Gahan Wilson's Even Weirder

I'm pretty sure I read this book; I'm pretty sure I owned it. Gahan Wilson's Even Weirder is a 1996 Tor collection of Wilson's single-panel gags, mostly from Playboy (his best-paid and most prestigious venue for most of his career), and I was paying a lot of attention to everything Tor published in those days for the day-job.

(And was then, as now, a big Wilson fan too.)

Since then, I had a major flood at my house in 2011 that destroyed what I said at the time was 10,000 books - I may have overestimated a bit, but it was somewhere in that ballpark - plus all my records of that old day-job. So I have vague memories of this book, and I can't see how I could possibly have missed it, but the only thing I can point to is an entry in my reading notebook to say that I did read it on Halloween of 1996, a few weeks before publication.

That was a long time ago, and a book of single-panel cartoons isn't the kind of thing that sticks in the mind tightly to begin with. So I was able to read Even Weirder as if it were new to me this time.

By my count, there are 232 cartoons here, all presented in black and white, each on their own page. It's full of the usual Wilson material - nervous kids in nice clothes, monsters of all sorts with oversized features and appendages, various aliens and talking animals, more fiendish Santa Clauses than you would expect, sinister cultists and mad scientists, devils and Satan both in Hell and out of it, and two different gags about a wife bricking her husband up, Cast of Amontillado-style. There's also a whole lot of slightly more conventional setups: dinner tables, office desks, diner counters, jury boxes, streetscapes, men and their dogs, analyst couches and doctor's offices.

Wilson was one of the great gag cartoonists of his time - of all time, I'd go further - with a uniquely creepy, horror-infused style and a facility with all of the random wellsprings of humor and a point of view uniquely his own: jauntily, often shockingly and unexpectedly positive in the face of disaster and apocalypse, cynical at its core but not dwelling on that, and full of a whistling-past-the-graveyard jeu d'esprit.

This is a fine collection of his work - but I should also say that he was pretty consistent, and had a long career. The best Wilson collection is the gigantic magisterial Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons (which I also owned, pre-flood; I had it for about a year), but any of his collections are worth picking up if you see them. If you ever liked Gross or Addams, Wilson is right up your alley. (And vice versa, if you're already a Wilson fan.)

Planet Paradise by Jesse Lonergan

This is not a sequel to Hedra. There's no way it could be set in the same universe. But they're from the same creator, from the same year, in the same genre, with a similar feel and with SFnal technology that works roughly the same way.

So maybe it's a companion piece, or another element in an era in Jesse Lonergan's career. I liked both books a lot, so I'm hoping something like the latter: I'd be happy to see him do SF books like this for a while, if he and the market agree.

(Although...they're both from four years ago, and I suspect the market has not agreed, since the comics market has been deeply disagreeable for close to a decade now.)

But let me get more specific about Planet Paradise, a roughly hundred-page standalone SF graphic novel. It's the story of a vacation that goes wrong.

Eunice and Peter live in some medium-future multi-system society, seemingly a pretty rich and healthy and happy one. They're off for a vacation on Rydra-17, billed as "the Paradise Planet." The book opens with them individually settling into their hibernation pods, which will then be slotted into bays in the ship.

This isn't a fast-FTL universe; it takes more than eleven days in transit to go from wherever-we-started to Rydra-17. The two crewmembers of this unnamed ship are the only ones awake for the journey.

There's a cliché that says a story is about what happens when something goes wrong: that's the case here. There's some kind of malfunction. The ship ends up crash-landing on some unknown world. One of the crewmembers is killed; the pods are scattered across the landscape and some of them have failed or broken, killing their inhabitants.

Eunice's pod is intact, but it pops open. We don't know why. But there she is: unexpectedly on an alien world, in the middle of a disaster scene, the only human on the surface.

Well, not quite the only one. The captain of the ship, Wanda, also survived: she's got a broken leg and is deep in the wreckage. Wanda yells for help, and Eunice saves her. So then the two of them can work to save the rest and call for rescue.

It's not that simple: Wanda is demanding and injured and obnoxious and treats Eunice as just the hands to do the things she wants done. Eunice is overwhelmed and untrained and unsure. And there are unexpected large carnivores on this planet.

They do manage to find a distress beacon and set it up. An emergency service agent arrives a few days later - again, travel between planets in this universe is at least several days. That does not go exactly as planned, either.

