitting on your own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything.” (p. 370-371)

After his release from prison, and the death of his wife, Shadow retreats into himself, and it is rare for the reader to get a glimpse inside. This leads to a good portion of the book feeling aimless, as we’re cast about in Shadow’s wake, without him even knowing – or caring – where he’s going. The reader that is willing to follow will eventually come to realize that Shadow’s recalcitrance is not shallowness, but, in order to get to that point, you need to be willing to follow Gaiman on all of his digressions.

On the subject of the book’s prose, Gaiman says in the included interview: I wanted to write American Gods in what I thought of as an American style – clean, simple, uncluttered – and push the narrator further into the background than I had in previous books. But the narrator crept out in the “coming to America” chapters, where I got to play with a wider set of voices. (p. 596)

It’s true that the writing is more subdued than it is in Neverwhere or Anansi Boys, the plot less self aware. But this is still a Gaiman novel, and it’s still filled with the delicious idiosyncrasies of language that characterize all of the man’s writing. There are sections here that are jaw dropping in their grandeur, and there are sections that are laugh out loud funny, and both build with the other to create a wry and majestic experience, filled with larger than life characters who are anything but above sarcasm.

American Gods looks like a simple read on the surface. Underneath, you soon come to realize the depth that is packed into every scene and every single glance. This is a book that is impossible to really predict, so come to it and get ready to be swept along. While occasionally directionless, American Gods is simply something that needs to be experienced. This is not the most entertaining book that I’ve read of Gaiman, but it is undoubtedly the best.

Email Account Hacked

It seems that just about everyone on my contacts list (family, friends, a teacher or two, a magazine or two, a blogger or two, people I haven't talked to in years, one of my favorite bands, etc) was just sent an email with a link to a "Surprise!" rapidshare. This was not me. I most certainly do not recommend downloading whatever the "Surprise!" might be; I suspect that the (not so) "Surprise!" portion of it will be ripping your computer's insides out and spreading them on the floor. I've changed my email account to nskteh at gmail. In case you're wondering, nsk're my initials, and TEH is, obviously, The Evil Hat.

My apologies to anyone who got the email (especially to anyone who opened it thinking it was from me).

Thomas Ligotti - Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech [Short Story Review]

[Note: 1. This is a more in-depth analyses of a single story from Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer collection.

2. The following has spoilers for Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech, and a basic understanding of the plot is assumed.]

Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech is unique within Songs of a Dead Dreamer due to the mundane nature of the protagonist’s goals. This is not Dream of a Manikin, where we are questioning the veracity of our very existence, not Masquerade of the Dead Sword, where we are seeking to blunt our horrible knowledge of the world, and certainly not Dr. Locrian’s Asylum, where we are seeking to blot out the proof of our viewpoint’s shortsightedness. Instead, Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech hinges on a man’s problematic love life:

“I suppose I should say there is someone –“

“Whom you have taken a liking to,” Voke finishes.

“Yes, but then there is someone else –“

“Who is somehow an obstacle, someone who has made your nights so frosty. This seems very straightforward.” (p. 199)

This is a story of elaborate silences shattered by sudden action, built of three scenes, each of which build up to a key point with added detail before suddenly shifting gears. Veech’s goals may be mundane, but Voke’s means are not, and each of those scenes meticulously color in every detail of the material world around us before shattering that façade with the introduction of the bizarre.

Every scene has three key elements. The first of these is the mundane, pathetic and, at best, pitiable. There is a gradually building dread, a knowledge that the familiar scene before us will soon be violated and discarded. Then there is the coming of the strange, the bizarre, the inhuman. And, in the end, the inhuman withdraws to show us the real shape of what we assumed that we knew. Each scene is constructed in this fashion, but it’s the manipulation of the players that Ligotti uses to drive his horror home.

