The River Bank by Kij Johnson

Books for children are often set in deliberately altered versions of the world: simplified or rationalized, turned into something more like a utopia or dystopia, or one of those weird things where eight-year-olds seem to all live alone in their own houses and no one has an actual job.

Books from the past are set in worlds that don't exist anymore: worlds we might recognize or not, worlds we might want to live in or not, worlds that never were or worlds that were supposed to come into being later.

And then we have new books, maybe for children, based on old books for children...I don't know if I could describe all of the ways a world like that is different. So Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows in 1908, about very English-country-people animals living along a river, and it was quirky in both writing-for-children ways and Edwardian ways, but deeply lovable and loved. Some of the writing-for-children and Edwardian things hit differently a hundred years later, which was likely part of the reason Kij Johnson decided to write a sequel, and actually include things like, I don't know, actual female characters.

That's The River Bank. A 2017 novel probably mostly for adults who read The Wind in the Willows as children, maybe particularly for women who wondered what a woman Mole or Badger or Water Rat (or even, heaven forbid! Toad) would be like. It's mostly slow and winding, like its model the Grahame novel or like its model the river itself. I haven't read Wind in ages, but this feels like the same sort of thing: Johnson isn't trying to subvert or rewrite the original, but to extend it and give it new life. (The other half of life, perhaps.)

So it begins not long after Wind. Toad is still chastened from his recent exploits, but of course he will surge back to heights of Toad-ness eventually. Two new residents of the River Bank have arrived, and taken up residence in Sunflower Cottage: Beryl, a Mole, and Rabbit. (Johnson is Grahame-esque enough to avoid using actual names unless she absolutely has to: the Rabbit does have a name, which we learn, and one faintly supposes the male characters do have personal names as well, but they never are necessary, so they never appear.) The Rabbit is flighty, as one expects a Rabbit - particularly a female Rabbit, at least one character sniffs -- to be.

This is largely still Grahame's world: the technology is that of a century ago. Motor-cars are new and exciting, and motor-cycles will be even more so (particularly to certain susceptible individuals). The social world is equally so: more formal and defined.

Mole - the original Mole - does not want to talk to or spend any time with Beryl. They know each other in some way, undefined for a long time, and she is friendly to everyone but he is just barely this side of rude with her. That's one strand of what will turn into the plot.

Another is Toad, of course. He will get a new enthusiasm, and will go much too far with it.

There's also a tertiary thread about creation and art: Beryl is a novelist, and the Water Rat writes poetry. The god Pan makes a return appearance in River Bank, reprising his role in Wind.

Like Wind, River Bank is made up of mostly independent chapters, each of which is about a particular day or series of events. There is a similar climax to the motor-car/prison/recapture of Toad Hall in Wind, which happens in a very different way with a somewhat different cast in a different place.

This is a deliberately small book, much like Wind. It aims to replicate the feeling and rhythms of living beside a placid river in a deep English summer, and does so well. It's a fine sequel that stands well besides its original. 

Breakfast After Noon by Andi Watson

We all define ourselves. By what we believe in, where we live, which sports teams we support, who our family is. What we do for a living is always a big one: I'm a doctor; I'm a lawyer; I'm a realtor; I'm a teacher. But what we do for a living is always dependent on someone paying us to do that, which is never guaranteed. Picking that as a major pillar of your self-definition is a dangerous thing.

Rob Grafton is an assembler. It's a skilled job: putting together various items in the Windsor Potteries factory in the West Midlands of England. He's been doing it since he left school. He thinks he'll do it for the rest of his life.

He's wrong.

The potteries - not just Windsor, but this whole region, largely dependent on this one industry - are in decline. The patterns are old and stuffy, younger families don't buy the fancy stuff to begin with, costs are rising, materials are getting more difficult to source and coming from further overseas. It's an industry running downhill, first slowly then quickly, in a region where that industry is a major pillar.

Rob gets laid off, along with his fiancé and live-in girlfriend Louise Bright. She works at the potteries, too, though she's not as keen to define herself by her job. Maybe because she does something more tedious and less skilled, maybe because that's more of a guy thing, maybe because she has other things that loom larger in her life, such as their impending wedding.

But Louise is keen to move on: apply for unemployment, get retraining, investigate what else she can do, jump to something else. Rob, though, is surly and grumpy: he's an assembler, he insists. That's what he does; it's what he will do. He'll just get his job back at Windsor, or get the same job somewhere else: how could he possibly do anything else?

Rob is wrong. I could type that a dozen times in this post: Breakfast After Noon is largely the story of how wrong Rob is, in many different ways. He's frankly not a very good person when we meet him: self-centered and thoughtless, the kind of guy who assumes the world will continue on exactly as it has, doing only the things he enjoys, because why won't it?

So Rob drags his feet with Louise. He doesn't do his end of the wedding planning; he doesn't take being unemployed seriously and look to move on; he's not particularly affectionate or loving to her at any point. And he's just as thoughtless with his friends: lazy and joking on their local-league football team, unpleasant at the pub, just not a pleasant person to be around in any way.

And his actions have the natural consequences. Grumpy, stubborn people don't get what they want because of their attitudes. They're often less likely to get what they want because of those attitudes, in fact. That's how it goes in Breakfast After Noon: Rob is wrong until his wrong decisions and attitudes and failures to act start driving people away, and then...well, that would be giving it away.

Breakfast After Noon was Andi Watson's first completely naturalistic comics story, the natural next step from the ebbing fantasy of Skeleton Key and the muted SF of Geisha. It was a six-issue comics series  in 2000 before becoming a book immediately afterward, but it shows the signs of being planned as a single story from the beginning: it has chapter breaks rather than issue breaks. And Watson may perhaps have made Rob a bit too stubborn and off-putting, even to a comics-shop audience of youngish men equally sure of everything important in their lives. I can also quibble a bit about the ending: I felt like there was an awful lot of "Rob is a stubborn ass who doesn't know what's good for him" and vanishingly little of "Rob realizes this and we actually see him change and make an effort."