But Eunice and Wanda do get off this planet. Eunice does finally get to Rydra-17, and her vacation with Peter. But, as we see in the last scene, her experience has changed her - unexpectedly, making her more confident and able in another dangerous situation.

Lonergan's panels here aren't quite as visually inventive as the wordless Hedra, but he plays with size and sequence and format a lot - there are some excellent big vertical panels near the beginning to emphasize the solidity of the ship and the old-fashioned lying-back take-off position, among other fun sequences - and his art is dynamic, great at both quiet storytelling and the more energetic action moments.

He also makes his world lived-in and specific; his characters consume soap-opera-ish media and grumble to each other about corporate budget cuts. This seems to be a pretty nice universe, all-in-all, but it's not perfect, and the imperfections led to this story - we can imagine those same budget cuts caused a little slacking off of maintenance that caused the original malfunction.

This is not a big story: it has a small cast, a short time-frame, and a modest scope. But it's strongly focused, has a great relatable main character in Eunice, looks lovely, and does everything it needs to do smartly, quickly, and with great style. It is a neat SF graphic novel, totally enjoyable and self-contained, and I would be happy if the world had many more books like that.

The Face by Jack Vance

I don't want to say that Kirth Gersen has fallen into a groove - or that the novels about him have - but there are similarities to all of his pursuits of Demon Princes to this point. His targets are all monomaniacs, not just criminals and ganglords but obsessives about specific things, cruel and mercurial in their temperaments and demanding that things be done their way all the time. They also all hide as other people, concealing their true identities behind masks when traveling through the civilized galaxy, only revealing themselves fully in their lawless homes of the Beyond.

Also common in multiple books: Gersen tracks them, one by one, partially by using the fortune he made in the second book, The Killing Machine. He worries both that he's losing the edge that gives him a chance to find and kill these monsters, and that he's forever unable to have a normal human life because of that edge. He meets women he's attracted to - in this book, as in the last two - which brings that contrast more strongly to his attention. He wants to find love, to live like a normal person...but he can't let himself do that.

Not while any of the Demon Princes still live. He was made into a weapon by his grandfather, and that weapon needs to be used fully before it can be put away.

The Face is the fourth of the novels: it followed The Star King, The Killing Machine, and The Palace of Love. The novel itself takes place what we think is soon after the previous books: it's never quite clear how much time is passing in this series, but it's not very long: maybe a few years, beginning to end. But the book came twelve years after its predecessor - readers in the real world at the time might have wondered if Vance would ever come back to the Demon Princes and finish the series.

(He did, obviously. My memory is that personally I only started reading Vance around the time of the last book, in 1981, so for my entire relevant reading life, the Demon Princes was a series complete.)

The fourth Demon Prince is Lens Larque, a sadist fond of tricks and schemes, a man from the cruel mostly-desert world Dar Sai and whose way of viewing the world - Vance does not emphasize this, but makes it clear as the novel goes on - is that of his people, only in exaggerated, hair-trigger form, just like them only more so.

Gersen spends the novel tracking the purpose and history of a now-worthless mining company that Larque controls through intermediaries, as always looking for a way to find the man he's chasing, to get close enough to kill his target. Along the way, he spends time on Dar Sai, gaining control of that mining company and learning more about the Darsh people, and then on Dar Sai's sister planet Methel, a richer, more comfortable world that hates and is hated by the Darsh in the way of neighboring nations everywhere.

Of course, Gersen does find Larque, and does kill him. That's the plot of the series. But the hunt is the point - both how Gersen has to figure out the aim of that seemingly useless mining company, how he gathers the supposedly worthless shares of that company to take it over, and all the things he learns about Larque and the Darsh along the way.

And now there is only one left: just one Demon Prince, the leader and organizer of them all. And Vance would get to his story much more quickly than he did to The Face, just a couple of years later. 

(Consumer Note: I linked The Face to the current standalone edition, a hardcover published by the Vance-family-controlled Spatterlight Press. That's certainly a solid choice, but the book is also available in a cheaper omnibus edition, The Demon Princes, Vol. 2, which is how I read it.)

Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces by Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati

The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition.

And this is all true, as far as I can see. This all happened, to the real Valérie Villieu, and she's telling that story to us, with the aid of artist Raphaël Sarfati. It was a little while ago - Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces covers a few years in the mid-Aughts, with the 2007 French presidential election somewhere in the middle - and the French edition came out in 2012, to be eventually translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2020 English-language edition from Humanoids.

