Shrines of Gaiety is a novel by Kate Atkinson, from 2022, and I think I'm going to read everything she's written until I hit something that makes me stop. (I've hit three of her "Jackson Brodie" novels so far, most recently When Will There Be Good News?, and found them all brilliant.) This one is a standalone, set in high society of 1926 London, and that's about all I know about it - and about all I want to know before diving in.
I still missed my father terribly. Losing someone close is like losing a part of yourself, an arm, maybe. You keep trying to do all the things you used to do, reaching for a book, opening a door, passing the salt. And then suddenly it hits you:" a part of you is gone, and it's forever.
- Lisa Goldstein, Ivory Apples, p.71
Today is the anniversary of Antick Musings! I first posted on this day in 2005; that first post is very tentative and pointless.
In the heady first decade of this blog, I pulled out all the stops for the big anniversary post every October 4th, with long lists of links and pointless statistics that I don't think any of you actually read or cared about. More recently, I've forgotten to do the post entirely about half the time, and have (this may be psychologically important) missed or bobbled all of the round-number anniversaries - five, ten, and fifteen.
This year, this anniversary post will probably turn into something - I'm starting it over a month ahead of time, so with luck I won't forget it - but I make no promises.
First, though, let me link to the past installments of this annual post: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth. and seventeenth.
Each of those is itself mostly a list of links, making this section the most purely blog-like thing I do regularly. (Remember: I started off in this world writing the SFBC's blog, which was a major link-fest, like so many things of that era. We spent our time pointing to things, and we were happy to do it!)
I usually try to explain that history or origin in more detail here, so maybe one or two more sentences: I started Antick Musings as practice, since the book-club company I worked for was going to start up a bunch of blogs, and I would be tasked to write the one for the SFBC. That corporate blog was scrubbed from the Internet long ago, and the company has changed hands several times and has continued to...let me be kind and say "transform;" I think a few people I knew still work there - so the fact that my personal blog has kept going, even in so ramshackle a state, is a testament to something, I suppose.
Anyway, this was...not an afterthought, but definitely not meant to be a specific thing. It turned into a book blog, which was the one thing I was absolutely sure in 2005 it would not be; I read and edited books for a day-job, so touching that more than very, very lightly here would have been a bad idea.
Such are the dreams of our youth.
I will also point out here that I'm still using the template I picked, nineteen years ago. It's not currently available in the Blogger console, and it's probably broken in at least a few ways - the blogroll, in particular, has not been touched in the slightest since about Year Three. But every time I look at the array of possible Blogger templates, I hate all of them and find them all ugly and generic. If I had a lot of energy and time (and a willingness to spend money of it), I'd port the whole thing to WordPress, refurbish from top to bottom, and have something that looked nice.
That will never happen.
I've consistently thrown into this annual post my one random metric: the number of posts each year. It means essentially nothing, but it's a tradition, and nineteen years later, traditions are pretty much all I have. So here goes:
I had another blog for a couple of years about a decade ago - Editorial Explanations, where I made fun of editorial cartoons at pretty much exactly the point when they began their own extinction event. I enjoyed doing it until I didn't, and then I stopped. It was a long time ago, and it doesn't matter now, so I've stopped adding them in to the blog-post totals. That blog itself is still available for anyone with an interest in decade-old political bullshit. (I will note that bullshit of that era feels almost quaint and homey these days.)
As I said above, this turned into a book-blog after I lost my editorial job - and I did wonder, years later, if my opinions here did contribute, in some small way, to my never getting another editorial job despite trying off and on for a few years. (Probably not: it's a ferociously competitive field, and almost impossible to get back on the horse once you fall off.)
Most of the posts here, for the last decade or more, are about books. So the bulk of this anniversary post, every year, is links to those posts, using sentences I wrote that I'm still inordinately fond of. Yes, this is a hugely self-indulgent thing - I do it every year, and I'm going to do it again.
When I have to make a random choice of what to read next, I try to ask "what looks weirdest."
I do, occasionally, post about other things. This year and last, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays - I like music, though I think I write about it substantially more awkwardly and less well than I do about books, so I try to keep my illusions very minor.
When I get new books - however I get them, after some waffling about tags and titles a few years back - I post a list here under Reviewing the Mail, a title I stole from Chuck Klosterman. I don't claim to do that quickly - lately I tend to take bigger book-shopping lists and break them over multiple weeks - but I do it, eventually.
I also do quotes from the books I read - every Saturday as Quote of the Week, and twice a year in a closet-cleaning exercise. (Also available from that link, in big clumps on New Year's Eve and whatever Sunday is closest to Independence Day.)
But...that was pretty much it. I'm still, a decade later, surprised that my absolutely-no-chance-it-will-turn-into-a-book-blog did exactly that, but there's a limit to how surprised anyone can be by the same thing over an extended period of time. It is what it is.
