Look Homeward, Angelmaker

"Leander Watts" is the pen-name of an accomplished writer firmly ensconced in the avant-garde wing of SF. Not wishing readers of his first Young Adult novel to experience cognitive dissonance should they chance to stumble upon his more outré works, Watts has chosen to remain concealed behind his pseudonym. This is the intriguing but ultimately inconsequential background to the appearance of Stonecutter (Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, $15.00, 181 pages, ISBN 0-618-16474-X). The book itself possesses immense merits that render such literary gossip well beside the point.

In the year 1835, in the wilds of upstate New York, young Albion Straight serves as a journeyman stonecutter to his amiable master, Mr. Bonness. Bonness’s son, Watty, a child with preternatural senses, is as close as a brother to Albion. When a strange man hires Albion away on a three-month contract, it’s natural that both Albion and Watty should feel distressed. But their mutual sadness is as naught to what Albion shall experience as he finds what his new master, one John Good, has in store for him.

Good is a rich man building a mansion in the wilderness. But he is also partly a madman. Rendered obsessive by grief over his dead wife, Good intends for Albion to sculpt a vast memorial to the vanished woman, using Michal, Good’s adolescent daughter, as a model for the deceased. Trapped on Good’s isolated estate, Albion and Michal plot their escape from Good’s tyranny. But their path to freedom is strewn with barriers, and only immense perseverance and luck can possibly bring them to their goal.

Told in the first person, in the form of Albion’s unaffected journal entries, this book offers an uncompromisingly stern worldview, reminiscent of Hawthorne and Henry James, of Poe and Melville. Replete with proto-Gothic imagery, Stonecutter brings vividly to life a shadowy era in American history when the encircling forests concealed not ATV trails and Sierra Club outposts, but rather panthers and savages, hardscrabble farms and haunted hollows. Yet so bold and good-hearted is Albion that he casts a soulful radiance that dispels the shadows of his primitive, limited life.

Watts deals with some of the same issues connected with the artist’s life that Rucker does in his book discussed above, and just as complexly. The impossible task that Good sets for the young lad recalls the similar assignment given to the protagonist of Jeffrey Ford’s The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque (2002). And some of the same nineteenth-century eeriness of Alex Irvine’s A Scattering of Jades (2002) is also to be found here. All in all, this novel transcends any category so limiting as "Young Adult." Brought to the screen by someone like Tim Burton (think of his Sleepy Hollow [1999]), this novel would be hailed as a period thriller for all ages—which is exactly how you should regard it in book form.

Down and Out in Super Europe

The phenomenal Brian Aldiss has recently released two novels almost simultaneously. Wonderful news, for all us dyed-in-the-wool Aldissians. But the bad news is that neither—shamefully—has a US publisher. Yet all is not lost. Simply surf on over to www.amazon.co.uk if you wish to purchase and revel in these two fine books.

The Cretan Teat (House of Stratus, hardcover, £9.99, 206 pages, ISBN 0-7551-1147-8) is a small-scale comic gem, with surreal and metafictional flavors. Our guide to its wonders is an unnamed elderly British novelist of some repute, narrating in the first person, whose career is doddering along at acceptable if not thrilling levels—until he is betrayed by his own randiness into a ludicrous scandal. Embedded in this frametale are actual portions of the novel the besieged author is currently composing, called The Cretan Teat. This book within a book concerns Archie Langstreet, a UN official, his wife Kathi and their son Clifford. The trio are on holiday in Greece when they stumble upon an icon illustrating an apocryphal incident from the infancy of Jesus. Soon the icon becomes world-famous, with bizarre effects on global society. Toss in some terrorism and marital discord, and you have a plot that would easily flesh out a complete standalone book.

However, it’s where the two narratives intersect that Aldiss achieves his most fruitful results. As our hapless novelist lurches from one comic misfortune to another, Kathi Langstreet begins to appear in his world, and he learns just how much he does not know about her life and his own.