Still, it's a great story: true to life, deeply grounded in a place and specific people, deeply meaningful. We all know Robs and Louises; we're probably both of them, in some ways, ourselves. And this is from the moment where Watson's art style had definitively shifted from manga to Euro influences: his lines are lovely and organic, always in the right place and the right weight, with warm grey washes to define spaces and moods.

My personal opinion is that Watson got even better than this quickly: Slow News Day and Love Fights and Little Star built on this naturalistic foundation and did similar things even more strongly. But this was the beginning of that period, and, for all of Rob's faults, he's a lovable lout in a relatable jam. For great comics stories about real-world people in real-world lives, it's hard to beat 2000s Andi Watson.

Young Shadow by Ben Sears

Sometimes a creator's different instincts and plans don't always play nice with each other. For example, a costumed-hero story has certain standard tropes: the hero can always leave the bad guys tied up with a nice note for the authorities and the reader knows that means justice has and will be done.

But if the same creator wants to do a story about corrupt cops in what seems to be a deeply corrupt city, tying up those cops will not have the same expected result: it just means their compatriots will untie them, maybe make fun of them, maybe get angry on their behalf. Frankly, it would just annoy Certain People even more: that's an event for the middle of the story, not the end.

So I'm not as happy with Ben Sears's new graphic novel Young Shadow as I was with the last book of his I read, House of the Black Spot. Black Spot had villains who could be dealt with by mostly offstage Forces of Justice, and heroes whose modus operandi was a bit more complex and nuanced than the costumed-hero standard of "run around the city at night, asking people if there's any trouble, and then get into fights with people whose look you don't like." That's very close to Young Shadow's exact words: he's the hero, so the book says he's right to do so, but his actions are exactly those of a bully or criminal gang: find someone doing something you object to (in this case, "rebel against your rich parents by drinking in the park and not bathing"), use violence on him.

If I were being reductionist, I'd say Young Shadow is "the Jason Todd Robin in an ACAB world." We don't know what Young Shadow's real name is, or his history: we meet him on patrol, in Bolt City. He's in tactical gear, with a domino mask, and he's good at violence but signposted to be on the side of righteousness - the first time we see him fight, it's to help a maltreated dog. Sears's rounded, clean art style isn't great at communicating this, though: Shadow says the dog is malnourished and dehydrated, but Sears draws him exactly the same then as later in the story, or like any other dog, just with his eyes closed most of the time.

Shadow doesn't appear to have any real home. Maybe a bolt hole or three where he sleeps, or stashes gear, or keeps whatever other stuff he has. It's not a "this guy is homeless" situation; it's just not important. What he does is patrol as Young Shadow. What he does is protect the city. Anything else he does is not even secondary.

Shadow has a network of friends, or maybe informants. They're the people of this neighborhood, or maybe multiple Bolt City neighborhoods. A number seem to be the owners of small businesses: a "lantern shop," places that look a lot like bodegas, an animal shelter. They would tell Shadow about miscreants in their areas, we think - but, in this book, they don't talk about nuts dressed up like wombats planning elaborate wombat-themed crimes, but instead about the night shift of the Bolt City Police Department. Those cops are acting suspicious, searching for things in a more furtive way than usual for cops. It's not super-clear if there are elements of the BCPD, or any aspect of Bolt City governance, that is generally trusted by the populace. My guess is no. There is definitely some generalized "never talk to the cops about anything" advice, as with similar communities in the real world.

We do get some scenes from outside Shadow's point of view, to learn that there are Sinister Forces, and that they encompass both the young malcontents Shadow beat up in the early pages and those crooked cops. (Well, maybe not crooked: they're not soliciting bribes. We don't even see them beat up or harass anyone. It's just that Young Shadow is set in a world with people who totally mistrust cops for reasons which are too fundamental to even be mentioned.) There is an Evil Corporation, as there must be, and both a villain with a face and a higher-up Faceless Villain. Their goals are pretty penny-ante for an Evil Corporation: get back a big cache of crowd-control weapons and tools, get some more pollution done quickly before the law changes.

Shadow spends a lot of time wandering around looking for these people. I'm not sure if Sears is trying to make the point that this is not a useful tactic, or that Shadow is good at the violence stuff, but not so much at the finding-appropriate-avenues-for-violence stuff. I thought he did make those points, deliberately or not. Eventually, another vigilante appears: Spiral Scratch. (At first in a closed helmet, which I was sure meant it would be a character we'd seen before. But nope.) The flap copy calls SS the sidekick of Shadow, but the opposite is closer to the truth: Scratch is more organized and planful, and Shadow wouldn't get much done alone.

In the end, our two forces of righteous violence find the thing the Forces of Evil are searching for, and dispose of it with the aid of an order of robot nuns. (I do enjoy the odd bits of Sears's worldbuilding.) And they tie up some of the henchmen, which, as I mentioned way up top, will probably not lead to anything like punishment for them.

So I'm left wondering if there's going to be a sequel: it feels like this story isn't really over, that our vigilante heroes haven't actually solved any underlying problem by punching a few people. And I also think I like Sears when his characters are detecting and talking rather than punching. But I like that in general, so that's no surprise. People who like more punching in their comics may have a different opinion, and God knows they're very common - if you're one of them, give Young Shadow a look.

