Oct 09 2024

Spinetinglers 3 by R. L. Stine

When R. L. Stine started making headlines as a writer with the Fear Street novels, I was already aging out of his target audience. I know that that’s a weird thing to say given how I voraciously read books across all age ranges now, but having grown up on Nicholas Fisk and Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, I was already well into Christopher Pike and adult horror territory when the Fear Street books came out. And they were fine. Interesting but not as deep or inventive as I expected or was used to, so it was pretty easy for me to tune out both that series and the massively popular Goosebumps books that would come out later, targeted at an even younger audience, while I set my sights on more mature reading.

But now that I’m a much older person with a lot more experience (and now that I’ve officially been a book critic for well over a decade!) I can look at his works and evaluate them as a professional instead of as a young reader. I couldn’t say whether Stinetinglers 3 hit in quite the same way as it would have were I a young reader still, but I can say that it’s quality horror writing, and something I’m looking forward to passing on to my own middle schooler, who adores watching the Creeped Out horror anthology series for kids on Netflix. Tho, as far as I can tell, the Creeped Out episodes tend to have much happier endings than the stories in this book do…

That actually surprised me, how the endings uniformly avoid the “problem solved, now the protagonists can go back to life as usual” sense of normalcy with which certain adults routinely baby children. Coupled with the almost wistfully written introductions to each story — each vignette a short explanation of how Mr Stine came up with the idea for the story that follows — this collection felt surprisingly mature and bleak, but not in a way that’s at all age-inappropriate. Change happens, sometimes for the worse. Life is full of ups and downs, and there are going to be moments when you’re in a bad spot because of things outside of your control. But, crucially, each spooky ending holds within it a seed of what could happen next. The stories almost dare the reader to keep going with the story, to fill in their own heroic endings. And if they don’t want to do that, if they’ve gone through enough of a rollercoaster of emotion to want to rest here at the thrill point (so to speak) before they can pull themselves together enough to carry on, then Mr Stine indicates that that’s okay, too.

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Oct 08 2024

Kill Shakespeare: First Folio by Anthony Del Col, Conor McCreery & Andy Belanger

Nothing screams “this was written by men” more than having Juliet Capulet (lately of Romeo & Juliet) assure Othello that he is not a villain. Lol, like hell. Iago may be just as much a bad guy as Othello, but Desdemona is still dead! Murdered for no reason! Even if she’d been cuckolding her husband publicly with the entire court, that’s still no excuse for violence, much less murder. Women are people, not possessions! Having a woman who tried to kill herself for love tell a domestic abuser that he’s not the bad guy is a Sure Jan of the highest order.

That said, this is an interesting take on the Shakespearean canon, sort of a Fables but with characters from the Bard’s oeuvre instead of Mother Goose’s. I love a good pastiche, and given my own ambivalence regarding William Shakespeare, figured that any title with the imperative to destroy him (obviously not a literal directive as the man has been dead for yoinks) had to be relevant to my specific interests. I enjoy Shakespeare as a poet, and admire his storytelling choices — including the adaptation of stories far older than he is for fresh new audiences — but I really don’t care for his script writing. His scripts feel more and more antique with each passing decade, and it weirds me out that people outside of England profess a belief in the masterfulness of his words. Slavish devotion to the Bard in the 21st century feels artificial and pretentious, especially without shared cultural touchstones.

So I went into reading this book feeling pretty open-minded about the reuse of his admittedly interesting stories and characters, especially without the dreary language. Well, mostly without: there’s still the odd quotation included, but those almost entirely make sense and serve as nice callbacks to the originals. Essentially, Prince Hamlet has survived the disastrous play he’s staged, but his mother Queen Gertrude and uncle King Claudius have exiled him for the unwitting killing of Polonius. Torn between wanting to avenge his father and guilt at what his quest so far has wrought, he boards a ship with his faithful companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/08/kill-shakespeare-first-folio-by-anthony-del-col-conor-mccreery-andy-belanger/

Oct 07 2024

The Midnight Mitzvah by Ruth Horowitz & Jenny Meilihove

Being a creature of perpetual lateness, let me apologize for that first before wishing a belated Shana Tova to all readers who celebrate!

