Locus, May 2013
Page 17
Some of the more wide-screen stories are also, perhaps, more conventionally science fictional. ‘‘Angel French’’ by Fujita Masaya (trans. Pamela Ikegami) tells of two friends who become interstellar probes and go out to explore a star system where a SETI signal was found; it is about their relationship more than the potential first contact. ‘‘The Finish Line’’ by Matsuzaki Yuri (trans. Stevens Heath) imagines a grad student’s biology experiment bringing about the end of life as we know it. ‘‘To the Blue Star’’ by Ogawa Issui (trans. Edward Lipsett) is a Stapledonian story of a gigantic interstellar exploration machine and its misadventures. Of these, ‘‘It’s All Thanks to Saijō Hideki’’ by Mori Natsuko (trans. Anthea Murphy) is absolutely not a typical postapocalyptic scenario, as a tall ungainly girl who desperately wants to believe she is a lithe schoolgirl and a drag queen are the sole survivors, and end up taking advantage of a regretful alien’s thoughtful offer. This one is like nothing you’ve read before; I can pretty much guarantee it.
Overall, this is a collection of really wonderful stories. None of them were bad, and if a few were a little less elegant or impressive than the others, they are more than balanced by the overall high quality of the selections. I was very happy to see the translators getting such prominent recognition, as all these stories are easily readable and very atmospheric, with none of the awkwardness that sometimes plagues hasty translations. If I could make one request of the editor, it would be for some brief notes to accompany each story; I would love to get a little more information and context about the stories and their authors. That curiosity is a tribute to the quality of the stories – they stick with you, and make you want to read more.
–Karen Burnham
STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ
The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies, John Langan (Hippocampus Press 978-1-61498-054-4, $28.99, 322pp, $20.00, tp) May 2013. [Order from Hippocampus Press, PO Box 641, New York NY 10156;
John Langan has been such a ubiquitous presence in horror anthologies of note these last few years that it comes as a surprise that The Wide Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies is only his second short fiction collection. Seven of its nine stories are reprints, and four of these made the cut for various (sometimes multiple) ‘‘year’s best’’ compilations. Almost certainly, one of the book’s two originals will also merit ‘‘year’s best’’ enshrinement, and if it doesn’t it will be only because of its considerable length. Langan is one of the best new writers of horror fiction to have emerged in the past decade, and this collection reinforces the reputation he earned with the publication of Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters in 2008.
Three of the stories might best be described as straightforward tales of supernatural horror. That’s not to say that there aren’t layers and nuances to them – rather, it’s to distinguish them from the stories in which Langan is being more overtly experimental. Though their characters and settings are modern, they have the feel of classic horror stories in which the building up of atmosphere creates a cumulative, intensifying mood of horror, and events are carefully orchestrated to culminate in a horrifying final revelation. Not surprisingly, all are novellas – the length best suited to the meticulous construction this type of tale requires.
The title tale is one of the better recent horror stories to depict the vampire-as-monster. During a firefight in Fallujah, a platoon of American soldiers and their insurgent opponents are attacked by a vampiric entity that effortlessly slaughters most of them. The psychic link that the creature establishes with its victims in order to disorient them proves so traumatizing to the four soldiers who survive the attack and so disruptive to their lives back stateside that, years later, they scheme a way to use it to destroy the creature. The story can be read both as a tale of visceral horror and a symbolic exploration of post-traumatic stress disorder born out of wartime experience.
‘‘City of the Dog’’ tells of a ghoul-master and his minions who turn a trio of terrified college students against each other. The story subtly references Lovecraft’s ‘‘Pickman’s Model’’, but transplants the germ of that tale into a story steeped in emotions that humanize Langan’s characters in a way that Lovecraft couldn’t his own.
‘‘Mother of Stone’’, one of the book’s two originals, is a magnificently plotted tale about a cursed statue with ties to pagan antiquity, and the horrors that erupt when it is unearthed in a small upstate New York town. It has a cinematic sweep and its subtler and gorier elements are perfectly modulated.
Langan’s attention to craft is evident in all of his fiction, but it is especially noticeable in the tales that are as much concerned with the mechanics of telling an effective horror tale as they are in horrifying the reader. ‘‘How the Day Runs Down’’ and ‘‘The Shallows’’ are mirror-image stories that juxtapose extravagant horrors with the banalities of daily existence. ‘‘How the Day Runs Down’’ splices ‘‘Night of the Living Dead’’ with ‘‘Our Town’’, featuring ordinary people reciting monologues about their experiences with the zombie apocalypse and a Stage Manager whose reflections on the meaning of human mortality are far from reassuring. ‘‘The Shallows’’, by contrast, features a world devastated by Lovecraftian horrors, where many humans have learned to adapt and life goes on as usual.