With echoes of Lawrence Durrell and Kingsley Amis, this book proves that Brian Aldiss is still playing at the top of his game. But to echo the Vonnegut-style tag-phrase that occurs throughout the book, "What else did you expect?"

Aldiss’s second book, Super-State (Orbit, hardcover, £16.99, 230 pages, ISBN 1-84149-144-6), is allied in its sardonic and rapier-like tone with Cretan Teat. This book is overall not quite so farcical, though, and deals with matters of more gravity and import than its mate, the same matters in fact treated more weightily in J.G. Ballard’s recent Super-Cannes (2000). The setting here is an ultra-unified, prosperous Europe of some forty years hence, one of the three dominant powers of its era (the USA and China being the other two, with no mention made of poor old Russia, Japan, or any other region). But Aldiss wisely chooses to depict his community at a moment of crisis, not calm. The EU wants to go to war with a small Asian state for problematical causes; the impact of a meteor has launched a massive tidal wave across the Atlantic toward Britain, France, and Spain; and various dissenters and terrorists are busy seeking to undermine the super-state. In other words, Aldiss’s wickedly pointed scenario could not come much closer to today’s current affairs, mutatis mutandis, if he had cut and pasted headlines from yesterday into his book.

Into this tasty pudding of power struggles and social climbing and intellectual ferment are seeded literally scores of intriguing characters, making for a panoramic novel that hops about like a six-legged jackrabbit. (Although it lacks the multi-media stylings of John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar [1968], this book can otherwise stand as something of an heir to Brunner’s plugged-in extrapolations.) We meet everyone from prime ministers to impoverished painters; cops on the beat to New Age gurus; media personalities to courageous astronauts. (A subplot involves the first human expedition to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.) And there are even non-human characters, in the form of a race of servant androids, prone to conduct rather Phildickian conversations among themselves when humans aren’t listening.

Writing like a combination of H.G. Wells and Anthony Burgess, Aldiss barrels along, generously heaping incident after hilarious or shocking incident upon us. (The ridiculous mutual murder of two inept assassins, for instance, is counterbalanced by such events as the death of a terrorist and his Stockholm-syndrome victim.) Aldiss possesses the true tragicomic vision of humanity and its fate in the universe. Someone should elect him president of this sorry old globe before we blow ourselves up. Except that, based on his opinion of politicians ("Politicians . . . are able to order their lives so that every waking hour is busy, so that self-enquiry or self-doubt need never intrude."), he’d be wise enough to decline the job.

Travels with Archie

Nicholas Christopher is one of those "mainstream fantasists" along the lines of Mark Helprin and Paul LaFarge—reviewed in the New York Times, his picture in Vanity Fair—whose work is far from condescending to the genre, and whose novels would amply resonate with fandom—if anyone at Christopher’s press solicited such attention. But we can erect bridges from our end of the great divide, as well.

Christopher’s first novel, The Soloist (1986), was determinedly mimetic. But starting with his second, Veronica (1996), he leaped into the empyrean of magical realism. A professional poet prior to his novelizing, Christopher produces elegant prose matched only by his deft use of archetypical mysteries and enigmas, arrayed in dazzling patterns reminiscent of a Crowley or Gene Wolfe. A Trip to the Stars (2000) was even more ambitious and amazing than its predecessor.

Now comes Franklin Flyer (Dial Press, hardcover, $24.95, 317 pages, ISBN 0-385-33545-8), and while not quite as complexified as Trip, it’s absorbingly wonderful. Our hero is named in the title: he derives his odd cognomen from the name of the ill-fated train he was riding when his mother gave birth to him, in the midst of wreckage. His miraculous appearance in the world is merely the first in a long history of odd incidents and adventures that we will follow, from the years 1929 to 1942. With an enchanting period feel, the globe-trotting Franklin Flyer will encounter dozens of famous personages—FDR, "Wild Bill" Donovan, Rita Hayworth, Josephine Baker—as well as a cast of equally riveting invented characters, such as the pulp publisher Otto Zuhl and the evil assassin Tommy Choylo. An inventor by bent, Franklin makes his fortune, gets swept up in the storm of WWII, and helps destroy the Axis’s plans to use the mystery metal zilium to conquer the world.

