BWBC 02: Climax Joy!
Welcome back to the Black Water Book Club. Today we’ll enjoy a very short one and a somewhat longer one.
IA Ireland’s “Climax For a Ghost Story” is an example of what would today be called flash fiction. It’s very much the kind of story places like Daily Science Fiction publishes regularly. That’s not a quality critique on flash fiction (I quite enjoy writing it myself!), Daily Science Fiction (who do what they do very well), or the story itself, just that its brevity no longer makes an intriguing curiosity but places it in a stylistic tradition. Read it for yourself:
“How eerie!” said the girl, advancing cautiously. “—And what a heavy door!” She touched it as she spoke, and it suddenly swung to with a click.
“Good Lord!” said the man. “I don’t think there’s a handle inside. Why, you’ve locked us both in.”
“Not both of us. Only one of us,” said the girl, and before his eyes she passed straight through the door, and vanished.
… spooky…
What actually makes this story notable is not the story itself but the likelihood that its author never existed and the whole thing’s a fabrication. The story’s said to come from Ireland’s 1919 book Visitations, which there seems to be no record of. Nor is there any record of the existence of Ireland’s 1899 book A Brief History of Nightmares. What is mentioned is that Ireland claims descent from William Henry Ireland, an infamous eighteenth-century forger who tried to pass his plays off as lost works by William Shakespeare. So for now, I’ll believe I.A. Ireland’s a hoax until some librarian tells me otherwise.
Here’s a little bit more on “Climax For a Ghost Story” and the mystery surrounding its author.
On to the next story, a tale of remembrance and loss. . . and getting a hand-job from your dead lover’s ghost until you die. The story’s called “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”, and it’s written by Tennessee Williams. And here we are going straight into Ick Country of the sort you’ll find in Samuel R. Delany’s writings on New York City’s Times Square.
But first, up front, I’ll just admit that I really, really liked this story. It’s all atmosphere. Yes, squalid, dilapidated, and sordid atmosphere, but that’s a feature not a bug. It’s also kind of a tender love story.
Pablo Gonzales is an aging watch repairman in Texas who is so much surrounded by time as to have become indifferent to its passage, and one day he decides to go to the movies. That’s the story, except more so.
Mr. Gonzales inherited his watch repair business from his long dead lover, Emiel Kroger. That this story is set in 1950s USA means their relationship does not at all look healthy. Kroger’s described as a grotesque (“very fat, very strange”) who picks up a teen-age (possibly underage) Gonzalez for sex one night. That Gonzalez returns Kroger’s affection, surprises the older man, and the two form a relationship that’s both master and apprentice and romantic partner. In time Kroger dies leaving everything he owns to Gonzalez. Meanwhile the local movie palace the Joy Rio descends into decrepitude, becoming the center of an illicit world of sexual practices on its upper floors. Mr. Gonzales is a regular visitor to the upper floors. That this is 1950s USA means all these assignations have to be done subtly or one risks bringing the wrath of society at large down on oneself, no matter how ugly and sordid that greater society might be. There’s a nice anxious paranoia in this story as Mr. Gonzalez navigates the risks and rules of the sorts of seductions carried on in the Joy Rio. When a misstep throws his life in sudden danger, it’s too the upper floors Mr. Gonzalez flees and where the ghost of Emiel Kroger waits.
There’s a companion piece to this story called “Hard Candy” that I hope to read some day, and the Ick Factor here is definitely drawn from Williams’s own life. There’s tenderness within the grotesque on display, and both serve to make this a very unsettling story, perfect for the sort of book the Black Water Anthology hoped to be.
Next week … faint hand-writing and Venetian masks!
Oh Shit! You’re Trapped in an Irish Fairy Tale
Your step-mom will try to kill you, but she will fail. So instead she’ll turn you and your brothers into swans. After a few centuries you’ll become human again, except you’ll be incredibly old. But fear not! It’ll all be okay because you’ll be baptized before you die.
The king will send you and your brothers on a suicidal mission (because you killed his da), but when you do well the king will have his druid cast a spell so you all forget what it is you’re supposed to be doing. Then three shouts from a hilltop will kill you.
