Light and Dark: a Study in Strongmen and Spiders

I'm going to come right out and say it. Are you ready? Okay, here goes: I do believe that this book here is Alan Moore's finest work since Watchmen. Tom Strong is a mental and physical marvel of the old-fashioned variety. His origins owe a great deal to his direct forebears Tarzan and Doc Savage, and like them he captures a sense of awe and adventure that has by-and-large disappeared from comic book storytelling these days. The irony is that the guy who heralded that disappearance (the aforementioned Mr. Moore with the aforementioned Watchmen) has given us the thrill of a pure hero who relies on his intelligence and his skill, and put him in a world of gee-whiz wonders that befits his title of "science hero." At the same time, Moore's intellectual rigor is not capable of producing a one-note narrative and, not surprisingly, Tom Strong's adventures are laced with all sorts of unexpected secrets and hidden depths (examine his origin story closely and consider carefully just who you think Tom's father really is). This gorgeous hardcover compilation, Tom Strong Deluxe Edition Volume 1 (by Moore and Sprouse) includes his origin and, among other adventures, an invasion by future “Aztechs” and Tom's meeting with a super-hero coalition from another world. All the tales feature Chris Sprouse's bright, muscular, dynamic art and breath-taking art deco designs which support Moore's wild flights of imagination stroke for stroke.

On the opposite end of the tonal spectrum is Spider-Man: Noir (by Hine, Sapolsky and Di Giandomenico), which places the webslinger in the darkest days of the Great Depression and onto the violent, morally compromised streets. Donning a darker appearance to go with his grim motives, Spider-Man contends with a ghastly array of re-imagined foes including the Vulture, Kraven and, of course, the Green Goblin (are you even allowed to re-imagine Spider-Man without the Green Goblin in tow?). At the same time, much of the supporting cast shows up here too, in slightly tweaked characterizations that feel both fresh and surprisingly deep for a fairly short book (check out the crusading and principled J. Jonah Jameson, for example). Spring for the full-sized Premiere Hardcover version over the digest-sized version if you can, as it shows off Di Giandomenico's super-detailed and expressive art to best effect.

So you caught me going on about pulp-inspired tales once again. Their influence still runs strongly through comics today. These two pull off the homage with real intelligence and style.

Winterdance - You Just Gotta Wonder About People Sometimes

Maybe he's just crazy. I mean, that would explain it, wouldn't it? "The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod" is the subtitle of Gary Paulsen's Winderdance. I don't know about "fine," but yeah, I'd agree to the madness part. Racing with a team of dogs for 1180 miles across the Alaskan snow and ice. Gary! What are you, nuts???

But he did it. He finished the race, and went back to do it a second time. A committed dude, that Paulsen. And if he isn't, he ought to be committed -- to an asylum. I know, that's an old joke. Sorry.

He trained the dogs, and the dogs saved his life. This is that kind of story. And Paulsen is such a story teller.


"Without thinking I jerked at the skunk to pull it away from Devil. This was risky in itself. Devil considered the skunk to be food, was in fact trying to swallow the skunk whole, or so it seemed, and grabbing Devil's food amounted to suicide.

But worse, I grabbed the tail, which had the effect of swinging the rear end of the skunk around to aim the potent business end at me, at my face.

Whereupon the skunk let go.

His firepower was somewhat diminished, as he'd dumped some of it on the dogs, but there was still a hefty load and it blew, like the winds of death, directly into my face.

'Gaacck!"

It was exactly that sound. I have never heard it duplicated by another person, and it was accompanied by projectile vomiting, walking in circles in the ditch, trying to rub it out of my eyes, and a sudden and sincere wish to become an investment banker, or any other job that would never put me close to a skunk's ass again.

It took a half hour to get some vision and ability to breathe right, and another half hour to sort the team and untangle them and get them ready to continue on.

It was bad, it was vile, it was in some way green and bilious, but we had overcome it and, I thought, could now finish the run -- stinking, perhaps, still queasy and sick, but none the worse for wear in other ways.

