Shelf Monkey

Goose Lane celebrates with a terrific sale!

2012-01-29T13:12:00.000-05:00

I don't normally shill for others (aw, who am I kidding?), but the good folks at Goose Lane Editions, Canada's oldest independent publisher, are celebrating a new website launch with some fabulous deals on amazing books!*

From the press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Goose Lane Editions launches new website

[Fredericton, NB] In 1994, still in the birthing years of the Internet, Goose Lane Editions, Canada’s oldest independent book publisher, made history by becoming one of the first publishing houses in the world to launch their own website. After 18 years, the site has gone through numerous transformations, changing to suit our evolving culture as technology improved and users became more computer-savvy. Now, we are proud to announce the newest iteration of www.gooselane.com, with new features, new content, and a new promotion to kick off the launch.

In addition to a complete visual redesign, we have added new website elements such as twitter feeds and ongoing blog posts by our many employees. Sample chapters are available for many books, and an ongoing stream of events and notices is added to the main page every day.

To celebrate our launch, we’d like to extend a special offer. For every day the week of January 30, we will be offering one book a day at a special highly-discounted price. Roadsworth, YOU comma Idiot, The Famished Lover, Miller Brittain, The Black Watch, Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy, and Ganong: A Sweet History of Chocolate will each take over one day of the week with a drastically discounted price to help celebrate our new look and attitude. All this, in addition to our regular feature of free shipping on orders of $60 or more. To take advantage of these offers, simply create an account with Goose Lane. By doing so, you’ll also ensure that you are regularly updated on upcoming special offers.

We’ve been around a long time, both physically and electronically. Here’s to many more years together.

*NOTE: I am, in fact, two online personas, Corey Redekop and the shelf monkey. As Corey Redekop, I am Goose Lane's publicist, so I am, of course, prejudiced toward them and therefore cannot be trusted when I say that these are beautiful books that are easily worth your time. But the monkey? He chooses no sides, but he knows a good deal when he sees one. And he says to not let people know of an opportunity for a sale copy of YOU comma Idiot would be a crime.

Favourite Monkey #1:

2012-01-22T14:32:00.002-05:00

wherein the shelf monkey commences upon a historic, nay, histrionic, nay yet again, monumental attempt to re-read and internetally review those most-beloved works of fiction that have nestled firmly within his psyche, an effort spanning the entirety of his entirely too-short life thus far.
His favourite books, in other words. Good god but this primate is tremendously verbose for someone who sleeps in a tree.

Today's exciting episode:

Stone Junction
by Jim Dodge

Plot synopsis (from Goodreads):

Stone Junction is a novel about Daniel Pearse, an orphaned child who is taken under the wings of the AMO - Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws. An assortment of sages sharpen Daniel's wide-eyed outlook until he has the concentration of a card shark Zen master, via apprenticeships in meditation, safecracking, poker, and the art of walking through walls. This unconventional education sets Daniel on the trail of a strange, six-pound diamond sphere, held by the U.S. government in a New Mexico vault, rumored to be the Philosopher's Stone or the Holy Grail. Shadowing the slippery netherworlds of role-playing games like Magic or Dungeons & Dragons, Daniel's quest to retrieve the magic stone and discover who killed his mother becomes a bravura act of storytelling, both a free-spirited adventure and a parable about the powers within us all.

When did the shelf monkey first read this? I recall purchasing Stone Junction from the University of Winnipeg bookstore, from a sales table. I was undoubtedly in my twenties. Picked it on a whim, the cover and copy intrigued me.

What were the first impressions? Stone Junction grabbed me like few books ever have. For years I considered it my favourite novel of all time.

How many times has the shelf monkey read this? This, I believe, is my fourth reading.

Has it withstood the perils of time and maturity? Oh, yes, and then some.

New thoughts: Thomas Pynchon calls Stone Junction "a celebration of everything that matters." Forgetting for a moment that a blurb from Pynchon is akin to the Pope's personal blessing for many people, it's a fine summation of Stone Junction's many, many endearing qualities. Jim Dodge has penned a rollicking joyride of a story down the backroads and dark alleys of a mythical American landscape that cannot possibly exist, yet should. I'm not a conspiracy nut by any means, but the idea of a semi-legendary affiliation of outlaws and magicians that subtly weaves itself through history is so tempting, it's no wonder one edition begins with a warning: "This book is a work of fiction. FICTION. Believe otherwise at your own peril."

When I first read Dodge's magnum opus — and it is just that; Dodge has only written three books, none since SJ, and I hereby plead with Mr. Dodge to pick up the pen again — I was still a young lad, somewhat well-read but on the whole ignorant. Since that initial reading I have become more familiar and conversant with the historical peers to Dodge's free-wheeling prose and plot style. Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan; writers of serio-comic fiction who quirkily explore philosophical themes with narratives that careen, bounce, and fly according to the meta-manic whims of the creator. Every character is provided a history, even the minor ones, and they all have a story to tell in flamboyant language that reads wonderfully and would be impossible to maintain in real life. Some people find these authors' refusal to use one word when ten will do tiresome; I personally love a lengthy sentence, and Dodge is lodged firmly within that genre, although his storytelling a touch more linear.

"Outlaws only do wrong when they feel it's right: criminals only feel right when they're doing wrong." That's a primary theme here; this is an excursion to the land of people on the fringes, people who cannot abide rules and regulations, but mean no harm. People named Longshot, and Volta, and Smiling Jack, Bad Bobby, Red Freddie, and Bridget Bardo. It's an adventurous bildungsroman of Daniel Pearce's birth, life, and eventual *removed for spoiler purposes*. It's a search for meaning, a quest for what the heart truly wants. And when Daniel learns to vanish, it becomes something even greater, pushing into magical realism.

Look, I can't pretend to fully understand what happens to Daniel. All I really know is that I loved the ride. Stone Junction is one of those rare novels that I don't want to end; I want to continue on in my relationships with Dolly, and Aunt Charmaine, and Wild Bill, and Shamus. My heart broke at Daniel's ultimate end, but the finale is the right one. It is ultimately unfair to me that Dodge's world does not exist, as I cannot imagine it wouldn't improve our world tremendously.

Verdict: still a favourite monkey

Tiny monkey - Butterfly Winter by W.P. Kinsella

2012-01-15T13:32:00.002-05:00

Butterfly Winter (Enfield & Wizenty, 2011)

by W.P. Kinsella

Description (from the publisher)

Butterfly Winter, Kinsella’s first novel in 13 years, is the story of Julio and Esteban Pimental, twins whose divine destiny for baseball begins with games of catch in the womb. They mature quickly and by the age of ten they leave their home in the fictional Caribbean country of Courteguay for the American major leagues. Julio is a winning pitcher who will only throw to his catcher brother, much to the chagrin of the team that employs him, which must keep mediocre esteban on the roster. events in the brothers’ homeland, including regular coups and the outlawing of baseball, continue to shape their lives. They are monitored by the wizard, a mysterious figure who travels by hot air balloon and controls events behind the scenes. In his last years he tells the story of the twins and their family to a skeptical ‘gringo’ journalist. Butterfly Winter is entertaining, funny and magical, and includes a diabolical chiropractor, a great love blessed by butterflies and a deep political undercurrent that unites the wealthy north with the baseball-loving and oppressed south.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks

Why the return of W.P. Kinsella wasn't heralded throughout the northern kingdom with hosannas and blaring trumpets I will never understand. Considering that the once-prolific author had claimed his career was over after a severe car crash left him unable to write, the printed return of Kinsella to his three loves (baseball, magic realism, and more baseball) should have been front-page news. Instead, Butterfly Winter slips onto the shelves unnoticed, released by a small independent publisher to a few good reviews. This must be rectified. Kinsella, in addition to being the finest writer there is or ever was of baseball lore (and this coming from an avowed sports unenthusiast), is one of the last true practitioners of the free-wheeling comedic plot practised and perfected by Tom Robbins, Jim Dodge, Edward Abbey, and Richard Brautigan. True to form, Butterfly Winter is a breezy treat, a magical journey to a land where lying is the norm and you can never be sure of the truth. Butterfly doesn't hang together as well as Kinsella's masterpiece The Iowa Baseball Confederacy; its episodic nature and refusal to be tied down to a linear plotline can frustrate. Kinsella's enthusiasm and sheer joy at writing smooth over the rough spots, and if the result isn't the sum total of the parts, well, the parts sure are fine all by themselves. It's good to have W.P. back, and like the best of friendships, I hope he'll stick around.

TINY MONKEY REALLY LIKES

Monkey droppings - Every Shallow Cut by Tom Piccirilli: "You're going to hurt yourself or someone else very badly."

2012-01-10T20:01:00.000-05:00

Today, the monkey swings in on a vine of happiness, and swings back out on a rope festooned with hooks and blades.

So, ouch. Be careful, everyone. This one is going to leave scars.

Every Shallow Cut (ChiZine, 2011)

by Tom Piccirilli

They opened the car door and Churchill hit the ground beside me with a thirty-five pound belly-flop. Our gazes met and he gave me such a look of confusion and unconditional love that a sob welled in my chest and nearly broke from my throat. He snuffled at my neck and licked me twice and they went for the keys in my pocket and Churchill went for their ankles.

I had a flash, almost a premonition, where I saw that here it was, my very worst moment in a long chain of very worst moments, where I was going to have to watch them kick my dog to death. It was worse than my wife leaving me, it was worse than losing the house, it was worse than visiting the graves of my parents. It was going to be nearly as bad as the day I’d passed wailing protesters at Planned Parenthood following my wife’s staunch shoulders across the lot. They’d break Churchill’s back, boot him into the gutter, dance off with my father’s coins, and drive away in my car.

Church growled and hung onto an ankle, and the guy tried to shake him and bitched, “Fucking fat dog piece of shit!” His partners found it funny and started to laugh. I got to my knees and then to my feet, and I remembered that I was a man with nothing left who wrote stories about men with nothing left who did ungodly acts of violence against each other.

I wrote from the safety of a desk but the dark cellar door of my failures had opened and called me through it, and I found all my urgent whispering pain and hate, and I laughed again and they turned to look at me and I went to work.

Every Shallow Cut was released in 2011, but I didn't get to crack open its cover until one dreary day early in 2012. The next few hours were a blur, and when I closed the covers again, I knew I had just experienced something very special.

Brutal, yes. Violent, sometimes. Unforgiving, oh yes, and spilling over with despair. It may be one of the finest literary recreations of depression I've come across. As the title implies, every sentence is a razor, every word a shearing of flesh from meat. Every Shallow Cut is a nightmare of urban angst, the terror of losing everything to faceless banks and sneering creditors. At its essence, in its tone and style, it reminds me of nothing so much as the brilliantly unsentimental work of Jim Thompson (an author who knew his way around insanity).

But is it special? With a capital S. If I'd read it three days sooner, it would have been in my top reads of 2011.

The nameless narrator is a crime writer, once one of some renown, as references to critical acclaim and awards fill the scant exposition. Time has not been kind, and he is now down to his last dollar, with his wife gone, his career in shambles, his house repossessed, and him living in his car with his faithful bulldog Churchill. He is truly living out the death by a thousand cuts,and if this story is at all biographical, we're lucky not to be reading about Piccirilli on the front pages of the tabloids, or the imprinting of a headstone.

Piccirilli begins his saga at the lowest of low points, finding his hero being gleefully stomped by hooligans outside a pawn shop. But if luck has fled his life, resourcefulness hasn't, and after dispatching with the hoods he sells the last of his belongings, purchases a gun, and heads out on the road to...

To where? That's the fun (if we can call it that), as Piccirilli keeps taking left turns. The cover and bumpf led me to believe that this was an ultraviolent Natural Born Killers scenario, a man pushed too far, Death Wish in a car, that sort of thing. And I would have been fine and dandy with that, I love a revenge fantasy as much as everyone, and the author plainly has the chops to make that work; his prose is stripped of elegance and refinement, so unadorned it makes Elmore Leonard seem like a crafter of purple prose. But Piccirilli — an author I am unfamiliar with, an oversight I will definitely rectify — elegantly crafts his story into an examination of despair. It becomes a modern-day retelling of the Job myth, although God finally eased up on the pains with Job. Piccirilli is not so kind as to offer a way out.

Every Shallow Cut keeps the reader eternally on edge. There are no names to these characters save Churchill, no signposts to help the reader keep his balance. The narrator has no connection to the people he meets along the way. They are only "my brother," "my agent," "my pal." Only Churchill reaches through the emotional vacuum and makes a connection. He cannot even connect with his writing, as he compulsively fills notebooks with a story his pal calls his best, yet he has no memory of writing. As he goes from person to person, the elements of himself are sliced off as fat off a roast, leaving only a nub of gristle and bone to take the reader into that darkest of dark places. The last few pages are as bleak, suspenseful, and swimming with misery as any I've read.

But I fear I've scared you off. And maybe that's for the best. The thrills of Every Shallow Cut are not those that can be easily shaken off. These are not funhouse horrors; this is the sickening vortex of mental collapse, a slurry of paranoia, self-pity, unfocused rage, and unremitting sadness. I'm almost afraid to read more Piccirilli; not because of the terrors I'm sure he can conjure, but because I don't know if he could ever top this. I hope he tries, though.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES

P.S. This is another substantially amazing release from ChiZine, a Canadian publisher who has made a deal with Satan to produce the greatest genre fiction out there today. If you haven't read ChiZine yet, you haven't lived.

What to expect in 2012 (before the endtimes commeth, of course)

2012-01-08T15:04:00.001-05:00

There are two ways to go in 2012, as I see it.

Succumb to Fox News hysteria, dig myself a large hole in my backyard, line it with concrete, make a bulk run to Costco, and hole up with piles of Glenn Beck/Ron Paul literature to wait out the 2012 Mayan apocalypse, only venturing forth to meet our inevitable alien overlords when I can reasonably expect to assert my new position as king of the mole people (after I've battled and vanquished Pat Robertson for the title); or
as I've already survived two (2!) raptures in 2011 using nothing but cynicism and common sense, consider myself well-nigh argmageddon-proof, and soldier on.

As per usual, the answer lies somewhere in-between (although if we were scaling this on a horizontal line, I'd definitely fall far closer to option 2).

2011 was a busy year for me. I read voraciously, watched movies fanatically, finished and submitted a new manuscript, went to work every day, and even started working out on a semi-regular basis. Now, having surpassed 100 books read and achieving a personal best of 25 push-ups in a row without vomiting, I look at my 2012 prospects and get instantly fatigued.

First, I'm going to divide myself in two, Internetally-speaking. Shelf-monkey.blogspot.com was initially intended to promote the publications of my debut novel (coincidentally titled Shelf Monkey), but has somewhere along the line transformed itself into more of an all-purpose literary review site. Not that I'm complaining, the site has kept me sane for some time, and has fostered an unexpected ability to gain free books for review purposes. Yet now, with the impending release of my sophomore effort Husk, I have decided to create a new site devoted entirely to my personal efforts, and leave Shelf Monkey (the blog) open as a continuing review site for whatever books and occasional movies capture my fancy. The new site is still a work in progress, but it's a public one, and I hope that you'll bookmark www.coreyredekop.ca and visit regularly for news and events relating to Corey Redekop the professional author. I've already imported most of my blogposts from here that relate to me, me, me, and the site is only going to get bigger when I win the Giller (*not a guarantee).

So shelf-monkey.blogspot.com will now solely become a review site, one I maintain purely for personal reasons. I like books, I like talking about books, I like recommending books, and occasionally I like trashing books. I'll be streamlining this site somewhat, ridding the blog of certain posts, perhaps altering the look. But rest assured, the content will be of the same middling calibre you've come to expect and tolerate from a low-rent Canadian author such as yours truly. I'll make occasional cross-over posts, but I feel I need to separate the professional me from the blogger me. This new blogger-me will be known online as Tasha Chestnut (not really).

But what about reading in 2012, Corey? What will you read? What will you review? How can we be expected to live out our normal lives not knowing your every move?

I think I'll cut back. I went for broke last year, and while I don't regret it, I didn't stop and smell the pages enough. So while I'm going to still read new books and review them (hopefully more regularly than of late), I'm planning to go back to my stacks and luxuriate in some past favourites. Rereading a novel is always a treat, because while the book has not changed, the reader has. I've already gained new insights into Jim Dodge's Stone Junction. I was in my mid-twenties when I first read it (taken from a bargain bin on a whim, became one of my absolute favourites, don't you love it when that happens?), and while I fell in love instantly, I lacked the knowledge to judge it on more than surface grounds. Now, a lifetime later, I am catching the freewheeling seeds of its progenitors in the text, the styles of Tom Robbins, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan that were unknown to me at the time, but have since served to evolve my personality.

After Stone Junction, I'm going to dance my fingers across the shelves and see what strikes my fancy. I've already put aside The World According to Garp (I estimate I've read this ten times already), The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (estimate: six times), Henderson the Rain King (four), and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (twelve). Perhaps I'll make a contest of it, a la my past Critical Monkey series devoted to the novels we were all avoiding. Haven't decided yet, although I will review them all here.

And beyond that, who knows? There's a cornucopia of awesomeness always on the horizon, some with buzz, some surprises. I've already read a few upcoming releases (a perk of the position), and while I won't review them yet, I will say keep a close eye out for Christopher Meades' The Last Hiccup and Scott Fotheringham's The Rest is Silence.

So bring it on, 2012! Ancient Mayans be damned! We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and the 2012 general U.S. election!

2011 in review, book-wise

2012-01-01T19:31:00.001-05:00

Ah, 2011. It seems like you just ended yesterday.

First, I’d like to again apologize for not keeping up the reviews like I should. I’ve had a few personal projects on the go, and I hope to return to a more regular output in 2012. This site may alter itself somewhat, but the reviews will continue.

But now, in lieu of said incisive literary commentary, I’ve had a close gander at what I’ve read over the course of the past 365 days, and I thought it would be a good time to bring the whole thing out into the open for a year-end Best Of list (the reason the Internet was created!).

In 2011, I reached what is probably a personal milestone: 107 books read from cover to cover. I’m not sure when the last time I broke three digits was, but I was likely still in short pants. So, pre-2006. That’s a lot of books, and going over them, I’ve had quite a good year. In 2010 I was intentionally hurting myself through a masochistic desire to read books almost destined to grate on me like steel wool against bare flesh (I weirdly miss the nad-shrinking prose of Chuck Norris, James Patterson, and Stephanie Meyer; what does that say about me?). 2011, I went with what I wanted to read, which was not only more soothing to the soul, but also lent me quite a large list of recommendations today.

So below is a sizable list, divided into sections for easy consumption. I have not paid attention to year of publication, and I have ignored books I reread. I’ve bolded those I’ve reviewed.

Favourite books of the year:

The Sisters Brothers (2011), Patrick DeWitt
A Book of Tongues (2010), A Rope of Thorns (2011), Gemma Files
Room (2010), Emma Donoghue
The Time We All Went Marching (2011), Arley McNeney
City of Truth (1990), James Morrow
Idaho Winter (2011), Tony Burgess
The Magician King (2011), Lev Grossman
The Blue Light Project (2011), Timothy Taylor
An Ordinary Decent Criminal (2005), Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal (2008), Michael Van Rooy

Novels I’d read again in a second:

Curiosity (2010), Joan Thomas
Drive-by Saviours (2010), Chris Benjamin
Kalila (2011), Rosemary Nixon
Tide Road (2011), Valerie Compton
The Guardians (2011), Andrew Pyper
Because I Have Loved and Hidden It (2009), Elise Moser
Sarah Court (2010), Craig Davidson
The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark (2010), Christopher Meades
The Town that Drowned (2011), Riel Nason
Major Karnage (2010), Gord Zajac
Annabel (2010), Kathleen Winter
One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011), Jasper Fforde
Low Town (2011), Daniel Polansky
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1897), H.G. Wells
The Canterbury Trail (2011), Angie Abdou
The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), Lavie Tidhar
Beauty Plus Pity (2011), Kevin Chong
John Dies at the End (2009), David Wong
The Alchemists of Kush (2011), Minister Faust
Butterfly Winter (2011), W.P. Kinsella
Chasing the Dragon (2009), Nicholas Kaufman
American Desert (2004), Percival Everett
True Grit (1968), Charles Portis
This Hidden Thing (2010), Dora Dueck
Jesus and the Eightfold Path (2011), Lavie Tidhar

Spectacular short fiction:

This Cake is for the Party (2010), Sarah Selecky
Light Lifting (2010), Alexander McLeod
Crisp (2010), R.W. Gray
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011), Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (eds.)
The Hair Wreath and Other Stories (2010) - Halli Villegas
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded (2011), Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (eds.)
The Urban Fantasy Anthology (2011), Peter S. Beagle & Joe R. Lansdale (eds.)

Great titles:

Jesus and the Eightfold Path (2011), Lavie Tidhar
John Dies at the End (2009), David Wong
Squid Pulp Blues (2008), Jordan Krall
The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz (2009), Cameron Pierce
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (2011), Patton Oswalt
Why Not a Spider Monkey Jesus? (2010), A.G. Pasquella
Major Karnage (2010), Gord Zajac

Books that would make awesome movies:

Sandman Slim (2009), Richard Kadrey
John Dies at the End (2009), David Wong (coming in 2012!)
Major Karnage (2010), Gord Zajac
The Sisters Brothers (2011), Patrick DeWitt
Chasing the Dragon (2009), Nicholas Kaufman
Brains (2010), Robin Becker
Patient Zero (2009), Jonathan Mayberry

Disappointments (not the worst books, just personal disappointment):

Damned (2011), Chuck Palahniuk - and that’s it for me, I can’t take another Palahniuk letdown
Wet Work (1993), Philip Nutman - heard a lot about it, but it’s only okay
The Fall (2011), Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan - it's a fun ride, but nowhere near as scary or suspenseful as some reviewers have said
Amnesia Moon (1995), Jonathan Lethem - from Lethem, almost anything not a masterpiece is a disappointment
Robopocalypse (2011), Daniel H. Wilson - killer robots should be fun, not boring

The monkey gets lazy, and watches a few movies instead of reading

2011-12-13T19:51:00.000-05:00

Boy, it has been a while, hasn't it? I have excuse, of course - a new novel, editing, work, a new website - but still, no excuses for not posting.

So, without further ado, I commit the ultimate sin a blogger can commit, and link to other content. Now, the other content is mine, but still...lazy.

