Tatyana Toylstoya's THE SLYNX

It's not every day that I come across a novel that seems destined for the "among the strangest things I've ever read" category simultaneously as it also just never quite winds up feeling strange enough, somehow, but such is Tatyana Tolstoya*'s The Slynx, a post-apocalyptic and satirical fantasy that is couched very much in terms of a folk tale.

The setting is sort-of-rural Russia, some 200 years after a violent unknown event referred to by its survivors as, simply, "The Blast", which was pretty obviously a nuclear war that didn't quite destroy the world, but sure did change it, starting with the aforementioned survivors. Those in our little corner of what's left of the world who managed to live through The Blast and its immediate aftermath just kept on living unless murdered or killed by a freak accident or finally just sickened of it all enough to commit suicide. But get this: they don't really age, and, if they were of childbearing age at the time of The Blast, they could keep on having children, and did, and so repopulation happened at a good rate.

Only about those children. Yes, about them. That's where mutation sets in. Everybody's got some kind of disfigurement, some visible, some not. And these children age, and die off, and basically enjoy the lifestyle and span of your average Russian serf, circa the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It could be almost idyllic, if your idea of an idyll is a return to pre-mechanized agriculture, ignorance, superstition, and boredom. Oh, and of a whole new sub-race of people who are human but alas, are also quadrupeds and are thus used in place of draft animals.** Draft animals that drink too much vodka and talk back to their owners and occasionally maybe try to stage a revolution...

Enter one Benedikt, son of an "Oldener" woman, who works as a copyist of old pre-Blast manuscripts. His calling is kind of noble and it lends him a certain weird distinction -- in order to copy one has to read -- but the 200 years between the last of these books' publication and his own time have wrought changes that make a lot of the knowledge he can gain thereby useless or nearly so, because it's all about context, and the context has changed. For instance, while books are precious in Benedikt's world, it's chiefly as testaments to the wonderful wit and wisdom of Dear Leader, one Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. He wrote them all, you see. All the novels, all the how-to books, all the chemistry text books. War and Peace, by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. A Manual of Applied Organic Chemstry, by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe. The 1972 Sears Catalog, by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe.

And yes, he is a despot, ruling from afar with the help of the dreaded Saniturions, secret/thought police in the guise of public health officials, who punish freethinkers by treating them as vectors of disease. Straight out of the movie Brazil, these guys. All that's missing are the weird baby masks.

But so, the plot of The Slynx (the Slynx being an imaginary monster that attacks and tears apart lone villagers in the night, and pretty much serving as a metaphor for all the woes of this world, especially ignorance and oblivion, because this book is all about what happens when a culture's memory is obliterated and everyone is just trying to make sense of it all from random pieces) is pretty much that of Snowpiercer. Benedikt is very like Curtis, if Curtis was more of a lovable doofus who marries above his station than a guilt-ridden antihero who kills his way to the front of the train, who advances uncomprehendingly through the several strata of a very confined society and learns that its very top/front isn't all that different from the rear/bottom and that it's all pretty much just a sad little cemetery of a society he's living in. But funny. Darkly and deeply funny.

You know, like life is. We're having a Blast. And maybe that's all that we deserve to be remembered for?

*Yes, she is from the same family as that War & Peace guy.

**Not a lot of animals survived The Blast. Mice are the primary food animal, and also serve as a kind of currency, for example. There are other, barely recognizable, creatures around, but most of them are not safe to eat.

Starla Hutchton's SHADOWS ON SNOW: A FLIPPED FAIRY TALE

First of all, let us take a moment to bask in the glory of this cover. Bask. It is glorious. The author is a graphic designer and has a whole side business in designing glorious book covers. I plan on using her myself, when I finally get some things finished and ready to publish again (soon, I promise! There will be seven. See what I did there?).

Second, let me just say that I'm pretty sure that pretty much everything that feminists and their sympathizers have ever found to hate about fairy tales in general, and the tale of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in particular, is addressed and corrected in Starla Hutchton's Shadows on Snow: A Flipped Fairy Tale. And not just because the genders of the rescued and the rescuer are flipped. Oh no.

So yes, the innocent and beautiful Snow White is, in this book, an almost ridiculously handsome prince. And he gets rescued by a princess. Dur. But wait, there's more.

Because the dwarfs, too, are gender flipped, but are also turned into something much more than mere caretakers of/providers of refuge for the hapless victim character. The seven in this tale are women. Moreover, they are magic users. Moreover, they are princesses. And the rescuing princess is one of them.