That's it. Year Nineteen is now over, and I guess I'm into Year Twenty. If I keep to form, you won't have to worry about a post like this next year, and then I'll be back at the end of Year Twenty-One with a weird apology. Or maybe noticing the pattern will stop it?
Who knows. I hope the self-indulgent things you do are equally fulfilling to you, now and into the future. Now go forth and read somebody else's blog.
I'll try to mostly avoid that urge, as much as I can. Maybe I should just say, up front, that Ivory Apples is an interesting, compelling contemporary fantasy novel from Lisa Goldstein, but that its main action takes place over about a decade, with the passage of time not always clearly signposted (or important in the ways I wanted it to be). I wished for a book with a bit more structure - maybe three parts for Before, During, and After; maybe something different - and a bit more clarity and attention paid to the passage of time. Ivory Apples instead just rolls on, chapter after chapter in sequence, one day or scene after the last. There's nothing wrong with any of that: it just felt like there was a more precise, pointed book lurking just underneath, that almost came to be.
The first-person narrator is Ivy Quinn, oldest of the four daughters of engineering professor Philip, in Eugene, Oregon. Her sisters - each two years apart - are Beatriz, Amaranth, and Semiramis; their mother Jane died when Semiramis was born. It starts in 1999, when Ivy is eleven.
The family has a big secret: their "Great Aunt Maeve," who lives in a house far out in the countryside a couple of hours away and who they see about once a month, is actually the famous and reclusive author Adela Madden, who wrote a book called Ivory Apples. Think a fantasy analog of Catcher in the Rye, for the cultural importance and continuing sales, and that's about right - with the caveat that Madden is much more comprehensively hidden than Salinger ever was, even with a dedicated fanbase continuously researching the book and making theories and searching for any proof that Madden is still alive, somewhere.
Madden's Ivory Apples was published sometime in the late 1950s, about forty years ago as Goldstein's Ivory Apples begins. Maeve herself is old, Ivy thinks, but the narrative doesn't make it clear how old. She's got to be at the very least mid-sixties, but she's slow and muddled in her thinking, which makes her seem substantially older than that.
Philip handles Maeve's correspondence and finances, all of her communications with the outside world, and the girls are sworn to secrecy about their Great-Aunt - it's possibly the most important thing in their lives, keeping this secret.
On one trip to visit Maeve, Ivy wanders off, into a strange grove, and meets a group of odd beings cavorting there. One of them "slams into her," somehow going into her body and taking up residence there. She can't get him to leave, and the quick conversation she can have with Maeve is unhelpful. (This bit is closer to horror than the book's tone for these creatures later; there are multiple odd tone shifts like this throughout.)
Ivy eventually names the entity Piper, after Maeve gives her a bunch of mostly-folklore books to read and continues mostly being unhelpful about what happened to her. Substantially later, Ivy learns that Piper is a muse - like the ancient Greek ones, and in fact descended from them - who live in groves scattered about the globe and sometimes bond with humans who come to seek them, giving creative insights to their chosen ones. Adela Madden was the host of a muse, for example, and - tediously; I always hate when books do "here's the secret magical explanation for human creativity" bullshit like this - so were probably every famous creative person you've ever heard of.
That's one of the two main elements driving the plot; the other is much darker.
Later that year, when they're all back in Eugene, a woman named Kate Burden - that name is just a little too on-the-nose, I'm afraid - "serendipitously" meets the four girls in a local park and befriends them. She is low-key obsessed with Adela Madden and Ivory Apples, Ivy realizes. Over time, she gets invited to their house and meets Philip. (This is one of the sections where time passing is a bit vague - again, the book covers nine or ten years, not always cleanly.)
Ivy is suspicious of Kate from the beginning, but the plot wouldn't work if Kate's plots didn't move forward, so they do: Kate lures Philip to her house on a pretext, and Philip tragically dies in a fall down the basement stairs. And the girls are surprised to learn that Philip has a brand-new will, making Kate the girls' guardian and giving her control of all Philip's assets.
Kate at this point suspects a connection between Philip's family and Adela Madden - in retrospect, it's not quite clear how her "kill Philip, something to do with underpants, profit!" plan was supposed to work - but the secret is still secret. None of the girls talk about Great-Aunt Maeve, apparently Philip had no records of the post-office box that he used for her correspondence or anything else in his actual house, and Kate is frustrated.
For a few years the girls live with an increasingly nasty and vindictive Kate: she seems to know Ivy is the key to finding Adela Madden but - despite some clearly supernatural powers mostly manifesting as creepy noises from the basement - isn't able to bend a twelve-year-old to her will.
Oh, and the clearly-incapable-of-handling-her-own-affairs Maeve somehow muddles through for two or three years in the background. There's a whole lot of "somehow" in the timeline of Ivory Apples.
