Steampunk vamps and undersea adventure

I'm all about cool fantasy titles over at my column in Bookslut this month; two novellas in particular stood out for me that I thought GLW readers would enjoy. If you're in the mood for alt history vamps or Sherlock Holmes with serious style, I have the books for you.

Elizabeth Bear’s new novella Seven for a Secret is a sequel to her alternate history saga, New Amsterdam. This time her vampire main character Sebastien and his companion, the sorceress detective Lady Abigail Irene, find themselves embroiled in a plot by Prussian invaders to conquer Russia -- the last strong holdout in a Europe that has been overrun and occupied. The couple has returned to London for the elderly Abigail Irene’s death but it is not comfort they find in this occupied city. The action begins early on when on a protective whim Sebastien follows a pair of teenage girls out late one night who are in danger of falling victim to loyal Brits who will not favor their Prussian military dress. There is something about the girls that strikes him as odd and as he reveals a few gathered clues to Abigai,l Irene and their friend Phoebe they realize that an attempt is being made by the Prussians to form a squad of werewolves that could be unleashed on the Russian front. Whether the girls (who are part of this) can be saved or must be sacrificed is a point of contention that is not solved until Sebastien meets with one of them and discovers her secret. He realizes that the adults are not the only ones with a plan, nor are they necessarily the most powerful ones in the plot to change the world.

While I enjoyed New Amsterdam immensely (and highly recommend it), Bear surprised me by making this very teen friendly sequel. Ruth and Adele, the teens Sebastien follows, carry their fair share of the story and are strong characters. Bear also does a great job of rewriting history here, with a dark version of 1938 that fits perfectly into might-have-been territory. (See Jenny Davidson’s The Explosionist or Jo Walton’s Farthing for other excellent alt-histories set in this period.) While the book will be most enjoyed by fans of Amsterdam, as it follows up on events there, new readers will find much to be excited about with Ruth and Adele as they face grave choices about loyalty to country, self and each other. It is clear that children are the new weapon of choice in this war but in a very unconventional matter. Bear provides plenty of political intrigue, some tension and enough mythic conversation to make readers long for a mystical library collection of their own. It’s nice to see Abigail and Sebastien still on the side of the good guys here, and even better to find a teenager who is bloody well tough enough to take on the true face of evil.


Alternate history detective Professor Langdon St. Ives returns in Subterranean Press’s The Ebb Tide, a steampunk adventure that includes one wicked cool submarine, a lost (and recently recovered) map, mysterious bad guys with guns and a final confrontation in Morecambe Bay “with its dangerous tides and vast quicksand pits.” St. Ives continues to be his brilliant deductive self although this time around more of the action is focused on stalwart sidekick (and faithful biographer) Jack Owlesby, who affords himself quite admirably in several dangerous situations above water and below.

Together with old friends and new, St. Ives and Owlesby are on the hunt for the suspected alien device from the Yorkshire Dales Meteor, which was lost in Morecambe Bay years before while under the care of Bill “Cuttle” Kraken who created a map of his intended route across the bay before succumbing to its treacherous tides. Just what the device is capable of no one knows but recovering it before the evil Ignacio Narbondo (otherwise known as “Frosticos”) is imperative. When the map is found, Ives is quickly on Kraken’s trail and along with Owlesby, a talented street urchin, and others who support him in his current days of banishment from the Explorers Club, the race is on to beat Frosticos. The discovery of a shipyard below the River Thames keeps things moving while introducing several of the mechanical devices that steampunk fans will enjoy. Everything leads to a confrontation with dastardly villains, one of whom gets his just deserts. All’s well that ends well (mostly) as Owlesby is victorious and the device -- whatever its origins might be -- is revealed at last.

Author James Blaylock keeps the action moving, the pithy comments flowing and the dire circumstances just this side of believable as St. Ives maneuvers his way around his arch enemy. Accompanied by J.K. Potter’s always stellar illustrations, The Ebb Tide is one of the better fantasy adventure characters I have come across in ages. Modern teens will love St. Ives but the inclusion of talented teen Finn Conrad (former circus acrobat of course) will keep them particularly riveted. There is nothing not to like about this novella and a lot to recommend it. Be sure to check out Blaylock’s other St. Ives adventures as well. (And don’t miss his afterword to the The Ebb Tide, a delightful combination of fact and fiction as the author ruminates on writing his story.)

