Benjamin Myers' THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE

He knows there is something else under all this. He knows there exists an under-England, a chthonic place of hidden rivers and buried relics, of the bones of extinct animals and battle-slain bodies. Layer upon layer of it, laminations of land, each made from stories packed tightly by the weight of time so that they become something else, just as wood becomes charcoal. So many stories, so many unseen footsteps. So many secrets that go beyond the limitations of the here and now.

I have a well- documented history of loving things like crop circles and of loving the people who love them. One of my favorite people ever to live was an aficionado; it's over this shared love that we first became friends. I still miss Mac Tonnies, all the time. 

I wish he was still around to have enjoyed The Perfect Golden Circle, Benjamin Myers' delightful character study of English eccentricity and the single- minded pursuit of a certain very unusual art form. 

 The Perfect Golden Circle is a delightful piece of conventional prose fiction, structured entirely around the serial creation by two men of vast crop circles of increasing scope and intricacy, intercut with snippets, John Dos Passos-style, of public reactions to same, mostly via the press. 

One way in which this novel, which takes two real "land artists" from the 1970s and 80s as inspiration but in no way tells their actual stories, really stands out is in its treatment of male friendship as something that can just be, without elaborate shared backstories or pseudo-psychoanalysis or invented conflicts or petty rivalries or toxicity of any kind. While they are very different men with no real reason to even know each other, let alone spend hours in the pub planning and more in the farm fields of England in the dead of night executing their plans, they do all of that, always together. Falklands War veteran Calvert and crustpunk Redbone don't even have a meet cute in the text of the story; we meet them in the third year of their project, the year they've decided to go beyond having a strange shared hobby and turn it into, as Redbone describes it at one point, a pursuit of art, myth and mystery. 

But the book's primary delight is describing the near-miss adventures the pair experience over the course of their summer as various other denizens of the British countryside at night, from rabbit-hunting weasels (in more than one sense) to tipsy toff landowners to the ever-increasing number of crop circle fanciers, armed with crackpot theories, homemade detective gear and flashlights, who are hoping to catch the aliens/fairies/secret agents/whatever in flagrante.

This was an especially enjoyable read for me on the heels of Andy Sharp's English Heretic, similarly concerned with English geography but altogether different in how the landscape might be interpreted. Here the land is scrutinized by Calvert's experienced logistical eye as he seeks the right field for the right project, which must not only be big and flat and full of ripening cereal crops but must also be accessible to two guys in an ancient VW van, and near a feature, natural or man-made, of sufficient height and, again, accessibility from which to view their creations in all their bizarre glory. 

It's better still if they have an interesting local name which can be incorporated into their private nomenclature. The best of these is the Cuckoo Spittle Thought Bubble, with the first two words coming from the name of the elevated landmark and the latter two describing the design they pressed, step by step with planks and ropes, into the grasses -- carefully and respectfully so as not to break the grain stalks and ruin the harvest. 

Ruining the harvest comes later, when the press blows up the sensation and people start flocking from as far away as exotic Oklahoma and Wyoming (heh) to see and study Calvert and Redbone's work, camping and trampling and dumping and landing helicopters. At least the more enterprising farmers can make up their losses by charging admission to see their new wonder.

Another source of great charm in The Perfect Golden Circle is the pair's consistent enjoyment of the attention given their work and the wild speculations about it. They take particular pleasure in seeing how close the press comes, in naming their productions on television or on the front pages of daily, sometimes national or international newspapers, to giving them the same names Calvert and Redbone did themselves. 

I'm reliably told by a friend on one of my book-focused Discord servers that Benjamin Myers is a reliable source for very, very good and beautiful books, but that no two of his are very much alike. Based on this one, I'll be exploring more of his work soon -- but not too soon, because I don't know if you've really noticed, but I'm on a year of trying to read only one book by any one author, and I'm doing my best to stick to that, but it's hard when I keep getting invited on buddy reads and book club forays. So I might cave and get, say The Gallows Pole or something sooner. Who knows?

Pip Adam's AUDITION

I am thinking very hard for a moment but trying not to go quiet like we did the last time we tried to think very hard.

One of the sillier, yet rather profound, bits of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy concerns the Belcerebons of the planet Kakrafoon. Formerly a highly civilized and quiet race, their perceived smugness about their civilization annoyed the rest of the galaxy into afflicting them with the dread social disease of telepathy. Once so punished, in order not to broadcast their every stray thought to the rest of the world, Belcerebons had to keep up a constant stream of chatter, at the expense of all other activity. Their planet thus became a very noisy and inane place.

