Review of Philip Jose Farmer's IRONCASTLE

TITLE: Ironcastle

AUTHOR: Philip Jose Farmer, after J.H. Rosny Aine

175 pages, Daw Books, ISBN 9780879972257

1976 paperback edition, cover price $1.25 (I got my copy for $3.00 at a used bookstore)

PREMISE: (back cover copy) Somewhere in the unexplored heart of Africa a part of this Earth had been taken over by an intelligence from outer space. Such was the message that reached the explorer Hareton Ironcastle, member of the famous Baltimore Gun Club. In that hidden and transformed valley would now be found monsters and pre-humans not to be seen anywhere else.

Such a challenge could not be ignored, and the account of Ironcastle’s expedition of daring but inexperienced amateurs became one of the classic novels of the French writer J.H. Rosny, who was a contemporary of Verne, Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now Philip Jose Farmer, Hugo winner and chronicler of the adventures of Tarzan and Doc Savage, has translated and retold Rosny’s novel, making it a marvel adventure novel to stand alongside the works of Burroughs, Haggard and Farmer himself.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: In the early 1970’s, science fiction grandmaster and pulp adventure aficionado Philip Jose Farmer realized that French author J.H. Rosny Aine’s 1922 novel L’Etonnante Aventure de Hareton Ironcastle had never been translated into English, and so he set out to repair that oversight. What Farmer gave us, by all accounts, is more adaptation than direct translation (I’m pretty sure, for instance, that the Rosny original didn’t mention Doc Savage, as that august personage did not debut in print until 1933; I also wonder if Rosny mentioned Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club), but 40+ years later, Farmer’s long out-of-print version still seems to be the only account of Hareton’s adventure that we have in English. (EDIT TO ADD: After hitting "publish," I was made aware that Black Coat Press has a collection of three of Rosny's works translated into English by Brian Stableford entitled THE MYSTERIOUS FORCE, which includes Ironcastle. It can be purchased at the Black Coat Press website.

And what a fun adventure it is, for lovers of pulp adventure and “lost world” type stories. If you love Doyle’s The Lost World, the various Tarzan stories featuring Opar and such cities, or even more recent fare such as Marvel Comics’ Savage Land or DC Comics’ land of Skartaris (from Mike Grell’s Warlord series, which DC really needs to collect in nice trade or hardcover editions, but I digress…), then you’re bound to enjoy Ironcastle.

Unlike the Doyle, Marvel and DC hidden lands, the transformed piece of Africa Ironcastle explores with his inexperienced but intrepid team doesn’t heavily feature dinosaurs .Instead, we get mutated humans, great apes, animals, and plant life in a setting that becomes increasingly more dangerous and unfamiliar the deeper into the heart of it Ironcastle travels. The descriptions of the flora and fauna are so detailed the reader can’t help but feel right in the midst of things.

Characterization-wise, the book is classic pulp and classic Farmer. By that I mean, the characters hit all the expected tropes (intrepid and strong leader with a team that includes a huge brute of a man who seems invincible, a marksman, a smart (lawyer/scientific) guy and a willful, headstrong woman, but in Farmer’s hands they all get very introspective, analyzing in their heads (but rarely aloud) what has brought them on this journey. Farmer makes the headstrong woman, Muriel, Ironcastle’s daughter rather than cousin or girlfriend, which I think bucks the pulp stereotype a bit; she’s also, as so many of Farmer’s female characters are, very capable of taking care of herself and far from the fainting damsel-in-distress one might expect in stories like this. (Towards the end of the novel, I found myself wondering what a team-up between Muriel, Jane, Dejah Thoris, and Patricia Savage would look like. Muriel could stand equal to those more well-known women, without a doubt.) The dialogue can be a bit Melodrama/Pathos-inflected (especially when the young Frenchman/marksman Phillipe is pining over/concerned about Muriel).

Pacing-wise, the novel never really slows down. This is a tightly-packed 175 pages, and the characters have a lot of ground to cover after the initial two chapters in Baltimore set the stage for what’s to come. Farmer keeps things moving, and works the character-building moments into the action. And throughout most of the journey, the world-building is fantastic. If I have one complaint, it’s that once Ironcastle and company find the man they’re looking for at the heart of this strange hidden world, the novel ends abruptly. So abruptly that I thought perhaps my used bookstore paperback purchase was missing a chapter, but the other side of the last page has a house ad for other Daw adventure/sf novels. I’m not sure if Farmer just decided the part of the story that interested him was over and stopped, or if the publisher set a strict word-count that the author ran up against, or if perhaps there were behind-the-scenes issues with translating/adapting more of the book (if there was more). Regardless the reason, the story ends where it does and we’re left wondering if Hareton Ironcastle and Muriel and Phillipe and Guthrie and the rest had any other adventures to be consumed.

While I can’t say Ironcastle is my favorite Philip Jose Farmer work, it does have all of the hallmarks of the works by him that I do love: the interconnectedness with works by Burroughs, Dent and Verne (and an off-hand reference to the “fantasies” written by H. Rider Haggard), the deep world-building, the strong female characters. And Farmer’s sheer joy at writing this type of thing is evident on every page. Well worth seeking out in a used bookstore.

Also, for those interested, Farmer experts and protégés Win Scott Eckert and Christopher Paul Carey wrote a tale teaming Ironcastle with French pulp adventurer Doc Ardan (an obvious stand-in for Doc Savage) called “Iron and Bronze,” which is available in eBook form via Amazon. Carey's novella "Exiles of Kho" also ties closely to Farmer's version of Ironcastle.

Also of Note: Ironcastle was the first book I read this year towards the TO BE READ CHALLENGE hosted by RoofbeamReader. Click here to see my original post about the challenge and which books I chose for 2018.

Review of Mickey Spillane's THE LAST STAND

TITLE: The Last Stand

AUTHOR: Mickey Spillane

285 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781785656869 (Print)

Publication Date: March 20, 2018 (I received an uncorrected proof ARC in exchange for an honest review), hardcover, $22.99

PREMISE: (back cover copy)  On Mickey Spillane’s birthday – a brand-new novel from the master.  A tarnished former cop goes on a crusade to find a politician’s killer and avoid the .45-caliber slug with his name on it. A pilot forced to make an emergency landing in the desert finds himself at the center of a struggle between FBI agents, unsavory fortune hunters, and the local Indian tribe to control a mysterious find that could mean wealth and power – or death. Two substantial new works filled with Spillane’s muscular prose and the gorgeous women and two-fisted action the author was famous for, topped off by an introduction from Max Allan Collins describing the history of these lost manuscripts and his long relationship with the writer who was his mentor, his hero, and for much of the last century the bestselling author in the world.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: As indicated in the back cover copy, this is not one new Spillane novel, but two. The first, A Bullet For Satisfaction, is an unpublished piece from early in his career, while the titular novel is the last full novel Spillane completed before his death. He also left plenty of unfinished stories and novels for Max Allan Collins to complete and publish over the last few years, but Collins (wisely, I think) decided to save The Last Stand for an auspicious occasion: the great author’s 100th birthday.

