Mar 24 2022

When Things Get Dark edited by Ellen Datlow

I am genuinely impressed by the way this collection invokes the spirit of Shirley Jackson. So many of the stories read as if they might have come from her pen, so seamlessly do they fit into the dark atmosphere engendered by stories such as The Haunting Of Hill House, The Lottery and We Have Always Lived In The Castle. This is a book of repressed women with unspeakable secrets; of insular communities with murderous tendencies; of finding both oppression and release in the supernatural — all hallmarks of that master of quiet, furious dread.

Despite that commonality, the eighteen stories here each stand as distinct entities. While the ones set in the past (or, as in Genevieve Valentine’s kaleidoscopic Sooner Or Later, Your Wife Will Drive Home, a number of eras) evoke more closely Ms Jackson’s mid-20th-century aesthetic, the modern tales feel like a natural carrying over of her work into the 21st century, where her themes are anything but alien. That said, perhaps my favorite story in this collection — for non-personal reasons anyway — is Tiptoe by Laird Barron, about a child of the 60s who tries to grapple with the family secrets that continue to haunt him decades later. One of the most overtly supernatural and creepy offerings here, the image of adult Greg playing the “game” will stay indelibly in my mind.

My personal personal favorite was Gemma Files’ Pear Of Anguish. Idk if it’s adolescent girls especially who are susceptible to the building of these reality-bending paracosms — or if it’s just that those of us who built them are more open about fictionalizing or even discussing them as adults than our counterparts of other genders — but I felt the strange, destructive relationship between Imogen and Una in my bones. I also really enjoyed the many stories within the story that is Kelly Link’s Skinder’s Veil, almost more than the whole itself, which I felt was somewhat let down by its ending: more’s the pity as this is the story that also completes the book.

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Mar 22 2022

Geronimo Stilton Reporter #10: Blackrat’s Treasure by Geronimo Stilton

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the clever plot twist of this volume, and definitely recommend this book for good all-ages fun.

Our title character is a workaholic reporter turned editor with way too many stories to write (and, boy, do I sympathize!) His relatives and co-workers, Benjamin, Thea and Trap, coax him out of the office in pursuit of exercise and fresh air and — more importantly to Geronimo — a story. A three-headed monster smelling of brie has been spotted down at the docks, and Geronimo wants to get to the bottom of what’s clearly a fantastic tale before he’s scooped by a rival paper.

But a bigger mystery soon presents itself while the team is down at New Mouse City’s foggy harbor. A strange, seemingly abandoned vessel is docked at one of the piers, a ship that Geronimo vaguely recognizes. He and his crew come aboard to check it out, only to be turned into a literal crew by Captain Blackrat, who casts off and press gangs them into working for him. Besides swabbing the decks and engaging in other naval exercises, Blackrat wants them to help him find a hidden treasure, no matter the peril. Will our team of heroes be able to survive the journey and discover the pirates’ loot, or will the wicked Blackrat (and his adorable companion Crabcakes) send one or more of them down to Davy Jones’ locker?

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Mar 21 2022

A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor

A Trail Through Time is the fourth book about Madeleine Maxwell and St Mary’s Institute for Historical Research where the historians investigate major historical events in contemporary time — “It’s time travel, OK” — and follows closely on the events of A Second Chance. The title of this book refers to the ability of its major antagonists, the Time Police, to follow Max up and down the timeline with alarming accuracy, but it could well have also been called A Second Chance because it is all about second chances. (And is thus probably not the best place to begin reading the series.)

A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor

See, Max died on an assignment at the end of the third book, but History put her into one of the many alternate worlds implied by the time-travelling premise of the series’ setup. She’s back at St Mary’s, but it isn’t quite her St Mary’s; she’s still together with Leon, but he isn’t quite her Leon. They need time to get reacquainted, to adjust to a new reality. They don’t even get through breakfast.

The Time Police — though they are not yet named at that part of the book — are apparently serious enough trouble that Leon gives Max thirty seconds to grab whatever matters to her before they flee the scene in his time travel pod. They spend the first hundred or so pages desperately on the run, as each time that occurs to them to escape to provides only the briefest of respite. I had a little trouble connecting with Max and Leon through this section — it seemed to me that the two of them could be either near-strangers with memories of having loved someone very like the person now in front of them, or they could be a well-meshed pair working to save each other while hurtling through history, but not really both. On the other hand, the scene with the Nile alligators during the reign of Akhenaten was very fun.

