Stephen Sherrill's THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK

A pervading weary hopelessness threatens every page of this novel, and no surprise; it's hard to imagine anyone having a carefree and cheerful experience of life on the lowest levels of working class society in the rural U.S. South, even if they are millennia-old beings from Greek mythology who are inexplicably stuck there. This seemed to me like weirdly unpromising material on which to construct a novel, but in The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Stephen Sherrill not only makes it work but makes of it an affecting, relatable and only occasionally shocking novel (and it's never shocking for obvious reasons; the low-hanging fruit, here, remains dangling off the tree) that I'm very glad I took a chance on when I stumbled across it in the available selections in the Kobo+ subscription listing.

Told from the perspective of the titular Minotaur -- and yes, this is the very same bull-headed man stashed away in Daedalus' labyrinth on ancient Crete, who somehow survived his encounter with Theseus and just kept on living and acquiring useful skills despite his bilateral vision, vast, sharp and heavy horns, and terrifying appearance -- our story begins where most of it takes place, in a not-quite town in the Piedmont area of South Carolina, where M* has turned up driving a decades-old Chevy Vega he has maintained himself and in need of a new place to live and a new job. He finds both, at first, at a small and decidedly podunk backwoods trailer park run by a widower, Sweeney, who buys and sells old cars for what living he doesn't quite make renting out a few old mobile homes he's tried to keep habitable. M. can help with that, and swiftly reaches an agreement to trade mechanic work on whatever cars Sweeney brings home in exchange for rent on an odd, but furnished boat-shaped trailer, at least until he can find a job in a restaurant kitchen, where he has traditionally made his own nut.

The man talking to Sweeny looks up and catches the Minotaur’s eye, which leaves the Minotaur no choice. He inhales deeply, from the belly up, filling his chest. He holds his head erect, horns straight, then walks toward them.

“Morning, M,” Sweeny says.

If fear is what he hopes for, the Minotaur is disappointed. The men acknowledge his presence with little more than nods and furrowed brows. There is a noticeable sag to the Minotaur’s shoulders.

Almost never is M.'s status as an immortal and impossible mythological creature commented on by any of the novel's characters, except occasionally as an occasion for bigotry on the part of the especially ignorant, though Sherrill devotes considerable thought to what it might actually like to live in and care for such an improbable body, to which not even emergency room physicians react to as especially strange when M. shows up with the results of various kitchen accidents. M's presence in the world is all but taken for granted, as is that of what I think is a satyr, briefly encountered stampeding a herd of goats, a tired looking wood nymph playing Ms. Pac-Man between customers at a gas station. Everybody has to make a living, no matter how glamorous her former existence might have seemed.

Most of the book takes place in a popular area restaurant, where M. gets a kitchen job not long after arriving in the area. Thus not a little of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break might remind the reader of a lesser-known work by the late and much-missed Anthony Bourdain; the hierarchy of waiters and cooks and management, the dinner rushes and the kinds of bizarre mishaps that can only happen when cabbage is being sliced and dressing made on the kind of absurdly vast scales of mess halls and cafeterias and restaurants with ten gallon drums of mayonnaise and gigantic dishwashers that run in cycles of minutes and incredibly sharp and well-maintained knives are flashing everywhere. The issue of the amount of extra headspace needed when one of your cooks has a wide pair of horns swinging around every time someone calls out his name is addressed early on, but nobody knows how to accommodate the kind of blind spot that only a guy with a bovine head experiences, unable to see what's right in front of him. Nobody gives him too much hell for these things, but his very slow and laconic speech does let him in for some issues, as, for instance, when two of the less mature waiters trick him into bellowing that he's a "tit man" right when new waitress Kelly, whose breasts have already excited plenty of comment among the staff in general, that are pretty universal in spaces where diverse personalities are thrown together and forced to interact despite their differences for hours every day.

This scenario all sounds like it would be leading to some kind of dumb monster erotica, and there is a little bit of sex in the book, but the relationship that develops between M. and Kelly is sweet rather than salacious, with plenty of time given for an actual friendship to develop out of the allyship of the kitchen before things get saucy -- and misunderstandings pile up.

Meanwhile, the community of the trailer park also gets a fair amount of page time, and while a few of the characters there threaten to become stereotypes, once again, what conflicts arise are not the kind of normies versus freaks, locals versus outsider hostilities that would serve as the easy route to drama for a novelist. Instead we get to see some healthy male friendships at work, bonds formed over the brotherhood of wrenches and carburetors strengthened by shared guilt over allowing an unfortunate accident to happen (trigger warning, animal death) and a shared resignation that this might be as good as it gets. Nobody in this book is dreaming of Getting Out of This Place and Making it Big Somewhere Else. Aspirations are modest, nobody is waiting to cut down the tall poppy or pull down a crab escaping the bucket, but it's mostly because nobody is really trying to. They don't seem to resent their lot; nobody is starving or avoiding medical care because of the cost, meaning that these characters are a bit better off than a lot of the people who might read about them, but not in an unrealistic way. Weirdly, it's kind of aspirational, which I'm not sure it was when the book was first published in 2000, but 26 years later it all seems kind of nice?

I think a modern myth is what author Stephen Sherrill is going for here, and in a gentle and thoughtful way, he has achieved it. M. has a stoicism to him that isn't showy or profound; he is a quietly competent and genuinely kind and generous being, whose thousands of years of life and haunting past as a figure of terror have left him with a tremendous compassion for himself and others that is comforting to read of and lovely to see. He can fix an engine, cook and carve a prime rib (and never mind the implications there, err...), carve an apple into a swan, read and contemplate a novel and help a friend move house, just like any other person; he has just learned to carry around a drywall patch kit to effect quick repairs when his horns accidentally damage his surroundings. I think a lot of of would like to have a friend just like him.

There is a sequel, set in and published 16 years later, The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time, but I don't feel any great compulsion to read it just now. I think I'll keep it around for sometime when I'm in the mood for something just a little melancholy or lonely, but don't want a great epic tragedy. We all need one of these now and then.

*Sherrill eschews the Minotaur's traditional name of Asterion, probably because how would a dude with bovine lips, teeth and tongue pronounce that, and refers to him simply as M., as does all of the novel's other characters. 

Elaine Vilar Madruga's THE TYRANNY OF FLIES (Tr by Kevin Gerry Dunn)

Elaine Vilar Madruga demands only a little of her readers, at first: we must suspend our disbelief enough to accept that an island nation's unofficial Second Family can contain a teenage daughter who is ferociously and very sexually attracted to inanimate objects; a son whose touch causes instant death, which animals as small as ants and as large as monkeys at the local zoo can sense and deeply and frantically desire, so that his own life is constantly accompanied by suicidal animals striving to make contact with him and end their miserable lives; and that it is actually the flies -- as in those annoying little flying pests that get in everywhere to fly around, buzzing, land on everything and immediately poop on it, and find a good juicy smelly food source onto or into which to lay eggs that hatch into squirmy little maggots that gross us out and then metamorphose into a new generation of flies even as their parents die and collect in the bottoms of our light bulbs, those flies -- yes, the flies that rule the world. And their will cannot ever be gainsaid, for how would they even know that you disagree?

I mean, I don't know about you, but I have believed a few, slightly more impossible things than these before breakfast. 

Welcome to The Tyranny of Flies. We've kept a seat for you, warm and soft like the gummy bears from a school bus passenger's pocket.

It takes a real woman to give birth, but it takes one hell of a real woman to admit you will never experience what other mothers do in those first hours, days, and months. Not just because the three babies you brought into this world took a big whopping shit inside of you, what the doctors inaptly call fetal distress but ought to call fecal jubilation*, the slow shattering of the mother's insides, the fetuses former home, with the foulest of substances; not just because you pumped out three kids with gargantuan heads that forced you to enlarge the epistiotomy twice, and not even that was good enough for the third, the breech birth. No, you will never get the same gratification as other mothers because, regardless of gender, each of your kids is a sick son of a bitch.

