It’s never been much of a secret how much I love Aqueduct Press–founder L. Timmel Duchamp is doing amazing work, and often at the expense of her own writing. Running a publishing company is a 24-7 job, and in this economy it’s doubly tough. So the fact that Aqueduct keeps putting out a steady stream of amazing books is something to be thankful for–especially since so much of what they do is not done by anyone else in the field.

The latest book is Narrative Power, pictured above, a collection of essays. There’s a great post about the book, with TOC, on the Aqueduct blog, and I hope to do something on Omnivoracious soon.

Also note that Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward will continue their guest blogging on Booklifenow next week.

Me, I’m going to be offline most of the time for the next couple of days working on various projects.

I’m much taken by rabbits these days, whether it’s smorkin’ labbits or the demented rabbit of Donnie Darko, my own Sensio or the dream-derived rabbit of Sexy Beast–or even the rabbits of our friends in Berlin (one of which I swear looks like a tiny bison, its wooly brown ears flopping down to cover the eyes in just the right way). So I ask: Is it wrong of me that one reason I liked Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver is because of the rabbits? The book’s about a contest of wills between two women, but one of them paints rabbits in children’s books for a living, and then puts flowers on the rabbits.

(No, these aren’t the flowery rabbits.)

Anna Aemelin, Jansson writes, “had the great, persuasive power of monomania, of being able to embrace a single idea…And that one thing was the woods, the forest floor.” She paints watercolors that “made people see” the “springy blanket of mosses and delicate plants.” Therefore, in some people’s opinion “It was a shame that Anna spoiled her pictures by putting rabbits in them, that is to say, Mama, Papa and Baby Bunny. Moreover, the fact that she drew little flowers on the rabbits dispelled much of the deep-forest mystique.”

(more…)

It’s raining here in Tallahassee, and it’s cold–in a word, narsty. Bearlike and grumbly, I’m about to go back into my hidey-hole soon and resume reading for our collosus of a weird fiction anthology for Grove Atlantic, soon to disembowel or set aside for snacking later many dozens of stories—and likely still grumbly. Picking the best meals from so many world-class cooks is almost an overload to the senses.

Meanwhile, though, a few notes on recent best-of lists of mine that’ve run on Omnivoracious and Locus Online.

(more…)

(No, this post is not about the song, although the song kicks ass.)

The Barnes & Noble Review has posted my piece on Peter Straub’s A Dark Matter. Originally, the review focused more equally on both the Doubleday version of the novel and Subterranean Press’s version (titled The Skylark), but for space reasons and the fact that The Skylark is not available to most readers the published review focuses on The Skylark only inasmuch as it provides insight into A Dark Matter. There are some spoilers that you can avoid by skipping the “In what kind of horror” paragraph, although given Straub’s focus on the characters rather than the events, they’re not, in an odd way, spoilers.

The review as published does reflect my point of view accurately—and the editors there did a great job re the repurposing—but I’ll be using the full 2,500-word version of the review in my nonfiction collection Monstrous Creatures.

Note: Subterranean Press still has copies of The Skylark available. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

This bit that was dropped I want to post here, though:

Another decision that works in A Dark Matter’s favor is the absence of an extended novella-length passage detailing the full extent of Hayward’s depravity—this depravity condensed down to a few pages near the end. The extended version in The Skylark constitutes the best fictional account of a psychopath, and a psychopath’s relationship to his mentor, that I have ever read. It’s a classic of deep, disturbing characterization, merciless and oddly moving. As a test of Straub’s ability to inhabit a loathsome character and understand that character, it’s perhaps unparalleled in modern literature.

But the section also places extreme emphasis on a character that, while important, is still peripheral to the main characters. In The Skylark, which relies more on multiple points of view throughout the narrative, the scene seems more appropriate, but in the new structure Straub has built for himself in A Dark Matter, Hayward’s point of view would have seemed out of place—it would, in fact, have eclipsed the true core of the book, far exceeding in emotional complication anything that happens to the four friends. In Skylark in particular, horror for Hayward’s actions and a wretched pity for his victims, often outweighs, for example, our feelings about The Eel. Perhaps in part because Straub, through Harwell, keeps telling us The Eel is special and wonderful, but she’s never allowed to demonstrate these qualities in actual scenes.