Josephine was a woman in her mid-eighties, living alone in a small Paris apartment, as she had for nearly sixty years. She'd recently been found wandering disoriented in the street, and, after a brief hospitalization, was back in her apartment with daily visits from caregivers and an official legal conservatorship to manage her affairs. Villieu was working as a visiting nurse, with a roster of patients like Josephine, who she would see several times a week, to evaluate and support, administering medications and keeping track of their conditions. Villieu seems to have been part of a nursing team; she uses "we" somewhat regularly to talk about the work done, and occasionally shows what I think is a colleague also visiting Josephine.

But it's mostly Villieu's personal experience: how she met this woman, how they interacted, what happened over those years, how Josephine affected Valérie.

A lot of the book is the day-to-day: complaining about the often-lackadaisical work of the caregivers, battling to get the conservator to actually do something and not just complain about how many cases he was handling, and slowly gaining Josephine's trust. Villieu writes at length about the work she does, and how she interacted with Josephine, and what Josephine was like as a person - this is a graphic novel with extensive captions, a very narrated story.

Villieu cared for Josephine for years - and I mean "cared" in both the professional and the personal sense. And she makes their relationship real here, without sugarcoating it. Josephine had a serious, unreversable, progressive mental illness, that confused her and made her forget thousands of things, that changed her moods and made her combative at times. Dementia is one of those horrible diseases we don't like to think about - for ourselves or for ones we care for - since it turns the sufferer into a different person, bit by bit stripping away important pieces of who they were and replacing those with a pseudo-childish shell, smaller and diminished and occasionally realizing that.

(I may be biased: a very close family member is going through something similar right now, so this is more real to me than another health problem would be.)

Josephine was still a quirky, interesting person: dementia had stolen a lot from her, but a lot of her was still there, the woman who had lived in that Paris apartment for decades and still had stories of the '50s and '60s to tell when she could remember them.

That's who Villieu wants to celebrate: the woman she met, behind the disease, the woman she supported and helped for a few years, giving her some more happy life at a point when she could easily have been shoved into an institution and left to decline quickly. Little Josephine is a more serious, deeper book than the cover would make a reader expect, but it's well worth the journey.

Portions for Foxes: Kate Miller-Heidke

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I think I'm behind on this week's performer's career. She's talented and quirky and from the opposite side of the world from me - Australia - and despite how global we're all supposedly these days, some things travel farther than others, for no reasons I can articulate.

So I have a ten-year old song from her, and I bet she's done a bunch of things since then that I would love as well. I may have to do some digging, and see what else is out there.

But, right now, for today, I have Jimmy, a 2014 song from Kate Miller-Heidke, an opera-trained singer/songwriter/bandleader from Queensland.

It's about that one friend you have who's kind of a jerk but, somehow, you stay friends. In this song, his name is Jimmy.

I said "Jimmy, don't embarrass me
I don't want a display
Everybody's staring, see
I'm just not in the mood today,"

But Jimmy is a force unto himself and just isn't having that. I'd quote the refrain, but - like a lot of music - it doesn't make much sense as flat words on a page. It all depends on hearing it, hearing the chugging, surging music, and feeling it in the moment.

OK, maybe I do need to say it: Jimmy has a soul full of guns.

I don't know what that means. I don't even know if it means anything: if it's an actual Aussie expression, or random slang Miller-Heidke and her friends picked up for a while or what. But it's striking and specific and absolutely fits this character.

The Jimmies of this world will always be with us. And, sometimes, they're worth it. This is a song about that.

Books Read: August 2024

This is the monthly index post for the blog; if you find it useful, yay for you but it's really something I do for myself. Here's what I read this past month; I will add links eventually:

Benoist Simmat and Stéphane Douay, The Incredible Story of Cooking (digital, 8/3)

Algis Budrys, The Iron Thorn (in SF Gateway Omnibus, 8/3)

Nancy Peña, The Cat from the Kimono (digital, 8/4)

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, 8/4)

David Prudhomme, Cruising Through the Louvre (digital, 8/10)

Julia Gfrörer, Black Is the Color (digital, 8/11)

P.G. Wodehouse, Big Money (8/11)

Charles Burns, Final Cut (digital, 8/16)