Already we're seeing fantastic levels of agency in the characters and an enrichment of the original Snow White plot that is wonderful to see. For these seven magical princesses have a deep and plot-relevant back story; the wicked stepfather (yes, more flipping. Starla flips it all, yo) has done his dirty deeds before, has a pattern of wickedness and sorcery, and these seven princesses were orphaned and exiled from their wonderful kingdom in the wicked stepfather's last go-around.

But this is all just background to the drama of the seventh and youngest princess, Rae, and her prince, Leopold, he of the skin white as snow and hair black as ebony -- but also he of considerable wisdom, kindness, martial prowess and all around quality. Snow White in the original tale is beautiful and innocent and kind, but Leopold could lead an army into war, yo. But he still winds up needing saving, because he doesn't know much about magic. Good thing for him Rae does.

But Rae also is not just a magic user. She's a fully rounded kickass heroine in the Katniss Everdine mode, with outdoor survival skills, a talent for managing horses, and believable vulnerabilities that keep her interesting even as she enacts the obvious fairy tale plot.

And this is key, when you're retelling classic fairy tales and legends. We know the story. We know the plot twists, know how it's going to end. We need reasons other than suspense to be bothered with reading the story yet again, and really, for this reader, said reasons need to go way beyond just "well, what if Snow White was a boy and he got rescued by Princess Charming."

On this, Ms. Hutchton absolutely delivers. Every character (well, except maybe the Voldemort-ish wicked stepfather, who is more of a looming threat than an actual presence in most of the novel, perhaps to the book's slight detriment, but oh well) is well-developed and unique. The novel length gives the author the chance to really explore the story's world, its politics, its history, its sexual dynamics, its humanity.

I'm pretty sure this is my favorite thing Ms. Hutchton has done. I am happily ever after.

100 Books #107 - Walter Moers' A WILD RIDE THROUGH THE NIGHT

"I've got no idea what's gone wrong with your dreams of late, but they've definitely been getting wilder."

When your own dear personal psychopomp aka "dream princess" who is also your late great-great-great grandmother tells you this, you know you're in for a weird adventure. Of course, by the time twelve-year-old Gustave Dore meets his ancestress and hears this observation, he's already been on one for a good bit: captaining his own ship and all but losing it to the "Siamese Twin Tornados", meeting Death and his sister Dementia, saving a Damsel in Distress from her Dragon but learning that he kind of misread that situation a bit...

Wait? Meeting Death? Yes. Death wants the kid's soul, like now, and the only way young Gustave can avoid complying is by performing a series of tasks. Welcome to the wild, weird, wonderful world of Walter Moers, here exhibited as part Where the Wild Things Are, part Maakies (Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby would have felt right at home on Gustave's ship), with a dash of the Twelve Labors of Hercules thrown in.

Every Walter Moers book I pick up becomes my new favorite Walter Moers, and A Wild Ride Through the Night is no exception, despite the absence of Moers' cartoons. That's not to say the book is unadorned by illustration, though; far from it. The story took its inspiration from twelve engravings by 19th century French engraver and illustrator Gustave Dore*, and these appear sequentially in the book (and, being engravings, look pretty okay in e-Ink, to my surprise), making it at least partly a sort of wry commentary on sequential art and how any sequence's story can be altered by any amount of interstitial storytelling; it can even be made into an imaginary portrait of the artist as a young man.

I've been a fan of Moers since I first stumbled across The City of Dreaming Books in the new books section of my public library a few years ago. With a title like that, how could I pass it by? That book was nothing like I'd expected, but altogether wonderful -- and the lovely thing about his Zamonia books* (I mean, besides their inherent charm and their amazing, adorable illustrations) is that any one of them is a wonderful introduction to this world, populated by sentient, literate, civilized dinosaurs, adventuring educated dogs, blue bears who captain ships, and yes, dreaming books. But also, any one of them is a total gateway drug; once you've sampled from it, if it's at all to your taste, you will feel utterly compelled to go and get them all. So, you know, here.

A Wild Ride Through the Night is an earlier work than the Zamonia books, but already quite a mature one: Moers has already worked out his signature style (and so has his translator, John Brownjohn), blending whimsy, satire and pathos with fairly strong character creation (Lil' Gustave is no Rumo, but who is?) and a whole lot of just plain WTFery. If you don't laugh at loud at some of these bits, see your psychiatrist. And while a lot of the weirdest stuff (like a monstrous flying pig with lizard/goat legs) originated from the fevered imagination of Dore, I really don't think Dore could have come up with the kind of dialogue Moers gives to such grotesqueries. Truly, he is like no other writer, living or dead.

But you know, if you can't have Moers illustrations in a Moers book, Dore will do. Yes, yes he will.

*Illustrations used are taken from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Orlando Furioso, "The Raven", Don Quixote, Legend of Croquemitane, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Paradise Lost, and the Bible.