Collins’ introduction traces Spillane’s life history, concentrating on his writing and how it changed from the early bloody days of the first Mike Hammer novel to the later, more circumspect tales written after he’d converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That difference is pretty apparent when one compares the two short novels in this collection.

A Bullet for Satisfaction is classic noir: rough-and-tumble guys and not one, not two, but three femme fatales. There’s plenty of violence and double-crosses to go around; the violence especially may have been the reason that Spillane chose not to release this after his conversion, as Collins suggests in the introduction. The novel hits all the noir beats: Upright police captain Dexter quickly becomes unfairly disgraced former-captain Dexter, who decides to take a murder investigation into his own hands even though it will shake up city politics and might cause him to become real dead real fast. He falls quickly and deeply in love with a woman who may or may not ultimately do him wrong, falls in lust with another woman from the opposite end of the social scale, and survives more double-crosses and near-death experiences than the reader can count. Still, he carries on, his mind on a combination of justice and vengeance, no matter how many people have to die for him to accomplish it. The descriptive language is dark, dreary, with a lurking undercurrent of menace. The dialogue is snappy, tight, almost violent without being excessively vulgar. The entire story, in fact, is tightly told. There are no padded scenes, no wasted moments. Everything propels plot and sets up character. Each reveal is perfectly timed, leading to the next, leading to the final reveal – and they all make sense, the clues are all right there to pick up as you go along.

The Last Stand, by comparison, is almost laconic. It clocks in at about 70 pages longer than A Bullet for Satisfaction, and Spillane not only takes his time getting to the big pay-off, he takes his time even clueing us in to what the real story is. There’s lots of set-up before the requisite twists and potential double-crosses. Despite some trappings, the story isn’t noir but rather “men’s pulp adventure via Clive Cussler.” As fits Spillane’s religion-based change of heart, there’s far less violence to be seen, and what is there is more damage to vehicles than to people (other than a well-placed sucker-punch or two). The setting is present day, on an unnamed Indian reservation in the southwest. The main characters are the tropes of a different kind of genre lit: the lonely white man who has everything except love, the Indian loner with a secret, the Indian’s lovely but unsurprisingly capable and headstrong sister. This is pulp adventure fiction writ modern and a bit bright and large compared to the dark intimacy of the noir story. Spillane still makes the desolate desert environment as much a character here as the dark small city streets and darker swampy outlands are in the previous story. But while the plot feels like classic Spillane, the longer story length works against the author. There’s a lag in the middle, several scenes that feel like their only purpose is to drag out the tension, and two subplots (the FBI’s hunt for a mysterious arrowhead and the local bruiser looking to rough up the main character over a woman) feel shoe-horned in. I think The Last Stand could have been forty pages shorter, with at least one less sub-plot, and been a much tighter and more exciting story. The dialogue attempts the usual Spillane snap but feels lifeless and repetitive compared to that of the story preceding. We get to know the three main characters well enough by the end thanks to the amount of time they spend together, but I’m not sure how well they get to know each other; the connections seem superficial at best. The potential and perceived bad-guys (gangsters and FBI agents and that big ol’ bruiser of a local who wants the lovely sister to be his own true love) remain personality-less cyphers until the last pages, more place-holders than actual threats. And the end, when it comes, feels a bit too abrupt after the twists and turns Spillane has put us through. The Last Stand is still a solid story, with a couple of riveting action scenes and some really cool ideas embedded along with some great descriptions of the desert. But ultimately, for me it’s just not as exciting as the older story (although your mileage may vary).

Spillane completists of course will flock to the book when it comes out, as they should. People who have read a bit of Spillane before, like me, may enjoy one story or the other even if they don’t enjoy both, and consider the cover price worth it either way.  At the very least, in pairing these two stories under one cover Hard Case Crime and Max Allan Collins have given readers a chance to see how Spillane’s storytelling changed over the long span of his career. And to me, that alone is worth the cover price.

WORLD-DELVING: Seanan McGuire’s “Incryptid” Short Fiction

Delve: verb (used without object), delved, delving.

1.       to carry on intensive and thorough research for data, information, or the like; investigate:

to delve into the issue of prison reform.

2.       Archaic. to dig, as with a spade.

verb (used with object), delved, delving.

3. Archaic. to dig; excavate.

Synonyms: research, inquire, probe, examine, explore.

(from dictionary.com)

I admit it: I am fascinated by Seanan McGuire’s productivity and creativity. I cannot imagine how she keeps track of the myriad worlds she’s created under her own name and her Mira Grant pseudonym. By my count, she’s got 6 current on-going series (novel series October Daye, Incryptid, Newsflesh, Wayward Children, and the “Deep” books; and the short story series featuring The Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad) and several that seem to be on hiatus but could return at any moment (Parasitology, Velveteen, Indexing). They are a marvelously disparate group of worlds featuring an endlessly diverse group of characters. Seanan McGuire builds worlds that readers love to become immersed in. But she doesn’t just build worlds to hang series of novels on – she delves those worlds, too.

“World-delving” is a term I may or may not have made up. I haven’t seen anyone else use it, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been used. Regardless, it’s the perfect word for what Seanan McGuire does in the short stories she writes to accompany her on-going novel series. She’s written short stories and novellas (and even, I believe, a poem/song or two) to dig deeper into the worlds of October Daye, Newflesh, and Incryptid. These stories occasionally take place in the “present” of the parent series, filling in events between novels (and usually featuring favorite supporting characters). But more often, they probe and explicate the past events that shaped the world the current characters live in.

Take world of Incryptid as an example. The novels (six so far, with #7, “Tricks For Free,” due in bookstores next week) give us the adventures of the Price siblings (Verity, Alexander, and Antimony) as they work in secret to protect the cryptid populations of North America from extermination by the Covenant of Saint George – a European-based secret society the Price kids’ grandparents and great-grandparents split from, on pain of death, in the early 20th century. While the novels throw in occasional references to that past, the majority of the plots and sub-plots and even sub-sub-plots are about the here-and-now of the Price kids’ lives (romance included).

There are short stories available filling in events between novels (mostly featuring Verity or her cousins) or events shortly before the novels begin (most focusing on Antimony’s roller-derby career), but fully half of the Incryptid stories McGuire has published for free on her website explore the Price family’s history. These stories deepen the reader’s understanding of the history that affects every one of the modern Price kids (whether Verity and her siblings and cousins are aware of the influence or not), as well as the reader’s understanding of the North American cryptid population the family strives to protect.