[cross posted from Bookslut]

The Sixth Sense vs. Turn of the Screw

You’ve seen The Sixth Sense, right?

And you remember the super secret shocker ending, right? Now imagine this. What if the movie had ended before the secret was revealed? And you and your pals walk out saying, “That was some weird stuff, but what the heck happened?”

Later a Taco Bell, you go, “Wait a minute! What if the kid saw…”

And your buddy goes, “But the kid didn’t see…”

And you go: “But maybe he did, but he didn’t realize …”

And so on.

Well, that’s what happened 100 years before The Sixth Sense with Henry James and his whacked out ghost story, “The Turn of the Screw.” He freaked people out and forgot to calm them down by turning the lights on at the end of the story. The secret stays secret.

If you’ve thought about tackling a "classic," this one isn’t a bad place to start. For one thing it’s short. For another it’s a page turner. Some of the sentences made my brain glaze over, but there's plenty of straightforward stuff to get you through.

And then there’s the big secret for you to chew over for a while.

The upshot is that a naïve, young lady lands her first job as a governess. “Go to my creepy country estate,” says her new boss, “and take care of a couple of orphans. It pays great, but there’s just one rule: don’t bug me -- no matter what happens.”

Things do happen, of course. AND things have happened in the past, which the boss failed to mention. Such as the untimely death of the previous governess. (You saw that coming, right?)

Then it’s all ghosts and creepy kids and who is lying to whom and more ghosts until suddenly - BAM - the story is over before the big secret comes out. IF there was a big secret. Maybe the big secret is that there wasn’t a big secret.

When you’re done with the story, you can go online and read the many, many theories about just what happened. These are often called “literary criticism,” but they’re really just seriously geeked-out Taco Bell conversations.

Where we stand on books for boys

The books are still arriving at InsideOut Writers for the Book Fair for Boys. We are going to give the project a week for the dust to settle and then we'll share how many books arrived, how the library is being set up (there are so many books we might have books in more than one location as there are three juvenile detention centers in LA County) and what the boys think. Keep in mind though, as awesome as the response has been we are still looking at about 300 books for 2,500 boys. This is just the beginning of our commitment to this project and we look forward to what comes next.

[Post pic of Eve's house as she opens books - read more, including some of the messages from folks who donated books, in her latest entry.]

For Surfers

Saw this in a recent issue of Booklist and couldn't resist passing along the review to you. Sounds like perfect summer reading if you live on the coast (which, incidentally, is where I grew up).
Fierce Heart: The Story of Makaha and the Soul of Hawaiian Surfing by Stuart Holmes Coleman:

Dude! Hang ten! Don’t wipe out! Such phrases, both quaint and common, have their genesis on the sylvan shores of the Hawaiian islands, home to the ancient and modern sport of surfing. And nowhere has the taming of the waves been more revered or refined than in the tiny, isolated village of Makaha on Oahu’s wild western coast. Led by the aptly named Buffalo Keaulana, a ragtag group of rebels and outlaws, loners and drifters, natives and haoles found solace and sought glory there through the study and mastery of towering walls of water. Inspiring and inspired by the gentle songs of Makaha’s giant Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’ole, this renegade village came to embody the peace and power of the ocean. Coleman richly pays homage to the legendary pioneers who elevated surfing from an island pastime to an international competition and shares stories of the great generosity, unwavering courage, and audacious vitality of the surfers who epitomize the deep cultural resonance of the Hawaiian spirit.

Monster Maker by Nicholas Fisk

Matt finds himself working his dream job - assistant to a special effects artist - but after being injured during a fight, he finds himself wondering if the creatures from the workshop have come to life.

One of the shelves in my bedroom is devoted to the books I loved as a kid. Last month I talked about one such "classic," and my May entry is devoted to another.

Back in 1979, I was ::cough, cough:: years old. I would go to my local library on the weekends like a devoted soul attends church or synagogue. Imagine my delight when I found a brand new book, protected by that crinkly cellophane jacket. Monster Maker (back then I never looked at author names, but the fellow who wrote the book was Nicholas Fisk). It had an exciting cover, featuring all sorts of monsters. And that brings me to another childhood love: monster movies, especially the Japanese men-in-rubber-suits sort of flicks. Godzilla was my muse.

I devoured the book in the car with as much relish as a dragon chomps on hapless princesses.