The content in question is on the genre film website Flick Attack, where I hurredly muse on some of the great, good, ignored, fairly ignored, and awful movies I've sat through. I've put up a few reviews lately, and I would be remiss if I didn't draw your attention to them.

First up, the high-kicking action of Chuck "The Toilet Brush for a Face" Norris, and his career nadir, Delta Force 2:

Directed by Aaron Norris (favorite bro of Bristle McSoloflex, and as fine a director as his sib is an actor), Delta Force 2 finds Punch Rockgroin leading some kind of anti-terrorist group, a leader so magnetic that no backstory or character development is necessary. After a friend is killed by Drago, The Beard with No Name works out his rage by kicking the snot out of his men in a training exercise and then traveling to South America for revenge, backed by the U.S. government.

Next, we have the guilty pleasure that is Jamie Lee Curtis battling cyborg monsters in Virus:

Here’s what Virus doesn’t have: genuine scares, anything approaching originality, and a director who can do more than aim the camera at the right spot. But when I’m presented with a monster comprised of electrical impulses that replicates itself by combining spare human body parts with mutated versions of the spiderbots that menaced Tom Selleck in Runaway, resulting in awesomely goofy Borg/Cenobite hybrids, I’m willing to forgive a lot.

And finally, a movie that earned me much family scorn for enjoying, the b-movie messterpiece Hardware:

It isn’t perfect; the script is undercooked, and the tiny budget betrays itself through clumsy action and ersatz effects. But Hardware, love it or hate it, is undeniably a pure product of Stanley’s mind, and in an era of generic Platinum Dunes horrors, it’s refreshing to see an unwillingness to compromise, even if the result is deeply flawed. Put it this way: If you can find the value of a movie where the hero strides past a baby tied to dead woman’s waist without taking a second glance, you’ll appreciate Hardware; if not, I’m sure Blockbuster has a copy of Big Momma’s House.

I'll get back to reading soon, I promise.

CANadian literature, Or CAN'Tadian literature? (Boy am I ashamed of that pun)

2011-11-13T13:36:00.001-05:00

Today, the shelf monkey goes all flag-waving and whatnot to answer an age-old question that has tormented Canadian bibliophiles since we first learned to write; what the hell are we reading, anyway?

There has been a lot of talk/complaining/buzz/whining/questioning/whinging/probing/babbling/hand-wringing/soul-searching/teeth-knashing by persons much smarter than myself lately, as there usually is around award season, as to what exactly constitutes what we refer to as 'Canadian literature' (best exemplified in this Globe and Mail article). Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers, winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and Esi Edugyan's Giller-winning Half Blood Blues have earned some backhanded criticism for winning Canadian awards with stories set in 1800's California and Nazi Germany, respectively.

As I see it, the major questions are:

Is its being written by a Canadian enough to qualify a book as an example of 'Canadian' literature?
Are Canadian writers being appropriately Canadian in their published works?
Should 'Canadian' literature have a strictly Canadian setting to qualify as such?
How much 'Canadian' content should a book have to qualify as 'Canadian'?
What is the proper ratio of beavers and moose per page? Is six enough?
I may have made that last one up.

There are seemingly no easy answers to this conundrum. What constitutes American literature, or English, or Greek, Polish, Lithuanian, Narnian? Does everything Irish have to come tinged with authentic Roddy Doyle wit? Should American author Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, with its Newfoundland setting, qualify as Canadian despite the author's nationality? Does Clive Barker's setting of his horror novel Cabal in Alberta disqualify it as an English product? Should we try and convince Howard Norman to accept Canadian citizenship, since most of his novels are set here anyway?

For me, the answer is deceptively simple, as befits my deceptively simple mind: Canadian literature is something written by a Canadian citizen. It matters not its setting, nor subject, nor genre. If you're Canadian, and you've written a novel, short, story, or poem, hey, you're in. Whether or not your work is any good is another matter, best left to wizened reviewers lurking behind their keyboards like trolls beneath a bridge, but as one who harbours an instinctive distrust of those who differentiate between 'literature' and 'fiction', I feel that if we settle on citizenship as a baseline, we'll all be a lot happier.

For some perspective, let's quickly look at some Canadian novels of note:

The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje - A novel set in wartime Europe, written by a Canadian of Sri Lankan origin. Only a few Canadian characters in a novel rife with many nationalities. Won the Governor General's Award and the Booker.
The Life of Pi (2001) by Yann Martel - A novel involving an Indian child trapped at sea with a tiger. The author hails from Saskatchewan. No major Canadian characters of note. Won the Booker and The Hugh MacLennan Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award.
The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood - A dystopian tale of religious patriarchal tyranny set in the fictional Republic of Gilead, located within the borders of the U.S. No Canadians. Written by a Canadian from Ontario. Won the Governor General's Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, shortlisted for the Booker.
A Complicated Kindness (2004) by Miriam Toews - Set in a Mennonite community in Manitoba, a young woman struggles to reconcile her yearnings for more with the regimented religious structure of the township. Written by a Manitoban. Won the Governor General's Award.
A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry - A story set in India, examining changes in Indian society. No Canadians. Written by an India-born Canadian. Won the Giller, shortlisted for the Booker, and was an Oprah Bookclub Pick.

Do you see a connecting theme, other than the awards and acclaim that accompanied each novel? Yeah, me neither. I do know that these all are accepted examples of Canadian Literature, and that, last time I checked, no one was accusing Margaret Atwood of not being Canadian enough (like anyone'd have the balls). And while this ain't near an exhaustive list, I hereby, in my accepted roll as legally accepted arbitrator of all things Canadian (it's true, don't dispute me!), claim that there is no single accepted definition of a 'Canadian' novel. And excepting only the caveat that the author must have some sort of Canadian citizenship, nor should there be (gasps from the gallery!).

Look, anyone who wants to write about Canada will write about Canada, that has never been a problem. Whether it be a tale of the immigrant experience (The Amazing Absorbing Boy), a trip backwards through time to uncover new facets of our shared history (The Time We All Went Marching), a legal thriller (Old City Hall), or an africentric sci-fi/fantasy adventure (The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad), Canadian authors will always set novels in Canada, covering themes and genres both classic and modern. I don't think we'll have to worry if, one year, we don't get enough novels about Canadian settlers braving the elements and/or frostbite. Somehow, we will survive as a culture.

But if we start (or continue) to argue that classifiable CanLit must adhere to certain standards, we risk alienating the artists we rely upon to create things for us to argue over. It is a well-worn trope that 'Canadian Literature' is viewed as being about history, and the prairies, and hard-scrabble lives, and fighting the elements. Indeed, it is precisely that form of literature (as fine as some of its novels may be) that drive people scarred from middle-school attempts to form them into functioning Canadians by having them read Who Has Seen the Wind? and The Stone Angel to make sweeping statements such as, "I never read Canadian fiction." This has been uttered to me by many people over the years, and none of my attempts to remind them of the works of Robert Sawyer, Will Ferguson, Timothy Findley, Minister Faust, Nalo Hopkinson, Thomas King, W.P. Kinsella, Timothy Taylor, Lynn Coady, Cory Doctorow, William Gibson, Michael Winter, or Spider Robinson will dissuade them from their opinion. And if they somehow have read these authors, or countless others, they will wave they hands dismissively and comment that these authors do not count as Canadian Literature, because they are entertaining, which is a state of being anathema to 'true' Canadian literature.

I have shouted myself hoarse at these people to no effect save restraining orders. I ain't proud of making a public spectacle of myself, but I would bristle and scream to the heavens and tear down walls with the force of my umbrage if anyone dared say to me that my work isn't Canadian Literature. You can call it sloppy, call it juvenile, call it a left-wing screed, call it just plain bad, but don't you dare question its nationality.

So I applaud this year's multiple awards for The Sisters Brothers and Half Blood Blues, for continuing the tradition (as evidenced above) of Canadian citizens writing about whatever pleases them and letting the awards fall where they may. Because for me, this is proof of a prime Canadian trait: accepting and rewarding others for who and what they are, rather than what we may wish they were.

The Shelf Monkey branches out to criticize more of the pop culture arts

2011-10-30T14:21:00.000-04:00

I thought I should take a moment to digress from my prepared remarks (something about the 'death of books' or something, I can't read my writing. Probably not important.) to let you know of a fairly new venture I've recently been participating in.

I've been following the movie review site Flick Attack—its motto: hitting you with one random movie a day . . . whether you like it or not—since it debuted a number of months ago. Its creator, Rod Lott, was one of my first boosters when his site Bookgasm gave Shelf Monkey a sterling review, and we've remained in contact ever since, through the usual social medias that serve to distract us from the horrors of everyday life.

Flick Attack is decidedly irreverent, with short, snappy reviews of any movie Rod and his cadre of reviewers happen to see, spanning the gamut from blockbuster hits to obscure D-movies, from Rambo to The Black Belly of the Tarantula to The Incredible Hulk Returns. It's a great site to discover true cinematic surprises and re-evaluations of past hits and flops.

Speaking of flops, I chose as my debut to tackle the Tobe Hooper weirdfest Lifeforce, one of my personal favourites, as it's practically five movies in one (which saves me all kinds of time.)

Here's a taste:

Cannon Films clearly didn’t know what it had signed on for. Lifeforce flopped, with reviews generally negative or worse (although Gene Siskel liked it). But aided through hindsight and extended editions, Lifeforce is a geek classic. Certainly no one involved phoned it in; Hooper’s direction (never better) captures the style and dry wit of the classic Hammer Quatermass films (well worth checking out), the score by Henry Mancini (!) is appropriately quirky and bombastic, and John Dykstra’s (Star Wars) special effects are superb — the desiccated zombie design is wonderful, and the alien spacecraft is a thing of beauty. No CGI here, just craft and skill.

Click here to check out the rest of the review, and I'll be updating the site with further reviews when they're online. Next up: the superb British werewolf movie Dog Soldiers!

Tiny Monkey droppings - The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

2011-10-25T19:35:00.001-04:00

The Sisters Brothers (Anansi, 2011)

by Patrick deWitt

Description (from the publisher)

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. Eli and Charlie Sisters can be counted on for that. Though Eli has never shared his brother's penchant for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. On the road to Warm's gold-mining claim outside San Francisco—and from the back of his long-suffering one-eyed horse—Eli struggles to make sense of his life without abandoning the job he's sworn to do.

DeWitt spins a violent, lustful, hung-over and humorous odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier. Doffing his hat to the classic Western, he then transforms it into a comic tour-de-force with an unforgettable narrative voice that captures all the absurdity, melancholy, and grit of the West -- and of these two brothers, bound to each other by blood and scars and love.

Film rights have been sold to actor John C. Reilly's production company in a major deal, with Reilly to play one of the brothers.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks

If I hadn't recently read Charles Portis' classic western True Grit, I would have claimed The Sisters Brothers to have a glorious style and cadence utterly unique to me. I can see that deWitt has perhaps co-opted the overall style of another (an arguable point, as his first novel Ablutions [a terrific read as well] has much of the same voice), but who cares when the result is this much fun? Very likely my favourite read of 2011, deWitt has created a profane, violent, funny, and just plain awesome piece of work, and the fact that this novel—written by a Canadian who has long made the U.S. his home, and with nary a mention of Canada anywhere—is up for major Canadian awards tickles me. deWitt's dialogue is superb, laden with dry wit, and the characters of Eli and Charlie are wonderfully done, the perfect mixture of psychotic killers and melancholy dreamers. Some have complained that deWitt's style is too 'cinematic' to be considered literature (who ever complained of a movie being too literate?); I say, it's not the story, it's how you tell it, and deWitt tells his story superbly in a style that completely suits the story. I wish more novels were this bloody alive: dialogue as rich, subtle, and memorable as this is hardly any easier than obtuse poetic descriptions of windswept Canada prairies (I'm being snarky, I know, sue me). The cinematic possibilities are present, of course—the Coen brothers desperately need to get their hands on this; keep John C. Reilly as Eli, add Philip Seymour Hoffman as Charlie—but merely because a movie can be envisioned is no excuse for needless denigration. The Sisters Brothers is a major achievement, as gutsy and vital and just damned entertaining a novel as you could hope for.

TINY MONKEY ADORES

Book Covers: After Dark! (a short film)

2011-10-23T12:32:00.001-04:00

In a little slice of heaven, acclaimed (deservedly) director Spike Jones, along with director Simon Cahn, has taken over 3,000 pieces of felt and put together a wonderful animated hypothesis as to what happens on book covers when the lights go out.

Bittersweet, gorgeous, and a little bit naughty, Mourir Auprès de Toi ("To Die By Your Side") tickles this shelf monkey in all the best places.

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

My thanks to the good folks at io9.com for the heads-up.

Monkey droppings - Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

2011-10-16T15:02:00.001-04:00

Today, the monkey holds his breath as he steels his nerve for another annual onslaught of Palahniukian proportions.

Will Chuck return to form? Or will he continue his sad descent towards irrelevancy?

The monkey, being a cautious optimist, refuses to bet either way.

Damned (Doubleday Canada, 2011)

by Chuck Palahniuk

Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison. I’m just now arrived here, in Hell, but it’s not my fault except for maybe dying from an overdose of marijuana. Maybe I’m in Hell because I’m fat--a Real Porker. If you can go to Hell for having low self-esteem, that’s why I’m here. I wish I could lie and tell you I’m bone-thin with blond hair and big ta-tas. But, trust me, I’m fat for a really good reason.

So begins Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's newest foray into obscenity-laden satire. As a fan of Chuck's works, I once looked forward to each new novel with a tingling sensation in my nethers. Chuck was a carnival barker extraordinaire, an energetic guide to a literary freak show of humanity's worst traits. It wasn't for everyone, but when Chuck was on fire (see: Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby, Rant), there were few who could compare.

Then came Snuff, a divisive work about a porn star striving to break the record for most conjugal partners in one day. Many hated it; I found much to admire, although there was the sense of Chuck spinning his wheels a little. After Lullaby travelled into magical realism, Diary showed a growth to other genres (reminding me much of Rosemary's Baby), and Rant displayed a razor-sharp style akin to J.G. Ballard, Snuff seemed a step back.

And then came Pygmy, a limp terrorist satire that vastly outstayed it's welcome and became the first Palahniuk novel to ever become outright boring.

And then came Tell-All, about which the less said, the better (but if you are inclined, here's a link to my review, and another link discussing his publisher's dishonest promotional techniques concerning said review).

But being the cautious optimist that I am, Damned looked like fun. Described as a Judy Blume novel set in Hell, it promised an unusual experience, and (hopefully) a return to Chuck's glory days.

Annnnnnnnd . . . meh.

Damned is the tale of young Maddie Spencer, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a movie star and a real estate tycoon who crosses the threshold of life during an ill-advised exploration of drug use. Maddie, through her wicked ways, has been condemned to Hell (as, it turns out, will most of us):

As it turns out, the way-fundamentalist Christian creationists were correct. How I wish I could tell my parents: Everybody in Kansas was right. Yes, the inbred snake-handlers and holy rollers had more on the ball than my secular humanist, billionaire mom and dad. The dark forces of evil really did plant those dinosaur bones and fake fossil records to mislead mankind. Evolution was hokum, and we fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Maddie spends her days in a cage, keeping her spirits up through hasty friendships with nearby cellmates, a Breakfast Club sandwich of a jock, a nerd, a prom queen, a punk, and herself (which makes her the Ally Sheedy of the group, I guess). The group sits in gore-encrusted cells, waiting to be devoured by passing demons, which isn't as final an end as it sounds:

If anything, life in Hell is like a vintage Warner Bros. cartoon where characters are forever getting decapitated by guillotines and dismembered by dynamite explosions, then being completely restored in time for the next assault. It's a system not without both it's comfort and it's monotony.

Damned is not without it's charms, one of which, unfortunately, is not Maddie Spencer, as annoying a protagonist as you could imagine. Part of this is because of Palahniuk's by-now-familiar style of meta; Maddie is forever reminding the reader that she is not an idiot, that she understands certain words, that she is smart. "Yes, I know the word absentia," she pouts. "I'm thirteen years old, not stupid - and being dead, ye gods, do I comprehend the idea of absentia." After a short time, these asides speed past precocious/cute and run headlong into precocious/put her outside already. Maddie never becomes a believable character, and her voice often grates with the worst tendencies of Palahniuk.

After a time in Hell, during which our heroine escapes and trudges past the Sea of Insects, the Great Plains of Broken Glass, the Ocean of Wasted Sperm, and the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions, Maddie finds herself a job in one of the two major areas of Hellish employment; telemarketing (the other area is Internet porn). Maddie finds that she has a knack for it, and soon her organizational skills come to the fore, and it turns out that Hell may be exactly the terrain where Maddie can finally shine.

As I said, Damned is not without charm, if one can affix the descriptor 'charm' to anything Palahniuk writes. He has plainly done some research into literary depictions of the abode of the damned, and his eternal plane of misery is a vividly-described wasteland of torment. Palahniuk has not, it seems, lost his knack for shock, evident in a gruesome scene wherein Maddie uses the severed head of the punk to sexually gratify a particularly nasty demon. And when Damned starts to ultimately become an afterlife bildungsroman, the novel finally begins to catch the reader's attention.

But there's a laziness afoot. Comments that The English Patient and The Piano are the only movies that play in Hell smacks of an exhaustion of imagination. Ditto the concept of telemarketers as damned souls reaching out to make human contact, an idea not nearly as clever as Palahniuk thinks. The plot never decides what, exactly, it is satirizing, and there isn't enough energy to propel the plot over its massive rough spots. Damned is hardly as lazy a product as Tell-All, but it doesn't have enough sustained imagination to lift it past, say, Snuff.

Damned is hardly the worst thing ever, not nearly even the worst thing Palahniuk has written. There are sparks of effort, and near the end, when the narrative gains some momentum, the story begins to actually involve the reader beyond a superficial appreciation of Palahniuk's wilting wit. Damned could be seen as notice that Chuck is not yet spent, that there are reservoirs he has not yet tapped. But the man is treading water when he should be swimming.

VERDICT: THE MONKEY TRIED. LORD, HOW HE DID TRY. BUT HE'S GOING TO GO RE-READ LULLABY FOR A PICK-ME-UP.

Tiny Monkey droppings - YOU comma Idiot by Doug Harris

2011-09-29T10:47:00.002-04:00

YOU comma Idiot (Goose Lane Editions, 2010)

by Doug Harris

Description (from the publisher)

Marginalized and alienated, perennial fuck-up Lee Goodstone is a resounding zero: a small-time hash-dealing slacker with no ambition about where his life isn’t going. One morning, Honey, his best friend’s girlfriend, inexplicably jumps into bed with him. Then another friend, Henry, is accused of kidnapping a teenaged girl no one knew he was seeing. Lee gets embroiled in the mêlée, finds himself making flip remarks to the media, and his mediocre existence officially spirals out of control.

Told in the second person, YOU comma Idiot is a cringeworthy, laugh-out-loud flight on the wings of the protagonist. The roller-coaster ride of a plot leads at breakneck speed to places even Lee can’t anticipate.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks

Full disclosure time; I am a publicist for Goose Lane. This is a Goose Lane product. Ergo, you cannot possibly trust my opinion. But if you do, my opinion is that not only does Goose Lane release some of the best literature this country is capable of (see: this year's wholly remarkable quartet of The Town that Drowned, The Time We All Went Marching, Tide Road, and Kalila), but last year's YOU comma Idiot is one of the best, and my favourite novel of 2010 (only reviewing on the blog now to avoid charges of favouritism and conflict of interest). Writing in the second person, a format only off-putting for the first paragraph, Harris' tale of a low-level drug dealer eking out his existence in Montreal by doing as little as humanly possible is a treat on every level. His dialogue is the highlight, as crunchy as Elmore Leonard and quick-witted as Nick Hornby, but his empathy for character and his sharpness in motivation and plotting keeps the novel humming. So sure of itself, so fleet-footed yet grounded, it is hard to believe this is a debut novel. It's as entertaining as anything out there, better written than most, and it's lack of presence on major awards lists is a devastating oversight by people who cannot comprehend that just because it's funny, that doesn't mean it's undeserving of attention.

TINY MONKEY ADORES

Tiny Monkey droppings - Idaho Winter by Tony Burgess

2011-09-27T19:15:00.000-04:00

Idaho Winter (ECW Press, 2011)

by Tony Burgess

Description (from the publisher)

Idaho Winter begins as the story of a boy with an extraordinarily painful existence. He is, through no fault of his own, loathed by everyone in the town where he lives. His father, Early Winter, feeds him roadkill for breakfast. The crossing guard steers cars toward him as he crosses the road. Parents encourage their children to plot cruelly against him. One morning Idaho finds it too much to bear and hides down by the river where he meets Madison. Madison, astonishingly, is as hurt by how he’s treated as he is. For the first time in his life Idaho experiences someone’s empathy and it opens a terrible world of pain in him. He dotes on Madison, in awe of her, and he cleans her muddy feet in the river, drying them with his shirt. Suddenly, hunting dogs descend on the scene and, trained to attack the smell of Idaho, set their jaws on Madison’s feet.

Then Idaho does something that changes everything. He gets up and runs home. Not so strange until the author realizes that this part was never written. Idaho becomes enraged upon learning that his suffering has been cruelly designed by a clumsy writer who confesses that he made his book meaner than all the others so it would stand out. Idaho locks the author in a closet and runs off, armed with the knowledge that the entire world is invented and that he has the power now to imagine it differently.

When the author emerges from the closet he finds that his novel is now unrecognizable. Phantoms and monsters, beasts from the boy’s angry thoughts now dominate the streets. Beneath the earth there is a resistance movement of secondary characters, including the poor Madison who is now bedridden and what’s more: anyone who comes within 50 feet of her is paralyzed with sadness and cannot move or be moved. The author sets out with these characters to cure the novel, to find a way to bring its mind and heart together as they embark on a journey as perilous and paradoxical as anything HG Wells or Lewis Carroll ever imagined.

