Raymond St. Elmo's LETTERS FROM A SHIPWRECK IN THE SEA OF SUNS AND MOONS

To a certain degree, I'm still trying to figure out the freaking ocean of words I just swam through, as I contemplate the very unusual and ambiguous Letters From a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons, by Raymond St. Elmo. I mean, I know I had fun shaking my head over the combination of godpunk, sea adventure, star-crossed romance and epistolary interrogation it contained, but did I ever actually figure out what was going on? Enough to write a coherent post about on this here blog? 

Let's find out.

Interviewer: Describe how to kill Typhon.

Oh, there are as many ways to kill a god as there are to destroy a man. Personally my favorite is to melt him down in confusion and despair. 

Readers here who are also readers of Gene Wolfe have already raised their eyebrows at the mention of the ancient Autarch and god-king of the Whorl, but this Typhon is merely (?) a storm god, one of a cargo hold-full of mostly dead and/or forgotten deities being carried aboard the good ship Unicorn from San Francisco, at which point the last of them was collected, to the mysterious and uncharted island of Theodosia.

Typhon could also be our protagonist, cloaked in the body of Clarence St. Elmo*, the blind old sailor rousted out by the unknown Interviewer for purposes unknown but urgent for that entity.** A mad scientist on the island on which Clarence and a few of his crewmates from the Unicorn thinks Clarence is Typhon, anyway. 

Clarence has been adopted, though, not by Typhon, but by the Egyptian god, Thoth, who appears to him with advice and wry commentary in the form, usually, of a sea bird, though occasionally he's got a vaguely human form, shrouded in black.

But all of this is just distraction, as far as the Interviewer is concerned; they claim to have dredged up Clarence to help in a search for two green leatherbound books, one in Etruscan and the other a French translation of the first -- allegedly. As for Clarence... He's just this poet, you know? 

I saw some useful poetic fodder in the situation. It's just my nature. I considered putting seaweed in my hair and appearing to them as my own drowned ghost. The idea made me laugh, then the laugh made me check. I did have seaweed in my hair. Maybe I was my own drowned ghost. The idea scared me so I combed it out with my fingers and headed on.

To arrive at the above situation, shipwrecked and pondering how to approach some other castaways, Clarence first allowed his beloved's father and fierce, ancient aunts to chase him away from her, so very away that he left their hometown of Maidenhead, NJ for San Francisco and thence joined the crew of the Unicorn. Which brought him to a weird island complete with lighthouse, a seminary run by the aforementioned mad scientist, the Master of the Green, and many other features atypical of your standard Robinson Crusoe-esque fare. Like a bunch of gods and ex-gods rampaging around and wreaking havoc. Only some of whom seem to have been along for the ride on the Unicorn. I think. Were there already some feral gods or ex-gods on the island? I never decided for sure.

Meanwhile, back on the voyage, Clarence wrote his beloved K. (all we ever get is this initial, never a name) a series of longing letters which give the novel its title, and the Interviewer has only secured his cooperation by convincing him they have a way of seeing that she gets them, since she didn't in real life? 

Except what is the reality of any of this, here?

While trying to figure all of this out may feel like too much work to some (my own dear personal mother, who spotted this book in our shared ebook library and was intrigued by the title, started it before I did but DNF'd it for this reason), it is a fun exercise for the Wolfe-pilled who actively seek out this sort of thing -- but it's not the only reason to give this book a try! 

There's also the enjoyment of watching perhaps the most ill-advised sea voyage since Ishmael signed on to the Pequod. The Unicorn, we learn, is a perfectly fine ship but its crew mostly abandoned it long before it reached San Francisco; they were terrified of its cargo of statues of forgotten gods, you see. Also, the captain is kind of a freak show. The result is that the ship can attract no kind of competent or experienced crew, so nobody has the first idea what to do when things immediately start going wrong in ways both predictable and un-.

I'm bouncing around in chronology, here, but guess what: so does the novel! It's all part of the puzzle box, one which I'm not sure I've solved yet. Truly, I am not sure I understood this novel. 

But the experience of reading it was fun enough to make me more than willing to try it again sometime. So maybe stay tuned...

*As though we are perhaps meant to wonder if he is not an ancestor of the author of the novel Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons? Except I think "Raymond St. Elmo" is a pseudonym? But who knows. All I could find poking around in the wreckage of the internet was that St. Elmo has written a bunch of other books that seem even weirder than this one. But few biographical details.