Hypnotwist / Scarlet by Starlight by Gilbert Hernandez

I feel like we're all just supposed to know how to read Gilbert Hernandez's "movie books," even though they've never been clear, and their publisher (Fantagraphics) has stopped even mentioning the movie connection. These days, it seems to be just the distinctive end-papers that give us a clue, and then we're on our own.

You see, Hernandez has been writing stories, in the various comics mostly named Love and Rockets, about a group of people, originally centered on the residents of a small South American town of Palomar though in recent decades shifting to the extended Southern California family of a woman named Luba who lived in Palomar for a long time. Luba's younger half-sister, Fritz, had a career as a film actress: not a great career, and not a lasting one, but she made a bunch of movies. And Hernandez has not just told stories about Luba and Fritz and others - stories in their world, meant to be "true" as much as any fiction is - but also told stories retelling those movies, telling stories that are meant to be seen as fictional from a fictional world.

It's complicated and knotty, and not explaining it in the books themselves makes it even weirder and complicated. The most recent, and most major, Maria M., was the height of convolution, telling the movie version of Fritz's mother's life (with Fritz in that "role"), which readers of Love and Rockets had already seen the "real" version of, years before. Prior movie books were from "earlier in Fritz's career," when she did pulpier, less ambitious....OK, let's say bluntly bad and derivative and exploitative movies: Chance in Hell and The Troublemakers and Love from the Shadows. (And I can't explain explain clearly how Speak of the Devil fits into this schema, either -- I think it's the "real" version of a story not about Fritz and Luba and company that was also made into a movie with Fritz, and maybe we saw some parts of that movie made in the main series.)

Hernandez was most active with these stories just over a decade ago - the first burst came out roughly every year, 2007 and '08 and '09 and '11. Maria M. took longer to gestate. And, along the way, Hernandez also made two shorter movie stories, which have now been collected together in flip-book format.

That is Hypnotwist / Scarlet by Starlight, both of which "star" Fritz as a major role, though (and maybe this is meaningful?) she doesn't speak in either story. One is a pretentious movie that I don't think Hernandez expects us to take entirely seriously. The other is a pulpy genre exercise.

And I still don't get the point of either book, or of this entire sequence. Is it meant to be some kind of parallax view of specific events in the "real" story? Are they just goofy, clear-the-decks stories that Hernandez wants to get out of his head, and this is a way to tie them in? Or what?

Hypnotwist is the longer story, 59 pages long: it's some kind of art film with no narration or dialog that follows a woman who may be dreaming, or sleepwalking, or hallucinating, or something. A sequence of surreal things happen, some of them sexual and/or violent, with some other characters reappearing and a central image of a creepily smiling face. Oh, wait! I forgot the magic shoes! She gets magic shoes at the beginning, and that might explain it all. If anything can explain anything here.

(You might have gathered that I don't get this at all. Hernandez has done a bunch of dream-logic stories in his career, and I like looking at them and appreciate the visual inventiveness but never get anything specific out of any of them.)

Scarlet by Starlight is tighter, a '50s-style space opera movie in 37 pages of comics - though, in the world of L&R, I guess it was made in the late '90s. Three Americans are on an alien planet, researching something or other, two men and a woman. There are two seemingly-sapient races here, though neither can speak: the human-height and furred Forest People and the dwarfish pinkies. The humans have befriended the Forest People - well, at least the couple Scarlet (female, Fritz's character) and Crimson and their children. The pinkies, though they seem to be more organized - they have a village with buildings, and a much deeper curiosity about the human's technology - are considered basically vermin.

But then Scarlet comes into heat, I guess, and tries to have sex with one of the Americans, and it all goes to hell. There's a lot of Hernandezian violence until the survivors are able to regroup with a Hollywoodesque happy ending. Again, Hernandez is not trying to present this as a good movie: rather the reverse.

I get the sense that Hernandez makes these stories either to scratch an itch to tell junky stories or to comment on junky stories, but I have no idea which, or if it's both, or if those are the only two possibilities. I enjoy the way he moves characters around and evokes junky movies without ever getting a clear sense of why he thought spending months of his time to do this would be worthwhile.

It's weird, man. The "movie books" are just an odd sequence of stories, and these two are the very weirdest of that sequence. People who like weird should dive in here; this book is about as bizarre and random as Hernandez gets.

Quote of the Week: Perhaps Also Some Sympathy

The noise in the hall had increased rather than subsided. A belated sense of professional duty returned to Glossop and myself. We descended the stairs and began to do our best, in our respective styles, to produce order. It was not an easy task. Small boys are always prone to make a noise, even without provocation. When they get a genuine excuse like the incursion of men in white masks, who prod assistant-masters in the small of the back with Browning pistols, they tend to eclipse themselves. I doubt whether we would ever have quieted them, had it not been that the hour of Buck's visit had chanced to fall within a short time of that set apart of the boys' tea, and that the kitchen has lain outside the sphere of our visitors' operations. As in many English country houses, the kitchen at Sanstead House was at the end of a long corridor, shut off by doors through with even pistol-shots penetrated but faintly. Our excellent cook has, moreover, the misfortune to be somewhat deaf, with the result that, throughout all of the storm and stress in our part of the house, she, like the lady in Goethe's poem, had gone on cutting bread and butter; till now, when it seemed that nothing could quell the uproar, they rose above it the ringing of the bell.

If there is anything exciting enough to keep the Englishman or the English boy from his tea, it has yet to be discovered. The shouting ceased on the instant. The general feeling seemed to be that inquiries could be postponed till a more suitable occasion, but not tea. There was a general movement in the direction of the dining-room.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Little Nugget, pp.145-146

The Little Nugget by P.G. Wodehouse

Stalkers may have noticed that I tend to hit a P.G. Wodehouse book about every three to five months: I have my unread books in two-and-a-half bookcases behind me, organized by author, but Wodehouse is broken out to a shelf of his own in the middle of the first case. (It's because what I have are the uniform small Overlook hardcovers, so it can be a low shelf: other books don't consistently fit there.)