The “Salmon Leap” is the cobra-claw secret move of all Irish heroes, well, that and a short spear stab to the belly.
You’ll know such a terrible secret about the king that you’ll start to die. A druid will tell you to go to the woods and tell the secret to a hole in a tree, but later a fucking bard will show up and make a harp from that very tree that tells everyone the king’s terrible secret. (The king’s secret is that he has horse ears.)
You will go hunting deer, but the deer will tell you to cut that shit out because they’re actually your half-sibling from the gap year your dad/mom spent as a deer because they annoyed a druid. This will also apply to wolfhounds and birds.
The fairies will be small, unless they are big. Either way, you’re likely in for a bad time.
Your dinner will get cold because all the heroes have gotten into a pissing match over who’s most worthy to cut the meat. Eventually this will be settled by a gigantic brawl, which was the whole point of the feast anyway.
Brain-balls are the deadliest missile weapon and made from the brains of a mighty warrior you killed mixed with lime and sculpted into a sling bullet.
The king will get hit in the head with a brain-ball, not die, but live in an infirm state with the ball still in his head. He’ll then die when the druids tell him about Jesus’s death and he gets so angry the brain-ball falls out, killing him.
If you’re a woman your eyes will be hyacinth blue, lips scarlet as rowan berries, feet slim, and the light of the moon will glow from your face.
Don’t drink from that cup! It has elf genetic material in it!
Oh shit, you drank from the cup, now your daughter’s an elf and kings will fight over her, and she will probably get turned into a bird or leaf or breeze, and she’ll spend countless days like this until she meets a monk or elf or druid.
If an elf loans you a horse and tells you not to get off a horse, DON’T GET OFF THE HORSE.
Actually, it’s best to avoid horses all together.
You will be rash and ignorant but eating more fish will make you wise.
Swamps are the best place to practice poetry.
Three things make a poet: the Fire of Song, the Light of Knowledge, and the Art of Improv, or Extempore Recitation as the druids call it.
No brave deed will be done that Conan the Bald won’t mock and belittle.
You will know a guy named Dermot of the Love Spot. You will regret this, but your wife won’t.
Refer to your OCD as a geis and everyone will be cool with it.
Strangely beautiful princesses are either elves… or Greeks… or Picts.
The fairies will steal your stuff and/or family just so you’ll stop by for dinner.
The King will disappear for six months to a year. No one will know where he went and they’ll be much speculation. Say hello to all your new wolf, bird, and deer siblings!
All these come from “The High Deeds of Finn and Other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland” by TW Rolleston. You can download it from Project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org/ebooks/14749
BWBC 01: Enter… the Ambiguity
Welcome back to the Back Water Book Club or the BWBC as I’m going to call it from now on. This week we hit the stories!
To start off is Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over”.
It’s a ghost story. Sort of.
It’s more a metaphor story, but for what I don’t know. This story has ambiguity dripping all over it. A middle-aged brother and sister living in an old house find themselves at odds with a nameless unseen “they” that shows up one they and starts taking over their home. At first it’s only part of the house, and the brother and sister flee behind a sturdy oak door into another part of the house, but before long the unseen “they” take over even this part, and the brother and sister are forced to flee the house entirely.
But who are “they”? It’s uncertain. They simply appear and instead of confronting them, the brother and sister let them take over the house. Is it scary? Are the brother and sister actually ghosts haunting their ancestral home? Is the haunting actually an indictment of the brother and sister, as the intruders appear to have much more life than either of the pair? The story offers no answers. My reading’s that the “they” are metaphorical, a symbol of the unseen majority that will push the marginalized into the streets unless confronted.
Scary? No. Strange? Kinda. Ambiguous? Oh yeah.
Following that, we have a more traditional story in Robert S. Hichens’s “How Love Came to Professor Guildea”. This one features the recognizable Victorian trope of two old educated bachelors of opposing personalties who manage to be great friends despite their differences. Instead of Holmes and Watson, it’s a Father Murchison and a Professor Guildea. Murchison’s the sentimental idealist, while Guildea’s the man of pure intellect and reason. The two meet and get into debates about the human condition. Then Professor Guildea finds himself haunted.