I mention this because a similar fate, though not under similar circumstances, has seemingly befallen the crew/passengers aboard the star ship Audition, a craft powered by sound. And while any sound would originally have done, these crew members soon have to resort solely to talking because, well, they're not on the Audition because of their superior skills or merits, but because they are afflicted by a freakish and continuous growth. This growth, which has resulted in our characters all having been about three times normal human size in every dimension at the time of the ship's departure from Earth, has left them, as Pip Adam's touching, inventive and at times weirdly theatrical novel, Audition, begins, confined to the three largest spaces on board ship, into which they now barely fit so they can't move anymore, can't make the sounds of footsteps or opening and closing doors or rustling fabric; the only sound they can make is by talking, calling out to one another by way of a continuous babble of conversation, which at first is just status reports on how their legs are losing circulation and maybe gonna die and fall off or how the big skylight on the basketball court where one is trapped is now just a keyhole relative to the size of their still-growing eye. When that runs out, they start trying to piece together how they got there, but are quickly thwarted by a big problem: they don't seem to remember anything from their pasts except that they had been launched into space because they were too big to stay on Earth.

They were the unwanted. That was clear to them, perhaps it had been from the start. They took up too much room.

Then we start to get a little more information about the crew members - Alba, Stanley and Drew - from the perspective of one of their earthside trainers in an extended flashback. The Giants, as they came to be called, have been herded to a big sports stadium in Europe to be trained for their special mission: they are to be sent in giant spaceships to explore and maybe colonize other parts of the galaxy. A joke is made that this will make room for 540 regular sized humans, as many jokes are made at the Giants' expense, for as they have grown, so have the distances that their nerve impulses must travel. Like the dinosaurs to which these poor people are often compared, they seem slow and stupid to the rest of us, and dangerous, and greedy for resources, and did I mention dangerous? People who are different are always dangerous, you guys. Even if they can't accidentally step on you and squash you like a grape.

But so before these Giants get launched into space, they must be "trained" -- really, conditioned, brainwashed even -- to follow patterns of behavior and belief set by the normal-sized humans (though, the Giants always tell us, they hate being called that), and to forget as much as possible their lives before the stadium they've been taught to call the "Classroom." Presumably this is so they don't develop resentments over how they were treated prior to the "launch 'em into space" solution was adopted, but also in general to make them more biddable. Thus all their prior habits of speech in the book's introduction begin to make sense as programmed responses. They've really done a beautiful job with the ship, you guys. The Classroom was beautiful, too. The teachers were so kind. The food was so delicious.

And so they all find themselves in space, unable to recall anything about their previous lives as ordinary human beings, compulsively responding to lights and sounds like trained monkeys and unable to hold on to the simplest thoughts once a behavioral trigger is activated. It's horrible to behold, even just in print, a real tragedy that seems inescapable even before they come up with a seemingly doomed idea: 

We thought if we broke the ship, we'd remember,' Drew says. 'That we'd get it back. Ourselves before the classrooms.' The ship settles again, suddenly, and the sound levels out. 'And we were wrong,' Alba says.

It's pretty much the most tragic observation I've seen made in speculative fiction, and remember, I've read stuff like The Sheep Look Up multiple times. But...

About 2/3 of the way through this gently strange and obscurely distressing book, Audition morphs into a kind of first contact story, and once if the best, in terms of conveying the truly alien, that I've encountered that was not written by Peter Watts. Because what our trio encounters at first adjusts them/itself into something in accord with Alba's and Stanley's and Drew's senses and understanding, accommodating them so beautifully they think they're maybe in Heaven, but then starts pulling them along to meet the new universe and awareness halfway in a very subtle and convincing manner:

Stanley and Drew are beside her and they’re under the tree where they spent the first night. It is changed. Some kind of autumn has come over it. Its branches reach the ground now and it’s a different colour. The sky around it has also turned. Everything is shifting from the pastels into much more saturated colours. The brightening has been happening, Alba now realises, gradually the whole time they’ve been there. But now it’s at a point where it affects everything. The whole world sings in the bath of the colour field that comes from the sky but the tree has definitely changed colour, it isn’t an effect of the sky. The three newcomers who aren’t that new anymore shade their eyes from the brightness but T.J., A.J. and R.J. look at them with open eyes, waiting for them to sit down. The locals are stiffer in their movements and possibly taller. They sit in a more anchored way than the first day they sat together. They are taking up a different space. Alba looks at Stanley and then at Drew and none of them have changed in the same way. No physical change has come over them at all. They are the same as when they first arrived. Which surprises her because her insides feel completely rearranged.

