Marune: Alastor 933 by Jack Vance

This is the second Alastor novel, of a three-book sequence. Some people might call it the middle book of a trilogy - and the three books are most commonly found today in a single omnibus volume.

But the three Alastor novels - he said, not having read the third one in several decades but pretty certain of his facts - are not a trilogy in any way. They all take place in the same globular cluster - thirty thousand stars, three thousand human-inhabited planets, five trillion people - near but not part of the Gaean Reach that's the background for a larger portion of Vance's mature SF output. Each novel takes place mostly on the specific planet of the title, and their connections are few and sparse.

Marune: Alastor 933 was published in paperback in 1975; it's set far enough in the future - and is by Jack Vance, who was less inclined to be grinding current-day axes than many SF writers - that it doesn't come across as particularly dated, though the relationships between the sexes are clearly 1975.

It opens in the Carfaunge spaceport, where an amnesiac young man is discovered and causes some consternation among various functionaries. He's eventually sent to a work camp on Gaswin Moor, to earn enough to pay for his passage to the Connatic's Hospital on Numenes, where his amnesia can be treated. (This may be a mid mid-centuryism to some readers, that balance between "this fellow clearly has a problem; we should send him to the place he can be helped" and "it's not my job to take care of people; let him work for his keep.")

Anyway, after a brief delay at Gaswin, where the young man gets the temporary name Pardero, he's forwarded to Numenes and treated by the staff there. His amnesia doesn't go away, but he has been gradually re-learning the ways of life, and seems to be back to his full mental capacity and intelligence. They do analyze him closely, to determine which of the three thousand worlds he may have come from, and declare that he is most likely of the Rhune people of the planet Marune, where a complex four-star system means the gradations of daylight and night have many names and meanings.

So our hero heads there, to Port Mar, the main port of this world, and learns that "his" people are a quirky aristocratic society, out in the wilderness, with strange taboos on eating in public and any expressions of affection. (The cover depicts their main official sexual interaction - during the rare times of full night, men dress up in masks and cloaks - and nothing else - and go to "visit" women, who generally have their rooms bolted tight, except perhaps against one man they have hinted they might be willing to entertain. In very Vancean fashion, it looks a lot like rape at first glance - and probably is, at least when things don't go as planned - but is much more complex and nuanced, in the ways every society has secretive things that are actually different from the ways they are officially.)

The amnesiac man learns he is Efram, by right the new Kaiark (roughly a count or duke) of Scharrode. His father [1] Jochaim has recently died, killed in a skirmish between two noble houses. (We learn this is pretty common: the Rhune people have endemic small-scale wars among these houses, leading to the deaths of a few fighters all the time.) Someone else is about to be installed in the seat rightfully his, but he goes to his family's seat - along with a local from Port Mar, a non-Rhune - and claims his rightful title.

Intrigues follow from there, as his stepmother and her two children - the son she'd planned to become Kaiark and a daughter who flirts with now-Efram for possibly-nefarious reasons - maneuver to take advantage of Efram's amnesia and possibly even to have him killed. This gets complicated for the reader due to the unique sexual prudery of the Rhune, as well as the invented titles Vance uses - they're basically dukes and their consorts and heirs and princesses, but called Kaiarks and Kraikes and Kangs and Lissolets.

Efram finds allies in his retainers, learns quickly to navigate this society, avoids at least one assassination attempt and - is there any doubt? - wins out in the end. It is a SF adventure novel from the 1970s, after all; that's how it has to end. Marune is a decent Vance novel from that era, maybe a little short for how much it tries to do and maybe having what turns out to be an extended prelude before Efram gets to Marune, but it's full of his mature language and ideas and distinctive world-building details.

[1] See the above explanation of the Rhune sexual customs, which means that no child can know their genetic father. Vance states that consequently, tracing ancestors tend to be matrilineal, but the aristocratic titles follow traditional male-line primogeniture nevertheless.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout by Doug Savage

First up: I know I missed one. In between the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy and this book, there was Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Disco Fever, which is unavailable from any library near me, digitally or physically. (In fact, none of the nearby libraries seem to have any of the Laser Moose books in dead-tree form, which shocks and annoys me.) I may have to read it in a bookstore at some point, assuming I remember.

But I'm pretty sure there weren't any shocking revelations or major change in Disco Fever: this is a middle-grade graphic novel series about a moose who shoots lasers out of his eyes and his best friend the slightly more reasonable rabbit, and that's going to be the whole point. Oh, and they fight crime. Well, maybe not crime as such, since they're out in the woods - but they help nice people and foil miscreants, so basically the same thing.