John Allison and Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off (digital, 8/17)

Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog (8/17)

Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Matt Smith, Hellboy in Love (digital, 8/18)

Peter and Maria Hoey, In Perpetuity (digital, 8/24)

Jimmy Bemon and Emilie Boudet, Superman Isn't Jewish (But I Am...Kinda) (digital, 8/25)

Lisa Goldstein, Ivory Apples (bound galleys, 8/25)

Koren Shadmi, All Tomorrow's Parties: The Velvet Underground Story (digital, 8/26)

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, 8/26)

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger (digital, 8/27)

Jean-Christophe Deveney and PMGL, Haruki Murakami Manga Stories, Vol. 2 (8/28)

A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science (in The Sweet Science & Other Writings, 8/28)

Jeffrey Brown, Kids Are Still Weird (digital, 8/29)

Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation (8/29)

Axelle Lenoir, Secret Passages: 1985-1986 (8/30)

Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog (8/30)

Tara O'Connor, Fly By Night (8/31)

More books next month - I assume.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 31, 2024

One book came in the mail this week, so I'm going to tell you about it here. (I also got books other ways, since I was on vacation, but I'm bumping those to later weeks, for mostly not-wanting-to-spend-all-my-vacation-time-typing reasons.)

Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror is a new reprint anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, gathering twenty-one stories, mostly from the last five or so years. There's also a cluster stories from the Aughts - a Stewart O'Nan from 2000, Margo Lanagan's "Singing My Sister Down" from 2004, other stories from Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Graham Jones, and Tim Nickels - and one real oldie, Charles Birkin's "A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" from 1964. Other authors included here are Laird Barron, Livia Llewellyn, and Simon Bestwick - and about a dozen others; if you squint you might be able to read all the names on the cover.

I think the subtitle explains it pretty well; these are stories of psychological horror. Datlow is the premier editor of short horror fiction of our time, so I trust her judgement. (I mean, I might not read the book, because I'm not fond of horror, but I have a vast and undying respect for her, and firmly believe she picks the best stories of the kind that I don't like.)

This is a trade paperback from Tachyon, officially publishing a week from Tuesday. Though...I have a real book in my hands right now, so your favorite bookseller might just be able to get you your own copy slightly before that date, if you ask them nicely.

Quote of the Week: Not His Favorite Place, I'm Guessing

Las Vegas is merely another low, drab, sun-baked stucco flatlands town - America has a thousand such, and I've probably seen the shopping centers of a quarter of them - but that one has a hot glittering diseased tumor sticking up in the middle of it. Get a high-floor suite in one of the Strip hotels and look out the window and you see that you're merely in one of a cluster of Crackerjack boxes surrounded by flat-roofed grammar schools and crowded-together trailer camps on a dry flat desert with a circle of low hills at a distance all around, as though this were the world's largest and most filled-in meteor crates. I once heard someone describe Las Vegas as a city built in an ashtray, and that about sums it up.

 - Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, p.227

Bigby Bear, Vol. 1 by Philipe Coudray

"All-ages" can mean a lot of things. Sometimes it means "designed for the youngest, dullest children and shoved out into the world with a vain hope anyone more experienced will find the tiniest bit of joy in it."

And sometimes it means something like "aimed vaguely at children by ruthlessly removing everything even slightly complicated or nuanced."

But it can also mean "pitched in a tone and using language that bright elementary-schoolers can understand, but serious about itself and unafraid to tackle the kind of Big Ideas that new, smart people are drawn to."

As far as I can tell, the "Bigby Bear" stories of French cartoonist Philipe Coudray are of the third type. This first collection - Bigby Bear, Vol. 1 - contains a hundred single-page stories, which I assume first appeared one by one in French somewhere, but the book doesn't explain where or how. That original publication is copyright 2012-2018, though I suspect that was the two or three smaller collections that were combined for this English-language edition. This version was translated by Miceal Ogriefa and published by Humanoids' all-ages BiG imprint in 2019.

Coudray uses a cartoony, simple, energetic style to tell these short vignettes about a thoughtful, quirky bear and his friend Rabbit, along with some other occasional forest animals as supporting cast. The stories about about exploration, wordplay, some humorous reversals, and a whole lot of cartoon thinking - digging a deep hole to see the sunset first, exploring how shadows work as the day goes on, and other things like that.