**Or entities. Sometimes the Interviewer uses plural pronouns in referring to itself/themselves. And frequently sounds, as does Clarence sometimes, too, like a piece of software or otherwise artificial being.

Alex Pheby's WATERBLACK (And the rest of CITIES OF THE WEFT)

Hey Kate, tell us about the weirdest trilogy you've found since Brian Catling's Vorrh series, why don't you. Pretty please? Is it Jeffrey Ford's Well Built City trilogy? What about Tade Thompson's Wormwood books? Or Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy (wrong, I haven't read that yet. But stay tuned!)? Well, close, but no: it's Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft, and yes, Mordew, Malarkoi and Waterblack (also the names of the cities in the series title) are weird as hell.

And yeah, just like happened with Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog/Ludluda diptych, I didn't post on here when I read the first two books last year, in glorious audio book form as narrated by the idiosyncratically excellent Kobna Holdbrook-Smith*, but again, not because I didn't love them. I just don't post about everything I read anymore because I don't have the stamina I used to and typing still really hurts. Anyway, once again, I saw the final book on Netgalley and didn't want to wait, so now I'm honor-bound once again to share my thoughts about it. Which I have to talk a little about the earlier books to do at all well. So.

A warning to start: Alex Pheby is not here to meet your expectations. He's not writing any kind of fantasy that your average Big Publishing House marketing team would have any idea what to do with (so let's hear it for the brave and tasteful souls at Galley Beggar Press!). He's not giving a master class on world building, not here to give fan service to people who have come to care a lot for the kid who seemed to be the series protagonist in the first book, Mordew, nor to lovers of his urchin pals who take over most of the action in the second, Malarkoi, nor even for the incredible magical dogs who steal the show in both of those books.

We start Waterblack full of questions about what's next for Nathan Treeves, Prissy, Gam, Anaximander and Sirius (well, we kind of feel like we know what happened to the Goddog but Pheby has taught us to maybe not take certain endings very seriously). Nathan's mother, Clarissa, seems to have achieved her ultimate end already and has nowhere to go but down; is that what we're going to watch here? Nathan's enemy, Sebastian, the Master of Mordew, is still kind of kicking around though he was pretty disappointed at the end of Malarkoi, what about him? What about Portia, the Mistress of Malarkoi, "goddess of gods," who gave little Prissy quite a gift last novel? 

Cue pitiless laughter from our author, who doesn't give a fig for our expectations, but who knows that he's got us hooked anyway because the kind of people who enjoyed the first two volumes of his Cities of the Weft trilogy want to know where the hell he's going with all of this weirdness way more than we're invested in any particular character. Although, them, too, somewhat. I mean, there's still an untold number of "Nathan flukes" loose and wreaking havoc in the topologically distorted ruins of Mordew, after all, and Clarissa, who's been powering all of her mighty spells in the single most ruthless manner I've ever seen a not-quite villain employ in a novel of any kind, ever, still has... something going on and hey, does she care about her son, like, at all? And speaking of offspring, there's still a puppy of the Goddog's running around somewhere.

There are some very weird and intriguing and mind-blowing plot threads that have yet to be properly woven into this here narrative textile, is what I'm saying.

However...

Waterblack starts off by posing an extended philosophical argument as to how a whole bunch of stuff we've just been taking for granted as "true" within the universe of the Cities of the Weft... is ontologically impossible. This undermines almost everything we've come to understand about the hundreds of pages and dozens of hours we've devoted to exploring his creation.

And then he launches into a deep exploration of the background of a minor antagonist who had maybe two scenes in Malarkoi and wasn't even mentioned in Mordew.