This self-consciousness about the craft of horror fiction is even more pronounced in two of Langan’s forays into metafiction, ‘‘The Revel’’ and ‘‘Technicolor’’. In ‘‘The Revel’’, a werewolf story, the narrator ‘‘speaks’’ directly to the reader, laying out the 12 or so components common to all werewolf stories and analyzing them at length as the story unfolds. Even as the narrator demystifies the werewolf story through his analysis of its clichés, the one he is telling builds to a satisfyingly horrifying climax. ‘‘Technicolor’’ is a dramatic monologue presented as a university professor’s discussion of Poe’s ‘‘The Masque of the Red Death’’ with his relatively unengaged undergraduate class. After presenting an illuminating critical dissection of Poe’s tale, the professor spins an elaborate yarn about an occult text that may have inspired Poe – and then, in a way that the reader is wholly unprepared for, he breaks down the wall between ‘‘fiction’’ and ‘‘reality’’ in his monologue, introducing his class to the horrors encoded in Poe’s tale.
The Wide Carnivorous Sky is rounded out with two short vignettes. It also features an introduction by Jeffrey Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron that give Langan’s fiction the eloquent praise it deserves.
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The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Laird Barron (Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-467-7, $26.99, 296pp, hc) May 2013. [Order from Night Shade Books, 1661 Tennessee Street, #3H, San Francisco CA 94107;
The title of Laird Barron’s third short fiction collection – The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All – is a tongue-in-cheek reference to death. It appears in the book’s concluding story, ‘‘More Dark’’ – a roman a clef about contemporary horror writers and their fans – as the title of a new book of essays by ‘‘Tom L,’’ a nihilistic writer clearly modeled on Thomas Ligotti, whom the narrator is traveling with, in the company of a colleague (allusively modeled on John Langan), to give a rare public reading. Though the story is darkly funny, and has probably earned Barron a few duel challenges from writers unflatteringly portrayed in it, its narrator is a character type that recurs in much of his fiction: a person so spiritually and emotionally deadened by life experience that, when confronted with the final horror the story has been building to, he finds himself spared by it, or even neutralized to it. As the narrator of the story puts it, referring to his suicidal ideations, ‘‘in this universe I’d already squeezed the trigger.’’
It says a lot about Barron’s characters that some are so soul-blasted that even the Void rejects them. The horrors in his stories are never run of the mill, and are usually of a scope so vast that it is hard to describe them accurately or render t
hem faithfully in an image. A trio of loosely linked period tales in this volume all culminate in brutal horrors which, it is suggested, are minimal expressions of a dimension of greater, unfathomable dread. In ‘‘Blackwood’s Baby’’, a crew of elite hunters is invited to an estate in the Pacific Northwest to hunt a monstrous stag that has stalked the grounds for generations and is supposedly the offspring of a satanic coupling. As the hunt unfolds, it becomes clear that the hunters are the hunted, and that they are prey to forces from an incomprehensible antiquity embodied in an ancient statue that the protagonist stumbles upon: ‘‘The statue was so very large, and its cruel shadow pinned him like an insect, and the voices of its creators, primeval troglodytes who’d dwelt in mud huts and made love in the filth and offered their blood to long dead gods whispered obscenities, and images unfolded in his mind.’’ ‘‘The Men from Porlock’’ is set at roughly the same time as ‘‘Blackwoods Baby’’ at Slango, a logging camp whose mysterious, Roanoke colony-style depopulation is a plot element in Barron’s novel The Croning. A team of loggers out hunting for game in the wilds stumble upon an old, forgotten village whose residents have brutally butchered members of their group, apparently with the blessing of certain ancient entities that they revere. ‘‘It amuses them to watch us practice cruelty,’’ says the village matriarch. In ‘‘Hand of Glory’’, the horror is more vague, though no less awesome in conception. A hired gun tracking down the man who put out a near-fatal hit on him discovers that the man is the son of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and that he (the hired gun) is being manipulated by an illusionist who hopes to recover a secret cache of films that explored realms far beyond those that Muybridge used for his famed time-motion studies. In the words of the illusionist, ‘‘They suggest great depths of depravity, of a dehumanizing element inherent in photography. A property of anti-life.’’
Most of the book’s nine stories were first published in theme anthologies where they were among the most memorable and more original of the selections. ‘‘The Siphon’’, from a compilation of vampire stories, features an ancient blood-drinking species whose ritual slaughter represents a sacrifice to ancient occult forces that defy human understanding. ‘‘The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven’’, a tale of shapeshifting, is yet another story set in a landscape that evokes ancient horrors of prodigious scale: ‘‘There were many, many bones, scattered across the mountainside. Generational heaps of them – ribs, thighs, horns, skulls. These graveyards were secret places, scattered for miles across deep, hidden caches among the high rocks.’’ ‘‘Jaws of Saturn’’, original to the book, is something of a companion piece to ‘‘Hand of Glory’’, in which a young hoodlum confronts an elderly stage magician, only to discover that the man possesses true occult talents that are but the slightest distillation from the dark dimension that he taps. Of the horrid nightmares that begin to plague the young man, the magicians says, ‘‘You realize these aren’t dreams. There is no such thing. These are visions. The membrane parts for you in slumber, absorbs you into the reality of the corona that limns the Dark.’’