I can't say much more about this aspect of the novel without giving too much away, so I'll just take a moment to marvel at how it transforms the entire rest of the story, including some pretty distressing material that comes up once our trio manages to break their conditioning and remember how they knew each other before the Classroom, before they even became Giants. Audition isn't here to coddle us and our delicate little feelings (though it's not here to brutalize us, either), you guys.

What it is here for, is to ask us to ask ourselves how certain we are that the world has to be the way it is now, that people have to have the relationships that they have, that what we know now about the universe is all that we can know, and that we are right about what we think we do know. That's all a pretty big job for a novelist, but judging from this book, my first read from both author Pip Adams (and from her fascinatingly off-beat U.S. publisher, Coffee House Press, which, more from them very soon!), Pip Adam is up for the job.

I think I'm going to need to read this one again sometime soon.

Andy Sharp's THE ENGLISH HERETIC COLLECTION: RITUAL HISTORIES, MAGICKAL GEOGRAPHY

Can we use film geographies to create cultural maps across a slice of time?

A long, long time ago when I first became concerned that all I ever seemed to read or watch was fiction, I made a particular effort to start adding more non-fiction to my cultural diet, went to the University of Wyoming's Coe Library (from which you could check out any number of books for a whole semester), and grabbed a big stack of stuff. One of which was Simon Schama's then-brand-new Landscape and Memory, a book that in many ways changed my life. Among other things, it led me to concoct, sometime later, one of my odder blog posts about how I personally had imagined the landmarks and locations of The Lord of the Rings when I was a kid.

Landscape and Memory is just that kind of read. But it's one that is almost sui generis; it wasn't until I discovered* W.G.Sebald and especially Rings of Saturn that I found anything to compare. 

Now I've found a third such project, a book that sums up a unique artist's strange and fascinating and definitely Ballardian (he even references Simon Sellars!**) oeuvre, English Heretic. A project that seems to have been aimed specifically at my little head but about which I'd been totally unaware until somehow I learned about Andy Sharp and The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography.***

Imagined in direct opposition to English Heritage and all it stands for, Andy Sharp describes his English Heretic project as a way to "use place as a means of fecundating the imagination." The resulting book is a survey of decades' worth of incredible creativity and energy, rendered in very serviceable prose, with lots of astonishing little insights popping up like graveyard ghouls from a cemetery that's older than my entire country.

As the quote I used to start this post indicates, a lot of Sharp's work begins and ends with film locations and sets, especially those appearing in the low-budget esoterica of the 1970s folk horror masterpieces he loves (many of which can be enjoyed via YouTube or Tubi as of this writing), like Witchfinder General or The Blood on Satan's Claw or The Shout or The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. I have seen precisely none of these films, but I'm looking forward to doing something about that soon. Judging from the trailers, I'm in for a pretty good time!

Anyway, a discussion of the latter film yields exceptional fun: The filming of Living Dead took place partly at a somewhat famous church, Hathersage in Derbyshire, and was interrupted by a coach load of tourists who "on witnessing the zombie orgies informed the authorities." The film crew had been working and camping it there for three days without official permission, of course. By the way:

The tourist party had come to Hathersage to view Little John's grave which takes up seven feet of the burial ground. Little John is the church's most famous inhabitant. I'd like to imagine Little John's reanimated corpse joining forces with Guthrie**** and his undead merry men to reap anthropophagic revenge on the do-gooding snitchers of Hathersage.

Sharp goes on to connect elements of the film's plot with actual local folklore, but leaves us to speculate whether the filmmakers were consciously aware of that folklore when making the movie. I mean, it's way more fun that way, right?

One location I can't believe Sharp didn't write about in any of these projects of his, is Winspit Quarry, though. You may think you don't know this place, but, friends, if you've ever watched much of the original Doctor Who series, you've likely spent rather a lot of time looking at it: it's that quarry Privately owned but publicly accessible at your own risk, this has to be one of the most haunted locations on the Sceptered Isle. It's stood in for so many alien planets, you guys. The psychic ghosts of so many rubber-bodied aliens are stalking it. And it's not like Andy Sharp doesn't know his Doctor Who or his Blake's Seven or anything. But maybe this is simply too famous a location for him.

Sharp isn't only concerned with films, though; another major cultural touchstone for this work is most of my very favorite psychologist, James Hillman's, later works after he developed his "acorn" theory of personality development, which I first encountered in a book he collaborated on with Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotheraphy and the World is Getting Worse.***** The personality at its youngest and least developed is Hillman's acorn, which is tiny and nut-shaped but contains within it the potential to grow into a vast and branching oak tree; as it becomes a sapling it develops "nubs" which Hillman views as behavioral and obsessional interests that hint at the personality's mature form, destiny and role in the world. Sometimes, as with, say, Winston Churchill, Hillman sees these nubs in a kind of negative, as when he considers Churchill's childhood stammer as a kind of fear or intimidation of the promptings his soul was giving him that prefigured that one day he would have to save the world by his speech. I believe Hillman went further with this notion in a book of his that I still haven't read but which turned out to be his most popular, The Soul's Code.

