Boo-yah, baby!

Well, I gotta say, while I'm sure the rug will soon be yanked out from under me, I'm really enjoying the reviews for Husk thus far.

I've already listed a few (here), but there's a few more I'd like to draw your attention to:

First, the venerable American publication BookList (which many libraries and such consult for ideas on orders), gave me this sterling nugget of awesome:

Redekop follows up his 2007 debut, the very funky Shelf Monkey, with the story of Sheldon Funk, a struggling actor, who wakes up during his own autopsy. Undead but still functional, Funk looks for a way to keep himself out of the wrong people’s hands, land a plum acting job, and (eventually) weather the storm of zombie superstardom before decomposition inevitably gets the best of him. Featuring Funk’s ambitious agent and an unsavory doctor who finds gruesomely clever ways to keep Sheldon’s body from falling apart too quickly, the story is a lesson in practical zombieing: what to do when you become a member of the walking dead, how to pass yourself off as (relatively) normal, how to learn to speak and walk again, and how to deal with your new meatcentric dietary requirements. Very funny and full of nifty surprises, the story has a big heart, too, presenting Sheldon as an ordinary fella trying to come to terms with his extraordinary new situation. The ending is appropriate and packs a serious emotional wallop. Highly recommendable—perhaps to more than zombie geeks.

And now, on the eve of actual publication (October 1!), The Toronto Star, which had already labelled Husk as one of their Top 20 Fall Reads of 2012, weighs in with a full review that completely and utterly gets me:

There's a point near the end of Husk where the narrator, long dead and without much of a body left to drag around, decides to embrace his "pop culture heritage" and start acting more like a traditional zombie...That heritage isn't essential to enjoying Corey Redekop’s book, his second novel, but some background helps...Redekop tosses so much into this zombie stew that instead of wearing out his premise quickly it almost seems as though he needs a bigger pot. By the time we get to the end, which involves a reclusive billionaire's bid for immortality and an apocalypse that stirs together pages torn from Philip K. Dick and H. P. Lovecraft, one feels there's no more ground to cover. Zombiedom's entire pop culture heritage has been thrown against the wall in bleeding chunks, where much of it sticks.

Feeling pretty warm in the belly right now. Hmmmm. Warm.

Monkey droppings - The Blondes - Just a trim, please. Wait, put down that knife!

The monkey decides to lighten up his doldrums and make himself feel pretty.

And how shall he do this? With highlights. Lots and lots of highlights. And a perm!

Ever seen a monkey with a perm? Not good. Like one of those elderly C-list stars who've had way too much plastic surgery yet somehow feel they're presentable enough to parade down Rodeo Drive looking to buy purses that cost more than you make in a year.

You know the ones I mean.

I don't know...I don't think the highlights worked.

The Blondes (Random House, 2012)
Emily Schultz

Personally, I've always preferred brunettes, or redheads. Just a matter of personal preference. But if the events in Emily Schultz's The Blondes ever come true, I'm going to be very happy I didn't fall hard for a dame with golden locks.

Because Blondes is every fashionista's worst nightmare come true. A mysterious virus begins infecting women with blonde hair (even those who've gained blondedom through dyeing), turning them into violent mindless people who attack at random, and kill without a second thought. Kind of like a zombie novel with split ends. Ba-zing!

Schultz being Schultz, however — which means, being the author of Joyland and Heaven is Small, that she is a damned talented individual — there is far greater depth to The Blondes than the surface would indicate (see what I did there?). As much a satire of society's obsession with looks as it is a Outbreak-like contagion thriller, Schultz expertly entwines a speculative fiction premise with social commentary, making Blondes akin to Dawn of the Dreadfully Good Looking. Ka-pow!

I'll stop punning now.

Our hero, Hazel Hayes, is a young grad student working on a thesis on the media obsession and transformations of standards of female beauty. She is also new to New York, newly pregnant with the child of her (married) thesis advisor, and understandably freaked out a little. Her bad luck, then, to be at what appears to be ground zero of the new epidemic, soon dubbed "the blonde fury" by media wags. When a woman randomly attacks a young girl, Hazel tries to help, but find that her fellow citizens aren't the type to rush to anyone's aid:

Then cellphones came out into palms, and people punched into them, some reticently, some frantically. The punching continued for what seemed like forever, but no one lifted a device to an ear. Lack of reception. A couple of the high school kids didn't even bother trying to phone; instead, they held up their devices and calmly filmed.

Such inaction is a major plot device here, the idea that the 'other' (government, the CDC, etc) knows best, so we shouldn't get involved. Leave it to the professionals. Which the world does, and Hazel soon discovers herself in a world of rampant security, hysterical paranoia, and increased insanity (the idea that men will pay scads of money to have sex with infected blondes being one of the more memorable/disturbing).

Corollary to this epidemic scenario is Hazel's own crisis of begin pregnant, alone, and when the borders increase security, suddenly cut off from family. Being a redhead, she is close enough to blonde to be a cause for suspicion, and while I do not wish to give away spoilers, suffice to say that North America goes down a very dark path indeed, one that has all-too-obvious parallels to historical and present events.