OK, so maybe Laser Moose gets a little wild with his eye-lasers, and cuts off the deer Frank's leg once in a while. These kinds of things will happen when you're defending the forest. And, anyway, Doc the raccoon can sew Frank's leg back on. Again.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout is just what the title implies: another adventure of Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, in which they meet and help out a time-traveling fish. A time-traveler from the polluted far future came back to their bucolic wilderness and dropped his time gizmo, which the fish immediately ate. (Because "I thought it might be a grasshopper. I tend to eat anything in the river, just in case it's a tasty grasshopper. You don't want to find out that it was a grasshopper later, when it's already gone," which makes just as much sense as anyone's motivation in this series.) 

This makes the fish travel semi-randomly in time: a big purple vortex appears repeatedly to pull him off when he thinks about past events and then again to return him to the present day. Our heroes - plus the evil Aquabear from the first book - get caught up in the shenanigans, with the usual time-travel complications, including changing the past and seeing how current-day things actually got that way. Oh, and dinosaurs. Time-travel stories are required to have dinosaurs.

In the end, Moose and Rabbit put (nearly) everyone back in their proper times, get the time gizmo back to the traveler, and watch the fish follow the traveler off to the future in search of adventure.

It is aimed at middle-graders, which may be a detriment for some readers. I love the goofy tone, and the plot's zippiness, and creator Doug Savage's clean cartoony lines, all of which make it a lot of fun and solidly land it in that genre. Graphic novels for pre-teens can often be substantially less serious than those for older readers, and I appreciate that a lot. Savage is particularly good at that kind of thing.

Better Things: Everyone Chooses Sides

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I'm back into the obscure stuff this week - as always, that's as far as I know; I'd be thrilled to learn otherwise - with a 2003 song from a band called The Wrens, from my neck of the woods. (Two of their record titles - Secaucus and The Meadowlands - make that clear.)

This week's song is Everyone Chooses Sides. [1]

It's more or less the story of a decision the band made after their previous record: either to go with their record company's idea, to become more "radio-friendly" and chase the big bucks, or stay true to themselves.

Fatty come a courting, Lord, the money!

And no one ever wrote or recorded a song about how they sold out and made lots of money.

Everyone choose sides
The whole to-do of what to do for money
Everyone choose sides
Poorer or not this year and hell's the difference

What I love about this song is the sound: it's a loud, fuzzy, pulsing song from the jump, with more than a little grunge in its DNA and a willingness to slide over towards noise when appropriate. (I've always been fond of songs that push the envelope of music into noise, or that let noise erupt into the middle of music.)

The words are growled, swallowed, spat out, full of complicated personal metaphors - all over that keening guitar and pulsing keyboard. It's a song that has somewhere to go, and is going its own way - if you want to jump on for the ride, good for you, but it's not there for you.

I've walked away from more than you imagine, and I sleep just fine.

[1] There seems to be some ambiguity about the title of the song. I have it as Chooses, from wherever I got the MP3 originally, and the video I linked uses that, but elsewhere, and in the song itself, it seems to be Choose. Does that make a difference? It's a matter of phrasing and emphasis, I think - the difference between a general statement and a notice that it's time to do this now.

Quote of the Week: Party People, Circa 1971

The party rumbled on like a Hay Wain (as someone in the middle of it pointed out), carrying its cargo of fools towards the hour of their release. A lady lawyer spoke long sentences about international law as regards defacing the moon, and to each the cryogenics man nodded and smiled. The girl in the snood claimed that Thomas M. Disch was the author of a novel called Concentration Camp. Other girls, in leather bikinis, glass crinolines, wooded mail, foil tartans and plastic pinafores behaved as slightly animated decorations, receiving each conversation item with the same graceful indifference with which chair cushions received buttocks of all shapes. News, gossip, complements, pedantry, wit and philosophy, all were rested on them briefly and then removed, leaving no impression.

 - Johgn Sladek, The Müller-Fokker Effect, p.219 in SF Gateway Omnibus

Apache Delivery Service by Matt Kindt, Tyler Jenkins & Hilary Jenkins

There's a fine line between laconic and nonexistent; at times, Apache Delivery Service runs right along that line. Some readers might find it falls off to the far side. Writer Matt Kindt definitely lets the pictures do the storytelling most of the time here: on the positive side, that can be difficult for a writer, and he lets this story be visually compelling, quick-moving, and atmospheric by that choice.

Two men - we learn the name of the central one after following him for two issues, and the other's last name is said once, much later - are in Vietnam, in 1967. Ernie Nez is an Army tracker who calls in airstrikes, spending long stretches alone in the jungle to find enemy locations. His comrades call him the "Apache Delivery Service," but don't seem to know him at all as a person: he's actually Navajo, has no specific experience in tracking, hates killing and hasn't done any personally, and spends as much time as possible in the jungle to avoid his fellow soldiers.

At the beginning of this four-issue series, he comes back to base camp after one mission, talks to a few soldiers and superiors, and leaves again almost immediately: he's just trying to get through his tour, and the end is in sight.