Anyway, Sharp calls on Hillman and his acorn theory as he contemplates personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, J.G. Ballard and Max Ernst, all viewed through the lens of place. He particularly goes to town on Ballard, whose fractally fascinating life as a child in a Japanese prison camp, an avant-garde writer of incredible science fiction short stories and a single father who only really got weird with it after his wife's untimely death left him raising four children a stone's throw away from a major film studio.

Of course Sharp is most interested in Crash, though The Unlimited Dream Company and The Atrocity Exhibition get plenty of attention, too. But it's Crash and its unforgettable character of Vaughan who really haunts English Heretic, as a fictional subject of Sharp's "Black Plaque" project, again, in direct mockery of English Heretic's plaques concerning the doings of various celebrated English people in various English places.

Sharp likes the nastier sort of person, of course. Don't we all?

At the rate I'm going, all but homebound on the high plains of the western U.S., I'm never going to get to visit the U.K., will never see any of these places with my own failing eyes. Thank Yog that people like Andy Sharp and Simon Schama are writing the next best thing to being there, books like English Heretic.

*Thanks to my late, lamented friend Lethe Bashar, aka Chris al-Aswad.

**IYKYK

***And no, I don't remember how I found out about this book, and it's driving me crazy. I've interrogated my usual suspects and nobody's owning up. So maybe Andy Sharp has just been beaming this book at my bean since 2020 and my skull is just too thick -- I do famously have incredibly dense bones, like freaking Wolverine -- to have admitted the signal right away. Or something.

****Guthrie played a drowning victim who spends the film as a soaking wet "submarine zombie."

***** A book which I cannot recommend highly enough, old as it is. Hillman and Ventura bounce off each other beautifully, and pushed each other into a lot of wild ideas that the rest of our culture is still catching up with.

Zülfü Livaneli's ON THE BACK OF THE TIGER (Tr Brenden Freely)

One hundred years and change ago, the Young Turks deposed the ante-penultimate Ottoman emperor, Sultan Abdulhamid II, and sent him, his wives and most of his children into exile in the then-Ottoman-controlled Greek City of Salonica/Thessaloniki. He was one of those rulers who was never meant to hold power, but when the throne came to him anyway, he gave up his idea of being a merchant and climbed up onto the the metaphorical beast named in Zülfü Livaneli's On the Back of the Tiger, a historical novel concerning Hamid's final years, and spent the next 30+ years of his life doing his best to look like he was riding that tiger rather than just being carried away by it. 

The novel, rendered into transparently readable, even journalistic English prose by Brenden Freely, is chiefly derived from the notebooks of one Atif Hüseyin Bey, who served as physician to Hamid and those members of his family who shared his exile. The doctor is thus a major character in the novel alongside the deposed sultan, and one of the book's greatest pleasures is watching the former's attitudes about the latter shift from resentment and hostility (Atif grew up with the prevailing idea of Hamid as the standard wicked and bloodthirsty tyrant) to grudging respect, to sympathy and even a kind of fondness, despite the constant criticism of his contemporaries, a number which includes the future first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

He was now certain that he and the former Sultan had reached a new agreement. It was as if he was the judge and the sultan was the defendant. One was interrogating, and the other was being interrogated. The doctor laughed aloud at the sense of power he felt, then began coughing from the cigarette smoke he just inhaled. After he got his coughing under control, he thought to himself,  Having power is a wonderful thing.

The uses and limits of a monarch's power when he sits atop a deeply entrenched bureaucracy is the main question On the Back of the Tiger sets out to explore. Abdulhamid II is regarded by history as the last absolute monarch the Ottomans allowed, but even he assumed the throne only by agreeing to become a constitutional one. That he dissolved the parliament within a year of his enthronement is the first charge laid against him by his doctor as stand-in for his people - but Hamid easily deflects this by pointing out that said parliament was one in which Turks were a decided minority; the parliament was composed of members of pretty much every ethnicity and religion the world had to offer, and most of these granfalloons were seeking independence from the Empire and thus had every incentive to undermine it and obstruct the executive (the Sultan). And Hamid became Sultan during another round of the Ottomans' historic conflict with Russia. Therefore the parliament forced Hamid's hand.