I should note too that I read The Skylark, then read Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and after that read A Dark Matter. This had an interesting effect on me, in that Bolano’s novel is in an odd sense about a vanishing point in the distance that 2666 never reaches. I read an interpretation of 2666 that basically suggested that the novel is about an event that occurs in the year 2666 (perhaps not literally that year), toward which all of the events and characters, and perhaps their descendents, are moving. And we just get a glimpse of the road toward that point—that the absence of that culminating event creates a powerful ghost or absence hanging over 2666. This certainly dovetails with my reading of Bolano’s novel. Especially since in the foreground of the novel, of the words themselves, you have another absence: the absence at ground zero of the various characters in the different parts of the novel meeting up at novel’s end. That potential event also occurs in the future, beyond the book’s last pages. This made me view the occult event I’d encountered in The Skylark very differently when I read A Dark Matter–although this difference is somewhat peripheral to the review posted at B&N Review. This difference is that I no longer believed it was at all important what happened in the meadow in Straub’s novel. I no longer believed, from a writer’s point of view, that knowing what the characters had seen made any difference. In short, from a writer’s point of view I now wanted a third version of Straub’s novel: one rearranged and structured to leave a hole in the middle that was the event in the meadow. I didn’t want different interpretations of the event. I didn’t want the event at all. I wanted only what happened before and what happened after, and I wanted that from multiple points of view. Again, this did not impact reviewing the actual novel in front of me. But it began to make me think, then, too, of certain of Karen Joy Fowler’s novels and stories, in which an absence shows the shape of a thing–what she leaves out haunts what is left in.

Anyway, something is bubbling up in my writer’s brain about all of this that’s going to fuel a future story or novel, I’m sure.

(No, not this Sky—…well, actually, this one kinda relates.)

(No, this post isn’t about that dark matter, either.)

The Washington Post Book World ran my review of John Twelve-Hawks’ The Golden City, the last in his trilogy. Although I’ll give him props for some of the settings, the characters were cardboard and the action clumsy at best.

Okay, so maybe these tiny books from Madras Press featuring original stories by Aimee Bender, Sumanth Prabhaker (the founder of the press), Trinie Dalton, and Rebecca Lee wouldn’t make it to their destinations in time for Christmas, but probably by New Year’s. You can’t find them on Amazon or anywhere except the press’s website and some indie bookstores. Which makes them great stealth gifts. They’re beautifully produced and I’ve read all four–great writing, lovely design. Sumanth had a story in Best American Fantasy #1 and both Ann and I love his work.

So go check out the website for Madras Press and learn more about this cool new boutique publisher. Highly recommended.

Jeff suggested to me yesterday that he’d be all right with me posting this before Friday, so I hope this entry is not ill-timed. If it is, Jeff, feel free to take it down!

Now here’s the review:

More spheres floated in this room, dozens of them. They were fantastically varied—of all shapes and sizes and colors—turning slowly and drifting through the air. They seemed to be nothing more than a child’s toys, until I looked closely at one and saw clouds swirling over its surface.

Sieh hovered near as I wandered among his toys, his expression somewhere between anxiety and pride. The yellow ball had taken up position near the center fo the room; all the other balls revolved around it.

“They’re pretty, aren’t they?” he asked me, while I stared at a tiny red marble. A great cloud mass—a storm?—devoured the nearer hemisphere. I tore my eyes from it to look at Sieh. He bounced on his toes, impatient for my answer. “It’s a good collection.”

Trickster, trickster, stole the sun for a prank. And apparently because it was pretty. The Three had borne many children before their falling-out. Sieh was immeasurably old, another of the Arameri’s deadly weapons, and yet I could not bring myself to dash the shy hope I saw in his eyes.

“They’re all beautiful,” I agreed.

It was when I reached this passage, on page ten of N. K. Jemisin’s debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (forthcoming from Orbit Books in 2010), that I fell in love. (more…)

Alaya Dawn Johnson’s debut novel, Racing the Dark, was released in 2007 by Agate Bolden. The epic fantasy is the first in the Spirit Binders series.

Racing the Dark begins when thirteen-year-old Lana is initiated as a diver who seeks and finds Mandagah jewels, a profession that provides her island’s main commercial export and is also religiously significant. The jewels Lana finds during her initiation mark her as chosen by the spirits, but Lana hides this fact so she can attempt to have a normal life.