But out in the jungle, he's captured by a man named Sobrat, a treasure hunter chasing a story of an Imperial Japanese admiral who hid "Nazi gold" in a cave somewhere in the area, at the end of WWII, only to be killed by the locals immediately afterward. (As with all such stories in fiction, we're not meant to wonder how anyone ever heard this story if everyone involved died immediately.) Sobrat, a Frenchman with a dark past, is somewhat older and does not seem to be under military orders.

He's been chasing this legend for a while, and now is close - but he says he needs a local guide, and apparently the only non-native who knows the area well is Ernie. So he basically kidnapped Ernie, tells him the story, and enlists him as a partner.

Ernie "agrees." We assume he doesn't trust Sobrat, and soon learns more reasons not to trust him. But, still: massive treasure, a chance to be rich beyond your wildest dreams, why not?

The two have a run-in with a local village, which we think protects the hidden treasure. There's talk of a curse. They escape. They find the gold. Sobrat is not as fond of sharing as Ernie would hope. Ernie is not as enthusiastic as Sobrat would like. The locals are lurking outside the caves, ready to kill them both as they walk out, burdened by heavy gold bars. It all ends.

Apache's description calls it a horror story, and Tyler Jenkins's scratchy, organic art, under Hilary Jenkins's moody, night-toned colors do set that mood. I may have more experience with more...expressive horror, in the Lovecraft tradition, full of descriptions and detail, so Apache read to me more as an adventure story - dark, clearly, but still well within the bounds of a normal Vietnam story. And, as I said up top, I would have preferred a bit more detail - Kindt and the Jenkinses use a lot of flashbacks to Ernie's pre-war life as visual parallel to this adventure, but I found that tended to undercut the supposed-horror aspects of the story. (If an experience reminds you of deer hunting and a car accident, it's pretty close to your normal life, isn't it?)

However you genre-type it, Apache Delivery Service is a dark, moody, fast-moving story of two men chasing gold in the middle of a war, told crisply with compelling art and a story that has no extraneous moments or pieces.

The Müller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek

This is Sladek's most New Wave novel - a lot of things happen, coming out of an initiating event, to a whole lot of people, and it is Satirical and Cutting and True To Our Times. Of course, Our Times were 1971, so it may strike modern readers as even quirkier or less relevant now than it did to readers then. (And the hardcore SF types mostly disliked it then, to be fair.)

The Müller-Fokker Effect is a novel that was not entirely written to thrust out that punny title - which would have seemed much more shocking in 1971 - but I have to think that was a huge part of it. It's a "look at all of these idiots" novel, about how the whole world is full of fools and knaves and con men and charlatans and every other kind of horrible person you can think of.

(It's available as a standalone, but I read it in the SF Gateway Omnibus with two better novels, the fun Reproductive System and the magnificent Tik-Tok.)

As much as it has a center, that's Bob Shairp, a technical writer for National Arsenamid - often called "National Arse" in dialogue, to give you a sense of the level of 1971 wordplay going on here - who is voluntold to be part of an experiment National Arse is doing with the US military, to record a human mind onto special Müller-Fokker tapes. Only four of those tapes exist, since Dr. Müller-Fokker has disappeared, supposedly defected to the Soviet Union.

All four tapes are used to record Bob, but a group of white-supremacist terrorists - deeply misunderstanding what's going on, in a very Sladek touch - attack during the experiment, killing Bob's body after his mind is recorded.

We get a bit of Bob's jumbled thoughts, here and there, during the novel, but more important is what happens to the four tapes, which are sold as government surplus and go in different directions, to let Sladek satirize various aspects of American society at the time: primarily nudie magazines, a typically corrupt evangelist, advertising, those white supremacists, and the military (including a military school for Shairp's son). Sladek gives us a lot of short scenes with a large cast, which somewhat crosses over among the various milieus that the tapes drop into, but they all are venial and self-centered and generally lousy people in their own ways - plus fairly dumb, too, of course.

The tapes separate, and then come back together in the end, so Bob can be resurrected and reunited with his wife. That gives the novel an ending, but it's not the point of the book: the point is all of the crazy stuff in the middle between Bob's death and resurrection. Bob is barely a character, and is dead most of the book.

That crazy stuff is OK but gets a bit tedious. The satirical targets are deeply obvious, so even when Sladek does hit them solidly, it doesn't feel particularly major. For example, the (frustrated, virginal) Hugh Hefner figure here learns, more than halfway through the novel, that women have pubic hair, which is shocking to him! This joke was only just barely plausible in the mid-'60s and was well past its sell-by date by the time this novel was published.

And none of the characters are appealing: yes, they're quirky and specific, but they are all horrible people and the reader is unlikely to care about what happens to any of them. (A lot of things do happen, some of which are horrible and a few of which are fatal - none of it really resonates beyond just a shrug and a page-turn.) All in all, The Müller-Fokker Effect is an interesting catalog of the nuttier aspects of American society circa 1971, as seen through a very dark lens, so it's of interest to cultural historians - but I can't really recommend reading it as a novel for pleasure in 2025.

Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert & George Freeman

To those confused by the attribution in my post title - this is the 1985 comics adaptation, not the 1976 Michael Moorcock novel. (Sidebar to the sidebar - the novel is divided into three novella-length sections, which are largely separate, but, as far as I can see, they were not published first as novellas as I expected, though two of the three seem to have been published later as novellas.)

See my post on Elric of Melniboné for more details on the adaptation series; I hope to read through at least all of the Elric books in comics form, and maybe then move on to other Eternal Champions stories, since Titan seems to have collected all of them in uniform trade dress these days. (And I am a major fan of big publishing projects and uniform trade dress, so I want to encourage that.)

By 1985 Roy Thomas had settled into the long haul in adapting Elric stories - he'd keep doing it through all of the extant novels at the time - and had landed at a publisher, First, that was somewhat more stable than Pacific had been. Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate was a seven-issue comics series, adapting a novel generally running about 160-190 pages into 198 pages of comics. So this, like the rest of the Roy Thomas series, is a comprehensive adaptation, aiming to capture every word of dialogue and story beat of the original in a visual form.

Sailor, the novel, was the first of many continuity inserts by Moorcock: the initial run of stories in the mid-60s (collected slightly later as Elric of Melniboné and Stormbringer) gave Elric's origin and fate, so every other story since has been filling the middle with more and more detail. This particular story starts in sturdy adventure-tale fashion: Elric has been fleeing some other adventure, and finds himself alone, tired, and hungry on the shore of a desolate sea.

A mysterious ship appears, claiming to have come to pick him up for some equally-mysterious purpose. It turns out to be one of the periodic gatherings of multiple Eternal Champion avatars - by never-defined forces that are probably related to the Lords of the Balance that Moorcock would introduce years later - to defeat a major threat to the entire multiverse. So Elric meets, for the first time for him - others are at slightly different points in their personal histories - Corum, Hawkmoon, and Erekosë - along with a dozen-plus other sword-swinging types, most of whom will die during this section to show how dangerous this threat is. The whole group of twenty is delivered, by this universe-sailing ship and its blind captain, to an island where two creatures from outside this universe are gathering power to do the usual apocalyptic thing if not stopped. The four ECs have to merge into a giant four-headed figure with a really, really big sword to kill the creatures, and they do so. Then they all seem to mostly forget about it, for vague mystical reasons.

Elric goes on to have two more adventures, with Count Smiorgan Baldhead, a new sidekick he picks up along the way. First, they land in another world where a Melnibonéan exile is chasing the reincarnation of the great love he tortured to death (Melnibonéans are horrible people, pretty consistently), while the third side of their love triangle, the guy who did not torture her to death, is chasing them. Elric helps the pursuer catch up, and justice is done and love reunited, more or less, though the reincarnated girl doesn't seem to have much of a choice in any of this and is handed off to the guy who is, I suppose, at least less horrible. 

Elric and Smiorgan try to head back to their own world, and end up rescued by a ship searching for the ancient original home of the Melnibonéans, deep in the usual fantasy jungle somewhere. They come along for the ride, where Stormbringer kills more allies than those allies would have liked, a giant statue of Elric's patron god Arioch comes to life, and Elric kicks off the Law/Chaos fight on his world that will eventually kill him. But he and Smiorgan do manage to find a ship, with which they can get back to civilized lands and be available for another continuity-insert novel.

Moorcock never claimed his heroic-adventure stories were great literature - he did write other books with more nuance and depth; he knew the difference - but they are flashy and exciting and full of portentous dialogue and Big Fantasy Ideas that seem to be more profound than they really are. They can be electric when you're young and tormented, and can still be fun and zippy even once you're not. As long as a reader is clear on the tone and style of the stories - High Weltschmertz and Deeply Meaningful - it's all good.

Michael T. Gilbert uses an ornate, detailed style here, ably supported by George Freeman's inks and colors - this book looks detailed and full of depth, as it should. It's a tale over-full of self-conscious woe, but that's the deal with Elric: if you're not in the mood for woe, you should stay away from him to begin with.

Graylight by Naomi Nowak

Naomi Nowak published three graphic novels in the Aughts - I missed the first one, Unholy Kinship, but covered the second one, House of Clay, for ComicMix at the time. And now I've finally found my way to the third book, 2009's Graylight.

At the time, I referred to her as "a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry" and noted that she seemed to work in English. She might not be making comics, but she seems to still be in Sweden, and still making art - paintings and jewelry, these days. I don't want to say art is art - I like to see narrative work, and have a bias in that direction - but it's great to see artists having what looks like a reasonably sustainable career, making the things they want to.

