20th Century Ghosts, Salon Fantastique, and Clubbing

I haven't written about books in a while, because ha ha who has time to write about books? Who has time to read books? Mostly I just read and write for work these days: it's starting to make me feel stupid, so I've been running around the house trying to find any relatively highbrow literature that I own and haven't read yet. Need brain stretch!

Here are three things I've read recently. I didn't finish any of them.

 

 

20th Century Ghosts, by Joe Hill.

OK, everyone knows by now that Joe Hill is one of Stephen King's kids, and everyone knows that he has oodles of genuine talent of his own.

I don't really read horror much anymore, though I was really into horror in the late 1990s. I started to find it tiresome. The thing with genre is: it's not true that it's automatically worse than mainstream realistic literature. But much of it is not necessarily better, either, so the "really great writers" in the horror genre (and in most others) are not writing great literature, they're writing very good commercial fiction. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it's not always what I'm in the mood for.

When I looked at the most recent Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, it seemed like the majority of stories chosen by Ellen Datlow (the horror side of the volume) were stories about being stuck in the hinterlands with something scary, bad backwoods-America dialect included. Add to that "so-and-so has been kidnapped by a serial killer," and you have something like 60% of all short horror fiction. It gets boring after a while, particularly when the writers are good-not-spectacular. (For me, I don't like reading a writer and knowing that I am as good as them or better; I like reading a writer from whom I can learn something, or who challenges me intellectually. For example, among the new stars of fantasy, I'm so impressed with Scott Lynch's amazing "ear" for dialogue. The rhythm is fantastic.)

So, what I'm getting at: Joe Hill is a wonderful writer, who occasionally writes things I don't like, but this collection is uneven. Christopher Golden did the intro, and has written a lot of vampire fiction, and liked the story "Abraham's Boys," which recasts Van Helsing as a fanatical, vampire-fearing sadist with two sons who hate his guts. I did not particularly like this story; there's a whole list of reasons why I didn't like it. (It's not really based on the characters, except in name only and with Dracula as a framing device. It's darker than anything I want to read right now in a way that I don't enjoy, which is nothing against the story itself; I'm just not into horror. I thought the characterization was heavy-handed.) There are several stories of the "escape from a serial killer" variety.

However, three I liked a lot:

The title story is about the ghost of a young woman who died suddenly in a movie theater during the first showing of The Wizard of Oz, and who manifests in that theater. All the people she manifests to are deeply affected by it, and somehow wind up with careers closely connected to the cinema, not least the boy she appeared to in the mid-1940s who wound up owning the theater for the rest of his life. This story, which I think is mostly about longing, has a peculiar beauty in spite of its "horrifying" moments.

There's a story a bit later which isn't a horror story at all (Hill has written in and out of genre); it lives more in the land of magical realism, and no, I don't mean "Mexico or Colombia." A kid's best friend is an inflatable boy. There's never any explanation of why the kid is inflatable: they live in a world where being born as a blow-up doll is an infrequent birth defect, and that's just how it is. He works around the logic of exactly what it would mean to be an inflatable person: mean kids would try to prick you, you'd have to avoid dog bites and excessive heat, the scars of your childhood would be covered by rubber patches. This one is quirky and elegaic.

The last of the stories I enjoyed a lot... you know, I can't remember right now. If I do remember it, I'll come back and add it. It might have been the one about the guy you think will be a serial killer all the way through the story, but he turns out to be a hero.

 

Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

This anthology didn't really have a theme, other than "Hey, you're awesome, write us a story." I have heard a lot of praise for it, but I thought it was middling... definitely better than all those Sword and Sorceress anthologies that have given many, many young writers of heroic fantasy their start, but, you know, not Borges. And again, it's not that any of the stories I didn't like were bad... it's that they reminded me of 10 other fantasies I've read. (For example, I like Catherynne Valente, but her story here essentially reminded me of The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip and the Ceres: Celestial Legend manga. There's really only so much you can do with a selkie. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't a standout.)