By the way, there is a third child in this family, and she is perhaps the strangest of them all. But more about Calia, still a poopy-pantsed toddler and despite this is the only one flies don't buzz around, tickle when they land, or vomit on, in a moment. First, though,  let's consider the family as a whole.

As I've already intimated, this is not a family that loves each other. The father, whom we only get to know as Papa, was an up-and-comer in a dictatorial regime, attending a public event in his splendid uniform, already decked out in a few of his ever-growing collection of medals, when he spotted a very pretty but otherwise ordinary girl who would become the family's Mama, and decided that She Would Do, would at least give him the beautiful children that his public presentation would require in order that his Importance might increase. She, being orphaned somewhat young by some truly extraordinary and bizarre circumstances that Papa might have wanted to know about before they married, but too late now, doesn't have any other prospects and so agreed to become his wife and have his children and let him take care of her and buy her pretty high-heeled shoes, and thus a family began.

By the time we meet this family, Papa and Mama have three children, daughter Cassandra (she of the ferocious sexual attraction to various inanimate objects, her passion growing with the size of the objects as she gets older, until at age 16 she is ready to declare that the love of her life is a neighborhood bridge, constructed of iron, genteel-ly rusting away, and certainly giving no indication that it does not welcome or consent to Cassandra's leering advances and eventual, uh, consummation); son Caleb (he of the deadly touch and parade of suicidal animals ever trailing in his wake) and daughter Calia, whom Mama is convinced is a reincarnation of Mama's dead aunt when Calia reveals both intense and non-verbal neurodivergence and a preternatural talent for drawing, even at just three years old, such realistic and lifelike animals that you'd swear that, on her anatomically accurate crayon illustrations of monkey's asses the perfectly rendered hairs would stir in the breeze of your breath if you blew on them. Mama's dead aunt could draw like that, and had other supernatural talents as well. But unlike Calia, Mama's dead aunt could be bothered to acknowledge the presence of other humans now and then.

Have you seen Yorgos Lanthimos' early film, still in Greek with English subtitles, Dogtooth? In which "A controlling, manipulative father locks his three adult offspring in a state of perpetual childhood by keeping them prisoner within the sprawling family compound," there to experiment on them rather unscrupulously by teaching them that, among other things, their canine teeth will fall out someday when they've reached full maturity and that until that happens, they are still children and owe him absolute obedience and credulousness? I think that Elaine Vilar Madruga has, but did Lanthimos one better: what if the kids started out weird and only got weirder? What if their Mama hated them from birth and wasn't shy about letting anybody know, including them? And what if their house's most frequent guest was the all-powerful leader of their country, who loved those children as though they were his own and, well, what if he really was, in some way or another their Papa? By which I mean yes, on top of everything else, there are questions of identity as well as of authorship and the reliability of our sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person narrator that might well turn out to be rather an unusual entity a la Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium but is probably just Cassandra? Maybe?

Oh, and by the way, Papa has one hell of a stutter, such that he is all but incapable of saying his children's names correctly. Thus we see frequent references to "Cacasandra," "Cacaleb" and "Cacalia," and the visually and to a certain degree sonically implied (as explained with some glee by Kevin Gerry Dunn in his special translator's note at novel's end) scatalogical syllables "caca" are very much intentional; this book does not shy away from toilet humor. Which, should that surprise you, given what two of the children call each other?

Anyway, Cacasandra, Cacaleb and Cacalia do not live in a normal household, even before their Cuba-esque island nation's dictatorial leader begins asking his favorite child, the Bridgefucker, to start spying on her parents. For, you see, the children's aunt and uncle have been found guilty of an assassination attempt against the dictator, whom Cacasandra calls "Pop Pop Mustache" because of his magnificent facial hair (no Castro beard, though), and thus the whole clan, but especially Cacasandra's father, is under a cloud of suspicion, ever gathering, like flies. She is reluctant to become a spy, not so much out of family loyalty as out of concern that becoming a government informant will interfere with her weird and illicit love affair, but ultimately she at least lets the dictator conclude that she's going to cooperate, having learned that a shrug is a good and acceptable answer to most of the proposals of those with power over her, who were going to project their assumptions onto her anyway, after all...

But so, ultimately, The Tyranny of Flies is a story of rebellion, if only of one on the smallest possible scale and with rather disappointing results. Just because it's monkey's asses that are chiefly involved in this story, one mustn't conclude that no monkey's paws were curled closed in its telling! But pay close attention if you want to follow the plot against the dictatorship(s): a lot is going on just out of frame while Cacasandra distracts you with precocious sexual shenanigans and Cacaleb conducts monstrous art out of all of those animal suicides. Can you guess the plan? Would you, too, suffer the fate of the tyrants? Or would they ca-catch you in the act?

Sorry, I couldn't resist. 

*Dude. You cannot tell me Kevin Gerry Dunn did not have a little more fun than usual in translating this book.

Maria Judite de Carvalho's AND HOW HAVE YOU BEEN (Tr by Margaret Jull-Costa)

To read and savor a story a day from And How Have You Been, Two Lines Press' latest and last collection of Margaret Judite de Carvalho's short fiction, is to subject oneself to a slow and precise beating, one perfectly aimed and precisely calculated blow at a time. At the conclusion of each incisive little portrait of an unusual and pivotal moment in a suddenly vivid character's life comes a denouement that, while not in the least bit funny (except when it sometimes, bitterly, is), the reader is doubled over and gasping, with de Carvalho and translator Margaret Jull-Costa looking down at her, tsking and eyeing one another with disappointment that one turned out to be such a lightweight.

(What's the opposite of a punchline? Even though what de Carvalho does is more worthy of that term than anything else I've ever seen?)

Finally, after an awkward moment or two, one of them stoops slightly and deigns to offer a graceful hand to help their victim to her feet, might brush off a little dust, if she doesn't have a newly-chipped nail to attend to, then everyone wordlessly parts company in a swirl of impeccable mid-century skirts, leaving unspoken the obvious certainty that all three will reassemble for another round tomorrow. The reader can already hear the ominous clicks of their tasteful heels approaching in the distance as she opens the book again, as she is compelled to do. 

This, of course, makes the title of this collection perhaps the most viciously funny one I can recall encountering. Picking up this rather hefty paperback for the first time, I didn't realize just how condescending this title's question was meant to be. Even before seeing that the "you" is in italics, the reader is being challenged by the vast array of characters whose bitter little moments she is here to snoop on. They know they've got a voyeur, that she's probably trying to escape her own distressing or disappointing or maybe even traumatizing present with some nice glimpses into an imaginary Continental past.

Not so fast. 

I've been wholly ignorant of Maria Judite de Carvalho and her oeuvre; this is why things like subscriptions to specialist publishers like Two Lines Press (publishers of this volume), Charco, NYRB, my beloved Open Letter, etc are the some of the best money a reader can spend. Yes, you're letting someone else pick some of your reading (which, what do you think you're doing looking at YouTube/Instagram/TikTok/etc book content?), but that someone is a person who gets to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair and other such events, who has had to hustle to get the grant money to pay translators and buy rights and rent warehouse space and pack up shipments and... so it's gonna be someone who really loves books, and I mean really loves them, because that skill set means they could be making more money doing pretty much anything else, but they're doing this instead. So they tend to have reliable taste while also venturing further afield than I ever could. So anyway. I would not be currently dusty on the ground desperately stanching a nosebleed and missing all my lunch money without my having gotten myself a Two Lines subscription for Christmas. And I'll do it again this coming Christmas, based even just on this, to say nothing of the many other excellent works that subscription has brought me -- some of which I haven't read yet; some of which I'm saving for Halloween. 

I'm still fairly ignorant of de Carvalho (I'd love to find a biography of her!), which made my experience at her hands such a bevy of surprising blows. For instance, the first third or so of And How Have YOU Been consists largely of domestic scenes and relationship dramas -- what once was and possibly still is, in her native Portugal, regarded as "women's fiction" but then, suddenly, "The Jungle in the House" takes a turn for the subtly science fictional and, depending on your interpretation of the ending, possibly magical realist, as a painting hanging in a family home that depicts a range of extinct predator and prey animals like lions and deer and tarantulas (I did say subtly science fictional; at least for now in 2026 while I write this. Your mileage may vary, future reader) begins to influence the family's well-being in somewhat dramatic ways -- or does it?

And then "My Father was a Millionaire" takes us into a realm I'm used to exploring with someone more like T.J. Bass. Its heroine is the first successful revival from a kind of suspended animation, but she isn't exactly dazzled by the technological wonders and incredible social progress prevailing in her new surroundings. This is Maria Judite de Carvalho, here to remind you that in this future, the ladies still wear deadly, pointy-toed, thin-soled, high-heeled girl shoes. The better to kick you in the crotch with, smiling enchantingly all the while.

All this is to say, Maria Judite de Carvalho is the very, very feminine Philip K. Dick that I didn't even know I needed. Minus, you know, the agency-lacking figurant women, and the vicious virago women who are just out to undermine the haplessly bumbling men, i.e. her gender politics, even in her most wildly science fictional stories in which we have colonized both Mars and Venus, are way, way better than dear old PKD could even understand the need for, and her science fictional ideas are at least as good as his, if not better.

She also conveys, even better than PKD did, the profound sense of alienation lurking under the surface of everyday life, the way ordinary scenes can charge into the stuff of our worst sci-fi nightmares with just the barest shift of perspective. 

Before sitting down, though, she picked up the lighter belonging to Ivette or Arlette and that she had nudged underneath the armchair and she studied it closely. It was nothing special, just an ordinary lighter made of silver-plated metal. She placed it on the round glass-topped table and left. She felt as if something had drained all the color from the world which was suddenly entirely black and white (a very discreet black and white, with no strong contrast), a transformation that had arrived unannounced. She could vaguely see people, the ones who had been there and others too, and they seem to her as if they've been cut adrift, with no roots or even an aura that would allow them to reach out to her or even touch her. They suddenly seem so strange, those people. Talking like mannequins, walking about like mannequins, and with her ending up being one of them, however imperfect.

Tell me that's not straight out of Ubik, say, or a Mercerist interlude in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or maybe a late encounter with some fellow humans already afflicted with one of Palmer Eldritch's Stigmata? Or did we wander into some Thomas Ligotti by mistake? But no, it's just an ordinary woman playing hostess to a cocktail party. 

So she's absolutely the answer, not only to "what if PKD had been a woman" but also to "what if PKD had encountered some initial success back when he was trying to be a mainstream/literary fiction writer." He would have been free, as de Carvalho was, to write whatever the hell he wanted, including science fiction. Ah, what might have been. 

Meanwhile, we did get Maria Judite de Carvalho, and you'd better believe I'm going to read everything of hers I can find. I've already acquired her novel. Grace Period, for instance, and I've got my eye on the other story collections Two Lines has already published. And if it hasn't been translated yet, I'll get back with the program of learning more Portuguese. Because I don't want to miss a thing. 

She knew that her brothers made fun of her, and that her parents, when they thought she wasn't looking, would watch her with furrowed brows or moist, uncomprehending eyes. She knew all of this and other things too, but she could do nothing to help them. They were strangers with whom she lived, and they always had been, and she felt as disconnected from them, even from her mother, as one of those fallen branches she sometimes spotted being carried along by the river, far from the banks, with no chance of getting caught up in the reeds. All right, she was there among the four walls of her room, but it almost came to the same thing.

Did somebody get the license plate number off that truck? Call an ambulance. 

Brock Clarke's AN ARSONIST'S GUIDE TO WRITERS' HOMES IN NEW ENGLAND

Before I'd burned down the Emily Dickinson House, they seemed to be normal, healthy, somewhat happy Americans who took vacations and gardened and who'd weathered a rough patch or two... Now they looked like skeletons dressed in corduroy and loafers. Their eyes were sunken and wanting to permanently retreat all the way back into their skulls... Why do we hurt our parents the way we do? There's no way to make sense of it except as practice for then hurting our children the way we do.

I'm rarely as mad as a book as I am at the "wildly and unpredictably funny", "Absurdly hilarious... searingly funny", "wacky and wildly imaginative novel" that "sizzles" and is "funny, profound... a seductive book with a payoff on every page" that is also a "darkly comic" "deadpan satire of all things literary" as all of the dumb little blurbs sprayed all over the book cover of later printings of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England proclaim it to be. And not, as one might expect, because these blurbs are misleading or mere puffery or in any way inaccurate (for all that they are wholly unnecessary; the title alone was plenty, Brock Clarke. You had me with the title). It's because they are. And also because they really, really aren't. 

I know better than to turn to a veddy veddy literary publisher with a name like Algonquin Books for a mere funny read, of course, so I'm not in anyway surprised that what An Arsonist's Guide really is, is an incredibly loving and empathetic argument for the idea that toxic masculinity, while indeed one of the great scourges of our time, does not have to be a life sentence, that, also, it's not exclusively a disorder from which the male of the species alone can suffer (I would argue that the worst sufferer in this novel is a woman) -- indeed, this book might be said to argue that it's high time we rename the phenomenon something more accurate and inclusive like "toxic stoicism." 

Dammit, my sentences are getting long again. But anyway, I'm trying to come around to why this book made me mad, without in anyway conveying the idea that I'm mad because my expectations weren't met or anything like that -- apart from my not having been prepared for what a god damned noble piece of fiction writing The Arsonist's Gude really is.

And yeah, part of my annoyance is really just jealousy, because with this book, my first but not my last Clarke that I'll be reading, Brock Clarke has proven to be exactly the kind of writer I love to hate the most, sweet, smug, punchable author photo and all. It's not just that he's good and he knows it, and is as good as anybody I've ever seen at doing the thing that I most enjoy-yet-roll-my-eyes-at thing of simply taking every cliche that pops into the reader's head as she's reading his work, invert it very simply and neatly, and pointing out that it's true either way, in a way that elicits a rueful chuckle if not a pained guffaw if not a full bout of John Trent laughter (iykyk. Do you read Sutter Kane? I bet Brock Clarke does). Though yes, it's a lot of that. And so I'm sitting here looking at my copy, so laden with book darts right now that it positively sparkles and probably weighs twice as much as it did when I got it* trying to find just the right passages to quote to show you what I mean and I can't decide and that, too, is making me angry.

Which, I mean, that's a pretty good problem to have, really? But... I'm just going to start typing strings of expletives here in a second. So I'll stop for now. I'll be back.

But so, OK. An Arsonist's Guide concerns the life and times of one Sam Pulsifer, a man of around my own age, perhaps a bit younger, who grew up in the nice Western Massachusetts college town of Amherst, MA (home, yes, of Emily Dickinson once upon a time, and also of ZooMass), raised by nice upper middle class parents who mostly kept it together bar a few strange incidents that come to loom very large in Sam's later life but only after, in the kind of dumb teenaged accident that can mark a dude for life even if he hasn't been raised in the tradition of upright New England stoicism that I've already compared to Toxic Masculinity, Sam accidentally does indeed burn down the house where Emily Dickinson once lived, also accidentally killing a couple who were trapped inside and thus forever altering not only his life and his parents', but also that of a boy whose own parents were trapped inside the burning Emily Dickinson House and will have a few things to say or do about it later. Much later. Like after Sam serves a prison term, is released into society and starts sort of half-assedly trying to make good, getting a degree in Packaging Science (the sort of non-subject Subject that writers like Brock Clarke are lucky enough to discover is a thing before any other writers do and get to show off to the rest of us the way an intrepid explorer from a prior generation might bring home a Masai spear or something oops I'm jealous-ing again, aren't I?), establishing a lucrative and respectable career as a designer of containers for products that we all use but never noticed, marrying a beautiful and resourceful classmate and having two beautiful children with her -- all without ever telling his poor old parents that he's even back out in the world yet, until The Plot of the Novel Happens.