We hit the second skunk within a mile.

The results were almost exactly the same except that this time the skunk somehow got away from the dogs on his own and I tried to help it by kicking it down into the ditch, out of the way, so it could escape.

Rule one: don't grab a skunk by the tail and pull.

Rule two: Don't kick a skunk."

You know, I wanted to give you a little of the flavor of the book, so I opened it at random to that part. The whole story is that engaging. Think you might want to race the Iditarod someday? Even if you don't (You're not crazy, right?), Winterdance is great fun.

The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan

If you're looking for a page-turning graphic novel that is both educational and kid-friendly, look no further than The Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan. This riveting story of one family's struggle during The Dust Bowl is not to be missed.

Kansas circa 1937 is shown through the eyes of an eleven year old boy named Jack Clark. While a bunch of bullies swings at him with their fists and their harsh words, a dust storm blows through town, and Jack runs off. Soon, we meet his family: Pa is gruff, Ma is sad, his sister Dorothy is sick, and his littlest sister, Mabel, has never seen rain. Jack overhears the doctor telling his father that Dorothy's condition is called "dust pneumonia," and that a new trend, "dust dementia," has started to spread. After seeing an odd face in the abandoned Talbot farm, Jack begins to worry that he too has been made ill by the storm.

Using pencil, ink, and watercolor, Phelan has created stark, dusty images of distinct, proud characters that will certainly stay with the reader. As Jack's level of courage goes up and down, so does his posture: sometimes he is slouched, and he often hides his eyes under the brim of his hat, but when push comes to shove, he stares, he shouts, and he stands straight up. There are wordless panels which express a great deal, such as the two panels on one of my favorite pages (199, which comes towards the very end, so don't you dare skip ahead!)

With her songs and and her smile, little sister Mabel steals every single scene - rather, panel - that she's in. Whenever she was shown skipping around with her umbrella, I thought of the Morton Salt Girl. Her natural curiosity and happiness nicely countered the sadness expressed by other, older characters.

Phelan also weaves in the power of storytelling: While bed-ridden Dorothy reads Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Ernie down at the General Supply tells young Jack tall tales which always star a courageous boy named Jack.

I'm certainly not the only GLW blogger who loves this book. Kelly Fineman praised it as well. Click here to read her post.

To learn more about the origin of this book, read my recent interview with Matt Phelan.

Vampire Haiku by Ryan Mecu

Long-time readers here at Guys Lit Wire might remember my review of Zombie Haiku back in March. And some of you may have read (or may want to read) my interview with Ryan for the 2009 Summer Blog Blast Tour. Well, let me tell you all a little something: Ryan Mecum has done it again with VAMPIRE HAIKU, combining haiku and story, humor and horror, and adding history, a hint of romance, and social commentary to boot. While the vampires in it may do, this is one book that doesn't suck. Also? This book is as much a survey of American history as it is the story of one vampire through the ages.

The book follows the history of a guy – let's call him William, since that's his name – who is turned into a vampire by a lovely lady vampire named Katherine whilst aboard a ship to the New World (to be specific, The Mayflower – in case you were wondering about those onboard deaths, all is now revealed – also, this makes the book perfect for November, what with Thanksgiving just around the corner):

One the deck at night
as thousands of stars shine down,
I see her, alone.

A married woman,
undeniably stunning;
likes to flirt with me.

Like a siren song,
each night she calls me to her
and I am in love.

In the glassy sea,
she, I, and the moon reflect.
Hers is a bit . . . off.

Katherine bites William, he bites back, and there are many haiku about his lust for blood, as well as Katherine's explanation of the "rules", which include "tanning is bad". Also included? This tidbit:

She explains to me
that wood through my heart will kill.
I don't think that's new.

Ahahaha!


A quick review of what haiku is - a short Japanese form, usually interpreted in English as a three-line poem with the first and third lines having 5 syllables and the second as having 7 (5-7-5, in other words). Ryan Mecum writes hundreds of them, then arranges them in such a way as to tell a story, move us through history in a linear manner, and provide details about vampire life along the way.

