SUNDAY SHORTS: Into Bones Like Oil

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

Kaaron Warren’s moving novella Into Bones Like Oil is about the ghosts, both literal and figurative, that haunt us. The characters and the setting are equally haunted by the sins of their pasts, and in some cases their present actions as well.

Every person who enters the Angelsea rooming hours is broken in some way. Dora, the main character, cannot sleep because of guilt over the death of her daughters; Luke has PTSD from his military service; a resident called the Doctor almost seems to regret the crimes he committed against his patients. Property manager Roy is obsessed with learning the secrets possessed by the ghosts of a nearby shipwreck, to the point he is willing to abuse his tenants to get what he wants. While there are a few disreputable and thoroughly unlikeable characters in the boo, Roy is the worst – but also the only one not willing to admit that he has done – scratch that, is doing – something reprehensible.

Warren’s language is elegiac, wistful and dream-like. The whole story is permeated with a sense of loss, regret, decay, of being stuck in a limbo created by an individual’s choices despite where else they may wish to place the blame. There are some truly uncomfortable moments as different characters’ faults and failures come to the fore – but they are all necessary for the characters, and the reader, to find catharsis. This is most especially true for Dora, who needs to process her own culpability in her daughters’ deaths and also in the current goings-on at the Angelsea. Dora, Luke, and several other residents are on a path of possible redemption, but each must make their own choices regarding how or whether to pursue it.

Warren beautifully illustrates how guilt immobilizes some and motivates others while also asking whether forgiveness can ever truly come from outside if it doesn’t begin within.

Review of THE GOLDEN KEY

TITLE: The Golden Key

AUTHOR: Marian Womack

320 pages, Titan Books, ISBN 9781789093245 (softcover)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): London, 1901. After the death of Queen Victoria the city heaves with the uncanny and the eerie. Séances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms.
Samuel Moncrieff, recovering from a recent tragedy of his own, meets Helena Walton-Cisneros, one of London’s most reputed mediums. But Helena is not what she seems and she’s enlisted by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens. But the Fens are a liminal land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. With locals that speak of devilmen and catatonic children found on the Broads, Helena finds the answer to the mystery leads back to where it started: Samuel Moncrieff.

MY RATING: Four out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: I’m reviewing an ARC kindly provided by the good folks at Titan. The Golden Key releases to bookstores on February 18, 2020.

Those who know me will not be surprised that I was intrigued by the premise: female occult detective meets man with a shadowy past while investigating a very gothic missing-child mystery. And there is much to enjoy in Womack’s novel.

The mood, whether the scenes are set in downtown London or the Norfolk Fens, is wonderfully evocative of the period. I truly felt like I was reading a Universal Monsters movie in novel form at points, and a classic gothic suspense novel in others. (In the London scenes I couldn’t help picturing Dwight Frye as the beleaguered Samuel Moncrieff and Edward Van Sloan as his mysterious uncle.)  The author captures equally well the confusion and crowd-inducing claustrophobia of London streets and showhalls, the stuffiness of the parlors and clubs of rich Londoners, the ugliness of remote insane asylums, and the dizzying otherworldliness of rural areas like the Fens.

The point of view shifts between three main protagonists: the confused and grieving Samuel Moncrieff, the incisive and methodical Helen Walton-Cisneros, and the inquisitive but innocent Eliza Waltraud. All three are well-drawn, interesting characters, and dividing the story among them allows the author to show the reader more of the hidden pieces of the world these characters are moving through. Eventually all three threads weave together and the characters learn from each other what the reader has already started to piece together. I don’t think Womack is ever truly trying to mislead the reader in regards to the main plot: it’s pretty clear from early on what Samuel’s secret is (or at least, what part of it is), and it’s fun watching the author drop the clues in the characters’ paths and how they don’t realize at first what they’ve just learned. In the chapters told from the POV of Samuel, his confusion, grief, and memory-loss come through very clearly; anyone who has ever had a traumatic experience will recognize the stages Samuel is going through. In the women’s chapters, Womack shows us a great deal about the way women were perceived at the end of the Victorian period, especially women doing work normally “reserved” for men, and what these women had to do to be taken seriously.

The POV chapters are also interspersed with magazine and newspaper articles about goings-on that surround the main and supporting characters: announcements and descriptions of séances and such. These add to the sense that bigger things are happening than even the characters are aware of, and each feels period-appropriate.

If I have one complaint about the novel, it’s that sometimes it feels like the author is trying to do much. Part of that is the overall tone, which seems to shift from Gothic to Lovecraftian to Faerie story and back throughout the narrative. If Womack is intentionally trying to mislead the reader at all, it’s in what type of story she’s trying to tell: the description makes us expect Holmesian Gothic but there are points where the story feels like cosmic rather than supernatural horror and other points where I expected a member of the Fae court to appear. The fact that the author captures each of these styles perfectly without descending into, say, the purple prose of Lovecraft, mitigates the disjointedness of style quite a bit. (And I should note: I’m not convinced the author is intentionally trying to confuse or mislead the reader: I think she just enjoys all three styles and wanted to incorporate them all into the same book.) There’s also a good deal of attention paid to some subplots that don’t really seem to pay off: the death of Queen Victoria and the details of Eliza Waltraud’s past feel like they should be more important to the main events of the novel (although at least the details of Eliza’s parents add to understanding her character), while Count Bévcar is given more attention in the early pages than feels warranted by the conclusion of the book. The subplot in the second half of the book regarding the way female mediums are investigated for fraud as compared to males also feels like it doesn’t add to what at that point is a fast-moving push towards the novel’s eerie and open-ended conclusion. I expected the Bévcar and Madame Florence subplots in particular to connect more solidly to the main thread than they actually did.