But, because Pheby is a hell of a gifted storyteller, we're immediately interested in this girl, Sharli and her defective firebird companion, Tinnimam, anyway. Even before it's hinted that her back story may allow us to learn, at long last, what the hell the Women's Vanguard of the Eighth Atheistic Crusade is all about. I mean, this isn't Philip Pullman, here; as the jacket copy on Mordew discloses before we've even read a page of this series, God has already been dead a long time, here. But there are definite echoes of Pullman's work in the Cities of the Weft; there's even a Subtle Knife, though the person who gets it puts it to very different use than sweet young Will does in the book named for it 

But wait, Pheby isn't done trying to talk you out of loving his trilogy. He still has many logical arguments to make as to why everything he's shared with us through hours of narration/hundreds of pages is really kind of bullshit, and he makes these arguments in exhausting detail (there's more than one reason why people refer to these books as the most Platonist since Susanna Clarke's Piranesi). And, as he starts warning us about halfway through the book, a lot of our pressing narrative questions will not be answered in the text of Waterblack proper; we'll have to wait for the appendices, which, Lord of the Rings-like, take up a good chunk of this last novel.

 

But that's really the only thing these books have in common with Tolkien, I assure you. 

What this ultimately comes to is the most fascinating yet frustrating read I've encountered in a long, long time. Waterblack does my favorite thing a series' final volume can do, which is make me want to go back and re-read the whole trilogy because it has fundamentally changed what the earlier books even mean. This is a particular achievement in this case, since I just re-read Mordew and Malarkoi last month in preparation for this! 

But so, despite Pheby's best and most perverse efforts to the contrary, I still love this series. I still love its characters, especially the magical dogs (and especially especially the new magical puppy introduced in Waterblack. I absolutely want a sequel devoted to the further adventures of Anaximines. I am also absolutely sure I'm never going to get one. But that's ok, I have this.); I still love its strange cities and its stranger creatures (especially the very cerebral and civilized Person-Headed Snakes). And I love most of all how it made me question pretty much everything I'd read before, both in and out of the fantasy genre. You might, too. Give the first book a try!

*Who commits pretty much every sin I hate most in an audio book narrator but makes it all work. Even his artificially high and breathy female character voices somehow work. But that doesn't mean I'll accept this from anybody else, you hear?

Indra Das' THE DEVOURERS (Narr by Shishur Kurup & Meera Simhan)

After spending what felt like months entangled in some very long 18th-century styled doorstop fiction, it's pretty refreshing to return to what mostly feels like a straight-up monster story, though there's a lot more going on in Indra Das' The Devourers than that, of course. 

The subject/object of the story has a dramatically weird entrance as a stranger approaches a lonely college professor, one of our twin narrators, Alok, with an arresting declaration -- "I am half-werewolf" -- and says he wants to tell the professor a story. His compelling announcement and first teaser serving of that story have an uncanny and hypnotic impact on Alok that seem more like the powers of a vampire than a werewolf, but as we soon learn, this Stranger sort of started self-identifying as werewolf for complex cultural reasons that started off when he saw,  in his third century of life, An American Werewolf in London. So, uh, buckle up, this is a strange'un.

The novel's overall premise takes more from  Interview with the Vampire, than from any werewolf story I've heard as The Stranger's tale unfolds over several intense encounters with Alok, but it goes Anne Rice one better. Or several - what if Louis were not merely one of Lestat's metaphorical children but his actual biological child by a human mother? And what if most of the story concerned that human mother's epic quest across the length and breadth of Mughal-era India to find her rapist (because of course he was) and give him a good talking-to? And that her traveling companion was one of the werewolf/rapist's ex-packmate, who is pursuing the rapist not out of a quest for justice or to help the newly-pregnant victim, but basically to berate the rapist for having sex with a human, and a female human at that, eww gross, that would be like if a human had sex with a chicken or something because humans are prey. I mean, it's already way more interesting than the pseudo-gothic whining of Anne Rice's sexy but self-pitying characters, right?

The story unfolds in two narratives, one told by Alok, chiefly in the form of intervals in which he tries and fails to make any headway in his relationship with the Stranger who has appointed Alok to transcribe and type a manuscript about the Stranger's shapeshifter people. As with the other narrative, of Cyrah, the Mughal rape victim, there is some sexual tension in Alok's scenes with the Stranger but that's really not the point of the story, any more than it is when we travel with Cyrah and her rapist's friend Gévaudon. Both stories are more concerned with the ineffability of the predators who have made humans their prey, while looking just like them, holding out as a tantalizing mystery, rather than a lore-established certainty, that these shapeshifters were once full humans and that the same transformations they've undergone can happen to Alok or Cyrah as well.

Or, perhaps, the Beasts can regain the humanity that they only think they've lost?

Of course, the Stranger could just be pulling Alok's leg and extorting free editorial services from him, a possibility which is also carefully kept in play as the two intertwined stories unfold.