But greater than these affairs of the world are Franklin’s affairs of the heart. A succession of occult women crop up at different points in his life, all with different lessons about the nature of reality to teach him. Led on by one paramount image—the chance-encountered photo of a woman he has never met—Franklin finds in the arms of these demi-goddesses the secrets hidden in his own heart.

And let us not forget the role played by Franklin’s most constant companion, a most unusual cat named Archie. Shipwrecked together early in Franklin’s career, Archie and his owner establish a bond nearly as tight as those with the man’s various paramours.

Christopher’s shapely prose is clear as water, nothing convoluted nor arch about it, yet it manages to produce immense effects. Combined with a ceaselessly onflowing narrative voice, his text generates belief and faith in its teller. When, toward the novel’s end, we receive a lesson on love— "Across the centuries, through millions of lifetimes, love is passed along by human beings without the machinery of the state, without laws or religions."—we nod gently and say, "Yes, you’ve showed me this, not just preached it, and I heartily concur."

American Fables

I know it’s wrong. I know one should allow favorite authors to grow and develop, not demand that they remain stuck repeating themselves, offering the same tricks and stunts you just so happen to enjoy. Still and all, I can’t help once in a while missing the younger James Blaylock, he who was more concerned with pratfalls and silliness than with mature confrontations with life and death. The Blaylock of The Digging Leviathan (1984) versus the Blaylock of Winter Tides (1997). But ultimately I don’t really want James Blaylock to revert to his green youth and lose all the wonderful skills and insights he’s since developed and exhibited in his more recent fiction. So I cast about for a substitute author, someone who can pull off the same jovial effects. As you might imagine, the search is quite challenging. But of late, I think I’ve found such a writer, who moreover possesses his own distinctive style and themes.

That man is Van Reid.

Reid debuted in 1998 with Cordelia Underwood. Set in Maine in the 1890s, this book tells of the founding of the Moosepath League, a social club of zanies, organized around the redoubtable Mister Tobias Walton, who find themselves embroiled in both serious adventures and absurd contretemps. Mollie Peer swiftly followed in 1999, and added a layer of tragedy in its tale of a nameless, kidnapped orphan boy whom the Moosepathians rescue. Daniel Plainway (2000) concluded the story arc, as the dark secrets of the orphan, since christened "Bird," are brought to light. And while the third book left the future open for more tales of the Moosepath League, it definitely seemed to round off or cap Reid’s amazing narrative sprint.

In these books—which have minor supernatural elements—Reid evokes such wonderful antique humorists as Jerome K. Jerome and Stephen Leacock, as well as the master of them all, the Dickens of The Pickwick Papers (1837). In prose that is old-fashioned in construction and vocabulary, yet utterly readable and droll without being postmodernly ironic, Reid chronicles the quirky misunderstandings of his protagonists, their love lives and hopes and fears, producing vast emotional payoffs. He generates laughter and a knot in the throat equally well.

Reid’s new book, Peter Loon (Viking, hardcover, $24.95, 299 pages, ISBN 0-670-03052-X), is both a continuation in spirit of his earlier ones and a departure from them in style and tone. Reaching back one hundred years earlier into the history of his beloved state of Maine (the tangibility of Reid’s recreation of this era, as well as that of the 1890’s Down East, is part of the charm of his books), Reid focuses on a hardscrabble farm inhabited by the Loon family. Seventeen-year-old Peter, as oldest boy, assumes a dire burden when his father dies. His mother, a distracted, half-mad sort, rouses him one midnight and bids him leave immediately to find his "Uncle Obed Winslow"—in actuality an old boyfriend of hers. Unsophisticated Peter dutifully sets out, little imagining what the wide world holds for him.

