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Note: Friday's Forgotten Books is a regular feature at pattinase, the blog of crime writer Patti Abbott. Log on each week to discover old, obscure and unfairly overlooked titles.
Graphic novelist Doug TenNapel's Black Cherry is less forgotten than never particularly well-known in the first place. TenNapel has built his career around absurdity, and his most famous works feature robot-hijacking cats (Gear) and space-suit-wearing annelids (Earthworm Jim). Silliness, exaggeration and an artfully sloppy art style are the tools of his trade. But Black Cherry represented a shift away from speculative subject matter to a combination of hardboiled and horror.
Small-time crook Eddie Paretti is in over his head. Stealing from the mafia isn't smart to start out with, but when The Family also happens to be your employer, well, that's a sticky situation for the shrewdest operator. And Eddie ain't that shrewd. Still, he's bright enough to know that his boss, Don Mauro, might wise up to his larceny one day. So when a rival crime boss offers him big bucks to swipe a body from Mauro's mansion, Eddie jumps at the opportunity. Who knows? Maybe he'll have enough left over to help find the girl that got away, a beautiful stripper named Black Cherry. Eddie snags the body, only to discover it isn't dead -- or human, either. Soon he finds himself pursued by a whole host of demons, a kindly Catholic priest and a comely new convert to the church who looks an awfully lot like a certainly lady he once saw spin around a pole.
The best part of Black Cherry is TenNapel's style, hands down. Intentionally loose, his black-and-white illustrations make masterful use of light and shadow, recalling classic film noir. (Click here to read the first ten pages, but heed the content warning.) The screwball plot is more of a take-it-or-leave-it affair. Longtime fans probably wouldn't bat an eye at possessed hitmen, a jive-talking katana-wielding angel, and a sight gag that takes a very literal interpretation of the doctrine of transubstantiation. Casual readers, though, may end up baffled by all the incongruity. However, the biggest sticking point is Black Cherry's edginess. Over-the-top slapstick works fine when married to an upbeat tone, but joining it with grim tropes is an uneasy union indeed. A decapitated demon dominatrix whose severed head spurts blood like seltzer? An elephantine flesh-eating squirrel that references the Sermon on the Mount after having a chair leg broken off in its eye? Gag and gag after gag about forcible sodomy? Yeah, you get the idea: The approach alternates between the ridiculous and offensive. TenNapel's work is worth getting to know, but start instead with his free-to-read Web comic Ratfist. This Cherry's sour.
(Picture: CC 2007 by p.v)
io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders wonders why cyberpunk writers are jumping the ship for dark fantasy. Excerpts:Cyberpunk has fallen from its peak in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the great cyberpunk authors are still writing. And many of them have turned to fantasy. ...
Consider:
Rudy Rucker, author of the Ware tetralogy and Postsingular, among many others, has described his new novel Jim and the Flims as being akin to fantasy. Also, Black Glass author John Shirley published the mystical Bleak History in 2009.
Metrophage author Richard Kadrey has gained a huge following for his Sandman Slim novels -- the third one, Aloha from Hell, is coming October 18. Richard K. Morgan, author of the cyberpunk Takeshi Kovacs novels, has written a bloody fantasy, The Steel Remains, with the sequel, The Cold Commands (or The Dark Commands), coming October 11. Meanwhile, some of Synners author Pat Cadigan's recent stories have seemed much more fantasy-oriented.
What's going on here?
Read the whole thing. Some of Anders' suggestions seem a bit off to me. For example, can we really state that cyberpunk's tropes can no longer speak to the current human condition or that fantasy fits better with a noir mindset? Failing to speak to universal experience is more of an authorial than genre problem, and early works from the godfather of cyberpunk drew so heavily on hardboiled that crime fiction aficionados still read them. But on at least two points, she hits the nail on the head. First, money follows fantasy more than science fiction. Richard Kadrey quips, "I never made a dime in the SF world. Fantasy keeps the lights on and smoke coming out of the chimney." And no wonder, given that the highly technical nature of much SF discourages casual readers. Second, Anders thinks that much of cyberpunk's vision of the future has come true. It's hard to argue otherwise when iPhones do much of the work of any fictional brainjack. Indeed, the closest contemporary entry in the genre that I've read is Paolo Bacigalupi's delightful The Windup Girl, only instead of investigating human-computer interactions he ponders the mysteries of genetics (albeit a bit simplistically). Perhaps cyberpunk's spirit will stay with us, only with a shift in subject matter.