Again, mostly ideas that an eight-year-old might have had, in exactly that way or a less sophisticated version - the odd, "how does this really work" ideas that are partially joke, partially an attempt to understand how the world really does work, and partially tying to sketch out how the world should work.

This is amusing and fun, not quite getting into meta-comics but occasionally coming close - Bigby is an explorer and a thinker, a creator of art and an active outdoorsman (well, he's a bear, so I suppose everything he does is outdoors, and he's not a man, but you know what I mean). He's an engaging character in a wide world full of color and life and ideas, and his stories are the kind of all-ages work that works just as well for adults as for children.

I Know a Trick Worth Two of That by Donald Westlake writing as Samuel Holt

This is the second book in a series Donald Westlake wrote in the '80s - it appeared under the pseudonym "Samuel Holt," also the first-person narrator and the amateur sleuth hero - that was supposed to be a test-case to see if he could be successful a second time under a different name. As it happened - as it always happens, since publishing sales forces want to sell books, and asking them to avoid talking about a book's biggest selling point is irrational - his name leaked out, and Westlake considered the experiment spoiled.

The first one was One Of Us Is Wrong, which I read recently. The second one is I Know a Trick Worth Two of That. There were two more following immediately, and then it stopped. If the series had continued and flourished, perhaps Janet Evanovich would have had to find a different gimmick, which probably only amuses me.

This second time out, the book is a little flabbier, with a somewhat flat ending. The stakes are lower - though there's still international intrigue lurking behind the plot. It's strengths are, like the first, Westlake's always-smooth prose, the voice of Holt, and the mildly jaundiced sidebar comments on Hollywood gleaned from Westlake's time as a screenwriter. (He notes in his foreword that he would have never used "that material" under his own name, but it seems incredibly tame - maybe some of the characters were drawn more closely from life than I realize, but there are no hatchet jobs here.)

Sam Holt was a cop on Long Island when he got hired as an extra for a movie, decided he liked the work, and eventually found himself starring as Packard, which seems to be the answer to the question "What if Quincy, M.E. was played by Magnum, P.I.?" The show ran five years, making Holt successful and rich enough for the rest of his life, while also making him both want to do more acting and utterly typecast as the one role he doesn't want to do anymore. So he has money and free time, friends and lovers on both coasts, and an English butler.

In this book, his old partner from the Mineola PD gets in touch: Doug Walford moved into private security and stumbled into a gigantic criminal enterprise. Doug doesn't know all the details - and can't prove any of it - but it involves the mob, international trade, major drug companies, and at least a few highly-placed US government officials (and probably electeds, as well). Doug has been targeted - an "accident" took out his girlfriend and child already, which he barely survived.

Sam agrees to hide Doug in his New York townhouse, for at least a little while, and to try to help him get to a point he can blow the whistle on the conspiracy. Sam also has a big annual party coming up at his house, and goes to some effort to conceal Doug's identity from his guests.

But Doug is killed at the party, in a way that looks like suicide and hints at a semi-locked-room mystery. Sam is sure it was murder, and has to investigate his friends to find out which one of them did it.

There is a big gathering of the suspects at the end, and Sam does the j'accuse thing. It works OK, but it's not as flashy as the action sequence that ended the first book, and it's a bit of a dying fall. The murder is solved, but the conspiracy is as strong as even - though a subplot did put some official investigative folks onto it, so we readers can assume it will be fixed by someone, eventually.

I still don't think you really want to have a book with a global conspiracy that potentially goes high up in your nation's government and just let it drop at the end of a book, though. It feels like an unfired Chekhov Gun. But this is a forty-year-old book from a writer now ten years dead, so it is what it is.

Mark Twain's The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg by Wander Antunes

This is a story doubly distanced: originally written more than a hundred years ago, about a small-town America that is no longer like this (assuming it ever was) and interpreted by a Brazilian creator for a French audience in 2022. But human hypocrisy, self-regard, and greed are eternal.

"The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg," the story by Twain, appeared in 1899 and was the title story of his 1900 collection. The version here, Mark Twain's The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, was adapted and drawn by Wander Antunes, with some small changes to bring modern readers in more easily, and translated into English for this edition by Benjamin Croze. (The book is silent about whether Antunes originally worked in Portuguese, which I assume is his native language, or French, the language of first publication.)