And it’s here where we encounter the “ick factor” I talked about back in the introduction, because whatever the entity is that attaches itself to the Professor, its main characteristic is that it’s mentally disabled and the chill of the story comes from that fact. The entity that haunts the Professor is described as an imbecile (and not so flattering as such), and this makes both men shudder. While the entity seems to mean no harm, the very affection that it shows the Professor is deemed unnatural and a thing to be feared. And so the men set out to rid themselves of the thing with mixed results.
So, is this scary? Sort of. From the entity’s initial appearance as a ragged form on a park bench to the Professor’s slow discovery of its nature, and the dawning realization of what it wants, the story manages to get under one’s skin and linger. But that it relies on ableism to do so can’t be denied.
Next week… a possible hoax and some more ick factor from Tennessee Williams!
Black Water Book Club
Hello, folks. Welcome to the Black Water Book Club.
Today we’re taking a quick look at the book’s forward before next week when we’ll start looking at the stories proper. Fortunately, the forward’s brief and it gets to the point quickly. Manguel gives a good working definition of what he thinks fantastic literature is:
“Unlike tales of fantasy (those chronicles of mundane life in mythical surroundings such as Narnia or Middle Earth) fantastic literature can best be defined as the impossible seeping into the possible, what Wallace Stevens calls “black water breaking into reality”. Fantastic literature never really explains everything.”
He then outlines the main themes common to all the stories selected for the anthology:
– Time warps
– Hauntings
– Dreams
– Unreal creatures, transformations
– Mimesis (seemingly unrelated acts which secretly dramatize each other)
– Dealings with God and the Devil
“The truly good fantastic story will echo that which escapes explanation in life; it will prove _in fact_ that life is fantastic. It will point to that which lies beyond our dreams and fears and delights; it will deal with the invisible, with the unspoken, it will not shirk from the uncanny, the absurd, the impossible; in short, it has the courage of total freedom.”
One thing I’ll note is that while no story has been steeped in the complete bigotry of, say, an HP Lovecraft story, a few so far have relied on certain prejudices to achieve their impact. That this would be the case in stories that rely on dreams, fears, the absurd, and the uncanny should surprise no one. But this “ick factor” when it occurs can leave a bad taste behind it. The fantastic as Manguel approaches it is not to be mistaken for a clean place at all.
If you want to read more about Alberto Manguel, here’s the link to his wikipedia page. His Dictionary of Imaginary Places is a fun book to spend a few hours with.
Favorite Reads 2019
And so here are my favorite reads from this past year. As usual very few of these books are recent books. Some like the Westlake and the Pohl I’d been meaning to read for years. One delight from the past year was reading Tanith Lee. I wish I had gotten to read her work sooner. One thing I didn’t read much of this past year was non-fiction. Maybe only two or three other books beside the Machiavelli one listed below.
The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake
The first of Westlake’s novels featuring his jinxed crook protagonist Dortmunder. This is a great fun heist novel where a simple jewel heist turns into something so much more complicated. Westlake writes a world that bends not simply crooked but cussed.
The Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot
A thriller novel about a doctor and his family who become drawn into the vampire subculture of Victorian Europe. It’s a mess of breakneck events, that is a lot more entertaining than it needs to be.
The Compleat Guth Bandar by Matthew Hughes
I am susceptible to the occasional Jack Vance itch
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Chambers might be my favorite for writing mac&cheese comfort food science fiction.
The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall
Hallucinatory secondary world adventure fiction that’s like a Spaghetti Western version of the Planescape setting.
Gateway by Frederick Pohl
A classic of 1970s science fiction that digs into the grot and grit of fabulous technology. Humans discover a cache of alien ships and the desperate start piloting them around the galaxy at much risk to life and limb.
Embers by Sandor Marai
A tense little book about two old man confronting their past relationship and the dark secret that binds them. One of those books that’s basically about two people eating dinner atop a roiling sea of subtext and back story.
Gates of Ivriel by CJ Cherryh
Eternal champion style immortal swords woman awakens from her eternal sleep and throws the world in turmoil as she attempts to complete the mission that brought her to the world in the first place. Told from the perspective of the eternal sword woman’s companion, a barbarian warrior bound to the woman by a debt of honor.