What the Tiny Monkey Thinks

Idaho is walking slowly. His feet are sore from deep dog bites and his stomach is roiling with the maggoty paw his father forced him to eat. It’s hard to say what Idaho really looks like. His hair is probably brown, but it’s so matted down with the dung of bedbugs that it could be red. His eyes, I’ve never seen; they are more than merely lowered; they are hidden, hooded, sunken back. Not enough nutrition in him to light them, maybe, or just no reason for them to look out. His hands are puffy, but I don’t think he’s a large boy; it may be that his extremities are swollen from the infectious mouths that bite him while he sleeps or just lies there, as he does, all summer — an unmoving unfortunate boy with no reason to rise.

Tony Burgess is a madman. A lovely madman, fun to talk to, kind and gentle, but a madman nonetheless, capable of unnerving a reader in a few short sentences. And Idaho Winter is unnerving for many reasons, not the least for being the most unhinged novel written for young adults since Lewis Carroll unleashed his fantasies on poor little Alice. Yet what else could you hope to expect from the author of Pontypool Changes Everything, the definitive Canadian zombie novel (and one freaky great film to boot). Idaho Winter is a mindf#@k of astonishing proportions, an excursion into a world where the rules simply don't apply. I thought I detected a theme of writers block at one point, as the unnamed narrator bemoans the fact that he doesn't have a clue where his character has gone or what he'll do (a sensation I'm sure all authors can relate to). There are breaths of Luigi Pirandello's absurdist masterpiece Six Characters in Search of an Author throughout Burgess' imaginative weirdscape, breaths that intermingle with the surrealism of Luis Buñuel, the paranoia of Franz Kafka and David Lynch, and the dream imagery of Salvador Dali. Idaho Winter is spectacularly peculiar, demanding, funny, gross, and unforgettable. If young adults are looking for tales of Twilight-like romance, stay far away; if they are yearning for real risk and reward in their literature, this should be just the ticket.

Tiny Monkey Loves

Tiny Monkey droppings - The Cut by George Pelecanos

2011-09-20T19:18:00.001-04:00

The Cut (Reagan Arthur Books, 2011)

by George Pelecanos

Description (from the publisher)

Meet Spero Lucas—the newest literary hero from George Pelecanos, New York Times bestselling author and writer for The Wire.

Spero Lucas has a new line of work. Since he returned home after serving in Iraq, he has been doing special investigations for a defense attorney. He’s good at it, and he has carved out a niche: recovering stolen property, no questions asked. His cut is forty percent.

A high-profile crime boss who has heard of Lucas’s specialty hires him to find out who has been stealing from his operation. It’s the biggest job Lucas has ever been offered, and he quickly gets a sense of what’s going on. But before he can close in on what’s been taken, he tangles with a world of men whose amorality and violence leave him reeling. Is any cut worth your family, your lover, your life?

Lucas Spero is George Pelecanos’s greatest creation, a young man making his place in the world one battle and one mission at a time. The first in a new series of thrillers featuring Spero Lucas, The Cut is new confirmation of why George Pelecanos is “perhaps America’s greatest living crime writer.” (Stephen King).

What the Tiny Monkey Thinks

If there is a class to be taught on how to write simply, succinctly, and yet achieve an impact like a punch to the gut, George Pelecanos is the teacher (or at least co-teacher with Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley). The Cut has nary one wasted word, not one superfluous scene, not fat to trim, yet it brims with astonishingly precise characterizations, brings Washington D.C. to life like few others have achieved, and is a mother of a mover to boot. I've only partaken of a few of Pelecanos' many works (and have not yet seen any of his television series The Wire, which everyone in the universe tells me is the best thing ever created in the history of everything by anybody), but there's no denying he's among the best of his breed. The Cut, however, seems a little light when compared to some of his previous efforts such as Hard Revolution; it's compulsively readable, but it doesn't linger in the soul the way his best do. Yet it's a spiffy crime thriller with a great lead in Lucas, an inventive investigator who knows his way around the streets. Lucas is flawed, magnetic, and deeply human, with echoes of Mosley's Easy Rawlins. The Cut may not be Pelecanos' best, but it's a tight, tough, and brutal novel that doubtless will be a series to be savoured.

Tiny Monkey Greatly Enjoys the Ride

Tiny Monkey droppings - The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar

2011-09-18T15:16:00.000-04:00

The Bookman (Angry Robot, 2010)

by Lavie Tidhar

Description (from the publisher)

When his beloved is killed in a terrorist atrocity committed by the sinister Bookman, young poet Orphan becomes enmeshed in a web of secrets and lies. His quest to uncover the truth takes him from the hidden catacombs of a London on the brink of revolution, through pirate-infested seas, to the mysterious island that may hold the secret to the origin, not only of the shadowy Bookman, but of Orphan himself…

What the Tiny Monkey Thinks

This is a type of book I'm beginning to refer to as a Dog's Breakfast Novel; it's messy, there's a little bit of everything, and hopefully it's palatable to the tongue and not simply snouts and entrails. What I mean is, the author seemingly throws everything into the mix, and in order for it to work, it better have verve, style, and entertainment value galore, or it's going to be really sticky (Gord Zajac's recent Major Karnage is another such example). Luckily, Lavie Tidhar (of the gloriously weird Tel Aviv Dossier) has style to spare, and his steampunk adventure novel echoes Verne and Wells while reviving the go-for-broke cliffhanger style of classic pulp fiction. Tidhar's narrative — set in an alternative history Victorian England where automatons converse with humans, martian probes are being launched into space, and intelligent lizards rule the land —is a hodge-podge of indelibly cool ideas and gee-whiz enthusiasm, wrapped in loving affection for the genre and its progenitors. Tidhar has great fun mixing historical personalities such as Karl Marx and Jules Verne with fictional heroes of the time, and the pages are rife with in-jokes for the literary crowd. I cannot say as I fully understood the complexities of the plot (it gets sensationally strange at times), but as Orphan's adventures unraveled, taking him from the slums of London to the high seas to the shore of mysterious islands, I found I didn't care one whit. I'll be looking up The Bookman's sequel Camera Obscura as soon as I can.

Tiny Monkey Greatly Enjoys the Ride

Tiny Monkey - The Canterbury Trail by Angie Adbou

2011-09-13T20:22:00.001-04:00

The Canterbury Trail

(Brindle & Glass, 2011)
by Angie Abdou

Description (from the publisher website):

It’s the last ski weekend of the season and a mishmash of snow-enthusiasts is on its way to a remote backwoods cabin. In an odd pilgrimage through the mountains, the townsfolk of Coalton—from the ski bum to the urbanite—embark on a bizarre adventure that walks the line between comedy and tragedy. As the rednecks mount their sleds and the hippies snowshoe through the cedar forest, we see rivals converge for the weekend. While readers follow the characters on their voyage up and over the mountain, stereotypes of ski-town culture fall away. Loco, the ski bum, is about to start his first real job; Alison, the urbanite, is forced to learn how to wield an avalanche shovel; and Michael, the real estate developer, is high on mushroom tea.

In a blend of mordant humour and heartbreak, Angie Abdou chronicles a day in the life of these industrious few as they attempt to conquer the mountain. In an avalanche of action, Angie Abdou explores the way in which people treat their fellow citizens and the landscape they love.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks:

I am sadly not familiar with Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, so I cannot comment on Angie Abdou's adherence or deviations to the original plot. What I can say is that Abdou is a first-class writer who captures the fluidity and exertions of the human body like few others. While her debut novel The Bone Cage was far more centered around a sports theme, Trail shows that Abdou really knows her stuff when it comes to the white powder and those who live to frolic in it. Abdou understands that sex, drugs, and alcohol are key components of the lifestyle, but she never lets the stereotypes become, well, stereotypical. These ski bums, mountain men, snow bunnies, and extreme snowboarders may be the equivalent of Canadian archetypes, but Adbou cannily subverts our expectations at every turn, finding unexpected pockets of humanity beneath the layers of Gore-Tex. This is not an A-to-Z type of plot; it meanders down back roads and hidden paths, and not every trek is a winner. But the whole is definitely greater than the sum, and for those with a taste for the offbeat and a fearlessness when it comes to a challenge, The Canterbury Trail offers up a plethora of pleasures.

Tiny Monkey Really Likes

Tiny Monkey - Annabel, by Kathleen Winter

2011-09-11T14:51:00.000-04:00

It's time for a new style of review, methinks. I am far behind in my postings of late, and a lesser monkey would likely give up.

A bigger monkey would post every day. A silverback gorilla, say.

But I, a lowly chimp stuck in the middle, can only do so much.

And so, I present my newest review format, the Tiny Monkey (who doesn't love tiny monkeys?)! A quick rundown of a novel that allows you access to my innermost thoughts, yet dispenses with the long-winded criticism and obscure asides that are my hallmark!

Yes, I'm lazy, but to catch up, this is what I'm doing. I will not be completely abandoning in-depth critical snarkiness, mind you, just forgoing it for the time being.

And so, the inaugural entry of Tiny Monkey:

Annabel (Anansi, 2010)
by Kathleen Winter

Plot (from the publisher website):

In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once. Only three people are privy to the secret -- the baby's parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina. Together the adults make a difficult decision: to raise the child as a boy named Wayne. But as Wayne grows to adulthood within the hyper-masculine hunting culture of his father, his shadow-self -- a girl he thinks of as Annabel -- is never entirely extinguished, and indeed is secretly nurtured by the women in his life.

Haunting, sweeping in scope, and stylistically reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, Annabel is a compelling debut novel about one person's struggle to discover the truth in a culture that shuns contradiction.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks:

Captured within the pages of Annabel is some of the most exquistely exacting prose I've come across. There are sentences that take my breath away, and I have rarely if ever witnessed an author so accurately capture the dynamics of family relationships. Winter's reproduction of Jacinta's and Treadway's marriage is breathtaking, and the undercurrent of confusion that paints Wayne's relationship with his father is heartbreaking. The ending is somewhat of a letdown, being more traditional and unsurprising than what has happened before, and I'm not entirely convinced of Treadway's ultimate circumstance being organic to the story. But Wayne's unique bildungsroman is a treasure, and when Annabel flies, it soars. Kathleen Winter has penned a jewel, and joins her brother Michael (go read The Big Why right now) into the ranks of Canada's next generation of great authors.

Tiny Monkey Really Likes

Monkey droppings - A triumphant triad of delights

2011-08-27T15:38:00.019-04:00

It has been a while since I've last posted. Apologies, all seven of you. I have no excuse save laziness. And I am working on a new book, so there's that. There's only so many words I can use in a day.

But today, a cornucopia! Three (3!) semi-short reviews of a magical bent, guaranteed* to provide you with endless hours of top-notch entertainment.
*not a guarantee

The Magician King (Viking, 2011)
Lev Grossman

He liked the dryads, the mysterious nymphs who watched over oak trees. You really knew you were in a magical fantasy otherworld when a beautiful woman wearing a skimpy dress made of leaves suddenly jumped out of a tree.

In 2009, Lev Grossman combined an intense fervor for the fantasy genre with a talented imagination to his novel The Magicians, an ode to the Harry Potter/Chronicles of Narnia books sheathed in adult post-modern sensibilities. Following his fallible young 'hero' Quentin Coldwater through the rigours of (for lack of a better description) magicians college Brakebills, Grossman posited a finely-hued world made up of the realities of today and the possibilities of true magic. It ended on a note of melancholy, as Quentin — older, slightly wiser, and hardened through combat — re-entered the fictional world of Fillory to find what he sought: true adventure. It was a bold, absorbing work that left as all good novels of the genre do, on an uncertain note, as if there are further exploits to tell.

Two years later, and here we are, presented with The Magician King, an immensely worthy follow-up that expands upon the themes of the original while further laying out a world many will desperately yearn to be true. If the Potter fanatics, now grown, are looking for a new sensation to whet their starving imaginations, this is the series to do it.

King begins where most fantasy novels end: Quentin and his friends are kings and queens of the land of Fillory, growing fat, lazy, and bored. Unsatisfied, Quentin decides to explore beyond the limits of Fillory, to the rarely visited Outer Island, which was owing his new kingdom in back taxes. "It wasn't the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn't trying to save the world from Sauron, he was attempting to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders." Taking a cue from The Voyage from the Dawn Treader, Quentin commandeers the ship Muntjac, and sets out with Julia (his friend from Magicians who was denied entry to Brakebills) to see how far the limits of his royal powers can take him.

To better keep the story grounded for the reader, Grossman also relates the tale of Julia, a secondary character in Magicians who proves herself a darker and arguably more interesting specimen than Quentin. Julia, denied a proper magicians education, takes to the back alleys and side streets of the world to learn magic the hard way. Her adventures, grim, gritty, and sexual, balance against the wondrous fantasy world which (as my experiences with Ed Greenwood have proved) can be a bit of a chore to read after a while.

As always, the subtext of maturation weaves through the stories, Quentin coming to understand that wisdom and maturity do not simply come with age. The ending, as fantastical in setting as it is emotionally devastating in impact, comes through Grossman's expert handling of character (from my perspective, a true rarity in such novels). The Magician King is a work of maturity as well, an acceptance that there are gray areas to the human experience that cannot be resolved either through magical summonings or acts of heroism. Its only drawback is that I will now have to wait years for the promised finale.

Low Town (Doubleday, 2011)
Daniel Polansky

I awoke with a headache that made my swollen ankle feel like a hand-job from a ten-ochre-an-hour hooker.

It is such a simple idea: take the tenets of the hard-boiled detective novel and apply them to a middle-ages fantasy world a la Middle Earth. It's a bold concept, and easy to completely screw up, so it's a relief when Daniel Polansky debut novel Low Town turns out to be fun. It's icing on the cake when it turns out to be fantastic, a mix of Mickey Spillane and J.R.R. Tolkien that goes down as smooth as a vial of pixie's breath.

The 'hero' is a nameless gent known only as The Warden, once an enforcer of law, now a drug-dealing low life in Low Town, the harshest district of the city of Rigus of the Thirteen Lands. Life is hardly easy, but The Warden has been able to carve a niche for himself through a keen mind and a judicious use of physical violence. When a small girl goes missing, it is only another hardship to ignore, but when The Warden discovers the girl's mutilated corpse, he finds himself unwillingly placed in charge of hunting down the killer.

Polansky layers his tale with all the tropes of the classic pulps; casual racism (here mostly represented by a race known as the Kiren), stool pigeons, drug use, flashes of vivid violence, both men and women of loose morals, and moments of gloriously over-the-top prose such as "Its voice was shattered porcelain and bruises on a woman." The Warden is an anti-hero straight from Andrew Vachss' Burke school of brutal enforcers with rarely-exposed glimpses of moral outrage.

All this would be fine (and I'm sure, based on what's on the page, that Polansky could deliver a hell of a classic pulp novel should he wish), but the author pushes the story into delirious WTF territory with his setting, as well as as the liberal doses of sorcery, wizards, and otherworldly monsters. What's most interesting, however, is not this unusual setting, but Polansky's refusal to rely on magic as a crutch, instead crafting the tale as a true mystery. The Warden may understand the perils of magic, but he's no practitioner of the dark arts; he doggedly pursues leads and suspects through clues and informers, not through, say, a magical portal that reveals all to those who are pure of heart. The world may have access to magic, but The Warden is a creature of the real.

While there may be other examples of fantasy noir, I can't say I'm too familiar with them, Jeff Vandermeer's brilliant Finch and China Mieville's astonishing The City and the City being the exceptions. Low Town may not be in quite the same league, being closer in spirit to John Meaney's flawed but inherently interesting fantasy police procedural Bone Song. Yet Low Town is a confident debut from a new talent, and I await further exploits of Polansky and The Warden with real excitement.

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (Harper Voyager, 2011)
Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (eds.)

His one, platonic, relationship seems to have been with a young mathematician and computer scientists named Alan Turing. Their dalliance let to the latter's formulation of his famous Wykeham-Rackham Test, which raised the question of whether it would be possible to devise a robot so lifelike that it would be impossible to tell it apart from a human being while making love to it.

There's a fair amount of geeky in-joking in the above two sentences. If you don't quite get it, then you may find The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities to be quite odd. If you do get it, then you'll find the Cabinet to be right up your alley.

Cabinet, a companion to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (now out of print, but I'm going to definitely track down a copy for myself), is a brilliantly imagined conceit, an examination of the strangest collection of antiques, oddities, and stories assembled by the genius Thackery T. Lambshead, a man who "existed on the fringes of medical science." After his death of "banal pulmonary failure" at his house in Whimpering-on-the-Brook, England, his vast accumulation of artifacts and curios has been catalogued, and careful selections are presented here, along with stories penned by some of the modern genre greats.

As befits the fictional collection, Cabinet harbours a myriad of delights, along with gorgeous paintings, sketches, and photographs (the book itself is gorgeous). Luminaries such as Michael Moorcock, China Mieville, Mike Mignola, Alan Moore, Lev Grossman, Tad Williams, Minister Faust, and dozens beside contribute tales, descriptions, and more, resulting in an anthology of vastly differing styles and themes. The entries, bearing titles such as Dunkelblau's Meistergarten, The Electrical Neurheographiton, the Clockroach, and The Thing in the Jar, are wondrous and strange, completely original, and sadly fictional (I want an Automatic Nanny).

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is an anthology of prodigious brilliance, bizarre wit, and expansive imaginations. As evidenced by this, alongside their amazing anthologies Steampunk, Steampunk II, and Bestiary (cross your fingers on that one, and yes, I am a contributor), Mr. and Mrs. Vandermeer are purveyors of the weird of the highest order.

VERDICT ON ALL THREE: YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY GO WRONG

Monkey droppings - Canadian authors and their demons. Seriously literate demons.

2011-07-16T14:05:00.014-04:00

Once again, the shelf monkey pits genre writers against one another! In the octagon!

This time, two Canadian genre authors, each dealing with unimaginable horrors in their own unique ways.

An unimaginable Canuck horror? Sounds unlikely, but have you seen our government lately? More terrifying than ogopogo and sasquatch combined.

The Thirteen (Random House Canada, 2011)
by Susie Moloney

The suburbs were deadly boring. And there were too many cats.

I'm not a huge fan of witches. When compared to their counterparts (wizards, magicians), the witch just seems to pale in comparison. Sure, they've got chants and potions, and the right ear of Satan himself, but they just aren't as cool. Genre-wise, they peaked right about when Margaret Hamilton first tried to steal the ruby slippers from Judy Garland.

And between you, me, and the Internet trolls, promoting Susie Moloney's new effort the The Thirteen as a cross between Desperate Housewives and The Witches of Eastwick isn't helping win me over (I'm assuming that the Moloney's publicist is referring to the enjoyably daft Jack Nicholson/Cher/Susan Sarandon/Michelle Pfeiffer movie, and not the original and immeasurably darker John Updike novel).

I'm willing to give Moloney a chance, however. Her novel A Dry Spell was an often riveting piece of genre thriller/horror, and The Dwelling a nifty and atmospheric haunted house tale. Moloney has the gift of rooting fantastic tales in the real, creating tension through an appreciation of character as well as a real sense of menace.

At first, The Thirteen has menace in spades, with a gangbuster prologue involving a grieving widow, a lighter, and several gallons of gasoline. Her friends do not respond quite as one would anticipate, and it does not detract from the story to reveal that the women of the neighbourhood have formed a cabal of witches. Now that one of their own is gone, the circle is incomplete. Yet there is a chance; after one of the oldest, Audra, takes mysteriously ill, her long-absent daughter Paula returns, her daughter Rowan in tow, and the surviving witches see not only an opportunity to reseal the circle, but to present an offering to the dark one in the bargain.

Moloney is careful to lay the groundwork for her main characters, allowing us to better sympathize with the mother/daughter team as they move back to a neighbourhood of weirdly cheerful citizens. At times, Moloney evokes the subtle satire and horror of Ira Levin at his best (Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives); there is true creepiness in many scenes, especially when the cabal meets to woo Paula over, with inane promises of "It's great. You'll love it. Your hair will be thicker, your skin so clear and smooth." There is the promise that The Thirteen could become an incisive satire of the forced domesticity of the suburbs, of the need to stay young and beautiful forever and the lengths we travel to keep themselves in comfort.

Alas, it was not to be. Despite such ripe possibilities, Moloney barely grazes the satire and instead amps up the horror. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, and she proves herself again a terrific talent when it comes to gruesomeness. She certainly does not shy away from some of the more unsavory aspects of witching, rewarding the reader with scenes of unsettling carnality and violence.

Yet The Thirteen is a novel that could have benefited from another hundred pages or so. It feels like the author is rushing to the finale, so quickly that several secondary characters who prove themselves vital to the conclusion get short shrift, their actions thus appearing random and essentially unmotivated (in particular the troublesome indecisiveness of Paula's childhood friend Marla, whose motivations appear to grow from plot necessity rather than a fully-formed character need). This is a dilemma common to all of Moloney's work so far: superb set-ups, but rather unsatisfying conclusions. There is so much that is good that it's a letdown that the end result is only entertaining. Moloney has proven herself as a genre writer of talent and verve; I only wish she had fleshed out the story a little more to give it an emotional base that would serve to heighten the horror.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES IT AS A BEACH READ, WANTED TO LOVE IT AS A CLASSIC

A Rope of Thorns (Chizine, 2011)
by Gemma Files

This was no mere confidence-show, some drab provoking ghosts for profit, telling sad and frightened folk what they most wanted to believe, but the truth behind a thousand pretty lies made flesh.

As Moloney is to Stephen King (finding horror in the mundane), so Gemma Files is to Clive Barker (anything freaking goes).

I laid down a lot of praise for Files' first entry in her Hexslinger trilogy, A Book of Tongues, finding it a delightfully nasty/tasty treat, a sui generis grab bag melange of magical realism, Aztec, Mayan, and Christian gods, cowboys, horses, and repugnant anti-heroes, all tied together in the form of a western so gruesome and gritty it made me want to take a shower. Lovely stuff.

Now, scant weeks after I acquainted myself with her talents comes A Rope of Thorns, the second novel in the trilogy, and an equally impressive follow-up. At this rate, the third novel better explode the world at least twice to keep up the level of excitement and intensity. This is a fantasy series for adults, so you'd better cowboy up if you want to survive. For those who yearn for the next Harry Potter-like series, be warned; the brave and resourceful Harry would have been dead and his body desecrated and defiled within five minutes in Files' universe.

