William T. Vollmann's YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS

Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps.

Man, I've known of the existence of this book for decades. I had a vague idea of what it's about and that it was probably going to be something I would love, but I never came across it in a bookstore, back when it was new and a physical store selling physical books, or a public library, was the only way to get them, so I never picked it up for my personal collection or checked it out. Later on, online booksellers became a thing and I went bananas, just like everybody else did, but by then a lot of newer books were on my radar, and then e-books happened and then...

But really? I couldn't tell you why it took me so long to get around to You Bright and Risen Angels, apart from its still never turning up in any bookstores I've managed to hit when I've a bit to spend. And there not being an ebook or audio edition. And there being millions and millions of other books vying for my attention. 

Sigh.

But so, better late than never. And also, thank goodness for my having a few dozen high brodernist friends, many of whom are obsessed with Billy TV and his oeuvre, who selected his Europe Central as a book club read (which I loved and consider one of the best books I read this year, but I'm not ready to write about it yet and think I'm gonna read it again before I do)* and I was jolted into remembering that back in the 90s when I was temping my way around the Greater Boston area (so many bookstores! But I never saw this in any of them. And anyway, Infinite Jest happened, etc.) I was kind of always on the lookout for this big chunk of literary speculative fiction about insects and revolution and hey, online booksellers still exist, and not all of them are avatars of pure evil...

So, anyway, You Bright and Risen Angels is finally in my life. And, as I often but don't always say, it feels like it was written just for me. Well, except for all the gun stuff. There's a fair amount of gun stuff. Which isn't really for me, but I'll put up with it if an author makes it worth my doing so. 

Billy TV sure did! Though he also kind of tricked me in some pretty inventive ways, like providing a rather untrustworthy, though vividly descriptive, table of contents. As such.

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.

I'm coming to dislike the phrase "late-stage capitalism" almost as much as I do all the Underpants Gnome-ish fantasizing about the neo-Nuremberg Trials that are surely just around the corner for the current crop of bigoted,  authoritarian oppressors who have come to power in so much of the world. Both memes presuppose that these regimes so obviously carry the seeds of their own destruction that it's just a waiting game for the rest of us; we don't really have to do anything. We certainly don't have to get nasty or violent. We just have to keep the popcorn ready for when the imaginary good guys who are going to swoop in and save us show up and clean house, like they did in World War II. Except somehow, we all seem to think that we're gonna get to skip the war part this time? Or at least that somebody else is going to do the arduous stuff? But on what basis do we think that?

Anyway, YBARA is an elaborate, baroque and challenging allegory of what it's most likely really going to feel like when everybody's finally had enough of the manipulations and empty promises of our current socio-economic systems that keep everyone too scared or hopeless or indoctrinated to be be willing to even imagine a slightly better world anymore. Couched as a giant revenge plot of bugs against bug zappers. 

But that sounds a bit dry and no-fun, doesn't it? But see, those are two things this book ain't, especially if you like weird shit like giant, freakishly long-lived anthropomorphic insects who have teamed up with their more conventionally sized and life-spanned brethren to fight back against human domination and destruction; like sentient agglomerations of electricity that, for their part, seek to preserve the status quo except with themselves in charge instead of stupid humans; like a handful of sinister, immortal oligarchs who both embody the status quo and believe the aforementioned agglomerations of sentient electricity are actually their willing servants and weapons; like a tiny cadre of passionate revolutionaries who were already ready to take matters into their own hands and fight, despite their paltry numbers, and then accept surprise offers of tactical, strategic and actual support from the very gnats that ordinarily would be tormenting them in swarms in their secret lair above the Arctic Circle!

Oh and there's also another oligarch, shadowy, sinister and remote, manipulating affairs from his base of operations on Mars? And a secret race of plant-people who can dramatically alter their own biochemistry to incorporate some industrial products and by-products to give themselves really weird superpowers like remote viewing via developing photographic film at a touch? I mean, you can't say Billy TV is unimaginative. 

All of this is related to us, by the way, by an unreliable narrator who seems to at least *believe* he is the last human survivor of the resulting conflict, who in his loneliness has programmed an elaborate computer simulation** depicting "resurrected" versions of all of the important actors in the scenario (helpfully listed for us with notes on their interrelationships and alignments in a Dramatis Personae at the beginning of the book right before its wild and rather fanciful table of contents). As he boots up his system for the latest iteration of the game, he addresses the personality constructs inhabiting it as his "Bright and Risen Angels" with a melancholy air. But is he really a lone survivor wistfully reliving the actual past of the narrative, or just a frustrated Infocom employee? Heh.