Yet being as Hazel's work is in female body image, the bulk of the subtext is a concise examination of women as they are, as they are seen, and as they regard themselves. Hazel begins her tale with the phrase, "Women have stupid dreams," and from there Schultz unearths an entire world in thrall to appearance rather than substance. Baldness becomes chic, and wigs become de rigueur. Interestingly, while Hazel goes on about the myriad of ways women look to attack each other (not physically like the infected, more of a passive-aggressive taunt-her-into-an-eating-disorder sort of way), it's her friendships with women that allow her to make it through to the (hopefully) other side. In a world without hope, Schultz finds the key to survival, and it is others.

Blondes gives us not only a fine novel, but a fine author completely coming into her own. Schultz deserves all the accolades she gets.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES

Some early reviews of HUSK

The book is still warm from the printers, and bookshelf appearances are weeks away. Nevertheless, Husk has already garnered a few remarkably positive reviews (I say remarkably because I have some issues with self-loathing which cloud my judgement on such things).

From Quill & Quire:

• “Despite all the violence and jokes about viscera, what gradually emerges is a tender portrait of a profoundly lonely man who finds love and acceptance only after his body has betrayed him . . . an enormously funny book that has real emotional heft underneath all the blood.”

Now that's a review, no? I slept very well after reading this, quite content with my place in the cosmos. Then, as the days crept by, my good vibes began to curdle in the lime juice of my low self-esteem. "Must have been a fluke," I thought.

Then, the Toronto Star saw fit to include my crazy ramblings as one of their Top 20 Reads of the Fall. Please check out the list, it's very likely the only time you'll ever see 'Corey Redekop' on the same honoured list as Alice Munro, Rawi Hage, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Orhan Pamuk.

And then, there's these wonderful blurbs that'll appear on the final cover, accolades from some of my favourite authors who were way too kind in their praise.

• “A superb blood-splattered comedy. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll puke!” — Andrew Kaufman, author of All My Friends Are Superheroes and The Waterproof Bible
• “A wild vicious romp through pop culture, Husk rips the heart out of the rotting zombie genre and shoves it down your throat. Infection never hurt so good.” — Peter Darbyshire, author of The Warhol Gang and Please
• “Camus meets Palahniuk in a darkly comic, but surprisingly light-hearted, mind-meld in Corey Redekop’s Husk. Sure, the protagonist is a zombie, but this is 2012, and as Redekop rightly observes, we’re all zombies now.” — Andrew Pyper, author of The Killing Circle and The Guardians

I gotta say, I'm feelin' pretty fine right now. I'm sure it'll pass, so I'm going to do my best to enjoy the moment.

Posted with Blogsy

An octopod of reviews for your pleasure

Oh, woe is me, I am late again with reviews. So lax. So lazy. I humbly beseech thee, prithee, forgive me.

I have been rather busy, actually, what with the job, the second novel coming out, the book trailers I am working on, etc. But tonight, I am all yours, with one caveat; I have an abundance of novels already read this year, and simply cannot give the time I normally would to each title (worthy though many of them may be). So, here now, a whole slew of novels, each reviewed in three to four devastatingly incisive sentences.

The Last Hunt - Cliff Burns

• I'm not a big fan of western novels (my knowledge of such limited to Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet [yay!] and Chuck Norris' The Justice Riders [retching noise]). But I am a fan of Cliff Burns, here straying from his usual sci-fi/cyberpunk/fantasy-noir settings to attempt a serious old-fashioned horse opera. He doesn't reinvent the genre a la Patrick DeWitt (ah, I knew there was another western I've read), but The Last Hunt is a solid oater, with clean, spare prose, conflicted heroes, interesting characters and caricatures, and hefty dollops of gunplay. I'd say it's sure to please fans of Louis L'Amour, but I'm guessing at that.

The Complete Lockpick Pornography - Joey Comeau

• Comeau has become a favourite of late (check out his brilliantly strange One Bloody Thing After Another), and Lockpick Pornography continues along the same lines, delivering a pair of weird, odd, funny, and very original takes on homosexuality, relationships, thefts, public sex, abuse, vigilantism, kidnappings, and more. I wouldn't call the two novellas burdened with plot; these are shaggy, rambling tales that charm the reader even as their wincing at some of the graphic descriptions (the title does contain the word pornography, so I don't know what else I was expecting). As Comeau's protagonists amble through a world they aren't really a part of, we grow to understand the effortless alienation that the LGBT community faces, and the strong sense of humour that can help people survive such bigotry. It's also remarkably sweet-natured and giving.

Bedtime Story - Robert J. Wiersema

• Wiersema has always had a hint of the magical in his stories up until now, but Bedtime Story pushes him into epic new territory. A story about a boy trapped in a fantasy novel and the father seeking clues to free him, it treads a fine line between realism and the fantastic that would trip up lesser novelists. Weirsema keeps his story straight and his style clear, capturing the feel of Tolkien-like epics on one hand while delivering an affecting portrait of grief and loss on the other. Pair this one up with Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Katja from the Punk Band - Simon Logan

• You want weird? Katja is Elmore Leonard via William Gibson, a fast-paced cyberpunk thriller that commands attention with great dialogue, twisted characters, and a fine sense of place. Set on an unnamed urban island and following a woman delivering an unnamed vial of something, Logan traipses back and forth through time and POVs, keeping the reader off-balance and filling in the blanks later with a precision that would do Christopher Nolan proud. This is a grimy, gritty, terribly unpleasant world, and I'd go back in a second.

Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth About the Writing Life - Marianne Apostolides

• This unusual set of nonfiction stories is ostensibly drawn from the author's real life, yet Apostolides twists each tale to blur the lines, leaving the reader wondering what, if anything, is real. What is real is her gorgeous writing style, her command of detail, and her daring take on the flexibility of memory. Presenting stories of her father, her relationships, and a fascinating visit to a brothel, Apostolides is fearless in revealing herself and masterful in ability. If you want stories that leave you sated yet wanting more, Voluptuous Pleasure fits the bill.

Pirate Therapy and Other Cures - Mark A. Rayner

• In a collection of short stories, essays, and flash fiction, Rayner fits himself snugly into the eternally off-kilter worlds of Monty Python, The Goon Squad, and Douglas Adams. In Rayner's warped imagination, Jesus contends with dinosaurs, Batman reveals a bout of insecurity, an alien overlord mans an advice column, and Anne of Green Gables eventually destroys the world. If one story doesn't tickle your fancy, the next one will. As with Monty Python's television series, I advise reading only a few stories at a time, as the non-stop punnery can be overwhelming, and taking pauses to savour Rayner's sardonic wit is a pleasure.

In Plain Sight - Mike Knowles

• Sometimes, with crime novels in particular, you can tell when an author is 'faking' it, i.e. the author really doesn't have a clue about the realities of crime. Knowles has no such problem, and his increasingly dark and violent tales of former mob enforcer Wilson reek of someone who knows the game; if Knowles is faking it, he's better than I realized. Almost unremittingly bleak, utterly nasty, yet compulsively readable, Knowles' Wilson series is a dive into the depths of humanity's own hell. In Plain Sight is as harsh as sandpaper (think Andrew Vachss before his Burke series descended into self-parody), and unless you're the sort that enjoys gruesome vengeance against irredeemable people (and I am), stay clear away.

Osama - Lavie Tidhar

• Osama qualifies as one of the greatest mindjobs I've come across, a metaphysical detective story that loops in and around itself like a mobius strip. Set in an alternate reality where global terrorism does not exist, Osama follows a private detective hired to find an obscure pulp author who writes of a vigilante named Osama bin Laden. What follows, in one of the best meta-fiction narratives I've read since Paul Auster's City of Glass, is an atmospheric descent into multiple realities that fractures the sanity of the detective as he confronts the realities of war and chaos. I really enjoy Tidhar's Bookman series of steampunk novels, but I was truly unprepared for the genius of this.

And there you have it, eight reviews to sate your appetite. Get though all of them, and win a t-shirt!

My newest author crush: David Nickle

There's a sign on the gate:

You must be this intelligent to enter.

So says the monkey, your highly-trained carnie for this carousel of dreams.

____________________________


I can't tell you what a relief it is to be confronted with a "horror" author whom I cannot say reminds me of Stephen King. This is nothing against King, mind you; his style is deeply effective, and there is a reason he has earned so many imitators, consciously or not.

How often, however, can you reach into that well before you cry "Enough!"? It's inevitable that all authors will resemble some other writer in overall style, with the unarguable exception of Kurt Vonnegut, and King's style is just simple enough to tempt new authors who cannot see the masterful effort that underlies the words. So when a novelist comes along that is the first in a long while to evoke pleasure of writers past while at the same time breaking though new territory, I take notice. Nick DiChario brought me new Theodore Sturgeon stories long after the old master had passes away. Gemma Files has channelled Clive Barker in her stunning horror westerns. And now, Canadian author David Nickle has gifted me with new Dan Simmons (not that Simmons is done himself).

Not that Simmons is done, he's still going strong, publishing at least one novel every year. Simmons is a maestro of practically every category of fiction, an author at ease in horror (Summer of Night, Song of Kali), historical fiction (Drood, The Terror), crime (Hard Freeze), and science fiction (the immortal Hyperion, among many others). He dances through genres like no one since Joe R. Lansdale (still going as well), and he continually brings a new perspective to every genre he touches.

So, too, does David Nickle, busting through the gate with two (2!) novels from Chizine (best genre publisher working today) that have completely floored me with their verve, originality, and utter command of story. I admit to not having yet read his short story collection Monstrous Affections, but I have no doubt it will continue Nickle's streak. His novel Eutopia is a gloriously original American historical horror, and his follow-up Rasputin's Bastards is a bold and disturbing Russian epic spy thriller that takes drastically disparate elements (there are echoes of James Bond, John le Carré, China Mieville, and Simmons' Carrion Comfort) and mashes them together in a fantastical narrative that crosses POVs and dimensions with an assurance that is staggering.

Have I got your attention yet? Good. Because David Nickle is that good.


Please note: the following comes mostly from memory, as I don't have the books on me at present. So, no quotations.

Eutopia (subtitled A Novel of Terrible Optimism) is ostensibly a historical drama, set in a small isolated mill town in Idaho in 1911. The town, Eliada, is idyllic, with no bars, no vice, and no outward strife. It is, indeed, an experiment in social control, led by a powerful businessman who dreams of his own Utopia. But as must happen in such tales as these, deep evil lies in the woods beyond, evil in unsettlingly lovecraftian forms, evil that recalls the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm at their most grimmest.