British 14 year-old Matt lands a job with his idol, a famous monster maker, Chancey Balogh, who builds mechanical creatures for Hollywood. Balogh is working on his magnum opus, a fire-breathing beast named Ultragorgon. This monstrosity is so life-like that Matt finds Ultragorgon haunting his dreams.

Life for Matt grows worse when the school bullies begin harassing him. The bullies (who come from impoverished households) discover Matt carrying several pound notes, money given to him by Chancy, and start nicknaming him "Moneybags Matt." Soon, Matt finds himself fighting the bullies and, without knowing it, suffers from a concussion.

Here the book takes a surreal turn. He starts seeing out of the corner of his eye the creatures from the workshop. Had Chancey's genius brought the monsters to life? But when he tells the girl he likes, even Chancey, no one believes him.

Matt's fascination with Ultragorgon becomes an obsession. And when the bullies plan to rob and vandalize the workshop, things take a frightening turn.

What I found so endearing about this book was that, as a kid, I found imagination so powerful that it could make the distinction between reality and fantasy blur. I wondered, while turning the pages, did the monsters come alive because of Matt's concussion or his yearning for them to be more than metal and plastic creations.

Fisk's work seems to have faded from too many shelves, a tragedy. The world needs more makers of monsters. And stories.

Bonechiller by Graham McNamee

It's the middle of the night and freezing, because this is Canada in December, and Danny is on his way home when he senses something following him. Something big and fast and soundless as it runs, something unlike anything Danny has ever seen before, that catches him as he nears home.

At first, the only proof Danny has that something out of the ordinary happened are a small blue mark on his hand where he was bitten and the giant footprints he finds in the snow the next morning. The prints are at least twice the size of Danny's feet, complete with claw marks, but Danny's brainy pal Howie is sure they're fake. Then the creature attacks Howie.

As Howie begins to piece together the clues that tell of a long pattern of missing teens, all bitten by a strange creature, then lured into the cold winter night, never to be seen again, he and Danny start to feel the effects of the bite. One of their classmates, Ray, fell ill with some sort of infection and ran away from the hospital where doctors were trying to treat him. Danny and Howie are sure Ray was the creature's first victim this winter. Will they be able to avoid Ray's fate?

Bonechiller by Graham McNamee reads almost like an episode of Supernatural, circa Season 1, but without Sam and Dean. (And not written by a guy named Chuck.) This isn't blood-and-guts horror, but a gradually-building supernatural thriller. McNamee deftly conveys his characters' dread and their determination to escape the creature, while also leaving the reader wondering how Danny and Howie can manage such a thing.

Danny's first-person narration is merely serviceable and I do wish the pacing had been better, because after the initial attack on Danny, not much happened for about the next 60 pages. But once the story got going, I forgot about about these complaints. Instead, I would swear that the air around me got cooler and the breeze stronger as I read deeper into the book. While the creature is physically terrifying, McNamee uses a less-is-more approach when it comes to its physical appearance. True, he does describe the way it looks and how it frightens Danny, but the main focus is on the creature's psychological effect on Danny and Howie: the way it relentlessly chases them and invades their dreams, and their knowledge, based on what they have learned of its previous victims, that they have less than two weeks to find a way to survive.

[cross-posted at The YA YA YAs]

Punkzilla by Adam Rapp

Jamie was stealing iPods for Fat Larkin by hitting joggers over the head with a pointy alarm clock. ("I mostly went for mom types or fat people because they were the easiest to knock unconscious. I'm still small for my age.") Fat Larkin rewarded Jamie with a nice one: color, 80GB, and--most importantly--loaded with a bunch of punk rock, like Dropkick Murphys, the Dead Kennedys, and Minor Threat. Fat Larkin somehow knew that Jamie was into punk, started calling him "Punkzilla," and pretty soon everyone in Portland was calling him that, too.

Fourteen-year-old Punkzilla/Zilla/Jamie has found himself in some tenuous circumstances, after running away from military school, going off medication for his ADD, ending up in Portland ("PORTLAND, OREGON, NOT PORTLAND, MAINE"), falling in with the likes of Fat Larkin, trying meth for his first time, and finally, hastily, boarding a Greyhound bus when he finds out that his older brother in Memphis is dying.

