Shadowland

by Kim Deitch

Fantagraphics,
trade paper,
$18.95,
180 pages,
ISBN 156097771X

Is it heretical or the sign of a promiscuous liberality of judgment to compare any graphic novel to the prose masterpieces of Thomas Pynchon? This question conceals an underlying core debate: is the medium of comics inherently less sophisticated and impactful and artistically deep than that of novels?

Recently, when Gene Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese was nominated for a National Book Award in the broad category of YA Literature, a critic or two objected to the inclusion of a funnybook among works of prose fiction. On the other hand, Time magazine boldly added Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel Fun Home to its general year’s-best book list without apology.

I’m inclined as a critic and reviewer and reader to place fiction-with-pictures on pretty much the same plane as fiction-without-pictures, while acknowledging that each mode has different strengths and weaknesses. Thus I have no problem in comparing Kim Deitch’s wonderful new book of both words and illustrations, Shadowland (Fantagraphics, trade paper, $18.95, 180 pages, ISBN 156097771X) to the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon, especially something like Pynchon’s latest, Against the Day (2006).

Both authors revel in the oft-times wacky (racist, sexist, ageist, and whatever-ist) detritus of forgotten pop culture, seeing in these decades-old effusions of the mass mind hidden cosmic significances. Both authors employ a kind of erratic, non-linear plotting by synchronicity and chance associations of characters. Both men endorse conspiracies as reality. Both gleefully and irreverently deploy an array of consensus SF tropes in wayward fashion.

Deitch’s novel is basically the life story of two generations of the Ledic-ker family, father and son showmen of the most dissolute, greedy, shifty, scamming sort. The lives of the Ledicker père et fils, their relatives and lovers and hangers-on, would be fit material for a mimetic Westlake novel—were it not for the fact that one exhibit in the sleazy Ledicker sideshow is a crashed alien spaceship with inhabitants still alive, and that the family is also under observation by—and interference from—a secret subterranean race of dwarves. These touches of the uncanny transfigure all into pure fabulation, while still allowing Deitch an ashcan naturalism.

We open in the year 1897, with the elder Ledicker exhibiting a diving pig that helps sell his snake-oil. This first chapter is rather anomalous, seemingly a kind of simple American frontier tall tale. Nonetheless, all the seeds of what will follow are present in embryo.

(The serial printing of these stories in various magazines over a long span of years contributes, I think, to their occasional misalignment of continuity and tone. But overall, this essentially haphazard publication history works to actual advantage, conjuring up fruitful enigmas and non-linear jumps and juxtapositions that a more compact and straightforward composition would not have allowed.)

From these humble beginnings, we will encounter killer geeks, orbiting cargo-trailer trucks, debauched orphanages, Hollywood silent-movie glamour, Polynesian castaways, heroic elephants, and a walk-on role by the author-artist himself. (Sounds pretty Pynchonesque, huh?) It all coheres into a hypnotic secret history of America, or at least one particular corner of this gonzo nation.

Deitch’s artwork is both ultra-modern and old-fashioned. His deep affection for the fashions and physiognomies of the early twentieth century conjures up some lost comic strip of the yellow journalism era. But his layouts and sophisticated bag of artistic tricks within each panel reflect the full range of the past century of graphic narratives. (Several extra features in this edition, including two gorgeous foldouts, add to the effect of the main story.)

Deitch’s work, with its parade of misfits, schemers, freaks, and con-men, is a love letter to America in all its sodden, sordid, unrepentant glory.

As I indict this review, the online used-book emporium known as AbeBooks offers for sale precisely two copies (in its primal 1993 Owlswick Press incarnation) of Avram Davidson’s Adventures in Unhistory—the last book of that unique author published during his too-short lifetime (1923-1993). The merchant in possession of the lower-priced selection asks a mere $400.00; the other, upward of $800.00. Which explains why I have not heretofore handled a copy of this rarity, which, in its market preciousness and collectibility, has ironically come to resemble one of the mythological beasts discussed within its own pages.

Stop. I vow that the rest of this review will not seek impossibly and involuntarily to emulate the ornate, recondite, witty, yet altogether engrossing and captivating style that Davidson employs in these pages.