As often works brilliantly with dual first-person narratives, the audio book edition's producers chose to use different narrators for the two stories, with Shishur Kurup giving Alok exactly the kind of precise diction and haltingly thoughtful speech we'd expect of a lonely college professor who maybe should be questioning his sexuality a little more carefully than he has been, while Meera Simhan gives Cyrah a forcefulness and, yes, bitchiness, that a character like hers would need to survive in a world that is already plenty hostile to a lone, uneducated Muslim woman who has had to turn to sex work in order to survive and has barely done so even before crossing the paths of three slavering monsters who would ordinarily just think of her as a midnight snack. If they are what they think they are. But even if they aren't, Cyrah would have been doomed without that strident willfulness Simhan gives to her every syllable. As her rapist, who claims to be Fenrir from the Norse pantheon just to make sure this story is weird enough, observes, his and Gévaudon's kind are to mere humans as human men are to human women: predators.

Yeah, it's a bit simplistic, but this is the 1650s in India. I mean, an early bit of Cyrah's account describes a partially completed Taj Mahal surrounded in scaffolding. 

Adam Christopher's HANG WIRE

My friend Adam Christopher is a bit of a circus performer himself, of the plate-spinning variety, and loves to see just how many he can keep going (answer: a lot, an he doesn't care if the plates he's grabbed to spin having matching patterns), so it was just a matter of time before he took on a creepy circus motif for a novel. And so while he eschewed the Scary Clown plate (for which I'm grateful), most of the other plates from the Creepy Circus collection are up there and spinning for Hang Wire.

But lots of other plates from other collections are up, too. Quite a lot from the Murder Mystery collection, one or two from the Disaster Porn collection, and of course, since this is Adam Christopher, a bunch from the Godpunk/Superhero collection -- but since Adam is also a guy who likes things that look nice, he didn't use any cracked and chipped Graeco-Roman or Norse ones, but grabbed a bunch of lesser-used Hawaiian and Korean and Chinese god-plates for his act.

If the combination sounds like a bit of a hot mess, well, maybe it is, sort of, but the key is that this is a plate spinning act, which isn't really about the patterns on the plates at all, is it? You might occasionally glimpse the image of a Tiki or a Police Line Do Not Cross or a Scary Dance Troupe as those plates whirl about, but if you do you're maybe missing the point of the act.

So Hang Wire is a murder mystery, and a first rate one in that the reader is kept guessing nearly to the end which of the bewildering array of characters is the killer; and its a sinister quest tale, in which a genuinely frightening figure with an unnatural life span trips through history reassembling his great Machine of Doom (which was originally created as a set of sinister carnival rides) that was taken apart and scattered after it started working a bit too well and put the circus it was originally part of out of business;  and it's a superhero/god story in which a few leftover deities from a few different pantheons team up to try to save the world, or at least San Francisco. And it all works.

Some bits work better than others, of course. The sinister quest story, in which one Joel Duvall visits all of Christopher's favorite weird moments in American history and manages to make them even weirder, is fantastically chilling, Joel a deeply creepy character who has moments of pure and brilliant evil. His story is Ted Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels as written by the Stephen King who brought us "The Mangler." I demand that Clancy Brown play Joel in the film adaptation someday.

And speaking of casting dreams and whatnot, Bob.

Hey, hi, how are you. Wanna foxtrot?

Bob first turns up in the novel's harrowing prologue during the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, shirtless and barefoot in a pair of blue jeans, saving people on the sly with his supernatural powers. When he's not subtly intervening in natural disasters, he's a fixture at the city's Aquatic Park, where he lives, still shirtless and barefoot in blue jeans, in a tiny hut and gives ballroom dance lessons on the sand to all and sundry. An enjoyably enigmatic and laid-back figure is Bob. As with Joel, I would happily read a whole novel just about him. But one mustn't get distracted trying to get a good look at the design on a spinning plate...

So yes, Christopher keeps all his plates spinning through his whole act, and ends without breaking a one. It's quite a feat. And it's a lot of fun to watch.

100 Books #115 - Aliette de Bodard's MASTER OF THE HOUSE OF DARTS

The Aztec godpunk trilogy that began with Servant of the Underworld and continued in Harbinger of the Storm comes to its Obsidian-y and Bloody end in this last volume but as should be the case in any good mystery series, Master of the House of Darts stands perfectly well on its own, even though we take up the thread of the story very soon after the conclusion of Harbinger.