Faces Under Water by Tanith Lee
An alternate renaissance Venice full of intrigue, alchemy, and a good bit of skullduggery as a scholar discovers a cursed mask beneath a mysterious woman’s window one night. Gets downright hallucinatory by the end.
Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World by Erica Benner
An oddly uplifting book about a republic in crisis due to the overweening pride and arrogance of a few men, and the dedicated man of principle who must walk a narrow path through the era. Hard to say why I loved this book, but I pretty much recommended it to everyone I knew at some point.
The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
The kingdom of Iraden houses many secrets as Eolo the warrior discovers as they assist their friend in reclaiming his position as the Raven’s Lease. Interesting world building here in part constrained in focus and scope to all the plot occurring in one location.
The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
Straight forward fantasy novel about a group of adventurers tasked with stealing an artifact to aid a kingdom. This earns its spot here by its attention to detail and the depth it goes in developing its small cast of characters and slim plot.
Black Water Book Club
Alberto Manguel’s Black Water: The Book of the Fantastic is an anthology of world literature from 1983 that’s considered a pioneering book for the weird genre. It’s cited as influential by others, in particular Ann and Jeff VanderMeer who put together their own anthology of weird literature. While Black Water‘s still leans Eurocentric, Manguel succeeded in pulling heavily from outside the English language, paying particular attention to the South American writers who formed his own background. At close to a thousand pages long Black Water does an admirable job at providing an overview of the fantastic as written around the world. Certainly its seventy-two stories excel in scope beyond other omnibus anthologies of weird stories from earlier eras. Used copies go for around ten dollars on Amazon, but I found my copy for half that back in 2017 at a used bookstore in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I bring all this up because one project I will work on this 2020 is a read through of the book over the course of the entire year, writing capsule reviews of the stories here at a rate of six stories per month.
I hope you’ll join me, or at least follow along.
Favorite Reads for October and November 2019
Not writing an October post nagged me all November, but I was traveling and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.
Here are the books I liked from the last two months.
The Compleat Guth Bandar by Matthew Hughes: Set during Earth’s penultimate age, Guth Bandar is a noonaut who voyages into humanity’s collective unconscious while traveling around the galaxy. Boyish and wry like Jack Vance, which it nods at heavily, but it lacks Vance’s cynicism and cruelty. Also spelling “complete” as “compleat”? That’s hot!
Headlopper Vol. 2 by Andrew Maclean and Jordie Bellaire: I didn’t like this one as much as Volume 1, but I liked it more than Volume 3. Heads get lopped as do limbs.
The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee: The book cover that needs to be airbrushed on the side of a van. I wrote about this one on the Patreon. For 1USD you can read about it and a bunch of other old weird books. This one is a cringy mess of 1970s fantasy tropes, but if you’re susceptible to that Conan itch like I am, and enjoy Tanith Lee, this is a must-read.
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole: Another one from the Patreon. And for 1USD yadda yadda… This one lays out the template for the Gothic novel but isn’t nearly as bat-shit loopy as The Monk. Although, that’s not to say it isn’t bat-shit loopy in its own special way.
The Deadly Sky by Doris Piserchia: This one is set on a far future Earth where a young scientist becomes obsessed with the sudden appearance of a hole in the sky. This was Piserchia’s last published book and it falls a bit flat at the end, leading me to think it was rushed to publication. Piserchia can be a ton of fun, but if you’ve never read her I don’t recommend you start here. Instead check out Star Rider.
Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown: A very 1960s SF novel about a hip, swinging space detective named Sibyl Sue Blue. She’s a mom, a cigar smoker, and always down for a good time. Not only do we have warp drives by the year 1990, but women regularly rouge their knees to keep up with fashion.
The Delicate Dependency: A Story of the Vampire Life by Michael Talbot: Of all the books here this is the one to read NOW! Even if you don’t like vampire books, this one is a great ride full of twists and turns. When Dr. Gladstone’s carriage strikes down a hauntingly beautiful young man on the streets of London, the event sparks an obsession in the doctor that brings him and his entire family into contact with a shadow world beneath the everyday one he believes he knows.