Whether Jewish or otherwise, plenty of people will enjoy and hopefully benefit from the message of The Midnight Mitzvah. Hanina Chipmunk is a champion nut collector who enjoys sharing her bounty with her friends and neighbors. Not only does she like feeding people, she also, admittedly, basks in the praise they give her in exchange. But Mathilda Squirrel gives her nothing but a cold reception when Hanina goes to visit one day, and spurns both gift and bearer. Hanina’s friends explain to her later that while it’s a mitzvah — the Hebrew word for blessing — to help others, it’s also a mitzvah to spare them embarrassment. Mathilda was once great at collecting nuts herself but refuses to admit that she’s no longer self-sufficient.

Hanina wants to help Mathilda, but how to do so without the squirrel losing face?* She finally resolves to bring Mathilda nuts under cover of darkness, so that Mathilda will not have to face the humiliation of accepting charity. But the night is dark and full of terrors… or as many as can be expected in a warm-hearted children’s book. Will Hanina be able to accomplish her mission and fulfill the mitzvah she’s undertaken?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/07/the-midnight-mitzvah-by-ruth-horowitz-jenny-meilihove/

Oct 06 2024

And Go Like This by John Crowley

And Go Like This collects nine works of Crowley’s shorter fiction that were originally published between 2002 and 2018, plus the final story “Anosognosia” — when a person cannot recognize that they have a disability because of an underlying condition — which was published for the first time in this volume. They range in length from one page (“In the Tom Mix Museum”) to about 60 (“The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” and the three parts of “Mount Auburn Street”). They range in genre from fantasy tinged by myth and history (“Flint and Mirror”) to science fiction (“And Go Like This,” “Spring Break” and “Conversation Hearts”) to ostensibly mundane (“Mount Auburn Street” again) to stories that, looking back, I have a hard time fitting into a category (“The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” and “This Is Our Town”).

And Go Like This by John Crowley

Crowley’s writing is never less than congenial, and he conjures scenes with apparent ease, whether they are the mid-century America of “Mount Auburn Street” or the allegorical aliens of “Conversation Hearts” or the nearish future dystopia of “Spring Break.” Some of the stories, like the title tale, have twist endings; others have more ambiguous stoppings, trailing off almost mid-incident and letting readers decide what happens next. If there’s a common aspect, it’s a slight stand-offisheness, an authorial distance from the events of the stories. Some writers are direct and visceral; Crowley is not one of them, at least not here.

I find that he’s difficult for me to write about because on the one hand there’s so much to say, and on the other his diffidence is slightly contagious: here is the work, take it or leave it. I’ve been reading Crowley for more than 40 years, but always steadily, never at a fever pitch. He’s best known for his fourth novel, Little, Big, and it’s a vast and engrossing work, a multi-generational saga that consorts with the ineffable and also has me quite believing that some of the characters can converse with a trout. I’m re-reading it now, slowly, with the turn of the seasons as my measure of time, and I cannot say how many times I have read it since I first picked up the Bantam edition from 1983. Then I went back and read his first three — The Deep, Beasts, and Engine Summer — and liked them all, especially for their very different atmospheres. I also thought that I could feel in those three how he was writing Little, Big all along.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/06/and-go-like-this-by-john-crowley/

Oct 05 2024

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

Because of the way that Lies Sleeping ended, Peter Grant finds himself suspended, temporarily he hopes, from the London’s Metropolitan Police. Because expenses don’t stop just because a job does, he signs up to work in the security department of one of London’s biggest and flashiest IT start-ups, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. The founder, an American tech billionaire who recently relocated to the UK, is clearly a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but he either didn’t get that the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation failed at everything it tried to do, or he enjoyed courting disaster by naming his newest firm after Douglas Adams’ creation. At any rate, I grew up on Hitchhiker’s and still have most of the six hours of the first radio shows committed to memory, so I got a geeky kick out of all of the locations at Peter’s new job being named for odd bits from the older work. Security staff are the Vogons. Fortunately, Peter is not asked to produce any poetry, and security is more friendly than their namesake.