And I'm reading physical books in "order" - one book from this shelf, then one from the next, start again at the beginning when I hit the end. It's a weird system, but I find it helps ameliorate the anxiety of choice: picking from thirty or forty books is easier than picking from four hundred.

When I hit the Wodehouse Shelf this time, I wanted to go early - I was reading his nonfiction a few years ago (and got through what I think is all of it), and then a cluster of late books, so now it's time to see what the young Wodehouse got up to.

Parenthetically, it's weird to think of an author who lived so long as being young, but that's how time works. Just because Wodehouse died at the age of ninety-three doesn't mean he wasn't once twenty, or forty, or eight. But the last view of a person is the one that sticks.

So that's why you get The Little Nugget today. A novel published in 1913, first in Munsey's Magazine and then in hardcovers, when its author was in his early thirties and looking to move from being a writer of school stories into other areas. Late enough not to be juvenilia; generally considered to be one of the first really successful novels of his career; still early enough to be pre-Jeeves.

The Little Nugget himself is Ogden Ford, the teenage son of an American millionaire. He is horrible, mostly in ways well-bred English folks of 1913 would find the most appalling: recalcitrant, fat, demanding, rude, obnoxious. We are told he was spoiled by his mother, and we believe it. His parents are now divorced, and are fighting over him - having moved the field of battle to England from the vague Midwestern bit of America where they came from. The LN attracts kidnappers like nobody's business: two in particular (Buck MacGinnis and Sam Fisher) seem to have made a career out of it, despite not actually ever capturing the boy.

Into the center of this mess wanders Peter Burns, a moderately well-off young man with a broken heart behind him and a new fiancée, Cynthia, who works as a secretary for Mrs. Ford. She puts him up to a kidnap scheme, to get the boy back to his loving mother: he will take a position as assistant master at the rural school where The LN is about to be deposited, and use his access there to spirit the boy away and off to Mrs. Ford's yacht in Monaco. Then he can be joyfully wed to Cynthia, and all will be well.

The plot does not go along those lines. The LN is horrible in ways that both stymie and facilitate kidnapping, for one. MacGinnis and Fisher are both known to be snooping around that very isolated school. And the woman who broke Peter's heart five years ago, Audrey, turns up at the school as well.

This is not a full-bore Wodehouse comedy. The plot is mostly taken seriously, and Peter is in real danger from the guns of the kidnappers. The love-plot, and Peter's mental anguish over it, is taken seriously, and is the kind of thing that later Wodehouse would parody or simply yadda-yadda over. But this novel is funny here and there, and it clearly showed to Wodehouse himself and his readers that he could flex in the direction of amusing, and he flexed that way more and more as the years moved forward.

So this is not a great Wodehouse novel. It's also not a great early-20th century thriller. It's good, definitely: fun and engaging and entertaining throughout. But it's somewhere in between those two things: not quite a thriller, not quite a comedy. I like platypuses like that: things halfway between one form and another. If you do, too, especially if you like Wodehouse, The Little Nugget is worth reading a hundred years later.

Room for Love by Ilya

This is a story about two people and about love. No, not that kind of story.

One of the people writes that kind of story, though. Pamela Green is a romance novelist, reasonably successful writing as Leonie Hart, with a fan club and what seems to be solid but unspectacular sales. But she's in a bad patch of writer's block, and has possibly soured on the entire idea of romantic love. Personally, she's deep into her middle years, and alone: we don't know exactly why and how when the book opens, but we will learn.

The other person is a young man: we actually meet him first. We don't know his name. He travels to London from wherever, hitching rides and exchanging sex for money. He ends up on the street, with another young man. Things go bad.

Room for Love is the story of Pam and that man -- call him Cougar; he does when he gives Pam a name at all. It's by a cartoonist of several names himself: credited as Ilya here, known to me previously as the Ed Hillyer who worked with Eddie Campbell on a number of Deadface stories.

Pam and Cougar meet on a bridge. It's already a third of the way through this graphic novel, so we know their routines and lives pretty well at that point. Pam thinks Cougar is going to kill himself; we're not sure but it seems plausible. She's wrong, and she ruins what Cougar has. To atone, she offers, suddenly and surprisingly to both of them, for him to live in her house.

Cougar, we see, is the kind of man who takes every opportunity he can, so he agrees. He moves in with her, cleans up a bit. Opens up, not even that much of a bit. They end up having sex after a couple of days, and then regularly.

In retrospect, we realize that's Cougar's pattern: it's how he gets close to people, how he transacts with people, how he gets what he wants. Maybe we realize that at the time: I didn't. Pam doesn't. Pam thinks this is a relationship.

Well, it is. But she thinks it's a romantic relationship, when it's a business relationship. Eventually, she learns better.

Actually, they both come out of Room for Love a little bit better, more able to handle the next big thing in their respective lives, the thing they were avoiding and trying not to think about. 

Ilya tells this story in contrasting colors: brown for Cougar and blue for Pam - panels washed with their respective colors when they're separate, discrete highlights on their clothing when they're together, dialog boxes outside panels in their colors. It's a small thing, but a deeply comics thing: a clear visual representation of how separate they are, and a clean way to keep what are and are not two story strands separate. His art falls in that no-man's-land: a little bit of cartooniness in his faces, to make them instantly identifiable, but mostly realistic, only in a slightly simplified, cleaner way. (I don't have the language to talk very well about art; I'm a words person, mostly.)