Into this simmering tempest Nickle throws a young man who has mysteriously survived a plague, and a black doctor who knows all too well how flawed Eliada really is. As they hurry to understand what is really happening beneath the idyll (shades of David Lynch), Nickle elegantly weaves themes of faith versus science, man versus man, and nature versus all, and no fair telling who wins, if you can call it winning.

As Nickle pulls the strings of his dizzying array of characters, his plot leaps from period western to redneck horror to magic realism, all without stumbling or missing a beat. This is dark, weird fiction that follows a logic all its own, pulling out all the stops in raising the creepy quotient, yet cementing the bizarre goings-on in characters who pull you along.

Rasputin's Bastards is an almost complete about-face (again, shades of Simmons). Nickle now delves into Cold War espionage territory, this time in a tale replete with guns, adventure, and of course, telepathic Russian spies bred in a secret facility. Sent underground after the war ended, the telepaths use their vast powers for their own means, while their young progeny find themselves being diverted against their will to an unusual location.

Rasputin, like Eutopia, is not a novel easy summarized. Nickle seems to delight in keeping the reader off-balance, easily achieved when half the novel is set in various fantastic mindscapes that continually weave in and out of conscious reality, creating a novel wherein the reader is perpetually on edge and unsure exactly where any single point of the narrative is set. If you are looking for an easy read a la James Patterson, stay far away: if you find China Mieville's expert world-building to be enthralling stuff, you'll have quite a time here.

And there are some squid present, in case you get bored.

Look, by now you can tell what kind of books these are, and whether you're interested. Genre fiction will always suffer the sniffs of snobs (lest you think otherwise, I'm a snob too, can't be bothered with romance, and Tolkienesque ogre opuses leave me cold [plus, did you read that Patterson snub in the previous paragraph?]). Nickle isn't writing for the cheap seats; he's unapologetic about writing for the front row, the elites, the ones who "get it."

Get it? Like Simmons, you can't rush headlong in to Nickle's work, you need a base to draw experiences from. Read your King, bone up on your Shelley, devour your Barker and Lovecraft and Poe and Bloch and Howard.

Then, move on up, and know that you've earned your right to take a ride.

So sayeth the monkey.

The Last Hiccup - The First Rave

Before I begin a post of unabashed enthusiasm on Christopher Meades' weirdly wonderful new novel The Last Hiccup, a note of caution:

Through careful research and self-imposed paranoid fear-mongering, I have determined that Chris, having never met him physically, is undoubtedly one of the following:

• my doppelganger;
• my long-lost twin, the one I thought I devoured in utero;
• a pod person bent on destroying me.

Why this belief, Corey, oh master of hyperbole? Take a look, and you tell me I'm freaking out over nothing:

All together now;

Meet Corey, who's done most everything,

From practice law to plane jumping.

But Chris has only stayed the course,

He's never even seen a horse.

What a crazy pair!

'Cuz they're authors,

Identical authors and you'll find,

They dress alike, they walk alike,

At times they even write alike:

You can lose your mind,

When authors are two of a kind.

Spooky, no? Maybe it's a coincidence, but I'm afraid to go to sleep at night. Should we meet I have no doubt the universe will cease to exist, or at least suffer a splitting headache.

On the plus side, should I ever die, we have a spare.

But I come here to praise Chris, not to fear him. I was a fan of his debut novel The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark, an unceasingly silly chase novel that gave me no end of pleasure. So when approached, I gladly agreed to blurb his novel (a professional first!), for his sophomore effort The Last Hiccup is everything I look for in a novel; funny, weird, vaguely historical, barely linear, ambiguous, and saturated with synchronous diaphragmatic flutter. Having suffered from a lengthy bout of the devil's esophageal convulsions myself (seven days, no fooling), perhaps I'm inclined to sympathize with Vladimir, the young Russian boy who starts hiccuping at age eight and continues to do so for decades.

If the novel were simply that, twenty-plus years of hiccuping, I think I'd have tired of it. Meades, however, takes the Kurt Vonnegut route of torturing the protagonist, placing his hero in early 20th century Russia and submitting him to horrendous ordeal after horrendous ordeal. In short order, Vladimir, a strangely self-possessed little boy, is abandoned by his mother, experimented on by a mad doctor, and sent to live in the mountains with a strange and silent monk. And I haven't even begun to factor World War I into Meades' melange.

I do love a story that never takes me where I expect, and Hiccup certainly fills that bill. It's also extremely clever, dark, surreal, and unexpectedly poignant. I certainly hope Chris continues to push himself into the unexpected, for I sense there are fathoms of fantastic weirdness in him just aching to be discovered.


[NOTE] Should there ever be interest in mine and Chris' life story, perhaps as a Patty Duke-like family comedy with hijinks galore, I hereby submit the following unknown Canadian actor for consideration:

'Cuz they're triplets!

Identical triplets, and you'll find,

They act alike, they brood alike,

Sometimes they're even subdued alike...