And all the Secrets come out. Secrets that Sam has kept from his parents, and they from him. Secrets Sam kept from his beautiful wife and children. Secrets festering darkly in the hearts of a hundred or so letter writers who have certain feelings about certain other famous New England writers and who wish that Sam would give those writers' houses the same treatment he gave the Emily Dickinson House. And the not-so-secret secrets of the poor kid whose parents Sam accidentally killed all those years ago. Not all of these secretes get aired out; not all of the mysteries get solved. But the ones that do, do so to devastating effect, making of An Arsonist's Gude rather more of a cathartic than a funny read. But, let's be real. If I'd known this was going to have Oprah levels of emotional cleansing and warm-heartedness and forgiveness, I probably wouldn't have picked it up.

But I'm glad I did.

*Gently used, from Thriftbooks, after the fearless leader of my favorite online book club praised a non-fiction book of Clarke's a few months ago. I went to get a copy of that book, an essay collection, for fuck's sake, but I saw An Arsonist's Guide and I spent my hard-earned on it instead. So it goes. As it were.

Bao Ninh's THE SORROW OF WAR (Tr Frank Palmos & Phan Thanh Hao, Narr James Langton)

Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling.

I've known more than a few United States veterans of the Vietnam War, listened to them talk about survivors' guilt and how that can color absolutely every aspect of their post-war lives, and that's hard enough for me to imagine -- but what if you were also living out that life in the same territory where you took your wounds, watched your buddies and rivals die? Which was also where you grew up, first fell in love, buried your grandparents or parents? Comparing these experiences is, of course, pointless. So I won't say one is worse than another, but, well, the most emotionally harrowing parts of the only novel I've read about this war from the perspective of the Vietnamese, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, take place on former battlefields long after the Yanks went home.

Our point of view character, Kien, has, like Bao Ninh himself, finally concluded, after years of failing to re-integrate into daily life in his home city, the much-revived and gentrified Hanoi, that the only real reason he has been forced,  by circumstance and conscience, to carry on, is to record his experiences for posterity. And so he has done, and is doing, for The Sorrow of War isn't just about his experiences of preparation, combat and aftermath, but also of remembering and writing what will essentially become this very novel. The one can be as harrowing as the other, as anyone with PTSD* can tell you. And as difficult to convey in words!

The Sorrow of War, like Slaughterhouse Five, pulls its narrator character unstuck from time, though without any of the (possibly imaginary) relief of S5's science fictional frame narrative. We see Kien on an MIA detail, retrieving bodies after hostilities have ended, in various medical camps recovering from injuries, taking damage from explosions of buildings, trains, planes overhead, with his childhood sweetheart as a teenager, misunderstanding his father as an even younger teen, rescuing one woman from assault and likely rape, failing to rescue another one, encountering still another woman he last saw as a worshipful little girl watching him bravely march off to war with her adored big brother only to find her forced into prostitution as an adult... and Bao Ninh via Kien is there to make sure we feel every second of Kien's pain, guilt, concern, helplessness, rage, love, fear, disappointment and, yes, immaturity and emotional stuntedness. War forces one to grow up too fast in some ways, and stops him from growing up at all in others. We do not see Kien's attitude about women evolve much beyond what it was when he was rolling around in the grass with his gorgeous first love at the age of 17. But he learns every other lesson imaginable, and doesn't shy from showing us that even from his perspective as a lonely middle aged man, he still has some growing to do.

All of this is conveyed with considerable introspection and tenderness by narrator James Langton, whose voice I associate more with the colder and more empirical narratives of science fiction writers like Adam Roberts than with the emotional scenes this book demanded. I mean to say, here, that Langton would not have been my choice for The Sorrow of War but that I would have been wrong. He hits the right note every scene, and even when he sounds like he's at his most detached, still also manages to sneak in subtle hints that it's all an act. I still think I would have rather read this one in print, but I'm poor and my beloved public library only has the audio edition, so that's what I got -- but I did not suffer for it. At least, not in terms of quality.

I suffered in lots of other ways, of course. All of them the ways that fiction intends. And I also got to visit, in my minds eye and through the beautiful words of Bao Ninh, Frank Palmos and Phan Thanh Hao, a beautiful country that I'll never see with the eyes of my body -- at both its best and its worst. Wow.

*And to this I can relate, in my different but still pretty fucking intense way. 

Jerrod Edson's THE BOULEVARD

Not since Robert A. Heinlen*'s Job: A Comedy of Justice gave us the jovial, folksy Devil in the person of Jerry Farnsworth has Old Nick himself aroused my positive emotions as he does in The Boulevard, Canadian novelist Jerrod Edson's not-really Allegherian literary train ride through the Underworld. Though in this case, Jerry Farnsworth is kind of split into two people, the Devil and Ernest Hemingway.

And yes, the third figure on the book cover is Vincent Van Gogh. All aboard!

The premise, or at least the inciting incident, of The Boulevard is pretty simple. A nearly-ignored email, checked almost too late, informs the staff of Hell that, for the first time ever, God Himself is planning on coming down for a visit to see what they've made of the gloomy void he condemned Lucifer and all of his rebels to, eons ago. He's heard such magnificent things...

Only the Rebels have actually just settled it like any of us would in playing a simulation game, starting with mud huts for shelter in the stygian gloom and crafting their way up to something like civilization (occasionally stealing a few resources from the world of humans now and then. Like light. But not enough of it), though they've had to make do with some poor substitutes like painted metal representations of the flowers that won't grow Down Below and were, in a charming early anecdote that would have done the Heinlein of Job proud, the original source of their trouble. They've made a decent go of it, these Infernals have, even unto bringing into being one real miracle of beauty and light that is the great joy of every demon and condemned soul, The Boulevard.

But if God sees that Hell is not, in fact, a lake of fire filled with torment and agony and eternal ugliness, sees that his employees are maybe enjoying their work and afterlives, well, just imagine Elon showing up at a Tesla factory one day and seeing that George Clinton was supplying the house band and all the assembly line workers were enjoying themselves while building cars that not only didn't lock passengers inside at the first sign of an engine fire but also don't treat pedestrians as targets! That's no way to run a torture chamber factory! There'd be Hell to pay. 

OK, I'll stop with the puns and the Heinlein comparisons. Just, Job was baby's first blasphemy book.**

The aforementioned train ride is one that Satan is making across Hell, to meet with his estranged friend and tenant, Van Gogh, without whose work the Boulevard would still just be a dark and depressing street in Hell's Capital City, and break the bad news that his greatest work, his shining triumph, his immortal glory, his 60-block-long celebration of art, has got to go in order to save them all from the literal wrath of God.. Um.

Hemingway just happens to have been on the same train, traveling with a Jean Rhys whose brief appearance is one of The Boulevard's few lowlights. She's drunk, she's disgraceful, she has no reason to be there except as unpleasant comic relief, and for someone Hemingway can bitch about misogynistically. Boo. Anyway, the Devil, Ernie thinks, will be better company, especially since he's in a confessing mood. He seems to carry a lot of guilt over his relationship with Van Gogh. Uh oh.

Much of the meat of the book, thus, consists of Satan narrating the life of Van Gogh as observed by a secret manipulator, now disguised as a magpie and captured in a famous early painting, now scrubbing the floors of his famous room at Arles, now appearing as a chance met companion for an easel-side chat in a wheat field, but always subtly guiding the artist towards the desired end, or ends. This exposition dump -- for that is what it is as far as the frame narrative of the journey is concerned -- could have been just a dull, short retelling of famous scenes from Van Gogh's well-documented life, but the Devil's perspective on them gives them immediacy and freshness, helped along by frequent pauses for Hemingway's usually sardonic commentary. If you're looking for a charming, brief and bittersweet biographical sketch of one of the greatest painters ever to do it, you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of The Boulevard; it's worth the cover price for this alone, with its entertaining and occasionally profound frame narrative an added bonus that will make you pause and think more than a few times.

Alas, I came away from this a little bit disappointed, because it feels unbalanced. There are a few jumps back to the titular Boulevard where Satan's minions are busy getting ready to undo all of the hard work that has gone into making the Capital City and all of Hell's other cities into the thriving metropolises that they are, but we get only the briefest of glimpses of these. The fact that they're enacted by the likes of Al Capone especially makes these bits feel inadequate for their brevity and their one-note treatment of what is going on; it's all logistics and very little emotion, and Capone and the other doers of Satan's bidding really beg to be fleshed out as characters in the ways that the riders on the train are -- especially Ms. Victoria, the book's other female character, frequently admired for her va-va-voomery but never allowed to become a person even though we learn she's been right there with Satan and the Boys since they were all angels and he went by Lucifer. I wanted this side of the story to have something closer to equal weight with the Satan and Ernie show.

