Warchild by Rick Bowes
All right, this book is one of those I wish I had read as a fifteen year old. At fifteen I would have gobbled this up as I did Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. A Mohawk-sporting, telepathic juvenile delinquent hops through time and dimensions to raise an army to do battle with mind parasites?
Yes. Sign me up.
Now sometimes this is a mixed bag. Often encountering something that speaks to our teen-self only increases our awareness of time’s passing, and you either succumb to wistful nostalgia or get grumpy because you got older. Other times by some quirk in the work or possibly within ourselves, the magic’s still there waiting for us to open the pages and discover it. Warchild was one of those other times.
If you have SFnal fifteen year olds in your life, find them a copy of this book and give it to them.
More From Disorienting Encounters
“There is no better way of obtaining useful information than by mixing with people. According to a wise saying of the ancients: “The eye never tires from seeing, nor the ear from hearing.”
Therefore, I decided with the help of God to blacken these pages with what I saw and heard during this voyage, be it clear or obscure. For I am but a woodgatherer of the night, the one who lags behind, a horse who is out of the race.”
– Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845 – 1846. The Voyage of Muhammad As-Saffar
One Book Four Covers
It’s time for another edition of one book, four covers. This time Lolly Willowes.
Once again I read the NYRB edition. That’s the one all the way over on the left. I think it’s a bit lousy–misleading and unappealing. It calls to mind folk artwork and certainly doesn’t tell you what the book’s likely to be about. The second one… umm.. yeah… First I guess it was published during the 60s/70s Gothic boom where a cover required an old house, a young woman, and some stuffy disapproving mysterious dudes. I’m surprised she’s not wearing a nightgown. Second, the ad-copy:
A charming woman–a midnight meeting–the scent of witchcraft “remarkable… pungent and satisfying”.
From now on I am going to say “remarkable… pungent and satisfying” whenever I smell anything.
The third cover is great. It screams THIS BOOK IS ABOUT WITCHES DEAL WITH IT! while also suggesting a playful irreverence. The fourth cover is a bit too much. Again it’s misleading and takes itself too seriously. It’s much too dark and brooding. As with the second cover it plays up the Old House aspect of the story, which is really a negligible part of the whole story.
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Here’s the first read for 2012: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. Yup, it’s another New York Review Book and it hasn’t shaken my conviction that all of their books are great. Warner combines the perceptiveness of Jane Austen with the supernatural touch of Shirley Jackson.
Laura “Lolly” Willowes is a single woman in the early 20th century, and the novel concerns her spiritual renewal late in life (well after she has been consigned to the role of spinster aunt by her family) when she becomes a witch of the Margaret Murray type. It’s a slow but fascinating novel, off-kilter in its meandering, but focused in its observations even though the plot really never strays too far from “spinster aunt sells her soul to the devil and lives happily ever after”.
By its end the ground is so well laid that when Warner kicks off the braces and lets fly with some social critique it’s honed to needle sharp perfection.
“’They say: ‘Dear Lolly! What shall we give her for her birthday this year? Perhaps a hot-water bottle. Or what about a nice black lace scarf? Or a new workbox? Her old one is nearly worn out.’ But you say: ‘Come here, my bird! I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.’ That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure.”
Also as a slight aside since I read a lot of weird late Victorian horror fiction, this book’s the perfect antidote to the veiled puritanism in Machen’s work. His women characters are so often “corrupted”, either inherently or by circumstance, that it’s fun to read Lolly Willowes and have that paradigm thrown on its ear. The bachelor nephew, Titus, who would be the hero in a Machen novel, here gets consigned to the role of villain and fool, and the “corruption” Lolly experiences is her hard-earned right to live as she pleases and be respected for it. Bravo for her!
A last point, save the introduction until after you finish the book since it’s one of those that lays out the entire story and, you know, SPOILERS.
2011 Writing Review
Writing-wise I’m pretty happy with this year. Here are the highlights:
– My Lovecraftian, sex tourism gone awry story, “Go Home Stranger”, was published in the anthology Bewere the Night.