The middle volume was all about the struggle for succession, and ended with the more or less expected victor emerging as Revered Speaker (in a bizarre and unique way), but his rule was not yet cemented, for various reasons. To do that, Tizoc-zin must lead his warriors in battle (his "coronation war"), capture physically perfect prisoners, and sacrifice them to the gods to ensure the continuation of the world as the Mexica knew it.

As we begin the action in Master of the House of Darts (the title given to the heir apparent to the Mexica throne, usually the Revered Speaker's younger brother), that battle has been fought and won, but a paltry 40 prisoners are brought back to Tenotichtitlan -- so the new Speaker's rule is already on shaky ground.

And then one the victorious warriors and one of the would-be sacrifices die unexpectedly and mysteriously.

And others suddenly aren't looking so good either.

Enter our hero, Acatl, the Death God Gumshoe, solver of crimes, defender of innocence, and High Priest of the Dead. He is by now a most seasoned solver of supernatural crime and has the scars and scabs to prove it.* Quickly, he determines that the sacrifice, an honorable warrior of a faraway kingdom now lying dead and leaking pus, died of most unnatural causes, namely a supernatural disease, as did the warrior who claimed credit for capturing him.

Uh and also oh.

Soon the plot is thicker than clotted blood as various candidates for the caster of the malign spell that has caused what threatens to become an epidemic are brought up and eliminated. Is it the merchant from a previously conquered city who turns out to have been a member of that city's Imperial Family? Is it the High Priest of the storm-god Tlaloc (a vicious frenemy of Acatl's -- and hey, the diseases's symptoms mimic suffocation or drowning, so this hypothesis immediately volunteers itself to the seasoned Obsidian & Blood fan)? The titular heir-presumptive, who happens to be a devotee of Tlaloc's wife Jade Skirt? All of them? None of them?

Acatl goes through all of the usual detective motions, trading hypotheses, interviewing suspects, raising the souls of the victims to ask what they remember of how they died... all the while stubbornly clinging to his faith in a person who has pretty much been the Archie to Acatl's Nero Wolfe. As the story and the mystery all finally come together, the roots of the later holiday, Dia de los Muertos, become evident and the reader suddenly feels a compulsion to re-read Malcom Lowry. As one does.

One also feels a need to go back and read the trilogy from the beginning, all in one go, to catch all the stuff she obviously missed. And knowing that she needs to read on an empty stomach.

And since a lot of elements in these stories are inspired by actual events, actual history -- the emperors, the inter-city politics, and yes, the epidemic -- one wants to do some non-fiction reading as well. As one does.

Damn fine stuff, this.

*Aztec spell-casting and other acts of propitiation and divination requiring that the supplicant donate quite a lot of his own as well as other animals and people's blood to the cause.

100 Books #28 - Aliette de Bodard's HARBINGER OF THE STORM

I predicted in my review of the first book of Aliette de Bodard's "Obsidian and Blood" series that this second book would probably concern itself a lot more with court politics in this dark fantasy version of the Aztec/Mexica culture, circa the 13th Century. And man, was I right: Harbinger of the Storm is a Game of Aztec Thrones!

Whereas Servant of the Underworld introduced us to our trusty narrator, the High Priest of the God of Death,  Acatl, and had him playing detective to solve a murder for which his brother has been framed, Harbinger of the Storm shows us the man in his regular milieu: the highest circles of government and power and, of course, magic. That he is uncomfortable in these circles we know from Servant; Acatl is the son of a peasant, and has risen to high position via a combination of merit and subtle patronage. Amongst the likes of the Revered Speaker (the emperor) and his Council, Acatl is the odd man out, priest of an unpopular but unavoidable god, tactless, low-born, gauche -- but needed, very much needed, when the Revered Speaker dies and leaves a power vacuum both literal and figurative. Funeral rites must be performed, of course, promptly and exactly lest the power that rests in the role of Revered Speaker, the power that protects the fragile Fifth World the Mexica inhabit, fails, which means the End of the World.