In the process of learning to kill (and yes, I'm still talking about the early blood-spattered pages of the book), Ryan – er, make that "William" – favors us with this description:

Blood tastes like cherries
mixed with a lot of copper
and way too much salt.

Gross. And awesome. And a might bit thought-provoking, if I'm being honest. Early on, Katherine skedaddles, leaving William hoping to find her, a yearning he returns to throughout the book (with occasional sightings of his lady love).

History begins to roll, as it does: the Salem Witch Trial turns out to be vampire-related. In 1774, we learn that William was around for the Boston Tea Party and that he is relieved "the Intolerable Acts/are not about me". William remembers the Alamo fondly as a massive feast:

Some people wonder,
How did Davy Crockett die?
The answer: Screaming.

William recounts horrifying Civil War stories, which indicate how violent and bloody the war was, and brings home the body count – over 600,000 – in a way that catches your attention. He moves on to mess with Emily Dickinson: "She would always say/that she couldn't stop for death,/so I stopped for her." (How much do I love this paraphrase of Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death? SO much! Additional famous people mentioned (directly or by implication) include P.T. Barnum, General Custer, Amelia Earheart, James Dean, the Son of Sam killer; other events include the Chicago fire, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War and State-side Peace Protests, Woodstock, a Kentucky coal mine collapse, the Bicentennial, the Branch Davidian cult standoff in Waco, Texas, and more. There are haiku about the practical realities of vampire life - finding and killing victims, efforts to avoid sunlight, whether one needs airholes in coffins, and more.

Some haiku I especially liked along the way? These, which speak volumes about religious faith, as one might expect when the author was a youth pastor:

A cross is a cross
if that is its intention.
Crossing beams don't count.

A cross only works
if the person holding it
believes it will work.

And how could I not adore the pop culture references about The Count from Sesame Street (happy anniversary, Sesame Street!), Count Chocula, Count Dracula ("On each Halloween/I dress as Count Dracula./I've heard he does, too."), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Lost Boys, Nosferatu, Near Dark, Interview With a Vampire and to Twilight. Oh, what the heck – here are two of the four Twilight haiku, what with New Moon coming out next week and all:

Those were not vampires.
If sunlight makes you sparkle,
you're a unicorn.

. . .

If this were real life,
Ed would have looked at her neck –
bite, dead, burp, credits.

Throughout the book, William searches for Katherine. Will he find her? Is she right to think she's been tracked by a vampire hunter? If so, who might it be?

You can read more about Ryan Mecum and his work at his brand-new website. You can purchase Vampire Haiku at Barnes & Noble and Borders stores (in the humor section, near Zombie Haiku), and at some independent book stores - including the marvelous Powell's Books (who will, like all indies, always happily order you whatever you'd like, btw), as well as from on-line sources.

Recommended for readers who like humor, history, vampires (or zombies, depending on which book we're speaking of) and, oh yeah – fans of poetry (especially haiku).

Sky Horizon

Twenty-Nine Palms high school seems like a pretty typical place, with social divisions that might be expected at any American high school. Its location near a military base and a top-secret research facility mean that a lot of the kids are army brats or the children of scientists. The fact that some of the kids from the math club are keeping an alien in their basement isn’t surprising—of course they’d want to study it. And they wouldn’t get much of a chance if they turned it over to the authorities! And its also not surprising that the alien is kidnapped by some jocks who are looking to make a quick buck by charging admission to stare at it.

Sky Horizon was brought to my attention by a friend who was trolling David Brin’s web site. While it is billed as “book 1 in the Colony High series,” and was published in 2007, I haven’t been able to find information about further volumes. Though the ending of this story does leave a big “what happens next,” I thought it was an interesting take on aliens and teenagers.

From the flap copy, which describes student Mark Bamford hearing the alien rumors and deciding to investigate, I expected a teenagers & alien vs. evil government story (I was thinking E.T., actually), but it actually turned out to be an exploration of first contact, and what that would mean for the Earth as a whole, particularly if teens were involved.