Antunes is mostly faithful to Twain's original: it's set in the same time-period, in the same small town renowned (mostly by itself) for its honesty, and Antunes uses a lot of Twain's prose for captions. He mostly diverges from the original by including Twain's characters Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as something like reader inserts or a muted Greek chorus, supposedly visiting this town (even though their ages completely don't work - they were boys before the Civil War, and this is the turn of the century) during the events of the story and learning about it from a minor character.

This somewhat softens the story: the point of "Hadleyburg" is that we the readers identify fully with the lying, self-justifying "prominent men" and don't have a clearly innocent and honest viewpoint to latch on to.

So how was Hadleyburg corrupted? An unnamed stranger had an unnamed offense in that town, and was petty or spiteful enough that, a year later, he devised a plan to shame the entire town because of it. He delivered a sack, supposedly containing a small fortune, to one of the prominent couples of the town, along with a note. The note explained that a stranger passed through Hadleyburg a year before, and was aided by one of the men of the town - but, sadly, the stranger does not know the man's name. He did, however, remember a piece of advice the Hadleyburg man gave him, which is written inside a second sealed envelope, for proof.

So the fortune will go to whichever Hadleyburg man can say he met the stranger, and repeat the advice he gave.

There are two wrinkles, though, that we as readers know. First, as is fairly obvious, the whole story is a lie: there was no helpful Hadleyburg man, and no one in town can remember the helpful saying that was never given. Second, the stranger sends letters to every one of the nearly-twenty prominent men of the town, giving them each the supposed advice, so they can all claim the fortune. (Or, of course, if they were actually honest, they would do no such thing.)

There is a big scene with the local preacher reading out all of the letters, which goes about as badly as it possibly could: all of the prominent men, save only the one who received the original sack - saved by the preacher for an unknown reason and mentally tormented because of it - have their letters read out, and are all revealed as liars and crooks when the stranger's explanation is reveled.

Even worse, the supposed sack of gold coins is full of worthless lead.

In Antunes' version, Tom and Huck leave town for happier places, having seen the whole thing, and the town (as in Twain's original) is humbled, becoming actually honest for the first time.

Antunes keeps this talky, mostly interior story lively, with a lot of great 19th-century-looking faces and good scene-setting - his pages tend to start as nine-panel grids and shift around to fit the action, though mostly staying as three equal tiers. The moral of the story is still as obvious as it ever was, maybe even more so as Antunes throws in some complete innocents to comment on the action and make it even clearer - he's making a book for an audience that probably doesn't see itself in the "prominent men" of a small town, unlike Twain.

Eartha by Cathy Malkasian

Cathy Malkasian's 2017 graphic novel Eartha is a metaphor for social media. It's more than that, too, but that's the log-line: it is centrally an argument against fake "connectivity" and the addiction to bad news.

(Whether the problem it metaphorizes is even our current problem in 2024 I'll leave as an argument the reader can have; I'm a bit dubious myself.)

Our main character is a very large woman - twice as tall as everyone around her, and notably more solidly built as well - among the gnomish happy rustics of the sleepy town of Echo Fjord. She's the usual soft-hearted giant: we first see her saving people from a flood of water caused by her own mother's flightiness. Most of the folks of Echo Fjord either grow crops or help to corral and progress the dreams of the faraway City Across the Sea, but Eartha has what seems to be a unique role: she's so much taller and stronger that she's the one to carry all the heavy things, and we keep seeing her pick up and carry the older people, as if they are babies and she is the adult.

The dreams of the city people is an important, complicated system - evocative without being quite as directly metaphorical as the didactic social media metaphor (which I'll get to in a moment). The people of the City Across the Sea have busy, complicated lives, so their dreams separate from them quickly. Those dreams manifest in Echo Fjord, generally popping out of the soil as purple-hued people - who look mostly like their dreamers - focused on a monomania and with a brilliant beacon of light shining straight up from the top of their heads. The Echo Fjordians attach "shadows" to the dreams to keep them from flying away, and watch them as they act out their psychodramas - usually a few times - before they inevitably go through the Dream Departures area and dissipate while crossing a broad, sunny field.

The Echo Fjordians have been guiding these dreams for a thousand years - before that, they were major trading partners with the City, but they broke off contact because it was unseemly to profit from knowing their trading partners' innermost secrets. So this is a major activity of these people, but it's not an industry: it's amusing and entertaining and central to their lives in the way that a church or tradition could be, but it doesn't bring them money or anything positive other than psychologically.

