Yet there are signs that the Count is up to more than just looking for a refuge to spend his final years in. At the first meeting with Navarro, the Count shows a creepily intense interest in his wife, Asunción, and their daughter, Magdalena, who is the same age as the Count’s ward. The Count expresses his hope that Magdalena and Minea will become playmates, and on a later visit Navarro discovers that the Count has somehow obtained pictures of his wife and daughter.
In Dracula, the Count’s predation towards his female victims is depicted as a sort of fatal seduction. A similar sort of gambit seems to be driving the events of Vlad, until it becomes apparent to Navarro that everything about his relationship with the Count – his selection to serve as the Count’s attorney, Asunción’s participation in finding the Count a house, the Count’s unholy interest in Navarro’s family – has been carefully engineered. What at first seems to be a case of seduction is revealed to be a genuinely horrifying act of betrayal, influenced by the drowning death of the Navarros’ young son Didier years before. Had Bram Stoker been steeped in the psychology of modern parenting and had he written Dracula in an era less inclined to present the triumph of ‘‘good’’ over ‘‘evil’’ as the concluding moral of the story, his novel might well have ended the way that Fuentes’s does.
At every point in this novel, it is clear that Fuentes is intentionally echoing narrative elements of Dracula. (In his first meeting with Navarro, the Count even utters that deathless line of Stoker’s that Bela Lugosi made his campy signature: ‘‘I never drink… wine.’’) Likewise the subtextual possibilities of the novel: in Dracula, Stoker depicted his vampire as not only a supernatural scourge, but as a foreign invader fouling English soil and society. Fuentes takes a similar tack in Vlad, presenting the Count as the representative of an ancient bloodline who refuses to become ‘‘lethargic’’ and acquiescent in a modern culture that disdains distinctions of class and social station. He sees his newly adopted continent as a banquet table of fresh viands that had been depleted in his native land. ‘‘Now I will lose myself in perhaps the most populous city on the planet. I will blend in with the nocturnal crowds, already savoring the abundance of fresh blood, ready to make it mine, to resume my thirst, the thirst for ancient sacrifice that is at the origin of all history.’’ Vlad is a novel that sees vampiric predation in the many social and political relationships that define modern culture.
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Evangeline Walton is best known as a novelist, and her reputation as a fantasist (and winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1989 World Fantasy Convention) rests primarily on her Mabinogian quartet, drawn from Welsh folklore and published between 1936 and 1974. Thanks to the research of scholar Douglas A. Anderson and Walton’s literary heir, Deborah L. Hammond, we now know that Walton wrote and attempted (without much success) to sell short fiction, even before her career as a novelist took off. Above Ker-Is and Other Stories collects ten weird tales that Walton wrote between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, four never before published.
Most of Walton’s short stories are, like her novels, seamless blends of history, myth, and local color. The first three in the book are period tales, set in Brittany, and featuring men and women whose passionate and tempestuous relationships recapitulate the experiences of characters of classic lore and legend. In the title tale, two lovers replay a contemporary version of the legend of Princess Ahes, who was sacrificed to the sea after having caused the inundation of her kingdom, Ker-Is, for the sake of a lover. ‘‘The Judgment of St. Yves’’ tells of an estranged husband and wife who, through a dark and ancient cultural tradition, invoke the judgment of the titular saint, knowing that it means the death of whomever of them is judged in the wrong. ‘‘The Mistress of Kaer-Mor’’ features yet another strong Walton heroine who, under the influence of a cursed dwelling, repeats a tragedy from the past. These stories are memorable for their depictions of people caught in the web of their seemingly preordained fates, and for their well-wrought descriptions that capture the characters in beautiful imagery (‘‘She sparkled like sunlit water’’).
In some of her stories, Walton tantalizes the reader with the possibility that seemingly supernatural events have a perfectly logical explanation. This is particularly apparent in a pair of stories set in immediately post-revolutionary Russia, where cynical moderns find their rationalist beliefs at odds with entrenched superstitions. In ‘‘The Tree of Perkunas’’, it is not clear whether a pair of women truly are the witches the locals fear them to be, or merely the victims of superstition and atavistic fears. ‘‘Werwolf’’ presents a series of events that suggest the terrorization of a small town by a werewolf, but the story ends ambiguously, neither confirming nor denying that any lupine transformation took place.
Walton’s renown as a lyrical fantasist notwithstanding, her short stories reveal that she had quite the flare for horror. In ‘‘Lus-Mor’’, a story very much in the tradition of Arthur Machen’s weird tales, a mother and daughter are the playthings of malignant fairy folk, who spirit away their souls for uninvited sojourns in supernatural realms and leave behind their inanimate corporeal husks. ‘‘At the End of the Corridor’’, published in the May 1950 issue of Weird Tales, tells of an archeologist’s encounter with a living dead predecessor in an ancient Greek tomb. ‘‘They That Have Wings’’ features a mother-daughter duo able to transfer into birds of prey and take advantage of a trio of escaped prisoners of war, while ‘‘The Other One’’ concerns a woman whose projected twin self comes to dominate her. These stories are especially interesting for their often blunt presentation of romance and sexuality as a trigger for supernatural experience.