But that show is glorious, and the imbalance isn't enough of a problem to stop me recommending that you pay The Boulevard a visit at your earliest opportunity. After all, unlike Hemingway and Van Gogh and Al Capone, you don't have to die to check it out. You just have to get your hands on a good book.

It's just a bit of a shame that it's not a truly great one.

*I know.

**My disappointment that none of RAH's other books were remotely like this still makes me sigh. 

Ursula Whitcher's NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON

Sometimes there's a better way to show me the society, the world an author is imagining than via a single piece of narrative fiction. If you've created a truly richly developed culture that really differs from ours, it can be more effective, by which I mean both more efficiently communicative and more interesting for me as a reader, to show me facets, via vignettes or mini-biographies or, most gracefully, short stories about different characters occupying different roles in that society. And the stories need not necessarily overlap or interact, nor do they have to depict earth-shattering crises or huge personality conflicts or major civilizational turning points, either. An older example of this is Lucius Sheperd's story cycle surrounding the vast corpse of The Dragon Griaule; but I've found an even better one here.

Ursula Whitcher's phenomenal story suite, North Continent Ribbon, where, as the cover explains to us, "every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret," depicts one of those imagined worlds that would feel like a fantasy setting if the tales within were read out of order; several of them involve no science fictional wizardry or even much-beyond-medieval era technology. Were it not for its opening matter, which declares that it comes from a larger work named Cross-Planetary Investment: A Practical Vraselian's Galactic Opportunity Handbook and informs us that the planet on which most of these stories take place is an important source for "faster-than-light vehicular components sourced from a high-orbit E-type singularity," the society on the North Continent of Nakharat would be all but indistinguishable from one of the weaving planets in Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers, for instance.

But amidst its tales of ribbon-crossed lovers and sundered families and somewhat shady business dealings, we get hints that there's a lot more going on than just trade and agriculture and the many different ways love can come and go in human lives. There's the question, for instance, of how those aforementioned vehicular components, once assembled into faster-than-light vehicles that navigate through what this culture refers to as the deep*, are sourced. And what they even are. Which, it might seem as one pages through this slim little volume, are questions that might not get answered? At least not explicitly?

At least, not if you're not well versed in the kinds of science fiction and fantasy that I love best, where what's going on between the characters is not the whole of what's going on in the book, might even be a distraction from that, actually. See also Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and Frank Herbert and Alastair Reynolds.**

But even if you're not willing to plumb the weird and somewhat distressing secrets of this world, Whitcher still has plenty of rewards for your attention in store; these stories feature deftly drawn characters facing dilemmas that are delicately fantastic yet still mundane enough to be believable, from clandestine business machinations by rival corporations vying for profit, to local political scandals, to estrangement between children and parents, to inappropriate workplace love affairs, to secret labor union conspiracies, to the threat of imminent invasion by military forces that might just be coming to restore peace and safety, but might also come to impose new tyrannies over old -- all amidst some stunningly good line-for-line science fiction writing, like this in an earlier story, "The Fifteenth Saint":

The new text began with a litany: an electron's internal spin, the electron dancing around a nucleus, the shiver of atoms within a rock, all the way up to the slow rotation of the galaxy's arms and the slide of entire galaxies. Twisted behind and within and around all of these things was the deep, that other space where starships cut between stars. At every shift in scale, the book said, we experience a loss. But at every shift in scale there is the deep, thus at every shift in scale we find eternity; at every shift in scale there is the beloved, who has always been the beloved.

The text under discussion in the above, by the way, is a sort of samizdat that is buried in a book that has found its way into the hands of one of a district's hard-working political officials, who is starting to suspect that some of his co-equals in power and responsibility not only aren't holding up their ends -- he has just had to spend a whole day solving what should be a trivial problem for somebody else's constituent, only to be stymied repeatedly by layers of bureaucracy that he didn't even know had been imposed because things have been so compartmentalized -- but might actually be corrupt! But the culture of Nakharat is far too subtle for a samizdat to just come out and say things like that; far better to do so indirectly, poetically and above all memorably.

But also, and this is what makes Nakharat feel truly fantastic to a 21st century reader in most of the English-speaking world, the situation that official just had to deal with is really more of an exception than the rule, because Nakharat has a fundamentally different conception of how a civilized society runs. Among other things, the military forces on this world do not exist primarily to fight wars or extend or exercise the domination of a particular polity. No. As two characters in a later story, "Ten Percent for Luck," discuss as one explains to another why she's chosen the career path she has:

"But why the military?" Because it sounded like Inkar hadn't just taken a Contract with Otter Company. Her parents might have had actual shares. People with that sort of income didn't join up, not usually, not even with a paid commission.

"Because I wanted to build something."...

"Don't Companies build things?"

"For themselves. So they can take tolls. The army, we protect everyone. It doesn't matter who you are."

And I haven't even gotten into the lovely grace-notes present throughout these stories, like the whole ribbon thing. Almost everyone on the planet wears their hair in braids decorated with colorful ribbons that show their various personal and professional affiliations. Look at a person's hair and you can see where they went to school, to what professional societies they belong, if they are married and/or have children, if they're a high official in a Company or a public servant or a member of the military or a sex worker -- but only if you are on close enough terms with them to see them without their turban. Every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret. And yes, there are some people who have no braids, no ribbons at all, and who flaunt this with loose, flowing hair not wrapped up in a turban. Those are very special people indeed, and yes, we meet one, kind of. But that person is maybe not as unencumbered as his hair suggests, hmm?

All in just 154 pages. My goodness!

Lots of people have had a good chuckle at the fact that North Continent Ribbon was short-listed for the 2025 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction, and that the author is also named Ursula, as though the fix is in. But her own prose above and Your Humble Blogger are here to assure you that Whitcher deserved the honor, actually. And she's just revving up; this is her first book. And whether she chooses to continue writing, publishing and collecting Nakharat stories, or tries her hand at something else entirely, I'm here for it. Though I reckon I'll have to be patient, as she is a working mathematician, too.

I'm gonna choose to believe that she's taking her poet's ribbon at least as seriously as her math one, though. Because I definitely want to see more of her stuff. I'll put one in my hair, too, if need be. I've been growing it out again. And hey, it's grey now, so whatever color she chooses, it won't clash! Lemme know, Ms. Whitcher!

*Which I think is basically what most science fiction calls hyperspace or wormhole space or folded space. Use your favorite hand-waving term for how we cross the stupefying vastness of space without wasting human lifetimes in generation ships here. "The deep" seems just fine. I like, too, that it's treated as nothing special, so that it doesn't even get capitalized.

**What? You didn't know that the secret of the Revelation Space universe's Conjoiner Drives is explicitly revealed within that series? Tell me you haven't read Reynolds' short stories without telling me you haven't read his short stories. My goodness!

Ann LeBlanc's THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF CHEESE

Whomst among us hasn't been here: you're the very best cheesemaker (curd nerd in the parlance) outside of Earth's gravity well, famous for your unique, creamy and full-flavored products on every space station, asteroid and shuttle plying the solar system (and possibly beyond? You really don't pay much attention to matters of trade; you've built yourself a body perfect for stirring, curd cutting, measuring and tasting, and hacked your brain decades ago so you can tune out absolutely everything else in the universe and just concentrate on making that beautiful RedOrion), you've got an entire asteroid hollowed out, moved into a stable orbit, kept at the perfect temperature, humidity and gravity and inoculated long ago with the perfect population of beneficial microorganisms to assist in the fermentation and aging of your famous handiwork... and then suddenly one day you happen to hear a snippet on the news about how a big shot businessman has announced that an asteroid he owns and manages for his silent and reclusive genius of a business associate is going to be let go and allowed to crash into the Sun. It will burn up with all its contents in about two weeks. Wow, sucks to be that sucker. But hey wait, which asteroid was that again?