Anyway, Ivy can resist Kate because she has a muse, and, at about the age of fourteen, runs away, to spend the next two years living on the streets.
Kate becomes even more monstrous in Ivy's absence, but the other three girls never give up Madden, which seems really unlikely. Eventually, Ivy feels guilty and tries to find her sisters, first finding their old house empty and abandoned. More time passes, Ivy meets a sidebar character who also has a muse and provides some background, and eventually saves her sisters from a horrible supernatural warehouse/prison where Kate had them penned up, living entirely within illusions generated by the hordes of muses Kate has captured and controls.
OK, wait: Kate already has what seem to be dozens of muses under her total control, and evil-wizard levels of reality manipulation. The fact that she's still looking for a muse to bond with her, and somehow need to find this particular grove, doesn't actually make sense. I don't think the book ever explains how Kate got all of these muses or the power to control them: she's just evil and monomaniacal and our villain, so of course she has massive powers, and all the magic here comes from muses, so therefore she has a mass of captive muses. But how muses are said to work - and do work for Adela and Ivy and others - is completely different to how Kate uses them, for no stated reason, and no one in the novel seem to even notice.
Anyway, Kate has now achieved the full Evil Wizard package, and is still searching for the girls.
The girls - the younger three fairly traumatized - move in with Great-Aunt Maeve, who is dehydrated and medically shaky, and who they have not seen for...three? four? years at this point, and who somehow took back control of her literary and financial affairs along the way, which she's still completely incapable of doing. Another couple of years passes, with conflict among the girls, until, after a I-want-a-muse-too tantrum, Amaranth runs away.
Ivy hires a private detective to find Amaranth, who went back to Eugene (and got in touch with Kate, of course). Eventually - though I think this is at least six more months later; Ivy is now about nineteen - Kate finds her way to Maeve's secluded house, captures all of them with her evil magic, and sets everything on fire before dragging them all to the grove.
(We're supposed to have some sympathy for Kate, as someone obsessed with her favorite book and with wanting to be creative - in a world where creativity is de facto locked by ancient Greek spirits who choose what humans will be able to create anything worthwhile - but she's so cartoonishly evil, vindictive, and destructive by this point that it would be a rare reader who doesn't just want her to die in some horribly suitable way.)
Kate destroys nearly everything this family ever had: killed their father, trashed their house, ruined their relationships with each other, stole their childhoods, supernaturally tortured them for years, stole their inheritances, and even burns down about half of Maeve's house and does some fire damage to the grove as well. She is finally stopped, and in a state where she won't hurt anyone anymore...but it's not particularly satisfying.
In the end, Ivy is writing poetry - remember, she has a muse, so she's able to be creative, unlike the vast majority of humanity - and the four girls have settled into adult lives that aren't completely horrible. The muses are saved, more or less, but still seem like selfish, arbitrary flittery things that are only worthwhile because, again, there's no creativity without them.
And I might need to revise my earlier note: maybe this is a horror novel. The muses are practically horror even in the best light - they take over people, do whatever the hell they want, and it's hinted they can burn out their hosts. Ivory Apples has a horror-novel ending: a few survivors try to rebuild their lives after everything they cared about was trashed by a malevolent supernatural force.
Ivory Apples has interesting things to say about creativity and obsession, about that One Book that changes your life - but I'm not sure if I can buy the things it says about any of them. And I do think its timeline is too extended, too attenuated: there's a version of this book in some other world, told from the point of view of all four girls (to get the different ages and perspectives) that takes place all within maybe one year. The version we got, though, is gnarly and quirky - for me, more a book to argue with and work through than to love, though I see other readers have loved it.
But it's not always clear how much the book is claiming to be nonfiction. This graphic novel - or bande dessinée, since it's originally from France - is in the "Life Drawn" series from Humanoids, which I thought meant it was clearly, well, drawn from life. But I just took a look at their website, and the series is described as "Biographies and slice-of-life tales that show us what it means to be human" - and, more specifically, Wander Antunes's adaptation of Twain's short story Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, which I read recently, is also included in the program. So my assumption that of course anything published as "Life Drawn" would be nonfiction has been proven to be inoperative.
In other words: this is probably close to true, more or less. But only...kinda.
Superman Isn't Jewish (But I Am...Kinda) is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a French boy, Benjamin, and covers mostly his youth in the late eighties and early nineties, in a large extended family with a (now-divorced) Jewish father and Catholic mother. It was written by the film director and screenwriter Jimmy Bemon and drawn by Émilie Boudet, first published in France in 2014 (when Bemon also made a related short film with the same name) and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2018 English-language edition.
Jimmy is immersed in Jewish culture and history by his father's side of the family, encouraged to believe himself part of a long, storied cultural tradition stretching back five thousand years, one of the chosen people. And he's happy with that part.