But despite those two minor complaints, this is a wonderful gothic horror novel with interesting characters whose mysteries and fallibility draw you in and make you want to see what will happen next.

My instinct is to give The Golden Key three-and-a-half stars. But as Goodreads and Amazon don’t allow half-stars, my policy is to round up.

Reading Round-Up: January 2020

Continuing the monthly summaries of what I’ve been reading and writing.

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues and stand-alone short stories in e-book format as “books.” I read or listened to 19 books in January: 8 in print, 5 in e-book format, and 6 in audio. They were:

1.       Lightspeed Magazine #116 (January 2020 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams. The usual fine assortment of sf and fantasy short stories. This month’s favorites for me were J.R. Dawson’s “She’d Never Had a Name Before,” N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” and Adam-Troy Casto’s “Fortune’s Final Hand.”

2.       The Ascent to Godhood (Tensorate #4) by J.Y. Yang. The fourth Tensorate novella fills in a lot of the history of the current Protector and her arch-nemesis Lady Han. It’s told in a far more conversational tone than the previous three editions, making it feel that much more personal/intimate. I’m hoping this is not the last we’ll see of the Tensorate universe.

3.       Loki: Agent of Asgard Volume 1: Trust Me by Al Ewing, Lee Garbett, Jenny Frison, Joerge Coehlo and others. Trade collection of Loki: Agent of Asgard #1-5, the first storyline in which the redesigned-to-look-like Tom Hiddleston Loki appeared. A fun mix of spy/crime capers with a deeper underpinning.

4.       The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth. I saw this on Broadway last year not before it closed (and sadly not with the original cast) and with the varying Irish accents I was sure there was dialogue I’d missed, so I picked up the script. It’s a brilliant bit of Irish drama set in the late 80s. Quinn Carney left the IRA years ago, but his younger brother didn’t and wound up missing. The drama unfolds as the brother’s body is found. At the same time, the show is a celebration of family, and like all good dramas there’s a lot of comedy to contrast with the inevitable tragedy. Worth reading, but even more worth seeing.

5.       Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer. A group of former childhood friends share memories of a girl who disappeared from their lives during the Pinochet regime. The prose is sparing and beautiful, the unspoken underpinnings even more tense and horrific for what’s implied.

6.       The High Window (Philip Marlowe #3) by Raymond Chandler. I set a goal of listening to all of the Philip Marlowe novels in audio form before I realized that most of the recordings are either abridged (Elliot Gould narrating) or full-cast radio plays (which I’m sure are great but miss some of Chandler’s descriptive language). This one was a solid story, but not quite as stand-out for me as the first two Marlowe books.

7.       Trading Teams by Romeo Alexander. Billed as a “jock-nerd college romance,” this one is not as frothy as it sounds. There’s a serious sub-plot regarding how we process grief and social anxiety and deal with depression and mental illness. There’s also a lot of meet-cute misunderstandings and a very nice representation of a young man accepting that he is in fact bisexual. Other reviewers have complained about the present-tense style and the nerd character’s depression but I liked the former and thought the latter was handled realistically.

8.       Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand. When I realized Hand’s “VH1 Behind the Scenes documentary” style novella about the tragedy surrounding the recording of a famous trad-folk band’s last album was also available as an audiobook, I had to do a reread/listen. The cast is roundly superb and maintain the tension of the print version. I suspect Wylding Hall will join my “frequent re-read / re-listen” list.

9.       The Half-Life of Marie Curie by Lauren Gunderson. Following a personal scandal, Marie Curie spends a summer with her friend and fellow scientist Hertha Ayrton. They debate scientific methods, women’s suffrage, the public’s fascination with famous people’s lives, grief and pride and their contributions to the British and French forces during World War One. Played brilliantly by Kate Mulgrew (as Ayrton) and Francesca Faridnay (as Curie), I would love to see the stage version of this.

10.   The Adventure of the Incognita Countess (Blood-Thirsty Agent Book One) by Cynthia Ward. A fun pulp-adventure novella starring Lucy Harker (dhampir daughter of Mina Harker and Dracula and step-daughter of Mycroft Holmes). In this inaugural adventure, Lucy is assigned to play bodyguard to an American carrying secret papers across the ocean on board Titanic. Sharp-eyed readers will recognize nods to and guest-appearances by a wealth of familiar real-life and fictional characters, including a certain Jungle Lord and a famous female vampire.

11.   Whose Boat Is This Boat? By the staff of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Sold to raise money for hurricane victims in the southeast United States, the author put President Trump’s actual statements and tweets in picture book form.

12.   Midnight Son by James Dommek Jr., Josephine Holtzman, and Isaac Kestenbaum. My first non-fiction audiobook of the year focuses on the case of actor-turned-fugitive Teddy Kyle Smith’s statements about encountering a mythic lost tribe (the Iñukuns) in the Alaskan wilderness. We hear little from Smith himself except for material recorded at his trial, but Dommek incorporates statements from family, neighbors and victims to form a picture of what Smith was thinking and why he did the things he did. Compelling but also very open-ended.

13.   Pirates of Venus (Carson Napier #1) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Carson Napier’s homemade spacecraft takes a wrong turn on the way to Mars and he ends up on Venus, discovering indigenous civilizations and falling in love with a native girl. It’s classic Burroughs fare, with deeply developed civilizations and language and lots of swashbuckling derring-do.

14.   A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert. A beautifully-written novella about the tragic life of a woman’s maid. This was my first time reading anything by Flaubert, and his skill at catching the details of every-day moments and expressions of grief is on full display.

15.   The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum (Blood-Thirsty Agent #2)  by Cynthia Ward. This time, Lucy is assigned as bodyguard to Winston Churchill when he decides to return to leading men on the Western Front during World War One, because of rumors the Germans are fielding a team of mind-controlled wolfmen in the area. Complications ensue, of course. Another very fun bit of steampunky-alternate-history-pulp-fiction. (I’m planning a Series Saturday overview of the series, including the soon-to-be-released third installment, The Adventure of the Naked Guide, in the near future.