Tiny Monkey Reviews - Triggers by Robert J. Sawyer

Triggers (Penguin, 2012)

by Robert J. Sawyer

Description (from the publisher)

A new mind-bending novel from Canada’s leading futurist

On the eve of a secret military operation, an assassin’s bullet strikes U.S. President Seth Jerrison. He is rushed to hospital, where surgeons struggle to save his life. At the same hospital, Canadian researcher Dr. Ranjip Singh is experimenting with a device that can erase traumatic memories. Then a terrorist bomb detonates. In the operating room, the president suffers cardiac arrest. He has a near-death experience—but the memories that flash through Jerrison’s mind are not his memories.

It quickly becomes clear that the electromagnetic pulse generated by the bomb amplified and scrambled Dr. Singh’s equipment, allowing a random group of people to access one another’s minds. And now one of those people has access to the president’s memories—including classified information regarding an upcoming military mission, which, if revealed, could cost countless lives. But the task of determining who has switched memories with whom is a daunting one, particularly when some of the people involved have reasons to lie ...

What the Tiny Monkey thinks 

I have to put some cards on the table up front: not only do I know Rob Sawyer, not only do I like Rob Sawyer, not only do I bring up the fact that I know and like Rob Sawyer at every opportunity; on top of that, one of the characters in Triggers, Eric Redekop, shares my last name. No mere coincidence this, as Rob confirmed via Facebook that he thought my last name was "cool." This FB message has thereby been printed out and framed, verifiable proof that someone likes the damnable moniker. And this also means that, likely for the first time ever, a Mennonite headlines a sci-fi novel, with the possible exception of Robert A. Heinlein's The Froeses of Mars.

So take this review with salt and imitation buttered popcorn, if you must; Triggers is a lot of fun. Sawyer has never been the greatest of prose stylists, but his enthusiasm for his topics, his hearty dollops of research, and his genuine upbeat attitude (an increasing rarity in science fiction) make the best of his work a pleasure to read (particularly his short stories: I cannot recommend Iterations or Identity Theft highly enough). Triggers, like most of Sawyer's work, sets its narrative around an immensely intriguing hook, and his plot machinations concerning selective telepathic powers keep the pages flying by. It isn't the deepest of reads, and part of me wishes he went further with his ultimate finale, when the plot ventures into Theodore Sturgeon territory (I won't be divulging this ending here, however; unlike a certain reviewer in the Globe and Mail, I try not to give away the ending whether or not I liked the book). I am unsure whether Triggers qualifies as Sawyer's most fanciful work, as the science behind his scenario sounds fairly wonky to the layperson in me, but that hardly counts as a disqualification. Triggers is fast and fun, with just enough inherent plausibility to the shenanigans to keep me glued to my seat.

TINY MONKEY REALLY LIKES

Tiny monkey - Natural Order by Brian Francis

Natural Order (Random House, 2011)

by Brian Francis

 

Description (from the publisher)

Joyce Sparks has lived the whole of her 86 years in the small community of Balsden, Ontario. “There isn’t anything on earth you can’t find your own backyard,” her mother used to say, and Joyce has structured her life accordingly. Today, she occupies a bed in what she knows will be her final home, a shared room at Chestnut Park Nursing Home where she contemplates the bland streetscape through her window and tries not to be too gruff with the nurses.

This is not at all how Joyce expected her life to turn out. As a girl, she’d allowed herself to imagine a future of adventure in the arms of her friend Freddy Pender, whose chin bore a Kirk Douglas cleft and who danced the cha-cha divinely. Though troubled by the whispered assertions of her sister and friends that he was “fruity,” Joyce adored Freddy for all that was un-Balsden in his flamboyant ways. Years later, Joyce married Charlie, a kind and reserved man who could hardly be less like Freddy. They married with little fanfare and she bore one son, John. Though she did love Charlie, Joyce often caught herself thinking about Freddy, buying Hollywood gossip magazines in hopes of catching a glimpse of his face. Meanwhile, she was growing increasingly alarmed about John’s preference for dolls and kitchen sets.

Today, as her life ebbs away at Chestnut Park, Joyce ponders the terrible choices she made as a mother and wife and doubts that she can be forgiven, or that she deserves to be. 

Voiced by an unforgettable and heartbreakingly flawed narrator, Natural Order is a masterpiece of empathy, a wry and tender depiction of the end-of-life remembrances and reconciliations that one might undertake when there is nothing more to lose, and no time to waste.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks 

I usually approach novels set up as "remembrances of things past" with high caution. There's a certain sameness to the form I find off-putting, as the elderly protagonist looks back at the mistakes in life and either a) bemoans cruel fate, or b) comes to terms with the vagaries of existence. Perhaps it's because I was forced (yes, forced!) to read Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel in school (twice!) well before I was primed to appreciate it that I dislike the subgenre so fervently. I've never gone back to Laurence's book, and despite its sterling reputation, I stand by my teenage opinion that it's about an old woman who was mean to everyone, and then died, and I was glad of it. (Next week; my issues with Pride and Prejudice: hidden feminist classic, or claptrap as boring as a sack of doilies?)