The island archipelago where Lana lives is in turmoil — her home island is suffering from environmental changes that seem to be caused by the great spirits (including water, fire, wind and death) which are struggling against their bindings. When the Mandagah fish become endangered, Lana’s family flees their home, looking for work on the inner islands. Lana becomes ill from hard labor and poor diet, forcing her mother to promise her as an apprentice to a witch in order to get money to pay for a cure.

The novel follows Lana through the major periods of her life, as she learns magic from the witch, takes on the spirit of death, meets the spirit of wind, and falls in love with the spirit of water. We leave her abruptly in the middle of the climax, paving the way for the sequel.

As I contemplated what to say about this novel, I came across a review by Niall Harrison of Alaya Dawn Johnson’s short story, “Far & Deep,” which appeared this year in Interzone.

“This is how you trail a novel,” writes Harrison. “‘Far & Deep’ shares a setting with, but is not extracted from (or is sufficiently well-adapted to stand apart from), Johnson’s Spirit Binders novels.”

He goes on to say:

“Far & Deep” is not as firmly controlled as I wanted it to be; the stabs of emotion that punctuate the predominantly cool narrative tilt, a little too often, a little too close to melodrama for my taste. I don’t think the revelation of the world and the mystery are quite geared correctly; we don’t always learn about the possibility of a thing and the significance of a thing in the smoothest progression…

All this is to carp, however. They are little criticisms. The busyness of the story — the many details of setting, the deft character portraits, a sense of events with forward momentum — the basic shape of it all — carries you over such details, on a first reading, and leaves you looking forward to Johnson’s next tale.

While I don’t feel that the momentum of Racing the Dark carries the reader over its flaws on first reading, the rest of Harrison’s review is spot on for my impressions of the novel. Racing the Dark is a flawed text, but a rich one, full of minor faults and major successes.
(more…)

In my blurb for Cat Rambo’s new collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight (Paper Golem Press, 2009), I wrote that reading her stories is like “reading the literature from worlds that don’t exist. She writes as that world’s Dickens, its Calvino, its Fredrick Douglass, its E. B. White. Rather than merely relaying the events of other realities, as some fantasy and science fiction writers might, at her best Cat Rambo acts as a literary interpreter. Within these imagined fictions — sometimes disjunctive and metaphysical, sometimes lucid and deceptively simple — there are embedded many new ways for looking at the history and social realities of our own world. Dying little girls may not be carried away by winged pigs, but what does it mean that we want so badly to believe that they might be? Cat Rambo’s fiction invites these questions, but the ultimate interpretation is left for the reader to ponder, and to answer if she can.”

I attended Clarion West with Cat Rambo in 2005 and have been a devoted fan of her work ever since. I’ve published her work on PodCastle – Magnificent Pigs; Dead Girl’s Wedding March; “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones,” the Manticore Said; Foam on the Water; In Order to Conserve; and the upcoming Narrative of a Beast’s Life, scheduled for January 19th. Paper Golem Press sent me an ARC of this book so that I could review its contents for possible publication in PodCastle, and so that I could blurb it, both of which I was more than happy to do.

Our host, the esteemed Mr. VanderMeer, lists Cat as one of his favorite fantasists. Cat’s stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld Magazine, and… everywhere. Once she burst onto the scene as a professional writer after Clarion West, she seemed to appear simultaneously in all magazines at once, as if she were at the center of some sort of physics-defying quantum phenomenon from a Star Trek movie.

(more…)

When I first laid hands on Gail Carriger’s Soulless (Orbit, 2009), I began to wonder if the book had been written specifically to irritate me.

1. To start out, the novel is urban fantasy. Already we’re on bad terms.

2. Also, there are vampires.

3. Too, werewolves.

4. And romance!

5. In case that’s not enough, Carriger mixes in a Victorian setting and a hint of steampunk. Neither of these inherently annoy me, but combined with items 1-4:

6. The novel is heavily weighted down by trendy genre elements.* In my experience, this usually leads to books that are poorly constructed, badly integrated, and the literary equivalent of a chess club stereotype wearing star-shaped sunglasses – trying much too hard to be cool.**

Soulless should be like combining salmon and chocolate while I, in this metaphor, am an ichthyophobe with no sweet tooth. However, it appears that skilled chefs can pair salmon and chocolate. And sometimes a novel that’s full of everything wrong can go terribly, tragically right.
(more…)