The Lands of the Lost

It’s been much too long since James Blaylock gifted us with a book. Until a few months ago, his most recent non-trunk novel was The Rainy Season (1999). Another substantial offering was the story collection 13 Phantasms, from 2000. Both way too long ago for us Blaylock addicts.

Now, of a sudden, he’s got three books out! Saints be praised! We’ll look at only two of them here, since our focus this month is, as semi-irregularly, on the small press alone. But that should not stop you from immediately rushing out and purchasing the third item, The Knights of the Cornerstone (Ace, hardcover, $23.95, 304 pages, ISBN 978-0441016532).

In 1989, Ken Kesey issued a novel titled Caverns, which was a collaboration between the famed writing instructor and his current class of would-be authors. Why do I mention this now? Because one of Blaylock’s new titles is Metamorphosis (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $30.00, 64 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-221-4), which consists of three stories JB wrote with three different students of his. If you can think of another such instance beyond these two books of mentor and mentees collaborating for print, let me know, because I can’t!

The ancillary matter—a nice introduction by Tim Powers (who also provides illos!), an afterword by Blaylock, and a second trailer by a certain “William Ash- bless”—reveals that the students, for this exercise, boned up on Blaylock’s own output, then sought to imitate the master, who subsequently refined their contributions by “adding his own two cents.” The resulting homages are curious creatures.

On the one hand, they read almost like pure Blaylockian fiction. These three students—Adriana Campoy, Brittany Cox, and Alex Haniford—nailed the tropes and techniques and characters most often favored by Blaylock. In “Stone Eggs,” Campoy presents us with a whimsical nephew house-sitting for a missing oddball uncle. Cox’s “P-38” finds melancholy nostalgia in a going-out-of-business hobby store. And Haniford’s “Houses” depicts supernaturalism in the suburbs. So what we have here are three quintessential and entertaining Blaylock pieces—rare and coveted items from a fellow who does not often work at such lengths.

But underneath each tale, like a ghostly murmur, are the unique voices of the youngsters, and they’re seductively promising and distinctive. As Powers says, “Remember their names,” for such talents will inevitably shine solo.

All in all, a successful and enjoyable experiment in sharing the work and the glory.

As for Blaylock’s own new short novel, The Ebb Tide (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $35.00, 136 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-228-3), I should hardly need to do more than announce that it’s a new Langdon St. Ives adventure, the first in that seminal steampunk series in nearly twenty years. Providing a resolution to past mysteries—whatever did happen to the coveted box containing that mysterious cosmic artifact?—the book is more of a pendant than a full-fledged new romp. Nonetheless, it holds everything we’ve come to love about the series: the chummy heroes, the nefarious villains, the absurd situations and queer Victorian technology. The exploits of St. Ives and his pals barrel along like a cheese-rolling contest, pausing only for moments of quiet exoticism. Here’s his portrait of a drowned carriage on the sea bottom.

“It stood upright on the sands as if it were a museum tableau. . . . The wheels were buried to the axles, the exterior covered with undersea growths—barnacles and opalescent incrustations, decorated by Davey Jones. The skeletons of four horses were tethered to it, and there were human skeletons inside, still traveling hopefully.”

Beautiful, apt, haunting—that pretty much sums up the appeal of Blaylock’s whole oeuvre.

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Shambling Towards Morrowland

The universe which James Morrow inhabits—and of which he is the reigning demiurge—is not ours. Oh, sure, it bears certain points of resemblance to our mundane sphere, attaches to ours tenuously at certain shared loci. But it’s a much bigger, weirder, funnier and more outrageous place, where the corpses of gods get hauled away like dead whales, and famous books can narrate their own stories, among other conceits. Morrow’s latest novel, Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Tachyon Publications, trade paperback, $14.95, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-892391-84-1), while a tad less outré than some of his past conceptions, upholds this standard of jaw-dropping effrontery in the service of art.

The frame-tale around the core of the book is the hurried, desperate composition of one man’s memoirs in the year 1984, as he drunkenly occupies a hotel room, facing suicide as his most probable exit.

Syms Thorley once had a major career during the Golden Age of Hollywood. But Thorley’s calling, in the far-off year of 1945, was not to play in comedies or romances, nor in westerns or melodramas. No, Thorley specialized in portraying monsters such as the Frankensteinian Corpuscula or the Mummyesque Kha-Ton-Ra. He’s very good at what he does, however, and even somewhat proud. With his girlfriend, scriptwriter Darlene, by his side, he’s content, and finds life good.

But then Uncle Sam comes calling.

It seems that top-secret Project Knickerbocker needs Thorley’s skills. Having bred gigantic fire-breathing lizards intended to wreak havoc on Tokyo (the monsters are hidden out in the California desert), the government has exhibited some last-minute moral compunctions. Rather than simply turn the critters loose without warning on the enemy, they want to try some shock-and-awe first. Thorley will mimic a pint-sized version of the beasts, in a special costume, and, through the ferocity of his filmed performance, convince the Japs to surrender.

Or so the theory goes. But theory does not incorporate such factors as a rival actor, public reaction to a sighting of the costume, and other chaotic intrusions.