Punkzilla--the book, and to some extent the character--is a little hard core, recommended for ages 14 and up. It's a collection of letters, mostly from Zilla to his brother, but also a few written back to him. Steer clear if you're uncomfortable reading about some intermittent (but never gratuitous) sex, drugs, and violence. ("I've gotten off here and there but I'm basically talking about hand jobs. I don't mean to be weird P but in your letter you said how you wanted the truth about stuff even if it's ugly and trust me it's going to get a little ugly. Uglier than my skittery penmanship if skittery is even a word.")

But despite the grittiness, Punkzilla still manages to be awfully funny at times, and always real and raw and surprisingly hopeful, as young Zilla navigates some pretty bewildering situations--some of them specific to the sketchiness of being a runaway on the road, and some faced by every restive boy on the brink of becoming a man.

The book was written by Adam Rapp, one of NYC's most exciting younger playwrights, so it's not too surprising that the character Zilla is so believable and appealing. Rapp's gift for drama is also clearly what makes the book itself such a page-turner, with the backstory revealed out of order, in bits and pieces from the letters in Zilla's worn spiral notebook.

Deadline

Deadline offers readers a scenario that's been done a lot in teen lit and in film. Main character finds out he has a terminal illness and has only a short time left. He decides to make the most of whatever time he's got, and learns more about what it means to live fully than most people who get to stick around for a whole lot longer. This is the deal for high school senior, Ben Wolf. A routine cross country physical turns up the worst possible news: a terminal blood disease. Ben makes the choice to keep the diagnosis to himself, partly because he's sure it will send his mentally-ill mother over the edge, and partly because he doesn't want to go through his last year known purely as "that guy who is going to die." He'd rather pass the days he's got making the football time, driving his hardass conservative civics teacher crazy, and winning the heart of Dallas Suzuki, the girl he's always wanted.

While Chris Crutcher may be working with a theme that's been done many times, Deadline never feels like a book you've read so many times before. You might be surprised by how funny a book this is. Ben meets his fate with as much humor as anyone possibly could. There are laughs in this book, lots of them, which is not something I had anticipated. Now I've read a lot of "teen girl with terminal illness" stories, and most of them didn't make me laugh. Trained by said teen girl books, at first, I couldn't get my head around Ben's reaction to his situation. How did he not break down? Where were the tears, the anger, the shaking of fists, the curses? How could he just go to school and do regular teenage guy things? Well... because he had too many other things he wanted to do, and why waste time?



Deadline is a book that asks the question, "What would you do?" It made me think. It touched on issues that teens should have opinions about: racism, child abuse, mental illness, and the education system. I liked this book a great deal because it moved beyond the typical "young life cut tragically short" story. I liked it in spite of the fact that I knew before I started reading that the main character was going to die, and also in spite of the fact that there were very long football scenes written with a whole lot of sports lingo that made me feel like I was reading a book in Latin. Another reason to congratulate Crutcher is that Ben does not reach the temptingly simple conclusion that Life is Beautiful. Instead, he recognizes that "Planet Earth is a tough town," and his one wish for those he leaves behind is to risk. Reading Deadline will require tissues, don't get me wrong, but you'll put it down feeling like you've read more about living than dying.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty to seventy percent of anything he had to say. If Rat told you for example, that he'd slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half. It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. ~ Tim O'Brien, "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong"

Here's what's I know for sure: Tim O'Brien was an infantryman in Vietnam. Twenty years later, he wrote a collection of loosely connected short stories, The Things They Carried. He dedicated it to "the men of Alpha Company," listing several people, including Rat Kiley, who later appear as characters in the stories themselves.

After that, nothing's certain. The book moves across a no man's land between the truth and lies, the swampy place where war stories come from.

Rat makes up--probably--a story about a soldier who has his girlfriend choppered into Vietnam from the States. Another grunt wonders about a man he killed, imagining an entire life for him, right up until the night their paths met on a narrow clay path. One story is about a soldier named Norman Bowker, home from the war and haunted by an incident where his cowardice caused another soldier to die. Next, O'Brien writes what seems like a non-fiction essay about Norman, saying he was a real guy but didn't freeze up or let anybody die. "That part of the story was my own," he confesses. Then he tells another story detailing the same incident, but this time, O'Brien himself is the coward.

If it weren't for the tinge of terror and desperation that hangs over every page, all this might come off as coy metafiction or simple bullshit. (Personally, I don't think there's much difference between the two, but that's for another post.) Instead, O'Brien and his characters struggle to explain things they don't have words for, the sort of massive truths that facts alone can't describe.