And how would I know what style he employs in said volume, if I’ve never perused it? Why, because the majority of the essays that comprise it first appeared in this very magazine, where I did indeed joyously read them, and also because the generous and wise folks at Tor Books have at long last reissued a facsimile edition (which means you get the great George Barr illos as well as Davidson’s scintillating words) of Adventures in Unhistory (hardcover, $25.95, 308 pages, ISBN 076530760X), and huzzah to them!

All right. I’m not being too successful in avoiding a bad pastiche of Davidson’s prosaic (as in “characteristic of [his] prose,” not, most certainly not, “not having any features that are interesting or imaginative”) manner. Maybe this fit will pass. . . .

But the book. Subtitled “Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends,” the book consists of fifteen sojourns through myth, legend, and science, concerned specifically with, but not limited to—oh, no, certainly not limited—Sinbad, the Phoenix, dragons, mandrakes, werewolves, Aleister Crowley, Prester John, the origins of silk, the land of Hyperborea, head-hunting, unicorns, mammoths, extinct birds, the Moon, and mermaids.

What Davidson does is cultural detective work, assembling the clues that will reveal the inner meanings of his resonant conundrums. He spins them all into a golden fleece (see page fifty-one, for thoughts on that aureate pelt’s dragonish associations) of narrative that dips and winds (a fleece dipping and winding? We’re in flying carpet territory!) through many a land and clime and era, filled with a vast cast of exotic characters. The result is like listening to the voice of History Himself, telling all the really good esoteric anecdotes left out of the official texts. A secret history of the whole globe.

There was precedent for Davidson’s demythifying/remythifying and his rambling, shaggy-backed conjectures. He himself generously cites L. Sprague de Camp, Willy Ley, and Charles Fort. And I always associated Davidson’s writing with someone vaguely similar who happened to come coincidentally to prominence right about the same time as these pieces: James Burke, and his books/ television series Connections.

But truth be told, all these antecedents fail to hold a candle to Davidson’s impassioned, champagne-giddy (“There is a feeling of giddiness which affects diverse people on reading things like this . . .”) romps through the kind of material that naturally appeals to those of us who love the fantastic.

Aside from the main intellectual attractions of this book comes another gift: many passages and snippets of autobiography, supplied by Davidson as illustrations of his points. We emerge from this Campbellian—Joseph Campbell, that is—odyssey not only bedazzled by his erudition and wit, but also with a portrait of the man himself in all his mundane (well, not mundane but quotidian) reality and heft.

Davidson closes his book with an explanation of the Buddhist concept of Indra’s Net, where every time any two threads cross, an infinite jewel is born, reflecting all others in the net. Davidson was just such a jewel.

Saffron and Brimstone

by Elizabeth Hand

M Press, trade paperback,
$14.95,
240 pages,
ISBN 1595820965

If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that the esteemed literary reputation of Elizabeth Hand rests mainly on her novels, eight masterful, slippery, slipstreamy volumes, none of which (aside from the first three that form a trilogy) recapitulate their predecessors. (Which is not to say that they do not all observably emanate from the same keen sensibility and deep talent.) And certainly she maintains as well a high profile as a critic, with regular columns in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the Washington Post Book World. But despite receiving an award or three, her short fiction gets a tad overlooked, it seems to me, just because there’s less of it. We need to make sure that her work at shorter lengths, which is just as remarkable as her novels, does not remain concealed in the shadow of the big books. So let me now direct your gaze to Saffron and Brimstone (M Press, trade paperback, $14.95, 240 pages, ISBN 1595820965).

(M Press, by the way, is a new imprint from the comics publisher, Dark Horse, with the capable hand of editor Rob Simpson on the tiller, and bears watching as well.)

This book incorporates a previous volume from PS Publishing titled Bibliomancy, with substantial additions and a subtraction: “Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol” is not present.

“Cleopatra Brimstone” opens the volume with a shocker about a mild young woman named Jane Kendall who develops an alternate personality after emotional and physical trauma. Reminiscent of the work of M. John Harrison and early Kathe Koja, it manages to conjure up shades of James Tiptree as well. “Pavane for a Prince of the Air” is a mimetic piece that poetically keens a muted, heartfelt elegy for a free spirit and the era that birthed him. In the John Crow-leyesque “The Least Trumps,” we follow the life of Ivy Tun, a tattoo artist by trade, as she discovers a pack of cards that might possess the power to remake the continuum. And the messed-up early college years of a woman prone to visions is the focus of “Wonderwall.”