Plainly Morrow is working in a more lighthearted and simplified vein than his usual recomplicated and sometimes densely ideational novels. Like the monster movies from which he draws his inspiration, this book is meant to be all surface effects—humorous rather than scary, in this case—concealing its message beneath a froth of excitement and spectacle. But pulling off such a trick involves at least as much skill as writing a book with more solemnity, and Morrow proves fully up to the challenge.

First, he creates and maintains an utterly authentic and consistent voice for Thorley, both during his heyday and during his despairing decrepitude. You can’t help rooting for the guy, admiring his professionalism and sympathizing with the sad course of his life.

Second, Morrow nails the qualities and quirks associated with the genre of monster films. He’s plainly done immense research into these pix, and devoted much thought to defining what makes them so appealing. Yet his research never dominates the story.

Likewise, he’s recreated the era of the 1940s very believably, summoning up a nostalgic portrait of days gone by that nonetheless incorporates the realism of everyday life. (Although one detail—Dos Equis beer on tap in 1945—seems to me a little anachronistic.)

Finally, he’s blended his invented characters and events so smoothly with the historical personages that the interface is seamless. When producer Sam Katzman or director James Whale are onstage with Thorley, they all seem equally “real.”

The resulting swift-paced, multi-laughs-per-page tale is something that reads like a collaboration between Ron Goulart and Howard Waldrop. Its satire is not as biting as Morrow’s usual acid-dipped fangs, but rather more affectionate: a homage and pastiche in parts. There are no real villains here, no outrageous idiocies or wrong-headedness or folly to condemn. Everyone is merely trying to do the best job they can, insofar as they can define it. The fact that things collapse and fail is part of the structure of the universe, rather than anybody’s fault.

It’s a lesson you might not expect from the story of a man in a rubber lizard suit.

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Boody Call

Every single review of Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers (Fantagraphics, trade paper, $19.99, 124 pages, ISBN 978-1-56097-961-6) must, by federal law, incorporate the phrase I’ve used as my section title into the review, so I decided to get it out of the way right up front. Now that that’s dispensed with, let me simply advise you to rush out and purchase this compilation immediately. We all owe editor Craig Yoe (and the right-thinking folks at Fantagraphics) a big round of applause for getting the insanely awesome four-color dreams of Mr. Rogers between covers for the first time ever.

Rogers lived a long life, from 1904 to 1996, but he retired from comics in 1952, thus making him an unalloyed Golden Ager. And he took full advantage of the lack of editorial rigidity and marketplace strictures in that nascent commercial art form known as funnybooks to let his imagination and pictorial talent run wild. These surreal stories presage everything from Basil Wolverton to Mad magazine to Robert Crumb. Aliens and strange physics abound, as well as plentiful pulp vigor, satire, and irreverence. Additionally we discover some of the same coded fetishism found in early Wonder Woman tales. “The Mysterious Case of Mystery Mountain,” with its imagery of bound and bridled women used as horses by a race of centaurs, must have sent some strange hormonal tremors through the minds and fibers of a juvenile audience.

As usual with Fantagraphics books, the design of this volume is superb, as are the reproductions of old artwork. We can only hope for more Boody-ful installments to come.

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Apocalypse Wow

Post-apocalypse fiction is hot. From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) to the recent Wastelands anthology (2008) assembled by John Joseph Adams, our genre—and the mainstream—is awash in tales of survivors stumbling through the wreckage of civilization.

This grand theme of SF, dating back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), seems particularly relevant these days, as formerly solid institutions—banks, newspapers, the auto industry—suddenly sprout hairline fissures which turn into giant chasms signaling collapse—or, at best, drastic and dramatic sea changes.

The publicity release for Ball Peen Hammer (First Second, trade paper, $17.99, 154 pages, ISBN 978-1-59643-300-7) makes this explicit: “After the economic rollercoaster of this past year, the end of life as we know it is something that’s in the forefront of everyone’s mind.” So the reviewer is immediately moved to ask at the outset: does this graphic novel by writer Adam Rapp and artist George O’Connor deliver a believable day-after-tomorrow catastrophe, ripe with gripping narrative, empathizable characters and cautionary lessons?

Hell, yeah!

The focus of the story is on four main persons. Welton, a musician; Exley, an actress; Underwood, a writer; and Horlick, a “lost boy” adolescent. They occupy a sparse number of sets (Rapp’s a playwright by trade), but we get plenty of insight into larger societal conditions through their dialogue. Their city is run by a dictatorial Syndicate, which doles out food, medicines, and punishments amidst plague conditions. A dog-eat-dog ethos prevails, and no one can afford nobility or ethics. Yet touches of real human grace, love, and kindness prevail. Surreal, oneiric moments intrude amidst the ashcan realism. O’Connor’s delicate palette and masterful cartoony mimesis perfectly complements Rapp’s minimalist staging and speech. It might never be exactly clear how we got from 2009 to this future, but it’s all too plausible nonetheless.

Readers might be reminded of Vertigo’s DMZ series, and Warren Ellis’s Freakangels. Toss in an odd flavor or two from Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), and you’ve got a potent landscape of monitory horror.