Resting himself in a pile of leaves on his first scary night on the road, Peter is awakened most unconventionally: nearby hunters have shot a huge deer that collapses atop Peter. Getting up from under the beast, Peter seems supernaturally reborn from the bloody carcass. Only the arrival of another wanderer, Parson Leach, convinces the hunters that Peter is not a supernatural creature.

From here, Peter’s fate is bound up with Leach’s. Rebellion is in the air, as poor settlers and rich landholders struggle for the deeds to Maine’s riches. Casting about for his "Uncle," Peter finds himself meeting a colorful parade of people, including the Clayden family—a wealthy household whose generous members undermine his sense of loyalty to the underdog class he was born into. As matters mount to a head, Peter finds that his black-and-white version of the world is not large or subtle enough, and must be revised. And as for Uncle Obed? His climactic appearance remains the biggest shock to Peter.

Reid has done away with his amusing circumlocutions and leisurely pacing in this book, instead fashioning a language that evokes the solemn, spirit-haunted landscape of early America and a story that barrels along at a speedy clip. Less Blaylockian than his earlier books, his wackiest characterizations and incidents are toned down, although such a scene as the meeting between shy Peter and the bluff Clayden patriarch in the latter’s library still provokes chuckles. With elements of Gothic mystery, Peter Loon is a shadowy tale even without overt supernaturalism. When Parson Leach and Peter meet the faunlike mountain man Mr. Klaggerfell and his dog Pownal in a nighted clearing, the effect is akin to any similar meeting conjured up by Gene Wolfe in his Book of the Short Sun. Peter’s whole pilgrimage hews to an archetypical fabulist outline. This is the pure-quill American version of Puss in Boots or Jack and the Beanstalk. Not to read this simply because it’s not marketed as SF or fantasy is to deprive yourself of a major pleasure.

Small Press Titles

Every now and then an experimentally post-cyberpunk book arrives with such a strange and deliberate voice that the lucky reader is convinced that nothing ever after in the genre will be the same. Of course, the sleepy and imperturbable genre usually keeps rolling right along, heedless of the visionary in its midst. Nonetheless, these hermetic mutants repay your attention, and somehow their impact does filter, however tenuously, into the mainstream of SF. Perhaps the first such book was Darick Chamberlin’s Cigarette Boy (1991). Recently, we had Andres Vaccari’s Robotomy (1997). And today we are privileged to discover Simon Logan’s I-O (Prime, trade paper, $12.00, 110 pages, ISBN 1-894815-05-X). Logan bills the eight stories in this volume "industrial fiction," and they earn this designation by virtue of their cyborg characters moving across polluted factory landscapes immeasurable to man. Like a combination of David Bunch and J.G. Ballard, Logan tells tales of a wounded humanity that has lived so long with its mechanical adjuncts that "nature" is a meaningless term. The twisted love story of "Ignition"—where a man who is a living bomb becomes enamored of a female terrorist who uses his explosive power over and over for her own selfish goals—is by itself worth the price of this innovative book.

The poetry of G.O. Clark, a regular Asimov’s contributor, is collected at last in book form in A Box Full of Alien Skies (Dark Regions Press, chapbook, $5.95, 42 pages, ISBN 0-888993-25-1). Here you’ll find Clark’s pleasingly conversational, yet hauntingly touching reflections on such themes as the vastness of space contrasted with the shortness of a human life ("The Unfinished Map of the Sky") and the ways in which the very medium of SF has changed over the generations ("Where Are You Now My Bug Eyed Ones"). My favorite poem, "When Robots Dance," conjures up the unforgettable image of a generation starship where the only sign of a mission gone awry is the pirouetting automatons of the title.

More fantastical stanzas can be found in the latest colorful issue of Mythic Delirium (DNA Publications, chapbook, $5.00, 30 pages, ISSN 1529-3726). Several well-known poets—Schweitzer, Kopaska-Merkel, Ann Schwader—consort with newer names—Sonya Taafe, Danny Adams, Shunit Mor-Barak—to produce verses that range across the map of horror, SF, and fantasy. Fabulous beasts tend to predominate in this issue—dragons (Karen Porter’s "Ophion") and lunar steeds (Gary Every’s "Moon Horses") among them. Include the snakes that sprout from a certain head in Kopaska-Merkel’s "Medusa’s Tale," and you’ve got a zoo of wonders indeed.