But being Jewish also meant that he was circumcised at birth - which is vastly less common in France than it is in the US, something Bemon didn't need to point out to his original audience but might make his histrionics come across weirdly to American readers - and so he is Different From Other Boys.
There are other issues as he grows up - undertones of how much "Jewish" means "Zionist" to a bunch of schoolboys, some of whom are Arabic, things like that - but the chopped willy is the big one. Benjamin is worried that, when he ever gets together with a girl, she will point and laugh, and then tell everyone else.
Superman Isn't Jewish is relatively short and conversational, like a film driven by a single narrative voice. We don't see a whole lot of Benjamin's young life: just what matters to his possibly-Jewish identity. He has classes with a rabbi, and celebrates his bar mitzvah. There's a moment where he's pulled in to be the tenth man for a minyan. But he doesn't quite feel Jewish, and eventually works up the courage to tell his father that. This is a mostly amiable, positive book, so that goes OK in the end.
I do wonder a bit how much of Jimmy is in Benjamin, and what there is of Jimmy that didn't make it into Benjamin. But that's the inherent question of semi-autobiographical fiction, isn't it? In the end, this is a nice story about a good kid who figured out how he wanted to live and found happiness, in bright colored pencils and big faces from Boudet's art - that's a fine thing to have.
That fatalism is clearest in their longest works; the very title of The Bend of Luck implies it. And their new book this year, In Perpetuity, offers another view, a slightly different Hoey world, another way that fates can be sealed and main characters trapped forever.
In Perpetuity is set in a classical underworld, with a dark sun and generally sad air. The shades who live there don't eat or drink, but they do smoke cigarettes and otherwise have lives much like those of living people: apartments, jobs, boxy cars filling freeways with congestion at all hours. The ruler of the afterlife is called Hades; by the end of the book we learn that, yes, it's that Hades, an actual person who is the Greek god. (And presumably the other gods are lurking somewhere, though the only other major classical name we meet, or hear referenced, is Persephone.)
We see them in a city, spread out over hills and valleys near a dark sea. There may be more to the Afterlife than this, but it's what these characters know: A.L., the post-life equivalent of Los Angeles. It's implied that the geography of the Afterlife precisely maps onto that of the living world, but this city is the core and center of the Afterlife as we see it - even Hades' mansion is nearby.
There are police in A.L., patrolling everywhere all the time, and everyone reports regularly to their parole officers, to make sure they're following the apparently draconian laws of their new home. Being dead in A.L. is not the worst possible thing; there may be more punishing realms, plus the constant threat of being "jarred," disembodied and trapped in a vessel for all eternity.
Jim lives in A.L., in a dumpy small apartment - but we get the sense that all of the A.L. is dumpy, all of it faintly disappointing and unhappy all of the time, that this is the kind of world where happiness is just not possible. He works at a gas station, cleaning windshields and checking oil and doing fill-ups, and spends his nights mostly working crossword puzzles that fill the newspaper. (Like a lot of the Hoeys' work, this world is locked fifty or seventy years ago technologically and somewhat socially - with the added twist here that everything, of course, is sadder and duller and less pleasant than anything in the living world.)
But Jim was involved in some minor criminal activity in the living world, and some of his old compatriots find him in the A.L., to drag him into different criminal activity here. It turns out he is a connector, one of the rare people who can be transferred by a medium back to the living world (at the moment of someone else's death, or near-death), do things there, and then send himself back to the A.L. from any convenient patch of real-world darkness.
The criminals' plot isn't clear in all of its details, but there's money smuggled from the A.L. back to the living world, shades who pay to have time in real-world bodies, and a forming larger and more lucrative idea to make movies with stars who died young and gorgeous - since shades stay exactly as they looked when they died, forever.
Jim's initial visits back to the living world are all to meet Olivia, a young woman subject to anaphylactic shocks from bee-stings - and so someone this criminal group can induce to have near-death experiences at will, no matter the damage to her health.
A noirish plot spins out from there, with Jim - and, to a lesser extent, Olivia - trying to find ways to escape this gang. But, as usual in a noir, there's official corruption as well, and Jim only get snared deeper. Jim makes many trips to the living world, but the criminal gang reaches there as well; there's no place in A.L. or L.A. safe from them. Jim and Olivia do get dragged in front of Hades eventually, and the fact that they're essentially innocents doesn't help.
It ends appropriately, if not what I would call happily. Does any story set in the realm of Hades ever end happily? That sounds like a contradiction in terms.
And, as usual, the Hoeys tell this story in their slightly chilly, formally strong, cleanly structured way I'm still impressed how their style looks like no one else in comics; I could almost take In Perpetuity as an informative handout given to new shades, warning them against getting involved in illegal supernatural activities. It's a good lesson, well told.
