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

Tiny monkey - Butterfly Winter by W.P. Kinsella

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 - A triumphant triad of delights

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.

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

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

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

hidden monkey - Crisp by R.W. Gray

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: The Good, the innocuous, and the ugly

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!

Monkey droppings - Two for a Chilly September Morn

The shelf monkey has been very, very lax on blog updates and reviews of late.

The monkey apologizes.

The monkey has good reasons, however; some selfish, some not.

The monkey will remain mum on that for the time being.

But in the meantime, the monkey throws you a couple of quickies, to mask his abject shame.

Bad monkey. BAD MONKEY! BAD MONKEY!

Seven Good Reasons Not to be Good
John Gould (2010)

What if Zane isn't actually good at all? What if he's just clever - clever enough to give his compulsion a purpose? You got a big ugly sweater from your mother-in-law for Christmas. It's yellow, the yellow of a smoker's fingers, and festooned with quasi-floral patters in lime green and salmon. It's stippled like a plucked chicken. You wear the hideous thing to your mother-in-law's once and then you donate it to the Sally Ann. Sure, it'll keep some poor soul warm on a winter's night, but that isn't going to get you into heaven, is it? You're just ditching the damn thing.

In 2003, John Gould published kilter: 55 fictions, a lovely collection of micro-stories that went on to become a surprise nominee for the Giller Prize. It was a sterling set of tales, and I'm not saying that because I was the only reviewer in mainstream media to review it, for the Winnipeg Free Press. I liked the spasm of attention I garnered for such a selfless act (got my heartily sideburned mug on the teevee and everything), but the stories certainly stand up to closer scrutiny.

Now, seven years later, Gould finally resurfaces with his debut novel Seven Good Reasons Not to be Good. Does it fulfill the promise of kilter? Well, that depends. Anyone searching for a direct repeat of his incisively concise narratives will be sorely disappointed. Anyone who enjoys a good story well-told will be well-satisfied.

Seven Good Reasons concerns Matt, a film critic (or "kritik" - "way cooler, way kooler than your average hack") on the horns of several dilemmas. His wife is cuckolding him with a female barista. His father (the Dadinator) is on his merry way to dementia, obsessed with crop circles and alien visitations. And his best friend Zane, the one constant he could always depend on, has decided to stop fighting and let his AIDs-related death overtake him. Matt has decided, now that he's newly-fired (no spoilers here, but the reasons are delicious), to visit Zane and stop him from embracing death. So he hops a flight to Toronto, starts up a hotel affair with a comely elevator companion, and decidedly does his best not to confront his problems.

There is a lot going on in Seven Good Reasons; novels about the travails of the mid-life crisis often do. There is an abundance of the hopeful fool in Matt, a man not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and a character firmly in the mold of the mid-life heroes of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Such novels are about the search for self, and possibly of meaning in a meaningless world, and Gould manoeuvres the oft-traversed paths with wit and grace. The humour is at once broad yet subtle, combined with a gentle depth of character that recalls Miriam Toews at her best.

Seven Good Reasons Not to be Good is not a game-changer; there are no elaborate flourishes of poetic license, none of that standard 'CanLit that is good for you' falderal. Rather, it is an insightful and humourous examination of human foibles, placed within a plot that always entertains and oftentimes zigs where a zag was expected.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES

The World More Full of Weeping
Robert J. Wiersema (2009)

For breakfast on the morning of the day he disappeared, Brian Page ate most of two scrambled eggs, three pieces of bacon, and almost two slices of multigrain toast. After he was gone, his father, Jeff Page, kept remembering the remaining triangle of hardening bread on its plate on the kitchen counter, the outline of Brian's bite sharp, a bright curve against the right angle.

I am not previously acquainted with Robert Wiersema's novel Before I Wake, despite suffering many people's admonishment for this oversight. After reading his sterling novella The World More Full of Weeping, I plan to rectify this horrific mistake posthaste.

Weeping is a tiny, almost perfect pearl of a story - a story of family loss tinged with elements of magic realism Stephen King might have written in his prime.

Brian Page has gone missing. The locals are not concerned, not at first; boys do have a habit of disappearing, especially when there is an inviting forest just adjunct to the backyard. But his father Jeff is not so sure; there are hints that he once disappeared himself, memories that refuse to surface, something to do with the woods and its mysteries. And if Brian has fallen prey to the same lure, he may never return.

I don't want to give too much away; the story is short, precise, and nary a word wasted with an economy of prose that should be taught in schools (I should take the course, definitely, oh yes indeedy do). Wiersema crafts an evocative yarn of tragedy and magic, very similiar in tone to the recent Tim Lebbon piece The Thief of Broken Toys (also great, and also a ChiZine release, my new favourite publisher). Wiersema also proves himself an expert creator of place, erecting a whole town from very few pieces (the process chronicled in the companion piece Places & Names).