Hamid's sobriquet in the West, and amongst his own peoples in secret, was the Red Sultan, for all the metaphorical blood on his hands, chiefly for the Armenian genocide that happened on his watch. But how much responsibility can really be loaded into one man, even one popularly understood to be omnipotent? Was he really omnipotent, astride the tiger of state that fought him constantly and sought always to attack and devour him? 

His doctor keeps having to ask these questions as they get to know one another, as the doctor struggles to reconcile the historical villain with the mild, civilized and cultured man who takes more pride in his carpentry skills than in his lineage, and whose family members show real devotion to and affection for him at every turn, further undermining his monstrous reputation.

These conflicting ideas come to a head in, for example, an early conversation the doctor has with the former Sultan about the fate of an ex-official imprisoned on his orders, and presumably executed in jail on those orders, too. The Sultan insists that had he wanted that man dead, he would have just ordered him executed. The man's actual death by strangulation while imprisoned, Hamid says he didn't know of until it was too late for him to prevent it. How much power can one man wield over the vast and complex apparatus of an empire, comprising individuals constantly having to interpret their mandates and act on their initiative to do what they assume is his will? As they've been doing for hundreds of years according to tradition and perceived necessity?

Livanelli doesn't pretend to have the answers to any of these questions, but in inviting us to ponder them he invites us to think about our own current crop of wannabe Sultans, including the ones in Turkey and Hungary and Trumpistan. And while I certainly don't like being asked to extend sympathy or respect to these autocrats, the thing that really separates them from people like Hamid stands out in very sharp relief that finally makes me, at least, decide that I don't have to. Hamid never made the kinds of speeches that these guys do. At least not in public. At least not overtly. At least not in front of TV cameras.

But what did he say in private? Those things, we're never going to know.

But it sure is interesting to think about, isn't it?

Fleur Jaeggy's THE WATER STATUES (Tr by Gini Alhadeff)

On his face had been spread as though with a spatula, an expression of peace, a sermon painted over a pale complexion. Though thin, at the core of his bones there was steel.

When a book is full of sentences like this, as Fleur Jaeggy's The Water Statues is, I wind up thinking even more about the translator than the author. I can't help but imagine Gini Alhadeff sitting and pondering each one, searching for a precise word order, an exact placement of modifying phrases and clauses, with an expression of concentration but also a slackness to her face not unlike the novella's protagonist, here.

The Water Statues, though even more compact than its page count might indicate, is densely packed with some of the most extraordinary sentences I've ever encountered, and for this reason alone is a book I would suggest to anyone because at least one of them is bound to resonate for them. So yes, the temptation to quote half of the book here is powerful, but I resist, because I don't want to rob you, reader, of the experience beyond what I already have.

The Water Statues might be an account of a young man, Beeklam, wondering why he can't grieve as his father does for his recently deceased mother, but then again it might be an account of that same person but as an old man, Beeklam, who is regretting the sale of his three best statues, one of which someone at some point had named after Beeklam's dead mother. Why not both, you might ask, to which I would reply, not this time. This book is like one of those weird plastic holograms we used to see all the time that contained two completely different images but only showed one at a time, depending on how light was hitting it. The old man, Beeklam, really doesn't seem like he was ever the young man, Beeklam, in the past, or vice versa. Their stories just occupy this same space. 

And what a space it is. Beeklam lives in Amsterdam in a house near the water with a flooded basement full of statues. A 21st century reader can't help but be reminded of Susanna Clarke's magnificent Piranesi, though this space is small and confined, with no tides washing through to freshen the waters and bring sea life to its rooms. Beeklam has deliberately caused this out of a desire to live like one who has drowned. 

Yes, it's all very strange, the more so for a static, dreamlike quality that would feel to have leaked over from something like J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World but for the habit of The Water Statues' characters to soliloquize as though a proscenium arch has just appeared above them, a quality all this novella's own.

I have read stranger books, even just this year, but none of them have made me feel quite as unmoored as this one 

Layla Martinez' WOODWORM (Tr Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott; Narr Raquel Beattie)

How a novelist handles tension is everything in horror and suspense. Most of what I encounter in these genres lets tension build and build and build until it's pretty near unbearable and then releases it all in an ecstatic final climax. And that's fun and satisfying and takes a certain amount of skill and a sure grasp of one's story that I can only admire. 

Other authors, though, authors like Spanish novelist and essayist Layla Martinez, construct something more intricate, full of small winding bits and catches and very, very controlled little releases. I suppose people would describe this as "edging" but it's more interesting than that in Woodworm, with its pair of narrators (a grandmother and granddaughter) and its exquisite blend of supernatural horror, generational trauma, class resentment and elements of rural soap opera.