It looks like Hellboy-verse books have continued to appear - and several audio dramas, just to make things even more confusing - but that they are all flashbacks or sidebars these days, and they all have series creator Mike Mignola involved to some degree but not doing more than co-writing. (Which Your Cynical Host takes to mean "approving the scripts and cashing the checks," possibly because the ongoing movie-reboot drama is taking most of his time.)
However the work gets divvied up, we got this book last year: Hellboy in Love, collecting five issues and three short series, all set in 1979 and featuring Hellboy's previously never-mentioned great love, the archeologist Anastasia Bransfield. (I say "never-mentioned," but the Hellboy universe is so continuity-besotted that she probably did get a footnote or two somewhere that I'm forgetting.) It's written by Mignola with long-time collaborator Christopher Golden, drawn by Matt Smith, and colored, as usual for this universe, by Dave Stewart.
And...they're pretty standard Hellboy stories, with an added flavor of "the girlfriend is along for the ride." Anastasia is smart and knowledgeable, though without any supernatural abilities or monster-fighting prowess of her own, so Hellboy has to keep her safe during the inevitable punch-the-monsters sequences, and I have to guess that her story eventually ends, however many years later, when Hellboy isn't able to punch one particular monster in time. (The monsters in the Hellboy universe are typically pretty nasty things, and the body counts, even in these somewhat more love-oriented stories, are quite high.)
So Helly and Ana meet cute on a British train when a band of goblins steal something valuable she's transporting, and they chase the goblins across hill and dale to the inevitable secret auction of supernatural materials organized by Shadowy Forces, where they retrieve the goods.
They enjoy each other's company, and so stick together in London afterward to do boyfriend/girlfriend stuff for a few pages before jetting off to Turkey to deal with murderous shadow puppets at a dig: that makes up the second story.
Anastasia's particular area of study is a semi-conspiracy theory - which, in this world, is clearly absolutely true - about an early-medieval global network of magicians and their methods of long-range communication. This theory has very little evidence, has been pooh-poohed by the finest minds of her time, and the reader is morally sure that not only is it completely accurate, but the organization still exists, is active, and probably at least mildly malevolent.
In the third, shortest story, there's another potential breakthrough - an ancient gigantic skull inscribed with mysterious messages in multiple wildly distant languages, which would prove that Anastasia's theory is true. And, of course, there's some kind of supernatural entity - Delilah, who was at the auction in the first story, and has some kind of demonic/vampiric thing going on - who wants the skull even more so, and is able to take it away.
My sense is that Anastasia's theorized ancient society of magicians is yet another still-extant, vaguely apocalyptic cult that threatens the whole world, and that we'll get subsequent stories to show how Hellboy thwarted and possibly destroyed them, though Anastasia nobly sacrificed her life in the process. I may be overly cynical here.
These particular stories are just fine, though the relationship stuff feels a bit shoehorned in, as if Mignola decided thirty years in that Hellboy really should have had a personal life at some point, and is now making up for lost time. And we all know the rules of flashbacks, especially long flashbacks about The Love of My Life. So expectations are definitely set, but this is fun and diverting for now, and a pleasant corner of this universe that isn't too burdened by the weight of apocalypse at the moment.
"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.
A lot of the music in this series is from the years around 2010 - maybe 3-5 years to each side - when apparently I was paying a lot more attention to new music, or the ecosystem (new-music notifications in iTunes and elsewhere, a pre-streaming emphasis on buying songs, a robust network of blogs to highlight new stuff, and so on) was closer to the ways I like to discover new music.
I don't know if it's an failing-ecosystem thing or a you-can-only-chase-fame-so-long thing, but a lot of those artists seem to have quietly dropped out to do other things since then, and this is one example.
My song this week is Everything to Lose by Bess Rogers, who had a bunch of music - great music; I dithered between about four of her songs for this series - for about a decade, including this Travel Back EP in 2009, but seems to have gone quiet since 2016.
It's got a great shuffling, handclap-y beat to start off, with a first verse of Rogers' voice just over that percussion before the rest of the music kicks in for the chorus:
why so down baby?
why so glum honey?
if the only thing you want is money
then you've got everything to lose
I guess you could call it a message song, but it's one of those messages everyone agrees with - if you only care about money, you're gonna miss out on a lot. But we don't always come to music for unique or profound thought - we don't come to music for that most of the time. We come to music to tell us things we know but might have forgotten, and do it with a punch.
Rogers has a lovely, flexible voice and it serves this song well - it's a fast song, and a moderately loud one, but she's never straining, never pushing. It just all flows out - boom boom boom. Three minutes, in and out: says what it needs to, like any great pop song. And this is one.
Tell you the truth: I still don't feel like it. So this will be roughly a third of the total, and the rest will come over the next two weeks.