Graylight is an allusive, imagistic book, colored out to the edge of the pages in tones that look just a bit desaturated to my eye - a unique, particular palette surrounding and supporting Nowak's complex lines and complicated page structures. Lines defining people sometimes fade out or end unexpectedly, while objects - especially thematically important ones, seem to be closer to the surface of the page and shown in more detail.

The underlying story isn't as complex as the way Nowak tells it: there's a young woman, Sasha, in this unnamed village that we assume is somewhere in Sweden. She's a bit flighty and self-centered: we see her with her friends and meeting a reporter, Erik, in town to interview a famous reclusive author, Aurora, who lives in the woods nearby.

Sasha impulsively - we think she does everything impulsively; she's that kind of young person - goes along with Erik as his "photographer," though we don't see her holding a camera at any point. Aurora and her grown son Edmund are not happy there's someone else with Erik for the interview, so Sasha flounces off, but not before (impulsively) stealing a book from Aurora's house.

Sasha, over the next few days, starts a no-strings relationship with Erik - this somewhat frustrates him, since he wants more. 

There's also something of a curse that starts to hit her, in ways Nowak presents almost entirely imagistically. Aurora knows she has stolen the book, and believes Sasha has the same kind of power she does - she's a witch, more or less, and calls on two others like her to make the traditional trinity to call down her curse on Sasha.

There's also what the book description calls a love triangle - Edmund hangs around, watching Sasha during the days before the curse comes on - but it's not entirely clear if he's in love with her, fascinated with her as an example of the outside world he's unfamiliar with, or just keeping an eye on her for his mother. In any case, he eventually comes to see her, as the curse starts affecting her more strongly, and retrieves the book and breaks the curse (these may be the same action).

Again, Nowak tells this story through gesture - drawn in an idiosyncratic way - and allusive dialogue and imagistic pictures, rather than by explaining in any detail. It's a visually fascinating book, full of striking images, with a story that I suspect different readers will take in somewhat different ways.

So many comics are easily pigeon-holed; it's refreshing to find one as specific and different, in both style and substance, as this one.

Better Things: Add It Up

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

It's probably cheating for me to call this song a favorite: I didn't hear it at the time.

I don't know exactly when I got into the Violent Femmes - the dates in iTunes just tell me they were part of my initial massive loading project in late '03 - but it was late enough that my copy of their iconic 1983 self-titled first record is the 20th anniversary edition. (Maybe I had the old version earlier, but, even in the best case, I was at least a decade late - I think I discovered them with the Add It Up compilation in the early '90s.)

So that's why this song wasn't part of This Year two years ago - I didn't hear it that year.

But the thing about time is that it's always getting later. Things are only new once, but they can be good forever. And I did discover that first Violent Femmes record, and loved it, as you should too. (Although it is possible to be too old on first hearing to love it, I think: there's something inherently young about early Violent Femmes, that gnawing longing of youth.) Blister in the Sun and Kiss Off are equally awesome, and Gone Daddy Gone not far behind them.

But the best song, at least for me right at this moment today, is Add It Up, one of the quintessential songs of teenage angst, desire and despair. (Singer Gordon Gano wrote most of that record while he was still in high school in Milwaukee, and it shows.)

It is one of the best ever "c'mon baby, we're both virgins but we should totally fuck right now" songs, building on a tradition of decades of songs that were more circumspect and less overtly horny to be clearly the next stage, the punk stage in that tradition.

But I look at your pants and I need I need a kiss
Why can't I get just one screw?
Why can't I get just one screw?
Believe me I know what to do
But something won't let me make love to you

The Femmes had a magnificent sound as well - punky but acoustic, propulsive and demanding, stark and loud and true, the sound of three guys committing totally to this song in this moment with their minimal gear and their raw energy. I think their longer early songs, especially this one and Kiss Off, give them the best scope to explore all the aspects of that sound - both also have excellent live versions on that Add It Up compilation.

Rock and roll is about fucking, when you come right down to it: it's why so many parents and bluestockings tried to ban it for so long. (Not just rock and roll, of course: vast swaths of popular music are about fucking; people like fucking.) And this is deeply in that tradition, late enough that it can be much more obvious about it than, say My Ding-a-Ling.

So, in your own life, when you need to make a life-changing decision, stop and

Wait a minute honey
I'm gonna add it up

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: You See But You Do Not Observe

People who know magic isn't real look straight at a ghost and see a flapping bed sheet. They deal with an irrefutable demonstration of how things really are the way an oyster deals with a speck of grit. The truth gets coated in a hard, shiny shell that can be worn proudly. A pearl is a lie you can roll between your teeth.

 - Kim Newman, Something More Than Night, p.37

Quote of the Week: A Lesson for Life

Realists are always getting intro trouble. They miss the sweet, easy victories of the daydreamer.