This is a thoughtful story about two well-defined people. I have a few quibbles: there's more than a bit of  psycho-babble near the end, and I think Pam's agent is acting a lot more like an editor. But the quibbles are all on that level: minor, unimportant. Room For Love is interesting and resonant: it's a book worth reading.

Bad Machinery, Vol. 9: The Case of the Missing Piece by John Allison

I like all of John Allison's comics: let me make that clear. Giant Days is wonderful, I really hope Wicked Things wasn't a one-off, and my main complaint with By Night is that he's too British to do an American-set story really convincingly.

But I love Allison in particular as a cartoonist. Like a lot of comics creators, he's just better when he's drawing his own material: he knows the jokes and characters, and probably adjusts things while drawing to make it all just that bit better. It's not that there's anything wrong with other artists; they just don't live in John Allison's head.

And so his webcomics have been the purest and best of his works: the most Allisonian, the funniest, with the most intricate plots and great character details. (And I say this while still avonding his currently-running Steeple because I haven't read the published-as-floppies beginning yet.) Bobbins and Scarygoround saw him get better and better over more than a decade, but Bad Machinery hit when he was already fully himself: I'd call it the first Allison work that was mature and entirely successful from the beginning.

Of course it's over now; Allison writes about people who live in time, and his stories usually have those people at a specific time in their lives. (Typically young enough to do crazy things, just getting old enough to know they shouldn't: late teens to mid-twenties most of the time, with some variation on either end.)

The Case of the Missing Piece is the ninth of ten Bad Machinery stories - I recall there were some uncollected bits, especially at the end, but Allison is currently upgrading his main site, so the extensive archives (including story details) are down at the moment. See my post on the eighth volume for some context, and then dig back further to volumes one to seven, and even to Scarygoround, for an unnecessarily large amount of context.

The series started out being about a group of kids at a local British school in the fictional city of Tackleford. (I think it was a "public" school, meaning not run by the government, but it seems to be more "competitive and moderately good" than "ultra-posh," for other Americans trying to set their expectations. More like the decent parochial school in your town, if you have one, than like Choate, where one of my college buddies went.) There were three girls and three boys, all tweens, and they solved mysteries: sometimes together, but more often competitively. Those mysteries often had a vaguely supernatural component; Allison's stories are generally realistic but he's not finnicky about consensus reality if it gets in the way of a fun story.

By this point, it's several years later, and they've mostly stopped solving mysteries actively. It's something they talk about, and vaguely think about doing again, like that sport you gave up last year because it interfered with your other activities. This book is not about a mystery, exactly.

Shauna is at the center: her mother is getting married to her long-term boyfriend (this is mostly a good thing, but a cause of change and stress), her older brother Darren has just gotten out of prison, she may finally get a chance to meet her father, and she's taken it upon herself to befriend Blossom Cooper, a frighteningly large and dangerous girl of their year. But Linton is mopey about never having had a girlfriend, Claire is going through her own love convolutions, with a boyfriend breaking up with her because his family is returning to Ireland (though not as quickly as the reader would expect), and the rest of the cast (especially Charlotte, who can always be counted on to barge in) circle around the main action. Oh, and the veteran teacher who handled discipline for the school is out after a health crisis, and there's a new face with new, modern ways. (Quote: "I don't do 'bollocking,' Linton. I thought maybe we could listen to some music...just rap about what's going on with you. Do you like the Beetles?")

All of those things stew around and with each other over the course of about an academic term, and it all comes to a head at Shauna's mother's wedding, as things do. Well, that's only about the halfway point of the book - the first major crisis. There will be more.

A lot of Allison's best works are about people realizing they're not who they used to be and that they need to rethink what they want and what they should be doing. This, like the end of Giant Days, is one of those stories. It's smart and witty and full of colorful characters, it's amusing and thoughtful and drawn with an energetic line.

Again, pure Allison is the best Allison. This is pure; this is one of his best. And he's one of the best. QED.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/7/21

It's a good-sized list this week: one book I bought and a bunch from the library, since my stock of books-to-read-quickly is at low ebb, and my life isn't such as to give it the flood it had in Elder Days. (Not complaining: I still have more books than I can read, and getting more is not in any way difficult. The problem, as always, is choice.)

The book I bought is Afterthoughts, Version 2.0, an updated and revised collection of new introductions and afterwords to his old books by Lawrence Block. I say "new," but the first edition is a decade old, so much of the material is at least that "new," which may seem less than "new" to some readers. But when Block is writing about books from 1958 or 1963, even 2010 is pretty new. I read the first edition nearly a decade ago, soon after it was published, and wanted to see what was different this time. (Also: the cover of the real book has covers of actual Block books on those stacks of generic books you see on this preliminary cover image, so he either learned Photoshop himself or paid someone who's pretty good at it.)

Everything else, from this point down, is from the library, so I'll only say that once. OK, maybe twice: these are from the mighty Emmanuel Einstein Library of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, though all of them originated from other nearby towns (Passaic! Verona! Woodland Park! Wayne!)

The Midwinter Witch is the third book in the series by Molly Knox Ostertag that began with The Witch Boy. I may have thought it was the second one, since I don't think I've read the actual #2, The Hidden Witch. I'm going to write about this book in about twenty minutes, since I read it yesterday, so I'll leave it at that here. See my post on the first book for more details.

PTSD is a graphic novel by Guillaume Singelin, from the small list of books for adults from First Second. (They publish a lot more for younger readers of various ages, and I've generally found all of their books are strong.) I know I've seen good reviews of it, but that was probably two years ago when it was published in English, so I don't recall exactly where at this point. It is some manner of post-apocalyptic SF in comics form, by a creator I don't think I've ever read.