16.   The Sideman (John Simon Thrillers #2) by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. Luddite cop John Simon and his android partner/friend Lucas George return for a second adventure that is more tightly plotted and faster-paced than the first book (Simon Says) without sacrificing any of the intimate moments or character development of the first book. The stakes are even higher this time, as a string of burglaries become evidence of a terror attack in the offing. (I read an ARC; the book will be on sale February 10. Longer review to come.)

17.   The Lady in the Lake (Philip Marlowe #4) by Raymond Chandler. Again, I listened in abridged audiobook form. Elliot Gould really nails Marlowe’s world-weariness. I found the overlapping cases this time (Marlowe is hired to track down a missing wife but finds dead bodies instead) a bit more intriguing than in The High Window.

18.   Occult Detective Magazine #6 (Fall, 2019), edited by John Linwood Grant and Dave Brzeski. A really fine mix of stories that feature both experienced and novice occult investigators, in stories that take place in eras ranging from pre-history to the far future, in locations from deep in the African continent to a space station. I’m sure a number of these stories featuring series characters, but I never felt like I was coming in the middle. There’s also a wealth of non-fiction book reviews, retrospectives and interviews.

19.   The Little Sister (Philip Marlowe #5) by Raymond Chandler. This was the first abridged audiobook that I felt actually suffered from sections being left out to keep the recording under three hours. I can’t point to any glaring plot-holes, but I felt throughout like there were necessary details I was missing. Still, the overlapping cases are intriguing.

STORIES

I have a goal of reading 366 short stories (1 per day, essentially, although it doesn’t always work out that way) this year (because it’s a Leap Year). Here’s what I read this month and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too. If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

1.       “The Men Who Change The World” by Christopher East, from Lightspeed Magazine #116 (January 2020 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams.

2.       “All Together, Now” by Jason Hough and Ramez Naam

3.       “She’d Never Had a Name Before” by J.R. Dawson

4.       “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” by N.K. Jemisin

5.       “Story Kit” by Kij Johnson

6.       “Destinations of Joy” by Alexander Weinstein

7.       “Holiday” by M. Rickert

8.       “Fortune’s Final Hand” by Adam-Troy Castro

9.       “Off-Balance” by Seanan McGuire, on the author’s Patreon page.

10.   “Here We Come A-Wassailing: A Christmas Story” by Thomas Perry, the 2019 free Christmas short story given out to Mysterious Bookshop customers by owner Otto Penzler.

11.   “Mike” by Jim Butcher, from The Jim Butcher Mailing List, edited by Fred Hicks

12.   “Mother Love” by Clara Madrigan, from The Dark #56 (January, 2020), edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace

13.   “No Good Deed” by Angela Slatter

14.   “Forwarded” by Steve Rasnic Tem

15.   “The Man at Table Nine” by Ray Cluley

16.   “The Rending Veil” by Melanie Atherton, from Occult Detective Magazine #6 (Fall 2019), edited by John Linwood Grant and Dave Brzeski

17.   “Komolafe” by Tade Thompson

18.   “The Way of All Flesh” by Matthew Willis

19.   “The Blindsider” by Cliff Biggers

20.   “Vinnie de Soth and the Phantom Skeptic” by I.A. Watson

21.   “The Empanatrix of Room 223” by Kelly M. Hudson

22.   “The Unsummoning of Urb Tc’Leth” by Bryce Beattie

23.   “In Perpetuity” by Alexis Ames

24.   “The Way Things Were” by S.L. Edwards

25.   “Angelus” by John Paul Fitch

26.   “The Last Performance of Victoria Mirabelli” by Ian Hunter

So that’s 26 short stories in January. Slightly under “1 per day,” so I’m slightly behind for the year so far. (January 31st was the 31st day of 2020.)

Summary of Reading Challenges:

“To Be Read” Challenge: This month: 1 read; YTD: 1 of 14 read.

365 Short Stories Challenge: This month:  26 read; YTD: 26 of 366 read.

Graphic Novels Challenge:  This month: 1 read; YTD: 1 of 52 read.

Goodreads Challenge: This month: 19 read; YTD: 19 of 125 read.

Non-Fiction Challenge: This month: 3 read; YTD: 3 of 24 read.

Read the Book / Watch the Movie Challenge: This month: 0; YTD: 0 read/watched.

Complete the Series Challenge: This month: 4 books read; YTD: 4 of 16 read.

                                                                Series fully completed: 0 of 3 planned

Monthly Special Challenge: I didn’t set a mini-goal of any kind for January, other than trying to get to some recently-acquired books. 11 of the 19 books read were books acquired in the past 6 months.

February is Black History Month, so my goal is to read primarily authors from Africa or of African descent. It’s also Women In Horror Month, so I’ll be working on reading horror by female writers as well.

Sunday Shorts: Two From The Dark #56

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.



Each issue of The Dark features two original stories and two reprints. In the January 2020 issue, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace, the two new stories both center on childhood trauma infecting and affecting adult life.

Clara Madrigano’s “Mother Love” features a writer processing her fractured relationship with the woman who raised her. The first-person narrative allows Madrigano to slowly morph the story from a standard “cold mother with childhood issues of her own that affected her ability to raise her indigent sister’s child” to something more horrific as the mother’s secrets are revealed. A passive father and a missing childhood friend add to the main character’s insecurity as an adult about why her mother chose others to fill a role rather than her own daughter. I don’t want to spoil the mother’s secret here, because the slow reveal of it – and the dread that built as I started to suspect what was really going on – is so well-crafted you need to experience it for yourself.