 - James Thurber, "The Case for the Daydreamer," pp.325 in Writings and Drawings

Something More Than Night by Kim Newman

There's more than a little discussion of the differences between mystery and horror in Kim Newman's 2021 novel Something More Than Night. Which is appropriate, because the book itself somewhat tries to split the difference - though, in the end, it falls solidly into horror, with the actions of the protagonists not being dispositive, with big set-piece scenes that run on for shock and effect, with pure monsters and their makers, with mad science and shocking transformations and deep lore and unpleasant truths about the way the world really is.

It also may be part of a longer sequence of Newman's works - there's a secondary antagonist, or maybe I mean a higher-level antagonist, named Ariadne, who appears on stage briefly only once but who is said to be something like the source of all evil in the world and who was part of a (mentioned but not narrated) major transformative event for our two main characters in their youth.

Frankly, for quite a while, Something More Than Night reads like maybe the fourth or fifth book in a series, with references to previous adventures and that origin story involving Ariadne. It's not, as far as I can tell - it seems to stand alone - but if Ariadne turns up in other Newman works, that could explain some of the odd aspects of the book.

This is a high-concept secret-history book, somewhat in the Tim Powers mode: famous people battling supernatural dangers in ways that illuminate their work in the real world. The famous people this time are author Raymond Chandler and actor Boris Karloff, who were English schoolboys at the same time in the same town, though they went to different schools. (Karloff was Billy Pratt in those days - Hollywood changes so many names along the way.) The third main character is their friend and mentor Joh Devlin, a DA investigator-turned-PI.

The three, in Newman's fictional world, spent much of the Thirties investigating creepy cases, in between their better-known work, and stopping at least a few fiends in human form. There's no specifics of supernatural elements mentioned about those previous cases, but there's no reason to believe they weren't supernatural, either. The mysterious, ages-old femme fatale Ariadne - who was invoked at some kind of ritual when Ray and Billy were schoolboys, at which they were among, and possibly the only, survivors - is behind some or most or all of these events, though we don't learn who she is or what she does or even what kind of a creature (vampire? goddess? human with mesmeric powers? something different or older?) she is.

We hope, in the early pages of this novel, that Something will be the story of their final confrontation with Ariadne, and to end with revelations to explain all of that. It is not, and does not. Hence my thinking that Ariadne is something like Brust's Devera: a motif or linking element more than an element of this novel.

Something also has an odd structure: it flashes back and forth multiple times, with a lot of sections of wildly different lengths, and jumps from mostly following Chandler's first-person narration to a couple of long chapters in third-person from Devlin's point of view. It's set in the late Thirties, it says, but the two main time periods seem to both be after The Big Sleep was published, and that was February of 1939.

Anyway, after the novel itself does some obfuscation with the timeline and sets up things that it doesn't entirely plan to explain, we settle into the main plot: Devlin pulls in Chandler and "Karloff" to investigate Ward Home Junior, a movie mogul and scion of a oil family - Newman is loading both barrels to show this guy is stereotypically California rich - who was just in some kind of a bizarre accident at his palatial home in the sprawling Home compound.

It turns out that Home's pet doctor Vaudois and the doctor's oversized, creepy assistant Norman Quin have developed a mad-science device for transferring "special abilities" - in this case, mostly side-show-freak things like quick healing or super flexibility - from one person to another. And the major test of that device left Home on fire, so that he's now recuperating at the Lamia Munro Clinic, also part of the Home compound.

First Devlin investigates the basement laboratory of Home's house - which is as full of horrors as might be expected, and where he learns that only one other subject survived the experiment, a woman now calling herself Laurel Ives, whose "special abilities" aren't exactly detailed but seem to include some manner of extended life or limited vulnerability.

(She also does not seem to have lost this ability from the experiment, though we see later in the book that abilities are taken away during the transference procedure with another character. I'm not sure if that's a plot hole, meant to be a clue as to "Ives's" true nature, or something else.)

Soon afterward, Chandler and Karloff go to the Munro Clinic, where they rapidly get in over their heads: Home is not only not in a coma, he's healthier than ever before, close to a foot taller, and possessed of near-superpowers. It all leads up to a big scene in a courtyard in the rain, where Karloff gets some special abilities himself, but our heroes do, eventually, get away, after yet more horror-movie scenes.

As I said, this is a horror story, so our main characters don't gather their forces and battle the monsters to save the world - that would be fantasy. They also don't find out exactly how it works, figure out how to counter it, and do so - that would be a thriller. And they don't gather evidence and present it to some authority who can shut down Home - that would be a mystery.

What they do is lie low and hope not to get killed, with a few more sections with varying timeframes finally coming back to the cliffhanger established way back at the beginning of the book. There is a more-or-less happy ending, but in the dying-fall mode: the characters don't initiate it, or have much to do with it, but they do realize that things have worked out in their favor, and are able to brush their hands together, say "well, that's that, then" and end the novel cleanly.

It's not the most satisfying ending one could have hoped for. Ariadne is resolutely not explained, let alone defeated. Home won't be a problem going forward, we think, but there's no reason the process his minions developed can't be used again, by just about anyone. Think of it as a sequel hook, if that makes it better, I suppose.