And the dreams are waning. It's been a week since there were any, and then we see a bare few of them.

Eartha, of course, is more worried than most people about the change, and goes around talking to various Echo Fjordians to figure out what to do. The aged keeper of the Archives, Old Lloyd, tricks her into taking a journey to the City to find out what happened - Eartha is uniquely right for this job, not just for the physical reasons we can see, but due to other things Old Lloyd knows that become clear later.

So she takes a small rowboat, and sets off. Somehow - this is a fable, basically, so a lot of things are "somehow" - she arrives at the City, to find it in turmoil. The average people of the city are selling everything they own, bit by bit, to a group of men in plaid jackets called the Bouncers, in return for biscuits with four-word "news" reports printed on them. The biscuit messages are all negative - HYSTERICAL JACKASS STABS RECLUSE; that kind of thing - and the point of the exercise is to be connected to the truth of the world, which is negative, and to gain that knowledge by giving up material things.

Of course, it's all a scam, but it takes a long time for the naïve, confused Eartha to realize that. The bouncers are led by a man named Primus, a nasty twisted authoritarian obsessed with women's breasts. Eartha runs into him, wanders through the city, is led by a talking cat who knows more than it's willing to tell Eartha, and eventually learns the truth.

The biscuit business started out normally, but it picked up steam when they started printing messages on the biscuits. The messages are not actually true - they're just generated randomly - but they seem true because they're negative, and that led to the feedback loop that ended with the Bouncers controlling the whole city and close to owning everything.

There is a resistance movement - which sends rubbings of gravestone life-summaries down gutter downspouts, and is more effective in breaking the hold of the biscuits on metropolitans' minds than you would expect - and Eartha joins it, in her confused, easily-led way. It turns out that many of the major characters - mostly ones I haven't mentioned - are related to each other, and we learn their stories.

Eartha is a didactic story with a message to deliver, so of course it has to end well, to bring Eartha back home and underline its message. (Rural is better than urban, lives are each unique and special, murderous authoritarians should be stopped - that kind of thing.) Old Lloyd shows up again, to deliver large pieces of that message.

Eartha looks lovely - its people are quirky and odd-looking, with lived-in faces, so maybe "lovely" isn't quite the right word - and it's full of ideas, impressively constructed and intensely imagined. I had a vague sense that it was a long argument against something that has already shifted substantially since the book was published, but that's not the book's fault.

Portions for Foxes: Ingrid Michaelson

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I've posted about this song before. I had a moment of wondering "am I allowed to do that?" but then remembered: it's my blog; there are no rules.

(I also posted, some years back, about another song by the same singer, Time Machine. That's less relevant, but, hey, I like to link.)

This week's song is The Chain by Ingrid Michaelson. As is pretty usual for me, it's another song about heartbreak, betrayal, and love gone wrong.

There's been a breakup, a bad one, and the singer is talking to the one who's gone away:

So glide away on soapy heels
And promise not to promise anymore
And if you come around again
Then I will take the chain from off the door

I always catch on that "promise not to promise anymore." Does it mean "don't lie to me again"? Does it mean "next time, it has to just be casual"? Does it mean "I'll take you back as long as you don't say anything stupid and ruin it"? Or all of those and more, all mixed together?

I'll never say that I'll never love,
Oh, but I don't say a lot of things,
And you my love are gone

I think of this song as more definitively "this is over" in my head than the song actually says. The title is explicitly referencing "if you come back, I'll let you." It's not quite a "please come back" song, but it's close.

What I love the most about this song I can't quote - towards the end, Michaelson does that refrain as a round, multi-tracking her voice, and going round and round it again and again, overlapping, as the music swells behind them - behind the "them" that is all her, all the individual voices that are all one person - and then it crashes and and it's just her voices, dropping out one by one as they hit the end of the refrain until it's just that one single voice ending it.

It's one of those perfect musical moments that comes around every so often, doing that paradigmatic thing - the soft LOUD soft transition that works so well in music when done right - and Michaelson just kills it. It is glorious and almost makes me ignore just how ambivalent the song is overall.