Even if Brin doesn’t move forward with the series, Sky Horizon will give you a lot to think about, and maybe you’ll even create some of your own stories about what happens next to Mark, his friends, and Twenty-Nine Palms high school. The possibilities are there, and one of the greatest things a book can do is spark your imagination. If you like this one, you might want to try out some of Brin’s other fiction, his web site details his Uplift series and has some short stories that you can read for free. Sky Horizon isn't for sale in many places at the moment, but check for it in your local library!

Cross posted at Dwelling in Possibility.

Tillmon County Fire -- Pamela Ehrenberg

From the prologue:

I can look at this page, this news about the trial and all the background noise around it, and I can say that this is my life, and also the life of a lot of other young and old and church-going and non-church-going and hard-working and not-so-hard-working people who live in Tillmon County and places just like it. It's my life, but it's their life too. We're in this together, however we might feel about each other at any particular moment. And remembering that makes me think, at least for a little while, that maybe I've found the point.

Tillmon County Fire is a collection of connected stories that describe, one after the other and in many voices, the lead up to and the aftermath of a fire in the community.

The narrators of each story -- a young man who finds God at summer camp; a 17-year-old who doesn't think much of his non-interest in his girlfriend until he sets eyes on the new guy from New York; the girlfriend, who has troubles and dreams she's never shared with her distracted boyfriend; the new guy from New York; a trumpet player; his autistic twin brother; a pregnant girl who works in the hardware store, among others -- speak in clear, distinct voices (and different fonts) that, while separate and individual, form a chorus, even though they don't realize it themselves.

I loved the format, and I felt that the different fonts worked -- in some cases, it would have felt gimmicky, but not here. The writing was too strong for that. I always enjoy seeing the same setting and the same event from different perspectives, and Tillmon County Fire not only achieved that, but made it feel real.

I did think that the Postscript detracted from the book. It felt tacked-on and unnecessary. I didn't feel that I needed the story of Aiden's early life, as his story and his actions during the trial made it very clear that, like everyone else, he's a complicated person: not evil, not perfect. The Postscript made it feel too easy, too pat -- that suddenly every bad decision he made could be somehow traced back to that event. I felt like it lessened him somehow.

Overall, though, I enjoyed it very much -- I'll be looking for more from Pamela Ehrenberg, and I hope specifically that there's more short fiction in her writing future.

____________________________________________________________________

Book source: Cybils nominee; review copy from the publisher.

____________________________________________________________________

Crossposted at Bookshelves of Doom.

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

Going Bovine by Libba Bray
"All 16-year-old Cameron wants is to get through high school—and life in general—with a minimum of effort. It’s not a lot to ask. But that’s before he’s given some bad news: he’s sick and he’s going to die. Which totally sucks. Hope arrives in the winged form of Dulcie, a loopy punk angel/possible hallucination with a bad sugar habit. She tells Cam there is a cure—if he’s willing to go in search of it. With the help of a death-obsessed, video-gaming dwarf and a yard gnome, Cam sets off on the mother of all road trips through a twisted America into the heart of what matters most."- summary from Amazon

This is a very messed-up book, but in a good way, which is an odd statement to make about a book, but it's true. Bray has created a story that is hilarious, random, surreal, and thought-provoking. I really enjoyed it, but I don't think it's for everyone. It's definitely a crazy, very weird, adventure-filled book; I mean, just look at the summary. I loved the characters in this book and they were all so much fun to read about. There was one part though toward the end that gave me pause; I was happy about this revelation, but at the same time, it felt like it came out of nowhere and I was puzzled by it. From what I'd read, there had really been no clues or hints about it, so when it was revealed, it seemed out of place. The ending was really interesting and very climactic. This was a wonderful book all the way through; it is very long but it held my interest all throughout.