False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

Another small set of details I enjoyed were the boardgames that the staff at Serious Cybernetics play on company time. Some of them were from way back — Metamorphosis Alpha gets mentioned on page 20 — and others were familiar names from more recent decades. The Hitchhiker’s references and the gaming go a ways to establish Serious Cybernetics as the kind of company that’s both old-school computing and cutting-edge tech, doing things so innovative and high-concept that nobody is entirely sure what they all are, or how they will make money in the end. Terrence Skinner, the visionary founder, likes it that way, and everyone else follows along. Except, to a certain extent, the head of security, Tyrel Johnson, an ex-policeman with a West Indies background. He has hired Peter to sniff out a rat that Johnson believes is nibbling away inside of Serious.

Then there is the matter of the top floor. Only certain people are allowed up there; nobody talks about what they are doing; and Skinner is very interested. It’s an ideal place for Johnson’s rat to be scuttling about, but Peter is not cleared for anything to do with that project. Naturally, he’s keen to find out more. He gets even more interested in when he spots a fae-adjacent person he knows from the London demi-monde trying to break into the secure area.

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Oct 04 2024

Tantalizing Tales — October 2024 — Part One

It’s October already, friends, and we have a mountain of excellent reads to dive into. First up is a book from bestselling author Richard Osman, he of Thursday Murder Club fame! He’s such a hot commodity amongst mystery aficionados that I keep getting beaten by other reviewers to claiming his books over at Criminal Element, which is saying a lot since my review schedule starts filling up almost half a year in advance!

Mr Osman’s latest is the first in a brand new series featuring a father- and daughter-in-law detecting team. Bluntly titled We Solve Murders, this series debut follows Steve and Amy Wheeler as they do exactly that. They certainly have the pedigree for it. Steve is retired from the police force and thoroughly enjoying his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat. He might do the odd bit of investigative work, but his most exciting cases involve insurance fraud and lost dogs, and that’s just the way Steve likes it.

Amy, on the other hand, thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. A private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. Having taken on what was supposed to be an easy job — hunkered down on a remote island, keeping a world-famous author alive — she’s shocked when the first dead body shows up. And then there’s the bag of cash. And suddenly a killer is on the loose with Amy in their sights. In need of help, Amy sends an SOS to the only person she trusts, launching herself and her father-in-law on a breakneck race around the world as they try to stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/04/tantalizing-tales-october-2024-part-one/

Oct 03 2024

Mythos: The Illustrated Edition by Stephen Fry & Jesús Sotés

This book really does have to be seen to be believed. The mammoth illustrated version of Stephen Fry’s first Mythos book is absolutely stunning, from its foiled covers and sprayed edges to its painted endpapers and gold bookmark ribbon. And that’s even before getting into Jesús Sotés’ evocative artwork, which reimagines the iconography of the Greek myths through a lens at once reminiscent of both early Christian religious art and proto-Cubism. It’s a wealth of visual material that perfectly complements the writing, rendering this volume a must-have for any collector of world mythology.

I’d never actually read this book in any of its previous forms before landing this luxe iteration. I did have the pleasure of reading the second book in the series, Heroes, and spending far too much time musing over the ramifications of storytelling on the human psyche over the ages. Luckily for me, a lot of the toxic masculinity on display in Heroes is largely absent from this book, tho the insidious nature of patriarchal influence can scarcely be denied. To be clear, none of this sexism is at all Mr Fry’s fault! He recounts the old tales as best he can, in lively, modern language that rightly points out what absolute dicks these gods could be, as their structures of power rendered them largely unaccountable, regardless of gender. Speaking of which, it’s also of note how the ancient Greeks were far more progressive on certain ideas of gender and sexuality than some so-called liberals are today.

It’s interesting to note, too, what other mores have changed. While fratricide is still considered one of the gravest sins, a parent killing a child in order to punish the other parent was once seen as an unfortunate but justifiable act. The traditional emphasis on xenia, the most gods-beloved spirit of hospitality, is also sobering given how selectively it’s practiced in the present day. I know it’s very intellectually indulgent of me to cherry pick which ancient beliefs should still be considered of higher importance — better to base my reasoning on thoughtful humanism than blind adherence to tradition, after all — but it’s the rare religion that doesn’t believe in feeding and sheltering the itinerant, and it pains me now to see how homelessness and poverty are treated even here in the United States of America, arguably the greatest nation in the world.