(Picture: CC 2006 by Stuck in Customs)
Sometimes a novel comes along that lives up to all the hype, one that astounds the reader with its freshness of vision and execution. Paolo Bacigalupi's Nebula- and Hugo-winning The Windup Girl is just such a novel. Set in a world where oil production has bottomed out and global warming has swept away coastal metropolises with rising sea levels, once-grand nations have contracted into provincial powers. Most have replaced fossil fuels with kinetic power, storing joules in specialized kink springs wound by specially engineered elephantine precursors called megadonts. But few countries can easily replace another equally scarce resource -- food. Agricultural monopolies bolster the marketing of their sterile crops by releasing blights tailored to kill natural growths and any who eat them. However, mutations to these designer diseases have put even the so-called calorie companies on the defensive, and their operatives scour the globe for any genetic material that can help put their herbicidal Pandora back in its box. Thailand has resisted the conglomerates at every step, which is why AgriGen's Anderson Lake is in the drowned city of Bangkok, posing as a factory operator. His right-hand man, Hock Seng, has a more mundane goal, namely to build a new life for himself after Malaysian jihadists murdered his family. Meanwhile, Environment Ministry enforcer Jaidee Rojjanasukchai seeks to keep Thai soil free of calorie company crops, as well as the genetically engineered servants known as wind ups. This terrifies one such wind up named Emiko who was abandoned by her master and now survives by selling her body in a brothel. Unbeknownst to this divergent group, circumstances are conspiring to bring them together in a violent confrontation that will rock Bangkok to its very foundations.
If William Gibson and Timothy Hallinan decided to collaborate, The Windup Girl might be the result -- and that's intended as high praise. Bacigalupi keeps his characters well-rounded and ethically conflicted, his plotting always unexpected and never forced, his setting ... Well, as you can probably tell from that overlong intro, the setting is a thing of pure beauty, jaw-droppingly complex and well-realized. I could pile on superlatives, but suffice it to say that while reading one almost feels the jungle heat, smells the salt spray of a rising ocean kept at bay only by ingenuity and good fortune, sees the saffron-robed Buddhist monks and the white-shirted Environment Ministry police threading through rickshaw-choked streets. Windup is the sort of book that can twist you into knots with sheer admiration and envy.
And yet ...
Typical, I avoid critiquing a novel's thematic content. After all, that's really more of a reader's job than a reviewer's. But a pair of controversial topics so thoroughly inform Windup's action that they deserve mention. The first is Bacigalupi's advocacy of economic isolationism, the populist notion that nations only survive when cut off front international trade. One bureaucrat tells Anderson that specializing to make use of its comparative advantages nearly brought Thailand to the brink of ruin, a notion that would raise eyebrows on most economists. Ditto for the concepts of economic assassins and coup-instigating corporations with their own standing armies. However, the novel's second big idea, that of genetic determinism, proves more problematic. Not only does Emiko suffer all sorts of degradations (some of which recall the awful ending of Requiem for a Dream), but Bacigalupi also implies that she submits to them somewhat willingly and that because of the content of her genome. A rogue scientist implies she owes her sexual subservience to having her helix spliced with that of Labrador retriever. Such a biological obliteration of free will surely goes too far and certainly ignores recent research into how quantum entanglement fits with the mind-brain dichotomy. The Windup Girl is an amazing read, one that every fan of speculative fiction should pick up, but it ultimate proves just as frustrating as it is fascinating.
(Picture: CC 2002 by besar bears)
Colson Whitehead talks Internet distraction and writerly willpower over at the Publishers Weekly blog. Excerpts: The doubters ask, how do you get any work done if you're RTing and LOLing all day, which is also fair, introducing the topic of Internet distraction in general. We've all read interviews where the author moans, "I'd never have finished my opus if I hadn't rented out serial killer Joel Rifkin's old hostage pit." Not only did this cinderblock retreat lack Wi-Fi, we learn it was also soundproof and windowless, a Lecterian Yaddo.
I say, yes, you can rent out a hostage pit. You can also close your browser. It's called willpower. If you can't muster the will to lay off Gawker, how are you going to write a book? ...