The first of the three scenes is Veech’s journey into Voke’s home. Anticipation is built even before Veech enters; his walk up the stairs slow and obstructed. When he gets into the good doctor’s home, we are treated to a description of every object within it. Ligotti’s eye moves with painful slowness, here, and a seeming randomness, the effect of both to fill in the environment all around us with no more rhyme or reason than Voke’s collection seems to have. Ligotti adds more and more detail, practically drowning us in minutia and leaving us unable to remember it all, glancing over our shoulder for that one detail that we know we’ve missed:

Somewhere above the gritty floor, more than a few life-size dolls hang suspended by wires which glisten like wetted strands of a spider web. But none of the dolls is seen in whole. The long beaked profile of one juts into the light; the shiny satin legs of another find their way out of the upper dimness; a beautifully pale hand glows in the distance; while much closer the better part of a harlequin dangles into view, cut off at the neck by blackness. Indeed, much of the inventory of this vast room appears only as parts and pieces of objects which manage to push their way out of the smothering dark. Upon the floor, a long low box thrusts partway into the scene, showing off its reinforced edges of bright metal strips plugged with heavy bolts. Pointed and strangely shaped instruments bloom out of the loam of shadows. They are crusted with age. A great wheel appears at quarter-phase in the room’s dimness. Other sections appendages, and gear works of curious machines also complicate this immense gallery.

As Veech progresses through the half-light, he is suddenly halted by a metal arm with a soft black handle. He backs off and continues to wall bout the chamber, grinding sawdust, sand, perhaps pulverized stars underfoot. The dismembered limbs of dolls and puppets are strewn about everywhere. Posters, signs, billboards, and leaflets of various sorts are scattered around like playing cards, their bright words disarranged into nonsense… (p. 196-197)

And then, when the tension reaches its peak (after more of the description that I just quoted), the eerie calm is shattered:

Veech approaches the booth a little cautiously. He seems to be most interested in the figure within. Through a semi-circular opening in the glass, Veech slides his hands into the booth, apparently with the intention of giving the dummy’s arm a shake. But before his own arm creeps very far toward its goal, several things occur in succession: the dummy casually lifts its head and opens its eyes…it reaches out and places its wooden hand on Veech’s hand of flesh…and it’s jaw drops open to dispense a mechanical laugh – yah-ha-ha-ha-ha, yah-ha-ha-ha-ha. (p. 197)

In this case, the bizarre was only a manikin. Such an everyday object, however, is given horrendous importance here. The manikin is the most important aspect of the story, but for now it is only an intrusion, remarkable only for its unpleasant likeness to us. It’s a man without the ability to do anything but laugh, but still a man in form, the twisted counterpart of Veech’s paltry grief.

As I said before, the bizarre is always removed before the scene’s conclusion, leaving us with the all too human aftermath. In this case, Voke - who enters as the manikin laughs - asks Veech what his problems are. Sounding pathetic and terrified – made insignificant by his surroundings and the manikin that stands over their conversation like a third participant and yet is above it like a deity – Veech tells Voke of his troubled love life.

The second scene follows the pattern of the first. Apprehension is built by our knowledge of Veech’s goal, and our fright of Voke’s means, so the arrival of Veech, his desire, and her lover in the Street of Wavering Peaks is already a moment fraught with tension. The Street is then described as something all around us, something unreachable with our unaided eyes, and cloaked in obscuring mist. The increasing nervousness of the lovers affects us because, though we don’t know the specifics of what is to come, events will soon turn against them. And then, with no warning whatsoever:

One moment Veech is drowsily conversing with his two companions, both of them looking sternly suspicious at this point; the next moment it is as if they are two puppets who have been whisked upwards on invisible strings, into the fog and out of sight. (p. 201)

That is not the end of the scene, however. We only conclude when the two lovers are brought back to us, returned to the world that we understand, returned grotesque but all too comprehensible: Two went up, but only one comes down – a single form suspended an arm’s length above the stone-paved street and twisting a bit, as if at the end of a hangman’s rope. (p. 202)

It’s with the third scene that Ligotti shakes up the pattern, not by changing the order of steps but by changing the participants. We start with the same manikin’s laughter that disrupted us before, but now that laugh is hideously ordinary, albeit unpleasant, the dummy and Mr. Veech forming a chorus with their demented laughter: What [Voke] sees is Veech and the Ticket Man both screaming with laughter. Their cachinnations stir up the stagnant air of the loft. They are two maniac twins crying and cackling with a single voice. (p. 202) Now, Mr. Veech is a man without the ability to do anything but laugh, but still a man in form.