Such is the plight of Millions Wayland, cheesemaker of, in, among and to the stars, or at least the bodies orbiting this one, whose life's work is currently careening sunward on a collision course for financial reasons beyond her comprehension, in Ann LeBlanc's stunning little novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. And of course there's no time to handle this the way most artisans of her caliber would; she's going to have to cross a rather large volume of outer space to even begin to lodge a complaint, and meanwhile there's these batches of cheese she just got going here in her workshop (not in the hollow asteroid-cum-cheese cave, not aboard the space station where that irresponsible jerk of a managing partner is, either, but another third place where crewed spaceships don't even go, just automatic cargo shuttles that periodically bring in supplies and bring out fresh wheels of space cheese to transport them to be aged in the cheese cave with the suddenly curtailed life span).

So, Wayland does what any of us would do: she makes a perfect cognitive duplicate of herself, memories, personality, connectome and all, and shoots it in a tight-beam to the space station in near-Earth orbit where the restaurateur, who didn't even bother to warn her about her cheese cave's imminent demise before she heard it on the news, lives and works and maintains contact with the financial, military, civic and religious authorities of Earth. She -- or rather, this newborn version of herself -- is going to give that chucklehead a piece of her/their mind, even if she has to confront, head-on, the scene of the greatest trauma of her past, and of his -- and of all the other versions of themselves that are out here in space.

Versions? 

Yep. This is a trans-human soap opera, kids, and all of the characters except a few heavily armed thugs recently come up from Earth are cyberpunk interations of one of the first people ever to decide to upload himself to the Net and start making custom bodies for himself -- work bodies with extra arms, business bodies that look good in suits and are focused on the bottom line, party bodies for various recreational pursuits (mostly food and sex) and oh, by the way, before most of the copies of this character came into being, the original made a male-to-female transition, which is why I've mostly used female pronouns in this post but switched to male ones for this paragraph. There is trans-humanism and then there is trans-humanism. Which I should maybe call trans-trans-humanism? Except that would be silly? I mean, some of the bodies containing versions of the Millions character are more like giant robot millipedes than anything else, and are capable of directly metabolizing starlight and thrive in conditions of hard vacuum, because at some point in Millions' life they decided the best way to explore beyond the solar system would be just to become the spaceship!

Which is to say that, title aside, this book is only superficially about cheese, though in addressing the question of whether or not future batches that Wayland Millions may make in the future, without her cheese cave, could be regarded in any way as the same cheeses she was making with it, The Transitive Properties of Cheese takes on lots of bigger questions about how far the society in which she lives -- and the one she left behind when she left Earth -- are going to be willing to stretch the idea of "humanity," and how much that is even going to matter.

All in just over 100 pages. Because LeBlanc is a goddamn storyteller, who makes every sentence count for "world building," character development, plot advancement and the conveyance of exquisite sensory detail. In an age of 800-page doorstops, half of which seem to be devoted to that first (and least interesting) element of a piece of fiction, LeBlanc's talent for the tight and pithy novella is cause for considerable celebration. And The Transitive Properties of Cheese deserves to sell many, many, many more copies than any of those doorstops. What are you even doing? Go! And while you're at it, have a look around the publisher's site. They have a lot of good stuff there.

Helen Oyeyemi's GINGERBREAD (Narr by the author)

Once I thought I had a hard and fast rule that no novel narrated for its audio edition by its author could be as good as one narrated by a professional narrator.* But that was before I heard the soft, sweet, not quite-childlike but nearly child-pitched tones of Afro-Surrealist (and possibly Post-Exotic) queen Helen Oyeyemi. I've immensely enjoyed settling down each night to let her tell me the weird and wonderful bedtime story** that is Gingerbread.

Caveat auditor/caveat lector, though: you're likely to wake up the next morning with a fierce craving for the titular treat. Myself, I prefer sliced from nice loaf, with a good glop or two of lemon curd, over the biscuit/cookie variey, but you do you. 

Anyway, this magical, disturbing and bizarre little novel, what?

We first encounter our triple protagonists***, Margot Lee, her daughter Harriet and her granddaughter Perdita, in plain old 21st century Yorkshire. The younger two share a flat on the top floor of a seven-storey house far too old and ill-regarded to have an elevator. Margot lives elsewhere; we don't find out for a while where,  but it's just as banal a setting as the flat. So far, so dull. 

How we meet them, though, is through Harriet's famous-or-infamous gingerbread, her primary means of communication with her fellow humans. If she is courting you,  or worried that you're angry with her, or suspects you and she are in any way at odds, she will present you with a tin of what a "gingerbread addict" once described to her as tasting like Revenge:

It’s noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d get away with it,’ the gingerbread addict said. ‘That heart, ground to ash and shot through with dars of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon.

"You are phenomenal. You have ruined my life forever, " the addict had continued."Thank you."

Now, I make a pretty great loaf of gingerbread (and am pretty good at fruit curds, too) but nobody has compared it to a feeling that satisfying. So, first of all, goals. And second of all...

It's this really just a book about baked goods? And if so, wouldn't that be a bit, I dunno, cozy for a book covered here at Kate of Mind?

Oh, ye of little faith!

For the Lee family, at least two generations of them as we know to start, are not native to Yorkshire. Or to England. They might be said to be natives to Europe, but only if your idea of Europe can stretch to accommodate possibly imaginary, or at least notional countries that at one point were officially recognized by just four other nations in the world, but now maintain any kind of relations at all only with the Czech Republic. Such is Druhástrana, a land where one may be sentenced to public execution for unspecified crimes but where few actually die this way, because a stay is granted if one of the spectators at the event of imminent death agrees to take full legal and moral responsibility for the criminal in future by marrying them. For instance. 

This is how the Lee family got its start, when Margot impulsively volunteered to wed a very handsome crook -- despite the fact that she had observed him to be weirdly in cahoots with another female spectator. Before we know it, the not very happy pair, Margot, the daughter of a fabulously rich family of dubious scruples, and her formerly condemned bridegroom, are reduced to eking out a living on some rather poor farmland and living in a rather poor house, but welcoming a beautiful daughter, Harriet. And then, before we know it -- but that would be telling. You see, there are many mysteries behind Harriet's talent for gingerbread and her recipe, and of how Perdita came to exist at all. And these are the mysteries we are here to explore alongside Perdita as she embarks on a mission of discovery via... baking up a batch of her mother's famous gingerbread with an extra, unknown but possibly psychoactive ingredient, eating it all up and... slipping into a coma? Surrounded by the apparently sentient but laconic combinations of dolls and houseplants that have grown up alongside her while guarding the corners of her four-poster bed?

Well, yes. What part of "Afro-surrealist" would possibly lead you to expect a standard and cozy book about baking? That would be boring. And Oyeyemi, while she sounds gentle and soothing and only slightly amused as she narrates her tale, is not here to bore anybody, least of all herself.

Also, that whiff of fairy tales that a title like Gingerbread gives off for most of us? That's no accident, and one in particular is evoked by the name of Harriet's sly and not entirely well- meaning best friend, whose faintly flour-dusted fingerprints turn out to be all over the middle Lee generation's life, and thus those of her mother and daughter as well. 

Along the way through this story of mother's and daughters and gingerbread, Oyeyemi has left odd little ambushes of insight that wait to attack us like packs of wolves, or wolf pups at least. An "authenticity theme park" full of ersatz gingerbread girls here, a professor with wise bons mot about the writing of Emile Zola there, a lesson or two about what we will and will not accept in exchange for doing what we do better than anyone else around another corner... and, strangest and most confrontational of all, the idea of a near-utopia in which every kind of equality between people prevails except for economic equality. People may get bored with lives in which sexes, races, religions, sexualities, degrees or attractiveness or physical ability or intelligence are all on a level playing field, the land of Druhástrana seems to have concluded, as long as the chance of "unexpected abundance" (often in the form of some kind of lottery winnings) is present. Would that be so? Oyeyemi doesn't give us the answer to that; we must decide for ourselves. 