A Trail Through Time settles down and gets better when Max and Leon pull off a trick to make it look like she has died (died again, from some points of view); the volcano on the cover is involved. They return to the Institute though he is off again almost immediately. Well, the book settles down St Mary’s style, which is to say it slows to somewhere between frantic and pell-mell. But that’s enough for librarians to provide Max with a working summary of the situation, over a well fussed-over pot of tea, of course.

Eventually, we each had a small table, a plate of crumpets, and a napkin.
Professor Rapson handed me my tea and said, without looking at me, “Should they ever find him, Leon Farrell will be charged with removing a contemporary from his own time, the sentence for which is death. Dr Peterson and Major Guthrie will be charged as accomplices. Dr Bairstow, as the person ultimately responsible for everything has, only temporarily we hope, been removed from his position as Director of St Mary’s.
“As mission controller, Dr Maxwell would have been charged as well, but she died. At this stage, we’re not sure if the colonel [from the Time Police] believes that or not. If he thinks you are Max, you’ll be shot. If he thinks you’re not Max, they might shoot you anyway. A no-win situation for you, I’m afraid. One lump or two?” (pp. 202–03)

So there is the true matter of A Trail Through Time: right at home, and not through the timeline at all. Keep Max alive, save St Mary’s, foil the Time Police, and hope for the best for Leon, wherever he has gone off to. Taylor delivers it all with heart and panache, action and hilarity, and rescues just in the nick of, well, time.

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Mar 19 2022

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith

In How the Word is Passed, Clint Smith recounts his visits to seven locations as part of what he calls in the book’s subtitle “A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” Monticello Plantation. The Whitney Plantation. Angola Prison. Blandford Cemetery. Galveston Island. New York City. Goréee Island (Ghana). Along with a prologue in New Orleans, the city where he grew up, and an epilogue of talks with his surviving grandparents, these seven locations — chosen from the dozens that Smith saw as research for the book — show important historical aspects of slavery in America. More than that, they demonstrate how people in the country reacted and continue to react to the facts of slavery.

How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith

The locations represent a judicious cross-section of slavery and its many legacies in contemporary America. Starting with Monticello Plantation brings the contradictions of slavery in America into immediate focus. Indeed, by insisting that Thomas Jefferson’s home be named as a plantation in the chapter’s title, Smith ensures that readers will have to consider it as a center of enslaving people, like many others across what became the United States. Jefferson, his soaring rhetoric and high ideals was essential to the creation of the United States of America. The unpaid labor of the enslaved persons whom Jefferson owned were essential to who he was and what he achieved.

Smith talks with tour guides and visitors to learn more about how the guides choose to present the history of Jefferson and Monticello, and to learn about what some visitors knew before they came, how they saw things afterward. Smith describes how the staff at Monticello addresses the lives of enslaved persons; there are different tours with different emphases. He also finds out that from the 1920s when Monticello first opened as a museum until 1951, all of the guides were Black men dressed in the livery of house servants. “‘Some of them were descendants of people who were enslaved here,’ Niya [Bates, Monticello’s public historian] said. Sometimes the stories the men told about the plantation had been passed on to them by family members.” (p. 47)

There is no story of Monticello—there is no story of Thomas Jefferson—without understanding Sally Hemings. We have no letters or documentation written by Sally (birth name likely Sarah) Hemings and nothing written by Jefferson about her. There are no photographs of her. Almost all of what we know of her physical appearance comes from Isaac Jefferson, who was enslaved at Monticello at the same time as Hemings and described her as ‘mighty near white [three of her four grandparents were white] … Sally was very handsome, long straight hair down her back.” Other than that, all portraits that depict her likeness are rendered from the imagination of the artists. She is a shadow without a body. A constellation for whom there are no stars. And yet the story of Sally Hemings sits at the center of Monticello. For two centuries, Jefferson scholars, as well as Jefferson’s acknowledged descendants, rejected the idea—despite evidence to the contrary—that Jefferson had either a romantic or a sexual relationship with Sally. They most certainly rejected the idea that he fathered all six of her children. (p. 29)

DNA evidence has proven the connection, and that has forced re-evaluation at Monticello, just as it has brought home to non-Black Americans how common it was for slave owners to have sex with people they owned. Jefferson’s own children were raised as slaves on his plantation. He did not free any during his lifetime, although when he was old in the 1820s Beverly (who was male) and Harriet Hemings left Monticello and were not pursued. Smith writes that they passed as white after leaving Monticello; with that, they passed out of the historical record. Jefferson freed his other surviving children in his will.