I'm not sure if I should read Minecraft: Wither Without You, Vol. 2 by Kristen Gudsnuk. I got it because I've liked all of Gudsnuk's books I've seen so far, and know enough about Minecraft (not much, but I did play it very briefly in the very early days) to be willing to see what she does here. I also vaguely thought that the first Wither Without You either was not by Gudsnuk or was not available in my library system...but neither of those things are true.

The problem is that Wither One is not available for hold, and there's only one copy in the system. So I'd have to drive to the library in West Milford (and I have no idea where that is, though I could obviously find out easily), during a time when it is open, find that book on the shelf (assuming no one else has done so in the meantime), and get it that way. I don't think I have the time for any of that in my life currently, so I might just read this one and see how much sense it makes.

Ascender, Vol. 3: The Digital Mage continues the series by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen that I have been making mild fun of the last few months. The series as a whole is also a sequel to their earlier Descender. And this one looks just as gorgeous and silly as the first two.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 10: Life Is Too Short, Squirrel is another one of the books collecting that popular and now-ended series. This one was written by longtime series mainstay Ryan North, drawn by then-new artist Derek Charm (with one issue by Naomi Franquiz), and colored by Rico Renzi, also a long-timer. The first issue here is the obligatory Death of Squirrel Girl! fake-out, which every superhero must do roughly once a decade. (Both Marvel and DC have big charts on prominent walls in their offices, I am morally sure, to keep track of who is dead at the moment and who is in which costume. Or maybe it's a private app, these days.) I've read the series up to this point, and it looks like I'm going to finish it up.

And last is Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil, which the "read this next" page insists is the third collection of the Black Hammer series written by Jeff Lemire. (I am more than a little dubious, as you may guess, but this is certainly in the same universe. And I'm willing to believe this story doesn't so much move forward as proliferate.) This one is drawn by David Rubin, who also did one issue in the second collection of the main Black Hammer series. I expect I will find this much less impressive than the longjohns fans do, but the library still has another couple Black Hammer-verse books, so I'm hoping it will be good enough that I can keep reading and actually get the end of the story Lemire started in the main series. (This assumes there is an end to that story, which may be an unwarranted assumption, given it's a superhero comic.)

Quote of the Week: Worth Any Number of Old Ladies

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling someone out.

 - Joan Didion, "A Preface," in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, p.7

The Follies of Richard Wadsworth by Nick Maandag

I thought I knew deadpan. Brother, was I wrong.

Nick Maandag is deadpan. Middle-of-Death-Valley-in-a-heat-wave deadpan. No flinching, no blinking, no prisoners. And I appreciate that, even as I start to wonder if I really should be laughing: what if, I think, this isn't meant to be funny?

There are sequences in the second story in this book, "Night School," that run straight down the weird borderland between dystopic horror and exaggerated slapstick. I did laugh, I admit it. But I immediately felt bad about it, and wondered if I should have.

The book is The Follies of Richard Wadsworth. Nick Maandag, again, is the cartoonist. It came out two years ago, and had three new stories - the title piece is about half the book, then "Night School" and "The Disciple" split the rest. There's also some four-panel jokes, somewhat along the lines of Ruben Bolling's "Super-Fun-Pak Comix," on the inside covers.

Maandag will not tell you when to laugh; he's not going to telegraph anything. His situations may be bizarre - "Night School," in particular, spirals from a fairly normal business class to escalating torments smoothly and plausibly. "The Disciple" is a bit more of a shaggy dog story, in which one young monk battles his attachments to the world and learns some unsavory secrets about his master. Oh, and manages a monkey sidekick, because Maandag will never quite be straightforward.

The title story plays it basically straight, with Wadsworth, a peripatetic philosophy professor in his early middle years, landing at a new college for a new academic year, hoping to finally put down roots and get tenure. But he's bizarrely impulsive and socially inept - in the manner of a comedy protagonist, mostly - and horribly bumbles both a relationship with a female student and learning a juicy piece of academic gossip. Wadsworth is one of those people who can't get out of his own way to save his life, but always in funny ways. Maandag, though, plays it all as it it were totally straight, as if this were yet another story of a professor lusting after a student and not about a total goofball who runs on endlessly about the joys of bland chain restaurants.

Maandag's line reminds me a bit of Seth: precise, thin, all the same weight, with a lot of texture on surfaces behind his characters. His people pop from their backgrounds, but still feel small, limited, inherently minor. It's a good look for comedy: his people are mockable down to their core, in the way he draws them as much as the way he writes them. They're mostly ugly or funny-looking to one degree or other, like real people are and comics people most of the time aren't.

I don't think anyone needs to be told this book is comedy. I think that would be clear in the reading of it, even if you picked it up randomly, with no knowledge at all. I think. Maybe not. Maandag is that deadpan. 

Poison Flowers & Pandemonium by Richard Sala

First of all, it's sad to see this book, because we know it's the last of Richard Sala's work. He died suddenly last year - and, it seems, at least somewhat mysteriously, which is grimly appropriate - and there won't be any more of his work ever again.

Sala was original, brewing up a mixture of horror movies, penny dreadfuls, and plucky young (barefoot!) heroines into a gorgeously-watercolored mixture that would be welcome to fans of Charles Addams, Gahan Wilson, or Edward Gorey but was uniquely Sala. Some of his best books, and places I'd recommend starting if you don't know his work, are The Chuckling Whatzit and Delphine and Mad Night.

What we have here today are his last four stories - some miscellaneous work that (I think) was already planned to be collected together even before his unexpected death. It's a nice big package; it looks lovely; each of the stories is fun and deeply Sala-esque. It's Poison Flowers & Pandemonium, and the bittersweet nature of publishing it after Sala's death is perhaps the most exquisitely Sala-esque moment in his entire career.