On the positive side, Newman does a good mock-Chandler throughout - it's not the same voice Chandler used to write his novels, but it feels authentic and has quite a bit of fine writing of its own. Newman's characters, though sometimes types - especially his villains - are interesting and well-drawn, and the central relationship between Chandler and Karloff is well-depicted and plausible. Something More Than Night, I found, is over-complicated in the telling and full of things that don't seem to begin or end in this book, but, all in all, it's a pleasant historical horror novel that does what it sets out to do: tell an untold, unexpected story of the friendship of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff.

Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the "how I got here" story - whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don't think that's dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is "how I got here," I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai's first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger. It's somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: "semi" is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn't mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we're reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed "Dear Beloved Stranger." I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to - I'm not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction - she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the "Dear Beloved Stranger." (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that "Cathy" was the real person in Pai's actual life, and that bit is less "semi" and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he's creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the "real" scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won't spoil that here. It's personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn't there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he's done since - which I did - we find that he's mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I'm always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make "here's how I broke through and actually started making art" stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there's more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he's been going since then.

The Interview by Manuelle Fior

With some creators, you hit the piece you love the most first, and spend the rest of your time wandering through their work, looking for something else that will give you that same sense of energy and power.

Manuele Fior is one of those for me: I've enjoyed all of his books since, but nothing has hit me like 5,000 km per second. He's a somewhat cerebral and assured maker of comics, working in soft tones (in this case, of blacks and greys, but more recently in color), who often uses SFnal themes in his work in a matter-of-fact, sophisticated way. I'd still send new readers to 5k kmps, but science fiction readers in particular will find a lot of interest in books like Celestia and Blackbird Days.

And also this one: The Interview, originally published in 2013 and translated by Jamie Richards for this 2017 American edition.

Like many of Fior's works, it's SFnal, set in 2048. Somewhere in Italy, Raniero is a fiftyish psychologist - he works from a hospital in the city, but lives in a suburban home, out in a zone not entirely safe since the unspecified Uprisings not too long ago. We think the Uprisings were pretty major - there are hints that Italy, or all of Europe, is now Balkanized - but Fior doesn't explain when or how or what it was. There was a major political/social disjunction, maybe a few years back, and it is still reverberating.

One of the reverberations is The New Convention, a movement among the younger generation. There is a manifesto laying out the principles, and we hear a bit about that - it sounds strident and demanding and visionary, all in ways that seem deeply unrealistic to those not committed to it, in the ways of all manifestos. The main tenets, or the ones that outsiders focus on, are the rejection of monogamy - the book description calls it "free love and alternative models to coupling and family." So not quite '60s communalism come again, but something very close - New Conventioneers seem to live in groups as well.

New Convention seems to be a positive, loving thing - all of those twenty-somethings fucking each other in whatever permutations they want, whenever they want - but there is also random violence in this world, with gangs of house-breakers roaming the now-dangerous suburbs, and it's not clear if they are connected to New Convention by anything but their shared youth.

One evening, Rainero is driving home, talking on his phone with a colleague. He sees something mysterious in the sky, glowing inverted pyramids or triangles. He crashes his car, runs out to see the apparition. He doesn't tell his wife Nadia about the vision, or his friend Franco who comes out to their house that night to tow the car away for repair.

But the next day, he has a new patient: a young woman, Dora, one of the New Convention. She's been institutionalized by her parents, because she claims to be telepathic, to be in communication with aliens. She says she sees them, glowing pyramids in the sky - most recently the night before.

Meanwhile, Raniero's wife Nadia is separating from him. We don't know exactly why, but we think Raniero has been distant, and maybe too much living in the past - the suburban house, the gas-powered old-fashioned car. She's picking out a new apartment in the city, and he goes with her to look at it. They're separating, but it's a polite, quiet, civilized separation - maybe because it's not inevitable, maybe because she hopes he can change, maybe because a dozen maybes. But she's moving out.

Before she goes, though, their suburban home is attacked by masked criminals one night - they are tied up, roughed up, Nadia threatened with rape, jewelry and valuables stolen. The thugs seem to have been sent specifically by someone - they say to each other that they were told not to hurt the couple too much.

Through these days, Raniero works with Dora, talks with her - about her "delusions," about the Convention. She's said to be very beautiful, though the way Fior draws her - that's her on the cover, big nose and all - does not strike me as notably attractive. Raniero is sexually attracted to her, of course - and, as part of the Convention, we suppose she's interested on some level. (The promiscuous must always want to have sex with us, right? Since we are clearly wonderful and special, since we are us.)

Events escalate. Raniero meets other members of Dora's communal living group, learns more about the Convention and what Dora thinks the aliens want her to do. And the pyramids come back, in a major way, in larger numbers, so that no one can deny they exist.