And it's short, not even 150 pages in Sophie Hughes' and Annie McDermott's English translation, which is full of interesting alliterations and rhythms that really translate wonderfully to the audio book medium, which is how I experienced Woodworm. 

But speaking of translation, one thing that gets lost in it here is the effectiveness of the book's title; in Spanish this book is called Carcoma*, which literally means "woodworm," but the onomatopoeia of the word spoken aloud is also a sound effect the author and the audio book narrator employ magnificently to convey many of the strange noises made by the ghosts and other malevolent presences as they go about their spooky business. 

For this is a haunted house story. The animated spirits of the dead, though, are the least interesting things haunting this house, originally built by a very bad man to contain -- really to entrap -- the poor woman he married in order to found the dynasty of unfortunate women condemned to live in the house and the nasty, gossipy, judgy and destitute Spanish village surrounding it.

The founding patriarch, by the way, made a habit of entrapping women, using his personal attractiveness, Andrew Tate-style, to draw in  many of them, only to manipulate them into prostitution to make him a small fortune, which in turn is how he afforded a fine house for the one he decided to marry, only to make her the most miserable of them all.

This pimp-patriarch (pimptriarch?) is the grandfather of one of our two narrators (unnamed; nobody in this novel has a first name and only one family -- significantly not the family living in the House -- gets a surname), a woman we only come to know as "The Old Woman" who has by reputation and necessity come to serve the region as a cunning woman, dispensing simple remedies and charms and curses to her neighbors, who despise and fear her, but not enough not to dispense with her services. The Old Woman is also subject to what we can only think of as absence seizures, in which supernatural beings "take her away" for hours at a time to share secrets with her. The Old Woman believes, or at least professes to believe, that these are saints, specific ones like Saint Lucy or Saint Sebastian (heavy on the martyrs with grotesque iconography, or who died by torture, or both), and further believes that it is via her prayers to them that her ill will against people who have wronged her, her daughter or her granddaughter, is put into effect. Enemies of the household accidentally break their legs in improbable accidents, go missing, get sick and die, all through her prayers to her "saints."

Of course the reader is skeptical, not about the reality of these "saints", but that they're really saints at all, especially when her granddaughter, "The Girl" who is our other narrator, reveals that their house is also visited by angels, and that angels don't really look at all like they do in Renaissance paintings and Catholic iconography. They're more like giant praying mantises with huge compound eyes. See the novel's Portuguese cover below.

Meanwhile, The Girl has grown up without parents; her teenaged mother was murdered (by one of two paramours) shortly after The Girl was born, and the girl's wealthy and privileged (probable) father has never acknowledged her, might not even know she exists for all that one of his family's many homes is next door to that of The Girl and The Old Woman. His is the family who gets a surname, and who long ago sought to employ the Pimptriarch's family members as domestic servants - a measure the Pimptriarch's pride would not permit, but one of which his descendants, including both The Old Woman and later The Girl, in turn, avail themselves, to the disdain of all. 

The inciting incident takes place in this rich neighbor's household, when The Girl allows, whether out of neglect or of simple and resentful malice, a great calamity to befall her cruel and snobbish employers, coincidentally at about the same time as The Girl first notices that her own mother's restless and fitful remnant is one of the many shades haunting her family's ancestral prison of a home. You know, the mother who got it on with the rich boy next door and then got murdered, either by him or by the boy she was gonna marry since the rich boy was leaving her to fend for herself and the baby...

It is left ambiguous as to what, if any of the weird and frightening phenomena that characterize the House can be attributed to The Girl's mother, whose ghost (?) is condemned continually to enter the place via the front door, versus the family's many other malevolent ancestors and their helpmeets of dubious nature and provenance. Something haunts a wardrobe in the bedroom The Old Woman and The Girl share; it does its best to lure people inside it, never to be seen again. Something else produces an apparition of a pair of legs that protrudes from under The Old Woman's bed. Then there are the aforementioned "saints" and "angels" who supply The Old Woman with endless gossip and the odd bit of important and actionable intelligence. All of these manifestations are barely regarded by the living women of the House, though The Girl, in her chapters, still expresses a certain pride in her ability to resist the wardrobe's blandishments and to ignore the whispers and cracks and carcoma/caruncho sounds that wake her in the night.

Woodworm is thus an incredibly effective and multilayered** bit of modern horror fiction, full of heavy emotional impact and genuine chills -- and surprises. It would have been so easy for Martinez to give The Girl a fate similar to her grandmother's or her mother's, the same only more brutal. Hints that this might happen abound. But while The Girl is as bound to the House as any of them, her own inner strength and resourcefulness let her remain her own character with her own agency and her own ideas about how to avenge her mother's family against her (probable) father's and against the villagers who have also done more than a little to add to their misery. Martinez and The Girl have other and more interesting plans, though, that lead to an even more satisfying conclusion than I felt I had any right to expect.