Of what I read here (not all of the stories), I was floored by Jedediah Berry's contribution. It's about a few people living in a cabin in the 1890s, running out of food for the winter, constantly negotiating with spirits who live on the perimeter of their now-spent farmland. The wife is narcoleptic and sleeps more and more; the husband has one leg and is constantly enticed by the spirits with visions of their son, a childhood suicide. A mysterious young woman, who may need to forget that she was once a Queen of either the spirits, the natives, or both, has moved in with them and does the cooking, and they've co-opted a visiting surveyor. It could be chilling, but for some reason, it's just dreamy and heartbreaking. (And I don't remember the title because I've already returned the book to the library.)

I also liked Gregory Maguire's story, which isn't really a fantasy: it's about what a gay-or-bisexual young soldier, shot in WW1, sees as he's dying, and as his lover tries to save him. Historically, I can't get into Maguire's stuff (I have most of his novels and have yet to finish even one of them), so I was pleased to like this one.

I read other stories in this anthology, but either couldn't get into them or didn't find them that interesting when I finished. Again, it's the issue of, yes, these are good writers, but ultimately I can't get into the stories they're telling.

 

Clubbing by Andi Watson & Josh Howard

No, no no, no no no.

I normally like Andi Watson's stuff; it's a bit fluffy, but sweet. This one is from DC's Minx line, which has made a lot of noise lately with books like The PLAIN Janes (which I thought was just OK, though illustrated by a friend of my fiance's -- the art is the best I've seen in a Minx book so far, which I'll get to in a minute) and Re-Gifters (which is my favorite of the Minx books I've read so far, about a teen Korean-American girl who has a mad crush on one of her classmates as they both attempt to compete in a martial-arts championship).

I can't really fault Minx books for being what they are: designed for girls in their early teens. From that POV, there's nothing much wrong with Clubbing, though it would probably still count as a bit shallow. The premise has promise: average teen goth girl (fashion obsessed, prone to sneaking out to clubs and lying about her age or to make herself seem more cool, etc) gets caught lying about her age to sneak into a club, then shipped off to visit her grandparents in the country. Her name is Charlotte.

 

The grandparents own a small golf resort in the Lake District; the grandmother is appropriately grandmotherly, while the grandfather is an old military man who seems like every "Old Colonel" cliche in every British book, film, or radio or television show ever. Oh, the amusement as ultra-urban ubergoth Charlotte tries to fit in with the yokels! Then a woman from her grandparents' circle makes a few mysterious remarks to Charlotte and ends up dead on the golf course -- clubbed to death, IIRC. (The title is a threefold pun.) It's a silly mystery and the solution is as far-fetched as you can imagine, but if I say that the premise of the whole thing is very similar to the movie Hot Fuzz, you might get the idea.

 

 

Disaffected junior punk/goth/emo girls in their early teens might like Clubbing, but I thought it was feather-weight and paper-thin and not even worth finishing. And Hot Fuzz is much more entertaining... so skip Clubbing and watch that instead.

The art is charming enough, but beware: a lot of artists whose work is put out at this size work much larger (12x15 is, I think, what my fiance does, maybe 14x17). It allows them to send in resized image files that makes their art look crazy detailed, because they shrink it down. (This is how my fiance works, and he's very open about it. He did a book for Oni, and Minx has mined a lot of Oni's talent, though not him yet. I think he would love having the work itself, but would not enjoy the following stricture:)

Minx requires its artists to draw the art at around the same size as it will be when published, so as a result, the art in their books is not very detailed. They also require a certain degree of speed, which doesn't help the look of the eventual art.

Someone I know (not my fiance) who was approached -- and eventually rejected -- to write a book for them explained some stuff about what one of the editors is looking for; the criteria ("put in something weird!") is such that you can expect to see more ridiculous plots like the one in Clubbing. Seriously, Andi Watson seems like a really cool guy with whom I'd totally like to be friends, but shelve this one with his lesser works. Mostly, it's about Charlotte's succession of really cute outfits, with a very light emphasis on her relationships with her grandparents.

Meanwhile, I'll be on the lookout for a book that engages me enough that I can finish it. Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar stories might be just the ticket. Sopa de Pena! I'm also going to hit Middlemarch or The Diamond Age soon: supposedly awesome books I own but have never read.

And Spamalot tickets for the family, because apparently they all want to go.