You’d think this was a digression, but really, what’s the point of mythology if not to be held up as a mirror to the world we have today? Myths and stories are some of the most useful ways to pass on knowledge, so that even if you don’t have experience of an ordeal, you’ll know how to avoid it (or court it, if you’re one of those types.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/03/mythos-the-illustrated-edition-by-stephen-fry-jesus-sotes/

Oct 02 2024

Sea Serpent’s Heir Book Three: Queen of Mercy by Mairghread Scott & Pablo Túnica

I can’t even remember the last time I read a graphic novel series that wrapped up neatly in three books. Good show, creative team!

The Sea Serpent’s Heir trilogy concludes with this final volume, as our heroine Aella must try to rescue the demon Xir who was once bonded to her, in the aftermath of her beloved aunt Kiana’s betrayal. Having stolen Xir’s power, Kiana is using her formidable magic to disguise herself as the murdered Black Sun Mother and take command of the Church of the First Light. She plans to become an irresistible force who will never feel powerless ever again.

While Aella managed to escape the church’s stronghold with her mother Ryanna, her other aunt Zuri and the former demon hunter Bashir, she refuses to flee the city. Xir needs to be freed, and Aella will not stop until she’s made sure of their liberty, even if it means facing down an entire church and Kiana’s machinations once more.

Complicating matters is the fact that Aella is strongly against killing, a concept her pirate mother finds unfathomable. Will Aella be able to find allies willing to believe her and work with her to take down the imposter? Or will Kiana successfully carry on her deception until its too late to save innocent souls from her reign of terror?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/02/sea-serpents-heir-book-three-queen-of-mercy-by-mairghread-scott-pablo-tunica/

Oct 01 2024

Ayo’s Adventure: Across The African Diaspora From Afro To Zulu by Ain Heath Drew & Erin Robinson

Happy October, readers! With Black History Month starting in the UK, what better time to explore a book on Africa and its diaspora?

Ayo is a young boy in America whose parents are doing a wonderful job teaching him about his heritage. While he’s proud to be a Black American with a rich generational history in the United States, he’s also tapped into the positive influences of Africa and its impact worldwide. As he’s falling asleep one night, his drowsy brain takes him on an A to Z journey through some of the major historical highlights and cultural contributions of the African diaspora worldwide.

A begins with Afro, before bouncing to Braids, hair issues that, while nominally linked to the USA in the book, are a concern for every Black person who’s ever been made to feel less than respectable for having natural hair. The book then swings down to Trinidad & Tobago to celebrate Calypso music before heading to Mali to explore Dogon culture, and from then on to the rest of the world.

Well, not the entire rest of the world: there’s precious little in Europe or Asia. While the African diaspora in Asia only gained a significant toehold in the 21st century, it does seem a little odd from a truly global perspective that no mention of their impact in Europe is made here. But that’s fine: this is a picture book from the United States, after all, and it covers so much elsewhere, especially on under-reported places in South America!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/01/ayos-adventure-across-the-african-diaspora-from-afro-to-zulu-by-ain-heath-drew-erin-robinson/

Sep 30 2024

UFO Mushroom Invasion by Shirakawa Marina

translated and edited by historian Ryan Holmberg as part of Smudge, “a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga”.

Honestly, this was rad and creepy all at once. The original manga was published in 1976, and has been translated and repackaged here for English-speaking audiences, with illuminating essays and notes to boot. Shirakawa Marina loved both space stories and Japanese folklore, and combines them with aplomb in this tale of alien horror.

Aoki is on a hiking trip with his classmates when he hurts his leg, necessitating that he and one of his teachers, Sada, stay overnight in a remote mountain cabin while the rest of his class returns to Shizuoka. That evening, a great crash rouses Aoki, Sada and their elderly host. The adults are shocked to find that a UFO has crashed nearby. After telling their host to go get help, Sada puts Aoki on his back and goes to take a closer look at the crash site. Despite Aoki’s pleas, Sada doesn’t want to get too close, just in case the UFO actually does pose a threat.

Nearly twelve hours later, government officials come to secure the crash site. Sada and Aoki are whisked away to a facility where they discover, to their dismay, that the truth is being covered up. Aoki’s visiting mother and sister laugh at his story of a UFO, repeating the official line that it was just a meteorite. But when the news starts reporting that other “meteorites” have been falling all over Japan and the rest of the world, Aoki and Sada both suspect that that UFO was just the herald of a far greater menace to humanity than they’d ever imagined.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/09/30/ufo-mushroom-invasion-by-shirakawa-marina/