Dark Entries: A John Constantine Novel by Ian Rankin and Werther Dell'edera

Is there anything more frightening than an undead cannibal with a personal grudge come straight from Hell to devour you, body and soul? Ian Rankin thinks so...and his answer to that question is "Reality TV." Before you think I'm going to act all smug and superior about how I don't watch reality TV, a caveat: I am a reformed reality TV junkie. Thankfully, I've kicked the habit, but that doesn't mean I still don't see the appeal.

If Satre's hell was other people, Rankin's is an amended version of this same place - other people watching and participating in reality entertainment. What's worse: to be stuck in a fabricated environment, chained to a dog-eat-dog competition against a group of celebrity-seeking strangers, or to be glued to the device that delivers this makeshift, ramshackle life-by-proxy straight to your home? If neither choice seems particularly appealing, you might just be willing to accept and gleefully celebrate Ian Rankin's television-as-Faustian-bargain metaphor, Dark Entries.


Outside of some oblique name recognition, I was almost completely unfamiliar with Ian Rankin before reading Dark Entries. So I was more than a little surprised that this book caught my attention while perusing my local bookstore. Ok, so the grinning, smoking, trenchcoat-wearing skeleton on the cover might have been the catalyst of my regard for the book, but I was equally suprised to see that this was billed as a "John Constantine" novel and that it was published by a new DC Comics imprint called Vertigo Crime.

Those unfamiliar with John Constantine need only know that he's a paranormal investigator, of a sort, with a shady past and a virtually savant-level skill to irritate anyone and everyone. Oh that - and maybe the fact that he was created by comic book virtuoso Alan Moore as a foil for Swamp Thing and that he most closely resembles Sting (put all thoughts - ALL THOUGHTS - out of your head of Keanu Reeves playing him in the abysmal movie).

This time, Constantine (down on his luck and isolated as noir conventions would have him) is offered the opportunity to investigate a reality television show called Dark Entries that has somehow gone wrong. The premise of the show is a hybrid of Big Brother and Scare Tactics - place a group of beautiful people in an isolated, artificial environment, attempt to scare the living hell out of them, then rake in the money as the television viewers are given their vicarious thrills. The problem that Constantine has to address is why the participants in the show are visibly haunted and terrorized by variables not introduced by the television producers. Is there something truly supernatural happening within the Dark Entries house, or is it just the "normal" psychological terror created by artificial isolation?

What seems cut and dry, from a paranormal perspective at least, turns out to be nothing of the sort, and Constantine must unravel mysteries within mysteries if he is ever able to escape the job he has accepted. To say any more about the plot would give way too much away, so I'll leave the basic story outline right there and instead evaluate the novel manner in which this work is marketed.

The new Vertigo Crime imprint is unlike most other graphic novels on the market today. In fact, at first I wasn't sure it even was a graphic novel. The only tell is a small logo in the bottom right-hand corner of the cover that states, "A Graphic Mystery." Otherwise, it's published in hardback in a much smaller form factor than traditional comics. It's an eye-catching throwback to the pulp roots of mystery fiction, and one that DC is already exploiting with a number of other artists and writers. Based on this one work alone it's hard to tell if it will be a successful venture for the company, but I certainly appreciate the experiment.

It's also odd that Ian Rankin gets HUGE billing as the author on the cover, while the artist, Werther Dell'edera gets only a third of the font size for his name in spite of his monumental contribution to the work as a whole. Certainly I realize Rankin's name is more marketable, but downplaying the artist in a work of graphic fiction speaks of disrespect for the content and the creator.

Considering Rankin's inexperience in the field of conventional comics, he does an admirable job of staying consistent with the Constantine character within this stand-alone story. Likewise, Dell'edera is strongest when depicting Constantine's menagerie of a British-noir life. Where both writer and artist lose focus is when the supernatural elements become the crux of the plot. Dell'edera is quite good at depicting the mean streets of London, but his Hell is amorphous, at best. Likewise, Rankin's plot goes off the rails when he twists the story more towards gore than grime.