Nevertheless, I dive into the pages of Brian Francis' follow-up to his best-seller Fruit, and find myself quickly and completely under his spell. Natural Order is not a game-changer, but it is a subtle portrait of a woman who could not help herself but try to do what she thought was right even when the outcome was hurtful. Joyce is not a selfish person in most respects, but her selfish refusal to see what her son actually is leads to family dysfunction and eventual unhappiness. Francis may stumble occasionally with some plot contrivances, but his overall sense of the character is riveting, and his refusal to go maudlin is to be congratulated. I truly enjoyed Fruit, but Natural Order is of a new level altogether, far more layered and affecting, the blossoming of a truly fine author.

TINY MONKEY REALLY LIKES

Tiny monkey - The Dead Kid Detective Agency

The Dead Kid Detective Agency (ECW Press, 2011)

by Evan Munday

Description (from the publisher)

Thirteen-year-old October Schwartz is new in town, short on friends, and the child of a clinically depressed science teacher. Naturally, she spends most of her time in the Sticksville Cemetery, which just happens to border her backyard. And that backyard just happens to be the home of five dead teenagers, each from a different era of the past: there’s the dead United Empire Loyalist! The dead escaped slave who made her way north via the Underground Railroad! The dead quintuplet!

Soon, October befriends the five dead kids. Together — using October’s smarts and the dead kids’ abilities to walk through walls and get around undetected and stuff — they form The Dead Kid Detective Agency, committed to solving Sticksville’s most mysterious mysteries. October’s like Nancy Drew, if she’d hung out with corpses.

When Sticksville Central High School’s beloved French teacher dies in a suspicious car accident, it provides the agency with its first bona fide case. Soon October and her five dead friends find themselves in the midst of a nefarious murder plot, thick with car chases, cafeteria fights, sociopathic math teachers, real estate appointments, and a wacky adventure that might uncover the truth about a bomb that exploded almost 40 years ago.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks 

Look, I ain't a kid no mores, see? I don't whitewash fences for nickels and a smile, I don't mow lawns 'cuz my Dad sez it ain't gonna cut itself, I don't go to school to gets me some of that fancy book-learning. But I do, on occasion, read YA. Perhaps its the latent librarian in me, but sometimes it's refreshing to read for a different age bracket. Like adult fiction, the quality varies, from the sublime highs of The Golden Compass to the doltish lows of Twilight. Author and illustrator (and genius publicist for Coach House Press) Evan Munday aims for the highs, and although The Dead Kid Detective Agency does not transcend the genre, it is an enjoyably sardonic adventure with an appealing lead and a surprising trek into a violent chapter in Canadian history. October (wonderful name) is a primo heroine, resourceful, slightly demented, and unafraid of ghosts, murderers, or, worse than both, stuck-up teenage girls (is anything more terrifying than a fifteen-year-old girl with a sense of entitlement?). Her home life is remarkably unvarnished; I can't recall any similar books where a parent is clinically depressed and another has simply run off in the night. It's the realism of these details which help ground the more fantastical elements, and if the plot occasionally careens off the rails, Munday's dry sarcasm and weird asides keep the narrative hopping. His style reminds me of Sean Cullen's Monty Pythonesque writing voice in the Hamish X series (check it out!), but Munday has a firmer grasp of character, and is less prone to leaving the plot altogether for the sake of an admittedly funny witticism. There is certainly enough in Sticksville to keep the series going, as Munday promises, and I hope October will get a few more chances to shine.

TINY MONKEY REALLY LIKES

Favourite monkey #2

• wherein the shelf monkey continues to peruse his vast library for those works of fiction that have tickled his funny bone, goosed his cochlea, frightened his liver, or in some way achieved some sort of response from some area of his anatomy.
• i.e. the monkey's favourite books this far in his short life. 
• and what excites the monkey today? A good old-fashioned mind-job.

Today's intriguing instalment: 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick

"The whole experience of empathy is a swindle."

 
Plot synopsis (from the Official Philip K. Dick website):

By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . . They even built humans.

Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.

Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

When did the shelf monkey first read this? I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (hereinafter DADES?) when I was twelve, the year that the book was commonly known under its cinematic adaptation title Blade Runner. Being a huge Harrison Ford fan at the time — still am, although I wish he would take some chances, hook up with Tarantino or Soderbergh, c'mon, man, try something — but being unable to watch the R-rated film due to a mixture of my age and my parents' just crazy unwillingness to sneak me in to the theatre, I had to make do with the book.

What were the first impressions? DADES? hit me like a tonne of proverbial bricks. My sci-fi knowledge up to that point was confined to the adventures of Tom Swift and John Christopher's Tripod trilogy. Being introduced so young to the thematic complexities of P.K. Dick probably warped me.

How many times has the shelf monkey read this? Estimation? Somewheres in the teens. Possibly even twenty.

Has it withstood the perils of time and maturity? In the name of Mercer, yes.

New thoughts:  Is it at all strange to claim a work that raises immense levels of despair and existential angst in the reader as a favourite? It feels wrong somehow. 'Favourites' should induce joy and wonderment, not dread, fear, and self-loathing. Nevertheless, there you have it. Id est, quid id est.

DADES? is one of those novels that reveals more and more every time you read it, exposing new pleasures and forgotten plot points. The movie version keeps pushing the novel to the side in my head, and while it is a superb film, it really isn't the novel. Aside from a few themes and character names, it's barely recognizable from its literary origins.