The main character in Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Forwarded” is not a writer but a former actor of some repute, struggling with trauma in his own childhood mostly based around an abandoning mother and a drunk, angry father. This time, there’s a slightly-estranged sibling in the mix. Tom, the actor, is drawn back to his childhood hometown by the twin impetuses of weird scrawled messages that have been forwarded to him from previous places he’s lived and wanting to attend his brother’s retirement from the police force. Tom’s angry past and his mistreatment (intentional or not) of his brother seem to be something he’s put behind him, but has he really? Tem balances the potential supernatural horror element and the more human terror superbly through the story. He leaves the reader with questions about what will happen next, but it still makes for a satisfactory and intriguing look at childhood trauma and what motivates us to behave poorly towards those we love.

Sunday Shorts: The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

As a fan of Bram Stoker in general and his most famous novel specifically (some would say “fanatic” is the more accurate term), I’m always curious about works that expand, expound upon, or deconstruct, Dracula. Even works I don’t enjoy will give me some new insight into my favorite novel, or at least insight into how other people regard it. And if I do like the work, even better!

Gwendolyn Kiste’s “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)”, from Nightmare Magazine #86 (November 2019), fair fully blew me away. It’s a wonderful deconstruction/reconstruction of a part of the novel that often gets ignored or conflated/downplayed by media adaptations: the life and death(s) of Lucy Westenra. Thanks to movie and television focus on independent, poor-but-plucky Mina Murray and her eventual marriage to damaged hero Jonathan Harker, people tend to forget that the novel features two female leads and that one of them doesn’t fare quite so well as the other. (And with the recent penchant for making Mina Dracula’s reincarnated soulmate or current lover, poor Lucy gets even less attention. But that’s a post for another time.)

Stoker gives us some of his original story in Lucy’s POV mostly via letters to Mina about Lucy’s courtship by three dashing young men of very different backgrounds – but you have to squint hard to see past the flighty exterior presented. What little else we know of Lucy we know from Mina’s own journal entries. Stoker never quite gives Lucy the introspective moments Mina experiences, especially once Lucy suffers her first death and we lose her POV.

Kiste gives us what is missing from the original work: Lucy’s inner self, conflicted over how she had to act to survive in high society and fulfill her mother’s expectations. The entire story is narrated by Lucy post-death, listing out how each of her friends, would-be-saviors, Dracula, and even society itself contributed to the end we see her receive in the novel. It starts out feeling like we’re just going to get a litany of blame – but as the diary entries go on, the story becomes so much more. Kiste doesn’t reveal anything regarding Lucy’s final death in the novel that many authors haven’t also revealed about Dracula (and Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, and other such creatures); the twist is what Lucy will do next.

The key to the story is the voice Kiste gives Lucy – there are glimmers of the flightiness and flirtiness we see in the original novel, but Kiste builds off of the few more serious moments Stoker gives to reveal a Lucy who knows exactly what her place in British society is and rails against it – and who discovers the power to do something about it.

Review of FROM SEA TO STORMY SEA

TITLE: From Sea to Stormy Sea: 17 Great American Paintings and the Stories They Inspired

EDITOR: Lawrence Block

336 pages, Pegasus Books, ISBN 9781643130828 (hardcover, ebook)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Seventeen stories by seventeen brilliant writers, inspired by seventeen paintings. That was the formula for Lawrence Block’s two ground-breaking anthologies, In Sunlight or in Shadow and Alive in Shape and Color, and it’s on glorious display here once again in From Sea to Stormy Sea. This time the paintings are exclusively the work of American artists, and the roster includes Harvey Dunn, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton, Helen Frankenthaler, Winslow Homer, Rockwell Kent, Grant Wood, Childe Hassam and Andy Warhol. Among the star-studded lineup of writers you’ll find Jerome Charyn, Jane Hamilton, Christa Faust, John Sandford, Sara Paretsky, Walter Mosley, Charles Ardai, Barry Malzberg, and Janice Eidus.  It’s an outstanding collection, with widely divergent stories united by theme and culture, and—no surprise—beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of the seventeen paintings.

MY RATING: Four out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: As noted in the synopsis, From Sea to Stormy Sea is editor Lawrence Block’s third anthology of short stories based on famous paintings (In Sunlight or in Shadow focused exclusively on the works of Edward Hopper, while Alive in Shape and Color cast a more worldwide net). As such, I knew to expect stories that covered, and sometimes crossed, several genres. This time out there’s a science fiction tale, a pair of meta-textual pieces, a number of historical period tales and a few that some readers would likely call “literary,” but which I’ll categorize as “modern drama” because they cover current every-day life. (The idea that fiction is only “literary” if it doesn’t feature recognizable genre elements is a discussion for another time.)

The lone science fiction tale is Jerome Charyn’s “The Man from Hard Rock Mountain,” inspired by Rockwell Kent’s painting “Twilight of Man.” It’s a tidy piece of post-apocalyptic fiction in which a lonely man, subsisting on what little he has after something permanently takes out the power grid and society collapses, finds himself visited by a traveling woman and girl who are a bit secretive about how they’ve been surviving. Rumors reach the main character through other travelers, but are the rumors true, or just vicious spite? The character work is wonderfully nuanced, the world-building subtle but complete. One of my favorite stories in the collection.

Of the two potentially meta-textual pieces in the book, I have to admit I struggled with Barry N. Malzberg’s “Riverfront,” in which the unnamed narrator takes painter George Bellows to task for not knowing more about a woman in his painting “Riverfront.” I’m not sure I really got what Malzberg was going for, which I suspect says more about how I process certain types of stories than anything about the writer’s talent. Lawrence Block’s own “The Way We See the World,” based on Raphael Soyer’s painting “Office Girls,” raises questions about how and when we see ourselves in art (paintings, short stories, novels) via a conversation between a woman viewing the painting and a man who approaches her to start up a conversation. I usually love Block’s dialogue-driven short stories, and this was no exception.