The World More Full of Weeping is a gem, a mood piece for a cold autumn's eve that will make you shiver even as you smile, and lament even as you wish it were true.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES

Monkey droppings - So Dark the Night by Cliff Burns: "Zombies vomitting maggots, blood-thirsty ravenors, that sort of thing?"

The monkey cannot come up with an adequate pun to introduce this review.

All out of monkeyshines today.

Wait...did that count?


So Dark the Night
by Cliff Burns (2010)

One of the drawbacks of being virtually immortal, the way the sins accumulate, across centuries of villainy, avarice and deceit. The victims who refuse to rest easy, their roaming spirits bent of revenge.

As I've said in previous posts (oh, go look them up yourself), there are a few themes and/or predicaments in the arts that always earn my affection. One is anthropomorphizing animals and/or inanimate objects, provided that it is done with skill and care and genuine wit. I will re-read Firmin and The Bear Went Over the Mountain and Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County again and again, and I will never tire of watching Toy Story and Babe and Ren and Stimpy. Conversely, I harbour absolutely no goodwill toward Hanna-Barbera cartoons, Garfield (comic or movies), Alvin & the Chipmunks, Marmaduke; you get the idea.

Likewise, I love a good hardboiled detective/supernatural mashup, and don't ask me to explain why, 'cuz there ain't no satisfactory answer. I will re-watch Constantine and Lord of Illusions and Angel Heart without tiring; Jeff Vandermeer's beautifully noir novel Finch was one of the best I read last year; I pray that William Hjortsberg will write more; and the mere mention of Clive Barker writing a Harry D'Amour vs. Pinhead novel sets my soul a-fluttering with joy.

So Canadian author Cliff Burns writing up a novel of jaded detectives with supernatural abilities battling lovecraftian forces from beyond? Yeah, I'm all about that.

Cliff came to my attention in 2009, when he introduced me to his collection The Reality Machine, a gritty and sublime collection of sci-fi horror tales that took few prisoners. Cliff has finally seen fit to personally release his first novel, one that has been available as a download for free on his website for some time. I'm normally filled with aversion to self-published works (see: Minnow Trap, Blood & Wine, and this deadly serious example of how unhinged some people can be, and you tell me I'm altogether wrong), but I'm willing to admit my failings, as So Dark the Night is a zippy, fun, and gruesome dip into the monster mash.

Set in the fictional city of Ilium, Burns' pastiche follows the adventures of Cassandra Zinnea and Evgeny Nightstalk, two "shades...nocturnal souls, temperamentally unsuited for the humdrum, nine-to-five existence of the 'Gray' world." The sun-allergic work as nighttime-exclusive investigators who report to a mysterious Old Man for detective assignments of an altogether stranger ilk than the usual. Cassandra is a powerful adept, capable of reading people, attuned to the spiritual realm, and inadvertently poison to electric appliances. Nightstalk, the narrator, is the brawn, a thug with a gift for storytelling, a passion for pornography, and a heightened ability to withstand (and cause) copious amount of violence. It is a strange pairing, but it seems to work, as evidenced by Burns' playful footnotes of past cases.

A strange case of murderous arson brings a mysterious society to the duo's attention. Soon, their investigations lead them to shadowy groups such as The Brethren of Purity, and as their contacts dry up, wither away, completely burst into flame, or much worse - "with one cruel tug, his personality and soul are ripped from his body, his essence gobbled up, the extraneous bits tumbling piecemeal into absolute nothingness" - the twosome begin to piece together a plan that could destroy the fabric of the world.

Yeah, it's one of those kind of novels.

While the ghosts of Hammett, Chandler, Lovecraft, and Poe are all well and accounted for, So Dark the Night is its own peculiar beast. Burns has a lot of twisted fun playing the collage of influences against each other, and he tells a mean tale smoothly.

I can't say that So Dark the Night is a perfect structure. Despite having the deliberate trappings of a hardboiled 1940s-era film noir, the novel is set in the world of today, with somewhat unweildy results; references to Pierce Brosnan, Robert Mitchum, DVDs, and well-appointed television stereo systems seem out-of-place, serving to jar the reader out of Burns' tale. Sometimes, Nightstalk's narration is too 'modern,' again a problem of incongruity with the overall atmosphere. The novel is, at times, too aware of itself as it pertains to its literary forerunners.

Yet So Dark the Night is inherently enjoyable, a fast-paced and occasionally grizzly funhouse ride. As hints abound as to other adventures in the duo's canon, it would be a shame for this to be Zinnea and Nightstalk's only literary appearance.

So Dark the Night from Sherron Burns on Vimeo.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES.