Books: Aickman, Wells, and Jama-Everett

[roadrunnertwice]

Robert Aickman - The Wine-Dark Sea

Short story collection. May 26, 2014

I left a few of these unread, which is a thing I often do with short story collections. Squirreling morsels away for later.

I put a library hold on this book a very long time ago, and by the time they gave up on their hypothetical wandering copy and got a new one, I'd totally forgotten why I wanted it. I must have had some reason; maybe someone quoted a story on Tumblr, or I read an essay about Aickman's work, or someone at work told me to read it. But functionally speaking, this was an ominous surprise delivery from Past Nick. Thanks, Past Nick, this book is great! What are you trying to tell me.

Anyway, these were very good and really weird. The prose was superb and understated and pervasively creepy. By example:

"Let's go," said Mimi. With difficulty they folded up the map, and Mimi returned it to Margaret's rucksack. The four grey stones continued to mark the corners of a now mysterious rectangle.

I mean! Look at that.

The preoccupations that drive the stories are very rooted in the neuroses of mid-century England. (Gender, generation gaps, land, class, industrialization and deindustrialization, xenophobia [lots of xenophobia].) But they blow out in such an elemental and outsize way that I really don't know what to think of the author's actual relationship to them, which is pretty much precisely as you want it for strange fiction.

A disquieting and odd collection. Recommended.

(Brenna and Chrono, I'd be particularly interested to hear your takes on these.)

Ayize Jama-Everett - The Liminal People

June 10, 2014

This ultra-violent superhero crime/revenge story was a functional page-turner, but was not precisely my cuppa. The protag was supposed to read as a dark, conflicted antihero, but he was kind of just a piece of garbage. (Cruel, ragey, crappy towards women, blames most of his flaws on his mentor/crime boss, etc.) And even ignoring him there were plenty of problems, what with the love interest killed off for motivation and the evil psychic disabled person and all.

Well-staged action, mildly intriguing urban fantasy set-up, frustrating and gross characters and plot.

Martha Wells - Emilie and the Sky World

June 10, 2014

I liked Emilie and the Hollow World, but this book is much better! (I suspect it doesn't stand well alone, though -- it jumps straight in with very little recap. Literally days have passed since the end of book one.)

It's a much tighter story this time around, plotted like a classical Hollywood thriller in the Die Hard vein. Fewer exploratory and expository lulls, and in Emilie's case, a lot less waiting for other people to decide what to do.

So, someone else should read this book and talk about Emilie with me, because I'm really interested in the direction her character went.

Someone (and I can't remember if it was an access-locked post, so I'm keeping their identity vague) recently wrote something interesting about the fight-or-flight response -- first, that it's actually fight/flight/freeze; secondly, that "fight" isn't really "fight" but a more general "go towards the danger and try to disrupt it;" and third, that most people consistently tend towards one of those responses when confronted with something fucked up and scary. And after the events of the first book, Emilie has definitely solidified on "fight."

Which makes sense given the genre! Wells has written about how she wanted to reconstruct the Boys' Own Adventure genre (nearly extinct in its original form but with its DNA widely distributed and very much alive; see Up for another story explicitly engaging with its classical tropes) with girls and women at the center of it instead of absent or invisible. So Emilie definitely falls into the Plucky and Helpful mold. But there's more than that going on -- she's visibly changed by what she saw and what she did on her last journey, and she's acquired a certain... I'm not sure if "ruthlessness" is the right term. I'm pretty sure it's not, actually. But she understands now what life-or-death stakes really means, and she's seen that she can affect the outcome of events that kids are not supposed to be able to affect the outcome of, and the combination has done a number on her.

Last time, she had a plucky willingness to go into danger. Now, she has a kind of shocking eagerness. She's starting to become what I've heard EMT describe as a "trauma junkie." And she's a really effective one, who operates with basically no angst about it, and seeing that in a teenage girl character is cool and kind of new. If this series were to keep going, I could see her aging into an Indiana Jones mold -- ostensibly a sensible and committed scholar, but ready to do something really ridiculous at the slightest shift of the breeze.

And she's very shrewd about what having that type of personality means, too -- she has an intimate understanding of all the ways young people (and young girls especially) get underestimated, and knows that any sort of audacious and dangerous move from her is going to be super unexpected. She plays that to the hilt. And this time, her companions are ready for it instead of being like "who is this demented stowaway." (I'm still kind of cheering at Miss Marlende's "Allow me to introduce the real Emilie" bit.)

Anyway, the shitty postscript to this otherwise positive review is that Strange Chemistry, the imprint that published this book and its predecessor, got shut down several weeks ago, so it's probably not going to sell much more. ARGH. You should grab an ebook or two and read these; they really deserve a wider audience than they got.