The first arc of stories, now seemingly complete, runs from 1928 to 1945 and gives us the love story of Jonathan Healy and Frances Brown (the Price kids’ great-grand-parents). Johnny is the only child that Alexander and Enid Healy were allowed to take with them when they split from the Covenant of St. George; he’s grown up in hiding and learning what it means to protect rather than destroy cryptids. On one such mission out west, he meets the fascinating and frustrating Frances Brown, nick-named “The Flower of Arizona, The Star of New Mexico.” Over the course of fourteen stories (each 20-28 pages in length, all but two available for free on McGuire’s website), we see how timid, uptight Johnny finally lets his guard down and brings new blood into the Healy family fold. We experience, in short bursts, not the entirety of Johnny and Fran’s life together but rather the highlights – the grand love story of a quiet man and bold woman that will reverberate through to those same great-grand-children. And if you’ve read the novels, you know that despite their outward demeanor, the Price kids all want to find lasting love like that of their grand- and great-grand-parents. Through Johnny and Fran’s cross-country trek home to meet his parents, we also get to know cryptid families that will play a role in their great-grand-children’s lives, to examine how those relationships were formed and firmed, in particular the folks who inhabit the traveling circus Fran was a part of when she and Johnny met. But these stories aren’t just about romance and building friendships: the shadow of the Covenant of St. George falls over everything the Healys experience, regardless of the Covenant’s physical presence. The fear of discovery, of their carefully-built world coming apart because of one slight slip in awareness, is palpable throughout – and that’s disregarding the very real dangers Johnny and Fran encounter from cryptids who don’t want their help or don’t believe they should have to stay hidden from humans any longer.

The second world-delving arc probes the next generation, commencing from 1954: Johnny and Fran’s headstrong, willful, adventure-seeking daughter Alice and her eventual husband Thomas Price (this is not a spoiler, as one of the sub-sub-plots of the novels is Alice’s interdimensional search for her missing husband). While the tension of the earlier arc involved the Healy’s (and particularly Johnny’s) willingness to let someone completely unknown in, the tension of this arc (three stories in, so far, all free on the site) sits firmly in the realm of “what happens when the enemy moves in next door, but doesn’t seem so bad?” Thomas is being tested by the Covenant, punished for recent failures, and the Healys have every right to be concerned he’s about to bring the wrath of the Covenant down on them, no matter how much he may profess otherwise. Again, the threat of the Covenant is clear and present, even if they never make an appearance. And again, through headstrong Alice and quiet, bookish Thomas, we see opposites attract, and we get to experience more of the Michigan-area cryptid community that will play roles in the adventures of Verity, Alexander, Antimony and their cousins. They say “the past is prologue,” and in these short story arcs, Seanan McGuire takes that adage to heart. She excavates here the nuggets of wisdom and experience that have been handed down to the present-day carriers of the Price-Healy banner.

For readers of the novels, these stories are world-delving, deepening our knowledge of the family history and world around them. But I don’t want to drive potential new readers away from a great free opportunity to dip their toes into the world of Incryptid. These short stories work as well as introduction as they do explication. Someone completely unfamiliar with the Incryptid novels could read these short story arcs and not feel like a clueless outsider dumped into a world the author presumes the reader is familiar with. McGuire peppers the stories with everything you need to know to understand the world and time these characters exist in; there are no references to what their grand/great-grand-kids will experience in the novels. For folks new to McGuire’s Incryptid world, these stories are world-introducing. They work on expertly on both levels.

Each story in each arc is complete unto itself and vital information is repeated from story to story. But the arcs also have a beginning, middle, and end. The Johnny-and-Fran sequence, essentially complete unless McGuire decides to go back and add more installments later, really needs to be collected in print form (Subterranean Press, I’m looking at you). It works very well as a mosaic novel of inter-connected short stories.

If you’re not familiar with the Incryptid novels and want to get a sense of the world, I recommend hoping over to Seanan McGuire’s website and clicking the sidebar menu for Incryptid. You’ll find links to descriptions of the novels, as well as to the page for all of the short stories. (Fair warning, though: events of the novels will be spoiled if you read the Verity-and-Dominic  or Sarah-and-Arthur stories on the page.) If you’re already familiar with the Incryptid novels but somehow didn’t know there were more world-delving short stories out there … well, now you know.

Reading Round-Up: January 2018

Reinstating what I intend to be a monthly summary of everything I’ve read, since I’m not reviewing every single book or story the way I used to try to do on Livejournal. Here’s what I read in January of 2018:

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues and stand-alone short stories in ebook format as “books.” I read or listened to 14 books in January: 11 in print, 2 in audio, and 1 in ebook format. They were:

1.       Lightspeed Magazine #92 (January 2018 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams. The usual fine assortment of sf and fantasy short stories and novellas. This month’s favorites for me were Catherynne M. Valente’s “Golabush, Or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy,” Sarah Pinsker’s “The Court Magician,” and José Pablo Iriarte’s “The Substance of My Lives, The Accident of Our Birth.”

2.       Aristotle and Dante Discover The Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Saenz.  A wonderful first-person gay coming-of-age story about two Latino boys in the Southwest in the 80s, endearingly read on audio by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I didn’t quite get the sense that Ari was as angry as the cover-copy made him out to be (conflicted yes, over-the-top angry not so much).

3.       Wonder Woman ’77 Meets the Bionic Woman, by Andy Mangels, Judit Tondora and others. Fun, fun, fun team-up between two of my favorite 70s TV icons. Mangels skillfully melds bad-guys from both shows into a formidable menace, and there are lots of great nods to both shows’ supporting casts (especially the female members). But there’s also an sub-plot that’s never resolved, indicating Mangels expected there to be a sequel mini-series/trade paperback. And Judit Tondora’s art is just wonderful to look at.

4.       Beneath The Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3), by Seanan McGuire.  The story of the portal-children at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children continue, this time with a quest into a Wonderland-like candy world that could have dire consequences for several members of the cast. What I love about these novellas is that you don’t have to have read the previous installments at all: McGuire tells you everything you need to know in each installment. But of course, reading them (in or out of order) gives you a much bigger picture to absorb.

5.       Sherlock Holmes and the Green Lama: Heir Apparent, by Adam Lance Garcia. Love Holmes pastiches, love the “modern pulp movement.” Not overly familiar with the pulp history of The Green Lama, but that didn’t affect my enjoyment of this crossover which draws on both the Lama’s and Holme’s overlapping experiences in Tibet. The tension is well-spooled-out, the action sequences well-done. I’m sure I missed some of the nods towards other pulp characters and settings.

6.       The Squirrel on the Train (Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries #2), by Kevin Hearne.  Another fun novella in the Iron Druid Chronicles narrated by everyone’s favorite Irish wolfhound, Oberon. The IDC novels and short stories told from the human characters’ perspectives are fun and exciting, but the voice Hearne gives Oberon is more endearing and intimate and just plain joyful.

7.       Binti: The Night Masquerage (Binti #3), by Nnedi Okorafor. The Binti trilogy of novellas concludes as solidly as it started: with amazing poetic prose, beautiful descriptions of people and places, action propelled by characterization, and at least one story twist I personally did not see coming. Folks whose first exposure to Afrofuturism was the Marvel movie Black Panther really need to check out this series.

8.       Lumberjanes Vol. 7: A Bird’s Eye View, by Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Carey Pietsch, Ayme Sotuyo, Maarta Laiho. After a couple of volumes where I felt the story had slowed or the art wasn’t quite up to the standard of the first few, I feel like Volume 7 is both a return to form and a departure, with several new interesting supporting characters introduced and other supporting characters returning and being given more depth – all without shirking development for the core cast. I hear there might me a television version in development, and I hope none of the spark and strength of these girls is lost in adaptation.

9.       Ironcastle, by Philip Jose Farmer, adapting J.H. Rosny Aine.  It’s taken me way too long to get around to reading this Farmer classic. I enjoyed it. There will be a longer review sometime next week, since this is one of the books I read to meet this year’s To Be Read Challenge, which requires an individual review to be posted.

10.   Superman: The Phantom Zone, by Steve Gerber, Gene Colan, Tony DeZuniga, Rick Veitch, Bob Smith and others.  I loved this four-issue mini-series when it was published in the early 80s, before DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, as goofy as the story is. Gerber told a great story (although the follow-up story in DC Comics Presents was a bit more convoluted upon re-reading than I remembered). Colan’s art here is not necessarily his best compared to Tomb of Dracula, or even the Silverblade and Nathaniel Dusk minis he was drawing for DC around the same time, but it’s still fun. The man was a master of shadow and fluidity of movement.

11.   Kiss Me Like A Stranger, by Gene Wilder.  I can’t believe I haven’t read Wilder’s memoir before now. It’s become my habit to listen to, rather than read, memoirs if they’re read by the author, and I feel like I got a better sense of what Gene was trying to say (and what he was shying away from saying) by listening to him. I think, especially when it comes to the estrangement from his adopted daughter, he had blinders on as to what the problem actually was, but then again it’s very easy to judge from the outside things that aren’t as obvious when you’re in the middle. And his love for Gilda as well as the woman he married after her passing are very very strong and clear.

12.   Iceman Volume 1: Thawing Out, by Sina Grace, Alessandro Vitti, Edgar Salazer, and others.  I really intend to write a longer blog-post about this eventually. As I said on Twitter, I felt like Grace really captures the act of coming out “later in life” (a subjective term, to be sure, but I think Bobby Drake coming out as gay in his late 20s, after having “come out” as a mutant in his teens, qualifies), and the different pressures and roadblocks that come with it. Bobby’s journey in these few issues very much matches my own coming out in my late twenties after years of trying to convince myself I was straight and having lots of failed relationships with otherwise wonderful women, many of whom are still good friends.

13.   Cry Your Way Home, by Damien Angelica Walters. A wonderful short story collection by one of my favorite authors, about which I don’t want to say too much here because my full review will be forthcoming at Strange Horizons in about a month.

14.   The Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, Book 3), by Rick Riordan.  I have not been as captivated by the Magnus Chase books as I have by the Percy Jackson and Kane Chronicles series, but this concluding volume of the first trilogy (which features a short guest spot by everyone’s favorite son of Poseidon as well as Magnus’ cousin Annabeth) grabbed me. A slightly slow start gives way to a fast-paced adventure that resolves all of the extant main and sub-plots and gives us more depth to the supporting cast of Magnus’ hotel-mates.

So fourteen books in January, which Goodreads told me was a few ahead of goal for the month/year. Ironcastle is the first book read for the 2018 To Be Read Challenge. Four graphic novels meets my “one graphic novel per week” reading challenge, while nothing I read in January helped meet any of the “Complete the Series” challenges, nor the “Bustle Reading Challenge.”  Those Reading Challenges were described HERE.

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 365 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) each year. Here’s what I did read and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too (with some short notes for stories that really stood out to me). If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

1.       “The Streets of Babel” by Adam-Troy Castro, from Lightspeed Magazine #92 (January 2018 issued), edited by John Joseph Adams.

2.       “Golabush, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy” by Catherynne M. Valente

3.       “The Eyes of the Flood” by Susan Jane Bigelow

4.       “Someday” by James Patrick Kelly

5.       “Auburn” by Joanna Ruocco

6.       “The Substance of My Lives, the Accident of Our Births” by Jose Pablo Iriarte

7.       “Divine Madness” by Roger Zelazny

8.       “The Court Magician” by Sarah Pinsker

9.       “A Thousand Nights Till Morning” by Will McIntosh

10.   “Written in Water” by Seanan McGuire, a Patrick-and-Dianda story, on the author’s Patreon page.

11.   “Guerilla Marketing” by Sanjay Agnihotri, from One Story #236, edited by Will Allison

12.   “Our New Lives” by Helen Coats, from One Teen Story #53, edited by Patrick Ryan

13.   “Trouble Comes” by Neal Bailey, stand-alone ebook available on Kindle

14.   “Tooth, Tongue and Claw” by Damien Angelica Walters, from her collection Cry Your Way Home, edited by Leslie Connor.

15.   “Deep Within the Marrow, Hidden In My Smile” by Damien Angelica Walters

16.   “On The Other Side of The Door, Everything Changes” by Damien Angelica Walters

17.   “This Is The Way I Die” by Damien Angelica Walters

18.   “The Hands That Hold, The Lies That Bind” by Damien Angelica Walters

19.   “Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Elephant’s Tale” by Damien Angelica Walters

20.   “The Judas Child” by Damien Angelica Walters

21.   “S Is For Soliloquy” by Damien Angelica Walters

22.   “The Floating Girls: A Documentary” by Damien Angelica Walters

23.   “Take A Walk In The Night, My Love” by Damien Angelica Walters

24.   “Falling Under, Through the Dark” by Damien Angelica Walters

25.   “The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter” by Damien Angelica Walters

26.   “Umbilicus” by Damien Angelica Walters

27.   “A Lie You Give, And Thus I Take” by Damien Angelica Walters

28.   “Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home” by Damien Angelica Walters

29.   “Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice” by Damien Angelica Walters

30.   “In The Spaces Where You Lived” by Damien Angelica Walters

31.   “How The Marquis Got His Coat Back” by Neil Gaiman, the full-cast BBC Audio production available on Audible.

32.   “The Way Home” by Seanan McGuire, an Alice Healey /Tom Price “Incryptid” story, on the author’s website

33.   “The Lay of The Land” by Seanan McGuire

34.   “Target Practice” by Seanan McGuire

So that’s 34 short stories in January, more than one per day, putting  me exactly on schedule for the year so far.

Review of Donald E. Westlake's Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

TITLE: Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

AUTHOR: Donald Westlake

255 pages, Hard Case Crime, ISBN 9781785656828

Publication Date: February 13, 2018 (I received an uncorrected proof ARC in exchange for an honest review), trade paperback, $9.95

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): JAILED FOR A JOKE

It isn't easy going to jail for a practical joke. Of course, this particular joke left 20 cars wrecked on the highway and two politicians' careers in tatters - so jail is where Harold Künt landed. Now he's just trying to keep a low profile in the Big House. He wants no part of his fellow inmates' plan to use an escape tunnel to rob two banks. But it's too late; he's in it up to his neck. And that neck may just wind up in a noose...

HELP I AM BEING HELD PRISONER is Donald E. Westlake at his funniest and his most ingenious, a rediscovered crime classic from the MWA Grand Master returning to stores for the first time in three decades.

MY RATING: Five out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: I admit I haven’t read a lot of Donald E. Westlake. Some short stories, maybe a Parker novel back in my ill-remembered high school days at the behest of a friend, and last year’s Hard Case Crime release of Westlake’s previously-unpublished novel Forever And A Death. Despite multiple people telling me how comedic Westlake could be, everything I’ve read by him has been on the more serious/adventure side of things. Those books had funny scenes interspersed, but weren’t wholly comedic tales.

I’ve now experienced Westlake’s full comedic prowess, and I’m hooked. Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner is a fast, funny romp of a story, virtually “unputdownable.” There’s a catchy turn of phrase, or a crackling bit of dialogue, or a tongue-in-cheek wink at the reader, on almost every page that should bring a chuckle, if not an outright laugh (and I did actually laugh out loud at least four times), to any reader with at least a moderate sense of humor. I suspect there are people who will not find Westlake’s wordplay or the main character’s antics funny – those people are the real life versions of characters Warden Gadmore and guard Fred Stoon – but I really enjoyed the book.

It can be hard to make humor based on mispronunciations work in print, but Westlake pulls it off on the first page. Our narrator has a name people have been saying wrong his entire life: Harry Künt (“with an umlaut,” he repeatedly tells people). He never quiet spells out exactly how people are mispronouncing his name, but the reader can guess pretty easily. This becomes a running joke throughout the book, and serves as character motivation for why Harry became a practical joker early in life. (Okay, it might be thin character motivation, but it works as a launching point.)

The entire book really is a comedy of errors, as Harry gets further and further in over his head. But it’s a comedy of errors that never quite veers into farce despite some of the stock characters Harry finds himself surrounded by (the officious and humorless warden; the threatening gang leader who just won’t give up the plan; the fellow in-mate who gets a little too lost in the character he’s playing outside the jail walls). In a way, it reminds me of classic episodes of The Simpsons or the Dick Van Dyke show: just when you think you know where the story is heading and what the punchline is going to be, Westlake adds a new complication to poor Harry’s life. And this includes the titular sub-plot: someone else in the prison is pranking the warden by having the title phrase pop up in unusual places; we know from the start this is one practical joke Harry is innocent of, but of course the warden, head-guard and other officials think it must be him because that’s what he got sent in for.

The author also seamlessly blends in the other genres he’s famous for (and some he's not): it’s a jail-break caper, a bank robbery caper, a feel-good prison-buddy story (Harry bonds with a fellow prisoner who is in charge of all the gardening), a military-base escapade, a romance. The comedy works because Westlake knows the tropes of all of these genres and tweaks them just enough to make each scene funny without losing the tension (the military-base scene in particular is equal parts Lee Marvin movie and M*A*S*H). I have no doubt that, had he wanted to, Westlake could have written this as a straight-up thriller and the story would have hung together just as well.

(Side-note: I’m actually surprised this has never been adapted to film. It’s an ideal vehicle for someone with an everyman look and solid comic timing, surrounded by character actors with the right mixture of menace and buffoonery.)

As seen above, Hard Case Crime’s re-release of this 30 year old long out-of-print Westlake classic comes with an equally humorous cover painting by Paul Mann that simply and expertly captures the mood of the book without being cartoony or too cutesy. This is the eighth Westlake novel HCC has released, following 361, The Comedy Is Finished, The Cutie, Memory, Somebody Owes Me Money, Forever and A Death, and Lemons Never Lie, (under Westlake’s Richard Stark pseudonym).

Fans of loving send-ups of classic genres, written by authors who know those genres well, really should check out Help I Am Being Held A Prisoner. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

2017 Reading By The Numbers

In which I analyze exactly what I read, in what formats and genres and such-like. (I like my personal counts to match my Goodreads page, so I count fully-read magazine issues and individually-published short stories and novellas as “books.”)

BOOKS

I exceeded my Goodreads initial goal of 100 books, and my updated Goodreads goal of 125. I did not attempt “To Be Read” Challenge this year.

TOTAL READ: 139

FICTION: 131

·         Anthologies: 8

o   Horror: 1

o   Christmas: 1

o   Weird West: 1

o   Transgender Spec Fic: 1

o   Pulp Adventure: 1

o   Science Fiction 2

o   Crime: 1

·         Chapbooks: 2 (both pulp adventure)

·         Single-Author Story Collections: 10

o   Horror: 1

o   Christmas: 1

o   Crime: 1

o   Mystery: 5

o   Science Fiction: 1

o   Mythology: 1

·         Graphic Novels: 37

o   Super-Heroes: 17

o   Horror: 8

o   Crime: 2

o   Comedy: 1

o   Fantasy: 2

o   Urban Fantasy: 2

o   YA Urban Fantasy: 3

o   YA Comedy: 1

o   Pulp Adventure: 1

·         Magazines: 12 (all Lightspeed)

·         Novels: 38

o   Alt-History Fantasy: 2

o   Christmas: 2

o   Fantasy: 8

o   YA Fantasy: 2

o   Urban Fantasy: 4

o   Historical Fantasy: 1

o   Steampunk: 2

o   Science Fiction: 5

o   YA Science Fiction: 1

o   Crime/Mystery: 5

o   Super-Heroes: 1

o   Horror: 3

o   Adventure: 1

o   YA Literary: 1

·         Novellas: 19

o   Christmas: 2

o   Alt-History Fantasy/Romance: 1

o   Science Fiction 5

o   Fantasy: 3

o   Mystery: 2

o   Horror: 2

o   Urban Fantasy: 3

o   Historical Fantasy: 1

·         Short Stories: 5

o   Romance: 1

o   Pulp Adventure: 1

o   Urban Fantasy: 2

o   Alt-History Fantasy/Romance: 1

NON-FICTION: 8

·         Memoirs: 7

o   Alison Arngrim

o   Carrie Fisher (x2)

o   Debbie Reynolds

o   Joel Grey

o   William Daniels

o   Dick Van Dyke

·         Book of Essays: 1 (Neil Gaiman)

OTHER DATA:

# OF AUTHORS/EDITORS/ARTISTS: roughly 107

SHORTEST READS: 20 pages (A Very Merry Blue Christmas; Caesar’s Children; In Sea-Salt Tears)

LONGEST READ: 459 (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Hammer of Thor)

FIRST BOOK READ IN 2017: Locke & Key Vol 1: Welcome to Lovecraft, by Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez & others

FINAL BOOK READ IN 2017: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

TOTAL # OF PAGES READ: 26, 987

AVERAGE # OF PAGES PER BOOK: 197

FORMAT SUMMARY:

·         Audio:27

·         Ebook: 26

·         Hardcover: 21

·         Softcover: 65

STORIES

I exceeded my goal of 365 short stories. I did not really track how many in each genre this year.