Vertigo Crime has a long way to go to firmly establish its imprint. Is it primarily crime comics, mystery comics, horror comics, or some unknown hybrid of the three? Still, it's welcome to see DC trying so many new ways to deliver graphic literature into the hands of those unfamiliar with it, and attracting readers with known writing talent is a good start.

Cross-posted at PastePotPete.

Graphic Metamorphosis

The opening of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes to discover he has been transformed into a man-sized cockroach, stands as one of the most recognizable moments in all of the Twentieth Century literature. If you've never read the story, Peter Kuper's graphic novel adaptation can serve as a fine introduction, and if you have, it will make you see the story in a whole new horrifyingly funny way.

Because, when the novel opens, being turned into a bug is not Gregor's biggest problem. No, weighing much more heavily on Gregor’s mind is that he is late for work. He has to figure out how to get out of bed, how to collect his salesman's samples, how to get dressed and how to catch the morning train. Gregor has been so terrorized by his bosses and is so obsessed with making money to pay off his family's debts that being stuck on his beetle-shell back with six spindly legs waving in the air pales in comparison.

And while Gregor recognizes the horror of becoming a vermin, the difficulty it might present, he is only devastated when his condition results in losing his traveling salesman job.

This is horrifying, agonizingly sad, and . . . well . . . kinda funny. For us, nearly 100 years later, The Metamorphosis can serve as something of a morality tale for our "uncertain economic times."


Peter Kuper's graphic novel adaptation fits perfectly into this landscape of eerie, comical horror. The use of a white on black background puts everything into comic-book negative, creating an appropriately nightmarish aura. Most of the characters are drawn broadly, as they are written: Gregor's sister Grete is a cute cartoon figure with a terrified expression pasted on her face, what might have happened if Blondie Bumstead had posed for Edvard Munch's The Scream; Gregor's father is a puffed out man with an over-sized angry head taken from an Otto Dix painting; and his mother looks quite simply like a corpse. Gregor is the most grotesque of all but is given the most emotional breadth: he is depicted as a beetle with a head still vaguely recognizable as a human. Kuper uses all of Gregor's attributes, from both man and insect, to convey his perpetually conflicting emotions. Graphic elements like off-kilter frames and jaggedly outlined dialog balloons contribute more to the edgy aura.

Not everything translates perfectly. The novel gets some of its horror from the visceral elements of being a bug--the ooze, the stench, the sticky and rotting stuff. Kuper's stark graphics can't really portray this kind of thing, and he doesn't really try, focusing on the story's other horrifying elements instead.

One of these is that Gregor never stops being human. He never loses the ability to hear others talking about him, although they assume he has and thus are not at all careful free in what they say. He never loses the ability to feel love, rejection, humiliation, and, finally, betrayal. What remains of his humanity Kuper expresses in his large terrified eyes, revealing an inner horror more terrifying than his invertebrate exterior.

As countless other commentators have pointed out, The Metamorphosis can be read in a number of ways, as a religious allegory, as social commentary, or as an expressionistic expose of a tortured human soul. Still, what struck me upon rereading it this time, both because of Kuper's adaptation and because of current events, is how much the story is about employment, about jobs. Even after the opening scene, Gregor continues to obsess about his lost employment as much as about being a bug. He recalls how he counted down the days until he could tell off his bosses. He swells with pride when he thinks about how he rescued his family from certain doom, working his way up from stock clerk to traveling salesman, after his father's business collapsed in an economic downturn. And he shrinks with shame when he considers all they have to go through now that he can no longer work. His retirement-age father must return to work as a bank messenger. His mother brings in sewing and his teenage sister becomes a salesgirl. The family also brings in three demanding borders who discover the family's secret shame, Gregor.

In the end, the conflict between Gregor's point of view and his family's creates the deepest irony. To Gregor, work has been mostly torture and humiliation, a life metaphorically like the one he adopts as a bug, but his family has come to find that work means something different to them. The story ends with the family, minus Gregor, riding a train together, and the three remaining members deciding that they each actually like their jobs. It seems mundane, but in this story it's the equivalent of Jason popping up out of the lake to terrify the audience one last time. Everything Gregor was about, all of his sacrifice, was for naught. All along, his family would have been happy, happier even, going to work! SKREET SKREET SKREET SKREET!