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Mar 18 2022

Wir sind Gefangene by Oskar Maria Graf

For about the first eighty percent of Wir sind Gefangene (We Are Prisoners), my assessment of the book was that I could see why it was a sensation in the 1920s but couldn’t see much to recommend it for readers of the 2020s. It begins with Graf is at school in the small Bavarian town of Berg, on the shores of Lake Starnberg not quite 30 miles south of Munich. His teacher tells him that he can go home, along with his sister Anna, because his father is very sick. Graf’s father is in fact dying and, in this account, succumbs mere minutes after Graf arrives at his bedside.

Wir sind Gefangene by Oskar Maria Graf

The first chapter is titled “Changed Life,” and after his father’s death, Graf’s life changes considerably for the worse. His older brother Max takes over the family bakery business and the small farm that had supported the household. Graf gradually reveals that Max had been bullying their father, pushing him ever more to the sidelines of the business until his father essentially gives up and commences to drinking himself to death. At which he eventually succeeds.

As head of the household and bakery Max reveals himself as a brutal tyrant, beating his siblings and the apprentices for the smallest infractions. The rhythms of the bakery are hard enough: up in the dead of night to make the bread, out before dawn to deliver it across the town and to other farmsteads, back to take care of farm chores, then prepare the dough for the next day. It’s not quite the apocryphal Yorkshiremen who woke up every day two hours before they went to bed and had to go to school uphill both ways in the snow, but it’s close. Even in the best of circumstances, it would be punishingly difficult labor, and Max’s direction is far from the best of circumstances. From an early age, Graf has a strong imagination and a talent for invention. Another older brother, Maurus, introduces him to the world of literature, lighting a lifelong fire in Graf. Max will have none of it. Graf has to acquire books secretly and keep them hidden, lest Max destroy them. Graf portrays his mother as a sentimentally pious woman who retreated into herself and did nothing to counter Max’s tyranny.

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Mar 17 2022

Pennyblade by J. L. Worrad

Oh my heart. I don’t know how a book as bawdy and savage as Pennyblade managed to make me cry at the beautiful heartbreak of the final chapters but oh, how it did and how I did. This is not a book that everyone will like (see: bawdy and savage) but if the idea of fantasy novels that hew closer to a dirty reality than to a sanitized idyll appeals to you, then you’ll likely adore this book as much as I do.

Kyra Cal’Arda is a commrach (i.e. elf) in exile in human lands. Once a spoiled member of the upwardly mobile elven nobility, whose main concerns were protecting her beloved twin brother while fostering her romance with the outcast Shen (to whom most of the novel is addressed,) she now spends her days wielding her blade in service to the highest bidder, hence the title. When a job goes awry and she’s forced to go on the run, before being essentially press ganged by the human church, all the secrets of her past come spilling out. But what have they to do with the mission that the church wants her to complete, under the supervision of the infuriating Sister Perfecti Benedetta, and why does the church need her in particular to achieve their goals? And what’s the deal with the creepy rope-masked humans who keep getting in her way? Surely, they can’t actually be worshipping the devil, which everyone who isn’t a superstitious rube (according to Kyra, anyway) knows doesn’t exist?

This sex-positive, queer-affirming European-Middle-Ages-inspired-fantasy is such a breath of fresh air in a genre that often takes itself Very Seriously but doesn’t actually have much depth behind its portentous facade. Pennyblade’s Kyra, otoh, is a cheerful shit with hidden, meaningful layers, whose rakish sociopathy is the natural adaptation to her upbringing and the betrayals she’s endured. The subversion of elves as being basically Nazis is both hilarious and surprisingly thoughtful: not in the form of inspiring any sympathy for fascists, but in showing how that kind of upbringing brutalizes you, even if it brings apparent advantages. Not that the humans in this book are much better, ofc, obsessed as they are with an invisible God who works through a totalitarian church. Both types of society, the book tells us, are worth subverting, but only in a way that doesn’t sacrifice our own basic decency by treating others as less than real people.

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Mar 14 2022

Wanderhome by Jay Dragon

It’s impossible to be involved in indie tabletop gaming circles these days and remain ignorant of Jay Dragon’s bestselling pastoral fantasy game Wanderhome, which was recently nominated for a Nebula Award. Unusually for a 100+ page tabletop roleplaying game, it has zero combat rules or stats, and almost actively discourages that kind of physical conflict. So it’s perfect for groups that want to emphasize the cozy storytelling aspects of roleplaying, almost an Animal Crossing-type antidote to all the hack and slash fighting games out there.