Following on the heels of the first, Thorns finds the outlaw and newly-minted hexslinger Chess Pargeter wandering the west with his companion Ed Morrow and a young spiritualist named Yancey Colder, looking for the Reverend Ash Rook, the man who stole Chess' heart. Literally. Had it ripped right out of him in a resurrection ceremony in book one: "His breastbone . . . cleft and barely re-sewn, each no-beat of his own missing organ a hammer-blow echoing from the inside out." Rook has joined forces with the goddess Ixchel to form Hex City, the first place on the planet where magicians can live without feeling the urge to tear each other apart (a side effect of having such powers). To get to Rook, however, Chess has to face many foes, including the whole of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, his own hair-trigger temper, and most gory of all, the resurrected Sheriff Mesach Love and his fearsome evangelical powers over death:

[Yancey] felt herself stagger, caught up one more time by Ed Morrow's welcome arm; clutched close to its warmth for comfort, finding none. Because—those figures arrayed 'round Love, just waiting—she knew them . . . had known them. They hung as if by hooks through the neck, all their weight dangling limp, black eyes staring off to a dozen different quarters. And woven over it all, pallid flesh and dirty rigs alike—sewn through the muscle, covering bone where it showed, blossoming crimson pods at every cheesecloth-skinned joint—a net of Weed throbbed and knotted, a hundred thousand marionette cords grown thick and juicy, hideously animate.

After the vicious Tongues, Rope is a true middle chapter, as our heroes (?) wander on their quest, vanquishing foes while incrementally getting closer to their goal. What that goal is, is in some doubt, as Chess—as violent and psychotic a protagonist as there has ever been— actually grows as a character, learning the limits of his power and actually evolving into something far more interesting. He starts Rope looking purely for revenge, but as Chess becomes more self-aware, he begins to see his place in the world, and understands the concepts of consequences and fate. If Chess had simply remained a remorseless stone-cold killer, Rope would still have been entertaining, but this stab at personal growth, Chess' actual attainment of empathy, is what allows the narrative to grow accordingly. There is still all the frank intergender sex of the first, but Files has leavened the outrageousness of the first through a deepening of the bonds between the leads. Chess and Ed may not become the next Frodo and Sam, but their quest is just as dangerous, and unlike those lovable hobbits, there is no doubt on the subject of homoeroticism.

Where is Files going with all this? I cannot tell, except that the finale will no doubt be apocalyptic in scope, a battle which will make Potter's last stand at Hogwarts seem a slap fight between fifth graders. Right now, I put The Hexslinger series in the top tier of my favourite urban fantasy series, right up there with King's Gunslinger/Dark Tower mythos, Barker's Art Trilogy (if the third is ever finished), and (hopefully, as I have not yet read the upcoming second installment) Lev Grossman's Fillory novels.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES

The monkey has irons in the fire...

2011-07-16T12:04:00.008-04:00

...many irons! Huge, blazing irons! I have no idea what the phrase means!

Anyways, in between work and editing the second novel, I garnered the opportunity to briefly work with many people I admire on a (hopefully) upcoming project of massive coolness.

From Ecstatic Days (the website of author Jeff Vandermeer):

Ann and I have (rather quietly) put together a unique new project over the past few month: a Bestiary with the imaginative working title of…Bestiary. In an A-Z format, with a couple extras, the anthology will contain all original fiction. Think of it as a cryptozoological text for the twenty-first century, although some entries go far back into history. (Ivica Stevanovic is on board as an artist.)

For this project we wanted to assemble the writers ahead of time and then sell the anthology, so a huge thank you to our contributors for being willing to send us material on such a speculative basis. The antho will make the rounds to editors in August.

Although we’re still in the editing phase, we do now have our final line-up, revealed here in its entirety for the first time. We think it’s a stellar group of writers. Certainly what we consider a kind of dream team, and in several cases our first opportunity to work with favorite writers who we hadn’t yet had a chance to publish. It’s a little overwhelming to think we have an original Michal Ajvaz—terrifically funny and pointed—and an original Vandana Singh and an original Karen Lord and Cat Valente and…well, if we keep going we’ll wind up listing everyone!

A: “The Auricle” by Gio Clairval
B: “Bartleby’s Typewriter” by Corey Redekop
C: "The Counsellor Crow” by Karen Lord
D: “Daydreamer by Proxy” by Dexter Palmer
E: “Enkantong-bato” by Dean Francis Alfar
F: “The Figmon” by Michael Cisco
G: “The Guest” by Brian Conn
H: “Hadrian’s Sparrikan” by Stephen Graham Jones
I: “Ible” by Brian Evenson
J: “Jason Bug” by Joseph Nigg
K: “The Karmantid” by Karen Heuler
L: “The Liwat’ang Yawa and the Litok-litok” by Rochita Loenin-Ruiz
M: “Mosquito Boy” by Felix Gilman
N: “N—– (Bolus Barathruma)” by Reza Negarestani
O: “Orsinus Liborum” by Catherynne M. Valente
P: “Pyret” by Karin Tidbeck
Q: “Quintus” by Michal Ajvaz
R: “Rapacis X. Loco Signa” by L.L. Hannett
S: “Snafu” by Micaela Morrissette
T: “Tongues of Moon Toad” by Cat Rambo
U: “The Ugly-Nest Rat” by Eric Schaller
V: “The Vanga” by Rikki Ducornet
W: “Weialalaleia” by Amal El-Mohtar
X: “The Xaratan” by Rhys Hughes
Y: “Yakshantariksh” by Vandana Singh
Z: “Zee” by Richard Howard
&: “Ampersand” by Karin Lowachee

(Not shown: a creature whose name begins with invisible letter, written by an anonymous writer who is not one of the editors…)

Now you tell me that doesn't sound all kinds of awesomesauce! And what a lineup! I'm not familiar with every author's work, but I can tell you that Brian Evenson is a spectacularly dark writer whose Last Days is one of the bleakest reads of the past few years, and Stephen Graham Jones was just this year nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for his collection The One that Got Away (Jeff Vandermeer is also a finalist for his on-my-future-reading pile The Third Bear). I can't admit familiarity with many of the authors, but a little research has gotten me very excited, particularly in the case of Felix Gilman's recent novel The Half-Made World.

And the couple behind the project, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, have earned my lifetime respect for both their passion for bring unusal genre efforts to the public eye, and their past releases which never fail to entertain. Jeff's Finch was one of my favourite novels last year, and I just completed his non-fiction effort The Steampunk Bible, an informative and lovely examination of the steampunk genre (and if you don't know what steampunk is, look it up). I am currently reading Ann and Jeff's new anthologies Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded (a wonderful collection of steampunk stories from some amazing authors), and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, a bizarre and often hilarious tome of vignettes and stories that document a fictional collection of fantabulous inventions that should be realized into fact post-haste (again from some terrific authors [China Mieville!]).

As revealed above, I have already submitted my bestiary entry, the unusual animal known as "Bartleby's Typewriter." And what, exactly, is a Bartleby's Typewriter? I'll never tell, unless this gets published, in which case I'll be obligated to. And if Ivica Stevanovic does a drawing? Holy freaking s|-|it! I will pay top dollar for the original artwork!

So, cross your fingers that this gets completed. If it does, it may not be the longest piece I've ever written, but it will be the coolest thing I've ever attached my name to.

Monkey Droppings -Robopocalypse vs. Major Karnage! Winner take all!

2011-06-26T10:16:00.019-04:00

Today, the monkey pits two two sci-fi actioneers against each other.

One is a heavily-hyped apocalyptic epic with a huge promotional push and expectations up the ying-yang.

The other is an unassuming, almost unheard-of sleeper from an unknown Canadian author.

Guess which one works, and which one doesn't?

Robopocalypse (Doubleday, 2011)
by Daniel H. Wilson

"You humans are biological machines designed to create ever more intelligent tools. You have reached the pinnacle of your species. All your ancestors' lives, the rise and fall of your nations, every pink and squirming baby—they have all led you here, to this moment, where you have fulfilled the destiny of humankind and created your successor. You have expired. You have accomplished what you were designed to do."

This is the big one, the tentpole action epic of the summer reading season! A high concept thrill ride, already speculated to soon be adapted to film by Steven Spielberg! With blurbs by heavy-hitters such as Clive Cussler! Lincoln Child! Robert Crais! The author Daniel Wilson has a Ph.D. in robotics! He's a genius! How could this be anything less than a genre masterpiece?

Quite easily, as it turns out.

It's all in the execution. Depending on whose hands wield the power, a tale of robots battling mankind can be either spectacular, exciting, and thought-provoking (think The Terminator), or dreary, repetitive, and uninspiring (Transformers). Robopocalypse lands far on the lesser end of the spectrum; it has some good ideas, but it has a paucity of style, little originality, and not much in the way of imagination.

Granted, it starts out nicely, as an oral history of humanity's battle with the robots (tremendously reminiscent of the format of Max Brooks' World War Z, a novel about the zombie uprising that is nowhere near perfect, but aces out Robopocalypse on every level). Humanity is just starting to recover from its years-long struggle, a struggle which began at the advent of artificial intelligence. The intelligence Archos viewed mankind as a danger, both to itself and to all other forms of life on Earth, and began the conquest of the planet through control of all mechanized resources it could summon.

There is a hint of real originality at one point, when true artificial intelligence is created in other robots, who then in turn decide to rebel against their robot overlord, but such flourishes are lost in pages of deadening prose and disposable, interchangeable characters. Three days after completion, I am hard-pressed to remember anything of the plot save a few scenes of robotic warfare that would, in a movie version, likely raise the coolness factor, but in the book merely get an eyebrow raise. I got far more entertainment in twenty-two minutes from the robot rebellion in the episode "Mother's Day" from Futurama, where I was treated to humour, style, and the image of Hermes Conrad screaming "Help! My stapler is collating me alive!" while being chased by an electric stapler. Not to mention the immortal phrase, "Conquer Earth, you bastards!"

So Robopocalypse isn't great, or even good, but what's even more damaging is that it is a dull, dull book. Direct comparisons are made in the publicity to Michael Crichton and Robert A. Heinlein, but Wilson has none of the satiric or stylistic flair of the latter, and very little of the former's ability to synthesize believable scientific research into a propulsive plot. Crichton was no maestro, but at his best (The Andromeda Strain, Sphere) he was able to throw out vast quantities of scientific exposition that never bogged down the storyline but instead actually enhanced it. Crichton didn't write great art, but he wrote great pulp (until he became bogged down in his own portentousness). Wilson's research isn't half as well presented, and never remotely believable, which lends the book an air of fantasy rather than the true-to-life science it appears to aim for.

Robopocalypse is a real let-down, not even a mildly diverting beach read. I was promised Crichton and Heinlein, Spielberg and James Cameron; I was given Michael Bay instead. Not a fair exchange.

Not even close.

VERDICT: MONKEY IS DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED

Major Karnage (Chizine, 2010)
by Gord Zajac

"Welcome to the Dabney Correctional Executive Class Hospitality Centre. We hope your stay with us is a pleasant one. Please enjoy these pastoral images and soothing mood music while you await trial and sentencing. And remember—at Dabney Correctional, we believe everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And it shows."

Now, see, if you're going to be derivative, this is how you do it.

Major John Karneski ('Major Karnage' to his friends/enemies) is unhappily enjoying forced retirement. After many glorious campaigns, he and his soldiers have been forcibly confined to a Veteran's Home for observation and re-education. In a world without war, a world completely run by the Dabney Corporation and its mascot cat, warriors are unnecessary, but people as violent as Karnage cannot be expected to meld back into society willingly. So for the better part of two decades Karnage has been held against his will, his violent tendencies held in check by a Sanity Patch on the back of his head which will explode if stress levels reach critical mass. At the start of Major Karnage, the patch is set at Lemon Breeze, with colour-coded levels that run the gamut from Snow White to Tricycle Red, with stops at Daffodil, Citrus Blast, Peachy Keen, Tangy Orange, Sharp Cheddar, Coral Essence, and many others. At Tricycle Red: boom!

But Karnage knows that the world is not safe. His man Cookie has been receiving alien transmissions in his skull, and it looks as if Unidentified Flying Objects of Death! are already on their way to lay waste to humankind. Only Karnage can hope to halt the invasion, but he'll have to fight his way past the guards, and then have to cope with a world that has moved on without him. To save the world, Karnage will have to deal with Dabneycops armed with Goober Guns, bizarre religious cults, alien sandworms, squidbugs, and a diligent cop named Sydney who can incapacitate a man with one flick of her baby toe:

"[Karnage had] never seen anyone move like this before. It was like a martial arts version of shiatsu. Sydney knew all the right pressure points to cause extreme pain in the body. It was brilliant. It was like ballet, except it didn't suck."

Quite obviously, Gord Zajac is first and foremost concerned with having a good time. This is not hard science fiction, and unlike Robopocalypse it doesn't have any pretensions to be. No, this is glorious b-movie-worth sci-fi ridiculousness, a non-stop chase through a landscape limited only by Zajac's imagination. Heavily indebted to pretty much every movie and novel you can think of, Zajac begs, borrows, and steals to great effect, steamrolling over plotholes and inconsistencies with glee.

Let's face it, you are either in the mood for such entertainment, or you're not. Me? Sign me up for more. Zajac is not a great stylist, but he moves his plot along with a sense of fun that is impossible to fake. There's more than a bit of the joy of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series and the early satire of Heinlein to be found here, by way of Douglas Adams. It's an anything goes, balls to the wall approach that can be wearying, but manages to hit all the right notes. It's nonsense, but it's good nonsense. ChiZine has always put out a quality product, but this may be their first release that is just out and out genre merriment.

If Zajac sees fit to continue the adventures of Karnage, I, for one, will be eagerly awaiting the next installment. Robopocalypse may get the endorsements and the mega-budget film, but Major Karnage is the winner.

VERDICT: MONKEY LEAVES WELL-SATED

Monkey droppings - magic, magic everywhere, but not a drop to drink

2011-06-14T16:41:00.012-04:00

Today, the monkey goes in search of magic and adventure.

And he finds some.

And he learns that sometimes, magic is not enough.

Vegas Knights (2011, Angry Robot)
by Matt Forbeck

I love me some magic realism. Taking the world as it is today, twisting it out of shape through supernatural means, always entertains me a sight more than the usual fantasy output of vaguely middle age-ish scenarios wherein dwarfs, elves, and centaurs form gangs and quest to their hearts content. Not that those are necessarily bad, it's just that I have a hard time relating. Put those same characters in a realistic setting, and I'm there. Lev Grossman's The Magicians is one of the best fantasies I've read in years, right up there with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

So a novel about magicians set loose in Nevada would seem ideal. Or at least fun. And Matt Forbeck's novel is fun, in a free-wheeling, loosey-goosey way. I just wish it had some more meat on its bones.

Bill and Jackson are, outwardly, fun-loving young men bursting to have a good time on the Vegas strip. In actuality, they are novice magicians, on break from their college courses in "trans-quantum postulating," looking to fleece some casinos during Spring Break. Being able to predict cards and change hands would seem an easy way to get some quick cash, but the boys are not aware of the sinister underbelly of the city, one that depends on magic to keep its allure alive. Two magicians playing blackjack is less a rare occurrence than they believe, and soon they discover that they may not be up to the challenge of taking on the entire magician's syndicate.

Forbeck has a lot of fun with this conceit, bringing in some lovely pseudo-science to explain the actuality of magic's existence. As Jackson explains:

"That's the stigma that surrounds magic—that it's the product of demonic pacts or other crazy things—but it's nothing close to the truth. Using your mojo is simply the conscious manipulation of the quantum state of things. By taking control of an altering probability, we can make things happen that seem magical, but every bit of the process can be explained with science."

Makes perfect sense. Or not, really, but it's fun to play with.

But Forbeck isn't a strong enough writer to bring his characters to life. His magicians are heroic and intelligent, but there's no depth to the portrayals. The plot moves briskly, and I can see this making a very enjoyable feature film, but Forbeck's style is too mundane to create much excitement. His prose is plodding, and despite a vivid imagination, he can't summon up the breathless excitement his non-stop narrative requires (for a better example, see Gord Zajac's Major Karnage, a non-stop sci-fi chase that brings enough wit and oomph to the pursuit that you don't even mind some gaping logic holes).

But even more than than, a story of magic requires, well, magic to make it work. Clarke and Grossman and others of their ilk (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis) have genuine mastery of language and style, proving themselves magicians of the highest calibre. Forbeck is likeable, with strokes of originality, but at present he's an off-strip illusionist at best. I wanted to enjoy much more than I did, as the publisher Angry Robot appears determined to produce high-quality genre fiction, as evidenced by its recent re-release of K.W. Jeter's steampunk classics Morlock Nights and Infernal Devices, along with Lavie Tidhar's The Bookman and Camera Obscura. But Vegas Knights is a trifle at best; much like Vegas itself, it plays at glamour, but in the end it's a rather cheap entertainment, diverting but unmemorable.

VERDICT: MONKEY ENJOYS LIKE HE ENJOYS NCIS

Harbor (2011, Thomas Dunne Books)
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Ah, hyperbole, where would we be without you?

I received the ARC of Harbor (to be released in October), and was taken in by the promise of "a sprawling horror epic." But having completed said novel, I make the following suggestion: if you are going to promote your book as a "horror epic," it had better be damned horrific and damned epic. The Stand is a horror epic. Carrion Comfort is a horror epic. Swan Song, Frankenstein, World War Z; these are epics of horror.

Harbor is not a horror epic. It contains elements of horror, yes, but its horrors are muted and small, personally terrifying to a character, yet hardly epic in scope.

That said, Harbor is not a bad read. Indeed, it has moments of creeping dread, and a storyline presented in vivid yet intimate detail. It's no horror epic, but it has elegance and style, and it takes time to build up its characters so that the horror, when it comes, is all the more intense. But it's also flabby and awkward, and makes the cardinal sin of having secondary characters far more interesting than the lead.

To be fair, it starts like gangbusters. On the remote Swedish isle of Domarö, Anders and Cecilia have taken their daughter Maja for a winter hike to a lighthouse, when she mysteriously vanishes. Cut to two years later; Anders is now a compulsive alcoholic, his marriage long dissolved, coming back to Domarö because it is the only thing he has left that still connects him to his daughter. His grandmother Anna-Greta and her companion Simon take care to keep him alive, but both are harboring secrets about the island, and from each other. There is an evil to Domarö, and Maja may have been a victim to something that has ruled the sea for centuries.

This has the potential to be a great, old-fashioned horror story, the kind that emphasized character and atmosphere over shocks. Domarö is an intriguing place, and even if the island never becomes what I hoped it would—there were echoes of Lovecraft early on, and I had visions of a great Cthulhu uprising that was not to be—it retains an aura of menace that Lindqvist and his translator (from the original Swedish) evoke with care and restraint.

Yet after a while, it becomes apparent that Harbor, for all its plentiful strengths, is rather schizophrenic, as if Lindqvist could not make up his mind what story to tell. Frankly, Anna-Greta's and Simon's story is by far the more compelling; Lindqvist goes into great detail over Simon's past life as a magician and escape artist, a man who one day discovers a strange insect that imparts to him supernatural powers over water. Simon's story is laden with intrigue and suspense, and his relationship to the secrets-holding Anna-Greta becomes the lynchpin for the entire narrative. Or rather, it should have, as it's by far the more effective plotline. Yet Lindqvist awkwardly fuses their story with that of Anders, who through his alcoholism and mania is a far less interesting protagonist. His missing daughter plotline may be more readily identifiable to readers—how many of us have been granted water-based superpowers?—but it doesn't hold the attention.

I am not familiar with Lindqvist's past work—all I know of him is the Swedish film adaptation of his vampire novel Let the Right One In and its American counterpart Let Me In, both very strong, atmospheric horror films with some poor CGI moments. Based on those movies, I will one day read the novel, as Harbor displays a writer with true gifts. Sadly, Harbor is very likely lesser to his previous work, a novel full of ideas that is unable to string them together.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES MOMENTS, BUT ONLY LIKES THE WHOLE

A lesson in the art of spin; or, I didn't say that, did I?

2011-06-05T10:51:00.017-04:00

Yesterday, I was schooled in the art of spin. Owned. Pwned, as the kids say, bless their unable to spell hearts. And while I am fairly angry about it, a part of me can't help but admire the cojones of all involved.

A little background:

In my wanderings through the literary landscape, I have had the opportunity to, once in awhile, espouse my views on certain written works for sums of money i.e. I write book reviews for publications. I have always tried to give such reviews my best attention to detail, trying to do more than simply summarize a plot and giving a thumbs up/down. I make no claims to greatness, but I take the work seriously, and try to give every author I read the benefit of a doubt. I have praised books I've admired, and when confronted with the occasional shall we say less-than-stellar offering, I usually do try to put the best face on a bad situation. The authors have presumably worked hard to bring their vision to print, and although I may not enjoy the result, I appreciate the effort.

Ah, but I am human, and flawed. Sometimes a book hits me below the belt, and I cannot help but to respond in kind. In the pages of The Winnipeg Free Press, I laid waste in five hundred words to such destroyers of trees/hope as Michael Slade's Bed of Nails and Paulo Coelho's Eleven Minutes, barely containing my rage at how such authors managed to scuttle away with vital hours from my life with their horrible prose, insipid characters, and limp narratives. We all have read such books, and cannot help but rail even when public opinion is against you, or if your own common sense tells you to back off, that you are making a fool of yourself.

Such it was with Chuck Palahniuk's Tell-All. My review was not so much an incisive dissection of a novel as it was a rant against an author I deeply admired for foisting upon his abundant fanbase a novel so lazy, so flaccid, and so dreary. In the past, I had forgiven Palahniuk for lesser efforts such as Snuff, knowing that even the greatest authors had off days. A man who gave me the gruesome, obscene satirical pleasures of Fight Club and Rant and Choke had earned some leeway. But Tell-All is atrocious, a novel that would likely never have been published save for his name on the cover. I place it in the same terrain as the gut-wrenchingly awful books of James Patterson, the flavourless spewings of Stephanie Meyer, the utter stupidity of Tim LaHaye. In the annals of disappointing releases from authors I deeply admire and respect, it belongs in the same category as Ira Levin's dismal Son of Rosemary, Richard Matheson's inane Seven Steps to Midnight, and Robert A. Heinlein's lamentable The Number of the Beast. I condemn it to the basest reaches of my filth-laden soul, and continue to do so, even as I begrudgingly admit that I'm looking forward to Palahniuk's next novel, it sounds like all sorts of awesome.