Fresh from the success of his fast-paced novella Diamond Dogs (2001), the space-operatic Alastair Reynolds offers another similarly sized work, Turquoise Days (Golden Gryphon, trade paper, $15.95, 78 pages, ISBN unavailable). Set in his ongoing "Revelation Space" universe, this book (which has a sly hook back to Diamond Dogs) concerns a woman named Naqi Okpik, resident of the waterworld Tur-quoise, where gloppy maritime aliens known as Pattern Jugglers occupy the center of Naqi’s professional and private life. After her sister is swallowed up into the communal aliens, Naqi discovers that her troubles are just beginning. This book showcases Reynolds’ flair for exotic locales, startling concepts, and crisp language. And as Golden Gryphon’s first venture into limited editions, this book offers future monetary returns as well as literary ones.

The wide range and high quality of the fourteen stories in Redsine Eight (Prime, trade paper, $6.00, 135 pages, ISBN 1-894815-01-7) is truly astonishing. (The latest issue of this paperback anthology also contains a typically perceptive interview by Nick Gevers with Tim Powers.) From the Euronoir "Elektra Dreams" by Geoffrey Maloney to the cyberpunkish "Les Autres" by Adam Browne to the off-the-wall deconstruction of the Robin Hood Myth, "Robin Hood’s New Mother," by Rhys Hughes, editors Trent Jamieson and Garry Nurrish have assembled a winning pack of slipstreamy stories that share nothing in common except their authors’ intentions to push the fantasy envelope. Like the Bradburyish demiurge in Jack Fisher’s "Mr October," these stories enchant and hypnotize.

Picture this: it is long after midnight, and you sit in a room lit by flickering gas flames. A man is reading aloud a horror story to you, his rapt audience, a story titled "The Rats in the Walls." And that man is the story’s author, H.P. Lovecraft, who even "laughs the insane laugh of the cannibalistic character." Such was the actual experience, oft-repeated with different tales, of Muriel and C.M. Eddy, HPL’s closest friends in Providence. You can read the memoirs written by the Eddys about their friend in The Gentleman from Angell Street (Fenham Publishing, trade paper, $9.95, 65 pages, ISBN 0-9701699-1-4), which also contains some of Muriel’s poetry. This book offers a useful first-hand perspective on a writer who sometimes seems larger than life, but who to the Eddys was simply a beloved, unique companion and fellow toiler in the Weird Tales vineyard.

Such wistful words as luminous and enchanting do not fully capture the sinewy strengths of Charles Harness’s Cybele, with Bluebonnets (NESFA Press, hardcover, $21.00, 160 pages, ISBN 1-886778-41-8). A combination of Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (1957) and Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie (1947), this quasi-autobiographical novel by the author of such SF classics as Flight into Yesterday (1953) and The Ring of Ritornel (1968) possesses a fey charm all its own. This story—of the maturation of Joe Barnes, a talented but poor young man growing up in Depression-era Texas, and his doomed yet exalted romance with the Rima-like woman named Cybele Wilson—is filled with Texas lore, eerie events, the allure of chemistry, tall tales, drama, humor, and pathos. Gene Wolfe’s cover recommendation is an apt connection to Wolfe’s own brand of magical realism, and Harness proves that he’s as capable in mimetic modes as he is in science fiction.