All this is just prelude and back-story, though. What's really going on here is a power struggle that does indeed bear comparison with certain of the works of George R.R. Martin, and perhaps does him one better, because the gods are in it, too, in a great big bloody way.* The plot is again driven by a murder mystery, though this time around it's more like tracking a serial killer -- one who summons seriously freaky monsters called star demons to do the dirty work -- and again, there is a strong element of sibling rivalry, but where in Servant that rivalry focused on Acatl and his falsely accused brother, Harbinger switches focus to that between two younger brothers of the late Revered Speaker, one of whom is Acatl's acolyte/student and friend, and the other, who thinks Acatl is a terrible, worthless parvenu. Naturally, the hater is the one most likely to succeed as Revered Speaker, and doesn't think that anything he is doing is wrong enough to matter.

He's not alone in this, as Acatl discovers in his interviews with a cast of semi-villains, all of whom have broken or bent the rules of magic and worship that keep this strange world from being destroyed utterly by rival gods and star demons. "The problem was the line between reasonable risk and endangering the Fifth World, a line everyone seemed to place much further out in their minds than it really was."**


What really sets this fantasy world apart from the run-of-the-mill white men in armor stories, though, is the nature of its theology and the duties that imposes on the world's inhabitants. As Acatl explains several times, the Mexicas' gods are dead, corpses under shrines; they sacrificed themselves to create and ignite the sun that makes all life possible, and thus relinquished their powers and responsibilities to humanity forever. Thus Acatl and, when they're behaving themselves, the other priests and leaders of this empire, are burdened with an unbelievable responsibility, the shirking of which has way more than ritual consequences. As this story progresses, the monsters that are the stars in the Aztec sky loom ever closer, until they're even visible by daylight, giving proof that the sun and the people's pact with it are too badly weakened to hold them back much longer: "I could see the stars too, could feel the pressure above us, like a giant hand pushing through thin cotton, the cloth drawn taut, on the edge of tearing itself apart."***

The resulting novel is thus a uniquely intense read, anxious, urgent and intriguing as hell even before the penultimate act forces the reader to reinterpret almost everything that's gone before. I have the third and final book of the series, Master of the House of Darts, on deck for later this year. My expectations for it are now very high indeed!

*Again with the blood. When your gods are so obviously real and present and one of their requirements is that you slash your earlobes to make them bleed every morning just to make sure the sun rises on time, well, you're going to be one scabby, iron-smelling dude. And probably, as I said before, anemic into the bargain. Yikes!

**Harbinger of the Storm is a bit of an allegory for our own perilous times, isn't it? Certainly for me it was hard not to think of various catastrophes that loom over us modern, non-magical, humans -- most of those catastrophes likely to be our own fault...

***Aliette de Bodard has a flair for imagery and a good prose style, too, which is always welcome!

100 Books #21 - Anetta Ribken's ATHENA'S PROMISE

I was pretty much primed from the beginning to enjoy this book, early chapter drafts of which I was privileged to see because the author is a good internet friend of mine -- but not only because of that.

Set in a hotel on the edge of the questionable part of town, Athena's Promise concerns the struggles of its front desk manager, Pallas (and the naming is no coincidence, there, but I'll get to that in a minute), made all the more difficult as the story kicks in by two unwelcome events: a murder that has taken place in one of the guest rooms, and a new, unlikable and unpleasant "guest services manager" imposed on the hotel by its owners to beef up the "numbahs" and make sure it retains its corporate flag.

This new guest services manager, by the way, is a werewolf.

And he's far from the weirdest thing in this hotel or this world, for Athena's Promise is, in addition to being what is termed a "cozy mystery", an exploration of what life would be like if somehow the old Greek gods and goddesses came back (she doesn't bother explaining how that has happened, just refers to "The Crossing" and leaves it at that) and brought the whole stable of mythological creatures along for the ride. Thus one front desk clerk at Traveler's Haven is a pixie and the night auditor is a vampire, the hotel manager is Medusa (yeah, that Medusa) and the housekeeping staff consists of a lot of very kind-hearted and well-behaved and hard-working zombies. Zombies, of course, being all of those things naturally, at least before they "Turn" and become the shambling brain-eaters of familiar lore.