It’s not clear how aggressively Walton attempted to market her short stories – probably not very – and only one of them was published close to the time that it was written. A handful saw print in fantasy anthologies in the early 1980s, decades after Walton had become so frustrated with the difficulties of short story construction that she gave up writing them altogether. This slim, thoughtfully organized book is a wonderful addition to Walton’s bibliography, and it gives readers a taste of what she might have achieved had she stuck to the short fiction path.
–Stefan Dziemianowicz
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LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: RUSSELL LETSON
Impulse, Steven Gould (Tor, 978-0-7653-2757-4, $25.99, 368 pp, hc) January 2013.
American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, Gary K. Wolfe, ed. (Library of America, 2 vols., 978-1-59853-158-9/978-1-59853-159-9, $70.00, 803+835 pp, hc) October 2012. Covers by Richard M. Powers and Ralph Brillart.
Something over 20 years ago, I reviewed Jumper, Steven Gould’s first novel about the forced growing-up of David Rice, a kid who, in response to physical abuse, learns to teleport. I liked it a lot, but for whatever reasons I didn’t see another Gould book for review until the even more assured 7th Sigma (reviewed in November 2011). Not that Gould had been loafing in the interval – he produced five more novels, including a Jumper sequel, Reflex (2004); Jumper: Griffin’s Story (2007), spun-off from the film version of the original novel; and a post-Reflex companion short story, ‘‘Shade’’ (2008).
Now Impulse offers a second look at what it might be like to find oneself suddenly possessed of a superpower. This time the unexpectedly empowered young person and first-person narrator is Cent, short for Millicent, daughter of Davy Rice and wife Millie (the senior Millicent), who has been raised in semi-isolation because her teleporting parents are on the radar of nasty, competent, and extremely persistent criminals who will stop at nothing to acquire the secret of their wild talent. (The parents get their own second-person-viewpoint chapters to fill out the action, but it’s really Cent’s story.) The book opens in the Rice family’s inaccessible secret home, deep in subarctic Canada, from which fortress of solitude the grownups carry on their activities (largely helping out charitable and relief organizations) while their non-teleporting teenage daughter stews about the
limitations on her freedom of movement and association required by the dangers posed by the forces hunting her parents – ‘‘I’m an overbright, undersocialized, discipline-challenged teenager who is going to grow up to be a maladjusted sociopath at this rate,’’ she complains. She should add that she has also seen a considerable portion of the world, been home-schooled to a fair-thee-well, and has as a result acquired mathematical, analytical, and survival skills far in advance of what most teens possess. But before she comes to understand that fully, she discovers that she too has the gift of teleportation and must learn how to use it safely while also navigating the usual shoals and rapids of adolescent impulse control.
In order to give Cent a more-nearly-normal life, her parents use a cover identity to establish a new home for the ‘‘Ross’’ family in a small city in the American Southwest. Now Cent will be able to attend high school with other kids – and will have to figure out how to conceal and control her abilities while mixing with ordinary people. Many of the challenges she faces are those of any teenager: making sense of the high-school social and bureaucratic systems, finding friends, facing down bullies young and old, joining the snowboarding club, and generally fitting in. Outside of school, she helps with one of her mother’s aid projects, delivering (via covert teleportation) food and supplies to flood refugees in Pakistan, where she gets a close look at some exotic varieties of misery and discrimination. But school and schoolmates present the primary challenges. The school’s star bully, the aptly nicknamed Caffeine, is considerably more troublesome than the usual mean girl, and dealing with her and her crew eventually leads to a kind of guerilla war with some dangerous non-kid people, and that conflict inspires Cent to develop her powers in ways that surprise even her parents.
That leads to part of the purely sciencefictional fun: the ways that Cent (like her dad before her) exploits and expands her single wild talent in a number of ingenious ways. Some of this grows out of the danger-escaping reflex that triggered teleportation in both Davy and Cent: when Caffeine closes in to administer a shower-room beat-down, Cent automatically jumps past her and escapes, and similar short-hop, hard-to-observe teleports make the girl seem extraordinarily quick and agile in close-up situations, as when Caffeine comes over a cafeteria table at her:
I jumped a foot to the side and ducked slightly. I felt her clawing hand glance off my shoulder, and she slammed into the table top, skidding across the table…. Caffeine went arms-first down onto the floor between our table and the next.
Poor Caffeine takes more falls and knocks than Wile E. Coyote, while Cent is almost as untouchable as the Roadrunner. But when Cent starts to explore the interaction of teleportation and momentum, jumping to arbitrary elevations in the middle of the air, she assembles a whole new inventory of techniques that will serve her well when dealing with bullies escalates into a series of encounters with very bad bad guys, and push comes not to avoidable shove but to a showdown with the enemies her parents fear most.
The Heinlein heritage is hard to avoid in YA (or YA-ish, or kid-protagonist) science fiction, and while Impulse has a modern YA sensibility – Cent’s school friends and even her enemies have domestic and personal issues that were unmentionable in the days of the old juveniles – it still has a particularly strong affinity to the Old Man’s picture of the value of discipline, hard work, and general competence in the life of a young person. The Rice family setup is particularly Heinleinian: Davy and Millie are fearsomely (even dangerously) able and utterly dedicated to providing Cent with a safe and sane upbringing in a world that holds more-than-normal peril. For her part, Cent accepts their demanding standards of behavior and achievement, and despite a youthful tendency to underestimate risks, she operates in a remarkably rational and thoughtful manner that marks her as a Heinlein Competent Person in training. Most of the time, anyway. The incident that first triggers her gift is a classic kid-style lapse, and it is not the last time she will take on a challenge that would give her parents the whim-whams. (That is an authentic term for parental response to a child’s adventurous urges – I learned it from my mother. Not to be confused with the megrims, the heebie-jeebies, or the blahs.) Cent has her girlie moments, but that streak of confident, gutsy risk-taking marks her as a cousin to Kimble Creighton of 7th Sigma. Too bad the kids occupy different fictional worlds – imagine what trouble they could get into together.
•
The Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s was edited by my Locus colleague Gary K. Wolfe, but I would have good things to say about it even if the project had been overseen by Anon instead of a friend and fellow ink-stained wretch. The two volumes of this boxed set offer a high-altitude view of long-form SF over a six-year stretch of the titular decade: the 1953-56 volume includes Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow, and Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man; from 1956-58 we get Robert Heinlein’s Double Star, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, Algis Budrys’ Who?, and Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time.
It would be silly to review the novels themselves – though I will have a few comments later on – but the value and usefulness of the set is worth talking about. The first impression of the physical package is that the books are handsome, well-made, and surprisingly compact, given the doorstop-spec, 800-plus-per-volume page count. The texts have been vetted, corrected, and reset rather than just photo-offset reproduced from existing editions, and the dust jacket and box art are period-appropriate – Richard Powers’s covers for the Ballantine Books edition of Childhood’s End and the Crest Books anthology 3 From Out There and Ralph Brillart’s cover for the Ballantine A Plague of Pythons. (That last one is actually a 1965 book, but the painting still has that ’50s vibe.)
This was a period when the SF novel was still a creature of the magazines, and all but the Matheson and Brackett first appeared as serials or shorter magazine versions rather than as original books. I know this fact and many others because this set is not just a Greatest Hits of the ’50s (As Seen On TV) thrown together, but carefully selected, prepared, and annotated by Wolfe and the LoA staff. The back matter of each volume offers biographical notes, notes on the texts, and plain old notes. The last of these not only explain obscure references but include, for example, chapters of The Space Merchants previously published only in the Galaxy serialization and introductory pieces written by Matheson, Blish, and Leiber for various later editions of their novels. There is also a website (
I suppose one question might be the audience or market for this set. Some of the titles have been in print often enough that they are not rarities, and many enthusiasts will have already read them – indeed, those of A Certain Age, such as the set’s editor and this reviewer, have probably read them several times over the span of a half-century or more. My immediate reaction was that one could build an intermediate-to-advanced college course around these titles – I would have embraced these volumes enthusiastically when I was trying to maintain a stable reading list for my courses. The texts are well chosen, the scholarly impedimenta are in place, and while a full survey of American SF of the 1950s would require a collection of short fiction, the long-form part would be well served by these novels. (And the volumes can be purchased separately, which would make course design more flexible and affordable.) Then there’s the standard-or-canonical-texts market – every research or comprehensive library should have these titles on their shel
ves, and this set has the virtues of solid scholarly preparation and physical sturdiness. (I believe that is the first time I have recommended a book on the latter grounds.)
And while it is an exercise in redundancy to evaluate the novels themselves – let alone second-guess the selections – I have to say that this is about as good a sample of ’50s SF as one could ask. I was particularly pleased to see The Stars My Destination and More Than Human make the cut, because when those novels and I were contemporaries they were touchstone works for me. (Come to think of it, they still are.) And now they and the other seven novels have a chance of staying on the shelves for another 50 years or more.
–Russell Letson
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REVIEWS BY CAROLYN CUSHMAN
Steel’s Edge, Ilona Andrews
Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling, Michael Boccacino
Ironskin, Tina Connolly
The Midnight Game, Cecilia Dart-Thornton
The Silvered, Tanya Huff
Polterheist, Laura Resnick
Fire Season, David Weber & Jane Lindskold
The Dirty Streets of Heaven, Tad Williams
The Far West, Patricia C. Wrede
Ilona Andrews, Steel’s Edge (Ace 978-1-937007-82-9, $7.99, 388pp, pb) December 2012. Cover by Victoria Vebell.
Locus, January 2013 Page 10
