My life in books

Cassandra Khaw is an author I’ve only recently come to appreciate. I’ve read a few short stories, and one novella - A Song for Quiet, which rocked me deeply. The pieces I’d read up to this point have been dark fantasy and horror, which she does very well, so well that I thought I’d acquaint myself with her other work.

Hammers on Bone, another novella, and I believe the first one featuring John Persons, who also appeared in A Song for Quiet, is a horror story with a difference. It draws on parts of the Lovecraft mythos for its characters and situations, but the real horrors are all too human - domestic and child abuse. Persons is an interesting character, definitely in the anti-hero mode. A private detective by trade, and a Yith by nature - one of the time travelling, body snatching entities found originally in Lovecraft’s stories, he has otherworldly powers, but also a detached, inhuman perspective that is partly influenced to occasional human responses by the faint presence of the human whose body he wears. Being who and what he is, his cases tend to have something of the supernatural and monstrous about them, and he does not necessarily handle these the way a human PI would. Khaw does an excellent jib if capturing the alienness of Persons, and the desperate humanity of those he deals with. With two Persons stories written, I rather hope there Khaw intends there to be more.

Bearly a Lady, on the other hand, is supernatural chick lit comedy. Zelda Joshua Andreas McCartney is a werebear, which is hard on all sorts of things, like underwear and dating. Her best friend and roommate Zora is a vampire. And she has, thanks to Zora’s pushing, a hot date with a very sexy werewolf she’s been lusting after for a very long time. And she’s still got a bit of a crush on co-worker Janine. Then her employer assigns her to act as a bodyguard to her visiting nephew, an arrogant, entitled fae lordling with full-tilt glamour. It’s Bridget Jones for the fantasy-reading woman, and it is as different from Khaw’ dark fantasy as it can be and still occupy the same broadly-defined genre.

There’s a lot of good stuff in here about female friendship, and some pointedly cautionary advice for the modern female wereperson who wants to have a bit of romance in her life. It’s a delightful change fir this author, who says in her afterward, and with perfect truth, “Because there’s a place and time for darkness and grim ruminations, and there’s a place and time for bisexual werebears with killer wardrobes and a soft spot for pastries.”

And then there’s the Rupert Wong stories: Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef and Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth, two novellas which I read packaged in omnibus format and titled Food of the Gods. I’m not entirely sure how to categorise these stories. Not exactly horror, though certainly full of horrific things. Not humorous, really, although the main character does use humour to deal with the improbabilities in his life. Definitely supernatural, full of gods, ghosts, ghouls and monsters from multiple cultural traditions. But whatever you decide it is, it’s certainly interesting.

Rupert Wong is a self-described “superstar chef to the ghouls and liaison for the damned of Kuala Lumpur.” His specialty is preparing human flesh and blood for the consumption of the various undead. He employs a large number of kwee kia, ghouls created from unborn fetuses, and despite the blood bind between them - he feeds them ritually from his own wrist - but he’s the kind of guy who believes in educating the exploited workers, and now they’re threatening to unionise. But that’s hardly the worst if his problems.

He’s a hard-working chef with a commitment to satisfying his employer, and not just because his employer is a powerful ghoul who’s likely to kill and eat him if he doesn’t. He’s a devoted family man, though both his wife Minah and their son are undead themselves. A sad story - Minah was pregnant when her first husband murdered her, and so when she awoke from the dead to take vengeance, her unborn child did as well. Rupert feeds both of them, too. And he has a lot of other responsibilities, too.

Rupert, you see, has a past. A very bad past. And when he finally realised that his bad past was going to seriously affect his afterlife, he made an arrangement with the gods to start working off his time in the Courts of Hell early. As he explains: “So now I’m working off my karmic debt through community management. I mediate arguments. I listen to complaints. I exorcise stubborn ghouls. I push pencils on hell paper and do the books every Hungry Ghost Festival.”