They're haunted by images, moments when the war grows from simply ugly to outright gothic and almost beautiful. The high school sweetheart from Rat Kiley's story falls in with some Green Berets and starts wearing a necklace of tongues. The soldier O'Brien--or maybe just his fictional stand-in--let die sinks into a field of mud and human shit, folded in with the land and the war. Another soldier steps on a land mine the same moment he steps into a shaft of sunlight, so it seems like, "the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms."

These images become the leitmotifs, or reoccurring nightmares, that hold the collection together. O'Brien turns them over and over, searching for some answer, some insight into the war, something, even while admitting the whole time that, "In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe, 'Oh.'"

But O'Brien persists. He returns to these moments in his writing and in real life. One of the last stories, "Field Trip," is about him visiting Vietnam with his daughter, Kathleen, showing her the fields and little villages where his friends died, where he killed people. While O'Brien is deeply affected by returning, his daughter is bored. She only sees fields and little villages, "flat, dry, and unremarkable." O'Brien can only tell her the facts about the war, not the truth.

The Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote, "In war, truth is the first casualty," back in the fifth century B. C. His little pearl has been pulled out for every war since. But it assumes truth and lies are like oil and water, that one is entirely and eternally separate from the other. Through The Things They Carried, O'Brien suggests something more complicated. That, "For the common soldier, at least, was has the feel--the spiritual texture--of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. Those vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity."

Twitter of 1906

I don't find it surprising that with the increase in Internet traffic people find comfort, solace, and convenience in the brevity of Twitter, the "micro blogging" force currently keeping everyone tethered to their electronic devices. Who has time for a newspaper when there are blogs to summarize and excerpt the news, and who has time for blogs when there are plenty of places that will feed you headlines? Why wait until the end of the day to provide the world with an update of your daily travails when you can jot down what is happening, in real time, in short 140 character tidbits?

Instead of 175,000 francs in the coffers deposited with the tax collector at Sousse, there was nothing.

All of this reductive communication might seem unique if it wasn't for the fact that the form is over a hundred years old. Back when newspapers were the Internet people relied on for their daily information needs, there were concrete issues with filling space on the printed page. Extra space in those column inches might be filled with maxims, poetry, or simple quotes culled to give pause or entertain. These bon mots were just as often short news items that didn't require more than a few lines' explanation.

No one ever enters Yolande's house at Montaley, Meudon, through the window by night, so she screamed, and they only took her purse.

I doubt few would look at these space constraints as perfect format for the novel but back at the turn of the twentieth century Felix Feneon did just that. Hired in 1906 to provide short items for La Matin in Paris, he took news items from wire services and other sources as fodder for his inspiration. Writing up to twenty of these nouvelles daily he managed to 1220 of them in less than a year before moving on to other ventures. All but just over 150 of them are collected in Novels in Three Lines, translated and introduced by Luc Sante.

The bread in Bordeaux will not be bloodied this time; the truckers' passage provoked only a minor brawl.

Naturally, the more salacious items make for better stories, and so we find plenty of death and grief and sorrow and murder. As the modern news axiom goes: if it bleeds, it leads. But it's Feneon's ability to crystallize a story to its most basic elements, and in language that weaves a hidden complexity into the deceptive simplicity. While the stories can be read at face value, what makes them novels is what goes unsaid.

By accident or, more probably, suicide, Mme Veit and her daughter Antoinette, 9, drowned in the canal at Nancy.

What?! Children perched on his wall?! With eight rounds M. Olive, property owner in Toulon, forced them to scramble down all bloodied.

Forty gypsies, along with their camels and bears, were forced by gendarmes to leave Fontenay-aux-Roses and for that matter the Seine.

What would cause a mother and daughter to commit suicide together, or a property owner to take pot shots at children sitting on his wall? And what of that pack of gypsies and their camels and bears? Were they just passing through, hiding out, or merely bathing in the Seine? Dark, mysterious and gruesome, and with a demented twist of humor in the telling, each of Feneon's "novels" delivers on the promise that less is more. Any enterprising reader could use this collection as the basis of story seeds, a compendium of examples in summary, or as short bursts of infotainment they were created to be.

Novels in Three Lines
by Felix Feneon
translated and with an introduction by
Luc Sante
NYRB 2007