The final four pieces are thematically and tonally linked under the heading “The Lost Domain.” “Kronia” chronicles the many serendipitous non-meetings of a man and a woman. “Calypso in Berlin” brings a classic Greek nymph into the modern era. An end-times scenario unfurls through the eyes of an isolated writer in “Echo.” And lastly, the heretofore-unpublished story “The Saffron Gatherers” finds two lovers forever separated by a large-scale disaster.

Hand’s stories all exhibit a number of virtues. She anchors her fantastical conceits in closely observed and lovingly brushstroked reality, oftentimes drawing on semi-autobiographical experiences, as we read in her “Afterword” to “The Lost Domain.” This unflinching incorporation of the sinews of her own life adds immense power to the stories—whether the reader even recognizes their origin or not. Additionally, on a line by line basis, Hand writes some of the most beautiful sentences around, either in the genre or outside: consider the beautiful way Ivy Tun describes the physicality of tattooing on page 101 as one example. And Hand’s creation of characters is perceptive and empathetic.

But what I’d identify as perhaps the strongest, most invigorating flavor in her work is a poking and prodding at the tenor of reality. As an author—and also while wearing the skins of her protagonists—Hand is always concerned with the nature of life and the cosmos. Is existence false or authentic, joyous or sorrowful, simple or complex—or every quality you can imagine simultaneously? These kind of ontological issues often become explicit—as when the protagonist of “Wonderwall” says she believes that “meaning and transcendence could be shaken from the world, like unripe fruit from a tree; then consumed.” But even if only a subtext, Hand’s quest for a visionary experience of the bedrock of creation is the engine that ultimately propels all her bold and adventurous narratives.

Assemble the dead: Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Lord Dunsany.

Assemble the living: Kelly Link, Don Webb, Zoran Zivkovic, Stepan Chapman, William Browning Spen-cer, Barrington Bayley, Neal Barrett, Jr., Ray Vukcevich.

Now let the guest of honor part the curtains and emerge in his humble yet self-assured manner to receive the applause of these simpatico peers, cold-bodied and warm-bodied alike: Bruce Holland Rogers.

In 2005 appeared from Wheatland Press—one of our finer small presses, run by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake —a story collection titled The Keyhole Opera (trade paperback, $19.95, 232 pages, ISBN 0975590375). A fair amount of unfortunate silence ensued. But a subset of alert and receptive minds responded, and in 2006 The Keyhole Opera won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. Short fanfare, and then the world at large went back to sleep, with very little formal recognition of the graces and delights of this book. Here, now, almost two years after its publication (yet with its continued availability assured, thanks to Wheatland’s merits as a smart publisher), we will remedy this, thus acknowledging that excellent fiction is timeless.

Bruce Holland Rogers offers us more than three dozen stories in the span of some two hundred pages, so you can immediately guess that they are generally bite-sized ones. But do not let this fact cause you to underestimate their impact. These multivalent parables and deceptively straightforward narratives pack punches out of all proportion to their size. Whether inhabiting the ancient classical past, some indeterminate land “beyond the fields we know,” or the meticulously observed present, Rogers’s stories make the most out of every single carefully chosen word. He has the knack of hooking a reader with a great opening sentence, usually of primal simplicity (“A young man from a fishing village once went to the Capital to see what he could see,” from “Half of the Empire”). Then he plunges into a glass labyrinth of incident and meaning. You think you’re in a place without walls, but really you’re mazed in the author’s crystalline construct.

Rogers is also a formalistic innovator, having invented a story format he calls the “symmetrina.” (Classy warm-up presenter Michael Bishop, so taken with this mode, offers us one of his own in his loving introduction.) And he also produces avant-garde pieces like “Invasions,” which feature neither plot nor character nor setting, but which compel attention nonetheless. In fact, “Invasions” is one of the most powerful anti-war stories I’ve ever read, critiquing non-ideologically our whole Iraq fiasco better than a thousand polemics. And with a bittersweet humor that is a Rogers trademark.

At once ancient and postmodern, the stories in this volume are mini-masterpieces, built cunningly to outlast the flashier fictions that might command reams of reviews, but which hardly are recalled beyond their brief heydays.