So, I trashed Tell-All in the Arts section of the Winnipeg Free Press, and I stand by my words. So it was with no small amount of surprise that I picked up the recent Canadian paperback release (to see who, if anyone, had actually praised it), and read the following on the back cover, just underneath the plot summary:

"A devastating dissection of celebrity . . . classic Palahniuk fare." — Winnipeg Free Press

Huh.

I checked my original review, and found the sentence in question:

Written in a style akin to gossip tabloids of the time (complete with boldface font for every name mentioned), the novel promises on its surface to be a devastating dissection of celebrity, classic Palahniuk fare.

Of course, this sentence handily ignores the rest of the review, including the following nuggets:

But with Tell-All, his fourth novel in as many years, Palahniuk simply gives up, delivering a novel as negligible in size as it is in ambition.

and

Tell-All is the effort of an author who has utterly given up. It is a soggy, misshapen mess of half-baked parody and puddle-shallow inspiration.

and

Tell-All is an insulting shrug of indifference from an author who once actually mattered on the literary scene.

Wow, that was harsh. I may have forgotten to take my happy pills that day.

Now, in addition to working as a reviewer and author, I earn a living as a publicist for a highly-regarded independent Canadian publisher. So I am intimately familiar with the concept of 'spin.' I have had opportunity to scour reviews for phrases I can employ to highlight my books in press releases and advertising. And occasionally, I have lifted chunks of wordage and used them slightly out of context, so that a review that rates a book as average can be used to highlight a novel's marvelous atmosphere or rich characters. It's part of the job. Not lying, exactly, but tweaking the truth in a certain way to achieve an intended result.

But this . . . this is complete falsity. They are using a review specifically designed to keep people as far away as possible from their book as a tool to lure people in. They've taken a spray can to a sign labelled DO NOT SWIM, SHARKS IN THE AREA, leaving it blaring to the public, SWIM AREA.

I do admire the ability to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, no question. But when faced with Tell-All, the proof is in the quotes; they did not have many to choose from. Check out the screenshot of the praise page above: most of them are fairly quiet on the novel itself, concerning themselves with Palahniuk and his reputation rather than the merits of the book. I've looked around; critical praise for Tell-All was fairly lacking. The page looks good, but when you come down to it, it doesn't tell you anything more than the praise pages for most of James Patterson's recent books, pages made up of glorious plaudits from bloggers and bloggers only. Yes, I'm being a little snobbish here, but my point is, there is no critical praise from reputable sources to be had. Some show it obviously (Patterson) and some hide it expertly (Palahniuk).

Who to blame? It's all the publishing company, and the publicists. They're trying to sell a product here, the art is left to the artists. I don't blame Palahniuk for the manner in which his company markets him, I only blame him for the product itself.

My point? Could it be, don't believe everything you read? That'll do, I guess. But the real point here is:

I did not praise Tell-All. The Winnipeg Free Press did not praise Tell-All. The quotation is a bald-faced distortion, a lie through and through. If you must read Tell-All, don't blame me if you feel used afterwards.

hidden monkey - Crisp by R.W. Gray

2011-05-17T16:09:00.006-04:00

Oh monkey, why do you hide from me?

Is it my breath?

TELL ME THE TRUTH, DAMN YOU!

Today's hidden monkey:

Crisp (NeWest Press, 2010)
by R.W. Gray

the hidden monkey plot: Well, these are short stories, so there is no plot per se (however, there is a perfect excuse to use the phrase per se). But to give you a taste of their contents: "Waves" is an exquisite glimpse into a one-night stand with a whale trainer; "Crisp" concerns two brothers whose father is burning eternally in a car fire while their mother swells to bursting inside their house; "Sunflowers" is a breathtakingly sweet tale of an old woman's infatuation with the new young priest of her church; "Wabi Sabi" maps out a wife's attempts to mold and whittle her fisherman husband into a more pleasing form.

why is this monkey hidden? Short stories are classically a harder sell for audiences, and unless a collection catches fire (or awards glory), they more often than not gather dust on the shelves. I really only became aware of Gray's collection after the two of us joined forces in a Writers' Circle event out here in Fredericton. Crisp may yet gather a larger audience, however, as its recent nomination for the Danuta Gleed Award certainly provides it with an extra oomph.

what does the shelf monkey think? I'm a big fan of magic realism, when done correctly, and Crisp has more than its fair share. Witness this small segment of "Wabi Sabi" after the husband has come home and destroyed his wife's pottery:

In the crisp morning air, she reached out with her two hands and placed them around his ridged and bent-to-purpose neck. She began again, kind, the way she was with flawed clay. Smaller clumps of him fell to the porch as she worked out the impurities, the air bubbles.
In the morning she awoke to peaches in the air, and found him in the kitchen making impressionistic waffles, a wounded apology on his lips. He was smaller now, shorter than her, and several kinds of sorry.

That's the kind of imagination I love, the ability to combine the fantastic with the humdrum ordinariness of life. In Crisp, no one questions how it is a woman can continually whittle a man into something new, how a fire can never be extinguished, why a trailer should suddenly up and slowly (oh so slowly) roll to the ocean and no one thinks to stop it. Beyond this, Crisp is a revelatory collection, delicate in execution and brutal in impact. Gray has a light touch, almost invisible, and his stories dance across the page even as they leave indelible impressions in the mind. Like the best short story writers, Gray understands the importance of being concise, of never wasting a word. His characters are all yearning for something, something beyond their control; love, or stability, or silence, or sanity.

hidden monkey verdict: this monkey shouldn't stay hidden. come out, little monkey, don't be scared

Monkey droppings - A Book of Tongues, by Gemma Files

2011-05-03T16:12:00.007-04:00

The monkey likes magic. And westerns. And horror.

But all three? At once?

Fair warning: this review will be one of the geekiest the monkey has ever done.

A Book of Tongues (ChiZine, 2010)
by Gemma Files

Once, the Rainbow Lady had told Asher Rook, in dreams, a human ball-player was enticed by owls to pit his skills against the lords of death, and made a descent into what was then called Xibalba. He swam the river of blood, yet did not become drunk with it. He reached the crossroads, the Place of All Winds, where he took not the red road, nor the white, but the black. He entered the bone canoe, piloted by spiders and bats. He sank downwards, through cold water, to the whole world's bottom.

Xibalba, as it was called then. Mictlan, as it became. Mictlan-Xibalba, as it is now, and will be, forever more.

When he arrived, however, he was met only with mockery and betrayal. The Sunken Ball-Court's kings set him impossible tasks, then cheated the rules to make sure he would fail, and sent him to be executed, decreeing that his severed head should be set in a tree by the wayside, as a warning to other travellers.

Promptly, the tree flowered all over, producing a hundred succulent calabash melons that attracted the attention of Blood Maiden, the Blood Gatherer's beautiful daughter. She reached up to pick one, only to discover she held the ball-player's skull instead. The skull spat in her hand, and told her: Though my face is gone, it will soon return, in the face of my son. And she found herself pregnant.

Confession time: I'm a geek.

No, no, please, let me finish. I'm a geek, and as such, there are certain literary qualifications I feel I have to admit to. I worship at the altar of all things Vonnegutian (if that's not an accepted term, consider it copyrighted to me and me alone, and you owe me a nickel if you use it in conversation). I play video games; perhaps not with the same "three day weekend of video goodness" mentality of my youth, but I recently completed Arkham Asylum, and am slowly working on the original Dead Space (I haven't jumped this much at a game since Resident Evil). In my early thirties I dressed as Bruce Campbell for Halloween, complete with chainsaw hand and sawed-off boomstick. I read zombie novels (hell, I'm writing one), I'm now heavily into the fantastical imaginations of Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville, I'm deeply drawn to steampunk, I've even contributed to a fantastical bestiary (still coming, click here for proof of my bookish geekiness). I can quote Monty Python sketches verbatim.

So yeah, I have geek credentials, a membership in the geek-of-the-month club. My not attending sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre conventions has far more to do with geographic placement than it does desire.

But if there is something that I geek out over more than anything else, it's Clive Barker.

When I first started reading horror (probably too young, but hey, psychological scars don't show), it was Stephen King I flocked to, devouring everything of his I could, shaping my sensibilities for decades to come. From him, being a gateway author, I experimented with others; I dabbled in Koontz (too silly, no lasting side-effects), Simmons (whoo, a rush and a half), McCammon (ups and downs, usually a good ride), Rice (strong start, lately almost unreadable), Lansdale (now that's more like it), Wilson (Repairman Jack, what a guy), and Lumley (ridiculous, but those covers haunted my nightmares as a teen).

But even beyond all those, the writings of Barker were a gutpunch to my psyche. Something about his style, gothic and gory and gorgeous, sank its talons into my medulla and began an eminently enjoyable parasitic relationship. Some labeled him as a 'splatterpunk' author, but Barker has never been a gore-for-gore's-sake sort, although he splashes the mausoleum red with the best of them. Reading The Hellbound Heart, with its miasma of kitchen sink marital drama and religious sadomasochism, was to suddenly comprehend the vast depth of perversions that exist outside my tiny middle-class life. The Damnation Game and The Books of Blood gave me epic horrors I never knew could be put to paper. Cabal gave me monsters as heroes, and to date is likely the only classic of modern horror to be set in Edmonton, Alberta. His efforts Weaveworld and Imajica and The Great and Secret Show proved to me that there existed the possibility of truly adult fantasies that created monsters and otherworldly terrains yet were not the usual hack-and-slash D&D epics that taint the fantasy shelves of my favourite bookstores (yeah, despite my geek certification, I've never fully embraced the genre subset of trolls and elves and middle-earth Tolkien wannabees). Barker filled his tales with mytho-religious symbolism, depraved desires, and the glories of all assortments of sexuality on a level I had never before experienced. And I fell head over hooks for him.

But Barker's output is now sparse and erratic, with many promised jewels still awaiting completion (where are you, Scarlet Gospels? If I don't get my Harry D'Amour/Pinhead crossover soon . . . ). So I've been forced to look elsewhere for similar entertainments, and while I have not regretted the search, I can emphatically state that I have never found an author who raised in me the same level of excitement.

Until, of course, the true subject of today's meandering post, Gemma Files, a Canadian author with some short story collections and poetry chapbooks to her credit, but nothing that has ever appeared on my radar. But her publisher ChiZine has, several times. I've said it before in these posts, and I'll say it again, there is no publisher out there that comes close to touching the heights of genre fiction that ChiZine is putting out. Tim Lebbon, Robert J. Wiersema, Lavie Tidhar, Craig Davidson, Douglas Smith, David Nickle, Tony Burgess - if you haven't yet discovered ChiZine, I envy you the journey I am now ordering you to undertake.

So when I saw Gemma Files' A Book of Tongues sitting on the shelf of my favourite bookstore (with another amazing cover - seriously, ChiZine covers are works of bloody art), I knew that I'd be getting a good bang for my buck. But I never saw this coming; it's too soon to call Gemma Files the next incarnation of Clive Barker, but if it happens the way I hope, I said it here first. Files has the same fanatical attention to research and detail, the same intermingling of eternal horrors with unexpected settings, the same fearlessness of the body and all its yearnings. If this manuscript had been given to me and attributed to Barker, I would have believed it.

Setting her yarn in one of the only genres I do not recall Barker ever trying, the western, Files puts together an apocalyptic, baroque melange of cowboys, magicians, long-dead Mayan and Aztec gods, detectives, and biblical fury. Outwardly a story of rebel soldiers from the Civil War making their way across the American landscape as thieves and pursued by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Files subverts all expectations and arrives at a stunningly original result; think Hellraiser crossing paths with The Wild Bunch. My experience with western novels starts with Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet (a masterpiece), and ends with Chuck Norris's ode to all that is awful in life The Justice Riders. I think it safe to assume that McMurtry might admire Files' subversive take on the genre, but Charles McHighKicks will choke on his own rage/beard as the heroes and villains of the western epic narrative tradition he has long modelled his career after are exposed to the unflinching sexual storytelling prowess of Files.

"On this whole wide earth, there's nothin' worse than a bad man who knows the Bible." So says "Reverend" Asher Rook, who knows whereof he speaks. Rook is a hexslinger, an outlaw born with supernatural tendencies, a bible-quoting mystic who uses phrases of the Bible to access his unique abilities.

As it bore down on [Rook] - the uppermost Pinkerton already back on his feet, grasping for the Gatling's crank - he opened his mouth and preached, from Corinthians:

THOUGH I SPEAK WITH THE TONGUES OF MEN AND OF ANGELS, AND HAVE NOT CHARITY, I AM BECOME AS SOUNDING BRASS, OR A TINKLING CYMBAL.

It was one of the sweetest verses known to man, quoting at every wedding he'd officiated. But when his lips shaped the words, something else came out through his mouth along with them - a lashing ghost-tongue spear of silver-gilt which rammed full-speed through the boiler without jumping the train off its tracks, just pinning it there like a massive iron bug, releasing its entire compliment of steam in a hissing cloud.

And that was the problem, in the end. It was a bit too dense for Rook to completely calculate what he was doing. So though he'd meant for whatever effect he produced to stop short, or just slap the Pink silly, it split the man's skull and neck alike, spraying everything around it with gouting red.

Together with his lieutenant/lover Chess Pargeter, a terrifyingly remorseless killer, Rook leads his men across the wilds of the west, robbing trains and banks, killing all in their path. Also in their midst is Ed Morrow, a detective gone undercover to discover the extent of Rook's power and perhaps unlock the secrets of magic.

In this world, magicians are not quite plentiful, but they are historically documented, and the Pinkerton Detective Agency hopes to gather enough information to put a halt to all magical activities, and perhaps use magicians against each other to clean up the Earth. "Break her to the bridle and use her, like any other animal. Turn a wolf into a dog." What works in their favour is the fact that "Mages don't meddle;" magicians in this world cannot work together for long until one inevitably turns on the other. This simmering hostility has kept hexslingers from combining their powers and becoming as gods. If Rook has his way, however, there may be a way around this.

Files is an intensely visceral writer, delivering fantasy/horror with the glee of a razor-wielding psychopath; just the thing for my Barker kick. But enough about Barker, Files is her own author, and while the similarities are there (Rook reminds me completely of Barker's Nix, another magician with delusions of godhood), Barker has only laid the groundwork for the next generation, a generation Files could prove herself a leader. She is equally fearless in gore, grotesqueries, and sex (boy, is she fearless in sex, in all its glories and fluids), but her style is brilliant and complex, a gorgeous mixture of goth and grit that completely transforms the material into something magical. Not many people, I suspect, could mash together lovecraftian-style horror with Old West patois with such panache.

Does it go too far? Arguable. The story does careen wildly at points, and doubtless some will be turned off by Files' frank and earthy depictions of homosexual congress, others by vivid descriptions a la "carving out loops of guts, as the man tried hopelessly to stuff them back in."

But sometimes, that's what I want in horror. I appreciate all forms of horror for their differing strengths (I'm currently enthralled with the quiet atmosphere and dread of John Ajvide Lindqvist's Harbor), but sometimes I want to be pushed past the boundaries of my own taste, I want to be abused. Clive Barker was my go-to guy for this, and still is; I predict a re-read of The Damnation Game is in my near future. And now, I've got Gemma Files to warm/horrify the cockles of my whatever it is that cockles reside in. She is a true talent, and I look forward to whatever fresh horrors she may unleash upon my imagination.

The second book in the series, A Rope of Thorns, is available at the end of May.

I've already pre-ordered a copy.

VERDICT: DID YOU NOT JUST READ THE REVIEW?

MONKEY LOVES!

I have been remiss! Oh, bad, bad monkey, thy name is ... remiss? Is that a name?

2011-04-22T13:35:00.008-04:00

I would be remiss if I were not to mention the recent online publication The Winnipeg Review, a literary endeavour which describes itself thus:

The Winnipeg Review publishes on-line every quarter, with weekly updates, from its eponymous home. Like the inhabitants of this midcontinental city, TWR is always opinionated, occasionally cranky, and ethnically confused. We exist to review literary books, mostly Canadian fiction, and to showcase interviews, excerpts, poems, and columns by writers with something to say.

Why bring this up, you ask? Well, aside from being a darn sight better than many similar websites, with insightful commentary and in-depth book reviews, it has a marvellous lineup of reviewers.

Do you really not see where I'm going with this?

Yes, I have gouged away heaping hunks of my free time to through a few reviews their way, which I have been sadly neglect in mentioning here, a neglect I will now remedy.

First, my very recent review of Timothy Taylor's remarkable The Blue Light Project:

The Blue Light Project does not do things the easy way; there are no clear lines of plot, the agendas of secondary characters flit in and about, not everything is tied up in a neat bow. Some reviewers have tried to compensate by refusing to follow the inner logic, instead imposing upon Blue Light a structure Taylor never intended: one reviewer in a major Canadian publication takes this so far as to devote the majority of the review to Pegg’s interview with the hostage taker, all but ignoring Eve and Rabbit, removing much of the mystery Taylor delicately builds, and emphasizing all out of proportion what turns out to be a fairly small segment of the actual novel.

Blue Light, despite some remarkably tense moments, is not a thriller, and Taylor never posits it as such. The hostage situation is integral, but it functions as a pivot point for the others to balance on, not as a central theme. What is far more important is Taylor’s conjecture that only through trauma can we see clearly and possibly hope to achieve something meaningful in our lives. Blue Light’s characters are all seekers; of what, they are not sure, until something jars them from complacency. We see this in the various mobs that surround the building, yearning to be a part of the conclusion, wanting to be a part of anything that might affect them and thus add significance to their existence.

And secondly, from two months ago, my two-hander review of Alexander MacLeod's Light Lifting and Sarah Selecky's This Cake is for the Party:

At this point, any review of Sarah Selecky’s or Alexander MacLeod’s recent work could be argued as superfluous. Their fame, for the moment, is secure. Two collections of short stories, each acclaimed to a degree that would make most authors collapse under the weight of their envy. Each a Giller finalist. Each now shortlisted for Commonwealth Best First Book, winner still to be determined. Each taking a comfortable roost inside national and regional bestseller lists. Selecky earns comparisons to Alice Munro. MacLeod escapes the sizable shadow of CanLit heavyweight and father Alistair to carve his own small niche in the canon. These are truly auspicious beginnings for any literary career.

Taken side by side, weighing each collection against the other as we would combatants in a field of battle, Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party and MacLeod’s Light Lifting showcase sizable talents, displaying unique voices and mastery of craft. They each contain stories of memories captured in time, stories that tell of personal moments and hint at larger ramifications beyond the last sentence. Yet of the two, This Cake holds together better as a whole, but Light Lifting hints at a slightly broader range. It is doubtful anyone would mistake a Selecky story for a MacLeod, but MacLeod could, in the future, pull off a reasonable Selecky.

And there you have it. Drop in to The Winnipeg Review for some terrific reviews of a few of my recent favourites, including a sterling treatise by Lee Kvern on Valerie Compton's affecting Tide Road and Michelle Berry on Miriam Toews Irma Voth (on my TBR pile).

Monkey droppings - sci-fi epics, haunted wilderness, and unnerving neighbours

2011-04-17T11:14:00.013-04:00

The monkey reviews three books today, to clear his shelf.

The monkey ranks them from least favourite to most.

The monkey likes ranking. And ranks.

Refer to the monkey as Commodore Monkey from now on.

Hellhole (Tor, 2011)
by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Pretty much all you need to know about Hellhole can be summed up in its cliffhanging final sentence: “With this war, we will make his planet a true hellhole.”

Translation: this ain’t a subtle work. I cannot say from personal knowledge how Brian Herbert’s continuation of father Frank’s Dune series ranks as compared to the originals, but from what I’ve read in Hellhole I’d say, “Not good.”

That’s too damning, however. Judged on its own performance, Hellhole is a fun space opera; hardly artful or incisive, but would likely make a good mini-series. Yet comparisons with Frank Herbert’s seminal masterpiece are inevitable, particularly when both books concern planetary politics, alien races, strange religious beliefs, and mad dictators intent on galaxy domination. Dune was almost biblical in its construction, an expansive, encompassing, engrossing piece of world-building that meticulously crafted theological underpinnings to guide its fantastic universe. Hellhole is a blunt instrument, a sledgehammer retelling of the settlement of America, except this time, the settlers make peace with the indigenous peoples rather than slaughtering them wholesale. Dune was fresh; Hellhole is recycled.

But it is fun, in an obvious way. I hadn’t read a sci-fi space epic since Neal Stephenson’s grandiose Anathem, and while this may seem like heresy (it does to me), I found more sheer entertainment in Hellhole’s pages than in Anathem’s ponderousness.

Taking place ten years after a failed rebellion, disgraced leader General Tiber Adolphus has been exiled to the Deep Zone planet of planet Hallholme (read: Hellhole) rather than receiving a death sentence.

NOTE: As an aside, can we all agree how lucky for the publisher that the original name of the planet wasn’t Peaspoot, Sheetcrack, or Matherfluck? Dodged a real bullet there.

On Hellhole, Adolphus bides his time, building up settlements and paying out planetary tributes to the power-hungry Diadem Michella Duchenet. But he’s also sowing seeds among the fifty-three other planets in the Deep Zone, altering transport routes and forming alliances. When explorers discover the original inhabitants of Hellhole (long thought dead from an asteroid strike), Aldolphus realizes that there might be a new way to rid his planet of the Diadem’s chokehold.

This is fairly standard sci-fi world-building, filled with broad expositional characters, speechifying, and ridiculous names. I suspect half the fun of writing such operas is the creation of unusual character appellations; a quick referral to the handy glossary reveals Ishop Heer, Encix, Kerris Urvancik, Rendo Theris, and Tel Clovis, among many others. Every character is clear and obvious; bad guys are hissable, good guys are noble. The alien race of Xayans are laughably spiritual and ludicrously naïve.

But again, it’s just fun. I won’t carry Hellhole in my soul as I do Dune, Brian Herbert and his co-writer Kevin J. Anderson are hardly maestros, but I never resented the time I took to read it. Call it a b-movie of a book, one of those films on TBS that you get sucked in to watching despite their obvious flaws. I loves me some Stanley Kubrick and Duncan Jones and Ridley Scott, but sometimes a Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay can be just the thing to wile away an afternoon. Or David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune, come to think of it.

VERDICT: MONKEY ENJOYS DESPITE HIMSELF (BAD MONKEY!)

The Silent Land (Doubleday, 2010)
by Graham Joyce

I had never heard of Graham Joyce, but I vaguely recall once perusing his novel Indigo, with an accompanying front-cover rave from Stephen King (a recommendation I can never again trust, thanks to his grossly over-enthusiastic blurbs on the covers of Bentley Little novels—man oh man, The Walking was just terrible). The Silent Land, however, comes with a rapturous blurb by geek god Jonathan Lethem, a writer whose shoes I am not worthy to lick. So in I dive, not knowing what to expect, keeping myself purposely vague on the plot details.

A short while later (the plot just zooms by), I emerge, unscarred but shaken and genuinely spooked. The Silent Land is hardly a genre-buster, but this atmospheric and ghostly little chiller is just the thing for a quiet night alone, with the wind howling outside for added oppression.

Zoe and Jake awaken early one morning during a ski vacation to get on the mountain before the tourists carve up the slopes. Trapped in an avalanche—a mightily effective piece of claustrophobic writing here, as Zoe struggles to right herself under hundreds of pounds of snow—the pair find their way back to the village to discover everyone gone. They wait for people to return, expecting that the town was evacuated as a precaution, but as the days stretch by it becomes apparent that something has gone drastically wrong.

Joyce is not exactly traversing new material here; Zoe and Jake’s predicament is the stuff of the Twilight Zone, two people trapped somehow outside of reality. There are echoes of King’s The Mist and The Langoliers in its construction, as well as the video game Silent Hill, although monumentally less gory. The Silent Land never crosses the road into outright horror, but Joyce can create a hauntingly evocative sense of despair and loneliness like few others.

Joyce is a craftsman, and while the structure may not be unique, the author layers on more than enough style to make the story his own. The Silent Land was recently nominated for the Shirley Jackson award, and it’s easy to understand why; Joyce shares with Jackson her marked economy of words and marvellous dexterity with mood. The Silent Land does not re-invent the wheel; the ultimate ending can be seen a mile away, being a staple of many similar entertainments, and this obviousness contributes to the slightly less-than-enthralling finale. It is a letdown to have the cards revealed, the magicians showing the trick, and having figured it out so easily.

Nevertheless, The Silent Land is a superior spook machine. Joyce has a canny grasp of characters and dialogue which raises the storyline from the merely weird to one that is greatly, enjoyably creepy. Read this one with the lights low, and a cat curled on your lap for company. As Zoe and Jake’s predicament unravels, you may find you’ll need the companionship as you check over your shoulder at every noise.

VERDICT: MONKEY REALLY LIKES

Sarah Court (ChiZine, 2010)
by Craig Davidson

You really are such magnificently grim bastards. Trashing utopias is how you party.

If Hellhole is entertainment for a lazy afternoon, and The Silent Land is a late evening’s ghost story, then Sarah Court is the book for two a.m., when your brain is tired and decides to play tricks on you. And if Jonathan Lethem’s praise of The Silent Land intrigued me, Sarah Court’s triumvirate of Peter Straub, Chuck Palahniuk, and Clive Barker grabbed me by the throat and demanded some attention, dammit!

Sarah Court, a series of five interweaving stories all set around a neighbourhood near Niagara Falls, is one strange little beastie. Craig Davidson has previously written a book of short stories and a novel, both set in and around the sport of boxing. Yet while boxing does make an appearance here, these tales are far different than I expected; gritty, moving, and often unpredictably eerie and horrific.

Translation: I loved Sarah Court, but I’d never want to live there.

Davidson’s stories are outwardly simple, only revealing layers of complexity when the other stories begin to overlap. There’s a father whose job it is to fish corpses from the river, and a son vainly trying to regain his glory as a stuntman. A doctor disgraced for uncertain reasons. A former boxer who now works as a high-end enforcer of the infamous American Express Black Card. A boy who thinks he’s Dracula. An unwilling powerlifter. A strange woman with a revolving door for foster children.

And through every tale, there are hints of unnamable corruption, usually in the guise of animals or elements of the corporeal body, reminding me of nothing so much as filmmaker David Lynch and his genius at creating unclassifiable dread. Red spider mites teem in a deer’s eyes, “so many as to give the impression it’s weeping blood.” A can of paint has “the hue of diseased organ meat.” Squirrels abound in Sarah Court, somehow playful yet harbingers of some interior evil a la the sinister owls in Lynch’s Twin Peaks. “The owls are not what they seem.” And in several tales there is the presence of a perplexing transparent box holding “a squirming mass the size of a medicine ball.”

While Davidson wreaks some sinister havoc on his characters, there is a grounding in reality that keeps Sarah Court from becoming weird for weird’s sake. There is an outlying supernatural element, but Davidson’s horror is far more the horror of character, of people causing unconscious destruction through their own ill-conceived desires. No resident of Sarah Court gets off unscathed; there are emotional cripplings, physical disfigurements, and mental implosions. There is also good, a desire to rise above the fray, making the climax of each story almost overpowering in each person’s sad realizations of their weaknesses.

Sarah Court is a startling, often brilliant collection, further proof that publisher ChiZine is the go-to publisher for unsurpassable genre literature (even more proof: just began Gemma Files’ A Book of Tongues, and wow wow wow). Mr. Davidson’s neighbourhood has never seen a beautiful day in its life, and I do not want to be a neighbour. However, I will walk its streets from time to time, whistling in the dark to keep the demons at bay. And watching for squirrels.

VERDICT: MONKEY FREAKIN’ LOVES

Monkey droppings - Room, by Emma Donoghue

2011-04-03T12:36:00.014-04:00

The monkey does not like being held captive.

Monkeys should be free, not caged.

However, the monkey does enjoy free meals, so he's torn.

Room (HarperCollins, 2010)
by Emma Donaghue

While Bath is running, Ma gets Labyrinth and Fort down from on top of Wardrobe. We've been making Labyrinth since I was two, she's all toilet roll insides taped together in tunnels that twist lots of ways. Bouncy Ball loves to get lost in Labyrinth and hide, I have to call out to him and shake her and turn her sideways and upside down before he rolls out, whew . . . Fort's made of can and vitamin bottles, we build him bigger every time we have an empty. Fort can see all ways, he squirts out boiling oil at the enemies, they don't know about his secret knife-slits, ha ha. I'd like to bring him into Bath to be an island but Ma says the water would make his tape unsticky.

By now, there really is little point in reviewing Room, Emma Donoghue's internationally best-selling novel shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (among others). Its high-concept subject matter assured attention, its pedigree assured quality, and its ultimate content assured that Room will be a staple of book clubs for years to come.

With all that, my knee-jerk reaction was to hate it. Nothing breeds reflexive contempt like massive success, which Room has in abundance. I am fairly surprised that there hasn't yet been a Life of Pi-like backlash, although I am sure that it's coming.

NOTE: And bite it, naysayers, Life of Pi is a damn fine novel, probably one of my top ten for the first decade of the century.

So it comes with no little sense of relief that I report Room to be, in all aspects, fully deserving of its acclaim. From the first page, Donoghue won me over with a superbly-examined portrait of a young boy caught up in horrendous circumstances, and a mother determined to keep her son safe from a reality almost impossible to imagine. Believe me, I'm as surprised as anyone to care for Room so deeply, as I fully predict an Oprah endorsement, if she's still doing that sort of thing.

Based thematically on real-life events too gruesome and upsetting to mention here (so I'll just point out a wikipedia article here), Room concerns the never-named Ma and her five-year-old son Jack. As Jack narrates the tale (in a manner obviously too advanced for any five-year-old, but never mind, we have to take some literary liberties, and besides, Donoghue's depiction of his mind-set is wonderfully original and astute), we discover that they have lived in an eleven-foot square room for the entirety of his life. For Jack, life is the room, what exists within the room, and the television which shows life beyond, but which Ma assures him is not real in the slightest. Anything they require comes from Old Nick, a (to Jack) foreboding father figure who brings what he and Ma need, if it suits him to do so. It becomes quickly apparent that Ma has been kidnapped, Jack was born in captivity after Old Nick had raped Ma, and she has done her utmost to protect Jack from the reality that there is an entire world outside the walls that he can never see. In this, Room is thematically similar to Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, about a father's desperate attempts to shield the horrors of the holocaust from his son by telling him that the death camp they reside in is really a game.

For Jack, alone with Ma and shielded from Old Nick, life is nothing but a festive routine:

We do Bowling with Bouncy Ball and Wordy Ball, and knock down vitamin bottles that we put different heads on when I was four, like Dragon and Alien and Princess and Crocodile, I win the most. I practice my adding and subtracting and sequences and multiplying and dividing and writing down the biggest numbers there are. Ma sews me two new puppets out of little socks from when I was a baby, they've got smiles of stitches and all different button eyes.

It is startling how readable Room is considering its intensely unsettling subject matter. I had steeled myself for a gut-wrenching tale of horror (how could it be anything but?), but Donoghue subverts expectations through placing her tale in Jack's hands. Through his eyes, what is horrific to consider becomes a day-to-day normality, and while Donoghue does not shy away from Jack and Ma's circumstances, her insistence in grounding the tale in Jack's limited perspective keeps Room from becoming a claustrophobic tale of horror, and her immaculate skill keeps the story from eroding into a Flowers in the Attic clone (wow, I just made myself shudder at the prospect).

It is not giving away anything (besides, every other review has done so) to reveal that Jack and Ma do indeed escape, and that half the book takes place outside of Room, as Jack adjusts himself to a world he never considered possible. As the two become unwilling celebrities, Donoghue allows herself some pointed barbs at media hysteria over such cases, especially in a pointed exchange between Ma and an over-zealous interviewer. As the interviewer keeps pushing for the triumph-over-adversity angle, and how brave it was for Ma to keep Jack despite his brutal conception story, she plays at being dismayed that Ma had breast-fed Jack for the entirety of their captivity. As Ma says, "In this whole story, that’s the shocking detail?"

As Jack comes to grips with the concept that his life has been an entire lie (There are other people? Animals actually exist?), the author arguably lays it on a little thick, and the tale threatens to become repetitive. Jack's befuddlement and sometimes outright terror at the new reality is clear and vividly drawn, but the constant predictability at his responses hinders the narrative. Perhaps it is because the first half of the novel was a completely alien terrain to the reader, but the second half suffers from a slight case of obviousness. Yet Donoghue keeps throwing left hooks where you least expect it, keeping the story building to its inevitable conclusion.

At its core, Room is about the mother-child dynamic, about love and trust, and the lengths we go to protect those we care about most. Emma Donoghue has indeed crafted a memorable novel fully deserving of its praise. Its themes are identifiable to most readers, its concept is gripping from the get-go, but what pushes it out over the top is that that Donoghue is just so fine a writer. She is a magician of character and nuance, and makes Room a special treat.

VERDICT: MONKEY DAMN NEAR LOVES

Monkey droppings: The Good, the innocuous, and the ugly

2011-03-09T19:20:00.012-05:00

The monkey's done a lot of 'high lit' reading lately.

Time to go genre, clear the palate, get some junk food.

Healthy, well-regarded junk food.

Subway, not Arby's.

Three reviews, hot and fresh and ready for the table. One good, one innocuous (bad seemed too harsh), and one ugly (think Hollywood-ugly, not ugly-ugly).

THE GOOD

Lanceheim (HarperCollins, 2010)
by Tim Davys

"Without doubt, faith is worth nothing."

In 2009, Tim Davys (a pseudonym) released the English translation version of Amberville, the first in what I have now discovered to be the Mollisan Town quartet. It was a hardboiled noir dealing with issues of faith, death, fate, and existence. It was also populated exclusively by stuffed animals, automatically appealing to a strange side of me that enjoys unique literary examples of anthropomorphization (Hello, Winkie! Hello, Hal Jam!).

I loved Amberville, and tore into its sequel Lanceheim with gusto, expecting another tale of Eddie Bear and his investigatory exploits. Imagine my surprise (and later delight) at finding Lanceheim to be an entirely different beast, set in another section of Mollisan Town (segmented into the quarters of Amberville, Lanceheim, Tourquai, and Yok), this time not a detective noir but a parable, a play on the Christ mythology that takes on many of the same themes of Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ yet plays them far more intriguingly (and I really enjoyed Scoundrel Christ).

Lanceheim follows two separate narrative paths: on one, the reader follows Reuben Walrus, a famed composer seeking a miracle following a diagnosis of quickly oncoming deafness; on the other, a fellow named Wolf Diaz recounts his life as friend and later servant to Maximilian, a strange stuffed animal with unusual powers and a gift for speaking in obtuse parables. As in Amberville, the residents of the city live in fear of death, or in this case, "the Chauffeurs," dark figures who arrive without warning and remove stuffed animals who have reached the end of their lives. New residents are manufactured by Magnus, their (for lack of a better word) god, and Maximilian, with his charisma and lack of guile, is starting to threaten the religious hierarchy that uses fear of Magnus to keep the populace of Mollisan Town in check.

"I intend to create a Retinue," said Chaffinch, "which is neither afraid to believe nor to listen. The stuffed animals in this city are suffering. You know that, Wolf, you know it well - the terrified pursuit of success and material happiness that never has an end. Weighed down by the dogmas of the church. The thought of the Chauffeurs, and that they might come any day whatsoever. Stuffed animals are to be pitied. And if we can give them solace, we must do so. If ten stuffed animals can repeat what I say, what Maximillian has taught us, we are ten times more effective."

Davys comes across heavy-handed at times, more so than Amberville, and oftentimes Lanceheim falls prey to speechifying to get its point across. Yet again, Davys uses the conceit of a world of stuffed animals to bring forth serious questions of faith, dogma, and politics that would weigh down more realistic portrayals. Lanceheim is a less satisfactory novel than Amberville, too episodic, but it still retains a startling power, particularly in its remarkable twists near the end. I look forward to the next novel Tourquai with particular delight.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT

THE INNOCUOUS

The Good Fairies of New York (Soft Skull Press, 2006)
by Martin Millar

"Right, you two," said Dinnie, stomping back into the room. "get out of here immediately and don't come back."

"What's the matter with you?" demanded Heather, shaking her golden hair. "Humans are supposed to be pleased, delighted and honored when they meet a fairy. They jump about going, 'A fairy, a fairy!' and laugh with pleasure. They don't demand they get out of their room immediately and don't come back."

"Well, welcome to New York," snarled Dinnie. "Now beat it."

Ah, whimsy. So easy to get tired of.

That's not fair, but sustaining whimsy over 200+ pages is hard. Far better if you taint your whimsy (yikes, now there's a sentence I've never typed before) with a healthy dapple of cynicism a la Vonnegut, or a dose of giddy mean-spiritedness a la Douglas Adams. You need balance, take the salt with the sweet.

Martin Millar almost pulls it off with The Good Fairies of New York. The cult urban fantasist (his Lonely Werewolf Girl sound likes a good time) sprinkles whimsy all throughout his tale of misplaced fairies making their way in the unScotlandlike boroughs of New York, but makes sure to add rude jokes, violence, obscenities, and various naughty bits to keep his ethereal heroines grounded in filthy reality. And it's fun, but too slight to resonate after completion.

The Good Fairies are Heather and Morag, thrown out of Scotland for inadvertently desecrating a fairy clan's sacred banner. Heather takes room with the disconcertingly awful Dinnie, "an overweight enemy of humanity [and] the worst violinist in New York," while Morag moves in across the street with Kerry, a free spirit suffering from Crohn's disease and attempting to complete a flower alphabet for a Community Arts award. There are also rock 'n' roll ghosts, Italian fairies, Chinese fairies, an awful version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, mythic flowers, horrible fiddle-playing, homeless people, and more subplots and diversions than you can shake a wand at.

It's all handled with a fair amount of aplomb; Millar is an amiable storyteller, and at its best Good Fairies reads like Neil Gaiman-lite, or a more sedate Terry Pratchett. But the story structure and its constant narrative momentum leave every character a cipher; I wanted to grow to like Dinnie, I understood that Kerry was adorable, but never did I actually appreciate them beyond their postings as serviceable plot movers. I can see that Millar is a talented fantasist, and I look forward to revisiting his imagination, but The Good Fairies is only diverting, too flimsy a tale to last.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES, BUT ONLY SO FAR AS THAT GOES

THE UGLY

The Fall (HarperCollins, 2010)
by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

Well, 'ugly' might be overstating it. The Fall is fairly entertaining. But these vampires, man, they is ugly.

The direct sequel to last year's The Strain, The Fall is part two in author Chuck Hogan's and director Guillermo del Toro's Strain Trilogy, about a vampire epidemic taking over the world. In this world, vampires ain't the usual vaguely European dandies in capes, they are virus-laden monsters with a six-foot stinger that extends from their throats to grab and infect any person unlucky enough to be nearby. Continuing from the previous instalment, we join our hardy gang of vampire killers (including an epidemiologist, his young son, an elderly vampire hunter, and a New York exterminator who takes to monster slaying with ease) as they hunt down the Master, the one rogue vampire responsible for an outbreak which shows every possibility of destroying mankind permanently. Or at least moving us substantially down the food chain.

The authors tell their story well, jumping from attack to attack, but as with The Strain, the real problem is a lack of actual scares. The vampires lack personality, and the story moves forward so rapidly that there is no time to learn to empathize with the heroes. What we get is a fast-paced Hollywood monster movie from two men who should know better. Del Toro knows his monsters (Cronos, Mimic, Hellboy) but as he proved with Pan's Labyrinth, he can provide depth to join with his imagination to result in something truly spellbinding and wonderful (side note: del Toro's finally giving up on his adaptation of The Hobbit is likely a great loss to filmgoers, and his recent troubles in getting a Tom Cruise-starring adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness is a personal grievance). Hogan, in Prince of Thieves, proved himself an able craftsman who can weld interesting characters onto classic action scenarios. Working together, the result should be a near-classic, and its managing to be merely entertaining is a severe disappointment. I'm not turned off enough to not look for the finale in 2011, but The Fall is a wasted opportunity, a lark by two talents slumming it.

VERDICT: MONKEY THINKS IT'LL DO UNTIL THE NEXT DIVERSION, HEY, SOMETHING SHINY!

hidden monkey - Because I Have Loved and Hidden It, by Elise Moser

2011-03-01T16:51:00.009-05:00

Today, a new monkey joins the shelves. The hidden monkey.

Or hidden book, if you will. The book that, for one reason or another, never got the attention it desired (leastwise, from the shelf monkey).

Which, of course, goes for most books. But since blogging is largely subjective, I'll allow myself the power to decide what precisely constitutes a hidden monkey.

These will be short, pithy reviews, because sometimes, my longwindedness overwhelms me.

Today's debut instalment:

Because I Have Loved and Hidden It (Cormorant Books, 2009)
by Elise Moser

the hidden monkey plot: Julia is a fortyish woman whose mother has just passed away. At the funeral, her Uncle Paul reveals a startling revelation about her past, one that her mother has kept hidden away until now. In a parallel plotline, Julia's married lover Nicholas has gone missing, and as she strikes up an unlikely friendship with his wife, Julia finds herself becoming unmoored from the life she thought she knew.

why is this monkey hidden? It is a fact of literary life that sometimes (hell, most times), despite glowing reviews, quality books deserving of love fall between the cracks. Until I had cause to meet the author Elise Moser in person, I had never heard of Because I Have Loved at all.

what does the shelf monkey think? Because I Have Loved and Hidden It is gloriously lush and sensual, a deeply passionate examination of one woman's spiritual rebirth, if that isn't too hackneyed and overused a phrase. Moser displays a raw carnality that is refreshing, never playing coy but giving full force to the emotional erruptions Julia faces. The plot description may seem the stuff of soap operas, but Moser is a gifted storyteller, bringing Julia to life with delicate notes that enbue her with emotional realism. There are a few jarring moments - references to The X-Files and other popular entertainments are at odds with the subtlety of Moser's prose - but overall this is a sterling novel, one to be savoured.

hidden monkey verdict: this monkey deserves to come out of the shadows.

Monkey droppings - The Guardians, by Andrew Pyper: "No such thing as an empty house."

2011-02-20T09:03:00.016-05:00

The monkey fears nothing!

'Nothing' as in an absence. A void. An empty space. Blackness.

Man, does the monkey fear nothing.

The Guardians (2011, Doubleday Canada)
by Andrew Pyper

It's really difficult to write about a horror novel without somehow mentioning Stephen King. You can't escape his influence, even if you want to. If a writer were to pen a horror novel without any foreknowledge of King's oeuvre, I'd still lay odds that there would be a comparison somewhere.

This isn't necessarily a bad outcome. It's no small thing to be compared to someone who single-handedly changed the way people looked at horror fiction. And when you write as King does (obsessively, compulsively) and publish as many books as he has, you're bound to cover pretty much every theme in the book.

King has his standbys, of course. He loves small towns. He luxuriates in the theme of past horrors rising back to the surface. He often puts children at risk in some way.

So when you write a novel about men returning to their hometown to confront an evil which scarred them as children, a Stephen King comparison is a fait accompli. All you can do is hope it's favourable.

Andrew Pyper, who has been Canada's best pure thriller writer for quite some time now (Lost Girls, his debut, is a marvel of sustained atmosphere), is finally getting some recognition beyond the critical. His last novel The Killing Circle was a treat and a half, a moody and introspective serial killer piece that also functioned as a sly critique of authors and pop culture journalism. His newest, The Guardians, has been appearing on best-seller lists since its release.

And no wonder; with its canny mixture of nostalgia, personality, and frights, The Guardians is a superior haunted house story, with echoes of the best of Peter Straub and Shirley Jackson.

And yes, it wields the traits of Stephen King, particularly in the precisely hewn township that Pyper sets his tale in. Rather than King's Derry or Castle Rock, Pyper crafts into existence the small, nicely forbiddingly named Ontario town of Grimshaw, a splendidly articulated burg that Pyper could easily revisit with other stories should he wish a la King.

