Category: Book Reviews

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MUSES: The Gnostic Gospels of Flannery O’Connor

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” was my first introduction to the work of Flannery O’Connor, and short fiction in general. It really packs a wallop. Black comedy, serial killers, social critique and, ultimately metaphysical transcendence are all in this brief story. Her fiction is dense and multi-layered. There is more going on in them than entire novels. Of all of the writers of the Southern Gothic school, her work is the one that endures the most with me.

In her cosmology, G-d dwells in the darkest corner of the soul, and that is where He does his work.
In her cosmology, G-d dwells in the darkest corner of the soul, and that is where He does his work.

It’s not just her acerbic wit or her finely drawn characters or her unmistakable sense-of-place. I think it’s because her fiction is tinged with a singular world-view that is just a wee bit over the edge. The subtext of her work is about Faith, particularly, the concept of the Lord’s Grace. But O’Connor’s Lord is not your grandmother’s Lord. In her cosmology, G-d dwells in the darkest corner of the soul, and that is where He does his work.

Many of O’Connor’s characters are terrible human beings. Openly racist, violence-prone, death obsessed, and narrow-minded. Though she was a devout Catholic, there is a streak of Gnostic theology in her work. Her characters worship the false God (the Demiurge), who created this flawed world (in her work, race relations simmer beneath the surface). The face (and Grace) of the true God is revealed to her grotesque characters in shocking ways.

I’m agnostic at best, but O’Connor’s fiction makes Christianity full of dark beauty and mystery.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Warrior Who Carried Life by Geoff Ryman. A classic of genderqueer speculative fiction.

The Warrior Who Carried LifeThe Warrior Who Carried Life by Geoff Ryman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Cara’s mother had always said something very strange about dust: that it was the remains of the dead, and should be respected. “The air is full of other people,” she had told Cara. The dust in the sunlight looked like stars.”

The Warrior Who Carried Life is Geoff Ryman’s first novel, which has been reprinted by the Canadian Press Chizine. It’s a darkly mythic novel that combines the Epic of Gilgamesh with dashes of Celtic and Indian mythology.

A young woman whose family has been dishonored by invaders undertakes a vengeance-based quest to oust the evil from her land. To do so, she magically transforms herself into a male warrior who is nearly invincible. Along the way, she discovers the true nature of the invaders and her quest eventually leads her to the land of death. The novel is drenched in magic, not unlike Tanith Lee’s Tales From the Flat Earth series—there are fabulous beasts, wise women, immortality, and miracles. TWWCL engages and subverts mythic tropes left and right, recalling Samuel R. Delany’s classic novel The Einstein Intersection. Despite the magical overlay, this is a brutal story, full of shocking violence.

Many of the tropes and themes that ballast Ryman’s oeuvre are here. The violence and war of the imaginary land shares a tenuous connection with other Ryman works that chronicle and examine the horrors faced by Kampuchea (Cambodia)—e.g., The Unconquered Country & The King’s Last Song. It is also a deeply feminist and genderqueer novel, with a transcendent lesbian love story at its spiritual center.

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First Flash Fiction of the New Year

Photo by Benjamin Carver
Photo by Benjamin Carver

Once, I captured my inner child. I saw one her evening, crawling on the cornices and wandering on the edge of the wainscoting. At first I thought it was a figment of my imagination; after all, I was a wee bit tipsy on the Creme Yvette cocktail Aunt Sapphire had made before she turned in. But sure enough, there she was, a winged cherub, flitting amongst my curios and tchocktes. The nerve! Frankly, I was disappointed in the way she looked. She was so delicate and pale; I am made of much sterner stuff.

But the fragile schtick was a sham. She was a little monster. She spat in my heirloom Waterford crystal glasses. She knocked over my favorite Llardo figurine—the flamenco dancer awhirl with a blood-red hem on her white dress. When she began crawling on my replica of an Imperial Russian samovar, it was too much. I slammed down my highball glass, and knocked the nasty child into the belly of the samovar.

There, she sat for months.

At first, she banged on the gold-plated tin prison walls. But as time passed, her clanging changed to scratching, and the scratching turned to silence. When I finally opened the samovar to check on her, she was as still as a porcelain doll. When I picked her up, I felt an ice cold knife pierce my left side, just below my ribs. That place still aches now.

I keep her effigy in a a golden cage, in hopes that one day she will wake up.

Inspired by a photograph by Ben Carver.

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On Depression: The siren song of the Echthroi

I tried to get off my anti-depressants around the same time my first book was published. Among the reasons I was quitting: no longer afford COBRA payments for my insurance, so I would no longer be able to get prescriptions anymore. Besides that, things were going pretty well. I mean, I had a book out that was the cumulative work of over 20 years of fiction writing. I followed the doctor’s instructions to taper off the drug.

That decision was a huge mistake.