These are the SFF books that I got in a big box of random remainders from HamiltonBook, a fine mail-order retailer relatively close to me (Connecticut) that I've been buying from for decades now. If you like books by the pound, and have wide enough interests to find stuff you like from a massive but quirky list, I recommend them highly. Many of the things I bought should still be available right now - though maybe not for long, since the deal with remainders is that they're only cheap as long as they remain.
Anthropocene Rag is a novella-as-a-book - it says so, though it's 250 pages long, which was enough for a full novel back in the Old Days - from 2020 by Alex Irvine. I read and liked several of Irvine's novels, but haven't seen anything from him for a while - quite likely because I wasn't looking in the right place at the right time. This one is a journey across some kind of post-apocalyptic USA (singularity model), with what looks like a quirky first-person narrator.
It is all very well to donate a group of females to the Academy of Motherhood, and one can only be commended for it, but if one of these creatures is wanted by the police as violent and dangerous, and another is under suspicion for intent to overthrow the civilized world, that is another story entirely. So what comes about is not quite what was expected.
- Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog, p. 108
That beard, he could swear, was a false one. It was so evidently hampering its proprietor. He was pushing bits of fish through it in the cautious manner of a explorer blazing a trail through a strong forest. In short, instead of being a man afflicted by nature with a beard, and as such more to be pitied than censured, he was a deliberated paster-on of beards, a self-bearder, a fellow who, for who knew what dark reasons, carried his own private jungle around with him, so that any moment he could dive into it and defy pursuit. It was childish to suppose than such a man could be up to any good.
- P.G. Wodehouse, Big Money, p.65
It's a short book, something like an allegory or a fable. And some elements feel very New Wave or classic-SF - there's a scientist with a major research project in his basement; that kind of thing - while the style and concerns are more modern and feminist. (Though, given the timing, clearly second-wave feminist, which could be important to understanding it.)
Emshwiller was mostly a writer of short fiction, and she writes this novel like a short-story writer: quickly, tightly, without extra details, explaining only as much as she has to and moving on to the next moment immediately.
The main character of Carmen Dog is not named that, though she is a dog, and she does have an unquenchable desire to sing Carmen, to be an opera diva.
But let me get to the premise first. This is a fantasy novel written in a SF style, about a massive unexpected and unexplained transformation in the world. Well, I say "world," but the book takes place in the US - the New York area, more precisely - and its viewpoint is both expansive and tight, so I would not be quick to assume the transformation is happening everywhere in the same way.
But here, in the US, women are turning into animals. And female animals are turning into women. Emshwiller does not want to treat these as two different phenomena; they are the same thing. All female beings who live closely with human men - I think that's the point; this is happening to pets, mostly, not to wild animals far off in the wilderness - are "moving up and down the evolutionary scale," as if that scale has suddenly become a game of Chutes and Ladders.
And, in the one house where we start the novel, the wife - never named, never a speaking role - is turning into a snapping turtle. At the same time, their beloved pedigreed golden retriever, Pooch, is having to take on care for the three children, starting to talk, and forming more complex thoughts and desires. She's our heroine: she wants to sing opera. (But she also still wants, at least at first, the things she wanted before: to be helpful and loyal and faithful, to care for and protect her family and master.)
The narrative mostly follows Pooch, as she travels, Candide-like, through the rapidly changing society, as "females" are all thrown into one category - with about as many rights as the half of them who were originally animals - and the men from Institutes of Motherhood and other big, "logical" edifices to understand and contain - and, most of all control - both this transformation and "females" in general.
The metaphor is not particularly subtle, obviously. Women are treated like animals by men, or maybe "no better than." And Emshwiller's tendency to be general keeps the metaphor strongly in the foreground: major characters here are only "the doctor" and "the master." Only a couple of the men even get names, though all of the women do - some of them, more than one name, as they transform and change and take on new roles.
And, centrally, all of the "females" are in roughly the same position: all somewhere in the middle, with elements of animal and human mixed and mingled. They can talk and have feathers; they want to sing opera but can only bark at the moment. They are sexy and passionate women while still being king snakes. Again, this is not a story about individuals moving up or down, or any contrast between individuals - it is entirely about the mass of "females" - the word Emshwiller uses most consistently; these are not necessarily "women" - and both what they are becoming and what the society around them is doing in response.
This is a sequence of moments rather than a complex narrative - events do follow each other, but there's a random, stochastic element to the book that I'm sure Emshwiller intended: this is an unknown event that transforms everything, which means it's all unexpected and contingent. It's not random, but it does hop and skip and jump through odd moments as it traces Pooch's travails in this transformed Manhattan.
The log-line would be "quirky feminist fable," and Emshwiller strongly hits all three words of that: it's an imaginative, distinctive, utterly original book that a reader might have some minor questions about while reading but should find compelling and fascinating.