It was thought, when they built the four lanes running west between Toronto and the border of Detroit a couple years before I was born, that the highway's proximity to Grimshaw would lend new purpose to what was before then not much other than a service town for the country's farmers. But there was no more reason to take the Grimshaw exit than there had previously been to limp in its direction on the old, rutted two-lane. Like many of the communities its size on the broad arrowhead of farmland stuck between the Great Lakes, it remained a forgotten place. Never industrial enough to be outright abandoned in the way of the ghost towns of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, but not alert enough to attempt re-invention. Grimshaw was content to merely hang one, to take a subdued pride in its century homes on tree-lined streets, the stained facades of its Victorian storefronts, its daughters or sons who met with success upon moving away. Now, entering it as a stranger, one might see a gothic charm in the wilful oldness of the place, its loyalty to the vine-covered, the paint-peeled. But for those who grew up here, it was only as it had always been.

As it is with all small towns, there is one house that somehow seems a little off, a little psychically skewed; "not sane," as Jackson put her Hill House. In Grimshaw, it is the Thurman house, decrepit yet always there, eternal, only in place to become the stuff of nightmares for children; "the Thurman house never allowed itself to be observed without a corresponding price."

The tale is narrated by Trevor, a middle-aged man suffering the beginning stages of Parkinson's Disease. Twenty-odd years ago, he and three friends, Ben, Randy, and Carl - the guardians of the title, and players on the local hockey team The Grimshaw Guardians - found their own shared nightmare within the walls of the house, a nightmare partly of the own devising when they decided to find out what had happened to a missing music teacher. Now, Ben, the only one to remain in Grimshaw, is dead by his own hand, and when the three Guardians return for the funeral, they find that they have never outrun their past.

Many haunted house novels (the good ones, anyway, the ones that stay with you long after you've closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and checked under your bed before you dared go to sleep) are not only about the house itself, but rather use the supernatural manifestations and ghostly goings-on as metaphor for larger issues. King's The Shining, with the never-surpassed ghastliness of the Overlook Hotel (thank you Kubrick for the ideal cinematic manifestation of its evil), is a novel about the dissolution of family through addiction. Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House addresses repression, Dan Simmons' The Summer of Night, the end of childhood. There are other themes present, of course, but I'm generalizing for the sake of brevity. And I'm lazy, there I said it.

In its dual structure of the present-day narration of Trevor and the past brought to life through his recorded "memory diary," The Guardians addresses the theme of masculinity, of what it is to 'be a man.' Much of the boyhood trauma which occurs (and no spoilers here, I assure you) requires the boys to take definitive steps toward a maturity they are arguably unprepared to take. In the present, we see said masculinity present in the mid-life crises of the men: Trevor, unable to commit and facing a slow decline into immobility; Randy, failed actor; and Carl, the saddest of them, vanished in a haze of dangerous activities.

All this may make it seem as if The Guardians is a ponderous slog though subtext, but Pyper keeps the story zipping along with verve. He does make the odd stumble - the main female character seems a bit too good to be true - but he displays, once again, a canny knack for characterization that feels warm and identifiable, an ability to put fully recognizable and sympathetic characters into great peril.

Pyper also understands the mechanics of the haunted house itself, the classic theory that such places are less haunted than they are psychic mirrors feeding off their inhabitants.

Within what was probably less than three minutes, I slid from the heights of fear to boredom. This is what a haunted house was: a place where nothing happens, so you have to make something up. It's the same impulse that makes us tell lies to a stranger sitting next to us on a plane, or pushes the planchette over a Ouija board to make it spell you dead cousin's name.

And when the horror comes, it is subtle and spooky and shivery in all the right places. Ghosts do indeed roam the halls of the Thurman house, ghosts that ache with past transgressions. Pyper never lets the story get gory, playing instead with mood to create the Thurman house as a dark and twisted place. "Touching the boy was like touching the inside of a scream," is a delicious sentence I'll remember for a long time.

Not that there's anything wrong with gore, lest you think me a prude: Richard Matheson's Hell House is a treasure trove of unsubtle, full-throttle gruesomeness.

I started this review with Stephen King, let me end with him. In his excellent treatise Danse Macabre, King lays out the three levels of literary fear. First is terror, which shows nothing but taps into the darkest recesses of the mind. Second is horror, a little lesser on the scale, scary to think about and usually contains a more visceral element. Lastly, there's revulsion, or in King's terminology, "the gross-out." Andrew Pyper's novel The Guardians never stoops to the gross-out, dabbles in the horror, and works mainly with terror, which makes it a top-notch horror novel, and a damned fine story whatever the genre.

VERDICT: MONKEY REALLY LIKES

Monkey droppings - Michael Van Rooy

2011-02-13T10:23:00.015-05:00

The monkey has no jokes today.

An Ordinary Decent Criminal (Turnstone, 2005)
by Michael Van Rooy

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal (Turnstone), 2008)
by Michael Van Rooy

"You do the math. If you're a bad guy, you don't have a job, no bank account, no apartment. You live in hotels, move around a lot, eat in restaurants. But not expensive hotels because you might be noticed in those and you'll need ID . . . You need maybe sixty bucks a day for food and a little more than that for the hotel and maybe another thirty to fifty for incidentals . . . That's about one-eighty each day. Life gets stressful, though, so you start doing a little something to deal with the stress. If you drink or do grass to level you out, that's another twenty or forty per day. But you can't be level all the time, you might have to move fast so that means keeping cocaine or crank or meth handy, and that's another fifty to one hundred a day and that's if you don't have friends. That's a total of about three Cs per day. Every day. That means two grand one per week, or eight grand four per month, and that means one hundred and nine thousand, two hundred dollars per year. Period."

Michael Van Rooy was a Winnipeg author who passed away far too soon in January 2011. Michael was an author much beloved in the Winnipeg community; his first novel won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, he won the 2009 John Hirsch Award for most promising writer, he worked with emerging writers, he served on several Arts boards and was named one of Winnipeg's arts ambassadors for its 2010 Cultural Capital of Canada campaign.

I never got a chance to get to know Michael; we were Facebook 'friends' brought together through mutual interests, and only last December did I have the opportunity to meet Michael in person. He was signing copies of his books at a Coles bookstore in Winnipeg, and I was fortuitously visiting my family for the holidays. I stopped by to do the old one author to another appreciation bit, and we chatted for twenty minutes or so. I found Michael to be a warm and approachable sort, and I thought to myself that were I to ever return to Winnipeg for a long-term stay, Michael would be a person I would very much enjoy hanging out with.

Even in that brief space of time, I could tell that Michael was a man passionate about his profession. He gave me a few pointers on how to better pitch a few novelists I represent to Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers' Festival. We discussed our mutual work, my still-in-editing second novel and his ongoing series of crime novels, which had just been picked up for release in the States by Minotaur Books. I left with signed copies of his first two novels and a promise to keep in touch.

And the books sat on my shelves for a brief time while I attended to the many other things that takes up the daily routines of life. And then Michael suddenly passed away, at the age of forty-two, while on tour for his latest release A Criminal to Remember.

I didn't know how to feel about it all. I still don't. We were not close in any way, but I keenly felt the loss of an author whom it appeared was on the cusp of bigger things. And so I honoured his memory in the only way I could; I sat down with his first novel An Ordinary Decent Criminal and began to read.

And now, with two books read and only one left to purchase, his loss is even more personal. Michael Van Rooy was a real talent, his novels bursting with wit, bravado, and style. That we get only three Monty Haaviko novels to remember him by is, quite frankly, not nearly enough, and not fair.

Both An Ordinary Decent Criminal and Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal concern the ongoing exploits of Montgomery "Monty" Haaviko, an ex-con with a seriously cruel past that Van Rooy thankfully keeps all but hidden. As Decent Criminal opens, Monty has changed his name and moved his family to Winnipeg, Manitoba, hoping to give them all a fresh start.

Doubtful. From the opening sentence, "I had a gun I didn't want to use," it is clear that Monty may yearn for the quiet life, but the quiet life doesn't want him. In its first four pages, Monty has killed three intruders to his new home, and Van Rooy has provided not only an attention-grabbing start but the groundwork for a defiantly appealing hero/anti-hero. Monty may view himself as a simple ODC ("ordinary decent criminal"), but as Van Rooy's story revs up, it becomes abundantly clear that Monty, no matter his current intentions, was never ordinary.

"I used to be bad. Now I'm not."

Throughout Decent Criminal's narrative, we see that the odds are stacked up against him at every turn. The three men he killed had connections to a local crime figure who has a personal stake in seeing Monty punished for defending himself and his family. Detective Sergeant Enzio Walsh has figured out Monty's past, and has made it his personal vendetta to destroy Monty by any means necessary. And Monty's new neighbourhood is hardly accepting of Monty and his family, particularly after Walsh begins a not so discreet campaign of slander against him. But Monty is not alone: his wife Claire is supportive, nurturing, but realistic about erasing Monty's past; his son Fred is still in diapers; and his dog Renfield is, well, a dog. Yet without them, Monty would be another lost soul

No reader would blame Monty for retaliation, and part of the many delights of An Ordinary Decent Criminal is Monty's ingenious manner of getting even. Monty may come across as a kind and accepting person, but hidden deep within his soul are immense reservoirs of cruelty and slyness that would make Mickey Spillane blush. His American publisher hypes Monty as akin to the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child, of which I am not familiar. For me, Monty is part MacGyver and part Burke, the one-name hero of Andrew Vachss' series of crime thrillers. But where Burke is grim, humourless, and skirting parody at all times (a line Vachss frequently crossed as the series grew more and more ludicrous, albeit entertainingly so), Monty has a way of finding the lighter side of things, even when he's being beaten into unconsciousness. Van Rooy's novel would not work half as well if Monty didn't have real charisma to help make some of the things he does more palatable to the reader. Because when Monty gets serious, he gets mean, and Van Rooy's balancing act of the two sides of Haaviko is a remarkable feat of writing, particularly when Monty gets very, very angry:

He looked hard and drug-fueled rage opened and closed his mouth until I pressed the barrel of the Colt .22 into his eye and he backed up, and then pressed some more until he backed and finally stopped when he hit the institutional grey wall.

"Stay out of my way or you die. Stay away from my family or you die. If you interfere with me, you die. You try to do anything that affects me personally in even the smallest way and you die."

With each word I jabbed a little harder into Robillard's eye and then I stopped and headed up the stairs. At the top I booked it down the alley, stopping for a second to open the hood and tear a handful of wires loose from Sandra's car. A few alleys over, I wiped down the three guns on a piece of canvas sticking out of a garbage can and dropped them one at a time into trash cans and down sewer gratings.

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal finds Monty in a slightly better, if offbeat, place. His wife Claire has found employment as a realtor, leaving Monty to run a daycare centre for local children in his home. Monty is more realistic now about finding real work on a legal level, but he figures that some laws can be bent for a greater good. And as must happen in such novels, if the hero won't go to trouble, trouble must come to the hero. In rapid succession, Monty finds a lucrative side career helping refugees cross into Canada, falls afoul of a criminal figure with eyes on using his unique route past border guards for more criminal-oriented enterprises, and comes back into contact with Smiley Wiebe, a former cellmate who wants instruction on going straight.

It is common knowledge that Michael did time in prison himself for armed robbery, a crime he always denied. I cannot attest to the truth of it, but his experiences undoubtedly helped infuse his writings with a tone of authenticity often lacking in similar tomes. Van Rooy has an eye for detail, both in the minute elements that go into Monty's plans and in the viciousness of his fight and actions sequences that, when they come, are clear, visceral, and riveting. Whether they are completely factual or not is not something I can prove; however, they feel real, which for a crime writer is high praise.

Beyond the authenticity of his research, in only two novels Michael Van Rooy proved himself as a great creator of character. Beyond Monty himself, the various people who populate the underbelly of Van Rooy's Winnipeg - and as an aside, a gritty crime novel in Winnipeg? Awesome. - are some vivid and intense personages indeed. His criminals are memorable, sketched somewhat broadly yet always with enough style to give them some personality. Only Claire remains somewhat a cypher, a woman of grit and substance who keeps Monty focused on his family even as he hangs out with decidedly unpleasant denizens of his past. Claire is an idealized character, too perfect by half for the life Monty lives, but there is enough of a character present to hint that there might once have been bigger plans for revealing her past in future novels.

Such rough patches aside, Michael Van Rooy was an author whose work, already accomplished, hinted at a career that was poised to take him to the next level of crime writers. His first two novels alternate between weirdly humourous and punishingly grim, mixing pulp with class, clearly marking his talent as approaching those who populate the higher echelons on the genre such as Vachss, Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. The loss of Michael Van Rooy is a huge blow, both to the writing community to which he contributed so much of his time and energy, and to Canadian Literature.

Michael, we miss you.

Monkey droppings - Verbatim by Jeff Bursey

2011-01-29T17:09:00.009-05:00

The monkey craves political comedy.

But The Daily Show is on too late, The Colbert Report on even later, The Rick Mercer Report is not as clever as it thinks, and This Hour has 22 Minutes ain't nowhere near what it used to be.

And in a world where Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are political icons, isn't satire dead already?

Verbatim (Enfield & Wizenty, 2010)
by Jeff Bursey

We are not here to make politicians sound like tramps or the average person. We are here to uphold the stability of decorum and the dignity of the house, which comes from the Mother Parliament in England, and is an institution worth preserving, not one to be torn apart. The road we are on is wrong! It leads to a mockery of an institution and degrades the Members.

In a former life, I attended law school for three terrifyingly long/remarkably speedy years. During my tenure as student, I had opportunity to peruse the many legal resources available to Canadians. Dominion Law Reports. The Canadian Abridgement. Black's Law Dictionary. And of course, Hansard, the written accounts of parliamentary debates. And once I looked in, I never wanted to return.

Reading Hansard is a slog (although recent electronic advancements have made it slightly easier to search). I did whatever I could to never need visit its pages. It is an invaluable resource; it is also dreadfully dull. Just my opinion, is all. I pity the person whose job it is to transcribe and edit the speeches, complaints, grandstanding, and just general mental meanderings of these woefully verbose Canadian politicians.

In other words, I pity Jeff Bursey.

Bursey has, going by his official biography, worked for Hansard for seventeen years, as transcriber and editor. It only seems fitting that his debut novel Verbatim have Hansard as its subject. Write what you know, you know? However, if Verbatim proves anything, it's that prolonged exposure to Hansard permanently skews the way you see the world. I mean, what if this is all Bursey can write? The poor man must suffer so, his life doomed to reinterpreting every thought through his editorial prowess.

That's a joke (I'm sure Bursey is inherently sane and pleasant), but not a huge one. Verbatim, written mainly in the form of actual Hansard transcripts, is a political satire so dead-on in tone and presentation it's almost indistinguishable from the real thing. I am sure whole segments of Bursey's imaginings could be dropped into actual Hansard pages with little to no disruption. It is a bold choice, and a commendable achievement, but it's also a flaw, as I'll explain.

Verbatim, set in an unnamed Canadian province sometime in the 1990s, is presented on the pages as actual transcriptions of parliamentary sessions (click here for an actual Hansard example: the presentation is exact in every detail). In this province, the Alliance Party and the Social Progressive battle for supremacy, each member giving lip service to their constituents, each primarily concerned with attacking the other's policies and credibility. Interspersed between sessions are letters between the new Director of Hansard, his staff, and the Clerk of the Court, outlining the day-to-day developments in renovating Hansard editorial policies to more accurately represent the speech and content of parliamentary members. In other words, to make them sound like sensible, rational people, not the easiest task in the world. And as the new Hansard policies are implemented, it becomes more and more obvious that the province is run by, for lack of a better word, sub-literates. And we, correspondingly, are implicitly to blame.

Bursey's reproduction of speech patterns and over-the-top hyperbole of Canadian parliament filtered through the arcane editorial processes of Hansard is note-perfect (I particularly love that, as in real life Hansard transcripts, bits of random hubbub by members are reported as "Some Hon. Members: Oh! Oh!" and "Some Hon. Members: Resign! Resign!"). As the members of each party repeatedly attack and mock the other, the statements prove that Parliament is, like most institutions, hardly a step above an elementary school in pettiness, vindictiveness, wilful blindness, purposeful obtuseness, and one-upmanship. As Bursey writes it, there are big, important issues out there, but when Parliament is in session, he who shouts the loudest and longest wins. This is hardly a new idea, but Bursey's inventiveness and integrity to the style and cause of his satire breathes new life into a stale theme. The epigraph by Wyndham Lewis is instructive: "Should we describe it as Satire (merely because it does not refine the truth?) or should we call it realism?" Bursey's satire is well-nigh indistinguishable from the real thing.

Indeed, Verbatim is such intensively perfect rendition of Hansard that it inadvertently falls prey to my own issue with Hansard; it can be frustratingly hard to read. This is not satire that may be read as a novel, in its more usual storytelling form. There are no characters, and members are interchangeable. This is as it should be, of course, showing us that good intentions and integrity mean nothing when the game of politics is at play. Yet I cannot deny that, as the book goes on and the attacks become louder and louder until the clamour of idiocy can almost be heard through the ink on the page, the satire becomes wearisome.

Verbatim is a book is easier to admire than it is to enjoy; just in the writing of this, I've realized that my appreciation of Bursey's accomplishment is far deeper than I first suspected. Bursey stuck to his guns on its form and narrative style, and should be applauded for the result (and it was not an easy book to get to press: click here for a story concerning one of its past publishing upheavals). His presentation is perfect, the comedy subtle yet deep (with a few broad jibes thrown in). Verbatim is not an easy book to digest, and I fear its challenging nature will turn off potential readers; it is, however, damned fine at points, and overall deeply worthwhile.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES

Monkey droppings - The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark by Christopher Meades: For the want of a plum. . .

2011-01-17T18:19:00.010-05:00

The monkey's been doing some heavy reading lately.

Literary heavyweights. Thick tomes of grand themes and ambition.

The monkey needs a beer and something decidedly lighter, just to take the edge off.

The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark (ECW Press, 2010)
by Christopher Meades

He was neither young nor old, weak nor strong; not fat enough to be obese, but chubby enough that parts of his sides folded over onto the seat next to him on the bus. He smelled a little, but his musty odor - part mildew, part inside-of-a-reptile-cage - wasn't particularly malicious and rarely did it cause great offense. Henrik had no interesting stories to tell. He'd never run through the streets in the middle of the night in a desperate search for condoms or had a girlfriend force him into a sunflower costume for Halloween. In fact, he'd never had a romantic relationship of any kind. Henrik had lived his entire forty-two years in complete obscurity. He was the weed sprouting out of the wallflower; generic in his generality.

A good loser is hard to find. A great loser is a rare thing indeed.

To qualify that; loser's ain't hard to find, and even easier in literature. But a great loser - a hapless sort who somehow keeps you coming back for more, despite his or her countless faults and social inadequacies - that's a rare beast indeed. Off the top of my head, I would call out Ignatius J. Reilly, Holden Caulfield, the anonymous narrator of Fight Club, Lee Goodstone, and the nameless fact checker from Bright Lights Big City as being paragons of the species. You can't say that you'd enjoy being around them in person, but reading about them can be an exhilarating experience.

It's a fine line, however, maintaining interest and readability in a character that, in any normal situation, you would likely yawn in the face of, hide in the closet to avoid, or run screaming away from. Some clever wags have labelled this genre 'loser lit,' but you won't hear me call it that. James Patterson, now that's loser lit.

I'd be hard pressed, however, to come up with a bigger loser than Henrik Nordmark. A man of no means, no charisma, no distinguishing characteristics, no anything, Henrik is almost intolerably awful as a lead character.

Almost. Christopher Meades finds a way to combat Henrik's loathsome passivity with a breakneck approach to plotting that throws everything into the mix to see if it stick. And while the resulting novel The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark may not qualify as high literature, it certainly ranks as one of the goofier good times I've had with recent novels.

Three Fates is a novel of mistakes, accidents, and massive coincidence, all revolving around the black hole that is Henrik Nordmark. A forty-two year old security guard, Henrik has never in his entire life done anything remotely interesting. Yet on one fateful day, Henrik comes face-to-face with his own mortality. Dropping a plum during a grocery store visit, he chases the juicy orb outside and into the street, where his life is saved by a mysterious man in a full tuxedo. Recognizing how close he came to death, and how few people would be at his funeral, Henrik comes to a turning point in his life: "He would turn his life around. He would find something interesting about himself. He would become unique if it killed him."

As Henrik goes about trying to get himself recognized for something, anything - including very strange and whimsical slapstick forays into sexual deviance, drug use, unfocused rage, and clipping his toenails in public - other characters who have somehow fallen into his sphere of influence weave their own tales of misery. Roland is a business analyst who quits his job, mistakenly believing that he won the lottery. Bonnie and Clyde are a long-suffering married couple who each have been surreptitiously attempting to kill the other for months. And most oddly of all, a trio of extremely elderly assassins have been hired to kill Henrik, for reasons left obscure. In a way, the novel begins to resemble some of the early films of Jim Jarmusch and Richard Linklater, following characters as they criss-cross each other's paths, and Three Fates has a great deal of the shaggy charm of those low-budget gems.

This is not to imply that Three Fates is high art, but it is damned entertaining. Meades has a lovely bit of fun with dialogue, such as Henrik's meeting with an employment counsellor:

"I want to find a job that makes me unique."
"What's your previous occupation?"
"Security guard," Henrik said.
"Well that's not very unique at all. There are thousands of security guards out there."
"That's my point exactly. I need a job that, by definition, makes me unique."
The man in the green tie picked up the clipboard with the list of occupations. He scanned the sheet for the ones Henrik circled. "Let me see here. Aerospace Engineer. Professional Bodybuilder. Lactation Consultant. Do you have any expertise in these areas? Any aerospace training?"
"No, sir, I don't."
"Any weightlifting or bodybuilding skills?"
Henrik covered his pot belly with his arms. "No."
"What about this last one - Lactation Consultant? Do you have an actual proficiency in this area?"
"Actually," Henrik said, "I wasn't a hundred percent sure what that one was."

Meades keeps his many balls in the air, juggling from each plotline and back again, piling on the coincidences, keeping momentum even when the story veers into terrifically unbelievable proportions and the entire structure resembles a particularly intense game of Jenga. That the story begins to resemble the anarchic narratives of the Marx Brothers (by way of the Three Stooges) is a compliment. The three assassins and their escapades are certainly worthy of plaudits, and Roland's desperately silly dive into despair is marked with high style.