And it is because of this that YBARA often gets categorized as proto-cyberpunk. As this is really barely just a frame narrative, though, I think so promoting it is a mistake. You're not going to see any console cowboys, expensive razorgirls, or Rastafarian satellite-dwellers here,  but nor are you going to get the funky, vaguely creepy pseudo-biopunk of, say, Bruce Sterling's more interesting offerings, or the intensely insect-focused action of "antasy" works like Clark Thomas Carlton's output to date,  which I must confess to having vaguely hoped for back in the early days of my knowing this book exists.

I am by no means disappointed by what I got, for all that it does not even contain what the second half of the table of contents suggests that it will. Because what it's actually in these pages is fascinating in its own right, with its alternate history of the industrialization of the United States, its vision of cryptoterrestrials (again, rather before even most fringe communities were even really talking about certain phenomena in those terms) and its depiction of how rebels are made, not born. This is that rarity of rarities, a genuinely unique book, and one I'm profoundly glad to have finally gotten to read.

Interestingly enough, I seem to have stumbled into what feels awfully like a spiritual sequel to YBARA. Stay tuned right here to find out what it is. 

By the way, I think there's going to be a lot more Billy TV content on this blog in the new year, but don't worry: I'm pretty sure this one is still going to prove to be unique, because this guy's restless intelligence and creativity have legendarily led him never to write the same, or even the similar, book twice. Dayum!

*Yes, I'm in a book club now, at long last, halfway through my sixth decade on this warming, dessicating planet. 

**Recall that this book was first published in 1987, when most high schools in the U.S. boasted, at most, a few Apple IIes awkwardly situated in the library for a handful of nerds to play typing games on. Oregon Trail was still in the unimaginable future for most of us who weren't in the industry or attending a handful of schools adjacent to it. But guess who was working in the industry as a programmer back then? Billy TV!

T. Kingfisher's A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES

I come to the work of Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher, in somewhat backwards fashion. I knew her first as the "Wombat Test Subject" on her husband Kevin Sonney's podcast, Productivity Alchemy, on which show I've fallen way behind because I've pretty much given up on productivity but still occasionally enjoy, mostly for the stories of the couple's pets and livestock and Vernon's description of her writing and illustrating processes. She is a woman of considerable gifts and a singular speaking voice and is beloved of most of the people whose opinions on books matter to me, so got filed as "an author I know I'll like and I've got to try sometime" but that guarantee of quality somehow perversely reduces the urgency of sampling an author's work. See also Leonora Carrington, on whom I slept for years. 

Anyway then Vernon, writing here as Kingfisher, wrote a southern gothic novel A House with Good Bones, in which the heroine is not only an entomologist but an archaeological entomologist. Zoinks!

So of course I knew there'd be tension between the habits of skepticism and demanding evidence that are so deeply ingrained in most fictional (if not always in actual) scientists and whatever supernatural forces were supplying the horror; I was not ready for Kingfisher's very successful attempt to import the elements of gothic horror into a story set in a tract house built in the 1990s.

Our heroine, Sam, has had to leave her latest excavation while some human remains found there are investigated, so she decides to go visit her mother,  Edie, still living in the house Sam grew up in with Edie, Sam's older brother, Brad and, for a while, Edie's viciously unpleasant grandmother, whom Sam always called Grand Mae. Mae originally owned the house and ruled it with an iron hand and a shedful of garden tools for maniacally tending her flawless rose garden, demanding of her progeny an adherence to the impossible standards of 1950s TV family perfection that no actual humans ever achieved. After Mae's death, Edie made the house a bit more interesting and comfortable, with brightly colored paint on the walls and actually interesting art that didn't depict things like Confederate weddings hanging from them. 

So imagine Sam's surprise when she discovers her grandmother's nasty taste again dominating the house, and the kind of detail only someone like Sam would notice: a complete lack of invertebrate life in the rose garden.

Oh, and a local vulture -- as in the actual bird, not an epithet for a nasty neighbor, though there's one of them, too -- hanging out on top of the mailbox. Often more than one. 