If there is a flaw in this work, it is in the audio book production. Raquel Beattie, the narrator, appears to be very much a go-to for Latina/Hispanic fiction and the narration thereof, especially if it requires an appropriate accent. But this is not a work of Latin American fiction, but of Spanish, so she uses her own standard American English speech patterns -- except for a rather cartoonish lisp, the kind that Americans who want to show off their sophistication affect when pronouncing place names like Ibiza (with a theta sound for the "z"). Which lisp she imposes throughout the text on all the ordinary English words of the translation, rather than on just the Spanish nouns and names. And she gives The Girl, who is rather more of an asexual Amazon than a nymphette, a breathy and sensual voice to differentiate her from The Old Woman (whose voice is ideal for the character, tough and serious and weary and protective and, yes, resentful) that really just annoyed me. So I kept being yanked out of this utterly incredible book by the narration. This would have angered me more if I hadn't just DNF'd another audio book that I stuck with way longer than I would have in print just because the narrator gave it a better performance than the material deserved. I figured they balanced each other out. 

And I never once considered setting Woodworm aside, despite my mild irritation at the audio. I would even listen to it again sometime, though I would really rather experience it as text. But Audible got me with an incredible sale price and Woodworm had been on my TBR for quite a long time, and...

Anyway, I sure hope Martinez, who seems more inclined to non-fiction than fiction of any kind, does decide to write another novel or two or three. I'm here for them if she does!

*It's even better in the Portuguese translation: Caruncho!

**I mean, I haven't even gotten into all the echoes of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime that echo through this tale. As my beloved Langdon from the Death//Sentence podcast observed of this book, it's the most Spanish thing imaginable. Well, at least since Guillermo del Toro's fairy-insect infested Pan's Labyrinth.

Ethan Rutherford's NORTH SUN or THE VOYAGE OF THE WHALESHIP ESTHER

We're told not to judge books by their covers, and to that I mostly hold, but occasionally I must make an exception. When this beauty started staring out at me from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum's web page, I had to bring it into my home. I mean, look at this thing!

And once it's come into your home, this cover's baleful stare, if allowed to peek out from under or from the top of one's stack of recently acquired books to be read (on dead tree despite the pain), will compel one to read it, and soon, if only to find out what the hell this staring creature even is.

Even if the book's possessor is a stubborn old crone-in-training like your humble blogger, feeling tsundoku guilt and determined to read some of the tomes that came here before it. Compelled by this cover, I took it up out of turn. And so here we are, with Ethan Rutherford's debut novel, North Sun or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, in the very year in which it was published.

And yes, there's a whale carcass in the room that I can't ignore, viz, the last book about whaling* I wrote about on this blog, which entry is still one of the most read things I've ever written, I'm pretty sure, my old review of Moby-Dick. Which most people seem to interpret as me roasting Melville's maritime masterpiece but 1. I love an unlikeable protagonist especially if he's an unreliable narrator and 2. The tedium is very much the point of that book and as such i respect Moby-Dick as a pinnacle of creative achievement and 3. I've since read it again, after having fallen in love with China Mieville's Railsea, and found more to admire in it a second time around. I could just take that post down (since I can't just let it sink into oblivion apparently) but I can't bring myself to do so. It's a pole holding up the tent of my identity. I'm the chick who called Ishmael the annoying hipster on the boat.** I own it. 

But anyway, North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther is a book that, for the first third or so, almost feels like a very streamlined and snappy retelling of the story of the Essex, that unfortunate ship whose fate inspired Moby-Dick and is depicted in In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, book, film and podcast episode.*** And of course, in certain respects, one sea voyage is very like another, at least to start with. The action is briskly told, the periods of inaction elided over, everything described in terse sentences, quick paragraphs and severely truncated chapters that would seem to be the very opposite of Moby-Dick. For a while this feels like it might turn out to be the whole point.

But then [REDACTED] shows up not long after a pair and then a whole pack of [REDACTEDs] attack and on the heels of a second encounter between little [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and the sinister and very large [REDACTED] in the bowels of the ship -- and everything changes. The ship turns north at the Sandwich Islands -- they are not merely on a whaling expedition, but are also off to try to recover a Mr. Leander, captain of another whaling ship, who lost his charge to the pack ice and sent the Esther's eventual captain back to New Bedford, MA to tell the owners of both the Esther and the lost Dromo, that nobody was coming home from the Dromo even though its captain is married to one of the family's daughters -- and heads up to the Arctic to hunt whales, walrus and Leander.