Alan Clark’s harrowing memoir of his own real life surgical experiences forms the underpinnings of the macabre fiction in Pain and Other Petty Plots to Keep You in Stitches (IFD Publishing, trade paper, $16.00, 112 pages, ISBN 0-9671912-5-4). Along with co-writers Randy Fox, Mark Edwards, Troy Guinn, and Jeremy Robert Johnson, Clark—who has contributed thirty B&W reproductions of his enigmatic and brooding and bloody paintings that informed the creation of this fiction—plumbs the depths of what bodies can endure—yet with an eye peeled more toward the Kafkaesque black humor angle than otherwise. In the long novella "Pain and Other Petty Plots," we witness the Grand Guignol goings-on at a hospital where Burroughs’s Doctor Benway would feel right at home. By facing unflinchingly the limitations and trancensions of our mortal shells, Clark and company derive courage and bravado from suffering.

Ramsey Campbell’s new novel The Darkest Part of the Woods (PS Publishing, limited hardcover, $55.00, 349 pages, ISBN 1-902880-38-2) is Lovecraftian in the best sense. It replicates in Campbell’s own distinctive voice the best frissons of HPL’s work, specifically The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927; 1951), without slavishly echoing any of the Master’s eccentricities. This tale of Heather Price and her family—sister Sylvie, son Sam, mother Margo, and father Lennox —and the cursed plot of turf known as Goodmanswood is guaranteed to produce chills. Campbell’s sophisticated sense of terror, the way in which he so-very-gradually builds suspense, is perfectly embodied in his sly, well-wrought prose. The village life of the Prices assumes so much mimetic heft that the supernatural goings-on are lent deep credibility as well. Perhaps only Campbell could make you shiver at the delivery of a simple Christmas tree—and that’s just one scene out of many equally disturbing yet plausible ones in this fine book.

Publisher Ben Jeapes and editor David Langford have done an incredible service to the genre by collecting and printing Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (Big Engine, trade paper, £9.99, 359 pages, ISBN 1-903468-08-6). Sladek, lamentably deceased too young, was a comic genius too little cherished on this side of the Big Pond. This volume presents a brilliant overview of Sladek’s talents. Divided into five sections— "Stories, Mostly"; "Poems and Playlets"; "Sladek Incognito"; "Sladek and Disch"; and "Sladek on Sladek"—the items here range from formalistic experiments from the days of the New Wave to utterly conventional yet zingy murder mysteries in a Hitchcock manner. Consider this snatch of dialogue, then try to tell me Sladek wasn’t SF’s equivalent of the Marx Brothers: "He came to a pair of feet sticking out from under a blanket. ‘Miss Carvell?’ / " ‘Don’t look, sir,’ said a doctor. ‘Not a pretty sight.’ / " ‘Dead?’ / " ‘No, fainted. [The murderer] never touched her at all. Still, she’s not a pretty sight.’ "

Rich with local color, history and suspense, Brian Hopkins’s El Dia de los Muertos (Earthling Publications, limited hardcover, $30.00, 109 pages, ISBN 0-9721518-0-X) is the story of a man, archaeologist Richard Bennington, driven beyond the bounds of sanity by the death of his daughter and the crippling of his wife in a Mexican earthquake. Convinced that invoking the old Aztec gods and asking favors of them will restore his happiness, Bennington embarks on a mad ritual whose outcome deviates wildly from his expectations. Hopkins, a three-time winner of the Stoker award, layers in emotional resonance through the use of extensive flashbacks and carries out a sustained supernatural conclusion across many more pages than a lesser writer would have attempted.

 

Publishers’ addresses

Agog! Press, POB 87A, South Strathfield, NSW, Australia 2136, Big Engine, POB 185, Abingdon OX14 1GR, UK. Dark Regions Press, POB 1558, Brentwood, CA 94513. DNA Publications, POB 2988, Radford, VA 24143. Earthling Publications, 12 Pheasant Hill Drive, Shrewsbury, MA 01545. Fenham Publishing, POB 767, Narragansett, RI 02882. Golden Gryphon, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802. IFD Publishing, POB 40776, Eugene, OR 97404. MirrorDanse Books, POB 3542, Parramatta NSW 2124, Australia. NESFA Press, POB 809, Framingham, MA 01701. Prime, POB 36503, Canton, OH 44735. PS Publishing, Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate HG2 9BQ, UK.