In the first of these tales, Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef, it’s this reputation that brings the Dragon King to him, with a demand that he investigate the reasons why the Erinys killed his youngest child. It’s not a request he can refuse. He wants to, of course, but the Dragon King isn’t just threatening to kill him if he declines - or takes the job and fails. The dragon holds a trump card. He can procure a reincarnation for Minah, a chance to work out her own karmic debt for killing her ex-husband. And Rupert would do anything for Minah. But as he begins his search for the Erinys, complications compound and he repeatedly runs afoul of various persons living, dead and divine, it begins to look as though there is no possible solution that doesn’t end in death, or worse.

Rupert does find a way through the maze of conflicting loyalties and demands, surviving to return in Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth. Due to various repercussions from his mission for the Dragon King, Rupert is now persona non grata among certain Asian pantheons, and his patron loans him to the Greek gods - currently based in London - to get him out of Kuala Lumpur. With his wife Minah reincarnated, and thus lost to him, there’s not much to keep him there anyway.

Being in London as the chef of the Greek gods is not a pleasant experience. No one seems to want to tell him what’s going on - why, for instance, a band of men in suits with guns suddenly appear on his first day in Demeter’s soup kitchen and gun down most of the homeless people eating there. As best as he can figure, he’s caught in a war between the old pantheons and the new gods created from human needs. And he has no idea what are the rules of engagement, or what role he’s supposed to play.

These stories are not for the squeamish. Rupert is, in his own way, a kind of a hero, but he does cook people for a living. And the gods and ghouls of the new and old pantheons around him are generally rather bloody and violent beings. But there’s a certain pleasure in watching Rupert as he survives the machinations of the endlessly powerful and manages to keep body and soul more or less intact.

Ruthanna Emrys’ debut novel, Winter Tide, is a treat. It revisits the lead character from her excellent novelette, “Litany of Earth.” This is a wonderful Lovecraftean historical fantasy, which starts from the premise that it is the victors who write the histories, and racists who invent stories of atrocities and foulness about those who are different, and so we - the readers - cannot trust what we have been told about the seapeople of Innsmouth.

Aphra Marsh is one of the last of the seapeople of Innsmouth. She and her brother are the only survivors of 18 years spent in an American concentration camp in the desert, where all her land-dwelling people had been sent after a campaign of lies resulted in the government sweeping them all up into captivity. People of the water die easily in the dry desert air, and so it was that only she and Caleb and one old man on the verge of his death were still there when the camp was used again to intern Japanese Americans.

Finally freed after the end of WWII, Aphra moved to San Francisco to live with the Japanese family that adopted her in the camp, and since then she has been looking for the lost wisdom of her people, aided by antiquarian bookseller and aspiring student of magic Charlie Day.

The government still keeps tabs on her, of course, and they have come to her now as one if the few who know anything about the heritage of magic that is in her blood. The Cold War is on, and there are rumours that the Russians have found the lost secret of mind transference - taking over another’s body. If true, nothing prevents them from assuming the bodies of key people in the US government.

The FBI wants Aphra to find out everything she can about this old, forbidden magic. In return, they are giving her and her brother access to the restricted libraries of Miskatonic University, where the books seized from her people have been placed.

This is a wonderful book that speaks deeply about the experience of being other. In addition to Aphra and Caleb, the last children of a persecuted race, the cast of characters includes Neko, Aphra’s adopted sister; Charlie, a gay disabled man; Spector, the Jewish FBI agent who becomes Charlie’s lover; Dee, an black woman working undercover as the servant and mistress of a prominent Miskatonic professor; Audrey, a student at Miskatonic’s less-regarded sister college, Aphra’s student, and a woman who carries the blood of the third of humanity’s races, the rarely seen people of earth; and the most “other” of all, the ancient Yith consciousness currently occupying the body of Miskatonic’s only female professor, Dr. Trumbull.

Socially conscious fans of the Lovecraft mythos will also appreciate the reworking of the overtly racist horror tropes of that mythos into a religious practice that has been misunderstood and libelled as so many non-Christian spiritual traditions have, with specific Lovecraft tales reworked as cautionary stories about the misuse of power, or as accounts of the acts of criminals within the seapeople community.

Emrys writes in an afterword that she originally had no intention of returning to Aphra Marsh’s story after that initial novelette, but realised that there was more to say. I find myself hoping that at some point, she will return again to the characters of Winter Tide, because I want to hear more if the true stories of the people of water.

Catherynne Valente, "Down and Out in R'lyeh"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/down-and-out-in-rlyeh/

This is not your average Cthulhu mythos story. In a style reminiscent of its other literary inspirations - Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - it's a travelogue, a drug-fueled expletive-filled exploration of the fetid underbelly of a city where that most fetid of all things, dead, lies dreaming. The narrator is an inconsequential 'eerie' named Moloch - not "the" Moloch, of course, just one of the thousand children of Shub-Niggurath, out for a night of tripping on the fumes of Cthulhu's farts. It's one wild ride, and it's worth it.


Allison Mills, "If a Bird Can Be a Ghost"; Apex Magazine, August 1, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/if-a-bird-can-be-a-ghost/

Shelly's Grandmother is a Ghostbuster. Shelly has the gift as well, to see and communicate with ghosts, to send them on. Her grandmother has a lot to teach her, about when to send a ghost on, and when to let them be. About treating them like the people they were. But when Shelly's mother dies, she has to learn the hardest lessons on her own. Very strong story, it starts out sweet and turns powerful and full of meaning. By the end I was near tears.


Cassandra Khaw, "Don't Turn On the Lights"; Nightmare Magazine, October 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/dont-turn-lights/

Oh, this is a dark little piece of horror indeed. Or, considering that it consists of multiple variations on a simple horror trope, a series of dark little pieces, each one successively darker and taking its motivations from deeper in the human psyche. Khaw turns the screws sublimely.


Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Worshipful Society of Glovers"; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/worshipful-society-glovers/

Kowal's novelette, a historical fantasy set in Tudor times, features a journeyman glovemaker in a world where the crafting guilds have arrangements with the queen of fairies to produce enchanted goods - all properly licensed, of course, and the penalties for making unlicensed ensorcelled goods can be grave indeed. But laws intended to protect can also trap a good but desperate person in a maze of deceit and worse, with no way out. A story that is, ultimately, about the cruelty of class, the desperation of poverty, and the callousness of a system that makes no allowances for circumstance or simple human necessity.


Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, "Concessions"; Strange Horizons, published in two parts, March 6 and 13, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/concessions-part-1-of-2/

In a world where religious strife has led to wars and a suppression of faiths of all kinds, where religious exiles live in small communities in barren lands becoming increasingly less habitable, a muslimah doctor and scientist struggles to balance both her callings, and find a way to atone for her part in the devastation. A thoughtful, moving story about healing, responsibility, science and faith.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "A Series of Steaks"; Clarkesworld, January 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/

A delightful sf caper about a prime beef forger and her assistant threatened by a nasty client with blackmail on his mind. The details of the forged food business - and its cousin, the printed replacement organ business - are actually fascinating, and the way the women turn the tables and ride off into the sunset is delightful.


Kathleen Kayembe, "The Faerie Tree"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-faerie-tree/

Striking a bargain with the faeries is never something done lightly, but when the need is great enough, some are willing to pay the price. But the sacrifice can be even worse than you thought it would be. A well-told tale with a bitter lesson.


Rachel Swirsky, "The Day The Wizards Came"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/day-wizards-came/

A short but many-layered story. What if wizards - mere schoolchildren, on brooms, not unlike the wizards everyone has been reading about - suddenly appeared and stopped a terrible thing from happening. And what if the mundanes, who the young wizards didn't have much respect for anyway, instead if being suitable grateful, wondered why now, why, if they had such power, they hadn't stopped other terrible things before then. And what if... But as I said, there are many levels to this unsettling tale, having to do with responsibility, and power, and expectations, and wanting things to be better without having to do it yourself, and other tricky questions.


Theodora Goss, "Come See the Living Dryad"; tor.com, March 9, 2017

Goss' novelette deals with an issue that I feel rather strongly about - the treatment of people who have visible differences and disabilities, by society, by those close to them, by institutions and media. Set in 19th century England (and thus evoking echoes of the life of a similar medical curiosity, Joseph Merrick, the famous Elephant Man), this is the story of the life and murder of Daphne Merwin, the Living Dryad. There is a real, and very rare, genetic condition known as Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia, in which damaged skin develops into hardened tissue and forms papules that resemble treebark, and branches. It is this condition that the fictional Daphne suffers from, and the reason that her husband - the man who found her alone and starving in the streets of London - exhibits her under the name of the Living Dryad.

The story is told through Daphne's journals, the internal narrative of her great-great-granddaughter, also named Daphne, who has inherited her condition, and various documents - handbills, news reports, excerpts from the younger Daphne's book on Victorian Freak Shows. The younger Daphne, reading the journal for her research, becomes suspicious about the official version of the murder, and seeks to resolve the questions she has. Daphne's journals provide clues. But what lies beneath the murder mystery - which is interesting in itself - is the tragedy of two woman turned into objects for display, for the financial benefit of the man who wooed and used them both, and the voyeuristic pleasure of others.


Carlie St. George, “If We Survive the Night”; The Dark Magazine, March 2017
http://thedarkmagazine.com/if-we-survive-the-night/

There’s a house in the woods where the girls who die in horror films go. Every day there’s an angel who calls on them to repent their sins, and every night they are murdered again. Because everyone knows it’s the bad girls who die. But who decides what’s good and what’s bad? And who determined that the appropriate punishment for any sin that a teenaged girl could commit is to be horrifically murdered?

In an interesting literary coincidence, shortly after reading this story, I encountered the following passage in Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life: “You can be made responsible whether or not you have modified your behavior in accordance, because gender fatalism has already explained the violence directed against you as forgivable and inevitable.”


Kirsten Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150 - 1224); The New Yorker, July 31, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/christina-the-astonishing-1150-1224

More mainstream/literary fiction. A thought-provoking story recounting the life of a late Medieval female saint from the perspective of her sister. Reading with a modern eye, one is unable to discern sanctity from madness. Did Christina really return from death, or from a paralytic fit that seemed like death to the uneducated villagers and barely educated priest? Her sisters suffer greatly from her ranting, accusations and erratic, sometimes violent behaviour - is it the wrath of God or schizophrenia? What tears at the heart is the anguish of a sister torn between love, resentment, anger and reverence.

Many readers of speculative fiction have a conflicted relationship with H. P. Lovecraft. I'm certainly one of them. There's a power, an allure, to the Cthulhu mythos that's hard to set aside - yet there's also the pervasive racism that makes so many of the specific works that form that mythos so difficult to read.

Victor LaValle's powerful novella The Ballad of Black Tom is both a retelling of Lovecraft's short story "The Horror at Red Hook" and a response to its appalling racism. I'd come across some reviews of LaValle's piece some time ago, and decided to reread Lovecraft's story before reading the novella.

"The Horror at Red Rock" has been called by some one of Lovecraft's most overtly racist works. It is set in a part of Brooklyn that Lovecraft populates with a "hopeless tangle and enigma" of "Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro element," "unclassified slant-eyed folk," and "swarthy, evil-looking strangers." The protagonist is a police detective named Malone, who works the human smuggling beat in Red Hook, investigating "the organised cliques which smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island." In the course of his work, he encounters a reclusive scholar named Suydam who seems to be unaccountably involved with the more corrupt and violent elements of Red Hook society.

In The Ballad of Black Tom, LaValle inverts the characterisation of Red Hook, painting it as a vibrant multicultural community that suffers under the structural racism of American society and the callous brutality of the police, whose job it is to keep the people of Red Hook away from white New York.

The protagonist here is a young black man named Charles Thomas Tester, a hustler with a minor musical talent who skirts the edges of the occult world. Raised in poverty and always under the threat of race-based discrimination and assault, he accepts an invitation to play at a party being held by the eccentric and mysterious Suydam - and is introduced into the world of Cthulhu.

The general course of events outlined in Lovecraft's story unfold in similar fashion in LaValle's novella, but from the joint perspectives of Tester and Malone. A tragic act of police violence finally drives Tester to Suydam's side snd he becomes his primary lieutenant, Black Tom.

In LaValle's work, it is the promise of revenge for years of oppression by whites that draws members of the Red Hook community, including Tester, to embrace the worship of Cthulhu, and ultimately leads Tester to choose the end of human civilisation over the continuance of white supremacy. As Black Tom tells Malone at the climax of the story, " I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day."

More short stories and novelettes from around the net.


"The Shape of My Name," Nino Cipri, March 15, 2015, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/03/04/the-shape-of-my-name/

This was an amazing story about creating one's own identity. The narrator is part of a multi-generational time-travelling family whose members have access to gene-coded time capsules enabling them to travel into any time between 1905, the year that the mysterious Moses Stone built the machine for the family matriarch, and August 3, 2321 - the significance of that date is unknown to the characters, but my guess is that it's the date from which Moses travelled back in time to build the machine that would allow forward travel. But that's not part of the story, really. The story is about creating identity and finding freedom from ingrained expectations.


"When It Ends, He Catches Her," Eugie Foster, September 26, 2014, Daily Science Fiction
http://dailysciencefiction.com/fantasy/fairy-tales/eugie-foster/when-it-ends-he-catches-her

One of the short stories that would have been on the Hugo ballot this year had the Puppies not done their thing, and Foster's last story, published just before she died. A poignant and evocative story of love, art and death, two dancers rekindling the memories of their greatest achievement in the midst of the ruins of civilisation.


"Litany of Earth," Ruthanna Emrys, May 14, 2014, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2014/05/14/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys/

Another piece that might have been nominated fir a Hugo if not for the puppies, Emrys' novelette is a majestic and powerful reworking of the Cthulhu mythos, ever mindful of the fact that the winners not only write the history books, they demonise the ones who lose. Emrys presents the people of Innsmouth and other such communities as a race of immortal others among us, with a faith and a knowledge no more evil than any other, persecuted, incarcerated, experimented on and killed for their difference. A must-read for those who once loved Lovecraft but lament his casual racism.


"Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land," by Ruthanna Emrys, August 20, 2014, tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2014/08/20/seven-commentaries-on-an-imperfect-land-ruthanna-emrys/

I was sufficiently blown away by Emrys' "Litany of Earth" to want to read more. And I was not disappointed in doing so. "Seven Commentaries" is a perfect pearl. Told in seven vignettes filled with glorious detail, it is about communities of the heart and soul, the perseverance of imagination and hope, the healing and binding power of story, and seeing the spirit of your sister in a stranger's eyes.


"Kin, Painted," by Penny Stirling, July 29, 2015, Lackington's Magazine
http://lackingtons.com/2015/07/29/kin-painted-by-penny-stirling/

Lackington's specifies that they are specifically interested in publishing stylised speculative prose, and I must admit to enjoying stylised prose (when well-done, of course), but more than just being stylised, this piece by Penny Stirling was a beautiful thing to read. An extended metaphor on growing up and making personal choices, notable for its references to persons of many genders and preferences.

I read three anthologies in 2011, all of them theme-based and all quite enjoyable.


Mercedes Lackey (ed.), Under the Vale and Other Tales of Valdemar

What can I say? Lackey's world of Velgarth, and her stories about Valdemar, and its Heralds and their Companions are irresistible to me. I know, telepathic talking horses. But so what?


John Joseph Adams (ed.), The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Holmes is another literary creation that I find irresistible. so if you give me an anthology of stories about Sherlock Holmes facing adversaries more fantastical than most of those Arthur Conan Doyle created, who am I to say no? A really excellent collection (to be expected, given Adams' track record as an editor).


John Pelan & Benjamin Adams (eds.), The Children of Cthulhu

And yet another irresistible topic - the Cthulhu mythos created by H. P. Lovecraft. These are stories inspired by the mythos, and not necessarily drawing directly on elements of the canon, but there are some excellent horror stories here, with all the distinctive flavour of the Lovecraft originals.