Seven of the stories actually incorporate the paintings that inspired them as a prop, to varying degrees of importance. Mark Rothko’s “Number 14” is simply the main character’s favorite painting in Janice Eidus’ “You’re A Walking Time Bomb,” a deeply introspective piece about mortality, missed opportunities and making the most of second chances. In Scott Frank’s “He Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” on the other hand, Robert Henri’s portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney drives the action across several owners/thieves and locations.

A number of the period pieces have the dark tone Lawrence Block anthologies are usually known for. Patti Abbot’s “The Prairie is My Garden,” based on the painting of the same name by Harvey Dunn and set in 1884 South Dakota territory, starts with a woman watching over her children playing in the plains around their remote homestead while her departing traveling preacher husband frets about their safety, but the story takes a darker turn as the history of the marriage and how they came to this house is revealed. Charles Ardai’s “Mother of Pearl,” set in post-Depression New York City (appropriate for the publisher of the Hard Case Crime line, I think) and inspired by Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie”, is a rumination on success, failure, identity, and the search for where we come from. It’s one of several stories I’ve read multiple times and I feel like I get something more from it each time. Two other favorites that are dark period pieces: “Get Him” by Micah Nathan, inspired by “Light at the Crossing” by Daniel Morper, switches POV between a young man traveling to meet his intended bride and the hitman who is trailing him, while Sara Paretsky’s “Baptism in Kansas” (inspired by the painting of the same name by John Steuart Curry) fetches a young east coast woman up against Midwestern Kansas stern morality, traveling religious shows, and anti-native racism. 

One period piece that isn’t as dark but also tackles racism: Gary Phillips’ “A Matter of Options” (based on “Why Not Use the ‘L’?” by Reginald Marsh) introduces a cunning cat-burglar called The Satin Fox. The public thinks The Fox must be a white man, but the truth enables the thief to blend in among her intended targets. It’s a fun, but still thought-provoking, piece of “new pulp,” taking the feel of classic pulp adventure magazine stories and adding a more modern sensibility. It’s a credit to Phillips’ world-building that I finished the story and went looking for where else the character has appeared. I was surprised that this is The Satin Fox’s first appearance. I hope the author is intending to do more with the main character and her companions.

It’s not just the period pieces that are dark. Jan Burke’s “Superficial Injuries,” inspired by Andy Warhol’s “Thirteen Most Wanted Men,” Brendan DuBois’ “Adrift Off the Diamond Shoals,” inspired by Winslow Homer’s “Reefing Sails Around the Diamond Shoals,” Christa Faust’s “Garnets,” inspired by Helen Frankenthaler’s “Adirondacks,” and Tom Franklin’s “On Little Terry Road,” inspired by John Hull’s “This Much I Know,” are all to one degree or another modern crime stories with interesting twists. The Burke is almost a cozy-mystery/classic 70s TV detective type of story; the other three are a bit more violent with main characters who carry secrets that threaten to boil up at any moment.

John Sandford’s “Girl with an Ax” (inspired by Thomas Hart Benton’s “Hollywood”) takes place in modern day LA and focuses on the relationship between a young musician and her elderly neighbor. Jane Hamilton’s “Someday, A Revolution” (based on Grant Wood’s “Daughters of the Revolution”) covers a woman’s conflicted feelings about her son’s life path and how her “friends” in the DAR feel about it. Both lack genre elements, although the second has a bit of a darker feel to it.

The most emotionally resonant story for me personally was Warren Moore’s “Silver at Lakeside,” inspired by the author’s father’s painting “Homage to Les Fauves.” The narrator reminisces about his childhood experiences with painting, trying to follow in his father’s footsteps, and how his father reacted to the narrator finally choosing a life path of his own. Wistfulness, nostalgia, childhood embarrassment and adult acceptance are expertly woven together.

Sunday Shorts: At The Bay

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

TITLE: At the Bay
AUTHOR: Katherine Mansfield
56 pages, Melville House Publishing, ISBN 9781612195834 (softcover)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Told in thirteen parts, beginning early in the morning and ending at dusk, At the Bay captures both the Burnell family's intricate web of relatives and friends, and the dreamy, unassuming natural beauty of Crescent Bay.

MY RATING: 3 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: Yet another classic novella that I don’t remember being assigned to read. Mansfield packs a lot of characterization and social commentary into 56 or so pages. The focus is on the women in the Burnell family, both adults and children, and a small cross-section of their neighbors. How they interact, how they empower and disempower each other in everyday moments. There is no grand event the story builds toward, no community-threatening or -destroying big moment that ties everything together. We’re experiencing a day-in-the-life of a very specific group of women and girls at a specific moment in time (1922), but much of what the author relates, in terms of what is deemed appropriate behavior and the like, is still true today. The moments among the children (three girls and their two boy cousins) mirror the moments among the adult women.

Because the story is set on a week-day the men in the family are fairly peripheral, acting on the women mostly from afar rather than in-scene. The men clearly think they are the center of the universe (one, near the story’s end, is highly concerned that his wife’s day was totally ruined because he rushed out to work without saying goodbye.), and are pretty much oblivious (willfully, I think) to the details of how the women spend their day. Interestingly, Mansfield starts and ends the story with the men: the opening scene focuses on two men going for a swim as well as the movements of a local shepherd. The shepherd retraces his route near the end of the story, overlapping with one of the few moments where a man’s effect on one of the Burnell women is direct and in-scene rather than from afar.

