In cleaning the office, I came across a book I bought in Minneapolis a few years back, when the kind folks at Rain Taxi had me up there to do my Ambergris multi-media at the Walker Center.

This is a very strange book from the 1934 that tries to make the fur industry whimsical, gallant, and even humorous. I bought because of the eccentricity of it–the weirdness of the narrative voice, at least to modern ears. It’s really somewhat macabre, and kinda gross to those of us who love animals. Crazy-town narrators in nonfiction always fascinate me, though, since they open up possibilities for characters in fiction.

Here’s a short excerpt from the intro, and some photos of the interior.

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My Graphic Novel Friday post on the latest Moomin book.

Because of these qualities, there’s a pleasure in reading Moomin that’s somewhat unique. We’re battered all day by various types of white noise and by all kinds of blaring media, from television to video games. Moomin has a restorative, calming effect while never being maudlin, sentimental, or boring. (Indeed, Jansson’s eye for satire can be sharp and unforgiving, within the context of her beloved characters.)

I just posted a feature on Melanie Typaldos’ excellent Celeste and the Giant Hamster on Omnivoracious. As I say in the feature, the chain of events that led to even knowing about this book looks something like this:

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My thumbnail review of The Angel’s Game by Zafon is up at the B&N Review (lower left). To say I disagree with the NYT’s dissection of the book would be an understatement.

Ultimately, though, the appeal of The Angel’s Game lies in its careful portrait of Martin and its exploration of what it really means to love someone. Readers who appreciate books, romance, and intrigue will find this novel a subtle, unforgettable, and satisfying page-turner.

“First and Short” is a new Ecstatic Days feature that reviews first books that happen to be novellas. Since books fitting this definition are usually published by indie presses, this feature serves the dual purpose of highlighting new authors and unique publishers. It in effect replaces the “Conversations with the Bookless” interviews that have now migrated to BookSpotCentral. Please send materials for consideration to POB 4248, Tallahassee, FL 32315 USA, marked “for First and Short”. Thanks–and please feel to spread this link to those who might be interested.

HORN by Peter M. Ball
Twelfth Planet Press / Paperback • 96pp • RRP AUS$10
ISBN 978-0-9804841-4-4

Recombinations of the mystery genre with fantasy have been getting stranger and stranger. In a way–inadvertently–the innocuous Harry Potter series started this trend, with the first three books fusing wizards with tea cosy plots, complete with lengthy explanations in the study to end it all. We’ve also seen the often cerebral and perhaps a spot too organized mix of fantasy and police procedural. But lately also a more dangerous and rowdy sort of hybrid has been making an appearance: fantasy mixed with hardboiled noir (undiluted by the romance of “urban fantasy”).

Peter M. Ball’s debut, Horn, takes elements of faery and places them within a hardboiled context, and by doing so renders the fantastical as sordid, tactile, and often gruesome. The story is relatively straightforward but contains rather delicious details: Miriam Aster is an ex-detective turned PI who still gets called in some cases, usually to the morgue, due to her past as both the lover of the exiled Queen of the Fairies and having once been brought back from the dead. In Horn, she’s brought in on a death related to a rampant unicorn.

At times, the effect of this fusion reminded me of Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, because Horn de-romanticizes and de-mystifies its fantasy element. In a sense, it makes faery mundane, but in interesting ways. A casual throw-away line like “Somewhere in the bowels of the building, he was feeding the corpse of Sally Crown into the morgue incinerator and hundreds of newborn fairies were dying” lends a kind of rough legitimacy to the milieu that’s lacking in more whimsical treatments.

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I just posted my Graphic Novel Friday feature on Omnivoracious, about David B.’s Nocturnal Conspiracies. I was originally going to review this in tandem with Koren Shadmi’s In the Flesh, but someone told me a Boston publication had already done that. Anyway, in case I don’t get around to In the Flesh, I highly recommend its surreal/dream-like stories of romantic encounters gone strange.