The fictional town of Tackleford was central to his webcomics from Bobbins to Scarygoround to Bad Machinery, but the last decade has seen that world expand to include a fictionalized version of Sheffield in Giant Days (with first Lissa Treiman and then Max Sarin on art), a fictional town in Cornwall in Steeple, and (less successfully to my mind, and perhaps not really in the same world) a small US town in By Night.
Allison started in that halcyon early-Internet era when you could just do a webcomic and (as I understand it) basically live on the proceeds, but that time seems to have passed: the market power of Google has driven the revenue flow of ads down massively and the subscription model for individual strips that aren't primarily about tab-a-into-slot-b never really worked. So my sense is that the Bad Machinery books were relatively successful, and Giant Days definitely a hit, but both of those stories hit their natural end. Allison has been poking around with other concepts since them - I've already mentioned Steeple, which was awesome but seems to have ended due to lack of publishing support, and By Night, which was an interesting experiment. His cast already has mixed and reshuffled across properties - one of the main characters of Giant Days had been important in Scarygoround as a teen - so several of those ideas are largely "what comes next for This Person?"
So Charlotte Grote, from Bad Machinery and a few guest turns in Giant Days, had a Wicked Things miniseries and turns up in occasional Solver stories on Allison's site. And now her compatriot in supernatural detection, Shauna Wickle, does what every young person worldwide seems to want to do these days: goes on a TV reality show.
The show is UK Bakery Tent, and the story of her time there is The Great British Bump-Off, written by Allison and drawn by Max Sarin. It was a four-issue miniseries from Dark Horse about eighteen months ago, and then collected into this one volume late in 2023.
As you can guess from the title, the show here is a version of "The Great British Bake-Off," and there is...a murder! Well, an attempted murder, at least. And The Show Must Go On, so someone has to solve the murder - and that will be Shauna, if she has anything to say about it. (With the aid of two of her fellow contestants - the nana and the quirky guy.)
There's a fairly large cast - a dozen contestants/suspects, the hosts of the show, and a couple of production people as well - and all of them except Shauna are new Allisonian creations. Even though Shauna is officially "the quirky one," I have to say they're all quirky, in amusing and entertaining ways - each, as I've implied, cast by this show to be a "type" and to fill a specific role.
(One member of the cast, who works in IT, has a complex model of all of the types with detailed predictions about how long each will last in the competition.)
Shauna runs around, trying to balance high-pressure baking competition with also high-pressure snooping, hindered by the fact that most of the contestants don't know the truth about "the accident." But she is a John Allison heroine, with endless reserves of energy (and sass, though that seems too American a word in this context) and so of course she does solve the mystery in the end, and succeeds in not being eliminated in the first week.
The book ends with the equivalent of the credits sequence explaining everyone's fate in later life - "later life" here meaning "the rest of the competition." Like everything else Allisonian, it is quirky and specific and a lot of fun.
I don't know if we're going to get more Shauna Wickle stories - this seems awfully like a one-off, unless she turns into the kind of "influencer" whose career is going on reality shows - but it's an amusing Allison romp with great energetic Sarin art, so anyone jonesing for more Giant Days (or something not too far from it) should be very happy.
Big Money, a 1931 standalone set in London, is one of the better Wodehouse books, from his prime period, and it does all of that - particularly wrapping up its ending quickly and cleanly, choosing a perfect moment rather than trying to tie off every last plot thread.
As usual with Wodehouse, the plot is driven by two engines: the drive of love and the need for some money to make that love feasible.
Ann Moon, an American heiress, is visiting her uncle, the millionaire T. Paterson Frisby, who has hired the genteelly impoverished Lady Vera Mace to chaperone the young lady and, with luck, find her a suitable young man with a good title to replace the unsuitable chap in the USA she was just shipped away from. Lady Vera has a nephew, "Biscuit" Biskerton, who she thinks would be very suitable for Ann. The Biscuit is also close chums with his old schoolmate Berry Conway, who yearns for adventure in the West of the USA but works as Frisby's secretary after his family money was entirely spent by his guardian aunt.
There's a secondary young lady, Kitchie Valentine, necessary so both of the young men can have a happy ending. There's a supposedly-worthless mine, far out in those Western US badlands, owned by Conway, and a decidedly not-cricket secret plan by Frisby to buy that (actually valuable to him) mine through two shady characters, Captain Kelly and Mr, Hoke.
And Lady Vera herself has hopes of capturing Frisby, who was widowed quite some time ago.
This is one of Wodehouse's "suburban" books - I've noticed a few novels of this era set a bunch of their action in new residential areas on the then-outskirts of London, and use them as a new exciting middle ground between bucolic splendor and the sophistication of city streets. The Biscuit has huge debts, and is being hounded by a phalanx of commercial enterprises who provided him with boots and shirts and so forth, all of whom would like to be paid for those things. To avoid potentially messy legal entanglements, particularly at a point when he's trying to get married to a heiress, he hides in a suburban semi-detached house under an assumed name - and, of course, that house is right next door to where Conway already lives.