The scene only shifts when Voke enters. Before, Voke was strange, but still relatable. Now he is different, almost wholly alien and utterly unsympathetic: You said you didn’t mind what form the solution to your problem took. Besides, I think it all worked out for the best. Those two were making a fool of you, Mr. Veech. They wanted each other and now they have each other. Two by two they have become as one, while you are free to move on to your next disaster. (p. 203)

Like before, the bizarre moves with an artificial jerkiness, one moment here and one moment there, one moment sane and the next anything but. One moment, Mr. Veech is laughing, the next moment Mr. Veech is dead. And then, like before, the bizarre departs just as suddenly as it came, Dr. Voke plummeting down the stairs without a care in the world, his insane laughter the twisted counterpart of the paltry grief of the only remaining character.

Throughout the story, death is idolized. The inanimate is, according to Dr. Voke, the perfect state, a sleep that should never [be] broken. (p. 198) Here, only in death can humanity escape its flaws, as was the case with what lies within Dr. Voke’s precious black box.

All that is left is the manikin: Those screams, the ones from beyond the doorway at the top of the stairs, belong only to a helpless dummy who now feels warm drops of blood sliding down his lacquered cheeks. For the Ticket Man has been left – alone and alive – in the shadows of an abandoned loft. And his eyes are rolling like mad marbles.(p. 205)

The manikin, now, is rendered alive, put through the most horrible tortures – that of wood waking up, life coming into being – and he is, as the story closes, more understandable to us than the demented Veech or the homicidal, suicidal Voke, though his screams still register as nothing but a coda to the death of Voke, in the same way that Veech’s pleas were, before, pathetic compared to the manikin’s own laughter. One moment the manikin was as foreign as something could possible be, the next as familiar. And, as we’ve learned, familiar is a rather sorry place to be.

The manikin has no back story. There’s no sense of how it got where it was, or where it wants to go. But there was no back story for Veech or Voke, either, and their sudden departures and arrivals are, perhaps, all there is to them and any of us.

FURTHER READING

My full review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer is here.

My in-depth look at the Nyctalops Trilogy can be found here.

There's no better place to go for Ligotti discussion than right here.

Up and Coming (and Essential?) in December

I’ve been meaning to read the Alcatraz books for a while now. This is quite clearly not the place to start, being out of sight of the series opening, but what Sanderson’s said of the series on Writing Excuses sounds amusing, and, no matter how uninteresting a two or three hundred page book turns out to be, there’s always the consolation prize that it’s damn short. (Kidding – in part). Though what I’ve written on here of Sanderson’s work (Way of Kings and Defending Elysium) has been critical, I really did love Mistborn, and I’m looking forward to both someday cracking open the Alcatraz books and to getting my hands on the new projects from the man on the horizon.

Parker’s a fascinating author for me. The broad arcs of her novels could be mistaken for traditional (wars, power struggles, etc), but Parker’s strict realism, cynicism, and wry wit always set her writing apart. And then there’s the fact that she seems beautifully loathe to repeat herself. How does an author known for their stringent realism bring that trait to a novella about alchemy? I have no idea, but I can’t wait to find out.

AND

My apologies to Ms. Valente for this one. I haven’t yet gotten to read much of her writing, but what I have read has been very interesting, and her new story collection from Subterranean Press and PS Publishing looks right up my alley. So why didn’t it get a feature? Well, I double check my release dates on amazon, and amazon doesn’t have it listed . If you want a sample of Valente’s short fiction, there are quite a few stories available through her website.

Reading in November

A very good, but not great, Culture novel. This was my third Banks book, and I’ll happily admit that I’m quite converted, now. Review here.


I was a bit worried going into this one. I’d heard that it was less focused than Thunderer, less plot driven, and I’d already found Thunderer’s pacing and resolutions to be a problem. I needn’t have worried. Gears of the City is an excellent novel with some of the best prose that I’ve ever read. Review on the way.


The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms set itself up as a traditional fantasy, but soon abandoned that and went off to do something far more interesting. I can’t say that it totally succeeds, but I’m glad that it tried, and the read was generally a good one. Review coming.


Though I have yet to review any of his work on the Rack, Martin is one of my absolute favorite authors. Which is probably obvious considering the amount of time I spend on Westeros, but whatever. I’ve been meaning to go through his short story collections for a while now; this is the first one that I’ve gotten to. The stories that were in Dreamsongs were, for the most part, just as good on reread, and several of the new stories were certainly worth the price of the collection. There was a weaker tale or two, but that’s something to expect in every collection.


To me, Year One was a disappointment. It traded depth for style, and what style it had was generally lost due to the artwork. Review here.


The only thing stopping me from making another comics epiphany post about V for Vendetta is that I’d already Watchmen, so it didn’t hit me quite as hard. Still, Moore is absolutely without peer from what I’ve read of the format. I’ll be writing more on this.


Murakami is one of those authors I’ve had on my list to be read someday for a while now, but the Westeros book club helped give me a kick in the ass. I considered a review, but the discussion that was already done on the book covered most of the points I would’ve, so, if you’ve just read the novel, I’ll direct you there instead. As for my own impressions in brief: Murakami conveyed complex and thought provoking ideas with clear and readable prose. I’ll definitely be reading more of his work.


This was an amusing epistolary novella about power and ideology, but it was stopped from being great by the format. Deprived of the space to circle around the events and give them the context that they deserved, the twists were interesting, but not gut wrenching. An enjoyable read, though I don’t know if it’s worth the thirty plus dollars that you’re likely to find it for.


I enjoyed Devices and Desires, but I wasn’t without my reservations. Evil for Evil takes most of my points of contention and rips them to pieces. I think the most remarkable thing about this trilogy is the almost ridiculous degree of plot motion. Each of the two books so far could easily have been multi volume sagas. Review coming after I finish the final volume, The Escapement.


Honestly, I’m underwhelmed, and I’m not sure if it’s a fault in the book that caused it or just that I’ve read so much more (and more widely) since I read the first eleven volumes straight and loved (almost) every word of it. Yes, this book had a lot of plot motion compared to other Wheel of Time books. But Wheel of Time books aren’t the only standard out there, and, compared to much of what I’ve read lately, the plot was bloated beyond comprehension, the characters so plot shielded that danger can’t get within the same zip code, and the pacing so ugly that clusterfuck barely begins to describe it. I didn’t dislike the book, mind you, but I certainly didn’t love it. I ranted about some of my (spoiler filled) thoughts upon finishing it here; there won’t be a review because, really, I think most people have heard of the Wheel of Time by now and have a decent idea where they stand on it.


Cycles was fast paced, decently clever, and good fun. I’m still not wow by Y, but the series has been very enjoyable so far. And the quasi-review of the first volume is coming soon. Really.

National Novel Writing Month, Conclusion

So here we are at the end. In total, I wrote 76,381 words. Seriously. Of those, just over eighteen thousand were written yesterday and the day before; Monday was the most I’ve ever written in a single day, and Tuesday wasn’t far behind. The book itself is coming along well, though nowhere near done. Most of those eighteen thousand words were, unfortunately, spent on an event that I assumed would take a single chapter, but I guess that's what I get for hilariously poor outlining.

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing, but the word count’s going to lead to yet another pile of books to join the vast number that are already coming my way for the holidays. For every five thousand words after 50k, I didn’t think I’d make it to the next landmark. So I set prizes of sorts. If you make sixty thousand, I told myself, you can have Grin of the Dark, say. But I just kept making it, and that’s where the problems come in. Though I guess it’s a nice problem to have.

This is, in case you were growing worried, the last time I’ll discuss my own writing until, I guess, NaNo next year short of some sort of publication related miracle.

So, anyone else out there got a NaNo success story?