The family secrets that emerge are straight out of the Women with Great Hair Escaping Castles playbook but don't feel forced into this very contemporary story; Kingfisher developed just the right background to explain the creepiness without having to resort to badly relocated Native American burial grounds or any of that foma, and in Sam and Edie gave us a delightful mother and daughter dynamic to enjoy while their world disintegrates around them. Even more delightfully, one of the vultures, named Hermes by his hedge-witchy keeper Gail, an older woman who worked in wildlife rehabilitation while she was Mae's much-disliked hippie neighbor but now lives the retired life of an herbalist with her last patient. Gail is pretty excellent, too, but Hermes' bizarre charisma always steals her thunder even before he earns his weird halo. Rounding out the duo is hunky, handy Phil, the grandson of the nasty neighbor who works as Edie's handyman and while there might be some romantic sparks between him and Sam, Kingfisher adds these with a light hand that never allows them to distract us from the thorny peril her characters are in.

So I'd recommend A House with Good Bones to anyone, but perhaps especially to the fans of John Bellairs; A House with Good Bones felt very much like a Lewis Barnavelt book for grown-ups -- though conversely, there's no reason, apart from occasional swearing, why a precocious kid fan of Bellairs wouldn't enjoy the hell out of this book. I could have used more insects, though. But we all know I'm rarely satisfied in that department. I'm glad that I got what I did, though, while on this wild ride of a story. Go get it!

Alice Brière-Haquet's PHAILANA (Tr Emma Ramadan)

What if the Mothman (of prophecy fame) were a little girl named Manon, lost in Jack the Ripper's London? Being relentlessly pursued by a would-be mad scientist and protected by a weird old lady and a pack of Very Good Dogs?

I mean, shut up and take my money, amirite?

In Alice Brière-Haquet's Phalaina (Greek for "moth") the Goodest of the Good Dogs, Giulio, even becomes a point of view character, as he is an agent of the secret Mothman People (I know it's basically the Secret Commonwealth aka Faerie, but they hang out with moths, have very moth-like habits and glowing red eyes; they are the Mothman People) via his friendship, not only with Molly, the woman who becomes Manon's human protector after Manon escapes from a convent, but with a strange and gangly man with weird abilities who is seeking to reunite Manon with her people. Her people who live in a special harmony with nature and can communicate telepathically with each other and with all animals. Manon can't yet because she's still a larva, basically.

Giulio doesn't entirely steal the show, but he does emerge as Phalaina's most dynamic and dependable hero even when he's not the point of view character, so I think perhaps this novel should actually have been named for him, but then someone would have to explain the cover art (though I like how, in the American edition, the upper wings of the moth depicted look almost like dog's heads in profile and the lower wings, combined with the tree's trunk and a hollow at its base, form yet another dog's face! I wonder if that was intentional? The cover artist for the English language publisher, Levine Querido, is not listed on the copyright or title page, dammit!). 

Ah, but the Mothman People are not her only people; Manon had a human father, a famous and wealthy professor, Dr. Humphrey, who corresponded with Charles Darwin and started an important scientific foundation before dying in a mysterious carriage crash out in the boonies, which some sinister types know Manon was in but survived...

Among the sinister types are the hilariously Cruella DeVil-ish Harriet Humphrey, the dead professor's sister and sole heir -- unless proof surfaces that he had a child, say -- and her icky boyfriend, John, who was the Secretary of the good doctor's foundation and is helping Miss Humphrey to locate Manon, but maybe not in service to Miss Humphreys' or Manon's interests!

The resulting tale is a chase narrative reminiscent of, say, The Quincunx (but written for a middle grade audience) tinged with all of the coolest cryptid stories, Charles Paliser meets Coast to Coast AM minus the mRNA vaccine hysteria.

Translator Emma Ramadan kept this book's intended audience very much in mind and kept the prose clear and direct, though for some reason decided that the very modern (I think?) "heave" was a good usage to convey nausea and vomiting in a historical fantasy set in the 19th century, which usage tripped me up every time. I doubt the intended readership will even notice that, though; they'll just be having a good time while absorbing the book's very timely message about living in harmony with, versus dominating, nature. What a different world we might have now if that message had gained more traction back then. 

I hear Alice Brière-Haquet has written a few other books. Perhaps the next time I'm in the mood for some weird fantasy from the French, I'll grab one and spend some time with her again. She is delightful!