Quote of the Week: As True As Anything Else

How could a superstition be true? Control pondered that later, as he turned his attention to his trip to the border along with a cursory look at a file Whitby had pulled for him titled simply "Theories." Maybe "superstition" was what snuck into the gaps, the cracks, when you worked in a place with falling morale and depleted resources. Maybe superstition was what happened when your director went missing in action and your assistant director was still mourning the loss. Maybe that was when you fell back on spells and rituals, the reptile brain saying to the rest of you, "I'll take it from here. You've had your shot." It wasn't even unreasonable, really. How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach?

 - Jeff Vandermeer, Authority, p.105

Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Ten years ago, Jeff Vandermeer published a whole trilogy in a year. That's always a dangerous, gutsy move, but I think it worked for him: both artistically and commercially, popping him up from a well-regarded quirky slipstream writer working mostly in the genre-fiction world into a solid position in the wider literary universe. Better yet: I don't think he changed the way he wrote or his subjects - he just got better publishing support and the kind of appreciative quotes that subtly imply this is not genre fiction, because it's good.

(Those quotes are always half bullshit - they were when Kingsley Amis made fun of them in the 1960s, and still are now - but they do their job, and I guess that makes them useful, even if they rely on a kind of reader who is paradoxically both fond of literary invention and skill and unable to see quality anywhere but a narrow plot of "good" fiction.)

The trilogy was called "The Southern Reach." The first book was Annihilation and this second one is Authority. (I'll get to the third book Acceptance eventually. It took me four years to get to #1 and six more for #2, so don't hold your breath.)

The whole series is about Area X: a coastal region in the Southern US - facing south, probably in the Florida panhandle - that had a transformational paranormal event thirty years ago. (The books take place in an unspecified time, probably slightly in the future from when they were published, but it's deliberately vague. Area X could have formed in the 1980s, or 2020.) A impenetrable - well, utterly destructive, as far as anyone can tell, which is nearly the same thing - border came down, except for one access point. Everything made by humanity inside Area X - except for one lighthouse - disappeared or was destroyed. Strange organic life has been growing there. There are other, weirder, less definable changes as well. Explorers into Area X come back transformed, if at all.

The Southern Reach is the organization - it rolls up to "Central," probably some acronymed agency we have heard of - that monitors and investigates and sends expeditions into Area X. They are themselves secret, as is Area X: the general population thinks there was some kind of ecological disaster, and everyone has been kept away from the region.

Southern Reach is also the name of their headquarters building, not far from the border of Area X.

Vandermeer doesn't write trilogies like most people do. Before this, he - to quote myself - "wrote three books about the city of Ambergris... the collection City of Saints and Madmen, the metafictional novel Shriek: An Afterword, and the detective story Finch." Similarly, Annihilation was a novel built from the journals kept by one woman on an expedition - called just "the biologist" there.

Authority is a third-person novel focused on "Control" - a career intelligence professional (OK, call him a spy if you want) named John Rodriguez, who has been sent to take over as Director of the Southern Reach and to investigate what happened to the Twelfth Expedition - the one chronicled in Annihilation.

Three of the four women of the Twelfth Expedition came back, appearing in random places far from Area X, without clear memories of their time there or their lives before the expedition. The one who didn't return, "the psychologist," was the previous Director of Southern Reach.

This book is partly about the conversations Control has with the biologist - he has not read her journals, the ones that formed Annihilation, and she can't tell him much of anything about what happened to her - partly about his troubles taking control of Southern Reach, where the assistant director, Grace Stevenson, is deeply loyal to the missing previous director and quietly blocks nearly everything he does, and partly about how he sifts through what the previous director left behind and what the rest of the scientific staff of Southern Reach can tell him.

Control learns that the most recent expedition was officially the Twelfth, but each numbered expedition was a series - the Eleventh had multiple iterations, and the total number of forays into Area X is well over thirty. And that Area X is not necessarily stable. And that, even thirty years later, the Southern Reach doesn't really know the first thing about Area X or the phenomenon or entity that created it.

He learns many things, plenty of them horrific, over the course of the novel, and loses control of Southern Reach in more than one way by the end. Like so many Vandermeer stories, it has creepy biological manifestations and a tone at most one or two clicks away from horror. It ends with a leap that I assume leads into the third book: it ends reasonably well for the middle of a trilogy, but it clearly is middle.

This is a creepy, unsettling novel, about something mostly unknown that just might be poised to destroy all of humanity and the entire biosphere of our planet - or maybe to do something even stranger, and potentially worse, than that. And Vandermeer does creepy and unsettling better than nearly anyone else: this is excellent in every way.