– Space Squid reprinted my story “Your Mother” in their Best of Space Squid anthology.
– Shimmer Magazine interviewed me in their Five Authors, Five Questions series. That was cool.
– I sold my Joe Mitchel meets Fritz Leiber story, “Shadows Under Hexmouth Street”, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. So I should have at least one story coming out in 2012.
– Started two novels (though at the time I believed I was starting one), and will likely finish the first draft of one of them within the next two months. The other one will get written later next year.
– Four new stories went out into the world, and I have another three that need polishing. My goal was to have six in the slush by year’s end. Didn’t quite get that. Next year. I did retire a few stories this year too. Always a sad occassion, but they’re back in the leafmold now awaiting possible hyrbridization.
That’s it. I am where I am, and the view’s not half bad.
Happy New Year
Have a happy New Year everyone.
My resolution for 2012 is to sweep the floor more often.
(And, yes, I’m not much of a Tom Waits fan. I pretty much like three of his songs and this one is two of them.)
One Week From Now…
I’ll be aboard an airplane cooped up in economy class making my way to Boston. To my surprise packing hasn’t started yet. When I think about packing it’s mostly trying to think of what books I want to read on the airplane. My clothes… eh…
Last week I taught some camps. It went well. Next week I will teach some more camps then Saturday will arrive and I’ll give my wife a kiss, board a bus, then a plane, then another plane, and another plane. At some point I’ll be in Osaka at another San Francisco. Then I’ll be in Boston.
Fun times.
The Glamour
I picked this up during a book-buying binge last summer. The only other book I’d read by Christopher Priest was The Prestige. I enjoyed that enough to give this a try.
The Glamour is a suspense novel that borders on the fantastic about a love triangle between people with the ability to make themselves invisible. It reminded me some of Patricia Highsmith’s Those Who Walk Away and some of Fritz Leiber’s The Sinful Ones. Nothing much happens for the first 100 pages, but I found myself swept along and reading anyway. The middle section, narrated by Sue, the woman torn between two men with varying degrees of “invisibility”, was the highlight where she talks about “the glamour”, the ability to become unnoticeable, and their subculture in modern day London.
Of course, “the glamour” also operates as a metaphor for certain social anxieties. Some might prefer it to be either one or the other – metaphor or speculative element, but magic powers as a metaphor for a universally observable social experience fits well with all the unreliable narrators, doubling, and pomo identity hijinks Priest employs in his novels. If that metaphor in the end makes me regard social experiences differently, then I’d say it’s successful.
To Priest’s credit he stays balanced on the border long enough to explore interesting ideas and resists the desire to provide simple solutions to them.
What I Want For Christmas
If I had the power to produce exactly what I want for next Christmas, I would have all the kings and emperors resign and allow the people to govern themselves.
I would have all the nobility crop their titles and give their lands back to the people. I would have the Pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting for God — is not infallible — but is just an ordinary Italian. I would have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and clergymen admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing about devils or ghosts, gods or angels. I would have them tell all their “flocks” to think for themselves, to be manly men and womanly women, and to do all in their power to increase the sum of human happiness.
I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths.
I would like to see all the politicians changed to statesmen, — to men who long to make their country great and free, — to men who care more for public good than private gain — men who long to be of use.
I would like to see all the editors of papers and magazines agree to print the truth and nothing but the truth, to avoid all slander and misrepresentation, and to let the private affairs of the people alone.
I would like to see drunkenness and prohibition both abolished.
I would like to see corporal punishment done away with in every home, in every school, in every asylum, reformatory, and prison. Cruelty hardens and degrades, kindness reforms and ennobles.
I would like to see the millionaires unite and form a trust for the public good.
I would like to see a fair division of profits between capital and labor, so that the toiler could save enough to mingle a little June with the December of his life.
I would like to see an international court established in which to settle disputes between nations, so that armies could be disbanded and the great navies allowed to rust and rot in perfect peace.
I would like to see the whole world free — free from injustice — free from superstition.
This will do for next Christmas. The following Christmas, I may want more.
Yesterweird 