The sourcebook consists primarily of Playbooks, where you choose an archetype to further flesh out into your unique character; Traits, which help you with that process of fleshing; Natures which help you build the location your characters are either currently in or shortly wandering into, and a Calendar to spark events and further story hooks. As with many sourcebooks, it can feel terrifically vague as to how the game is actually supposed to go until you get a chance to sit down and play it, preferably with people who have an idea of what they’re doing from previous experience.

And so I signed up with what I soon learned to be a table of fellow seasoned other-game Game Masters who were just as intrigued as I was with this concept, tho they each had at least a little more exposure than I had to Wanderhome. We didn’t have a guide (as the game calls its optional GMs) per se for our session — tho shout-out to Curtis for taking the most initiative! — but were all experienced enough with collaborative storytelling to attempt to share the load and build the world and adventures equally. Which, I must say, is actually pretty tiring! Building things out of whole cloth, even with the help of the sourcebook, while actively working to navigate new relationships with people over a voice-only game, is mentally draining tho ultimately worthwhile.

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Mar 13 2022

Black City by Boris Akunin

A rare blunder by Erast Fandorin, Imperial Russia’s foremost detective, puts him on the trail of an assassin and revolutionary in the summer of 1914, a trail that leads to Baku, oil-spattered boomtown and possible crucible of a plot against the very order that Fandorin upholds. The city itself is a bubbling pool of money, violence and corruption, and even Fandorin must tread carefully and watch for treachery everywhere. Indeed, he is attacked the moment he steps off the train from Tiflis (present-day Tbilisi) and is lucky to escape with his life. Someone with the access to the innermost communications of the tsarist regime wants him dead.

Black City by Boris Akunin

To make matters more complicated, Fandorin’s wife Eliza — whom he married at the end of All the World’s a Stage — is now one of Russia’s greatest movie stars, and she is filming an extravaganza in Baku. More than a few bandits or political factions would like to make a splash, or at least a huge sum of money, by disrupting filming and kidnapping the famous actress. To make matters even more complicated, three years of matrimony have revealed to Fandorin that the two of them are incompatible, and he wants nothing more from her than an honorable way out. Nevertheless, he must play the role of a devoted husband — and in the Caucasus of 1914 that may also mean the threatening role of a jealous husband.

Just days after Fandorin’s arrival in Baku the telegraph brings news that the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary has been assassinated in Sarajevo. Readers, but not the novel’s characters, know that the clock is ticking down to the outbreak of the First World War, a war that will bring down everything that Fandorin has spent his career propping up.

The mysteries multiply, and plots thicken. Armenians and Azeris carry out vendettas, strikers organize against oppressive oil magnates, entrepreneurs try to protect their millions by buying off bandits and putting spanners in their rivals’ works, the Russian government tries to maintain a semblance of order while remaining resolutely on the take. It’s a potentially head-spinning whirlpool of scum and villainy, but Akunin carries readers along with aplomb. The pace never flags, as Fandorin lurches from breakthrough to setback, losing allies and gaining assistance from unexpected quarters. His prey remains elusive and capable of counterattack, to say nothing of the ordinary hazards of being a visible and wealthy outsider in Baku.

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Mar 12 2022

The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé

I wish I could remember who recommended The Man Who Walked Through Walls to me, I owe them a great big thank you. It’s a book I would never have found on my own, and I was completely charmed. The Man Who Walked Through Walls was originally published in French in 1943, reprinting stories that first appeared in magazines between 1938 and 1943. This English translation by Sophie Wells came out in 2012. (I would have liked for the book to list the stories’ original titles and dates of publication.) It collects ten tales by Marcel Aymé, who grew up the son of a smith and only turned to writing after working as an insurance representative, mason, banker and painter, among other occupations. In fiction, his breakthrough came with The Green Mare, which I have not read but which the front matter of this book characterizes as “a dark satire on sexuality published in 1933.” Beginning in the mid-1930s he also had considerable commercial success writing for the cinema.

The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé

Every story in The Man Who Walked Through Walls has some kind of fantastic element that Aymé then develops in unexpected directions, or sometimes in expected directions but with droll and biting humor about human folly. The fantastic element in the title story (“Le Passe-muraille,” 1943) is obvious enough, and Aymé so matter-of-factly describes how “a gentleman called Dutilleul” discovered his ability that the reader accepts it without question. The ability disturbs him so he goes to see a doctor, who

was soon persuaded that Dutilleul was telling the truth and, following a full examination, located the cause of the problem in a helicoid hardening of the strangulary wall in the thyroid gland. He prescribed sustained over-exertion and a twice-yearly does of one powdered tetravalent pirette pill, a mixture of rice flour and centaur hormones.
Having taken the first pill, Dutilleul put the medicine away in a drawer and forgot about it. As for the intensive over-exertion, as a civil servant his rate of work was governed by practices that permitted no excess, nor did his leisure time, divided between reading the newspapers and tending his stamp collection, involve him in any excessive expenditure of energy either. (p. 10)