TOTAL READ: 380

# OF AUTHORS: 212

SOURCES:

·         Anthologies: 14

·         Single Author Collections: 9

·         Magazines: 10

·         Author Websites/Patreon/Self-Pubbed: 17

First Story Read in 2017: “Rate of Change” by James S.E. Corey, in Lightspeed #79

Final Story Read in 2017: “Pups” by Kate Folk, in One Story #235

2018 Reading Challenges

Young me circa 1974 says "So much to read, so little time...."

Last week, I posted my list of planned reads for RoofbeamReader’s 2018 “TBR Challenge.” But I always set myself more than one reading challenge a year. Some carry over from year to year, and some are new. Some are broad and some are themed. And in many cases, books read will help me meet more than one challenge.

365 SHORT STORIES CHALLENGE

Every year, I challenge myself to read one short story per day. Some years I keep the pace pretty well, and some years I fall behind and then scramble to catch up (and some years, I catch up and fall behind again). I used to post thoughts on each individual story over on my now-largely-defunct Livejournal; this year I plan to review a story or two in-depth each Sunday and then do a monthly “round-up” of all stories read that month. I’m defining “short story” as anything from flash fiction to novella-length. If a story/novella is published as a stand-alone book (ebook or otherwise), that story will also count towards my annual Goodreads “Books Read Challenge.”

GOODREADS CHALLENGE

Goodreads allows members to set a challenge. In 2017 I set the same 100 book challenge as previous years. I blew past that in mid-fall and decided to increase it to 125, and managed over 130 books. So for 2018, I’m going to start out planning on 125 books and see where we go. Goodreads also counts magazines and individually-published short stories as “books,” so I count them for this challenge as well. Of course, any book read for the TBR Challenge, or the challenges mentioned below, count towards this one.

GRAPHIC NOVEL CHALLENGE

I own far more graphic novels and trade paperback collections of classic comics than I’ve read. In 2017 I started trying to turn that around, and I’m setting a goal in 2018 of reading one graphic novel per week. I may start a separate post tracking these, or I may just come back and update numbers here.

“BUSTLE” CHALLENGE (adapted from 2017)

A co-worker pointed me to the Bustle.com 2017 reading challenge near the end of 2016, and while I had every initial intent of working on the challenge because it would foster reading outside of my comfort zone (non-fiction in general is something I really need to challenge myself to read), I dropped the ball on it. So I’m challenging myself to do it in 2018, and adding one category to the 20 of the original challenge. For some of the categories, I’ve already decided what I want to read (and already own the books in question), while for some I’m leaving myself room to pick something after I gather recommendations).  I plan to come back to this post and add “date completed” for each category, and links to reviews where appropriate. Here are the categories (and the books already chosen):

1.       BY A WOMAN UNDER 25: I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

2.       ABOUT NON-WESTERN HISTORY: A History of the Philippines From Indios Bravos to Filipinos by Luis. H. Francia

3.       A BOOK OF ESSAYS: Teenagers From The Future, edited by Tim Callaghan COMPLETED FEBRUARY 2018

4.       ABOUT INDIGENOUS CULTURE: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, by Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz

5.       BEFORE YOU SEE THE MOVIE: The Lady Vanishes / The Spiral Staircase, by Ethel White (believe it or not, I’ve never seen the classic noir movies based on these books)

6.       YOUNG ADULT BY AN AUTHOR OF COLOR: Shadowhouse Falls by Daniel Jose Older

7.       SET IN THE MIDDLE EAST: Solacers, by Arion Galmanaki

8.       ABOUT WOMEN IN WAR:

9.       A GRAPHIC NOVEL BY A WOMAN: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

10.   BY AN IMMIGRANT/REFUGEE TO THE US:

11.   CHILDREN’S BOOK (READ ALOUD):

12.   REREAD A CHILDHOOD FAVORITE: A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle COMPLETED MARCH 2018

13.   AN LGBTQIA MEMOIR: To The Stars by George Takei READ APRIL 2018

14.   POST-APOCALYPTIC FICTION BY A WOMAN: Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor

15.   FEMINIST SF NOVEL:

16.   FIRST BOOK IN A NEW SERIES: Velveteen Vs. The Junior Super-Patriots, by Seanan McGuire

17.   SET IN AFRICA, BY AN AFRICAN AUTHOR: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe COMPLETED FEBRUARY 2018

18.   TRANSLATED BOOK: Invisible Planets, edited and translated by Ken Liu

19.   CONTEMPORARY POET: Lies, Mistruths and Perception by Kate Fox

20.   BY A MODERNIST WOMAN WRITER: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

21.   BY A MAN UNDER 25: A Lite Too Bright by Samuel Miller (to be published May, 2018)

COMPLETE THE SERIES CHALLENGE

In previous years I’ve challenged myself to come “up to date” on series I’d started but fallen behind on. This year, I’m challenging myself to also read one series that I own but have not read. Titles that I have read in each series are indicated with (re-read).  I plan to come back to this post and add “date completed” for each book individually and for each series as a whole, and give links to reviews where appropriate.

THE VELVETEEN SERIES by Seanan McGuire

1.       Velveteen Vs. The Junior Super-Patriots

2.       Velveteen Vs. The Multiverse

3.       Velveteen Vs. The Seasons

LAWRENCE BLOCK’S CLASSIC CRIME LIBRARY

1.       After The First Death

2.       Deadly Honeymoon

3.       Grifter’s Game (re-read)

4.       The Girl with the Long Green Beret

5.       The Specialists (re-read)

6.       The Triumph of Evil

7.       Such Men Are Dangerous

8.       Not Comin’ Home to You

9.       Lucky at Cards

10.   Killing Casto (re-read)

11.   A Diet of Treacle

12.   You Could Call It Murder

13.   Coward’s Kiss

14.   Cinderella Sims

15.   Passport to Peril

16.   Ariel

VANTAGE BOOKS MOVIE CLASSICS (Themed Set by PenguinRandomHouse, 2014-2015)

1.       Showboat by Edna Ferber (re-read)

2.       Cimarron by Edna Ferber

3.       Back Street by Fannie Hurst

4.       Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington

5.       The Ghost and Mrs. Muir by R.A. Dick

6.       The Bad Seed by William March

7.       Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds

8.       The Bitter Tea of General Yen by Grace Zaring Stone READ MARCH 2018

9.       Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

10.   The Night of the Hunter by David Grubb

THE RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION SERIES (Themed Set by HiLo Books, 2012-2013)

1.       The Scarlet Plague by Jack London READ APRIL 2018

2.       With The Night Mail / “As Easy as A.B.C.” by Rudyard Kipling

3.       The Poison Belt by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

4.       When The World Shook by H. Rider Haggard

5.       The People of the Ruins by Edward Shanks

6.       The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

7.       Goslings by J.D. Beresford

8.       The Clockwork Man by E.V. Odle   (re-read)

9.       Theodore Savage by Cicely Hamilton

10.   The Man with Six Senses by Muriel Jaeger (re-read)

E. CATHERINE TOBLER’S “FOLLEY & MALLORY” SERIES

1.       Rings of Anubis READ MARCH 2018

2.       The Glass Falcon READ APRIL 2018

3.       The Honey Mummy

4.       The Clockwork Tomb

CHINUA ACHEBE’S “AFRICA TRILOGY”

1.       Things Fall Apart READ FEBRUARY 2018

2.       No Longer At Ease

3.        The Arrow of God

Review of 'Nathan Burgoine's HANDMADE HOLIDAYS

HANDMADE HOLIDAYS, ISBN 9781947904354, 82 pgs, $2.99 (Kindle, no print edition)

‘Nathan Burgoine, NineStar Press

PREMISE: (From Goodreads.com)

At nineteen, Nick is alone for the holidays and facing reality: this is how it will be from now on. Refusing to give up completely, Nick buys a Christmas tree, and then realizes he has no ornaments. A bare tree and an empty apartment aren’t a great start, but a visit from his friend Haruto is just the ticket to get him through this first, worst, Christmas. A box of candy canes and a hastily folded paper crane might not be the best ornaments, but it’s a place to start.

A year later, Nick has realized he’s not the only one with nowhere to go, and he hosts his first “Christmas for the Misfit Toys.” Haruto brings Nick an ornament for Nick’s tree, and a tradition—and a new family—is born.

As years go by, Nick, Haruto, and their friends face love, betrayal, life, and death. Every ornament on Nick’s tree is another year, another story, and another chance at the one thing Nick has wanted since the start: someone who’d share more than the holidays with him.

Of course, Nick might have already missed his shot at the one, and it might be too late.

Still, after fifteen Christmases, Nick is ready to risk it all for the best present yet.

MY RATING:  Five stars out of five

MY THOUGHTS:   ‘Nathan Burgoine’s new holiday-themed novella is a beautifully-crafted story of chosen family, kindred spirits and the old edict that “timing is everything.”

It’s almost a trope now that we LGBTQ+ folk love to build our own families. Even those of us whose birth-families accepted and encouraged us still build families of the heart to supplement our family of the blood. But for still too many LGBTQ+ people, the chosen family is the only family they have, built up through common experience and shared hobbies when their birth-families have abandoned and disowned them. This is where Burgoine picks up Nick Wilson’s story. We know just enough about Nick’s birth-family to know they exist and that they have thrown him aside because he’s gay. In some other hands, this story would be about a happy holiday reconciliation with the family that abandoned him. But Burgoine is not afraid to start with the hard truth that for some in our community that reconciliation never comes, and let the story develop from there.

Nick’s family-of-the-heart doesn’t appear miraculously on winter’s breath with traditions full-blown. The first Christmas, with only Haruto and candy-cane ornaments, is full of uncertainty and anxiety. It’s also imbued with just a touch of bravado and a healthy camaraderie that let us know right away: while there may be drama and heartbreak ahead, this is not a sad story. It carries the hope that “it gets better” from the first paragraph. Over the first few chapters, and thus the first few years’ worth of developing holiday traditions, we get to see Nick become comfortable with who he is and the family he’s building around himself. Matt, Fiona and Perry bring out different sides of Nick, from the protective to the argumentative. We get to know them as Nick gets to know them, and they are all engaging and interesting. Even the supporting characters who are on stage for far less time (and some of who are far from likeable) are at the least interesting. 

Of course, there wouldn’t be much of a book without complications, distancing, and misunderstandings, and all five of these core characters experience their share. Burgoine heightens that drama by occasionally letting more than one year go by between chapters, allowing for lots to have changed within the group dynamic without having to show us every incremental step in those changes. This time-hopping (but never flash-backing) technique keeps the reader engaged, keeps us wondering what new changes will become apparent with each new chapter, much as we might wonder what news the latest “Christmas Letter” is going to bring from old friends we only hear from once a year.

The novella spans fifteen years in the life of Nick and his friends, experiencing losses and gains. It reads fast and easy, another reason I love ‘Nathan Burgoine’s work: he gives us deep characterization and emotional stakes without dragging the story out any longer than it needs to be. If there’s a personal or sensory detail missing, it didn’t need to be there to begin with. The end of the book comes too fast (because we’ve come to love these characters and don’t want to say goodbye) but also not too fast (because the story has reached a natural, happy, end-point without being forced).  I can’t recommend Handmade Holidays highly enough, and it is definitely going on my annual re-read list.

2018 TO BE READ CHALLENGE

Most avid readers have a “to be read” pile, in our office or near our bed: books we bought intending to read, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet.  Some of us have “to be read” bookcases.  This year, book blogger RoofbeamReader  is re-instituting his To Be Read Challenge after a two year hiatus. (The first year RBR didn’t run the challenge, I challenged myself and succeeded; in 2016, not so much.)

You have to go to RBR’s website to officially sign up for the challenge if you want to be entered to win a gift card to Amazon or the Book Depository at year’s end: https://roofbeamreader.com/2017/11/07/announcing-the-official-2018-tbr-pile-challenge/  but the basic rules (other than how to enter) are:

The Goal: To finally read 12 books from your “to be read” pile (within 12 months).

Specifics:

1.       Each of these 12 books must have been on your bookshelf or “To Be Read” list for AT LEAST one full year. This means the book cannot have a publication date of 1/1/2017 or later (any book published in the year 2016 or earlier qualifies, as long as it has been on your TBR pile). Caveat: Two (2) alternates are allowed, just in case one or two of the books end up in the “can’t get through” pile.

2.       Crossovers from other challenges are totally acceptable, as long as you have never read the book before and it was published before 2017!

*Note: You can read the books on your list in any order; they do not need to be read in the order you have them listed. Audiobooks count. Graphic novels count. Poetry collections? Essay collections? All good!  As you complete a book – review it, go to your original list and turn that title into a link to the review. This will keep the comments section here from getting ridiculously cluttered. For an example of what I mean, Click Here.

MY 2018 TO BE READ CHALLENGE LIST:

1.       THE LADY OF THE SHROUD, Bram Stoker     (1909)

2.       THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART, Lawrence Block    (1965, reissued 2011)

3.       IRONCASTLE, Philip Jose Farmer and JH Rosny   (1976)

4.       GIOVANNI’S ROOM, James Baldwin    (1956)

5.       WHO FEARS DEATH, Nnedi Okorafor  (2010)

6.       THINGS FALL APART, Chinua Achebe    (1958)

7.       SOLACERS, Arion Gokmakani    (2012)

8.       THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, Grace Zaring Stone    (1932, reissued 2014)

9.       BECOMING NICOLE, Amy Ellis Nutt     (2016)

10.   THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, Junot Diaz    (2008)

11.   SOFT APOCALYPSES, Lucy A. Snyder    (2014)

12.   INVISIBLE PLANETS, translated/edited by Ken Liu   (2016)

ALTERNATES:

A.      REVENGE: Eleven Dark Tales, Yoko Ogawa (Stephen Snyder, translator) (2013)

B.      BUTCHER ROAD, Lee Thomas     (2014)

I have a few other reading challenges that I’m setting myself for 2018 that will overlap partially with this. I’ll be posting about those over the next few weeks.

Review of JY Yang's TENSORATE novellas

THE BLACK TIDES OF HEAVEN, isbn 9780765395412, 237 pgs, $15.99 (print)

THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE, isbn 9780765395399, 213 pgs, $15.99 (print)

JY Yang, Tor.com Book (Tom Doherty and Associates)

PREMISES: (From Goodreads.com)

BLACK TIDES: Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as children. While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While his sister received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What's more, he saw the sickness at the heart of his mother's Protectorate. A rebellion is growing. The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue to play a pawn in his mother's twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in with the rebels. But every step Akeha takes towards the Machinists is a step away from his sister Mokoya. Can Akeha find peace without shattering the bond he shares with his twin sister?

RED THREADS:  Fallen prophet, master of the elements, and daughter of the supreme Protector, Sanao Mokoya has abandoned the life that once bound her. Once her visions shaped the lives of citizens across the land, but no matter what tragedy Mokoya foresaw, she could never reshape the future. Broken by the loss of her young daughter, she now hunts deadly, sky-obscuring naga in the harsh outer reaches of the kingdom with packs of dinosaurs at her side, far from everything she used to love. On the trail of a massive naga that threatens the rebellious mining city of Bataanar, Mokoya meets the mysterious and alluring Rider. But all is not as it seems: the beast they both hunt harbors a secret that could ignite war throughout the Protectorate. As she is drawn into a conspiracy of magic and betrayal, Mokoya must come to terms with her extraordinary and dangerous gifts, or risk losing the little she has left to hold dear.

MY RATING:  Four stars out of five (for each books)

MY THOUGHTS:  The two novellas that comprise the introduction to The Tensorate, JY Yang’s new Asian-inflected fantasy world, could just as easily have been published as a single 400+ page novel with shifting POV, but the decision to publish the material as two stand-alone long-ish novellas allows the reader to be fully immersed in the point of view character for each part of the story. Despite the fact that The Red Threads of Fortune clearly follows The Black Tides of Heaven in chronological order, one could read Red Threads before Black Tides and not be at a loss for character background or world-building.

The novellas are immediately immersive; the characters understand how their world works (both the magic and the politics), and there is no “gateway” character innocent of this information to operate as reader-stand-in. Therefore, the world-building is subtle. Vital background information is imparted by inference, forcing the reader to do the heavily lifting of figuring out how the pieces fit together to make the world run. The hard work is rewarding. “The Slack,” the in-world magic system, is given just enough detail for the reader to understand how the Slack works but not so much that the magic feels like science: the Slack has several aspects interlinked (water-nature, fire-nature, forest-nature and the like), and manipulating those natures allows talented individuals to accomplish amazing tasks. Likewise, the politics of the Tensorate (which most of the characters call The Protectorate instead), are explicated just enough for the reader to understand that a) this realm is a largely despotic monarchy, b) at least one religious order lies outside of that monarchy’s control even while being located within the physical boundaries of the realm, c) there’s a tentative, mutual-beneficial alliance between monarchy and religious order, and d) there are other lands outside of the Protectorate that may come to play more heavily in future installments of the series.

Oh, and that separate religious order, The Grand Monastery? Led by Head Abbot Sung and later by Head Abbot Thennjay, they include a group of warrior-monks called Pugilists, who use the Slack to become incredible fighting machines. The Pugilists are mostly background-worldbuilding for now, but every time they were mentioned I could not help but flash back to Sunday afternoons watching poorly-dubbed black-and-white “wire fu” movies as a kid. I sincerely hope Yang will give us an installment of this series really showing us what the Pugilists can do. But I digress.

The first section of Black Tides is largely told through the POV of Head Abbot Sung, and sets the stage for all that is to come. The circumstances of the twins Moyoka and Akeha’s birth are laid out as well as their early formative years.  There are massive time-jumps – in less deft hands, this would be a detriment to the story flow but Yang is adept and feeding us what little we need to know about the intervening years and not bogging us down with details that would be nice to know but remain unimportant to the story being told. But then the majority of the action follows Akeha moving out into the world and discovering the political tensions that exist within the Protectorate. There are street fight scenes (wonderfully described), use of Slackcraft, romance, and familial tensions intricately intertwined.  Red Threads picks up after Black Tides and references the events of the first novella, but shifts the focus to Mokoya’s point of view. How does an ex-prophet and spouse of a Head Abbot navigate political tensions and grief to find a new place in the world?

The non-binary nature of Mokoya, Akeha and their friends and family is important on both the world-building and character-building levels. This is a world where gender is not assigned at birth, and characters remain gender-neutral (using the singular They as common pronoun) until they declare/confirm a gender. Some do it early (Thennjay, by all indications, and other minor characters), some later (Sonami is a late teen, Mokoya and Akeha are well into adulthood when they choose) and some don’t choose at all (Rider, for example, but also almost Akeha), while some declare gender but don’t go to the Confirmation Doctors to be physically altered (Yongcheow). How Mokoya and Akeha in particular decide on their genders is a function of their struggles to maintain their twin-bond as well as Akeha’s feelings about being the unexpected/unwanted/unplanned-for child. And both twins’ decisions are a part of the fall-out of the manipulations and other horrible things their mother, the Protector, does.

These two novellas introduce us to a host of intriguing characters I’m eager to watch develop. I don’t believe Mokoya and Akeha’s stories are done yet, alone or together. And I believe there are as many stories to tell about this world as there are threads in the weave of fortune.  I look forward to exploring it all in future installments.