In order, those four stories are:

"The Bloody Cardinal 2: House of the Blue Dwarf" is a sequel to the first Bloody Cardinal book, also published originally as a webcomic, although it's less focused on the title character (either of them). A typically Sala heroine, Phillipa Nicely, is caught up in a group of fiendish types when an acquaintance of hers enlists her in an attempt to swindle them. It all gets vastly more complicated, of course, but there's a full-page listing of characters up front to help keep track of them as they get machetes to the brain in turn. (People die often in Sala stories; he tells bloody monster movies in comics form.) This one has a lot of energy and I think is more successful than the first Bloody Cardinal, but still could have used a little more space and careful pacing - my sense is that webcomics weren't the best format for Sala, who did somewhat better work when he could rework groups of pages or entire stories together.

"Monsters Illustrated" is mostly a series of full-page illustrations of monsters in action, with a very thin frame story (involving a plucky barefoot girl in danger [1]). The monsters are not named precisely to explain who they are, but readers will likely recognize many of them, and I suspect really devout readers could place every single one of them.

"Cave Girls of the Lost World" is another frame story, and almost a self-parody. A young boy discovers a bottle on the beach, inside which is a fantastic story of a planeload of private-college girls who found themselves in a savage land (not The Savage Land) full of dinosaurs, cavemen, and Bat People. The cave-girl story is told in hand-lettered prose (as if on weathered parchment) on left-hand pages, with full-page illos of the bare-breasted girls battling the various dangers of their lost world on the right. Sala has a fun wink at the very end; I wonder if he had hoped to expand this out to something larger?

"Fantomella" is another one of his stories of an avenging young woman, in the vein of Violenzia. It's set in a dystopian world, and is almost entirely the title character fighting her way up the tower HQ of the masters of this crapsack world, killing colorful lunatics along the way, mostly with her ubiquitous knives. (Though she does mix it up a bit as she does along.) This one is fun and energetic, but very much in a style Sala has done multiple times before.

So all of it is solid and all of it is deeply Sala-esque, and no one else could have made any of these four stories. I wouldn't rank any of them as the best in his career, but it's all solid mid-rank work. Again, I wouldn't start Sala here, but it's certainly a great way to send him off, since we do have to send him off.

[1] I don't know what the deal was with Sala and women's bare feet, but he regularly has his heroines wandering around cities, doing things otherwise normally, without shoes. Other people's kinks, man!

The Burglar in Short Order by Lawrence Block

I admire and praise writers with a streak of orderliness. They're the ones who curate their own backlist, keep track of editions, push their books back into print almost as much for tidiness as for income. They also tend to want to collect the miscellaneous bits, too - if there's a drawer full of uncollected stuff, then the thing to do is collect it, right?

Lawrence Block, I believe, is one of those writers, or at least has become one at this era of his career. He's republished vast swaths of his very early backlist: quickie sex books, quickie crime books, and even some books that originally appeared under his actual name. [1] He's collected the uncollected in books like The Night and the Music (his Matt Scudder stories) and Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails (miscellaneous nonfiction) and Afterthoughts (the afterwords from those self-re-published old books).

Last year, he did the same for another one of his series characters, Bernie Rhodenbarr, gentleman bookseller and burglar. The Burglar in Short Order collects thirteen previously published pieces related to his career - two are novel excerpts, the first story predates Rhodenbarr but prefigures him, a couple were vignettes written for newspapers, and one is non-fiction about the Burglar movie with Whoopi Goldberg - along with a new introduction and afterword.

(I say "he did," but, from a note on the copyright page, I think Subterranean Press may have had the idea first, or at least published a fancy edition slightly earlier. The paperback that I read, though, is not just written by Block but published by him.)

Bernie has been the hero of eleven previous comedic mysteries, most recently The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, in 2014. The obligatory disclaimer: no one should begin reading a series character who mostly lives in novels with the short, very miscellaneous collection his creator assembles from the back of a drawer in his early '80s. In other words: don't start here. Pick up Burglars Can't Be Choosers, the first book. Or maybe The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, where Block first assembled all of the elements that would be important for the rest of the novels.

If you have read all eleven novels, this is a nice bit of lagniappe, not least because of Block's discursive introduction about the writing and publication of the included pieces, and because of  his metafictional afterword, in which Block and Bernie discuss age, mortality, and whether there will ever be another Burglar book. (Almost certainly not.) If you are a Bernie fan, you will recognize the novel excerpts, and will likely have read some of the other stories: several have appeared in other Block short-story collections over the years. And I should note this is a short book: just over 180 pages. There was a not a lot of short Bernie material.

But this is the complete and definitive Shorter Rhodenbarr, which is a good thing. If you liked any of the novels, first read the rest of them. If you liked all of them, maybe look for this book.

[1] I think he's so far avoided republishing his fake-non-fiction books, in which he pretended to be a doctor - different fictional doctors for different books - to write about sex in a way that could be both scandalous and acceptable for publication. Those are probably hugely of their time, but I'm fascinated at the way the "really racy," borderline-pornographic material of a repressive era reads in latter, less repressed days.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 8/2/03

One book I paid for is arriving next Wednesday, and the library tells me six books are "In Transit." But nothing new is actually in hand as I hit the deadline to write about books that arrived this week, and so I have to go to Option Two. Instead, I fire up the RNG, get a 2003, and dig into reading notebooks to tell you whatever I remember about the books I was reading eighteen years ago this week:

Williams C. Dietz, For More Than Glory (bound galleys, 7/27)

No direct memory: Amazon tells me this is the fifth book in his "Legion of the Damned" MilSF series. I'm pretty sure I didn't read that series from the beginning. Good MilSF is like popcorn, and isn't necessarily memorable (unless the writer is obviously stealing from Rorke's Drift or something; that tends to get remembered), so the fact that I can remember absolutely nothing about this should not be taken as any kind of criticism. But I definitely can't tell you anything about it.