Is there a moral? I don't know. But if it's about jobs, I'd get a good one if I were you. Stay in school. Find something you love and work like hell at it. Don't let what happened to Gregor Samsa happen to you . . .

Check out the book's website. The opening movie is well worth a visit and provides and excellent preview of the book.

Ebook versions of the original, translated by David Wyllie, are available free at Project Gutenberg.

This post has been crossposted at Critique de Mr. Chompchomp

Of Kings and Nobel Laureates

King Arthur is the vampire of fantasy.



By that I mean that everyone has written about him, and he's come full circle from vicious Dark Ages battle leader to tragic romance hero to YA fantasy fixture. To write about King Arthur is to stand in a line that starts in 1136 with Geoffrey of Monmouth and shows no signs of ending:



Still, most Arthurian revisionists don't bring the chops that John Steinbeck did.

Steinbeck won a Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, and the United States Medal of Freedom. He wrote The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and East of Eden. So when he decided to delve into Arthuriana, it was significant.

Alas, he didn't live to finish it. Begun in 1956, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights was based on the original Arthurian novel, Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Steinbeck did massive amounts of research into Malory, intending to retell the stories without losing the flavor and atmosphere that had so affected him as a young reader. And he got it right...mostly. Its unfinished status means it's hard to know if what we now have is truly the manuscript Steinbeck intended. He retells seven tales, beginning with the life of Merlin and ending with Lancelot and Guinevere's first embrace. But in only the final two stories do the characters, events and moral themes really come to life.

In "Gawain, Ewain and Marhalt," three questing knights meet three women who specialize in leading knights on quests. The adventures themselves are exciting and action-packed, but what's really intriguing are the relationships between the men and women after they pair off. Each knight learns something about themselves without consciously realizing it, and each lady demonstrates the power women could wield even when denied swords and shields. The final line of Marhalt's adventure, in fact, sums up the gender issues with bone-shuddering succinctness.

But it's Ewain's adventure that finishes the chapter, and rightly so. An untried knight, he finds that his questing lady, though older than the others, is also a brilliant tactician and trainer. She schools him in technique and discipline, and presciently warns him that the longbow, a weapon easily obtained and mastered by commoners, will spell the death of the knights and their feudal society. Then she accompanies him on his first battles.

The final chapter, "The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot," brings the world's best knight front and center. We learn what kind of man inspires such a fearsome reputation, and we see how his best intents derail him toward the tragedy we all know is coming. The story ends, in fact, with the first irrevocable step on that path, and it strikes the reader's heart almost as vividly as it does Lancelot's.

These two tales alone make the book worthwhile, and with the exception of Mary Stewart's The Wicked Day, are the best contemporary Arthurian stories I've read. Oddly, in both Steinbeck and Stewart Arthur himself is a supporting character. But while Stewart chose to tell her story through Mordred (and in her earlier trilogy, the tiresome figure of Merlin), Steinbeck adopts Malory's tactic of jumping wherever the action is.



I disagree with Steinbeck when he says, as quoted in a letter, "Arthur is not a character. Perhaps the large symbol figures can't be characters, for if they were, we wouldn't identify with them by substituting our own." To me Arthur is the character, and all the others exist only to illuminate aspects of his personality. As Christopher Reeve once said (apropos of playing Superman as a fairly normal guy), "You can't play the king; the people around you play to you being king." Those people need the king as much as the king needs his people.

Teen male readers familiar with current fantasy might find Steinbeck's style off-putting in the earlier stories. And that's okay; there is no one "story" of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, but rather a collection of stories created all over the world, among which readers are free to pick and choose their favorites. But if you skip to the final two chapters, I think you'll find both stories to be fun, exciting and thought-provoking.

(A note: Christopher Paolini does the introduction, and there's irony in the author of Eragon chastising modern fantasy for its "clotted prose.")