Excerpt:

For this type of art to work, it must be composed primarily of what I call “charged” images. On a basic level, an image in a book or a painting can either be inert or charged, with other descriptions of this latter state ranging from “luminous” to the banal and simplistic “symbolic” (because the term inevitably reduces image to one thing or another, and evokes the word “Freudian,” which imposes strict purpose on imagery in a way I find distasteful). An inert image is one that more or less is what it represents, without any further life inhabiting it. A charged image is also what it represents, but contains some other quality that animates it in the reader’s mind. It has a resonance that connects with something universal, or perhaps even something personal.

A short feature on Omnivoracious about Ajvaz’s The Other City. It achieves its effects in a minor key, but I found it satisfying.

With China Mieville guestblogging this week in connection with the release of The City & The City, I thought I might focus on a book that nicely co-exists with some of the fantastical concepts set out in Mieville’s novel, although very different in texture, intent, and execution. The Other City by Czech writer Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues. As the jacket copy reads, the novel serves as a kind of “guidebook to this invisible ‘other Prague,’ overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads.”

“The characteristic feature of this strange art is that it attempts to depict the extrasensory, to provide symbols for the mysterious forces to which we are subjected in our daily lives but which we do not know–indeed, that is revealed to us only in wild dreams and fantasies, in states of clairvoyant nervous strain….[Such art] may be born from feelings of anxiety, of isolation, of floundering horror. With a self-tormenting love, it seeks the nocturnal sides of life; it is at home in twilight, in torment, in the wild, in the uncanny, and the ghastly…” – 1903 Berliner Illustrirte (a painter of the invisible).

So…I posted this piece on Alfred Kubin on Omnivoracious. My excuse? China Mieville’s new novel is apparently influenced by Kubin, and he’s guest-blogging on Omnivoracious. Also take a look at these prior posts on Kubin and on Dedalus and the Decadents.

Kubin led to Franz Blei and his description of Kafka: “The Kafka is a magnificent and very rarely seen moon-blue mouse, which eats no flesh, but feeds on bitter herbs. It is a bewitching sight, for it has human eyes.”)

Kafka led to Max Brod, and Brod led to memories of City of Saints & Madmen and “King Squid,” which lovingly ransacked Dedalus Decadent editions for much of its influence (it was a way of remembering the books I’d read), including in the bibliography–in fact, to this day, I keep calling Franz Blei Frank Blei and Max Brod Maxwell Brod because of it…which led to remembering China’s contribution to the bibliography, heh (Vielle, C.M., Naughty Lisp and the Squid: A Poly Diptych). Which led to Max Brod’s “The First Hour of Death” in The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000.

I encountered the title in the TOC while finishing up the appendix sections of City of Saints, read the first sentence (“The odd incident occurred as the minister was leaving…”), realized I wanted a different story for the title, and promptly sat down and wrote my own “In the Hours After Death,” presented in City of Saints as having appeared in the neo-Decadent Burning Leaves journal. If it reaches past that context of affectionate nod to its predecessors, it’s because I wrote it in a moment of utter and devastating sadness, and I offer it up here as a sacrifice to this week of ongoing decadent-surrealist-literary fantasy that I’ve got going.

(Oh, and go vote for or against Last Drink Bird Head in SF Signal’s cover contest…)

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(Why do I have these? A–I’m a Halo addict, B–I have been hired by the competition to help create something called “Palo”, C–a legacy player who has grown bored with the game and loves my work is paying me to write Halo fan fic that involves Ambergris, or D–I might be writing a story for an antho.)

It’s time again for an incoming books post, but I thought I’d switch it up this time and add some idea of what’s going on outside the house, too, not just what’s coming into it…

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(Born on a South Florida TV news show.)

I just interviewed James O. Born for Omnivoracious. He’s a gritty crime novelist who’s just had his first SF novel published by Tor–under the name James O’Neal. We’ve seen lots of fantasy/SF writers deploy detectives in their fiction, but fewer crime novelists turn to SF, so it’s interesting to see how that alchemy works.

The Human Disguise is a fast-paced thriller set twenty years in the future. The SF elements are what make the book really interesting, though. Are they completely believable? I’m not entirely sure I care one way or another, because it’s all a lot of fun, frankly. It’s an entertaining novel, and one that should satisfy a lot of readers. Good summer reading.