Centaur hormones! Not that there is any further reference to centaurs or any hint that this is a France in which centaurs roam freely, apart from occasionally giving their hormones to medical science. Dutilleul is not tempted to put his ability to use until something happens at the Ministry of Records that quite upends his world. He receives a new boss, one who

intended to introduce reforms of considerable scope … For twenty years now, Dutilleul had commenced his official letters with the following formula: “With reference to your esteemed communication of the nth of this month and, for the record, to all previous exchange of letters, I have the honour to inform you that…” A forumula for which Monsieur Lécuyer intended to substitute another, much more American in tone: “In reply to your letter of n, I inform you that …” (p. 11)

Quelle horreur. With that, Dutilleul’s inhibitions are broken and he starts to use his wall-walking abilities, first to harass his upstart boss, and then to embark on a life of crime and lasciviousness. The ending is unfortunate and unexpected.

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Mar 10 2022

Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold

For reasons not detailed within the novel, the planet Athos is settled exclusively by men. It’s a backwater, isolated by choice and religious conviction. Converts are few, visitors prohibited, and travel off-planet essentially nil. The rest of spacefaring humanity seems to regard them as quaint but harmless oddballs.

Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold

The men of Athos have mastered the technology of artificial wombs, and of course they have sufficient genetic technology to only create male embryos, but they are still dependent on cultures of ovarian cells. In the two hundred or so years since Athos was settled, these cultures have started to degrade. Scientists on Athos determined that the rate of decay is increasing and will reach a crisis in the near future. As the novel opens, they have bought replacement lines from one of interstellar society’s centers of genetic expertise. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong along the way, and the delivery that reaches Athos is cellular junk.

Athos has no choice but to send an emissary into the outside worlds. They choose Dr. Ethan Urquhart, chief of biology at one of the planet’s reproductive centers. He’s smart, and resourceful by local standards, but isolation from half of humanity has left him almost comically unprepared for a mission that will turn out to be much more than some commercial acquisition. Athosian society comes across as Calvin’s “Girls Are Icky” Club writ large, and its supposedly wise councils like a bunch of bickering old maids.

[Ethan] found himself looking suddenly, on screen, at two of the strangest faces he had ever seen.
Beardless, like men without sons, or boys, but devoid of a boy’s bloom of youth. Pale soft faces, thin-boned, yet lined and time-scored; the engineer’s hair was nearly white. The other was thick-bodied, lumpy in a pale blue lab smock.
Ethan trembled, waiting for the insanity to strike him from their level, medusan gazes. Nothing happened. After a moment, he unclutched the desk edge. Perhaps the madness that possessed galactic men, slaves to these creatures, was something only transmitted in the flesh. Some incalculable telepathic aura? Bravely, he raised his eyes again to the figures in the screen.
So. That was a woman—two women in fact. He sought his own reaction; to his immense relief, he seemed to be profoundly unaffected. Indifference, even mild revulsion. The Sink of Sin did not appear to be draining his soul to perdition on sight, always presuming he had a soul. (p. 14)

Bujold is having one on about male supremacists, a laugh at the religiously driven misogyny that tends toward the cruel and the vile rather than toward the harmlessly dotty. Anyway, Ethan of Athos is a novel of intrigue, action and adventure rather than of theology and sociology, so Bujold does not dwell on these points. Instead, she sends Ethan off to Kline Station, a sprawling artificial habitat at a nexus of interstellar travel routes. Then, through bumbling on Ethan’s part she places him in the capable hands of Elli Quinn, an officer in the Dendarii Mercenary Fleet, a native of Kline Station, and the link to the larger Vorkosigan Saga.

At first, Quinn is willing to help him to uphold Kline’s reputation for aiding travelers, but they soon discover links between Ethan’s mission and her own undercover reasons for visiting Kline. Sending genetic junk to Athos wasn’t just a mistake or greedy maliciousness, but a deliberate act of sabotage. Ethan and Quinn have to race to find out which of several possible suspect factions cares so much about Athos’ genetic material before those factions can eliminate the Athosian emissary with extreme prejudice.

The action and reversals come fast and furious, and the book’s good fun to read. Bujold brings it all home in fewer than 250 pages, a size nearly lost in contemporary science fiction but just right for an afternoon of reading. Keep the popcorn handy, sit back, watch the heroes overcome the odds and grow a bit in the process.

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