Jill Thompson, Death: At Death's Door (7/28)

The title looks silly written out like that, but it was a Sandman line-extension graphic-novel - in a trendy, small-format manga-style book, as I recall - about the character of Death, so her name was big at the top and At Death's Door was the real title.

I think everything about this was "Sandman, but manga!" but I'm unsure if that was Thompson's take or if there was some bandwagon-jumping on the part of Certain Suits at DC Comics. I'd like to assume it was all Thompson; I recall this being cute and funny and more kid-friendly than the regular Sandman comics. It seems to be extremely out of print at the moment, so it may have been plunged firmly into the Memory Hole, now that we're back in an era of Extremely Serious Sandman.

Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw (bound galleys, 7/29)

I can't say this is Walton's best book, since I'm behind on her work (and I could also make cases for Farthing and Among Others, just among the ones I've read), but it's got a great concept and does it perfectly well.

You see, in Victorian novels, particularly those by Anthony Trollope, there's a weird background sense that women are inherently fragile, that their "honor" has some kind of physical presence that can be broken irrevocably by various innocuous-seeming activities. (Actually, what was happening was that authors could only hint, really obliquely, about sex, but both they and their readers knew full well that people had sex and that it was a lot more common and fun and appealing than they would be allowed to even hint at in a novel.)

So Walton wrote a fantasy novel in which that was literally true: a society of dragons in which things literally worked in actual analogies of the coded manner of the Victorian novel. It was an audacious exercise that worked really well: it was not just fun as an idea, it made a fun, intriguing novel that casts a quirky light back on a whole genre of old novels.

Michael Jantze, The Norm: The 12 Steps to Marriage (7/30)

Jantze's strip The Norm had a bunch of book-format reprints around this era, or maybe I was just reading all of those reprints, and they'd come out earlier. In any case, this was a newspaper strip that has been restarted (not really "rebooted," since all of them seems to be semi-autobio work about the author, and continue in time and sequence from the previous stuff) a couple of times since then. (I've seen references to "The Norm 4.0," and that was back in 2015. He could be rivaling iOS for release numbers by now.

As I remember, this was the thinly-fictionalized-version-of-my-wedding-planning storyline, something like Adrian Tomine's Scenes From an Impending Marriage would be a decade later. No deeper memory than that, though Jantze's cartooning is cute and fun - he had then and now a Watterson-esque line and a good eye for observational comedy.

James Gleick, What Just Happened (7/31)

According to my searches, this was a collection of previously-published articles from roughly the previous decade, and thus I assume it was a "The Internet! Wondrous and fearful land of tomorrow!" book.

I have no memory of it, and my guess is that it has aged really badly, since "here's what's hot now, and let me explain what it will turn into next" punditry always does.

Tobalina, Spanish Fly, Volume 3 (8/1)

Comics porn - I think I've linked the thing I read, but who knows at this point? This was the waning years of comics porn actually published on paper, as the Internet turned into a much more efficient engine for porn of all kinds (Sex, food, books, political, etc.) and the big players like NBM and Eros ran out the game and kept making money for as long as they could. I won't apologize for reading porn, but I do wish I had something better quality - maybe a Xxenophile collection - to mention, something I remember more than just "oh, yeah, that was porn" and could make a comment about.

Robert A. Heinlein, For Us, The Living (typescript, 8/2)

First up: don't read this if there is any other Heinlein book that you have not read. Even the recently republished longer version of Number of the Beast. Maybe even the two-volume biography. Definitely all of the good stuff, and the less-good stuff, and the not-really-good-at-all stuff, and the gosh-this-certainly-reads-like-horrible-racism-now stuff. Then maybe read this one, if you have to.

This was Heinlein's first-written, admitted-by-nearly-everyone-to-be-bad novel, written in 1938, rediscovered and published in 2003 more than a decade after his death. I would never say any work should remain unpublished - I think even the letters people want to burn should be saved and kept for posterity - but this is a book for Heinlein scholars and those who have drunk too deeply of the Heinlein Kool-Aid, and for no one else. It is interesting mostly as a catalog of bad writing and of ideas Heinlein would use later in what could only be better ways. Please do not read it: you will never get those hours of your life back.

This was the middle of a stretch where I finished a book every day from April 29 through August 28. I don't think that was on purpose; I was just reading a lot quickly in those days.

Books Read: July 2021

Hey! I try to do this post on the first weekend of the next month, assuming I remember. This month, I did remember. And here's what I've been reading:

Don Rosa, Walt Disney's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Vol. 1 (7/3)

Jon Rivera, Michael Avon Oeming, and Nick Filardi, Cave Carson Has an Interstellar Eye (7/4)

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, 7/4)

Richard Sala, Poison Flowers and Pandemonium (7/5)

Gilbert Hernandez, Hypnotwist/Scarlet by Starlight (7/6)

Nick Mandag, The Follies of Richard Wadsworth (7/7)

John Allison, Bad Machinery, Vol. 9: The Case of the Missing Piece (7/8)

Ilya, Room for Love (7/9)

P.G. Wodehouse, The Little Nugget (7/9)

Ben Sears, Young Shadow (7/10)

Andi Watson, Breakfast After Noon (7/11)

Kij Johnson, The River Bank (digital, 7/16)

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean, Black Orchid (7/17)

Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem (7/17)

Kyle Baker, Lester Fenton and the Walking Dead (7/18)

Shary Flenniken, Trots and Bonnie (7/24)

Lewis Trondheim, Gloomtown (digital, 7/25)

Jim Korkis, The Vault of Walt, Vol. 2 (7/31)

Lewis Trondheim, Slalom (7/31)