The plot is a succession of the usual Wodehouse scenes: talking in offices, scheming for money or love, amusing collisions of interesting characters, leaping through conveniently open windows into strange houses, being bothered by the radical anti-aristocratic element so common in the new suburbs, and so forth. There's no official impostors, though one character does pretend to be a Secret Service agent for quite a long time. As I said up top, it comes together swiftly at the end and closes out in a great moment rather than wasting time anatomizing everyone's happy endings - at his best, Wodehouse was confident enough to imply and be done with it.
Final Cut is Burns's new book, and his first major work of comics since, I think, the odd Tintin-inspired trilogy a decade ago, which started with X'ed Out. And it's very much in the spirit of his older works: the characters are young, maybe college-age though with no obvious school or jobs or other concerns to complicate their schedules. The world they live in is probably the early 1970s - our hero sees The Last Picture Show in a theater; it might not be first-run but it's playing - and they are making a movie.
The point of view alternates between Brian - he's the uneasy young man this time out, possibly manic-depressive and always sketching strange things - and Laurie, the girl he's obsessed with and who is going to be the star of the short horror movie this group is making. Brian and his best friend Jimmy have been making short silent movies with a personal film camera for maybe a decade, starting when they were about twelve: grisly murders, alien invasions, pulpy violence and startling danger. That kind of thing. The things that pop-culture-steeped young Boomer men would gravitate to, derivative versions of '50s monster movies.
They're doing this, I think, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. One member of the group has a family cabin, out in the woods, they they can use. And the book takes place partially in their home city - whatever that is - but mostly on a few camping trips, to that cabin and elsewhere in the woods, to film this movie. And, along the way, to drink and goof off and fool around - Brian is super-serious about this movie, but no one else is, and all the others are more typical twenty-somethings, mostly happy and looking for a good time.
The publisher's description calls this a book about the creative impulse, but I'm not sure if I agree. Brian, we see as the book goes on, has some level of ambition - like a "real" filmmaker, he has a vision of what he wants this movie to look like already in his head, and we think it might be decent. (It's still a silly derivative horror movie - let me be honest - full of second-hand ideas and random shocks, but perhaps his imagery and artistic eye would have made that something compelling.) Laurie, though, is not part of that impulse at all. She's not a would-be actress: she's just the pretty girl dragged into this by her friends. For her, this is something fun to do, she hopes, or something at least interesting to look back on later. And Laurie is at least half of the story here. Calling this a story about creativity reduces her to a role in Brian's movie, rather than a real person with her own concerns and issues.
Like many other Burns protagonists, both Brian and Laurie are mostly passive here: Laurie is directed to gesture at supposed alien ships in the sky or to struggle out of a pod. She trails along with this group because they're her friends, and they have plans and ideas. Brian is more central, but it still feels like Jimmy is the energetic one, the one who makes things happen, the man with enthusiasms who convinces everyone else to go along. Brian has the ideas, but would end up sitting by himself just drawing them without someone like Jimmy.
Of course Brian is obsessed with Laurie in a complicated artistic and personal way. He wants her to be his girlfriend, but also his muse - or, rather, she already is his muse, for this project at least, and he desperately wants her to live up to his unrealistic constructed vision of the woman-who-looks-like-Laurie in his planned movie.
They don't talk about the personal stuff, just the movie. If Brian were the kind of person who could explain things in words, it would be a very different story: it wouldn't be a Charles Burns story, I think. Brian does not get what he wants, obviously. Laurie...does, as much as she wanted anything specific.
They do make a movie. It is something like Brian's vision. But his vision would be a completely believable, Hollywood-quality production. Anything Brian does with this group, in this amateur way, will inevitably fall short. (There may be a deeply buried, implied "and so the Brians of the world grow up to be Charles Burns" - that they move to a similar artform that does let one person control everything, where budget is not as important as time and craft and focus.)
Final Cut looks gorgeous as well - as we expect from Burns - with inky blacks and his deep shadowing over colors that often are a bit brighter than we remember.
There's one way Final Cut differs from earlier Burns stories: the creepy horror-movie iconography and worries are all confined to the movie-in-the-book. This is not a genre story; it's about making genre stories. So it uses that imagery, but only in the service of creating art: we get some of Brian's dreams and visions, but no sense that they are real, unlike books like Black Hole, which are more centrally unsettling.
So this is a quieter, subtler story than we've seen before from Burns - most of the same elements, but with the realism mixed higher and the supernatural very low, as a background touch. And I'm impressed with the way he treats Laurie, and keeps her central as a character - not just the imaginary version of her Brian has created. In the end, it is her story as much as his: she's not just a viewpoint to illuminate his ideas, but an entirely separate way of seeing, a different way of thinking about this impulse.