Mansfield’s descriptions of the weather and the natural setting are just beautiful. The weather isn’t the focus of the story, so one might be tempted to take these descriptions as window-dressing and choose not to linger over the language. I also found it interesting that she personifies some of the animals (a cat, and the shepherd’s dog, have distinct personalities), and also that the one infant in the story is described the way the animals are – he’s given a bit of personality but remains nameless unlike the older children. Even nameless and speechless, the baby still comes across as as much of a burden/inconvenience to his mother as his father is.

I wasn’t as enamored of the vignette-style telling of the story as I was of what it had to say about culture and the treatment of women (both by men and by other women). It felt more disjointed than cohesive.

Reading Round-Up: December 2019

Continuing the monthly summaries of what I’ve been reading and writing.

BOOKS

To keep my numbers consistent with what I have listed on Goodreads, I count completed magazine issues and stand-alone short stories in e-book format as “books.” I read or listened to 13 books in December: 9 in print, 4 in e-book format, and 0 in audio. They were:

1.       Lightspeed Magazine #115 (December 2019 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams. The usual fine assortment of sf and fantasy short stories. This month’s favorites for me were T.L. Huchu’s “Njuzu,” Rick Wilber’s “Today Is Today,” Cat Rambo’s “The Silent Familiar,” and KT Bryski’s “The Path of Pins, The Path of Needles.”

2.       Faux Ho Ho by ‘Nathan Burgoine. Another wonderful holiday m/m romance novella from one of my favorite authors. This time, the story involves a fake relationship to appease nosy family members, and a gathering of conservative family members at a sibling’s Christmas wedding. The two leads are adorable (I may be crushing on Silas still, weeks after reading the book), the supporting cast wonderfully varied. Read my Full Review HERE.

3.       From Sea to Stormy Sea: 17 Paintings by Great American Artists and the Stories They Inspired edited by Lawrence Block. The paintings range from naturalist to abstract, the stories range from noir to science fiction. Favorites include Charles Ardai’s “Mother of Pearl,” Jerome Charyn’s “The Man From Hard Rock Mountain,” Janice Eidus’ “You’re A Walking Time Bomb,” Christa Faust’s “Garnets,” and Gary Phillips’ “A Matter of Options.”

4.       The Dead Girls Club, by Damien Angelica Walters. One of my most-anticipated books of the year came out in early December, and Walters did not disappoint. Time-jumping between the narrator’s present adult life and the summer when she was 12 and her best friend went missing, the story is a multi-layered supernatural mystery.

5.       Kolchak: The Last Temptation by Jim Beard. In this novella, Beard digs back into a mystery from the very first Kolchak TV movie and gives the reporter some closure. The story also involves investigating a charity organization called “Sons of the Morningstar,” so there’s some devilry afoot.

6.       Rawhide Kid: The Sensational Seven by Ron Zimmerman, Howard Chaykin, and more. The trade collection of the second Rawhide Kid mini-series from Marvel teams the character up with Annie Oakley, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, Red Wolf, Kid Colt and the Two-Gun Kid to rescue Wyatt and Morgan Earp. Tons of fun in the old West. Also pretty bloody.

7.       A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. My annual reread of the print edition signed for me by Dickens’ great-great-grandson was accompanied by a listen to the audiobook version narrated by Tom Baker. Baker struggles with some of the character voices, but as Scrooge and the Narrator he’s wonderful.

8.       Into Bones Like Oil by Kaaron Warren. A troubled woman checks into a seaside hotel that promises to help her sleep – but is also haunted by the ghosts of a shipwreck.

9.       A Family for Christmas by Jay Northcote. Another truly wonderful “fake relationship” gay Christmas romance, this one between an awkward young man and the somewhat anti-social coworker he takes home to his family for Christmas. Bonus cute kittens.

10.   Fearless by Seanan McGuire, Claire Roe, Rachelle Rosenberg (main story), various creators (backup stories). The trade collection of a four-issue mini-series from earlier this year with stories told completely by female creators. The main story involves Sue Storm, Captain Marvel, and Storm as guest-speakers as a science-based summer camp for girls which Ms. Marvel and a few teenage mutants are attending. One back-up pays tribute to the unsung female comics creators of the Golden and early Silver Ages.

11.   Lumberjanes Volume 13: Indoor Recess by Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Dozerdraws, Maarta Laiho, Aubrey Aiese. The Janes find themselves stuck in the dining hall during a particularly bad storm. Jo and Molly find themselves helping Athena Cabin with play-testing a new board game, while April, Mal and Ripley unexpectedly explore caverns underneath the camp.

12.   If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Clear and Cold by Ken Scholes. A beautiful novelette that explores grief after the loss of a parent and why we continue to uphold traditions in which we no longer believe. Print edition also includes a prequel short story. Longer review HERE.

13.   Christmas with the Dead by Joe Lansdale. A fun short novelette about a guy just trying to get in the holiday mood after a zombie apocalypse.

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 read this month and where you can find them if you’re interested in reading them too. If no source is noted, the story is from the same magazine or book as the story(ies) that precede(s) it:

1.       “A Bad Day in Utopia” by Matthew Baker, from Lightspeed Magazine #115 (December 2019 issue), edited by John Joseph Adams.

2.       “Njuzu” by T.L. Huchu

3.       “Motherhood” by Pat Murphy

4.       “Today is Today” by Rick Wilber

5.       “The Mocking Tower” by Daniel Abraham

6.       “End of the Sleeping Girls” by Molly Gutman

7.       “The Silent Familiar” by Cat Rambo

8.       “The Path of Pins, the Path of Needles” by KT Bryski

9.       “Help Wanted” by Seanan McGuire, on the author’s Patreon page.

10.   “The Eight People Who Murdered Me” by Gwendolyn Kiste, in Nightmare #86 (November 2019), edited by John Joseph Adams.