Like the movie, DADES? concerns identity, and the increasing loss of it in society. In this instance, a society wherein most of the able-bodied people have fled the planet after World War Terminus, and the citizens who remain are slowly succumbing to the radioactive dust which coats the planet. It is a world where entropy rules, one where every person and thing is turning to the wondrously awful concept of "kipple:"

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match, or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you leave any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."

While the world yields itself to its kipplization, its citizenry makes do with a variety of mood-altering conveniences. There's the Penfield mood organ — a clear comment on the increasing use of medicines to alleviate states of emotional being — a device wherein the user may dial an appropriate mood to get through the day. Rick Deckard gets through the day by dialing for "a creative and fresh attitude towards his job," and he is horrified when he discovers his wife Iran has dialed herself a six-hour self-accusatory depression. As she explains, explaining one of the novel's leading themes:

"I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness [in the surrounding apartments] intellectually, I couldn't feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting — don't you see? I guess you don't. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness: then called it 'absence of appropriate affect.' So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair. So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who's smart has emigrated, don't you think?"

As Deckard works to hunt down and kill the androids that have infiltrated Earth, he undergoes an existential crisis as he begins to empathize with them. In this future, empathy is in short supply, which is a main reason for the rise of Mercerism, a religion that uses a virtual reality linkup with the user to increase their empathy through a metaphorical trek up an endless mountain alongside a very old man. As you trek, stones are hurled from unseen enemies, often leaving the Mercerite bruised and cut, allowing them to become more in tune with the feelings of other. The lack of empathy is a major reason why humanity is seemingly on its last legs, with officials claiming that "Mercerism reduced crime by making citizens more concerned about the plight of their neighbors." This is also why it is considered the height of one's existence to own at least one true animal (most animals being extinct, and people making do with electronic facsimiles). I have in my literary life had few emotional responses as strong as my pity toward Deckard as he uses his bounty money to purchase a real goat; the joy he has, the utter belief that this will make him a better person, is as pathetic and heart-rending a moment as any I've read.

The empathy shortage is also a reason why androids fit in so well. Deckard's investigation leads him to a bizarre subworld of his city where is seems androids have taken over the neighbourhoods, with their own police force. As his quest continues he becomes increasingly depressed, unable to determine the real difference between man and machine.

DADES? is not perfect; there are some plot points that still don't make sense to me, especially Deckard's sudden realization that the Russian policeman he is sitting with is an android. Deckard also obsesses over how hard these new androids will be to track and kill, yet they appear remarkably easy prey.

For me, such moments do not matter. DADES? gets to me like few novels ever have; perhaps it is a flaw in my mindset, an error in my programming, but sometimes I just need to feel bad. Like Iran, sometimes I need to remind myself of the misery of the world, to force myself to accept feelings I don't enjoy. Some may achieve this by reading Kafka, or the plays of Chekov. For me, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the cure for my happiness.

Verdict: still a favourite monkey

Monkey droppings - Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess

Today, the monkey puts on his spelunking gear and slowly lowers himself into the depths of another's psychosis.

Going really deep into this one. I can see stalactites hanging from the roof of his ego. And there's bat guano everywhere.

Pontypool Changes Everything (ECW Press, 1998: Chizine, 2010)
by Tony Burgess

At a breakfast table in Caesarea a couple sits across from each other. Their mouths are open and liver coloured. She tries to lick her bottom lip but misses, catching her tongue in the slippery well of skin at the base of her gums. The tongue pushes to a point in this pocket until the O of her lips reaches its limit and the tongue springs out, releasing a full pouch of liquid down her chin. Her husband mimics this, but he extends his tongue directly through the O, clearing its edges, missing the point.

Like all the other zombies, the only expression that these two can achieve is one of supernatural failure. Like gargoyles, they frown in exhausted masks of hopelessness. Her eyes rise into the bridge of her nose and tunnel up beneath her brow; the lashes have fallen into the tails of goldfish that fan across her cheeks. His eyes are the same, but for heavier lower lids that scoop out like wading pools, vividly red and beating with vulnerable membrane.

I know Tony Burgess. I like Tony Burgess. He's a good guy, easy to approach. Affable, even.

But I'd never want to be trapped inside his mind.

Burgess is one of the preeminent Canadian masters of literary horror, that vague subset of the horror genre where the story is told just too damn well to be relegated to (he writes with a sniff of derision) mere "horror." Dean Koontz has never even seen literary horror from his perch (nor do I believe he knows of its existence). Stephen King stops by on occasion (although it's been a while). Clive Barker visits frequently. Burgess has his own gazebo on the lawn, where he sits sipping absinthe from a silver cup.

Burgess's specialty is dropping insanity into the most mundane of surroundings. Basing many of his works in smalltown Ontario, Burgess excels at delving into that madness that peeks out the corners of everybody's eyes. In People Live Still in Cashtown Corners, its the gas jockey who decides that arbitrary murder is the best way to go. In Ravenna Gets, the populace of Ravenna decides en masse to destroy the populace of nearby Collingwood. In Idaho Winter (his first YA book), a young boy goes on a rampage after learning he's a character in a book.