As if it were waiting in the shadows, my depression came back. I call my depression the Echthroi, after the creatures in Madeleine L’Engle’s novel, A Wind in the Door. The Echthroi are the spirits of nihilism and depersonalization. They wish to destroy all joy in life and leave an empty husk, a blank  simulacrum. Depression is not exactly like voices in the head, but it is more than just the blues.

I remember being in the subway, deep underground. The Echthroi whispered in that seductive way of theirs, Why don’t you jump in front of a train. It projected a vision of screaming steel, sleek locomotives, and endless silence. Imagine having those images constantly flashed in your brain. I would write suicide notes, and delete them. Some days, I would cry for hours. One time, I had an episode where I threw a cell phone at the place where I was temping. I lost that job.

Depression makes you a marionette whose springs are pulled by the Echthroi.

The thing that stopped me from actually harming myself was constantly reminding myself that it was all faulty wiring and out-of-whack brain chemistry. In the end, I finally got the help I needed.

Sometimes, people listen to the Echthroi. They are very good at what they do. After all, you still feel horrible and get flashes of suicidal actions and feelings of worthlessness even if you don’t succumb to the temptation. They promise an end to the pain, which won’t relent. They work ceaselessly. Even if you have a partner, or children, or a job you love, or you have a critically acclaimed collection of fiction published, they will stalk you and turn the world into Mordor.

I’m writing this because someone I knew  recently succumbed to the siren song of the Echthroi. Sometimes they succeed. I just think it’s important to understand what Suicidal Depression is, and the importance of treatment.

wings

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MUSES: Jean Cocteau and the shadow of Orpheus.

Jean Cocteau is perhaps best known for his films, in particular, his elegant, candlelit classic take on Beauty and the Beast. He was a kind of renaissance man, with achievements in literature as well as film and art. He was not a Surrealist, though that movement did influence some of his work. His work is deeply informed by myth and fairy tale; the figure of Orpheus shadows much of his cinematic work.  Like the musician Orpheus explored the shadowy underworld, the artist Cocteau explored the subconscious and its language of myth and symbol.

Cocteau Collage

As much as I like his films, it’s his highly idiosyncratic artwork that entices me. The drawings have a child-like simplicity but are deeply mischievous, and, in some cases, openly homoerotic.

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BOOK REVIEW: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. An ecological field guide full of beauty and horror.

Annihilation: A Novel (Southern Reach Trilogy, #1)Annihilation: A Novel by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The fiction that truly disturbs me, that causes me nightmares, that stays with me, that chills me to the bone all have one element. Beauty. Gore and splatter punk can gross me out and causes a short, sharp shock. But evil beauty, or weird beauty—that stays with me for the long haul.

The first book in the projected Southern Reach Trilogy is a kind of ecological horror novel. It takes the form of a field report of an unnamed biologist who enters a region called Area X, which is a kind of pocket universe or dimension that suddenly appeared one day, killing off the residents of a sparsely populated area. The landscape is pristine and beautiful, save for a couple of anomalies. The first person narrative is full of meticulous descriptions of the natural world. As a result, when the counter-factual appears, it is truly creepy and insidious.

The supernatural moments are all shot through with a weird, textural (and textual) beauty that entices as it disturbs. The images and effects VanderMeer achieves are lush and lingering, at time recalling the landscapes conjured by the surrealist artists. As a counterpoint, the story of the biologist’s past and her own agenda are subtly woven in the tense narrative. This a dense, interior multilayered horror/thriller full of mystery and dread. The novel is atmospheric and open-ended, and most importantly, hauntingly beautiful. Reviews have been popping up about the ‘Lovecraftian’ nature of the work. To me, it’s more reminiscent in tone to the philosophical dark fiction of Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti.

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My Mother, the Soul Sister Scheherazade of the Seventies.

1001

Like many mothers, my mom told me fairytales when I was a child. But as a public school administrator (her title was Cultural Coordinator) she had access to a wide breadth of media, including films and ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) of picture books.

Two items in this treasure trove of fairytale lore stick with me.

One was a 16mm short film adaptation of the fairytale ‘Puss In Boots.’ This film, which my mother rescued from a discard pile of educational materials, was simply beautiful. It was black and white stop motion animation. The puppets’ clothing was ornate and rococco, and the sets were meticulously crafted. The black and white photography was luminously elegant—there is a touch of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast in the aesthetic.  We broke out ‘Puss in Boots’ during birthday parties. It mesmerized me.

The second item was a picture book, an original fairytale about a knight battling a cowardly dragon. The dragon was aided by a kindly fairy godmother, who was a bit of a literal genie in her wish-granting. The knight is a bully, and both  the fairy and the dragon figure out a way to beat the knight. Eventually, the dragon and the fairy princess fall in love and live happily ever after. The thing that was notable about the story—aside from it’s humorous trope reversals—was that the fairy godmother was a jive-talking black woman with a huge Afro—imagine a cross between Whoopi Goldberg (at her peak) and Moms Mabley. That book, which I don’t know the name of, was the bomb.

What sparked this memory is that I am current in the process of writing four different fairytales. Thanks, Mom, for the inspiration!