Cassandra Khaw: A Song for Quiet

Cassandra Khaw’s novella A Song for Quiet begins with the protagonist, musician, saxophonist, bluesman Deacon James, on his way home from his father’s funeral, on a night train headed for Arkham. And it ends with a young black woman, who wanted to end the world because living in it hurt so much - but didn’t.

There’s something about H. P. Lovecraft that makes people want to engage in literary conversation with his work. While he was still alive, writers like Robert Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert Bloch wrote stories riffing on his themes and paces and strange gods, and for many years afterwards, writers by the score produced dark fantasies drawing on his mythos. Then came a newer generation of writers, many of them people of colour and white women, who used their own interpretations of his mythology to interrogate some of the real evils of the world - racism, sexual violence, and so on - through and against the tropes of Lovecraft’s work.

And so we have Ana, an abused and tormented black girl who carries a seed inside her, of something destructive and evil inside, something that makes her hear, and create, strange discordant music, something almost ready to burst, and it will destroy the world - and Ana has known so much pain that she’s ready to see it go. And we have Deacon James, a black man who, we learn, also carries that seed. He’s also a black man who has hope, despite the experiences of a life lived as a black man under Jim Crow, who knows joy as well as sorrow. And he’s a black man who gives everything he has and is to keep hope alive, to hold onto a world that he knows will grow bleaker and more violent, because even in that world there will be others who fight against the darkness.

This one left me in tears.

Tom King: The Vision, Volume II

I finally got around to reading the second volume of Tom King’s graphic novel The Vision, subtitled Little Better than a Beast, which continues the story of Avenger Vision, a synthetic being, and his equally synthetic family, trying to live as human beings.

It’s a tragedy. Partly because they are trying to be what they cannot be, partly because society cannot let them be what they are, partly because of the problem at the core of the superhero story, the one about having so much power snd attracting evil and dealing with that in the middle of a world full of ordinary people. Some superheroes deal with it by having secret identities - that’s the DC universe way, for the most part, and it kind of works most of the time.

But Marvel heroes don’t always do that, and Vision is so very different that he couldn’t do it anyway. So this story about a superhero trying to have a normal family life becomes a meditation on fame, power and difference. It’s also a frightening look at how a chain of poor decisions can lead to horrifying results. Lies, denials, betrayals, spreading out like ripples, reinforcing each other and evoking terrible consequences.

One of the characters becomes obsessed with quoting Shakespeare, and there is something very Shakespearean about this story. Figures larger than life, fatal flaws, and cathartic consequences. Hidden guilt coming to the surface. And destruction. And renewal, and the seeds of more to come.