And the guests make the staff look plumb dull: randy centaurs flashing trashy bling and showing up demanding rooms by the hour, the better to ravish their too-willing groupies; Elementals for Environmental Protection in town to supervise work on cleaning up the Mississippi River (the city of St. Louis is never explicitly named as the locale for this story, but it is Ribken's home and the novel has the feel of St. Louis throughout); and mermaid divas who travel from city to city and strip club to strip club putting on shows and mezmerising men who then abandon wives, families and girlfriends to become the mermaids' too-devoted followers and, incidentally, steady guests at motels like Traveler's Haven.

And that isn't all, for Pallas herself, bustling around trying to maintain order AND solve the murder, is not an ordinary girl, either, and her mystery is expertly teased out in little doses throughout the novel, complementing and beefing up the neatness of the main plot.

She is, too, the narrator, and it's her unique, fierce, feisty voice that really makes this novel enjoyable. Her protectiveness towards her staff, especially the much-misunderstood zombies, her impatience with the foibles of centaur studs and barely competent cops and Guido the cheesy werewolf who thinks he's the boss of her, is wickedly fun to read, and even if you think you know her secrets from reading between the lines and applying your own meta-knowledge of Greek mythology, you really don't, not quite, but it all works very well.

This is a self-published paperback and it does have a few flaws in formatting that might bother some: the page numbers on the left-hand pages are in the wrong corner, and there are a few passages of text that, bizarrely, are centered instead of left-justified, but I urge anyone who thinks he or she might enjoy a story like this to forgive these. Ribken is a one-woman operation (except for her cover artist, Rebecca Treadway) and an original, amusing voice in fiction writing who deserves to be read.

Bring on Athena's Chains, the sequel to Athena's Promise!

100 Books 45 - James Curcio and Jason Stackhouse's FALLEN NATION: PARTY AT THE WORLD'S END (Volume 1)

Stop me if you've heard this one: Jesus, Dionysus and Loki walk into a bar... except wait, they don't walk into a bar, they escape from a mental hospital and Jesus is a purple-haired shemale and...

Thanks for stopping me. I suspect that I suck at telling jokes. And I suspect that a joke is not exactly what the authors are going for in this trippy little novel, the first in a series of I-don't-know-how-many, though bits of it are awfully funny.

As I said, though, I don't think Curcio and Stackhouse are out just to amuse me. Like Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy before it, Fallen Nation has more than a little bit of a didactic/allegorical bent amidst the wildness. The sense that the authors are in some sense trying to program, or at least awaken, readers to some non-apparent truths about the world is that strong; an unmistakable pulse of urgency beating through the cacophony. Sometimes too urgently; Curcio has claimed to me that he only knows how to write non-fiction, which meta-knowledge only strengthens my impression that Fallen Nation is meant as an allegory. But for what?

Well, I'm not sure. But I find hints, like an observation early on that on 9/11 "the terrorists didn't just fly planes into buildings. Somewhere in that twisted rubble lies the shattered remains of this country's sense of  humor," and later "Ground Zero is just ground" -- observations that I can only share as I ponder the rise of the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, the ongoing advance of CCTV cameras, your own gnawing annoyance here. As a society we've gotten extraordinarily uptight and rigid; we need, Curcio and Stackhouse think, another Ken Kesey busload of pranksters to take us Furthur.

The narrative itself mimics this, of course. After Jesus, Dionysus and Loki escape from the mental hospital -- due largely to Loki's craftiness; he seems more a personification of ingenuity than mischief/evil in Fallen Nation's pantheon -- they somehow come across one Lilith, who appears to be a descendant of Crowleyite superstar Jack Parsons and does indeed have scarlet hair, and before the crazies know what's happening next they have formed a rock band and are on tour with some groupies in the ultimate magic bus, Furthur, Hunter Thompson's White Whale, Arky Mavranos' suburban and Hagbard Celine's submarine all rolled into one. Hijinks in the real world and the world between death and birth ensue. Hot tub orgies. Traffic stops. Concerts. And a police investigation, for you'd better believe the law is on these maybe-demigods' trail, with, well, the kind of results you'd expect; demigods always  have it rough.

At bottom, what Curcio and Stackhouse are trying to do is write modern myth - mythology in the modern world is their obsession, as anyone who has ever visited Curcio's website knows (and, by the way, this book has me looking forward to Curcio's upcoming nonfiction compilation on The Immanence of Myth even more than I was already). I'm not 100% convinced that they have succeeded in this, here.

But I'm mighty glad they tried.