What keeps The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark from taking off and becoming more than a diversion (although an exceedingly funny one) is Henrik himself. Despite his top billing, Henrik is never more than caricature; he is clumsy when the plot calls for it, he is dense only to propel the plot forward, he is hapless beyond belief only because any believable character would have wised up far earlier than he. Henrik is a foil, a device, but he never becomes human. He's a good loser, not a great one. And Meades storytelling, as enjoyable as it is, isn't refined to the point where he can turn such an oblique character into something more substantial, nor is his style as relentlessly hilarious as the titans of comedic writing such as Douglas Adams and Robert Rankin.

But sometimes, all you want is silly, and The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark fits the bill. Meades shows definite talent, and I look forward to what his imagination unleashes next. The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark may not change your life, but sometimes that's not what I look for nor need. I don't want The English Patient all the time. Sometimes, I just want Happy Gilmore. And that's a compliment.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT

Monkey droppings - Drive-by Saviours by Chris Benjamin

2011-01-08T11:45:00.011-05:00

The monkey feels bad about things.

The monkey watches a movie about good people helping other people, where everybody hugs at the end after learning heartfelt lessons about something.

The monkey knows he should feel better, but somehow feels even worse. And dirty, like a kitchen rag squeezed dry after wiping up a spill.

Drive-by Saviours (2010)
by Chris Benjamin

If there is one genre of art almost guaranteed to raise hackles (mine, anyway), it's that of 'liberal guilt.'

You know the genre. There's a person who feels guilty, and takes it upon him or herself to somehow 'better' the life of someone less fortunate. When done wrong (and it has been done so, so wrong), it usually takes the form of overly-sentimentalized Hollywood hokum (The Blind Side, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, etc). The kind of movie, book, or television show that ends with the audience so damned pleased with themselves, feeling themselves better for having shed a tear for those plucky immigrants/inner-city students/sick kids. And please don't think ill of me, I promise this is not a conservative screed disguised as a book review; I'm as lefty as all get out, but I call shenanigans on such saccharine drivel.

The genre does have highlights, works that somehow transcend the genre with though, imagination, and a lack of bathos. Friday Night Lights, for example, presents realistic portrayals of all involved without over-varnishing of the travails of everyday life (and I hate football, so for me to watch it, it must be freakin' good). Dead Man Walking was a movie that could have gone wrong in so many ways, but gripped me from beginning to end. Half Nelson found a good balance.

My point? It's a fine line between writing a theme and bashing people over the head with it. And I should know; I mean, have you even read Shelf Monkey? Sledgehammer, baby.

Drive-by Saviours, by newbie author Chris Benjamin, skirts this line time and again. But through skill and subtlety of character, Benjamin for the most part pulls it off.

Drive-by tells in alternating chapters the stories of two men; Bumi, an Indonesian immigrant, and Mark, a Toronto social worker. Bumi's life has been one of hardship; brought up in the island of Rilaka, he is removed from his family to enter a newly-established residential school. Bumi is eager to learn, intelligent to a fault, but he suffers from variety of obsessive compulsive tics that make it difficult for him to concentrate, and earn him a reputation as a fairly strange man:

his incessant purification rituals that crossed the line toward self-abuse; his long morning routine of dressing, undressing, and redressing multiple times until he got it just right . . . His use of elbows and feet instead of hands, which were often protected in plastic bags; his strange and complex series of patterned twitches . . . his harassment of strangers as they passed on foot, writing down their names and purposes or fretting inconsolably if they refused to provide the information.

Through a series of mistakes and assumptions, Bumi is forced to flee for his life, leaving his family and taking up a life as an illegal immigrant in Canada.

Mark, on the other hand, is a fairly well-off Canadian with little in common with Bumi save a less than perfect childhood. His job as a social worker at a community health centre is undemanding, Mark writing up proposals and plans, seeing people less and less; his clients would "give me the Coles Notes version of all their problems and I made suggestions, like a drive-by saviour."

It doesn't take a genius to see that these two men will cross paths, and it's a tribute to Benjamin's talent as a writer that the trek to that point is almost sheer pleasure. Perhaps by necessity, Bumi's tale is far more interesting, and Benjamin pulls off the neat trick of taking a potentially dark tale and never succumbing to despair. Bumi's life is harsh, but the bleakness never overwhelms either Bumi or the reader. Mark's life, likely more familiar to the average North American reader, is more comfortable than Bumi's, but his life too is full of pitfalls and disappointments. Benjamin is working with a universal theme here, the idea that happiness comes from within, and it is how we strive against obstacles that defines us. It's a far more palatable motif than the aforementioned theme of 'let's help those who cannot help themselves and feel better about ourselves as a result.'

And when the two finally meet, not as social worker and client but as two figures on public transport, Benjamin takes great pains to avoid any clear-cut resolutions. Mark understands Bumi's dilemma, and recognizes his OCD, but such a revelation does not lead to triumphant resolution. Bumi appreciates Mark's efforts, but knows that his life in Canada is not the life he wishes.

At times, Drive-by Saviours veers perilously close to polemic, telling rather than showing, especially with regard to Mark's efforts to help Bumi, but Benjamin's novel only uses their relationship as an anchor to tell the stories of two sad and lonely men, each trying to find their place in the world. While it's a common theme, it's only as strong as the storyteller, and Benjamin proves himself a natural.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT

How to survive the holidays, with zombie hints

2010-12-30T10:35:00.002-05:00

Just a quick one today, with zombies AND holiday cheer. A twofer!

Monkey droppings - the year in review. Book-wise, anyway.

2010-12-16T18:43:00.013-05:00

Well, it's been a helluva year, hasn't it? Seems like every day there was a new travesty on the scene, whether it be physical, political, climatological, theological, sexual, ideological, scatological, or a mix of some or all of the above.

And we never did get Roy Scheider up into space to rescue Hal and the Discovery from their decaying orbit around Jupiter.

Something wonderful, indeed.

Myself? Busy year. New jobs to start, new books to edit. But I did manage to read a few books now and then, to take the edge off. And as this is a blogosphere, an electronic entity made up of equal parts cats, pornography, uninformed comments, and lists, I thought I'd add to the shebang with a quick look back at some of my most memorable reads.

The year isn't over quite yet, and I'm not sure if my current read will make the list - China Mieville's Kraken. Greatly weird, sort of a kitchen sink approach to fantasy, just throwing in everything, but I'm enjoying the ride. Might make a good double-bill with Clive Barker's Weaveworld. On my TBR pile in the next year? Charlie Huston's The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, Andrew Pyper's The Guardians, Liz Jensen's The Rapture, Chris Benjamin's Drive-by Saviours, Jeff Bursey's Verbatim, Jonathan Maberry's Patient Zero, Michael Van Rooy's An Ordinary Decent Criminal, Craig Davidson's Sarah Court, and many, many others.

Plus my own Husk. Over and over and over again.

Not all listed were published in 2010, not all were reviewed in the 'pages' of this blog (I have gotten so lax of late), but all affected me in one way or another.

Best twisted novel - Peter Darbyshire's gloriously weird The Warhol Gang, a vicious satire of consumerism and identity that easily one-ups Palahniuk at his own game.

Best short story collection - Douglas Smith's Chimerascope. A sterling set of tales spanning the triple genres of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Echoes of Stephen King, Richard Matheson, and Clive Barker haunt the halls of Smith's work, but the end result is completely original, and always enthralling.

Runner-up, short story collection - A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, by Darryl Whetter. Sex runs rampant in these tales of lust, love, pain, and tree planting, but aside from the raunch, Whetter displays an able craftsmanship and an ability to twist the world into new shapes.

Best mystery/fantasy (double winner!)- China Mieville's The City and the City. Just an amazing piece of work. How Mieville managed to keep his two cities (both occupying the same space yet somehow different) is a marvel of talent.

Runner-up, best fantasy - Andrew Kaufman's The Waterproof Bible. Gentle, weird, and full of frog people. Lovely in all the right ways.

Runner-up, best mystery - Douglas Glover's Precious. A Canadian Hammett, a noir as hardboiled as they come, and as chilled frozen as only a book set in northern Ontario could be.

Best overreaction by critics - Yann Martel's Beatrice & Virgil. Not near as accomplished or memorable as Life of Pi, but hardly the failure some made it out to be, and nowhere near worth the sputtering vitriol some unleashed upon it.

Best reread - Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut. Not his best, but if I have to explain to you why Vonnegut is special, then you just don't get it, and never will. And I pity you.

Best comedy - YOU comma Idiot by Doug Harris. A lackadaisical narrator belies the talent behind this book, an always-grinning jaunt through the lower levels of society. Great dialogue akin to Elmore Leonard, a warmth of character on par with Nick Hornby, and surprising twists kept me smiling when I wasn't laughing. Which was most of the time.

Best out-and-out masterpiece - Lesley Choyce's The Republic of Nothing, an intimate yet epic bildungsroman that marks Choyce as an obvious Canadian counterpart to John Irving (who is not Canadian, but earns high marks for his love of this country).

Runner-up, best masterpiece - Elle, by Douglas Glover. A historical romp through Canada's early years that should serve as full notice that historical fiction does not have to be staid and plodding, but can be vibrant, sexy, scatological, and bold.

Best book set in an ethereal plane - Heaven is Small by Emily Schultz. For Schultz, Heaven is a publishing company. She had me at hello.

Best dystopian satire - Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. The future five minutes from now is bleak and crumbling, but that doesn't mean there can't be any fun. Shteyngart crafts a believable May-December romance out of a stark world where everyone is linked electronically, books are obsolete, and the yen rules supreme. Like I said, five minutes from now.

Best horror (tie) - David Moody's Dog Blood and Stephen M. Irwin's The Dead Path. One genre, two wildly different books. Moody goes the Romero route, bleak, bloody, and exceedingly nasty. Irwin takes the higher road with a King-esque tale of past tragedy and forest hauntings and goopy spider mayhem.

Best others - I cannot find a title for these, but they have each stayed with me since I closed their covers.

Therefore Choose, by Keith Oatley
The Incident Report, by Martha Baillie
Perfecting, by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Come, Thou Tortoise, by Jessica Grant
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman
Before I Wake, by Robery J. Wiersema
The World More Full of Weeping, by Robert J. Wiersema
The Thief of Broken Toys, by Tim Lebbon

And now, the other end of the spectrum:

Worst 'twisted' novel - Chuck Palahniuk's Tell-All, a limp, soggy, misbegotten waste of a satire on celebrity from a novelist I used to adore. After this, Palahniuk has quite a hole to dig himself out of. I still hold out hope for rehabilitation, but he needs to take a break.

Most disappointing - Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey. I usually worship at the altar of Carey (go read The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith immediately), but despite obviously monumental research and a great character in Parrot, I was left cold. Hardly worthless, but disappointing, especially considering I loved his previous novel His Illegal Self. Figures that this one got nominated for awards.

Runner-up, most disappointing - Denis Johnson's Nobody Move. I really wanted to like this one. I'm not familiar with Johnson (please, I know, and I promise I will read Jesus' Son), but this looked to be a mean little thriller with a literary pedigree, like Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance. But while it had the moves, that doesn't mean it could dance. Put this one next to Martin Amis' Night Train in honourable failures in hardboiled fiction.

Second runner-up, most disappointing - Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado. Came with all the right pedigree and acclaim, and I'd be hard-pressed to find a single sentence that wasn't amazing. But boredom reigned.

And finally -

Worst book of the year - The Murder of King Tut, by James Patterson & Martin Dugard. Yes, it took two people to craft the most godawful piece of tripe ever to drip moistly out of the Patterson pipeline of crap. That this ridiculous, inane, poorly researched pamphlet masquerading as a 'non-fiction novel' ever got released is testament to how poorly James Patterson thinks of his fans. He hates you, people. If this book is any indication, he wouldn't cross the street to kick you in the groin if your balls were on fire. He hates you so, so much.

So, kind of a long year, some highs, some lows, one low so low it made me re-examine my definition of the word 'low.'

See you in 2011, fellow chimps.

Monkey droppings - The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin

2010-11-28T12:41:00.015-05:00

The monkey is not a fan of arachnids.

The monkey is definitively not a spider monkey. Look at that face. No spider there.

The monkey appreciates what they do, please don't misinterpret the monkey.

But spiders give the monkey the willies.

The Dead Path
by Stephen Irwin
Knopf Doubleday, 2010

It may be trite to note Stephen King in any review of a horror novel not written by Stephen King, but such is the world we live in. King changed the face of horror, and such mentions are almost mandatory at this point, so no apologies will be forthcoming, nor necessary.

Anyway, remember IT? That lovely, epic tome of childhood travails and adult nostalgia, all wrapped up with a monster so hideous and vile and genius in execution that King has, to this day, never topped it? There was a scene late in the 1000+ pages that has always stayed with me, haunting my subconscious with promises of terrors so delicious that Hell itself seems a summer day camp by comparison. No, not Pennywise, but good guess, clowns are always a safe bet for unspeakable evil (see also: The Pilo Family Circus).

In this small tableau (SPOILER ALERT), the villain has been unveiled as being a giant spider (or something so akin in form that our tiny human minds fill in the blanks lest they be overwhelmed by the unnameable horror that confronts them). It turns out that the beast is pregnant, and has laid eggs throughout its subterranean lair. One of our heroes takes it upon himself to smash every egg, which unleashes a slightly squashed (but still abnormally large) baby spider which the hero is obliged to finish off with the heel of his shoe. There are many, many eggs, and soon the hero has run out of matches to light his way with, and he continues his unholy and gruesome task in the dark, feeling out and squishing giant spiders with his gore-soaked feet.

Yeah, I got shivers just writing that sentence. Me and spiders go way back, and while I have matured to the point where I can watch Arachnophobia without screaming, where I can truly giggle at Shatner combating the Kingdom of the Spiders through sheer force of ham, where I can scoop up small ones in my hand and deposit them outside, any arachnid bigger than 5 or 6 millimetres in diameter gets me reaching for the tissues. And once, outside when I was burning weeds on my driveway, a flamethrower. Trust me, it was that freaking big.

So, in a nutshell; Stephen M. Irwin's new novel The Dead Path made me squirm. A lot.

And it starts so innocently, spider-wise. Nicholas Close is a haunted man, quite literally. After an accident which inadvertently takes the life of his wife, Nicholas can see the dead; or rather, the last moments of the dead, the last few minutes of the lives of persons taken too soon, repeating their final acts:

Now, in those silent attics, garages, basements, and back rooms, behind boarded windows or under musty eaves or paused on damp cellar stairs, he watched empty-eyed men throw ropes over rafters, thin farmers ease their yellow teeth over phantom shotgun barrels, tight-jawed mothers stir rat poison into tea, young men slip hosing over invisible exhaust pipes . . . over and over and over...[The] ghosts, in return, took no notice of their living landlords, spouses, children, enemies . . . yet their dead eyes rolled to stare at Nicholas. They knew he could see them.

Distraught, bewildered, he returns to his hometown where, as a child, his best friend was abducted and murdered. Upon his return, new disappearances begin, and Nicholas begins to suspect that there might be something far more sinister than child abductions at play. Something old and evil lives in the woods, something that preys on the weak, something that, as hinted above, controls spiders as we would control puppies. Something that, in Dark Path's more horrific moments, had me scratching at invisible insects crawling over my skin. And something that, after one of the more grisly encounters, Nicholas knows cannot be stopped, or even be told.

The old woman knew there was no room in a sane world for stories about huge spiders and Brothers Grimm strawberries. A retelling of what happened would sound like the babblings of a madman. No, she knew there would be no police.

Like King at his best, The Dead Path excels at presenting realistic figures caught up in supernatural occurrences. The theme of a town beset by an ancient evil is not exactly new (see, again, IT, or Dan Simmons' similarly spectacular Summer of Night), nor are the concepts of ghosts, Pagan rituals, and fate, but Irwin treads these well worn paths with verve. As the plot motors from daytime normalcy to unsuspected witchcraft, heading toward the final, unavoidable showdown, Irwin expertly balances the smaller character moments and the larger moments of unadulterated horror, keeping the creep factor constant throughout.

The Dead Path does not break new ground, and it does lose some steam in its final pages, a dilemma it shares with most novels I've read of a supernatural bent, how to actually end the carnage effectively when dealing with a well-nigh unstoppable force. Yet Irwin proves his mettle through a canny mixture of believable personalities and some truly dark and disturbing vision. The Dead Path is a solid, spooky read, perfect for a few nights worth of shiverings.

And also; spiders. So gawd-damned many of them.

Verdict: SPIDERS! THEY'RE ALL OVER ME! AUGH!

Canada Reads 2011 - preliminary thoughts

2010-10-31T12:56:00.010-04:00

At the risk of fanning the flames of controversy, I'd like to take a moment to discuss Canada Reads 2011.

And please note: I am hardly a disinterested third party here. As my novel Shelf Monkey is in their rankings of the Top 40 Novels, I do have a somewhat vested interest in the contest.

Canada Reads was launched ten years ago by CBC, an effort to bring to attention certain books that each year's jurors wished other Canadians would read. It has always been an imperfect contest, prone to pushing already popular novels out further into the spotlight, but has led to some interesting books receiving a level of public consciousness they might not normally have achieved (Fruit, Brown Girl in the Ring, Natasha and Other Stories etc.).

As some of you likely know, this year the organizers behind Canada Reads have altered its format, allowing Canadians to personally vote for the one book they wished everyone would read. From this list, the top 40 selections would be deemed 'The Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade.' This decision to change format likely arrived as a result of public dissatisfaction with past years' selections as being a trifle too obvious. Suffice to say, when Oprah has already chosen a book for her club, it has reached a level undreamed of by most, and gets read all over the continent. Doing a Canada Reads debate on that book, regardless of its quality, seems a touch superfluous.

Already, this new format had major flaws, akin to any such lists. Voting in such a venue is a crapshoot at best, with already well-known novels likely to dominate, and smaller novels falling by the wayside unless the author/publisher makes a conscious decision to personally push a novel to get on the list.

And this is exactly what has happened; I'm proof of that. I did not go out of my way to solicit votes from strangers, I did not purchase billboard space, I did not launch attack ads against Joseph Boyden. I simply put up a public Facebook page and invited friends to vote for me, and put up a blog post as well (and if you did indeed vote for me, my deepest thanks to you and yours). If others wanted to join in, so much the better. But by focusing a group of willing participants to vote for one single novel en masse, I squeaked in and got on the list. The Top 40 is chock full of well-known, best-selling authors (and I do not mean to slight them, these are quality novels), but by virtue of a coordinated attack (the closest I'll ever get to reaching a level approaching competitiveness), both myself and number of other, lesser-known quantities such as Chris Benjamin and Leo McKay got ourselves prime positions on the list.

Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with this. In today's environment, it's increasingly hard to get recognized, and every little bit of publicity helps. I don't consider this hucksterism, or akin to prostitution (a charge leveled on me and others by a few bloggers); I consider it an opportunity, for free advertising if nothing else. Being that Canada has a few very large publishing companies that dominate the sales lists, us small-time hoods have to step up once in awhile to make ourselves heard. And besides, just being on the same list as Atwood, Boyden, Vanderhaeghe, Martel, and Shields is a thrill unto itself.

It's all silly anyway. Really, 'Top 40 Essential Novels?' Such a list is impossible to define, prone to massive subjectivity, and is far better used as a marketing ploy than a definitive collection. Which is what I suspect this all is; you can't deny, people are talking. At least, people who follow Canada Reads. If, as they claim, they had over 6000 votes, that's a sizable contingent of literary lovers.

From the Top 40, the original plan was for the five unnamed jurors to chose their Top 10, and then from those the five they would debate together on national radio in 2011. Now, at literally the last minute, Canada Reads has changed the conditions of the test, and left it to the public to decide the top 10. After the cutoff date of November 7, 2010, the as-yet-unknown jurors will be forced to choose their selections from that much smaller list.

This new decision has led to both enthusiasm and outright condemnation, and without meaning to appear wishy-washy, I do see both sides here and heartily agree with both arguments. By limiting the choices, presumably at least one of the jurors will end up with a novel he or she does not actually care about in the slightest, which could lead to a less-than-enthusiastic debate. And conceivably, as they were not declared verboten, the Top 10 could be made up entirely of past winners and nominees, leading to, again, a less-than-riveting chat about books we've all already read (or are at least familiar with).

This is a real risk, and I agree, the format this year is hardly ideal. The Top 40, while a very strong collection, is very possibly going to be whittled down to an unimpressive line-up of already popular titles. This is what happens when a large amount of people are polled, the result ends up rather homogenized in nature. I sometimes wonder, if this list included American novels, would Dan Brown have made the cut? I fear so.

But I cannot tell a lie (unless you count writing fiction as telling lies, in which case, I am an inveterate liar): I'd like to get into the top 10. I do not hold my breath on this possibility, I've already beaten the odds to get this far. But I like it when people read what I've written. I like it when people buy my book. Am I going to return the $4.00 in royalties I've made so far on Amazon.ca for sales since the Top 40 announcement? I am not, and to come out against the Canada Reads format this year would be supremely hypocritical on my part.

But what if? That's the question. Laying aside my own selfish concerns for a moment, what if we could get the list we want? Look at the Top 40 as it stands now: these are terrific fictions, and while some have arguably had their critical/commercial days in the sun (and not to take away anything from their accomplishments thus far - I think it part of the Canadian condition to distrust those who have achieved a certain level of success, but I will not succumb, I truly love many of these fine best-selling works), there are others so gawd-damned deserving of wider recognition that I salivate at the thought of a Canada Reads debate on their merits.

Think of a Top 10 like this:

Inside by Kenneth J. Harvey
Come Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant
Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall
Conceit by Mary Novik
Elle by Douglas Glover
The Fallen by Stephen Finucan
Moody Food by Ray Robertson

Now that would be an interesting selection. Some well-known, some esoteric, all winners, all deserving.

Do I wish that the overall list was different? Of course. I wish desperately that past winners and nominees were ineligible, to lend more space to deserving books. I wish Minister Faust has made the list; ditto John McFetridge, Peter Darbyshire, Andrew Kaufman, Emily Schultz, and Jonathan Bennett, amongst many, many others.

But I don't make the rules, I only work within them, so all I can do is work my small part of the world and hope that it is enough, and enjoy whatever fame/notoriety I can.

So if you want, please ignore Canada Reads this year, it won't hurt my feelings one bit. But if you are going to vote, vote wisely. Start up your own campaigns for your favourite novels. Let's do our best to sneak a few outsiders on the list.

And if I turn out to be one of the outsiders, I won't complain.