11.   “The Prairie Is My Garden” by Patti Abbott, from From Sea to Stormy Sea: 17 Paintings by Great American Artists and the Stories They Inspired, edited by Lawrence Block

12.   “Mother of Pearl” by Charles Ardai

13.   “Superficial Injuries” by Jen Burke

14.   “The Man From Hard Rock Mountain” by Jerome Charyn

15.   “Adrift Off the Diamond Sholes” by Brendan DuBois

16.   “You’re A Walking Time Bomb” by Janice Eidus

17.   “Garnets” by Christa Faust

18.   “He Came In Through the Bathroom Window” by Scott Frank

19.   “On Little Terry Road” by Tom Franklin

20.   “Someday, A Revolution” by Jane Hamilton

21.   “Riverfront” by Barry M. Malzberg

22.   “Silver at Lakeside” by Warren Moore

23.   “Get Him” by Micah Nathan

24.   “Baptism in Kansas” by Sara Paretsky

25.   “A Matter of Options” by Gary Phillips

26.   “Girl With An Axe” by John Sandford

27.   “The Way We See The World” by Lawrence Block

28.   “The Doom of Love in Small Spaces” by Ken Scholes, included in the print edition of If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear.

So that’s 28 short stories in December. Slightly under “1 per day,” but still enough to keep me way ahead for the year so far. (December 30th was the 365th day of 2019.)

Summary of Reading Challenges:

“To Be Read” Challenge: This month: 0 read; YTD: 3 of 14 read.

365 Short Stories Challenge: This month:  28 read; YTD: 402 of 365 read.

Graphic Novels Challenge:  This month: 3 read; YTD: 35 of 52 read.

Goodreads Challenge: This month: 13 read; YTD: 144 of 125 read.

Non-Fiction Challenge: This month: 0; YTD: 5 of 24 read.

Read the Book / Watch the Movie Challenge: This month: 0; YTD: 0 of 10 read/watched.

Complete the Series Challenge: This month: 0 books read; YTD: 0 of 16 read.

                                                                Series fully completed: 0 of 3 planned

Monthly Special Challenge: I didn’t set a mini-goal of any kind for December, other than trying to get some recently-acquired books in before the end of the year. 11 of the 13 books read were books acquired in the past 3 months.

I’ll be posting a full 2019 Round-Up as soon as I’m able to crunch numbers and put it all together. Ditto a post about my Reading Challenges for 2020!

Sunday Shorts: If Dragon's Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

It’s been a few years since I’ve reread Ken Scholes’ “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear.” It was first published on Tor.com as their holiday story for 2011. It’s been newly released this year in a nice slim paperback edition from Fairwood Press, and as it is holiday-related, I thought it might be an appropriate final 2019 entry for Sunday Shorts.

This is the story of Melody Sheffleton-Farrelly (call her “Mel”), coping with the first Dragon’s Mass Eve without her father – which just so happens to also be the day of his death. Mel and her father lived on the outskirts of town, operating a dormant Hope mine. Neither were really believers anymore (Mel possibly never was) in the Santaman or the promise of Dragon’s Mass Eve. But they kept the traditions, minus going to church, going through Mel’s entire life.

The thing that struck me when I first read the story online and which still strikes me reading this print edition, is how well Scholes captures the effect a parent’s death has on the holidays. I lost my mother in 2005 (after spending her final Christmas with her, as Mel does with her father Drumm) and my father two years later, so the first time I read this story I had a few years’ remove from the loss. But I still recognized how Mel acts on that first Dragon’s Mass Eve without Drumm: at first, going through the motions, almost flying on autopilot reciting the Santaman Cycle (as she buries her father), then throwing traditions out as the emotional (and physical) exhaustion hits. A year later, she’s able to observe some of the traditions with fond memories of her father – and she’s also able to do things they never did on the holiday (I won’t spoil what those are here.) Healing from the loss of a parent happens at different speeds for all of us, and Scholes expertly shows that process over the course of the story.

Does it matter that Dragon’s Mass Eve is a holiday the author made up, with only winking nods to recognizable figures and stories? Not at all, because the effect is the same as if he were writing about Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, or Yule (or any non-Winter holiday that has adherent family traditions, for that matter). In fact, the effect may be stronger because the story doesn’t become bound up in one’s own experiences of any particular current holiday. We get a strong enough sense of the reason for the holiday and the historical/legendary underpinnings thanks to the sections of the Santaman Cycle interspersed throughout the story. The Cycle itself raises questions about the world Mel, her father, and their neighbors exist in: there’s enough we recognize (“Santaman,” and aspects of various Creation myths) to think this is possibly Earth long after some climate change cataclysm, but enough fantastical (Hope comes from mines; Love is a feral creature) to think it might be a completely fictional, or at the least alternate-Earth, world. Scholes has never weighed in conclusively on which it is, and ultimately it’s not as important a piece of knowledge as it might feel.

Mel has a really strong character arc, starting in grief/death and ending in hope/life. I don’t want to spoil any of the events that lead from the one to the other, so I won’t say much more. Just that the conclusion is satisfying and feels very true to the character we meet in the early pages and the child we meet through her own memories.

This story gives me so much to think about that I’m not sure why I haven’t long since made it a part of my Christmas reading tradition (which includes annual rereads of A Christmas Carol and others). I’ll rectify that going forward. I highly recommend seeking this one out. (I also hadn’t realized that Fairwood Press had started a Novelette Series, of which this is the latest volume. I’ve gone to their site and ordered all of the earlier entries and pre-ordered the next one, coming in 2020. I’ll do my best to do Sunday Shorts entries about all of them.)

Series Saturday: Nathaniel Dusk

This is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.