By the time the ship is on its new heading, the reader has realized that they are sailing, not only into chillier, more dangerous waters, but also into the wild waves of Weird Fiction, as I'll get into in a bit.

Ahoy!

On the Esther sails through the choppy winter sea! She swoops her spirit up one wave and down another, proud and vain. Finally, the cold truly catches and the temperature drops. The water turns gray and leaden; every surface of the ship remains damp. The fog smothers and surrounds them. But the silence they sail through is not the absence of sound at all. Rather, it is the presence of all sound. The cold bites the men's skin; they feel it in their teeth. They bundle against it, but that's how it is.

How many chapters would Herman Melville have taken to describe this? I kid. Kind of.

But anyway, the hazards of a whaling voyage are many, even before things get explicitly Weird. For instance, while of course I'm enough of a veteran of maritime fiction to know what a shipworm is (actually a kind of clam, with a long flexible body; they use their little shells as drill bits to bore through the wood of ships) but I've never encountered them depicted as crawling free between locations on deck where little ship's boys could potentially see them. Which, this alone could introduce a note of horror for the squeamish reader -- which I am not. I am a sicko, which is why I decided to share an amusing-to-me image of these strange and destructive critters:

Thank you, Internet. You're still capable of providing some good things.

Oh, and by the way, the worms in the book, have grown to be as big around as your arm

and proportionally as long. You're welcome!

But Rutherford isn't here just to try to gross us out. He's enamored of the imagery the setting affords him, and takes full advantage: 

That morning the men have their first glimpse of clustered ice. What a sight! The northern sun glints off the Frozen expanse - her light is a dancing thing, it plays over the basin and reflects crystals in the air. The ice cakes are like glistening scraps skimmed from the pots. They see no patch of color in front of them. Everything - sky, snow, apparent horizon - is a gradation of brilliant white. Except, of course, for the sea itself, which, in the leads and channels, appears black.

Which is to say that we get some quite beautiful prose in North Sun, but with which the author never gets too carried away. The above passage, like the passage I quoted before, constitutes almost an entire chapter, and soon we are back to the plot, the plot, the plot! This is 21st century fiction for the TikTok audience, or something, lean and hungry and raring to get back to pursuit or butchery or uncanny haunting or...

Weirder things. Things which I'm not going to spoil for you but which chiefly concern the two little Riggs brothers, aged ten and twelve, though they are listed on the manifest as twelve and fourteen because, while whaling families are, as one captain observes early in the novel, monsters, they're not complete monsters. They wouldn't employ child labor or anything, I mean come on! But anyway, these two little boys, being the smallest bodies on the boat, get all the nastiest jobs, like getting lowered into the head cavities of slaughtered whales to collect all the spermaceti (you can't have a whaling story without spermaceti!) and being subject to the unwelcome attentions of the kinds of people who pay unwelcome attentions to powerless little boys (trigger warning, there, though nothing gets too graphic).

But there's also a dude who kind of fills the role of the Bond Company Stooge in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Mr. Thule (great name for a vaguely sinister figure, no?), who stays mostly below decks until they reach the ice but then emerges as a figure of unexpected force and knowledge who may be exercising some kind of weird occult powers on behalf of the ship's owners and who is absolutely unperturbed by the forces of weather, wind, tide, wildlife or the increasingly outlandishly bad luck that has afflicted the ship at least since they rounded Cape Horn, the kind of luck which has their chief harpooneer blowing his hand off in a rare bit of comic relief as he experiments with a new kind of explosive harpoon dart that can kill a whale before the animal can dive below the ice and threaten to drag a whaleboat under with him, as nearly happens soon after they arrive in the Arctic.

And there is another figure aboard about whom I'm not going to write here but who will haunt me for a long time, I think. Oh, Old Sorrel. I might even cut out this paragraph just for mentioning him at all. I don't know yet. If I leave it in, it's just because I decided to tease you, dear readers.

I didn't know how much my life was lacking a combination of Herman Melville and Drew Magary (if you know, you know. Crab) until this book found me, but now I'm craving some more whaling tales. And, fortunately for me, I have at least one more in the teetering TBR stack. And readers, that one rhymes. 

Stay tuned!

*That's not an incidental appearance of the practice in an Aubrey/Maturin novel.

**It is perhaps a mark of that post's relative antiquity that I felt the need exhaustively to define what a hipster is.

***Only the latter two have I experienced as of yet, but I have the book on deck for sometime soon. The podcast episode, by the way, is a mini-series by the guys at Last Podcast on the Left.