Alison Bechdel hits a home run

Funhome: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel

I found this to be a compelling example of memoir as graphic narrative. Of course, Bechdel is one of the best graphic novelists out there – the Dykes to Watch Out For volumes are an amazing blend of storytelling and political satire, as well as being a record of life in the US during a period of great social and political change from a lesbian perspective. Mark my word, future social historians are going to be citing the DTWOF all over the place.

But personal narrative is a different kind of storytelling, and much harder to do successfully, and Bechdel has done it brilliantly.

Funhome: A Family Tragicomic is an honest, poignant and often painful story of the artist as a baby dyke, in which the processes of growing up different, coming of age and coming out are paralleled against the slow revelation of a family secret – a father’s struggle with his own sexual difference – that ends tragically.

In reading Funhome, it is impossible not to think about the role that society’s demand for the appearance of “normalcy” and the suppression of difference, especially sexual difference, has played, and continues to play, in the personal and family lives of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, two-spirited and otherwise queer people. Bechdel’s father pays an enormous price for attempting to compromise with society’s demands – as do all the other members of the family. Bechdel herself, a generation later, faces fewer barriers in coming out and in her story, contrasted with that of her father’s, we see the hope she has begun to emerge from the shadow of secret desires that surrounded and coloured her childhood.

I found it to be an intensely moving book. It’s interesting to me that while I am not a big fan of the graphic novel, two of the most interesting personal narratives I’ve read in recent years – this book and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis – have been graphic works by women who adopt a relatively simple style. Stripped to its essentials, the messages become even stronger.

Naturally, because the book is an honest examination of sexual themes in a young girl’s life, there have been howls of protest about it, particularly since it has been assigned in at least one university level English course. Visually, there are some panels that do contain sexual images. And of course it’s a book about growing up gay with a father whose repression of his own homosexuality leads to all sorts of unhappiness. To those who protest, I can only say, "grow up – and acknowledge that sex is a part of growing up while you’re at it." The panels in question are narrative, not erotic, and as such are less sexually charged than at least half of the billboard ads you’ll see walking down the street in any North American city. Frankly, I think this book should be required reading for every high school student in North America.

Dark visions

Unwelcome Bodies, Jennifer Pelland

I thought this was a great first-time collection of short stories from an up-and-coming writer of speculative fiction who has a truly unique way of looking at the world as it is and as it could be.

It’s also the first published book from a friend whose evolution as a writer I’ve been privileged to follow almost from the beginning. So yeah, I’m biased.

It’s also true that I have an abiding fondness for reading about the darkness in the human mind and soul, which explains a lot of things, including my interest in dystopic fiction and narratives about serial killers, and this is a collection representative of Pelland’s darker writing.

Because she’s good*, and she hits a lot of my buttons, I would have enjoyed these stories even if someone else had written them. They are for the most part dark, often uncomfortably so, and whether they are horror with an SFnal base or science fiction with a serious dose of what human beings find horrifying, they are original and thought-provoking, each and every one of them.

I can’t really pick out a couple of favourites to talk about. Many of the stories in this collection place the protagonist in a profoundly difficult, even nightmarish situation and then follow the story through to what H. P. Lovecraft might have called unspeakable ends – except that Pelland dares to speak them. Among the purist examples of this are the stories “Big Sister/Little Sister” and “The Call.”

There are dystopic visions galore, from the despair of “For the Plague Thereof Was Exceeding Great”, a story about a future in which a new air-borne variety of AIDS comes to be seen as a gift that frees people from devastating isolation to the ecologically-based nightmares of “Flood” and “Songs of Lament” – visions given a profound reality by Pelland’s ability to distil all the horror of these damaged worlds into their singular expression in the lives of her protagonists. I’ll give a very special nod in this general category to the previously unpublished story “Brushstrokes,” dealing with forbidden love, forbidden thoughts and forbidden knowledge in a society that enforces its rigid class and caste laws with police state methods.

Then there are the – for me, at least – profoundly moving explorations of disability, both as a lived and as an observed state of existence in “The Last Stand of the Elephant Man” and “Captive Girl.”

There are stories that explore the ways in which even the highest and purest of ideals and philosophies can, under the right combination of pressures and personalities, drive the descent into terrible acts – “Immortal Sin” and “Firebird.”

I feel that I must point out that Pelland’s work is not all dark – in fact, one of the stories in this collection, “Last Bus,” is to my mind a very optimistic story in its own poignant way – although it’s also true that even her funniest work can contain some elements that some might consider disturbing (you’ll definitely know what I mean if you’ve read “Clone Barbecue” or “The Burning Bush”**). This collection was published by Apex, a publisher that specialises in dark speculative fiction, so naturally the short stories selected for this volume showcase that side of her writing. I hope her next collection will have some room for all the other shades of Pelland’s distinct vision.


*She’s already been a Nebula Award nominee for her short story “Captive Girl,” and I see many more nominations and awards in her future.

**Links to a number of stories available online can be found at the author’s website.

Things that go ka-thump in the night

Night Child, Jes Battiss

I have to admit, I’m picky about my urban fantasy. Two of my favourite urban fantasy writers are Tanya Huff and Mercedes Lackey – Huff’s Blood books were among the first urban fantasy I read, and I also like her Smoke trilogy and her Keeper novels. Lackey’s Tregarde mysteries and her series of novels featuring Bard Eric Banyon are also favourites. I used to like the Anita Blake novels before they became all about how many different supernatural species you can squeeze into one BDSM play party. And I think R.A. Macavoy’s Twisting the Rope is one of the best urban fantasies ever written.

The thread here is, broadly speaking, the detective story format. I read classic detective novels (Conan Doyle, Sayers, Christie, Marsh to name a few of my favourite authors over the years), I watch a fair selection of police procedurals on TV, particularly the ones focusing on forensics, and I like urban fantasy that involves paranormal beings and abilities in a crime-solving format.

Which is why I was so interested when I happened across the author’s website and read the background for his first novel, Night Child, featuring occult special investigator Tess Corday, who works out of Vancouver’s Mystical. The premise is that, unbeknownst to most of us, all sorts of paranormal beings live around us, and like us, some of them are criminals. So naturally, also unbeknownst to us, there is a secret police organisation dedicated to solving crimes involving paranormal creatures when they impinge on the world of ordinary humans.

The biggest plus for me was the abundance of female characters on all sides of the investigation. Tess Corday is an interesting protagonist in that she isn’t always super-strong or super-right, and she has a backstory that is only partly unravelled by the end of this, the first book in a planned series (Battis was working on the third book in the series as of the last interview I read).

One of the biggest weaknesses was that the complex histories of the various groups of paranormal beings, and the nature and origins of the relationships between human and paranormal species, communities and organisations wasn’t as clearly explained as I would have liked, so that at times I was a bit lost as to exactly what was happening.

I also found myself a little disappointed in one respect. The author makes a point in his forward to the book that one of his goals in writing this novel – and, one hopes, a number of sequels – is to write positively about queer characters in an urban fantasy setting. After making such a point, I was disappointed to find that the only obvious recurring queer character so far is the female protagonist’s sidekick. Going back to Huff and Lackey, both of these genre writers and others have been writing positive, openly queer characters – leads as well as secondaries – in their novels for 20 years now. Yes, there’s plenty of room for more, but in that context, it hardly seems appropriate for the author to present the novel as something different or new for its treatment of queer characters.

Still, I enjoyed the mystery and the crime solving, and I do look forward to reading more of the occult forensic adventures of Tess Corday.

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Walkabout beyond the stars

The Outback Stars, Sandra McDonald.

This is the first novel in a space opera/milSF trilogy with a strong female protagonist and a universe in which Australia gets to be the basis for an interstellar civilisation. And it’s a lot of fun. Political intrigue, mysterious alien technology, space pirates, rebellion, spies, vanished civilisations and a judicious splash of romance made this an enjoyable read for me.

I particularly enjoyed the early section of the novel, in which the protagonist, Lt. Jodenny Scott, services and supply specialist, arrives on a new and clearly trouble-ridden ship and is assigned a mid-level command position in one of the most dysfunctional departments on board. It is in some ways a bit of a clichéd situation, but the attempts of the hero to get to the bottom of what’s rotten in the face of military protocol, closed ranks, and corrupt officers is both realistic and fascinating.

The other really interesting element in the book is the mystery of the ancient alien instantaneous interstellar transport technology that humans have been using without understanding much about how it works and what it is capable of, which is of course the big mystery that awaits our hero after she deals with spies, rebels, and corrupt officers. I am really looking forward to finding out more about the – supposedly – long-vanished alien civilisation that left this system in place for humans to find.

Beyond the Australian flavour of the setting and of Jodenny’s experiences with the mystery alien transport system, there isn’t really a lot that’s new in this book, but all the elements are put together in such a way as to provide a pleasing space romp.

The elves of England are upon us

By Slanderous Tongues, Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gillis

This is the third instalment in Lackey and Gillis’s delightful series about elves in Tudor England. There’s something that just seems so right about the combination of the glorious but all too human courts of the Tudors from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I and the marvels of Faerie – from Spencer’s Faerie Queene to the modern day fantasies of Lackey and Gillis (to say nothing of two other very different takes on the concept by Elizabeth Bear and Marie Brennan that have also taken up residence on my bookshelves this year).

In this instalment, Elizabeth is now 14 and a pawn in both the earthly political machinations of Thomas Seymour and the battle for power between the Seleighe and Unseleighe courts in the realms of Faerie. Dark elves in the household of Princess Mary, seeking to ensure that she becomes queen and Bright elves acting as guardians for the young princess Elizabeth in the household of Dowager Queen Catherine, make for a great deal of magical intrigue on top of the schemes of Seymour to make an alliance with whichever heir to the throne will take him. And, at the same time that Seymour is trying to seduce Elizabeth for his own purposes, the sexually awakening Elizabeth decides that her best chance for romance is with her elven protector Denoriel.

Elves and Tudors – what’s not to like?

Bloody, bold and resolute

Blood Bank, Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff’s Blood books, featuring Vicki Nelson, homicide cop turned private investigator, Henry Fitzroy, vampire writer of bodice rippers, and Mike Celluci, Nelson’s former partner on the force, have long been favourites of mine. In fact, if I have my publications dates right, Huff pretty much invented the urban fantasy crime-solving genre with these books (they were preceded by Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde Investigations series, but the first of the Blood books was published well before the sub-genre became so popular), which is rather a remarkable feat, considering how many variations on the theme there are now in publication.

Huff brought the series to a close some years ago in a profoundly final fashion, but this volume collects the handful of short stories that feature Vicki, Mike and/or Henry, and as such is a welcome chance to return to some beloved characters.

Two by Bradbury

The Martian Chronicles
Something Wicked This Way Comes

I've been re-reading a lot of Ray Bradbury's work recently - mostly his collections of short stories, which are without question among the finest examples of the craft of the short form.

The Martian Chronicles, like several other of Bradbury's collections, seems to tell a story - overtly, about the human attempts to colonise Mars - but each story in and of itself speaks to elements of the human condition, from hope and joy to hate, suppression and fear. Re-reading the stories in this volume was like a master class in the art of distilling human existence in all its rich variety into a few pages full of words and images.

I was not as pleasantly occupied by my reading of Something Wicked This Way Comes. I don't remember reading this novel before, and I doubt that I will return to it as I have to his short stories or his classic novel Fahrenheit 451. Something Wicked This Way Comes feels like a potentially great short story drawn out to lengths that the material simply doesn't sustain. And in the drawing out, it accentuates one of the great flaws on Bradbury's work - the idea that only boys and men can have wonderful adventures and fight the great struggles against the dark. In most of his short stories, this unfortunate tendency is clear, but not generally expounded upon. Something Wicked This Way Comes is too full of observations about the nature of boys and men when confronted with the felicities and adversities of life, without any corresponding observations on what sorts of exciting and important things girls and women can do.

Ah, but those splendid short stories - that's what's worth remembering.