All this and at least one seriously adorably funny sex scene!

I have but one complaint about Gingerbread, and that's about the ending, which throws in several intriguing but unexplored new plot elements and characters at us by way of teasing a still-to-come reunion between Harriet and her old Druhástranian friend and on the whole feel like they've come from some other book entirely. It's a book I'd very much like to read someday, but I don't feel like it was a great way to end this one. 

Nonetheless, I've added the rest of Oyeyemi's output to date to my endless TBR, and will look forward to new work from her with anticipation and pleasure, like a freshly baked loaf of something dark and complex and delicious straight out of the oven. 

*Though one must always make allowances for the likes of Podiobooks and any similar efforts by aspiring authors who are trying everything they can to get attention for their beloved book babies, especially nowadays. Too many authors who have truly enriched my life got their starts that way, and some, like Scott Sigler, have never abandoned this practice. 

**If you're OK with tripping balls in your dreams that night. 

***Played in my imagination by 1980s-era Joan Plowright as Margot Lee, Juliette Stephenson as Harriet Lee, and Joely Richardson as Perdita Lee, because I spent many years with only a handful of movies on VHS to my name and my very favorite, watched until it wore out, was Peter Greenaway's Drowning By Numbers, a film I still haven't tired of, by the way! And yes, the text makes clear early on that the Lee women have "pearl gray hair and bark-brown skin" but I couldn't help it. Once the idea leaked into my head, it couldn't be budged.

Ernest Hogan's CORTEZ ON JUPITER

I don't know about you guys, but if we have to have a Palmer Eldritch figure in our damnable future, I would much rather it be a Latinx visual artist than Elon Musk. Can we live in Ernest Hogan's World instead of Philip K. Dick's? Just as a treat?

Think before you answer. 

Allow me to elaborate. 

It's going to be very hard not to drift into the incredible bilingual slangy brilliance that is every word out of the mouth, pen or spray can of Pablo Cortez, the hero of Ernest Hogan's early cyberpunk should-be classic, Cortez on Jupiter, because I've been trying to improve my Spanish lately by reading the Oz books translated into that language, and the weirdness of that experience easily bleeds over into the demented delight of this tale of a graffiti artist in space!

Pablo is more than "just" a graffiti artist though; once he gets into space by a circuitous route involving the overworked criminal justice system and the jaded art world of a near-future greater Los Angeles, our man only goes and invents an entirely new art form! One that takes his already highly developed color sense and love of movement for its own sake and adds the novelty of zero gravity to what he does and to what the paint does -- and how it makes his "canvas" a truly three-dimensional sphere of influence, as it were, muchachitos.

"Working in freefall," he tells a news camera invading his studio at the center of a space station, "Has added a new dimension to my work."

If you can't tell, I kind of like this book. 

 

I had to feel -- and create -- ways of flinging paint and moving in freefall. It was like magic, flying and dancing with colorful matching creatures: the protomorphic beastery of a new mythology. This was a second ritual for outer space. I was a shaman for the new frontier. (Italics mine)

While Pablo makes his zero-gravity splatter paintings* in defiance of the arts foundation board who paid his way up the gravity well (they liked his sketched ideas for what amounted to ascemic writing, the beginnings of an imaginary alien alphabet that i can't help but imagining the Beltalowdas of the Expanse series using for secret communications sprayed in plain sight someday -- but aren't too keen on what he's chosen to do instead), another artist works on a "viral graffiti robot bomb" and other less probable contraptions, the kind of work that might someday inspire a new generation of industrial designers working on machines our species hasn't imagined a need for yet; another of the artists is a floating bombshell of a woman who occasionally remembers to sculpt something between press interviews and photo shoots and three-day drug binges because artists gotta artist.

The sculptor tries having a fling with Pablo to keep the paparazzi excited -- if they get bored, her career could sink her back down to the Mudball after all -- but Pablo is in the Zone, work-wise and anyway, doesn't do drugs. When he was a little boy in East L.A., his parents got a little too deeply absorbed in a neo-Aztec subculture** and got addicted to a new-old drug called ATL and overdosed, leaving little Pablito to discover their bodies. All part of the legend, but he stays true to it and doesn't even really drink alcohol. 

All of this by itself would make for a unique and intriguing novel (as far as my reading has gone, we won't really see much attention paid to the idea of art in zero-gravity until the very early 21st century, when Alastair Reynolds will consider the possibilities of vast and intricate glassblown confections that would only be possible in space stations), and there's more than enough character drama with these artists and patrons to have kept me happy,  but Hogan had more on his mind.  This isn't "just" about what if we sent a graffiti artist into low earth orbit to make art on a space station. For one thing, this is a future in which humanity has started spreading through the solar system -- and encountered another life form right in our backyard. The planet Jupiter, a vast gas giant that could contain 1300 Earths in its volume, and that doesn't have what we could regard as a solid surface except deep in its core where it's subjected to pressures that make the floors of Earth's oceans feel both easy and peasy, has something weird living in its famous Great Red Spot! But so far, we have utterly failed to make contact with it. Or have we.

Before you can say "volatile and mercurial artist beefs with his patrons," Pablo has manipulated (or been manipulated into; opinions differ, and this story is told from many divergent points of view) his way onto the weird team of volunteers who have agreed to be lowered via special modules into that giant atmospheric storm to try to talk to the beings known to us as the Sirens. Pablo won't be the first; several others have failed and come back as mind-wiped vegetables. He isn't the most qualified; the OG "Sirenaut" was a seasoned spacer with a system-wide reputation, after all. Until he came back with zero control over his bodily functions and whatnot...

No, what Pablo is, is the strangest, the most stubborn and the most egotistical of the candidates. So when he shows up in Jupiter's orbit, the scientific reasearch/entertainment conglomerate*** in charge is ready to launch him on the mission immediately! But first he has to meet the love of his life, telepath and fellow Sirenaut Willa Aboid, whose fate is weirdly bound up with his even though they're not very successful as a typical couple and their romance does not satisfy the audience back home. Once again, Hogan has much more interesting things in mind for this pairing, things that are impossible to discuss without spoiling the fun of discovering what all the weird little hints and foreshadowings sprinkled through the novel actually mean. And while Cortez on Jupiter largely does exist as a self-spoiling text, there's no point in robbing you of the fun of what discovery there still is. Though if I haven't convinced you to check this one out as yet, maybe you deserve it.

Hmm.

Anyway, I'm delighted to see that Hogan, who is a practicing visual artist as well as a Gonzo science fiction writer, is still at it after all of these years, even to having just recently published a short story collection that I'm going to rush to get just as soon as my current embargo (I'm trying to read down a huge accumulation of the evidence that when it comes to buying new books, I have no self-control at all, even if I'm down to my last head of lettuce in the fridge. You may not see my tsundoku room. The fact that I have a tsundoku room is bad enough) conditions are met, aka I have read at least 100 of the print, ebook and audio books that I already own. But then, yeah, Guerilla Mural of a Siren's Song will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine.

*And yes, of course I'm thinking of that OK Go video. 

**Anticipating Hogan's next novel, the psychedelic cyberpunk splendor that is High Aztech.

***Why yes, Ernest Hogan anticipated reality TV just like D.G. Compton did. 

Michael Weingrad's EUGENE NADELMAN: A TALE OF THE 1980s IN VERSE

There ought to be so many books like this, 

As writ in verse, in meter and in rhyme, 

Yet telling modern tales, or modern-ish --

This one's nostalgic for a place and time, 

For Philly in the early Reagan years. 

Which years are now as far behind us as

Was World War II and all its hopes and fears

From its young hero's life and times. Such has

Been 'mongst my thoughts while reading this, a tale

Of 1981 and thereabouts.

Our Wonder Years are come at last. Avail

Yourself of Eugene Nadelman -- no doubts! --

As soon as e'er you can, for to enjoy

This charming story of this charming boy.