It has long been thought that physical horror and the style of visionary horror that we associate with the fiction of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and H.P. Lovecraft, are mutually exclusive; that carnage and the cosmic cannot serve a common purpose in a tale of horror. Barron’s fiction disproves this. His characters live mean, desperate lives and dispense their share of brutalities. It’s all the more interesting that he persuades us these explicit horrors are a denatured trickle-down from horrors that defy expression.
–Stefan Dziemianowicz
Return to In This Issue listing.
CORY DOCTOROW: IMPROVING BOOK PUBLICITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
I’m not complaining when I say that YA book-tours are a death march. I relish the chance to go on the road, and I’m profoundly grateful to my publisher, Tor, for sending me out with my books – in February, I hit 23 cities in 25 days with my novel Homeland, and in most cities, I did multiple school presentations as well as press stops and then a public event, usually in the evening. All this is rather tiring, but it’s the exhaustion that comes from a job well done. Harder to deal with – for me, at least – is explaining to friends that while I’m coming to their hometowns for a visit, it’s a flying visit, skipping over the city’s surface like a spinning stone, lucky to come to rest long enough for a sit-down meal, let alone a proper round of socializing.
But a few lucky times, I was able to score a few free minutes for a meal or a conversation with friends, and the number-one-champion frequently-asked-question they asked me was, ‘‘How is the book doing?’’
Cory Doctorow
The honest answer to this is, ‘‘We’ll know in two to six months.’’ I mean, yes, Homeland was on the NYT bestseller list for four weeks, on the Indiebound bestseller list for three, and still carries a satisfyingly high Amazon salesrank, but none of this tells you anything particularly useful. Indiebound and BookSense tell publishers a bit about where books are selling, but compared to Internet businesses, publishers are almost entirely in the dark about their books. Even e-book reporting is frustratingly opaque: e-book retailers know which sites refer customers to their purchase pages, know those readers’ demographics and other purchases, understand which search terms direct the most traffic, and which subset of those terms generates the most sales. Publishers get little to none of this data. If I was negotiating with Amazon, Apple, Google, and Kobo, my top request would be realtime access to anonymized aggregate data from these services.
So publishing has a long way to go on the retail side. But there’s also lots that can be done before the books ever go on sale, in the world of sales, marketing, and PR to make things more efficient and streamlined.
I am in a curious position because I’m a writer, a publisher, a reviewer, and a bookseller, so I get hit up for blurbs, for sales, for reviews, and for books, by various publishers all over the world. Many of these publishers are separate divisions of the same company, but one thing that is abundantly clear is that none of the different departments are coordinating with one another. Most contemporary sales, marketing, and PR organizations outside of publishing use some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to coordinate their activities. Fundamentally, these are just databases that record all the different interactions that the company has with the people with whom it does business.
With a simple CRM system, a publisher’s various departments could record:
• which books each reviewer has reviewed,
• which books each reviewer was sent but did not review,
• which reviewers’ stuff has been useful enough to pull for a quote on the cover of a book,
• which people have been approached to blurb a book,
• which reviewers review which categories of books.
But also, for each book and author:
• who reviewed that book or author,
• who was sent a copy of the author’s book and didn’t review it,
• who blurbed that author’s books.
Right now, this stuff all lives in separate word-processing files and spreadsheets in different departments’ hands, which results in all sorts of bizarre occurrences that I see firsthand.
There’s the trilogy whose first volume I blurbed, and whose first two volumes I glowingly reviewed – and I sold a ton of each. The publisher didn’t send me book three for review, even though it had a quote of mine on the front cover, the back cover, and the jacket-flap. They didn’t even tell me it was out – by the time I saw it in a store, it had been out for a month, and my review showed up weeks after the book’s publicity push was over.
I know how that happened: the cover quotes came from editorial and were sent to marketing, which had them in a word-processing document. When PR brainstormed people to send review copies to, they forgot to include me, so it fell through the cracks.
There’s the graphic novel series, now in up to somethi
ng like 17 volumes. I’ve given every book a positive review, and all the new volumes have quotes from me on the cover. I never get review copies of this one – I don’t even get a notice from the PR department when a new volume is out. But the same PR department has sent me something like nine volumes of another series, none of which I’ve ever reviewed. If I don’t review book one, that means I either didn’t like it, or didn’t even bother with it because it looked so unpromising. Having skipped book one, you can be certain I won’t review book two. This same publisher sends me mountains of single-issue comics, even though I’ve never reviewed one of those.
There are publishers who send me everything, mountains of books, none of them remotely appropriate to me.
All of this breaks my heart. I get literally 100 times more review material than I could possibly read, and almost all of it ends up at my local literacy charity, which is nice for them, but a terrible waste for the publishers. After all, I live in the UK, and almost all of these publishers are in the USA, and the postage is ruinous. Many of these books are grotesquely expensive Advance Review Copies, which are produced in very short runs that editorial and marketing have to fight like hell to get budgets allocated to. What’s more, I have to pay for a PO Box to store all this stuff, and taxis just to haul it all around. This system benefits no one.