There are those who moan, oh, Shakespeare wouldn't have written all those wonderful plays for us to "modern update" if he'd had Angry Birds ... Is it so terrible, here in the 21st century? A sonnet is perfect Tumblr-length, and given the persistent debates over the authorship of his work, the bard would have benefited from modern, cutting-edge identity theft protection. The old masters didn't even have freaking penicillin. I think Nietzsche would have endured non-BCC'd e-mail dispatches in exchange for pills to de-spongify his syphilitic brain, and we can all agree Virginia Woolf could've used a scrip for serotonin reuptake inhibitors. I digress. The Internet is not to blame for your unfinished novel: you are.
Read the whole thing. I want to expound upon Whitehead's comments at length. I want to analyze them and synthesize them, post my own reconstituted musings here and check my comments every, say, seven-and-a-half minutes to see if any of you fine folks have responded. I also want to surf on over to IO9.com to check out the latest SF-related distractions, sneak on to Tor.com to see if they've updated their detailed reread of The Name of the Wind and sign in to my email for the thirteenth time today. But I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to plant my rear in the seat and enter some edits. It may not satisfy my desire to grab a fistful of online ephemera, but it'll certainly prove more productive in the end.
(Picture: CC 2006 by kainet; Hat Tip: Nathan Bransford)
Penguin Group CEO John Makinson sat down with The Wall Street Journal to talk traditional versus electronic publishing in an interview released May 9, 2011. Excerpts:
WSJ: Will there come a time when physical books are no longer published?
Mr. Makinson: No, I really don't think so. There is a growing distinction between the book reader and the book owner. The book reader just wants the experience of reading the book, and that person is a natural digital consumer: Instead of a disposable mass market book, they buy a digital book. ... I looked the other day into the sales of public-domain classics in 2009, when all those books were available for free. What I found was that our sales had risen by 30% that year. The reason is that we were starting to sell hardcover editions -- more expensive editions -- that people were prepared to pay for. There will always be a market for physical books, just as I think there will always be bookstores. ...
Mr. Makinson: This is a new market that can't exist economically in print. You can't manufacture, ship and store a book at those prices. But we as publishers probably need to participate.
We'll look at new content that maybe we can popularize in different ways. We'll also look at our backlist. Maybe there are customers for westerns at $1.99.
Read the entire thing. If the Journal's Web site wants to curtail your access to the article, remember that Google is your friend. Makinson's partial acceptance of e-books mirrors my own slight migration away from print. Thanks to a relative's new Kindle that I've had the privilege of perusing, as well as a kind electronic publisher who has seen fit to put some of my stuff in print, I think I understand the new medium a little better. However, I really do think e-books best serve those who don't need to intensively study a text. Due to a poorly stocked campus bookstore, I had to settle for an electronic textbook for a grad class last semester. Every with a search feature, attempting to find old highlight sections of text proved far more difficult than simply thumbing through a ream of physical pages. Short stories on a screen? Perfect. Complicated technical info? Hello, Mr. Migraine.
(Picture: CC 2008 by Horia Varlan)
Just in time for the sultry days of summer, B. Nagel is hosting a round of shared storytelling at his blog. Excerpts:Hello friends. This is a writing exercise. And I want to take this opportunity to invite you all to take part in it.
In my head, I'm calling this exercise "Wake up, writing monster!" You can call it whatever you want. But first things first, right off the bat, this is not a contest with fantastic getaways to southern Spain or giftcards to internet bookstores. The only prize is participation; the only reward, community; a shadow beside ours as we walk the writing road. ...
But what is the story supposed to be about? Well, I want everyone who participates in this exercise to write to his or her own purpose. I have been travelling through a dry patch and need to to revive, tease, wake up the writing monster. So my story will be about that. Now, my story may star two old ladies having coffee and flirting outrageously with a barrista OR a young boy passing through manhood trials OR I may write about myself writing about library patrons. All of these options are on the table and more beside. I am writing to exercise and inviting you to work out with me. In a free-for-all, internet word gymnasium kind of way. Just keep it PG-13, please. My mom does read the blog.
Read the whole thing for all the pertinent details, including word count and posting date. Monsters? Writing? I am so in, and you should be, too. To sweeten the pot, B. has tag-teamed with Peter Dudley of Corner Kick to encourage participants to add audio or video to their entries. By gum, it’s going to be a veritable multimedia extravaganza!
(Picture: CC 2008 by Stephanie Massaro)
Surely you've heard that renowned Mark Twain aphorism: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." It's become a mantra for many writers, a call to focused creativity and compositional excellence, a pledge to rise above mundane prose.
I wonder just how many stories such a commitment has killed.