But The Interview, the bulk of it, is not the story of the world or the aliens - it's Raniero's story, of how meeting Dora, working with her, seeing the glowing pyramids, changed him, diverted his life. So the main story ends with him, with the decisions he made.

Well, I say his decisions - Fior might not agree. There's a coda at the end, that provides the title: it's a hundred years later, and Dora is being interviewed as a beloved, respected, world-famous leader. Her telepathy is now ubiquitous, and it's implied that human relationships are vastly different, now that everyone can read minds - this seems to be more of a "flash of insight" telepathy than a "I can see all your thoughts in real time" telepathy, but I don't put too much weight on that distinction. Over time insights build on each other.

The world seems civilized and stable; we hope it's better than our own, or the world we saw in 2048. The people in it think the aliens didn't mean to do anything - if they even were intelligent aliens, not just some bizarre natural phenomenon - but the glowing pyramids, whatever they were, just passed through our space, and caused changes in their wake.

The Interview is a book full of ideas and thoughts: like a lot of Fior, it will not explain or declaim those ideas. They're in the weave, to be plucked out and examined, intrinsically part of the story. This one might not have grabbed me quite as deeply as 5k kmps, but it's a deep, thoughtful, capacious SF story with a depth of nuance and gesture rare in comics.

The Last Flower by James Thurber

This is the second of what will be four or five posts on the Library of America James Thurber Writings and Drawings volume. I'm reading it in chunks, since I'm not the man that can go straight through a thousand-page book these days, and most of those chunks are excerpts from the various books Thurber published, because LoA didn't want to put out a multi-volume complete Thurber for whatever reason (I'm guessing budget or space on the list or a sense of his importance; mostly likely a combination of all three).

The first post was titled after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times. This one is slightly sillier, since I'm going to write about two hundred-odd pages of Thurber under the name of a short fabulistic drawn book from the eve of WWII. The Last Flower is available as a separate book, if you want it that way.

See that first post for more details on Thurber and the LoA book, if you care.

The clump I got to this time is from the late Thirties: extensive selections from the two collections The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze and Let Your Mind Alone!, and then Last Flower itself.

Middle-Aged Man is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction - or, rather, has a bunch of stories about mostly married couples, some of which are explicitly framed as reminiscences of Thurber, and some of which have characters described in the third person and given other names. They're all in the same tone and style, all in that Thurber voice, and they work well together as a collection. (I have no idea how much else was in the original book, or how similar it was; compiler Garrison Keillor edited out some unknown amount of material from all of these books to fit it into a single LoA volume.) There are a few autobiographical pieces that are not about men and women, too, I should mention. Particularly the famous "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox," which many readers may have found in some anthology somewhere or other.

Let Your Mind Alone! is a somewhat more themed collection - the full title includes and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces. Let Your Mind Alone! itself is a series of ten linked essays about a bunch of then-well-known pop-psychology books; Thurber returns to the same four or five writers repeatedly over the course of the series. All the books seem to be in the "how to be happy" mode, aimed at a relatively affluent, urban, educated audience - I'm pretty sure this series of essays was in The New Yorker originally; it's exactly that sort of audience - and Thurber takes a very dim view of all of their recommendations and ideas. It's amusing, but not particularly relevant, ninety years later - we've had at least a dozen different pop-psych phases since then, and this one is quite musty and unfamiliar, although the general outlines don't change all that much.

Also from Let Your Mind Alone! comes eight miscellaneous pieces - pretty much along the same lines as the ones in Middle-Aged Man, and equally amusing. These tend to skew more towards autobiography, though it also included one of Thurber's best-known man/woman stories, "The Breaking Up of the Winships."

And then The Last Flower was published in November of 1939, and apparently made very quickly just before that time: it could be seen as a very early graphic novel, telling its story with one big image to each page with a caption underneath. (The alternative interpretation is that it's a picture-book format, like so many books for children, only this one is for an adult audience.) It starts in the aftermath of "World War XII," which led to the collapse of civilization. Most of humanity is full of anomie and despair, for the usual fabulist unspecified period of time, but one young woman and one young man nurture the last flower in the world, which leads to the rebirth of civilization...and, then, inevitably, to the next world war, which reduces the world to only one man, one woman, and one flower.

I see that Last Flower is generally considered guardedly optimistic, even with its cyclical destruction. But I instead see escalation in it: WW XII destroys civilization but leaves a large number of people alive to go on; WW XIII kills all but two people. Clearly, to my pessimistic mind, the next cycle will finish the job entirely.

Thurber is a somewhat limited writer: he had a distinctive style and set of concerns (Last Flower is mostly outside of those, though, I should say) which he turned into a stream of amusing and thoughtful pieces for about thirty years. For most of us, a thousand pages of Thurber would be too much all at once, but two hundred pages or so - like I did this time - is a fine dose, and I recommend it.