To Pushkin and to Petrarch Weingrad pays

His tribute here, while I obey the form

Of Shakespeare. I am well set in my ways

As readers of this blog well know -- with warm

Regard do I invite you, please to click

The link that's to the right, if you have yet

To buy my own experiment in slick

And sonnetized narrations. He has set

The tale of Onegin in junior high,

At summer camp, bars mitzvah, and, the most

Important, in a basement dungeon I

Could only envy, where, with his host

Eugene fights monsters, swings his weapon and

Loots wizards' towers scattered through the land. 

For yes, some action only here unfolds

Before the teenaged eyes of teenaged minds

In D&D! But lo!  This here game holds

Unguessed-at dangers, as our hero finds

When Abigail, his lady-love, comes down

To watch a bit, and has a girl's effect

On boyish hearts, which ever seek renown

Before a girl's attention. What will wreck?

A budding love affair? A friendly game?

Companionship from childhood? You must read

The book to learn the nature of the shame

And of the glories waiting for Eugene

In this short work. The little time you'll spend

In doing so rewards well in the end. 

Kylie Lee Baker's BAT EATER AND OTHER NAMES FOR CORA ZENG (Narr by Natalie Naudus)

There's something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

Kylie Lee Baker would have been fun to have as a lab partner in high school biology, I decided about halfway through her creepy horror/crime hybrid Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. She relishes the particular and intimate, yes, the gory, details of the insides of organisms, revels in the sensory details of textures felt and observed, how smells penetrate not only the nostrils and sinuses but also the back of the throat, if the substance giving them off is thick enough; the contrast of vividly colored internal organs and tissues to dulled and more uniform integuments and surroundings. 

So of course her heroine here is a specialty cleaner -- of murder crime scenes. And as we already know from comics and TV, that makes for an interesting enough character and milieu right there, but Baker has bigger and better ideas than the low hanging ones. 

Because, for starters, Bat Eater takes place in Manhattan at the height of the very first wave of COVID-19, when everybody who had the luxury was sheltering in place and hoarding toilet paper and being, perhaps selfishly?, grateful not to be among the corpses stacking up in hospital morgues, then meat lockers, then refrigerated trucks parked wherever they'd fit on the island -- and our heroine, Cora Zeng, is Asian. Specifically American-Born Chinese.

Oh, and just for extra fun, all of this kicks off just in time for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, when the gates of hell open up and let the spirits of the dead roam the earth again, demanding attention and sustenance from their loved ones. Ignore them at your peril; they might take a bite out of your coffee table. Or out of you. Best to give them what they actually want, maybe?

I mean, if you believe that stuff.

And if you accept your Chinese aunt's insistence that you acquire symbolic objects made of joss paper and burn them as appeasement offerings to your dead, rather than your white and Catholic aunt's snobbish attitude that Hungry Ghosts and joss papers are just icky Asian superstitions and you should really just pray and confess and enact ritual cannibalism instead. 

Cora, you see, is half-white. But her older sister, Delilah, is fully Chinese. And, as Delilah observes of their situation in a poignant flashback to when they suddenly came into each other's lives after some familial drama finally brought them together, how they might feel about it won't charge the fact that they're family. So they might as well be more grown-up about it than their parents seem to have been, and stick together. 

Until suddenly, Delilah announces right before shocking tragedy strikes, that this whole pandemic thing has Delilah thinking about breaking up the team and heading back to China without her mei-mei, who isn't fluent in Mandarin or the local dialect their father's family speaks, and anyway Cora has nice white relatives she can maybe rely on like she does their father to send her a check from China each month to help cover NYC living expenses that are beyond his girls and their useless liberal arts degrees...

I still have a mostly negative attitude about Pandemic Literature. Too many people, I knew at the time and still maintain, decided that lockdown was the perfect time for them to finally sit down and write that novel they always knew they had in them, which, that's fine; we've been dealing with tidal waves of NaNoWriMo projects for years now and some of them have even been good, so this alone is no reason to dismiss a book, but too many of them have been about COVID-19 and the writer's personal experience of lockdown and toilet paper shortages and fear and germiphobia and putting their groceries under a UV light before putting them away (if privileged enough to have the money to spend on such a gadget) and all the rest of the, yes, mostly pretty common experience that most of the planet seems to have shared unless they were deemed Essential Workers and had to keep going to work at risk of their lives either as healthcare or grocery stockers or ambulance drivers... and didn't get to stay home and write that novel they've always known they had in them. I mean, there's only so many of those stories that I, personally, have patience for, and that number is pretty close to zero. Unless...

Unless someone has a different experience of this to share with me. Which the protagonist/narrator of Bat Eater most certainly does, for not only is she facing a new excuse for racism evoked by the title; as the Leader of the Free World and all of his minions declared while pushing the infamous "lab leak" hypothesis even as they also blamed it all on a wet market in Wuhan, China, lots of people at least claimed to believe that COVID-19 was all China's fault, and by extension the fault of every person they might encounter who even looks vaguely Chinese, even if they're third or fourth generation Americans with dim origins in completely different Asian countries than the one where Wuhan is, even if they don't speak any language but English, even if they're actually Native American but just kind of vaguely look Asian. Against whom it is now perfectly okay to discriminate and even enact hate crimes to punish the "bat eaters" for the disease and its impact on everybody's sudden inability to get a haircut.

I mean sure, racism is racism, but it has to have been extra bizarre and extra scary to suddenly get called "Bat Eater" before being spit on (which, get ready for all the bodily fluids in this story; it's not confined to the blood that Cora and her colleagues have to clean up in the crime scene du jour) or shoved or assaulted or -- here we go! -- murdered.

...maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.

It would seem that there's a serial killer at work in Chinatown, targeting young, single Asian women who live alone. The killer bursts into their homes at night, brutally and spectacularly murders them in a variety of different ways, and then shoves a bat down their throats or otherwise inside their bodies, to make sure everybody Gets the Message. But so far, only Cora and her two colleagues, happy go lucky and kind of doofy Harvey (nephew of the Chinatown dry cleaning mogul who pivoted his business to crime scene clean-up when the pandemic meant nobody needed their work clothes professionally cleaned anymore) and sharply observant, intelligent and no nonsense Yi-Fei* (who is every bit as at-risk as Cora herself, being an actual immigrant from China who still has a bit of an accent), the found family Cora comes to rely on when her actual family seems to have let her down, seem to understand what's really going on. At least until they get the call to come clean the crime scene where a Chinese-American member of New York's finest has gotten the bat treatment. He would seem to have noticed as well. And to have paid dearly for noticing.

Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.

Anyway, the relationship that develops between Cora and her co-workers -- a relationship she is in sore need of, as the above suggests -- is the best part of the story, for me. Both Harvey and Yi-Fei get to be fully developed characters who have important things to contribute to Cora's efforts to get anyone in authority to give a damn that young Asian women are being, not just verbally or physically attacked but murdered, to maybe track down the bad guy who ruined Cora's own personal life, and to deal with the Hungry Ghost that seems to be stalking her, and not just out of hunger. Because yes, the ghost stuff is far from incidental to the setting of this story. We get lots and lots of ghost action, some of it hilariously gory, some of it genuinely creepy, much of it heartbreaking. Good thing Cora has friends.

One thing I really like about horror novels like Bat Eater is how well they maintain a sense of ambiguity for as long as possible. Is this a fully supernatural tale, in which all of the adversaries, even the disease, are eldritch horrors from beyond the veil? Is the disease "natural" but the serial killer and the ghosts supernatural? Is the disease real and the serial killer just some asshole, but the ghosts are real? Or is all of this going to turn out to be aspects of Cora's psychological trauma? Baker kept me wondering and speculating about this until almost the last hour.

And all of this, to further muddy the issues, is delivered to us with a purring, cooing tenderness by narrator Natalie Naudus, who sounds like a mother telling us a weirdly contemporary bedtime story and doesn't want us to get too scared, but still relishes the disgusting details, described with immaculate syllabic precision so we can't elide or ignore them. I smelled, heard, and felt every drop of various fluids, every garbage pile, every whiff of bad breath. I'm pretty sure I showered a few more times than I needed to. I defy you not to.

Don't snooze on this one if you're in the mood for a good scare.

*I might have misspelled her name because audio book.