Don't get me wrong, I love excellent writing. I delight in phrases freighted with literary import, sentences stuffed with alliteration and allusions, all carefully constructed to yield maximum emotional impact. It's all good stuff. Such beauty can print you like a brand.
The problem lies in that such a standard is exceedingly difficult to meet, especially right out of the gate. For those who (like myself) desire to find it, discovering the right word can feel like a stumbling block or an millstone tied around your neck, a barrier to writing rather than an incentive. I can't tell you how many times I've stared at a half-finished page, willing the perfect turn of phrase to come and walking away in a huff when it didn't.
The solution? Well, I've stopped aiming for the right word -- at least at first. Let my early drafts (and perhaps even some of the latter ones) be embarrassingly sloppy. At least I have them. Some say that good is enemy of the best, but I say sometimes the best is enemy to anything at all.
(Picture: CC 2006 by art farmer)
Katie Wech, screenwriter for Prison Break, Stephen King's Dead Zone and Prom, talks how less script often equals more story in the April 30, 2011 edition of The Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:In screenwriting, you have to cover a lot of ground with very few words (a mentor of mine once described it as "the thong bikini of writing.") Instead of spending a half page describing a character, I have to do it in a sentence. And it better be a good sentence, specific and vivid enough to help everyone from a casting director to a costume designer bring that person to life. ...
When the script runs long, decisions about what goes and what stays hinge largely on the story's spine. The spine is its essence, the thing you can't change without fundamentally altering the whole piece. I've thrown away exquisite pieces of dialogue, set pieces that made me giggle, characters I've lived with for months, because at the end of the day, they weren't necessary to the story.
Read the whole thing. Though Wech claims screenwriting in particular is known for its economy of language, I'd argue that all good writing involves putting the perfect word in its particular place. Even the efforts of authors who churn out epic sentences and paragraphs feel more impressive than expansive when they're paying attention to craft. The challenge for me (and a few others, I bet) lies in wanting that not-a-word-wasted draft right out of the gate, in trying to shortcut the tedium of composition and revision. Unchecked, that yearning for immediately beautiful writing becomes instead a recipe for no writing at all.
(Picture: CC 2007 by mchlmbrk)
Once I read a wonderful little synopsis of the dramatic differences between Shakespeare and Chekhov. Although I can't lay my hands on the exact source, it essentially said that when the Bard's characters reach the end of the proverbial rope, they intone something like, "To be or not to be," while in the same situation Chekhov's creations murmur, "My, I think it's time for tea." That strikes me as a perfect continuum on which to situate a narrative's action: Where does a particular story fall between big and bombastic on one end (Shakespeare) and soft and subdued on the other (Chekhov)? Well, if we're talking about Andrew Klavan's thriller Man and Wife, it's Shakespearean through and through, stuffed full of enough dramatic tension for any number of alienated royals.
Cal Bradley had a good life. A thriving psychiatric practice in tiny Highbury, Connecticut. Three adorable children. A wife with whom he shares a passionate love even after 15 years of marriage. Things seemingly couldn't have been better -- until that fateful night when Peter Blue snapped. Seemingly out of nowhere, the nineteen-year-old beat his girlfriend, stole a pistol and set fire to Trinity Episcopal Church. If he'd died there, things might have been simpler, but Orrin Hunnicut, the Highbury chief of police, hauled the kid from the flaming wreckage in an almost holy wrath. Hunnicut wanted to send Peter up the river, but after Peter tried to hang himself in the holding cell, a number of Highbury's elites convinced a judge to put the boy under Cal's care for psychiatric evaluation. But as Cal begins to untangle his charge's psyche, his own family begins to fall under scrutiny. And then while hiking through the woods one day, his spies his wife deep in conversation with another man ...
Man and Wife isn't a book you'll read for subtlety. It has nothing secreted away in some literary corner. With the exception of Cal, every character is broad as a battleship and given to launching into over-the-top antics with precious little provocation. The novel's themes are self-evident from the get-go, and the ending is foreshadowed multiple times with more forthrightness than art. And yet I still found it entertaining, primarily because Klavan knows how to plot. From the first chapter on, we understand that Cal and most everyone around him will do some Very Bad Things. However, the exact path of his downfall remains in doubt up until the very end, an end which recalls A Simple Plan and A History of Violence. An entertaining, flawed entry in Klavan's canon.