At least once a year, I Tweet at DC Comics about what older, now defunct, series they should collect in bound (softcover, hardcover, whatever works) editions. Somewhere at the top of that list pretty much every time are two long-out-of-print series: Nathaniel Dusk Private Investigator, and Silverblade. We’ll get to Silverblade in a future installment. Today, I want to wax poetic about Nathaniel Dusk.

Nathaniel Dusk appeared in two eponymous four-issue mini-series from DC. The first, Nathaniel Dusk Private Investigator (subtitled “Lovers Die at Dusk”) was published with cover-dates of February to May, 1984. The second, Nathaniel Dusk Private Investigator II: Apple Peddlers Die at Noon, was cover-dated October 1985 to January 1986. And that was it. Other than a profile in DC’s Who’s Who in the DC Universe, and a quick cameo in an unusual issue of Lobo, Dusk hasn’t been seen again. (He apparently shows up as a movie character played by an actor in the recent Doomsday Clock maxi-series from DC, but I haven’t read that yet.)

Dusk should be a much more well-known character than he is. That he’s somewhat faded into obscurity to me feels like a crime (although not the type of crime ol’ Nate himself would investigate. Not enough blood or bullets in it). He should be up there with Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer. He’s of their ilk, created in homage but not slavishly so (definitely not as violent as Hammer, although they inhabit the same streets only a decade or so apart). He’s got his own history, his own character, and thanks to Gene Colan, his own distinct look. But the publishing gods were not kind. Despite the powers-that-be at DC backing the idea for two mini-series, Dusk just never took off well enough to come back for a third round. Would it have been different if the book had been launched as an on-going title from the start, without that year-plus gap between the two minis? We’ll never know.

Created by Don McGregor and based at least in part on Robert Culp in his “I Spy” days, Dusk is a private investigator (a “peeper,” as several characters call him throughout the books) in 1930s New York City. He’s a former World War One flying ace, a former NYC cop who couldn’t stomach the shadier side of the NYPD and so struck out on his own as a PI. He’s still got a good relationship with his former partner in the detective squad, Murray Abrahams, but we never really get to see how he is with the other cops he used to work with. Dusk is disgruntled but not totally world-weary. He may not like People as a herd, but he likes individual persons well enough. Of course, it’s his job to be cautious, to question everything – although sometimes, as these things go, he asks the right question too late. Which tells us he’s not perfect. I like my heroes on the fallible side, so it’s no surprise I really like Nathaniel.

The books are peopled with supporting characters you want to care and know more about because Dusk clearly cares about them: Oscar Flam, the local newsstand operator has a paralyzed young son; Freddie Bickenhacker, the shoe-shine guy is a former Wall Street biggie who lost it all in the stock market crash and believes he’ll work his way back up. Dusk is dating a young widower, Joyce Gulino, with two young kids, Jennie and Anthony, with whom Dusk has a playfully adversarial relationship. Throughout the two books, Dusk is also surrounded by strong women who know what they want and who will do whatever it takes to protect the people they love. Sometimes this backfires on them (it is noir, after all) but not always. There are also mobsters a plenty at the heart of each story, because what is New York or Atlantic City or Chicago in the 30s without gangsters. (I’d like to think that if there’d been a third mini-series, McGregor would have varied things up a bit.) This is a well-developed world, grounded in the reality of 1934-35 NYC: in one of the issue’s essays, McGregor gives a taste of the level of research he did to keep things as accurate as possible.

At the time these books came out, first person narration captions were not the prevalent storytelling mode in comics that they are now. Most of the other books published at this time from the Big Two still had omniscient narrator captions that allowed the action to jump away from the main character and back again, with the hero’s thoughts relegated to balloons. Dusk narrates the entire story himself (the same way Marlowe would: poetic turns of phrase here, quippy wordplay there, a bit of navel-gazing introspection usually at just the wrong moment) – there are no cut scenes to give the readers information Dusk lacks, which makes for a pair of very fair-play mysteries for the reader. The clues are there to be followed, sometimes in what characters say and sometimes in their physicality.

And if that’s not a segue to talk about the art, nothing is. Both mini-series were shot directly from Gene Colan’s uninked pencils and then those stats were colored. The process was, I think, fairly experimental at the time of the first mini-series, but the results are much sharper in the second. (Folks more knowledgeable about the history of this process, feel free to chime in in the comments.) Either way, what we gets is a sense of the fluidity of Colan’s artwork that was sometimes lost depending on who was providing the ink work (Tom Palmer over Colan on Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula was a one-of-a-kind pairing that brought out the best in both artists, in my opinion). Colan understood the hard-boiled detective genre as well as McGregor did, and he knew how to make it work in comics form. He gets across the danger and the high speed chases but also the grit of NYC in winter and summer (two very different feelings) and the romance/sexual tension that is part and parcel of these stories. And the lack of inks allows colorist Tom Ziuko to do some really amazing work.  Sometimes the colors are more muted, sometimes they pop at the eye. There are sequences washed entirely in grey tones for memories, for blinding rainstorms. (Interestingly, the covers of the first mini-series are all inked: 1, 3, and 4 by Dick Giordano, #2 by Bob Smith, and they convey a very different tone from the more pulp-influenced uninked-but-colored covers of the second mini-series.)

It would be great to see a new Nathaniel Dusk book hit the stands. The character is perfect for Hard Case Crime’s line of novels and comics, and they seem to be having some success bringing Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty’s Ms. Tree back into print. Sadly, I think the rights to Nathaniel Dusk are owned by DC. Even more sadly, Gene Colan left us in 2011, and I’m not sure I’d want to see Nathaniel drawn by anyone else.

But the least DC can do is give us a nice hardcover Nathaniel Dusk The Complete Series to sit on our shelves alongside the Marv Wolfman – Gene Colan Night Force The Complete Series they gave us last year. (And a Cary Bates – Gene Colan Silverblade to go with that, a voice whispers – but that’s a different Series Saturday post).