Pontypool Changes Everything (hereinafter PCE) is ostensibly a zombie novel, yet relegating it to that qualification does it as much a disservice as assuming Moby Dick to be a book about whaling, Naked Lunch to be about drugs, and To Kill a Mockingbird to be about racism. The labels are superficially correct, but completely missing the point.

The plot of PCE defies easy summation; like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive — and if there are any two artists whose combined talents would result in the freakiest , most disturbing story ever put to film, it's these two — PCE weaves through reality and fantasy without distinction between the two, physically pushing at the reader's concepts of linear narrative as dreamlike imagery takes hold. Make no mistake, reading Tony Burgess takes effort, an effort many people will be unwilling to take (wimps). Leave them to their safe little zones, their Bentley Littles and Robin Cooks; yeah, I'm not a fan. There is no safe ground in Burgessland. Everything shifts, and if you think you're safe and steady, the world is about to drop out from beneath you. His words are slivers beneath your fingertips, burrowing in and refusing to budge.

Burgess's zombies are not the now-standard grabby and bitey undead of innumerable b-grade movies (although, to be fair, they do grab and bite on occasion). To start, the virus is not transmitted by blood, or saliva, or radiation, but through language:

The virus had hid silently for decades up in the roofs of adjectives, its little paws growing sensitive, first to the modifications performed there: then, sensing something more concrete pulling at a distance, the virus jumped into paradigms. It was unable to reach the interior working of the paradigm, however, due to its own disappearance near the core. The viruses bit wildly at the exterior shimmer of the paradigms, jamming selection with pointed double fangs. A terrible squealing ripped beneath the surface of the paradigms as they were destroyed. The shattered structure automatically redistributed its contents along syntagma, smuggling vertical mobiles across horizontal ropes. What was in the air had to travel as ground and the virus sauntered right into these new spaces, taking them over. Radical spaces evolved to compensate. Negative space became a fortune telling device. Positive space arched its back painfully, now pocked horribly by the frenzied migration of vehicles into the ground.

The plague first manifests itself in the infected person as a type of déjà vu, with an accompanying aphasia. Everything that happened presented itself as already happened. This infinitely complicated things. For as soon as the person adjusted, understanding that this was merely a symptom of the plague, his or her understanding slipped backward into the already happened. Each realization had to be doubled against itself into becoming understood next: an impossible therapy to maintain. The present tense was a slippery slope to anyone in remission. The "now" became a deepening lesion, and from it rose the smell of this new sickness.

There are two sections to PCE: in the first, "Autobiography," we follow a man who may or may not become a zombie himself stumble through the beginnings of a plague, intent on rescuing the newborn son he's never met. His reality mingles with detached flights of hallucination, and by the end, I'm not even sure there was a son. The second section, "Novel," tells the story of the zombie plague itself, and how it begins to affect the people of Ontario.

On September 7 strange new edicts are passed in the Ontario legislature with more hand-washing than wringing. and by late afternoon the instructions are handed over to heavily armed teams. They are directed to exercise maximum force immediately. To combat contagion all form of communication is banned. Speaking, listening, reading, even sign language are punishable at the brute discretion of Ontario's own licensed assassins. Citizens are instructed to stay at home and communicate only through nods or shakes of the head.

This is only a brief summary, as, like Lynch at his most mind-bending, Burgess resists a traditional narrative structure in favour of scenes that insinuate themselves into your medulla, and images that by turns fascinate and horrify. Other characters flit about, their importance to the story nebulous at best. One character may or may not be a ghost, or demon, or angel. Two children flee their parents and hide in an abandoned cabin, whereupon they commence to live an existence that would surely get the book summarily banned should those with weak temperaments and even weaker grasps of art versus reality ever read the book (not much chance there).

Sometimes, it's hard to even justify what you are reading as anything more than being weird for weird's sake (not that there's anything wrong with that). Yet even if PCE were to be thoughtlessly shoved into the 'bizarro' genre of literature — a serious literary genre that combines satire and absurdism with non-traditional narratives and crazy-weird plot devices: while it has a fan in sci-fi/fantasy grand master Michael Moorcock, whose acclaimed Jerry Cornelius series could be classified as bizarro, the genre is usually populated with titles such as The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, Gigantic Death Worm, Squidpulp Blues, and Unicorn Knife Fight — it would still stand head and shoulders above its peers. Burgess is a fine writer, and his prose oozes menace while following an inner logic that virtually demands repeated readings.

Burgess is never going to be to everyone's taste; like I said, he demands some work on the part of the reader, like most artists do. If your taste leans toward a relatively undemanding horror where vampires sparkle and werewolves solve crimes, stay away; if you've replayed Lost Highway more time than you can count, wondering how Bill Pullman transmogrified into Balthazar Getty, you'll undoubtedly love Pontypool.

Verdict: The Monkey Loves, Although His Head Hurts a Bit

P.S. Bruce McDonald, with Burgess as Screenwriter, produced a film version of Pontypool which — while an utterly fabulous flick, grim and dark, one of the best zombie films of the past decade — takes serious liberties with the text. I advise reading one and watching the other, but recognize beforehand that they are markedly different monsters.

Favourite Monkey #1:

• 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