(Picture: CC 2009 by Nahh)
Over at Storytellers Unplugged, Richard Dansky (Firefly Rain) points out problematic tropes for authors of fantasy, horror and science fiction. Excerpts:
If there are more proper nouns in your back cover text blurb than non-proper ones, you're probably doing something wrong. ...
You're looking to get someone to get to know your kingdoms and monsters and wizards, not give them a Wonderlic test on their suitability to read without resorting to a dramatis personae cheat sheet. So if your book comes back with back cover text that reads like the fantasy equivalent of the President's morning briefing, complete with strategic analyses, family trees and threat levels, suggest a change for something simpler. Your unminted readers will thank you.
Unspeakable evil probably doesn't live in your mom's basement.
Look, I get it. Horror is largely a symbolic genre. The ghosts and vampires and unnameable critters from the vasty plains of Fgg'gtt'btt'tt (or, as I like to call it, Brooklyn) all stand in for something. ... That being said, it seems odd that every old family home that falls into the hands of every struggling writer on the planet has a gate to interdimensional evil in the basement. ...
Because really, what you're saying when you claim world-destroying evil is seeping out through the walls of the place you grew up is that your childhood fears are the worst and most important ones that ever were. ...
Try some perspective. Put it in scale. ...
If your star-spanning galactic empire doesn't have working cell phone technology, you may want to rethink things a bit. ...
Handwave the faster-than-light travel. Make all the aliens want to boink like space is one big rave at Ibiza and Orbital is doing their version of the Dr. Who theme song. Throw in zap guns and nanotech and God knows what else to your heart's content, if it makes for a better story.
But the moment your intergalactic space cops need to rely on a communications device that can't do half the crap my iPad does, you lose me. The instant your plot hangs on a mystery that could be solved in fifteen seconds with Google (and I say fifteen only because space cops are lousy typists), you bore me.
Read the whole thing. Dansky's advice seems spot-on to me -- except the bit about horror. Okay, I get it: Scribes of the scary stuff need to pay attention to verisimilitude. But if you've read classic spooky stories, the stuff from Lovecraft and Poe and James, you know that the genre isn't primarily symbolic. And even if you do many the squamous beastie squatting in your basement representative of some larger theme, that doesn't necessarily strip it of depth. As Richard Matheson has reminded us, evil lurks everywhere, in the cubicle next to you and in checkout line in the grocery store and in the man standing in the pulpit and people to whom he preaches. That's as true-to-life as you get.
(Picture: CC 2010 by horrigans; Hat Tip: Brandywine Books)
Note: The final paragraph of this post contains various spoilers.
You know, I really wish writers would kill more of the characters we love.
This sentiment doesn't spring out of a latent sadism or some sort of empathetic deficit, I assure you. Like everyone else who enjoys good stories, I form attachments to particular characters, identifying with them and rooting for their success. When they're in peril, my pulse quickens, my mouth goes dry, and I frantically flip the pages to see how it all will turn out. I'm emotionally invested, in other words. And it's that very investment that makes me believe it's sometimes in a story's best interest for an author to drop the hammer on well-rounded, likeable characters.
To see what happens when storytellers refuse to do so, just consider the action movies of the eighties and nineties. Arnold or Sylvester or Jean-Claude might have faced scored of baddies armed to the teeth and itching to unload them into the heroes' friends and family. Yet the main thrills from such films come not from imminent peril to such folks, but from the inventive dispatching of the antagonists. After all, we know none of the important people will die except the villain and only at the story's precise climax. If someone's going to perish, it'll be a tangential character introduced at an opportune time. It's a simple formula -- and likely the reason why the genre's on life support.
If insulating major characters from meaningful peril cuts dramatic tension off at the knees, placing them before the real possibility of death gives it a growth spurt. In the first section of The Passage, Justin Cronin created a kind widower, carried him through terrible peril and killed him suddenly with radioactive fallout. Justified (aka The Best Show on TV) offed Raylan Givens' aunt with a close-range shotgun blast in a scene that felt like a slap to the face. And Dan Wells' I Am Not a Serial Killer sends one major character to a grisly demise. These stories don't offer impersonal body counts. They serve up white-knuckle reading and viewing because you know precious little is off the narrative table.
(Picture: CC 2008 by Kurt Komoda)
Note: Friday's Forgotten Books is a regular feature at pattinase, the blog of crime writer Patti Abbott. Log on each week to discover old, obscure and unfairly overlooked titles.
